Chapter Text
In dreams, he sees the forest.
Images stack and loop through his mind. The sickening crack of Rey’s skull against the tree. Blood hissing into snow as Ren’s face twists feral and his gloved fist pounds against his side. The red-blue burn of sabers locked and sizzling in the cold air.
Blinding agony driven up his spine.
Darkness presses, firm but unreachable. He wants desperately to yield to it, to let it wash these scenes from his sight, but it shrinks from his touch like the wrong pole of a magnet.
(Ren’s eyes spill with raw, measureless hate and his teeth glint smudged-white in the dark. The hilt of his saber sears Finn’s shoulder and he screams, he screams, he screams.)
Perhaps, he thinks, as he watches Ren’s blood drip dark in the snow, he is dead, and this is his hell. Phasma always said that disobedience would never go unpunished, and leave it to the First Order to find some way to make him miserable, even in the afterlife. He pictures her chrome helmet inclining in that smirking way as she sentences him to an eternity of crack against the tree and sizzle against his skin and pain, pain, pain so sharp it scrapes him out inside.
No. The intensity of his thought surprises him, but he latches onto it, lets it carry him like driftwood out of a river. The First Order had him once. He will never let them have him again.
Ahead Kylo Ren pounds one, two, three on his side, and behind Rey flies crack against the tree. But this time, Finn ignores them both, looking instead to the sky, the darkness flecked with spots of bright. He reaches up and spreads his trembling fingers toward the night.
For a moment, nothing happens. The sky yawns wide and Rey snaps against the tree and Ren screams in rage, but then it’s wrong, all wrong, because somehow the darkness is receding and suddenly he’s grasping stars in his hands, the light bursting forth all at once, smothering his vision until gasps wrack his body and he finally breaks free.
**********
“Finn? Naked? Wh—BB-8, that’s not funny,” Poe glares at the little droid, already starting to regret some of the things he let slip the other night.
In the past few months, BB-8’s taken to acting like a makeshift therapist. On late nights when D’Qar’s moons fill the sky, Poe presses his elbows to his knees and hunches over the edge of his cot, dredging up the things that keep him from sleeping. BB-8 listens as the words tumble from his lips, sometimes interjecting with a demure beep or a nuzzle against his knee. It’s a sweet, selfless routine, one of those things that make Poe stop and wonder how he’d been so lucky to get a droid—a friend—as good as this.
But now he casts his astromech a suspicious glance and wonders if the sneaky little shit only went along with it to learn his secrets.
BB-8 beeps insistently, and Poe rolls his eyes, turning around with exaggerated deference. “Okay, sure. You’re not joking, and I’m going to look up and see Finn naked in the middle of the hangar, and I’m not going to send you to maintenance for a week, and—Holy Yoda!”
The last part comes out in a yelp. Before he can even think, he’s swinging out the x-wing cockpit and pushing through the hangar, BB-8 chirping a three-tone told you so behind him. His boots scuff against the duracrete floor and he blinks hard a few times as he nears, but nothing changes—Finn is still there.
Poe calls his name, and Finn turns to him, his eyes ridged with confusion and his skin taut over his cheekbones. But he’s whole and alive and awake, and Poe stops short, the force of his relief knocking the air out of his lungs.
He knew, intellectually, that the coma was temporary, a necessary medical procedure to hasten the healing process. But for all the bioscans and medic’s assurances and confident projections, the sight of Finn—immobile, stretched out on the table, chest barely rising with each shallow breath—shoved him back in time to that scared six-year-old on Yavin IV, clutching his mother’s cooling hand and thrashing against his father’s arms.
“Poe,” Finn starts and stops, voice breaking from lack of use. The bacta suit hangs loosely over his frame, its contents swirling inside and drenching his bare chest in the sweet, herbal-scented gel.
Finn gives him an odd look and Poe’s face heats as he realizes he’s not only staring, but his hand is stretching out, almost by its own accord, as if to lay on Finn’s chest. Embarrassment spikes through him and he changes course midair, clapping Finn on his uninjured shoulder and babbling with a determined nonchalance.
“Finn, buddy, it’s so great to see you. Really, really great—I’ve missed you so much. I mean, not I as in me—well, including me, I guess—I mean the whole Resistance, and force , why am I still chattering on when you must have a million questions—”
“Where’s Rey?” Finn interrupts, and Poe’s heart sinks.
************
She wakes to a pair of dark eyes staring back at her own.
Desert-hardened instincts take over. Her hand jumps to the staff strapped across her back, a millisecond away from unsheathing it when she processes who’s—what’s—in front of her.
Oh.
The porg blinks curiously, hopping an inch closer. Relaxing, Rey sits up and pushes her arms into a stretch. The sudden movement startles the bird, and it takes off, squawking loudly on its way to rejoin its friends.
She rubs the sleep from her eyes. Ahead, the still-dark sky paints the sea a deep blue, melting into gold at the horizon. The bird woke her a half-hour before dawn, she estimates, but she finds she doesn’t mind; it was her own decision to sleep out here, after all. Luke offered a cot inside, but Rey took one look at the spongy hills, so green and so alive, and decided there was no way she’d be cooped up in a stone prison all night. Not when there was so much life out here.
When she told him that, there’d been an instant when Luke gazed at her with sunken, unreadable eyes. A second later he seemed to remember himself, the scowl sliding back into place as he grumbled and returned to his hut without another word.
But later that night, when he thought she was asleep, he stood a few meters away, watching with that same peculiar expression. As if she were a riddle he wasn’t sure he wanted to solve.
Or a memory left purposefully buried.
She picks up a handful of soil and lets it filter through her fingers, leaving the rocky base behind in her hands. She knows things like this shouldn’t still amaze her. After all, she’s been to five planets now—five. After glittering lakes and sprawling forests and snow (snow!), a handful of soil shouldn’t delight her. But it does, and she can’t help it, so she embraces it, this tiny handful of dirt and rock and spindly roots.
Jakku doesn’t have soil. It has sand, and it has rocks, but they’re different. Barren. Vagrant. Battering and shifting and blowing away. Not like here, or Takodana, where the ground lies firm and solid beneath your feet.
She swirls her fingers in the dirt and tries to imagine what it’d be like to grow up in a place like this, but her mind circles inevitably back to thirst and cracked skin and grit caught between her teeth.
Maybe she can blame Jakku for that cavern inside her. Maybe the buffeting winds weathered a hollow that no lifetime can fill. Maybe she was over before she even began.
But no—she pushes to her feet and shakes her head, as if her malignant thoughts were grains of sand she could dislodge with a mere toss of her hair. She can’t allow herself to slip down that path. She won’t. She promised General Organa she’d bring her brother home. She promised Finn they’d meet again. And she promised herself she would find Kylo Ren and make him suffer.
And no matter what stands in her way—Luke’s stubbornness, millions of miles, unfaceable odds—Rey will make good on her promises.
**********
Growing up in a desert, Rey learned quickly to evaluate thirst. She eventually came up with a classification based on three broad categories:
- The kind that crouches in the back of your mind, like an insect perched high in the corner of your room. You can get by with it there, but a part of you is always thinking about it, always dreading when it’ll move closer.
- The kind that lodges in your throat and drains the moisture from your tongue, your lips, the roof of your mouth. It propels you to action; to find water if it’s available, or step toward despair if it’s not.
- The kind that steals your breath, cracking your lungs with each inhale and pounding on your skull until you can’t move, can’t think, can’t do anything but lie there with your lips parted and mind foggy and pray for a merciful stranger to pass by with a canteen, or, if not, a blaster.
Right now, Rey’s at a 1. It’s not so bad, really, and she’s definitely felt worse, but the voice in her head that kept her alive all these years whispers for her to find a spring, just in case. Plus, she has a bad feeling that if she asks for something to drink, Luke will just grin and offer that horrid green milk, and Rey would rather spend a week on level 3 than let that sludge pass her lips ever again.
Fresh water isn’t easy to find. But Ahch-to supports a variety of alien life, and they must drink something, so Rey keeps looking. After a few minutes it occurs to her that there’s no guarantee the creatures even need fresh water—it is an oceanic planet, after all, and it wouldn’t be too far out for them to drink salt water. But a moment later the porg she’s been tailing hops around an outcropping and she sees it: a small, round pool, shiny like the flat side of a coin.
A smile breaks across her face and she jogs forward, lowering herself to kneel before it. She nods to her reflection and makes a note to retie her hair after she drinks. Then she poises over the water, her lips just about to break the surface when something—everything—shifts.
She jumps to her feet, staff brandished protectively in front of her. All the noise around her—the porgs splashing in the pool, the waves crashing on the rock, the faraway chatter of Caretakers in their morning chores—falls away. It’s all still there, but—muted, somehow. Like there’s invisible hands covering her ears. Yet her own breathing, ragged and harsh, resounds abnormally sharp.
What the hell is going on?
She turns and looks back at the pool, jumping at the sight. What moments ago shone with her own reflection, now shines black, as if the pool were somehow drained and refilled with oil.
She creeps closer and closer until her knees press once again into the cool mud. Drawing a breath, she reaches out a hand, fingers shaking as they near the surface. A part of her mind, the sane, rational part, is screaming at her to pull back, to run far, far away, because when has sticking an arm into a strange, possibly supernatural substance ever turned out well for anyone?
But another voice, the voice that urged her to steal the Millenium Falcon, the one that pushed her to escape her bonds on Starkiller and showed her how to beat Kylo Ren into the snow, whispers gently into her ear. Maybe it’s a test from Luke, maybe it’s a trick from Snoke, maybe it’s a by-product of some green-milk induced delirium. But whatever it is, she has to know, so she extends her shaking fingers and plunges them below the surface.
The world folds inside out. She quickly withdraws her hand but the pool’s already gone, fallen away with the rest of Ahch-to. At first, it seems like she’s standing in a blank, white room, walls made of pure light. She blinks, and as her eyes focus she realizes it’s not that at all, but another planet, its surface coated in some chalky white substance.
Dimly, she thinks that this must be a vision, like when she touched the lightsaber in Maz’s castle. She’s still not entirely sure what she was supposed to see then, and she sure as hell doesn’t know what she’s supposed to see now.
She takes a cautious step forward, the ground crunching under her boots. The movement stirs a cloud of red dust, and she frowns, crouching to examine it. When she looks back up, a rickety speeder is barreling straight toward her.
Panic roots her to the spot. She should move, she has to move, if she doesn’t want to get flattened—or does she? Are there rules for death in a dreamscape? Can she just pop back up like nothing ever happened?
The speeder gets closer and her heart lurches when she realizes it’s Finn in the cockpit. She screams his name, but if he hears, he doesn’t give any indication. His eyes are almost serene, but his face is resolute, hands locked around the controls. He looks—he looks resigned.
Confused, she looks in the direction he’s hurtling towards.
Her heart stops.
Out of the mist rises a massive, pulsing thing—a cannon, or energy weapon of some sort. A cold inkling drips in her stomach. No, no, no—she whips back to Finn, the same quiet, stoic expression on his face—No—she’s screaming now, everything sliding into place with grim clarity. She waves her arms and runs, finally, towards the speeder, reaching out with the Force and trying to halt it in its path. But she’s too late. The speeder passes right through her, like she’s not even there.
Because she isn’t.
She blinks and her head is poised over the pool, the porgs splashing and waves crashing and Caretakers chattering like normal. But nothing is normal. Not to her, anymore.
Her chest heaves and she crawls away from the pool as fast as her shaking limbs allow. She knows she should go back and drink, but suddenly thirst and hunger feel like dreams, like things that belong to other people.
People who didn’t just learn that their best friend is going to die.