6. Chapter 6

Ben's never gone on a date before, but he knows the theory well enough. Take the person you love somewhere nice, pay for their food, have pleasant conversation with them, hold their hand, and maybe steal a kiss or two. He and Rey have got the holding hands thing down pat and the kissing already out of the way— although he certainly wouldn't say no to more of it— and he has credits to spend. It's the somewhere nice that's the problem, because the squat gray cantina is the only dining establishment on Kemal Station and it leaves much to be desired.

Immediately upon setting foot inside, they are assailed by a veritable wall of noise. Most of the rough-and-tumble congregation of spacers, miners, and small-time criminals are well into their cups, the assortment of heated quarrels, boisterous guffaws, and slurred chatter blurring together with the live band's rather brutish interpretation of a sinfonia concertante to form a grating siege on the ears. The meager lighting is a sickly green hue. The air smells like booze, tabac, and grease.

Ben is quick to decide that this had been a terrible idea and he's all for making a hasty exit— munching on tasteless sticks of synthetic protein in the Falcon' s dingy lounge would be immensely preferable to staying in this hellhole one second longer than necessary. However, before he can communicate as much to Rey, she makes a beeline for a vacant booth in the corner and he has no choice but to follow, shouldering his way through the throng.

She sits down and he squeezes in beside her, grimacing as the upholstery sticks to his clothes in a way that clean upholstery wouldn't. The booth is on the small side, and Rey's expression flickers like she's on the verge of laughing as Ben occupies a good majority of the narrow seating area, crowding her up against the wall.

"What's so funny?" he huffs.

"You." There's the tiniest of teasing glints in her eyes. "And your constant losing battle with furniture."

And as he flashes a mock scowl at her that makes her eyes sparkle just a little bit more, it occurs to him that he's never heard her laugh— really laugh, joyous and unrestrained. It's odd to be so in love with someone and share such an intense connection with her while still not knowing what she looks and sounds like when she gives herself to laughter.

Then again, there'd never been much cause for humor in their interactions during the war. And even now.

A GG-class serving droid trundles over to them. "Eat or drink?" it whirrs out gruffly in its tinny, mechanical voice. When Ben replies that they'll do both, it pulls up the menu from its databank, a list of food and beverages and their corresponding prices glowing in the air above the table in symbols of icy blue Outer Rim Basic.

The selection is far from inspired. It's cantina fare— simple, oily, quick to prepare. After some rather tentative deliberation, Ben settles on the Quor'sav-fried steak with a side of goatgrass salad and two gartro eggs over easy.

"A bowl of nyork chowder for me," Rey says to the service droid.

Ben frowns. She'd picked the cheapest item on the menu. "Rey, no offense, but that's soup—"

"It's very good soup." The droid seems about as affronted as its programming can allow it to be. "Freshly shucked nyorks in a creamy broth with diced potatoes, celonslay, Ojomian onion—"

"You should get something more filling," Ben tells Rey, ignoring the droid, who emits a harsh click of disapproval at being treated in this manner. "What about the steak?"

"Ben," she hisses, "it's almost thirteen credits—"

He turns to the droid. "Make that two Quor'sav-fried steaks."

The droid's round eyes flash yellow as it commits the revised order to memory. "Side dish and style of eggs for the lady?"

Rey is silent. Mutinously so. "Same as mine," Ben instructs in clipped tones before he proceeds to select a bottle from the abysmal wine list.

Once the droid has taken its leave, all of Ben's attention zeros in on the woman beside him. Her posture is stiff, her hands balled into fists on her lap. He braces himself for an argument, and there is a part of him that welcomes it— welcomes the return of her fire and the way she never makes anything easy for him.

But she doesn't say a word. Her sullen acquiescence is unnerving; it sharpens the sounds and smells of the cantina until there is a tense, claustrophobic knot in Ben's throat. Seeking relief, he drapes an arm over her slim shoulders, gathering her as close into his side as he can.

"Tell me what's on your mind." He doesn't care if he sounds like he's begging. There is no room for pride when it comes to Rey. He won't make his parents' mistakes.

The request appears to mollify her. She relaxes against him, her answer muffled against the black fabric over his collarbone. "I know you just want me to eat better, but it's hard for me to let go of old habits. I grew up without a single credit to my name. Paying to sit down and eat a meal prepared by someone else was unheard of. So, to this day, it's instinct for me to cut costs as much as possible— and when you spoke over me and changed my order—" She falters, taking a deep breath as if for courage. "Logically, I understand why you did it. But it felt... it felt like you were invalidating my choice, and the life that led to me making that choice." Her next words come out in a rush. "I know that's not what you meant, it's just how I feel, and you're the one paying for dinner and I'm being ungrateful, I'm sorry—"

"Rey." Ben's fingertips mold to the round of her shoulder in a touch that's as gently reassuring as he can make it. "No need to apologize. I was an ass and I should have been more tactful. I'm sorry."

It's so careful, all of it. The two of them dancing around each other, afraid of wounding. Such a far cry from—

He remembers red light shrieking against blue. Snow and forest, sea and ruins. Rey's all but burrowing into his side, her arms looping around his waist.

"I don't want to fight, this time around," she says with heart-wrenching plaintiveness. "I never want us to fight again."

"I honestly don't think it can be helped," he muses. "This is me we're talking about. I get restless when I'm not pissing someone off."

That elicits a snort out of her, at least.

The service droid comes back with the food, and then with the wine. It's Celanon Semi-Dry, much too young, but a backwater trading post's cantina in the Outer Rim can hardly be expected to possess a well-stocked cellar. It's a stroke of sheer luck that this vintage is fruity enough to abstain from clashing with the pom seed flour-battered meat.

"What happened when you were brought back? On the Deep?" Rey asks after a few bites of steak and eggs and salad. Her inquisitiveness is almost— perfunctory, as if it hadn't occurred to her until now. As if all she'd cared about since he fell into her lap in Mos Eisley was the mere fact of his return, hang the particulars.

But they have to talk about it at some point, even if it's not a time he cares to relive.

Ben takes a sip of wine. So much for the pleasant conversation part of the date. "I woke up naked," he says bluntly as he sets his glass back down on the table. "In a mine shaft."

Her lips press together as a faint, alluring pinkness shades her cheekbones. In the time before, he hadn't realized how easily she blushed, and how prettily, too— he's not exactly short on reasons for wanting to kick his past self, but not having taken advantage of this is climbing to the top of the list in record speed.

"Hopefully you didn't have to remain that way for four whole months," Rey says primly.

"I didn't. A woman on the morning shift found me first. She was a Twi'lek, her name was Daeshara'cor. I had no idea how to even begin to explain the situation to her, but it turned out to be easier because..." He trails off, belatedly noticing that— for some reason— Rey now has her fork in a death grip and she's glaring a hole into her plate.

"Because what?" she prompts tersely before he can ask what the matter is.

"Daeshara'cor was Force-sensitive," Ben explains. "I could feel it inside her. She wasn't even supposed to be in that particular section of the mines that morning, but she said she felt drawn to it. To me." Rey has resumed eating, hacking away at her steak, stabbing the eggs, chewing the greens with a savagery that is surely disproportionate. Ben raises an eyebrow at all of this even as he continues his tale. "I told her as much of the truth as I could risk— that I'd died during the war and the Force brought me back because the galaxy was in danger, although I couldn't tell her who I was, obviously—"

"Oh, I don't know," Rey mutters, "she strikes me as the very understanding sort."

He is truly confused now, but he perseveres. "She found some clothes for me and we concocted a story that I'd been accidentally left behind by the previous batch of workers a couple of weeks prior. The underground mining complex ran through the whole planet so it wasn't too far-fetched that I'd gotten lost. The downside of everyone buying it was that they expected me to have no problem working to earn my keep until the next supply ship arrived." He flashes a wry grin at his date. "I got really good at using a borelifter."

"I suppose Daeshara'cor was an excellent teacher in that regard," Rey says through a full mouth, her cheeks bulging, her eyes narrowed.

And that's when it clicks.

Ben fantasizes about leaving the cantina right this instant— just scooping Rey into his arms and walking out on their half-eaten meals and the bill and carrying her back to the Falcon, where he'll devote the next eternity or so to showing her that she has no cause to be jealous. No cause at all, especially when she looks this good in his jacket.

"Daeshara'cor was kind enough to show me the ropes," he says cautiously, "but I think she got tired of me after a few weeks."

"Oh?"

"Yeah." Under the table, Ben's knee bumps into Rey's entirely not by accident. "I wouldn't shut up about the love of my life."

There it is. Her tiny smile, unfolding like a lyris petal in full bloom. They don't speak again until they've cleared their plates, but the silence that has fallen over their booth is a comfortable one.

Ben sips some more wine to fortify himself before he picks up the threads of unfinished conversation on a more serious note. "I wouldn't call it a good four months. The physical labor helped take my mind off of things— as did giving Daeshara'cor some basic training in how to use the Force— but during downtime I had to deal with... with everything. With being alive again. At night, it was just me and all my regrets. And I missed you so badly that it hurt to breathe."

"I'm familiar with the sensation." Rey leans her head on his shoulder, staring into the ruby depths of her own wineglass. "When did Luke and Leia start manifesting to you?"

"A few days in. Luke was first. I was so startled I nearly hit him over the head with a shovel."

"Sure," Rey scoffs, "you were startled."

Ben can't quite hide a fleeting smirk. "We were able to talk after the attempted bludgeoning. Him and then my mother... It was a gradual process, but we laid a few things to rest— although we're still working on some other stuff. There's an entire lifetime of grudges and mistakes to cover, after all."

"I'm glad they were with you. I'm glad you weren't lonely."

A bittersweet pang twinges through his chest, because that couldn't be further from the truth. "I'm always lonely when I'm not with you, Rey." His arm shifts so that it's once more draped over her shoulders. "I tried reaching out to you, through the bond. Several times. But it was like walking into a brick wall."

Her energy signature flares up, as if stricken. "I was... compartmentalizing," she forces out. "The bond— it— I locked it away. Being constantly reminded that you weren't on the other end— it was too painful."

There's more that she isn't telling him. Even with mental shields in place he can still sense the shape of unspoken truths lingering beyond his reach. But he will be patient, and careful. He won't demand what she isn't willing to give yet. It's not as if he doesn't have secrets of his own.

"I understand," he says.

Another bout of quiet, this one more fraught than the last. The two of them are lost in their own thoughts, much too somber in contrast to the drunken, roaring festivities that surround them, etched in a haze of shadow and green light.

"What was it like?" Rey finally asks. "Being... being one with the Force?"

She mouths it like a euphemism. Like someone saying a few starships short of a fleet instead of insane, or gone over the falls instead of overdosed on spice.

Being one with the Force instead of you died, you were dead.

Ben almost chuckles, but he catches himself in time. Somehow he knows that it would hurt her beyond belief if he were to laugh now. "It was a whole lot of nothing," he says truthfully. "Like I was just sleeping, although there would be occasions when I'd get pulled into a semblance of wakefulness and I'd see mist. Just mist. I had no memories, no..." He trails off, struggling to put the experience into words. "No sense of self," he concludes at last. "I was part of the mists." Rey shudders and his arm automatically constricts, tucking her tighter into his side. "Was it like that for you, too?"

It's not something he can bear to dwell on for too long. Her cold skin, her open, sightless eyes. The way her limbs had— flopped as he jostled her, unresisting and devoid of life. He'd had nightmares about her waxen corpse all throughout those months spent on the Deep.

"No, it wasn't," she tells him, and the thin and fragile phantom that is their bond seems to strain from the blow that Exegol had wrought. "I was somewhere else. A dark, vague place, with so many doors..."

"Doors?" That jostles something in Ben's recollections, but he can't quite place it.

At least, not until Rey continues speaking. "I think it had something to do with one of the illustrations I was studying in the Jedi texts, before. There were nexus points— pathways— all linked together. But there wasn't much else to go on in those pages."

"The Chain Worlds Theorem," Ben says. "Luke and I used to discuss that back when I was his apprentice. Supposedly, there's an in-between place linking all moments in time together." It's odd to be talking about this in an uproarious, smoke-tinged, and utterly mundane cantina with the cheerful jangle of a live band playing in the background; it moves the scene firmly into the realm of the surreal. "According to the ancient scholars, finding yourself in that plane would give you some form of access to the past and to the future."

"I heard voices," Rey mumbles. "The voices of... They were the Jedi of the Old Republic, I know it. They called to me as I was looking up at a sky full of stars. They told me to rise." She lifts her head from his shoulder so that she can look at him. "Did you— were you also able to—"

"No. It was just me." There'd been no one else with him amidst the rocks at the bottom of the abyss. He'd climbed out on his own, broken leg and all. Nothing to coax him higher except for the saving grace of sheer stubbornness.

Rey's hazel eyes flash. She drains the remaining wine in her glass in one swig. There's a part of him that winces at that— while this Semi-Dry may not be one of the more notable vintages, it still deserves a little respect, in his humble opinion— but then she's glaring off into the distance, tight-lipped, and it strikes him that her rage is cold. Like it's been given time to fester.

A year's worth of time, perhaps.

Before he can discern the source of her anger, her gaze darts abruptly to the crowd. Four burly human males are staggering over to the booth, the other patrons all but scrambling to get out of their way. They look drunk and belligerent— the worst possible sort of combination.

They look like trouble.

☾✩☽

Blondie, Snaggletooth, Eyepatch, and Mullet.

These aren't the men's names, but they are what Rey decides to call them, basing off of physical appearance since chances are high that introductions won't be in order. There'd been a cantina on Jakku, too— she knows what people look like when alcohol has made them brave and they're spoiling for a fight.

Ben draws his arm back to his side, but not before giving her one final squeeze. At first she thinks he's wordlessly assuring her that everything will be all right, but, no— he catches her eye, shaking his head slightly, and that's when she realizes he's telling her to stand down.

She raises an eyebrow at him. She's not making any promises.

A quick once-over of the group doesn't reveal any tattoos or paraphernalia indicating allegiance to any of the numerous criminal organizations that plague the Outer Rim. Their muscular builds and the faint whiffs of machined oil suggest that they are miners— probably on the hunt for a good time before they return to their posts on the nearby gas giant. In these rough circles, a good time can often include a brawl or two.

Rey shouldn't begrudge them overly much. She understands all too well the effects that stir-craziness and monotonous toil can have on the human psyche. But she doesn't like the way they're sizing Ben up as if they're a school of dim-witted sharks and he's the big fish who wandered into their midst.

"Looks as though we've got a little misunderstanding on our hands, buddy," Eyepatch slurs. "This here's our booth, you know?"

"Is it," Ben replies in perfect deadpan.

"It is." Snaggletooth waves a meaty and none too steady finger in front of Ben's nose. "See, we were talking about how nice it would be to put our feet up, and this booth's the comfiest in the house."

Ben bats the offending finger away from his face. "I missed the part where you said you put your name on it."

The drunken louts bristle. "Get outta here, pal, before we make you," snarls Blondie. His red-rimmed eyes slide to Rey and his snarl turns into a leer. "Your girlfriend can stay, though."

Demonstrating a complete and utter inability to heed his own advice, Ben's on his feet in an instant, his fist slamming into the blond man's jaw.

Rey manages to scramble out of the booth just as Mullet draws a blaster. She launches herself at him before he can aim it at Ben, grabbing hold of his wrists and then slamming her forehead into his. He reels back, dropping the weapon onto the floor, and she kicks it away, not waiting to see it disappear into the crowd before she throws a punch at Eyepatch.

From behind, a pair of beefy arms encircle her windpipe. It has to be Mullet again, because Snaggletooth is currently stretched out prone over the grimy tiles after Ben smashed the wine bottle over his head. Rey telekinetically forces Mullet's hand closer to her mouth, sinking her teeth into the fleshy mound of his palm. He yelps; she takes advantage of his loosed grip to drive her elbow hard into his ribs, following it up with a spin kick that sends him crashing into Eyepatch.

A short distance away, Blondie has recovered from Ben's left hook and is charging at him. Ben easily sidesteps his inebriated opponent, hauling him up by the back of his shirt and flinging him against the nearest table.

Unfortunately, the table is occupied, and the cluster of fanged, dark-scaled, female Barabels on their species' equivalent of a girls' night out are none too pleased about having their beer spilled all over them.

It's total pandemonium after that.

In hindsight, with the alcohol and the spice overflowing while everyone is so tightly packed together, Rey supposes that the situation had been a powder keg waiting to explode from the very start. The entire cantina devolves into one massive brawl— ludicrously, the live band keeps on playing. She loses count of how many people she has hit and how many have in turn hit her; if she's being honest with herself, there is a certain exhilarating freedom to be had in switching her brain off and letting the adrenaline rush of this kind of riotous combat take precedence.

However, she still has enough presence of mind to be aware that she and Ben need to get out of here before they end up killing someone. They're not defending themselves from seasoned thugs who want them dead. It's just a bar fight.

She snatches the bag of supplies from the abandoned booth and, when she finds Ben again in the sea of swinging fists and overturned furniture, he's clutching the broken wine bottle in one hand and a splintered-off table leg in the other, several unconscious people at his feet. His hair is a sweaty mess and his dark gaze is wild, and he looks like he's enjoying himself far too much.

He pouts a little when he sees the no-nonsense expression on her features, but he releases his makeshift weapons and lets her take his hand and drag him behind her as she clears a path through the chaos, the brawlers who are in the way sent flying in every direction with Force push until she's able to slip out the door with Ben in tow.

And then they're running, through the cold, damp fog, through the glow of yellow lights. Just in case someone decides to chase after them, they don't stop until they've boarded the Falcon, and a few minutes later they're soaring back up into the black, leaving Kemal Station behind.

Rey stares blankly at the celestial wastes beyond the viewport as they set course for the hyperlane. It had all happened so fast— and it hasn't even been a day since they fought their way out of Mos Eisley and through Sluuce Canyon and fed someone to the sarlacc.

"You just appeared out of nowhere and completely turned my life upside down," she says to Ben, glancing over at him with something like amazement.

He smirks. There's a cut on his lip and a bruise on his cheek, as well as some swelling around his right eye. "So now we're even."

She doesn't bother to dignify that with a response. They have fifteen minutes to go before they can make the jump into lightspeed, so she figures she'll use that time to heal him.

Rey stands up, and every single iota of Ben's attention immediately focuses on her with an intensity that's somehow tender and blistering all at once. She moves into the space between his spread legs and stoops over him, brow furrowed in concentration as her fingertips skim over his various injuries and banish them with the Force.

He quietly lets her do this, his head tilted back, the column of his throat as smooth and as pale as alabaster in the starlight. With the attunement that's required for Force healing, she feels his pulse race like it's her own second heartbeat when her thumb dips into the satin-soft bow of his upper lip.

Ben doesn't speak until the cut on his mouth has disappeared under her ministrations. "Sorry our date didn't go so well." The nonchalance in his tone is forced; there's a solemn gravity in the way he looks at her.

"I mean—" Rey shrugs— "at least this time no one got chopped in half."

He chuckles, equal parts strained and affectionate. She returns to her post just as the sensors blare in warning of their impending approach on the hyperlane. They strap in and flip controls with practiced ease, and then the Kemal Station system begins to blur before their eyes.

"Rey," Ben suddenly blurts out, "we forgot something."

She turns to face him sharply, wondering what they could have forgotten, wondering if this is cause for panic. "What is it?"

"This." He leans over from the pilot seat and his lips meet hers just as the world beyond the transparisteel viewport dissolves into brilliant starlines.

Rey closes her eyes, smiling as she kisses him back, gentle and slow and sweet, and she decides that, no, it hadn't been a bad date.

Not at all.