Rey woke easily in her new quarters at the Resistance base. It wasn't mostly quiet like back on Jakku where she could hear the slow flap of bird wings or the scuttle of the desert lizards or the high winds during the storms peppering the walker with a rapid fire rat-a-tat-tat noise as stinging sands bit into its metal walls. But in between the storms, when she ate and worked in the scraped hollow insides of the walker that was somehow still her home, there had been a quiet and a stillness that was utterly lacking here under the constant murmur of voices, the tread of boots, and the gunning, screaming engines as pilots with their squadrons rose from their hangar bays and flew.
She sat up and listened to these new noises, the exhalations of the base just as living and just as breathing as the people who walked through its multi chambered halls. She raised her hand and felt the vibrations of the power generators providing air and light and warmth to its inhabitants. She closed her eyes and breathed.
The noise had been the first thing she had noticed once she had had a moment to sit and breathe and process. The second thing had been General Organa pulling her by the elbow so that she could join the others as they went in line for their midday rations.
They ate several times a day, more or less, depending on their cultures and their hunger. Her dinner, that first day, was heaped with flavored rations like the kind she'd found in the ship she'd rebuilt from the desert, the kind that filled her mouth with so much flavor she had to take long pauses in between bites to let it fade. She could have washed the taste away with the water they wasted but she wanted to pour it in her canteen, and save it for just in case she needed it for later or for when they ran out.
She saved the food portions that were left over when she was no longer hungry. She vacuumed them, air tight, into plastic packs that would keep it tasting like new for several days, tasting good for a week or more, and edible for a month. Anxiety itched under her skin. The tasteless portions of Jakku could last for years and years if she had ever found herself to be in excess of what she needed for a day-but that had never happened.
There was an irony there, she thought, that food that could last for years were eaten day by day in a scrape for survival.
When she wasn't training in the ways of the Force, Rey worked with the pilots and their ships with the permission of the squadron leaders. Though she could fly (and how she thrilled to see the stars through the gold haze of her helmet), she did not have enough knowledge of squadron formation to fly safely with Blue or Red or Orange teams. Poe was teaching her, but until she had more skill, more knowledge, most of her flying was spent by herself with an astrometric whistling and booping at her, laughing shrilly in binary when she performed a particularly tricky spin or hair-raising dive.
Her favorite co-pilot was an older R8 unit with faded pink highlights who flew with a pilot they fondly called Testor. R8S3 loved to talk about Testor.
Testor had made a similar forward roll, R8S3 whistled at Rey, during the attack on Starkiller Base. Once, Testor had made a shot that R8S3 had estimated could not possibly be made but she had done it because she was amazing like that. When Rey spiral-dived towards the ground, R8S3 remarked that if she made it slightly tighter on the inside she'd achieve a logarithmic spiral, of which Testor was a master. Nobody flew like Testor did, R8S3 assured Rey.
Rey smiled but it didn't reach her eyes. The nav controls were sluggish-there was too long of a delay. "R8S3, do you feel that?"
R8S3 blooped their agreement and then launched a detailed simulation of the ship deflecting a set of particularly well aimed missiles on its rear deflector shields. Still, the strikes had hit with such impact they'd "bruised" the X-wing, causing what R8S3 could only assume was some sort of situation with the power relays that eventually fed into the nav system. If the ship had had a more intuitive design form, the droid added, they would have been able to repair the damage immediately instead of attempting an elaborate series of jury-rigging so that there was only a split second delay as opposed to a more morbid alternative.
"So why hasn't it been fixed, yet?" Rey said. "It's not like we're in the middle of a battle still?"
R8S3 launched in a shrill set of trills as they sent a list of other ships who were in line for maintenance before Testor's. As far as Rey could see, the list made sense. Attend the more grievously injured ships first and then do the quick fix for the singed power relays last.
"Let me give it a try," Rey said. It had felt like a long time since she had taken anything apart and fixed it. Her hands itched to do it again, and even though she had listened to Maz about her family lying ahead of her instead of behind, she still found herself looking back towards Jakku, dreaming of desert rippling around her, spilling into storms from cusps of wind scraping across the dune seas until she found shelter, until she could pour sand from her boots and hands and mouths and eyes.
Sometimes, she thought there was someone in the gold expanse, shimmering like the mirages that had once so easily tricked her as a child.
R8S3 blipped at her and she was surrounded with greenery again. "Of course I don't mind," she said. "I don't mind at all."
After she had landed, she went towards the rear of the X-wing and popped the protective casing that kept the interior wires and circuitry intact. "I can fix this," she said, "I can do this."
She went to retrieve the tools kept in their proper sheds at the back of the hangar bays to make the repairs. She still marveled at the number of tools and their variety. On Jakku, she had had to scavenge tools, and had to learn to use them to perform beyond what they had been designed to do. She chose the one she was most comfortable with, and returned to the ship. She unzipped her orange flight suit, tying the empty arms around her waist, working only in a sleeveless undershirt so that she could move freely and without constraint.
When she was done, she leaned back for a minute, arms folded across her chest, and surveyed her work. It was good, she thought, maybe not as good as what some of the others here could do, but good enough so that when Testor went into her logarithmic spirals, she'd let out a whoop at how good she flew, at how smooth it felt, like when Rey had been on the Millennium Falcon with Finn and they had worked in such sync together and the ship had felt -
She slumped against the landing strut of the X-wing, titling her head back against its cool metal sides, letting her eyes fall closed as she relived that moment. She was tired, she realized, and she could sleep if she wanted to.
That was another strange thing about this place-being able to do something about being tired.
She jumped when R8S3 let out a shrill whistle and hurtled down the smooth hangar floor towards a woman who carried a helmet against her hip and whose long, dark hair was tied back into a single braid. Considering the droid's excitement, Rey could only imagine that she was Testor, R8S3's favorite pilot.
Nervous, Rey followed cautiously after, already rehearsing what she'd say to explain who she was and what she was doing there.
Testor had given up walking and had instead crouched to be level with R8S3, exchanging her own whistles with that of the droid. When she saw Rey's approach, she glanced up with a smile on her face. "Hey! R8S3 said you fixed my ship. Thank you!"
Rey felt herself blushing. "It was nothing," she said, even though she could hear Unkar Plutt offering her three portions for a fully functional navigation system.
Testor rose to her feet and held out her hand towards Rey. "I'm Jess, Jessika Pava."
Rey took her hand, wondering if Testor was R8S3's nickname for Jess. She could feel the callous along her trigger finger, and she tried not to think about how many times she had to have flown, how many times she had had to squeeze, to form something like that. They were all here, weren't they? They had all killed someone on the other side. "I'm Rey."
Jess's face split into an eager smile. "The Jedi?"
"I'm not a jedi." Rey didn't have the heart to say she wasn't even sure she wanted to be one. People here-they adored General Organa and they held Luke Skywalker in so much reverence that it was hard to remember that he wasn't a myth, but someone who was real, someone she (she!) had met face to face. They all wanted to see his dream and vision restored, and sometimes Rey felt they assumed she would want it too, because it would be better than anything she had ever known, right?
"Oh, I'm sorry," Jess said. "I hadn't meant to assume-there are so many rumors swirling around about you and Finn and-" her face fell for a moment, and Rey wondered if she had been going to mention Han. "People on the base talk." She shrugged.
"People talked on Jakku too. Told so many stories that may have been true once a hundred tellings ago." Rey missed those stories. Sometimes, those stories had been the only thing they had left to them, the only easy thing to bear, to repeat over and over until the words had run together into a shimmering line of somewhere out there.
Jess tossed her helmet into the pilot seat, then braced her elbow against the X-wing in one of the most casual stances Rey had ever seen. But then she reached out her hand towards a scorch mark left by some blasting TIE, her thumb lingering along the strip of singed metal. Maybe one day Jess would tell Rey the story of what had happened.
R8S3 piped at her and Jess smiled. "I have to go. I'm on a top secret mission to retrieve some data." She gestured down the front of herself. "Hence the civilian attire as orange sometimes draws unwanted attention. And besides, orange? Maybe one day they'll issue another standard color."
R8S3 trilled something like a laugh as Jess started climbing up towards the cockpit. She paused in the middle of seating herself in the pilot's seat, and twisted her head around to look back at Rey. "Have you ever flown a B-Wing? They're a two man ship."
Rey shook her head.
"You want to take one for a spin when I get back? Shouldn't be more than a couple of weeks."
"Yes," Rey said, nodding. "I'd like that very much."
Jess waved in farewell and slid into the pilot's seat. She put her helmet over her head, gave Rey a thumb's up, and prepared the ship for take off. Rey backed away so she wouldn't be deafened by the engines, and watched her soar from the planet surface until she was gone.
Rey returned to her quarters, and stretched on her cot with the mattress people had described as thin but it still felt like a thing of luxury. Even though her limbs were weary, she could not keep her eyes closed, she could not sleep. Her fingers tapped against her skull until she rose and paced restlessly in the room, nearly tripping over her flight suit because it had not been made for her and it was a little long in the leg.
She paused then, and with haste, she marked where the suit should end and used her knife to cut away the excess cloth. The hems were ragged but that was okay, she could fix that later.
With her head bowed she arranged the pieces of cloth, drawing a pattern on them that she cut from the fabric. It took her some time to find a needle and thread, but she did and then she went to work.
She sat on the floor, fabric spooling over her knees, as she carefully hand stitched the orange fabric into a small pilot figure. Afterwards, she hemmed the flight suit's legs so they were neat and tidy once more.
The next day, she went outside into those green forests until she found the perfect piece of wood fallen from one of the trees. She carved it into a small, doll-sized helmet, on which she painted the resistance symbol. With the rest of the wood, she made a miniature R8S3.
Those were the easy parts. The rest would take longer, but she scrounged the garbage chutes for discarded parts that the Resistance would not find a use for and stripped lengths of metal from larger pieces she could not possibly carry herself. She also found a controller for the patroller droids that roamed the halls (souvenirs of the Empire that Chewbacca was still fond of scaring), and she could not stop her delighted giggle as she held it in her hands. What a prize she had found.
It would be difficult, but she knew she could do it.
Pouring over the schematics of Jess's X-wing, she began to build a toy sized model of it. With General Organa's permission, she had a work bench of her own, and at the end of the day, after all of her duties had been performed, she would be there with her head bent, protective glasses over her eyes, as she soldered pieces of metal together into the framework of a miniature X-wing. Then she built a small engine that could bear the model's weight and carry it aloft at a modest speed. She programmed it to respond to the controller she had found so casually tossed aside.
It took several tries for her to install it right but when she did, the skeletal frame of the X-Wing hovered a few inches from her table, and Rey clapped her hands in delight as she heard that engine sing.
She covered the skeletal frame of the X-wing with metal sheets, which she then painted to match the strip of blue marking Jess as part of Blue squadron. She even painted the scorch mark along the side.
A day before Jess was due to return with her data so vital to the Resistance, Rey was kneeling before her work bench, cheeks pressed to her hand, as she gazed at the model she had created. It looked sleek and shiny and new, and she rotated it so that she could better see the miniature R8S3, safely secure in their astrometric socket.
She rotated it again so that she could look at the pilot inside, and then she smiled.
But when it came time to actually wait for Jess to return, Rey found herself feeling nervous, stealing backward glances at her workbench where the X-wing perched, ready to be Jess's welcome back present. It was silly, she thought, a silly gift.
Other times, she thought it was one of the coolest things she had ever built, something she had done for fun instead of survival. It wasn't like the flight simulation she had found (and left behind) on Jakku-it was a ship that couldn't reach lightspeed and couldn't carry a person (as it also carried no life support) but if she could build a toy ship from scratch, what could stop her from building real ships or, even more amazing, designing them?
But that still left the matter of actually giving the gift to Jess. Rey had considered leaving it at her quarters, with her name carefully written on a piece of paper so no one else would take it, but Rey had realized she wanted to see Jess's face when she saw it.
Not even when she saw it, she just wanted to see Jess when she returned, when she came back.
After what seemed like an interminable wait, she head the familiar sound of the engines. She roused herself from where she had pacing in circles near her workbench, and looked out towards the hangar bay.
There was Jess in her X-wing. There was the flash of pink that was R8S3.
There was Jess returning safe and sound, and Rey rushed towards the landing strip, pushing the ladder towards the ship so that Jess wouldn't have to drop and roll the several meters to reach ground level.
Jess pulled herself from the pilot seat and barely gave Rey enough time to secure the boarding ladder before her boots were sliding down the rails, not even bothering to take them a step at a time.
Rey loved that.
"You're back," she said. She knew she was smiling, and Jess was smiling too.
"I know! I'm back!" Jess flung her arms out in something like triumph and Rey wondered if, for a brief second, she was supposed to have hugged her.
"After you've been debriefed from your mission," Rey said, "I have something for you."
Jess grinned. "I can't wait to see it."
"Meet me over there," Rey said, pointing to her work bench even though the gift was there, sitting in plain sight, but Jessika was already on her way, walking backwards towards where General Organa and all the other important people of the resistance were fighting and plotting so that she could give Rey one final wave goodbye.
R8S3 turned their domed head towards Rey, lights blipping as they whistled. "No, I'm not going to show you first. You'll just have to wait."
It only took Jess a couple of hours to be debriefed, and when she returned the hangar bay, she immediately headed for Rey where she sat at her workbench. She gasped when she saw the ship, and immediately bent down so that she could get a closer look. "There's me!" she said, smiling bigger and bigger as she pointed towards the doll inside. "And there's R8S3!"
Behind them both, R8S3 squealed in what could only be delight.
Rey thrust the control into Jess's hand. "Here," she said.
"No," Jess said, staring first at the control and then to Rey and then back again. "No way."
Rey nodded, barely able to control her own excitement as Jess powered the ship on, and it lifted from the workbench. Jess sent it through a lazy figure eight as she laughed and R8S3 rocked back and forth in what sounded like applause.
"This is amazing," Jess said. "You made this?"
Rey flushed with pride. "I did," she said. "I did."
"Wow," Jess breathed as she set it down to land.
"It's yours," Rey said. "I made it for you-to welcome you back."
"Wow," Jess said again. Then she took Rey by the hand. "But it wasn't like I was on a super dangerous mission, you know."
"I know," Rey said.
Jess looped her arm around Rey's shoulders. Her presence was warm and solid, and Rey relaxed into the curve of her elbow, slipping her own arm around Jess's waist. "So what about those B-wings?" Jess said.
"I can't wait."
They turned their heads to look at each other and smiled.