Warrior ◊ Star Wars

chapter thirty-four; home

There were two things that Rey and Mara had to deal with the days leading up to the Millennium Falcon' s departure to Ach-To; Mara's past and Rey's future.

First was the news that as one of the last known Force-users in the galaxy, Rey would have to be sent to Luke Skywalker's location to discover if he really inhabited that world. If he did, she must be trained properly in the Jedi ways to combat Kylo Ren when it came time to face him again.

"My girl is not leaving without me." Was the blonde's first reaction.

But even Mara knew as she spit the words while they dug deep in her core, she couldn't. Training a new, possibly influential warrior was more important than a foul-mouthed woman without that power tagging along to possibly hinder that process.

It broke both women's hearts to separate, but both wouldn't let that show. No, the stars wouldn't shatter and the galaxy crumble just because they had to separate. It may if someone didn't stop Kylo Ren and Snoke.

That wasn't the worst part.

Kylo Ren had mentioned off hand during his interrogation with scavenger girl the late Commander Hux, who had been found miraculously alive after a member of the Gauvian Death Gang reported a sighting of her to the First Order. The subject was not harped on and the monster implied that Mara had died on Takodana, then decided to try and invade her mind (to which Rey gave him the Force equivalent of the middle finger). Throughout the rather harrowing events that followed her kidnapping, the newfound Jedi hadn't even had time to process who this Commander Hux was, why she was alive, and if she was somehow involved with Mara.

After the dust had settled and their lives weren't in immediate threat, Rey tentatively asked about her friend about what Ren may have meant when he mentioned the Commander. The blonde's answer was simple; worry and terror overtook as she realized that she would have to explain her history in the First Order (as well as her history all together, something both women had made an unspoken pact not to discuss). Once Mara calmed down and the two found somewhere private to talk, she started with her childhood living in the house of a former wronged Imperial general. She didn't delve too deep into her father's emotional abuse when it came to his youngest child before explaining everything from her speeder accident that cost her a leg to the fight with her parents that forced them to send her to a flight academy off world.

And it all spilled out like a sea broken over it's limits; her time in the academy where she mostly lived with her Aunt Ly who gave her the famous batons, to her parent's divorce when she was seventeen, her expulsion from the academy that set her on a path of crime ( "All those jail stories I told you about? Yeah, started when I stole Solo's sold fighter on a dare."), how her brother Armitage would bail her out each time and how she'd end up back in a cell three weeks later. She explained her alias, Mariana Hoss, and why the dark-haired woman in the Intelligence uniform would often stare at her ( "My family killed the majority of Cali's in the war. Neither of us found that out until the bitch brother showed up to bail me out again."). She shared her time in the death gang before they turned on her and how she ended up on Takodana nursing a hurt ego and alcohol abuse.

Then Mara was stumbling over how she'd been arrested once again for high theft ( "The X-Wing looked like it was worth it at the time." ) and was going to be sent to a mining colony to work off her sentence before her brother showed up, offering her a way out only if shejoined the First Order as a tactician. With shaking words she admitted that she'd taken the chance, not fully understanding all it entailed at the time.

And with a closing throat, Mara admitted her faults with the First Order. The reasons she felt obligated to stay with her pilots even after she found out the truly nefarious deeds of the Order, the selfish route she did take and the wrongs she'd commit. Then came the fight with her brother, her expulsion, meeting Dameron, the escape from Ratakka, and the miscalculated jump to lightspeed that brought her to Jakku.