Chapter Text
F I F T E E N Y E A R S A G O
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Surrender.
In the stars, amidst a cruiser full of people, each on a clandestine mission of their own, tracing a collision course that culminated in this crisis.
This giving of self. This capitulation to forces beyond control. In the midst of this terrible war, here in this vergence of space and time, here was an act of mutual confession.
A fearful thing. A mad thing. A beautiful thing.
The breathless dawn of hope could shatter. The fragile moment could rupture. The galaxy could fold in on itself like so many little creases, tucking every soul snug into shadow until it arrived back at the beginning to unfold anew and begin everything all over again. Anything could happen to destroy this impossible moment in time.
They could even destroy it by thinking too hard about it. By realizing what it is they were confessing in this collapse.
Which was why she didn’t. Rey didn’t ask herself how she got here, or why it was happening. She didn’t ask herself what would happen after.
None of that mattered. Her reasons for being on the Halcyon were forgotten. His reasons for being here, unimportant. The angry words they’d hurled at each other like darts when they came face to face for the first time since Crait, furious words hissed with outsized venom, intending to pierce with blame and make sense of the pain that had plagued them since the burning bridge and the rejected offer. The betrayal. Each wanted the other to hurt as they hurt, not knowing that they already hurt the same.
Those vicious accusations had somewhere along the way gotten lost, subsumed in the deluge of passion. Closer and closer they’d gotten in their argument, each calling the other foolish and weak and small-minded for clinging so dogmatically to their respective sides of the Force, until his breath mingled with her breath and she was so overwhelmed with violent desire that she thought she would burst. She’d grabbed his shirt in rage. How that had turned into this , she didn’t know. She couldn’t trace the steps.
Maybe she kissed him first, maybe he kissed her. Something burst from them with the hot plasma expansion of a supernova and they were consumed in this fire.
Vague panic and the ache of too much wanting muddied her mind and made her desperate, dragging her hands through the impossibly soft locks of his hair as his full lips sucked a mark into the upper swell of her breast. His fingers swirled lines of burning pleasure into her skin, but they trembled as they did it. He trembled. His immense and powerful body was wracked with the fragile feelings of his own strangled heart. Somewhere in there, he needed her. She could feel his need. It felt like a sob trapped in the deepest chambers, a cry, a plea, a gasp. He needed love with the same unbearable hunger that she needed it too.
Almost a year since the Supremacy. A year since they’d felt the sealing flames of the forge fusing them into one powerful entity, of single mind and purpose. A year of trying to pretend it hadn’t happened, or that they could ever go back to the people they were before that throne room.
Their breath mingled, their names chasing each other from their lips. She said it again and again, in soft, ragged whispers.
“ Ben. ”
He touched her where no one had touched her. She pulled at his many layers of clothing until he was bare to her fingertips, broad and hard and ripe for exploring. She chose not to remember the first time she saw him half-naked before her, standing on a remote island on a distant planet while the storm bore down on the horizon, the air heavy with pressure and her stomach heavy with embarrassment and forbidden curiosity. She chose not to remember those circumstances, or anything that came before this moment. No Luke, no Ahch-To, no Snoke, no Supremacy, no Crait. No Resistance, no First Order. Nothing but a fervent need to climb into each other’s bodies and become one whole, never lonely again.
“ Rey,” he groaned in soft agony when her kisses dragged his breath from his lungs and his fingers sank deep into her virgin heat.
There was no pain. Only trust. Only sensation and pleasure. His lips landed on her stomach and she clawed at him with emotion too strong to name.
She didn’t want it to stop.
The Force around them crackled with static, the friction of their desperation throwing roiling storms of energy from them in ripples of power. In defiance of Snoke’s pompous claim that he had facilitated their cosmic bond, the Force had gone on connecting them long after Ben had cleaved the Supreme Leader in two. Cleaved him in defense of her. His mighty, impossible equal. His scavenger. So many, many times since Crait, the Force had tried to thrust them together again. Either she or either he had shut it out, refused to give it place, refused to allow that void of sound to open and pull them both together.
Rey knew the truth then but she could not allow herself to acknowledge it. They were more entwined than even Snoke knew. Their destinies were shared.
“Open to me,” he pleaded into her ear, his voice tattered and ragged with husky desire. “Let me in.”
She wrapped her arms around his neck and forgot the alarm and misgiving that should have warned her away from this moment. Until she met him, she had never wanted this. Now, it was the only thing she wanted.
“ Ben—n,” she stuttered, stumbling over the single syllable as he replaced his fingers with a much larger part of himself and pushed.
Here invading her body was a man on the edge. His lips shook and his hands held her with bruising force while his eyes, two coals of hunger and fear, searched her face as he forced himself deeper. Too fast, maybe. He was too wracked with agony and need and lust.
“Fuck, fuck, oh fuck,” he groaned, his body tense as iron under her fingernails.
She struggled to adjust to him, but she didn’t ask him to stop. She needed this too. She was tormented by their inescapable connection too.
His mind pushed into hers as insistently as his cock stretched her body, and she gave him place. She let him see her grief and longing during this last year, her anger, her pain, her desire. She let him see how much she wanted him now, let him feel the way she unspooled at the foreign pressure and pleasure of his invasion. In her he found an exact mirror in this wreckage.
What transpired there in the joining of two shuddering bodies into one produced a seismic shift in the Force, though it went undetected by most inhabitants of the galaxy. The dark and the light, the shadows and the glow, the burning stars and the emptiness between, everything swirled in surrender and resolution. It resolved into one marbled whole.
Instead of searching for the holocron from Luke’s Jedi collection like she was supposed to be doing, she took her enemy into her arms and into her soul and into her sex, accepting the offering of his heart to bind to her own. Instead of crushing the Resistance activity he knew was using the Halcyon to ferry illicit goods, he poured his unbridled love (for thats what it truly was) onto the feral creature who had ruined him and saved him, who had throned him and threatened to unthrone him, who daily tormented him with his torturous need of her.
When she could take it, he began to move with the same savage commitment of his whole soul that he always threw into his endeavors. She could feel the tremor of nervousness and hope shivering through his mind, but from his body came only the ferocious confidence he always projected in battle.
“I know you. You’re strong. You can take it,” he huffed when she squeezed her eyes shut.
And she, unbreakable as she was, did take it — and beautifully, with greedy insatiety. The intensity of the foreign sensations became intolerable pleasure, like finally scratching an age-old itch. She moaned with relief, with ecstasy, and did not want it to stop. They tumbled together, fighting each other for dominance and showering gentle adoration on one another in equal measure. It was chaos and sublime rapture.
“My scavenger,” he breathed in tremulous awe. “We were made for this.”
They were.
Little by little, Rey found the strength of her pleasure too much and she began to lose the ability to meet him thrust for thrust. As sensations heretofore unknown to her coursed through her veins, she found herself reduced to a trembling, sweating, panting puddle seized by waves of euphoria. He plowed her right through it, whispering soft praises in her ear, hastening on to his own ruinous end.
And in the glow of after, she knew that it was always meant to be this way.
He held her close against his chest, still twitching inside her from time to time as their bodies cooled and their hearts slowed from the frantic race. Tears gathered in her eyes and slipped onto her bright burning cheeks as she realized that she’d never felt so safe or so wanted, and she couldn’t lose this.
Rey knew he felt it too. She could feel the peace emanating from him, could see his astonished, pleased, comforted heart and that he knew they needed each other in this way.
It should have lasted longer.
It should have lasted forever.
The trouble was how to get from here to there when they each stood on opposite ends of a great scale. Movement toward one side or the other would tip the balance and everything they stood for would be upended. This they realized with cold devastation when he slipped his fingers between hers, curling her hand into his, and softly whispered, “My queen. My empress. You finally see what I have always seen for us”
But that wasn’t what she saw. Her body stiffened. Dread replacing pleasure, she turned to him with a tight throat and said, “No, Ben. I…I thought…”
His hand tightened he understood that they had yet again made the mistake of feeling the same thing, but had taken two opposing meanings from that feeling.
“You’re here,” he said flatly. “That means you’ve accepted what I offer.”
“No, it doesn’t.” She lifted her head, yanking her hand from his and sitting up. “You know it doesn’t. Don’t do this again. Not again, Ben.”
What was at first glorious quickly became a disaster. Betrayal shone like an indictment in his eyes.
They had to go through the motions, even if they knew deep inside it was fruitless. They had to try. They had to save this beautiful, fragile thing between them.
Emotion making his voice thick, he dared to give hope one more try, and asked her again, so, so gently again, to come to the First Order. She, in pained denial, pleaded again for him to come with her to the Resistance.
Staring at one another, still naked, still vulnerable, still caught only inches apart, they saw and felt each other’s hurt and saw and felt each other’s disappointment and humiliation and regret.
They should not have done this.
The anger returned, fueled by even greater pain forged in the fires of realized passion. It couldn’t be that they were so doomed to misery. It couldn’t be that this, finally being together, wasn’t enough to overcome all obstacles.
Their obstacles were themselves, though, and they could not escape that damning truth.
“I know you felt what I felt, Rey,” he said in extreme frustration, getting out of his bed, pulling his clothes back on with dangerous ferocity. “Don’t try to deny it.”
“I’m not denying it,” she said, her heart aching as she followed his example and got herself dressed. “I just don’t understand why you’re not willing to step away from this life that isn’t you . You’re not this. The Supreme Leader? It’s a joke, Ben. It’s a mask. Come with me.”
“Enough!” His head snapped to the side, giving her a baleful glare. His voice was laden with too much venom. “Stop this campaign for my soul. I don’t need saving.”
“You’re not happy—” she started to say, fingers curling into fists as her hopelessness turned to fury.
“Are you?” he fired back, dark eyes gleaming. “If we’re stuck in this misery it’s because you won’t admit that I’m right. I have everything . The whole galaxy at my fingertips. The might of the Force Order behind me to bring systems to heel and put things to right, the way they should have always been. I could give you the life you never had. We could give the galaxy the guidance it has always needed. Why are you still clinging to lost causes? Tell me you’ve moved on. Don’t tell me you’re still stuck on Jakku, looking for something that won’t come.”
Rey couldn’t stand it. Their irreconcilable obstinance sprang up as quickly as had their passion, and she had to leave. She was too hurt even to cry. Before their time on the Halcyon had ended their mutual sense of betrayal had mounted to such a degree that they crossed sabers in a violent mockery of their beautiful synergy in the throne room. It was an impasse. Neither could prevail. Rey got what she came for and got the hell out of there. In the end, he vowed to find her, and she promised to evade him. When she found herself back at the Resistance base, more or less successful in her mission but bitterly alone, she finally wept.