chapter four
This is a dream.
Rey is sitting on the porch of her house on Yavin IV, watching the fireflies dance in the waning light, watching her children dance with them too. They’re not really hers, and when they go home to their parents in the village over the ridge for the night, their mothers and fathers and parents will tuck them into bed and they’ll dream of the undying Force and all its forms, good and bad. But she’s been teaching them for long enough that in a small way, in her heart, they are hers.
Generations of Force-users, placed into her hands and then let go, thousands of tiny stars wheeling around the galaxy. They are not Jedi, not in the way of old, and not all of them decide to set up schools of their own, like she has, or fight injustices the way Finn does. But still they wheel across the cosmos, and Rey can feel the world settling into balance, light and dark. With hope, it will stay that way for a long, long time. She and so many others had bled into the stars to make it so, generations of pain. She's hoping against hope for a bit of peace. Even just for a short while. She hopes that these children can grow up happy, with no dark shadows hovering over their lives.
She thinks that Leia must be proud.
Warm arms wrap around Rey’s shoulders, and lips press against her cheek. The beginnings of a laugh, the soft scent of the wildflowers filling her nose. All the living things, growing and green in the night.
“Pilot,” she mumbles, as Jess plants herself behind her, Rey leaning back in the vee of her legs. Jess, despite all her grumblings of being overworked, has never given up the skies and the silence of space. She teaches others to fly now. Sometimes Rey catches her looking up the dark, and it's a thing of beauty. Rey doesn't find the same comfort that her wife does in the stars, but she understands it. Jess cannot feel the Force, does not fathom the life that runs around and through them like a mountain stream through rock, but when she looks up, she is reminded of everyone else in the universe. They are silent for a moment, and Rey cranes her head back to look at her wife’s face. She's not looking at the stars this time, but her. The silver in Jess’s greying hair catches the moonlight, and Rey says nothing, transfixed.
“Jedi.” Jess kisses her on the forehead, and smiles that wry, crooked half-smile, all lips and no teeth. “I thought you could sense me coming.”
She could, and Rey knows a lot of other things too, now, with decades of studying the Force. She’s been watching the flow and ebb of the galaxy for a while now, and she knows so much, and yet doesn’t know even more.
The unknown is still out there, a gaping void of time and space that Rey, even in her studies, will never even begin to understand.
But she is no longer afraid.