Archive of Our Own ^beta

***

Lor San Tekka is waiting on the south dock when Poe gets done setting the morning's shipment of pottery. He's a tall, crooked coatrack of a man perched on the dock plate with his semi idling behind him. Poe looks into the trailer's interior, then back to Lor, who fingers the feathery papers sticking out of his jacket's inside pocket. Underneath, he's wearing a shirt for Stir Cove's Black Metal Deathfest, participating band names marching down over his pauchy belly, the black fabric faded to a somewhat less deathfest shade of grey with age.

"Buddy," Poe says, in what he hopes is his politest, most disappointed voice. "Come on."

There's a sign on the side of the warehouse: Receiving Hours - 8:30 to 4.

Lor makes a show of checking his phone, eyebrows hiked. It's not 4 yet -- fifteen till, in fact.

"Come on," Poe says again, and this time, the man has the decency to look sheepish. Nobody likes being that person.

He pulls his cap off, scrubbing at the white dandelion seed tufts of hair still making a go of his scalp. "I was up the street for almost an hour," creaks out of him. "They couldn't decide what they wanted to do, kept me waiting while they called everyone and the kitchen cat. You know I would have been here on time, otherwise. I wouldn't do that to your boss -- she's royalty to me."

Poe concedes the point. Lor San Tekka -- or is it "Lors, a trucker"? Depends on pronunciation, but Poe made his best guess at the first introduction and is sticking with it -- is a regular, and Poe's never been good at telling drivers to take a hike and come back in the morning, not over a piddly fifteen minutes.

Besides, the general's going to want what he has, even if it means staying late to unload it.

"Yeah, all right," he goes, and takes all five-foot-mumble-mumble of himself to go find a forklift.

***

Poe Dameron can drive anything.

When he first moved out here and paid the discounted weekly rates at a motel while he scoured apartment listings, heartsick as a man could get, Skywalker's was the first place he applied to that didn't ask him to provide proof of address before hiring him. They put him on a landscaping crew -- squadrons, they were called, and once the last hard frost of the year passed, the season heaved and kicked into gear like a calf sliding to ground.

Suddenly, he had as many hours as he could ask for.

Piece by slow piece, he forgot about anything that wasn't his sore shoulders and an aching back and the dirt he could never quite scrub out from around his nails.

It blurs together now, a fleet of trucks sitting in the backlot and the men and women who mill around them first thing in the morning, all jockeying for the best equipment and yelling orders; Black Squadron needs three gas-powered leaf blowers in addition to the usual muck; Red Squadron's installing a pond fixture and needs four sets of rubber boots, yeah, yeah, the boys all claim they need Larges, but sign me out some Mediums and let them pretend; did Skywalker's get their sweet potato vine in yet because Green Squadron needs 60 flats of it for the First Union Bank job! And then away everybody goes, drivers propping cell phones into their shoulders and coordinating with clients over arrival times, commuter traffic cutting in and around their cumbersome trucks with a cavalier disregard for safety.

Lunches on-site always come together as beans, rice, Monterey tortillas passed around and paper-towel napkins, and trying not to look at each other too ironically whenever a client would say to Snap -- who isn't even squadron leader, he just happens to have three generations of Kansas-grown wheat farmer obvious in his face -- "do you think you could … ? I asked one of your Mexican guys, but …"

(You get that a lot, working crew. Maybe one time in seven would the "Mexican" remark land accurately -- everyone else hailed from places up and down the entire Central and South American coast, from Guatemala to Peru to Argentina. You know, "Mexico.")

"It still beats road construction," someone would mutter around a mouthful of rice, and the rest of the crew would tip their Pepsi cans in acknowledgement.

Poe likes it, insomuch as you can ever like anything that leaves you that exhausted. There's always that moment, where you step back part-way through a project and you look at what you've done and your mind makes this sudden shift, from a daunting we're never going to get this done to hey, this is coming together, and the misery retreats to the background, leaving you with a sunburned neck and an armful of plants waiting for you to put them where they'll be for their whole lives. And it never gets old, driving around town and thinking, I did that, and That was us.

There's a certain kind of calm, still-water joy that comes with looking at good landscaping -- one most people don't even realize they feel until it's not there.

By the end of May, Poe's driving the truck, and clients unconsciously draw towards him when they're talking, responding to some unseen authority like moths bumbling around a light. In the morning, the crews do the same: Dameron, the pump's jacked on the fountain cleaner, what do we do? or hey, they said you were the person to talk to. Could you look at our truck?

In mid-June, Statura slips a disc and Poe finds himself promoted to squadron leader. He's given a clipboard, a raise, and a different-colored shirt; not much else changes.

As August turns around, bringing with it the smell of No #2 pencils and back-to-school supplies in cardboard displays at the check-out line at J-Mart and his people digging up the now-leggy bedding annuals to replace them with fall-hardy chrysanthemums and last-ditch pansies, Poe walks through the warehouse and finds Statura by the Bobcat with one hand on his back brace and the other pointing something out to the general.

They both look up at Poe's approach, and at the expressions on their faces, he knows he's the topic of discussion.

He slows.

"Ma'am," he says to the general. "Sir," he adds to Statura, whose whiskery chin lifts with a responding smile.

"Good morning, Poe," the general says, and Poe experiences the momentary vertigo that comes with hearing your name come out of the mouth of someone you assumed to be too important to know it. The Bobcat is orange-and-white, the general green-and-grey; she puts a hand to its side with an affection that Poe instantly recognizes, respects. "The admiral says you got our friend here unstuck?"

"It was just sand," Poe says immediately. The logo on the back of the Bobcat is near-faded to obscurity, leaving just the faint impression of a letter or two, so even though the eye looks at it and knows it's supposed to say "Bobcat," the mind still skips to those few letters. "Bb8 didn't need much rescuing. You can get high-centered in sand the same way you can get high-centered in snow, so you get out the same way, too."

The general's eyes crinkles; she's aware of the nickname.

Good, Poe thinks. Neither the nursery nor the landscaping division of Skywalker's would run without Bb8, simple fact. It is the single most fought-over piece of equipment in the whole store.

"Oh?"

"You ask nicely." Poe waits a beat, then shows all his teeth.

"Was that our problem?" she asks, and he shrugs, modest; getting a heavy vehicle like a Bobcat out of the sand pit, bucket attached and everything, is exactly the kind of exhausting, labor-intensive task you'd think it would be. That wasn't Bb8's fault, though.

The general tilts her head. "Can you drive a forklift?"

"Gas-powered or electric?" Poe replies, confused. The electric has a tendency to jerk alarmingly when you first put your foot down on the gas, but as long as you're conscious of that, you could predict it and not accidentally stick the forks through bagged goods. "I can drive anything, ma'am."

The smile widens. "Do you have any other plans for when the season ends?"

Layoffs started weeks ago -- a greenhouse only needs a skeletal staff in fall and winter, and Poe's been watching squadrons rearrange around him with a growing sense of inevitability. His heart rate picks up. "No."

"Hmm," she says. "I have a position open in greenhouse operations."

"I … don't know that department."

"Of course not. I just made it up." She gestures, inviting. Walk with me. "Would you like to hear about it?"

And Poe Dameron didn't know Leia Organa's story, not right then; he just knows that everyone calls her "the general" for reasons so historical explanations don't feel necessary anymore, and in this moment, he doesn't need to know why. Right now, if she'd commanded it, he would follow her to war.

***

In the parking lot, a young man removes a white helmet, clipping it to his backpack by the straps.

He has good shoulders and a good face, good hands and a good smile. In fact, there's no one thing about him that anyone can look at and say with certainty, that's bad, and the only person who refuses to believe that is himself.

He contemplates the building in front of him. It scrutinizes him in return, hunkered close to the ground, flat-roofed like a convenience store. Its wood paneling makes it a technicolor remnant of the 70's, the dark slats faded to grey in patches. There's a turret, too, that he can't explain -- it is supposed to look like a cabin-castle? Or like a watchtower? It's old enough for the shingles to start peeling up in places, borderline shabby. If it wasn't for the metal-framed greenhouse he can see poking up on the other side of the low awning, he would have mistaken the whole place for a very cheap motel.

Don't look back, he tells himself, trying to be firm about it, so naturally that's exactly what he does.

He hasn't come far, geographically -- two blocks, at most, maybe three? But right now the distance feels insurmountable, like whole seasons have passed instead of just a week; like growths of summer, autumn, winter that have calcified over him like hard white armor and if you scratch his skin, they'll fleck off and uncover the bareness of him somewhere underneath. It's stupid -- it hasn't been that long. His juice is probably still in the fridge; he's not going back for it. He can see the ribbon of the interstate above the treeline, signs of nearby businesses lofted high to meet it.

Shaking himself off, he walks his bike the rest of the way, padlocking it onto the rack with the care afforded to a prized personal possession, then passes underneath the sign.

Skywalker's, it says, curling script in front of an unfurling padme lotus blossom.

The inside of the shop is a subterranean cove, earthy and close, like he shouldn't be surprised to look up and see tree roots coming from the ceiling, running through the light fixtures like wires. He knows from the last time he was here that you pass through this dark space to the doors on the other side and burst suddenly, stunningly into a bright, airy greenhouse. It's an immediate, visceral pleasure, that breach into the light -- and surely done on purpose.

At the sound of the bell clanging against the glass, the girl at the register looks up. She has blonde pigtails and an expression on her face universal to cashiers everywhere: don't ask me any hard questions.

Her nametag reads "Connix", and he smiles at her with the instant empathy of the uncommonly-named.

At her elbow, a radio crackles.

Is Luke in yet?

A pause. His breath's indrawn, mouth open, but he doesn't want to interrupt. Her hand twitches toward it, still watching him, but then somebody else answers.

I haven't seen him.

Is there anybody working in the plant care department who can take a call on line three? It's about the Dagobah willow blight.

"Hello. I'm supposed to clock in?" he says to Connix, and her expression clears.

"Right through there," she leans across the counter, pointing towards a door set behind a display of tin buckets, all stacked around each other and bursting with silk florals. The whole inside of the shop is full of stuff like this -- small, decorative ornaments; garden signs rioting with joy over spring, a rack of greeting cards with the same smiling folded-paper cactus expressing different sentiments. Items too delicate for the outdoor fervor of a garden center. "I'll buzz you through."

He goes as directed, finding the time clock sitting in the middle of the employees-only room. There. Officially in a state of employment.

Again.

After a beat, the satisfaction fades, and he looks around, nervously. He doesn't have any instructions on what to do past this point.

Cubbies line the walls, overflowing with the belongings of absent people -- comfortable shoes here, uncomfortable shoes there, raincoats in three different shades of caution-tape yellow, a bag of pretzels, and one -- bizarrely -- rubber alien mask, alone in a cubby with no company except some loose change and a pen cap. He finds an empty square and stores his backpack and helmet. There are a couple cubicles here, but nobody occupies them. The fridge hums.

He circles around them back to the time clock. There's a corkboard beside it, plastered with flyers and announcements. He glances through a list labelled "10 Things You Probably Haven't Remembered to Do to Prepare for Spring" and then on to an an advertisement for a beekeeping seminar. A section about pollinator-friendly flowering plants is highlighted. He fingers the feathered ends with the telephone number, and then the door opens.

A man in an orange uniform barrels through, and he jerks upright, startled. At the sight of him standing there by the computer, his face lights up.

"Good morning, you made it!" he says cheerily, coming forward to pump his hand in greeting, immediately giving him the impression that this is the kind of man who does everything urgently. "Sorry, buddy, I hope you weren't waiting long. I'm Poe. You must be --"

Caught up under the freight train of an enthusiastic introduction, he hands over his name without hesitation.

Valiantly, Poe manages to repeat the first two syllables accurately before the rest errors out; his mouth makes mush of it, and he grimaces, embarrassed.

"Is that what you go by?" he wants to know, and the young man with the good shoulders smiles, offering an affable shrug.

"That's the only name they gave me."

"No, I get that," says Poe. "Make 'em work for it, right?"

An immediate look of understanding passes between them; the same one he'd been tempted to give Connix earlier.

"No nickname, then?"

He contemplates saying no -- his name is his name, and people shouldn't get away with changing it just because they can't -- or don't want to -- pronounce the original.

He'd known a woman once, somebody's great-grandmother who came from El Salvador, and she had a tendency to collar people and walk them through every syllable of her name like she was dragging them down the street she grew up on. You had to look at every landmark, every trip of the tongue another thing she wasn't going to let anyone erase out of ease of convenience.

And, if he's being completely honest, there's a part of him that wants to mess with Poe. Just a little bit. Just to see what he'll do.

But then he sees Poe's mouth -- and it's the kind of mouth you have to pay attention to, set in a prominent jaw and filled with very straight teeth; nothing about Poe's face wastes space -- walk itself over the syllables again, silently to himself.

(He knows what he'll do, is the thing. He'll try.)

Affection batters around inside his ribs, easy as that.

"Nah, man," says Ephintuu Onweseven generously. "If you need to shorten it, go ahead."

Poe doesn't hesitate. "You ever see Adventure Time? How about Finn? It's the white helmet, man."

And here's another thing he learns about Poe Dameron: he knows his coworkers well enough to recognize which belongings in the cubby holes weren't there yesterday, and any scrap of a misgiving he had vanishes. You can't not trust someone like that.

"Finn's fine, that's fine," he says, and it earns him a hearty clap on the back.

"Excellent!" says Poe. "Now, listen up. We're about to take you on a tour. Welcome to Skywalker's, by the way. You need a pilot."

"I need a pilot," Finn agrees gamely, and then, "Wait, what?"

***

The week starts with dark clouds that come in with the suddenness of a spill, and the radio jumps from "slight chance of" to "showers into the late night," and it stays that way until Thursday.

At first, the rain does wonders, bringing the sky close to the earth and unfolding every shade of green into something deeper, richer, more themselves, but after four days of unchanging drizzle, everything just starts looking damp and drowned. Poe sends one of his guys out with a pushbroom to sweep puddles out of the storefront; he can hear the scrape-scrape-scrape of it all the way across the parking lot.

Before, when he was still living at home and had different plans entirely, if you'd asked Poe what a greenhouse was he would have conjured up some Pinterest-esque glass-walled building set in idyllic European countrysides, the glass fogged with condensation and the suggestion of green shapes inside.

The reality is less romantic, but Poe's generous and he thinks it's not for lack of trying.

Glass is expensive, and not practical in hailstone country. Behind that wood-paneled storefront, the rest of Skywalker's is made up of several hoop-houses shoved together, plastic tarps pulled taut across the tops. The effect is the same; heat and humidity marinate within like a hothouse, and the light comes through to stain everything, all the annual bedding plants and tropicals sitting drunk and delighted on their tables. But strong winds snap the tarps like sheets being unfolded, and the sound of rainfall -- no matter how light -- is immediate, visceral, like putting your ear to the mouth of a conch shell to listen to your own heartbeat.

Customer counts stay low all week -- people don't think about plants on rainy days, he guesses.

Regardless, Poe moves fast. Greenhouse operations is the department that goes wherever it needs to go; a wet morning spent arranging displays of heavy frost-proof pottery to Ackbar's satisfaction here, unloading tall racks of heat-tolerant dragonwing begonia there. He takes Bb8 to go refill the soil bin at the booth where they do the custom-designed planters, and Jessika yanks aside one of the overhead hoses in order to blow him a kiss.

"Croton?" she calls across to him, shouting to be heard above Bb8's beeping as Poe expertly reverses out of the narrow booth.

"Not yet!" he calls back. "Maybe Friday!"

She waves acknowledgement.

Soil cakes her to the elbows, like she herself had only just been uprooted. In a way, he supposes she had been: Jess had been in Poe's squadron that first summer he did landscaping, where she discovered a talent for visual variation and an unironic love for scratchy tejano music, and the general approached her about working inside over the winter.

He turns Bb8 around and drives back along the perimeter, careful of the small lakes that had, only a few days ago, been nothing more than puddles of rainwater with ambition. The walls have been rolled up, somewhat optimistically, and he can see straight through to the other side, where Chewie's rehanging the sign for the Bespinese maples. He's got a caution-yellow raincoat pulled ineffectually up over his head, and behind him, all his trees stand in their rows, branches held out to the sides and bent a little in the manner of children protesting a persistent damp.

His radio lights up; Statura asks him if he could round up a couple damaged shopping carts they've quarantined inside.

Bb8 makes a noise, tires briefly spinning out on the wet asphalt, and Poe says, "Sorry, buddy, you can't come in with me."

He leaves the Bobcat by the trees and, hopping to the ground, starts walking back towards the storefront. It's habit, mentally carving up the greenhouse by departments as he goes through; there's the custom potting booth, here are the long tables of annuals that give way to the rows of perennials he'd just come from, the low displays of indoor plants, clustered-together bunches of succulents like old ladies meeting for brunch, and the racks of herbs and other edibles. Over there, close to the entrance, are the shelves that divide up the plant care section. Poe cranes his neck, but he can't see if there's anybody over there, which --

Where is Luke, anyway?

He probably could drive Bb8 through here without demolishing something -- the aisle's wide enough, and Poe Dameron can drive anything -- but he'd rather not risk it.

A flash of orange in between the aisles pulls his eyes toward it. Finn yanks a hose out and stretches over a table of calibrochoa, small dime-sized blossoms the color of confetti spilling over the ends of their flats. He looks up as Poe goes by, attention pulled inexorably into his wake like leaves caught up in a particularly urgent stream -- a pretty good way to describe Poe, if he's being honest with himself.

He lifts a hand in greeting, and Finn smiles and straightens. The hose -- and how ironic is that, that they've still got to water when the sky's been trying to drown them for four days -- pops over the edge of the table.

"Oh, heck," he hears Finn swear, as cold water soaks his socks and shoes, and Poe smiles at that, heck, strangely charmed by it.

Further down the main aisle, he passes another orange-shirted employee just in time to witness her run a customer over.

Okay, not literally.

"-- sure this is the right price?" the customer is saying, with that tone of voice that has all the years of Poe's retail experience thinking, oh no, all at once. It's blunt. It's imperial. It's the kind of tone that conquers arable land and plants a flag in it without consideration for whoever may already be present.

"Yes."

"Oh, that doesn't make any sense. This exact same item is available at the Home Depot for ten dollars cheaper."

Maz Kanata tilts her head, squinting one eye shut like she's sighting down a barrel.

Poe slows down. He's going to want to hear this.

"Is that so?" says Maz, as politely as if she's just seen someone sneeze without covering their mouth. "Is that where you thought you were? No wonder you're confused."

The conquering forces have encountered resistance from the locals.

"I beg your pardon?"

"But I'm glad to hear that you found a pricing you agree with, dear. Would you like me to put that back for you?" Maz sets down her overstuffed accordion binder and extends her arms, pointedly.

There's a hasty retreat for the moral high ground.

"There's no call to treat me with rudeness! You can't just --" but here it peters out, because Maz is killing with exemplary courtesy. "I don't appreciate your tone!"

"I'm sorry to hear that. Is there anything else I can help you find?"

A box is deposited into Maz's arms. It's a grow-light, and not even the most expensive one they carry, either, and the customer sweeps up all the calvary and cannons and marches for the exit. The progress of imperialism has been stopped for another day. Poe comes to a halt at Maz's side.

"In all my years," she says slowly, staring at the mushroom cloud of indignation left in that wake, "I've seen evil take many forms."

Poe squints a sidelong smile at her. "Are you telling me that evil is entitled rich people?"

She doesn't hesitate.

"Evil is entitled rich people."

Maz Kanata is the smallest and oldest person Poe has ever met, with a weathered, walnut-colored face and spectacles twice the size of the eyes peering owlishly out from behind them. She's been running landscape design since before the Skywalker twins had even been born, back when there was little inside the store except a subterranean gloom, a collection of skinny ivy in pots, and a lot of gardening tools. With every job, she picks the layout, the plants, and the squadrons who will implement it.

Live long enough, she says, and you see the same designs in every yard.

Poe rarely ever sees her without that binder or without her camera, the candy-colored micro kind that had been popular back when Poe was trying to graduate high school. It's currently hanging by its weathered lanyard from her wrist, the paint banged off the corners. He's sure someone's tried to tell her that most people just use their phones these days, but Maz has a swamp-dwelling hermit's aversion to modern trends -- except for jeans with the rolled-up cuffs. Those are allowed to come back.

"Do you think they'll file a complaint with the cashier?" he asks. "Do you know who it is today? Zo? Connix?"

"Connix," Maz confirms, and they exchange a look. Waifish, blonde Connix had, like Poe, thought herself invisible until the general proved otherwise, and now she'll do anything for her, short of following her onto a battlefield -- and okay, probably not even short of that. She'll be soft-voiced until the exact second she won't be.

"How come they always bring up the Home Depot?" he wants to know. "It's like they expect us to quake in fear whenever it's mentioned."

Maz props a hand on her hip, bangles clanging together, and replies, "Didn't you hear? The Home Depot is rebuilding the oligarchy."

Poe feels his face lift and spread, showing all his teeth.

"The Home Depot plans galactic domination? One grow-light at a time?"

"Mr. Dameron, the Home Depot gives children nightmares," says Maz, playing along.

"The Home Depot frightens old people, too? It is a hive of villainy?"

"Yes. The Home Depot blew up the government."

When he looks at her, she's already looking back, eyes over-round under the Coke bottle-thick lenses of her spectacles, and they share a grimace; perhaps that had been taking it too far.

"Well," she starts, but before she can say anything else, a shout wings out on the other side of the greenhouse and they crane their heads around -- Maz moreso than Poe, being several inches shorter. A section of the overhead tarp has given way in the corner where it meets the frame of the hoop house, dumping rainwater on the unsuspecting pilot standing underneath.

Maz makes a thoughtful noise. "I believe repairs are your department, are they not?"

"Heck," Poe swears.

***

Rey has a problem.

That problem is that she had been deposited here at the beginning of her shift and told, "hey, can you watch plant care for a second? We'll be back, call somebody on the radio if you need help with anything," without any other instructions, up to and including how to find anything in this department. Or the store, for that matter. She's brand-new and she knows where the sign-in clock is. Everything else --

"Lights, lights, lights …" she mumbles to herself, scanning along at eye-level for anything that looks like an appropriate switch.

She flips one, and --

"Okay, no, not that," quickly, and, "maybe --? Oh!"

Warm, golden light spills in a puddle on the desk and swamps over the shelves, coming from the rodeo bulbs that've been helpfully strung up across the department, radiating from the "Plant Care" sign outward. The rain's made everything darker, so even though it's only early afternoon, the day's taken on the underwater gloom of a lazy evening, and now the light makes it a little more welcoming.

Rey props her hands on her hips, stealing a moment of satisfaction with that accomplishment. She wanted light, she figured it out.

Next on the list --

The pallets of bagged potting soil are bare bones. They should probably be refilled. How does that happen?

She could do it -- she saw a Bobcat on the way in, and where there's a Bobcat, there's probably a forklift, so all she would need to know is where they keep the pallets of bagged goods and how, exactly, to maneuver a forklift through the store. She wouldn't be off the sales floor for more than a minute, that would be okay, right?

Ugh. Rey needs a teacher. A supervisor. A manager. Something.

"'We'll be back,' they said," she mutters, and stretches up onto tiptoes, checking the rest of the store. She spots an orange-shirted employee here and another one there, but nobody who looks like they might be in charge. "Yeah, when are you coming back?"

Shoving her cowlicks back up off her forehead, she gnaws on her lip for a moment, then darts for the main aisle.

She doesn't find a forklift, but she does find the Bobcat, a unique orange-and-white contraption sitting out in the trees. It doesn't have any forks, but it does have a bucket, and she can probably stack the bags in there and haul them in that way -- it isn't as elegant as having a full new pallet, but it's better than the nothing that's there now. She'll have it back before anyone misses it.

There's a mountain of a man nearby, moving signs, and Rey hovers for a beat to see if he's going to argue with her about the Bobcat.

A raincoat tents over the top of his head -- it's not how you're supposed to wear raincoats, but she isn't sure they make raincoats big enough for this guy -- and he props it up higher in order to get a good look at her, but other than a rumbling kind of sigh, says nothing. His face is hard to look at, like trying to spot something camouflaged in a thicket of cockleburs; as she stands there, his teeth peek out briefly from behind a colossal mass of facial hair, then disappear again. He's got on a bandolier over his orange shirt -- which has faded to a muddy color across the worn boulders of his shoulders -- and it bristles with tools. She spots sold tags, measuring tape, pruners, a roll of yellow flagging tape.

He looks, frankly, like everything Rey imagines a professional arborist would look like. Everything she not-so-secretly wants to be.

Something gives a peculiar little tug at that spot in her stomach, the one that always heats up when she's comparing herself to others.

Stop, she thinks, and smiles back at the man before turning her attention to the Bobcat.

The paint's peeling off the back, and Rey pats its side in an affectionate way as she hauls herself into the cage.

"Bb8, huh?" she says, swinging the cage door shut and glancing towards the ignition to make sure the key's in there. It's clearly a well-loved machine; the foam's coming out of the seat and someone has painstakingly peeled every sticker off their apples and stuck them in a row by the ignition; there must be a year of Fuji in here. "Nice to meet you, I'm Rey."

Driving back through the greenhouse on Bb8, bucket stacked high with bags of potting soil, attracts a lot more attention than her departure had, and Rey rehearses what she'll say if anyone corners her about it.

I have a CDL. I'm licensed, I've driven one before. It needed to get done and I wasn't sure who I needed to ask for permission.

She eases her foot off the gas; a lone customer drifts back and forth, forlorn, by the plant care desk.

Swearing, she pulls Bb8 in between the grass seed bin and the empty pallets and throws it into park. It makes a cross noise and she says "shush," kicking up the cage door and clambering out, leaving the Bobcat sitting offended behind her. She crosses over to the customer, folding her hands in front of her, keeping up her internal litany of curses; what if there's a complaint? How is she going to explain the fact she left a customer unattended on her first day?

The woman, tall and sporty and dressed in a truly astonishing amount of denim, is carrying a gallon-pot in her arms. Rey recognizes it as a hibiscus less because of its blooms or its leaves, but because the tag's still stuck in the soil. The plant itself, bleached and wane, bears very little remaining resemblance to its picture. Sympathy cramps itself into the space between Rey's ribs; her fingers go out automatically to touch its trunk, reassuring.

So she misses the beginning of what the customer starts telling her, and tunes in to --

"-- got it home, and its leaves started turning yellow and falling off. I'd only just gotten it from you guys, it couldn't be sick, right, so I tried moving it around and then --"

No, Rey thinks, don't do it.

"-- so I watered it and added some fertilizer to perk it up, and --"

Oh my god.

"-- and -- and I'm guessing by your face that that was a stupid thing to do."

"We really don't recommend that you fertilize a plant that's in shock," Rey offers, diplomatically. "It's like when you're feeling ill and somebody tries to feed you beef stroganoff or something -- it's way, way too rich for your stomach to handle. You're going to throw it up. Same with plants -- all plants are going to go through a period of shock following a sudden change in environment. They'll stop blooming. They'll drop leaves. You'll wonder why it doesn't look as nice as it did in the store. Wanting to fertilize is a common impulse."

In unison, they look at the skeletal hibiscus still cradled worryingly in the woman's arms, punished by that impulse.

"Be patient," Rey continues. "Ease them into their new routine and they'll pull through it."

Her mother had often given her the same advice, whenever she found Rey sulking or dead-eyed amongst the moving boxes, missing whatever it was they had just left behind; the tree in the backyard and the friend who climbed it with her, the ice cream shop by the EZ-Advance Checking where Rey would get two scoops of bubble gum whenever she showed off an A+ spelling test, the teacher who let her borrow the 64-pack of Crayolas during project time.

Be gentle with yourself, sunshine, she'd sing-song, tugging Rey's ponytail as she scooted on by. You're a transplant and you're adjusting! You deserve a little extra care.

"Okay," the customer says, and she, too, touches the hibiscus's trunk like she's trying to reassure it. "Okay."

Rey walks her through a few more points -- cautions about insects and root rot and the dehumidifying effects of air conditioning that most tropical plants, hibiscus included, won't like -- and then sends her on her way, feeling a little sheepish but more at ease. She doesn't tell her she isn't optimistic about that plant surviving, but who knows -- Rey's seen plants rebound in pretty miraculous ways before.

Slowly, she exhales.

After checking to make sure there aren't any other customers she's missed, she turns back to Bb8, still waiting by the empty pallets.

"Well, then. Let's get you back before somebody starts looking for you," she tells it, and muscles a bag of potting soil over her shoulder.

***

By Friday, the sun seems to realize that enough is enough, and comes back blazing, turning everything golden, bronzy, and green. Clouds scuttle around and the grass lifts up out of the mud and waves. It's the kind of day you survive six months of winter in order to experience.

"You ever work with plants before?" Poe asks, and shoulders a hanging basket, grunting with the effort.

He routinely moves heavy pottery and hundred-pound pieces of statuary with Ackbar, sure, but sometimes he swears moss baskets are almost worse, like trying to carry around small swimming pools. Bits of damp, itchy sphagnum moss make their way under his collar, sending moisture trickling down the back of his neck. He makes a face at nobody in particular -- he's going to have to wash that out of his armpits later.

"Sort of," Finn says, in that way that means no.

He braces himself against the edge of the scissor-lift, which lets him take some of the weight from Poe, and together, they heave the basket onto its new perch along the awning of the storefront.

Banging some of the mossy fibers off his hands, Poe fixes Finn with a huge grin.

"You're doing fine," he promises. "Thanks for helping me with my mission today."

Flustered, Finn scrubs at the tops of his ears with the heels of his hands, and he says, "No problem, it's fine," and, quickly, "what are these?"

The baskets are Jessika's -- they're amazing, deep purple wave petunias and dime-sized callies and trailing tendrils of sweet potato vine the same acid-green as sour apple candy. The colors pop against Skywalker's dark wood panelling. Poe points out their components. Jessika would have started them when they were still plugs; it takes weeks for them to grow to this size.

"I did warehousing, mostly, at my last job," Finn blurts. "It wasn't anything like this."

Poe nods back, encouraging, and stoops to untangle the chains for the next basket.

Skywalker's warehouse is straightforward, if unsophisticated. If there's one thing Poe learnt doing landscaping for people with money to burn, it's that once you get use to a certain standard, it's hard to go back to anything less, and he worries that wherever it is Finn came from, he might find Skywalker's rather lacking. He wants him to like it here.

The fanciest setup Poe ever saw was at the Home Depot -- the whole thing was computerized, every item of backstock allotted its own special space on the racks. An automated system of check-outs and check-ins kept careful track of inventory. They based it off Amazon's warehousing system, the general told him -- he remembers craning his head around, gaping, trying to take in everything at once -- even the floors were spotless, which had seemed the most unfathomable part. His reaction had been gratifying to somebody, he's sure.

"What made you want to come here?" he asks.

Finn glances away, his eyes skittering off across the parking lot. You can see the interstate from here, lofted above the rest of traffic. He looks towards it and back.

"I didn't want to be there anymore," he says, which isn't exactly an answer.

"Cool." Poe knows a wall when he sees it. Then, "Ready for the next one?"

***

Crossing the department, Rey's foot kicks something slender and silver, sending it skittering way out ahead of her, and she has to get down on her knees to fetch it out from underneath a four-way shelf.

She comes up with a sonic spike.

"Huh," she says.

It's long, cylindrical, and fits in her hand like a sword hilt. She stands and starts absently waving it around like one, falling into a stance copied from too many "recommended for you" Netflix action movies. Then she frowns -- she doesn't see the cardboard wrapping that the others on the shelf have.

What's the policy for items out-of-packaging? Discount? Does she yellow-sticker it and put it back on the shelf? Who's in charge around here?

Oh, right -- Luke. Where is he?

"Well, that looks deadly," a voice remarks.

Jolting, she spins around, and the man steps back sharply, like she really is carrying a weapon. It's a sword with an imaginary blade, anyway. A sonic sword. Whatever. She tucks it behind her back, suddenly embarrassed to be caught playing pretend.

"Only if you're a mole," she replies.

Spring hires at Skywalker's fall into one of two categories; younglings, and pilots. And, like her, this man is definitely a youngling.

Outside, the day's still nice, but under the greenhouse roof the humidity's already climbing, and sweat beads up on his forehead and his upper lip. His eyes are bright and black and curious, and his name tag has a lot of vowels in it; Rey's brain spends a total of three seconds panicking about it before she wrangles the phonetics of it into place.

He starts to say something, but then his nostrils flare and his head comes up.

"Yeah," Rey agrees at the look on his face. "They're trimming basil."

"But," he turns.

The edible plants are three bays away, behind a display of wrought-iron hanging baskets and their liners. It's important to keep them trimmed back -- not only does it encourage a bushier growth instead of a leggier one, but most herbs lose their flavor intensity once they've flowered and gone to seed, so giving them frequent haircuts prevents them from flowering and preserves their taste. Besides, Rey's found that they'll usually leave the clippings in a paper bag by the sign-in clock, as a help-yourself kind of thing.

Her previous job definitely did not include the smell of fresh-cut basil, and judging by his expression, neither had his.

"I know," she says.

At her grin, he grins back, as kneejerk as if he's trying to catch something she'd thrown at him.

"So why are we stabbing moles?" He folds his arms, unfolds them, shuffles his feet and jerks his chin at the device in her hands. "And what's with the spike? Are they vampires? Do they eat plants?"

"Not typically," she responds. "They cut tracks in your yard, though -- damages sod and ruins ornamental beds. Unsightly stuff."

"That doesn't seem … worth killing them for."

She shrugs. "The spike won't kill them. It's sonic, you shove it into the ground, it releases a pulse at certain intervals, it's just incredibly obnoxious to them. It encourages them to move elsewhere."

Ignoring, of course, that they're standing next to a jug of pellets labeled "mole killer" in big letters. That's half of what plant care is -- animal repellents and insecticides. Trapping, killing, and maiming in creative ways. They keep assigning Rey to this department to cover, and she hopes it's because they know she can handle herself, and not because they think she has a particular inclination for those things, the killing and the maiming.

He asks, "Is this your department?" with something new in his tone; a junior talking to a senior.

It makes the hairs on Rey's arms stand up -- she's nineteen.

"No, the usual guy hasn't come in yet."

Luke, the phantom employee. He's on the schedule, and Rey has no idea how someone can stay on the schedule and then not show up when he's needed. His legacy is everywhere -- on the desk, on the shelves, in the messages sitting on the voicemail and the reminders taped underneath the phone. Everybody wants to talk to someone who isn't her.

"Hey."

She surfaces from her reverie. He's grabbed another sonic spike off the shelf, and is holding it through its cardboard packaging much the same way she'd been holding the other one, like he's about to hit a homerun.

"We gonna duel or what?" he goes.

It startles her so much that for a beat, all she does is stare at him. He waits, unperturbed.

Slowly, unbidden, a smile starts to widen at her mouth. "Now, see, that's rude," she says. "You've only known me for two minutes and now you're going to fight me?"

He throws his head back and laughs, and at the sound of it, Rey goes still, completely still, like his laughter is a butterfly that's landed on her and she doesn't want to dislodge it, too honored to be chosen as its perch to do anything other than admire its colors and its wings. She immediately wants him to do it again.

"My name's Finn," he volunteers. "What's yours?"

"I'm Rey."

He nods, and steps in, and opens his mouth --

-- and she darts forward, rapping the back of his hand with her own spike, hard enough that his fingers open reflexively. At his comical look of affront, she smiles so wide she feels it in her whole face.

***

Lor San Tekka issues a solemn proclamation: "He's going to be the death of me."

Hurrying alongside him down the length of his semi, Poe accepts the pick ticket and shakes it out, studying its contents. The general wants to be informed immediately if Naboo Nurseries shows up -- there are a baker's dozen of special orders waiting on that shipment, Jessika's crotons included, and this isn't it, but there are two other trucks waiting to unload on the south dock and he won't know if those are Naboo's until he gets this one taken care of.

It's going to be one of those days.

"Were you up the street again?" he guesses, looking around for a forklift.

"Yes," Lor says with a skeletal grimace. His shirt today is a company one, black with a collection of sharp, silver shuriken forming the "K"s, and Poe is once again off-put by the fact that in a certain slant of light, he can see the shape of Lor's skull under his skin, the protuberant forehead and the deep eye sockets, like it's only a matter of time. "Have you met the plant guy they've got up there?"

"No," Poe lies.

(The last time he'd talked to the kid, it had been at his graduation party, and it hadn't been about anything in particular -- the first of the summer blockbusters, whether or not the director was ripping off some Bespinese period piece like Rotten Tomatoes said. They'd been standing by the veggie dip and he spoke to Poe in Spanish. Poe remembers being surprised by that, although in hindsight he shouldn't have been; whatever else runs in the general's family, a willingness to meet people where they're comfortable is hallmark.)

"Nightmare," is all Lor says about it, though, and Poe believes him.

His day goes from bad to worse when, shortly after he gets the third truck unloaded and sent on its way, his radio lights.

Poe, and it's Statura. Can you come to the annuals tables?

He fumbles his radio off its clip, one-handed. "Is it something I can answer over the radio? I'm a little tied up."

After his back surgery, the admiral had continued to work with Poe in the warehouse until the third time the general caught him trying to lift something completely out of his weight restrictions, and sent him inside. Now he directs younglings and assists pilots in explaining to people the difference between annuals and perennials and why they shouldn't be surprised when annuals don't come back the next year -- they only last a year, it's in their name.

It's Mr. Solo, he wants to talk to you.

Poe jerks to a halt.

"Oh," he says.

Inside, he spots Chewie before anybody else, standing a head above the rest, and that's worrisome, because getting Chewie to part with his trees is a herculean task on the best days. The procession of racks that Poe just unloaded off Lor San Tekka's truck have popped off-track, a collision making a cluster in the main aisle, orange shirts milling around it.

And at the center --

Han Solo carries himself like the kind of middle-aged man who can always be relied upon to frown and talk about the Youth with a capital letter. He looks astonishingly similar to that old white man you never want to do anything fun or spontaneous in front of, and certainly not anything ethnic, he's not going to tolerate that nonsense. He's got an expressive set of eyebrows and he drags himself everywhere by the chest, hands planted firmly on his hips, and Poe dodged him for months before Han proved his first impression wrong.

If Poe had to pick an owner to throw off a cliff, he would save Leia, every time, but he might feel a twinge of regret about it. The old man's surprisingly hilarious.

There's nothing funny about him now, however.

He's worked up himself up into an impressive bellow by the time Poe arrives.

"-- going to do with these? You can't put them on the tables like this! What were you going to say to our customers --"

His eyes snag on Poe, and crosshairs him immediately, jabbing a finger in his direction.

"You!" he says, barrel chest pumping forcefully. "Who brought these?"

"Brought …" Poe echoes.

Statura materializes at his elbow, gesturing. He pulls a flat off the nearest rack, tilting it towards Poe so that he can see the six-packs of impatiens, small six-pointed flowers in valentine colors, which are --

Which are --

Which are thick with mildew, a soft powdery white growth choked and growing up out of the cramped, tight quarters. Now that he sees it, it's everywhere. The whole rack is infested. There's no breathing room in between those six-packs, no space, and after four days of rain …

Han's anger is suddenly justifiable. Poe had brought these off the truck and sent them inside without looking at them, and they had almost put them out to sell them.

He's found that Han Solo will tolerate a lot of stupid mistakes -- or, as the general likes to say, he is a lot of those stupid mistakes -- but such an obvious insult to his wife's livelihood is not one of those things.

"Who brought these?" he repeats.

"Kanjiklub, sir."

"I should have known. Why do we keep making deals with them?" Han asks in an aside to Chewie, who makes a mountainous noise in his chest that could mean anything. He swings back to Poe, eyebrows flatlining. "Did you sign for them?"

Poe's stomach does something complicated and inverted, knotting itself up like one of those Cirque-du-Soleil dancers performing midair acrobatics.

"We were in a hurry --" he starts, then realizes it sounds like an excuse and gulps it back. He darts his eyes at Chewie -- he knows how monstrously busy they are today: Poe helped him load two worshyr trees in 45-gallon pots just this morning. "Yes, sir."

Han's chest pumps again, but before he can work himself up to full furious blaze, a youngling steps forward.

"You can spray for it," she says, planting herself at the edge of the confrontation, and Han Solo spins on her. Her greasy hair is thrown up into a series of small knots, which gives her head the look of a small, pointy stegosaurus, and she tips her chin up, jaw setting. "If it was downy mildew, we'd be out of luck, that's a death sentence for impatiens, but this isn't that. This is a different fungus. And it's treatable."

"Who are you?" Han fires at her.

Rey, Poe remembers. Her name is Rey.

"Nobody," she says quickly. "I mean, I'm just a -- with a watering hose."

Not true, he thinks, immediately and fiercely. This is the spring hire who drove Bb8 through the main aisle of the store without a single casualty.

Another youngling joins her, standing at her shoulder with the expression of a man who's going to back her up in a fight. Bemused, Han's eyes flick to him, taking in his name tag and performing the life-long familiar flinch of confusion mixed with panic. There's a lot of vowels there.

"I'm Finn, Mr. Solo, sir," he says helpfully, and folds his arms in a movement that nicely shows off --

He bites his lip.

Focus, Poe.

"You won't be able to save all of them," Rey continues, undaunted. "Not at this stage, but enough of them could be salvaged that we won't lose the whole shipment. Spray 'em, spread them out, roast them in the sun if you can, if --" she falters, grimacing. There are a lot of annuals that are heat and sun tolerant -- peppercorn-shaped lantana and the waxy-looking begonia, for instance -- but impatiens aren't one of them. They're famous for being good shady porch flowers for a reason.

"She's right," Poe interjects. "As long as there's light, we've got a chance."

"I know that!" Han says sharply, but the venom's gone from his voice. "Where the hell is Luke, anyway?"

Nobody answers this: the "not here" should be obvious to anybody with eyes and the ability to notice a pattern.

He sighs, and when he looks at Rey and Finn next, it's thoughtful.

"We'll tell Lando to put it in the next e-blast," he says, seemingly to himself. "We'll push the New Guinea impatiens instead, at least until we can get another shipment. Do either of you have a pesticide license?" he asks, and his eyebrows spring apart in surprise when they both raise their hands.

"No, really," Rey insists. "It's up-to-date and everything, you can check."

Chewie rumbles, amused.

"… Huh," says Han, slower.

***

Rey originally got the license because they'd required it at her last job; clear up the aphids and scrub enough of the scale off for the plants to sell, and at that point, any lingering disease was the customer's responsibility -- J-Mart's garden center accepted no returns on live plants after seven days. She'd been applying controlled-substance pesticides without registration for at least two years before the city slapped them with a hefty fine and forced them to show licensing.

And she kept going in for the renewal tests every year after that because, like her CDL, it looked good on her resume.

Oh, her resume. No other document in Rey's whole life was ever curated with more love and more care, and yet, she could never bring herself to send it in anywhere. It just sat on her thumb drive, brought up and polished occasionally, for years.

There was always some excuse, some perfectly reasonable explanation as to why she had to turn down job offerings whenever they came around.

I can't leave J-Mart right before the holidays, she'd catch herself thinking. I'm the only competent employee here, I'll get them through this and then I'll leave.

And then the holidays would pass and Rey would have found some other reason why she couldn't go, why she should ignore the job listings in her Google history, just for another month, another two months, just a little longer --

To compare J-Mart to Wal-Mart does Wal-Mart a disservice that, for all its vast and myriad sins, it does not deserve. J-Mart isn't even corporate hell -- it's where corporate hell goes to die. It's what big-money corporations like Wal-Mart and the Home Depot and Lowe's look at when they want to see their own graveyard, some wasted bonefield washed up somewhere in a Montana desert.

J-Mart is a bleary, florescent-lit megastore that does its white-blue buzzing lighting on purpose, the owners having read somewhere that people who feel hopeless are inclined to spend more money.

Rey sold plants in the spring and summer and holiday decorations in the fall and winter, and she went home and washed her bras in the sink and stirred microwavable vindaloo with her finger and thought about changing the position of a comma on her resume. It would be the only proactive thing she would do all week, and, just like that, she would look up and find that J-Mart had sucked another year out of the marrow of her bones.

Before Skywalker's, she'd never seen this much green.

And not just the green plants, but the people. The atmosphere. Green. Rey had no idea people could be so green, so growing, so full of light.

She fires the price gun, peeling the tag off the end and sticking it to the back of a bag of soil amender. She does the same for the next in line, all the way down the shelf -- aluminum sulfate to turn hydrangeas blue, high-phosphorus fertilizer for high-yield blooms, bags of bark chunk for repotting orchids. Everything in a greenhouse collects a fine film of dust, no matter how many times she wipes the shelves down, and she puts the gun down long enough to wipe the gritty feeling off on her orange shirt.

She's here, in plant care, because they asked her to be. She's proven she can handle herself.

And everyone -- General Organa, Han Solo, Poe -- have made it clear she's doing them a favor by covering for Luke's absence, and Rey's not sure how his failure to be here when he's needed most is her responsibility -- or theirs, for that matter.

Honestly, Rey would rather be with the annuals, working alongside Finn, watching the impatiens make their steady comeback, rearranging flats, trimming the herbs or the coleus or the leggy shamrocks. Trimming plants is the kind of rhythm the hands can do without much input from the brain, once you've developed an eye for where leaf meets stem and cut there just above where the new buds are forming.

It's a lot like scrubbing all the dirt off something just to see there's something valuable underneath.

"Hey, Rey -- you okay?"

She jumps, standing quickly, but it's just Finn, peering at her in concern. He's got a shopping cart piled with precarious stacks of dark orange flowers, flagged for the Green Squadron -- they must have a job.

"Yeah," she says, and points her chin at the flowers. "Docks are that way, though."

"Uh-huh," Finn agrees, mouth quirked, and she realizes that he must have taken a detour to talk to her. Maybe just to talk to her -- it's been a few days since they had a shift together, when Finn had paused his conversation with a customer in order to wave at her with his whole arm as she drove by on Bb8. The obvious enthusiasm in the gesture had made something warm settle low in her stomach, where it now turns over and heats up in a cozy way.

Abruptly shy, she fidgets with her fingers, before plucking off one of the flowers on the cart and popping it into her mouth.

Finn goggles at her.

"What?" she goes.

"I -- those are edible?"

She blinks, then blinks again, and then laughs.

"Nasturtium," she says by way of explanation, and plucks off another flower, holding it out to him. "Nontoxic to humans and animals. They're sometimes used as salad toppings."

"You're kidding."

It tastes like pepper. Finn's eyebrows go up, and Rey laughs again.

He shakes his head, incredulous. "What else can you eat around here?"

***

Han Solo blows by, moving fast.

"Don't drink the hose water, kid, it's got fertilizer in it."

Finn looks up, affronted. "Now you tell me?"

***

First thing Wednesday morning, the general calls a war council.

They meet in the conference room, where Maz Kanata usually takes her landscaping clients; it's a spacious, airy room in the turret off the main building. It has that same underground ambiance, like there should be roots coming out of the ceiling. Everybody call it's Maz's castle. All squadrons, back to castle, had been the shifts-over call at the end of the day, back when Poe lead the Black Squadron.

He pulls up a chair across from Maz, and Han puts the table between himself and his wife so they can see each other's faces -- "who are you again?" she'd remarked, dryly, and Han keeps pulling at his jacket in an embarrassed way. They're joined by Chewie, Artoo, and Lando Calrissian, their graphics designer who doubles as head of marketing and outreach, who pulls the platter of strawberry cupcakes toward him with single-minded enthusiasm as soon as he sits down.

(Honestly, that's the real reason why Maz is everybody's favorite. Even if she wasn't one of those genuine kindly people that pulls aside younglings to give them advice and even once informed Finn in all seriousness that if he needed to get out of the country in a hurry she knew a guy, she'd be the favorite simply for bringing free food to work.)

(And also, the cupcakes have actual sliced strawberries added to the frosting. The first five minutes of the meeting are lost to appreciative noises.)

"Okay," says the general, after Artoo's made his trip to the wastebasket to toss his wrapper away and maneuvered his wheelchair back into place at the table. "Everyone knows why we're here this morning, right?"

Nods go around the table, spare one.

"Ah," says Han, reluctantly.

The general's mouth compresses, and Lando leaps to the rescue.

"It's about that wonderful Bobcat," he says. "We're going to fight over who gets custody of it."

"Bb8 belongs to Poe, first and foremost," Leia replies, swift as a guillotine, and Poe's pulpy little heart remembers all over again why he's going to follow this woman for all of his days. "The rest of us are going to ask nicely. Now, we're coming up on the four busiest weeks of the season." She says it the way some people say, the sky is blue, or, they blew up the government and we can't take much more of having our public works be at a standstill. "Artoo wants me to remind you that we make more than a quarter of our yearly revenue in the next four weekends alone."

She looks sidelong for confirmation, and Artoo's shiny domed head bobbles in an acknowledging way.

"Our success depends on everything running, if not perfectly, then at least smoothly, and for that, Bb8 is the most important piece of equipment in this store. Agreed?"

Nods make another round. Artoo plucks at his silver-and-blue sweater and Chewie vocalizes something affirmative.

Maz nudges her chair closer to him -- in all the time Poe's worked at Skywalker's, he's watched Maz go from nursing an understandable crush to being Chewie's secret admirer to his girlfriend to his fiancé, and he's not entirely sure if anyone's apprised Chewie of these status updates. That bramble-colored bracket that dominates his face parts briefly to allow him to smile down at her, but that doesn't tell Poe anything. He's not, like, really worried that one of these days, Chewie's going to turn around to find that Maz has arranged an altar for them, but you never know.

"All right," Leia continues. "Now --"

She doesn't get a chance to finish before the door bursts open.

"General! Oh, sorry, excuse me --"

"It's fine, Threepio. What is it?"

Threepio is a slender, golden, cerebral sort of man with a permanently wide-eyed, nervous expression and a tendency to fall back on hilarious formality when uncomfortable. His nickname in the greenhouse is "The Robot" despite being perhaps the least robotic person Poe knows. It comes from his body movements, he assumes, but you'd probably move like that too if your left arm and kneecaps were prosthetic replacements.

He and Artoo are in charge of almost all of Skywalker's managerial work, from payroll to purchasing to pricing and inventory -- they're both people who adapt everything around them to work for them -- and Poe's still not sure whether they genuinely hate each other or if they just act like it.

"General," Threepio says again, his eyes hugely luminous behind his rounded Harry Potter spectacles. "General, the most terrible thing has happened!"

"Tell me," says Leia shortly.

"It's the Home Depot, ma'am. They announced their weekend sale on Twitter -- four bags of mulch for $10!"

Silence doesn't so much fall as land with a terrific, gory mess.

Leia's eyes lid, betrayal greying the lines around her mouth.

Maz clenches her hands.

"Those beasts," she says, vicious.

***

Finn has a secret.

It's not the Home Depot thing, although he swears he's going to tell Rey about that soon. Or maybe he'll tell Poe first, and work his way up from there.

It's just -- they both think he's this good person. He wants them to keep thinking it.

But good people don't steal from their employers.

He winds the watering hose around his arm and walks it back up its length, weaving slowly back around the tables. Wet dirt showers everywhere, smearing across his forearms and the tops of his thighs, but it's just dirt on top of dirt by this point. His socks cling damply to his ankles.

The spicy scent of recently-deadheaded geraniums fills his nose, wafting up from the flats to his left -- firework blooms of white and red and midnight purple crest the tops of skinny stalks, erupting out of their flats. He keeps winding the hose; geraniums are more drought-tolerant than most, and only like to be watered when they're so bone-dry they're lighter than air.

Rounding the end of the table, he encounters a display of hydrangeas along the main aisle, and the banana-peel smell that they make when they're thirsty. He must have skipped these earlier.

He pauses, then hikes the coil of rubber up his shoulder and turns on the nozzle.

Some of the other younglings still water across the top, casual and careless, but Finn bends down so that he can get the hose nozzle to water right along the soil line -- showering across the tops not only makes it difficult for water to reach the roots evenly, it also encourages water spots and rot. So, carefully, Finn waters the hydrangeas until it runs out the bottoms of their pots.

When he's done, he winds up another length of hose, and then takes a moment to stand there quietly, breathing in.

Wet cement, soil, hydrangeas and geraniums and the summer-sharp smell of tomatoes not quite in bloom. He swears even the sunlight has a smell.

The Home Depot warehouse had been dry, completely colorless, greys and whites and blacks.

He's never going back.

"Thanks, Ackbar! I'll tell them!" a pilot shouts, close enough to startle him.

He glances around, then back. Ackbar is a squat, brownish man who resembles his wares; the boulders and statuary that line the courtyard outside the main building, where all the heavy pottery is kept. In the other direction, Chewie's helping a pair of customers with a willow, and their small child has been hefted up onto his shoulders to ride along. The kid keeps reaching up to snatch leaves off the branches of the trees as they pass under them.

Finn takes a deep breath.

Here's his secret:

Unattractive plants aren't sellable, so annuals that are diseased, underwatered, or simply aren't performing well are often thrown out. Finn's sympathetic streak hijacks him.

With patience and care, even the scantest, most scraggly plant can be encouraged to come back. People do it in their homes all the time, why can't he do it here? They don't deserve death in the compost bin just because they don't stand up in comparison to their neighbors.

Putting the hose away, he moves quickly, zigzagging back and forth between the tables, gathering up the latest; two flat-faced vinca flowers and a butter-yellow callie in a four-inch pot.

He ducks around the back of the potting booth, where they keep the towers of fiber pots that Jessika Pava and her people use for their custom-designed planters. He keeps a stash back here, where people aren't likely to question it -- they'll figure some orange shirt probably put it here because she's doing up a pot, better leave them. He sets the vinca and the callie carefully down among the others, then goes to check them out of inventory.

Dead, he writes. Reason: failure to thrive.

It's stealing.

At the Home Depot, this would have gotten him terminated, Finn has no doubts about that.

He secrets a look over his shoulder, then crouches down and whispers, "You guys look out for each other, okay?" and can't find it within himself to regret it.

***

Across the greenhouse, Rey's nose is assaulted with the smell of capsaicin and garlic.

"Bleergh," she says, with feeling. One of the bottles of animal repellent must have leaked on the shelf; since most nontoxic repellents are scent-oriented -- deer and rabbits and dogs having learned to avoid anything spicy-smelling the hard way -- the smell is pungent even in small doses. Wrinkling her nose, she can't help but wonder why so much of this "plant care" job involves making life miserable for every other living thing; animals, insects, weeds. Finn and Poe care for things, she gets to kill them.

There's something metaphorical there, she's sure.

She tucks the department phone into the cradle between her ear and shoulder and waits for the answering machine to pick up.

She listens to about three second of her mother's voice -- hi, you've reached -- and decides that's more than enough, and hangs up. The number blinks once on the screen and then vanishes into the call history.

At the sound of footsteps approaching, Rey looks up, shuffling and rearranging her face into something she hopes is helpful.

"Is, um."

The man who stops in front of her desk hunches forward in order to talk to her, like he's drawing her into a confidence. He's a reticent fellow, everything from his cheeks to his chest sucked in and concave. He tips his head sidelong and palms a quizzical look across the counter.

"Is Luke here?"

She fixes a smile on.

"Not at the moment, I'm afraid, is there anything I can help you with?"

He pulls a Ziploc bag out of some interior pocket. It's a good sign; Rey's had people come in expecting her to triage plant emergencies based on their vague descriptions alone. They don't usually remember the details she needs to know -- how frequently does their plant have to sit in its own moisture, are the leaves buckling, what do the spots look like, how many hours of sunlight does it get on average?

Take pictures, she advises people, but it's best if they bring in a sample of something -- a diseased leaf, some shell casting, something.

"Oh," says the man.

His mustache does something unfortunate when he speaks. He's in a mechanic's blue coveralls, "Biggs" stitched into the right breast.

"I've always talked to him before," he insists. "It's the whole reason I came all this way -- I live two hours east, you see. I rely on him."

You and me both, Biggs, Rey thinks grumpily.

Every day, he's on the schedule, and every day, the desk is empty and the lights are off when Rey comes in. She's beginning to think this Luke is a myth -- a very persistent one. Her rules for absentee department heads look like they're going to be the same as her rules for absentee parents: work around them.

"Do you think you might be able to help me?" Biggs continues, and to his credit, he doesn't sound too disbelieving -- Rey is young and fresh-faced and definitely not named Luke, and whatever reservations he has about her are his responsibility to get over, but even as they stand there, she watches him do it. He looks to her, a novice asking the expert for advice.

I have approximate knowledge of many things, she thinks, but doesn't peg him as the right generation to get an Adventure Time reference, so she just extends her hand for the Ziploc.

"Absolutely," she says with confidence, and reaches under the desk for the handheld microscope. "Let's see what we can do."

***

When Finn had been a little boy, seven or eight, around the age when the biggest decision in his life revolved around whether or not they would name the class rat "Chowder" or "Yoda", the older brother of a friend took the garbage dispose-all apart so that Finn could see what it was, exactly, that made all that noise.

In hindsight, he doesn't think the brother had a plan for how it was going to go back together -- he'd been a kid too, Finn realizes with the kind of generosity that only time can afford. He couldn't have been older than fifteen, a freshman in high school, but he saw the way Finn reacted after they shoved rotten tomatoes and a bad avocado down the gullet of the sink and turned on the dispose-all, tearing them to shreds with a terrific noise.

That older brother of a friend took the whole sink apart just to show him there wasn't anything to be afraid of.

He had cartoonish ears and turned-in toes, and he still carried the accent from home, although they told him a few more classes at the YMCA and that would go away.

It's a place Finn's never been, although he hauls around the weight of it in the syllables of his name, baggage he can't leave unattended anywhere.

Ephintuu Onweseven.

At graduation, he had to break it into palatable parts for the dean of students, a man he'd never spoken to, not even once, just so that he could go on stage to get his diploma. They gave him a card and said, Just spell it out.

He spent ten minutes drawing little Superman 'S's, one right after the other, all along the edge of the card -- it was the extent of his artistic ability at the time. And then he did:

FN2, he wrote, very slowly. 187.

It's your name, man, Slip said to him in exasperation. Not a jail cell.

But he remembers that older brother of a friend putting his palm against the glass in winter so that the frost melted in the shape of his hand while Finn waited and thought about hot chocolate and marshmallows, only bumping back down to earth when the brother said, "We don't come to cold countries because we want to."

Nobody leaves home unless home looks like that dispose-all had looked, dismantled -- a shark's single churning blade set in hungry, grasping rubber lips.

Nobody leaves home unless home will maim you.

He thinks jobs might work the same way.

Just leave, just leave, everybody will tell you. Can't you see everything's on fire and you deserve better?

All of that is fair, and sure, there might be something better over there if you were willing to pack up all your efforts and start over from scratch somewhere new, where you had to write your name down phonetically and had to ask all the simple questions all over again, like, where do I get more staples for the stapler or why do you call the owner 'the general'? And yes, maybe you'll be happier. Maybe it needs to be done.

It's never easy, though.

Finn can't say he understands Rey's homesickness for J-Mart -- he went in for laundry detergent at buttcrack o'clock once and you can't pay him to set foot anywhere so soulless and miserable again -- but he is, at least, sympathetic.

Leaving the warehouse at the Home Depot had felt impossible up until the moment he did it.

"Why?" Poe breaks in to ask. "I mean, you don't have to tell us, but --"

"An ethical conflict over a coworker's injury," Finn hears himself say, with dignity. It surprises him more than it does them; he'd been sitting on it for so long. "They took a stance I did not agree with, so I quit."

Slowly, Poe leans against the plant care desk, one foot propped up against a display of gallon-sized tree drench in a pose that's a little too Captain Morgan for Finn to take it seriously. Rey's on the other side of the counter, and they both look at him like they can tell the real story is underneath, a violent, sharp-bladed mass, but they don't dismantle it to look at the pieces. Instead, Rey breaks her star-shaped cookie in half and offers him the other section.

The cookies are courtesy of Maz; the eager huddle of orange shirts milling around the desk with them are courtesy of the cookies.

Spring hires at Skywalker's fall into two different categories, Poe tells them: younglings, who are high school and college kids grabbing up an easy summer job; and pilots, older stockier people like Statura and Antilles who wear sensible orthopedic shoes and come to help Leia out during her most urgent times of year. Poe, it seems, knows every face in the store, from the weekly delivery drivers to Han Solo to the after-school kids who come in to water.

"Everybody," Poe's voice changes. "At attention, it's the general."

Finn straightens up.

He doesn't know what he's expecting, but the woman who emerges from the store, blinking against the light in a familiar way -- she's tiny, with faded grey hair and faded grey fatigues, faded grey eyes set in a mixed-race face.

He knows she's a veteran, it was mentioned on the webpage, and he knows she's not actually a general because he's pretty sure they don't let real-life generals come back to run their family-owned businesses, but looking at her now, he can tell at once that she's like Rey: everyone who knows her will follow her to war, and it'll be easy because she carries the war with her everywhere she goes.

You don't leave home unless home will maim you, so what do you do when home's on your back like a shell?

The pilots snap immediately to attention -- she's the reason they stick gel inserts in their sneakers and sunscreen on their faces and leave their comfortable retirements. Leia Organa, owner of Skywalker's Garden Center and Landscaping, has got the same muddy palm prints on her pants that they do.

"Poe," she says, generously overlooking the fact that everyone's scrambling to cover for the fact they were eating, not working, "what did we do with those one-gallons that Naboo Nurseries brought? The gardenias and the jasmine?"

"Lando wanted them for a photo op for the e-blast before we put them out on the sales floor, so we're holding them in a pin by the pussy willow," Poe explains.

Behind his back, all the younglings exchange delighted grins -- he said the word!

"Hmm," says the general thoughtfully. "All right, here's what we're going to do."

***

Dead, Rey writes. Reason: water rot.

She steals one more look at Finn's handwriting, then closes the Dead Book and puts it back, letting her fingers drift over the spines of the neighboring binders. Most of their labels have peeled away, illegible, dragged apart by hands that didn't need to read which binder this was; they were already known.

A curiosity opens in the pit of her stomach, and it feels startlingly close to hunger.

Movement in her peripheral has her pivoting on her heel, feeling like she's been caught at something -- greedy, she's been caught at being greedy.

It's just Jessika, though, entering the booth with two tall cordeyline spike plants tucked under her arms, with sharp leaves standing straight up like swords. She sets them down on the work table, pulls her hair up and sticks her pencil through it before she turns and opens her stance, giving Rey a questioning look.

"More impatiens?" she guesses.

"The calibrochoa," Rey says, and holds up the tags in evidence. "They didn't recover from all that rain, either."

Then, unable to help it, she steps to the side so that Jessika can see all the binders and blurts it out:

"What are these?"

"Recipe books," Jessika answers. She reaches above her head, snagging the hose nozzle suspended there and pulling it along its track. Her work table's backed up against the bin of soil that Rey's watched Poe refill with Bb8 on more than one occasion, and it's this she sprays down, turning it with her hands until the top layer glues together, moistened.

As she works, she explains, "It sounds fun and all, getting to make your own containers all day, but honestly, there are only so many combinations of annual flowers you can make that will successfully tolerate the same light, the same space, the same amount of watering. Having recipes makes it easier for us to keep track of good combinations so we don't sell a customer something that isn't going to make it because it's got bad neighbors.

"And creativity is never a bad thing, exactly, but this isn't the time of year we encourage experimentation. It's like the Clone Wars in here every spring -- me and my squadron will plant up a couple hundred of the same thing that customers can just grab and go, and then we move on to the next hundred. If folks come back looking for us to make them something special but don't have any instructions beyond, 'well, I want it to be pretty,' we can ask them some questions and then pull out the recipe books to show them some examples."

Rey hadn't considered it like that.

She looks back again. Sure enough, if she tilts her head, she can just make out faint lettering on one spine that might be, low-light, shady porch.

"I thought it would be more …"

"Spontaneous?" Jessika's teeth flash. "Less like a factory assembly line? Maybe, but it's still fun. Here," she says suddenly, gesturing. "Come here and we'll make one up."

"I," says Rey, her back bumping up against the counter. She quickly casts a look towards the plant care department, the flock she's supposed to be tending. From here, she can't tell if there are any wolves prowling in customer's clothing. "I'm not sure --"

"Planter or hanging basket?" Jessika continues, like she hadn't said anything.

She points out examples of each. The planters are made with fiber pots and the baskets are made with mossy bottoms that allow for plugs to grow from their undersides, nearly upside-down, and at Rey's curious noise, she picks up one of the fiber pots and plunks it down on the table.

"Get your hands dirty," she orders, and Rey obediently moves for the soil bin.

Jessika walks her through the steps: a layer of soil, a scattering of slow-release fertilizer pellets. A layer of soil, a layer of fertilizer, and repeat until the soil line comes nearly to the top of the pot.

Then, you punch out a few holes. Pick your plants -- your trailers go around the edges so that they can pop over the side of the pot and stretch for the ground, vines and trailing flowers and what not. Then the uprights, bunches of flowers that won't grow much past a foot. And then a tall centerpiece for the middle: sunset-colored crotons or pencil cactus or cordeyline spikes, something that'll carry all the height and character. Tear open the root balls -- "with your fingernails, right," Jessika says, like something in Rey isn't turning over at being told to deliberately rip at a part of a plant's anatomy, "it'll encourage them to spread out and grow" -- and plant them, then water them in.

"And -- you're done," she says happily, stepping back. "We'll set them aside to let them grow into shape a little bit, shall we?"

Rey picks the planter up, geraniums tickling the underside of her chin, and goes where Jessika directs her, setting the (now very heavy, because it's wet) pot on a rack with a half-dozen others. Someone's left a small collection of half-dead plants back here, Rey notices -- except they're not abandoned, there's damp rings underneath them from where someone's watered them recently.

Huh, she thinks, and then shrugs, standing. She goes back to hose the potting soil off her hands.

Jessika's already started on the next one, and as they squeeze around each other, Rey says to her, "No one would ever accuse these of being assembly-made."

And can tell at once that she's hit a point of pride: Jessika's cheeks plump up, her smile stretching all of her features, pleased.

***

The weekend comes. The weekend goes.

Finn spends the first day of it absolutely steamrolled, and the next fish-mouthed and trying to determine what, exactly, had just happened, and why he feels like his ears should still be ringing. There's times of drought, he supposes, that you have to expect when you're in the plant business, and then there are times of utter catastrophic flood. Weekends in May tend to be the latter.

He gets nothing useful done on his day off, and goes back into work on Monday tentatively, the same way you'd be careful of a natural disaster site.

Skywalker's refused to match the Home Depot's sale on mulch, either because they genuinely couldn't afford to, or as a point of pride -- there's a story there, Finn thinks, but probably the kind that comes with noise and a lot of grinding parts. Taking it apart might make him less afraid of it, but. It's the Home Depot. Finn's feelings on the Home Depot can be summarized simply as go and away.

Rey enlists his help with the clean-up, and they're both hauling empty racks back to the south dock for pick-up when they encounter Han, chest-deep in a shipment.

Finn's kneejerk reaction around a boss is to camouflage and become circumspect, but Rey's survival instincts are attuned for an environment of abandonment, not surplus, and they kick in too late.

"What happened to your arms?" she yelps in alarm.

Han looks down, like he's got to check on them now that she's drawn attention to them, like somehow he's going to find they're not attached to him anymore. His forearms resemble sliced bread, red and leaking from numerous angry cuts.

The racks slow to a halt, dirt and fallen-off begonia blossoms bouncing to the cement, and Rey and Finn stand there and stare.

"Oh," says Han, with vague disappointment, clearly not having noticed his state. "Well, that's a mess."

Finn recovers first.

"Don't tell me," he says, as a glimmer of previous experience suddenly surfaces in his brain. "A Rathtar's gotten loose."

"What's a Rathtar?" Rey asks.

"You ever heard of the Trillian Massacre?" he says, solemn, and her eyes go a little buggy.

"No?"

"Good."

The cracked, whiskery bits of Han's face fold up, laugh lines deepening around his eyes, and he takes pity and comes to her rescue.

"They're just ferns, kid. With a lot of sticky sucker shoots."

Surprise makes a portrait out of her. She lets go of her rolling rack to gesture at his arms. "And they did --"

"Sharp bastards, too. There's no safe way to hold them, but," Han's face lightens. "They're low-light plants and are great for office spaces. We make a killing on them during promotion season: everybody buys them up as gifts. Bit of a double-edged sword, don't you think?" He shows off his arms in evidence.

"Violent plants make good gifts?"

"Something like that," Han says with a grin.

***

Poe Dameron had told her, quite confidently and with almost no bravado -- it's not bravado if it's earned -- that he can drive anything.

On that long and boastful list of equipment, he'd included the scissor-lift, but as the lift in question lets out a showboat whine and trundles across the pavement at a speed much slower than the average human could walk, she rearranges this estimate in her head. This doesn't count. Rey had a turtle as kid, pilfered from its perfectly happy existence in its pond out behind her mother's rental and subjected to a child's delighted experimentation as a newly self-minted pet owner, and it could probably operate this scissor-lift with no supervision. It could definitely outpace it.

Don't get her wrong, Poe is one of her favorite people -- he has so many teeth, and a nice jaw, and he always, even after a long day, manages to smell so invitingly of 3-for-$5 supermarcado soap. He responds to Rey's online-taught Spanish with easy answers and a much better accent. Rey would sell holiday decorations for Poe, if he asked.

But if he asks her to drive the scissor-lift again, she's going to tell him to stick it.

Grumbling, she yanks the hose along, turning the nozzle onto the next hanging basket in line.

She can see Jessika's hand in the recipe, in the way all the bright acid colors pop against Skywalker's antiquated wood-cabin siding. Snail-paced lift notwithstanding, she will admit it's a nice change of pace from talking people through the math involved in pesticide application, which is what's waiting for her otherwise.

Well, almost. She did hit her head on the sign going under it earlier -- the Skywalker's logo, that big curling script and the unfurling padme lotus blossom, had made for a pretty solid thunk.

She's still rubbing at the knot contemplatively, when raised voices snag her attention.

On the other side of the parking lot, where the pavement gives way to gravel and the trees are old enough to have grown into each other, sending light and shade dappling down in equal measure, she can just make out two figures squared off against each other. It's this, more than the loud voices, that instantly pings Rey to the fact this is an argument.

One of the men is very tall and broad-shouldered, his car keys clenched in one fist in a familiar cross formation, and the other --

Rey jolts with surprise.

The other man is Han.

He's relaxed, or pretending to be -- his posture's open, elbows held loosely at his sides in the manner of a man who isn't sure what's going to get thrown at him -- and the height difference suddenly becomes that much more noticeable, because (in Rey's admittedly truncated opinion) Han himself isn't exactly a short person.

"Squared off" is really the best way to describe the altercation at this point; Han's opponent has his hair pulled up and he's dressed head-to-toe in black, the way people did at J-Mart when they were in charge and wanted to make sure everybody knew it.

Rey is too far away to make out the words, only the tone; as bitten-off, jagged, as full of teeth as the car keys in his fist. Han's replies carry the weight of an impenetrable fortress, heavy and battered.

She's gotten to know Han better since that dilemma with the mildewed impatiens -- she and Finn have been suffering the unique repercussions that come with having your competence uncovered by your boss -- so she's seen Han wrest hoses away from younglings with a God save us from idiots look on his face, and she's seen him get salty with customers who've made the cashiers cry, and she's even seen him throw playful punches and mock-wrestle with Chewie, but this is something else entirely.

This is a fight.

It's in every line of Han's body, moving like he's carrying a weapon and his opponent is going to cut himself on it if Han's not careful.

As she watches, the man in black suddenly shouts something and kicks gravel -- Han steps back smartly, hands raised.

"Pathetic," Rey decides.

The sudden loud splat of water hitting the pavement wrenches her attention around front again. The hanging basket she's watering has reached saturation, spilling out over the edges and pouring from the mossy bottom, and she twists the nozzle off obligingly. She propels the scissor-lift onward to the next one -- it whines, and whines, and eats up the five-foot distance with about as much speed as an egg timer inching its way around a minute.

Rey says it again for good measure. "Pathetic."

***

Inside, Finn's witnessing an equally peculiar argument between Maz Kanata and a strange, bronzed man whose name, a pilot tries to tell him, is Threepio.

"No, it isn't," says Finn blankly, seemingly unaware of any pots, kettles, or the color black involved in calling someone else out on an uncommon name. "It can't be."

A troupe of orange shirts have descended on the tables of citrus-bright lantana and sweet potato vine that Finn and two other pilots have spent all morning carefully condensing and arranging, wanting the best plants on display up front. The orange shirts -- these must be the squadrons Poe keeps talking about -- all have some kind of green kerchief tied around their necks or arms, which seems to be more of a personal show of loyalty than a uniform requirement. Green Squadron, perhaps?

Regardless, they're leaving a dent -- piling shopping carts high with flats and flats of flowers. Dirt showers across the cement.

"Madam!" Threepio says, strongly. "I really must protest!"

"Well, I'm not stopping you."

For a dwarfish woman, who's probably older than most of the independent countries on the globe, Maz moves startlingly fast. Her jewelry clatters woodenly against itself with each flip of her hand, and Threepio jerks doggedly after her. Sweat stands out on his bald, golden skull.

"You can't just -- until our truck comes in, our supply of lantana is limited and this stock must be saved for the customer!"

"I have plenty of customers, dear."

"I know that, but if you would just fill out a requisitions form -- the same requisitions form, may I remind you, that we have implemented for years --"

She stops.

"Young man, have you always had those glasses? Here, give them to me, I want to see how blind you are."

He blinks roundly. "Madam!"

"No, really, here, you can try mine …"

Realizing abruptly that now might be the perfect time to take advantage of a distraction, Finn pushes himself off a nearby table and ventures into the fray. He wades through the grasping squadron members and rescues one struggling lantana the same bright pink as a strawberry Starburst, then picks up two sweet potato vines who've been severed at an unfortunate angle by the sharp edges of the neighboring flats. All will recover, he believes, but only if they're given time away from scrutiny.

He sets off for the potting booth, and nobody blinks twice -- it's just three more plants for the Dead Book.

Rounding the tower of fiber pots, he --

-- he --

They're not here.

They're --

He finds himself turning in a circle, looking in between towers, which is silly, because what does he think happened? All the plants he'd secreted away, they didn't just grow legs and move to a sunnier patch. Someone discovered them and threw them out.

Loss makes a complicated, grisly paste out of his insides. The plastic pots in his arms crack in protest to his grip tightening, and he swallows, hard.

All of his work …

They don't deserve -- !

"Finn?" a voice calls.

He looks up. It's not Jessika -- this is her day off, snatched straight out of the jaws of the busy season with the desperate relief of a life preserver -- but it's one of her lieutenants, a compact woman with the same golden-bronze skin that Threepio has, except she possesses considerably more hair; a whole tawny flop of it, currently gelled up off her forehead in a swoop like a duck's tail. Like Rey, she seems to think of her name tag as more as a suggestion than a required part of her uniform.

She gestures with the jar of slow-release fertilizer. "They're over here."

Finn turns and looks.

At first, he doesn't see anything but the scattered mess of discarded pots that have a tendency to pile up precariously in the potting booth when they're on a roll. But there, on the bottom shelf underneath the recipe books --

There they are. All of them, lined up neatly underneath a grow-light with a jacked handle.

"I --" Finn starts, caught.

Jessika's lieutenant doesn't say anything, but she does smile and nudge him in the direction of a watering can, and Finn breaks his paralysis, going over and bending down to check on his plants. He tucks the lantana and the sweet potato vine in among them, and the aching mess inside his chest starts to feel a little cooked with the proximity to his heart, which feels warm and overlarge.

He adjusts the grow-light unnecessarily, and smiles.

Poe's voice comes out of his memory, As long as there's light, we've got a chance.

***

Leia plants her elbows on her desk, leaning forward until she feels the satisfying pop in the lower regions of her spine as she stretches out the knot.

"Ah," she says, with relief.

She tangles her fingers together, propping her chin on top of her knuckles, and maintains that position for another minute before she settles back into her chair, gazing out over the top of the complicated architecture of folders, reports, and catalogs that overtakes her desk every spring.

Everyone insisted that she take the loft level of Maz's castle as her office; it's the nicest space with the largest window that overlooks the courtyard, the clusters of colorful talovera pottery and stone statues of cherubs blowing kisses and Grecian woman carrying urns. Through it, she can just make out the edge of Chewbacca's hut and the tree rows beyond it; the one-gallon shrubs clustered close to the greenhouse, all the way out to the enormous Bespinese maples swaying in the back field.

It's very queenly, she thinks, to be able to survey her kingdom like this, but in reality, all it does is give her a clear, unimpeded view of the interstate overpass, and all the signs for the opportunistic businesses that have been lofted to meet it, the golden arches and the car dealerships singing their siren song to the interstate travelers.

Even with the afternoon just starting to fade, more the suggestion of evening than the actual start of it, the Home Depot sign is lit so you can't miss it.

And Leia has to look at it every day.

It's one thing, you know, to put a CVS kitty-corner to a Walgreens on a busy intersection; that's just ridiculous, and a little funny. It's another thing to put in a box-store like the Home Depot just down the street from a well-established, locally-owned garden center and offer prices that can't be competed with.

She's not asking for much, honestly, but some goddamn respect would be nice.

"Tough shit," Leia says to herself.

As far as pep talks go, however, this one is rather lacking.

Skywalker's Garden Center and Landscaping had been her mother's gift to her father at the time of their marriage, an open-palm offering from one immigrant to her refugee husband, a place that was as much sanctuary as it was a livelihood, here in this new, cold country.

Back then, it'd just been the small cove of a building, with questionable safety codes and nowhere near enough light. More money had been made selling lawn mower blades and now-banned brands of pesticides than plants -- weapons of war over instruments of peace, her father used to joke, poorly. The hoop houses for the greenhouse had been built later, at Padme's insistence.

Because of the light, Ani, she would say.

It became a capital letter subject in their marriage, the Light, and the legacy they passed down to their twin children had its shape punched through the middle of it.

Now she knows just how much of an oversight it had been on her part, letting her brother be the focus of that inheritance while she followed other pursuits.

It was just -- he'd been so suited to it. He does so well with --

Well, with everything alive, really, from the fungus overtaking the yellowing elm to the homeowner frantic about it, from the finicky orchids that die at the slightest provocation to the kid who just wants to color or climb something while his parents talk to Chewie at tedious length about what tree they want. Luke had cared about all of it, cared for all of it, and it seemed so natural on him. Of course Luke Skywalker is Skywalker's heir and owner, of course he is. Anyone could see that.

And now here she is instead.

Leadership, it turns out, comes as instinctively to Leia as unending compassion does to Luke, but it doesn't stop her from feeling like a fraud, somehow.

Like -- like the real Skywalker is going to show up one day and claim their business out from under her, like all she's doing right now is borrowing it from them.

"Stop," she says out loud to the quiet office -- well, the nearly-quiet office. Voices keep leaking through from the conference room below; Lando and Threepio, and somebody's even managed to drag Artoo into it, which only means everything Threepio says now has three more levels of indignation to it, "-- did you call me? That's entirely uncalled for, you two-wheeled bucket of bolts, how --" while Lando throws interference or encouragement as he sees fit.

Leia shakes herself off. Impractical thoughts. She has work to do.

There's an outstanding order with Coruscant Statuary that she needs to finalize, and if Kanjiklub dodges her claim about those goddamn impatiens one more time, she's going to sic Han on them. "Bitchy" and "bossy" are words often liberally thrown around to describe Leia herself, but nobody makes a scene the way her husband makes a scene. They'll pay up.

As she straightens up, her eyes are drawn, unbidden, to that specter of the Home Depot looming out the window.

Her son is less than three city blocks away, but the distance is unfathomable, insurmountable.

She's heard that NASA was trying to put men on Mars -- or at least, they were, before the government went bankrupt and is currently in the process of imploding unless somebody saves it, fast -- but that kind of distance is nothing, she thinks. If NASA could breach the divide between herself and Ben, those three city blocks, it would be a feat worthy of the history books. Home, for Ben, is right there, it hasn't moved, but home is a thousand years away, too.

Nobody leaves home unless …

How does the rest of it go?

If things keep going the way they are, someday, sooner or later, she'll have to sell -- she wouldn't like to, obviously, that's the last resort, but she knows better than to have no contingency plan for it -- and Skywalker's will become … something.

But until then, Leia will keep her mother's business going. She's got people wanting paychecks and plants wanting light and shelves wanting to be stocked, and as long as one person is willing to come in and work, she will be here.

She pulls her chair in and starts composing an e-mail to Artoo. He's just downstairs, she could pop her head through the door, but he'll appreciate having a written directive, too. She cc's Lando in while she's at it.

Go ahead, she says. Put mulch down to 4 for $10.

The Home Depot hadn't renewed the sale for the upcoming weekend, which means that people who missed it last weekend will be looking for it. Skywalker's will provide, and to sweeten the deal …

And here's another suggestion, while we're at it.

***

"Where do you think you'll go after this?" Finn asks her, just as they're both finishing up lunch.

Rey always brings her own, he's noticed: they're the same cardboard microwave-meal that J-Mart always advertises as 10-for-$10, and today, he managed to persuade her to let him bike to the taco truck down the street. It's set up at the very edge of the Home Depot parking lot, a technical no-man's-land that falls outside their property line, so the cooks don't have to pay any price for the privilege of using the space. Finn respects that on so many levels.

He watches her use the end of her tortilla to mop up the last remnants of juice from the corner of her take-away box.

"Go?" she echoes, frowning, and then, "heck," as juice drips down the heel of her hand.

Finn hands her a napkin.

It's a flawless, unfolding kind of May day, where there's something to appreciate no matter which way you turn your head; the sky is a fantastic, floodlit blue, and lumpy clusters of clouds huddle together in front of it like tourists gawking at a national landmark. Birds trill from every direction, the stuttering dee-dee-dee of a chickadee rises above one mournful cry for a willlll, willlllll, whoever Will is. The harmony of it is interspersed with the sound of laughter and tape loudly popping apart as a couple younglings crush down boxes for the compactor.

The azaleas are in bloom, spade-shaped petals leaving wine-colored debris all over the statuary courtyard. Someone's hauled the folding card tables out of the break room; their compact size is Finn's excuse for why he leaves his knee tucked up against Rey's. He's never been so aware of so many nerve endings all at once.

"Yeah," he says. "They hire seasonally, don't they? After the -- the war is over, so to speak, we all go our different ways."

Her frown deepens.

"We're not like Poe," he adds, and it sounds nonsensical even to his own ears, but Rey's eyes light with instant understanding: you can't imagine Skywalker's without Poe. There's job security for you.

A touch of nausea starts to tinge Rey's features, and he knows she's thinking the same thing: how miserable it's going to be, doing the whole thing over again.

The searching, the resume-padding, the constant phone-checking to make sure he hasn't missed a call, the interviews, trying to find something to do with her hair that doesn't look ridiculous, the both of them dressing up for professional consumption and then scowling at their mirrors for having the audacity to show them a person that doesn't look like them.

But Finn's not wrong, either -- it was right there when they signed the paperwork, temporary hire. Plants aren't a business that lasts forever.

She ducks her head, fiddling with the tab on her take-away container, and Finn leans back in his fold-out chair and closes his eyes so he doesn't have to see the grim expression on her face.

Then she says, "I'll go back to J-Mart, I suppose."

Finn's eyes pop open.

"BACK TO --"

And he stops himself with difficulty, throat working rapidly as he swallows his words back, because hadn't he just talked himself through this? People leave behind bad situations at their own pace, you can't hurry them along, nobody leaves home unless --

A minute twitch catches the corner of Rey's mouth, and a smile pulls loose like a cloud being tugged across a jewel-toned sky.

All breath leaves Finn at once.

"You --" he starts.

"Didn't you hear?" she goes, leaning forward. "The government broke its gridlock. All those stupid factions got their shit together, so there's money coming into public works again. The city's going to be hiring all its people back, soon." Her voice is so calm. "I could do construction, road crew. Garbageman."

Slowly, Finn starts to smile back.

"Yeah, hey, maybe the city needs two garbagemen," he says, and what was on Rey's face before couldn't have been a smile, because this is a smile, a real smile, all of Rey's teeth blooming at once and reaching for the light, and Finn fidgets and then holds still in front of it, the traveller stunned. Inside his chest, his heart roots in, and it grows, grows, grows.

***

"There you go, buddy, you're all set," Poe tells Bb8, and slams the last panel into place. He gives the Bobcat's right wheel a reassuring pat, and turns to Finn. "Thanks for helping."

"Sure, sure," says Finn, handing over the dishrag he'd been using to clean parts.

Poe folds it and sets it in his toolbin, tidier than he usually does. There's something Finn's been working himself up to say for ten minutes now, Poe can see it laddering its way up his throat, so he takes his time putting everything back.

When this yields nothing but Finn taking several sharp intakes in preparation for speech, only to vent it back through his nose, he tries, "Want to come check irrigation lines with me?"

"Sure, yeah, sure."

Bb8's engine ticks over in what Poe imagines to be a sympathetic way, and both Finn and Poe absently bump their fists against its side as they walk around it, heading into the greenhouse.

The forward momentum seems to do the trick, because they round the annuals tables and Finn's words unstick.

"When I worked at the Home Depot, they used to make fun all the time," he says carefully. "Said Skywalker's was a terrible, ass-backwards place to work -- just look at the turnover rate. How can you trust a company that can't hold onto its employees."

He stops, and it's not a question, but he's looking at Poe like it is.

"Falsely inflated," Poe comes up on the defensive. "Falsely inflated turnover rate. Everyone who works here starts out in one of two places: landscaping crew, or in annuals. It becomes its own screening process -- those who aren't suitable, or aren't suited, get weeded out when the season ends."

"So …"

Finn doesn't seem to know where he's taking that.

"So," says Poe, glancing over at him. "The people we keep after that point are the people we know are golden. You," he licks his lips, trying to sort his words out. "You get the measure of a person," he decides on. "When you put them in charge of the smallest, most helpless living things. You see their compassion. Or lack of."

They're quiet, then, for a long time. Poe stops once in every bay, and does an inspection, tightening washers here and there, but there's nothing wrong with the irrigation lines and he knows it.

Wind picks up the plastic tarps covering the hoop houses, snapping them like a towel. Everything smells like approaching rain; clouds are coming closer together, making patchwork spots of shade all the way down the greenhouse.

The sound, Poe knows, will be tremendous, like being inside a glass jar.

"And me?" Finn finally asks. It takes every last ounce of his courage, to stop and look Poe in the face. "What do you see when you look at me?"

Poe's eyes crinkle.

"Buddy," he says, without hesitation. "You've got so much compassion it overflows. There's so much of it, you've got enough for you and for everybody else, too. Just by being near you, the rest of us remember to be kinder."

He sees Finn breathe in, and breathe in more, and hold it, blinking fast like the light is too much. His teeth start to show, with growing confidence.

Poe smiles back.

Do something with this, will you? Maz had said to him at the beginning of the month, handing over the grow-light that irate customer had demanded a discount on. The handle was jacked, it turned out, unsellable -- the joke would have been on the customer, bringing up a Home Depot price comparison just to buy a defective grow-light -- and it wasn't until Jessika pulled him into her booth to show him somebody's secret stash of sickly plants that he put two and two together.

In the back of his mind, he hears Leia telling him, you can make decisions for this company without my permission, Poe, you've more than earned my respect, a hundred times over, except it's not a memory he brings out too often. He wants to keep it up on a high shelf somewhere, the kind of treasure you only take down to admire on holidays.

But he reaches for it now, and he says, "Hey, Finn, buddy, do you or Rey have a job lined up after this?"

And, slowly, Finn shakes his head, and he is smiling, smiling, smiling.

***

Leia Organa lives in a small house on a busy street, set far enough back from the road that the noise isn't quite so immediate. A gravel path connects front door to driveway, chunks of white rock mixed with fishbowl tourmaline that wink like bits of glass in the sun -- a stylistic choice her mother had been fond of in her own decorating, that Leia indulges out of … out of homesickness, maybe. Childhood nostalgia. Something.

The lawn is overrun with spent dandelion heads and the white flame-shaped clover blossoms, leaving chunks of grass to struggle valiantly up in between. A Dagobah willow dominates the view and shades the front windows, swollen large with sunlit year after sunlit year. In full bloom, its branches become so heavy they trail nearly to the ground. A tire swing hangs from the lowermost branch.

Her home's curb appeal is average, at best, Leia thinks with savage honesty.

Looking down the street, there are any number of houses that someone would pick as belonging to the owner of a landscaping company-slash-garden center, and she's pretty sure that if it wasn't for Poe, who makes a point of rounding up a crew every now and then to come out and mow and clean up the flower beds, without her having to ask, her lawn would be more of an embarrassment than it was worth.

In all her years doubling as a member of the military and as Breha Organa's oldest fledgling, Leia's learned almost everything there is to known about ornamentation and presentation, but in her own life, functional tends to win out.

This morning, however, when she steps out onto her front step, checking and double-checking to make sure the door locks behind her, it's not the weedy lawn or the unused tire swing or even the reassuring flashes of blue-green amid the gravel that catches her attention.

Instead, she stops and surveys her occupied driveway.

The invading eyesore is a squash-nosed blue-and-silver RV, a heap of junk that looks severely out of place on her manicured, sunny street. Morning condensation fogs its windshield. The nebulae painted on each side are exactly as she remembers, barely even faded, like someone's gone and lovingly touched them up sometime in the past decade. Even that stupid falcon is still there.

Fondness makes a wet, pulpy mess of her heart, entirely against her will.

"Damn," she mutters, but it's too late: memory conjures Han behind the steering wheel, Chewie sitting beside him in a seat that had more or less been bullied into fitting his gargantuan shape, and herself with her hand on Han's shoulder -- back when she'd just come home from tour and everybody tried to tell everyone else the war was over, like they knew anything about it, back when the Skywalker inheritance didn't have much to do with her and everything to do with her brother.

She could never persuade Han to get rid of it.

It's part of the family, princess, get used to it, he would tell her.

Bah! was always her reply, footprints so well worn in this argument she could walk them blindfolded.

When they fought, this is where he retreated, sleeping in the RV with the driver's side door propped open so he could blare his annoying leather-jacket rock in the direction of her house. Ben came outside sometimes to kick himself around on the tire swing and inform his father, loudly, that Mom said I can't talk to you.

And Han said, Okay.

And Ben would continue, but she didn't say anything about talking to the street and if you happened to overhear because you're in the way, that's not my fault.

And Han said, happier, Okay.

Slowly, Leia passes down the length of the millennium-edition RV, squeezing around it to get to her own car, and so she doesn't see the newspaper thrown up under the back tire.

***

Threepio is already running to meet her before the bell stops clanging against the door behind her. The store is darker than usual, buckets of silk florals lost to shadow, the single air conditioning unit still in standby, and the sight of Threepio moving jerkedly but determinedly toward her sends her suspicions racketing in every direction: his car and Artoo's tiny, custom-made SmartCar and Maz's Toyota are all already in the parking lot, and they almost never beat her here.

"General --" Threepio starts, but she's already holding out her hand for whatever it is he's got in his non-prosthetic grip.

"What is it?"

He looks at her face and hands it over.

It's the morning newspaper, and it takes one beat, then two, for the significance of this to register: the Hosnian Herald was one of those public works that blew to pieces when the government ran out of money. If this is today's paper, then …

And then her eyes register what she's seeing.

It's her store, in full color print. That's her storefront, Jessika's row of frothing hanging baskets and the logo Anakin Skywalker designed as a wedding gift for his wife. Those are her greenhouses, the neat lines of flowering annuals and quixotic displays of assorted product. It's not just a blurb, it's an article, whole inches of print dedicated to -- to --

"What …" she breathes out, astonished, and steps backwards, tilting the paper towards the light so she can read it.

The first part of the article covers the local history -- Padme and Anakin's torn-up roots, the connections to their home countries they didn't want to lose, the hope they planted for themselves and their children, who grew up to be local characters in their own right. Leia experiences a moment of vertigo to see herself in print, standing between Luke and Han and smiling indulgently for the photographer they'd sent for some long-ago event.

Then it moves on to praise Skywalker's commitment to the local economy: it's not the Skywalker way to do anything if it can't be done great, after all. For Earth Day, they brought in a local band to perform as part of the celebration -- Milly and the Mon Mothmas, album available on iTunes. And it had been Finn and Rey's suggestion that Leia ask the owners of the food truck Yavin if they wanted to park in the Skywalker's lot free of charge during the four busiest weekends of the year. And she's known for awhile that Maz's people do donation installations, but it's another thing to see it acknowledged in writing. Stacked together, it forms a startling portrait, one Leia hadn't even seen coming together.

And at the very end, there's a reminder:

This weekend only, Skywalker's Garden Center and Landscaping is offering not one, but two special deals: select mulch is 4 for $10, and 8" hibiscus at only $14.99 -- now that's a deal you can't find anywhere else in the city!

She reaches the end, and then goes back to the beginning, her eyes skipping from column to column.

Slowly, she walks into the break room-slash-office and asks, "Who's responsible for this?"

Nobody has to say it, though Threepio opens his mouth like he's going to.

It surfaces in front of her eyes, like the print's given way to one of those Magic-Eye images.

"Luke," she says, with certainty.

In his cubicle, Artoo mutters something, and Threepio begins nodding earnestly.

"He's right, ma'am, we're going to get an astonishing influx of guests from this. We need to prepare immediately."

"You think so?"

It's an effort to keep her voice mild; sarcasm rusts at the edges, peeling back and baring something raw and unpolished underneath.

She knows exactly what this kind of publicity is going to do. It's like when restaurants get a sudden surge of attention every time Guy Fieri's show comes up on rerun on the Food Network, and people are going to pay extra attention to this edition of the newspaper because it's the first one published since the government went into gridlock. There's fourteen pages explaining what happened, she's sure, and it's probably in exhausting detail, but after people have gotten depressed over that, here's the article on Skywalker's. Some things stood still in the center of chaos.

Oh, Luke, she thinks, battered by it.

She climbs the turret staircase, and closes her office door behind her. Around her, the day breaks, and breaks.

Oh, Luke, she thinks again.

There you go. Always reminding people what they love most.

***

In the plant care department, Rey flips on the rodeo lights and says good morning to the seedlings under the grow-lights.

She glances at the notes she's left herself on the desk -- call back this customer, call back that customer, confer with Artoo about low inventory, look up current ground temperatures in the neighboring counties so she can have them on hand, e-mail that guy she knows in Tattooine City about a replacement part for Bb8 that Poe's not going to admit he needs.

Somewhere in the store, one of the warehouse guys is blowing leaves down the main aisle; the roar banks back when he finally makes it out to the trees. The pilots are shouting morning greetings to each other, hauling in their water jugs in preparation for a long hothouse day. When she leans across the desk, she can just see one youngling hold onto another so she can fish her sock out of her shoe, her orange shirt tied in a knot to show off her waist.

Somewhere else, Finn's laugh booms out, unafraid of itself.

Rey smiles, and crouches down to pull the floor mats back into place.

They've got plans, her and him and Poe, to grab food after work today -- they couldn't decide on a place, and money was definitely an issue, but when isn't it? Poe's the only one of them with a car, so he's going to drive them through all the fast-food places along the interstate and they'll get one thing for everybody from each; a quarterpounder with cheese here, seven-layer burritos and churro bites here, a Sonic shake ("that's almost a dinner!" Poe protests, when they goggle at him,) and the point isn't the food, Rey knows that, the point is the drive, three orange shirts pulling through one drive-thru and trying to hide the food they just got from another drive-thru, with nowhere more urgent to be than with each other.

Thinking about it is like putting her hand against a hot car in summer; too bright, a little painful. It's like seeing fireworks when it's unexpected, like on a Wednesday in the middle of the month or somewhere in October, a gift that's not to be underestimated. She's delighted all over again every time she comes up against the thought: she has plans to hang out. With friends. After work.

The radio at her hip crackles.

It's Connix, warning them that the doors are unlocked. The store is open.

There's a note in her voice, daunted, and that's perfectly understandable. Rey saw the parking lot.

This is the first day, after.

She's already read the article -- a stack of newspapers towered on the superintendent's desk when she made it out of the elevator this morning, as gorgeous to look as a multi-tiered cake, and she'd eagerly grabbed one to read on the way to work. Only then she flipped it open and saw SKYWALKER'S leap out at her in big print, and her stomach dropped out like she'd missed a step in the dark.

This will be … this will be a day.

From behind her:

"Are you ready?"

Rey bangs her hip and her shoulder standing up as fast as she does, her heart almost strangling itself on her ribs in its attempt to leap straight from her chest.

There's a man standing there, has been standing there among her soil amenders and her smelly repellents and her weed killer, since -- since she doesn't know how long.

He's got a brown-and-grey beard, brown-and-grey hair, and brown-and-grey clothes, like something you need to pull down from a shelf and dust off before it can be displayed for guests, and it isn't until his eyes crinkle in the corner that she sees the general standing at attention inside the frame of his body, Leia in the shape of his face.

At the same time, she realizes she's standing in his spot.

Of course she's standing in his spot.

"Luke," she says, not a question.

Here is her supervisor, the department head who was supposed to train her, and it's only now that she's looking at him that she realizes she doesn't need him.

Well, that's not entirely true, there's a lot he could teach her, starting first with where they keep spare paper for the printer, but she doesn't need him the way she did when she first started and they asked her to cover a department she should probably have a degree to run.

This is the man people would travel two hours to see.

Luke Skywalker smiles at her.

"Ready?" he repeats.

Rey makes a noise deep in her throat that could mean anything and turns around, just as the first customers emerge, blinking, into the greenhouse with all of its light, and there's green everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.

-
fin