Chapter Text
The storm came suddenly, as it often did in the deep desert. It howled against the viewport of the tipped Imperial freighter, never to lift into flight again.
There was an art to it all really. Turning an abandoned ship into a home. Making a living scrapping. There, a blanket roll tucked where seats once lay. There, a small lap table crafted by lopping the top off the copilot seat with a lightsaber. There, the marks on the wall from solo training in a tight space when the sandstorm lasted days, not hours. It passed the time.
Finn hadn't understood. Would never understand. After the war, after the wedding and riding space horses or what-have-you, he needed the bustle of city life, the sounds of Coruscant alive and flourishing. Mainly though, he just needed a job and a way to corral those orphans they had adopted together after the war.
It was rather sweet really. His wife working as an engineer while he worked a daytime care service for others’ children in their home and taught their children himself. After the life Rose lived, she didn't have much trust in any public forum of education until their later adult years when children were then better equipped to know their own minds. She'd seen countless bright eyes dim under organized schooling's mental reconditioning. And Finn was more than happy to make her dream a reality while Rose continued doing the work she loved. But sometime in the last five years, he’d also stopped. The visiting. But then, so had Rey.
Rey sighed, ending her meditation and rising.
Her hair, once divided into a signature style that had overtaken the young landscape of a new republic, now hung short, clipped to her shoulder on one side and buzzed to the quick on its mirror. She had never wanted a signature look, but like the Leia hair styles of her youth, it had caught on regardless of wishes and fishes.
Fifteen years had passed.
Fifteen. Years.
And Rey was alone. By choice.
But alone.
When her journey began, she was so full of hope. So naive. And when it ended, she hoped she could bury the truth of who she was. What she was.
But the truth followed her like a weight, pressing from all sides.
Palpatine. Palpatine. Palpatine.
Her heartbeat dinging to the sound of her guilt and her shame.
She should have never claimed the name of Skywalker, but claimed it she had regardless. The line was lost, and she thought herself worthy of its mantle.
It was laughable really. Despicable.
And when the truth revealed itself, as oft it did once the ashes settled, she fled. She fled to the planet she never called home, burdened with the poison of truths she could never unexpose. And she sank her past into the sands that held every tear of her childhood sorrows.
She returned to Jakku.
She returned, and let the galaxy sort itself without her.
Time moved strangely in the desert, and as the years wore on, she came to find a sense of solace in the knowable routine of it all. The pit where the hum of Ben's consciousness once stretched across parsecs and his emotions caught fire and played with her own hung limply. Empty. Like the once lush planet she found herself on, her soul stretched dry, choked with its own lack, as she struggled with its scraps.
She rose and sat crossed legged at her makeshift floor table. A few ionas of water and the polystarch ration expanded into her afternoon's meal. For all the limited moisture wealth she had farmed and brought with her from Tatooine, without the freight's water recycle and filtration system, she would have run dry years ago.
At one point, she had tried creating her own in-house miniature vaporator, but that pursuit had been a dead end without a usable droid and access to necessary parts. Having a standard moisture farm sized vaporator had proven ill-advised on a planet whose life sustaining necessities were controlled almost entirely by a singular entity. Unkar Plutt didn't take too kindly to competition.
Nor Jedis as luck would have it, which led Rey to create her own trade routes with some old friends in the more remote parts of the planet where she could live out her solitude without judgement. Wookies made for loyal and understanding friends. Chewie had his own small trade fleet, finally settling into a less hands-on role in the business. Though he still ran one trade route, a highly guarded single stop route with an old friend on Jakku.
With food done and meditation ended, Rey dropped into the routine of training as the winds continued to howl across the sands.
.........
Tucked in the tipped world of a firmly buried destroyer, Rey was at one with the rope she dangled from. Finding the ship had taken a mixture of skill and luck, but mostly it took Rey getting stuck in a patch of sinking sands and forcing herself into a nearly comatose Force induced state until her body arrived at the source of the surface breech--a single pane of busted transparisteel.
She now used the trap that had firmly tried to kill her as her main source of food, supplies, and trading material.
This particular destroyer was different from other ships she had scavenged. Before she removed them in the early years of finding the ship, bodies had littered the main thoroughfares in such a happenstance way that made Rey believe the arrogant ship admiral hadn't come to terms with the vessel's fallibility before its descent. The vessel had fallen quickly and unforgivably with all escape pods, save one, intact and undisturbed.
Wrapped in a moisture retaining outfit that had taken a full year of scrapping the largest untouched parts she could find and Force pull to the surface without collapsing the structure’s state of equilibrium, Rey climbed her way to the temporarily covered now widened viewport that had become the entrance of her explorations. The outfit creaked as she pulled herself to standing in the chamber she had crafted herself with scrapped metal so the events of that first dive through sand into the destroyer's abyss would never be repeated.
Today's haul was small but substantial. It had taken her nearly half the long daylight hours just determining how to remove the part in the first place, and the rest had been spent in a strange dance of the physical and the Force to make removal possible.
Sometimes it concerned her how long it took for her to not just believe the Force existed but to recognize that she had in fact been using it all along in her determination to out-scrap every scavenger on the planet as a teen and young adult. Not that she ever had much to show for her efforts.
She returned to the hovel upon which she laid her head as the dueling moons rose to prominence with the sun's setting. An outdated X-wing Starfighter stood like a sentinel perched at the structure's side.
It was Commander Poe’s.
Rey resigned herself to the feigned concern and overt manipulative attempts to make her return to the Core and end her self imposed exile. It wasn't all feigned she knew, but it was hard sometimes to separate the Poe she knew from the one that existed today.
“Commander,” Rey said by way of greeting as she set her haul down and entered the cockpit.
Poe sat comfortably in the pilot seat, head back, eyes closed, arms crossed. He looked firmly at ease, while BB-8 nervously twitched at her entrance, unsure where to go.
Rey crouched down from where she stood. “Oh hello, BB-8. I've missed you. Where's D-O? Aren't they usually with you?” BB-8 whirled, wheeling forward and back in the process. “Oh, not this time? No, I understand. I'm still so glad you came.” Poe cleared his throat.
“Well. I see it’s ‘Commander’ now.” Poe’s eyes were open, searching as he stood and leaned against the backrest, taking in the less than neat state of her dress and jaggedly cut hair now exposed from the helmet she held at her side. Rey stood, a more passive expression overtaking the small smile she had given for the droid’s benefit. She shifted minutely under the scrutiny, waiting. “Quite the friend you are, Rey. I thought I’d earned at least a hello as well. Couldn’t have even bothered with sending a message through subspace transceiver or anything like it. Haven’t so much as talked to me in nearly seven years now. I kept sending messages through Chewie for years, with no reply and nothin’ outta him. Like I hadn’t fought for you. Tried to make them see. Explained when no one would listen nor defend, not even you!” Rey flinched, fingernails digging tightly into her balled fists at her side and looked away, hair hanging like drapes, closing off her expression.
Poe sighed, fingers brushing through his unruly locks. He looked exhausted. Like the work to rebuild had taken more than just his years. Quieter, calmer, he began again, “Look, I’m not here to have that conversation again. I know your thoughts, and while I disagree strongly, I’m not here to fight. I apologize. See, I can apologize. Still got it. Crikk, I’m going about this all wrong.”
Rey just stared, breathing calming breaths before walking slowly around the living space as she gathered supplies. “Why don’t you sit down? I can make us a little jeru tea, and we can start over. It’s been a long day. I’m tired, if I were being honest.”
Poe agreed and sat crossed legged at the table as she efficiently made just enough tea to fill two glasses. Slowly sipping from the small cup, he began again. “The Kaminoans, do you remember them?”
Unsure how to respond, she shook her head, working to recall the species.
“Yeah, not many do. A bit of a reclusive species, especially after what went down with all those clones they made.”
“Wait, Kaminoans, like from Kamino? During the Clone Wars? I thought they had gone extinct decades ago.”
“Well that Sith cult learned to clone Palpatine from someone. Apparently, there were some Kaminoans involved. Turns out they are still around. Found this out a couple months ago. There’s a few of them apparently that aren’t quite dead as a dicario. Well not yet that is. Their reproductive system is a bit wack with that planet of theirs essentially worthless now. That’s a whole ‘nother matter though. Anyway, they sent two messengers to the Galactic Alliance. Caused quite a stir.”
Rey had set to clearing the table while he spoke, cleaning the cups and nodding like a functioning adult human. She put them away as she spoke, “Did they now? And what has that got to do with me?”
Poe’s toe tapped lightly against his boot sole as BB-8 shifted slightly back and forth at his side. Now we come to the root of it all. Poe wouldn’t be here for just any reason. The Alliance, for all the good it had accomplished, for all the rot it had expunged, was still relatively new. Untested. Untrusted too really. Poe hadn’t left the seat of power in ten years, but he came for a simple chat with a hermit who was better suited for dunes and avoiding gnaw-jaws than putting the galaxy back together. She could hardly keep herself together as it was.
The stench of the makeshift cabin’s recycled air centered Rey’s swirling thoughts. In, out. In, out. And under it all, a feeling. A whispering Force. A voice beckoning her to embrace the change that was to come.