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‘You’ve been sighted again,’ says Rey when Ben returns from the outpost with a bag full of wilted produce.
‘Oh?’ Ben shakes the sand off his mantle at the doorstep before slinging it on a wall hook and lugging his shopping bag the short distance across their small, single-room home to the kitchen. ‘Where?’
Rey studies the image on her computer screen. It is, to be fair, a passable likeness if you squint. ‘In someone’s toast,’ she says.
Ben snorts and wanders over for a look. His indistinct likeness gazes back from the charred surface of a slice of bread, his dark brows and prominent nose etched in carbonised crumbs. ‘That’s not me,’ Ben says, already heading back to the kitchen to resume unpacking shrivelled root vegetables into the pantry. ‘The real me isn’t half as handsome as that toast.’
‘You’re handsome enough for me.’
‘You,’ he says, pointing a yam at Rey, ‘have low standards.’
Perhaps she does. No one else in Rey’s life has ever understood why, after everything, she wanted to come back to Jakku. The planet hasn’t changed since she left: it’s still a backwater wasteland, an endless stretch of desert dotted with fringe religious communes and scavenger colonies. But life here is different when you have a ship of your own on which to come and go, and enough credits to pay for food that isn’t Unkar Plutt’s extortionate polystarch and shelter that isn’t the rusted-out wreckage of an Imperial war machine. More importantly, life here is different when you’re not alone. Rey has found a place where no one will ever come looking for Ben. She doesn’t need much else. She lives quietly and trains in the Force and helps the people of the outpost where she can.
Since the reveal of Palpatine’s return and the violent revolution it sparked, not everyone in the galaxy has found it easy to keep a level head. Wild theories have been circulating on the holonet that the emperor’s resurrection was a hoax, a bid by the failing New Republic to reconsolidate its power. Communities of Palpatine skeptics deride those who believe the Battle of Exegol really happened as gullible idiots, often in less polite terms. #NewRecucklic trends cyclically on their social platforms of choice.
On the other hand, there are those who believe in the resurrection a little too wholeheartedly. The official story, which is only half a lie depending on how you look at things, is that Supreme Leader Kylo Ren died during the fight against the Final Order. To that, a certain kind of self-identified free thinker says: if Palpatine could return to life, why not Kylo Ren too? A bewildering variety of sub-theories have spawned from this basic premise. The most common variant says that Kylo Ren is alive and massing his forces to lead a resurgent First Order back to power. (Believers are sharply divided on whether or not this is a bad thing.) A second variant, skirting uncomfortably close to reality, says that the resurrected Kylo Ren is on the New Republic’s side and will reinstate the Jedi Order. (Rey has wondered more than once how many proponents of this theory are Force sensitive and don’t know it. Most, probably, are just being contrarian, but some of the more accurate guessers may have sensed fractured shards of the truth in the Force.)
And then there are the toast-face people. The ones who accept Kylo Ren’s death on the physical plane, but insist that, having become one with the Force, he is now present to them in ways unconstrained by mere human flesh. He appears in mold patterns on walls and in strange formations of clouds both bright and stormy. Many “authentic” copies of his clothes have made their way back from the pits of Exegol to be traded among the credulous with furtive awe. A number of women consider themselves his spiritual wives, and congregate on forums to discuss their sex lives and argue over who knows him best. These ones are Rey’s favourites. She likes to bring them up sometimes, when she and Ben are tangled together beneath the sheets and his guard is down.
‘I hear you’ve been cheating on me,’ she’ll say, running her toes along his calf.
‘Not RensGirl35 again,’ he’ll sigh, knowing the joke by now and not finding it anywhere near as funny as Rey does.
‘She’s saying your spirit impregnated her through the Force last night.’
‘That’s not how the Force works.’
‘She also says you’re hung like no other man she’s ever slept with. But xx_devoted_to_kylo_xx says she’s a slut for having sullied herself with other men before you and that you deserve a pure wife, and it got so nasty that the forum mod had to come in and shut the whole thread down.’
‘Why do you keep visiting these forums?’
‘I get bored sometimes. And they’re very entertaining.’
What Rey doesn’t say – what, given their Force bond, he probably doesn’t need her to say – is that she finds the theories strangely soothing. Firstly, because they’re wrong enough to ease her fears of discovery: for as long as the people willing to theorise Ben’s survival are all so crazy, no one reasonable will ever entertain the possibility that they’re right. People who really do see Ben’s face, not on their breakfast plates but peeking out from beneath his cowl on the street, will convince themselves that they saw someone else because they’re not like those people. But secondly, the theories give Rey a strange sense of solidarity: she’s not the only person in the galaxy who wants Ben to be alive. Public exposure is out of the question. An actual legal pardon is unthinkable. The life Rey has built for herself with Ben can only continue in solitude and secrecy, but somewhere out there on the other side of the computer screen, there are people – strange, misguided people, but people nonetheless – who have freely and passionately joined Rey in rejecting the fact that Ben died on Exegol.
Because he did die. Rey watched it happen. She felt him go cold, saw that too-brief flicker of a smile fade from his lips, and she couldn’t stand it. And so for the first time since her powers awoke, she called on them not out of necessity or courage but out of blind, selfish fear – out of simple, mindless desperation not to lose him. A reserve of strength she didn’t know she had left came pouring out of her.
Ben died. Rey brought him back to life, back to Jakku. The undiscovered Force sensitives shouldn’t have to resort to conspiracy theories; Rey should be out there inspiring a new generation and rebuilding the Jedi Order. Instead she is here in this baked sand hut on the ragged outer edge of civilisation, watching a man who once ordered the destruction of worlds peel tubers for their evening meal.
And unlike the confused women of the Renwives forum, Rey will push his real human body down onto their mattress after dinner tonight and move atop him till they both forget where one of them starts and the other begins.
‘You’re wrong, you know,’ Rey tells Ben.
Ben flicks a long strand of peel into the scrap bin. ‘About something specific, or just in general?’
Shutting off the computer, Rey joins him in the kitchen and starts peeling the moldy outer layer off one of the rare imported onions that made it all the way through space to the outpost’s general store. ‘About the toast. You’re far more handsome than a piece of magic Force ghost bread.’
‘Um. Thank you?’
‘You’re welcome,’ Rey says cheerfully. She goes to toss the onion skin, then reconsiders and sets it aside. Once their stew is on the boil, she should inspect the mold stains more carefully. Perhaps the spores will turn out to have formed a perfect likeness of Ben’s profile and she can post pictures on the holonet to brighten RensGirl35’s day.