12. Chapter 12

"Let them."

"Let them?" Rey repeated. "You mean you want to leave your fate in the hands of people who don't even know you?"

"Yes," Ben said simply, in that mild manner of his. Rey was pacing around his bed, having returned from her failed conversation with Finn in a huff. She had immediately launched into planning how she could somehow subvert the council or ensure an optimal outcome. Ben, however, seemed to have no interest in engineering his own future, but appeared resigned to accept whatever consequences were assigned to him.

Rey stopped pacing and knelt at his bedside. He was sitting up now, propped against a stack of squashy pillows Shanvuras had brought for him. The medic had declared him surprisingly healthy, if weak, and had prescribed a strict routine of water, food, and further rest—real sleep, she'd called it, "not this Force stupor nonsense"—before he could attempt any significant activity.

"Ben," Rey said for the millionth time, "most of the people on the council will have no idea what you did for me. They don't know that we would have lost without your help. I'll tell them everything, of course, but they'll probably want revenge more than they'll want to dispense mercy."

"Let them have their revenge." Ben smiled gently at Rey's look of distress, reaching out to gather her hand in his much larger one. "They deserve justice, Rey. And I deserve punishment. A man who gives no mercy earns none."

"But I—"

"Please." Ben's voice was coarse with emotion. "Let it rest, Rey. There are so many things I can never undo. But I can pay for them. I have to. They need me to. And so do I."

Rey opened her mouth to say more, but something in his eyes stopped her. It was the pain she'd seen in him since the day he killed his father. He was a broken man; the damage he'd done to himself was in many ways irreparable. Perhaps there were some small hurts that could be mended, some losses to make peace with, but most of his gaping wounds would remain raw for years, if not the rest of his life. He wanted to serve whatever sentence the council dealt to him as penance, a way to let his former enemies heal, even if the healing it brought would only ever be superficial, and never satisfying.

"Okay." Rey leaned in and kissed him. He responded tenderly, sending bursts of shivers down her spine, fireworking all the way to her hands and feet.

Rey pulled away at the sound of footsteps entering their cavern. It was Jannah, carrying the tray of food both Poe and Shanvuras had promised. Rey rose, shielding her surprise that it was Jannah making the delivery, instead of one of Shanvuras's underlings.

"Thank you," she said, relieving her of the tray and setting it down on her own empty cot. "Is the council ready to convene yet?"

"Not quite," said Jannah. She paused, standing there awkwardly, apparently uncertain of what to do with her hands. "Sorry, but—could I speak with you a moment? In private?"

"Oh," Rey said. "Er, sure. I'll be right back," she added to Ben. She didn't notice he was far more concerned with the food that she'd set just out of reach than he was with her leaving him alone.

Rey followed Jannah out of the room and into the corridor that connected the system of caves. The passageway could hardly be categorized as private, what with the constant flow of traffic moving through it, but Jannah guided Rey into a small, naturally-occurring alcove in the wall.

"What's this about?" Rey asked.

Jannah took a quick survey of their surroundings before answering. "Finn. Sort of."

"Sort of?"

"Yeah, it's about Finn. About both of you." Jannah sighed, seemingly losing patience with her own inability to explain herself. "Listen, I know I don't know him half as well as you do, but I get him in a way that not many other people can."

Rey nodded. She didn't know much about Jannah's past, just that she'd been a stormtrooper who'd defected with a group of likeminded others.

"Point is, I understand where Finn's coming from about your boyfriend." Jannah held up a hand to cut off Rey's imminent argument about her choice of vocabulary. "I'm not here to judge you for seeing goodness in someone, even him. I'm just here to offer my two cents because I think they might be useful."

"Go on."

"Finn thinks he's angry at you for bringing Kylo Ren here, into a place he considers safe. But really, he's hurt. He sees Kylo Ren as a symbol of the suffering he was forced to endure—and asked to enact on other people. It makes sense because, well, it's true."

A warm, liquid sensation was dripping down Rey's throat and into her stomach. Guilt.

"None of that will ever change," Jannah continued. "Even if 'Ben Solo' declares his undying devotion to the Resistance and repents every heinous crime he ever committed, Finn will hate him for being part of a system, and leading a system, that robbed him of his childhood and forced him into a life of servitude for a cause he never believed in."

Rey understood. It was one of the first things she and Finn had bonded over: the fact that their identities had been stolen from them and had long remained beyond their control. The First Order may have existed before Snoke had recruited Ben, meaning Finn had been inducted long before his involvement, but that didn't make Kylo Ren any less culpable, or Finn's pain any less real.

"But what Finn hasn't realized," Jannah said, "and that I've had the time and space to come to terms with, is that Ben Solo isn't that different from me and him. He was an impressionable kid who got swindled into taking a bad deal. We've all been there." Rey frowned, taking this all in. "Not a one-to-one comparison, maybe, but it's not such a leap to imagine what could happen if the brainwashing worked on you, and you fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. Finn could just as easily have gone the route of Captain Phasma or Kylo Ren and become a tyrant. But looking at that is uncomfortable, so he's just angry without doing the work to figure out why. I'm not saying that he owes Kylo Ren a second chance or that you should expect him to greet an old abuser with open arms. But this is a—complicated situation, and I think it's worth considering that not everything is as clear cut as we'd like it to be, and that we could all be seduced to fighting for a bad cause, if we were fed so many lies and were vulnerable enough to want to believe them."

For a few seconds Rey couldn't find her voice. She was impressed by the woman's emotional savvy. She had held the same beliefs long before this conversation but could never have articulated them so clearly.

"Th-thank you," she said. "I think you're right. In fact, I know you are." She thought of what she had seen in the Death Star, that creature that had worn her face and bared those pointed teeth at her. Was there some version of all of them that had chosen darkness? Emperor Palpatine had held the survival of her friends hostage for the ransom of her willingness to join him. And she had been a hair's breadth away from taking his deal. It wasn't the same as what had happened to Ben, but Jannah had hit the nail on the head. The Dark Side preyed on vulnerability. That truth didn't absolve anyone of their sins, but—it humanized them.

Jannah nodded. "I just—I just wanted to let you know what I was seeing from my side of things. Finn doesn't hate you, Rey. He's just in a lot of pain, and he doesn't know how to deal with the fact that you've become a part of it."

"I understand," Rey said softly, almost a whisper. "I never wanted to cause him pain. But I . . . I care very deeply about the man in that room, too. We're connected in a way I've never been with anyone else. It helps me see him. Kind of like how you can see Finn."

"Yeah. I get it. I hope I helped. I'd like something good to come out of the council, or something better than what we've had until now, anyway. There's a lot of other things to decide, not just the fate of Kylo Ren."

"Would you be willing to speak? About what you just told me?"

"I can speak to my experience," Jannah said. "Nothing else."

"That's good enough for me," Rey said. "Thank you, Jannah. See you at the council."

"Sure," Jannah said, and the two women parted ways.

Rey returned to Ben's room to see the plate of food floating up from the tray on her cot and over to him. He froze like a steelpecker caught on a shipwreck, the food hovering in midair. Rey stared at him.

"I'm hungry," he said. Rey burst into laughter and went to go give him the rest of his food, pushing aside the important decisions that would be made later that evening.

A/N: Thank you for your patience! The holidays were busier than I expected, but quite lovely. Thank you so much for over 300 follows! I'm excited to get back into this fic and squee with y'all some more. I'd like to note that I still have only seen the movie once, so I may make some continuity errors. I'm hoping to see it again next week. I'd also like to hear from you guys and find out what you'd like to see in this fic/where you'd be interested in having it go! I'll probably wrap up the meat of it before school starts back up in mid-January, but I could potentially keep working on it more slowly after that if there's interest, or do epilogues/drabbles after the main plot ends. Lots of love!