Chapter Text
The vast galaxy of stars makes her want to throw up. Nothing ever throws off her equilibrium, not for long anyway, and she wouldn’t be nearly as efficient at retrieving others’ used junk if that wasn’t the case. Yet no matter how long she waits, the spinning won’t seem to stop and there’s a pain in her head that hurts her eyes. She’d been in darkness hadn’t she? Had she been asleep? She can’t remember what she was just doing. She puts her hands to her head, then to her eyes. Yes, that dulls the brightness of the stars, but it doesn’t make them stop turning. Or is it she who is turning? She can feel her eyelashes on her hands so she knows she’s blinking. What is the whining sound she hears? It’s so shrill. Perhaps it’s an alarm of some sort.
Ground. She just needs to find a ground. Removing her hands in order to search makes her vulnerable to the brightness again, but she needs to feel where the ground is. Then she can orient herself. She finds firmness under her right arm around the same time that the shapes she’d sort of assumed were planets start to take on firmer edges. Her vision is mostly red, but there are those black shapes. She can’t tell what they are. The ground is cold and metal-firm.
It takes forever, longer than she’s been alive, for her sight to return and for the twirling to slow enough that she can push herself up onto one arm. The nausea surges with the change in position, but it helps clear the lights and the blobs in her eyes. She’s on a ship. Only, the ship is tilted and smashed. Everything is illuminated by red flood lamps and sparking electronics. The klaxon’s volume is decreasing along with the blobs in her vision, meaning that it was probably just her head all along, though it had sure sounded like an emergency alarm, shrill and persistent.
Before standing up, she first shifts her weight onto her knees to see if she can handle the movement. As she’d expected, the dizziness intensifies, but her vision doesn’t blur, so she stands. The ground turns out to be a broken walkway, her feet at an odd angle on its slope. It may increase her nausea, but the new standing position makes her brain immediately more alert. She doesn’t recognize the ship. It might look familiar if it wasn’t damaged, but she doesn’t know it now, nor why she’s here or where here is.
“Where am I?” she asks out loud, testing her hearing. Her voice rumbles in the low parts and pierces in the high, but she can hear it. It’s a relief, a small one given how she’s feeling, but something onto which she can hold.
“You’re on my ship.” A voice replies.
She hadn’t actually been expecting a response; she whips her head too fast to spot the speaker and circles like the bubbles in champagne float around her vision. She clutches onto the sides of her head, willing the pain and visual detritus away. She pushes into her skull, finding some relief in the hard pressure.
“Or what used to be my ship,” the disembodied voice continues. “Before you and your rebel friends shot her down.”
Where is he? She takes a step, slowly and tentatively, down the slope of the walkway to the more stable floor. She sees only busted machinery and torn structures that used to be support beams or internal hulls. He’d said shot by her friends. Finn, maybe, or Poe. Why is she on this ship? If the throbbing deep within her skull would stop, even if only for a moment, maybe she could remember.
Her careful steps bring her to where she thinks she’d heard the voice. Her own damaged navigational abilities have brought her to a pile of twisted metal. She blinks at it, feeling like there’s something to the image that she’s not seeing, like an optical illusion.
“And you’re in nearly as bad a shape as my ship.” Once he speaks and her eyes are able to really focus, she finds the man within the mass. From the look of it, most of the debris fell above him, not directly over him, so that he’s within a cocoon of fallen debris. One of his legs is sticking out, the other is completely hidden by metal along with the rest of his lower torso. His chest, arms, and head are unpinned. Everything is red under the light and yet she can tell that he’s pale because his skin is also glossy. Blood loss, maybe, or shock. He doesn’t sound like he’s in shock; if anything his voice sounds too calm, resigned.
Even in this state, she recognizes him because the only other time that she’s seen him, he’d also been bathed in red light, the red light that had brought the destruction of the Hosnian system. “I know you! You’re the man who fired Starkiller. You! You… ended... ended billions of lives.” She stutters from the sudden anger that makes her head pound harder.
“And I know you. You’re the scavenger who destroyed my weapon and split Kylo Ren’s face in two.” His eyes are penetrating and the way they reflect the light makes them look like fireballs, but there’s no anger there in his voice. It’s cold, nonchalant. This man has accepted that he’s going to die. If anyone has ever deserved it more, Rey doesn’t know it. “Kudos, for that latter part. He always did look too…” he pauses trying to find a word to describe the Dark Side user. “Confident.”
She pushes her palm against a spot above her right ear. It feels as though she needs to keep her brain from bursting out. “You’re an evil man and you deserve exactly what you get,” she seethes. “I’m glad my friends shot down your ship.”
Her vitriol fails to impress him. “With you on it, it seems.”
It does seem that way. Perhaps they didn’t know she was here. Trying to remember only brings a sharper pain, a pinprick that stabs all the way through.
She’s wasting time with this devil of a man. She needs to figure out where she is. He’d said the ship was shot down, so they must have landed planetside. They must have been pretty low to have survived the drop, fresh from take-off or touchdown. She needs to get the word out to her friends that she’s alive.
Rey looks around her. Good luck, she thinks sarcastically. Finding technology onboard functional enough to send out a distress communication seems like a stretch. If it was a bigger ship, like the last one of the First Order’s that she’d been aboard, she’d have plenty to choose from, but this is a smaller craft, closer to the Falcon than the Finalizer. If her vision was better, if the headache would abate, it would perhaps be a stimulating challenge, but now she feels incapable of forming coherent thoughts and her memory is as shot full of holes as this ship.
With baby steps, she moves around the cockpit away from the viewport. She needs to see what the rest of the ship looks like. Unfortunately, she’s not going to get that answered. The door that no doubt led to things like food storage, weapons, and envirosuits is twisted, irrevocably turned into a wall. Just to cover all her bases, she presses on the door panel and is unsurprised by the lack of response. Carefully, she returns to the trapped man.
“Where’s your communication relay?”
“Probably crushing one of my men somewhere.” He says unhelpfully.
It’s large for a cockpit, looking more reminiscent of a small command deck. The section of control panels closest to the viewport is on its side and sending out an occasional spark, but she wagers that that’s where the transmissions are sent from, or had been sent from; this ship would never fly again.
“Are you even aware that you’re bleeding?” he asks. He’s staring at her face and so she touches around where he’s looking. When she feels the wetness beneath her nostrils, she pulls back slick fingers. That’s probably not good. She looks at him with worry. “Not just there. Your ears.”
Immediately her fingers trace around her ears. She can only feel the sensation with her fingers; the ears are numb. She finds wetness in the groove beneath her ear holes. Panic rises within her and the ringing, never completely gone, increases. “I… I think I hit my head.”
She doesn’t know this First Order villain well enough to understand his facial reaction, but she studies it nonetheless. She wants to gauge how bad off she is by how bad he thinks it is. But his words about how she looks make more sense now. She’s been talking to him with blood coming from her ears and her nose and, no doubt, a dazed look as she attempts to piece together where she is and how she came to be there. Is she like him? Dying?
There’s a tremble in her voice when she asks him, “Was that the comm?” She points.
He nods, confirming her guess.
It’s embarrassing how carefully she has to climb over the debris to not upset her equilibrium. She searches around for the comm. It takes her so long and she isn’t even sure she’s found it when she has because it is smashed almost beyond identification. Against her head’s preferences, she crouches beside it, pulls out a clump of disconnected wires from the casing. It takes her a long moment to identify where the wires had formerly gone. Her heart sinks. No, she can’t repair this, wouldn’t be able to even with proper lighting and proper brain function.
She allows her butt to fall the rest of the way to the floor and she holds the wires while fighting back an influx of crying she knows will do her head no favors. She needs to strategize what comes next but she can’t think properly. It’s all so muddled. She feels sleepy, suddenly, and she feels like the light isn’t so bright as it was.
“Scavenger, did you find it?”
The bad man’s voice jolts her. She’d forgotten about him over there sweating and immobile with his crushed limbs and hopelessness. She dares not yell again, remembering how it had felt before. Instead, she gets up and makes her way back to him.
His face is inquisitive until it stops being so as he reads her disappointment. He seems to have none of his own. Of course not. He can’t expect her to help rescue him, not after what he’s done. But now he can watch her plight, maybe even her death. No, she can’t think like that. A defeatist attitude is not what had kept her on Jakku all those years. She won’t be joining him in his death acceptance.
“I’ll figure something else out,” she says.
“No doubt,” he replies. She can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic or not.
The destruction around her could have useful tech. Some of it could be repairable. She should go through it, see what she can find. She wants to lie down instead. Perhaps they know she’s here. It’s possible if she waits long enough, they’ll come to search the inside of the ship looking for survivors or supplies. The possibilities seem too numerous and they flit around her like fireflies. She considers reaching out to grab one and finds herself stumbling, just a bit, but it jars her into some alertness. She blinks away the visualization and rubs at her forehead.
He’s watching her. She finds herself explaining, though she doesn’t know why. “I’m having trouble focusing.”
“You were wanting to find another way to contact your friends.”
“What planet did we crash on?” It’s perhaps the most intelligent thought she’s had since she’d woken up. He should know if he was the captain… general? This man is everything that Leia is not, but Rey feels like she remembers this man being a general. It’s too noble of a title for a killer of worlds’ worth of people.
“Nethic.” The word means nothing to her, possibly because of her head injury, probably because she’s never heard of it before. When she scrunches up her face attempting to will her recollection, he says more. “Argon atmosphere, unbreathable and hell on the eyes. Very sparsely populated by two sentient species.”
She can’t just walk out then, not without a breathing apparatus of some kind. The only solution she can see is creating a beacon of some sort, hoping that her friends aren’t too busy fighting what’s left of the order to find her. Her most pressing concern is the damage to her head. What happens when she falls asleep? With no medical training, she doesn’t know the exact odds, but she has a guess that she might not wake up again.
“I need to make a beacon.”
When she was younger, she’d found a portable utility light and attached it to a four or five-meter long stick. She had erected it like a light pole, hoping that it would guide her parents back to her. Eventually, its batteries had died and she had never bothered to replace it but had left the pole there, unwilling to acknowledge the futility of any of her actions. The light had been orange, not red like the color around her now, but it feels like she can see it, like the floodlights might be morphing into that stick.
“Scavenger!”
Rey jerks at the yell. With wide eyes she realizes she’d been falling asleep, right there. Her startled gaze holds his solid one.
“I almost fell asleep,” she says, though she thinks she went farther than almost.
He nods. “It’s the concussion. I would advise against doing it again.”
His help is surprising, more so when she realizes he’s supplied her with nothing but useful information. “You…” she almost voices it but stops. Men like him, the ones who never do anything good for anyone, they think looking out for others makes a person weak. She’s met many evil men in her lifetime. Though, some deep instinct tells her not to lump him in with the others so easily; he is hard to read and that makes him hard to anticipate as well. He is more dangerous than anyone else she’s met, with the exception of Kylo Ren. “Thank you.”
“You were going to make a beacon,” he reminds her.
“I’m going to. Would you… yell at me… if I need it?” She’s asking favors now from him and that places a debt there, but the alternative could be deadly. Besides, if she’s rescued, there’s a chance that they’ll rescue him, even if that salvation comes in the form of a quick blast to the head and not a slow death by internal bleeding. He must be thinking of ways that it could serve him, because he agrees.
“Consider it my pleasure,” he says.
Rey sets off to find useful things, as she always does.
16 hours earlier
Like all the other planets in this system, Nethic’s atmosphere is pure poison for humans, so Finn had known that to accompany General Leia to the surface meant putting on a helmet again. He’d accepted that, or at least thought he had, because now that he’s down here with the bucket back on his head, he’s panicking. Too much of his life has been spent standing around as a silent, nondescript guard to people with way more power than he’ll ever have. He may know that the situation is different but his nerves don’t seem to be receiving the message. At least he can see out of this one and he takes advantage of that, looking often for the reassuring presence of Poe next to him.
“Where the hell’s Rey?” he mutters.
She was supposed to rendezvous with them in orbit around Nethic, but the meetup time, 1700 the previous day, had come and gone without a word. Leia had left orders to have her meeting interrupted should Rey finally show up, so she must have some level of concern but Finn couldn’t see the worry. It certainly wasn’t expanding within her every single hour until it felt like she’d explode with fear like it was for him.
Rey can hold her own, he’s seen that with his own two eyes, felt it when she’d knocked him flat on his ass when they’d first met on Jakku, but kicking one power-hungry space wizard’s ass didn’t mean that she was invincible. She could still be hurt or killed. He wants to know that she’s alright. Then maybe he can deal with how frightened he is of being back in his helmet.
“Probably having more fun than we are,” says Poe.
“Whiner. You’d never have lasted as a trooper.” Inside, he agrees with Poe. He doesn’t want to wait through any more clandestine meetings like this one. He wants to make his own assignments, not have them meted out to him. He wants his life to start. He knows, logically, that’s exactly what will happen once they defeat the First Order. Then he’ll be so overwhelmed by his choices that he’ll probably just follow Rey and Poe around like a loyal puppy. Freedom, he’s learned, is scary.
The room is large and unfurnished save for some ugly tapestries that hang on all sides, providing dampening for conversations that should not be overheard. According to Poe, who follows this sort of thing more than Finn’s own experience or interest level allows, the man with whom they’re meeting has a reputation for knowing everything. Though their helmets muffle the dialogue occurring between the general and Prylar Enzo, he could strain to listen, if he wanted to, but what would be the point? Anything interesting that occurs as a result of this meeting will be easily summarized later, probably by Poe who keeps in the know so that he can take action later.
“That’s not whining. Whining is what you’ve been doing,” Poe says. His voice is unnecessarily low, given their distance from Leia and the Prylar.
“I’m just worried about a friend. She’s your friend too you know.”
General Leia hands something to Prylar Enzo. He examines it briefly before passing it to his own retinue. They run a scanner over it, checking it as though it’s even a possibility that Leia would just hand them a bomb. Finn suspects it’s the device that Rey’s been working with the Raddus’s scientists on for the past few months. So that’s why they’ve had to meet in person, why he’s trapped in this stifling helmet; Leia wants to be the one to put the device into the intermediary’s hands before it makes its way to their insider.
“That friend could kick your ass up one wall and down another. Now, shut up.” Poe flashes him a judgy glance before straightening up and looking forward like a good, attentive bodyguard.
This is good and Finn suspects that this bickering is for his sake. It feels normal, helps with claustrophobia.
“Don’t tell me to shut up…” whispers Finn, but he’s not angry.
Finn’s worry is not allayed over the next few hours; no communication messages interrupt General Leia in her conversation with the prylar. They keep an eye out for her as they make their way back to the Resistance transport. The roads here are nothing but dirt where foliage doesn’t grow. The indigenous population is low, few beings thrive in the high argon concentration, but they are not the only visitors trapped inside their helmets of breathable air. None of the handful of faces they pass, with breathing apparati or without, are Rey’s.
Leia, though eager to leave, delays their departure from Nethic. After 12 hours, she receives a call for assistance from the Prylar. A second one comes 3 hours after that. Apparently he’s as eager to see this batch of Resistance fighters leave as they are to go. When Leia touches Finn’s hand, assures him that Rey will catch up, even Poe looks ill at ease.
When parts of the Antioch had landed upon him, Hux had felt the worst pain in his life. He’d caught his finger in mechanical joints before, but he’d always been able to immediately pull it out again with a blood blister or bruise the only lasting mark of the incident. But he can’t move the portion of his ship that landed on his leg and pelvis and this is going to leave a greater mark than a jamb. The intense pain hadn’t actually lasted very long. All those hormones that help a body cope had done their jobs and then he hadn’t felt much of anything, except thirst. Hux is a trained soldier, even if his parentage kept him from much ground combat (thank you, Father) and he knows the symptoms of shock include overwhelming thirst. Still, it’s unreasonable how strong the sensation is. Here he lies with what feels like a mountain atop him and all he can think about is water or caf or anything that could diminish this violent need inside him. Even now, with the adrenaline and endorphins starting to wane, masking properties fading like dimming light fixtures, he is less concerned by the new thrum of pain that is starting than his thirst. He resisted asking Rey to find him water. As long as he’s in shock, there’s a chance that he’ll just vomit up the water and lose the fluids he already has, not to mention he’d be buried under metal and covered in vomit. There’s also a high possibility that she wouldn’t fetch him a damn thing. She believes him solely responsible for firing the weapon on Starkiller Base, a lone icon of genocide.
Well, let her think it. Enough do. He doesn’t know enough yet to make any proper judgments on her, knowing mostly only what her capture means to Kylo Ren. She’s resourceful, that’s certain. He’s amazed by how quickly she set to task despite the drying blood trails all over her face and the intermittent glassy quality to her eyes. She thinks that she needs to save herself, so that might be something she’s used to doing. She needn’t bother. Her friends will be checking soon to see if there are survivors, potential hostages. He’s surprised they haven’t already shown up, poking around to see what trophies they can salvage from the new wreckage. Unlike him, she will survive this.
“Scavenger!” he calls. It’s easy to keep a rhythm when your stomach is pulsing with trapped arteries desperate to do their jobs.
“Awake,” she says, voice not far from him.
He has been too distracted trying not to ask for water to pay attention to what she’s been doing. He may cave and ask once his skin stops creating lakes of sweat, tapped out of natural fluids, or, if he is strong enough, stubborn enough, he can wait until her friends arrive and either execute him, leave him to die, or take him captive. His future is much bleaker than it had been when he’d woken up this morning. He can’t say that he really cares. He feels as though he wouldn’t mind being publicly executed, a shining example of what the rebellion does to their enemies, so long as he got a nice tall glass of ice cold water first.
He speaks at normal volume, now that he’s aware of her location. “Are you having luck?”
She appears before him, a makeshift spear in her hand roughly two meters long. Attached to it are several devices, one of which is glowing a green of technological functionality. It has power. He blinks in surprise at it. “I make my own luck,” she says.
Impressive.
“I think it’s working. I think it would work better outside,” she says quietly, looking as though in hypnosis at the beacon. “You should know that the doors are stuck. We don’t have access to the rest of the ship.”
They don’t have access to water then. If they are trapped here in the cockpit, he can’t ask for water because she won’t find any. It makes him want to cry. He’s resigned himself to die but to die with this thirst seems too cruel even to a man who expects the universe to be so. A sound escapes from him then, almost a whine, as though 30 years of tamping down his emotions meant nothing.
He needn’t worry about her judging his tiny outburst because she’s not aware of it. She looks unsteady on her feet. Her hair is askew. What had formerly been buns are now just hair angles, surreal art pieces. Her eyes are glazed. No, her whole face has a frosted glass appearance. She’s losing her battle for consciousness. Maybe she actually will die. Maybe her friends won’t get her medical care in time. It seems like such a waste. It’s a waste if they both die here, their respective talents going with them.
“Scavenger, are you okay?” Silly, because of course she isn’t, but his voice has been effective at snapping her out of her trances.
It works this time, but he suspects that won’t always be the case. “Rey. My name is Rey.”
“Indeed it is,” he says.
“You’re a general, aren’t you?”
That’s a tricky question. “Yes, I suppose I still am a general, for a while anyway.” There’s a pause while she considers something, he guesses that she wants to know his name. Surely she knows it, everyone does after the Hosnian incident, and it must be driving her crazy that she doesn’t remember it. “My name is Armitage Brendol Hux and you were going to ask me if there is another way outside of the ship besides through the main entry ramp.”
“Hux,” she repeats, practically snapping her fingers with recognition. “Yes. Is there another way?”
“Well, you can’t exactly roll down a window and stick it on the front viewport.”
She frowns at exactly the same time a tremor runs all the way through his body. He lurches. He feels some pain and lots of fear. Is this an organ shutting down? The start of his heart giving up the battle? Rey moves to him, but there isn’t anything to do but watch. Perhaps that brings her pleasure but she looks worried and the hands she’s holding out above him, it’s like she wants to assist. He shuts his eyes tight and waits for the shaking to stop. So, this is what dying feels like, like being captive to your own processes. It’s going to get more real than this even, much worse.
It does subside, eventually, though not completely and he opens his eyes to the girl’s alert expression. “Well, you could stand there enjoying the process of me dying, or you could see if there is a functional forward docking hatch to test your makeshift beacon’s durability to a ground jettisoning.”
“I’m not enjoying any of this,” she replies sadly. For a moment they just look at each other. With all the gore, she looks battle-hardened and Hux approves, having always preferred resilience to fragility. In another dimension maybe, another timeline, they could have worked well together. “I’ll let you know if it works.” It’s more than he’s owed by her, for sure.
He watches her step gingerly away. While she works her way around the cockpit, picking up bits of trash in an attempt to find something that doesn’t exist, he takes his pulse. Surely there’s only so long it can keep up its frantic beat, but each check returns the same alarming pace. He pushes on his chest. That’s one of the few places on his body that doesn’t hurt. He can’t move either foot, not even the one attached to his untrapped leg. So, spinal damage, probably. He’d already discovered that earlier, but there is a part of him that has been wishing it would renew itself somehow. He wipes sweat off his face. The skin there is so cold and wet like leather left in the rain.
Maybe if he’s very lucky, she’ll kill him before the pain returns in full.
Naps are a spiritual ritual for most Purcels, and Enzo likes to honor that tradition by commemorating particularly difficult or meaningful business exchanges. Nearly every planet’s denizens have their own stories of creation and of divine intervention, some smaller like the farmers of Kinyen whose goddess’s powers seem to be relegated to making fertile the fields and wives, and some huge beyond imagining like the Essence of Enzo’s people. The Essence, say Purcel teachings, not only created every mote in existence, but constantly exerts its power on everything. The Essence moves every beat of all hearts and holds together the solid state of every stone. Napping then, is making yourself as little a burden as possible to the god, and shows it great love and respect. Since all of Enzo’s waking life is a burden greater than the average Purcel, his naps feel like small recompense for the deity, but he does his best as a devout follower.
Feeding the Resistance is not profitable, but it feels good in his primary heart to do. He has a good feeling about the young sallow-faced First Order commander too, despite how the rest of the galaxy views him. Enzo believes the Essence devotes much of its time to the life that man lives, which is no doubt why he always looks so harried, so desperately in need of his own sleep, his own time outside of the god’s effort.
He has instructed his servants to add the Mantellian Flutterplume down comforter to his bed and he’s slipped into his wampa fur-lined robe in order to sleep as restfully as possible to best honor the Essence, to thank it for the ability to enact change on such a large scale. As far as he knows, he’s the most ambitious Purcel ever born.
Enzo raises a goblet filled with a deep purple liquid to his lips at the same moment that a deep rumble shakes the building. His hexagonal eyes dart around the room. The shaking stops quicker than the noise that accompanies it, a booming which echoes with deep reverberations. Lagme, the bodyguard on duty, enters Enzo’s room, weapon ready and alert. His drink and nap forgotten, Enzo bolts to his feet and calls up his head of security on the nearest console.
“We felt it, sir. We are on it,” says Yorst, before Enzo can ask.
“Your best guess, Shield Yorst?”
There’s ten seconds of dead air before Yorst says, “I prefer not to guess, but I would lean towards crash over artillery.”
A ship crash. Given the minimal amount of air traffic, that would make it poor General Hux’s ship. Enzo spies the small clock on his bedside table. Yes, the timing would work out. Instantly he suspects violence. “Put someone else in charge of obtaining flight paths and scheduled landings and takeoffs for 6 hours before and after…” he stops, not sure what to call what’s happened. It’s too soon to tell. “After the explosion.” Another thought occurs to him that he knows what ship would have most recently left before Hux’s, and that would be the one belonging to the First Order’s greatest nemesis. He feels the guilt in his esophagus, instantly burning with potentially unwarranted blame. “Get me the time that Organa’s ship left orbit. And calculate her return time if she doubled back to Nethic.”
Prylar Enzo gets confirmation of his suspicion while he’s en route to the site of the downed ship. From the backseat of his private hovercraft, he contacts Organa’s ship which is hovering in the stratosphere from where it fired upon Hux’s ship. There is no police force on Nethic; if there was, he would never be able to use it as a base of operations for his business, but there are three ships, two are Enzo’s own, with weapons targeted on Organa’s medium-sized shuttle. He has personnel tracking the larger ship’s orbit, but there isn’t much he can do to keep it from fleeing, should they decide to leave.
General Leia’s face appears on the subspace comm. Gone is the pleasant familiarity she’d worn when they’d met only a day ago; now she is all seriousness. Good, what she’s done is serious business, and he wouldn’t want her approaching this with frivolity. “Prylar Enzo,” she says.
“You returned to my planet to shoot down a visiting ship. This is hardly a friendly action and I demand an explanation.”
Her already thin lips tighten further. If she is not used to having things demanded of her, then she should practice conversing more with those who run their own little empires. She is not the only royalty in the galaxy; his may have been paved with credits and no actual lineage, but at least his planet still exists.
“The man on that ship was responsible for the destruction of the Hosnian System,” she says.
Enzo sighs and looks out the window of the hovercraft. He’d thought himself prepared for the sight, but he is nonetheless jarred by seeing the smoking wreck of Hux’s ship smashed into a copse of fine Varlar trees. General Organa is very lucky that this planet is sparsely populated. If any Purcel lives had been lost in the attack, he would have been tempted to personally seek retribution against the teachings of the priests. As it is, he still feels the anger over the murder of the overworked hyperalert young man he’d met with less than a couple hours ago.
“And what destruction are you responsible for, Organa?” he asks. “Not just today. How many have died because of your actions? Is it only the quantity that makes him worse than you?”
He shouldn’t talk like this to her. She is more powerful than he, strictly from a muscle-perspective, but this blatant disregard of the Essence’s greatest gift is worse than infuriating, it is openly disgusting.
She sounds tired when she says, “We do what we have to do. I know you understand that, Prylar.”
“Your words have wisdom, Leia, you should listen to them. You might find that the world has one fewer side than you believe there to be.”
There are maybe ten people around the crash, a mix of Purcels and Derducians, standing and staring as it smolders. It will fall on Enzo to hire people to clear the debris. This planet is, after all, essentially his, with no formal government to perform public services. The fires inside the ship will snuff out quickly once it runs out of oxygen to fuel it and Nethic air is great at gobbling up oxygen.
“I hope you know,” he says, “There will be no more trades between us following this incident.”
“A day ago, I would have thought that was a great loss for my people,” says Leia, conveying what she understands to be his double-dealing ways.
He could correct her, but he sees no point, their business relationship is done and he isn’t worried about sharpening a reputation for neutrality. “I expect that any other future business you have on Nethic be concluded as well. My world has no desire for combat.”
She nods. “We will respect your wishes and depart... after we have investigated the ship.”
A horrified gasp escapes his throat without his intention. “You have some nerve! You want to pick at the bones of your kill? Have I really misjudged you and your people so badly?”
Quickly, she shakes her head, a bit of the old familiarity returning. “No, not like that. It’s the woman we were waiting to rendezvous with. Enzo, I think she might be on the ship or hurt nearby it.”
“I very much doubt that she’s there unless it was without the pilot’s knowledge,” he says.
“That is a distinct possibility,” Leia says. “She… she’s young and hasn’t yet learned that there are places she shouldn’t go.”
Prylar Enzo considers. Leia had seemed awfully worried about her missing resistance member. He’d suspected already that this was the Jakku girl, the one with the Force powers, but this confirms it. He couldn’t imagine the General going this far out of her way for anyone else. “I must… think on this. For now, send one person from your ship to check your rendezvous point again. I not only find it to be unlikely that your friend managed to stow away in the time between your departure and the time of this travesty, but I find it in the poorest of taste for you to rummage through your victim’s goods.”
“And if we don’t find her at that point?”
“Then communicate that with me. And I will send some of my people to help you search for your friend, and only your friend.” What he’s saying in no uncertain terms is that she’s not treasure hunting in that ship, not for information about the First Order, not for ammunition. It’s on his planet and he’ll protect the dead man’s property as he would any of those who meet on this neutral ground.
“I accept your terms, Prylar. I’ll be in touch.” Her image winks out.
“This has turned into a regrettable day,” Enzo says to himself. “We don’t often deserve the blessings the Essence gives us, but we have utterly failed it today.”
“There is no forward docking hatch, is there?” she asks, allowing herself a moment of rest. The metal beneath her is cold when she sits cross-legged in front of the dying general. She doesn’t let go of the beacon, not even for a moment. It’s hard to tell time right now, but she thinks it’s been only ten minutes since she’d turned it on. She thinks it’s working, but there’s no way to know for sure. The only way she’ll know is if and when her friends burst into the ruined ship and save her. When he remains quiet, she presses. “Is there?”
“Was it not worth looking for?”
Any emotions seem to make the pain in her head worse, she tries to push back the rage, tucking it behind what feels like a ridge of brain in her head. “Not if the ship doesn’t have one,” she whispers. “But then, it wouldn’t have made any difference, would it?” Rey asks. “Putting it outside, I mean.”
“Not my area of expertise,” he says.
She thinks back to her childhood attempt at a beacon. “It wouldn’t have. Either it works or it doesn’t. It’s just… I made something like this before, hoping it’d bring back my parents. I put that in the ground. I guess I thought if I put this in the ground, maybe this time…”
She’s just so tired. It doesn’t matter that she’s rambling about her childhood to this man. What will it matter? Soon he’ll be dead and she’ll either be dead or in a coma. Her vision is blurred now and maybe that’s a blessing. She doesn’t want the last thing she ever sees to be this murderer, even if he’s helped her stay awake.
His seizures are coming more frequently now. Not being able to help him is worse somehow than not being able to help herself. She isn’t used to standing by while others suffer, even if they’re reprehensible.
Unable to stop herself, she allows herself to lay out on the hard floor. She doesn’t even bother to move the debris there before she does. She sighs, luxuriating in the feel, whatever is digging into her side more comfortable than being upright.
“Probably not the smartest option now,” he says to her.
She ignores him. This feels so much better, though it makes her eyelids heavier. She thinks of her AT-AT home on Jakku. That had been cold metal but it had been a safe haven, a refuge from the scorching sun and sand, from those that wanted to take advantage of a lone girl in a cesspit. She feels like she’s there, can see her knick-knacks around here. Why had she ever left?
“Scavenger! You must stay awake.”
“Must I?” she asks petulantly, recognizing a voice inside her that she hasn’t heard since she was a child. Little abandoned girls don’t get to be bratty. “Why?”
“Because your friends shot down this ship and they will be here soon to search it.”
“You think they’re just scavengers. Even I’m not a scavenger anymore, not really.”
“They knew I was on this ship,” he tells her. “Or else it would be safe and not smashed to pieces. They also know you’re missing and have been since before we took off. Your friends will take a look to retrieve you or to make sure I didn’t survive.”
Her friends. Leia with her motherly arms. Where had she been when Rey had been growing up so desperately in need of those hugs? Finn with his fast mouth and warm heart. He broke his programming with just that heart alone, because he couldn’t do the things that they wanted him to. Poe. He was new to her but he seemed so dashing and full of bravado. In a small way, he reminded her of Han.
“Scavenger!”
She hates the evil man’s intrusion into her daydreams. “Shutup!” she hisses. “I’m dreaming.”
“Scavenger! Rey! Did you fight to survive for nothing?”
She didn’t survive for a reason. She survived because there was no other option. There were times she wanted the sand to just swallow her up, but that’s not how things worked. She’s no survivor; just another person living a life. She looks at him. All she sees is the shape of a mass of metal scraps. What would she see if she could see straight? A dying sweat-covered pale soldier yelling at her, begging her to stay awake. “Quiet General. It’s time to sleep.”
She closes her eyes and the galaxy swirls around behind them. She hears the evil man calling to her, but she ignores him, and his voice changes into those she cares about. She hears Finn first, then Han, then many voices combine and she’s overwhelmed by them. She can’t keep up with their words which float around her. She lets herself be lifted by their voices, carried off to a place where time doesn’t exist. She loses herself there.
When they find Rey, face coated in dried blood and unconscious, Finn’s first thought is that they are too late. They’d had to wait for Prylar Enzo’s machines to pry open the doors of the ship when droid override hadn’t done the trick. He cries her name and skids to his knees across the ruined floor, grabbing her up into his arms, too distressed to count heartbeats. Instead, he’s putting his breathing masked face up to her nose hoping with everything in him that she’s breathing. “Come on, Rey. You’ve gotta be alive, okay?” He shakes her, though he shouldn’t, because she probably has broken, well who knows what all could be broken if she was in this kite when it folded, but he’s scared and he’s not responding like a trained soldier but a frantic friend. “Poe!”
Poe’s beside him on the floor and he grabs at her wrist feeling for a pulse. Her hands are bloody too, and oily with workshop grease. For too long Poe is quiet as he listens with his fingers for a sign of life. Finally, he says, “Yeah, it’s there. She’s alive.” Poe stands and yells to the rest of the search party which consists of two more from their ship and four native Nethics provided by Enzo, “We need a stretcher over here! We’ve got her, but she’s not doing so great.”
“Rey. Rey, can you hear me?” He cups her face, jostling it, trying to get her to wake up. He notices the dried blood pools in the shells of her ears. “Rey!”
“Sleeping…” says the softest voice he’s ever heard. It’s more like an exhale that happens to form a word.
“Rey! Poe, she’s awake!” It’s an overstatement, but he’s just thrilled for consciousness. He shouted that pretty loudly with his face inches from hers and she opens her eyes. They roll a lot, like she’s dizzy, and he’s not sure if she sees him. “Hey Rey, it’s me. It’s Finn. We got your signal.”
“My signal,” she repeats. The words don’t mean much to her. She says them again. “My signal…” then recognition. “I made a beacon.”
“Yeah you did. We picked it up.”
“I’m not in a coma.” Then she cries out, her hand thwacking the side of her head. Her mouth hangs open, a grotesque expression of pure suffering, and she wails with the pain. “It hurts! Oh, it hurts!”
The people waiting with the stretcher move into action. They lift her onto it. The relocation doesn’t seem to hurt her, just her head. She holds onto it tightly with both hands as they cover her in a blanket. She sits halfway up which can’t be easy on the flimsy canvas the rebellion uses for their stretchers.
“Finn, the general…”
“She’s waiting on the ship. We’ll get you right to her,” he assures.
“No! Wait!” she yells at her rescue entourage who had started to carry her out of the ship. She grabs at Finn’s shirt desperately. “Not that general.” Then, she points to a pile of rubble, the one she’d been lying in front of. “Get the general out.” Her voice is raging with intensity and he can tell that every word hurts even before she cries out again, returning the dirty hands to try and hold in her own skull.
“Finn?” asks Trauri, uncertain if they’re allowed to carry her to safety yet or not.
He nods. “Get her back to the ship, we’ll figure out what she’s talking about.” They do so, leaving Finn and Poe behind along with two of Enzo’s men. “The general?” asks Finn toward Poe. It’s possible that whatever damage had been done to her head made her see things. Had she seen Leia here in this mess?.
“She was talking about me.” It actually makes him jump. He hadn’t been expecting a person in all the rubble even after Rey had pointed right there and said there was one. He rushes toward the pile and his eyes scan desperately in the dim red lighting to find the speaker. When he does, it’s jarringly close to him (he’d been maybe a meter away) and jarringly familiar.
Finn’s frown is one for the ages, truly an expression of deep displeasure with a situation. “No, there’s no way she meant you.”
Poe draws near as well, shoulder touching Finn’s. “Well, so it’s true that cockroaches really can live through anything.”
Finn paces, rubbing his hands together as though for warmth. Yeah, it’s a First Order ship that was carrying Hux, but he hadn’t expected to find General Hux still alive, though barely from the look of him, and he definitely hadn’t thought Rey would be requesting that they aid the bastard. He can’t even stand to look at him, but he forces himself to. Hux looks worse than Rey had, sweaty and pale, eyes glowing red and shivering.
He doesn’t notice Poe’s eyes on him, nor the incredulous expression on his face, because he’s too caught up with his own inner turmoil, but they share a moment after Poe asks, “Wait, we’re not obligated to help him. Right? Finn, buddy, she wasn’t telling us to help General Psychopath here, right? I mean, the guy exploded five planets. Surely that’s reason enough to leave him behind?”
Finn doesn’t know. He’s not used to making decisions and while he thinks he’s done a pretty damn good job at learning, he’s not to this level yet, the life-or-death decisions when dealing with one’s enemies. He puppy dog eyes Poe. “I don’t know, man.”
Poe stretches up on his tip toes and tips back his upper body stretches his back, letting out a huge groan. “She really said “get the general out and not “retrieve the General’s small-dicked corpse?””
Finn frowns. Then he whispers, because of all the things no doubt wrong with Hux, hearing doesn’t seem to be one of them, “He doesn’t look like he’s going to make it anyway, right? Chances are we take off the rubble and he’s going to die anyway.”
“Okay.” Poe nods, then responds quietly back, matching Finn’s volume. “Yeah, I follow. We do the right thing and get him off the ship, but he doesn’t pull through because of the extensive damage.”
They nod at each other for a moment, each one picking up what the other is saying.
“What if he lives?” asks Poe, then, when Finn has no answer, he turns to the Prylar’s lackeys. “Uh, we’ve got another survivor, I guess. Can that machine outside get this shit off him?”
General Hux closes his eyes, perhaps from relief or maybe choosing this moment to die. Finn’s hopes for the latter get dashed quickly enough when he opens them again. “You’re lucky.” he says, leaning down to his former commanding officer, “We don’t put as little effort into saving people as you do.”