Where's Rey?

"What is he saying?"

The faces come into focus one by one. First a woman he doesn't recognise, wearing the uniform of medical staff. Then the ruddy face of Poe, tinged with an anxiety bizarre on him. And finally that of the General. Leia Organa, leader of the Resistance, is looking at him with a mother's anxiety, but her face is well acquainted with the expression, falling easily into thin, worn lines.

Staring up at them, Finn tries to speak around the dryness in his throat, forcing his lips to form around the words. "Where's Rey?"

The three exchange glances. General Organa's expression is unreadable.

"She isn't here right now. I'll tell you later. For now, you should get some more rest." 

Discreetly, she ushers Poe out of the room and follows, her small shoulders still strong, poised from a lifetime of fighting. Finn wants to protest--he feels like he's slept for a week already, and maybe he has--but starts to cough violently instead.

The medic holds a cup to his lips. He's expecting water, or something beige and chalky like the all-purpose medicine the First Order used to give him, but instead the liquid is a sunshiny orange, and smooth and sweet, and that makes him oddly happy. Rey would love this, Finn thinks, and then thinks once again that unanswered, unsettling question: where's Rey?

-

Leia waits until he can stand, until he's stopped feeling the chill in his bones, to tell him.

"With Luke Skywalker," Finn says, dumbly. "To be a Jedi."

His face openly says what Leia has secretly felt, so many times: an awestruck tremble at knowing your greatest friend is or will be the greatest of the Jedi, that ancient race of warriors. It is strange, to realize half your soul inhabits a world so distant from your own. Graciously, she gives him a few minutes to collect his thoughts, but he doesn't need them, because everything falls into place, perfect. Of course (the way the world bends for her, the blue of her lightsaber in the snow). Of course she is a Jedi.

"Where is she?"

Leia shakes her head and points to the map. "She is going to Ahch-To," she says, "but communication is hard on some of these planets. We lost contact a while ago. We have no way of knowing how near or far she is. And when she does get to Ahch-To, we do not know how long she will stay there."

"There's a lot you don't know," Finn remarks. He doesn't want to be rude, but he doesn't like it. Not knowing. 

"There is one thing." The General smiles, turning her grimness into softness, as if by magic. "I know she's safe."

"Because she's with your brother?"

Despite everything on her shoulders, Leia laughs, actually laughs. "No," she says, and her eyes look beyond. "Because the Force is with her."

Finn tries to see what she is seeing, feel what she is feeling. For a moment he does--he does know--but it is gone too quickly.

It is not enough.

-

In time Finn gets used to the not knowing. He gets used to life on the base, sort of--having people who smile at him and food that doesn't taste like wet sand and easy laughter and unshameful tears and music. (He never quite drops the feeling of quiet wonder that this, this is his now.)

And he never quite stops wondering, either. In the early hours of the morning he rises early to watch the sun. On late nights he leaves the brightness and noise of the canteen to stand beneath the stars. 

Looking out at them, he pictures his friend, the galaxy's champion, journeying uncharted planets and discovering new and beautiful things every day. He feels a twinge of loss, because he should be there, with Chewbacca and the Falcon and her, but he also feels, unequivocally, that this is her time, not his.

Then he asks the question, the one that's always at the back of his mind: 

where's Rey?