[ Her teeth set, resisting the tremble of the cold just long enough for her jaw to tighten and accompany a roll of her eyes at his criticism before her muscles loosen to allow for the steady shake and chatter. She steels through it, forces her jaw loose enough to at least quell the sound, which sounds to her like weakness, and she’s sure when she manages that she’s beaten the cold.
But then she hears it again, whispering on the gust of winter, telling her to kill Kylo Ren. It is a half-remembered hiss, recounted from their battle. So easy. So quick. When he was half-dead already, wounded and disarmed, but not now. Yet she can’t stop herself considering how readily it would solve their problems once the voice has stuck in her mind, and she has to forcibly extricate herself from that course of thinking by turning her gaze upward towards him and considering the deep gouge that she left in his face, scarred to a reddish welt now.
She has felt the sting of a lightsaber since then, licking her skin as cleanly as it burns it, the welts still fresh on her body from their earlier fight on Corellia—it’s hard to remember that they’re still there, but that’s a good sign. It means they maybe aren’t. It means they’re plunging deeper. ]
Don’t listen to them. [ It is presumption that tells her he must hear them now, but she feels certain in drawing the conclusion, confident in her understanding. ] You need to clear it out of your mind. That’s what’s stopping you from centering yourself.
[ A guess, at best, but an educated one. She cannot claim his or Luke’s wisdom of the Force and how it works, but her intuition serves her well, and training reinforces her mindsets.
Snow shuffles off the trees and sticks in her hair, a stark contrast to her reddening nose and ears that betray just how unused to this chill her body is. Acutely, she wonders if her physical body reflects the same symptoms, or if somewhere apart from her mind she is wrapped in the muggy warmth of Corellia. ]
I used to imagine that my parents were all sorts of places. [ It feels like ripping open a healed wound, baring nerves raw from injury, but she keeps her voice level, fixes her gaze on the base ahead and forces herself not to look on him and acknowledge how she exposes herself now. ]
That they came from Coruscant, where they were important diplomats, who only left me so they could go on a dangerous mission for the Republic. That the planet we were really from, where I was born, was all marshes with plenty of water. [ And still, she couldn’t have conceptualized what Takodana would look like to her nearly a decade later. ] I want the chance to see it. I’ve heard Naboo looks like that. Maybe that’s where I’ll find them.
[ The lie remains just under the surface, dormant but persisting. The lie that she will find her family one day, that they are out there—alive, waiting for her. That it will somehow help her find what is missing. It hurts to expound for him to hear; she braces herself for the worst, for him to tear these childish notions apart, wondering if she can survive the devastation, but she needs to keep talking, and her life as it was has never been eventful enough to go on about at length. Not until Han Solo entered it, and that seems like a sure way to keep him from finding calm, not aiding him to reach that place. ]
no subject
But then she hears it again, whispering on the gust of winter, telling her to kill Kylo Ren. It is a half-remembered hiss, recounted from their battle. So easy. So quick. When he was half-dead already, wounded and disarmed, but not now. Yet she can’t stop herself considering how readily it would solve their problems once the voice has stuck in her mind, and she has to forcibly extricate herself from that course of thinking by turning her gaze upward towards him and considering the deep gouge that she left in his face, scarred to a reddish welt now.
She has felt the sting of a lightsaber since then, licking her skin as cleanly as it burns it, the welts still fresh on her body from their earlier fight on Corellia—it’s hard to remember that they’re still there, but that’s a good sign. It means they maybe aren’t. It means they’re plunging deeper. ]
Don’t listen to them. [ It is presumption that tells her he must hear them now, but she feels certain in drawing the conclusion, confident in her understanding. ] You need to clear it out of your mind. That’s what’s stopping you from centering yourself.
[ A guess, at best, but an educated one. She cannot claim his or Luke’s wisdom of the Force and how it works, but her intuition serves her well, and training reinforces her mindsets.
Snow shuffles off the trees and sticks in her hair, a stark contrast to her reddening nose and ears that betray just how unused to this chill her body is. Acutely, she wonders if her physical body reflects the same symptoms, or if somewhere apart from her mind she is wrapped in the muggy warmth of Corellia. ]
I used to imagine that my parents were all sorts of places. [ It feels like ripping open a healed wound, baring nerves raw from injury, but she keeps her voice level, fixes her gaze on the base ahead and forces herself not to look on him and acknowledge how she exposes herself now. ]
That they came from Coruscant, where they were important diplomats, who only left me so they could go on a dangerous mission for the Republic. That the planet we were really from, where I was born, was all marshes with plenty of water. [ And still, she couldn’t have conceptualized what Takodana would look like to her nearly a decade later. ] I want the chance to see it. I’ve heard Naboo looks like that. Maybe that’s where I’ll find them.
[ The lie remains just under the surface, dormant but persisting. The lie that she will find her family one day, that they are out there—alive, waiting for her. That it will somehow help her find what is missing. It hurts to expound for him to hear; she braces herself for the worst, for him to tear these childish notions apart, wondering if she can survive the devastation, but she needs to keep talking, and her life as it was has never been eventful enough to go on about at length. Not until Han Solo entered it, and that seems like a sure way to keep him from finding calm, not aiding him to reach that place. ]