apparare | i found something in the woods somewhere.

i found something in the woods somewhere.

open post.
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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?

[ If she weren't already so keenly aware of it, Kylo's comments would have made it impossible to ignore the bantha on the ship that is his relationship with his family. Every word out of his mouth drips with the way he personally identifies and projects his own experiences onto hers in how he understands them, and though she doesn't begrudge it, she is much more able—particularly at a moment like this—than he is to separate herself from him and how he has lived.

So she isn't ruffled by his quiet insistence and the way it strives to grant her permission to be angry, to hate them, to want to lash out and bear the exhausting grudge of fifteen years of abandonment. But it is a burden that she refuses to carry, that grudge, and Kylo's mere being reminds her all too well how heavy it would be, how it has broken his back and worn down his joints over the years. ]

Not well. I'm usually at the helm, not back here to play. [ She glances over at it, considering the board. She hadn't even turned it on since Finn had done so accidentally when Han first picked them up in his tractor beam: there were so many parts of the ship, still, that didn't feel like hers, and she hardly wanted to go nosing through a dead man's things. Sooner or later, she'd have to accept the inevitability of making herself at home there. ]

( With his arms crossed as they are, he's aware of the misshapen sag of a folded crane that his body collapses into possibly better than the person who had once told him to his face was aware. His chest is broad and his arms are long and his shoulders strain against a majority of the tunics and flightsuits that he has been given in his life, and this is no exception. He feels tall and awkward and uncomfortable in the cramped confines of the ship, nowhere to go and nothing to break, a wave of restless energy that can't crash against anything now that the subject of anger and their respective - and intertwined, given Rey's inheritance of the Falcon - families has been dismissed.

In a way, Kylo is glad for it, knowing that the gravity attached to the topic would likely lead to the partial dismantling of the ship as it tears its way through space, hurtling toward Hapes, and that would bode well for none of them. He makes the executive decision to let old dogs lie for as long as they're in danger of becoming space junk and resolutely does not stop to spare time or consideration for what likely pursues them, the image of the Knights that he had projected into Rey's thoughts for her partial benefit still beating a bright fire in the back of his own mind.

So. Games. )

If you're interested in learning, it's not that challenging of a game. ( The way he looks at it, it might be somewhat therapeutic to watch their individual pieces kill one another. ) Unless you're more interested in letting me thoroughly embarrass you at sabacc. ( His shoulder raises in the slightest approximation of a shrug, easily mistaken for a shift in his body weight from one foot to the other. ) There's little else to do when the ship isn't actively trying to defy you by breaking apart in the middle of hyperspace.

( When you're not actively trying to destroy one another in some way, after months and months of believing in its purpose. )

[ Somehow, the image of Kylo Ren gambling aboard the Finalizer with the stormtroopers is not one that Rey can summon, though she tries as she lowers herself into a seat at the dejarik table after some consideration of his offer. The attempt only furrows her brow, leading her to look him over with impregnable scrutiny until she can only shake her head. No, it simply won't fit.

The only reasonable explanation for his confidence dawns on her a moment later in the form of his father, and Rey feels her chest clench as her fingers dust across the table to reach for the switch and light it up, realizing that Ben Solo must have learned a long time ago at this very table. ]

You should give this ship more credit. For all it looks like a junker, it's held its own against your fleet plenty of times. [ She still calls it his fleet, the First Order, but only by reflex, and it's just as much reflex that she rallies to the defense of the Falcon rather than confirm her interest in playing with anything more than her physical presence at the table. Holograms of creatures she hardly recognizes roar to life on the table with jerky, uneven movements that speak to the table's disrepair, but it's enough for Rey to assess it with interest all the same.

She's never own anything that wasn't in disrepair. ]

( Kylo accepts the designation of the First Order fleet as his fleet without bristle or the need for correction, whether out of habitual association or something else entirely, something else that smacks of uncertainty even if his future association with that branch of power and authority in the galaxy is all but snuffed out. Hux would argue the semantics involved in her overarching nomenclature, and if there is anything that he is glad to be rid of in casting off the heavy, dark cloak of First Order bureaucracy, it's his affiliation with that redheaded ass, without question, however superficial the intent behind saying as much would be.

In a way, though, Kylo still associates himself with the inner mechanics and workings of First Order politics, the situation at hand too new and too fresh and too murky to be considered a true divorce of principles and loyalties. Settling on the uncomfortable sofa as far away from Rey as possible without actively balancing on and off the edge, he's aware of the strange dichotomy at work in suggesting games that his father taught him, on his father's ship, with his father's protegee, when he's still so embroiled, in his own head, in the state of the Order. When he killed the man in question himself. )

I'm not going to make excuses for the skill and talents of the TIE pilots that neglected to stop two - ( He's careful with his word choice, pausing briefly under the pretense of running fingers over his side of the game board as if refamiliarizing himself with the controls. ) - people and a droid from escaping from a wasteland like Jakku. ( The memory of his anger, of Mitaka's neck slapping like raw meat into his outstretched hand, rises easily to the surface. He acquiesces, somewhat. ) It's a fast ship. It always has been. In capable hands it's able to do unbelievable things despite its age and constant state of disrepair, when there's a pilot worth their salt at the helm.

( Those feel like lines recycled and edited with heavy corrections that don't tend as much toward blatant favoritism and preening, and he can almost hear Solo's voice in his own words as they come steamrolling out of his mouth, distracting himself from the fact that he's more or less just paid Rey a compliment without actively meaning to. Fortunately, the board is alight, caught in the projection of a previous game that was stopped midway through. Kylo stares at it a moment, watching the projections move jerkily and blink in and out of partial existence, losing arms or legs or tentacles or whole heads in the ghhhk's case.

Underneath the table, he jams his knee into the underside and all the holographs flicker out of life and then burst back into perfect detail. )

[ She opts not to deeply consider the implications intrinsic in Kylo's awareness of precisely how to jimmy the table into full functionality, the familiarity he demonstrates with this particular dejarik table's functionality. It would mean reflecting on the father that he killed, and she does not want to think of it when she is trying to save the son's by pulling him out from behind the nightmarish castle walls he has built around himself with his own choices. Rey is not sturdy enough in her current state to fact that train of thought, so she evades it entirely.

In doing so, she runs straight into the necessary acknowledgment that a compliment then lies in his words, for if she won't pay mind to his actions and analyzing them, she must at least answer those. It startles her a little, for although she had to acknowledge there was some praise implicit in offering to teach her in the first place, in exploring this tenuous link between them, in accepting her help to sever his bond with Snoke, she had certainly never expected him to state it outright. Particularly when he'd levied half-hearted, shell-shocked criticism at her after the flight pattern she'd followed through the field of asteroids near Roche. ]

And a good pilot knows how to repair it once they drop out of hyperspace, no matter how it shakes apart. We'll see it good as ... well, good as it was before we took off at least. [ She lays her palms on the table and, in doing so, seems to set the subject of the Falcon's state aside—to their mutual benefit. ] So, how does it work?

( More than content to drift away from subjects and lines of conversation that orbit the topic of his pedigree, Kylo spreads his fingers over the curves of his knees and leans forward so that his shoulders crowd the Dejarik board. Of course, explaining the nature of the game to her at all is, in and of itself, a callback to the person and past he has dutifully distanced himself from, buried under sand and dirt, but it's objective enough to serve a function in passing the time until they reach Hapes, at which point they will have a new world of problems to deal with, no doubt.

It's probably the most that he's said to her in one stretch of time, but Kylo explains the rules to her at face value, indicating her characters on the board and their individual strengths and weaknesses, naming them all with immaculate pronunciation and striking the side of the table once more - with a heavy kick from the toe of his boot as opposed to smashing the bottom of the thing with his knee - when her savrip wanders too close to his molatator in the interest of chewing on one of its haunches. Once he jolts the pieces back into their proper places, the savrip resumes swinging its arms and adjusting its vest. )

They become bored if you take too long to either begin the game or take a turn. ( He explains, with a detached sort of displeasure in his tone, before laying out the moves that each player can make during their designated turn, how the creatures are chosen, and eventually arrives at the inevitable conclusion. ) You want to destroy all of your opponent's pieces before they have the chance to destroy yours. It's very similar to holochess, just more violent and possessing the ability to reach a much broader audience as a result. ( He leans back into the stiff angles of the sofa, once again resetting their pieces where they have drifted in idle discontent. The savrip seems to drag its feet as it trudges back to its spot on the board. Kylo quirks an eyebrow. ) Has Chewbacca coerced you into a game?

I didn't know he played.

[ The statement comes out reflectively sad. Truth be told, there's not much that Rey knows of her co-pilot other than the fact that his coarse exterior is precisely that: the loss of Han came too soon into their relationship, and it was Leia who Chewie had sought for comfort in the wake of it.

The wookiee made his share of sarcastic complaints or rallying cries, but discussion of his late best friend mostly provoked unintelligible but indubitably dismissive warbling and stern mechanical work: he kept the loss with him and suffered it daily, wounds reopened by the haunted halls of the Falcon itself, which he could not abandon. It did not keep him from being kind to her, but to a degree, it was a distant sort of kindness, that welcomed her into Han's space only at a pace comfortable for Chewbacca, and Rey was happy to permit him that. He deserved it, to be certain, and she had been stunned and flattered that he had even considered her an eligible pilot to take Solo's place.

She wishes she could have known what he was like when Ben Solo knew him, but that was a lifetime ago—her entire lifetime ago, as it happens—and something about that timeline sticks in her mind like scrap metal in gears, stopping it up just long enough for her to find it significant, but frail enough to be crunched up and moved on from before too long. Nothing, she was sure, but her reading into coincidences. ]

Try not to be offended that I'm saying so, but I'm surprised you enjoy the game. [ She looks up at him from the moving beasts, a slight smirk lilting into her voice and twisting the corners of her mouth as she turns his phrasing back on him, though there's truth to the statement beyond the opportunity to take a jab at him. There had always been something graceful and refined in the cold, intimidating lines that carried Kylo Ren across a battlefield, even as he hacked in desperate fury across the snowy forest of Starkiller Base. Unhinged, and he still carried weight. By comparison, dejarik seemed a bar game. She could not picture him in the thick of Maz's castle, placing bets and leering. ] It's rough around the edges.

( Kylo snorts, and for once it isn't lacking in actual humor, though the color of it barely reaches his eyes as if it's as out of practice as the rest of his attempts at being anything other than disagreeable and hostile. Maybe because he recognizes that turnabout is fair play. Maybe because of her implied attitude toward his overall style - especially when Kylo himself is critical and aware of his unpolished edges, his distinct lack of finesse and innate skill lacking when it comes to something as crucial as, say, saber combat - offers the undeniable possibility of a good ego stroke. Maybe still just because he thinks it's funny. Whatever the reason, he doesn't take offense, though he does take the opportunity to correct her. )

I prefer chess.

( His father had not preferred chess, enjoying the carnage of dejarik over the perceived boredom of moving black and white pieces across a black and white board, but Kylo had always seen a remarkable amount of symmetry in the latter and had understood its value as something beyond him, where the violence of dejarik hadn't interested him even as a child who would later go on to take pleasure in wanton destruction and horrific brutality. Leia had played with him once he was old enough to be a worthwhile opponent, on the occasions she had time to indulge the both of them in that way, though not long after she had sent him away. He and Hux had tried to play once. The board had ended up embedded in the far wall and several of the pieces had crumbled by the time they were each seven moves in. )

It's more challenging, the games can be much more drawn out, involved, and there's more strategy required, somewhat. Not to say that dejarik doesn't have its methods and tactics for winning, but - ( He glances up at her across the board, and there's a ghost of something that looks like a grin hanging around his eyes if not his mouth. Some things, at least, change with time, if his apparent interest in the game is anything to go by. ) - as you said, rough around the edges. I assume that's why your co-pilot is so good at it. ( He presses a button on his side and its twin ignites on Rey's end of the table. Kylo gestures at her to press it in the interest of getting the game under way, although the decision as to who will move first is still to be made. ) I learned at a young age. I'm sure you can imagine how without my getting into the details.

( He wonders how long they'll dance around the topic, how long until the deep well within him opens up to something deeper and darker, until they're standing at the edge of another chasm, screaming into the hurricane between them. )

Would you like to go first?

You're only doing this so you can beat me in a fight.

[ There's a little grousing as she moves a piece—the Monnok, purple and lanky—forward on the board to approach his squad of monstrous holograms. Her nose crinkles at the way it lumbers across the checkerboard, its limbs swinging in an evidently programmed pattern that spoke to the Falcon's age more than the game itself. She knows better than to delay the game with any further pressing for details about Kylo's education on the game nor his familiarity with the Falcon's table.

Though she does lift her head to consider him, and the lopsided smirk that he wears, faintly reminiscent of the father he'd shedded, once her piece has moved. Rey props her elbows on the table, only appearing graceful in the movement because it's reserved and pointed in the way it takes up space, dominating the alcove where the table sits. ]

He hasn't played it practically since we met. Once with Finn, I think. [ And it makes her worry, if that wookiee is no longer taking joy in a game that he once held so dear, how he must be handling it now that Kylo Ren is on the Falcon—how much worse he'd take it if he walked out to see Han's killer playing at that same board. It sticks like a lump in her throat, keenly aware of what a betrayal her co-pilot perceives in her current project. ]

( He makes a noise of acknowledgement directed toward her initial comment but doesn't technically respond to it, letting her interpret what she will. Nothing he could say would be any evidence to the contrary, besides, and he has moves to make in his own right, nudging one of his rear creatures a couple of spaces to the left as he strikes out during his own turn. It's too earlier for tactical advantage or aggressive maneuvers, at least until he sees what angle Rey plays and what her overall strategy might be, and his overall intent is to demonstrate rather than decimate.

Her turn again, he leans back into the concave fold of the sofa and drops his hands in his lap. )

I'm sure that he would if you asked him.

( Maybe. It's a large assumption of character to make about someone he doesn't even know anymore. Rey has better insight into her co-pilots whims and desires than Kylo ever will, and more even than that, she cares enough to wonder, to worry. He exists in the metal cage of their current predicament as a passenger, acutely aware of the topic of discussion that awaits him should he choose to engage in whatever way, while they hurtle through hyperspace or after they've landed on Hapes. It's been months and still the prospect seems too ragged, the responsibility and guilt in his actions too bright and eclipsing to do anyone any favors. The particulars of that line of thinking draw him into himself, turning him quiet as they game progresses and unfolds in a series of moves and glitching animations. At one point, Kylo's Houjix takes one step forward and then disappears completely out of view. When it emerges, it's on Rey's side of the board, occupying the same square as one of her own pieces. )

This is ridiculous.

[ His reply seems to attenuate any efforts to prod at Kylo's more learned assessment of Chewie's state in the wake of what Kylo himself had done, and Rey is more than happy to take the hint and let it fall away there with nothing more than a noncommittal noise of thought to indicate that she has heard his suggestion. ] Perhaps.

[ On the contrary, she takes an aggressive stance in the game as the turns move onward, attempting to corner him in the same predatory fashion that she had risen against him on Starkiller once she'd accepted the guidance of the Force to supplement her own abilities. She fails to fork him effectively, and before any pieces can be properly shattered, one of the holograms flashes into another on Kylo's turn and Rey's expression twists and screws up in confusion.

Luckily, Kylo voices the same, though in him, it presents more as frustration. ]

It's not supposed to do that, then, I gather.

[ Despite the inquiry itself, she sounds unruffled by that outcome; given that the dejarik table finds its home aboard the Falcon, it comes as no surprise that it would be just as unreliable as some of the ship's more important systems—the hyperdrive, for instance, which has before sputtered in and out on her in a way that some might call dangerous (she likes to think, though, that Han Solo would simply call it an inconvenience). ]

Maybe we should open the panel and tune it up. It can't be that hard to— [ An unintelligible wookiee yell calls her to the cockpit, interrupting any comment she had aimed to make. Rey finds herself disappointed by the interruption in a way that startles her, but she spares herself the examination by standing and excusing herself from Kylo Ren's company with a brief dismissal. ] That'll mean we're close to Hapes.

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i know so much about dejarik now

scholar goals

/turns it into a thesis

academic applause

much more useful than my first class of the day that's for sure

filed under things i don't miss about school: useless classes