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.