—Chapter 23: Analgesia—
She didn't know how long she'd been praying for. She didn't even know if she was doing it right. She didn't know if there was a right way to pray. Rey's spirit had been dispersed in the ethereal darkness of the Cosmic Force for an eternity—at any rate, for an immeasurable amount of time. Time didn't seem to pass at all, here in the void. But for much of the length of that eternity, she'd been praying.
She concentrated on the words, the images her mind could conjure. She'd been afraid that if she let her mind go blank, she would disappear forever, so she'd anxiously probed her mind for words and images she could consciously recall. Her consciousness was all she had left, so she'd kept it busy. She prayed to see her son again. She chanted Ben's name. She summoned images, memories of the school on Dendrokaan, and the beloved faces that dwelt there.
She prayed.
But these weren't images she'd invoked. Lights and sirens were blaring. Her mind was reeling.
And her lungs filled greedily with air.
She was awake, though she nearly didn't believe it. Buried under the alarms, she made out the enthusiastic warbling of a Wookiee, followed by the sensation of a furry hand pressing down on her forehead. The alarms were cut, and she felt like she was falling.
Her eyes hadn't adjusted to the light yet, and her equilibrium was completely out of whack. She didn't realize she'd been sitting up until she became aware of the hand on her back, sliding out from behind her as she again found the stiff bunk mattress. Her breath, however, was beginning to even out, and she attempted speech.
"Ch—Chewie?" she heaved tentatively. There followed a string of exultations, curse-words in Shyriwook, that were, in that moment, the most beautiful sounds Rey had ever heard. "Where…?" she began, but Chewbacca didn't wait for her to finish her question before rattling off a condensed version of how he came to be in her service and where they'd ended up.
"N—Naboo…?" she stuttered, confused. "But I feel… Ren…" Am I dreaming that sensation? she wondered. No… He feels… scared…
Galvanized by the fear that reached across Theed to cut into her heart, Rey closed her useless eyes and drew the Force around herself like a blanket, letting it permeate her disused body. Chewie went silent, observing her not with apprehension at her sudden stillness, but with awe.
Rey exhaled and opened her revived eyes, taking in the Falcon's utilitarian lounge and comfortable familiarity. Reaching down, she flung off the blanket that covered her legs and swung herself over the side of the bunk. Without missing a beat, she marched across the lounge and through the bulkhead door on her way to the cockpit. Sitting herself down at the Falcon's console and disengaging the landing gear for takeoff, she raced toward the torchlight in the night sky that was her son's Force signature.
—
Things had been so chaotic after their hasty retreat from the planet's surface that there had been no time to exchange information. Ren had stolen a hug from his mother before she finally got him strapped into a seat, but that was about the only exchange that had taken place that wasn't strictly about escape. Now, their belts disengaged and the Falcon safely en route to Dendrokaan, the group could catch their breath.
Rey was seated at the dejarik table with Ren at her side, and Finnie was seated at the opposite end of the bench, folded over her arms at the table. Though space remained on the lounge bench for her to sit, Malfi chose instead to remain standing next to Temiri, clutching his hand. Judging by the look of discomfort on his face, had she not been hanging on to him so firmly, he might have slipped away into a private room. In contrast, Chewbacca leaned casually against the bulkhead door next to Poe, and Finn was sleeping soundly in the bunk Rey had occupied not long ago, tethered to biomonitoring equipment.
"How did you know where to find us?" asked Poe.
"After I woke up, I could feel Ren's Force signature, and his fear. I got to you as quickly as I could."
"Well, your timing couldn't have been better," he said. "We had just escaped the Black Dragons' lair, narrowly avoiding our own execution."
"I guess the timing is pretty lucky," she remarked, cocking her head slightly. "I've been in psychic limbo ever since I last visited in on Ben's dreams, and I know as much about why I woke up as I do about how I got knocked out in the first place." Rey paused nervously. "Where… where is Ben, anyway? I can't… feel him anywhere." Ren tightened his grip on his mother's arm.
The group exchanged glances, except for Temiri, whose eyes were glued to a spot in a far corner of the room. Rey watched him tentatively. She could see he was guarded, and was nervous about pressing him for information. She didn't yet have a handle on the nature of the trauma he must have endured.
Before the silence could become awkward, Ren broke it. "Who's Zrirus?" he asked.
No one answered right away. Poe eyed Temiri with the same apprehension he saw on Rey's face. "Hey, yeah," he said. "That guy that was going to kill us mentioned him."
"I heard that name inside mama's head before she went quiet. Daddy said it. 'This is for Zrirus, you bitch,' I heard. What's a bitch? I didn't know what any of that meant…"
"You heard that inside my head?" asked Rey. "Were you in there?"
Ren looked up to meet his mother's eyes. "I was trying to keep you safe… I'm sorry I failed," he said, tears forming at the corners of his eyes.
"Oh, my sweetie, you did just fine," she said, kissing the top of his head and rubbing him affectionately on his back.
Temiri then broke away from Malfi and retreated into the aft compartments, toward the cargo bay. Malfi took a step to follow him, but Rey, looking up from Ren, abruptly raised her hand and quietly stopped Malfi in her tracks. Once Temiri was out of earshot, she shook her head at Malfi, "Let him go, Malfi. He's obviously tortured. Help me understand what happened to him."
"What do you already know?" asked Poe.
Rey shook her head. "Practically nothing. After I woke up, Chewie told me that after I…" she sighed, trying to compose herself, "after what happened to me, you had a troubling exchange with Ben, so you called him to come take you to Naboo so you could investigate." She furrowed her brow. "And why the hell did you have to call him from Kashyyyk to come get you if it was such an emergency? I know the U.R.M. shuttles aren't flashy, but come on…"
"There were no U.R.M. transports available. I know, it's ridiculous," said Poe.
"Why not?" she asked, bewildered.
"Fuck knows. That's an entirely different mystery," he said, shrugging.
Rey sighed again. "Okay, anyway… that's all I know. Start from the beginning. What was this troubling exchange you had?"
Poe looked at Ren, anxiously clutching his mother's arm, and wondered if he should be talking about this in front him. He wasn't a parent—he had no idea what kids could handle.
"After I lost you, Mister Simeon called everyone into his cottage," said Ren, taking the liberty to tell the tale himself. "We called you first, but we couldn't wake you up. We called daddy. He answered, but it wasn't… him. Then Temiri didn't answer his comlink. We were worried. We had to wait for Uncle Chewie to get there so we could leave, but we got here as fast as we could. Daddy was gone. We finally found Temiri at this weird underground place filled with scary people, and after a while… we escaped with Temiri."
Everyone was silent for a minute as they took in the abbreviated summary of events told through the eyes of a five-year-old boy. Rey looked down at the tiny but indomitable boy at her side, whose eyes had stared blankly into her as he recited the tale. She glanced back to the others, settling her gaze on Poe. "Is that pretty accurate?"
"Yeah, pretty much. There are some details he left out, but that's a pretty good summation."
Rey nodded her head, furrowing her brow. "I, uh, I know this may not be the most germane question, but whose idea was it to bring the kids?"
"Hey, they fucking stowed away, don't look at me!" blurted Poe, raising his arms defensively. Rey glanced at Finnie, who acknowledged his point with the subtlest of looks.
"Okay, so the six of you flew here to investigate, and you brought me with you. And where is Simeon? He stayed at the school?" she asked. No one answered. She looked at them, a sad acceptance transforming her expression. "So Simeon is…"
"He came here with us, but I think…" said Malfi, pausing, "I think Temiri… killed him."
Rey looked down at Ren, who'd begun trembling, silent tears on his face. She looked back at Malfi. "Are you sure?"
Malfi nodded. "I didn't hear it from him directly, but I think so. The place he was in… the people who took him… they had convinced him that you, that the Republic, you'd killed our families on Lothal and taken us to serve the Republic. He wouldn't let me call him 'Temiri"… I think they called him… 'Whuhai'… He said you'd enslaved us for our power…"
Rey pursed her lips. "He believed that?"
Malfi nodded sadly. "Ben had—well, the thing controlling Ben—had cut Temiri's arm off, and that, well…"
"—Was a traumatic enough experience that he was susceptible to lies and manipulation," said Rey, finishing her thought for her. Malfi nodded. "But you were able to convince him otherwise?"
"I did, eventually," said Malfi. "But before we got to him… I think he made some… mistakes," she choked on the last word as she said it.
Poe crossed his arms and shifted his weight from one leg to the other. "The guy who came for us did say something about… 'making you a murderer as well.'… The 'as well' really stuck with me."
"Me too," said Malfi. "Plus, he… he had Simeon's lightsaber on him…" she added, eyes downcast. "Before then, in the moment when I finally convinced him that we loved him… he started bawling. He wouldn't say why, but I could feel his regret. Now I'm… I'm sure."
Finnie had been silent this whole time. She was still trying to wrap her head around not just the events themselves, but about what was happening to her. Now that she was beginning to understand, she realized she'd felt his regret too.
Rey's eyes were steely. There were so many threads to this story that she needed to explore, but right now, her focus was on understanding the events as the group had experienced them. "How did you escape?" asked Rey.
"He'd taken Malfi away to talk to her privately—to try to turn her, I guess, but that failed…" explained Poe, rambling just a little, "then they came back with a plan for him to let us out in the middle of the night," said Poe, "but before he could, this Sith guy came and stopped him. He was going to kill us all, but Finnie… uh, Finnie…" Poe trailed off, lacing his fingers behind his neck and sighing. "Finnie, can you tell this part?"
Finnie looked up, and exchanged glances with everyone before settling her eyes on Rey. Rey looked at her approvingly.
"It's finally awake, isn't it?" she said, beaming.
Finnie looked quizzically back at her. "You knew?"
"We suspected, yes. When did it happen?"
Malfi was rapt with attention. She'd had no idea her friend was Force sensitive.
"I'm not sure, exactly," said Finnie. "I think… I could hear Temiri's crystal, and that's when I… started feeling unsettled."
"You can hear it too?" exclaimed Malfi.
Finnie nodded.
"That's amazing," said Rey. "I've never heard of three people bonding with the same crystal before."
"I'd heard it the first time I saw it, but I think I must have also heard it calling to me when we were searching for him," said Finnie. "We followed it back to the Hall of Records, where we found Temiri. And right as that guy was about to kill him, something inside me just… clicked. The saber was there, inside that guy's robe, and it just came into my hand. I used what you taught me," she added, looking at Malfi, who stood up a little straighter. "It's just like a wave, as you said."
"And you killed the Black Dragon who was holding you hostage?" asked Rey.
Finnie pursed her lips and nodded. "Well, sort of," she said, correcting herself as she thought back on the exact events. "I cut his arm off. Then Temiri killed him with Simeon's saber."
"Is this the same man who had spoken of Zrirus?"
Poe stepped forward suddenly, away from the wall. "You think he…"
"—He was the one who cast me into the void, yes. Killing him must have been what woke me up."
Ren sat up and pulled away from his mother to stare adoringly at Finnie. "You saved mama?"
Finnie blushed, looking down at her hands in her lap. "Ren, it's not as if I did it alone. I think we can share credit." She glanced up at Rey. "Stowing away was his idea, you know."
Rey looked down at her son. "My hero." Ren smiled proudly up at her.
—
A short time later, Rey insisted they all needed some real rest, so it was time for everyone to pick a bunk and go to sleep. She would set up the autopilot to put them in orbit around Dendrokaan when they arrived, and after everyone had gotten the rest they desperately needed, they would regroup from there. Before she set the autopilot, she wanted to get the kids put to bed.
Ren insisted that Rey stay with him until he fell asleep, but once his head hit the pillow, he was out in under a minute. Malfi settled down in the bunk just above Ren's, and Finnie took the top of the triplet of bunks. Poe volunteered to sleep on the bench adjacent to Finn's bunk in the lounge, and Rey, Chewie, and Temiri would take the other triple bunk.
Chewbacca had put himself to bed already, but Rey had been delayed by seeing to the kids' comfort. Once Ren was securely asleep, she bid good night to the girls sleeping in the bunks above him and dimmed the lights in their compartment. From there, she looked briefly in on her own compartment to see Chewbacca snoring soundly in the top bunk. Both remaining beds were empty—Temiri had yet to show himself since he'd retreated to the back of the freighter. Rey was intensely worried about him, but for now, she was too preoccupied with other concerns to see to him, as much as that pained her to admit. Rey sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose, shaking off a tension headache.
As she rounded the corner from the sleeping quarters to the lounge, she discovered Poe there, leaning over Finn, whispering to him with his hand on his forehead. At her approach, Poe abruptly pulled away and cleared his throat, awkwardly looking for his blankets to get his bed ready.
"We need to talk," said Rey, flatly.
"Yeah, I was just checking up on him. He's stable, he just took a good knock to the head when we got zapped by—"
"—Poe, as much as I care about you and Finn, and Temiri, and fifteen other people and things, I just don't give a fuck about that right now. You can keep your excuses for what you were doing. I have other, more pressing drama that I need to discuss with you. Cockpit, now," she added tersely.
Sheepishly, Poe quit his nervous fiddling and followed her to the cockpit. When they arrived, she waited for him to cross the threshold before sealing the cockpit door and slumping herself down into the pilot's seat, then gestured curtly for him to take the copilot's chair.
Once they were seated, he looked at her expectantly, waiting for her to get things started. He felt like he was in trouble, but since he wasn't sure what he'd done wrong, he wasn't sure what he could do that was right either.
Rey took a second to just look at him, then she exhaled deeply, and slumped even further into her chair. "I'm sorry, Poe, I don't mean to snap at you. I've just been keeping it together for a very long time, and if I don't do something selfish pretty soon, I might crack this freighter in two."
Poe nodded sympathetically. "How can I help?"
"My son may be traumatized. Temiri is traumatized, and god help me, I can't be there for him right now. Simeon is dead, Finn is unconscious. There's a school full of orphans left unguarded for all I know. I have a million things that went wrong while I was trapped in wherever-the-fuck that I need to worry about, but I need to take just one, single, fucking second to ask about something I couldn't talk about in front of my son."
She paused to catch her breath, letting some of the red drain from her face. He waited.
She had a tortured look on her face. Her lower lip quivered as she readied herself to speak. "Where is Ben?"
Poe wished he knew. He moved his mouth, but no words came. He didn't know what to say.
"I can't feel him. I don't know where he is, and I can't tell even if he is. We're bonded by the Force, and without him, I… it hurts, Poe. What the fuck happened to him?"
Poe grimaced. "I don't know, Rey."
"You said you talked to him, but it wasn't him. So who the fuck was it? What did you learn after you got here?"
Poe shook his head, mouthing more unspoken words as he struggled to answer. "We… We think he got taken over…"
"By whom? Was it Anakin?"
"We don't know. But whoever took him over, he attacked Temiri. Chopped his arm off and kicked him out of a third story window. The Black Dragons took over from there…"
Rey steepled her hands under her chin and wrung them together, her face reddening once more. This was the event that Malfi had eluded to that sent Rey's mind into a well-concealed tailspin. "Ben is being controlled… by something… and that thing mutilated and tortured Temiri…"
"That appears to be the shape of it, yes," said Poe, knowing full well how lame that sounded.
"And now that thing is nowhere to be found?"
Poe shook his head. "We know he left the planet. The Port Authority confirmed he took their Mark II and took off with it without settling his bill."
"Sorry, but I don't give a shit about the bill," she said flatly. Poe shrank into his seat, regretting his choice of details to bother having included. She thought for a moment. "Tracking device?" she asked with a raised eyebrow.
He shook his head again. "Not standard."
She nodded. "Fuck."
An interminable silence followed as Rey stared blankly out through the cockpit window. Poe watched her, wishing he could read her thoughts. Wishing he could do anything.
"It's fine. Go to bed," she ordered, without altering her gaze.
Poe nodded, and slowly peeled himself out of the seat. He ambled morosely over to the door release and pressed it, breaking the silence with a gritty, unapologetic swish. He lifted a foot to leave.
"Shut the door behind you," she barked in parting.
He nodded glumly and did as she commanded him. As the door closed shut behind him, he exhaled a bellyful of air he'd been repressing and stared out into the hallway that would take him back to Finn. As he contemplated his future, his relatively bright future, his ears detected the muted but unmistakable wail of a woman finally giving in to her misery. He covered his hands over his ears, shut his eyes tightly, and began the first steps away from her towards the lounge. Even after a shot of whisky and a hefty dose of hypnocane, he couldn't dull the sound of her screaming inside his head.
—
Finnie knew she wasn't the only one awake. Ren was asleep in seconds, and Malfi didn't lag far behind him, but Finnie couldn't silence her mind long enough to find respite. Through the even humming of the Falcon's systems, she could hear the muffled sound of voices from elsewhere in the freighter, but she couldn't make them out. In spite of not being able to understand them, she couldn't bring herself to tune them out either.
She rolled onto her side and stared out into the hall, but felt something digging into her thigh. The saber, she remembered. Temiri's lightsaber had been strapped to her hip since returning to the Falcon. She'd forgotten about it. She'd gotten used to its hum.
Reaching down, she unclipped the weapon from her utility belt and studied it under the low light. It was beautiful. It had smooth, simple lines from base to tip, a modest activation switch, and little else. Other than a bore ring at either end to enhance its structural integrity, it was free of any of the sorts of superfluous adornments that typified so many of the specimens she'd studied in Jedi lore. Honestly, she didn't know where those Jedi got their raw materials from that they would bear some of those markings, which meant they must have been intentional. Temiri had forgone all of the needless embellishments that, frankly, just got in the way. It was exactly the sort of weapon she'd have crafted, had it been hers to design.
As she lay there admiring the weapon, she felt like it was calling to her. Was it her imagination? As she looked at it, its hum seemed to pulse at her, as if to say, No, this isn't your imagination. I need your attention. Finnie eyed it quizzically, unsure how to answer its call. Was she supposed to get up? Maybe Malfi would hear it too, and she could ask her what it meant.
The kyber grew louder, more insistent. There was an urgency there that compelled Finnie out of bed. Anxiously throwing her legs over the side of her bunk, she carefully stepped down to the floor, trying hard not to disturb her sleeping companions. Weapon in hand, she left the sleeping compartment and tiptoed toward the lounge.
Her father was sleeping quietly, alone in the lounge. From here, Finnie could tell that the conversation she was hearing was coming from her left, toward the cockpit. Was that where she needed to go?
The kyber buzzed at her: No.
Tentatively, she edged her way back toward the cargo bay, to where Temiri had retreated earlier. The kyber urged her on, getting louder and louder. She scurried through the repair bay and into the engineering station, but found nothing. Opening the aft bulkhead door in the cargo bay, she found Temiri, awake and kneeling in the cargo lift, an ignited lightsaber in his hands, poised to disembowel himself.
No! Her mind screamed. Time slowed, and Finnie reacted on instinct, reaching out to pull the lightsaber out of his grasp and into her eager palm. As time resumed, she gasped for air, realizing she now held a lightsaber in each hand.
Temiri looked up at her miserably. His kyber had abandoned him for her, and now here she was, robbing him of his only immediate opportunity for release. "Please, just let me end it," he begged.
"Not on your life," she retorted, clipping the new saber to her belt.
He almost chuckled at her bizarre choice of words, but instead sank defeatedly into the floor. His eyes were puffy and red. "What are you doing here?" he asked calmly.
"Your kyber. It… made me come here," she said.
"I guess it doesn't think I've suffered enough," he replied. "Now that you've come and robbed me of my peace, what do you intend to do?"
She studied him. She barely knew him, this boy, this young man before her. Their lives had run parallel for five years, but seldom did they cross paths. Like her own youth, accelerated and abbreviated, she'd seen him graduate to manhood and burn out in far too short a time. What he'd been through… would he be able to overcome it?
"Speak or leave, don't just stand there gawking at me like some captive rancor," he barked.
Well, she wasn't going to leave. She didn't know what to talk about, so she decided to go with honest inquiry. "Why were you going to do that?" she asked.
He exhaled abruptly and shut his eyes, turning his head slightly away. "Because I hate myself. Will you leave now?"
"Why do you hate yourself?"
"Is this twenty questions? If I answer all twenty, will you get the fuck out? I hate myself because I'm a piece of shit who betrayed the only people in the galaxy who ever showed him any kindness, and killed his mentor. I crushed his trachea with my mind and watched him suffocate at my feet. I'd have murdered you and all the others if Malfi hadn't talked me out of it. I'm a fucking monster, and I don't deserve to live."
"You were manipulated," she said.
"Then I'm too stupid to live, same difference."
"You can help people," she pressed.
At that, he actually laughed. "I can help people? Maybe you're too stupid to live…"
"No, I'm serious. You're really powerful. You could use your gifts to help people who can't help themselves."
"I kill people who can't help themselves. I kill people who can help themselves. I kill people who try to help me. Get the fuck out of here."
"Listen, if you die…" she started, unsure how to continue from here. What she'd started with him, she wasn't sure she could finish. The Force had brought her here. She took a breath, and trusted that the Force knew what it was doing.
"If you die, you'll never be able to right the wrongs that you've committed."
"I'm not equipped to right diddly shit," he retorted.
"So you're just going to give up, without even trying? Wouldn't you rather die knowing you'd at least tried to make some recompense?"
Temiri sighed. "I don't know how to un-murder a person…"
She took a step closer to him. "You did something you regret deeply, I know. I can feel it. I can feel it, Temiri. But you know what? That regret means there's still hope for you."
He didn't say anything. His mind flitted back to his early lessons, on the Light Side versus the Dark Side. Something Ben had said about regret…
"If you were truly a monster," she said, "it wouldn't faze you, what you've done. That you sit here in agony right now tells me that you deserve to live. You deserve a chance to make things right."
He'd begun silently crying again. "I don't know how to do that. I'm a remorseful monster, but I'm still a monster. I liked the power I felt, Finnie. Feeling that energy course through my veins? Lighting you up like I did? It felt good at the time. I had some regret later, but only for Malfi. Because…" he choked, "because I felt bad that I'd hurt her, when all I wanted to do was… make her like me!" He struggled to get through those last words, then began bawling in earnest.
Finnie edged closer and sat down next to him, scooping his upper body off the ground and hugging him while he sobbed.
"Can you imagine that?" he cried. "I was going to turn her into… into me! Oh god, oh fuck! She'd have been better off dead!"
Finnie rocked him while he cried. She'd rocked her father once, after mom died. She hadn't been bred for consolement, but somehow, for her, this was the role that too often seemed to fit her.
"I don't know how to be good!" he howled. "It's not in me! I've always felt like I was faking it, putting on an act of goodness! Everything in my blood is pushing me to be a selfish, mean, ignorant asshole! I should've died long ago! I should've let my father beat me to death! That's the only way it ever stops!"
With that, Finnie's sympathy fell away, replaced with pure indignance. "Everything in your blood? That's the stupidest thing you've said so far. You think it's in your blood to be a monster?"
Temiri didn't answer, but she could tell she had his attention.
"Have you forgotten who you're talking to? I'm a fucking clone, Temiri! And not just any clone! A clone of a fucking… supervillain! You asshole! You think I'm fucking doomed to instigate fucking genocide because it's in my blood?! You stupid, fucking idiot!"
She'd stopped rocking him, and he'd stopped crying. The two of them sat there, just letting their hearts beat, their blood cool, their breathing even out.
"Don't act so fucking powerless," she said, after a while. "Like you have no choice in the matter at all. My dad was fucking brainwashed to be a killer—but he isn't. Phasma was a killer, but she wasn't Force sensitive. And I am—apparently—so just fuck off. 'It's in my blood…' he says… What utter bantha shit…"
"Are you done?" he asked, looking up at her.
She looked down at the pathetic, one-armed man she was supporting, and met him in his beautiful blue eyes. "Yes, I'm done. Are you done acting like a fucking moron?"
"I'm not sure," he said, sniffling. "For now, maybe."
"Well, good. Now, you missed these instructions, because you pussied out and left the room like a fucking baby, but we were told to get some sleep. You have a bunk waiting for you, so get up."
"Do I have to sleep in there? I just… I'm not sure I'm ready…"
"Ready to what? Sleep?"
"No, to… to be with… everyone else."
"That's stupid. It's a fucking bunk. Sleep in it. If you want to draw attention to yourself, sleep in here. If you want to be left alone, go to the bunk."
"Can I… Can I at least have the saber back?" he asked.
"You want your lightsaber back? Then you're for sure going to the bunks. I'm not leaving it here with you."
Temiri sighed, but relented. "Fine, I'll go to the bunks." He shifted his weight off of her and sat up, contemplating pulling himself the rest of the way off the floor.
Finnie stood up. "Can I help you up?" she asked, offering him her hand.
He looked up at her, then down to her hand. He once again reached for something with the limb that wasn't there, moving awkwardly on the floor as his other limbs acted as though his arm were actually attached. "Yes, please help me," he said, shifting his weight again.
She reached lower down and took his hand as he removed it from the floor where it had been stabilizing his upper body. Pulling him up, he was as tall as she was.
"The saber?" he prompted, as she was turning to leave the cargo bay.
"Oh, right. Here," she said, offering him the saber he'd constructed.
"No, not that one. The other one," he said, gesturing to the one on her belt.
"Simeon's? Not yours?" she asked with some surprise.
"Yeah, that one," he said. "I just… I think I prefer it… for now. Besides, that one…" he said, gesturing to the blue lightsaber he had constructed with Malfi's help, a lifetime ago, "seems to fit you."
She looked at the saber in her hand. "I do like it," she admitted. "You did a very good job on it."
"I had Malfi to help me," he said.
"Mmm," acknowledged Finnie, unclipping Simeon's yellow lightsaber from her belt and offering it to him. "Just don't do anything stupid with this. You have too much to do."
"So you say," he sighed. "Look, I promise, I will run all my future decision making by you first. I can tell you're not a yes-man."
"No, that's true. I'm only too happy to tell you if you fuck up."
"Obviously," he said.
"Let's go," she said, gesturing toward the bulkhead door.
As they wound their way back through the dim compartments on their way to the bunks, they passed the lounge, and an utterly comatose Poe. "Shit, check on him," said Finnie. "That's an alarming amount of hypnocane it looks like he took."
Temiri walked over to where Poe was sleeping and lifted the back of his hand up to Poe's nostrils, then checked his pulse. "Seems fine," said Temiri. "Pulse is low, but steady and strong."
"I guess he knows his limit," mused Finnie.
"Everyone has one," he said, by way of agreement. "She certainly does," he added, jutting his head toward the cockpit and its miserable occupant.
"We'll help her, don't worry," said Finnie.
"It's that, or die."
