Rey is sitting cross-legged on a rooftop, looking down on the rest of the Resistance base beneath her and relishing in the quiet. The chaos is nice, up to a point, but it gets overwhelming for someone who grew up entirely alone. She leans back against a spire and feels the sun and the breeze on her skin and takes no notice of the ship sinking closer to the shipyards until she catches a glimpse of it out of the corner of her eye- her mind hones in, brushing over the metal structure and finding no crew, just a pilot, one pilot burning bright in the Force, but- another Jedi? But there are no other Jedi, none so well-trained. Her father is meeting somewhere with Leia and the Resistance generals and higher-ups, so it can't be him. Besides, his presence is distinctive.
The pilot isn't a Sith, though, and the ship hasn't been shot down. On the contrary, people seem to be flocking out towards the shipyards as it comes in to land- something important, then, someone important, though she can't think who. But the pilot isn't Dark- or Grey, a concept which her father had explained once to her during a reasonably civil conversation in the mess hall. They're getting better at that kind of thing, though it still gets... awkward, at times. Neither of them are good with words.
Rey, ever-curious, hops nimbly from the rooftop to the ground, some hundred feet below her, the Force cushioning her fall, and starts off.
The crowd have gotten larger by the time she reaches the shipyards- she can feel her father somewhere nearby, and the waves of emotion pouring off of him, and then Leia, much the same. She picks out Poe and Finn from the chaos and works her way over to them, gently nudging minds with the Force so people don't mind so much when she bumps into them in her haste.
"What's going on?" she asks when she gets there, and Poe stares at her, eyes wide. Finn, at least, seems to be just as confused as she is. "Who's here? Is it someone important?"
"Rey-" Poe starts, then stops, then tries to start, stops- tries to start again, with more success than before. "That's the Jade Sabre."
The stranger's presence in the Force remains as unfamiliar as it was when she first noticed it, but she knows the name.
Two hands, fingers long and thin and slender and edged with rough callouses, wrapped gently around her own, and her feet on top of someone else's- look at that, my little Rey of sunshine, you're walking!- and sitting on a woman's lap, those same fingers tying her hair up until three little buns- and watching with glee as Mama sewed a tiny pilot's uniform to put on Mr. Dollie, her hair in the sunlight of Yavin IV matching the color of the orange fabric-
"That's not possible," she says, and she realizes she's trembling.
Poe just looks at her, a bit lost and a bit pale. "I was in the meeting with Skywalker and the General, we were coordinating our next raid on First Order forces. The call was patched through. She came from Maz. He recognized her voice."
She turns her gaze toward where the crowd is thicker, people pushing forward to see the woman of legend.
Rey!
Her father's shout ripples out in the Force, centering in on her in a state of almost-confusion underneath the chaos of his emotions, not expecting her to be so close by- love-hope-awe and alive-love-alive-
Rey...
She forgoes the gentle Force nudges this time as she pushes through the throng crowding around the men and women of legend. Her quarterstaff smacks a few people in the face- she probably elbows some others- she knows she steps on a few toes. Mara Jade Skywalker is standing next to Luke, their foreheads pressed together, and Rey flounders for a moment in the face of such emotion- her father is crying, actually crying, and Leia and Han stand at a respectful distance, and- who are all these people, anyway, thinking they have the right to intrude on their reunion?
And again there is the disconnect from herself and those people of legend- Mama is an entirely different set of memories and emotions than the tales spun of Mara Jade Skywalker, the Imperial, the smuggler, the Jedi- just like Papa is not her father, not anymore. So even when she is in sight she does not step forward, not yet- she sees, and she does not move. The woman is tall, a couple inches taller than her father, and her hair is a flaming red streaked through with silvery gray. Her skin is freckled, unhealthily pale. She has a build and angle to her posture that reminds Rey of herself, of the other scavengers on Jakku- strong out of necessity and sandblasted into something hard and unyielding, burning with a quiet inner strength to keep them warm on the frigid desert nights. There is a scar across her face, probably more that Rey cannot see. Her clothes are stolen, too large for her, draping over a body that seems too thin.
"Can't get rid of me that easy, Skywalker," the woman says, voice thick with emotion. Rey's father makes a choked noise that might be a laugh. "You're stuck with me."
"Good," he manages to say.
Chewie loses patience and surges forward to sweep the two of them up in a massive hug, and the woman's feet dangle off the ground. She's laughing. Someone else has finally realized that maybe the middle of the shipyards isn't a private place, particularly not with a crowd, and has started herding people away, and Rey- Rey stands, and watches.
Go on, kid, Grandpa's voice whispers, gentle and warm. She looks around, but he isn't here- looks back, and Leia has joined the group hug, and Han, Han is looking back at Rey. Han understands. Han didn't have a family for a long time, either.
It's a strange feeling to get used to.
She makes her left foot move first, and then her right, and then her left again, and the slight momentum and the mantra of don't-think-just-act keep her walking forward until Chewie looks down at her, huffs something, and pulls her into the pile.
Her mother looks at her with so much love and adoration she nearly has to back away. With Grandpa it's different, Grandpa raised her, knows her, but to have virtual strangers who care so much-- about her? Even Poe and Finn had something in common with her, to make them care. "You're all grown up," she whispers, and puts her hand on Rey's cheek. "I missed so much."
Missed the sandstorms and the loneliness and the time she nearly bled out in the sand dunes because another scavenger found the partial hyperdrive she had ripped out from an X-Wing and tried to take it from her (they hadn't succeeded)- missed the nighttime stories, the rare moments of joy and laughter-
"We need to check your ship for homing beacons," Leia says, sounding reluctant. Rey realizes that they're all wet-eyed, now. "I imagine you already did, but-"
"Protocol," her mother says dryly, not taking her eyes off Rey's face. They're a hazel-colored type of green, flecked with gold- her heart wrenches. She has her mother's eyes. Grandpa never said. "Nice to see some things haven't changed. Suppose there's a meeting, too?"
"Unfortunately."
So they leave the shipyards, and they meet, and Rey sits in on the meeting, tuning out the words entirely and staring at her mother's hair and trying to recall if the laughter in her memories belongs to her or Grandma- it doesn't last long, and once the various higher-ups conclude for themselves that Mara Jade Skywalker did, in fact, escape by herself and was not brainwashed or something similar (Luke and Leia push the point, citing the Force and yes, sir, we can tell these things and are you implying I cannot do my duty as General- and they aren't lying, because Rey can tell these things, too, and she has no reason to defend a stranger) they can all leave. Leia offers her private quarters as a place for them to talk and hugs Mara- so does Han, and so does Chewie, though Chewie really hugs everybody at once and Rey hears something crack- and then it's just the three.
"Where did you go, after- after Ren destroyed the Temple?" her mother asks.
Rey knows she's imagining the weight of her Grandpa's hand on her shoulder, but it's always nice to pretend, and she knows she isn't imagining his voice.
It's okay.
"Grandpa and Grandma raised me on a planet called Jakku," Rey begins, and the air falls still.
It's too much emotion for one night. There's a lot of crying, and a lot of shouting, and a lot of shouting while crying. Her mother is furious with her father for leaving her on Jakku, and her father seems willing to bow his head and take the lashing- it doesn't matter that his wife is shouting at him, because his wife is alive, and he thought she'd never be able to do anything again. Rey defends him, a little bit- he didn't know that they had died- but even she hurts, still, though she rarely ever shows it. She's forgiven her father, but that doesn't change what happened.
Rey's mother hugs her before she leaves. Rey goes stiff for a fraction of a second, she does hug back, but it's enough for her mother to look agonized. She kisses Rey's forehead.
Rey flees to the rooftops, but from there she can see the Jade Sabre-- she goes to the Falcon, instead, and buries herself in its machinery, and pretends she's far away on some distant planet, all hues of blue and green, and that there's nothing wrong in the galaxy.
Han more or less gives her the ship after the first couple times they move bases. Surprisingly enough, he doesn't look like he's in pain when he does; he says that if she ever needs a ship to take the Falcon, because the old ship will get her anywhere in the galaxy, and not to let it get blown up. "She's home to me, but so's Leia," he tells her. "And I can't leave, not again."
"Suppose we survive this, Mr. Dollie," she muses aloud. The control panels in the cockpit are starting to short out, and that can be disastrous if if happens in flight. Rey is half-underneath the console, only her legs sticking out, her feet propped up in the copilot's chair while she works. The doll, ragged and threadbare, has a new orange uniform, made in part out of scraps of the old one, which fell apart a few months back, and sits proudly on top of the navscreen. "The war. It's our ship now, so we can go wherever we want to. We could go anywhere. Maybe- Naboo? That's where Grandma lived. They have a memorial garden dedicated to her. And Endor, because that's where Grandpa was buried. That, and Ewoks sound precious."
"Careful, they have a bite," Grandpa says. "They took down AT-ATs."
"Wonderful!" Rey exclaims, and he laughs. They fall into a companionable silence- or maybe for him it's companionable, but Rey's thoughts are still whirling, and she's fallen out of the zone her mind slips into when she's fixing things. "Grandpa?"
"Yes?"
"Did you know- Mama was alive?" He doesn't answer for a long stretch of time. Rey hastens to elaborate. "I know you wouldn't have kept it from me, not- deliberately. You told me she was dead."
"All beings become one with the Force, Rey," he cuts in gently. "Jedi, anybody who can tap into the power of the Force, they have an easier time manifesting in this world after death. They have an easier time communicating with one another. Your grandmother, she isn't supposed to be here, but- you know my thoughts about rules and masters. Your mother, Rey, she... I knew her, when I was Vader. I went looking for her, to find her and tell her what had happened to you, to teach her how to manifest like I can, but I couldn't find her. She would have had no way of knowing what happened to you, so I assumed she was avoiding me. And wherever she was being kept, she was forced to wear an inhibitor. No one had any way of knowing she was still alive."
Rey blinks up at the circuitry, vision blurring.
"If I had known she was alive, I would have told you, Rey. I swear it."
"I believe you," she says, and that's really too much emotion in too short a time frame. She feels raw and shaky. "Could you tell me a story?"
"Of course," he says, voice warm, and she resumes the rewiring of a panel as he begins to speak. "I haven't told you about the time Padme and I each skipped out on our duties to spend a whole day together on Coruscant- have I?"
"No," Rey tells him. He never seems to run out of stories to tell, rarely repeats them, even after fifteen years.
"Okay, well- it wasn't the smartest decision, and Obi-Wan was decidedly upset with me when I came back, but we had the best time. See, we were just going around sightseeing for a while, lost track of time, realized we were hungry, so we stopped at the closest place to eat, but that's also not the smartest decision on Coruscant. We walk into this ridiculously upscale place, and neither of us are dressed up because we're trying to avoid attention, and it isn't that we didn't know how to act in a place like that, but I hate rules and we were trying to avoid all those formalities. Then the maître d' catches sight of us and gives us this look, who are these common folk, so of course we straighten up and ask them if there are any tables free..."
It's whimsical and anecdotal and doesn't have any kind of deep meaning to it, not like a lot of his stories do. Grandma joins part of the way in, adding her own commentary. It's hilariously funny, because Grandpa and Grandma had set out to make all the pretentious people there as uncomfortable as possible -– Grandpa particularly, Rey notices between fits of laughter. He could never stand the idea of overindulgence, having come from a place that had nothing, from a people who had nothing. Rey understands that, a little bit. Maybe she can talk Poe and Finn into doing something similar with her.
"We order this ridiculously expensive soup, some fancy name I can't remember, and- Padme, it was this, this-"
"-awful, puce-colored thing," Grandma laughs, "popular on maybe one or two planets in an isolated system, considered a delicacy there. And it tastes like absolutely nothing to Humans. So we spent-"
"-the whole time making these sarcastic comments to each other, 'oh, yes, the watery texture of this is perfect-'"
"'-and the tepidity of the dish really brings out its flavor, doesn't it-'"
"--Force, it was wonderful!"
"I thought you were going to get us kicked out, Ani."
"I thought you were going to get us kicked out, love."
Rey has long since stopped attempting to repair the console and has curled herself up in one of the chairs. Her cheeks hurt from laughing so much. "But- wouldn't they recognize you? Both of you were famous!"
Grandpa just kind of shrugs. "Hey, they see what they expect and want to see. It was only the tabloids who ever got anything right about us, and no one listened to them."
"Besides," Grandma adds, amused, lips twitching. "The Senator of Naboo would never act in such a manner."
"Definitely not," Grandpa agrees, just barely managing to keep a straight face. "And why would General Skywalker be spending time with the Senator?"
"The tabloids?" Rey asks them. She's seen the brightly patterned holomags scattered around the base, blaring ridiculous headlines like EVIDENCE GENERAL HUX ACTUALLY GENERAL GREVIOUS –- #3 WILL SHOCK YOU.
"We weren't exactly- subtle," Grandma says tactfully, and Grandpa snorts. "But it was like we said. No one expected us to be together, so they didn't notice. It was, to most people, a ludicrous idea, which is exactly why the tabloids got it right. Your grandfather nearly had a heart attack the first time he saw one."
"I did not-"
"You did, Ani."
Rey smiles again. She still feels raw, like a sandstorm has scoured away much of the walls she's built up around her heart to protect it, but- she feels better. Grandma and Grandpa always tell the best stories.
However:
"It's getting late," she says, looking at the ship's chrono, and she feels the weight of the long day settling heavy on her shoulders. "Poe is leaving early in the morning, and Finn and I want to be there to see him off."
"Sleeping at the base or in the Falcon?" Grandpa asks her.
Sleeping on the Falcon means she won't risk running into anyone on the way back to her quarters, but it's also the first place people will look for her if they want to find her. Sleeping in her quarters- well, it's a terribly large room, at least to her, and the bed is too soft, and the air is too quiet-
"In the base," she says. "Thank you for staying with me."
Thank you for staying when no one else did.
"We aren't leaving," he replies, and Grandma takes his hand and smiles at Rey, and she thinks that it's okay being the child of legends if it means she has her grandparents in her life.
Poe and Finn aren't sleeping when she knocks on the door to their quarters; Poe is obsessively fine-tuning some of BB-8's circuitry to make sure there isn't a repeat of his last mission (the little ball droid, as it turns out, doesn't do well on cold planets, and Poe had needed to lug him through a blizzard to the X-Wing when he abruptly powered down), and Finn is reading, absorbing anything and everything that isn't First Order propaganda.
They don't ask questions, though she knows they have a general idea of what's upset her. Finn puts down his book, and Poe finishes reconnecting some wires and closes the panel on the top of BB-8's head and sends the droid back to his charge port, and they all pile into the lower of the two bunks in the room, Rey squished between them.
The bed is kind of cramped, and Finn is like a small furnace, and she'll find out in a few hours that Poe snores, but they hold her and Finn lets her cry into his shirt and Poe hums something quiet and soothing and they all fall asleep in a tangle of limbs and she isn't quite as sad when she's with them.
The lonely years on Jakku are almost worth it if they mean she gets to have these two in her life.
"Rey. Rey, I need to get up."
Rey blinks a couple of times, still very sleepy and not entirely sure of where she is. Not Jakku, it's too soft, and the warmth around her isn't the dry heat of desert suns- but not her quarters in the base, because she isn't alone, and not the bunk in the Falcon- she blinks again, and she's tucked in between Poe and Finn, and BB-8 may or may not be taking holopics from over by his charge port. Her vision is still blurred from sleep.
Finn's arm is like a durasteel beam over her waist, and his chest is pressed against her back, his face up by her hair- half of Poe's torso, meanwhile, is underneath her, and she realizes she has her fingers wrapped around his wrist. He's looking down at her, smiling in amusement, not fully awake yet but decidedly more awake than she is- prods at her foot with his.
"Nn," she replies eloquently, and she doesn't want to get out of the cocoon of blankets or the safe feeling that comes from their arms around her, but she does anyway, because Poe has to leave and she can't keep him from that, even if she wants to. She does her best to extricate herself without waking Finn or elbowing Poe- succeeds in the first but not the second, and her body is still all bones and sharp angles. "Sorry."
"No worries," Poe whispers, sounding a bit winded, and he smiles at her and rolls out of the bunk. "Here, more room so you can go back to sleep."
On one hand, sleep, but- "S'pposed t'go with you. T'the shipyards."
"Not for another three hours, love. There's a mission briefing before we fly out. I'll set an alarm so the two of you can be there, okay?"
That makes sense, and she's too tired for more words- still feels drained from yesterday, and it's too early to be doing anything. She likes sleep. Poe kisses her forehead, and she crawls back under the covers with Finn and huddles up against his side and drifts off to sleep to the noises of Poe getting ready and BB-8's soft chirps and beeps.
(he calls her "love" and she tries to commit to memory the exact feeling of her heart seeming to warm inside of her)
One more chapter. As always, thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed.