( Her words are hollow echoes of a reality that he does not want to face. Not because it's difficult. Not because the long, slow climb out of the pit is just that: long and slow. Not because he sees any particular merit in what the Light Side philosophies might have to offer. Not because he doesn't see a place for himself among those ideologies, this boy who has lived with weight and expectation and monsters - real and imagined, outside invaders and internal demons - who can't reconcile the idea of who he was supposed to be with the person he has become, as if there were ever a way out. But because he doesn't know how.
Rey sees her own terror, her own paranoid fear, in the beast that he has turned into as a result of his inability to turn away from what has felt easy, what has felt right for so long despite knowing that it was wrong, and it occurs to him then that, despite their mirror similarities, despite the hard and lonely life she has had to live, despite knowing how perfectly she could like being what and like he is, she will never understand this perspective completely. And he has no words capable of describing it. Outside of showing her the way that he has in the past, there is no way to make her comprehend the complex assortment of disparity that he feels in doing something so simple as existing. The kind of man who believes his own absolution is to be found in the murder of his father and realizes too late the mistake that he has made. His life is a series of mistakes that he is barely beginning to right. )
We can't all leave the desert behind so easily, Rey. ( His tone is mean. The comment is a low blow, and Kylo knows it, given the horrible loneliness he has felt within her on more than one occasion, the sense of waiting, waiting, waiting for someone. A thousand, three thousand, five thousand and more scratches into the walls, fading white lines marking not the days until but the days since. Her decision to abandon such a fruitless endeavor, he knows, was not made easily or lightly, but he's mad at her and lashing out in the only way that he can despite the faith that she presents in him in saying what she does. Because of course that's there, too, that stalwart belief that this is not the end. She can scream and hiss and spit at him like a demon but it's intrinsically there at the heart of her words. Bundled up in anger and spun into a wicked web of disdain and superiority - at least, he interprets it as such, but then he is angry with her - it hides inside her barbs and the sharpness of her tone and behind the wall of her internalized fear that he absolutely does feel, too used to feeding off of in others like a breath of fresh air, but it exists.
He had told Han Solo that it was too late, and to the end he was insistent that it wasn't. They - Organa and Skywalker - have resolutely refused to give up on him, and Rey has dragged him kicking and screaming the entire way over a trail littered with broken glass and hot stones to wherever it is they are now, beyond his moon, beyond Concordia. Why she had not dropped him down off the ledge on Corellia, he will never know, but his own voice from moments prior resonates within him now. There is only forward. ) No path is easy. Good or bad, light or dark, it will never be easy. Our path - paths will never be easy. ( He glances down at Aurren's helmet gathered in his hands, feeling a strange urge to slip it on, to stare into the void and feel comforted in not having his face so exposed. The light from the fire throws long shadows over his features and distorts the shape of his face in the heavy visor. ) I'm not good, I'm certainly not Light, and I never will be, not entirely. ( After a moment, he tosses the helmet to Rey. ) I don't know who I am or what I'll be outside of what and who I've been. I need time to figure it out.
( But he's trying. He'd said as much previously, on the Falcon, and he'd been surprised then to know that he had meant it. Some of the fight goes out of him, drained through the hole in his leg and the pain of it that he calls on in an effort to keep the embarrassment of faltering at bay. He won't look weak. He won't submit. He needs to get away from her before she says anything else that sets him over the edge and drags him down again. She has the ability to do it, just as she has the ability to see right through him. One glance back at the blackening body of Aurren Ren sees him striding up to and level with Rey, giving her a wide berth as he makes to move past her. A thought occurs to him. )
I assume it won't matter when we return to the Resistance either way. ( They'll imprison him again, at the very least, especially if Rey discusses what has happened here, gives her thoughts and opinions on him as a person as she's presented them to him now. Kylo surprisingly feels nothing at the prospect. It looms too far ahead in the wake of what has transpired between them, somehow more important than his eventual death, to be of any consequence. )
no subject
Rey sees her own terror, her own paranoid fear, in the beast that he has turned into as a result of his inability to turn away from what has felt easy, what has felt right for so long despite knowing that it was wrong, and it occurs to him then that, despite their mirror similarities, despite the hard and lonely life she has had to live, despite knowing how perfectly she could like being what and like he is, she will never understand this perspective completely. And he has no words capable of describing it. Outside of showing her the way that he has in the past, there is no way to make her comprehend the complex assortment of disparity that he feels in doing something so simple as existing. The kind of man who believes his own absolution is to be found in the murder of his father and realizes too late the mistake that he has made. His life is a series of mistakes that he is barely beginning to right. )
We can't all leave the desert behind so easily, Rey. ( His tone is mean. The comment is a low blow, and Kylo knows it, given the horrible loneliness he has felt within her on more than one occasion, the sense of waiting, waiting, waiting for someone. A thousand, three thousand, five thousand and more scratches into the walls, fading white lines marking not the days until but the days since. Her decision to abandon such a fruitless endeavor, he knows, was not made easily or lightly, but he's mad at her and lashing out in the only way that he can despite the faith that she presents in him in saying what she does. Because of course that's there, too, that stalwart belief that this is not the end. She can scream and hiss and spit at him like a demon but it's intrinsically there at the heart of her words. Bundled up in anger and spun into a wicked web of disdain and superiority - at least, he interprets it as such, but then he is angry with her - it hides inside her barbs and the sharpness of her tone and behind the wall of her internalized fear that he absolutely does feel, too used to feeding off of in others like a breath of fresh air, but it exists.
He had told Han Solo that it was too late, and to the end he was insistent that it wasn't. They - Organa and Skywalker - have resolutely refused to give up on him, and Rey has dragged him kicking and screaming the entire way over a trail littered with broken glass and hot stones to wherever it is they are now, beyond his moon, beyond Concordia. Why she had not dropped him down off the ledge on Corellia, he will never know, but his own voice from moments prior resonates within him now. There is only forward. ) No path is easy. Good or bad, light or dark, it will never be easy. Our path - paths will never be easy. ( He glances down at Aurren's helmet gathered in his hands, feeling a strange urge to slip it on, to stare into the void and feel comforted in not having his face so exposed. The light from the fire throws long shadows over his features and distorts the shape of his face in the heavy visor. ) I'm not good, I'm certainly not Light, and I never will be, not entirely. ( After a moment, he tosses the helmet to Rey. ) I don't know who I am or what I'll be outside of what and who I've been. I need time to figure it out.
( But he's trying. He'd said as much previously, on the Falcon, and he'd been surprised then to know that he had meant it. Some of the fight goes out of him, drained through the hole in his leg and the pain of it that he calls on in an effort to keep the embarrassment of faltering at bay. He won't look weak. He won't submit. He needs to get away from her before she says anything else that sets him over the edge and drags him down again. She has the ability to do it, just as she has the ability to see right through him. One glance back at the blackening body of Aurren Ren sees him striding up to and level with Rey, giving her a wide berth as he makes to move past her. A thought occurs to him. )
I assume it won't matter when we return to the Resistance either way. ( They'll imprison him again, at the very least, especially if Rey discusses what has happened here, gives her thoughts and opinions on him as a person as she's presented them to him now. Kylo surprisingly feels nothing at the prospect. It looms too far ahead in the wake of what has transpired between them, somehow more important than his eventual death, to be of any consequence. )