Here we go again! Is it just me, or does just about every early October Project song apply to this 'ship?

The sky was falling.

Rey staggered out from under the monolith that crouched over Exegol's plain, wondering vaguely why it still hovered in air instead of crushing her flat - only to find there were plenty of crushing opportunities left. The ground shook with impacts as Star Destroyers succumbed to gravity all around, and the noise was incomprehensible.

Fog seemed to envelop her brain; shock, some small part of it diagnosed coolly. Somehow she managed to cross the rocky ground to Luke's battered X-wing, dodging the occasional bit of flaming debris curving down from overhead. Every so often her restless hand drifted to check the hilt of one or the other lightsaber hooked to her belt.

The other was clenched tightly around the small bits of metal she'd found in the ruin of Ben's empty clothes.

Ben -

His name swelled in her throat, locked tight lest the anguish escape and Rey lose all that remained of her strength. Death was raining down. She had to concentrate.

The X-wing's cockpit was still damp and smelled like fish, an oddly calming contrast to the hell outside. Luke's old helmet didn't fit, but it was a familiar weight, all those times she'd played with the one she'd scavenged, imagining lifting away from the desert, escaping gravity -

Her hand was still fisted. Rey forced it open and dropped the contents inside her shirt for lack of a safer place, then swallowed, engaged the engines, and left Exegol behind.

Somehow the antique fighter's life support system still worked, and it supplied her with untainted oxygen and a few of the revolting energy chews that were specially made to never expire. The chatter on the comm was exultant, but without an astromech droid she couldn't turn it off, so Rey let it flow past without listening and simply concentrated on piloting. The silence that fell when she made the jump to lightspeed was a blessing.

In the glazy drone of hyperspace she tried to center herself. Her body ached weirdly and the scrape on her forehead still oozed blood, a sticky patch under the helmet. Her heart kept speeding up and slowing down, as if it hadn't quite got back into the habit of beating. But that was just her outside; it didn't really matter.

Ben

The wail burst out of her without warning. Rey screamed, fists smashing into the console. Ben!

It was disbelief; it was fury; it was wild tearing anguish. It felt as though her soul, her very self, had been ripped right down the center and was bleeding. As if a part of her had been carved away with a lightsaber, burnt, damaged beyond repair.

She was grateful, then, that there was no droid riding behind her. Rey let the pain pour through her, hoarsening her voice, bruising her hands; the old craft absorbed it all.

When it passed, Rey was calm, if only the calm of exhaustion. She sat back in the seat and tried to come to terms with the deafening silence, the scorching pain where that once-unwelcome presence had been.

She wanted to go back and...and…

And what?

Even the Force didn't allow for time travel.

Rey wasn't even entirely sure what had happened. She remembered Pal- the Emperor - dragging life out of her and Ben. Then Ben was gone and the Jedi were chanting in her head, giving her the strength she needed to defy him.

The Emperor disintegrating as she - as they - turned his power back on him.

A time, not of nothingness, but of utter peace. She would have taken it for unconsciousness and hallucination, except that at the end of it she had felt her own heart begin to beat again, which had been deeply strange.

What had happened to Ben after the Emperor had attacked them, Rey didn't know.

I never will.

But she did know that he had given her back the life she'd given him, and that hurt too.

With an effort, she turned her thoughts outward. Poe's alive, I got that much. But as for Finn, Rose, so many others - she didn't know.

From what I saw - it was bad. So many ships gone in blooms of light overhead, each one lives snuffed out. Rey hadn't been sure the Resistance would get her message, and she certainly hadn't expected the sheer volume she'd seen when the Emperor had started to pull them from the sky.

But the only way to know was to go on.

Rey hiccuped, swiped at her face below the goggles, and unwrapped an energy chew. Survival was an old, old lesson.

You just go on.

At first, it was easy.

The Resistance's sorrow-laced euphoria of victory was enough to carry Rey through the next few hours of combined celebration and wake; and when they all fell into whatever beds they could find, full of alcohol and dizzy with exhaustion, no one was expected to get up early.

Rey slept, and slept. At one point, she was dimly aware of being moved, turned onto her back; someone was dabbing at her face with a damp cloth. But oblivion pulled her back down, and Rey was glad to go.

Asleep, she could not feel the absence gaping in her soul.

When she did wake, it was easily, all at once. For a long time she stayed still, afraid to move, but all she could hear was the occasional beep of a droid at rest and Poe's funny whistly snore, and sometimes busy sounds much further away.

You can't stay here forever.

Rey forced her eyes open. The hydration line into her arm, and the other medical equipment around the bed, told her why she didn't feel worse. The surroundings looked like Resistance-base living quarters, though she didn't recognize the room.

Just a few feet away was a battered couch that looked as if it had been salvaged from a trash dump. Finn was sprawled on it, arms along the back, head tipped back. Poe was stretched out next to him, head resting on Finn's thigh. Both of them were clearly asleep; a game of Star-tarot One-up lay abandoned on the low table next to the couch.

She wept then, as silently as she could, muffling her sobs with a palm pressed to her mouth. Because they were there, they were alive and well, she hadn't lost them too.

When the ache in her chest finally eased, Rey rolled over enough to blot her eyes on the pillow. Sleep tugged at her; it would be easy to slip back down into unconsciousness.

No. I must get up sometime. Her life was a gift back to her; it wasn't to be wasted.

They'd all had a crash course in basic medical care after Crait. Rey removed the devices that had kept her stable, glad that someone had enveloped her in one of Finn's oversized shirts.

I don't know where my gear went but I bet it's not salvageable. But someone, and she was pretty sure who, had carefully placed both lightsabers on the little table next to the bed. Next to them sat a little set of brassy dice, connected by a chain.

The sight of the latter made her throat tighten, and Rey picked them up with trembling fingers. She'd seen them before, of course; they'd hung in the Falcon's cockpit where Han had left them. A good-luck charm of sorts. Which meant that there was no way they could have ended up in Ben's pocket on Exegol.

And yet, they had. She'd found them by accident, patting frantically at his empty clothes as if she could bring him back by sheer dumb insistence. She had gathered them up in desperation, some last fragment of him - it was stupid but -

She had no pockets to hide them in, but it was easy enough to gather up her tangled hair and twist it, secreting the dice within and pinning it with a stylus she found nearby.

It will do for now.

Rey swung her legs off the bed and looked more closely at her surroundings. BB-8 was in the corner, in battery-charging mode, which explained why he hadn't woken everyone with a volley of whistles.

She was just contemplating moving when a prickle of awareness made her lift her head. No footsteps sounded in the corridor, but Rey could sense who was coming.

The sight of the tall form that appeared in the doorway made the pain inside her swell. Chewbacca was carrying D-O, and he put the little droid down with the faintest caution to be silent before holding out his arms.

Rey stumbled into them, eyes blurring again. He was a wall of warmth and safety, wrapping her up tightly as she cried into his fur, crooning high in his throat in a song of comfort and mourning. She had no idea how he knew Ben was dead, but there was no doubt that he did.

And Ben had been, once upon a time, family.

Chewie rocked her for a long while afterwards. Rey inhaled the spicy-sweet smell of him and wondered wearily if she was doomed to keep losing all the people she cared about, if the two sleepers across from her, the cheerful droids, the patient mentor who let her get his chest all wet were to be snatched away like Ben. Or Luke, or Leia, or her parents.

Be fair. They have lost people too. Poor Chewie had lost all his human family, in fact, one by one by one. And yet somehow he managed to keep going.

"Uh-oh," D-O said, very softly, and Rey glanced over to see all BB-8's indicator lights coming up.

Chewie growled a warning, but it was too late; BB-8's scream of delight made Finn spasm up straight, blinking. Poe jerked and half-fell off the couch. "What? What is it?!"

BB-8 zipped over to bump into Rey's legs repeatedly, whistling wildly. D-O dashed in circles like a demented spinbug. Rey slid from Chewie's lap to fall into her friends' embrace. And if there were yet more tears, they weren't hers, and there was plenty of laughter to brighten them.

Down in the center of her, Ben's absence burned unhealing, but Rey focused on those around her. The pain would be there later too.

It would always be there.

"So what exactly happened?" Poe asked, because he had no tact. "You know you have to tell us."

Rey sighed. The stars were thick here, over the Resistance base; the four of them lay on their backs on top of the Falcon, where no one could see anyone's face and it was easier to talk.

Rey was clean and fed - Chewie and Finn and Poe had all stood around watching her pointedly until she'd finished the tray Finn had brought in - and now, Rey thought wearily, it was time for the debriefing.

The bottle Poe was passing around helped. Rey took a small swallow and let it burn down her throat before handing it along. "Where should I start?"

"Kef Bir," Finn said promptly. "Why the hell did you take off like that?"

"I...I went back to Ahch-To. I was going to stay." Rey stared up until her eyes unfocused. "It...I sensed Leia's death, and what Kylo Ren told me - it was all too much."

She went on before they could ask. "Master Skywalker...he came to me. Told me what I had to do. I had Ren's wayfinder."

The bottle was pressed into her hand again, and she took another sip to steady her voice. "I found P- the Emperor. He...he wanted me to turn."

How could she explain that horrific offer, without telling them who and what she was? Without risking them pulling back -

Finn's hand fumbled down her arm to wrap her fingers in his. The warm pressure was a lifeline. "I - did you see what happened with - on Kef Bir?"

He squeezed a little harder. "Only that you were fighting, the water kept getting in the way. And then, I...I felt it too." He choked a little. "Leia."

Rey nodded, even if he couldn't see it. Finn went on.

"Jannah and I saw you take off, but Ren was still there. So we got out of there before he could come back for us."

Rey heard Poe drag in a constricted breath, half a sob, and reached for his hand too. His fingers were harder than Finn's, but his clasp was just as warm. "Why did she do it?" His voice was a whisper.

"She...she saved me. Distracted him." Rey could still feel the furious panic of knowing she was going to lose, skill outdone by weight and sheer brutal strength, and then Kylo's weird stillness, and she'd acted on reflex - a lightsaber through flesh hardly dragged at all -

The choice, that wasn't really a choice, because she could not do otherwise. Not because of the dyad; because of everything else.

"I stabbed him. Then I healed him."

No one said anything for a long moment, then Poe rolled up onto one elbow. "Why the hell did you do that?"

Rey flinched, and from Poe's other side a hairy arm pulled him down flat again. Let her finish, Chewie said.

Rey shrugged a little; the stars were blurring overhead, though her eyes were dry. "It was what he needed."

It was the closest she could come to explaining what she couldn't put into words. How giving him that gift was the only way she had to show him that she still believed in Ben. To prove that he was still worth saving.

Poe muttered something under his breath, but didn't interrupt.

Rey squeezed her eyes closed. "He followed me. To Exegol." She swallowed. "Ben Solo did."

She heard Finn suck in a breath. Chewie let out a low whine, almost inaudible.

"He turned?" Finn asked, voice hushed. "Away from the Dark Side?"

"That's shit," Poe began, dropping her hand, but whatever else he said was muffled by fur.

"He fought the Emperor with me," Rey said, and it was absurd, packing all of that down into a few bare sentences. "He - the Emperor did something to him, to us, I was unconscious. When I woke up I was alone."

But not really.

"I fought the Emperor again, and I won. And…"

Her voice failed her, and she mouthed the words silently to the sky before forcing sound out. "I died."

Chewie swore. Poe's hand grabbed for hers again, bruising tight. Finn wrapped his other hand over her wrist, as if the words would somehow snatch her away. "I felt that," he said, voice thready. "You were - were gone. But you came back, and I thought I was wrong."

"Ben healed me." It was stark, bare, nothing of the incredible waking in Ben's lap, to see his reddened eyes watching her in dawning, disbelieving joy. "And it killed him."

And tore her in two, and how could she explain that even to them, her first and truest friends? How could they possibly understand what she barely comprehended herself?

There was a long, long silence.

Then Finn rolled over to envelop her in a hug. "I guess we owe him one, then," he said into her shoulder. "Doesn't make him any less of a rancor's asshole, though."

A wry laugh burst out of her, and Rey hugged him back hard. Poe's hand ruffled her hair, and Chewie chuckled.

They ended up in a messy pile with Chewbacca mostly on the bottom, the bottle empty and the whole thing a little easier to bear through the haze of alcohol. Rey was halfway to dozing off when Chewie growled low.

What did Kylo tell you, that hurt you?

Rey sighed again. She could refuse to tell them, she supposed, but what good would it do? She might put the others off, but when Chewbacca wanted to know something there was no getting out of it.

She pushed up to a sitting position, leaving a little space between herself and them, because if she felt tainted by her own blood, how would they feel?

"Emperor Palpatine was my grandfather." She let the words out all at once, before her courage failed her. Her skin suddenly felt ill-fitting, as if it didn't quite belong to her. "He wanted me to take the throne of the Sith and rule in his place."

Another silence, before Poe broke it. "And you told him where to stick it," he said easily.

Startled, Rey blinked.

"'Course she did," Finn said, sounding drowsy. "He's dead, isn't he?"

Chewie simply pulled her back down to the pile. Bemused, Rey allowed it, relaxing as various arms landed on top of her. "You don't mind," she said, a little disbelieving. "That I'm a Palpatine."

Finn snorted, and Poe made a derisive noise. "Oh please," Finn said. "Like that's any worse than the runner of spice here - "

"Says the ex-Stormtrooper - "

Their semi-drunken tussle was short-lived. Rey propped her head on Chewie's shoulder and closed her eyes again, listening to them laugh. The broken bond ached and burned, but the rest of her was at peace.