Archive of Our Own ^beta

The first clue Luke Skywalker has that something bad has happened to his daughter is not concrete proof. 
In fact, it’s far from it. More of an inkling. An instinct. A gut feeling that really does hit him in the gut, twisting up his insides in uncomfortable and distressingly familiar ways. He’s sitting at his old hardwood desk when it happens, attempting to meditate in a rickety chair that he needs to replace, fingers of one organic and one mechanical hand splayed out over the familiar worn pattern of his desk. His right index finger fits perfectly into the groove, longer than it is wide, created by an unfortunate encounter with a doorknob when moving this desk long ago. His wrists brush lightly against the long-since smoothed out edge of the desk, and even with his eyes closed he can map out every single burn mark, ink smudge, cocoa stain, and knife scratch on the wood. 
This is what Luke does when he’s stressed, and what he has been doing for more years than he can count: he meditates, and he memorizes his surroundings. Sometimes he forgets things, because he might meditate in a place he’ll probably never visit again, but sometimes he passes by the place weeks or months later and recalls the strangest whispers in his senses. More often than not, it is at the desk in his office, or on the floor at the window in his bedroom, or on the highest balcony in the apartment building he lives in. 
Like his surroundings, Luke is also in tune with things that could be called metaphysical. Clairvoyant, mystical, call it whatever, he knows when even the smallest detail is off about the places he knows best, and he knows this about the people he knows best.
Luke’s fingernails dig into the desk, and he already knows without consciously considering it that there will be five new marks in the wood where his mechanical hand lies when he lifts his fingers. His organic hand can’t apply enough force to scar even the relatively soft wood of the desk without also hurting himself. His mechanical hand, on the other hand, can crush bones without an arduous amount of strain. 
Luke forces his muscles to relax as the synthetic nerves in his right hand, and mostly the all-too-real ones in his left, start to react to his stress. Artificial or not, both hands react the same way to the feeling that has just started in his brain and, catching Luke and freezing him in his tracks, made its way down each and every one of his vertebrae. 
Clench. Unclench. 
Daylight burns his eyes, coming through the slits in his half-closed blinds, as he pulls himself the rest of the way out of the meditative state he’d been in. There are five new marks in the desk; five sharp, thin crescent moons.
He’s used to watching his thoughts go by as he meditates, sending them floating away down the ambient river of his mind as quickly as they appear, and he’s used to his brain conjuring up everything from the most mundane of considerations to the delightful and the dreadful. So of course the first thing that he thinks is that, somewhere in his subconsciousness, he’s recalled something bad from his past. 
Something he might not remember, because parts of his brain still blur when he examines them head-on, some of his memories are still locked away. 
Luke looks at his hands.
Clench. Unclench.
He wonders, briefly (and pushes the thought away in a manner slightly too aggressive to be meditative) how he got here.
Clench. Unclench. 
The freezing, creeping feeling slides up his spine now, and down again, and back and forth, as if his vertebrae are a particularly hideous instrument. 
Clench. Unclench.
Luke runs through all the possible sources of this feeling, and it doesn’t take long for his brain to settle on one concrete image, crystal clear in his mind’s eye (he doesn’t just memorize places, no, people too; he can’t bear to forget what he cares about in the same way he forgot the things that, however horrible, still meant something to him because of the way they shaped him). A girl, barely an adult. Tallish. Rather scrawny, more muscular these days from climbing fences. She doesn’t flinch at quick movement anymore, but something still flashes in her hazel eyes at loud, sudden noises. Wise beyond her years. Luke could fill an entire book - an entire library - with every little detail he has memorized about her, but one thing always comes to the forefront of his mind about her: she’s his daughter.
“Rey,” he mumbles inadvertently, slightly perturbed and slightly aloof, and he stands.
His knees are shaky. He doesn’t think it’s the fact that he’s getting older every day now (although that may have something to do with it) so much as the fact that he’s been sitting cross-legged in that forsaken chair for the last hour. Even in his prime days, when there was still tangible hope for the government of Galactic City, when he was Red Five (the bright-eyed flyboy with uncanny instincts), when he still had a real purpose in life, his knees would still be aching after trying to sit cross-legged in a chair with arms.
The image of Rey, who is the closest thing he has to family these days, refuses to leave his mind. A stubborn little part of Luke’s brain devotes itself to thinking about the rest of his family, who are all either dead or out of contact with him, and he can do nothing but regard it in silent resignation as he lets the familiar thoughts play out. These thoughts, like every little flaw in the desk, are worn into his mind in familiar grooves, and they are some of the few that he never tries to push away, even when meditating - some of the few he’ll actually lose himself to.
His mother: dead in childbirth.
His father: dead in a swan song for freedom.
His sister: alive, but. But. There are so many buts.
His sister’s son: dead in a scheme of his own design.
That was the one that got her, that got Luke, that got all of them. The kid was the breaking point. The kid is the reason Luke hasn’t been at the controls of a fighter jet in eight years, and the kid is the reason Luke’s helmet, the one with the insignia of Red Squadron on it, has been collecting dust in the back of his closet for those same eight years. The kid is the reason that Luke removed himself from any sort of attempt at mediating the hellish government of Galactic City through rebellion, and instead became a private detective - these days, that makes him not necessarily above the law, but not below it either. He’s on the same level, he supposes, but perhaps off to the left a bit, all on his own. He does good when and where he can, and he stays on the sidelines.
With the thoughts of his family (or, at least, the parts of his family whose veins run with the same blood as him), having run their course, Luke returns to the now piercing feeling in his spine. His hands are tingling, maybe from clenching and unclenching them so much and maybe from the spreading of his unease, and he finds that his feet have carried him to the holoprojector bolted to one wall almost without him consciously willing them to.
Luke’s hands shake as he punches in Rey’s contact info, memorized like everything else (he isn’t sure that he actually, consciously, knows this; it just sort of resides in the back of his mind somewhere and makes the jump directly to his hands when needed), and he wonders yet again how he got here.
He tells himself that nothing is wrong, no, everything is fine, as the call goes out.
The holoprojector buzzes, its unassuming little blue-tinted loading screen blinking cheerily at Luke as he stares, and he waits, and his hands continue to shake.
The call does not go through. Not even declined, it just doesn’t make it; Connection could not be established, number unable to be reached. Connect to an operator?
Luke does not connect to an operator. He does not check to see if he entered the wrong contact information, because he has never once done that in almost ten years of knowing Rey. Instead, tasting that horrible knowledge of something not quite tangible, but surely bad, and surely coming for him soon, he shuts off the holoprojector.
Luke lifts his left hand, looks at the comm on his wrist, and feels his heart sink. The clock there confirms what the alternating rectangles of sunlight falling over the entire office had already told him: it’s the middle of the day. Rey should be out and about right now, probably at the garage or the scrapyard, maybe too busy to answer a call, but the only way her number could cut off like that is if her comm broke, and she takes far too meticulous care of her possessions for that to ever happen.
He doesn’t have the garage’s contact info memorized, but he has them on speed dial, so it doesn’t make a difference either way. And they know him, too, evidently well enough that someone on the other end recognizes his contact information, because there’s no cheery standardized greeting when this call goes through.
Poe Dameron - a pilot, one of Rey’s best friends, and quite possibly an active Rebel, but Luke has never really pried into that - is on the other end, and even through the absolutely horrendous quality of the holoprojector, Luke can see how concerned he looks.
“This is about Rey, isn’t it?” he asks before Luke can even begin to formulate words. 
Mouth open in a half-formed O, Luke finishes the shaky breath he had begun to take, and he nods through the shock resonating throughout each and every molecule in his body.
He was right. He was kriffing right. There was a point in his life at which he had learned not to doubt his instincts, partly because they were unfailingly right and partly because he didn’t have time to do so in the heat of battle, but he’s broken out of that habit these days. He’s not sure whether that’s a good or bad thing, whether he’s double-checking himself or just second-guessing, but he’s all too cognizant of the shock - and disappointment - he feels at discovering that he was right.
He wants to ask, What the hell do you mean? How do you know this is about Rey? What happened? 
He lets out the breath he’s been holding. His fists are clenched, fingernails digging into his palms now. Only the ones on his organic hand will leave any marks; he stopped bothering with synthskin a while ago, and ever since, nothing short of an ice pick can dent his cybernetic hand. 
“Do you know where she is?” he asks, voice dangerously steady.
Poe’s hesitation tells him everything he needs to know, and the boy’s (hells, Luke must be getting old, Poe is a grown man) words tell him even more: “She never came to work today. I tried to call her; it didn’t go through.”
Every single remaining bit of dignity that Luke has drains out of his body, all at once. 
“Whoa, whoa, do you -”
“Ah, kriff,” Luke says over Poe.
“Do you know where she is? Is she okay?”
Luke tilts his head, fixing his gaze on Poe’s worried eyes, tinted blue and white from the hologram. He finds that he doesn’t remember exactly what color they are, despite having met Poe in the real world many times. He suspects he’s going to find out sometime soon.
 “I was wondering the same thing. She was already gone by the time I woke up this morning, so I assumed she went to work early.”
A crashing noise, muffled through the holoprojector, comes from somewhere Luke can’t see. Poe’s head snaps sideways. Something wild, something fearful flashes in his gaze when he looks back at Luke. 
“Kriff. She never showed up. Kriff, I hope she’s okay, but - I’ve gotta go. Please tell me if you find anything out, I mean anything, she’s -”
The call cuts out before Luke can find out what Poe was going to say, a punctuated Kriff! echoing in his eardrums.
“Kriff,” he says out loud. Ghostly, icy fingers dance over his spine in an almost painful way, and he arches his back to stretch. He looks over at the window, as the sunlight coming in fades and then strengthens again, back and forth, from the midday cloud cover that is no doubt coming over Galactic City right now. Rey has done things like this before, stubborn and determined as she is (he thinks it runs in the family, even if they aren’t related by blood), but something feels different this time. Usually, he finds out through the concrete proof, through someone from work calling him slightly concerned and/or exasperated, or from Rey herself, stumbling into the house covered in grease and blood and all sorts of other unknown.
Luke thinks back to his days as a pilot, as a Rebel with a cause. He thinks back to his instincts, muffled since then but never really gone. He thinks, in the present, that something big is changing, something from his past looping back around to come pick him, stranded all alone, up again. 
He thinks that he can’t afford to reflect on that at the moment, because he needs to find out what happened to Rey. Despite his semi-official title, despite what he says whenever his sister calls, being a detective doesn’t mean he constantly has cases. No, less and less these days, as the Empire-turned-First-Order tightens its grip on Galactic City, threatening all freedoms - including his own, his freedom to enact justice in a way that is neither connected to the First Order nor to what it calls “extremist groups”. 
He’s made his own cases before, though. When Ben died, and he was still a Rebel. When the other Ben died, and he stopped being a Rebel once and for all. 
He can do it again.
Although, the losses of past cases seep into his thoughts, weaving around his brain and begging to be noticed, and they push back when he tries to push them away. Luke won’t lose family this time, not again, not like this. 
He can do it again, but different this time.

Luke is halfway out the door of his office, having already flipped his OPEN/CLOSED sign onto its CLOSED side, one hand on the lock, when he realizes he has no idea what he’s doing. His fear motivated him to get up - determination, really, he can already hear the first Ben (not that distinguishing between the two matters so much these days, not when they’re both dead and gone) disappointedly berating him in his mind’s eye.

But now that his instinct-driven fervor, or whatever in all nine hells this is, has had time to kick in, he falters with the door still open, and realizes he isn’t sure where to go. Perhaps he relied on his old instincts a little too much, he thinks, realizing that, were he still affiliated with the Rebellion, he could just reach out to any of his contacts. Leia, probably, but even if he couldn’t get an actual mission sanctioned, that would never have stopped him from taking his hoverbike and going in on his own.

Well.

He could always do that last thing, no matter the circumstances. There would be some differences - he doesn’t have the rest of Red Squadron with him now, doesn’t have those resources. They’re only a squadron in name, they haven’t fought in an actual battle or even touched fighter jets in years, and, well...even if Luke were still a Rebel, there’s only one other Red left. 

Luke still hasn’t decided if he personally considers Red Two a loss or not. This is a thought that he can’t will himself to push out of his head on the rare occasions that it comes to him, but he thinks that even if he wanted to he wouldn’t be able to. He isn’t dead, no, far from it, but he may as well be. They haven’t talked in years, and Luke still has every detail of the man memorized, from the crinkle of his eyelids in a smile to the glint of his canines in a yelled order, and the way he is - was , whatever, this relationship is in that theoretically beautiful but really just horrible place where it transcends time - 

Luke forgets where this particular train of thought was going.

Oh . Red Squadron. Right.

There was a time when it was just the two of them, Red Two and Red Five, when things were bad but they were still holding everything together, when Luke could have waltzed right in there with half a plan and walked out with another heart attached to his own (maybe a hand in his, too, if he was lucky), but no.

They’d held hands, but never with the unspoken meaning behind it that Luke had always hoped for. 

Nonetheless, he remembers every detail, and his hand - the mechanical one - twitches at his side where it’s still hovering over the doorknob.

Luke jerks his hand back, maybe a little too aggressively, and then hastily locks the door. He turns, stiff and forced. And walks, all too aware of just how alone he is, away from his office.

His heart might be the only thing emptier than that locked room. At least the room has some sunlight in it, too. 

He gets a call a little later, on his comm, from Rey’s friend Finn. Finn worries, of course he does, wants to be included, says Poe does too. Luke insists that he can handle it on his own - should handle it on his own - and hangs up. He thinks, in passing, about how part of him views Rey's kidnapping as his own personal failure - she was abandoned by one set of parents, the last thing she needs is to go through that again. Moreover, he doesn’t want to get involved with the First Order or Rebels again, he really doesn't. 

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that Luke will be doing much of anything but getting involved. At least, with the First Order. That’s not so bad; it’s impossible to cover a single block in Galactic City, whether horizontally or vertically, without finding traces of their presence. More often than not, more than traces. 

He hates himself for it, and then hates himself even more for hating anything, but part of him shies away from the idea of interacting with the Rebellion - now Resistance - in any capacity that matters. Part of Luke flinches at his sister’s outstretched hand, so clear in his mind’s eye; part of him wants to keep turning away like he’s been doing for the last eight years.

So he does. 

He can do this alone, that’s what he keeps telling himself as he makes his way from his office to his apartment. As much as he wants to hunt down the nearest First Order meeting in a speakeasy backroom and hold whoever’s in charge at gunpoint until he can get some answers out of them, that’s not the way he was trained. It would be sloppy of him to do that, and such a thing could easily turn into a massacre, which is frankly against his morals. 

Luke searches his apartment, and it doesn’t take long. Rey’s room is one of the places he doesn’t have 100% memorized, in part because it changes so often and in part because he respects her too much to poke around in her things like some parents might, but a quick scan reveals absolutely nothing out of the ordinary.

Then again, the things that are ordinary by Rey’s standards might be due cause for Luke to have some questions. Case in point: the old Rebel helmet perched haphazardly atop a coat rack, and the massive (homemade, from the looks of it) Resistance banner pinned to one wall, partway overlapping with a purple-white-grey-black flag that Luke knows all too well.

Once again: Some things run in the family, even if only by coincidence, or by whatever strange quirk of the universe it is that seems to pull Luke towards the people who, however inexplicably, are just like him in their own little ways.

(This makes him think, as he seems to be making a habit out of doing in recent times, about Red Two. Luke refuses to address him by name, not out of a bitterness towards the man but rather out of the exact opposite; if he says that name, he thinks he’ll be bitter towards himself, and then overcome with the knee-weakening interplay of love and loss. As it is, Red Two alone hurts Luke, right in the little bit of his heart that knows he’ll still respond if someone calls him Red Five , that knows that helmet in the back of his closet will have to come back out someday.)

The banner and the helmet make him wonder, though. Assuming Rey was taken against her will, and hasn’t just gone off on some self-assured fool’s errand from which she’ll inevitably return in a matter of hours, her affiliation with the Resistance could have something to do with it. Luke knows she’s with them, in however informal a capacity, and that’s about all he knows. Rey is aware that he used to be a Rebel, but she doesn’t know he used to be one of the Rebels. She doesn’t know Leia is his sister, or that he is (was?) Red Five, and the last time he talked to Leia, they agreed that it was better that way, at least for the time being. Luke and Rey are constantly locked in this odd little standoff, wherein Rey bites back the desire to pry further into his history, and he bites back the desire to pull her back into a facade of safety.

She’s not a kid anymore, though, and he can’t pull the wool over her eyes in good conscience. He’s content to give her the thumbs up or turn a blind eye if she wants to climb fences and spray graffiti and surreptitiously collect intel or whatever else the Resistance is up to these days.

The door to Rey’s room, old and wooden like most of the interior of this apartment, has a glossy printed photo of an old Rebel jet, back from the glory days, taped to it. Luke regards the photo in silence as he closes the door behind him. Rey doesn’t idolize the pilots the same way she did when she was younger, but the base feelings behind that idolization are still there in everything she does: that yearning for freedom, that sense of justice, that fiery, burning passion bordering on anger when it isn’t tempered by empathy, but it usually is. 

That, too, probably runs in the family. Luke doesn’t want to say that Rey was destined to wind up neck deep in the Resistance, but the thought of it is oddly fitting. Really, it’s not even odd. It just fits . 

Still, Luke isn’t ready to dust off that old helmet, and by all nine hells, he isn’t even approaching ready to touch the minefield that is (was?) Red Two.

So he makes his case: Rey has disappeared, presumed kidnapped, and Luke is hiring himself to track her down. Not because she’s Resistance, and he as a former (but maybe not so former) Rebel has a duty to that, but because she’s his daughter.

Okay, maybe part of it has to do with the Resistance, and maybe a tiny (really, it’s barely there, wholly insignificant and inconsequential, he could just ignore it and he wouldn’t know the difference!) part of it has to do with the image in his mind’s eye of Leia’s inevitable delight when she finds out that Luke is letting himself fall back into everything he said he’d leave behind but they both knew he couldn’t.

Luke is still holding onto that little shred of stubborn hope that he can really leave the Resistance behind - the name doesn’t matter so much as what it stands for, and that hasn’t changed since they were called the Rebellion and could afford to operate in any manner not out of the shadows. He locks the apartment behind him, and double-checks the biometric locks to make sure they won’t glitch and kick Rey out like they do after every software update, and he holds onto that tiny little bit of reassurance like a lifeline even as he tells himself that Rey isn’t going to be letting herself in anytime soon.

Luke takes off at a brisk walk, multiple knives and a plasma pistol concealed in the folds of his dark, muted trench coat and even more muted clothes. He’s never been a fan of too much color in his wardrobe, but sometimes he thinks about the way his taste in clothing has changed over the years, an odd little reflection of his outlook on the world. First all tans and whites, happy and bright, and then all black, the mark of someone in mourning. 

These days, he settles on greys and browns, the colors of a forest. Dark, but not in a fearsome way. Muted really is a good word to describe it. Mostly, he’s calm. A little sad. But he keeps standing, and the occasional fire only leaves space for new things to grow.

He isn’t consciously thinking about his foolish promises to himself as he reaches Mitaka’s Cantina, but they’re still floating in the back of his mind like a rotten mush on the surface of a pond. 

They sink a little as he flashes a two-fingered salute at the bouncer, who thankfully recognizes him and elects to not give him trouble tonight, evidently deciding that it’d be too much work to frisk the grouchy, annoying old eccentric. Luke certainly isn’t the weirdest person who frequents Dopheld’s, nor is he the most intense of the regulars who fall into the grouchy, annoying old eccentric category, but he’s also technically not supposed to be carrying approximately two-thirds of the weapons that he has on him right now, and it’s usually a 50/50 tossup as to whether the bouncer will bother him just for the fun of it.

Luke’s eyes don’t adjust to the darkness, punctuated by neon red and purple lights, as quickly as they used to, but he’s barely in his forties. He’s not ancient yet .

(They used to occasionally get strange looks, such a young man with such an old child, but those have tapered off in the last few years.)

He shoulders through the midday crowd, thickening with people on their lunch breaks, and makes his way to the bar. One of the Mitakas, not the one Luke is looking for, is busy taking orders and sliding glasses of all sorts of strange substances down the bar.

The neon lights glint off of multiple piercings, and now that Luke is closer he can see through the lights that this Mitaka has brightly dyed hair, possibly blue, but all he can tell for sure is that it’s bright . He recognizes them, despite the suspicion he has that this Mitaka is the kind of person who changes their appearance quite frequently, but he doesn’t remember their name.

Still, they’re definitely not the Mitaka he’s looking for.

This Mitaka doesn’t bother to stop what they’re doing, iridescent nail polish gleaming under the lights as their hands fly between a rack of glasses, a computer console, and the row of taps behind the bar. They look directly at Luke, and somehow manage to fill a glass perfectly while doing so. 

“You gonna order?” they ask, “or are you just going to stand there?”

They don’t look like they’d care much whether Luke beats around the bush or not, so he skips that step.

“I’m looking for Dopheld Mitaka,” he says, and they scoff.

“Well, I’m not Dopheld,” they say, “I’m Anasil.” 

And then, “Out of all the sibs, you just had to go for the Orderio.” 

Anasil sounds just self-assured enough that Luke thinks they might have a point in judging him right now. He doesn’t ask what in all nine hells Orderio is supposed to mean, but it’s also no secret that the youngest Mitaka is in deep with the First Order.

“Is he here?” Luke presses.

“Yeah, yeah, he is, but what do you want with him?”

“What’s it to you?”

That gets Anasil to stop what they’re doing. They look at Luke again, dismissive gaze morphing into something between suspicion and weariness, and squint at him as if they’re trying to decide whether he’s a real threat or not.

“Look,” they say finally, leaning across the bar. “Doph is neck deep in some real hot water right now, and he’s making it work, but the last thing he needs is more trouble. The kid may be a kriffing dumbass, but he’s still my brother.”

Luke wants to point out that it might not be the best choice to tell him these things if Anasil wants to keep Dopheld safe, but he says nothing about that. Instead, he shrugs.

“And he’s also in bed with the First Order.”

The next few moments are a deeply uncomfortable silence, topped off by Anasil throwing their head back and laughing hysterically.

“Who isn’t ?”

Me , Luke wants to say. My daughter. My sister. My…

(Leia never stopped being his sister, not when they share blood and all the hell they went through. But when does a friend stop being a friend? What if that person was something more than a friend, but now he doesn’t know if they’re anything to him at all?)

“I’m not trying to stage a coup,” Luke tries, which is possibly the worst possible thing he could have said to divert suspicion from himself. Anasil levels him with a look endlessly more suspicious than before, if that’s even possible.

For a fleeting moment, Luke is nineteen, twenty, twenty-one again, bright-eyed and in love with the sky, and the very concept of freedom, and then someone he doesn’t know he loves until he’s thirty and alone with his feet firmly planted on the ground and it’s far too late.

“Then what would you possibly want to talk to him about?”

Luke’s face straightens itself out into a thoroughly displeased expression. He steps back from the bar. 

“If you’re going to keep being like this, nothing at all.”

Anasil looks downright offended, but they just purse their lips and square their shoulders and step back. “I’ll go find him if you tell me what you want from him first.”

Well, that’s not the worst concession Luke has had to make to get his hands on intel, but he’s still not looking forward to it. Kriff, he’s resourceful, he can work this out on his own.

“Well, no deal, then,” he says, and he walks away.

A few moments of judgemental side-eye later, he’s ordered a hot cocoa, and is stalking his way into the bowels of the cantina, where the lights are just a little dimmer and the mundane midday crowd is replaced by gamblers and hitmen and the like. Luke is so distracted, not angry at Anasil or even at himself so much as he’s just dejected and scared, that he barely has a coherent thought all the way to the tiny booth he’s scouted out, up in a corner against a fogged-up window where he can scope out most of the room but not get any surprises from behind.

He meditates while he waits for nothing in particular, memorizing the feeling evoked by the scene, by the combination of the pulse of music from the club next door and the cold metal of the table under his hands and the dim purple echoing behind his closed eyelids.

Luke almost feels relieved on Dopheld’s behalf; he had fully planned on interrogating the kid, but then again, what he was going to put the youngest Mitaka through to get a hand in First Order intel is nothing compared to what he has planned for whoever took Rey.

But he gently pushes those thoughts away, and focuses on his every breath coming in through his unfortunately dry nose and going out through lightly parted lips. He can smell his cocoa, still too hot to drink, and the familiar chocolatey scent is comforting.

He almost misses it when someone slides into the booth opposite him, and the slight sideways pull as his his eyes open, tugging him back into reality, jolts him.

“Did I surprise you?” his new companion asks, voice low and casual. There’s something clipped in their voice that Luke instantly picks out to be a Corellian accent, albeit a faded one, and he’s fairly sure they have some kind of voice modulator equipped. They must , because they could surely fit it under the jet-black fighter pilot’s helmet they’re wearing (clearly modified, but Luke suspects it used to be of the Rebel variety; it looks too much like his own for him to miss out on the little giveaway details), and nothing else could explain that odd tinge of familiarity he feels from hearing their voice.

“A little,” Luke says, rolling his shoulders, shaking out the last remnants of agitation holding on to him. Steam wafts up from the mug on the table, catching in the light. Purple glints off the visor of the other person’s helmet, tinted too well for Luke to make out anything telling about their face. He suspects they’re Resistance, though.

“I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation with Anasil,” this new person says. “Looking for revenge?”

“Revenge isn’t my way,” Luke replies, picking up his mug and tilting it so that the cocoa swirls a little. He looks up, instinctively moving to meet their eyes, but there’s nothing save for that visor staring back at him.

He waits for them to say something, but nothing comes. They rest their elbows on the table, crossing their arms, one gloved hand forming a fist and one curling around the other. This silence hangs over the two of them, and there’s something eerily familiar about it, as if Luke is falling into an old habit, as if his fingernails are finding forgotten grooves in that desk back in his office, and they fit in perfectly. Luke considers this as he stares down into his cocoa, into the hypnotic steam.

“You’re a Rebel, aren’t you?” they ask.

Luke stares back up, eyes widening despite himself, and he realizes that this action in itself is more telling than any words could be. So he doesn’t try to deflect. He doesn’t try to change the topic. He just takes a sip of cocoa, and winces as it burns his tongue a little, and sighs in resignation.

He thinks they’re smirking, although possibly in a soft way, under that helmet, as they answer Luke’s question before he’s even fully formed the words.

“I can see it in your eyes,” the stranger says, gently. Luke is reminded of a roaring fireplace in the middle of a downpour, burning and passionate and fiery while somehow managing to be warm and welcoming and an aching relief all at the same time.

“I’m no Rebel. Not anymore, at least.”

They laugh, and Luke swears, he swears on his own kriffing heart that he recognizes it. There’s a flicker of something deep in his memory, but it can’t be, he refuses to let it be, and he shoves it away. The cocoa scalds his throat as he takes a long sip, more to distract himself than to actually enjoy his drink. 

“Once a Rebel, always a Rebel. We may have a different name now, and we may not be fighting an actual war - well, not yet - but we still stand for the same thing.”

They lean closer, almost conspiratorial. Luke tightens his grip on the mug.

“I know who you are, Luke Skywalker. And -” the stranger tilts their head as Luke leans back, against the seat, into the seat, as far away as he can get without up and leaving the booth. 

“-don’t take it as a threat, because it’s not. This is the furthest thing from a threat. This is, I suppose, a lifeline. This is m- us reaching out.”

“Did Leia send you?” Luke snaps, suddenly overcome with a bout of rage that he has to breathe deep to let go, to let it melt into annoyance and then null, nothingness. 

“I wish she had, but no. This is purely opportunistic.” There’s something else, something unsaid, behind those words. Something like I’ve been considering coming after you for some time now, but Luke knows he shouldn’t project like that. Part of him wishes someone would come after him, but Leia stopped sending people years ago. Everyone else knows he hasn’t gotten over Ben’s death, but he has yet to decide whether he’s gotten over it or not.

“Eight years change a lot, huh?” they ask, sensing that Luke isn’t about to let up on his silence. Once again, there’s something unsaid, but this time Luke genuinely has no idea what it could be.

He sighs. Takes a sip of his cocoa. It doesn’t burn his mouth now, having reached that point at which it becomes a tolerable temperature and then very quickly starts to cool.

“You’re not wrong,” Luke replies, “but I’m also not going to join the Resistance just because you or Leia or whoever think I’ve forgotten what happened eight years ago.”

“That’s perfectly valid reasoning, Luke,” the stranger says.

And then, sliding out of the booth as smoothly as they came in, just like every word out of their mouth has been, a single hand splayed on the table just close enough to Luke’s that he thinks they could intertwine their fingers if either one of them reached out a little more (but he doesn’t know why that thought came to him): “Think about it, okay?”

Rey has never gotten drunk, let alone even touched alcohol, but her first thought when she wakes up is that this must be what a hangover feels like. 

Well, a hangover and the aftermath of a beating, because even when she’s made questionable dietary choices and woken up sick to her stomach the next day, that doesn’t make every muscle in her body ache when she tries to move. She’s barely awake, exhaustion tearing down to her very core, but her back is pressed uncomfortably against something cold and metal, and as her inner ear realizes that she’s not lying upright or flat on her back, the discomfort kicks in. She wants to move, to stifle this sense of whatever it is that’s making her jittery yet tired at the same time, making her feel that something is just fundamentally wrong about this situation.

There’s also the restraints, digging into her wrists. The sensation of the heavy bands makes memories come flooding back, bile in the back of her mouth, dryness on her tongue, a pounding ache in her spine. Recorn she had to carry out.

Oh, Luke is going to be pissed. Join the Resistance if it’s what you want, he’d said, It’s a cold war these days. Just don’t bring me into it. I’m not a fighter any more, not even a behind-the-scenes one.

“Huh,” is the first thing out of her mouth, croaked rather miserably, as she forces heavy eyelids open, wishing she had her hands free to rub her eyes. 

And then, because Rey may be old and mature enough to be affiliated with the Resistance and to agree to recon that wound up getting her kidnapped, but she is first and foremost a teenager with a bad sense of humor: “That’s kinky.”

“What in the hells did you just say?” a heavily accented and even more heavily perturbed voice asks from somewhere in front of Rey.

Oh, fun, she thinks as she looks around for the first time. She’s in a First Order interrogation room. This is going to be interesting. Already, part of her brain is dedicating itself to plotting how to get the hell out of here, but she doesn’t feel the familiar presence of her trusty plasma pistol strapped to her waistband, nor any of her larger knives. She’s pretty sure whoever searched her and/or beat her up didn’t get to the folding knife in her boot, or the one strapped under one arm, but she can’t exactly reach those right now. Given these circumstances, verbal persuasion is going to be her friend.

“I said, what did you say?” the voice repeats, and its owner comes into Rey’s line of sight. A First Order officer, short, gelled reddish-blonde hair, kind of ratty looking face. Maybe it’s not the face so much as the vibes. His uniform almost looks big on him, and it’s probably the smallest size they even make regular First Order uniforms. He can’t be more than twenty, twenty-one, not much more than a child. It’s a shame, really; the First Order propaganda gets to people early, and if that doesn’t get to them, sheer necessity will - lost jobs, monopolies, an eviction notice slid under the door.

Then again, Rey isn’t much more than a child either; she’s nineteen, and she’s already gotten her hands dirty in a cold war that, if the involved parties aren’t careful, will surely escalate.

Rey tilts her head sideways, wincing at the stiffness in her neck, and grins at the man. 

“I said, that’s kinky.”

A blush rises in the man’s face. He looks downright offended. Rey can’t blame him. 

“With -” he takes in a sharp breath, clearly stammering, “with all due respect, ma’am -”

“Don’t ma’am me,” Rey interjects, “this isn’t exactly a respectable establishment.”

“I - this is the First Order, not whatever you mean to imply.”

“Once again,” Rey says, shifting her body in an attempt to make herself more comfortable (all she manages is to make muscles she didn’t know she had start to ache), “still not a respectable establishment.”

Something flashes in the man’s eyes, and Rey is struck by a sense, for just a moment, that this isn’t just a game. She may be playing it as such, in that adrenaline-fueled way she so loves, but she can’t push him too far or risk killing herself in the process.

She rolls her neck, which is pretty much the only part of her body she has anything even approaching full range of motion for. 

“Still,” she adds, deciding that she can afford to push him a little further, “I’ve got to say, I’m a little disappointed that the First Order doesn’t have, I don’t know, a BDSM division or something. Seems right up you guys’ alley.”

The man blinks at Rey. She wonders if he knows her name. She wonders, for a single fleeting moment, how they got here. What chain of events was it that led to her awakening, injured and disoriented, in the bowels of what must be one of the First Order’s sprawling inner city lairs? What led to this man, whoever he is, being the one to keep an eye on her? 

Rey decides that it doesn’t matter if destiny, or chance, or just some very unfortunate choices, led to this moment, because she decides to do what she does best (and what is probably the thing that got her here in the first place, if she’s being honest): she takes matters into her own hands.

That path flopped, she thinks. 

“You just gonna stand there?” she says.

“Annoying as you are, I can’t let you go.”

“You can leave,” Rey suggests, already calculating how long it’ll take for her to break out of these restraints if she’s left to her own devices. 

“I’m afraid I can’t do that either,” the man fires back.

“Oooh,” Rey tries, “you’re afraid? I thought the First Order doesn’t like their pawns to feel fear.”

That strikes a nerve, she can see it in his eyes. Maybe the hit to his fear, maybe because she called him just a pawn when he thinks he could be something more. Probably both. 

“Careful,” the man says, “I have the high ground here.” 

He really isn’t qualified for this job, Rey decides, because he looks like the threat physically pains him. Good. It should pain him.

“Maybe so,” Rey says, “but one of us is going to go to sleep tonight knowing they don’t fight fair, and it’s not going to be me.”

The man opens his mouth to reply, and is instantly cut off by the sound of a buzzing comlink. He fumbles, and answers the call, and makes eye contact with Rey for half a terrified second as another voice fills the room.

“Thanisson,” the voice says, and what the kriff, Rey swears she recognizes it, “we have a problem.”

A few things happen at once.

One: Thanisson replies, looking for all the world like he’s been plunged headfirst into panic just now, that “Now is really not a good time, Mitaka!”

Two: Rey hears the name Mitaka, and can’t hide the look of absolute confusion that falls over her face, because she knows the Mitakas, they’re Resistance (well, except for the youngest, but nobody really talks about him).

Three: Thanisson has had a small object clutched in one hand this entire time, the control switch for Rey’s restraints, and he drops it in his panic as he goes to answer Mitaka. The switch drops, and Rey wants to throw her head back and laugh as it bounces once, and then hits the ground.

The restraints click open, and this whole fucking situation is so improbable, but Rey doesn’t have time to reflect on the nature of probability or entropy or the fact that the universe tends towards chaos. 

Instead, she lunges forward and punches Thanisson in the jaw. Bruised knuckles (what the kriff happened yesterday?) meet flesh, and Rey feels the adrenaline starting to surge through her veins. She can only hope it’ll be enough to hold off the exhaustion clawing at her eyelids. 

Thanisson falls to the ground with a satisfying crunch, and Rey steps over his writhing body and out the door before he can get up again. She won’t kick him while he’s down and unarmed. If their places were switched, she thinks he might not kick her either; it’s not her place to drag him back from whatever quarter-life crisis he’s having right now, but she also doubts that he’s fully entrenched in the First Order as much as he pretends to be.

The door shuts behind her, locking automatically with a telling click, and some horrific combination of weariness, resignation, and determination hits Rey like a fist to the jaw.

Well.

She has to get out of here, and now that she’s had time to remember, she might want to poke around a little and look for intel. Ideally, getting captured again won’t be part of this.

Rey makes it approximately ten feet down the hallway before she spots a security camera. It’s around a corner, and she isn’t in its line of sight from here, but still - these camera systems are designed so that people can’t travel the area for long while also evading them. 

So then, her first order (pun not intended) of business will have to be to find the maintenance tunnels. 

Rey is used to finding all sorts of strange things waiting for her when she kicks in vents and falls out of ceilings. Especially considering that she’s already taken a detour into the first security office she could find and done her best to mess with the security footage and unlock some doors, she’s prepared to find First Order officers with guns cocked. A blaring alarm would be a nice touch.

What she does not expect to find when she falls into the hallway leading to the base’s data storage unit is another Resistance fighter, but apparently the universe has no shortage of confusion in store for her today. The only reason she even knows they’re with the Resistance is because nobody else would be brave and/or stupid enough to be in here.

“What the hell,” the fighter says, turning away from the security panel they’ve been jacking into, voice muffled through an old fighter pilot’s helmet, painted a glossy black all around, with the visor pulled over their eyes, “are you doing here?”

Rey gets into a fighting stance anyways, because you never know.

“You know me?” she replies. 

“Rey,” the fighter says, “right?”

“What the hell,” she breathes, echoing their earlier words, and they sigh. She relaxes a bit.

“Yes, that seems to be the consensus.”

“Okay, yes, but who are you, why are you here, and how do you know me?”

The fighter holds up one hand - gloved, she notes - and returns to rearranging cables inside the security panel.

“One question at a time. You can call me Wraith. You probably don’t know me. The vocal modulator tends to throw people off, but I use he/him pronouns. I was a Rebel pilot back in the day, and I still work with the Resistance.” 

He pauses, taking a deep breath as if bracing himself for something.

“However, most of the newbies don’t know me. I work in the shadows these days, low-key work. Mostly recon and intel.”

He pauses again, leaning closer to the panel. Rey imagines his brows furrowed under the helmet, and then wonders if he even has eyebrows. 

“Let me guess,” Rey tries, diverting all thought from Wraith’s possibly nonexistent eyebrows, “we don’t know you, but you know us.”

“Yep,” he says, drawing out the y and just slightly popping the p. There’s something foreign in his voice, less clipped than Thanisson’s accent but familiar nonetheless. She feels like she’s met pilots with this accent before, but she can’t remember for the life of her exactly what it might be, nor is now the time to ask, so she tries to pull her brain back on track yet again.

Hells, she must really be out of it. She’s beginning to remember what happened yesterday now, come to think of it, but she isn’t sure she wants to. Bruises, lots of them, and yelling, and one too many snappy comebacks followed by sharp pain. Blood, welling up at the edges of a dozen small, needlepoint cuts. 

Luke is going to be so pissed. If Rey makes it out of here alive, that is.

Rey is beginning to feel a little useless, jittery, just idling in the background, but before she can comment on it, Wraith finally stands up. Whatever he did to the security panel - Rey can’t really see from here - it must have worked, because she hears a door click and slide open from somewhere down the corridor.

“Why are you here?” she asks, following him as he starts down the hallway, and he stops. Looks back at her. Seems to realize that this small scavenger child has joined his mission, and there’s nothing he can do about it.

“Why are you here?” he fires back, but there’s no malice to it. Classic Resistance bantering.

Rey holds her chin up high. “I was kidnapped while running recon. What about you?”

“I was not kidnapped while running recon, thankfully, and I’m here to collect some data. And -” Wraith holds up a hand, pointing his index finger at Rey “-before you say it, I know you want to come with me, and I’ll let you do that because we’re on the same side and we both need to get out of here. But please don’t interfere with my mission.”

He drops his hand. Cocks his head. It’s strange talking to someone whose face Rey can’t see. She usually associates facelessness, that strange statue-like quality of hiding yourself behind a mask, with the First Order. Even in old Empire propaganda, from the days of the real war, all the soldiers are masked.

“Deal?” he asks, and Rey forces herself to relax a little. He has reasons for hiding his face, surely, the same way Luke has reasons for not rejoining the Resistance, the same way he doesn’t talk about his history as a pilot. 

“Deal,” Rey answers.

(Wraith said he was a pilot. Rey wonders if he used to fly with Luke, if they know each other. Something stops her from asking, either the single shred of common decency and respect that sometimes overcomes her impulsivity, or just the fact that Wraith starts walking the second Rey has closed her mouth again.)

Whatever intel Wraith is here to collect, Rey has no idea if it would be interesting to her or not, because he sets her on guard duty.

“Watch the door, kid,” he says when they reach the storage room, dark and cold and filled by blinking computers in hulking lines. “There are only two ways in or out of here if you don’t count the vents. I can keep an eye out on the other one, but you have to make sure nobody comes in or out of here.”

That’s a mistake - Rey always counts the vents. However, she doesn’t think any self-respecting First Order officer is going to crawl through them, especially not when doors are an option, so she gives Wraith a thumbs up as he disappears into the abyss of the data storage room. 

And she waits.

And, frankly, it’s boring. 

The First Order never takes a day off, but she supposes her and Wraith’s combined efforts to take down the security systems, as well as whatever that problem Mitaka had called Thanisson about right before Rey had made a run for it, must have been enough to divert suspicion from this part of the base.

It occurs to Rey, at some point along this train of thought, that she doesn’t even know which base this is. There are quite a few in the sprawling megapolis of Galactic City, and she can’t have been taken far from the inner city district she usually hangs around. No, that would be too much effort for the First Order. Utilitarianism is the First Order’s mantra, almost to a fault. Definitely to a fault, if you count human lives as more than just another expendable resource.

Rey is almost starting to get distracted by her boredom (and the weariness, creeping steadfast back in, never letting her catch a break) when the alarms start to go off. 

So much for boredom. She takes off into the data storage room, heart pounding again, and makes it approximately three feet before Wraith comes running, chest heaving.

She turns around, making a full 180, and follows him.

“What happened?”

“They upgraded their damn security systems is what happened!” Wraith calls back as Rey catches up to him. He may run fast, but Rey is young and even faster despite the rapidly returning ache in what feels like it must be every one of her muscles. They’re both also conveniently motivated by the fear of being caught.

“Did you at least get what you came for?”

“Yes, yes,” Wraith says between heavy breaths, sounding downright angry, and his shoes squeak on the floor as he skids around a corner and comes to a stop, barely managing to grab Rey’s arm in time. Rey’s lungs are heaving now, too, and the pain is setting in now that she’s stopped, but she’s glad Wraith caught her and pulled her back. They’re at an intersection of hallways, a little ways past the security panel that Wraith had disabled, and just a few meters up is the next intersection, where a squad of Stormtroopers are walking by. 

Making their patrol rounds, no doubt, ready to shoot on sight if they catch Resistance spies. 

Rey, Wraith’s hand still resting protectively on one arm, pokes her head around the corner. The Stormtroopers are gone.

“Kriff,” Wraith hisses, “that was the route I was going to take to get out of here.”

Rey is going to say something about the vents, but she remembers just in time that a) Wraith is taller and older than her, he’s definitely not the kind of person who can fit into such a small space, and b) she doesn’t actually know the layout of this building, and her default plan in such scenarios is just to kick in vent covers until she tastes fresh air on the other side of one.

“Is there another way we can go?”

“We could go back through the data storage room, but security is going to be coming that way soon.”

“Vents?” Rey asks, just in case.

“Absolutely not.”

Rey goes for her plasma pistol, only to remember that she still hasn’t gotten it back. Well, that’s one more thing for Luke to be pissed about.

Wraith, still in the midst of whatever internal monologue he’s been having, doesn’t notice it, and he jolts a little when he looks over a moment later to find that Rey has pulled a utility knife from her boot.

“Hells, kid, did you have that in the interrogation room?” he hisses, sounding rather incredulous.

“They took my pistol and bigger knives, but not this. I have an electrostaff, too, but I left that at home.”

Wraith mutters something under his breath in a language Rey doesn’t speak. It’s probably a curse word or some sort of prayer. Maybe both.

He looks around, up, down, in every direction, scanning and thinking, and then back at Rey. 

“You planning on using that knife? I doubt it’ll get you far against a squad of Stormtroopers.”

Rey shrugs. “I only need to get the upper hand on one, and then I’ll have a gun too.”

He chuckles. “Smart. Anyways, as great as it’s been getting to know you, we can’t stand here and loiter forever.”

“Which way?”

Rey imagines he’s pursing his lips, brows furrowed as he considers their options. This time, she succeeds in not thinking about the status of his eyebrows, or whatever else might be hidden under that helmet.

“Only way out is forward,” Wraith says, rather vaguely, after a moment’s deliberation. 

“After the Stormtroopers, or no?”

“No,” he replies, decidedly. “Keep going straight.”

It takes all of Rey’s willpower not to make a joke about how she’s never done anything straight in her life, but she and Wraith hurry down the hallway past where the Stormtroopers went, and continue ahead, in a mostly straight manner.

They make it, in classic shitty-holodrama manner, nearly all the way to the main entrance before they get caught.

Of course, they circumvent the main entrance itself, making a move for a nearby room that Wraith insists has windows big enough to fit an adult human through, but they don’t even make it all the way through the door into said room before alarms are blaring. 

Great, is all Rey can think, this is fine. Everything is fine. 

Of course, everything goes to shit.

In a manner of seconds, they’re surrounded by Stormtroopers, and Rey remembers just how kriffing taxed she is after her beating yesterday night and then crawling through vents and now all this running, but she really doesn’t want to get captured again, so she can’t make herself give up just yet.

(Hells, she’s going to take the best damn nap of her life when she gets home. But first she’s going to have to sit through Luke’s inevitable rant, and then hopefully a hug or seven, and she has to make sure Finn and Poe are okay, and she has to check in with General Organa…)

This is fine, she repeats to herself, and the situation continues to deteriorate, as if the universe is manifesting itself into some sort of conscious being with desires and goals and opinions, and it’s giving her a giant middle finger.

The cherry on top, really, is the part where Wraith delivers a punch to the bucket-helmet of a Stormtrooper and uses the fallen trooper’s gun to plow down half the rest of the squad while yelling for Rey to make a break for it. And then the part where he’s dragged away kicking and screaming, still yelling for Rey to kriffing go already, you dumbass, get the hells out of here, I’ll be fine!

She forces herself to shatter the window and climb out without looking back, and the pain of various construction materials digging into her recent wounds combined with watching Wraith be taken away and knowing she can’t do anything about it is nothing compared to the pain of realizing that she cares about Wraith despite having known him for all of an hour. 

It’s going to be a long night, but as Rey scales down the side of the building and runs through alleys she’s never seen before and, eventually, shaking and grimy and bloody, stumbles into a road she actually recognizes and feels the sheer overwhelming relief of knowing she’s almost home, she makes a promise to herself that she’s going to repay Wraith for what he did for her.

Even if it hurts, especially if it hurts, she’s going to find him, and she’s going to bring him home, wherever that might be.

An hour passes, and Luke sits at that table until long after the cocoa in his mug is cold and then gone, and he thinks about Ben Solo.

The kid - man? He had been in that weird place where nobody was sure if he was a kid or an adult, not even Ben himself - had shown so much promise. He was going to be a senator (just like his mother!) and he was going to repair all the damage that years and years of war had done. He was born during the war, and that accounted for a number of his troubles, but that wasn’t it. Dwelling on the reasons things went wrong had never helped, and it won’t help Luke now. 

He still wonders, though, if things had gone differently, what his life would be like now. What Ben’s life would be like now, if he even still had it.

But ten years ago, the war had ended, and the last remnants of the Empire refused to completely give up, but they were falling apart. There were a few months where the only time Luke went behind the controls of a fighter jet, the only time he stopped being Luke and started being Red Five, was for training, just to keep his skills in the same place they’d been at. Red Two - hells, that makes him bite his tongue and hold back tears, even now, that makes something primal and agonized climb up the back of his throat - had made it out alive, leading the final fight as a sort of penance for the one time he’d been a coward (he had known more than anyone else that it was wrong, and so he’d been prepared to lay his life down to atone). There had been a few months, then, where things were good. 

Well, maybe not good .

But things had been getting better, and Luke still remembers it vividly, painfully so, still remembers the tantalizing promise of happiness, just out of frame in some old photo, slipping between his fingers whenever he tried to get any sort of real grip on it.

Ben had slipped through the cracks, and he’d gone too far trying to appease bad people to prove himself in a way that, even if he could have succeeded in doing, he never should have.

In the end, he’d tried to kill people, good people, he’d fought Luke, and Luke had hesitated at the crucial moment, but he’d had to do it. He’d...well, he’d had a choice, he has always had and will always have a choice, but the alternate to striking the man - yes, he was a man, Luke thinks, he wasn’t a child after the things he had done - down was too horrible to consider.

Sometimes, he wonders if things would have gone differently had he stayed in the fight in its early stages, kept Ben’s darkness at bay until something, anything different could have happened, but he knows it would have gone the same way no matter what. 

Luke couldn’t stay with the Rebellion (by then, they were the Resistance, more political than military, holding up that facade as if they weren’t still the same traumatized band of freedom fighters they’d always been), though, not after what he’d done. He left, and he put his helmet out of sight, and he put his old attachments out of mind.

That’s it, he thinks now, staring into the foggy window. His reflection, distorted and not much more than a purple-tinted blob, stares back at him. Two things Ben - the other Ben, the first one, the one after whom the second Ben was named - would be disappointed in Luke for. 

One: he walked away.

Two: he has attachments.

Well, had . Almost had. And now has , but in a different way. 

Luke knows Ben would be disappointed in him for both of these things, and he knows he has a duty to Ben - Ben’s memory, whatever - to not disappoint him, but that’s also never stopped Luke before.

So what changed things?

Why, only now, is Luke considering going back to the most heart-wrenchingly familiar thing in his life, when he knows it’s just going to hurt him, when he’s had eight years to do it but hasn’t?

Maybe that stranger was right. Eight years do change a lot. Rey isn’t a scared little kid anymore, Luke is starting to get grey hairs, it’s been looking for a few years like the Resistance doesn’t have a chance against the First Order. 

Does Luke want to join the Resistance? Does he want to step back into the fight?

It’s not like he ever fully left, really. He, as an individual, may have cut himself off from it, but he’s never tried to stop Rey from being an active member of the Resistance. He knows she’s done more than she tells him, that not all her time at the garage is spent working. Hells, he’s taken cases from Resistance members before, more than he’s ever taken them from the First Order - this is partially because the First Order doesn’t need a private detective, not when it has the law on its side, and partially because Luke has enough of his moral code intact to turn the First Order down on the rare occasion that it does come knocking.

Somewhere else in the cantina, a glass shatters. Someone curses loudly, momentarily snapping Luke out of his meditative state. He blinks a few times. Rubs his eyes with the back of his organic hand.

He grimaces at nothing in particular, and realizes that he doesn’t know what he wants. And then, that this isn’t a fresh realization. He has known this for years, that he is afraid of what he might have to face if he goes back to the Resistance - walking amongst those he used to fight by the side of, knowing that he killed Ben Solo, knowing that everyone else knows he killed Ben Solo, all of them remembering that Ben Solo was once a child.

All of them remembering that Ben Solo was once their leader’s son, and that the fact that Luke is her brother can’t make up for that.

That stranger made him think, though. Reminded him of memories he’s pushed away for the last eight years, of those few precious months before everything went to hell, and of the immediate aftermath, when Ben Solo’s body was still warm.

People had been willing to forgive Luke, because yes, he’d had a choice, but the alternative to striking Ben down had been so horrible, nobody wanted to consider living through it. He just hadn’t been willing to forgive himself, hadn’t been willing to look Leia in the eyes every day and think about what had led up to that fateful moment.

This time, Luke pulls himself back into reality. Clenches his hands into fists. Unclenches them. Takes deep breaths to steady himself.

Clench. Unclench.

He slides a tip onto the table next to his long-empty mug, and he leaves the cantina with a sense of purpose. Somewhere along the line, he’s come to the subconscious conclusion that Rey, whatever she might have gotten herself into this time, will likely have gotten herself out of it while Luke was sulking, and this makes him feel bad about his ability to watch out for his own family, but then again, Rey is his family. Even if not in blood, she’s a Skywalker , and Skywalkers are resourceful and stubborn if nothing else.

Still, one man can only do so much against the First Order.

Luke isn’t sure whether he’s more annoyed or relieved when he, barely a block away from the cantina, gets a frantic comm from Poe Dameron’s number.

He picks up, not entirely sure what to expect, and almost trips over his own feet when he stops too suddenly at the voice on the other end.

“ -ke? Luke? Kriffing pick up already - Luke! ”

“ Rey? ” he says into his comlink, incredulous. Someone bumps his shoulder a little too harshly as they rush past him, and he forces himself to keep walking again, faster, towards the garage.

He wants to ask a million questions, starting with Are you okay? , but he doesn’t get the chance, because she’s already rambling, in a panic. 

“Luke, I’m so sorry, you’re going to be so pissed, but I messed up, I was going on a recon mission and a patrol squad caught me and I woke up in an interrogation room, I -”

She cuts herself off, no doubt expecting Luke to make some exclamation about her going on a recon mission, but he just sighs.

“I know, Rey. I know you’ve been doing more with the Resistance than you’ve told me. And it’s okay, well, it’s not okay that you were kidnapped, but. It’s okay that you’re doing that. All I want to know is, are you okay?”

She stops. He can hear her shaky breaths even through the comlink. 

“I...not really. But I will be.”

“Good,” Luke says. “Are you at the garage?” He’s walking faster now, trench coat flapping wildly. He almost wants to run.

“Y-yes, I didn’t know where I was when I got out of the base, and I just walked until I recognized something, I should have gone home but the garage was closer, it -”

Rey cuts herself off again. She sounds on the verge of tears. Luke wills himself to walk as fast as he can without just sprinting.

“Rey, you don’t have to explain everything right now,” Luke assures her. “It’s going to be alright,” he adds, more to reassure himself than anything else.

“I - I don’t want to hang up,” she says, and kriff , she’s definitely crying, or something close to it, “not until you get here.”

“That’s fine, just, keep talking, or do you want me to talk?”

Rey pauses, and sniffles, and then speaks again: “I can talk, I guess.”

She explains to Luke as he walks, how the First Order has been tightening its grip on Galactic City in the last eight years, which of course Luke already knew, of course he did, and he tells her that without telling her the rest, he’s still not ready to share that part of his history with her. But in the last year, it’s been upping its action against what remains of the Senate, and the Resistance has had to run even more recon, staying on its toes. This particular mission wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but Rey had messed up, she’d been captured. She’d fought back, viciously, and woken up bruised and bloodied in an interrogation room. Her captors hadn’t gotten a chance to pry any information out of her, though, because she’d broken out.

“Oh, and he got a call from one of the Mitakas,” she says, “which threw me off, because they’re all with the Resistance, so I guess it was the youngest one, but I thought the whole situation was kind of weird.”

That makes Luke’s blood chill, makes an uncomfortable tingle run the length of his spine, because he had been looking for the youngest Mitaka earlier, looking for a way into the First Order’s intel loop. Had Anasil warned Dopheld?

He doesn’t have time to reflect on that, though, because he looks up and finds that he’s at the garage, and Rey immediately picks up on his hesitation.

“Luke?” she asks. “You alright?”

“Yeah, thanks,” he replies, smiling to himself. There’s something bittersweet about this whole occasion. “I’m here, so I’m going to hang up now.”

“Okay.” Rey still sounds bothered, but notably less so than she was when Luke first picked up the comm.

He hangs up, and wastes no time in making his way inside.

Rey is waiting in the break room of the garage, curled up on the ratty old couch with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders and a steaming hot mug of caf between her hands. Her eyes are red-rimmed, and she’s not actively crying anymore, but she clearly was just recently. She’s a mess, frankly, her face visibly bruised and scratched, and Luke is sure from the way she gingerly holds herself up that she’s even more injured in ways not immediately visible. It makes his heart ache in a way that reminds him ever so clearly (not that he’d ever doubted this, except in the very beginning) that Rey really is family to him, more than any of his blood relatives, with the possible exception of Leia, have ever been.

Finn is sitting next to her, one arm around her shoulders, close yet giving her space. Poe is perched a little further away, on one end of the couch, holding his own mug, and another - probably Finn’s - has been forgotten on the low table that sits in front of the couch.

All three of them look up when Luke enters, and he stands on the threshold for a single awkward moment, hovering, lingering, unsure what to do. He’s so, so glad that Rey has these wonderful people in her life, these friends, allies, colleagues, whatever they are, who share an obvious bond and mutual feeling of caring with her. 

Luke regrets that he couldn’t do more for Rey, in this situation and in general, but he’s also very relieved that she manages to be so resourceful and self-sufficient without parental guidance.

He’s proud of her for this.

He’s proud of her for being braver than he is, too.

Rey looks up at Luke, sniffles a single time, puts down her mug, and smiles. 

Luke’s feet carry him forward, towards the couch, and he’s kneeling, pulling Rey into his arms, and they’re clinging to each other like the lifelines he thinks they both are to each other.

“Damn it,” Luke mutters into Rey’s shoulder, “I love you no matter what you do, but do your best not to get kidnapped again, alright?”

Rey chokes out a laugh. She hugs him a little tighter. “No promises, but I’ll try.”

Luke remembers one of his old mentors telling him, in a vague rant that he still doesn’t understand: Do or do not, there is no try . He almost wants to recite that to Rey, but she’ll ask him to explain it, and he really can’t. 

He eventually pulls back, gripping Rey’s shoulders, smiling at her through the pain. “You did good, though, kid. I’m proud of you”

“Wait, wait, there’s more, I didn’t tell you the whole story.”

Luke feels his face pale, and Rey shakes him a little.

“No, it’s good! Well, it’s a problem, actually, but part of it is good. I met this guy called Wraith, and he said he used to be a Rebel, but he works for the Resistance now. Low-key intel stuff, so not a lot of people know him these days. Does that name ring a bell?”

She looks so hopeful, so excited, that Luke is intrigued despite knowing better, and he really wishes he had an answer for her, but he has to shake his head.

“Well, he was really mysterious, had a vocal modulator and a helmet and all that -” now, that rings a bell for Luke “-but he helped me out, and I got out, but he…” 

Rey hangs her head. 

“The Stormtroopers got him.”

Luke wants to console her, and he squeezes her shoulder in a half-assed attempt at doing so, but he’s too distracted by Rey’s description of this mysterious Wraith character.

“Rey, I’ll let you finish, but I think I might recognize him. You said he had a vocal modulator? Did he have a Corellian accent, by any chance?”

“I mean, I don’t know, really, it was some kind of accent, kind of like Finn’s but, I dunno, less posh.”

Finn, from beside Rey, makes a face of disdain. She smiles apologetically at him. 

“Hmm, could be. And the helmet, was it a Rebel pilot’s helmet, but painted all black, with a tinted visor?”

Rey’s blink of incredulity, coupled with the silence that follows Luke’s question, gives him the answer he’s looking for even before she speaks again.

“How do you know him?” she asks finally, barely audible.

“This is quite the odd coincidence, but he approached me when I was trying to reach Dopheld Mitaka earlier.”

“Doph- isn’t he, like, the only Mitaka who works with the First Order?”

“Yes. I was hoping he could tell me, perhaps after a little bit of diplomatic persuasion, where the First Order might be taking those it’d recently kidnapped.”

“That’s...definitely a strange coincidence,” Rey says, “but more importantly, the guy who helped me - Wraith - he didn’t make it out.”

Luke’s breath catches in his throat. “He died?”

“No, no. He distracted the Stormtroopers so I could get out, and he...they took him.” Rey looks disappointed in herself, and Luke wants to reach out and tell her she shouldn’t be, but he’s spent this entire day running an internal monologue about how disappointed he is in himself, so he can’t really judge on that front.

So Luke asks the obvious question: “Are you going to go after him?”

Rey looks apprehensive, but decisive.

“Obviously,” she replies, without any hesitation. Rubs her eyes again. The post-cry redness of her eyes is starting to clear up, overshadowed by the usual gleam and glint of determination.

Finn speaks. “You’ve got me on your side, if you need help.”

“Me too,” Poe says. “We’re in this together.”

The words are out of Luke’s mouth before he has time to second-guess himself, before he has time to hold back like he’s been doing for the past eight years.

“I’ll help you too,” he says. “I can’t stay out of this fight forever.”