Chapter Text
She knows three things. She is small and scared and they are all she has here on this sun-scorched planet with its big sky and bigger horizons.
One, her name (Rey). Two, her age (six). Three – they’ll come back (they will).
They have to.
The first few days are the hardest. Rey is small and scared and this world is brimming over with the hungry eyes of the starving. She has a bruise on her arm from where strange hands kept her from running back to them, and a nick on her cheek where she wriggled free and fell on her face into the sand and grit. It’s stopped bleeding, and now it just aches.
It's the first day, and Rey’s on a speeder, pressed flat against the hot rattle of the engine. The stranger is a heavy weight behind her. There’s a long linen wrap around her face, but even with the protection the sand stings at her. Through the mottled orange of the oversized goggles that had been jammed over her head the sand leaping up around them looks almost like fire. It makes her uneasy, so she looks higher, to the jagged white trail of the ship that had taken them away. It’s breaking up, pulled this way and that by the wind. Rey watches it without blinking until it’s almost gone and her eyes hurt as much as her face.
They stop when the beige sky darkens to a brown sunset. The sun is a fat orange circle, bigger than what she’s used to, its image dancing in the heat haze. The speeder gurgles to a halt and even when the stranger cuts the engine it shudders and ticks and hisses. Rey closes her eyes and lets unfamiliar hands lift her away from it, and somewhere in there she falls asleep for real.
She opens her eyes to grey and brown. There’s metal over her head and grit beneath her cheek, but when she flexes her fingers she feels fabric beneath her. A bed. A shelter. She sits up and stares around, finding a patchwork world. The roof above her is a long panel of dark metal. It’s held up by poles that are braced together by netting and linked by long sheets. Daylight shines through them.
“Here.”
A bowl, chipped. It looks like it could have been an old helmet. There’s something grey and watery in it, and a hunk of bread. She grabs the plate and stuffs it into her mouth in huge pieces. Broth runs down her chin, and Rey wipes it with her hand.
The stranger watches her. She’s a tall, bony woman, with sand-blasted cheekbones and a rip in the lobe of her left ear. “Don’t waste any,” she says, her voice even but her eyes reproachful. “That’s all for today.”
The bowl is almost empty. Rey’s chin is damp and flecked with crumbs. She’s eaten meals this size just for breakfast before. She doesn’t say anything, but the woman must catch something in her face, because she huffs. A tired smile brightens her face for an instant before fading.
“Welcome to Jakku, kid.”
* * *
They wash their plates clean in the sand. Water isn’t for washing, out here. It’s her first lesson.
The sun is peaking and the heat is searing, so they go back under their shelter. The woman scrapes at the floor and then they lie together on the sand that had been kept cool beneath the top layer. It’s there, as they try to last through the hottest part of the day, that she notices the ticking of the roof.
“Solar panels,” the woman tells her, seeing her interest.
The panels run a water reclaimer, which the woman shows to her when the heat lessens a fraction. It’s a messy thing full of live wires and tape, but the woman is so careful with it that its worth here is obvious. Here, on Jakku, a planet with skies made beige by sand, where children can be given to strangers for safekeeping.
The water reclaimer spits out a fine dribble of warm water that she gulps down, though she slows when the woman gives her a sharp look, careful not to miss any of it like she had yesterday. She’ll piss here later, in the bucket with the hose that will take it up to be recycled and drunk again. In the now, they both drink what they need and then the woman fills two plastic cartons with it and leads her back outside. The wind is weaker today and a great panel of blue sky has opened up, the beige shrinking back a little. The woman doesn’t even glance at it but Rey can’t look away. It’s so big she feels like she could fall into it if she steps too high.
The woman lifts her up onto the speeder and then climbs on behind, and they’re off again. They skate over dunes that tower like mountains and down dry, cracked valleys that haven’t seen rain in a million years. There’s a shape in the distance that stands higher than even the tallest dune, and as they come closer and closer it resolves into an enormous grey wedge of metal that casts a pointed shadow out more than a kilometre over the sands. After so much nothing, it’s impossible to look away from. Tens of thousands of windows streak its great girth, and a cannon the size of a tower block juts up from the ruined prow.
They stop the speeder by the belly of the beast, and then they approach.
“Durasteel,” the woman tells her, when she touches it with a small hand. Then, “Watch,” as she pulls a screwdriver from a pouch on her belt and uses it to lever open an old airlock hatch. It clatters open, and the woman ducks through.
Rey stands paralysed. She could run. She could take that speeder – try to, at least – and make for the spaceport she’d been left at. She could sneak onto a ship, punch skywards, and then—
They would come back for her, and she wouldn’t be here.
She follows the woman into the dark.
* * *
The tunnel they’re walking down is rounded with ladder rungs above their heads from when the ship wasn’t sideways and half-ruined in the sand. There’s a rack with suit lockers where maintenance workers could have prepared for a spacewalk, but the suits are long gone, and so is most of the security wiring.
They pass through a secondary airlock and then the ship goes from stark functionality to some semblance of design. There are panels with sleek regular hollows that would once have been lights. The floor is still shiny beneath all the grime.
The woman leaves these nicer parts of the ship for more maintenance tunnels, and then starts using that screwdriver again. She opens up three access panels before she hits on one that hasn’t been tampered with, and she gestures the girl over to look. “Watch,” she says, and points out all the components piece-by-piece. She says them at Rey until she can parrot them back, and then she points at them again in order of value and begins to disassemble them.
They go through nineteen more panels – Rey keeps count – before the woman seems satisfied. Then they carry the parts back outside to the speeder and head back to the shelter. The sun is low again. The second night approaches.
It’s cold that night, enough for frost to glitter on the dunes, and Rey cries and hopes the woman won’t hear.
There’s no food the next morning. Rey’s belly gurgles, feels taut beneath her dirty clothes, but the woman says nothing. They go outside and get onto the speeder. They don’t talk.
This time they cross smaller dunes, and Rey could swear the sand here shifts and sighs as they cross it. The sun rises higher and higher, and they don’t take shelter. Rey’s skin prickles uncomfortably. She pulls the linen scarf higher around her face and tries to curl into the shadow of the speeder, but the sun is almost directly overhead and there is no relief to be had.
They climb another dune, and when they crest it the ground falls away. A crater some hundred kilometres across stretches before them, and while Rey is still staring the woman begins their descent. There’s a town down there – a collection of linen tents and old metal husks – and Rey stares at the growing buildings with greedy eyes. This is the spaceport. This is where they left her.
They get off the speeder just outside of town, and Rey runs ahead before the woman can stop her. There are people here – humans and not-humans, all of them with hollow cheeks and shadowed eyes. A mon calamari woman stands in the meagre shade of a repurposed cockpit. Her round fishlike eyes are dull and dry, and her barbels hang stiff and dead below the sad curve of her mouth.
She turns and stares and runs but she doesn’t see them. The woman finds her standing in the same shadow as the mon calamari, and she pats Rey on the head with a leathery palm before walking away.
Rey follows her.
* * *
The woman was Selpa Secunda, and she’s three years dead when Rey has her first blood. She’s thirteen, still living in their old shelter with its solar panel roof and its water reclaimer, and she stares at her ruined linens and doesn’t know what to do. She can’t wash them with water, but the scent of blood will carry in the strong desert winds and losing the water reclaimer itself would be a much more severe loss.
She takes the linens out on the speeder and drags them for miles through the sand. When she gets back she spends an hour working herself up to it before digging through Selpa’s private locker. It’s the first time she’s seen inside of it, and her hands tremble and hesitate over things like hair ties, sewing needles, shoes too big for Rey to wear.
There’s a box at the bottom of it, and she finds a rubbery cup inside. She’s seen it before, when Selpa was still alive to have bloods of her own. They used to take the speeder out some five kilometres away so that they could bury the blood safely in the sand.
She never saw Selpa wash the cup in sand, and it’s too clean. Still, it takes her long minutes to get herself to actually get over the taboo, and even then she only takes out tiny handfuls of water and washes the cup with her fingers, rinsing the dust and sand of three years of abandonment.
It takes her three tries to get it inside of her, and she cries because it is strange and frightening, and at the end of the day she takes the speeder out and empties it. When she puts it in again she doesn’t cry, just closes her eyes and thinks they will come back, they will come back, they will come back until it is done.
She only has her blood three more times before her shelter is found by a lucky scavenger, and then she loses the water reclaimer and the solar panel and her bed and Selpa’s locker and her blood stops for over a year as her body does its best just to keep her alive.
Then she finds the AT-AT and she starts again with all the knowledge that Selpa gave her and a lot more she’s learnt since, and nine years later she meets Finn and Poe and Han and Leia and—
* * *
She meets Poe for the first time already a Jedi. He’s a beautiful man with a sweetness to his smile and sleepy dark eyes, and she eyes him with immediate suspicion. Finn she gets – scared and fumbling and as new to it all as she is, but Poe…this is his world. It shows in the easiness of his smiles and the relaxed slump of his shoulders where Rey and Finn are both livewires, exposed and sparking at anything that comes too close.
Rey is a livewire, at least. Finn is still – asleep. That’s the nicest word for it. She kisses his forehead, lets her lips linger there. She can feel him, his presence in the Force. He’s a warm amber light that she could close her eyes and sink into.
“Oh, I—”
It’s Poe. He’s standing behind her. She can feel him in the Force too, a bright green bubble that’s rapidly deflating the longer she stays silent. She turns and smiles at him, an expression that feels strained and must look it too from the slight widening of his eyes. “He’s not hurting,” she tells him, and it sounds like Luce speaking through her.
“Probably all those painkillers,” says Poe, with a weak smile. “He’ll be loopy for weeks when he’s up.”
“I’ll bet,” she says, turning back to Finn.
Poe comes closer, until she can see him in her peripheral vision. “You wanna get a bite?”
“No.”
“It’s just that the nurse said you’ve been here since morning, and it’s past lunch—”
“No.”
He takes a step back. His Force presences brightens, if anything, and Rey looks up at him despite herself. “You can’t help him by punishing yourself,” he says, the most serious he’s been around her. “I’d know.”
“You barely even know him,” she says.
“You don’t know him either,” he shoots back. “But he’s a good guy. I know he is.”
Rey scrutinises him for a long moment, but Poe isn’t Force sensitive. He believes what he’s saying, though, and Rey looks back to Finn’s face, relaxed in sleep. “He is,” she agrees. She stands, and Poe looks at her in surprise. “Do you know if the cafeteria will have anything left?”
“Not anything good,” he says, sounding pleased. They turn from Finn and walk away, and Rey presses her nails into her palms until she stops wanting to glance back at him.
Rey thinks of Jakku and Selpa and huffs out a laugh. “Sounds fine by me.”
He leads, and she follows. This is his world, and she doesn’t question it when he takes her away from the cafeteria to the outside. She’s never going to say no to being out in a world this lush, even after months of the storm-swept isle that Luke had chosen for his penance.
He takes her to his X-Wing. It’s a lovely ship, sharp and swift, wings pocked with old scars and it guns scorched at the muzzle tips. Poe climbs up onto its wing, and she follows, and she sits on the wing with her legs dangling while he reaches into the cockpit. There’s a lockbox in there, she thinks, eyeing him with new curiosity as he comes back, turning with fruit in both hands. Actual fruit, with thick peel and juicy segments and a strong sweet scent. Rey takes it from him fast enough it’s almost a snatch, and misses his smile as she bites straight into it without peeling. The juice is strong enough it’s almost sour, and she slurps it down eagerly as Poe delicately takes off the peel in a long curling strip, like he’s unwrapping a gift.
Rey eats the pith and the peel, and then eats Poe’s as well when he offers it to her.
“Thank you,” she says, because while fruit might not mean as much on this lush green world as it did on Jakku, it came from his lockbox and that makes it valuable in its own right.
“You’re welcome,” he says. Then, a few minutes later, as they sit together with a new ease, he tips his head towards the open cockpit and there’s a question in his eyes that she can’t say no to.
They fly together and Rey thinks of Jakku and skies big enough to fall into, and she isn’t afraid.
* * *
Finn wakes, weeks later. He’s wobbly and dazed but he’s awake, and Rey and Poe sit together with thighs pressed warm against one another and watch him as he blinks up at them with bleary eyes.
“Hey,” says Poe, and his tone is tender and raw and Rey understands something she didn’t before, not even after weeks of daily flights and shared fruits. Oranges and plums and peaches. There are so many kinds of fruit, and Rey wants to learn them all.
“Hey,” mumbles Finn, and Poe smiles that beautiful smile, and Rey leans just a little bit harder against him.
“How do you feel?” she asks, and Finn makes a big deal of considering it before he lifts a shaky hand and wobbles it from side to side.
They all laugh, and it feels clean and new and hopeful, and a month later Rey kisses Poe and the Force sings around them. She turns and kisses Finn and the Force quakes and so does her belly as Poe slides his arm around her, his palm big and warm on her skin. Then Poe and Finn kiss, her boys, their mouths a slick push until Poe slides a palm up the back of Finn’s skull and guides him into something sweeter, better. Finn follows his deft little nips for a few moments, learning, and then he pushes forwards and Poe groans and dips back, and Rey catches him without touching him. They stop and part, mouths wet, waiting for her.
She goes.
* * *
She knows three things, now. One, her name (Rey Skywalker). Two, her age (twenty-one). Three, that you need to chase after the things you want, not wait for them to come to you (she's still so conflicted about Luke, she dreams of his face some night and wakes with wet cheeks).
There's a fourth thing, actually, and it's difficult to explain but it's there when Poe smiles and when Finn does that boyish grin and when they fly together, all three of them, her and Poe in the cockpit and Finn on the guns. It's magic, it's real. It's the Force.