Chapter Text
He found her working in the hangar, the long plait he’d braided in her hair earlier that morning falling loose at her neck as she twisted some new part into place on the underside of their ship. The sleek Mandalorian dress he’d bartered her into wearing, now covered in grease stains, had been torn at the knee, revealing the ratty old boots she insisted on wearing. It was quite the look, and if he couldn’t feel her teetering just on the edge of a breakdown following the disaster of a meeting she’d fled from, he would’ve told her so.
Instead he approached with caution, reaching out through the bond to ensure she knew he was there, testing the waters to see if it was safe to speak.
“Look, before you say anything, I’m sorry.” She grumbled, the toned muscles on her arms flexing as she screwed in a particularly stubborn nut. “I know I shouldn’t have run out like that. Drardos was just so… so….”
“Arrogant?” He offered, leaning against the hull. “Narrow-minded? Tactless?”
Rey scoffed. “Are you describing Drardos, or yourself?”
“Hey now.” He feigned offense. “I’d like to think I’ve made progress in that department.”
Rey grunted, eliciting a sly smile from him as he bent down in time to watch her finish her battle with the last remaining bolt on whatever new system she’d installed on their ship. He knew better than to tell her she looked adorable like this, but it didn’t change the fact that it was true. She had a far healthier way of dealing with her emotions than he did, something she was happy to remind him of whenever he questioned her need to “upgrade” the ship he’d gifted her, and he didn’t have the heart, or the desire, to try and stop her.
“Well, he was arrogant. And narrow-minded and tactless.” She continued, crawling out from under the ship, wiping her hands clean in the fabric of her dress.
She plopped down on the ground unceremoniously, grabbing her tools from under the ship and sorting them into their place in her tool box. He followed suit, unconcerned with who might see them this way.
“But that’s not why you left.” He pressed, leaning in to brush a stray hair behind her ear gently.
She turned away, and he felt a deep sadness settle over her. He’d asked a lot of her. Far more than she’d promised him and certainly more than she’d ever wanted. Yet she continued to stand by his side unflinchingly, tolerating the dull meetings, heated debates, and tense trials like a seasoned pro. The weight of it had taken its toll, and she never hesitated to voice her frustration when they were alone. But she’d sat through far worse than the meeting today without flinching.
No. Rey hadn’t left the meeting because of she was angry. She hadn’t left when Drardos tossed away perfectly good food with a sneer. She hadn’t left when he’d snidely commented on Ben’s age, backhandedly questioning his qualifications to lead. She hadn’t even left when he made his distaste for the slave initiative she was championing known. She’d left because she was sad. Devastatingly so. He felt it creep over her as the minutes dragged on until it consumed her, and he hadn’t needed to look into her eyes to know she needed the escape. It was why he’d let her go, turning back to Drardos’s stunned coalition without blinking an eye. What he didn’t know, and what he still hadn’t figured out, was what it was that made her feel this way.
He leaned forward, trying to force her to look at him. “What is it Rey?”
Rey gulped, finally looking up at him with a weighty sigh, tears threatening at the corners of her eyes.
“His family is important.” She stated flatly. Ben furrowed his brow, unsure he understood why that was relevant.
“On Mandalore, yes.”
“No. I mean, his family is important to him. He couldn’t stop talking about them.” She shook her head shamefully. “It’s just... I don’t have a family name, or a title, or anything that ties me to anyone else. I never have. I’m just Rey.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Ben squinted, nudging her slightly. “I happen to like just Rey quite a lot.”
“Nothing.” She shook her head. “To me. And to you, maybe. Or my friends. But when we go before these people… All they see is a name, or a title, or a uniform. That’s what matters to them. That’s what gives your opinions validity.”
Ben looked at her thoughtfully, thinking back on their meeting with the Mandalorian Ambassador. Drardos had certainly not shied away from emphasizing his family’s significance to Mandalore, nor his pride in his children and their accomplishments, but Ben hadn’t given the quips so much as a second thought. Then again, of course he hadn’t. He too had royal blood in his veins. And no one would deny that his own family’s impact on the history of the galaxy far surpassed the legacies of everyone else. The name Kylo Ren instilled fear, but Solo? Organa? Skywalker? Those were the names of heroes. Names he and he alone held claim to. They held power. Power he took advantage of without even realizing it.
And while he’d resented those legacies growing up, shed those names like the family who’d given them to him, shedding a name required having one to dispose of in the first place.
“Drardos is a small man using his family's accomplishments to prop himself up.” Ben insisted. “ You are something far greater than that. You’ve lived through hardships neither he nor I could possibly imagine. You’ve fought for everything you have and you’ve earned it. That makes you far more valuable than some arrogant aristocrat. I don’t care what his title is.”
She smiled sadly, shaking her head at the toolbox in her lap. “It’s not just that.”
“What then?”
She sighed, looking out across the hangar before dropping her gaze down to her hands. “The way he spoke of them, of his family…” She twisted the ripped end of her dress between her hands, “Leia talks about you that way. And Max about Rose.” A stray tear fell down her cheek, and he reached forward to catch it in the air. “I know I don’t need a family name or a title to have value. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t sting to watch others belong somewhere when you don’t.”
His chest constricted painfully as he pulled her in against his chest, running his hand down her arms as he cradled her there. This conversation had been a long time coming. He’d sensed it bubbling up within her from time to time. They’d ironically been on Chandrila the first time he’d recognized it for what it was.
He’d taken her to his childhood home. Or, rather, she’d begged him to take her and he, helpless against her charms, eventually relented, despite the festering dread that prevented him from keeping any food down from the moment he’d begrudgingly agreed. She’d been excited, giddy even. But as he’d watched her explore his boyhood toys and drawings, her curiosity morphed into longing before his very eyes. She’d comforted him through his own torment at facing down the one place he’d ever felt loved, but her pain was distinct from his. Where he felt loss and shame and remorse when he looked at the old family pictures his mother left hanging on the walls, she saw a family. A family that she was in many ways a part of now, but that would never quite replace the one taken from her.
She’d dragged him out onto his parent’s old balcony that night, wrapping herself around him and forcing their entwined bodies to sway to the music echoing up from the streets below. And it was in that moment that he knew. He wanted to belong to her, and she to him. Not in a manner of possession, but as a promise. A commitment. He wanted her to be his family in every way that she possibly could, and to give her the belonging she so deserved.
The words had very nearly tumbled out of his mouth the first time they’d made love, desperate and clumsy in the cockpit of their ship, having narrowly avoided death in the asteroid field outside of Annamar, her hands twisted in his hair, moaning his name as he buried himself inside of her over and over again. It had taken all of his admittedly minimal willpower not to beg her right then and there, and it had taken a restraint he didn’t know he was capable of each and every time she’d allowed him to love her since.
But asking Rey to marry him while in the throes of passion seemed wrong somehow. He wanted to give her more time, to make sure that it was what she wanted. That he was really what she wanted. She needed to be fully aware of what she was agreeing to, something she would not be with his tongue between her thighs. And so he resisted despite himself. But once the idea sprouted in his mind, it grew like a weed and while he kept the words from spilling out, he was utterly incapable of cutting it off in his mind.
When, a few months later, she still hadn’t signaled any intention to leave, he’d started devising more romantic plans. He’d considered taking her to Takodana, to the forest where they’d first met, but quickly realized that it was just about the least romantic place he could take her, considering her reaction upon seeing him for the first time had been to shoot to kill. He debated going back to Chandrila, or Naboo, or Endor. He’d even considered sneaking away to Ahch-To, to where they’d first touched hands across the stars, but eventually he nixed that idea as well. There were too many ghosts on that island, too many painful memories of rejection and loneliness. The opposite of everything he wanted her to feel when he finally worked up the nerve to ask her to be with him forever.
Up to this point, nothing had felt quite right. He didn’t know when it would, only that when he finally worked up the courage to ask Rey to marry him, he wanted to moment to be perfect.
Which was why he was surprised to find himself here, sitting on the floor of some hangar in Keldabe, with Rey covered in sweat, and grease, and dust, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was it.
“You know,” he began slowly, brushing his lips against her temple. “I could give you a name. And a title. If you wanted.”
She scoffed, pushing away to glare at him like he’d missed her point completely. “I don’t want some random name Ben.”
“No, not a random one.” He murmured, playing with a stray thread on the end of her dress. “I could give you my name.”
She turned to him with a furrowed brow, looking at him like he’d just made the most ridiculous suggestion. “What are you talking about? I can’t just take your name. The only way for me to do that would be to…”
She froze as the implication of his words finally dawned on her, her mouth falling open as her eyes blew wide.
“You’d have to marry me, yes.”
Rey turned slowly, looking up at him like he was some sort of three headed loth cat.
His heart was beating so rapidly in his chest he could barely hear himself think. For all the time he’d spent lying awake thinking of what he would say to her, he was wholly unprepared him when the moment finally came. So instead he turned to her on the ground, reaching forward to take her hands in his own, hoping that whatever tumbled out of his mouth next made a modicum of sense.
“Rey, I love you. Everything about you. Exactly the way you are right now. I love the way you scrunch your nose when you see something new for the first time. I love the way your hair always ends up in knots when you sleep. I love that you insist on wearing ratty boots and that you take your stress out on our ship. I love that you are fiesty and strong-willed, and that you question everything I do just to irk me. But perhaps most of all, more than any of the millions of little things I love about you, I love that you make me feel like I matter. That I am seen, and heard, and loved.”
Ben’s voice cracked as the tears welled up his eyes, blubbering his words as they continued to spill out. “From the moment you broke inside my head and forced me to confront who I was, I knew you were it for me. And every day I’ve spent with you since has only reaffirmed that. You’ve never needed a name to have a family, Rey. You built your own family from the ground up. You brought my family back together, when all I’d ever done was tear it apart. You are the person I want by my side, who I want to make proud, who I look to when I’m lost. Without you I am nothing. My name means nothing. Only you. Because you are my family Rey.”
Rey’s lips were quivering as thick, heavy tears raced down her cheeks, her small hands twisted up inside his own.
“Ben…”
He shook his head, biting back tears of his own as he swallowed down the thickness building up in his throat.
“I promised you that you weren’t alone. That won’t ever change. Even if you don’t want to marry me, I need you to know that. I need you to know that you have a —“
“Ben.” She cut him off more firmly this time, removing her hands from his vice grip. “Stop.”
His stomach dropped as he looked up from her hands, certain she was going to reject him before he’d even gotten around to saying the most important words. Instead he found her shifting to her knees, reaching out and taking his face in her hands.
“Ben,” She murmured, her big, beautiful eyes taking hold of his like a tractor beam, immobilizing him as she dragged him down into their depths. “Yes.”
He stopped breathing for a moment as she looked down at him, love, and joy, and elation bursting through her like the sea as her face split open into the most brilliant smile he’d ever seen.
“Yes?” He asked in disbelief.
“Yes you nerf herder. Of course yes.”