For three months after Exegol, Rey looks for ways to stopper up the holes inside her. At first, she thinks it's grief, plain and simple. She thinks that if she holds out long enough, staunches the wound firmly enough, time will blunt its edges, until one day she can touch the memories without drawing blood. Until one day, she can wake up and breathe without it hurting. She's done this before. For Han, and Luke, and her parents, and everyone who believed in her who she couldn't save from the war. And while Rey has learned that grief never truly passes, she has also learned that it does dull.
But this is something different. Worse.
The worry gnaws into her like a weed. Rey tries to starve it out, to clear her mind of all feeling, all thought. But worry burrows, twining with the deepest parts of her. Rey inhales. The air is piercing cold. She opens herself to numbness and the Jedi serenity. She tries to submerge her mind in the soothing pattern of glaciers she's sent serpentining around her.
Where it goes instead, is to Ben. Ben lifting her out of the void, his warmth an anchor inside her. Ben's hand, bare skin instead of leather, cupping her head as she comes back. Ben's eyes, seeking and beseeching, lining with tears. His mouth. His kiss. His smile. All falling away from her, his presence dissipating on the other side of their bond. And Rey running, screaming to find a ship to deliver him into safety, to hospitals and medics that could save him, and to Leia before she passes entirely. But by the time she'd found one and returned, there was no trace of him.
Something is keening in Rey, vast and irreparable. Ben Solo did not leave a blade of grief in her, as the others did. He has torn something away. Something crucial. And if she never gets it back -
"Rey."
She opens her eyes. The ice boulders topple to the ground, one narrowly misses crushing D-0. The droid shies back, stammering. "N-n-no thank you."
Rey cringes. She's been clumsy with the Force lately, and only seems to be getting worse. In a small act of defiance, she keeps hold of it and turns herself, still levitating, toward the interruption. It is Leia, wrapped in furs, gloved hands draped over the arm rests of her hover chair. Her feet are motionless. The general's mind had awoken from her collapse during the war, but the rest of her body had not. Because she was a Jedi, Leia was able to move herself from place to place, pushing her hover chair along with the Force. But the new stillness in the rest of the General's body bothered Rey. When given the choice, she preferred to focus on the Generals eyes, alert and intelligent and warm as they had always been. Currently, they are looking at her with exasperation and a touch of concern.
"I said, it's time to start the obstacle course." Several combat droids hover around Leia, a whirring, buzzing halo. They were waiting for her.
"Right. Um, sorry." Rey toes to the ground, graceful as a dancer in a landscape of jagged ice boulders. Her boots slide on the snow-powdered ice.
Before Leia can ask her if she's alright, Rey takes off. If Leia asks, she'll have to answer, and where would she even start? With a breath, Rey throws herself into the crevasse which holds her vertical obstacle course. She splits the frigid darkness with her light saber, and lets the screaming wind fill her ears.
#Hours later, when her body is a banged up jumble stitched together with pain, Rey strips down in the women's locker room and steps under a column of hot water.
As Rose has pointed out several times, Rey is the only one aside from Leia who is permitted to bathe in the Jedi temple's lunar pool. Rei has entered those steaming, milky waters twice, both times under specific orders from Leia and in the name of her training. The pool was built by the Jedi to promote physical healing and mental clarity. Rey had not enjoyed the experience.
She preferred the women's locker room, with its hard steel frames, it's single mirror to share, and the chatter of the Resistance women as constant as the water squeaking from nozzles and slapping on the tiled floor, liable to turn from scalding to frigid at a moment's notice.
Tonight though, Rey is alone. Her training had run over time and the core of the Resistance would now be converging on the mess hall for dinner. Rey should be ravenous. She feels it, the hunger. But she has no inclination to eat. The tight knot of her stomach feels right inside her. Rey still eats, of course. Her body demands it, with all her grueling training and the frigid temperatures of this remote, little moon of a remote, little planet. Rey eats when its expected of her. She eats especially when Finn and Poe start casting glances at her dinner tray. She hates to make them worry. But food itself has become purely functional. If Leia had asked her to down a packet of sawdust three times a day, Rey would have approached it with the same enthusiasm.
The door to the locker room squeals. Moments later, the smell of meat and something creamy glosses the steamy air. Rey looks out past the shower divider and sees Rose sitting on the benches between the showers and the lockers. The petite girl smiles. "Hey."
"Hey," Rey says, grateful for the interruption of her solitude, but confused as to why Rose is here. Then she notices two clamshell containers on the bench by Rose's hip and nods toward them. "Did you get put on the night shift for the generator again?"
The ship's generator had been unreliable at best, kicking out in the middle of the night and plunging the ship into dangerous, sub-zero temperatures three times in the last week. Rose was the only engineer who could reliably keep it going through the night. She would take her dinner, a flashlight, and something to read down into the ship's belly and keep the generator company until breakfast, coaxing it back to life whenever it sputtered out.
"Yeah," Rose says, " but one of these is for you."
"Me?" Rey turns off the water and reaches for her towel. She tucks the thin, coarse material around her bust. "Thanks. I was going to the mess hall next though. Finn and Poe are probably waiting." Rey isn't sure why Rose wouldn't know this. Before the generator started acting up, Rose had been joining their table every night.
"Actually, General Leia wants to see you in her quarters, right away. She asked me to tell you. I thought you wouldn't have eaten yet, so…" Rose lifted the top container. "It's some kind of meat pie thingy."
Rey frowns. She'd been with Leia less than an hour ago. What could have possibly gone wrong between now and then? And then, the horrible selfish thought crosses Rey's mind. If something had gone wrong, she might be glad for the distraction. Rey reaches for the container.
Rose frowns. "Do you want to, um, maybe get dressed first?"
"Oh. Right. Yes. Clothes. Are good."
"Very good," Rose nods. Her smile is sweet and uneasy.
The question flashes again, this time in Rose's eyes. Are you alright?
Rey lunges for the lockers.
#Rey strides down the corridor, spooning meat pie into her mouth. D-0 trails her as fast as his single track will allow, his lens fixed on her curiously.
In the end, Rey's clothes had been too soiled to put back on. She had rummaged with Rose in the communal bins for something to wear and found a pair of training leggings that hit just below her knee, a sports bra that seemed clean enough, and a stiff black cargo jacket clearly intended for a broad shouldered man. Zipped up over the sports bra, it was comically over-sized. But Leia had never cared for decorum.
As she rounds the corner, Rey spots a waste chute. She shovels a final spoonful of meat pie into her mouth, then perches the closed container atop the chute. She's eaten less than a third of what Rose had packed for her and knows she ought to finished the whole thing, that her body will flag tomorrow for the lack of calories. But she can't be bothered with it. If the container was still there when she came out of her meeting with Leia, she'd consider taking it back to her apartment to finish it off.
Rey reaches Leia's door and pauses to straighten, wiping both sides of her mouth with the back of her hands. "How do I look?" she asked D-0. "Have I got food on my face?"
D-0 replies with a static-clouded mumble that sounds vaguely reassuring.
"Thanks. You can wait here for me if you'd like. If not, I'll see you back in the dorms."
Leia's door slides open when Rey knocks. The entryway is empty.
"Come in, Rey." Leia's voice calls from deeper in the apartment. "In the living room."
Rey crosses the entryway and heads to the first door on the right. She knocks as she opens it. "General Leia? Rose said you wanted -"
And Rey stops. Or maybe, the world does.
Because Leia is sitting before a small gas fire, her furs arranged over her. And to Leia's right, beside the small hearth, sitting forward with his forearms braced against his knees, looking up at Rey like a wound dreading to be reopened, is Ben Solo.