Chapter Text
The air in Ahch-To is saturated, nothing like the arid climate of her former homeland that threatened to drain every molecule of precious moisture with each second of exposure for anyone delirious enough to call the desolate wasteland home. But here, the atmosphere is drastically different, almost benevolent, drawing up recollections of the rare days she’d managed to trade enough for a fleeting spray of cool water for her perpetually baking body. The only similarity she could draw was the ever-present slick of sweat, only here it collected from the outside air, rather than the protective shell of clothing worn just for that purpose.
But she begins the long assent up the isle, a sudden breeze cut through the building coat of perspiration, cool and mild, sweeping away in one moment the reminder of home.
She shoulders the strap of her staff, having elected to carry it rather than the Jedi weapon so leaden with meaning, a legacy she wasn’t sure if she had the right to carry. It took a moment of desperation to wield it in self-defense, and she sure as the Force had no intention of declaring herself a Jedi just because she pulled off a few mind-tricks and survived a monster of a man delirious from having taken both blaster fire and a vicious scorch to the arm.
Alright, maybe she did better than most, but in the wake of Luke Skywalker’s return to the galaxy the light saber simply wasn’t hers to keep, regardless if he took her on as his apprentice. She recalls a monster’s words, impressing upon her mind, “You need a teacher!” and he’d been right, that was easy to admit, true as it is, but she’d sooner expose herself to the ripper-raptors than she would call the man who’d murdered Han Solo master.
Ahead of her the trek up the outcropping is long, she can’t even see the temple they’d spotted flying overhead, but the stone slab steps are shallow and forgiving compared to the endless scramble up slipping dunes and vertical climbs up ships the size of mountains and it leaves her mind to observe the fantastic greenery and surrounding sea-scape, seemingly wrought from her imagination. Rey suspected she’d never get used to these planets so littered in life, for all their beauty and really, why would she ever want to?
Her soft boots make a gentle sound as she moves along, engrossed in the vastness of the view. The ocean pans out endlessly around the island, dotted by a few similar isles, a seemingly universal shade of clear-yet-azure and it’s suddenly hilarious how her previous life revolved around the stuff, where here there was no escaping it. Even as her ascent led her through an obscuring overhang, the foliage and land-scape gradually blocking out the visual the scent of salt water still permeated the air, notably sharper than the crisp fresh-water lake on Takodana.
Rey reaches out to the wall of overhang, grazing the tips of her fingers over the delicate lichen as she walks, imagining the countless Jedi that must have trod this very same path over the course of a millennia and she considers for a moment that perhaps she has a place among them after all.
The overhang continues for quite some distance, throwing her path in such darkness it had her squinting at the sudden exposure to the sun, hand flying up to shield her eyes from the light of Ahch-To’s binary stars, relatively dim compared to the scouring sun on Jakku, but none-the-less bright without the protective eyewear you never went without in the desert.
Only when her vision adjusts does the full impact of where she is, what she’s doing here finally hits her. The path has taken her finally to the First Jedi Temple, antiquated by time and half assimilated by flora but no less magnificent. She’s reminded of her greatest find, a ship that totaled 72 portions but even that pales to the dogma of this place, enriched by the struggles of countless lives that lived here, trained here, found sanctuary here, and she’s suddenly struck by a sensation of awareness, the Force, flooding her perception and despite her greenness, Rey knows it’s an accumulation of this solemn place, a memory of the presence of so many that were once here. Unbidden, she walks along the halls, struck by a scavengers instinct to search, see what she could find here, treasures untouched for her to unearth but she masters herself. No more is Rey a desert scavenger desperate for scrap to survive another day. She didn’t escape Starkiller base and the imperial fleet by the skin of her neck just to go back crawling to the abandoned reaches of some site because it’s comfortable.
A memory jeers in her head that she chooses not to engage. Though the sound makes her uneasy all the same. “Sand Rat.”
Small signs of settlement litter the temple. A still-green walking stick leaning against the stone brick, a worn dura-steel canteen, capped, half-filled with water, spare parts to a holocron, twenty some-odd years old but not completely obsolete. Luke Skywalker isn’t found anywhere among them, but the same wordless whisper that told her as a child where to step in the crumbling wreckage of a mostly-salvaged ship before she learned to use her staff, the same voice that told her how to fight against Kylo Ren, where to strike, tells her now that she will not find her master here, and Rey realizes that the voice accumulates here at the temple. She keeps moving.
She knows it isn’t far now. Rey feels the invisible thread pulling her along begins to run out, and she sees there simply isn’t anywhere higher to go. Looking back, the temple is below her and the ocean rimmed horizon stretches out endlessly in the view. The twin suns have begun to set, throwing an uncanny light over the whole of the planet, a shimmering orange not unlike the sands of her former home. A few more steps and then she feels it, a magnitude of presence saturating the air unmatched by any she’d felt before, though her data points are few.
A silky voice, unwelcomed presence in her head, violently ripping through memory after memory and suddenly being aware of another power, her own, forcing through his own surprise and knowing his fear, a decrepit helmet, half-melted around a skull still contained.
Even larger than that and Rey found herself shaking as she crested the final flight of stairs and the miasma only mounts and there he is, a figure of the legends she’d heard as a child around the washing tables, the leader desperately needed to inspire peace in the galaxy, a brother wanted home by a woman Rey was beginning, hoping to connect with, already someone in her life she could call motherly. Luke Skywalker is here, and as she stands unflappable she finds the twisting in her chest not to be the product of apprehension, but of conviction.
She hesitates to speak, tight-lipped with an iron grip on her staff that would crush a lesser contraption. Ceaseless slews of questions run through her mind, none of them even resembling a greeting so she does the only other thing she can think to do, reaching into her satchel to grip the cool, detailed metal of the saber she was due to return.
Luke Skywalker senses her then, or perhaps he’s always sensed her here and he turns his head, eyes brimming with inexplicable sorrow that catches her off guard, saber faltering in her outstretched hand. There’s a name on his lips that leaves her head reeling, now burning with a question that takes immediate priority and she spits it, confusion settling into her chest like a weight.
“How do you know my name?”