peskylilcritter:

a day late but also nearly 2000 words. hope you like it 🙂

***

The lab is old and dusty, the floor and consoles are covered in sand.
There’s no light, except what little gets in through the broken doors.

Rey
is only here because the storm appeared out of nowhere, and she hadn’t
caught the signs quickly enough, too focused on finding enough sell-able
scrap that she can buy food.

Now she’s stuck in a decades old lab on an equally old ship, long since stranded on Jakku,

After
a few hours and several attempts to sleep, she decides to explore a
little. It can’t hurt, she tells herself. These ships are always empty,
and the other scavengers left before she did, clearly recognizing the
signs of a storm.

The steep angle of the floor makes it difficult
to move around quickly, so it takes her a while to find the stasis pod
at the back of the lab.

It has a little window near one end,
showing Rey a man, human looking, pale skinned, with a full white beard.
She can’t tell how old he is. The white of his hair makes him look old
but his face is much younger.

She leans forward, trying to get a closer look. Her hands touch the side of the pod and-

The
sudden light makes her jump back; she nearly slides all the way back
down and just manages to catch herself on one of the consoles, which, to
her relief, doesn’t react even when her fingers press buttons.

The
pod must be running on a separate power source, and a remarkably
long-lasting one, if it’s still working three or four decades later.

(Rey
isn’t sure how long this ship has been stranded here. It’s been over
twenty years since the Empire ended, and another twenty since the
Galactic War. Who can tell how long this particular ship has been on
Jakku.)

The pod opens with a hiss and Rey ducks down behind the
console. The man in the pod is gasping like he’s been running over loose
sand. He’s afraid. She’s absolutely sure of that suddenly. He’s
terrified.

She can hear movement, the rustle of clothing, and then
there’s a thump and just as she’s decided to peek around the edge of
the console he slides past her.

Somehow she ends up holding on to his bare foot with one hand and the console with the other.

He panics, tries to turn, tries to look at her and his foot begins to slip from her grasp.

“Hold still!” she says, gritting her teeth. “You’ll fall.”

His movements stop as quickly as they started.

For
long minutes the two of them stay like that, her holding him up. They
need to move. They need to get somewhere she doesn’t have to hold on to
him anymore and they need to move now, before she loses her grip.

“Hey! Can you hear me?” Rey asks, hoping he speaks Basic.

“Yes.” He sounds young.

“There should be a console somewhere to your left. If I let you go can you catch yourself on that?”

He
doesn’t answer right away. “I think so. but I wont be able to hold on
long. I’m afraid stasis has weakened my muscles considerably.”

She lets out a breath of relief. “That’s fine. I just need my hands free for a minute. You ready?”

“Yes.”

She
lets go, already half-turning to see if he’ll make it or go sliding out
through the jagged pieces of metal that are all that’s left of the
doors.

His hands touch the console, find handholds as his legs and
feet slide on, turning with his torso. His hips hit the other corner of
the console with a thump and for a moment she thinks he’ll fall after
all.

Still keeping an eye on him, Rey attaches a cable to the side
of the console with a magnetized [grab thingy] and lets herself slide
down until shes next to the man.

“Can you get yourself down with the cable?” she asks.

He looks embarrassed. “I don’t think I have the strength. This is difficult enough and I cant hold on much longer anyway.”

She nods. “Alright. Hang on to me then. I’ll get us down.”

He’s
lighter than he looks, but that’s still heavier than Rey is accustomed
to. Still, they get down to the doors without too much difficulty, and
the walls next to the doors are flat and, more importantly, intact.

His hands shake visibly once he lets go of her to sink into a crouch, and he’s breathing heavily.

“I’d offer to take you into town, but it’ll be a few hours until the storm lets up so we’re stuck here for now.”

He gives her a small smile. “Thank you. For catching me, and all the rest.”

She shrugs, suddenly uncomfortable and unable to articulate why. “Couldn’t just let you fall.”

“Still. I’d have understood if you had. May I ask your name?”

She
considers him for a moment, trying to decide how to reply. He looks
small now, and old, crouched on a wall. He’s thin, she realizes
suddenly, as if he’s starving, and the looseness of his thin pants and
shirt emphasizes it.

“I’m Rey,” she says finally. “What’s your name?”

“Obi-Wan. Could you tell me the date? I’m afraid I’ve rather lost track, stuck in the stasis pod as I was.”

The look on his face when she tells him is pure horror. She hesitates, then asks anyway. “How long were you in there?”

“Over forty years,” he whispers. “Half my life.”

***

His
sleep is restless, but he doesn’t wake again, even when Rey starts
sorting through the days haul. It’s noisy work but it doesn’t seem to
disturb him any more than his dreams.

It took a long while before
he fell asleep. He kept claiming he didn’t need sleep, that he’s slept
enough for a lifetime, even when he started nodding off mid-sentence.

Rey understands his fear, but she’s glad he’s asleep now.

What
is she going to do now? She cant just drop him off in town, creditless,
with nothing but the clothes on his body and whatever wits he has. She
also can’t support a second person. What she earns scavenging is barely
enough for her alone, she can’t afford a second mouth to feed.

She doesn’t have answers so, all necessary tasks completed, she heads to bed.

***

Obi-Wan is curled up on the very edge of the sleeping area, under a single thin blanket.

Doesn’t
he know how cold the desert gets at night? Rey’s home has pretty good
isolation but she only has one small heating unit and the cold does seep
in.

She tosses a second blanket over him and climbs over his legs
to curl up behind him, close enough that she can feel the heat of his
body.

***

He’s still asleep when she gets up the next day.

She’s
considering waking him to take him with her to town to sell what she
can when he screams, words she doesn’t know, and scrambles to get out of
the tangle of blankets.

She’s not prepared for this, she thinks, backing up.

He manages to untangle himself and crawls unsteadily to the wall, wedges himself into the corner and starts crying.

It’s
so familiar, the sound, helpless and lost and grieving. Rey is torn
between running away from that sound and wanting desperately to help.

“Obi-Wan,”
she says after a while. Its a compromise. She’s not coming closer and
she’s not running away, and that counts for something, doesn’t it?

Her
voice startles him into lifting his head, muscles tensing as for a
fight. The tears are running down his cheeks into his beard, but they
slow when he sees her. He blinks hard a few times, wipes the tears away
with his hands, and only then seems to recognize her.

“I’m sorry,” he says, hoarse.

She shrugs. “I understand bad dreams. Are you hungry?”

He hesitates, then nods. “Do you have water?” he asks, getting up. He’s shaking again, she notices.

“Yes. Come on.”

***

He
waits inside while she loads the landspeeder, then sprints to her side
and jumps up. He’s lucky; this early in the morning the sand isn’t so
hot as to blister his bare feet but he’ll need shoes as soon as
possible.

If they can’t find any cheap ones he may have to wait until they can find some in one of the wreckages.

He smiles at her as she climbs up.

When
she increases speed he shouts something and clings more tightly to her
waist. She grins into the cloth over her face and slows down just a
little.

***

Rey stares at him, is aware she’s gaping, mouth open, eyes wide. “How?” she manages.

He looks at her, eyebrows rising in surprise. The pod gently sets down on the ground. “You have no training?”

“Training?”

“Using the Force.”

“You mean like the Jedi? But they’re a myth!”

He looks offended. “Do I look like a myth to you? We’re not a myth, and we never were. Would you like to learn how to do that?”

She
gives him a skeptical look. “Even if you are a Jedi – and I’m not sure I
believe that – what makes you think I can lift things with my mind?”

“I
can feel it, your strength in the Force.” He’s looking at her with an
intensity that’s almost scary, like he can see her, all of her.

“If I say yes, will you stop looking at me like that?”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

“You can teach me?” she asks. What if he says yes? What if he says no?

He nods. “Certainly. Come here, I’ll show you.”

***

He
doesn’t leave. When she asks why he says he has nowhere to go back to
and besides, she needs a teacher, doesn’t she? Then he smiles, genuine
and sad, and finds and excuse to end the conversation. She doesn’t ask
again.

In the beginning they split the work into big, heavy things
that he lifts with the Force, and small delicate things that Rey
collects with her hands.

As he builds up muscle and she learns to use the Force, they split the work more evenly.

***

(The
Force, oh, the desert has never felt more alive than when she’s looking
at it with the Force. Millions of lifeforms, living under the sand and
in the wreckages, making the barrenness their home. It’s beautiful.)

***

She doesn’t see the crash but she feels it, and from the look on his face she knows Obi-Wan does too.

Still, she doesn’t think much of it until the dark skinned boy takes her hand and they run, Obi-Wan following.

***

Finn is like her, she realizes later. She can feel him and he’s the brightest life she’s ever felt.

***

for this prompt meme

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