The Art of Broken Pieces

50 Porgs

They went another 15 parsecs without talking. In that time, Rey kept busy with the inevitable repairs. Age and porgish nesting meant a lot of time spent reaching into panels or crawling half inside ducts to find stripped wires or empty settings for pilfered circuitry. Every so often, she checked the recorder. When there was something to decode, she patched an alert through to the gun well and made herself busy with the engines or the galley.

The last of her bread was gone, and she found herself missing the hot meals of the Alliance's provisional galley. She missed Finn, too. His warmth and humor and loyalty. She missed Rose's quick smile and Poe's hotshot passion. She missed BB-8 and Chewie. She missed Han, and Leia.

Strangely, she missed Ben, or the version of him that came out only in moments. She missed the Ben across the fire, who'd told her she wasn't alone. She missed the Ben that had fought by her side, or the quiet Ben that had visited her through the Force one night, when the loneliness and loss had threatened to consume her. He'd said nothing. The Supreme Leader of the First Order, and the last Jedi of the Resistance had lain, side-by-side, in their respective beds across the universe, knuckles brushing. They'd been simply there, together, needing the kind of understanding only the other could provide.

That Ben hadn't shown himself yet. Even his presence that day in the cockpit had been agitated, resentful. She was starting to feel alone again.

Or maybe she was simply feeling restless.

He no longer went out of his way to avoid her, as he had in his first days on the ship, but he didn't make contact with her either. Conversation seemed unnecessary and pointless to him, they had nothing left to say.

Fully healed from the strain of his captivity, Ben took to exercising regularly in the main lounge of the ship, the only room really big enough to accommodate even a fraction of the pent up energy that was building in him. Even without his lightsaber, he could run through forms and imagine the way his blade would just melt through that plastic, spark off the holoboard, and carve this blasted ship to rubble.

He needed the release of battle, the chance to take out his frustration on something... or someone. The nagging voices in his head that insisted he try to do right left him only one option when it came to venting on those who were deserving.

When the computer finally pinged that they were nearing their destination and the familiar shuddering of the ship intensified with the drop from hyperspace, Ben hurried to the cockpit and evicted a huddle of porgs from the seat of the captain's chair with an absent flick of the force. Indignant squawking surrounded him and he did his best to ignore the irritating little beasts.

Stars once again surrounded them, pinpricks of light in the vast dark of space. Rising in the distance was the familiar hemisphere of Toland's fifth moon, currently home to a tiny and irrelevant mining company, one dirty spaceport, and the sleek ship that Ben had taken with him when he had fled the fall of the First Order.

He had hopped a transport from the moon to the surface of the planet where Rey had found him, and with any luck the idiots hadn't actually traced his path back to the ship. The decoder necessary to understand the First Order transmissions--and encrypt his own-- would still be installed aboard.

"Your ship," Rey said, looking at the sleek, compact vessel. When he'd told her why they'd come to this port, her mind spun in a hundred directions. Was Ben trying to escape her? Was he trying to run somewhere else? Or was it simply too hard for him to stay aboard the Falcon? He needed room and autonomy to feel sane.

She'd reached out, intending to just examine his intentions, but found herself fighting the desire to hold onto him with her mind, to make sure he wasn't going to leave her behind. Like everyone else had, until Finn.