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1…
All she can do is breathe. The air is sharp and clear; rich with the cold. Behind her, waves break on the black stone of the island and the sound crashes against her ears. She begins to climb.
46…
With each step Rey expects her feet to sink into the earth, to fall through sand, but the rock beneath her is solid and unyielding. The climb is too easy. The fight that she fosters deep in her chest, the same fight that blooms in the bones of every soul on Jakku for the purpose of pulling their bodies up the vast, curving dunes, is left to float aimlessly through her, lacking direction. The froth of it manifests in the nervous tattoo of her heartbeat, the white of her knuckles around her staff, and a glance back towards Artoo, Chewbacca, and the ocean. She remembers to breathe.
89…
On Jakku, sand lined her lungs - a thin film that was coarse and constant. Rey had feared that someday she would dry out, and parts of her would be blown away in the Jakku winds. As a child she would hold her breath for long periods of time, before eventually spluttering and coughing and gasping for air. It was a nervous habit, a legacy of both hope and spite, and she did it without realising. There was no one to worry for her. In the end, Rey couldn’t stop her throat from becoming sore and dry. She learnt to take shallow breaths.
157…
Now all she can do is breathe. The colours around her are vivid and full; teeming with life. Her eyes fall on small purple flowers and Rey is filled will the irrational desire to pick them, take them back to Jakku, and place them proudly in the vase on her small working table. Above her, a bird calls. She feels as if she is walking through a dream…
223…
In another time and another place Rey invents islands and oceans to help her drift asleep in the belly of her AT-AT. When the nights are particularly cold, she imagines she is resting deep in the sea, water cradling every inch of her skin. She envisions her fingers weaving between internal currents, and feels as if she is witness to some form of ancient knowledge, to truths that are otherwise just beyond her reach. It is a kind of warmth she has never known on Jakku, despite the blistering heat. While during daylight she climbs the yawning mouths of star-destroyers - ships become cathedrals to the poor and desperate scavengers of Niima Outpost - at night, this is her religion. Her ocean, her island…
493…
In another time and another place Rey calls upon these dreams to hold herself steady. To empty the world around her so that she is alone - the only state in which she knows herself. Starkiller Base and Kylo Ren dissolve into negative space. She feels the currents, the riptide, and allows herself to be carried back to the Rey that is of the wastelands, the Rey carved by hope, sand and survival. She opens her eyes and they meet the boy’s in front of her. A memory echoes, a face - elongated features sculpted by the silhouette of his fear. She lets its go. She sees the danger in the child and chooses not to forgive.
521…
She lets herself breathe and continues to climb. In her dreams, Luke Skywalker’s presence and the presence of the island itself are one and the same, but now that she is here, Rey can outline the difference between them. He feels familiar, and she realises now that his presence must have always been a part of her imaginings. It is a realisation that should probably be disquieting, but in reality feels only natural. Rey is not surprised by this. She has always known how much a myth can feel like home.
602…
In another time and another place Rey rests in her AT-AT clutching her meagre quarter-portion and wondering if her family knows that they have almost made a slave of their daughter. Rey had long ago come to accept the truth of what the workers at Niima Outpost truly were. Unkar Plutt owns the people, just as he owns the ships and the junkyard and the desert itself. And in the bones of her circumstances, Rey is the same as all the rest. It is true that she could leave at any time, but if she left, where would she go? There is no direction that does not mean starvation. The desert is no friend to scavengers. It serves only Unkar Plutt. He controls the food, so he controls the people. But Rey doesn’t feel owned. She is different. Her family will come for her. She knows. It is this hope that means she is free. As she sits, she thinks that she can feel a presence, a ghost, just behind her. Yet when she turns, she finds no one. The next morning she wakes with an image of a boy settling in her mind - a sad, handsome face with a scar through his right eye. Rey wonders if she is lying to herself?
679…
In another time and another place, food is given to her freely. The ghost stays by her even here on the resistance base. It’s echo whispers in every detail - in Luke’s lightsaber, along the curve of the General’s jaw, between the grains of sand in her shoes, and in the belly of an X-Wing’s engine. It’s presence doesn’t bother her, it is but one of the many things that have followed her from the desert. She can’t help but think of Finn - so gentle and kind, so different from anyone she had met on Jakku. To Rey, he is a great upheaval; a tsunami that has swept upon her island, so immense that it has left the rock a different shape. She wonders if change means freedom? For the first time, Rey feels as if the ghost is trying to speak to her. She envisions words beginning to grow like a pattern in the grass of her island, and murmurings that weave between the white noise of sea form dissolving back into waves. The force will not free you, the force will not free you, the force will not free you, the force will not free you, the force will not free you…
The force will not free you (but they might)…
754…
All Rey can do is breathe. One foot in front of the other in front of the other in front of the other…
800…
She climbs knowing that Luke Skywalker will be at the top.
827…
She climbs knowing that this place feels familiar.
858…
She climbs knowing she is here for a purpose.
872…
She climbs the steps hoping belonging is not behind her but ahead.
901…
The stone steps begin to give way to grass. Up here, the wind roars, filling her ears with a language she doesn’t quite understand. She can see a figure begin to take form in the distance. Myth become a brown cloak. It is him, it must be.
She approaches, decades of words stuck behind her teeth. Instead, she reaches for the currents, the riptide, and hopes that they will carry her to the Rey that is of the island, the Rey carved by patience and the ocean. Rey holds out Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber.
The figure turns and lifts his hood. His eyes are sunken and the years, like a knife through clay, have etched creases into his skin, yet Luke’s face seems to rhyme with everything Rey knows about herself. He looks at her as if she is not quite real.
Rey holds her breath.