A Pauper’s Grave
Jakku hadn’t changed a bit. It was all as Rey remembered: the sun just as searing, the air as dry, the people as selfish and desperate. The galaxy’s garbage bin, where junk was left to rot.
She found her parents’ grave on the outskirts of town, so close to the place where she’d spent years bargaining for her daily bread, waiting for a family already laid to rest. Rey remembered coming here once when she was five or six, just a few days after her parents had sold her to Unkar Plutt. She’d buried it down, deeper than the single grave that held their bodies.
The spot was marked by a stripped-clean cruiser’s battery. It had been so heavy to her childish arms that she’d been forced to beg an older scavenger to carry it for her. It was a miracle that the shifting sands hadn’t dislodged it.
Rey sat, legs crossed, and pressed her bare hands to the ground. Breathe, Luke would have told her. Just breathe.
She could feel the decay below the earth, bones stripped of flesh toward no purpose. This wasn’t Ahch-To; her parents’ bodies had never fed new life.
They’d been weak people with rough lives who had loved neither her nor each other. Your parents threw you away like garbage, Ben had said. A nasty thing to toss in her face, and all the more bitter to swallow because it was true.
Rey spent that night in her AT-AT. (A foul-mouthed Twi’lek had taken it for himself, but one swing of her lightsaber near his lekku had the bastard running off.) She could have slept aboard the Falcon, or better yet taken it back to base, but she didn’t want to. She wasn’t ready to leave. Maybe she’d never been ready to leave.
Her hammock was gone, but the Twi’lek had put together a pallet of musty blankets and flight seat cushions. Rey clutched her doll to her chest, looking up at the wall defaced with thousands of tally marks. Each one commemorating a day passed on this desert hell, wasted waiting on people who were here all along, dead and buried.
Rey didn’t cry. She’d shed enough tears for a family who had undoubtedly shed none on her.
She was half asleep when she felt the world slow down, her crippled walker hushed to an unnatural silence. And then Ben was there, lying right beside her.
He stared at her with hungry eyes, mouth trembling with want and anger.
“No wonder you wore a mask,” Rey said. “Everything you think shows on your face.”
Ben sat up and snarled, baring his uneven teeth. Rey looked up at him, frozen under the weight of his fury.
“I should be the angry one. It didn’t have to be this way, Ben.”
He laughed, a sound so sharp that it could cut her from across the stars. “No, it didn’t. You could have come with me, ruled with me. And instead you’re doing--what, trying to build a rebellion out of one ship full of fighters?”
Rey didn’t answer, although his assessment was spot on and he had to know it.
Then he softened, settling back to the calm she’d learned to expect from him in the quiet moments when the Force connected them. It was strange, how even keeled he could be with her when the rest of the world only ever saw his rage, as unbridled as an animal’s.
“What do you want?” Rey asked. “You know I won’t join you.”
Ben’s gaze swept over her, taking her in, and Rey felt suddenly exposed. She could be his prey, lying on her back like this; she could be his lover.
He reached for her, brushing her cheek with the back of his hand. Rey closed her eyes, a shudder rippling over her body. They’d touched so little since they met that it always felt precious, even when it was only the ghost of him that laid hands on her.
“Come back to me,” he whispered. “Please.”
Ben cupped her cheek now, and Rey clenched her jaw to keep from making some small, pitiful noise. It felt so good to make him beg, to break this powerful man over his need for her--but it was growing so hard to deny him, more difficult every time he asked. Rey leaned into his touch, stealing what comfort she could while he was here. The Force wouldn’t allow them much more time. She could already feel their connection slipping away, the noise of the real world invading this sacred space.
Rey couldn’t give in, but she could give him something.
“I miss you,” she said.
Ben looked down at her, his vulnerable lips parting, but she’d never know what he was going to say, because then he was gone.
Rey held her doll tighter. She’d almost forgotten the principal law of this world, the one that ruled every day of her childhood: the desert only took, never gave.
NOTES: This story is for the @reylofanfictionanthology‘s TLJ Flash Fic Challenge prompt “Jakku”
