A/N: A little bit of TFA-era (and before) force bond.
Jakku is cold at night.
Sand storms, by their nature, bring heat. They carry with them grit and friction and fury, all beneath an insolent, all-powerful sun.
And then—then, when the winds settle and clear the air, there is nothing left.
So it is at night.
Rey learns to sleep curled up as tightly as possible, knees almost to chin. Hands tucked under her arms, fingers locked like the curving shells she's seen hanging from traders' belts.
Her family must not come at night. If they do, they might miss her all together, what with her making herself as small as she can. Her family must not come at night.
But something does. She finds warmth and whispers in a small, shadowed realm of her mind, lets that warmth work its way down through throat to rib-cage to the pit of her belly, and she sleeps.
.
(Nothing. You come from nobody.)
(No one is ever really gone.)
She will not hear any of this for years, but she will hear whispers.
.
Rey's eyes are brown. So are the eyes she sees in her dreams. But they are not her family's eyes; no, these eyes belong to a face. Pale, a little crooked of expression and a little tight with pain.
She does not remember what her family even looks like.
She won't lose this memory, either.
(If a memory is even what it is.)
.
She doesn't think she belongs here. Rey, to be fair, has never thought about belonging. Waiting—that was her only practice and her only prayer.
She is not the welcomed defector, like Finn, or the Resistance's golden heart. She is, by necessity, an unknown.
Girl. Scavenger.
He lifts the helmet and he is all pale skin, dark eyes, and a little tight with pain.
Before he even searched within her, it was as though he already knew.
.
The idea haunts her, when it has time to. After snow and blood and fire and fight are all one and all nothing, she hunches, knee to chin, and remembers the memory that isn't a memory.
She is shaking with cold. Beside her, Finn is very still. She does not know if he will—she does not know.
Rey reaches for that tendril of warmth in the hollow of her mind, and cannot find it. Instead, she finds anger.
Wonders, somehow, why they belong to the same place.