7. Chapter 7

Ben Solo is thinking about his father again. It's hard not to. Long jumps through hyperspace provide little in the way of diversion for a crew of two people with a doddering old A.I. that can't be trusted to navigate properly, and Han's presence is everywhere in the cockpit. Written into the very bones of the ship itself.

With Rey asleep in the copilot seat, there's nothing to fill Ben's head but ghosts and silence. A glance to the left and there's Han, or a shadow of him, grumbling about the mechanic who'd tried to sell him on a compressor for the ignition line. A glance to the right and Han's on his feet, stretching muscles stiff from sitting as he gazes contemplatively out at the field of silver and bluish black racing beyond the viewport.

So it goes as the hours drag on, along with the starlines. Sometimes it's Han in his younger years, with the mischievous glint in his eyes that's never far off. Sometimes it's Han as Kylo Ren had seen him last, gray-haired and weathered— still oddly hopeful, for all that. Sometimes it's just his voice, a low, gruff rumble of indistinct things.

Ben's drowning in memory.

Rey emerges from slumber when they're a quarter of the way up the Corellian Run. It's not a gentle process; she jolts back into waking, his name torn from her lips in a gasp as her eyes fly open, wide with panic— only when they land on him does she relax, slumping back into her chair with the oddest mixture of relief and defeat.

"I was afraid it had all been just a dream," she mumbles.

He suppresses a wince, recalling what she'd said about always waking up to find him gone. Force, there's so much that they need to figure out, and he's not helping the situation one bit— not while he still carries the baggage from his previous life. He reaches over to tuck a stray lock of her hair behind her ear.

"It's not a dream." He says this with more conviction than he feels. "I'm here, ma sareen."

She hides her blushing face in the backrest of the seat. Cute, cute, cute, bleats his single brain cell despite the gravity of the moment. He just wants to squeeze her.

When she peeks over at him, it's with a more serious expression as the echoes of his unguarded thoughts over the last few hours are transmitted through the bond. "You were thinking about your father."

Ben nods.

Rey waits. Not expectantly, but tentatively, as if she hopes he'll share this with her but she isn't sure whether he actually will. He looks at her and he thinks about the hand that reached out to touch his, so long ago. The tear that slid down a freckled cheek, gleaming in the firelight.

"Neither are you," she'd said. They weren't alone. Not anymore.

And he'd gone and messed it up, but perhaps that part still held true. Perhaps that part can still be saved.

Perhaps it's finally time to tell someone all of it. Perhaps that someone is Rey.

"I loved my father," Ben says thickly. "He used to tell me that there was a whole galaxy against us, but we were going to make it. I believed that. I truly did. But there were voices in my head, and they got louder as I got older. I know now that it was Palpatine in the guise of Snoke, in the guise of my own doubts." Rey flinches; he's about to assure her that he doesn't blame her for her power-mad grandfather's sins, but she shakes her head and motions for him to continue. And so he does. "I know that now," he repeats, "but, back then, all I understood was that there was darkness inside me. It made everything worse— my parents' absences, their quarrels, many of which were about me, what to do with me— it rotted all of these things in my head. Eventually, I was sent to train under Luke, and that was when my feelings of isolation increased." His hands balled into fists on the armrests. "I grew to resent Han Solo. The voices told me he was a liar, that people laughed behind my back because my mother had married a smuggler, that any potential I had was greatly diluted by his blood— by his lack of Force sensitivity." Stars, but he feels smaller and smaller with every word spoken. He could almost be that child again, so lost, so angry, so afraid. "Most of all, I resented him for letting me be sent away. For not coming to get me. That probably doesn't make a lot of sense."

"It does." There is a quiet fierceness in Rey's tone. On her face. "Those years on Jakku, back before I— before you told me..." She hesitates. Suddenly there is a space between them in the shape of the blue-tinged distance between their past selves on the Steadfast' s hangar bay. "We'll kill him together." He'd taken off his mask so that she could see he meant it. It hadn't worked. The Falcon had come roaring up from out of the black, and she'd gone somewhere he couldn't follow.

"Growing up in that desert, I was torn between missing my parents and being furious at them for not coming back," Rey is saying now. "I didn't know— and I still don't— which of those two emotions I felt more. So, what you are feeling, it makes sense to me."

As far as declarations go, it's a balm in more ways than one. It soothes something inside him. Not alone, not alone anymore. It gives him the will to continue, even though the next part is going to hurt the most to say out loud.

"When she began manifesting to me on the Deep four months ago, my mother told me that Han— that Dad—" Ben's voice cracks around the word the way it had on a stormy ocean moon in the Endor system towards the end of the war— "that he fought to not have me sent to Luke. That she eventually convinced him, but it cost her their marriage. And in the end he was the one who came to save me, after all. He was as Force-sensitive as a rock, but he showed up on Kef Bir when I needed him most." Ben hangs his head, unable to meet Rey's gaze. "Or maybe he was just a figment of my imagination. Just me trying to give myself the final push I needed to become Ben Solo again. Maybe the truth is that my father would have taken on an entire galaxy for me and I killed him and he died looking into my eyes."

The silence that follows is absolute, but it is short-lived. Before Ben can succumb to the bleak, indelible reality of his mistakes— before he can even start to fear that Rey will come to her senses about this Corewards jaunt with a murderer brought back from the dead—

— she moves, unbuckling her seatbelt and crawling into his lap. Closing the space between them.

He is too stunned to do anything but let his arms close around her in response to some instinct that's as old as time itself. She hugs him back, strong and warm and smelling like the desert.

"I think that love is stronger than death," Rey says. "I think Han went to Starkiller Base because you were worth everything, and I think he defied time and space to come to you on Kef Bir for the same reason. And even if he was just a memory then, it still means that the dark side couldn't cast a shadow over what you carried in your heart." She leans in close, resting her forehead against his. "You have Han's strength. You have his spirit," she breathes along the curve of his cheek. It's as hushed as only the truth can be, threaded through with the solemnity of the Force. "You are your father's son."

Tears leak from the corners of Ben's eyes; he hides them in the chestnut strands of Rey's hair. They hold each other quietly as the ship sails on through the starry corridors of hyperspace, both of them reveling in this closeness that had been so hard-won.

When she speaks again, it is to tell him, "I have something for you."

☾✩☽

The silence in the crew's quarters is deafening. The small, sparsely furnished cabin that Rey claimed for her own is too vast and too empty without Ben in it. She left him at the cockpit for only the short amount of time it took to walk here, but there's a part of her that misses him already.

There's a part of her that's afraid he won't be there when she returns.

Rey shakes her head as she rummages through the compartment bolted to the wall. This is her comeuppance— it surely is— for having locked her grief away for so long. For not talking to anyone about what happened on Exegol save for the barest bones of it. For not telling even her closest friends about all the things that had lain waste to the chambers of her being.

Now that same grief sneaks up on her at unexpected moments. She feels the echoes of it tenfold.

Her fingers closing around a familiar length of twine, she gingerly extracts Han Solo's dice from the piles of odds and ends that she'd accumulated since fleeing Jakku. The original chain had begun to rust; she'd replaced it with the twine until she could find something better, closing it into a loop with a ball clasp fashioned from salvaged metal bits so that the dice dangles from it like a pendant of sorts.

Rey studies the dice, their aurodium plating cool against her palm. Ben had loved playing with these as a child, Leia told her once. He'd scamper about with the chain dripping from his chubby fingers, telling everyone that he wanted to be a pilot like his dad.

It makes Rey smile a little, the mental image of Ben as a fat, happy toddler, but it's a smile that's quick to fade as she's lanced through by a spike of ice-cold fury. He should have been a pilot, she thinks. The Jedi path brought him nothing but suffering. The Force used him for its own purposes and then cast him aside. She's been dwelling on this ever since their eye-opening discussion in the cantina at the Kemal Station outpost. Ever since he told her about climbing out of the void on his own.

The Force wants something else from him now— from them both. But they were under no obligation to cater to its demands. They'd already done so once and it had cost them dearly.

We can still run away together. Who is there to stop us? We can change course and leave the galaxy behind to burn.

The intercom crackles to life, sparing Rey from more of her dark musings. "Everything all right?"

Ben's voice is tinged with static, modulated by the wires snaking through metal too dense for comlink frequencies to penetrate. It's a shade too close to what he'd sounded like from behind his old mask and Rey shivers, her free hand clutching his jacket tighter around her body.

She walks over to the intercom and presses the button. "Everything's fine. I'm about to head back."

"Don't take too long or I'll start missing you."

Rey is absolutely mortified by the giggle that escapes her lips. It's a little high-pitched and girlish, and upon hearing it she's hard-pressed to believe it comes from her at all. But she's unable to suppress it, so wonderfully helpless in the face of the pleasure that fills her in a rush of warmth. Of light.

The darkness retracts its claws.

"I haven't even been gone ten minutes," she admonishes him.

Ben's crooked, rueful grin is audible in his tone when he replies. He no longer sounds like Kylo Ren. "I'll start missing you anyway."

Of course she has to kiss him for that. She all but flies into his arms the moment she sets foot inside the cockpit. He's standing— most likely stretching out legs cramped from the long haul in the pilot seat— and he catches her easily as she surges up on the tips of her toes and presses her lips to his.

It hadn't taken Rey very long to arrive at the conclusion that she can gladly spend the rest of her life kissing Ben Solo. She bemoans the fact that she is human and needs to breathe; when she pulls away, he chases her mouth and it is nothing short of a massive display of willpower that enables her to stop him, bracing her palms against his wide, enticingly muscled chest.

"I have to give this to you first," she insists, showing him the dice.

He turns solemn at once, his deep brown eyes softening in memory as the golden cubes catch the grimy light coming off of the Falcon' s glow-panels. "Dad won this ship from Uncle Lando using those," he says. "He called them his lucky dice."

"Maybe now they'll bring you luck, too," Rey tells him quietly.

Although he says nothing in response, Ben leans down so she can slip the loop of twine over his head. When he straightens up, the pair of dice settle beside his heart and it seems to Rey that it's their rightful place.

Ben fiddles with them as if testing their weight, as if confirming that they're real. She remembers Crait, remembers the bond opening to show him on his knees in the abandoned Rebel base, cradling Luke's projection of the dice like they were sacred objects. He had looked so pale and so lost. She hadn't been able to tear her eyes away from his right up until the moment the Falcon' s door slid shut.

But that was in the time before. Just as the dark side could not in the end hold sway over Han Solo's son, so too will the past cease to have power over Ben and Rey and all that they carry between them. She'll never allow it to be otherwise.

His free hand reaches out to her, cupping the back of her neck so he can guide her closer. "Thank you, beloved," he murmurs pressing a kiss to her forehead just as she starts to blush again.

☾✩☽

They sleep in shifts throughout the rest of the journey. The Falcon can't be left unattended while in hyperspace and, in spite of her mutinous compulsion to leave the galaxy to its own devices, Rey has to acknowledge that breaking up the jumps is a luxury they cannot in good conscience afford. The mysterious threat puts her friends in danger, too.

Besides, it would be nice to see Finn, Poe, Rose, and the droids again. She warms to the idea as they draw closer to Coruscant. There's the matter of how the hell she'll explain Ben strolling into Galactic Alliance headquarters a year after she told them that he died to save her on Exegol, but the mere fact that she needs to explain it in the first place— it's a gift in itself. Its complications are secondary. She and Ben will just have to wing it when they meet with the others.

Rey's not too worried about that. Their shared history has made it clear that they do best when they're improvising.

"Has Chewbacca taken on an active role in this federal republic?" Ben asks, drowsy-eyed and nursing a cup of bitter caf as they pass through the Narvath sector.

It's preposterous he's even entertaining the notion that politics would be Chewie's style, but Rey sees the question for what it is. "He went back to Kashyyyk after the war," she says gently. "Rebuilding efforts are underway over there and he wanted to spend time with his clan. I visited him a few months back— he told me he's most likely quitting the spacer life for good."

Ben nods, staring moodily out the transparisteel viewport. She'd felt the bowcaster wound in his side twinge once or twice, via the bond, and she'd also felt it heal that stormy day on Kef Bir.

"His nephew, Lowie, is Force-sensitive," Rey continues, and Ben's gaze darts to her with a hint of surprise. "A rare thing for their species. Once-in-a-century kind of rare."

"Lucky bastard."

It's not the expletive that gives Rey pause. It's the fact that Ben's the one saying it, his perennial aristocratic tone laced with a sarcasm that's perfectly self-deprecating and deadpan. She wants to laugh. She wants to cry, to, for the boy who'd been so young when the burden of generations was placed on his shoulders.

Before she can do either, Ben continues his line of inquiry. "Why aren't you teaching him? Lowie, I mean."

She looks away, her gaze falling to the dashboard with its plethora of controls. Chewbacca had asked if she could, but... "I'm not ready, Ben."

She's afraid that he'll pry— and he wants to, she can sense it, can sense his mixture of frustration and curiosity rising to the surface, but he soon clamps down on it with some effort.

"All right," he says, amiably enough, and she's seized by the urge to apologize for being so cagey.

There is so much that she's not ready to give voice to yet. There is a year's worth of sorrow and failure that has sunk into the marrow of her bones.

In between shifts, they discuss other things as the hours tick by and the starlines of hyperspace pulse on like minnows in a stream. The Falcon is crossing from Merthian to the Iseno sector when Rey learns what really happened the night Luke raised his blade to his sleeping nephew— how it was a freak storm that had brewed above the temple and razed it to the ground, how the confrontation with the surviving apprentices had spun wildly out of control. How Snoke and the Knights of Ren had been the only ones Ben could turn to in the aftermath.

He is oddly calm and resigned as he retraces his trail of doom. The overall picture is that of a boy who'd had no choice, who'd been manipulated from the very beginning on account of a power and a legacy that he hadn't asked for in the first place.

Rey's aware that she is hardly an unbiased judge. If things were otherwise— if she didn't love him as much as she does— would these truths be enough to absolve him in her eyes?

She'll never know. All she's sure of is that Ben had come back to the light, and that there had still been light in him even amidst the machinations of all those who'd tried to extinguish it for their own purposes. It occurs to her that he might be the strongest person she's ever met.

He is certainly the most stubborn.

☾✩☽

Coruscant went relatively untouched by the First Order's rise to power and its subsequent downfall. After the destruction of the Hosnian system, most of the remaining Core Worlds had quietly surrendered, and when the tide of war changed the First Order troops installed therein had just as quietly fled, thrown into disarray by the deaths of the Supreme Leader and other high-ranking officers at Exegol.

When Rey told Ben that she couldn't stand to remain on Coruscant for long periods of time due to the sheer number of people, it had been an excuse, but it hadn't been a lie. Although she braces herself as they make planetfall, the combined weight of billions upon billions of energy signatures still slams into her with all the force of a sack of bricks— or perhaps a massive wave, threatening to pull her under. She grimaces and bolsters her mental shields, taking refuge in the multiple steps of the landing sequence so she can shut out everything else.

The control tower at Galactic Alliance HQ— really just the old Imperial Palace, repurposed for this new era— wastes no time in granting the Falcon permission to dock. Rey Skywalker is their Jedi, after all. Their war hero. They'll probably be singing quite a different tune if they ever learn who her grandfather was.

Only Finn, Rose, Poe, and Chewie know.

Ben is clearly nervous as they prepare to disembark, chewing on his bottom lip, his complexion paler than usual. "Should we get you a mask?" Rey asks him.

She'd meant it as joke, albeit not a very good one— she is nervous, too— but he appears to give it serious consideration.

"It should be fine," he slowly says after a while. "I didn't... Not a lot of civilians saw my face, before. It was always Hux or Pryde making the announcements, giving the speeches. As for former Resistance personnel— I can use the Force to stay below their radar until we've secured a meeting with your friends. Somewhere private, obviously."

"Obviously." She hands him back his jacket, more than a little sad that their time alone has come to an end. But there will be other times, she'll make sure of it; they just have to get through this first.

Here we go, Rey thinks as the Falcon' s main door slides open and the ramp lowers, and she and Ben step out into the blazing sunlight.