Chapter Text
When Ben disappears, Rey refuses to let him go.
She knows about the World Between Worlds the way she knew how to heal: it was there in the ancient Jedi scrolls, a puzzle involving planets in the Unknown Regions and a way to move through space and time using the Force. If the last two years has shown her anything, it’s that somehow knowing that something is possible is enough for her to turn it into reality. Like the way she saw how to wield the Force from being in Ben’s head that first time.
So, with her mouth still tingling where it had been pressed against his, with his body heat still thrumming through her skin, she refuses to panic when he falls back and fades out of existence. Her eyes sting with the tears she won’t let fall and she takes deep breaths to ground herself. Concentrate on something else—anger. Yes, anger will do. Anger is productive.
She’s read about Force bonds in the year since she refused his hand, enough to know what was going on between them, even if the word dyad had never come up before. But the emperor, that horrific, cackling wraith, hadn’t been lying when he told them their bond created life.
Rey is still alive. It seems clear to her that if she’s alive, Ben cannot be dead. Not really. He’s still there, a fragment of his soul tucked within hers, quiet and distant but not extinguished.
As she pulls herself to her feet, weary in ways that don’t make sense when she’s been revitalized by Ben’s life force, she rummages through her memory to figure out what to do next. She’d spent hours meditating and memorizing the stuff from the scrolls, whether it made sense to her or not, because she’d never known what she might need to know. Now she remembers the vague, half-formed theorem about the World Between Worlds from the text, and decides that’s the first place to start looking for him.
She clips both lightsabers to her belt and takes a glance around the ruins of Exegol. It’s mostly shadows and rubble, the maddening brush of all those Sith worshipers whispering now reduced to a desolate silence.
She tips her head skywards. It is dark, and vast, and empty up there, but the sweetness of victory vibrates through the galaxy—an echo of the Resistance’s joy. That they left without waiting for her suggests they do not expect to see her again; that the Force sensitives in their numbers felt her fight and her sacrifice, and will pass on what they think happened. She’ll be celebrated as a hero, but she doesn’t have a place with them after that. Rebuilding the galaxy...she’s not a politician, doesn’t have the patience for it, and certainly doesn’t have any wisdom to dole out like they’ll be expecting.
Fine. That makes her quest easier. She can slip into legend and not repeat Luke’s mistakes.
The silence surrounding her is good, it will help her concentrate. Not on her surroundings, but on the bond; the place inside her that’s Ben . The knot of warmth behind her ribs which had bloomed open whenever there’d been physical contact between them, leaving them raw and exposed to each other’s minds, like it had been trying to merge their two spirits into one.
The knot is there, anchored below her heart, and she takes hold of it with the Force. She treats it like a rope, one she’s climbing, and at the other end it’s tied very securely in place, taking her where she needs to be.
She doesn’t have to walk far before Exegol changes. The shadows deepen, and she opens herself up to the Force, letting it guide her as she follows the trail of the bond. Sometimes she thinks she hears his voice, not a whisper but a low murmur in the corner of her mind, urging her on. Soon enough the murky gray surrounding her has become pitch black, and she can’t even see her own hand when she holds it in front of her face. The only thing keeping her going is the way she can still feel Ben, even as her limbs begin to grow cold and numb.
Rey wanders for what could be hours or days before she realizes she isn’t getting any closer to Ben. He feels as distant from her as he had right after he faded away. At least she can feel him—the only thing she can feel. Hunger pangs have come and gone. Her lips were chapped with how thirsty she was. All this she’s experienced before on Jakku, and she thought she could push through it, but she can’t, not with how much Force she’s using up.
She’s been an idiot. A lucky idiot. No right-minded person would have charged into a different plane of existence without knowing what they were doing, but she did, and now she’s trapped here without any way of finding her way out. Worse, the way that she’s slipping towards unconsciousness here on the unforgiving ground—and when exactly did she lie down—means that all of this was a waste. Ben healed her and died for her, just for her to throw it away immediately. He probably heard her coming and fled, not wanting to share this plane of existence with her either.
Her last act is to bare her teeth and snarl into the shadows. She’s not going to die feeling sorry for herself. She’s going to die being angry, and making sure the Force knows about it. Only then does she let the blackness take over.
The Force has other plans for Rey.
She’s surprised to wake up. She’s even more surprised when she’s processed that fact and feels a creeping sense of deja vu, even before she opens her eyes. Her head feels heavy, like she’s done more than sleep naturally, and there’s something pressing across her body, keeping her pinned in place even though she’s upright. It’s not comfortable and she suspects it isn’t meant to be. The atmosphere around her is the filtered, slightly chilled air of a ship, and close by she can feel a familiar presence…
Rey opens her eyes. Kylo Ren—Ben—is crouched a few feet away from her, surveying her from behind his mask. The original mask, not the repaired version with its veins of red. For some reason he seems intimidatingly large even though this is far from the closest she’s ever been to him.
The room is familiar too, as her mind catches up with all that it’s busy absorbing and processing. She’s on Starkiller Base. Before it blew up. In the interrogation room. In the interrogation chair .
Oh.
This is—not what she intended.
She struggles to contain her panic and collect her thoughts as Kylo remains watching her, apparently impassive. Even though she knows he’s anything but—that underneath that mask there are roiling, shifting, intense emotions, hidden from the world and the people around him. She wants that kriffing mask off of him, so she can see his face.
Ben’s face.
This second realization is as big as the first, but sweeter, infinitely sweeter. Ben is here , in front of her, alive. She doesn’t know exactly what she’s done—gone too far in the World Between Worlds, traveling not just through space but through time as well—oh, she’s a fragging idiot—but does it matter when she’s back in a place where Ben still lives?
He’s waiting for something. Maybe for her to speak. All she knows is that she wants him to take that mask off, like he had done the first time.
The words from that first conversation come to her, like a script from those trashy holoserials Rose always played while they were in her workshop.
“Where am I?” she asks. She can still hear a thread of panic in her own voice. What is she supposed to do now she’s back here? Just live it all again? She doesn’t even understand why here, of all the times and places she and Ben have connected over the years. It’s not even the first time they’d met—that was on Takodana. Years ago to Rey, but in reality—this particular reality—it was only a few standard hours behind her.
“You’re my guest.” The sound of his voice through that awful modulator almost makes her shiver. She’d forgotten about that aspect of the mask too—most of the times they’d interacted, at least before he became Supreme Leader, she’d been able to watch the barely-veiled emotions ripple across his face.
She pushes ahead. “Where are the others?”
“You mean the murderers, traitors, and thieves you call friends? You’ll be relieved to know I’ve no idea.”
But her own question has helped Rey realize with mounting horror that, hours from now, Han Solo will die at Ben’s hand. And it will break Ben, putting him out of the reach of the Light until it is almost too late, when turning back to the Light is the last thing he will do.
She has to stop it. For Han’s sake. For Ben’s. Somehow, whatever the rules are—whether she’s here to stay and live through this life again, or will get sucked back into the World Between Worlds soon—she has to stop it all from happening.
“You still want to kill me,” he continues.
“That happens when you’re being hunted by a creature in a mask.” She finds the venom to sound convincing enough from somewhere.
He rises to his full height and she holds her breath. She wonders if he can hear her heart pounding—not in fear, not like the first time around, but in anticipation. Anticipation of his face. Anticipation of him coming closer, almost touching her. It seems to take him minutes, long, slow, agonizing minutes, to reach up and release the mask.
At first all she can see is the pale column of his neck. He shakes the hair out of his eyes, and now she remembers how curly his hair had been that first day, perfectly styled despite being crushed beneath the mask for hours. Not unkempt or drenched in sweat like later, like on Ahch-To, like when he’d offer his hand, and not as long as it was after he took his throne. She never touched it, not once—his fingertips and his face, but never his hair, and her hands twitch with the urge to bury her fingers in it. She’d never known that she wouldn’t ever get the chance and now he’s in front of her again, it’s all she wants to do.
At least until she focuses on his face. It knocks the breath out her like it did that first time, to see that long face, the high cheekbones, those dark eyes, intense as ever. All his wonderful features, big and incongruent and yet somehow so lovely together. His mouth is her focal point, pink and plump. This she had touched, but nowhere near as much as it deserved.
He drops the helmet down onto the brazier and moves towards her. He has so many layers on, but when she’d seen him the first time, she’d thought him slight beneath all the armor. That moment of connection while she was on Ahch-To had disavowed her of that notion, as if the Force was trying to show her what she was missing. Now she’s seen him without a shirt and in a thin undershirt, she wants the layers gone too. They confine him as much as the mask. They keep her hands from his skin, when that is exactly where her hands should be.
If only she could convince him to release her.
But, oh stars , she’d forgotten how intense he could be. He isn’t using the Force yet, but she could feel him standing there even with her eyes closed, the way he’s absolutely laser focused on her. She doesn’t miss the way his gaze tracks to her mouth, then down to her chest, and is struck by the heavy recognition that he’d been attracted to her from the beginning. Like she’d been attracted to him, drawn together by the Force but each trying to deny it to themselves.
“Tell me about the droid.”
It’s better without the voice modulator. He sounds like he should.
Oh. Right. Her script. “He’s a BB unit with a selenium drive and thermal hyperscan vindicator—” There. Again, his focus not on her face but her body, right before he cuts her off.
“He’s carrying a section of a navigational chart,” he says, glancing away like he’s realized he’s looking where he shouldn’t. “We have the rest, recovered from the archives of the empire, but we need the last piece and somehow you convinced the droid to show it to you.” This is where his voice turns disdainful, and she can’t help bristling in response. “You. A scavenger.” And now he speaks a fraction more quietly. More intimately. “You know I can take whatever I want.”
The words gust over her like a breath, leaving a mess of goosebumps in their wake. Originally it had been fear—that oddly seductive menace, mixed in with what she now understands was her body awakening. She’d been opening up to the Force, yes, but to Ben as well, the dyad chiming to life due to their proximity.
And with that thought about the dyad, she grasps why she’s here. She can already feel the connection inside her, and he's not in her mind yet, so it certainly wasn't created by Snoke or by what comes in a moment or two. Even if they'll never know how the dyad came to be, then at least she knows what dragged her back to their first moment of connection: the bond itself creates life.
She has a plan. One she hopes will save them all.
She abandons the script.
“You don’t need to take what’s freely given.”
He can only blink at her as she tips her face towards him, towards the gloved hand that is reaching for her. “What?” he murmurs, his forehead creasing into a frown.
“There’s so much you need to see.” She licks her lips. “Ben.”
He snarls at that, yanking his hand away like he’s been burned. “How do you—”
“I know you.” She meets his gaze, nods encouragingly. He tries to cover up his fear and confusion with a veil of anger, but she can see the truth. It’s there in the way his lips tremble, as he casts around the room for an anchor. “You’ll see.”
Some ghost from a different reality whispers words in the back of her mind. So lonely. So afraid to leave. They’re so off the beaten path now.
She echoes his own words back to him.
“Don’t be afraid, I feel it too.”
Those deep, dark eyes widen, and she can see Ben peering out from within Kylo. So close, so tantalizingly close. “I don’t know what game you think you’re playing,” he spits. “If this is a trick—if this was engineered in some way by my mother—”
She shakes her head. “No trick. Nobody sent me. It’s just me, I came for you.”
“I won’t be distracted,” he vows, even as his jaw quivers. “Whatever you think you can do, it won’t work. I’ll have that map.”
“Okay,” she says quietly. She relaxes into the chair and waits for him to raise his hand again. There’s a tremble in that too and she wants to take it, to soothe him.
Soon.
She feels him prod at the edge of her mind, tentative and slow. It wasn’t like he’d ripped into her the first time they’d been here, but this time half of the fear is his. He’s trying not to set off the tripwire on any ambush she’s laid out, because he’s realized by now that she’s Force sensitive too. She should probably push back against him, like she had done, and at least try to keep him out of her head so it didn’t look too suspicious, but instead she’s mentally rolling out the welcome mat. She’s too damn ecstatic at that familiar brush of his energy, dark and rich and so fiercely him.
She’s got too much to show him.
At first, she keeps it light, and that’s not easy when everything between them has always felt so life or death. She casts a couple of memories in his direction—the first connection on Ahch-To, then the golden light and graze of fingertips in her hut there. She can feel his curiosity vibrating through the space they share. It draws him in deeper, to other memories; other moments where they connected. Delight unfurls within him as it begins to dawn on him that he was important to Rey, that maybe she really is here for him and him alone.
He’s in so deep she’s not sure where she ends and he begins. It gives him access to everything.
Everything.
It rushes past her as Ben sinks all the way into her mind, submerging himself in her memories like he’s taken a dive into the ocean. The emotions, unearthed from where they rested, move too fast for her to catch onto any one of them and examine them. It’s not only her life since she met him that he explores; it’s all the way back to Jakku, all the way back to her parents…
“Come back!”
And worse. His lightsaber buried in Han’s chest. Him offering her the entire galaxy and her turning him down, despite how torn she’d been. Leia’s passing. Their kiss, and Ben fading into nothing in her arms.
When he wrenches himself away, there are tears on his cheeks. On hers, too, judging by the salt in her mouth and the sting in her eyes. He is breathing so hard, his mouth moving like he’s trying to find the words and failing.
When the words do come, they lack conviction. “Lies.” His voice cracks and he swallows. “I—I don’t know how you’re doing this but it’s lies.”
“It isn’t,” she replies gently. “You know it’s real. You can feel the dyad as much as I can.”
There’s another glimmer of the little boy peering through the shattered mask of indifference, the boy who’d always felt cast aside and unwanted. “Then I die?” He’s furiously blinking tears away. “All of that—I become Supreme Leader and yet the Skywalker bloodline ends at Palpatine’s hands? It’s all for nothing?”
He’s worked himself up to angry again, his default state, the only emotion he really knows how to wield, especially now. This time there’s a thready note of panic in his voice.
“It doesn’t need to be.” She needs to touch him, to soothe him. She reaches for the mechanisms on her restraints with the Force to release herself, but nothing happens.
Karking —she’s back to her untrained state. She remembers all the rules but she’s never actually wielded the Force and it won’t respond to her. She slumps back against the chair and tries to ignore her own alarm. Everything’s going to be a lot harder if they have to rely on Ben to do all the hard work.
“I think I’m here to help you,” she continues. “The Force sent me back to this moment for a reason—and I think it’s to rewrite what happened.”
“Is that so?” His eyes narrow. “To bring me back to the Light?”
“It’s not about—I don’t care about any of that! Not if it means losing you again.” She doesn’t mean to, but it’s all tangled up in a sob. Having all her memories, good and bad, ruffled through like that has left her raw.
He meets her gaze and stills. “Would you take my hand now? If I offered it to you?”
She returns his stare and hopes he can see all she feels. “If I did, would you turn your back on Snoke and the First Order?”
“And if I did that for you?” He’s trying so hard not to seem eager, not to show her how much he wants this, but she has the advantage here: she knows him in ways she doesn’t think he knows himself. Not yet. He spent two years chasing her, despite her splitting his face in two, despite her every insistence that she would never be by his side, but he’d been so persistent. That persistence came from a place she knew well: loneliness. A need to belong to somebody.
That’s exactly what she can offer him. “Ben, I will give you everything. All of me. I swear it.”
“Us, together? A dyad in the force?”
His mouth is so close to hers. All of that fierce energy is pushing in her direction, reminding her of the times they’d been close—so close—to more than skimming fingertips. He’s looking at her like he had right after he’d offered her his hand, like he wanted to devour her. Like she’s something delicious and he can’t wait to taste her.
“I would burn the First Order down for that,” he says softly.
She thinks she’s probably staring at his lips the same way.
“Good,” she tells him. “We should do that.”