My thanks to everyone who supported and encouraged this story! Here's the end. Hey, I warned you.

For possible/eventual future Reylo content follow the author, who currently wants to be free of this pain (but will surely return to the subject anyway. Just not this story).

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Rey held the back of Ben's hand against her cheek, her mind in a strange state of disconnect, at once watching the expressions shifting on his features and racing with troubled thoughts.

If only there was something more she could do – something more she dared do.

If only – whatever there was between them, at once tentative and unsure and powerful and disconcertingly profound – if it could be allowed to develop without the nagging worry, at every step, whether this was the straw that would eventually break them – if this was the word, the touch that would leave them vulnerable and helpless.

(Rey did not want to have to break him.)

(She knew he would break before he could destroy her; and Ben knew that, as well, she was certain of it. He knew, and detested that knowledge.)

Rey allowed herself to close her eyes for a moment, to focus on the touch. After a while she sensed a movement – he drew closer, she understood. She opened her eyes to see Ben watching her intently, his other hand half-raised towards her; she glanced towards it and back at him, half-smiling despite the ache in her soul, and nodded slightly.

(Who will be broken by this, you or me?)

Ben touched her other cheek, lightly wiping away the tears she had cried over his pain; the gesture caused her eyes to well up again, and she cried silently while he caressed her ever so softly.

"Why are you doing this?" he asked her quietly, and she could hear the frustration in his voice, the continued lack of comprehension, the underlying fear, barely masked by gentleness. "Why do you care?"

For a moment, Rey was too dumbstruck to find any words with which to answer him.

"You're not alone now," he continued, and it was true, she could not deny that she would never have turned to him if she had not felt so devastatingly lonely—

(You're not alone. Not alone.)

(Neither are you.)

(But he was; even with her, he was still alone.)

"You have friends here."

Rey blinked at him.But not like you; you're not a friend, you're something different, or, but you don't, and now I've seen you—

"They're my friends, but you're… you," she murmured. "I… I've told, I care." I want you by my side, she thought, and briefly it seemed to her as if he picked up the thought, or perhaps the sentiment; he frowned. "And—you—why are you doing this, Ben?"

Ben looked at her in a way that scared her. Yes, Rey knew why; she would not torment him by making him admit it.

"This is also—why," she whispered instead.

Ben flinched, as if slapped, and his fingers stilled on her face; he understood.

She squeezed his hand.

(She wished he would come to her side, more than anything in the world; yet if he were to turn, it could not be solely for her sake – Rey saw that now.)

"This won't last forever," she said.

Ben had once again sat with his back to her, and Rey felt him tense.

"I know," he answered shortly. Of course he knew, even if it was not pleasant to admit: their quiet meetings were a stolen interlude, in a way already doomed, already gone – at least, if all continued as it was.

(Rey was waiting for him to come to her, but time was limited.)

"We'll eventually meet again in person," she went on. "What will you do then?"

"What will you do? You've already spared me once."

She nodded. "I will... do what I have to do. I only hope I will have the strength to do it," she said, noting his uneasy twitch. "And that it will not be what I fear," she finished, her voice barely above a whisper.

"What you have to do," Ben repeated after her, slowly, drawing out the words. "What will you have to do? That depends also on you."

"And on you."

They fell back into silence.

"What about you?" Rey asked him again. "Will you be able to let the past die?" she demanded, an edge to her voice. Am I stopping you from becoming what you're meant to be? How do you know what you're meant to be?

"I wanted—"

"I know," she interrupted. "I know what you wanted, Ben. But it wasn't what I wanted." Not that. Not like that.

She leant against him, tilting her head back, and sighed heavily. And is it truly what you want, now? Rey thought he heard, or at least understood; she was almost certain she sensed his frustration and pained resignation.

"We'll have to find out," he said, eventually.

The bond flared open while Rey was lost in meditation, dazzling her mind's eye with light cloaking them both, bringing them together.

Once she had resolved to search for it, meditation allowed Rey to sense the bond easily: the multitude of links wrapping around her, distinct for their purpose and direction amongst the omnipresent connections binding all living things. She had imagined herself following the links to Ben, seeing how they wrapped around him, too, perhaps reaching out – she had not, however. For the time being she had been content with exploring the patterns and paths in the Force that stretched out between the two of them.

Now, however, Rey was finally seeing the bond come to life before her in all its complexity and vividness, and it stole her breath away. She felt Ben sit down opposite from her, more by the motions of the Force than by any physical sense; the tendrils of the links shone in the midst of the turmoil in him, the swirling darkness and the shy light – all stark clear to her perception.

Distress. Resistance.

The emotion flashed in him, sudden and intense, and Rey paused. Was she reaching too deep?

Challenge.

Abruptly, he opened himself up; power burst out of him, tendrils of darkness crept up the bright links, sparks of light stifled in their midst. Rey inhaled sharply, yet willed herself to remain calm, and rose to the challenge. The power clashed violently, then mixed and blended, blinding her with a mesh of light and darkness she did not know how to name; and she felt him again, at the other end of the bond, beside her, somehow closer than he should be in yet another way.

Shock. Rejection.

She recoiled as if from a punch, and felt him recoil as well; without thinking, she withdrew into herself, shutting the whole thing off.

She panted.

She was alone.

She had just shut him off.

She struggled to collect her thoughts.

She had just cut herself off of the connection.

She felt empty, she felt alone, and it hurt. Dread hit her with the force of a blaster bolt. Had she damaged the bond?

Numbly, Rey stared ahead, mustering the courage to reach out where she feared there would be nothing to find; but there was. The threads of the connection, so bright moments ago, were now dimmed, barely visible, the light in them fainter even than it had been in their inactive state – but they were untouched.

Rey had to know.

Cautiously, still shaken from the experience, she reached through the bond; Ben was there, right across from her, as if nothing had happened. He sensed and acknowledged her, shooting her a grim look.

"Satisfied?" he asked for the third time.

Rey shook her head wordlessly, staring at him; and she retreated, leaving the bond as it had originally been.

She had plenty to reflect upon.

The connection brought them together once more before Rey was ready – but when had she ever been ready for this? – yet it also filled her with unexpected relief: it had not been affected.

She went on with her training, carefully going through the positions and motions, the staff reassuringly in her hands. Thrust, lean away, swing, turn, blow: the familiar dance relaxed her, emptied her mind of worries, and Rey realised she did not mind Ben watching her – and he was, she knew without looking, with that intense, focused expression.

(Silence was always comfortable between them; and it was the easiest.)

When Ben spoke, however, his question took her completely by surprise.

"Where is the lightsabre?" he asked, and she heard the tension in his voice.

She stopped and turned to him, slowly. He had not asked about the sabre before.

"I haven't managed to fix it yet," she answered, somewhat bashfully.

"Fix it?"

Rey stared at him. Oh. He did not know. He genuinely did not know, and it had never occurred to her to tell him.

"It's broken," she said, looking him straight in the eyes. "We tore it in half."

A mixture of emotions crossed his features – a flash of shame, of relief, of regret.

"I thought you had given it to Skywalker," he said tonelessly.

Well, of course you did.

(When you had no further use of me, you turned on me!)

"No," she said, unnecessarily now, but she was gripped by the need to reassure him. Lowering her staff, she stepped towards him. "It wouldn't go to me. It broke. I collected the broken pieces. I was hoping to repair it, but I don't know where to begin."

Nervousness rose in her, which was annoying. There was no reason for her to feel guilty.

(Except there was.)

Now Ben appeared thoughtful, and hesitant, and a suspicion, or perhaps a hope, bloomed in Rey's mind.

"You could help me," she said slowly, in the tones of one who had just experienced an epiphany.

The look the threw her was full of hurt and faint resentment, yet there was a tiny glimmer of satisfaction, too: he had something to offer her, she was asking for his help. Rey could not bring herself to grudge him that satisfaction.

"Will you help me fix it, Ben? Please?" she added.

He took a deep breath, and Rey was reminded, abruptly and forcefully, of how much the lightsabre meant to him, how desperately he had fought to keep it. Doubt gripped her. Should she be asking that of him? Did she even comprehend what it was she asking of him?

(You keep asking for more!)

Rey held her breath.

"Yes," he replied at length. "I'll help you."

"Thank you," she breathed. Her lips bent in a smile, warm with gratitude. "Thank you, Ben."

He looked away.

Rey saw him out of the corner of her eye; she was in a room with other Resistance members, and apparently Ben was similarly engaged, in so far as she could tell. He was arguing with someone, and the only acknowledgement gave her was a glance over his shoulder, timed perfectly with her own.

Even so, his presence was not so easily ignored – and she was certain Ben felt the same.

(It was one thing when they were alone, and another when one watched the other interact with people outside the bond; when both of them were occupied, and yet were still brought together like this, the sensation was downright surreal.)

(She could shut it off, she remembered; but now that Rey had learnt that the bond could be closed, she was oddly reluctant to do it.)

She did her best to tune him out, while absent-mindedly listening for the barely audible hum of the connection.

"You knew it could be controlled," she stated.

"I suspected," Ben conceded. "I told you—"

"You told me it could be manipulated. By Snoke."

"Yes," he said calmly. "Which meant it could be controlled. Opened and closed. Encouraged. By Snoke, and now by us."

He was right, she supposed; but it was also true that he had never mentioned the possibility of them controlling it, and Rey would know the reason.

"Have you done it before?" she demanded.

"No. I haven't."

Rey believed him.

"Why not?"

"Why aren't you doing it?" he returned. "Now you know how to."

She huffed in irritation. "Can't you give me a straight answer for once? You're supposed to be knowledgeable about the Force, so I'd expect you to, I don't know, experiment with it! You've seen what happened when I tried to mess with it," she added abashedly.

Ben clenched his fists; she sensed anger rising in him, but the anger was no directed at her – somehow, she was sure of it. His eyes narrowed. Was it the connection again? There we go, always in circles.

"I didn't try to touch this bond," he said, pronouncing each word carefully and decisively, "because I wanted to keep it the way it was. Same as you. You could have looked into it anytime you wanted, but you didn't, it had to happen accidentally. And the reason you didn't is that you knew that if you acknowledged it could be controlled, you would feel obliged to control it. It was easier for you to treat it as something involuntary."

The sudden straightforwardness surprised Rey; she was not going to deny the truth of his words.

She stared at him.

"So what happens now?"

Ben tilted his head, as if to suggest that it was up to her, not him. Of course.

(Why are you doing this?)

"You asked me about the bond before," he said after a while. "But you didn't ask if it could be broken."

Rey had not. Now she believed she knew the answer. I would have to tear out a part of myself, to be rid of it, to be rid of you. And it would never recover. It had hurt to turn him away; perhaps she could learn to tune out his presence temporarily, but an attempt to permanently sever the connection she did not want to imagine.

Sorrow welled up in her at the memory of that loneliness and pain, as well as the ever-looming perspective of confrontation; Ben was correct, she would, eventually, have to decide whether to try and break the bond, now that she was aware that it could be broken, or at least permanently closed.

(It won't last forever.)

"Tell me," she requested, "and what if one of us… dies?"

His lips twisted at her phrasing, although she would not quite call it a smile.

"Then it will be broken," he answered, his dark eyes glistening.

And I thought this could not be harder. Overtaken by an urge to touch him again, to hold onto him for as long as she could, she extended her hands and he took them, a flash of relief crossing his face. And he was right, he took her meaning right – could he even get it wrong now, with the bond linking them ever closer? – that was Rey's decision, unchanged: to salvage whatever was possible, while it was still possible.

(He would accept anything from her, she knew.)

"I heard a voice in my head," she confessed. "There, in the snow."

(—that look, from the forest—)

"It told me to kill you."

Ben watched her closely; she remembered him lying on the ground, in the snow, his expression had been—had surprised her, or would have if she had had the presence of mind to register it properly.

(Kill him.)

She remembered standing over him, lightsabre in hand.

"Would you have done it?" he asked in a low voice. "Your hate was palpable enough."

Rey had though about it before, long and hard, albeit reluctantly, too.

"I don't think so," she answered slowly.

"Why not?" Were you connected to me then, did a part of you feel it already? The future you talk about?

No, I don't think I did.

"I was trying to run away," she said, thoughtfully. "Finn was wounded. I wanted to be rid of you, yes…" she hesitated. "I had already struck you down, so the immediate threat was averted, and I had other matters to see to."

Silence.

"I was afraid of the voice," she admitted. "I didn't want to do what it said."

Silence.

I didn't want to strike you when you were already fallen, that was not what I wanted—I hated you, you were the monster of my nightmares, but I saw your eyes and I didn't want—

"Rey, it's fine," Ben told her, quietly, reassuringly. "There's no need to worry about it."

Rey nodded, and suddenly laughed, hit by the absurdity of the situation; her laughter died quickly.

"Was that—"

"It could have been," he replied, keeping his tone carefully neutral. "Probably was."

Rey shuddered.

"They still don't know, do they? Your friends."

Rey's ears caught on the way he said the word friends, yet again.

"No," she said wearily. "They don't."

"And they don't notice anything?" he demanded.

Rey sighed.

"They notice something is off," she conceded. "They don't know what it is."

"What do you tell them?" he questioned, with an insistence that alarmed her.

"What is it," she asked, with a catch in her voice, "do you want me to tell them about this?" What happened to 'what would they say'?"

(Rey imagined she had a pretty good idea of what they might say, and it was not encouraging.)

"No," he said at once. Of course. If this time together was all they could have, he would hate anyone else knowing about it, anyone else sharing the secret. That much was clear to Rey, yet there was something else there, something she did not see, for he was still visibly hesitating, trying to select his next words. "No, I don't want you to tell them. But..."

"But what?"

And then, in a flash of insight, Rey understood; she saw what he was trying to convey at the same exact moment as he began to speak, and she stared at him with her mouth open.

"It isolates you," he said. "Keeping secrets. A secret like that." You'll grow apart from them. You already have.

Rey blinked. And—Oh. Oh, of course. Her eyes widened in disbelief; she wanted to object, to reject such a comparison, there was nothing, there could be nothing similar at all—

—except there was, and she felt like crying. Instead, since she had no idea how to respond to that, she sought for an answer to his question.

"I tell them it's nothing, or that I'm just stressed out, or that I need time to connect to the Force... the last one almost not being a lie," she said, realising as she did that that could well have been what he had said, again and again, until there had been so little trust left that Luke Skywalker had invaded his sleeping mind and tried to kill him for what he saw there. "I don't think they always believe me."

There did not seem to be more to say.

Neither was a good sleeper.

"I dreamt of the island," Rey said quietly, and felt Ben tense against her; she did not care. She snuggled against him with a comforting hum; this was something she would only do in the dead of night, in the grey shadows draping them both. "It was so hard to fall asleep, but the island… soothed me. I knew there was something waiting for me, there. There was a voice, too, telling me I wasn't alone… and I wanted to believe it, but then I woke up and I was alone."

(Not alone.)

Ben listened, gradually relaxing, his stillness soaking up her words.

There were times when the connection terrified Rey in its depth and its strength; years of loneliness had left her secretly craving the closeness of another person and at the same time entirely unprepared to approach it, especially when the intimacy was thrust upon them in so short a time. And other times still she felt cheated that it would be him – that this extent of understanding between them had initially been taken by force, and if she had confided in him, it had been because there had been no-one else there.

(You're not alone.)

Thus now Rey told him of her life, of her lonely days on Jakku. She told him of her early days of scavenging, when she had been sent into places too small for adults to reach, of how she had realised she would do better on her own and succeeded. She told him of her monotonous days, of her exciting discoveries, of tasteless rations and of the stubborn waiting that strained her mind like a cord. She offered him everything he had already taken and more, and Ben accepted it in silence, huddled beside her on the floor of her room in the Resistance base.

(Perhaps they had been two people nobody had wanted, she thought.)

(But that was not true. There had been people waiting for him to return, and her—Finn had cared for her by then, and Han—her thoughts stopped at Han, too pained and too conflicted, and she wanted to cry out in frustration.)

(It was ever there, at the back of her head, together with the shock and despair she had felt, which never went away, even if some of her sadness was now directed at him. She could not forget. She would not.)

(Everything I had waited for all my life, you threw away! Couldn't you see how he loved you?)

(That was one of the things she would not say, for she knew the answer too well already; but she suspected he was aware what it was she was not saying.)

The repaired lightsabre flared to life in her hands, sky-blue as she remembered it.

She looked over at Ben, who was watching her carefully, with that keen focus of his; in his face she read the memory of their fight, and something approaching awe, which briefly took her breath away.

(The light of the sabre reflected in his eyes.)

"Thank you," she said softly.

"You needed something to defend yourself with," he said dismissively, but emotion rang loud in his voice.

The corners of her mouth rose in that half-smile he would evoke every now and then. Defend myself from what? You?

His face darkened, his hands curled into fists. "Rey," he spoke, and stopped. Do you know what it is you're holding in your hands?

(Do you know what I've surrendered to you?)

Rey held his gaze; she switched the lightsabre off and slowly put it away. Covering the distance between them in a few steps, she held out her hands. Ben grabbed her by the elbows, drawing her closer; Rey had to tilt her head back to meet his gaze.

I think I do, she thought. I think I know.

Then you know I won't be able to fight you.

Her fingers tightened around his arms; she looked into his eyes, dark and intense and full of conflict as his thoughts echoed in her mind.

(Everything. Everything except the one thing she truly wanted from him.)

Please, she thought simply, her whole mind radiating the plea, please, Ben. She took another step forward, slowly, hesitantly wrapping her arms around him; she craned her neck in an attempt to see his face, and what was reflected there took her aback. But when Ben closed his own arms around her, holding her close, one hand in her hair, she rested her head on his chest.

(Who will be broken by this, you or me?)

Please, she thought again, with as much intensity as she could muster; a motion above her told her he shook his head, and a wisp of a thought, a feeling reached her, that clenched her heart.

(You should have killed me.)

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Rey's voices come from TFA novelization (which I admittedly have not read, just heard snippets of what's in it); Kylo Ren not knowing that the lightsaber was broken comes from Rian Johnson (yes, yes).

Thanks for reading!