( It does him no advantages to disagree with her, to dismiss her charges as a mother's brand of denial or to register them as a misinterpreted fortune read in tea leaves or with a carefully illustrated deck of cards. The truth had been spoken aloud months ago, at any rate, gathered together in Han Solo's palms before the sharp burst of red through one side and out the other had snuffed him out and scattered that truth away. I'm being torn apart, Kylo had said, and recalling it now recalls the way in which his throat had constricted and his voice had come high and his vision had doubled and then tripled before blurring completely. It had only cleared when the sun dimmed and then died, allowing him to blink into the red emergency lighting that had striped the bridge and then drove a wall between himself and his father. Then the sharp nothingness, like a light going out inside of himself, had choked him before that fissure of intense agony had ripped him open from the left side out, and he had looked up to see them both standing there, the traitor and -

Rey. Sitting almost across from him now, sifting through her own emotions even as she presents her reasoning for her direction to him. Instinctively, Kylo knows that it's more than just the moral obligation that she feels toward his mother, more than just the civic duty she has as a new Jedi to expel whatever darkness has hooked talons into him and drag him - kicking and screaming, if need be - back toward the light, and for that reason he doesn't altogether understand her. Were their positions reversed, he would kill - but no, he can't even complete that thought without ultimately admitting that it's a bold faced lie. Because he does understand her, even without the bond. That knowledge in and of itself leaves him as conflicted as anything does, as much as her answer does, and he's forced to live with the tightening of his fist even as he brings it down to curl over the lip of the bench, rippling the old cushioning underneath the force of it. )

General Organa is misguided about many things at work in the galaxy, whether she's willing to admit it or not. ( Despite the resentment trying to claw its way out of his throat by way of his hand curled around the bench, it's a mostly internal sentiment that manifests in a way not dissimilar to his admission to Solo on the bridge: a recognition of who and what he has become in the wake of someone who believes that he's capable of better, who believes that he belongs. But there's no going back, and that's the fact that Solo and Organa could both never recognize. ) Organa thinks that her son will come back as she once knew him, but what she refuses to remember is that her son was never the boy she likes to pretend that he was. He was angry and afraid and weird and - ( Kylo's eyes skip over to where Rey sits, involuntarily drawn to her and her association with this one word. ) - alone.

( Of course his loneliness will never amount to what she has been forced to experience, but it still stands to reason that his own loneliness as a child was at least in part somewhat responsible for the ease with which he was drawn away by Snoke. But Kylo rushes to cover it, more at ease discussing the possibility of their future in each other's lives than he is with rehashing the very real past as seen through different sets of eyes. Kylo's own skip away from Rey's face and settle back on the checkered board between them, and he stretches his legs out long in front of them, so that they stick out on the other side of the table, out of his line of sight but probably visible to Rey if she looked. )

You managed to get one thing right in all of that, though. I have been quite the nightmare.

( He doesn't disagree with her, though, about the rest of it, about protecting her. Whether it's because he agrees with her or can't speak to the validity of her prediction as a whole, even Kylo himself can't determine. )