Work Text:
One thing that Rey learns from her time spent on the lost world, is that it is all endless. The galaxy. The Force. Life itself. It cycles and it never ends because it is all reborn. There is no death, there is but the Force and all that have passed through and will ever pass through exist in its fabric.
Just as the evil that permeates the galaxy continues to exist despite its repeated defeats. The cycle continues.
Even if she defeats it again—drives the madness from the man that used to be Ben Solo—it will not be destroyed. If she is lucky, it will go dormant, maybe for centuries. But it will rise again. Rey doesn’t want to think about what might happen if she is unlucky.
Memory, she thinks, is endless like Life and the Force. Things thought lost came rushing back to the surface once there were those around to know them, to remember them. The beings of this once great Alliance, they are gone, but their spirits live on. Their fight continues. The only fight, as she had once been told.
The Jedi, Rey thinks, they have ended so many times. Luke’s Jedi. The Jedi of the Republic before the Empire. The Jedi of this ancient civilization, and societies even older had seen the rise and fall of the powerful Order. It continues. Through her. One day, she hopes she’ll pass on what she knows to someone else. She thinks this knowledge should not die with her, if it is her death that lies at the end of this journey.
So she takes notes. Records the translations of her texts so that if someone else finds the old books they’ll know what she learned. She tells Poe and Leia the things the ghosts pass on to her, and dictates it to BB-8 so he’ll have it stored in his databanks. One day, someone will find it. They will remember Rey and their small band of resistance.
Once she was lost in the stars, lost in the Force. She felt like she was drowning in a deep pool. Now, she feels something closer to the balance so keenly felt on this planet. She wonders if this feeling could last forever, or if some other challenge will come to try and knock her down.
She smiles because she know that it will. And she welcomes it.
She is stronger now.
Not a Jedi.
Not yet.
But they are close.