Parental Duties
By Rey
Chapter summary: Rey is independent, and the world should have known about it.
Warning for: brief allusions to child labour in a dangerous place and pseudo-slavery
4. Rey: The Ships
Going from a very hot and dry place to a warm and slightly watery air is sort of shocking, but not like the shock of electrical discharge. Still unpleasant, though. And the headache!
Rey curls up in a ball till her headache goes away a little, trusting her trusty stick and that the other balls of miserable kids all round her won't attack her while she's down.
`It's worth it,` she repeats again and again and again in her mind, in time with each throb inside her head.
The kiddy kid who spoke to her right into her mind promised good company, after all, and they also promised a family, and she desperately wants it, wishes for it, needs it. Who knows, maybe the kiddy kid's guardian can help find her parents later on? Maybe she can work easier to earn her portions, too? This looks like a milder planet – and how neat it is, to travel so fast to a place so far! She's almost forgotten how she and her parents had travelled so much before they left her on Jakku.
She perks right up despite the lingering headache when engine – no, engines – suddenly rumble-whines above them. it startles the other kids, but Rey is interested. It's not every day that a functional ship got to visit Jakku, after all! Who knows, one of these ships might be her parents'….
She runs alongside the other kids. It's just sensible, really, in case the ships got weapons and trigger-happy pilots. But she looks up, too, from beneath her hideout of overhanging stone, while the others are still hunkered down. And she's glad she looks up!
It's starfighters – three functioning starfighters, of no make she knows, each shaped like a deadly looking torpedo of silver and black and blue and green that bristles with little torpedoes and cannons – flying so beautifully, with the middle starfighter going steady and the other two going up then down then ahead in relation to the middle one. So sleek – the fighters, the movements, the promise she can feel in the air, like a brandished knife caught in sunlight – and she'd like to admire it to the fullest, knowing the deadliness isn't aimed at her – at least not this time.
And then the fighters land somewhere downhill, without a hitch – at least nothing that she can hear from here! – and she's one of the first to streak out of the various hideouts, following a teeny tiny little green thing on two legs and massive pointed ears and a bigger kid that seems to be twice her age or a little less that totes a blaster rifle at a ready on one shoulder. She can't wait to admire the ships from up close!
She got shorter legs than many of the people – all kids or at least short beings – here, still. So, though she's one of the first to run, she ends up right at the back with two kids that look just a little older than she is, or at least taller.
`So. Annoying.`
But, well, her stature got a use, too, like when she scavanges for parts in places bigger hands and bodies can't reach. It's rather easy for her to slip and wriggle her way to the front, here, now, once the stampeed stops for the moment down the hill – `Not a sand-hill! Strange.` – and closer – `Ugh, not close enough!` – to the grounded but still ready-to-go starfighters.
There are two beings who look like they're in armour and some kind of hooded robe or something – `Or are those droids wearing people's clothes? Strange, but neat!` – standing near the idling ships. Rey wants so much to sneak past them and into one of the ships, to look round, to ask if she can drive it for a little bit – promise she won't steal anything! But the beings nearest her suddenly looks at her without looking at her, and she shrinks a little, back into the throng, daunted, though the being's regard is just wary and interested, far kinder than anybody on Jakku she's met so far.
`Later, later, once they're all finished speaking,` she decides, then, throwing a look at the rifle-toting kid and the third maybe-dressed-droid she didn't notice before and the three adults – as tall as adults, anyway – gabbing tensely not so far away.
But, sadly, when they're finished talking, everyone follows the rifle kid away from the starfighters!
And nobody tells anybody where they're going!
Rey huffs. `Nope. I'm asking first! Stupid kids. Don't go with strange adults – or droids! Really!`
Well, her parents left her with the Fishy Fish, and she came here listening to the invitation of a kid younger than she is, but that's different, right? And they'll come back, and she'll still be there for them! Surely the kiddy kid knows the way back if they brought her here?
So she jogs towards the maybe-dressed-droid who was gabbing with the rifle kid and the big ones, who's returning to the two others and the starfighters, and waves her free hand to hopefully attract their attention in a good way.
And she gets what she wishes, this time. The maybe-dressed-droid looks at her in curiosity, though also with a little… alarm? Well, anyway, they even come to her, veering away from the starfighter they're about to scale. And, unbelievably, they crouches before her – not in a you-little-kid-must-listen-to-me way, at that!
Well, something tells her they got very little time, so, before the maybe-dressed-droid can say anything, she says what she wants to say.
"Hi I'm Rey I'm seven are you a droid what's your name where's the other kids going can I go with you if you go the same way why're we leaving where are we going can I drive your ship? Please?"
The maybe-dressed-droid feels amused, now, and a little concerned, and their head cocks a little, and their body too, perhaps in a silent language that tells the same.
Rey keeps the silent language in mind. It can be quite useful if she gets to go with this one or meet them again later. But there's a much more important thing she pays attention to, right now.
The maybe-dressed-droid answers before she can do more than opening her mouth, though, let alone repeating her questions.
"Hello, little one. I'm Tarre. I'm not a droid, and neither are the other four beings clad in armour like mine. We are just going to a safer place. Did you get accidentally left behind by your friends? You can go with me, then. But, next time, please pay more attention to your surroundings. Now, come, we do not have much time."
They sound young, younger than their stature, and kind, and not judging, and not either male or female.
They're honest, too. And, above all, it's what clinches it for Rey.
Still, "You haven't told me if I can go drive your ship for a little bit," she insists, even as she climbs into Tarre's armoured arms. "Can I? Please? What's the ship's type? Looks like a torpedo!"
And, to her astonished glee, Tarre talks all about the smallish, sleek, deadly starships The Whistling Birds – `What an odd name for a starfighter type!` – all the way to their ship and into it and as they do things on the control panel and in-between talking with others through the console's comm in a language she's never heard before. She doesn't get to pilot, but she gets to sit in Tarre's lap and watch them pilot and watch the sky turns into deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper blue then black with little pinpricks and wafts of light in it and–.
"Oh! What's that, Tarre?"
There's a rather big, functional Imperial cruiser hanging over the planet, so near to the uppermost atmosphere, as if it's waiting for them, and she doesn't like the kind of deadly this one speaks of.
If the Whistling Birds are like naked knives, this cruiser is like one of the huge bombs that the older scavangers sometimes said about the Battle of Jakku that got so many ships grounded broken on the sand.
And she doesn't like bombs.
Bombs can't be avoided, and they don't target specific things or people, either.
Sometimes they leave places not good for living, too, like a few spots on Jakku.
Before she can urge Tarre to leave, though, the starfighter already veers away under Tarre's deft hands, following a fellow Whistling Bird ahead. And, not a moment after, the cockpit's viewport displays only the starlines of hyperspace, vaguely familiar to her memory of the before.
Seeing that, she slumps against Tarre's front with a shaky sigh. Tarre themself slumps back into the only seat in this small cockpit and mutters something in the language they sometimes speak.
Their peace doesn't last for long, though.
The comm alert light on the console – or so she notices from previous comm exchanges – flashes green, and Tarre drags themself back upright with a groan to hit the button below it.
It's Rey's turn to groan when the voice of one of the armoured beings – Mandalorians, Tarre explained – from one of the previous exchanges comes out of the speaker outlet surrounding the "on" button, sounding quite worried and somewhat exasperated and a little confused, and speaking not in the language Tarre sometimes uses, like he mostly did before.
"Ah, Whistling Bird One, do you happen to have a youngling with you? Obi-Wan said his group is one youngling short, and he is aware about it only now. We – or some of us – must return for the youngling, if they are not with you."
"I'm not part of his group. I don't even know who Obi-Wan is," Rey grumbles, intentionally loud enough to hopefully be picked up by the mic. She gets an admonishing tap on the top of her head and a stern, warning mention of her name for that from Tarre, but it's worth it.
She gets to control so little in her life. So, what she can control, she will, including not to belong to a group she doesn't even know about.
But then, Tarre speaks to her, right into her mind, just like the kiddy kid, and they say, with understanding but also disappointment, `Obi-Wan is only worried about you, little one. And, in this case, his message was relayed by another person, through another's words. It is possible that Obi-Wan did not even use such words exactly. You should ask him yourself, when we find ourselves a safer place to talk – all of us.`
`You're boring,` Rey grumps in return. But she does apologise to the person at the other end of the comm and ask to speak with "Obi-Wan" about her not being in his group when they both have time later.
"Oh, and thank you for asking after me," she dutifully parrots on Tarre's mind-to-mind prompting, a beat after. But then she continues on her own, much more genuinely, as her mind connects the request for her whereabout with the bomb-like cruiser waiting over the planet and the tales the older scavangers shared, "Thank you so much for checking if I got left behind, mister. I want to be picked up if I got left behind – that cruiser is so scary!"
The other Mandalorian acknowledges her, and she likes it. She's satisfied with it. It all pales compared to the happy regard Tarre gifts her, though.
`No, I take it back. You aren't boring,` she tells them, and the two of them laugh together, to the bafflement of the other Mandalorian.
The happy moment is almost enough to cover over the imagined feel of herself alone standing on the planet beneath the bomb-like cruiser.