Luke half-carried the tired junker down the hallway, trying his best to prevent her falling over. By the looks of it, even with the little bit of energy he'd passed on to her, falling would mean not getting up.

"Whrreyeu…?" she slurred to him. Her vision was a fuzzy wall of red and brown.

"A friend. Now, don't talk, just - " Snap. Hisss. Green spike appearing from nowhere. A similar humming to that of the two black-clad assassins in the desert. The delayed report of a blaster. A yelp. A body hitting the floor. She did not question any of this.

The lightsaber went away.

"Artoo, how does it look up there?" Some buzzy wheepling of a droid over a communicator. "Understood, we're coming out now." Now to Rey: "Hurry. We don't have long."

The front door slid open, and Rey saw now that the sky was a churn. Red, blue, green thunder. Black clouds. And that magnic hum, she realized, had been persistent ever since she'd awakened.

A ship she recognized from Rebel holos shot down from the sky, gradually decelerated and pulled up a couple meters in front of them. Its parted wings gradually became two wholes.

The canopy popped open. A ladder folded from the hull itself. Rey's vision, as you can guess, was gradually clearing. The new figure shuffled with her over to it. They stopped a moment, as if he were trying to formulate the right plan. And failing.

Then:

"Get in. Artoo'll direct you from there, and don't fight it when you feel tired." He paused a moment, he began shuffling her a bit closer to the ladder. She understood, and gathered the strength in her arms to climb. Into the cockpit she went. So much equipment she'd never seen before, so many more she'd seen in odd places, like the gang barge. Her own "family's" skiff.

"Strap in," Luke told her. "It goes kinda fast." She nodded emptily, then started reaching around, trying to find the straps. Given time, she found the fabric strips that wrapped around her shoulders, and clipped them together. That'd be enough, she figured.

Luke shot a nod to his astromech. "May the Force be with you."

Droids don't have the Force, the R2 unit wheepled out. But he'd heard the rhetoric enough times to understand. The canopy closed. The fighter lifted, spread its wings and was off again, blowing Luke's black robes about himself.

He hoped he'd made the right decision, sending her off again like this. At least now she had Artoo with her.

He would finish his mission here alone, and signal for transport when he was done.

Signal now, his impulse told him. So he pulled the thing from his belt, signaled to the New Republic overhead.

"Jadder Wun to Jadder Squadron: My X-Wing's coming up, Artoo's carrying an injured civilian. I'll be needing transport, if any up there are interested."

"Jadder Foar to Jadder Wun: That's a negative on transport. We're - !" Silence. Brief signal loss. He cut his comms before they had a chance to get back to him.

He'd need to find some other way off Jakku. Like…

No. Even for a Jedi, no.

Part of him dryly wanted to think of it as an adventure - the kind he'd longed for back on Tatooine. That part of him was more or less dead, but it still popped up now and again. If he'd ever wanted to kill some conscripted child soldiers, now was the time.

He would head for the First Order base nearby.

With the usual powers you'd expect from a Jedi - and his own knowledge of this world's layout - it wasn't hard nor long to find. And they knew of the Jedi, ya, but not that he would show no remorse when cutting through them. At least not outwardly.

Compared to the small city of kilometers-high transmitter towers, the First Order base was small - just a couple bell-shaped buildings strung together with a system of tunnels. Not very mobile, but probably quickly accommodating of transport ships. And the hangar wasn't hard to see from the outside.

Ornithopters passed over his head a time or two, but with a wave of his hand they would pass by. The second time, he saw it was heading back to base.

They're pulling out their forces. I won't have that long.

That little voice again reminded him of why. He didn't like the idea at all.

Again, on impulse, he decided he would do everything he could to stop that, as if the idea had never occurred to him before. It certainly occurred to him now, though.

He came within twenty meters of the base when Terror Troopers were dispatched. As a sixth of the galaxy could personally attest to, the soldiers really did emulate the late Lord Vader uncannily. The stallers, the visils, even the unit commanders marked by the visible cybernetics and capes. But they had stolen that from Luke's own father and twisted it for their own purposes.

Once the green lightsaber came out, it didn't go away. Luke sure gave a good show when he had people to get through.

He was inside the base in nar time flat. More Terror Troopers and even a few non-masked Order officers. He'd give them all equal treatment.

The Darkness was strong here, perhaps as strong as on Korriban. Snoke. The Knights of Ren. Gone now. All the more sign that this lost ground was now disposable.

Another possibility, he hoped without seeing, would be to convince them all to abandon their posts and aid him in a mass exodus offworld. But that wasn't practical. And he didn't do much thinking once blaster bolts went flying.

He knew where the hangar was. He found it, started up one of the TIE Hexects, saw the controls were the same as the last TIE he'd stolen.

Luke blasted out of the First Order station and rigged the transmitter for Jadder Squadron frequencies.

"Jadder Squadron, Jadder Wun actual. Hexect on approach."

Static. "Roger that, Jadder Wun actual. We need your fancy tricks up here. Badly." End transmission.

He saw why, even as he broke the lowest layer of clouds. He'd seen the blasterfire from the ground.

Now it was everywhere - one big party and every warship in the galaxy was invited… Almost every, anyway. It always seemed different as a battle moved closer and closer to a planet. MonCal dreadnoughts went toe to toe with gestola Hexects and other TIEs. The Empire was sure quick to pull out, though; only a handful of Clawcraft remained, and none of them moved planetward.

He truly ceased to be a participant, becoming a witness as his hands followed each image in turn: hundreds of fighters on all sides. Unfortunately he was still the enemy to his allies - just another Terry space bug.

He moved like the speed of light, fast as any Clone Wars-era droid fighter, sometimes faster. When he fired, it wasn't a question of hitting based on aim; it was instead an absolute journey, like conduction of heat and magnicism.

The TIE/oz Hexect is a modular ship, meant to form greater objects - gestolii - when linked to other Hexects. The hexacomb wings could fold into any shape, link to any port, share energy and battle data through touch. When studying insectoid physiology (ants, or ormign), the xenophobic faction's main space fighter becomes ironic.

He joined Order gestolii several times, breaking the formations in swift enough fashion to line them up for swift execution, zipping out fast enough that it could be none other than Luke Skywalker. And he earned his surname, dancing, walking amongst the starpoints of cannons and explosions.

He saw the new Star Destroyer the instant before it fully emerged from hyperspace. He didn't know they now built them wider than they were long. And it was wider than the First Order's Eclipses, which admittedly were small compared to the old Executors. He'd seen files on this ship. It, too, would earn its title.


Rey was half-delirious the whole time she was aboard the X-Wing. She'd never been in such a tight space for so long before. And the droid flashing symbols across the main readout didn't seem to help, either. Some of the characters she'd seen many a time before, others like things she could remember yesterday and would be clueless to tomorrow.

"Greetings. I am R2-D2, and you're stuck in that cockpit until I get you to Coruscant."

Something about the droid's mannerspeak made Rey suddenly regretful. He and Charlie probably would've gotten along great.

"Who's Charlie?"

She didn't realize she'd said any of that out loud.

"A friend," she replied whisperingly. "Droid, like yout. Big, ugly dome and a fast bocker."

"Wun: computation astromechs always were the ugly ones. Too: I haven't heard Outerbase in years. I had a translator friend, would've gone nonks for you."

A bit of turbulence as she finished reading the words. She looked outside and saw the whole universe going Heldown. Turbolaser fire in the distance. Rey gripped the nearest hand-sized holders she could, gripped them hard.

"We'll have to head into that massive battle over there, if you don't mind. Hang on."

She didn't feel any of the pull, none of the usual yanks she felt whenever any of her family were at the helm. It was like the world outside was a flat screen turning itself for her best view.

And soon she saw what all the lightshow was. More cannons, more ships, more everything than she'd ever seen before in her miserable Jakkui life!

Now data flashed across that central screen without thought. It looked like several different writing systems running at once, all moving in different directions but managing to avoid one another with space to spare.

It sure was beautiful outside. She had to think again of the view from the planet below, and realized all at once that I'm finally free! I've left that miserable place behind once and for all! Despite it all she had to smile at that - possibly her first real smile in weeks, months, maybe even years.

The endless minor jerks of the ship became droning. Equipment hummed at just the right volume. The pain in her side and everywhere else subsided, and she found she was again being rapidly overtaken by exhaustion.

She fell asleep in the cockpit by the time the Supremacy dropped over the desert.