Save The Date (A Drarry FanFiction)

Chapter Thirty Four

   Rocky was out into the brilliant sunshine as soon as the gap was big enough, but Harry and Fan had to wait until it was lowered all the way, inviting them into what appeared to be a desert. "Just what kind of holiday is this, bird?" Fan asked as they wandered out, shielding their eyes from the sun reflecting off the sand.

"Look, look, look!" Rocky gushed, pointing back at the place they had just come from with his wing before flying upwards to get a better view. Harry had assumed it was a building, but as he ventured further into the sand and turned around to take a better look, he gasped.

It wasn't a building. It was a spaceship.

He moved further back, taking in the mostly circular body with two pincer like shapes sticking out from the front and a big exhaust port on the right. They had been making this very ship in the workshop for over twenty years, it had never gone out of fashion. "It's the Millennium Falcon," he whispered reverently.

Fan squinted in confusion at him. "The what?"

"The Millennium Falcon, Rocky, where in all the Lands are we?"

Rocky had been doing summersaults over the top of the ship, which Harry could now see was lopsided in the sand dune. Like the inside there were a great number of scorch marks blemishing the outer hull, and several gaps where there really ought to have been more things stopping the outside reaching the inside.

"It doesn't look like a bird," Fan pushed on, and Harry laughed. The air was hot and dry, and he coughed several times before answering.

"No," he explained. "That's just its name, it's from a film. But I don't know why a film would have its own land. Rocky!"

Finally Rocky calmed down enough to fly back over to them. "Isn't this great?" he cried as he landed on Harry's shoulder.

Harry looked around them. Other than the ship and the desert, all he could see were a few other battered looking crafts sitting in the sand as forlornly as the Falcon was, and what might have been a small town in the shimmering distance. "Err," he said.

"This is just a bit of it, of course," Rocky went on hastily, not seeming to have noticed Harry's hesitation. "But I've never managed to get here before. Wonder why it worked this time?" Before Harry could answer again, he was off, heading towards the town. "Come on, come on!" he shouted back to him and Fan. "We need to go see if they've heard anything about your mystery boy!"

Harry glanced at Fan, who shrugged her shoulders. "At least he's excited," she said, and he had to agree.

They marched through the burning sand, Harry's bindle swinging over his shoulder as he adjusted the stick. He was impressed that the handkerchief has stayed tied, and he looked forward to maybe having some more of the food later if they got a chance to stop.

"Harry, you know about Star Wars, right?" Rocky asked as he came flying back over his head. "How they say "May the force be with you"?

Harry raised his eyebrows. "Um, yes," he said. They had made plenty of toys that spoke those words when you pressed the right button. In fact, his dissertation project had been on plastic lightsabres, one of which had used that very quote. He'd got a 2:1 for that.

"So," Rocky continued. "Seeing as there's a May 4th, people decided to make that Star Wars day, make sense?"

"Why May-" Fan began, but Harry groaned over her.

"May the fourth be with you," he said shaking his head. "Alright, that's pretty clever."

Harry watched as Fan brushed some sand from where it had blown on her red tunic, looking around with an unimpressed expression on her face as they approached the few structures that passed for buildings in the town. Most were just sticks driven into the sand with material tied at the corners to form a sort of canopy over the top. Underneath people were sifting through an inordinate amount of unidentifiable junk, washing twisted bits of metal and polishing cogs of every size.

He called them people, but not everyone looked human. Some of them were squishy looking with all manner of different skin colours, and some were robots, repeating the same actions over and over in their unimaginative way. Aliens and droids. Harry couldn't believe what he was seeing. Wait until he told Joe and Bobby about this.

"It's not much, is it?" Fan said, careful not to start touching anything as they made their way through the makeshift aisles between the stalls.

Rocky scoffed. "And you gave Harry a hard time about not appreciating your holiday enough?"

Fan's cheeks went pink, and she tucked her hair behind her ears as she grimaced. "Oh, yeah," she said sheepishly. "Sorry."

Rocky shrugged, landing on a currently unoccupied station. "Nah, don't worry about it. This isn't the most impressive part of the land I'm sure."