Rey is too wired to face Poe or Finn the next day, not after all the events of the day prior, all the emotions that had passed between them. She considers helping Rose and the other mechanics prepare for the mission, until, in her absent mindedness, she runs hard into C-3PO, who then tips into R2-D2, unwittingly starting a game of dominos with her body.

"Oh, I'm so sorry, here, let me help you." Rey helps Threepio to his feet before tipping R2 back upright. R2 lets out an appreciate few beeps.

"Oh, Master Rey, please excuse me, how clumsy of me!"

"It's my fault, really" she smiles as she lets them pass and resumes her path to the mechanics, trying to ignore the formal "Master" C-3PO insists on addressing her as.

"Oh R2, will you hurry? We're going to be late," she hears Threepio's anxious accent fade as they continue down the hallway.

Her strides stop suddenly and she turns around curiously to see the droids quickly vanish down the corridor. Her mind loops with questions...what would they be late for? Curiosity piqued, and with nothing else to really do, Rey reverses direction and follows the droids into a smaller supply room.

Inside she finds what looks to be a meeting of the machines. All the droids on the ship cluster in this small space. BB-8 whirs and rolls up next to her as she sits on a container in the back, trying and failing to go unnoticed. His spherical metal body brushes up against her shin and she adjusts his antenna, as is their greeting. After a few minutes of curiously watching, she realizes that the droids are slowly starting to form...a line?

C-3PO acts as air traffic control, imploring the droids to wait their turns. His worrisome anxiety comes in handy and they all quiet and wait patiently. He begins to clean and polish them, lubricating their squeaky cogs and rewiring faulty systems where he can. R2 stands next to him, his internal toolkit out and working to unscrew a droid's breastplate in front of him. Rey is confused for a moment at these unlikely ring leaders, but then she remembers: Threepio is the only one with opposable thumbs, and R2 has years of experience fixing broken things, having been Luke's. Of course they would be the ones to lead repairs.

She thinks back, who was in charge of the droids? They had been on a skeleton crew for so long and that job had been so far to the bottom of the list. It is then that she looks around at all the droids and notices how grungy and rundown they all are, with the exception of BB, who Poe cleans and services. BB practically shines, but seems to be there in solidarity with the rest of his brethren.

Rey shoots up after realizing this is some sort of underground maintenance shop, "Let me help you."

"Oh Master Rey, really, it's okay. I know you have much more important things to focus on than a few piles of tin."

"No, I really don't, Threepio. And this is important. I would be more than happy to help out."

"Well then, there's lubricant and parts behind you. I am just an interpreter, so really all I can do is shine and grease, R2 really is the mechanic, but it seems to have been working these past years." R2 beeps in agreement as he unscrews the ambulatory strut of the astromech droid in front of him too far, causing the poor thing to tip over.

"Oh dear, R2, will you be more careful?!" Threepio chides as he stabilizes the wobbling droid.

Rey spends the next couple of days away from everyone on the ship, fixing the droids. Rose brings her food and still warms her bed at night, but mostly, they all know that Rey needs time to adjust to what is to come, so they leave her alone. Her binary is as good as ever, and she spends her time telling cheesy jokes to the droids to pass the time. They all start flocking to her at whatever chance they get, and take to following her around the halls, igniting weird looks from other crew members.

They all need a lot of work, having been pushed to the wayside over the last few years. She stretches her rusty skills out on motherboards and hydraulic systems, employing all her honed skills from childhood. Granted, she was usually disassembling droids, but if she can take them apart, she can put them back together.

She feels like she knows what she's doing here. The tactile feedback the droids give her makes her forget for a while that her friends are all going to leave her behind. It is nice to keep busy and out of the way. She knows they have enough help with the ships in the mechanics core, where she usually spends her time when not training. Besides, it feels good to see the small army of droids grow stronger by the day.

She talks a great deal to Threepio about Leia during her repairs. R2 is more reluctant than Threepio, and part of her thinks he is purposefully secretive, but she shakes the thought from her brain. R2 is funny and charming, she focuses on those attributes rather than her unfounded suspicions.

After C-3PO and R2 see what Rey is doing for the others, they allow her to tune them up as well. Threepio is in dire need of a new overhaul, but his anxiety keeps Rey at bay for a bit. He agrees to let her look at him arm, at the very least, as he has had so much trouble with it. He lets out a worried, "Oh" when she twists his arm to resurface it, but he eases and begins to trust her once she replaces the it, good as new.

R2, on the other hand, loves being fawned over. He giggles as she scrubs him off, and Rey is amazed at the sand she finds buried between almost every bit of his machinery. She wonders how one droid could have so much hidden sand, especially because she had never seen him near sand in the three years she had known him. All misgivings about R2 are squelched when she works on him, and she empathizes with him more than any other thing on the ship. They both would always have sand in their hearts.

She is thankful for the trust the droids put in her, even if her human friends don't do the same.

On the tenth day of working with the droids, on the day her friends are set to leave the Falcon , Poe comes to her. A First Order fleet had been detected in the Core Planet regions, and it was just small enough for the Resistance's rebuilt armada to practice for the larger battles to come. It wouldn't be a long mission, but it would be the first one she was not a part of since Crait.

Poe languishes at the door of the supply closet where Rey had spent the last week and a half. They hadn't spoken since Batuu, but only because Rey was actively avoiding him. She could rationalize the position Poe was in, as the General and her friend, and she wasn't mad at him, but she was terrified at being left alone. She knows he is there behind her, but she waits for him to talk first, and he does in a very Poe-like fashion, by letting out a slow wolf whistle.

"These droids are blinding. You think you've polished them enough?"

Rey turns and looks at Poe, dressed in full combat attire, leaning against the frame of the entryway. She is taken slightly aback by his orange jumpsuit contrasted against his pitch black beard and hair. She can't help but smile. She doesn't often notice just how handsome he is, but in this moment, she does. He smiles back, but there is a sadness there too.

He walks fully into the room and all the droids turn to look at him as he does.

"You have a full congregation, it looks like" he says, as he stumbles past a fleeing MSE-6 droid.

"Just getting them ready for the fight. Most of them are due at their battle positions in an hour," she looks down and smiles sweetly at a her flock, not wanting to look at Poe while she talks about the mission she's not a part of.

Poe takes her cue and looks down too. "Rey, I just wanted...I know...I..."

"It's fine, Poe, I get it," she wants to make this easier for him.

"I just...I don't want you to think I am doing this because I don't think you are capable, or strong enough. In fact, I'm probably risking lives by not taking someone as capable as you are on this mission. But I would be risking more lives if you came and something happened," his eyes dart to her face as he says the last word. "I have watched you grow so much over these last three years. You are our best shot, but we need to weaken the First Order before I am comfortable risking you against Kylo Ren again."

Rey looks at Poe as he mentions Kylo and a deeper form of understanding washes over her. Poe is afraid of repeating Leia's mistake with Rey. Poe wants to give her as much time as possible before facing Kylo again. No one had talked much about Rey's injury in the year since it happened, everyone preferring to look forward instead of back in this war. But looking at Poe now, she realizes how much it must have scared him to see her so damaged.

Rey doesn't know what to say, she stands still, but her rigid stance softens the longer she thinks about Poe's concern. Poe closes the distance between them by dodging around a few more droids. He pulls something out of his pocket and presents it to her.

At first, Rey is too distracted by her new revelation of Poe's thought process to notice, but then she looks down to the flashing blue eye of the cloaked binary beacon bracelet she had worn all those years ago to connect her to Leia while she was on Achc-To.

Rey audibly gasps when she sees it, "I thought these were lost years ago."

"Not lost, just not needed. Until now."

Poe holds out the bracelet and Rey slips her freckled hand through it. He tightens it around her tiny wrist, and as he does, Rey sees its twin already around Poe's arm.

Poe presses the center of both beacons, causing the irises of both to flash blue and purple, syncing them to each other.

Poe raises his hands to rest on Rey's shoulders, "As long as we are in this galaxy, you aren't alone. We will always come back for you."

He pulls Rey into a tight hug, and she swells with happiness for a moment, but then, the hug is gone. The thought that this may be their final hug, and there is absolutely nothing she can do about it, flashes in her mind.

She shoves the thought down and brings her own hands up to straighten Poe's jumpsuit collar, before teasing, "Ready, flyboy?"

"Always," that rugged smile parades across his face and they all, Poe, Rey, and the commissioned droids, make their way out and towards the launch bay.

Rey sees all of them off, hugs Finn, Rose, and BB-8, and says her temporary goodbyes. "It's just for a few weeks." "We will be back before you know it." She is still raw from being excluded, and her blood feels coppery with jealousy when she watches the four of them board the shuttle, but she needed to make sure she saw them. War is no place for bitterness.


Three days after they leave, deep in the puzzlement of working on a particularly damaged gyroscopic stabilizer, Rey gets another visitor.

"What are you doing?" the voice fills the empty room, extinguishing any small mechanical whirs or beeps the remaining droids, mostly of the maintenance and protocol variety, were emitting.

"Fixing droids" her voice is detached, focused. She doesn't look up from her work, but she knows who it is by his voice.

"Why? They're just protocol droids. They have no tactical advantage, unless you intend to talk the First Order to death." His voice is full of sarcasm, but at least it is full.

"I don't know, tell that to the Death Star" she scoffs back.

He lets out a short, indignant laugh. Rey swirls around to look at Kylo Ren and scrunches up her face in a dubious smile. He notices grease streaks haphazardly framing her face and smiles back, the expression looking sinister and foreign on his skin.

"Did you just…?" Rey's disbelief is palpable.

"No, you're imagining things." Kylo's face straightens out as he says it.

She turns back around and snaps out of it. Kylo Ren, Supreme Leader of the First Order stands behind her in the supply room of the Millenium Falcon . Despite their last meeting, she should not be this at ease with that fact. She straightens her body and remembers they are enemies, remembers how close they have both come to slaughtering one another.

"To what do I owe this visit, Supreme Leader ?" Rey's voice is harsh and pushes down the levity they had just been playing with.

"Payback, mostly, for the last time," Kylo wants to keep teasing, keep with their verbal jibes, but he knows from her shifting body language it's a losing game.

"I see." Rey responds and all semblance of comfort between them evaporates.

An awkward air permeates. Rey's heart picks up with nerves befitting for the situation. She tries to go on with her work and ignore the interloper. She turns toward Kylo and walks to the shelf he is leaning against, wanting to appear as unconcerned as possible. She reaches up to the top shelf to grab a M820 lubricant container. She realizes too late that she had not bothered to change out of her sleeping clothes today, as it was just her, Chewie and the droids now. Her top inches up her torso, revealing the jagged sliver of a scar he had left there a year earlier.

His eyes are drawn immediately to it and she quickly grabs the container and shoves her top down once she notices his gaze on her stomach.

"It looks like mine, a little" his hands come up to run his fingers across the scar bisecting his face she left him with three years ago. He takes a step toward her, closing the distance between them until they are inches apart. She doesn't flinch like she once did. She looks up at him and notices he is covered in a thin layer of sweat. She can smell him, like the crisp ocean salt water on Batuu. When he speaks again, his register is deeper than she has ever heard it, "We've both marked each other now."

Her stomach swells uncomfortably, as if she had swallowed a weight. It inches down further and further, becoming a pressure in her pelvis. When she recognizes the feeling he is stirring in her, she moves past him back to the droid, barely missing sliding against him. She moves the droid a little further away to a station in the far corner of the room, wanting to put as much distance between them as possible.

Kylo's voice is full of ego when he speaks next, "Just another thing in common I guess. We can add it to the pile of what we share. Or will share."

Rey flashes hot. She reaches for her saberstaff but realizes it's not there, it's back in her bunk, still on her hilt. His words are repugnant, but more than that, she is repulsed by whatever feeling he was kindling in her. In her rage, she snarls her words, using them as her weapon instead, "Don't pretend you know me. You don't know me. We've spent a grand total of a few hours together, and the majority of it we have been trying to kill each other. So don't stand there and say we share ANYTHING in common. We don't."

"I know you. I know you better than anyone else in this galaxy, just as you know me. I have seen inside your head. I have seen your future and your past. I have seen you."

"No. Don't delude yourself, Kylo Ren. I know what it feels like to belong to people now. I know what it feels like to really know someone else now. This isn't that."

"Do you really think that they can ever understand you, those Rebels you were thrown together with? Do you really think they will ever know what you are? What you have to grapple with every day just by being born with what we have?"

"They're my friends, Kylo. Do you understand what that means? Or are you so far from being human now that you've forgotten?"

A silence covers them and the hum from the engines buzzes. She hates that she feels a twinge of regret for that sting. She shouldn't. Her narrowed eyes break from his and she turns back to the droids and resumes stripping wires. Kylo awkwardly shifts behind her as if to leave, and her heart lunges for a moment, not wanting the conversation to end with that. She takes a move out of his playbook and asks him a question she already knows the answer to in order to keep him there.

"Do you know the droids by the callsigns C-3PO and R2-D2?" Rey looks to their prone shells in the corner, she has yet to turn them back on after their last cleaning. Poe had left them with her, Threepio being of use when it came to translating her sacred Jedi texts. She doesn't know why she asks Kylo this particular questions, but she knows he is the only other person, perhaps in the galaxy, that might have answers for her. And now that she has an open line she doesn't want to waste it, even if it was not the most opportune moment.

Kylo shrugs, his voice settles, "You know I do."

"Tell me" Rey demands.

Kylo sighs, knowing this game, but there is a pang of excitement to his voice at the realization that Rey is now in charge of the conversation, willingly talking to him after striking out, "Threepio was General Organa's droid from before I was born. He's fucking annoying but he taught me most of the languages I know. He serves his purpose. R2 was Skywalker's, used mostly for navigation and mechanical work."

"Okay." She tries to find her next words carefully, looking off to her right, "Okay, is there anything else about them that you know?"

"Yes, they helped blow up the Death Star and win the Galactic Civil War." He answers her in the most monotone voice he can muster and her lips curl in as if that is not quite what she meant. Kylo grows frustrated, "What are you getting at?"

"I've been working with the droids lately, and those, C-3PO and R2-D2, their codes are so complex, more complex than any other droids I have ever seen. Doesn't that strike you as odd?"

"They're useless, they belonged to Bail Organa first, they were just palace droids."

"Is that what you think?"

"Gods, just say what you want to say," Kylo could play this game forever with Rey, but he is too intrigued now, he just wants her to spit it out.

Rey looks back to her work as she talks, "They're like mirror images of each other. R2 has some of the most intricate learned coding I have ever seen. He is very old but he has never been wiped. Threepio is the opposite. His code has been erased and written over countless times. When I went in for a check up on Threepio, I found ghosts of old protocols. They didn't have the technology before to see the overwritten data, but now we do. I was able to access different safe mode points in his history."

"What made you do that?" Kylo couldn't understand why, in the middle of a war, Rey would be fiddling with protocol droids.

"It was just so convoluted in there. There was so much going on. I felt like, I don't know, that he had been manipulated so many times and had lost who he was so many times, I just wanted to give him some peace." Rey turns to meet Kylo's eyes when she says this, the parallels between Threepio and Ren not lost on her.

"That's an irrational thing to say. He's a machine."

Rey rolls her eyes, "Okay, but listen. Most of the access points were nothing, a few of them he would respond in High Galactic or Huttese to, I even got one where he was speaking Olys Corellisi." Kylo's face turned at the mention of that very dead language. "I just figured they were latent programming that people had overwritten when those forms of communication faded. But, when I got to the save point dated 22 BBY, something...something different happened."

Kylo shifts his attention and gaze fully on Rey. Rey notices the shift.

"Does that year mean something to you?" she asks, turning her body so that she could face him more clearly.

"Keep talking. What happened on that save point?" his voice is hiding something, but she obeys.

"He, he didn't recognize me. He started to call me...Senator Amidala...and complain that I had started to wear my hair differently." Rey shifts her weight and crosses her arms.

Kylo leans fully back against the wall when Rey says that name, but she doesn't hear anything through the bond and oh, she is listening, so she continues.

"I looked her up on a datapad, but there's not much information. Not even a picture," Rey grabs the tablet next to her and tries to hand Kylo the datapad, to show him, but also to test the boundaries of this bond. He doesn't take it. She sighs and sets it on a container next to him. "She was one of the founders of the Rebel Alliance. She was a Queen on Naboo before becoming a Senator. But that's it. Well, I mean, that's all I could find. She seemed extraordinary, but I can't find anything on what happened to her. Do you know anything? I know you have studied that time period extensively."

"I know the name." He shifts uncomfortably and takes his eyes off Rey as he says it, but again, the bond is quiet. This makes Rey suspicious.

"What are you not saying?" she steps closer to him, but still keeps quite a distance between them. She notices his sweat beading and streaking his face, and wonders where he must be on his side of the bond.

"What are you not saying?" he poses in return.

Rey shifts her weight to other leg, and looks over to Threepio's darkened eyes in the corner. She is so unsure of if she should tell Kylo the next part. It wasn't part of her plan, but none of this was. She closes her eyes as she talks, as if that wouldn't make her decision to tell him real, as if she can just pretend to be telling the air. "His internal functions clogged up after that, almost like a coded self-destruct. I think he knew what was about to happen," she rubs her eyes with her palms as she speaks, wiping away her consternation, "because there was a change in his eyes, almost like his consciousness reawoke. He grabbed me and started to repeat random numbers over and over again. Then he rebooted to his last known save. I checked, but I couldn't find any former save points after that."

"It was probably just binary," Kylo is dismissive.

"No, I know binary," Rey is determined.

"Of course you do," he means to sound flippant, but it comes out more reverential.

"It would have been easier if it were binary, but this was something else" she paused, not knowing how much she should give away, not knowing how much she should trust this man after very few positive interactions. She looks up and his eyes are so soft, so willing. She sees the man who told her about the sun-dew fields on Chandrila. The words are out of her mouth before she realizes:

"He gave me coordinates."