apparare | i found something in the woods somewhere.

i found something in the woods somewhere.

open post.
▬ action
▬ prompts
▬ continuing threads
▬ force shenanigans

( Kylo wants to interject at any of the opportunities afforded to him by the natural breaks in her speech - about Ji, about Snoke, about himself - but he holds his tongue. He feels the slight drag over his mouth as his lip starts to curl, balanced between hysterical laughter and blind rage at her presumption, another gorge opening up within him and threatening to swallow him down, but the edges of the chasm are lined with sharp teeth that catch and pull and make the descent a messy affair as opposed to the smooth slide down into blackness that the Dark Side provides, a tempting, easy transition from the constant battering of high, wild winds that so often try to rip him right down the middle.

He wants to say something, defend himself, but he finds that, save for the shift in his expression to open, active hostility - without the mask, he's just too expressive, both a good and bad thing considering what he's been trying to do for the last fifteen years - keeping his mouth shut affords him more ammunition against her, and there's something cathartic in watching her slam materials around, splash him with fuel as she dumps the canister on Aurren's lifeless body, as if coming to recognize that he is not the only one with a poor amount of control over his retaliatory instincts. Rey is so often the picture of controlled indignation and sometimes arrogant in that presentation that watching her fall apart in ways that Kylo himself is familiar with, albeit to a much smaller degree, is somewhat satisfying, but not satisfying enough to distract him from the abject offense that he feels as she continues to level charges at him one after the other, after the other.

The notion that he has no room to feel offense considering what he's done, what side of himself he's shown her once again, does not cross him. What he does feel is offense at her temerity to assume that he has been lying to her about who and what he is, and it's the recall back to that thought, the initial charge, that pushes the pain and any traces of the arrogant amusement he'd felt at her displeasure, the small amount of relief at seeing her slowly crumble under the weight of her own anger and the sharp smell of fuel soaking into his clothing, away from him as if caught in a heavy tide. All that's left is a high, long ringing whine that echoes in the forefront of his mind, a pinprick of anger that is so fine and so sharp it could cut diamonds with surgical precision. )

I have never lied to you. ( Kylo feels petulant saying it, despite the fact that it needs to be said in the first place. He hadn't lied to her on Starkiller, even though the differences in their opinions and perspectives may have created the illusion that he was at the time, and he has not lied to her since. Not on Yaga Minor. Not on Corellia. Not on Hapes. Not in the barren wasteland of their tandem efforts to see Snoke expelled from his head, from his thoughts, in the ghostly husks of Ilum, Yavin IV, Jakku and the praxeum and all the landscapes in between. It has to be said in the interest of establishing his honesty now, Kylo realizes, as he curls his fingers into fists and stares at the muted green-brown of her eyes and the tension wiring of her shoulders, though he doesn't know why.

A thought occurs to him, and it could be his or hers, considering the bleed between them. He wouldn't have done it to her. He wouldn't. )

You are the most stubborn person I have ever met. Do you really think that I could make you believe something that you hadn't already decided on yourself? ( Childish disgusts contorts his tone, but the anguished ire that he feels is raw and real, his voice rising in tone and volume the longer he goes on uninterrupted. ) I let you believe nothing. If what you saw when you looked back at me on Corellia was a blameless shell that Snoke filled up with his own intent alone, then you interpreted it incorrectly, and that is on you. ( It might not be the whole truth but it's the truth that he knows and the truth that he accepts, the truth that exists as a result of the reality that he has lived since Snoke found him, since the Dark Side found him. With or without Snoke's influence, Kylo reasons, there is a good chance he was damned from the start anyway, but he cannot and will not pretend that the choices that he has made, the things that he has done, exist in a vacuum that can be closed now that the path that he walks has changed. )

I have lived the most of my life in the dark. It has always been there, and it always will be. A few hours spent in a meditative state won't change that, as much as Snoke's instruction and acceptance of that side hasn't managed to snuff out the opposition. ( The light, always burning, blinding when he looks too long at it. Kylo takes a few steps toward her, and his leg drags in the dirt lamely but he barely notices it, letting the heavy weight of his gaze consume and feed off the fire of Rey's own anger, her disgust, her shame and betrayal, a hurricane swaddled in the white bones and bronzed cage of a girl. ) Ji wasn't helpless. Couldn't you feel it? ( The heavy timbre of his voice climbs again, and he doesn't have to say it for the implication of his question to be present: stupid, naive girl. ) She had help, and she very well might have killed us both, killed you, or brought you somewhere that would force you to wish she had! Is that what you wanted? To be brought before Snoke and made to answer for your actions against him? I was trying to -

( He breaks off, at the end of the line of his frustration, feeling the heady pulse of destructive rage uncurl in his gut like a series of claws opening and closing, tracing sharp, hot lines across his insides. A hand rips its way savagely through his hair, yanking it back where it's started to fall, damp with sweat, into his eyes, and Kylo turns away from her, unable to look at her and knowing, innately, that his reasoning might only infuriate her further. Saving her, saving them both, had been a motivating factor when he'd squeezed his fingers around Ji's throat and refused to disengage, but it isn't the whole of it, and in that recognition lies the suggestion of a lie if there actually were one. He had fed off of it, in the end, and there is no denying that, but Kylo won't make excuses for it. )

I see it, sometimes. ( He says, moving away from her, showing her his back. Aurren's helmet glints again in the dim light, and Kylo bends to remove it, unkind with residual anger, from the man's head, slipping his fingers underneath the jaw where he knows the mechanized latch is that will release it. Aurren's older face stares back up at him, washed with salt-and-pepper stubble, and his eyes are closed, but the area around them is bruised and black. ) I saw it on the General's face after we emerged from the meditative state on Corellia. The expectation that in the wake of Snoke's eviction from my thoughts, Ben Solo will return, as if Kylo Ren is some monster wearing that boy's face. ( Kylo turns back around to face her, voice quieter than he intends it to be. ) Who do you expect me to be?

[ Neither of them will fully emerge from this war without blood on their hands. Rey knows that as well as she knows violence’s snapping jaws at the back of her mind trying to lash out and take a bite of her enemies, the same urge that Kylo Ren had given into down in the mine. It was a warped mirror, showing her the snarling, bared teeth of a predator from the other side, watching through a lens what she had looked like when she tried to fell him on Starkiller, what she feels every time they fight.

For the first time, it occurs to her that they might never clash in that way again, and the wistful sorrow that comes with losing something significant joins the relief of commiseration that she had already felt in their bond. That realization grows strong with the implicit understanding of his intent, flaring to full awareness now—he thought he could protect her (the both of them, yes, but her) and brackish disgust turns Rey’s stomach as it floods her mouth, thinking that he’d done what he did in some misguided defense of her.

Still, his accusations gouge the sails of her argument in deep slashes until her bluster is nothing but wounds in white canvas flapping lamely in the insignificant wind, but she won’t allow her discontent to be dismissed entirely while she can still feel the heat of Ji’s throat under her own hand, as if she had been the one to squeeze and squeeze, as if she had not stopped until the life drained out of her. Rey’s horror is as much a result of the transference as it is a result of her understanding of what had allowed him to indulge and celebrate in the unforgiving brutality of the act; it is gristle in her teeth that she cannot mull over in a satisfactory, easy way, resisting simple interpretation.

There’s nothing else to lash out at, she realizes sadly when she looks down to find her hands are not only empty of Ji’s throat, but of anything at all, and it leaves her with a white dwarf of agitation humming inside of her with no way to vibrate its way out of her skin and find peace. She paces away, raising her arm to wipe sweat away from her face, and she pretends not to notice the frustrated tears that come away from her contorted expression, tight with restraint, with the rest of the salt. The exhale that spills past her lips is not at peace, but seething, steam billowing out of an active furnace, and though she lifts her gaze to the darkened sky to find comfort, she finds nothing but emptiness. ]

No. Not blameless. [ She hisses the words as a defense, turning back towards him with the darkened scowl of a woman who knew precisely what she blamed him for: Han’s name goes unspoken between them not because she won’t dare utter it, but because she knows she doesn’t need to. He is not a piece of leverage to heft around between them. The loss is greater than that.

She uses the reminder now to block his efforts in painting himself the victim of expectations now, deliberately or otherwise, for she will not allow him to lob arms at his mother, the only mother she’s ever known, because she wants to recover what Kylo Ren has cost her: a family. Not only Ben Solo, but Han as well. She will not allow him to vilify Leia for that. Her tone turns scolding and impatient as she lashes back at him, voice raising while she hoists the lights she’d brought out, flicking them on and breaking open the bulbs so they’ll catch on the fuel-soaked scraps of fabric and consume Aurren’s body. Flames roar to life and try to drown out her speech as she drops the broken light, filament cutting her palms in carelessness. ] Stop hiding behind other people! You can’t justify what you do by claiming it was in defense of me when I didn’t want it, and you can’t disavow Snoke’s influence and begrudge your mother hers in the same breath!

[ So what does she want? Like it or not, he has narrowed down the real problem, that she got something she didn’t expect in this, but not in such a way that it’s different than anticipated, for that implies she had some fully manifested expectation. No, it’s more than she wanted, and not in a way worth celebrating. Looking at Kylo Ren and the life he offered her when he’d attempted to lure her to the dark, Rey saw the potential for the intimacy of understanding and the comfort of camaraderie—without him, she might never stop being alone.

But he understands more than the nature of her abilities, than the experiences implicit in them; he understands the darkness within her, the vengeful, spitting rage and the joy of the hunt and the bloom of satisfaction that comes with wielding power that you’ve never had before. She hates seeing the worst of herself in him, hates it because like any fire, she knows that it is catching and it could burn her up just as soon as warm her. She is afraid—paralyzed, really. She thought he might help her find a way that is their own—not Luke’s, not Snoke’s, but she realizes suddenly and sharply the unfairness of this projection of hers. Freeing him for her own benefit makes her no better than Snoke himself, let alone than Kylo Ren. So she grits her teeth, forces it away, and instead turns it back around on him, opening herself to reality rather than her blind hopes, rather than her needs. ]

It isn’t about what we expect; it’s about what you want. Did you want to be free of Snoke so you could escape the darkness that he has drowned you in, to find your own path, or did you simply want the power he offered you without the leash?

I want to be free. ( The statement tears itself out of his throat without warning, catching on his canines and gnashing his tone, a violent, desperate bark that sees itself leveled at the only other person available - worthy, brave, strong - enough to weather it. It's an admission that crackles with all the cold electricity of lightning in a bottle, a harsh realization for himself, if for no one else, and Kylo feels that if he weren't so thoroughly exhausted, wrung out, bone dry, the subsequent explosion of his rage and frustration would be enough to level the area. Rey's careful edging around it, and Kylo's own recollection of the last time he delivered such an embittered charge, could only ever call to mind that startled face, bathed in red, falling down and down and filling him up and up only to be left with -

Nothing. Nothing at all. The culmination of everything that she is charging him with reduced to ashes, cinder. A battle fought and waged and won but lost. Dark, dark blood on his hands, darker than he could hope to wash away, and then bright pain dragging him under. It had been too much then, and it is too much now, a confusing jumble of thought and intention that leaves him feeling scraped raw. The loss, greater than leverage, hangs open and gaping between them, the both of them gathered on separate ledges of the horrible chasm that has opened between them, a pit of loss and bitter hurt for reasons that are different and the same. That is them in a nutshell, he and Rey: different but the same, the warped and cracked mirror, the opposing sides of the same coin. What she sees of herself in him, she hates, and what he sees of himself in her, he cannot accept.

The inversion is strange and alarming and it won't, he knows, ever go away, no matter what happens to them. They could be locked saber to saber now, teeth bared and arms trembling, and he knows without having to even skim the surface of her mind let alone dive deep within it that the sentiment would not change. It's an acceptance, an understanding, that physically aches, and for as much as neither of them want to permit the other, there is no room between them for denial. He can't shut out the billow of hot, scalding anger that issues forth from the engine of her lungs, and he can't stop the oily slick of its counterpoint from slipping from him to her. They pushed too hard, too much, and there is no going back, there is no hiding from one another.

The opposition rips at him, not dissimilar to the way in which everything that he has ever done has torn him in two, but rather than sink down into it, give in to the brutalized anger and resentment that threatens to claw its way out of his open mouth, Kylo finds it easier to let the hard burn of her ignored tears find a mark within him as well. A tight heat that has nothing to do with with fire she has lit, nothing to do with the smell of burning flesh and melting hair, traces its way across Kylo's chest and chokes him. It is so different from the heartbeat of darkness making him smug, light, powerful not so long ago that he knows this can only be the agony afforded to him by the light, calling, heckling, demanding to be let in. He is a disaster. )

I am not hiding. ( The disdain that spikes any time that anyone mentions his mother returns, though it's clouded with an overall objective feeling of despair that he can't quell in the midst of this turmoil. Angry tears threaten, a solid, heavy lump rising in his throat at the thought of her - memories and imagined realities and the potential future that he cannot see beyond their jettison out of here - and Kylo - Ben is filled with as much abject misery and longing as he is hatred. They had not been good to each other, any of them, really. )

I don't know who else to be, and I won't - I can't apologize for who I am. You thought you could take the monster out of the creature and have the man left but there is no dividing line. There is no going back. There is no changing the outcome. There is only forward. I don't know what will happen. I don't - I just don't know. And you can't expect me to have it figured out yet. People don't - no one changes overnight. ( She expects him to, she worries that she herself will, and Kylo has a strange half-formed notion that he would, if he could. An idea that he might give her anything she wanted if she asked. But it goes as quickly as it comes, carried away with smoke and wind. ) This has been who I am for the last twenty years. Expecting it to go away because it scares you is naive.

You don’t scare me.

[ Pride speaks abruptly with her voice, but it is thick and curdled with loathing, warped into something that can hardly be recognized as hers. Bitterness makes her intractable, but realization alone will not temper it because it is the conflict that she can see battling out across his features that she has become embittered to, by her own mirrored struggle with it.

The push and pull of both sides too often threatens to suffocate her: she is filled with well-grounded outrage and agony at her own abandonment, at more than a decade of undeserved misery that she was subjected to, the intrinsic unfairness of circumstance doing its best to turn her out, a weapon with its point raised at those who had contributed to her suffering. Only through the understanding and empathy afforded to her by a lifetime of misery does she tame it, remain stalwart in the face of its influence.

In that way, her pride lies plainly and boldly, for though Kylo Ren’s actions and the threat of his strength do not scare her in the way that they are precisely the traits that leave most people quaking in fear of him, she does feel afraid of what he embodies. A realized form of her failure, the threat of her missteps, he represents the worst of what she could be if she misjudged or lost her grip on that calm center at the eye of her misery. The notion that she could so easily be him paralyzes her in cold terror.

But this isn’t about her, as hard as Kylo tries to deflect it onto her fear and her inadequacy and her haranguing expectation; this is about his choices and his stumbling path out of the darkness. She cannot take the steps for him, will not coddle and hold his hand—Rey offers him only the possibility and light cast on the hard path that leads up out of the familiar territory of his own whirlpool of hate and sorrow and pain. No one had offered that much to her—she’d found her own way to suffer it without surrender—but she wishes they had, so independent of obligation, she sets it out for him.

In that context, it seems petty of her to grow angry and frustrated when he chooses not to take the path she has lit for him, knowing it is his choice and it is not her responsibility to push him along it. ]

You want to be free? Free yourself. [ For all her empathy and understanding, Rey unsympathetically spits the words at him, a wide sweep of her arm gesturing to him as the sole guardian of his fate. ] You cling to this idea of “who you are” as if it is stagnant, infallible, eternal, but it’s not. The person that you are is the choices you make in every moment; the past doesn’t chain you or define you, it doesn’t matter at all! But continue to choose the easy path, the one that is familiar to you in the dark where you’ve lived for so long, and that will always be the person you are.

( Her words are hollow echoes of a reality that he does not want to face. Not because it's difficult. Not because the long, slow climb out of the pit is just that: long and slow. Not because he sees any particular merit in what the Light Side philosophies might have to offer. Not because he doesn't see a place for himself among those ideologies, this boy who has lived with weight and expectation and monsters - real and imagined, outside invaders and internal demons - who can't reconcile the idea of who he was supposed to be with the person he has become, as if there were ever a way out. But because he doesn't know how.

Rey sees her own terror, her own paranoid fear, in the beast that he has turned into as a result of his inability to turn away from what has felt easy, what has felt right for so long despite knowing that it was wrong, and it occurs to him then that, despite their mirror similarities, despite the hard and lonely life she has had to live, despite knowing how perfectly she could like being what and like he is, she will never understand this perspective completely. And he has no words capable of describing it. Outside of showing her the way that he has in the past, there is no way to make her comprehend the complex assortment of disparity that he feels in doing something so simple as existing. The kind of man who believes his own absolution is to be found in the murder of his father and realizes too late the mistake that he has made. His life is a series of mistakes that he is barely beginning to right. )

We can't all leave the desert behind so easily, Rey. ( His tone is mean. The comment is a low blow, and Kylo knows it, given the horrible loneliness he has felt within her on more than one occasion, the sense of waiting, waiting, waiting for someone. A thousand, three thousand, five thousand and more scratches into the walls, fading white lines marking not the days until but the days since. Her decision to abandon such a fruitless endeavor, he knows, was not made easily or lightly, but he's mad at her and lashing out in the only way that he can despite the faith that she presents in him in saying what she does. Because of course that's there, too, that stalwart belief that this is not the end. She can scream and hiss and spit at him like a demon but it's intrinsically there at the heart of her words. Bundled up in anger and spun into a wicked web of disdain and superiority - at least, he interprets it as such, but then he is angry with her - it hides inside her barbs and the sharpness of her tone and behind the wall of her internalized fear that he absolutely does feel, too used to feeding off of in others like a breath of fresh air, but it exists.

He had told Han Solo that it was too late, and to the end he was insistent that it wasn't. They - Organa and Skywalker - have resolutely refused to give up on him, and Rey has dragged him kicking and screaming the entire way over a trail littered with broken glass and hot stones to wherever it is they are now, beyond his moon, beyond Concordia. Why she had not dropped him down off the ledge on Corellia, he will never know, but his own voice from moments prior resonates within him now. There is only forward. ) No path is easy. Good or bad, light or dark, it will never be easy. Our path - paths will never be easy. ( He glances down at Aurren's helmet gathered in his hands, feeling a strange urge to slip it on, to stare into the void and feel comforted in not having his face so exposed. The light from the fire throws long shadows over his features and distorts the shape of his face in the heavy visor. ) I'm not good, I'm certainly not Light, and I never will be, not entirely. ( After a moment, he tosses the helmet to Rey. ) I don't know who I am or what I'll be outside of what and who I've been. I need time to figure it out.

( But he's trying. He'd said as much previously, on the Falcon, and he'd been surprised then to know that he had meant it. Some of the fight goes out of him, drained through the hole in his leg and the pain of it that he calls on in an effort to keep the embarrassment of faltering at bay. He won't look weak. He won't submit. He needs to get away from her before she says anything else that sets him over the edge and drags him down again. She has the ability to do it, just as she has the ability to see right through him. One glance back at the blackening body of Aurren Ren sees him striding up to and level with Rey, giving her a wide berth as he makes to move past her. A thought occurs to him. )

I assume it won't matter when we return to the Resistance either way. ( They'll imprison him again, at the very least, especially if Rey discusses what has happened here, gives her thoughts and opinions on him as a person as she's presented them to him now. Kylo surprisingly feels nothing at the prospect. It looms too far ahead in the wake of what has transpired between them, somehow more important than his eventual death, to be of any consequence. )

[ Leaving the desert came with a fight, tooth and nail, against her very nature and every hope she'd clutched to her chest for more than a decade, the only thing she had to warm her at night and promise her that there was an end in sight. These and more, she had to give up, with no guarantee that the alternative would be better, and he spits it back in her face knowing full and well what he claims. The insult she takes is not indignation, not precisely, but it is comparable enough that there is a touch of it in the anger that flashes through her, oil in a pan that makes Rey want to claw at him and wrestle him to the ground and solve this with sweat and bruises and muscle fatigue, but that will not settle any matter so philosophical as this. Too bad, really.

But because she can rationally acknowledge that he knows better, Rey manages to rein in her temper and quiet the storm that threatens the teetering, fragile alliance that they have built out of paper and popsicle sticks. It's a wonder that the flames on Aurren's body have not ignited it already. It helps that, moments later, he makes acknowledgment that their difficulty in this life, in the path that stretches before them, is a mutual one, rife with grief and loss and loneliness, and it is only his childish bitterness that prompts him to try to undercut her experience with it, her struggle.

That does not preclude her desire to similarly undermine him, to hurt him as he has hurt her, but like many other impulses she shares with Kylo Ren, Rey demonstrates better restraint, tightening her grip on the helmet that has found its way into her hands rather than take it out on the man before her. ]

You make a lot of assumptions. [ Though she imagines the other leaders of the Resistance will favor the prospect, Rey has a hard time imagining Luke or Leia considering it with any seriousness—Luke out of doubt that such an environment could hold him for long, and Leia out of sentimentality. But they would be hard-pressed to make a good case, to prevent a trial, and to that end, even Rey must admit the high likelihood of an eventual execution.

She decides then that she won't let it happen, not only because Kylo Ren—for better or worse—is essential to her as he is now, because there is no telling what would become of either of them if one were to die with the bond as it stands, but also because she cannot stomach the mere imagining of Leia's grief, let alone the reality of it. They had already shared tears with one another over Han. She refuses to do it again, refuses to let the Resistance take her family from her all over again when it's so clear that it played a role in the division the first time. ]

We should stay here and keep the Falcon's systems off until you heal. [ She points to his leg, both avoiding the subject further and opting to solve the only problem that she can solve right now: time. ] It will keep us off radar, keep us from drawing further attention. [ If he needs to figure it out, better that he do it away from Organa and Skywalker—Leia and Luke, her mind corrects as if scolding it, startled by the smooth adoption of his monikers for them. It will also afford them the chance to make sure that Ji is really gone. ]

Concordia's mostly harmless, right? Barely inhabited since the mine shut down. I doubt we'll run into anymore trouble.

( The way that she views these monolithic figures that bookmark certain points of his life - Organa, Solo, Skywalker - sits in such stark opposition to the way that Kylo perceives them that it consistently puts him on the defensive any time there is so much as an implication as to their characters. In some ways, he can understand why Rey would look at them the way that she does: her experience with them is in complete contrast to his own. These are the people, the faces, the warm arms and full hearts that accepted a nobody made of sand and spare parts. Solo had endeared himself enough to her that she easily thought of him when prompted to fill the hole of a missing father, and Leia's kindness and acceptance in the face of her diligence and dedication, how rigid and unflinching and strong she can be, has certainly struck a cord with Rey as well. Skywalker is less difficult, still, to reason out, considering what he represents, what he can show her, what he can give her.

Kylo has none of those same experiences, and as a result he has none of that faith. The father who might have loved him but didn't understand or know what to do with him, how to relate; a mother too absorbed in the rest of the galaxy and too afraid of her own inadequacies and culpability in what her son was becoming to take it upon herself to fix it; and Skywalker an uncle who pushed and pushed in the only way he knew how, thinking he was doing the best that he could, only to have it shatter in a radius that took down an entire generation of possibility. Kylo is responsible for his own actions, who he is, and he knows that, but the assumptions that he makes are based in a history that Rey might never know, might never understands. Not rose colored glasses, necessarily, but she's been afforded a new lens through which to peer at the world as those three people inhabit it; his own perspective isn't as forgiving.

He isn't expecting to have attention drawn to his injuries, especially not after the volume and severity of their argument - it wouldn't be surprising if they shattered a few windows or fueled the fire in some way - but Kylo can't deny that he isn't exactly eager to return to the Resistance, as previously mentioned. Level enough with Rey to peer down at her if he leans slightly to the side, in her direction, he doesn't invade her personal space with his body language but comes close enough that he can see the precise way the orange light of the fire bends the shadows around her face. )

Famous last words, scavenger. ( His tone his much more mellow than it had been, though it carries the sharp edge associated with the death of screaming matches only moments prior. Finished but hardly forgotten. ) Are you sure you want to spend anymore time in the company of a monster?

( It might as well be a rhetorical question, since he already knows the answer. He gets the sense that without actively trying, it will be very unlikely that they are able to keep most things from one another in the future. )

[ Anger like Rey's—or more accurately, the potential for it—can only be controlled in one way; it needs direction, and like any wave, it will relax and quell given enough time and distance. On Jakku, she turned it into a mantra: they'll come back. As long as she subverted her anger with that simple statement, she could not allow the anger at her parents' abandonment to overtake her and mould her into some huddled, bitter creature.

She does the same now in the way she accepts that she has said her piece, expelled her discontent as far as it's safe to do so, and her mind should be redirected to the task they have at hand instead of her own ill will. After all, they have a body to burn, supplies to gather, and injuries to sleep off. When there's work to do, there's no room for thinking and hating—a good lesson, even if she came by it in an awful way.

But his tone snaps her attention up off the stinking mass of flaming flesh, and Rey's expression sours. ]

I have a name, you know.

[ The question, she doesn't bother with; it's better not to engage something like that for neither of them would enjoy the result of the answer. She won't correct him, dismiss the monstrous label, and she certainly won't lie and claim that she is content to remain in his company, but they don't have options, and Rey doesn't make a habit of wasting time complaining about her circumstances when it won't change anything. She focuses on what she can change instead. ]

Don't go anywhere. [ She pulls the blaster rifle down off her shoulder, tucking the stock against the crook of her shoulder and stretching long arms down the body to rest at the trigger guard and on the barrel. ] I'll get bacta from the Falcon, but it's better that we camp away from her in case anyone else followed. They'll see the ship, and maybe we'll get a heads up that they're coming that way.

I'm quite aware of that. ( Is his immediate response. Kylo is not so quick to put past transgressions behind him, however resigned and accustomed to their presence he may become. The retaliation is childish and unnecessary, but if it bothers her enough to vocalize the displeasure she feels at being called such a thing - and he knows the implication behind it eclipses the literal nature of that nomenclature; he's not just calling her what she's factually been for her entire life but twisting the word around his tongue like an insult, made more apparent when he'd spoken her name aloud only moments before - then he is more than happy to use it.

He knows better than most the power that lies in the naming of things, however much she might dismiss it while failing to dismiss the moniker that he's afforded to himself. That, at least, in this moment, with the black mark of what happened in the mine shaft not long enough ago to be resigned to memory and memory alone, is an accurate assessment, never mind his protestations and the argument spent defending himself to her. )

Leave the helmet. ( He says in response to her commands, after a moment spent considering the business end of the blaster she holds as if he might suddenly find it trained on him. It's a fleeting notion, conceived of a lifetime spent looking over his shoulder rather than beside it. Whatever their stance toward one another, that default position between the two of them has shifted with the formation of what exists between them, a blessing and a curse in so many ways. As for the helmet, Kylo is loathe to allow it on the ship, regardless of how little love he has for a vessel that Han Solo, in turn, loved. Aurren may not have been Force sensitive, but that bucket of rust is teeming with ghosts already, and neither of them need to be in the market for one or two more.

Kylo says nothing else, lumbering over under the slow drain of adrenaline to sit on one of the broken, crumbling steps leading into the administrative office that they'd been hacking away at for close to two hours now. He looks at the spread of his knees as he sits, resolutely not examining the injury to his leg until Rey has left and occupying the time until instead by looking up at her, tracing the lines of her face and the way the light bends as if to allow room for encroaching shadow. Blood has stained the side of her tunic, and although he cannot see the gash that Ji left in her side, his own skin tingles in a faint reminder. His leg throbs, and he closes himself away from her. )

[ For a moment, Rey considers carrying it with her for spite, but the helmet is bulky and interferes with her grip on the stock of the blaster rifle; it clunks as it hits the dirt, a plume of dust carried up around it as it creates a hearty dip in the landscape where it falls. Let him stew. Sand grinds beneath her boots as she turns heel and paces away from him without another word; concern that he will vanish into the dark while she is gone surfaces briefly, but she drowns it out by fixing her awareness on the steady throb of his thigh where it echoes in her own.

The hike back to the Falcon is tedious if not overly long, made longer by the way the heat of her injury spreads from one single point between her ribs, out through her lung and around her back. As worrisome as it is, it doesn't flag her step, for she knows the answer lies up on the creaking pile of garbage that had sat under a tarp just miles from her for years without her ever realizing what it could be to her.

When she boards, she moves past the cargo bay where the medical supplies wait, settling her palms on the back of the cockpit seats and staring out at the woodlands revealed by the front viewscreen. She presses her lips tightly together, quietly wishes that its original owner were here to offer her something, or at least forgive her for absconding with his murderer and leaving the Resistance to whatever fate befalls them. She takes small comfort in knowing that he's done the same, willingly and not, though it doesn't escape her that he recognized his avoidance for what it was and returned with them.

Turning away from the pilot chair, she hastens back through the central winding corridor and gathers up the bacta, stuffs an economical but what she suspects is sufficient amount into the leather pouch at her side, then strips off the linen that wraps around her body, disentangling the bands of fabric from her belt so she can pile it in a corner.

Dark brown and deep red stain a third of her tunic, the ivory canvas absorbing everything from mud to blood, and she pulls it up to slap a bacta patch against the smeared and dirty wound over sweat and dust from the mine. The back of her hand wipes sweat from her forehead, and she turns to leave her home behind and return to the wild ghost town whence she came to sift and scavenge once again through the hollowed relics of an age past. ]

( As Rey retreats back to the canopy of the ship, Kylo watches the shadows swallow her back and shoulders until she is nothing but the vague suggestion of an off-white shape in the distance. The Falcon is not stationed far enough away for her to fade completely from sight, but the shadows of the overhang and the encroaching evening do their part to obscure her, blot her out and distort what he can make out of her withdrawing figure. He turns his gaze away after she disappears underneath the metal hull of the ship, letting some of the tension created as a result of holding himself together with wire and screws drain out of him now that he's alone.

Gloved hands peel apart the hole in his pant leg to inspect the damage done to his thigh but there's little to be done in the half-light and even less to be accomplished without the supplies that Rey has left to retrieve, so he does stew. He stews for three full minutes in a muck of self-doubt and chastisement, of lingering anger and frustration and inward disappointment, a cavalcade of vitriolic energy that wants to snap its jaws and lash out at the next person available while it slinks away to lick its wounds and bide its time until the next outburst. The air smells like charred flesh and burning hair and the melted fibers of the clothing that hadn't been removed from Aurren's frame. The helmet glints up at him where Rey had dropped it, and Kylo finally lumbers to his feet in order to stride toward it.

Ultimately, he leaves it, and for no reason other than to be contrary, he doesn't not go anywhere, as she'd instructed him. Rather, he wanders his way through some of the other buildings, entering none save one of the last ones, which appears to have served as an administrative barracks for the miners at one point. The floor seems solid, and none of the rafters overhead come down as he picks his way through the abandoned items, all of which seem useless and exhausted with age and disuse. It's something to do other than watch Aurren burn, but even wandering loses its shine once Kylo finds that there is nothing to procure. Rey, no doubt, will be able to find use for each and every item that she pulls from the dust, but he hasn't spent his life scavenging for parts. Just for Jedi.

Back at the fire, he waits for her to return, standing rather than sitting, leg outstretched, as if any pain could be so great as to incapacitate him when he had drawn such strength from it previously. Kylo stares down into the tarnished durasteel of Aurren's mask and considers what might happen were he to put it on, what transformation might take place as a result of the association so easily made with the disguising of his face. He has now spent more unbroken time without his helmet than he has in longer than he can remember. What that says about him, about what is happening, about Rey, is beyond Kylo's level of comprehension and equally beyond his level of attentiveness, concrete thoughts draining away like meltwater and leaving vague approximations and hints of ideas and concepts behind instead.

After a long moment, he bends to press the helmet between both palms, examining the weight and shape of it, the way the dust and grit has overtaken some of the seams and cracks that mar the visor. There isn't enough adequate lighting to show Kylo his own reflection in its totality, but he can see the outline of his hair, flattened to his head, and the protrusion of what he assumes is his nose in the visor as he turns the helmet to catch more of the firelight. Lighter and somehow less scuffed and dented than the one he left on Corellia, it seems to grin at him, beckoning.

Kylo dumps it into the fire at Aurren's feet. )

[ Absently, in the back of her mind, she can feel him stir and pace, an aimless sort of wandering that comes not from need for anything in particular, but from insolence and impatience, and for that reason, Rey doesn't let it rile her. Strangely, it offers something familiar and understandable in him, a reminder of the man that he claims is one with the monster she'd seen that had frightened her to defensiveness. This is something she recognizes, at least, so she lets the pendulum of his pacing search soothe her nerves with the familiar before she hikes down the ramp of the Falcon and back into view.

The effort of suppressing her injury keeps her gait stiff as she approaches, none of her breaths quite expanding her chest to its full capacity before the sting sets in and blocks her, but pride keeps her stubborn. She finds him there, pale face glowing orange as the flames reflect in his features, casting long shadows that exacerbate the already awkward proportions of his face, and she looks down at the crackling, mechanical sound of the circuits of the helmet frying, a death rattle of its own for the mask that Aurren Ren wore.

For the first time, it occurs to her that Kylo Ren never really chose to leave that particular symbol behind on Corellia, but was forced to by circumstance and her. She doesn't pity him or wish for anything less, but it does give her some idea of why he'd demanded she leave the other Knight of Ren's helmet on her disappearance.

Quite suddenly and without a word, she crouches in front of him, granules of dirt digging into scuffed and half-bared knees as she reaches for his pant leg to assess the wound for herself. Her head tilts briefly and she gets brief hold of the material—enough to see the hole left in it—and lifts her gaze, not bothering to straighten her spine or extend her legs, for she'd never reach near his height anyway. Instead, she just nods to the mound of earth beside her. ]

Sit down. [ She doesn't deliver it like a command, yet the advisement brokers no argument. ]

( Kylo senses her approach long before he hears it, but he makes no move to retreat from the circle of soft orange that casts a wide halo across the overturned dirt. Through the film of smoke and fire, he can see the open mouth of the mine shaft, a blacker scratch on a blackening evening, and not for the first time and surely not for the last while they remain on Concordia, he casts his senses out, doubt tickling the back of his neck, the sensation of being watched peeling down his spine like skin pulled back from the meat of a bright fruit. There is, as there was before, nothing there, no sign of anything, no disturbances that aren't rock formations breaking apart and beams splintering as the chain reaction of their damage ripples through the cavernous space.

Nothing. Just the two of them: Kylo blotting out a section of the fire and Rey bringing up the rear with heavy footfalls, the fuzzy sensation of her healing injury warming across his own ribs at temperature wholly different from the blaze that climbs high in front of him. Rey comes to stand next to him, and for a quick moment, Kylo studies the give and take of the shadows that play over her profile out of the corner of his eye before averting his gaze completely back to the disintegration of Aurren Ren. The smell has abated somewhat, given over more to the choke of black smoke and the popping of wood, sparks drifting up into the air and burning out before they can reach the navy blue of the oncoming dark.

The silence that stretches between them, pockmarked by these pops and shifts of kindling, is something less than comfortable but more than awkward. An acknowledgement of sorts that negates the need for actual words. Rey breaks it not by speaking but by grinding her heels into the dirt and swinging herself around in front of him to crouch down, taking him by surprise enough that she's able to gather the flapping material of his pant leg to peer beyond the frayed edges of dark fabric and get something of a look at what lies underneath. Kylo steps back automatically, the uneven ranginess of his gait as a result of the injury giving him an off-balance tilt and a stagger in his step that rights itself in the same manner, no matter how hard he tries not to favor the leg that sports the injury.

Rey hovers there in the dirt, and Kylo looks down at her for a long moment, weighing his options. He could refuse her assistance and take care of the injury himself, or refuse her assistance in its totality and treat the wound with the same care and attention he had allowed himself following Starkiller, sparing his pride at the expense of his thigh. Part of him enjoys the authoritative quality of her tone, enough to want to sit as directed while his curiosity is satiated by seeing what it is that she does next, and still part of him longs to stand if only to be contrary, the same way that he had wandered despite her clear instructions to stay put, to exert some control over himself if not over the situation in its entirety.

In the end, there is little choice but to sit down as instructed. Kylo manages it in one fluid motion despite the pain that it inspires, gritting his teeth and bending his knees until his backside smacks unceremoniously into the dirt. He eyes the length and width of her hands, her fingers, the sharp angles of her face, then kicks his leg out and digs his fingers into the tear in his trousers, widening the hole himself. )

[ The stench of burnt flesh and death are thick in the air around them, but if Rey smells it in the smoke, she doesn't react, keeping her expression set and duty-focused. While tending to injuries for a political prisoner does not precisely fall under the purview of her duties as a Jedi Knight (padawan, technically), it does help extend the lives of them both should another fight arise, and her experiences with Aurren and Ji do not give her considerable faith that she would fair as well without his aid.

She does not admit these practicalities out loud, as much to spare her pride as to avoid inflating his.

Instead, she allows him the dignity of widening the tear in his own clothing and pulls a canteen from her leather bag, shaking some of the water out over the bloodied puncture that lies beneath. The skin has puckered, layers of flesh turned up like corners pulled away from the wound by an invisible force, a removed blade, and fresh blood bubbles out of it as soon as the water from her canteen temporarily washes blood and dirt away.

He should never have tried walking on it. Just one glance would be enough to tell her how deep it is, if the crippling pain she'd felt transferred to her own thigh hadn't given her some indication already; as it stands, it confirms what she already knows, that flesh and muscle have torn straight down the bone, that even with the miracles of modern medicine, it will be some time—days, she guesses—before his leg is fully functional again.

The cap goes back on her canteen before she swaps it out for a tube of bacta, which she applies judiciously with a smear of her fingers, his blood staining them through mine soot. As she applies it, she grows more conscious of the steady tingle, the latent cool burn, of the patch on her side, and she wonders if it is the bond transferring the feeling of application and her mind simply referring it to where it expects the sensation to come from or if it's merely a natural empathic reaction.

Submerged in silence, Rey is the most comfortable she's felt around him since he tried to choke the life out of a Knight in the mineshaft, a reminder of years in isolation where she merely tended to the tasks that required her attention as they came up and worried about little else, so she does not break it with evaluations or platitudes. Instead, she sets about wrapping bandaging tape around his thigh once it's lathered in the skimpy portion of bacta she'd opted to use—conservation as a habit dies slowly, painfully, screaming each step of the way—and winds it tight around his thigh. She pretends that she doesn't take petty satisfaction in the discomfort she undoubtedly causes him. ]

( Where Rey falls naturally into comfortable silence, Kylo sits on pins and needles, tension thick as soup and gathered in the taut line of his shoulders and the clenched, hard shape of his fists. It has little to do with physical pain. The sensation of water washing away blood and dirt and sweat and whatever else has compounded around the gaping hole in his thigh is undoubtedly uncomfortable, but it isn't the worst injury that he's suffered, and the sting and dull throb that have set in as extensions of the appendage, seemingly, have nothing on the way that his face and shoulder had felt as if they'd been separate entities from his body when she'd torn the blue beam of her saber down the length and width of both of them. Pain, as he had commented previously, is instructive, and as such he finds merit in every twinge, every bubble of blood, every splash of red that mingles with the pale clarity of the water.

So it isn't the tremble in his thigh as he bites the inside of his cheek in an effort to keep perfectly still, settles his eyes hard on the glint of the fire rather than the slope of her neck as she bends over to inspect her work but rather her presence in general that leaves him feeling so at odds. The last time he needed assistance with an injury bestowed had been after Hux had escorted him - he refuses to think of it any other way, given the way that ginger bastard's lip had curled after Kylo for days following - from the collapse of Starkiller, and his recovery at the time had been a difficult endeavor, to say the least. But Rey is not a droid that he can mangle, and she isn't a med officer that he can just ignore or intimidate into promptness and efficiency just by breathing. The ties between them run too deep for that, and her distaste for him and her anger with him had been too palpable prior to retrieving supplies from the Falcon for Kylo to just forget it.

Her decision to see to him now, personally, is an odd choice, and prickles under his skin and along the back of his neck as he watches her slather bacta over his skin with dirty fingertips and the smell of stale sweat hanging around the both of them. Her fingers are not careful around the mean hole that Ji has carved into him, but they are not purposefully rough in any way either. Rey's touch reminds him of his own, perfunctory but cognizant, the touch of routine, and he can see in the indifference she trains her expression in the small amount of pleasure that she takes in undoubtedly causing him some amount of pain, however small, as if it were an adequate punishment for the things that he had done in an effort to keep them both alive.

He frowns, first at the bridge of her nose and then at the motion of her hands, the back and forth hard pull of a swathe of bandages encircling the meat of his thigh. It's the closest that anyone has ever been, the closest that he has ever let anyone, in a very long time, and after a couple of passes of the bandage over his skin, Kylo bumps her hands away in an effort to take on the task himself. )

I think I can handle it from here. ( His voice feels rough with momentary disuse, choked and blackened by the smoke that pours ever upward, disappearing into the darkness of the evening. Dark eyes made amber by the light of the fire, Kylo lets his gaze skip from her hands up to her face and down to where he knows her own injury stains her side. His own skin buzzes faintly. The question he asks is rhetorical. ) Sort yourself out?

[ Her hands recoil as soon as his make contact, like an electric shock has passed between them or a venomous creature has bitten her, and Rey lifts her gaze to meet his eyes in the immediate aftermath of the disproportionate reaction. Not, she realizes, disproportionate to either of them or their circumstances; he will see that, even if her instinct is to assume that no one else would.

It takes her a moment longer to stop her heart from racing from the steep surge of adrenaline that comes with a presumed attack, but she does it as she withdraws from him, remaining crouched there while she waits for him to stop staring and continue the wrapping of his bandage. She averts her gaze first, lowering it in a gesture that she realizes too late reeks of submission. ]

On the ship. [ She shakes her head. ] It wasn't deep.

[ A lie, but not a maliciously made one; dismissive, rather, for the purpose of keeping the focus on the way his own wound would hamper their progress. She'd seen people on Jakku get left out in the desert and stripped by the elements for less, by scavengers who wanted to divvy up the sparse possessions they had. In those days, she'd blamed neither: people did what they had to in order to survive. But she doesn't entertain the thought of leaving Ren here. ]

You can't do that again.

[ She says it firmly, insistently, schooling the emotion out of her voice, even if she can do nothing for the passionate intensity with which she establishes the rule. There is no need to specify what she means for it hangs between them like a tightrope for them each to walk in unsteady paths back towards one another. Worse than his thigh, she can feel the gouged flesh of their bond like a torn ligament, strained and limping as if it had been rent from the bone, and the thought of another pull so jarring as to shred through their sameness makes her stomach churn. Bile rises in her throat, but she ignores it. ]

I know you think you had to, that it was right, but if this is going to work at all, you can't. Killing someone in the heat of battle is one thing, but restraining her and then— [ The words sound like they put a strain on her breath, the very memory of how she'd felt Ji's windpipe crumpling under her own hand winding her. ] I can't be a part of it, and I have to be a part of you. Whether either of us likes it or not.

( His hands stutter on the wrapping, long fingers tangling through the tapestry of off-white bandage while the opposite hand ensures that the dressing lies tight and secure against his leg. Muscles twitch and flutter underneath surface level skin and deeper down, as if jumping straight off of the bone. The licks of pain are secondary now, little twinges that pale in comparison to this weeping, damaged thing that spans the distance between them, larger than a gulf and smaller that a breath all at once. Kylo gets the impression that were he to raise his hand absentmindedly to hold it palm up, the bones and tendons required to mirror the motion in Rey's own hand and arm in order to press their palms together would spring into action automatically.

It manifests as an image in his mind but does not present itself as an actualization as he winds the bandage around his leg once more, but he understands what it is that she's suggesting even without having to hear the rest of what she has to say, which of course he does have to hear, seeing as there is nowhere to run and even fewer places to go. They've let the bond become too tangled, a knot of sinew and marrow, a combination of twisting and twining light and dark and the spectrum between both extremes. Right now his slide back into the familiar overwhelms and pollutes it, so that every word and breath from Rey's throat sounds as if it is being ripped from her, as if his hands were squeezing her trachea in an effort to snuff her out.

The idea perturbs him more than it would have a year ago, before he was acutely aware of her existence, before she was a flesh and bone person as opposed to a far off feeling, a star on a horizon, just a girl. So he cuts it off, shunts it away, and ties off the ends of his bandaging without bothering to admire their respective handiwork. The binding is secure, that's all that matters, but he'll have to find something else without a gaping hole to wear eventually. For the time being, Kylo falls quiet, dragged down in the whirl of Rey's grief - if it could be called that - enough not to take inventory of the submissive way in which her eyes had lowered. If anything, his aversion and preoccupation with his injury displays a similar reluctance, although he is quick to cast his gaze toward her again once he's finished. )

I can't promise you that I won't. I can't even promise myself that I won't. ( He delivers it quietly, most of the authoritative edge of his tone and the anger from earlier drained out of him and smothered by the fire and his own weariness. Even men like him get tired; juggling two consciences is exhausting. Kylo's throat feels dry, and although his voice doesn't carry the same qualities that it had prior, that dryness makes it rougher than he intends, a scrape of stone over a slab of rock. He stretches his palm flat over the bandaging covering his thigh, biting back the urge, for whatever reason, to curl his fingers around her arm, recalling easily the way that she had recoiled from him only moments ago, her horror at what he had done. He's quiet for a long moment, looking at her, mulling over nothing and everything.

Starkiller and Corellia, Yaga Minor and the ice caves, long stretches of desert and the lush green on Takodana. He did this. His relentless, reckless pursuit, his desire to prove himself, prove his worth, prove to the darkness in him and to himself that he could do this. This is his responsibility, as much as it is her load to carry in turn. He did this on Starkiller and she finished it on Corellia. Rey dragged him the rest of the way under, but not before Kylo stuck his head below the water in a desperate bid to come back up breathing the moment that Han Solo's death punched a hole right through him and let the light back in. The struggle manifests this time as a sigh, tightly controlled, quiet, pinched at the end. ) I'm trying. I'm going to try. ( Because at the end of the day, that is what any of them are doing. Trying. So he'll try, for her, for himself, and - ) I'm sorry.

( It's an awkward endeavor but it exists all the same, brushed under the heavy popping of the fire and the creaks and groans of the encampment around them. He hasn't apologized to anyone in so long that even Kylo questions whether or not it's genuine but in that moment, with the sound of her voice choked still in his ears and this fragile but strong yet incredible wounded thing pulsing between them, he finds that it is, and that no one is more deserving of the first acknowledgement of genuine remorse in years than Rey. )

[ Even without the bond, Rey would be able to feel the weight of the words in the implicit haunting image of his lonely mindscape, a barren and icy wasteland that afforded few fond memories, all far off, of other people. If Snoke had ever earned an apology out of him, it was a bruising command, not something freely offered, not something rich in conciliatory regret for the resulting pain.

The words press Rey's eyes shut to stave off the threatening trickle of tears—both empathic and personal, a result of the memory of the mine and its effects on her as much as the relief of his honesty and the transferred inner turmoil he feels. She draws a deep breath before looking back up at him, amber eyes glinting with the smoldering fire beside them that scorches the remains of the crime, and she presses her lips tightly together to collect herself while she nods. ]

Try is good. I'll take try. [ A lopsided, grim bastardization of a smile touches on her lips, haunting in its failed efforts to become even a shadow of the expression's intent, but she gives up on it quickly, eyes turning skyward. Each star glitters like the end of a blaster barrel pointed down at them, either light traveling years to reach them from another system, or an incoming shuttle that's eager to carry them, injured and off their prime, out to the Unknown Regions were Snoke awaits. ]

We need to move the body somewhere. [ She points towards the sloping hills of the refinery further south in the crater of the mine, where silt is carried and piled and strained through chemical smelting into refined ore. Even in the dark, the various minerals glint in the light as though winking at them from artificial mountains that roll out of sight and obscure the rim of the crater where the treeline continues. ] Then head further in to set up a camp. If anyone comes looking to finish the job, it will be to our benefit that they find the Falcon empty and the Knights gone; it might even give us enough time to recover before they catch on.

[ Doubtful. But she isn't up to getting them off-planet in her present condition, and Kylo Ren isn't up for another melee bout. Better that they firm up their plan for rest and take another go at it when the sun touches Concordia's forgotten mines. ]

( The tightness in her chest that manifests in direct relation to the fan of her eyelashes across the dark circles marring the skin below manifests in his own as well, an echoed sentiment that brings the air in lungs down to a scratchy wheeze in his chest, though it doesn't exist as a reality in its own right. Or maybe it does, he can't be certain, as caught up and tangled within one another as they have become both since leaving the mines and before they ever entered them. There is a weight that settles behind his breastbone, stacking on top of itself to pile rocks in the pit of his throat, restrict the flow of that rattling breath that expands and contracts across his chest with every breath that he takes, and Kylo knows what that sensation is without ever having to stop and give it a name.

He doesn't now, and he doesn't bother with the thickness of his tongue and throat in an attempt to answer with any form of immediacy, not trusting himself to gather the conviction required to ensure that his voice does not waver in the wake of her acceptance, her approval. It's a different make and model and of a different caliber than anything Kylo is used to - from the people who had once been his parents, from the Jedi who had once been his uncle, from the shadow that had once been his master - and it rests heavy and burrows deep somewhere within him, a small, burning ember tucked among the blackened coals. His head tips forward in a nod at her acknowledgement, and something not at all like a reciprocated smile touches the corner of his mouth - more a grimace or a wince than anything overtly pleasant - and falls again as the heat of the fire rinses his face and a particularly loud pop draws his attention from the contours of her own, the bright ring of amber that eclipses the kaleidoscope of brown and green made darker by firelight.

Kylo doesn't follow the line of her sight up into the stars but stays attached to the fire until its brightness forces him to look away, out beyond the hills that she points to once he catches sight of her movement out of the corner of his eye. His initial response is little more than a grunt, flexing his fingers around the bandaging on his thigh, digging the pad of his thumb into a point just outside the radius of the wound, testing it. It's hardly pleasant. )

Maybe you should have considered that before lighting it on fire. ( There's no real heat behind his tone; if anything, despite evidence to the contrary, he sounds like he might be teasing her. Even so, Kylo can't deny that the suggestion has merit, as little as he wants to spend even a night lying on the ground, though sleeping in one of the cramped bunks on board the ship sounds just as appealing. ) We can pull a door off of one of the buildings and attach something to drag it with, make it somewhat easier on ourselves, considering - ( He gestures between the both of them, a vague indication toward Rey's ribs and his own leg. Dragging or propelling the smoldering remains of Aurren Ren via the Force seems like a waste of energy when the two of them together should be able to pull whatever is left of him behind them with less fanfare. As unenthusiastic as he is about spending what might amount to longer than one standard cycle on this moon, Kylo has to concede her point: neither of them are in any shape to do anything other than sit down, as much as Kylo might like to insist otherwise. )

I'm less comfortable leaving our only method of transport unattended, but there doesn't seem to be an overwhelming amount of alternative choices to be made. ( In the interest of speeding their production along and also limiting the chances of something else less productive, more quiet and subdued, from occurring, Kylo plants his hands in the dirt and rises ungainly to his feet. There is no room or place for pretense between them, not anymore. It's pride and duty that pushes him forward now. ) I'd rather get it over and done with, wouldn't you?

( He extends a hand in the interest of pulling her to her feet. )

[ A scowl answers him—he'd been the one to suggest a warrior's funeral of any kind—but it's less vicious than the looks she had fixed him with previously, and as such, manages to look almost good-natured in comparison despite the way her teeth clench and set like a strill's. The desert left her feral, and every inch of progress she makes in the opposite direction only proves to throw into starker relief how savage she still is.

Any distaste falls away when he pushes forward to the practical, something Rey can easily throw her support behind in full force, and she does so ignoring the gesture he makes to her injuries. She's dragged more weight with worse to account for. In fact, it had never occurred to her that he might aid her efforts; rather, she felt the need to get him on board with the plan, imagining a dozen ways he might combust if she were to simply begin dragging the corpse of his old ally away, but never considered his participation.

She grabs onto his hand and pulls herself to her feet with it, wary to avoid lending too much of her weight to him for she knows not to take his swelling bravado as a sign of what he can actually juggle on that leg. ]

Whatever's left. [ She corrects herself, turning her attention down at the smoldering pile of blackened flesh that has tightened around the bones below. For a brief moment, she misses the loose fabric that she used to wrap around her head as a hood and mask, wishing something could blot out the smell of burning flesh and hair, but the life of a scavenger is far behind her, even if the skills and urges are not too far to be recalled. ] Do what you can to put the flames out.

[ His command of the Force, while perhaps less innately powerful, is better refined, and she imagines that it will make the task simple; meanwhile, she heads for the administrative building with stiff but resolute steps where she lifts the hilt of her lightsaber for a moment. She thinks better of leaving such obvious burn scars in the building, though, and instead sets about prying the hinges loose and rattling the flimsy metal door free. ]

( The severity of her scowl sometimes catches him off guard for how familiar it is, a hearkening back to easier days, simpler times, when the mean, lean look of a survivor's hardened exterior, the quills and barbs of her shell, were the only things made accessible or offered to him. Now there are dips and valleys in between one glare and the next, catalogs of soften expressions and a new, broader spectrum of aching for the raw look in her eyes to travel along. They lean against a backdrop of deeper understanding on his part, an innate sense of knowing, manifested and fortified as a result of the connection between them, a continuous loop of feedback that plays uninterrupted and without request.

Rey's look now is certainly less scathing than what she has attempted to pin him in place with before, but it is still a return to something normal between them - and how strange that is, to think that there ever could or would exist something as benign and familiar between them as normal - and Kylo, glancing down at her with his hand extended, black leather catching and absorbing the light from the fire, he is unsure which extreme he prefers: that of normalcy or the thrill of the unknown. With sluggish work impeded by their own injuries, no doubt, to be done, he has little time to consider it, and with Rey's permanent residency in his head, he has even less room to reflect.

Kylo shuts it down before it can become more than what it is is, though its existence is criminal all by itself, and claps their hands together with a hollow sound that echoes down into the bones of his hands via the cup that his palm makes as he hauls her to her feet. He sways with her added weight, just a bit, leaning on his good leg in an active effort to spare the injured, though it's hardly enough to belie his depleted strength on the whole. The both of them standing, Kylo wonders why he bothers at all with the pretense of feeling no pain, no effects of such a wound, when it's plainly obvious she knows without having to ask or be told or mislead. )

What do you need from the ship before we leave the area? ( He asks, once she's wandered away and before he realizes that he's not spoken aloud but shouted down the winding rope that binds them together, mind to mind. It's a strange realization to stumble over, when he's done an overwhelming majority of things in his life with deliberation, however recklessly, and speaks more to the inherent issues Rey had addressed only moments ago, as they sat on the ground, to the instincts that he has to try hard to suppress in order not to drag her under the shifting, dark sands that he is still mired in. An equally strange realization, and Kylo wonders, briefly, vaguely, whether or not it will prove to be a guileless one in the end.

Present one moment and gone the next, he allows those thoughts to filter in and out like running water, and collects the Force between his fingers in much the same way. Despite its constant presence, the threads that weave and threaten to overwhelm at times, he finds the task as it stands momentarily laborious, and uses the bulk of his concentration to gather large clots of dirt above and below one hand with the express purpose of dumping the dirt onto the fire, smothering it. It has the added benefit of choking the high plume of smoke that wanders ever upward, though it takes him five solid passes to get the fire to extinguish completely. When he's finished, sweat has beaded underneath his hair and the high collar of his cowl once more, and the night air is cool as it licks him dry. The fire still smolders and glows orange in places, reduced to cinders and embers that do nothing to illuminate what's left of Aurren's body. An ally, maybe, but just as likely to kill him - kill them - as anything. )

[ It takes the leverage of her full weight, but the door comes off its hinges with a creak and, following it, a shrill sound of metal scraping against itself as she wrenches it free unceremoniously. Rey props it against the building, rubs a sweaty palm across her dirty forehead and is unsurprised to find that neither situation has improved by contact with the other when her hand comes away with dirt stuck to it. The physicality of the task relieves her of the burden of her own mind, allows her to evade the considerations of Kylo Ren's mental state, of her own in the wake of what he'd done and what ripples she'd felt coming from him. ]

I already got ration bars, water, and plenty of bacta. [ The reply comes automatically, and on its heels, a quick reel of considerations as she tries to ensure that she hasn't forgotten something critical in the assumption that she'd taken care of necessity. Only once she's sure of her strategy does she realize the implications of the question in the first place, and she looks up at the metal door in its considerable weight as though she intends to expedite the drag. ] You shouldn't go back to it on your own.

[ Not walking like he is, but he's stubborn and prideful and something about conveying that as she does is sure to set him off in some defensive flourish; Rey seizes the edges of the door and begins to drag it, hauling it with intermittently vibrating scraping noises as it skips along the dusty ground at an angle that elicits protest from her lower back. Anything else wouldn't get her the leverage she needs to move its weight: solid metal, as it turns out, is not light, but it is bulky, and Rey accounted for that well before she offered to take the door.

She waits until she's closer to turn around and leverage the door up to foist it onto her back, adjusting her grip to firmly tug it against the curve of her shoulder blades while she brings it the rest of the way. A few minutes see her back to the makeshift campfire where Aurren rests, and she drops the enormous steel plate with a clatter beside him. ]

( He hears her return before he actually sees her, the metallic scraping of the door echoing throughout the basin that they have found themselves in and startling a flock of birds roosting in the treeline not far off from where the Falcon fades into a shadow, large and looming. As if he would return to it on his own if he didn't absolutely have to: a thought that manifests within him as much as the scowl across his face does the moment that Rey had suggested he not go back to the ship as if it were at all a task he would assign himself in the first place, as if he were a child.

Stubborn pride wills him to return just to spite her, the way that he had wandered the barracks and administrative buildings when she was retrieving supplies from the ship's cargo if only to disobey her, but Kylo keeps himself in check with the reminder that the exertion of dragging Aurren's corpse and whatever slab of metal Rey has managed to find to suit their purposes is going to require a certain amount of energy and concentration that he can't afford to waste elsewhere. He certainly wouldn't waste it on a pointless excursion back to a ship that offers him nothing save for carefully constructed reminders and, maybe, a pair of trousers too small and too old and belonging too overtly to someone else for him to ever slip them on. There's nothing for him there.

So he waits for her to return, wishing that he were wearing something more conducive to rolling his sleeves back as he plunges his hands into the smoking remains of the fire that had burned Aurren down to black char. Kylo does not drag the body all of the way out of the pit but waits for Rey to return with the door so that they can haul the remains onto it as a unit, as opposed to taxing one another individual. Of course, this is a thought that is mostly squandered the moment Rey comes into view with the door slung over her back, looking as if it weighs twice what she does. Kylo makes no move to assist her, though he does drop the pretenses of their connection in order to open his mouth with a droll tone once she slams the thing down heavily. )

Why didn't you just use the Force to carry it? ( He already knows how much she's capable of lifting: she did carry him through Corellia, after all. )

[ The hesitation before she answers speaks to her inexperience, reveals the months of training substituted, in a moment of desperation, in place of years; while Kylo Ren has been studying the Force from birth, no doubt, Rey came to it after she was already a woman who had found a way to survive without it. She balks for a moment, realizes that he doesn't mean it as a scathing insult but rather that it becomes one only through her stiff realization that what he suggests should have been obvious, and finally collects herself. ]

There's no sense in using the Force for something I can do perfectly well for myself.

[ Disparaging and dismissive, she stomps over to where he stands near the ashen remains of the Knight of Ren, bending to help him lift the shell of a man from the dirt—she looks up at Kylo Ren to time it: one, two, three—onto the steel plate of the door. She should have gone looking for another emergency blanket instead of just listening to Kylo's suggestion, but it's too late now; some of the corpse crumbles when they drop it onto the slab of metal. Rey turns away to use the back of her hand to mask her nose and mouth from the dust on principle more than in any sense of squeamishness.

She steps over to where they'd grabbed him from, kicking around the dirt to stir away some of the scorch marks left behind, blackening silt to something charred and identifiable. It's impossible to keep the area from looking disturbed, but she can at least try to mask the scorched impression left behind in the earth. ] Do you use the Force for everything? Summoning blue milk to you in the morning?

( Not birth, not necessarily, or at least not in the way that she might envision in her mind. But then again, maybe. If there were anyone outside of his own self who might be able to attest to the terms and conditions of his introduction to the Force, it might be Rey, but there are certain things that Kylo keeps under lock and key and far away from even himself, let alone her and the access that she carries to the furthest corners of his mind. He had been present for her introduction into the concept himself, but despite asking the question, he isn't all surprised to have found her relying instinctively on physicality rather than the introduction - if it could even be called that anymore, considering how much time has passed - of her own abilities. A lifetime of sand and hard loneliness, of relying on her own strength and prowess, have molded her. )

Caf. ( He corrects, once they have displaced the remains and his hand has come away from his mouth in an attempt to shield his tongue and the back of his throat from the upward swirl of dust and ash and flaked, black skin that climbs higher than their heads once they deposit Aurren's body onto the metal slab. While Rey kicks her feet to disturb the dirt in an attempt to cover their tracks, so to speak, Kylo drops to a knee with a diagonal sort of lean, favoring the injury on his leg, to secure a bit of fibercord scavenged from the remains of the administrative buildings to the door so that they can drag it behind them. He looks up at her without a smile, though there's the suggestion of one hanging around his eyes. )

It's also helpful in making the bed and starting the morning shower. ( He arches an eyebrow and straightens back up with as much dignity and grace as he's able to, winding the fibercord into a tight circle around his palm. ) You haven't covered this in training?

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this is the worst tag i'm so sorry this weekend has been insanely busy and it's only saturday