Rey's First Rain (A SW:TFA Drabble)

It comes on the third day of being with Luke. (He hasn't agreed to teach her. Yet. But he talks to her, he tells her stories, and he doesn't seem so wary of the lightsaber he once owned--so that's a start.)

Rey supposes she shouldn't feel surprised, surrounded by water day in and day out as she is, a fluid blue expanse as far as the eye can see. She's used to that, almost. But the same water, falling from the equally blue sky, soft as kisses? 

This is new.

When the first drops fall--plop!--onto her head, Rey jerks up with the tiger alertness bred by Jakku's treacherous sands. For an instant she's confused, unable to figure out their source. Then she lets her eye travel upwards to the low, overhanging cloud, enveloping the island like a grey blanket. She notices a different feeling, cool, heavy, expectant, in the air. 

She wants to drink it in.

Another drop. The next, and the next, and the next. Landing on her sunburnt skin. Catching in her windblown hair. Falling perfectly into the hollow in her sand-roughened palm, so that she cups the little pearl of moisture like a tiny world and stares at it in wonder.

Rain, the long-forgotten word comes to her, out of the deep, deep blue.

The raindrops keep falling, growing in noise and size and intensity, so close together Rey can barely breathe. She upturns her face to the sky so the quicksilver liquid streams down her face, down her hair, down her bare shoulders. She lets it wash away the pain and exhaustion and dust of Jakku, lets it cleanse her like a newborn, lets it seep right into her bones. Laughter wells up within her, laughter that's lost in the rain, and if a few tears slip out onto her cheeks--nobody notices but the seeds they land upon.

Rey feels like a plant soaking in its first drink of water, and, like a plant, she blooms.

The rain sings so loud she cannot hear her own voice, not even in a shout. That does not matter. It drenches her till her clothes cling tightly, wetly, coldly, to her frame. That does not matter. 

It calls a tired old man out of his cave, and lets him down gently next to her, where he watches her dance in the rain, remembering the long-ago wonder of a farm boy off Tatooine. That matters. It matters quite a lot.

It's not much. Just an old man, clinging on to the last of his once-bright light, and a little girl, beginning to find hers in the deep, deep rain. (Just the last of the Jedi and the galaxy's new hope.)

But it's a start.