Rey Skywalker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thatwaslucky) wrote2019-07-26 04:28 am
thatwaslucky) wrote2019-07-26 04:28 am
Jakku... and then not- Friday
Rey didn't know why she'd done it. She'd gone to Niima Outpost to see if they could find BB-8's owner, and to sell some things she'd collected before so she could actually eat today. Unkar Plutt had stonewalled her on that front, but offered her sixty portions for the droid, and for some insane reason, she'd said no.
It was stupid of her. She couldn't exactly afford to give up food like that, and sure, she was turning out to like the little droid, but it wasn't like she had some real attachment. Not really, anyway. It had been nice to have someone around to talk to, even if she'd never had company at home before. She just hadn't been able to do turn him in.
And when two of Plutt's goons followed her and said they were taking BB-8, she was glad she didn't do it. One grabbed her, the other tried to get the droid, but Rey wasn't exactly someone to try that with, because her immediate instinct was to fight back harder than them. With a big stick. Really, they should know that by now, it was why people left her alone.
Once she'd beaten them down, she knelt by BB-8 to check on him, and his dome swiveled towards a man watching them from the tents.
Less than a day ago she'd been willing to let BB-8 find his own way around without her, and now with one statement from him, she automatically took off running towards the man with her staff out. It took him a second to realize she was coming for him, and then he took off through the tents. She knew her way around them, though, so she was able to cut him off and meet him halfway to knock him to the ground with her staff. "What's your hurry, thief?"
"What?" he asked, sounding genuinely surprised. "Thief? Ow!"
That was BB-8, who had rolled over and shocked him.
"The jacket! This droid says you stole it!" Rey said, still threatening him with her staff.
The man did not like one bit. "I've had a pretty messed up day, all right? So I'd appreciate it if you would stop accusing me- Ow!" He glared at BB-8. "Stop it!"
Rey ignored him. "Where'd you get it? It belongs to his master."
He looked at her, annoyed, and then at the droid, and his expression changed. "It belonged to Poe Dameron. That was his name, right?" he asked, and BB-8 rolled back astep, cautious. "He was captured by the First Order. I helped him escape but our ship crashed. Poe didn't make it."
She glanced at BB-8, who warbled sadly and dropped his dome, and she couldn't help but feel bad for him. He rolled off to the side to be alone for the moment.
Rey turned her attention to the man, trying not to look impressed. "So you're with the Resistance?"
"Obviously. Yes I am. I'm with the Resistance," he said quickly, standing. And then since they were in public and thus clearly wasn't something to just announce, he whispered, "I'm with the Resistance."
She'd heard stories forever, about the Rebellion and Resistance, even helped one, once. But to have it here... That was exciting. She lived among the ruins but the people were mysteries. She lowered her staff and couldn't stop a conspiratorial smile from crossing her face. "I've never met a Resistance fighter before."
"Well, this is what we look like. Some of us," he amended. "Others look different."
"BB-8 says he's on a secret mission, he has to get back to your base," she hissed.
"Apparently he's carrying a map that leads to Luke Skywalker, and everyone's after it."
Rey blinked. A weird thing happened when you spent years in Fandom, a place where you could meet people from your universe that might live in different times or not exist at all: you could end up believing that the stories were wrong, or at the very least different than you'd heard your whole life. And as someone who'd been taught by a different Skywalker without ever hearing the name Luke, who knew a Jedi but had no proof that they'd ever actually existed out here from in the middle of nowhere, Rey believed every story she'd heard was just that. It had happened somewhere, but not here.
"Luke Skywalker?" she repeated, incredulous, her voice a whisper. "I thought he was a myth."
BB-8's alarmed beeping ended that topic, and Rey peeked around the tent corner to see two white-clad stormtroopers talking to the thugs Rey had just taken care of. They were pointing in the direction of the tent.
He grabbed her hand, and as Rey asked, "What are you doing?" he took off running, pulling her along with him while BB-8 rolled along behind.
She got her answer a second later when blaster bolts hit the cleaning unit next to where they'd just been standing. She might have screamed. They were being shot at! Rey had been in plenty of fights, but being shot at was new and unwelcome!
"Let go of me," Rey insisted.
"No, we gotta move!" he yelled back over the shooting.
"I know how to run without you holding my hand!" she said, pulling her hand away. "BB-8, stay close! This way!"
Rey lived here, she knew where they were actually going, and she zigzagged them through the tents until they could take cover and hide. "They're shooting at both of us!" she hissed.
"Yeah, they saw you with me! You're marked!" he said.
"Well, thanks for that!"
"I'm not the one who chased you down with a stick!" he shot back. "Does anyone have blasters around here?"
Rey looked to BB-8 to ask if he was okay, but the man shushed her. Rey listened, and there was some kind of whirring mechanical scream from above, and he grabbed her hand again.
"Stop taking my hand," she gritted out, and dropped it while they ran clear of the tent. Above them was a TIE fighter, followed by a second, and one of them fired.
The blast hit the sand, too close, sending all three of them flying. While rattled that starfighters were shooting at them, Rey pulled herself up and made her way to the man, who was either unconscious or dazed. "Hey!"
He jolted, and looked up at her. "Are you okay?"
Rey frowned, confused, not used to being asked that. Also, she hadn't just gotten knocked out. "Yeah," she said, and stuck her hand out for him to help him up.
She had a plan, and it was probably a bad plan, but hiding wasn't going to help them or anyone else. So Rey took off and led the way across the sand, away from the tents.
"We can't outrun them!" he yelled behind her.
"We might!" she said, pointing ahead in case he couldn't hear her. "In that quad jumper!"
"We need a pilot!"
"We've got one!"
"You?"
...Maybe. Rey didn't have a lot of practical experience. She'd flown the ship she'd scavenged and rebuilt only twice, and tested out a couple things for Unkar after that, but most of her skills were learned via simulators. But, generally in a setting like this, she couldn't take the time to think about something before she did it.
"What about that ship?" He called, pointing off to the side.
Rey glanced in that direction. "That one's garbage!"
As she said that, the TIEs swooped in and fired, hitting the jumper. It exploded into fire, sending a thick of black cloud of noxious smoke into the air. Rey stopped in her tracks, covering herself from debris, and stared slack-jawed at the fireball in front of them.
"The garbage will do," she decided, starting towards the other ship. It was old and dilapidated and had been sitting dormant for years, and Rey just had to hope she could get it moving.
The TIEs circled around and fired again as they hit up the landing ramp. Rey directed the man to the gunner's position while she raced to the cockpit.
"Y'ever fly this thing?" he yelled as he ran in the other direction.
"No!" she said, pulling her staff from her back and tossing it aside so she could sit in the pilot's seat. "This ship hasn't been flown in years!"
Which was fine. It was fine.
"I can do this, I can do this," she mumbled, beginning startup procedures. Then she pulled the yoke, and the ship rose into the air... and dipped. It spun and tilted, slamming into an archway and breaking it apart.
Rey winced but kept trying, hitting at least one more thing that she couldn't see before pulling the ship into the air, which felt better. The two TIEs were on their tail, though, and she wasn't entirely sure how to get out of that situation.
"Whoa! Hey! Oh! Stay low! Stay low!" came the orders from the gunner well.
"What?"
"Stay low! It confuses their tracking!"
Right. This was going to be insane, and she was afraid to do it, but that wasn't going to stop her now. She let go of the controls to reach over to the co-pilot's seat and hit a few things, calling back for BB-8 to hold on. Then she sat up straight, stabilized the ship, and warned, "I'm going low!"
She pulled the ship up at a dramatic upward arc, upside down, then swooped perilously low across the sand, sending both TIEs screaming past. A moment later the ship shook as they took a blast, and Rey yelled, "What are you doing back there? Are you ever gonna fire back?"
"I'm working on it! Are the shields up?"
She reached over to switch them on and returned, "Not so easy without a co-pilot!"
"Try sitting in this thing!" he said, but fired at the TIEs and missed, leaving both to fire on them again.
"We need cover, quick!" he said.
"We're about to get some," she told him.
And to herself, she murmured, "I hope."
She knew the landscape of Jakku. So she flew them through a rock formation, grazing it and taking out a chunk of the side. She banked so hard that the edge of the ship ripped a line in the sand as it turned, straight for the ship graveyard where Rey had spent so much of her time. She wasn't sure this would work, but she had to trust that it would.
He hit one of the TIEs, sending it exploding against part of a ship. A few scavengers below were already on their way to start stripping the parts that were left. Good for them.
"Nice shot!" Rey yelled.
"I'm getting pretty good at this!" he said happily.
They were still being fired on by one remaining TIE, and the ship rocked with another hit. "The cannon's stuck in forward!" he told her. "I can't move it. You gotta lose 'em!"
Rey honestly didn't know how many more hits they could take, and there was one thing she could try. He would not like it. She wasn't sure she would like it. But she was going to do it. "Get ready!"
"Okay! For what?"
Rey didn't answer. Instead she steered the ship upwards, and straight into the rear of a crashed Super Star Destroyer, with the TIE following in pursuit.
He realized where they were, and there was a slightly panicked, "Are we really doing this?" from his position.
Rey had been in here probably hundreds of times, exploring and rappelling and pulling things loose. She knew it like the back of her hand. She wasn't so sure she knew it that well when she was flying through it in a ship. She was terrified, but this was going to be okay, because there wasn't any way out but through.
They grazed a bit of the wall, then bounced off slightly to hit the other, and she realized they were going to run of out space to fly. So she yanked the yoke again, making a hard right through an exit she wasn't sure was going to be there.
Back in the daylight, for some reason she decided to cut the power and flip the ship so that it faced backwards, allowing the gunner's position a clear shot at the TIE in pursuit. He fired, and Rey gunned the engines again, flipping them once more as the TIE crashed behind them, and they rose up towards space.
Once she was sure they'd gotten clear, Rey barely allowed herself to breathe before unbuckling the crash restraints and hurrying aft. BB-8 had buckled himself to the walls and was retracting them now, and the man met her in the lounge, both of them excited to the point of giddiness.
"Good shooting!" she said.
"Thanks! That was some flying! How did you do that?"
"I don't know! I've flown some ships but I've never left the planet!"
"No one trained you?"
"No! Your last shot was dead on."
"That was amazing."
"You got him with one blast!"
"You set me up for it!"
"It was perfect!"
They both stopped, laughing, and Rey realized how long it had been since she had had fun. There was no way they should have gotten through that, and they did, and here they were.
BB-8 beeped urgently, and Rey knelt to get on his level. "You're okay. He's with the Resistance. He's going to get you home." And, since she was already off Jakku, and they had no other way to get anywhere, she promised, "We both will."
Rey looked back up at the man, and stood. "I don't know your name."
"Finn," he answered. "What's yours?"
"I'm Rey."
Finn paused, maybe a quarter of a beat, and said, "Rey-"
Before he could finish the sentence, across the lounge, steam burst from under the grating. "Help me with this, quick!" she said, running toward it, and pulling the heavy metal grate up with Finn's help. BB-8 rolled over to watch.
"What's going on?" Finn asked.
Rey climbed into the hatch, checking the controls and assessing the situation as an emergency alarm blared. She popped up again, ordering, "It's the motivator! Get me a Harris wrench. Check in there!"
With Finn checking the storage box, Rey disappeared again, her heart sinking as she began to realize what was happening.
"How bad is it?"
"If we wanna live, not good!" she answered.
"They're hunting for us, we gotta get out of this system!" Finn said.
She popped up again, finding him scouring through the contents of the box until he found a wrench. "BB-8 said the location of the Resistance base is 'need to know.' If I'm taking you there, I need to know!"
He tossed her the tool, and she dropped down again to start working. She couldn't hear what was going on above, or maybe she was more focused on keeping them from dying, and a moment later she came back up to demand the pilex driver. "So where's your base?" she asked as he went looking again.
"Go on BB-8, tell her," Finn said.
BB-8 looked from him, to Rey, and back again, before finally answering.
"The Ileenium system?" she repeated, disappearing again to make some tweaks. That was far. That was too far.
"Yeah, the Ileenium system, that's the one. Get us there as fast as you can," Finn told her.
"I'll drop you two at Ponemah Terminal. I need the bonding tape, hurry!"
"What about you?" he asked.
Rey popped up again. "I've got to get back to Jakku."
Finn looked very frustrated by that. "Back to Jak- Why does everyone always wanna go back to Jakku?"
Rey didn't know, but she still needed supplies, so she gestured towards the tools now laid out on the deck to search through. "No, that one," she said. "No. No. The one I'm pointing to. No. No. No. If we don't patch this up, the propulsion tank will overflow and flood the ship with poisonous gas!"
Finn held up the tape. "This?"
"Yes, she said calmly, and disappeared again to set the tape in place.
"Hey, Rey," he said, moving to the edge of the hatch so he could look down at her. "You're a pilot. You can fly anywhere. Why go back? You got a family? Got a boyfriend? Cute boyfriend?"
The alarms and steam stopped, and Rey popped up, annoyed. If she hadn't recently gone through having her ship stolen by people who actually wanted to escape, this might not have hit the note with her that it did. "None of your business, that's why."
The power went out.
"That can't be good," Finn said slowly.
"No," Rey said, pulling herself out of the hatch and trying to ignore the pit that was forming in her stomach, "that can't be."
He followed her as she ran back to the cockpit and sat in the pilot's seat, checking the dead instrument panel. "Someone's locked onto us… all controls are overridden."
Finn answered that by trying to climb up to look through the viewport for himself by sticking his hand atop her head to steady himself.
"Get off," she complained, shoving his hand away. "See anything?"
"Oh no."
A shadow appeared from above, just out of Rey's line of vision. They were moving towards a hulking dark shape, and she realized they were in a tractor beam, being pulled aboard another ship.
Finn flipped back in the seat. "It's the First Order."
"What do we do?" Rey asked, fighting down panic. "There must be-"
"You said poisonous gas."
"Yeah, but I fixed that."
"Can you unfix it?"
Rey blinked, and understood, scrambling out of the seat and grabbing the gas masks hanging in the lounge area on the way back. They climbed back in the hatch, struggling to pull BB-8 with them- for a little droid, he weighed a ton.
"You think this'll work on the Stormtroopers?" Rey asked, pulling open the panel to begin undoing her work. She didn't even have time to be annoyed about that.
"Yeah. Their masks filter out smoke, not toxins," Finn answered.
From above, Rey could see lights come on, and the landing ramp could be heard lowering. "Hurry!" Finn urged, pulling the grate shut.
"I'm hurrying!"
A moment later, the grate was pulled off again, much more easily than they'd managed it. Finn and Rey stopped suddenly, hands raised in surrender, looking up at the new arrivals. One was an older man with white hair and a leather jacket, a blaster trained on them. The other was a Wookiee.
"Where are the others? Where's the pilot?" the man demanded.
"I'm the pilot," Rey said immediately, hoping that wasn't the wrong choice.
"You?" he said doubtfully.
The Wookiee began to agree, and Rey answered him. "It's true, we're the only ones aboard."
"You can understand that thing?" Finn asked, frowning at her.
"And he can understand you, so watch it," the man said. "Come on outta there."
They climbed out, with BB-8 more easily pulling himself out with his magnetic arm. Rey still wasn't sure how this was going to go, but the man's blaster was lowered now, and there didn't seem to be a threat.
"Where'd you get this ship?" he asked.
"Niima Outpost," Rey answered.
"Jakku? That junkyard?"
"Thank you! Junkyard!" Finn said to Rey.
The man turned to the Wookiee. "Told you we should've double checked the Western Reaches! Who had it, Ducain?"
"I stole it from Unkar Plutt," Rey explained. "He stole it from the Irving Boys, who stole it from Ducain."
"Who stole it from me! Well, you can tell him Han Solo just stole the Millennium Falcon back for good."
He walked away, and Rey stared after him in awe. "This is the Millennium Falcon? You're Han Solo?"
"I used to be," Han called back.
"Han Solo?" Finn repeated. "The Rebellion general?"
"No, the smuggler!" Rey said.
Finn looked to the Wookiee. "Didn't he used to be a war hero?"
The Wookiee shrugged, and responded with something along the lines of "Yeah, sort of."
"This is the ship that made the Kessel Run in fourteen parsecs!" Rey continued. This was history! She was aboard actual history!
"Twelve!" came Han's voice, more distant now.
A few moments later, after some time at the cockpit, he came back again and said, "Hey! Some moof-milker put a compressor on the ignition line!"
"Unkar Plutt did," Rey explained. "I thought it was a mistake too, puts too much stress on-"
"The hyperdrive," Han said, finishing her sentence with her. He blinked at her, then said, "Chewie, throw 'em in a pod, we'll drop them at the nearest inhabited planet."
"Wait! No!" Rey protested. "We need your help!"
"My help?"
"This droid has to get to the Resistance base as soon as possible!"
"He's carrying a map that leads to Luke Skywalker," Finn added.
Han stopped in his tracks.
"You are the Han Solo that fought with the Rebellion," Finn went on. "You knew him."
"Yeah, I knew him," Han said quietly. "I knew Luke."
From… somewhere came a loud metallic clunk, and Han said, "Don't tell me a Rathtar's gotten loose."
He hurried down the landing ramp and into the giant freighter's hangar, with Finn saying, slightly panicked, "Wait-- a what?! Did you just say Rathtars?"
******
So what Rey learned today (among an increasing number of other things) was that she did not like Rathtars, nor did she like whatever gangs Han had been dealing with, but mostly- again- she did not like Rathtars. Escaping the most immediate threat of being eaten by giant tentacle monsters meant running back onto the Falcon, with Han helping a wounded Chewbacca up the ramp and yelling at Rey to close the door, and for Finn to take care of Chewie.
Rey did, and then did the most logical thing, which was to follow Han into the cockpit and easily drop herself into the copilot's seat.
"Hey, where are you going?" Han asked.
Rey was already hitting the necessary switches, informing him, "Unkar Plutt installed a fuel pump, too. If we don't prime that, we're not going anywhere." She'd been on this ship before, she knew where everything was.
"I hate that guy," Han grumbled, taking his own seat.
"And you could use a copilot."
"I got one, he's back there," Han said, jerking a thumb aft. "Watch the thrusts, we're going out of here at lightspeed."
Rey gaped at him. "From inside the hangar? Is that even possible?"
"I never ask that question till after I've done it."
She actually understood that. It was how she tended to have to do things herself, after all.
A Rhathar jumped onto the windshield, and Rey was not even a little embarrassed at the scream she let out. Its giant mouth chewed at the transparisteel.
"This is not how I thought this day was gonna go," Han groused, and told Rey, "Angle the shields. Hold on back there!"
Three of the gang members could be seen past the creature on the window, and Rey saw on the controls that they'd apparently blasted their fuel lines.
"Come on, baby, don't let me down," Han said, hitting a switch- and… nothing. "What?"
Rey reached over and pressed a different switch. "Compressor," she explained calmly.
This time the hyperdrive flared to life, and the Rhathtar was ripped away an instant before starlines filled the view.
Rey had never been in hyperspace before, and she wanted to be able to really see it, but the cockpit was still chaos. They could hear Finn trying- and failing- to help an upset Chewbacca with his injury outside, and inside alarms were beeping while Han tried to get them under control. "Electrical overload!" he said, probably mostly to himself.
"I can fix that," Rey said, already starting.
"The coolant's leaking!"
"Try transferring auxiliary power to the secondary tank-"
"Secondary tank, I got it," Han said, taking over immediately. He also spared a second to call over his shoulder, "You hurt Chewie, you're gonna deal with me!"
"Hurt him?" Finn called back. "He almost killed me six times!"
Han ignored that, his attention back on the controls. "This hyperdrive blows there's gonna be pieces of us in three different systems."
Rey simply reached up and pulled a part from the control board. The alarms stopped, replaced by a pleasant sound of everything coming up working just fine.
Han frowned, looking over at her. "What'd you do?"
"I bypassed the compressor," Rey said, grinning.
Han's expression didn't change much, but there was something to it, something familiar. And then he just said, "Huh," and got up to head aft, leaving Rey to wonder why that look was familiar.
Then she realized that while she'd always had a natural talent with mechanics, she didn't know how she'd bypassed the compressor, either, or how she'd known to do it, and then she remembered the last time she'd seen that expression on someone.
Not wanting to think about the circumstances around that at the moment, Rey followed Han into the lounge area, where Han was telling Chewie to get some rest. Then he turned to Finn and said, kind of awkwardly, "Good job, kid. And thanks."
"You're welcome," Finn said from his seat at the dejarik table, and immediately hit a button that sent him scrambling to make the holographic figures go away.
"So, fugitives, huh?" Han asked.
"The First Order wants the map," Rey explained. The gang had labeled her a fugitive, which she didn't agree with, but it was one of the many things making this her most interesting day in a long time. "Finn is with the Resistance. I'm just a scavenger." Obviously this was a case of mistaken identity with her.
Han glanced at Finn, but said to BB-8, "Let's see what you got."
BB-8 rolled forward, and projected a holographic map into the room. Rey had gotten out, seen some of the galaxy while she was in Fandom, but Earth was a tiny planet in a small system that had nothing to it. This was… a lot. She hadn't thought there were this many stars and systems and planets anywhere, and here they were, right in front of her.
"This map's not complete," Han said, stepping through part of the map. "It's just a piece. Ever since Luke disappeared, people have been looking for him."
"Why did he leave?" Rey wondered.
Han's discomfort wasn't going away. "He was training a new generation of Jedi. One boy, an apprentice, turned against him, destroyed it all. Luke felt responsible... He walked away from everything."
"Do you know what happened to him?" Finn asked.
"There were rumors. Stories. The people who knew him best think he went looking for the first Jedi temple."
Rey had always had a hard time reconciling the fact that there were Jedi from all over time and space in Fandom- including one named Skywalker- when there weren't any here. She'd written it off as being a difference between realities, because she couldn't have heard all those stories and had them actually be real and then have it not exist anytime in her time. It didn't feel right.
And here was Han, a legend in his own right, talking about it like it was no big deal.
It gave Rey an uneasy feeling, like she was stepping into a place she didn't belong. "The Jedi were real?"
"I used to wonder that myself. Thought it was a bunch of mumbo-jumbo- magical power holding together good, evil, the dark side and the light," Han said, and looked back at them. "Crazy thing is, it's true. The Force, the Jedi…. All of it. It's all true."
[This one's long and I even cut stuff out! NFB, NFI, OOC just fine. Taken from The Force Awakens, which will be happening for a bit.]
It was stupid of her. She couldn't exactly afford to give up food like that, and sure, she was turning out to like the little droid, but it wasn't like she had some real attachment. Not really, anyway. It had been nice to have someone around to talk to, even if she'd never had company at home before. She just hadn't been able to do turn him in.
And when two of Plutt's goons followed her and said they were taking BB-8, she was glad she didn't do it. One grabbed her, the other tried to get the droid, but Rey wasn't exactly someone to try that with, because her immediate instinct was to fight back harder than them. With a big stick. Really, they should know that by now, it was why people left her alone.
Once she'd beaten them down, she knelt by BB-8 to check on him, and his dome swiveled towards a man watching them from the tents.
Less than a day ago she'd been willing to let BB-8 find his own way around without her, and now with one statement from him, she automatically took off running towards the man with her staff out. It took him a second to realize she was coming for him, and then he took off through the tents. She knew her way around them, though, so she was able to cut him off and meet him halfway to knock him to the ground with her staff. "What's your hurry, thief?"
"What?" he asked, sounding genuinely surprised. "Thief? Ow!"
That was BB-8, who had rolled over and shocked him.
"The jacket! This droid says you stole it!" Rey said, still threatening him with her staff.
The man did not like one bit. "I've had a pretty messed up day, all right? So I'd appreciate it if you would stop accusing me- Ow!" He glared at BB-8. "Stop it!"
Rey ignored him. "Where'd you get it? It belongs to his master."
He looked at her, annoyed, and then at the droid, and his expression changed. "It belonged to Poe Dameron. That was his name, right?" he asked, and BB-8 rolled back astep, cautious. "He was captured by the First Order. I helped him escape but our ship crashed. Poe didn't make it."
She glanced at BB-8, who warbled sadly and dropped his dome, and she couldn't help but feel bad for him. He rolled off to the side to be alone for the moment.
Rey turned her attention to the man, trying not to look impressed. "So you're with the Resistance?"
"Obviously. Yes I am. I'm with the Resistance," he said quickly, standing. And then since they were in public and thus clearly wasn't something to just announce, he whispered, "I'm with the Resistance."
She'd heard stories forever, about the Rebellion and Resistance, even helped one, once. But to have it here... That was exciting. She lived among the ruins but the people were mysteries. She lowered her staff and couldn't stop a conspiratorial smile from crossing her face. "I've never met a Resistance fighter before."
"Well, this is what we look like. Some of us," he amended. "Others look different."
"BB-8 says he's on a secret mission, he has to get back to your base," she hissed.
"Apparently he's carrying a map that leads to Luke Skywalker, and everyone's after it."
Rey blinked. A weird thing happened when you spent years in Fandom, a place where you could meet people from your universe that might live in different times or not exist at all: you could end up believing that the stories were wrong, or at the very least different than you'd heard your whole life. And as someone who'd been taught by a different Skywalker without ever hearing the name Luke, who knew a Jedi but had no proof that they'd ever actually existed out here from in the middle of nowhere, Rey believed every story she'd heard was just that. It had happened somewhere, but not here.
"Luke Skywalker?" she repeated, incredulous, her voice a whisper. "I thought he was a myth."
BB-8's alarmed beeping ended that topic, and Rey peeked around the tent corner to see two white-clad stormtroopers talking to the thugs Rey had just taken care of. They were pointing in the direction of the tent.
He grabbed her hand, and as Rey asked, "What are you doing?" he took off running, pulling her along with him while BB-8 rolled along behind.
She got her answer a second later when blaster bolts hit the cleaning unit next to where they'd just been standing. She might have screamed. They were being shot at! Rey had been in plenty of fights, but being shot at was new and unwelcome!
"Let go of me," Rey insisted.
"No, we gotta move!" he yelled back over the shooting.
"I know how to run without you holding my hand!" she said, pulling her hand away. "BB-8, stay close! This way!"
Rey lived here, she knew where they were actually going, and she zigzagged them through the tents until they could take cover and hide. "They're shooting at both of us!" she hissed.
"Yeah, they saw you with me! You're marked!" he said.
"Well, thanks for that!"
"I'm not the one who chased you down with a stick!" he shot back. "Does anyone have blasters around here?"
Rey looked to BB-8 to ask if he was okay, but the man shushed her. Rey listened, and there was some kind of whirring mechanical scream from above, and he grabbed her hand again.
"Stop taking my hand," she gritted out, and dropped it while they ran clear of the tent. Above them was a TIE fighter, followed by a second, and one of them fired.
The blast hit the sand, too close, sending all three of them flying. While rattled that starfighters were shooting at them, Rey pulled herself up and made her way to the man, who was either unconscious or dazed. "Hey!"
He jolted, and looked up at her. "Are you okay?"
Rey frowned, confused, not used to being asked that. Also, she hadn't just gotten knocked out. "Yeah," she said, and stuck her hand out for him to help him up.
She had a plan, and it was probably a bad plan, but hiding wasn't going to help them or anyone else. So Rey took off and led the way across the sand, away from the tents.
"We can't outrun them!" he yelled behind her.
"We might!" she said, pointing ahead in case he couldn't hear her. "In that quad jumper!"
"We need a pilot!"
"We've got one!"
"You?"
...Maybe. Rey didn't have a lot of practical experience. She'd flown the ship she'd scavenged and rebuilt only twice, and tested out a couple things for Unkar after that, but most of her skills were learned via simulators. But, generally in a setting like this, she couldn't take the time to think about something before she did it.
"What about that ship?" He called, pointing off to the side.
Rey glanced in that direction. "That one's garbage!"
As she said that, the TIEs swooped in and fired, hitting the jumper. It exploded into fire, sending a thick of black cloud of noxious smoke into the air. Rey stopped in her tracks, covering herself from debris, and stared slack-jawed at the fireball in front of them.
"The garbage will do," she decided, starting towards the other ship. It was old and dilapidated and had been sitting dormant for years, and Rey just had to hope she could get it moving.
The TIEs circled around and fired again as they hit up the landing ramp. Rey directed the man to the gunner's position while she raced to the cockpit.
"Y'ever fly this thing?" he yelled as he ran in the other direction.
"No!" she said, pulling her staff from her back and tossing it aside so she could sit in the pilot's seat. "This ship hasn't been flown in years!"
Which was fine. It was fine.
"I can do this, I can do this," she mumbled, beginning startup procedures. Then she pulled the yoke, and the ship rose into the air... and dipped. It spun and tilted, slamming into an archway and breaking it apart.
Rey winced but kept trying, hitting at least one more thing that she couldn't see before pulling the ship into the air, which felt better. The two TIEs were on their tail, though, and she wasn't entirely sure how to get out of that situation.
"Whoa! Hey! Oh! Stay low! Stay low!" came the orders from the gunner well.
"What?"
"Stay low! It confuses their tracking!"
Right. This was going to be insane, and she was afraid to do it, but that wasn't going to stop her now. She let go of the controls to reach over to the co-pilot's seat and hit a few things, calling back for BB-8 to hold on. Then she sat up straight, stabilized the ship, and warned, "I'm going low!"
She pulled the ship up at a dramatic upward arc, upside down, then swooped perilously low across the sand, sending both TIEs screaming past. A moment later the ship shook as they took a blast, and Rey yelled, "What are you doing back there? Are you ever gonna fire back?"
"I'm working on it! Are the shields up?"
She reached over to switch them on and returned, "Not so easy without a co-pilot!"
"Try sitting in this thing!" he said, but fired at the TIEs and missed, leaving both to fire on them again.
"We need cover, quick!" he said.
"We're about to get some," she told him.
And to herself, she murmured, "I hope."
She knew the landscape of Jakku. So she flew them through a rock formation, grazing it and taking out a chunk of the side. She banked so hard that the edge of the ship ripped a line in the sand as it turned, straight for the ship graveyard where Rey had spent so much of her time. She wasn't sure this would work, but she had to trust that it would.
He hit one of the TIEs, sending it exploding against part of a ship. A few scavengers below were already on their way to start stripping the parts that were left. Good for them.
"Nice shot!" Rey yelled.
"I'm getting pretty good at this!" he said happily.
They were still being fired on by one remaining TIE, and the ship rocked with another hit. "The cannon's stuck in forward!" he told her. "I can't move it. You gotta lose 'em!"
Rey honestly didn't know how many more hits they could take, and there was one thing she could try. He would not like it. She wasn't sure she would like it. But she was going to do it. "Get ready!"
"Okay! For what?"
Rey didn't answer. Instead she steered the ship upwards, and straight into the rear of a crashed Super Star Destroyer, with the TIE following in pursuit.
He realized where they were, and there was a slightly panicked, "Are we really doing this?" from his position.
Rey had been in here probably hundreds of times, exploring and rappelling and pulling things loose. She knew it like the back of her hand. She wasn't so sure she knew it that well when she was flying through it in a ship. She was terrified, but this was going to be okay, because there wasn't any way out but through.
They grazed a bit of the wall, then bounced off slightly to hit the other, and she realized they were going to run of out space to fly. So she yanked the yoke again, making a hard right through an exit she wasn't sure was going to be there.
Back in the daylight, for some reason she decided to cut the power and flip the ship so that it faced backwards, allowing the gunner's position a clear shot at the TIE in pursuit. He fired, and Rey gunned the engines again, flipping them once more as the TIE crashed behind them, and they rose up towards space.
Once she was sure they'd gotten clear, Rey barely allowed herself to breathe before unbuckling the crash restraints and hurrying aft. BB-8 had buckled himself to the walls and was retracting them now, and the man met her in the lounge, both of them excited to the point of giddiness.
"Good shooting!" she said.
"Thanks! That was some flying! How did you do that?"
"I don't know! I've flown some ships but I've never left the planet!"
"No one trained you?"
"No! Your last shot was dead on."
"That was amazing."
"You got him with one blast!"
"You set me up for it!"
"It was perfect!"
They both stopped, laughing, and Rey realized how long it had been since she had had fun. There was no way they should have gotten through that, and they did, and here they were.
BB-8 beeped urgently, and Rey knelt to get on his level. "You're okay. He's with the Resistance. He's going to get you home." And, since she was already off Jakku, and they had no other way to get anywhere, she promised, "We both will."
Rey looked back up at the man, and stood. "I don't know your name."
"Finn," he answered. "What's yours?"
"I'm Rey."
Finn paused, maybe a quarter of a beat, and said, "Rey-"
Before he could finish the sentence, across the lounge, steam burst from under the grating. "Help me with this, quick!" she said, running toward it, and pulling the heavy metal grate up with Finn's help. BB-8 rolled over to watch.
"What's going on?" Finn asked.
Rey climbed into the hatch, checking the controls and assessing the situation as an emergency alarm blared. She popped up again, ordering, "It's the motivator! Get me a Harris wrench. Check in there!"
With Finn checking the storage box, Rey disappeared again, her heart sinking as she began to realize what was happening.
"How bad is it?"
"If we wanna live, not good!" she answered.
"They're hunting for us, we gotta get out of this system!" Finn said.
She popped up again, finding him scouring through the contents of the box until he found a wrench. "BB-8 said the location of the Resistance base is 'need to know.' If I'm taking you there, I need to know!"
He tossed her the tool, and she dropped down again to start working. She couldn't hear what was going on above, or maybe she was more focused on keeping them from dying, and a moment later she came back up to demand the pilex driver. "So where's your base?" she asked as he went looking again.
"Go on BB-8, tell her," Finn said.
BB-8 looked from him, to Rey, and back again, before finally answering.
"The Ileenium system?" she repeated, disappearing again to make some tweaks. That was far. That was too far.
"Yeah, the Ileenium system, that's the one. Get us there as fast as you can," Finn told her.
"I'll drop you two at Ponemah Terminal. I need the bonding tape, hurry!"
"What about you?" he asked.
Rey popped up again. "I've got to get back to Jakku."
Finn looked very frustrated by that. "Back to Jak- Why does everyone always wanna go back to Jakku?"
Rey didn't know, but she still needed supplies, so she gestured towards the tools now laid out on the deck to search through. "No, that one," she said. "No. No. The one I'm pointing to. No. No. No. If we don't patch this up, the propulsion tank will overflow and flood the ship with poisonous gas!"
Finn held up the tape. "This?"
"Yes, she said calmly, and disappeared again to set the tape in place.
"Hey, Rey," he said, moving to the edge of the hatch so he could look down at her. "You're a pilot. You can fly anywhere. Why go back? You got a family? Got a boyfriend? Cute boyfriend?"
The alarms and steam stopped, and Rey popped up, annoyed. If she hadn't recently gone through having her ship stolen by people who actually wanted to escape, this might not have hit the note with her that it did. "None of your business, that's why."
The power went out.
"That can't be good," Finn said slowly.
"No," Rey said, pulling herself out of the hatch and trying to ignore the pit that was forming in her stomach, "that can't be."
He followed her as she ran back to the cockpit and sat in the pilot's seat, checking the dead instrument panel. "Someone's locked onto us… all controls are overridden."
Finn answered that by trying to climb up to look through the viewport for himself by sticking his hand atop her head to steady himself.
"Get off," she complained, shoving his hand away. "See anything?"
"Oh no."
A shadow appeared from above, just out of Rey's line of vision. They were moving towards a hulking dark shape, and she realized they were in a tractor beam, being pulled aboard another ship.
Finn flipped back in the seat. "It's the First Order."
"What do we do?" Rey asked, fighting down panic. "There must be-"
"You said poisonous gas."
"Yeah, but I fixed that."
"Can you unfix it?"
Rey blinked, and understood, scrambling out of the seat and grabbing the gas masks hanging in the lounge area on the way back. They climbed back in the hatch, struggling to pull BB-8 with them- for a little droid, he weighed a ton.
"You think this'll work on the Stormtroopers?" Rey asked, pulling open the panel to begin undoing her work. She didn't even have time to be annoyed about that.
"Yeah. Their masks filter out smoke, not toxins," Finn answered.
From above, Rey could see lights come on, and the landing ramp could be heard lowering. "Hurry!" Finn urged, pulling the grate shut.
"I'm hurrying!"
A moment later, the grate was pulled off again, much more easily than they'd managed it. Finn and Rey stopped suddenly, hands raised in surrender, looking up at the new arrivals. One was an older man with white hair and a leather jacket, a blaster trained on them. The other was a Wookiee.
"Where are the others? Where's the pilot?" the man demanded.
"I'm the pilot," Rey said immediately, hoping that wasn't the wrong choice.
"You?" he said doubtfully.
The Wookiee began to agree, and Rey answered him. "It's true, we're the only ones aboard."
"You can understand that thing?" Finn asked, frowning at her.
"And he can understand you, so watch it," the man said. "Come on outta there."
They climbed out, with BB-8 more easily pulling himself out with his magnetic arm. Rey still wasn't sure how this was going to go, but the man's blaster was lowered now, and there didn't seem to be a threat.
"Where'd you get this ship?" he asked.
"Niima Outpost," Rey answered.
"Jakku? That junkyard?"
"Thank you! Junkyard!" Finn said to Rey.
The man turned to the Wookiee. "Told you we should've double checked the Western Reaches! Who had it, Ducain?"
"I stole it from Unkar Plutt," Rey explained. "He stole it from the Irving Boys, who stole it from Ducain."
"Who stole it from me! Well, you can tell him Han Solo just stole the Millennium Falcon back for good."
He walked away, and Rey stared after him in awe. "This is the Millennium Falcon? You're Han Solo?"
"I used to be," Han called back.
"Han Solo?" Finn repeated. "The Rebellion general?"
"No, the smuggler!" Rey said.
Finn looked to the Wookiee. "Didn't he used to be a war hero?"
The Wookiee shrugged, and responded with something along the lines of "Yeah, sort of."
"This is the ship that made the Kessel Run in fourteen parsecs!" Rey continued. This was history! She was aboard actual history!
"Twelve!" came Han's voice, more distant now.
A few moments later, after some time at the cockpit, he came back again and said, "Hey! Some moof-milker put a compressor on the ignition line!"
"Unkar Plutt did," Rey explained. "I thought it was a mistake too, puts too much stress on-"
"The hyperdrive," Han said, finishing her sentence with her. He blinked at her, then said, "Chewie, throw 'em in a pod, we'll drop them at the nearest inhabited planet."
"Wait! No!" Rey protested. "We need your help!"
"My help?"
"This droid has to get to the Resistance base as soon as possible!"
"He's carrying a map that leads to Luke Skywalker," Finn added.
Han stopped in his tracks.
"You are the Han Solo that fought with the Rebellion," Finn went on. "You knew him."
"Yeah, I knew him," Han said quietly. "I knew Luke."
From… somewhere came a loud metallic clunk, and Han said, "Don't tell me a Rathtar's gotten loose."
He hurried down the landing ramp and into the giant freighter's hangar, with Finn saying, slightly panicked, "Wait-- a what?! Did you just say Rathtars?"
******
So what Rey learned today (among an increasing number of other things) was that she did not like Rathtars, nor did she like whatever gangs Han had been dealing with, but mostly- again- she did not like Rathtars. Escaping the most immediate threat of being eaten by giant tentacle monsters meant running back onto the Falcon, with Han helping a wounded Chewbacca up the ramp and yelling at Rey to close the door, and for Finn to take care of Chewie.
Rey did, and then did the most logical thing, which was to follow Han into the cockpit and easily drop herself into the copilot's seat.
"Hey, where are you going?" Han asked.
Rey was already hitting the necessary switches, informing him, "Unkar Plutt installed a fuel pump, too. If we don't prime that, we're not going anywhere." She'd been on this ship before, she knew where everything was.
"I hate that guy," Han grumbled, taking his own seat.
"And you could use a copilot."
"I got one, he's back there," Han said, jerking a thumb aft. "Watch the thrusts, we're going out of here at lightspeed."
Rey gaped at him. "From inside the hangar? Is that even possible?"
"I never ask that question till after I've done it."
She actually understood that. It was how she tended to have to do things herself, after all.
A Rhathar jumped onto the windshield, and Rey was not even a little embarrassed at the scream she let out. Its giant mouth chewed at the transparisteel.
"This is not how I thought this day was gonna go," Han groused, and told Rey, "Angle the shields. Hold on back there!"
Three of the gang members could be seen past the creature on the window, and Rey saw on the controls that they'd apparently blasted their fuel lines.
"Come on, baby, don't let me down," Han said, hitting a switch- and… nothing. "What?"
Rey reached over and pressed a different switch. "Compressor," she explained calmly.
This time the hyperdrive flared to life, and the Rhathtar was ripped away an instant before starlines filled the view.
Rey had never been in hyperspace before, and she wanted to be able to really see it, but the cockpit was still chaos. They could hear Finn trying- and failing- to help an upset Chewbacca with his injury outside, and inside alarms were beeping while Han tried to get them under control. "Electrical overload!" he said, probably mostly to himself.
"I can fix that," Rey said, already starting.
"The coolant's leaking!"
"Try transferring auxiliary power to the secondary tank-"
"Secondary tank, I got it," Han said, taking over immediately. He also spared a second to call over his shoulder, "You hurt Chewie, you're gonna deal with me!"
"Hurt him?" Finn called back. "He almost killed me six times!"
Han ignored that, his attention back on the controls. "This hyperdrive blows there's gonna be pieces of us in three different systems."
Rey simply reached up and pulled a part from the control board. The alarms stopped, replaced by a pleasant sound of everything coming up working just fine.
Han frowned, looking over at her. "What'd you do?"
"I bypassed the compressor," Rey said, grinning.
Han's expression didn't change much, but there was something to it, something familiar. And then he just said, "Huh," and got up to head aft, leaving Rey to wonder why that look was familiar.
Then she realized that while she'd always had a natural talent with mechanics, she didn't know how she'd bypassed the compressor, either, or how she'd known to do it, and then she remembered the last time she'd seen that expression on someone.
Not wanting to think about the circumstances around that at the moment, Rey followed Han into the lounge area, where Han was telling Chewie to get some rest. Then he turned to Finn and said, kind of awkwardly, "Good job, kid. And thanks."
"You're welcome," Finn said from his seat at the dejarik table, and immediately hit a button that sent him scrambling to make the holographic figures go away.
"So, fugitives, huh?" Han asked.
"The First Order wants the map," Rey explained. The gang had labeled her a fugitive, which she didn't agree with, but it was one of the many things making this her most interesting day in a long time. "Finn is with the Resistance. I'm just a scavenger." Obviously this was a case of mistaken identity with her.
Han glanced at Finn, but said to BB-8, "Let's see what you got."
BB-8 rolled forward, and projected a holographic map into the room. Rey had gotten out, seen some of the galaxy while she was in Fandom, but Earth was a tiny planet in a small system that had nothing to it. This was… a lot. She hadn't thought there were this many stars and systems and planets anywhere, and here they were, right in front of her.
"This map's not complete," Han said, stepping through part of the map. "It's just a piece. Ever since Luke disappeared, people have been looking for him."
"Why did he leave?" Rey wondered.
Han's discomfort wasn't going away. "He was training a new generation of Jedi. One boy, an apprentice, turned against him, destroyed it all. Luke felt responsible... He walked away from everything."
"Do you know what happened to him?" Finn asked.
"There were rumors. Stories. The people who knew him best think he went looking for the first Jedi temple."
Rey had always had a hard time reconciling the fact that there were Jedi from all over time and space in Fandom- including one named Skywalker- when there weren't any here. She'd written it off as being a difference between realities, because she couldn't have heard all those stories and had them actually be real and then have it not exist anytime in her time. It didn't feel right.
And here was Han, a legend in his own right, talking about it like it was no big deal.
It gave Rey an uneasy feeling, like she was stepping into a place she didn't belong. "The Jedi were real?"
"I used to wonder that myself. Thought it was a bunch of mumbo-jumbo- magical power holding together good, evil, the dark side and the light," Han said, and looked back at them. "Crazy thing is, it's true. The Force, the Jedi…. All of it. It's all true."
[This one's long and I even cut stuff out! NFB, NFI, OOC just fine. Taken from The Force Awakens, which will be happening for a bit.]