apparare | i found something in the woods somewhere.

i found something in the woods somewhere.

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

( What begins as a viable option still resting somewhat on skepticism's shoulders bottoms out in a full fledged impression of pursuit. Initially, Kylo is more than willing to bet credits on the existence of his pervasive feeling of wrongness as a result of the groaning and lurching of the ship's integrity and second and third generation mechanical successes and failures. For all Rey's posturing about the ship being good and solid - despite a mound of evidence to suggest the contrary - the Millennium Falcon itself seems to shudder violently in retaliation as Rey and Chewbacca coax it out of hyerspace. One of the lights above the control terminal across from him actually flickers upon deceleration, goes out for a moment, and then blooms back into artificial, yellow light.

Once they disengage the hyperdrive, Kylo can no longer blame the ship itself and its many structural problems for the surge of intuition that rises in him. It fuses with Rey's voice in his head and sits squarely on his shoulders, breathing dark breath and thinking heavy thoughts. He casts his senses out, beyond the skeleton of Han Solo's freighter and out across the cold vacuum of space. The galaxy is huge, but Kylo can feel the blips in the radar signifying First Order fighters like spreading his hand over a black cloth peppered with broken glass. He isn't dissatisfied, in a way, recognizing the achievement inherent in the goal that they had set out in hoping to draw the fleet away, but he can't deny the bitter tang of contempt and conflict that sours his tongue at the notion of being tailed by pilots who operate under First Order command. His command, in a roundabout sense.

Two days ago, he could have given the order for them to desist, could have given the order for them to fire, take prisoners, take no prisoners. Now he is a command on the other end of that order, a target to be sought out by the twin cannons that will hurtle after them as they break for the Roche asteroids. In the main hold, where no one can see, Kylo scrubs his hands through his hair and stands, reaching out in every direction in an attempt to get an estimate. He feels Rey on the other end of their connection, and speaks before she has a chance to tell him what's going on. )

How many follow? How far to Roche?

( If they can make it to Roche before First Order TIE fighters have a chance to track them and hone in on their exact location, then they have a better chance of escaping the area without engaging in any sort of dogfight. Rey has escaped from the updated models in the past, but with the advancement of a significant chunk of the fleet behind their pursuit, Kylo has little interest in drawing the confrontation out. This is precisely why he prefers fighting on the ground, with a saber, with the Force. Every scar earned and injury scored is an opportunity for growth, and despite its warbled construction, his lightsaber is still less likely to fall apart under his hands than the Falcon is. )

[ His questions don't pester her quite as much as the insistent nagging of intrusion that she feels pressing into her awareness, impatient and neurotic. Rey doesn't waste energy rebuffing him, knowing that it would be a vain effort in her current condition and draw her focus away from shaking the TIE fighters in the rapidly condensing field of asteroids that they descend into.

Still, she doesn't offer him an answer immediately, in part due to spite but in part due to genuine distraction. The ship heaves to the side in a turn too quick and sharp for a freighter of the Falcon's size, navigating around a cluster of space rocks as they edge nearer to Roche. The edges of the system are a mostly harmless belt of debris and rock, making it a poor navigational route to begin with, but none of the airspace is so bad as the dense center, where even TIE fighters would find the fit tight—assuming Rey could keep them spaceworthy in that minefield in the Falcon.

Cargo slides with a sharp sound of grating metal in time with the turn. Only then does Rey answer him. ] You're not helping. [ The ship lurches upward very suddenly to pop over a small cluster of asteroids beat into powder by some of its neighboring rocks, giving everyone onboard the acute sensation of weightlessness for a moment, like a theme park ride. ] We're an hour from the primary colonized asteroids. I should be able to lose them long before that in here, but not if you insist on pestering me.

[ Green lasers collided with asteroids just above their starboard flank, and Rey banked to avoid the explosive debris, narrowly avoiding a necessary roll of the freighter. A wookiee yowl of challenge echoed through the metal hallways and the turrets whipped around to fix on the TIE fighters while Chewie began to hone in to pick them off. ]

( It would be more practical and prudent to stay seated, to strap himself down to the sofa or the game board with no small amount of cables and the Force in an effort to stop himself from being flung bodily across the ship as Rey throws the Falcon into a maneuver that makes the damn thing groan. Kylo, of course, does not do this, taking her silence on the other end of their open channel as an indication that he is going to get no answer in light of recent events. So he gets up, spending a long moment hanging in the doorway between corridor and main hold before pressing his palm hard into the wall and leaning with and against the gravity of the ship as Rey tries to outmaneuver First Order fighters and probably the whole damn navy at once.

He is tossed backward a few steps in his pursuit as Rey throws the freighter into an upside-down dive, fingernails scrabbling against the paneling and catching himself by rocking backward on his heels and using the Force to keep him upright. His stomach rolls and then drops before settling again, and he uses the brief inertia of equilibrium and the innate ability to determine up from down to swing forward and barrel down the corridor to the cockpit with the stride of someone with a mind made up.

Regardless, he isn't prepared for the physical lurch that setting foot in the cockpit hits him with, bombarded with the back of the Wookie's head and the old seat that Han Solo once sat him in as he looked out over the lush green forestry of Yavin IV. It smells like sweat and field rations in the box that houses the pilot and co-pilot seats, as well as the two chairs that functionally serve as passenger seats. Kylo curls his fingers into the metal that separates the safety and seclusion of the corridor from the graveyard of the cockpit and then trades the sensation of metal scraping underneath his nails for the sensation of old leather and lumpy cushioning scraping underneath his nails as he steps inside, not saying a word, barely breathing, staring at the back of Chewbacca's head and trying to remain as invisible as possible.

It won't work, of course: he's a dark blot in the wake of their flurry of movement. Rather than be discovered out of the corner of Rey's eye or by the merit of Chewbacca's sense of smell - which Kylo is sure picked him up the moment he stepped out of the hold - he announces his presence in a fashion not atypical for him, plowing right in with heavy footfalls and an obnoxiously entitled demeanor. He does not say, you fly this thing like you're trying to kill everyone on board at the last minute and chooses instead to go with something a little more diplomatic, in the interest of retaining his arms, if the brief look that Chewbacca levels him with over one hairy shoulder is anything to go by. )

No sign of the Finalizer? ( It's a rhetorical question and aimed more at the co-pilot than at Rey, who he can recognize should be focused on not slamming them into the side of a rock as opposed to indulging his questions. Kylo tries to cast out in an attempt to find Hux's little cloud of red smog in order to answer his own question but draws a blank, which could be good or bad, depending on who it is that manages to tail them. ) The Star Destroyers may not have been able to follow immediately, but they'll arrive once the TIE fighters are able to relay the intel.

( It isn't a thinly veiled criticism, just a fact. He doesn't want to admit it, but hiding in Roche may not have been the worst idea anyone has had today. )

[ By no accident, the howl that Chewbacca answers with—an abrupt confirmation that the Finalizer is nowhere to be found, that only TIE fighters have caught up to them—sounds a great deal like a hissed accusation. It stabs itself between Kylo’s ribs and names him a traitor, for while Rey can look past his crime for the betterment of the galaxy, she did not owe a life debt to the man he’d cut down, did not lose her raison d’être in Han Solo’s murder.

For that reason, Rey passes no comment on the interaction, instead keeping her focus thrown rigidly ahead out the front window while she bites down on the inside of her lip and sheets of sweat pour down the sides of her face. The urgent grasping movements she makes to jerk the freighter through the narrow, hairpin-wide gaps of the asteroids to jostle the faster, more agile TIE fighters by mere warrant of their pilots being less skilled take the same toll on her that they take on the ship, and Han Solo’s ghost may as well have his hand settled on her shoulder for all the wild, unconscionable risks she takes in trying to shake them.

For Chewbacca, a wild flurry of fireworks emitting from the gunner position is a more familiar setting, and though Rey cautions him in a hush that laser canisters aren’t free, and he of all people should know that with how many he’s smuggled, the wookiee insists on laying suppressive fire like a blanket over the pursuing fighters. He takes one of them down, and it explodes into sparks against the side of a ferric asteroid; only then does he half-turn to Kylo and explain in a low, relenting grumble that they dropped out of hyperspace too close to the asteroid belt for the Star Destroyers to pursue. It was the kind of insanity that left no question why Chewie settled himself into the co-pilot seat beside Rey, the kind befitting his best friend, but that, Chewbacca left unsaid. ]

If you’re going to criticize my flight paths, the least you could do is leave until I’m not sitting right beside you. [ Rey spits it out of the corner of her mouth, too distracted by her efforts to keep them alive in this firefight to do anything but snap back at them. ] You’ll be grateful when none of us are dead.

( Kylo doesn't miss the stab of allegation that rumbles from the Wookie's chest and spikes something low and hot and painful in the pit of his stomach, fanning out like wildfire underneath the shadow of the bowcaster injury that he had taken to the flank, rapidly turning to a twisted mound of scar tissue under the pale, freckled skin still shiny and red with remembered agony. He has no ground to stand on, literally and figuratively, so rather than risking both Chewbacca and Rey ganging up on him in a skirmish that would likely end with the cockpit blown clean off the Falcon's nose, he keeps his mouth shut for once and sits down in the passenger chair directly behind Rey. He thinks that he might be faster than Rey should she take it upon herself to turn on him and keeping Chewbacca at a careful distance more or less seems par for the course, as does keeping one eye on him at all times.

Her flying gets his blood pumping and his adrenaline up, as much as it makes his stomach flop over and his intestines crawl into his throat. He's pleased that Hux has not followed them as much as he is disappointed and disturbed at the fact. For as much as he would like a chance to wipe any vestiges of smug smiles and the arrogant weight in the general's gaze as it scans space beyond the viewport of the Finalizer's bridge as his pilots attempt to shoot them down from retreat, he can't deny that it's beneficial for the Resurgent-class destroyer to be lagging behind. Of course, it also opens up the possibility that Hux has not been discharged by Snoke's order to pursue as he pleases, which opens up another myriad of avenues of potential problems for them to encounter further down the road.

It also opens up the possibility that some of his Knights have already been dispatched following his capture and betrayal on Corellia, that they are spinning into a trap the harder Rey pushes them into Roche space, but that possibility does not sit well with him, knowing that neither he nor his Knights have time or inclination for aerial dogfights or other branches of First Order business unless their goals directly coincide. His capture, Rey's capture, they coincide with the Knights' ambitions well enough, but not enough to be part of the envoy that tails them now. More than that, none of the Knights would cram themselves into TIE fighters when better shuttles are available for their use.

By this estimation, Kylo allows his fingers to slacken somewhat where he curls them into the seat of the chair he tries not to get thrown out of. Rey sends the ship into a roll as Chewbacca barks at him out of the corner of his mouth, and Kylo tries not to look too taken aback at being addressed a second time by a creature he knows operates with the implicit understanding that Kylo Ren is a grain of sand who should be crushed under the weight of all that he has done and Chewbacca's grief and anger alone. Not for the first time and he knows not for the last, Kylo is reminded of the shot that tore straight through skin and muscle and burned a hole that oozed dark red blood into the snow.

It was a wide shot. )

Exactly none of us have to be dead in order for us to be grateful in the first place. ( His tone makes no guarantees, and he knows that he shouldn't bait her when she's sweating buckets over the controls. From this vantage point, Kylo can see the way her hair sticks to the back of her neck in wisps that coil like loaded springs. Perspiration soaks through the upper-middle of her tunic despite the chill of space, and he makes an active point to divert his attention out the front of the viewport and casts his senses out into the bleak maw of Roche space. Bigger asteroids begin blotting out the stars, the glowing yellow sun, Roche itself, obscured. A sharp pull tugs his attention to the starboard side, and he opens his mouth before he actively realizes what he's doing. ) One - no, two, coming up starboard.

[ Reluctantly, Rey exchanges a look with Chewbacca that signals her acknowledgment of Kylo's assistance, one that speaks of her surprise at the presence of the TIE fighters and the usefulness of Kylo's own Force-based sensory radar in the minefield of magnetic interference that makes up the Roche cluster. She responds accordingly and promptly, pushing hard on the stick to bank hard right and cut them off, collapsing into a group of mid-sized asteroids that threaten and loom, periodically blotting out the light that filters through the vacuum of space entirely and just as periodically preventing Chewbacca's gunner station from making any headway shaking these ships.

An unexpectedly large asteroid appears in front of them almost instantaneously as she hurdles over another, and Rey cuts into a starboard roll to avoid it. The two TIE fighters of which Kylo had warned them double back to regroup with another three, but one of them jags against the same asteroid Rey had narrowly avoided, and it occurs to her then that the asteroids themselves are presently their best weapon against pursuit.

She dives into the thick of them with that in mind.

The Falcon wheezes at its joints, too old for the way she zips in and out of the belt of space rock, but she knows it better than any other ship, and the yoke feels like an extension of her arm. She doesn't realize that she's stopped relying on the instrumentation in front of her until it starts to blare a proximity warning, red lighting up across the instrument panel. Dropping her gaze, she searches out the warnings and groans. Ahead of them, a cluster of asteroids drift in their pattern to a near-interlocking position, blocking their flight path, and the Falcon's systems screeched with the impossibility of it.

Diving into an area with smaller, more loosely packed asteroids would likely save the ship the irreparable damage of a collision, but it would allow the TIE fighters hot on their heels to overtake them. A voice echoed in the back of her mind—Luke, while he was training her on Yaga Minor, carrying her out by shuttle into the dark of the woodlands and telling her that the Force would guide her back, if she let it. Senses and tracking, none of it could compare to the tug of the Force, and she'd followed that very pull to Luke where he waited for her, leagues from the Resistance base.

Adjusting her grip on the yoke, Rey quietly steadies herself and hopes the same success can be granted to them by the Force now: she does not believe its will is to see them scattered on the side of an asteroid. So Rey keeps the course, barreling forward. ]

Hold on. [ She warns the others in the cockpit, pushes the yoke, and goes hard at the nearest asteroid, carrying with her the heavy winds of the Force and feeling them as they crash against the solid wall of asteroids. Time and distance tick down, hurtling them towards an impending collision until with seconds remaining, the Force feels its way through, and Rey swerves. She rolled the Falcon, top down, and pulled heard to find her way between the whisper of a passage between the asteroids, ferrous rock clanging against the starboard shields with a terrible internal grinding sound, but that sound puts up no contest against the flashbang of the TIE fighters that slam full-speed into the same asteroid that the Falcon hugged.

Only then does Rey breathe, settling back into her seat and tipping her head back. Quietly, red blips fade from the radar. Three at once, then another, and another. Reaching one hand out, she claps it over Chewie's furred paw, squeezing with all the relief of survival, then she lolls her head to the side and glances back at Kylo to ask, ] Can you feel any others? I don't know about you, but I'd like to get out of here.

( He is reminded, somewhat bitterly, of both his father and his uncle in every risk that Rey takes and every bank that she pushes the Falcon into. And - distantly, reverently - of his grandfather. Best pilot in the galaxy in his day. The same could be said of all of them, though less of him, given the location of his own interests. Kylo has to admit that Rey's style leaves both something to be desired for the state of his insides as they splatter against the bones and muscles and miles of skin designed to keep internal organs from getting on the outside as well as something to be admired. He's impressed, in a way, though more frustrated with the fact that he has to stretch a leg out and brace it against the floor and then the chair opposite to keep from sprawling, long-limbed, in the center aisle, and feels further vindicated in his choice to seek her out as an ally rather than something to be destroyed.

Never mind the circumstances, the details of their thrown together truce shaky at best when held up against the bright flame of his previous intentions.

Chewbacca, he knows from stories and legends that he was told as a child - inflated by the Wookie himself and then downplayed by Han Solo - holds his own in a dogfight, which leaves Kylo to pick up the slack where he can. It's not a responsibility that he's used to, and he's uncomfortable enough with the submissive position he is backed into to seriously doubt the validity of his decision to board the ship at all, but he knows inherently that this is childish posturing, a boy unused to not getting his way.

Still, he casts out with the Force in his own right, determined to avoid the scrape of TIE fighter cannon discharge damaging the ship and sending them careening into the asteroid belt in the way that Rey tricks and deceives the fighters into bright bursts of light against rocky surfaces. An interesting choice, to be certain, but there's no accounting for dividing lines when life or death is on the line in such a way, and philosophy has no place in these stars. At the ends of his outstretched fingers, Kylo can feel the massive structures orbiting the Roche star like shapes on a child's mobile, suspended in space, bustling with life on the larger rocks that rise up ahead of them like planets in their own right. Rey hurtles toward one, barks a command out of the corner of her mouth, accent rough and aggressive as she urges the Falcon down and down and down, rockface rising to meet them, swimming into claustrophobic sight through the viewport until -

She pulls up, sends them shivering through asteroids as if passing by them in hair's breadth as a jumble of TIE fighters fail to make the same maneuver and smash into the rock in a tangle of explosive gas and space junk. He's hit with a strange sensation of vertigo, but Kylo recognizes that the breath he holds has nothing to do with anticipation of their survival or adrenaline raised as a result of Rey's choice in avoidance tactics and everything to do with how much of himself he's pouring into determining whether or not they have been followed, by a Knight or TIE fighter. Or something worse. In a place where anyone else might expect to find panic or relief or stress given Rey's choice of piloting technique, Kylo finds the slightly rippled surface of a calm lake.

The Force. Her mastery of it here and now. Her confidence despite extreme odds. The echo of it through the connection that continues to shrink and expand between them. He exhales. )

No. ( Gloved hands push the hair back from his face where it has fallen forward with the stress of their movements. It sticks up slightly with static electricity. ) You're an insane person. ( There's little malice in his tone, as if he's simply stating a fact, but in the plainness of his response exists the truth behind his lie: he's quite impressed with her, the same way that he had been on Starkiller despite that impression being dwarfed by his consuming, bruising anger. He leans back into the chair, debating whether or not he should retreat back into the objective space found in the main hold. ) Get us the hell out of here before more of them show up.

( Somewhere in the afterlife, Han Solo is probably proud. Of someone, at last. )

[ This far into the cluster, they have to rely on manual piloting for a while, evading the persistent barrage of asteroids that aimlessly float in a cloud around them, as if some giant creature had kicked up dust a thousand years ago and it hadn't quite settled. But there is ease in how Rey takes up the yoke now, assurance against their pursuit, and the great expanse of space out the front window puts her at ease, a cold calming presence to war with the inferno of conflict and muddy gray area that occupies the seat behind her.

The arrow of his assessment strikes her, but shatters on impact, falling away without ever penetrating the wall of relief she builds around herself. She doesn't need to remind him that this insane person just saved his skin; she's too busy being grateful that she and Chewie had managed to save their own to properly lord it over Kylo Ren, and she doesn't want his gratitude. She just wants to collapse onto her bunk and curl into a ball and pretend the world outside doesn't exist for a few hours.

Twenty minutes bring them out of the maze of Roche's asteroid field, and Rey works with Chewie to set the hyperdrive for the central planet of the Hapes cluster before she ever rises from the seat in the cockpit. Chewie remains, though it's impossible to say if he does because he's firmly at home in the seat or simply because he doesn't want to turn around and engage Kylo.

Rey, in a study of contrasts, claps a hand on Kylo's shoulder as she moves past him, through the corridors of the ship and into the main hold. There, she begins to sift through cargo containers for vacuum-sealed food. It's not terrible—better than the portions she'd survived off of (which is a generous estimation of the word survived) on Jakku, and it keeps her busy in the hours that separate them from Hapes. ]

( Kylo bristles under the weight of her hand on his shoulder, a thin line of tension running from the back of his neck and down into his spine. He isn't expecting it and is looking for it even less, so it's a welcome relief when Rey brushes by him and leads herself into the main corridor in the winding layout of the Falcon's internal structure. For all his discomfort, for the aggrieved chasm that stretches between them, rife with uncomfortable silence filled with too much context to pick through without the proper tools and necessary distance, Kylo does not immediately follow Rey out of the cockpit and instead spends one moment too long catty-corner and behind her co-pilot, staring at the pilot's seat as if expecting a ghost to turn around and say to him, You know, when I was your age, I pulled this baby through a couple tight corners myself.

He leaves, striding long and heavy and purposeful into the corridor, with one backward glance out the viewport and no word at all to Chewbacca, though he expects that the Wookiee will mind less than he would if Kylo had remained in his personal space. Rey is in the main hold - he can hear her banging around in that direction without having to search her out remotely - and seeing as she's the only one on board out of the three of them who isn't overly confused about his presence on the ship, he takes it upon himself to follow her in there. Physical proximity has no effect on the bone-deep exhaustion that he feels rolling off of her in waves - he'd be able to sense, note, and catalog it from any part of the ship at this point, it's staring him so proudly in the face through the link they have managed to cultivate - but seeing it etched plainly into the hollows underneath her eyes makes it that much more realized. )

What are you doing? ( Is a terrible way to strike up a conversation when it's plainly obvious what she's doing, but Kylo finds himself caring less and less about coming off as imposing when they're on more solid footing, now that he's getting used to her hanging around in his head and in his peripheral and, sometimes, in his direct line of sight. It's the latter of those options in play when he stalks across the main hold, boots clunking heavily against the floor, to snatch the rations from the tight clutch of her hand. ) You look like you're about to drop dead.

Edited (literally just realized i've been spelling wookiee wrong for like 10 years) 2016-02-25 17:52 (UTC)

[ His voice carries through the hold in a way that makes it impossible to ignore the way it crashes against the rocky shore of her back. Rey takes a moment to rally herself for the interaction, sure from his flat and somehow persistently critical tone that she won't enjoy it, but even that is a moment too long, and he's already stolen her food. Instinct drives Rey to swipe at him and grab it back with all the force of her not inconsiderable strength, shoving him back with one well-placed palm at his center of gravity. ]

Get off! [ She barks, teeth bared with the sharp demand like a cornered animal. Years suffered in the barren wasteland of Jakku made her defensive of meals, and it was impossible for one who'd spent so much formative time scrounging for food, on the brink of starvation, to really accept in her bones that she didn't have to worry about where her next meal wold come from. Realizing with some small shame the severity of her reaction, she schools calm into the tension of her jaw, though she still holds the chalky ration bar to her ribs with all the lingering possessiveness.

The wariness of her gaze is only exacerbated when she realizes what he'd said to her while he was taking it, escalating to suspicion in the way her eyes narrow. ] That's what I'm trying to fix.

[ It's not the first time she's gone so long without sleep; at least this time, she'd had food while she waited for Kylo to wake up in his makeshift cell. She could remember drifting in and out of consciousness for a lack of both while she was working on that ship she'd worked on with Devi and Strunk. Fleetingly, perhaps in demonstration of her exhaustion, she wondered where they were now—if they were safe and happy as they'd dreamed they'd be once they left Jakku, or if the First Order had simply scooped them up a few outposts down. ]

( Kylo stumbles back under the abruptness of her assault. Hardly far enough away to give the impression of actually being moved by her inferior physical strength but enough for the cloud of his expression to be visible to her. For a moment, he looks primed for a fight, meeting violence with violence and expounding upon the restless, relentless energy that he has had since boarding the ship, a caged animal. But it doesn't persist. He lets it leak out of him as if through a pinhole, tension in his shoulders visibly draining until the moment he realizes that she's the one enforcing it, letting it fill and permeate the main hold.

Shoulders raise and tighten again, as if operating under a childish urge to simply defy her, but he doesn't lash out. Instead, Kylo crosses his arms, eyes skipping from the hostility that haunts her gaze to the desperate way in which she holds the ration bar close to her body. She's fed and lean but there's a hunger that still lingers around the corners of her mouth and eyes, in the hollows of her cheeks, drawn sharp by the drought of exhaustion. It's a spine forged and made steel by decades of hunger and loneliness, a world he has glimpsed in her mind before, cold desert starlight and sand in every crevice, in water and portion packs of stale bread. Kylo stares at her for a moment, brown eyes meeting hazel across the threshold, and something in him relaxes. )

You aren't going to fix it on dried out rations and letting your mind wander. You should actually sleep. ( Wandering is betrayal enough in its own right. Kylo can remember sitting upright and trying not to fall asleep while meditating by thinking in images to things that had already happened, memories and imagined realities and words that he would have said to his parents when they told him they were going off-world without him again, intricate ploys to rewrite the past. Skywalker always caught him looking and always reprimanded him for it, and he recognizes that slide into nostalgia - if it could be called that - in Rey's own head, two names standing out as if she's blared them from a loudspeaker. Devi and Strunk. He regards her curiously, leaning back against a bulkhead. ) Who are they?

None of your business. [ She can't close her mind off from him properly, not like this, but she does darken the shades of it to give the distinct telepathic impression that he is not welcome there. Strunk and Devi are the tack of sweat on her brow, drenching through the linen of her back, the fresh surge of excitement at her first run through a refresher in too long—even if the ship was bone dry. But mostly, they're one more pair of people gone. She breaks off a piece of the dried nutrient bar and stuffs it between her teeth, chewing it against her cheek and stuffing the rest back into the cabinet, as if it might make her look less reactive, less flustered. ]

I'll sleep when we reach Hapes.

[ Until they see the journey through, get the ship into the hands of those who can begin its repairs, she doesn't feel as though she has permission to sleep. The job isn't done yet, and Kylo could feasibly hijack the whole thing and chance their course, carry them straight into the arms of the First Order. She realizes that such paranoia is a child of her weariness a moment later, but she doesn't scrub it from her mind entirely for she knows the reason General Organa affirmed this mission in the first place was not her blind faith in her son, but her understanding that Rey would run supervision in the less restrictive environment of the Falcon. It went without saying that it was the same reason Luke allowed it. ]

( Kylo watches her shove the nutrient bar down her throat, tearing at it with bright, flashing teeth and chewing it in swell of one cheek, mouth halfway open. He feels his lip curl a little in retaliation, one eyebrow descending to look at her with a perplexed expression as she turns and puts the rest of it back where she got it in the first place. Uncivilized. Barbaric. Rough and unpolished around the edges. Jakku bleeds into her in overarching crescendos and progressions from one measure to the next but also blooms unexpectedly in small ways that might be easy to miss were he not paying such close attention.

It doesn't make him feel sorry for her, not precisely, but it does continue to cultivate the little seed of understanding that has sprouted as a result of their prolonged exposure to one another. What it will grow into, he can't be certain, but he makes a show of hiding it away under the scowl that settles back into position over his dark features. )

Have it your way. ( Kylo begins pulling his gloves off, stuffing them into his back pocket and stretching his fingers out to examine the burns. No worse for wear, but inflamed and bright red. His mouth presses into a thin line and he brushes by her to open the cabinet that she had just closed, fishing out her ration bar and tossing it to her over his shoulder. ) If you aren't going to sleep then you might as well finish it.

( He can't begrudge her the desire to keep one eye trained on him at all times, whether the eye is one of her actual, physical eyes or the way in which she can see and sense what he's doing through the Force. Were their positions reversed, he would do the same. He would probably restrain her in some way. Rey's exhaustion does little to help his cause, though, and the way that Kylo sees it, if they're attacked as soon as they touch down on Hapes, she will be of little value to him and even less assistance if she's not operating at full capacity. But he can't knock her out the way he had on Takodana, and his options run dry save for frogmarching her back into her bunk and glowering at her until she passes out from boredom, and he's not about to sacrifice the dignity he has left in order for that to be an actual, viable possibility.

It's better to find an alternative way of passing the time, and he considers her lightsaber strapped to her belt and his where it lays flat against his hip. First, though, his hands. )

Is there some semblance of first aid on this ship?

[ Rey's eyes fall to the burns, angry welts slashed across his palms with black lines coursing through where leather melted into skin. It's a war wound, grown worse for being untreated, but she doesn't get the chance to feel the flash of guilt before he's brushing past her to return the ration bar to her hands in a gesture that is paradoxically defensive and helpful.

The furrow of her brow accuses it of that very thing, but it doesn't hold, lost to the turn of her head as she crouches to rifle through crates. It's here somewhere, she's sure, but Unkar Plutt had made a mess of the ship that Han Solo had never been able to properly remedy before his death, and she's never sure if she should be considering where to find key components from the mindset of a hoarder like Plutt or a smuggler like Han. She stuffs the ration bar between her teeth while she searches, an excuse to keep quiet on the subject of his interrogation as much as on his injury, but she finds the kit readily enough and slides its tin casing over the floor to him. ]

It's old. [ She warns him one the bar is pulled from her mouth, still chewing while she speaks. ] But it should have whatever you need. [ For a moment, she wavers on starting that particular philosophical debate—she knows she doesn't have the energy for it, evidenced by the fact that she sits on one of the unopened crates in the hold—but she can't help herself. ] You know, Luke found records predating the empire in the temple where I found him. They indicated that the Jedi had found meditation an effective tool to channel the Force to even heal one's self.

( While she searches one of the many cargo canisters that fill the ship, Kylo rummages around in the cabinets that he has just produced the nutrient bar from, sticking his head into one and glancing the length of the others before bending to check the lower compartments. He doesn't turn around until he hears the scrape of tin over the metal of the floor and turns in time to catch the kit coming his way with the arch of his foot, trapping it between boot and flooring. Snatching it up, he sits down on one of the cargo canisters low enough to the ground that he can stack his knees at right angles but high enough that his feet don't crowd over themselves the way that they do sometimes, a poor bad habit maintained from youth as a result of being too tall to fit in most chairs. )

It'll do. ( Kylo makes short work of the lid, popping it open and fishing out some ointment specifically designed to treat burns and a few long strips of gauze with tape. There are bacta patches nestled inside, but he's loathe to use them in the event they really need them or in case they've expired. He's unraveling a long spool of yellowed gauze when Rey speaks again, and Kylo looks over at her from under the heavy weight of his brow, snorting without mirth. ) I thought we'd come to the conclusion that meditation was not my forte when training as a Jedi.

( There's latent resentment in his tone but no real bite or sting. An old wound, scar tissue made fresh when in the right company. Strangely, he feels he can talk openly with Rey in this way without the deep black well inside of him opening up the way that it does when he's spoken to Skywalker or Organa. He doesn't waste time contemplating why but elaborates somewhat further in ways that are more current and true to who he's become. )

Pain is instructive. ( Gauze unwinds, and before beginning to wrap his hands, Kylo smears a little of the blue-white ointment onto his skin and makes a face as the skin sizzles and burns. No wince twisted with pain, just a passing acknowledgment of something unpleasant. ) It shows you where there's a weakness and how it might be exploited. You either correct the weakness or suffer the resulting consequences.

[ In her current state, it is easy to patiently weather his dry answers and the explanations that come with them, however particularly convoluted those rationalizations may seem to her. Rey mulled his response over by chewing slowly while she considered, her furrowed brow the only glimpse of a reaction before she had the chance to fully examine it.

Ultimately, it was the same way in which she was taught by the harsh environment of Jakku, and she could not ignore the truth in that: to some extent, it must be effective, because she had found success since leaving the desert. The more scavengers attempted to rob her of her finds for their own sake, the more quickly she learned to defend herself against them, to conceal what she had, to scour for the higher quality parts and trick them into stripping her of the useless junk. She had adapted to survive just as much as luggabeast to the unforgiving conditions, and pain had instructed her to hide her weaknesses, to stop others from exploiting them.

On the other hand, had she listened to those cutthroat lessons instead of her gut, guided by the Force, she would have sold BB-8 for food, would have abandoned the mission to run away with Finn and pretend the war between the Dark Side and the Light was someone else's problem, would have dismissed the Resistance as a few radicals trapped in an old age unable to embrace the change and certainty promised by the First Order. Those hard-fought lessons of pain taught her only survival, at any cost, and to do the right thing has meant opening up her weaknesses, making herself vulnerable, and accepting that sometimes strength comes in weathering the pain or taking it on for someone else, not avoiding it. ]

Avoiding pain seems like a very narrow understanding of the world to me. It doesn't leave much room for anything in between. [ Not everything, she understands now, is strength or weakness, life or death. Some things just are. And more importantly, survival at any cost is not always the right answer; some things cannot be corrected or saved with pure strength. ]

( He works in silence for a few moments, watching her out of the corner of his eye with the sort of understanding that they will probably always regard one another in such a way. Sleep with one eye open or forgo sleep altogether in the interest of not waking up with a saber held to their own throat, tend to their wounds with their backs to the wall, mindful of what could come through the door. Kylo doesn't have the luxury of time to consider what could have been and what still might be given their situation - what might have been different had she listened to him on Starkiller and come with him; what might be different now, in the future, that he followed her down into the depths of his own head on Corellia - as Rey eventually picks up the thread of conversation much the same way Kylo picks up the long pieces of gauze once the ointment has stopped scorching his skin to begin wrapping his hands. )

It is a very narrow understanding of the world. ( His agreement with her statement is non-debatable, even if he hadn't spent years and years as a student under a teacher who believed wholeheartedly that pain as punishment and pain as tutelage were mutually exclusive concepts, even if her own perception of pain and what it means and what it's good for might ultimately be different from his own. He wraps and wraps, and when his right hand - dominant - is done, Kylo lets the gauze hang and scrounges around in the tin for a small pair of scissors, cutting the off-white piece without flourish and taping it down before moving onto his left hand. ) Pain is a teacher in its own right. To have never experienced it is to have never had any reason to grow or learn.

( The roll of gauze bounces off of his knee and pools on the ground at his feet, but Kylo calls it back to him without thinking, using the Force to lift it from the floor so that he can catch it in the palm of his hand and continue with the task at hand. They are both children of pain, though he would hazard a guess in saying that it has shaped them as two completely different people. His bloodline is a bloodline of pain, and without knowing decisively as to Rey's parentage, he would still feel confident in assuming that whoever they are or were, whatever they did or will have done, their lives were full of pain as well, if the hurts were great enough to leave a child behind to feast on sand and drink dirty water for the majority of her life were any indication. Ben Solo was born into a life that should have been free of pain, made to want for nothing, and the wound that he has carved and that has been carved in him in turn has done immeasurable hurt to an incalculable amount of people. The list continues to grow. )

It's inescapable, besides. ( He snips the final piece of gauze and tapes it down, flexing his fingers and stretching his hands to test the give of the material. They'll hold but he'll need to get a better, more permanent solution - maybe on Hapes - or risk some sort of infection. For now it will have to do. ) You either control it or let it control you, like anger.

( He's gotten marginally better at the latter though not entirely, as a result of the Supreme Leader's final stages of his training, ultimately incomplete but still instructive in their own right. Pain is something that he's always been able to use to his advantage, pushing him further, harder, longer, than he might be able to go otherwise, a burst of dark black blood in the bright white snow summoning a monster from the deep well of anger that ripples beneath his surface. Kylo has no place for any of it now, so despite the conversation, it doesn't manifest. Instead, he slips from the cargo container with the closed kit in his hands and shoves it across the floor back toward Rey as he settles down, cross-legged, and unclips his saber in the interest of taking it apart to clean off the mud and grime that has seeped into it as a result of the Corellian weather. )

I don't think that's true. [ To a degree, this is the most conversational Rey has been with him aside from the mockery of it she'd made by sharing BB-8's specs with him in the restraints of a torture rack he called the First Order's guest quarters. She chews it over some more before speaking on the subject further—she can't place her finger on the exact point of disagreement, but something in his assessment sits poorly with her. ]

I think anger is like pain, you're right about that, but not in such black and white terms. It's like any other feeling: it demands to be acknowledged and understood before you can find a way to let it go.

[ Inescapable. She taps her fingers on the wrapping of the ration bar and settles on it: that's the word that she can't swallow of his assessment. The absolutes that he uses to define his experiences—weak, not weak; controller or controlled—those, she can rationalize as the necessary adaptations to make sense of the world he's lived in for so long, but to call any emotion inescapable is to deny control over one's self, and she's grown in a world where she can control nothing but herself. ]

You're entitled to your opinion. ( He says it with no small amount of disagreement, though the fact that he doesn't see things the same way that she does has little to do with whether or not he means what he says. They mirror each other in a number of ways, so why should this perspective be any different? She had the opportunity to give in, to yield, to take what he was offering her in the snow on Starkiller, and could have buckled and relented under the punishing internal gaze of Snoke as he broke the line of defense surrounding them to call out to her on Corellia, and she hadn't. He might not agree with her perspective, but he can't fault her for it, and he certainly can see why she takes the position that she does. ) Although Skywalker might disagree with you on your approach to the black and white of it.

( Kylo doesn't mean any harm in the statement, and he's conscious enough of his position on Skywalker's teachings in the past and Rey's position as his uncle's apprentice to keep any disdain out of his tone, remaining neutral. It helps that he's experienced a bit of a culture shock over the last year or so, despite the twisted dark of further training under Snoke's hand. )

Do you remember - ( He pauses for a moment to work his lip between his teeth as he goes about the careful business of shifting the wire running the length of his poorly assembled blade. Mud is caked underneath and around, turning red a dull shade of patchy brown in places. He also wants to make sure that Skywalker had not done anything to tamper with its assembly or construction; temperamental as it already is, he can't run the risk of the blade exploding in his hand the next time he ignites it. ) - on Starkiller, when I - ( He grits his teeth and blows sharply into the hilt of the saber, a few flakes of dried mud drifting to the floor, then moves onto the plasma emitters. ) - struck the injury from the Wookiee's bowcaster? ( Kylo expects her not to have forgotten it, given how weird it probably seemed. The surge of power that he had felt as a result of those endorphins, that pain, buzzes like intoxication now. Still, it hadn't been enough. ) Anger and pain are useful in their own right. Sometimes it's worth it not to let it go, if you can manipulate it to serve you better, but there's a difference between manipulating it and using it and letting it manipulate and use you.

( Something metal pops under his attention, and he presses his mouth into a thin line. It's a heavy statement to fill such a small compartment, and he isn't sure whether or not it's a result of what he's learned through training in the last year or through other avenues, fresh, gaping wounds. She is right, in a way: none of it is really so black and white. But he thinks that he has a right to use the word inescapable as much as the next person, for all that pain and suffering and anger and hatred has taught him. They will always be there, waiting and lurking and ready to twist. )

If I ask you something, will you try not to get offended by it?

( Kylo isn't positive what provokes him to ask rather than just barrel right ahead, nor does it really readily occur to him what prompts his curiosity in the first place. Her tone is conversational, however, and after living in and out of one another's head for the better part of twenty-four hours, after what she'd done for him in severing Snoke's direct link to his mind with no guarantee that he would keep his word and not find some way to use it to his immediate advantage, Kylo supposes he owes her that much. He'd taken before and the response hadn't been favorable. He's not interested in history repeating itself now. )

No.

[ Her answer comes blandly, as if spitting the powdery ration bar back at him as soon as it touches her tongue, but Rey's gaze doesn't narrow with any animosity: mere practical honesty colors her face as she counters him. She won't try anything, but she's not going to go out of her way to be offended either.

And besides, he's given her a lot to think about. Not a lot to challenge her views, exactly, but to help her understand him. She studies him with some interest, in fact, as if recalling the memory of what she'd taken for some absurd intimidation tactic born from the Core Planets that she'd never seen before. It wasn't entirely unheard of among animals, as she understood, that kind of balking, but the reptiles that prowled the deserts of Jakku did not often waste resources on posturing. They were a pragmatic bunch. It makes more sense, settles the moment into the rest of her image of Kylo Ren a bit better, as if a puzzle piece were turned and slotted into its proper place.

None of that makes her see it his way; instead, all she sees is one more way in which Kylo gave in to the dichotomous limitations of a world that was overflowing with anger and pain, refused to let it out and instead fed on it to grow stronger, stoked it until it became useful to him and tainted his bond with the Force by touching it with blood-drenched hands. No, it doesn't make Rey agree with him: it makes her feel sorry for him—not that she'd show it or say it. ]

( He cocks an eyebrow at her but doesn't immediately say anything, working the face off one of the emitter shrouds and running his finger the length of the piece, following the bow of the metal and rubbing away any lingering traces of mud that he can find. It's been cleaned, somewhat, he notices, and the coiling realization that it was probably Skywalker who had cleaned it while he had been inspecting the crude assembly settles low in Kylo's abdomen with the sort of slow burning simmer that lends itself to later explosive disasters. He doesn't like that someone else had his hands on what's his, and he likes less that the Jedi was likely taking careful stock and catalog while examining the blade. He likes even less that there was a measure of kindness and good will extended from one party to the other with the decision to clean the majority of his saber, like an olive branch reaching beyond the act of returning Kylo's blade to him at all.

While Rey is on the other side of the room from him, occupying the same space and able to see the careful series of expressions that track across his face if she's paying close enough attention, Kylo doesn't stop to think about it too hard. Instead, he reassembles the emitter shroud and begins the process of checking the other for the same treatment, fairly certain of what he'll find there. As such, it seems like a long time before he follows up his own inquiry with an actual question, and Kylo glances up at her to judge the caliber of her expression before plunging in with both hands and feet. )

Are you angry at your family for leaving you on Jakku?

( He gets the impression that he has no right to ask the question just as she has no right to go stomping around inside his head and look at his doubts and fears, but here they are, and here they continue to be. Space junk orbiting in one another's gravity, caught up in the inertia of their mutual, distant goals and a perverted sense of duty. She's seen some of him and he's seen some of her, and he remembers with perfect clarity the personification of her loneliness not only in her own mind on Starkiller but also in the darkened dome of their own projected consciousnesses, twin moons bathing the desert sands in alternating light. He remembers her imagined realities for them, the inventions that she had drafted for herself in an effort to explain away the abandonment of a four-year-old to a desert graveyard like Jakku. And, of course, the implication of his own involvement in that outcome.

He could be responsible, but Kylo doesn't know for sure and it seems like he might never. As such, he's careful to keep his tone appropriate for the topic at hand, treading carefully, almost lightly, around memories and perceptions that he took without asking to begin with and then experienced without trying to take the second time around. )

[ Anger flares, bright and hot enough for him to feel it, but it's a fleeting burst of energy that fades as quickly as it came, a supernova dying out to an ember: none of it directed at the faceless shapes that occupy her memories, but at Kylo for assuming himself in the position to ask such things. Reminding herself of the mind walk she'd taken with him not so long ago quiets her indignation somewhat, but turnabout is not always fairplay, and it still sticks in her teeth.

Still. She knows precisely the conclusions he would draw from her silence: Kylo Ren is a creature of pain and misery, for he has steeped in it without reprieve for too long. He was taken young enough to be forged in it, and she cannot make him forget it in a day, so she doesn't pretend to try. If she offers him no answer, he will substitute his own, and she does not need to have a direct line to his mind to read the tense grudge he holds against his own family for slights that she cannot understand—slights that she understands less now that she has come up against Snoke even secondhand, for how could any of them have hoped to keep him out?

So instead, she takes the moment to finish chewing the last of the ration bar, recycles the packaging in a vacuumed receptacle in the side of a pantry cabinet, and gets to her feet. ]

Of course not. [ She shakes her head, a burn in the back of her throat dying for a way to express how layers of sentiment complicate the feeling beyond mere anger. ] If you mean to ask if it hurts, of course it does. [ Which rebuffs him somewhat, as if scolding him for poking his finger through an open wound and wiggling it around until she squirmed. ] But I'm not angry. I don't know them enough, don't understand enough about why they did it, to feel angry.

[ The persistent image of her mind of a shuttle blasting off Jakku, Unkar Plutt's thick, slimy fingers wrapped around her pole-thin arm, sticks in her mind and nags her, a lapsed transmission that can do nothing but repeat. No matter how often she cycles it, it won't expand, and she can't retrieve any of the corrupted data. It's just gone, with the faces of the parents she lost—or who lost her, however deliberately. ]

They're out there somewhere. Maybe one day, I'll meet them and decide if I should be.

( The small burst of anger that he receives is not unexpected, not unwarranted or unwelcome, but it still stings like the bright shock of a slap across his face. He misinterprets the intended direction of it until the lash at the end of its crack scores for him and does not internalize toward faceless, nameless shadows in her past, no physical manifestations to retaliate against. Kylo presses his mouth into a thin line but doesn't reciprocate in any way, content to let her feel the way she feels and take comfort in it if that's the course her anger runs itself. In some small way, though it might be misguided, he feels justified in her response if not in her reply.

That reply doesn't come with the immediacy that he would necessarily like, but it's unlikely that he would answer with any level of expediency were Rey to ask him the same question. He hasn't, in the past. In fact his retaliation has been physical and external. So he waits out the quieting of the storm that broils like a pressure cooker for a moment and then dies within her as she stands, just as he pops the last bit of metal casing for the emitter shroud back into place with some satisfaction and some dissatisfaction.

Skywalker.

His only response is a gruff noise in the back of his throat, half and hum and half a scrape of acknowledgement. Maybe he is looking for the same sentiments in her that he feels within himself, but they're non-existent every time he goes digging. Kylo can't be certain whether or not what he feels is disappointment or just further isolation. Or maybe some degree of envy where her resilience in the face of this kind of adversity is concerned. He'd always used his resentment and the dejection associated with his family as a crutch to help him rise to the top, and Rey stands on similar ground with no such animosity. Conditions of circumstance, he tells himself, while the idea that Supreme Leader Snoke would probably be able to take one look inside the girl's head and figure out who she is and where she comes from and who she belongs to without batting so much as an eye.

A piece of casing on his saber's hilt cracks quite suddenly and breaks in two, a section breaking off and falling to the floor. He swears under his breath and sets the blade aside. )

I wasn't asking to be intentionally cruel. ( Kylo says it with the air of someone who could very easily be intentionally cruel about it if he wanted to, and he could. They both know that. ) You're infinitely more likely to run into them now that you're actually off Jakku. ( He stands, boots thunking against the floor, knees and back popping helpfully, and calls his saber to his side to hang it once again from his waist. ) In my experience your family always has a way of catching up with you whether you want them to or not.

[ The crack of his saber draws her attention, but it's turned away before she can assess the source of the sound, leaving Rey with a suspicious and narrow gaze roaming the space Kylo Ren occupies on his father's ship—for it would be Han's ship no matter whose hands it fell into, no matter where Han was, molecules turning to fuel burning up in the sun that became of Starkiller Base. Her hands unclench at her sides when he starts to speak again, the muffled curse forgotten as she realigns her attention.

He seems bitter, but she can't imagine that he is. So much of what he holds in resentment for Leia and Luke seems, to Rey, rooted in his inability to forgive them for their failings, for letting him become what he is, and she cannot reconcile that with dissatisfaction that they and Han had scoured the galaxy for him and sent barrage after barrage to bring him home, even occasionally at great cost to the Resistance. For him, it's not as simple as anger either, and she settles her beliefs on that, whether he'll admit to them or not.

At full height, he dwarfs her, and she finds herself wishing she'd never stood, for now she only stands at a loss for where to go. The cramped quarters of the Falcon don't afford her the luxury of leaving this conversation. ]

I wish they would. [ Said sadly, but she grows more despondent after the words are out of her mouth, staring just past him as if she expects the ghost of Han Solo to appear in the doorway at any moment. He doesn't, of course. But she does seem to see further into herself, some, for she continues then. ] Sometimes, I want to be angry with them. I believed for so long that they were coming back for me, but they didn't force me to believe that. No one did. I did it to myself. Being angry with ghosts won't undo any of it. That's how I calm myself, and keep it from being anything that I need to control or that could control me.

( Kylo isn't immediately sure whether or not her words serve a dual purpose, whether she's speaking to the gaping wound in his own flank where family is concerned or just imparting something personal with no intent to find a mark. He recognizes that he isn't actually the center of the galaxy and that not everything revolves around him and his ongoing drama with his family, but it's hard not to draw comparisons. He'd told her once before that they were two halves of the same coin, and the more Kylo learns the more he believes that to be a platitude that was true in every way that he'd meant it.

In that way, he doesn't feel remorse for what he'd done to Han Solo - a complicated weaving of sentiment that he still has not had time or opportunity to consider - but he can understand the despair that it had caused her and why, even if he doesn't agree with her choice in father figures. She's right though: being angry with ghosts doesn't change what's happened. Although he can say that he isn't angry with Han Solo's memory as much as he is distressed by it, by what it means, by what it brings forth in him when there should be a black, swirling void of absolute power rather than the churning nausea of sick guilt and sadness. )

Why wouldn't you believe they were coming back for you? ( His voice is quiet in the main hold, easily swallowed up by the hum and buzz and creaking and groaning of the bulk of the ship around them, but Kylo knows that she can hear him. It's a rhetorical question, and revealing in its own right, though given their inability to see eye-to-eye on the state of his parentage, he doesn't expect her to sympathize outright, even if she elsewhere. ) You were a child. Children always think that their parents will come back and save them, regardless of whether or not it inspires anger that fades or anger that lingers.

( If Rey feels cramped and trapped in the main hold, Kylo feels it just as much, having wandered down an avenue of conversation that has only a dead end should they choose to keep walking it. He crosses his arms and inclines his head toward the old board nestled into the corner of the hold. )

Do you know how to play Dejarik?

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