Saga - OT Night (Rey introspection)

Title: Night
Author: Divapilot
Character: Rey
Timeframe: Just prior to TFA
Summary: Dreams are a luxury a scavenger girl cannot afford.

***

The girl left the security of the little space she called home and stepped outside. Her feet sank into the soft drifts of sand that gathered against the exterior, and little shards of irritating grit slipped inside her loosely tied boots to chafe her skin. But it was worth the price. She stood still, her hand resting on the cool metal of the abandoned vehicle she lived in.

Around her she heard night sounds- some predatory animal howling far in the distance, the whispering shift of sands as gravity and the wind reshaped the topography. The breeze was a gentle caress, not the scouring assault that it became when the day’s heat kindles it. She lifted up her face to let the breeze blow across it, and she smiled.

A panoply of stars looked down at her. They burned with white hot heat into the dark sky; glittering, fantastic points of light against a void-black background. No other light competed with this. Well, only the moon, but it was at its lowest point and small enough that its light was negligible. No, the night belonged to the stars.

The girl gazed at them. They didn’t fill her with wonder or a sense of awe. She was not struck with the realization that she was very small and the galaxy was very large. Instead, they were familiar lanterns, come to visit a lonely friend and keep her company through her solitary night. Sometimes she thought she could see patterns in their arrays. She imagined shapes between them: the wedge-shaped collection of stars looked like the wreckage of the star destroyer that she sometimes scavenged; the circular one looked a bit like a fat bloggin.

She stepped off the metal grate and into the soft sand, her feet sinking a little as she advanced into the darkness. The soft breeze blew her gauzy scarf, lifting the ends and curling them around her thin frame. She held her staff tightly; one never knew what new monster could pop out of the sand at any moment. But this was worth the risk. A meter or so distance from her home gave her a wider view of the brilliant sky. She tilted back her head to take in as much as she could. So many stars. Such beauty in this savage, hostile world.

She stood silently and absorbed the sight. Then, smiling to herself (as no one else was there to see it anyway), she turned and walked back through the shifting sands and onto the metal grate by the entrance to her home. She placed her hand on the side of the fallen vehicle and turned one last time to gaze at their light before shaking the sand off her feet and stepping inside to secure her home for the night. There were so many other worlds out there, but although she yearned to explore them, she knew far too well how fragile her existence was. Desires and dreams were shunted aside, drowned out by the monotony of work and the constant struggle for survival. She could not afford to gaze upward for long. For now, she would have to continue to walk the path of the hot and gritty sand. Maybe someday, in some future far beyond her current grasp, she would walk the sky.

 

Love this! Beautifully written, I feel Rey's pain and hope, bound to the earth but screaming for the sky like her father before her.

 

I agree with JadeLotus! Simply beautiful. Rey strikes me as a girl who would like to dream if she could (like her daddy), but she's admirably pragmatic.

 

Lovely! I particularly like the way you show she doesn't have the luxury of dreaming of far off worlds (like her possibly father did?) because in her life even taking a few steps outside her own home at night is hugely risky. And yet the urge still lies within her!

 

Oh, divapilot - I always feel in the midst of your scenes. So vivid, so sensorily rich!!! What a beautiful moment and so much an echo of Luke at that age. Thanks for sharing, as always.

 

One of my favourite quotes ever is this one by Yoko Ono:
Look at a star in the sky not as something unreachable but as a planet you would visit one day.

And I'm giddy to see anything even remotely similar to that. I don't necessarily think that Rey is hopeless here, it looks like she sees dreams as delusions, and, at the same time, from the way her mind works, she is able to transfer them into the energy she needs to live. The idea of seeing those constellations as shapes of things known to her on a world where otherwise there isn't that much to see. And sure, this continues the whole motif of "hating the sand" from Anakin's part of the Saga and gazing at the sky from Luke's.

Now, the idea of one metre being enough for a disaster to happen is a whole different story! Eeek.

 

"she would walk the sky."

Very nice. Rey might be one that "walks the sky" soon enough. Well Done.

 

Just wanted to add my two cents - this is a rich little piece, full of promise of what we know is coming, but what Rey won't allow herself to risk believing in.

Because, dreams are risky in a survival situation, to be grabbed and held close in the quiet moments, and there had to be few of those on Jakku ...

Thanks for sharing,
Onderon1