Chapter Text
It’s a planet that Armitage has had no reason to go to before, Jakku: he’s combed over every parsec of the Inner Rim and some of the Outer, but he’s flying blind through this patch of space, relieved when he finally glimpses its identification from the datapad in his X-wing, some scattered bits of information filing past in blue letters across the screen. Apparently, Jakku is ninety percent unoccupied desert. Junkyard of the Gods, they call it (or so the General had insisted during the mission briefing,) littered with the refuse of the last fifty years of wars.
And now, here he is: come to stop another. Striking a match and raining down rivers of flammable fuel, if all goes badly.
BB-8 makes an inquisitive beep as he charts a path to a small hovel with a pile of others, planning a landing on rough terrain. Armitage is no great hand at Binary, but he catches some apprehension. Where are we going, Armitage Hux-Master?
“I’m not your master,” Armitage argues, not for the first time. He rolls his eyes and flicks the necessary switches above him to begin their descent from orbit. “Stop asking questions. You’ll see.”
BB-8 makes his best approximation of a sonic huff. Armitage’s friend Kaydel keeps insisting that this new huffiness is an impersonation of his new “master”: you turn up your nose at things all the time, grinning, and he clenches his jaw at the memory. He doesn’t turn up his nose at everything. He just has good taste. And masters are for slaves.
Armitage’s parents were once slaves, bred and trapped in an Imperial factory, and so was he, and—
Now he’s a pilot, falling from the sky. An intelligence officer on a mission handed down from Amilyn Holdo, hero-general and former Chancellor of the Republic herself.
He doesn’t answer to anyone he doesn’t damn well choose to, anymore.
(Of course, his parents are dead, swallowed in the mouth of their underground factory by a preventable rockfall—a lack of safety precautions, low budgeting—who the fuck cares about a few thousand slaves—covered over with concrete by the Empire, not even a funeral, not even a fucking funeral or a grave that he can visit, and this is why Armitage fights and flies and threads his way throughout the galaxy for Holdo—
(For them.)
(Everything he does and is for a grave marker that lists their names, that will one day list his own.)
He lands on the planet’s surface and still blinks in wonder at the black, gaping-open patchwork of stars. Makes him feel uncomfortable; plumbs up old memories of cavernous chambers of rock that arced so high above him he couldn’t find the ceiling. All darkness, lit up with thousands of strips of distant lights, and he stands and pushes up the cockpit to dispel the illusion, and—
Immediately begins coughing, enveloped in a cloud of sand.
“Kriffing damn it!”
Watch your language, BB-8 beeps.
“Yeah, you’re one to talk,” Armitage sighs, but gives BB’s white armored plating an affectionate rub anyway, once he’s stretched his legs and disembarked.
An old man is waiting with his hands clasped in front of him, as expected. He’s got a long beard and stained gray robes; looks frail and harmless, but appearances can be deceiving.
“There has been an awakening in the Force,” is the first ominous thing Lor San Tekka says. “Have you felt it?”
Armitage waits for a moment, dead sure that this is a code phrase that he’s supposed to recognize and respond to. But he’d memorized the mission details back-to-front after the briefing, and is twice as sure that he doesn’t remember that particular combination of words.
“Excuse me?” he says, leaning in.
“Ah,” Lor San Tekka snorts, a little of the light dimming from his eyes. “Nevermind. I see you are not Force-sensitive. I was hoping she might send someone that could understand.”
He sighs, as if this is horribly inconvenient. Armitage hesitates; was he supposed to be? He doesn’t even know what that means, being “sensitive” to the Force. He’s not even positive that the Force isn’t something that parents make up to soothe their oversensitive younglings when they wonder if there’s a point to it all.
(mom when can we see the sky)
(someday, baby, someday we’ll take a ship and look at all the stars we missed)
“Are you getting any of this?” Armitage asks BB-8, rolling at his side. BB-8 looks up at him through his viewport like a head with a blank black eye and does his best vocal impersonation of a shrug.
“But I suppose you’ll do,” the old man goes on, without much conviction. He stands straighter and regards Armitage’s X-wing with a wary eye, his lips twitching.
“You shouldn’t have landed here,” he snaps. “You’ve left us exposed.”
“Who’s going to be looking for one X-wing in the middle of the desert, in the middle of the night?” Armitage asks, swinging his arms around at the other five huts to their left and right, still shuttered and silent.
But Lor San Tekka only clutches at the bridge of his nose with two fingers, as if trying to fend off a headache.
“Bad people,” he says eventually. “Very dangerous people. They have felt it, and they’re afraid.”
He walks over to Armitage and slips a canvas bag into his palm, meeting his eye. His fingers brushing the inside of his wrist—slight, like a warning.
“She’ll be coming for us, now,” Lor San Tekka says, his voice dropping lower. “There’ll be no stopping her.”
“Her?” Armitage furrows his brow.
“You should leave right away,” is all the old man says in response. His face stretching wide with panic, as he glances over his shoulder and leans in.
“She’s coming.”
“Who?”
“Oh, Force.” The old man falters, and falls against the side of an old crate lying amidst a stack of others in the sand. He makes a low shaking, whimpering sound. “She’s already here. You need to—go, go—I’ve had dreams of her,” he shudders, “She’s—”
Armitage’s hands shake, as he undoes the strings closing the canvas bag and tumbles out a few datachips into his palm, counting them. One, two, three, all there. Good.
A shadow seems to pass over the sky.
It’s distant, at first; but in a moment, one large shadow separates into two, then three, then four.
Armitage starts walking quickly back toward his ship, stumbling over old bits of scrap and rope and things littered across the ground as he continues to stare up at the black holes where the stars used to be. He should have a few minutes’ leeway to do some systems checks on the X-wing, but—
A red beam blasts down from above, easily twice the width of his body.
Armitage bites out a curse and flings himself down to the ground, hitting the sand—kriffing coughing again, kriffing damn it—and then scrambles again to his feet, only to have his face almost seared from his body at the downfall of another red beam, burning a crater into the space where one of the hovels used to be.
“You know who’s doing this?” he turns to shout at Lor San Tekka. But the old man is gone. Oh for the love of the Force, he grits his teeth and pats at the blaster he’s now incredibly grateful he’d strapped to his side before leaving the ship. BB-8 only spins in circles at his side in a panic, spherical body rotating faster than his eye can track—
“Hey, it’s—” Armitage almost gets out that it’s okay, everything’s okay, buddy, before a third beam of red light spears down and flashes before his eyes, blinding him. His ears ring; he coughs (he hates fucking sand he’s only been on a desert planet five minutes and he already hates it) and finds himself knocked on his back, the stars distant blurring shapes overhead, slipping in and out of consciousness. He can hear his mother’s voice, singing to him.
Fifty-five thousand levels under the grass,
Under the trees,
Under the breeze,
My son returned to me.
Sixty-five thousand levels under the grass,
Under the trees,
Under the breeze,
My sister returned to me.
Seventy-five—
It takes him long, groaning minutes to realize that the whining sound he’s hearing isn’t a human voice, but a high, swift engine. It’s soft; quiet, unlike anything he’s ever heard. Almost a purr.
The sound of yelling comes to him as if he’s sitting at the bottom of a pool, watching the blurring shapes of fire unfurl in slow motion overhead. Armitage grits his teeth and struggles onto an elbow and makes out the shape of BB-8 hovering above him, extending several sharp implements like he’s unsure if he should perform some form of major surgery.
“Buddy,” Armitage groans, slumping back. “Put those away. You’re killing me.”
Armitage Hux-Master is dying, Hux-Master is dying, I wish to help—
“I’ll be fine.” He gives a couple of what he hopes are comforting pats to one of the orange circles split across BB-8’s side. The paint chipped with some smears of dirt and debris. “Remember,” he says, spitting it out mid-cough (kriff, he thinks he’s punctured a lung), “Remember, the mission.”
He winces, and sucks in a breath, biting into his bottom lip hard enough to draw blood as he pulls out the data chips from his pockets and slowly—painstakingly—offers them to BB-8, who accepts them into a port in his body with an exaggerated metal groan.
Hux-Master, I do not want you to die, I do not want.
“You need to take those away from here,” Armitage whispers, gritting his teeth. Forcing in whatever air he can, with his lungs probably looking like a punctured balloon. Feels like he’s broken a rib or three. “You need to finish the mission,” he emphasizes, grimacing. “She’s coming.”
He doesn’t know who she is, but he’s got a bad feeling that he doesn’t want to find out.
“You need to run,” he rasps.
I will not leave you. BB-8 spouts off a number of other protests in a high whine that Armitage can’t interpret, (he really needs to work on his Binary,) and lowers his head—so often spinning, now very still. After so many gentle reminders and threats, it only took Armitage kriffing dying for BB-8 to finally calm down for a minute, Armitage reflects; to make him stop worrying about everyone in the galaxy besides for himself.
Armitage allows himself a small, sad smile.
“This is an order, BB-8,” he says, clawing himself closer by another desperate inch. “Run away. Leave me. Your master commands it.”
(It’s like acid on his tongue, that word; master, master, associated with electrowhips and shouted curses and you cave people half-deaf with machinery, simple folk need guidance, why feed the slaves)
(The Imperial overseers never knew about their songs, the ones the deafer folk drummed loud against rock with metal pipes until the insides of Armitage’s skull rang with their clamor with the force of a growing avalanche, shattering out twenty thousand levels in either direction, the same depths of oceans he’d never seen—)
Armitage makes a valiant effort to rise to his feet and turn his back on BB-8. It ends with him passing out for several seconds and waking up on the ground. But BB-8 is nowhere, and he’s choking on dust.
Come on. Come on.
He summons his courage, grips on some hot scalding piece of wreckage that makes his insides scream and his outsides groan out a moaning sound through his teeth, and finally achieves a rise to his feet. He raises his head, panting, fumbling for his blaster. Father would be proud. Father had a straighter back than any of them, even after leaning over fourteen hours a day. The posture makes the man.
Armitage squares his shoulders, squares his weapon.
Through the flames, what appears to be a battalion of white-armored soldiers is swarming through the sand, kicking up dirt. He turns, and sees most of the hovels burning, slight flickering shapes of villagers running through the darkness. One soldier raises their blaster—a red beam of light extends in an exact straight line and knocks one down, and then another. Armitage sees a braid of gray hair fall, tangling, hands clasped together with a young girl—
Eighty-five thousand levels under the grass,
Under the trees,
Under the breeze—
He lets out a panicked breath (fuck his lungs fucking burn), and finds his best approximation of cover behind some untouched crates. His fingers are slick around his blaster, now, but Armitage remembers his training and steadies himself through the pain tearing him apart with each rasping intake of air, small leaks of sound that could give away his position. His heart beating in his ears louder than anything.
What is he aiming at? There’s too much happening, all at once. He doesn’t know who the soldiers are—what they are—besides for Holdo’s vague intelligence of a cult-militia forming at the edges of the galaxy; the reason why he’s come to stop a war in the first place. Fringe groups, Old Empire remnants congealing into a bad brew. These soldiers look like the decades-old holos of stormtroopers Armitage has seen, but—but the features of their masks are cut in one interrupted black line, like grim smiles connecting to their eyes at dark slashing angles.
He watches one crouch beside a dying woman. The woman reaches up with a trembling hand and streaks three lines of blood across the trooper’s silver mask.
The trooper’s weapon falls. Almost as if it has a sense of fucking empathy, but Armitage isn’t convinced; he peels his lips back in a bite-snarl, die die kriffing ghosts of the past, and he shoots indiscriminately and they shoot back until he finds what he thinks he should be aiming at.
A black shadow is descending from the gangway of one of the ships.
Armitage freezes for a second, fascinated; he can’t figure out what the kriff it is he’s looking at, at first. He catches some details that don’t seem to match together, added up: long, rippling dark robes unsuitable for walking in the desert, steel-toed boots, a hood that drapes over a face with long, pointed white teeth.
And then, as the hood lifts by a fraction—
Yellow eyes.
They latch onto him at once, across the chaos and the fire and the screams.
Armitage’s hands tremble. But he remembers his courage through another sting of pain, as he remembers to breathe, and fires and fires and fires.
He grits out a war cry, moving out into the open, not caring to stop himself now. He stumbles over—fucking kriff, Lor San Tekka, he’s waxy and blood-spattered and his eyes are dead—and keeps moving, shooting, fuck you fuck the empire, if he’s about to die he will die with a mountain of bodies underneath his feet.
His mother had promised him that he’d see the stars, and he’s done that. He’ll gladly go down fighting.
His blaster bolts break through a lot of sparking electric objects that must have formed a patchwork electrical system for the hovels and kick up a veil of smoke. He lowers his blaster, panting, blinking at the sight of his blaster bolts arcing toward—
No, no. That can’t be right, he thinks; but they’re really not arcing at anything, anymore.
They’re hovering in midair in the smoke, five red screaming lines suspended in space—an impossibility of every known law of gravity dangling in front of his eyes, and he’s sure for a blissful second that this is a dream. That he’ll wake back up in the safehouse in Coruscant and watch stupid holo dramas with Kaydel and laugh with her about having to wear a wig to the store to avoid camera detection.
But the smoke dissipates, as if swept by an enormous hand.
The shadow moves closer. It raises a glove from the length of its cloak—black, draping sleeves, swallowing lengths of darkness—and moves some of the frozen blaster bolts casually to the side, levitating them around itself, forming a hole through which it can pass with graceful, sand-skimming steps.
The shadow flicks its hand, and the blaster bolts scream past it at their intended speed into silence.
Armitage’s hands shake. He drops the blaster—apparently it’s not going to do anything, anyway, so why bother shooting. What is that? How is it doing this? It doesn’t make any sense, and he feels another pressure he can’t explain suddenly anchor his legs to the ground, as if they’d been encased in concrete.
He fights to move, flailing, but his body is paralyzed; he’s smothered, he can’t even scream. It fucking hurts, like a million needles are piercing under his skin as the shadow draws close enough to finally loom above him and expose its face.
A pale face. Sallow, waxy, a flawless moon. Those feral eyes, those fangs it extends in sharp points as it slavers, spit pooling down its chin as the shadow leans over him, dangling its fingers over Armitage’s forehead until they touch.
“Captain Hux, is it?” the shadow murmurs. Her gloves are sticky-wet with blood.
Oh, Armitage realizes, swallowing. Oh, this is the she. Her voice is low, and more human than he would have expected. She’s shorter than him, but it feels like she’s a hundred feet tall—like she’s one with the sky, spilling out into the night overhead, leaking into the edges of every shadow in the length of her cloak.
“I am Lady Kira Ren,” she says, with that same appalling smile. A fresh run of saliva drips down the sides of her cheeks. “So far, I have only given that name to those that I kill, or have no use for. I hope you shall be the first to remember it, Captain.”
She leans in. Armitage catches the scents of blood and smoke and spoiled, rotting meat, and makes a soft sound of protest. Can’t move. Can’t look away, though every cell of his body is screaming not to look, if you don’t look it’s not real—
“Where is the map?” she asks, soft.
His tongue frees itself, and he finds himself able to speak.
“M-map?” he says, his eyes wide.
“Yes, the map. To Luke Skywalker’s current location.” Her voice drops, and takes on a curious, lilting tone, as she purses her thin lips. A slight pink slash across that mask of a face—hardly humanoid—a monster—Armitage grits his teeth against a new kind of pressure emanating from her fingers that grinds into his skull.
“Show me,” she croons.
The image of Lor San Tekka flashes through his mind, dragged up by that blunt, unrelenting force. And then, his own voice echoing in his ears, run, run, this is a direct order, and he grits his teeth and sobs. No no no no—
He blacks out, before he can fight what comes next.
—
Aboard the black, hollowed-out depths of a landed transport vessel, Phasma clutches at a strap meant to steady soldiers through major turbulence and tries to catch her breath.
She’s—she’s tossed her helmet to the side, stupid cumbersome thing, and she feels naked with her face exposed to the cool night air, panting, heaving air in and out with a motion close to vomiting, baring her teeth and trying to suck in some form of a grip—she is a Captain, she cannot be hiding in transport vessels while her soldiers (hers, hers) are crawling around out in the dark with Lady Ren.
They’re all so very young. She should be with them.
Phasma straightens, willing herself to breathe, breathe, breathe. She shakes her hands to rid them of their numbness, smooths them down the length of her armor with its chromium polish. She is well-respected. She is allowed this small piece of ornamentation to emphasize her status; her request for it was granted on the advent of this mission, as a sign of the First Order’s great trust and pride in her leadership.
She swallows, and closes her eyes, and remembers.
She remembers—she remembers the village, standing twenty places in front of Lady Ren and trying not to marvel that she’d made it that close. That force of nature, all wild-shadow-biting-animal, and Ren had turned to her, the commander of a squadron, and said:
Kill them all.
In a voice like a snarl, like some Hunaen mink velvet curled between her fingertips.
(Stormtroopers do not know these luxuries, but Phasma had once been a part of a mission in a stranger’s house.)
(A rich lady; an Outer Rim princess with callaxium mines. Phasma had run her hand over her fine blankets, only for a moment, before letting them go.)
(Later, she’d come back into the room, and found them stained dark with blood.)
Kill them all.
Phasma slams her fist into the side of the vessel with a sound like the clang of a bell. It smarts her fingers and centers her focus between her knuckles, so she punches again. And again, and again.
Kill them all, kill them all.
She remembers, and tries to picture her own voice layering over Lady Ren’s, kill them all kill them all kill them all, all the small shivering little children in the village that had reminded her of the five-cycle-old stormtrooper cadets slated for decommission, so few of them lived, so few of them survived in their white sterile dormitories with bunks like durasteel cages, and—and if you weren’t a smart and obedient cadet and didn’t sit still and rattle off the Creed each morning and sit through necessary morning speeches, The First Order lives, you live for the First Order—
Kill them.
Kill them all.
Except that she hadn’t, this time.
Except that she was hiding here instead, wandering off in a daze, her mind floating between a pair of wide blue eyes staring up at her from a youngling’s face. Smudged by soot, by fire.
Lady Ren, what do you want us to do with the villagers? Phasma had asked first, the words sticking in her throat. As if there would ever be any other answer.
She’d looked out over FN-2865, JN-6738. FN-2999, all her soldiers; Nines, Eighty-Six, Double Sevens; Thirty-Three, with her steady hands and even voice like a pool of water, so often calming the others, FN-8842, hardly older than seventeen, asking what it felt like to kiss before the mission started. Phasma, disciplining him and promising to half his rations later, because that kind of talk was always forbidden, cut out like a malignant tumor before it could grow.
Kill them, Lady Ren had commanded to FN-8842, not knowing this. Kill them.
Kill them kill them kill them,
Phasma has given her life for the First Order. She was born in a white box and is known to be cruel. She is exacting, she gives no quarter when it comes to expecting perfection. She reports the dissidents, as she is required to by law.
She’s always had the strength to look away.
Kill them all
Phasma kicks her helmet across the transport vessel and allows herself a shout.
She’s disobeyed a direct order; from Lady Ren, no less. She’ll be submitted for court martial and then decommissioned and that will be the end of her, and it will be like she never existed. Phasma stares at the gleam of her helmet in the darkness, and then grinds her teeth and kicks it again, because she hates how it shines in the firelight extending through the cracks in the doors, reminding her that she’d asked for this assignment—she’d asked to be seen, to be required to do this. This is what she’s always wanted, she’s been told. What she’s been telling herself she needs.
Kill them all,
The helmet has three red lines scratched across it from an elderly woman reaching up and dragging her bloodied fingers down Phasma’s face, twitching, dying. A slight, sad smile at her lips.
(Stormtroopers older than forty-five cycles are decommissioned. They do not live—this woman had lived—Phasma’s soldiers had followed through with Ren’s order, even as the words had died on her lips, because they were good and loyal and they would die, too, before they could know what it was like to kiss—)
Phasma swears under her breath, for the first time ever. She’d overheard some curses from the higher officers before, muttered in secret, laughing together. She hadn’t understood what they meant.
She breathes now, and her lungs fill with air, and she feels, which to her is a rare, incredible thing; most of the time, she operates in an empty vacuum like her emotions have been sucked into space.
She feels, she feels, she feels.
Phasma walks forward, anticipation humming like electric wires under her skin, and presses the button that opens the transport vessel’s rear doors.
They expose the sky: a bluer shade here than she’s seen from the decks of the star destroyers that have always been her home, marred with smoke. The scent of blood. There’s no more screaming, only an unnerving quiet.
Phasma leans down to pick up her helmet, and slips it over her head. She feels better; more like herself, looking out at the world this way. This is who she is, she tells herself, retrieving her blaster from the floor. She’s never been anybody else.
She steps outside, chromium boots sinking into the sand. Even if she hadn’t passed along the order, her troopers had done it anyway—it could’ve gotten lost in the shuffle of things. It could’ve been. She convinces herself of this, nodding to FN-2999 as he raises his hand in a brief salute.
Yes—she’d said so, the words had only gotten a little lost.
If she keeps reminding herself that it’s true, they might believe her.
She makes her rounds around the village, stepping over bodies, making her face flat at the familiar smell of burning flesh. Nines and Eighty-Six are carrying a man handcuffed to a stretcher into Lady Ren’s shuttle. He’s wearing a weathered brown leather jacket. Red hair.
“A spy,” Lady Ren says beside her.
Phasma turns her head to the side, affecting her usual air of cool nonchalance, despite the pounding of her heart in her chest. She feels nothing. She will always feel nothing.
“He worked for Republic Intelligence,” she goes on, exposing her pointed teeth in a curving smile. “And now, his intelligence will work for us.” She tilts her head to the side at Phasma, like a predatory bird examining a piece of roadkill beneath its claws. “And where did you go, just now?” she asks softly.
Those feral yellow eyes seem to melt and run over into blackness, mesmerizing, shifting across Phasma’s helmet like she can read her face. She wonders, and hopes, that Ren’s mind-reading can’t be done at a distance.
“I went to file a report with General Dameron, ma’am,” Phasma replies, keeping her back straight. “I was excited to tell him news of our victory.”
“Hmm.” Lady Ren makes a small, musing sound. “In the middle of battle, Captain? How odd. And I’d heard from Dameron that you were so thorough.”
Phasma waits for a moment, heart hammering faster, toes curling in her boots—
“Though I suppose the day is ours, either way,” Lady Ren sighs, still smiling, and Phasma tries not to visibly relax. “At the end of it all, each of your blasters will be taken, and your shots catalogued with the armory. How many of them do you think you got, Captain? Two? Three?”
Her smirk widens.
“I’m not sure, ma’am,” Phasma says stiffly.
“Well, that’s no fun. I’d expected better from you.”
With a flick of her wrist, Lady Ren extends her lightsaber from where it had been folded in half at her waist and spins the dual red blades of plasma. Then presses a button, and flips the saber shut again. It all happens so fluidly that Phasma doesn’t notice the smoking corpse in front of her until it’s fallen to the ground in two smoking pieces.
“I’ll be consulting your troops’ reports,” Ren says then, as if nothing had happened; a muscle jumping in her cheek. She strokes it, idly, smearing a fresh spattering of blood. “And then, I think, I will decide what to do with you.”
“Of course, ma’am.”
“If I don’t like what I find…”
Lady Ren turns and offers her that full, slavering grin again—the one she’d seen before, continually flipping her folded saber between her fingers without drawing the blades.
“I think I’ll very much enjoy myself, either way,” she says.
Then she leaves, dark cloak rippling above the ground like she’s floating, and Phasma stands there at Attention, rigid and still. Not bearing to move until she’s sure that Lady Ren means to go back into orbit, and the order must be relayed to her troops to follow.
Phasma gives the order, and notices the blood staining their white armor (our armor is our privilege not our right, the Creed is our Decree,) and leads her soldiers back to the transport, leaving the planet still burning behind.
—
Ben gropes through the darkness, pausing to wipe the sand away from his goggles as a swell flows into his face from the west. Praying there aren’t any karumis around, with their tendency to bite chunks out of scavengers’ arms with their beaks. They’re a good reason why so many levels of this wreck have remained untouched; though after living through twelve years on Jakku, Ben doesn’t have much fear.
No; what really scares him are the others.
(A dead body can get you twenty portions on Jakku, if you parcel out the meat. It’s quicker and easier than feeding another mouth, and who’s going to stop you?)
(Certainly not anyone important. They’ll probably pay you extra if you give them a choice cut. A strip of flank or stomach or liver.)
At the thought of that, he spits out a brown string of maca root to the side, and then chews and spits the cud. He’ll probably have to approach this hole from the inside; feels like the CC-A24 plasma generator’s pretty well stuck in there. Ben heaves a sigh that flutters the rags he’s wrapped around his face for protection from the hot-stinging sand and sun; he shifts his shoulders and readjusts the straps of his pack, damp with sweat, and makes his way toward the the massive, gaping hole scraped out of the wreck’s durasteel hull.
He squints up and up and up above him before climbing through, at the hulk of the Star Destroyer covering the sky. Some distant jun’na spreading their four wings overhead; scaly predator birds, waiting for him to drop dead. Ben leans over to spit a third time, clear out his mouth of the stink.
(There’s a nursery rhyme about them stealing kids, raising them and spitting out their souls once they’re older. The younglings knew not when to shout / the younglings could not live without,)
(Ben had overheard this from an old beggar woman, mumbling to herself as she’d tried to steal his shoes,)
(he’d hit her twice and given her a quarter-portion out of pity when she’d started to bleed;)
He steps over a warped, jagged edge that he takes care not to catch on his tunic, because it’s the only one he owns after he’d ripped the other. It’s a ragged thing, but then again, everyone on Jakku is ragged. He washes it sometimes with his precious little supply of water, takes care of what he’s got.
A noise—
The sound of screeching, settling steel. His hand rests on the leather handle of his knife until it fades. He grumbles, and reaches in his pack for a light, shaking it a few hard times before it flickers on and illuminates the shape of a hallway in front of him, picked-through control panels with cut wires hanging around like black snakes. Swaying, long-dead of any electricity. The tail of a karumi slips around a distant corner with the skittering sound of talons, and Ben holds his breath. He’s practiced at slicing them open. Good meat in them, sometimes. But sometimes they catch you by the pinchers first, and they don’t let go, and you lose a kriffing arm.
He walks softly, then, the sound of his boots (more hole than boot at this point, stuffed with stolen greasecloth) muffled against the steel panels of the floor. But no other sounds come, and he allows himself to breathe out, before he rummages in his pack for a hand-crank drill and seals it against the wall. Here—here, the CC-A24 unit is almost singing to him through the wall. He can almost feel it, with that sixth sense he gets sometimes. He gets lucky.
The drill makes loud groaning noises as it spirals into the steel, and Ben grimaces and braces his shoulders against it and forces it through. The sound echoes up and around him until it sounds like there’s an army of Bens attacking the cruiser, though the battle this thing fell from the sky from is long over, already—won, lost?—none of the other scavengers really know for sure. There’s the Empire and the Republic, and those are names he’s heard before; he’s pretty sure Jakku is in the Republic, not positive. Not like he’d have a reason to care, anyway.
Eventually, the drill doesn’t meet any resistance, and Ben bends over to peer through the hole, adjusting the rough gloves on his hands. He lifts his goggles to get a closer look—
Another flick of a tail, and—
His instincts press into him, danger, danger, burned into him with scars and fear from the desert, and he pulls his knife just in time to gut the karumi before it sinks its beak into his nose; probably ripping off half his face with it, if it had gotten its wish.
“Kriffing…” Ben shakes it loose, grimacing as blood and gore slide off his knife, and the tiny furry body slumps to the floor. He releases a shaky breath, heart racing. “Kriffing…”
He closes his eyes, and opens them again. Almost died. That’s okay, now he’s got fresh meat. Not good meat (gamey) but better than eating boot leather like he’s done before.
He catches a glimpse of his own warped reflection in the steel walls as he fights to catch his breath—tall, too skinny, black hair cut off in choppy lines at his shoulders. Bones poking out at every inch of him, straining against his skin, and every year he grows taller and more like a skeleton, no matter how much he scrounges to eat.
He imagines his mother’s voice, sometimes: my sweet boy, and can she even recognize him like this? Will she even know him, when she comes back to rescue him?
He closes his eyes again and slumps against the wall.
No—she’ll know him, he can feel it. She’ll recognize him when she comes. Even if he can barely remember what she looks like, even if her face has melted into a kind white haze when he tries to pull her to the surface of his mind.
She’s coming back.
(Elsewhere, in the hull, there is a long, steel groan—a shudder—a wall panel comes crashing down with a shattering noise like thunder, breaking open the sky.)
—-
The desert is a hot, shriveling screech of motion under his speeder by the time that Ben makes his way to Niima Outpost, later in the day—the kind of hazy heat that will soon break for coolness, once the twilight comes. He’s almost too late.
Ben disembarks from his speeder (a salvaged thing he’d assembled himself with blood, cursing, and not a few frustrated outbursts that had required him to take the whole thing apart and rebuild it again three times—he is a perfectionist, he knows, an idiotic trait in the desert—) for Plutt’s scrapyard, readjusting the pack at his back. One of the straps is almost worn through, he’ll have to patch it with another. But for now, Plutt is waiting behind wire bars, ringed by shadows pouring down from the tattered bits of cloth that snap in the wind over his trailer. Ben luxuriates in the coolness for a moment, sighing, back aching from spending most of his day in a crouched position, hands red and scratched and picked with grease.
He rummages through his pack and sets down the CC-A24 and some other fuel cells and odds and ends. He waits, rocking back on his heels.
Plutt slides the CC-A24 carefully through a gap in his wire screen and turns it over in his hands. He’s a pink, bloblike creature; a real stingy cunt.
“One quarter portion,” he intones.
Ben spits. “Excuse me?” he says slowly.
“One quarter portion,” Plutt repeats, not showing a single twitch of a reaction. He slaps the pack down against the table and waits.
Ben glares at him. All day, he’d spent—at least worth three—that fat kriffing son of a bitch, he’s never had to starve and—
“Take it or go,” Plutt says, with his best approximation of a vile, root-stained grin.
(He’s only got about three teeth. Ben’s lost several, over the years.)
Ben grumbles and imagines a lightning bolt descending from the sky and frying Plutt alive, as he slaps his palm over the portion and drags it back. Nobody else has got food like Plutt, and he’s not anxious to go killing and stealing for it the way he had when he was a kid. But it doesn’t mean he can’t hate him for it, down to the marrow of his bones.
A being like that—Ben mutters under his breath all the way back to his speeder, kicking up the stand with a single sharp motion. Human bodies get you twenty portions. Someone like Plutt, all fat and fleshy—forty maybe, maybe fifty—
He sticks a fresh wad of root in his mouth and chews. It helps cool his temper, as he sputters the speeder up to speed and races back off into the desert, the dunes like shifting mountains he’s read about but never seen. He reads a lot in his spare time; keeps his mind sharp. Helps him dream about the places his mother might’ve been, where she is now. Somewhere beyond those pinpricks of stars, trickling between his fingertips, always running through.
—
He’s still clinging to the warm thoughts of her (he always will) when he reaches the hollowed-out freighter that serves for his home. An old Correllian build, good stock—he’s read the manual in the stripped cockpit many times. Plutt’s got one similar in his scrapyard that he keeps fueled up. This one has holes in several places that he’s patched with some hanging bits of cloth, shelves in the walls packed with whatever random shit he’s picked from wreckage that wouldn’t get him anything from Plutt:
Old Imperial propaganda posters;
Shattered comm links that sometimes pick up bits and pieces of transmissions from cargo ships in transit;
White-bucket stormtrooper armor;
Pilot helmets with yellow visors from the Rebellion;
He’s got a few books that he’s read over and over again—mostly instruction manuals from other downed ships—and a wall of scratch marks that he crouches and adds to before he eats his quarter portion, etching another day into the metal. Ben steps back and cranes his neck upward, heart dropping to his feet the way it always does when he studies the thousands of marks sprawling above him to meet the ceiling.
Every mark a day. Many of them spent alone, just him and the wind whistling through the holes of his broken ship.
His mother must be sad, wherever she is, Ben sometimes thinks. She must get tired of looking for him.
But he pushes the thoughts aside, his throat closing up, and heats up the portion pack on a burner until it bubbles and yields up a loaf of green bread. He eats slowly, chewing without much taste, so tired he keeps nodding forward, bobbing at the edge of sleep. And beneath his consciousness is a dark rush of sand, suffocating him, pulling him down into a warm—
A humming sound jolts him upright; he crams the rest of the portion into his mouth as he stands and draws his knife at his side, slowly creeping toward the flapping cloth that serves him for a door; he draws it back with the dull edge of the blade, blinking up at the sky.
There’s a black shadow rising up into the stars. Ben wouldn’t know what to make of it, or that strange noise it’s making—it’s quieter than any ship he’s ever heard—except for the dim lights flashing at the edges of its wings. It really is a ship. Ben’s heart leaps in his chest; he shouts and starts running, stumbling through the sand, because ships from the Republic mean medicine and food, and whoever gets to the food first gets to the best portions and can sell the rest to the others. He doesn’t know why one is landing so close to him, instead of at Niima Outpost, but he’s not about to complain at his good fortune.
(Lucky; he’s always been lucky. Good instincts, right place right time.)
“Hey!” Ben cups his hands around his mouth and shouts at the shadows, waving his arms. “Hey! C’mere!”
The shapes only continue to hover and hum, continuing to act un-ship-like as they turn and grow smaller and smaller in the sky. Ben stops to catch his breath, bending over his knees. Kriff. Just missed them—why were they here at night? he wonders. Humanitarian missions usually come in the middle of the day, when everyone is busy and the Republic agents won’t get mobbed.
He feels a twinge of disappointment that only melts into irritation, at the sound of a high, grating screech that shreds through the desert quiet as he stands there, digesting his annoyance; shifting his jaw as he slowly turns to regard whatever is making that awful kriffing noise.
The sound is mechanical—seems like it’s coming from a droid, though the screech is so oddly humanoid that it raises the hairs at the back of Ben’s neck and prompts a fumble for his knife. He stares into the shape of a lantern bobbing in the dark and captures other details that make more sense—an enormous muzzled luggabeast swaying the lantern back and forth, Teedo on its back.
Teedo. A scavenger the other scavengers whisper about; murderer, mercenary, he gets away with thieving when he can.
(He’s supposed to be something like a sheriff, keeping the desert peace. But who kriffing needs a sheriff on Jakku, besides everyone, all the time.)
(How fair can a lawman be, then?)
Teedo brandishes his hands and starts cursing at Ben in Kaur’ai. Something along the lines of, What are you looking at, sand rat.
“Can you tell that thing to stop screaming?” Ben shouts, over the sound of another mechanical whine. He grinds his teeth. “I’m trying to sleep, out here. And—what are you doing here, what was that ship?”
He stops in Teedo’s path before he can spur the luggabeast past, making Teedo throw his fists at him again like he’s boxing the air.
It’s no business of yours. Get out of my way, rat, or I’ll crush you.
Ben peers around the beast to the net that it’s dragging behind itself. It has a kind of spinning white-orange ball inside, shrieking to itself in Basic. Oh Hux-Master Hux-Master I am so very sorry and now you are dead!!! I have failed my mission prerogative, Kaydel-friend will be very upset,
“What’s it talking about, ‘Hux-Master’?” Ben says, frowning. He walks over to the thing, which shies away from him, its head bobbing away on its spherical body like it’s trembling. Poor little thing, Ben can’t help but think with a pang, despite everything. He kneels down to the droid’s viewport-level. “Where did you come from, buddy?”
Confidential, the droid beeps on cue.
“Oh, it’s confidential, huh?” Ben raises his eyebrows and rises back to standing. “Teedo, the poor thing is preprogrammed and scared out of its mind. I can’t imagine it would net you anything.”
Its parts will net me plenty, Teedo insists, anyway.
Before Ben can question his better judgement, he’s drawing his knife and sawing through the net so that the droid can roll out, slowly, bobbing its head in suspicion at him. Viewport camera flickering in and out, like it’s zooming in on his face.
“Ay!” Teedo barks.
“You’d better come with me, kid,” Ben says, peering down at his new companion. “He says he’s gonna scrap you for parts.”
I’ll rip you apart, rat—
But Ben cuts through him with his best mean-mug glare, showing his years in the desert. He’s killed with these eyes, he wants to show him; he’s punched out teeth and slashed up guts and did what he had to in order to survive when the water supply grew thin, and the eyes of the others grew hungrier, skimming his bones and calculating portions—no lawman intervened then, and none will intervene now.
He draws a few inches of steel knife from its leather sheath to show him more.
Teedo grumbles and seems to realize that it’s not worth the trouble. He promises Ben that he’ll be strung up dead, next time he meets him alone, and snaps the reins of his luggabeast. He lumbers very slowly away.
“Can you at least tell me your name?” Ben asks the droid, once they’re out of earshot.
I am BB-8. I belong to the Resistance, the droid chirps.
“Alright, I’m Ben. I don’t belong to anybody.” He nods and crouches down again to his knees, studying the droid’s odd white metal shell. The tiny antenna next to his camera-eye is a little bent. “Looks like something’s a little crooked, there—there,” Ben murmurs, adjusting it between his fingers. He straightens, smiling. “Better, huh?”
It is nominally more acceptable, BB-8 agrees. Do you possess a surname, Ben-human?
“I don’t know. Don’t think so.” He shrugs, then squints up at the sky; damn, no more ships. He’s walked away from what was supposed to be a windfall of food with nothing but one anxious rolling ball of nerves. “My mom might be able to tell you that, when she gets here. She’s gone, for now,” he says, squaring his shoulders, “But she’ll be back.”
His voice dwindles, but he nods, reassuring himself of this. Clearing his throat, and stepping away.
“Follow me, BB-8,” he says. “I don’t think you want to be out in the sand all night. The winds here can scrape the skin clean off a man’s face in a matter of hours. Probably ruin that shiny paint job of yours.”
BB-8 makes an agreeable sound. Ben risks a pat at his “head”; the thing really is kind of cute, upon closer inspection. It rolls at his feet, about the height of a dog, and seems to have calmed down some. In any case, it’s no longer screaming.
“Who’s Hux?” Ben asks the droid again, and gets that same answer from before:
Classified.
“Who’s Kaydel-friend?”
Classified,
“I’m trying to help you out here, buddy—”
Classified.
Ben sighs, and laughs out loud to himself, maybe for the first time in years.
“Force,” he says, blinking back some unexpected wetness in his eyes. “I haven’t had anyone to talk to out here, in…”
He doesn’t finish the phrase, because the rest of it would be that he hasn’t had anyone to talk with, ever. There’s a reason every scavenger carries a staff or a knife. But his mother isn’t a scavenger, he doesn’t think; when Ben daydreams of her, he imagines her as a pilot on a ship somewhere, scouring through every inch of space for him. Maybe streaking across the stars in an X-wing, flashing her wings before the flare of twin suns like in the legend-stories of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo.
He can fly, too—in theory. He’s read all the manuals.
They make their way back into the freighter, and Ben pats BB-8’s flat head one last time, to make sure he’s not dreaming.
“So this is it,” he says, gesturing at all of the helmets and knickknacks once they’re inside. “This is home, for now.”
He wrings his hands as BB-8 extends a blue laser and scans the marks on the wall. “I keep track of how many days it’s been, since…”
Ben trails away, as the memory pours through his mind and leaves him shaken:
(My sweet boy. Wait for me,)
(wait wait)
(wait mama i can’t)
The sound of engines picking up speed, the gray dot of her ship growing fainter in the broad blue sky. Back then, he had brief memories of staying with another family in a nice house with green plants, and then—and then there had been some shouting and a fire, and he was out on the street. That part was clearer; that part was hunger, and pain.
Ben draws away from the memories like they burn, sucking in a breath between his teeth. He rubs at the back of his neck.
“She’ll be back,” he says, and leaves it at that.