The mood at the Resistance base is a strange double-sided thing, memorials and mourning and fear and hope mixed in a way that sits sour in Rey's stomach. She repairs the Falcon with Chewie, sits at Finn's bedside with his pilot friend ("he'll be okay," Poe Dameron says, and she appreciates both the confidence and the worry she senses under it), and tries to ignore the absence that seems to shadow General Organa like a tangible thing. Rey has been left behind, but she can't imagine what it feels like to lose so much so quickly.
Which is why she tells no one - not Poe, not Chewie, no one - that if Finn is not okay, if he dies or doesn't wake up, she will use the power thrumming under her skin to hunt down Kylo Ren and murder him in cold blood, the General's grief be damned.
(When she dreams, she falls.)
There is a man sitting next to her in the Falcon's cockpit, where Chewie ought to be. Rey wonders why she isn't surprised to find him there, or why it doesn't bother her that she can't seem to focus on his face.
"You're a good pilot," he says.
Rey has the sudden and distinct impression that he's even worse at conversation than she is.
She takes a deep breath and rests her fingertips on the controls to ground herself. The man is a strange jittery tangle of a presence, like a sun caught in a net. "What are you doing here?"
"I don't know," he admits. "I thought I should try."
"Try what?"
She catches a glimpse of his face, just for a moment. He is young and stubborn and ashamed.
"Being here," he says.
She wakes up to the proximity alarm and Chewie shaking her shoulder. They're getting ready to drop out of hyperspace.
On Jakku, she developed a good eye for the real value of scrap and salvage. She knows that a TIE fighter's backup power regulator is worthless, but a B-Wing's will get a half portion on a good day. She knows that the cost of water goes up when there are more than three smugglers' ships at Niima Outpost.
She knows that nothing in the galaxy is ever actually free.
Rey can do things she couldn't have days earlier. She is a part of something now. She has people who will keep their promises, who will come back for her.
(She pays a price; now, she has loved ones she can lose.)
She is in the desert. It isn't anywhere on Jakku she's ever been. Possibly it isn't even Jakku at all.
"I'm worried that you're not enough like him," the man from the cockpit says. He ought to look ridiculous standing in the middle of sand dunes, waiting for heat stroke and thirst to claim him. Somehow, he doesn't.
Rey decides this is a dream. She's not entirely sure that makes it any less real.
"Like who?" she asks.
"Luke."
She can safely say she is nothing like Luke Skywalker. "Should I be?"
The man's shoulders slump like the weight of a planet is sitting on them. His presence flickers and stutters, and she is reminded less of a sun and more of standing in the empty echoing darkness of a broken battleship as her lamp goes out. "There are worse people you could take after."
Something prickles at the edges of Rey's mind. "I should know you." she says as she stares at him. "Why should I know you?"
He smiles. This time he is old and scarred and bone-weary. "Of course you should," he says. "We have too much in common."
With the Republic in chaos, the Resistance scrambles for funding and support. A man with a quick smile and a fancy septsilk cloak worth at least two portions arrives first. He disappears into a room with the General and Luke Skywalker and several other very important people, and when he emerges he looks ten years older and isn't smiling anymore.
("General Calrissian," Poe explains to her. Rey's heard stories. They leave out the cloak.)
The other new arrival is a very very old man, the oldest human Rey has ever seen, bent double and white-bearded and white-haired. He is some kind of expert in guerrilla warfare and jury-rigging old weapons into newer deadlier weapons. He also stops dead when he sees Rey, lightsaber dangling from her belt, engine grease smeared on her face and BB-8 in cheerful orbit around her like a small satellite; his whole face crinkles up with his smile and he pats her arm like she's a grandchild he's particularly fond of.
("One of the old clone soldiers," Poe says, and Rey will never be able to explain the strange chill that runs through her.)
She knows it's a dream, now. There is no waking reason for her to set foot on a nightmare world of black rocks and burning red rivers. There is nothing in this place but blood and death and faded pain like an old bruise.
The man is looking up at her from the riverbank. She has the high ground.
"Don't stand there," she snaps at him, feeling sick. "You'll burn."
He laughs. It's ugly and unpleasant. For a strange surreal moment, it reminds her of Kylo Ren. She gives serious consideration to pushing the man into the molten river.
"I'm sorry," he says, suddenly human again, or near enough. "That wasn't funny." He sounds very young now. She wonders if he knows how old he is, or even who or what he is, or if he's somehow come unstuck in this strange dream world they seem to be sharing.
"Who are you?" she asks again.
He looks out over the river. "You know who I am."
And she does, somehow. She's not sure she will know when she wakes up, but that's the waking world and this is something else. "You're what he wants to be?" she snaps, suddenly angry in a way that makes power fizzle under her skin. "You're the reason - "
She makes herself stop. She can sense the bloodshed hanging from him like a tattered cloak and there is a metallic taste in the air that makes bile rise in her throat.
"Why?" she tries again, even though she's not even sure what she's asking.
He frowns at her like he expects her to already know the answer.
"To save someone I loved," he says.
"I knew a Jedi like you," the grizzled old soldier tells her. "The greatest Jedi there ever was."
She doesn't miss the look the General and Skywalker exchange.
She walks into the infirmary and Finn's bed is empty and the doctors won't meet her eyes.
For a long horrible moment her grief cracks foundations and shatters supports (she falls and pulls the Resistance down with her) but no, no, it's not real. She would know, the fizzling crackling power inside her tells her. She would know.
"He's not going to die," she tells the man.
He looks almost sympathetic. "What if he does?"
"He won't."
"You know what you'll do."
Rey holds out her hand in a benediction and wishes the ruined base whole. She moves closer to the man, one step after another as he flickers between young and old. The strange eerie calm she felt at Starkiller Base settles over her.
"I don't," she says. "But neither do you. I'm not you."
He rests warm hands on her shoulders and gives her a lopsided sort of grin, like a proud parent. "I know you're not. Don't forget that."
She wakes up with wet cheeks and her head pillowed on her arms and Finn blinking blearily at her, asking in a croaking voice if she's all right and where the hell they are.
When she dreams, she falls.
She flings her arms out, steady and sure, and catches the hands waiting to pull her back up.