[ Pride speaks abruptly with her voice, but it is thick and curdled with loathing, warped into something that can hardly be recognized as hers. Bitterness makes her intractable, but realization alone will not temper it because it is the conflict that she can see battling out across his features that she has become embittered to, by her own mirrored struggle with it.
The push and pull of both sides too often threatens to suffocate her: she is filled with well-grounded outrage and agony at her own abandonment, at more than a decade of undeserved misery that she was subjected to, the intrinsic unfairness of circumstance doing its best to turn her out, a weapon with its point raised at those who had contributed to her suffering. Only through the understanding and empathy afforded to her by a lifetime of misery does she tame it, remain stalwart in the face of its influence.
In that way, her pride lies plainly and boldly, for though Kylo Ren’s actions and the threat of his strength do not scare her in the way that they are precisely the traits that leave most people quaking in fear of him, she does feel afraid of what he embodies. A realized form of her failure, the threat of her missteps, he represents the worst of what she could be if she misjudged or lost her grip on that calm center at the eye of her misery. The notion that she could so easily be him paralyzes her in cold terror.
But this isn’t about her, as hard as Kylo tries to deflect it onto her fear and her inadequacy and her haranguing expectation; this is about his choices and his stumbling path out of the darkness. She cannot take the steps for him, will not coddle and hold his hand—Rey offers him only the possibility and light cast on the hard path that leads up out of the familiar territory of his own whirlpool of hate and sorrow and pain. No one had offered that much to her—she’d found her own way to suffer it without surrender—but she wishes they had, so independent of obligation, she sets it out for him.
In that context, it seems petty of her to grow angry and frustrated when he chooses not to take the path she has lit for him, knowing it is his choice and it is not her responsibility to push him along it. ]
You want to be free? Free yourself. [ For all her empathy and understanding, Rey unsympathetically spits the words at him, a wide sweep of her arm gesturing to him as the sole guardian of his fate. ] You cling to this idea of “who you are” as if it is stagnant, infallible, eternal, but it’s not. The person that you are is the choices you make in every moment; the past doesn’t chain you or define you, it doesn’t matter at all! But continue to choose the easy path, the one that is familiar to you in the dark where you’ve lived for so long, and that will always be the person you are.
no subject
[ Pride speaks abruptly with her voice, but it is thick and curdled with loathing, warped into something that can hardly be recognized as hers. Bitterness makes her intractable, but realization alone will not temper it because it is the conflict that she can see battling out across his features that she has become embittered to, by her own mirrored struggle with it.
The push and pull of both sides too often threatens to suffocate her: she is filled with well-grounded outrage and agony at her own abandonment, at more than a decade of undeserved misery that she was subjected to, the intrinsic unfairness of circumstance doing its best to turn her out, a weapon with its point raised at those who had contributed to her suffering. Only through the understanding and empathy afforded to her by a lifetime of misery does she tame it, remain stalwart in the face of its influence.
In that way, her pride lies plainly and boldly, for though Kylo Ren’s actions and the threat of his strength do not scare her in the way that they are precisely the traits that leave most people quaking in fear of him, she does feel afraid of what he embodies. A realized form of her failure, the threat of her missteps, he represents the worst of what she could be if she misjudged or lost her grip on that calm center at the eye of her misery. The notion that she could so easily be him paralyzes her in cold terror.
But this isn’t about her, as hard as Kylo tries to deflect it onto her fear and her inadequacy and her haranguing expectation; this is about his choices and his stumbling path out of the darkness. She cannot take the steps for him, will not coddle and hold his hand—Rey offers him only the possibility and light cast on the hard path that leads up out of the familiar territory of his own whirlpool of hate and sorrow and pain. No one had offered that much to her—she’d found her own way to suffer it without surrender—but she wishes they had, so independent of obligation, she sets it out for him.
In that context, it seems petty of her to grow angry and frustrated when he chooses not to take the path she has lit for him, knowing it is his choice and it is not her responsibility to push him along it. ]
You want to be free? Free yourself. [ For all her empathy and understanding, Rey unsympathetically spits the words at him, a wide sweep of her arm gesturing to him as the sole guardian of his fate. ] You cling to this idea of “who you are” as if it is stagnant, infallible, eternal, but it’s not. The person that you are is the choices you make in every moment; the past doesn’t chain you or define you, it doesn’t matter at all! But continue to choose the easy path, the one that is familiar to you in the dark where you’ve lived for so long, and that will always be the person you are.