It is dark inside the cantina - a stark contrast to the blinding light of the desert sun outside.
A diverse assortment of life forms congregates within the cramped, dingy establishment; so disparate in shape, size, background, and language, but all seeking the same form of respite.
Refuge from the sun, or light, or any other reminder that there is a life outside of alcoholism and debauchery.
The cloaked figure who enters and slinks its way through the unruly crowd must be the first living being to arrive here in search of something, as opposed to in escape of it. They are barely noticed by the surrounding patrons, who are much too engrossed in their own drinks, pillaging, or fistfights to take note of any new individual who squeezes their way in through the open door.
Two hands reach up to remove the hood from atop a head, revealing the face of a young, stoic woman beneath. She approaches the bar slowly but purposefully, her gaze steadily fixed on the bartender behind the counter. His sour, unwelcoming expression does nothing to discourage her, as she leans tenaciously over the counter and utters a name into his ear.
He raises his chin contemptuously, peering down at her with immense suspicion. "Lando?" he echoes in a cautious murmur, narrowing his eyes at her.
She nods sternly, her jaw set with resolution.
He smirks.
With a momentous click, he swiftly cocks and raises a blaster to the visitor's face, aiming it directly between her eyes.
While the patrons around her all react with a wide berth, the woman does not flinch, steadfastly staring past the weapon pointed only a few inches from her nose and fixating solely on its wielder.
"Lando's not taking visitors today," the bartender hisses venomously. "I suggest you go back the way you came if you want to leave this cantina alive."
His challenger merely blinks at him, unfazed by his audacious threat.
"You will take me to Lando," she states evenly.
The bartender gazes back at her in astonishment. "What?" he splutters, inexplicably lowering his blaster.
"You will take me to Lando now," she reiterates. "And you will do it discreetly."
A few blinks and a shake of the head, and the bartender suddenly straightens, his eyes glazing over in a stupefied daze. "I will take you to Lando now, and I will do it discreetly."
He slips away from the counter as instructed - silently, inconspicuously - and leads her to the back of the building, through several archways, and down many winding corridors, before finally arriving at a tall, rusty, steel door. "It is locked," he informs her, almost matter-of-factly.
"Break it down," she orders without hesitation.
He obediently complies, taking advantage of his own huge, hulking figure to slam his way through the door. It gives in like it is made of plaster, crumpling feebly to the hard, sandy floor.
They are immediately sprayed with a barrage of blaster bolts.
The woman reacts expeditiously, whipping out a lightsaber from under her cloak and igniting it with an emphatic whir. She deftly swings it in fluid patterns of self-defence, deflecting bolt after bolt in all random directions about her body. It is somewhere around the tenth or eleventh blaster shot that the cascade finally ceases, leaving behind a thick, murky cloud of smoke.
She hears his genial laughter before she discerns him through the haze.
"So this is what Luke has sent to me," Lando Calrissian chuckles heartily, emerging from the shroud of lingering smoke slowly curling past his form. "The famous Rey of Jakku."
Rey stares back at him impassively, unresponsive to his provocative remark. She wordlessly sheathes her lightsaber and peers nonchalantly over at the bartender, who is standing idly by on the other side of the room, miraculously unscathed. With an almost imperceptible nod of her head, she dismisses him.
Lando smirks fondly at the young woman in front of him, the sleaziness in his expression punctuated by the thin, snazzy moustache adorning his upper lip. "Lando," he introduces himself, swaggering up to her and taking her by the hand. "It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance.
She rolls her eyes as he bends down to press a chivalrous kiss to the back of her hand. "Do you have what I came for?" she demands impatiently.
"Young ladies are so forthright these days," he remarks wryly, shooting her a wink. "May I first apologise for the rather unceremonious welcome into my office? You must understand that I'm feeling quite touchy today, of all days, considering the...sensitive cargo I'm to deliver to you this afternoon."
"And where is this 'cargo'?" she questions, once again cutting to the chase.
He finally acquiesces, releasing her hand and gesturing towards a closed door in the corner of this grimy, chaotic mess of a room he calls an office. "Right behind here."
Her eyes instantly shift from the middle-aged man in front of her to her new target across the room. She approaches it with slow, deliberate steps, instinctively reaching out a searching hand. The closet door barely requires a nudge of her fingertips before it effortlessly sweeps open, revealing her object of pursuit within.
A young, dark-haired man glares up at her with even darker eyes from where he is hunkered down on the closet floor, furiously thrashing around in vain protest against his unyielding restraints. His wrists and ankles are securely shackled with metal handcuffs, his knees are bound to his chest by rope, and his mouth is definitively sealed with masking tape. All he can do is glower irately at his two captors as they tower over him.
"This is what you guys were after, right?" Lando mutters, grinning affectionately down at the squirming man on the floor of his closet. He leans down with his hands on his knees and teases, "You're a hot commodity today, kiddo."
The man growls a muffled, unintelligible response that would have been a vulgar slur if his lips were uninhibited.
The Jedi Knight, Rey, scowls faintly down at him, secretly perturbed by the tumultuous energy radiating off of this man. His gaze is wild and frenzied behind the tufts of disheveled hair curling over his eyes. Even in this powerless hunch, he is clearly very large in build, his biceps swelling with every defiant wriggle of his torso. He is the personification of a ticking time bomb, or a long-dormant volcano ready to erupt at only a moment's notice.
"In all seriousness," Lando whispers, glancing over his own shoulder warily, "we'd best get him onto your ship as fast as we can. I can't guarantee you that there aren't some other folks out there who've also traced him back here and are heading this way at this very moment."
She tears her gaze away from the man on the floor, who is, by then, staring up at her intently. "You're right," she murmurs inscrutably, turning to address Lando. "Put him in a box."
The cloaked figure does not exit the way she came. Lando shows her to the back exit of his cantina, and she glides right through it, elegantly levitating the box of "cargo" in front of her as she proceeds.
Though her ship is only a few yards away, she and Lando make the fatal mistake of assuming that the path to it would be empty. It is siesta hour in this part of the planet, but as Rey calmly loads her cargo with a swift wave of her hand, she fails to notice the two wandering Twi'leks who've snuck out from their designated huts in rebellious disobedience of their mother's strict curfew, and who immediately recognise the levitating box as the outcome of a Force ability.
There is only one thing that the Jedi and the First Order are concerned with today - the announcement had spread across the entire galaxy like untamed wildfire.
Ben Solo's bounty is astronomical, and it seems as if it may be within their grasp.
It is almost silent on the ship.
Rey composedly pilots the vessel out of the atmosphere, her expression cool and unbothered.
Unbothered, in particular, by the incessant groans and bangs of protest emanating from the box at the back end of the ship.
Once in the stillness of deep space, Rey promptly switches the controls to autopilot and leaps out of her seat. She pads her way soundlessly out of the cockpit and into the cargo area, blinking expressionlessly down at the loud, restless box before her. With a flick of her wrist, she unlatches the top, revealing a very incensed, shackled Ben Solo inside. She regards him with a barely discernible expression of intrigue, tilting her head to the side infinitesimally. "I hope you know your family is very worried about you," she tells him flatly.
He scowls, stilling in reaction to her words, his demeanour darkening.
"It didn't have to come to this," she mentions, "but it appears you are too stubborn to know what's good for you."
His scathing retort is suppressed by the masking tape over his mouth.
"I'll let you out of the box, but I'll have to restrain you against a chair. Master Skywalker warned me that you're unlikely to behave," she explains, a tinge of resentment colouring her tone.
His response is muffled again, but she thinks it sounds like he is scoffing, "Master Skywalker."
Now in the safety and quiet of her own ship and floating through the depths of space, Rey feels much freer to revert to her usual, more talkative self. "You know, I could've left you in there for much longer," she comments pointedly. "I still need to figure out where the Resistance base is before setting the course for light speed. I can't seem to reach them, and the homing beacon has been acting up. So be grateful that I prioritised your comfort over that!"
He stares at her unresponsively, as if taken aback by her abrupt shift in behaviour.
"I'm Rey, by the way," she says, as she dismantles the rest of the box. "I'm from Jakku. Master Skywalker found me when I was a little girl."
A curious look flits across his face.
"I was waiting for a family who would never return. He saved me from a life of unending loneliness," she reveals earnestly. "I would do anything for him - including getting you back home safely." She narrows her eyes at him. "No matter how difficult you're going to make it for me."
He lowers his eyebrows, his gaze intensifying in affirmation of her last sentence. You bet I will.
Before she can lift him from the floor and into a more comfortable position on a nearby bench, the raucous sound of the ship's proximity alert blares overhead, interrupting her.
She quickly abandons him on the floor of the cargo area and sprints back to the cockpit, urgently scanning her eyes across the myriad of control screens. Her breath catches in her throat when she discovers that they are being pursued by another, much bigger ship, rapidly gaining on them from the direction of the same planet they'd just escaped.
Rey cusses under her breath and hastily slides back into the pilot's seat, just as the pursuant ship begins its bombardment of offensive gunfire.
Her ship, only small in relative size, teeters precariously upon the first inopportune strike, eliciting an irritated groan from Ben Solo in the back, who was surely knocked violently around on the floor by the momentum. She haphazardly wrenches the ship back upright, cringing at the aimless see-saw motion of her own slipshod flying.
Suddenly, her ship stalls to a halt, the lights on the controls panel all stuttering off. Every subsequent push of a button or steer of the yoke is utterly futile.
"No!" Rey hisses, hastily scrambling out of the cockpit. She ignores Ben Solo's incoherent growls of protest as she enters the cargo area and snatches up a crowbar. In one corner of the room, she jabs the crowbar into a cranny at her feet and heaves a small section of the floor open, revealing a smuggling compartment beneath. She whirls around to face him. "You're going in here."
He cannot object strongly enough.
The two sister Twi'leks warily approach the ship they'd just ensnared into their hangar, armed to the teeth with a hearty melange of gadgets and weapons.
"You go for Solo. I will take the Jedi," the older one proposes, cradling her favourite two-handed melee weapon to her chest.
They both hold their breaths as they draw nearer to the ship, which is much too still and silent to approach with anything but unease. Once within sufficient range, the older sister gasps as she discovers what she recognises to be the boarding ramp of the ship already unfurled.
Someone has already disembarked, and they've somehow completely missed it.
The undeniable buzz of a lightsaber thrums behind them, and the younger Twi'lek is suddenly aglow with blue when the weapon is suspended threateningly over her neck. She shrieks as the Jedi Knight seizes her from behind.
Her sister snarls venomously at their opponent, her eyes ablaze with fury as she points her weapon at her.
"I don't want to hurt you," Rey warns them equably, levelling a stern gaze at the older sister. "I won't hurt you. You just need to let us go."
The Twi'lek merely glares at her, her expression betraying no indication of compliance nor defiance. There is a very long, sustained period of tense silence before she finally acquiesces, lowering her weapon and slackening her stance.
"Good," Rey says. "Now-"
The angry growl of the Twi'lek in her arms interrupts her - as does the sting from the thick needle that is aggressively jabbed into her thigh.
Rey gasps and stumbles backwards, relinquishing the Twi'lek from her hold. Her limbs sag with numbness as she crumbles to the floor, her head swinging with an increasingly heavy weight. She mentally curses her own inexperience and naivety, right before her cheek hits the floor.
The tranquilliser isn't strong - it is only a few minutes later that Rey comes to, but she is still too weak to do anything more than register her surroundings behind weighty eyelids.
She is being dragged by the leg down the length of the hangar by one of the Twi'leks, drowsily attempting to tune in to their hushed, panicked squabbling.
"It doesn't make any sense. He should be in there. What else would a Jedi be doing on our planet on a day like this?" one of them whispers insistently.
"The box is opened. He must have escaped. On a ship that small, we would have definitely found him," the other whispers back. "You sure you checked the smuggling compartment?"
"Of course," her sister replies. "He's here. On our ship. He must be."
Rey almost jerks with alarm, but luckily represses the instinct.
There is only one smuggling compartment in that whole, tiny ship. If the Twi'leks didn't find him, then their deduction must be correct.
Somehow, Ben Solo escaped.
She can feel her limbs humming with sensation as consciousness seeps back into her body, her eyes frantically scanning her surroundings as she devises a getaway plan.
As if on cue, the tug on her leg abruptly loosens.
One Twi'lek after the other collapses to the ground in a single heap, the thuds of their bodies hitting the floor following the echoey bangs of hard metal striking the backs of their heads.
Ben Solo stands triumphantly over all three of his hunters, Rey's crowbar swinging listlessly in one hand. Without hesitation, he carelessly discards the crowbar with a clang against the concrete floor, before proceeding to loot one of the unconscious Twi'leks for weapons.
Rey smirks, pushing herself up onto her feet and dusting off her hands. "Well done," she commends him, impressed by his resourcefulness.
He ignores her, straightening with a machine blaster hoisted over his shoulder and a pistol in each hand. His head is ducked as he surveys the sister Twi'leks on the ground, gently nudging them with a foot to confirm their debilitation.
"By the way," she pipes up, "how did you get out?"
She barely has the opportunity to finish verbalising her question before he promptly raises a pistol to her and fires, never once even bothering to spare a glance in her direction.
For the second time within that hour, Rey blacks out.