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The desert is unforgiving; it’s a fact that Rey knew well. It would take the unprepared and shrivel them, the sand claiming all things given enough time. Even the AT-AT that Rey called home was half-submerged in the sand. No food grew in this wasteland, and any water had to be drawn from deep underground by wells. She survived on rations in exchange for scrap, scavenged from the carcasses of crashed ships from wars long ago. Most days, she was hungry.
Often, after she finished her meager meal, Rey sat outside, staring up at the desert sky, full of stars. She examined each one, wondering where her family might be in the dark spaces between. She silently willed them to return, to take her from this wasteland. It was at night that she was her loneliest. Sometimes she thought that the desert’s darkness would overwhelm her, that the sands would swallow her whole like the ships that had fallen from above, just another discarded thing from far away. Away from the hardened faces of the other scavengers, a few tears would fall from her eyes, and she would let them. But only for a moment.
Friendship on Jakku was hard to come by. She often sat at a table in town with some other scavengers, dusting off scrap and fixing it up for sale, but they would soon as smile as slit your throat. Friendship here meant recognition; maybe you would get a grunt or a slight nod of the head as you passed, but that was all. Friendship here was built on fear and practicality, but Rey knew that there could be much more than that to the term. Maybe, not here certainly, but somewhere far away, there were people who were friends simply because they liked one another.
Rey kept herself busy, working herself to the bone in the hot desert sun day after day. She knew that the days passed more quickly when she had a task to accomplish. Work also kept her mind from dwelling on her situation, a dangerous habit when she spent most of her day alone with only the wind for company. Rey was often filthy, covered in a layer of dirt and sand, and since water was scarce, she usually stayed that way. Happiness on Jakku was an even scarcer commodity than friendship, and Rey could only remember once when she felt truly joyful.
It was one of the worst sand storms that had ever descended upon Jakku. Rey had holed up in her AT-AT and listened to the gusts of sand batter the outside. Periodically, she would poke her stick outside to make sure she wasn’t being totally buried. Eventually the howling sand stopped, only to be replaced by an unfamiliar sound. Rey cocked her head; it sounded like a million fingers tapping at once against the metal. She grabbed her stick and cautiously peeked outside. A drop of water hit her squarely on the nose. The sand, darkened, held her footprints as she stepped out. Rey spread her arms and tilted her face to the sky, relishing the moisture as it gathered on her skin. She had never felt anything so incredible. After a moment, her practicality snapped back into place and she rushed inside to gather every bowl she owned to collect water. After she set them in the rain, Rey dug a shallow hole in the sand and wallowed in the water that collected there, laying back so she could stare up at the sky. She looked at the stars, and she could have sworn that one blinked at her. She gathered up every shred of happiness that she had and shot it up at the sky, hoping that, maybe, wherever they might be, her family might feel it and know that she was ok out here, if only for tonight.