CHAPTER ONE
The Poor Man's Daughter
Trigger warning for descriptions of child abuse.
Rey searches the much picked over wreck of an imperial-class star destroyer, looking through its hollowed out innards for choice pieces. Prizes that might buy portions for herself and her family. The old ship is a graveyard of oxidized junk, already looted many times, and so she climbs high—higher than Lari likes, and her oldest sister calls up, saying, "Be careful!"
Rey has always been the most sure-footed, the strongest and most graceful of her sisters. She isn't afraid to fall, because she knows with a strange sort of certainty that she won't.
She wrenches rusted panelling out of the way and digs through the dead machinery beneath, until she finds what she's looking for: a crystal resonator.
"Got it!" Rey shouts, and then she starts the long climb back down. They're out of rope, and haven't been able to afford to buy more at Niima Outpost, so there will be no quick descent today. It's so warm that Rey can barely breathe, a muggy, suffocating heat that makes her sweat all over. By the time she reaches the ground, her shirt is sticking to her back, and her mouth feels drier than the sands outside.
"Have you got any water left?" Lari asks her.
"No," Rey says, surly.
"What have I told you about saving some for the trip home?" Perra rolls her pretty blue eyes, but she gives Rey her own canteen just the same.
She takes a shallow sip, careful not to drink the last of her sister's water, grateful and a little irritated at once.
They carry their finds back to the three-seated speeder that Lari built four years ago. Her sister can make anything out of the right kind of junk, and even this thrown together vehicle—pieced into purpose out of things abandoned and unwanted—runs better than any other that frequents Niima. Rey knows the ins and outs of every bit of imperial and rebel tech to fall to its destruction on Jakku, but she doesn't have Lari's keen, creative eye for construction.
Once the speeder is loaded, they climb up, Rey into the driver's seat, and make the trip to the outpost. They had to go a long way to find a wreck worth scavenging, so it takes a good hour to reach Niima. Perra, the fastidious one of the three of them, scrubs their most valuable pieces at the acid baths, and then Lari spearheads the bartering with Unkar Plutt. She knows the worth of the tech better than Perra—who hates scavenging almost as much as she hates the desert—and she's far more diplomatic than Rey.
The Blobfish tries to cheat them, offering less than half of what the crystal resonator is worth, but Lari manages to talk him up to a more reasonable price in that calm, firm way she has. They walk away with enough portions to feed their whole family for the night and a small pack of painkillers for Mum.
"It's not a bad haul," Perra says. Then she reaches over and ruffles Rey's trio of buns, no doubt simply to annoy her.
"Quit that—" Rey hisses, but she's only just swatted Perra's hand away when she sees a tall man on the outskirts of Niima, trying to mount their speeder.
"Hey!" she shouts. "Get your hands off that!"
She sprints to the speeder, which is revving to life, and pulls her quarterstaff as she runs. Rey recognizes the man now as Helok Zar, a skinny scavenger who's been growing thinner by the day. No doubt desperation drove him to thievery, but Rey doesn't care whether he's starving or not. Without that speeder, her family doesn't eat. Without that speeder, her mother could die.
She knocks him out of the driver's seat with a vicious blow to the stomach. Zar falls to the ground, cursing and groaning, gripping his middle. Rey hits him again, this time across the back of the head, and he slumps to the sands, clearly dizzy and disoriented, but not unconscious. She should stop, she knows that, but every blow makes her feel stronger, more powerful and less defeated by this desert, less bound to this life. Rey smacks him across the face with the end of her staff, and Zar spits out blood and teeth. She makes to kick him in the belly too, but then she hears, as if from far away, that Lari is shouting and Perra is crying, both begging her to stop.
She lowers her weapon and looks at Zar, really looks for the first time since she saw him trying to make off with their speeder. He's skin and bones, really, half-dead already, and now he has a seeping head wound and a broken mouth.
"Let's go," Rey says. "We need to get this medicine to Mum."
She takes her seat at the front of the speeder and waits for her sisters to climb up after her.
"You went too far," Lari says.
Perra frowns at Zar, trembling and bleeding on the ground. "Maybe we should help him—"
"You're too soft-hearted," Rey says, but her voice shakes a little on the reprimand.
For the whole ride home, it isn't the sight of Helok Zar, injured and starved, that haunts her, though. It's that sensation she had when she attacked him, the power and purpose that flooded her veins. It made her feel alive.
Rey's home is a one-room shack, a hybrid of scavenged pieces, the child of rebel and imperial wreckage: sand-coated, rusting, and lopsided. There are two pallets of musty blankets, and Mum lies on the smaller one, eating pieces of green protein pith and water bread from Perra's hand. Every minute or so the quiet of the house is broken by her mother's coughing. The rough sound of a dying woman's hacking and the rattling breaths in between.
Jakku offers little in the way of medical treatment. Painkillers and cough suppressants are the best they can scrounge at Niima Outpost, but even those are costly, and they do little enough to help ease Mum's suffering.
A wooden crate serves as the table, and this is where Rey, Lari, and their father sit now.
"How's Mum been today?" Rey whispers. She keeps her voice down because her mother doesn't like it when her daughters ask after her health.
Dad chews his bread, thoughtful and quiet as always, before he swallows and says, "No better. No worse."
Rey nods and returns to eating her own food. She's so hungry that she wants to shovel it into her mouth and lick her fingers clean, but her father hates it when she does that. He tells her not to eat like an animal, no matter how famished she is. So Rey forces herself to eat slowly and carefully, hoping that she won't earn Dad's anger somehow.
That hope is short-lived, because Lari says, "A man tried to steal our speeder today."
Dad looks up, directly at Rey, and asks, "How did you stop him?"
She knows what's coming already. The blame, the fury, the punishment. Whenever Rey gets in a fight, no matter how justified, it's always the same.
"I beat him," she says, picking at her bread. "Is that what you want to hear?"
Dad scowls. "You know it isn't."
"What should I have done? Let a thief steal our speeder?" Rey asks.
She's treading dangerous ground now. Her father hates being talked back to, and he's quick to raise a hand to her when she smarts off at him. Rey has been smacked in the face more times than she can count for comments less provocative than this, and she can tell from Dad's hard expression that he's close to coming around the crate and backhanding her.
He never hits Lari or Perra. Just Rey. When she was a child, she wondered why this was, what she'd done wrong to deserve the pain. Now she doesn't bother giving it any consideration; she gave up on understanding her father many years ago.
"One more fight and I'm taking your quarterstaff," Dad warns. "Now leave the table."
"I'm not done eating," Rey says, and she hates how timid she sounds. How weak. She's a strong girl, but in the face of her father's anger she always grows so small.
"Lari can have the rest of your food." Her father reaches across the crate and pushes Rey's plate over to her sister.
"Dad, please don't do that," Lari says, and she sounds suddenly panicked. "Rey was just protecting us—"
"Be quiet and do as you're told," he says, in a tone that brooks no argument.
Rey leaves the table and goes outside. Their whole ramshackle house shakes when she slams the door behind her, but she doesn't care. Let the whole damn thing fall down, for all it matters to her. Rey hates this broken home and her hard-handed father. Hates her mother, who rarely speaks up in her defense, and her sisters, who never get punished.
She sits in the sand with her back pressed against the metal wall of her scavenged house, fighting hunger pains and tears. Her stomach growls fiercely, twists in the very pit of her, and to distract herself from this hurt, Rey starts picking out constellations in the star-speckled sky. Mum taught her how to find them when she was a little girl, before she fell so ill.
For a moment—just a moment—she allows herself to imagine a world outside of Jakku. A far away place, green and beautiful, where she could be free.
Author's Notes: This is the first chapter of my story for the Reylo fairy tale anthology, Keeping the Stars Apart, which Next to Something and I are heading up! The sign-up period is closed, but if you want to keep up with the project, follow reylofanfictionanthology over at tumblr. I chose the fairy tale East of the Sun and West of the Moon for my retelling. So, if you're familiar with that story, you can probably guess what's coming up in Chapter 2. ;)
The title of this story comes from a quote from Edith Pattou's lovely novel East: "That's the trouble with loving a wild thing: You're always left watching the door." Also, the illustration I used to make the cover for this fic is by Kay Nielsen. (It was labeled as available for reuse with modification by Google images.)