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After what had happened on Starkiller Base, Leia wanted to cut herself off from the Force. She wanted to avoid a repeat of the jarring, cutting, sharp pain of sensing Ben kill Han. But her connection to the Force was no more voluntary than her hearing or her experience of temperature. It was a part of her, and she had never learned to control it as her brother had. She remained open to the impressions of the Force. Not that control over her connection would have mattered in what was about to happen.
When it had been a few hours since Rey and Chewbacca left on board the Millennium Falcon, the coordinates to the planet where Luke had exiled himself, plotted into the navigation system, a burst of energy rang through the Force, and every force-sensitive individual in the Galaxy felt it. It settled in their awarenesses as a bright spark appearing against midnight the darkness in an empty region of space. The more powerful ones, Leia among them, also saw visions of a man with dark clothes, dark hair, and green eyes, and knew that he was very important for the struggle between the two sides of the Force.
—
Harry detested ending up on lifeless, uninhabited worlds. They were boring. They were useless. They were a waste of time. There was nothing worthwhile for him to do while he waited for extraction. His superiors told him to take the time to relax, take some downtime, he needed it with all the running around and chasing people evading the law he was doing, but relaxing in the middle of nowhere wasn't as easy as all that. It had nothing on being safe at home in a real bed.
The only thing it had going for it was that it wasn't as bad as ending up in empty space with no gravity and no way to tell up from down, but it was bad enough.
Not for the first time, Harry cursed the people responsible for the existence of time-space travelling devices, the people who had sold them to criminals, and his colleagues who couldn't plot the right coordinates even half of the time. Hopefully, he hadn't travelled overly far through time and space. The farther from home he got, the longer it took for extraction to occur. Even with magic, some of the logic of space had to be adhered to.
This particular lifeless planet was a hunk of rock—the surface mostly made of silica, alumina, lime, iron oxide, and magnesia—with no atmosphere to speak of. It was much like Earth's Moon, and the one positive of worlds such as this one, in Harry's opinion, was that the view of the night sky always was spectacular. Without a discernible atmosphere, nothing interfered with the light from the stars. Currently, though, it was day time. The system's central star stood high in the sky, blocking out the light from any other stars as its light reflected on the planet's surface.
Getting ready for a long wait, Harry checked over the modified bubble-head charm that covered his entire body, protecting him from the vacuum of space, all dangerous radiation, and kept him supplied with temperate, breathable air. It was intact and functioning as intended. All fine on that account.
He transfigured a medium-sized bolder into an armchair. It kept its original colour and the legs remained stone. Transfiguration was a difficult discipline, and even most adult wizards struggled with it. Harry considered it a success as long as any furniture he created were comfortable, and the chair he'd created had just the right amount of give, and the backrest was perfectly positioned to support him, and so he settled in, sinking into thoughts about the next Quidditch game he was scheduled to attend.
He may have dozed off for a bit because he startled when powerful vibrations travelled through the ground. He jumped up, terminated the transfiguration, and pulled his invisibility cloak around his shoulders and up over his head, sprinting away from his last known position to observe the spaceship that was landing not two hundred feet away.
"Where the hell did you come from?" he muttered.
Upon arrival, he'd cast spells to determine if there was life on the planet. The results had been negative. No life detected for a couple of light-years, which begged the urgent questions of why a space ship had come now and why it had landed basically on top of him.
A ramp fell down, and three people came out—well, they were probably people. The proportions, the upright posture, and the gait were right. Two were armoured in white, one was in black with a hefty cloak sweeping from his shoulders.
The black one directed the other two directly towards Harry, pointing straight at him. It shouldn't be possible. He was hidden. The cloak hid all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. There was no atmosphere, so there was no sound. The ground was rocky, so no footprints. Somehow he still knew where Harry was.
Harry dropped and rolled as beams of energy were shot out from the contraptions—guns?—the white ones were carrying. The black one kept directing the whites, having them shoot in Harry's direction. Harry, in turn, kept moving. He sent a shield charm behind himself—Protego Duo—to see if shield charms were useful against this energy, and he smiled a little as it stopped the shots, deflecting them back to the shooters. Time to fight back.
The first spell he cast was expelliarmus—keeping to the basics was always good—and the guns flew out of the hands of the white ones, coming in Harry's direction. He caught them with another spell and cast quick transfiguration at them, changing their properties enough that they'd be useless as weapons.
Meanwhile, the black one had produced a weapon of his own, a blade of red light, like a broadsword with a crossguard and everything, and he walked steadily towards Harry who sent the same burst of scarlet light signifying the disarming charm at him. The man raised his free hand, fingers curled, and the energy stopped in mid-air.
"That's new." Harry rolled his shoulder, got a crick out of his neck and plunged headfirst into the battle. Spells sent directly at the man were all caught or deflected and were therefore only useful as distractions. Using magic to change the environment was the required strategy. Harry liked that strategy anyway. People never seemed to expect it. And who could blame them for faltering when the ground under their feet was in constant flux, fist soft, then hard, then slippery, then turned to spikes, and then soft again.
This guy though didn't seem too bothered. It was as if he knew even before Harry did what the ground would become next and could compensate for it. It slowed him down but didn't incapacitate him.
Sending hordes of rocks transfigured into vague animal shapes only served as a distraction too. The guy sliced them apart with his energy blade, disrupting the magic that let them move.
Harry was getting rather frustrated, and the experience was apparently mutual because the guy had caught on to what the source of Harry's power was and sent tug after tug at Harry's wand, trying to snatch it out of his grip, but Harry, stubborn wizard that he was and stubborn, special, and ancient wand that he had, managed to keep hold of it.
They were evenly matched. Something had to give.
Minutes went by where the struggle continued, Harry trying to come up with new and creative ways to distract, or for crying out loud, managing to incapacitate his opponent, and the black guy getting more violent in his tugs.
Harry's movements slowed. Exhaustion setting in, but his opponent was tireless. He tugged anew at Harry's wand, and it slid to the very tips of his fingers before one of his transfigured beast got to the black guy, cutting off his concentration.
And that's when more ships appeared in the sky. One of them was huge. There was no chance it would be able to land. It would sit in orbit and vomit out, Merlin knows how many smaller ships, and if even one other person had the power level of this guy, Harry was screwed.
Thinking that he could really use that extraction about now, he sent up a wall of flames and spirited away, casting new obstacles behind as he went. The problem with that was that he was giving his position away. You didn't have to possess any particular type of sight to tell where he was, and the ships were landing in a pattern that would serve to corner him.
With his invisibility cloak serving no purpose and only hindering his movements, Harry allowed it to drop from his head and flap freely behind him, continuing to move as best he could, staying away from everyone who was trying to kill him.
Then another ship joined the fray, shooting at Harry's assailants, setting off explosions and evading their answering fire. It was a different model altogether, sleek and pointy and painted with orange details where the others had round bodies, two vertical side wings.
Whoever was flying the orange ship, they were good, great even. Not a single hit landed on it, and it was taking out the people who wanted to hurt Harry by the dozen. By the creed of the enemy of my enemy Harry liked this pilot, and the liking skyrocketed when the pilot managed to clear a space, land, open the door and urgently gesture for Harry to board. Not about to look a gift horse in the mouth, Harry joined him, buckled into a seat, and thrilled as the acceleration of flight kicked in. Barrel rolls, quick turns, and loops made Harry's head spin as the pilot guided the ship in a continued battle and then sent them shooting away from the planet's surface.
He said something in a language Harry had never heard before, reached out and switched a flip, and they were pressed back in their seats as the ship's hum rose into a crescendo and everything outside the windows blurred. Long streaks of light replaced the pinpricks of stars in the midnight void that was space. The flight turned smooth and the ship turned silent.
The escape successful, the pilot turned to Harry and grinned broadly. He said something more and pulled off his helmet. Harry followed his smile up to his now uncovered eyes, and his jaw dropped. He knew those eyes. They were glittering and green and up until today, he'd seen them every time he looked in the mirror.
The pilot was his soulmate. By meeting, they'd switched eye colours, the sign of their bond. Harry knew that he was no longer green-eyed, that he no longer had the green eyes Lily had given James, the eye colour so many had envied him for having as it would make it easy for him to tell when he met his soulmate.
His soulmate looked at him with no comprehension of the momentous thing that had happened. Likely, his eye colour hadn't been an as usual one as Harry's—some shade of brown probably.
His soulmate had caught on as far as the language barrier was concerned though, had tried to use some computer program to translate for him, and that failing had moved on to awkwardly using gestures to communicate. He pointed at himself and clearly enunciated two words several times. "Poe Dameron."
Turning his shock and incredulity—of bloody course, Harry would meet his soulmate as far away from home as possible—to cautious joy, Harry responded with his own name, "Harry Potter," and then gestured at first Poe's eyes and then his own, trying to indicate the switch.
As the realisation of what Harry was trying to say sank in, Poe's eyes grew wider, making the green of them stand out more. He rummaged around by his seat, got out a shiny object to serve as a mirror, took a look at himself, got fully on the same page as Harry, handed him the shiny object, and slumped in his seat.
Harry studied his new eyes. They were a deep, warm brown. It was a strange sight, but they suited him. Now to deal with all that was going on. Strange powerful enemies, a rescue by his soulmate, and no sure idea of when he could be extracted and get back home. They'd search for him at his exit coordinates, not find him, hopefully not find the people who'd been trying to kill him, and they'd worry.
He'd need to send them new coordinates, and then wait as they were transferred. He'd be here for a while. The mess was just growing worse by the minute. But looking at his soulmate's face, he found that he didn't mind too much. Nothing bad that didn't bring some good, as it were, and as far as silver linings go, having a skilled flyer for a soulmate wasn't so bad.