excavate me (from all the girls I've tried to be)

1.

Jakku is a savage planet, its nights as frozen as its days are ablaze. The scavenger burrows deeper into her tattered blankets, every bone in her body shivering. Silence surrounds and pervades this tomb she calls a shelter – once a crucible for war, a harbinger of destruction.

The wind hisses her name across the sands. A single syllable, like a question. Rey. Rey.

A surname doesn't answer.

The scavenger clutches the blankets tighter, trying to reassemble herself like so many other machines. But she has never known which parts are missing, only that her chest aches when she washes the sand from her skin and stands, alone, in this abandoned hulk - only one girl, perhaps now nearly a woman – only one ray that proceeds from an unknown sun. The world dips into dark all the same.

Rey closes her eyes, plunging herself into vacancy that ripples with a thousand waves, calling her deeper, calling her home. The nameless ocean drowns her dreamless sleep.

2.

"Skywalker." Rey's voice feels like it comes from someone else.

When he looks at her, there are a thousand worlds in his eyes, whole systems he tried to drown in the surrounding ocean, but all the pain floats defiantly to the surface again, beached shards of all the people he has been. He doesn't smile. "Now that's a name," he says, in a voice not quite his own, "that I haven't heard in a long time… a long time."

Rey's heart skips a beat. She extends the lightsaber further, her hand trembling. "This belongs to you."

"It belonged to my father," says Skywalker. "Trying to wield it cost me my hand, and very nearly my integrity of heart."

"There are those who would tell you it's now saved the galaxy."

"And what do you say?"

Rey straightens. "I say the weapon owes much to its wielder; the blade to its Jedi, the Jedi to the Force."

"What do you know of the Force?"

"Very little. But I think it knows something of me."

Skywalker shifts, gravely, his fingers knotted together like roots of ancient trees. His stare is its own accusation. "You used this lightsaber."

"I –"

"I see its shadow in your eyes," he sighs. "What price did it exact from you? Not a hand, I see. Not your heart, or that blade would be ignited at my throat."

Rey swallows, but the lump in her own throat persists. The air feels charged with lightning. "I had a vision. But I don't think it came from the blade." She winces at the memory. "I saw this very ocean before us – every ripple, every rogue wave. I think I always have. I think it's always been there, buried beneath. Waiting to be excavated." She almost laughs. "It seems I've always been good at unearthing old things."

"Some are better off forgotten."

"You were never forgotten."

Skywalker looks to the setting sun. Then he draws his hood down over his face, covering his eyes, and says, "I should have been."

3.

There are burn-marks all along Rey's spine, across her knees and elbows, and along her wrists and ankles, from times Luke Skywalker sliced just close enough to singe. The stench of burning hair or angry flesh replaces the gentle brine of the sea. The azure blaze of a channeled crystal burns itself into her eyes like Jakku's relentless sun. Skywalker's emerald blade is everywhere; more so even than the planet's lone sun, it is strikes from his sword that divides day from night and sparring from sleep.

After years of reconstructing nothing but junkyards, Rey learns to disassemble an opponent's stance, and the way every bone and blood vessel leads into another, and the pregnant pauses between breaths and heartbeats.

The Force is the motion in every momentary stillness, the quiet in every sudden roar of strength. Rey hears it whisper in her sleep, a name she thinks belongs to her, but it's gone when her eyes fly open wide, and they always do. Rest is a privilege she must forsake if she is to become more skillful, and skillful she does indeed become.

Skywalker prepares her like something is coming.

It's fitting because something does.

4.

Rey dreams of fire in a set of eyes, and blood crafted into a blade. An invisible hand is outstretched, prepared to silence her scream, when she opens her eyes to nothing but stars, stars, stars. It's a beautiful night, undisturbed. She should roll over and listen to the waves until sleep washes over her again.

But a voice scatters the silence, distinct as a warm breath against her ear: Rey, get up.

She flies to her feet, one hand already reaching for Anakin Skywalker's blade at her belt. "Who are you?" Silence returns in useless answer. Heart pounding, Rey looks to sleeping Skywalker, then nudges him in the ribs with her boot. "Get up. Master, get up…"

"Rey…"

"Up!" She all but pulls him to his feet with her free hand.

Blinking, Skywalker unclips his lightsaber from his belt. His eyes scan the island like twin moons. "What is it?" he says, every muscle tense.

"Something is coming," Rey breathes.

"Indeed it is," says a voice out of the dark, and then the starlight is eclipsed by blood-red streaks along the shoreline.

All the blood drains from Skywalker's face. "No," he says, but he doesn't seem to be talking to her, or even to himself. "Not here. Not here…"

The blood-streaks shift ever closer in the darkness. Rey raises her lightsaber, and a midnight blade scatters the dark with a roar and a hum.

"This was supposed to be a separate place," says Skywalker, "suspended in the Force. Is nothing sacred? Is nothing uncorrupted, my apprentice, by what you have done?"

A laugh like a snake's cuts through the air. It twists, cold, down Rey's spine.

"You are an old man and a fool, Skywalker. Kylo Ren has taken his own apprentices now. There has been an awakening, and no matter how deep your slumber, it was always destined to take the veil from your eyes… and from hers."

Rey's knuckles go white around her weapon. "What do you know of me?"

"A better question, I think…" Another blade ignites, inches from the soft skin of Rey's throat. For an instant she's alone in a snowy wood, her closest friend in the galaxy tossed aside like spare parts, waiting for the end. "What do you know of yourself, girl?"

"I know enough." She closes her eyes, and the blade at her throat leaps to her free hand. "I shamed your master without a lick of training. What makes you think yourselves any mightier than the one you serve?" Both blades, azure and scarlet, cross in front of her eyes, burning into her irises. "And I have grown more powerful."

"Ah, there it is." The snake she disarmed steps out of the shadows, a perfect echo of Ren himself, every angle of the mask familiar, every sweep of the dark robe a reminder of how close she came to death. But he is only a dark disciple. "I feel your anger, your hatred. You have grown stronger indeed – but not, I fear, as the old fool desired."

"Rey," says Skywalker. "Don't fight them." He returns his own weapon to his belt, jaw tense. "It's what they want."

Rey's breath plumes in the cold night, gleaming in the light of her twin sabers. "I'm not afraid of Ren anymore."

"Good," says the disciple, and lunges.

Rey blocks the strike with both blades, the Force gathering inside her like a fist clenching, and when it breaks loose the disciple staggers as if struck by a gale.

"Our master has many followers," says the disciple, as a flurry of other blades from other shadows comes wheeling into attack range, "but room enough for only one apprentice. Always two, there are. He would make you his second."

The air crackles with spears of color, crashing together, breaking away – a lethal dance like lightning sparring.

"I have a master," says Rey, but as she looks around, he is nowhere to be seen. The Force flowing through her freezes, glacial, and she's suddenly trapped in her own body again, barely managing to block the rapid succession of blows.

"Ren would teach you," says one disciple.

"What this old man has always withheld," says another.

"Knowing you would surpass him," says a third.

"As he surpassed his father," says a fourth, and it's then that Rey feels a heavy boot crash into her ribs, and she hurtles blindly through the air and into the dark.

When she lands, she doesn't know if she's actually looking up or only seeing stars from the impact. Then blood-shine stands poised to pierce her heart, and Rey knows for certain she's lying on her back. Her twin blades are sprawled uselessly, like broken wings, at her sides.

"Who are you, girl?" says the mask.

The old abyss screams within, the imprint of Jakku, and Rey knows herself to be a wasteland all her own, desolate, something made of wreckage and lost time, waiting to be pieced back together. "Enough!" she screams, and she hears the disciple's head thump dully into the grass before she registers that she is standing, and her blades are crossed at a headless throat, and her eyes are stinging.

"My thoughts exactly," says another shadow.

A streak of bloody light. A pain nearly beautiful in its purity.

Rey shrieks and falls to her knees when she sees her hand, still clutching the enemy's lightsaber, sheared cleanly free at the wrist, and tumbling into the grass. The blade she still holds slips immediately from her grasp, and she pitches forward without another cry.

Gasping, Rey stares, aghast, at the bloodless stump where her hand should be. Tears leak defiantly out of her eyes. She tries to scream again, but her breath is gone, barely a trickle in the back of her throat.

A masked shadow looms over her like the grave. "Look at me, Skywalker."

Rey wipes her face free of tears with her remaining hand. Her lower lip quivers, but she sets her jaw. "Skywalker has already escaped… and with him, his legacy. The promise of another generation of Jedi."

The mask doesn't flinch.

Rey stares at the expressionless armor, her lips peeling back from her teeth. "You've failed."

The dark disciple extends his lightsaber. Rey wills herself to keep her eyes open, to stare her enemy down when he finishes her. But instead, the blade taps one of her shoulders, closely enough to sting, and then the other – like a knighthood.

"Rise, Skywalker."

"I told you," Rey hisses through gritted teeth. "He's gone." Like everyone else. Like all the girls I've tried to be. Like all the girls I might have yet become, because I'm going to die alone on this unknown sea.

The mask returns his lightsaber to his belt. And like a crashing wave, like a renewed flame, like the weight of a planet falling squarely upon her shoulders, the mask looks at her and says, "I was talking to you."

5.

Millenniums before, on a planet not so far away, there was a story much the same. A promising hero, a legend incarnate, that the assembled shadows christened Darth Revan. A battle, a betrayal, and he was reborn by another name, adopted into the light with no memory of the darkness.

The memories, when they returned with a vengeance, nearly drove him mad. And the Council deemed such radical reprogramming a violation of its Code.

Millenniums later, the last Jedi watches his most prodigious pupil succumb to the dark. Only his nephew, only a distant relation, and even this warrior has a hell inside his soul, the fire of a thousand suns at his command. He will leave scars upon the galaxy.

Another Skywalker, if claimed by the dark, would consume the galaxy altogether.

So Luke returns to among the oldest stories he's studied, the most forbidden of techniques, and he drops a girl on a desert planet with flashes of a life she never lived, and only ashes of the one she truly did. He presses a kiss to her forehead, a promise to her skin, and asks an old trustworthy Resistance leader to keep an eye on her. It's a tale that transcends time, the circle now nearly complete. And he hopes she'll never know the name Skywalker.

As she plunges into the ocean, summoning Chewbacca with all the mental force her father once used as he dangled from Cloud City, Rey hears that name over and over, like a drumbeat inside her skull, before her vision collapses into dark.

6.

The first person the Wookiee calls isn't even Resistance. Just a boy who was never meant to have a name, who almost dares to hope for a home when he sees Rey's eyes for the first time in a short forever.

She's in a haze of medical drugs, and she winces with every tiny movement, but Finn thinks she's quite possibly the most beautiful thing he's ever seen, radiant in her survival against the odds, eyes still bright despite being clouded with painkillers.

While BB-8 converses with General Organa's hologram, discussing the availability of a prosthetic, Finn keeps watch, on his knees, beside Rey's bunk. She's been looking blankly at him for a while already, but suddenly she blinks and seems to see him.

"Finn…"

"Rey." He can feel his smile, so wide it could split his face. "Rey, you're alive. We've got you."

A single stray tear leaks out of one eye before she closes them both. "I saw… I saw…"

"Tell me."

She does, and it's like gravity reverses and leaves him floating aimlessly, anchorless, on a sea as nameless as he should have been.

7.

BB-8 tells them a prosthetic will be ready when they land, but Chewbacca is still repairing damage sustained to the hyperdrive during their last-ditch escape from Luke's island planet, so it could be a while.

Still visibly in pain, teeth gritted, jaw clenched, Rey turns abruptly to Finn and says, tersely, quietly, "Hold my hand."

Finn blinks. He doesn't move.

"Did you hear me?"

Finn's face heats. "Are you… sure? I mean, the last time I tried that you…" Her gaze is furious even now, and he blurts out, "All right, all right."

He takes her small hand in his. He only held it for a moment before she protested last time, but he's aware of every new callous, every unfamiliar line. There's a map of these past months on her remaining hand. He wishes she hadn't had to lose one to let him hold the other; he wonders what that means.

"Finn," Rey says, barely audible. "I'm not alone anymore."

"I know," he says. "I've got you, Rey. I –"

She swallows what sounds like it should have been a sob. "Try to understand. My only steady companion on Jakku was silence. Silence can't bleed; people can." Her gaze is piercing. "You can."

"I don't care."

"When we land, when they take me away, we can't see each other again."

It feels like the floor has been knocked out from under him, a cruel trick. "No," Finn says. "I left you once. I left you once because I was asleep, because I didn't have a choice, but now I do, and I'm not leaving you. I'm not leaving you ever again."

Rey chokes. "Silence kept me company for years, Finn."

"Silence can't hold your hand."

"And what makes you think I need someone to hold my hand?"

"You don't," Finn says. "But I think you deserve it."

Rey sighs, all the tension ebbing out of her body, even though he's holding her hand tightly enough to tear it loose, too.

Finn swallows. The air between them is heavy with shared breaths, synced heartbeats. "You kissed my head, when I was asleep."

Rey hesitates, then says, "I did."

"Why?"

"I don't know."

Silence stretches. Finn thinks about releasing her hand, but he doesn't know if he'll ever be permitted to hold it again, and the moment is too fragile for him to risk shattering it. "I almost kissed you," he says, "when we rescued you, or you rescued yourself. Or however you want to tell the story."

"Why didn't you?"

"I don't know."

Rey's eyes drift slowly shut. Groggy, she says, "Just hold my hand, Finn."

He laughs. "I haven't let go."

"Then don't," she says, and slips into sleep.

(She won't remember when the drugs wear off, but he doesn't.)