She almost missed it, initially.
Sliding down the belly of the old Star Destroyer, the rope held tightly in both hands and her eyes on her fast-approaching landing, the last thing Rey was looking for was the glint of the old lightsaber. The bottom was farther away then it seemed, and the rope pulled taut with another four or five meters of empty space to the floor.
She dangled in the dusty air. "Blasted rope", she muttered to herself, scanning the interior of the ship for a ledge, a landing spot, even a pile of garbage, anything which would soften her fall. Enough bones had been broken in her years as a scavenger, and Rey was in no great hurry to break any more. Even without broken bones the past few weeks had been strained, with the presence of the First Order troops creating an urgency at the trading post which was new and entirely too unsettling for her tastes.
Not that she had much to trade anyway. The First Order was reclaiming and gutting old ships, making it nearly impossible for even the best scavengers to reach their daily quotas. Food had been scarce, with Unkar Plutt being especially stingy with rations. Even Rey, who fancied herself an excellent scavenger, had gone hungry more days than she cared to think about.
A burning in her shoulders pulled her out of her thoughts. There were more important things to worry about at the moment.
No obvious ways to climb or jump down stood out to her. Sighing, Rey took a look around and closed her eyes, shutting out the dust which was speckled by the hot sun gleaming through the cracks in the hull of the ship. She blocked out the creaking of the metal and the rope, the sand shifting outside, and listened to her own breathing.
There had been times when she had almost heard voices, whispering where to go to find the best parts or which way to turn when she was hopelessly lost in the belly of an ancient cruiser. It seemed like that could be her best chance to make it out of the current situation. She stilled her breath, concentrating.
Rey.
Shocked, her eyes flew open as she noticed a strange glint by one wall. With that her concentration broke, right before the sensation of falling hit her. In that half second of lost focus, she had let go of the rope.
The fall was, surprisingly, not as bad as she had previously imagined. The landing was much worse. Rey felt the sting of cold metal as she hit the bottom of the shaft, then nothing more than darkness.
Nearly fifteen feet below the end of the wildly swinging rope lay the figure of the girl, sun-speckled and undernourished, crumpled where her fall had deposited her. She groaned, opening her eyes. She put her hand to her head, checking for blood. Nothing but her own sweat trickled over her palm, and with a grunt of relief she checked the rest of her body. Besides a probable concussion and a great deal of bruising, nothing seemed to be broken.
Offering a silent prayer of thanks to anyone who might be listening, Rey sat up slowly, pausing to take a sip of her water before attempting to stand. As she screwed the lid back on, she studied her surroundings. It shouldn't have been possible to walk away from a fifteen foot drop with only bruising, and yet here she was.
She shook her head, trying to clear her thoughts, and grabbed at a nearby shelf for support as she made the attempt to stand up.
That was a mistake. The shelf came crashing down around her, engulfing her in rusted metal and old equipment with a sound that probably could have been heard in Plutt's own house, back at the trading post.
Stunned, motionless beneath the ruins, she cursed herself. "Idiot, what did you think was going to happen?" In her daze she had almost forgotten the state of disrepair the Star Destroyer was in, and had nearly killed herself twice in less than five minutes.
The weight of the metal digging in between her ribs and on her legs hurt, and she begrudgingly began to work her way out of it. Shoving aside a metal spike (she could have been impaled), Rey made a grab for her fallen gear through the wreckage. However, her fingertips brushed something else entirely.
The metal was cool and smooth beneath her skin, a contrast to the torn metal shelves which had toppled down on her. Frowning, she pulled it out from under the remains.
It looked oddly familiar. Something tugged at the back of her memory and then she grasped it. A lightsaber. A relic of the late Jedi order, which she had only imagined in dreams. Rey was never quite sure that the Jedi had even existed. With the galaxy so torn by war, how could peace have ever lasted? But the cylinder fit into her hand as if it had been made for her, the design simple yet elegant. The weapon of a more civilized age. She stared at it as if in a trance, and slowly, hardly realizing what she was doing, ignited it.
Rey. Fulfill your destiny.
The voice from earlier, speaking as if directly into her ear. She gasped and swung around wildly, expecting to see a face to put with the nameless voice. There was no one. She was alone.
Rey didn't know what she had expected, and as she extinguished the bright blue flame and turned the handle over in her hand she convinced herself that these voices in her head were nothing more than figments of her imagination, brought on by the concussion. The lightsaber, though, would feed her for a week.
Her stomach growled at the thought, and as she tucked it safely into her bag she dwelled no more on the strange voices in the ancient ship.