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When Luke Skywalker begins to train her, she's not exactly sure what to call him.
He's her father, yes, but going straight into calling him "dad" when she barely even knows him, and knowing he left her behind . . . it feels too quick. Too soon. She also feels reluctant to call him Luke because as easy as it is to be around him, he looks beyond mere first names. Beyond reason.
He's a Jedi. The last of an order she thought was a myth.
So she settles on "Master Skywalker." That lasts all of five seconds.
"Master Skywalker was the name of my father," he jokes, although he seems to cringe at the thought of his own father. "Call me Luke."
"It's the name of my father too," she offers hesitantly. "Looks like we have a lot in common." He smiles.
It's shaky, but it's a start.
Training is exhausting. Her mind and body both are worn down from extensive use.
At the edge of her mind, she can feel it. Kylo Ren, scraping and clawing to be let in.
It's almost ironic, she muses one night as she meditates alongside Luke. She used to long for connection, desperately. But never, in her worst nightmares, could she have ever imagined that she would develop a Force Bond with her worst enemy.
Her cousin.
The Force is cruel, she decides. There's no other possible explanation.
But when she reaches out, she can almost feel the currents and eddies of life. The living Force, her father called it. She can feel Finn resting fitfully, aching to wake from his medically induced slumber. She can feel Poe looking, searching for any information he can to help her. She can feel the General: her aunt, grieving for Han Solo.
Her uncle. He was her uncle and he died before her eyes.
The anger is surprising. The absolute, utter fury. It scares her with its intensity, and she doesn't know what to do with it. She has a feeling it has to do with her bond with Kylo, but in her heart, she knows much of the anger is hers.
"I'm so angry all of the time," she tells Luke. "Is this what happened to him?"
Luke sighs. "In a sense, yes. But your anger is different. It's directed outward. Be-Kylo's was directed inward. Still dangerous, but I can help you more with it. When someone hates himself, there's not much you can do."
"I don't want to be like him," Rey whispers. Luke reaches for her, taking her hand in his. His fingers are rough, just like hers.
"You are strong, Rey. Stronger than you know."
She pulls away. He may be her teacher, but he's not her father. Not yet.
"I don't know if I am."
Luke seems to believe the best way to make up for lost time is to tell her all about everyone but himself.
The General was a princess. He found her on the Death Star after hiring Han Solo to provide them transport to her home planet Alderaan. Han was his best friend, and Luke used to heckle him about the Falcon just to get a rise out of him. She should meet Han's friend Lando, he says. She would like him. He takes an entire afternoon to tell her his story, starting from his childhood on Tatooine and going into the first time he held her in his arms.
It's surreal, in a way. He paints a picture of an imperfect yet idyllic childhood to her, of a fiercely loving mother and a devoted father who was in over his head. Of an uncle terrified of fatherhood, of the idea of raising his son wrong. Of an aunt, beautiful and strong, who couldn't settle back into politics no matter how hard she tried.
She can sense his pain when he speaks of Kylo. He speaks of he and Ben Solo as two different people. In a way, Rey knows there must have been a distinction. The Ben Solo described to her was quiet, but had a wry sense of humor. He was brimming with power and eager to learn, to take the world in all at once.
And therein laid his downfall.
"He was impatient," Luke says, "Never wanted to be a beginner. He wanted to be the best, the most powerful. And in terms of raw power, he was. But self-control and skill did not come naturally to him. Traces of his father, I suppose." His eyes grow distant. "He had all of Han and Leia's best qualities, but all of my father's worst."
"You think you failed him." Rey's never prided herself on her tact, and Luke's surprise at her blunt statement is evident as he looks at her, eyebrows raised.
"I don't think I failed him. I know I did."
"No," Rey insists with a ferocity that surprises her. The sadness in her father's eyes, eyes which still mourn the loss of a wife and years with a daughter, pulls at something deep within her. "I have seen his mind. The choice has always been his. You cannot fault yourself for his sins."
"That's the logical thing. The rational thing," Luke says with a humorless chuckle. "But Skywalkers have never been prone to logic."
Rey cannot argue with that.
She loves training with Luke. He is endlessly patient and good-natured, eyes twinkling with the kind of hopeful youth that lasts forever. But he is also wizened by years of seeing the best and worst of the galaxy, and she clings to his every word. However, that doesn't make her forget what she has left behind.
She hasn't been able to directly contact the Resistance beyond a single encrypted message confirming she had found Luke. It was too dangerous; they couldn't risk revealing his location unless she was bringing him back.
The topic of returning was something she learned early on was off-limits, even for her. She had brought it up their first day, and he had simply walked away, telling her to finish her exercises before spending the rest of the night in stony silence.
She had panicked, remembering a ship taking off from Jakku, a harsh grip on her arm as she screamed for it to come back, to not leave. She woke in the middle of the night crying in Luke's arms, whispered words promising to never leave her again.
She brings up the idea of returning once again to him, and supposes progress has been made. He refuses to acknowledge the subject, but doesn't leave her alone.
He's at least learned that much.
His hardest test, he tells her, had nothing to do with lightsabers or the Force at all. It was a test of his inner strength. He doesn't tell Rey she will have a test like his, or even describe what he saw, but she knows. She will have the face a cave of her own.
"How do I prepare for it?" she asks, eyes trained on a tower of stones she is trying to stack with the Force. Luke snorts, and her focus wavers a bit, causing a stone to drop to the ground with a soft thud.
"There's no way to prepare for a test like that," he replies. "Remember to concentrate."
"That's comforting," she mutters, drawing a soft laugh from the Jedi Master.
"Concentrate," he repeats.
"I am concentrating!"
"On the stones."
She lets all of them drop with a frustrated huff. "How am I supposed to concentrate on the stones when you're telling me about some transcendental test of my moral fibre? In what world can anyone do that?"
Luke arches an eyebrow.
"This was a lesson, wasn't it?" she guesses dryly. He winks.
They break for lunch near where the Falcon is docked. Luke quietly converses with Chewbacca while Rey sits on a boulder near the clearing's edge, looking out at the sea.
She doubts she will ever get used to the sight of endless bodies of water after a lifetime of memories on a desert world, so she just empties her mind and stares out. The sea could be terrifying; unimaginably deep depths going on as far as the eye can see and mind can imagine.
In her hands, she holds Luke's lightsaber, meandering it back and forth in her hands. It's more than miraculous, she muses, how much history this weapon has seen. The Clone Wars, the Imperial Civil War. Darth Vader wielded it as he fell, and his own son, her father, fought against him with it.
"That lightsaber is the closest thing to a family heirloom we'll probably ever get," comes Luke's voice from behind her. She doesn't turn, letting him climb up to sit beside her. "The funny thing is, the biggest fight I ever had with that weapon was a loss."
"Against Vader?" she clarifies, and he nods.
"I was completely outclassed. Yoda hadn't yet taught me how to fight with a lightsaber, and I was only versed in fighting with blasters."
"That's when you lost your hand."
"Yes. I wonder if Maz has that hidden somewhere." Rey scrunches her face in disgust, drawing a soft, amused smile from the older man. "You're clearly comfortable with the lightsaber."
"It's like my staff," she explains, "The techniques you've been teaching me, they feel natural. They make sense."
"You were able to hold your own against Ren," Luke points out, "You're a natural." Blunt praise is rare from him, so this draws a bright smile that he returns. It's the most open smile she's seen on his face.
A memory springs forth, from the deepest reaches of her mind. She's young, very young. Luke is kneeling before her, face less wrinkled and somehow softer. He's smiling down at her, the exact same expression directed at her now.
Chewbacca calls them, still hungry, and the moment is broken. But something inside Rey seems different somehow. She feels different. Lighter.
The lessons continue. Rey notices the physical work comes easier after a while, though Luke always increases her training regimen when he notices her getting comfortable.
Her powers grow, and she revels in the feeling of unadulterated freedom that courses through her when she leaps and bounds across the island, the Force flowing through her as she lifts large boulders and deflects sparks of energy thrown her way from a small remote Luke dug up from the Falcon.
She can sense immense, immeasurable pain so intense she can feel her skin tingling. She wonders what sort of tortures her cousin is enduring to warrant such an ardent reaction in her own mind and body. But time and time again, she pushes Kylo Ren from her mind, determined to forge her own path independent from the dark legacy of her father's former apprentice.
But with the pain comes knowledge she simply cannot ignore: the First Order and the Dark Side are getting more powerful, and she cannot hide at the edge of the galaxy forever.
Luke can sense the conversation to come when she approaches him, at the same spot near the island's highest point where she first found him.
"No," he says before she can even get a single word out. "I've taught you everything I know. Told you everything that has happened. There is nothing I can do anymore." He turns from the ocean, looking her in the eye beseechingly. "This isn't my story anymore. It's yours."
Any other time, Rey would have dropped the conversation here and changed the subject. But today, Kylo Ren got inside her head. He found her in a moment of pure concentration, when her mental shields were down, invading her mind with the ease and darkness so typically him.
"We will meet again," he had promised, only unlike every other time, there was a confidence and certainty that had fear coursing through her. Not for her own life, but for her friends. The Resistance. Leia.
No more hiding.
So when Luke turns back to look at the ocean, she stays right where she is.
"I'm leaving tomorrow. Chewbacca is preparing the ship right now."
"Oh," he says softly. Fury rises up in her.
"That's all you have to say to me? Me, the daughter you left behind with no memories years ago?" Her voice cracks, but she continues on. "I finally found you again, and we were fixing things. Really fixing them. And you're just going to let me leave? Is that what you want?"
"Of course not, I-"
"-am too afraid to return, to be the Jedi you are supposed to be. The last Jedi. Because you failed once, and you cannot stand the idea of failing again." He says nothing, and she knows she's got him. "You taught me all you can here. And I know that Jedi do not sit idly by while the galaxy falls apart when we can save it."
"Look at you," Luke murmurs, head turning towards her ever so slightly. "Sounding like a hero."
"Thanks to you," Rey insists, stepping forward. "I spent my whole life scavenging for myself. I cared for nobody. I had nobody. But now I am telling you that you don't have to do anything alone. None of us do. Please, Father, come home with me. Help me make the galaxy what it could be."
She's never called him "Father." She's thought of him as such, accepted him as such for a long time now. But she's never spoken it aloud to him, afraid of shattering the ease which settled between them.
She feels his struggle. The regret, so potent, tears at him. The grief, old and endless, for her mother, and fresh and raw, for Han. The intense, powerful, consuming love for her. For Leia. It's a Skywalker trait, she decides. Feeling so intensely it consumes you. The weight of the galaxy forever on your shoulders.
"Come home," she repeats, the barest hint of a whisper. "At least try."
After a long moment, he finally turns, and she feels his decision. His eyes are fiery, alight in a way she has never seen, like something long dormant has finally awoken inside him.
"Do, or do not. There is no try."
She smiles.
They're finally going home.