"Poe?"
"Finn! How'd it go?"
Finn will never get tired of hearing Poe's voice, even distorted through a comm. He draws a slow breath, unsure how to answer. "Terrifying."
Poe is silent. "That could mean a lot of different things, buddy," he says at last, voice strained. "Care to elaborate?"
Finn slides down the wall outside Jess' holding cell until he's sitting on the cold floor, knees pulled up to his chest. "Ok. So. It worked. I think. Oh, kriff."
"Lieutenant Finn. Report." Poe orders.
Finn clears his throat. "Yessir," he replies automatically. "Right. So, they injected the drug into Jess. I started to try to brainwash her. She resisted at first— and then she started to agree, Poe, but it was Jess, still backtalking me every step of the way but now agreeing with the First Order, and we took her out to the target range and she shot at Snap, Poe, she shot at Snap and Leia and—" He gulps. "And Rey. She shot at Rey, Poe. Called her a Jedi scum, ran and tried to choke her. I tried to talk her down then but she wouldn't— she just wouldn't go back to normal. She tackled me, called me a traitor to the First Order, fought me until Rey froze her." Finn pauses to catch his breath. "She shot us, Poe." His voice shakes. "With a live blaster. She just wouldn't stop attacking us. Jess. It was terrifying."
The comm crackles with the static of Poe's breath. "What did you do with her?" he asks.
"Cuffed her and put her in a holding cell."
"In a holding cell?" Poe's aghast. "Are you still there?"
"Yeah."
"Is she still awake?"
"Um— yeah? I don't know? Why?"
"If it's the same drug they gave me—" Poe swallows. "She'll black out eventually and wake up in serious pain. I don't know if that was caused by the same drug, though. Maybe they used a separate memory wiper? I don't know. But if she does pass out, it's probably all included. She shouldn't be alone in that cell, Finn, don't let her wake up alone." Poe's voice shakes.
"Ok, ok! I'll check on her." One of the guards walks with Finn into the cell, stun baton at the ready. Jess is still awake, but she doesn't look quite right— sitting on the floor, slumped back against the wall, staring vaguely up at the two of them. "Jess?" Finn asks.
"...hmm?"
Finn crouches in front of her, a safe distance away. "How're you doing?"
"...mmm?"
Finn stands and thumbs his comm again to reach General Organa.
Poe scrambles to his feet with obvious relief as their small brigade invades the lockdown room. BB-8 is now scattered in small pieces around the floor by his feet. Finn and Rey lay Jess' now unconscious body on the cot. Her wrists and ankles are still shackled— no one's certain if the drug will be fully out of her system once she wakes up, or if it will require synthesizing a separate drug, or she'll need to be reverse-brainwashed.
Finn really doesn't want to think about any of those possibilities. She will wake up, and she will be Jess again. In the meantime, they will wait, he and Poe and Rey.
Poe won't allow even Rey to touch BB-8's inner workings, but he finally, grudgingly allows her to take a small rag and clean the crumpled exterior plates. They all hold their breath as Poe connects BB-8's mostly intact core processor to a datapad. Poe's brow knits in a fine line as he reads down the long stream of code, but it all looks good. Lights on. Situation normal.
When he looks up with the broadest grin they've ever seen, Finn and Rey break into laughter. The lockdown room is the perfect place for a tiny celebratory dance party.
"Finn!" His comm crackles to life. "Report to the landing bay immediately. Another shuttle's arriving."
"How many?" Finn makes a hasty exit from the lockdown room, mouthing apologies, and starts to run towards the bay.
"Seven."
"Wearing their armor?"
"Dumped it into space."
Finn grins. A moment later, he stumbles to a halt on the landing bay beside General Organa, panting. The shuttle's gangplank hisses open. As the first figures cautiously descend from the ship, Finn spreads his hands wide to greet them. "Welcome to the Resistance."
Jess wakes with an agonized groan. Poe jerks upright in his seat, startled out of a short doze. "Jess!" Rey reaches towards her instinctively.
Poe knocks Rey's hand aside before she can touch her. "Don't! It's not going to help. Trust me on this." He gestures to the commlink in Rey's lap. "Comm the nurse."
Jess groans again, tries to move, finds herself cuffed. Her breath chokes off in shock. "Wha—" Her voice drags against her throat and her head falls back against the pillow, limp. "Oh, kriff," she gasps.
"Jess. Can you hear me?" Poe leans closer, careful not to jar the bed. Jess cries out as the door's lock opens with a heavy thunk. A meddroid glides to Jess' side, grabs her shoulder and wrist to hold her still, and slides a cool hypo of painkillers into her arm. Jess' mouth is open, working for air, twisting in pain. Rey's knuckles are white on the arms of her chair. As the drugs kick in, Jess relaxes a fraction, but no more than that.
"Can't you give her anything more?" Poe pleads.
"I am sorry, Poe." The meddroid's empathy program makes the words sound barely— but only barely— authentic. "This dose is already the maximum safe dose for a human of her age, sex, and size. I will return in four hours to administer a follow-up dose once this has worn off." It glides out of the room on silent casters, closing and locking the door behind it.
"Jess," Poe repeats, once the room is quiet again. "Can you hear me?"
"Fuck. You." Jess whispers.
Poe grins. "Good to have you back, Pava. How're you doing?"
"Oh, kriff." Jess whispers again.
"Yeah. I bet. It'll pass, Jess. It'll hurt like a bitch until it does, but it'll pass. Trust me."
Jess is silent for a moment, trying to breathe around the excruciating pain. "Y'din't have any painkillers."
"Yeah. Well. Doesn't look like they're working too well for you, so." Rey's leg is jiggling silently beside Poe's chair. She's biting down hard enough on a knuckle to leave teethmarks for days. "Jess, Rey's right here. Do you want her to hold your hand?"
"Not sure I have one." Poe has to lean even closer to hear her. Jess moves her fingers one by one, pulls them into a fist— and feels the shackles again. "Why am I cuffed? Poe, why am I cuffed?" Her voice is one note short of desperate.
"I'm sorry about that, Jess. Believe me, not my choice."
Jess opens her mouth in an attempt to laugh. "Yeah. You were never really kinky that way."
Poe grins again. Jess' chest rises and falls with each pained breath. "Fuck," she breathes. She can feel another wave of pain building, gathering, coiling in her limbs. "I— oh kriff oh fuck oh holy fucking rancorspawned banthashit—" Her voice cuts off as her body arcs into the pain. Rey's free hand reaches out behind her to grab Poe's shoulder with bruising fingers. Poe wraps a hand around her wrist and grips it just as tightly. By the time Jess' body slumps back down to the mattress, Poe's back is soaked with sweat. Jess' breath comes in short, ragged, groans.
Rey's face is ashen. "It's not getting better, Poe. You said it would get better."
"It will. It will, I swear. If this is the same, and it looks like it is."
"Then how much longer?" Rey snaps.
"I have no idea."
"How do you have no idea?"
"Do you think she can tell how much time is passing? It's not like there was a chrono in the cell, Rey, I—" Poe flings himself out of the chair and paces around the narrow room like a caged rathtar. He scrubs his hands violently through his hair to get himself back under— no, fuck control. He leans down towards Jess on the other side of the cot. "Jess," he says, gentle. "Jess. Are you there?"
Jess breathes as though she has been sprinting around the perimeter of the base. Slowly her body starts to relax again. "Not going to die."
"No." Poe's mouth relaxes upwards in relief. "You're not."
"Ok. Ok. Oh holy fucking fuck. Ok." Her eyes gradually ease open again, half-lidded against the light. "Poe." Her voice is ragged. "How did you stand it?"
Poe shakes his head slowly. The first time? Just like you did. The hundred time? I think I might have gone mad. "It will pass, Jess. Really. It will pass."
Jess' head bobs in the barest of nods. Her eyes open fully, take in Rey's. "Ok. Ok. I think I'm ok now. Ok." She wiggles the fingers of one hand. "Rey?" Rey moves to her side with visible relief and takes her hand. The overwhelming burn of Rey's touch against her sizzling nerves shorts out Jess' fragile hold on her sanity for a moment, but she hangs on anyway. Fuck pain.
"Sorry, Poe," Jess whispers at last.
"What? Why?"
"That it didn't work. I thought— I really thought—" Jess stops to focus on breathing. Her thoughts ebb and drag around currents of whited-out pain. She can't hold onto anything resembling coherence for long.
"What do you mean, it didn't work? Jess— what do you remember?"
Jess' eyes flick open, close tight against the dimmed lights. "Don' remember anything." Sweat glistens on her forehead. "Guess I tried it?" Slowly a few neurons manage to connect. Fuck! she mouths, presses into the pillows by another wave of pain. Oh holy fucking fuck this hurts this hurts
"It's ok, Jess," Rey's voice is calm, quiet. "You're going to be ok."
When Jess can breathe again, her thoughts continue to trace themselves around in circles, trying and failing to hold to each other long enough to make any sense. She can feel Rey's fingertips in hers now. That's a good sign, right? That's got to be a good sign. She's going to take that as a good sign. She can also feel the cuffs on her wrists.
Oh.
It did work.
Fuck.
"What did I do?" Jess' words are streaked now with an entirely different type of pain. "What did I do?" Her voice rises, edging towards frantic.
"Jess." Rey probably could have made a living as a rathtar tamer, in another lifetime. "Everyone is all right. Everything is fine. You did really well."
"It did work, Jess. I think they're going to clear my name. Because of you." Poe's voice is thick.
Jess thinks about this for a moment. "You're going to owe me for this one, Dameron. You're going to owe me big time."
"That's Commander Dameron to you, Pava." Poe kicks back in his chair. "Glad to be in your debt. Call it in any time."
"Oh, I will." Jess forces her eyes opens again, squints up until she finds Rey swimming blurrily above her. "Rey. Shoulder?"
"It's fine, Jess. Few more days of bacta patches, no problem." She smiles. "I hear that's thanks to your in-flight medical skills?"
"Damn straight." Jess coughs. "So, cuffs. Off? Now?"
"I commed Dr. Kalonia when you woke up. She said to summon her once you were ready to talk. They just want to ask a bunch of questions— Master Luke, Leia, the intel officers— to make sure you're back to yourself before they take the cuffs off."
Jess is silent. "What did I do?" she asks again. If Poe hadn't flown with her through hundreds of near-death escapes, he might not have noticed the undercurrent of dread in her voice.
"What's the last thing you remember?" Rey asks.
"Talking about it over lunch, I guess? I don't even remember agreeing to do it. I mean, I remember offering, but I don't remember actually saying yes."
Rey's lips flatten into a hard line. Questions are important. Yes is important. "I'm sorry, Jess! I'm so sorry. You did agree, I promise! We'd never have done it if you hadn't. The whole experiment was recorded for the trial, so we've got a holovid of it if you want to see."
" 'S ok, Rey. I trust you." Jess convinces her hand to tighten around Rey's fingers for a moment. The resulting pain does not kill her, so she thinks she might actually be starting to get better. "So what happened after that?"
Rey takes a deep breath and dives in. "So— right. What happened. They injected the drug into you. Finn brainwashed you. It worked. He took you out to the target range and asked you if you wanted to kill Snap. You did. He gave you a blaster and you, uh, well, see, you—"
"Rey." It's nothing like her recruit-training tone, but Jess' voice has gathered a bit more strength over the past few minutes.
"Right. You, uh, you shot him."
"I shot him. Wait, what? Shot Snap? That's ridiculous."
They're silent.
"No!" Jess tries to sit up for one idiotic moment before her vision goes white with pain. Gradually she notices the mattress at her back again, Rey's hand pressing gently against her chest. "That was a dumb move."
Poe snorts.
"Shut up." Jess looks back to Rey. "I think you were saying something important. I don't remember what it was. Oh. The test. Brainwashed. Fuck. And— Snap? I remember you saying I shot Snap, but that can't be right. What do you mean, I shot Snap?"
"Well, technically, you shot at Snap. He didn't get hurt. And Jess, he knows it wasn't you. The real you."
Jess' mouth opens and closes. "I shot Snap."
"It's ok, Jess! I told you, everyone is fine. Luke stood behind the target and redirected the bullets towards the ground."
"Ok. Ok. So— that's good, I guess? That means the test worked." A sudden thought strikes her. "But wait, I remember talking about how we would need more than one piece of evidence in order to conclude anything. So what else happened?"
Rey and Poe exchange a glance.
Jess narrows her eyes at the two of them. "Look. The moment I get out of here, I will be able to ask someone who knows what happened. And when that person tells me something you two nerfherders left out, I will be really fucking pissed. And when I'm really—"
"And then you shot at Leia. Oh," Rey's mouth twitches, "oh, and you called her a witch first—"
"I what?"
"It's ok, Jess," Rey insists. "Everyone knows it wasn't really you talking. I mean, you called Snap a hot pile of bantha shit—"
"She what?" Poe cracks up with laughter. "Oh, no. Oh, Jess. You are so screwed."
"But it wasn't really her, Poe, you can't—"
Poe looks down at Jess, lips twitching. "Do you want to tell her or should I?"
"Fuck you, Dameron."
Poe grins at Rey across the cot. "Thing is, that is the real Jess. She's called Snap a pile of hot bantha shit at least once a week, usually more, for the last two years they've been flying together. So the fact that she also called the General a witch…"
Rey presses her free hand against her mouth in an attempt to keep a straight face. It doesn't work. Her bubbling laugh sends Poe into another fit of hilarity. He collapses back into his seat by Jess' bed.
"It's ok, I can wait," comes Jess' cool voice. "Before you laugh any harder, Poe, I'd like you to remember that I still hold the highest sparring score out of any of the pilots. I will take you down."
"Not me, you won't." Rey's still sputtering with laughter.
"Look." Poe clears his throat and focuses on wiping the laughter off his face. "She'll understand, Jess. Don't worry about it. She's heard far worse."
Jess snorts. "I know that. It's not her I'm worried about. It's you two lunkheads and everyone else on this fucking base who'll never let me hear the end of it."
Rey looks down at her again, quite serious. "Not if you don't want them to. I'd be happy to teach every single one of them a lesson, if you'd like."
"Rey, I love you."
Rey grins down at Jess. "I know."
The room goes silent for a moment as Jess closes her eyes to fight another fierce wave of pain. It's definitely getting easier. It definitely is. She'll have to go apologize to Leia. Oh, kriff. But wait— "Was that it?" Jess asks. "That's only two. Didn't we talk about three tests?"
Poe looks up at Rey, watchful. Rey stares down at Jess. Jess looks between the two of them, suddenly afraid. "What happened?"
Rey smiles gently. "It's ok, Jess. The last test was you shooting at me."
Jess' face is entirely blank. "The what uh with when the who?"
Rey bites her lip to suppress a laugh. "You didn't hit me, obviously. I redirected the bullets, same as Luke had."
"I shot you," Jess says faintly.
"It wasn't you, Jess. It's ok."
"Ok?" Jess explodes. "I could have killed you!"
Rey gives her a look down the end of her nose. "Jess. We've talked about this."
"Even Jedi make mistakes sometimes!"
Rey raises a pair of elegant brows.
"Ok, fine! You can take care of yourself. But still, Rey, who in Malachor thought that could possibly be a good idea?"
"It showed how strong the drug was."
"Right." Jess swallows. "Right. Yeah. Guess— guess it did. So— that was the end of the test?"
"Yeah." Rey presses Jess' hand between her own.
"Right." Jess nods. "Then why are there bruises on your neck?"
Rey blinks.
Carefully, slowly, painstakingly, Jess raises her arms to touch Rey's neck with the fingers of her free hand. It's painful, but she doesn't pass out. Progress, no? It's hardly more than an Akivan moonshine hangover now. "And why are my arms still cuffed?"
Rey sighs and braces for impact. "You shot at me again. I took your blaster. You ran and tried to choke me. The bruises are my fault, I—I didn't really believe you'd do it. Stupid. And then talkdown didn't work. You, uh— you jumped Finn, too. That's when Leia ordered us to keep you cuffed until she and the rest of the testing team could make sure you were no longer a threat."
Jess stares back up at Rey. "Is Finn ok?" she asks at last.
"Yeah, he's fine. He can handle himself, too."
Rey grins. Jess doesn't. "Good thing I have friends who can fight back when I try to kill them."
"Jess, it was an experiment. It wasn't you. Everyone knows that."
"Do you?" Poe asks softly, gaze fixed on Jess.
"I don't even remember it," Jess answers, equally soft. Her eyes snap to Poe's. "I'm sorry I locked you up on the shuttle."
Poe shrugs, presses his hands into tight fists. "Orders. You had to."
"Fuck orders." Jess struggles to sit up. She slides a sardonic glance to Rey when her body smoothly slides into position. Jess has made it clear that she actually likes small Force-moves, finds them funny rather than jarring. Rey doesn't really understand this, but it does make life easier sometimes. Especially when reaching for high objects. And the look on Jess' face never fails to make her laugh. "Bring the team in," Jess commands. "Let's get this mission over with."
Rey picks up the comm. "General Organa? We're ready for you." She puts the comm down with a wicked smile. "The witch is coming."
"Fuck. You." Jess whacks her with a pair of still-shackled hands.
