Rey smiles fondly as she starts the recording, already knowing what she'll see. Two familiar figures are projected across the room in bright, flickering hologram blue. The image is blurry compared to current technology, but even seventy years on, she can still feel the love and tenderness radiating from jungle clearing.
With lovestruck eyes only for each other, the pair waltz across the grass. Twenty-eight-year-old Rey's simple dress swishes around her feet as they move in time. She learnt the steps for the wedding, and they loved it so much they still dance regularly to this day. Slower and less energetically, perhaps, but no less lovingly.
They were both far younger then, with their whole futures stretching out ahead of them. Just as there were a myriad of paths open to them, there were many different people they could have become. Everything in life sang with possibility and promise, and the only certainty was that they wanted to be together throughout it all. In good times or bad, in sickness or in health, always just them.
She's proud of who they were – of the man who gave up the comfort and safety of his home to fight for what he believed in and the woman who left behind all she knew to follow her destiny and defeat the First Order.
Yet it's undeniable that living together has altered them both, fundamentally and eternally, in ways both obvious and subtle. It took years of disagreements and conflict, but they've both become less headstrong. He's learnt patience and responsibility while she became far more comfortable with being vulnerable and accepting help.
So re-watching the recording now feels odd. The memory is as warm as a child's favourite blanket, yet those versions of themselves are so incomplete that they're more like the balls of yarn that will eventually go into sewing that blanket. If neither of them changed since they waltzed in the jungle seventy years ago, they wouldn't have been able to handle half the hurdles thrown at them over the years.
But at the same time, the love, respect and conviction they needed was all there. Of all the things that have changed over the years, that's one thing that never has and never will.
A/N: Prompt: 'Because I knew you, I have been changed for good.' from For Good from Wicked
