Chapter Text
Rey is 11 the day things change. She isn’t aware of it at the time and won’t be for more than a year. But the day she brings the haul back from the mostly-picked-clean Star Cruiser to the south of Niima Outpost is the day things change.
At 11, Rey is small for her age. Like many on Jakku, she works as a scavenger. Her young age doesn’t shield her from the realities of the planet and its inhabitants. Most people here, including Rey, are hungry. She learns early on that Jakku malnutrition is made worse when you are competing with others who can lift and haul more than you can. To survive, Rey ‘partners up’ with adults who can't fit into the smaller spaces. Some of these partnerships are fruitful, others are closer to slavery, but if you don’t work, you don’t eat. She is paid for these jobs, but rarely is it more than a small portion. This may be enough to stave off starvation, but it is never enough to stave off hunger.
It’s Taungsday when she makes her way to the old southern Star Cruiser. A request from the junk boss Unkar Plutt has brought her here. It’s the first time in several months she’s tried to scavenge anything by herself. Normally she wouldn’t bother with something like this. The cruiser is old and has been mostly picked clean, but word around the Outpost is that there are still good parts inside, if anyone can fit into the small, out of the way spaces. Small, out of the way spaces happen to be Rey’s specialty. She has recently realized that this skill set is something that no one else around Niima Outpost can do. She isn’t sure what she is going to do with this information yet, but this request, this she knows she can handle it.
By the end of the day, Rey has a good amount of usable parts lying on the speeder she was lent by Plutt as part of his agreement with her. (It makes things easier and she can drag a lot more weight if the machine is doing most of the lifting instead of her arms.) Climbing out of the remains of the ship, she sits down and starts going through the last batch she’s gathered for the day, slowly picking out the usable parts from the junk.
At first, the innocuous part is thrown into a junk pile. It doesn’t look impressive, is beat up and when she pushes the buttons on it, nothing happens. If it won’t have any value to Plutt, then Rey has no reason to keep it. However, as she finishes the sorting, something tells her to take another look. And she does.
Rey picks up the abandoned piece of equipment and turns it around, opening the back compartment. The wiring inside is pulled out and the components are somewhat fried, but other than that, it’s in pretty good shape. It will need a new powercell, wire reattaching, and some new processors, possibly a new sending beacon, but those parts are common in the Graveyard…
Rey is 11 on Taungsday when she finds the broken radio and decides to fix it.
Rey has no idea that taking a second look at that junk pile changed everything for her, but it has.