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Old Dula is a fellow human scavenger with one working ear, scraggly teeth she keeps filed into points, and a verified spitting range of fifteen feet once she gets a good south wind behind her. She claims to have lost the other ear in some long-ago fight with a Kyuzo, the issue being their bar tab and who had promised to pay it. Rey believes her.
(She considers Dula a kind of grandmother, in fact, even though Rey knows very well that Dula would kill and eat her if they ever got lost in the Empty Quarter together.
But it wouldn’t be anything personal, really. That’s simply the standard by which all friendships on Jakku are measured – how long you would wait before killing somebody for the contents of their pockets or their hearts.)
Now they stand together at a public well, washing rust off old connector rods and hydraulic piston rings. Rey sneaks a glance at Dula’s hands, practiced and methodical, in between the squinting glares she sends over one shoulder.
Several men gathered around the trading station – men in the generic sense, not the human one –glare back.
“I wish I were taller,” Rey says, unprompted. “Nobody would boss me around then.”
“Oh, la-la-la. Wishful talking again?” Dula has creased brown skin and eyes lighter than her face. “Men who are that stupid-proud could stand just level with your kneecap and still act like their heads scrape the sky. You have to remember for yourself how small and foolish they are.”
“How?”
“Why ask me? It’s your problem, not mine.” Dula sticks a gasket in her mouth and bites down to test its strength. “Pretend they’re naked.”
Rey almost tumbles forward into the scummy water. They’ve missed the happabore by about a half-hour, but there’s still a thin gloss of slobber over everything.
“What?”
“All that clothing and armor. It’s for show.” Dula spits between their feet. It sizzles against the hot sand. “Some men like to make you forget that they came into this galaxy looking the same as everyone else – bare-assed and wailing about it.”
“That’s –” Rey crinkles her nose. She imagines damp, pale things, like the creatures found in caves or under rocks. “I don’t want to think about that.”
“Then don’t.” Dula shrugs. “But if you see a person naked once, you can never take them all-the-way serious again.”
Rey contemplates this.
Strictly speaking, the only genuine naked body she’s ever seen up close has been her own – and that’s only in bony bits and pieces, since she has no large mirrors or puddles to let her see anything more.
(She’s also suffered the recent disappointment of learning she can only grow two breasts, rather than six, the way that one female Askajian innkeeper can. Rey’s aren’t even meant for something practical, like holding extra water on a long desert journey. She finds this exceedingly unfair.
At least the whole business about bleeding once a month hasn’t proved fatal, though. Yet.)
“…So if I do that, I can laugh at them? Is that what you mean?”
“If you think about it hard enough, you can laugh at anything.” Dula scratches the stump of her missing ear. “Your mind survives longer that way, too.”
“Oh. All right.”
They return to their scrubbing.
(When Rey counts out the scrap pieces later, she will realize that Dula has stolen a handful from her pile.
The thought will make her chest flood and fill, as though her heart has suddenly sprung a leak, but then she’ll plug it up with the sober understanding that this isn’t meant to be taken personally, either.
One does what one must.)
And for a full week, the whole glaring-glowering-swaggering population of Nima Outpost is collectively baffled – not to mention mildly alarmed – by their scrawny human girl’s new tendency to burst out laughing whenever they walk past.
It’s the heat, they decide. Or maybe the solitude finally working its way into her brain. Oh well.
…
Their swords come up to meet again, raining sparks and colors through the dark corridor around them.
She’s grown much too accustomed to Master Luke, Rey thinks, those composed strokes planned out twenty steps in advance. Kylo Ren’s motions by comparison are wild, unrestrained, almost sportive in the way they demand her snap-judgement reactions.
“He’s been that way for as long as I can remember,” he tells her, answering something she hasn’t said aloud. “All grace and dignity, but no innovation. I’m sure he’s also told you how the truth –”
“ – Can change, when seen from certain points of view.” Rey rounds it off like a line of verse. “He learned that from my grandfather.”
“Do you believe it?”
“Yes. Only a Sith –”
“ – Deals in absolutes, yes.” He lunges, she parries. An alarm blares several floors overhead. “So we’ve been told.”
His lightsaber hums around in a great arc, trailing plumes of scarlet, and then it drops itself down in one heavy swing. Rey knocks the blow aside. The doubled doors stand open behind him, her ship and escape route somewhere further beyond that, and this is not at all how she’d seen this mission going.
She feels his mind wandering ticklish-light through her own, like a child’s questing fingers or a thread of pouring sand.
(“Don’t you ever ask permission?”)
He tosses the saber from his right hand to his left, makes a stab at her arm. The impact of their locking swords seems to rattle all her joints loose.
He stands tall enough that he could curve her over backwards, if she lets him, and he’s close enough that she can see how shadows form at the scarred corner of his mouth. A ragged lock of dark hair has gotten stuck to it.
(“They say asking forgiveness is easier,” she hears. “But aren’t you interested in learning something new, yet?”)
And Rey wants to hate him, then, both for this warm sardonicism and for the man whom it reminds her of. She wants to luxuriate in righteous loathing and let it sing through her blood. She wants to kill him, to press her body in against his until there’s no more space between them and burn a hole clean through his heart.
She could do it, of course, assuming he has a heart at all. She could, she could, she could, she –
Instead Rey grips the lightsaber and turns quickly aside, bowing out from under him as though refusing a dance. He rights himself before he can overbalance.
Black coattails slice around him when he turns for another blow.
Stupidly impractical accoutrements, Rey manages to think. She adjusts her focus to fit this equally stupid but safer scope. How does he even move?
Because then there’s also the second, shorter coat, the tall boots he probably polishes each morning, the rough cowl like a noose around his neck, the belt and the gloves and the helmet he’s tossed aside once again, and –
Rey narrows her eyes.
Ah-ha.
The pared-down image she assembles next is slapdash guesswork, but it’ll have to do: tendons and sinews, hipbones and ribs, scars that she’s carved into him herself, long limbs dangling down off sharp-cornered shoulders, white skin and blue veins and the overall impression of a soft, vulnerable underbelly.
Then Rey takes this image, reels her whole mind back, and uses a thousand years’ worth of sagely aphorisms and sanctified teachings to wallop Kylo Ren upside the head with it.
They see it at the same time.
She puts so much vigor behind it that their teeth rattle, collectively. Their ears ring. She throws herself forward in the same instant, lays him flat with an elbow, though she likely could’ve done it with one finger just as easily.
And if Rey lives to be eight hundred years old, shriveled and shrunken and talking in spirals like Master Yoda’s ghost, she will never again see such bosom-clutching, freshly-slapped, undignified shock on another man’s face.
(Huh. Serves him right for snooping through her thoughts.)
“Well. There’s something new for you, anyway,” Rey says. She snaps into a tidy pilot’s salute. “Don’t take it too personally.”
She veers around him and runs.
If he thinks to use the Force at all, to catch her by the wrist or to snare her by the feet, she slips away without feeling a thing.
(The laughter that follows her is big and booming and clumsy – laughter that could more feasibly come out of a man with some simpler, yielding name like Ben – so Rey is glad when the doors slam shut behind her.
She can’t quite say why.)
…