( It is and isn't the reaction that he is expecting. Watching her hands not ghost but drive over her forehead and back over the crown of her skull, he finds himself ill-equipped to deal with the pulse of emotion that coalesces with her answer. Kylo does not dip his hands into the bowl of her thoughts nor does he wade waist-deep into the quagmire of her personal history. He doesn't need to. He's been on that beach and he has smelled that sea air and he has tasted the bitter pill of her dehydrated isolation. He has stood on his own distant planet and watched the tail end of a ship careen away from him in the bright afternoon and felt the tugging pull of a long thread snap and trail off, floating listlessly between stars and planets and the galaxy's bright core, and he has ripped Rey's own perception of what she remembers of her private, inevitable loneliness from her and dissected it enough not to tear into it with teeth and nails now.
What good would it do, anyway?
What good had it done then?
He could leave her, too. Wait until she rouses him from what will amount to nothing, he knows, and somehow pick his way back down the hillside, power up the ship that he would no sooner sell for parts than pilot, leave her on Concorida and try his chances on the Outer Rim, try his hand with the Supreme Leader. It doesn't even exist as a fully formed thought, it's so pointlessly inane. He has hunted her across the galaxy only to become snagged in the tightening grasp of her superior ability. She has brought him here, to this point, and he has seen them over the edge, but even that doesn't feel right, feels like it's assigning too much value on her shoulders when he could have incapacitated her as easily as she had him on Corellia. He could have done any number of things to secure himself the upper hand and see their circumstances mirrored. So what good would it do for either of them, to leave the other behind?
None, Kylo knows that now, as well as he did on Yaga Minor, on Starkiller. A chasm stretches before them now, again, but this time they are huddled on the same side, torn and bleeding but still breathing. What that says, only time will tell, the course of events too far in the future, too unclear, for even Kylo to hazard a guess as to what they might entail. Instead of trying, he lets the limits of his peripheral vision trace the fading lines of her face in the encroaching darkness and says nothing, taking stock of the caliber of her voice and the roughness of it, the jagged sound of her breathing in the moments before her spine sought to steel itself against the onslaught of the storm within her. He doesn't nod, but he does recline, on his elbows, on his back, staring up at the sky overhead as the purple night turns into navy blue turns into black. All the stars come out, an explosion of pinpricks and diamond-white winks unobstructed by city lights, lingering against the backs of his eyelids long after he has attempted to drift off.
Despite Rey's clear instruction, sleep does not come, and Kylo spends some amount of time between deep, meditative breaths, chest and stomach moving as one, before he surrenders to his inability to drift off and sits up again, running a hand over the back of his head where small stones have tried their hardest to carve grooves into his skull. He's quiet a long moment, operating under the guise of scanning the valley below for any signs of movement, before speaking with the carefully controlled timbre of someone who has been practicing disguising and convincing himself that his own fear does not exist. )
What do you suppose will really happen, once we rejoin your comrades?
( In general, yes, but more importantly - to him. )
no subject
What good would it do, anyway?
What good had it done then?
He could leave her, too. Wait until she rouses him from what will amount to nothing, he knows, and somehow pick his way back down the hillside, power up the ship that he would no sooner sell for parts than pilot, leave her on Concorida and try his chances on the Outer Rim, try his hand with the Supreme Leader. It doesn't even exist as a fully formed thought, it's so pointlessly inane. He has hunted her across the galaxy only to become snagged in the tightening grasp of her superior ability. She has brought him here, to this point, and he has seen them over the edge, but even that doesn't feel right, feels like it's assigning too much value on her shoulders when he could have incapacitated her as easily as she had him on Corellia. He could have done any number of things to secure himself the upper hand and see their circumstances mirrored. So what good would it do for either of them, to leave the other behind?
None, Kylo knows that now, as well as he did on Yaga Minor, on Starkiller. A chasm stretches before them now, again, but this time they are huddled on the same side, torn and bleeding but still breathing. What that says, only time will tell, the course of events too far in the future, too unclear, for even Kylo to hazard a guess as to what they might entail. Instead of trying, he lets the limits of his peripheral vision trace the fading lines of her face in the encroaching darkness and says nothing, taking stock of the caliber of her voice and the roughness of it, the jagged sound of her breathing in the moments before her spine sought to steel itself against the onslaught of the storm within her. He doesn't nod, but he does recline, on his elbows, on his back, staring up at the sky overhead as the purple night turns into navy blue turns into black. All the stars come out, an explosion of pinpricks and diamond-white winks unobstructed by city lights, lingering against the backs of his eyelids long after he has attempted to drift off.
Despite Rey's clear instruction, sleep does not come, and Kylo spends some amount of time between deep, meditative breaths, chest and stomach moving as one, before he surrenders to his inability to drift off and sits up again, running a hand over the back of his head where small stones have tried their hardest to carve grooves into his skull. He's quiet a long moment, operating under the guise of scanning the valley below for any signs of movement, before speaking with the carefully controlled timbre of someone who has been practicing disguising and convincing himself that his own fear does not exist. )
What do you suppose will really happen, once we rejoin your comrades?
( In general, yes, but more importantly - to him. )