[ Dark hair bobs down as Rey ducks against the ground, peeking up only to try and squint through the dust at the blaster fire as it pings, near enough that it could singe her back if they don’t move soon, and she tries to trace it back to its origin point. Too slow, though. By the time she pinpoints the assailant, Kylo Ren has crippled and disarmed him—and to call it crippling would be a generous assessment of Ren’s mercy. Rey doesn’t look away from the mess left behind as she gulps down fresh air, allowing her lungs the ease of satisfaction even as the rest of her body aches in its persistent tension.
It floods her then, the moment the threat is gone, a series of brutal realities all demanding her awareness at once: Kylo Ren’s thin restraint of and the visceral horror struck by his scraping, clawing, gnawing bloodlust; Ji’s willingness to fall on her own sword to bury them here in service to a phantom master who, Rey understands now, just as likely sent her as a threat and a message of the reach of his power than as any real threat. Had he wanted them both dead, now, she would have rallied every other knight at her back, and they would have swelled and overcome Rey and Kylo Ren easily.
This was a warning shot, and yet, the discharge it sounds when it tears through the air deafens her, dazes her, and she feels the coursing rapids of nausea rattle her apart. Rey pushes up onto her hands, retches over the dirt of the mine, and still choking, pushes the rest of the way to her feet to stagger blindly through the cloud of dust in a dizzy panic. Her thoughts are a jumble: a warning shot, a series of images of cold steel ship pathways and an armed guard of black-cloaked knights, the empathic screaming waterfall of pain of phantom punishment exacted on Kylo Ren.
No one can give her orders or training rituals or an objective to cut through the senselessness of the battle, the hideous chaos of the war that rages in a hurricane around them. Being quick-on-her-feet, determined, resolute, none of these things help her when she’s adrift in a vacuum of wandering suffering. There is only one answer, one end, to kill Snoke, but he is a phantom, coiling his fingers around their throats from across the galaxy, and for the first time, doubt strikes her.
They need to rest, regroup, heal, strategize, but the thought of doing any of those with Kylo Ren turns her stomach as surely as the slurry of panic and imagined futures that assaults her mind, and it’s frantically shoved aside just as quickly. Wrong. She was wrong. Leia, in her insistence, was wrong, and though she had allowed Rey to believe that the monster was inside of him, she sees now that he had become it long ago.
Rey stops in her tracks when her feet kick the barrel of the rifle. Bending over, she scoops it up without stopping to think about what she’s doing—scavenging—and pulls the harness over her shoulder, and diverts her attention back towards the clearing mouth of the mine where she expects to see the shadowy form of Kylo Ren. It feels a lot like being right where she started. ]
no subject
It floods her then, the moment the threat is gone, a series of brutal realities all demanding her awareness at once: Kylo Ren’s thin restraint of and the visceral horror struck by his scraping, clawing, gnawing bloodlust; Ji’s willingness to fall on her own sword to bury them here in service to a phantom master who, Rey understands now, just as likely sent her as a threat and a message of the reach of his power than as any real threat. Had he wanted them both dead, now, she would have rallied every other knight at her back, and they would have swelled and overcome Rey and Kylo Ren easily.
This was a warning shot, and yet, the discharge it sounds when it tears through the air deafens her, dazes her, and she feels the coursing rapids of nausea rattle her apart. Rey pushes up onto her hands, retches over the dirt of the mine, and still choking, pushes the rest of the way to her feet to stagger blindly through the cloud of dust in a dizzy panic. Her thoughts are a jumble: a warning shot, a series of images of cold steel ship pathways and an armed guard of black-cloaked knights, the empathic screaming waterfall of pain of phantom punishment exacted on Kylo Ren.
No one can give her orders or training rituals or an objective to cut through the senselessness of the battle, the hideous chaos of the war that rages in a hurricane around them. Being quick-on-her-feet, determined, resolute, none of these things help her when she’s adrift in a vacuum of wandering suffering. There is only one answer, one end, to kill Snoke, but he is a phantom, coiling his fingers around their throats from across the galaxy, and for the first time, doubt strikes her.
They need to rest, regroup, heal, strategize, but the thought of doing any of those with Kylo Ren turns her stomach as surely as the slurry of panic and imagined futures that assaults her mind, and it’s frantically shoved aside just as quickly. Wrong. She was wrong. Leia, in her insistence, was wrong, and though she had allowed Rey to believe that the monster was inside of him, she sees now that he had become it long ago.
Rey stops in her tracks when her feet kick the barrel of the rifle. Bending over, she scoops it up without stopping to think about what she’s doing—scavenging—and pulls the harness over her shoulder, and diverts her attention back towards the clearing mouth of the mine where she expects to see the shadowy form of Kylo Ren. It feels a lot like being right where she started. ]