When security officers charge into the alleyway, blasters clanking at their belts even though it's already too late, Rey melts into the shadows like darkness itself. Suddenly her gaze is gone from his, her accusatory eyes no longer burning into him like a wound, and he only catches a glimpse of an edge of a brown robe before he's expected to turn to the officers, looking around at the carnage with wide eyes. Clearly, officers on Tatooine are used to dealing with drunken brawls and the occasional dispute between a bounty hunter and their target - never First Order invasions.

"Take word of the deaths to the families," Finn says to the leader, who seems confused as he looks around at the fallen bodies of Stormtroopers and allies alike. "Several ships have crash-landed here today - they are to be left alone for the scavengers." Of course, this reminds him of Rey - so much of this planet does.

"You led them?" the officer asks, looking at him as if he's some particularly small, disgusting creature. "What kind of leader is a man who steals a blaster?"

"A brave one, without whom we could all have died here today," the young woman who fought so fiercely says, stepping forward and laying a hand on Finn's arm. "Leave him alone. Leave all of us alone. We've done your job for you, and you better spread the word that the First Order are attacking us."

They leave, and Finn turns to her, watching her wipe the dirt from her brow and holster her blaster with steel in her eyes. She looks up at him, and the ghost of a smile flickers across her face. "Fake name, huh? Personal conversations with a Jedi?"

"You could say my past is a little turbulent," he concedes with a shrug, and she really smiles now, grinning so brightly at him until he can't help but smile back. "You're a good shot."

"Well, my past is turbulent too. As is my present," she replies, and reaches out to firmly shake his hand. Something passes between them - something that feels like respect. "Call me Blue. Perhaps our paths will cross again, Finn. We seem to fight for the same side."

"I don't have a side," he says, the words slipping out of him before he can swallow them down, and she turns around to look at him with a withering gaze, one hand at her blaster and one eyebrow arched.

"Everyone has a side in a war," she says. "And if you were with the Order, you wouldn't fight them the way you did today. You're Resistance, even if you don't call yourself one of them." And then she walks away, leaving him standing alone in the alleyway. Alone on the planet, with Shee dead. No one to turn to in the confusion suddenly filling his head like a fog.

Shaking it off, realising the chill of the early hour, he pulls his jacket closer around himself and walks away. The morning staff can deal with the fallout of the attack. He can't even bring himself to care whether people take the money from storage. People have died here today, and that matters more than money ever could - at least to him.

"Same jacket," comes a voice as he walks towards his speeder, and he finds Rey perched in his seat, her robe hanging loose around her. He lets himself take in her appearance, how similar and yet different she is - same hair, same determined eyes, same defensive stance and wary way of speaking. And yet, aside from such obvious differences as her clothes - the traditional uniform of a Jedi, according to the history books that survived the purge of the Empire - she is so different. She almost seems more relaxed, at home in herself, and there's an enormous difference in her confidence that shines on her skin and in her eyes. "Nice speeder."

"Picked it up from a junkyard when I first came here," he says, and something mistily sad creeps across her eyes, and she slides down from the seat, the material of her robe whispering against the metal. "What are you going to do? Your ship just got shot down."

She pulls up a voluminous sleeve to show him the silver band around her wrist. "Issued by the Resistance to everyone who goes on missions outside of the base. I've already activated the tracker, a ship will be here in the morning. Until then, I'll just hide out somewhere."

"Come with me," he says, and she looks up at him, that strange blend of emotions clouding her face again - anger and sadness and shock and, perhaps, a touch of joy. "I've got a tiny hut out in the wastelands, enough for you to stay there for a night. Please, Rey - it's the least I can do."

"We're going to talk," she says, and climbs onto the back of the speeder, tucking her robe around her as if she's done this a thousand times before. "Well, come on. There might be more Order troops waiting to attack." That shocks him into action, and throughout the journey he's on edge, waiting to hear the scream of TIE fighters sweeping across the sky.

With Rey inside, his meagre home seems even smaller. She seems bigger now, to him, taking up so much more space. It's the authority she has, being a Jedi - she sweeps her robe off in a grand gesture, spreading it over the threadbare couch and sprawling out there in her loose-fitting white clothes, designed for combat. The lightsaber is set on the nearest table, but he can see the way she gravitates towards it, for protection. She almost seems like a different woman - the scavenger girl he met is gone, absorbed into the history of the first in a new generation of Jedi. "So, your last three years?" she asks. "Have you been a leader for an underground battalion of ragtag drunken misfits?"

"I work at the cantina," Finn answers, avoiding her eyes. She wants to imagine him as a hero, even though he ran away, wants to think that he's been fighting quietly, out here in the desert. "I live here and work there. Nothing else. I was leading them because they needed someone to organise them so they didn't all just die." He lets himself look at her, and she looks so disappointed, the feeling raw in her eyes, that he feels hot with shame. She believed in him, and he gave her this. "And you?"

"That's a long story," Rey says, deflecting, folding her arms and sitting curled over her own lap, shrunken in to hide her secrets. There's pain in her memories, he can see it on her face, and his stomach clenches at the thought of what might have happened. "I'm with the Resistance now."

They sit in stilted quiet for minutes, as he watches the shallow rise and fall of her shoulders as she breathes, sees her swallow the silence and hug herself a little tighter, worry furrowing her brow. "Han's dead."

The words work their way down into Finn's bones, filling him with cold, and when Rey looks up there are tears in her eyes, bright like ice, and he reaches for her hand, the way he did the first day they met. She hesitates, but allows him to hold her. "What happened?" he asks softly, and the silence seems to hum around them as their eyes meet.

"Starkiller Base targeted the Resistance," she begins to explain, voice barely above a whisper, the tears tracking down her cheeks. "The general sent the pilots to blow it up, but they needed ground support for the shield. I went with Han and Chewie. We turned it off. But there was a confrontation, and Han was killed." She blinks, and fat tears roll down her cheeks, gleaming silver in the light provided by candles. "Kylo Ren is Han's son, Finn. And Kylo Ren killed him." When next she meets his eyes, a ghost of a smile crosses her face and she adds, "I felt exactly the same way when I found out."

"So how does all of that come together to you being an apparently qualified Jedi now?" Finn asks, darting a glance to the lightsaber, and Rey smiles to herself, like she's sharing a personal joke.

"It started at Maz's castle, after you left," she says, appearing to unfurl a little as she talks, obviously a little more relaxed to tell him this story than to tell him of the deaths that have happened since he left (could he have saved him?) "She had Luke Skywalker's lightsaber, and it called to me. Destiny and so on. She had me take it, and I fought First Order troops with it when they arrived to find us. Han took me to the Resistance, we managed to complete the map, I found Luke and he started to train me." Her eyes shine, the confidence in her brighter than Tatooine's twin suns, and she smiles a secret smile, almost to herself, as she confesses, in a hushed voice, "He's my father."

He just gives her a pointed look, swallowing the shocked exclamation he wants to let escape, asking for explanation with his eyes, and she smiles as she crosses her legs beneath her, like a child, and looks mistily into the distance, seemingly happy. "It was a dramatic affair, he told me, between him and my mother. He wouldn't tell me who she was, but he looked so sad that I think she's dead. They fell very quickly in love and she was pregnant after a few months. Luke was training Jedi at the time, so he hid her away so she couldn't be used against him by the Order. Even Leia didn't know that there was a woman, never mind a child on the way. When Ben - Kylo Ren - turned against him and killed his trainees, so he came to find my mother and I. I was four when he split us up for our own safety, and left me on Jakku. He meant to come back when the coast was clear, and make us a family, but the Order just became too powerful. He had to run."

"And you believe him?" he asks, and he senses the anger that flares up in her almost immediately in the flashing of her eyes and tensing of her hands and flicker of her gaze towards her weapon. "I just mean that he wouldn't have abandoned you on Jakku for so long if he cared about you. Why was your father, the most powerful Jedi in the galaxy, letting you work for barely any food and have to live in machines?"

"There were always the dreams," she says, almost dreamily, and he watches her expression relax once more, sinking into nostalgia. "There's a connection between every Force-sensitive - family connections make those bonds stronger. I remember dreams when I was a child, of a young man who would tell me little things to make my days better. I heard his voice in my head when I was scavenging, telling me what to look for to get the biggest payment. And there was another voice when I started flying, helping me. And a woman, very beautiful, who came to me when I was sad or scared. I believe the three were my father and my grandparents." Even in the sadness of these stories, he can feel the way she relishes it - having connections, having a past, a family. "And you don't know how the rise of the Order ruined everyone who came through from the Empire. They need to be stopped, but they're so strong that there isn't a lot the Resistance can do alone. I've been all over the galaxy, trying to drum up more support for us. General Organa believes sending out the Jedi offers more hope and more possibility for support."

"So you've spent three years training to be a Jedi and working in public relations for the Resistance?" he asks, genuinely curious, and she nods - though there's a slight hesitation before she does so. There's something she's not telling him - but the fragile thread of trust between them, forced by circumstance of dramatic escape, was broken when he left; and the thought that what's she hiding might be another death is enough to make the prospect of knowing frightening. "What's it like? In the Resistance?"

"It's a community, General Organa wants it to be that way," she says, hands wrapped around her knees. She looks almost like a child, but there's too much suffering in her for her to be so young. "I mean, they've put me on the committee, which some people weren't happy about. They think it was just handed to me."

"Idiots!" Finn exclaims before he can bite it back, but she smiles, the sound of her soft laugh seeming to make the room a little brighter. "Honestly, a Jedi trainee and the daughter of a hero of the Rebellion should be on the committee."

"Daughter of one, niece of two," she corrects him with a satisfied little smirk shadowing the corners of her mouth. "General Organa is my aunt too, so people think it was handed to me. But I get my own room, and I'm part of all the planning and get to express my opinion in the meetings, and they need the opinion of a Force user in there. In general, though, the people there are all friendly and supportive, and wonderful fighters. They'll never stop until the First Order falls or we all die trying. I love being part of it - my name will be in the history books." She looks at him, her eyes probing into the depths of his heart, and he feels like all the guilt and fear that had him run comes flooding back to the surface, where she can see it. "Your name could be there too."

"I don't want to join the Resistance," he says, even though it's a lie that he feels reverberate in his bones. "All I ever wanted was to get away from the Order. I didn't ask to meet you and end up on an adventure. I...I just wanted to keep running."

"And you did," she says, her eyes piercing and her tone stern. "You left in a ship with, frankly, some very suspicious characters, and you came here and you changed your name and took an awful job and lived in this tiny hut and kept ignoring the war for three years. I wanted to come and look for you, but Leia told me that she tried to do that when Luke first disappeared, and there's no point searching for someone who doesn't want to be found. I just wanted to know you were alright. Finn, the Resistance has always been there for you if you wanted it. I've always been here for you."

"It's just not an option for me, Rey," he says, feeling the weight of his words and that strange, cold sadness in his blood. "I'm not a fighter. I just want to run. I can't stay here now the Order's invaded, but I'll find somewhere to go."

"There's nowhere to hide from the Order, Finn," she says, urgent and ardent. "We think they're reaching into the Outer Rim because they're looking for more troops for a final fight against the Resistance. We're close to an ultimatum, and no one is complicit in a war. You can't stand for nothing - if you do, what happens when you get shot down by a Stormtrooper? How will you be remembered? Please, Finn, fight with me. We started this together."

"I can't." And with those words, he stands and leaves her staring up at him, all that raw emotion in her eyes the way he's never seen her before. Always, her mask was on - she's vulnerable now, asking him to be at her side in the fight. But he can't - he's so scared, the thought of him has him cold. He doesn't want to die, he wants to go on living - but is it living, if he has no cause? If he keeps hopping around the planets to run away from the war, if he keeps changing who he is, if he keeps never letting people know who he is behind a warm smile and charming words, is he a person or simply a mask? Is he letting fear rule his head? But then - hasn't he always? He ran from the Order when he saw reality. He ran from the Resistance when he was at a crossroad. He runs scared, like some frightened tiny creature, and if he stops the war will catch up, consume him and spit him back out again. "Wake me up when your rescue arrives."

He goes to his hammock, the gentle swinging not soothing as his mind and heart roil, consumed with indecision. If he goes with her, he's choosing a side, choosing the war, choosing to be known rather than be anonymous. There's safety in being unknown - but today has illustrated that there's no protection in being unknown. The war is stretching its net further, consuming the entire galaxy - if he can't escape it, shouldn't he be on the side of the light, the side he believes in? Shouldn't he choose to be surrounded by fiercely determined fighters, safe, rather than be with those who would cower and hide like he has for three years?

When he finally finds sleep, he can't slumber unknowing and happy. His dreams twist like a fog, woven with Shee's broken body, with Rey's blazingly angry eyes, with ever-more dramatic imaginings of Han's death at his son's hands, with distant memories from his days in the Order, peppered with fear and flares of courage and chilling knowing of the inevitability of the war finding him wherever he runs. His head is still spinning when he feels a hand on his shoulder, and a voice pleading him awake, and he sits up to find Rey standing over him, a gleam of silver at her hip beneath the voluminous folds of her robe. "My ride is here," she says softly, and looks around at his tiny room. "Come with me. Please. If you really won't join our fight, we'll find somewhere for you, somewhere remote and unpopulated."

He looks around the room, the four walls and narrow hammock he's protected for three years, his only possessions, and he reaches for the shelf, taking down a piece of jewellery he found at the market, something he bought when his mind was still sharp with memories of Rey. Wrapping his hand around it, protecting it, he looks up at her and says, "Okay."

Outside, the morning is hot and dry, the air blistering the back of his throat, and the Millennium Falcon is outside, its engine humming a song into the silence, and Rey rolls her eyes as she walks to the lowering ramp. "Couldn't you have flown something more subtle in for a rescue?" she asks some unseen figure, and it bites at Finn's heart how fond she sounds. He could've had her friendship and love, but he ran from her. "Landing the Millennium Falcon on Tatooine is asking for trouble. And why are you flying my inheritance again?"

"You know I love flying her," comes a voice that rings a familiar note somewhere in Finn's memory. He knows them, whoever it is. "When I get a distress signal I'm not going to fly back to base to get a different ship. I didn't know if you were safe, I wasn't going to waste time."

"Excuses for you stealing my ship," Rey says, her eyes glinting with mirth, and the swirls of her cloak are almost elegant as she throws her arms around the pilot. "I've picked up a stray. Possible recruit. You know him - he's an old friend."

She releases her rescuer, and Finn's heart stops when he recognises the dark hair and orange uniform and set mouth that lifts with a smile. "Poe," he breathes, unable to think anything else. "I thought you were dead. Three years..."

"We tried to find you," Poe says, as they stand apart as if about to duel, staring at each other. "But Le-General Organa wouldn't let us. You didn't want to be found."

"Poe, I think you can call her Leia, you're part of the family," Rey says with a roll of her eyes, and turns onto the entry ramp, cloak billowing around her. "Let's go. We may need a stop on the way to base if Finn doesn't want to come with us."

"We have to go to Takodana," Poe says, as Finn follows them silently onto the ship, heart clenching with the memory of Han moving around the ship, authoritative and soothing in how well he knew the pattern of war. "I took Ani to visit Maz yesterday, you know how much she likes seeing him, and I was there when you sent out the signal."

"So you left him with her?" Rey exclaims, and there's an anger in her voice Finn didn't expect. "Poe, we talked about this! Maz runs a bar, you can't keep leaving Ani with her! I would trust her with my life, but that place is not somewhere I want him exposed to! You really should have gone back to base to swap ships and leave him with someone who can look after him!"

"I'm sorry, who's Ani?" Finn asks, and both look at him like they forgot he was there at all. It hurts him, seeing how easily he blends into the background, and drives home again that he left. He could've been part of their lives if he hadn't just given in to his fear.

"Our son," Rey says, and his stomach drops.