happy birthday to you

"You don't know when your birthday is?"

Poe is perched on a crate of rations, watching Rey and Finn get some forms properly filled in. It's already been somewhat of a disturbing experience, even with the administrator tactfully skipping over last names--Rey only reluctantly put down Jakku as her home planet, and Finn has been shuttled to and fro too many times to name just one. 

Rey shakes her head with both defiance and embarrassment. Of course she doesn't know her birthday. She doesn't even know her own family. Poe supposes he shouldn't be surprised.

"And you?" Poe turns to Finn.

He shrugs. "The First Order never kept track. It's easy to figure out your age if you have the right technology, though. I'm twenty-three. You can put that down."

The administrator does so, dutifully.

"I'm nineteen," Rey chimes in. "At least, I think so."

You think so? "That means you've never had a birthday party, either."

Again Rey and Finn exchange slightly confused glances."...No?" Rey ventures. 

"Sort of," Finn qualifies, remembering all the new duties the First Order added with every year you grew.

"Okay." Poe holds up his hands and shakes his head. "Do you want a birthday?"

"What's so important about a birthday?"

This stumps Poe for a second, because it's always seemed so natural, birthdays in the Dameron home, in the Resistance. "It's like a day...to celebrate...being you. Your existence. You know? People sing songs and have fun. They give you presents, too. Mine is in a few days, and I think Jessika is plotting something."

The General walks past, busy as always, but catching a snatch of their conversation. She pauses to look fondly at the bright faces of the boy who broke his training to join her battle and the girl who brought her brother home. "I think the two of you are cause for celebration," she says, before moving on.

"See," says Poe. "The General thinks you should have birthdays, too. Just pick a date that you like. The day you met the Resistance, maybe?" No, he thinks, a second too late. That's mixed with too many bad memories.

Rey and Finn both scrunch up their faces and think. It takes a long time. Too many dates have bad memories tied to them, Poe guesses, dismayed.

"Maybe," Rey finally says, "we can have yours?"

"Yeah, yeah!" Poe jumps off the crates with a kind of eager desperation. "Sure. You can have mine. We can all have the same birthday. That'd be nice. You can put that down," he adds, to the longsuffering administrator.

He leaves the three of them to complete the paperwork and covers the base to make sure at least ninety percent of them remember to wish Rey and Finn a happy birthday--because if there's anything Poe Dameron is good at, it's rallying the troops.

-

Poe has big plans for the big day. There's only one small problem.

If there's anything Poe Dameron is good at, it's not baking.

Jessika comes in, her hands sticky with paint from hanging up a birthday banner, takes one look at the cake, and bursts out laughing. 

"What's so funny? It's not--it's not that--okay, come on, you're getting paint everywhere."

His friend stops laughing long enough to gasp out, "That's the worst cake...I've ever seen."

Poe frowns at it. It does look sort of terrible, lopsided and charred on one side, the iced words a barely intelligible scrawl. "I don't have time to bake another. Maybe I can add some sprinkles."

"Poe, no amount of sprinkles can possibly save that cake."

With a sigh, Poe deposits the cake on the far end of the counter. "Okay, let me see that banner."

Cheerfully, Jessika unfurls it. "Happy Birthday to Rey and Finn and Poe," it reads. The "Poe" is very small, the letters all squished together. At his squint Jessika shrugs. "I ran out of room."

She did it on purpose to rag him, but Poe can hear Rey and Finn's voices in the hall, so he waves mutely for her to hang it up. It turns out Resistance pilots are laughably bad at all sorts of arts and crafts, because the banner sags threateningly and falls down on them both, and when they finally disentangle themselves the birthday kids are already peering at the cake.

"It says 'Rey and Finn,'" Finn observes, puzzled.

Rey has gone ahead and taken a mouthful, even as the two banner-swathed pilots fling out both hands to stop her. "Rey, stop, that's the junkiest cake ever," Jessika says, but Rey's eyes light up.

"What is this?" she asks with her mouth full.

"Cake," Poe answers helplessly.

"Cake?" Finn stares down at the chunk Rey has handed him, and tentatively puts it into his mouth. "Maybe I've heard of it. It's sort of like bread, but better."

"It's the best cake I've ever had," Rey says breathlessly.

"I've never had cake."

"Neither have I," Rey admits, and then before anyone can get in her way she's running off with a slice for the General, too.

General Organa returns with a napkin, crumbly cake, and a perplexed expression, while Rey bounds in front of her in a state of great excitement. Her eyes roam the room until they land on Poe. "Who taught you to bake, Dameron?" she demands, but she looks like she's trying not to laugh.

For a second Poe stares at his boots. "No disrespect meant, ma'am, but...you did."

Oh, that brings back memories. For a moment Leia is lost in a scrambled recollection of two little boys licking batter out of the pan, and, even further back, two other wild boys, one dark and one fair, presenting her with a cake they cobbled together from Rebellion rations. (It was completely unpalatable, but they ate it anyway, stealing whatever joy they could from under the hands of their oppressors.)

She snaps herself back to the present. Rey gives Poe such a brilliant smile that he'll carry the memory of it for a dozen birthdays to come. He figures if she's grinning at him like that, the cake can't be that bad.

So he tries it, scooping a bite up with a fork, and then makes a disgusted face, because it is. 

But the laughter is sweet, anyway.

kylo ren's guide to pleasing your master

I.

Step One.

Don't.

Don't cry when Luke Skywalker comes to take you away.

Don't sulk and refuse to talk to the other children when you arrive.

Don't demand to see your parents fifteen times instead of listening.

Don't drop the stick. You're supposed to pretend it's a lightsaber. (You aren't trying very hard.)

Don't hit your friends with the stick when they look at you funny.

Don't slouch and droop when it's time for inspection. Draw yourself up tall, smile proudly, and look Luke Skywalker straight in the eye. (You are a Jedi. At least try to look the part.)

Don't call him a "tyrant" who "doesn't know anything."

Don't. (Ignore the voice, dark and sonorous, in your head.)

Don't be yourself.

-

Step Two.

Being a Jedi is hard.

Please try to clean up after yourself.

Please try not to leave your master's students smashed and scattered in the snow.

(You are tracking the blood in.)


II.

Yes, you can.

Of course you can.

You can make a mess if you want. We have thousands of troops who can clean it up.

You can rage in your room. No one will hear you.

You can even destroy the furniture. No need to worry about the cost. No need to worry about Hux's complaining. It's all part of the process. You will learn in time.

You can slam the stormtrooper who disobeyed you into the wall. Listen to his groans. (Darth Vader would have been proud.)

You can kill him, if you want.

You can land on that planet, draw your rusty red lightsaber, decimate the population, bare your teeth, grow stronger on their blood. (Somebody can take care of the mess. Move on to the next planet. And the next)

Yes, you can, you can, you can do it all.

Please.

Go ahead.

-

(You've forgotten a lot, haven't you, Ben?

Luke Skywalker's face when he came for you and you cried like you would never stop? He turned away for a moment and when he turned back he was trying to smile. Don't knock it till you try it, Ben. I promise you'll see them again.

He was proud of you, for all your griping. The first time your parents visited one would have thought he was the child, bursting with the need to please.

Your parents didn't want to let you go, but they had to. When's the last time you did something because you had to? They thought Luke could keep you safe. Your mother wept afterwards. Your father walked out to the cliffs because he needed to be alone. Didn't you feel it?

Don't you remember when Henutl, the welt of your pretend lightsaber still emblazoned across his face, challenged you for another round? Again, Ben, he said, and then shared his biscuits with you afterwards.

Remember when Luke Skywalker was a tyrant? 

You certainly have forgotten a lot.)

-

Snoke wants the pilot. Get him the pilot.

Snoke wants the droid. Get him the droid.

He wants your father. No, no-- Get him your father. 

(Be careful, father. Stay away from the sides of cliffs.)

-

Snoke wants the girl.

Here is how to please your master:

Step One. 

Find the girl.

When your father falls, somebody screams.

There she is. 

Step Two.

Fight the girl.

You should not find the fight difficult. She has no training, no master, no teacher. (She probably needs one.) Pound on your wounds, grit your teeth, plow through the stormtrooper who stands in your way, and fight the girl.

Step Three.

Lose.

(You've really done it this time, haven't you, Ben?)

Let yourself bleed out in the snow.

Let him stitch you back together again. However he wants.

Taste the freedom, raw and red and good, in your mouth. (Ignore the voice, brilliant and deafening, in your head.)

Please.

across the stars

"Come with me," he says, holding a promise in his eyes, of a life filled with something other than loneliness and fear and anguish.

And Rey wants to, so very much. She wants to take his hand and follow him to where the First Order can't reach them and see that promise fulfilled. No one has ever asked her anywhere with such desperate kindness. No one has ever given her a choice.

But that's it, isn't it? She doesn't have a choice. Han and Chewie and the Falcon are pulling her one way, and beyond that is the greater pull of the Resistance, and beyond that still is a cry too large and deep for her to understand. Of all these strings pulling at her, Finn's is the weakest. 

Yet, something in her whispers yes, all the other voices shout no, and Rey cannot say one or the other. Finally she says don't go instead, putting everything she has into the words.

Finn bows his head, and she can see that he, like her, truly believes he has no choice. She can almost sense him, with bitter resignation, cut the string from her heart to his. But not before he asks one last thing of her. "Take care of yourself. Please."

And just like that, she is turning away to hide her tears, and he is gone.

-

The Resistance does defeat Starkiller, but it's a narrower shave than anyone is happy with. 

Before Han walks out on that bridge he slips her the lightsaber. She doesn't want it, it still sends shockwaves through her whenever she touches it, but then he falls, and for some unknown reason that sends larger shockwaves throughout the terrible power she has learnt to call the Force.

Rey gets away from Kylo Ren, leaves him bleeding in the snow, but the hilt of her lightsaber still stings her palm, and his blade has cut a furious red line down her right arm.

Too many Resistance pilots lose their lives that day.

Too many homeworlds are burnt to ashes before their inhabitants find the time to scream.

When they return to D'Qar, there is too little reason to celebrate.

Everything is happening as it should, the Force tells Rey.

No, something is wrong, she says, but not to its face.

-

Rey is part of the Resistance, one of the Jedi, exactly where she should be, among air and green and water and people who are bright and good. She meets the General, a princess old and fire-tested, and finds home in her strong arms. She meets her Master, a grey man whose golden boyhood is buried deep, and finds purpose in his quiet voice. She meets BB-8's owner, the swarthy pilot named Poe who destroyed Starkiller to the roar of "as long as there's light, there's hope" in his head, and finds friendship in his broad smile.

She can't help but remember that before she found belonging in these three pairs of eyes, there was another, melting and scared and kind.

(Maybe she could have chosen to go with Finn. But she would have chosen wrong. If it was his lot to run, it is hers to stay. Always has been.)

"He still has your jacket," she tells Poe one day.


"There isn't a better person to wear it anywhere in the galaxy." Poe says it with an easy acceptance Rey would give anything to inhabit. When she admits she is unhappy, disappointed that Finn fled, Poe shakes his head gently.

"Others have always made his decisions for him." Her friend looks up at the stars, and she follows his gaze, trying to imagine Finn somewhere among them, free and safe and happy. "This is his choice."

-

Rey didn't think anything could hurt as much as those dry interminable years, waiting for the family who had abandoned her. 

It turns out fresher cuts take a longer time to heal. 

Years and years with the Resistance, and she still wakes up sometimes with a Finn-shaped hole in her chest. Eventually it scabs around the edges, and she stops turning around in the Falcon asking, "Finn, did you see that?" to see only sweet Chewie looking sympathetically back at her, stops sitting in her bunk and thinking about what if, what if until she has to open the window for air.

Everything is as it should be, the Force says again.

This time, she doesn't disagree.

-

When she brings Kylo Ren to the Resistance Base personally, Rey is no longer a girl. She can't decide if this gives her the strength to watch, or only makes the pain more acute, when he screams for his mother, and when Leia Organa clamps her lips together and stills her tears, because she can either be a perfect leader or a perfect mother, not both.

When the First Order is wiped from existence, Rey watches the Republic rebuild itself, again. It wisely refrains from calling itself "New New Republic," and drops qualifiers altogether, as though it has always existed, old as the Force. By this time Kylo Ren has screamed himself out, and is a powerful ally, though an uneasy one. Rey never quite stops watching her back even when he fights by her side.

When she buries her General and her Master, who die together as they were born, Rey feels terribly tired and terribly old. She has no space for Poe's wild-eyed grief or Chewbacca's howls, but only wishes she had Han's body to bury with them. The Force swells to encompass its treasured twins. The empty holes in her chest grow bigger and bigger.

-

Rey lives long and rich and full. It is a life of hardship, but also of happiness, scavenged snatches of luminous joy between the pain. She has a special place for her memories, the people she has lost, so that they don't keep her awake at night. Somewhere deep in there the thought of Finn lies buried.

She digs it out once in a while. Allows herself a single what if.

In between the what ifs she has seen the Republic grow like a masterless child, seen freedom rise and fall countless times, and become grey-haired and fire-strengthened herself. She has kept herself alive, and saved countless others. And I am too old to be chasing rumours, she thinks, as she flies towards an anonymous Outer Rim planet. But there is a man there, the locals say, who knows the Force, who saved a million lives in the Battle of Chanslook, and thousands more after, and then tried to disappear.

("He saved the stormtroopers, too?" she asked, and they nodded, the strangeness of it familiar to them.)

As she lands, the Force sings out, filling her head with its fierce, urgent delight. Her lightsaber hilt humming in her hand, she turns a corner, and suddenly there's a pair of eyes there that feels like home.

One of them is milky, almost filmed over. But the other is still warm and bright and kind, and she would know it anywhere.

I thought it might be you.

She says his name, and he says hers, soft and simultaneous as rain soaking desert-dry ground.

Sixty years too late and just in time, a girl and a boy are in each other's arms, and their hearts are too close together to need a string between them.