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Daisy zips up the trail toward home, grateful for how much faster the speeder is when it's not laden with supplies. Today, the only things weighing it down are her, the human passed out over the handlebars, and the unresponsive and immobile battle droid lashed carefully but inelegantly to the storage area.
Up ahead, there's a flash of red light. There's really only one thing that can be, this time of the morning.
"Yeah, forever's not a good time to stay anywhere."
He leans back on the bench.
"I guess we've just gotta play it by ear. It'll probably help that I can sleep back on the ship."
"Yeah, I expect that'll be more comfortable all around. Should I leave the cot out anyway?"
"...yeah, that'd be good, if it doesn't crowd this place too much. Just in case."
"Yeah, this is pretty livable. I can always put it away for a few hours if I need to."
Hug?
"I should check on Daisy and Nine, and you're free for the afternoon? Please don't set anything on fire close to the house and if you're going to walk around in the heat make sure you have water with you."
"Sounds good to me. I promise I won't traumatize Jazz or anything while I'm gone. And I'll bring water."
Time to head off into the great unknown, and hopefully not get lost.
And she goes back to check on the droids. They're crowded into Daisy's room, and she can hear them talking quietly, about ownership and what Nine wants to do next, and she doesn't interrupt them. Instead she gets out the poetry and the spare reader, and digs the painting supplies out of storage.
Meanwhile, the desert is hot and scrubby and punctuated with frequent spires and mesas and the occasional arroyo or walking path.
He fills a backpack on his ship and walks out into the desert, just far enough that if he wasn't looking hard he wouldn't know which way to walk back.
Then he spends an hour or two lighting scrub on fire with his mind.
At first, he does it from a distance. Then he rips up a few dead plants and starts to practice lighting fires under his fingertips.
By the time he comes back, his hands are covered in burns of varying severity, and he has lost and replaced most of the water in his body via sweat and water bottles respectively.
He sits down in front of his ship and goes to work on his hands. Better to not take a shower with open blisters.
Dusk comes out while he's distracted, very quietly, and sits under the tree with a glass of water with berries floating in it.
He's too deep in concentration to even notice she's there.
The Jedi tried to teach him that the way to heal is to block out the pain and concentrate on the healing, but that doesn't make the slightest sense to him. How could you possibly separate them? How can you heal if you don't follow the pain, understand it and become it enough to unmake it?
Maybe that's why he's never been able to extend it past himself.
Blisters cover over and shining, red burns sink back into the skin at a remarkable pace.
It doesn't take very long at all for it to be finished. It's certainly faster than it's supposed to be.
When he looks up, flexing his fingers to make sure it's all done, there she is.
"...oh. Hey."
"You think?"
He is so pleased every time she compliments him, it's ridiculous.
"It's pretty useful. Also, I learned today that making things be on fire is way easier than making the things next to them not be on fire."
Oh. That must be scary as hell.
"...it really sucks that I can't do it for anyone else, then."
"I mean, there's not much inside a few lightyears that's actually dangerous to me. But it's interesting."
He actually feels the urge to protest, for a moment.
He could be dangerous. Not now, but someday.
There's absolutely no reason to say that aloud, though, no matter how true it is.
"Sometimes I wonder what else I could do with it."
Amusement intensifies. "Not much, not nothing, though you'll find I'm a pretty tough nut to crack. Anyway, I do power design, I could show you how it's done."
"...Power design?"
Oh, if that's what he thinks it is, that is a whole universe of possibilities.
"How to make the Force do stuff, yup. Like this - " she holds up her hand, and it's gloved in lightning, arcing and sparking but never getting more than half an inch from the skin. While he watches, it darkens to a deep navy blue, then shifts to purple, then orange, then red, and back to the starting yellow-white.
"Yup."
"Jedi aren't supposed to be able to do lightning, but I don't think it'd be impossible to hold onto one while you learned the other."
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