Chapter Text
“Two days.” Finn can’t seem to stop himself from pacing, even though there’s hardly any empty deckspace in the overcrowded Falcon. He’s trying to keep his voice down while most of the crew is sleeping. They put Threepio in sleep mode two cycles ago just to keep Chewie from ripping him apart, so it’s quiet as the wastes at midnight. “Two days since anybody on this ship has had anything eat, and we’re down to, what, a half-liter of water for all us to share?”
“Don’t be a pussy.” General Organa doesn’t look up from her nav chart. The wiring diagram crinkles in Rey’s fist as someone behind Rey snickers, and Artoo beeps sassily. Poe’s head jerks up in surprise, and there’s no mistaking the disapproving frown that looks so foreign on his cheerful face.
Finn glares at the general. He hasn’t done much other than glare since they held their little memorial yesterday, where he’d kept his jaw clenched and his eyes straight ahead, and Leia hasn’t been much friendlier. Poe said some things about Luke’s sacrifice, and Leia said some things, and Rey pretended her silence was fresh grief. It was, mostly.
“No one’ll risk giving us supplies with the blockade, and this ship is a target. We’ve tried all our options. We need a plan.”
Poe half-closes his eyes and pinches his nose, breathing out slowly. Rey sees the exhaustion in his eyes; Poe’s been sneaky about it, but she’s caught him skipping his water ration so they can keep Rose hydrated while she lays unconscious. “We do have a plan, Finn.”
“Oh, really? Is it dying of thirst? Is that the plan?”
Rey uncurls and stands, abandoning a wiring diagram on the blanket that serves as her bed, resisting the urge to kick the tin where she’s stashed the dismantled lightsaber parts. She shoves the diagram into a drawer, between two ancient books she refuses to look at. Dehydration drills into her head like she’s been out on the badlands all day, and she can’t make heads or tails of the diagram. She doesn’t aim her voice in any particular direction, but for a fraction of a second she meets Leia’s eyes. “You can have my next water ration, Finn.”
Finn’s cheeks darken. “No, Rey, I didn’t mean that—”
“It’s fine.” She grabs at a wrench—she misses it the first time—and drifts toward the cockpit. “I’m used to being thirsty.”
Poe and Finn exchange a glance she supposes might be worried, and she catches a few of the others watching her with something like awe. She’s their weapon, after all. They need her tuned up, ready to swoop in and—what? Move rocks again?
Rey steps over sleeping bodies, heading to the cockpit with a vague intention of working on the auxiliary intake switch for the O2 regulator.
But when she reaches the empty cockpit she sits where she always sits, in Han’s seat, shooting a resentful look at the water-recycling gauge that’s been parked on high-red since the primary scrubber burned out from overload two cycles ago. She and Chewie spent hours on it, but there’s no way to get it up and running without new parts. Leia locked up their last half-liter ten hours ago, and it’s another two hours before they each get a sip. After that, it’s game over unless they land.
A nervous cough makes her go stiff, but it’s only Finn. She lets the wrench drop to the deck beside her and leans back. It smells like electrocuted porg; Chewie left the oily bones from their last meal in a corner on the deck. The air feels suffocating, but Rey’s certain she imagines it, since they’ve got hours before O2 saturation drops to noticeable levels.
Finn tosses down a set of ratchets, which he’d apparently grabbed at random because they’re useless for anything in the cockpit, and collapses into Chewbacca’s chair.
She finds herself annoyed that Finn’s come after her. But of course that’s stupid—she’s just dehydrated and hungry and tired of Finn whining when they’re all in the same boat. Literally. For all his big talk about helping the Resistance after they left Crait, she half-expects him to start talking about running away again.
“I’m not gonna take your ration, Rey,” Finn says. His hands work like he wants to say something else.
“You can, if you need it.”
“I was just frustrated. You need to hydrate. You’re our Jed—"
“I’m not. And I’d like to be alone,” she says, and hurt flashes across his face.
“I’m sorry, I mean, I shouldn’t have complained—”
“Stop apologizing.” She tries to school her face into a smile, but he noticed the hesitation. “Just—I need some space. Please?”
He nods and mutters an embarrassed apology, but hesitates before he leaves. The air sort of wavers around him, like the Force vibrates with unsaid words. There are so many since Crait, and Rey knows she’s not the only one who’s been keeping things to herself in the crowded freighter. Finn’s slept beside Rose’s bunk every off-shift. He reaches out to squeeze her shoulder, and she brushes her fingers across his before they disappear.
Rey listens to him go, then sighs to clear her head. She’s not angry at Finn, she just can’t be what he needs her to be right now. He’s right, about needing a plan.
What do you want me to do? Take a laser-sword and face down the whole First Order?
Luke could do that, but Luke was a legend. Peace and purpose, she told Leia. Good for Luke. He could’ve taken three seconds to share his kriffing purpose with Rey.
No rogue Jedi parents, no secret destiny in that sick-smelling carcass of a tree, not for Rey. Rey from Nowhere. Nothing from Nowhere. All she got was a bunch of moldy books, a broken lightsaber, and a pair of brown, contemptuous eyes—pretty eyes, Luke called them, because Luke saw right through her—telling her once and for all that she has no place in this story.
You need a teacher.
She doesn’t. She’s never had a teacher in her life, and she was fine, and she’s fine now. She doesn’t need the Force, she needs—what?
To fix the damn ship, that’s what. That’s what matters right now. Feeling sorry for herself isn’t going to get the job done.
She picks up the wrench and starts removing the panel for the aux access switches, hoping it’s just a problem with the wiring, but she doubts it. The ship isn’t equipped to handle the load they’re putting on it, not with all the fungineered pseudo-fixes she and Chewie and Han put in to substitute for necessary parts. They’re twenty-one people in a ship Rey stocked to crew two. Three, counting the extra rations she packed for Ben. But Ben did not come back with them. Ben is the reason they’re all starving, running, lost and alone.
And Finn is right; they don’t have a plan. If they don’t find a place to land soon, there’s not going to be a Resistance.
Rey jerks the switch box out of its holder and groans. It’s not a wiring problem; she and Chewie will have to get down in the hatch and look at the line again. If Han was here he’d probably have some workaround she would’ve never thought of. But Han’s not here. Ben ripped him out of her life, too.
A click sounds behind her, and Rey’s on her feet, fingers clasped around the reassuring grips of her staff. The hatch sneaks slowly open, like Han’s name summoned her.
“Hi,” Leia says. She eyes the staff with a raised eyebrow, and Rey sets it reluctantly against the bulkhead. They watch one another for a moment. Leia’s face flashes intermittently orange and deep blue with the blinking of the O2 warning gauge.
“You shouldn’t have said that to Finn,” she says.
Leia’s frown deepens.
“I know this hasn’t been easy for you,” Rey continues, raising her chin, “but you shouldn’t take it out on him. He’s not weak. You know he’s not, and you know he already feels guilty for the transports.”
Poe pulled him aside and told him it wasn’t Finn’s fault, that he was the officer and somehow that made Poe responsible, even though it was Finn who came up with the plan. It seems like it made as much sense to Finn as it does to Rey.
“I do know,” Leia says. “And you’re right, I haven’t been myself. I’ll apologize.”
“In front of everyone.”
The general’s slight nod seems genuine, and Rey can’t be sure that she’s imagining a hint of approval there. Leia could tell her that she gives the orders here. Her son would.
Rey moves the panel off Chewie’s seat and lets the general ease herself down, belatedly wondering if she should’ve let Leia have Han’s seat. It doesn’t matter. Rey sits, back rigid, head pounding. A tightness around Leia’s eyes tells Rey she’s as unhappy about this conversation as Rey is.
Leia’s eyes flick up to the dice sagging over the viewport. “You skipped over some details in your story, that first day. I got the feeling you might want to say some things in private.”
She’d rather not say them at all. Rey hasn’t missed the way Leia watches her when her back’s turned, like she can smell her son when Rey passes by.
“It’s about Kylo Ren.” Leia says. It’s not a question, and there’s no emotion in her voice as she says it.
Rey plucks at a wire and runs her thumb along it like she’s checking for skittermouse bites. “I went to him. On Snoke’s ship. I thought I could turn him.”
Out of the corner of her eye Rey catches the way a muscle in Leia’s chin jumps. She and her son share that, at least, that iron control.
“Chewie told me.” There’s an obvious question, the one Luke asked her, the one Rey can’t stop asking herself ever since his miserable face popped back into her life: how could you ever be stupid enough to think you, a scavenger, could turn a man that evil? But Leia doesn’t ask the obvious question. Instead, she blinks resolutely at those dice.
“Did he hurt you?”
There should’ve been concern in her voice. Rey’s glad there isn’t. Leia needs her to be strong right now—they all do.
“No.” It’s close enough to true.
“Your arm’s wounded.”
“It wasn’t him.”
Leia nods. “Good.”
“Yeah.”
Rey pinches the wire out of its socket just to have a reason to hide from Leia’s eyes.
“And?” the general says.
“I saw him kill Snoke. I thought he’d turned.”
There it was. That was the heart of her stupidity, believing that he’d changed.
Leia looks out at the stars streaming by. “He hadn’t turned. He used you to kill Snoke.”
She sounds so much like Ben when she does that--asks a question that sounds like a command.
“Exactly,” Rey says. And then she tells Leia everything. The visions on Ahch-To, the trip in the escape pod onto Snoke’s ship, the confrontation with Snoke, how Snoke tortured her and then asked Ben to kill her.
“Don’t call him that,” Leia says sharply. “He’s not Ben.”
Rey holds her tongue, but it feels cheap to say that Ben’s dead and some beast called Kylo Ren destroyed him. That’s not what happened. It’s what Ben wants to believe, but Ben Solo isn’t gone, he’s just made his choice.
“Did you tell Luke about these visions?”
Rey hesitates. No. It’s not fair, to tell this woman the brother she loved tried to murder her son.
“Eventually,” she lies. The little wrinkles around Leia’s eyes twitch as her eyes narrow. “He told me not to go.”
“You ignored the warning, and he just let you go?”
“He refused to help.”
At the heat in Rey’s voice, Leia nods, and motions for her to continue.
She doesn’t mention their conversation next to the fire. Or that desperate please, or the moment she stood, remembering it, over his unconscious body, trying to make a decision. Those things are between her and Ben, for now. Not that she owes Ben Solo anything.
The only time Leia shows the slightest hint of feeling is when Rey had tells her that Kylo Ren stood in the throne room watching the Order pick off the helpless Resistance transports, and he could’ve stopped it, but he’d refused. The general closes her eyes and breathes out silently through her nose, and so quickly Rey almost doesn’t notice it. Nothing else seems to surprise her.
“I thought the visions had stopped. But, the thing is, they’re still happening. One happened last cycle.”
Leia’s still staring out at the blue and white steaks of hyperspace beyond the viewport.
“What do you talk about, in these visions?”
“He insults me, mostly.”
“Just insults?”
“He tries to get in my head.”
“Literally? Like an interrogation?”
“No, I mean, he told me not to tell you any of this, because you wouldn’t trust me if you knew I was talking to him. Or he said you’d ask me to spy on him.”
“He said those things because they’re true.”
Rey swallows again, just a reflex because there’s no moisture in her throat. “Not that I think you’d do anything wrong, or that this is your fault,” Leia clarifies. “But this is a huge security risk. He can use this…connection…to get valuable information, information that could get us killed.”
“No he can’t,” Rey says, too quickly. She welcomes the anger that smooths over the fear rising out of the depths to wrap around her windpipe. “You can’t think I’m stupid enough to tell him anything, and I told you, he can’t see my surroundings.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I can’t see his.”
“And how much Force training have you had, Rey? Two days? He's been calling on the Dark side since he was in the womb, he's been throwing people across the room with the Force since he was two years old. Do you really think he’s not able to do things with this connection that you can’t?”
In the womb. Rey stops herself from shuddering, but she can’t quite keep her voice under control.
“But I’m telling you he can’t. That’s not how it works.” She’s certain of it. She feels it.
“Rey, I’m sorry to throw this in your face after you confided in me, but he’s already tricked you into willingly walking onto the goddamned flagship of the First Order. Alone, and against Luke’s direct instruction. I’m not going to risk the entire Resistance on your judgment.”
Rey knew this couldn’t last.
“You can trust me,” she says. “I promise.”
At the plea in her voice, Leia’s face softens. Rey looks away.
“You’ll send me away. If we survive this, I’ll have to leave the Resistance. He said that would happen. He said you’d send me away.”
An alarm beeps, and since there’s nothing Rey can do to fix it, she just silences it and leaves her hand on the toggle. After a few moments Leia’s swollen knuckles move to close over hers, but Rey withdraws her hand too quickly, pretending to fix one of the other switches.
“I’ll do everything I can to keep you with us, Rey. I promise.”
Rey manages a curt nod.
“But I respect you too much to lie to you. If he can use this against us—”
“I’d leave.” Rey starts nodding, because it’s not even a decision, is it? They’ll never let her stay. If she doesn’t leave they’ll abandon her. “Of course I would, I couldn’t put Finn in danger.”
The Force hums with Leia’s sadness. “You shouldn’t have to bear this responsibility. And you shouldn’t have to deal with—him.”
“I’m not afraid.”
“I know you’re not.”
There’s something odd in Leia’s eyes. Recognition, maybe. It doesn’t make Rey feel much better, because she knows this can’t last. Soon she’ll be alone again.
Leia folds her hands briskly, and Rey’s glad. “I need to have a conversation with Poe,” she says, and Rey understands then: Poe doesn’t know that Kylo Ren is her son. “If one of these visions happens again, keep your ears open. Ask him questions. Find out what you can, be careful.”
“I have been careful.”
“He’ll try to sedu—to persuade you over to the Dark side. He’s already tried to make you suspicious of us. Don’t let him put a wedge between you and the Resistance, Rey. Remember you’re not alone.”
Rey flinches, and tries to cover it by pretending she pricked her finger on a wire. “I know.”
Leia observes her, but decides to ignore the strange response. “And don’t tell anyone about this.”
“I won’t,” Rey says, and then, immediately, “though I’d like to tell Finn.”
“No. Not even Finn.”
Rey draws herself up. She’ll go crazy if she can’t talk to someone about all this.
“With all due respect, General,”—she’d heard Poe say that and she’d been looking for an excuse to try it—“Finn has more experience than anyone else with people trying to brainwash him with lies. I need his help.” And if I’m going to die in the next two cycles, I’m not going to die keeping a secret from my only friend.
Leia considers her. Rey is about to tell her that she’s going to tell Finn no matter what, but Leia figures this out on her own.
“Fine. But Finn…Finn isn’t great at keeping secrets. Or following orders. Tell him how serious this is—I trust you, and I’ll do my damnedest to keep you with us, but we’re looking for allies, and if anyone finds out the Supreme Leader has a direct line into your head—”
“I’ll make sure he keeps it secret.”
Leia presses her lips into a thin line, then nods. “Are you done with whatever you were working on here?” She gestures to the disassembled switch box.
“For now,” Rey says. “It’s the O2, it’s not going to last more than a cycle or two.”
“Understood,” she says. “Rey. After Finn followed you, Poe and I made a decision. We need to land. Whatever we find when we drop out of hyperspace in an hour, we push through it. We’re out of chances. But I think we’ll make it.”
Rey nods. All of this back and forth about Ben, about the future, about allies—none of it is really going to matter if they don’t punch through the next blockade. It should terrify her.
But it doesn’t. Leia took the time to have this conversation, knowing she might die in an hour, because she believes they won’t. Whatever complaints Rey might have, she has to admire her. She has hope.
Leia glances up at the dice again, and stands. The general takes a deep breath of oxygen-poor air, and pinches the edge of her massive black coat sleeves.
“Is there something else?” Rey asks, following her to her feet.
The Force whispers around the general, and seems to wedge down into Rey’s throat, sticking in her parched windpipe like sand. It’s like she’s got a question that she doesn’t really want to ask.
Leia’s eyes fall to the floor, to the greasy porg bones in the corner, as if to remind Rey to clean them up. But instead she speaks so low the engines almost swallow her voice.
“How is he?”
Rey’s throat works, trying to swallow around Leia’s feelings.
“Is he happy?”
Rey shakes her head.
Leia brings her hand to her mouth, perpendicular, so that the side of her pointer finger arches over her lip. She nods, and keeps nodding even as she turns back to the hatch, even as it swings open.
“When we make planetfall,” Leia says on her way out, loud enough for everyone in the hold to hear, “you should replace the modulator alarm.”
“Sure,” Rey says. “You got it.”
***
In an hour, they drop out of hyperspace near a planet Leia knows has Resistance sympathies and a small Republic army garrison, expecting a barrage of First Order fire to welcome them like it has the last sixteen times. Rey’s hands are white-knuckled on the controls—even though Poe and Threnalli are seasoned pilots, Chewie insisted she sit in Han’s chair for these missions, and after Poe and Threnalli saw what she could do, they stopped arguing with Chewie.
But it’s quiet.
“I don’t like this,” Poe says, quietly enough that only she, Leia, and Chewie hear but the rest of the nervous Resistance doesn’t. Rey feels him squeeze the back of her chair.
All of them are frantically scanning the viewport, looking for the telltale shimmer of cloaked enemy ships. But there’s nothing.
Chewie growls a question, reluctantly, because Rey knows he hates this mumbo-jumbo. In response, Rey closes her eyes and tries to feel through the Force if anything is there. “No, I don’t feel anything,” she replies. “It feels—empty.”
Their hearts are pounding as they put in a coded query on a frequency the Resistance had used to call for help after Crait. When the coded reply comes back—Come on in, we’re glad to see you. Airspace clear, eagles left the roost two hours ago—only a few muffled shouts go up in the back. Leia’s anxiety comes off in waves in the Force, and she knows Leia feels hers, too.
This is too easy. This is a trap.
Rey catches Leia and Poe exchanging a concerned glance. They need to land. They decided to go for it, whatever they found when they dropped out of hyperspace. But they’d both been expecting a fight. They’re wondering whether to call it off.
Out of the corner of her eye, she watches Poe take Leia’s hand. Leia nods. “Take her in,” the general orders.
Rey and Chewie exchange a look. They don’t like this any better than Poe and Leia do. But they follow orders.
Twenty gut-wrenching minutes later, the whole Resistance is guzzling water in the mess of the Republic garrison—too fast. And vomiting because of it. Rey tries to tell everyone to slow down—she’s too used to water-hunger to make rookie mistakes like that—but everyone is so overwhelmed with relief and thirst and sheer joy to be alive that they take huge gulping swigs and promptly throw up on their hosts’ floor, but their hosts don’t care, they have headache medicine to spare that they pass around like candy, they offer intravenous hydration to the crew members who need it most, and whisk Rose off to medbay.
Leia’s already apologized to Finn, and Finn hugs Rey four or five times out of sheer jubilation. Poe studies them with interest. Rey sips water carefully from a canteen as she watches Leia embrace her friend, Colonel Sana Devi, who she knew from her Senate days.
When she starts feeling better, she returns to the hangar where they’ve parked the Falcon to run some post-flight checks and talk to the techs there about the parts they need. They’ll have to put the old freighter in more permanent hiding, since it’s the most-wanted ship in the galaxy. Gradually, the techs and the happy Resistance fighters, including Finn, peel off for a much-needed meal and rest.
Rey’s stomach roils from hours of crushing anxiety, so she stays in the hangar, putzing with small tasks that make her feel useful. Poe comes in while she’s fiddling with a sticky compressor valve. He’s been so busy she expects him to just walk through, but to her surprise he pulls up a crate and sits next to her. He’s got a very old-looking datapad with him.
“I talked to Leia,” he says. His voice is neutral, but Rey can feel, through the Force or just through her own intuition, that it had been a very difficult conversation, and that Poe was reeling from hurt and worry and grief for Leia’s pain.
Poe is the son Leia deserved.
“Hm,” Rey says. What do you say to someone when they’ve just acknowledged you’re the security breach that might get them killed?
“Here’s what I think,” he says, his voice assuming the get-to-it optimism she’s come to expect from him over the last three days. “I think you’ve got a thing going on here with Kylo Ren that you need to take care of—”
She snorts. The corner of his mouth turns up.
“But I don’t care about all that,” he says. Her eyes meet his, and they’re as serious as she’s ever seen them. “Rey. You’re a hell of a pilot. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the Resistance is a little low on pilots lately.”
Rey can’t possibly believe what he’s offering her.
“Got a few minutes to start your flight training?” he asks.
She almost drops the compressor hose in her haste to put it down. “Now? Aren’t you exhausted?”
He shakes his head. “Mission days always get me a little wired. And this was a crazy mission. If you feel up to it, we can go over some of the boring ground-school things and I’ll get you in a cockpit tomorrow.”
Rey is practically quivering with excitement. Finally, something she’s actually good at. She’s glad her mechanical skills have come in handy, and it’s not like she doesn’t love sitting and solving a problem with her hands, but the thought of spending the rest of the war staying on the ground as a mechanic—or even worse, a useless half-Jedi—is almost unbearable. If there’s going to be a fire, she needs to be facing it.
He grins at her enthusiasm. “So I assume we don’t need to go over the parts of an X-wing,” he says. She shoots him a bland look, and the grin turns to a smirk. He hands her the datapad. “So we’ll start with some of the basic maneuvers and commands you might hear over the comm.”
She peers down at the datapad. It’s got one schematic of a maneuver that she can follow, but the rest—she frowns.
“I can’t read,” she says.
Poe raises an eyebrow. “Really?”
She shrugs. “It wasn’t really something I needed on Jakku.”
He doesn’t miss a beat. “Well, I’ll just go over it then.”
And he does. They sit for an hour, Poe running her through practice conversations on the comm and demonstrating maneuvers with big, sweeping motions of his hands. She reminds him of a kid with a toy fighter, making vroom-vroom sounds and pretending to use pilot jargon. It’s a thousand times better than Jedi training already, and she hasn’t even left the ground.
After she nearly dies laughing from a particularly animated explanation of in-formation barrel rolls, he pulls something out of his pocket. A flask.
“It’s just water,” he says apologetically, “but it’s fun to pretend, and I’m really happy about water right now. Want some?”
On Jakku it’s a gross insult to refuse water. When she lowers the flask, his downturned eyes are studying her.
“So,” Poe says with exaggerated casualness as he takes the flask back. “You and Finn, huh?”
With the preparations for dropping out of hyperspace and everything that happened afterward, she didn’t have time to talk to Finn. He’d been exhausted, so she let him go to bed with the resolution that she’d talk to him tomorrow.
She glances over at him. “Me and Finn what?”
“You’re a thing.”
It takes Rey a second to follow his meaning. “Oh. No, no. We’re just friends.” She’s not sure that’s true for Finn. She hopes they’re just friends.
“Really,” Poe screws the cap onto the flask and stuffs it back in his pocket.
“Really.”
“It’s just, you two are…huggy.”
Rey laughs again. They are huggy; she noticed that in the cramped arrangements. Everyone else seems to need a lot more space, but she and Finn stand together and touch each other in small, casual ways that the others don’t seem to mirror, just because they can. “I think we’re both happy to have someone we can hug. We didn’t have that, before.”
He makes a face. “I guess Jakku didn’t seem like a huggy place.” She snorts. “Neither did the First Order. Kylo Ren didn’t seem like a hugger; I tried.”
She’s so buoyant that even the mention of Kylo Ren doesn’t break her mood, and she half-believes Poe really did try to hug him. She can’t help but laugh at the image. It feels good to laugh.
Poe is flashing her a mischievous grin that makes her cheeks color. He really is handsome, in a rough kind of way.
Something seems to pass between them, but then he sweeps up the datapad and practically jumps to his feet. “Tomorrow, 0800, I want you here for flight training. Got it?”
She’s a little whiplashed by the sudden move to leave, but he’s smiling and she says that sounds great.
“Good,” he says with a suggestive smile. “I’m looking forward to it.” He strides out of the hangar without looking back.
It’s late; it must be around midnight. She might as well try to sleep, though the prospect of flight training, and talking to Poe, and not fighting for her life, makes her so excited she’s not sure she’ll be able to get any rest. She stands to leave.
Her hand is on the toggle for the hangar lights when the cage snaps down around her. His eyes are on her back.
Instinct tells her to reach for her staff, to face him and fight. Instead, she freezes, takes a deep breath in, then out. She turns to him, her cheeks still pink from relief and what she’s increasingly sure is Poe’s flirting. He’s wearing his usual expression of dull, hopeless misery. He's filthy, like he's been rolling around in an ash pit.
The tendrils of his sadness flick outward in the Force, wrapping around her neck, and it’s almost enough to make her feel sorry for him, until he opens his mouth to say something hateful.
“Shut up, Ben.”
To her surprise, he does.
Rey swallows against a sensation like ashes in her throat, then she turns off the lights, leaving him to dissolve, alone, in the dark.