Smuggler Ben and Rey

The Force is omnipresent, omniscient, and always has its own plan.

Benjamin Organa-Solo knew this from the time he could understand what the Force was. He'd always felt it. He couldn't remember a time when the Force wasn't surrounding him and his soul. It sometimes felt like a warm blanket, protecting him from everything. And at other times, the Force was an unemotional teacher.

Han and Leia had tried their best to be good parents. But Han's wanderlust and inability to toe the legal line and Leia's dedication to leaving Vader's legacy behind and being a figure of hope for the whole galaxy had overshadowed whatever parental instincts they'd possessed one time too many. And so, little Ben Solo had mostly grown up in the company of some nanny droids, with occasional visits from his Uncles Chewie and Lando.

Jedi Master Luke Skywalker opened a school for Force sensitive children after the war against the Empire was won. Ben didn't really have a choice in whether he wanted to go to the Jedi Academy or not. Though he did want to be trained to harness the Force, nine year old Ben couldn't see this move as anything more than his parents bundling their problem child off to someone who they thought could handle him better.

Needless to say, his sadness at being sent away, frustration at having no choice in his own future, and his innate strength in the Force, coupled with his emotional turbulence caused more than a few spectacular tantrums over the next few months. It didn't help that Luke felt it necessary to be extra hard on his nephew lest someone accuse him of favoritism. At least that was what Ben assumed the reason had to be, until one evening a few months later.

Luke had been talking to someone over a holocall. Hearing his name, Ben quickly snuck into a recess in the wall nearby… and heartily regretted it when he heard what his uncle had to say.

"There's too much Vader in him. I am afraid the Dark Side might win the battle for Ben's soul."

That night, with just six months of Jedi training under his belt and nothing but a practice saber at his hip, Benjamin Organa-Solo stole his uncle's ship and made his way off planet before anyone even knew he was missing.

Unfortunately for his family, Ben didn't leave any clues to where he was going except a message for his parents that left Leia sobbing and Han wallowing in guilt. Fortunately for Ben, the person he'd gone to after leaving the Academy took him in, no questions asked, and accepted his friend's son as his own. Lando Calrissian may have been a gambler and a rogue, but there was no way he would turn away a too serious ten year-old who seemed to carry the weight of the galaxy on his shoulders.

And so, Ben Solo's life took a turn for the better. The Force still deigned to let him harness its powers as he could, but there were no absentee parents or judgmental uncles. Best of all, the dark cloud that had haunted his steps as long as he could remember receded enough for Ben to feel as if he was alive for the first time.

Lando got in touch with Han and Leia about Ben, but managed to keep them away for their own sakes. Han's 'shoot first and ask questions later' attitude and Leia's need to save everything and everyone from themselves were definitely not good parenting strategies, in Lando's opinion. So for a few years Ben's life settled into normalcy, or what passed for it on Bespin. 

He had been studying what he could of the Force, practicing his lightsaber forms, learning combat skills from Lando's guards, enjoying the occasional visit from Uncle Chewie and later, assisting Lando with his less than legal affairs.

And then one day, the dreams started.

It was the same every time. An ocean, blue and grey with choppy waves, an island rising up in the middle, tall and rocky, and a cave hypnotically calling out to him.

The first few times he had that dream, Ben didn't really think too much about it. But after a few months of seeing the same image for nights on end, some part of him started to obsess about its meaning. He was almost sure that it was a Force vision. His readings hadn't clarified much, but without any other explanation and knowing that the Force ran strong in his birth family, Ben convinced himself that the Force was giving him a quest.

If the weird happenings in his life had confined themselves to dreams, Ben might have had an easier time of it. Years had passed and Ben now ran a cargo shuttling service for Lando: an extra-legal service to be precise. Along with the repeated dream almost every night over the last few years, which Ben felt he had completely memorized, there were also sudden flashes of emotions that were definitely not his and visions of things, commonplace things that somehow felt important.

A ragdoll made to look like a Resistance pilot, an AT-AT walker, scratch marks on a metallic wall and dried flowers sitting in a tin cup. At times, he would feel a weariness that settled deep in his bones, other times a deep loneliness that he'd never experienced, but somehow understood, would envelop him.

Before long, the academic in him figured it out. He had a Force bond. Someone out there in the vastness of the galaxy was connected to him in the Force. And Ben would find them if it was the last thing he did.

He set out, stopping on each planet that had oceans and islands. Every time he did a supply run or a pickup for Lando, he would visit and cross nearby planets that fit the criteria off his list. For years, he'd searched for his bondmate in vain. And now, at almost twenty-eight standard years old, Ben had started to lose hope that he would ever find them.

This particular run's destination wasn't really inspiring his confidence. Jakku was a dustbowl, a wasteland dotted with downed Imperial cruisers and Star Destroyers from the famous battle almost thirty years ago. Nothing of any importance happened on Jakku after the battle.

Shaking his head in resignation, Ben lowered his ship down near a small town called Niima Outpost. Ben felt odd as he did so. Something was brewing in the Force. He could feel it in his bones; it was the calm before a storm. Something was going to happen and Ben needed to be ready for it.

Stepping out into the unforgiving sun, Ben's already prickly senses started to work in overdrive. He'd come to Jakku to pick up some packages for Lando from a Crolute called Unkar Plutt. But First Order soldiers seemed to be hunting something in the town too. It wouldn't do for Ben to get involved in any such skirmish. Ben knew he had to avoid being captured by the First Order and making it easier for them to get him to the so-called 'Supreme Leader', if they found who he really was.

Just as he walked toward the outpost, TIE fighters dropped out of the atmosphere and started to strafe the sand. All it took was a second to realize that they were shooting at two people running in his direction. Explosions followed their footsteps and before Ben knew what he was doing, he had signaled them to run to his ship and started the lift-off sequence. The second he knew they were onboard, the Grimtaash shot toward the atmosphere.

It took plenty of fancy flying to get the TIEs off their tail, but Ben was vaguely aware that one of the two people who had boarded his ship was a girl and that she was at his co-pilot controls, working with him so seamlessly that even in the middle of the nerve wracking chase, he needed a moment to gape at her. Her similarly awe-struck expression let him know that something other than the ordinary was at work. But with TIE fighters trying to fry them into space dust, right then probably wasn't the best time to discuss how they felt about supernatural interventions. 

Once they had shaken the TIEs and jumped to lightspeed, Ben turned to the girl who smiled shyly at him before looking at her companion, or rather, companions. Ben hadn't noticed earlier, but the girl was accompanied by a young man and a kinda-sorta familiar white and orange BB unit.

Finn was the other human, a Resistance fighter. The droid, BB-8, was the irritatingly overconfident flyboy Dameron's droid, which also carried a map to the location of his to-be-avoided-at-all-costs Uncle Luke.

Groaning mentally at their story, Ben knew he needed to pick his next steps carefully if he wanted to get out of this whole mess alive and with his sanity intact. He decided to first take them to Maz Kanata and organize someone from the Resistance to come get them from there, while he made his way to the quickest space corridor near Takodana so he could disappear before either of his parents found him.

That decided, Ben finally turned to the girl, Rey. Her eyes were brightened with excitement and she was almost hopping around from foot to foot in what appeared to be a mixture of happiness, excitement, and anxiety. She'd apparently never been off of Jakku.

Slowly, in fits and starts, her story emerged: her parents leaving her on Jakku and promising to come back, how she'd waited for them for almost fifteen years now. How she thought now that maybe they weren't coming back, and she needed to go out there and see as many worlds as she could so that if she recognized any of them, she could finally solve the mystery of where she belonged.

Though he was tempted to say she belonged with him, which frankly was crazy talk, even for him, Ben just nodded understandingly and offered her a job. She could co-pilot with him as long as she wanted and once she figured out what she wanted to do with her life, he could drop her off wherever she wanted. Rey's answering smile was so bright that Ben decided then and there that he wanted to spend the rest of his days making her smile like that. If Rey had decided something along the same lines about the tall, handsome smuggler with a heart of gold, they would figure it out between themselves, eventually.

Despite Ben and Rey being unaware of their destiny as a dyad, the galaxy had already begun to feel the oncoming change.