When: Room 2, Day 5, Evening
Where: Outside, near the motel
Status: Narrative, Complete
Rating: Low
It had hurt Rey, more than something so minor probably should have, to learn that Finn had reneged on their agreement to abstain from the tasks. It wasn’t like he’d made her any promises and he hadn’t told her any lies either. He hadn’t injured anyone, killed anyone. He hadn’t made her do anything she hadn’t already wanted to do in refusing to take part. All he’d done was change his mind. If that was a crime, Rey knew she was as guilty as anyone. She didn’t understand why, then, she felt so betrayed.
Was it betrayal that she felt? That knotty, sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. Couldn’t it perhaps be embarrassment instead? She had felt embarrassed when she’d seen people looking around Finn and Poe’s art exhibition, realising, in the same moment that she had, that the art was so bad that it simply had to be earning some team or another points. How many people had she told that she and her friend had an agreement, an “alliance”, that they were taking a stand against the idea that their loyalties were for sale, and how many of those same people now thought that she was a gullible fool?
No. That wasn’t it. Not exactly.
While it might be true, it wasn’t what other people thought that really bothered her. It was what she thought that was causing her disquiet: the knowledge that she had let herself be blinded by her own ideas of what should happen, seeing only what she wanted to see. Again. She was annoyed with herself. With only a little encouragement from Finn, she had convinced herself that it was the right thing to do to abstain from the tasks and she had let herself become so absorbed in that rhetoric that she hadn’t stopped to consider the idea that Finn might change his mind, that he might feel a greater need to support Poe, his friend, their friend, than he did to prove a point. She was angry with herself for allowing herself to be blindsided, yes, but she was also disappointed with herself for not being able to achieve the depth of insight which might have led to her offering her support.
Having friends was turning out to be much harder than Rey had ever thought it would be. It had been easy to dream, whilst curled up alone in her AT-AT shelter on Jakku, of being surrounded by people who cared about her and wanted her, of finding a home for all the love inside her, which she felt like she’d been waiting nearly her whole life to give, of achieving the elusive sense of fulfilment she craved and finally finding her place amongst people she could call her own. However, she was quickly learning that other people, with all their nuances and incongruities, had a habit of not fitting neatly into the role she’d imagined up for them. They were more complicated than that and it made Rey feel out of her depth.
It was that feeling, the feeling that she was barely managing to keep her head above water, which had driven her out to the fields beyond the motel parking lot to train, to do something she knew she could do, whilst the rest of the motel denizens made their way to Mutt’s Barn for Harvestfest. She had fashioned herself a long and sturdy staff out of a fallen branch not long after they’d arrived in the town and, although it didn’t have the same familiar weight and grip as her trusted, old quarterstaff, it comforted her to feel it resting against the back of her shoulder as she carried it with her out into the near darkness.
Rey stopped beneath the outstretched arms of a tall tree, its fingerlike, black branches caressing the deepening blue of the sky as dusk set in around them both. The trunk was thick, as broad as a man’s shoulders, and Rey found it easy to picture it as an assailant as she lowered herself into a loose-kneed, defensive stance, swinging her staff up and around in front of her so she could clasp it with both hands.
Pushing aside the bitter, swirling feelings of disappointment and shame that had been simmering just beneath her surface all afternoon, Rey closed her eyes and focused only on the feeling of the Force flowing through her and all around her. She could feel tendrils of it snaking up through the cells of the tree in front of her, connecting her to it and it to her in a perfect balance of energy. She took a slow, deep breath, the cool, damp, evening air vibrating through her lungs, before her muscles snapped taught and, in a carefully curated series of movements, she surged forwards, dancing around the tree trunk as she drove her staff downwards in a sweeping arc until she felt it make contact with bark.