chapter two
Bringing all the Jedi texts with her as they ventured across the galaxy had ended up being useful after all, and instead of playing sabacc, Rey and Jess pore over the old tomes. Jess hasn't ever touched real books like this before, and she handles them with the utmost care, like bombs about to go off in her hands. Rey's been busy creating a kind of key to be able to read the books, which she'd intended on using with Finn, but Jess is a good reading companion, and already familiar with a few of the ancient languages, to Rey's surprise.
"I studied Ancient on Hosnian Prime." A rare, slight smile. Rey wonders how Jess would react if she knew they were the only two alive to set eyes on these books.
It's slow going, although they can disregard a few of the newer tomes about weaponry and Jedi training techniques. The texts are dense and sometimes sentences wrap and twist around each other, meaning one thing but saying another. They still talk, though Jess is a bit gentler than before, and sometimes there are long silences left unbroken, except for the quiet scribbling of notes.
At night, Jess sneaks into the Falcon, and whispers Rey stories to help her fall asleep. Sometimes they are tales of Jess in the war, or of other pilots, but she skirts around the topic of Kylo Ren and for that Rey is grateful. Other times, they're whispers of legends long gone, stories of Luke Skywalker that even Rey hasn't heard, or of unnamed heroes of old. It makes her feel a bit childish, being whispered to sleep like this, their hands loosely grasped together, but Jess does not flinch from the dirty details, the truth. Rey falls asleep and her dreams are hazy and indistinct, never fully taking form. When she wakes to BB-8’s merry whistling and a new planet to jump to, Jess is always gone.
-
They aren’t as discreet as she thinks, because as Finn is handing her tools to repair the aged, failing shield generator, he asks: “What’s up with you and Pava?”
She stops dead, wrench in hand, and looks up at where he’s crouched, BB-8 chirping merrily at his side, from the hatch in the floor that she’s pried open, and feels a weird sense of deja-vu.
“Why does everyone want to go back to Jakku?!”
“Rey?” She blinks, and quickly tightens one of the lines before it spews the weird, sticky substance she’s deemed shield gunk all over her hands.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“C’mon, Rey. I came back late and she was trying to sneak out. I asked her what was up, and she just gave me one of those scary looks of hers and went back to her tent.” Finn peers over the edge of the hatch, and she sighs, dusting off her hands and getting to her feet.
“She’s helping me, with the nightmares I’ve been having,” Rey says, keeping her voice low. Jess hasn’t spoken about it, but Rey gets the feeling she’d rather keep everything about what they’re doing quiet. Jannah is at the helm of the Millenium right now, and sound carries almost too well in these old hallways.
“I didn’t know you’d gotten so close.”
“Believe me, I’m as surprised as you are. We just talk, Finn. Nothing’s happening.”
He takes the wrench back from her and puts it away, giving BB-8 a pointed look. The droid looks at Rey, back to Finn, and very loudly whirs out the room, presumably to go bother Jannah. Finn turns back to Rey.
“You know you can talk to me about anything, right? You’re my best friend.”
“I know.” She smiles up at him, this kind, sweet man with a heart of gold that a lifetime of mental conditioning and brutal training couldn’t crush out of him. “I’m as surprised as you are that… whatever this is, is happening. But we can handle this.”
“You just said nothing is happening.” One of his eyebrows twitches up, and she fights the urge to laugh, despite the circumstances.
“Oh, you’re one to talk. Have you spoken to Poe recently?” Finn makes a face at her and tosses her a roll of mesh tape, just as she was about to ask for it. She ducks back into the hold, waiting for a reply.
“You’re welcome. And no, not really. He’s been so busy.” Something in his voice has changed and Rey sticks her head out the hold to see Finn’s normally expressive face stilled. She taps a finger against the floor to get his attention.
“Well, of course he’s busy, he’s… Generalling. Running the entire Resistance? We’ve got an easier job, breaking into these training camps, reuniting these families. The First Order is distracted, on the retreat, and Poe’s forcing them into that corner. Helping us.”
“I know. I just miss him, that’s all.” Rey makes a sympathetic face at the look on Finn’s and climbs out of the hold to give him a greasy, sticky hug. He accepts it without complaining, even when the grime of the hold clings to his shirt. Actually, it looks like one of Poe’s.
“We’ll be back in a flash, don’t you worry. He’s probably missing you as much as you’re missing him.”
“You really think so?” Finn looks at her with so much hope that it gives her pause. Something clicks into place as she stares at her friend, and she can’t help the slow smile that spreads across her face.
“What?” Finn asks, and she shakes her head, hopping back down into the thrumming dark of the hold to hide her grin.
“Nothing. It’s nothing.” She wonders how she’d missed it for so long. The Force wasn’t needed to see who owned her best friend’s golden heart.
-
Two days after they fix the Millennium's shield generator, they arrive at a small, mild dwarf planet in the Outer Rim whose name Rey finds completely unpronounceable, covered in thick forest, towering waterfalls and deep, still pools. There’s only one settlement, and it seems to mostly be a trading outpost that has expanded into a small town. The return of some of their lost children sparks something part celebration and part funeral for the others who Finn and Rey were too late to find. Either way, a bonfire is lit in the centre of the town square, and tables are dragged out from the ramshackle houses. Rey eagerly samples a good portion of the local cuisine on display and takes a liking to the light green fizzing spirit that comes from the huge barrels carved from the trees, and wanders as the sun sets and tiny glowing insects begin to flit about the night sky.
She finds Jess at the edge of the party, a slight smile playing her lips as she nurses a cup of her own. Jess’s smile grows a little wider as she spots Rey, and the women stand in warm companionable silence as they watch Finn attempt to not tread on the multiple legs of the local who’s trying to dance with him.
“Want to come dance with me?” Rey blurts, and Jess tips her head at her.
“Rey, do you even know how to dance?” From another, it might have been a bit of an insult, but from Jess, it was a genuine question.
“Not to songs like this. Teach me?” Rey beams at Jess, and she sighs in defeat, setting her cup down, and links her arm through Rey’s, pulling them both closer to the fire and the music.
Rey picks up what Jess is doing quickly, and they swing through the crowd, managing not to step on each other’s feet. She vaguely registers a few stares, but who cares? Jess is warm and grinning in her arms, not trying to hide her emotions in front of her for maybe the first time ever. Rey spins her, and she whoops as she twirls, coming back, a planet orbiting the sun.
They dance, and dance, until the crowd begins to disperse in the early hours of the morning. Tripping back to the Millenium Falcon in the dark would be hard and maybe a little terrifying if they weren’t leaning on each other, Jess’s arm around Rey’s waist, giggling like children, the fizzy green drink beginning to take its toll on their clarity. Jess helps Rey up the ramp, making sure she doesn’t hit her head on the low entrance. When the pilot tries to go back out, Rey whines, pulling her with her.
“Gotta go back to m’ tent, Rey,” mumbles Jess, even as she’s shucking off her boots. She tips herself backwards and Rey follows her, her head fitting comfortably in the space next to Jess’s neck. She feels warm arms wrap around her shoulders.
“I’ll stay until you fall asleep, o mighty Jedi warrior,” she hears Jess breathe, hears the smile in her voice. She stifles a laugh in Jess’s hair.
“‘s called a master. ‘m a Jedi master, Pava.”
“Shush. We’re gonna regret this in the morning already. I can taste the hangover.” Jess wriggles further into the bunk so Rey will have more room, and their knees knock together, dissolving them into giggles again. Once they’ve died out, the sounds of the forest outside take over. Finn had turned off the Falcon’s engines to refuel, and without them, Rey can hear the sound of the distant waterfalls crashing.
“Night, Jess,” Rey whispers into the dark.
As she’s drifting off, she realises that today was the first time she’s ever heard Jess laugh. It’s a beautiful sound, and her last thought before sleep is that she’d like to hear it again, and again, and again.
-
A week after that, they’re going through the Jedi texts, when Jess says, “Hang on.”
Rey scoots across the bunk to where Jess has set the book down, smoothing her callused fingers over the ancient pages. She cranes her neck to see what the other woman’s found, and Jess taps the spot helpfully.
“You said you had a dyad with Kylo- Ben, or whatever, right? And Palpatine removed it? Do you think this could be it?” Rey reads the passage, going very silent and still.
Oh.
Oh.
“Maybe. I think so.” She scoops up the book and rereads the page. Again. Again.
When a dyad is ripped away, either soul may feel the reverberations of the tear, much like a plastoid bond breaking. The severed ends lash backwards and forwards, stinging, still carrying the signature of the other being, even in death…
“Rey?” Jess’s voice is so, so gentle, and her hands even more so, as they wipe the tears trickling down Rey’s face. She sniffles, and slowly closes the book, marking the page with her finger.
“I didn’t want this,” she tells Jess, the words spilling out. “The whole dyad, the connection. It wasn’t my choice. He hurt my friends, he hurt so many people. He hurt me.”
(He said he didn’t want to, he said, he said… But he had, hadn’t he? He’d left her like this to pick up the pieces of a broken thing, not of her creation, not of her choice.)
“And now that he’s gone, it doesn’t even mean the pain will stop. All these families, their kids gone forever, and all we can do is visit them and tell them the truth. And these visions I’ve been having… Will they ever stop? I just want to put this behind me. I want to move on.”
Jess cups Rey’s face in her hands, and even with her tear-blurred eyes, Rey can see the open, raw earnestness in the other woman’s face.
“Oh, Rey. You will. Ben Solo left a gaping wound in the galaxy, but just like it heals, so will you.” Her voice isn’t soothing, it’s factual, and Rey clings onto the absolute belief, the infallible strength in her words.
“Nothing stays hurt forever.”
-
Now that the mystery of Rey’s dreams (or visions, or memories, whatever they are. She hasn’t quite decided what to call them) has been solved, she doesn’t expect Jess to really stick around. Sure, they’d become a lot closer since they’d met, and Jess knew a lot more about her then Finn or Poe, but… this is different. Finn had been the first ever person she’d really connected with, in her entire life, two souls running, misaligned compass points, looking in different directions until they’d figured it out. Undoubtedly, he was the closest to her soul. Poe, on the other hand, had been a vaguely irritating acquaintance she’d put up with for Finn’s sake, then a vaguely irritating friend who had her back as much as she had his, and now she supposed he was as close to a vaguely irritating big brother as she was ever going to get. Han, Chewie, Leia, Luke, had been somewhat like parental figures, even as their faces grew distant in her mind’s eye (except for Chewie, obviously, who watched everyone like a hawk when they piloted the Falcon, except for her. She was still learning Shyriiwook, but she got the idea. She was trusted to fly Han’s ship). Rose and Jannah were friends, but she’d never really gotten to spend as much time as she’d wanted with them before they’d parted ways.
(She does not know what to call Ben Solo.)
But Jess is different. And against all expectations, she stays. They go back to playing sabacc, but sometimes if both of their minds are tired from the days of planning and fighting, they instead retire to Rey’s room in the Falcon, and swap stories until Rey falls asleep. She's half convinced that Jess never actually gets tired, because she's always gone in the morning, no matter how comfortable she’d looked as they sprawl over Rey’s bunk. They gravitate towards each other after good missions, share meals, and Rey’s dreams start becoming less ominous, lighter things. Dreams she’d rather remember then forget.
A week passes of this, and Rey wakes up one morning, one of the Jedi histories still open on her chest, and realises she hasn't dreamt of Kylo Ren at all.
She isn't sure if she'd even thought about him over the last few days.
She tells Jess about it at breakfast, as they sit on the strange red moss that seems to be equivalent to grass on the misty Outer Rim moon that they’ve found themselves on today. Finn and Jannah and two of the ex-Troopers have gone into the nearby village. Today won’t be a good day. The intel they’d gotten had told them that every child taken from this planet had perished in the explosion of Starkiller. The look on Finn’s face as he’d left this morning told her enough of how he felt about it.
“You sound almost sad about not remembering,” Jess says, in that measured tone of hers, finishing off her loaf of polystarch. Rey hands her own off, having had enough of the bland, chewy dough on Jakku to last a lifetime.
“It’s not sadness, exactly,” she replies, running her hands over the damp moss. “I’m the only one left alive in the galaxy who knew… the truth of it, I guess. I don’t want to remember, but if I don't, who will?” What she doesn’t say is: Maybe I deserve to be tormented by this memory. Maybe I should keep Leia and Han’s son with me, for as long as possible, for as long as I live.
Jess props her chin on her knees, peeling strips off the polystarch. “Rey, you won’t ever forget. You’ll look back, and it’ll still be there, you can’t just wipe everything that happened out of your head. If we could do that, we’d never learn anything from anything. Those Jedi history books we’ve been reading would be next to useless.”
“Should I write a book about it then?”
“Maybe you should. It’d be a bestseller. Call it The Skywalker Saga.
“I don’t know if I have a right to that name.”
Jess bumps Rey with her shoulder. “Hey. You said it yourself. Han basically emotionally adopted you, from what I’ve heard about your short time together. Leia always looked at you like another kid, same as she looked at Dameron. If anyone has a right to the name, it’s you.” Jess smiles at her, and it’s almost startling as Rey realises how much Jess has opened up to her, warmed up to her. There’s a flicker of something in her chest as she watches Jess tuck a strand of dark hair back into her messy, flyaway bun.
Rey sighs, trying to release the tension that’s been building in her shoulders and arms, and tips herself sideways to rest her head on Jess’s shoulder. The reddish, iron-filled atmosphere tints the whole world red on this moon, and the stars look like they’re bleeding. Rey closes her eyes.
“How do you always know what to say at the right times? It’s infuriating. Poe does the same thing.”
“Chalk it up to a pilot thing, then. We make up good ideas as we go along.” Jess’s voice sounds a little strained, and Rey almost lifts her head up to see what’s wrong, until the other woman wraps an arm around her shoulders, and they sit there together under the dark sky.
-
Rey knows that Jess is getting curious about Finn’s training, the way the pilot’s eyes linger on them as they “sneak” off to whatever isolated place they can. Finn is meditating, floating a few feet off the ground with the small pebbles that made up the surface on this planet, when she suggests they tell the others.
Finn’s eyes fly open and he falls bodily to the ground, one of the stones almost hitting him in the head as they collapse as one.
“No! No, we cannot tell Pava.”
Rey frowns and helps him up. “Okay, why?”
Finn looks sheepish. “She’ll tell Poe. I already asked her to not tell him that you’re with us, but if she hears that I have the Force, there’s no way she’ll be able to keep that quiet.”
“You haven’t told Poe I’m here?”
“Look, remember how upset with me he was when he heard I was going away? I don’t know how to explain how you’re with me and not him without also telling him I have the Force.”
“And why don’t you just-” She realises why just as Finn’s expression darkens, and they say his name as one.
“Ren.”
Finn’s face is pained. “I guess it’s irrational but- I don’t want Poe afraid of me. I want everything to just stay the same.”
“And it will. You know Poe, he’ll understand.”
“Will he? He knows you and trusts you, but you should have seen how he was after Exegol. After the shit on the Steadfast. The look on his face when you mind tricked those troopers…”
Rey feels sick. “He knows me, he knows you. He’s not going to shut you out if you tell him the truth, Finn.”
Her friend’s face has shut down, and he hands her a spanner, mouth in a firm line. “I’m not telling him, not on a comm like this. I’ll tell him face to face, when we come back.”
“You do know the longer we hide this, the worse it’ll be, right?”
“It won’t be for much longer.” She looks quizzically at him, and he gives her a tentative smile, full of anticipation, the anxiety of a homecoming long overdue.
“Jannah didn’t tell you? We’ve got 2 more planets, and that’ll be all the intel we managed to decrypt from the First Order. We have to go back to Ajan Kloss to make out the rest. We’re going home.”
-
It is bitterly cold on Starkiller, each gust of wind like a slap to the face, and she can feel nothing but the roaring pain in the wound in her side and the faint buzz of the lightsaber she wields. FN-2187 is on his knees, panting in the snow, the limp body of the scavenger girl in his arms, and she hates them, she hates all of them, all of these useless arrogant fools who think they can stand in her way. These scraps of garbage and filth that her father had scraped off who knows where.
Her father is dead. She had killed him.
No.
Kylo Ren slams his lightsaber into the ground, snow boiling into water. He is going to burn this stormtrooper into ash. He is going to wipe this defector from the fucking universe.
“Traitor!” he bellows at the other man, and the trooper stands, ignites a lightsaber that shouldn’t fit as well as it does in his hands. The face looking back through the snow reminds him of the set, fierce determination he used to have, when he was foolish and blind and training under Skywalker. The rage sets his body alight, and he hisses as the gash in his side shrieks in pain.
“That lightsaber.” He points, shaking in fury. “It belongs to me.”
“Come get it,” the other man lashes back, and charges, untrained, unwieldy. He attacks, but is forced to retreat as Kylo presses him backwards, wild slashing strikes pressing him down. Rey registers dimly that it’s her on the ground, unconscious. She wasn’t awake for any of this. All she knows is how this ended.
She does not want to see how this ends.
Kylo is breathtakingly casual. He holds his saber in one hand, the pain still driving him a little off balance, and his face is blank as he drives the flaming hilt of the saber into Finn’s shoulder. Finn screams, and screams, and Rey is sobbing, she can feel the tears on her face, or is it the snow on Kylo’s?
It’s obscene, the smoke curling out of the hole in Finn’s shoulder, and under her horror, she can feel Kylo Ren’s glee. There is no softness, or kindness, or empathy, just a void, just rage, just destruction. There is nothing of the man on Exegol who gave his life for hers. There is nothing even resembling love.
It’s just pain.
-
She’s awake, her shoulder and her side throbbing, her face damp with tears. She jerks out of bed, almost falling onto the floor, barely registering Jess lying beside her. A small part of her brain goes, Oh, she does sleep, but she’s out of her cabin in a second and stumbling into Finn’s.
He’s still awake, shirtless and sleep deprived, poring over a holo of the system they’re jumping to tomorrow, and she crashes into his surprised arms, the sight of him digging fingers into her heart. He hugs her automatically, rocking gently back on his heels.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry Finn-” He’s alive and warm and there and it’s enough to send her back into a fresh well of tears as he murmurs soothing things in her ear.
“Woah, Rey, it’s alright, it’s alright. What happened? What’s going on?” He guides her down to sit on his bed, and she draws her knees up to her chest, feeling very heavy and small. She’s cried all over Finn, she realises to her mortification, but he doesn’t seem to care or notice.
"Is it the dreams again? Talk to me Rey." His hands are big and warm around hers and she's shaking. All of this could have been taken away. It could have been destroyed so, so easily. There is a starburst of pale skin on his shoulder, the pucked, jagged mark all that remains of the wound she had just seen in horrifying clarity.
"Can I see your back?" she asks, the words stuttering out of her mouth in a rush, her sobs rubbing the air from her lungs. Finn looks at her quizzically but turns, the dim light from the hallway lights catching the mark that followed his spine. It shines, several shades paler than the rest of his skin, and she looks at it, remembering smoking, ruined flesh, the grotesque hint of white spinal column. The bacta has healed it remarkably well. If you looked quickly, you might not even realise it was there.
"What's this about, Rey?" He asks her, turning back around, hands in his pockets. She chews on her bottom lip. She's already busted into his room in the dead of the night. He might as well know.
"I… The dreams. Some of them are memories. Not my memories, but Kylo's memories." Her voice is surprisingly steady. She could say more, but the words jam up in her throat. Finn sits down beside her, brow furrowed in concern.
"You saw the fight on Starkiller." A statement, not a question, and his eyes are steady and solid as he takes her hands again. "Rey, it was over a year ago. It's healed. Ren's dead. It happened, it's done. There wasn't anything you could've done about it."
"Does it hurt you?"
He pauses. "Sometimes when it's hot, it feels like my back tightens up. And I can't bend down to touch my toes like I used to in First Order drills, or it aches, a little. But it's fine, seriously."
She fixes him with a stern stare until he can’t hold it anymore. “I think the worst part was the coma. I thought I was dead, and I could feel myself just… decomposing. Something like that. I thought maybe the First Order had got me back, or maybe everything had been one sick dream. When I got out of it, I’d lost so much time… I didn’t know what was real or not until Poe found me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You keep saying that, but Rey, you’ve got nothing to be sorry for.” Now it’s his turn to stare earnestly at her while she looks away to the floor, unworthy of his gaze. “You saved my life on Starkiller, and you saved it more times I can count. You’re not responsible for what happened.”
Her head is pounding, but Finn’s hands are slowly bleeding the cold from her hands, and the phantom-pain is fading. “I know. Logically, I know, but… I felt the lightsaber in my hands. I could feel it, and the cold, and I could feel what he was feeling.”
“You said he faded back into the Force, right? Have you tried… talking to him?” He’s tentative, keeping his voice neutral, and she knows he must be quieting the part of his mind that remembers the pain, the coma, the long rehabilitation afterwards. Ranks of white, cut down by bleeding fire.
“I think I could talk to him, if I tried. I don’t think it would help me, at least not now.” She feels a lot calmer now, and sighs as Finn draws her into another hug. They sit there for a long while as Rey’s heartbeat slows to match Finn’s.
He pulls back, pats her cheek. “Go back to bed, get some sleep. We leave early tomorrow.”
“I think it would be today, actually.”
He laughs gently. “You know what I mean. Go.”
Rey stumbles back to her bunk, exhaustion weighing down her legs, and as she falls asleep, she realises that Jess is gone.