Chapter Text
Ajan Kloss has been a rebel base for a standard year, give or take a few weeks. Rey of Jakku trains under General Organa and when she’s not training, she’s repairing whatever needs to be repaired. Fixing stuff is one of two things she’s really good at, the other thing is to wait. It feels as if she’s still waiting, like she used to do, back on Jakku, but she can’t tell why she’s waiting, or for what, or who, it’s just this constant sense of longing. Today is no different, while the entire base is buzzing with excitement, she’s a bit… detached.
“Rey, have you seen the tree?! It’s marvelous!” Rose’s voice pulls Rey out of her head.
Rey’s friend grabs her hand and drags her along to the edge of the jungle, where a lush tree has been transformed into a Life Day Tree.
”It's beautiful,” Rey gasps when she sees it.
“It is, isn't it?!” Rose squeals, while clapping her hands.
Rose has worked together with Chewie, and she’s spent weeks on making traditional orbs, filled with small lights, after the Wookie’s description. Rose must’ve produced at least a hundred orbs, that’s now littered all over the tree, making the visual effect astonishing, since every orb looks like a tiny sphere full of glowing stars. Rey, among others, has spent the last week tying strings to various metal objects, such as screws, bolts and broken electronic components, and they’re now hanging from every branch of the tree, glimmering in the orbs’ soft light. Rey had been completely dumbfounded by the idea, but played along for Rose’s sake, but Rey now realizes that her friend is kind of a genius.
Last year there had been no Life Day celebration, due to everything that had happened during their evacuation, and on Crait, but this year Chewie insisted. Along the tree line there’s tables waiting to be filled with food, everyone has been pitching in with ideas and recipes from their home worlds. Rey can’t cook, but she can hunt, and she’s provided with some kind of big flightless birds that’s now roasting over several pits of burning coals. The scent rising up over the camp is enough to make a grown woman cry, that’s for sure. Poe and Finn just got back from their supply run, and it’s basically just crate after crate of alcoholic beverages, enough to give every rebel a chance to wake up with a blazing headache tomorrow. During the last year the Resistance has grown into a couple of hundred rebels, but as of late the recruiting has been slower, maybe because the new Supreme leader keeps a lower profile than his precursor. Rey had been surprised when Kylo Ren didn’t mention her in any way when he informed the galaxy of the passing of Snoke, and declared himself Supreme leader, instead he’d claimed Snoke had died of old age. The creature had been old, of course, but the light saber through his torso probably played a bigger part in his untimely death than his age. Rey isn't unhappy with Kylo’s lie, this way nobody but her and Chewie knows about her failed mission to the Supremacy. Well, except for Kylo Ren, but she never thinks of him anymore, so he doesn’t count. To be honest, she does occasionally think of him, very intensely, for a couple of minutes at the time, but the prize for those moments is to endure an all consuming shame for weeks afterwards, so she tries to avoid it all together. They haven’t connected through the Force since she shut the door of the Falcon, and at first it had been Rey who kept her mind sealed, furious as she’d been, but after a couple of months she had tried to reach out, only to find the bond between them limp and unresponsive. He’s shutting her out, that bastard, as if she wanted anything to do with him, she’d just been curious to see if the bond worked. It’s still there, but she can only pick up faint waves of his emotions from time to time, otherwise it’s as good as dead. Tonight there’ll be no thinking of force bonds, him, the state of the galaxy, or anything else, she’ll just focus on the food, her friends and the contents of Finn and Poe’s crates.
✨
Supreme leader Kylo Ren stumbles back to his quarters onboard the Finalizer. General Hux had finally been able to persuade him into hosting an official event to celebrate the new leader of the First Order, an absolute necessity according to Hux. They’re currently hovering over Coruscant and everyone that’s anyone is crammed together in a hangar transformed into a ballroom, (with winter themed decorations, as tradition bids it on Life Day, even though Kashyyyk is a tropical planet - it’s messed up if you ask Kylo, but nobody does) and Kylo has only been able to make it through the night by drinking a bit more than what’s advisable for a man of his importance. When Hux had realized the extent of his superior’s intoxication, he’d forced Kylo to leave, before he accidentally, or not so accidentally, started to choke the most annoying people at the party. So here he is, the Supreme leader of the galaxy, in his chambers on a fucking time-out. Kylo shrugs out of his cape, flinging it into the laundry drop, and stalks to his liquor cabinet. He picks a bottle of Corellian whiskey, ignoring any thoughts of his father, and sits down in a massive leather armchair. Force, he forgot a glass! It can’t be helped, he’ll have to do without because he’s not getting up again. He takes a sip, straight out the bottle, and leans back. He shouldn’t drink, it makes not thinking about the scavenger a lot harder than usual. It’s been more than a standard year since he last saw her, and still he needs every ounce of discipline to not reach for their bond. She’s alive, he knows that much, and it should be enough. It’s not though, not at all enough, he wanted her to stay with him and she left. Now he has to walk through this life of endless responsibility, paperwork and idiotic advisors alone, and she’d told him he wasn’t but he definitely is very much alone. He takes a huge gulp of whiskey, to suppress the sudden sense of shame washing over him, when he thinks about how he’d begged her to stay.
✨
Rey walks out of the fresher into her small bedroom, aiming for the door in order to get back to the festivities. But something tugs in her mind, the world warps, and suddenly she’s standing a foot away from the Supreme leader. He’s sitting in a brown armchair, head tilted back with his eyes closed, and a bottle of whiskey dangling from his hand. Rey wonders if there’s any possibility to sneak out without him noticing, but then he opens his eyes.
“Rey,” his voice is hoarse, “it’s been awhile.”
“Ben,” she retorts.
“That’s not my name,” he sighs, “you know that.”
“You’re drunk.”
“And you, you seem to be partying as well,” Kylo gestures vaguely at the dress she borrowed from Rose.
“It’s Life Day.”
“I know,” he squints at her, “I think you’re drunk too.”
“A little.”
He hums and shuts his eyes again. Rey knows she should leave, but she can’t. This man has been the center of her non-thoughts for such a long time, and she just wants to look at him for a little while. The scar she gave him has faded but it’s still there, and his hair is a tad longer than she remembers, but all and all he’s looking pretty much the same. He suddenly jerks upright, and extends the bottle towards her.
“Do you want a drink?”
She shouldn’t.
“Okay.”
She can feel his eyes on her as she sips his whiskey. Oh Force, this is messed up. She had almost started to believe that the energy she’d felt between them had been a result of her imagination, but the burning sensation in her stomach can’t be fully explained by the alcohol. She takes another sip, and hands the bottle back to him. The silence stretches, and she blurts out the first thing she can think of:
“Do you ever wonder how your life would be without the Force?”
“Not really…” he knits his brows together.
“You would be a stuck up senator's son and I would be... maybe a mechanic?”
“Without the Force you would be a corpse in the Jakku desert, and that would have been a waste.”
This is spiraling out of her control. Yet she doesn’t do anything to save the situation, on the contrary actually.
“Do you really think so?”
He’s pinning her down with his gaze.
“Yes.”
Rey swallows.
“Could we… just for this connection… pretend we’re not on the opposite sides of a war?”
“No,” he growls and Rey’s heart reacts by beating a billion beats per minute.
“Why?”
He gets up on his feet, towering over her, and he’s standing way too close.
“If we weren't on the opposite side of a war, this meeting would turn out very differently.”
Rey can scarcely breathe.
“Yes, you’re probably right.”
She steps even closer. There’s not more than a few inches between them, just as it had been in that elevator a lifetime ago, and Rey reaches out, placing a hand over his chest.
“You should go,” he rumbles, his voice vibrating under her hand.
“Why?” she asks again.
“Because if you don’t,” his hand is suddenly behind her neck, “I’ll probably try to get this meeting to turn out differently.”
“And if I wouldn’t stop you?”
He closes the gap between them, claiming her lips with his and Rey will regret this tomorrow, but not now, definitely not now.