Lovingly pinched from @kylo-wrecked‘s most wonderful work here.
<< Back at Rey’s apartment, one week after the Stone expose. West Yavin City. >>
"I got these for you."
Ben hung awkwardly in the doorframe, large, besuited, and bashful; his body was unsure whether it would be invited in. He stood with one foot on the hallway tile, the other gently toeing Rey's hardwood floor. He could smell shampoo and florals. He was careful not to brush the small, modern rug in the--well, it wasn't a foyer. Vestibule? A small, interstitial space where hellos and good-byes were meant to be short, at most. Discouraged at best.
His mind was wandering. Ben knew this because Rey did. She showed him in the way that she watched him. There was an air of suspicion about her--in her eyes, her body language. He'd seen this before, and the thought that it might be too late worried him. The crisp black clothes and shoes... Money had a way of masking a person's desperation, their inwards mess, but it was clear that Ben was despondent. His hopelessness was written all over him, like an unshakeable jingle.
Quickly, Ben revealed the package. It was wrapped in pastel tissue paper. A single orchid blossom poked out from the carefully folded corners of green and pink, spoiling what might otherwise have been a surprise.
"Orchids," he said unnecessarily. "A little company for your friend there," he added, motioning to the single succulent vying for light and space in the back of Rey's living room.
The card attached read, 'I'm sorry' in Ben's small, lettered, chicken-scratch handwriting. If he'd signed it, it might have been worth something.
Rey’s silent pause at the sight of Ben filling her doorway felt twice its actual length to her. She’d struggled to speak with him the first time he’d appeared here, with that friend of his in tow, and now...all suited and booted and clean shaven and with a gift as well; the subtle scent of his cologne reaching her across the scant couple of feet between them...Now, she was still struggling. There was a lot to unpack, it felt like. A lot to say. But deep, emotional conversations- Rey treated those like a stone skipping across a lake did water. Lightly. Quickly. Perfunctorily. At least until her momentum dropped. Then she was diving for the lake bed.
For now though...This was, she felt, skip number...two.
Everything was still so fresh, so whiplash inducing that she was struggling to process it; struggling to land on how she felt exactly. About the in-industry theft rumours. About the Kylo Ren revelation. About Ben himself.
The whole thing made her want to hide under a rock for seven years; maybe poke her head out then and see how things had landed in absence of her, but maybe not too. Just disappearing back from whence she came, being the local nobody that the press didn’t give a fig about, sounded hellish appealing as an alternative to the media scrum she’d been subject to of late. And that was just the half of the woes she’d had thrust upon her. As the edifice of a man in her doorway proved, this was more than a little bit personal.
‘I’m sorry-’ she read, the message on the card quite legible provided she squinted at it. She was a glasses person where distance was concerned, but with Ben and his gift close enough to touch if she so wished she barely had need of narrowed eyes. She did wonder though precisely what he was saying sorry for. Part of her wanted to ask him; to put it all out in the open and to bed at once. The rest though - the rest that thrived on not knowing facts that scared her about people she cared about - counselled silence on that front. The majority had it--
‘-I...’
--even as she fought with herself over pulling the same shit with Ben, now, as she had for years with the parents she may as well have never had for all they neglected her before fostering her out. And that, sliced whatever way you liked, wasn’t healthy at all. Skip number three of the stone across the pond came then. It roughly matched up, oddly enough, with the third of the five stages of grief -- bargaining.
‘I’m...struggling’ Rey mustered, facing what scared her all she presently could. She leaned against her apartment door’s frame, looking up at Ben as he lingered on the threshold. ‘My world’s gone from light and music to a vacuum with a gag order - not a whisper to anyone press-shaped about anything at all on pain of excommunication or-’ A brief and silent fight ensued over the proper verb to use. It ended in a stalemate. ‘Whatever it is Walker does to people he doesn’t want anymore. I don’t even know if I should be talking to you, but-’ A sigh escaped. ‘We’re a bit beyond that now, right? We’ve got sorries and flowers. That’s more than talking and it’s-- Terribly. Terribly...awkward.’ There, she’d said it; named the thing that was keeping him on her stoop, not on her futon like he used to be. ‘Right? And I wish it wasn’t but I don’t know how to make it...not.’
