Be With Me - Reylo (TRoS alternate ending)

Chapter Seven

Ben was regretting the black. Not that he had a choice, but the black clothes were really starting to bother him. The constant, relentless heat was constantly being absorbed by the thick black fabric designed for the freezing void of space.

He had walked along way. He found the town a while ago, and now, having asked a local named Unkar Plutt where the scavenger Rey used to live, he was on his way to find her old home.

"Who are you," he had asked in his grunting voice, suspicious.

"I'm no one," he had said, for the first time in his life. He wasn't a general's son, or a jedi in training, nor was he a Knight of Ren or a Supreme Leader.

Unkar snorted. "Funny. That's what she used to say." Ben got the impression that deep down in his cruel, hungry heart, he held some compassion for Rey. Ben knew the feeling.

Since no one on Jakku could spare the time or effort to give him a lift out there, he had began the walk and walked he had. He didn't have to go, yet he felt a strange tug to see the place she had raised herself all alone.

Over desert dune and past scrap pile after scrap pile, he reached a ridge. He closed his eyes, allowing himself to remember the memories he had ripped from her mind upon their first meeting. Feeling guilty, he headed over the ridge, knowing that her AT-AT would be there.

It was.

Suddenly Ben felt nervous. He was intruding on a place that had shaped the most important woman in the galaxy. He didn't want to go inside, didn't want to harm this almost sacred space as he had harmed everything else.

Despite his failing nerve, he pushed himself, and entered the fallen walker home.

It had been left alone, surprisingly, everything left exactly as if it had been left one morning, expecting to be returned to. Before his orders had ruined her life.

On a nearby table was a dried flower, pieces of equipment; the remnants of a life that had been so rudely interrupted. There was a hammock, and a doll, signs of young life that she had never been ashamed of, or felt the need to hide.

Growing up alone would have been deeply hard for her in many ways, but at least Rey had never been prescribed what was good, or right, or expected of her. She had formed her own moral code, and was not ashamed of any part of what made up that wonderful head of hers. If anything, she was her greatest fear.

Ben sat, and took a moment to view the little home from her bed, the very view she would have seen every morning in years gone by. His breath caught in his throat when he saw one of the metal wall, covered in small lines. He didn't need to be told that each one represented a day of her life, a day spent waiting for family who was never coming back.

She had been forced to make choices, to leave her home and join a fight that had never been hers.

Being here was wrong, and he should never have come. But by the same token, he had never felt so at home. Without trying to, she had created the perfect safe haven for herself. Ben guessed that through them being a dyad, that meant that where she felt safe, he did too.

It occurred to him that he didn't know where he felt safe.

Ben swung his legs around and lay on her bed, looking up at the scratches on her wall and wondering how many there would be for him. How many days would be scratched into a wall waiting for their son to come home? He clenched his jaw and closed his eyes.

Taking a deep breath, he willed himself into calmness, finding it altogether too easy. With the Force, in a strange state of quiet, Ben floated just above the bed, suspended in the air by an invisible power. He had become far better at using the force in a balance, rather than just using it to hurt or take what he wanted. He sensed the constant battle between light and dark, good and evil, and the in the eye of that storm, the not quite quiet balance, peace. Two sides of the same coin, merged perfectly into one, before splitting into two again, but containing part of the other side.