chapter three
The second last planet the team visits is so far out of the way that it doesn’t fall under First Order or Resistance jurisdiction, making it a risky destination. Often locals of “neutral” places like this tended towards the pricklier side, and neither Rey nor Finn have the stomach for fighting civilians, even in self defense. As they descend from the thick purple clouds that blanket the planet’s surface, Rey can see a small party waiting for them on the rocky surface below. She reaches out, just a little, and feels the deep, simmering anger that the locals below are feeling, the weight of it, the bitterness. She’s about to warn Finn when he comms her from the helm of the Falcon.
“We need to take this slow. Stay with the ‘trooper freighter. I’ll land the Falcon first. Be ready to fly.”
“Alright. Defensive positions, shields up.”
The Falcon begins its descent. They fall into the reverse V shape and wait, the carrier freighter cradled between them all. It’s almost empty now, but there are maybe 3 or 4 kids sitting inside who might still have family down there. She can see Jess’s X-wing in the other arm of the V. They’d left in a hurry this morning, so she hadn’t had a chance to talk to her yet.
“Transferring Chewie to comms. I’m going out. I count 20, 30 of them. They have anti-aircraft weaponry. No sudden moves.” Finn’s voice is tense and Rey wishes she could have joined them on the ground.
She squints below as the tiny shape of Finn exits the Falcon, hands above his head. He’s waving his arms, pointing up to where the rest of the team are hovering. A bead of sweat drips down Rey’s neck.
Finn’s still talking, and she reaches down, to try and gauge what’s happening. The locals’ anger has diffused, and they’re bewildered, some feeling overwhelmed. They don’t trust him, not yet.
Rey. They’re asking me to prove to them who I am.
Show them your lightsaber. Be careful.
She watches as Finn lowers his hands slowly, and unclips his saber from his belt. He draws it, ignites it. The deep purple of his double-ended saber matches the turbulent clouds circling overhead. The mood below shifts rapidly, fear to awe.
Alright, they trust me. It’s safe to come down.
“All units, we can land,” Rey relays into the comms, and a collective sigh of relief echoes in her ears as the pilots release their tension. They slowly, carefully ease their way downwards, settling in the dust. The whir of the engines is loud in Rey’s ears as she hops out her craft and makes her way to Finn’s side, where he’s reattached his lightsaber to his belt and is shaking hands with a tall, masked, hooded figure who appears to be the leader of the small group behind them.
“You are Jedi also, yes?” They speak in heavily accented Galactic Basic, and Rey shakes their hand as well. The leather gloves that cover their hands are cracked and peeling. Despite the thick purple clouds, it looks like it hasn’t rained on this planet in a long, long time.
“I am. My name is Rey. Children were taken from you?”
“My son, barely two cycles old. Thirty more, from our tribe and the neighbouring ones. How many with you?” The hope in the person’s voice is fragile, wavering, and the truth makes Rey's chest ache.
Rey glances at Finn, who looks as forlorn as she feels, and replies, “Only four. All female. They’re inside the freighter.”
The being nods, seemingly composed, and very slowly kneels, pulling their mask off their face. Rey catches a flash of blueish skin and red eyes before the person wails, gloves scrabbling in the dirt. Finn closes his eyes, his mouth pressed in a firm line, as the other locals kneel with their leader in the dirt, their heartbroken cries filling the desolate plain.
-
The children are returned, and the plain tribes gather to hold a funeral for the ones who couldn’t make it. They decide to stay out of respect, and besides, they need to stock up on supplies. The locals are understandably wary of them and stay away for the most part, but their children aren’t as cautious. Finn is soon swarmed by a flock of small, scrawny, blue-skinned humanoids who pounce on his back and swing from his arms. They’re entranced as he makes small pebbles float in the air, snatching, laughing.
“He’s good with those kids, isn’t he?” Jess sidles up from behind, her voice blank in a way Rey hasn’t heard from her in weeks.
“Yes, he is. It’s sweet.” Something is pressing down on her chest and getting rapidly heavier.
Jess folds her arms, and says in the same, placid, infuriating tone, “Well that’ll be helpful for you in the future.”
Rey whirls to face her. “What on earth do you mean by that?”
“It doesn’t matter. You should go join him. Entertain the kids for a bit.”
“Jess, what’s going on? Talk to me.” Rey reaches for her, but she pulls away, stepping back, her face fixed in that impenetrable mask. The ground is falling away from her feet. This is not how it’s meant to be.
“I’m going to work on my ship.” She’s turning away now, slipping away, and Rey doesn’t know what to do.
“Jess.” The pilot pauses at the tone of Rey’s voice, shoulders set in a hard line.
“Jess, talk to me. Something’s clearly bothering you, what is it?”
Jess does not turn to face her, her next words barely more than a whisper. “What are you doing, when you go off with Finn? Where do you go?” The question throws Rey off balance, and she’s scrambling to find something to say that won’t undo Finn’s plan.
“I- It’s not my story to tell. It’s not that important, anyway.” She knows it’s the wrong thing to say when she sees Jess’s shoulder sag, just a little. It feels like there’s a hollow space in Rey’s ribs, slowly caving in. But what can she say? What could she possibly say to Jess to make her understand?
Turn around, she begs her, silently, Just look at me. Look at me.
Jess walks away.
-
The next week passes in a blur of misery and guilt. When Finn finally announces that they're going back home, sitting around the bonfire on the last planet, she just watches Jess's faint, relieved smile, how it doesn't reach her eyes, how she walks off to sleep long before the other pilots are finished celebrating. Rey wants to go after her, but she’s too afraid of making whatever’s wrong even worse. The indifference stings, but hate would destroy her.
Jess has not looked her in the eyes for a week, and Rey is feeling every second of it.
"Seriously, what's wrong with you two?" Finn lowers his saber, switching it off with a deft flick of his wrist. He’s a quick learner, almost startlingly so, incredibly strong in the Force and with a real talent for saber combat. A couple more months, and he’d definitely be beating her. He’s still too hesitant with attack though, more comfortable fighting defensively, which is the main reason why he’d opted for an overall shorter blade length, but with dual ends that detached in the middle. In a perfect world, he’d never have to use it, but there will always be more battles to fight, as long as the First Order maintained even a semblance of power in the galaxy.
“Hello? Rey, c’mon.”
“Sorry Finn. I was just… Yeah. What did you say?”
“I was asking why you and Jess keep acting like the other has some kind of disease you’re afraid of catching.” Finn hooks the saber to his belt and folds his arms, one eyebrow arched expressively. Something about his stance reminds her of Master Skywalker.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, bantha shit. You guys were like… magnets, and now someone’s reversed the poles. Repelling instead of attracting. You keep watching and walking around each other but not actually talking. It’s making everyone tense, hell, it’s making me tense.”
She scoffs. “Glad to know everyone’s so invested in our relationship.”
“Oh it’s a relationship now, is it?” Finn waggles his eyebrows at her and she rolls her eyes, huffing out an embarrassed breath. Jess has been watching me?
“I’m not sure if you’ve noticed this Finn, but I don’t exactly have time for… that. Hell, I don’t even know how I’d start. Jakku wasn’t exactly flush with dating opportunities.”
“And the First Order was?”
“Well it’s not like I see you running around with a boyfriend.” He points the saber at her teasingly, though there’s a dark flush to his cheeks. She bats it away and tries for a smile, though she knows it won’t be convincing.
“I don’t- Poe- We- Don’t deflect, this conversation is very specifically about you and Testor.”
“There’s nothing else to say. I think I made her mad at me. I don’t know how to fix it. That’s all!” She clips her saber to her belt and sighs, stretching out the muscles in her hands. Finn looks concerned.
“Mad? Mad how?”
“She… asked about this. The training.” She waves at the earth they’ve stomped flat in the two hours since they’d begun. “I tried to deflect it. Didn’t go well.” Finn groans.
“You know she can sniff out lies like a bloodhound, right? Half the reason why Poe assigned her to go with us. She’s like a bullshit detector.”
“Well, that would’ve been helpful information a week ago Finn,” she mutters, feeling like something has scraped her hollow. He pats her arm reassuringly and pulls her to sit down on a fallen tree branch. They sit there for a while, soaking in the Force, feeling it move through them, a comfort, always.
“I think about her. All the time.” Her voice is low enough to just be another bit of ambience, but she knows Finn is listening. “When she’s not there. I think about her eyes and her hair and that hideous orange jumpsuit all the pilots wear. I keep seeing her hands.” Rey squeezes her eyes shut, and there they are, clever and quick and slim, machine oil stuck in the crevices. Kriff.
“And she’s so damn wise, Finn, always knows what to say. She looks at you and it’s like she’s reading a holo, or something, but I just want her looking at me. And she’s been avoiding me all week and I don’t know what to do. I miss her.”
Finn sucks in a breath and lets it out slowly. “Hate to break it to you, but I think you might be in love.”
She barks out a startled laugh. Not what she’d been expecting. “Love? Hardly. I know love, it isn’t this.”
He fixes her with the most deeply unimpressed, Leia-like look she’s ever seen on another face that wasn’t the late General’s. “Seriously?”
“What?”
“Rey, I-” he lets out a frustrated sigh and shakes his head. “Alright, you know love? Tell me what it is.”
“It’s…” The words dry up in her throat and she coughs to buy herself some time. They sit there in the twilight of the jungle planet, some far off creatures chittering in the trees high above. She could close her eyes and meditate right here, melt into the pulsing flow of the Force. She knows Finn’s waiting for an answer. Not yet, she whispers into the trees. Not now.
He pushes up and off the branch, offering a hand to her. He’s warm and solid and steady, grounding, even as her heart threatens to beat out of her chest. When he hugs her, something eases, just a little bit. No matter what happens, you’ve got him.
He pulls away to look at her seriously, his brows furrowing slightly. “You’re smart. You’ll figure this out, Rey.”
-
And the thing is, she thought she already had.
Love, that is. It was the spark in Finn’s eyes when he talked about Poe, the way Leia had smiled, so gracious and so fierce, whenever she spoke of Han. There’d always been a lightness, a sense of wonder, a glow in the Force so tangible she felt she could almost taste it. Love is what makes the world go round, a memory of a long ago whisper, somewhere far away. She didn’t recognise that voice, but it rested in her mind, reverberating like her X-wing was as they shot through hyperspace on their way home. BB-8 has seemingly picked up on her mood (could droids do that?) and remains uncharacteristically quiet, something Rey isn’t particularly sure she wanted. A droid, she could talk to, bounce her ideas off of, but alone in the echo chamber of space? She is feeling startlingly alone.
Here is the thing- when Rey looks back to when air rushed back in her lungs, when her fingers regained their feeling, when she came back to life- She remembers fear, and an ache, deep inside, like a wound that had never really healed. She remembers cold, and pain, and a dark shadow passing over her soul she did not want. But she hadn’t been all there, not yet. She hadn’t really come back into herself until she was back on Ajan Kloss, her best friends in the world holding her as the Resistance celebrated a victory that had been unthinkable only a few hours ago. She’d laughed so hard she almost cried, and it had felt like the world was swelling up under her feet. She’d been buoyant, lighter than air.
And here is the thing- in those brief hours of joy before the horror and the exhaustion and the urge to run had set in, she hadn’t thought of Ben Solo at all.
Thinking of him makes her feel tired, fragile to her core, thin and worn and pulled taut like an elastic cord, on the verge of snapping. He’d terrified her, ever since she’d sensed him in the forests of Takodana, like a prickling rash that stayed stuck to somewhere she couldn’t reach or relieve. There had been the urge to save him, help him, but with every loss and every atrocity, every wound in the Force that cut her down to the bone, it grew harder to stay objective, to promise that she was only doing this for Han. She watched him break every heart that tried to help him until there was only hers left.
Is this what love is supposed to be?
She shudders, suddenly cold, and BB-8 beeps gently, doing something to the interior of the cockpit that warms it slightly, easing the chill that had settled in her chest.
She thinks of Jess instead.
Eyes as dark as the Sith pool on Ahch-To but a million times warmer, alight with life and fierceness and so much beauty it had stolen the breath clean out her chest. Jess is quiet, seemingly the calmest of all the people Rey had known, but there is a stillness to her that belies something waiting, something else. All quick half-smiles and brushes of touch, on her wrists and hands, so light she could almost imagine that they’d never happened. And she missed her, physically, an ache in the pit of her stomach that Jess had simply filled by being around.
Rey thinks of the pilot’s clever fingers and quicksilver smile, and finds that maybe she does know what love is, after all.
-
She tells Finn first, about her plan, and after some hesitation, he agrees with her. They set out the next morning, after first meal, and set off into the jungle in full view of the hangars. It’s a test of will, to not look behind her, but Rey knows that Jess will follow.
She and Finn find a good, empty clearing, and spar briefly, yellow and purple sabers spraying sparks over the damp leaf-litter floor. Then, she sends Finn to do the obstacle course that she’d done under Leia’s tutelage only a few months ago, and waits.
Once she’s certain Jess is watching from the trees, she turns.
“Pilot.”
“Jedi.” If Jess is embarrassed at being caught, she doesn’t show it, shaking her boots clear of leaf litter as she joins Rey in the sun. “But I guess Finn’s a Jedi now, too?”
“He’s not all the way there yet. In the old Republic he might be considered a padawan, but we’re not exactly going for historical accuracy here.”
Jess’s tone is easy, casual, like nothing has happened at all. Her eyes are fathomless, dark and deep, but warming slightly, and that breathes hope into Rey’s veins. “And you and Finn aren’t a thing.”
“No.”
“Why didn’t you guys tell us?” She can hear the unspoken message. Why didn’t you tell me?
“You might have told Poe. Finn wanted to do that himself, but-”
“Poe’s avoiding him. I’d tell you why, but I don’t think that’s my story to tell.” There, a bit of venom, emotion. It stings, but it’s better than nothing at all. If Jess really didn’t care, it would show.
“It’s not. They know what they’re doing.”
Jess snorts. “You’re smart enough to know that what you just said is bullshit. Lie to me, whatever, but don’t lie to yourself.”
Something in the air has shifted, they’re just not talking about Poe and Finn now. Rey decides to just be as honest as possible and hope for the best.
"I miss you. I don't know why you've been avoiding me."
Jess drops her gaze and sighs, heavily. "I miss you too. I just… I've done this kind of shit before. I didn't want to go through it again."
Rey steps forwards, takes the other woman's hands. "What kind of shit? Jess, I don't understand."
"You. This. Whatever we were doing." Jess closes her eyes, like she can't bear to look directly at Rey. Her hands are limp and unresponsive in Rey’s, and it hurts, stings worse than anything Rey has known. “I’m a pilot. We’re disposable by job description. You’re too… bright, in my mind. I don’t want to try this dance and get nothing by the end. Do you understand?”
“Jess-”
“And I can’t just be your friend, Rey. Not when you’re you. Don’t you understand how special you are? And I’m not just talking about the Jedi shit. You.”
“I don’t want to just be your friend.” And it’s true, she realises. She knows friendship, the love that comes with it, the easy laughs and bright humour she shares and savours with Finn, with Rose, with Jannah and Chewie and Poe. There’s another type of line connecting her and Jess, another path, and it’s been fraying, worn down by unspoken resentments and misunderstandings. She wants to walk that path. She doesn’t want it to break. She breathes in, steps closer.
“Rey-”
Jess’s mouth is warm, the softest thing she’s ever felt, and she makes a small exhalation of surprise before the other woman pulls her closer, kisses her deep, something flickering to life inside, something bright and precious.