i found something in the woods somewhere.

[apparare]

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

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[forcevisions]

[ The steady lift of his hand to match hers is genuine enough to surprise her, eyelashes fluttering as she glances briefly down, then back up to search him. Rey's heart aches with the weight of his question—that he feels like he must ask it, that he cannot trust good will, that he is so damnably cautious with taking hold of the life raft she offers him now—because she knows what it means. That question is one more of the many scars he bears from years of manipulation and cruelty, isolating him from the only people who could help him.

It leaves her short of breath, not only because it's overwhelming to conceptualize, but because she understands it too clearly. Her stoicism tapers off into the thick tone of eager, swelling hope, twisting her expression into one that almost pleads with him to allow her that. ]

I want to help you.

[ It doesn't fully answer his question, though, in that it doesn't adequately express why she feels so driven to offer him this hand up, a question she's avoided asking herself since it began. His insistent disbelief compels her to turn inward now and pinpoint that moment in the vision he'd shown her of the two of them, side-by-side in battle, playing off one another with seamless ease into a more devastating threat for the light or the dark than either could be on their own.

And it affords her a simple sense of clarity.

Even when he's beside her, training her, Luke Skywalker feels miles away, a relic of another time, lost long ago and returned only as a learning tool and a guide, not a companion. And among the Resistance, there are no others with the skill or sensitivity to be Jedi, to take up the mantle and use the Force for the light. The responsibility has fallen to Rey and left her, in the wake of Han's death, even armed with Finn's friendship, precisely where she started. Alone.

It's like she never left that desert in Jakku, why even the calm and focused corners of her mind that she reaches out to silence the loneliness as she suffers insomnia are an island, silent for its isolation, not its peace. For as long as she can remember, Rey has been alone, and now she's seen a glimpse of what it could be like if she weren't. The cool serenity of understanding settles over her features, drawing the intensity of her passion out like a sieve.

Killing Kylo Ren would mean killing the one person who understands her experience and how she perceives the world thanks to the lens of Force sensitivity, and shutting herself off forever from anyone who could offer that specific empathy to her, which is sadly impossible for Finn or Poe, and he has expressed the same interest himself in his desire to teach her, to groom her. She knows, based on Han's stories, that Kylo Ren is the one responsible for ripping away any other opportunity to meet students of the Jedi way. It is his fault that she feels this fear. And yet …

The lure is not enough to draw her from the light, but that selfish desire is enough to make her desperate to pull him free from the darkness.

Some mixture of shame, surprise, and resignation strike her features and she breaks Kylo Ren's gaze with this realization, dropping her eyes to the spot where his hand touches the glass. She doesn't recoil, not fully, but her eyes tell the full story—she knows why, now, and she cannot pretend at ignorance any longer. ]

I refuse to believe that our fate lies in destroying each other.

[apparare]

( Her initial response is not the answer he is looking for, regardless of the sincerity in both her tone and the look she fixes him with. Rather than retaliating immediately, Kylo quiets the swell of annoyed, knee-jerk anger - he does not want her pity - and waits. It isn't easy. Patience has never been a strong card in the hand he works with, but he has the impression that what she grapples with internally is legitimate enough that he doesn't want to miss it by slamming the heel of his hand against the plane between them in an effort to shatter it. The thought does cross his mind, and he feels the keen absence of his saber as if it were a physical ache deep in the bones and muscles in his hands and arms, but he quiets it.

Instead of pulling back and then surging forward, his hand remains on the glass, watching conscious thought flicker across her face and behind her eyes like a series of candles being lit, one after another, after another. He doesn't need the Force to pick them out one by one, gathering them together like the pebbles he had cupped in his palm in the forest, but before he can assign them any real value or merit in his own mind, she looks away from him, cuts her eyes to where their hands might be pressed together if not for the paneling separating skin from skin, tendon from tendon, bone from bone. The slight bow of her head as she focuses the point of her perception toward the five-point star of his left hand is enough of a response in and of itself, and before she can open her mouth, Kylo has the distinct impression that he has an idea of what she's going to say in the same moment she does. It still isn't what he's expecting.

He watches the bow of her lips form syllables and speak but the weight and story in her eyes paint a clear enough picture for him without her words to solidify it. He holds very still where he stands, something in him shifting and settling into place. The image, the idea, of them, half-remembered, that he had shown her what feels like lifetimes and galaxies away, now, burns his retinas as if it's a reality. Darkness in him wells and sings, a chorus of echoes and whispers and chants, then quiets, dims, falls silent as he remembers laughter, tastes salt, smells the tang of the ocean and wet grass, thick moss, smooth stone beneath his palms, damp biting at his knee through his pant leg. Kylo thinks he can feel the warmth from her hand spilling through the glass and seeping into his own, and he pulls away so that the cool, filtered air of the downed shuttle can chill his skin where his palm has begun to sweat. )

I don't believe that either.

( It's a lot. When he speaks, it's with the careful, guarded quality of someone who does everything alone, who shares nothing of himself or his agenda with anyone unless specifically ordered to do so. Even Hux, who so frequently operates on a wavelength in tandem with his own, has no such advantage. None of his Knights. Captain Phasma. No one. The totality of his loneliness has not been so precise and crushing as Rey's - Rey, who spent decades on a desert planet, who sung herself to sleep on her shoreline dreams, still alone in her self-isolation even when she could imagine comfort anywhere, still alone in the bracket of arms she has fallen into. Rey: the island - but it has been present, it has been constant. It rests in the darkness within him and thrives. For her to reach for him with that sort of statement, to present it honestly and plainly with the promise of her intentions in what she plans to do, the look on her face wrought with the weight of it - it digs fingers into him and hooks, no matter how deftly he attempts resistance. )

I don't know the precise length of his reach or how Skywalker's presence might be problematic in his attempts to establish contact. Or yours. But if he were able to do anything other than reach out toward me, as you suggested, it wouldn't be the first time that the Supreme Leader's ire manifested itself in a physical way. ( He finally admits it after ignoring the question long enough for them to arrive at this bend in the conversation. With everything else that's on the table between them, it seems pointless to withhold information from her that will only assist him in the end. His tone is still reluctant, however, as if confessing a sin he's been holding onto for twenty years. ) His reaction depends largely upon what Hux tells him, and my absence, both from the Finalizer and from his perception of the Force. I haven't felt him try to reach out yet, but I'm hardly searching for him or opening the channel up to welcome him to look around. I doubt he would appreciate what he finds there. He will, though, eventually, recognize that something isn't quite as it should be.

( On Starkiller Base, he had screamed traitor at FN-2187's back so roughly that his throat had felt hoarse after. A voice inside of him shouts with the same intensity, and it resounds throughout him, all the way down to the soles of his boots. )

[forcevisions]

[ Hope thrums like sparks flying off a steel mill, bright and fevered. For a moment, she believes she's misunderstood, but he keeps going, explains with candor the depths of his experience with Snoke's power and its extent, and Rey realizes that his reply means precisely what she thinks it does. Trepidation stutters her heartbeat and shortens her breath, chest expanding with the light feeling of elation that is so foreign she hardly recognizes it, mistakes it briefly for anxiety and panic. ]

Then we haven't got much time.

[ The task is neither quick nor simple, and if Snoke goes probing once they're both in Kylo Ren's mind, it may well damn them both. Without ever stopping to consider that the reply may be a ruse because it validates and bids goodbye to something she's feared for so long that she can't imagine letting go of the possibility. And she, perhaps boldly, accepts that confession as assent to her offered plan.

The last hints of tension ease out of her muscles and shoulders, showing her weariness for what it is, and the airlock hisses with release—her mistrust and Luke Skywalker's suggestion had kept the airlock sealed with the strength of her control over the Force as much as the basic locking mechanism, which she moves immediately to release with a series of button presses at the panel just out of Kylo Ren's view from within.

It takes a few moments, leaving him to his thoughts without an indication that she's still nearby but for her presence in the living Force until finally the airlock clicks and rotates like an clunky, rusted dial, creaking as it dilates and opens the glass casing. ]

[apparare]

( As Rey disappears around a corner, he steps away from the glass, retrieving his gloves from the bench behind him and curling them into one fist. His palms are still damp with perspiration, as is the back of his neck, and when he runs the bare flat of his hand over the skin there, it comes back with the flaking pieces of mud that Organa had missed when she bent over him and peered into his face. It's unclear to him whether or not it's a physical manifestation of the effort he is still expanding to keep his thoughts to himself or something else entirely. Whatever it is seems to work itself into a stone that drops into his gut, reaches up to pry at his ribcage with long, spindly fingers, not pulling him apart but hanging on with a desperate grip.

The airlock hissing open affords him the luxury of not having time to think about it in too much detail and with the rush of fresh air that greets him, sweeping in and bringing with it all of Corellia. Rain on the dirt. The heavy discharge of smoke and blaster fire still hot in the atmosphere. Flames. Smoke. He can't see her but knows instinctively that she's still there, and he waits for the airlock to slide back into place completely before stepping out of the makeshift containment cell, his footfalls heavy on the durasteel flooring of the command shuttle. Kylo looks up and down the length of the ship, beyond the immediate area to the cabin where he has piloted a shuttle not unlike this one himself, back down to the ramp that waits to spit him back out into enemy territory.

Rey materializes in his peripheral and then his complete view at the control panel, and he sizes her up now that nothing separates them, the gears that permitted him entry back to the outside world settling in place once the machinery tends toward idle. He could escape, now. He could slam her against the wall of the shuttle the same way he had thrown her like a rag doll into the dead branches of that tall tree on Starkiller. A voice purrs at him to do it. He doesn't. )

After you.

( Regardless of what's transpired here, no one here is going to let him walk out of a prison block ahead of Rey. )

[forcevisions]

[ Even being the one to open it, there's something startling about watching him walk out of the cell at his full height. Second nature, probably, to feel the stomach dropping sensation of shock when confronted by him, but it morphs quickly into a flicker of a relieved smile. He's on board. That's what matters. Her nod seems to be as much to confirm her resolve as to hearten him in stepping out of the shuttle with her, then she's at his side and guiding just a step ahead down the ramp into the Resistance camp.

If Kylo Ren had any illusions of the size of the Resistance after he devastated the Republic's fleet, they were corrected immediately. The camp spanned no more than a mile, pitched in tents stretched off of shuttles and X-wings and the scarce carrier or metal hut designed for encampment. Altogether, it gave the impression that they had accidentally staggered their way into this rebellion rather than premeditated it.

The fighters that strode past, most of them in flight jumpsuits with or without the vests that specified them as pilots rather than mechanics, were starkly disparate to the First Order's facilities in another way, though. They traveled in groups, none patrolling, but all earnestly hurrying around in a hush of concern or laughing and reuniting over a drink from shared canteens. But for Rey herself, not a single Resistance fighter stood alone in the camp.

They truck through mud, only drawing attention once they've crossed a handful of lopsided structures—less than a hundred feet off the shuttle, soldiers made their way from inside the tents to stand outside of them, humor dying off like they brought an airborne plague with them that spread through the encampment with each heavy step. Finn and Poe were among them, clearly resisting the instinctively sour expressions, and Rey avoided allowing their expressions to wound her by turning her head up towards Ren to say, ] Don't let it bother you. There weren't many here who expected that you'd take a way out if we offered it.

[ But she did. And Leia did. And in some ways, maybe she's reassuring herself that despite their judgment, she's making the right call, but she decides not to reflect too extensively on that, instead cutting a direct path for the largest and only reasonably sized structure among the camp, the only one that could rightfully earn the title of building.

Oval in shape, the squat metal dome housed the General and a war room for her to plot in. A number of other high-ranking officials had used it for their base on the ground as well, though most of them preferred remote operation. This battle was far from a sure bet for any of the Resistance, but General Organa had always been the sort to die with her people rather than remain in her ivory tower. ]

Tied up in your mind, your consciousness and mine won't be as tethered to our bodies as they usually are because of the meditative state we have to reach. Master Luke and General Organa will watch over us while we're there.

[apparare]

( It becomes very, very weird very, very fast to be walking across the Resistance camp with her undetained, unshackled, and conscious.

In a way, their hodgepodge set up surprises him even as it doesn't. The Resistance, while Republic-backed, is still a small sect with an alarming number of competent fighters. General Organa is their heart and backbone, and while it's true that their size does continue to grow as it recruits new supporters just as it has the Corellians, it's a well-maintained and gossiped about topic among First Order squints and higher-ups alike that Organa could keep the whole thing running and pushing ahead on her own merit, a universal belief that has always annoyed him. Kylo very seriously doubts the Resistance's ability to overpower the First Order without Corellian support and the element of surprise, but the fact remains that they had both today, and now Kylo is following this scrap of a girl through their barracks with a target from every pair of eyes painted on his back.

His boots leave deep impressions in the mud, and he has to shorten his strides so that he doesn't outpace her and pull ahead. The scene that unfolds before him is as jarring as it is unfamiliar, and the rising pitch and swell of laughter that breaks out in peals in different corners of their campsite registers as strange. There is no such debriefing following First Order victories. A breech in protocol of that degree would not be tolerated under any superior officer. Their jovial celebrations and loud, whooping calls to one another warm no part of him, don't take root or dislodge the cloying feeling that still latches somewhere beneath his lungs, and he makes no effort to look a single one of them in the eye as they stride past until a ripple in the Force turns his attention away from their destination.

Poe Dameron and that traitor stormtrooper are watching him as he and Rey pass by the tent where they are stationed. An electrically charged hush falls throughout the gathering of hastily assembled lean-tos and a droid whistles disdainfully somewhere in the thick of things. Dameron in particular looks like he isn't entirely sure what to do with his face as Kylo meets his eye across the muddy yard that spans the distance between them. Without his helmet, there is no question as to whether or not the creature that exists beneath the armor is human or not, even if the truth of his parentage isn't necessarily common knowledge. Ben Solo died so long ago that he could exist as much as Luke Skywalker did before Rey brought him back from exile, a myth. The last time he saw Poe Dameron without a mask, he was barely ten-years-old, to tall for his own body, awkward and burdened with darkness that spilled out into every unfavorable reaction and childish whim. Kylo looks at him now and wonders if Dameron even recognizes him as the boy who used to poke his head into starships with the kind of curiosity that might one day lend him to being a halfway decent pilot.

The extended olive branch of Rey's voice draws his attention away from that particular memory and he clips his words short to emphasize their meaning. )

I'll try not to lose sleep over it. ( He follows her abrupt change in direction without a falter in his step, almost as if expecting it. ) Although maybe I'm the one who should be saying that to you.

( Rey leads him another hundred yards or so toward the squat, gray building and he feels a surge in the Force roll over him like a wave. Their combined presence had been a hard pill to swallow when he was a child, but it had been a source of warmth and reassurance for him then. Particularly Organa. Now, the two of them together overwhelm him and drag him down in their currents. Even without seeing them, he's aware of their proximity the way he is aware of a planet's gravitational pull. This is more tangible even than that. It saturates his mind and all his senses like being submerged in bacta. He's unwilling to let his steps falter, unwilling to show weakness in front of her and in front of them. He follows her inside the command station and focuses on the pain in his hands, a single point of stability against the backdrop of calamity. A flash of gold catches the light from the ceiling and Kylo can hear something that sounds suspiciously like I'm terribly sorry, captain. I've been telling the general for decades that his wiring's no better than scrap metal, but - )

There's the very real chance that the Supreme Leader will intervene once he's aware of what's happening, which I anticipate won't take long once I stop focusing solely on cloaking myself from him. You are running the risk of bringing him down on you as well as everyone else in the base. ( He pauses to let that sink in for a moment, though he assumes that it's a thought that's already crossed her mind, and continues pointedly ignoring everyone who looks at him twice. The back of his neck is still damp. ) I hope your faith in Skywalker and Organa's abilities as babysitters isn't misplaced.

[forcevisions]

Yes, thank you, I gathered.

[ The clipped edge of her tone strikes as familiar in how it rebuffs him—she doesn't bother with schooling her countenance to calm and controlled, but instead lets herself snap back in a show of nerves.

If she fails, Kylo Ren or Leader Snoke or both will run the base into the ground.

If she fails, Luke Skywalker and General Organa will die, and the Resistance with them.

Worst of all, she will not die with them. The guilt will be hers to carry for as long as it takes for Kylo Ren and Snoke to give up the hope of converting her to their ways, or for Snoke to view her as more threat to his control over Ren than potential to add to his strength. It is a hard thing, for a survivor to imagine a fate worse than death, this potential outcome manages to plague every corner of her mind with nightmarish flashes. ]

With their combined strength, it shouldn't be impossible for them to mask your presence here for a short while longer.

[ Unfortunately, 'should' and 'short while' are both insufficient reassurances, but by the time Rey can think up more, they've stopped inside the inner sanctum of the Resistance's war room where Luke and Leia wait, talking in hushed but passionate whispers. It sounds like a disagreement, resignation written across Luke's features that doesn't inspire faith in Rey.

Still, she turns to Ren and nods for him to join her in approaching them, lifting her chin in a way that offers the impression not of professionalism and merit, but rather of a child putting on airs and playing at soldier. ]

He's agreed, and confirmed the concerns we had regarding Snoke's involvement. The sooner we begin, the better.

[ Organa doesn't seem to hear her, sorrowful dark eyes fixed on the face of her son, studying the terrain of his face as if she had to memorize it, searching out every difference, the scar left by Rey, the hard set of his gaze that was so different from how he'd looked as a child, where it was curiosity lighting them, not the fires of rage. ]

Do you have a space ready?

[ In a snap, Leia nods, and with only a passing comment that It's good to see you back on your feet to Ren, leads the way to a back room beyond the circular war room. Luke wears the same cautious but mournful gaze that Rey had first seen on him, fixing it unerringly on Kylo Ren's, guilt thick in the furrow of his brow and the tug of his lips. This is a mess that he made, and he does not immediately speak for that reason alone, solemn in accepting his part in it. ]

[apparare]

( He suffocates. Sweat rolls down the back of his neck and bleeds into his collar under the careful, scrutinizing gaze that Skywalker and Organa fix him with from across the room. They are a unified front despite the quiet argument preceding Rey's arrival with him in tow. He hangs back a moment, and Rey takes point as she has the entire duration of their hike across the mile long stretch of Resistance territory in leading him to them. No amount of uncertainty paralyzes him, and he realizes after Rey has taken exactly three steps in the general and her master's direction that what he's been carrying with him, tucked up behind his ribs and hiding in behind the solid wall of his sternum, is fear.

He's carried his gloves this far in the large span of one hand, and he crumples them tighter under the pressure of his fingers as he strides forward after her.

Kylo can't decide if he should choose one of them and maintain eye contact or look at neither of them to show that he isn't intimidated, that they hold no sway over his decision to see this through. In the end he settles for staring Luke Skywalker down with all the weight of what has transpired between them trapped within a short distance of ten feet or so. He cannot and will not look at the general, even if he feels her staring at him so intently that he's sure she wouldn't notice if Rey broke down the act of a dutiful soldier that she's putting on and stood on her head. He does not even entertain the notion of trying to slip into either of their minds and see what's going on inside of them, but he does let loose some of the latent frustration he feels at being this close to the man he had hunted across the galaxy only to lose because of the girl at his elbow.

Organa retreats to lead them away from the main area with a clipped platitude in his direction that he does not return, following them all while still refusing to meet the general's eye even as she very overtly and resolutely continues to commit the angles and lines of his face to memory, tries to reconcile them with the image that she must have of him locked in her head from years ago. Han Solo had worn the same expression for a moment, and recalling that he had summons the image of him speared through the middle with a burst of red light. Skywalker turns his face in Kylo's direction abruptly, and he feels oddly speared himself to be on the receiving end of that gaze, rife with sentiment that he can't read and doesn't want to. So he ignores it, maneuvering through a set of elbows and stepping around a small command post where a couple of officers pour over traffic reports while sipping on something that he can smell even from his distance.

As Organa shows them into the room they have set aside for whatever is to happen next, Kylo gets the distinct impression that he is living in a dream, for all the absurdity of the situation. She approaches him, and he can see the word Ben on her mouth before it even has a chance to be fully formed. Don't, is all that he says, finding his tone less cruel for all its brevity than he had anticipated. It strikes him how small she is next to him. Ironic, given how large she looms in the eyes of the Resistance and the Order, not to mention his memories. Despite her unquestionable strength of character and conviction, Organa does not plunge recklessly ahead by completing the thought he had quelled before it had a chance to be finalized. The risk she takes is greater, reaching a surprisingly smooth hand up to catch the scar tissue running nearly the length of his face with the tip of her thumb. Kylo smells powder, oil, rainwater and something else, something new. )

Rey. ( He pulls away from the general's questing touch and moves toward her, keeping Skywalker in his peripheral like he's waiting for an attack to come from any angle. With no saber at his belt - Kylo suspects that it's with Skywalker, though he can't be positive - he feels naked and exposed, doubly so without the helm, leaving his expressions bare for the world to see. Finally, he turns to his uncle and says with no affection - ) Your move.

[forcevisions]

[ As surprised as she is to hear her name spoken as if he were reaching out for a lifeline, it is dwarfed by the ripples left by his step towards her as flinches from his mother's touch, overwhelmed by the warmth of her hand. The embrace offered to her by General Organa when they returned from Starkiller Base victorious remains the first and only memory that Rey possesses of maternal care and attention, and the realization that Kylo Ren could so adeptly refuse it staggers her as surely as watching him drive a sword through his father's chest had.

Her eyes flutter through a series of stumped blinks, and she raises a hand as if to reach out for him, either to support his arm or nudge his back like she were coaxing a cautious deer forward—whatever the intent, her hand never reaches him, dropping when he finally confronts Luke.

Master Skywalker's age belies the strength of his conviction, and he does not hesitate to answer Kylo Ren's antagonism, but neither does he meet it with similar standoffish aggression. Instead, he keeps his tone level and informative, painfully patient if anything. He starts by calmly asking if Rey has told him everything, and she quickly cuts her head in with enough suddenness to make discourage him from speaking further. Luke considers it a moment, something unreadable but still understanding in his eyes, mournful in how it urges her towards something.

Instead of carrying that thread through, he explains that he and Leia will attempt to use the Force to block Snoke from sensing Ben—for he will not call him anything other than Ben, regardless of how his nephew has rejected Leia—themselves until such a time that Rey and Ren are able to complete their own task within his mental landscape.

He steps further into the room as he speaks, leading Ben and Rey around to a flat and functional sitting area where steel chairs, bare of any cushions or padding, sit just off the floor, squat and broad enough to serve as a bunk; they sit parallel to one another, but several feet apart in the cramped space, as if they were once part of a soldier's barracks.

Rey touches Kylo Ren's elbow as she passes him and sits on one, stripping off muddied boots to fold bare feet beneath her. Her palms rest on her thighs, but she lifts one to gesture for Ren to mirror her position. ]

The mind-walk is achieved through deep meditation, pushing both of our minds beyond the physical world and into the deepest shadows of your own. [ Her eyes flicker briefly up to where Luke stands off to the side, and quickly avoid fixing on him for any extended period, instead darting back to Ren as she warns him, ] I can't tell you what it will look like there, or how long it will take us to return. [ The tightness in her shoulders and her jaw betray that there is more still to be said on the subject, but she does not offer it. ]

[apparare]

( Skywalker's lack of aggression bothers him. Borderline unnerved, Kylo keeps his chin tipped down and his gaze level, taller than literally everyone in the room but hunkering down within himself as if expecting an attack. He can't stop staring at his uncle, and it's neither with kindness nor disdain, a sort of in-between state of antagonized wonder. For all his efforts, for how far he had extended his reach, had pushed the Order, the Knights, and their resources to find this man, this shell of a human who had stood so tall in so many varying ways when Kylo was so young, for him to be standing here so plainly in front of him, brought back from nowhere by the jagged will and determination of a girl who reaches out for his elbow at the frustrating betrayal of his own voice inquiring after her - it's enraging.

For all intents and purposes, he may as well be pouting, but seeing as he's nearly thirty and that sort of behavior is beneath him, his face schools itself into a mask of fierce and rapt attention, the hungry cast of his gaze darkly directed at the floor when Skywalker looks pointedly at him. The storm that rattles around inside him beats itself into a frenzy every time the old Jedi drops a name that has been systematically wiped from databases and banned from being spoken aloud. Han Solo had been the last person to say it at any decibel, and hearing it forcefully repeated as if to drive home a point is enough to turn his grip white-knuckled. No matter what happens, there's no hope for that name carrying any meaning once this is all over. He can feel it deep down on a molecular level, where the Force swirls and rises and drowns everything beneath it.

Arguing the point seems moot, especially so when Skywalker pins him so deflty under that sharp blue, beseeching look that dares Kylo to disagree. He lets down the first line of defense in retaliation, a crack in the glass of his expression appearing and splintering the heavy cast of his countenance into something that vaguely resembles poorly suppressed anger and something like hubris, chin moving from its position pointed toward the floor to settle at an angle. The line of his jaw tightens with each staccato presentation of that word - Ben. - as it accentuates the details of their plan and his role in it, molars digging into one another as he suppresses the very real desire to fight someone. That desire is quelled almost instantly by the cleansing fire of his own amused skepticism regarding his mother and his uncle's ability to keep Snoke from seeing what's happening, a borderline-imperceptible twist at the corner of his mouth and the slightest exhale through his nose.

Rey's palm is warm against the barely-damp fabric covering his elbow, the weight of her hand present through the layers of his armor and the flightsuit underneath. It's the second time that she's touched him today and the third time - to his knowledge - that anyone has. The hair on the back of his neck stands on end, and his arm tenses all the way up to the shoulder, suspicious, on edge, ready for an altercation, and he watches her sit down and tug off her boots without deflating, consciously aware of the other two people in the room and the position that he finds himself in. Kylo spares one backward glance at a family from another time and then glances once more at Rey again before ultimately sitting down, folding into himself with no amount of grace or comfort.

In motion, he is solid but fluid lines and angles; in repose, he betrays bits and pieces of the awkward Padawan that he used to be. But he does sit. Refusing to strip out of his boots the way that she has, Kylo Ren folds long legs into a traditional meditation position and does not feel at ease. He considers divulging his difficulties with meditation - how he finds it useless, how he lacks the ability to focus so completely the same way he lacked the ability to divest himself of all emotion while training as a Jedi - but something in the set of Rey's shoulders, the look on her face, snags his attention before he can begin considering how to bring it up. )

Something you're not telling me?

( Kylo ignores the other two figures in the room, zeroing in on Rey and letting the world blur at the edges as he tries to decipher whether or not she is hiding anything of import. )

[forcevisions]

[ For a moment, she's struck by the jarring and deceptive familiarity of the situation. Kylo Ren cannot look intimidating sitting across from her with no clear idea of what to do with his gangly limbs, and he fails in playing the part of the villain from this angle. In fact, it's all she can do not to allow a smile to bubble up—for a moment, anyway. She finds a great deal more ease in it after he points out her own discomfort. ]

There are a great many things I'm not telling you.

[ Her favorite color. How they plan to celebrate Finn's birthday, or give him one at all. The date of her last menstrual cycle. Biting sarcasm waits on her tongue in multitude, ready to lash, but Rey catches sight of Luke out of the corner of her eye and his paternal disapproval tamps down her upstart urges.

The flick of her eyes to the opposite corner betrays how begrudgingly her explanation is made, but she makes it all the same. ] Only one that matters to the task at hand.

[ Some of the fight drains out of her, starvation dwindling the flame of her disobedience, and her eyes fix reluctantly on Kylo Ren—gentle, but firmly guarded. Her stubbornness in holding out has not fully relented to necessity, it would seem, in great part because she knows it will have to. ]

There's a good reason I'm the one walking you through this process, and it's not for your comfort. [ The truth draws out of her a little at a time, facing resistance as her lips drag it from the depths of her chest where she tries to lock it away. Though her voice remains a steady pulse, tension sticks in her throat and twists her words to side-step her own inextricable involvement. ] Master Luke believes that the reason you and I have been able to reach one another across such great distance is due to a bond, one that could be strengthened and used to force Snoke out.

[ For weeks, she has kept her mind clamped down like a vault, sealed and inhospitable to him, desperate to isolate her mind and make it her own again, training herself to be the one who rules the terms of such a connection under Luke's tutelage. Now she speaks of plunging back into it and counting on that unnerving link to solve the one problem Han Solo could not talk his way out of.

If they were wrong, or if either of them were to get bogged down in resisting or holding out, it would fail—unquestionably. Asking him to be willing to show her everything was not a simple request, but a requirement; they would slough through the catacombs of his mind in tandem with the hope that exposing her to the truth of him would shine the light into dark places and leave no room for Snoke's shadow to prey upon him as it once had. The solution was Leia's, even if the knowledge was Luke's. ]

You will have peace in your mind, I promise you. [ The rush of her words, an afterthought, seems to bear her hope that she can say the same for herself. ]

[apparare]

( His gloves, Kylo realizes, are still caught up in the fierce strength of his grip, and by degrees he releases the pressure in his hand to let blood pound back into his fingertips, tossing leather to the side and smoothing his hands over the rounded points of his knees. The bite of his burns is less extreme, tempered by adrenaline and distraction - and, he suspects but doesn't examine, some sort of influence that Organa does not even realize she is exerting - and they become less twin focal points of razor-fine, precise rage and more throbbing reminders of the failure that he has suffered today. They're reminders of the inevitable: that Snoke is not far beyond the veil that he uses to mask himself, that beyond the fortress of this room, this base, the Supreme Leader waits for him with cold patience. )

So he's using you.

( His voice is calm, conversational, and Kylo says it mostly to needle her for her previous backlash against him - he could look for what her favorite color was and dig it out of her head if he really wanted to - and although he can feel Skywalker looking at him, the conversation is his and Rey's alone.

Kylo might say it just to grate on her nerves, but the fact remains that it could easily be construed as truthful. She might not see it the way that he does, but at the end of the day that's what she is as much as he has been: a tool, a cog in the machine, an extension of her master's arm to reach the depths that he cannot. It doesn't matter whether or not her goals work in tandem with Skywalker's, just as it doesn't matter whether or not Kylo's ambitions meet Snoke's goals stride for stride. That Skywalker recognizes the connection that has formed between them - long suspected and now made concrete by the admission of a man more knowledgeable than Kylo himself, he can admit that much - says enough on its own merit. Their bond is exploitable, malleable, and he sees it plainly for what it is in their eyes, the same way that he could distinguish it in Snoke's. And his own. It's not so different from what they were able to show each other on Yaga Minor, but it has a different flavor and cadence from what he tasted and felt thrumming through his veins and down the back of his throat.

He cuts the head from any whiplash anger she might snap out with at the suggestion he makes by leaning forward toward her somewhat, voice low between them but hardly low enough to discourage or prohibit anyone from hearing him. Kylo knows that isn't a luxury just as much as the luxury of having time to make a decision regarding this whole endeavor wasn't back on the command shuttle. )

Two sides, same coin. I told you before I understood the workings of a bond. ( He does not meet her eyes when he inclines toward her but looks instead at the shadows of mud still worked into the creases of her hands. The weight of the risk that she is actively and voluntarily taking catches him off guard somewhat in that moment. Opening herself to him and vice versa in order to eradicate Snoke leaves her open to him potentially without an expiration date, to having something monstrous in her head. He looks up, meeting brown eyes in the sea of her face, and holds. ) Why else would I let you try?

( The fact remains that he would not allow any of the other Force capable individuals in the room close enough to even consider it. It's a damning and frustrating actualization but no less true for all the contempt it inspires. He exhales slowly, through his nose, and leans back away from her, already feeling the beginning disintegration of the defenses he has constructed in his own mind in an effort to keep himself walled away, whether by Skywalker and Organa's shouldering of the burden or his own exhaustion finding root and digging in. Kylo flexes his hands on his knees and sits up straight. )

You should be aware, meditation is not my strongest card. ( His voice becomes somewhat mocking. ) I've been told I lack adequate focus.

[forcevisions]

[ His words and the weight they carry threaten her, sticking in her throat and threatening to close it with thick dread, all of her energy shrinking to withdraw into her gut as if to shrink away from the darkness intrinsic in the force of his belief. To accept that Luke is using her for her power is logical, and in this case, their only option, not like the consuming manipulation that Snoke exerts over Kylo, but it seems a slippery slope.

Through sheer force of wheel, she draws a breath and forces herself to open to him despite all her reservations and fears, sundering them to preserve her certainty. What she does here, she must do, no matter what dangers she feels it poses to open herself to his mind as much as he opens himself to hers.

It only occurs to her as he leans forward that he could just as easily be seeking to spread the influence of Snoke's way to the corners of her mind in doing this.

Her eyes shift then to Luke, searching for some form of comfort in him, but he extends nothing to her; in that moment, she finds herself missing Han Solo's brief but sympathetic glances, even if when he offered them, she bristled against what she then perceived as pity.

She swallows thickly and nods. His insufficient calm for meditation only aggravates the threat that he poses to her, a pot ready to boil over and scald her, bursting at the seams with untempered power fed by fury and hurt, but she does not let it show beyond the flicker of her eyes to his hands, examining the burns he is no longer working. Her eyes lift to level on his, and the space between them swells, then crumbles. All at once, even the several feet between them feels like too intimate a closeness, and her breath falls from parted lips in time with his. ]

I can guide you. [ Rey, for her part, excels in meditation, though she would not brag on it in answer to his jape. Clearing her mind and finding a calm center comes as easily to her now as it did on Jakku, when those open spaces and her own company were all that she had for more than a decade. Even the harsh grit of the desert soothes her now, rolls over her skin without buffeting it, and it's the desert that she finds when her eyes drift shut. ] Focus on my voice.

[apparare]

( For all the time it takes Rey to submerge herself in the practice, it takes Kylo twice as long. He can't divorce himself from the world around him as easily as she can, finding little comfort or security in the duo who stand watch over them, casting a wide net around Rey and him to shield them from view, likewise in the structure itself, so vulnerable to attack should the right bombardment fall, should the Order return to finish what the Resistance started. Fear clouds the path to peace, the calamity of his mind not quieting even as he actively works to dismantle his previous guards against the Supreme Leader in order to leave him open to the possibility of submerging himself.

It's a laborious process, focusing on his exhales, on her inhales, the distance that expands and contracts between them like a living, breathing organ. He knows that he has to commit but even in knowing that, it's difficult to disengage from the world around him. Kylo has spent full hours trying to achieve the sort of focus necessary for meditative tasks less substantial than this and found it taxing and difficult, borderline impossible for the tempest of his thoughts. It rankles him now, getting the sense that this comes as naturally to her as anything, which in turn distances him from detaching the way he needs to, rooting him firmly in this weakness and frustration. He stares at the wall behind her in an attempt to ground himself, the slight curl of her hair around the heightened point of her forehead, the slope of her neck, and then settles for the bridge of her nose before meeting the cut of her eyes across the distance between them.

The world grows to insurmountable extremes, too large to be contained within the walls of this room, universes spanning the space between fingers and stretching into infinity between them, mountains and plains and the roll of the ocean, before collapsing like a supernova.

He does not close his eyes but keeps them fixed on hers. Kylo is unsure of how long he sits like this, hands on his knees, watching the words form on her mouth and then not at all, the vaguely Imperial lilt of her accent clear in his head and then again in the atmosphere as it changes over time. The room is still the room but it's not, crowded with sand, the desert stretching before them under a cloudless night, pockmarked with stars and twin moons. One is the deep harvest red of the Corellian season; the other is so startlingly white that it looks carved from bone. He gets the sense that they are on Jakku, dunes rolling the sandstone plains like waves transfixed in time, stuck out of place like the scuttled Star Destroyer notoriously grounded during the planet's big battle. Wind touches the sweat on the back of his neck, even under the high fabric of his armor, and chills his skin while the moons cast odd shadows on the ground. His is long and lean as it stretches out behind him. Rey is twenty paces or less from him, and when he takes a step in her direction the ground supports him like solid stone even as he expects it to swallow him whole. )

Rey. ( Her name out of his mouth again. His own voice is clear and unobstructed, a direct channel between them. He finds her easily there, in the dark. ) Is this my mind, or yours?

[forcevisions]

[ This time, her name sounds familiar on his tongue, firming a connection that she had waited for. Turning her head, she looks away from the starlight to fix her penetrating gaze on him, expression a perfect conflict between the levity of relief and the dread of uncertainty. Ultimately, though, it's a ghost of a smile that settles on her lips. ]

Mine. [ Weariness sags at the edges of her mind, ready to collapse it, but she staves it off to secure their position as she approaches him. ] Only for a little while. [ The musical warmth of her voice tries to reassure him, but it's an alien sound in an impossible circumstance. ] You're not very good at clearing yours.

[ The playfulness takes a turn for something direct enough to expose what she's doing like live wire, deflecting from her discomfort with something not quite manufactured, but certainly exaggerated. ]

This is where I come to draw focus and eliminate distractions. [ The island is a place of peace, of retreat, and will not do for centering herself in preparation for battle or drawing power from. Jakku reminds her of her isolation, the cost of failure, but also of her ability to survive it.

Strangely, now that she is free of it, the rolling hills offer her security. She cannot fall farther than what she has already withstood. Time never seems to pass on Jakku, and it makes it a sturdy constant for her to return to in her heart when she needs to remember how she learned what has brought her this far. ] You have a lot of them.

[apparare]

( Kylo's expression does not mirror hers in levity or relief. He's managed so far to keep some amount of composure in the interest of self-preservation around the general and the Jedi, but here in the desolate space of where her mind and his intersect and bleed into one another there is no need for the facade. Rey has seen inside his head more than anyone other than Snoke, and her presence here leaves him feeling exposed in a way he had not anticipated, shred open and laid bare. It bothers him less than it should, and he supposes that's the inherent gift in meditation, peace and focus, the steady pulse of her own personal constant. He knows he'd never achieve it were she not anchoring him to the bottom, and now that she has, he doesn't waste energy or effort in trying to disguise himself with a mask. There's no point, there's no hiding from each other, here.

Footsteps in the sand track her progress across it, even as he watches that same sand that separated to allow her passage closer to where he stands sink in to hide her tracks from prying eyes. She's a ghost in her head, despite her unquestionable tether to this reality she has carved out for her own purposes. Kylo casts a look over his own shoulder to find that any trace of his movement has disappeared as well. He turns back once the red moon shifts and bathes the world in cerise shadows, chased away only by the crystalline brightness of the white moon lurching in to overpower its sister and the warmth in Rey's tone, strange in this equally strange place yet a buoy in its own right. )

As I said, I don't excel at meditation. I've never found it particularly useful. ( Being open to her presence in himself doesn't mean that he has to take admonishments lying down, and he chases the shifting sands of her tone with his own heavy timbre running after her. Boots heavy with cloying sand bring him closer to her, until they are no further than they had been when separated by the glass on the command shuttle. His palm thrums with the phantom memory of that cool surface, and he curls them both into their default state, loose fists at his sides. ) There's no place I retreat to in order to clear my mind the way that you do. There never has been.

( Even his earliest, most earnest attempts at clearing his mind and silencing the world around him just acted as a conduit for Snoke and the dark to slip in, uninhibited by the locked doors and trip wires of his thoughts when he was so focused on emptying himself completely, and it wasn't long before he was leaving the door unlocked for them. He has no Jakku, no island in an ocean. It's never been a problem before, not for a dark sider so reliant upon thoughts and feelings to begin with. To shut them out would have been counterproductive.

The breeze rustles again, a little, at the back of his neck, and cool sweat beads underneath the fall of his hair. )

I thought you were supposed to guide me.

[forcevisions]

[ And for an instant, she sees it. Every flash of a location in his mind that could potentially hold something pleasantly neutral, tainted by the looming shadow of Snoke, either in whispers or curling tendrils of dark creeping at the edge of his perception, the only constant. Sorrow grips her, pushing sympathy into her eyes that looks too like pity, and she feels no less powerful for turning her chin up towards him to lock his gaze with it. ]

Your whole life has never known a moment of peace, has it?

[ The very concept is at odds with her understanding. Jakku was brutal; she'd had to learn to fight to survive, and fast. It showed in the scrappy earnest of her lightsaber wielding still, a relic of her exile that she could not abandon, but she had learned and for long stretches, the respect it earned her had helped her to be left alone to comfort herself on the cold nights. ]

Be patient. It won't come easily. [ And the need for them to get it right is too great. She gestures up the hill and begins to walk, welcoming him at her side wordlessly. The deep breath she draws savors the clear and dry air of Jakku, so different from the thick heat of Corellia, missed in some ways and yet not at all.

Kylo Ren doesn't have that. Every planet he's seen, every experience he's had, tinted by the shade of the dark side, creating a barrier that kept him from truly experiencing quiet. If she could, she would introduce it to him. Show him something that Snoke had never touched. ]

My earliest memory is when I arrived here, four years old and screaming. [ Her voice matches the rhythm of her footsteps. The sand swallows her boots with each planted foot, sifting off the sides as she lifts them out and carries on, the rhythmic persistence lulling her into a sense of ease, just as the metronome of her soft voice will hopefully do for him, with time, disarming him. ] And yours? How long has he been there?

[ The very question demonstrates the extent to which she misunderstands, the way she believes it can be quantified in stretches of time or collective moments, tied into a neat number or experience. Mostly, she only hopes it will get him talking. Candidly, if such a thing were possible. ]

[apparare]

( He balks at her sympathy, somehow managing not to mistake it for the pity that presents itself in her eyes as they turn toward him, her whole face tipped to catch his gaze and pin him there, but still staggering somewhat under the weight of it. Or under the weight of the sand. One misplaced steps sends him nearly to his knees as the ground shifts and dunes rise and fall underneath them, the ground surging up to mid-calf and spilling into his boots. Rey, by contrast, is a veteran of the sand, comprised of sand. She doesn't sink nearly as deep as he does, and it isn't until he matches her step stride for stride that he finds the footholds in the shifting grains, bleached white and then red by the shifting light of the moon, and ceases to sink so far down.

Her question seems rhetorical, but her voice is soft, and Kylo has the impression that if he so much as thought an answer, a tapestry of scenery would present itself in an effort to show her the exact details of it. That awareness halts him. He hasn't let go of enough yet, still has sand crowding around his ankles, hasn't found the release mechanism that will allow her to see everything as she had claimed was needed previously. The longer he follows her, the less sure he is that he's actively capable of doing it. Be patient, she says, as if he has ever actually known the expression. )

I. ( Starts. Stops. Sinks and catches himself on a kneecap. Up again and walking. He grits his teeth and resolutely determines that he will not be pitied. Anger curls in the low sling of his gut. Anger and fear. But her voice is soft. Their stumbling, haggard pace through the sand breaks his words into fragmented sentences. Sand gets in his mouth and crunches between his teeth. ) I can't remember. You can't assign a value to something that infinite. It isn't like we ran into one another at the market when I was five and got to talking. ( It occurs to him that he isn't totally sure what actually comes out of his mouth and what is projected into the world around them as amplified thought. Not that it matters. ) It was there as long as I was there. Sometimes louder, sometimes quiet, but always still there.

( It. Snoke, sure, but it, too. The darkness. The trace of his signature through the Force as soon as it burst into life. The Supreme Leader knew of Ben Solo's existence before he was the Supreme Leader, knew the power that would manifest in another child in the Skywalker line. His long gaze telescoped in until it pierced galaxies and star systems alike, paved a road from his icy tomb and crawled out of the twlight to reach for the darkness that already existed in Ben's heart and breathe. Snoke was electricity looking for the perfect, special something to flow into; the Dark within him as a child was the perfect conductor. )

You were barely even a child. Why did they leave you?

( He clearly has no conception of the specifics of her abandonment but it doesn't take being inside of her mind to gauge the source of her loneliness. It had been so tangible when he pushed into her the first time, before she had been able to toss him back out, like snagging a nail and ripping the entire thing off in swift pull, the pain sharp and deep. Kylo doubts that she knows the answer - children often do, before a certain age, and are fated to form their own ideas - but he asks anyway, in the interest of talking. To her.

They crest the hill, and the down slope of the dune is paved with ice and hard-packed snow, dotted with trees that eventually blanket the valley in a thick carpet of evergreens below. Starkiller Base stretches out in front of them, thick with trees and echoes, a graveyard full of ghosts of the Unknown Regions and swirling with blue-white flakes, chips of ice and snow that fall with deceptive grace and peace. Kylo regards the change in scenery for a moment, then steps with Rey onto new but familiar terrain. )

[forcevisions]

I don’t know. I never had the chance to ask. [ The words pierce through her like the wind does, buffeting her with bitter cold that gnaws at her bones and slows her movements as she pushes through it. Her boot gets stuck in the tightly packed ice on her first step into the new terrain, though it’s not so much a firmly drawn line as a slow shift in composition, sand swirled in to turn slush to mud. She has to focus on wrenching it free, kicking frozen clumps of ground away with each forced step.

This is not a specter from her mind, but from his, and it is only upon accepting that truth that she realizes how thin the barrier between them has become, how thin it might henceforth always be. They weave in and out of one another with masked seams and such familiarity that it’s hard to tell at first whom a given image belongs to. ]

I hate the cold. [ Even recognizing it for what it is, a construct of their joined minds, she cannot stop the chill from permeating deep beneath her skin, whipping straight through the thin, breathable fabrics she favors for the muggy summer of Corellia, for the violent assault of Jakku’s sun. ] There’s no keeping it out, it just blows right through you. And it hurts.

[ Her infantile complaints speak to inexperience, giving voice to her first reaction when she exited Starkiller Base onto the planet’s forested surface, allowing him that understanding or simply not thinking to hold it to herself.

Stupid snow.

However, it makes for a good distraction from what it really reminds her of, the echoing metal hollow that she curled herself in every night waiting for her parents to return to her, the cold inside of an AT-AT without the sun to heat its belly.

She stops then, lifting her gaze to the red glowing horizon beyond the metal workings of the base that open up like a wound in the planet before them. Her nose crinkles. Two sides of a coin. Every moment he wished for peace, silence, to be truly alone, she ached for the opposite. Every way in which she understands him is through negative space, filling in the gaps of what he is not and considering the image left.

She wants to ask him what that feels like, but she recalls her steady mounting awareness of where his presence held against the corners of her own mind, and she expects she has some idea now, even if she never did then.

Only then does she notice that the Starkiller Base of his memory is not as she recalls it—shadows creep up from the earth like dust, peeking out from behind clustered, snow-caked trees. It is everywhere. Her memory, her fears, echo through the woods in the form of plasma hums and cracking wood, filling him up with her own perceptions, though not the light that Luke had hoped for. It is her darkness that sieves into him. ]

Do you want him gone?

[apparare]

( Their feet break through the first layer of permafrost that forms halfway down the dune's southern side like punching through brittle, cloying glass. Sand swirls in with the snow and mud, creating a substance not unlike glue that freezes in a thick stretch of dull gray. The back of his neck feels burnt with remembered sunlight: a byproduct of her presence, her memory, as the landscape behind them is still bathed in alternating moonlight. Even in voluntarily and purposefully handing the focus of their illusion toward him as he takes it from her, they remain mired in her world, her mind, in certain, small ways. It makes him wonder how tightly wound this bond will be when they emerge, whether they will be able to keep anything from one another regardless of the success of what they endeavor to do here.

Eventually the desert terrain gives way completely to ice, swallowed up behind them in the sweep of mountains. Kylo does not feel the chill on his skin as intensely as Rey does, swaddled in heavy, padded armor and the clothing underneath, and yet he does. Goosebumps pebble underneath the fabric covering his sleeves, chill swirling its way up his spine and out into his uncovered hands, which ache down to the bone underneath the brutal assault of the wind. His heels feel heavy and numb as they trek across the landscape, and he knows without her having to specify by opening her mouth to do it that she's freezing, can feel it thrumming off of her in waves without having to turn and look at her to see the vapor of her breath and the stern shadow of her face. )

Maybe if you dressed appropriately. ( It's a thin, dry attempt at humor, which sounds as awkward coming out of his mouth as folding himself into the meditative position in front of her had felt. ) I prefer it to the heat. It's easier to dress for the snow than it is for the sun. All the black.

( He's spared the agony of continuing by the pause in her step, coming up short himself just on the edge of the forest. Starkiller Base looms like a scab on the horizon, and the darkness lingers at the threshold of the forest - the forest - like thick fog. It's always been present on this planet, leaking into the atmosphere and cultivating a hurricane of power to draw from, attracted to the technological prowess of the Order's weapon, but it's never been so prevalent in reality. Nothing like Illum. Kylo resolutely does not think about Illum, shoving it as far away from this place as he can manage while understanding that the more he tries not to think of that distant planet in deep space the more it creeps into the edges of their forged connection. Rey's memories overpower it, and he in turn focuses on them, losing ground in his own right when they are supposed to be gaining it but giving her more in turn.

They fought, here. Their tracks are in the snow. The broken quillon of his saber catches light deep in the forest and winks. Trees creak and groan with the remembered intensity of her overhead slashes as she cut them down in an attempt to block his path. The exposed image of her across a gorge from him surges to mind, and he recalls now that he thought he had heard a voice on the wind, then - Kill him. - before she turned and ran. But that isn't right. There had been no voice. Only the two of them there, in the dark. He had advanced on her at half-power, hoping to herd her rather than kill her, and Kylo feels like he could advance now, like he could turn and not fight her down but gather her to him and keep her there. It catches him off-guard, the darkness that filters through her and threatens to overwhelm him. It feels like swimming through tar and sinking beneath the warmth in relief against the freezing temperatures of Starkiller Base.

He could drown in it, let it consume him, pull her under with him and show her the power she's capable of wielding. He wants to, it's that easy, that natural, but even as he wants to give in and slip under, Kylo knows it's an impossibility. The bright white meltwater from the bridge will always keep him suspended, hanging indefinitely in a bright glassy surface. The wind whips through the trees with new intensity, filling their head with whispers. )

I want them all gone.

[forcevisions]

[ Her teeth set, resisting the tremble of the cold just long enough for her jaw to tighten and accompany a roll of her eyes at his criticism before her muscles loosen to allow for the steady shake and chatter. She steels through it, forces her jaw loose enough to at least quell the sound, which sounds to her like weakness, and she’s sure when she manages that she’s beaten the cold.

But then she hears it again, whispering on the gust of winter, telling her to kill Kylo Ren. It is a half-remembered hiss, recounted from their battle. So easy. So quick. When he was half-dead already, wounded and disarmed, but not now. Yet she can’t stop herself considering how readily it would solve their problems once the voice has stuck in her mind, and she has to forcibly extricate herself from that course of thinking by turning her gaze upward towards him and considering the deep gouge that she left in his face, scarred to a reddish welt now.

She has felt the sting of a lightsaber since then, licking her skin as cleanly as it burns it, the welts still fresh on her body from their earlier fight on Corellia—it’s hard to remember that they’re still there, but that’s a good sign. It means they maybe aren’t. It means they’re plunging deeper. ]

Don’t listen to them. [ It is presumption that tells her he must hear them now, but she feels certain in drawing the conclusion, confident in her understanding. ] You need to clear it out of your mind. That’s what’s stopping you from centering yourself.

[ A guess, at best, but an educated one. She cannot claim his or Luke’s wisdom of the Force and how it works, but her intuition serves her well, and training reinforces her mindsets.

Snow shuffles off the trees and sticks in her hair, a stark contrast to her reddening nose and ears that betray just how unused to this chill her body is. Acutely, she wonders if her physical body reflects the same symptoms, or if somewhere apart from her mind she is wrapped in the muggy warmth of Corellia. ]

I used to imagine that my parents were all sorts of places. [ It feels like ripping open a healed wound, baring nerves raw from injury, but she keeps her voice level, fixes her gaze on the base ahead and forces herself not to look on him and acknowledge how she exposes herself now. ]

That they came from Coruscant, where they were important diplomats, who only left me so they could go on a dangerous mission for the Republic. That the planet we were really from, where I was born, was all marshes with plenty of water. [ And still, she couldn’t have conceptualized what Takodana would look like to her nearly a decade later. ] I want the chance to see it. I’ve heard Naboo looks like that. Maybe that’s where I’ll find them.

[ The lie remains just under the surface, dormant but persisting. The lie that she will find her family one day, that they are out there—alive, waiting for her. That it will somehow help her find what is missing. It hurts to expound for him to hear; she braces herself for the worst, for him to tear these childish notions apart, wondering if she can survive the devastation, but she needs to keep talking, and her life as it was has never been eventful enough to go on about at length. Not until Han Solo entered it, and that seems like a sure way to keep him from finding calm, not aiding him to reach that place. ]

[apparare]

( Denying the existence of those whispers would prove nothing, especially as they grow in volume and severity. What she hears and what Kylo hears may be different beasts entirely, each hush tailored to something individual within them. He can't decipher whether or not it's the soft sigh of snow falling that tells him that he could best her, that he could turn her, how happy Snoke would be with him for doing it, for cultivating his own apprentice from snow and sand and striking down the Resistance, eradicating the Jedi once and for all. But in that promise lies another, and he knows it as plainly as he knows the stuttered chatter of her teeth and the cold blush across her cheekbones: she will best you.

He's moved ahead of her, the rise of her voice following him further into the forest until he stops with his head full of potential promises. Kylo knows those dark thoughts. He has embraced them long enough to be able to greet them like old friends, arms open to accept the pat on his back even as the other hand holds the firm tip of a blade to his neck. A threat and a promise. Seduction laced with pain. Rey's voice almost startles him, beating into his head like a war drum. She tells him to center himself, and he doesn't say anything, searching for the source of the voices in the forest in an effort to get to the hive and drive them away. Spindly branches of the trees above and around them throw jagged, broken shadows across her face when Kylo turns his head back over his shoulder to look at her. His own face overcast by the same shifting light that leaves her half in and half out of the darkness makes the gouge of scar tissue across his face look more knotted and angry than it actually is.

He does want this, the quiet she's promising him. What it means in the end, he doesn't know, but for now the focus is putting one foot in front of the other.

The pain is obvious in her voice, but he doesn't feed off of it, doesn't capitalize on it the way that he had when he saw her island in her head. There's no pressing need to draw the agony of her memories out of her this time, and so for the first time since he struck Han Solo down, he allows himself to find a channel in which to empty all the rage and hatred out of him, rather than calling it to him. It doesn't work completely - he suspects it never will - but it seems willing, at least, to drain away, not replaced with light or warmth but a clear, definite void. )

My grandmother was from Naboo. ( The information comes to him unbidden, flooding his head like a memory, exploding out of his mouth like a tap has been broken and the knobs ripped off. Snow melts under their boots, and he picks carefully through the stories that he knows in order to protect the mythology that he has cultivated with such dedication over the years. ) She was a queen, then a senator. I remember my - ( He stumbles over the words as if saying them aloud for the first time. ) I remember being young when we went there. I can't remember why we did. There were beaches, and the water was surprisingly cool. ( Leia had kept him so close to her he had been unable to sit still, squirming out of her grasp and running full tilt down the shoreline. White sand had just started to scrape the unblemished skin of his knees when Han Solo caught him under the armpits and swung him up, up, high on his shoulders to be chastised but held aloft. He'd gotten a bad sunburn. It's the one memory of Solo he has that doesn't end with disappointed scorn and it easily recalls all the black, tarnished thoughts he has of the man despite his death, despite how killing him had made him feel. ) There's nothing worth finding or looking for in the past, Rey.

( Why wouldn't they come back for her if they were well and truly out there, he wonders. Why would they leave her at such a young age on a desert junkyard planet with no guarantees of return? Just a single burning memory imprinted into her brain to turn over for years and years. Her lonely isolation is so tangible he can almost taste it, and he wonders, as briefly as he can in this shared space... how the time line matches up with when he defected from the Jedi and burned the whole thing to the ground. It's fleeting, and dark, and singed at the edge with some emotion he has no name for nor time to examine at length, watching, instead, snow land and melt on her skin.

It occurs to him that the world is quiet, just the soft brush of the wind in the trees and ice pinging against frozen bark as it begins to rain. After a long, quiet moment of deliberation, he holds the bare stretch of his palm out toward her, and sees lush greenery, rolling forests dotted with lakes that reflect the stars. It's not Naboo, but Yavin 4. )

[forcevisions]

[ What had he been ready to say? Her gaze cuts away from the trees to fix on him, studying the shadows reflecting over his strong features as if she hopes to siphon secrets from the very appearance. His mother? Father? The thought choked in his throat, never to make it past his lips, and she wondered how many more stumbles like that she would find before they were through.

Her short strides hurry to keep pace with him, lagging constantly just behind, often leaving her with the sensation that she must leap through snow drifts just to manage what he breezes gracefully past. The stuttered dance she performs in comparison is reminiscent of their first battle, shuffled steps only just keeping her off the ground, while he came at her with all the weight and ease of a freighter.

He must mean Leia’s mother; she decides it quickly as a sort of surrogate solution to her uncertainty of what followed “my.” Naboo, royalty, political leader, none of it seemed to be the kind of life that would lead Han Solo into smuggling. Maybe, though. Maybe she had a senator somewhere too. ]

There’s nothing worth fearing in the past, either. It cannot hurt you more than it has. [ Something she learned long ago in her dwelling on that day, wondering why it had happened. It didn’t hurt anymore, but it chafed. She no longer felt wracked with uncertainty, possessed by her grief, but accepting of the facts and curious about the truth. ] It—

[ His hand extends, and the snow melts into the trees ahead—not off, exactly, for there is no moisture. It’s the chaparral of Yavin IV, thick with greenery but still temperate and dry. She stutters and stops in front of him, looking at his hand like she wonders what snake will bite her from inside his sleeve, as startled as she is suspicious, but there are so many more ways to hurt her that she can’t imagine this being the true threat. Her hand clasps in his. ]

Why here?

[ She remembers finding him here. The Resistance base, the broken speeder; it is significant in her mind, but she suspects it is rather a construct of his all the same. ]

[apparare]

( The lines on their palms cross and intersect, weave highways and star charts out of burns and impacted dirt and dried mud. Whatever it is that is solidifying between them in this shared space, it thrums like a separate, deep heartbeat, tangible yet still abstract, physical yet incorporeal. He can't say for certain what it is that inspires him to reach out for her, only knows the deep well of satisfaction that fills within him when her added input across the bond brings Yavin IV's flora into sharp focus. Snow and ice does not immediately recede but gradually disengages, sloughing off of trees not in a way typical of snowfall but more akin to washing dirt away with water.

Before long the air is full of the scent of pine, sharp, dry needles crunching underfoot as Kylo shifts and drops her hand. There is no cloying darkness here, no heavy, dense fog that rolls through the underbrush, chokes the vegetation and blots out the sun that manages to wink through the trees. The forest around them is thick with tree trunks, resembling those on Starkiller Base inexplicably, and they stretch high enough that he would have to crane his neck all the way back just to catch a glimpse of the topmost layer of branches. Save for the wind that rustles leaves and bushes as it whispers through the foliage, the world is quiet. No whispers, no encouragement. Just their breathing permeating the atmosphere.

Kylo knows that he might have killed her on Starkiller. Or at least attempted to persuade her the way he has in previous encounters, draw her down to his level and below, build her back up in his image, in Snoke's image. Their conjoined lean toward the dark there was great enough that he could feel it manifesting, grabbing at him, pulling him back willingly with an old beckon. It isn't conducive to what he's trying to accomplish here, and while he's not sure where the knowledge or motivation came from in order to change the path they walk, he thinks he can pinpoint it to what she had said. There's nothing worth fearing in the past. He's never been afraid of the past, but he's never been interested in revisiting it until now. She said she needed to see everything. )

There's more control, here. It's quiet. I know you can feel the difference. ( He assumes that she'll know what he means by that, note the distinct lack of persuasion inherent in the landscape. High noon sunshine winks down through the treetops, piercing the grove they stand in with little pockets of light that illuminate the world only partially. ) Starkiller Base was mired in darkness. It would have dragged us both down. ( He turns and starts to walk again, crunching through dry leaves and twigs. When he glances over at her under the shadow of a heavy brow, Rey's cheeks are no longer the high red of frostbite. The words that come out of his mouth are unexpected given his dissociation from the boy he was, and they feel strange and clunky on his tongue. ) I was born here. If there was ever a time when things were quiet, it was here. Not completely silent, but quieter than it would be eventually.

( She had started to say something, before he offered her his hand, and he considers revisiting the curiosity now but decides to tuck it away for the time being. They're drowning in the past enough as it is, for two people who claim that it holds little bearing on the present and the future. )

You said you needed to see everything. ( They step over a fallen log, moss-eaten and sprouting flowers thick with thorns. His boots crunch underneath the impact of his weight on the other side. ) Define everything. What do you need to see?

[forcevisions]

[ Dark eyes search the memory-summoned scenery with the immersive interest of a newcomer, poring over every detail, not for the truth of him, but for the truth of something she has not encountered before. An adventure, a safe haven, an escape. Questions burn fresh in her mind, and she finds herself subconsciously searching for fresh or flowing water.

There are no songs in the trees, no chirps of birds. The rustle of leaves in a soft breeze welcomes them as travelers from a long journey, offering them rest and some final sense of peace. The crunch of earth joins it in chorus as they move, and she understands then. Hidden under the nature sounds, there are no whispers. No dark shadows licking at their heels.

He was ready.

Even preoccupied with the particulars of their task, he finds clarity of mind in the forests of Yavin IV, and Rey feels a strange surge of pride in witnessing it. A ghost of a smile fits her lips as she looks up at him, not fond but still pleasant. It blinks away as she replies. ]

Everything that pulled you to the darkness. [ Her calm makes a Herculean labor sound like falling off a log. Despite this, she knows how much she asks of him, and she would not ask it if she weren't prepared to consign herself to share whatever fate becomes of their efforts. The slide into the darkness is easy, just as the pull to the light is strong. Resisting either, finding a path between the two, takes strength of will, one that she believes she has seen in him. ]

The best way to break its grip on you must be to determine whatever allowed it to seize you in the first place. [ This is codified bullshit, like most things that have come out of Rey's mouth since she scrambled to find her way off Jakku with BB-8 and Finn in tow. So although she sounds committed and certain, it's not rooted in knowledge or experience—barely more than a guess, really. ] I think you're ready to begin.