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Later, much later, when Rey was safely ensconced between Finn and BB-8, the steady thrumming of the Falcon’s engine at her back and the quiet murmuring of the ragtag survivors of the Resistance filling the ship, she began haltingly to relate the whole kriffing thing.
Looking back she could never remember quite what she had said. It could not have been very coherent, told between fresh bursts of tears and peppered with gaps she just couldn't fill. Perhaps Chewie had helped, in those moments when the thick wad of shame and fear building in her throat had grown to be too much. Rey didn’t really care. Her most enduring memory of it all was Finn’s warm hand in hers and Leia's unwavering gaze.
The story did not take long, some events need no embellishment, some don’t bear repeating, it did however attract an audience. In the future, Rey would grow used to this; stories of lightsabers, long-lost Jedi legends and tested loyalties have a timeless appeal, especially for weary rebels. Back then it was another challenge at the end of a very long day; audiences after all rarely behave themselves. This audience had questions.
“So Skywalker’d lived out there alone for all that time?”
Not exactly alone. She explained the caretakers and the island’s small menagerie of wildlife. Her stumbling description of the porgs earned a few wobbly smiles.
“Did you see any ghosts?”
No. Rey didn’t really understand the fascination with Jedi and ghosts but at least the question was easily answered.
“And you’re sure that Snoke is dead?”
Yes. Some sights once seen were there forever. A room full of ash and corpses, the pervasive stench of burning flesh and bodies releasing their bowels in death. Those weren’t things Rey would be forgetting.
After Leia, her small frame frail in a way incongruous with the steel in her eyes, had retired to one of the hastily assembled camp beds, the questioning started to wind down. Conversations splintered off across the group. By that point Rey was beyond caring, her head dipped onto Finn’s shoulder, feeling his living warmth, breathing in the comforting smell of soft leather. Low voices washed over her, the words fading in and out of focus.
“But why? I don’t get what could possibly make anyone think that Kylo Ren,” the name was spat like a curse, “would turn against the First Order.” It was a ground fighter, her shoulder wrapped in filthy bandages more red than white. Her outburst prompted a brief uncomfortable silence and Rey could almost feel the flicked glances in her direction. Clearly it was something they all wanted answered, just hadn’t dared ask. She left her head buried in Finn’s shoulder and pretended not to hear. Eventually the conversation rumbled on.
It was a question that would dog Rey’s footsteps for the rest of her life.
i.
For the holodramas the answer was a passionate, star-crossed romance stretched across the galaxy, trailing bloodied hands and cankered hate in its wake. It was of course a fairly standard trope, the beautiful maiden tearfully begging her erstwhile lover to join her in righting the innumerable wrongs done to the galaxy.
She watched one once, curled up in her room with Finn, Poe, Rose and whoever else could spare a few hours from their evening. It was only a few years after the whole affair, when barely enough facts had trickled into the public consciousness to string together a coherent plot. The heroine was a long-lost space heiress with perfectly styled hair that tumbled artfully down to her ankles and a penchant for Force-related innuendo. They had Kylo Ren slightly more accurate though Rey doubted that even he spent that much time oiled and topless.
Rose found the whole thing hilarious, its endless melodramatic monologues bloated with purple prose and lovelorn wailing. She took to doing a running commentary of mockery and complaints which kept Finn in stitches. To Rey’s horror, Poe claimed to have quite liked it. Then again, he’d spent most of the film watching Finn’s face so she wasn’t sure his opinion counted for much.
Rey never quite could work out how she felt about it all. Should she be angry? The pouting heroine was so unrecognisable that to be offended by its representation of her was almost laughable. Its half-baked idea of how the Force worked was even worse - she might not know much but she was pretty sure it wasn’t a matchmaking service. There was some, it was hard to find the right word, discomfort perhaps, at watching two people who were supposed to be her and Kylo Ren locked in a passionate embrace. She had been wrong about him. He wasn’t interested in forgiveness or the Resistance, just his own crazed revenge mission against the world for not giving him enough. Sometimes she still felt echoes of him in her head, his rage, his fear, his violence. She hated that. He had rifled through her mind like an old diary, leaving dirty, careless finger prints all over it, ripping out pages to mock her with.
But, on the other side of things, just occasionally, one of the absurd soliloquies hit a little too close to home. She had gone to him. She had hoped. She hadn’t even been completely wrong. Maybe if she’d done it differently, said this instead of that, well, maybe there wouldn’t be so many dozens of corpses littering the salt fields of Crait.
It was pointless speculation really. Kylo Ren had made his choices and she had made hers. For the most part she just threw pillows at Rose and laughed it all off.
ii.
For Leia, the reason Rey left Ahch-To was a terrible misplaced hope.
Initially Rey didn’t understand. She had once told herself stories, into the empty silence of nights on Jakku. She had whispered them to her doll, long past when it was acceptable for a girl to want such childish comfort, promising Dosmit that Rey’s parents would come back for the two of them. She had come up with a thousand different ways it would happen.
Her father would be a rich merchant who owned a fleet of huge ships, bigger even than the ones Rey scavved from. He would give her a speeder, a room with a ‘fresher all to herself and more polystarch than she could eat in a year.
Or perhaps her mother would be a Resistance hero, laughing and boisterous. She would sweep Rey into her arms, brushing aside Unkar’s blustering threats with just a glimpse of her blaster, and whisk her away on a hundred daring adventures.
As she grew older the stories had evolved; there were fewer kings, assassins and grand adventures. Maybe it would be a kind aunt who would tearfully explain that, just before they died, Rey’s parents had sent her to find their little girl. The quest had taken years and spanned the galaxy but now finally Rey could come home.
The specifics of the stories didn’t really matter. What was important was that family was forever. When they had her safely bundled into their arms, they would beg her forgiveness and promise never, ever to leave her again. Apparently real families were more complicated.
At first she looked for a chance to explain in more detail. To tell Leia that she had tried, to tell her that she had seen something of Ben Solo in Kylo Ren, to tell her that he had hesitated. Rey was certain that his mother, of all people, would understand about that little spark of good she had been so damn sure existed.
In the end, she cornered Leia in a supply room, pulling her down onto a few sturdy looking boxes and a fumbled explanation came tumbling out. She wasn’t at all sure she’d done a better job than the first attempt but at least there were fewer omissions. After the telling was done Leia made no move to leave, she didn’t try to say anything either. They sat for a while like that. It was funny sometimes, how close Rey felt to this woman who she had so little in common with. She’d heard people speak of the General in hushed voices, something akin to reverence in their tone, but to Rey she’d always been Leia.
“You couldn’t have done anything for him,” Leia spoke into the silence. She must have seen the doubt in Rey’s expression because she smiled, kind brown eyes wrinkling at the corners, “I know my son. If that boy didn’t want to do something, nothing could ever make him do it. And believe me, we used to try.” She broke off, her mouth twisted into something that wasn’t quite a smile but wasn’t far off it either. “I’ve made my peace with Ben. The best thing we can do now is protect what we have left.”
There wasn’t really anything to say to that. Neither of them moved. It was hard, in moments like those, not to let the thick anger clogging up her throat become suffocating. Ben Solo had had everything, everything Rey had yearned after for so many long, lonely years. And he had ripped it to shreds. There was nothing left but aching pain and absence.
After another few minutes of quiet closeness, Leia gave Rey’s hand a squeeze and pulled herself up off the bench. “Now, I hear we’ve had a fresh shipment of parts delivered to hanger three. I’m sure there’ll be plenty to do for a pair of young legs.”
Let no one say Rey couldn’t recognise a dismissal when she heard one.
iii.
For the rest of the Resistance leadership, attempting to turn a prominent First Order leader was about strategy.
The advantage the Resistance would have gained had Rey succeeded in bringing Kylo Ren back into the fold would have been huge: an immense blow struck to the First Order’s morale, another Force-user and a powerful one at that, an in-depth understanding of exactly how the First Order was run, and a near complete knowledge of codes and plans of the highest level security.
The eventual debriefing, awkward because no one was quite sure where Rey fell in the chain of command, made it clear that she was never to take such a risk again without permission from the Bridge. That she had gone on board The Supremacy with a location bracelet that could have led the First Order straight to General Organa was not something they took lightly. But the Resistance was nothing if not pragmatic. In the end rebuilding the movement from near the ground up and the shock to the system that was the death of Snoke left everyone too busy to spend much time lecturing Rey on proper procedure.
While Commander D’Acy very much did not approve of Rey’s decision, she at least respected it. Perhaps they both knew that, really, strategy had been the least of Rey’s concerns, but it was a convenient fiction, something they used to placate their remaining allies.
iv.
For Poe it was about the Jedi.
Contrary to popular belief Poe and Rey hadn’t bonded instantly. They had started out a little wary even, circling each other, not aggressive but not quite trusting either; as much as they both loved Finn it is hard to build a relationship off of nothing but mutual adoration. Rey was not too keen to share her first and only friend, not after she had just got him back, and keeping up with Poe, his flyboy swagger and easy smile, seemed to require a lot of energy. After a while though, their friendship grew out of little incidents, dozens of roots twining together to create something fresh and different.
A few days after their escape from Crait, Poe found her struggling with a particularly stubborn landing jet component and spent an afternoon teaching her about the new X-Wing series. Later on Rey helped him sweet talk BB-8 into shutting down for a programming update, apparently the little astromech was more inclined to respect his once saviour than Poe, whose novelty had long since disappeared.
On a rare night off and without Finn, Poe introduced her to Corellian Whiskey, the good stuff, the kind most decent-thinking planets didn’t allow past customs. They spluttered and drank through until morning. It was after Poe’s second slurred monologue to Finn’s shoulders that they discovered something else they shared: a childhood spent dreaming about rebel heroes and lightsaber battles.
Sure, Poe had listened wide-eyed to his mother tell him what Luke Skwalker was really like, while Rey had competed with assorted Jakku urchins over who knew the tallest tales, but deep down it was the same stories. They left the same marks.
“Of course she had to give him another chance,” was what he said when the subject of Kylo Ren was breached one evening over sabacc, “that’s what Jedi do.”
It didn’t escape Rey’s notice that he had counted her among the fabled Jedi order. It wasn’t the first time someone had done so, it was however the first time by someone she considered a friend. That was Poe though, an optimist and a storyteller. They were going to beat the First Order, that’s what the Resistance did, and to do so they’d need their Jedi.
v.
Finn though, Finn got it. After all the interviews she had sat through, he looked at her in that way he had and he just knew.
Because the thing is, what the holodramas forgot, what the whispered rumours left out, what the history books would never understand was that the Rey who tried to redeem Kylo Ren was a nineteen year old with one friend in the galaxy.
When Rey thought of home she didn’t think of Jakku with all its lethal, untamed beauty and the scavengers who taught her how to survive. She didn’t think of her AT-AT where she learnt how to fly, what her hands were capable of and what she could do when she put her mind to it. When she thought of home she thought of Finn, of being crushed against a strong chest in the middle of a Star Killer. They had both been sweaty and he had gripped her bruised shoulders a bit too hard to be comfortable but none of that had mattered. It had been perfect. For the first time in her entire life someone had cared enough to come back for her. He hadn’t wanted her to do anything for him, he hadn’t expected repayment, he hadn’t cared about any of that. He had just wanted her to be safe. That, Rey had thought, was what home felt like.
The best thing in Rey’s world had been a Stormtrooper. Back then Rey hadn’t known the details, kriff, she had only known Finn for a few days. But she knew what Stormtroopers did. She had heard the horror-stories of going home to a burnt out village, had met men and women scarred by blaster shots and grief, had grown up on tales of the Empire’s destructive wrath. If Finn could be a part of all that and come out so kind and brave, well, maybe redemption wasn’t such a false hope after all.
Finn had left the First Order. He had left because a pilot took a chance. And Rey had learnt from that. She had taken a chance.