SCAVENGER

by ardavenport

"You need to provision another mission? Can't we just all evacuate together?" the rumpled and harried Sargent looked up from the orders on her glowing terminal pad. Then she whirled around and shouted at a droid that had slowed its lifter load.

"Get that to the transports. Don't wait for me; ask the deck officer where they want it." The droid and its lifter zoomed off. Starting to regret that she had asked for anything, Rey hunched her shoulders and lowered her head. All she wanted now was to get on the Falcon with Chewie and go find Master Skywalker.

"Just take her to the cold stores and let her take what she needs. We can't take any of it anyway; there's no time. Please hurry." Commander D'Acy said the last to Rey. "We've all go to get out of here before the First Order shows up. The Force be with you and all of us." She gave Rey a small and rushed smile before hurrying back to the command center.

"Come on." The Sargent tossed the terminal pad onto a work table and Rey had to double-time walk to keep up with her new guide. The small, squat woman led her through paths between shelves of supplies, many of them empty, but Rey did not know if that was because things had already been taken away for the evacuation of if the Resistance was poorly provisioned, possibly a bit of both. This place was full off the smells of whatever was stored there, fuel and plastoids mostly. And a weird scent that she had finally identified as dampness, something she hardly ever encountered in the desserts of Jakku.

They arrived at a wall of shelves formed into squares, each one containing a black bin with improvised tags attached.

"Take anything you need from this." The Sargent pulled an empty gray-green bin from a shelf behind them. Rey stepped forward and examined a tag, then another and another – name, rank, home planet – for each one she peered into the bins' contents. She saw bundles of clothes, small personal grooming tools, a bit of jewelry . . . .

Concerned, Rey looked back to the Sargent. "These are people's things."

"They won't need them anymore." The Sargent blinked and looked down. The shelves were stacked with bins higher than Rey could reach.

"There might be sealed boxes of cremated remains, but only in a few of them. We keep everything, just in case we can send them back to their families, but just contacting them can put them at risk. The First Order has spies everywhere."

The Sargent straightened her shoulders. "You need to hurry. Take anything you need."

Another droid, an older model that was mostly a dented silvery box with grabbing arms and a tall sensor stalk came beeping around a corner. The Sargent pointed.

"Go help Z-Aye-Two in the other bunker." The droid whizzed off.

"Don't say anything, but we can't take most of the droids with us either," the Sargent confided before giving Rey a last warning to hurry and leaving her on her own.

Rey looked up at the wall of black bins and their tags. Then she squared her shoulders like the Sargent had. This was hardly the first time that she had picked over the possessions of the dead. People died in the junkyards she grew up in and sometimes the wrecks of the Empire destroyers in the Jakku desert still yielded the bodies of their crews in closed off corners, dried and desiccated in the dry air and heat. Jakku was a merciless home . . . .

. . . . no, not a home. Not anymore. That strange, small woman, Maz, had forced her to see that there was nothing for her there. The only place to go was forward. But still . . .

Rey pushed aside that small hope that had sustained her for so many years as she pulled out bins; there was no time for it now. Rummaging through the bins, she found no uniforms, just personal things. The bins banged on the floor as she pulled more of them out. There was obviously no reason to keep everything neat as she looked for clothes that would fit. Pants, belts, sashes, wraps. She had left Jakku with nothing but what she was wearing. And after being rescued and fighting her way off Starkiller base, even by Jakku's loose standards of hygiene, she needed a fresh change of clothes. Especially for her mission to find Luke Skywalker.

And maybe she would discover why she was there, what now drove her and how she had been able to fight Kylo Ren, win and escape. What was this Force the everyone was supposed to 'be with'? She knew the legends of the Jedi, of Luke Skywalker bringing down the evil Empire with this mythic power. Kylo Ren had it, she had felt the heat of it when they fought. He used it to murder and kill. She needed to learn the part of it that would really defeat him. And the First Order.

The stack of clothes grew in her gray-green bin. She only made rough estimates on sizes, pants and tops and underclothes, but her guesses were usually pretty good. She was a scavenger after all. But experience had taught her to check the sizes of the boots before letting them take up space in her bin. She tossed in a few grooming tools. She had no idea what she could use on the Millenium Falcon but she doubted that Unkar Plutt had stocked it with anything useful for her.

That despicable trader had told everyone that the Falcon was a junker, barely worth the land to park it on, but it was now clear that he had maintained it in better working order than he let on, probably kept in reserve as a last-ditch escape craft in case his relationships with the other thugs on Jakku turned sour. And of course, Plutt had said nothing about it actually being the Millenium Falcon, originally stolen from Han Solo.

Rey clenched her fist; there was no time to mourn. Leia had said that herself and she had so much more reason to do so, when her son, Kylo Ren, shattered her family by killing his own father. How could anyone do something so monstrous? Killing a parent who had returned to reach out to him . . . .

Shaking the thought off, she crammed in a last wide reddish belt to get it to stay the bin. She could hear ships launching outside. Leia – General Organa – and the other Resistance leaders had dispatched some other fighters and ships on separate missions. Leia said that the Resistance always needed allies, but she did not say anything else and Rey did not think she needed to know more than that.

Hefting her bin, she stood. She had all she needed. The lightsaber, the one that Maz had said belonged to Luke Skywalker, and her staff were already aboard the Falcon. Chewie would be waiting for her, along with R2D2 and the navigation map they needed to find Skywalker. She needed to hurry.

Still she paused, and glanced back at the wall of bins, a wall of the dead, now well picked over by her.

"I'll put it to good use," she promised softly, which was the best thing any scavenger could say over the graves they pillaged. Hiking the bin up on her hip, Rey headed out of the bunker to the Millenium Falcon and the next part of her life.

o o END o o

Disclaimer: This story first posted on tf.n on 29-July-2018 . All characters and the Star Wars universe belong to Disney/Lucasfilm; I am just playing in their sandbox.