3. Chapter 3
Much like the one she'd used on Jakku, Rey's current speeder is what spacers would call an Ugly if it were a ship. It's cobbled together from scrap that she'd pulled out of junkyards and desert wreckage, as well as spare parts gifted in exchange for healing and repair work. The hull is a monstrous combination of podracer and Y-wing, with a flatbed bolted to the rear for cargo, and most of the engine once belonged to a skiff that had met its untimely end near Anchorhead Pass.
She can feel Ben's struggle to not say anything, but he eventually loses, as she'd known he would.
Love of her life though he might be, he's never learned how to shut up.
"My mother gave you access to the Organa vaults. You can easily buy top of the line."
"I prefer customizing." She only ever dips into that account when she's desperate. It's not her money.
Ben makes a grumpy sort of face that Rey shouldn't find so endearing. His eyes are wonderfully brown in the golden morning light as they dart from her to the single seat and back again.
"It'll be fine," Rey manages to force out. Her cheeks are on fire in a way that has nothing to do with Tatooine's suns. "Go on."
Ben shrugs, then jumps up to straddle the seat with a careless ease that she'd only seen in flashes, in the bond, towards the very end. Stray locks of dark hair fall across his forehead and he sweeps them back with boyish impatience, and out of nowhere comes a painful tug at the corner of her heart.
She still can't believe he's real.
Ben surveys the minute space between his body and the speeder's controls with pursed lips— lips that proceed to stretch infinitesimally into the tiniest of lopsided smirks. "Nothing for it, then, pateesa. Hop on."
Rey hadn't thought it was possible for her face to get any warmer. "I... what?"
He cocks his head at her. "It's Huttese for 'sweetheart'—"
"I know what it means," she hastens to interrupt. "I just—"
She stops talking, unsure.
Just what?
She's been called terms of endearment before. Sarcastically, by merchants she's arguing with. Casually, by Resistance flyboys. None of those people had ever held her heart the way Ben does, and that makes it different, somehow. Rey's caught between embarrassment and some tentative, budding delight.
Ben's eyes widen as they take her in. They appear a little darker than they'd been a few moments ago. "You've gone as pink as a Tarisian rose," he sighs, a little too happily for someone stuck with a traveling partner who can't even handle a pet name. "Come here."
He holds out his hand. She automatically takes it and he hauls her up. Sunlight blurs him at the edges, and she feels like she's being pulled headlong into a dream.
☾✩☽
Okay, so maybe I didn't think this through—
— had been a common lament of Han Solo's that Ben never expected to be so freely echoing years later.
But he really didn't think this through.
Balanced precariously on the lone seat, he spreads his thighs wide enough for Rey to perch between them. It's not so bad at first, but the purr of the engine soon sends reverberations throughout the hull that— coupled with the way she moves as she steers them through the bluff's many twists and turns— jostles the curve of her ass against his groin.
For a man who'd resisted baser impulses his whole life and spent six standard months as an incorporeal resident of the Netherworld after that, it's the most exquisite form of torture to be pressed up against the woman who'd been a constant fixture in his darkest fantasies throughout the last year of his previous existence. Death and the Mists-Beyond and resurrection have not been enough to staunch his desire for her.
If anything, he feels as if his every nerve ending is live wire.
However, once they're on flatland, another matter takes up his attention entirely. It's the sand— stirred up by the repulsors, it beats against his face in a flurry of coarse particles. He screws his eyes shut but it gets everywhere— up his nose, into his mouth...
The speeder comes to a halt. Rey rummages for something in her pack, then twists around to face him. She'd slapped on a pair of goggles and pulled up her hood at the beginning of the journey, and now she's taken out a bunch of clean rags and is draping them over his head, wrapping them around the lower half of his face, securing them with knots. Her slim fingers work quickly and efficiently, but they are unfailingly gentle, nonetheless.
She's caring for him, in one of the ways that she knows how to. A lump rises in his throat.
Beloved, let me take you away from all this, he wishes he could beg her. We'll go somewhere nice, and green, and you'll never know hardship again for the rest of your days.
But that's not why the Daughter had brought him back. And if he doesn't do as he'd been bid, soon there won't be anywhere nice left in the galaxy.
Although there will probably be quite a bit of green.
Once his head is swaddled in enough protective layers to satisfy her, Rey starts the speeder up again. Ben had thus far been using the Force to maintain his balance, but he succumbs to the wave of affection that has him curling around Rey's much smaller frame, his arms encircling her waist from behind as they coast over the tarnished expanse of the Great Chott salt flat.
It feels so right, to hold her like this. Like he'd been made to hold nothing else. The bond gleams an inviting silver along the edges of his mental walls and the temptation to lose himself in it— in her— has never been as great as it is now.
But... not yet. There might be time later as he nears the end of destiny's road, but not yet.
They disembark at the ruins of the Lars homestead. Ben removes his wraps, and it's the smell that hits him first. Earthy clay and sharp sodium, beneath which lies the musty undercurrent of decay. There is a flash of images across the surface of his mind— plumes of thick smoke wafting up into the scorched heavens, charred corpses at the house's door. There is a stirring in the rivers of time, ripples of Luke Skywalker's grief echoing through the years.
"This place is a graveyard," Ben tells Rey.
"It's where I buried the lightsabers," she says in wooden tones, slipping off her goggles. "Come, I'll show you—"
"I'll do it." The words emerge more brusquely than he'd intended; he squeezes her hip in silent apology. "Get back on the speeder." It's suddenly imperative to him that she rises above, that the unseen shadows do not cling to her a second longer than is necessary.
She arches a brow but complies easily enough. He reflects that their story might have gone more smoothly if only she'd been this cooperative from the very beginning— a foolish notion that he is quick to nip in the bud. He would not have preferred her any less defiant, any less of a storm, any less of who she is and what she had meant to him when he died and what she means to him still.
Her watchful gaze weighs at the back of his neck as he sets forth, stopping several feet away and closing his eyes, trawling for the hum of kyber hidden beneath the sands.
At first, there is nothing, and he grows mildly concerned that the sabers are no longer here. What was there to stop some eager Jawa with a metal detector from digging deep, after all?
"For goodness' sake, Ben." The note of frustration in Leia's voice nearly makes him grin. His mother had always had a temper to rival her husband's, although she'd masked it with diplomatic acumen and courtly graces. "Concentrate. Use what you were taught."
Right.
The crystal is the heart of the blade. The meditation comes back to him, providing a focal point as he continues to search. The heart is the crystal of the Jedi. He can picture a younger version of Leia turning the age-old words over and over in her head as she constructs the weapon, as she attunes to it. He remembers doing this himself, under Luke's tutelage. Perhaps that is all the passage of time is— a family being mirrors of each other, from one generation to the next.
The Jedi is the crystal of the Force.
The sapphire pulse of Leia's kyber illuminates the darkness behind Ben's shut lids. He stretches out his hand. He hears a rustling as the sands part to give up their treasure. A metal hilt glides into his palm, and his fingers close around it as his eyes fly open.
The Force is the blade of the heart.
His mother is standing in front of him, with a sad smile that speaks of what has been lost and what could still be found again someday. She gestures at the lightsaber that he's now holding. "I gave it up because I saw your death at the end of my Jedi path," she says. "Maybe what happened at Exegol was what that vision had meant all along, or maybe there's another universe where I am a Jedi and you are a memory." She cradles his once scarred cheek. "All I'm certain of is that— in this universe— I made so many mistakes, Ben. But please— please just know that I loved you through all of them. I loved you until my last breath. I love you now, in the life after."
Ben nods, too overcome to speak. There are tears streaming down his face. Leia takes her time brushing them away, and then she's gone, leaving behind only desert air and silence.
He tucks the lightsaber into the holster of his belt, then wipes his dripping nose on the sleeve of his jacket. He'd never been a graceful crier, and he's still sniffling a little as he returns to where Rey is waiting.
If she's surprised by his tears, she doesn't say a word. Instead, his beautiful girl immediately clambers off the speeder and throws her arms around his neck. He crushes her to him as the twin suns bear down upon the land.
They stay like that for a while, lost in a place that's quiet and just for the two of them. Eventually, it's Ben who lets go first. "I'm all right now," he mumbles with an abashed half-smile, dropping a kiss on top of Rey's head.
She doesn't quite look like she believes him, but she nods. They board the speeder, and together they leave the past behind.