Rey's not really sure how to broach the whole having the nightmares of a psychopath thing to Luke, but in the end he makes it easy. They've barely settled cross-legged on the floor of the sparsely-outfitted room when Luke asks, "More nightmares last night?"

"Yes," Rey says, but then she hesitates for a moment, brushing a strand of hair behind one ear. Luke's eyes are studying her intently, warm. "They're not… mine, I think. They're Kylo Ren's nightmares. It's like I'm in his head."

Luke's eyes widen a bit and he rocks back. His stare slides away, contemplative. Finally he asks, "Does he know you're there? Does he… talk to you?"

"I don't think so?" Then she reflects on her most recent nightmares and amends, "Not until last night, at least."

"Have you learned anything about him, what he's doing, where he is..?"

Suddenly she knows where this is going and she shakes her head, her eyes a little wide. "No, it's a jumbled mess, memories and — sometimes I don't know where he stops and I begin, and I hate it." She takes a breath, fixes her stare on Luke. "I hate it. I want it to stop."

He holds her stare for a time before slowly nodding.

"Can you help me block him out?" Rey asks.

Luke sighs, settling his wrists over his knees. "It's a matter of training. We'll keep working. Your control and focus will get better. You'll learn to shut down the connection."

Rey nods as relief washes out through her limbs. "Then let's keep going. I'll try to get into your mind, right? Like before?"

"Yes. Remember to study the way I shield my thoughts. It will help you when it comes time to shield your own." Luke closes his eyes, breathes. "Go ahead."

She closes her eyes too. He's still there, solid in her awareness, a powerful beacon of the Force. When she eases her awareness along the edges of his mind, like she does with Finn or Jess or Iolo, she gets… not exactly nothing. There's a difference between that solid facade of emptiness and the true null of something the Force doesn't interact with, something without a mind.

It feels… hot and dry. It reminds her of Jakku. Of wandering the sand dunes, aimless, monotonous. But she knew where to go on Jakku. In this barren construction, she's lost with no landmarks to guide her.

She tries anyway. Pushes one direction, then the next. She's met with more nothing. It's strange, a flexible sort of barrier, but a barrier all the same.

After a while Rey heaves a sigh and withdraws, opening her eyes to look at Luke. "Maybe if you start by trying to get into my mind?" It was easier to follow the thread of Kylo Ren back into his own head, after all.

But Luke shakes his head without even opening his eyes. "You need to be able to do it this way. You're letting me control it. It's an easy habit to fall into; it is my mind, after all. But to push through someone's defenses, you need to take control."

Rey draws a bit of her lower lip between her teeth as she considers what he's saying. She doesn't like it. She might just know what he means, now, but it reminds her too much of being in Kylo Ren's head in his memory of torturing Poe. Poe's barrier had been a wall, not like Luke's odd expanse of desert. And Poe's barrier hadn't lasted long.

She pushes back into Luke's mind, into the barren place he wraps around his thoughts to trap her. Take control, he said. With a wall, she can break through it. She can be a laser cannon, a vibrosledge, whatever she needs to be to break through — or rather she can shape the Force into any of these. But in Luke's wasteland, she needs another method.

On Jakku, she would navigate by a landmark. She would find something like the Spike to help orient herself. And since none of this is real, she uses the Force to create the Spike in the distance, and there it is — a landmark to move toward. Of course, the moment she starts heading in that direction, the wind begins to pick up with the threat of a sandstorm.

Luke, has to be. Reacting to her changes. But if Rey can create the Spike out of nothing in this wasteland, then she can create more. Suddenly she's beside her speeder, and she climbs onto it and opens the engines, powering across the desert.

But why stop at a speeder? Something bubbly and light pools in Rey at the possibilities of this space where nothing and everything is possible. A twist of thought and now she's in the pilot's chair of a familiar X Wing, the one Poe lets her practice in. She speeds toward the Spike, outpacing the sandstorm, and reaches it in no time. The Spike, the Crackle, all of it as she remembers, vast sections of glassy rock left from the crash of some great ship years ago. Rey circles the spire that sticks up into the desert sky, one of the few remaining pieces of the crashed ship still standing free of the sand.

She can create here, but she's still stuck in the desert buffer Luke put up around his thoughts. What she needs is to cut through the illusion. And as she imagines it, the ground below her fighter splits, sand falling away into a black nothingness.

The scene dissolves from around her. It had been so vivid. Just Luke's way of running her around at the outskirts of his thoughts. But now she feels… bright threads of memories she can reach out for.

She pulls at one:

Luke watches a small girl walking quickly to keep up with the long strides of a gangly, dark-haired teen, and his worry brushes up against Rey — fear for the boy, fear for the little girl. Familiarity seizes up Rey's gut.

That little girl, maybe four years old — that's her. That's Rey. She's even got the same hairstyle Rey so frequently wears.

Another flash, then: Luke's hands pulling tiny Rey's hair into those little loops, one after the other, and tying them off carefully. Both of his hands look like flesh, not like the robotic one he has now. And tiny Rey is babbling about something, trying to pull away before he secures the last tie in place, but Luke laughs and stills her with a hand on her shoulder.

Why — why is Rey in Luke's memories? Why isn't he in hers? What is she missing? She combs through. Suddenly the memories are shifting away from her, slick in her grasp, and she has to chase after them. Luke is speaking, she knows dimly it's aloud — "Rey, wait a minute, stop, let me talk to you" — but she pushes on, chasing a memory that feels like an answer. It's a resonance.

She reaches for it, but it slips away. She falls into another instead:

Luke is fighting someone Rey doesn't recognize, someone quick and brutal and not Human but not a species she's encountered before, when a lance of agony cuts through him as one of those bright lights tied to him gets snuffed out — and it builds. More and more lights going out. He's trying to focus on the fight, but part of his mind is seeking out along his connection to his students, trying to find out what's gone wrong, what is happening —

He misses a block. His opponent's vibroaxe smashes against his hand, crushing through synth skin, wires, and mechanics, but it doesn't hurt, not outside the pressure it puts on his wrist. The opponent must expect it to, because he tries to push the advantage, but Luke brings his lightsaber around in two sweeping arcs and then his attacker falls, his skin scorching.

This was… was this a distraction? Luke runs a hand back into his hair, reeling from all those bright lights snuffed out as he backs away from the fallen enemy. He has to get back. All of his students —

Ben. Ben whose connection to Luke has long been flickering in ways that worry him, eclipsed with darkness that Luke was only just beginning to root out for what it is. Luke's sense of Ben wavers, but what he does get is Dark, and agonized, and heady, and —

Rey.

Nausea rises in him as he races for his ship.

Rey gasps in a deep breath as she reels out of the memory, her eyes going wide. "I'm — I'm sorry —" Luke's sorrow and helplessness and anger and grief and — and worry, an intense worry — these are still whirling through Rey's gut.

"I thought you died that day," Luke says. Tear tracks streak his cheeks and his eyes shine.

Rey's chest is heaving and she can't just sit here. She can't. It's too much. She stumbles to her feet, her hands going to her cheeks — damp with tears — and her fingers raking back into her hair as she stares at her boots, pacing. "What — what was that? I don't — that was me. I don't remember any of that. Why don't I…?"

Luke stands, pushing himself up slowly, and his hands hover out like he would touch her, but he doesn't. He watches. "You're my daughter," he says.

And Rey stops. She turns to stare at him, her hands falling from her hair to her sides. "My… I don't remember you." But she never remembered her family, only the overwhelming certainty that they would come back for her.

"He must have blocked the memories," Luke says. There's a weird sense of calm in his voice that makes Rey want to scream, because how is any of this okay? But Luke just keeps going. "I bet that's not all he did. But I can't be sure of the extent of it yet."

But Rey's still stuck on you're my daughter because how? And if it's true, why did he leave her? And why didn't he tell her before now? Why did she nearly have to drag it from his mind? "What are you talking about?" It's all she can manage to get out.

Luke sighs and finally reaches out, strong hands gripping her shoulders. "Let me start at the beginning. Okay?"

Rey nods and lets him guide her gently to the edge of the bare bunk against the wall. A rushing sensation consumes her, like long stretches zoned out on her speeder with just the hot desert air racing past. When Luke starts speaking, she's staring at — or maybe through — the backs of her hands in her lap.

"When Ben was a child, Snoke wormed his way into his head and used the Dark Side to manipulate him, to bend him. But Han and Leia didn't know it at the time. It took a long time for me to understand what was happening to him. I'm still not sure I understand it all.

"But by the time you were born, I knew enough to realize you were in danger. Your cousin was targeted because of his Skywalker heritage. Because Snoke expected he would be strong in the Force. You would have been just as much a target. Maybe more."

Skywalker. Rey's stare snaps up to meet Luke's. So is that her family name? Is she not just Rey anymore?

Luke's mouth quirks with something like a smile, but mellow. Sad. "I didn't tell anyone about you. As far as anyone knew, you were an orphan we took in because you were Force-sensitive. You trained with the other padawans."

Rey's mouth is dry, but she forces a swallow and asks her most immediate, burning question: "My mother?"

"She helped me with finding Force-sensitives, and with training. She left for a long trip to find more people — children mostly — who could be trained in the Force. While she was away, she had you. No one questioned when she brought you back with the others, an orphan with potential for the Force."

"But who is she? Is she —" alive, dead —

"Her name was Mara," Luke says, his voice soft. "She died the same day I thought I lost you."

Trying to make sense of it is like trying to piece together an unfamiliar droid. She's not sure what goes where or even if she has all the right pieces. Kylo Ren wiped out Luke's padawans, she knows that. And that connects to the memory she experienced in his head: all those lights flickering out, lightyears away. "Did he — did Kylo Ren kill her?"

His expression hardens. "Yes. And I thought he killed you. For years." He pauses, lets out a low breath. "I slipped, once. Training with him. I didn't expect how he would take to mental manipulation. He caught a memory of you. I wasn't sure at the time whether he realized what it meant, but the only reason I can think that he left you alive out of all the others is that he knows you are his cousin."

"My cousin." Rey nearly chokes on it. She's going from an unknown family long gone to a Jedi father, dead mother, and murderous cousin. And — and that means General Organa is her aunt, then. And Han was her uncle. The water welling in her eyes makes Luke's face blurry-bright. Another piece falls into place: "Does that mean he was the one to leave me on Jakku?"

"He must be," Luke agrees.

Heat boils in her gut and washes up her neck, into her limbs. Kylo Ren is the reason she spent all those years alone on Jakku, waiting for a family who would never come back for her. Her cousin. No. He's no family of hers. He did so much to cut himself out of his family. Let him.

And he left her on Jakku! A dustbowl of a planet, a junkyard as Finn would happily tell anyone who asks. Why not just kill her? She came close to starving more times than she likes to think about. What was the point? "Why?" she asks.

"I don't know," Luke says, reaching out to clasp a hand over her arm. "I don't know. And I'm sorry you found out this way. This wasn't what I intended. Underestimating our family ability seems to be a habit of mine." There's a dark humor to his words.

Rey's stare sharpens. "Why didn't you just tell me?"

The way Luke's eyes soften into an aching expression knots up Rey's gut. This is — her father? "You didn't recognize me," he says. "I didn't know what happened to you. I thought it might be best to try to figure it out before…"

Suddenly it doesn't matter. None of that. None of the why or how. Just: "But you — you are my father?"

Luke's eyes crinkle into a smile. "Yes. You made it home."

Rey surges forward, throwing her arms around his shoulders and holding on for dear life. There's a warm thread between them that's growing, braiding into a solid connection. The Force resonates between them. She can feel the truth of it. "I can't believe it," she whispers. All that time waiting for her family, and she's here at last.

I chose the name Mara as a nod to the EU, but ... obviously it's different, lol. Anyway this chapter was stressful to write, so many worries about consistency and... everything. I hope it turned out well.