Modern AU – Where it all comes together

Ben Solo's harsh pants echoed through the room as he lay on his bed, completely soaked with sweat, his eyes staring wildly into the night.

It was the same dream. The same images flashing, cycling endlessly through his mind.

Him and a girl, a young woman, in very different clothing, running around in a desert, on some ship in the middle of pouring rain, in corridors of what looked like a spaceship. They carried weapons that looked like guns, but shot laser rays. They had laser swords. Red and blue. He couldn't get those images out of his head. No matter what he'd tried, even if he closed his eyes now, he would be able to see the young woman's face, bathed in golden firelight. Her wide hazel eyes shimmering with tears as she extended a hand to him.

"You're not alone."

"Neither are you."

But the reality was, he was alone. He always had been.

Benjamin Organa-Solo, the man with as many names as problems, was the son of two Hollywood legends. His grandparents had been a small time actor who had risen to become a studio owner and a princess respectively. And his life had been an unmitigated disaster from day one.

Coming into the world, he'd almost killed his mother. With his intense emotions and antisocial nature, he'd caused his parents to split up and in the process leave him with no parental authority except a crazy uncle who'd tried to kill him once. There were documentaries made about his family and unfortunately, when he was a teenager, he'd found out about his grandfather's big scandal from one such illuminating film. Anakin Skywalker had been vilified as a war sympathizer and profiteer, using his influence in Hollywood to finance and support laws and appointments that benefited the country's war machine.

Fifteen-year-old Ben Solo discovered this when a disgruntled classmate flung the documentary name in his face after a particularly caustic argument about something he couldn't even remember now.

Knowing that his family had kept him in the dark, while routinely claiming that Ben's intense emotions and his anti-social behavior reminded them of Anakin, had been the straw that broke the camel's back. Ben had left the house that night and not been back. All communications between Ben and his parents ceased for almost a decade.

In those ten years Benjamin Organa-Solo died so Kylo Ren could live and take the world by storm. It served to his advantage that he looked so different from both his famous parents. Even the hungriest of the media sharks had never made the connection between gangly fifteen-year-old Ben Solo with acne and Dumbo ears to the hotshot actor Kylo Ren who had taken the world by storm with his intense portrayal of the dark and conflicted anti-hero character in the latest Stellar Battles series of movies.

Even before the first movie in the franchise's release, the buzz generated by his character was enough to land him four more interesting roles and Ben never looked back. Now, with close to a decade in the industry, a dozen awards and critical acclaim under his belt, Ben somehow still found himself unsatisfied. Something still felt hollow inside, as if he was but half a person living half a life.

And there were the dreams. They didn't always come and even when they did, they weren't always the same. But they were always about the same two people – him and this young woman. He knew in his gut that he'd never met her, didn't know who she was. But in his dreams, he did. She was his other half and in every scenario that played out in those dreams, it was always the two of them.

Sometimes they were together, sometimes apart. Sometimes enemies, sometimes friends, and in a few, one of them had to kill the other. But in each and every one of his dreams, the young woman featured a starring role. Her chestnut curls, big, sparkly hazel eyes, pert nose and sunshine smile, her lean lines and hidden strength, her generous heart and her iron will were all etched in his heart and mind.

This woman he'd never met had taken over his sleeping and waking moments.

He tried to analyze whatever he remembered of the dreams to figure out what they meant or if he could find some clues to see when or where he might've met her, to try and get some context. In the dreams, the scenarios changed, their relationship changed and they themselves changed, but there were no clues that Ben could use to figure anything out. No real world locations, no real world costumes and definitely no real world weaponry. It was as if Ben Solo was writing his own science fiction series in his head while asleep. But something, a gut feeling of sorts, warned him not to dismiss anything out of hand.

After multiple sleepless nights when he'd obsessed about this girl from his dreams and the frankly disturbing visions he'd experienced, he'd confessed to a confused agent and an irate manager.

His manager, Gwen Phasma, was an Amazon of a woman whose no-nonsense attitude ran Ben's life like clockwork. Her frosty, disdainful stare was renowned in the industry for being uber effective against overenthusiastic fans and press alike. It was less common knowledge that Gwen was happily married to the gorgeous supermodel Bazine Netal. They both liked their privacy and figured that anyone who was important to them already knew.

Armitage Hux, his agent, had been Ben's closest friend since they both could remember. The snarky redhead knew and understood Ben like no one else, and he'd been with him since the beginning. It had been Hux who'd introduced Phasma to Ben and the rest was history. Hux had met his fiancé Rose, a special effects engineer, on the set of Stellar Battles a few years back, and promptly fallen head over heels for her. It had taken him a while to convince the bubbly, young Asian woman to give him a chance, but Hux had persevered and was now happily planning their upcoming wedding with her.

With his closest friends happily in relationships, Ben found the loneliness getting to him. In an effort to rid himself of the growing worry that he would just disappear one day and nobody would miss him, he found himself unloading his weird sci-fi romance story in front of the four people he trusted. The three ladies seemed enraptured by the story, while Hux was staring blankly at him, wondering when his best friend had fallen on his head and lost his mind. Alcohol was consumed in massive amounts that night and a lot of theories were put forth, each more outlandish than the other and while no concrete change was affected, Ben felt a whole lot lighter after having shared his burden with his friends.

One thing that did change was that the ladies had convinced him that his soulmate, the woman from his dreams, was real, did exist and that he should look for her instead of just wallowing in his misery. Previously whenever he left the house in his hat and sunglasses 'disguise,' all his attention and efforts would go into making sure nobody followed him or figured out who he was. But now, in addition to protecting himself, Ben was also on the lookout for his girl.

He'd tried every avenue at his disposal short of asking a family friend of his who worked in law enforcement to put out a BOLO(Be On the LookOut) for her. But after months of keeping up his hopes just for them to be crushed again and again, Ben was ready to give up and go back to being the mopey, sad, single fifth wheel in their group.

Which was why, when he walked out of the London Airport one fine day and found her waiting in Arrivals, Benjamin Organa-Solo promptly dropped his carry-on and just wrapped his arms around her.

Rey didn't know what had prompted her to come all the way to the airport. She'd just woken up and in some sort of a mental fog and decided she just needed to be at the airport. Now, standing at international arrivals, Rey felt like a fool, waiting for someone who was definitely not coming.

That was the story of her life. She was always waiting, waiting for people who were never coming in the first place or never coming back.

Her parents, her foster parents, her first friend, a dozen friends after that and worst of all, the man who starred in her dreams, every single night.

She'd had these dreams for as long as she could remember. She'd known Kylo Ren even before he'd ever acted in a movie. But seeing his face on a fifteen feet tall movie poster had certainly been a shock. She's seen all the Stellar Battles movies, but only because she'd been a fan of the franchise even before Kylo became a part of it.

An orphan who'd aged out of the system, Rey Johnson had few people she liked enough to let them get close to her. Finn and Poe had wormed their way into her affections when she hadn't been looking and now refused to leave. They called themselves her brothers and irritated the heck out of her, but it was fond exasperation most of the time. She wouldn't admit it even under torture but Finn and Poe had become very important parts of her life in the few short years she'd known them. 

Finn and Rey were both in their last year of Architecture and Sociology studies Master's programs, respectively. They'd met during first year at a random campus mixer and never looked back. Poe had come as a package deal with Finn, the two of them disgustingly cute even after having been together for a long time. 

Rey was studying to become a social worker so that she could help as many children like her face the system and the world with their best foot forward. She wanted to give them the opportunities that she and many kids like her never had.

Rey's unstable childhood meant that she almost never felt safe. Whether it was food, money, things, or people, Rey was always tempted to hoard and hide everything from anyone who could take them from her. Even now, after years of having enough food, money, a job and a place to comfortably live, Rey's insecurities still managed to get the better of her when she was down.

She'd tried to act normally, tried to be normal, but her eccentricities had always shown through. Most of her relationships had ended because the men always thought she was too weird. There was also the fact that she had always mentally compared her boyfriends with Ben, the man from her dreams, even before she'd known he was Kylo Ren. And Ben had always proved the better choice.

Even though Finn and Poe encouraged her to put herself out there and seize her own happy ending, to Rey, a stable job, a stable income, and a stable life were more important. Plus, she always had her Ben. He was with her just in her dreams, but with him she was safe, she was important and cherished, just as she was.

But none of this explained her sudden urge to go to the airport that day or why she was actually looking at the people coming out from the international arrivals section, as if expecting someone in particular to show up.

It didn't explain the fact that he had walked out to precisely where she'd stood and dropping his carry-on, how he'd just dragged her into his arms as if she was his long lost love, whispering a name he couldn't have known.

"Rey…"

Or the fact that she'd wrapped her arms around him in return, her body relaxing into his hold as if she'd finally come home after a long and arduous journey, whispering his real name in return; a name that so few people associated with him that even with her included, they could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

'"Ben."

"You're not alone."

"Neither are you."

The picture that Ben sent to his friends didn't break the Internet, but it did break a glass vase that Bazine had been filling with water for some flowers from her lovely wife when she dropped it in shock at hearing said wife squeal very loudly from the living room. Vase forgotten, Bazine rushed to find a very giddy Gwen hopping around the room, doing some sort of weird victory dance, her phone held in her hand like a prize. Of course, if the picture and the following message elicited a similar reaction from the usually sophisticated model, none but her equally happy wife was witness to it.

At Rose and Hux's apartment, an almost eerily similar incident occurred, this time involving a very expensive wine bottle that Armitage vowed to himself he would make his friend pay for. Rose had already started to mentally design the special effects and fireworks display she wanted to put on at Ben and Rey's wedding.

Her vision came to fruition within the year when all of Hollywood learned about it the week after the very hush-hush wedding with the super exclusive guest list not even a dozen people long. By then, a very tan Rey was being chased across a private beach by a sunburnt but very happy Ben, their laughter echoing as the universe smiled.

Everything was finally as it should be.