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Rey notices the cat first, before she’s even gone into the building. It’s a fat orange tabby pressed up against the glass inside a fourth story window, watching the sidewalk with disdainful interest punctuated by the rhythmic swishes of a white-tipped tail.
Cats are decidedly not Rey’s favorite. The feeling is usually mutual, something about the way they always look at her, like they know more than they’re letting on.
She counts the windows – the cat’s, third from the corner, should be apartment 406 – and glances quickly at the row of numbered mailboxes inside the lobby as she waits for the concierge. Hux, reads the nameplate, and she resists the momentary urge to take off her glove and swipe her bare hand over the brass box handle, the little coded lock underneath. If she is honest with herself, the itch for it is always there, simmering right underneath the surface of her conscience: touch, skin to sheets, skin to brick, skin to anything other than the inert glove liner, its thick, deliberate weave rendering everything quiescent and removed. She wiggles her fingers slightly inside the gloves, the leather rippling on the surface. It’s good that the weather still allows for them so late in the season. The cabbie’s radio had promised snow, and he’d smiled up at Rey, bundled up in her scarf and her new belted coat.
“You know what they say, Miss – in like a lion,” he’d said, fingers brushing leather as he’d taken the cash out of her hands. Like a lion – it seems fitting, she tells herself; she can do this.
“I’m Rey. Ms. Organa should have left some keys for me,” she tells the concierge, and looks around some more as he digs under the desk. The mailbox for Ben Solo’s apartment – her new apartment, at least for the next week – doesn’t have a nameplate, just the number; sixth floor, odd instead of even, with windows facing the blind alleyway in the back instead of the street. She’ll need to check it out tomorrow, after she’s gotten her bearings a bit. In the meantime, there are the stairs and the elevator; she decides against the latter once she has the keys in her hand, and takes the stairway up, slowly, pausing on the landings and letting her arm brush over the banister.
The slight residue feeds in through the gap between glove and sleeve, a small patch of unprotected bare skin. There’s the usual, what she picks up most of the time without even trying – hundreds of footsteps, multitudes of hands sliding down the same wooden railing, travel mugs of coffee, cigarettes, briefcases, umbrellas – it’s much too much to filter through, a rising buzz that isn’t worth trying to unravel. She thinks she catches a glimpse of a tall, black-haired man taking the stairs down, two at a time, but then he’s gone, a phantom, replaced by dog walkers and postal carriers and a little girl in rain boots.
She tugs up on her glove, closing the rift in the cloth as far as it will go, and makes sure nothing else bare touches the stairs or the door as she unlocks it.
The apartment is two-bedroom, larger than she expected, and it smells stuffy, unlived in, though obviously someone – probably also someone hired by Organa – is still wiping up the dust and paying the utilities. The overhead lights flick up on their staggered track when she thumbs the switch, and Rey looks around the tile and chrome kitchen, the geometric sofa and coffee table in the adjoining living room.
“OK, Ben Solo,” she says, setting down her travel bag and hanging her new coat carefully on a hook by the door. “This was your life. Let’s see it.”
It makes her feel a little silly to address the empty room, but it’s how Maz has always taught her to get it focused. To switch from tuning out the ambient feedback to asking it in, narrowed and sharpened; for someone completely insensitive to it, Maz had been surprisingly knowledgeable in how Rey’s potential should have worked.
She misses Maz and Finn more than she’d expected, she realizes suddenly, and has to remind herself that this is for the best. Organa has ties, connections, access. Access to people that can get Rey what she needs – new papers, new place, new life – far away from anyone she could hurt with her presence.
She throws open the living room window to get some airflow going, and walks around the room, running a still-gloved hand idly over the back of the couch. Some of Ben Solo’s things are still around – whoever packed up the place left some dishes in the strainer, a blender and a pair of oven mitts by the sink. There is a stack of books on the floor by the sofa – art and architecture, large, collectible editions, the sort that look smarter than they are, though she is probably being unfair.
The spare room hasn’t yet been gutted – an enormous TV hangs on the wall between the windows, two leather recliners and another bookshelf to the side. Plastic game cases are scattered on the floor in front of the set, along with walkthrough guides for something called Memories of Ice and Fortuna.
She finds the master bedroom further down the hall, considerably more stripped than the rest of the place, everything neatly stacked in long rows of moving boxes at the back. Some are labeled, sheets, bathroom, shoes, music; she opens one on top, at random, and finds Solo’s dress shirts, folded, mostly blue, grey and black, though there are a few that look more stereotypically work-ish, white with pale pinstripes and button collars. Most of the shirts look like they’ve been laundered and pressed before being packed away, she notices with irritation, but still strips the glove off one hand before plunging it deeply in.
It comes on as it always does – a lens flare burning up her sight, and the odd mixture of strain and relief at once. Relief at not having to keep it contained for a moment longer, the freedom to touch and feel and see everything and so much more, and the strain of sorting the images, keeping them ordered, linear, finding the effort to flip to the ones she needs through the multitude of so many – smells, textures, faces.
She’s seen Solo’s face in the photographs Organa had showed her, pale and long and a little askew, the kind of face she thinks makes more sense in person than in a still. She sinks her fingers deeper into the box, feeling between the layers of fabric – a dry cleaner’s tag, the inside of a closet, the cedarwood smell hitting her head on, mingling with something else, spicy and dry, probably shampoo or cologne. A frosty street, a sunrise, a sunset, the clink of ice cubes in a tumbler, the amber glug of something – most likely whiskey – sloshing over the side and onto the lapel of Solo’s jacket. And there – there – the sense of him hits her sudden and hard, his angular face in a mirror, opened collar as he pulls his hair back, the knot of a black tie loose around his throat. Stubble on his cheeks, gaunt in the electric light, the marbled sink with matching brush cup and soap dish, an old-fashioned black handled razor set on the sink edge.
Rey fishes the shirt out of the box – a thin, soft black button down – and runs back down the hall to the bathroom, flipping the lightswitch only to see a flat white counter without any marble pattern. She hadn’t expected the soap or the razor, but this isn’t the same bathroom at all, and putting her hands on the mirror doesn’t get her much of anything, either. In fact, she realizes, as she touches the door, the hallway walls, as she sits in one leather recliner, then the other – the whole place feels too scrubbed. Not just cleaned and half-packed away, but scoured much deeper. Cleaned up by someone who knew to expect people like her to come looking, and wanted to take every precaution possible.
You were right, Leia Organa; your son has definitely pissed off the wrong people, Rey thinks, and begins to unbutton her flannel.
She doesn’t bother folding her own old clothes nicely. Her worn jeans join her flannel on the floor, followed by tank top and socks. She leaves her panties on, more for comfort than out of any sense of propriety, and dives headfirst into Ben Solo’s shirt, letting it engulf her whole. It’s huge on her, the shoulders dwarfing her own, hanging down and loose over her arms. She rolls up the sleeves the best she can, and does up the buttons in the front. Maybe there’s a tie or a belt she can use to cinch it tighter if she goes looking, but in the meantime, Rey kicks the pile of her clothes aside, and sits down on the carpet, cross-legged. Eyes closed. Concentrating.
Blood is the first thing she feels, faint and metallic, but undeniably there; Ben Solo has bled on this shirt, or at the very least, bled while he had been wearing it. She can’t quite tell if had been something serious, or if he’d simply cut himself shaving, but the sharp, iron sense of it helps her zero in on the rest, to pull everything she can out of the soft, cotton glide of the shirt over her skin.
It still isn’t much; the shirt is cleaned, muted, like everything else in the place. She sees Solo shrug a jacket on over the shirt, grab a scarf and a backpack. There is a flash of him with a paper cup in his hand, another in the back seat of a car – private, not a cab; there’s no partition. She can’t see the driver, but there is another man in the front passenger seat, older and balding; when he turns back to Solo, she can make out the bandage covering his ear and part of his jaw. He is saying something, something Solo listens to attentively, but the words are warped, covered in static, and Rey flexes her fists in frustration, pounds her knuckles into the floor.
She opens her eyes and checks her new phone: half an hour just for this, a glimpse of a man in a car. Organa is unlikely to be happy with this little. Then again, Rey considers, if it were easy, Organa would have hardly bothered with an unregistered sensitive hiding out with the top of the list of her ex-husband’s known associates.
She’d met Han only a handful of times, and he had never mentioned Ben. Neither had Maz, and Finn probably hadn’t known, same as her. Organa was the first to tell her that she and Solo, Sr. had a son together, and that now that son had gone missing.
“What can I do that hasn’t been done already?” Rey had asked, playing dumb; Organa may have been married to Han once, but she could see the wince forming on his face before he’d said, “Come on, Leia, don’t.”
“I’m not asking you to do anything wrong, or illegal,” Organa had continued in her mild, no-nonsense voice. “A week in the city. I’ll leave you the keys. I know you can – let’s say, pick up impressions. Maz tells me you’ve only been getting better.”
Han had eyed Maz with something like resigned disappointment, but the woman just shrugged, and he’d settled down.
“Just look through his place, and tell me if you see anything out of the ordinary, and I will be in your debt.”
You’ll be in mine if you don’t hadn’t needed to be said. Organa was slight, and she’d looked unbearably tired, but Rey knew, then and now, what Organa could make happen for her. She’d offered money, as well – she’d called it living expenses, but it was more than Rey had remembered having at any one time. She’d mentally split it up right away, a pile for food and a pile for not, and another pile, still ridiculously, stupidly large, to squirrel away safely and never touch until needed.
Finn had disapproved; she could see it in the set of his shoulders, the lines of his face. Rey had told him they’d see each other again, eventually, and couldn’t quite decide whether she’d been lying.
After she’s certain the shirt has no more secrets to give up, Rey scrolls through her phone and orders take-out from the place with the best reviews nearby. She writes down the list of questions she should ask Organa as she waits, on the small pad of paper she finds in another one of Ben Solo’s boxes. It would be good to know who packed up the place, and who else still has access. Where else Solo could have been likely to spend time. Going to Solo’s former office would be too obvious, and not very smart, but she thinks maybe she could try some places in the area. After all, a man in his position, a man his age, could hardly have spent all of his time locked up in his apartment, as nice as it is.
After the list is complete, Rey snaps the pencil into four pieces and grinds it to dust in the sink’s disposal unit. She looks at the paper, memorizing the questions one more time, soaks the list, and sends it after the pencil.
She thinks she is probably tipping too much when her food has arrived, but it feels nice to be able to do it at all. She’ll probably do it again tomorrow, after she spends some time checking out the alleyway in the back and the rest of the building. She should probably get some more nicer clothes, as well. The coat had been one of the first things she’d bought, but the jeans and the flannel won’t do for the rest of her stay – or her cover.
She eats her spicy, delicious dinner on Ben Solo’s dishes, flipping through the channels on his enormous television. It feels a little strange, but not probably not as strange as the prospect of sleeping in his bed when she’s ready to turn in for the night. It’s been stripped down to the mattress, and she doesn’t detect anything from the laundered sheets she’s remade it with, but she feels like an intruder even so.
It’s also a little bit spooky, she admits to herself as she undresses, brushes her teeth, shuts off the lamp, a bit of the outside light still filtering in through the closed blinds. At least Ben Solo isn’t dead; she knows that much. No matter how much the cleaners would have tried, that’s not something that can be covered up, not from sight like hers, no matter how untrained. She would have sensed it the moment she’d walked in, the way she had sensed it before, and the memory makes her shiver, makes her sit up and reach down to the floor, grabbing blindly until she’s found what she is looking for.
Wrapped once again in Ben Solo’s too-large, soft, worn shirt, Rey settles back down, and doesn’t wake until morning.