Florrum is a world of dry dust and ancient plateaus.
Rey has never quite gotten used to the way every horizon in the galaxy takes on a different shape. Jakku had the Carbon Ridge and a thousand others just like it; Takodana had forested mountains and waterfalls, a wide green span of possibility. D'Qar is misty, even now, humid at all times of the year, and she had spent a happy few hours wandering near the Resistance base, sketching the local wildlife. Each planet had only been the beginning of a path that would take her on a journey spanning from one tip of known space to the other, and both of the ones with green on them felt wondrous. As if she would never experience anything quite like it again.
This dust ball, though, doesn't inspire the same sense of awe.
"Just like old times," she tells herself as she fishes ration packs out of a drawer in her ship's tiny kitchen unit. It's not quite true—she never had anything so advanced as a kitchen unit before—but it's true enough. It has all the familiar elements: tasteless, nameless matter, providing only nutrition; her tassels, long, brushing against her calves with every movement; the sight of a desert lit under fading light, a sun crowning the planet's rim.
A dying star.
There are thousands of them out there. As night falls on Florrum, Rey can't help but clamber up the side of her ship and perch on top, her eyes watching the sky. Even as she lifts her comm to her mouth to record a message for General Organa, the majesty of the night captures her attention.
It feels... lonely. Like the darkness of high noon in a Star Destroyer, swinging across the vast expanse of the abyss with only a cable to cling to, your breath the only living sound in all the space.
"I'm en route to Dromund Kaas, General," she says to the comm. The message will be encoded and sent several star systems away. Where, exactly, she doesn't know—it's for both the Resistance's safety and hers should her connection to Kylo Ren spring up again, a preventative measure Leia came up with for both their sakes. "So far the trip has been smooth. Whether or not the relics are still there is anyone's guess, but all the spacers seem to agree that the planet is haunted. I'll report back in when I've learnt more. May the Force be with you."
There are clouds, here on Florrum. Jakku only clouded over when the X'us'Riia was imminent. But here, the clouds shift and broil—they're almost like angry wanderers, lost somewhere near the atmosphere, left behind long ago. Their movement shutters the heavens, bathes her in the thin light of dusk.
Planet upon planet, star upon star, celestial body upon celestial body. Every single one is within her reach now. Nothing is beyond her means when she's with the Resistance, accompanying them on their travels, undertaking their missions and fighting in their war—a war she's only barely had time to process.
Rey makes a quiet noise in the back of her throat, hand drifting to her shoulder. Covering the wound there had only served to remind her of its presence. Finn had asked about it the first moment they had to themselves, before Rose woke, and she'd stammered something about the Supremacy and falling shrapnel, she'd tried to infiltrate, to discover if there had been any hidden knowledge the First Order was secreting away about the Jedi—
"You're incredible with the Force, Rey," Finn told her, something too knowing in his eyes for her liking, "but you're a terrible liar."
"I don't know what you mean," she snipped back.
Finn, to his credit, wasn't terribly unsettled. "I don't know what happened up there, Rey. Won't ask unless you want me to. We all have our secrets—you know mine. Some of them. Whatever happened, your arm..." Reaching for just under her elbow, pausing and gesturing at her upper arm instead, he mimed grasping for his other hand. "It looks almost deliberate, to me. Like someone... well. Did anything happen?"
What he really meant, with the blue of hyperspace flickering across their faces and the prospect of a very long trip ahead of them, was who did this to you?
Kylo Ren, she thought, in a way, but the name stung too much. Then: Ben Solo. Even further: A man who was once a boy, whose future I saw some kind of shard of. Was I wrong, Finn?
But even if she'd been in a time and place where admitting that was safe, she never would have spoken the words out loud. She shrugged instead. Finn seemed disappointed, but true to his word, he let it pass. Instead Rey learned all about the cute Resistance mechanic that saved his life.
She's happy for him. Really.
What she is not happy about is the trespasser skulking about near her ship. She can't hear any movement, and the terrain around here is as still as a desert planet can get, but she can sense whoever it is. Since Luke's "instruction", she's grown used to practicing increasing her awareness of the Force whenever she has the opportunity. What that has yielded for her now is the knowledge that they are somewhere behind and to the left of her, which also just so happens to be where the loading ramp to her grubby, ancient YKL-37R Nova Courier is located.
Rey keeps her posture as loose and fluid as she can. Her staff, habitually slung across her back, sits at an odd angle against the knobs of her spine. The old 'saber hangs at her hip. This isn't easy, it never is, but she has honed the art that is patience.
You don't survive long in the desert without learning when to pick your moment.
She hears footsteps, light and faint. They pause. Then, with the memory of the X'us'riia in her bones and the fading light on her face, Rey summons her strength and leaps back, flipping in the air and landing behind her visitor, staff in hand and set against their neck.
"What do you want," she demands more than she asks. It's somewhere between flat and openly threatening; the Rey that had learned not to trust strangers is lingering in this place.
The man she's threatening has the gall to chuckle. To laugh! "I see, I see," he says pleasantly, as if being held captive with a weapon near his cranium is a run-of-the-mill occurrence. "So this is what the Jedi have to offer these days, eh? A scrappy desert rat!"
Rey grits her teeth. "What," she says again, "do you want?"
"Using force, but not the Force," he muses. "Fallen on hard times, have we now?"
"Give me one reason why I ought not knock you out and toss you off this cliff," she growls, pressing her staff against his throat.
He coughs. "Well. I think you'll be needing the code if you'll want to get that tracker off your ship."
"Or I could just knock it off. I've got practice."
"Not these trackers, little Jedi. They have advanced technology these days—you'll be hard-pressed to find anything with more suction power than one of these!"
With a scowl, she divests him of his two visible blasters and steps back. There's no good reason to believe a pirate, which he so clearly is, but at least he'll be forced to waste time going for a different weapon if he tries anything. "Fine, then. Clearly you've done this for a reason. What are you after?"
"Some manners would be nice, for one. Don't you Jedi have a, ah, what do you call it..." He scratches his chin in thought. "A code of etiquette?"
"Give me your name and I'll give you mine," she grumps. Whoever this man is, she's only going to regard him as a karking nuisance.
He tilts his hat in a mocking gesture of propriety. "Hondo Ohnaka. At my service... and no one else's!"
"Lovely," Rey deadpans. "I'm Rey. I've asked multiple times what your business is here and I'm not about to ask again."
"Ah, Rey. I have a business proposition for you. You are a Jedi, I am a pirate. We're the only two types of people in the world that don't fear places like Dromund Kaas, and I have it on good authority that relics are going for a pretty credit in certain markets right now. Something about old things waking after a long sleep... and a new Jedi walking this galaxy. One with the power to destroy men long believed to be untouchable." He paces in a small circle, a thoughtful moue planted on his face, then turns to her with his arms spread wide. "Why, just imagine the possibilities! If we were to team up, for instance, and take on a temple or two on Dromund Kaas, you might just find your relic... and I may just find a fine fortune."
She considers this for a long moment, her jaw set and her lips thin with displeasure. It would be a far easier task to take the man down and leave him for those nasty-looking raptors she's spotted in the distance, but Hondo clearly knows exactly what a Jedi is—well enough to insult her capabilities as one—and pirates are a disgustingly predictable lot, in the sense that the only thing you can trust them with is that they can't be trusted in the first place.
Rey knows a thing or two about working with brigands that you absolutely do not trust under any circumstance. One of the only things that stands out the way her parents leaving had is the sight of Devi and Strunk taking off with the 690 long freighter she'd painstakingly pieced back together on that flimsy promise of funds and camaraderie.
(Not that she had much trusted the idea of camaraderie from two known fools in the first place. Maybe she had wanted it—but wanting is different from trusting, and Rey is a fool as well, but not fool enough to keep deceiving herself about the deep ache in her bones, in the base of her spine. It goes beyond want. And that, she knows, is perhaps the most dangerous thing she has had to reckon with in all her twenty standard years.)
"...Fine." She turns abruptly and stalks over to the loading ramp, the unwelcome memory further darkening a mood that hadn't had much hope of turning lighter in the first place.
Hondo turns and catches up to her with a jaunty step. For a pirate, he certainly seems fond of accessories that jangle and bounce and alert anyone within a twenty-meter span of his position. "We have a deal, then!"
"We might have a deal, but I have just been through a twenty-standard hour flight and I am going to rest," Rey snaps, whirling to face him with her feet on the loading ramp. "You stay outside. We'll leave in the morning."
He holds his hands up, a placating gesture that accomplishes about nil. "Worry not, my dear Jedi, I understand. We'll want to be in fine form, won't we?"
"Don't touch my ship or make any other modifications. I will know."
She slams the button to close the ramp and tries not to reflect on how the more things change, the more some things stay the same.