- When Rey is ten, another scavenger tries to steal her haul. It isn’t much: a twist of some old engine, a carbonator; but it’s enough to feed her for the rest of the day, maybe the next, and pickings have been slim lately. The clutch of metal bits (barely enough to swell the lining of her bag) represents the first meal she’ll have had in two days (she is so hungry). And this man – this boy, she’ll think when she looks back; he can’t have been more than fifteen – grabs it from her. There’s no civilisation on Jakku, no sense of protect the small and weak – there’s no mercy for a girl alone. And the boy just takes it, snatches it from her grasping hands, holds it aloft, grinning wide and wild and mocking. “Finders keep –” he starts to say, quoting the oldest (and only) law of the desert. The rest of the words snag on his loose teeth and split-open lips: Rey smacks him in the jaw with her staff and every bit of strength she has. He stumbles, makes for the blaster at his side, and she panics: she hits him in the legs to bring him down, hits him in the skull until his hand falls slack and he is very, very still. Rey snatches her haul up and runs and does not look back. (She’ll think of him sprawled in the sand, skull open and red and wet, when she prowls through the frozen forest towards Kylo Ren. She’s older. She knows better. She’ll hesitate. She will not deliver that final blow.)
- Jessika Pava snatches a chip from her plate in the canteen. It’s all in good humour; Rey is hanging out with the pilots in one of the rare moments she isn’t training with Luke, enjoying the noise and hubbub – oh there are so many people. It gives her a headache, light and sharp behind her eyes, but it is a good pain, a clean pain; a growing pain. Anyway. Pava snatches the chip – a misguided attempt at flirting, maybe? – and Rey reacts without thinking and stabs her in the back of the hand with a fork. There’s silence for a moment, an aching and desperate silence, and Rey can only hear the roar of blood in her ears. She stares down. Pava’s hand has slackened; the chip is on the table. The tines of the fork haven’t sunk in that far, but there is red pooling on Pava’s skin and Rey feels a great rush of nausea. Her stomach cramps, hard, and she leaps to her feet, gabbling apologies. Pava holds up her hands, says, “Hey, hey, it’s okay, it really is,” and Poe scrapes a good chunk of his dinner onto Rey’s plate and says, “We won’t ever let you go hungry,” and it’s all too much: Rey bursts into tears. (No one tries to steal her food again. Later, she leaves a basket full of apples and potatoes on Pava’s bed. It is an apology. It is a very well guided attempt at flirting.)
- “What’s wrong with this water?” she gasps, holding her cupped hands out to Luke. “It’s awful!”
Luke bursts out laughing. “It’s full of salt, Rey. You can’t drink it.”
“All that water,” she says, scornful, “and not a drop to drink – are you sure that the Force is benevolent?”
“Hey, when I first saw an ocean I did the exact same thing. Only difference was that Han pretended that that was what water was meant to taste like. Pretended to drink it and then got offended when I didn’t. I didn’t want to seem like the odd one out so I drank a whole mug of it and vomited everywhere – he wasn’t laughing so hard when he was trying to air the smell of vomit out of the Falcon.”
Rey bursts out laughing, wading back towards shore. “Tell me more about him,” she says.
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