Rey Skywalker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thatwaslucky) wrote2019-08-03 12:45 pm
thatwaslucky) wrote2019-08-03 12:45 pm
Crait- Saturday
Rey had waited too long in a stolen ship in space, trying to evade the First Order's notice. She'd watched the last of the transport ships escape to the planet below and had to worry without being able to do anything about it. Was Finn aboard one of the ships that had been destroyed? Had he made it down to the planet? What about Leia? Rey still had her beacon to know that whoever had the other one was somewhere nearby, but she had no way of knowing who, or what kind of situation she would find when she got there.
When Chewie was finally able to return in the Falcon to pick her up and follow them down, she'd been so frantic that she'd instantly earned an annoyed bark from him, and she'd wisely shut up.
They arrived at the salt caves of Crait in time for a battle, though they couldn't make out exactly what was happening where. According to Chewbacca there was an abandoned mine there that the Rebellion had once used as a base, and the First Order was encroaching on it with ships and towering walkers, and he and Rey had decided that they would be most helpful driving some of them off the rebels. He took the controls while she headed to the gun turret, picking off TIEs attempting to attack the rebel speeders below, sending the First Order ships spiraling into flaming pieces.
"Oh, I like this," Rey called back as she fired at another TIE.
Chewie was flying expertly even without a copilot (unless the porgs that had invaded the ship counted), leaving Rey to do the actual fighting, which she was fine with. This was practice. She found that if she opened herself up to the Force it was easier, she was able to hit targets better and more accurately, and that would be one or two or three less ships firing on their friends.
She saw two of the TIEs leave their positions above the walkers in order to follow the Falcon, and she called into her headset, "Chewie! Peel off from the battle! Draw them away from the speeders!"
He yowled an affirmative and accelerated away from the battlefield with those and even more TIEs chasing behind them. Rey continued shooting and after a minute or two realized that they were flying into the gaping red wound of a canyon in the salt flats, where the crystalline walls were narrow and there was less room for several fighters to maneuver around each other and chase a target.
Rey remembered doing something similar in the Star Destroyer on Jakku, what seemed like a hundred years ago already. Chewie was better at it.
Two fighters misread each other's signals and crashed into each other, and Rey shot at anything that followed them. Soon enough, those were taken care of.
When they were clear of enemies and safely out of the canyon, Rey made her way back to the cockpit as the Falcon swooped over the battlefield, and her heart dropped as she saw the massive scorched hole in the shield door, with the First Order close to it. And then, all the guns started firing at once, at one very specific point.
Rey and Chewie looked at each other.
"Better go around the back," she said.
They did.
Behind the mine was a ridge over a deep fissure in the ground. They flew slowly, with Artoo plugging into the ship to access its sensors, beeping unhappily.
"The beacon's right beneath us. They've got to be somewhere," Rey said. "Keep scanning for life forms."
After a minute, Artoo began warbling excitedly to get her attention, and she looked out of the viewport to see dozens of crystal foxes coming out of a fissure in the mountainside.
Chewie landed the Falcon, and Rey was already at the landing ramp, setting it down the moment she was able. Jumping down terrain hadn't ever been a problem for her, so she scrambled down into the fissure, and when she got to the bottom, she found the scene before her to be more daunting than she'd expected. It was a massive wall of boulders as high as the one she'd just climbed down, but she could see the narrow crack where the foxes had escaped. There was no other way in back here, and there was no way to get past the First Order out front.
"Lifting rocks," she muttered with a sigh.
She didn't know what she was doing, still. Not really. But so far, most of what she'd been able to do had involved just trusting that she'd figure out how to do it. So, all right. Rey closed her eyes, and lifted her hand, focusing on finding and lifting one single rock. And after that, another single rock. And another. It was like that first lesson on Ahch-To, instead of experiencing everything at once, it was focusing on small pieces of it, while keeping everything else in mind. She could feel them all individually and all together at once, keeping them levitated while she found the next rock, and the next...
She didn't know how long she was at it. But when Rey opened her eyes to check her progress, she was shocked to see that she'd essentially lifted the mountainside. The rocks, everything from pebbles and dust to boulders the same size as herself, were hovering in midair, revealing people standing at the new opening and gawking at her. At the front of the group was Finn, alive and well after she'd left him in a medical pod. He stared at her in surprise for a moment- it was entirely possible he didn't know she could do this at all- and then he started running towards her, not caring about anything else.
With the opening cleared for people to escape, Rey let the rocks fall to the ground as if they weighed nothing, walking towards him to meet him halfway. He got to her first, immediately pulling her into a tight hug. Neither of them said anything, but it was the best she'd felt in a very, very long time. After all the hurt and lies and anger and disappointment over the last few days, this was exactly what she needed.
The group had to get up the side of the fissure to where the ship was parked, which took some time, and Rey was busy shooing the Resistance fighters on board the Falcon when she felt it, and she reached out to grab the nearest solid object to steady herself. There was Luke, suddenly on the edge of her consciousness, or maybe he'd already been there in a way and she hadn't realized before now, and then… he wasn't.
So.
Now it was just her.
She held it together, got everyone else on board, and made sure she was the last one on. At the top of the landing ramp, she felt that familiar tremor in the Force, that live wire buzzing around the edges, the one that she felt anytime she was about to have company.
There was Kylo, standing on the ground before her, looking up at her and watching her reaction. He didn't say anything, and neither did she. He was upset- not just rage, but grief and disappointment and loneliness and what felt like a thousand other swirling emotions that she wouldn't have wanted to pick out individually. Some of it had to do with her, and Luke, and every single person he felt had ever wronged him. Rey could have pitied him, she supposed, but he had done this to himself. Luke had made mistakes, and Kylo's choices weren't simple, or easy, but he'd been the one to make them.
Now he had to live with it.
She decided she didn't want to see him anymore, and just like that, the connection severed, and Rey closed the door to the Falcon so they could leave him and the entire First Order behind.
Chewie got them safely into hyperspace, though Rey wasn't entirely sure where they were going. Away, to start. There was a devastatingly small amount of Resistance fighters on board, but at the same time it was too many people in a small area, all milling around, with several people and droids being reunited and finally taking the moment to talk.
Like BB-8, who rolled over to Rey, beeping with excitement to see her again. She smiled and knelt in front of him to give him a pat, and lightly tweaked the new antenna that had been put on since she'd left. "I like it," she told him.
Someone else, a dark-haired man in a jacket, walked up to talk to her, and Rey stood up meet him. "Hi, I'm Poe," he said, offering his hand.
Oh! Him! She'd heard enough from BB-8 about him, and slightly less from Finn due to not having been around him the last week or so, and was glad to meet finally him. She shook his hand, and said, "I'm Rey."
He gave her a look, as if he wasn't sure why she felt the need to say that. "Yeah, I know."
She somehow hadn't considered that word would have made its way around about her, even after she'd held boulders in the air to save their lives not long ago, even though she'd been the girl who had taken off to find Luke Skywalker. People had pinned their hopes on her, too. She just hadn't thought that someone important to the Resistance would care who she was, let alone make a point of introducing himself because he knew who she was.
She talked with him for a few minutes, then found a place to sit that didn't have anyone already sitting there. Everyone else had their own discussions going, and while she was alone among them, she pulled the two halves of the lightsaber from where she'd had them hanging on her belt and studied them. She didn't know what to do with it now. Maybe it could be fixed, but she didn't know much about how they worked, so putting an ancient weapon back together correctly felt like a lot. Maybe there was something in the ancient texts?
She looked toward the drawer where she'd stowed them, and saw Finn rifling around in there for a blanket to put over Rose, unconscious in the relief bunk. Rey hadn't actually gotten to meet her yet, since she'd already been hurt when the Falcon arrived, but as she watched him, she knew that already she was going to have to share him. While she'd been off in relative isolation, he'd been here, with these people, forging relationships. It wasn't jealousy, per se, just… one more thing she had to view from the outside, and it made her heart ache a little.
It'd been a long… however many days, and by now she had conflicting emotions about everything, and it felt unfair.
She turned away from them when Leia took the seat next to her. She looked all right, considering, but sad, and quiet. If Rey had had a bad time of it, she could only imagine what Leia was going through. She'd lost her husband, her brother, her son, her rebellion, and the people and friends that had been a part of it.
And not knowing what else to do, Rey said quietly, "Luke is gone. I felt it. But it wasn't sadness or pain. It was peace, and purpose."
Leia nodded. "I felt it, too."
Rey couldn't help but feel guilty. Leia had sent her on this mission to find Luke and bring him back, and she'd failed. She'd taken it upon herself to complete a new mission, and failed at that, too. And for some reason, when something terrible happened, Leia came to check in with her.
She looked around at the fighters around them and asked, "How do we build a rebellion from this?"
And Leia, sad as she was, within as much to worry about as she did, laid her hand on top of Rey's and smiled. "We have everything we need."
Rey found she believed that, too.
[And done with current movie canon! NFB, NFI.]
When Chewie was finally able to return in the Falcon to pick her up and follow them down, she'd been so frantic that she'd instantly earned an annoyed bark from him, and she'd wisely shut up.
They arrived at the salt caves of Crait in time for a battle, though they couldn't make out exactly what was happening where. According to Chewbacca there was an abandoned mine there that the Rebellion had once used as a base, and the First Order was encroaching on it with ships and towering walkers, and he and Rey had decided that they would be most helpful driving some of them off the rebels. He took the controls while she headed to the gun turret, picking off TIEs attempting to attack the rebel speeders below, sending the First Order ships spiraling into flaming pieces.
"Oh, I like this," Rey called back as she fired at another TIE.
Chewie was flying expertly even without a copilot (unless the porgs that had invaded the ship counted), leaving Rey to do the actual fighting, which she was fine with. This was practice. She found that if she opened herself up to the Force it was easier, she was able to hit targets better and more accurately, and that would be one or two or three less ships firing on their friends.
She saw two of the TIEs leave their positions above the walkers in order to follow the Falcon, and she called into her headset, "Chewie! Peel off from the battle! Draw them away from the speeders!"
He yowled an affirmative and accelerated away from the battlefield with those and even more TIEs chasing behind them. Rey continued shooting and after a minute or two realized that they were flying into the gaping red wound of a canyon in the salt flats, where the crystalline walls were narrow and there was less room for several fighters to maneuver around each other and chase a target.
Rey remembered doing something similar in the Star Destroyer on Jakku, what seemed like a hundred years ago already. Chewie was better at it.
Two fighters misread each other's signals and crashed into each other, and Rey shot at anything that followed them. Soon enough, those were taken care of.
When they were clear of enemies and safely out of the canyon, Rey made her way back to the cockpit as the Falcon swooped over the battlefield, and her heart dropped as she saw the massive scorched hole in the shield door, with the First Order close to it. And then, all the guns started firing at once, at one very specific point.
Rey and Chewie looked at each other.
"Better go around the back," she said.
They did.
Behind the mine was a ridge over a deep fissure in the ground. They flew slowly, with Artoo plugging into the ship to access its sensors, beeping unhappily.
"The beacon's right beneath us. They've got to be somewhere," Rey said. "Keep scanning for life forms."
After a minute, Artoo began warbling excitedly to get her attention, and she looked out of the viewport to see dozens of crystal foxes coming out of a fissure in the mountainside.
Chewie landed the Falcon, and Rey was already at the landing ramp, setting it down the moment she was able. Jumping down terrain hadn't ever been a problem for her, so she scrambled down into the fissure, and when she got to the bottom, she found the scene before her to be more daunting than she'd expected. It was a massive wall of boulders as high as the one she'd just climbed down, but she could see the narrow crack where the foxes had escaped. There was no other way in back here, and there was no way to get past the First Order out front.
"Lifting rocks," she muttered with a sigh.
She didn't know what she was doing, still. Not really. But so far, most of what she'd been able to do had involved just trusting that she'd figure out how to do it. So, all right. Rey closed her eyes, and lifted her hand, focusing on finding and lifting one single rock. And after that, another single rock. And another. It was like that first lesson on Ahch-To, instead of experiencing everything at once, it was focusing on small pieces of it, while keeping everything else in mind. She could feel them all individually and all together at once, keeping them levitated while she found the next rock, and the next...
She didn't know how long she was at it. But when Rey opened her eyes to check her progress, she was shocked to see that she'd essentially lifted the mountainside. The rocks, everything from pebbles and dust to boulders the same size as herself, were hovering in midair, revealing people standing at the new opening and gawking at her. At the front of the group was Finn, alive and well after she'd left him in a medical pod. He stared at her in surprise for a moment- it was entirely possible he didn't know she could do this at all- and then he started running towards her, not caring about anything else.
With the opening cleared for people to escape, Rey let the rocks fall to the ground as if they weighed nothing, walking towards him to meet him halfway. He got to her first, immediately pulling her into a tight hug. Neither of them said anything, but it was the best she'd felt in a very, very long time. After all the hurt and lies and anger and disappointment over the last few days, this was exactly what she needed.
The group had to get up the side of the fissure to where the ship was parked, which took some time, and Rey was busy shooing the Resistance fighters on board the Falcon when she felt it, and she reached out to grab the nearest solid object to steady herself. There was Luke, suddenly on the edge of her consciousness, or maybe he'd already been there in a way and she hadn't realized before now, and then… he wasn't.
So.
Now it was just her.
She held it together, got everyone else on board, and made sure she was the last one on. At the top of the landing ramp, she felt that familiar tremor in the Force, that live wire buzzing around the edges, the one that she felt anytime she was about to have company.
There was Kylo, standing on the ground before her, looking up at her and watching her reaction. He didn't say anything, and neither did she. He was upset- not just rage, but grief and disappointment and loneliness and what felt like a thousand other swirling emotions that she wouldn't have wanted to pick out individually. Some of it had to do with her, and Luke, and every single person he felt had ever wronged him. Rey could have pitied him, she supposed, but he had done this to himself. Luke had made mistakes, and Kylo's choices weren't simple, or easy, but he'd been the one to make them.
Now he had to live with it.
She decided she didn't want to see him anymore, and just like that, the connection severed, and Rey closed the door to the Falcon so they could leave him and the entire First Order behind.
Chewie got them safely into hyperspace, though Rey wasn't entirely sure where they were going. Away, to start. There was a devastatingly small amount of Resistance fighters on board, but at the same time it was too many people in a small area, all milling around, with several people and droids being reunited and finally taking the moment to talk.
Like BB-8, who rolled over to Rey, beeping with excitement to see her again. She smiled and knelt in front of him to give him a pat, and lightly tweaked the new antenna that had been put on since she'd left. "I like it," she told him.
Someone else, a dark-haired man in a jacket, walked up to talk to her, and Rey stood up meet him. "Hi, I'm Poe," he said, offering his hand.
Oh! Him! She'd heard enough from BB-8 about him, and slightly less from Finn due to not having been around him the last week or so, and was glad to meet finally him. She shook his hand, and said, "I'm Rey."
He gave her a look, as if he wasn't sure why she felt the need to say that. "Yeah, I know."
She somehow hadn't considered that word would have made its way around about her, even after she'd held boulders in the air to save their lives not long ago, even though she'd been the girl who had taken off to find Luke Skywalker. People had pinned their hopes on her, too. She just hadn't thought that someone important to the Resistance would care who she was, let alone make a point of introducing himself because he knew who she was.
She talked with him for a few minutes, then found a place to sit that didn't have anyone already sitting there. Everyone else had their own discussions going, and while she was alone among them, she pulled the two halves of the lightsaber from where she'd had them hanging on her belt and studied them. She didn't know what to do with it now. Maybe it could be fixed, but she didn't know much about how they worked, so putting an ancient weapon back together correctly felt like a lot. Maybe there was something in the ancient texts?
She looked toward the drawer where she'd stowed them, and saw Finn rifling around in there for a blanket to put over Rose, unconscious in the relief bunk. Rey hadn't actually gotten to meet her yet, since she'd already been hurt when the Falcon arrived, but as she watched him, she knew that already she was going to have to share him. While she'd been off in relative isolation, he'd been here, with these people, forging relationships. It wasn't jealousy, per se, just… one more thing she had to view from the outside, and it made her heart ache a little.
It'd been a long… however many days, and by now she had conflicting emotions about everything, and it felt unfair.
She turned away from them when Leia took the seat next to her. She looked all right, considering, but sad, and quiet. If Rey had had a bad time of it, she could only imagine what Leia was going through. She'd lost her husband, her brother, her son, her rebellion, and the people and friends that had been a part of it.
And not knowing what else to do, Rey said quietly, "Luke is gone. I felt it. But it wasn't sadness or pain. It was peace, and purpose."
Leia nodded. "I felt it, too."
Rey couldn't help but feel guilty. Leia had sent her on this mission to find Luke and bring him back, and she'd failed. She'd taken it upon herself to complete a new mission, and failed at that, too. And for some reason, when something terrible happened, Leia came to check in with her.
She looked around at the fighters around them and asked, "How do we build a rebellion from this?"
And Leia, sad as she was, within as much to worry about as she did, laid her hand on top of Rey's and smiled. "We have everything we need."
Rey found she believed that, too.
[And done with current movie canon! NFB, NFI.]