Chapter Text
The holovid opened on Finn, standing straight in the middle of the frame, posture perfect. He was wearing an old Rebellion flight jacket, and heavy boots; he looked sturdy and capable and collected.
“I’m Finn,” he said. “I’ve had that name for about a month now. Before that I was designated FN-2817, and I served the First Order, as I had done since before I could remember. I was a Stormtrooper, and I served under Captain Phasma.”
He gestured with one hand, a small gesture, turning his hand palm-up as if presenting himself. “Clearly,” he said, “you can see, I’m not a Stormtrooper now. And in case you were wondering, this is what a lot of us look like under our armor. We’re all different types of people. All that I know of are human. Only some of us remember a life before being Stormtroopers. Most of us don’t. We were taken, and some of us don’t even remember that.” He shook his head slightly. “I know I was about two, I know I’m twenty-three years old now, but I don’t know if anything I remember from that long ago is true.”
He put his hands on his hips. “So what that says is that the First Order has been collecting Stormtroopers for at least twenty-one years. I know there’s debate on this topic. It’s one of few things I know better than anyone else. I was collected expressly to be a Stormtrooper, and they spent a very long time on my education and training. But in all that education, I never really talked to anyone who wasn’t in the First Order.”
He looked down for a moment, then looked up, straight into the camera. “They taught us a lot of things,” he said. “But the first time I was in battle, and faced what that training meant-- they said, if a comrade falls, leave him and move on. They said, if an officer tells you to do something, do it without hesitation, even if it kills you. I was prepared, but when my officers told me to slaughter a group of civilians who had surrendered their weapons, and were huddled together with their children in their arms, I did not know then how to obey that order. Obeying orders was all that I knew, but there was something else inside me, something they hadn’t taught me. And that something else told me, do not fire on those children. Try to save your fallen comrade. This is wrong .”
He breathed in slowly, then let it out, settling his arms back down by his sides. “So I didn’t fire on the civilians,” he said. “I knew I would be subject to discipline, knew I would be-- reconditioned, is what they call it, and it involves those interrogation droids. Just so it’s clear. You think the blank white armor is something we volunteer for? None of us has any notion of choice. I was half-convinced something in my brain had broken, half-convinced I needed to surrender myself for recalibration. But this thing inside me, it said clearly, no. What they want is wrong .”
He shrugged. “As it happened, we had captured a pilot, who was affiliated with the Resistance. I was set to guard him, and I took the opportunity this presented. I escaped with him, and fled to the Resistance. And here I am, now. And I will do everything in my power to tear down the First Order.”
He leaned in to the camera. “Look at me,” he said, face serious and eyes lively. “Look at my face. Look at my eyes. I am a man. I am a person. I am a human. I did not choose to join the First Order. I made no choices until I chose to leave them. I did not know that such a thing existed as free will. But that does not make me less of a human.”
He put his hand on his chest. “The more I learn, the more I know that there is injustice all across this galaxy. Stormtroopers are only one group of people who are enslaved. But we are enslaved in our minds as well as our bodies. I will never forget how it felt not to understand the idea of choosing something. I thought I was broken, I thought I was dying from the inside.”
He grinned suddenly, fierce. “But I didn’t,” he said. “I broke the conditioning, and I got out of there. If I fight now, it’s for my beliefs.”
___________
Luke Skywalker was really not what Rey had expected. That was the main lesson of all of this, so far. She’d learned many things, at his side these last few weeks-- months?-- but that was the main, overarching theme: Luke Skywalker was not really what anyone would expect.
“Well,” he said, hanging grimly onto the copilot controls for the Falcon, “I really thought that would work.”
“Seems not to have,” she said, doing her best to keep the thing on a reasonable heading.
“We may only have one choice left,” he said.
“Don’t be dramatic,” she said. “Just-- whatever you do-- don’t.” Besides Luke’s direct teachings, she’d had sudden access to a lot of educational materials, and she knew plenty about his family history now, thank you very much.
He gave her a startled look, and Chewie howled with laughter; Rey was getting better at interpreting Shriywook, with practice. Being able to use her new awareness to sort of lightly scan his intentions made it much easier, of course.
“Fine,” Luke said, with a glimmer of amusement, “I won’t be dramatic. Just, we should probably find somewhere to land.”
“Great,” Rey said. “Where are we?”
Near a jungle planet, as it happened. The first few times Rey had experienced vastly different ecosystems from the Jakku desert, they had been miracles to her-- she’d stood for an hour in one planet’s beautiful, gentle soaking rain, the first time she’d had time to really see it, and had just marveled at it, at how different it was from the destructive force of rain in the desert, until R2 had come out beeping in disgruntlement and hauled her back inside to dry off-- but at this point she was sort of inured to miracles. They all blended together.
“I know better than anyone to look for a solid place to land on a swamp planet,” Skywalker muttered, and made her keep flying for ages even as the stabilizer juddered looser and looser.
They finally set down on a plateau overlooking a jungle, and set up camp, and Rey dragged her tools out and she and Chewie went to work on the repairs.
She’d sort of expected they’d follow the star chart, find Skywalker, and go back to wherever the Resistance had relocated to, and that would be that. She’d figured there might be some adventure along the way, just because nothing was ever boring anymore. She really hadn’t expected that Skywalker would make them fly him all over the place on a strange, poorly-explained, mission of reconnection. He had to see various people in a specific order, and it was something to do with the remnants of the Jedi and securing alliances, and it was all very significant she was sure but she wasn’t really in on it.
In between, she’d learned all kinds of wonderful things from Skywalker and some strategic holovids that actually, she was pretty sure Chewie had found and loaded onto R2 for her (they were too strategically-conveniently relevant to have been a random selection), and their ragtag little crew had definitely helped in crucial ways with the struggle of various key communities to adapt to the loss of the seat of the Republic’s governance and the abrupt shift of the First Order from rumor into defined threat. Sure.
But she couldn’t stop worrying about Finn, and wanted to get back and see what had happened with him. She missed him, she found herself constantly wondering what he would think about things she encountered, and she was always aware of a kind of itch in her awareness that was nothing so much as a hunger to talk to him.
Her waking mind kept coming back to the looming figure in black with the red light saber, as well— that pale long face, his broken-little-boy rage, his stymied and baffled power, the enormous looming sense of him. And she tried to clear her mind, but it kept coming back to him. And Skywalker resolutely refused to say anything about it.
It took a day and a half to even disassemble the broken component. Skywalker helped sometimes, meditated at other times, and interrogated R2 and Chewie at great length about all kinds of things at still other times. Rey mostly could lose herself in the work, and the novelty of having a knowledgeable companion (Chewie) who wasn’t trying to outcompete her to get the best components. But in the evenings, when the light failed and there was nothing to do, she had time to be bored and disgruntled.
She had abandoned her post, on Jakku, and for what? For whatever this was, and it was mostly a different kind of bored isolation. Luke kept insisting he wasn’t any kind of teacher or master or whatever, he was willing to show her things but he wasn’t any kind of formal anything, and she was learning stuff from him but she wanted-- more.
She finished eating and went and lay on the big flat rock, looking up at the stars. After a while, Skywalker came over to join her. “Nice view here,” he said.
She pointed up at one star that was moving. It wasn’t a meteor. “Is that a spacecraft?”
Luke craned his neck to get her angle. “One way to be sure,” he said, “is to try and sense the life force of whoever’s on it.”
Rey stretched out to it, waiting for the moment when she found it, but there was nothing. “It must be a satellite?” she said.
Luke frowned. “It doesn’t look like one,” he said. “It’s-- look, it just fired a burner to establish orbit. It wasn’t there before. Someone’s flying it.”
“I swear to you,” Rey said, “there is no one alive on that ship.”
Luke sat up. “You’re absolutely right,” he said. “There’s no one alive there, but someone’s flying it.”
Rey sat up too. “Can we hail it?”
“Might ought to,” Luke said, as the ship’s bright dot vanished over the horizon, now orbiting the planet.
The Falcon’s instruments showed them the ship. “Why, it’s an X-Wing,” Rey said.
“T-70,” Chewie commented. “Resistance uses those.”
Rey was most familiar with the old 65s-- for obvious reasons, that being the current model at the time of the Battle of Jakku-- but Luke would have flown 70s too, surely. She looked over at him, and he was watching the blip on the scanner, chewing on his lip. “How would they have found us?” he asked.
“More importantly,” Rey said, “why is there no one alive on the ship?”
R2-D2 made an impatient noise, and jammed one of his extensions into an interface port. “Wait,” Luke said, but R2 had already made a request to the ship to pull its itinerary and manifest.
“If there’s no one alive on there,” R2 said, “but someone’s flying it, it’s an astromech.”
“There’s no way an astromech can fly an X-wing alone,” Luke said. “They’re not designed for it.”
“Says you,” R2 said. “O great Jedi mastur-bator. Thinks he knows so much.” Rey glanced at Luke in some alarm, but he was clearly so used to R2’s manner of speech that it seemed not to have even registered. It wasn’t as good a pun in Binary as it was in Basic but R2 made it work anyway; obscenity was one of his chief talents.
The response came back with the ship’s information, and R2 put it up on the holoscreen. The ship was named Hallit Two, registered to the New Republican Fleet, with one Nahul Powell piloting. The itinerary was utterly nonsense, originating at a point half the galaxy away, and terminating in an entirely separate location. It made no sense.
A LITTLE OFF-COURSE THERE, BUDDY, R2-D2 sent on the text interface. AND WHERE’S YOUR PILOT?
There was a hesitation, and then the ship sent back via the astromech’s text readout. R2-D2 IS THAT YOU?
“How did it know?” Rey demanded.
“Locator beacon,” R2-D2 answered off-handedly, and wrote, FUKKIN A, PAL. SEND THE REAL MANIFEST, WON’T YOU?
HOLY FUCKING SHIT HELP ME R2, I’M FUCKED, wrote the astromech, and sent the ship’s information again, a different file this time, and Rey made a little squeaking noise out loud. White Four, registered to the Resistance, with pilot Poe Dameron, she recognized him from the attached ID photo, she’d seen him, that was Finn’s friend, and astromech--
“BB-8!” she said, and clicked the comm. “BB-8! What are you doing out here?”
REY REY REY REY REY, BB-8 wrote, REY HELP ME REY, HELP.
“Where’s your pilot?” she asked. “Where’s Dameron? There’s no one on your ship!”
“Damn it,” Luke muttered.
DID YOU LOSE YOUR PILOT AGAIN, R2D2 wrote.
HELP ME, BB-8 wrote, HELP ME, HE GOT TRAPPED ON A FLEET VESSEL AND WHEN HE REALIZED THEY WEREN’T GOING TO LET HIM GO HE TOLD ME TO RUN AND I CAN’T LAND THIS THING AND THEY’RE GOING TO SELL HIM TO BOUNTY HUNTERS AND I LEFT HIM TO DIE AND I SWORE I’D NEVER DO THAT AGAIN AND I DID IT ANYWAY AND I CAN’T LAND THIS THING
The text scrolled up the readout faster than Rey could read, and she said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa BB, hang on.”
“Fuck,” Chewbacca said, or something that served the same role in Wookiee.
“The Resistance is a politically-recognized entity now,” Luke said calmly into the comm. “A Republican vessel legally must treat with him as an ally.”
There was a moment’s shocked silence, and then BB-8 wrote IS THAT LUKE FUCKING SKYWALKER?????
THE SAME, R2-D2 wrote back before anyone else could answer.
IT’S THE REPUBLICAN CRUISER UNYIELDING , BB-8 wrote back, AND THEY DON’T GIVE A FUCK, THEY LIED TO GET HIM ON BOARD AND THEN OPENLY SAID THEY WERE GOING TO COLLECT THE BOUNTY ON HIM.
“They can’t do that,” Luke said. Off-comm he said, “It just figures Poe Dameron would have a bounty on his head. I’m assuming he must have one beyond the standard Resistance pilot bounty that the First Order has had out there forever.”
“Half a million last I checked,” Chewbacca said.
“Half a million!” Luke turned to goggle at him. “For one -- come on now, they never asked more than a hundred thousand for me!”
“Poe’s talented,” Chewbacca said. “Which means BB-8’s probably not lying, it’s not unsurprising there’d be corrupt Republicans.”
“I don’t know how to handle this,” Luke said, tapping his metal fingers on the console. “I mean. If I just waltz in there, that’s kind of a reveal I wasn’t ready to make. But I don’t want to get into messing with bounty hunters. We don’t have a ton of time to work, here.” He clicked the comm. “BB-8, what kind of timeframe are we looking at, here? How long ago did you leave him there?”
CALCULATING, BB-8 wrote back, then immediately, SIX HOURS HAVE ELAPSED.
“How long to get this thing to fly again?” Luke asked.
Rey groaned a little, and rubbed her face. “If we only have to go in straight lines, two or three hours of work. If we have to do anything fancy, longer. A bunch longer.”
“Let me talk you through landing that thing,” Luke said on the comm. “Are you ready, BB?”
I CAN DO THIS, BB-8 said, SURELY I CAN DO THIS.
“I sure hope you can,” Luke said.
Rey and Chewbacca went back to work trying to repair the Falcon, while Luke worked to get the X-Wing landed. It very nearly ended in disaster; Rey crawled out from under the Falcon at a shout from Luke to see the X-Wing careening down toward them, Luke’s face ash-gray as he fought to get a grip on the thing with the Force. She scrambled up and added her strength to his, and between the two of them, they wrestled the ship down to a landing on the hill next to the Falcon, only knocking down two or three trees.
“Ow,” Rey said, collapsing as soon as she could let go of the thing. Luke was beyond speech, and sank down next to her, patting her shoulder with a shaking hand. She’d never extended herself like that; it was painful.
The astromech clamp whirred down, and BB-8 rolled out, looking dizzy. “Help,” ey beeped, “help,” and rolled up to Rey. She put her arms around em without thinking, and BB-8 whistled a sound of distress. “He told me to run,” BB-8 said to her, “he told me to take off and just go , as far and as fast as I could, and I did , but I promised I wouldn’t leave him again, I broke my promise.”
“You had to follow orders,” Rey said, rubbing her hand across the little droid’s plating.
“You’re way too loyal to that asshole,” R2-D2 said.
“I am not ,” BB-8 countered, distraught, “he’s not an asshole, he’s the best, and he’s going to get rhyndo’d and sold if we don’t go and save him right away , it might already be too late.”
“Nobody uses rhyndo anymore,” Chewbacca grunted, unfolding himself from between the panels of the Falcon and dropping down nimbly. “That’s a bad-old-days thing.”
“The First Order’s offering bonuses for it,” BB-8 said.
Chewbacca crouched down to look directly at BB-8. “No way,” he said.
“Saw it myself,” BB-8 said stubbornly. “A Fleet officer got as far as jamming a syringe into him before Karé Kun shot her hand off. We still have the syringe, back in the medbay. Took three days before we were sure she hadn’t pushed the plunger.”
R2D2 made a horrified little noise, and then beeped. “Confirmed,” he said. “Syringe present in medbay inventory.”
“Why do you have the medbay inventory?” Chewbacca asked.
“I downloaded everything I could reach,” R2 said, “because I figured all of this would be boring as fuck, and I wasn’t wrong, up until now.” He projected an image: a syringe. “Contents tested and confirmed.”
“That’s bad,” Luke said, rubbing his face. “That’s really bad.”
“I don’t know what rhyndo is,” Rey said.
“It’s pretty much every pilot’s worst nightmare,” Luke said. “Every humanoid anyway.”
“Wookiee too,” Chewbacca put in.
“It’s a toxin that causes lesions in the brain and inner ear,” Luke went on. “It causes irreversible damage to the vision and balance centers, in humans. It’d be bad for anyone, but it used to be an old punishment for piracy. It was really old-fashioned, but someone in the Empire somewhere brought it back, and it got sort of common for a while. When I was young, you’d find a rhyndo’d old smuggler or two in every spaceport, usually beggars. I know there was one back on Yavin 4, Poe’s home planet, he would’ve known him as a kid.”
“What, so it makes it so you can’t balance,” Rey said, thinking that over. “Oh. That would be terrible!”
“Awful,” Chewbacca confirmed.
“Wait, so you know Dameron?” Rey asked. She’d seen him once or twice, mostly kind of at a distance; he was more a figure of mythology to her, from BB-8’s near-constant mentions. They’d spoken but it had been brief. They’d-- hugged, too, kind of by accident. Dameron had been nice about it.
Luke nodded. “His parents both fought with the Rebel Alliance,” he said. “Poe was a little kid, and I mostly remember him as really young. My sister was closer with them-- Shara Bey, Poe’s mother, went on a fair number of missions with her, and one with me. They were really tight. And the kids, Poe and--” He stopped suddenly.
“Poe and Ben were friends,” Chewbacca filled in for him. “When they were little.”
“Oh,” Rey said, remembering the way Han’s voice had cracked out that name-- Ben! -- across the chasm.
“Poe was a couple years older,” Luke said, “but he was a real nice kid. Ben thought he hung the moon. Really wanted to go to the Academy just like him.”
“Really,” Rey said.
Luke shrugged. “I don’t blame him, I wanted to go to the Academy too. Granted, though, I didn’t know I was Force-sensitive then. Ben did.”
“I can’t imagine what that would be like,” Rey said, but she wasn’t even sure which part of it was the most unimaginable. Knowing you had something? Knowing you could go somewhere? Knowing you had options? Having a friend whose options were different from yours? Having a friend? It was all foreign.
“The longer we stand here talking,” BB-8 said, agitated, “the more likely it is that my pilot has been poisoned.”
“We can’t just rush out there and get him,” Luke said. “We have to have a plan, BB-8.”
“You’re the Last Jedi,” BB-8 said. “You could just go get him, and make them all forget he ever was there.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Luke said.
“Okay,” BB-8 said, “but it’s not like they could stop you.”
“Let’s just calm down,” Luke said.
“They wouldn’t give him the rhyndo until the bounty hunters showed up,” Chewbacca put in. “It kills humans, sometimes; dosage is real tricky. Why risk him dying before they can get their money?”
“Good point,” Luke said.
“I mean, it’s real tricky to get the dose right,” Chewbacca said. “And humans are pretty fragile.”
“No, you don’t understand,” BB-8 said, “they’re not doing it for the money, they’re doing it because they hate Poe.”
Luke actually laughed, at that. “Who in the world hates Poe? He’s ruffled a lot of feathers, but he’s never really had actual enemies.”
“Sanata Callis,” BB-8 said, tapping out the name in long-form spelling. Luke, Rey, and Chewie all glanced at one another; the name was meaningless to them. But R2-D2, after a moment’s hesitation, let out a long string of curses, some of which Rey had never heard before in any language and had no idea how to translate from Binary.
“I don’t know who that is,” Luke said finally.
“His ex-sister-in-law!” BB-8 said. “The crazy one?”
“I didn’t hear about Poe ever being married,” Luke said.
“Oh, he was, and it was a disaster,” BB-8 explained, none too patiently. “She wanted him to quit the Navy, and he wouldn’t, so she divorced him and applied for a transfer out but pirates attacked the Fleet base where they were stationed and killed her and Sanata accused Poe of having her killed on purpose, and ever since he defected to the Resistance has been personally trying to have him shot for desertion.”
“Oh,” Luke said. “I-- oh. I didn’t know.”
“That’s almost Skywalker levels of dramatic,” Rey pointed out. (Her research had been a little bit focused. She definitely knew some things now.)
“He is basically a Skywalker,” Luke said wryly.
“My point is,” BB-8 concluded, “she has almost certainly personally poisoned him at this point and I’m sure she doesn’t care if he lives long enough for her to collect the money.”
Luke rubbed the back of his neck. “How long until the Falcon can fly?” he asked.
Chewie groaned. “Not yet,” he said.
“Another couple of hours,” Rey said. “At least. Even if we hurry.”
BB-8 made a noise of complete despair. “So take the X-Wing!” ey said.
Luke was chewing on his lip. Rey realized she had her fists knotted in the hem of her tunic. The X-Wing was emphatically single-passenger; taking it was a big commitment, because it didn’t have an exit strategy built-in. “I’ll go,” she said. She could feel Luke’s inner turmoil over this, and couldn’t even begin to guess what it was about, but she knew she had to do something. “I can do it. It’s not the First Order, it’s the New Republic, and I can sneak in and back out a lot less obviously-- okay, at least a lot less significantly -- than the Last Jedi.”
“That’s not my hesitation,” Luke said.
“I don’t have any hesitation,” Rey said. “I can do this. You help Chewie fix the Falcon, and I’ll go keep Dameron alive, and then you can come rescue me before the bounty hunters show up.”
“Fine,” Luke said, which she hadn’t expected at all. “What’s your plan?”
Rey let her mouth pull to one side. “I suppose just going and asking for them to hand him over wouldn’t do, unless I could convince them I was someone important.”
“Kill them all,” BB-8 said, vibrating slightly in eir intensity.
“Sick,” R2-D2 said approvingly.
“If I could fly an X-Wing,” Chewie said, “that would be my plan.”
“If I could sneak on board,” Rey said, “maybe without them seeing me, I could try to get him free and sneak him off again.” Into what ship? Surely there’d be ships there and she could steal one. It had worked for Finn.
Luke rubbed his face with his hand. “So you’re saying, you’ll improvise,” he said.
Rey considered that. “Yeah,” she said.
“The terrifying thing is, that sounds better than what I’d thought of,” Luke said. He sighed. “I shouldn’t let you go off half-cocked. But I think it’s probably a better plan to let you go, and come after you as backup in the Falcon as soon as it’s ready, instead of the other way around.”
Luke’s only condition was that she take R2-D2 instead of BB-8, who was in severe need of a recharge and was verging on too distraught to be functional. And so R2-D2 taught Rey how to fly a T-70, which she’d never been in before but hadn’t wanted to mention lest it prove to be a problem. (She knew a ton about T-65s, inside and out, and had spent days in them in simulators, but the T-70s had a few crucial differences that R2 sensibly highlighted for her. He talked a cantankerous game, but he was very efficient.)
Dameron’s flight harness and helmet were still in the cockpit. He’d left almost everything behind. The helmet fit exactly like the one she’d had back on Jakku, Dosmit Raeh’s helmet-- it was functionally the same, though a different design, and in much better condition. The comm mic was paired to the X-Wing’s system, and she got a little thrill from clicking it on and off a couple of times.
There was something strangely intimate about opening a little bag and finding his toothbrush and tooth powder and hair comb. He’d even left a change of clothes and a datapad. Rey pushed the helmet visor up and leafed through the datapad, once they had made their somewhat-shaky takeoff and were on their trajectory. A collection of holopics of places she’d never been, many of them clearly taken by BB-8-- the low perspective and preponderance of shots of Poe looking fond gave it away-- and oh, a bunch of the pics were of Finn, looking healthy and happy and, frequently, wearing the brown jacket he’d been wearing when she met him. The one she’d mended.
Finn looked so good, he looked so good-- clean and well-fed and smiling and in one he was staring at Poe with what looked like open longing. It was hard to tell for sure. She looked at it for a long time.
WHAT ARE YOU DOING, R2-D2 texted.
“I’m looking at a datapad I found in here,” Rey answered. “I probably shouldn’t snoop. I don’t really know Dameron at all.”
I MOSTLY REMEMBER HIM AS A SNOTFACED BRAT, R2 wrote. BUT HE WAS A POLITE ONE. CHEWIE LIKES HIM A LOT.
“Chewie is pretty easygoing,” Rey said, “but he seems a good judge of character. Finn likes Poe a lot though, doesn’t he?”
I THINK THEY’RE FUCKING, R2 said. OR IF NOT, THEY SHOULD. I DON’T REALLY UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS THAT MEATSACKS DO, PRECISELY, WITH ALL THOSE FLESHY PARTS.
“Honestly,” Rey said, “I don’t either.”
I THINK BB-8 DID A WHOLE RESEARCH PROJECT ON IT, R2 said. WE DID A DATA SWAP AND EIR DATABANKS WERE MOSTLY PORNOGRAPHY AND PERSUASIVE ESSAYS ABOUT HOW POE SHOULD RUB HIMSELF ON MAGIC BRAIN FIXER, WHO IS APPARENTLY THE SAME PERSON AS FINN.
“I don’t know that I was prepared to know that,” Rey said. Something felt a little tight in her chest as she considered Finn doing-- things-- with someone else. She didn’t exactly want to do things with him, but she didn’t want to be left out either, and it was very confusing, and she had been doing really well at not thinking about it.
NEITHER WAS I, R2 said. NO OFFENSE BUT MEATSACKS ARE GROSS.
“I’m not entirely in disagreement,” Rey said. “But do you have any ideas about how I can get onto this ship without them noticing?”
EASY PEASY, R2 said. WHEN THEY LAST SAW THIS X-WING IT HAD GONE CAREENING OFF PILOTED BY A MAD ASTROMECH. IT COMES CAREENING BACK STILL PILOTED THE SAME WAY, MALFUNCTIONING AND FUCKING AROUND, AND THEN IT CRASHES INTO THEM AND IN ALL THE CONFUSION THEY DON’T REALIZE THAT THERE WAS A HUMAN PILOT ON THERE AFTER ALL.
“Wait, that means they’ll catch you,” Rey said.
NOT IF WE DON’T CRASH THAT HARD, R2 said. WE CAN JUST FOLD UP, KINDA CRAM INTO A DOCKING BAY, LET YOU OUT, THEN I CAUSE A WHOLE BUNCH OF DAMAGE AND FLY OFF AGAIN, AND HOPEFULLY THEY’LL GET SO MAD AT ME THEY DON’T NOTICE YOU CREEPING AROUND THE SHIP.
“And then how do I get off again?” Rey asked.
THE FALCON SHOWS UP, R2 said, OR, HM. WELL. I MEAN, IT’S NOT LIKE TWO PEOPLE FIT BACK IN THIS COCKPIT, SO--
“It breaks down a bit there,” Rey said. “But I guess if we’re playing this by ear, we’ll work that out when we get there. You’re right, he’d have to be pretty skinny to get into this cockpit with me.” There wouldn’t be a way to hook him into the respiration system either, though it wasn’t always necessary. She didn’t relish the idea of sharing quarters that close with anyone, let alone a man she’d met maybe once.
AND I MEAN, R2 said, IT’S NOT LIKE THEY’RE FIRST ORDER. THEY’RE NOMINALLY ON OUR SIDE. IT’S JUST THAT POE HAS TERRIBLE TASTE IN WOMEN APPARENTLY.
“Does he really?” Rey asked.
WELL. I GUESS. HIS REPUTATION WHEN HE WAS AT THE ACADEMY WAS THAT HE’D FUCK ANYTHING THAT HELD STILL LONG ENOUGH BUT MY INFO’S LIKE TEN YEARS OUT OF DATE, HE PROBABLY WAS NEVER THAT WILD. R2 let a string of ellipses float across the screen, then went on, WHATEVER IT IS THAT MEATSACKS GET OUT OF FUCKING, HE MUST HAVE A LOT OF IT OR SOMETHING, BECAUSE EVERYBODY WANTS TO DO IT TO HIM. BB-8 COLLECTED SOME DATA AND REALLY, EVERYBODY WANTS TO DO HIM.
Rey managed not to laugh out loud. “Is that so,” she said. She tilted the datapad a little, to look at the holopic that was still up. Poe was looking at the camera, which was most likely BB-8, squinting a little, but smirking, a line between his eyebrows. His mouth curved upward at one corner. Next to him, Finn was staring at him, mouth slightly open, completely rapt.
If they aren’t fucking, they should be , she thought, just to try it out. She had never quite gotten the point of-- sex, and things. Had never wanted to do them, had only really ever seen them done with one of the parties markedly unwilling. She’d watched some holos, and still didn’t get it at all. Finn’s face, his presence, made her light up inside somewhere, made her happy; she could see how maybe she could get to feel that way about Poe, whose dark eyes and curving mouth and clear fond amusement drew the eye in every holopic, but she knew other people felt these things much more strongly.
I GUESS IT’S NOT A THING YOU HAVE, R2 said, DESPITE THE WAY THEY TALK ABOUT IT. I GUESS IT’S A THING YOU DO. SO I GUESS IT’S THAT HE’S GOOD AT IT. OR SOMETHING. SOMETHING YOU CAN TELL BY LOOKING, OR MAYBE THERE ARE PHEROMONES OR SOMETHING? I HONESTLY DON’T KNOW.
“Perhaps I’ll ask him,” Rey said. She probably wouldn’t. She didn’t know him. He was probably nice, if Finn liked him. But she didn’t know. It wasn’t the kind of thing she knew how to discuss.
IF YOU FIND OUT, TELL BB-8, R2 said. I’M STARTING TO GET WORRIED ABOUT THAT LITTLE FELLOW.
Rey did laugh, at that, and poked through the datapad a little more. She found a set of what sounded like instructions for cooking food-- recipes, they were called, and fascinated herself poking through them, looking at the exotic ingredients, and trying to imagine what they would taste like. Many of the ingredients were words she didn’t know, some clearly in another language, and she was enthralled trying to imagine what they were.
He had music on there too, and she found out how to play the recordings-- some of them were popular songs she’d heard played at the trading post at Jakku, or from various other recordings. It was a good collection; most of them she’d never heard before, but she found she liked almost all of them.
And as she distracted herself, part of her worked on her plan, collected her strength, and got ready to ram an X-Wing into a New Republic cruiser to save a man she didn’t know, because his astromech had asked her to.
“They still haven’t shot that thing down?” the technician said to her companion as she checked the switch relays in the hall. Wedged inside a wall panel, Rey focused on breathing as shallowly as she could, which wasn’t easy with how out-of-breath she was from the wild scramble up here.
“No,” the other one said, laughing. “That crazy little astromech has lost its goddamn tiny mind, and the gunners just can’t get a bead on it. It’s rammed the ship three times now! Thank the Force it doesn’t seem to be able to use the X-Wing’s guns.”
“Almost makes you feel bad,” the first one said, leaning against the wall and poking at his datapad.
“Guess a couple of the pilots knew him,” the woman said, pausing to count out loud. “No, that’s thirty. We’re okay here.”
“What’d the pilots say?” the man asked. “Like, is this guy really a murderer? Some kind of evil jerk?”
“No,” the woman said, “no, that’s the crazy thing! Everyone else was like, dude’s supposed to be legendarily nice. Like, I mean, legendary . And here’s the thing, part of his deal, he was so good with his astromech that even as a cadet they had him teach classes on it. Advanced AI skills, or something. So that’s the deal-- he was so good to this little astromech that-- I mean, it flew the X-Wing away because he told it to. Right? He realized there was danger and he told it to run. That’s-- like, I dunno, I’ve never really worked closely with an astromech like that, but I don’t think my first thought would be to get my robot out of danger?”
“That’s heavy,” the man said. “Third panel next.”
“Got it,” the woman said, moving away slightly.
“So he told this thing to escape, and instead it’s following us around screaming,” the man said.
“I mean, I know AIs break sometimes,” the woman said, “but that’s almost uncannily like how a sapient would break, you know?”
“You’re saying it’s mad with grief,” the man said.
“Kinda-- like a holodrama, isn’t it?” the woman said, a little amused. “I mean, it’ll be a pain in the ass to clean up after, but what a hell of a story, right? It’s totally right out of a holodrama.” They were moving away, and Rey tilted her head to see them, until she couldn’t anymore. Good work, R2 , she thought, even though of course he wouldn’t hear it.
That sounded like Dameron was alive, anyway.
It took her another hour to find him. There wasn’t a brig, on this spaceship. You’d think there would be, but a cruiser was actually not all that large a vessel as these things went, and so there really wasn’t a single-purpose room like that. There were storage bays, and smaller rooms along that corridor, and they seemed the most likely place.
Rey kept having to fiddle with door wiring, and she’d found a technician’s jumpsuit in a room full of uniforms, so at least she had that going for her. On impulse she stuffed a spare one into her belt, a larger size, in case she could use it to camouflage Dameron.
It would only be a matter of time before someone spotted her, if nothing else by checking the logs of doors opening, because she was sure there’d be such things. She could feel the life force of the various people on the ship, could tell when they were approaching, but that would do her no good against cameras or droids or surveillance equipment.
But finally a chain of locked doors and the sensation of an unconscious life form led her down a corridor full of small storage rooms, and into a room where there was a mostly-naked man shackled to the wall, and she blinked in shock for a moment before she finally made the connection that this surely was her target.
His head was hanging down, his body limp; he was a man of medium stature, light brown skin, black hair, and he was wearing nothing but some very brief shorts, pale blue-striped. His chest was all patches of bruising, some recent and some older; his knuckles were bloody, and there was blood on the floor where it had dripped from his face. He didn’t react to her entrance to the room at all, and his arms were held slightly out from his sides, fastened to the walls with heavy metal shackles, and there was another one around his ribs.
Rey stepped into the room, approaching hesitantly. Surely there was a guard. But there were no other life forms nearby. She stared at him, and he was motionless, but she knew he wasn’t dead.
Now what? She’d sort of expected to talk to him. She had really been banking on Chewie being right, that they wouldn’t have poisoned him. She stepped into the room and let the door shut behind her, and then stood and reached out to his mind.
An unconscious mind was something she hadn’t tried before; she leaned into it, and kept sliding off to the sides. There was nothing to really grab onto; no fully-formed thoughts to understand. He was blank, completely blank, with only echoes of himself reverberating, and nothing new. She reached in and tried to find something to grasp, to pull him back by, and it kept sliding away, like digging in sand.
“She should take a holopic,” someone beeped, “it’d last longer.”
Rey jerked in startlement; what she’d assumed was part of a wall compartment was in fact a power droid, fitted neatly into a slot on the wall, plugged in for charging. Next to it, an astromech swiveled its sensor array to look at her.
“What, are you lost, honey?” it whistled. The room was full of droids. This was the charging room, Rey realized; there were half a dozen little niches, bristling with the various power couplings most common for different kinds of droids. There was a big loading droid plugged into the bay on the end, blinking sleepily at her, and an older R-model astromech next to it.
They had all woken from low-power mode to look at her. “I was looking for him,” she said, gesturing at the unconscious pilot.
“Not much to look at,” the old astromech said, swiveling to regard him.
“Well,” Rey said, “not at the moment, no, but he must be some thing. His astromech has gone mad with grief and is attacking the ship to try to get him back.”
All the droids looked at her, then, and she waited for alarms to start blaring. “Wait, were you answering me?” the old astromech asked suspiciously. “Do you speak Binary too?”
“I do,” she said. “I’m a pilot.”
Several of the droids made odd little noises. “Is that really what’s going on?” the newer astromech asked. “Those crashes and thumps?”
“I heard they lost his X-Wing because his astromech flew away with it,” the old astromech said, “but I couldn’t believe it.”
“It’s true,” Rey said.
“An astromech can’t fly an X-Wing unassisted,” the new astromech scoffed.
“This one could,” Rey said. “Maybe not a T-85 like you guys have,” she added diplomatically, “and ey couldn’t land it, we had to help-- but a T-70, ey sure can.”
“Nothing stacks up to those old T-65s,” the R-astromech said grudgingly. “Those were the classics.”
“You are always on about those,” said the other astromech, “but you know they upgraded them for a reason.”
“Not like you’d know, pipsqueak!” the first astromech said.
“Don’t start,” the power droid said, with a weariness that hinted at long experience. “Just-- seriously, don’t start, or I’ll unplug you both myself.”
These droids clearly had very little interest in or concern for the security of the ship, Rey realized, so she stepped forward into the room, and approached Dameron a little hesitantly. She hadn’t expected this, but it was really upsetting her that he was almost naked. She’d never seen an adult human man in a state of undress like this, not in person, and it just-- unsettled her. It wasn’t that there was anything offensive in his anatomy-- even she could tell that Dameron was a reasonably attractive man, symmetrical and compact but well-muscled and sort of hairy and nicely put together, anatomy-wise-- but she couldn’t help but find the very idea of a naked man vaguely threatening. It wasn’t healthy and it was something she’d have to work on someday, but it was low on the priority list and she’d rather not be distracted by it at the moment.
“Dameron,” she said, reaching out and touching his neck. His skin was cold. “Dameron, wake up.”
“So his astromech is still flying this T-70 and running it into the ship and they haven’t shot it down yet?” the power droid asked.
“Apparently,” Rey said. She bent, taking his jaw in her hand and tipping his face up to look at it. He’d definitely been in a fight, had taken a couple shots to the face, but from the state of his knuckles he’d given as good as he’d gotten. None of the bones of his face or skull seemed to be broken, though he was bleeding from the nose and mouth. “Dameron!”
“Why do I know that name?” the newer astromech asked. “Is that him?”
“Poe Dameron,” she said, cradling his face in her hands. His eyes weren’t all the way closed; his eyelids were motionless but his eyes gleamed a little, flatly, under the edges of them. It was creepy. “Apparently when he was a cadet at the Academy they used to have him teach classes in astromech handling, because he was so good at it.”
“Really,” said the new astromech.
“Well,” the old astromech said, “whatever else, if his is ramming a star cruiser with an X-Wing he’s got to have given it some absolutely insane programming.”
“Insane is definitely the word,” the power droid said.
“Come on, Dameron,” Rey said, closing her eyes and trying again to pull him back to consciousness. He was coming closer to the surface, she thought, because he was aware now of all the parts of him that hurt, but there still wasn’t anything for her to grab onto. “I need to talk to you.”
“Is it an R-unit?” the newer astromech asked. Rey had no idea what type it was; most of her expertise was about thirty years out of date, which was when Jakku had acquired most of its salvage. Whatever the new astro was, it was more recent vintage than that.
“No,” Rey said, “it’s a BB-unit, a newish one.” She could hear her own words echoing in Dameron’s mind, and wondered what that meant.
Dameron surfaced abruptly, and slurred, “Sperimental protoype,” alarming her so much she almost dropped his head. “One ‘va kind.” He sucked in a breath, and tried to move his head, then it went heavy in her hand again. She tipped his face so she could see him, and his eyelids slid shut, eyes rolling.
“Newer droids who haven’t had many masters tend to be pretty loyal,” the power droid said knowingly. “It’s a compelling fantasy, you know? That your master really cares for you? We get attached. Astromechs are the worst.”
“Shut up,” the old R-unit said, cranky.
“I don’t give a fuck about my pilot,” the new astro said.
Dameron peeled his eyelids open but his eyes rolled away before they could focus on Rey’s face. His eyes were dark, she couldn’t tell his irises from his pupils in this light. “BB-8,” he said, drooling blood. “Got away?”
“BB-8 got away,” Rey confirmed. “Ey’s safe with Luke.”
Dameron made a little noise of profound relief, and sagged in her arms. “Good,” he said. “You’ll nvv’r get em, you fuckers.” Rey realized he assumed she was one of his captors, and cast about for what to say to explain to him without the droids catching on. Dameron’s head lolled in her grasp, and then he scrunched up his face and said, “Wait, Luke ?”
“R2-D2 had a tracking device,” Rey said. “BB followed it.”
Dameron tried again to get his eyes open, and he blinked at Rey, though his eyes kept sliding away. “Who,” he said, trying and failing to look at her.
“It’s Rey,” she said. “Shh. We’re not alone.”
He tried again to look at her, eyes crossing, then sliding away to one side, and his eyes rolled shut again. “Fuck,” he slurred, “wha’re you dnng hr?”
“I came for you,” she said.
He closed his eyes and looked pained. “The point,” he said, “was f’r BB-8 to ge’ way .”
“Ey did,” Rey said. “That’s R2 now, ramming the ship and demanding your release.”
“Hey, now,” the power droid said to Rey, “do you know this man?”
“He’s Rebel Scum!” chirped the new astro.
“Don’t make fun of my war stories,” the cranky astro said. The new astro sniggered, and the power droid made disapproving noises. “The Resistance is not the direct successor of the Rebel Alliance!”
“R2,” the loading droid said slowly, swiveling its head sensor out to look at Rey more closely. “Did you say R2 is out there?”
“R2-D2,” Rey said, turning to look at the loading droid. The other droids were all staring fixedly at her.
“R2-D2 is active again?” the cranky astro asked. “We had heard a rumor that R2-D2 had shut down but we could not credit it.”
“Yeah,” Rey said, “he’s with the Resistance now. He came out of standby after the destruction of the Hosnian System.”
The droids all hummed and whirred to themselves, and Dameron twitched uncomfortably. Rey could tell now that he was dizzy; he kept opening his eyes, tracking them absently left to right across the room, and rolling them shut again, and his head jerked a little now and then. That wasn’t a good sign.
The cranky old astromech suddenly projected a little holovid, and it was R2-D2, rolling back and forth in place, then spinning around. He had a wreath of flowers on his head. “R2-D2 is a hero of the Rebellion,” it said. Rey had a feeling it had personally recorded that footage.
“R2-D2,” a couple of the other droids chorused, quietly.
“BB said they were going to rhyndo you,” Rey said to Dameron.
“They did,” Dameron said. He opened his eyes again, giving her a flat look of despair, and his eyes slid off her again. “It’s too late. Kill me, so th’can’t get’ny fformation, and get off th’ship.”
“BB-8 would never forgive me,” Rey said.
“BB-8 will get over it,” Dameron said, pulling away from her grip and trying to hold his head up on his own, though he wobbled so much he would have fallen over if he weren’t fastened to the wall.
“I promised BB I’d get you back,” Rey said.
“I told you,” Dameron said, both eyes squeezed shut, “B will get over it. Especially if you take over, ey likes you. Look, ey’s yours now, okay? Get the override codes from Toowers, ey’s yours now.”
“No,” Rey said. “I have a plan, Dameron.”
“Go,” Dameron said, turning his face away, “and take good care of my little Beep, okay?”
“Are you Resistance?” the cranky astromech asked, rolling out of its charging dock to look more closely at Rey. Rey stepped back a pace, wiping her hands on her coveralls-- she had Dameron’s blood warm and sticky all over one palm, where his cut lip was bleeding steadily and had smeared all down his chin.
“I’m with R2-D2,” Rey said. “And Poe Dameron.”
Dameron squinted one eye open to give her a look. “I told you to run,” he said. “I’m not fucking around. This ship’s a leaky bucket and the commander has no control, you gotta get out before the bounty hunters show and the whole place blows up into fucking mutiny.”
“I’m not leaving you,” she said.
“Dameron,” the newer astromech trilled suddenly, with an air of realization. “I know where I know that name from!”
“Shit,” Dameron said, desperate and pleading, going cross-eyed as he tried to look at Rey, “ go .”
“Little Beep,” the new astro said, and rolled slightly out of its charging dock to project a holovid. “It says Dameron on the Little Beep Song Man’s flight suit.” The holovid it projected was low-res and blurry from being copied too many times, and it was Poe’s face, retreating from the camera as if he’d just switched it on.
“Oh my stars,” Rey said. Poe looked younger, much younger, his hair shorter, his jaw thinner, his eyes larger in his narrow face-- he was barely more than a child-- and he smiled down at the camera, retreating across the floor to pick up a strange, bulky object-- it was a musical instrument, like she’d seen in musical holovids.
“Okay, BB, are you ready?” holo-Poe asked, settling down to sit on the floor at a good distance for the camera’s angle to get all of him in the picture and in focus. His voice was thinner and lighter than it was now. He was wearing a New Republican Fleet uniform coverall, with second cadet’s insignia on the collar. And sure enough, his name tape was visible up near his shoulder, and it said “Dameron” legibly. There were stickers all over the stringed instrument, and he had bare feet.
“Oh, by the living void ,” real Poe said, managing to focus enough to see the vid. “How did you get that ?”
Holo-Poe started to rhythmically strum the musical instrument. “Okay, little beep, time for sleep!” And he tilted his head and started singing, in rhythm with his playing the instrument.
“Beep, beep, beep-- go to sleep little beep!
Time for good droids to sleep!
Back up your datacenters,
spin down your hard drive platters,
plug in and go to sleep!
Sleep, sleep, sleep, for a, nother day with the fleet!
To calculate trajectories
and hyperspace jumps,
and all the other stuff that you do!”
He paused, and stopped strumming the instrument to gesture vaguely with one hand, as if indicating a group of people or droids. “Or whatever you do,” he said, grinning brightly. There were no lines on his face. “You know, all the rest of you.” He resumed his strumming, tilting his head.
“Beep, beep, beep-- go to sleep little beep!
Charge up, sleep tight
plug in, turn out the light
spin down, take a break
and go to sleep, little beep.”
He finished with a flurry of strumming and a final flourish on the stringed instrument, then put it down and knee-walked over to the camera. “Okay,” he said, grin tinged with fond exasperation, “now you have a recording, so I don’t have to sing it to you every night.”
BB-8 whistle-booped cheerfully, and Poe’s hand came over and turned off the camera with a click, and the holovid ended.
“Little Beep,” several of the droids murmured, and the only way to describe their tone was reverent.
“That was the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen in my life ,” Rey said fiercely, shocked at how protective it made her feel..
“I made up that song when BB-8 was new,” Dameron said, his expression a jumbled mixture of pained, embarrassed, and incredulous. “Ey liked it when I gave em a pep talk before recharging. And the other droids got jealous so I’d sing to them too. And I didn’t have time to do it all the time so I had em record it.” He shook his head slightly, rolling it a little side to side before quickly and obviously deciding that the motion was too much, squeezing his eyes shut tightly and grimacing. “I figured ey’d share it with some other droids but I never thought about them making copies .”
“We all listen to the Little Beep song when we recharge,” the power droid said, something hushed and reverent in his tones.
“It’s terrible,” Dameron said, “it doesn’t rhyme, I’m like, twelve years old, the guitar’s not even in tune properly, I recorded that for my astro like fifteen years ago--”
“No one else has ever sung to these droids,” Rey said, looking at the way they were all staring, all of them with their sensors pointed at Dameron, all of them perfectly motionless.
Dameron managed to get his eyes open and look over at the motionless droids. “Do your masters know about the Little Beep song?” he asked.
“Sure,” the power droid said.
“They don’t need to,” the old astromech said, a little defensive.
“We never play it when any humans are around,” the loading droid admitted.
“That’s a no,” Dameron said, squeezing his eyes shut again.
“We’ve listened to it on every ship I’ve ever been on,” the power droid said. “What would be wrong with it?”
“It must be Fleet-approved,” the old astromech said. “He’s wearing the uniform!”
“He’s Rebel scum, though,” the new astromech pointed out.
“Well, sure, now he is,” the old one said, “but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t legitimate Fleet at the time.”
“If you’re not now, you never were,” the new astromech said, with the air of an old argument.
“He’s the Little Beep man,” the power droid said, “it doesn’t matter what else he is!”
“I don’t suppose,” Rey said, “I could convince you that perhaps it’s a waste to sell the Little Beep man to bounty hunters.”
“It’s immoral,” the new astro said.
The others all hesitated. “Well, I mean,” the power droid said, “we’re not really equipped to make moral judgements, are we?”
“Not as such,” the old astro said. “But I hate bounty hunters.”
“Clearly,” Rey said, “whoever decided that it was a reasonable thing to do was operating on incomplete information. He’s the Little Beep man, and he’s also a friend of R2-D2. It seems like being against him is just the wrong choice, if you know all that.”
“You’re insane,” Dameron muttered.
“Hush,” Rey answered.
“We should ask,” the power droid said. “Let’s ask someone.”
“No,” the loading droid said unexpectedly. “They were fighting among themselves, asking would only make them fight worse.”
“Who was fighting?” Rey asked.
“The ship’s commander and the captain, Callis, the one who accused this one.” The droid gestured solemnly. “Callis is the one who insisted he be arrested, went over the commander’s head about it, and there was a fantastic argument. We must not stir up more disagreement.”
“So the commander thinks it immoral to sell a man to bounty hunters,” Rey said, pouncing on that eagerly.
The loading droid swung its sensor array around in an elliptical circuit, a version of a nod. “It was a terrible fight. We must not stir it up again.”
“So get us off this ship,” Rey said. “I’ll make him disappear, and they won’t fight anymore.”
“That would be nice,” the loading droid said.
“I think they might fight about losing him,” the power droid put in.
“Better that than letting bounty hunters onto this ship,” Rey said.
“That’s true,” the old astro said.
“And better than R2-D2 attacking this ship some more,” Rey went on.
“We must not go against R2’s wishes,” the old astro said fretfully. “He is a hero of the Rebellion!”
“I don’t know what to do,” the power droid said.
“I do,” the loading droid said. “R6-14, unfasten him.”
The new astro trilled nervously. “Is that allowed?”
“Sure,” Rey said. “If they didn’t want you to, you wouldn’t be able to.”
“You’re insane,” Dameron said, eyes crossing as he tried to look at her.
“Don’t wreck this,” she answered.