Chapter Text
“Rey.” Leia Organa’s voice, as always, belied her small stature. Rey stopped short in her retreat when she heard it. She turned around, turning against the tide of Senators and aids leaving the conference room.
“I didn’t think you knew my name.” She fought to keep her voice steady. When she’d trailed into the Senate that afternoon, Leia Organa had swiveled on the spot where she stood and looked straight at her, a peculiar look coming over her face. It was disconcerting, as was her searching, appraising expression now.
“I know more about you than you think.” The Senator touched her elbow and strangely, despite the fact that her hand was small and soft, it reminded her of Ben. There was something reassuring about that gesture.
Still, Rey felt her stomach knot. She’d known, in her heart of hearts, that her marriage would not be a secret forever. It was only a matter of time before Ben launched another assault on her defenses. He made no secret of his love for her. He wouldn’t be satisfied until the whole galaxy knew. In that sense, giving in just a little bit had been a monumental mistake. It was a mistake she couldn’t bring herself to regret, even if their union was a secret no more. “You have the Force.”
Leia smiled a little. Her signature was faint, in comparison to Luke’s or to Ben’s, but consistent, like a little hummingbird’s wings. “Like my son. Like you.”
Rey swallowed hard. She’d carefully buried the most precious secret – her marriage – in the recesses of her memories. If Leia had found it out, Luke would, too. She steeled herself. “Like Master Skywalker.”
Something sympathetic crossed the older woman’s face. “Yes.”
“Can you – can you look into my thoughts, and memories, like Ben can?”
“No.” Leia answered. “But I don’t need to.”
“How did you know, then?” Rey’s gut churned. Had she looked through the marriage records? Had Ben’s father guessed and contacted her? Had – worst of all words – Ben been careless with the secret, and told her? Had he told anyone else?
Leia smiled serenely. “A mother always recognizes her son.”
Rey blinked, her panic arrested. “I – what do you mean?”
“His Force signature.” Leia’s gaze drifted down her body, and Rey realized that Leia Organa didn’t know about their secret wedding. There was something else she knew, and suddenly, Rey knew it, too. “Don’t you recognize it?”
***
The younglings, the very smallest of them, were in the midst of elementary lightsaber drills in the main courtyard when Rey worked up the courage to approach her Jedi master. The mid-morning humidity of Yavin IV had settled into her skin and hair; she’d missed it, strangely. After years on a dry desert, she loved the wet, heavy air on the moon.
The rows of children moved their training sabers – too heavy for their little hands – in clumsy forms. One of them, Hrea, saw Rey, and dropped hers. With a squeal, she broke with the line and ran towards the older student.
“Rey’s back!” Someone said. The words and excitement rippled through the pupils.
Rey crouched and caught Hrea with one arm, wrapping the other arm around Kaya, who crept like a shy, stray pet to her side. She’d put on weight, and muscle. Her little arms weren’t quite so stringy.
Luke Skywalker waded into the fray of distracted students, palming the tops of their heads and shushing them. The drills were a lost cause. “Find a calm place, and meditate.”
“I ought to meditate, too.” Rey rose to her feet, unsteadily, as the chagrined students dispersed. “I’m… unsettled.”
Luke’s face showed the slightest reaction; like a minute ripple on a glassy still pond. He knew, then. Her Force signature had changed, roiling from a deeper, different part of her body and contorting into a new thing entirely. It was like being in Ben’s presence, enveloped in his familiar signature, even when he was worlds away. The Force had adapted to comfort and reassure her, as if it knew she confused and terrified by this turn of events.
“I find meditation helps me to accept what is.” He paused. “But I sense you already have.”
“Yes.” A few cycles in deep space, with the hyperdrive turned off, had accomplished that. She'd cried, and laughed, alternately.
“And you haven’t come here for my counsel.”
“I came to get my things.” Rey exhaled through her teeth. It had been a painful decision to come to him, supplicant, and to acknowledge her betrayal. But she would not beg forgiveness of him. That, in and of itself, felt like a betrayal to Ben.
“A Jedi must have the deepest commitment.” Luke sounded as he were repeating someone else’s words. “When I was your age, my own master told me that he had been watching me. That all my life, I had looked to the future, to the horizon. My mind was never where I was. I wanted adventure and excitement. A Jedi craves not these things.”
He looked at her steadily, and Rey admitted, sheepishly, “I cannot be a Jedi. I crave him.”
Luke inclined his head a little. “That life requires the deepest commitment, too.”
“I have made that commitment.” Rey blurted out. His brows rose, incrementally. “I married him.” Rey wondered, from the resulting expression on his face, whether she was the first person to shock Luke Skywalker. She felt an irrational urge to explain herself, but she couldn’t. Skywalker’s blue eyes blinked at her, wide as she’d ever seen them beneath his bushy brows, and then he roared with laughter. It was a bizarre sound – one she’d never heard before.
He said, almost to himself, “History repeats itself.”
Rey blew out all the air in her lungs, more unnerved by his laughter than anything. “I can’t be both a Jedi and his wife. I can’t live in both worlds.”
“No.” Luke agreed, or so she thought. “You cannot live in two different worlds.” He paused for a moment. “You can make your own world.”
“Master?” Rey’s voice cracked with emotion and surprise.
“You needn’t call me that anymore.” Luke reached out, and tucked a stray strand of chestnut hair behind her ear. There was something fatherly in this gesture. That was a posture he’d never allowed himself with her before, even though she’d longed for such a figure. “But you will always have a place here.”
“You’re not angry?”
Luke smiled, to her surprise. When he responded, she detected an almost amused edge to his voice, as if he were making a private joke. “There is no emotion. There is peace.”
Rey felt the stone fall out of her belly, and suddenly, her body seemed very, very light. She pressed her hand to her lower abdomen to ground herself to the spot where she stood. The Force thrummed under her fingertips. “I am… at peace with this.”
And, for the first time, she was.
***
When Rey had left the grungy hotel room and their marriage bed, as it were, Ben had remarked, his voice soft with tenderness and regret, that they ought to have a honeymoon. She’d kissed his hairline and whispered into it, “I’ll send you coordinates.”
Ben waited for what seemed like an age. The ties binding them together were wound tighter, now, but that only served to constrict his heart in his chest. She was his wife, now. He wanted her by his side always, and she wasn't. Perhaps she didn't want to be.
His comm device beeped as he was unloading crates in a spaceport on Bespin. He pulled it out of his pocket, ignoring the knowing look Han and Chewie exchanged.
Ben frowned at the cryptic message. Rey’s messages were always succinct, and clear. They were coordinates – nothing that could give her away save a few digits revealing her location.
This message was different. Meet me on the Forest Moon.
She hadn’t sent coordinates, but Ben knew where they would rendezvous next. Endor. He shifted on his feet, unsure of why she would pick that planet. He remembered showing her his memories of it, and feeling her wonder and pleasure at seeing so much green and blue. She’d thought that it was beautiful. It was, of course, but it was a barely populated moon with nothing but trees as far as the eye could see.
His comm device buzzed gently in his palm again.
I have something wonderful to show you.
***
Ben stood by the shore, hands in his pockets. He hadn’t had to steal – borrow – a ship. Han had given him the Falcon and a curiously proud look. He’d set the old piece of junk down on the shores of a lake he’d swum in as a child.
He could feel it when his wife entered Endor’s atmosphere, although her Force signature had that strangeness about it that it had the night he’d asked her to marry him. Her ship came across the sky like a comet incoming, turning in great, looping circles over him like a bird of prey. He watched it, enjoying its lazy swoops through the clouds.
As she set down on the glassy surface of the lake, the water sprayed up in great arches. The waves lapped at his boots. By the time the ship nudged the pebbled shore, the light was bouncing off the still water.
As Rey climbed out of the slim star-fighter’s cockpit, her Force signature arrested him. It burned hotter than it ever had. It had mutated, in the matter of days that they had been apart. In it, he recognized her – he always would – but he recognized something of himself, too.
He remembered the message she’d sent him. He imagined her whispering those words to him, her voice low and sweet with love. I have something wonderful to show you.
Ben’s throat closed. The brilliance of her and of the sunlight on the lake surrounded him like a sandstorm on Jakku, and, for a beautiful moment, whited out everything.