For the Thousand Meme! Now, I do feel that it’s relevant here that I don’t…entirely agree with TLJ as a narrative decision and reserve the right to ignore it to my taste.
1. Something before canon
Rey’s staff used to be medical piping, before she got to it. She ripped it out of a downed Empire ship, crept through the bowels of the thing until she found a door that was jammed shut by a broken hydraulic. It took her about three hours and five mild shocks to rewire it so that it could be opened.
The piping from the room on the other side, she kept. She needed a weapon, and her last staff had been on the unfortunate end of a well-aimed laser cutter a week before, during a fight. This was medical-grade tungsten-coated steel, and the thicker ones were heavy enough to do damage, so–weapon.
The hyperbaric chamber–an odd thing to put in a warship, but not hers to question why, Rey supposed–got her food for a month and a half, when she dragged it back to the trading post.
2. Something during canon (TFA)
The hug she gets from Finn is the first time Rey has been embraced in over a decade.
3. Something after canon
Someday Rey will be expected to attend state dinners as a war hero.
It will be…interesting.
4. Something happy
Rey knows, in theory, that thunderstorms are a thing that exist. Heat lightning ran rampant in Jakku, in the right weather. But the first time she hearts thunder boom overhead, she freezes, and Jessica Pava waves a hand and says, “It’s just a rainstorm.”
The entire Resistance is treated to the sight of Rey, the hope of the Jedi, sprinting out into the rain so that she can whoop and holler up at the sky every time it roars.
5. Something sad
Rey never–she doesn’t miss Jakku, it really is as bad as Finn claims it is. But sometimes she looks out her window or out of the Falcon, or out over a room full of people expecting things from her, expecting things from miraculous Jedi powers all the way down to knowing to use a fork rather than her fingers, and she misses being somewhere with rules she knows. Sometimes she misses that so sharply it hurts.
6. Something shippy
Poe has known Rey for three days when he discovers that she thinks ration bars are the height of gastronomic joy. Finn’s not quite that bad, but he’s close.
The second they’re on a planet with green things and a spare three hours, he sits them down and cooks them a whole meal. It’s a bastardization of his father’s tapas, on account of being mostly made out of alien plant life, and could definitely be better, but both of them look at him like he’s a god while they’re stuffing their faces. Poe grins back at them and considers in depth exactly how screwed he is.
7. Something smutty
Rey is a straight-shooter by nature, not overly given to concealing her thoughts when she doesn’t have to. So once she finishes her tapas, she folds both hands on the table and looks at Finn and Poe and says, “I think we should have sex.”
Then she waits for the two of them to finish choking on air and says, “We all like each other very much and I believe this was a date. Am I wrong?”
“Well, no,” Poe says frankly, and Finn stares at his hands like he’s trying to will himself into invisibility. Rey smiles at him, sweet Finn who can’t hide his thoughts on his face for the life of him. Too much time behind that helmet.
“So,” Rey says, standing up to whisk the plates away. Poe has explained this to her–plates are washed, which happens in the sink. She leaves them there to get dealt with later and blinks at the two of them from the door to the bedroom. “Are you coming?”
8. Something domestic
Rey’s love for plants becomes well-known within weeks of her joining the Resistance, and Rey is liked and likable, so people begin bringing her gifts. Flowers in vases, at first, but the first time someone had to explain that they would die and she looked outright alarmed, they switched to potter ferns and succulents, hardy things that thrive even under the artificial lights of the Falcon. The first time she’s given a carnivorous plant, sort of like a star-shaped, tentacled flytrap that snaps shut on insects like a mouth, she’s enchanted. She becomes a remarkably talented gardener, for someone who grew up on a desert world.
9. Something dramatic
Rey finds some old footage from the Clone Wars and discovers that–shit son–if you use the Force right you can jump off buildings and do backflips over whole crowds. The galaxy will never know peace again.
Finn can’t quite hold it against her, because the first time she puts it to use is to drop three stories into the middle of a fight and save his ass.
10. Something AU
I’m still bitterly upset about the whole “you’re no one” thing so…
It’s halfway true. Kylo Ren says the words and Rey swallows them whole like razor blades and ignores the way they make her bleed.
It’s later, when she’s trying to meditate the feeling away in the pilot’s chair of the Falcon, that she feels a distinct little bzzt against her mind that’s almost like Ren hollering down that link, but not quite. She opens her eyes suspiciously and there’s a young man sitting in the empty copilot’s chair, his legs crossed like hers, dressed in plain brown and looking at her through long curly hair the color of dark sand. He has bright blue eyes and a scar and he glows.
“He was wrong, you know,” the young man observes–he has a deeper voice than she expected. He can’t be much older than she is.
“About what?” Rey has pretty well hit her threshold for dramatics and nonsense, these days, so–sure, now she’s seeing things.
“You’re not no one,” the young man says. “Your mother was, but you aren’t.”
“I think I’m about done being told what I am,” Rey muses, and she gets a wide grin in reply.
“That’s a good instinct,” he advises. “Go with it. But you’re not no one, and I thought you might want to know.”
“All right, who am I, then?”
He offers her his gloved hand, bumps his knuckles against her own in an oddly fraternal gesture–or mimics the motion, at least, and stops before his hand passes too far through her own. “You’re a second chance at balance. Do better than the first one, yeah?”
Rey, from TFA!
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