Rey thinks her fingers may be permanently stained with charcoal as her hand moves tirelessly across the page. The once faded AT-AT manual has been repurposed for her drawings, the faded yellow pages growing slowly darker - even so, she has yet to fully capture the sights in her memory.
Every morning, she takes her speeder out to scavenge the wrecks. She haggles with Unkar Plutt over increasingly smaller portion sizes. She sits outside her makeshift home, wearing her pilot's helmet, staring at the sky. Somewhere along the way, its blue has grown a little deeper.
At night, she spends hours in front of the computer terminal. With some effort, she has reprogrammed it to access an old database of planets and moons. She combs through thousands of results, consulting her sketches and her memory for any indication that perhaps, just maybe, this will be the one - the location of Luke Skywalker's Jedi temple.
One day, she discovers a surprisingly intact Ghtroc 690 light freighter, and a plan begins to form. Repairing the ship proves difficult, as it means using parts she could have traded for food, making her go hungry more often than usual - but Rey is convinced that it will be worth it.
Before she goes to bed each night, she wishes hard and prays to whatever deity might be out there… but she still doesn't wake up as Ben.
It is weeks later when she completes her sketch, and months before she matches it to a location - Yavin 4. Her heart skips a beat as she recognizes the sprawling tropical jungles, the mountain ridges dominated by volcanoes, the interconnected oceans and the landlocked sea.
Rey cries for the first time since their last switch.
Rey boards her fully operational freighter with her old Rebel Alliance flight helmet tucked under one arm, her homemade doll clutched in her free hand.
She tries not to think too much about her decision to bring her only meaningful possessions along for this journey - part of her remains convinced she will return to Jakku after this, that she will continue to wait for the family that may never come back.
A part of her knows better, knows that if she finds Ben and his Uncle Luke, if she meets Tai and Hennix and Voe, that she is the one who may never come back.
The flight is a long one, and Rey has little to do other than speculate and wonder if she has simply gone insane.
The exchanges with Ben had started out of the blue one day and ended just as suddenly. No matter how much thought she gave it, she couldn't figure out why.
After weeks of contemplation, it got harder to shake the suspicion they might just have been a string of extremely vivid dreams.
Rey has proof, though. She can't believe that the logs left on her computer terminal on Jakku came out of her own head.
Rey is convinced Ben is a real person. His body heat, his pulse, the way he breathes, his voice, the vibrant sounds in his ears - Rey felt all of that herself. Experiencing his life was so intense, it convinced Rey that if he isn't alive, then nothing is. Ben is real.
Because of that, the abrupt way it ended made her oddly uneasy. Something might have happened to him. Maybe there was some sort of accident. Even if she was overthinking things, at the very least, Ben was bound to be worried about the situation, too.
That's why Rey was determined to meet him in person. Or at least, that was part of it.
Since she doesn't know exactly where the temple is, Rey decides to land by the landlocked sea, recalling that Ben's friends would sneak off to go swimming. From that point, all she'll have to go on will be the landscape sketches she drew.
It's a really vague approach, to the point where Rey can't really call it a "plan" at all, but she couldn't think of any other way.
As she lands in an empty, overgrown clearing, Rey thinks fondly that she had never known there to be this much green in the galaxy before she began switching with Ben. To see it as herself is another kind of wonder.
There is nothing Rey wants more than to set out right that minute, but night is upon the planet and there are no doubt predators hiding in the lush jungle. She resigns herself to sleeping in the freighter, with the intent to leave the moment morning comes.
Rey wakes to an odd feeling. Not just any odd feeling… the kind of tugging, the kind of pull that she has come to associate with Ben.
Her eyes fly open, and for a moment she expects to see the familiar sight of Ben's hut at the Jedi Academy. Her disappointment when she quickly recognizes that she is still reclined in the freighter is immeasurable.
She sits up, and frowns. The feeling is still there. It's not Ben, but it's not nothing either. She spares a glance out the window and freezes.
Facing away from the freighter, on the edge of the landlocked sea, is an older man in billowing robes. The tugging feeling grows stronger, and Rey scrambles to lower the ramp and disembark.
As she stumbles across the clearing, the man turns to look at her for the first time. Rey stops in her tracks. There is no denying his identity.
Rey falls to her knees - whether out of relief or reverence, she's not entirely sure.
"Master Luke," she whispers, as tears spring to her eyes.
The man gives her a tired smile.
"Hello, Rey. I've been waiting for you."
For a long moment, neither of them move or speak. Luke Skywalker stands before her. Much older, much more grizzled, but there all the same.
"You… you're real," she whispers, voice breaking as the tears begin to fall. "That means… it was all real. I thought… I thought I might have gone insane. But you're here and you're real which means… Ben is real too."
Luke's expression morphs into one of distinct pity at the mention of his nephew, and Rey's heart drops. Slowly, he extends a hand down towards her. With the thoughts racing through her head at the moment, Rey barely registers that it's a prosthetic.
"Come with me. We have much to discuss."