Archive of Our Own

“Finn,” Rose says, with red smoke billowing around them. He looks distraught, which is not what she wanted. He’ll thank her for it later, she hopes. But he is there, and breathing, and she can imagine the desperate light in Poe’s eyes when she he walks back into the base, the relief in all their shoulders. They have not lost another hero. They have not lost Finn.

“Why would you do that?” he asks her, hand on her shoulder. He’s already undoing the buckles and straps keeping her in the cockpit, already lifting her out and wincing at what she assumes is her wound. She can’t feel it. She can barely feel her own heartbeat.

She shakes her head. Him and Poe, she thinks, they don’t get it, that martyrdom is not heroism. “I saved you, dummy.”

He pauses, and focuses on her.

“It’s not about killing people you hate,” she says, and thinks of Phasma and Finn’s terrible grace and beauty and anger as he killed her, how fearful and unfamiliar he was in that instant. Thinks of the Dark Side and the Force and Finn’s gentle hands on her shoulders and how he is nothing like that, the rest of the time; she thinks of Paige’s hands in her hair, pulling it back and smiling, leaving bits out at the temples. There. That suits you, Ro. “It’s about saving the people you care about. I couldn’t save my sister, Finn. But I saved you.”

“Rose,” he says, frantic, but she slumps back, suddenly too tired to keep talking, and she remembers nothing more, just his hands tightening on her shoulders and his face blurring into a brown expanse, full of life against the stark white and blood red of the landscape.

***

Rose wakes up to a solid, dragging pain in her lungs, pulling whenever she takes a breath. She wakes up to Finn by her side. This isn’t a surprise.

The fact that there are two other people and a droid is, though.

“Rose!” Finn says, triumphantly, his face breaking into a wide, happy smile. “I knew it! I knew you’d make it.”

“Ow,” she says, because he’s shouting, and her head is ringing with the sound of his joy. It’s a nice kind of hurt, though. “How’d we get out? Are you okay?”

He has a scabbing-over wound on his forehead and several others on his arms, visible past his rolled-up shirtsleeves.

“Me?” he says, like it’s the least of his concerns. “I’m fine. You’re fine, Poe’s fine, Rey’s fine. Everyone’s fine.”

“Not everyone,” a girl with dark hair and soft eyes says. Those eyes are deep brown, and sad, and distant, though she smiles are Rose like she’s happy to see that she, at least, is awake. Rose guesses that this is the famous Rey, the one Finn has not stopped talking about since he got here, the friend he has missed so much. They’re sitting close to each other, but Poe is just as close, on Finn’s other side. BB-8 is whirring softly at Poe’s feet, and Rose reaches down to touch the little droid on the top of her head.

BB-8 beeps good morning, Friend-Rose! at her, even though it is clearly not morning. She attempts to sit up and winces.

“Hey, none of that,” Finn says, and puts his hand on her shoulder, easing her back down. “You were wounded really bad. You should stay still.”

“Oh,” she says. “How many did we lose?”

“One less,” Poe says, “because of you.” His hand has drifted to the crook of Finn’s elbow, his thumb moving back and forth, back and forth. “Thank you, Rose.”

She manages a smile. She knows why he’s thanking her. “Did you know Paige?”

“Tico?” Poe says, and grins. He’s just as blindingly handsome as everyone is always saying he is in maintenance, Rose thinks, but he hasn’t looked like it for a few days, not until just now. Maybe Poe is only handsome when he’s safe. Maybe that’s just when he smiles most. Maybe it’s having his hand on Finn’s elbow, and Rose having brought Finn back. “Yeah, I knew her. She could play poker like nobody’s business. I lost a lot of money to your sister.”

Her throat clogs up. Somehow this tiny detail is much nicer than any of the condolences she’s gotten since Paige died. Everyone has been so concerned with saying that she died a hero that no one has remembered all the times before that, when she was just a normal girl, just Rose’s little sister. But here is Poe, thumb moving on Finn’s arm and remembering Paige, not as a hero but as a poker player with a con-artist smile and a sunny laugh.

“Yeah,” she manages. “She was good at poker.” There’s a slight silence, before Finn pats Rose’s hand and moves them on.

“Rose, I know you must’ve figured it out, but this is Rey,” and the soft-eyed girl waves. She’s got freckled, strong arms, and hands that twitch quickly like she thinks she needs to make movements before anyone can see that she’s done it. She’s got burn marks and scrapes running down her neck and body but she’s sitting straight up in the chair, ramrod, daring anyone to comment. Finn’s other hand is gesturing at her, and Rose switches back to paying attention to the words as they’re spoken. “She just got back. It was her that brought the Falcon so we could all escape.”

“We’re in the Millenium Falcon?” Rose asks, at first attempting to hold back a squeak at the thought of — wow — being in one of the most famous ships of all time, but then letting her initial hero-worshipping excitement fade out and looking around. “It’s . . . junkier than I expected.” That’s a surprise, and not, all at once.

Rey laughs, and the changing of her face as she does is more stunning than a sunset. Rose feels a sudden and violent tug in her gut, not unlike being thrown into hyperspace. She wants Rey to laugh again, in a thousand different situations and in a thousand different ways, wants to trace the dimples that crop up on her cheeks. She realizes she’s grinning, big and stupid, when Finn raises his eyebrows at her.

“It is, a bit,” Rey says. “Junky. But it’ll do for now, won’t it?”

“Of course,” Finn says, and bumps his shoulder against hers. “You should get some rest. Weren’t you just flying?”

“I’m all right,” Rey says, and then yawns. “Okay, maybe I’m not.”

She stands, and stars she’s tall, Rose thinks, she’s tall, and smiling at them all sleepily, tucking some of her loose hair behind her ear. Her clothes are simple and utilitarian and they look almost like Jedi robes, if Jedi robes were made from different bits of fabric and cobbled together. It’s charmingly innovative.

“Good to see that you’re doing better, Rose,” Rey says, and smiles at her again, and her dimples, her smile, her soft eyes. Rose can feel her heart picking up speed. “I’ll see you all in the morning.”

She vanishes into a small hallway, and Poe and Finn look at Rose.

She blushes, which seems to be answer enough to their unspoken questions.

Finn just laughs, kindly. “I knew you’d like her,” he says.

Rose, if possible, blushes harder.

The General herself stops at Rose’s bedside, after Finn and Poe have vanished to sleep as well. Finn stayed longer than Poe did, giving Rose ample time to tease him about the way Poe’s fingers slid over his shoulder as he walked away, like he couldn’t let go; the way Finn’s eyes followed his back as he walked away. Finn, in turn, teased her for blushing at Rey’s smile. “Not that I don’t get it,” he added, smiling more fondly. “Rey’s something else.”

Rose had only blushed again, harder this time, unable to even say yeah, she is.

Now the General is standing there, hair in her mourning braid, looking at Rose Tico solidly and quietly. “Hello, Rose.”

“General,” Rose says, and scrambles for what to say. “Did you need—”

“No,” the General says. Leia Organa. Rose remembers seeing posters of her as a child, back when she was a part of the government and not the Resistance. She remembers being half in love with the woman on those posters, all brown eyes and soft-looking hair. Paige had teased her ceaselessly for it.

Rose is not half in love, anymore, at least not with the General, but she still cannot speak. The General smiles as if she expected this, but does not exactly enjoy it.

“Good to see you’re doing all right,” she says, and reaches out to pat Rose’s hand. “That was some flying. Reminded me of Luke.”

“Really?” Rose says. She tries to imagine Luke Skywalker’s legacy combined with her own two hands and can’t quite manage it, but the General just smiles and nods.

“Oh, yes,” she says. “You’re all heart, Rose Tico.”

All heart, she thinks. I like that. “I’m sorry about your brother,” she says. The General inclines her head.

“I’m sorry about your sister,” she replies, and the General’s protocol droid, C-3PO, walks up to stand next to her. Rose has seen him before, but he has always been talking about something, fluttering his metal hands like a nervous uncle. It is odd to see him silent, like he has been lately, like other protocol units. She wonders if this is how he mourns.

“Princess,” the droid breaks in, “Master Dameron’s unit, BB-8, has informed me that R2-D2 is once more becoming unresponsive. I believe it would be beneficial to keep this from happening.”

“Oh,” the General says, in surprise, and stands. “Surely you can speak to him, Threepio?”

“He has been asking for you, Princess.”

“That’s odd,” she murmurs, before looking back at Rose. “Duty calls. Keep healing, Rose.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” she says. She receives another pat on her hand in response.

“Call me Leia,” the General says, and smiles at her, and then she’s standing, following C-3PO towards the cockpit of the ship, where the R2 unit is most likely waiting. Rose watches her go and tries to imagine calling the General by her first name.

She can’t quite manage it, but that’s all right. The offer, if nothing else, makes her very happy.

The Falcon is small and cramped, but given the fact that their forces are incredibly diminished, it fits them fairly well. Chewbacca — “Call him Chewie,” Finn suggests, but Rose has a hard time doing so, just like she would have trouble calling the General Leia — spends most of his time in the cockpit, flying quietly and occasionally growling and roaring at the General, who sits in the co-pilot’s seat and murmurs, voice soft, “I know.” Rose does not see much of the cockpit, except when Chewbacca sleeps and Rey takes her turn at the helm of the ship, Poe in her co-pilot’s seat and Rose and Finn sitting behind them, the four of them sometimes talking and sometimes existing in silence. Rey prods Rose and Poe for stories about other planets, about rain and oceans and deep forests. Rose manages to recall nice things about the place where she grew up, the mining town that smelled of dust and ore but had three moons, which sometimes rose together in a straight line, all lifting up over the horizon like ships taking off.

“We had festivals, whenever they lined up,” Rose explains. “The miners would get the day off, since they only happened once every few years. It was good for morale, I guess, but I just remember the way everyone would get excited in town, how people would scrape together the last of their things to exchange gifts and cook good food. There was this one older miner who knew how to play music, and he would play, and people would dance in the field under the moons. Paige and I would go watch.”

“Music,” Rey says softly, glancing back at her. “What kind?”

Rose flounders at the honest longing in her eyes. “I don’t know how to explain music.”

“I know what it is,” Rey says. “Just — what kind?”

“Oh,” Rose says, understanding, “love songs, usually,” and she hums a few gentle stanzas before adding the words. “ My love, meet me under the moons, my love, meet me under the sky, our sorrows are gone, the work is all done, my love, meet me under the sky. ” She watches as Rey smiles softly, keeping her eyes focused backwards, on Rose, letting Poe do the flying. She keeps singing, if only to keep Rey looking like that, soft and unburdened, a girl and not a hero. “My love, meet me under the stars, my love, meet me under the sky, the morning won’t come ‘til we want it to come, my love, meet me under the sky.”

“I like that,” Finn says, and Rey turns her face back to the stars.

“I do, too,” Rose says. “It’s one of my best memories from home.” She reaches up to touch her necklace. “Paige gave me this during one of the festivals. We were older then. I think I was nineteen? She was seventeen, I remember that. She’d been saving her wages for ages to buy it.”

There is a quiet silence, not a sad one, but a silence nonetheless. Rose is the one who eventually breaks it. “What kind of festivals were there on Yavin 4, Poe?”

Poe looks back at her and smiles, then hums thoughtfully, facing forward again. Rose looks at Finn, who is watching him, a smile lift at the curve of his mouth, contentment and gentleness. “No shortage of ‘em, that’s for sure. My mother liked the solstices, though. Dad would make honey cake and Ma would light candles in every room—”

Rose closes her eyes and leans back, and lets their friendship wash over her. She is still healing, she knows, knows it every time she moves and feels the tug of the skin over her stomach. But she has them, and the Resistance will live, and she will not let any of them die like she let Paige.

“Are you all right, Rose?” Rey asks, then, and she opens her eyes to the slightly worried, lightly freckled face of a beautiful girl. She beams without really meaning to and without any ability to stop herself. Rey, looking surprised, smiles back.

“Yeah. Tired, that’s all.”

“Good,” she says, and surprises Rose by reaching out with one hand and resting it on her shoulder, squeezing gently before turning back to the controls.

These are her favorite moments, Rose thinks, and she’s sure they will remain so in the weeks and months to come, when she looks back on them. The four of them in the cockpit of the Falcon, surrounded on all sides by stars, and Rose glowing under the gentle light of Rey’s undiluted attention, her stomach flipping over itself as she watches her steady hands and the slope of her shoulders.

The night sky looks better when it’s reflected in the brown of Rey’s eyes.

“You like her,” Finn says. They’re sitting next to the largest viewport on the Falcon. Poe and Rey are both sleeping, and so is almost everyone else. Their wounds, Rose’s barely-healed stomach and Finn’s scarred back, are keeping them up, and there is nothing else to do besides sit next to the viewport and stare out into the stars and try not to feel so completely swallowed by the tiny ship. They have been here for close to four days. They have an end destination. Poe has explained that to the whole group, in detail; they are going to the abandoned Rebellion base on the moon of a planet called Vulyon. The air is breathable, there are sure to be some semi-functioning ships there, and Vulyon itself is only a few hours’ journey from Bespin, where Cloud City (and more importantly, the General’s allies) lie. The Falcon is a small enough ship that it will not be noticed, and they are a small enough group that gathering resources from allies will not be so difficult.

Still, it is hard to avoid feeling claustrophobic and a little hopeless, which is why she’s here, now, sitting with Finn.

“Yeah,” she says. She does. She likes Rey so much she might die of it, might just lay down one morning and go to sleep for the rest of her life, all the better to dream of Rey’s gentle smile and the way her mouth might feel on Rose’s neck.

Finn hums and nods. He doesn’t tell her she should say anything, which is an unexpected comfort. She wonders if it is because he still has not said anything to Poe, or maybe because he knows the situations are endlessly different and endlessly similar, that they are both wrapped up in longing with little idea of how to pursue it but that Finn is braver, Rose marginally more experienced. She wonders if he lays bets with himself over who will say something first, like she does. Then she wonders if that’s a terrible thing to do.

“When all this is over,” Finn says, “someday, what will you do?”

Rose knows the way a question sounds when a person only asks it because they want to be asked themselves.

“Throw a party,” she says. “Play some love songs. And get everyone to dance.” She reaches up to grip her necklace. “Bury my sister. Use my war-hero influence to stop those stupid mining companies from killing people.” Kiss Rey, she does not say. That sort of thing takes courage that Rose is not sure she has developed. “What about you?”

“I want . . .” Finn breathes out, slowly. “I want to look for the planet I came from. I want to go to it and see if I can — if it can be home again.”

Rose turns that over in her head. “What if it can’t be home?”

“Then I’ll find somewhere else,” he says. “But at least I’ll know.”

She nods. She rests her head on his shoulder, and they watch the stars go by, together.

Even once they land at their new base, Rey continues to sleep in the Falcon, citing discomfort with heavy walls and buildings, and being used to sleeping in ships. No one protests, but Finn goes out there with her and stays until he stumbles, yawning, into the two-bunk room he shares with Poe. She comes inside to eat with them, though, a small smile on her prematurely serious face, her shoulders always straight as a board. Poe and Finn joke with her to try to get them to loosen up, but Rose only asks her questions, over and over and over. “What’s your favorite color,” she asks, smiling when Rey’s eyes turn outside to the forest and she mumbles green, her smile suddenly cracked wider and dimply. “What do you like flying better, the Falcon or an X-Wing,” because Rey has been learning from Poe how to fly them on the old models ever since they got here.

“Both,” Rey says, grinning impishly, “for different reasons,” and bursts into a rush of sentences about how much she likes flying, how the two ships are so different and so similar, how any time she’s in the air she feels endless, weightless, eternal. Rose cups her chin in her hands and watches her. She likes her most like this, filling the room with her presence, forgetting to make herself small. She likes her most like this, excited, with dimples.

And Rey asks her questions back. Her favorite color. (Yellow, but a particular kind, like the earliest traces of sunrise.) Her favorite thing to eat. (Chocolate. Rose is nothing if not predictable.) Her favorite games, songs, stories. Her favorite everythings. Rose answers all the questions she can, talks about her childhood in the mines but also her childhood playing with Paige. Rey tells her about Jakku and the sand and heat and the pilot’s helmet she found in the wreckage once and kept for herself, to play with. The endless tally marks on her walls.

It’s not that all they do is talk, though. They have work to do. Rose is pulled into making the place livable, workable; she and Poe spend a lot of their time fixing pipes and wires, BB-8 rolling around at their feet and beeping at them indignantly in Binary when they do something wrong before swooping in to fix it herself. Finn works with the General, more often than not, doing what she calls recruiting and what he calls spreading rumors; it’s an attempt to convince other Stormtroopers to defect, like he did. It’s been successful already, too, without anyone even trying: a few days after they arrived, an escape pod with three straight-backed, nervous looking people arrived, staring at Finn like like they couldn’t believe their own eyes. They introduced themselves with serial numbers. Finn shook his head and sat them down and started to help them pick names.

(Jade, he told them, Pidge, Lee, Katsa, Cecil, Aira, Liani, Byron, Jo. He tells them endless names and waits for them to choose. One of them has chosen — Lee, a man with dark hair and a hesitant smile, a talent for machinery — the other two are still debating. A name is important, Finn tells them. Pick one you like. Pick one you love. He glances at Poe when he says this, if Poe is in the room.)

Rey spends her days training with a stick, cut to the length of a lightsaber, and meditating under the trees, her legs curled underneath her. Her face goes slack and peaceful, like she’s asleep. When she’s not training, she helps where she can, but Rose remembers her most like this: spinning over the ground in a complicated, un-choreographed dance, spinning the stick in her hands. Sometimes Finn joins her in the meditation, and sometimes he joins her in the lightsaber-training. But what Rose remembers most is Rey, alone, dancing with herself and her imaginary enemies, her eyes focused and distant, something huge and powerful guiding her movements. She does not look at any of them when she does this, even when they slow down to watch her. She doesn't even know they’re there.

Black Squadron arrives on the base about a week after the Falcon does.

Poe’s talking to Finn in the dining hall when they get in range, spinning a spoon between two of his fingers and cautiously flirting, Finn grinning and leaning over the middle and flirting back. Rose has her hands wrapped around a cup of water and she’s laughing at them, but only a little, and not meanly. Their growing relationship is so silent and hesitant that sometimes she has to bite her tongue against really laughing in some misguided attempt to push them forward and into each other. But she doesn’t think either of them have ever felt something close to what they feel for each other — life or death situations and daring rescues seem to do that to a person — so Rose contents herself with playfully rolling her eyes once in a while and waiting it out.

But then someone comes barreling into the dining hall, and calls out, “Commander!”

Poe’s head snaps around, and his back straightens to attention. But whoever it is isn’t bringing them bad news; he’s grinning, like it’s the best news he’s ever had the pleasure to deliver.

“Yeah?” Poe shouts back.

The grin grows wider. “Black Squadron just made contact, sir. They’re due to touch down in—”

Poe is on his feet before the sentence can even end, running towards the door, grabbing Finn and Rose by the hands and tugging them along with him. “Thank you, Captain!” he calls, over his shoulder, at the stranger, who laughs and follows them.

Black Squadron touches down in a parade of X-Wings, just as Poe, Finn and Rose close behind him, rounds the corner into the hangar. BB-8, beeping wildly, rolls right out into the fray, past Poe’s feet to meet three other protocol droids that have already, just as excitedly, left their respective ships. The loud beeps and whirrs fill the room for a second, the Binary too fast for Rose to mentally translate, and Poe laughs, loud and deep. He’s grinning so hard Rose knows his face will hurt later, with a look in his eyes like the rising sun.

“Poe!” a loud voice shouts, and then he’s running forward to crash into a sharp-jawed, pretty woman in an orange flight suit, her hair tucked up into braids and coiled into knots near her ears. “Kriff, Poe, when we heard about everything that happened we all thought—”

“ Jess,” Poe says, and he won’t let go of her, just keeps hugging her, laughing and spinning her around.

“You are the luckiest kriffing bastard alive, ” Jess shouts back at him, her face wide and wild with laughter, and then a third person joins the embrace, a taller man with an uneven smile, taller on one side than on the other.

“You can say that again,” he grins. “How’s it been, Commander?”

“I miss my ship, Snap,” Poe says, “I missed all of you, ” and then he breaks off from Jess to hug him, slapping him on the back about three times before letting go and hugging another, taller woman, with dark skin, light hair, and an easy, slow smile.

“Gettin’ emotional on us, Commander?” she teases, but her knuckles are pale against his shirt. Rose nudges Finn, who nudges her back, his eyes happy and light as clouds.

“‘Course I’m emotional,” Poe shoots back, “none of us are dead, that’s reason enough.”

Jess grins and stands on her toes to look over his shoulder. “Speaking of dead! Finn’s not!”

“You think I’d go and let him die, after all the shit we went through to get him back to the ship?” Poe says, turning and meeting Finn’s eyes. Finn smiles again, in the same light-as-clouds way, and Poe grins back. “Anyway, he’s tough.”

“Nice to see you all again,” Finn says, and receives a hug from Jess and one from Snap in exchange for the greeting. Jess whispers something in his ear that makes him laugh, bent over, straight from the gut. She only winks, in response. Poe looks suddenly pained.

“Don’t listen to a word she says, Finn,” he pleads, and Finn just keeps laughing. Jess turns, hands on her hips, to lock eyes with Rose, and her smile widens.

“A new face! Are you a pilot?”

“Oh, no, I’m a mechanic,” Rose says. “I don’t fly.”

“A mechanic!” Jess says. “Fantastic! We always need those. What’s your name, mechanic?”

Her smile is distinctly flirty. Rose can feel herself getting red.

“Down, girl,” the other woman laughs, resting her elbow on Jess’s shoulder. Jess pouts.

“I’m just being nice, ” she complains. “You didn’t get on Poe’s ass when he was waiting by Finn’s bedside like some kind of holofilm cliche —”

“You waited by my bedside?” Finn says, amused.

“She’s exaggerating,” Poe tells him.

“He slept there,” Snap says.

“Shut up, Snap!”

“I’m Rose Tico,” Rose says, amidst the heckling. Jess and the other woman smile.

“Jessika Pava,” Jess says, “and this is Karé Kun.”

“Nice to meet you,” Rose says.

Jess’s smile becomes less flirty and more soft. “Thanks for looking after Poe. He’s a dumbass, but he’s our dumbass.”

Rose laughs. “I don’t think I had to do much looking after him, but you’re welcome.”

“Seriously, though, Rose,” Karé says, reaching out and clasping her hand between two of her own, “any friend of Poe’s is a friend of ours.” She lets go, and smiles, reaching backwards for Snap’s hand, tangling their fingers easily together. “Now is there any food on this rock? I’m starving.”

Poe is different with the pilots around. Lighter, more willing to joke and laugh and attempt to flick engine oil in Jess’ direction when she bothers him. It’s a more enhanced version of the person Rose already knows, a weight off his shoulders that no one realized was there. Rose starts to spend a fair amount of her time in the hangar with him and the pilots, in the afternoons where Finn is working with the First Order defectors and where Rey is training in her solitary, whirlwind way. There are a lot of ships to be fixed, after all, and Rose has quickly moved up the ranks from just working on pipes to working on engines.

The other pilots are nice, too. Rose never had many friends growing up — it had always been just her and Paige, trying to hard to carve out a place in the galaxy together. Being able to feel as if she’s accomplished that, she’s found her place, and just focusing on fixing ships and making friends is nice.

“Is that her?” Karé asks, one afternoon, nodding at the doorway to to the hangar, where Rey is crouched, talking to BB-8.

“Yeah,” Poe says, easy, lifting a hand to wave.

“She’s the Jedi girl? The one who went off to get trained by Luke Skywalker?” Jess adds, wiping some sweat off her forehead and blatantly staring. Rose frowns. Not at the staring, at the way she’s talking about her, Rey the hero, Rey the Jedi. Which she is — but.

“She’s Rey,” Poe says firmly, shutting down Jess’ line of questioning, just as Rey approaches them.

“Hello,” she says. “BB-8 said you needed another pair of hands.”

“Not as much as you need to stop training for a little while,” Poe says. “C’mon, it’ll do you good to take an hour’s rest.”

Rey scrunches up her face, like she doesn’t agree, but doesn’t protest, either. “All right.”

“Help me with this engine,” Rose offers. “You fixed the Falcon, right? This should be easy.”

“The Falcon was a functional ship,” Rey says, but sits next to her. “This is all in bits.”

“It’s easier that way,” Rose says. “We take them apart to find out what pieces are missing.” She glances back at Poe, and sees Karé and Jess sharing an awed, excited look over Poe’s head. Something about it rubs her the wrong way, uncomfortably, even though Rey can’t see them do it. Rey has been just Rey for so long now to Rose that, despite knowing full well and believing in Rey’s capacity for heroism, it’s no longer the first thing she thinks when she sees her.

Rey gives her a dimpled, private smile over all the pieces of the engine, and Rose tries to put her irritation aside. “I think it’s the compressor that’s missing from this one,” Rey says.

“Okay,” Rose tells her. “Let’s find one.”

Despite attempts to get Rey to slow down, she trains and trains and trains. Rose allows herself, every once in a while, to leave her own duties, to come out and watch as Rey spins on her heels and twirls her stick in the air, fighting dozens of invisible people, breathing hard but steady.

The thing about Rey is that she has beauty made up of sharp angles and soft glances and roiling, dangerous energy — dangerous not because she is cruel or unthinking but because there is so much of it, because every bone in her body seems to rattle sometimes with her desire to run and run and never stop. Rey can be on the move for hours and have no need of rest, or so it seems to Rose in those early days, those weeks just after they move to the new base. Rey trains, and trains, and trains. She never stops. She makes herself into a whirlwind, a powerhouse the size of a girl, and Rose watches her from the doorway.

Rey’s arms stay strong, her shoulders stay straight, and her rare, sunlit, dimpled smiles stay private and gentle, like they’re only meant for the eyes of her friends. But Rose watches her train, and an unfamiliar, protective feeling burrows into her gut, and stays there, leaving her to figure out what to do with it.

“Do you feel the Force, too?” Rose asks Finn one afternoon. It’s one of the rarest days of all: when their breaks align, and they can take a moment together, sitting and watching as Rey trains. “Like she does?”

Finn has been joining her once and a while, in her training, but he is not as focused on it as she is, preferring to spend the majority of his time with the First Order defectors, who have almost all chosen names and are becoming more and more numerous. What was once three scared ex-stormtroopers in a stolen escape pod is now Lee, and Kiri, and Lexa; Creel and Oscar and Liani. There are still two without names, one from the original group of three. She tries on different names every day, hunting for one that sounds right in her mouth. Finn details their progress at lunches like an enthusiastic brother.

“I feel it,” he says, humming to himself in thought, “but it’s different than what she feels, I think. It’s different for everyone, that’s what Leia said.”

“Do you want to be a Jedi?”

“I want to fight for us,” Finn says. “If that’s the best way, then yes, I want to be a Jedi. I want to do whatever I can, whatever will help the most.”

Rose nods. She thinks of Rey’s quiet determination, the way she swings the stick hard and fast and without mercy, Poe’s loop-de-loops and calm voice, Finn’s endlessly tactical mind and strength. They are, all of them, becoming soldiers, if they weren’t already. She thinks of the stories she has heard of Jedi: embracing the light side of the Force. To do that, surely they must embrace love, hope, family; it must not all be violence and detachment and meditation. Rey is trying, she thinks, to reach something that she does not understand with methods that she understands even less. “Maybe it means something different now, to be a Jedi,” she says to Finn. “Something different than it did.”

Finn hums in agreement. “I hope so. I think — I think Ren has made the Sith mean something different. I think it has to change, to match him. To stop him.”

“Rey said he wants to burn the past down.”

Finn doesn’t ask when Rey told her that, or why. It’s just another of the thousand things that has come up during their conversations. He only nods. “We have to embrace it, I think,” he says. “Know our past and understand it. That’s — that’s hard for her. She wants to forget Jakku.”

“it must be hard for you, too.”

“Nah,” he says. “It’s — I don’t know how to explain it, like, it’s something I walked away from.” She knows he’s talking about the First Order, how they took him and trained him and nearly killed him again and again and again. “It’s something they did to me and I didn’t let them keep doing. It’s — I let it make me strong.” He laughs. “Otherwise I think I wouldn’t be able to breathe, most of the time.”

“Finn,” she starts, her stomach churning, but he shakes his head at her, grinning.

“It’s not like that,” he says, “I’m not — I’m not hurting from it. They did it and I got out. I walked away. I spit in their kriffing faces. That’s what it means, to know your past, I think. You have to understand what happened to you and understand that you can stop it from making you a bad person.”

“I don’t think you could ever be a bad person.”

“Good’s something you choose, Rose,” he says. “It’s not something you are, not really. Just like bad’s something you choose. And I chose the Resistance and Poe and Rey and you. I chose to do something good.”

“I’m glad you did,” she says, because what do you say when someone tells you something like that? Finn smiles at her, cheerful and unburdened. She smiles back, and stands, offering him a hand. He takes it and pulls himself up.

“Rey,” she calls, and Rey twitches as if she’s waking from a deep sleep, looking over at them slowly. “We’re going to get some dinner. You coming?”

It’s a no-so-subtle reminder to stop, break, breathe. Rose has found herself administering these reminders to Rey, more often than not. Poe and Finn remember to pause, to eat, to sleep, to laugh. But Rey lets her too-straight shoulders carry her into a place where the rest of them cannot follow, and Rose has begun to casually (carefully) pull her back.

“Oh,” Rey says. “Yes. Right.” She blinks once, then twice, then shakes her head. It only adds to the illusion that she’s just waking up.

“Come on,” Rose says, extending her hand to Rey, this time, and smiling when the other girl walks over to her and takes it. “I’m hungry.”

“Lead the way,” Rey says, and smiles her relaxed, dimpled smile again. They step forward. Rose does not let go of her hand, and Rey does not let go, either. Finn is walking on Rose’s other side, and they start talking about the upcoming mission to Cloud City, and Rey does not let go of Rose’s hand, and they reach the dining hall, and Rey does not let go of Rose’s hand. They sit down next to Poe, who is sitting with Karé and Snap. Rey does not let go.

When they do eventually break apart to eat their meals, Rose feels bereft, cold. She wonders if Rey does, too.

Does it mean to her what it means to me, Rose has asked herself, many times, the gentle reminders to stop and rest, the hand-holding, the smiles with dimples. Does Rey know? Does she care? Does her heart beat in double-time when Rose looks at her?

It’s hard to tell, sometimes, but if rebellions are built on hope, than this can be too, Rose thinks. Hope that Rey looks at her and smiles and means it, hope that her hands are just as cold without Rose’s in them as Rose’s are without hers. Hope that she knows, and cares, and that her breath sticks in her throat when Rose talks to her.

Rose has heard so many people saying Rey is their hope, now, after the loss of Luke Skywalker, Rey in her straight-shouldered, determined glory, knocking Poe down every time in their matches, training at all hours outside in the sun. A Jedi and a hero. It makes her a stranger when people talk about her like that, like she’s already a legend, like she’s a story. Rose is so glad she learned Rey the person first, instead of Rey the Jedi and Rey the hero and Rey the warrior. She knows it is inevitable that Rey fade into storybooks and history and legend, but she had always thought they would have more time, enough to laugh at them and enough to prove them wrong. As it is, Rose just wants to go around the base and shake people by the shoulders and tell them that Rey has soft eyes and dimples and she laughs like an idiot when Poe does imitations of Hux across their dinner table, that Rey is warm and gentle despite her strong arms and shoulders, that Rey is gorgeous and human.

Rey the person is so much easier to love, and Rose does, Rose does.

“The four of you are going to Cloud City,” the General says, three weeks after they arrive at the base. They have spent those weeks making it livable, rebuilding, trading parts, calling to allies. Some have arrived, now that the threat of the First Order is not so immediately at the door. Some have not arrived. Poe, Rose knows, is just happy to have X-Wings again, happy to have the other pilots around. She watched him fly up in one a few days ago, laughing like a child. Finn had watched, next to her, endless softness in his eyes; Rey had snorted and challenged him to a race. Then Finn had bet twenty credits that Rey would win, and Rose had taken it, and Poe had acted all falsely offended and —

Well. None of that now, Rose thinks, because they’re going to Cloud City. It is impossible to forget that they’re in the middle of a war, but sometimes Rose finds herself forgetting that they all must fight in it, that they do not have the luxury of too much preparation or rest.

“I have different tasks for each of you,” the General continues. “Rey — there are documents and texts that I’ve stored there, that I need you to retrieve. They’re being held by Lando Calrissian—”

Here, Poe’s eyes widen. “ The Lando Calrissian?”

“Keep it in your pants, Dameron,” Rey mumbles under her breath, to Rose, who giggles.

“Yes,” the General says, rolling her eyes, “ the Lando Calrissian. Rose, I’m going to need you to talk to him. Give him this, from me, and tell him he’s one of the last people I could call on. Tell him we need his help and his resources.” She hands Rose a small disc, likely containing a holo-message. “And tell him that Leia misses him.” She smiles, and it’s a sad, small smile, but a real one. Rose takes the disc and wraps her hands around the General’s, carefully, holding on for a moment before stepping back.

The General smiles at her. “Poe, Finn, I’m going to need you to visit one of my other allies in the city. Just do your best to be convincing. Get all the support and resources you can so we can begin rebuilding the resistance.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Finn says. She smiles at him, too.

“Be careful,” she adds, “and may the Force be with you.”

With so few people and so little time, there is no reason for prolonged goodbyes, but Chewbacca hugs Rey and Finn tightly anyway.

“ Lando Calrissian ,” Poe says, for maybe the third time. “Kriffin’ hell.”

Finn rolls his eyes at Rose, who rolls hers back. The four of them are in a transport ship, more subtle than the Falcon for traveling, but Rose finds that she misses the four of them in the tiny cockpit, trading stories.

This ship only needs one pilot, though, and Poe is doing an admirable job, leaving Rey to sit next to Rose, their arms pressed together and brushing as the ship moves. Rose is trying to pretend this isn’t happening, so she won’t freak out about it. That can come later.

“I’ve never heard of him,” Rey admits, softly. Just to Rose. Rose wonders if this is to avoid Poe hearing and launching into a speech about what, exactly, makes Lando Calrissian so great, which he will inevitably attempt to disguise as admiration despite all four of them knowing he probably had a crush on him at age ten.

“He was a friend of Han Solo’s,” Rose tells her. “He fought with the Rebellion.” She tries to remember the history lessons on the holopads that would be passed around back home, from person to person, after a hard day’s work. Knowledge that was not exactly forbidden, just hard to come by, and precious. “He went back to Bespin, after, to Cloud City, and he’s a leader there. I don’t know much else about him.”

“He betrayed them,” Finn says, just as softly. “He sold them to Vader to protect his city, and then he — something happened to Solo, I think, and he switched sides again.”

“Huh,” Rey says. “And the General trusts him to help us now?”

“Guess so,” Rose says.

“Well,” Rey says, “let’s hope she’s right.”

Her arm stays pressed against Rose’s, warm in the chilly ship. Rose smiles.

“Oh,” Rose says, softly, once they land. She’s looking out the viewport at the city, all white and steel. It looks very clean, but it reminds her uncomfortably of Canto Blight, of decadence and decay. Rose does not belong in places like this, nor does she really want to.

“Huh,” Finn says.

“Yeah,” Rey says. “It’s not what I expected, either.”

There’s a man standing there, waiting for them. He’s tall, with dark skin and a full, greying mustache; his shoulders covered by a ocean-blue cape. The cape is fastened with gold at his throat.

Rose does not know if she likes him, or not. He has kind eyes, but she has learned not to trust people who dress like they have money.

Rey steps forward.

“Are you Lando Calrissian?” she asks. He nods. She extends her hand to shake, and he bows over it, kissing the back briefly before stepping back.

“And you must be Rey,” he says. “It’s a pleasure.”

She stands up straighter, if that’s possible; Rose knows the signs of Rey’s discomfort, and steps forward, but Calrissian seems to realize, too, and moves back a bit farther.

“Apologies,” he says. “I forget I’m not still dealing with princesses.”

“It’s all right,” Rey says. “I forget I’m not dealing with Jakku traders.”

He laughs. “Jakku, huh? A desert wasteland, like Luke’s home planet. Bet he thought that was funny.”

Rey smiles, quick and soft. “This is Finn,” she introduces, “a former member of the First Order who defected to help our cause. He’s been with the resistance for three months now. This is Commander Poe Dameron, one of the Resistance’s best pilots, and this is Rose Tico, our resident engineer.” BB-8 beeps indignantly, and Rey smiles again. “And BB-8, of course.”

Rose remembers her murmuring these same introductions to herself in the days before their mission began, practicing, not wanting to let the General down. Remembers suggesting Rey practice on her, but the two of them laughing too much to make it worthwhile.

“It’s a pleasure to meet all of you,” Calrissian says. “Come into my office and we can talk.”

Rose still does not know if she trusts him or even if she likes him, this history-book figure that she has never met, but Rey and Finn move forward, and so she does, too.

“Cloud City is a neutral zone,” is the first thing that Calrissian tells them. “We’ve had to rebuild ourselves, after the fall of the Republic. I can’t afford to give help to either side. All our resources need to stay with us.”

Rey opens her mouth, then closes it, as if she doesn’t know how to respond.

“What exactly do you mean by neutral, ” Rose finds herself saying.

“What it sounds like.”

“It can mean different things,” Rose points out. “Do you mean neutral as in I won’t help anyone, because my city needs it more? Or do you mean neutral as in both sides are welcome? I don’t know about the rest of my friends, here, but I’d really rather not walk outside and come face to face with General Hux.”

“The first one,” Calrissian says. “No one from the First Order is welcome here. Officially, no one from the Resistance is, either, but that one gets bent a bit more often. It’s not that people aren’t sympathetic, we just can’t spare—”

“Yeah,” Finn says, and raises an eyebrow. “You sure look like you’re struggling.”

BB-8 whirs closer and then says Good one, Human-Finn, in Binary. Poe ducks his chin to hide a smile.

“Look,” Calrissian sighs, and sits down at a small desk. “I know I must sound like a dick. But we’re rebuilding. We need to focus on that. I can offer you some rooms to stay in, and a place that won’t be visited by any First Order soldiers, and a place to do your canvassing and recruiting among the visitors we get — who are all pretty well off, and could give you something. Knowing Leia, I’m sure she’s pointed you in the right direction regarding that. But I can’t spare any ships or weapons or soldiers in my city. They’re needed here.”

“Mr. Calrissian—” Rose starts, but he holds up a hand.

“Lando,” he corrects. “Please.”

“All right,” she says. “Lando. You have to realize that staying neutral in this kind of a situation — it’s not the right thing to do.”

“Not the right thing to do,” he repeats, and folds his hands on top of the desk. “And what is the right thing to do, Rose? I do what I can, here, to put roadblocks in the way of the First Order, but there’s not much I can do while keeping my city out of it. Last time we got dragged in, and I don’t want that happening again.”

“The Resistance is dying,” Rose says, and looks him in the eye. She thinks of Rey’s straight shoulders and Poe’s easy charisma and Finn’s earnest brown eyes, and wonders why she, of all people, decided to speak up. Then she remembers what she told Finn, just after flying her ship in his way. Just after saving his life. “It’s not just about hurting the First Order, Lando. It’s about using your resources and your power to save the things you love, the things you care about.” She thinks of Paige, then, her sister, bright-eyed and too kriffing young. “The General’s already lost her son and her husband and her brother. She needs your help to protect the things she loves. Giving her that help — that’s the right thing to do.”

“Han’s dead?” This has rattled him. “He’s actually—”

“He died confronting Kylo Ren,” Rey says. There’s something harsh and distant in her voice, something that makes Finn’s hand close comfortingly over her wrist. Rose watches as she twists out of his grip, as she straightens her shoulders. “I couldn’t — there was no time.”

Calrissian’s face is ashen. “No,” he says. “I — sometimes there isn’t.” He looks at his hands. “Han’s dead,” he says, again, softly. “And Luke, too — kriff .”

Seeing him like that makes Rose take a step back, uneasy. It feels wrong, pressing him for ships and weapons and soldiers, when he’s so clearly trying not to cry. Han’s dead. She thinks of Paige again, thinks of the stomach-wrenching fear of losing Rey or Finn or Poe.

Finn’s hand wraps around Rose’s wrist, this time. She gives him a grateful look. “We didn’t mean to spring it on you,” he says. “We’ll — we’ll give you some time.”

They’re at the door when he looks up.

“No,” he says. “If Han’s really dead, if Luke—” His voice cracks, and none of them know what to say. “I’ll come back with you, and see Leia, and we’ll go from there.”

Rose still doesn’t know what to say, but Rey steps forward, her eyes compassionate. “Thank you, Lando,” she says. “We’ll leave you be.”

“Oh!” Rose says, and hastily pulls the General’s message port from her pocket. “This is from the Gen — I mean, from Leia. She said you would want to see it.” She lays it carefully on the desk. “For whenever you want to look.”

Lando looks up at her and nods, and she sees a shadow of the man he was before all this, before he was the sole person responsible for a city, before his friends left him alone. “Thank you,” he says. “Rose.”

“No,” she says. “Please don’t thank me. Not for bringing you such bad news.”

“Thank you for the rest of it, then,” he says, and gives her a watery smile. “Your rooms should be a few doors down. My protocol droid will show you.”

The rooms, like the rest of Cloud City, are white and clean and look like they’re meant for rich people. Rose can hear Poe, next door, whistling. It’s muffled through the wall, but the thump when one of them lies down on their bed is clear as day, as is the sequence of irritable beeps from BB-8 as she calls out for attention. Rose smiles reflexively, and turns to Rey, hoping she’ll share in the joke.

Rey isn’t laughing, though. Her face is curiously blank and cold, carved out of stone. Rose moves a step closer to her, cautiously, and Rey does not appear to notice. She’s staring out the viewport of the room, into the endless, sundrenched clouds.

“Rey,” Rose says, softly, and touches her wrist. It feels monumental, to touch her; worthy of legends and stories and songs. Not the kind that people back on the base make up about Rey, the kind that they tell about the General and her husband, about hands finding each other in the darkness. Then Rey moves away, and smiles at her, a stone-carved, half-smile. No dimples, no warmth. Rose’s chest grows tight.

“You should get some rest,” Rey says, and Rose feels like she’s missed a crucial part of the conversation.

“Are you all right?” she tries, and Rey’s smile only grows stiffer and falser.

“I’m fine,” she says, and heads to the door.

“Where are you going?” Rose says, and Rey looks back at her for a moment.

“I’m going to look around,” she says, and something else about it rings false, to Rose’s ears, but not enough that she can put her finger on why. “Don’t worry about me.”

The door closes with a soft whoosh behind her, like a sigh, and Rose stares at it for a few seconds, chest growing steadily tighter. She can hear the faint sounds of Poe and Finn talking, from a room over; Finn’s laugh ringing out, sweet and low. BB-8 beeps out an affirmative to whatever’s been said. They sound happy, she thinks, but where she would normally feel affection she can only feel sorrow.

Rose wraps her arms around herself, and sits down on one of the too-soft beds to wait.

Rey slips back into the room hours later, splashing her face with water in the attached fresher and lying down on her bed. Rose keeps her eyes tightly shut until Rey has gotten under the covers, and then opens them, intending to ask her again if she’s all right, to see if she might want to talk about it —

But Rey’s back is to her, and the warm room suddenly feels so cold.

Rose sighs, too soft for Rey to hear, and closes her eyes again.

It is interesting that being without Rey’s warmth for a moment had made Rose understand how much she adored it. Her love for Rey has been building so slowly, a compilation of the months and weeks and days they have spent together, small moments of Rey’s smile and her eyes and the way she looks swinging her staff through the air. It is Rey dancing with herself and looking gorgeous while she does it. Rose has let that love grow, and now it tugs at her stomach and chest, makes itself known in little ways.

She loves Rey for more than just her smile and her eyes, though, which is the most difficult part; how undeniably Rey has fit into Rose’s heart, how horrible the idea is of letting her remove herself again.

If that’s what Rey wants, of course Rose can’t stop her, but she wants things too, and what she wants most of all is to have to courage to bridge this gap between them, to cross the room and press her hand to Rey’s face, to tell her I’m here, I’m not leaving, I never will. I want to love you. I want you to let me.

For Rey to press her mouth to Rose’s, feverish and warm. To be kissed like Rey is starving, like her feelings match the intensity of the ones curled in Rose’s chest. To be let in.

Rose wants so badly to be let in, to play more than just a role of friendship in Rey’s life. For Rey to tell her secrets and for Rose to tell hers, for Rey’s hands on her hips, for the sex and the emotion and everything that either of them have to offer, doled out on a platter. This is me, she wants to say. This is everything I am, and everything I am loves you. She wants Rey to say it back; she wants beds to rattle and hearts to swell.

It’s selfish, she thinks. Everyone else asks so much from Rey already.

It’s selfish, but love is selfish too. Selfish and selfless all at once. She wants what Rey wants and she wants what she wants. If they’re lucky, that will end up being the same thing.

If not — greater people than Rose have been in love and had to deal with it.

She laughs to herself a little — it’s so dramatic, what would Paige say — and rolls over to go to sleep.

Finn is in the room when she wakes the next morning. He and Rey are hunched over a holopad, bodies curved toward each other like parentheses and sitting on Rey’s unmade bed. Rose watches them for a second before yawning and sitting up.

Finn grins at her. “We were gonna wake you soon,” he says. She nods and yawns again. “Some beds, huh?”

“They’re too soft for me,” she admits, and he laughs, full-bodied.

“That’s how I felt when I first came to the Resistance,” he tells her. Rey shifts in her spot next to him. She is not smiling, not like the two of them are.

“Morning,” Rose says, looking at her carefully.

“Morning,” Rey murmurs back. “We got the texts that Leia sent us for.” Her eyes skitter away from Rose’s face, and Rose feels that confused hollowness creeping back into her chest again.

“Okay,” she says, because at least Rey is talking. That’s a start. She still doesn’t know why she acted the way she did the night before, but she knows that questioning her too much will just make her close herself off again. Maybe it would help if Rose just pretended things were okay, if she let Rey ask for help by herself. “What do they say?”

“They’re interesting!” Finn says, eyes flicking between the two of them but evidently deciding not to say anything about their weird silence. “Most of them are about the Jedi. I think Luke Skywalker might have written them.”

Rose crosses to Rey’s bed and peers down at the holopad that’s between Finn and Rey. It mostly contains words she doesn’t recognize in Common, like ataru and makashi, but each unfamiliar word is labeled as some sort of form, and with the accompanying illustrations it’s easy to discern that the author was explaining different lightsaber techniques and fighting styles. Rose stares down at it, attempting to keep her face mildly interested instead of afraid, because with every step Rey and Finn take towards becoming Jedi, the more she realizes the danger that they’re in.

“Huh,” she says, and lies, “you’re right, that is pretty interesting.”

Rey traces a circle on the rumpled sheets with her index finger. “I think Niman is the most effective,” she says, mostly to Finn, but glancing up at Rose as if making sure to include her. “It’s the simplest to learn, according to this, and we don’t have much time.”

“This says it’s best for dual wielding,” Finn points out. “We don’t even have one lightsaber between us, much less two. I think we should try to figure out the first form, the most basic one, and go from there.”

Rey grits her teeth. “That one’s not effective against other lightsabers, and I think—”

“But it is good on a battlefield,” Finn points out. “And that’s where you and I will be, most of the time. It’s not all going to be fighting Ren.”

Rose turns away and tunes them out, looking instead at the other holopads on the table. There are five, counting the one Rey and Finn are fighting over, and she looks at them one by one, skimming over other elements of Jedi training, like blaster-bots (small circular droids that hover in the air and fire short blasts at people, blasts that they are meant to deflect with the Force) and meditation. Half of her is happy that Rey will have something to do, something to study and implement, besides her endless battles with herself. Maybe this additional information will help to calm her somehow, to make her feel like she’s moving forward rather than standing still. A larger part of Rose is terrified, though, and doesn’t want Rey to be in any more danger than she has been already.

The last holopad is smaller and appears older than the rest. Rose checks the signature code absently, and raises her eyebrows when it does not read Luke Skywalker .

“Hey,” she calls to Rey and Finn, “who’s Obi-Wan Kenobi?”

Rey’s eyes widen. “Give me that,” she says, half-demanding and half-begging, holding out her hand. Rose is too confused by the reaction to do anything besides hand it to her. “He was Master Luke’s first teacher, he — he knew Anakin Skywalker when he was young, he trained him. He trained Master Luke, too.” She worries at her lip, staring down at the holopad like it holds a galaxy’s worth of secrets. “He didn’t speak of him much, but I knew he lost him when he was still young, and he — he cared very deeply for him.”

Finn looks over her shoulder as she opens it, and both their eyes widen, almost in one movement. “Oh,” he says, softly.

“This explains how to build lightsabers,” Rey says, just as quietly. Wondrously. “No wonder Leia wanted us to come find it. This must be the only set of instructions for that left in the world.”

“In the universe,” Finn agrees, then, to Rose’s surprise, turns the holopad around so she can see it. “Rose, could you build something like this?”

She looks at the schematic, spread out over the screen and backlit by an unassuming blue light. “I could,” she says, slowly. “If I had the materials.” She isn’t an engineer, not exactly, but she’s a mechanic, and she can fix things with instructions. Surely with help, and with the supplies, it wouldn’t take too long. Rey could help, too, she’s got a deft hand with tools. Not to mention the engineers on base —

She looks back at them. Finn looks excited, but Rey just looks distant again; contemplative. Rose twists her fingers together and asks the only question she can think of.

“What colors would you want?”

Rey looks up, and smiles the first real smile that Rose has seen from her all morning. She remembers asking Rey her favorite color and watching her turn outside, to the jungle and the trees, and smile just like this.

“Green,” Rey says, and Rose feels the weight in her stomach vanish. They’re okay.

Before they can talk about it more, Poe appears with BB-8, rapping his knuckles against the doorframe. “Ready to go talk to the people, Finn?”

“Ugh,” Finn says, and stands. “No. I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”

“The First Order sucks bantha balls,” Poe suggests. Finn glares at him.

BB-8 beeps, It appears you are not being helpful, Master Poe.

“Sure, fine, take his side, like you always do,” Poe teases, and BB-8 zips back and forth across the floor and makes indignant noises as Finn stands and shrugs into his jacket. Rose laughs, and lets her eyes drift back across the room to Rey, who is smiling again. Rose smiles back, and Rey looks surprised, her own face softening.

Poe and Finn keep talking on the way out of the room, BB-8 cheerfully rolling around at their heels and whirring at them. Rey doesn’t look away from Rose’s face, and she feels her cheeks get hot at the attention.

“What are we gonna do while they’re gone?” Rose says, and crosses the room to sit next to her, knocking her shoulder with her own and smiling.

“We could look around,” Rey suggests, and knocks her back. Her smile is relieved, happy. “I’ve never been someplace like this before. It’s beautiful.”

Rose swallows down the affection that wells in her throat, deep and heavy. “All right, then,” she says, and extends a hand, shakes off her disappointment when Rey grasps it to stand and then instantly lets go. “All this Jedi stuff can wait a few hours, right?”

“Right,” Rey says. “A few hours.”

If there is hesitance in her voice, Rose does not notice it.

Rose still does not like beautiful things that are only beautiful in order to hide decadence and wealth, but even she has to admit that seeing the world through Rey’s eyes makes this feeling different. Rey can dismantle things in her mind in a way that Rose has never been quite able to do, can see beauty despite what that beauty might potentially be hiding. In Cloud City, her eyes widen and stay that way.

“It is nice,” Rose admits, knocking their shoulders together and smiling. Rey smiles back.

“I like it,” she agrees. “But I like home more.”

“Jakku?” Rose asks, raising an eyebrow. She might love Rey, but why anyone would prefer Jakku to anything is a mystery to her.

“No, of course not,” Rey scoffs. “The base, with all of you.”

“Oh, good,” Rose teases. “I thought you’d lost it for a second.”

Rey laughs, and then sobers. They’re standing on a steel bridge that overlooks a kind of a town square, or marketplace, and her eyes are slowly growing distant as she looks out over it. Rose has been looking, too, mostly at Finn and Poe, who are sitting out in front of a shop and discussing something earnestly with someone that Rose has never seen before. No one has drawn any weapons yet, though, which is a good sign. She looks back at Rey.

“Do you ever think about how many people there are in the universe?” Rey says, softly. Rose walks up until she’s standing just next to her, their arms brushing. “I mean, even just here, in this city. There’s so many people.”

“Yeah,” Rose admits, “sometimes.”

“It was different on Jakku,” Rey says. “I saw the same people every day. It was easy to forget how — how big it all is. How many lives are held in the balance.”

“And now?”

“Now I can feel it, when I focus,” Rey says. Her hands tighten on the railing of the bridge. “Through the Force. Now I can’t forget.”

“Is that a good or a bad thing?” Rose asks her.

“I don’t know,” Rey says. “Good, I think.” She looks beautiful. She always looks beautiful, but here, backlit by the white of Cloud City, she stands out in her tan clothing like a beacon for Rose’s eyes to follow. “It’d be irresponsible, wouldn’t it? To forget how much is riding on this.”

“I guess so,” Rose says. She allows herself to shift closer, so their arms are pressed together instead of just brushing. Rey doesn’t move away, but she doesn’t look at her, either, eyes still scanning the crowd like she’s searching for something.

“Hey,” Rose says, cautiously. “Are you okay?”

Rey stares into the distance for a moment more, not seeming to realize Rose had even spoken, before she shakes her head.

“I’m going to go back to the room,” she says, giving Rose a quick smile that doesn’t look insincere, just rushed. “I want to look at those holopads a bit more.”

“Do you want me to come with?” Rose offers, turning around so her back is pressed against the railing, her body angled towards Rey’s. “I don’t mind.”

“Oh, no, it’s okay,” Rey says. “Just — I don’t want to stop you having fun.”

“I already said I don’t mind,” Rose says, and touches her arm. She doesn’t want to make that strange, tense silence from last night crop up again, but she doesn’t want to wander this place on her own, either. Rey doesn’t appear to take offense, though, so that’s good. Maybe she can ask about last night, later, after Rey’s looked over the holopads a bit more. Finn and Poe are sure to be a while.

“All right,” Rey says, another quick smile flashing over her face. “It’ll probably be boring, though.”

Rose falls asleep again before Finn and Poe get back, and she never gets a chance to talk to Rey, because the other girl is absorbed in the holopads for hours, her head bent over them and her mouth moving silently as she reads every word. Their silence is more balanced, though, more deliberately quiet than awkward, and Rey shakes her awake the next morning with a teasing smile, so Rose writes the night off as a miscommunication and decides not to think about it too hard.

Lando Calrissian, true to his word, comes back with them to the base.

“Leia,” is the first thing he says to the General, and then they’re embracing each other tightly, the General leading him off to a quiet corner so they can talk. Their faces are drawn tight with emotion, their hands gripping each other’s on top of the table between them and refusing to let go. Rose watches them for a minute, sadness tugging at her stomach, before she turns her attention to Poe, efficiently and quietly instructing the rest of the room to continue going about their work and slipping into the General’s vacated position as easily as putting on a helmet. Finn grins at him, some mix between proud and besotted.

He steps down easily, almost eagerly, when the General returns to her post, and she thanks him with a pat on the shoulder. He leans down to tell her something, softly, and she nods.

“I’ll meet with the four of you later,” she says, “I have to debrief with him first,” indicating Calrissian, who gives her a half smile and a two-fingered salute. “1900 hours?” she adds, to Poe, who nods.

“Should work,” he says. “I’d better get back to my X-Wing and the kids.” He’s been training newbies recently, in between shifts cleaning and rebuilding the base. He enjoys it more than Rose thinks he admits — he’s always jokingly complaining about the ‘kids’ he’s teaching to tell one end of an X-Wing from another, but his smile is always soft when he does so. Jessika teases him about the way they so clearly look up to him, knocking his shoulder with her own until he laughs and shoves her back. But it’s true, really. And the leadership suits Poe, who, when given time, becomes fierce and protective, willing to do almost anything to make sure someone he cares about gets out of something alive.

He grins at the three of them, claps Finn on the shoulder, and then he’s out the door. Finn moves into his own position, which for the past few weeks has involved tailing the General and learning more about how structure and command works in the Resistance. (Now that the base is functioning, and is as well built as they can make it, he’s learning everything else — the General seems to think he has potential, too, because he’s been discussing things like tactics and strategy and high-level, command concepts that Rose knows he’s enjoying, despite the fact that it’s a war.) Rey scans the room for a second, clearly antsy, and steps forward.

Rose almost wants to put a hand on her arm, to stop her, but she doesn’t.

“Leia,” she says, her voice low and urgent.

“Rey,” the General says. “Later.”

“No, we need to — the holopad you gave me, the information on there—”

“Which we will discuss later,” the General repeats.

“But the lightsaber schematics!” Rey says. “It’s important — no, not even that, it’s crucial that we get functioning lightsabers as quickly as possible—”

“Rey,” the General says, in her quiet, no-nonsense way. “I promise we will discuss it. There’s no way you can leave right this second, so leave it alone. ”

Rey’s face tightens, frustrated, but then she nods, breathing out slowly, and leaves the room. Finn looks after her, worried, but doesn’t leave his post, only catching Rose’s eye and shrugging.

She sighs, a barely-there sound, and then nods her own goodbye to the General and follows Rey out the door.

“Rey.”

There’s only silence, Rey’s shoulders tight and straight in front of her. She’s walking so fast that Rose can hardly keep up, with her shorter legs.

“ Rey. ”

“Can you just leave it!” she snaps, and then stops, winces, closes her eyes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

“It’s okay,” Rose says, and cautiously moves forward to touch her wrist. “It’s just an afternoon, Rey.”

“It’s not!” she says, and whirls around, beginning to pace. “It’s not, Rose, it’s — it’s just another setback. And I know Leia doesn’t mean it like that but — this needs to be done. ”

“She’s trying to protect you,” Rose points out. “You can’t go alone. ”

“Why not?” Rey asks, crossing her arms over her chest. “I went to Luke alone.”

“You went to Luke with Chewbacca,” Rose corrects. “And you had an end goal, which was meeting him there. Once you arrived, you weren’t going to be alone. This would be different.”

“It shouldn’t matter, that I go alone,” Rey says softly. “It shouldn’t matter . That’s so unimportant, I need to get those materials before—”

“It’s not unimportant,” Rose says, her voice tight. “ Stars, Rey, are you listening to yourself? It’s one afternoon! We just went on a mission, we need time to breathe—”

“It wasn’t a difficult mission!” Rey counters.

“That’s not the point! This one would be. Kylo Ren has a lightsaber! You can’t possibly think he doesn’t know how to make them, doesn’t know where the materials are, what planets, what places on those planets — and they all know that your lightsaber broke. Don’t you think the First Order is smart enough to know you’re going to need a new one?”

Rey turns away from her, and the silence between them is furious. Rose feels like she’s shattered something, thrown it on the ground with a kind of recklessness that she didn’t know she possessed.

“ Rey, ” she tries, insistently. “There’s no harm in being careful.”

“I know there isn’t,” Rey snaps. “I know how dangerous it is. But it still needs to be done. If we wait, it only gives him more time to prepare.”

“If you run in blind, you’ll die .”

“You don’t know that,” Rey says, furious and firey, and stalks off down the hall. “Rose, you don’t know anything about this,” she adds, over her shoulder, and it’s that sudden moment of bitterness that stops Rose from following. Her shoulders are tall and uninviting and Rose knows she would not be welcomed if she went after her, either way. So she only watches as Rey turns the corner, vanishing to — to wherever not-quite-Jedi go to sulk after an argument with a friend. That is, if Rey even plans on sulking. From what Rose knows of her, she is much more likely to vanish into the forest surrounding the base and train furiously until she cannot remember her anger.

Rose glares after her, and goes to her own post.

“So she just left? That’s not like Rey,” Jessika says, at lunch. Finn has not left the General’s side, yet, and Poe is sitting next to Snap and eating like he hasn’t seen food in days, which Rose knows cannot be true, because she ate breakfast with him just five hours ago.

“Well,” Rose says. “There might have been some — words. Exchanged. Between us, I mean. Before she left.”

Jessika raises an eyebrow.

Rose sighs. “I told her she was being reckless,” she says. “And that if she went off into space with no plan and no help, she’d die. She told me I didn’t understand anything about the mission or how important it was or whatever. Then she walked off.”

Poe stares at them across the table. “Wow,” he says. “Now that’s really not like her.”

Rose sighs again, softer.

“She’s angry,” Jess guesses. “She wants to do something, not just sit here. My brother Matti is the same way, he feels useless when he’s sitting still, and he hates feeling useless.”

“That’s no excuse,” Rose grumbles, stabbing at her food with more force than is strictly necessary. They still have to debrief with the General tonight, which she is not looking forward to, both because they will inevitably discuss this mission and because she will have to see Rey again, and act civil, when all she wants to do is take her by the shoulders and shake her and tell her I love you, and you cannot scare me like this, you cannot treat your life and your safety like something that can easily be put aside. She does not want to say this to Rey, for several very good reasons, the main one being that springing an I love you on her in a situation like this feels like it will be at best inconvenient and at worst manipulative, and won’t be understood for the simple truth that it is.

She stabs at her food again and looks across the table at Poe, who is watching her very carefully.

“What is it with hero types and not thinking before you make a move?” she says, bitterly. She means Rey, so eager to do what she thinks must be done that she forgets to plan it; she means Finn, so desperate to protect and save his friends that he makes a suicide run. She looks at Poe because she thinks he’ll understand the endless hollowness in her stomach, because Poe has been avoiding telling Finn he loves him for the same reasons Rose has been avoiding telling Rey.

He shrugs with one shoulder and looks mournful. “Wish I knew, Ro,” he says, and she’s reminded suddenly and vividly of Paige, calling her Ro with so much light in her voice, in her eyes. Her little sister the hero, dead above a Dreadnought, her bombs falling in her last, victorious act. It’s such a pretty thing on paper and such an ugly thing anywhere else.

She feels sick, and pushes her food away, and then glances at Poe again. He looks so understanding that it makes her chest hurt, and he reaches out to take her hand across the table. His is warm and comforting, and she breathes in once, shakily. Jess tentatively wraps her arm around Rose’s shoulders and squeezes.

“I can’t lose anyone else,” she says. “And I know I’m gonna have to.”

Poe squeezes her hand and stays silent, but it’s enough.

“I’m keeping all four of you grounded for a while,” the General says, and Finn nods, hands clasped behind him. Rose watches as Poe touches him, gently, in the center of his back; as his shoulders relax as a result. Finn still stands like a soldier, sometimes.

Rey’s eyes are dark as a stormcloud. “General—”

It’s the General that surprises them. Rey calls her Leia, her voice sun-warm and soft. Leia is the last link to Luke Skywalker and the closest thing to a mother that Rey has ever had, even if that’s not saying much.

“Rey,” the General starts, and she sounds tired, the way she sounded at Rose’s bedside, weighed down by loss. “Please be rational about this. I know it’s important, but we cannot risk sending you now.”

“We have to,” Rey says. Her voice is low and insistent. “There’s no other way to defeat him—”

“There are a myriad of ways,” the General says. “Getting lightsabers and training you and Finn in the ways of the Force is one of them. And it’s a good one. But it’s not our only option and right now, it’s too risky.”

“You can’t.” Rey looks furious. “You can’t give me this,” she waves the holopad, “and not even let me pursue it —”

“Rey,” Finn says, softly, putting his hand on her shoulder. “No one’s saying we won’t go eventually. Just not now. ”

“You’re taking her side? Finn, you know how crucial this is—”

“I also know it’s crucial for none of us to die!” Finn says. Rose opens her mouth to agree, and remembers Rey’s furious eyes, lined at the edge with tears; remembers her saying you don’t know anything about this. She meets Poe’s eyes, and he looks pained, watching Finn and Rey, the central force of friendship in their little group, glare at each other.

Rey glances around at all of them, her hands balled into fists at her sides. “Fine,” she says, softly, bitterly. “Fine.”

“Okay,” Finn says, “okay,” and then he hugs her, brief and gentle. “Rey, I want to do this with you. We just have to be smart about it. The Resistance can’t lose you. And neither can we.”

Rey softens, at the speech. Something in her shoulders loosens up, becomes more fluid, more willing to hug him back.

Rose glances at Poe again, and lets herself hope that this is the end of it.

(It isn’t, though.)

Rey begins to avoid them all so casually and so quietly that Rose, at first, does not even grasp that she’s doing it. But after the third time Rey walks past her in the hall with her shoulders straight and tall and offering her little more than a nod and a soft “hello,” Rose gets the hint. Once is a mistake; twice a coincidence. Three times, though, three times is deliberate.

Her first instinct is to be brokenhearted, which she indulges for about five minutes before discarding it in favor of sudden, unfamiliar anger. Rey, pushing herself away from them for no reason; Rey, forgetting to plan and running off into the night with no resources and no intentions besides hurt the First Order. Rose wants to tell her none of us know how to do this right. She wants to tell her we are children. We are not soldiers.

Maybe Rey is a soldier now, though. Maybe she, in her straight-backed indifference, has moved forward and left the rest of them behind.

Rose still catches short scenes in the holo-drama that must be Rey’s life, now, a hero and a Jedi, the symbol of a new age. She sees them in the moments when she passes by the door that leads to the outdoor training area Rey has made for herself, when she pauses to watch the staff swing through the air. She’s never the only one watching. Ex-stormtroopers and new Resistance recruits and old members of the flight teams alike crowd around the windows and look out at her, whispering to themselves. Rose remembers once thinking that those whispers were a sign of hope, a sign that people believed in the capability that Rose and Finn and Poe and Leia already knew Rey possessed. Now she can only stare at them and feel anger revolving in her stomach, moving in steady, unchanging circles. They only know Rey as a thing, as a hero, as a Jedi. Rose knows her as a person, a laughing, living, breathing person.

Rose knows her as a person and Rey has taken steps to move away from her, to carefully deconstruct the shelter Rose has tried to build around them.

She moves back from the doorway, thinks of Paige laughing and rolling her eyes and running headfirst into danger. Her impulsive sharp-eyed baby sister. Rose had tried to build walls around them, too, protective walls, sheltering walls. Nothing she does is ever enough. It was not enough to stop Paige from flying out into space and never coming back, it was not enough to draw Rey away from training, training, training, every moment of every day. She eats breakfast early and dinner late and does not stop for lunch; Rose comes across her once in a while in the dining hall as she eats and sits down across from her. Sometimes, if she’s lucky, they will fall into conversation just like they always did. Rey will smile at her, dimples and all, and allow herself to be distracted for a moment before inevitably checking the clock, swearing, and hurrying out the door.

Rose still loves her more than she can understand, that’s the thing. She is still selfish and selfless with it, willing to step back and let Rey be if that’s what she wants but at the same time burning with how much it hurts, how much she wants to be near her and speak to her and hold her hand. And Rose has never been in love, before, doesn’t know what to do with it. It is a sieve full of water and the water is slipping out, through her fingers. She is trying to catch it and failing.

And Rey is hyper-focused on training, on beating Ren. And that’s important, Rose knows. It’s a selfless thing to do, forgetting herself to defeat the First Order.

Life is not only selflessness, though. Rose wishes Rey would be selfish, too. She wishes she could go to her and place her hands on her shoulders and look in her eyes until Rey knew what she meant to her, to all of them. She wishes she could kiss her and press her back against a wall and help her to turn off the switch in her mind that is always going, going, going.

She thinks of doing this, more times than she can count, but every time she takes a step closer to the doorway, Rey’s eyes will skim over her like she isn’t there, too intent on her movements and the Force and fighting until she’s black and blue, and Rose will retreat into the hall, furious at having lost her nerve.

Finn and Rose are leading two of the new recruits to the room they will share when one of the girls (barely nineteen, bright-eyed) stops and blushes, staring at Rey training in the yard.

“Oh, wow,” she says. Rose glances out, and Rey is looking back. Maybe she sensed Finn’s presence through the Force somehow — they’ve always had a stronger bond than Rose can really comprehend, forged in fire and held between palms. Maybe she needs a break.

“Come on,” Rose says, her voice false and bright. “You can meet Rey later, we probably shouldn’t interrupt.”

“Oh, of course!” the girl, Nick, says, embarrassed, the blush still high on her cheeks. Rose knows the feeling. She scurries down the hall after them, periodically glancing back towards the grass and the yard, where Rey is already methodically swinging her staff again, back and forth in her dance.

Later, though, Rose sees Rey at dinner, sitting across from the new recruits at a table and talking with her gently, her smile calm and easy. Nick is still starry-eyed, delighted to be sharing a moment with a hero. Rose pauses in line just to watch how steady and straight Rey’s shoulders are, how she is answering all of Nick’s breathless questions with ease but appearing to actually ask nothing herself. She looks calm, collected, but Rose can’t decide if Rey looks happy or not.

When Rey gets up to leave the dining hall, Rose calls out to her.

“Hey,” she says, “come sit down, stranger.” She waves a hand and grins, hopeful. Finn and Poe are sitting next to each other and across from her. They just need Rey to complete their quartet.

Rey smiles, and waves back. She looks as calm as ever. “No, sorry,” she says, and even appears to mean it. “I’ve got to get back to work. I’ll see you at breakfast.”

Then she goes. Rose sighs.

“This really isn’t like her,” Finn says, quietly.

“I know,” Rose answers. “I don’t know what to do. I’ve been here. ” Then she blushes, and adds, “We all have.”

Finn looks after her, chewing on his lip. “I miss her,” he says, finally. “I wish she would stop and realize that.”

“Yeah,” Rose says, ducking her head, and they finish their dinner in silence.

She begins to see Rey less and less at dinner, only meeting up with her fleetingly at breakfast. She is getting up slightly earlier than she ever used to, hoping to catch Rey before she leaves to practice. More often than not, she manages it; she likes to believe this is because Rey has noticed her coming and has started to wait for her. They sit together, and determinedly talk about things that have nothing to do with anything important — until one morning when Rose, impulsively, breaks their routine.

“What was Luke Skywalker like?” Rose asks. She asks because she can remember the two of them questioning each other, giving and taking in an endless circle, back at the beginning of their friendship, before Rey was swallowed by her own devotion to her cause. Rey looks up at her, surprised at the question but not offended.

Rose wraps her hands around a cup of warmed water. They don’t have any caf yet, on the base, even after a few months, so she has been heating water to a boil and pretending. She’s been pretending in a lot of ways, lately, she thinks; not without some bitterness. Pretending that warm water could compare to tea or caf, that the war is not inching ever-closer, that Rey is not tired behind her strong shoulders and focused eyes. Pretending that nothing is wrong between them when really, everything is wrong.

“Sad,” Rey answers, her brow furrowed. “Sometimes he looked at me like I was a ghost. But he was a good teacher, and a good man.”

Rose does not say anything, just watches her, tapping her nails against the sides of the mug. Rey’s eyes go far away, frozen and gentle with the past.

“Do you,” Rose starts, not knowing how she’ll finish the question, but then trails off at the desperate confusion and sadness blooming in Rey’s eyes.

Rey sighs, and blurts, unexpectedly, “I wish he hadn’t gone like he did. I know he was at peace, but we still need him. Sometimes I don’t — I don’t think he taught me enough. He always said experience would be my most effective teacher, but—”

Her hands are shaking. Rose stares at her, unable to remember the last time she’s gotten more than a four or five-word answer from Rey.

“I don’t know if I could ever be half the Jedi he was,” she says. Her voice cracks on the last word, loud as a laser blast in the quiet room.

Rose stands and crosses to her side of the table, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. Her hair smells like stardust and like engine oil, like the world and a girl. Rey makes this little noise, like a sob and like a sigh, and her ever-steady shoulders crumble as she turns to bury her face against Rose’s neck.

“We’ve lost so many people,” she whispers, and does not cry. “And I don’t know if—”

None of them know, Rose thinks, it’s war, no one knows, but she does not say it. She only sighs and wraps her other arm around her, too, stroking her hair. “Shhh.”

“I’m sorry,” Rey says. They’re alone, in this echoing room. Rose thinks of being upset as a child and  trying to hide it from Paige, trying to hide it from everyone; hating the noise bouncing off the walls if she cried, and Rey pulls away from her, standing. Her face is dry and unmarked by tears, her shoulders straight again, her eyes closed off and cold. Rose’s chest aches, looking at her.

“Rey,” she says, and tries to take her hand again. Rey doesn’t let her.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have — I should go.”

She does, and Rose does not follow her.

She will kick herself for it, later.

The alarm rings out so loudly that afternoon that Rose drops a wrench on her foot and swears, the sound drowned out by the sirens. She meets the eye of Jian, one of her fellow mechanics, and they look back grimly, knotting the arms of their jumpsuit a little tighter around their waist. The two of them both know what that noise means.

The First Order is launching an attack.

Rose nods to Jian and takes off for the main command center. Part of her knows that this is more than a little reckless, that she’s a mechanic and has no formal training and should probably stay behind. But the General has sent her out before. She might need her again.

Finn nods to her as she runs in the door, skidding to a halt and snapping a salute to the room in general. “Is there anything I can—”

There’s an explosion from somewhere far off, rattling the ground a little. She wobbles, but does not fall.

“Poe and Black Squadron are already out,” Finn explains. “I’m heading out when or if they manage to land their ships. Do you have a blaster?”

“No?”

He grins. “Then you’re better off in here, I think.”

“Stay on site,” the General suggests. “We usually have a mechanic or two in the command room, just in case something’s damaged during the battle.”

Rose nods. “Where’s Rey? Is she flying with the squadron?”

“No,” Finn says, “she—”

There’s another far-off explosion, and Rey runs through the door, skidding to a halt in much the same way that Rose had, a minute ago. “I have to go out there,” she says. Her eyes are burning, brown and intense. “General, I need to go out there. They’re landing. ”

“Rey,” the General says, holding up a hand, “I had no intention of keeping you grounded.” Rey deflates a little, like she was expecting more of a fight. The General only smiles in a tired, grim way and throws her a blaster, which she catches in one hand. “Finn’s going with you. Watch each other’s backs.”

Everything happens so fast in battle, Rose thinks, looking back and forth between Finn’s determined mouth and Rey’s burning eyes. Everything happens fast, too fast for her to track it. Just like that, her best friends are put in danger. Just like that, everything she loves is on the line all over again, without her even getting the chance to reconcile with Rey, catch her by the wrists and apologize for asking a question which upset her so much.

Rey inclines her head to the room at large, but her eyes catch Rose’s and hold them, just for a moment. It does not feel like forgiveness, but like recognition, understanding. “May the Force be with you all,” she says.

“Come back safe,” the General says. Finn picks up a blaster, and they run.

Rose does not see much of the battle. She stays in the command room, bouncing on the balls of her feet and waiting for news, catching parts of transmissions from different parts of the room. She stands near Lieutenant Connix’s station and throws herself into keeping track of the damage on the field, directing the medics through the wreckage and blaster-fire to find the injured. When needed, she sends comms to the engineers, too, sending them to different parts of the base to try and fix parts that have been blasted at. This sort of job is tense and quick-moving and often seems pointless, but Rose is desperate to do something other than stand in a corner and listen to her friends get hurt. Poe’s voice rings in every few minutes over the General’s comms, along with Jess and Snap and Karé and the other members of Black Squadron, giving updates. They’re all circling above, taking out TIE Fighters and shooting at enemy ground forces, taking out AT-ATs before they can do too much damage.

“General,” Lieutenant Connix asks, early on, “is Ren—”

“No,” she says, cutting her off. “I would be able to feel him.” Her voice is even, solid. Connix nods and turns back to her station. The room breathes a little more easily, after that, and so does Rose; if Ren is not there, Rey will not be drawn into battle with a lightsaber she no longer possesses.

Rey and Finn are in the middle of the battle the entire time, shooting back to back, Rey fighting with her staff and stealing blasters from dead ‘Troopers when hers runs out of fire. The Force must be guiding them, Rose thinks, because all of their shots are ringing true, the army surging behind them. The Force, and hope.

Then Poe’s voice crackles through the comms. “Rey’s been hit.”

“Commander—”

Rose freezes, staring over at the General’s station, where his voice is filling the room. Her stomach drops to her feet, her heart suddenly too loud and too big for her body. Rey’s been hit.

“She’s all right, I think,” Poe says, then, from a long way off, from a distance. “She’s not slowing down, but she was definitely hit just now, either in the shoulder or the side. She and Finn are a little overwhelmed.”

“Have Black Squadron focus on that area,” the General instructs, “and just try and keep the ‘Troopers off their backs.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Poe says, and Rose feels everyone around them move back to their stations, but she can’t move, still frozen and staring, thinking Rey, Finn, Rey.

“General,” she says. “Permission to meet up with them?”

They need help, she says, with her eyes, hoping the General can read them. She knows this isn’t proper protocol. But she also knows she won’t be able to stand just sitting here, when they’re fighting, when Rey has been shot.

“Permission granted,” the General says. She tosses Rose a blaster in much the same way that she threw one to Rey, thirty minutes ago. “This fight is almost over. Go make sure we win.”

Rose catches it, nods, and runs.

The base is eerily empty, everyone either at their positions or out on the field. Rose crouches against doorways and swings around silently, holding her blaster aloft and willing her fingers to move on the trigger. She is a mechanic, not a soldier. She has never been meant for front lines, but love makes you a fool, she supposes, and the urgency in her heartbeat makes finding Rey the most important thing, the only important thing. If Rey is a soldier, then Rose will have her back, and Rose will lead her home when it’s over.

She finds Finn, first, cornered but still shooting steadily, his eyes like steel. She locks her gaze with his across the room and shoots some of the oncoming ‘Troopers in the knees. As they fall, she watches him smile, just a little, and exhausted, but there.

“Looks like I’m saving you again,” she jokes. He grins a little wider.

“Let’s not make it a habit.”

“Rey?” she asks. He nods towards the doorway to the left, the one farthest from them.

“She ran that way. I got stopped before I could follow her. I think she sensed something.”

Something cold drops into Rose’s stomach. “Ren?” She shoots another oncoming ‘Trooper.

“I don’t know,” Finn admits. “I hope not.” He shoots, too; the hallway is clear. “Let’s just go, okay?”

“Right,” Rose says, pulling up a determined front that she’s not quite sure if she feels, and running, Finn by her side, to the door.

They find Rey after ten minutes of running and shooting and tense, terrified silence, and she’s surrounded, too. There’s something burning in her eyes, in the set of her mouth; she’s even breathtaking like this, her jaw clenched and her brows furrowed. She looks angry, but not bitter. Frustrated, but not lost. She looks like Rose imagines the Force would look, were it a human and not a Force. Brilliant and bright and unyielding, uncaring. She has to have been fighting alone for ages, but she does not look tired. There is a ring of ten or eleven ‘Troopers surrounding her, but she just knocks one of them down with her staff and glares at the rest.

Finn runs forward, shooting a ‘Trooper in the back and calling out to her, and she makes eye contact, barely, before turning back to her battle. Rose raises her blaster, but then, in the air, there’s a loud, harsh siren; the sound of the First Order’s retreat. Finn punches the air as some of the ‘Troopers break off and run for the ships, leaving only five surrounding Rey. Rose shoots one, Finn shoots another, and Rey knocks the rest off their feet by sweeping her staff under their knees. Then she stands up, straight and tall, the end of her staff resting lightly against the ground.

Finn calls her name, and she turns, and then Rose sees, as if in slow motion, the way she’s clutching her side with her free hand, the way there is dark red seeping over the soft brown of her clothes.

“No,” she whispers. Finn runs.

By the time he has reached her, she is on the ground, dead ‘Troopers in a circle around her, like she’s an explosion that has gone off. She has destroyed everything around her, including herself.

Finn scoops her up into his arms, his face ashen, terrified.

“Let’s go,” he says, and they do.

Looking at Rey in the medbay, breathing shallowly and quickly, her face wrenched in pain, Rose thinks: it is amazing how much a person can willingly ignore. And she means herself, means that in the months that have passed since meeting Rey she has made the same mistake that so many other people in the base have: believing that she is invincible.

Finn is pacing, behind her, back and forth, back and forth. She imagines the ground becoming worn under him, imagines turning around and seeing a ditch dug in by his worried feet. She closes her eyes, instead, blocking out the sight of Rey lying, practically lifeless, on the bed.

There’s a noise at the doorway and then Poe and the General are standing there, Poe instantly wrapping his arms around Finn like he doesn’t know what else to do. Rose can hear faint, whispered words from behind her, the sound of Finn’s feet stopping in their endless movement and Poe breathing comfort against his temple. Rose does not look back at them for long, preferring to watch the rise and fall of Rey’s chest, her own heart beating only when she’s sure of that tiny movement. The General crosses the room to stand at Rey’s bedside, right next to where Rose is sitting, and staring, and wishing she had the courage and permission to reach out and take Rey’s hand.

The General gives her a watery smile. “Rose,” she says, “we need to stop meeting like this.”

Rose refuses to laugh. It helps sometimes, she knows, but it will not help her now. Laughter is cheap and useless without Rey to share in it. “Is she going to be okay?”

“Yes,” the General says. There’s such conviction in her tone that it shocks Rose. It makes her tear her eyes away from Rey’s pale cheeks and look at the General’s wet eyes, instead. “Yes, she’ll be okay.”

“Are you saying that because you believe it,” Rose says softly, “or because she has to be? Because you need her to be?”

The General sighs. “Both.”

Rose nods. She can’t fault her for that, not really. She needs Rey, too.

The General sits down next to her, and Rose, impulsively, reaches out to take her hand, squeezing it gently and not letting go. She and Finn both cried, in the first few minutes back on base; sobbed from the gut and held onto each other like the world was ending, and maybe it was. That was before they knew Rey was still alive, when she was nothing but a body being carried into the medbay, when they didn’t know if she would make it. Finn has stopped crying, descended into a worried kind of shock, but Rose’s eyes haven’t exactly gotten the memo.

The General looks at her, and her eyes are wet, too.

She doesn’t let go of Rose’s hand.

Rose looks back at Rey, and thinks, can’t you see how much we all love you?

Out loud, she says, “I wish I’d stopped her.”

She can feel Finn’s eyes on her back, but the General only hums in agreement.

“She was so upset earlier,” Rose continues, “I should have known—”

She buries her face in her free hand, her left still clinging to the General’s for dear life.

None of them can say a word.

The day that she wakes up, it’s raining, and Rose isn’t there.

She hears about it two hours after the fact, from Poe as he passes her in the hall. She knows in the way that he grabs her elbow that something important has happened, but the look on his face makes her afraid that it’s something terrible. It’s a relief when he only says “She’s awake,” his eyes dark and searching Rose’s for Force-knows-what. “She’s awake, but — she’s awake.”

But, Rose thinks, as he squeezes her arm and leaves. There’s always a but with Rey.

“We won,” Rey says, impatiently, “didn’t we?”

Rose pauses in the doorway to get a read on the situation. Finn is standing up, arms crossed, Rey laying down and looking very upset about it.

“You almost died,” Finn says, his voice icy.

“But we won ,” Rey says. “I didn’t die. So would you quit —”

“ Rey, ” Finn says, and then sighs, rubs a hand over his face. When he looks at her there’s a curious emptiness on his face, a bitter dismissal. Rey glares back at him. Rose feels like she’s walked into a bigger fight than any she’s ever witnessed from Finn and Rey, bigger than any of their previous disagreements or arguments. “Never mind. I have work to do.” He shoves his hands into the pockets of Poe’s coat, and turns, not even looking at Rose as he storms out the door.

Rey stares after him, an indignant and angry look on her face. There’s something hard behind her eyes that Rose can see and feel, something Rey is not confronting. But she’s just Rose, with her endless love and inability to help. She and Rey might still be fighting. They never had a chance to make up before the battle began. Even if there is something hard in Rey’s eyes, Rose is at a loss on how to approach it, or if she even should.

“Rey,” she tries, and Rey closes her eyes.

“Can you go,” she says, but it’s not a question, not a request. Rose feels that hit her in the ribs, the gut-punch of Rey’s dismissal. She doesn’t want her there. She almost died. She might still be hurting. And she doesn’t want Rose to be there.

Maybe this was what war had made them all into, Rose thinks. Maybe they are soldiers first, now, cold and hard and self-sacrificing. Maybe that is how to win. Maybe it’s not about saving what you love at all, maybe it’s becoming cold enough that losing it does not matter.

She swallows the hurt she can’t help but feel and walks away, leaving Rey alone behind her.

Finn catches up to her later, when she’s sitting outside in the grass, under the trees. She’s been tracing designs in the dirt with her fingers mindlessly, trying to keep her mind off Rey in the medbay, Rose’s desperate need to be near her, to try and help, and how Rey told her to go.

“Hey,” he says, and sits down next to her. She shifts, rests her chin against her knees and sighs.

“Hey,” she says, miserably.

“She’s being —”

“Yeah,” Rose agrees.

Finn nods, and they fall silent for a while. He watches as she draws in the dirt, and eventually she straightens, wrapping her arms tighter around her legs and sitting up a little straighter, staring off into the night sky.

“She said she needed to get up,” Finn says, finally. “And keep training. She kept saying she needed to get better.”

“What did you say?” Rose asks. Finn sighs.

“I got mad,” he admits. “I think anyone would have, but.” He shrugs. “I told her she almost died and you need to take some time off to recover. And she just —”

He waves a hand and sighs. Rose nods.

“She told me to leave her alone.”

“She said that?” Finn asks, turning to her.

Rose nods again. The hurt that’s been welling in her is threatening to overflow, and she finds that she’s suddenly, embarrassingly, close to tears.

Finn wraps an arm around her shoulders, and they don’t say anything else. She just rests her head on his shoulder and closes her eyes, willing the hurt away. She wonders if this is how Rey does it, if she forces her feelings down deep enough that she can forget she has them. Maybe their argument just bothers her less. Maybe she doesn’t care with the same force that Rose does.

But that doesn’t fit with the Rey that Rose fell for, the laughing girl with the dimples, or the love in her smile when she kissed Finn’s cheek or wiped dirt off BB-8’s metal head. It fits with this new Rey, this closed-off stranger, but this new Rey is also cold and sad, holding her shoulders straight to hide how her spine is crumbling.

“Something’s bothering her,” Rose says, finally. “Something big. I wish she’d let us help.”

Finn nods. She can feel it against her head. “She was alone for so long. I don’t know if she knows how.”

“It’s not impossible to learn,” Rose points out, and closes her eyes again. She lets the rest of the sentence remain unspoken. I could teach her. I’d be willing. But if Rey won’t try to understand, the whole thing is moot.

Finn nods again, and they watch the stars. His arm stays around her shoulders, tight enough to feel protective, and she wraps her free arm around him, too.

“I miss her,” she says, softly.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, me too.”

They don’t see Rey for a few days, after that. Life on the base is, as always, busy and quick, and Rose doesn’t have time to look for her at first. She justifies it by saying she’s giving them both time to cool off, that Rey doesn’t seem to want to talk to her anyway, that it’s better if Rose gives her space, for now. She knows, beyond the justifications, that she’s only being selfish. She doesn’t want to fight again. She doesn’t want to see Rey’s eyes go sharp when they look at each other.

Rose stays with the engines, eats lunch with the pilots, and wonders if it is on her shoulders to go after Rey, again, to apologize or to talk or to try. Rey has never come to her, in all this time. Rose has had to find her and wait for her to speak.

She doesn’t know how, Finn had said. It still wasn’t fair.

So Rose decides — screw it. She’s not going to go back, this time. If Rey wants to talk she can come and find her. Let her make the first move. It’s a war and they are all hurting and Rose is so kriffing tired.

Of course, right after she makes this decision, she runs into Rey in the garage in the middle of the night, wincing and panting and holding her side, trying to move across the room in her old dance, holding her staff in her hands.

Rose dropped what she was holding. A book, maybe; a spare part. She hardly remembers holding anything after seeing Rey.

“You shouldn’t be training yet,” she says, soft, terrified. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

“I didn’t think anyone would be here,” Rey says.

“Oh, stars,” Rose says, passing a hand over her face. “Oh, stars.” Panic is churning through her chest like an earthquake. “Rey, you almost died a week ago, you shouldn’t even be walking —”

“I can do it,” Rey snapped.

“I don’t care if you can!” Rose snaps back. “You shouldn’t be!”

“Rose —”

“You can’t keep this up, you’ll hurt yourself, you’ll kriffing bleed out down here alone, you’ll die — ”

“ Rose. ”

“Don’t you know how much we need you??”

“ Of course I know that!” Rey screams, loud enough that she seems to have frightened herself for a moment. She steps back and presses her face into her hands, shaking, and then looks up with eyes that are wracked with guilt and loss and horror. Rose’s gut churns. “Everyone kriffing needs me,” she says, softer now, but her voice is still hard as flint, sharp as a knife. “That’s all I ever hear, how important the Jedi are, how much you need me, how it’s a shame that Master Luke is gone but at least there’s me.” Her hands are clenched into fists. “Everyone needs me. Everyone needs me, all the time. ”

“Rey,” Rose tries, reaching out, but she jerks away, furious.

“I was used to not worrying what anyone needed but me,” Rey says, her hands shaking, her eyes wet. “And then Finn came along, and that was fine, and Han and Leia and Poe and Luke and you and — and if it was just you, Rose,” and she meets her eyes for the first time in minutes, desperate and terrified. “If it was just you I could do it, I’d be happy to do it. I’d — I’d sit and let you ask me questions for decades and I’d answer all of them and I’d be so happy, Rose, I’d — but it’s not just you. It’s not just Finn or Poe or Leia. It’s the whole kriffing galaxy .”

“Shit,” Rose says, “ shit,” and reaches out for Rey’s hand again. This time Rey lets her grasp it. She’s still shaking, and Rose doesn’t know what to do. What is Rey without her steady shoulders, her warmth and her quiet softness, her sharp protective eyes? But it’s hitting her with hard, sobering clarity that these things have been stripped from Rey over the past months against her will, that she has felt the need to tear them out of her chest to make room for this anxiety and fear and guilt-ridden sense of duty. Rose lets her hand slide up to Rey’s shoulders, shivery and terrified. Her instinct is to say she’s sorry, for not noticing, for not confronting her with it. To not saving her faster. But it isn’t about saving, not right now. It’s about Rey knowing that she’s allowed to crumble, that Rose will be here to catch her when she does. It’s about love.

“Come with me,” she says, on impulse. “Come with me.” She tugs her by the shoulders and Rey moves along with her, stumbling like she’s drunk.

She takes Rey out to the Falcon, and they go into the little room where Rey sleeps. Rose sits on the cot, and holds out her arms, and Rey nearly dives into them, holding onto her so tightly it’s a little difficult to breathe.

Well, Rose thinks. I’ve done something right.

“Shh,” she says. “It’s okay. I’m here.”

“Don’t go,” Rey says, muffled against her shoulder. “Please.”

“I won’t,” Rose says, and takes her hand, linking their fingers together. “I won’t.”

She hums the love song from her old town, the one Rey had liked so much. My love, meet me under the moons, my love, meet me under the sky. She hums it until Rey stops shaking and looks up at her, Rose’s left hand tangled in hers and her right hand in her hair. Rey’s legs are tossed across Rose’s lap, in an effort to get as close to her as possible. She can feel the other girl’s heart thudding as if it’s in her own body. Maybe it is.

“I’m sorry,” Rey says again, hoarse from sobbing.

“Don’t be,” Rose says. “Are you okay?”

“I shouldn’t have done that,” Rey murmurs, but her hands are white-knuckled, holding on so tightly, like she’s afraid Rose will pull away. “I shouldn’t have been so weak, I need to be—”

“You can be as weak as you want around me,” Rose says, and gathers her close again, letting Rey tuck her head back under her chin. They’re awkwardly positioned, because Rey is so much taller than she is, but — but Rey is breathing more steadily, the lines of her body soft and comforted and melting in relief. “I don’t want you to be some Jedi hero, all right? That’s not why I like you. I like you because you’re my friend and you’re Rey and my friend Rey is one hundred percent allowed to be sad, if she’s sad, or upset, if she’s upset. And I’ll be right there for her the whole time.”

She watches as the words settle over Rey’s shoulders like a warm blanket. “You asked me what Luke was like,” she says, then. Her eyes are wet. “He was the kindest, strongest person I’ve ever met. That’s why I — I mean. Everyone’s expecting someone like him. I’m not. I’m angry, and bitter, and I hold people too close when I love them and shove them too far when I don’t. I don’t know how to let people care about me and I don’t know what to do when they don’t. I just — I’m not Luke. I know I’ll never be the teacher he was, or the Jedi he was. There’s only one thing I can do and that’s fight. ”

“You do more than that every single day,” Rose says, softly. “Every time you sat with me at lunch and we asked each other questions, every time you sat with Finn out under the trees and played cards, every time you raced Poe in the X-Wings. That’s something. It’s more important than fighting. It’s hope, Rey. Rebellions are built on hope.”

Rey smiles, a little. “Leia always says that.”

“You create hope just by standing in a room,” Rose says, and runs her fingers through her hair, again and again, soothing. “I know it’s a lot to carry on your shoulders. Or I can imagine, anyway. But — you have such an effect on people. You won’t have an effect by dying, Rey. If you die you’re not a martyr. If you die we all just lose you. And I can’t lose you, I can’t.”

Rey shifts, presses her face into the curve of Rose’s neck. She doesn’t say anything.

“You said it would be easy, if it was just for me and Finn and Poe,” Rose says, then. “Rey, you don’t have to live your life for the whole world if you can’t do that. You can just live for us. Paige and I didn’t join the Resistance because we had patriotic dreams. We both joined to protect each other.”

“For you,” Rey says, softly, slowly. She’s testing the words, letting them roll off her tongue. “I could do that, I think.”

Her hands are still shaking a little, from the force of her earlier panic, and Rose wraps her arms around her again, tight, and hums the love song again.

They wake up like that, wrapped around each other, clinging for dear life. Rey is already awake when Rose stirs, her head on Rose’s shoulder, her eyes open and thoughtful. She’s not shaking any longer, nor does she look upset or frustrated. She just looks alive, and present, and unworried. Rose wonders if it is as easy as that and thinks that no, it probably isn’t. But this is a start. They are both willing, now, to breathe and stop and listen.

“Thank you,” Rey says, surprising her. “For — for last night. I’ve been such an idiot.”

“You were scared,” Rose says. She is determined not to shy away from that. “Maybe you were an idiot, but it’s nothing that can’t be fixed.”

“I don’t know what I ever did,” Rey says, “to deserve a friend like you.”

Rose becomes hyper-aware of the fact that they are still holding each other, Rey’s legs tossed across her lap. Rey is looking at her in a way that makes heat pool in her stomach.

“I already told you, you don’t need to do anything except be Rey,” Rose says. “That’s enough for me.”

Rose looks at her mouth, unsmiling but soft, and her heart is screaming, screaming, screaming. She would die for this feeling, she knows, she would die for Rey in her arms and holding her hands. As she looks at her mouth, Rey’s thumb moves, softly, against the back of her hand.

“What are you thinking?” Rey asks. And in a way it’s their old question game, their old back-and-forth. In another way, it’s something else entirely. Rey is looking at her like she pulled the moon out of the sky and handed it over. Rey is looking at her like she’d gladly remain in her orbit until the end of time.

If it was you, Rose, I could do it. I’d be happy to do it.

Rose swallows the lump in her throat and answers.

“I want to kiss you,” she says. “And I want to be sure you want that. And I think you’re brave and impossible and that really scares me, sometimes, but I also think you’re the realest person that I’ve ever met, the most human person, and that scares me more. I want to kiss you and I want to make you believe I won’t go. I want to throw a party and dance with you. I want to take you to every kind of planet you’ve never seen.”

Rey looks at her, eyes huge and soft and unafraid. “And if I want those things too?”

“You’d have to tell me,” Rose says, feeling a rush of bravery, a rush of love, ripping and leaping through her like a spinning X-Wing. “You’d have to tell me, Rey.”

“Okay,” Rey says. “I want to dance with you. I want to go to oceans and jungles and beaches with you. I want to see the rain. I want to hear you singing to me when I’m not upset, I want to hold your hand even when there’s no real reason to. I want to kiss you.” Rose’s eyes dip to her mouth again, and it’s smiling now, and those dimples are her undoing, they always have been. “I want to kiss you.”

“Then kiss me,” Rose says, and leans forward, and meets her halfway.

Rey laughs shakily against her mouth, and kisses her back.

Rose has imagined kissing Rey a fair amount, by then, but it’s nothing compared to the real thing, to have Rey warm and breathing against her, her lips chapped. Kissing her is clumsy. Rose thinks she might even be the more experienced, between the two of them; she’s kissed two people in her life, which is usually a startlingly low number, but suddenly she likes it, likes that they’re on an equal playing field. And the clumsiness of the kiss doesn’t take away from the tenderness, the way Rey cradles her jaw like she’s something impossibly delicate, and the swoop in Rose’s stomach when Rey catches her bottom lip between her teeth.

Rey hums and pulls back, delighted. Her eyes are sparkling.

“You should go back to the medbay,” Rose says, grinning and biting her lip. Her finger traces a circle on Rey’s side and Rey leans into it, smiling wider.

“Not yet,” Rey says, and kisses her again.

Kisses, Rose thinks, her brain a little hazy, are a very reasonable alternative to medical care.

(She does get her back to the medbay eventually, but not before Rey leaves a soft pink mark on the bolt of her jaw and Rose scatters a few of her own against Rey’s neck. The nurses all glare at them pointedly and make comments about maybe taking it into account that someone is injured before sneaking out of the medbay to neck like a couple of teenagers. Rey doesn’t listen, just grips Rose’s hand and smiles.)

The next morning, Rose is sitting at breakfast, laughing at Jess’ impression of Poe’s face when BB-8 tripped in her excitement to get out of the cockpit and nearly dented her head. There’s a slight murmur through the seated people in the dining hall, and she looks up. Rey is standing in the doorway.

Finn, next to her, straightens. Rey looks at him for a moment, a million emotions flickering over her face, apologies and white flags, and Finn relaxes again.

Then Rey looks at her, right into her eyes. Her shoulders are soft and relaxed, and she’s smiling, gentle and carefree. Whole. Happy.

Rose grins at her, and shifts a little on the bench so a spot between her and Finn is free.

Rey, still smiling, begins to make her way towards them.