Chapter Text
This was a mistake.
Rey knew it the moment the elevator door opened and she came face-to-face with Snoke for the first time. She knew it when Ben released her, distanced himself from her mind and kneeled before his master. She knew it when his lightsaber stilled just inches away from her face, and she was forced to look up at him and beg with just one word: Ben.
In reality, Rey shouldn’t have expected it to work. She knew Ben Solo was still in there, but this was her worst idea yet. She couldn’t trust him to do the right thing in the presence of his master, the creature in every crevice of his consciousness.
Ben. What a fool she was.
Even so, it wasn’t like she mattered in the end. A few days ago, Rey was a nobody from Jakku. She lived day by day, hoping, praying that her family would come back for her. If she had suddenly dropped dead and was buried in the sand by whatever sandstorm would come next, nobody would have cared. Nobody would have remembered her.
This was no different. Maybe a few would have mourned, but in the end she was just one person in a galaxy of trillions of people, a grain of sand in an entire desert. She had failed in everything she set out to do, and now she’d failed in bringing Ben Solo back to the light. A means to a messy end.
Fulfill your destiny.
Maybe she should be grateful. A death by a lightsaber in an effort to save the Light surely would surely be better than finding herself old and weathered on Jakku, still wishing for the family that would seemingly never come. At least now Rey could say she had done something, hadn’t just wasted her life away alone. Now she had Finn, a friend that would remember her. Maybe even Leia would tell the story of the foolish girl from Jakku who thought she could change things, thought she could change someone.
Foolish, indeed.
Snoke was lying, she knew he was. There was no way it was him who bridged their minds. Ben had to know this. Ben had to know he was being tooled with. Still, he made no indication that he was anything but loyal to Snoke, showed any signs that he knew this was wrong.
It couldn’t end like this. It couldn’t. She was just beginning to understand herself and this thing she had, what she could do with it. She was just beginning to explore the galaxy and see all the things she always dreamed of seeing. She was just beginning to find people that she maybe could call family one day. Were her 19 years stuck in the hellhole Jakku supposed to be for nothing?
No. No, that was not going to happen.
Everything seemed to move slowly but all at once at the same time. Ben’s lightsaber was close and then it wasn’t. She was levitating and then she wasn’t. Snoke was alive and then he wasn’t. That’s all it was, a fleeting moment where everything seemed to go her way. But as soon as relief flooded her, as soon as the lightsaber hit her hand and she stood in front of Ben with a million questions on her tongue, there was another battle to win.
The fight was electrifying. Rey sensed Ben like he was a part of her, moving in time with him like he was an extension of herself. In a way, he was. She felt his anger coursing through her, the rush of adrenaline, the power. It was dark and dangerous but this was just the tiniest taste of it.
You went straight to the dark. It offered you something you needed, and you didn't even try to stop yourself.
Maybe Luke was right, but if this was dark side, Rey wanted so much more of it.
One .
Her muscles ached, her body battered from a combination of the encounter with Snoke and the fight, but there was no time to stop and take a breath. One guard came, took a blow, then rotated with the other. Again and again, one after another. It almost seemed never-ending, like there was no escape from the assault of red that constantly came in waves.
Two.
Her fighting was messy now, turning into chaotic, predictable clashes of energy. Jedi didn’t fight like this. Jedi didn’t fight through desperate, uncalculated swings and cuts and knicks and bruises. The Jedi were supposed to be unparalleled and incomparable. No, Rey didn’t know that kind of fighting. The fighting she knew came from error, pain, death. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t easy, and it never ever stopped.
Three.
There wasn’t time to breathe before she spotted him across the throne room on his knees with a guard at his throat. It was the first time Rey’d seen him the entire fight, focused entirely on the guards pursuing her. It hadn’t even occurred to her that he could be lying dead himself, leaving her with no way out, alone again.
The last guard was close to giving her that exact reality. Rey could never make it to him if she ran, the Praetorian’s blade too close to his neck now, so she did the first thing that popped into her mind: threw it.
In reality, her plan shouldn’t have worked as well as it did, but she imagined the Force had a hand in navigating the saber into Ben’s hand. He didn’t hesitate activating and deactivating it within a second. Ben’s eyes met hers and didn’t leave them even as the last guard fell back, his body slumping to the floor.
Rey was already walking—more limping, actually—forward when Ben got to his feet, tossing the deceased guards weapon away. Her lightsaber was still in his hand, hanging loosely down by his side. A fleeting thought, It belongs there, passed through her head before she stopped a few meters away from him.
“Ben,” she said, chest heaving.
“Rey.” His eyes didn’t break contact with hers, didn’t look away once at the scene of destruction around them. Embers rained down upon them, reflecting a faint glow of yellow onto their skin as they just stood, completely overwhelmed by the other’s presence.
Neither of them spoke for the longest moment, the crackle of fire the only thing penetrating the silence between them. Was there anything to say at all? Plenty. There were almost too many things to say at this point. A million questions, but not nearly enough answers.
Instead, Ben stepped forward and closed the distance between them until they were only inches apart. Moist hair stuck to his forehead, skin slicked with sweat from the fight, and there was a slight tremor in his hand as he reached up to press his palm against her cheek. Rey still remembered how his fingers felt when they touched each other in the hut with tears and shaky hands and too many realizations. This, this was different somehow. They weren’t lightyears away, weren’t brought together by the Force. It was just them here and now with each other and no one else.
“Rey,” he said again.
Without hesitating another second, Rey pressed her lips against his. She’d seen people on Jakku do this, the ones lucky enough to have found someone to rot their miserable lives away with. Rey hadn’t understood it at first, wanting to give yourself to a person in any way. It was too risky, too treacherous to die of a broken heart before your body decided your fate for itself. Love was a luxury on Jakku, one she could not afford to have.
Rey never really intended to allow anyone close enough to touch, let alone close enough to know. They didn’t know of her pain, of the days and nights sat crying in her broken down AT-AT over a family she never knew, of starvation and murder and rations that barely allowed her enough energy to function. They didn’t know of the sand and the stars and the kiss of death that came with compassion. They didn’t know, and it was always, always better that way.
All too well, she knew all this would lead to more pain and suffering than it was worth, but as Ben’s lips moved against hers, Rey couldn’t find it in herself to care.
It took entirely too long but much too quick for them to break away, neither of them particularly willing to let go. When they finally did, though, Ben’s arms wound around her waist, and Rey let out a small whine at the touch.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, face pressed into her neck.
She sucked in a sharp breath. “Everything hurts. Not exactly sure what. Just everything.”
Ben nodded and loosed his grip but still kept his hands on her waist. When he looked at her again, Rey swore she saw the hint of a smile on his lips. “Snoke’s dead.”
She nodded and reached up to cup both of his cheeks. “He is. You did it. Ben, I—”
“We did it,” he cut her off. “It was us, together.”
It was them. Even if Rey had only taken out three of the Praetorians and Ben five, he was very nearly killed himself by one. Then again, she doubted Ben would’ve been stupid enough to kill Snoke alone and then have to face all the guards. It really was them together.
“Together. I like the sound of that.”
Ben pulled away and held her at arm’s length. “I’d tell you it was a bad idea to come, but I’m fairly certain you got the memo on that already. Are you okay? I know Snoke…” He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I should never have let him touch you, but you had to understand the position I was in.”
“It’s fine. It was my idea to come. I guess I didn’t really think it through, but it worked out in the end. I’m just glad it ended this way.”
“Ended which way exactly?”
“Yes, you turned on Snoke, Ben. Don’t you see it? The light’s inside you still. I feel it. Don’t you? Killing Snoke proved that.” She brushed her thumb over his cheekbone. “Come back with me, Ben, to the Resistance. They’ll accept you back. We can fight the First Order together, and we can...” We can… be together? Kiss all the time? Pretend that our minds aren’t creepily meshed together in some will of the Force? “We don’t have to be apart again, not like this.”
Ben stepped back, completely removing himself from her touch. “You’re still asking me to go with you? Did you not see what I just did? Do you not know what I’ve done?”
She stepped forward and reached for his hand, but he yanked it away. “We’ve all done terrible things in this war, but we need you. You have to stop running away. Please.”
“Me? Running away? Look at yourself, Rey. You’re standing there, trying to fix me, while clinging to your greatest weakness. You know what it is, don’t you?”
No. No. He couldn’t be doing this, not here, not now. “Ben, no—”
“I’m not going to lie to you, Rey. I’ve never lied to you. I’m not going to give you false hope. I’m not going to coddle you. Try and tell me you’re over it all you want, but we both know the truth: Your parents. You know what happened to them. You know who they are.”
“I…” I’ve never lied to you. He hadn’t. In the entire time he’d known her, fought with her, he’d never told her anything that he didn’t believe himself. “Ben, I really don’t want to have this conversation right now.”
He let out a wry laugh. “Fine. Fine, just keep telling me to go back to a place where I never can then. I am never going to the Resistance, and I’m never going back to the Light. The sooner you can accept that, the better or none of this is going to work.”
“What is going to work? You mean us?”
“I mean any of this.”
Rey met his eyes again, hands curling into fists at her sides. “I’m not sure what I expected from you. I thought maybe if I came to you…” She couldn’t say it, already tasting the words of defeat on her tongue.
Ben, however, held no such reservation. “You’d win the war? I’m not some kind of prize. Snoke has no control over me anymore, but you can’t make me do anything. I’m not going to help you win the war, despite what you might’ve fantasized.”
“I didn’t fantasize anything,” she spat. “I knew you wouldn’t just turn, Ben. I had hoped, though, that we could find a way to put all this aside and… I don’t know, figure something out.”
“You hoped I’d put my entire life aside for you?”
She opened her mouth to object but closed it at once. Come to think of it, that had been what she wanted, wasn’t it? She wanted him to leave with her immediately, forget about the Dark Side and come back to the Light and stay there. Even if it was what she wanted, that wasn’t fair to him, no matter how much she hated it. “Ben, I—”
Rey was almost glad that the elevator doors opened when they did, unsure of how to end the sentence she’d started, but the moment Armitage Hux entered the premise, any relief flew immediately out the window.
“What. Happened?”
The fire had almost nearly burned itself out, but embers still fell around them with some kind of sick ethereal glow around the crimson Praetorian guards littering the floor. In another time, in another place, maybe Rey would’ve found it beautiful.
Footsteps squeaked over the floor, but Rey couldn’t tear her eyes away from Ben, who looked almost as panicked as she did. She should run while she can, get out of here before Hux put all the pieces together, but her feet felt firmly glued to the floor. Even if Rey could somehow get away without Ben or Hux catching her, there’s no way she’d be able to get to a ship hangar and fight in her condition. This was the only option.
“Who is this? Where is the Supreme Leader, Ren?” Ben merely look over at Hux, who stood completely dumbstruck, clearly not getting the whole picture. There was a heartbeat of silence before Hux gasped, finally putting two and two together and turning to face Rey. “You’re the scavenger, aren’t you? You and Ren…” He took a step back and pressed something on the watch he wore around his wrist. “The Supreme Leader is dead.”
Rey shivered as Hux’s icy glare settled on her. She and Ben were standing too close for anyone to reasonably question their allegiance, even Hux. Honestly, she hadn’t thought about this outcome of possibilities. The plan in her mind always seemed to end with Ben returning, not with a pasty, red-haired gremlin crawling all over the place.
Another step back. He was trying to get away. One could only imagine the terror of walking in on two Force users who had just destroyed the most powerful man in the galaxy and having no way out.
She half-expected Hux to full-out run, but he stopped in his tracks. Ben stepped toward him, hand raised and eyes narrowed. Hux wasn’t frozen by his own volition, she realized. He was being held there.
Ben regarded Hux, circling the man like a wolf would to his prey. This, this was the Kylo Ren the First Order knew and feared, the Kylo Ren that was unforgiving and showed no mercy to anyone. That person wasn’t real, simply a façade used to mask the pain underneath.
“You’re correct. The supreme leader is dead.” Ben released his grip on Hux slightly, just enough for him to be able to breathe. “I can imagine you can figure out what happens next.”
Ben dropped his hand and backed up a few steps to look down upon the man. As he did so, the elevator hummed and opened to reveal at least ten stormtroopers, blasters raised and ready as they flooded out of the elevator.
“General, are you alright? We received your distress signal.”
Hux cast a glance toward Ben and Rey before turning to the troopers. “Perfectly fine. It seems… Supreme Leader Snoke is dead. Kylo Ren will be assuming command of the First Order.” The words came out of him pained, almost forced, but the troopers lowered their weapon all the same.
“And the girl, Sir?” the same trooper asked. “Will she be brought into custody?”
The question was aimed at Hux, but Ben cut him off before he could even open his mouth. “The girl will remain in my custody and no one’s else. If she is harmed in any way, shape, or form, or I hear one complaint, those responsible will answer to me. Is that clear?”
The stormtroopers agreed immediately, but Rey froze. This wasn’t the plan. This was never the plan. There was no way she was staying on a First Order ship, especially not with Ben after he insisted there was no good left inside of him.
“Supreme Leader,” Hux said, nearly choking on the words, “are you sure that is wise? She’s escaped you once before, and we can’t afford to allow the Resistance any amount of intelligence.”
“She escaped your stormtroopers, not me. Let’s make that very clear. The scavenger has not come to ruin us. She’s left the Resistance in search of me.”
“And why would she do that?”
Ben looked back at Rey, the very faint hint of a smile on his lips. “She needed a teacher.”
Everything leading up to this moment had been awful, but this really took the cake, and if Rey didn’t have any sense of self-preservation, she might’ve argued with him. There would most definitely be time for that later if she had anything to say about it.
He stepped closer then, setting a hand on the small of her back in a way that made her want to kiss him and push him away at the same time. “Come with me,” he said, his voice just low enough for her to hear. “I’ll explain later.”
In any other time, any other place, Rey would’ve said no, would have laughed in his face and fought her way out, but the look in Ben’s eyes, the promise of something more, completely melted away the last of her resolve. And so, Rey did the only thing she could: she followed.