WOOHOO! First Star Wars fic: complete.

This piece was originally written for the Reylo Charity Anthology Vol. 2 - Across the Stars, OUT NOW! Go check it out on tumblr and see how you can get a copy today :) it's packed full of beautiful fics and artwork, so don't miss out!

SW is one of those fandoms where I've grown up loving, but never thought I'd end up writing for it, and, well...here we are :) I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Accompanying playlist on spotify can be found here: playlist/5kNqYXDDd2aNJr37f2W7OO

Disclaimer: I don't own Star Wars

i.

Rey lays on her cot aboard the Falcon, curling underneath the blessedly warm blanket as her racing, restless mind refuses to settle. She thinks about the cold night winds in the unforgiving Jakku desert and fights back a shiver, scolding and reminding herself in the same breath that she is no longer on that planet, no longer scavenging for her next meal, no longer al-

She feels a tug then, deep inside her, familiar and wholly unwelcome at this moment. She opens her eyes and there he is, Kylo Ren—Ben Solo—laying down on his side facing her, impossibly close. Their Force bond still startles her sometimes, but it has been long enough that it no longer surprises her or scares her. There have been worse times they've bonded, she knows, but as his dark eyes bore into hers, all she can think of is how she is still so impossibly angry at him and the stunts he pulled on Crait and so she rolls her eyes, rolling over on the mattress to turn her back on him.

There is a rustle behind her, and she sees more than feels his bare arm hesitantly drape itself over her waist. It's not an apology; he doesn't say anything, but she feels through their bond his hesitance, the calm after the storm.

There isn't a need for a red ribbon, a red keychain, red…anything in this life. The rivers of blood they accidentally leave behind on each other's bodies and the red glow of his saber is enough to lead them forward.

Epic I.

Her name isn't always Rey.

In the same vein, his name isn't always Ben.

There aren't always heavy family legacies tied to their names, weighing them down like boulders roped around their ankles in the ocean, the pair of them drowning endlessly, helplessly. There isn't always a war, there isn't always an Empire or a Republic. Sometimes, the Force revels in its balance, and there is peace. Sometimes, they're born because the Force is out of balance, but sometimes, he's on a planet across the galaxy and she dies before they meet, and there's always that empty feeling on the left side of his chest—and sometimes hers when he is the one who meets his end before she does—and some lives...

Some lives are lived with that echoing hollowness until the end of their days, where they again become one with the Force, and their thousands of years of love and history and memories come rushing back to them.

Then time will pass, and then they will find themselves looking at one another again, hundreds of years later, standing at opposite sides of the street, jungle, river—always, always something between them—before they come together, in those lives where they are able to come together at all.

They are equal sides of the Force; the dyad is the physical manifestation of the potential balance of the Force, existing all throughout time and space, living, dying, and destined to come together time and time again. Where and when the dyad exists, the Force can be brought into balance through their living, brought into tune through their dying.

Just...not every life. Sometimes, the Force is thrown out of balance, and everything suffers, everything burns, and the dyad is right at the center of the explosion, suffering, burning, more than anything else, until they are brought back into balance once more, living, dying, and living and dying again.

The dyad is extraordinary. Some of the lives they live are extraordinary. They are there at the dawn of the Jedi, discovering together the different aspects of the Force and establishing the Je'daii Order. They are there to watch its fall in the Hundred-Year Darkness. They are there before the Galactic Republic and after its end, and they are there hundreds of years later, hundreds of galaxies away, where they are two people standing across from each other in a hallway in a newly constructed apartment complex, where they are two people standing across from one another in the middle of a busy intersection at the heart of an enormous city.

It isn't just them, though, when they live and die and live again. It's the Force, inside of them and all around them even in the lives where they are ignorant of what the Force is, where they are not Jedi and Supreme Leader, even when all knowledge of the Force has passed into obscurity. It's also a spark of red, sometimes a ribbon, sometimes a lightsaber, sometimes a scrap of cloth, or just a flash caught in the corners of their eyes before the dyad passes on to await their return, their chance to bring the Force back into balance, their hands finding each other's despite the years, the galaxies between them.

Epic II.

The words they say to one another have all been spoken before and will be spoken again.

"WHY DID YOU DO IT."

She's just sacrificed her life to save his, and he holds her as she lays dying, scared, angry, pleading, and he's looking down at her, so small and cradled in his arms, screaming the only words he can think of in his rage and desperation.

"I thought I'd find answers here. I was wrong. I've never felt so alone."

In this life, they find each other in a dark, grubby bar on a miserable and rainy night, led there by something beyond their comprehension, both able to offer the other what they've desperately needed and wanted their entire lives. She whispers to him hours later when they're lying sweaty in bed, wrapped up in each other's arms.

"You're not alone."

"Neither are you," he whispers back.

"At night when you're desperate to sleep, you imagine an ocean. I see it."

He looks up at the bright stars in the Tython system as he lays on his back, his thoughts floating off in some sort of meditative trance, having been in the same position for a few hours now. She joins him on the rocky outcrop, sitting down cross-legged next to him. There are times, she knows, where he is unable to rest, unable to sleep, unable to fully immerse himself in the Force and meditate.

Her whisper is so quiet he nearly misses it, but he hears her as he always does and opens up his mind to her. He opens up the part of him that wants so inexplicably, so badly, to connect to her, and lets her in to really see the calming waves that crash against the shore. There's no beach, no ocean on Tython that looks quite like this one, she knows, and wonders where it is he's longing for.

"Get out of my head."

They meet over a cup of spilled coffee, where, completely in character, he runs into her first and ends up buying her another cup. They talk, they laugh, they get to know each other on a beautiful breezy afternoon, and find that they have, surprisingly, a lot in common. She teases him with that line and a wide smile, in a lifetime, in a galaxy where she meets him on a day that is bright and sunny and promising.

"Don't be afraid. I feel it too."

Their fights aren't always with lightsabers or pitting their abilities in the Force against one another (and honestly, they're equals in every respect, but everything pales in comparison to the Force); she's gone off on him about some idiotic move he just pulled, a typical, typical Skywalker-Solo trait, honestly, in any and every life, and she's accidentally yelled out exactly how she feels about him.

They're both breathing heavily, staring at each other, feeling the weight of the words she accidentally let loose, and the rest of the world fades away. For the first time since he's known her, she looks so uncertain, looks so shocked, hiding behind a mask of bravado and the flare of red spreading rapidly across her face. He steps forward, puts a hand on her cheek, cupping her jaw, and tells her, softly, gently, those exact words

"It isn't too late."

There are tears in his eyes and there are tears in hers when they stand across the battlefield from each other, a red saber in one of their hands and a blue saber in the other.

"I'll help you."

He really only happened to just walk past the bookstack in the library when he sees her among the shelves, reaching up on her tiptoes to grab a book from the top shelf. Completely unbidden and immediately drawn to her, he whispers so as to not distract the other students from their work, and the payment he receives when he easily reaches up for the volume that she needs to hand it to her is the brightest smile he has ever seen.

Standing rooted to the spot, he'll swear it's also the most beautiful smile he's ever seen.

"Why is the Force connecting us? You and I?"

It is a whispered confrontation in the dark halls of the Jedi Temple. The lights of Coruscant are too bright tonight; they're together and they're terrified, everything that is against the Jedi teachings pulling at them and pitting them against everything they were taught. He holds her, and she clings to him, not because they are weak, but because they are afraid of what the future holds and they have the opportunity to be afraid together.

He holds his hand out to her, after a long, long time of deliberation, and after a long, long moment, she takes it, unsure of their future and of everything around them, their clasped hands their only anchor.

They become two renounced Jedi knights who make their home on the Mid Rim planet of Takodana.

In that lifetime, Jedi and Sith do not clash. In that lifetime, there is peace.

ii.

Rey wonders, not for the first time, how many people have seen this side of Supreme Leader Kylo Ren—Ben, she keeps wanting to say, but knowing that he isn't ready to hear it yet, not in moments as close and tender and silent and vulnerable as these—curled up in a ball and holding her through their bond as closely as he can. How many people have counted his tears, have seen his shoulders shake and his resolve crumble? How many people have seen the absolute brokenness in his dark eyes, heard his unspoken pleas as he holds her so tightly she feels as if she could be suffocated, shattered to pieces in his bruising grip?

He's not really there, she knows, but she can feel the storm raging in his mind, and adjusts herself to pull him closer.

The nightmares don't really stop. Her heart nearly does, though, the first time she feels him jolt awake through their bond, sweat pouring down his face, his heart hammering away and lightsaber in hand, pointed at an invisible enemy.

I feel the conflict in you. It's tearing you apart.

Ben—no, Kylo's breathing has evened out, his heart rate slowed enough for her to feel at last some semblance of peace after the nightmare passes. Impulsively, she drops a kiss onto his forehead and feels him draw strength from that one, barely-there touch.

"Someday," she tells him absent-mindedly as she's rewiring something on the Falcon, "when this is all over, I'd like to go live somewhere with a forest. A lot of greenery. And a lake."

He hums without looking up from whatever it is he's doing, whatever he's tinkering with in his hands—the Force bond won't tell her today—but when he finally does look at her, his eyes twinkle in a way she rarely sees.

"I could take you to some," Ben says, and Rey almost wants to laugh. "Where do you want to go?"

She shrugs. "I hear Naboo fits the bill quite well. Though it might be nice to visit Endor. Meet some Ewoks, see the jungle. See where the last war ended."

The war, this war and the last one, can be a sore topic for them, but today, it isn't. Instead, he chuckles.

"The Ewoks don't like me."

Rey can't help herself; she starts giggling, and then that giggle turns into full-on laughs when she sees the sheepish smile on his face.

"What did you do to them?!" she manages to ask when her laughs finally stop. Ben's eyes widen a little, his ears are tinged red, and oh, she knows it's a good story now. He mumbles something she can't hear, so she wheedles him for an answer until he clears his throat.

"I, uh…" He starts messing with the thing in his hands again. "Itriedhuggingoneofthem."

Rey bursts out laughing so hard she nearly pops a stitch in her side from a wound she sustained a few battles ago, but she can't bring herself to stop. Ben huffs, but she can tell he isn't angry or annoyed, which makes her laugh even harder.

"The Ewok had no idea what to do with me," Ben continues, still muttering. "It just…stood there until…Chewie pulled me away from it."

Imagining a very young Ben Solo waddling his way up to an Ewok to pull it into a toddler's firm hug makes Rey laugh like nothing else, and for a very, very brief moment, she wonders what he looked like as a child, as a baby, and wonders if his child would look more like him or look more like-

She quickly shuts that thought down in case it leaks through their bond, a thought she isn't entirely sure she should be having, but his head immediately snaps back up to meet her eyes. Ben's fingers still as he stops tinkering with the object he's holding, and by the sudden thoughtful look on his face, Rey knows he must have caught onto what she's been thinking. A blush burns on her cheeks, and this time, she is the one who looks down to avoid eye contact.

iii.

She feels like the Force sometimes—everyone keeps telling her they know her, but no one really does. She wonders if the Force feels the same way, wonders if—no, knows—Ben feels the same way.

I know everything I need to know about you.

You do? Ah, you do.

It's almost textbook, the way they're pit against the other; light against darkness, good against bad, Jedi against…not-quite-Sith. What the others don't understand, what most people don't understand, is that the root of both sides is the want to better everything around them, and both sides of the Force, the light and dark, help them to reach that goal. The only difference between them is how they define better, and the roads they take to achieve it.

No matter the road they choose to get there, though, there is only one thing aside from the Force that is constant, the price they all pay for the greater good:

Sacrifice.

Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to. That's the only way to become who you were meant to be.

But always, always he offers his hand to her; their hands are stretched out towards each other, across time, across light years and space and stars and worlds and realities.

Epic III.

Her bottom lip is caught in between her teeth, her hands twisting and gripping the silken gray sheets beneath her as large, warm hands run over her naked body, trailing reverently over her calves and her thighs, up her sides and palming her breasts. His hands cover the entirety of her chest, his fingers slowly rolling the peaks of her nipples and drawing out breathy moans from her as his steady eyes take in her every reaction. He lowers his head down to hers to capture her lips, gently nipping at her reddened bottom lip while his hands leave her breasts to curl around her shoulders, behind her neck to support her and draw her closer to him.

He pulls back again and puts enough space between them to admire her, needy and wanting and ready beneath him, her normally tied-up hair loose and spilling over his pillows and between his fingers. Her pupils are blown wide, her honeyed eyes meeting his molten fire. They surge forward to meet in the middle, one of her hands gripping his strong shoulders and the other lost in his dark curls as she rolls her hips, grinding her core against his leg between hers, the friction causing her to let out a moan that is half-lost in between their mouths.

His arms tighten around her and he crushes her to his chest as he nudges her legs apart with his knees, sliding into her with ease and familiarity. It takes his breath away, and she lets out something between a gasp and a curse when he fills her and rocks her, and it isn't until much later when they're both basking in the afterglow atop his cool sheets that she lets out a smile, turning her head to look at him, her fingers gently running through his hair and brushing strands away from his face.

They're silent then, taking in the moment of just being.

(It isn't their first time together; they've had hundreds, thousands of lives together like this after all.)

(And sometimes there's a war.)

(Sometimes they're only able to come together once.)

(Sometimes not at all.)

(But Rey finds herself held, loved, safe, in his arms-not Kylo Ren's but Ben's, her Ben's—and really, if it's once, twice, three times in the middle of a war they're on opposite sides of, meeting aboard his ship when he's able to get away, when she's able to get away and the separation just gets to be too much-)

(They agree to never talk about their meetings, agree that those moments are theirs in the darkness, and have no place in the light, between blaster fire and the hum of their clashing lightsabers.)

(She holds onto those moments the next time she sees the glowing red of his saber, and thinks wryly that he couldn't properly bleed the kyber crystal using the dark side of the Force, like Master Luke told her, and she sees the same longing for her in Ben's eyes through Kylo's mask.)

(But there's a war to fight after all, and Rey will not jeopardize the Resistance, Rose, Finn, Poe, Leia, the galaxy just to take his hand, outstretched toward her across the stars, waiting.)

(No matter how much she wants to.)

(And she wants to. She's seen it, her hand in his and standing beside him as Empress on the Dark Throne, where she's clothed in a Sith's black robes and wielding her own double-ended saber, thinking, we could burn it all down.)

(She's seen him untie those same black robes, pushing them off her shoulders as they pool around her bare feet, and he crashes to the ground in a low bow before her as the Emperor of the galaxy is brought to his knees in worship.)

(But Rey fights, because she's also seen a vision of Ben Solo taking her hand instead, both of them filled with the light side of the Force, and finally, finally she's able to keep her silent promises to Han and Leia to bring their son back to them, her promises to Luke to bring his nephew back to the light.)

(She cannot, will not, accept another ending to this war, another outcome where Ben Solo is not by her side.)

(There are whispered apologies and frantic kisses the next time, but after each time, she sees Kylo Ren meeting her back on the battlefield instead of her beloved Ben Solo.)

(They don't tell each other how much they break each other's hearts every time.)

iv.

The more they connect, whether by Force bond or by spending hours, days flying at lightspeed through hyperspace just to meet with each other, the more Rey really believes that Ben Solo can and will turn back to the light. There's no possible way he can hold her the way he does, be as gentle as he is with her if he isn't there, just underneath the surface of the mask he wears as Kylo Ren. As she gets to know him more and more, she clings to this more and more until she sees the light at the end of the tunnel and feels the light streaming through the cracks in his darkness like the red streaks in his shattered mask.

And then they find Exegol.

"I know what I have to do…but I don't know if I have the strength to do it."

v - ad infinitum.

It isn't supposed to end this way. Everyone knows stories don't just end this way.

There are a thousand and one things that Rey wants to say, wants to scream out, but her energy has completely deserted her body, and she is left looking down at the broken and impossibly beautiful man in her arms who is struggling to even take his next breath. She carefully brushes his bangs back from his face, and it is Ben Solo, freed from the persona of Kylo Ren, who gives her the warmest smile he can muster.

She is so, so, so angry at him.

"You weren't supposed to-" Rey starts, planning to give him a piece of her mind only for her voice to crack on her last word. She opens her mouth in an attempt to try again, but her tears are dripping down her cheeks now, and despite the pain she can see in his face, the pain that she can feel through their bond, Ben only smiles.

He manages to bring his hand to her cheek, fingertips grazing her tear-tracked skin. His memories come slowly, their lives spanned over thousands of years and galaxies trickling back to him as his life force leaves him. There are stars shining in his eyes, and Rey swears that she can count them all, trying to keep her own tears at bay. She's died—he should know, he brought her back—and her own memories were restored the moment he pushed his life force into her. They're silent for a moment as their story is being retold to them once again.

A thousand words, calling through the ages and reaching across the stars.

"Hey," Ben whispers. Rey chokes on a sob, her lips in a soft smile.

"Hi," she whispers back.

Time runs against them, always. As Ben's eyes close and Rey's cries slip past her dried, chapped lips, she feels the Force bond between them go slack, as she now remembers it doing a hundred, a thousand times before, and then there is only the ringing emptiness, that deep, hollow chasm that tears her asunder when, quite literally, the other half of her soul is ripped from her.

Rey's breathing picks up, her chest heaving and vision blurring. "Ben!"

His body fades, his weight completely dissipating in her arms and she crumbles. Having her memories back, she knows in full who she is, who he is, who she is meant to be with. It was always supposed to be this way, she thinks bitterly; the Force dyad may be uneven, unbalanced, even, but that's the point-they exist, and the Force comes back into balance, one way or another. They manage to come together in the end one way or another, but at this moment, when she holds him in his last seconds…it is not a comfort and will not be a comfort until they are together again, one in the Force. It isn't until so much later that Rey reigns in her tears, evens out her breaths, and manages to force herself to lift her chin. Then, she gasps at the sight before her.

Out of the ruins of Exegol and in the wake of Ben's death, she finds, completely out of place, a red flower on the ground in front of her. A carnation, something in her whispers, and though Rey loves greenery and plants and flowers after a lifetime spent on a desert planet, she knows she has never seen this flower. Instead, she searches through her millennia of memories to find her answers.

A red carnation, they tell her. Deep love, appreciation, admiration, pride, passion, affection, evocation, revolution-

She feels the weight of these words as she carefully cups the flower in one hand, the other clutching tightly to Ben's torn, bloodied shirt, and recalls him—not Ben, that wasn't his name then-handing the same flower to her so very long ago while singing her a song. That same song, which she knows would have had her Ben blushing to the roots of his dark curls, is what accompanies them both to hell and back—until they lose each other anyway, but always manage to find each other again.

The Force seems to swirl around her, an excitement pulsing through her as she closes her eyes and takes in a deep breath. When she opens them, the flower is gone. Gone, like Ben is gone.

"Be with me," Rey whispers, her voice hoarse. "Ben, be with me."

She ignores the ache in her bones, instead pulling at the Force and searching deep, deep within herself where-

There. There, she feels that infinitesimal strand of something pulling at her heart, pulling her to the horizon where she is certain Ben is waiting. It's different this time, Rey knows. The memories she's lost, she's regained, memories she isn't really supposed to have, but retained anyway; she has Ben's life force inside of her, keeping her alive, and that is where she feels the small tug in her chest telling her that unlike all of those thousands of lives before-

Ben Solo will come back to her. Ben Solo is hers, as much as she is his.

She steps into Luke's x-wing, Ben's shirt tucked securely in her arms, and closes her eyes once again to push past the empty half of her, where she knows her bond with Ben should be, and focuses instead on the thin thread that she knows without a doubt will lead her to him again. With a pilot's practiced ease, Rey flips the controls and the x-wing takes off, following that thread home. A thought occurs to her before she shakes it off with the smallest smile.

She could swear that in the moment between her eyes closing and opening again, the moment she latches onto the small remainder of her and Ben's bond, the thread guiding her forward was red.