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Rey tells him the day she realises the baby is coming, three months after the First Order surrenders unconditionally to the alliance.
“You’re pregnant?” Finn asks, his eyes widening. “But we—”
“Oh, no, no,” Rey shakes her head with a smile. They’ve been careful, but only because Finn insists on it. Rey's been starved and overworked most her life, so she bleeds barely once a year. Before now she had given herself fifty-fifty odds of ever conceiving, and even less of wanting to. “Not yet. I don’t know when. But I can feel… them moving in the Force. They’re just one possible future, I think. Years away, maybe.”
Finn and Rey are sitting on the grassy roof of a disused bunker at the edge of the base, feet swinging over a low lip of concrete. Finn stares at her, but she can feel the smile forming in his mind even before it spreads across his face. “I want to feel them,” is the first thing he says. “Can you show me?”
She takes his hand and puts it on her breast, above her heart. His palm and fingers make a hot silhouette through her clothes. She closes her eyes and breathes in deep, pressing up against his skin, trying to draw the untrained ore of his spirit into the channels of Force she’s carved into herself over the last few years. But just as his edges blur into hers, she reaches back towards the flutter of future she felt this morning and—
Now do you fear me?
“Rey!” Finn catches her as she crumples into his lap, clutching her head.
Rey groans and opens her eyes. She’s twisted towards him, one arm pressed into his stomach. They're alone. Kylo Ren is not here. Kylo Ren is dead. Finn’s dark eyes are the only pair looking into hers, every speckle in their depths familiar and warm. He’s saying, “Rey, Rey…” but it takes her a moment to remember it’s her name.
He sits her up carefully, holding her arm, although she’s not dizzy, just clenched up all over. “My fault,” she whispers, pressing two fingers into the centre of her forehead just to feel something real. “I guess trying to look through time… it goes both ways,” she swallows around a suddenly dry throat and blinks slowly against painfully bright sunlight. “I felt the echoes of him. Of the dark side.”
“Is that normal?” Finn asks, squeezing her arm. “Should you talk to Luke?”
“No,” Rey snaps. “It was nothing. I’ll be more careful next time.”
She does not need lore and warnings, she does not want Luke pushing her into some new training regime. She’s done with the Jedi and the past; she’s got her own way with the Force, and despite all Luke’s warnings it was what saved them in the end. Luke wants to protect her, but Rey knows he first wants to protect the universe from her (and Force knows, she understands why, after what happened to his last protégé). But Leia and Finn can carry the Force inside them, as a part of them, and not turn to the dark side. For fuck’s sake, Luke needs to let Rey do the same.
She realises she’s shivering as if with a fever, and there’s sweat pooling between her breasts. The war is over but it's still chasing her through time. Padding in her footsteps like a predator. She looks at Finn. “Do you want that future?”
“Yes!” he says, brushing a strand of hair out of her mouth. He gives a short laugh, “Especially, well, if I’ve got a few years to prepare.”
“I want that too,” she says. “Just the two of us.”
“And Poe,” he says. It's worked so far, sharing Finn between the two of them. Rey didn’t want it any other way. But everything has been different since they won the war.
“Not in the beginning. Not here. It can’t happen here,” she says. “We have to get away from the past.”
---[]---
They both know that Poe won’t leave the Resistance until there’s true stability in the bleached aftermath of the First Order. But when they tell him they’re leaving, he holds them both close and says he’s seen this coming for a while.
“I’ll join you when things settle down,” he grins, and Rey can feel herself falling in love with him, though she knows she’s really just feeling what Finn feels all the time.
“We’ll be hard to find,” Finn says, choking a little on it.
“I always catch up with you two sooner or later.”
“Poe, you could come with us. You’ve given your life to the Resistance, you can take a break.”
“Buddy, we wouldn't have won the war if I'd done a half-assed job,” Poe nudges the underside of Finn’s chin. Rey understands what he really means; that things could still go bad, that he can’t leave his post until the dawn finally breaks. Finn sniffs and leans in to embrace Poe again. She watches them kiss for a long time, Finn’s hands shaking, Poe gripping tight to fistfuls of his shirt. She wishes she could see the future and know that Poe was part of it, but Luke always says that nothing is certain.
Better to make the future ready for Poe, make a life he can slip into beside them, than to wait here for it to happen on its own.
---[]---
The Resistance procures them travel papers with fake names and intersystem work permits. Finn and Rey set their sights on a small planet in the outer rim that is little-touched by the war. There are still enemies out there who might hunt them if they travel openly; for revenge, or for a bounty from the remnants of the Order, or simply for the notoriety.
The planet of Muirias is a frozen wasteland at its poles and a cracked, quake-ridden nightmare around its major tectonic plate, but there is a swathe of green on the far side, along the equator. A continent of ancient mountains and deep valleys, occupied for a millennia by migrants who fled the conflicts deeper in the galaxy rather than be absorbed into the Republic. Cataclysms every million years kept the planet’s ecology hardy but uncomplicated, covering the habitable terrain with little more than lichens and plankton. When the travelers arrived they seeded the rich, volcanic soil of the continent with all the flora and fauna of their home worlds. It spread and consumed the native lichens until the continent became a thickly-wooded, abundant land with life from a myriad of different origins. Give it another million years and these invaders will be wiped out by the next super-volcano or global tsunami; the lichens will return and restore equilibrium. But a million years is plenty of time for Finn and Rey to live quietly.
They travel for the first year, working service jobs where they can get them, moving to the next city every few months for a change of scene. They live in spaces no bigger than a ship’s cabin, because that’s what they’re used to, and learn the local dialect as it differs from Galactic Basic. At last they come to a mountain ridge that stretches a thousand miles across the northern edge of the continent, shielding the inhabitants from the worst of the polar weather. There’s jobs in the big city down on the plateau, and homesteads for sale in the mountains, and magnetic train routes connecting all the small towns.
They have money saved from their work, and land is cheap up here where the slopes are too rough for industrial farming. They mortgage a hectare of rocky forest with a few flat shelves of soil and stone, and a dirt road running right into town.
On the property, near the road, stands an old house made of durable synthetics. Rey equips it with solar power and fixes up the old artisan pump to fill the pipes. There is an overgrown barn at the back of the property, and Finn replaces the rotting planks in the walls and puts a solid padlock on the door. Together they repaint the walls, lay down a new faux-wood floor, freeze-kill the pests that are laying eggs in the wiring, and lug boxes of cheap furniture up the track to the front door. There is so much work to do around the house that they are exhausted each night by the time they finish dinner. They fall into heavy sleep, entwined together on mats on the floor for the first few weeks, until they can get a second-hand bed with a new mattress.
Most of their neighbours are more than a mile away, but there is an old, blue-skinned woman named Mam Ura just down the road who pops by to find out who they are and where they’ve come from.
“We were in the war,” Finn tells her truthfully, over her basket of fresh baking. He reaches over and takes Rey’s hand. “That’s where we met. But we’ve put all that behind us.”
---[]---
Rey loves the forest. She loves the tangling, clamouring wild of plants and broken cliffsides, the smell of water and sap, the endless shapes of green and gold and grey under the canopy. But she is not a gardener. She has never been able to hoard things of real value before. Food and plants were always stolen if not eaten quickly, or they wilted, or went rotten, or were covered in insects. Rey has no patience for gardening: she needs instant gratification for her work, or she expects to be cheated. Nobody paid their debts on Jakku.
It’s Finn who takes to the earth, with the patience and discipline of a soldier’s training. He engages the grocer with questions about plants for an hour at a time while the woman serves other customers around his elbow. He cuts beds into neat rows along the paths that surround the house, digging out the old banks and filling in the ditches until there is a hundred feet of stepped land dropping away around the cottage. He filters the weed-bulbs from the dirt with a sieve he’s made himself from old fence-netting. He measures the alkalinity every week, lays down porous pipes for irrigation, trims the branches of the trees along the road to get the sun and barters his labour for saplings from their neighbours. Finn digs his fingers into the soil and packs it around the roots of the trees and checks them for parasites every day. He stakes out rows of wire for creepers. In three or four years, the trees and vines will begin to fruit with local produce; sugarsquash, fat bunches of cherries, black-fleshed starfruit, and sour plummans for making preserves and wine. He nurses seeds in window-pots until they’re strong enough to plant in the beds: bitterstick, snowberries, and a handful of different vegetables that he and Rey all class as lettuces and cabbages without much consistency. He takes cuttings and buys seasonal bulbs when they're cheap, and grows flowers, petals bright as stained glass, and native grasses that shine in the sun like bursts of silver and gold threads.
Rey watches him from the deck on his days off, as the weather shifts through Muirias’s slow seasons (it takes thirty standard months to circle the distant sun). The muscles of his back move beneath his shirt with his sleeves rolled up, and he wears a ridiculous flop of a hat to keep the sun off the back of his neck. The sun here is not the baking, hateful torrent of light that Jakku suffered, but Rey still worries about ultraviolet burns and heat exhaustion – somehow she thinks of Finn as cloistered and soft, raised indoors like an aristocrat’s child, unprepared for the weather of the world. She knows it’s nonsense. She knows how hard Stormtroopers are trained, never mind that he was a captain in Leia's army for five years. But she also knows that training isn’t the same as surviving in the real world.
Finn spends hours in the garden without complaint, and comes back to her salty and gritty with sweat and dust, and Rey kisses him and hands him a cold drink with a smile.
She doesn’t take to gardening, but she takes to food; she learns to cook in a frenzy (badly, and then moderately, and then increasingly well). It is meditative, and the rewards immediate, and it is so much easier than the work of her childhood. No hauling hunks of metal twice her weight, no more live circuits and chemical burns, no more climbing hundreds of feet without a safety line just to collect enough spark plugs to survive the next week. She loves being able to give to Finn, every day, sex and food and then just her warmth as the old burner flickers red in the darkness.
In the cottage, the mountains block the signals from the continental networks, so they can only get interplanetary broadcasts when they’re down in the village. Instead, they listen to local broadcasts in the evenings on a crackling stereo they found in the attic when they moved in.
They try to get used to the strange music of this planet, dancing in the kitchen where the rug won't trip their bare feet. Sometimes they move to it, and sometimes it’s so strange they have turn it down until they can only hear the beat, and sing pieces of Resistance drinking songs that fit the rhythm, falling into each other with laughter when they can’t remember the words.
---[]---
Finn gets a job in security four days a week in the city. There is no catch-all mechanic in town, only a garage for farm vehicles, so Rey rents a tiny space between the grocer’s and the dance club and opens a repair shop. She likes working with her hands again instead of the mental athletics of the Force. The Grocer hires her for her first day, replacing refrigerator filters, and is so pleased with the job well done that he puts her logo up on the holo-board that advertises the specials in the front window. It’s strange to be paid for her work, so the club manager takes pity on her and helps her with her accounting.
Mam Ura is no doubt the one who spreads the news in town about the nice veteran couple who’ve moved into the old cottage under Lodestone Ridge. Finn and Rey make friends and acquaintances easily, as two youngsters in a strange land who are clearly still learning how to be adults. People want to help them, and people like new stories. They’re invited to concerts in people’s back yards, and to birthday feasts for the local matriarchs. Their new neighbours are nosy as hell, but thankfully they’re cautious around the subject of the war and no one even asks whose side they were on. In the absence of the truth, the rumour-mill decides that Finn was a foot-soldier for the Resistance and Rey was a First Order pilot shot down over a lonely moon-base, and that she changed her loyalties after he rescued her and nursed her back to health.
“Why would they think that about me?” Rey hisses, as they leave the grocer’s with their arms laden with the week’s food. “Why do they think I’d ever have worked for those monsters?”
Finn raises an eyebrow at her. She pinks. “I mean voluntarily, obviously.”
Finn chuckles and kisses her cheek. “Because it makes a good story, I suppose.”
They have been on Muirias for more than nine hundred days when the first big change comes. They have filled the cottage with trinkets, blankets and dried herbs. Some of the autumnal trees are flowering, and a few small fruit have appeared on the vines. Finn wears a thick, felted coated for his walk to the magnetic train each morning. Rey finally installs the central heating. Their first winter in the cottage is well on its way.
She goes to the physician at the clinic in the next big town over rather than picking up a test from the grocer’s pharmacy. Not for privacy, but simply because she's already pretty sure she’s pregnant, so she doesn't want to waste money on a test and the doctor. The physician confirms it; the baby is coming, due in eight months. Somehow she didn't expect them to be so soon. She thought she was still recovering. The food and the peace and the sunlight have been good medicine for her body.
She meets Finn at the station. There’s a moment where he meets her eyes and fear flickers across his face; in the war, a break in routine almost always meant bad news. But then she smiles and waves her arm, chewing on the thumbnail of her other hand, and she pushes her happiness towards him with the Force. He understands even before she yells, “It’s happening!”
He sprints the length of the platform to sweep her up in his arms and spin her around. She’s definitely a lot heavier than she was when they arrived on Muirias. The line of hair on Finn’s crown is thinner than the day they met in the desert, and the lines on his face are deeper, but they’re deepest around his smile.
She tightens her arms around his neck, laughing into the cool air of dusk, and feels like she will burst into flower with joy.
---[]---
They sit squashed in their big armchair together a few weeks later, drinking hot musk-root, as the stereo plays a slow tune like the drip of water on glass.
“What would you have done?” Rey asks, tipping her head against his shoulder. “If you’d escaped that day on Takodana, gone away with those mercenaries, and the First Order never found you?”
“I’d just have kept running,” Finn shrugs, winding a thin trail of hair at her temple around his fingers. “I didn’t think about it.”
“But now,” she insists, wriggling deeper into the corners and crooks of his body like they are two puzzle pieces. “Now you have a chance to think about it. What did you want? You couldn’t just have been pushed away from the Order. There must have been something to pull you.”
He is silent for a long time. His lips rest on the border where her forehead and her hairline meet, his breath soft on her skin. At last he says, “When I was in my teens I started to think that maybe I had a family out there. I wanted to tell them what had happened to me. I don’t think I really even wanted to go back to them – we’d be strangers, you know, and I didn’t know what a family could offer me. But I felt so guilty, thinking they were worrying about me, wondering what I’d become, wondering if I was dead. Eventually I would have gone to find them, just so they wouldn’t have to worry any more.”
“Do you still think about them?”
He lets out a long breath. “Sometimes,” he glances down at her. “What about you? If you’d stayed on Jakku?”
"I don’t know. I was just waiting for things to get better," she said. "It's hard now, having expectations I can actually meet, because I'm so sure they're going to fall over."
“Never,” he slides his arms around her and squeezes her until it almost hurts. Her belly is not yet distended, but it’s firm between them. “We’ve been through the worst. Nothing can take the future away from us now.”
---[]---
It is around the thousandth day on Muirias that the past sweeps into their home like an uninvited guest. Rey’s belly is heavy but not yet noticeable under her clothes. She has an interplanetary news channel running in the background while she replaces rusting converters and tightens suspension coils. She used to only listen to music at work; she hated being reminded of how big the universe was, and of how Luke always made her feel responsible for it all. But over the last few months she’s gone back to the interplanetary stuff. It’s exciting to hear those familiar names; places and politicians she hasn’t thought about for such a long time.
When she hears Leia’s voice on the broadcast she almost drops the microwelder in her hand. She switches off the gas with trembling fingers and turns up the radio. In a few seconds the sound-byte is over, but the broadcast winds down the story, “…the death toll is likely to rise as rescuers continue their search.”
Rey messages Finn, and he calls her from the city and says he’s heard the news about the surprise attack. They talk for a few minutes, but there’s just nothing they can do from a million-million miles away. There’s no more information coming out and Finn has to go back to work.
Rey meets him at the station and drives him back to the cottage in silence. They try to eat like normal. The sun goes down early in winter. It is too cold to sit outside and watch the stars, and the heating has broken down again. Rey will have to take the afternoon off to work on it tomorrow. They curl up in bed, Finn wrapped around her as she lies on her back and stares at the ceiling.
“Can you feel him?” Finn asks at last. “With the Force?”
“I’ve been trying,” Rey says softly. “We… we’re not connected, not like you and me. But you and him – you’d feel it if something was wrong, I’m sure. Leia and Luke both said they felt Han when he died—”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure I’d know,” Finn turns his face into her shoulder and she feels the dampness of his tears on her bare skin.
Finn wriggles all night, turning over and back again, his breathing shallow and fast. Rey can’t sleep while he can’t sleep, and the baby is pressing against her bladder.
They go to work separately the next morning, both snappish and exhausted. By the end of the day, Rey is almost falling asleep at her workbench. Maybe that makes her reckless. She meets Finn at the station again.
“We need to contact the Republic’s interim authority,” she says. “We need to know that Poe’s alright.”
“It’s too dangerous,” Finn rubs the back of his neck. They’re standing below the platform in their big winter coats, in the speeder yard where a trickle of passengers head home after their commute. “We can’t break our cover.”
“Finn, not knowing will wreck you,” Rey steps in close to make sure no one can hear them. “Please. Just call them.”
They end up having a row about it right there outside the station. Finn keeps making excuses – “They’re in the middle of a crisis, we shouldn’t bother them” – which turns into – “You and the baby have to come first!”
“Me?” she snarls, eyes narrowing. “What, now you’re just protecting me? Since when in the history of the galaxy have I needed you to protect me?”
His mouth goes hard and he says, “Isn’t that why we’re here?”
“Fuck. You fucking soldier,” she turns away, digging both hands into her hair. She finds herself giggling as she turns back to him. “Is that what you came for? Just to look after me? My big strong bodyguard?”
“Of course not,” he says, but his shoulders are hunched up in his coat and his voice is a mumble.
“The war’s over, Finn. This isn’t a mission you just have to do out of duty. Tell me what you want.”
He swallows, looks over her shoulder at nothing, looks back at her face. “I don’t know how to want things. They didn’t train us for that. I only know how to do things.”
She steps in close and takes his face in her hands. “Do you want me?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want a boring life with me?”
“Yes!”
“We can have that. Now. But we can’t do that while you’ve got a stupid little voice in your head telling you Poe could be dead.”
At last he nods, “I know,” and she kisses him.
She takes him back to the village. The transport office has a comm centre where they can make interplanetary calls. Either of them could ring through the Resistance with their access codes, but Finn decides he wants to be the one to send a message so Poe knows he’s not in a state of panic about the attack. Then he takes a few minutes of flexing his fingers and deep breathing before he trusts himself to keep calm. The message goes through quickly, but there’s no active node right now so they won’t hear back for a while. Maybe it’ll be a few days, if the Resistance isn’t answering non-urgent calls.
They go home to the cold cottage and don’t sleep much better that night. The next morning, Rey gets a message from the transport office while she’s driving Finn to the station. There’s a call coming through from an off-planet node. She turns the speeder around and heads straight there.
In a booth at the back of the office, the screen connects them through to a headquarters, worlds away, and there is Poe. There’s the sound of traffic out a window behind him, and the distant shape of a towering skyline. He’s in a business tunic that is so formal on him it looks like a costume. He’s even combed his hair into a fashionable slick.
“Guys!” he waves at them, grinning broadly. “Hello! Wow, I’ve missed you so much!”
Finn almost falls over himself trying to get close to the screen. Rey puts her arm around him with a smile as he wipes his eyes. “Poe, oh man, Poe. It’s so good to see you. We heard about the attack, I saw Leia on a newscast – we’re so sorry to see what happened, but you’re okay—”
“I’m fine, buddy, I was off-planet,” Poe’s face turns serious. “Things are holding together right now. A splinter group claimed responsibility, so the treaty is holding up and we’re working with the ex-Order territories to cut off their armament routes. But what about you? Is everything alright?”
“Everything’s wonderful,” Finn says. “You should come join us, Poe. You really should.”
There’s a flicker in Poe’s eyes, visible even through a million, million miles of code conversion and hyperspace transmission; envy, and anger, and grief. There’s a speckle of grey at Poe’s temples, though Rey can’t remember whether he’s forty this year or next. He rallies his smile and says quickly. “You know I can’t. We can’t all run away from this mess.”
There’s a moment of silence. Finn sits back in his chair. “It was your choice, man.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Poe lets out a long breath and runs his fingers through his hair. There’s a bandage around his hand and Rey wonders if he was really off-planet. Or maybe he came home and has been part of the rescue effort at the scene of the attack. His rank should put him way above that kind of manual work, but they’ve never been able to keep him out of the action. Poe shakes his head. “I really miss you.”
“Me too,” Finn kisses the tips of his fingers and brushes them at the camera lens. “Love you, Poe. Can’t wait to see you in person.”
Rey leaves them to talk until the node overloads and the connection cuts out. She takes Finn to the station and he hugs her goodbye, letting out a long-shuddering breath.
“We can still go back,” she says.
“No,” he rests his chin her shoulder for a moment. “This is what I want.”
---[]---
The baby is getting closer, pressing tight against Rey’s waistband and making her back ache. Mam Ura comes by uninvited twice a week with herbal tea to cure all her ails, which Rey hides in the pantry because she is not convinced Mam Ura, despite her skill at baking, is an expert on human biology. Staying busy is the best medicine for her discomfort.
There is an autumnal dance in town, and someone lends Finn and Rey clothes to replace the threadbare ones they brought with them. Rey catches a glimpse of them both in the window of the club as they head inside. The outfits are made of layers of draped, gauzy fabrics with fringe hems, and it makes them look like locals. Like they belong to this place.
They dance half the night. When they need a rest they head outside onto a veranda heated by burning gas-towers. They catch up on gossip from the other young couples and trios at the party; news about who is sneaking around with whom, who has gone to the city for medical treatment, hearsay about the newcomers in town, a family of refugees originally from the Hosnian system. And of course all the usual speculation about what the coming baby will be; a foot-soldier like Finn or a pilot like Rey.
Back inside, they are dancing in the half-trance of late-night exhaustion and deep music, when Rey feels like something is crawling up her neck. She turns quickly and sees a man she doesn’t know, though he’s wearing the same local fabrics as everyone else. He’s holding a thin recorder up to the crowd, taking pictures despite the dim light.
“You okay?” Finn asks.
“Yeah,” Rey answers. She catches the arm of someone nearby and points at the man. “Is he part of that new family? The Hosnians?”
They shake their head. “No, I don’t know him. I think he’s just a tourist. He’s staying at the hotel.”
Finn tucks her in close under his arm while they dance so that no one can see their troubled faces. They head home as soon as they can, stumbling in the glow of the patchy village lamps until the largest moon appears from behind the clouds.
---[]---
A week later, Rey wakes to a cold bed. She reaches for Finn and finds only his pillow on the edge of the mattress. For a moment she listens to the creak of the pipes and a night-bird voicing its hungry frustration in the winter air. Then she reaches out with the Force and the world comes alive; the flow of the water from the well, the scurry of creatures in the forest, the sleepy trees with sap sitting half-solid in their veins. And Finn standing at the window, looking out into the night with his mind buzzing with resignation and fear.
Rey sits up at once. “Finn?”
“Sh,” he moves near-silently back across the room. “Get up. No lights.”
Within a moment she has her feet on the floor and is wrapping a gown around her waist. She hears him ease open the sliding door under the sink and pull out the blaster that has been gathering dust since they arrived. Rey crouches under the bed and feels for a bundle of worn linen that still smells faintly of the flowers at the temple where she said goodbye to Luke. She rests it on her lap and unwraps it in the pitch black.
Despite the cool air, the lightsaber is the same temperature as blood and fits in her hand as if she was moulded around it.
“Force woke me up,” Finn whispers by her ear. She can feel the heat of his skin, pumping with adrenalin through a thin shirt and his briefs. “Something’s out there.”
She doesn’t need to close her eyes, it’s so dark in the cottage. She can’t sense anything alive, but there is a warning pressing against the skin of her thoughts. Danger. The future is loud and frantic and close.
“The side door,” Finn says with a breath, and they move, two soldiers in thin clothes on a winter’s night.
At the door, Finn crouches low to one side of the frame, and Rey stays behind him. The rifle is in one hand, the butt tucked against his shoulder, and with the other he reaches up and unlatches the bolt. He gently turns the handle.
“Ready?”
“Ready,” Rey whispers.
Finn throws open the door. Rey has kept it well-oiled, and it opens silently. Cold air and double moonlight streams inside. Finn’s rifle is up at his eyeline and he tucks the barrel around the edge and fires twice. At the same moment, a missile of energy blasts through the open door and hits the far wall of the kitchen.
“There’s two more in the yard!” he barks, bolting outside in bare feet, hunched over.
Rey straightens up and follows at a jog, the lightsaber blazing to life in her hand. She takes in the smoking shell of a combat droid twenty feet from the side door, and hears Finn’s blaster fire three more times, in chorus with the screech of metal. She steps out onto the frosty path and pushes her senses outwards. The night-bird has fled. There is nothing alive and bigger than a rodent within half a mile.
Finn stands over the body of the largest of the three droids. There is an array of cameras set high in its chest. A green light winks above one of them as Rey moves to stand beside him, her lightsaber at the ready. They both see themselves reflected in that cold, electric eyeball, and then Finn fires directly into the array until all that’s left is a melting crater.
Rey looks at him as she retracts the lightsaber. A bead of sweat rolls down his temple, and his breath fogs in front of his face. He lowers the rifle to his side. Rey is already shivering. One of the dead droids lies draped over a dry bush of perennials. They are battered machines, with recently repaired armour and heat-cracked paintwork, but all of the same make and model. Their insignia have been scratched off. Maybe they’re all that’s left of a once-powerful arsenal. Or maybe they’re just the first wave.
“We have to go,” Finn says, and she nods without taking her eyes off the droid.
There are two suitcases pre-packed on top of the wardrobe, and a lockbox hidden in the roof-beams, with emergency cash and a second set of identity papers. By the light of one weak lamp, they pull on traveling clothes and boots. Rey’s hands keep creeping towards small, useless things that she knows she cannot fit in the suitcase: a woven blanket from the market, strings of homegrown herbs, and the old stereo that can only pick up the local music. She pulls her fingers back and wraps one hand around her belly, feeling the kick of the agitated child inside. While Finn stuffs protein-packs into a satchel and fills up a bottle with fresh water, she scribbles a note to Mam Ura. We’re safe. Sell everything, give to charity. Goodbye. What else can she say?
Outside in the moonlight, she looks around and grabs Finn’s hand. “We can’t, Finn. We can’t leave.”
“We can’t stay,” he shakes his head, tugging her towards the forest. Under the trees is the old barn with the padlock, and inside it is a hyperspace-capable Roidlander that will get them out of the solar system within the hour.
“We’ll fight them,” she says. She is already gathering the Force to her will, the lightsaber almost trembling where it hangs at her belt. She can destroy anyone who comes to their home with evil intent. She was trained by the last Jedi, she killed Snoke, she helped end a war that could have consumed a thousand planets. Surely she can defend this small patch of land at the edge of the galaxy.
The Force comes to her summons joyfully, like a flock of flowing, bounding hounds. She has missed this, the power of the Jedi and the danger that follows. It’s like stretching her limbs after a long sleep. She wants to test her strength.
“No,” Finn turns towards her. “We chose to leave the war behind. We can’t go back now.”
“But your garden…”
“Rey, the garden doesn’t need us,” he puts down the suitcase and takes hold of her face. “It can grow wild without us. But I need us. You need us.”
She sobs, pressing closer to him until their foreheads meet. Then she takes a breath, drawing the Force back into her core and holding it quiescent. She can feel the future, the one she was waiting for in the desert. She doesn’t know the specifics still, but she knows at last that everything is going to be alright.
They run into the night, and take the garden with them. She is the soil, and he is the sun, and their clutching hands are the sweet water beneath.
---[]---
The ship hums to life after long months in storage. The systems flicker up one by one, and the engines begin to throb. Rey eases them out of the barn and up above the trees. She starts winding up the hyperdrive, so they won’t have to remain in orbit too long around the planet. There’s another firm kick at her bladder as she leans awkwardly over the controls, the seat-belt digging into her hips. Finn puts his hand on her arm as she turns the ship away from the lightless cottage and up towards the mountain peaks.
"We'll go and find your family," Rey says. "That's what we’ll do. Just like you dreamed when you were a kid."
"We gotta find somewhere safe to have the baby."
“They baby is already here. I can feel them so close, now.”
“Are you sure?”
“Nothing's going to go wrong," Rey smiles at him. “We’re going to make sure of it together.”
The baby kicks again, full of excitement as they draw closer to the stars.