( The bunk, as he knew it would be, is far too small for Kylo to fit into it comfortably. He spends an inordinate amount of time staring at the little box with his arms crossed, half-convinced and almost unwilling to test the theory that he isn't going to fit inside of it at all. Bone-weary exhaustion forces him to try his options, since the sofa in the main hold isn't going to do anything for his over-saturated brain and the fugue state that he feels he is existing in. Meditation has done nothing. The physical and mental toll of excavating Snoke clean from his head and then plunging desperately into aerial dog fights and flight paths, jumping systems and working throughout a night cycle at something he has never been preternaturally good at in the first place - it's all but decimated what's left of his mental faculties.
Never mind Organa and Skywalker. Never mind the physical ramifications of keeping walled defenses up around them, in the blast radius of their presence. Never mind the constant reminder of his father's gait, his shrug, his lopsided smile that Kylo himself has shattered from mirrors and reflective transparisteel. Never mind Rey knocking around in his head and him knocking around in hers, the two of them bumping knees and elbows in an effort to maneuver through this mine field they have planted in one another. Never mind the last thirty years.
He crams himself into the bunk with all the grace and dexterity that he can manage. Which is to say none at all. He's right about the length of the bunk and the width of it, too. Kylo has to draw his knees up to his chest and wedge them against the wall in order to lay flat on his side, and when he rolls to his back in the interest of staring straight up at the durasteel plating that comprises the bulkhead above him, his legs don't fit at all unless he angles them to the side, leaves one dangling outside of the bunk, an overgrown child trying too hard to fit into his childhood bed. He remains on his side, tries to will away the discomfort that blooms as a result of the pressure his weight is placing on his hip and shoulder, and does not find sleep as quickly as he would like or expect. Instead, Kylo listens to Chewbacca rattle around - or at least, he assumes that it's Chewbacca, given the direction of the sound - and flattens his palm over the healed bowcaster scar on his flank. When he turns his nose into the pillow in the interest of making an active effort to fall out of consciousness, he thinks that it smells too clean and unused to not have once belonged to someone else. His last thought before finally succumbing to the absolution of his exhaustion is an inquiry: who laid their head here in all the years that Han Solo did not?
Nightmares hunger for him in the dark well of unconsciousness, little teasing beckons that smart of bright sunshine on white beaches, the roar of the ocean loud in his ears, rolling back and forth, small shells under large feet. He's a boy but he's a man, and his mother guides him down the shoreline while the water rushes in around his boots and he sinks into the white sand up to his ankles. He turns to look at her, sand piling up to his knees, reaching his thighs, threatening to devour his waist, and he asks her not to let go of him, to pull him out. He tries to shout but his mouth is full of white hot sand, and Leia is not Leia but still is Leia, a confusing conglomeration of what she is and what she was and what he had hoped that she would be when he was young enough to believe in that kind of nonsense. Luke joins her on Kylo's other side, and together they wrap one hand each around his wrist and try to pull him out of the sand, but dark water rushes in from the belly of the ocean and he sinks down into the darkness. He wakes, damp with sweat and overheated, throat dry, but the consciousness is momentary and half-formed, so that when he wakes again later he won't be able to remember whether or not it was a reality or a transition, his father's ship a ferry from one bend in the river to the next.
He's on Ilum. The ground is cracked black with permafrost and Snoke's breath, real and bitter cold despite the fact that Snoke himself is tangible in this world, in his seat, surrounded by the shimmer of a million kyber crystals all shocked white with the depletion of their power. Snoke is seven feet tall, twenty feet tall, his height is immeasurable, and he opens wide, dark eyes with no bottoms and sees straight into Ben Solo's mind with razor sharp focus and precision, the pinprick of a knife, of a surgical laser, dissecting him to the tiniest atom. My poor boy, he says to Ben Solo, who is eight-years-old and covered in sweat. When the boy looks up, he is on a bridge that stretches endlessly in either direction. He has been on this bridge a hundred times before. There are boots on the bridge twenty paces from where he is doubled over, trying to breathe. Han Solo steps across the durasteel and a burst of red hits him like a spotlight. Ben tries to warn him, but when he opens his mouth sand pours out of it, made clumpy by black water, dark and viscous enough to be motor oil. Han is close enough to touch him, but instead of pulling Ben to his feet, he begins shoveling the sand into his hands and dumping it over the bridge. The tar-like liquid shines on his fingers, and Han says, with a lopsided grin full of blood, This stuff'll kill you.
They fall, and Ben - Kylo - is on the ground in the mud. It's raining. Lighting forks the sky. Thunder rolls from a distant murmur to the decibel of bullhorn overhead. He is on his feet, and the rain pelts against the helmet that he wears, taptaptaptap, but it's not his helmet. His helmet is in the dirt on Corellia. This one is new, the visor is different, affords him a wider range of vision. Around him are six black figures. They are watching him, waiting for him. Knights. He's confused. The number is wrong. There should be seven discounting himself. Where is Dryx? his voice comes through the helmet without the modulator, a muffled sound muffled further by the roar of thunder and rainwater. One of the Knights gestures with the unlit hilt of a saber, long and braced against the flat of a forearm. His eyes track the straight line afforded by the gesture and there is a bright spot in the dark din of night, fingers clawing through the mud, the long end of a staff raised to strike.
Red erupts. It melts bone and disintegrates muscle, turns blood to ash and cauterizes split skin. His arm burns under the weight of this dead body but when he moves to deactivate his saber, Kylo finds that he has no saber. He takes two paces to turn and sinks into a puddle, up to his ankles, up to his thighs. He doesn't sink any further but he can't move, mired in the mud, stuck between one slide and the next. When he looks up, the storm has broken, though the sky is still gray. Behind her, he can see the glittering stones of Hapes' capital city. His mother is beyond, gray and white in regal attire. Rey is washed in dark creams and tans. She offers him her hand, making to pull him out of the mud. He is eight-years-old and on his knees in the dirt. Get up already, she says, and the club from the rain swings. Rey falls and a Nikto with skin the color of chalk dust shows him black eyes that stare at him, unblinking. )
R -( Is as far as he gets when he bolts awake with his breath caught in his chest, slamming his skull against the bulkhead in the process. Stars and black spots blink in front of his eyes for a moment, and Kylo jams his palm into his temple in an effort to regroup, to get the room to stop spinning. It's only when he realizes that he's sucking in great lungfuls of oxygen, that he's been holding his breath long enough to have woken himself, that he manages to calm himself down enough to restructure the discombobulation that he feels. Reaching out for her is like trying to find a station through space chatter and static fuzz, but it's still faster than anything else he can conceptualize in that moment, as he actually falls out of the bunk and sprawls on the floor when his foot - still closed in a boot - tangles in the thin sheet he's been sleeping on top of. He can feel Organa's presence on the planet burning like a volcano, but it's Rey he floods with a sense of unease. ) Something's happening.
good job on your hoth comment, self. never reply to anything when you first wake up
Never mind Organa and Skywalker. Never mind the physical ramifications of keeping walled defenses up around them, in the blast radius of their presence. Never mind the constant reminder of his father's gait, his shrug, his lopsided smile that Kylo himself has shattered from mirrors and reflective transparisteel. Never mind Rey knocking around in his head and him knocking around in hers, the two of them bumping knees and elbows in an effort to maneuver through this mine field they have planted in one another. Never mind the last thirty years.
He crams himself into the bunk with all the grace and dexterity that he can manage. Which is to say none at all. He's right about the length of the bunk and the width of it, too. Kylo has to draw his knees up to his chest and wedge them against the wall in order to lay flat on his side, and when he rolls to his back in the interest of staring straight up at the durasteel plating that comprises the bulkhead above him, his legs don't fit at all unless he angles them to the side, leaves one dangling outside of the bunk, an overgrown child trying too hard to fit into his childhood bed. He remains on his side, tries to will away the discomfort that blooms as a result of the pressure his weight is placing on his hip and shoulder, and does not find sleep as quickly as he would like or expect. Instead, Kylo listens to Chewbacca rattle around - or at least, he assumes that it's Chewbacca, given the direction of the sound - and flattens his palm over the healed bowcaster scar on his flank. When he turns his nose into the pillow in the interest of making an active effort to fall out of consciousness, he thinks that it smells too clean and unused to not have once belonged to someone else. His last thought before finally succumbing to the absolution of his exhaustion is an inquiry: who laid their head here in all the years that Han Solo did not?
Nightmares hunger for him in the dark well of unconsciousness, little teasing beckons that smart of bright sunshine on white beaches, the roar of the ocean loud in his ears, rolling back and forth, small shells under large feet. He's a boy but he's a man, and his mother guides him down the shoreline while the water rushes in around his boots and he sinks into the white sand up to his ankles. He turns to look at her, sand piling up to his knees, reaching his thighs, threatening to devour his waist, and he asks her not to let go of him, to pull him out. He tries to shout but his mouth is full of white hot sand, and Leia is not Leia but still is Leia, a confusing conglomeration of what she is and what she was and what he had hoped that she would be when he was young enough to believe in that kind of nonsense. Luke joins her on Kylo's other side, and together they wrap one hand each around his wrist and try to pull him out of the sand, but dark water rushes in from the belly of the ocean and he sinks down into the darkness. He wakes, damp with sweat and overheated, throat dry, but the consciousness is momentary and half-formed, so that when he wakes again later he won't be able to remember whether or not it was a reality or a transition, his father's ship a ferry from one bend in the river to the next.
He's on Ilum. The ground is cracked black with permafrost and Snoke's breath, real and bitter cold despite the fact that Snoke himself is tangible in this world, in his seat, surrounded by the shimmer of a million kyber crystals all shocked white with the depletion of their power. Snoke is seven feet tall, twenty feet tall, his height is immeasurable, and he opens wide, dark eyes with no bottoms and sees straight into Ben Solo's mind with razor sharp focus and precision, the pinprick of a knife, of a surgical laser, dissecting him to the tiniest atom. My poor boy, he says to Ben Solo, who is eight-years-old and covered in sweat. When the boy looks up, he is on a bridge that stretches endlessly in either direction. He has been on this bridge a hundred times before. There are boots on the bridge twenty paces from where he is doubled over, trying to breathe. Han Solo steps across the durasteel and a burst of red hits him like a spotlight. Ben tries to warn him, but when he opens his mouth sand pours out of it, made clumpy by black water, dark and viscous enough to be motor oil. Han is close enough to touch him, but instead of pulling Ben to his feet, he begins shoveling the sand into his hands and dumping it over the bridge. The tar-like liquid shines on his fingers, and Han says, with a lopsided grin full of blood, This stuff'll kill you.
They fall, and Ben - Kylo - is on the ground in the mud. It's raining. Lighting forks the sky. Thunder rolls from a distant murmur to the decibel of bullhorn overhead. He is on his feet, and the rain pelts against the helmet that he wears, taptaptaptap, but it's not his helmet. His helmet is in the dirt on Corellia. This one is new, the visor is different, affords him a wider range of vision. Around him are six black figures. They are watching him, waiting for him. Knights. He's confused. The number is wrong. There should be seven discounting himself. Where is Dryx? his voice comes through the helmet without the modulator, a muffled sound muffled further by the roar of thunder and rainwater. One of the Knights gestures with the unlit hilt of a saber, long and braced against the flat of a forearm. His eyes track the straight line afforded by the gesture and there is a bright spot in the dark din of night, fingers clawing through the mud, the long end of a staff raised to strike.
Red erupts. It melts bone and disintegrates muscle, turns blood to ash and cauterizes split skin. His arm burns under the weight of this dead body but when he moves to deactivate his saber, Kylo finds that he has no saber. He takes two paces to turn and sinks into a puddle, up to his ankles, up to his thighs. He doesn't sink any further but he can't move, mired in the mud, stuck between one slide and the next. When he looks up, the storm has broken, though the sky is still gray. Behind her, he can see the glittering stones of Hapes' capital city. His mother is beyond, gray and white in regal attire. Rey is washed in dark creams and tans. She offers him her hand, making to pull him out of the mud. He is eight-years-old and on his knees in the dirt. Get up already, she says, and the club from the rain swings. Rey falls and a Nikto with skin the color of chalk dust shows him black eyes that stare at him, unblinking. )
R -( Is as far as he gets when he bolts awake with his breath caught in his chest, slamming his skull against the bulkhead in the process. Stars and black spots blink in front of his eyes for a moment, and Kylo jams his palm into his temple in an effort to regroup, to get the room to stop spinning. It's only when he realizes that he's sucking in great lungfuls of oxygen, that he's been holding his breath long enough to have woken himself, that he manages to calm himself down enough to restructure the discombobulation that he feels. Reaching out for her is like trying to find a station through space chatter and static fuzz, but it's still faster than anything else he can conceptualize in that moment, as he actually falls out of the bunk and sprawls on the floor when his foot - still closed in a boot - tangles in the thin sheet he's been sleeping on top of. He can feel Organa's presence on the planet burning like a volcano, but it's Rey he floods with a sense of unease. ) Something's happening.