Work Text:
The night after Crait is silent. Even the infestation of Porgs that have nested in patches of the Falcon have fallen quiet, like they understand the Resistance is mourning and deserve time to hold vigil for those they lost. So many transports were destroyed as Rey had watched, and their stand on Crait had thinned out their numbers even more; but there’s still enough that the freighter feels too small, the sleeping quarters filled up with doubles, no one accepting the offer to sleep in the captain’s quarters. Poe had helped Leia there earlier, a hand at the ready to steady her if needed; she was relying on a cane now. She hadn’t been when Rey left.
If she was on Jakku, Rey had thought, she’d be dead.
Shame quickly followed, and she’d turned her head away to allow Leia and Poe some privacy, as much as she could afford them on such a crowded ship. The alternative was watching Finn, standing over a still unconscious Rose. Someone on the ship — a woman who’d clearly never suffered beneath a sweltering sun, with golden hair — informed her she would be alright in due time. It wasn’t the same woman who had treated Finn back on D’Qar, and it wasn’t until D’Acy left that Rey had realized it was likely because Harter Kalonia was dead, too.
After their reunion on Crait, salt and ash clinging to her tunics like snow, Finn’s face tucked into her neck and his strong arms wrapped tight around her, they’d separated again. He hadn’t left Rose since, barring a moment where he’d gone searching for a blanket after asking Rey if she knew where one was. The stab of envy she felt wasn’t unlike a hunger pang, but Rey despised it more than she ever had her empty belly.
Strategies had been tossed around; unfamiliar voices tossing out suggestions of new bases, new allies, until finally exhaustion crept in and Leia had spoken with authority that it was time for everyone to retire, and get some rest. The rest, she’d said, could be solved tomorrow.
Rey had tried to follow her example, tried sleeping in the floor of the barracks, but it was too noisy there with everyone else already piled in there, and every time she shuts her eyes, she sees Ben. Not in the way that she’d seen him on the island, so close yet light-years away, this time he is nothing more than a memory, one that hurt almost as badly as the still untreated cut on her upper arm.
She’s rubbing it as she slips out and creeps toward the cockpit. It is empty, except Chewbacca, who moans softly when he spots her. “Couldn’t sleep,” she explains, dropping into the seat opposite of him. Han’s seat. She wonders if Ben ever sat here, too. She’s sure he has; if she tried reaching out, tried touching the leather of the seat and let the Force wash over her, she’s sure she could pick up on an echo of a happy family oblivious to the tragedy in their future.
Rey sits her hands on her kneecaps instead, as she tucks her legs up against her. “If you want to try to get some rest,” she offers after a few minutes, “I can keep an eye on things.”
Chewbacca watches her for a long moment, then nods once. As he stands, he rumbles something else, and she feels heat sting at her eyes. Will you be alright, little cub?
“I’ll be fine,” she assures him, trying for a smile. Chewie doesn’t look convinced, and she supposes of anyone on the ship, he understands more than anybody what she’s gone through; he’d trusted her enough to drop her at Snoke’s ship, and had been the one to pull her out of the aftermath.
But still, he gives her space, and leaves her alone to the cockpit that is silent yet full of ghosts and thrumming machinery. It’s familiar; Rey has been surrounded by ghosts and machinery her entire life. She grew up in a graveyard of battle ships, the proof of Palpatine’s final defeat; it never held power over her the way that Ben does.
She exhales slowly, shakily, and lowers her head against her hands. She feels foolish, dirty, and worst of all, disappointed. Her whole life has been spent hoping the ones she loves would come back, and for a space of a moment, she’d thought her forgiveness and the promise of a future together would’ve been enough to bridge the gap, that Ben would choose her over the Dark Side.
But he hadn’t; he wasn’t any more capable of letting go of the past than she is, no matter what he claimed to the contrary.
At the sound of the door opening with a hiss, Rey straightens instantly, reaching for a weapon that isn’t there — foolish, letting your guard down — but it's only Poe, and he doesn’t look capable of attacking anyone, much less her. In fact, Rey doesn’t think he’s even noticed she was there; he is transfixed on the swirling hues of hyperspace.
When he speaks, his voice is as quiet as it had been when he’d first introduced himself, but full of exhaustion rather than awe (and what about her was there to be awed about?). “Can they track us?”
“I’m sorry?”
Poe blinks, turning to her with surprise. He’d definitely not known she was there. He clears his throat, then shakes his head after a second, like a delayed response. “Nothing, just —” he sighs, long and heavy, and steps forward, taking the seat Chewbacca vacated earlier — “Can they track us?”
She’s only gotten bits and pieces of what had happened to the Resistance; that they’d somehow been tracked through lightspeed by the First Order, their fleet reduced down to nothing. And then the transports that had meant to be shielded from view had been given away by the codebreaker that Finn and Rose was forced to work with.
“Chewie spent the time we were gone making sure the Falcon was clean,” Rey explains. “He and Han were able to track it the second it left Jakku…so no, I don’t think the First Order can follow us.”
Poe’s shoulders drop at the same time he leans his head back against the seat, relief softening his features. “Alright. Alright, that’s good.” He slings his head to the side, appraising her. “I thought you went to sleep with the others?”
Rey tenses for a second, before she realizes it’s not accusatory but instead worried. She’s not used to having people be concerned with her, and because of that, it takes a minute for her to find her voice again. “I couldn’t - I couldn’t sleep.”
After everything, even that feels like saying too much. Where had cracking open her heart gotten her with Ben? Standing in a shower of fire and ruin, while he echoed the same words that Unkar hurled at her at every chance he got: you’re nothing.
She knows that: she knows she is nothing more than a desert rat, who only knows how to scavenge and survive. Rey is no hero, no Luke Skywalker. She's just somebody that crawled her way to adulthood in a body that knew starvation more than it knew satisfaction, with a childhood of scattered, broken and missing memories, clinging desperately to the promise that someone would return for her, no matter how many times Unkar sneered at her that she’d been sold to him for nothing more than drinking money. For years, she stayed firmly in denial: Unkar was a greedy, cruel man who would say anything to keep people under his heel.
But her parents were dead, and no one was coming back for her, and Jakku was something that would never leave her, but Rey had left it.
She’s lived so long in denial that they were alive, but she can’t keep denying that her parents sold her because their vices had been more important to them than their own daughter.
And now, she's sitting in the cockpit of the most infamous ship in the galaxy, that had destroyed a Death Star, and liberated the galaxy. She is in clothes that aren’t her own, but feels enough like her own that it isn’t horrible to wear, yet it made her look like something she isn’t: a Jedi. A hero. Someone important.
You have no place in this story.
He’d been asking her to stay with him; Rey sensed it.
It hadn’t changed the way it felt like a knife to the gut. It doesn’t change how it feels even now, ashamed of who she was, feeling even more undeserving of these gifts, the awe Poe had looked at her with earlier. I know, he’d said, and Rey’s cheeks hurt from how widely she’d smiled.
He is still looking at her like he knows her: not in the way that Ben does — did — because he could feel her, because he’d been in her head. But Poe is looking at her like he sees something in her that she can’t see, and Rey almost squirms for it. “Yeah,” he breathes at last, “I couldn’t either. Just kept replaying everything.”
Don't go this way.
“I know the feeling,” Rey finds the courage to admit, turning away from him again. Poe feels a little too bright to look at, like Jakku’s blazing sun. It reminds her of what it felt to touch Ben’s hand, that livewire spark.
She feels Poe soften, even without looking in his direction. The Force, she guesses. She's not sure how she feels about that.
“The General would say to leave the past where it belongs, and focus on now.”
Kill it if you have to.
So that's what he'd gotten it from.
“Maybe she's right,” Rey admits, hoarse. They sold you for drinking money. “Maybe we should leave it where it belongs.”
His breath hitches around an unformed thought, one that he gives life to a few seconds later: “I think it's a little more complicated than that. We can't get lost in our past, but we can't shake it either. We're who we are because of it. Everything I've gone through, all the choices I've made, it's why I am who I am.”
Rey turns toward him sharply, but he's gone back to looking out the viewport, giving her a view of his profile: a sharp jawline, darkly stubbled, and a strong noise. Long, midnight black curls. She likes it, Rey realizes unexpectedly. She likes Poe Dameron’s face.
She's not sure how she feels about the man, yet. He made her feel seen, feel special, when he introduced himself to her, and Rey liked that. She likes what she knows about him from BB-8 and Finn and Chewbacca. But his statement feels eerily perceptive, like maybe he does know what's going on in her head, and Rey isn't sure she likes that.
But she is curious, so she asks, “Who is that?”
He considers for a moment, jaw flexing as he thinks. “Somebody who wants to keep his friends safe, and free the galaxy. No matter what.”
Liar.
The thought startles her, but it's true. “I don't think so,” she says, surprising herself — and Poe, for the way his eyes turn towards hers, defensive. She keeps her voice soft as she continues, “I don't think ‘no matter what’ is true.”
His lips part on a silent exhale, but the next one comes out heavier. “Yeah. Maybe not. We'll find out. What about you?”
I'm a scavenger, Rey thinks.
She thinks of Ben Solo, Luke Skywalker. How she inherited the Falcon. BB-8, once upon a time.
“Someone who is very good at salvaging broken things,” Rey settles on.
Poe smiles. It's not like the one he'd given her before, it feels more tender and more private. “Then I think the Resistance is in good hands, being on your ship.”
Not for the first time and, as she later learns, certainly not the last, Rey smiles back at him.