“Screw the jumper, that one’s closer!” He and the woman both spare a glance in the direction the other man is pointing, and likely make the same disgusted face. Kylo had seen the ancient YT-Model on his way into the outpost several hours earlier, and had even stopped for a good long minute or two to dwell on things that he’d have rather left dead and buried. But anyone with half a brain left in their braincase could see that the hunk of junk hadn’t been flown in at least a decade, if the heaps of detritus and large tarps covering parts of it were any indication.
“That one’s garbage! It hasn’t flown in years,” the woman asserts. She barely gives it more than a glance, preferring to keep on course to their original destination.
“We need to get out of the system before the First Order can get a bead on us! A quadjumper can hit hyperspace faster than you can say-“ before Kylo can say it, the TIE fighter screaming through the air behind them fires twice and hits the good-sized orange craft dead-on. It goes up in a ball of flames and a deafening explosion, acrid black smoke immediately pluming into the air above it.
“The garbage will do!” The woman yells out, immediately changing direction towards the YT-Model. The man in Poe’s jacket has to physically pull Kylo from where he’d stopped dead, staring at the smoking crater that had been his mostly-paid-for quadjumper.
The Guavians he’d bought it from were going to put a bounty on his head, there was no way around it.
“Come on!” The other man yells, yanking harder to get Kylo to run. They duck under the tarpoline covering the entrance ramp to the old YT-Model, and as the droid knocks past their heels to get up into the ship the dark-haired man starts to slow again. At the top of the access ramp, covered in the kind of grime no sane person likes to think about the origins of, the near-illegible designation plate for the old cargo ship stares him down as though it is a sentient entity that has come to pass judgment upon him. It is familiar, just as the silhouette of the old Corellian bucket of scrap was familiar against the shifting dunes and cloudless blue sky hours before, and just as the faint traces of small grubby handprints on the cream-colored walls are familiar to his much-grown fingers.
“The gunner’s position is down there! YT-Models need two pilots, can you fly?!” Kylo shakes himself from his reverie and hits the ramp controls to seal the ship up behind him, the movement practiced despite years of having never stepped foot upon the ship.
“Can I fly?!” He parrots incredulously. “Lady, I’ve been piloting Corellian YT-Models since before I could walk!”
“Good, I need a co-pilot!” The woman’s voice comes from the direction of the cockpit, as though she’s already traversed the layout of the ship a dozen times before. For all he knows, in its derelict state for the past decade or so, she’s learned its every nook and cranny as well as its rightful owner. He takes the familiar path himself with long strides, not sparing a glance for the bench seats and small dejarik table off to one side. He has to duck to get into the cockpit, his wide frame almost making him do the same sideways shuffle that he distinctly remembers Chewbacca being forced to do to get through the small door. The air is stifling in the sun-warmed cabin, and Kylo can already feel sweat beginning to bead anew on the back of his neck and the top of his forehead as he slides into what was once his large hairy uncle’s seat and divests himself of his bloody scarf and thick black vest. The mystery woman, desert clothes sticking out like a sore thumb in the dark interior, is already running pre-flight checks and priming the- Kylo’s brain shorts for a moment at the new addition to the console.
“What moof-milker thought it was a good idea to put a compressor on a YT-Model?” She resolutely ignores him and hits the controls to finish powering up the craft- which does so for only a moment before dying back down with a whine. Without preamble, Kylo rocks back in his seat and aims a hard kick at a specific spot on the console, adding his boot print to the slightly dented and discolored patch of metal just above one of the control levers. The engine thrums to life again, the lights in the cockpit blinking into existence and surrounding them both with a delicate glow. The life support systems kick into action as well, pumping cool air into the overheated cockpit as the woman pulls back on the controls and they lurch into the open sky. A number of metal cargo containers fall from the ship with a cacophony of screeches and bangs, tarpolines ripping away to expose the cloudless blue sky- and the two TIE fighters headed straight for them.
“Keep low! It confuses their tracking!” As the woman pulls them immediately into a steep upward climb, the man in the lower gunner’s position manages to hit the comm controls somehow and comes over the tinny speaker in the cockpit. Working in tandem, the two pilots quickly bring the unwieldy craft into a smooth dive around the edge of a dune. A bright green laser bolt rockets past the cockpit with a screech of rent oxygen, and Kylo wastes no time reaching over to engage the aft shields before steadying the craft out of yet another extreme turn.
“We need to lose those tag-alongs before we have any chance of gettin’ past the Destroyer in orbit,” he mentions offhand. When a warning light begins to blink at him insistently, followed by a nagging incessant beeping, he slams his fist into the dash twice to make it stop. His eyes on the small readout of the immediate radar area, he primes one of the automatic starboard guns and tries to get a lock on the closer of the two fighters riding their tail.
“I’m working on that!” Without any other means of heads-up, the lanky dark-haired man nearly flies from his seat and into the wall next to him as the woman in the main pilot’s seat pulls a turn so hard it makes the bottom drop out of his stomach. Behind them, in one of the small hallways of the ship, the little spherical droid screams in what could almost be described as terror- if a droid could feel something like that. The field of debris that stretches out before them when he manages to level them off, the massive engines of Imperator and ImpStar Deuce-class Star Destroyers peeking out of the shifting sands in the dozens, is enough to give him stunned pause.
“Got one!” The man in the gunner’s position shouts out with glee, and Kylo can almost hear how excited the young man is through the speaker. As he watches, one of the blips tailing them on the radar screen disappears as abruptly as the faint sound of an explosion behind them.
“Lucky shot, kid! Don’t get cocky! That other pilot’s all over the place, I think he knows we’re tryin’a turn him into a carbon smear.” A few more shots squeeze over and under the old YT-Model, and the brunette pilot deftly maneuvers them out of their immediate path while Kylo keeps them steady. Dipping low, she almost skims the dunes before rocketing around a tight corner and slipping inside one of the hulking Star Destroyers like she isn’t playing touch-and-die with a couple billion tons of Imperial scrap.
“I’m trying to cage him in for a better chance! Can you get a lock on him?” Another gleeful whoop is all they get from the comm system as a massive burning ball of First Order technology hits the far wall of the Star Destroyer’s engine compartment, caught by the gunner’s fire just as it entered through the exhaust port on their tail.
“That answers that, I suppose,” Kylo quips. The brunette at his side pulls another hard turn and guns the engine, rocketing the small cargo freighter out of the derelict Imperial vessel and into the open blue sky. They burn atmo faster than he expects, the old beater of a ship managing the buffets of the desert planet’s upper atmosphere with grace with her two pilots at the helm. At the barest reaches of their radar screen, a massive black shape blots out a quadrant of stars as it moves in geosynchronous orbit with the desert world. It’s big- easily twice the size of the picked-clean skeletons that litter the surface of Jakku below them- and even at a distance they can see that it’s bristling with weaponry.
“How are we doing on the hyperdrive?” The woman asks offhand. Kylo plugs in a few numbers and gets a clear reading for the section of starway directly in front of them, no immediate dangers cropping up on the star charts for a large enough swathe of distance that he feels safe confirming their course.
“Punch it and we’ll blow this kriffhole,” he replies. Without further ado the brunette- he still doesn’t know her name, or the gunner’s for that matter- pushes forward on the hyperdrive levers, and the achingly familiar sight of the stars becoming smeared streaks of light on the YT-Model’s cockpit window becomes the only thing he can manage to focus on.
When he finally pulls his eyes away from the sight, sparing a glance over at the lady taking up the captain’s seat, he’s surprised to see that she’s disappeared entirely. The cockpit door is open behind him, and he picks his vest and scarf back up as he makes his way into the small common area behind her.
“I don’t know your name,” he can hear her saying as he shoulders back into his vest and absently reaches under one of the bench seats for a dusty first aid kit, one that he distinctly recalls his large and hairy uncle stocking under his father’s nose for the all-too-frequent occurrences of glancing blaster burns and maintenance mishaps.
“It’s FN-“ the man catches himself, and it comes out sounding more like ‘Ephin’ than a designation. “It’s Finn.”
“Ephin Finn?” Kylo pulls a medicated moisture wipe and an unopened bacta patch from the mess of discarded wrappers that litter the little kit, wiping the remaining blood from his face and delicately cleaning the crusty blood from his airway with a twisted corner. He sticks the bacta across his broken nose as he turns the corner in the hallway, only to come face-to-face with the mystery desert woman as she whirls on him and fixes him with a smile that glitters in the grimy old Corellian freighter.
“I’m Rey, what’s your name?” She asks, and the brilliance of her beautiful smile- the way her eyes crinkle at the edges and the excitement in her voice suffuses the entire ship with something he could almost call pure Light- promptly makes him draw a blank on quite literally everything he’d ever invented for himself as an identity.
“Ben Solo,” he mumbles. Behind the overlarge bacta patch on his nose, and through the awkward break in the cartilage, the words tumble out less as a name and more as a single long garbled word. He immediately regrets giving her that name, not even sure why he’d said the words, but then the woman- Rey- smiles at him again and he can’t remember why he hesitated. He has a vague sense that her smile might be dangerous, seeing as how he gets stupid every time she fixes it on him.
“Benz Olo?” He’d be damned if the girl didn’t have half of Jakku stuck in her auricular canals, but that name would work just as well- and it would probably keep him from being associated with loftier, more well-known names.
“Yeah, but most folk call me Kylo Ren. I run the Knights of Ren.” Rey’s brilliant smile comes back as he mentions the small smuggling ring he’d started a number of years previously, but Finn’s countenance seems to darken into a furrowed frown.
“The Guavian enforcer gang?” The shorter man asks, and Kylo almost slaps an open palm to his face before he remembers that his nose is broken. Two or three of his Knights (and honestly, what had he been thinking with a name like that?) were, in fact, heavily involved with the Guavians- that was how he’d gotten his ill-fated quadjumper. But as a rule, he liked to consider his little operation to be unaffiliated.
“No, the smuggling ring!” Apparently he doesn’t even need to defend himself, as Rey immediately comes to his aid. They don’t have long to debate the exact terms describing his self-employment, however, as a klaxon begins to sound and a huge explosion of steam billows out of the nearby grated floor with a bang.
“The motivator!” Kylo and Rey both yell at once. Finn almost loses his balance behind them as the old YT-Model drops out of hyperspace with a massive lurch, but he follows dutifully as the two pilots run to pull up the access panel and Rey drops into the billowing steam cloud without so much as a by-your-leave.
“How do you know that’s safe to breathe?!” The young man dutifully holds the piece of uprooted flooring when Kylo hands it to him, and peers into the depths of the ship as though hoping to catch a glimpse of the woman inside.
“I don’t, but it’s the only way we’re getting the hyperdrive back,” she replies. Kylo returns with a massive toolkit in his arms, the box almost too large for a human to handle effectively. He drops it to the floor with a bang, and starts rooting around in it for the requisite tools.
“We’ll pull her up if she starts screaming,” he says, elbow deep in hyperspanners and sonic screwdrivers of various sizes and widths.
“Don’t worry though! If you hear screaming and swearing, I’m fine. Can you hand me a .35 socket lever?” Kylo dutifully pulls the correct size tool from the box after a moment of rummaging, and plunges it into the steam. A small hand grabs his, warm even in the hot vapor, and then it’s gone along with the lever in the space of a heartbeat.
This is not how Kylo Ren (or, for that matter, Ben Solo) thought his day would end. But as he makes himself comfortable and resigns himself to the job of making sure the young desert-dweller in the bowels of his father’s ship has the tools she needs, he honestly can’t find too much fault with the company he’s managed to find himself in.
Re: FILL: requiem for a totaled quadjumper (1b) (posting it in the right place this time)
“That one’s garbage! It hasn’t flown in years,” the woman asserts. She barely gives it more than a glance, preferring to keep on course to their original destination.
“We need to get out of the system before the First Order can get a bead on us! A quadjumper can hit hyperspace faster than you can say-“ before Kylo can say it, the TIE fighter screaming through the air behind them fires twice and hits the good-sized orange craft dead-on. It goes up in a ball of flames and a deafening explosion, acrid black smoke immediately pluming into the air above it.
“The garbage will do!” The woman yells out, immediately changing direction towards the YT-Model. The man in Poe’s jacket has to physically pull Kylo from where he’d stopped dead, staring at the smoking crater that had been his mostly-paid-for quadjumper.
The Guavians he’d bought it from were going to put a bounty on his head, there was no way around it.
“Come on!” The other man yells, yanking harder to get Kylo to run. They duck under the tarpoline covering the entrance ramp to the old YT-Model, and as the droid knocks past their heels to get up into the ship the dark-haired man starts to slow again. At the top of the access ramp, covered in the kind of grime no sane person likes to think about the origins of, the near-illegible designation plate for the old cargo ship stares him down as though it is a sentient entity that has come to pass judgment upon him. It is familiar, just as the silhouette of the old Corellian bucket of scrap was familiar against the shifting dunes and cloudless blue sky hours before, and just as the faint traces of small grubby handprints on the cream-colored walls are familiar to his much-grown fingers.
“The gunner’s position is down there! YT-Models need two pilots, can you fly?!” Kylo shakes himself from his reverie and hits the ramp controls to seal the ship up behind him, the movement practiced despite years of having never stepped foot upon the ship.
“Can I fly?!” He parrots incredulously. “Lady, I’ve been piloting Corellian YT-Models since before I could walk!”
“Good, I need a co-pilot!” The woman’s voice comes from the direction of the cockpit, as though she’s already traversed the layout of the ship a dozen times before. For all he knows, in its derelict state for the past decade or so, she’s learned its every nook and cranny as well as its rightful owner. He takes the familiar path himself with long strides, not sparing a glance for the bench seats and small dejarik table off to one side. He has to duck to get into the cockpit, his wide frame almost making him do the same sideways shuffle that he distinctly remembers Chewbacca being forced to do to get through the small door. The air is stifling in the sun-warmed cabin, and Kylo can already feel sweat beginning to bead anew on the back of his neck and the top of his forehead as he slides into what was once his large hairy uncle’s seat and divests himself of his bloody scarf and thick black vest. The mystery woman, desert clothes sticking out like a sore thumb in the dark interior, is already running pre-flight checks and priming the- Kylo’s brain shorts for a moment at the new addition to the console.
“What moof-milker thought it was a good idea to put a compressor on a YT-Model?” She resolutely ignores him and hits the controls to finish powering up the craft- which does so for only a moment before dying back down with a whine. Without preamble, Kylo rocks back in his seat and aims a hard kick at a specific spot on the console, adding his boot print to the slightly dented and discolored patch of metal just above one of the control levers. The engine thrums to life again, the lights in the cockpit blinking into existence and surrounding them both with a delicate glow. The life support systems kick into action as well, pumping cool air into the overheated cockpit as the woman pulls back on the controls and they lurch into the open sky. A number of metal cargo containers fall from the ship with a cacophony of screeches and bangs, tarpolines ripping away to expose the cloudless blue sky- and the two TIE fighters headed straight for them.
“Keep low! It confuses their tracking!” As the woman pulls them immediately into a steep upward climb, the man in the lower gunner’s position manages to hit the comm controls somehow and comes over the tinny speaker in the cockpit. Working in tandem, the two pilots quickly bring the unwieldy craft into a smooth dive around the edge of a dune. A bright green laser bolt rockets past the cockpit with a screech of rent oxygen, and Kylo wastes no time reaching over to engage the aft shields before steadying the craft out of yet another extreme turn.
“We need to lose those tag-alongs before we have any chance of gettin’ past the Destroyer in orbit,” he mentions offhand. When a warning light begins to blink at him insistently, followed by a nagging incessant beeping, he slams his fist into the dash twice to make it stop. His eyes on the small readout of the immediate radar area, he primes one of the automatic starboard guns and tries to get a lock on the closer of the two fighters riding their tail.
“I’m working on that!” Without any other means of heads-up, the lanky dark-haired man nearly flies from his seat and into the wall next to him as the woman in the main pilot’s seat pulls a turn so hard it makes the bottom drop out of his stomach. Behind them, in one of the small hallways of the ship, the little spherical droid screams in what could almost be described as terror- if a droid could feel something like that. The field of debris that stretches out before them when he manages to level them off, the massive engines of Imperator and ImpStar Deuce-class Star Destroyers peeking out of the shifting sands in the dozens, is enough to give him stunned pause.
“Got one!” The man in the gunner’s position shouts out with glee, and Kylo can almost hear how excited the young man is through the speaker. As he watches, one of the blips tailing them on the radar screen disappears as abruptly as the faint sound of an explosion behind them.
“Lucky shot, kid! Don’t get cocky! That other pilot’s all over the place, I think he knows we’re tryin’a turn him into a carbon smear.” A few more shots squeeze over and under the old YT-Model, and the brunette pilot deftly maneuvers them out of their immediate path while Kylo keeps them steady. Dipping low, she almost skims the dunes before rocketing around a tight corner and slipping inside one of the hulking Star Destroyers like she isn’t playing touch-and-die with a couple billion tons of Imperial scrap.
“I’m trying to cage him in for a better chance! Can you get a lock on him?” Another gleeful whoop is all they get from the comm system as a massive burning ball of First Order technology hits the far wall of the Star Destroyer’s engine compartment, caught by the gunner’s fire just as it entered through the exhaust port on their tail.
“That answers that, I suppose,” Kylo quips. The brunette at his side pulls another hard turn and guns the engine, rocketing the small cargo freighter out of the derelict Imperial vessel and into the open blue sky. They burn atmo faster than he expects, the old beater of a ship managing the buffets of the desert planet’s upper atmosphere with grace with her two pilots at the helm. At the barest reaches of their radar screen, a massive black shape blots out a quadrant of stars as it moves in geosynchronous orbit with the desert world. It’s big- easily twice the size of the picked-clean skeletons that litter the surface of Jakku below them- and even at a distance they can see that it’s bristling with weaponry.
“How are we doing on the hyperdrive?” The woman asks offhand. Kylo plugs in a few numbers and gets a clear reading for the section of starway directly in front of them, no immediate dangers cropping up on the star charts for a large enough swathe of distance that he feels safe confirming their course.
“Punch it and we’ll blow this kriffhole,” he replies. Without further ado the brunette- he still doesn’t know her name, or the gunner’s for that matter- pushes forward on the hyperdrive levers, and the achingly familiar sight of the stars becoming smeared streaks of light on the YT-Model’s cockpit window becomes the only thing he can manage to focus on.
When he finally pulls his eyes away from the sight, sparing a glance over at the lady taking up the captain’s seat, he’s surprised to see that she’s disappeared entirely. The cockpit door is open behind him, and he picks his vest and scarf back up as he makes his way into the small common area behind her.
“I don’t know your name,” he can hear her saying as he shoulders back into his vest and absently reaches under one of the bench seats for a dusty first aid kit, one that he distinctly recalls his large and hairy uncle stocking under his father’s nose for the all-too-frequent occurrences of glancing blaster burns and maintenance mishaps.
“It’s FN-“ the man catches himself, and it comes out sounding more like ‘Ephin’ than a designation. “It’s Finn.”
“Ephin Finn?” Kylo pulls a medicated moisture wipe and an unopened bacta patch from the mess of discarded wrappers that litter the little kit, wiping the remaining blood from his face and delicately cleaning the crusty blood from his airway with a twisted corner. He sticks the bacta across his broken nose as he turns the corner in the hallway, only to come face-to-face with the mystery desert woman as she whirls on him and fixes him with a smile that glitters in the grimy old Corellian freighter.
“I’m Rey, what’s your name?” She asks, and the brilliance of her beautiful smile- the way her eyes crinkle at the edges and the excitement in her voice suffuses the entire ship with something he could almost call pure Light- promptly makes him draw a blank on quite literally everything he’d ever invented for himself as an identity.
“Ben Solo,” he mumbles. Behind the overlarge bacta patch on his nose, and through the awkward break in the cartilage, the words tumble out less as a name and more as a single long garbled word. He immediately regrets giving her that name, not even sure why he’d said the words, but then the woman- Rey- smiles at him again and he can’t remember why he hesitated. He has a vague sense that her smile might be dangerous, seeing as how he gets stupid every time she fixes it on him.
“Benz Olo?” He’d be damned if the girl didn’t have half of Jakku stuck in her auricular canals, but that name would work just as well- and it would probably keep him from being associated with loftier, more well-known names.
“Yeah, but most folk call me Kylo Ren. I run the Knights of Ren.” Rey’s brilliant smile comes back as he mentions the small smuggling ring he’d started a number of years previously, but Finn’s countenance seems to darken into a furrowed frown.
“The Guavian enforcer gang?” The shorter man asks, and Kylo almost slaps an open palm to his face before he remembers that his nose is broken. Two or three of his Knights (and honestly, what had he been thinking with a name like that?) were, in fact, heavily involved with the Guavians- that was how he’d gotten his ill-fated quadjumper. But as a rule, he liked to consider his little operation to be unaffiliated.
“No, the smuggling ring!” Apparently he doesn’t even need to defend himself, as Rey immediately comes to his aid. They don’t have long to debate the exact terms describing his self-employment, however, as a klaxon begins to sound and a huge explosion of steam billows out of the nearby grated floor with a bang.
“The motivator!” Kylo and Rey both yell at once. Finn almost loses his balance behind them as the old YT-Model drops out of hyperspace with a massive lurch, but he follows dutifully as the two pilots run to pull up the access panel and Rey drops into the billowing steam cloud without so much as a by-your-leave.
“How do you know that’s safe to breathe?!” The young man dutifully holds the piece of uprooted flooring when Kylo hands it to him, and peers into the depths of the ship as though hoping to catch a glimpse of the woman inside.
“I don’t, but it’s the only way we’re getting the hyperdrive back,” she replies. Kylo returns with a massive toolkit in his arms, the box almost too large for a human to handle effectively. He drops it to the floor with a bang, and starts rooting around in it for the requisite tools.
“We’ll pull her up if she starts screaming,” he says, elbow deep in hyperspanners and sonic screwdrivers of various sizes and widths.
“Don’t worry though! If you hear screaming and swearing, I’m fine. Can you hand me a .35 socket lever?” Kylo dutifully pulls the correct size tool from the box after a moment of rummaging, and plunges it into the steam. A small hand grabs his, warm even in the hot vapor, and then it’s gone along with the lever in the space of a heartbeat.
This is not how Kylo Ren (or, for that matter, Ben Solo) thought his day would end. But as he makes himself comfortable and resigns himself to the job of making sure the young desert-dweller in the bowels of his father’s ship has the tools she needs, he honestly can’t find too much fault with the company he’s managed to find himself in.