Chapter Text
Weeks went by. Though the awkwardness of that day lingered for longer than Rey would have liked, her and her ostensible companion/housemate eventually settled back into a hum-drum rhythm of domestic activity. She felt relieved—she hadn’t liked being the subject of his tense displeasure for a change. That’s not how it was supposed to work in her opinion—if anything, she should still be disapproving of him and his clearly sub-par life choices. Thankfully, however, she felt Ben yield to her after a while, and the normalcy between them returned. Normalcy that had become almost cordial.
Ben seemed a lot more mobile these days, the wound in his midriff having healed enough to not need any bandaging at all. In the mornings before he’d don his tunic, Rey had spotted the raw, pinkish skin there—healed at an advanced rate, no doubt, with help from the bacta spray.
He’d thus had begun to accompany Rey on the occasional scavenge. Nothing too challenging of course—just some locations where an extra pair of hands at the exit came in handy. She’d even deigned to allow him to drive the speeder—but only ever as getaway driver when the scavenging territory was in dispute.
He was reliable in this way, she thought, as they’d sped off from a particularly angry gang of Teedos. Ben’s piloting skills, she had to begrudgingly admit, were considerable. He had waited only a split second after Rey had leapt on to open the throttle, and not a moment longer. His instincts and timing were just impeccable in that way, when in the driver’s seat. She always insisted on taking over once they’d made a pit stop at the Outpost, and there was no longer in any danger of pursuit—but it was hard to admit she didn’t hate the feeling of encircling her arms around his solid waist. She tried to clasp her hands together, to avoid touching his rigid abdomen with her open palms.
In the evenings, she’d grill Ben on which starships he’d piloted, wanting badly to hear about them all. There were many, as it turned out—some which Rey had encountered in the ship graveyard herself.
“—the B-wing has a kind of funky weight distribution,” Ben said, finishing a fuel cell and clustering it with the others on the work bench. “And, oh yeah, a very junky YT-1300 freighter. It’s a Corellian ship.”
Rey was working on her own components, leaning forward at the bench on her elbows. She was fascinated by all the descriptions of these. Not only that, but it was a topic of discussion Ben seemed open to divulging—nothing too personal. “What are those like?”
“Like flying a lopsided trash compactor lid,” Ben muttered with derision. “It was about a million years old, too. A lot of Corellian ships are; that was their production hay-day…”
She enjoyed these moments. They were less about the awkward differences between them, and more about hunching over the same tasks; him sharing the knowledge of the wider galaxy that Rey felt starved for.
“Oh—” Ben said, after looking up at her. Over the weeks, his profuse stubble had settled into something of a sparse beard. It was more of a goatee, she supposed—it grew in so patchily along the rest of his jawline as to be nearly non-existent. “You have—something—“
Rey jumped as Ben pointed a large, thick finger at her face. She flinched as it made contact with a point to the left of her lips, and swiped.
“Bit of polystarch,” he murmured, before switching back to the subject at hand. “Another Corellian ship I flew was an ST-70 Gunship; they called those Razor Crest—”
It would go on like this for a while. One day, one of the starships they were discussing felt fully familiar but on the edge of her brain. “Oooh! Oh!” Rey exclaimed, jumping in her stool a little. “I know that one!”
“From the graveyard?”
“No, from my flight simulator,” she said, as if this were an obvious fact.
Ben threw down his tools in mock anger. “You have a FLIGHT SIMULATOR? AND YOU DIDN’T TELL ME?” His voice went from raised to a loud yell, and he mimed flipping the work bench. Rey was doubled over in laughter at his completely deadpan face.
To be honest, she’d forgotten all about the simulator ever since Ben had crash landed into her life. It was a rinky-dink little thing, with barely any ability to hold a charge. But it wasn’t until that night that she remembered she’d always set out two jump seats in front of it. Even though one had never gotten used.
Ben settled into the seat next to her, lowering himself with the help of his crutch. They spent the rest of the evening there, taking turns with the different models available on the simulator. A little wire frame model of the starship’s cockpit would appear on the black screen under their control, with an inset image of the starship itself. According to Ben, the simulator must be “a billion years old,” and Rey rolled her eyes at the derisive comment typical to this man. Still, he seemed to enjoy it. Sometimes he’d recognize a ship based on the appearance, as many he was only familiar with by their colloquial names.
Rey relished the ability to completely crush her Pilot in certain runs she’d been well practiced in. But Ben gave as good as he got—in timed trials he’d wipe the floor with her, his normally stony face cracking into an infuriating smirk; eyes locked on the screen.
“Stop—stoooop—” Rey couldn’t help but laughing as her little simulated Lambda shuttle teetered out of control. Ben had been increasingly nudging her with a jerk of his shoulder in the seat next to her.
“What? I’m not doing anything,” Ben lied, his voice higher pitched the way it usually was when he was intentionally being an absolute sleemo.
“You’re such a cheater—”
He feigned innocence as her shuttle careened off course. “Oh this? I was born with this twitch; it’s very sad—”
Nights like that were the most fun she’d had in a long time. Maybe even ever, if she thought about it enough.
* * *
It had been a long, not all that fruitful day in the ship graveyard, but Rey was satisfied enough with her haul. In the morning before she’d left, Ben offered to come with, but she’d waved him off, and with good reason: the rusted out hull of a freighter she’d heard of was neither accessible to someone not fully mobile, nor did it yield many great treasures.
He’d be at home tinkering on some new pieces, she thought, as she gave the disgruntled Gamorrean shower guard one token in exchange for a soap on a rope. It was fairly soon after her last shower—not even 2 weeks! But Rey had consistently felt somewhat shamed by comparison to how often Ben seemed to clean himself.
Even when they couldn’t scrounge up the change for a shower at Niima Outpost, he’d still gather some on the laundry gray water for home. “Better than nothing,” he’d say, as he stumped out to the privacy of the latrine zone with a canteen of the gray water and a rag nearly on the daily.
Rey tried not to think about how disgusting she might surely appear to someone from such a posh upbringing as Ben. She could always, after all, tell herself brusquely that it didn’t matter—she made up for any of her ignorance of a well-heeled galactic society at large with cunning and raw survivalist skills. Skills, she reminded herself, that Ben wouldn’t have been able to survive without.
However, even though Ben might occasionally make wry comments about the sad state of their hygiene, she couldn’t help but notice it didn’t stop him from getting into her personal space from time to time. Once, he’d offered her a boost when she needed to climb into a wreckage too high-up to reach on her own. Rey had felt self conscious stepping into his large, clasped hands, her entire body much too close to him as he hoisted her up with ease.
If he objected to their physical proximity at any given moment, in the AT-AT or on the speeder—he never showed it.
Rey hung her near-empty bag on a post in the privacy of a small curtained stall, and disrobed, her thoughts still straying to Ben as the rationed and lukewarm trickle of water hit her body. She loosened her buns and let it thoroughly soak her hair.
She couldn’t conceive of what Ben’s home planet might be like, or any of the Core Worlds. From the sound of it, they used potable water for nearly everything, even cleaning objects. Rey couldn’t imagine that sort of waste and…well, opulence. Then again, she couldn’t quite imagine what an ocean or a glacier looked like, despite Ben’s capable descriptions. Sometimes at night, her exhausted mind would try to dream about it.
Rey ran a soapy hand over her shoulders. She could feel the light scar of the cut Ben had stitched up for her. It felt like a lifetime ago, now. It never left her, what he said to her that day.
You take care of me. I take care of you.
Simple. Easy to understand. Transactional—like everything else in her life.
So why could she not stop thinking about it?
Rey closed her eyes briefly to scrub her face, and when she opened them again, a strange noise filled her ears. Or was it—more like the absence of noise?
She shook her head and jammed a finger into her ear, wondering if it had gotten waterlogged. Despite her best efforts, however, the sound of the trickling water and general noise of Niima Outpost beyond the shower tents seemed to have fallen away completely. But a shiver that she felt had nothing to do with the tepid water ran down her spine, bidding her to cast her eyes around the stall. Something strange came into focus immediately.
The sight stunned her into silence.
It was Ben, leaning on his crutch—in the small curtained stall with her—only about a foot or so away, looking exactly as he’d looked that morning and every day recently, but—
His eyes were closed and his mouth slightly open, an expression that could for all the world make it look like he was experiencing a troubled sleep—except his shorts were tugged down his front below his tunic and his hand was vigorously pumping away in fast, hard strokes on his thick, reddish, weeping—
“Ben??” Rey said, in a strained panic at this bizarre image; the noise of skin slapping on skin being filling the air along with his breathy pants.
The apparition before her snapped his eyes open in shock, and gaped down on her form, open-mouthed, arm pumping faster. Rey snatched the thin coarse towel in a feeble attempt to cover herself up instinctively—
“Unghh,” Ben ground out, his tugging arm ceasing its frantic movement with a great shudder while staring at her; a pained expression on his still-open-mouthed face she’d never seen him bare—
And then he was gone in the blink of an eye, a rush of ambient sound returning to her ears.
* * *
It must have been a hallucination. That was the only explanation. It had been a hot, dreary day, and she hadn’t had quite as much water as she’d have liked. When the shower hit, it must have been a shock to her system. That had to be it.
Rey sped home on her speeder, having hurriedly finished her shower before the water timer dinged, and trying without success to determine whether somehow, Ben had been able to get to Niima Outpost on his own. No, he couldn’t have, and not just because the surly female Gamorrean confirmed she’d admitted no one matching his description that day. But because it would have been impossible.
Therefore: hallucination. Right? It wouldn’t have been the first time something like that had happened to Rey out in the desert, she thought grimly. Although…it was a strange one to be sure.
What had that version of Ben been doing? Certainly nothing she’d seen him do—even the expression on his face was like one of a stranger. But the features were unmistakably his, down to his leg wrappings, his large distinctive nose, and mostly-healed face scar. The thing hanging out over the top of his shorts, however—Rey swallowed. She wasn’t sure how or why her dehydration-addled brain would have come up with giving Ben a body part like that, let alone the abuse he dealt it.
Rey felt guilt rise at the thought. She had some mild awareness that what her brain had invented in the shower was…sexual in some way, though she did not quite have the words to explain it. She’d seen—no, imagined—Ben doing something to himself that gave him sexual pleasure. It was clear from his face, and the sounds he made, if not his violent and aggressive pumping. Rey was sure she’d made a face and sounds just like it alone in her hammock at night, working her fingers between her legs, in the days before Ben had become an intruder upon her solitude.
Her face felt hot at the very thought.
When she pulled up to the AT-AT, she was determined to try to be as normal as possible. Everything was fine. Ben would be inside, proving he hadn’t gone anywhere, and everything would be fine.
Except my dehydrated brain, she thought as she took her headdress off and ducked to enter the shelter.
She felt something clenched inside her release when she saw Ben, sitting in his usual spot by the work bench. He was sitting a little straighter than usual and said, “Hi.” Did his voice just crack?
“Hi,” Rey said, feeling a little dumb. Ben hoisted himself up with the aid of his crutch, and pushed his hair out of his face with a large hand like he usually did. “Do you need—help—with your haul, I mean?”
He said this in what was nearly a stammer. Rey peered at his face. It was like he was trying to settle his expression into his usual resting glare, but his shiftily darting eyes rendered it ineffective.
“No—there…wasn’t much today to be honest,” Rey said faintly, trying not to remember the thick thatch of black hair barely visible above his pulled-down shorts.
Ben fixed her with a more steady gaze after a second; a curious one as she passed by him to drop her meager findings on the bench. “Oh. Did you…did you shower today?” He asked, in a higher pitched tone than usual, and stammered to add, “Because—you smell good—I-I mean—not as bad as you smelled this morning—”
Some of the awkwardness Rey felt was, to her relief, replaced by annoyance. “Yes,” she said with a sigh. “Thanks for the notes.”
Things were more or less back to normal as Ben asked her about her day and they went about their meal routine, and she caught him up on all the mundane news Niima Outpost had to offer in between large gulps of water from her refilled canteen. Ben listened, quietly, only speaking to persistently ask her if she’d seen anything out of the ordinary throughout the course of her day. Rey lied and consistently told him no—she didn’t need Ben to lecture her on proper hydration. Regardless of her answer, he’d sometimes pierce her with a somewhat searching gaze.
Rey, for her part, tried to look away. He did this sometimes. She didn’t need to be absorbed in his tractor-beam eyes, normally almond-shaped and stern, and remember what they looked like when she’d seen them wide and boyish; under brows raised in ecstasy.
When it was almost time to retreat to her hammock for the night, Ben asked her seemingly out of the blue, “This, uh, shower you had today.”
Rey felt a little aggravated, but tried to hide it. She didn’t need more reminding of how full and lush his open lips had looked under his scraggly facial hair. “What about it?”
“Do you—remember what time it was? Roughly?”
It was an odd question.
“I don’t know. Late, I guess. Maybe an hour before sunset? Hour and a half?”
Whatever answer Ben had expected, Rey didn’t know, but his reaction to it had been strange—he almost immediately looked down to the ground as if her gaze might burn her.
“Why?” Rey asked, feeling perplexed by his reaction.
“Just…curious,” Ben said, turning away towards his makeshift bed on the floor.
