Chapter Text
It started by accident.
...well, actually, the start was deliberate, it was the rest that happened by accident. As in, Finn deliberately said, “You have a boyfriend? Cute boyfriend?” because the Sith was dealing blows faster than he could block them and he had to do something before she took his head off. And he was sort of attached to his head, keeping it where it was; he was sentimental that way.
“A wh— no, ” the Sith said, throwing all her weight behind the next thrust. Finn barely had time to bring his lightsaber up, and the impact knocked him back onto his heels, sinking a little into the soft earth as he tried to stave off her blade. She was stronger than she looked and he gritted his teeth, lashing out wildly with the Force. He managed to catch her with the sharpened edge of it, and she flinched but didn’t budge.
Their sabers screamed, throwing sparks of light and white smoke.
Finn pressed forward, but the moment he shifted his weight the Sith was already dancing away. She moved like a dream, her heels never seeming to touch the earth, darting just beyond the reach of his lightsaber.
Finn thought he could see her flash a vicious, delighted smile.
They circled one another. She had—annoyingly good form, Finn conceded, looking for an opening. The ancient city of Nekmit had been abandoned for millennia and the soft earth, tangled with overgrown grasses and loose stones had Finn struggling to find his footing. But she’d moved through three different stances in quick succession without seeming to notice any of it. Even when Finn started switching hands, a trick that Luke considered cheating and had summarily banned from sparring, the Sith had just looked interested. And scorched the sleeve off Finn’s favorite tunic.
“ We’re good to go, ” Luke said suddenly, his voice crackling over Finn’s earpiece. Finn practically choked on a sigh of relief. “Get back to the ship, I can’t keep this thing idling for long without blowing the reactor.”
The Sith’s eyes had narrowed, and Finn wondered if something in his face had given him away. He launched himself forward without thinking about it, without warning—she barely had enough time bring her lightsaber up to block his overhead blow, and then they were close, too close; Finn could where see her arms trembling as she tried to hold him off.
She had a thin white scar on running along the side of her face, Finn wondered how she’d gotten it.
He was so distracted he almost missed the beginnings of a shift in the Force, churning as it turned over from Light to Dark. It felt like a storm moving in, one of the violent, sudden outbursts you got on desert planets sometimes, or over open water. Finn had visions of lightning at the Sith girl’s fingers, like all the stories Luke had told about his battle with the Emperor.
Finn hated those stories, they’d given him nightmares.
“So you don’t have a boyfriend!” he said breathlessly.
The storm...paused.
The Sith pulled a face. “No,” she said. There was strain in her voice too, and when Finn pressed in, bringing all his weight to bear on their crossed lightsabers, he saw the muscle in her cheek jump. “No, I told you already, I don’t have a—”
“You want one?” Finn asked with a grin, and he was stupidly, pathetically grateful when she froze, her eyes wide.
Her arms went slack, enough for the scream of their lightsabers to fade to a hum. When Finn took a hesitant step backwards, the Sith stayed frozen as though she were still blocking his saber.
For a moment they stayed like that, breathing hard and staring at one another. The Sith’s mouth opened as though she were about to say something, but nothing came out. “Well,” Finn said after a minute. “Let me know, okay?”
Hesitation wasn’t much, but it was enough. An opening to switch off his lightsaber, turn on his heel and sprint for the Stormspike, which he could knew was hovering beyond the crumbling city walls. He was tired—kriff, his lungs were already burning—but there was something freeing about tearing down what must have once been the main street of Nekmit, crumbling buildings flicking by in his periphery. The wind pulled at his tunic but he was running, the sky huge and blue above him.
He darted through the city gates and reached behind him blindly; the Force leapt to his hand and he cast it out like a bright hook, pulling until he felt the stones of the ancient gate begin to fall.
Finn didn’t dare look behind to see if the Sith had been caught in the collapse, just raced toward the Stormspike and dove for the open bay doors. “Go!” he shouted, and the freighter lurched into the air, kicking up a cloud of dust. Finn let himself slump against the interior hull, coughing.
“Took you long enough,” Luke said cheerfully over the earpiece.
“Fine,” Finn said. The inside of his mouth tasted like grit. “Next time, you can distract the Sith, and I’ll be in the ship with the priceless Jedi artifact and the big laser cannons.”
“Yes, you’re very brave and heroic. Can you shut the bay doors manually? I think the auto mechanism’s broken again.”
Finn sighed, and pushed himself up onto his feet. The auto mechanism was always broken, just like the reactor was always overheating. He was pretty sure Luke’s hand was a genuine miracle of modern tech, given all the repair jobs and partial rewiring. Even the manual shut lever was only partially manual shut lever anymore; the rest was spacer tape and durasteel patches. You had to wiggle it, then slide it down at just the right angle—
Afterwards, he couldn’t say why he looked, except he did.
The Stormspike wasn’t so far away that he couldn’t see her, the Sith girl standing atop the pile of rubble that was Nekmit’s city gate—a lonely figure dressed in black. The wind was pulling at Finn’s tunic and his mouth tasted like sand, but he stood there and watched her grow smaller and smaller, further and further away. He watched even as the ruins of the ancient city of Nekmit were swallowed up, and disappeared into the dusty green haze of the Wastes.
Then Finn closed the bay doors, and went up to talk to Luke.
//
She’d had nice eyes, Finn thought as he crawled in his bunk that night. It seemed like cheating, for a Sith to have pretty eyes.
//
He woke up to someone jabbing his cheek, which—after a moment of disorienting panic, where he groped for his lightsaber and almost cracked his head against the top of the bunk—was a pretty typical way for his day to begin. Realizing that it wasn’t the Sith girl come back to finish the job, Finn groaned and let himself fall back onto the pallet.
“Good morning, Etturi ,” Finn said, squeezing his eyes shut as the Rodian started poking at his nose. She was just a larval and still honing her depth perception; she tended to miss his nose and jab him in the eye if he didn’t take precautions.
“It’s not morning,” Etturi giggled. “You’ve been hibernating so long Master Jedi sent me to wake you up.”
“Mm,” Finn hummed noncommittally. He’d been dreaming about a temple, maybe; it had looked like a temple. Columns of black stone and deep shadows, cold enough that his breath fogged in the air. He had been wandering through the great expanse of it alone—and then he hadn’t, someone warm and bright beside him, close enough to touch. But he hadn’t been able to turn his head, and when he tried to speak there was nothing but wind, and silence.
Then there’d been a noise like thunder, like something huge shattering, and the bright stranger grabbed at his hand. He’d—
Etturi poked him in the eye. “Your face is so funny,” she said, sounding delighted. “Come. Hatcher is making Toopil noodles, your favorite.”
Toopil noodles were in fact not Finn’s favorite, since they tasted like raw seaweed dipped in sour sauce, but he wasn’t about to say so. He’d spent enough time following Luke Skywalker around the galaxy to be grateful for every scrap of hospitality, especially food freely offered. The Chekkoo clan had been good to them, despite the danger of sheltering two sentients with a bounty on their heads as well as the trove of ancient Jedi junk aboard Stormspike. Sure, Luke was old friends with the head of the clan—something to do with the war, which meant everyone said “Oh you know, the war,” like that was an explanation. But Finn and Luke had been using Rodia as their base for months now, and friendship didn’t seem enough to balance out that debt.
Finn had started teaching the larvals Basic whenever he was on-world, out of sheer guilt for the amount of caf, Toopil noodles, and fish he’d consumed on the clan’s credit.
Etturi poked his cheek again and Finn sighed and sat up, minding the top of the bunk. Etturi was already reaching, grabbing at the air and babbling excitedly in Rodese. There weren’t many words Finn could recognize in Rodese—it wasn’t really a language for human ears, all low frequencies—but this was definitely one of them.
“Not today, sorry,” Finn said, rolling his shoulders. It felt as though he’d slept on something much harder and colder than the bunk, his muscles complaining every time he shifted. Maybe he’d bruised something fighting with the Sith.
Etturi stamped her foot, and demanded, “Up!”
Finn snorted, but her tiny scowl was too much; he sighed, holding out his arms. Etturi was all smiles again, scrambling up into his lap. He could feel when she snuck her hands down the back of his tunic, the suction cups at her fingers latching onto his shoulders. Finally, she buried her snout in his neck, and chiruped, pleased.
“You’re lucky you’re cute,” Finn muttered, making sure he had a firm grip on the larval before attempting to stand.
He had to rap on the bunkroom door with his elbow to get it to open, and Etturi giggled as the panels slid back. “Yeah, laugh it up,” Finn said, adjusting his grip so her suckers weren’t pulling on his neck. “Your species is the one that didn’t build sensors to detect human-colored people.”
Finn set off down the winding corridor, half-listening to Etturi chatter in a happy mix of Basic and Rodese. Aside from the inconvenience of having to knock on every surface to get anywhere, Finn liked the Chekkoo clan’s enclave. It had been built generations before, to house the full clan and unnumbered future generations of Chekkoo. Finn had tried to count the rooms once, one particularly dull afternoon; he’d given up after the first few thousand. Most were sitting empty, and had been since the start of the rainy season. Except for larvals and a handful of hatchers, the Chekkoo were on the other side of the planet, staging war games with the other clans and renegotiating or renewing alliances.
(Though Luke denied it, Finn was pretty sure that was the reason they were still on Rodia. The head of the Chekkoo was known to have ambitions, and just the name ‘Luke Skywalker’ carried weight. If negotiations weren’t going the way she wanted, being able to summon the Jedi himself from the Chekkoo enclave would be a stunning coup.)
Still, in the absence of the clan, the enclave didn’t feel empty. It should have—a huge stone monument without windows, Finn had nervously mistaken it for a tomb at first. But the Rodians adored light, and had a hundred different ways of playing with it to make rooms seem larger or smaller, from open flames to the iridescent red flares of the lower levels to the soft white orbs that hovered over Finn’s bunk. Some of the larvals had been teaching him how to adjust the various settings, though Finn couldn’t help thinking that he probably needed an extra tongue and maybe a throat sac to make it work.
Finn could see how so much light was necessary. The enclave was deliberately beautiful, every inch of the grey stone carved, intricate with the history of the Chekkoo, stretching back to their first hatchers, whose names were just a faint impression on a mossy wall. Finn had even found a Jedi, hidden in the corner of a storage room; despite being carved in the flat, artificial style of the Rodians, it was hard to mistake a lightsaber. He’d asked around about it but the clan historian was gone to the war games, and the larvals had told him there was no name etched beside the lone figure.
Finn turned from the corridor and stepped out into the main hall. Of all the rooms in the enclave, the hall was his favorite. It had been built around three huge gilaa trees, each of their trunks wider than Finn’s arms could hope to reach. As far as he could tell, the hall didn’t even have a ceiling; the trees’ branches came together in a natural canopy, keeping out the sky.
He’d always wondered about the Great Tree, what it had been like, looked like, before the destruction of the Jedi temple on Coruscant. He imagined it like the gilaa trees, the Force eddying around it like the ever-present sound of the rain on the purple leaves overhead.
Finn shivered, thinking inexplicably of the black temple, its cold and polished columns of obsidian. He wondered if, whoever the brightness beside him had been, if they’d dreamed of this hall and the gilaa trees. The smell of the rain and the sound of it. He hoped—
“Finn?” Etturi whined, pulling at his neck.
“Oh,” Finn said, straightening up readjusting his grip on Etturi. She nuzzled his neck, which helped, even though there was a cold creeping in under his skin. “Sorry. I was thinking.”
Finn walked quickly the rest of the way, refusing to think about the black hall or the brightness, or anything except Toopil noodles and the really hot caf that he prayed was waiting for him.
The kitchens of the Chekkoo looked more like a manufacturing plant than a place where cooking was done. Finn had been told that when the clan was in residence, every inch of it was needed—several thousand Rodians ate like an army, and it took a small squad of droids and Rodian cooks to keep them all fed. With the army decamped, though, it was just Etturi’s hatcher, Ruris, standing over the hot fabricator.
The steam billowing forth was a sickly green. Finn sighed.
“Smells good, Ruris,” Finn said with a tired smile as he approached, and the Rodian’s antennae went faintly yellow, pleased. Etturi trilled and unlatched from Finn, reaching for her hatcher and chattering something in Rodese. Ruris just laughed, and scooped her up from Finn’s arms, speaking at a frequency too low for Finn to register as anything except a faint pressure at his eardrums.
(There was a sound like thunder and the brightness had taken his hand—)
“You were asleep so long, we were afraid you might be unwell,” Ruris said, startling Finn. Ruris’ antennae were flicking curiously in Finn’s direction even as he rocked Etturi in his arms. “Are you ill?”
Finn swallowed. “Just tired. It was a long mission, and I didn’t sleep well. Weird dreams.” Finn dismissed Ruris’ concern with a wave of his hand. “Is Luke around?”
Ruris gestured to the back of the kitchens, and Finn sighed. “His usual table, then. Thanks.”
Luke was at his usual table, if you could call a borrowed workbench at the back of the kitchens that. He was surrounded by a maelstrom of half-finished mugs of caf, books, datapads, and holo-chips. He’d been taking notes on the table again, this time in what looked like paint, or maybe ink. Finn had no idea where he’d gotten paint from , let alone a brush, but there was messy High Galactic inked along the edge of the wood. And some smeared on Luke’s left forearm.
He looked tired.
It wasn’t often Finn considered Luke getting—older. Luke was Luke, had always been Luke, since the first time he reached out and took Finn’s hand and dragged him up out of the dark. But sometimes Finn remembered that Luke’s hair hadn’t always been the color of old ash, that once his beard had been more brown than grey. The lines on his face had been etched so slowly that sometimes Finn forgot they hadn’t been there before, or even just a few years ago.
They were going to have to talk about it at some point, about what happened when Luke was too old to climb through ruined cities or run from Sith. They were going to have to talk about the training temple too, which meant there would be a lot of shouting. But today Finn was tired, and cold, and it felt like a day when he could let himself forget time touched Luke Skywalker at all.
“Any news?” he asked as he slid onto the bench across from Luke. Luke looked up, a little startled, but he smiled ruefully and nudged the mug of caf toward Finn’s elbow. Finn gratefully wrapped his hands around it, leeching a little of the warmth. It was strange how chilly he was; Rodians were cold-blooded and kept their dwellings warm, the stone floors heated by a complex system of pipes, furnaces, and water from the nearby sea. Finn ordinarily woke up sweating.
Now, the mug of caf cradled in his hands felt like the only warmth for a hundred klicks in any direction.
Luke was frowning faintly, his eyes narrowed when Finn shivered. “Hm. Well, no news yet,” he said quietly. “I’m still waiting to hear from Lor San, but I think we’re going to have to take it to Vuma to unlock it.”
“Vuma?” Finn asked. “What’s on Vuma?”
“The key.”
“For the...?” Finn trailed off, glancing to where Ruris was still standing at the fabricator, Etturi in his arms. It wasn’t as though anything Finn and Luke did was secret, or dangerous. Most of the time Luke just talked about the Force and the Light, occasionally finding acolytes who could lift pebbles, or dream strange dreams; Finn taught small sentients how to meditate, and showed off with the handful of lightsaber forms he’d learned from an old holocron. They collected antiques and old religious texts, the occasional nonfunctional lightsaber—Finn often joked that he might as well have been apprenticed to a junk trader, given all the old pottery shards and bits of hollow tubing they had laying around the Stormspike.
But Finn and Luke were hardly the only ones in the galaxy looking, and their rivals were rarely good houseguests. After that incident on the moon of Ri’is, it was better for just Luke and Finn to know what they were searching for, and why.
“Yes, for that, ” Luke answered dryly. “I think it’s keyed to galactic coordinates, as a precaution; that’s why we couldn’t open it in Nekmit. But we’ll know more once Lor San confirms the translation. My High Galactic is—”
“Worse than all nine hells?”
“I was going to say rusty.”
Finn huffed, dropping his gaze and staring into of the mug. “Vuma’s Core, you know,” he said quietly. “You remember the last time we were on a Core world, it didn’t go well.”
Luke hummed a noncommittal noise. “We’ve learned to be more careful since then,” he said. “And Vuma’s not as populous as Chandrila, less chance we’ll run into bounty hunters.”
“What about Sith?”
“She...was a surprise,” Luke admitted, and Finn snorted. When he glanced up, Luke was levelling him an unimpressed look. “You’re sure she was Sith?”
“We didn’t exactly stop to compare credentials, no. But there aren’t a lot of people running around the galaxy with red lightsabers.”
“She could have been one of the Knights of Ren.”
You had to know Luke Skywalker very well, Finn thought, to see the way his mouth tightened and the light went out of him as suddenly as a blown hololamp.
Finn looked down, studying the mug of caf again.
They would have known if the girl was a Knight. They would have known the girl —Luke would have taught her and Finn would have grown up alongside her and her presence in the Force would have been familiar, even masked by the Dark. But discussing exactly how the Knights of Ren had sprung up on the Outer Rim wasn’t something they did. Sure, sometimes Luke would tell stories about Finn’s childhood, the students he no longer had, but it was always in the past tense. And in the same tone of voice Finn had heard him speak of the dead.
“The Knights would never go after us themselves,” Finn said with a shrug. He could feel Luke looking at him, but he kept his gaze firmly on his hands. “That’s what bounty hunters are for. Plus, every report of their activity says they’re masked and carry twenty tons of fancy weaponry. The Sith wasn’t even wearing armor.”
“She doesn’t have a boyfriend either,” Luke said, and Finn felt himself go hot. It must show on his face, because Luke grins. “You had your comm in, flirt.”
“That,” Finn said stiffly, “was a diversionary tactic.”
“Never tried that one with the bounty hunters.”
“None of the bounty hunters never came that close to slicing me up.”
“You know—”
Luke fell silent, looking at something over Finn’s shoulder. Finn twisted to see Ruris coming towards them, somehow balancing Etturi in one arm and the bowl of Toopil noodles in the other. Finn stumbled to his feet, quickly whisking the bowl away and carrying it to the table himself.
“This looks great, Ruris, thank you so much,” Finn said, stacking some of the books and datapads to make room for the food. Luke reached over and retrieved the plates and wooden forks from where they’d been holding down the edges of one of the scrolls. Rodians typically used their suckered fingers to eat from the serving dishes; after the first few times he and Luke had to wash their clothes along with their hands, Finn had clumsily whittled these out of some spare gilaa wood.
( I’m from a desert planet, Luke had said when Finn asked him to help. I never saw a tree before I was nineteen, and I’m not sure what you mean by ‘whittling’. )
Finn was still trying to clear a space when Etturi clambered up onto the bench beside him. Out of the corner of his eye, Finn saw her reach for the wooden plate and fork Luke was holding out to Finn, her hands grabbing at the air. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d stolen his flatware—she thought it was funny, which meant she would usually run off and hide the plate and fork in some sub-basement corner it would take Finn hours to find.
“Etturi, no ,” Finn said, trying to both set down the stack of datapads and grab the flatware from Luke before Etturi could, and succeeded in neither.
In hindsight, he could see how jumping a foot in the air and going grey, his breath suddenly harsh and quick to his own ears, would have been disconcerting. But the sound of the datapads sliding to the ground with a crash, and the flatware landing with a clatter was almost like—
It wasn’t like thunder, but it was similar enough. (Even the brightness had been afraid. It had reached out and taken his hand, and Finn had known it was afraid.)
He went to his knees shakily, gathering up the datapads. The stone was somehow cold beneath his knees. He could hear Ruris scolding Etturi in Rodese over his shoulder, but that was happening distantly, far away from here, or from him. Finn forced himself to breathe, as steadily as he could. He had been afraid too, in the black temple. He had been so afraid, except when the brightness took his hand.
Then he hadn’t been afraid.
By the time he stood again, stacking the datapads on the table and crawling a little to retrieve the plate and fork from where they’d fell, he was capable of smiling, assuring Etturi that he wasn’t angry he just didn’t want to play tonight. He could laugh—shakily, but he could—at Ruris’ comment about larvals, and compliment the noodles, even though he was sure they would taste like ash in his mouth.
The mug of caf was still warm, at least. Finn drank half of it at once, hoping it would melt some of the cold of his insides.
When he looked up, Luke was studying him over the bowl of Toopil noodles, his eyes narrowed. “Are you sure you’re feeling all right?”
“Yeah,” Finn said, cradling the mug between his hands. He wondered if a human had ever successfully drowned himself in caf. “Just weird dreams.”