When Rey was five years old, she was left on Jakku. A life before that, she barely remembered. She remembered hiding in the engine rooms of ships, and staying close to a figure clad in black in lifeless, brightly-lit city-planets. It wasn't until a long time after she'd finally left the desert planet that she came to remember more details.
For many years, she dreamed of the waterworld that she eventually discovered was Anch-To. She saw Han and Leia and Luke's faces, although she always assumed they— and Ben Solo and Poe Dameron and Finn— were her family. Visions of the future on that junkyard were so vivid, she believed it had to be her past.
But as she went to sleep at night on the Millennium Falcon, details of her past began to drift back to her.
"I'll be back for you, sweetheart. I promise."
A woman had said that— her mother.
She wore black.
She had red hair— reddish-brown, maybe, she wasn't sure.
A memory:
Curled up next to her mother, in a lower-level apartment in Coruscant, she tells her daughter a story. The story of an ancient Jedi Knight who slew a krayt-dragon. Rey loves it— she loved her mother's tales of ancient Jedi and Sith.
She knew the stories by heart. But for the longest time she could never remember the source until now.
"I promise."
When the crew landed on Naboo, and began rebuilding the ashes of the Resistance with the Naberries, more details came back.
Something was wrong about her childhood. Not just that her mother had left her in the care of Unkar Plutt.
But that her mother hid from the world, that she was constantly moving addresses in Coruscant. Rey wasn't allowed outside on her own. There was occasionally a man named Karrde, but mostly she didn't meet anyone else.
It was as if she was a secret of her mother's.
"I promise."
As she pored through the sacred texts she stole from Luke, and looked to rebuilding her lightsaber, she began to recall another lightsaber. Not the green one Luke sometimes carried, or the Skywalker lightsaber she summoned. Certainly not like Ben— Kylo Ren's.
She has to correct herself sometimes.
It was on her mother's hip. A slender silver cylinder, always hanging from the thin brown belt wrapped around her black sleeveless jumpsuit.
A memory:
Rey is alone in a sparse cabin. Her mother just rushed out moments before, muttering something about vornskrs getting loose. The door is locked, and Rey can hear the snarling outside, can sense the fear.
Alone, holding her pilot doll close to her, she opens the trunk at the end of the bed, and sees all sorts of weaponry, all of the highest quality— laid out in their secure place. The only part that isn't strapped in is the silver cylinder.
Rey picks it up and turns it on. The magenta— pink, she called it as a child— blade shimmers into existence.
The light entrances her, and she reaches out to touch it.
"Rey, no!"
The blade spins out of her grasp, perfectly into her mother's gloved hand. She clips it to her belt and closes the door behind her, pounding the button. But when she takes in Rey's fearful eyes, as she clutches her pilot doll, her hazel eyes soften.
She closes the weapons' trunk, and kneels in front of Rey, taking her little hand into hers.
"You can't open Mommy's trunk," she says. "It's dangerous. Especially this lightsaber."
"Lightsaber?" Rey wonders how she never made the connection. "Like. . . Jedi?"
Her mother's expression is hesitant. "There is more to this galaxy than just the Jedi."
"I promise."
"You can see my past." Rey spoke earnestly to Ben.
He wasn't really there— he never was— but that never mattered to them.
"And apparently you can see my future."
"Can you see my mother?" Rey asked.
All traces of sarcasm disappeared. "I saw your parents, how they looked. . . How they died. . . But not much more."
"Can you try?"
He frowned and then that expression of wonder appeared. "Her name was Mara. That's all I can see."
She could kiss him right there. Maybe more.
"I promise."
The mission went wrong. Veranda Calrissian didn't mean to lead them into a trap, as her father once did, a long time ago. But they were all on their knees, in handcuffs, waiting for the judgement and jury of the First Order.
Rey prayed for Ben to hurry— she sensed his rage, that his subordinates wouldn't wait.
First, Hux came, and was followed by a woman in black.
She looked nearly identical to Mara. More brown hair, though, eyes definitely brown, too. Different face, slight differences.
But the resemblance was shocking, for the both of them.
"You're Mara's daughter," she said. Rey could sense her anger. "She took everything from me."
"I promise."
In the cell, Rey dreamed of her mother:
She looks as young as she did the day she left Rey on Jakku.
"Sweetheart," she sobs. "I'm so sorry."
She looks away, to the Jakku desert. "I never wanted to leave you. But my greatest rival, Shira Brie— she was after you. I had already served evil, but you were my one good thing. You were meant to be a great Jedi, when I never was. I had no other choice. I always did mean to come back to you."
When Mara touched her face, Rey woke up. She reached her hand to where her mother's ghostly hand was on her cheek. Then she watched the blue spirit disappear. Giving way to a connection tangible and living: Ben.