Chapter Text
The Jakku sun beats down hard though it hangs low in the sky, but even without a breeze, somehow, somehow, the sand swirls around her face, choking her.
The outpost is busy, brimming with the castouts and the forgotten refuse of the galaxy.
Still, she waits in queue.
It’s what she does. All she knows.
Finally, it's her turn to dump the heavy bag of scrap onto the high, pitted counter. The parts scatter and scrape across the surface messily--the only defiance she allows herself towards the tyrant of Niima. The vile Crolute who dispenses just enough for her to survive.
One and a quarter portion. More than satisfactory but damn if she couldn’t think. A dangerous combination of hunger, thirst, and exhaustion subdues her, making it difficult to distinguish between Plutt’s words and the happabores that graze on the outskirts of the bazaar.
She hadn't eaten in four days and downed her last sip of water around noon. The lack of food had made her impulsive--to leave home without enough water was inexcusable. Rey knows better.
Burning thirst tempts her towards one of the fill stations to drink and reconstitute her portion, but even through the beginnings of delirium, she understands that to eat in public is to invite assault. Food is serious business in this system. Worth fighting for.
Worth killing for.
Tucking the portions into the folds of her tunic, Rey trudges over the sand swept path, focused on getting home before the sun completely disappears. Since her speeder had been stolen a few standard months prior, the trek home is a much riskier and lengthier gamble.
But it's already dusk as she nears her AT-AT, its sharp angles in contrast to the natural slope of the dunes.
Staff in hand, Rey can feel them before she hears them.
Many.
More than she knows she can fight on her own. Running full speed, she darts towards the steel door, behind which she has a chance at holding them off.
She manages to get within a few yards of her metal sanctuary when her foot hits the tip of some sort of scrap and the slightly jutting object sends her tumbling.
Grounded, the staff flies from her feeble grip, knees sucked into the ground by the force of the fall.
That was how they found her. Prostrate with a mouth full of sand and steelpecker shit.
Rey doesn't care. During the fall, she'd lost her portion. She was probably dead either way.
((((((((((((())))))))))))))
The days are a blur of unknown faces and uncertainty.
The first night, she is lashed to three others in a closet-sized cell. Two human men and a young Togruta.
No one attempts to talk. No one dares to move. It wasn't until one of the men soils himself that Rey sees her captors again, or rather the barrel of a hose as the yoke of prisoners is washed down, the frigid spray pressurized enough to knock her off balance and shoot up her nose.
Her head hits the metal wall and as she loses consciousness, she stupidly wonders what it would be like to never wake up.
But she does, with a blaster aimed at her chest, connected to intravenous feeding tubes, and secured to a recovery slab she is treated with her first view of space.
All things considered, she is grateful that the edge of hunger disappears and that her thoughts come more quickly and clearly for the first time in weeks. Whoever these people are, they don't want her dead and the thought is slightly comforting.
Around the fourth day, the feeding tubes are removed and Rey is led out of the med bay and through the winding maze of the starship, an endless loop of locked doors and identical levels.
Her lone escort stops at a blast door three levels up, Rey leashed to his side, and scans the door open before motioning with his blaster for Rey to walk through first.
((((((((((())))))))))))))))))))))
There are many others in the holding pod and while they can tell her little of the people who took her they do tell her why.
It's how she finds out she is a slave.
The empty chill of space is as different from Jakku as she could imagine, but she can't help but wonder if a life of servitude, a life as someone's property, would be better than what she's left behind. After all, aren't slaves usually fed? Property is taken care of.
People roam freely behind the secured door, take their meals at long tables, and sit around the wide viewing glass, making bets with credits they do not have as to their final destitution.
The guards come only to serve food and to make sure no one has died.
Some of the younger ones cry.
Rey is, for the most part, content. She is more than pleased with the bowls of flavorless gruel that are dished out at regular intervals. The texture is grainy but her belly is consistently full for the first time in memory.
((((((((((())))))))))))))))))))
It isn't until around the seventh or eighth day that reality sets in and it becomes impossible to ignore how disgusting and pungent the holding pod has become.
There are some things she can't get used to. Having spent the majority of her life apart from others, Rey had been mortified to learn that she was expected to shit and piss in a communal fresher in front of the others, men and women.
“Isn't any different than what I had back home,” one of the women shrugs as she takes her place on the toilet after Rey has finished.
There are no beds, everyone sleeps huddled on the floor on blankets damp with fluids. Every night she is afraid to sleep, fearful of the way some of the men leer at the females, hungry for something more than food.
There's just so many people. Nearly forty, Rey surmises, in a room that was built for no more than fifteen. The odors, the constant noise--it was becoming too much.
Hair bugs begin to spread from head to head and while some are given a detergent, anyone with locks below their ears has their hair shorn to the scalp. Rey is no exception.
She was never one to dwell on her appearance, but can't help but notice that without her soft, brown strands, she has lost any semblance of femininity. In fact, along with her thin, wiry frame born out of the Jakku deserts, she easily passes for a boy.
An ugly boy at that.
Many of the women make snide remarks about her looks, despite their own baldness, and she can hear the men snicker.
An older Twilek reminds her that she still has good teeth but she does her best to ignore the talk and pretends it doesn't hurt to hear her ugliness so openly discussed.
But still, through the growing filth, through the uncertainty, through the fear that threatens to swallow her, Rey refuses to panic.
Something--something tangible, something real--urges her to keep going. To not give up.
She can't explain it. It's a soft whisper in her ear, in the air around her.
She has no friends waiting or family to go back for. She is alone.
Only this internal force, this will to live and the dreams at night of something better. Something more.
The day that Rey decides she will beg the slavers to place her in solitary confinement for the rest of their journey, the starship makes its descent.
They have arrived.
One of her fellow prisoners recognizes the land on the other side of the viewer and word spreads quickly.
Some are excited. Most, however, shrug.
Rey says nothing and doesn't make towards the window. She's never heard of the place.
She has never heard of Naboo.