"Her name was Mara," he says.
Rey rakes her hand across her face, pulls her wind-swept hair back and tucks it behind her ear. His voice is soft, gravelly, as though he hasn't just been trying to find the words but the voice itself.
This is the first thing he has said to her since she arrived on this planet, but Rey is hardly surprised that this is what he chooses first to reveal. His every waking moment is spent before the gravestone where she first found him, this man who wanted to stay hidden but ran out of places to run.
"She was a Jedi."
But for as distant as he keeps himself physically from her, from everyone he once knew, what doesn't stay hidden is his grief. It hits her like a sonic boom everymorning, a grief folded upon itself, heavy as a mountain, infinite as a black hole. She is untrained in the use of the Force, but even though she cannot read it yet, she can still see the ripple of pain and despair radiating from him, see its gradation of shades that she understands on a certain level to be more than just about one person or one event. But that he opens up at all, it's a start. She will take it as she did the crumbs of food from Unkar Platt. They both are means to survival.
Luke Skywalker's head drops to his chest, and Rey sees his shoulders fall, his hands move toward the lightsaber she presented to him the moment she first knew it was him. A man, not a myth. And a very lonely man at that. Rey doesn't know why he ran nor what he was running from, nor does she know what keeps him here, but loneliness is one thing she understands, and so her heart hurts for him.
He holds out the lightsaber to show her, turning the metal hilt over with his hands. "This was hers, and mine before that." He pauses, a ghost of a smile touching his features, and Rey expects him to continue, but the words die on his lips, leaving her with yet another mystery.
She wonders at the history of this weapon. When she touched it back in Maz Kanata's, she had been bombarded by voices and images, but there had been no vision of a woman, no voice saying her name. If this had been this Mara Jade's, then where was she? What was her story? Why has her death broken the once great hero of the rebellion?
"Where did you find this?"
Rey takes a breath, considering her words. "It found me." She shakes his head. "I mean, I came upon it at Maz Katana's place. It was in a box. She said that it was yours and that she had been safekeeping it, and that it was calling to...to me. The Force," she says, "it was calling to me. And now it is calling me to you."
It seems a lifetime ago, but it's been what, two weeks? She still wakes up thinking she is at home in her AT-AT walker on Jakku and automatically stands up to shake the nonexistent sand from her clothes. And what has happened in that space of time could have filled her life in the long years before that. Meeting Han Solo only to watch him die. Meeting Finn, her first true friend, but leaving him before he could wake from his long sleep. The sound of the crashing waves has to bring her back each morning, it brings her back now. She reminds herself to be strong. She has been strong all her life and refuses to stop now.
Luke Skywalker considers her for a moment; she stares, listening to the pounding of blood in her ears.
"What is your name, girl?" he asks.
"Rey."
There is a ripple in the Force. And maybe it's the angle of the sun, the way the light reflects off the water or the stone, but she sees his eyes darken, she sees them suddenly filled with tears.
"Rey," he echos. His hands tighten around the lightsaber.
She touches her face to swipe at another loose tendril of hair; pulls her hand away to find her finger tips wet with her own tears. She steps toward him, afraid for a moment. Afraid that she will say the wrong thing, that he'll say no, that she'll have waited too long or asked too soon. "Will you come back?" she asks. "Will you come with me?"