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When Jess suggests it, Rey’s resting on top of Jess, her hands loosely grasping her girlfriend’s wrists, her weight holding them to the ground as she kisses Jess. They’re both laughing, and smiling, and then Jess says, “If you tied me up, you’d have your hands free, too.”
Rey freezes at the remark, and sits up.
“Rey?” Jess props herself up, slowly reaches forward. “Are you okay?”
With a shake of her head, Rey stands up and walks away without saying a word.
Her heart’s hammering and she doesn’t know why and she doesn’t want to figure out why, right now. She loses herself in her work, instead. The Resistance mechanics are always glad for her help, and their light chatter about everyone’s lives relaxes her enough to go to the gardens and touch things that everyone agrees are alive instead of machines that thrum with electric life.
The gardens are for meditation and food both, and she spreads her awareness into the slow flow of sap through trunk and stem, and feels her own heart and breath calm to match. Then, she can almost think enough to start figuring out why she walked away. Except, of course, for how every time she starts thinking of tying Jess up, she loses the green calm, and needs to fight to find it again. And for how her memory of Kylo Ren keeps intruding, and she needs to keep thrusting it away to find something that even resembles peace.
Finally, she gives up. There’s no point in sitting in the orchard being agitated. She retreats to the outskirts of the base and starts practicing the lightsaber forms that Leia had taught her with the comment “I almost never used them, but they make for good exercise, at least.” And Rey appreciates that. The hum of her weapon as it moves through the air is just as steady as her hands, and so long as she focuses on the slow change in position between guards and strikes, she doesn’t need to think about anything but the power inherent in her body, and how she can keep herself safe.
Rey doesn’t see Jess at dinner that night, but it’s not exactly like she’s looking. She sits with Finn instead, in a quiet corner of the room. They both eat quickly, habits from a lifetime of regimented diets. The mass of people of all species and sizes means that there are at least five languages being spoken that Rey can hear and differentiate, and she lets the sound wash over her, a balm to her own uncertain thoughts. Finn doesn’t try and talk to her, either, but he’s a solid presence and Rey knows she’s safe with him. That helps.
In the pocket of quiet, Rey pulls out her datapad and brings up the Base datanet. It’s easy enough to send Jess a message, and -- now that it’s been a few hours and her body aches with precise movements -- Rey admits to herself that it was a little rude, just walking away from her earlier. She sighs, and continues ignoring the tight ache in her chest that has nothing to do with her earlier activities as she taps out a message: I’m not mad or anything, I just needed space. I’ll see you tomorrow?
It’s almost an hour later, and the sun has set and the night bugs are singing, when Rey’s datapad chimes quietly.
Rey doesn’t look at it immediately. She’s watching a holo with some of the mechanics, and they’re explaining how this holo -- The Citadel -- had come out when they were young and had been formative in various ways. Rey keeps getting into arguments while trying to understand why any of them could get past how wrong the technology was. The rest of the vid is fine: it’s the story of how a young Togruta woman snuck into a heavily fortified citadel to free a squadron of rebels. She understands that, and the dialogue is on the funny side of cheesy, and the special effects of lava and explosions and lightning are great. But the explanations of all the citadel’s traps make no sense, and she can’t get over that.
She does enjoy it. She keeps reassuring them of that, as the credits roll and she actually reads the message from Jess. I’ll be at breakfast bright and early, if you want to join me then, it reads, and Rey sighs as some of the tension in her shoulders releases. Jess isn’t angry at her either. That’s. Good. She bids goodnight to the mechanics, who are debating plot points of another holo she hasn’t seen that she’s sure she’ll be shown sometime soon, and returns to her room.
It’s hard to sleep.
The bed’s too hard, after years of sleeping in her AT-AT hideout. The floor’s too hard, after weeks of sleeping on a mattress, even one everyone else thinks is crap. Blankets as a softener don’t help enough, or they help too much, and Rey ends up deciding that if she’s not going to sleep, she’s at least going to be comfortable while not sleeping, and ends up on the bed. She can feel every dip and divot, and the blankets are almost suffocating as they wrap around her, clinging tightly to her arms and legs.
Rey throws them off the bed and dresses, instead, in the warmest halfway comfortable clothes that the Resistance stores gave her. It ends up being essentially wearing her everyday clothes underneath sweatpants and a jacket lined with fake fur. She pulls the hood up around her head, and wraps her arms around her chest, and reminds herself to breathe. Her heart’s beating too fast and she can’t quite put a name to why, and Kylo Ren’s face keeps appearing in front of her eyes whenever she closes them.
She ends up focusing on the blue glow of her timepiece, and the way it blinks slow seconds and slower minutes, trying to convince her heart to beat in time to the clock. It almost works, until she her arms relax and her eyes slip closed and she’s being thrown against a tree and pain’s exploding in her head, and she’s alert and breathing like she’s running a race. Rey curls into a tiny ball and starts cursing in every language she knows. When she runs out, she adds in all the swears that she’s learned in the past weeks; the Resistance members share curses like a game, trying to collect them all.
It’s 0300 hours when Rey gives up entirely and gets dressed. Someone is always awake. It’s just a matter of who, and where, and if she wants to interact with them. Right now, the idea of interacting with literally anything other than her own brain sounds nice, though. She wanders through the darkened halls into the pilot’s lounge, mostly because there’s always caf there, and she can more easily pretend like she’s awake for a real reason if she has caffeine.
Poe’s there, curled up on a couch with his giant ugly mug cradled to his chest. He’s got stubble on his chin, and seems to be half-watching an animated holo. A bantha calf was walking through the desert, alone, looking sad and kind of creepy with its too-large eyes and expressive mouth. Rey looks between it and Poe, and then shrugs and walks over to the caf machine. Even if she doesn’t have her own mug, there are enough generic ones that she can use sitting around. She takes one and fills it, breathing the acrid scent. She’d never had any before the Resistance, but she loves it now.
“Can’t sleep?” Poe says. His voice is rough, and Rey’s pretty sure that this is the first time he’s spoken in hours. “Join the club.”
“Is it really a club if it’s just you?” Rey turns to face him and leans against the counter, holding the steaming caf to her chest.
He shrugs. It’s jerky and awkward, the way he’s sitting. “It wouldn’t just be me if you joined.”
“You don’t make sense.”
“I’m tired. I don’t need to make sense.” He swallows a mouthful of caf. “What’s keeping you up?”
Rey shifts, sips at the caf. It stings her tongue, but she swallows it anyway, moistening her suddenly dry mouth. “Dunno.”
“Wow, such insight.” Poe pokes something, and the holo blinks out. “Come sit down?” He pulls his feet up, so there’s space between his legs and the arm of the couch.
Gingerly, Rey curls up in the space, facing Poe over both their knees. “Why are you awake?”
“I keep remembering the thankfully brief amount of time I was captured.” Poe lets his head fall back, looking up at the ceiling. Rey can still see enough of his face to tell how blank his expression is, belying his wry tone. “It’s not exactly prime bedtime material. You’d know.”
“Yeah,” Rey says, because what else is there to say? “That’s... why I’m awake, too.”
Poe grins and pushes himself up, holding out a hand. “Hey, right, we’re trauma buddies!”
“What?” Rey stares at his hand and the excitement on his face, not comprehending either.
“Oh.” His hand falls and wraps around his knees, until he’s holding onto them and leaning against the back of the couch. His other hand still has his caf mug. “Trauma buddies? We both experienced the same terrible thing and feel like shit because of it?”
Rey curls tighter, and drinks more of her caf.
Poe stays where he is, his bare toes carefully not touching hers. After a minute, he leans over and sets down his mug. As he sits back up, he says, casually, “Being trapped sucks.”
She nods.
“I can deal with straps, mostly because I spend so much time strapped into an X-Wing I’d go bonkers if I didn’t.” He folds his arms and rests his cheek on them, looking sideways at Rey. “But it’s hard to get... the rest of it out of my head.”
“I’ve never liked being trapped,” Rey says, more to her caf than to Poe. “What he did...” She shakes her head, unable to continue past the tension in her throat and chest, the ache of remembered straps on her arms.
“You lived in the desert, yeah? Lots of open space there. On Yavin 4, where I grew up, it was a jungle.” He smiles, and his voice softens. “We tamed it around the ziggurat that used to be a Rebellion base and then became the center of a little town, but if you walked five minutes in any direction, you could be lost in the trees.”
“I can’t imagine that,” Rey says, looking up. “The forests here, and on Takodana... that’s enough to confuse me.”
Poe laughs. “The air’s dry here, compared to what I grew up with, and the sky and woods are empty. Yavin 4 is full of life. I’ll need to take you there, someday, you and Finn both. I think you’d like it.”
“Maybe.”
They sit there in silence for another minute, and Rey finishes her caf. She stares into the empty mug, and then says, “Poe?”
“Yeah?”
“Jess said...” She coughs, trying to clear her throat, and forces herself to continue. “She said that I could tie her up, leave my hands free instead of using them to pin her.”
Poe had been shifting, humming some song and tapping his feet and fingers in time with it. Now he’s silent and still. “You don’t need to do anything you aren’t comfortable with,” he says, and his voice is so fierce that Rey looks up. He’s looking at her, completely serious in a way she rarely sees him. “If you don’t want to, just tell her that. You don’t even need to say why. She’ll respect that, or she’s not the woman I think she is.”
Rey nods, and whispers, “I kind of ran away.”
“Made you think of that Sithspawn?”
“Yeah.” She’s breathing more easily now, Rey realises. She hadn’t been expecting that. “I think so? I... wasn’t really thinking at all.”
“Anxiety’s an asshole like that sometimes, yeah.” There’s a silence, and then, much more quietly, Poe says, “If you want me to explain to her for you, I’m willing to.”
“No,” Rey says, immediately, instinctively. She stretches out her legs a little, lets her feet slide between Poe’s. His skin is warm, and it’s nice. “If I’m going to say something, I’ll do it myself.”
He smiles at her. “That takes strength. I’m glad you have it.”
Rey can feel herself blushing, and she can’t quite figure out why. “Thank you,” she says instead.
“You’re welcome,” Poe says.
Neither of them exactly move, just curl up in more relaxed positions on the couch. Poe restarts the holo so that Rey can watch all of it, and it’s apparently called The Little Lost Bantha Cub and is based on a children’s story. It has good music, Rey decides, when she curls up under the blankets inevitably kept inside the lounge and falls asleep to the sounds of desert wind in the soundtrack, because those are real, and familiar, and comforting.
She wakes to the sound of Poe’s alarm and his swearing and is momentarily confused. Then she remembers, and groans, and levers herself upright. “What time is it?”
“0630,” Poe says, his voice much more lilting than usual, with an accent she can’t really place, but is probably from Yavin 4. “Fuck, I thought I’d turned that off.”
The sun’s starting to rise, outside the windows. Rey sighs. “I think I’m awake,” she admits.
“I probably should be, too.” Poe doesn’t look particularly awake. He’s still curled up on the other side of the couch, glaring at his now-silent timepiece from under blankets.
“Come on,” Rey says, standing up. “You’ll feel better with food.”
“You’re terrible,” he informs her, but he stands up and follows her to the mess hall.
Much to Rey’s relief, almost nobody is there yet. Much to her disappointment, one of the few people who is there is Jess. In response to her slowed steps, Poe says, “Oh, just get it over with, she’ll be fine with it. But get food first. It’ll help.”
“You’re also terrible,” Rey says, but she follows him, getting generic mush that’s apparently called oatmeal. Poe dumps a scoop of diced fruit into first his, and then hers, ignoring her glare. Then, when she can’t avoid it any more, she follows him to the table that Jess is sitting at.
Jess looks unfairly rested, and her hair even looks brushed. “You two look like shit,” she says as they sit down. “Something happen last night?”
Rey groans and starts eating, not looking at either of her companions. The fruit, much to her annoyance, does improve the taste of the mush.
“I had trouble sleeping. Flashbacks about being imprisoned by the First Order.” Poe sounds way calmer than Rey would’ve expected. “Rey kept me company in the lounge.”
“Ah.” Rey can feel Jess’ eyes on her. They’re practically burning into her scalp, as she determinedly doesn’t look up. “Your difficulties sleeping related to... all that, yesterday?”
She nods. Nodding doesn’t involve looking up.
“Was the sleepover nice?”
Rey nods again.
“I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“I know,” Rey says, and she finally looks up. Jess has pushed aside her own plate, and now that she’s paying attention, Rey can see the shadows under her girlfriend’s eyes too. “You didn’t sleep well, either, did you?”
“Better than you, I think, but that doesn’t sound like it was hard.” Jess sighs, and reaches a hand across the table, palm up. “I’m sorry.”
Slowly, Rey slides her hand over, until her fingertips overlap Jess’. “So am I. It... I had a bad experience being restrained.” She tilts her head towards Poe, who’s politely ignoring their conversation, hoping that Jess will understand.
Jess looks between them, and Rey can see the moment she passes through confusion. “Ah. I’d... that hadn’t...” She runs a hand through her hair and grins, sheepish. “I hadn’t connected that until now.”
Rey curls her fingers into Jess’, holding tight. “It’ll be okay.”
“Yeah.” Her fingers are pale around the joints. “I’ll try not to mess up like that again.”
“You won’t,” Rey says, smiling, just a little. It feels nice. “You’ll find some other way to mess up instead. And that’s okay, I’m sure I will too.”
“Isn’t it lucky you have friends to help sort these things out?” Poe says, his voice a low drawl.
Jess and Rey both start laughing.
They don’t stop holding hands across the table until they need to leave.