[open]

[forcevisions]

WHO: REY and YOU
WHERE: Abstract dream land or the Mt Everest ruins
WHEN: March 15 - 31
WHAT: Rey returns from her canon update despondent and distant, committing herself to hermitage in the ruins of the Mt. Everest gate rather than rejoining her friends in New Amsterdam. She can't hide her return, however, as her subconscious pulls others into her unpleasant dreams and memories.
NOTES OR WARNINGS: Child neglect at the very least, but also spoilers for the first half of The Rise of Skywalker

there are worse ways to die

[ She wakes up in her bed, while Daenerys is out. Her hair is longer, now, and brown again, but the starmap tattooed on her hand is still there, as are the burn scars that wrap around her wrists. She checks for all of them like someone checking that everything that happened in a dream was real.

It's been a year since she saw those scars, a year since she slept in this bed. It doesn't feel like it belongs to her anymore. It feels like a pretend life, one that she'd left behind. So do all the artifacts of it: the stuffed bat, the golden dice, even the unbroken lightsaber of Luke Skywalker, which peeks out from under her mattress like an accusation.

She grabs these things, and some spare clothing, some food, and she leaves before Daenerys can find her. When she sets foot outside her apartment, she doesn't know yet where she plans to go, but she knows that she can't stay here anymore. The apartment is full of too many memories, made painful now, and being in New Amsterdam feels like putting the Displaced at risk. Because she isn't a hero. She isn't a rebel fighter for Morningstar. She's a Palpatine. A Sith. It's only a matter of time before that side of her emerges. She won't subject any of them to that.

Messages try to change her mind. Han. Diana. The people she'd thought could be her family; she recognizes that now as an escape, a denial. She had constructed this life as an artifice to protect herself from the truth. So she doesn't reply. Instead, she pushes herself as far from them as she can.

That's how Rey winds up in the last place she'd been before the new memories of her galaxy pick up. She uses the New Amsterdam gate to get there. The ruins of Everest are as she left them, and the golden-eyed animals greet her with a familiar animosity that she thinks she deserves. There are no sherpas here. No fellow Displaced.

It's just her, and the empty stone chambers, and the valley. She shivers against the cold. Probably, she deserves that too. It's the closest she'll ever come to Ahch-to in this galaxy. No one would come find her here. Few could, and they wouldn't even know to look.

After a few days, it starts to look lived in. Rey has made up something like a bed with the supplies she had originally packed for the Everest trip. She does not think about how she'd shared that sleeping bag with Ben —with Kylo Ren. She only lay it out beside her lantern and beside the makeshift firepit she builds from rubble. Some of the days blur together. Some don't. When she's at her best, she does her meditative routine, the one Leia had taught her, and she sets up a training course in the ruins, and she scavenges food from the sparse wildlife. When she's at her worst, she doesn't get out of bed.

It's not much of a life. But it's a life. ]

dream #1 - the throne of the sith

[ When Rey becomes conscious of the fact that she's dreaming, she's sitting on the stone seat of the throne of the Sith. Angular and comically large, it stands on a large stone dais at the center of an enormous audience chamber in a stone temple. Stadium seating lines the walls, and a lightning storm crashes overhead through the open ceiling. The space is bitter cold and dusty, full of skeletons and shadows.

Rey wears a black dress with a hood, and at her side sits Kylo Ren. It would be impossible to know this man for the one who made a life for himself in New Amsterdam, for he wears a steel helmet that hides his face. Shattered once, glowing red spiderwebs hold the plates together.

Around them, in the audience seating, disfigured shadows and skeletons in hoods roar. It's support and approval, but it's cultish, fervid in a way that suggests more colosseum than true celebration. It is Kylo Ren's words, whispered in her ear with the helmet scrambling his voice, that brings her back to herself, and makes her aware of the Displaced person that now stands before them. His hand settles on her shoulder, the curve of her neck, with an intimate sort of possession as he says: When the time comes, you'll join me.

Rey leaps to her feet, tears away from him more in fear than disgust. The latter, where it appears, is with herself — with her own wanting. ]

dream #2 - i know all about waiting

[ Thinking about her family always brings up her worst memories of Jakku, and right now, it's impossible not to dwell on the family she'd lost. The family who'd sold her.

A woman's voice fills the abstract, intangible space of the dream first: I'll come back for you, sweetheart. I promise. But as it repeats, the voice grows clearer, and — It's Rey's own voice. A younger version of it, to be sure, but as it grows sharper and clearer, the scenery solidifies.

Rey — the child Rey, not the recently returned Rey — lies curled up on herself in the belly of a fallen siege weapon, an AT-AT. The interior has been converted into a generously-named apartment, more a den than anything, and the child whispers this to herself like a mantra: I'll come back for you, sweetheart, I promise. ]

Stop. [ The adult Rey, standing over the child, looks irate and grief-stricken. ] Stop it. They're not coming back.

[ She should have known it. She should have known it from the start. ]

Comments

[inherited]

I know. But you can talk to her over your implant, let her know that you're sorry. [Right now, Rey is fragile, and it worries him to see her return to that at the moment. Daenerys is someone who is sharp—and, Riku thinks, someone who could get this if Rey had the chance to talk to her. She has her own demons, but it might not be the same. Not really. Or maybe she'll be frustrated that Rey forgot that.

Riku could understand that, too.]

But I know I can't force you, so I'll just stay right here and wait. [And, well, he pulls back on his glove. It's cold!]

[forcevisions]

She hates the implant.

[ Recalling this is like recalling a childhood memory. New Amsterdam and her knowledge of all the people in it feel far away to her, memories that were unused and put in cold storage. Anchoring herself in amiable chatter about them helps pack some of her darker feelings away. If she can stamp them down, suppress them, then maybe ...

Maybe she'll get through this. Just like she got through Jakku. Maybe she can be the person her friends need her to be. ]

I don't think she'd even seen a shuttle before she came to this world. One of those. [ She waves her hand, then hooks her lantern to a carabiner on her backpack. ] It'll be better in person. [ Plus, she'd left her in the lurch with rent, and most of Rey's stuff was still there.

But Riku's already admitted he won't press the issue, and that's for the best all around. It doesn't take her long to get things packed up and ready to go back to New Amsterdam via the gate. It feels a little like restarting, back to where she had been before she'd gone home, taking another stab at the year that followed, that had driven her to flee. Maybe she'll do better this go around. ]

[inherited]

[Riku does worry that it won't be as simple as just bringing her back. He recalls a lot of the trials with Xion, as well as the difficulty involved. She says that Daenerys doesn't like the implant—but then, it's not as if Rey is going to have an easier time of explaining why she took some of her stuff and hid.

He'd offer to be there for her, to help her through it, but that doesn't seem like the answer, either.

As it is, he just falls into step beside her, helping her where he can.

As they're about to head back, he adds,] Let me know if you need me for anything once we get back.

[forcevisions]

I will.

[ she's put her gloves back on, the ones that have kept her warm enough to survive up here, and with that security, she reaches out to squeeze his hand, as finn had taken hers. together, he'd said. and for a moment, just a moment, she tries to imagine that could be true, here. ]

I promise.