[ When she reaches out for him while they run, everything from hovering to guide passively to actually pushing at his shoulder to keep him out of the way of a smoldering branch from above, she thinks of Finn, of the moment she realized that he was not holding her hand for her sake, but to center his own conflicted mind.
After being in Kylo Ren's, she can guess that his mind is equally conflicted now, and she offers him those brief flashes of contact as they stagger at a sprint through the wood, leaping over gnarled roots and trying to outpace nature herself. The desert, Rey quickly decides, was peaceful beside this. Sinking sands are predictable, and sandstorms can be weathered. There is no haven, no strategy, no evasive tactic for a forest fire.
Their steps grow shorter, and it's only when they stutter and slow progress that she realizes the severity of the decline, but by then her heels are digging in and she's careening down the hillside, sloshing mud around the grooves she cuts in her attempts for traction. The rainfall, which only barely pierced the canopy above them at first, now trickles steadily through, and it's the cold breeze on her damp back that makes her realize the forest thins this way.
Suddenly, she clasps Ren's hand, gripping him with enough strength to draw defined lines into the muscles of her arms while her other reaches out for a low, deadened branch of a tree. It breaks, scrapes her legs while it falls, and she grabs another, more alive but flimsier, whip-like, and she pulls herself and her enemy back just in time to narrowly miss the steep drop-off that is the cliffside they meet at the end of their slide. ]
We need to climb! [ Her deaf shouts rise above the roar of battle, but only just. ]
sobs academically into my cereal this is fine
After being in Kylo Ren's, she can guess that his mind is equally conflicted now, and she offers him those brief flashes of contact as they stagger at a sprint through the wood, leaping over gnarled roots and trying to outpace nature herself. The desert, Rey quickly decides, was peaceful beside this. Sinking sands are predictable, and sandstorms can be weathered. There is no haven, no strategy, no evasive tactic for a forest fire.
Their steps grow shorter, and it's only when they stutter and slow progress that she realizes the severity of the decline, but by then her heels are digging in and she's careening down the hillside, sloshing mud around the grooves she cuts in her attempts for traction. The rainfall, which only barely pierced the canopy above them at first, now trickles steadily through, and it's the cold breeze on her damp back that makes her realize the forest thins this way.
Suddenly, she clasps Ren's hand, gripping him with enough strength to draw defined lines into the muscles of her arms while her other reaches out for a low, deadened branch of a tree. It breaks, scrapes her legs while it falls, and she grabs another, more alive but flimsier, whip-like, and she pulls herself and her enemy back just in time to narrowly miss the steep drop-off that is the cliffside they meet at the end of their slide. ]
We need to climb! [ Her deaf shouts rise above the roar of battle, but only just. ]