[ hey, i brought you this soulmate ]

[thefreakout]

soulmate meme ;
▸ post your character ◂
▸ you're now in a universe where destined soul mates exist! ◂
▸ rng for the type of au and for the ~situation~ ◂
▸ tag around ♥ ◂

type of au;

1. tats, your character has a tattoo of the first words the love of their life will say to them
2. familiars, your character has an animal tattoo representing their soul mate on them
3. glow, the first time your character sees their soul mate, their chests glow!
4. world in color, life is literally black and white, until you see your soul mate for the first time
5. choose your own, i'm definitely missing a milly because i'm lazy, pick your own

situation;

1. first meeting, you've never met this person before.
2. childhood mates, you've always known this person -- but on one particular birthday, everything changes.
3. together, you've been in a relationship for awhile now! happily wed or not, you decide.
4. not together, you've known you're soul mates for a long time, and yet have avoided a relationship.
5. choose your own, self explanatory c:

Comments

[scruffier]

[ It might have been easier on her, if she never found out. On an edge-of-nowhere ball of dust like Jakku, daydreams are as dear as water. Something to chase. It doesn't matter how much or how little she thought about it. It was a possibility, and now it's a loss.

If things were different, he thinks-- he shouldn't think about it, he knows. But he thinks Ben would have liked her. He would have liked having her as part of the family, he thinks.

Or maybe it's just wistful thinking.

He can't look at her, not right now. For a long moment he's quiet, looking out at nothing, trying to find some way to answer. ]

We lost him, [ he says slowly, carefully, ] after he went to train with Luke. One of his apprentices turned against him...

[ It's not untrue.

It's a lie.

He shakes his head. ]

i'm sorry these are so slow i'm just over here being emotionally devastated

[reydacted]

[ Her gaze is somewhere in front of them too, staring through the transparisteel and drifting, mostly unfocused, hanging among the stars.

The nod she offers is small, like a forced jerk of her head. Just once. She's got it. Her hands are in tight fists and the meat of her palm digs into her thighs. The friction of the rough fabric and the way her fingernails cut into her palms at least giving her some feeling to focus on other than the fact that she learned who Ben Solo is and also the fact that he is apparently dead in the approximate span of two minutes. ]

He was a Jedi.

[ A legend is the coded meaning behind that. A whole family of legends, really. She's not quite sure how to reconcile that with being a totally nobody from nowhere.

Well. She supposes it's not something she has to really grapple with anymore.

She swallows hard, literally trying to shake herself from this self-pity. She was no stranger to death, only narrowly avoiding it herself on Jakku more than once while other scavengers lay as bleached bones in the desert sun. She had never met Ben Solo, and she could not reasonably mourn him. She could not let herself. It was selfish to make this about herself. ]

I'm sorry. About what happened.

[ She can't help but feel like this comes off as a pale attempt at sympathy, no matter how genuinely she means it. ]

ngl, i'm pleased to be the instrument of such destruction

[scruffier]

He might've been. Someday,

[ he says softly, barely managing to hold back a sigh. For once he sounds... unenthusiastic, about the Jedi. It's unfair, and the truth is it's not that he blames Luke or the new Jedi order for any of it-- it's just... There was too much of his grandfather in Ben.

They pushed him, to turn his talents and his strength to the Light, and maybe they pushed him too hard.

Or maybe-- probably-- Han just doesn't understand a damn thing about it. He's always been a man of action, but to run across a situation where he couldn't do a damn thing, couldn't begin to imagine what he could have done?

He failed his son. Whether through his obstinate practicality, the fact that he's about as Force-aligned as the damn conservator, or through inattention, or... Or something. He doesn't know. Can't begin to know. And that's the worst part. ]

[reydacted]

[ She wraps her arm up again, more tightly than usual. Everything from sound to touch feels a bit muted, and at least the sensation of winding fabric around her forearm gives her something else to focus on. ]

Thank you for telling me.

[ Even if she had to push him. Even if the conversation hurt them both. It's kinder, she thinks, to know even if it hurts. Maybe.

What are the chances a Jedi would have ever ended up on a backwater planet like Jakku anyway? ]

[scruffier]

[ He just grunts in response, because what is he supposed to say? He hasn't lied, not exactly. But none of this is the truth, either. Hopefully it's enough of a response and he can leave her to stew in whatever ill-defined, ill-informed misery she's going to carry with her. It's not like he could give her hope. And wouldn't it be worse for her to know the truth?

Ben Solo is gone, he reminds himself. By choice, by destiny. Does it matter if he's still breathing?

It's a relief to be done with the conversation. That's it. It's finished. ]



You would have been good for him,

[ he says, after a few minutes of dead silence, like a man possessed.

He suppresses the urge to swear at himself. What the hell, Han? You were done. ]

[reydacted]

[ It's sort of a relief for the conversation to lull. The quicker they leave it in the past, the quicker she can get over it. It had never really been hers to be upset about anyway, right? Either way, she's content to sit in the quiet, her pulse slowing down, her breath steadying. She's wrapped up her arm, and she can leave Ben Solo behind on the Millennium Falcon.

And then he just hits her with that, and her throat sort of feels like it's closing up. ]

You don't-- [ She makes a pained expression because part of her wants to hear it, to keep imagining what Ben Solo would have been like.

Serious, Han had told her that. Studious too if he was going to be a Jedi, right? She looks back over to Han, picking out his most notable features and unwittingly mentally constructing him. Rey had seen a few holos of the old rebellion heroes, so it's not hard to start with an aged down version and just adjust. ]

You don't have to do this.

[ It's quiet, barely squeaked out. But maybe he needs this. Maybe he's doing the same thing she's doing, dipping down into an impossible what-if. Just for a moment, and maybe she should let him if it can bring him some peace about his son. ]

[scruffier]

I know,

[ he says, sounding just a little cross. He doesn't have to do this, so why the hell is he doing this?

But apparently they're doing this. ]

You wouldn't have let him brood.

[reydacted]

[ His words hang awkwardly in the air, and she's not sure she wants to do this. Well, scratch that-- it's easy to want to do it, to want to indulge in that curiosity, scratch the itch to know more, one that she mostly buried while counting days in the desert.

But she guesses they're doing this. ]

No. I wouldn't have. Brooding isn't worth the time.

[ It hardly seems practical, and it doesn't get you far when anything but survival can't help but be top of mind. They'd be quite the pair, she thinks. Scholarly, serious, and brooding juxtaposed with her scrappy resilience and the optimism that she knows is a bit unearned and might have exasperated him given what she knows from Han now.

She can't quite tell if this is helping more than it's hurting for either of them. ]

He didn't ever say anything..?

[ She taps her wrist, even if that's not necessarily where her name was inscribed. ]

[scruffier]

[ He shakes his head, just a little. ]

Not to me. Or Leia, I don't think.

[ She would have said something. Maybe not early on, she might not have betrayed it if Ben shared it in confidence-- and maybe to spare Han's ego, because isn't that the sort of thing a boy should tell his father? But after everything-- if she'd had any hint, any lead, any scrap of information that might have meant something it would have spilled out. They shared everything so fully, at first, in that flood of grief; and then they followed different trails until they lost sight of one another, more or less, and it just seemed simpler to stay that way.

He misses her as much as he ever has. But he knows what she sees when she looks at him. So apart they stay. ]

I think-- well, I don't know, [ he admits. Isn't that the problem? They never knew him well enough, in the end. ] But like I said, he was serious. Maybe he didn't want to say anything until he knew more about you.

[ Not that it would have mattered. They would have tried to find her. In those happier days they would have welcomed her with open arms, and under the circumstances Han obviously knows he'd have gotten along well with his presumptive daughter-in-law. But it's easy to imagine the Ben he remembers being cautious- wanting to understand before he took a step. Ben, who did so well at so many things and struggled to contain his frustration when he didn't. Maybe he just wanted to be less of an awkward screwup than his old man, whose first encounter with his wife ended up being chased down a trash chute.

There's all that bantha fodder about avoiding attachment the old Jedi used to prattle about, and sometimes Han wonders if maybe Ben took that to heart. He's not sure how; not when Luke radiated love for his family like a blue star. But he doesn't know. Can't know. ]