Rey felt the crackle in the ground underneath the cool stones that poked her back. That crackle made her teeth chatter and her bones groan, and she wondered if it was already too late to leave. A part of her didn't want to leave, and though she knew her hands would move and her legs would rise, there was comfort in thinking the end had been a choice she didn't have to make.

But as clearly as she felt the stones in her back and the dried blood that crusted over the lid of the shirt she held, she felt the safety and gravity of the time ahead of her. She felt the security of her feet as they trampled against bending rock and the gust of air on her face when the dying remains of Palpatine's forgone temple met the reality of an erupting Exegol.

Things she knew she needed to feel, that one day she'd be happy she felt, were coming, and there was some sort of relief in that. But for now, for the seconds she knew she had, she closed her eyes, and breathed in his smell. It was new, some combination of the way his hand felt on Ahch-To and the short, raspy breath she felt brush against her face when they sat together, before she ran away. But there was something else, something she'd always known had been there, but had never quite gotten to feel.

Slumped over in the rotted temple of Exegol, a bloodied shirt in hand and with the future calling, she finally met Ben. It was just a smell, and it'd be gone as soon as she opened her eyes, but she didn't care. That smell held the weight of so many conversations she wished she could have, but more importantly, it felt like all the words she knew she didn't need to say. It was something she could understand. Mementos she could decipher.

That moment was a pair of arms around her, and as the cold of the hurricane that trickled into the temple and the heat of the force lightning that crumbled the statues around her met in equilibrium, there was solitary comfort. She was alone, but she could imagine, and that was a love she knew she couldn't let go of.

The hero of a war that decided the fate of galaxies slumped back against the floor, a vacant shirt crumbled in her fingers and warmed by her chest. She forgot the embarrassment of loving another person, and she didn't care really about where she'd come from. A guilt that would overwhelm her in the years to come began to percolate in her stomach, and tears made dried blood new again. But it was here, in her weakest, most vulnerable moment, that Rey felt a perfect balance, a winding tunnel of emotions intermixed with the pain and happiness she knew would envelop the rest of her life. She clung tighter to the shirt and to the memories of the person she'd felt in that shirt moments earlier, and let her feelings wander through that tunnel.

There was darkness for a while, but the dark didn't mean anything to her anymore. What had once been the boogeyman, a future she thought she couldn't avoid or a truth she couldn't run from, had been made tame. She understood that what had scared her before was now just a part of understanding the life that surrounded her. The darkness she had feared became a part of a journey she knew she had to take.

Ben had taken that journey, and she saw it swallow him whole. Emerging from that darkness didn't mean he had taken the wrong path; she wasn't so sure there was more than one path to take anymore.

When the darkness cleared and gave way to the white powder of snow against the earthy bark of the trees ahead, she wasn't relieved. It was just another step she had to take.

The ground that squished underneath her feet was familiar, and though she knew she'd never find a word to call it, the feelings that surrounded her were a place she'd someday call home. The familiarity was ahead of her, without heat and without kindness, and it didn't beckon her forward. It was full of quiet and something she knew she wouldn't understand for a long, long time.

Making her way forward, Rey took stock of herself; the blood on her hands had fallen away, and the cuts and chips on her fingernails were beginning to stitch themselves back together. Her arms and chest were covered in the shirt she had clung to on her way here, but she could feel a heat bathing over the cuts she knew would become scars. Life hung in the air in this place, and it oiled the creakiness in her bones; for the first time since she'd left Jakku, her body was at peace.

There was no breeze through the trees she walked under, but she could hear birds sounding in the distance. Their sound raised the sky on some of the planets she'd been to since she left home, but here they seemed more like a reminder to bathe in the light from the stars that hung above her ahead. She tried to make sense of whether this place had a day or night, but all she felt was the light of the stars that never seemed to end. There wasn't a darkness strong enough to stop their light, and the planet was bathed in a twilight that felt perfectly equal.

Stopping at a rock, just as the trees began to end and hills began to emerge, Rey took in the rest of her surroundings. Beyond the forest, she saw a center, and rivers that ran across the planet carried water into that center. Water fell in, and the axis of the world seemed to turn around it, but she didn't find herself drawn to it. Jumping in was just as likely to send her up as it was to pull her down. There was no fear.

She heard the rushing water from all sides, life that filtered through the center and back out again. She followed the sound up the hill, leaving her rocky perch behind. She imagined the places he might have walked, and tried to match her steps with his. She kept pace with a ghost that lived in her memory, feeling the wet spots on her cheeks. Winter planets, walks in a summer forest, the way spring makes things even more of what they are, those parts of life she wanted to experience, she wished he could feel them too.

A part of her wanted to believe he'd been there too. Maybe he'd imagined the same place. Maybe he'd felt the same balance. It was hard to imagine the man she knew he became; all she had was the smell on his shirt and the taste of his lips.

Still, she closed her eyes, and danced in the way a child might, placing her feet in the imprints his ghost had left behind.

She trekked up the hill and found steps that gradually rose above the snow that had trickled toward the center. The steps were stone, and her feet found tree roots that cracked through as she made her way upward. Eventually, the steps opened up to a temple, rotted out and green under the blue twilight of the sky. Her hands felt the cold of the stones that held up what was left of the temple, and her eyes met the space that had once been the roof. Life pulled her toward the back of the temple, where a darkness led to places and people she knew would stop her breathing. Still, she stopped, feeling the wood of barely standing tables and the paper of worn down text pages.

She flipped to one particular page of two boys standing alone in a river. The banks around the river had faded, and the trees disappeared at fraying ends, but the river itself radiated a warmth that she felt creep up her bones and settle in her chest. Life trickled out into the water, and her fingers traced that life back to the boys. They looked up, to some unknown thing in the worndown distance, but she smiled where their hands locked.

Being a child was such a faraway thing, and though she expected a yearning to wash over her, she was instead filled with something she could only describe through a memory. She remembered a dream she had, not long after leaving Crait. There was a loneliness as the night crept in, and the people she knew she loved but couldn't tell had gone off, not because they wanted to leave but because they had to. She comforted herself with that bit, living in the idea that she had to stay and they had to leave. Understanding the reasons people leave, though, never really filled in the gaps they left behind.

The night made her own her solitude, deal with it, but as she drifted farther from where she was to where she was going, the ghosts of those out on adventures began to comfort her. She felt water, not unlike the water she could see on this page, in between her toes, and in the distance she saw Finn, clinkering away in a bucket of parts, mouthing some words she'd never hear to Poe. Poe was hidden away, tucked behind the gears of the Falcon.

She felt mud between her fingers, and she stretched her legs in the water. She knew that this dream hadn't meant anything; the Falcon wasn't destined to go anywhere, and Ben wasn't on these shores. Seeing Finn and Poe, feeling the way the world surrounded them without the dread or elation of understanding the journey ahead; that memory was her feeling. It was more than joy and happiness, deeper than any sadness, and more grounded than any nostalgia.

She turned the pages of this particular tome closed, and though she thought of taking it with her, there was an acceptance that nothing here would be coming back with her. Nothing she kept in her pocket or underneath the shirt that would eventually take her home could leave Exegol. Undoubtedly, there were secrets held in these washed out pages, or the ghosts of those secrets, at least. But she turned, making her way towards the back of the temple, a colder darkness that called her closer and intermixed with the erupting grass and roots of the surrounding hillsides.

She remembered the darkness that called to her on Ahch-To, and the bleakness she felt after leaving it. She remembered how the rain came down on that place, and she hoped after she left Exegol that it might rain too. Rain against the windows of Master Luke's ship made her feel warm, like she was already inside her ship. That feeling made her twist the sides of the shirt that covered her arms and bite down on its collar; she'd come here to stay, but somehow time was pushing her forward, even now.

Somewhere beyond he was waiting for her; the life in the air around her told her that. Still, waiting on the rock, thinking of him ahead, somehow that was what pulled at her heart. It was an unbalanced thing, that feeling.

The darkness at Ahch-To had come from her desire to understand, her unwillingness to let go of a pain she created to mask another, deeper wound she had tried to hide. The force had been dark there, but in many ways it helped her to understand her light. The darkness ahead of her was merely space now, space hidden from the stars that lit the path here. Entering the darkness didn't mean the light went away; she just had to find it again.

Ben had found it again, on the remains of a darkness that had been crushed so long ago. The cool of the metal, the water that splashed against them, they were nothing like his cheek, or his lips. The water that trickled onto her fingers from his vest, and the warmth that she felt on her palms soon after. Somehow, he'd found himself there, in a space where she'd never felt more lost.

She understood things now; she knew she had to move forward, as she was. She knew she couldn't be afraid, and she knew all the things she'd been able to do. Still, she needed a hand to reach out, to pull her along. One last time, she needed someone to pull her along the way.

One last time.

She approached the darkness, closed her eyes to the light that warmed her back, and moved forward.

"I didn't think you'd be able to turn away from this place, Jedi or not," a voice ahead of her said.

Rey recognized the voice, a sharper tone from the old masters she'd felt drifting towards her during her final moments on Exegol.

There was a happiness that radiated through her now; without meeting him, without really knowing anything about him, Rey felt like there could be no one else to guide her along.

"You'll help me find him, Master Kenobi?" she replied, finding her footing alongside the robed Jedi Master, young again in a place that filled him with life.

"I should think we'll be helping each other, Rey. I've still got a lot to learn, so for now, I think we're both students," he replied.

"That's something only a Jedi Master would say," Rey remarked, finding her footing on the stones that lined the cave they traversed. She felt the smoothness of each one with every step she took. All that scared her now was beyond this place, outside the darkness.

Rey found that Obi-Wan Kenobi paced his walk much faster than even she could, and understood just how much younger this version of him must have been from the master she'd heard in Han's stories. She couldn't make out the jingle of his lightsaber as they walked along, and for the first time she felt the missing weight of her own against her hip. Neither Luke nor Leia were with her in this place.

"Master Kenobi, I'd like to keep walking like this forever, you know," Rey started.

"But you've got so many questions to ask, I'd imagine," Kenobi replied.

"I'm not really sure where to begin, trying to connect where I am now with where I was on Exegol," Rey said, "and to be honest, I'm not really sure I want to connect these at all."

"I'm not sure I'd be really be able to tell you anything more than you already know; I'm not interested in understanding much of this place either," Kenobi answered back, slowing down to walk next with the girl he'd help to save.

There was some quiet peace in walking next to her now. She felt so much like that apprentice he'd met so long ago, if not a little more worn-down. Here, his happiness could warm the darkness around them, and light the path ahead, if only a little.

"I think, at the heart of it, I'm not here to answer anymore Jedi riddles. Maybe that's more of what life is, a fickle force an ancient religion tries to comprehend, but for right now, I'm just trying to find the boy I lost," Rey said, clinging to the little bit of light that had filtered in, unaided by any cracks in the surrounding walls.

"I don't think there's anything any Jedi has left to teach you, Rey. You're the best of all of us," Obi-Wan replied, "As for the boy you lost, I think he'd like to find you, too."

Rey tugged on her shirt; there weren't memories sewn into its seams, but she imagined all the memories they might have created together. Memories she wanted to have with Ben weren't quite ghosts, but they were still haunting. They were echoes she knew she'd never forget, though they might change and grow just as she did. However far she got from this moment, from this conversation with Obi-Wan, from this planet she'd one day call home, she could never outgrow that love. Love she wished could sew into this shirt and love for as long as life would keep her up.

Love that understood her. Love that could be called dreaming.