"You're late, Dameron," General Organa says, and she sounds tired, but there's fondness in her eyes. Poe has always thought of her as a mother figure, though he's never said anything about it- doesn't dare say anything about it now, not after what happened to her son. He thinks she knows, though.
"Had trouble getting out of bed this morning," he replies easily, taking his seat next to Jess Pava. It is the truth, and he had waited close to half an hour after his alarm went off to wake Rey, because she looked so peaceful and damn if he doesn't want her to always be peaceful like that, unworried, unafraid.
His squadron sits with him for the mission brief. General Organa and her husband are there, because they always are during the mission briefs- Skywalker isn't there, and Poe is grateful for that, because Jedi Master or no, General Organa's sister or no, he isn't entirely sure that he could keep himself from hitting the man.
Rey's explained it to him and Finn both- it's a complicated emotional mess, and she needs to be the one to work things out with her father, and Poe, don't get upset because of me-- and sure, the guy had assumed she'd be safe, but he's seen the scars on Rey's body, he knows how she hoards food in her quarters because I need to ration this, Poe, what if it runs out, he knows that Finn was the first person to properly hug her in fifteen years. And knowing all that, he can't not be pissed off.
But Skywalker isn't here, so his issues with the man are irrelevant, and he focuses his attention on the briefing.
They wake up again, a little while later and a little bit before the alarm Poe has set for them goes off. She's still wearing the same clothes she wore all day yesterday, and her quarters are two blocks away and they don't have that much time, but Finn just tosses her one of his shirts and Poe's leather jacket and a brush for her hair.
Rey gets the tangles out while Finn hunts down his own clothes, nimbly does her hair up in a single bun instead of three. Finn's shirt is too big on her, Poe's jacket even bigger, but she wraps herself in the warm fabrics and breathes in the smell of grease and motor oil and feels better than she had the night before. She feels... drained, now, but she'll take it to feeling like an open wound someone rubbed sand in.
They hurry out from their quarters and off to the shipyards in the wee hours of the morning, the sky only just starting to turn gray with the coming dawn, mist still clinging to the trees and the ground, and Poe is there in his orange pilot's jumpsuit, standing with the rest of his squadron. Leia is there, as always, to shake their hands and see them off.
Poe lights up when he sees them, ignores whistles behind him as he jogs across the tarmac (though BB-8's whistle from the back of his X-Wing is more excited than teasing), wraps them both in a hug.
"Jacket suits you," he says with a wry grin.
Rey smiles back as best she can, quashing the worry inside of her that says this is just another person who won't come back. His hugs are like a blanket, warm and soft and love-care-safe, and she focuses on that instead. "Don't make us lead a rescue mission for you, Dameron."
"Who, me? I'd never need a rescue mission."
"I beg to differ," Finn says, and they all laugh. "Good luck, man. Fly safe."
"Will do. It's only reconnaissance, scouting out potential areas for future bases. I'll be back before you know it!"
They're interrupted by Pava - "Whenever you lovebirds are finished...!" - and they reply, almost at exactly the same time, "Not lovebirds!" and that just sets them off laughing again. But Poe needs to leave, and the half-dozen X-Wings take flight in a perfect V formation, and Finn and Rey watch until the Xs fade to dots fade to foggy sky.
"Breakfast?" Finn asks.
Rey nods. But first-
"Leia?"
Leia turns, and her smile is kind, her smile is always kind, and Rey isn't sure how she keeps that kindness after everything. She's heard the stories. "Luke's quarters are down the hall from mine, and Mara has her own next to his, if you want to talk to them."
If, if, and that's part of the problem, isn't it?
"Thank you."
Breakfast comes first, if only because it's too early for any heavy conversation, and she still feels tired. Finn takes her hand, and their fingers lace together, and it's early enough that no one is in line at the mess hall and they can take their time picking what they want to eat.
They pile a plate high with pancakes and some sweet syrupy something that Rey thinks is made from fruit, and a cup of actual fruit, and two chilled water bulbs, and settle down at a table with the plate between them and tuck in. It's baffling how much food is just there, available for anyone to eat regardless of how much work they've done or how well they've done it. It's baffling how much food gets thrown away at each meal- it almost makes Rey sick, when she thinks of Jakku and the jut of her bones and the hunger gnawing away at her insides, so she saves what she doesn't eat and eats what she can't save.
Between the two of them, though, they clear the whole plate, and she feels better after having eaten, after talking with Finn. From the mess hall they go their separate ways, Finn to assist in medical and Rey to-
-well, to do something.
She knows she isn't the kind of person to run from her problems, despite family history, but she has to talk herself into going further into the base and seeking out the two solar flares in the Force that are Mara Jade and Luke Skywalker. Before she succeeds in that, she fixes some transport engines, helps a radar technician with some trouble, eats lunch with Finn, works on the Falcon-
Right, okay, this isn't helping anything.
Rey casts her mind out, brushing over the base, drifting and hovering about until she finds Mara, mixed in a swirl of lights and movement- the Falcon's chrono says that she's worked up until dinnertime, and most of the base is slowly working their way through the mess hall. She isn't hungry, but she stands all the same, brushes her hair from her face, scrubs most of the grease from her hands, changes into a set of clothes that aren't filthy from repairs.
It's weird, having different clothes to wear every day.
She ducks back into her quarters, very briefly, gathers up some schematics and her datapad and Poe's jacket -– it's not precisely cold at night, on this planet, but it can get cool and windy. Hurries out, forces herself to put one foot after the other after the other until she slips into the chaos of the mess hall in the evening, bright noise and talking and laughter.
Mara has somehow managed to get a table to herself, a tiny square just big enough for her and a few other people tucked into the corner. Either no one's noticed her or no one has the courage to go sit with her, but whatever reason there is doesn't matter to Rey. The table is otherwise empty, which means she has room to sit down, and her mother looks over with a crooked kind of smile.
"Hello, Rey," she says softly.
"Hi," Rey says. Fidgets. "I had, um. Ideas. Was wondering if you could take a look?"
The crooked smile blossoms into something brighter, younger, and Mara spears a piece of fruit on her fork. "Give me a moment to finish eating, and we'll find somewhere that's quiet."
"Okay. Thank you."
"It's not a problem." A pause. "Have you eaten?"
"Wasn't hungry."
It's the truth, at least, because she still isn't used to three full meals a day, and her stomach still protests when she eats something too rich or too sweet or too spiced. She doesn't say all that- the conversation-turned-emotional-mess from the night before had only just covered how she grew up on Jakku and Luke had exiled himself and what had happened with Starkiller, and she'd avoided mentioning all of the hungry and cold nights, the injuries- she doesn't want to bring it up, not yet, and she doesn't want to ruin this moment, to take away the smile from Mara's face.
Mara eyes her with a scrutinizing gaze, then pushes over a cup of vegetables and half the bread on her plate. "You're skinnier than your father was when I met him, and that's saying something."
Grandpa said he was short, she thinks, but doesn't say- I knew her, when I was Vader, and she knows that Leia doesn't like any mention of Grandpa and thinks Mara might not either.
"Thank you," she says again, and she isn't sure what else to add.
They both finish quickly, Rey out of habit and Mara due to the fact that she was almost finished when Rey sat down, and then they duck out into the hall and out the base and back towards the shipyards yet again.
Shipyards are a good place for thinking, Rey decides.
She trails along behind and a little bit to the left, looking at the way Mara's hair catches the sunset, turning into a halo of flames about her. She wants to think that it was like that on Yavin, at the Temple- but now, with so much time between her and the past, she's never sure which of her thoughts are memories and which are dreams, crafted in order to comfort her. She isn't sure how to ask.
"They've checked the Jade Sabre for bugs and trackers," Mara explains, punching in a keycode and walking up the ramp that lowers down. "Finally going to let me work on fixing her. You're- welcome to help, if you want."
Even after the First Order got its hands on the ship, it's still an elegant design, sleek and narrow and probably very fast, with the right pilot at the helm. It's better than any ship she's ever seen before, if she's being honest, if only because it's unlike any ship she's ever seen before, and she's seen a lot of ships.
"What model is it?"
"Custom-built," Mara replies, and Rey can hear the smile in her voice. "Your father built it as a wedding present, after I crashed the old one to get us into a complex we needed to infiltrate."
That sounds like an interesting story. That sounds like a really interesting story.
"I can tell you more about it later- there's a table in the galley, and I'm curious to see what you've got there."
Right. Stuff.
If there's one thing Rey is good at, it's mechanics. If there's one thing Rey is bad at, it's conversing with people, but when she's conversing about mechanics, the two kind of cancel out, sort of.
So they sit down at the table, and Rey takes out her datapad and her notes and her scraps of ideas and spreads them all out, pushing the papers around until they fall into a vaguely coherent order, tapping the datapad's screen until the hologram she wants comes up -– she's not as good with the 3D designs as a lot of other people are on base, but she's working on it, and it makes it easier to see exactly how parts will fit together.
"Grandpa says that there's a planet with crystals not far from the base," she says when she's finished. Mara is looking over the designs curiously. "A few systems over, it might take me a couple of days to get there and back, if I'm allowed to go. Jedi are supposed to build their own sabers, aren't they?"
"This is double-bladed," she says, tapping a finger on a rough outline of the saber, both blades sketched out to show their size in comparison to the hilt. "If you're only using one crystal, they'd be thinner, smaller."
"I designed an amplifier, hold on, it'-s- here, if I wire that into the emitter matrix, it should extend the reach of the blade..."
Rey is very good at talking about mechanics.
They pour over designs, and Mara makes suggestions or points out a mistake or asks for clarification on a footnote, and when she asks if she can call Luke in Rey says yes and refuses to think about the backlash- it goes well, surprisingly, rather quiet, but quiet is a welcome change from the night before. Luke and Mara must have spoken at some point during the day while Rey was- well, avoiding them, because there isn't even a lingering tension in the Force around them.
The construction of sabers is supposed to be something unique to each Jedi, the designs not shared with another soul- that was what Grandpa said about the old Jedi Order, anyway. Rey doesn't think she cares much for them, and she certainly doesn't consider herself a member, so she does what she wants.
She crawls into bed next to Finn and folds up into a little ball under the covers, and their fingers lace together.
"Talk with them?" he asks.
"Yes," she says. "Went better."
"Good." He squeezes her hand. "Heard from Pava who heard it from Snap who heard it from a mechanic that there's gonna be ice cream in the mess hall tomorrow."
"What's ice cream?"
"Dunno, but she was pretty excited about it. Figured you and I could go check it out."
"Love to. After sleep, though."
"After sleep," he agrees. "'Night, Rey."
"Goodnight, Finn."
Ice cream, as it turns out, is magical.
She starts work on the lightsaber. She tinkers with the Falcon, occasionally joined by someone- anyone, really, she's had visits from Han, Leia, Chewbacca, Mara, Luke, Finn, Jess, BB-8- and speaking of BB-8, he seems to have spread his love of her to the other droids on base, because they start to show up, too. She tries new foods with Finn. She learns how to talk to her parents again- doesn't call them Mama and Papa, doesn't know if she ever will, but they're all trying, and that's the best that they can do. She sits in on meetings with the Resistance leaders and offers suggestions and they listen. She talks with Grandpa and Grandma.
It's not easy, but she's used to not easy, nothing for her has been easy, and she's come to expect a challenge at every turn.
It's in another meeting, more informal than the others but no less important, and a technician hurries in saying that the base scanners are picking up a squadron of six ships coming out of hyperspace, the same number of ships that left a few standard weeks back, and she can already feel a weight lifting off her shoulders.
"I believe we'll need to cut this meeting short," Leia says, getting to her feet. "Our pilots deserve a warm welcome."
Rey slips away from her seat near Luke and Mara, grabs Finn by the hand, and darts off toward the shipyards.
None of this is easy. The waiting isn't easy. The fighting isn't easy. The First Order took a massive blow with the destruction of Starkiller, but they have the resources of loyalists to the Empire behind them and the Republic is no longer standing in their way.
She thinks it's worth it, though.