I don’t know. I never had the chance to ask. [ The words pierce through her like the wind does, buffeting her with bitter cold that gnaws at her bones and slows her movements as she pushes through it. Her boot gets stuck in the tightly packed ice on her first step into the new terrain, though it’s not so much a firmly drawn line as a slow shift in composition, sand swirled in to turn slush to mud. She has to focus on wrenching it free, kicking frozen clumps of ground away with each forced step.
This is not a specter from her mind, but from his, and it is only upon accepting that truth that she realizes how thin the barrier between them has become, how thin it might henceforth always be. They weave in and out of one another with masked seams and such familiarity that it’s hard to tell at first whom a given image belongs to. ]
I hate the cold. [ Even recognizing it for what it is, a construct of their joined minds, she cannot stop the chill from permeating deep beneath her skin, whipping straight through the thin, breathable fabrics she favors for the muggy summer of Corellia, for the violent assault of Jakku’s sun. ] There’s no keeping it out, it just blows right through you. And it hurts.
[ Her infantile complaints speak to inexperience, giving voice to her first reaction when she exited Starkiller Base onto the planet’s forested surface, allowing him that understanding or simply not thinking to hold it to herself.
Stupid snow.
However, it makes for a good distraction from what it really reminds her of, the echoing metal hollow that she curled herself in every night waiting for her parents to return to her, the cold inside of an AT-AT without the sun to heat its belly.
She stops then, lifting her gaze to the red glowing horizon beyond the metal workings of the base that open up like a wound in the planet before them. Her nose crinkles. Two sides of a coin. Every moment he wished for peace, silence, to be truly alone, she ached for the opposite. Every way in which she understands him is through negative space, filling in the gaps of what he is not and considering the image left.
She wants to ask him what that feels like, but she recalls her steady mounting awareness of where his presence held against the corners of her own mind, and she expects she has some idea now, even if she never did then.
Only then does she notice that the Starkiller Base of his memory is not as she recalls it—shadows creep up from the earth like dust, peeking out from behind clustered, snow-caked trees. It is everywhere. Her memory, her fears, echo through the woods in the form of plasma hums and cracking wood, filling him up with her own perceptions, though not the light that Luke had hoped for. It is her darkness that sieves into him. ]
no subject
This is not a specter from her mind, but from his, and it is only upon accepting that truth that she realizes how thin the barrier between them has become, how thin it might henceforth always be. They weave in and out of one another with masked seams and such familiarity that it’s hard to tell at first whom a given image belongs to. ]
I hate the cold. [ Even recognizing it for what it is, a construct of their joined minds, she cannot stop the chill from permeating deep beneath her skin, whipping straight through the thin, breathable fabrics she favors for the muggy summer of Corellia, for the violent assault of Jakku’s sun. ] There’s no keeping it out, it just blows right through you. And it hurts.
[ Her infantile complaints speak to inexperience, giving voice to her first reaction when she exited Starkiller Base onto the planet’s forested surface, allowing him that understanding or simply not thinking to hold it to herself.
Stupid snow.
However, it makes for a good distraction from what it really reminds her of, the echoing metal hollow that she curled herself in every night waiting for her parents to return to her, the cold inside of an AT-AT without the sun to heat its belly.
She stops then, lifting her gaze to the red glowing horizon beyond the metal workings of the base that open up like a wound in the planet before them. Her nose crinkles. Two sides of a coin. Every moment he wished for peace, silence, to be truly alone, she ached for the opposite. Every way in which she understands him is through negative space, filling in the gaps of what he is not and considering the image left.
She wants to ask him what that feels like, but she recalls her steady mounting awareness of where his presence held against the corners of her own mind, and she expects she has some idea now, even if she never did then.
Only then does she notice that the Starkiller Base of his memory is not as she recalls it—shadows creep up from the earth like dust, peeking out from behind clustered, snow-caked trees. It is everywhere. Her memory, her fears, echo through the woods in the form of plasma hums and cracking wood, filling him up with her own perceptions, though not the light that Luke had hoped for. It is her darkness that sieves into him. ]
Do you want him gone?