Author's note:
Here's the important part: This fic is set between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker. I did my best to make it fit into canon, but it might be a bit of a stretch.
This stuff you can skip if you want: Thanks for reading! This piece formed in my brain while I was driving one day, and I rather liked it. I haven't written a fic in a long time, but I decided to tap this one out as practice for some original work. Plus, the new trailer for The Rise of Skywalker got me all excited! Hope you enjoy it, and feedback is always appreciated!
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~~Finn~~
Three moons. Four billion stars. One sky that stretched on for lightyears in any direction.
Finn lifted his eyes to the darkness above Tatooine and felt his smallness in this sprawling galaxy.
For once, just one time in his minuscule life, he vowed to do something that mattered. This mission was personal.
"How far?" he asked, and even his whisper seemed too loud in the bare desert night.
"Almost there. . ." Rey replied, glancing down at the holo-map on her Resistance wrist-piece.
Sand and rock stretched on as far as the eye could see, but that was all. Maybe the occasional patch of desert scrub.
"I don't see anything," Finn muttered.
He had managed to hide his anxiety for miles and miles of walking in a straight line through featureless dunes, but now it was getting to him. He was tired and fidgety all at once.
Rey nodded, "I think maybe that's the idea."
She was ridiculously comfortable with the desert—serene, almost, eyes moonlit beneath her linen head wrap. He wondered if she felt the stakes like he did. How could she, really? She had been poor, mistreated, wounded, and alone, but she had always been free.
"So how long again? Until it's just me?" he questioned, not because he didn't remember, but because he wanted to hear the words out in the open.
Silence. Rocks crunching underfoot and finally a long, slow inhale.
"I won't leave until I'm sure they buy it, Finn. I promise."
Rey's smile was too faint to be truly reassuring. Finn knew why. After she left—that would be the scary part. And he knew she had to leave, that she had to stay alive for a bigger mission. The biggest mission. Still, without her he would be all alone with. . . he didn't want to think about it yet.
"Never thought I'd have a bodyguard. Especially not a Jedi Knight."
"I don't think I'm technically either of those things."
"Yeah, well. Technicalities."
Rey came to a stop, digging her staff into the ground, and Finn pulled up beside her. A breeze sent shivers up and down his arms and swept up ghostly wisps of sand from the dune peaks.
"There, do you see it?" she pointed into the distance.
Finn squinted against the wind, searching for anything unusual in the barren landscape. Finally, his eyes found a cluster of domed, cylindrical buildings. They were the exact same beige color as everything else on Tatooine, and it was no wonder he had missed them before.
"Guess it's time to get in character, huh?"
Rey's brow tightened, "Are you ready?"
Finn tugged at the loose swaths of fabric covering him from head to toe and missed Poe's jacket, missed Poe and Rose and even Chewbacca, maybe for the last time.
He caught his breath quickening and forced it to steady, in and out.
Turning to Rey, he said, "As I'll ever be."
In reply, she pulled her goggles down, covering the sliver of her face that had been showing. She took off her wrist-piece and tucked it deep into the folds of her tunic.
Finn hid his matching Resistance tech and then brushed his fingertips across his forehead, feeling jagged claw marks he still wasn't used to. He prayed the scar didn't look fake.
Wordlessly, the pair moved onward towards the strange buildings—two specks of life in an ocean of sand beneath an infinity of stars.
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~~Rey~~
Pain and suffering and fear radiated from the buildings like heat from Tatooine's dual suns. The closer Rey got, the more it invaded her consciousness. She struggled to stay in the moment, not to get carried off with all the hurt. Her head throbbed with effort.
She had known the palace was an evil place before Finn volunteered for the mission, before she insisted on helping, even before Leia warned them both that it was the vilest cess pool of crime in the galaxy.
After all, who hadn't heard stories? The Hutts left behind a deep gash of a legacy when they died out, and most of it was carved right there, in that palace.
But Rey wondered if the Hutts themselves achieved this level of harm, so intense and raw that it hung in the air like poison gas. She was suffocating in it, every breath was—
". . . Jhi? You good?" Finn's voice brought the Jedi out of her spiral.
"Yeah," Rey responded to her cover name, haze clearing, "Just—can you feel that?"
Finn didn't need his fake scars or the shock of white dyed into his hair or his grown out beard to appear dangerous and weathered in that moment.
"I don't have to," he stated. It seemed that he would lash out, that something was boiling beneath his skin, underneath his eyes. In the end, he sighed and said, "So. . . do we knock?"
It was only then that Rey realized they had reached the palace door, a giant semicircle of metal embedded into the side of a rock.
"Er- doorbell, maybe?" she teased nervously.
If her mind slipped away like that while they were inside. . . well, the words "bantha fodder" came to mind.
Before any other suggestions could be made, a mechanism extended from the door—a long pole with a sphere at the end of it. The sphere snapped open like an eye startled awake. Upon second glance, it was an eye of sorts, some kind of old fashioned surveillance tech.
"Who are you?" a male voice emanated from the device. It was threatening, with a guttural accent Rey had never heard before.
"Friends of Tal Jaarkin," Finn spoke up, "Some people doubted, but he told us dawn is breaking."
The mechanical eye blinked once and then retracted.
Finn shot a worried look Rey's way, but, just as he did, the ground began to tremble.
With an earsplitting scrape, the metal door lifted, unearthing clouds of sand and dust as it went.
Then, noise faded to silence, dust settled, and a gaping hole remained where the door had been. It looked like the maw of an exogorth.
Without hesitation, Rey and Finn stepped into it.
