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THE TRIO—AND BB-8–WASTED NO TIME ONCE ABOARD THE GARBAGE SHIP. Rey and Arabella rushed straight to the cockpit, whilst the boy headed to the ship's blaster cannon.
"You sure you can do this?" Arabella asked, taking the seat of the co-pilot. Arabella had been a trained pilot for her whole life, and perhaps it was a smarter decision for her to fly her new team away, but she knew she wasn't that skilled. A part of her believed Rey could fly them to the Resistance base, and she decided to act on her trust, despite the building doubt.
"I can do it," Rey insisted, though it sounded like she was telling the affirmation to herself. She boosted the ship to life, and despite a rocky start, managed to get them up in the air.
"We won't be able to get out of here with all these fighters," Rey said to Arabella in a worried tone.
As she pressed various buttons, trying to gain more stability for her pilot, Arabella called out to the boy, "We can't leave until all the TIE fighters have been shot down!"
"Okay!" The boy replied, the sentence reminding him of the conversation he had shared with Poe Dameron only a few hours ago. After fiddling with the cannon attached to the ship, he began to slowly but surely firing shots at the oncoming TIE fighters. To him, the moment felt all too surreal. Not even twenty-four hours ago, he had been wearing the stormtrooper uniform, and now, he was fighting the ones with whom he had been raised.
"Stay low!" the man called out to Rey. "It confuses their tracking!"
Arabella nodded in confirmation and the pilot went low, hoping to the stars that the boy would be able to gun them all down. The girl raised the ship's shield and urged the boy to start fighting back. Though he mumbled the difficulties of such a thing to himself, Arabella heard him clearly and she threw out a small smile.
"We need cover. Fly through that," Arabella instructed, pointing to the wrecked Star Destroyers sitting below them.
"Really?" Rey asked, full of doubt. The girl sent her a nod in reply and so she pushed forth, weaving between various wrecked ships.
They managed to lose one of the two TIE fighters, but with the second one hot on their trail, the boy cursed under his breath, pressing the gunner's buttons hoping for results. With some newfound luck, he managed to hit the fighter, and it fell quickly to the sandy ground in building flames.
"I'm getting pretty good at this," the boy smiled to himself. For a moment, he wondered if Poe would have been proud, but quickly shook the thought from his mind.
Arabella watched out the window as scavengers were already in pursuit of recovering the pieces the fallen fighters would leave behind. However, the calm lasted for only a second, as another TIE fighter was now shooting behind them.
Suddenly, a loud bang, followed by a curse, caused Arabella to snap her head around. "What was that?" She called to the boy in the gunner position.
"The cannon is stuck in forward. I can't move it!" He exclaimed and Arabella felt her throat constrict painfully. Sucking in a desperate breath, Arabella instructed to Rey, "You're going to have to lose them. Fly through that wreck."
The pilot nodded, pressing some buttons and telling her team to hold on. Arabella held tightly on the arms of her chair, and watched carefully as Rey maneuvered through the wreck. The team barely made it out of the Star Destroyer alive, the fighter shooting closely behind them.
Suddenly, Rey pulled the ship out of the destroyer, back into open land where she made a large loop, holding the ship upside-down. The boy watched, and as the TIE fighter drew closer, fired aggressively at it. He didn't miss, sending the fighter to the ground. The group all let out cheers of celebration as Rey straightened the ship, sending them out into space.
Rey let out a relieved breath and leaned back in her chair after she put the ship into autopilot.
"Good job," Arabella smiled, and the two exchanged a friendly smile before being interrupted by the boy, who had BB-8 trailing quietly behind.
"That was amazing!" The flabbergasted boy exclaimed like a child watching his first magic trick. "How did you do that?"
"I don't know!" Rey exclaimed, standing up. "How did you do that?"
"I don't know!" He returned and Arabella looked at them from her chair.
"You both did great," she mused with a proud smile on her face. She then looked past Rey to the boy, who was still smiling like an ecstatic child. "What's your name?"
"Finn," he answered. Really, his name was FN-2187, for it was the title he had been given when working as a stormtrooper for the First Order. However, when he and Poe escaped, Finn was the name Poe gave him, and he found himself with a real liking for it.
"I'm Arabella. This is Rey and that's BeeBee-Ate," she said in a friendly tone.
"It's nice to meet you both," he said genuinely.
"What do we do now?" Rey asked after a moment of silence passed them. Arabella, the unofficial leader, stood up and approached them, her arms crossing her chest.
"You take me to the Resistance, Finn too," she instructed, noticing the way Finn avoided her gaze at that last comment. "And then you do whatever the hell you want, whether that's joining the Resistance or travelling the galaxy. The general will thank you immensely for your help in saving me and BB-8."
"Wait," the brunette interrupted, her brows furrowed. "You're with the Resistance."
"Yes, I was Poe Dameron's partner," he confessed. "I don't mind whatever it is you want to do but your first priority is getting that droid to Leia Organa."
She said it like she expected she wasn't going to make it.
"Why? What's so special about that droid?" Finn asked, seeming just as lost as Rey.
Arabella approached the droid and bent down, retrieving from its small holding compartment the flash drive she had put in there last night after they fled the village.
"This," she held up the disk for her peers to see. "Is very important. It holds a map that leads to Luke Skywalker, and we need it."
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argh! this wasn't the best but i tried guys, i really tried! i need to practise writing more action scenes, i know. also, this trio is so cute
