There's a chance that the souls of those left behind are the souls of those who should [Luke]

[tobereckoned]

Rey wasn't sure she should feel so at home doing this. After all, hadn't she finally accepted that she was more than a scavenger from Jakku? Yet here she was, carefully picking her way through one of Darrow's junkyards. There was money in her pack to trade for anything she might find useful, which was strange in and of itself. Instead of hot, hungry, and thirsty, she'd woken up in her bunk on the Falcon in a warm blanket and eaten food she'd been able to purchase without work. As strange and unrecognizable as these credits were, she was glad to have them.

Most of the dormant machines here were terrestrially bound and centuries behind the technology she needed, but Rey wasn't deterred. She'd built her speeder out of spare parts and junk and she could do it again. If nothing else, she could pick up a few spare parts to tinker with. She'd need to familiarize herself with the parts and engines of Darrow.

By midday, she was getting frustrated, though it was nowhere near the frustration she'd felt on Jakku's worst days. Sitting at the edge, she checked the list on her datapad once again and added a few notes.

Comments

[thelastjedi]

The weeks Luke have been here have been more confusing than his first weeks off Tattooine. He feels at odds with himself, at odds with the training and the Order that he's embraced. Here he's no one, and his path is nothing and his dream to rebuild the Order seems a silly one.

Which, likely, is a sign that he still has too much pride.

The strangest things are the disturbances he feels to the Force. Others use the Force in ways he's never imagined and is unable to do himself, and each time someone appears in this place there is a small disruption.

Sometimes the disturbances don't fade, and these past few days something has been pulling at him. Luke tells himself to stop ignoring the feeling, imagining the chagrin he'd feel were Yoda or Ben here. He stops sulking and meditates, clearing his mind of everything but the Force.

It takes time, but Luke cuts through the confusion. There's someone here, someone who is strong with the Force. Someone he needs to find.

His connection leads him to a junkyard, a place he has yet to explore. He sees a girl and knows - knows - she is the one he's been looking for. Luke watches her, wondering if she feels him as well.

[tobereckoned]

It felt like a gut reaction to nothing at all and Rey lifted her head up, casting about as if someone had just shouted at her but she hadn't heard anything. Closing her datapad, she stood up and walked toward him, head tilted. Before now, Rey hadn't known it was possible to feel so many things and not have a name to put to any of them. The only word she could put to it was that it felt significant.

He was looking right at her and Rey swore it was like he was looking into her too. Kylo Ren had done it with the Force and it had left Rey feeling scraped raw but this man didn't push or flaunt.

"Are you...can you feel that?"

[thelastjedi]

"I can feel that," he confirms, still watching her closely. He wants to run toward her, wants to ask her where she's from and how she feels so important.

"You arrived a few days ago, didn't you?" He's willing to share the knowledge, he wants it to be her.

[tobereckoned]

"Yes. On the Falcon." It felt like a magnet. Sitting here almost felt wrong when Rey could be running up to him, like she was resisting the pul of something significant.

"That's the Force, isn't it?" Rey still barely understood what it was but every second she looked at him, she thought she was understanding a little better.

[thelastjedi]

"You were on the Falcon?" Han had said something to him, something he'd barely listened to. That was a problem he realises, he's been so wrapped up in his own head, his own problems. Luke has been failing himself and his friend.

Luke takes a few steps toward her, curiosity driving him now. He has his lightsaber at his hip, and he wants to show it to her for no reason that he can explain. "It is the Force. You've felt it before?"

[tobereckoned]

Rey nodded. Of course he knew the Falcon. Why wouldn't he? There was something in his face, she thought, an echo of the same fondness in Han's face when she'd met him the other day. When she'd met him in another lifetime. The Falcon must have meant a lot to him too. And Leia.

"Only once. And I..." Rey paused and then looked at him, feeling it with her whole being that this was something and someone important that she was talking to. "Who are you?"

[thelastjedi]

Luke felt the importance of this moment too, the realisation that something was about to change. When the Force prodded and pushed, it was better to not resist.

"Luke Skywalker," he says quietly, unsure if his name will mean anything to her. He looks at her again, closely this time, trying to determine if there is anything about her he knows. That's when he sees the hilt on her hip, a hilt he lost once in what feels like another life.

"How- Where did you get that?"

[tobereckoned]

"On Takodana. I found it in a–" It clicked into place them, slamming into Rey with all the weight of that first vision in Maz Kanata's cellar. He had said that name and he recognized the weapon at her belt. Han Solo had told her that she could find him here but now here he was, sneaked up on her like a heat mirage made real.

Fingers shaking, Rey fumbled the lightsaber off her belt and held it out to him. It was his weapon, after all, no matter how she had come to think of it as her own. It had only and always been borrowed.

[thelastjedi]

He wants to take it, wants to grasp it and all that it represents. But that Luke - the Luke that didn't know the truth of his parentage, before he lost his hand - is gone now. The saber that he carries is his, and this one...

This one is hers.

"It's yours now," he says, reaching out to the Force again. She's strong, and she's connected to the saber in her hand. "Trust that feeling."

[tobereckoned]

"I barely know how to use it," she said. It was a poor reply for all that it was true. Although there was a sense of rightness she felt about having the lightsaber, it wasn't because the weapon felt peculiar in her grip. Throughout the duel, she'd kept trying to take a low jab with an extension of the handle that wasn't there.

"I was sent on a mission to find you. To give this back. To start training. To bring you back to help the Resistance."

[thelastjedi]

"To find me?" Where had he gone. When is she from? Questions crowd his mind, unsettling him. She unsettles him in a way he isn't used to. "The Resistance? You mean the Rebellion? But it just finished. We won."

It still feels strange to say that, and it's hard to know that the New Republic has been left behind. "We're forming a New Republic."

[tobereckoned]

"No. I know it sounds impossible but for me, that was years before I was even born. " Rey still wondered what kind of people her parents had been. If they'd been in the Rebellion and she was following their footsteps. Had they seen the fall of the Empire?

"The Resistance fights against the First Order. Maz Kanata said that they were just another form of evil. Like the Empire. Like the Sith."

[thelastjedi]

"Before- What year was it?" He realises that is the question that he needs answered first. He needs to understand when she is from before he can begin to understand any of the rest of this. Like who the First Order were, and how long their fledgling Republic had lasted.

[tobereckoned]

"30 ABY," Rey said, admittedly a little hesitant. "That's the Galactic Standard Calendar isn't it? Battle of Yavin?" They had used Coruscant years on Jakku and, nominally, adhered to the GSC but it hadn't actually mattered very much and no one had really cared.

"I don't know when the First Order formed. Fifteen years, maybe?" That would have made Kylo Ren old enough to be an apprentice, wouldn't it? The First Order had loomed on the border for so long that Rey had honestly forgotten about the time before they were a threat.

[thelastjedi]

"Thirty years?" It's been nearly six for him. Six years since the Battle that began to change everything. Six years since he started on this path to being a Jedi and bringing down the Empire. "How did it happen?"

"Leia- Han?" She had the Falcon, surely she would know of their future. They were the two most important people to him, especially his sister. "Did you know them?"

[tobereckoned]

Rey nodded, though it was hesitant. "I traveled with Han Solo a little while. My friend Finn, too. He helped us on a mission to get a droid back to General Organa." She smiled a little, though it was slightly guarded, afraid that Luke might somehow know she wasn't telling the entire truth.

"I only knew her for a little while. But she chose me to go find you."

[thelastjedi]

General Organa. He smiles at that, knowing that his sister would have deserved that promotion. The Rebellion had been her cause, and if there was another dark force that rose she would have been on the forefront of that fight too. "Droids have a way of getting in trouble"

Where was he? That's the only part that confuses him. Why would he have left when there was a need for him? He likely shouldn't ask. He should accept that he knows something about his future, and move on and live his life now. But he can't help it. "What happens? Why do I go?"

[tobereckoned]

"I don't know if I should tell you," Rey admitted outright. "There's so much that's happened and it hasn't happened yet." She didn't know if she could, or should, be the one to tell him what his nephew had become. Sometimes, Rey could still barely accept what she'd seen.

The living, younger Han Solo here only made it more confusing and a little painful.

"And I was only there for a little of it."

[thelastjedi]

Her words reinforce his first instincts. He shouldn't know what happens and what brings them to a place so far into in his future.

"You're right," he agrees, though he still wants to know more. That urge is not a healthy one. Luke looks back to the lightsaber she holds. "You haven't been trained, have you?"

[tobereckoned]

Rey shook her head. How could she have been when she didn't even have a family, much less teachers?

"Are you offering?" she asked, trying not to sound too hopeful.

[thelastjedi]

Is he offering? Is he in a place where he can teach yet? It's been his goal for months now, to start another Jedi Temple and help the order live and grow. But it was something he imagined as being months off, if not years. Yet here was a young woman with a connection to the Force as strong as his own. How could he say no to her?

"I am, if you'll have me. You'd be my first."

[tobereckoned]

Rey's heart jumped and she broke out into a smile. Her whole chest felt lighter for a moment and she nodded her gratitude. Admittedly, she knew very little about Luke as he was but she couldn't think of anyone better, past or present.

Whatever else, she knew he wouldn't be like Kylo Ren.

"Thank you. Thank you."

[thelastjedi]

Her smile is so wide and excited that he can't help but return it, as nervous as he is. "Don't thank me yet. It's not an easy path. Not for either of us."

"Be glad this place doesn't have a swamp."

[tobereckoned]

"I've never seen a swamp," Rey said. She knew of them from reading and running simulations on her datapad, but the first time she'd encountered anything green was still Takodana. "I'll have to take your word for it."

[thelastjedi]

"I don't know much about you. Where are you from? Not Dagobah, if you've never seen a swamp." It had been a joke of a sort, a reference to a time that she couldn't have known. Not a very good joke, because of that exact thing.

[tobereckoned]

Rey frowned, trying to decide how to answer that. "I grew up on Jakku, but i wasn't born there," she said. "I don't know where I was born." Where she'd been born, who her parents were, they were all beyond her knowledge. The longing to know had anchored her there, even when it had been time to leave.

[thelastjedi]

"I wasn't born where I grew up either. I didn't even know who my mother was until a few months ago." He knew that Anakin had been his father, but no one had spoken to him about Padme until after the second Death Star was destroyed.

[tobereckoned]

"You know more about your parents than I do." Rey had never talked about this with someone else. The closest had been when she told BB-8 that her family was coming for her too, a fairytale she'd told herself as she scratched in a countdown on the wall. "I have a family. They were going to come back for me."

[thelastjedi]

"Something happened, and they didn't?" It's less of a question than it sounds like, he can feel her pain at being abandoned. "I'm sorry."

[tobereckoned]

"I don't know. Maz Kanata said I shouldn't go back and then so many things happened at once." Circumstances had practically conspired to make her follow Maz' orders.

"And now I need to learn how to use the Force. I didn't even think it was real and then there I was. I have to make sure I can use it right and not hurt anyone."

[thelastjedi]

"Why would you think you would hurt anyone?" He can feel her worry and concern, and to Luke it seems strange. The Force was not a malicious thing in and of itself. "Use of the Force is an extension of yourself."

[tobereckoned]

"Because that's the only way I've really seen it used," Rey admitted. The memory of Kylo Ren in her mind still made her feel queasy and she wished she could burn him away from her.

His absence from this world was the only comfort in being here.

[thelastjedi]

"Who used it so?" He hates to think that there could be another Sith lord, another emporer or Vader.

"I'm sorry you experienced that. I can show you another path."

[tobereckoned]

"Kylo Ren," she said, using the name that he'd chosen for himself. To call him Ben Solo or Skywalker was still too strange to contemplate, especially after the last person she'd seen use that name.

The thought of Han Solo still made her chest ache.

"I don't know if I'm supposed to be a Jedi, but I know I don't want to be like that."

[thelastjedi]

He doesn't know the name. Luke shakes his head, sad that anyone should have to experience a Dark use of the Force ever again. "I don't know him."

"The path of a Jedi is a hard one, but I don't even know if I'm able to truly teach that." It is the thing that he doubts and worries about most. "But I can teach you. We can learn together."

[tobereckoned]

"He's with the First Order. But they were all the same. Empire, First Order. They all want the same things in the end." The plans were different but the results, the destruction, were familiar enough.

When Rey had gone looking for Luke Skywalker, she had hoped at best for a master. A distant teacher. What he offered now was something else. Something more equal.

Holding out a hand to shake, Rey nodded. "Deal."

[thelastjedi]

This feels right, feels like the agreement he was supposed to make with her. He smiles, relieved that she's agreed to it. "Deal."