for@nokreli for Star Wars Secret Santa 2019! Angst & Family with the prompt “Don’t give me that look”!
,,,
“Don’t give me that look, cub,”
Rey sits with her knees drawn up to her chest, eyes closed, listening to the gentle hum and whirr of the Falcon reverberating through the walls. Finn is piloting, and she is meant to be resting.
“Why aren’t you sleeping?” Chewie rumbles.
“I’m alright,” says Rey instinctively.
She doesn’t really expect him to accept that for an answer. Sure enough, he sits himself down in the bunk opposite and whimpers expectantly.
“Iam excited.” She hugs her knees a little tighter. They’re on their way to Yavin IV, where the winter solstice is drawing near. Truthfully, a solstice doesn’t really sound like something worth celebrating to her. Less daylight on Jakku just meant less time to work and more nights spent awake and hungry.
This is the sort of thing that still feels weird, even now. Big gatherings mean social rules, new foods which may or may not be acceptable to eat with one’s fingers, and a constant out-of-place feeling which reminds her of standing on shifting sands. “I’m grateful that Poe invited us. But with the war and all, and so many people gone, it’s a strange time to be intruding on a family tradition.”
Chewie shakes his head vehemently. “You are family. Cub thought so. Little one too.”
Many Basic syllables can’t be pronounced in Shyriiwook, so Rey has noticed that Chewie has given his own ‘name word’ to most of their human friends. Han’s name roughly translates to “my cub” or “one I protect”. Leia’s on the other hand sounds more like “little one”.
He pets the top of her head a little too roughly. “Go to sleep.”
Rey doesn’t, but Chewie’s words help calm the nervousness and giddiness prickling at her insides.
It only gets worse when they arrive. Finn scampers down the boarding ramp and into Poe’s arms, their faces splitting into identical grins. Something hard bonks into her leg just below the knee. BB-8 trills excitedly and swings her head around, rolling in a happy circle.
“Hello, Bee,” Rey says, giving the droid a pat on the head. Finn and Poe invite her into the hug. For just a moment, she thinks that maybe this is going to be alright, but soon the nausea returns.
“I’m glad you got in before the snow that’s supposed to come,” says Poe.
“Poe says that snow on Solstice means good luck for the new year,” Finn supplies.
Poe and Chewie greet one another with a clap on the arm and a roar respectively, before Chewie shepherds them all into the transport, complaining about the cold.
“I can’t believe they managed to rent this old place for the weekend,” Poe says, climbing into the driver’s seat. “We came here every year when I was a kid. My parents always invited the Organa-Solos and Luke too, of course. It looks just like it did then.”
It’s a short ride back to a little cottage. Rey has never seen anything quite like it. It’s two stories and built with wood—imagine, having enough trees around to start chopping them up to make a dwelling—and an inviting, gingery smell greets them at the doorway. As they remove their wet shoes, Rey notices an old-fashioned fireplace crackling with warmth and light in the living room, where the entire Dameron clan is mingling.
“Chewbacca!” Lando Calrissian’s voice cuts through the chatter as he weaves his way through Poe’s relatives. “Hey buddy. Kids, how are you?”
Warm greetings are exchanged. “I was just telling this one,” he gestures to Poe. “Some of the Dameron cousins cut down some fir branches last night and brought them in to dry, but we needed Chewie’s help to hang them up.”
“…inside?” Rey asks.
“By the fireplace and around the door,” Poe confirms. He smiles a little, like he’s not sure whether to laugh at her. Rey swallows hard, determined not to feel stupid. After all, there’s plenty of things about Jakku that Poe doesn’t know. She laughs a little, to seem at ease.
“That’s kinda weird,” Finn says. She can feel his concern across their already blossoming Force bond, which Finn is still getting used to shielding. She slips her hand into his.
After the obligatory introductory lap around the living room full of Damerons, they find a quiet corner with oversized armchairs draped in bantha-wool covers.
“Oh no, not these,” says Poe with a playful groan, picking up a rectangular object from an endtable. “My father’s holocrons.”
“Careful with them,” one of Poe’s aunts warns. “Every year I tell myself someday I’m going to back them up to a hard drive.”
“He made one for every Solstice we spent here,” Poe explains.
Rey counts them quickly. There are fifteen holocrons piled on the table. Each undoubtedly filled with memories of warm, happy times in Poe’s childhood, probably. It’s hard not to feel a little weird about that. Rey scoots over to sit closer to Finn.
After they’ve talked for a while, Chewie brings an armful of borrowed winter gear over and rumbles at them to bundle up and meet him outside. In the little shed out back, they find him organizing piles of cut evergreen branches. They’re bigger than Rey expected them to be, they practically look like entire limbs of trees.
Chewie hands her an armful and directs her where to put it.
She cringes as she hears herself ask, “It doesn’t…hurt the trees, does it?”
She waits for them to laugh, but they don’t. “Rey, look,” says Poe, pointing out the shed door. She looks out into the backyard. After about a hundred yards of flat ground, the horizon gives way to miles of forest.
“All the people in this town probably take a few branches from that forest, if not an entire tree. And that’s how much is left. Fir grows back really fast, and there’s plenty of it, I promise.”
Chewie handles the boughs for the doorframe and sends trio to handle the railing by the front steps, and the hearth inside. Finn seems at ease, laughing and shoving Poe’s arm when he talks back.
“I-I’m getting cold,” Rey says quickly, and the color rising to her cheeks supports her claim. “I’ll see you later.”
She can still hear them chuckling at one another’s jokes as she curls back up in her chair by the fireplace.
Rey takes one of Poe’s father’s holobooks from the endtable. The first image that pops up when she turns it on is one of Luke and Leia holding some kind of baked good and sitting by this very fireplace. In the next one, a woman with Poe’s dark eyes has joined them.
Rey hears Finn and Poe approaching. Poe runs a hand through his hair to brush the snowflakes out.
“There’s Mom,” says Poe, looking over her shoulder. Finn sits down in the chair beside hers. “Leia always brought those cookies. They were traditionally made for this Alderaanian holiday that usually fell near Yavin’s solstice.”
Rey clicks to the next one, which features Chewie and Han tacking evergreen boughs up in the foyer. A nine-year-old Poe sits on Chewie’s shoulders.
Rey smiles a bit. “He’s so young! Chewie looks the same, though.”
“There is no way Solo looked like that,” Finn agrees.
“Oh, he did,” says Lando with amusement, peeking over from across the room.
In the next one, Poe is dressed in an enormous, puffy blue parka with matching snow pants. He is laughing and towing a duraplast sled with a tiny kid on board.
“That’s—” Rey starts to gasp, then swallows hard before she blurts out his name. The little boy is grinning sans front teeth, but his features – his forehead, his nose – still look so much like the face that haunts her nightmares. Rey almost wants to throw up.
She exchanges a glance with Finn, who looks equally perturbed. She realizes they are the only ones in the room who did not know Kylo Ren when he was that tiny grinning kid. When he was Ben Solo.
Thankfully no one says anything as she clicks to the next holo, which features Poe’s parents sitting at the dining room table. But then the next several are of Ben perched on Leia’s lap and Poe showing him toy spaceships, and Poe reaches over Rey’s shoulder to turn the thing off.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
Everybody looks at her, and that makes it worse.
“It’s not your fault,” says Poe.
She tries hard to forget it. They talk about other, safer things, until the fire dies down and the rest of the party starts to wander towards bed.
Rey slips out the back door and turns on the single light on the ceiling of the shed. She breathes in the scent, which is wonderful and green and indescribable except that it just smells like coldand outdoors. It’s calming.
“Hey, are you okay?” a voice whispers.
Finn catches her gaze so she can’t look away. She can feel his worry thrumming in the Force.
“I’m alright,” she says instinctively.
“You’ve been kind of quiet,” Finn counters. “It was weird for me too…seeing him, you know?”
“Yeah, I guess it was,” Rey admits. “He hurt me. He hurt all of you. But now he’s not here, and I don’t know whether to be relieved or sad.”
She sees Poe standing a pace behind Finn. They both look at him, then back at each other.
“Look, I used to think of him like a little cousin. But I didn’t see him for years leading up to… and none of it changes what he’s done,” Poe grumbles.
“It must be weird for you too, buddy,” Finn offers. “In a different way.”
“It wasn’t just the holos,” Rey admits. “All of this is new, and odd.”
“She’s got a point,” says Finn.
“And everybody is acting so excited, but the Force is strange around them. Everybody feels happy, but also kind of empty inside.”
Poe takes a moment to think about that.
“It’s been so many years since we’ve done this - since we’ve been able to. It’s not the same now, with so many people gone,” Poe speculates. Then he looks at Rey and Finn. “But our family has grown, too.”
He’ll never know the peace that statement brings to Rey’s mind. She belongs here, she’s apart of them.
“Want to go inside?” Finn suggests. He has one of the big wool quilts wrapped around his shoulders. He puts one arm around Rey, enveloping her too. There is no safer place in the world than Finn’s arms.
“The sooner we sleep, the sooner Solstice will come - that’s what my dad used to say,” Poe says into the darkness. “I used to try to stay up all night.”
“No chance of that,” says Finn with a yawn.
[Are you sure you’re good?] A gentle nudge of the Force, warm like the quilt.
An exploration of Rey’s unseen grief over Ben’s death at the end of TROS.
(feat. Force Ghost Ben and a happy ending.)
preview:
The moment he is gone she forgets how to grieve.
The first and only thing she feels is pain, sharp and unyielding, like she has been run through by a lightsaber right in the soft spot at the base of her neck.
The pain fades quickly and is replaced instead by a hollowness that spreads from the centre of her chest outwards; an implacable coldness that consumes her quickly. She feels her face ease from its tormented grimace into something that might have almost been considered serene if it didn’t feel so much like a brumal death from within. She exhales softly, a light breath released from lips that have gone numb.
Her hands dazedly pat the soft material of his tunic, still warm from his body, as though she has somehow just missed him. As though she’ll still make contact with a solid form underneath and within.
Instead, all she encounters is the scrabbled ground beneath the fabric. There is no warm, breathing, living man within. It is now just an overlay for the hard unyielding rock below.
Had it truly been just moments before that she had held him in her arms, legs spread across his, their chests touching?
Was it really only seconds prior where their lips had met, held and captured, his mouth moving against her own? The feel of his fevered breath expelling from his nose and hitting her cheek as they desperately, awkwardly tasted each other for the first time? His arms hefting her, holding her, crushing her to him?
Had it even really happened?
For a moment she wonders if maybe she is dead again.
Maybe she is still dead.
Maybe she was always dead?
The feeling is the same, after all. The feeling of being trapped in that horrid liminal space where she had screamed and screamed in isolated terror, her voice singular amongst the endless stars; that inky blackness symbolizing a blank eternity.
Her throat feels raw, raw like she is still screaming although her face does not move aside from the slow descent of her eyelids, blink after painful blink.
Her breath comes out in short bursts as she scrambles up on shaky legs. At the last second she reaches down and grasps the shirt still on the ground, crumpling it up and sticking it under her arm. Her feet feel like leaden weights, knees wobbling, the coldness in her chest beginning to feel like an icy burn.
Summary:She’d thought she’d known loneliness before. The years on Jakku. Touching the reflective surface of the cave on Ahch-To. Aching for her parents. For answers.She is off Jakku now. She has her answers.And this loneliness, the loneliness of lost opportunity, of a future foretold but never realized, this is the most unbearable thing of all.
Delia is one of my favorite Reylo authors and her stories never disappoint. This is a very intense but also very beautiful journey into Rey’s grief after losing Ben in Exegol. It really feels like you’re inside Rey’s mind and feeling everything she’s feeling. It’s heavy, but also very cathartic. I can’t wait for chapter 2 (where Delia says we’ll get to the “happy parts” of the story!)
Summary:The best part of Ben Solo’s day is his visit to his local coffee shop. The fact that he can’t stop thinking about the barista who works there is completely unrelated.
Sometimes all you need is a soft and fluffy coffee shop AU.
Summary:Home, Ben has come to realize, isn’t four walls and a roof. Home is the pair of arms that hold you, the lips that kiss you goodnight, the face you see when you wake up in the morning, the person whose heartbeat is synced to yours. Home is Rey. And Rey is here (or: the one where Ben and baby go out to greet Rey).
This is one of my go-to stories whenever I’m craving canon Reylo domesticity/baby cuteness. It fills my heart with joy every single time! So adorable.
An exploration of Rey’s unseen grief over Ben’s death at the end of TROS.
(feat. Force Ghost Ben and a happy ending.)
preview:
The moment he is gone she forgets how to grieve.
The first and only thing she feels is pain, sharp and unyielding, like she has been run through by a lightsaber right in the soft spot at the base of her neck.
The pain fades quickly and is replaced instead by a hollowness that spreads from the centre of her chest outwards; an implacable coldness that consumes her quickly. She feels her face ease from its tormented grimace into something that might have almost been considered serene if it didn’t feel so much like a brumal death from within. She exhales softly, a light breath released from lips that have gone numb.
Her hands dazedly pat the soft material of his tunic, still warm from his body, as though she has somehow just missed him. As though she’ll still make contact with a solid form underneath and within.
Instead, all she encounters is the scrabbled ground beneath the fabric. There is no warm, breathing, living man within. It is now just an overlay for the hard unyielding rock below.
Had it truly been just moments before that she had held him in her arms, legs spread across his, their chests touching?
Was it really only seconds prior where their lips had met, held and captured, his mouth moving against her own? The feel of his fevered breath expelling from his nose and hitting her cheek as they desperately, awkwardly tasted each other for the first time? His arms hefting her, holding her, crushing her to him?
Had it even really happened?
For a moment she wonders if maybe she is dead again.
Maybe she is still dead.
Maybe she was always dead?
The feeling is the same, after all. The feeling of being trapped in that horrid liminal space where she had screamed and screamed in isolated terror, her voice singular amongst the endless stars; that inky blackness symbolizing a blank eternity.
Her throat feels raw, raw like she is still screaming although her face does not move aside from the slow descent of her eyelids, blink after painful blink.
Her breath comes out in short bursts as she scrambles up on shaky legs. At the last second she reaches down and grasps the shirt still on the ground, crumpling it up and sticking it under her arm. Her feet feel like leaden weights, knees wobbling, the coldness in her chest beginning to feel like an icy burn.
Originally I was planning to share this one later as a part of my upcoming epIX “serie ”…something to bright up these difficult days…Stay strong everyone!
It’s quiet, finally.
Not just in the Falcon, not just in their bed, not just in the warmth and security of her arms.
But quiet…everywhere.
No longer does he have insidious whispers in his mind. The voices once so difficult to differentiate from his own.
Those voices of evil. Of hate. The ones that pushed and prodded him for his entire life into a reluctant existence of howling rage.
He’d always begged for silence. To be free of the burden of those voices, those pernicious and malevolent things.
He’d always known how good it would feel, the quiet.
Had always imagined how sweet and how right it would be.
What he hadn’t anticipated, couldn’t have possibly known, was the sheer perfection, this painfully poignant tenderness, of experiencing it in the arms of someone he loved.
Reblogging again because 1) the artwork is breathtaking by itself and 2) the words by @delia-pavorum are beautifully paired with it and together they feed my soul.
backstory: Inspired by a tweet and turned into a tweetfic, this one-shot ended up with an additional 4100 words (mostly smut) and a home on AO3.
summary:
He didn’t know why she drank every week. Didn’t know if it was with friends or alone. If it was after work or after midnight. Didn’t know why it would inevitably lead her to his home, his bed.
All he knew was that, when she was there, she was his.
And he would protect her at all costs, from whatever demons chased her into his arms.
Ben Solo wakes up about once a week to find his neighbour, Rey Johnson, inexplicably in bed with him. Oddly, he doesn’t seem to mind.
preview:
She looked so sheepish and adorable that his heart seized a little bit; a sweet-sharp plunk of longing, despite the fact that she was right there in his arms.
I could love her, he thought, lying to himself—knowing he already did.
In which I switch to inking with real brushes (and let’s just say there was a learning curve involved) and also Rey’s long-awaited reunion with Ben quickly starts to go sideways.
I changed Ben’s seat from a chair to a crate—it wasn’t a good look for Ben to hog the only chair in the room. It also fits the humble state of the Rey’s room better. I fleshed that out a bit too here, hoping to give the impression of some utility room in the Tantive that the Resistance just shoved a bed into and called a bedroom.
Once the whole comic is done, I plan to go back through it and fix all these inconsistencies before collecting it on Gumroad or something.
As for why Rey isn’t quartering in the captain’s quarters of the Falcon—it’s a combination of what I think she would pick and what I think best suits the mood I’m trying to set.
In which I switch to inking with real brushes (and let’s just say there was a learning curve involved) and also Rey’s long-awaited reunion with Ben quickly starts to go sideways.
I changed Ben’s seat from a chair to a crate—it wasn’t a good look for Ben to hog the only chair in the room. It also fits the humble state of the Rey’s room better. I fleshed that out a bit too here, hoping to give the impression of some utility room in the Tantive that the Resistance just shoved a bed into and called a bedroom.
Once the whole comic is done, I plan to go back through it and fix all these inconsistencies before collecting it on Gumroad or something.
As for why Rey isn’t quartering in the captain’s quarters of the Falcon—it’s a combination of what I think she would pick and what I think best suits the mood I’m trying to set.
Takes place after the defeat of Palpatine and before Rey’s trip to Tatooine.
Just to keep all y’all sticklers off my back: The ship pictured is the Tantive V, the successor to the Resistance flagship Tantive IV, which, as I’m sure we all definitely knew when I started writing this, was destroyed in the battle of Exegol. ;p
Takes place after the defeat of Palpatine and before Rey’s trip to Tatooine.
Just to keep all y’all sticklers off my back: The ship pictured is the Tantive V, the successor to the Resistance flagship Tantive IV, which, as I’m sure we all definitely knew when I started writing this, was destroyed in the battle of Exegol. ;p
Just to keep all y’all sticklers off my back: The ship pictured is the Tantive V, the successor to the Resistance flagship Tantive IV, which, as I’m sure we all definitely knew when I started writing this, was destroyed in the battle of Exegol. ;p
