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She leaves quietly one night. The last thing he remembers is stopping at the door frame of the living room to tell her he was heading to bed. She told him she would be up in a minute. She didn't look at him. She just kept her eyes on the television screen as she watched some late night television show.
When he wakes up the next morning, he reaches for her instinctively. But her side of the bed is cold. He doesn't think much of it at first—she was probably just out for a run. It isn't until he goes to get dressed after his shower in the morning that he notices something is wrong.
Her clothes aren't hanging in their shared closet anymore, and her suitcase is gone.
He doesn't find a note anywhere.
He tries to call her, but there's no answer. He tries again and again and again and again and again until he loses track of how many times he's called.
He throws his phone across the room and it smashes against the wall, breaking into pieces as it falls to the floor.
—
Rey finds the highway isolating at night. She isn't used to the lack of activity. There is nothing but darkness as far as she can see, and it makes her want to cry.
Alone, again.
She looks at the clock: 1:00 am. She should be curled up with him right now, head on his chest, arms around her.
But she couldn't stay, not with the way they had been fighting lately.
—
He calls Poe and Finn, but they haven't heard from her either.
Didn't even know she had left.
—
She ends up finding a hotel in a city two states away. She tells the woman at the desk that she doesn't know how long she'll be staying.
The room overlooks the mountains, and she can see for miles when she stands at the window and looks out.
Sometimes, out of habit, she wonders what he's doing. If he's worried about her. If he's mad she left like she did.
She supposes he probably is.
She would be, if he had done it to her—up and abandoned her like that. She would be furious. And she would never stop trying to make him come home again—not until he forced her away, pushed her away and told her he didn’t love her anymore.
But he still does love her.
And she left him.
Worse than that, she left him in the middle of the night—like she was afraid.
She was.
She thinks she should have realized that it was too good to be true.
—
It’s been a few weeks now.
And he misses her like wild.
The bed feels empty at night. Fuck, the whole house feels empty. He feels like there’s a giant hole in his life—a giant her-shaped hole that he can visibly see.
Sometimes he turns around to say something to her, and he remembers.
Remembers that she’s not there. Remembers that she left him.
And that hurts more than anything.
That it was by choice. Her choice.
It’s a weird kind of betrayal that doesn’t sit well in his stomach.
—
She grows tired of watching bad television on the small screen in her hotel room quickly, but she doesn’t know what else to do. There isn’t much of a city to see, and she doesn’t feel like leaving the room. She feels a kind of tired that has made its way perfectly in her heart, her soul, and her bones.
She doesn’t think she could explain the ache in her chest if she tried.
—
Now it’s been a few months.
He’s put her things away. Not gotten rid of them, never. He’s just put them in boxes in the attic in case she comes back.
He hopes she does.
But his hope is beginning to fade.
He thought about going after her—he still does—but he’s not interested in chasing her if she doesn’t want to be caught. Finn and Poe still don’t know where she is.
No one does.
—
She manages to find a job. It’s just as a desk clerk in the hotel she’s been staying at, but she doesn’t mind. She works as much as they let her, which, admittedly, is quite a lot. She doesn’t mind.
She thinks Maz—the old woman who owns the hotel—worries about her, but neither of them ever say anything about it.
Rey stays busy. She doesn't think about him, or that it's getting close to Christmas. She has started decorating the small hotel lobby for Maz. Rey doesn't think about the travel plans they had. Rey doesn't think about finally meeting his family in a few weeks. Or how warmth and the desire to cry had come over her as she'd finally felt like she just might have a family.
One she was building herself, but it was still a family. It still counted.
It would have been the first time he had seen his parents in years, and he wanted her to be apart of that.
She thinks about calling Finn one day while she's decorating the Christmas tree. She remembers helping Finn and Poe decorate their tree last year, a dazzling sight of rainbow baubles. She misses them both, but she's sure they're fine. They’ve always been okay—that small but vital part of her constructed family.
—
She checks the names on the reservation once more, just to be sure.
Han and Leia Organa.
Ben's parents.
His parents are standing right in front of her, checking in. They're everything she had hoped, and yet, they seem better than he described. She sends them on their way, without telling them who she is. She’s two states away. There’s no way they would ever really know who she was, even if they recognized her name.
She feels empty as they walk away. She watches as they climb the stairs, laughing. They seem happy, and Rey aches for what she could have had.
Maybe I could still have it, she thinks. It’s too late—that thought comes unbidden and unwanted, but Rey thinks it rings with a certain amount of truth.
He won’t want her now. Not now that she’s abandoned him.
—
He heads off to his parents’ for Christmas alone. He’d be lying if he said there wasn’t a small part of him that hoped she would be back by now.
—
After he gets home after Christmas, he decides he needs out of this place. Their place. It’s driving him crazy. When he’s home, nothing can distract him from her absence. (It doesn't help that he's broken a few of the dining room chairs. A few of the doors have cracks in them. He's been meaning to fix it all, honest. He knows what she would think if she came home and saw all that. He’s going to have to buy new dishes too. The first one wasn’t on purpose, but once they started breaking, he couldn’t stop.)
He packs quickly one afternoon, throwing a few items into a small duffle bag. He gets in the car and just starts driving, unsure of his destination. He finds he doesn’t care.
Anywhere is better than the home they built together.
—
Christmas at the hotel had been quiet. She spent both Christmas Eve and Christmas morning with Maz.
Maz didn’t have a family either.
At least Rey isn’t the only one alone. She and Maz had fallen into a comfortable pattern of spending their free time together. Rey liked spending time with the old woman. She didn’t ask Rey about why she was here, or why she didn’t have anyone to spend Christmas with.
Rey had to acknowledge that she would have had quite a few people to spend Christmas with if she had stayed at home. With him, her mind supplied. It wouldn’t have been their first Christmas together, but she remembered being excited for it early on in the year. (Not too early, of course. September was probably around when they started to make plans to visit his family, and when she started to look forward to what she was considering a real Christmas. A Christmas surrounded by family and friends.)
She calls Finn on New Year’s Day. The phone rings for so long that she assumes he isn’t going to pick up. (Rey assumes this is because he doesn’t recognize the number. She is calling from the hotel, after all.)
He is happy and surprised to hear from her. They chat for a little while. He fills her in on what’s been going on with him and Poe, and she tells him about the hotel and Maz.
There’s silence on both ends of the line for a while.
Finally, he asks, “Rey, what happened?”
She inhales and lets out the breath. She feels jittery and shaky.
She doesn’t say anything, and he continues. “He called me, you know, asking where you were.”
She can feel the tears starting in her eyes. She puts her head in her hand and closes her eyes. “God, Finn. I just…I don’t know.”
They hang up shortly after that.
The next morning, Rey finds that her pillow is wet and that she feels empty.
—
He’s driven two states over before he decides he has gone far enough. There’s a small hotel in the mountains, and he decides it’s a good enough place to spend the night.
He gets a room that looks out onto the mountains. It’s a pretty enough view, he supposes. He isn’t quite sure how long he’ll be there.
However long it takes for the ache in his chest to stop, probably.
—
The hotel has a small restaurant that provides meals throughout the day. He slept later than he thought he would have, and ends up going to the restaurant for a late lunch. The food is better than he expected.
He’s heading back to his room when he sees her in the upstairs hallway. Her hair is pulled back, and she’s wearing the same blazer that the receptionist he spoke to last night was wearing.
Rey.
He’s not even sure he said it, or that he would have had to.
She stops dead in her tracks, and her eyes go wide.
She says his name, and he feels like he could burst.
She crashes into him, and his arms tighten around her. He’s sure they’re both saying things, but it feels like he’s in a tunnel with the windows down. He knows the noise is there, but he can’t quite make it out.
He pulls back long enough to press his lips to hers, and to wipe the tears off her face. He’s crying too, of course.
He thought—oh, it doesn’t matter what he thought. All that matters is that she’s here now—that he can feel her strong and safe and warm in his arms, and knows he can begin to make things right.
—
Rey wakes up the next morning, his sleeping form curled away from her. She rises from the bed and goes to stand in the large window. Rey looks out over the mountains as the sun rises. She doesn’t know how long she’s been standing by the window when he comes and wraps his arms around her, kissing the top of her head. She sighs and closes her eyes, leaning into the embrace she missed and feels, for the first time in months, at home.