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The Titanium Beggar is a moderately-classed space vessel, made for deep explorations into Wild Space and the Outer Rim. Originally a heap of junk that would have made more money as scrap, Tony Stark got it for a pittance – barely thirty rations and it was only that expensive because the owner knew the cracked hyperdrive had a working operating system, even if it couldn’t be dismantled and separated from the ship.
Intellectually, Tony knows he isn’t from here – here being The Galaxy. Tony can remember this world. Jakku, he thinks, recalling a home movie theatre and the laughter of two boys. The fact that this is the Star Wars universe though, pales in comparison to the fact that he can’t remember who those two boys are – or who the red-haired woman in his dreams is, or the owner of the red and blue shield heading straight for his heart.
Who are they?
Tony thinks that whatever brought him here took his memories. Why they didn’t take his memories of the Skywalker Saga is a mystery, one Tony doesn’t like to think about. He aches for the family he’s left behind, because he has. He’s left them behind.
A girl with his hair and his eyes and her smile-
“Boss, we gotcha some parts from the Star Destroyer past the sinkholes!” The exclamation comes from Dika, a tiny, squirrel-like alien with eight fingers and the kindest heart. For such a long-time resident of Jakku, that’s rare. As Tony comes back to himself, he finds Dika already buried wrist-deep in his arm, prying at melted mechanics to replace the fried wires beneath.
“How was the search?” Tony asks, watching her work. She’s the size of a goddamn baby, perched on his elbow. “And thanks again for this, by the way.”
“No problemo, boss,” Dika chirps. “Usha’s retrofitting the mainframe, now. Should have access to the New Republic Database soon!”
“We’ll have to get better pylons and aerials before that happens,” he replies, listening to Dika chatter on about the scouting party that Chryal is leading as they speak, marking off the Star Destroyer as theirs amongst the many scavenger tribes.
Then Dika mentions Unkar Plutt.
“He got a new worker-girl, recently. Bad business, boss, bad business.”
“How old?” Tony asks immediately, brain flashing back to that image of Rey, Plutt’s slimy orange hand wrapped around her arm as a ship flies off into the distance. On his arm, Dika eyes him carefully.
“A child. Human. Young enough to know how to scream for her mother.” Dika fidgets, whispering, “Whatcha gonna do, boss?”
“I’ve been waiting for her,” he murmurs, before shooing her gently off his arm. Dika hops from his arm to the ceiling, scurrying out of sight into the Vents, which are more like tunnels than ventilation. When Dika and her tiny clan of mechanical squirrels joined Tony, he made the Vent System first, so they wouldn’t have to be tiny in a world of giants; they even have their own bridge, which can take primary control of the ship, if it ever comes to that. Tony hopes it doesn’t.
Standing, Tony takes a moment to fiddle with the connections in his prosthetic to his shoulder before forcibly stopping, walking towards the docking ramp. He grabs a nearby cloak, one among many they’d taken from a Star Destroyer chock-a-block with seemingly random items. Cloaks, beads, breathing apparatus – Dika said they once belonged to Jedi.
Tony thinks it’s cool, if depressing, that the cloak he likes the best once belonged to a dead Jedi.
“I’m going to see the girl. Going to assess the situation she’s in and all that,” he drawls, knowing his crew can hear him. There’s an echo of a chirp – Dika, or maybe Usha, the others don’t talk to him – before he opens the ramp and leaves the ship.
Jakku is hot. Tony can remember pain and heat and a word: Afghanistan. Another person he can’t remember was there, an empty black where a voice and a face and eyes should be. Afghanistan was where his journey started – where he became the person he is today. Iron Man. The first suit.
People make people, he can’t help but think; and I can’t remember my people.
Tony knows he had a daughter. He knows he had two sons, a wife, a brother-who-was-his-teammate, a friend who tried to punch an assassin in the face…he had a family. There are more people, who lived in his peripheral. Parents. A father who he tried so desperately so please and a mother who was always distant. A butler – a butler who was better than a father – and someone who died, who was like the butler and who wasn’t. A person. A person without a body.
He figured out pretty quickly what that might mean. He can remember creating an artificial intelligence in MIT that he won awards for, but he can’t remember their name or their ‘siblings’ – that ‘person without a body’ must have been an AI of some kind. Tony thinks he lost them well before he forgot.
How can someone know things like this? Tony’s mind is a swirling pit of despair, because he knows he loved them. He knows he did. But he doesn’t feel that love – and he yearns and aches for it. It’s an emptiness in his soul that can’t be filled or replaced by living in the Star Wars universe.
“Lego Death Star,” he mumbles to himself as he uncovers the speeder, sand falling to the ground in the windless air. Jakku doesn’t get windy. Dika has warned him that the day it does, there will be a month-long sandstorm and he had better be inside the Beggar when it comes.
Tony knows this – he appeared on Jakku the last time there was a sandstorm. That was six years ago.
Niima Outpost is a two-hour journey away and really, Tony should go earlier in the day than this. Dark is falling by the time he arrives and nights on desert planets are different to the days. He wraps his cloak around him tighter, metallic arm jerking once before he traps it against his side. So hazardous, I should just get rid of it.
If only he could.
Tony hears her before he sees her. Her cries are hoarse and making the shopkeepers grumble and gripe where they settle in closed boxes under their stalls. Niima Outpost is a hive and those with a place in it rarely leave – Tony almost made himself a slave when he dared try sleeping against the wall of Plutt’s shop, the only solid building in the Outpost. He should have realised the walls were empty because the others were afraid of exactly that.
“-shut up, before I throw you to the rancors!” Plutt yells and Tony picks up the pace, finding the Blobfish with that same little girl from The Force Awakens, her arm trapped in his grasp. “If you don’t, you’re out! You’ll get taken or eaten and you’ll never get to come back here again!”
“No!” Rey cries, shaking as she slowly – slowly – quiets down. She’s still tearing up, though and Tony watches as Plutt looks over at him, glaring.
“What do you want, Stark?”
“…who’s the kid?”
“I’m watching her. Nice little fee from some fancy Core Worlder,” he grunts, narrowing his eyes. “What do you want? I won’t ask again.”
Tony tilts his head. “I want to know who the kid is and what you’re going to do with her.”
“That’s my business. Not yours.”
“I’ll pay.”
“Pay what?” Plutt says and Rey is staring at Tony, eyes wide and so very innocent. Scared.
“Depends what you need. Engineering, mechanics – or I could look after the kid for you,” he offers, one of his many plans for this moment rearing its head. “We aren’t exactly leaving the system in the Beggar. Less screaming for the Outpost to deal with.”
Surprisingly, Plutt growls at him. “She’s not for sale. If you’re one of those child-lovers, I’ll shoot you.”
“What the hell?” Tony recoils, disgusted. “No. I’ve had kids of my own before, Plutt, I know how to look after them. Frankly, if she grows up with any semblance of normality after this, I’d be surprised.”
“And what if I want to look after her, eh?” Plutt says, but it’s clearly a bluff. Tony crosses his arms, catching how Rey’s eyes lock on the red shimmer of his mech-hand.
“Did Uncle send you?” she asks, voice cracking. She points limply with her free hand, looking less morose than before.
“Uncle Luke?” Tony tries, not expecting the girl to burst into tears, falling to the floor. Plutt lets go of her, staring in avid curiosity. “Well,” Tony mutters, “That explains something.”
Rey Solo. She has to be a Solo.
“What did the Core Worlder look like?” Tony asks Plutt in an unnervingly calm voice. Rey doesn’t have many tears left to shed, clearly, hiccoughing soon into her fit of relief. “Dark haired? Male?”
“Something like that,” Plutt mutters. “Gave me a tidy sum to take her and keep her out of the way. Wasn’t fully-grown. Knew how to dress on a desert-planet, though. Thought that was odd.”
“Thanks. What’s our exchange, here?”
“Got no reason to keep the girl. Don’t want to. The Core Worlder said they might send more credits.”
“To Jakku?” Tony raises an eyebrow. “You really believe that?”
Plutt shrugs, before he nudges Rey with his boot, forcibly moving her out of his doorway into the sand between them.
“There’s a ship in the yard,” Plutt says. “Hondorian Class-Nine. Take a look at the engine and I’ll look the other way, if you take her now. Any funny business from you, though and you’re blaster-shot. Got it?”
“Loud and clear,” Tony says, still standing there. He doesn’t move towards Rey, even though he wants to. “I’ll come in two days along with our next haul.”
“The Edasayad still with you, eh?” Plutt pulls a nasty-looking grin. “Any trouble from them, I know who to blame.”
“Fine. Evening to you,” Tony says, watching Plutt step back and shut his door with a clang. Immediately, he reaches down, pulling Rey up onto his hip, feeling her gangly little limbs wrap around him like an octopus. She shudders, sobbing silently. Some kind of instinct takes over and Tony adjusts his grip, rubbing her back as he walks back to his speeder.
“Uncle Luke didn’t tell me your name, kiddo,” Tony murmurs to her. “You’ve got to tell me.”
There’s a mumble into his shoulder that he can’t hear and Tony sighs. “A little louder, maybe?”
“Breha.”
Tony nearly drops her. He knows his Star Wars.
“Breha…as in, Breha Organa? Queen of Alderaan?” No wonder she thought her name was Rey. Easy to drop the ‘B’ and ‘A’ on that. Does that make ‘Rey’ a ‘Reh’? Oh lord. “What about a last name, Breha?”
Breha-Rey sniffles before murmuring, “Breha Solo.”
“Breha Solo,” Tony repeats quietly, coming to stand by his speeder, still rubbing her back. He thinks on that, mentally adjusting his world-view. Breha might grow up to look exactly like Daisy Ridley or she might not. How old is she? Has she had all her space-vaccines? Tony can’t imagine a world where Leia Organa skimps on her own daughter’s vaccines.
Taking care of a child…wow, it’s scary. Tony thinks of his lost daughter. His first. The boys were already grown up when he met them – and how freaky is this? To think of this girl, Rey, as his? He has a responsibility to look after her, now, knowing that the First Order is rising. Ben Solo – fuck, her own brother, what the hell – is turning into Kylo Ren, if he already isn’t and Luke Skywalker is about to go on a decade-long hike to some planet in the middle of nowhere.
Meanwhile, Leia Organa and Han Solo are looking for their lost daughter, who’s now in the care of Tony Stark of Jakku, Captain of the Titanium Beggar.
“We’re going to go to my ship,” he tells Breha, “and we’re going to get you cleaned up, fed and watered. Then, I’m teaching you how to live on this godforsaken world, with the help of my friends. They’re called the Edasayad, but I like to call them my own alien squirrels. It’s apt, really, it is. Hopefully, in a couple of years we’ll have access to the right systems, so I can find your parents and join the Rebellion- sorry, the Resistance. Christ, that’s a hard thing to remember. How did your parents do it?”
Breha is silent.
Tony looks down, finding her asleep. “…long day for you, I suppose. Long week, probably.” He murmurs to himself before getting back on the speeder, arranging Breha against his chest under his robes, hoping to any god that exists that she doesn’t fall off at a hundred miles an hour.
“Let’s go home.”