2
The funeral is four days later. Rey watches out the window as the rain pours down on the black-clad figures shuffling around the plot of land they’ve decided to bury him in. Leia said it would be fine if she didn’t come. Leia sad a lot of other things, too, but Rey is pretty sure she only heard about ten percent of what the general was saying. Everything was happening too fast, and she was bleeding all over the floor, or maybe it was Luke’s blood…she couldn’t tell. They had gotten off the ship, Rey still holding Luke like that was all she could do, and then they were in Leia’s office and she was asking what happened, and then there was the medical corridor, all bright lights and crisp sheets and dull voices above her. When she woke, two days later, there was nobody around.
She likes that best, anyway. If someone happened across her room, if someone sought her out, she would have to talk. And she has nothing to talk about. She doesn’t want to cry about Luke, she doesn’t want to say over and over again how sad she is that he’s dead. It’s easier to stay here with the doors closed and hope that nobody drops by.
The figures in the rain are starting to disperse and Rey realizes, with a sudden jolt of panic, that someone is going to come and want to talk to her. She pulls herself away from the window, stitches in her stomach protesting, and dresses slowly and painfully. She looks up and down the corridor before stepping out, but the hallway is deserted. Briefly, she wonders if Poe and Finn will come find her. She saw Finn this morning at breakfast, sitting with the other trainees and eating oatmeal. He was wearing a black dress shirt, so she assumed he would go to the funeral. She didn’t see Poe. Maybe he was on a mission.
The hallway seems to grow every time Rey takes a step forward, but she finally makes it to the door. Outside, the rain is even worse than it looked through the window. She considers going back in, but then remembers why she left in the first place.
The base is segmented into four pieces by two main roads, and intersected at regular intervals by smaller paths. She starts down one of those paths, nearly running. The rain feels good. It wakes her up, pulls her out of the stupor she’s been in for days. Eventually, she makes it to a huge tree, towering a black from the rain.
The tree extends high into the sky and its roots go deep into the ground, extending tens of meters in every directing and looping and pulling at the earth. She sits in the crevice between two of the roots and wonders if maybe Luke sat here one day. She thinks he might have.
Something shifts within her. She starts crying, and once she’s started it’s near impossible to stop.
She goes to see Leia. After drying off her eyes and brushing most of the dirt form her back, she climbs the set of stairs to the general’s office. She is told to wait by a droid who she’s pretty sure smiles at her, so she sits on a tiny chair in the entranceway and listens to Leia speaking a foreign language in the next room over. Finally, the door opens and a small green figure walks away indignantly. The droid beckons her in.
Leia looks awful. Tired, drawn, angry. Rey realizes she might look just as bad, but she brushes it off. When Rey enters, Leia stands and give a weak smile. “Rey,” she says. “How are you?”
“Fine. How are you?”
“I’m holding up.” Leia stands there for a moment, as if unsure what move to take next. Finally, she speaks again. “So, what do you want to talk about?”
Rey clears her throat. “When we were…there. Getting Ellann, um, Luke said some things after it happened.”
Leia visibly tenses. “What did he tell you?”
“He said, uh, he said leaving me was hard and then he said to go to you. That you would tell me everything.”
Leia sinks into her chair. “Anything else?”
Rey shakes her head. “What did he mean?”
“Listen, Rey. It’s complicated.”
“So you’re not going to tell me.”
“No, I just want to make sure I tell it right.”
Rey tries to think for a comeback, but that seems reasonable. “When?”
Leia stands up. “Tomorrow? Come by sometime and we can talk.” She pulls Rey into a hug, which is unexpected but not altogether unpleasant. “Did you know that you and Ben trained together when you were kids?” (THE BLACK ROOM, HIS EYES, DARTING BACK AND FORTH)
Rey reels back. “What?”
“When you were young. He told you that, right?”
Rey tries to get her bearing into the room again. “He told me that he trained me when I was a kid but…” She supposes it makes sense. Luke had told her about some of the training, how there were kids there who were just toddlers and some who were teenagers. Of course Ren would have trained somewhere. Of course he would have trained with Luke.
For a few seconds, she finds herself thinking about what he would have been like in training. Did he live here, on the base? Maybe he knew Poe. Maybe he grew up with Jess.
Leia smiles, and for the first time in days, Rey remembers that Luke was her brother. “Come by tomorrow.” She opens her office door and lets Rey into the entranceway. “Oh,” she says, before she closes the door. “If you see Poe, come tell me. Nobody can find him.”
“Is he okay?”
“I’m sure he’s fine.” She shuts the door.
Rey walks back to her room half in a daze. As she heads down the main road, Finn runs by with a group of trainees. She doesn’t look up, and he doesn’t see her either.
Back in her corridor, Rey heads to the shower room. Jakku didn’t have showers, just dirty bathing houses that she knew much better than to go into. She takes off her soaked clothes and turns on the water, letting the steam cascade around her. She’s nearly finished when the door opens. She turns the water off, berating herself for not remembering that other people would be here.
She wraps a towel around herself and grabs her clothes and is nearly to the door when she sees Jess.
“Rey,” Jess says. “Sorry, I didn’t realize anyone was in here.
“I was just leaving.”
“I didn’t see you at the funeral. It was really nice.”
“I didn’t go.” Rey takes another step towards the door.
“Leia gave a really lovely speech.”
Rey wraps the towel tighter and pulls a forced smile. “I’m sure it was.”
“Rey, listen, if you ever want to talk to someone…”
“I don’t.” The fluorescent lights of the shower room make Jess’s eyes look like gold. Rey forces the thought from her head.
“If you want to do something other than talk, too.”
Rey looks up. Jess is so close to her, even closer than before, and her lips are pressing against her own, they’re soft and warm and…
Jess pulls away. “I’m sorry. That was inappropriate. I know you must be grieving and—”
“Don’t be sorry.” Rey cuts her off. “Do it again.”
Jess kisses her again, wrapping her hands in her hair and pushing Rey’s back onto the tiled wall. For the first time in days Rey doesn’t think about Luke. She doesn’t think about anything.
Back in her room she lies on the bed, anxiety building in the pit of her stomach. Her lips feel tingly, on fire. She wonders if what she did was wrong. If leaving was a bad thing to do, if staying, talking, going back to Jess’s dorm was some kind of normal action that she simply didn’t know. She can feel the hot tears building up behind her eyes but she won’t let them spill over, she won’t let herself do this. Stupid, she thinks. Nothing seems simple anymore.
At eleven that night she’s reading a book Luke gave her, some boring manual on lightsaber technology but now she clings on to every word as if she can somehow find him lost within the pages. The book is mind-numbing, though, and every few paragraphs her thoughts turn back to Jess, back to the showers and her lips, hot and slow. She doesn’t know what she did, doesn’t know exactly what anything that happened meant, but it took her mind off everything for a little while. Poe Dameron bursts into the room. The door to her bunk slides open and suddenly the doorway is filled by his figure, shadowy against the florescent hall lighting. “Rey,” he says. “We have to save Finn.”
Panic courses through her. “What?” she manages to choke out. Images fill her head: Finn, taken by the First Order. Finn, being executed by Phasma in front of Ren.
Poe moves closer to her. “He’s a Stormtrooper, Rey, he’s there and they’re hurting him!”
“They took him?”
“We have to rescue him.”
It doesn’t add up. Finn wasn’t on a mission, he’s missing and no one seemed to know where he was. And somebody would have come to get her if he had really been taken, or so she assumes. Poe’s eyes are frenzied and exhausted. “Poe, just slow down, OK? Tell me what happened. Where were you? Leia was worried.”
He shakes his head roughly. “No time. Come on, we have to go!” he grabs her hand and tugs, and then he’s running out the door. She puts the diagrams of lightsabers on her bed and follows him into the hallways. “Poe!” she yells. “Poe. If he’s been captured, we have to go to Leia. We have to tell her.”
“She might be one of them,” he says. The look in his eyes terrifies her. “Come on. You’re either with me or you’re with them.”
And Rey follows him, through the winding hallways, through the cement structures that wind around the base. I’ll take him to Leia, she reasons. I’ll take him to Leia and everything will be ok. She makes a plan as she runs, because planning is always the right thing to do, isn’t it? She’ll follow him to the end of the corridor, and then she’ll figure out where he’s going and she’ll go find Leia. If Finn is gone, Leia needs to know. If Poe is acting this way for…whatever reason he is, Leia needs to know, too.
Their feet slap against the plastic floors. Poe is running at breakneck speed and it’s all Rey can do to keep up with him. He takes a left and a right again, and then barely stops to punch in a code in a cement door. The keypad scans his fingerprint and he barrels through the doorway. She makes it through just before the door closes.
They’re in a massive hangar, and she knows with a sinking feeling what he’s doing. She lingers by the door as he strides across the floor towards a tiny ship in the left corner. “Come on!” he yells. “We don’t have much time!”
She starts to follow him across the floor. “Let me go tell Leia,” she says in the calmest voice she can muster. “She can sort this all out.”
“Leia,” he spits from the ship’s entrance, “can’t do shit for him.” He ducks through the doorway and into the cockpit.
She turns to run to Leia, to find her and bring Poe back. Rey turns her back on him for a half a second and in that moment, in the infinitesimal silence of that instant, she hears the engines fire. She starts to run, and makes it to the door before the ship hums to life. The door is locked. She curses whoever made the system so secure, and then, in the same instant, she realizes that the large hangar doors aren’t open. The ship is hovering now, feet about the ground, and the doors are closed. There’s no way out of the room, and nowhere for the ship to go.
She tries to force the door open with the force, tries to do what Luke told her and clear her mind and visualize, but a dark headache builds behind her eyelids until she has to stop. Her vision goes blurry and then there’s a crash and there’s fire coming from somewhere, Poe is yelling Finn’s name, or maybe that’s her own voice, she’s thrown forward and hits the door, which gives way and finally bursts open. About time, she thinks, and then she blacks out.
Bright light appears in the corner of her vision. “Where’s Poe?” she manages, her mouth stinging. “He’s alive,” someone says. She thinks it’s Luke but she can’t be sure.
The next time she wakes up the light is gone and her whole body aches. She sits up and is surprised when her back and abdomen don’t protest too much. She wonders where Finn is. She wonders if maybe he’ll talk to her again.
She visits Poe in the medical corridor. Finn is sitting in a chair drawn up next to him, holding the other boy’s hands in his own. He gives Rey a weak smile when the door slides open.
“They’re keeping him asleep for now,” he says. Rey nods and stands there, arms crossed, looking down at Poe’s sleeping face. The calm that rests there is so strongly opposed to the last time she saw him.
“Rey—” Finn says, and then cuts himself off. He stays there for a few seconds, teetering on the brink of speech, but eventually he bows his head and turns away from the door. Rey knows she isn’t needed any longer, that she wasn’t needed in the first place, but it is nearly a minute before she steps out of the door.