"Concentrate, Luci," My uncle's voice called through the darkness, and I could just make out  the shadows of his face from the green streak of light coming from his lightsaber.

"I'm trying," I muttered determinedly, holding out my lightsaber as I extended it, the clearing in the forest lighting up bright purple alongside the green of my Uncle's weapon.

"Feel the force," he told me calmly, and I felt his gaze on me, watching my carefully as I swung my saber elegantly, being much more careful with it than I would've been with a blaster. "Let it be with you, remember everything I've told you before, how the force is with you even when it feels as though you are alone. Remember what I told you, about what Mater Obi-Wan first told me?" 

"The Jedi can feel the force flow through them..." I recalled, my voice quiet as I remembered my lessons, swinging my saber once more as I watched the purple beam of light, the weapon feeling like an extension of my soul. "He told you that when the Empire still held the galaxy, when the galaxy needed the Jedi the most,"

"Right," he nodded, and I could see a small smile cross on his face, almost in pride. "I asked him if the force controls your actions,"

"Does it?" I frowned, looking from my lightsaber as I considered his statement. There was still so much about the force that I didn't know.

"Partially, yes," he nodded again. "But you need to let go, trust in your instincts. Let the force guide you, remember it will always be with you," 

The only company I had on Jakku, apart from the womp rats that I hunted for supper when they occasionally ended up on the Falcon, was my memories. As painful as those memories were, they often manifested in the form of dreams. That particular dream was one that had been haunting me for months, just me and Uncle Luke one summer when he'd taken me off to Degobah to see where he'd trained, and when I woke up tears had streamed down my face in desperation to go back to those happier times. 

I wiped my tears away quickly, cursing myself for being so emotional. Tears and sorrow weren't the Jedi way. Sometimes the dreams were a comfort, when they reminded me that I had experienced a life outside of my exile on Jakku. It had been short, and often surrounded my darkness and upset, but a life all the same, a life away from a sandy wasteland that I had been stranded on for longer than I ever wanted to be. Most of the time though, the dreams were a burden, showing me memories I often tried to bury and hide from, that memory especially.

In that dream, I'd only just made my lightsaber a few weeks before. I must have only been fourteen, nearly twelve years ago. My Uncle had taken me off to Degobah alone, just the two of us, his intentions being to further my training away from everyone else, even my brother. It had been at my request, desperate to see the planet that the great Master Yoda had exiled himself on. It was ironic, looking back, now that I was in an exile of my own, but in hindsight, that trip also seemed to mark the beginning of the end of my life as I knew it. 

Until then, I had been a child, Luci Solo, an enthusiastic student excited to continue the legacy of the Jedi. Only a few months after that trip, the First Order rose to significance within the Republic and began to take more and more power throughout the galaxy. My mother, a senator, had encouraged me to take a stance against them, and soon I was no longer just a Jedi Padawan, but an activist freedom fighter and an enemy of the First Order with a significant bounty on my head, though the last part had always been true due to me spending my summer holidays from the Academy working with my father and Uncle Chewie smuggling. At first the life of being a rebel was exciting, until it all became too real, too scary, and soon I was neither a freedom fighter or a Padawan, but a hermit, hiding out on an abandoned ship on Jakku that had once belonged to my father, waiting for my brother to come find me and put me out of my misery.

It did not do to dwell on dreams, at least not ones that made me think of a time when life was so full of hope, that hope mostly coming from my time at my Uncle's academy. I'd loved training, especially when it came to the other students of my Uncle's academy, all of them being like siblings to me. I'd loved learning how to become one with the force, even when I failed, as that was when my Uncle showed me the way, and he seemed to be able to do everything with ease, his strength with the force making him my hero. Even the dreams that were not centred on training seemed to hurt. They reminded me of a better time, the memories of my family back when we were all together. They reminded me of my parents, my smuggler, nerf herder father who had always been there for me, and my mother, the brave Princess-turned-senator-turned-General who was my greatest hero. Worst of all, they reminded me of my little brother, and the promise of a good, safe life I had made to him, the promise I had broken when he left me for the darkside.

Without my dreams my thoughts did not linger on my family often, it was too painful to remember a time where we were all together, thinking our happiness would last. I'd always been of the opinion that I had the best parents in the galaxy, and the best little brother I could have ever wished for, but I lost them, and I lost him. Ben going to the darkside as Snoke's apprentice had been my fault, and it haunted me ever since. 

"Today is another day," I whispered to myself, pushing the memories from y mind, though that was practically an impossible task. "It was in the past, and I must move on,"

I told myself that every morning I woke up haunted by memories, knowing that now I was in exile on Jakku, no one else but myself could reassure me of that fact. Stretching, I got up from my makeshift bed in one of the old smuggling pits, jumping up out of the pit and onto the main floor of the Millenium Falcon. 

It has been five years since Luke Skywalker had disappeared, abandoning me at the Resistance base after the destruction of the academy, and I had been alone on Jakku for three years, hid away on a ship, waiting to be found. After my brother had been manipulated into going to the darkside, after the voices in his head that I had told him to ignore had finally won, my Uncle and I fled. I'd only just got back to the academy, after months of travelling with two other classmates, and by the time we got back, Ben had already gone, turned into Kylo Ren, the academy in flames and our classmates murdered. 

Uncle Luke and I fled, Luke having the intention of the two of us hiding away on some island planet, so far from everywhere else that no one would be able to find us, not my brother or his new Master Snoke, not the First Order, not even the Resistance. I hated that idea though, ever my mother's daughter, and insisted that we go to the Resistance. I was badly injured and we both needed help, and after much convincing he agreed. Except by the time we got to the Resistance base I'd passed out from the pain of my injuries and Uncle Luke left me, disappearing into thin air with no one able to find him, just the way he'd wanted. 

Tortured by what I'd seen and gone through, I stayed with the Resistance for two years, a shell of the person I'd once been. As a teenager, I'd loved every second I'd spent with the resistance, feeling like a true rebel, but once I was there for good, I felt useless, too hurt from what I'd gone through to be of real help. At least one good thing had come from that though, as I was reunited with my childhood best friend Poe Dameron, now a skilled X-Wing pilot, the best in the whole Resistance fleet, as well as my mother, the pain of our losses bonding us together, closer than we had ever been before. 

The same could be said for my relationship with Poe, who'd been my best friend ever since we had been children, only going our separate ways when I went to become a Jedi and he went to the Republic flight academy. He'd been with me ever since I turned up at the resistance base, bleeding and shaking with my arm only minutes away from needing to be amputated. He'd looked after me all throughout my time with them, often sleeping at my side as I suffered through nightmares and insomnia. He tried endlessly to help me recover, but that was a harder task than any of us had anticipated. 

I tried my best to help out at the Resistance, though I never went on missions, my mental state too ruined for that, so instead I trained as a mechanic and an engineer, and often followed my mother around the base, learning how to command from her. My mother was the greatest teacher I could've had for that, and she was a wonderful support for everything I was going through, but yet there was a huge bantha in the room between my mother and I. The absence of my father, who'd gone back to smuggling after we lost my brother, had upset us both, though my mother didn't seem to let it show as much as I did. She never let her pain or suffering damage her, but no matter how strong she was I knew she missed my father. She missed my Uncle too, but I couldn't do much about that matter, so with her permission I took an X-Wing from the fleet and flew out on a mission to find my father, alone. 

I was a good pilot, but only in the Millennium Falcon since that was what my father had taught me in, and since I'd spent most of my time at the academy Jedi training I'd never had much time to practice in an X-Wing, though I realised that much too late. The ship crashed on Jakku, just outside Niima outpost, damaged beyond repair with the tracking and communication systems broken. There was no way to contact my mother, not that I'd want to really my anxiety filling my mind with the realisation that I'd failed her. 

That was when, for the first time in my life, I had doubts in the force. How could something I was told to trust in forsake me? Despite always allowing it to guide me, the way my Uncle had taught me, I had been left ruined, my brother gone to the darkside, my father and uncle gone, my friends all murdered, not to mention I was far away from the only two people left who I cared about. However, as if the force was playing a trick on me, that was when I found the Millennium Falcon, parked in a junkyard in Niima Outpost. 

I'd been raised on that ship, and I knew that wherever she was, my father and Uncle Chewbacca weren't far behind. Except they were far behind, because three years later, I was still alone, waiting for them to come back and find me and the ship. At first I had thought to make it air-born, fly the Falcon far away from Jakku and hope the resistance would find me, but the pessimist in me knew it was far more likely that the First Order would find me, and wherever they were, my brother wasn't far behind. The fear of my father coming back for his ship also seemed to possess me, and so there I was, a twenty six year old half-trained Jedi, hidden in an old ship on a half-forgotten planet. I was probably forgotten about too, or at least I could hope I was. 

Due to my Skywalker blood, my affiliations to the Resistance and my Jedi training, I knew if I drew attention to myself I would most likely be handed over to the First Order, so I stayed on the Falcon. My first day on the planet I traded the wreckage of my X-Wing in for portions of food, enough to last me a few months, but after that I would sneak out at night to steal supplies. In the day I would work repairs on my father's beloved ship, knowing with dread that he loved this ship too much to abandon it, and so he was most likely dead and gone. At first I used to spend the days trying to send out messages to the Resistance, but I soon gave up, realising that those messages could easily be intercepted by the First Order, so instead I distracted myself though meditation, trying to reach out to my Uncle Luke, and even thought he was unreachable I tried not to give up hope trying not to dwell on the feelings of abandonment, knowing that similar feelings had led my brother to his dark fate.

I meditated, practiced with my lightsaber, practiced with the force, and scavenged for food. It wasn't much of a life, but I didn't really know a life outside of the violence of the war between the First Order and the Resistance. That had been my entire teenhood, and now, as an adult, it was actually quite nice to escape the fear and the fighting. I was glad for the peace, feeling as though I really had been forgotten about, a good feeling when I considered the bounty on my head from the First Order, but a horrible thought whenever I considered my family. Three years of nothing had left me in a period of limbo, not quite forgetting the pain of my past but at least learning how to live with it, no longer suffering from nightly panic attacks, which was something. 

I was completely alone, and though I was fine with it most of the time, but whenever I had a dream that put me back into that time, I realised just how much I missed my family, and how I would do anything to have my life back to the way it once had been. As I hid myself off into the sand, I grew further from the person I had once been, separating myself off from the rest of the galaxy unknowing of the chaos that was about to unfold that would bring me straight back into the war.

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Word count: 2530

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