I Can Get It Back

Way Out in the Distance is a Vessel on the Seas

Part II: Bargaining and Anger

And though despair of things before will never leave, although our past mistakes can never be retrieved, way out in the distance is a vessel on the seas

Rey woke from a nap she hadn't intended to take with a creeping feeling on the back of her neck. She sat up abruptly and looked around, trying to figure out why she felt like she was being watched when the room was far too small to be hiding anyone. There weren't any surveillance devices either – she'd started checking for those and causing them to malfunction not long after she'd left the Supremacy a year ago. Whether or not the recording devices could pick up things through the Force was unclear, but she hadn't needed any evidence of her connection to Ben while she was in the Resistance.

Still unsettled, she got up from her bed and put on her belt and boots. The conversation with her friends had been draining so she shouldn't have been surprised that she'd fallen asleep, but she felt confused and disoriented. Her brow furrowed as she recalled their discussion about Ben. Instinctively, her hand went to the scar on her shoulder, and she jolted as she glanced down at it and found it gone. How could this have happened? She had been careful to hide it and keep it hidden – even, lately, from herself – but surely that wouldn't cause it to disappear?

The confusion gave way to dismay as she realized that this last vestige of Ben was gone. The last indication of his effect on her life, gone as thoroughly as if it had never happened. The scar had resembled two hands reaching for each other, like she had reached for him on Ahch-To, and now it had disappeared. He had comforted her in her lowest moment, and the scar had always served as a token of that act of compassion. Its absence now was a stark reminder that he would never be able to comfort her again.

There were tears on her face and she was breathing hard when a knock at her door brought her back to the present. The scar on Ben's face, the one she had given him, had disappeared after she had healed him of his mortal wound. Perhaps he had done the same when he brought her back from the dead. An innocuous change, really, but one that she found particularly devastating in the light of what she had already lost. A future she had only dared to dream about, late at night, when the loneliness on the Resistance base became too much to bear. A future where this war was over and where she and Ben could finally be together. Not that she had ever let herself consider specifics – that only made things worse.

She jumped when the knock came again, harder this time. "Sorry, coming," she said and quickly opened it.

Chewie growled at her for leaving the Falcon and being difficult to find.

"Oh, I'm so sorry," she said, stricken. "I was talking to Finn and Rose and Poe and I forgot you were coming back."

He waved off her excuses and she couldn't be sure if she had offended him or not. There were some cultural differences that, combined with the language barrier, made her uncertain of where she stood with him sometimes. He leaned down to look her in the eye and huffed before reaching into his bag and pulling out something blue – a round toy of some kind. Her brow furrowed in confusion, glancing back up at him. He grudgingly suggested that perhaps she could use the Force to bring back its owner somehow.

Touched by his suggestion, she reached out to take the toy. And was blindsided by a vision – not just one, but several, like the first time she had touched Anakin Skywalker's lightsaber. Images of Ben in his youth passed by, too quickly for her to really understand what was happening. Him with his mother, with his father, with Chewie – some were happy moments, a few angry, but there was a pervading sense of loneliness that she could not help but relate to.

"Rey?" the ten-year-old version of Ben asked, looking at her with eyes that were too familiar. His disappeared, only to be replaced by an even younger version, who stared at her in that same beseeching way Ben so often had. "Come back, Rey. Come find me," he said, desperation evident on his face. She gasped and let go.