A/N: Title is a snippet from the Odyssey.
Jakku is a sunburnt planet. The storms rise from the earth; they do not fall from the heavens. The sand dances and whispers, and it filters down like grit and ashes after the wild winds pass.
Back then, in the day-in, day-out rhythm of her life after being left, but before leaving, Rey would sit at the edge of her makeshift home. She would run her fingertips through the sand, let it roughen and burn her hands in an intimate, almost pleasant way. The tactile pains of familiarity, of heat curling around her as she bumps along by day on her tired speeder, of the great empty sky at night that sends the winds down upon Jakku a little too cruelly—these, she knows.
The tactile, familiar pain of waiting. That settles in her throat, and it tastes like ashes. That, she knows better than anything else.
It's almost the only thing she takes with her.
...
You see the same eyes in different people, Maz says. If this was a different world, a different war, Rey would have asked her so much more. Whose eyes do you see in my face? Am I more than myself?
But this the war that chose her, the world that plucked her out of the desert sands and only gave her enough time to keep running. She is drawn towards the gleaming silver weapon, she is drawn to the whispers and the cries that flit about her mind like the gauzy shapes of ghosts, and—
Red flames the lightsaber, whining and sizzling, deathly close.
Red. The city burns, she runs, she fights.
She does not escape.
...
She's afraid of seeing different eyes in the same people, people who no longer know her.
She's afraid of never seeing them again at all.
...
Rey grows up, but she only knows it in the moments after. After, she will reflect that the changes came the moment after she saves Finn from the dreadful tentacled rathtars, the moment she hears these are your first steps, the moment Han Solo falls from the bridge and the little piece of her heart that kept playing Chewie likes you over and over falls too. She grows up, and she realizes that she only tastes the burnt sands of Jakku on her lips in the brief, dreamy time before she falls asleep.
...
She isn't going back to Jakku.
It no longer seems important.
She still dreams of her family. But now she dreams of Finn, the boy who came back. And she dreams of the monster with the boy's face, the boy with the monster's face—she does not know which it is. She only knows that he killed his father, and that his father loved him anyway.
She only knows that he haunts her dream and the whine and sizzle of his lightsaber makes her sweat and chill by turns at night, fighting, always fighting.
She misses Finn. She does not miss Jakku as much as she thought she would.
Maybe it was never really Jakku she loved.
...
Luke Skywalker carries a great weight. She sees it in the lines of his face, in the empty spaces around him where his family and friends should be. Rey does not belong in those spaces, not yet. But she belongs here, and the lightsaber belongs in her hand.
Train me, she demands, because she has a right to, because she flies Han Solo's ship and she bested Han Solo's son and Leia trusts her and she must see Finn again someday, but not until she is ready.
...
The Force comes naturally, not easily. Every night she sleeps in this ancient place, anew made green by turning seasons, and her very bones seems to sink into the moss the grows on every stone. It is exhausting.
(She wonders if he is dead, the monster-boy-man with the gash across his face and the wounds in his heart that showed behind his eyes. She wonders if it would be her fault.)
(He killed his father, but she wonders if he loved his father anyway.)
There will be enemies to come, whoever they are. Rey grinds her teeth and realizes again that the Force cannot be forced.
Give more than you take, Luke tells her.
I have nothing to give, I never have, Rey answers, and suddenly she is crumpling to the ground, weeping as she has not let herself since the day on the snow-covered planet with destruction at its heart.
Luke Skywalker watches her impassively, without comfort or rebuke. Rey wipes the salt from her eyes as she used to wipe the sand, across her sleeve and then squinting, searching for the light.
She gets back up.