We were never perfect.

Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was

once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.

We might make them again, she said.

Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.

You must make your own map.

- Joy Harjo

Rey clings to him and he is steady.

(Rey opened her eyes in a quiet, reed-woven world, and only thought of him.)

For her, he jumped. For her, he threw himself into danger, and once again, he took her hand.

This is a life that begins or ends differently, such that it is pierced and centered by the moment she flings herself into his arms.

"Rey," he breathes, against her hair. He says her name the way he has always said it, like it is something that will save him.

His hands are a comforting weight against her spine. Her chin is tucked in the divot between his neck and shoulder. They fit together. The galaxy led them both to Jakku, to Takodana, to a planet that no longer exists, because this has always been true.

.

It is only because Rey remembers, very belatedly, that Han Solo—his father—is standing a few steps away from their embrace, waiting with uncharacteristic patience. When Rey lets go, she doesn't let go of his hands. In the corners of her vision, Takodana flares verdant, watchful, near.

"Glad you two have patched up whatever was rusted," Han observes. There's a smile creeping over his face. "Yeah, yeah, Chewie. I hear you. I know they have to go."

Rey's hand is suddenly empty.

(He let go.)

"What is it, kid?" Han's voice is as gentle as Rey's ever heard it. "You have a world to get to. Hell, I'm not force-sensitive, and I can feel it. You're ready. Ready to do whatever it is you're supposed to do." He pauses. Again, again. Han Solo has grown old. "I died there, sure, but—"

There is a silence in the meadow, and it bites its way amid the grass around their feet. It is a silence that sounds almost like a voice, like a voice that began in a young boy's nightmares.

"You didn't die," his son says, at last, from the other side of time. "It was me. I killed you."

For a second that clenches like a fist, no one says anything. Rey can only think of the two Ben Solos, both of whom have had to grapple with the shadow cast by their father's light. Her Ben—she doesn't quite want to call him Kylo anymore, but she must identify him somehow, and why not as hers?—has tears that hang in his eyes like stars.

Han doesn't move. When he speaks, he only says—

"I know."

It is his most famous catchphrase, a story that even Rey has heard, because everyone has heard it. The love story sung around the galaxy—their galaxy, every galaxy—is marked with near escapes and harsh words and soft kisses, and the man who knows is always marked by a final fall.

Ben (her Ben) chokes. "What?"

"I know," Han repeats. "Knew since you first showed up here, not able to look me in the eyes. I'm simple, kid. Not stupid."

Then he crosses those few steps of space with his easy struggler's stride and wraps his arms around the son who drove a blade through his heart, at just about the same distance.

Rey doesn't breathe.

This makes for an earthshattering stillness, a different kind of silence, mercifully voiceless, and unbroken until Rey thinks she can hear all of their heartbeats.

Father draws back from son, one hand clenched on Ben's shoulder and the other lifting gently to rest on the furrow that carves across Ben's face.

"Quite the scratch there," Han observes, like he's only seeing it for the first time. "Gives you character. Who gave it to you?"

"She did," Ben says hoarsely. He doesn't look at Rey.

Inexplicably, Han grins broadly. "Keep 'em both," he says.

Ben turns scarlet. Rey clears her throat, hurriedly, and says, "I think we should be going."

But in that moment, they are already gone.

.

Falling.

Oh, to remember…oh, to return. To look up into a vast well of empty darkness, and see there a light reflected, an answered call, a soft gaze amid the volley of enemy fire.

(This is who we are.)

.

A bird sings. No bird that Rey knows, though Rey only knew the scrap vultures of Jakku for most of her life. This lyrical trill is one sliver alone of one day of her life, but it is a day in which almost everything that mattered coalesced like molten gold and light.

Takodana.

There is stony dust on her skin and clothes. She feels the hard lump of the lightsaber pieces in her belt. She stands, unsteadily, amid ruins she recognizes.

It feels too long ago to be true, to be real, but she did come here, on Leia's orders. She was looking for answers, and she—she—

Less than a dozen paces from where she stands, Kylo Ren rises from the rubble.

Rey stands, speechless. But when he sees her, his face clears.

"Ben?" she ventures. Her throat is hoarse and sore, as if she has been screaming.

"You're here," he whispers.

"Do you—"

"Remember?"

.

Remember how you kissed my hands, how we held each other after the fall, remember your father, remember—

.

"Yes," Ben says heavily, sweeping his hair away from his forehead with one gloved hand. "I remember it all. You, me. Another life."

"Another future." Rey does not mean it to sound bitter. She doesn't mean anything, in this moment, because that is too much to string together in the quaking uncertainty of her mind and soul. She is want and hope, now, and very little else.

He takes a step closer. The sky is blindingly blue; the birds sing louder still and the city has fallen but the forest never will.

"We got what we wanted, didn't we?" Softly. Those lips, softly.

Rey holds him only with a gaze. No words. No touch. Not yet.

"You, the ruler. Me, the scavenger. Is that what you would call hope? Is that what you did hope?"

"I've hoped for long enough," Rey answers. He is close enough that if he stretched out his hand—

—her hand could rise to meet it.

"I've never had much hope." He half-turns, a study in profile, a fallen knight who has nowhere left to fall, and so may find himself suddenly on solid ground. "Isn't that uglier? Born of the parents I was, raised in the Light as I was—"

"Hurt," Rey says. "Hurt, as you were."

His eyes meet hers again. "Jump," he whispers. "Jump with me, Rey. I care nothing for a future that enslaves our past."

Tears swarm Rey's vision. "I told you. I can't be who you want."

"You are who I want." He does reach for her now, and warm leather closes around her fingers as his hands lace with hers. "Not the vision. Not the ruler. Just you."

Rey wants to tell him that they have everything to lose. That she asked him to jump, and he did, and when she found him along some meridian of time she ran to him because it seemed the only thing to do. She wants to tell him that she wants him, too, not the vision, not the scarless face—but all of that is too much to say in such a brief, immortal moment, and so Rey only says, "I love you, Ben Solo."

It turns out that that is what she wanted to say all along.

(It's not like that.)

(But you want it to be.)

Ben Solo crumbles, only it isn't Ben Solo at all, but the last pieces of Kylo Ren. He stumbles a little, or perhaps Rey leans in, but whichever it is no longer matters. Her hands find the soft wealth of his hair, his gloves are torn off and his hot fingertips are tracing the lines of her throat.

"Please," he whispers, torn, against her mouth, and Rey murmurs back, blaster-quick, "Please never works on me," and then he crushes her lips with his.

(They fit together.)

Rey allows the invasion of grazing teeth and wildfire longing, gives as good as she gets, and does not—does not—let go. She is so much smaller than he is, but she matches every inch of him.

Rey has been waiting every moment of her life to be met and matched, to be needed and loved in equal measure.

.

Rey, who mends the broken.

Rey, who walks with the Force, but not because she has to.

Rey, who has been found.

.

Kylo's hand is against her waist, now, spanning an impossibly wide distance with thumb and forefinger, points of searing warmth. He nudges against the lightsaber, and Rey almost laughs into their kiss.

"Do you want it back?" she asks huskily. "It's still broken, you know."

"It's yours," he answers promptly.

"I'm not a Skywalker."

He lifts an eyebrow. "That can be managed."

The last unflushed inch of Rey's skin floods with a blushing glow, as though they haven't just been locked against each other. "I'm not of the bloodline."

His brow furrows with gentle reproach, and his hand is trembling slightly as he tucks a strand of her hair back from her cheek. "You're the savior of the bloodline," Ben Solo tells her, and Rey leans against him, against his heartbeat, certain that she could remain there forever.

.

(Hux shoots from behind.)

.

"Rey?"

Everything tastes of salt. Taste is all that Rey can manage, at the moment: she is weightless and formless, otherwise. When she opens her eyes, the world is white. A dark shape shimmers into relief; Leia. Leia Organa, alive and well and…somehow, older?

"What…" Her voice is rusty, out of use. "What…where—Ben—"

"Be still," Leia lays a hand on Rey's. And yes, Rey still has hands. Not so formless after all. "You're still weak."

.

The story will be told to her, on Endor, by many different people. Rose will tell her that the blaster bolt seared all the flesh to the right side of her heart, that it still seems impossible that she survived. Finn will tell her that she has been in stasis for six moon cycles, and that there were too many times to count when all of them believed that the end was near.

Poe will tell her that Hux is dead, and all the captains of the First Order with him, since they led the frontal assault on the ruins of Takodana.

Leia will tell her that Ben Solo destroyed a ship that shouldn't have been flown at lightspeed, by flying it at lightspeed; that the ragtag rebel forces parted before him as he carried Rey to his mother's waiting arms. That he knew to find them on Endor, but waged no war; that he asked for no forgiveness, but has spent the past six months acting in retribution for the First Order's crimes, in every corner of the galaxy.

Leia will tell her that Ben Solo loves her, but this, of course, Rey already knows.

.

"I want to see him."

"You're barely fit to see anyone," Leia says. She has not asked a single question about Takodona; Rey's muddled mind is sure that she has much to tell, but it all feels so long ago that she wouldn't know where to begin.

"Does he know I'm alive?"

"He does."

"Is he—is it safe for him to come here?"

"He won't hurt us." Leia's eyes are grave, but peaceful. "And we don't have the firepower to hurt him." The smile has been a long-time coming; it illuminates her face. There is the beautiful princess of Alderaan, crowned at last by a mother's love. "Some still want to; most don't. We grow wise, and merciful, Rey, as we grow old."

.

"I've kept this safe for you." Finn presses a bundle into her hands, and Rey knows what it is at once.

"The saber."

"He said he could mend it." Finn doesn't say who he is, but his tone is forbidding enough that Rey can guess. "But I said, it stays with me until Rey tells us what to do." He puts a hand on her shoulder and squeezes. Their hearts—hers and Finn's—will always keep each other close. "Rey, do you…"

"Yes." She is still a little shaky on her feet. Still too thin, and too lightheaded. But Rey has not one modicum of doubt. "Yes, Finn, I do."

.

If dreams are more than dreams, and other worlds exist and break in the same way as those that are known, then Rey of Nowhere loves Benjamin Organa Solo as much as he always loves her.

.

"I need to see him," Rey says, and because she is strong enough, she wanders the mists of Endor and lays open her mind.

(Rey, who waits.)

.

When an unmarked First Order ship makes planetfall on Endor, the Resistance watches with wary eyes. But Leia walks among them, a steady voice and reassuring gaze, and there is no protest, no whisper of fear.

Rey, leaning on Finn's arm, strides along a cleared path towards the lowering hatch. She blinks through the rush of steam. She waits—

.

She doesn't have to wait any longer.

.

His kisses are tender, this time, because he has found her on the other side of nearly losing her. There is a hush around them, the hush of a people who have survived from one end of history to the next, and who are quiet when they see the first gleam of hope reborn.

"Ben," Rey breathes, because Rey is not afraid of any silence, "Ben, you're here."

His smile is his father's and his eyes are his mother's and his scar is hers, and yet somehow in all of this he is more his own man than he has ever been.

"We are here," he replies. He is still draped in black, but the cloth at his throat is gray and fine-woven, like something of Leia's making. "But dear one, where are we going?"

Rey rests her arms around him still, but half-turns to face the crowd behind them. In a clear voice, she says, "We are going forward."

And to Ben Solo, she whispers, "That is why you and I came back."

…the sky on fire,
the gold light falling backward through the glass
of every room. I'll give you my heart to make a place
for it to happen, evidence of a love that transcends hunger.
Is that too much to expect? That I would name the stars
for you? That I would take you there?

We are all going forward. None of us are going back.