Chapter Text
“Don’t be dumb. Come have a beer! You have time for that.”
Rose stood there resolute, hands on hips, giving her a glare that was more amusement than irritation. Rey looked up from her seat, squinting through protective eye wear that created a kind of shadowbox effect over the top half of her face. Her brown hair hung in limp strands from the bun hastily secured on top of her head, and she was certain that by now her hands were covered in oxide smudges. The tattered laminate counter-turned-makeshift-workbench in front of her was covered in tools, the most prominent being a ring bender, rubber mallet, and file. She knew she was lucky that Rose didn’t complain about the damningly inconvenient set-up in the apartment they shared.
In such a cramped space, there really was no other place to shape and bend and create the jewelry she sold. Rey could not, for instance, just skip off to the metals shop on a whim. She didn’t have a car and went everywhere in town on foot most of the time; the dusty, scuffed Docs she usually wore were evidence of that. Going to campus wasn’t always a palatable option, and this was one such moment. The cool of October had set in. The trees were turning, then falling completely, leaving the bare bones of trees scaling across the sky like bare arms.
Even though it was often sunny during the day, the nights were starting to develop a chill that crept under layers straight to skin. Combined with uneven sidewalks that lined the side streets of town, a cold fall onto hard pavement became an even greater likelihood. Rey didn’t consider herself a graceful creature; the scars and bruises all over her knees were proof of that. It was almost as if she’d been cursed with an adversarial relationship with physics. What she did not need was a busted knee, or various other scrapes. Even if she wanted to – and even though Rey loved the rust and mustard-smelling dusk of autumn - walking alone at night was not pragmatic. She could just show up to the metal studio during waking hours like everyone else in the morning.
Instead, she was working in the middle of her apartment on the small island counter that separated the living room from the kitchen. A set of cupboards were built in just overhead to provide further separation between the two “rooms,” so she often smacked the ever-living shit out of her forehead when she wasn’t being careful. The complex she and Rose lived in was mid-century, designed to mirror Spanish colonial revival architecture. It had been advertised online as “vintage,” but no one honest would call it charming. More like diseased and crumbling at the edges.
And then there was the landlord. Christ, what an oily specimen of human horse flesh. Rey and Rose immediately knew what kind of a person they were dealing with when he told them to call him “Uncle Plutt.” The first time they’d met him was in his dark, musty little office space in order to sign their lease. It was hard not to notice the layers of dust on the old fax machine, the old Coors calendar hanging from the wood-paneled wall that apparently hadn’t been switched out since 2010, as well as the Venetian shades, half broken and drawn so only a sickly amount of light could get in from the street.
His small watery eyes were vacant and wandering; his face went slack when Rey’d asked him about their move-in date and deposit. Plutt – and most of her interactions with Plutt - left her feeling cold in a way she couldn’t describe. Every encounter stayed in the pit of her stomach for hours after it had ended, and there was nothing that could ruin her day like a run-in with the strange, disheveled little lump of a man. These days, he liked to show up at their place without warning to “change out air filters” while only one of them was home.
He’d skulk around their flimsy wooden door at all hours, leering a little too long when either one of them happen to be in view, whether they were climbing up the old black iron stairsteps to the second floor or taking their laundry down to the machines. It wasn’t just the threat of Plutt that kept her and Rose on edge all the time – the apartment itself was old and crumbling and probably had black mold hiding in the walls. They needed to leave. And so instead of having beer with her friends, here she was, and here she’d stay.
“Roooossseee, I gotta keep working on these. You want to get out of here, right? Maybe before we get told we have to sign another lease with Plutt or get kicked out?”
Rey asked the question with a smirk, waving her hand around at the room before setting it back down near the rubber mallet. Rose huffed, sending a stream of air directly into her thin curtain of black bangs.
“Might be a good thing. I mean, we could just live with Kay.”
Rey rolled her eyes.
“She has a studio, and that’s not enough room for the three of us. If you want our future deposit to exist, we’re going to need my Etsy sales. And the craft show sales. And the art fair sales…”
Rose sighed in protest while rolling her eyes, bobbing her head slightly.
“I took on extra hours at the store. You don’t have to keep pumping out merchandise like your life depends on it. And jewelry…people are always going to buy jewelry, Rey. Especially this awesomeness…”
Rose gingerly swooped forward, grabbing for a nearly-finished spoon ring, only to have Rey swat her hand away. That led to an indignant noise from the back of her friend’s throat. Rose had been eyeing the spoon rings she’d been making for months, never suspecting that her girlfriend had already put money toward “just the right one.” Kay had plead Rey for secrecy, making her promise to keep it quiet.
There’d been a sacred pinky swear and everything.
“Boo! You whore,” she retorted, quoting their favorite lazy day movie with a half-grin.
More finger shaking. More scolding. Rey snickered good naturedly. This was their dynamic, after all; it would be a cold day in hell before she’d stop bossing Rey around, and Rey loved it. Rose was good at acting like a protective older sister, and it made her feel wanted. Precious enough for someone to boss her around. The company, the caring – it was all so much healthier than the weak fluorescent light that blinked above them, and it made their cheap little hovel a home. It made things bearable.
“What, you think that spending your twenties like this is healthy? When was the last time you went out for more than an hour? When was the last time that you dated someone? I can’t even remember the last time you got laid!”
“That’s…a weird thing for you to remember, Ro.”
“You know what I mean. Listen, your boots are right by the door. Take off the weird goggles, go run a brush through your hair and…come…on!”
“Tomorrow.”
There was a high-pitched shriek of defeat.
“Fine! Dry up like a weird misanthropic art prune. I don’t care!”
“Yes, you do.”
“Goodbye, weirdo.”
“Night, babe. Be careful.”
At half-past eleven, Rey’s eyes started to burn. It had been three hours, and she’d finished two rings. The process itself wasn’t hard, but it took patience to get right. The ring bender had been a birthday present from her aunt and uncle; there’d been a horrible beat of guilt that hit her chest when she’d received the heavy box on her doorstep because she knew her little family never had ninety dollars just laying around.
To be fair, it was because of them she was here in the first place. The love of metal started early in Chewy’s shop. The smell of it when she was young – oil, welding fumes, and inorganic sparks igniting on ozone – it was comforting. Rwookrrorro Garage kept her clothed and fed as a kid; the business had been a dream for Chewy and Auntie Maz when they were young, and they’d sunk every spare dollar and second into the business. Money was tight like taut skin over the top of a new drum, but they’d given their little niece a good life.
Good, if not unorthodox.
There had been a playpen in the garage office that she’d spent a good chunk of her early life in, and Rey’d cut her teeth in that same place, sucking on clean, icy rags Maz left for her in the shop’s freezer. She’d had birthday parties there, and instead of hearing bedtime stories about princesses and big bad wolves, Rey grew up with Uncle Chewy tucking her into bed every night while he told her of motors and axels and mufflers he’d worked on all day. Worn-out spark plugs and cracked engine blocks – those were the villains the tiny slip of a girl with thick brown hair and golden eyes heard about.
By the time she was nine, she’d learned how to spot and deal with left-handed threads.
When she was eleven, she learned how to change a tire, although at that point, she still needed help with the lug nuts and jack.
There was a nice routine to her days and waking hours; she sprang up in the morning at seven, went to school around eight, went to the shop afterwards to do her homework, and then went back home with Maz at around five or six for supper. Sometimes her uncle left for the day with them, sometimes not.
It was a small, happy life that was nicely crammed at the edges.
But it couldn’t be Rey’s entire existence forever.
On the eve of her seventeenth birthday, Rey began applying to colleges and by the time she graduated, she’d been accepted to three different programs. It just so happened that the smallest school – hours away from home - offered her the best scholarship and the cheapest tuition rates.
So that was that.
She trundled west to a small college town that was only three hours away from the Colorado border. Rey found herself enrolled as an art student with plans to specialize in sculpture and metals at Jakku State University because she, like her uncle, was addicted to working with her hands but knew in her bones that she’d have to become a craftsperson in her own right.
Wheel alignments were fine, but the technical processes of bending metal and forming something new – making wonders and adornments that weren’t specifically utilitarian – that was enough to satisfy a place in herself that hadn’t gotten much breathing room back home.
Her family’s generosity – their belief in her - had mattered more than anything in the world. A bender (the price of which she suspected caused her aunt and uncle to do without a few of the small luxuries they did enjoy) usually paid for itself thrice over, and in this case it had - almost immediately. To hasten her exodus from the dreaded apartment, Rey started collecting various metal scraps and abandon sets of dinnerware. She practiced by making rings for friends and got a steady stream of advice from the lavender-haired metals professor in her department, Amilyn. After a few false starts, Rey started to see her skills improving. It was an exercise in faith to create an online shop, but she’d done it. “Aluminum Falcon: Jewelry and Collectables” came into being, and she’d managed to build a nice little nest egg.
Her scholarship only covered so much, after all. She was working part time in the art department’s admin office, but it barely covered the bills. Rey’s job mostly entailed filing work and answering phones, but depending on the number of grumpy students, tired professors, and errands across campus, it wore her out. On any given day, she’d bounce between delivering messages to Dr. Akbar in the ceramics studio, cleaning rollers near the printing press, and bounding down the hill just west of the art building to the glass studio with a delivery of cane in various, twinkling colors. After all of that and her class work…well, she didn’t have any trouble sleeping hard at night.
Rey’s side gig required the skill of scavenging around the small college town of Jakku for material she could use, which was strenuous. Sometimes her friends found bits and bobs to gift her with and it seemed to make them feel good – to help her. If she was honest, it was nice to have a close found family despite her homesickness for her aunt and uncle. In fact, Kay often brought Rey weird metal scraps to see if she could make it into something worth selling; it was a game they’d had going since she’d started selling stuff online. The final straw for Rose had been when her girlfriend brought Rey part of a rusted can.
“Stop trying to give her tetanus,” Rose roared; Rey had just giggled while Kay grinned and good naturedly rolled her eyes upwards.
There were various unused pieces of copper piping, worn out keys, and – yes – even silver utensils. She was also always eager to scope out estate sales in the area, convincing Rose to drive her out to farm auctions early on Saturday mornings.
The only shitty part of it all – the only downside – was that her shop’s selection either dwindled or thrived depending on pure luck…so when she wandered into the town’s only second-hand store and found half a dozen mismatched spoons, she jumped at the chance to restock her wares. For the low, low price of eight fifty, she could make at least seventy bucks. It was absolutely worth it; the fiduciary turn-around would be great and it would add substantially to her “let’s get the hell out of the creepy apartment” fund.
Even if Rey did have to give up the crumpled bills in her front overall pocked that she’d been saving for her customary Diet Coke and Hostess fix from the vending machines outside the metals studio, it would pay off. It had to. That’s why she was working urgently; getting her merchandise restocked was the hit of dopamine Rey needed to feel like she was…getting somewhere and doing something worthwhile for herself. They could be up on her site day after tomorrow, easy.
Rey’s hands shook a little as she put down the ring she was working on, and she took a deep breath before heading over to the sink and refilling a faded plastic cup with water. She didn’t want to drink any more coffee, even if it would give her the energy to keep going. Sleep was important too, and the next day promised to be stacked full of gallery workers needing keys, students checking out lockers, shouting matches between the printmaking professor and his rival the photography instructor…and she had studio time with Professor Amilyn in the morning.
Their current projects were focused on engraving, so in order to get a good grade, she’d have to work within the parameters of the latest assignment. It was detailed stuff, and there was little distance between the successful sweep of a spit stick or the disastrous results of an unsteady grip. That meant focus or fail. And that meant she’d just have to finish her rings another evening. She sighed heavily and wandered over to the other side of the living room. Airflow in the apartment wasn’t great, which made working for long periods of time in the kitchen uncomfortably stuffy. It set her on an edge that she felt – even though her aching brain and screaming fingers were her more immediate physical issues.
With a halfhearted push, Rey slid open the dual glass-and-screen panel, then sagged against the doorframe, sighing into darkness studded with streetlights from across the small, enclosed yard below.
The base of audible música norteña from one of the other apartments in the complex lulled her, and she swore that the vibrations reached her skin. That was probably just exhaustion hijacking the senses she couldn’t quite rely on at this moment. Rey closed her eyes, trying to will herself back into the apartment, but faded shapes of rings outlined by the red impressions of bad lighting bounced behind her lids, and she simply stood there – tired, breathing, and leaning.
To be fair, she didn’t hear the wing beats at first because of the resounding 2/4 signature in her ears…but soon she realized that something percussive was out of time with the music and getting closer. Her eyes shot open, and two feet away from her face was a black…thing?
Bug?
Impossible to be a bug that big.
Maybe.
Two reflective, shining animal eyes bore down on
her, and she let out an undignified shout, backing her way inside without losing sight of…of whatever this was. Her mind quickly filled in the blank with the word “bat,” but Rey had already dodged behind her workspace, crouching down, head level with the counter.
What if it followed her? Was it trying to hurt her? Did she get close to its nest or something? Did bats have nests?
She momentarily cursed herself for not paying more attention to Mutual of Omaha’s nature documentaries before mentally snapping back to the present.
Before she could stop herself, and in a fit of weird evolutionary self-preservation, she hurled an unfinished ring in the winged beastie’s general direction before dropping back behind the countertop. Rey shut her eyes, bracing and waiting for the flapping of small wings to dissipate back into the night. Instead, she heard a muffled “thud.”
Rey’s stomach dropped, and she slowly raised her head just above the counter’s surface, bracing her shaking hands on the edge. From her refuge, she could barely make out the balcony and a small dark crumpled figure.
“Oh…oh God,” Rey muttered to herself, hands balling into fists. She hadn’t meant to hurt the…thing. Hell, she wasn’t even good at killing spiders because, even though they were creepy, they were living and sharing the earth. It never seemed right to kill something just because you didn’t like the way it looked.
For what seemed like hours, Rey sat behind the counter, trying to decide what to do. Finally, she reemerged and crept back out into the night air. Music still blared from beyond her, and it seemed too loud now. She finally focused on the dark little splotch near the balcony railing. Maybe it was because it was late, or because she was stressed. Maybe she was just too tired to think clearly, but Rey felt the prick of tears behind her eyelids as her chest got a heavy. It hadn’t been trying to hurt her. Bats ate bugs, didn’t they? It had probably just gotten confused and flown haphazardly toward her without meaning to.
Suddenly, the small body twitched, and a single leathery wing shook itself, then the whole body reanimated. It made a small noise, and if she didn’t know better, she’d think it’s little pinched face looked alarmed. It’s face which, to her horror, now had a sweltering mark from where her unfinished ring had hit its target. Rey was not, strictly speaking, used to aiming and hitting anything. She was not athletic in a classic sense, although she enjoyed the occasional run or hike.
The last time she’d tried to play a sport had been in high school gym class, and it hadn’t gone well. She worried the top of a chipped front tooth with the memory.
People often asked about it – wanted to know about the little divot in her top left incisor.
Rey just told everyone she’d gotten into a bar fight.
No one believed her.
For its part, the bat didn’t seem capable of much movement, and Rey made a noise in the back of her throat that turned into a small, injured sound.
“Oh, buddy,” she groaned. “I’m so sorry.”
Her mind spun. She couldn’t just leave the poor thing outside, could she? There might be predators that would eat a bat, even if she and it were two stories up. Could an owl scoop up a bat with its talons and eat it for dinner? Were there owls in this part of the country? Well, if there were bats, there were probably owls. Clearly, she needed to pay more attention to basic zoology in the future. Maybe even pick up a subscription to National Geographic. Rey took a deep breath and turned resolutely back into her apartment.
“Think, think, think,” Rey repeated softly.
She had to try and save the little animal’s life.
This was her fault, after all.
She didn’t know anything about bats, but maybe someone in the biology department could help.
There might be a vet in town that worked on exotic pets and would take on a charity case. God knows she didn’t have the money to foot a bill for random nocturnal creatures.
Rey bounded off to her room, then frantically searched for the shoebox she kept Kay’s scraps in.
Relief flooded her as she unceremoniously emptied its contents onto one of the emptier shelves of her bookcase. This would work for now. It was just temporary, after all. Running with the empty box to the kitchen, Rey took a moment to line the bottom of the box with paper towels, then she poked a hole in the box top with a red-handled pair of kitchen scissors. The injured bat would probably be ok in the box until morning, but there was just one more problem; how was she going to get the little animal from the floor to its temporary shelter?
She glanced ruefully at the flapping, injured maybe-a-rodent on her balcony and sighed. After a moment, Rey flung open one of the drawers next to the sink and retrieved a black plastic spatula.
“This is going to be really embarrassing for both of us,” she muttered.
The bat didn’t resist being spatula’d up and placed gently into the box. That surprised Rey, but she figured that it was probably in shock. Once the ordeal was over, she gently placed the lid on top, and brought box and bat into her apartment. Treating the emergency beastie shelter as if it were a breakable thing, she placed the cardboard rectangle gingerly on the countertop next to her ring bender, pausing only to pick up her phone with a heavy sigh. As she dialed Rose's number she heard a slight fluttering, then silence.