Work Text:
Rey read the skies wrong, and she realizes it far too late. She is still thirty quars out from her camp--much too far to outrun the storm. She could turn back to the ruin she was scavenging, but it barely seemed stable when the air was still. She does not waste time weighing death by collapsing starship versus raging sandstorm. She runs over the map in her mind, trying to locate shelter within three, maybe five quars distance.
The best she can come up with is a big relic, almost completely buried, save for one scrapped-out stratospheric engine bloc. Small, but it should be stable. It’s only two quars out, but straight in the direction of the storm.
Rey adjusts her goggles, and fangs it.
Her nav system is old and more and more faulty by the day, oscillating between bearings unpredictably. The traders at Niima always say that “dead reckoning means dead meat”, but there is no way she can afford a new one. Besides, Rey is pretty lucky as these things go. Usually.
She should have come upon it by now, if her odometer is still working (it should be), and the wind is starting to make going forward more hazardous. She starts to panic, starts to wonder if she could survive by crashing her speeder and hiding in the leeward side. Instincts say: hell no. She has scavenged more than one such grave.
She hears something over the approaching howl of the wind, a cry that is more organism than weather. She scans her surroundings, but sees nothing. Visibility is diminishing by the second. She closes her eyes, curses her so-called luck, and guns the engine. Blindly, she veers her course a few degrees left, then a few more.
She nearly hits the damn thing. Lucky Rey is back online.
She pulls her speeder as tight to the wreckage as she can, and squeezes past a bent propeller blade into the empty engine block. It's dark, and the roar of the storm is muffled. She hears the cry again, this time just a whimper, this time close by. She turns around, and is knocked clear off her feet.
Rey scrambles for a sparklight from her tool belt and finds her right ankle caught in a derru trap. The teeth have been worn down, as if designed not to damage its prey, but the mechanism still holds fast. It isn't tied to anything, but the lead weights on it are too heavy for her to move. She hears the old propellers creak, and looks up to see a shadow of a figure slipping through, toward her vehicle.
"Hey!" she shouts. "Come back here!" She stumbles up and bangs on the propeller, the echoing noise rivaling the storm. "You're going to get killed in the storm and ruin my speeder!"
The hunched figure seems to come to the same conclusion very quickly, and retreats to the engine block with an aggravated growl. They dig out a blade—an improvised shank, really—and slump against the far wall, left leg trailing awkwardly in the sand. Rey adjusts her light to illuminate her trapper, and they hold up a hand to shield against the brightness. Their other hand follows, apparently shackled together.
"Are you trapped too?" Rey asks carefully. The figure—a man, human most likely, twice her size with a haphazard beard caked with blood and dirt—does not acknowledge her question. He glares at her distrustfully.
"Are you deaf?" She asks, and he shifts at her words but does not answer. "Do you speak Jakku?" No response.
"Quingpin?" Nothing.
"Galactic?" Apparently not.
He points at the sparklight, still directed at him. "No light," he says.
"Ausver, okay, I can work with that," she says and turns down the light. She points the low beam at her face. "I think we can help each other. I'm Rey." She points the beam upwards to create an ambient glow. "What's your name?"
He twitches away from her. "Does it matter?"
Rey sighs. "I suppose not, strictly speaking." She swivels to bring the leg trap into his view. "Can you get me out of this? Then I can help you with yours."
"Not helping a trader," he growls. He flinches away from something invisible.
A mad man. Great. So much for Lucky Rey.
"I'm not a trader," she assures him. "I'm a scavenger. For parts. Hardware only." She digs an RD converter from her pouch. "This kind of stuff."
He considers this, nodding to himself. "Y'have bolt cutters?" He asks, jangling his shackles.
"I have an arc torch, in the speeder. It should cut through those easily." Assuming they can still get to the speeder. The howl of the wind is rising higher.
The man nods again, and stumbles to his feet. He motions her away with his hand, trying to reach for the trap without getting close to her. As she scoots back, he digs what looks like a severed finger from her pocket and releases the biometric lock. Rey decides not to think about that too much as she scrambles out of the trap and massages her ankle. He stands back, watching her with what might be concern.
"I'm okay, thanks." She gets to her feet to demonstrate. "Let's get you free too."
Rey wraps herself back into her goggles and scarves and ventures toward the propeller, the shackled man trailing behind her. The speeder is no longer hovering at all, the underside covered by a growing dune of sand. She steels herself and dives forward out of the engine block.
The wind tears at her clothes as she stumbles to the speeder. She crouches beside the side panel, trying to keep too much sand from getting in. She pockets the arc torch and reaches for a satchel as a loud creaking erupts around her. The speeder begins to vault forward. She tries to leap back, but too slow, when she feels something pull hard at her collar and jerk her back into the engine block, landing her hard on her back. She wheezes and looks up to see the shackled man standing over her, watching the speeder collapse against the propeller with a shuddering bang.
"I, I got it," Rey gasps. She taps her pocket, then lets the satchel fall out of her arms. "And I grabbed a medipack."
She pushes herself up, and the man presents the chain to her. She examines it for a moment before suggesting, "I think we can cut through the lock on the cuffs." When he starts to protest, she continues, "I'll be careful, I promise. I extract delicate machinery all day, I'm good at this."
The man huffs and settles in front of her, his left wrist extended, the right flexed and wary. Rey lights the arc torch, and adjusts the flame to a sharp blue edge. "Ready?" She asks. The man nods. She slices a red hot line through the latch and the shackle falls away. The man pulls the freed wrist to his chest, and gives a shuddering sigh of relief. Rey tries to hide her smile. "Next one?"
With both shackles off, she can see blood smeared over his wrists where the metal had gouged his skin during his struggle. "Here," she says, pulling a handful of supplies from the medipack. “Give me your hand.” He holds a hand out reluctantly, and she squeezes it gently as she wipes away the blood from his wrist with an antiseptic, then wraps the wounds in gauze. He holds the bandaged arm back to his chest as she cleans the other one.
"Better now?" The man hums, not quite an agreement. He slides away from her, and settles back against the wall, positioned to survey her and the entrance. Rey turns up her sparklight to compensate for the light blocked by her fallen speeder, and empties her pack to tally and clean the day's finds.
"If my speeder is still running after the storm, I can take you to Niima." She looks up to meet his eyes. He looks away quickly.
"Traders there," he grumbles.
"It's the only place you're going to get a ride off planet," she says. "I assume you don't want to stick around here." He sighs harshly, and stares off at something she can't see. She shrugs and lets him be while she works on her haul.
After what feels like hours, the roar of the storm softens to a quiet rush. Rey stretches and gathers her wares back into her pack, then stands to go look outside. The man jolts awake as she passes, fists clenched and ready to fight. She waits for him to take in his surroundings, then tips her head toward the exit. "Have a look?" He nods slowly, and pushes himself up to follow.
They duck their heads to peer around the bent propeller blade, and he recoils quickly. She jumps back, startled by his sudden movement.
"What did you see?" She whispers.
He chews his lower lip. "What did you see?"
"Nothing," she scowls. "You scared me. What did you see?"
He shakes his head and they move back toward the entry. Rey doesn't see anything but a buried speeder. She sighs.
It takes them until the first sun sets to dig out the scooter, and until the second sun is low in the sky to get it hovering again, if a bit wobbly.
"Your nav is no good," the man says, poking at the old machine that is now showing bearings nearly twenty degrees off.
"I know," she sulks. "I tried to fix it, but it just started acting up again. I don't have anything to calibrate it with anyway."
"None to scavenge?" He asks.
Rey smirks. "That's usually the first thing to go. They're good on the market if you can get hold of one, but people will fight you for it." The man nods, and runs through the other screens.
"So are you from Ausva?" Rey asks. The man glances at her over his shoulder, and shakes his head.
Rey waits for him to answer, but gives up after a while and finishes digging sand out of the engine panel.
"Alicia," he says eventually. "Moon of Ausva."
"Never been there," she says. Never been anywhere. "Is it nice? Your family there?"
He watches her for a long moment, then shakes his head. "Engine clear?"
"It should be ready. Hit the ignition." Rey lets out a whoop when the speeder rumbles to life.
It is long after dark by the time they reached the AT-AT Rey has made into a home. She slips inside and ducks into her ration box, to find the selection even more meager than she remembered. She turns around to find the man still standing at the door.
"We're going to Niima," he says, looking around warily.
She frowns. "Niima is dead this time of night. It's the biggest outpost around, but it's still small. Nothing good happens there this late." He sighs and wanders in.
"I'm sorry, I don't have many rations left," her stomach grumbles. "There's about one meal's worth here that we can split."
He looks around, then looks at her. "No, mm," he starts. "Eat. It's yours." He licks his lips. "Water?"
She jumps up and points outside. "My sundew should be full," she huffs, "though probably full of sand now." She retrieves the bucket and strains it inside. She pours some out and hands him a canteen. "Take this to drink. And there's extra to wash up. You've got, um," she pauses, gesturing at the dried blood in his beard and hair, "stuff. There's a mirror in there."
She prepares her rations and sets some aside on a second plate. The man reappears cleaned, his haphazard beard now haphazard stubble. She holds out the plate for him; he hesitates, but takes it.
"You're here alone," he says, something wavering in his voice.
"My family is coming back," she says staunchly.
He furrows his brow. "How long?"
"They're coming back."
He shakes his head and turns his attention to his plate.
"They are."
"Okay," he says. "It's okay."
She frowns and finishes her meal, licking the plate. "Where's your family? Are you going back to them?"
He shakes his head, his eyes drawing across the room. "They're gone. Long ago."
She watches a forlorn look pass over his face. "Do you ever wish they were here so bad you could almost see them?"
He looks at her then, and says in a quiet voice, "I see them. All the time."
"Like ghosts," she says. He dips his head, barely an acknowledgement. She leans forward. "Maybe you're a Jedi."
He looks up at her with abrupt confusion.
"Jedi could see ghosts, that's what the old stories say. Maybe that's why you see them," she says with the hint of wonder.
He snorts a humorless laugh and turns back to his plate, shaking his head.
In the morning they head into Niima, salvage in tow. Rey gives the man a dark grey scarf to wear as a hood, to hide his face and the blistered slave brand on the back of his neck. As they approach the trading post, something catches his attention.
"What is it?" Rey asks, then realizes he's looking at the old Falcon. "That? That's a piece of junk."
The man glances at her with a knowing smirk and keeps walking.
"It is, trust me," Rey retorts.
He hefts the pack holding the derru trap. How he can lift that thing, she has no idea. "How much does this go for?" he asks.
Rey considers. "Three rations, if you're lucky. Definitely no less than two."
Unkar Plutt disagrees.
"One ration" he declares, glancing boredly between Rey and her companion. Rey translates for him.
"Three," the man says in rough Galactic, holding up three fingers.
Unkar Plutt snorts. "It's biometric, so it's nearly useless without the previous user. I'm offering you anything because it's the only piece of junk I've seen all day that's not full of rust and sand."
Rey translates again, and halfway through, the man digs the severed finger from his pocket and slams it on the counter. "Three," he growls.
Unkar Plutt jerks back, then sighs. "You've made quite a friend there, Rey." He tosses the man three rations.
"That's great!" Rey grins as they walk away. "You could buy passage with one. The other two should give you enough to eat to make it to the next outpost." Rey tucks the half ration she earned for her scrap in her pouch. The man looks down at his, and shoves two in her hand. She looks up at him.
"No, they're yours, I couldn't—"
His attention is suddenly caught elsewhere, a look of abject rage on his face. She startles back when he growls, "That's my ship!"
He takes off running for an old Intercepter parked beyond the holding pens. After a moment's hesitation, she takes off after him.
"Hey, Mister, wait—" she watches him disappear into the open cargo hatch. She looks around; no one seems to have noticed the commotion yet. She makes for the cargo hatch when a man in traders' robes tumbles out of it, clutching a bloody nose. He stumbles up and makes to swing at her, but she knocks him back with her quarterstaff. She scrambles up the hatch and dives to the side in time to avoid another trader being shoved out. She peeks out and sees a crowd beginning to form.
"Is that all of them?" She asks anxiously. The man nods and stalks off to the flight controls. Rey glances back down the hatch and sees some big guns wading through the crowd. She slams the hatch and yells, "Go! We need to get out of here!"
The ship is fast, despite its rough exterior and controls that look a generation old. They reach a low orbit and drift silently.
Rey stands and moves toward the flight controls, where the man is working through the panels, making sure everything is still functioning. She leans over the copilot chair. "Looks like your nav is off."
"I know," he huffs, and flicks the controls. The coordinates shift toward something that seems close to right, then veer off again.
She straightens up when she hears a soft sound behind her, a voice soft and indistinct. Then laughter, bubbly like a child, responds in a faint echo. She looks around, but sees nothing. The man watches her from the corner of his eye, but stays silent.
She returns her attention to the flight controls when he gestures at the viewscreen. "Mm, where do you want to go?" he asks. He gestures down toward Jakku. "Home? Or," he gestures upward, "somewhere else?"
Rey slides into the copilot chair and looks out at the stars through the viewscreen. She hears those distant voices again. She sighs.
"Home."
He lands with precision beside her AT-AT, and gestures for her to wait. She gives him a questioning look as he starts digging through the cargo hold, and emerges with a crate of dry food—actual food, not just rations—and shoves it into her arms. She looks at it in shock.
"I can't take this! I—I don't even know how to cook anything like this!" Rey looks at him in bewilderment.
With a disconcerted expression, he points at the bags in the crates. "Instructions on there. Mm, get creative."
Rey stares at the crate, then back at him, dumbfounded. "Can you tell me your name? So I can thank you properly?"
He pulls his jacket tighter around his shoulders. "Max."
Rey beams at him. "Thank you, Max." She starts down the ramp, and pauses at the bottom. "May the Force be with you."
Max ducks his head and waves her on home.