Archive of Our Own ^beta

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.

Chapter Text

Ben figures he might as well make some use of the droid as he rises and goes about his rounds the next morning, since it insists upon staying at his side.

“I don’t have any replacement parts for you, if you break any,” he insists to BB-8 for the third time as the droid rolls dolefully behind him. “I have nothing for you—I literally have nothing—Niima Outpost is that way,” he snaps, pointing a hard finger westward. “Travel there in a straight line twenty dune-lengths, make a right turn to avoid the Shifting Sea, and you’re there. If you feel any tremors, those are the maneaters. Stay still, they’re only worms, they won’t eat you unless you’re moving. You got all that?”

This is the eighth time he’s given that little speech, and still BB-8 follows him as he starts striding forward toward another wreck. He sighs, and slaps a palm to his forehead. Sure, the little droid is cute and was good company to start with, but he can’t care for it long-term. The other scavengers will target him, cause trouble. He can practically hear them now: Why should Ben keep such a bounty of parts to himself?

“You can get a transport to the city at Niima Outpost and take a ship to your Resistance friends off-planet,” Ben keeps going, glaring down at BB-8. “I have no money, so I can’t help you there.”

BB-8 only rolls along and cocks his viewport back at him, zooming in.

My facial recognition scanner finds your features familiar, he says.

“I’m sure we’ve never met.”

Ben’s tearing through one of the freighters that he regularly picks through, when he doesn’t feel like going on long journeys out to the star destroyers. Not bad, today—he’s already found some copper dimatrite wiring that was missed in the walls, which should fetch him a quarter-portion when combined with some other stuff. He coils the wiring into a loop between his elbow and his forearm and raises his eyebrows at BB-8 as the droid continues to study him.

“If you’re here, you might as well scan for anything else that might be valuable,” Ben says.

The wiring in your hand is worth two hundred and thirty-eight credits, BB-8 beeps.

“That means nothing to me. None of us use credits here,” Ben says blankly. “We trade in food portions.”

BB-8 makes a whirring noise that sounds suspiciously like a sigh, and sweeps over the hull of the freighter with his scanner, coating it in blue. 

I see nothing else of value, he concedes.

“Sure, thanks a lot.” Ben rolls his eyes and decides to call it a day early, walking out to secure the wiring to his speeder. There’s enough space in the back for BB-8 to fit if he’s lashed with a bit of rope—though he squirms quite a lot at first when Ben attempts it, calling it an affront to his dignity as a star-navigator—

(Ben wonders what fussy kind of owner he’d had before—a prince? Some pampered-rich Hutt?)

—but the droid settles when Ben threatens to leave him behind. 

“Alright,” he says, throwing his legs over the hunk of leather that serves for a seat. He peers over his shoulder at BB-8. “We’re going to Niima Outpost. Niima Outpost, where I’ve been talking about before, okay? Listen, kid, it’s been nice knowing ya,” he says, patting BB-8’s metal side. “Really, it has.”

BB-8 makes an affronted beep. 

“I have nothing to offer you, here,” Ben says then, and shifts his body back forward, biting into his lip. All he’s got is himself, and his hope. For so long, he’s had to make do. He can make do for however much longer it takes for his mother to get here.

They take off into the desert—prompting a squeak from the back—though it doesn’t take long for them to reach Plutt’s trailer again. Ten spare minutes of them melting under the sun, the sand searing past, Ben remembering a few seconds in to draw up his scarf and lower his goggles over his eyes. Then the world is a gritty blur, and then:

Niima Outpost, lifting his goggles to take in a few stares from passersby as he unties BB-8, whirring all kinds of loud huffy comments.

I am a star-navigator. I have served with… It is classified, but Hux-Master would not have stood for such—

“Then you could’ve gone by yourself, buddy.” Ben rolls his eyes, and picks up the copper wiring and his knapsack, swinging both onto his back. He starts walking to Plutt’s trailer, to the bits of cloth snapping to the wind, and registers the motion of BB-8 rolling at his heels. “Who knows,” Ben tells him, shrugging. “Maybe if we ask around, we can find your Hux-Master here.”

Hux-Master is dead, BB-8 says mournfully.

“We can still ask,” Ben insists, because he knows from experience not to trust that a person’s dead until you’ve taken a good hard look at the body. He’s been pronounced “dead” a number of times, himself. 

(That time another boy knifed him in the stomach and gave him his first scar—Ben had kept the long knife the boy had lodged in his skin, realizing he had nothing else of his own, and held on to it since;)

(That time he’d sweated under the sun for so long he’d started seizing, stopped breathing;)

(and then, determined, forced himself to start breathing again.)

(And again. And again. And again, until the pain hadn’t gone away from the knife-wound or the sun, but had faded enough for him to stomach.)

Ben also knows that it’s better to ask other people what they know, if given the chance. A person can only be so powerful until they ask for help.

He approaches Plutt’s counter first, though, and sets down his wire and some of the other gadgets he’d gathered. Plutt leans over, an unusual gleam passing over his eyes as he takes in the sight of BB-8, scanning him curiously.

“That’s a nice droid, scavenger,” Plutt intones. Then he shows Ben his back, and rummages around for so long that Ben starts to worry he’s about to pull a blaster on him, or sound an alarm—

“Sixty portions,” Plutt says, slapping down a mountain of packets.

Ben’s mouth falls open.

Sixty portions. That’s more than he’s ever seen—more than he eats in months. He didn’t even know Plutt kept that many on hand.

His hand shakes at his side as he looks down at BB-8, swiveling his head over to him. How well does he really know this droid, Ben wonders to himself. He’s fancy; says he’s a navigator, so he could belong to a Republic ship. He doesn’t want to mess with any of that, get involved with any soldiers.

“Sixty portions,” he whispers to himself, shaking his head.

BB-8 makes a low, keening beep.

Ben-friend, you cannot. Ben-friend, it is imperative that you cannot. You cannot leave me here, I must find Kaydel-friend and Holdo-general.

Ben-friend.

Ben-friend, I plead.

It’s stupid—he really shouldn’t—but Ben hesitates, warmed by the idea that he has… He has a friend. He’s never had one of those before, even in a droid.

He’s looking for his master. His master might be dead.

Ben looks up at Plutt and shakes his head, a lump rising in his throat.

“Sorry,” he manages, swallowing. “Sorry, just—just the copper wiring, and the other things, please. The droid’s mine.”

Plutt grunts. “Suit yourself.”

Ben holds his tongue as he sweeps aside the massive pile of portions and replaces it with a single packet.

“One quarter portion,” Plutt intones.

Ben takes it with a slight, painful nod. Oh, kriff. This is the most idiotic thing he’s ever done. The droid had better appreciate it.

He walks away, waving aside BB-8’s appreciative chirps. “Yeah, yeah. You’ll only have to thank me until the end of time—yeah, I know.” Trying to push down his smile as BB-8 does a spin, whisking up a whirl of sand and promising Ben-friend, Ben-friend, that he is thankful.

His first friend. Ben rearranges his scarf over his mouth to make himself big and faceless and intimidating, as he walks into Niima Outpost with the intent to haggle. Only took him most of his life and six months’ worth of food to get one, but there it is. Something good.

—

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…

Armitage jolts into consciousness like he’s been struck—maybe he has, he can feel an imprint of something sharp across his cheek—and gasps in air. 

He regrets it immediately, as agony radiates from every pain-center of his body—fuck, the probes, they’ve been sticking needles in him for hours and releasing tiny droplets of something that hurts like he’s standing in the hot searing asshole of a sun approaching supernova; but it’s nothing he hasn’t trained for, he reminds himself, trying to slow his breathing, still the blood-pumping race of his heart. Kaydel had warned him that this might happen when he’d joined up with the Resistance. Back then, he’d laughed.

What, you think a little thing like poison would break me?

He grins a bloody, slavering grin and strings out a laugh now. He’d been right, he’s unbroken. His eyes adjusting to the darkness; the room is perfectly black, save for a white strip of light circling around the mirrored tile floor, offering some clarity.

A shadow ripples at his back, whistling a tune. It wavers in the air around him, circling with the clatter of slow, deliberate steps. As if it’s hovering above him from the sky, a predator-bird extending its wings, cocking its head down—

Its hood—

Eighty-five thousand levels under the grass,

Under the trees, 

Under the breeze…

“What a cheerful song,” Kira Ren comments. “I’d never heard it before.”

She stops in his line of sight, yellow eyes sinking into him like teeth. 

“I’d suspected our torture wouldn’t work on you,” she says, and her voice is quiet and cold, a pool of ice. “You are an Intelligence officer, after all.” 

She bares her fangs in a smirk.

“Or rather,” she whispers, leaning in, (she smells horrible like rotting meat-flesh-blood,) “I’d hoped.”

Armitage doesn’t flinch away. 

He glares up at her, into that thing that resembles a face so much as an emotionless lump of clay resembles a face, and remembers the overseers in the mines with their whips. How helpless they’d been without them; in the end, only shriveling little men and women in crumpled uniforms. Hardly paid more than their dogs.

He bares his teeth right back.

“Screw…” He curls his hands into fists over the armrests that they’ve strapped him in—the leather creaks—“...you.”

Kira Ren stares at him for a long moment, her smile falling as he pants. Chest rising and falling, fuck-you he’s going to breathe even if it tears him kriffing apart.

She waves a hand behind herself, and the door (a door? Armitage registers faintly, to another black hallway?) slams shut.

“Alright,” she says softly. She starts pushing up the fingertips of her leather glove, one by one, and slides it off, revealing a slight, pale hand. It looks like a dead thing, pallid in the white light. 

She lays it across his forehead, clicking her tongue. Her touch is cold as death, too. He’d expected it; braced himself for it.

“Alright then, Captain Hux.” Her voice is low, almost soothing. She leans down and brushes a hair away from his forehead with her thumb. 

“I’ll make sure this hurts.”

There’s a clenching feeling, crawling inside his skull—Armitage clenches his jaw, but pretty soon the pressure mounts, and mounts, and his brains boil over with images of the fight and Lor San Tekka and BB-8, run away leave me, the datachips—

Armitage jerks his mouth open and screams.

—

Phasma stands before a transparisteel window with her hands behind her back at a state of Attention.

She studies the stars. She inhales and exhales and recycles air. 

She feels nothing. She feels nothing.

Her armorweave cape is a steady weight upon her shoulders, as is her black pauldron. Her armor, newly polished—her helmet, unstreaked with blood. She will face her execution, when it comes, with dignity, with pride—her soldiers (hers) must not see her tremble, they must be brave, they must live—

But they cannot live, she knows this, she knows this. Phasma closes her eyes and exhales, and she does feel, because she is weak. It has been impressed upon her since birth that she is expendable; that her brothers and sisters and crechê-lings are nothing, they are blasters, they are the First Order’s helmets and helmets don’t have eyes. They don’t ask what it’s like to kiss before a mission starts—

(she hadn’t cut FN-2888’s rations; never got around to it, she tells herself,)

—She forces her eyes open and burns the stars into them. Her heart jackhammering a tattoo in her chest. Beat beat beat.

(she feels, she feels, she feels—)

Phasma makes an abrupt right-face pivot on her heel and starts walking, breathing harder, skin lit up wick-hot with fire. Like an unpinned grenade, she’s a force of gravity and nature, now, her feet moving somewhere that her mind is hesitant to go.

If she leaves now, her soldiers might be spared.

She doesn’t have to die—she doesn’t want to die, she finds suddenly, hastening her steps, but she doesn’t want to live like this, either. She doesn’t want to be decommissioned at forty-five; to watch her cadets and soldiers face a firing squad for asking questions; to cut their rations and bark at them to shut up, be quiet, you are a blaster not a mind. And she is a soldier and she loves her soldiers more fiercely than she can imagine loving anything else, but a war in which kill them all is an option isn’t one that she thinks she can fight. That is the opposite of the war that she’s fighting.

Kill them all, kill them all—

She doesn’t realize where she is until she’s already there, hesitating, ramrod-straight. If she’s going to leave, she needs to be smart about it. Needs a pilot.

There’s only one pilot on the Finalizer—a Resurgent-class star destroyer with twenty-two decks, thirty thousand souls aboard; nine hundred guns port, nine hundred starboard, sixty forward, eighty-five aft, plus three total Long Guns (facts she’s forced her cadets to bark at her in punishment, when she couldn’t bear to dose them with pills like the handbooks recommended,)—that can help her, and he’s down the winding darkness of black mirrored hallway in front of her. He’s about to be transferred to the prison block; Phasma heard chirps on her comms from General Dameron that Lady Ren had taken all she needed from him.

“Ma’am.”

Sure enough, two troopers salute as she makes her approach. FN-9876 and FN-2837. Decent shock troops, each; quiet types. She nods at them.

“I’ve been asked by our Lady to escort the prisoner myself,” she says stiffly. “You are dismissed.”

If the troopers have any reservations about this, they’ve been beaten to a pulp enough times to keep them to themselves. 

“Carry on,” Phasma says, and they nod and depart. 

She approaches the door and sighs—muffled by the vocoder in her mask—as she swiftly undoes the straps of her gauntlet and frees her hand. She lays it against the scanner and doesn’t flinch as a needle extends and pricks into her third finger for blood; she is a Captain, and unsurprised when the door parts in front of her, bowing to her access, exposing yet more darkness and the quivering, shivering state of Armitage Hux.

Another Captain. Phasma wonders how that works, in his branch of the Republic’s military—First Order Intelligence officers are vile creatures. Most of them are integrated into her units to weed out those suspected of traitorous intent.

(General Dameron was once an Intelligence officer, she recalls from her studies; well-renowned for gaining the trust of his targets.)

(Well-renowned for dripping poison into their wine.)

“Here to kill me?” Hux croaks.

Phasma reaches over and works at his restraints, freeing his arms and legs. He looks terrible; a greasy slick of red hair stuck to his forehead, clammy, drenched in sweat like he’s just been dredged from the bottom of an ocean. Speaking with Lady Ren will do that to a person, Phasma supposes; at least, from what she’s seen so far. This is the closest she’ll ever get to her Lady in her military career, and she thinks it’s been more than close enough.

“I think I may have lost my mind,” Phasma says faintly.

“So you are going to kill me.”

He’s sitting up now, massaging his wrists. Staring at her with wide blue eyes, gaping like a gutted fish. Phasma sort of wants to bark at him like he’s an unwieldy cadet to shut it, you’re letting flies in. 

“I need a pilot,” she says in a rush, looking over her shoulder. “Quickly—quickly, I need to leave. We need to go now, before she comes back.”

“Are you even real?” Hux whispers, his eyes unfocusing. Blurring over, rubbing at his temple. “What—you’re trying to trick me, aren’t you. This is another dream, you’re going to kill me,” he gasps out, then, not moving, sitting bolt-straight, “You’re going to kill me—”

Phasma realizes, then, what part of the problem is: 

He’s staring at a mask.

He’s staring at her chromium armor and her armorweave cloak and he’s seeing her for the overwhelming force of military grit and power that she is, but he’s missing vital parts of her—new parts she has to expose, if she’s going to win his trust.

Phasma grits her teeth and lifts her helmet, jamming it under the crook of her arm in the Second Position of Attention as he continues to stare, scrambling to his feet, obviously searching around himself for some kind of weapon. He comes up blind, of course—his gaze pins to the sidearm at her hip, next to the concealed knives and her retractable chromium staff and grenades (things she should have surrendered to the armory after they took her F-11D, where they are currently counting the shots she didn’t make and Lady Ren is deciding,)

“We don’t have much time,” Phasma insists.

Hux’s lips slowly slip shut.

“Who are you?” he asks, mystified. Edging toward her, studying her face with slightly less apprehension. “Did we send you? Are you with us?”

“Please. I would never lower myself to the level of a spy,” Phasma snaps, rolling her eyes. “Foul line of work—Stick behind me, Captain,” she says, slipping her mask back over her face. “You’ll have to trust me on this, or Kira Ren will spend the next three days scraping out the contents of your skull. And then, only then, she will let you die.”

—

Armitage doesn’t find the idea of being tortured to death in such an exquisitely painful, brain-gurgling way to be very appealing—

(he’d felt biting soft muscle split lips, there are bloody nail marks in his palm, he can hardly drag himself forward another grating kriffing step down these endless snaking kriffing hallways,)

—so he allows himself to be dragged forward by the extremely tall blonde woman-soldier in binders (for appearance’s sake, she’d insisted; I’d have you dress like a stormtrooper, but you don’t remotely have the posture for it and there’s too much I’d have to teach you), wrists already chafed from straining against the torture-chair. His savior is a shiny silver color. Has a maroon cape and a pauldron. He’s not entirely convinced that she’s not dragging him to his execution; or Force forbid, her again.

Her. Armitage lets out an involuntary shudder. Her. His armpits are cold with sweat—he can’t breathe—

“I have to stop,” he gasps out.

“No you don’t,” says the giant muscled woman, grasping him by the binders and pulling him forward. He totters at her will, a slave to gravity. She moves him like he’s nothing—like he weighs less than a duura fruit she’s clutched in her palm, about to squeeze for the juices with those intimidating iron gauntlets.

(There’s a kind of mesmerizing, terrifying quality to her movements, like the spring mechanisms that move a blaster to fire—no action taken without forethought, executed without a hint of hesitation.)

“We cannot stop,” she says. Her voice has an edge of static from the vocoder in her mask. She nods to a group of stormtroopers marching by, holding up their blasters. “We stop and we die.”

Armitage cranes his neck in amazement as he follows the stormtrooper’s progress into an enormous hanger, stacked with ships like he’s never seen. There’s—thousands of soldiers in that beetle-bright armor; a kriffing army. 

“How big is this place?” he croaks to the woman, the spy-pilot in him curious, despite everything.

“Does it matter?” she says flatly.

“I… I mean.” He stumbles over flat ground, and rights himself. Feels like Ren slammed into the back of his head with a hammer; his inner-ear balance is all off and the binders constraining his hands aren’t helping. “What are you all… doing, here? Who are you?”

The woman snorts.

“We are the First Order,” she says, as if this name should be obvious. He swears under his breath as she leads him up what seems to be an endless row of black steps (he’s definitely going to fall and hurt himself, swaying like this, he’s a landship without a rudder set afloat on fucking Mon Calamari in the spring), “Our victory is inevitable.”

“Right,” Armitage says slowly. Then, he has to spend the next few minutes very carefully placing his feet in the correct positions so he doesn’t fall and crack his head open, though who the Force cares, he’s probably dead anyway. 

They’re in a hangar, though—that’s something. Armitage takes a moment to survey the various unfamiliar ships, struck by how odd and sleek they are; again, like those old holovids of the Empire, except everything’s got a layer of spit-polish and sharper wings.

“Is that a TIE-fighter?” Armitage says, squinting.

“There are only fifteen in this bay,” Phasma remarks (Only fifteen, Armitage’s mind shudders). “But do you think—”

She stills.

Huge and solid and immovable as a durasteel mountain as Armitage bumps into her, and startles back. Ow—he banged his nose, kriffing hurts. Even her muscles are like concrete.

“Captain Phasma,” calls a voice from below, and she reaches behind with her metal gauntlet and wrings his hand of all of its blood in one squeeze. Her fingers barely even twitch. “Captain Phasma, I must have a word with you.”

He follows the angle of her helmet down to the sight of a man that’s obviously important, based on the way the soldiers salute and part around him like the waves of a white-beetle sea; he’s dressed in a spotless military uniform with a black cape like something from a propaganda poster, and he even looks like an actor, like one that Kaydel might make a fuss over in her holo-soaps, Armitage thinks, dazed, all blood lost from his forearms-down, now, as Phasma’s steel grip clutches him tighter—the man’s got a strong jaw, curly brown hair, a wide charming smile that almost makes Armitage smile back despite everything, despite that he’s almost about to be dead.

“General Dameron,” Phasma mutters under her breath. “We’re caught.”

“Wha—”

Phasma doesn’t even bother to let him walk this time, only slings him up like a sleepy toddler onto her shoulder and starts off at a dead sprint. Her metal clinks against tile, a dozen Phasmas running at the same time at speeds Armitage doesn’t think should be biologically possible for a human even without the armor. It makes his stomach lurch; whee, delirious, he almost giggles—

A whirl and then he’s upside down (never been manhandled by a woman, kind of a sexual thrill—no, no, Hux, not the time or place, focus—) and he’s being strapped into a chair and shoved forward by an electric cable and his hands are in two grab-bar-like handles that aren’t letting them go.

He blinks. When did Phasma get the binders off?

Where is she, anyway?

He huffs out a breath that fucking hurts because everything is fucking agony forever and hears her over his shoulder, chucking her helmet to the side. Dual seats, back to back.

“Well?” she snaps, as he stares at her. Odd, seeing them as human beings behind the mask—she’s so human. He wonders how many he killed back at the village on Jakku.

“Well, what?” he says, stunned.

“Well, they’re mustering the…” Clearly not in the Imperial—First Order—whatever-the-fuck-this-is navy, she flings up her hands at a loss for words. “We have to go!” she seethes.

“You mean this isn’t a trick,” Armitage says, bewildered. What.

“Go, go—oh Force damn it,” Phasma grits out through her teeth, reaching up to flip some switches. None of them do anything, because they appear to be fuel gauges, but that doesn’t stop her from trying. “You’re supposed to be the kriffing pilot!”

“I’ve never flown a TIE-fighter before! Is this even… I don’t know what this is!” he sputters, flinging his hands at it, giving the switches in front of his console some experimental flicks. There—the lights flare to life, the engine starts up with a quiet purring noise that makes him shiver, in how silent it is. Doesn’t sound like a ship, like anything he’s ever heard. Doesn’t sound possible.

“It’s a ship!” Phasma’s snarling, “You fly ships—”

“I fly X-wings! And freighters, and luxury-class vessels, and—and—this is from the kriffing future, I’m not from the future, I’m from now—”

“Can you stop babbling like a cadet?”

Something hard slams into the side of the TIE-fighter, rattling the teeth in Armitage’s skull. Ow. Okay—they’ve got company, and apparently Phasma is friend, not foe, even if it doesn’t make any sense and he’s still fifty-fifty on that one with the squadron of stormtroopers kneeling in front of them on the attack. Sirens blaring, and Armitage decides that he shouldn’t think; it would be fucking stupid to think right now, with the blast doors starting to close the way to interstellar space in front of them—and yanks forward, hard, on the controls.

The TIE fighter shrieks forward at amazing, cheek-stretching speeds—

And stops. 

Yanked back by a cable securing it to the wall, Armitage notices through the camera displays, lighting up all around him—so much information, all at once. Does he really have to know his own heartrate, right now, right next to how many hours of oxygen are left? Seems like one would be more important than the other—whatever, keep moving, Phasma’s shouting something and he tries another aborted yank as blaster bolts continue to ricochet against their sides.

Force, this thing’s tough, too, Armitage realizes, impressed despite himself at the shields. Older TIE models never had those; kind of amazing. He’d like to shake hands with this ship’s evil architect someday and pick their brain if he isn’t about to die in the next point-two seconds, and he yanks, and this time the cable cracks off the wall and Armitage takes the second of confusion of it swinging through the crowds of shouting stormtroopers beneath him to check on the ship’s guns.

Good, good—okay. He breathes a sigh of relief. Not so complicated, right-panel shoot left-aim circle target sweep down—yes, this is his drug as a pilot. 

“You good with a blaster?” he shouts over at Phasma, who scowls back, because of course she is. She’s eight feet tall and dressed like one of the mining gods his mother used to light candles for that could blast their way through tunnels with their fists. Cape and fucking all.

“This isn’t that much harder,” he shouts, bracing his hands over the controls. Okay, now it’s clicking—he thinks he gets it. Bit of a learning curve, though, learning to fly a ship smarter than he is. “Right panel shoot, left aim, circle when you see the target, it’ll show up on the screen as a sweep-down when it’s in view—there, fire—”

“I’m not firing on my own troops!” Phasma argues, horrified.

“Fine, fine, let us die, then. I’ll do it—”

“Just get us out of here!”

“You sure you’re not here to arrest me?”

But Armitage rolls his eyes and applies full speed forward to the TIE fighter anyway, figuring the closing blast doors aren’t going to wait for them to take down a stormtrooper battalion before they’re locked inside to be tortured oh so very very slowly. Phasma had guessed three days; Ren had told him weeks—

(Eighty-five thousand levels under the grass,)

(Under the trees,)

(captain i like your song very much i like your mother your pain is honey wine)

He shakes his head, No no no, don’t think about her, don’t—don’t—there, scream out into the sky, he’s feeling better with the controls of a ship beneath him, and it looks kind of like a kid’s edgy sketch of what a TIE fighter would look like if they were cool while bored in pilot school (kind of like the ones littering his own notebooks), which is kind of thrilling.

They catch the lip of the blast door and grind out some sparks, but then they’re all the way through to open space. Armitage lets out a shaky laugh, wrenching one of his hands free of the controls; hadn’t been stuck at all, he’d just been too disoriented and terrified to pry his grip from them earlier. But now the adrenaline is kicking in, numbing everything else, and he’s ready to loop back around for the harder stuff.

“What are you—” Phasma chokes, as they return to the ship’s hull. Armitage starts in surprise; he’d suspected from the inside, but hadn’t been able to believe that it was true. The ship is at least the length of a star destroyer; star-destroyer-like in make and size and those turrets that are swiveling at them that will kill them before they have the chance to get out of their way.

“We’ll die before we make it a quarter-parsec out if we don’t take out those guns,” Armitage grits out in response, flicking the necessary switches to light up Phasma’s display. “You’ve got the guns on your end, come on, you’ll have to do it.”

“Me?” Phasma says, astonished. 

“Don’t think I can backflip over my seat anytime soon, so yeah, it’ll have to be you.”

“Can’t we just...” She makes a stupid flapping motion with her hands, “Fly away?”

“No, that would be—” Armitage scrambles for words, outraged; come on, kriffing basic cosmic battlefield literacy 101, Pilot School stuff: you don’t outrun a star destroyer’s long-range guns. The plasma beams they shoot are as twice as wide around as your vessel, probably, and extremely accurate with their targeting systems, and you won’t even know you’re dead until you’re dead.

“—suicide,” is all he says instead, “Come on just do it, just hit the red button on your controls!” he shouts, bringing her into range—the targeting system blares out a warning in a woman’s voice (sick, really cool, why the fuck doesn’t his X-wing have that):

“Target: in range,” the TIE-fighter blares, “Target: in range.”

“Come on, Phasma!”

Phasma presses down on her controls with a shudder that Armitage can feel through their connected seats, and with a bit of fancy flying on his part—some dips and rolls, if he does say so himself—one of the long guns attached to the bottom of the star destroyer like a barnacle (yes it is a star destroyer, he’s decided to accept it) goes up in a puff of flame and smoke.

“Force,” says Phasma.

Then:

She laughs.

It takes Armitage by surprise, swinging them down through a crack the size of a Coruscant Second-Level street avenue to try to find the second gun, which if this is a typical Star Destroyer, should be two of three and should be right—there, “Fire before they can get it running!” Armitage screams, “Fire fire fire they don’t know we’re here yet, but they’re scrambling—”

Phasma lets out a cackle louder than the guns as she fires again, and whoops.

“I should’ve been a pilot,” she says, dazed, an odd grin crawling across her face. “I feel…” She exhales, sharp and quick, “I feel I feel I feel!” she shouts, slamming her fist down against the chair. 

“Yeah, that’s great, I guess—kriff.” 

“The First Order… did horrible things to us!”

“Yeah, that’s great,” Armitage repeats slowly, biting into his lip (fuck hurts fuck), “I think they’ve scrambled.”

The third gun is turning toward them, enormous in its cannon-capacity. He swallows. It’s as big around as an apartment block.

How did the Republic not know about this? Where did they get the money to build this? Questions he’s not sure he wants answered, because the army’s here and she’s here and it’s already too late.

Another time; he’ll think about it another time.

“I’m glad they know,” Phasma is saying with relish. She leans back over her seat to meet Armitage’s eye, and beams. “I’m glad.”

And he corkscrews them upwards in a tight spiral, and the long gun tracks their movements and the dozens of close-range turrets open fire, and the stars blur into white streaks and—

They soar.

—

Kira Ren tears down the halls of the Finalizer in the wake of the sirens—too late, after the TIE’s already taken off, and her lightsaber is swinging at her side, limp and useless. Should’ve killed the spy, she thinks to herself, and her hatred is an oily-hot broil that scalds her with its potency in the Force; should’ve killed him, was taking too much enjoyment in tearing him apart.

Distractions—Snoke is always telling her how distracted she is, your mind is elsewhere, my apprentice—

You’ve felt it too, haven’t you?

Something is coming—

Something is here, and she draws her lightsaber anyway and singes a flaming line into a CG-99 cleaning unit that she passes just to delight in the sparks that fly. But her final reaction is flat; she has to sheath the dual blades in time to look as though she’s not in a panic by the time she finally reaches the bridge, and Dameron, standing there for once without that idiotic smirk on his face that he seems to find so charming in the mirror.

Why Snoke has decreed he is to be trusted, and to remain untouched, Kira will never understand.

Dameron is pacing the length of the bridge with the intensity of a rat trapped in a cage, barking orders—charge the eighth quadrant guns, fire, fire—and his scowl lengthens deeper upon seeing Kira there, observing the show.

“Who is it?” she asks, clipping her lightsaber back to her belt. Smoking—the way she likes it, hot enough to leave burns on her thigh that she’ll have to press a med droid into treating later. For now, the pain is prickly-sweet. “Who’s the traitor?”

But as soon as Dameron looks at her, glancing up from pinching the bridge of his nose, she knows.

“Damn it,” she snaps, stalking forward to spit it at him, “Damn you, I told you Phasma didn’t have the bones for it. Too close by half to those buckethead cadets, I said.”

“Lady Ren.” He tries on one of his genteel smiles that don’t reach his eyes, practiced from the high society balls of Coruscant. He was quite the rogue, according to the society papers—Kira wants to wipe his intestines off her boots. “If you hadn’t noticed, we’re in the middle of a firefight with your traitor, so if you wish to admonish me, I’d suggest waiting for—”

“Your traitor,” Kira hisses, “Yours. One of your own.”

One of Dameron’s soldiers has finally turned on the First Order without being killed—humiliating, catastrophic. Kira’s anger boils around her, boils her alive in the Dark Side, in the endless limitless searing lightning-power until it snaps up and seizes Dameron by the throat.

Can’t kill him. But she could—she could snap his neck, easier than breathing. Used to do it with fluffy squirming chicklets when Luke was too busy to watch,

(my daughter, something is wrong with her and i don’t know, i don’t)

(help me skywalker you’re my only—)

“For fuck’s sake, fire the ventral cannons already,” Kira hisses over her shoulder, consciousness overleaking into all of the corners and shadows of the room: lapping at the engineers’ fear, the green flicker of their doubts, they don’t understand and think she’s getting in the way. Kira lets Dameron go before his brain starts to hemorrhage and strides past his collapse to the ground. She’ll right this ship herself, if there’s anything left of it.

“Aye, ma’am,” the ballistics engineer nods, and gives the order. The two ventral cannons out of five that should be already charged (fucking Dameron) loose their white beams, and curve and follow the TIE fighter as it splits away from the hull to avoid the pursuit.

Good—never got the chance to fire at their port-side long gun. Kira gives the order to charge the gun and waits, bobbing back on her heels, flipping her cooling lightsaber at her side from its short length of silver chain and hardly realizing, as she stares through the transparisteel windows out into space.

Something down there, on Jakku—she feels it. A tugging behind her heart.

There has been an awakening in the Force.

Have you felt it?

She’s been waking up drenched in sweat, even now, on the verge of the First Order’s becoming. Kira is half-convinced she’s mad with it; imagining things, the way she sometimes had when she was a girl.

(i think there’s something wrong with her)

(luke there’s something wrong)

The desert planet looms beneath her feet, and Kira forces her Force-consciousness to fold back inside the confines of her body, dimming her perception beyond the blood thrumming hot at her fingertips, twitching at her sides.

She wants to kill something. Not Dameron, struggling up to breathe;

But if not Dameron, then who?

—

Armitage swerves out of the way of the third gun the second he sees a white light arcing towards them, tracking the TIE’s movements, oh kriff, fuck—it’s okay, that third gun looks really kriffing huge, maybe it takes a few minutes to charge up. Most long-range weapons that look like that do.

“What about the third gun?” Phasma shouts, grinning a madwoman and totally kriffing lost.

“Forget about the third gun!” Armitage yelps back. “We’re retreating! They’ve fired their ventral cannons!”

Should’ve known it wouldn’t take long for a military outfit like this to get up and running; he grits his teeth and shoves the controls down toward Jakku’s looming desert surface with as much strength as he can muster.

“Why are you taking us back to Jakku?” Phasma demands, clutching at the walls instead of her seat, knuckles white. Her face white, too—a little green. Apparently, she gets airsick. “You’re going the wrong way!”

“I have to go back!” Armitage insists. “Get that—”

Before he can even finish, Phasma’s gripped the controls again and shot the first trailing white streak of ventral cannon plasma head-on, before it can collide with the ship.

“Nice shot,” Armitage says, more than a little impressed.

Phasma makes a gagging noise. “I don’t think I like flying anymore,” she grumbles. Then, remembering again, swiveling in her seat as far as her neck can take: “We can’t go back to Jakku!” she yells. “We have to go—”

“I left my droid down there!” Armitage blurts.

“What?”

A second ventral cannon blast follows the first, the beam tracking them so close its radiation rattles the inside of the TIE like the ring of a gong, as Armitage makes an aborted stupid-looking loop-de-loop to avoid it. Luckily, this thing flies like a dream; seems to respond to his thoughts as soon as he nudges the controller, holy shit, he needs to stop freaking out over evil post-Imperial tech but it’s so cool how it—

Focus.

“He’s a BB unit?” Armitage shouts, as he brings them closer to the surface, and Phasma swears. Loudly, awkwardly, like she’s not used to it. “He’s a sphere, and he’s got an orange and white kalorium-steel alloy shell? I left him on Jakku, and I have to go back for him!”

“But he’s a droid?” Phasma exclaims, like she still isn’t understanding this.

“Yes, he’s a droid, and he’s my friend!”

“You’re going to get us both killed over a kriffing droid?!”

“In the Resistance, we don’t leave anyone behind!” Armitage insists, jerking them both to the side and righting them again—the white beam splits into two, momentarily confused, and then coalesces back into one. “He’s got the map to Luke Skywalker!” he blurts then, because he might as well confess some things, if they’re dying here they’re dying together. Just him and this giant concrete statue of a woman. I stole my father’s razor for a week to see what he’d look like with a beard. I found out today that I’m very attracted to muscular women throwing me around like I’m three feet tall,

“Luke Skywalker is a myth!” Phasma shouts back, like he’s an idiot, and—

Something hard slams into the ship, tearing through the port wing—ripping it apart, actually, and their descent into Jakku’s orbit becomes more like a plummet, tumbling through space upside-down-sideways until nothing matters and Armitage thinks he gets some of Phasma’s vomit on him as she heaves and lets loose. He can’t exactly blame her. He’d be vomiting, too, if he wasn’t used to this kind of thing.

What a life he leads, nowadays.

The sand and blue sky runs together into one long jumble and Armitage isn’t sure which one they crash into when they crash, but when they do—

—

“Estimated impact in the Goazon Badlands, sir,” one of the engineers says, looking up from her monitor.

General Poe Dameron stumbles his way up from recovering in a chair (fetched for him quietly by an assistant, hoping in vain to avoid Ren’s detection) to his feet, rubbing at his neck. He wheezes out a breath, flicks his tongue across cracked lips.

“Send a squadron,” he rasps. Proud at himself for the words, for standing, for straightening his spine. Father’s voice snapping in his ears, You are a Dameron, stand up straight. The Lady Ren watching the guns fire through the transparisteel windows, a crawling black shadow swallowing up the stars in her wake.

“They’re after the droid,” she says. She doesn’t look at him; she’s used him and discarded him and thrown him away for her pleasure. Poe rubs at his throat, dizzy with it. Lady Ren is like the core of a star, compressed into the shadow of one slight human being; uncontainable, awe-inspiring, he can’t look away. The stuff of spinning galaxies, of legends.

He hates her more than he thinks he’s hated anything else living—his hatred burns in him now, lights up his veins like the hard stims he’d injected this morning to keep him standing after forty-eight hours awake of meetings and drill and speech-writing. His gums are starting to bleed, or maybe that’s from how often he’s been biting into his tongue.

But he cannot look away from her—for all he tries, he cannot look away.

“Do you…” He wets his lips again, as he turns to his engineer. (Taste like copper like blood.) “Do you think they survived the fall?”

“It’s not likely,” she says hesitantly.

“They did,” Lady Ren says, and he believes her. He stays perfectly still as she turns to him. Don’t move; feral yellow eyes flickering with excitement, without a trace of doubt, don’t move. “They did.”

Chapter Text

Inside the engine room of the Finalizer is a nightmare, taking shape:

Sawed wires cut-kill, if she can’t kill Dameron, Kira Ren will kill what she can reach from the frustratingly short lengths of her saber; her rage simmers and overwhelms her, she is suffocated and enlightened by the Dark Side ripping its claws through her body rending past her flesh into the hallway where the lights flicker and—die, die, and she screams and buries her scarlet blade into one console and then another and shreds through wires and blurring whirring red flashing lines, kill them all;

Kill them all, kill them all,

The droid has escaped, with the traitor and a scavenger boy scrounged from the surface of Jakku (though the boy is less important, beneath her notice; she is sure he will die with his throat cut without their ever meeting). Two TIE-fighters are decommissioned, and the tugging behind her heart is more insistent than ever.

There has been an awakening.

Have you felt it?

Kira straightens, panting, pressing the button that retracts the dual blades frothing with scarlet light at her side. She folds the sheath in half, swings it from the length of its silver chain. 

She must consult with her master, she decides, straightening her spine. Snoke will know what to do with this. She dislikes coming to him to advice—their encounters so often turn into lectures like a kind of slow, agonizing torture of words—but.

She looks around herself, at the sparking cables and searing lines of plasma burned into the temperature regulation controls. Perhaps a cool talk would be better than this. 

She doesn’t understand herself, lately; she’s unbalanced,

(I think there’s something wrong with her,)

There is something off with the Force. A new presence. In times like these, Kira Ren closes her eyes and meditates, and in the cooling of her pounding heart she tries to search for the voice of her grandfather.

Emperor.

Sidious, the Sith that killed them all; every trace of the Jedi expunged from the darkest corners of the galaxy until only faded remnants remained. And then he’d raised the greatest Empire the galaxy had ever seen—and now, in its shadow, she raises the First Order.

Grandfather, you will be answered.

Speak to me.

But Grandfather is as silent and elusive as always; a distant point upon which Kira fixes her hopes, and her fears, and her dreams.

(Yes, even the Sith dream.)

(And what Kira dreams will always haunt her, before she wakes.)

—

This is what Kira Ren dreams:

There’s something wrong with my girl, her mother says. Kira is listening in from another room, though she’s small and her name wasn’t Kira then. Her mother is pouring Luke Skywalker a cup of tea.

There’s something wrong, she says, and then she keeps smiling and laughing, and Kira steps into the room to shout at them and tell them they’re wrong, they’re mad, but they keep laughing and laughing and don’t react, even as the room starts shaking and the decorative plates fall from the counter and a fire tears through the windows to burn through the kitchen wallpaper with its river lilies and waterbirds, flesh sloughing from Luke’s cheeks—

I love you, Mother insists a moment later. She’s resisting the flames, she’s all in white. I love you I love you I love you, oh please my darling wake up, 

(Luke is crying, there are tears pooling in the empty sockets of his eyes, running all over his face)

Please come back to me, it is not too late, Mother calls, smiling at her, swiping a fallen lock of hair from her daughter’s cheek—a strip of skin and muscle comes with it, it dangles from Mother’s long nails and melts and drips hot red lines of blood—it is not too late it is NEVER too late for you, my girl, I love you. There is nothing in this reality that can’t be fixed.

When Kira Ren wakes, she reaches for her saber. She is fine, she is perfect, Snoke has always insisted; she is perfect, she is perfect—

She cuts through another engine room, and walks out with her robes tattered, holes sizzling through the black armorweave of her cape like a charred, floating piece of intergalactic space.

(By the door, a trooper loses his head.)

(Phasma would know him as FN-2888.)

—

Phasma is a soldier. 

She is a warrior, she is a tactician; what she is not is well-versed on how she’s supposed to comport herself when she’s not carrying any weapons. So the first thing she does, after the boy wrenches them past danger into space, is go to find one.

There are aimless piles of stuff around the ship: evidently, the junkyard owner hadn’t let the scavengers get to all of it, but most of it is covered in thick layers of dust and mildew that make Phasma pick up a gas mask she finds hanging by the gangway—how convenient, almost like they’ve been regularly used before (cementing her suspicions that there are dangerous toxins crowding around them, shoving into her lungs on this rust-bucket death-trap that dares to call itself a ship)—

(First Order ships are graceful, humming creatures.)

(They are angels. Their beams are promises of rescue, shot down from the sky. A relief, to hear it; a terror, to see it retreat.)

(Pilots, on the other hand, have always been insufferable.)

But Phasma is a soldier, and soldiers make do. She inhales mold and is rewarded through her searching through what appears to be an enormous pile of stinking socks with a pair of expired bacta packs. She shakes and presses one against her face and sighs in relief, as her scorched skin starts to feel some relief, microbes knitting her flesh back together.

She glances back toward the cockpit—the boy. It’s only been an hour since he laid a knife against his throat. She finds another rusted knife at the bottom of the sock-pile and grimaces, but slips it into the pockets of Hux’s jacket anyway, because it’s better than nothing if he ever decides he wants to cut her throat again.

(He might. The First Order is not popular,)

(She was not even popular in the First Order, she did awful things—he would be well within his right,)

It doesn’t matter. Phasma pats at the bulge in her pocket and rises, and goes to form a plan of attack. Here is how she will approach their shared future, she decides, making a mental checklist as she marches back over to the boy and opens her mouth:

1. She questions him first on why he lied about not being a pilot. (He lies, again. His eyes are dark and guileless and he stutters, That was the first time I ever… never in my life…)

2. She shames him for lying; (his mouth slips shut without argument)

3. She thinks for a long moment, because one must always think before they speak instead of flapping their mouths like gundark puppies nipping at a tit, 

4. She conceals the truth again, when he, damn scavenger, scrounges that second to think for himself and ask her a maddeningly appropriate question, too:

“You never answered me, before,” he says. Ben’s face is odd; long and angular, tanned and stretched tight as leather. Black oilspill of hair cut choppy over his ears, greasy with frustrated speckles of acne. How old is he, really? “Who are you?” he asks, his lips thinning as he poses the question like an unfurled shock baton. Gaze falling to the patches on Hux’s jacket.

“I have told you,” Phasma starts, without much patience (in her high position, every trooper saluting her already must know).

“I know your name,” he says with some exasperation, “But—”

He’s interrupted by a harsh, shrill beep, and every light in the freighter slowly dimming into darkness.

They’re plunged into blackness. Phasma’s breaths come shorter—her heart flutters, and out of the corner of her eye, is that a flash of—

(how could she be here, how could her eyes)

The auxiliary power kicks in what feels like an eternity later, floor lights quietly seeping up strains of red at their heels. Phasma thinks about the ship bleeding as Ben rises from the captain’s chair with a lurch and starts running, BB-8 following in a fast-rolling ball at her heels. Damn droid.

“What are you—” Can everything kriffing stop for even a moment? Ever since she’s met Captain Hux she hasn’t had a minute to think without being inexcusably interrupted, she’s not used to demanding the attention of her inferiors all the time—

Their boots clatter against grates, Ben’s ratty patched things far more softly than hers. She can practically see his toes poking through the soles. “I think it’s the overhead compressor,” he throws over his shoulder. They stop in one of the rooms of piled stuff in boxes, and—Ben’s eyes gleam for a minute, running over them—but then he shakes his head, and bends down, and curls his fingers into grooves of a man-sized grate, raising it and setting it aside.

“We’ll need tools,” Ben says. No sooner has he said it than he immediately seems to spot a toolbox, dangled precariously over a stack of crates. Lucky boy; Phasma hadn’t even noticed. He snags it and tosses it beside him and contorts his body until he’s disappeared down where the grate had been into the floor, and his entire slim, lanky bulk disappears.

Phasma cranes her neck downward and catches glimpses of hissing machinery and belches of smoke. The boy works quickly, black head bobbing up a second later to scrape the box toward him and dig for various patching objects.

“I need…” His face screws up, as he starts thinking again (never ends well for her, it seems, when he does;)

“What we need is to get to hyperspace,” Phasma says flatly. “Before they find us again.”

(They will, if they linger. She has no doubt that General Dameron will burn every corner of this sector until they are turned out;)

(she thinks of the rats that used to crawl through the brig of the Finalizer drawn up by their tails, she thinks of General Dameron’s easy smile as he plans routes of attack that burn and burn through planets until nothing is left. He cracks nuts and chews and swallows and scatters the debris across the table. When he wants to describe the enemy’s position, he moves the debris around to illustrate, then smashes each broken shell with his fist.)

(Kill them all.)

She shudders.

“What do you think I’m trying to do?” the boy protests. His nose wrinkling up, until he seems to find the tool he’s rummaging for with a beam of surprise; then he pokes his head under again, and she hears grinding and rattling and a spat of curses. 

“I’m used to taking these kriffing things apart,” he spits. “This ship is trying to eat itself alive, the fuel’s leaking all over the place… Fucking karumis, biting holes in the tanks…”

He disappears with a smaller wrench, then, for so long that Phasma starts to grow bored, and sits on the grates beside him, cross-legged. She’s waited longer stretches, of course; battle is mostly waiting. But it’s worse when she’s no longer in battle, and the anxiety lingers like a wet, clinging shroud. Scraping under her skin; her cheeks are no longer raw. She sets the bacta packs aside.

She’s startled by a sudden wash of blue that burns her retinas as BB-8 scans her, camera lens cocked back in doubt.

“What are you hoping to find?” she asks the droid sharply.

“You’re with the Resistance, aren’t you?” the boy interrupts, then, triggered by the sound of her voice; head popping up like a rodent, again, and Phasma is startled twice, which is not an easy thing for her to stomach.

He cocks his head to the side, dark eyes calculating. “You knew those soldiers,” he says, “And you knew BB-8’s master.”

Phasma says nothing for a while, palms clammy with sweat. She is terrible at lying. She cannot lie—but then again, she’s been lying to herself for years, so—

“Yes,” she lies stiffly. She looks down to make sure the First Order insignia sewn into her shirt is covered, readjusting the jacket around her shoulders. It’s too tight; it was a bit big on Hux, she remembers with a shake of her head. Force help that man, swallowed by the desert, the kriffing fool.

“Great. Good.” The boy’s throat bobs, as he nods; he casts his gaze aside. “So you can trust her, BB-8. She can bring you back to your friends.”

Does she detect a note of disappointment, there? 

Where are you going, Ben-friend? BB-8 whirs, with a suspiciously humanoid bend of his viewport.

The boy rolls his shoulders in a shrug. “I have to get back to Jakku.”

Phasma throws up her hands, exasperated beyond belief. “Why, in the name of the good Force, does everyone want to go back to Jakku?”

“That’s my business,” The boy starts—and then ducks back down again, as a shrill beeping alarm starts to sound. “Ah, kriff.” His voice echoes in a flat line beneath her, bending into a monotone. “I need the bonding tape—now, NOW, Phasma, fetch it over!”

“I’m not your servant,” she protests—

Ben pokes his black eyes up with a glare. “I wouldn’t ask for help if I didn’t need it. I need… Come on, the ship is about to fill up with poisonous gas and we will die, if I don’t patch up these exhaust cylinders—”

Phasma searches through the toolbox with an angry clatter and tosses it over so that it skitters across the grate with dramatic, angry thunks. The boy glowers back and seizes it with one hand, then immediately disappears—with a belch of purple smoke, the alarm silences itself.

He pops back up again. Always. She kind of wants to kick him back into that hole like a Geonosian sand-gopher with her boot.

“Where are we going, then?” he asks her, raising his eyebrows.

“What do you mean?”

“Where do we take BB-8?” He waves the tape around with one hand, punctuating his point. “I’m assuming there’s a Resistance base, or something, that he belongs to.”

“Of course there is.” Phasma rounds on the droid, bracing her hands on her hips. BB-8 stares back through his camera-eye, not at all intimidated (She’s made grown men crumble into tears, under less pressure—if she had her helmet on right now, this might have gone differently). “It’s… Why don’t you tell him where we both know it is,” she demands.

The droid looks at Ben, and then at her. Then at Ben, and then at her.

The location is classified, BB-8 beeps. Only members of the Resistance must know. It is against my prerogative to reveal to Ben-friend—

“Then why don’t you tell me, Phasma?”

Yes—what a brilliant kriffing question. Phasma bares her teeth in a motion that she hopes resembles a smile and scrambles for answers that she doesn’t have. 

“Let me think,” she says. “I’m tired.”

The boy rolls his eyes and calls for a thing from the toolbox lying at her feet—no, not that one, not that one, of course I didn’t mean that one, and she throws the speculating adjustor he’s been asking for at him with a trajectory she calculates perfectly to hit his nose.

Because the boy possesses an infuriating amount of luck, he catches it instead and nods his thanks. He disappears beneath the floor.

BB-8 stutters, and starts to beep. Phasma-human, an analysis of your body language reveals that you are lying. Interrogative: why.

Phasma lowers a hand over his flat kalorium-steel viewport, wishing that the kriffing thing had a mouth she could shut up. But it doesn’t, so she rolls her eyes, and has no other option but to bend down to the thing’s level, poke a glare over her shoulder at Ben, and roll out what she has to say in a wavering hiss, volume-controlled between her teeth:

“Alright, droid, I’m going to level with you,” she says quickly, with great speed, a mission brief spat out like they’re about to crest a hill of blaster bolts from an entrenched position (because the boy can fly and she cannot, damn it, so this is his ship and she cannot mutiny, and in many respects she is, in other words, stuck)— “I’m not with the Resistance, alright?”

BB-8 reels back. So you really are Hux-Master MURDERER—

“No no no!” 

She frantically waves her hands before he can whine any louder. Ben’s forehead doesn’t appear above the tiles, thank Force. “I wasn’t lying about that, I promise; your master did down his ship in the desert, and he gave this jacket to me. He told me about you, remember?” Stringing together scraps of the truth is the easiest kind of lie, she finds; and BB-8 slowly retracts a taser back into his shell. “Your master saved me, okay?” she hisses, tongue sour with the truth, “I’m escaping from the First Order.”

You are with the First Order—

“Stop repeating it, I was,” Phasma warns, glancing over her shoulder. “Nobody else can know. They’ll find me and they’ll kill me for deserting, and it’ll be a slow, agonizing kind of death.” Even worse, she knows exactly who will be delivering it. “All I want is to escape, alright? Let’s… make a deal.” She switches tracks, thinking that this is a droid she’s talking to, not an emotional humanoid, and she’d better appeal to raw logic.

She jabs a finger at his viewport. “You tell us where that Resistance base is, and I’ll get you there. Then you can live out your days in your happy corner of the galaxy, and I’ll find mine somewhere far, far away. Alright?”

A clatter at her back, and she startles, at the sight of Ben frowning up at her. Hoisting himself up to his feet, kriff, he’s done, and throwing tools back into the box without much tact or care.

“Come on, Phas—just tell me where we’re going,” he pleads, tossing down a wrench. “We won’t get away from them if we’re aimlessly flying in circles,” he complains.

“‘Phas’?” Phasma says blankly.

(oh teenage boys and their whining, she hadn’t missed it—)

BB-8 makes a sound like a snort. Acceptable terms met, Phas-human. We must go to the Ilee—

“The Ileenium System, yes, exactly what I was about to explain!” Phasma interrupts loudly, talking over BB-8 with a nod. 

(BB-8 replicates a rude human gesture by extending a lighter from its shell like a raised middle finger.)

“Well, I suppose I could drop you off there before I go back,” is Ben’s bewildered reply, looking between them, now, with his eyebrows raised. “BB-8, what do you mean, ‘acceptable terms’?”

“It’s nothing,” Phasma laughs, quickly. A forced, high sound. She glances away, changes the subject: “You can’t be serious, heading back to that poodoo junkpile of a planet. You have a ship,” she rushes on, then, because his stubbornness is really getting under her skin, for some reason, “You can go anywhere in the galaxy that you want—”

And then she stops, dazed at the idea, herself.

She looks at BB-8, the only other being in the room that might understand her predicament; she can go anywhere she wants. But there’s a whole galaxy, and she’s not an army anymore, she’s alone, and—and she’s frightened by the image of that, all of a sudden.

So much galaxy, and she’s only one lone soldier.

(Kill them all.)

(Kill them here, kill them now, this is who you are you listen you do not know anything else but.)

She watches the boy shift his jaw. The junkpile is all he knows, she realizes suddenly; and she knows from experience what sweet enticing agony it is to wait out a nightmare. How appealing it can be to close your eyes and turn back, instead of walking forward.

“Are you waiting for someone, back there?” she asks. To help you, she almost adds, but holds it behind her tongue for another time.

He jerks his head to the side in a barely perceptible nod. And Phasma rises to her feet, away from the droid giving her unsubtle “winks” by zooming its camera in and out of its viewport (at least, she assumes that’s the intention, there), and realizes that the boy isn’t her problem to fix. He’s got to realize, someday, that he’s got to help himself.

If she’d done it—

(He can, too. Maybe.)

(Maybe anyone can.)