The Art of Broken Pieces

Lunch and Spoon Piloting the Falcon (They Think)

Rey was aware of her own heartbeat. The fabric of the universe pulsed, sluggish and strange. It felt...harder to be here, somehow, like her concentration was thready and weak, harder to push past that first set of walls, to convince herself they didn't exist.

It hurt so much. How could she tell herself that pain didn't exist?

Because she had to. If she wanted to live, she had to. A twang of determination rippled from her, pushing her hard past the surface of her own mind. The pain fought her, but she clamped down on her willpower and forced her brain to clear, her grasp on the Force to steady, drawing her deeper and deeper into meditation until...

It all dropped away.

She might have slid sideways, right off a cliff. She plummeted into the Force, unable to stabilize or control her descent, and felt it unfurl into infinity below her. She could fall forever. She could just vanish, unshackled from the world, her body dissipating into nothing, like Luke.

No... she thought, to the Force, to Luke, to anyone who might listen. Help me....

She landed in soft sand, shapeless dunes rolling out into infinity. They shifted like mirages in the heat, becoming familiar one moment, and foreign in the next.

"Hello, Rey." The voice was quiet, kind, a voice that had seen many years and the wisdom they brought. He was still distant, walking across the sands towards her, though his words could have been spoken from her side. Long robes dragged the sands as he approached, hands clasped before him, face still shrouded in the darkness of his hood.

One moment she was looking up from the ground, the next she was standing, boots tilted in that familiar way—it had to be just-so when you stood on dunes, to keep the sand from slipping out from under you. Every instinct was to squint, to lift a hand to shade her eyes...but the light was different here. Familiar, but without the same reflective burn of a real planet.

She watched the figure, watched the sun behind him...suns? Sometimes there seemed to be two of them, other times, only one.

Had he...answered her call?

"Hello?" she called, unsure if he could hear her. "Are you...can you help me? Who are you? Where..." She looked around, noticed the staff in her right hand, and felt a bit better. "Is this Jakku?"

"Yes, and no." He said with a smile in his voice, leaving no footprints as he moved across the dunes towards her.

"You know where you are." The sands shifted again, rocky brown earth exposed beneath before the wind blew the sands back over it again. "This is the Force, Rey. Or rather, your construction of it."

He was beside her then, face still shadowed. "Come, sit with me."

Rey wasn't startled. Somehow, him suddenly appearing beside her wasn't surprising—it was right. So was the appearance of the half-buried AT-AT walker she'd once called home. As soon as she knew it was there, they were sitting on it, side-by-side.

He was tall, broadly built and large of hand and foot. There was a serenity emanating from him, soothing the edges of her mind like a cool breeze.

Her brain scavenged for names, for people she had heard of in stories. People who might have responded to her call.

"...Ben?" She ventured. "Master Kenobi?"

He laughed then, large hands reaching up to pull down the large hood of his Jedi robes.

"Not exactly." He said, smiling, the weathered lines of his face hauntingly familiar and yet different from the faces she had known--from Luke's, from Leia's. His eyes were dark, warm, and very, very much like Ben's. "I'm not sure if he would be amused or insulted by the comparison."