On this mountain, green as hope in the center of a sea-trapped planet, Rey does not learn patience.
Nor does she learn peace.
One she already knows, from the long days and longer nights of her in-between. One is not hers to hold.
.
The first day Luke's eyes darken is the day she knows she must leave. He fears her, and fear is no fit teacher. She knows that before he says the words.
And then she pulls the threads of memory together, and thinks that the pale-faced soul in the demon's mask is son and nephew, and just as the sands of Jakku hold the whispers of Rey's past, the lines of Luke's face tell their own tale.
"Is it him?" she asks, while the world simmers around her. The sea is crashing in the distance, but the sea is always crashing. It never storms here, but the waves beat themselves to exhaustion against cragged castles of refusal all the same. "Is he the one who—"
Luke's eyes answer the question before he does.
.
As an orphan, she was self-contained. Scavenge and hunt and dream, all in the space of mind and hands. There was no one to talk to, to really talk to, and so Rey is not exactly lonely when she sets out alone, leaving Luke behind.
The lightsaber stings cold against her side. It is a silent thing, sleeping with purpose.
She is not exactly lonely, at least, her orphan self would not be.
But that Rey is gone, all scraped blank by sand and wind and the day in the marketplace, when it all began.
.
Without Luke to demand an accounting of her dreams, they run more freely. She sees Finn, healing and fighting. She sees Leia, with a gaze that is all tragedy and a smile that is all courage.
And she sees the nameless boy beneath the named monster, and when his hands find her skin, they burn.
(But not like fire burns.)
.
She has seen too many planets die for someone as young as she is. But no—she must not think that way. War comes in a time of children as much as in a time of kings.
There are no kings left here.
Rey knows that some people die by being forgotten, and some die close and fever-bright with sacrifice, and some live forever because they are hidden.
She does not know which fate is worst, or which is hers.
.
Luke taught her many things. How to guide the voices in her head, how to raise heaven and earth with a thrust of her hand and a stabbing pain in her chest, how to wield the arc and color of the saber, letting it become her and she it.
But Luke could not teach her what he does not want to know. And Luke is weary, Luke is old, Luke is lonely, and he is missing more than a hand.
.
At night, she feels as though she and Han's son are the only people left in the galaxy. If it were true, she does not know what else would be true, too.
She nearly killed him, but she is certain that he still lives. More certain than that is the knowledge that he is the answer to the questions she has not yet dared ask—
And that he is the darkness in light as surely as she is the reverse.
.
When she finds him—
But they find each other.
And when they do, he holds out his hand, he holds out a future, he holds out a bridge through fire to the other side of the war and the world.
She takes it.