Chapter Text
She's somewhere deep in the Wastelands, sweat-soaked and tired and sandy, when she feels it. A presence. Something strong and spreading and too-bright like Jakku's sun, and Rey nearly falls from the support strut she's resting on as she startles. The Force nudges her back into balance, but she draws her own presence in, curling it up tight inside of her-- she doesn't know this presence. And nothing ever happens on Jakku, not really, and this is different, and that means she needs to be careful.
“Grandpa, if you're around...” she says to the empty air, before crawling the rest of the way across the chasm beneath her to the hallway ahead. The Star Destroyer has been gutted by wildlife and all the scavengers who came before her, but she's scoped this one out before. Learned how to hack into the Imperial circuits, opening up previously blocked rooms and corridors. If she's lucky, this hall will lead her right to the control room.
The ghost of her grandfather doesn't answer, which is-- well, she's used to it. He has to leave from time to time. She understands. But she doesn't know what that presence is, and it just keeps spreading the longer she works in tense, uncomfortable silence-- her leg still aches and throbs from an injury sustained a couple months back, and her attention is split between finding what parts are worth taking and hiding her mind, and though she's inside, in the shade, the ships in the Graveyard are like ovens in the heat. She's baking slowly.
The presence spreads and spreads, like it's looking for something. Rey thinks about what her grandfather has told her of her family, her cousin, and doesn't dare nudge back with a presence of her own, approach it to see what it wants.
She finds enough scrap to last her for a few days-- parts in good condition, circuit boards, paneling. She caves, breaking routine to sit on the frontal viewport in the control room to drink the last of her water, the drop beneath her to the sands below dizzying (the Destroyer crashed on its side, decades ago, and she's made her way to the top of it with the floor and ceiling acting as walls).
She leaves the way she came, the heat of the sun little better than the heat of the ship behind her. She piles her scrap into the side of her speeder, clambers into the pilot's seat with a grunt, and makes her way to Nema Outpost.
The presence is stronger here. Nearly overwhelming in its proximity. But she needs water, needs food. Plutt closes shop after a certain time of day.
Rey ducks underneath the canvas canopy to begin scouring the grit and sand caked into her prizes; the shade does little to shield from the searing wind or the heat, much as the shade of the Destroyers themselves. Her lips are cracked and dry. She's fallen behind since her injury and she doesn't have any water stored away; she aches. The next time her grandfather tells her to steal a ship and get off this planet, she's going to listen to him, she really will.
Speaking of her grandfather, he hasn't shown up yet. The presence is growing in ebbs and flows. Rey keeps her head down and works.
“--looking for word of a couple. Sey and Bela.” It's a man's voice, nearby. The presence is so strong that it wants to blind her, making the edges of her vision go fuzzy simply by her sheer proximity to it, making the hairs on her arms stand up straight even though she isn't cold at all, making something go tense and alert in the back of her mind.
“Can't give you information if you don't pay.” The rasp of a trader. Ytal; she recognizes their accent. Greedy bastard.
“Oh, kriff off,” says another. Blyka. Rey traded a square meter of plating to her for a pair of shoes. “You've been 'round less than a decade, no way in hell you'd've met those two. C'mere, offworlder. Information, for a price-- reasonable price.”
The presence flutters, reaching out, out, out-- Rey keeps her head down, careful not to scratch up the circuitry as she works to remove all the grit caked into it. It needs to work for her to trade it in.
“What sort of 'reasonable' price?” asks a woman. Rey frowns. The accent is like her grandmother's. High class. This is Jakku; high class means you have a house of your own, nothing more.
“I'd like that fancy thing at your waist there, not that you'd ever hand it over.” Blyka cackles. “I'll take the blaster, instead, we can call it even.”
A pause, presumably in which either the man or the woman hands over their blaster and Rey panics. The presence doesn't notice, but it's only a matter of time. No one has blasters on Jakku, and the two are either very desperate or very stupid to just hand one over-- or perhaps they simply have blasters in abundance. And the fancy thing-- well-- Rey knows her grandfather's stories by heart. It makes sense that the presence would also have a lightsaber on hand.
If she runs, they'll notice. And she needs water.
“Sey and Bela,” the man prompts when the silence stretches on for too long.
Blyka tuts. “Dead.”
The presence runs cold as ice. Rey stifles a sharp gasp.
“Came into town one day, on the cusp of a sandstorm, eleven years ago, give or take a few cycles. Told 'em they should just bunk down here, but they insisted on trying to make it back.”
The man says nothing; the presence runs colder still; the woman speaks in the man's place, so quiet that Rey has to struggle to hear it over the surrounding talk and chatter.
“Was there anybody with them?”
“With 'em? You're asking an awful lot of questions, kid.”
“Was there anybody with them? A little girl. Five years old, then.”
“...No. Never had kids, those two. 'Fraid that's all I got, unless you wanna try their homestead. Can't imagine you'd find anything there, though.”
“Thank you for your time,” the woman answers, in a tone cold enough to match the sudden churning cold of the presence. Rey's hands are shaking too badly for her to work; the desert air does nothing to warm the chill which seems to have settled inside of her.
The presence distances itself. Not far, but it leaves Nema, and that's enough.
It leaves Nema in the direction of the stranger's house.
A little girl. Five years old, then.
She trades in her circuit board and a section of paneling for only a single portion and doesn't even protest, too frightened to breathe until she's safe inside her shelter once again.
Rey tries to think. It's hard; she's split between thinking and panicking and running.
There are two people looking for her. A man and a woman. With a presence in the Force so strong it knocks her off-balance. They could be someone sent by her cousin-- she knows that's part of why she's here, because Mama and Papa wanted her to be safe. But they could be-- they could be--
Does she reveal herself? Does she stay safe, let them leave none the wiser? Does she try to get close enough to see them, to know for sure?
The presence is moving. Searching. Looking for her. For her.
She isn't scared of a lot, but she finds herself petrified.
“Where are you, Grandpa?” she demands of thin air. Her grandfather doesn't answer. The inside of her shelter remains dark.
In the end, the presence moves into the Graveyard, and Rey isn't left with much of a choice. She can't know for sure, but it feels like it's following her, going to the places it knows she's been like she's left a trail behind her in the shifting sands. Perhaps she has. Grandpa says that Jedi leave a Force signature in their wake, and other Force-sensitives can tell if they've been somewhere recently. She isn't a Jedi, but she does have the Force. And so does the presence.
It moves into the Graveyard, moves closer and closer towards her shelter-- a fallen Imperial Walker in a sea of other Imperial Walkers, but it's going to be able to tell the difference. It will know if she runs.
It doesn't feel dark. Not in the way she's imagined that her cousin would be, or those like him. Like her grandfather once was. But she can't imagine another outcome, another possibility. So she packs away everything she can into her speeder if she needs to make a getaway-- her food, water rations, her doll, her helmet, the scrap she has yet to trade in. Her quarterstaff stays in her hands. She moves the speeder into the shadow of the Walker and hides behind the crest of a dune.
If I don't see you again, Grandpa--
The man and the woman are walking side by side; Rey can actually look at them, now, see their traveling clothes, too nice to be inconspicuous, both of them short in stature. Older, brown hair streaked with gray, no hoods. Something twists sharp and painful in her chest, makes her eyes burn, and she doesn't know why.
The man and the woman and the presence approach the Walker in a solemn silence, stoop to crawl in through the hatch. Rey can shut them in, if she wants to-- she doesn't see a lightsaber at the man's waist. But she doesn't move. Hardly breathes. They're in her home.
The presence isn't dark, it doesn't feel dark-- it feels-- taught. Tense. Larger than anything she's ever felt before. But something about it is inexplicably tranquil in a way she cannot understand-- tranquil, perhaps, like the blue of the sky before a sandstorm rolls across the horizon?
There's a noise; the presence-- thrashes, for want of a better word. The man darts out of the Walker like something inside of it is chasing him, and she can hear his words: “I'm sorry-- I'm so sorry--”
“She's been here recently, Luke,” says the woman, but she sounds shaken as she follows the man out. “We both felt it. She's still alive.”
“She was counting the days,” the man replies in a voice that all but breaks Rey's heart. Or maybe it's the realization she has when she hears his name. Her cheeks are wet, regardless.
Grandpa, Grandma. They came back.
Papa, of course, is someone different than the Luke Skywalker of legends. And her auntie is a different woman than Leia Organa. Papa is warm hands and gentle laughter and eyes like the desert sky; Auntie Leia is poise and grace and strength. Skywalker and Organa are just... stories.
They came back.
And so the people in front of her are more strangers than the scavengers she passes by in Nema, than the offworlders who land and leave within a day. But at the same time, they're family. And Rey...
Rey is tired, and thirsty, and so very lonely.
She slides down the dune and into the light of the setting sun.