A/N: This all Reylo, some spotty research, and if I've messed up any Star Wars universe details you're just going to have to deal with it.

nor are we forgiven (which brings us back)

"We have not touched the stars,
nor are we forgiven, which brings us back
to the hero's shoulders and the gentleness that comes,
not from the absence of violence, but despite
the abundance of it."

- Richard Siken, Crush

"Why should the imagination of a man

Long past his prime remember things that are

Emblematical of love and war?

Think of ancestral night that can,

If but imagination scorn the earth

And intellect its wandering

To this and that and t'other thing,

Deliver from the crime of death and birth."

- William Butler Yeats, A Dialogue of Self and Soul

By the seventh day, Rey has nearly told Leia seven times.

Always at night. Scant as their numbers are, Leia now makes the rounds just before most of them head to their bunks, pressing a hand on a bent shoulder here, quirking one of her wry, weary grins there.

And when she comes to Rey, night after night after—soon it will be eight, and then a dozen, and Rey will tell her—it is not Leia's eyes that haunt her.

His eyes are dark like that. His eyes fight fire with shadow, reminding her of sacrifice. And always, Rey thinks of him in present tense.

She only has to keep reminding herself that she should no longer think of him as Ben.

There are wounds to be bound. Poe—he is shorter than Rey had imagined, but that is not his fault—has a dislocated shoulder. Or had. Chewie pops it back in for him, with an accompanying howl that drowns out any sound Poe makes.

(She knows that the blaster shot, that night on the bridge, nearly killed him. Chewie pulled aside at the last moment. That's the only reason Kylo Ren didn't fall as his father fell. Because of mercy, or something like that.)

Leia is going to begin to be suspicious. Leia has known too much grief to let it consume her for long.

"I'm fine," Rey practices saying, to herself. She misses her ragdoll in the AT-AT. Wonders how much remains of her little haunt in Jakku. Wonders if the sands have covered it by now. Kinder, in their oblivion, than she is to herself.

(Rey picks at scabs.)

"Who are you talking to?" Finn is not unscathed either. Bruises are blossoming, deep purple against his dark skin. The Rey of another time would have lifted a hand, would have brushed her fingers lightly against his cheek.

But her hands cannot be trusted and she keeps them at her sides. "Just going over some coordinates."

There's no nav system in front of her. Not even an old manual. But maybe Finn is too tired to call her out on the lie. "Everyone's bunking down soon," he says. "I'm going to sit up with Rose for a while, but I wanted to make sure…" he breaks off, biting his lip.

Rose has not yet woken up. How much of what Finn feels is duty, and how much is something more, Rey doesn't know. She doesn't ask.

She lost the right to, sometime after Ahch-To.

Finn is her family. She knows that with the fierce knowledge of wrapping one's arms around something. Finn and Leia and even Poe—they are her people.

You're not alone.

Neither are you.

The sob rises in her throat and she blinks as though that will send it away, wrestle it to the depths of her sternum.

Distance is not safety, but it is close enough.

It has to be.

"I'm alright," she manages. "I think I'll finally sleep tonight."

Finn nods. His smile reaches his eyes but there isn't any humor in it, just comfort. Rey wishes it could reach her. "You need it."

Yes, Rey needs.

It is the seventh day since Crait. Crait is no longer even in a dust mote in the vision-lines of their plotted course; it is nothing more than red crystals wedges into the soles of her boots and the memory of eyes like Leia's eyes.

To say it is nothing, then, is not much help at all.

…

Maybe they should send her to Tython.

She can't make out too much from the texts—her reading is shaky at best, and the Jedi texts are not exactly the occasional scrap of pulp paper, bleached by sun, that would make its way to Jakku with rumors of green places, golden cities, and more people than Jakku had burned to dust in all its history.

The texts are dense.

But Rey makes out flesh-eaters and temple location—a question, not an answer—and Tython looks rather soft in the sketches drawn. She could handle the flesh-eaters. She will not be afraid.

And yet afraid seems to be the only explanation, when it comes working up the courage to tell Leia her idea. She thinks it is nearly impossible when day eight rises (sunless, there are no suns in space, only stars) and she still has not given away the larger secret that must frame every other question like a horizon.

Send me to Tython, send me to somewhere no one can find me. Send me away, so that no one can find you.

So drastic a plea would require some kind of explanation. And there is the root of Rey's problem. She can run from him, or from the Resistance, but if she runs from everything at once she will collide with herself.

(Once more, once more, the room of mirrors.)

(They shift not as one but as a fracture spirals outward, and Rey realizes that foresight is knowledge without patience, and perhaps that makes her afraid.)

…

Poe wants them to go to the Outer Rim. Rey is crumbling her nutrition bar into her hand to slow the time it will take her to eat it. No one is grimacing over their rations, although they taste like cardboard. No one in the Resistance expects better. Rey might miss her bread, but someday, probably, she will miss this. At least it is filling her belly.

Durasteel, all around—

Knees and chest drawn forward, feet scrabbling for a hold—

You can't breathe. Leather presses against the hollows of your throat; you skid to a halt.

You can't breathe.

Teeth—crushing, warm, angry—against your lips.

Rey sends half of her nutrition bar flying across the floor.

Every head turns towards her. Poe, mouth forming on the word Hoth, stares open-mouthed.

"I'm so sorry," Rey says. "I—reflex. It was my arm."

Leia's eyes narrow at her, and Rey knows: the eighth day will be the last to keep her silence.

…

"You were not with Luke."

"I went to Ahch-To," Rey protests, as though half a lie can save her. "I—"

"Rey," Leia says. "I learned long ago that secrets suit the dead better than the living. Cough it up."

Rey stares at her hands. His fingertips had been softer than hers, less calloused. Perhaps it was the gloves. "I went to save him," she says. And since Leia has lost nearly everyone she loved to the saving of that particular him, she does not ask for a name.

"How?"

"We've been connected by…visions." Something in Rey snaps like a string pulled tight. Anger, again, and not hers, though it could be. She wonders if he can see her, or if this is her own guilt. She doesn't think that the bond is open (she doesn't know if it can be shut).

Leia presses her lips tight, but her eyes hold—can it be relief?

The words tumble out of Rey just as she feared they would. "I c-can't control it. Maybe neither of us can. But we started meeting and—I did tell him he was a—" She stops. To admit her weakness would be to dishonor Han Solo's death. To call Kylo Ren a monster is to say it to his mother's face.

"Luke and I shared a kind of connection," Leia says. If the past tense hurts her any more than usual, she does not show it. "And Han wasn't force-sensitive—wasn't any kind of sensitive, the scoundrel—but I could feel him, too."

Rey is pressing nails to palm, as memory or future pressed his teeth to her lip less than an hour earlier. "What does it mean?"

Leia looks at her like she should know.

"I don't want this." Rey is desperate. "I didn't ask for—"

Leia's brow quirks up. "When has asking ever brought anything to anyone?"

A hand, outstretched.

Please.

"I don't think it's safe for me to be here," Rey says. "The visions have—well, I haven't had any, but he's angry."

For a moment, her greatest fear is that Leia will ask her why. But perhaps, again, Leia already knows.

"If he finds me again, I'll betray you all without meaning too," Rey whispers. "I should have told you sooner, but I—"

She couldn't bear to be alone. And now Leia will be angry that Rey has balanced the survival of so few—too few—on the edge of her own need.

"There are other ways to fight than running," Leia says. "Although, it sure looks like we're running now, doesn't it?"

Rey nods. There are tears in her eyes. There is a sob, and there is salt on her tongue. It is not Crait's salt. "I don't know what to do."

…

In the end, she sleeps.

…

Rey wakes to forget her dreams. They are all of him, and in some of them she stays. In some of them, he can only say her name, and in some of them, neither of them say anything at all.

"Takodana is near Endor. Relatively."

Rey rolls out of her bunk, and forces herself from staving off her own instinct for a fighting stance. It is only Leia.

"I know," Rey says. Takodana is many things to her and all of them are broken.

"We are going to Endor," Leia explains. "Chewie and I, at least, will be remembered there. It is small enough and secret enough to be out of the way. And more than that…we took him there when he was a boy. I think he will tell himself that he does not want to go back."

Leia is speaking more openly, Rey knows, because Rey is the only one here who understands. She nods.

"Luke ran from the past. I left mine behind me." Leia sighs, once, deep. "I'm starting to wonder if you aren't at the heart of all of this, Rey."

Rey does not want to think about hearts. "What do you mean?"

"I feel him too. Anger, darkness—yes, that's all there. Now there's something else."

If Rey allows herself to remember, it is more than the touching of hands. It is her name on his lips and his name on hers, it is the way they turned as one together, facing death, it is—

Rey will not allow herself to remember.

"Loss," Leia finishes quietly. "He feels loss. And that is perhaps the closest my son has been to hope in a long time." She lets her proud shoulders slump a little. "We're so few, Rey. Running won't last forever."

"So you want me to go Takodana," Rey says. Why, oh why, must her voice shake? Foolish girl. This was your idea, wasn't it? "To end things?"

"No." Leia stares at her like she's daft. "I want you go back to the beginning."

…

"I don't get it."

Rey can't help feeling as though she's poked through her ribcage and pried out her own heart. "Finn, it's…" She doesn't want to say that it's their only hope, because it probably isn't, and she said that last time. "It's something I have to do. To mend."

She won't explain—not here, not now—what she hopes will happen. That the bond will be severed or resolved. That she'll be able to sort out what passed between them. And all of that—what she can foresee, or even try to—doesn't come close to what Leia wants out of it.

Once again, Rey dares not ask what Leia has guessed.

You're nothing. No one. But not to me.

"I'll come back," Rey murmurs.

"I'm coming with you," Finn blusters, but Poe has a hand on his arm.

"We need you here."

Finn's eyes settle on Rey, waiting for her to tell him that she needs him too. And she does, but that's exactly why she can't tear him away from their people.

She stays silent. That turns the tide towards goodbye.

…

The last night before Takodana, it is as if she has already left. Finn has taken up watch again by Rose's makeshift medbay bunk. Poe and Kaydel are hunched over an X-wing manual, talking about repairs. No one asks about Rey's solitary mission, because it was Leia's direct order.

Rey will take one of the pods to Takodana, and rejoin us later on Endor, Leia had said, and her tone had not sought questions.

Rey lies on her back, fingers circling against her palm. She doesn't want her doll from Jakku anymore; she wants the lightsaber. But it is packed away with her supplies and her staff.

Two pieces, you and him. Two pieces.

It would be easier if she could find her old anger and hatred towards him. Easier if she could believe that his offer in red and blood and dying sparks was all a lie.

Don't do this, Ben.

Rey does not know what she will find on Takodana.

Nor does she know what will find her.

…

Its very greenness pains her now. One foot in front of the other, and she points her mind forward as well as her steps. To look back is to think of how Finn pulled her close, without even looking her in the eyes. How Poe and the rest saluted her, as though she was doing them any good.

How Leia—

Leia said nothing at all, only held Rey tight for a moment, and then let her go.

The ground beneath her feet is moss to the ankle. The lightsaber is wound in the folds of her sash; her staff is in her hands. If she breathes too deeply, the spice of the evergreens will bring back the sound of Han's voice and the spires of Maz's city.

Rey shuts her eyes.

Grief, a hollow center, an answering ache.

Battered fists, a throat hoarse with weeping.

She reels back. It is so much different than his anger.

She just doesn't know which one is real.

…

The air is cool, but not too heavy. The trees chatter with birds but she sees no other signs of life. And when she comes upon that bay of water and sees the city, laid flat as a coffin, tears prick her eyes.

We brought destruction here, she remembers.

She wonders if destruction is a path of its own, or if it is following her.

Leia didn't exactly give her a mission. Leia told her to go back to the beginning, and the beginning, for Rey, is underneath rubble. She found the lightsaber there. She found—

Her vision was cold as pain and bright as fear, and she saw him before she knew him.

Well, she thinks. This is the beginning.

…

Rey lets the Force guide her. The air is snapping with it here. The Force has a mind of its own, and Rey used to think she had a mind of her own, but it grows harder and harder to tell. She keeps to a narrow passageway in her mind, which does not look anything like the long line of mirrors, and she leads with hands out in front of her.

She sets her staff aside and heaves away stones. Yes, here at last, beneath the ruins of the common room, are the shoulders of steps.

These are your first steps.

Rey does not know that voice.

So you're the girl I've heard so much about.

As for that voice—

If she wandered far enough into the forest, she would find trees scarred by blade and blaster bolts. She would not find their footsteps, burned into the earth, but she can retrace them with her mind.

She has tied an old sash over her mouth, to keep from coughing up dust. The prickle down her spine, however, is not dust or any underground draft.

At the end of the steps her path is blocked by two great wedges of rock.

She opens the passageway first in her mind. She stretches out one hand, then the other, and then she jolts back.

For a moment, she could have sworn, warm fingers laced through hers.

She nearly shouts out, Get out of my head—another memory uncomfortably close to Takodana—but doing so would let him into her head.

Rey grits her teeth.

Forever is forever, at least when it has to be.

(When has asking ever brought anything to anyone?).

Let me go, she breathes. Let me go.

The earth doesn't move under her feet.

(Everything else does.)

…

Overhead, the sky is the color of rock-salt: white, tinged with gray shadow. Rey hears her own breathing first, and then she hears everything else: the blur and chaos of a thousand voices.

Her ears are ringing and every bone aches. Her mouth tastes like something died there.

Maybe something did. Maybe she is dead.

She stumbles to her feet, and if this is death, death is a city.

No one seems terribly concerned with being dead, though. There is a gaggle of metal traders practically trampling over her, and a faction dark-robed, impossibly thin creatures shuffle past, low voices hissing to one another. Her eyes skim over dirty human children, tumbling in the street, and some humped pack animal plods by, braying pitifully beneath its load.

Under her prodding fingertips, Rey's arms and shoulders feel utterly familiar. Sore, still, yet familiar.

I am not dead.

But that is no answer to any other question.

…

She keeps her head down. Yes, if there is one thing that becoming so, so much more than Rey of Jakku has taught her, it is that danger lurks around every corner. And although there is much life here, Rey recognizes hungry faces and dark, frightened eyes at each turn. She is no longer on Takodona, and despite the crowds, she feels like she might as well be at the end of the world.

The streets weave together here like a basket pulled loose in parts. Some are nearly parallel, separated only by a few traders' stalls. Others are stretched apart by long, low buildings. Lodgings, Rey thinks. She squints, trying to get a look beyond the next alley.

The shrill keening of an alarm blares. Rey feels the panic rise around her as the sandstorms used to rise in Jakku, a groundswell spinning up. An Arcona, wide-set-eyes flailing, jostles her forward. She darts out of one alley and finds herself on the main street at last. It is a wide swath cut down the center of this strange city. Rey tries to retreat to the relative obscurity of the alley, but finds her way blocked by a flesh-and-blood wall.

She realizes, belatedly, that everyone else is on their knees.

…

Rey has never been very good at self-preservation. That's probably why she tends to go for battle.

At the moment, therefore, she does not press her forehead to the ground with the rest of them. She kneels, and hates to do so, but she lifts her head to watch what it is that sweeps down upon this city, which is not quite alive.

Storm troopers.

Rey swears mentally, so strongly that she wonders why she hasn't felt a surge through whatever tattered remains of the bond there are. But there's—nothing. Silence, and stillness, where she's been fighting a steady push for days.

Storm troopers, and a figure in black—

Panic surges through Rey. It must be panic, to send such a tingle to her fingertips. It must be panic, for she does not dare feel anything else.

Logic follows a moment after. The figure in black is a foot shorter than Kylo Ren, and smaller in every dimension. Shoulders, waist—recognition—Rey tries to catch a glimpse of a face, but a white-plated shoulder blocks her view.

The alarm sounds again. The troopers halt. Rey blinks and breathes with a white boot six inches in front of her nose.

Look down now, you kriffing idiot.

A clank, a puff of dust. The ranks have shifted back a step.

Rey stops breathing.

Footsteps don't burn into the earth; she knows this. She knew this in Takodana, but that might have been a year ago or half-an-hour ago. The shadow that falls over her is darker than the ones that trace the pale sky.

She sees the black folds of a heavy robe.

Every fiber of her being is telling her to run, but now it is too late. A hand—leather gloved—reaches down and twists her head back by the hair, tugging hard.

And a voice, almost as cold as it is familiar, rings out. "Who are you?"

Rey lifts her chin a little further.

Her own eyes in her own face stare back.