A/N Ahhhhh it's a new story in a new fandom! Because I have poor impulse control! But I've been picking away at a couple Star Wars stories for awhile now and I decided to go ahead and start posting... If you're here because you follow my other stories in other fandoms I love you, and thank you for giving this one a chance and if you're a completely new reader for me WELCOME! And I sincerely hope you all enjoy it!

The wind whistled around her, blowing escaped strands of hair in her face as she stood in front of the mythical last Jedi, holding his father's lightsaber out in front of her as an offering. He brought his hands, one flesh, one mechanical, up and lowered the hood that had been obscuring his face. The moment stretched out for long silent minutes, but despite his soul-penetrating gaze, Rey held firm. She was good at waiting.

"How?" The question burst suddenly from the Jedi's chest as if against his own volition, his voice rough from disuse.

It wasn't how she was expecting him to break their standoff; frankly, she didn't know what she was expecting. But she supposed the question made sense, after all, what else was there to ask?

"Maz Kanata had it on Takodana," Rey explained, not lowering the weapon. "I don't know how she got it."

"No," Luke shook his head sharply, pushing out another question. "How are you here?"

"Oh, I found the map you left behind," she explained, the fierce intensity with which he was looking at her making her uneasy, but she kept her chin lifted high, refusing to be cowed. "Well," she amended, "it's more that I found the BB unit who happened to have the map. It was the Resistance who were actually looking for it. Looking for you."

He took half a step in her direction. "You're supposed to be dead."

Rey lowered the lightsaber and her defensive instincts kicked in as she matched his pace, taking a half step back, keeping the distance between them the same. "Excuse me?"

"I felt you die," he continued, his voice thick with an old pain. "I felt it as your life essence was ripped from the Force."

"Wait… I- What?" she asked, eyes wide with confusion.

Luke slowly began closing the space between them and this time Rey allowed him to advance, although her body remained tense and poised to act.

He stopped just a few feet in front of her.

"Reyssa." The name tumbled from his lips like a benediction.

"Rey," she corrected automatically.

Luke nodded, he would call her whatever she wanted. "Rey," he repeated. He brought his flesh hand up slowly, telegraphing his movements, taking the same care not to spook her as he would a wild creature. "I knew something had happened, I felt an awakening in the Force. I knew someone was coming, but I never dreamed that it could ever possibly be you."

"How do you know me?" she asked, searching his face with the same intensity he was searching hers.

His palm landed soft and warm against her cheek. "How could I not know my own daughter?"

Rey couldn't hold back the gasp that escaped her throat, or calm her heart which was thundering wildly in her chest. But before she even begin to formulate a response, she found herself in the circle of his arms, pressed into his chest as he held her tight. She was frozen stiff and for half a moment she thought to pull away, but before she could an inexplicable feeling of rightness washed over her, warming her from the inside out and she found herself relaxing and drawing further into his embrace instead.

The lightsaber slipped heedlessly from her fingers, coming to a tumbling stop a few feet away as she brought her arms up to return the hug, her hands gripping at the back of his robes. He smelled of salt from the sea and something earthy and wild. Power radiated from him, swirling dangerously around them both, but she was safe in the eye of the storm even as she trembled, overwhelmed by it all.

All those long and lonely years on Jakku, waiting for her family to return and find her. If only she'd known all that time, that if she wanted her family she would have to go and find it herself.

"How?" she asked, her face tucked into his shoulder.

Luke pulled back enough that he could see her face. "I asked that question first," he replied teasingly, even as his eyes were damp and swirling with emotion. "Come, let's go inside and see if we can't figure out the answer. Are you hungry?" he asked, one arm still wrapped around her shoulders as he led her back down the mountain towards the hut he had made his home.

"Wait," Rey interjected, looking over her shoulder, "the lightsaber."

"Oh," Luke paused. With the miraculous appearance of his daughter after fourteen years of believing her dead, he'd barely given the weapon a sparing glance. Calling it with the Force he looked at the weapon for a long moment. With a small nod, which was more for himself than for Rey, he put the saber back into her hands. "Hold onto it," he told her. "It's yours now. At least until you build one of your own."

"Alright," she said a little stunned as she clipped the saber to her belt. Nothing so far had gone as she'd expected, and despite it being better than she ever could have imagined, she felt like she was back on Jakku, walking up a steep dune with the sand slipping out from beneath her feet with each step she took. Like it had so often lately, her world had once again spun on its axis and she was left trying to reorient herself.

"I have thuttle fish soup simmering," Luke mentioned as he motioned for Rey to enter his home first. "Do you like that?"

"I've never had it," she replied, taking in her surrounding, not sure what to do with herself once she was inside.

"Thuttle fish?" he asked.

"Fish," she said generally with a negligent shrug, "that's a water animal right? Actually, I've never had soup either," she added, idly running her fingers over a roughly hewn table.

Luke frowned behind Rey's back as he carefully ladled up two servings of soup into carved wooden bowls. As a little girl she had loved to dig up worms and go fishing in the lake behind the Jedi temple. He and her mother used to marvel at the patience she showed even as small child, waiting until she got a nibble and proudly bringing home her catch, no matter how small, to be served with her dinner. He had joked that she would excel at meditation once he began her training, but his wife had countered with the idea that she was unknowingly using the Force to urge the fish to bite before the little girl could get too bored. Regardless, the idea of his daughter not even being sure what fish were any more concerned him.

"Where have you been all these years?" he couldn't stop himself from asking as he placed the bowls on the table and gestured for her to sit.

"Jakku," she told him, sniffing the meal in front of her.

"The junkyard planet?!"

"That's how Han said it too," Rey mentioned, experimentally dipping the tip of her finger into the broth and sucking it off her skin. It was saltier than she had been expecting, but not unpleasantly so.

"Han… he's-"

"Gone," she confirmed, a shadow of grief passing over her face. "I only knew him a few days, but…" she trailed off not entirely sure how she was planning on finishing that sentence. Nothing she could say would be adequate to express how she'd felt about that man she'd only just learned was her uncle, even after such a brief period of time.

"I saw the Falcon land," Luke admitted as he picked up his spoon and gave his soup an absent stir while he waited for it to cool enough to eat. "I knew he wasn't on it." He'd felt the death of his brother in law and the sorrow of his sister echo through the Force a few weeks ago.

"The General gave her to me," Rey explained, watching him from under her eyelashes, also picking up her spoon and mimicking his actions. It was something she had begun doing in the few weeks she'd spent on D'Qar, picking up social mores from observing others. "She said it's what he would have wanted."

"I'm sure she's right. Did Han find you on Jakku?" he asked, still wanting to know exactly how his daughter had found her way to him.

"No, he found the Millennium Falcon," she shrugged. "Finn and I just happened to be on it after we stole it from Unkar Plutt to escape the First Order."

Luke blinked. There was a lot of information in that one sentence. He wasn't sure where to start. "Why was the First Order after you?" he asked, since that seemed as good a place to begin as any.

"Because they saw me with Finn who was a Stormtrooper that had just deserted and Beebee-Ate who they knew had the map to you," she explained. "They weren't actually after me specifically, but I was guilty by association."

"So you stole the Falcon with a Stormtrooper and a droid," he repeated, trying to reconcile what she was telling him.

"Finn is an ex-Stormtrooper," Rey said firmly, wanting no misunderstanding between them. "And he's my friend."

"Maybe you should start at the beginning," Luke suggested gently, as he began to eat his dinner, since every new bit of information she revealed only left him with more questions.

And so she did. She began with the moment BB-8 first crossed her path, all the way through to R2-D2 coming out of low-power mode to complete the rest of the map and General Organa charging her with coming to find him. While she spoke, she slowly made her way through the bowl in front of her. She wasn't actually hungry, having shared a meal with Chewie shortly before landing, but she'd spent too many years knowing the constant gnaw of hunger to turn down a perfectly good meal sitting in front of her.

"So let me get this straight," Luke began slowly, when she finished retelling the adventure that had brought her to Ahch-To. "Somehow the map I left behind found its way to the same backwater desert planet that you were living on, as well as your Uncle's prized ship that had been sitting in a junkyard for years." He didn't mention the battle with her cousin or Han's death, not ready to discuss either event yet.

"When you put it that way, it does sound rather farfetched," Rey muttered under her breath, frowning into her empty bowl.

"No more farfetched then my uncle buying the R2 unit that happened to be carrying the plans to the Death Star and a message from my twin sister who I didn't even know existed," Luke countered, reaching across the table to lay a comforting hand on top of hers. "The Force works in mysterious ways."

"I never used to believe in the Force," she admitted, eyes still cast down, looking like she expected to be scolded for her confession. "I didn't believe in fate."

"You don't have to believe in it, when it believes in you," the Jedi Master replied enigmatically. "The Force surrounds us and guides us, even when we don't know how to listen."

Sensing that Rey was feeling rather overwhelmed, he gave her hand another small pat before standing from his chair. Picking up both their bowls, he took them to the sink to rinse them, allowing her time and at least a modicum of privacy to process. While he was up, he went ahead and stoked the fire, making sure the stone dwelling would stay warm against the cold wind that came off the ocean in the evenings.

"Would you like some tea?" he offered. When she simply looked at him like she didn't know how she was supposed to answer, he spoke again. "I'm going to make myself some, and you may have a cup as well if you decide you want to."

By the time the tea was made Rey seemed more at ease again, or at least not as overwhelmed as before. Luke went ahead and poured her a cup of tea in addition to his own and placed it on the table in front of her. Cradling his mug between his hands, he watched as she tentatively took a sip from her own, a small furrow developing between her eyebrows as she tasted it.

"You don't have to drink it if you don't like it," he told her gently. "I won't mind."

"No, it's not that," she replied quickly. "It's just, I find the whole practice strange," she admitted honestly.

"What practice?" Luke asked, his head tilted curiously.

"On Jakku one of the most precious things you could get your hands on was fresh clean water," she explained. "It was a luxury that you savored when you could get it. Even more so if it was actually cold. So the idea of taking clean water and then putting something else into it to change the taste… It's just odd to me."

It was something she'd found just as puzzling back on D'Qar. Where everyone seemed to treat water as a last resort when it came to choosing a beverage with their meals.

"Would you prefer a glass of water?" he offered, feeling bad for not anticipating this.

"No, this is fine," Rey insisted, drawing the mug in closer to her, like she was afraid he might forcibly take it away from her.

Luke didn't press the issue, but filed away the information for later. Having grown up on a desert planet himself he should have known. But he'd been one of the lucky ones, living on a moderately successful moisture farm had meant that he'd never gone without. Not like his daughter.

"How did you end up on Jakku in the first place?" he asked, getting back to their earlier conversation.

Rey shrugged as she took another sip of her tea. "I don't know," she admitted. "My first memory is running after a shuttle as it was taking off. I don't even know who was on the ship, I just knew I had to wait on Jakku for them to come back for me."

"So you don't remember me at all?" Luke asked, trying to keep his expression neutral.

Rey shook her head sadly. "I'm sorry. No." She didn't have the heart to tell him that until she'd been told of what BB-8 was carrying, she had actually thought he was nothing more than a myth.

"It's okay," he assured her. "You were very young when you were left on Jakku. It's to be expected."

"I feel like I should, though," she mentioned. "Whenever I try to remember anything before watching that shuttle leave, it's just blank. It's not the same feeling as when you forget where you left your favorite hyper-spanner. It's more like the blinding burn of the light when you step out into the desert after spending hours inside a dark star destroyer."

"Interesting," Luke murmured. He looked at the young woman across the table for a moment consideringly before speaking again. "With your permission, I'd like to try something."

"Try what?" Rey asked, before agreeing.

"I'd like to look into your mind," he told her. "To see if I can find your memories of that day. Hopefully we can get a better picture of how it came to be that you were left on Jakku while I believed you were dead."

"Alright," she consented quickly, not even having to think about it. She'd wanted answers to those questions for as long as she could remember.

"Come," he requested, standing from the table, crossing the short distance to the pallet he used as his bed, before sitting down cross-legged, motioning for her to do the same. Once she had settled in much the same position, he held out his hands in invitation.

"Is it going to hurt?" she asked curiously, not hesitating to place her hands in his. She wouldn't back down from the pain, but she just wanted to steel herself.

"Of course not," Luke assured her quickly, taken aback at the question. "I would never have suggested it if it was going to hurt you."

Rey shrugged, "It hurt when Kylo Ren did it."

"I'm sure that was his intention," he replied, looking at her with sad eyes. "Now, close your eyes and empty your mind."

Rey did as he asked and it wasn't long before she felt him pressing into her mind. It wasn't what she had been expecting at all. When Kylo Ren tried to force his way into her thoughts it felt cold and slimy and dark. He had punched his way forcefully into her mind without her consent and it was all she could do to fight him off as long as possible. But this was entirely different. His mind brushed up against hers gently, as if asking for permission, and when she opened her thoughts to his it was like a warm light infusing her from the inside out.

Once he had access to her mind, Luke started digging. Her most recent adventures were of course right at the forefront and he tried to pass through them quickly as he moved backwards through her memories.

Their own reunion at the top of the mountain.

Leia embracing Rey, both of them brimming with grief.

A lightsaber battle fought in the falling snow.

Her connection with the Force reigniting within her in the basement of Maz Kanata's castle.

Battling Tie-Fighters at the helm of the Millennium Falcon.

Rescuing a small droid from a scavenger.

Long hot days.

Longer lonely nights.

An aching hunger which never went away.

Sand.

Sand.

Sand.

Once he reached a memory where Rey looked just as he last saw her he stopped. Just as she had told him she was running after a shuttle. But what she hadn't mentioned was that she had been screaming and crying for it to come back, while some bulbous creature roughly dragged her away.

He tried to go back further but came across a wall, just as Rey had described. Under his constant and insistent pressure he managed to push through it.

Luke had to force himself not to accidentally pull out of Rey's mind when he saw his wife kneeling in the sand in front of his distraught five year old daughter.

"I'm so sorry sweetheart, but this is only temporary," she said trying to console the little girl. "You just shine too bright, my little Rey of sunshine. You're a beacon and I can't let them find you."

She placed her hands over her daughter's temples, gently kissed her forehead, and told her to close her eyes. The little girl cried out in pain after a moment and when she opened them again she was dazed and confused.

"What-"

But she wasn't done. "You have to stay here," she told Rey forcefully. "Stay here until someone comes for you."

"I have to stay here until someone comes for me," Rey parroted back.

"And know that no matter what, your family loves you," she told her daughter, a single tear rolling down her face. She embraced her tightly, before standing and running back towards the shuttle they'd arrived on, not looking back.

Rey tried to follow, screaming for her mother not to leave her, begging her to come back. But Unkar Plutt grabbed her arm and dragged her away.

Luke pulled them out of Rey's memory and they were both left gasping.

"Was that-?"

"That was your mother," he confirmed, inhaling deeply when he realized he was going to have to explain the memory to her. "Do you know about the attack on the Jedi Academy?"

Rey nodded, "Some." Han had explained some of it and she'd been able to fill in some of the holes on her own.

Luke was grateful he didn't have to relive it. "You and your mother were there that night," he told her, "but she managed to escape with you in the chaos. The First Order was still after you both, and from what I just saw, she left you Jakku to hide you, she blocked your connection to the Force so that other Force users wouldn't be able to sense you."

"Is that why you thought I died?" Rey asked, starting to form a picture of what had happened to her.

Luke swallowed hard and nodded, remembering that awful day where he had felt the light of all of his students get snuffed out one by one. When the light in the Force that was his daughter, disappeared soon after he could only come to one conclusion. "When you found my old lightsaber it must have brought those blocks down. That's why I could feel you in the Force again."

"When she told me to stay on Jakku until someone came for me," she hesitated for a moment before finishing her question, "that was a Force suggestion wasn't it?"

Luke nodded again. "You were so little, I'm sure she didn't want you wandering off before she could come back for you or before she could tell someone where you were."

Rey supposed that made a lot of sense. It explained her insistence over the years that she had to stay on Jakku. And the fact that against all evidence to the contrary, she was sure that it was only a matter of time before her family came back for her.

"Why didn't she come back for me?" she asked, already fairly sure that she knew the answer. The mournful look on her father's face only confirmed it.

"Not long after what I thought was your death, I felt her pass as well," he confirmed.

"Are you sure?" she asked with a pang of hope. "If I'm still alive, maybe-"

Luke shook his head. "Her shuttle was shot down by the First Order, we recovered her body. When you weren't found with her, we thought…" he trailed off. It didn't matter what he thought at the time any more.

Neither of them spoke again for several long minutes, before Rey inhaled sharply, steeling herself to ask a question she wasn't entirely sure she wanted to know the answer to.

"If you had known I was on Jakku, would you have come for me?" she asked, eyes cast down as she picked at a loose thread in the knee of her pants.

Luke reached out to cup her chin, gently lifting her face waiting patiently until she met his gaze, he wanted her to see in his eyes how serious he was when he replied. "Reyssa... Rey," he corrected himself. "If I had had even the slightest hint that you were still alive, I would have torn apart the galaxy until I found you."

She couldn't help it, she burst into tears. Rey had always considered crying to be a waste of the hydration her body so desperately needed, and had trained herself out of the practice at a young age when she realized that tears would not bring her family back. But after fourteen years of waking up each morning with the hope that that day would be the day her family would come for her, that each mark she scratched into the side of her home would be the last, only to go to sleep each night disappointment settling heavy in her chest, finally hearing that her father would have come for her, had he only known that she was alive. It was just too much.

If Luke was surprised by her emotional outburst, he quickly recovered. He didn't try to tell her not to cry, because she was owed her tears. He didn't try to tell her that everything was alright, because nothing that she had gone through was alright. Instead he simply pulled the young woman into his arms, and let her cry into his shoulder as he gently rubbed circles onto her back and hummed tunelessly into her ear. It was the same thing he would do to sooth her nightmares when she small or comfort her after a skinned knee.

She cried for the lost years of her childhood, stolen from her. She cried for the family now dead that she would never know. She cried for the family that had thought her dead and had spent the last fourteen years mourning her. She cried for the life she was forced to live and what they could have had instead. She cried until she had no more tears to give and if Luke let a few tears of his own fall, well, there was no one there to see it.

Eventually her tears slowed, and her breathing evened out as she fell into an exhausted sleep. Grabbing the pillow from the head of the bed, he put in on his lap and gently lowered Rey onto it before using the Force to drape a blanket over her so that she would be more comfortable. Gently, he pulled the leather cords from her hair and combed the tangles out with his fingers, taking great care not wake her.

He knew that he needed his rest as well, but he couldn't bear to close his eyes. He had his daughter back and he couldn't take his eyes off of her. Instead, he just watched her sleep, running his fingers through her hair, late into the night.

When Luke woke up the next morning, stiff and sore from sleeping sitting upright, there was a single terrifying moment when he realized he was alone in the hut where he thought that the day before was a dream. That his daughter had not come back from the dead for him, and he was once again alone on the island. Using the Force he reached out and quickly found her, a weight lifting off his chest. She was safe and close by, her emotions calm, but contemplative. She was also cold.

Climbing to his feet he found his spare cloak before throwing his own over his shoulders to ward of the chill that settled over the island in the cool Ahch-To mornings. It wasn't hard to find his wayward girl, she hadn't gone far, she had wandered to the edge of the mostly abandoned village and was perched on a large boulder overlooking the ocean. She had her knees drawn up to her chest, and her arms wrapped around her bare shins in a futile effort to keep warm, but she didn't seem to be overly put off by the cold, at least not enough to go back inside to sit beside the fire, despite the fact that he could see her shivering from where he stood.

Luke knew that he didn't make any sound as he approached, but Rey didn't seem surprised when he draped the heavy fabric over her shoulders. Instead she simply smiled gratefully up at her father as she drew the robe tighter around her.

"You're up early," he said, settling next to her on the rock.

"I'm used to waking up with the sun," she explained with a shrug. "Get the most out of the day, also get out to the graveyard before it got too hot to travel."

Luke just nodded, his upbringing on Tatooine having taught him the importance of taking advantage of the cooler parts of the day on a desert world.

They fell into a comfortable silence watching and listening to the water break against the rocks beneath them. He could sense that there was something she wanted to say, but he gave her the time to find the words.

"Do you think that even though I couldn't remember you and you couldn't feel me," Rey began after some time, "that we still could have been connected somehow?"

"Why do you ask?" Luke asked curiously, turning to look at Rey, who was still looking far out at the water.

"I used to dream about this place. Wait no, that's not right," she shook her head to herself. "I wasn't sleeping, the opposite actually. Sometimes back on Jakku, on nights I couldn't sleep, when the hunger was too much to ignore and I felt even more alone in the galaxy than usual, I would close my eyes tight and I would be here," Rey confessed. "I just always thought it was my mind coming up with the exact opposite of a decaying AT-AT in the middle of the desert, because I couldn't imagine there could actually be this much water anywhere in the galaxy, but it was definitely this island."

Luke considered this for a long moment. "Through the Force, anything is possible," he finally said.

Rey side eyed her father,"You said that before."

"No," he shook his head. "I said the Force works in mysterious ways."

"Isn't that basically the same thing?"

"You'll learn the difference, in time," he told her enigmatically.

"Does that mean that you'll teach me?" Rey asked, her voice both cautious and hopeful. "How to be a Jedi?"

"I'll teach you anything you want to know." Luke didn't hesitate, despite the fact he'd sworn years ago to never take another padawan. But when Rey finally turned his direction, beaming brightly, he knew meant his promise. He laid a gentle hand in the middle of her back between her shoulder blades. "But no one is becoming a Jedi before breakfast, so let's go back inside and eat."

Neither of them spoke much as they walked back towards Luke's hut and as he prepared their breakfast, but it wasn't awkward. Both of them used to their solitude, and neither of them felt the need to fill the silence between them. Now that they had found each other, there would be plenty of time for conversation later.

"I'm going back to D'Qar," Rey announced unceremoniously, halfway through the bowl of porridge that had been set in front of her. "Are you coming with me?"

Luke froze, his spoon stopped halfway from his bowl to his mouth. "When?"

"Today," she answered, still eating, seemingly oblivious to his hesitance. "I need to get back to the Resistance."

With a small frown he placed his spoon back in the bowl. "We should begin your training here at the temple."

"We could begin my training back on base," she countered, shoveling another spoonful into her mouth. "The sooner we're back, the better."

"The resistance has survived this long without us-"

Rey shook her head. "I need to get back to Finn," she interjected.

"The Stormtrooper?"

"My friend," she corrected. "Before I left, I promised that I would be back."

"And you will be, but you would be better served by-"

"No," she interrupted again, looking up from her breakfast to look her father in the eye. "Finn came for me when I was taken by Kylo Ren. Even though he was terrified of being recaptured by the First Order, even though the last place in the galaxy he wanted to be, was back on Starkiller. He came back for me."

Luke swallowed hard, able to hear all the things she wasn't saying. That no one else had ever come back for her before. That that was all that she had ever wanted. He took one look at the familiar stubborn set of her jaw and knew there would be no dissuading her. She came by that particular trait honestly.

"Well," he said with a small sigh, "I suppose I should pack my things then."

Rey smiled brightly, and he couldn't help but smile himself as he took in the dimples in her cheeks that she had had since she was baby. A sight he never thought he'd see again.

"Good," she said brightly. "I don't think the General would be very happy if I came back without you."

He chuckled lowly, he couldn't imagine that his sister didn't at least have an inkling of who Rey was, and knew that there was no way he would allow her to leave Ahch-To without him. He'd just gotten his daughter back, he wasn't going to let her back out of his life so easily.

It didn't take long for Luke to gather up his few belongings, and before the sun was high in the sky the pair was making their way down the mountain to where the Falcon was waiting for them.

"So tell me," Luke asked when he spotted Chewie and R2-D2 waiting for them in the shade of the freighter. "How angry is your Aunt at me for leaving?"

"I think she'll just be happy to have you back, it's Artoo you're going to need to win over," Rey said casually, pointing at the droid. "He had some very," she laughed as she considered how to describe it, "colorful things to say about you on the flight here."

Luke shook his head, knowing all too well the attitude his faithful droid had. "I can only imagine."

A/N And there we have it, the beginning of a new story... next time Rey, Luke and co. make it back to D'Qar and more reunions are had! So anyways, I will love you all forever if you would let me know what you thought, because posting in new fandoms always makes me nervous... Thanks for reading!