fic: if you find yourself lost, dig (Star Wars; Rey & Leia; g)
if you find yourself lost, dig
Star Wars; Rey, Leia; g; 3,225 words
Rey and Leia bond after an ambush leaves them stranded.
Title from "Elsewhere, Mon Amour" by Nick Flynn.
~*~
if you find yourself lost, dig
Rey let herself get lulled into a false sense of security. The mission itself had seemed simple enough.
"Fly me to these coordinates," the General had said, and so Rey had strapped herself into the pilot's seat of the Millennium Falcon and flown.
"Stand there and look intimidating," the General had said. So Rey had stood just behind her with her face set in a blank mask and a hand on the hilt of her lightsaber while the General negotiated for the use of an old Rebellion base on Cardooine with the queen of the planet.
But the Falcon was too well-known to slip so easily under the radar--even if the First Order hadn't been searching for them, some bounty hunter or other always was, looking to pick up an outdated bounty on Han and Chewie, or just to make their bones. There weren't many legendary smugglers left these days, and Han's reputation still loomed large even months after his death.
Rey and Chewie were only about a third of the way done with overhauling the ship's very old and ridiculously patched together systems. Each item they wanted to update ended up causing a cascade of other necessary repairs and replacements. Luke watched them with mild amusement, helping whenever he had a free moment and defending the ship's idiosyncrasies whenever Rey started wondering if the job was just too big, too open-ended.
"It'll teach you patience," he said.
Rey gave him a skeptical look, because who knew patience better than she did?
He bobbed his head, acknowledging her silent rebuke, and amended, "Perseverance. Persistence. Other words that start with 'p' that are the hallmark of a Jedi." He couldn't keep the grin off his face, though, and she laughed with him.
"It'll teach you how to care for the things you love," the General told her later, as the bright deep blue of hyperspace streaked by outside the viewports. "Even when you can't tell if they love you back."
Rey had no quippy reply for that, but luckily, the General didn't seem to need one. If she insisted on traveling on the Falcon, which had become her home long before Rey was born, Rey wasn't going to argue. Even with the extra complications it involved.
After a few minutes of negotiation for form's sake, Queen Ruagia had agreed to the General's proposition--after all, the Rebellion had built the infrastructure the Resistance was hoping to co-opt and no one was currently using it. And even if that argument hadn't worked, there weren't many people able to withstand General Organa's presence and good sense, even if they'd previously discounted her legendary reputation. The Queen sent them off in an armored speeder with two local guides, since the area surrounding the old base was disputed territory between two notorious gangs of bandits the local militia hadn't been able to root out.
They might have been safe, might have passed as travelers under the Queen's protection, if not for the Falcon being recognized when it had landed.
When the attack came, about an hour into the ride, Rey responded so quickly that even she wasn't sure what happened. Luke said that if she was deeply in tune with the Force, time would seem to slow down during emergencies, giving her the ability to process events and make decisions quickly. She'd nodded but hadn't really believed it until now. When time slipped back to its usual speed, the two guides had disappeared with the armored speeder, and the General-a little muddy from having been tossed out of the speeder but otherwise unharmed--was looking at her with something like amusement in her eyes, though her words were all business.
"We can call the palace for a pickup." She put a hand in her pocket and came up with the crushed remains of her comm unit. "Or not." That glint of amusement in her expression only increased. "I guess we're on foot back to the spaceport," she said. "We can fly the Falcon over to the base to do recon."
"Why didn't we do that in the first place?" Rey asked, curious rather than accusatory. She trusted that the General must have had her reasons.
"Because it would have been rude to decline the queen's offer of help. And I knew we could handle whatever those bandits could throw at us." The General's voice was rueful and her eyes were bright. "I didn't think we'd lose the speeder."
Rey looked down, her disappointment in herself far stronger than the General's. "I'm sorry."
The General shook her head. "Not your fault." She wiped her muddy hands on her muddy trousers and sighed when they came away still dirty. Then she tilted her chin toward the way they'd come. "We'd better get moving if we want to make it back before dark."
Rey nodded. If she thought they'd be lucky to make it back to the spaceport by dawn, she kept it to herself.
*
The forest was noisy. It wasn't that the desert had been quiet, or lifeless, though people who'd never spent time there thought it was. Expected it to be. Rey had been to enough planets by now to know that even in their stillness, most were noisier than Jakku, even with its unexpected oases of noise and life, but this forest was surprisingly loud. The leaves rustled in the wind, the birds swooped and cawed overhead, insects and other lifeforms chittered and hummed, a distant stream burbled, and occasionally, far above the canopy of trees, a starship screamed by.
She wasn't used to how big the trees were, either. It was like being in the cool, cavernous confines of a wreck, except instead of the familiar odor of hot metal, everything smelled green and alive. Shafts of sunlight illuminated the way. The liveliness of it kept her glancing side to side, up and down, eyes wide and hand on the hilt of her lightsaber.
The Force felt bright and green and clear, and after walking the first klick or two in silence, she allowed herself to relax.
"You knew we were flying into an ambush," Rey finally said.
"I had a feeling," the General allowed.
"The Force?"
The General shrugged. "Common sense." She tilted her head--Rey had noticed Luke sometimes did the same when he was trying to figure out how to answer her without lying but without actually telling the truth--and grimaced. "And the Force."
Rey wanted to push, to question her about why she'd never trained the way Luke had, but the residual awe she felt for the General--and her own reluctance to be pressed into answering personal questions by other people--stopped her.
Something of her thoughts must have leaked into the Force, though, because the General shot her a wry glance. "There was never time," she said. "And I never wanted that kind of power. I'd seen how it could corrupt up close and personal." She shook her head, and Rey wondered--but again, didn't ask--if she was thinking about Kylo Ren. This time, she got no answer.
*
They walked for the better part of the afternoon, occasionally stopping so Rey could climb a tree and confirm they were still heading in the right direction, since the forest was trackless and their path unclear from the ground.
The trees hummed in the background, alive and ever-present in the Force, and after an unfortunate incident which took several embarrassing and awkward minutes to untangle her hair from an unexpected thicket of branches the first time she tried, she let that hum guide her attempts at climbing. She would never have actually said that some of the trees felt friendlier, but she certainly thought it as handholds made themselves apparent to her through the canopy of leaves. The sun was on the downward slope of its path through Cardooine's sky, but she thought they still had a couple of hours of light left. A gleam caught her eye in the distance--the late afternoon sun glinting off something. If it was an abandoned speeder....She raised her macrobinoculars again. Not a speeder, but something nearly as good.
She scrambled back down, using the Force to keep her jumps from branch to branch from disturbing the tree too much, and then leapt to the ground, delighting in the crunch of leaves beneath her feet when she landed. She offered her canteen to the General, who took it gratefully. Rey was glad she hadn't gotten out of the habit of carrying it on her belt, along with a stash of food in her utility bag, so a ration bar was the next thing she handed to the General. Aside from their weapons, all their other belongings had been lost with the speeder.
"There's a stream not too far away," she said. "West of where we need to be, but I could probably make it there and back in less than an hour." She didn't point out that sunset was only two hours away and they were still at least twenty klicks from the spaceport.
"We'll both go," the General said. "I always preferred camping near water if possible."
"I never really had the option before," Rey replied.
"No, I imagine you didn't." Her mouth quirked in a half-grin. "Joining the Resistance is one way to see the galaxy."
"That's not why--" Rey started.
The General didn't let her finish. "I know." She shrugged a shoulder. "We try not to question people's motives for joining. As long as it's not spying." She smiled, a softer smile than Rey was used to seeing on her face. "Han originally joined the Rebellion because he thought he was going to get paid."
"Was that when he and Luke rescued you from the Death Star?" Rey asked eagerly. Luke had told her a version of that story, slightly different (sadder, realer) from the one Poe told her, which had a lot more fun and a little less sad.
"Yes. Though rescue is too organized a word for what they did. It was mostly a lot of running around and shooting at stormtroopers."
"Finn and I did some of that on Starkiller," she said, and then stopped. She'd told the General about how Han had died in a debriefing in front of Resistance High Command, but they'd never discussed it after that. Never personally. She got the sense that discussing it now wouldn't be welcome, so she changed tack. "I had already mostly rescued myself, though." That hadn't mattered to her at the time; the fact that someone--Finn--had cared enough to come after her was what was important.
"That sounds familiar," the General said, and the deep sadness behind her soft smile made Rey's chest ache.
*
The stream wasn't very deep and it was narrow enough that Rey could easily leap it if she had to, but the water was clear and cold and running quickly over smooth gray stones. She ran it through the filter on her canteen anyway to make sure, and then started to wash up.
The General's hair was still tightly bound in its coronet of braids, but Rey's buns were in disarray after her first tangle with a tree, and she was still picking twigs and leaves out of it from her various climbs. That was something she'd never had to deal with on Jakku.
She undid the mess with wet fingers and pulled a brush from her pack.
"Let me," the General said, gesturing at the ground beside her.
Rey handed her the brush and sat.
They were silent for a little while, as the General worked the brush through the tangles in Rey's hair. The motion was soothing, and between that and the soft rushing sound of the stream, Rey let herself slip into a light meditation. There was still a lot about the Jedi--about the Force--that she didn't understand, but this part she was good at, thanks to all those long empty nights she'd spent alone on Jakku.
"I'm surprised you kept it long," the General said eventually, using her fingers on a particularly stubborn knot.
"I wanted to make sure my family recognized me when they came back," Rey replied. She blinked, surprised at the sudden swell of tears behind her eyes, her emotions unexpectedly close to the surface after meditation. "I changed so much over the years," she said, waving a hand at herself, "but if this one thing was the same, they would know it was me." She laughed thickly. "It sounds stupid when I say it out loud."
"No," the General said. Her hands gentled, and Rey shivered at a whisper of the Force as she worked another tangle free. "I shouldn't have been surprised. I still wear my hair in styles that were popular on Alderaan when I was young."
Rey felt the phantom ache of old grief and reached out tentatively with the Force, offering comfort. She still wasn't sure what was acceptable when communicating this way--Luke was usually pleased when she did it, and Finn welcomed her attempts warmly, but the General was...she was the General.
She'd been at war her whole life--with the Empire, with her father, her son, herself. Rey could sense that struggle even now. And yet somehow she'd found a stillness and a peace within that Rey could only hope to emulate one day. Some people called her cold and vicious, said she was a warmonger like her birth father, but no one who'd ever met her could believe that. She was sharp as a vibroblade, and hard as durasteel when she had to be, but there was a warmth and graciousness to her that accepted people for who they were, and who they hoped to be. She'd welcomed Rey immediately and without anger, had never blamed her for what happened to Han. She wore it differently from Luke, but Rey knew it was there. She could feel that, too.
And now, she squeezed Rey's shoulder in acknowledgment and what might have been gratitude, before continuing on with the task of dealing with Rey's hair.
"I could braid it for you," she offered.
"I'd like that very much," Rey replied through the tightness in her chest.
*
Rey gathered branches, twigs and leaves and built a fire on the bank of the stream. She allowed herself a brief moment to wish for the cloak she'd shed in the speeder in the warmth of the early afternoon. The temperature had dropped quickly after the sun went down. But wishing had never gotten anyone anything, and there was always some kind of work to be done.
"Is there anything you don't have in that bag?" the General asked as Rey rummaged around and pulled out another ration bar. She broke it in half and shared it with the General, who bit into her half with an exaggerated grimace.
Rey gave her a small smile. "A comm unit. A tent. A spare speeder."
The General hummed in amusement.
"I'd settle for a blanket, though. Next time." Rey made a note to herself. Luke liked to reiterate that a Jedi should be ready for anything, and Rey had thought she was well prepared, but she always knew that sometimes no preparation was enough. Things happened, and you dealt with them. It was something she'd learned early on Jakku, and if that weren't enough, the General was a walking, talking example.
Her hand brushed against the hilt on her belt and she unhooked the lightsaber. "General? I never asked if you wanted this," she says, holding it out to the General the way she'd once done to Luke. She wouldn't ever let Ren have it, but his mother had more claim than she did.
The General laughed out loud this time. "No, thank you, Rey. I've used a lightsaber once or twice, and it was fun," her mouth twisted ruefully, "for certain definitions of the word, but I prefer a good, reliable blaster any day."
"Poe says you're the best shot in the Resistance."
"Poe says a lot of things." She put a hand on Rey's knee. "And please, call me Leia. I should have said something sooner."
"Yes, sir, I mean, Leia." Rey didn't try to keep the giddiness out of her voice. She was just glad she hadn't stumbled over the name.
"Has he spoken with you about flying with Black Squadron?"
Rey couldn't stop smiling. "Yeah. I can't wait." Then she realized how that sounded. "I mean, it's an honor. I'm looking forward to flying with them."
"I know what you meant."
The silence stretched between them, broken by the crackle and hiss of the fire and the chirping of night insects and the constant rush of the stream. Rey wondered if she'd ever get tired of the sound.
She was about to offer to take first watch when the General--when Leia said, "If you don't want to become a Jedi, if you simply want to fly with Black Squadron and help the Resistance that way, or even if you want to forge your own path separate from ours, don't let my brother," and here Leia drew a deep, exhausted breath, "or my son, push you into anything else."
Rey glanced over at her, but she was staring into the fire. "When I found Luke's lightsaber, I wanted nothing to do with any of this." She gestured between them. "I was scared at first," she admitted. "I still am sometimes."
"We all are."
Rey pursed her lips. "I know," she said after some consideration. "But this is where I'm meant to be. What I'm meant to be doing."
"You really believe that?" Leia finally looked at her, and in the orange glow of the fire, she looked burnished, ageless, like an avatar of the galaxy instead of a tired, middle-aged woman.
The Force hummed happily in Rey's head and heart and bones. "I do." Even if she hadn't, they both knew that the First Order would never let her be now. But Rey wasn't going to let them dictate the terms of her life. She'd found her purpose and she intended to fulfill it.
Leia must have felt it too, because she simply nodded and said, "Okay."
*
They were sweaty and sore and dirty when they finally limped into the spaceport the next morning. Rey let Leia have first crack at the refresher while she attempted to contact the Resistance base. It took a few moments of fiddling, but she finally made the connection.
Finn looked relieved when he answered the comm. "You're okay!" He looked over his shoulder and called out, "Luke, Poe, they're okay!"
"Were you worried?" Rey's tone was teasing, but she was secretly pleased to know they'd been concerned about her. She didn't think she'd ever get used to people caring. She wanted to luxuriate in it, but now wasn't the time.
"Yes," Finn said firmly as Leia joined her in the cockpit.
"I wasn't," Luke said, a small smile playing across his lips. "I knew you were together."
"We make a pretty good team," Leia agreed, squeezing Rey's shoulder companionably. "We secured permission to use the old base. We're going to do recon on it now."
Rey grinned, warmed by their confidence, and prepared the Falcon for takeoff.
end
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~*~
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Star Wars; Rey, Leia; g; 3,225 words
Rey and Leia bond after an ambush leaves them stranded.
Title from "Elsewhere, Mon Amour" by Nick Flynn.
~*~
if you find yourself lost, dig
Rey let herself get lulled into a false sense of security. The mission itself had seemed simple enough.
"Fly me to these coordinates," the General had said, and so Rey had strapped herself into the pilot's seat of the Millennium Falcon and flown.
"Stand there and look intimidating," the General had said. So Rey had stood just behind her with her face set in a blank mask and a hand on the hilt of her lightsaber while the General negotiated for the use of an old Rebellion base on Cardooine with the queen of the planet.
But the Falcon was too well-known to slip so easily under the radar--even if the First Order hadn't been searching for them, some bounty hunter or other always was, looking to pick up an outdated bounty on Han and Chewie, or just to make their bones. There weren't many legendary smugglers left these days, and Han's reputation still loomed large even months after his death.
Rey and Chewie were only about a third of the way done with overhauling the ship's very old and ridiculously patched together systems. Each item they wanted to update ended up causing a cascade of other necessary repairs and replacements. Luke watched them with mild amusement, helping whenever he had a free moment and defending the ship's idiosyncrasies whenever Rey started wondering if the job was just too big, too open-ended.
"It'll teach you patience," he said.
Rey gave him a skeptical look, because who knew patience better than she did?
He bobbed his head, acknowledging her silent rebuke, and amended, "Perseverance. Persistence. Other words that start with 'p' that are the hallmark of a Jedi." He couldn't keep the grin off his face, though, and she laughed with him.
"It'll teach you how to care for the things you love," the General told her later, as the bright deep blue of hyperspace streaked by outside the viewports. "Even when you can't tell if they love you back."
Rey had no quippy reply for that, but luckily, the General didn't seem to need one. If she insisted on traveling on the Falcon, which had become her home long before Rey was born, Rey wasn't going to argue. Even with the extra complications it involved.
After a few minutes of negotiation for form's sake, Queen Ruagia had agreed to the General's proposition--after all, the Rebellion had built the infrastructure the Resistance was hoping to co-opt and no one was currently using it. And even if that argument hadn't worked, there weren't many people able to withstand General Organa's presence and good sense, even if they'd previously discounted her legendary reputation. The Queen sent them off in an armored speeder with two local guides, since the area surrounding the old base was disputed territory between two notorious gangs of bandits the local militia hadn't been able to root out.
They might have been safe, might have passed as travelers under the Queen's protection, if not for the Falcon being recognized when it had landed.
When the attack came, about an hour into the ride, Rey responded so quickly that even she wasn't sure what happened. Luke said that if she was deeply in tune with the Force, time would seem to slow down during emergencies, giving her the ability to process events and make decisions quickly. She'd nodded but hadn't really believed it until now. When time slipped back to its usual speed, the two guides had disappeared with the armored speeder, and the General-a little muddy from having been tossed out of the speeder but otherwise unharmed--was looking at her with something like amusement in her eyes, though her words were all business.
"We can call the palace for a pickup." She put a hand in her pocket and came up with the crushed remains of her comm unit. "Or not." That glint of amusement in her expression only increased. "I guess we're on foot back to the spaceport," she said. "We can fly the Falcon over to the base to do recon."
"Why didn't we do that in the first place?" Rey asked, curious rather than accusatory. She trusted that the General must have had her reasons.
"Because it would have been rude to decline the queen's offer of help. And I knew we could handle whatever those bandits could throw at us." The General's voice was rueful and her eyes were bright. "I didn't think we'd lose the speeder."
Rey looked down, her disappointment in herself far stronger than the General's. "I'm sorry."
The General shook her head. "Not your fault." She wiped her muddy hands on her muddy trousers and sighed when they came away still dirty. Then she tilted her chin toward the way they'd come. "We'd better get moving if we want to make it back before dark."
Rey nodded. If she thought they'd be lucky to make it back to the spaceport by dawn, she kept it to herself.
*
The forest was noisy. It wasn't that the desert had been quiet, or lifeless, though people who'd never spent time there thought it was. Expected it to be. Rey had been to enough planets by now to know that even in their stillness, most were noisier than Jakku, even with its unexpected oases of noise and life, but this forest was surprisingly loud. The leaves rustled in the wind, the birds swooped and cawed overhead, insects and other lifeforms chittered and hummed, a distant stream burbled, and occasionally, far above the canopy of trees, a starship screamed by.
She wasn't used to how big the trees were, either. It was like being in the cool, cavernous confines of a wreck, except instead of the familiar odor of hot metal, everything smelled green and alive. Shafts of sunlight illuminated the way. The liveliness of it kept her glancing side to side, up and down, eyes wide and hand on the hilt of her lightsaber.
The Force felt bright and green and clear, and after walking the first klick or two in silence, she allowed herself to relax.
"You knew we were flying into an ambush," Rey finally said.
"I had a feeling," the General allowed.
"The Force?"
The General shrugged. "Common sense." She tilted her head--Rey had noticed Luke sometimes did the same when he was trying to figure out how to answer her without lying but without actually telling the truth--and grimaced. "And the Force."
Rey wanted to push, to question her about why she'd never trained the way Luke had, but the residual awe she felt for the General--and her own reluctance to be pressed into answering personal questions by other people--stopped her.
Something of her thoughts must have leaked into the Force, though, because the General shot her a wry glance. "There was never time," she said. "And I never wanted that kind of power. I'd seen how it could corrupt up close and personal." She shook her head, and Rey wondered--but again, didn't ask--if she was thinking about Kylo Ren. This time, she got no answer.
*
They walked for the better part of the afternoon, occasionally stopping so Rey could climb a tree and confirm they were still heading in the right direction, since the forest was trackless and their path unclear from the ground.
The trees hummed in the background, alive and ever-present in the Force, and after an unfortunate incident which took several embarrassing and awkward minutes to untangle her hair from an unexpected thicket of branches the first time she tried, she let that hum guide her attempts at climbing. She would never have actually said that some of the trees felt friendlier, but she certainly thought it as handholds made themselves apparent to her through the canopy of leaves. The sun was on the downward slope of its path through Cardooine's sky, but she thought they still had a couple of hours of light left. A gleam caught her eye in the distance--the late afternoon sun glinting off something. If it was an abandoned speeder....She raised her macrobinoculars again. Not a speeder, but something nearly as good.
She scrambled back down, using the Force to keep her jumps from branch to branch from disturbing the tree too much, and then leapt to the ground, delighting in the crunch of leaves beneath her feet when she landed. She offered her canteen to the General, who took it gratefully. Rey was glad she hadn't gotten out of the habit of carrying it on her belt, along with a stash of food in her utility bag, so a ration bar was the next thing she handed to the General. Aside from their weapons, all their other belongings had been lost with the speeder.
"There's a stream not too far away," she said. "West of where we need to be, but I could probably make it there and back in less than an hour." She didn't point out that sunset was only two hours away and they were still at least twenty klicks from the spaceport.
"We'll both go," the General said. "I always preferred camping near water if possible."
"I never really had the option before," Rey replied.
"No, I imagine you didn't." Her mouth quirked in a half-grin. "Joining the Resistance is one way to see the galaxy."
"That's not why--" Rey started.
The General didn't let her finish. "I know." She shrugged a shoulder. "We try not to question people's motives for joining. As long as it's not spying." She smiled, a softer smile than Rey was used to seeing on her face. "Han originally joined the Rebellion because he thought he was going to get paid."
"Was that when he and Luke rescued you from the Death Star?" Rey asked eagerly. Luke had told her a version of that story, slightly different (sadder, realer) from the one Poe told her, which had a lot more fun and a little less sad.
"Yes. Though rescue is too organized a word for what they did. It was mostly a lot of running around and shooting at stormtroopers."
"Finn and I did some of that on Starkiller," she said, and then stopped. She'd told the General about how Han had died in a debriefing in front of Resistance High Command, but they'd never discussed it after that. Never personally. She got the sense that discussing it now wouldn't be welcome, so she changed tack. "I had already mostly rescued myself, though." That hadn't mattered to her at the time; the fact that someone--Finn--had cared enough to come after her was what was important.
"That sounds familiar," the General said, and the deep sadness behind her soft smile made Rey's chest ache.
*
The stream wasn't very deep and it was narrow enough that Rey could easily leap it if she had to, but the water was clear and cold and running quickly over smooth gray stones. She ran it through the filter on her canteen anyway to make sure, and then started to wash up.
The General's hair was still tightly bound in its coronet of braids, but Rey's buns were in disarray after her first tangle with a tree, and she was still picking twigs and leaves out of it from her various climbs. That was something she'd never had to deal with on Jakku.
She undid the mess with wet fingers and pulled a brush from her pack.
"Let me," the General said, gesturing at the ground beside her.
Rey handed her the brush and sat.
They were silent for a little while, as the General worked the brush through the tangles in Rey's hair. The motion was soothing, and between that and the soft rushing sound of the stream, Rey let herself slip into a light meditation. There was still a lot about the Jedi--about the Force--that she didn't understand, but this part she was good at, thanks to all those long empty nights she'd spent alone on Jakku.
"I'm surprised you kept it long," the General said eventually, using her fingers on a particularly stubborn knot.
"I wanted to make sure my family recognized me when they came back," Rey replied. She blinked, surprised at the sudden swell of tears behind her eyes, her emotions unexpectedly close to the surface after meditation. "I changed so much over the years," she said, waving a hand at herself, "but if this one thing was the same, they would know it was me." She laughed thickly. "It sounds stupid when I say it out loud."
"No," the General said. Her hands gentled, and Rey shivered at a whisper of the Force as she worked another tangle free. "I shouldn't have been surprised. I still wear my hair in styles that were popular on Alderaan when I was young."
Rey felt the phantom ache of old grief and reached out tentatively with the Force, offering comfort. She still wasn't sure what was acceptable when communicating this way--Luke was usually pleased when she did it, and Finn welcomed her attempts warmly, but the General was...she was the General.
She'd been at war her whole life--with the Empire, with her father, her son, herself. Rey could sense that struggle even now. And yet somehow she'd found a stillness and a peace within that Rey could only hope to emulate one day. Some people called her cold and vicious, said she was a warmonger like her birth father, but no one who'd ever met her could believe that. She was sharp as a vibroblade, and hard as durasteel when she had to be, but there was a warmth and graciousness to her that accepted people for who they were, and who they hoped to be. She'd welcomed Rey immediately and without anger, had never blamed her for what happened to Han. She wore it differently from Luke, but Rey knew it was there. She could feel that, too.
And now, she squeezed Rey's shoulder in acknowledgment and what might have been gratitude, before continuing on with the task of dealing with Rey's hair.
"I could braid it for you," she offered.
"I'd like that very much," Rey replied through the tightness in her chest.
*
Rey gathered branches, twigs and leaves and built a fire on the bank of the stream. She allowed herself a brief moment to wish for the cloak she'd shed in the speeder in the warmth of the early afternoon. The temperature had dropped quickly after the sun went down. But wishing had never gotten anyone anything, and there was always some kind of work to be done.
"Is there anything you don't have in that bag?" the General asked as Rey rummaged around and pulled out another ration bar. She broke it in half and shared it with the General, who bit into her half with an exaggerated grimace.
Rey gave her a small smile. "A comm unit. A tent. A spare speeder."
The General hummed in amusement.
"I'd settle for a blanket, though. Next time." Rey made a note to herself. Luke liked to reiterate that a Jedi should be ready for anything, and Rey had thought she was well prepared, but she always knew that sometimes no preparation was enough. Things happened, and you dealt with them. It was something she'd learned early on Jakku, and if that weren't enough, the General was a walking, talking example.
Her hand brushed against the hilt on her belt and she unhooked the lightsaber. "General? I never asked if you wanted this," she says, holding it out to the General the way she'd once done to Luke. She wouldn't ever let Ren have it, but his mother had more claim than she did.
The General laughed out loud this time. "No, thank you, Rey. I've used a lightsaber once or twice, and it was fun," her mouth twisted ruefully, "for certain definitions of the word, but I prefer a good, reliable blaster any day."
"Poe says you're the best shot in the Resistance."
"Poe says a lot of things." She put a hand on Rey's knee. "And please, call me Leia. I should have said something sooner."
"Yes, sir, I mean, Leia." Rey didn't try to keep the giddiness out of her voice. She was just glad she hadn't stumbled over the name.
"Has he spoken with you about flying with Black Squadron?"
Rey couldn't stop smiling. "Yeah. I can't wait." Then she realized how that sounded. "I mean, it's an honor. I'm looking forward to flying with them."
"I know what you meant."
The silence stretched between them, broken by the crackle and hiss of the fire and the chirping of night insects and the constant rush of the stream. Rey wondered if she'd ever get tired of the sound.
She was about to offer to take first watch when the General--when Leia said, "If you don't want to become a Jedi, if you simply want to fly with Black Squadron and help the Resistance that way, or even if you want to forge your own path separate from ours, don't let my brother," and here Leia drew a deep, exhausted breath, "or my son, push you into anything else."
Rey glanced over at her, but she was staring into the fire. "When I found Luke's lightsaber, I wanted nothing to do with any of this." She gestured between them. "I was scared at first," she admitted. "I still am sometimes."
"We all are."
Rey pursed her lips. "I know," she said after some consideration. "But this is where I'm meant to be. What I'm meant to be doing."
"You really believe that?" Leia finally looked at her, and in the orange glow of the fire, she looked burnished, ageless, like an avatar of the galaxy instead of a tired, middle-aged woman.
The Force hummed happily in Rey's head and heart and bones. "I do." Even if she hadn't, they both knew that the First Order would never let her be now. But Rey wasn't going to let them dictate the terms of her life. She'd found her purpose and she intended to fulfill it.
Leia must have felt it too, because she simply nodded and said, "Okay."
*
They were sweaty and sore and dirty when they finally limped into the spaceport the next morning. Rey let Leia have first crack at the refresher while she attempted to contact the Resistance base. It took a few moments of fiddling, but she finally made the connection.
Finn looked relieved when he answered the comm. "You're okay!" He looked over his shoulder and called out, "Luke, Poe, they're okay!"
"Were you worried?" Rey's tone was teasing, but she was secretly pleased to know they'd been concerned about her. She didn't think she'd ever get used to people caring. She wanted to luxuriate in it, but now wasn't the time.
"Yes," Finn said firmly as Leia joined her in the cockpit.
"I wasn't," Luke said, a small smile playing across his lips. "I knew you were together."
"We make a pretty good team," Leia agreed, squeezing Rey's shoulder companionably. "We secured permission to use the old base. We're going to do recon on it now."
Rey grinned, warmed by their confidence, and prepared the Falcon for takeoff.
end
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