albinomilksnake | STAR WARS: possible spoiler warning

[It's not like he's lost his Droid. Not this time, at least, and after last time he's pretty sure that BB-8 would come home from anything. Besides, almost all hands were on deck for the repairs on the legendary Falcon, still in the air despite the loss.

It's a strange feeling. He doesn't- didn't- know Han Solo all that well. Not comparatively. But he knew the General, and his parents knew everybody. They talked about them like you'd talk about family. He understood that, with his squadron he understood it now better than ever. Almost enough the years he went without seeing his parents faces for longer than a week or two seemed forgiveable. They'd lost a hell of a lot more than a symbol. But they'd gained-

His fingers skate along one of the Falcon's struts as he pokes his head around, looking for a telltale roll. Plenty of people at work, but no custom Droid to be found. The hatch was open, though, and it was inviting, even if this ship wasn't exactly his kind of ride.

He takes a single breath before he ascends, like crossing a church mantle, footsteps more even and less rushed than usual. Inside is a mess, too, and honestly he's a lot more pilot than he is mechanic but even he knows it's going to take a lot of work. So he's not surprised to see his Droid lending a hand. He's a little more surprised to see who he's lending a hand to. Not that it shows. He doesn't get starstruck by Jedi. Even pretty ones.]

There you are- [He'a kind enough to make sure her head isn't in a place that jerking back will earn her a nasty bump, that she's not doing anything too delicate with her hands. Attention to detail was important.]

[It's fortunate timing, really. If she knew much of anything about Poe Dameron, maybe she'd have a passing thought along the lines of 'Typical.' But she doesn't really. As it is she has time to secure the wrapped wire, close her hand almost blindly around the wire cutters held to her by BB-8, to experience a momentary clench of adrenaline in her belly over the droid's question, and then-- then they're being interrupted by a pilot and it doesn't matter what her stomach's doing or how she doesn't really have an answer for that beyond 'Find Like Skywalker.'

Rey flicks him little more than a look. Her expression is drawn, naturally pinched and set. Then she turns the wire cutters deftly in her spare hand and dives back in to jam the sharp ends where they can do their job, snipping the extra wiring - stripping what she needs at the base of the main strand to finish securing it. It's an easy one, two motion. There. Done. Next wire. She's rapidly running through the coil in her lap.]

There's another set of wire over there. [Jerks in the direction with her temple, but doesn't look up as she measures the remaining length against what she needs, finds it suitable, strips one end and begins braiding it in.] Bring that over, would you?

[Whether she's talking to the droid or a pilot is anyone's guess.]

[BB-8 swivels its head to visually locate the indicated wire before retracting it's arm to roll in that direction more easily. The droid doesn't ignore Poe, of course, but being intent on helping Rey repair the Falcon cuts any potentially more lengthy greeting to a more staccato acknowledgment. Droids, especially of the already eccentric astromech variety, have a tendency to be somewhat single-minded.

As BB-8 retrieves the coil and returns to Rey's side--somewhat awkwardly, with its arm extended--it chirps at Poe that maybe, as someone with hands, he might lend them to their efforts.]

[His smile doesn't waver even in the face of her closed, serious look. Jedi were supposed to be serious, right? Maybe she'd been practicing. He didn't know much about her besides that, either, other than the short bursting tales BB-8 had managed to impart. She was a good pilot, apparently.

He turns his head to glance at the wire but the Droid is already rushing to comply, making his eyebrows raise slightly. He could almost be jealous, loyalty like that.]

Well, nice to see you too pal. You've seen my handy work before, I'm not sure you want to out the Falcon's life support system at risk like that.

[Cheerful cheerful. But for all he's talking to his wobbly little friend his eyes are still firmly on the new hero of the resistance.]

We haven't really met yet, have we?

[There's a very narrow pull at the corner of her mouth, something like fondness for the droid's suggestion. She tips her head to the grating beside her, not looking up or pausing the task her hands are currently employed at.] Thanks. Just set it there. [She braids the wire - over, under, over, under--]

Not really. [Her hands do slow then, still. She makes to glance back at him - looks at his boots on the Falcon's deck, then his face. She slowly resumes her task without looking, habitual more than thought.] You're Commander Dameron, right?

[The droid could bring up Finn's ability to help despite his inexperience in mechanical repair, but refrains. Protocol isn't in BB-8's programming, but all it takes is a certain level of attachment to inform on whether or not bringing up a gravely injured friend is appropriate. Instead, he complies simply by setting the wire where Rey specifies and makes sure to be ready in case she needs something soldered.

He also takes a moment to introduce Poe to Rey, in a manner of speaking. Or, more accurately, in a manner of beeping. It's the kind of off-handed introduction one gives about someone who's been spoken of at length. This is the one I told you about in so many words.]

Poe.

[The name rolls easily and automatically off of his tongue. He was friends with almost everyone, but he was even more predisposed to want to get to know someone who had BB-8's back, not to mention someone Finn was so obviously attached to.]

And you're Rey. I've heard a lot about you.

[Plenty of excitable beeps. He rolls up on the little Droid, nudging it companionably with the side of his knee. It gives him the added benefit of being able to look down at what the girl was doing with clever, practiced fingers.]

I meant to thank you for watching out for this little guy. The rebellion would have been lost without your help.

Edited 2015-12-24 21:30 (UTC)

[Even if she didn't understand BB-8 and even if the familiarity wasn't obvious between the two of them, the astromech droid's series of excitable trills would've told her enough. As it is, with light years worth of stories between here and Jakku relayed from the droid about his ace pilot Resistance friend combined with what she's heard from Finn-- well, she thinks she has a pretty good grasp of the situation.]

Oh. [Her eye drops from him back to the work in front of her. She secures the braid, wraps it around one of the port posts and runs the wire from point a to point b. Strips the end of the wire and then wraps and starts braiding that into place too.] I didn't do anything on my own. If it was up to me, BB-8 and I would still be on Jakku.

[Simple as that. Well, partly--] Until he convinced me to get him off world anyway. [She shoots BB-8 a quick glance, eyebrow quirking, hands never stopping.]

[BB-8 swivels its head around, tilting it back to look up at Poe, then back to Rey. The next chirps and whistles are a confirmation that leaving Jakku was necessary, and a fortunate necessity at that. Without Rey's help, where would they be? Not just BB-8, or Poe, but the entire Resistance?

There really wasn't a best case scenario other than the one they were living.]

[She's not quite what he was expecting, although if pressed he's not sure he knows what he expected. She'd just won them a huge victory though, and found a place among some of the best. Not that it meant much if you didn't want to be there. And not like it had been easy. Still.]

Have to agree with you, pal. [His tone is soft, close to gentle. Fond around the edges.]

Besides, none if us do it on our own. We're a team. I'm glad you joined up.

[Her braiding doesn't slow, but she does twitch her face back toward them by a half degree-- She wants to say... What? That she's glad too, maybe. Or that she wishes she'd never had to come - not because it wasn't necessary, just wishing the circumstances had been different so they'd never had to be put into the position where she was ever on the Millennium Falcon, that Starkiller Base had never existed in the first place, that no one had to get injuries or killed even if it meant that she wasn't here and hadn't met him or BB-8 or Han Solo or Finn.

But that doesn't really matter. She's here now - they all are - and that means... doing what needs to be done. How being glad fits into that she isn't sure (it would be easier to feel that way if some things were different), but-- she blinks rapidly. She sets her jaw. She wishes Finn was here and not laid out on a cot in the base below them. She wishes--]

Sure. [She finishes braiding. She measures, cuts and strips another wire. Starts work on that one too.] You're friends with Finn, right?

[BB-8 trusts Poe to be able to answer that question himself, and decides instead to try and best estimate the next tool or item Rey needs next. The droid rolls around, beeping softly to itself as it peruses the scattered bits and bobs before settling on grabbing a roll of insulating tape and bringing it back to set next to the coil of wire.]

[Charm got him most places. Not everywhere, but when it didn't he didn't feel the need to push. He wasn't nice to break people down. So the fact she isn't open as a door for him doesn't bother him much. Her sideways glances and short answers were hers.

Still, he smiles at the question. He isn't often known as someone else's friend first. His fame tended to reach even further than his parents at this point. It was kind of nice, just being Por Dameron, Finn's friend.

He sidesteps as the Droid as he goes to get tape, shifting to the other side of the deck as he watches him process. BB-8 was a good little Droid. Capable and clever. A great pal. It was nice to have him back.]

Yeah, I'd like to think so. He's a good guy, helped me out when I was in a real bind.

[And he kept the jacket. It was sweet.]

How many more days do you figure she'll be grounded? Seems like the two of you are getting pretty far.

Thank you. [Said small to the droid for the tape. She picks at it until she finds the seam, pinches the end and strips a long piece from the roll with an obnoxious shrrrk!]

The two of us and every other Resistance mechanic. [It's clipped, habitually brusque. She looks at him over the curve of the roll and bites the strip of tape free.] Until tomorrow, I think. Early. The ion impulse regulator's still offline, so there's a half day on that to get the rear drive back in shape.

[And then she's wrapping the stripoed section of wire with insulation tape - quick and efficient and as even coverage as it needs to be.]

[BB-8 is two seconds too late popping a cutting tool out of one of his silver panels, intending to help by cutting the insulation tape to length, but Rey has already torn through it with her teeth. The droid looks between Rey and its extended arm before warbling something akin to oh...neeeevermind and retracting the outstretched tool.

He starts to do another pass around the deck to find the next useful thing, but remembers something and stops mid-way. Wobbling a bit side to side, he chirps and whistles, reminding Rey that it'd be worth running diagnostics on the hyperdrive. Artoo seemed to think it'd save everyone a lot of trouble.]

[That little bit of gratitude goes a long way in making his impression of her even more positive. Plenty of people didn't treat druids with much respect or appreciation. Like they thought since it was their job they didn't deserve consideration.]

Quick. Where'd you learn to fix ships?

[He crouches down then, hand to the top of BB's head. Gently swivels it with his palm, smiling easily.]

Well pal, seems like you could manage that.

[If BB-8 had eyelids--or eyes, for that matter--he'd be blinking at Poe.

Of course he could manage a diagnostics run on the hyperdrive, in theory. It's just a matter of finding the right port. He is an astromech, after all. But the Falcon is nothing like the X-wings he's used to interfacing with; it's older, and bigger, and BB-8 is rather small. The droid makes half a beep, the start of a response, before stopping suddenly.

He stares at Poe for another moment, then swivels his head sharply towards Rey, stares, swivels back. Repeats this motion a few times, dubiously. But of course, if Poe wasn't here to help, or to talk about Important Things...

BB-8 chirps, if you say so, and rolls off towards the cockpit, which seems like the most logical place to have a port for the hyperdrive.]

[It's a perfectly fair suggestion and a good place to start work next, really. They'd need the hyperdrive in perfect working order and part of her, the part intimately familiar with the modifications the Falcon had been settled with, wants to check it herself. But-- BB-8 knows what he's doing and anything that pings back wrong she can check. More than likely half the fixes that needed to be made would be out of the droid's reach anyway. Inconvenient, she thinks, putting so many access panels in the ship's subfloor where he couldn't easily reach.

But she also doesn't miss the droid's moment of indecision. That has her squinting, brow lowering by a degree. She looks between the two of them and slowly secures the last wire with the insulation tspe as BB-8 rolls off.]

I took a lot of things apart on Jakku. [She unsticks her fingers and fits the cover back onto the eletrical compartment. Easy enough. Hefting herself out of the hatch, Rey squirms along the grating and eventually gets a foot under herself. Her hands are black with grease and there's a smudge on her cheek from where she bumped it across her hand while using her teeth on the tape.] This is just doing it the other way around.

[Maybe, if they were alone, he would play up how insulted he was. Ask what the little Droid was suggesting. But they weren't, and he doubted very much she'd be the kind of girl to find that sort of thing cute. Instead he shoots BB-8 an aborted little salute as he rolls into the cockpit.

He did want her alone, to be fair. To be more fair, his intentions were far from impure.]

Hey- [He turns his face back to her as she pulls herself up, moving with a kind of practiced ease that made it clear nothing about what she'd said was false. The expression on his face shifts into something a little more serious, not quite the focus he applied to piloting, nothing quite so sharp, but without any veneer.]

You don't have to say anything if you don't want to, but if you ever want to talk about what happened- you know, when they captured you, I'm here. I figure if someone else would get it-

[He shrugs soft. Easy, slides his gaze off to give her time to think. He'd been thinking about it. A bit. He hadn't spoken to anyone else about it, even though they'd tried. And they probably would have kept trying if things hadn't been so desperate. If the General wasn't so wrapped up, she'd probably have insisted.

But everyone had bigger things to worry about. Him too, when he wasn't sleeping.]

[If there's something she expects from a stranger-- from a friend of Finn's, sure, but still just a man in an orange jumpsuit and an inflatable pilot's jacket --, it's not that. It catches her off guard, has her blinking: away and then back at him, something wide and open in her expression.

What does she know about Poe Dameron? That he was a friend of Finn's. That he was BB-8's master. That he was an excellent pilot. That something had happened to him on Jakku, and then he'd almost died but he-- hadn't. What's he suggesting, exactly? She leans down, catches the grating and wrenches it back into place to cover the access channel.]

You were captured?

Edited 2015-12-28 07:59 (UTC)

[He is, in a way, surprised she doesn't know. But then again, would it be the first thing Finn told his new friend? That his old friends- that's unfair. They weren't any friends of his- captured and tortu- that they took the information from him they needed and we're going to kill him before he helped him escape?

No, not good conversation. Not for anyone. So her surprise makes sense. That very young look on her face.]

Yeah. That's where I met Finn. They uh- wanted the map, and I was the last person who had it. Before BB-8.

[Wrong place, wrong time. Or wrong man. He'd given them what they wanted eventually. Even though he was supposed to be the best man for the job. The only mission he'd ever failed. If it weren't for Finn, and this girl. Rey. The new Jedi.]

He's not a very gracious host.

[He figures it's obvious enough who he means. Kylo Ren. The General's only son. A ghost that haunted the halls of the Resistance as long as he'd been a part of it.]

[Kylo Ren. That's the only person he could mean, the only person who had tried to ply her for what she knew of the map. He's the last person she wants to think about - his face, his hand on his lightsaber, the shape of him on the bridge set against Han Solo's before, how he'd looked at her past his outstretched hand with his fingers twitching like he wanted her throat more than what lay inside her head. It makes her blood run cold, prickles the small hairs at the back of her neck. Some part of her goes swimming at the thought of him - untethered and wild and viciously angry for a hundred things including, maybe, the part where he must have hurt Finn's friend Poe Dameron. It puts a bitter taste in her mouth like standing too near an ion coil. She blinks rapidly. Something behind her eyes stings and she doesn't want to think about what that is.]

No. He isn't.

[She bends, fetches the roll of insulating tape from the deck, and moves with purpose toward the cockpit after BB-8.]

[He wants to ask her. He wants to ask if she talked. Like the shuttering hot and cold expression on her face wasn't enough for him. Even though he told her she didn't have to say anything.

She didn't. She didn't, not like him. If she had the First Order would have what they wanted. They wouldn't be waiting for the falcon to be fixed. They'd send their fastest pilot- him, and Leia would trust him with it even if- to bring Luke back before Kylo Ren and his master found him. So she didn't talk.

It should be easier to accept that it was just how it was. She was a Jedi, and he was just a damn fine pilot.

He doesn't say anything. Just let's her pass before he stands to trail after her, expression falling back into place. She'd talk to him if she wanted to. He'd offered, at least.]

[BB-8 is just trundling through the door as Rey moves to enter the cockpit, a combination of variables that results in a slight collision. BB-8 isn't moving fast enough to even knock Rey off balance, though the droid itself rocks backwards slightly after the impact with her legs, making a high pitched sound of surprise.

Tilting his head back, he looks up at Rey and trills a brief apology before moving aside. He did manage to find a port through which to interface with the Falcon, and discovered that the hyperdrive is in good condition, though needs some calibration, according to the ship's computer. He conveys this in a drawn out series of warbles and whistles, his head rotating to look towards the instrument panel, then back towards Rey and Poe.

Nuanced facial expression isn't something a droid can even attempt, and as such the droid just appears to stare blankly, more so at Poe than Rey.]

[The collision is, all things considered, totally minor - at least half her own fault. Rey makes a short noise of surprise, throwing her hands out to catch the droid though he's already rolled back, twisting away to accodomate her presence (and Poe's) in the small space.]

Good work, BB-8. [She's stepping around him, climbing into the co-pilot's seat to access one of the secondary panels. The blasé way she pulls up the panel's facing has everything to do with being comfortable with the components and nothing to do with an eagerness to leave the subject of Kylo Ren behind.]

This will be easier with three pairs of hands anyway. [She pushes her hand into the exposed circuits and wiring, feeling around with a pinched look on her face that smooths when her hand closes on-- there. Rey drags a square box and its countless attachments out into the open.]

BB-8, you take that-- [and then she's climbing over to stand on the other seat, popping a panel overhead. Reaching in, she's barely tall enough to find what she needs to.] --Here. Poe, I need your hand there. There's a lever. BB-8 can tell you when to crank it.

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