Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Finn had heard sirens like this before. The smearing, nasal wail was a prominent part of life on the Starkiller base: close in your ear jolting you from sleep, echoing across the empty plains between different sector posts. Most often, it had been accompanied by the steady rhythm of stormtrooper boots on the corridor floors. A smattering beat, not perfectly in step, but close enough to mimic the heartbeats behind the shiny white breastplates--the sirens were just one noise in the commotion. He never had time to consider it in singular, away from the other pieces of the scene.

It was many of the unprecedented consequences of Dantooine. 

These sirens were quieter than the ones Hux had employed, but as they rang through the situation room on D’Qar, no one moved. No one ran to their blasters or to throw on a flight vest, with helmets slipping from fingers and thonking to the cracking concrete in the rush. And no one, not even General Organa, reprimanded anyone else for their lack of action. 

Knuckles turned white on the edge of the holo-projector in the center of the room. Finn couldn’t tell if anyone else was even breathing--despite the sirens, his own breath felt too loud in his ears, too brash and out of place as the sirens kept at it, shifting between the same two pitches over and over and over. The white noise of the hustle to mobilize had muffled it in all his years in the First Order, and with his fellow Resistance fighters frozen beside him, what the sirens truly meant hit deep in his chest for the first time--something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

But it wasn’t supposed to go wrong. Things never were, of course, but Dantooine especially. Dantooine wasn’t a scouting mission that any of the lower-level, newer recruits could have handled, flying down towards the other pole of the planet or to some of the other worlds in the Ileenium system. Nor was it anything that would have required stealth, not a Jakku, meeting with the General’s mysterious old friends in village tents among forgotten sand dunes. Really, Snap had told Admiral Ackbar in the days leading up to it, they could technically take that old a-wing whose blasters had been busted for months and things would be fine.

“That would be asking for trouble, Wexley,” he’d said. Not like asking for the trouble would have really mattered, in the end, but there had been no way to know that then.

The afternoon before the mission was supposed to take place, General Organa pulled a hologram of the planet up in the situation room with all officers and pilots slumped into their usual seats or against their usual spots on the wall. Rey and Skywalker hovered near the back, near the door to the bunk wings. They had been back for just over two weeks, and it had taken just under two minutes for the rest of the base to realize that Skywalker’s presence was something that altered the very air around them in a way none of them could describe. The General’s words came out differently, with the same amount of assertion as they always had, but something else was there, something Skywalker brought back with him.

Rey’s attention was split between the General and Finn, and she offered him a small smile over the crowd of the officers’ heads.

Dantooine: an isolated planet on the outer rim on the other side of the galaxy from D’Qar. Wholly insignificant in the grand scheme of things as they stood in the present day, but there was a time, the General said curtly, when Dantooine held a base just like this one, but smaller. When its path briefly crossed with that of Alderaan and was allowed to keep on going. 

“The Rebel Alliance wasn’t based there for very long,” she said, “but we had to leave quickly and couldn’t transfer all our data in time. Some of it is still in the systems in the abandoned facility, though we did what we could to hide that there was anything still there.” 

With its distant location and the rest of the war raging throughout the galaxy, any thought of searching the base had apparently been tossed aside, a luxury that wouldn’t be afforded to future bases. “The First Order apparently decided to go back through old Imperial records and found a stack of places that never got raided. Dantooine is, from our analysis, the last place they’re going to go. We need to get that data before they do.” 

In and out. A half-day’s trip with the right pilot and the right tech. With the only reports of stormtroopers and TIE fighters all the way in Geonosis, the pilots murmured among themselves, it was less of a mission and more of an errand. 

“It still has to be done,” Admiral Statura said sharply, and the chatter fell away. “And soon. Ideally three days from now.” 

But not a soul would volunteer--unusual, Finn heard the General muttering to the next-in-command, because if a simple errand meant getting out of drill duty for the day or scrubbing down the astromechs, the names in the pot would have been overflowing. But the vines of gossip curled around the halls of the base faster than biology should have allowed: Nien Nunb’s birthday was coming up, and the whole crew had been planning the surprise party for weeks. Snap had brewed his own booze in an old washtub in Besh Wing’s abandoned medbay, and Jessika had corralled the rest of the pilots into figuring out how not to set the crew kitchen on fire. 

Couldn’t the errand wait one more day? Just until after the party. 

“And send someone through hyperspace hungover?” the General said without looking up from her notes, and that was that. 

Of course Poe was the one to step forward. And it wasn’t that he was necessarily self-sacrificing, Finn thought, at least in this instance; but more so that he was pragmatic. Understood his own strengths and limitations like he knew how to breathe. 

“I was just in charge of decorations anyway,” he told Finn the night before he left. Their shared room was bigger than anything he had been allotted with the First Order, but with the way Poe lived--cluttered and open in a mirror of how every emotion would flit across his face--it was effectively just as cramped. “Jessika won’t let me near the kitchen after--well, you obviously weren’t there, but…” Poe sighed, tossed the shirt he had meant to fold over his shoulder. “I wanted to make a cake. The oven nearly exploded.” 

Maybe Finn should have been surprised at the somewhat sheepish confession--but he snorted instead, and Poe threw the shirt at him, missing, the cloth brushing against his elbow before falling to the floor in a flump.

“I’ve never actually been to Dantooine, you know,” Poe said later that night. The base was quiet save for the clunking old pipes scraping against the inside of the concrete walls and the night was pressing on Finn’s eyes before his pupils adjusted--the grimy ceiling could have been a starless expanse of the night sky for all he knew, and he did know that Poe was looking at the same. That was what they did, lay on their backs and stare up past the confines of their bunk into the vast emptiness where they both had come from only to end up on the same solitary rock. 

“The planet was near my home world,” Poe continued, “but we never had reason to go. Never had a whole lot of reason to leave, period. My dad didn’t, at least, not after--well.” There was a long intake of breath from Poe’s side of the room, but the sigh never came, like he had decided to swallow the words he’d caught in his throat for safekeeping. “And he took a while to let me fly off-planet on my own. By then…” 

“There were too many other things to see.”

“Right.” 

Silence fell between them, and Poe’s breathing evened out; when Finn couldn’t sleep, he would count Poe’s breaths instead of the loth-cats in the remedy Snap had offered up over a groggy breakfast months ago. 

“Where do you want to go?” Poe asked suddenly. 

“I wouldn’t begin to know,” he said, because it was true--he had been to the Starkiller and Jakku and Takodana and here, D’Qar, it was the longest time he had stayed on an actual planet, a real planet. He didn’t know the galaxy outside of a few key names before his defection. The Hosnian system, that was always at the head of the discussion, though--his stomach sank. Names of other systems and planets only trickled down through the glossy white ranks in the legends smeared with the fingerprints of the First Order’s propaganda machine. 

Tatooine, the double-edged sword of a desert giving rise to that hand that would build the Empire and the hand that would destroy it. Hoth, the site of a decisive flexing of the Empire’s strength. A few of the higher-ranking officers would mention Naboo and tales of a fearsome lord of the Dark Side who had felled the original master of one of the Jedi’s last great heroes.

“Wherever Rey found Luke sounded pretty nice,” Poe yawned. “All that water…”

“What about your home world?” 

The blankets rustled across the room, and when Finn pulled his gaze from the ceiling to look, Poe had turned to his side and was staring right at him. His features were muted shades of gray-blue in the dark now, not just lost to the black, and his eyebrows pulled together in a question he didn’t have to say. 

“What was it like, Poe?”

Poe’s eyes dropped to a lone boot on the room’s rug. “Trees. Old Rebel Alliance bases and huge temples that were even older. Mainly trees… and one, my--my mother brought it back after the war.” He smiled, wide across his face and lost in details he wasn’t sharing, but as he began to speak again, it faded. “It was just a twig then. I helped her plant it in the little clearing in front of our house. By the time I was seven, it was twenty feet tall with these thin, golden leaves that never died. She said it was Force-sensitive.” He met Finn’s gaze for half a second before flipping over to his back again, and the break of the eye contact snapped the subject closed.

“You gotta tell me about Dantooine when you get back, though,” he said, and when Poe didn’t say anything, he added, “I need to start making my list of planets to see.” 

And Poe laughed--or, not so much laughed as exhaled sharp and quick with the small tic up of his lips that he would do every time one of the pilots muttered something under their breath at a briefing. “I can do better than that, buddy,” he said. “If it’s nice, I’ll take you there. Once General Organa says it’s safe, of course.” A beat--“I could show you Yavin 4, too. If you wanted.” 

And that was that: the top of the list, Dantooine and Yavin 4, plus the promise to start brainstorming the rest, charting the route around the galaxy, the best spots to see the wafting towers of gas clouds light-years beyond the Outer Rim lit up green and yellow from the distant starlight. He could use some time off anyway, Poe had muttered before drifting to sleep. 

He was gone before Finn woke up. 

And then, hours later, there were the sirens.

For an indeterminate amount of time, Poe was only aware of the small rocks and sticks digging into his back, dry blades of grass trying to poke through the fabric of his flight suit, and the ground--dirt under it all, solid and heavy and cracked from the blistering Dantooine summers he’d heard about from traveling pilots as a child. Or maybe he had just dreamt it, filled in the gaps once he woke up, because the jolting lurch that gripped his whole chest when the unforgiving stormtrooper gloves closed around his arms had to have meant something. He had to have lurched from somewhere, a dark expanse of nothing until suddenly there was a wall where his memory should have kept reaching back. 

His feet weren’t cooperating, but the stormtroopers dragged him up the small hill ahead of them anyway. 

This is bad--the thought came to him quietly, vaguely. No panic, not yet. To his right there was a smoking ship, like his x-wing but with more scratches along the paint on the nose and-- 

It hit him. Getting shot out of the sky, crashing, the astromech unit he borrowed from a mechanic while BB-8 was getting their tune-up immediately fried. A large gash on the back of his left hand. A stinging red blur in his eyes as something--blood, that’s blood--dribbled there. 

No, no--his voice wasn’t working and his legs were jelly, wobbly when he tried to set his stance, close to powerless to fight back against the stormtroopers roughing him up as they approached their ship in the distance. The same low lights he had seen descend to Jakku the night of his first capture sat waiting for him here. 

Across the galaxy, history repeating itself. 

Only this time: the best pilot of the resistance captured not for a reckless, emotion-driven attack, but for letting his guard down. Assuming too much. Letting his thoughts stray back to the night before with Finn and focusing a little too hard on curating the list of planets and moons to a reasonable number. Poe Dameron, bested by his own ego and now-- 

Now-- 

He hadn’t eaten since his early dinner the night before and there wasn’t much for his stomach to push back up his throat at the thought, but stars, did it try. A splatter of bile burned the back of his tongue, acrid, and he tried not to think about it, what was waiting for him. The implications of it all spread out before him in his splotchy, blurring vision, stones in the deep puddles that would spring up in front of his house on Yavin 4 during the rains. Plunk plunk plunk, and the ripples would rush past in every direction, crash against the grass, drown the bugs that got swept up in the ebb. 

Again his empty stomach clenched. He gagged, and the troopers pulled him harder. 

He was dropped to the ground, as far as he could tell, metal lurching up to meet the side of his face as the gripped support at his arms disappeared, and it pushed against him again--so they had taken off. Left his ship an abandoned, burned wreck in the middle of the field. No hope of contacting base and giving them even the slightest clue what happened to him. 

No hope--  

His eyes were sealed shut. Or he couldn’t see, was starting to black out. Either way. 

A boot rolled him to the wall of the ship’s hull as they rocketed to lightspeed, and as his thoughts grew fuzzier and the pain along his head and limbs twinged and pulsed, he thought of his wrists. How they were still free in front of his face, how at breakfast the day before--just yesterday, was it just yesterday--Finn’s hand had latched there when Poe had reached to snag a piece of fruit from Rey’s plate that looked like it wasn’t going to get eaten. His hand had been warm, his fingers long enough to latch around Poe’s wrist completely.

And Poe tried to hold onto that feeling. Remember it. The constraints were coming, clinical and heavy, and the lock on his head would be picked open.

No hope-- 

********** 

On Yavin 4, the sunset would burn a brilliant lavender before settling into black, the entire galaxy speckling the sky so far away from the main trading station. Poe hadn’t seen a lavender in the sky like it since. But it was here again, here lining the tips of the trees around the clearing, right in his eyes and the Force-sensitive tree--it was twice as tall, three times as tall. It kept growing into the sky, looming over him, and the golden leaves wafted down to the earth. Sharp as razors. They sliced his hands and burned without burning--white-hot, but so much that shocks of ice shot up his veins.

The sky was lavender and he knew he was twenty and ready to leave the moon to join the New Republic’s air fleet. He knew his house was behind him and his father was calling him to come inside, to have one last meal before embarking. He knew his mother was dead but he could hear her too, beside his father, promising something he couldn’t quite make out. 

When he turned, the lavender sky fizzed away into the bright midday sun, blue and cloudless. The house had an extra story, a lopsided single room thrown on top of the second floor, a person in the doorway who shouldn’t have been there.

“Poe,” she said, “This was all for you.” 

What was? But his throat closed around the question and held it there. Saying anything would just distract from the image: Shara Bey, veteran pilot of the Battle of Endor, whole and standing there just looking at him, looking, and her face was both nothing and everything like his moth-eaten memories had kept safe for the last twenty-four years. 

She spoke again, but the whisper birds had begun to chatter and drowned her out, and he suddenly couldn’t remember what her voice sounded like--he turned back towards the tree, taller still and now in the cover of night without a single star in the sky, the galaxy blotted out. 

But the tree, the tree’s leaves shone brilliantly, glaring into his vision and forcing him to throw up a hand, stagger back-- 

********** 

His eyes flew open and he desperately tried to suck air into his empty lungs. 

It was even the same room, the clamps around his ankles and wrists just too tight in the way that woke him up in the middle of the night sweating through the sheets. 

Something dripped down his temple, hot and slow. The last time he had been here, it was blood. It could be sweat now. He couldn’t be sure. Fear was something the other pilots joked about, saying he didn’t have it, that he had taken his fair share and divvied it up when they weren’t looking and slipped it into the rest of the base’s coffee at breakfast. 

“Aren’t you the least bit scared you’re going to die out there one day pulling one of those stunts?” Jessika had half-yelled after one mission a few months before Jakku. It was behind the closed door of his bunk but the whole squadron could hear it, the General could have probably heard it, but the mission was successful even if he had been in free-fall over the ocean-drenched Kamino for a solid minute. And the reminder of that didn’t stop her from collapsing into the pinched glare he knew hid every emotion she didn’t want him to see. It didn’t stop her from slamming the door so hard that BB-8 ducked behind the bedside table. 

It wasn’t that he was scared to die. That was the furthest thing from the truth. 

He was a little scared of what came before, right before. In the Republic fleet, his first bunkmate had gone up in flames on their third mission run, and the nightmares plagued him until the next time he strapped into his x-wing. The quiet moment, a vacuum, and then the crack that separated his life into saveable and not--the nightmare would hum in the crack and watch the flames sparking out of the controls slowly lick towards his fingers, never quite reaching. That was for the after. 

The knowledge in that crack that death was coming wasn’t the part he feared. It was everything else, the immensity of everything else. Death he could deal with. 

The everything else was smelted into the metal that made the cuffs where he was held.

The everything else was the slick glossy black of the eyes of the stormtrooper’s helmet at the door of the room. He wondered what their designation was. What planet they came from. What they looked like. 

“You were the Resistance pilot that escaped with FN-2187,” she said suddenly. 

“Sure was,” he said. His voice had grown raspy since the crash and the words stung the back of his throat. “His name’s Finn now, you know.” 

“If anyone in the First Order was going to commit treason, it would’ve been FN-2187,” she said, and the bit of disgust coloring her voice burned into a swell in his chest. 

“Finn.”

The hard plastic plates of her armor clacked as she reset her stance and shoulders. Tightened her grip on the large blaster resting against her arm. “Don’t expect that to happen again.”

“A stormtrooper rescuing me, or Finn rescuing me?” And he bit his tongue against the taunt that rose there, because there might not have been hope from the pragmatic side of it all, but in the infinites of possibilities--a realm that, to Poe, looked a lot like the galaxy as he stretched into hyperspace--rescue and Finn were one in the same. Two celestial bodies twisting in space, never quite certain which one was orbiting the other. 

“Either.” 

He snorted, which hurt deep in his chest--an internal bruise that he hadn’t had time to assess, strained lungs, even a cracked rib, something--but he couldn’t focus on the source of the pain. The finality with which she spoke dug a knuckle wherever he wasn’t already injured and added to the patchwork of purples and greens that surely lined his skin. 

No hope--no. No, there had to be hope. Wasn’t that the point of that story the General had shared with him and Snap late one night waiting for Nien Nunb and Ello’s scouting mission to return? Nothing survived outside overnight on Hoth. Until something did.

So: hope. He scourged, found a sliver of it to put before his mind’s eye and hold there--but the door to the room hissed open, and the clunk of boots seized in his lungs. The low garbled voice ordering the stormtrooper to another post, it had perched on the edge of his eardrums for so long with perfect balance and finally it was tipping forward in a rush. 

“Are you really the best pilot of the Resistance,” Kylo Ren said slowly, “if you manage to get captured twice?” He didn’t allow any time for Poe to answer. “I think we have some unfinished business to attend to.”

“Why is no one kriffing doing anything?”

Whatever the walls of the bunk wings were made of resonated with Jessika’s voice in a way none of the other pilots could imitate, so even in the close space it echoed and vibrated down around the corners where so many of the squadron had skulked off to once the sirens had been shut off. Part of her wished that she could have expected this, muttered a bitter typical under her breath and stomped back to elbow her way into the back of the officers’ meeting--but it wasn’t. It was anything but typical, and she was ready to kick all of their sorry asses to the far end of the Outer Rim and back to knock everything back into the way it was supposed to be.

Or--as close as possible to the way it was supposed to be, given the circumstances. 

She stopped in the middle of the hall, peered into the cracked door that led to Finn and Poe’s room, saw it dark and empty. Her breaths were coming in isolated huffs now, and even if she were to follow instinct and trudge back to the situation room, there wouldn’t be a meeting to crash: just the General and Skywalker pinching the bridges of their noses in silence while Rey and Finn wavered behind them, shifting constantly on the balls of their feet. Finn was wringing his hands until Rey wrenched them apart by putting one in hers, and the glance that passed between them appeared blank, but Jessika assumed a long time ago--and confirmed when Rey first came back--that there existed around those two an odd sort of bubble that distorted the reality of things to everyone outside. Everyone but them.

It was difficult to watch, the doing nothing, the flat empty strategy board when Poe was out there, he had to still be out there--

“Listen.” And somehow her feet had developed a mind of their own and pulled her back to the command center. The scene was just how she had imagined it, the way it had been when she angrily followed after the rest of the pilots. 

The General frowned. “Pava--” 

“You’re acting like he’s dead!” 

She saw Finn swallow stiffly out of the corner of her eye, and if she had been paying closer attention to those smudges of the edge of her vision, perhaps she could have said for sure if Rey and Skywalker both turned to him, as if they felt the shift under his skin.

“We’re not,” Finn said. “We’re not doing that at all.” The words started tumbling out of his mouth in some feigned attempt at being casual, and the mask was paper thin.

What the mask was supposed to be covering, that Jessika couldn’t put her finger on.

“He didn’t die on Jakku, and he didn’t die on Dantooine,” she said quickly but her volume was fading, becoming something denser, and Rey’s feet shifted. Just slightly, but also just enough. “He’s not going to die on Dantooine,” she clarified.

“We lost communication with his ship,” the General said. “We don’t know if he survived the crash or if he’s even still on the planet if he did.” She glanced over her shoulder at Skywalker, then back at Jessika, and there it was, just like the blow she took to the head her first week of training once she joined up. A quick feint and a one-two punch whose strength had not been gauged with the proper amount of care for a spar left her wheezing flat on her back. It was only supposed to have been a spar. A placement test, even. And Iolo had leveled her.

It was happening again, but bruises heal. They couldn’t just pull another Poe Dameron out of the ground. 

Who was supposed to lead the squadrons against the swarm of TIE fighters the next time they did anything bigger than a damn errand and who was supposed to remind Snap to check that one tricky regulator in the bottom right engine during maintenance and who was supposed to sit up with her at odd hours of the night before a day off and drink Bespinian liquor straight from the bottle?

“So you lost him?” she said. And she had moved into the dangerous sort of quiet, that notorious sort that even the newer pilots in the airfield had learned to fear, and so what if she was talking to the General and Luke kriffing Skywalker, so what, so what, surely they needed to know how her ears were ringing with it, how her stomach was curling in on itself. “You don’t lose a pilot. A person. You lose--you lose socks. In Major Ematt’s case that one time, sometimes you lose all of your socks. But not--”

“That’s enough, Pava.” The General straightened the set of her shoulders and felt ten times larger than she had moments ago, and Jessika’s mouth laid open, muted mid-word. “Don’t assume that you know what our priorities are with this.” And after a pause--“Dismissed.”

She fought the urge to huff, instead turning on her heel and pushing through the doors back to the bunk wing. If she pressed her lips into a thin enough line, put all the pressure there, maybe she could keep the stinging at the corners of her eyes at bay. No, Jessika Pava didn’t cry, she never cried, not when Iolo had nearly broken her nose in that sparring match and not when she left her tearful grandmother on Corulag to join the Resistance. Not when her bunkmates didn’t come home from a mission.

But something was welling up and starting to blur pockets of her vision, so maybe it didn’t count as crying if it was born of frustration.

“‘Don’t assume you know what our priorities are,’” she muttered to the empty room her feet finally led her to, and the leftovers from Nien Nunb’s party looked dejected in the vacant space under the haphazard decorations they had thrown together in Poe’s absence. Like it was all mocking her. “Sure, sure, easy to say from your side, General, when you know what the hell is going on and everyone else is left in the dark.”

Someone had left a plate with a piece of half-eaten cake on the couch, the fork sliced halfway in and left abandoned. She fell into the spot beside it, picked at the corners which were already well on their way to stale. The atmosphere on D’Qar was unforgiving to baked goods. 

“There’s still a war to fight,” she said a bit louder, and the cake may have started to dry out but it still tasted fantastic and better than anything she would have found to stress-eat in the cafeteria. “First Order’s near Geonosis now, and Geonosis isn’t that far from here and they know we’re in this system now and--pfassk, General, you more than anyone should know Poe puts down half the TIE fighters in any given battle and--what, Snap?”

He tried for an easy grin as he leaned against the entryway and it was wholly unconvincing. “Just wanted to check in… see if you were okay… you know, as I do.”

That grin became a lot more difficult to maintain the longer she glared at him in silence. Finally his shoulders slumped and he trudged over to where she sat, picking up the plate of cake so he could sit in its place. “I know, dumb question.”

The thing about Snap was that he was often written off as inexpressive by the majority of the mechanics and analysts, even some of the newer pilots in the squadron, but when they read him, they only focused on the blank pages, the spaces in between the lines of text as if they couldn’t see the typeset surrounding the bits of nothing. They looked at his face when they should have been estimating the angles of his slouch or how white his knuckles were becoming as the skin stretched over the bone.

His grip on the plate of cake was turning his knuckles whiter than a freshly-cleaned pilot vest.

“Are you going to eat that, or can I continue this healthy coping mechanism in peace?” she asked, and he handed her the plate without looking at her. “And yes, it was a dumb question. Glad to see you’re picking up on that. Sure has taken you long enough.”

Without the plate, his hands had balled into fists just above his knees. Still white at those bony ridges, growing whiter still at the borders with the rest of his hand.

“It was going to happen eventually, Jess.”

“Not you too--”

“It was a miracle he came back from Jakku,” he said. “After what they did to him and the village--”

“You’re not the only one who read the reports, you know--” 

“Jessika.” Snap put a hand on her shoulder, more gentle than she had expected given the way he was gripping at the nothing just moments before, at the loss of something that should have been there to ease the strain. “You were on a supply run when he got back. He didn’t look good.”

“Of course he didn’t,” she said, eyeing a glob of icing that had gathered on her fingernail before licking it off. “Do you need a reminder of the hell he went through--”

“Something wasn’t right, Jess. Look,” he sighed. “You say you read the reports? Then you know he didn’t say what the First Order did to him while they had him prisoner. Yammered on and on about how Finn rescued him, but he flat-out refused to talk about anything before that to any of the nurses. Even to the General. Or me,” he added, and his slouch deepened a few more degrees.

Poe had been back on base for two days by the time she had returned from the next planet over, the small freighter ship laden with more food and raw materials bought from the local species. The fear that had knotted in her chest unfurled and snapped, and the muggy cloudy day she had returned to was better than vibrant sunsets of her home planet. Poe wasn’t dead. Her best friend had lived, and he was sitting upright in medbay and talking strategy with the General and cracking jokes with Snap and Ello. Poe was fine.

Or: Poe had acted fine.

“So we assume the worst?” she said quietly. “What, he ran into an entire battalion of TIE fighters and took them on instead of running because he was finally given a reason to cash in on that death wish we all said he had? We don’t even check?”

Apparently they didn’t, and she crushed the paper plate and the rest of the cake in her hands, icing and crumbs oozing out the sides and onto her hands and pants and she couldn’t even pretend to care--Snap was relaying in a tempered, even tone how he had listened in on the officers meeting, how a search and rescue at this juncture didn’t make strategic sense. The First Order had been crippled by the destruction of the Starkiller base, but not as much as the Resistance had, and sending even a skeleton crew out to Dantooine when the rest of the First Order fleet was a few systems over would leave D’Qar defenseless against a possible attack.

After Jessika threw the mess of smashed cake and ripped-up plate to the ground, Snap left her alone, saying something about him being back in his bunk if she needed anything. Exactly what he said was lost in the roaring buzz that had overtaken her eardrums--eerily similar to the roar of the x-wings as they broke through a planet’s atmosphere in tight formation, the hums coming together in a grating chord.

 “Snap said not to bother her.”

“I don’t care what Snap said, frankly,” Rey said. “And let go, please.”

Finn dropped her wrist and held his hands up on either side of his face, his ridiculous face that was smiling while trying to tell her, without words, how bad of an idea this was. “Look, Rey,” he said, and didn’t he see that they didn’t exactly have a lot of time to debate things? She strode past him towards where Snap and Ello had told them Jessika had holed herself up. Hopefully he would catch up and just go along, because she had a good feeling about this, and Master Luke had told her an irritatingly high number of times per day to trust her feelings.

But Finn, for once, could not just go along.

“Rey, Rey, please.” He stepped in front of her and she was forced to come to a stop a few inches from his face. “One thing I’ve learned from being here the past couple of months is that when someone says you shouldn’t bother Jessika, you listen.”

“Okay then. You listen. I’ll go talk to her.”

“Rey.”

She stepped around him and kept walking with enough purpose even for her shoes, normally silent on the base’s concrete, to smack loudly with every step. Their window was closing with every minute they wasted, and out of all the Resistance members on base, not telling Jessika what they had planned would have been--not rude, rude wasn’t the right word for it. But it wouldn’t have been kind to leave without offering a slight glimmer of hope to fan in the gross pessimism that had infected the higher officers. She and Finn might not have agreed with the General and Master Luke though they didn’t dare voice it, not when an act would be so much more to the point. 

“If you’re so concerned,” she whispered once they were at the entrance to the common area, “then let me do the talking.”

When they rounded the corner, they found Jessika lying on her back with some pale stains on the front of her pants. Much of the room that was within arm’s reach of the sofa looked as if it had suffered at the hands of D’Qar’s infamous fall monsoons.

“Whatever it is, it’s not important,” Jessika said flatly.

“It’s about Poe,” Rey said.

“Please leave me alone,” she said. Most of her face was ghostly pale save for her nose, which glowed a deep pink.

Finn shot her a deflated frown of told you so, but no, no, he had not told her one damn thing. Not yet. “We’re going after him, Jessika. Finn and I.”

Finally Jessika turned her head away from the ceiling, took a couple long hard blinks; Rey could tell they were slightly bloodshot. “The General changed her mind?”

“Mmm… not so much,” Finn shrugged.

“Wait…” Jessika scrambled to her feet, cupped her hands over her mouth and shuffled over to them until she was only a few inches away from where the two of them stood. “You’re going against orders?”

“I have a reputation to maintain,” he said.

Jessika opened her mouth to respond, but Rey cut across her quickly--“He’s not dead, Jess, he isn’t. I can--I can feel it. He’s not dead. And if General Organa can’t spare any of the pilots to go after him, well…”

Jessika searched her face, let her mouth hang open. A nagging worry ate at the back of Rey’s head that she was going to ask her how she could possibly know that Poe was still alive when everyone else among them had consigned him to the worst fate, his own endgame that Snap insisted they had all known was coming. Rey didn’t have an answer for that. Maybe it was the Force, but Finn had sighed something about the Force probably not working like that, not if the General and Master Luke hadn’t picked up on it as well.

“We’re taking the Millennium Falcon to Dantooine tonight,” she continued. “Soon, actually.” 

“Right after we leave here,” Finn said.

“Great, I’m in,” Jessika said quickly, turning back to gather the shoes she must have kicked off since she set up vigil.

Which had not been part of the equation.

“We just wanted to let you know,” Finn said carefully, “seeing as you and Poe were really close and you were obviously upset about everything--I mean, not obviously,” he said, holding up a hand when she glared at him over her shoulder. “But me and Rey, we got this.”

“Oh, I’m coming.” Jessika pointed one of her shoes at the both of them, laces flying about with every punctuated motion she added. “Either one of you ever flown that far across the galaxy before? And don’t give me any sort of bantha fodder about how the two of you got BB-8 back here, because that was Solo. I know you’re a pilot,” she said as she shoved her bag into Rey’s arms, “but you need a professional.”

Jessika was a tad shorter than Rey, though not by much, and in that moment it didn’t seem to matter. The way she held herself added a solid six inches to her height, and the smirk she threw their way as she sprinted down to her bunk might as well have made it a solid foot of difference. Rey’s cheeks burned, only burning harder when Finn snorted. 

“Well, that went about as well as I expected it to,” he laughed. 

“Give it a rest,” she said. “Go get your things and head to the Falcon. Meet you there in five.” 

As it crept closer to seven minutes later, Rey could hardly keep from pacing at the foot of the ramp into the ship. The wildlife buzzed and croaked around them, hidden in the deep shadows cast by the trees in the waning moonlight and, at least in one corner, the solitary lamp the base kept on overnight for anyone working third shift. It would have been nice any other night--without her pulse racing, without Jessika deciding to throw the entire toolbox across the main cabin inside the ship, or whatever it was she was doing. 

“C’mon, Finn,” she muttered, and her foot jiggled against the cracked tarmac, one hand tugging at the wrap up the other arm, and-- 

“Where’s your boy?” Jessika asked, far too loud for they stealth Rey thought they needed. Her head was poking upside down out of the close side of the open hatch and grease spots cast a smeared dark line along her nose all the way to her newly-tangled hairline. “Isn’t he usually quick?”

“He’s not my--he is quick, something of his probably just got lost in that junk heap of a room he shares with…” She met Jessika’s gaze for half a second before huffing and turning back towards the base entrance--behind the grease and dust caked on the sweat lining her brow, there had been a moment of softness that blurred the hard edges, and it sank to the bottom of Rey’s gut with a thump. Don’t mention Poe. Don’t bring up Poe until you have to, focus on Finn, steady yourself--and the voice had shifted into Master Luke’s. 

Even Master Luke couldn’t get her heartrate to settle. 

“Hey--” Jessika said, hand reaching over Rey’s shoulder below to point at the doors which slid open with a hiss and a creak to reveal Finn, packed and ready to blast to the other side of the galaxy.

Finn, with Poe’s old repaired jacket only pulled onto one arm, his other hand gripping awkwardly at the handles of his bag. One of his shoes was falling off and it sent him half-stumbling every couple of yards as he sprinted towards them. 

“Go, go, get the engine ready we need to go--” 

“What did you do--” 

“Rey, I’m serious--” 

Jessika jumped down to the ramp with a clang behind her while she was rooted to the spot watching Finn scramble for what might as well have been his life. He was telling her to run, and Jessika was half-listening to him at least, but her attention had been narrowed to a pinprick, a single thought devoid of anything but a lone exclamation point. 

And he was still running down the airstrip, but she blinked--all she did was blink--and then he was very much in front of her, tugging at her elbow up the ramp, babbling on about the urgency, it was urgent, couldn’t she see that? Couldn’t she?

“Oh no you did not,” Jessika muttered.

Rey followed her line of sight over her shoulder: the door to the base had squeaked open once more, and the quick clunks of footsteps were unmistakable.

(One of the side effects of the Force, Rey had learned, was that it could wrap around her bones, into the very lattice of their cores, and once it snapped into place, she was three feet taller. Not in stature, but the way her body held itself against the gravity of the planet. The shadow she cast was deeper and longer and the space at the center of her swelled. This only happened, Rey and Master Luke had learned, when she became supremely frustrated or angry.)

“No one was supposed to know we were gone until after we left,” she hissed.

“They were going to find out in the morning anyway,” Finn said, hands jerkily searching for some explanation to latch onto, an easy eloquent way to pull the words that were tripping out of his throat. “You know, when--I don’t know, when they look outside and see the Falcon is gone and we’re gone and all they’ll have to do is switch on the tracker--”

“Which I kriffing disabled!” Jessika shouted, running back into the cabin. “And now you led him here--”

“Master Finn! Mistress Rey! And is that Captain Pava I see?”

C3PO’s eyes were nothing but beady and menacing floating orbs in the dark, growing closer, the dull shine of his brass body shifting as the angle of the lamp and the moon changed as he clunked closer. It was a slow but steady pace, an apt way to go. Torturous. Unpleasant. She really shouldn’t have expected anything else. 

“I don’t recall seeing any scheduled maintenance on the Millennium Falcon this evening!”

“Emergency repairs,” Rey shrugged. Her mouth strained at the grin C3PO hopefully didn’t recognize was uncharacteristically bright. “Have to go pick up some supplies first thing tomorrow morning, you know. And it was making such funny noises yesterday.” 

C3PO clunked closer and Finn’s grip on her elbow tightened with every step, and finally the droid had stepped into the arc of the light from the cabin. The casual pose Finn assumed was truly terrible and not casual at all: he had propped his elbow on her shoulder, the other arm sitting against his hip, and his grin was all teeth. 

(Sometimes, mainly at times like this time, Rey would briefly think back to when she first met this boy on Jakku who insisted he was with the Resistance, and she would wonder how such a terrible liar had ever successfully convinced her of anything resembling a lie.) 

“Captain Pava is scheduled to run drills tomorrow morning, so I will alert the General of the change of plans, though I’m sure she already knows--” 

“Oh, she definitely already knows,” Finn said. Over-dramatic, as always. “Must’ve forgotten to update the log.”

“Do tell though, Master Finn, where are you going?” C3PO said. “I know you haven’t been to many parts of the galaxy because of your First Order upbringing--and nor have you, Mistress Rey, why, this must be an adventure--”

“Not that much!” Finn said a little too loudly, mouth stretching over the words almost comically. “Not an adventure at all, actually, just over to, you know…”

The clanging from up in the cabin quieted, as did the stomping from Jessika’s boots.Even without tapping into the Force, Rey knew the two of them were thinking the same thing--please, please stop talking. 

“...not too far,” Finn continued, shrugging, shaking his head, “...like…”

Rey sneaked a look over her shoulder and Jessika had reappeared, wearing a look that Snap and Nien Nunb had both separately warned her foretold of a coming path of destruction, usually if someone had misplaced the novel she had nicked to read from the collective library. If Finn would turn around, the whole mess could be over--

“Just Da…”

No.

“...ntooine.”

C3PO took a hobbling step backwards in surprise, jerking his head between the two of them and then back at Jessika, who was already cursing up a storm in a language neither of them knew. “You’re going after Commander Dameron! The General explicitly forbade this, you’re going to get yourselves killed--” 

He bounced into a turn to hurry back into the base, already prattling loudly about protocol and the dangers of not listening to the General’s wisdom and Rey’s heart leapt straight up her throat to the back of her tongue, a choking panic to mirror that which had overtaken Finn’s face and Jessika’s vocabulary, and she saw her hand dart out before she realized it was moving.

It latched onto C3PO’s red wrist. “Threepio,” she said slowly. “Someone has to get Poe. We all know this. You don’t need to tell the General.”

The droid looked jerkily at the two of them in turn. “Mistress Rey, I do worry about Commander Dameron, but unfortunately I’m afraid I must tell the General, she was simply adamant about this--”

He attempted to scoot away with Rey’s hand still tight around his arm; they were quickly running out of options before they even managed to leave the planet, and Poe was still out there in stars knew what sort of condition--

“I got a better idea.” Finn stepped forward and pushed C3PO face forward into the ground with a single smack on his back panels, and he shouted so loudly it managed to drown out the crunch of brass on concrete. 

“I won’t stand for this sort of abuse! I fought in the war too, you know--”

“Get his legs,” Finn hissed as he grabbed under C3PO’s shoulders. Despite the dense network of wires visible under his breastplate, he was surprisingly light, and they were able to shuffle into the cabin of the Falcon quickly enough to feel confident that no one had heard the commotion.

“I haven’t suffered such an indignity since Bespin, why did I think I was past this sort of cruelty--ahh!” 

They dropped him on the floor of the cabin just beside the old holo-chess table and closed the entrance; and if Rey had thought Jessika looked livid before, it was nothing compared to the pure, unadulterated fury pouring off of her in waves.

“Oh no,” she whispered. “Oh no no no... we are not bringing him along.”

“If we leave him here, we’re never even going to get to the Mid Rim,” Finn said, “because the General is going to shoot us out of the sky.”

A silence passed as the three of them stared at each other in a standoff--in a few seconds, it grew heavy enough that something snapped, and it was a physical piece of machinery under their feet that started hissing steam loudly enough to cover up the litany of new complaints pouring from C3PO’s mouth. 

Not loudly enough to cover up her own shouting at Finn and Jessika to throw her the tools to fix it as she pulled up the grate, jumping down and securing a couple new bolts in the place of those that had cracked from the pressure on the worn threads of the pipes.

“Flying this ship as far as you’re planning is asking for certain death, Mistress Rey,” C3PO whined. “Of all the ways to go…” 

“Look,” she said, climbing back up from below and standing a few inches from Jessika’s flushed face. “If you want to get Poe, then we have to leave now and take Threepio with us.” 

Jessika’s jaw tensed, and Rey waited for some alarm, some muted shouting to erupt beyond the thick hull of the Falcon. Already waited too long, likely, and every second that passed was another second closer to the General pulling on her other shoe and stepping outside. Pulling them back to earth and leaving Poe to face whatever fate he had seemed to start stumbling toward.

“Well I, for one, am I casting my vote on taking Threepio along to Dantooine,” Finn said, leaning back slightly when Jessika gaze flared toward him like stray shots from a blaster. “In case anyone was wondering.” 

Finally Jessika threw her hands up, sighed, more tired than angry, and Rey couldn’t put her finger on where the shift had happened. Not that it mattered, and not that she had the luxury to dwell on it. “Good,” Rey nodded. “Now come on, I need a copilot for this hunk of metal.” 

She could hear Jessika’s footsteps behind her as she half-jogged to the cockpit, layered underneath by Finn’s shuffling to pull C3PO to his feet. The droid’s continued grumbling, that was easy to tune out for the moment as she put distance between them, especially with Finn talking right over him--but Jessika, even in her usual thick boots, hardly clunked against the metal underfoot. 

It was the quietest Rey had ever heard her--and seen her. The first full day after she and Master Luke had come back to D’Qar, the situation room was packed to capacity for a mission briefing, and amid the shouting match that had escalated between Snap and two of the analyst ensigns, one that had been garnering enough commentary from the rest of their ranks to drown out any attempt at clear thought, tight-lipped Jessika was the noisiest just by the way she held herself and moved around the crowd of men arguing over the day’s latest trivial matter. They’d made eye contact from across the room, Jessika had rolled her eyes and jerked her head over at the ballsiest ensign, and Rey’s ears began to ring. Only then, not before.

But now: Jessika silently slipped into the copilot chair and refused to look past the tips of her own fingers as they flipped the appropriate switches for take-off.

“I’m just worried about him is all.”

Rey pulled her hand back from the knob that would put them in the air. “I know.”

“Let’s get this damn ship into hyperspace already,” Jessika said, and she seemed to inflate back to her normal stature. “I don’t want to risk that shiny moof-milker having any bigger of a mouth than I already think he does.”

Having a hand digging through your brain wasn’t painful--no, Poe knew pain. He’d broken countless bones climbing and falling from the trees surrounding his house on Yavin 4, had parts of him sliced and punctured and ripped as his ship spiraled through the sky. Had enough puckered blaster burns along his edges to fashion out a couple constellations. But this: this was a pressure, an unrelenting pulse pushing out from behind his eyes while he was made acutely aware of parts of himself that had never had the nerve endings to feel. 

And there wasn’t any way to fight it. He could grind his teeth together, bite his tongue until it bled, but the information would still emerge pressed between Ren’s fingers. That he could feel, the extraction, a cold wisp of thought weaving its way through the wrinkles and he had screamed with the effort to keep it in. To hide it like he’d promised the General. And he had failed.

Ren’s figure loomed above him, maskless, and Poe’s stomach roiled watching the gloved hands twitch at his sides.

“I’m not going to kill you,” Ren said. “But as I said, there is unfinished business. The map to Skywalker was urgent and needed to be addressed--and then you escaped with that traitor--” 

“He has a name--”

“Quiet.” Ren’s tongue spat against the T and muted Poe’s voice, held his vocal cords still. “And then you escaped… there’s lots to dig through in your head, you know. The golden boy of the Resistance, the old golden boy of the Republic fleet--it’s all just gilded, isn’t it? Skin deep.”

Poe refused to let his gaze drop, as if that would convince Ren that a raw flood of adrenaline, fueled by fear and panic threaded with a thousand other things, was actually proof of his own courage.

“As a pilot, at least,” Ren continued. “Gold isn’t the most valuable currency out there. I’m sure you know that.” 

In one fluid motion, he stepped back and reached his hand forward, fingers stretching and jerking toward the spot between Poe’s eyes, and the pressure mounted. The fingers were inside his skull, massaging against his brain and ducking around corners. Peeking into shadowy alcoves that had gathered drifts of dust over the years, overlooked. Embarrassing childhood memories. Terrifying, nonsensical nightmares. And on and on and on. 

He was screaming again, but Ren hadn’t lifted his imposed silence. His mouth gaped open in vain.

But Ren must have found something worth stopping for--Poe’s vision flooded with it, he was suddenly there again, a D’Qar night thick with a recent rain, clouds drifting in and out with the wind as the stars came back out. He sat against the joint where the top half of the side of his ship’s wing met the cockpit, and Jessika was sidling up beside him double fisting two large urns of booze. “Gave Iolo some credits to pick me up some goodies on his last supply run,” she said. She didn’t elaborate where these concoctions had originated. They frothed up the inside curves of the urns, and the intermittent starlight shone through to reveal the brilliant colors.

“Y’know,” he said. “I remember all the liquor in my parents’ cabinet being brown.” 

“Yavin’s on the boring side of the Outer Rim,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’m off tomorrow and you get to spend an entire three days on base before the General sends you on another stupid mission. Let’s drink.”

She hadn’t brought cups, and the urns were heavy, difficult to maneuver without splashing neon green splotches all over themselves and the wing--which had been freshly scrubbed down, too--and the solution was, so obvious to Jessika, that they had to drink more to make them lighter.

In the not-so-boring side of the Outer Rim, Poe would have been considered a lightweight.

(Why was Ren here? This was a happy memory, what could he exploit, there was nothing--)

“Your folks are still back on Yavin?” she asked, tapping against his arm. They had slid down so that they were lying on their backs, half-emptied urns at their hips, watching the stars spin around their pupils in new orbits. 

“My dad, yeah,” he said. He could feel her eyes on him. 

“What about your mom?”

“She… um. She died.” 

“Oh pfassk, Poe, I’m sorry.” 

He didn’t look over at her, but the glugging of liquid against the glass of the urn, followed by a splutter, was clear enough to indicate she had taken another clumsy swig. “You didn’t know. I’ve only been in the Resistance about a month and most of it hasn’t been here, anyway.” That line had come out of his mouth ten times in that month--to Snap and Ello and Iolo, Doctor Kalonia and every mechanic that stopped to chat with a wrench behind their ear. Kes Dameron and Shara Bey, minor Galactic Civil War legends, how were they doing, anyway? And then he’d have to tell them.

“What about you?” he asked with a cough. “Where--”

“‘Mfraid I’ve got about as cheerful of an answer as you, buddy.” Her voice fell flat, like she wanted to let the subject drop, but he lifted his urn and clinked it against hers. “What?” 

“To their memories,” he said. 

“You’re a sap.” But there wasn’t a single drop of sarcasm in her voice.

How touching--Ren’s voice grumbled over the scene while the memory of himself, of Jessika laid there in silence. The liquor was warming in the sticky air and bound to grow sour with it, but he could already sense the planet’s rotation beneath him, a comfort. Some things would never stop no matter how hard some days tried to dig their heels in.

“God,” Jessika groaned. “I haven’t been this toasted since--oh, this was right before you defected to us, lucky you. The entire squadron threw the General a Life Day party. Not me, mind you, but if they were supplying the booze, you bet I would show up and--gods, it was a sight--”

“Isn’t Life Day a Wookiee holiday?”

“Listen,” Jessika said, turning towards him and then pausing to shut her eyes and refocus. “Nien Nunb insisted, but he wouldn’t tell us why--”

The pressure in Poe’s head built to a new peak, threatening to leak a mix of blood and who knew what else down his nose before it ebbed back to its old levels. 

“--so there was a party. And even the General relaxed a little and danced once Ackbar dragged her out, and that one analyst--you know, she’s helped brief you a few times, Kaydel?--stars, she was more beautiful than anyone I’ve ever seen and I could have kissed her right… uh…” She brought the urn back to her mouth and took another swig, eyes refusing to leave Poe’s face. 

“You know, one time,” he blurted, and his hand reached out to her forearm, just above her wrist, to guide the urn back down to its spot beside his on the wing. He met her gaze as solidly as the alcohol would let him. “A few times, I guess, over the course of a week… I had a couple really graphic dreams about Admiral Statura.” And he waited, looking back at her through the dark; finally there was a bright spark of teeth as she snorted. “He has a great ass, all right?”

“Whatever you say--”

The cold hit him first as he was yanked back to the present. Head throbbing while the vestiges of intoxication seeped back into his memory and Ren stared at eye level inches from his face. “Gold or credits wouldn’t have gotten you very far there,” Ren said. A curl had stuck itself, matted, to Poe’s forehead and a leather finger pulled it free--it hung heavy from his hairline with the sweat. “No… the currency there--some would have said it was trust. You trusted her.” 

It had been trust. It had been. They trusted each other in the sky and they could trust each other when the wings of their ships were left loose in the dust clouds that blew in from the south, and some parts of the galaxy still had some catching up to do--but they were in another sector of it, just them in that moment. What else could that be but trust?

“It was fear.” Ren unfolded from his crouch, placed a casual hand on the restraints chafing into Poe’s wrists. “Fear was the motivator, and it can be a powerful one. You don’t like to think that fear is a part of your life, but it is. I’ve seen it.” 

His hand reached back towards Poe’s head, fingers extended like they were about to probe into his mind again--he winced, just slightly, and it brought a tight smirk to Ren’s face. “I never claimed I was fearless,” Poe said, vocal cords functioning once more. 

“You let your squadron think so. You let FN-2187 think so.” Ren closed the distance between Poe and his hand, but the touch was gentle, fingers curling loosely around his hair. “Your father, too, whenever you find time to call home. Now tell me… how did your mother die?” 

Poe’s teeth ground together and something in his chest pushed hot and tight against the constraints of his ribs, burning darker as Ren’s hand drifted lower to grip along his jawbone hard enough to leave a bruise. 

“War hero, wasn’t she?”

“Don’t you talk about her--” 

And Ren was back in his head, the sting of coppery blood filling his nose. “It must be difficult,” Ren said distantly as Poe’s vision began to splotch into black and fill with hazy patches of images he had long tried to keep from dwelling on. “Being the son of veterans and still having to fight their battles… and to do so as poorly as you have. Captured twice?” 

“Stop,” he choked, but the air was soupy and squeezing out his words. Ren’s face was fading back in, he could catch glimpses of his brow furrowing, the thin mouth pursed into a glower--then the pressure amped up again and the scene dipped into a nothingness darker than the void of space.

How did she die, Poe Dameron?  

Tell me how Shara Bey died.

He was warm. He knew his hands couldn’t stretch as far as he was used to but he tried anyway. The scent caught in his nose was somehow familiar and foreign at the same time, and he buried his face into it deeper.

“Poe, sweetie, I need to move my arm.” 

He shifted down the bed, tucked his face into her side as pulled her arm--his pillow--up and back over her chest. And he pushed himself back up to slot his chin over her bony shoulder, catching her staring at him when he finally opened his eyes. The sun streamed in through the skylight above the bed, the tips of the ruins visible just above the bottom sill.

“Remind me to tell your father that you need a haircut,” she laughed, even though his hair wasn’t that long. It wasn’t.  

He wondered if she thought it was too long because one of her eyes was taped up. A thick pad of gauze sat under the tape and the edges of a sickly green bruise peeked out behind it--they had explained it to him, his father and the doctor, in simple terms. We never knew that injury from the war was as bad as it was. We don’t know if we were too late to fix it. 

(An older voice, his own, murmured in his head: blaster-shattered glass cutting into her face and eye, pushed through the body in an effort to expel it, pushed into the bloodstream instead. Sharp in the veins, headed straight for the heart.) 

Her breathing grew more shallow as the sun arced across the sky, and he suspected that they did know if they were too late to fix it but the thought of telling an eight-year-old--even though she’s said so many times, eight, wow, you’re going to be a pilot before I know it.  

“Tell me the story about the pyramids,” he said, squirming until his too-long hair was nestled against her neck and his feet dangled off the side of the bed.

“Again?” She looked down at him with a grin.

“It’s my favorite.” 

(She never understood why he liked it so much, his father told him later, right before he left for the Republic Airfleet Academy. It wasn’t a happy story.) 

“Okay,” she whispered, leaning her head against his. “A long time ago, on this very moon, there lived a people who called themselves the Massassi--” 

(At sunset in the lull between finishing school in the nearby village and waiting for word on his application to the Academy, he would climb to the top of the nearest pyramid and watch the sky turn lavender as the sun sank beneath the jungle. Moss pushed up against his hands through the cracks of the millennia-old stone with weathered carvings along the ornate crowning. It wasn’t a language anyone spoke anymore, with tongues crushed under Sith boots right into the dirt he walked on every day.) 

And every time after she finished the story: “Did you and Pa fight the Sith too?” 

Her lips pressed softly to the top of his head, and her quiet words warmed him down to his toes. “Not exactly. More like their legacy.”

“And you won, right? You beat them?” 

“I like to think so.” 

How cute that she was so wrong--  

And Poe was screaming, wrenched back to the ship and the cold restraints with the ghost of his mother’s touch still wisping around his head--Ren staggered, unbalanced, a wild shine in his eye. “Don’t talk about her--”

“The war never ended, she died for nothing--” 

“STOP.” 

Poe’s voice sounded unfamiliar in his ears, but he hardly had time for the fact to register before Ren was pushed flat on his back by an invisible extension of--himself? That was what it felt like, the borders of his body reaching past the skin, holding Ren down by a point in the center of his breastbone. And in his mind’s eye, he could see a smudge of Rey from an angle as if he were suddenly taller, her eyes defiant. An emotion rose in him, not his own, a mix of fear and curiosity and something else that was starting to feel like victory. 

And then it was over. Ren scrambled to his feet, breathing heavily, and Poe was left with himself. The anger that pulsed in his temples and boiled under his fingernails. 

“The Supreme Leader was right about you,” he gasped. A smile twitched on his lips, decided not to stay.

Poe watched as Ren slammed the door behind him, echoing in the now-silent chamber. But his heart, it wouldn’t slow, and sweat dripped down to the bridge of his nose, and he tried to push away the thoughts of the scene the morning after the one Ren yanked to the surface. Locked doors and starchy white sheets and a sudden hollow carved out at the center of his father. Staying under the shadow of the Force tree until his grandfather brought him in after dark and ignoring the wrinkled swelling under his eyes.

It took a total of two minutes for Finn to get himself kicked out of the cockpit.

As it turned out, the Han Solo School of Hyperspace was not the accredited institution he and Rey had come to believe--yes, Jessika had explained, you did have to punch in the coordinates of where you were trying to go, lest you accidentally crash into a planet, but there was so much more to it than that.

“I know it doesn’t always look that way,” she said, leaning into Rey’s space to slap a couple numbers into a complicated screen. “But the galaxy does have rules. Can you imagine if anyone and their astromech could jump to lightspeed whenever they kriffing well pleased? Chaos.” And when she had pointed out a diagram on the Falcon’s internal map--picking up the Corellian Run at Tatooine, veering off to the Hydian Way til an offshoot by Bandomeer--Finn had merely asked a question. A measly question. 

“That cuts through the Core Worlds--wouldn’t it be better to avoid that and go around it?” His finger laid on a section of the map labeled “Unknown Regions,” a gap between the galaxy core and a smattering of about five or six planets. 

“Did you not hear what I just said?” Jessika said tersely. 

And he may have argued.

C3PO was glad for the company, anyway. 

“Master Finn, please do excuse my saying so, but I’ve calculated the odds and--”

“Threepio, please--” 

“--the chances of finding Commander Dameron alive on Dantooine are less than eight thousand to one.” 

Finn reluctantly bit his tongue when the droid sounded sincerely distraught at the prospect, though the urge to push him out of the chair didn’t subside. The tense frustration coiling around his bones needed a breakthrough to release it, and the probabilities C3PO had been spouting since leaving the Ileenium system were only pulling it tighter. 

“What are the odds of finding him alive at all?” he asked.

“I’m afraid my processors are not capable of running all the necessary data points to expand the scenario to the entire galaxy.”

Figured. 

Finn eyed the holotable in the center of the room, the same one he’d accidentally elbowed on the first time on the ship; back on D’Qar, once Rey had returned with Luke, Chewbacca, and R2-D2 in tow, they had finally said what it was. Some form of chess, not that he’d seen any other type of the game before. Chewie explained the rules as Rey translated, and he was able to hold his own against her by the time--well, now. They’d only had a few weeks. 

The thought of challenging C3PO to a match crossed his mind, but he swatted the idea away. No doubt it would only make his current situation more insufferable. 

“I wasn’t even worried about him this time,” he said--out loud, which wasn’t the plan. No, the plan had been to sit in silence with the droid until Jessika and Rey felt like inviting him back up to the cockpit or they landed on Dantooine, whichever came first. But why would anything start going according to plan now? 

“About who, Master Finn?”

“Poe,” he sighed. “Every time they went out on a mission, I worried, okay? I worried. You know how he gets--” 

“Oh yes,” C3PO said. “Exceedingly reckless. And you know whom I have as comparison.” He shifted in his seat slightly, and Finn almost wished that his metal face had the ability to properly display facial expressions. 

“The one time I didn’t and--I didn’t even see him off.” 

He knew that the waves of anxiety he got would do nothing but swirl around inside himself; they wouldn’t hurtle through the stars and weave into the x-wing’s shields or warn Poe of a sneak TIE fighter attack. And then came the nagging thought, a whisper: but what if it could? 

“Well, I--um,” C3PO said. “I’m certain he doesn’t begrudge you for it in the slightest.” His head turned away, just off to the left of where Finn was seated, and he didn’t press the issue further. Even without the wringing hands or squirming mouth, it was evident C3PO was at a loss for what to say and wanted to let the subject drop. 

Which was fine, really, especially if that meant hearing fewer statistics rattled off with increasingly pessimistic outlooks.

The thought he kept circling back to stood in the face of all the hard data sent churning through the droid’s brass skull--if anything was going to kill Poe Dameron, it wouldn’t be a simple recon errand to Dantooine. That was too simple for a man with a record like Poe, an anticlimactic puff into oblivion when, at the very least, he deserved to go out in a stream of exploding engines masquerading as fireworks. Enough so to confuse the residents of a nearby planet into thinking a star had gone supernova. 

(But truthfully, Finn thought, there wasn’t any end Poe could deserve. Maybe the Force sensed that. Maybe it could tell, and maybe it kept him alive at the other end of the galaxy.) 

“Grab your blaster!” Rey called from the cockpit. “Jessika says we’ll be landing in--” 

The Falcon jolted, tossing Finn and C3PO to the ground.

“Sorry!”--this time from Jessika. “The hyperdrive controls on this trash heap are ancient, damn--” 

In the commotion, the bag with his haphazardly packed gear had tumbled to the floor, the blaster sent skittling across the grates. He tucked it into the back of his pants, ignoring whatever comment C3PO had made thanking the Maker the safety was on, and sprinted back towards the cockpit. This time, Jessika didn’t tell him to step back from her seat, so help her stars--

She and Rey were shouting at each other as their hands flew across the various controls before them--as soon as one set of lights stopped blinking dangerously, another would start flashing, and with the sound of the engines roaring through the thickening atmosphere around them, their words melded seamlessly into the din, unintelligible.

And finally cutting through: “We’re coming in too fast for a landing and we can’t slow down!” Rey yelled over her shoulder. “The ship can’t crash land on ground this hard--”

“Wait wait wait--” He squeezed between their seats just as the Falcon broke through the cloudline--Dantooine spread out beneath them, a wide expanse of plains lined by a forest. And by the forest, at the foot of a hill, a charred stretch of grass and overlaid by hunks of metal. “I got this!” 

Finn yanked the controls from under Jessika’s fingers and sent the ship careening left, Rey tumbling into him and him smacking into Jessika, whose cursing storm was already halfway to a profanity typhoon. Stabilized, back level, and the Falcon was swooping down, the tips of the trees rising up to meet them, first in a light thwacking as the leaves skimmed the bottom of the hull and then in violent cracks. Thick branches flew across the windshield of the cockpit, dotted with metallic popping as bits of the hull were wrenched from where they were welded. 

“You call this gotting it?” Jessika shouted.

“I do, yeah!” He saw Rey drag a hand over her face from the corner of his eye. “Han landed the Falcon on the Starkiller base like this! Through the trees!” 

“Han Solo is not a role model!” She lunged for the controls and Finn blocked her with his shoulder, holding his stance firm as her arms stretched and strained for a grip on something, anything. Or so Finn assumed; there was an unfamiliar air of desperation to her as she tried to scramble around him, and then Rey only started yelling louder. 

“At this point, fighting about it isn’t going to help!” The two steps she took from her seat to the controls, tense and laden with something that made her footfalls echo in the hollow of his chest.

He relinquished the controls quickly, and Jessika didn’t argue.

********** 

The Falcon had skidded and bounced to a stop an indeterminable distance into the forest, leaving a wide berth of trees demolished to splintered toothpicks in its wake. Every couple of minutes, another crack would echo past their line of site and a small cloud of native birds would flutter into the air to choose a perch further from the wreckage.

“At least we have a clear path back to the field,” Finn said. He threw a grin over his shoulder at Jessika and Rey and was met with blank stares.

“Yay,” Jessika deadpanned. 

“What are we going to do with…” Rey jerked her head back to the open hatch of the Falcon where C3PO had appeared with clanking footsteps. 

Finn almost felt sorry for him as Jessika and Rey immediately began to argue whether they should risk taking him and blowing their cover to potential First Order troops on the planet--or risk letting him stay at the ship and alert the General of their whereabouts. It wasn’t something that needed an extra voice in the mix, anyway; the two of them had it covered. 

Before them, the crushed trees formed a straight line until it cut sharply to the left, back out to the open plains and the gleaming wreckage Finn had spotted from the sky. Poe was here, that was Poe’s ship--but he shushed the hopeful hum with list he’d been culling since they landed. 

He could have been seeing things, mistaken a boulder or house for it. The downed ship could be old--a scrap junker from the days of the Old Republic or a casualty from the planet’s stint as a Rebel Alliance base. 

And the planet was large: smaller than D’Qar, reportedly, though not by much, and if what he spotted wasn’t Poe’s x-wing--his throat closed up, starting with a cold grip on his lungs and snaking upwards.

If they returned to the base empty handed, his bunk would be so quiet. 

“Enough staring into space, let’s go,” Jessika said, gripping his shoulder as she stepped past him. And while her voice tensed with the remnants of the spat, the glance she tossed his way was knowing. 

He rubbed his hands over his eyes, shook his head to loosen the vines of doubt that had started to creep there. And then Rey was beside him with a small smile and a gentle squeeze at his hand. 

“Thanks,” he sighed. 

“Don’t be thanking me just yet,” she said, and her smile grew into a lopsided grimace. “You and I have droid duty.”

Rey had won out, in the end--while C3PO had assured them time and time again that of course he wouldn’t send a transmission back to D’Qar straight to General Organa’s personal inbox, the assurances were a tad too specific to make even Jessika comfortable to leave him. It didn’t mean she was happy, though, not by any means. 

“Compromise is always important,” Rey said, and Finn almost laughed as she tried to keep up a cheerful expression. 

The downed trees immediately surrounding where the Falcon had come to a skidding halt had formed a terrain that guaranteed slow going--thick trunks and the splintered remains of their stumps littered the ground and were just high enough to require a bit of climbing, something C3PO was not equipped to do in the least. Finn and Rey each locked an arm around his waist and carried him over the debris, hoisting him up whenever the logs were too large to straddle over.

“How much do you know about this place, Threepio?” Finn asked once they could spot the edge of the worst of the obstacle course, where Jessika was waiting impatiently. “You were in the first war, weren’t you?”

“I was indeed, Master Finn, but I’m afraid my affiliation with the Rebel Alliance began long after the Dantooine base was abandoned.” 

“Not to worry, though,” Rey said as she hopped up on the last trunk of substantial size. Finn hoisted C3PO up by his metal hips so she could grab his hands--thankfully, his bitter muttering had stopped about five minutes into the journey. “Jessika told me quite a few times that she knows the planet’s geography like the engine of her x-wing.”

Her tone was off, a little too bright for the circumstances. “Has she been here before or something?” he asked. Rey offered him a hand up after she made sure C3PO was balanced on the other side, and while he could have managed without the extra lift, he took it anyway. “I didn’t think anyone outside of the General and Admiral Ackbar had.” 

“Oh no. No no no. She just took a lot of military history classes at the Academy--”

“Rey.” 

She sighed, motioned down at C3PO to wait a moment as he had started to shift his weight from foot to foot in that antsy way he had about him. “This isn’t how I thought this would go.” He watched her eyes trace a line from the Falcon to the shambled forest around them and then back at Jessika, who had plopped down on a small patch of grass and was picking at it idly. “I told you I had a plan, and now we have a wild card--two wild cards--and…”

“Is it something with Jessika herself? Because you two seemed to get along fine back at the base--” 

“No! No…” she said, half clearing her throat. “After you left the cockpit, I was very tense”--her hand ran across her breastbone--“and I tried Master Luke’s techniques to control your emotions and nothing was working and--I don’t know--her next to me was a constant reminder that things were already so far from what had been planned and we can’t leave him out there alone, Finn.” 

He opened his mouth to speak, but the words piled up in a jumble on the back of his tongue, his face flushing. There was a promise there--of course we’re going to get him, we are not going to abandon our own--but it was weak, ready to shatter before the idea traveled down to his vocal cords.

Weeks before Rey and Skywalker finally came back to D’Qar, a risky mission had cropped up with some First Order battalions stationed in the Hutt territories, dividing the Resistance officers on whether they should intervene, because it was a lone First Order battalion on a planet in the Hutt territories, not even in anything that was close to the Republic’s jurisdiction, old or new, and it wasn’t worth getting caught in the skirmish. The General had stood taller than her physical frame in the situation room--these people have been quietly rebelling against the Hutts for years and they would do and have done the same for us. I promised them we would help. Finn had stood behind her, stood behind Poe and Doctor Kalonia while Admiral Statura and stepped forward from the other side of the room and said, “The galaxy doesn’t take well to promises, General; it’s best not to make them.” 

“Finn?” 

He jumped as her hand touched his knee. “Sorry, I…” When he refocused his gaze, her eyes were scared and impatient. “This isn’t a Jakku.” 

Not a promise. A remark on the present, something that cannot change in the split second it’s observed. The opposite of a lie, though it still felt like one. 

********** 

“Where did you say you saw the wreckage again?”

On the ground, the field was far more expansive than he had anticipated; the small dips and curves in the land he’d spotted from above had morphed into hills blotting out the horizon. They weren’t tall enough, however, to shield them from the scorching sun now that they had stepped past the shade afforded by the trees left standing in the Falcon’s wake. 

Jessika shielded her eyes as she looked back at him, raising her eyebrows in lieu of asking again. 

“It was off to the right when we were flying in, so--” 

“To our left. Got it.” 

The hill immediately before them was steeper than it appeared from a distance--despite the physical training regimen in the Resistance, all three of them were out of breath long before hitting the halfway mark. Pain sparked along the scar on Finn’s back from the effort, doubly so where muscles around his spine connected with his shoulders; droid duty had not ended simply because they were clear of the forest. 

“Artoo is going to be picking grass out of my circuits for days,” C3PO lamented as he and Rey dragged him up the slope by the arms. 

“Your little buddy is going to picking my shoe out of your mouth hole for the rest of your existence if you don’t shut the kriff up,” Jessika said. 

C3PO let out a little huff and Rey turned away before Finn could see her reaction. Undoubtedly she was rolling her eyes or jutting out her jaw--likely both--but his vision fizzled, the colorful fuzz dotting the muted dry greens of the planet while his back grew hot enough to burn through the jacket again. 

“Finn, are you all right?” Rey muttered. 

“Yeah, I’m--” He paused, seeing as she had dug her feet sideways into the cracked dirt to do the same. She didn’t look convinced in the slightest. “Okay,” he murmured, and he snuck a glance up at Jessika, stalled a few feet above them. “My back hurts a little, but it’s nothing--” 

“Threepio, are you sure you can’t make it up on your own?” she said suddenly.

“Mistress Rey, I assure you I cannot,” he said, “though if you don’t believe me, I would be more than willing to demonstrate how I would go tumbling back down to the bottom. I’m afraid I’m not built for such terrain like you are--excuse me?” 

Later, talking to Rey, Finn would want to describe how Jessika shifted back down the hill in a fluid motion, slick and sudden in the way she maneuvered to her looming stance over the droid--but he had seen fluid. Fluid was Rey twisting through a technical lightsaber exercise for the sixteenth time, the single arc Poe took on Takodana to shoot down half the enemy ships. This, with Jessika--it was more of a snap, an instant echo of C3PO’s words assuming physical form. 

Naturally, he and Rey stepped back.

“You have some nerve--” Jessika’s face screwed up in a tight frown while her finger jabbed at the rivets of C3PO’s nose. “Look. I know that you’re a protocol droid and that going after Poe is the opposite of protocol, but we need you to stop being an insufferable svaper because a man’s life is at stake. Got it?”

Though he began to splutter out a response, she didn’t wait to hear what he would eventually put together, taking Finn’s spot at C3PO’s arm and jerking her head up the hill. 

Without C3PO’s added weight, the strain across his back had eased to a light sting at the deepest ruts of the scar tissue, the ridged bits of skin that already flared up with the weather. His legs were starting to burn from the climb, but it wasn’t anything that the First Order PT regimen hadn’t already put him through. 

“You don’t have to look at me like that,” Jessika said behind him, likely to Rey. “I’ve been with the Resistance and put up with this garbage a lot longer than you have.” 

“Oh--no,” Rey said. “It’s not--it’s not that. I was about to do the same thing, honestly.” 

The crest of the hill was growing nearer, and with it came a wider view of this small portion of the planet--the plains, covered in spurts of dry grasses; the greener forests along the edge that stretched on past the horizon. And to think the four of them could have been back on D’Qar finishing up breakfast with Poe elbowing his way between Snap and Iolo after grabbing seconds, and the night before, he could have laid on his bed facing the ceiling like he always did. Poe could have found the exact right words to capture this. The field and the trees. The dry earth and dust under the broiling sun. And Finn could have stared back up at his own part of the ceiling and seen it perfectly in his head under the comfort of his own blankets, knowing the promise of coming back together still hung between them, waiting to be fulfilled. 

Instead of this. Whatever this was panning out to be. 

“If it’s not that, then what is it?” Jessika said. 

“I’m just stressed.” 

“Looking at me stresses you out, huh?” Her voice indicated an obvious smirk, even if Finn couldn’t see it for himself.

“Wh--no! I--no,” Rey stuttered. “In general. I’m stressed in general, Jessika. This is a stressful situation we’re in.”

“Well…” she sighed. “You’re not wrong.” She sounded tired, though Finn couldn’t hear any signs that indicated her breathing was labored or her muscles ached. “It’s a little less stressful now that this bucket of bolts has shut up.”

“Is he always like this?” 

“You have no idea…”

While C3PO protested for a moment, he quickly fell silent again as Jessika recounted tale after tale of of the droid’s narrow escapes from being throttled by various members of the Resistance--never the General, she explained, who had long ago inured herself to it all. Currently, Snap and Admiral Ackbar were tied for the highest number of close calls. “Though Snap probably wins because we actually had to hold him back one time after Threepio said something about battle droids,” Jessika said as Rey laughed. “I mean, even Poe one time… um.” 

Finn had heard the story. Repairing an old Y-wing recovered from a battle before even the Dantooine base had been established. C3PO, constantly leaning over his shoulder, pointing out loose circuits on the switchboard and oil that was staining Poe’s pants, as if he hadn’t been aware. And he’d brought his wrench up a little quickly, gripped it a little too tightly, maybe hadn’t hidden the strained tendons in his neck like he’d thought. But I’m not Snap, he’d told Finn. It had been a long day. Lost one of the squadron on a mission the day before and… look, I like Threepio a lot but I didn’t want any company, you know? And Finn knew, had nodded even though Poe was turned away, attempting to fold his laundry. 

“Do you see anything up there?” Rey asked, and Finn looked down to find his feet on the crest of the hill.

The downed ship was right where he remembered it, and it was indeed a ship. An X-wing, even, with a smudge of color along the nose where Poe’s formation designation would be written in the galactic Aurebesh. 

“If we had to come all the way up this hill,” he said, “at least we were going in the right direction.” 

********** 

The X-wing was unsalvageable--or, as Rey quickly pointed out, nearly unsalvageable. The entire electrical system had been fried to hell and back, the dashboard in the cockpit still reeking of burning metal and plastic, and the most crucial parts of the engines had suffered damages no amount of scrubbing or tinkering would fix.

“I just found what was left of the astromech,” C3PO said sadly. “Poor R6-B1. I think Artoo really liked that one.”

“Lucky BB-8 was in the shop,” Finn said.

Jessika groaned. “Stars, please don’t make me imagine that scenario. I don’t think I could stand the moping.” She halfheartedly kicked the underside of one of the wings and squinted out at the plains. “Okay, so: game plan. This is obviously his ship. And he’s…” 

She paused--it went unsaid. With no body, it would be safe to assume he didn’t die in the crash--but Jakku kept creeping up the back of Finn’s neck. Both of them had been thrown so far from the TIE fighter, and the idea that Poe could be in the nearby cluster of the forest or over the next hill, cold and a dull sheen to his eyes--it wouldn’t unperch from his shoulder. 

But this isn’t Jakku, he reminded himself. This isn’t sand. The marks on the ground would have led to him if he was thrown and didn’t make it, it’s okay, it’s okay--

Rey’s hand brushed his elbow. “He’s alive. And that’s a good place to start.” 

Coughing, Jessika glanced at his elbow, Rey’s hand--kicked the wing again for good measure. “That it is. Y’know…” she said slowly. “He could have gone to the old base to see if he could establish contact on some of the old Rebel Alliance back channels. Kaydel’s been monitoring them lately.” She shrugged towards the plains ahead, thankfully towards a small valley between another two sizable hills. “Poe was headed in the right direction when things malfunctioned. We’re in the Burad Hills now… so…that way’s north. Right across the steppes and we’ll see the base by nightfall.” 

He’d been so close.

Absently he felt Rey squeeze at his arm before pulling away. Gathered her belongings in his peripheral vision as he kept staring down the line past where Jessika had pointed. The horizon distorted and stretched until he refocused his gaze elsewhere. Closer, by the broken blade of grass next to the toe of his shoe with the threads of it starting to peel apart. 

“Captain Pava,” C3PO said behind him, and then beside him, because he must have been moving--“I wasn’t aware that you and Lieutenant Connix were back on speaking terms--” 

“For a protocol droid, you have no sense of tact.”

“Pardon my saying so, but no one aside from Commander Dameron seemed to know why you weren’t speaking, and he refused to elaborate so if it was a sensitive matter there was no way for me to have known--” 

“What part,” Rey said slowly, “of ‘no sense of tact’ did you not understand?”

“Honestly. Thank you.”

Finn felt two hands clap him on each shoulder before Rey and Jessika’s frames appeared in his line of sight, unfocused and blurry, and he trudged ahead until their edges sharpened. They were talking quietly between themselves, softly enough that the frustrating huffing from C3PO behind him drowned it out; Rey had pulled from her bag a couple blackened pieces of the X-wing’s engine that she had pried from the wreck, pointing out a few things here and there to Jessika. When she had had the chance to salvage anything was beyond him, but then again, his head had been half elsewhere.

Maybe that was a sign of something, letting his mind wander on a mission, the vigilance slipping away without a frenzied moment of self-correction. Too many times after the mission on the Starkiller his shoulders had slouched or his thoughts had meandered to wondering about the next meal and something in his chest would seize, waiting for Captain Phasma to cast a shadow over his shoulder. The cold grip never came--just a deeper wash through his chest of something he couldn’t yet identify.

There was a sense of being untethered as their journey continued: the Rielig Steppes, as Jessika identified them, were a flatter expanse of land than anything Finn had ever seen, a dry and dusty olive swathe breaking off at the skyline in every direction he turned. They were the only figures rising above the grass. No herds of native fauna. No signs of intelligent species. The four of them trekked further into the field and away from where the Falcon had crashed, and the entire scene--the nothingness, the blank of the blue sky above them, cloudless and bright--was too reminiscent of space for it not to draw his thoughts back to Poe. The Resistance. The First Order. Their ships hovering in the blank black between the stars. Finn was no longer a stormtrooper yet so new of a rebel, decommissioned from one and not completely accustomed to the other. Were it not for Dantooine’s gravity, he feared he would float away. 

“Did BB-8 really zap you on Jakku?”

It was Jessika. Her cheeks were flushed from the sun and her eyes were crinkling at the corners and she was still walking ahead without looking there. Beside her, Rey had her hand clutched over her face, turned away, shoulders shaking the way they did when she was holding in a laugh.

“Well… yeah,” Finn said. “But only because they thought I stole Poe’s jacket.” 

Jessika’s smirk crawled further up her cheek, lopsided as her eyes traced how the same jacket draped his frame now. “Didn’t you, though?” 

“No, Jess,” Rey snorted. Jess. That was new. “He gave it to him!” 

“I mean, he did,” Finn said. “Later. Not then.” 

Apparently satisfied, they turned back to each other, voices low again--or, maybe not low, but not projected to include anyone but themselves. He didn’t mind. He liked seeing the two of them toeing closer to something like happiness when its opposite was ready to chomp down on their heels. 

The sun arced through the sky as they pressed onwards, dipping down below the horizon and illuminating the silhouette of a craggy structure, a small bump against the flat expanse of the steppes. A sign, Jessika said--that was a sign. The base had been situated near the remains of an old Jedi temple. 

Rey held her breath, wide eyes belying her efforts to conceal whatever she was feeling as she met each of their gazes. The tiniest of grins inched across her face when she turned back ahead.

Just as Jessika had predicted, the sky was just starting to darken when they came across the prefab base, the paint peeling into rust as the grass pushed up through the short stairs to the only door they could find. Finn flicked on a glowrod--the sun had fallen behind a tall, weathered concrete slab that still stood tall beside the crumbling remains of the temple, and its shadows were long, deeper than he felt they should be.

Rey’s gaze crawled up to the tip of it as Jessika stood cemented in place, C3PO nearly bumping into her.

“Something doesn’t feel right,” she said. 

“It definitely feels different,” Rey murmured.

“Of course it would to you. I’m not Force-sensitive.” Jessika side-eyed C3PO and took a step to put some distance between them. “I’m talking about something else.”

Finn made his way up the steps alone, trying to ignore the sharp tug at his gut that Jessika must have been referring to. There should have been some sign of disturbance if Poe had made it to the base to complete the mission and call for help, but the stalks of grass remained unbroken and the dust that had settled on the steps bore no footprint save his own. 

“Poe?” He shined the glowrod at the lone circular window in the door, the glass a grimy near-oblique shade of black. “We came to get you.”

Nothing.

The muck was caked on the window thick, and no amount of spit and rubbing with the hem of his long-sleeve shirt was going to return it to its original condition. Grit stuck to the sleeve and the window was left with the dirt streaked into new swirling patterns.

“Poe!” He tried the door--the handle wouldn’t turn, and despite his pulling it there were no signs that it was budging from the frame. “C’mon,” he sighed quietly. “I know you’re a heavy sleeper but this is ridiculous--” 

“Finn…” 

“I mean.” He turned around, heard himself laugh though the feeling of it slowly shredded across his lungs, air escaping, and maybe he shouldn’t waste his breath on laughing when it was suddenly becoming more difficult to breathe. “I know you’ve known him longer than me, Jessika, but you don’t have to share a room with him. Seven alarms and he’ll sleep through all of them--” 

Tried the door again. This time a few flakes of rust fluttered down to his feet. 

“I don’t get it,” he said under his breath. 

“Finn, he’s not here.” Jessika’s voice cracked and the last bit of breath he’d been clinging to, an invisible foot punted it out of his chest. “Clearly no one has been here since the war.”

“Well--” His breathing was coming in gasps, but nothing seemed to stick in his lungs, like that foot had cracked a hole and everything was leaking out. “We should still--I mean--”

Then Rey was beside him, gently shifting him a few steps away from the door. Quiet but forceful, a hand already at the lightsaber strapped to her hip. “If he didn’t get here, that means the data the General wants still hasn’t been retrieved.”

He watched her hands--thin fingers clasping around the hilt of the saber, another fist squeezing his lungs--“Wait, wait…” And he tried to catch his breath, control how much his chest was heaving as she found his gaze and glanced back at Jessika. “It’ll go right through the door… what if… I mean, on the off chance--” 

“No, you’re right,” she said. The saber slipped back into its strap and she studied the door intently, brow knitting together. “It’s a last resort. Maybe I can…” And she stuck her hand back out, the bones along its back straining against the skin as her fingers bent and froze until the door cracked against its seal. “Never tried that before,” she said to herself, and she shot him a small grin that he felt help his heart slow. 

More rust flakes fell down at their feet as the door groaned open--not because it looked heavy against Rey’s arms, but likely due to disuse. 

“Goodness,” she coughed upon stepping inside. Finn peeked after her and found her frame dwarfed by boxes in a cloud of dust illuminated in the fading light. “Most of this looks like old blaster storage… all empty… we got anything to pull the data from these old hard drives?”

“All right, it’s your time to shine, buddy.” Jessika hoisted C3PO into his arms, sending him stumbling back against the wall of the base. “Sorry,” she said as she jumped up and pushed the droid inside. “If I had given him any more warning I think he would have tried to make a break for it.”

And while C3PO certainly did protest, he did so under his breath, just loud enough for Rey to catch wind and push her mouth into a tight line. They started at booting up the decades-old system, brushing off the screens and searching for data ports--occasionally swatting away each other’s hands. 

Jessika looked away from their squabbling to give him a once over before turning back. “I’ve never seen anyone use the Force before,” she said quietly. “I mean, you hear about it. You know what it’s supposed to be and all that, but…” From inside the base, Rey groaned and ran a hand over her face, trying desperately to talk over whatever C3PO was going on about this time--and Jessika’s face pulled into the brightest grin he had seen her wear in the months since joining the Resistance. 

It fell back into her normal expression as soon as she caught him looking. “Anyway,” she coughed. “Are you doing okay? We’re going to find him,” she added hurriedly before he could respond. Almost as if she were trying to convince herself as well as him. “He’s resourceful. Honestly,” she sighed, “I’d bet you my weekly share of caf that he’s found another way to broadcast on our back channels. We’ll check as soon as we’re clear of this place, okay?” 

He nodded, and she kept talking to fill the silence--tidbits here and there about why the Rebel Alliance had picked Dantooine as a strategic outpost--but her words garbled into mush before he had a chance to decipher them.

Home had two seasons, hot and hell, and before the air turned to soup in hell season, right before the solstice, he would climb to the highest branch on the Force tree that could support his weight, back against the warm trunk, and watch the lavender sky sink into darkness through the golden leaves. As the years passed, that branch was lower and lower down--but Poe looked down at his hands, his legs draped over the bark, and the oil staining his palms and orange flight suit were unmistakable, as were the scars lining the first two fingers on his left hand. (One short and thick, an electrical burn from his ship at the Academy; the other thin, running along the inside edge, still a deep red even after surviving adolescence.)

He hadn’t been this high in the tree since his eighth birthday. The limb hadn’t grown thicker; it was still a supple, spindly thing, the perfect size for little hands to grab onto as a walking stick once it snapped and fell to the ground. But his body had gathered the layered rings of age that hadn’t bothered to wrap around this part of the tree. 

The thought settled into his chest. It rattled against his ribs. Skittered to a heavy silence that only sank deeper and collected sweat at his brow.

The hell season was definitely coming.

“Poe.” 

And there his mother was, standing at the base and teasing a shining leaf between her thumb and first finger like she always did when she came to fetch him for dinner. No gray lined her hair--she was his age, calling up to him like he was a child, and it was suddenly impossible to swallow past the lump in his throat. 

“Did Luke ever talk to you about this? This tree?” 

He blinked and she was kneeling on the branch beside him, her entire weight on a branch no thicker than the one he himself was perched on, yet it didn’t even begin to bend. 

The sun was setting. Lavender shifting to a dark purple shade by shade. 

“No,” he said. “He’s never… he’s never brought it up.” 

Her face was so close. Familiar in his memory and so strange to be present and whole this close to his again. He was overly conscious of the stubble lining his jaw, of each hair pushing through his skin. The lines etched at the corners of his eyes and mouth. The new scars. The child she had known was buried under so much but she still reached out, cupped his cheek with her hand and rubbed just along the ridge of his cheekbone.

Her hand was warm, just like the spine of the tree against his back. He leaned into it, weighted by the heaviness in his chest and coiling around his heart.

“Sweetheart, look at me.”

And he did. The scar cutting through her eyebrow was darker in the setting sun but her eyes glowed a bright mahogany and it was the same sight he had seen every morning when she came to sit on the edge of his bed with promises of his father’s breakfast in the kitchen.

(It wasn’t real but he wanted it to be. In that moment, when he could convince most of himself that it was real, he wanted it more than he had wanted anything before in his life.) 

“I’m so proud of you.”

Over her shoulder, he could see their house: tilted on its side, engulfed in flames as black and violet as the sky was becoming above them. 

********** 

“Captain didn’t tell me I was getting a roommate.”

Poe pulled his eyes open, and before he even tried to move, he could feel the sharp twinges of a crick in his neck and a sore shoulder from the position he had been sleeping in. (Not sleeping. Knocked out. How long had it been since he was locked up in the interrogation room with Kylo Ren? He couldn’t remember, just shackled then suddenly here on a bare, paper-thin cot--) 

He sat up and tried not to wince but he must have anyway; the stormtrooper standing next to the cot on the opposite side of the small room made a tsk noise under his breath.

“I don’t think I’m your roommate,” Poe said.

“Obviously.”

He removed his helmet, and Poe didn’t know what he was expecting but it wasn’t this: skin so pale it glowed, a stark contrast to the red hair mussed by sweat. His face looked incomplete, somehow, as if whoever had sat down to design him before his birth had been called away before they had finished and never returned. The stormtrooper eyed him warily before setting the helmet on the table at the head of the cot and removing the rest of his gear. 

“I’ve been given the honor of keeping track of you over the next few days,” he said. Poe couldn’t tell whether he was being sarcastic or not. “Captain just didn’t tell me that you’d be sharing my bunk, too.”

His back was turned to Poe as he stripped off the top half of the black body glove--along his right shoulder was the unmistakable pink scar from a high-powered blaster. Its hue appeared so angry next to the paper white of his skin, and only then did Poe realize that he looked unfinished because he wasn’t dotted with freckles as every other redhead he’d met had been. This was skin that had never seen the sun.

“What’s your name?”

The stormtrooper looked back over his shoulder and pulled on a plain t-shirt. “My designation is FN-2199. Everyone else in this corps calls me Nines, so don’t.”

Nines.

Poe knew that name.

“And we all know who you are,” Nines continued, flopping down on the cot. “The Resistance scum broken out by--him.” He opened his mouth to say something more, but it collapsed into a thin line as he glared back up at the ceiling. Undoubtedly Nines had a lot to say to him, and Poe almost admired him for the restraint it took to keep it inside.

It was a quality he knew didn’t come naturally for himself, so he bit his tongue and laid back against the wall, eyeing the ceiling. The General would have been proud, him listening to this often-repeated plea for once--the look she had given him after hearing how he’d mouthed off at Kylo Ren on Jakku had almost made him regret it.

Across the room, Nines had fallen into an easy breathing, slow and even, hardly paying him any mind. Like he knew Poe wouldn’t try to escape. Maybe he knew that it was impossible, the doors locking behind him to keep them both inside or extra guards staged in the hall. Or he had simply inferred enough from Poe, how he had fled with Finn the first time, to know there wasn’t anything to fear.

In battle, locked into his X-wing up in the sky, that was one thing--shooting down TIE fighters piloted by the jet-black stormtroopers was a matter of survival, his own and his squadron’s; it wasn’t something he had the luxury of time to think about in the moment. Returning to D’Qar, he would replay the battle in his head and count the number of ships he’d shot down, take a moment to acknowledge the lives he’d been forced to end because of the war. Because of circumstances within the war. He took even more time to reflect on each ship after Finn came into his life.

Poe supposed it would be easy to jump Nines. Incapacitate him, make a break for the hangar and hijack another TIE fighter to fly back to base. The plan began to formulate in his head, the best way to go about it, but the image warped in his head whenever he would look down and see his hands connecting with Nines’ face or throat, the pale skin flashing to a specific shade of brown he had come to recognize as something close to home. And at once the plan fizzled into nothing.

“What do they want with me?” he asked.

Nines sighed. “That’s above my clearance level. But,” he said, meeting Poe’s gaze. “If I were General Hux, I would use you as bait. Make an example of Eighty-Seven to show the rest of us what happens when you commit treason.”

“Why do you think he would come for me again?” he asked slowly. He knew why--because he was Finn, because he’d threatened to do so over the comms once when Black Squadron had gotten into a nasty pocket of TIE fighters and things had started to go south, and even after Tabala had pushed him out of her station he could still hear him in the background. Repeating himself.

But how was the First Order supposed to know that? How was Nines?

“Eighty-Seven formed attachments,” Nines said. “It’s been his weakness since the beginning.”

I wouldn’t call it that at all, he almost replied. His molars dug down harder into his tongue, right to the point of bruising.

“Plus,” Nines continued, “we all heard Kylo Ren slice half the kitchens apart when Hux told him they’d traced the Millennium Falcon taking hyperspace lanes towards wherever they picked you up.”

The lights in the room clicked off-- it must have been whatever qualified as nighttime on this ship--and within minutes soft snoring grumbled from Nines’ cot. Poe squeezed his eyes shut until dots of color burst into the black of his vision, reaching out tentatively with a shaky grip on the tense burn at the core of his chest that hadn’t abated since his encounter with Ren. It broiled with the same rhythm as the anxiety that would flare up in the wake of close calls, but this was different. This was new. This was the source of the invisible hand that had thrown Ren off his feet, and Poe knew what he ought to call it, but he hesitated.

But still he reached, tried to feel past the walls confining him with Nines and into the galaxy at large--to find Finn or, at the very least, clutch onto Rey. Because she would know if he were on the Falcon. She would feel his fear and tell him to come home.

********** 

By the time the lights clicked back on, Poe’s eyes stung from fatigue with every blink; whether or not he ever actually fell asleep was uncertain as the night seemed to drag on forever, hazy and gray. Nines hopped up almost at once and reassembled himself in his armor and helmet by the time Poe had rubbed half the sleep from his eyes. And by then, Nines had already slapped cuffs around his wrists.

“Up,” he said. His voice had taken on the filtered electronic quality the helmets were prone to supply, and when Poe didn’t move immediately, he kicked his foot. “We have to pick up morning rations, and then I’m dropping you off with the Captain.”

In the hallway outside their room, a steady stream of stormtroopers were marching around the corner to their left. It was early--it had to be--yet not one of them displayed any signs of grogginess like he was accustomed to seeing in the caf line on D’Qar. The butt of Nines’ blaster dug into his back and they slipped into the line where there was a small gap.

“How was it bunking with the enemy?” someone behind Nines asked with a laugh.

“Shut it, Zeroes. You know how important this is to the Order.”

Zeroes--he knew that name, too. “Oh, we had a fantastic night,” he said before he could stop himself. So much for listening to the General. “He’s a great little spoon--”

A searing pain slashed across the back of his skull and he found himself on his knees, leaning against his forearms, back to biting his tongue to keep back the stream of curse  words that he suspected would only bring more pain. But still there was a satisfaction in getting to them so easily, knowing that aspects of his very existence was a form of rebellion within these ranks. Nines had a nice face--in another life, he would have paid him a second or third glance at the cantina.

But it was this life, and Nines’ face was hidden behind the uniform sickly grin of the helmet and his hands gripped his blaster like he was more than ready to knock a few of his teeth out to keep him down.

A foot hit his hip and he scrambled back to his feet, and the quiet snickering behind them kept on while Nines kept the blaster nestled close in the small of his back. The fear that had washed so strongly over him the night before had ebbed to a low, ignorable pulse at his core, circling that warmth he refused to name.

“Captain’s got a lot worse waiting for you than a blaster to the head if you’re insolent with her,” Nines hissed in his ear.

And the first thing to come to Poe’s mind was: Excellent, looking forward to it.

Stars, as if he weren’t right on the path to proving the General and the Admirals right. He’d overheard them murmuring among each other in the situation room late one night--the blue squadron had come back with a few pilots smaller from the Vivenda Sector mission, the black with a couple fried astromechs, and the air around the base hung on everyone’s shoulders like the thick moss draped over Yavin 4’s trees. Dedicated to a fault, that was what the General had said. Ackbar and Statura hadn’t understood.

But it’s one thing to be dedicated and another completely to revel in the consequences it brings you personally--so he had come back to their bunk with a shiner so swollen it was pushing his eye shut and a cracking blaster burn on the back of his calf. He wasn’t dead, and he finished the mission and got in a couple barbs to the First Order officers stationed on Dorvalla.

That’s when I got this, he’d grinned, pointing to the black eye, and Finn had said what he said. Repeated it, even, when he’d squeezed the bacta gel onto the burn and Poe’s wince had looked more like a grin.

Refusing to even go to the medbay… what’s wrong with you, Poe Dameron?

Good question.

The morning rations were a single hard protein bar, a nauseating grayish-brown with the kind of texture Poe had come to associate with the freeze-dried sides on base before the cooks had added the water. It sapped all the moisture from his mouth immediately, but he forced it down as Nines pushed him down another hallway off the cafeteria. The cuffs were making it difficult to unwrap the very bottom, and though he wasn’t eager to choke down another mouthful, he didn’t have a clear idea of when his next meal would be.

Eventually they came to a small room tucked away in the corner of the hall before it curved back towards what Poe guessed was the nose of the ship. It was sparsely furnished, with only a lone plastic chair and a table pushed up against the wall equipped with a one-way mirror. Beyond that, into the room next door, sat four stormtroopers--each sitting in a plastic chair similar to the one Poe found himself being forced into, their helmets removed.

Nines removed his cuffs and replaced them with a set of durasteel restraints on the arms of the chair similar to the ones that had held him in the interrogation room the day before. The added girth of the chair arms made their hold on Poe’s wrists just too tight, and it was already starting to cut into his skin.

“Who are they?”

“Always with the questions,” Nines muttered. “Members of the FQ corps that were determined to need some reconditioning. Never used to be more than one at a time, you know, and not this frequently. Another thing to thank Eighty-Seven for.”

“You seem to put a lot of the blame on him instead of me,” Poe said. Nines had just stepped towards the door and turned back around, finger idling near the trigger of the blaster. “He wouldn’t have been able to get out if I hadn’t helped him.”

(A little lie was okay when goading the enemy, he had often told himself--they didn’t have to know the gritty details of his every thought.)

“You were the vehicle of his escape, but you didn’t make him defect.”

“It was personal, wasn’t it?” He let a smirk slide onto his face, watching as Nines’ hands tensed.

“I never liked FN-2187. None of us did much,” he spat. “But this--” He pointed to the room beyond the mirror. “--this is what he’s done. What you helped him do. But he did it. I don’t care that it was him--I care that it’s happening at all.”

The door slammed behind him with a clang, leaving Poe only with the low hum of the ship’s climate control and whatever huffs penetrated the thick walls from the room on the other side of the mirror. The four stormtroopers weren’t strapped to their chairs like he was, though they weren’t prisoners, not in the same way--but their faces were young, and even in the small sample the range of origins stretched across the entire galaxy. Stolen from their families as infants, mourned, presumed dead. If there was anyone left alive to mourn them at all after the kidnapping.

Finn never spoke about that part, and Poe never pressed the matter. He imagined that he brought it up more with Rey if he did at all; that river between them ran deep with their mutual lack of answers. But this, this room Poe could see now--Finn had spoken about this, however briefly. How they had brought him in for reconditioning. (How it must not have worked very well, because he was sitting with Poe on the floor of their bunk, facing each other, backs up against the sides of their beds--in the Resistance base, far from the fleets of star destroyers as the clock ticked further and further from the hour of lights out, and Finn was letting his foot lightly smack against Poe’s ankle whenever he found something he said particularly ridiculous.)

Poe blinked and each of the stormtroopers in front of him turned into Finn.

He blinked again and the scene shifted back to what it really was.

The door in the corner of the other room swung out heavily with a low metallic groan, quickly closing behind the figure who stepped inside. Phasma, the captain who loomed a solid foot over most of her compatriots, gifted with the chrome armor never before seen in any of the surviving records from the Empire or Clone Wars. At the base, day-to-day, Finn would name-drop her in stories, an omnipresent shadow in every significant memory from his time in the First Order he had decided to share. But he never addressed her directly: it curved around the side, following the warped reflection in her breastplate, so when she creeped up in his nightmares she would stand before him in piecemeal. Not the image of her, because Poe had seen that for himself on Jakku--but the essence, light shone through the gaps, throwing the generic face of the helmet into a haunting relief.

He understood it now. Her head turned towards her side of the mirror, right where his chair had been stationed. She couldn’t see through the mirror but the imagined path of her eyes under the black strip of the helmet pressed a heavy weight onto his chest.

“FQ-1602, FQ-1689, FQ-1657, FQ-0222.” The voice came from the corner of Poe’s room, piped in from the other side and into a speaker tucked just under the ceiling paneling. Staccato and direct, just like the commands of the air fleet he had trained with at the Academy. “You should know why you are here today. But in case you forgot: the four of you were caught discussing matters at odds with the mission and values of the First Order. Without a unified front behind these ideals, there is no path to victory in the galaxy.” She clanked to the far wall and pressed a button, dimming the lights and bringing up a large holovid before them. “You have been excused from your duties today for this session. I will return before evening rations so that you may return to your bunks.”

Phasma’s cape flashed behind her as she exited, but Poe hardly paid it any attention--the holovid had begun to project a series of images that he recognized not only from military history at the Academy, but from around his home on Yavin 4--the first drafts of the Rebel Alliance emblem, snow-covered AT-ATs, the Death Star incinerating in a novalike burst. And the sequence moved through history in a melange, zooming in on particular events as the grainy music swelled. The destruction of the second Death Star and the liberation of Naboo. Establishing the New Republic. Pushing the remnants of the Empire to patches along the Outer Rim.

“Your fellow escapee left behind quite a mess.”

Poe jumped in his seat and turned to the source of the voice, finding the head of a blaster tucked next to his ear; Phasma loomed behind him, cast him in shadow. I didn’t even hear you open the door--it sat on his tongue and didn’t dare to move.

“Cases like this are easy,” she said. “We catch a group of them muttering together about the rumor surrounding that one cadet from the FN corps. The next week there’s a smaller group whispering that maybe they’re on the wrong side of this war--it doesn’t take long to spot. And they just need some reminders about our history. Repeat offenders need a little more tough love, but this tends to suffice.”

Beyond the mirror, Finn’s face took up half the holovid’s projection, and a whole block of stormtrooper helmets with their designations took up the other--“FN-2187 betrayed the First Order, delivered a key prisoner and intelligence back to the Resistance, and killed your brothers in arms listed before you. Because of his actions, the New Republic has been allowed to regroup after our victory in the Hosnian System and continue their oppressive machinations to control the galaxy.”

They fear you, Finn. A bubble of pride rose in his chest, and he wanted to reach back through the months to when Finn first was cleared to leave the med bay, when he fell back on his new bed and his eyes glossed over, staring at nothing. (“They want me to join the Resistance for real? But I’m just a--” And he’d stopped, a grin flopping onto his face. Wondered why Poe was looking at him like that. “You’re not ‘just’ an anything, buddy,” he’d told him.)

(The First Order could get one thing right, at least.)

But the bubble burst as the holovid progressed. His own face soon replaced Finn’s. Then Han’s. The General’s. Admiral Ackbar and Nien Nunb and a grainy image of a young, beardless Luke Skywalker. Each of them had their own visual for body counts, and the stormtroopers squirmed as the numbers crawled higher, the battles between the Rebel Alliance and Empire described in vivid detail with close focus on the supposed treachery of the rebels. The print was too fine to read from a distance--Poe couldn’t tell if the numbers were fabricated.

How would you know? Do you keep a tally? Do any of them?

“The First Order,” the holovid continued, “is the legacy of an ancient fraternity who toiled for thousands of years against the crimes of the Old Republic and the Jedi. But it wasn’t until a martyr of the Empire, Lord Vader, struck back against the Jedi that the Old Republic would finally fall and justice could be restored--”

“Are you…” He couldn’t breathe. The air in his lungs seethed hot and scalding and scorched up his throat and his vocal cords couldn’t handle the strain to speak.

“Am I what?” Phasma said. “Spit it out.”

Everything was pushing to come out at once, elbowing to the front, and had his fingernails not been bitten to nubs they would have started to dig into his palm. Broken the skin and tried to keep going.

The holovid kept going but the images went blurry, the stormtroopers melted, the voiceover distorted--the heat at the center of him was spreading outwards and seeping from his skin without the familiar damp drip along his hairline.

“When Vader attacked the Jedi,” he finally said, voice shaking, “they say he attacked children. And you’re telling them to treat him like a kriffing hero--”

“Those children had been taken from their homes to be indoctrinated by the Jedi, who were no more than the puppet strong-arm of the Old Republic--”

“What about yourselves, then?” His throat tightened around his words, and even with the force behind them, they came out in a rasp rather than the shout he had been aiming for: the push of his tongue behind the noise, a hope that it would knock against the shiny chrome of her helmet and leave something to ring in her ears. “What about them? What about Finn? You call the Jedi kidnappers when you have an army eons bigger than they ever did, and from children you stole--”

“Saving them from a life under the boot of the New Republic--”

“Because yours is so much better.” And he almost had to laugh. Almost, but the cold waves rolling down his limbs kept the need at bay.

The holovid switched to an image of an asteroid field beside the face of Bail Organa, and he couldn’t look. He pushed the ringing in his ears louder to cover up the voiceover, because wouldn’t it be disrespectful to the General to hear the slander about the man who raised her when she never let his name slip herself? 

“You should ask FN-2187,” Phasma said. “Not about the boots. See what he says about Alderaan and the Emperor or anything else he hasn’t told you. You might be surprised.”

The four stormtroopers flashed into Finn’s face again, their wide eyes of horror and disgust at the supposed crimes of the Rebel Alliance drawn into the face he’d watched sleeping when the insomnia shook at his shoulders. Bile scraped the back of his throat, kept scraping higher and higher. You don’t know the half of what he lived through or what any of them lived through and this is just a sliver of it and it’s already turned your blood to steam in your veins--

The tip of Phasma’s blaster dug further into his neck and pulled along the skin--she was stepping slowly around his chair to place herself between him and the one-way mirror, each step deliberate and shrilly reverberating as metal came down on the grated floors. “He had all the makings to be General Hux’s right hand man one day,” she murmured. The blaster traced up his jaw and towards his hairline, pulling away a curl that had dropped into his eyes. “Until Jakku, of course.”

Were his hands not strapped down, Poe would have made to reach up and pull the helmet off her head. Her eyes, he needed to stare into the pinpricks her pupils would be curling into under the buzzing lights, see the twitch of the muscles at the corners when he said what was building at the back of his teeth.

Instead he leaned his head forward, digging the thin skin at his hairline into the barrel. “I don’t think you knew him as well as you think you did.”

With a swift jab of the blaster, she pushed him back against the seat, turned on her heel with an awful metallic screech. Slammed the door behind her to leave him to watch the rest of the smear campaign they called reeducation.

Nines came back however many hours later, found Poe’s hands clutched around the end of the chair’s arms so tightly that they had started to shake. Skin hot, breathing hard and deliberately. Silent while Nines stripped him of the restraints and led him once again with a blaster barrel burying itself into the notches of his spine.

Back to the bunk: another ration bar laid on his cot but the thought of food churned something bright in his stomach all the way up past his lungs.

**********

His hands were small as an eight-year-old, even for a child of his age, and they felt even smaller dwarfed in the tight grips of his father and grandfather. One on each hand, standing with backs unnaturally straight, at least an inch taller than what he was used to--he could feel the angle bent further in his neck as he tried to catch their eye, either one of them. They were the only two at the small ceremony that he knew and the whisper birds were echoing all the questions sitting at the tip of his tongue, the ones he couldn’t make himself vocalize. Not now. Not when the thickness of the heat was starting to ebb, releasing the pressure on their throats. The silence needed to be kept for a little while longer.

He tried to peek around his grandfather’s back to the other two in attendance. They had greeted him warmly, though he never remembered meeting them--he felt like he would have been able to find them in his memory if he had. The long brown cloak and the one glove on the man’s right hand. The elaborate hairstyle and set of the woman’s shoulders. The way both of their eyes were drawn to the tips of the Force tree reaching high over the roof of the house.

He’d been here before: the first time, and then the mirrors after that. The mirages behind the back of his eyeballs that crept their way to the front when the night was at its deepest.

The flames of the funeral pyre were how it how it ended in the copies. Yellows and oranges spat up towards the sky with sparks fizzling slower behind them as the young wood of the forest popped in the heat. His gaze lingered on the pyre in this iteration longer than usual and without the urge to yank himself away and back into the quiet of the present.

The flames were black.

By the time they had settled themselves into a state to make any sort of decisions, the last edge of the horizon had its color wiped away into black. Rey had briefly entertained the idea of spending the night at the abandoned base or temple, her eyes dropping to where Finn’s fingers had twisted themselves into a knot--he needed the rest, they all did, but there wasn’t room in the base with the heaps of boxes, and any entrance to the temple was closed over by thick swathes of vines.

“Slicing through it would obviously not be a problem,” Rey said. “But something tells me I shouldn’t disturb the place.” She turned back to glance up at the structure, just a dark splotch against a darker background now.

“So we’re walking back in the dark,” Jessika sighed. “Super. Are you good to go, Finn?”

“Yeah, yeah… ‘m fine,” he said. Straightened his back with a cough, shook his hands out, stretching his fingers after they had been curled so tightly--with his brow knit the way it was, the way Jessika had seen so many times as she and the rest of the pilots had explained something he’d missed growing up in the First Order, she suspected that there was a depth to his worry the rest of them had not noticed.

She also suspected that he might not want them to notice, at least not yet.

They trekked back across the steppes in silence without having to even shut C3PO down--an actual miracle, if Jessika had ever seen one. And after the first hour, Finn was able to store the glowrod back in his bag: first the stars had sparked in one by one and then the moon rose, a yellow orb bigger than any other moon she’d ever seen. It lit the path before them, casting deep shadows where their steps had flattened the glass.

Jessika was behind Finn and Rey, who had opted to take the lead back to the Falcon. They stayed in step, close, so much so that whenever one of them stepped on an unexpected rock, the jolt would brush their shoulders together. Though they didn’t make eye contact, didn’t so much turn their heads toward the other: Finn stared ahead, off at an angle where the Falcon would be waiting for them in the downed trees, and Rey’s head was craned towards the moon, slowly swiveling to map out the stars around it.

The light caught the corner of Rey’s grin when she turned halfway over her shoulder, and Jessika found herself thanking the stars that she hadn’t come back with Skywalker any sooner than she did, because what in the kriff sort of distracting-- 

Nope. Not going there, Pava.  

When they at last arrived at the entrance to the ship, hours and hours later with far too much droid maneuvering to fill them, it was a welcome sight. They collapsed around the holotable once the dock closed and wiped the sweat and dirt from their faces. 

“You’ve got a… hold on,” Rey said, and she reached forward to pull a leafy twig from the tangled braid over Jessika’s shoulder. “Got it.” And there was that grin again. 

Jessika wanted to kick herself. Rey redirected the grin to the twig itself, feeling the leaves between her fingers and scratching absently at the bark--and Finn snorted, kicked her lightly under the tight confines of the table, because his knee knocked against Jessika’s in the process, and she redoubled on trying to determine the mechanics of kicking oneself.

“I know we’re all exhausted and sleep-deprived, but,” she said, and finally Rey put the twig down and she could live peacefully a little bit longer. “Does anyone have an idea of what our next step could be?” 

“I still think we should check the back channels to see if Poe is broadcasting anything,” Finn said. “If he is, we go get him. If he isn’t--” He opened and closed his mouth a few times before sighing into his hand. “Would he still be on Dantooine if he wasn’t at the base? Jessika, what do you know about the local species?” 

“Not a lot,” she said. “I mean, most of my knowledge about this planet is from a military standpoint but… there’s not much here. There’s a humanoid species here but they’re not advanced enough to make a city where he would lay low or to think about taking him for ransom.” 

They fell silent, and after a few moments C3PO began to look between the three of them. “Pardon me, Master Finn--if I may be of assistance--”

“Get to the point, nerf herder,” Jessika said.

“Very well--I’ve calculated the odds of Commander Dameron still being on-planet since obtaining this new data and it’s very slim. He is likely elsewhere.” When no one said anything or even looked at him, he added, “I should also tell you that the Millennium Falcon’s transmission system is a tad problematic… lately certain atmospheric conditions have been interfering with it.”

Finn drummed his fingers on the table and frowned. “Okay. All right. So let’s get off this rock,” he said as he stood, squeezing past C3PO and heading to the cockpit. 

Rey glanced over at her, sharing the determined expression that had overtaken Finn since they left the base, and Jessika met it with a nod. There was no use in stewing in the disappointments of one dead end.

They settled into the front two seats of the cockpit, Finn already staving off antsy squirming in his second-row seat. C3PO clanked down beside him and offered an awkward couple pats on his shoulder--and as much as Jessika wanted to tell the droid to go back to the main cabin, seeing the tension ease in Finn’s frame kept her mouth shut.

“Well, it’s been fun, Dantooine,” she muttered under her breath, and soon the ship was groaning out of the debris and rising through the cloudless sky. A couple shudders of turbulence rocked them in their seats as they flew past the atmosphere and--

“Maybe you shouldn’t have spoken so soon,” Rey said lightly.

“For the record, I was being sarcastic,” she said.

It was likely that the galaxy or the Force or whatever had been listening had not yet discovered the finer subtleties of language--though, considering the swarm of TIE fighters whining towards them, Jessika was willing to bet it just had a sick sense of humor.

“We’re doomed!” C3PO said simply to himself.

“Shut up,” Finn said before turning back to them. “The blaster controls are below, I’m headed down there now--”

“Wait,” Jessika said, and she grabbed at his wrist as he got up to leave. “No offense, but I’m the second best shot in the Resistance, let me--”

“This is nothing like an X-wing, he knows what he’s doing!” Rey said. Her voice had started to climb in volume--not from panic, gauging from her hands flying over the control panels in a calm concise manner, a mirror of Poe on the flight simulator, and Jessika began the defensive maneuvers hardly realizing that she had let go of Finn and his footsteps had faded down the hall.

Two short wails were quickly followed by a shudder, C3PO’s babbling on about the sheer size of the fleet before them, as if they hadn’t noticed already. But the shields were up and red blaster shots were spitting towards the TIE fighters from Finn’s position at the gunner and a few connected, bright orange sparks of explosions in different pockets of her vision.

“You got a plan?” she shouted to Rey over the din--a couple alarms had started to sound, nothing Rey appeared too concerned about to vocalize, and the green bullets were whizzing with more frequency and increasingly accurate aim.

“We have to escape!”

“That’s a goal, not a plan, by the way!”

Rey didn’t seem to care about the distinction, standing to move to a better position to man the controls, and the Falcon careened through the mob of them a full ninety degrees from parallel, dipping and never staying at one angle long enough for more than a glancing shot to hit the shields. (Which were, Jessika noted grimly, as old and garbage as the rest of the ship, because they were falling more rapidly than shields should from those types of hits.) And no matter how many fighters Finn downed, the numbers never seemed to fall with them.

“Threepio’s right, we can’t go up against this many,” Rey said as she jerked the controls sharply to the left, nearly vaulting the droid right out of his seat. “We need to hyperspace our way out of here and lay low.”

“Where are we supposed to do that?”

“You know this galaxy better than I do--pick someplace and go--”

The hyperspace controls sat right in front of Jessika’s seat: the knobs and buttons were grimy and worn from use and likely a lack of proper cleaning, stray strands of Wookie hair caught in the tight grooves--it was all she could look at as Rey and Finn struggled to keep their collective heads above water as the cloud of First Order troops now appeared to grow in number even as Finn’s aim steadily improved. Her mind was a blank. Where were they supposed to go?

There were the systems and planets of the New Republic, none too keen on accepting a known Resistance vessel; the other systems tightly controlled by the Order, the single planets here and there under the Hutts or other crime lords--Jessika brought a map of the galaxy up in her mind’s eye and attempted to focus as the Falcon whirled and shook and the blaster fire outside grew more and more intense.

And as much as she tried to scan the full breadth of the map, she kept returning to one planet, a planet whose coordinates she knew better than the names of half the new techs back on D’Qar. If they weren’t going to be taking a hyperspace lane, she couldn’t risk flying anywhere else.

In seconds, the stars stretched and warped before the propulsors flung them into the ether.

“That was some flying,” she gasped as Rey collapsed against the back of her seat, and she was met with a tiny uptick of her lips.

“Thanks.” Rey’s grin pushed into something quieter before she looked back over her shoulder--Finn’s footfalls could be heard clanging loudly on the grated floors. “You’ve gotten better at that contraption, Finn.”

“If you say so,” he sighed, wiping sweat from his brow. “Where exactly are we going?”

The two of them, and then C3PO after a beat, turned to stare at her. She could see the blurred swaths of the galaxy rushing past them and was half waiting for a TIE fighter to do the impossible and sneak up beside them to send them to a bright green death. “Corulag,” she said finally. “No First Order presence, independent from the New Republic. It’s near the Deep Core, but we should be okay.”

“Excuse me, Captain Pava,” C3PO said, leaning into their circle. “But how can you be so certain of this particular planet’s alliances?”

“Because brass-brain…” Jessika gripped his skull and pushed him back into his seat. “Corulag is my home world.”

**********

Carth may not still have been working down at the ship bay in this sector of the planet, old as he was by the time Jessika left for the Academy, but his presence lingered in the stale scent of vanilla incense soaked into the walls of his old office and in the glimmer of recognition from the younger man whose feet were propped up on Carth’s old desk. Jessika leaned against the doorframe as they eyed each other, and she could hear C3PO murmuring behind her to Finn and Rey, who were both telling him to stop worrying. 

“That your freighter?” the man said, jutting his chin towards the window overlooking his desk onto the floor of the hangar.

“Flew it here, didn’t we?”

“I’m gonna have to see some identification--”

“Look, we’re kind of in a hurry, and I got a lot of credits with your name on it if you let us stash it back where Carth used to store those V-wings he salvaged from the war.”

At that, the man looked her square in the eyes and straightened his back enough that his feet slid off the desk and to the ground. “Carth Pic’s been gone from here for a long time.”

“So have I.” She pulled the scratched credit chips from her pants pocket and smacked them down on the desk. “This is twice the rate he would charge for a ship that size. We’ll take it back there. You don’t get our names.”

With the way he was trying to spread the stack of chips, she knew he was trying--and failing--to be discreet in counting how many were really there, as if she was going to drop every single suspicious line in the book on top of trying to swindle him. (As if she hadn’t heard the General tell tale after precautionary tale during stealth mission briefings about a certain someone she knew from her youth and the consequences of that particular type of hubris.)

“Not a lot of people know about that back section, you know,” he said lightly.

“It’s a good thing I do, then, if we’re going to park it ourselves.”

The smirk that had started to crawl up his cheek slid back to its place. The art of subtlety was long lost on him. “Fine,” he said, swiping up the credits. “You have a deal. Now go on, store your kriffing ship.”

A single, stiff nod and she turned on her heel, nearly stepping right on Rey and Finn’s toes before they grabbed C3PO by the elbows and started back to the Falcon. They both looked at her like they wanted to ask her something--that, or waiting for an explanation that she knew better than to give in the middle of a hangar that could amplify a murmur three times over. But while the airiest of whispers could bloom into an echo, the scuffs of their shoes against the specially-cured concrete had a duller bounce back--space never changed, the sounds or lack thereof, even when it was grounded.

As she carefully navigated the Falcon towards the abandoned back wing of the hangar, the silence pressed in on them through the windows. But it was closer there in the cockpit, crowded with their bodies and the whirs and beeps of the control panel and C3PO’s inner workings, and the transition was jarring, forcing her to allot most of her energies to keeping her face from screwing up in that contorted grimace Kaydel had found so endearing.

“Carth was who first taught me how to fly,” she said. The words mashed up together in their hurry to get out. “I hung out here a lot when I was a teenager. So now you know.”

That end of the hangar was close to the northwest corner, where a door bent on complaining any time it was moved led to one of the many pedestrian bridges between the towering buildings that dominated this side of the planet. Carth’s old hiding space had grown grimier than usual every since he left, whenever that had been, and the door groaned even more spectacularly than she could have imagined.

“C’mon, it’s not far,” she said with a jerk of her head. One flight of stairs up and they found themselves in a fairly crowded walkway at least three hundred feet above the ground, though they could hardly see it through the web of structures similar to this one connected the high-rises to anything else in its reach. 

Rey and Finn were glued to the glass wall. “Wouldn’t it be easier just to head to the bottom?” Finn said. “Might avoid all these people.”

“No,” Jessika said sharply. “This is actually quicker, and we’ve got enough trouble on our hands without worrying about what goes on down there.”

Finn accepted this with a shrug and pulled away, but Rey’s eyes kept climbing higher and higher, trying to spot the top of the building the walkway was leading them towards. The hub of Crullov City was the largest of any in the northern hemisphere and rose to a staggering three hundred stories, all dull durasteel and windows tinted black against the scalding summer sun. “You said nearly the whole planet is like this?” Rey asked. “How?”

“I’ll tell you on the way there, but we really ought to get going.”

They pushed their way into the hub--down three flights of stairs in the main atrium that reached up to nearly the top stories of the building, all lined with a golden-tinted marble that was doing its best to outshine C3PO’s own coating. Jessika was maneuvering them hastily through the throngs of people--whether she could actually trust Carth’s replacement she hadn’t quite decided, and, despite the overwhelmed huffs coming behind her, she knew it was the only way to keep from getting swallowed amid the sea of legs.

“Wait--” Rey called, and suddenly her hand was latched in Jessika’s. “So we don’t get separated.”

Her cheeks immediately burned, only burning hotter as she furiously told herself to cut it the pfassk out--looking over her shoulder, she saw that Rey’s other hand was firmly grasping Finn’s, who in turn had a grip on C3PO’s wrist. To Jessika’s Corulag-native street smarts, they looked completely out-of-place forming this human snake chain, worse than the tourists that would overrun the main hub of Curamelle during the summer festivals. If the goal was to be discreet, they’d certainly failed--already two Mon Calamari traders were eyeing them oddly.

“If you say so,” she said over her shoulder.

After a number of turns and flights of stairs, they emerged into another pedestrian walkway: it was much lower than the one connected to the hangar and narrower too, with the marble tile lining the floor dull from a lack of care. Finn and Rey sighed and dropped their hands in relief when they saw no one else was there.

“It’s not far now.” Jessika started to head towards the building ahead, but she could sense something was off--she paused and turned back around, and the rest of them were standing motionless at the center of the walkway, eyes squeezed shut or glancing down at C3PO’s feet, and she immediately wanted to kick herself. “I should have warned you about what it’s like here,” she said. “I forgot not everyone is used to that sort of thing.”

“Never seen that many people moving that fast in one place before,” Rey muttered, running a hand over her face. Her shoulders set back in their usual strong stance, shaking whatever she had been feeling to the side and away from the conversation; one hand at Finn’s elbow, and he finished collecting himself as well.

“It’s no Coruscant, but--what is it, Captain Pava?” C3PO cocked his head to the side, genuinely curious.

They should have left him on the Falcon, but no--no, Finn had to argue for his potential usefulness fixing the old transmitter Jessika said she had back home and that the risk of him calling the General had not abated in the slightest. Regardless, her patience had thinned to dangerous levels in an instant and she was ready to close the gap between them and shove him down the nearby stairwell.

“I don’t care if it’s not as big or crowded as Coruscant,” she said pointedly. “If you’ve never been to a city world, it’s overwhelming.” Somewhere a few flights up a door slammed, the echo falling down the each individual step with a thud, rolling to a stop at their feet. Specifically: between hers and Rey’s. “I mean,” she said with a sigh, “It’s just--”

“It wasn’t that big of a deal,” Rey said. “Realy. I’m fine.” Her mouth had pressed into a thin line and she’d decidedly looked back out the window, past the grime and the slivers of skyline caught between two smaller structures. 

“Right, right.” Jessika glanced over at Finn, who was wearing a flickering grimace. Then at C3PO, who always looked sort of alarmed and, at this point, for good reason. “I… like I said, it’s not far.”

And it wasn’t--but the familiar route, normally so quick under the terms of muscle memory, dragged on as she replayed again and again the past minute. Did Rey really need to be defended like that in front of everyone? Of course not, of course not, and even if she did, Jessika didn’t know her well enough to know if she would have wanted it at all--but she could have guessed, right? With the life Rey had led--and wasn’t that what Kaydel had said, anyway--

Poe had been the one to finally come see what had caused her to hole herself up in the common area, flicking through one of the books from the collective library that she’d already read ten times. Chewing diligently on the nail of her little finger, then down along the skin beside it until there was a small globule of blood by the cuticle. She hardly noticed, but Poe had sat down beside her to listen. Because he knew what had happened, what was a blank slate to the rest of the pilots and analysts that couldn’t understand why Jessika and Kaydel suddenly repelled each other like the same poles of a magnet. It wasn’t enough for me to find about everything else. She told me I was overbearing, that she would have gotten a rancor if she needed someone to sic on the asshole analysts that badly.

Even with the knowledge of her flaws barrelling towards her from a distance, she still couldn’t quite figure out how to step out of the way in time.

But the self-indulgent wallowing would have to wait--they were only a few doors away now, and the least she could do was warn them. “Just so you know, she can be a lot,” she said, “but she is very well-intentioned.” Unit G2180’s door stood before them, the identifying letter and numbers polished until they were able to shine even in the light from a waning bulb in the ceiling above. “My grandmother,” she said to Rey and Finn’s questioning looks. “Surprise, surprise. This is where I grew up.”

Jessika raised a hand to the door, ready to knock with the knuckle of her first finger, waiting for the inevitable question that always seemed to follow. But they said nothing, and the quick raps at the metal door clanged and filled the whole hallway.

“Perhaps we should have called ahead?” C3PO said after a beat, but it was soon followed by the clear sound of a hand knocking against his breastplate. “Mistress Rey, I beg your--”

“You don’t know how to take a hint, do you?”

But the door creaked open, the familiar whine of long-unoiled hinges pushing a lump into Jessika’s throat, which grew thicker seeing her grandmother’s iron-gray hair now turned completely white. “Hi Nai-Nai.”

Nai-Nai’s face fell open into a wide grin even as she looked the rest of the group up and down, squinting into her thick glasses and hovering over C3PO’s static expression in particular. “I didn’t think they gave you vacation time in the underground,” she said, and the grin was still there even if the tone of voice had shifted ever so slightly towards the suspicious, something Jessika knew no one else would pick up. Even the slight quirk of her thin eyebrow could translate into what have you gotten yourself into?

“Well,” Finn started, “that’s not really the case, ma’am--”

“I know it’s not, I’m not dense,” Nai-Nai said, stepping aside. “Now come inside before the neighbors hear you blabbering. Berloc wouldn’t know his own business even if was labeled.”

Jessika let the others go ahead as Nai-Nai kept talking and ushering them in towards the tiny living room; she let the door click behind her with another groan of the hinges that had wriggled its way into a permanent place in her memory. Looking down at her hands, Jessika half expected to see the scar on her left palm red and angry, fresh from where she sliced it open helping Carth fix a speeder--it had grown pale, fading into just another line that curled up in her fist. Nai-Nai’s decor hadn’t done anything to deter that expectation, either: the same holophotos were displayed on the walls, the couches still hadn’t been refurbished from their awful threadbare mud-green. The same pearl earrings were drooping slightly in Nai-Nai’s ears, just at an angle a little deeper than before.

“Jessika,” Nai-Nai said, and she was pulled out of the fog. Down the length of the long narrow apartment, Finn, Rey, and C3PO had seated themselves on one of the ugly couches, the set of their shoulders betraying the awkward tension. “Get some water for everyone, please, and--oh, you’re a droid. Do you need oil or a charging station or something? I haven’t actually spoken with a droid since right after the war--that Berloc next door had gotten his leg broken at the hub and some medical droid came to look after him, and I just never knew what to say…”

“I’m quite all right, actually,” C3PO said quickly.

“Okay, if you say so,” she sighed, settling in on the other side of Finn from Rey. “When are you going to tell me what’s going on?” she added when Jessika set the waters down on the table. Some dribbled down the sides of the glasses in the hurry to try to steer her away from the path she’d seemed to have settled on, the winding thing that picked up any stray concept along the way and wove itself into an impossible knot.

Living alone would do that to anyone, but here it only made a natural quirk worse.

“When you let me get a word in,” she said with a light smile, and thankfully Nai-Nai only snorted and held her hands up.

“I haven’t seen you since you graduated the Academy, you know.” Her bony hands were shaky picking up the glass nearest to her, the purple veins bulging up against the skin. “No fault of your own, I know,” she said when Jessika opened her mouth to protest. “But calls home aren’t the same with all you can’t tell me. I don’t even know who your friends are!”

Though Finn and Rey were suddenly tripping over themselves to give an overdue introduction, Jessika could hardly pay attention to Finn’s earnest near-stuttering, Rey’s nodding, her hesitant grip as she shook Nai-Nai’s hand. Her grandmother would never say as much, but slipped between the letters was always what she had meant to say but had been too guarded to let past the cavity of her chest.

(I’ve missed you, Jessika.)

“Well,” Jessika sighed. “Call this making up for lost time.”

(I’ve missed you, too.)

They couldn’t tell her everything, of course. The Resistance’s informational security policies were amorphous, relying on the General’s trust in her people and in their common sense to know what intel could be shared and with whom. So they were generic: a downed pilot near the Tingel Arm, an unauthorized rescue mission, a surprise attack from the First Order. No mention of Poe’s identity in particular, which would have only added to Nai-Nai’s endless list of questions; no mention of Rey’s training to be a Jedi or Finn’s past as a stormtrooper. Jessika was sure to cut the two of them off when their contributions to the story even so much as felt like going in that direction.

“We just need to borrow the transmitter,” Finn said. “And then we’ll be out of your hair.”

“You say that like it’s an inconvenience.”

“We don’t want to put you in danger,” Rey said with a grimace.

Nai-Nai snorted and rolled her eyes. “Danger? Please. This is nothing. Now it’s getting near time to eat--let me fix you all something while you get that transmitter running again, stars know it needs some help, haven’t been able to listen to the radio since you left, Jessika…" 

(It’s been lonely, you know. Just me here.) 

“Well, we’ll have you listening to Railin’s morning show again in no time.”

(I know. I’m sorry.)

********** 

The first order of business was making sure C3PO busied himself with something other than the delicate tinkering in Jessika’s old room. Finn quickly suggested to Nai-Nai that she get him to help her in the kitchen, and soon C3PO was being ordered around the cramped space with an apron thrown around his neck, holding a bundle of vegetables in one hand while his red arm was stirring whatever hissing mix she’d already managed to put together. Nai-Nai was overjoyed: Jessika had always been a hopeless sous chef, and C3PO was fluent in Nai-Nai’s mother tongue. 

“Isn’t Corulag’s official language Basic?” Finn asked as Rey dismantled the back of the difficult piece of equipment.

“It is,” Jessika said. “But she and my grandfather moved here from Dandoran before my dad was born. Basic was only spoken in the capital.” Once again she held her breath waiting for them to ask because it was more explicit now and all they had to do was tag on the thought to a simple where--

But Nai-Nai and C3PO were laughing, which brought a smile to both Finn and Rey’s faces. “What are they going on about?” Rey said.

Truthfully, Jessika hadn’t been listening that much--her facility with the language had been tenuous at best even during childhood, but she could pick up bits and pieces, untranslated names that could hint at the rest of the conversation. “Threepio mentioned Endor a bunch, so… I guess he’s talking about something from the war. Not sure.”

Rey had her tongue between her teeth while she fiddled with some of the wires, pulling stray pieces of metal from the depths of the transmitter’s inner workings. But her eyes kept straying towards Jessika, though hopefully not long enough for Rey to realize her cheeks were starting to singe.

“Poe told me his parents fought in the Battle of Endor,” Finn said quietly.

“Really! I never knew,” Rey said with a quick glance up. “Kind of a legacy then, isn’t he?”

And Finn laughed, handed Rey whatever screwdriver she was blindly tapping the ground for. “Don’t let him hear you say that.”

“Why not?” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Jessika regretted it. She’d had her own limited experience with Poe and bringing up his parents, both featuring spectacular cases of foot-in-mouth disease on her part, and if Finn was closer to Poe than she was, then it wasn’t her business to pry into something she wasn’t chosen to know.

But she still asked. She still noticed, too, how Finn referred to him in the present tense.

“He tensed up funny a couple of times when some of the older officers brought up parts of the war,” he said, eyes on his hands. Rey had given him a circuit board to tinker with while she pulled out more and more wires. “You know it didn’t really end with Endor, right?”

“Everyone knows that,” she shrugged.

“I literally lived in wreckage from the Battle of Jakku,” Rey deadpanned.

“Right, right… well…” Finn sighed. “We had that recon mission to Naboo a while back, right? I think it was before you got back, Rey. And--ow,” he hissed. Part of the circuit let out a thin wisp of white smoke. “Anyway. The General talked about strategic places around the capital from when she and Poe’s mother flew together to help get the last parts of the Empire out. And Poe got all weird. Fidgety. And he doesn’t fidget. He didn’t lose his cool once when I was helping him escape before but--kriff, Rey, what is wrong with this thing?” He threw the circuit in front of him and stuck the pad of his zapped finger in his mouth.

“Oh,” she grimaced. “Those wires are faulty, no wonder. I’m sorry. Here,” she said, but he pushed the colorful bundle back. “Finn--”

“I can’t talk and wire at the same time, okay? We’re not all that gifted. Okay,” he said once Rey rolled her eyes and grinned. “I asked him about it that night after we turned out the lights. He didn’t answer right away. Said something about if you’re always carrying a hundred-pound box then you don’t need someone mentioning it to you.”

He sighed again, shrugged, picked the circuit board back up. With the new material Rey had given him, it was rewired without another shock to his fingers--they worked nimbly within the tiny spaces, and he hardly had to pause to ask Rey for direction even if it was evident he had never done this before. Finn had done so little of what Jessika had taken for granted in her life that he didn’t realize how rare it was that Poe turned over to show the soft, vulnerable underbelly of himself that he normally kept hidden under his fight suit. She’d seen it a couple times, murky through the haze of liquor on an X-wing one night, or in a nervous muttered comment after a debriefing--but he’d curl it back into his jacket, hidden where no one could see and trace it back to the commander they trusted in the sky.

“I walked into our bunk once,” he said and handed the circuit back to Rey. “It was right after you and Skywalker came back. Poe was calling his dad with BB-8’s communication system. I think his dad tried to talk about Skywalker, something like, ‘you’ve met him before, remember?’ but Poe ended the call when I walked in. I--I don’t know.” He watched Rey click the circuit into place, twist a more bolts in and replace other wires she had yanked out almost indiscriminately. “He did mention taking me to Yavin 4 whenever things slowed down. I don’t know if he was serious now that I think about it, but…”

He looked back up away from the half-dismantled transmitter, towards Jessika, and something in the way he shrugged at her slotted in a few missing pieces in the puzzle that had been the two of them, Finn and Poe, but the final image was still a blur. An abstract. But it was still an abstract of something that didn’t resemble what she had seen of Poe since he joined the Resistance, the apparent shape of himself when he let the easy personna drop, revealing it to be stiff suit, grating and rubbing him raw.

“I think that should do it,” Rey said. She screwed everything back in its place, switched on a few levers and dials--the lights blinked hopefully, the static hissed. Adjusting the knobs, she was able to land on a couple local news stations, a sports broadcast from Corellia, a few hazy transmissions in Huttese from the other side of the galaxy. “You know the frequencies, right?”

Jessika took the transmitter from her gingerly, their fingers brushing slightly. Rey pulled back in a hurry and squeezed her hands into the bends of her knees. “I mean, yeah. There’s only a couple that are still secure after all these years, so…”

The first frequency was filled with heavy static, a couple low tones breaking through the fuzz at irregular intervals--if it was code, it wasn’t standard, not anything Poe would have been likely to use if he actually wanted to be rescued. The next two were silent. No static. Unusual, even by old Rebel Alliance standards. The fourth had been turned into what sounded like a First Order propaganda station, though they couldn’t be sure. The transmission wasn’t in Basic or any language the three of them knew. (“Threepio might,” Rey offered, but tepidly, as if she realized halfway through the idea that they wouldn’t want to have the translation. It wasn’t Poe, and that was all that mattered.)

“How many more are left?” Finn asked after a moment.

“Just one.” It might have been worth mentioning that the third frequency had probably been their best bet, one that the General had called a backup after the second Death Star had finally been destroyed. Had the circumstances been different, Jessika probably would have said it without a second thought--the grip of her natural pessimism was seeping back into the grooves of her thoughts. The urge to bring these idiots down a peg so they could work with what was before them rather than the distorted shadow cast by the light of their hope.

“But there’s still a chance,” she said, forcing herself to grin at Finn, then wider when he mirrored her.

(Poe had nestled his way into the fabric of that boy in a way that she could not explain, only identify. Poe was there, and she wasn’t about to pluck out those threads with an ill-thought-out stab at pragmatism.)

When she twisted the knob, there was only static.

“Or not,” he said softly.

“Just because he’s not transmitting anything right this second doesn’t mean he still isn’t out there,” Rey said. “He’s still alive, I just know somehow--”

“I get it, okay? I know.” He ran his hands over his face and rolled one of the bolts Rey had pulled from the back of the transmitter under his finger. “But it was the only lead we had. He’s probably--” He cut himself off with a huff.

“Look,” Jessika said, and she hesitantly placed her hand on his knee. “We need to eat. And this place is safe. We can map out our next move and be on our way.”

A warm and tangy aroma had finally bled from the kitchen down to the bedroom--the unmistakable sign of the stew the Pavas had brought with them from Dandoran. Jessika hadn’t had it since the night she left for her Academy training.

“She’s certainly pulling out all the stops for you,” Jessika said, trying not to stare at Rey too conspicuously--she had pulled her head back, eyes shut, revelling in that particular way the scent tingled your nose that Jessika knew all too well.

“It’s delicious,” Rey sighed.

Finn snorted. “You haven’t even had it yet.” For a moment, Jessika thought she saw him briefly look her way, a small smirk twitching onto his face--like he knew that she had been staring because her face felt a little hot, and that only happened when she was obvious about it, like when Poe had to kick her under the table at dinner. But there was no table and no Poe to know to kick her, and no, she hadn’t imagined Finn’s look: it was there again when she realized Rey was grinning at her, the room silent, and she was staring open-mouthed like a kriffing idiot.

“I’m sorry, must’ve zoned out for a second,” she said. Swallowed. Cast a pointed look at Finn, the kind she has used to shut up Nien Nunb and Iolo from across the situation room any number of times, and he only shrugged.

(You’re losing your damn touch, Pava, get it together. And it wasn’t her own voice admonishing her, but Poe’s. Later that same day after a number of kicks under the table. Laughing, elbowing her in the side as he threw a grease-blackened rag over his shoulder. Because he could try to teasingly cajole her into just asking her out in the safety of his corner of the air strip, waggling his hips and shoulders as he sauntered up to her: c’mon, Testor, lay down some of your usual moves and she won’t know what hit her. BB-8 would beep like they were giggling--and she imagined that corner of the air strip with another T-70. New grease blotting over a sacred space, and it slipped across the stars and into her tightening chest.)

“I just asked,” Rey said, still grinning, “if what your grandmother is cooking is delicious. Because I’m sure I’m right.”

“You are.”

“That wasn’t the point,” Finn said. “But fine.”

Outside, C3PO’s feet tapped along the floor, a skittish morse code of an undercurrent that pushed them to crane their necks above water without a blip of desperation. Jessika could sense their thoughts racing in the same way hers had been, reaching out to the closest version of Poe they could find in their memories when faced with another dead end. The charade couldn’t keep up--Rey’s smile began to fade, Finn’s despondency bubbled back, and it was all too evident that there was no close version of Poe at all. The ones they carried with them still existed over an impassable chasm, and all it did was grow wider and deeper and shrink the figure of Poe standing on the other side to a smudge.

“Mistress Pava wanted me to inform you that--oh.” C3PO had appeared at the door, the lilac apron now tied around his waist. He looked between the three of them. “No luck with locating Commander Dameron, I take it.”

“No luck at all,” Finn said.

The droid’s arms lowered, and he almost seemed to sigh. “I am sorry. I had high hopes that this would lead us to him. Dinner is ready, however. Do come get something to eat.”

Nai-Nai was bustling around the small, scratched table straightening the threadbare placemats before setting down the rest of the odds and ends she was pulling from the cabinets--cloth napkins, a nice set of spoons Jessika had never seen. Whistling under her breath that same old five-note tune.

“I don’t know where you’ve all been,” Nai-Nai said, gesturing towards Rey and Finn, “so you may have had something like this before--see, Jessika’s grandfather and I came from an old Hutt territory planet, so some of our food is fairly similar. You’ve heard of chuba stew, right? Well, the Hutts make it with gorgs, but you’d be hard pressed to find gorgs anywhere in Crullov City. Not to mention their meat is foul, frankly. My substitutions have only improved it.” The rest of them could only stand idly while she shuffled between the steaming pot and the table, leaving a full bowl at each chair. “Well go on, sit down! Stars know the last time you must have had a good meal.” 

After a moment’s hesitation, Finn and Rey found their spots on the far side of the table, leaving Jessika and C3PO to face them and Nai-Nai at the head; slowly, one by one, they dipped their spoons into the stew, eyeing each other, unsure of the protocol of this new territory. This wasn’t the first time Jessika had shared a meal with the two of them, but it was the first time outside of the D’Qar base’s cafeteria, outside the din that would smother most conversation until you were sitting at a particular table and where predictable arguments would arise from the officers’ corner, or between Snap and Karé whenever the kitchen served spiceloaf.

“I don’t want to bring up a possibly sore subject, but did you fix the transmitter?” Nai-Nai asked after a few minutes of half-watching Rey slurp quickly through her entire helping.

“Yes, but…” Jessika started. Her voice wavered under Nai-Nai’s stare, but her wrinkled face folded into a sympathetic frown.

“You couldn’t find your pilot,” she sighed. “I’m so sorry. Are you…” She set her spoon down with a clink and rubbed at her temples. “I just hope they haven’t fallen into the hands of those awful stormtroopers… you know,” she said, “I quite had enough of the Jedi and the stormtroopers after the Clone Wars, and--yes, it was awful what happened to the Jedi, I’m not denying that, but when both planets you’ve lived on get overrun with one side or another, and--well. You tend to want all the sides of this war to just be done with. Especially”--and with that she reached out and placed a hand on Finn’s arm--“when they might have your friend.”

Finn tensed up, and Nai-Nai must have read it as worry for Poe because she gave him a light squeeze, squinted into a smile that gave her eyes the perfect reassuring twinkle. And Jessika had hoped that there would have been a way to avoid bringing up the Clone Wars and the Empire and the whole segueing tirade that would inevitably come with it. It sounded like a bad joke: so a Jedi-in-training, defected stormtrooper, and civilian traumatized by war walk into a cantina--who shoots first, and can you even tell?

“Has there been much First Order activity in that part of the galaxy?” Finn asked--first to Rey and Jessika, then turning back to Nai-Nai. The tension along his shoulders had eased but his mouth was still pressed to a thin line. “Other than. Y’know,” he added in a mutter. He cocked his head: there was a reason we were caught off guard, it seemed to say.

“Oh, I wouldn’t know anything for certain,” Nai-Nai said. The hand holding her spoon waved away the notion and little flecks of the chuba stew flew past Jessika’s face. “I’m too old for any of that spy nonsense--but.” Her first finger held in the air, a dramatic pause. “Jessika, dear, you remember Lucia?”

“I would hope so,” she said. “Why?”

“I’m sorry, who?” Finn said quickly.

“Old friend of Jessika’s from grade school--Lucia was a few years behind her, stayed on working odd jobs around the hub after a couple years in Curamelle. She can help you.”

“Nai-Nai,” Jessika sighed. “It’s not that we wouldn’t appreciate the help, but how is a civilian supposed to get us any information that could give us a lead?”

“All you Resistance types think you’re the only ones working against the First Order. Come on.” She hopped up and shuffled over to slip on her shoes. “I said, come on--we’re going to go see her. Chop chop, you should be embarrassed this senior citizen is beating you right now, come on--”

So they scrambled, left the dishes on the table and only remembered to toss C3PO’s apron back in the apartment after they’d already taken a few steps outside--Nai-Nai led the way, still going on about an old story from when Jessika and Lucia had taken a week during a summer break to travel to the oceans on the far side of the planet’s cluster of cities. C3PO took up the rear, complaining that the rest of the group was moving too quickly for the limited motion of his legs. Stuck in the middle with Finn and Rey, Jessika could only try to ward off their silent and dramatic gestures imploring her for an answer she couldn’t possibly give them. How do we know we can trust this person? Your grandmother is lovely but is she also out of her mind?

For the moment, she was glad that they were too worried about this turn of events to listen to Nai-Nai’s story, a practiced retelling of a week using events she couldn’t have known didn’t happen the way she described--and it fit. It really fit that in the midst of what was turning into a search and rescue that she would have to see Lucia--

“Here,” Nai-Nai said, stopping, and the four of them nearly bumped into her. “Lucia should be in the back room of Sibosa’s store. Or that’s where she was working out of last week. Now come back when you’re through so I can at least send you off with something for the road, all right?”

They watched her go, a pit of acid growing in Jessika’s stomach, and as soon as her gray hair disappeared around the corner, Rey whispered, “What in stars’ name is this about?”

“I don’t know, okay?” This was the last place she wanted to be, betting the fate of her best friend on someone she hadn’t spoken with since she left Corulag, and for good reason. “But if she thinks Lucia can help… let’s go kriffing see.”

Jessika pushed her way through the cluttered aisles of Sibosa’s, some clothing boutique that had popped up on the outer edge of the city’s hub after she’d left. The hangers poked at their shoulders as they headed toward the back, the slick overpriced material occasionally snagging on C3PO’s edges, and if he was fussing (which he had to be) she had tuned it out.

“Wait.” Rey’s hand had latched onto her shoulder just as they came to the abandoned counter and till--it was a small hand, stronger than she had imagined, and the pads of her fingers pressed into the muscle with a warmth that spread up her collarbone and down the back of her spine. “Something’s wrong.”

“Yeah,” she deadpanned. “The four of us and Poe aren’t back on base yet.”

“Jess, you know what I mean.”

“It’s not important.” Not for what they needed to do to get back on track--but Rey kept pressing, not with her hand or words but just with a look, the soft knit of her brow and mouth tucked into a small frown, and Jessika suddenly remembered the first time she spotted her training with Skywalker, the ferocious swing of the lightsaber shining against her gritted teeth, now that same rush crawling up into Jessika’s throat, and oh. She was in far too deep to deny it now.

“Not sure I quite believe you,” she said, dropping her hand.

“Pardon me, Mistress Rey,” C3PO said. “I didn’t want to interrupt, but I seem to be caught on something rather stubborn and Master Finn is having the most difficult time undoing it.”

A hideous maroon felt beret had snagged on the thin protruding edges around the droid’s head, falling vertically against where his left ear would have been. “We can fix it later,” Jessika said. “I’d rather we get in and out here sooner rather than later.”

“This is frightfully embarrassing,” he muttered.

“Well, there are worse things,” Finn said, rolling his eyes. “Come on.”

The door to the back room where Nai-Nai had directed them was ajar, and as much as Jessika wanted to shoulder her way in like she would have years ago, she let herself listen to Snap’s words of wisdom for maybe the first time in her life. Diplomacy will save you many a bloody nose.

Half a second after she knocked, Lucia’s head whipped around the door--suspicion and shock washed over her face in the next half second before finally settling on a compromise between the two that looked a lot like confusion. “Jess… it’s been a while.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“And you’ve even made new--wait a sec.” Lucia squinted past Finn and Rey, running a hand through her thick curly hair before pointing it at C3PO. “I know you.”

“I beg your pardon?” C3PO said. “I don’t believe we’ve--”

“Threepio.” Lucia quirked up her eyebrow, the one tiny motion that she could always get to say more than should have been allowed. “I was a little kid, though, so don’t trouble yourself too hard for not recognizing me. Anyway,” she said, turning her attention back to Jessika and doing a quick once-over that solidified every bit of dread into something toxic and heavy in her blood.

An itch started tickling on the bottom of her feet, urging her to grab the rest of the crew and put as much distance between them and Lucia as they could--save her all the energy keeping her from becoming something kriffing embarrassing. “Yes, anyway,” Jessika said. “Friend of ours is in trouble and we need some intel to check a lead.”

Lucia frowned. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Huh, okay. You showing up here with an entourage got me worried this was something personal,” she said with a snort. “For the record, I like it a whole lot better when you and me are on the same side of things.”

Any other time, she would have taken the bait. The retort was waiting--could’ve fooled me, you know--and she curled her tongue in her mouth to keep it back, because if she did take the bait, the hook would sink too deep into her lip for a quick extraction. And it wasn’t worth risking Poe having that kind of time.

Lucia pulled the door as far open as it would go into the closet of a room, cluttered with boxes of extra merchandise for the store and half-dismantled blasters that appeared to be leftovers from the war. The one strewn across the desk had the Rebel Alliance emblem scratched crudely over the stamp of the Empire, as if someone bored at the old base on Hoth had sat for hours to pick away at it just to convince themselves they were making a difference. Lucia brushed a couple pins and bolts off a holopad and tapped at its dark screen impatiently, the blue light flickering on and casting a glow on her dark skin.

“Can you track First Order movement on that thing?” Rey asked. “I’m Rey, by the way. And this is Finn.”

“More or less,” Lucia said. Her fingers tapped a couple more times and then a map of the Core worlds projected above their heads--between the orbs of the stars, planets, and moons were smaller specks flitting along hyperspace routes and orbiting around various systems. “Hacked my way into some of the satellites on the hub and built monitors that can read starship emissions to trace traffic patterns. The First Order fleet has a couple specific signatures, so--”

“Pfassk, this is incredible,” Jessika muttered. “How’d you do all this?”

“Nicked some junk no one was using back at Dad’s mines a while back,” she shrugged, but the nonchalance was so obviously an act. You’re not better than me just because you’re a Resistance pilot, she had practically shouted. “What do you need to s--”

“Dantooine,” Finn blurted. “I, uh… we--Dantooine. A couple days ago.”

The projection zoomed out from the Core and then back in, centering on the Raiballo Sector. The image fritzed a tad as Lucia adjusted the date, squinted carefully at the lone dots swirling around the neighboring planets. “Okay, see here?” The dots froze in place and Lucia drew a circle around three in particular. “This yellow one is a newer model X-wing. These two red ones are First Order, and judging by the data one’s probably a star destroyer. Dunno about the other, something smaller. Maybe a shuttle?”

Lucia’s voice had grown smaller as she put the pieces together, and she fell back into the desk chair when the silence confirmed the suspicions and chilled the room from the center of their chests outward. When Jessika finally forced her head to move, she found Rey’s jaw pulsing from her grinding teeth. Finn could only stare down at his hands.

“This is… certainly not the outcome we had hoped for,” C3PO said after a moment.

“Where are those ships now?” Finn said. His voice had gone flat, and his hands flexed as he looked up to meet Lucia’s gaze. “Can you track them?”

“Should be able to…” The image above them flickered again, this time focused on a lone planet with a violent, writhing surface. The two red dots drifted in its orbit. “Mustafar. Been there for the better half of today.” Lucia glanced over at Jessika with a grimace, and the cold foreboding sank deeper as the scattered bits of knowledge she had about the planet gathered themselves in her head.

A molten sea of fire and rock burning through space. The amorphous connection to the rise of Darth Vader, where the details shifted from person to person and more quickly than the sloshing bubbles of magma shown in her grade school geography class.

“Thank you,” Finn said. “I--we… we appreciate this more than you know.”

Jessika watched Lucia study his face, settle into a stoicism that betrayed the years they had spent apart from each other. The diverging paths neither of them could have predicted as they had curled around each other in a fit of uncontrollable laughter on that beach when Jessika had tried to kiss each silly expression off her face. (At least until she had left for the Academy; she could have predicted it then. The fork in the road, that was the best case scenario as the ugly rift opened up.)

“We mean it,” Jessika echoed, and Lucia gave her a grim smile.

“Well, go on then,” she sighed. “Don’t waste your time thanking me.”

Finn and Rey stepped back into the store, already talking lowly about a plan, the inklings of one at least, laying out the basic steps to fill in on the fly if Jessika were to hazard a guess--and she was about to follow after them when C3PO spoke again.

“If you don’t mind my asking, when exactly did we meet? It’s bothering me immensely that I can’t seem to place it.” He cocked his head slightly to the side and finally the beret pulled loose and fell to the ground.

“My family used to live full-time on Bespin,” Lucia said as she cleared a spot on the desk to set the holopad. “We moved here to help the liberation when the last of the Empire occupation wasn’t clearing out and had started taking out civilian dissidents…” She coughed suddenly, and Jessika was thankful that she didn’t look her way. “And you’ve been to Bespin.”

“I have indeed, miss, but--oh!” he said. “The mines--”

“When you lot get back to your base, tell Han that Lando’s been asking about him, all right?” she grinned. “Because he has. A lot. Like every time I call home.”

Jessika felt C3PO’s eyes on her and that he was about to say something she didn’t want to get into--not now that they had an actual idea of where Poe was--so she quickly said, “We will. And thank you again.”

(You could’ve easily turned us away. You had every reason to.)

And she could’ve waited for Lucia to say something else--but the urgency was starting to tighten and she grabbed C3PO’s hand to follow in Finn and Rey’s wake. Thankfully they hadn’t strayed far, just outside of the storefront.

“So,” Finn said, hands coming to his hips. “Guess we got a lead.”

“Do we have a plan?” Jessika asked. “Or part of one?”

“Not, uh… not really,” Rey muttered. “But we have time til we get there, right? We’re good at ad-libbing.”

Finn snorted and pulled a grin onto Rey’s face, and when she turned back to Jessika to await her response, she could forget for a moment that the three of them and a useless droid were flying off to a near suicidal rescue mission on a burning planet. For that moment, the unwavering faith in that grin in not only all of them but her specifically--her, who had barely had two whole conversations with Rey before this mission--was enough to convince Jessika that their hopes weren’t going to go up in smoke.

It wasn’t that Poe never got angry. A low, simmering anger on the state of the galaxy had long motivated his defection to the Resistance and his dedication to the cause--but it was a rational anger that had compressed into something useful, that he had shaped until it had given him direction. The anger that he was unfamiliar with was the kind that sat in the center of your chest and throbbed until it drove all other thoughts from your head.

Neither Nines nor Phasma had bothered him since his day observing the reconditioning session, so he was left for hours and hours on end to stew in silence in the empty bunk. He replayed the propaganda behind his eyes, imagined shooting down each lie that was fed to the stormtroopers until even the version of himself in his head had a voice hoarse from shouting. The anger would build and twinge down his arms, grow hot along the back of his ears and he would want to scream--but he wouldn’t give the First Order the satisfaction. He knew they were watching.

Occasionally he would bury his head under the thin pillow and squeeze his eyes shut against the mattress until the colorful sparks began to burst against the dark, and he would try to reach out and sense for someone familiar with the newness inside him he still refused to name. Something had grown stronger since the last time--it felt like Rey, or he wanted it to feel like Rey, and almost like sonar he could sense figures around her. Or whomever it was. One, a weaker signal, felt like Finn. And last night--he’d woken from it--there had been a swell of something that had felt like hope from that collective beacon, but it only circled him back to the anger. 

Go home. Can’t you feel me telling you to go the kriff home?  

And it would keep circling, deeper, until all the reverberations of the anger had traveled back to his cot and they amplified each other, screeching in his ear that he had been careless and rash and he had only himself to blame for the string of shit in the wake of his crash. He was better than this. The risks he took, the ones that had garnered near-demerits and harsh debriefings, they were too overcalculated to leave anything significant to chance. Except Dantooine. He hadn’t been paying attention, and now-- 

Now--

The door to the bunk was opening. A stormtrooper, not Nines or Zeroes, stood in the entry with a long blaster cradled in their arms, finger hovering near the trigger. “Up,” she said. “Come with me.”

It wasn’t registering in his head right. Even Nines when he would return for the night wouldn’t say a word to him, just tossing the allotted ration of protein bars to his cot. Poe hesitated, stared at the blank eyes of the helmet, and it must have been a second too long because the blaster was digging into his forearm and then prying his back from the wall until he stumbled to his feet.

“Now.”

She pushed him into the hall with the blaster now pointed between his shoulder blades and already he could feel the ring of a bruise rising. This used to be satisfying, almost. Knowing that he had gotten to them, that they felt the need to manhandle him while he was in their custody. Even as he bled and his bones inched closer to fracture, the pain was temporary and he could let himself grin up at his captors with rivulets of blood running between his teeth and their anger would spike. In that position it was the only thing he could realistically do for the cause was other than keeping his mouth shut during interrogations.

Poe couldn’t bring himself to do that from where he stood now. His own anger clouded his thoughts and stretched out haphazardly into the space around him: anger at the labyrinth of halls complicating any attempt at escape, anger at the threat trying to bury itself into his back, anger at the stormtrooper for following orders and the higher-ups for giving them to her and the war for not ending when it should have.

Did Alderaan perish into dust just to see an entire system follow in its wake? Did his parents fight for nothing? Did his mother die from complications from a war wound for nothing? Were he and his father left in their death-silenced house to prepare themselves to see the galaxy spin back to the same spot as if nothing had changed?

He hadn’t been paying attention to where the stormtrooper had been leading him, and the abrupt stop at the door to the ship’s main command room took Poe by surprise.

Kylo Ren was waiting on the other side, facing toward the long line of windows overlooking the rest of the star destroyer. The rest of the analysts’ posts were abandoned but the screens and buttons still flickered and beeped.

“Thank you, FN-0629. That will be all.”

And then they were alone.

“Come here, Commander Dameron.”

He wasn’t wearing his helmet, and while the daunting silver mask had crept through his nightmares since Jakku, Poe almost wished for it. The sight of Ren’s face and the hints of the General and Solo there, the angry scar striping down his cheek by Rey’s hand--it was too human for the acts Poe knew he had committed. The empty ominous shield better suited what he was.

“What do you want with me?” Poe said impatiently.

“You see that planet down there?” Ren said, pointing. It was hard to miss; the star destroyer was locked in its orbit and the whole of the northern hemisphere lit up the command room’s windows with writhing oranges and yellows. “Mustafar. Do you know why it’s important?”

Ren glanced down at him, and Poe met his stare, teeth chewing on his tongue to keep the hot flood rising up the back of his throat at bay.

“Well then.” Ren turned back to the view of the planet. “The Supreme Leader has determined that the next step in my training is to begin training someone myself. And--I couldn’t believe it myself at the time when I realized--but you have it, Poe Dameron. You have the Force.”

Poe was suddenly overly aware of the heat at the center of him, how it filled the cavity around his lungs and heart. A piece of it had spun itself thin and reached through the gaps in his ribs and out into the open, seeking a tether to the same power that burned greater within Ren--and other pieces, innumerable, sought out the this glass window, breaking through to reach for anyone and anything else.

(He’d known, in some quiet part of his thoughts, after his last encounter with Ren. And he couldn’t ignore the truth of it anymore.)

“But you have the Force,” Ren continued, strained, “not because you were born with it. No--after the war, Luke Skywalker took your mother to retrieve the last of the Force tree from the old Jedi temple. And he gave her one of the two pieces. Her. Not to our family, but someone… inconsequential.”

Poe’s fists were clenched so tightly that they began to shake, but he only bit down on his tongue harder until a twinge of copper seeped in his mouth.

“No one had studied the Force tree and knew the extent of its power, but the Supreme Leader had a theory. You, growing up with it, about as Force-sensitive as a rock at birth--it gave you power you never would have had, locked away. Until now.” Ren latched his hand onto Poe’s shoulder, his grip tight but not at all warm. A threat hidden in an attempted gesture of camaraderie. “You’ll need a teacher, you know.”

No.

Not you.

Not here.

“You need someone to help channel all those emotions inside you,” Ren said softly. “I can feel it. I know what it’s like. There are ways with the Force that can help you.”

Not you, not this.

Anything but you. But this.

Not when--

A flash of his mother’s face drifted before his eyes: smiling in the kitchen talking to his father about something that had passed between them in the training before the Battle of Endor, and Poe thought that his chest was going to burst right open.

“I never imagined that you wouldn’t be resistant,” he said. “Which brings me back to Mustafar. We’re going to take a little trip.”

**********

Poe had expected to have something more pounding against his senses on the shuttle down to Mustafar: the anger that had started to overwhelm him, the concern for Rey and Finn who seemed to be trying to come after him. But he was numb. Ren had led him by a sharp grip to his elbow into the shuttle that had taken him from Jakku and a stormtrooper had followed close behind--Nines, he could see now.

The surface of Mustafar continued to roil beneath them and Ren spoke lowly about the history of the planet, its key role in the Empire’s rise to power. Darth Vader wouldn’t have been the man he was had it not been for Mustafar, he said. Poe sensed that he was leaving details out; Mustafar, as far as he could tell, was not a planet eager to nurture someone to their full abilities. The fire licked at dark outlines of rock and durasteel, turning it red hot in wide swatches, burning it away. Surely a human wouldn’t receive special treatment.

A human, no, but Darth Vader? He’d heard the stories as they’d circulated around D’Qar late at night when the topic turned to politics--never from his parents, who skirted around mentioning the Empire’s leaders like it would char their tongues clean off. On base, Nien Nunb and Iolo would dig their heels in and go full abstract, reaching back into the near-lost details of the Old Republic leading up to the rise of the Emperor and dredging up political theory that didn’t even apply to the way things were anymore. And they’d argue, Nien’s I was there and against Iolo’s I read somewhere that, and Poe and Snap and Jessika would take bets on who would stomp away first.

The one thing that the two of them would agree on, however, amid the delicate nuance of intergalactic politics, was that no matter how human Darth Vader had been born, he ruled and died with rusted metal cogs for a heart.

Was that what helped him thrive on this planet against all odds? The inside of the shuttle was starting to grow stiflingly warm from the approaching atmosphere, the gleam of the molten rock growing sharper--and all Poe could wonder was if Nien Nunb had managed to have a nice birthday.

The temperature was even worse once they landed and stepped outside: it was as hot as an oven and humid as well, slicking his and Ren’s face with sweat almost instantly and adding another surface for the magma’s glow to reflect upon. Hell season on Yavin 4 would have been a relative winter, and how appropriate it was that its extremes were beaten at last by the closest thing in the galaxy to the underworld.

(Is this a bad dream? Am I already dead?)

The center cavity in him twisted, as if the Force were pushing the thought away. No, no,--he felt himself thinking in a voice that was barely his own. Not dead yet. Furthest thing from dead. For the first time--aware of the full potential this power brings, aware of the web between all things.

The web twitched towards Nines and then more strongly to Ren--his black cloak fluttered in the roaring hot wind pushed by the magma and he stared over the scene before them with an odd sense of pride. It reminded Poe of his father when he’d built the table for his mother’s birthday when he was seven--but without the object of his own making, it felt misplaced.

“I’ve been meaning to come here for a long time,” Ren said. “Can you feel it, Commander Dameron?”

“Feel what?”

“The history,” he said. “The first steps of the Empire--painful as they were, and as all splits are, but crucial… you have to feel it, it’s everywhere--”

Poe focused on the warm spot in his chest, and while the spirals it was forming were too quick and complicated to pin down every iteration it took, there was a particular one that hummed at the same frequency of something old and pained that tore at him the longer his thoughts remained there. Betrayals staring each other in the eye as pieces of themselves disintegrated to nothing.

“It’s almost palpable, isn’t it?” Ren pressed.

“It is,” Poe said quietly. He knew now: betrayal was thick, corded and sharp, breaking the skin in pricks so the blood pushed up in small bubbles. He could hold it in his hand and smell the copper.

“Come with me. You too, FN-2199.”

In the distance, a metal bridge laid black against the bright backdrop--Ren was taking them in that direction, reaching into his cloak and keeping his hands within the folds there, checking for something, reassuring himself.

It wasn’t a guess: Poe knew all this, sensed it. Glanced at Nines, felt the uncertainty and the questions underneath the hardwiring compelling him to do his duty and follow orders.

The bridge was wider than he had expected when they finally arrived, leading from the cracked concrete shore where they stood to a building halfway across to the other side. The drop to the fire was a long one but the heat radiated, belched up more dark clouds of smoke to further obscure the sunlight and the easy movements of his own lungs.

The scene felt so empty: the fire, the stark and dismal structures. Not a living thing for miles except for what was right beside him.

“Here.” Ren pressed something into his hands and stepped back, putting Nines between them with the blaster head already up against his spine. “Go.”

Nines pushed him forward, out onto the bridge; Poe was vaguely aware of the heat under the soles of his shoes and the sweat dribbling down his back, but the metal rod in his hands was still sharp with the chill afforded by the protection in Ren’s robes. And the uncertainty from Nines had taken on a solid shape: why, why, why, one Poe could echo. He’d just been handed a lightsaber. (Why?) Nines was leading him over what might as well have been a crack in the galaxy. (Why?)

Help--he thought it before he could stop himself. His fingers shook along the grooves of the saber’s handle even as the air kept cooking.

Why?

And then a shove, stumbling forward: the presence of the blaster had lifted and the sweat that had pooled around it filled in the blanks, and once he steadied his wavering footing, Poe found Nines with the blaster raised. Aiming at him. Finger on the trigger.

Ren still stood at the end of the bridge. The wind was blowing hair in his face.

“In the interest of full and fair disclosure,” he shouted, “FN-2199 has been given orders to kill you.”

Poe’s legs stopped twitching but the movement had only moved up to his hands and he could hardly keep a steady grip on the lightsaber. Did he even know how to turn it on? It had looked simple when he had spotted the blue one powering up as he flew over Takodana: hold it up straight and the blade would hum and fill up the empty space beside him. But the step between, the thing to press, it eluded him and Nines didn’t lower his weapon.

“What are you going to do, Commander Dameron?” Ren was taunting him now.

And he was angry, hands fumbling to find anything close to a power switch, sweating harder from the pulse pounding inside his ear--Nines stepped forward, readjusted his finger waiting to riddle his body with bullets, and Poe found a button, pressed it, and a green blade shot out the end, sparked against the surface of the bridge, bouncing back--

It was heavy in his hand. Heavier than he imagined. But maybe it was just the strain in his arm, the tense hold of his muscle on the bones as his teeth ground watching Ren in the distance. FN-2199 has been given orders to kill you. The implication was there: fight to the death. A stormtrooper, not a person but a number, cannon fodder to prove a point. No value in the person under the suit, for the head that kept hurtling the why out into the ether so loudly that Poe felt it ricocheting in his own skull.

He couldn’t kill him.

He was being told to. Live or die.

Nines could have a life, too. Like Finn. Could choose a real name. They all could but they were being robbed--

Poe swung the lightsaber in front of his face before he knew what he was doing, and it squealed, deflecting the shot Nines had fired. “Kriff--come on, buddy, you don’t have to do this--”

“Orders are orders.” The certainty was there, coiled around that one sentence. The rest of the waves rolling off his armor told the same story as before.

Why.

Stepping forward, Nines fired four more times in quick succession and all four were redirected away by the blade. Poe had never had such intuitive aim; even in his X-wing the learning curve had been steep, and still sometimes he missed. Here, clutching the stuff of legends in his sweaty hand, it was almost second nature, and every time his arm put the lightsaber between his body and another round of shots from Nines, his chest warmed under his skin.

“I’m not going to do this, Nines,” he said. He was more than three-quarters of the way across the bridge now, and beyond Nines’ helmet, he could see Ren had left his perch on the shore as well. “You don’t have to do this--”

“Yes I do, and it makes my job easier if you keep your word.”

The shots kept coming and Nines was going to back him up against the wall of the building soon and there wouldn’t be anywhere for them to go and the anger was coming back. It was coming back searing and cracking along his bones and he was shouting now with every blast he blocked with the lightsaber.

It wasn’t that nothing had changed since the war.

Ren had been right: the war had just never ended.

And he and Nines were being asked to pay the price for it, like Solo had and his mother and the countless others had, and they all deserved better than the future they fought for turning around to spit on their graves.

Poe thought he was going to split in half.

One haphazard wave of the lightsaber deflected a shot right back at the blaster, and the inside crackled and sparked. “There, see? We don’t--hey--Ren!” Poe shouted past Nines as he watched him throw the dead blaster to the ground and rush forward with nothing but his fists. “You gotta put an end to--oof--”

Nines tackled him, pinned him with his knees, and Poe slapped the lightsaber off and tossed it out of reach. An armored hand squeezed his neck, aiming to crush his windpipe in record time but he kicked up, knocked Nines off balance and they rolled, hitting and scratching at all the soft spots they could reach. Nines was intent on choking him--whenever his throat was clear, Poe tried to appeal to any iota of empathy Ren possibly had left.

“This isn’t the way to do this, you don’t have to make me try to kill him--I’ll--I’ll even talk with you, just end this--”

But he didn’t. Ren slowly strode closer and Poe’s view kept flipping as Nines fought him, got a solid grip on his neck this time, both hands, and his legs dug into the crooks of his elbows as he held him down. They had rolled near the ledge in their struggle, Poe’s flailing hand able to curl fingers to the underside of the steel, scorching hot every time they made contact--Nines pressed down harder and black dots were blinking in and out of his vision, growing and growing and growing and his muscles were screaming and his lungs were screaming and the center of his chest, the kriffing Force, it still burned. A last ditch effort, a jolt of the shoulders and knees to the stomach and he could breathe again--his own gasping rang in his ears but it went silent as soon as he saw Nines’ hand slip from the edge.

He didn’t scream until he hit the bottom and the fire swallowed him up.

“No.” Poe pushed himself back to the middle of the bridge. “No no no no…”

His lips were moving, he felt his tongue hit the back of his teeth and this throat vibrate with the words but there was nothing for him to hear: a vacuum enveloping his head, warm and stuffy like a blanket in the peak of summer, and he stumbled up to his feet still staring at the white-hot glob below where Nines had disappeared.

Kylo Ren beamed triumphantly from where he stood, growing closer, and he was saying something too, a whole string of things that strained the muscles in his neck and blew his mouth wide open against the smoke. But Poe couldn’t hear him, he still couldn’t hear him or his own thoughts as they screeched at too high of a pitch to discern; quietly at first, then overtaking the silence with a pressure right behind his eardrum.

His jaw clenched until it began to ache and one of his shaking arms managed to move far enough to swing behind him and then the hilt of the lightsaber was smacking against his palm, the green blade slicing through the air again. It hummed against his fingers and it felt right. This felt right. The center of his chest where the Force collected, it expanded against his ribcage and then to the rest of him until the boundaries of himself hovered inches above his skin.

The impact of his feet against the bridge as he ran jolted against his knees. Ren did this. Ren flicked lives away as casually as a piece of dust from his robes. And Ren was meeting him halfway, his own lightsaber drawn and lighting the edges of his feet.

The sound roared back when their blades crashed together and ground in a dangerous low static, nearly succeeding in drowning out their own shouting, the rush of the fire below them. The high-pitch tone still ringing in Poe’s head, pressing like his skull was going to crack with it.

Their lightsabers crossed between their faces, shining against the sweat and still Ren was grinning like he’d won, like he was still winning and would always win and in that moment, Poe had never hated anything more in his entire life.

Poe crunched his heel down on Ren’s foot, their blades separating and forcing Ren stumbling backwards, and in the half second Ren’s attention flitted down to the state of his toes, Poe thrust an empty hand forward. Fingers curling around an invisible sphere and the arm rising--Ren’s body flew up with it, ten feet between them. His arm started to shake, then his legs. More sweat slid into his eyes, and pushing his hand just an inch further sent Ren flying, crashing with a bounce and a skid against the rocks on the shore.

A spurt of magma flew into the air beside him as he shakily made his way back off the bridge. And another on the opposite side. And another. Above, the sun struggled through the black clouds, appearing for a brief moment before sliding away again, resembling a moon more than an actual star. And before him he held the lightsaber, turning the rocks at his feet green as he approached Ren, now stirring--sitting up, gently taking the lightsaber from his shaking, weak hands and sheathing it, tucking it back into his robes.

There was blood in his teeth, but it was still a smile he offered Poe once his eyes refocused. It was still triumphant.

“This was your first lesson,” Ren said. He touched one gloved finger to Poe’s breastplate, right where the glow still burned hotter than the air around them. “Now you’ve seen for yourself all the possibilities that come with the Dark Side.”

For a moment the silence closed around his ears again. And he could see the Force tree by his home during sunset on the brink of hell season, one of the golden leaves drifting to the ground, gripping at him all the way across the galaxy.

“It’s stronger in you than I anticipated. And it can get even stronger. See?” he said. “It’s growing even as we speak.”

His chest throbbed at the center where Ren’s finger still pointed, still dug.

On the way back to the shuttle, Poe thought of his mother. Surely there was something to say to her, or something for her to tell him at a moment like this, reaching across the gap of the dead--but there was nothing, not even his own thoughts, wiped blank by the ever-whining note in his ears and the sick churning that had started to sink into his stomach.

It only took five minutes from take-off at Carth’s hangar for Jessika and C3PO to descend into a petty argument and then another ten seconds for Rey to make some excuse up about checking some wiring to give her and Finn a chance to leave the cockpit. She’d harped on a sensitive topic, in retrospect--merely mentioning that BB-8 had never used such language before R2-D2 had woken up--and Rey had to wonder if even the General and Master Luke had ever seen such a tirade from the droid.

“Do you think Threepio is trying to defend Artoo’s honor or something?” Finn asked as they settled into the seats around the holotable.

“I might’ve believed that if he didn’t go around insulting Artoo all the time himself,” she sighed.

Despite not having a rancor in the fight, Rey felt that she ought to thank C3PO later for letting her slip out into the more open parts of the ship. It wasn’t that Corulag had been too crowded for her to manage--claustrophobia had never been something she struggled with, having crawled into tight crevices and duct banks on scavenging runs on a regular basis. The throngs of people had simply been another factor to include in deciding on a strategy to navigate the whole ordeal, and staying together had seemed optimal, so of course she grabbed Jessika’s hand.

Only then did it become more difficult to breathe.

Once they arrived at her grandmother’s apartment, she thought maybe it would ebb--the tension was familiar, similar to the unplaceable odd frustration she’d contended with on Dantooine, but it had grown and leaked past the boundaries where it had stayed before. It did anything but ebb. And she liked Jessika well enough, wished now that she’d had more time to get to know her before this mission went awry, yet the feeling persisted.

Some part of her wondered if this was a part of the Force that Master Luke hadn’t gotten to yet in her training, that maybe the Force was able to amplify parts of her intuition that she hadn’t quite caught yet. The entire time they’d spent darting across the galaxy in search of Poe could have been a trap for all they knew; would it have been too outside the realm of possibility for Jessika to be a mole within the Resistance, feeding them bad intel about a star destroyer on Corulag? And then there was another part of her that grew hands just to grab this idea and shake it about--are you out of your mind, don’t be ridiculous.

But Finn was here. Finn would listen, as he always did.

“Can I ask you a question?” she said. “It’s going to sound stupid.” He snapped out of whatever daydream he’d had and leaned forward on the holotable, chin in hand. And it would have been jokingly earnest if it had been anyone else, but with him there wasn’t an ironic muscle in the entire gesture. “You know that feeling I was telling you about on Dantooine? How I thought I was frustrated about Jessika being here?”

“I do indeed remember that.”

“Well I’m fairly certain I’m not frustrated anymore, but the same feeling is still there, and I’m worried that the Force is trying to warn me about something--what are you smiling about?”

The smile wasn’t overt at all: he had pulled his lips in between his teeth in an effort to bite the corners down, keep them from ticking up, but parts of it extended up to his eyes and he might as well have been beaming, all teeth. “Rey…” he sighed, and there the grin was, pulling up to one side as he shook his head.

“What is it? I don’t get what’s supposed to be so funny.”

“You like her, don’t you?”

“Wh--of course I like her!” she said. “Were you even listening? That’s what I’m worried about--what if me liking her is blinding me to some other serious issue?”

“Stars, Rey.” He put his hand on top of hers on the table, looked right into her eyes after a deep breath that seemed to drag on forever as she waited for the follow up. “I mean you like her.”

Was there supposed to be some new meaning in the way he said it this time? She thought for a moment, frowning, and met his gaze with something she assumed was close to a completely blank stare. “Um.”

“Kriff--okay,” he said, doubling down with the intensity like he always did when he tried to focus. “Have you ever thought about kissing her?”

Kissing her?

She hadn’t--she hadn’t ever actually considered the possibility, kissing Jessika, and she assumed Finn meant on the mouth just by the look he was giving her. So she took a moment. She imagined kissing Jessika like she’d seen on the holovid dramas Finn and the other pilots had showed her: taking her face in her hands and pressing their lips together, slowly opening her mouth until--

Oh.

“Your face is really red, Rey.”

“Shut up, Finn.”

“I was right, though, wasn’t I?” he grinned. “You like her.”

“I don’t want to talk about it!”

“Okay, that’s fine.” He grinned at her again, bright and warm, and her irritation waned even as she maintained her scowl. “Anyway… I haven’t come up with any good ideas on a plan to infiltrate the star destroyer so I’m hoping you or Jessika have had a breakthrough…”

Rey shrugged. There had been ideas, seeds of plans ready to sprout into different viable avenues they could follow--and she had begun to trace the shoots with her finger, feeling for weaknesses that could foretell the whole thing unexpectedly withering beneath them. Chin in hand, she started again, thinking it through, but whenever it ran up on a step involving Jessika, the image of her in Rey’s head would smirk and her face would flush again.

She wondered how Jessika’s hands would feel crawling up the bare skin of her back--

“Y’know, I have an idea,” she said, and she could hear her voice lilting higher in pitch, much higher, and Finn raised an eyebrow. “Let’s you and I brainstorm together. Out loud.”

It helped to have another voice there with her--to keep the thread of everything focused on the task at hand but also to keep her grounded, away from the panic she had been sliding towards. Finn’s voice, calming the heartbeat pressing insistently against her breastbone, a constant in all the times they’d escaped narrow odds.

By the time C3PO joined them, Jessika grumbling in tow, not much headway had been made--any semblance of a strategy they could come up with relied wholly on being able to dock the Falcon in the destroyer’s hangar without being spotted, and trying to both locate a spare First Order shuttle and procure the access codes to land would take far too long. They couldn’t risk the ship slipping back into hiding.

“You’re running into the same problem I was having,” Jessika sighed as she slid onto the bench beside Rey.

That feeling was back, like her heart had contracted mid-beat and had yet to let go.

“From what I’ve been able to overhear from the General and Statura and Ackbar since Starkiller,” she continued, “this star destroyer is the biggest thing they’ve seen out and about from them in ages. They were saying the Order could’ve retreated to the planets past the Unknown Regions where their whole operation started. If…” She sighed thickly, and it almost turned to a grumble. “If they take Poe out there, we--that’s not something we want to happen.”

“How close are we to Mustafar?” Finn asked.

“One star system over,” she said. “Got us stalled on an asteroid for now.”

“Which I advised against,” C3PO muttered. “For what it’s worth.”

“Not a whole lot, asshole.”

“Which I also disagree with, and you would understand if you would take one moment to listen to me!” C3PO slammed his red hand on the table, clanging much more loudly than expected judging by the way they all jumped. And from what stories Master Luke had told Rey about the droid during her training away from D’Qar, the outburst was extremely unlike him.

Jessika gnawed at the inside of her cheek for a moment before motioning for C3PO to say whatever he had to say, and Rey felt the urge to put her hand on Jessika’s knee--but hesitated. A finger twitched and then the mere idea of touching her sent her stomach lurching. She could offer support in other ways, ways that didn’t compromise her ability to be a useful member of their team.

“Firstly,” C3PO said, already back to his normal demeanor, “idling on this asteroid is ill-advised due to its size, as--um, things have been known to live in them and I would much rather not contend with that again. Secondly, by my calculations this asteroid is just out of range to make a call to a private communicator on D’Qar, which we will need to do if you don’t want to die before even boarding the star destroyer.”

The pulse in the room was suddenly electric, the sense of depleted stores of hope swelling back up to their full potential in the silence that followed. And the General’s words echoed quietly in Rey’s head, an off-hand remark tossed her way after the situation room had cleared following a particularly unruly debriefing: Threepio can be a real pain in the ass but there’s a reason we keep him around. There’s a reason he survived the war.

“All right then,” Jessika said. Her own communicator was already open in her hand. “How far do we need to go and who do we need to call?” 

Rey would have bet the small number of credits she’d amassed since leaving Jakku that this was the longest C3PO had spoken without anyone interrupting him once. He seemed to realize this as well, his voice growing more disbelieving bit by bit as he would pause, look between the three of them, and continue on with his explanation. It was almost endearing. Almost.

What the three of them hadn’t known--even Jessika--was that C3PO had been assisting a number of the analysts and techs in trying to revive and adapt nearly-lost technology from the Clone Wars for use against the First Order. Lieutenant Connix led the operations with occasional input from Admiral Ackbar, but they had made the most headway after R2-D2 had been revived and they could access his longer-reaching memory drives.

“The group of separatists that would become the Empire had this one weapon,” C3PO said, “and it would cut the power to a starship once it was hit. The Resistance obviously does not have unlimited resources, so Lieutenant Connix and Artoo were attempting to see if the settings in our fleet of ships could be adjusted to produce this effect. They had had one successful trial by the time I got roped into all of this mess.”

“So we need to call Kaydel,” Jessika sighed.

“I trust that’s not going to be a problem, Captain Pava?”

Even before Rey glanced over, she knew that the tone he took was going to push Jessika close to the edge of her patience. And her gut had been right: the walls around Jessika’s face had jumped up, leaving a cold stare and gritted teeth where there had been some semblance of warmth between them as the hours had worn on.

“It’s only going to be a kriffing problem if she doesn’t pick up my call.” She slid out of the seat and stormed past C3PO and towards the hall leading to the gunner post. “So let it go, rust bucket.”

Fifteen tense minutes later, Jessika reemerged from the hall, red in the face. “She picked up. It’s not a hard thing to do with this ancient piece of garbage, thank stars. Let’s get Poe back already.” She didn’t stop as she passed through the room and down to the cockpit, muttering under her breath in something that wasn’t Basic nor any of the other languages Rey had picked up on Jakku.

“Rey--really, this isn’t…” Finn started, and only then did she realize she was standing with one foot pointed at Jessika’s path.

“This isn’t what?” she said. “Going to be helpful? And sitting here on our hands is?”

As she maneuvered quietly toward the cockpit herself, she knew she was being unfair--one of the key pieces of advice on D’Qar was steering clear of Jessika when she was upset, and Finn was aware that she was maybe, perhaps being motivated by intentions she was just now beginning to put words to and far from understanding. But while the ire brought a glow to Jessika’s face she found endearing rather than terrifying, Rey’s heart was prone to skipping three times as many beats when she smirked, half of her mouth turning up and pinching her face into a wink.

The number that it skipped when she found Jessika crouched down next to an open wall panel had to have been ten times higher than she was used to, and her hand reached up to worry at the neckline of her shirt. “I came to see if you needed any help,” she said quietly. “I’m pretty good with this stuff too, y’know.”

Jessika huffed and leaned back so she was sitting on her heels; her cheeks, dotted by a couple stray bits of grease, sat untugged by any sway of her moods. By Rey’s estimation, she didn’t even look angry anymore--the redness had receded, replaced by an odd warmth that needed a hue beyond the red to do it justice, an unseeable thing that tinged the deepest edges of the galaxy.

“Thanks.” Another sigh, a hand running across her face, smearing the grease into lighter gray smudges. “Hardest part’s done, though.” She took a couple of the wires between her fingers where the ends had been fastened together with a black plastic clip Rey had seen her readjusting in her hair back on Corulag.

“Well…” Rey sighed. “What’s next, then?”

Jessika stood up with a snort, shaking out her knees after they let loose a couple cracks. “Just getting the settings right on the dash.” She leaned over the passenger seat and shoved the wall panel shut with her foot--over her shoulder, Rey noticed a few of the blinking lights had changed their frequencies and a couple bright ones had lit up along the top for the first time. “I’d say we should test it, but there’s no way to know if it works until we’re staring that hangar in the face.”

“Right.” And she could sense some part of Finn urging her to dial it back a bit, considering that just minutes ago Jessika was on a warpath, but this moment was nice. Just the two of them: no warpath or oblivious droids and the danger wasn’t so imminent that its breath was already hot against their necks. Jessika stretched, holding onto the chair for balance, her shirt pulled tightly against her back and drawing the thought from Rey’s throat--“Why didn’t you tell Lucia that Han was dead?”

She expected a shattering sound that didn’t come. What did: Jessika turning slowly, no signs of irritation, and shrugging. Shaking her head. Sinking into one of the second row seats with Rey mirroring her in the other. “Her dad and Solo went way back. And Solo was around a lot before they moved to Corulag. I’m not--someone better needs to tell them. They deserve that.”

“Why isn’t that better someone you?”

For a moment, Rey thought Jessika was going to answer, but as soon as she opened her mouth it fell shut again so she could worry at the corner of her lip. “I’ve tried to deliver news like that before,” she finally said. “It just got… messy.” The way she was staring at Rey was starting to--not hurt, no, but it was gathering towards something like it. “I’m never a rock when I need to be. Poe was. Poe could always--” And then she was staring back across the cockpit’s dashboard, right out to a smooth arc of stars brighter than those twinkling against the heavy backdrop.

“Well,” Rey said. “I’d say that you’ve been a plenty good rock during this whole ordeal.”

“That’s what you think.”

“I know--it is what I think!”

At last Jessika burst into a full-toothed grin before burying it into her hand, a lone bit of laughter growing until both hands were needed to muffle herself, and Rey couldn’t tell what she found so funny but it was contagious not only in how she caught it but also in how it seemingly wanted to perpetuate itself and spread until the pall of their looming mission retreated into the corners. Jessika would collect herself only to glance at Rey biting down on her fist and start up again, snorting, sending Rey into a new fit of giggles.

Her cheeks were aching once Finn and C3PO peeked their heads into the cockpit.

“Threepio, I think we missed something.”

“It would appear so. I haven’t heard laughter like that since Master Luke tripped and fell over Chewbacca’s son’s toys on Life Day.”

“It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” Rey said, catching her breath. Jessika had already gotten to her feet and moved to the pilot’s seat and motioned to the copilot seat with a shrug, and the small smirk she added before turning back to the controls sent Rey’s heart flipping again. “It’s ready to go, though. If you’re ready.”

“Yeah.” Finn gazed around at the rest of them. Gulped and nodded. “Yeah, let’s do this.”

They settled into their seats, Rey beside Jessika in the front with Finn behind her, C3PO opting to stand towards the back. His commentary was coming more infrequently, at least at a volume they could all understand, and she was half-ready to tell him to come sit in the empty seat, that Jessika wasn’t as angry about the mess with Kaydel as she had let on, not anymore. But that was probably better left buried where it lay.

“Okay.” Jessika had one hand on the controls and one on the arm of her seat, and the grip was so tense on both that they were starting to shake. “This thing can’t disable the whole star destroyer, it wasn’t designed for ships of that size--but if we come up on the underside of it and hit the section where the hangar is, their security protocol will go down with the power and we’ll be able to land. Thankfully the magnetic field on the entrance is powered by generators on another system so we won’t get sucked back into space after we get off the Falcon.”

In the distance, right where the horizon would have been had they been earthbound, Rey spotted another star, larger even than the arc Jessika had been eyeing earlier. It seemed smaller than the one left behind after Starkiller base was destroyed, a dimmer set of oranges burning in the emptiness--and before it, a speck. Furiously red and sparking like any other star in the galaxy.

The star destroyer was still there, and Poe with it. And others. She could sense it, a concept she still had not fully adjusted to even with Master Luke’s help; a queasy jolt rocked her stomach, and it was unclear whether it was her own or someone else’s echo. Poe’s. A misplaced sense of disgust climbed up her ribcage until she had to swallow back bile--no, this wasn’t hers. This was a hand extended into the ether, desperate for help and sore from the effort of trying to keep upright.

We’re coming. We’re almost there.

“I mean…” Finn leaned up between their two seats, grimacing and holding his stomach. “When you say it like that, it doesn’t sound too hard.”

**********

It was.

The weapon was magnificently effective with Jessika’s aim and within half a minute of shooting off a couple rounds, the Falcon was docking in the destroyer’s hangar amid wildly scurrying astromech droids and a slew of TIE fighters off their storage tiers. But the element they had counted on with the main power outage--chaos, distraction, the stormtroopers and other security droids running into the center of the ship to assess the cause of the malfunction--was not as thoroughly spread as it had needed to be.

Leaving C3PO behind in the cockpit (much to his relief), Rey had led Jessika and Finn into the darkened hangar, steering clear as best she could of the patches of light streaming down from the couple lone emergency bulbs overhead. Blasters at the ready, fingers on the triggers twitching at the slightest of sounds while they ran toward the first exit they spotted, and then there was the gleam of white plastic at the corner of her eye--

“Hey--”

The firefight lasted all of fifteen seconds, not a difficult hurdle with how the sides were stacked but the notice the stormtroopers sent out had gone through their comms and down into every helmet of their peers and the waves of the alert crashed and crashed, roaring still as they ducked into a door leading to a main corridor and into a nook of a supply closet. More stormtroopers’ footsteps clacked outside, rhythmically in-step. They were in and had to hide from adversaries who knew to look for them and Rey’s hold on Poe through the Force had ebbed into something else. Away from the nausea, a numbed hollowness that pushed inward on her lungs and iced the tips of her fingers.

“That could’ve gone better,” Finn muttered.

“Not the time,” Jessika said. “You two have been on one of these things before. Where would he be?”

This wasn’t the Finalizer--but were all First Order star destroyers built with identical plans? Rey caught Finn’s eye and they exchanged frowns. The pressure of a ticking clock loomed, squeezing harder every time she reminded herself that they didn’t know how long they had until it hit zero. And Poe’s numbness continued to grow, but it tugged too, out of their hiding spot and to the left--

“I think we should head through those double doors on the left,” Finn said quickly. “I got a good feeling.” 

“Seconded,” Rey added, just as Jessika was about to raise hell about her doubts. “Left it is. Have to start somewhere.”

The corridor was abandoned when they stuck their heads out, even lacking the echo of footsteps, but their own feet were pressed into scrambling, threatening to trip over ankles while they darted to the doorway and Finn slapped a couple buttons on the access pad.

“What are you doing?” Rey hissed. “We don’t have all day!”

The door clanked open, just enough to put a hand through the crack. “I was doing that, thank you very much,” he said. “The power outage fried most of the access pads too, okay?”

Jessika pushed forward to heave the doors the rest of the way open. “Can we please just keep moving? I keep re-realizing I’m on a First Order star destroyer and my hands are getting too sweaty for my blaster.”

Rey’s chest swelled in two different directions as she followed after her with Finn on her heels--endeared at Jessika’s particular brand of sardonic barbs coupled with the dread that it was masking something much more real.

But still they pressed on, able to scurry back around a corner until the stormtroopers passed, no shots fired, and each time they arrived at a fork, she and Finn could agree the route to take within seconds, their gut instincts working in tandem--with the current of the Force underneath the two of them in some respect, Rey imagined--and when they came to a hallway lined in white tiles that still glared brightly with the little bit of power the backup lamps afforded, Finn stopped dead in his tracks.

“I don’t think this is right,” he said quietly.

This has to be right, Rey thought. Poe’s pull within her sense of the Force was stronger than ever, almost as if he were staring at her from the other end of the wing, the dense weight of his eyes landing on her shoulder, urging her to just turn around and look.

“You and Rey led us here on gut alone, and now you think it isn’t right?” Jessika sighed.

“It’s just…” Finn turned back to both of them, trying to keep a wince off his face and failing. “This is a stormtrooper barracks.” He ran a hand over the blank space of a wall between two doors, finding a groove between the tiles and letting just his little finger trace the line. “Why would he be here?”

“You don’t know if he is, Finn, that’s what I’m saying!”

“No, he is,” Rey said. “He is absolutely here. And it’s not just my gut telling me.”

Finn glanced towards her, barely long enough for her to even offer him a small grin to ward off the waves of distress rolling off of him. “Second to last on the right, Rey? Is that what you’re getting too?” he murmured.

And she reached down and out, concentrated like Master Luke had taught her while the sea around them raged during a storm--concentrate, and she wouldn’t have to lose her balance and topple over on the rocks, and they wouldn’t be face-to-face with any stormtroopers off duty. Concentrate--the numbness was there along the right as Finn said, seeping under the tiny gap between the door and the floor at the second to last.

She nodded, and he nodded back. A couple levels above them where the power hadn’t been cut, sirens started to wail, filtering down to them in a whisper. They were running out of time.

“I don’t know exactly what you two are doing, but if this worked I do not care,” Jessika muttered. Her blaster was tucked back into her belt, one hand tucked under her arm while the other was perched on her chin, letting her mouth at the scabs around her cuticles. As Finn went back to work on the bunk door’s access panel, Rey watched her from the corner of her eye, how her brow furrowed anxiously even as the rest of her face was set in a frown, how when she pulled her hand away from her mouth there was a speck of red at the corner of her nail she quickly licked away.

Rey rested a hand on her shoulder and Jessika was able to draw the hand down from her teeth, hesitantly lay it on top of Rey’s for a brief moment before pulling it back to finger the blaster again.

“We gotta be ready to move,” Jessika said, and he pushed open the door. “Oh stars.”

Relief washed over her in a flood at the sight of Poe on one of the cots--but the water rose too high and spilled into her lungs once she looked closer. He had never been a tall man, but he was smaller than he should have been, curled into himself, chin pressed against his chest. Glaring red burns dotted the back of his hands and the beginning of a black arc of a bruise stretched down across the bit of his neck she could see.

He was awake. She could sense that. He was awake and the door had opened and they had stepped inside and he hadn’t bothered to lift his head.

“Poe.” Finn stepped to the edge of the cot and kneeled to put himself at eye level, craning his head to put himself between Poe and whatever he was staring at. “Poe, it’s Finn. It’s Finn and Rey and Jessika. We’re getting you out of here.” He laid his hand on Poe’s shoulder and still he didn’t move. “Hey, c’mon,” he said, quieter this time, and his voice was starting to crack. “There’s no way this thing can be more comfortable than what you have on D’Qar, right?”

In all their planning, they had never accounted for the uncomfortable middle ground: infiltrating the star destroyer to find Poe alive but still being too late. The last vestiges of her hope were dwindling, and Jessika’s too, it seemed--her hands were cupped around her mouth, eyes closed, denying. This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening this way.

Finn’s hand moved from Poe’s shoulder to his face, hesitating at first, then gently brushing a couple stray curls from his brow. They would flop back almost immediately, but he kept brushing them back anyway, a soft motion to keep his hand busy. “Poe Dameron, I need a pilot.”

She half expected Jessika to roll her eyes, mutter something about how he already had two--but she didn’t, pulling her hands down low enough to peek over the tips of her fingers as Poe’s face screwed up into a grimace to squint up at Finn, then over to the two of them.

“What…”

“Yeah, man. Yeah,” Finn said. His grin was ready to split his face in two even if it didn’t reach his eyes. “We’re going home.”

The smile that Poe offered him was weak but present and that was all he needed to see before he had an arm around him, hoisting him up slowly to a sitting position. “A pilot,” Poe said slowly. “I don’t…"

Rey’s stomach heaved and it took all her willpower to keep it from clenching any further around the meager scraps of food left on the Falcon--just another reason to add to the list of why they couldn’t afford to drag their feet. Poe needed medical attention and it was starting to infect the air around them so much that even Jessika was starting to look green.

“You don’t what?” Finn said. He kept his face close to Poe’s as he held him upright, shooting a look at Rey and Jessika. They ran over and Jessika lodged her shoulder under Poe’s other arm, and she and Finn were able to pull him up to his feet.

Before the three of them, Rey tried to catch Poe’s gaze. He was staring just past her ear, eyes halfway to glassy but desperately pulling back at the same time, wanting to stay focused, and she could give him something to focus on as they trudged back into the barrack’s corridor. “It’s not that far, and then you can lie down again,” she said.

But he was turning into deadweight as his knees considered buckling with increasing frequency, and the sirens on the next level up were only getting louder, meshing with those that had switched back on as the power was restored, and they didn’t have time--

The Force helped us find him, so it could help ease his pain on the leg back, in theory--she put a finger to his temple and willed his thoughts to quiet from the frothing roar but Poe winced, hissed. Yanked his head away.

“Stop,” he muttered. “I don’t want anything to do with it, no--”

“Not a good idea right now, Rey,” Jessika said. “We got him. You go make sure anyone that’s trying to get in our way won’t be, all right?”

Swallowing the lump in her throat, she ran to the doorway to check their surroundings--still empty, but the air felt thicker from the noises clunking past the walls, stormtroopers or droids or otherwise she couldn’t tell, not when Poe’s distress was growing louder and louder.

Focus. Focus.

She could only think in a series of actions: hand on her blaster, then the lightsaber. Motioning them to follow her, retracing steps. Finn calling out which path to take when everything her head swelled to a deafening fuzz. Poe clawing away at something in his head and also in the whole of him until the undersides of the fingernails were smeared with red.

“They… sent you after me?”

“Well,” Finn said. “Kind of!”

“Why...?”

“Don’t you make me lecture you in the middle of this kriffing star destroyer, Poe Dameron,” Jessika growled. “I don’t like repeating myself.”

The star destroyer had to have grown in the time it took them to get to the barracks because Rey would have remembered the way in taking this long; maybe they had taken a couple wrong turns, had dived further into the belly of the First Order and were about to round the corner into a collection of officers or Kylo Ren himself, lightsaber out and flickering.

Or maybe they hadn’t. Maybe the halls were really this empty--slowly she began to recognize some of the walls, ones with a couple loose wires sticking out between the finishes or the propaganda poster with the folded-down corner. The lights were clicking back on one by one, overtaking them and brightening the path she then knew would lead to the hangar. It was too easy.

“Rey,” Finn called. “Through those doors on the right--hey, Poe, come on, it’s just a little further, okay--”

When she pushed open the doors, they slammed back against the wall and the echo swam in the cavernous space. It appeared deeper now that the lighting system was back online, glistening off the windows of the air control room, the TIE fighter engines, the wildly waving brass protocol droid in the Falcon’s cockpit--

“Get him inside, I’ll cover you,” Rey said. She put her back close to Poe’s as they shuffled across the open space that was wider than necessary--it was always going to be too wide, she realized, but now it was an expanse with far too many opportunities for their luck to run out.

This couldn’t have been luck. Luck didn’t sit like this in her gut. Finding that one piece from an AT-ST fan belt when she was twelve had been luck. Poe still being alive, that was another likely candidate. But there were eyes on them now, hidden, and the nausea she had been picking up from Poe was tinged with a different color from the combined weight of their gazes.

“That really such a good idea?” Finn asked over his shoulder. “Having that thing out so close to us?”

“What?” She looked down at her right hand, and she had pulled out the lightsaber without even realizing. Her thumb was hovering above the button to unsheath it. “I’ll keep my distance if it’s on. Just worry about him--”

Above them there were two bursts of screaming green, showering into sparks just ahead of them as the blasts hit the front edge of the Falcon. They froze, ducked down with a shout, waited. A few more late fritzes fell to the ground and cooled at their feet, and the silence that followed was the smothering kind, pushing into their tense muscles until they were about to knock together shaking from the pressure. And Rey almost thought that could be a welcoming sound, however useless it would be--if only to disrupt the quiet.

They didn’t come this far to accept useless.

She slid a few extra inches away from the others before turning on the lightsaber. Finn jumped slightly as the hum filled the room, or maybe it was Poe reacting and pulling Finn along with him--she couldn’t tell exactly with her back to them, nor could she risk turning to check if they were all right. A tinge of relief spread across her shoulders as she heard Jessika murmuring to them, and Rey then focused her attention on the source of the blaster fire.

It didn’t take long: the pulses of living beings within the Force were so glaringly obvious when they were spread out and had heartbeats rocketing along the insides of their wrists.

“The TIE fighters,” she said.

“What?” Jessika hissed.

“We didn’t see anyone on our way back because they hid in the docked TIE fighters.”

“Which one did that last shot come from?”

“I don’t know, that’s what I’m trying to--”

And then the air around them was lit with green, most of the shots sending equipment crashing into walls, leaving spurts of smoke along the dented sides of their ship--half the damage it could be, Rey repeated to herself, half the damage it could be if her aim slipped. If her new and tenuous grasp on the Force faltered before she could deflect a shot away from Finn and Jessika as they hurried to haul Poe aboard the Falcon.

“Rey, come on!” Finn shouted. Presumably they had reached the ramp up to the cabin. Or they were close.

The TIE fighter fire didn’t stop.

“Get him on board and get the ship ready to go!”

Another shot deflected. And another. And another. One sent flying back into the fleet’s maintenance tubing, one setting a stash of extra life support vests on fire. The shots weren’t hitting her and they weren’t hitting the others and they weren’t hitting crucial parts of the Falcon but they weren’t even starting to slow. Occasionally, just occasionally, one shot would fly back from her saber and into one of the many ships’ ion engines. Enough to ground it, but not enough to stop its attacks.

Then Jessika calling from the ramp: “REY--"

The cockpit of a TIE fighter along the wall before her exploded almost from the inside out, then another a couple rows down. Red blasts. A familiar engine screech in the distance--

X-wings--

Outside the hangar--

“Come on, we gotta go!” Jessika yelled.

She ran, green blaster fire chasing her heels even as the ramp closed up behind her into the muted quiet of the ship. Her sheathed saber dropped into its holster at her hip as Jessika grabbed her wrist--her pumping heart getting an unneeded extra rush--and pulled her along to the cockpit.

She got one brief look at Finn kneeling beside Poe sprawled on the seat carved out of the cabin wall--but Jessika pulled her onwards, already talking quickly to C3PO and turning every needed knob with her free hand.

“Kriffing hell, we are getting back to D’Qar,” she said. “We’re going--oh!” She looked down at her hand around Rey’s wrist. Dropped it like a bolt fresh from a hot engine. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to, uh…”

Rey wanted to reassure her that no, it was fine, she could really hold her wrist or her hand any time she wanted; but her breath was still coming heavy and rushing loudly in her ears, and by the time she could get the words to the tip of her tongue, Jessika’s head had ducked, attention diverted back to the droid.

“Open up the comm links, Threepio!”

“Yes, Captain Pava, right away.”

Another TIE fighter rode into the air on a fireball before crashing back down, and Jessika grinned as she settled into the pilot’s seat. “All right, let’s get out of here.”

No blaster fire followed them as they flew from the hangar, twisting down and out after a couple lone specks of gray metal in the distance.

“You!” Jessika jumped up from her seat and leaped again to C3PO, grabbing his head and pressing a loud and sloppy kiss to his forehead. “You are the unsung hero of the Resistance!”

“Captain Pava,” C3PO said slowly. “While I appreciate your gratitude, I must ask if you are feeling all right as this is still rather unusual--”

“Blue Three, you might not live this down.” The voice crackled from the comms speaker and was poorly stifling a laugh. “Plus arguably owing a life debt to a protocol droid?”

The mirth faded from Jessika’s face within half a second. “Can it, Snap. We would’ve still made it back even if Threepio hadn’t called back to base for help. You didn’t see Rey back there.”

Rey’s cheeks burned so hot that it immediately reminded her of the surface of Mustafar. 

“Anyway, you got Doctor Kalonia on call for when we get back?” Jessika sighed. 

“...how is he?” Snap asked quietly. 

“Just make sure she’s on the tarmac, okay?” She paused, ran both hands over her face before continuing, “And you and Nien Nunb cut the shit on the way back. I know we’re going to get enough of it from the General when we land to last us a long lifetime.”

He signed off and she shuffled back to sink into the pilot chair, slowly pressing the sequence of buttons to jump into hyperspace after the X-wings. Even amid the air of celebration, the relief that Poe had been rescued from the First Order alive (again), something wasn’t sitting right. Something, in the undercurrent of the galaxy, still seeped enough poison into the fabric of it all to send their thoughts spiraling into an endless depth of worry. Senseless worry mingling with the explainable sort until it all grew into a shape no one would have words for.

“Okay,” Jessika murmured. “It’s time to go home.”

Poe had hazily asked Finn to sit with him on the inset bench, apparently unaware that his entire body was stretched across it. His left foot hung off the edge towards the end, but the rest was a tangled flop of limbs, and after a couple moments’ difficulty, Finn secured a seat for himself with Poe’s head resting at the cross of his ankles. 

Poe had passed out almost instantly. Not even the lurch into hyperspace jolted him awake. 

“You’re going to be okay,” he whispered, a hand resting just above the curls that laid against his forehead. 

Because the world in which the opposite was true wasn’t a world Finn thought he could manage, so he refused to entertain the idea. 

His fingers twisted around a couple more locks of Poe’s hair, rubbed softly against his scalp. The scar under his eye had faded to a pale pink but so much of the color had drained from his face that it had deepened to red again. Red and angry. 

You were going to take me to Dantooine and Yavin 4 when you got back. I wish I knew what my home world was so I could take you there instead. We could learn everything there is to know about it together.  

The corners of his eyes stung and his chest was swelling hotly from the inside out, pressing against his ribcage--just from the thought. The thought. Himself and Poe Dameron, snatched back from the edge again, standing on the cusp of an unknown village, an alternate history’s version of home.

But this history, the one life he had to live here and now, home stood so long as an idea stolen before he could remember it. An idea that he had to rebuild for himself as soon as the uniform helmet fell from his fingers on Jakku. An idea that had solidified before his eyes in the shape of so many people on D’Qar but the center of the orbit always fell back to Poe. It fell back to the confident quirk of Poe’s eyebrow in the closet of the Finalizer as they planned the escape and the whirlwind of everything after. And when Finn looked down at Poe’s battered sleeping face in his lap and focused on the swelling that was starting to scald his lungs and the blood pumping through his heart, he finally understood Slip’s hushed whispers in the night on what it was to fall in love, how it felt so much like returning home.