Inevitable, A modern day Reylo AU

Chapter 2 - Dinner Anyone?

The sun was shining brightly as Rey stepped out of the office tower and into the cool October air.   It was a perfect autumn day and she was happy to have the afternoon off to go visit her adoptive parents, Obi and Anna.  Although she called them weekly, she hadn't seen them in over a month, and was therefore long past due for a visit.

She didn't really remember her real parents.  They'd been killed in a car accident when she was a child – just 5 years old - leaving her an orphan with no family.  She didn't even think of them very often anymore, but every once in awhile she'd have flashbacks of them.  When the flashbacks came, they were more like memories of feelings rather than actual images or thoughts, having been too young when they died to retain very much.

Obi and Anna Kenobi had taken in the 5-year old orphan as soon as they'd found out about her parents, and that she was all alone in the world with no other living relatives.  Luckily she had been at day care when the accident had happened, but it had taken her family away in an instant.  However, when her father's former teacher and his wife had found out about her parent's deaths, they didn't think twice about taking her in.  They'd never been able to have children themselves, and had always wanted a daughter.

Even though they were older, and money was always short, they'd been happy, and did the best that they could, giving her as much love as her own parents would have.  They'd become a family, and she couldn't love them any more than she did.   She loved them as if they were her natural grandparents – to her, it certainly felt like they were - and was extremely grateful they'd taken her in when they did.  Had they not done so, she certainly would've ended up in foster care.

They'd given her a good life.  Their down to earth outlook on the world had helped instill a sense of hard work and self-reliance that most kids her own age didn't have.  When she was little, she used to sit for hours watching Obi tinker with his old pickup truck.  It was forever breaking down, but they couldn't afford a new one.  Eventually, Rey learned enough about engines that she would help him fix whatever was wrong with it.  It was one of her favourite memories growing up.

In contrast, she'd spent an almost equal amount of time with Anna, who'd taught her to cook, as well as tried to teach her to sew, and generally 'keep house'.  Thinking about it, Rey chuckled to herself.  Anna had called it her biggest failure.  Although Rey had mastered cooking - to her, cooking was just a form of chemistry - she was dismal at anything else related to house chores, unless it involved fixing something that had fallen apart.  Like engine repair, she excelled at fixing plumbing or electrical problems, and other small things.   By the time Rey was 10 years old, Anna had given up on trying to teach her the basics of 'all things that women should know' as she called it.

As a teacher, Obi had been strict with her studies – teaching her that knowledge was powerful and that she should never stop learning – about anything and everything.  Because of that, it was her life's guiding principle to learn something new every single day.  She never forgot it, and that dedication to her education combined with hard work and her natural knack for fixing things - as well as generally understanding how things worked - helped her earn an engineering scholarship at MIT.  Quite simply, she excelled at it. It was her calling – and by the time she was 14 she'd known it without a doubt.

When she was in her late teens, she'd been curious about her parent's deaths.  Obi and Anna had cautiously pulled out a file of police reports and old newspaper clippings for her to read.  That was how she found out that the circumstances of the accident were unclear, with one witness having reported what they'd thought was another car running them off the road and into oncoming traffic.  However, the mystery car was never found and the police apparently attributed the eyewitness accounts as some sort of trick of the fading sunlight.  No investigation was ever launched and the case was closed.  In the end, the accident was reported as simply that – a tragic accident and nothing more.