When Rey is ten, another scavenger tries to steal her haul. It isn’t much: a twist of some old engine, a carbonator; but it’s enough to feed her for the rest of the day, maybe the next, and pickings have been slim lately. The clutch of metal bits (barely enough to swell the lining of her bag) represents the first meal she’ll have had in two days (she is so hungry). And this man – this boy, she’ll think when she looks back; he can’t have been more than fifteen – grabs it from her. There’s no civilisation on Jakku, no sense of protect the small and weak – there’s no mercy for a girl alone. And the boy just takes it, snatches it from her grasping hands, holds it aloft, grinning wide and wild and mocking. “Finders keep –” he starts to say, quoting the oldest (and only) law of the desert. The rest of the words snag on his loose teeth and split-open lips: Rey smacks him in the jaw with her staff and every bit of strength she has. He stumbles, makes for the blaster at his side, and she panics: she hits him in the legs to bring him down, hits him in the skull until his hand falls slack and he is very, very still. Rey snatches her haul up and runs and does not look back. (She’ll think of him sprawled in the sand, skull open and red and wet, when she prowls through the frozen forest towards Kylo Ren. She’s older. She knows better. She’ll hesitate. She will not deliver that final blow.)
Jessika Pava snatches a chip from her plate in the canteen. It’s all in good humour; Rey is hanging out with the pilots in one of the rare moments she isn’t training with Luke, enjoying the noise and hubbub – oh there are so many people. It gives her a headache, light and sharp behind her eyes, but it is a good pain, a clean pain; a growing pain. Anyway. Pava snatches the chip – a misguided attempt at flirting, maybe? – and Rey reacts without thinking and stabs her in the back of the hand with a fork. There’s silence for a moment, an aching and desperate silence, and Rey can only hear the roar of blood in her ears. She stares down. Pava’s hand has slackened; the chip is on the table. The tines of the fork haven’t sunk in that far, but there is red pooling on Pava’s skin and Rey feels a great rush of nausea. Her stomach cramps, hard, and she leaps to her feet, gabbling apologies. Pava holds up her hands, says, “Hey, hey, it’s okay, it really is,” and Poe scrapes a good chunk of his dinner onto Rey’s plate and says, “We won’t ever let you go hungry,” and it’s all too much: Rey bursts into tears. (No one tries to steal her food again. Later, she leaves a basket full of apples and potatoes on Pava’s bed. It is an apology. It is a very well guided attempt at flirting.)
“What’s wrong with this water?” she gasps, holding her cupped hands out to Luke. “It’s awful!”
Luke bursts out laughing. “It’s full of salt, Rey. You can’t drink it.”
“All that water,” she says, scornful, “and not a drop to drink – are you sure that the Force is benevolent?”
“Hey, when I first saw an ocean I did the exact same thing. Only difference was that Han pretended that that was what water was meant to taste like. Pretended to drink it and then got offended when I didn’t. I didn’t want to seem like the odd one out so I drank a whole mug of it and vomited everywhere – he wasn’t laughing so hard when he was trying to air the smell of vomit out of the Falcon.”
Rey bursts out laughing, wading back towards shore. “Tell me more about him,” she says.
Okay, so we all know that Poe went around the Resistance base telling everyone about the Handsome Stormtrooper that saved his life – but what about BB-8? Imagine BB-8 coming back to base and promptly telling everyone about the good brave human who saved his Poe. This is Finn he is so lovely, he is the best of all humans, look at him, be nice to him – he’s a little bit slow – doesn’t understand droid at all but he’s a quick learner.
And imagine ALL THE DROIDS falling into line, looking after Finn, and Finn is just so nice to them because he remembers what it’s like to be treated like you’re nothing, like you don’t have a personality. And they just adopt him: Finn the best human, they designate him, and R2-D2 – battle-hardened war vet that he is – teaches him binary but teaches him the bastardised sweary binary that all the older droids speak and BB-8 is innocent and oblivious and C3-PO is scandalised because Finn is going round saying things like fuck me this is hot in this little whistle-beep.
And whenever Finn sits down he’s surrounded by happy young droids who absolutely adore him, and he is just so nice and all the droids go out of their way to do things for him.
And yes. Give me sweet lovely Finn with his droid ducklings.
so if BB-8′s “a BB unit”, does that mean there’s a BB-1 through 7?
Does this mean there were scary stories on the flight deck pre- or post-mission with Poe and Black Squadron? Imagine Poe with a light-stick beneath his chin and a glint in his eye, kneeling to speak in a spooky voice to BB-8.
“Hey, BB-8. Why is BB-6 afraid of BB-7?”
An inquisitive whirr.
“’Cause BB-7 ate 9!”
“!!!!” BB-8 rolls back and forth in panic while Poe falls over laughing.
“It’s okay, buddy. I didn’t mean it literally! It’s just a joke!” (A joke??) “Yeah, a joke!” BB-8 gently zaps Poe in retribution and rolls away, the droid-equivalent of a walking off in a huff.
“Ow, hey! Come on, BB-8, it was supposed to be funny!”
BB-8 doesn’t speak to him for the rest of the day, so Poe goes on a mission around base asking any and everyone if they’ve seen any droids, and joins the squadron table at dinner looking exhausted but triumphant. BB-8 is with them.
“Hey, BB-8, look!” He holds up a round, shrieking droid with a grin. “It’s BB-7!”
BB-8 beeps in alarm and hides behind the table leg while Poe gently explains that BB-7 is not really scary at all, see?
BB cautiously rolls out to investigate for itself. Cue gentle droid booping.
They become bosom buddies and roll everywhere together, collect the whole gang and then BB rolls up to Poe pre-flight sometime a week later, like ten minutes before take off. “BB-8, buddy where were you? we gotta go!” “!!” “what is it?” BB-8 is insistent.“!” “You wanna show me something? ok buddy but make it quick, it’s almost time to leave.”
BB-8 whistles and BB-6 rolls over in a panic, whirring. BB-8 whirrs at it and it whirrs back and all three of them turn towards BB-7 rolling determinedly along. BB-6 Ducks behind BB-8 as BB-7 rolls to a stop a few feet before reaching them. A smaller beep draws Poe’s attention to his feet where BB-9 sits, rocking back and forth in contentment.
All three droids beep back the joke in binary.
Poe cries laughing and doesn’t stop until the General herself contacts him on comms to ask what him the hold up is.
Okay but consider: the droids.
The fact that they clearly, CLEARLY rehearsed this little show before showing off to Poe on the tarmac just before the flight
BB-8 is a very strict producer ok
lots of beeeeeeep!!! and whirrrr bleeep!!!s when the others got it wrong
“no it has to be THIS WAY” “this is how Poe told it!” “do it OVER.”
can we take a moment to just think about how incredibly scary magical healing is in-context?
You get your insides ripped open but your friend waves his hands and your flesh just pulls back together, agony and evisceration pulling back to a ‘kinda hurts’ level of pain and you’re physically whole, with the 100% expectation that you’ll get back up and keep fighting whatever it was that struck you down the first time.
You break your arm after falling somewhere and after you’re healed instead of looking for ‘another way around’ everybody just looks at you and goes “okay try again”.
You’ve been fighting for hours, you’re hungry, thirsty, bleeding, crying from exhaustion, and a hand-wave happens and only two of those things go away. you’re still hungry, you’re still weak from thirst, but the handwave means you have ‘no excuse’ to stop.
You act out aggressively maybe punch a wall or gnash your teeth or hit your head on something and it’s hand-waved because it’s ‘such a small injury you probably can’t even feel it anymore’ but the point was that you felt it at all?
Your pain literally means nothing because as long as you’re not bleeding you’re not injured, right? Here drink this potion and who cares about the emotional exhaustion of that butchered village, why are you so reserved in camp don’t you think it’s fun retelling that time you fell through a burning building and with a hand-wave you got back up again and ran out with those two kids and their dog?
Older warriors who get a shiver around magic-users not because of the whole ‘fireball’ thing but the ‘I don’t know what a normal pain tolerance is anymore’ effect of too much healing. Permanent paralysis and loss of sensation in limbs is pretty much a given in the later years of any fighter’s life. Did I have a stroke or did the mage just heal too hard and now this side of my face doesn’t work? No i’m not dead from the dragon’s claws but I can’t even bend my torso anymore because of how the scar tissue grew out of me like a vine.
Magical healing is great and keeps casualties down.
But man.
That stuff is scary.
shit just got creepy
Or maybe magical healing doesn’t leave scars or damage. It is magical, after all.
So after years of fighting, your skin is still perfect. Unmarred. In fact, you’re actually in better shape than regular people who don’t get magical healing when they fall out of trees or walk into doors or cut themselves while cooking dinner. You’re in such good shape that it’s unnatural.
And the really good healing magic takes away more than just the obvious injuries. You first start noticing it after about ten years when you go home and haha, you look the same age as your younger sibling, that’s funny.
Not so funny ten years later when they look older. Or forty years later, when you bury them still looking like you did at twenty. When do you retire from this gig anyway? How much damage is too much damage?
How many times do you glimpse the afterlife, or worse, how many times don’t you? What do you live through, get used to, show no outward sign of except a perfectly healthy body, too perfect for any person living a real life.
How many times are you sitting in a tavern with your friends and you hear the whispers, because the people around you know. How can they not know? Your weapons shine with enchantments and your armour is better than the best money can buy and there is not a damn scar on you. You hardly seem human to them.
How long before you hardly seem human to yourself?
And you find yourself struggling to remember the places where the scars should have been, phantom pains that wake you screaming, touching all the old injuries and finding nothing there. It’s all in your head. Was it ever anywhere else?
How long before you’re fighting a lich or a vampire or some other undead monster and you wonder…
…what makes me so different?
Here we go someone who GETS IT.
Not gonna lie, this is my number one consideration when I’m constructing magical universes. If magic can heal, what effect does it have? Do you retain some of the damage? Can it only heal to a point? Does it heal EVERYTHING, right down to the aging of your cells? Does it force your body through the usual healing process, just really really fast, and leave behind knotted scars and damaged bone? Does someone else have to take on the damage so that a soldier can keep fighting (and what does that do to the soldier, when a mage walks out onto the battlefield and dies of blood loss without a blade laid on them)? Does magic stop working at ‘death’ or can you raise someone whose heart is stopped? Does magic take time to heal–if someone is bleeding out from a slit throat, could they die during the healing? What price does the healer pay for the healing? Are they weary, are they injured, are they sick? What price does the healed pay for the healing? What kind of trauma does that leave?
It’s kind of tricky when you’re a over-thinker and you are aware of it. At this point I’m so unsure about the conclusions I come up with. I mean, is it true? Or did I make it up because I have been overthinking too much? Am I right or has my overthinking fooled me?
The Island of Discussion, Glencoe, Scotland. It was a place to settle disputes. A place to resolve differences. Officially named Eilean a’ Chomhraidh, the Island of Discussion is small and alone.
This island has served a noble purpose for many, many years. Over 1,500 years or so. When clansman had a disagreement, this is the place they went to work it out.
The rules were simple. When there were quarrels or arguments, the feuding parties where taken out to the island and left alone. Left there. With whiskey, cheese, and oat cakes. And they didn’t leave the island until the dispute was settled. The result, in over 1,500 years, only 1 recorded murder in the area.
