Notes:
Okay, this one's pretty short, and I *REALLY* like chapter 21 and want to share it sooner, so, YAY Bonus chapter!
2/23/1 Y.O.
Rain. More rain. Some days Rey's sure Lirium is trying to drown her settlement off of the map.
It was luck, or the will of the Force, that she decided to not put any of the buildings on the rocky shore of the lake, because that shore is getting smaller and smaller every day.
And cool. Not cold, but it's getting to the point where she's remembering Ahch-To. Poe's supposed to be bringing warmer clothing for them, and more blankets, and cloth and leather and yarn, and sewing and knitting stuff. Some of the kids are growing so fast that just bringing in new clothing won't keep them dressed, so she needs the stuff to make clothing.
Not that she's ever done that before, but… Worst comes to worst, she'll ask Kylo how to do it, and if they all look like a bunch of little Padawans because that's the only outfit he knows how to make, well, they'll look like Padawans.
Though… Thinking about it… She checks her library, and yes, there are books on sewing and how to make clothing. It can't be that hard, can it?
She can feel Kylo sniggering in the back of her head as she's pondering that thought. Apparently, he's looking forward to hearing about her adventures in clothing manufacture.
Cool… Way too cool. If this were dry cool, she'd be okay. Jakku got below freezing most nights, though between the dry air, and the fact that it got well above blood temperature during the day, things like the metal of her home soaked in the heat and stayed fairly warm.
But this… It's like a cool, wet, blanket that clings to her skin, and permeates her lungs, and she can't scrub it off, or wrap up in enough blankets to keep it out. It doesn't seem to bother the kids. Most of them come from places with things like cool, rain, and humidity. Savarah's actually under the impression that this is what high summer feels like, and Rey very much never wants to set foot on her homeworld if that's true.
Chewie's going to be bringing them more heaters for the cottages. They're designed to stay comfortable in a range between 15-35C, but she's starting to wonder if the lake's so cold because it gets cold here.
Rey's been watching the suns, when they deign to show themselves through the clouds, and like she expected, because they're at the equator, the green sun has been spending about the same amount of time in the sky each day. The blue one is setting earlier and rising later, and… They may actually have some sort of winter here.
She wonders if there'll be a day when the grass vanishes under snow. Wonders what it would be like to actually appreciate snow, get to look at it and play in it. If she'd been doing anything else on Starkiller, she'd have wanted to explore it, because she'd never seen it before.
Later that night, Kylo tells her, "If it does, I'll show you how to make a sled."
"What's a sled?"
"Some sort of flat, plate-like thing you use to slide around on the snow. There's a bit of a hill between the chapel and the lake, you could slide down it."
"Why?"
"It's fun."
She's not sure how sliding about in cold and wet snow might be fun, but he kisses her forehead, and lets her see a few memories of being a small child on Chandrila. They had snow there. And Han had gotten them a sled. It's big for Kylo alone, but he and Han fit on it just fine.
"How old are you?"
"Four or five. It didn't snow a lot on Chandrila. Once or twice a year, tops. They weren't home most of the time there was snow on the ground."
She gives him a little kiss.
She looks up, watching rain spattering on the dome of her chapel. With any luck this is winter. Potential for sledding aside, she'd rather prefer this is as cold as it gets. Even better if spring is coming soon.
And with any luck, they'll get through the rest of this lesson easily.
It's 'focusing' time. She supposes it's meditation, or sharpening their senses, or awareness of the Force, but… since not all of them can do all of those things, she calls it 'focusing' time.
Everyone can sharpen their focus, can learn to spend longer and longer bits of time concentrating on something.
It's a fairly simple… ish… exercise. They're all sitting on pillows on the floor, as comfy as they can get, and have picked one rock. The goal is to just pay attention to it. And nothing else. Just the rock. Look at the rock, feel the rock, think about the rock, just the rock.
It's okay if they get distracted. Rocks are boring. And Rey intentionally picked something that was boring to do this with. After all, it's easy to focus on interesting things. But, if their minds wander, it's their job to bring it back to the rock.
And… She's doing it, too. Her mind wandering away from her rock to the rain. The steady drumming of tiny patters all over her dome. For some reason that's a magnet for her mind, and the little black-gray stone in front of her isn't.
Back to the rock. If she's going to make them do it, she needs to do it, too.
It occurs to her, that part of why she's not Mistress Rey, or Teacher Rey, or… anything other than Rey, is that she hasn't earned the title.
She's teaching herself as much as she's teaching them.
An hour is more than long enough contemplating rocks. The kids are edgy and jittery and looking to do something.
She sends them out to go play in the rain, which if they hadn't just been sitting around contemplating rocks, they'd complain about, but right now, the chance to run around, even in the rain, is welcome.
From inside the dome, she can see the whole settlement, and it's clear that they need some sort of place for small people to run around and be rough and rambunctious that's also dry and warm.
Another dome, probably. Big one.
That gets a sigh. A place to run around dry and warm is much lower on the list of things they need than, say, microfarms, or a water processing plant (though Chewie says he's got a lead on one) or something to store feed for the Faviers in, or the feed, because if she's right about it getting cold, they're not just going to be able to graze. And… good lighting for the workshop. And if this sewing thing is going to be part of what they're going to need to do, she's going to need space for that, and more lights and…
How can one settlement with fewer than fifteen fulltime people need so much stuff?
She notices Savarah and Elias, her two oldest, and newest Maji, lingering by the door of the dome.
She waves them over, and they come.
Savarah is unique among the Maji children. She knows, to the day, how old she is. Fifteen in two months. Most of her life, she had parents, a family, people who cared for her. And then a plague went through her town. Bad water they said. After that, she took any odd job she could find in town, until, one day, serving drinks, she ran into a pilot with a smile in his eyes and a spiral on a stone around his neck.
Elias doesn't know how old he is. Fourteen-ish. Probably. Old enough that he's getting taller, fast. Young enough to only have a little bit of downy, brown bunny fluff on his upper lip.
"Rey?" Savarah asks, tentatively.
Rey nods at her, interested in what the two of them are conspiring about, what they want to talk to her about without the rest of the children nearby.
Elias is looking at the swirl beneath their feet. "Are you… sure… about this balance thing?"
Savarah nods, intensely. The Church of the Force wasn't a thing in the neighborhood she grew up in. They were members of the Holy Cyclindia of Eternal Starlight, worshippers of the stars, and this is not what she learned in her weekly devotions. "It… feels like you're saying it's okay to be evil."
Rey grabs the pillow she was putting back, and gestures for them to grab their pillows, this isn't a two minutes and done conversation.
They settle in, and Rey takes a moment to just feel it. Both to get her own thoughts settled and to figure out how to convey this so it makes sense to them. Finally she says, "What's evil?"
They both, in their adolescent certainly of a world of only black and white, look like that's the most appallingly stupid question, ever.
"No, I'm serious. How do you know when someone's evil?"
"They kill people," Elias says.
"I've killed people. Master Poe has. Master Finn, he killed a lot of them. I'm not sure about Mistress Rose. Chewie's killed lots of people. Does that make us evil?"
"You did it in the war!" Savarah says, shutting that down fast. Rey isn't evil. The very nice people they've met since they've been here can't be evil. Wrong or misguided, that's possible, but not evil.
"Yeah, that doesn't count!" Elias says.
Rey smiles at them, amused by how quickly they're shutting that idea down. "Okay. What makes a person evil?"
"Killing people when you don't have to?" Savarah tries.
"Better. But I can tell you, just about everyone who's killed someone thought they had to do it. 'Have to' is very subjective. And, again, let's look at Master Poe, he made some bad decisions that got a lot of very good people killed when they didn't need to die, but he was sure that he had the right answer. Is Master Poe evil?"
"NO!" Elias, who idolizes Poe, and wants to be him when he grows up, says, certain, and Savarah, who's a bit less taken with Poe, but quite fond of him nonetheless, is nodding vehemently in agreement.
"Okay. I don't think Poe's evil, either. I think he made some bad decisions. And he thinks he does, too. Wishes he made some different ones. But in that one moment, he was sure he had to do it.
"How about this, my friend… he killed someone he didn't have to. Everyone in the galaxy is probably better off with him is dead, but he didn't have to. He could have just stayed put, knelt in place, and let him do what he was going to do."
"Was the person he killed going to hurt people?" Savarah asks.
"Yes, a whole lot of them, me among them."
"Then he had to do it," Elias says.
"No child. He chose to do it. He chose to kill another person, and that one… if he lived… he would have likely killed other people, but not me or anyone I cared for. Did he have to kill him?"
"No?" Elias doesn't sound like he likes that answer. Or many of the thoughts Rey's planting in his head.
"No. He didn't. He made a choice. I think it was a bad one, and these days he thinks it was a bad one," though she realizes, because she and Kylo have never talked about Han, that she doesn't actually know that, "too, but he made it. And when he made it, he was sure he had to do it." Rey pats the swirl under their pillows. "I hope this isn't an excuse to be evil. I'm afraid it may be used that way, but… The old way… If you stayed in the light, just about anything you chose to do would be 'good.' And… I don't think that works.
"I think it's about each and every choice. I think it doesn't matter which set of emotions you use to get to where you're going, as long as where you go makes things better." Rey smiles at them. "Now you ask me what better is."
"What's better?" Elias asks.
"I don't know. That's the hard part. That's where balance gets tricky. We can all look back and point at something and say, 'Oh, that was a bad decision,' but… In just about every case, the person who made that decision thought they were making a good one for good reasons."
"That's not comforting," Savarah says.
"I know. But it's true. Mostly… I want you to be able to use your powers, your skills, your feelings, all of them, to get what you want and need. I think, if you look for things that build connections, accord, communities, and lives… I think that's mostly where good lies. I think the things we work on together, making us more connected to each other… I know that can be used for evil, but, I think that's where the core of good lies."
"What do you think evil is, Rey?"
She half shrugs. "Intentionally hurting someone, against their will, for your own gain or pleasure. But… I think that's an action. I don't think people or things can be evil, they can act evil, but not be evil. Palpatine did a lot of evil. He did it right and left and throughout the entire galaxy. But his rule made for a stable platform where most of the people in the galaxy enjoyed happy, functional lives." She sighs a little. "Someone, somewhere, benefits from every possible decision made. Knowing that, understanding it, and applying it to the people around you is part of growing up."
Rey trails her fingers over the dark swirl. "Maybe this is self-serving. I don't have a lot of dark, but it's there. You both have your own dark, too. Poe has his. My friend, he's got his. And… I feel like we're better off if we learn how to use it, than trying to shove it into the back of our minds and pretending it's not there." She pats her lightstaff. "I hope the dark is like this. It's a tool. And you can use it to defend and build and protect, or you can use it to tear down and kill. And it's just about what you chose to lay your will and energy to."
They're thinking about what she's saying, and look a little disappointed.
"Would you like it better if I just gave you a long list of rules?"
They glance at each other. "It'd be easier," Elias says.
She smirks at that. "I agree, it would be. You know where the library pads are. If you want, you can go work on your reading. I can promise you every list of rules you could ever imagine is in there. If you find a handy list of them that apply to every circumstance, feel free to show it to me, I'll want to read it."
That gets some stink eye aimed at her. Neither of them much likes reading, or for that matter, long lists of rules.
"So, we… just make our own rules?" Savarah asks
"Everyone does. They may say that God or the Force or the Sages handed them down and made them holy, but, really… We make our own rules. My hope is you learn how to make good ones from your time here." Rey thinks about that for a moment and adds, "Lists of rules… They tend to be very straight and rigid and unbending. Do this. Don't do that. Never do this other thing. But, look around you, feel around you, nothing in nature, nothing in the Force, is a bright straight line with a big DO NOT CROSS sign on it. Everything flows and meanders and wanders. So, I think, instead of looking for rigid rules, it may be a better idea to get a feel for the flows around you, and see which ones lead you to places you want to go, and which ones pull you away from that. That might be more useful than rules."
"By contemplating rocks?" Savarah asks, looking at the floor.
"Eh…" Rey shrugs a little. It's not like staring at rocks directly leads to wisdom. "The ability to focus on boring things will come in handy no matter what you do next. We good?"
They glance at each other, and then nod.
"Good, go run around some. We've got more lessons in an hour or so."
"More rocks?" Elias asks.
"Nope. Math."
They groan, but head out to play in the rain.