apparare | i found something in the woods somewhere.

i found something in the woods somewhere.

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

[ The rationale behind his prompt warning does not escape her, a correction to evade the earlier anger she’d pointed towards him in a moment of panic, but what surprises her is the contentedness that follows in the wake of that acknowledgment: she’s glad to know that he considers her anger something to be evaded, to be wary of. She is a threat, a coiled and feral animal ready to strike as soon as he gives her the excuse, and it is better that she has that effect on him, given her mutual wariness of his temperament.

But that is not what keeps her silent following his admission; instead, it is the deliberate weighing of their options, considering the benefits and drawbacks of potentially meeting this Knight on her own territory. Surely she would have a better understanding of the terrain, be able to track them more quickly, but at this point, the goal is not merely to evade—they need to confront, and if they cannot convert, they need need to kill.

That’s a bucket of cold water on her head, tightening her grip on the yoke. ]

Good. [ That final decision does not come without tension, the muscles of her jaw rippling with flexion; if they have hope of converting rather than killing, her home planet is likely the place to do it. Maybe it will remind her of who she was before she was hollowed out by Snoke. Maybe it will leave her feeling on the defensive, having them crash through her personal history so recklessly. Or maybe it’ll just end this sooner.

Switches flip and the engines begin their hum, leading Rey to turn and nod her head to Kylo for them to, in tandem, ease the ship forward and lift off from the hangar. Lights strobe as they shudder towards the doors, and Rey only realizes as they begin to pass that the hangar is closing. The Millennium Falcon cuts cleanly through and into the glimmering daylight of Hapan airspace, but behind them, steel blast doors continue to draw shut as if to trap the Resistance within.

Rey sits up straighter in a panic, eyes wide, tense all over, the possibility of turning back on the tip of her tongue as she strains to help the people she had a moment ago planned to abandon. She cannot, on an emotional level, fathom the Queen-Mother’s intentions in keeping them there, though she presumes it’s to curry favor with the First Order to help them remain apart from the rest of the galaxy’s problems as it continues to sweep through. Betrayal screams through her, wracking her, demanding that she wheel the ship around and dive back in, but instead her hands hold steady, knuckles white, while tears well in her eyes.

It will be too long before she knows what has become of Finn, of Poe, of Chewbacca, but the General’s shuttle breaks atmo to return to the greater Resistance fleet above. The monolith of the cause will survive, even if her friends do not, and she needs to find a way to reconcile that ache in her chest. ]

( Kylo holds his breath without realizing it as the ship glides through the hangar doors, the motion of them sliding closed behind them an almost physical feeling as they are effectively cut off from whatever it is that is going to happen next. Knowing the First Order, knowing the Hapans, whatever waits for the Resistance fighters left inside the city walls, it won't be a pleasant second chapter. They can't afford to waste time lingering on those options, though, and in knowing that the General's ship never kissed Hapan soil, Kylo allows himself not to feel anything at all for the people who have been left behind. This is war, after all, and he is willing to pay more attention to their flight path and keeping the ship in the air as well as he's able to in terms of contribution than he is willing to spare thought for those they have had to leave behind.

Rey, though, is a different story.

Her pain is his own in the broadest sense only. He spares a glance back at the planet as they hurtle toward black space, glancing the General's ship as it rockets away from Hapes and into infinite possibility beyond. The acute sense of betrayal and abandonment that slices through Rey's consciousness, her beating, bleeding heart, punches him in the chest as a result of both their proximity to one another and their link. He tries to shake it loose, focusing on the controls and tracking lights that wink to life within the cockpit, running through the catalog of information that he has not accessed regarding this ship in a very, very long time. But when the sensation borders on achieving real volume within the dome of his skull, Kylo turns to look at her out of the corner of his eye and doesn't miss the shining brightness washing out the color of her eyes.

He doesn't know what to say, so he says nothing at first, flipping a switch that signals an unnecessary readout - more of the ship complaining about the state of the heating unit, a panel that needs closed somewhere but poses no immediate danger or risk - and trying to focus the bulk of his thought that isn't directed toward the ship and their escape on the possibility of encountering one of the Knights on Mandalore. What it would mean in terms of their overall chances, he can't be sure, just as he can't be sure that they will even meet Ji or Dryx or any of the others, although he knows that he'll feel it when they're about to. The deep pulse of Rey's wound through the Force prevents him from focusing completely, though, and so after a moment he glances over at her again, obviously privy to her conflict but operating as if he hasn't seen the shine of her eyes and the tears that gather there, however briefly. He's always preferred it when people pretend not to notice, himself. )

Keeping yourself alive and free is doing them more of a service than you would be able to do had you remained on Hapes.

( He could offer her some platitude, some made up inside knowledge about the First Order or Hapan customs, but they would be lies, and Kylo doesn't have any desire to start lying to her now. She would know he was making it up, besides, and he's never been particularly well-versed in feigning sympathy or compassion; it's either present, or it isn't. )

[ To have Kylo Ren offering her words of comfort, even in a more honest form than the cheap platitudes and reassurances so easily reached for, turns her stomach and Rey grits her teeth while she blinks back the tears and swallows the thick lump that forms in her throat with difficulty.

She can't help but think how he has no idea what she is feeling, the difficulty of it, because it's too foreign to him to care about someone else's safety more than she cares about herself. When she was on Jakku, her survival was all she had, but that's changed now, and it's worth a great deal less to her than Finn's, than Chewie's. ]

Don't. [ It's perhaps unfair to cut him off so abruptly, to ignore the clear fact that he'd evaded any jeering answer to her apparent tears, but that doesn't stop Rey from doing it. She doesn't want his hand to be the one on her shoulder, figuratively or otherwise. Rather than dwell, she pulls the yoke back and the engines accelerate until the ship is rattling with the force of breaking the atmosphere, a clean fade into the peaceful abyss of space.

Regardless of who she's doing service to, she follows through, and they clear the planet and leave the trickling pattern of Resistance ships parting at another angle, a thin belt of grey splotches on the inky cloak of space. She raises her arm then and wipes a tear that leaks down her cheek away, stubborn enough to be mad at it for daring to fall rather than examining the sentiment that led to it. She can't afford to be plagued with it right now.

She sets immediately about charting the course through hyperspace around debris, letting the projected potentialities distract her from her own feelings with the familiar coolness of soft blue light. She locks it in, promising them an arrival at Mandalore within half a day. Kylo warrants only a presumptive nod from him as she reaches for the hyperdrive, waiting for him to join her in engaging it so that the stars can streak into white lines down the front window of the ship, and peel away the last remnants of Hapes' hold. ]

( She isn't wrong to reprimand him, but Kylo can't find it within himself to feel chastised despite the force behind that one singular syllable. He doesn't counter with anything all the same, doesn't push back with a similar punch though he assumes that his silence serves its purpose in its own right. That she sees fit to respond to him in the way that she does means that what he's said has taken root somewhere, and despite the displeasure it might stir within her, wherever it's found a hold and burrowed in is good enough for him. Rey is right: he doesn't have anyone to care about other than himself in the way that she clearly and painfully cares for those she has come to surround herself with. Not anymore.

The ship vibrates as it carries them further into space, gradually breaking free of Hapes' gravity well and leaving the swirling mess of the planet and its inhabitants behind. He's glad to be rid of it, glad in a way to have the eyes of the Resistance off of his back, and as such takes a moment to draw a deep breath in through his nose, letting it slowly out the way that it came. His head clears somewhat, disengaging from the fog of adrenaline and the haze that his fitful, exhaustive time spent asleep had left over his mind. Kylo feels along his own nerve endings where the location sensor digs into his hip, wedged underneath the weight of his saber - two comforting yet unpleasant reminders of the storm that waits for them on the horizon - and tries to relax despite the knots winding themselves together out of muscle and skin, still on pins and needles while on this freighter.

Rey charts their path through hyperspace, and he watches her do it with some amount of interest, refreshing himself on protocol that he hasn't been privy to for well over twenty years. It isn't entirely different from his own Upsilon-class shuttle, but then he's not routinely the one piloting it. Despite knowing what he's doing innately, it doesn't hurt to pay attention, the same way in which he had paid attention when Rey was finishing repairs on the heating unit. He's ready when she prompts him, and he assists her in easing the YT-model into hyperspace, running through recycled steps as they coax the hyperdrive out of stasis and into active duty. It is, possibly, the only thing they have ever done together without arguing over it first, and as such he stays in the co-pilot seat until black becomes white becomes a swirling screen of bending time and space all around them.

Without saying a word, he fishes the location sensor out of his pocket and keys it into the ship's computer, pulling up a technical readout of the sensor's specs and data on one of the small screens that decorates the cockpit. The sensor reads offline as he punches in commands and coordinates, splicing in several relay points that are sure to confuse the First Order and possibly a few of the more technologically lacking Knights, if they're lucky, if it doesn't throw them off their trail entirely. Once it's done, Kylo unbuckles his belt and climbs to his feet. The back of his clothing is littered with light and dark brown hair, but he only shows Rey his profile, disengaging the location probe from the nav computer and holding it in his palm. )

The signal is set to beam back to Hapes. ( His tone is neutral, and he doesn't look at her. He hadn't missed the pass of her hand over her face as she'd wiped away any and all evidence that she'd been crying. Another time and he might have exploited it. Now is not that time, and all he feels is uncomfortable for having glimpsed it. ) Then bounce back to Corellia before veering up into Kuat for a short while - long enough to refuel, I suppose - and then hurtle down toward Nar Shaddaa, where the signal will die. The First Order might be unwilling to get involved immediately with the Hutts, so it could buy you some time. ( He tosses the sensor to her, tugging restlessly on his gloves. She can plug the thing back into the computer and check to see if he's lying, if she wants. ) You can choose when to activate, though I wouldn't dally if I were you.

( With that he strides from the cockpit, remembering to duck on the way out. )

[ All business, Rey keeps her eyes fixed on him while he explains the nature of what he'd programmed the sensor to do. For the most part, it falls outside the realm of her expertise, but he breaks down the basics to a sufficiently simple path and leaves her to pull the trigger on it, the decision one more on a pile of difficult ones she's had to make.

She closes her fist around the sensor, debates crushing it and letting the Knights find them sooner to get it over with, but survivalism is built too deep into the core of her being to allow her fist to clench. Impotent for the strength of her own will to survive as long as possible, she lets her head tip back against the seat as she peers out at the emptiness of hyperspace unfurling before her.

Shutting her eyes affords her a sense of clarity, a calm that settles over her, and she lets herself focus on the movements of the Force as they whip through it. Absently, she wonders if the nature of a hyperdrive pierces the veil of the Force as it does the fabric of space; would it be damaged? All curiosity quiets the moment she decides to reach out for Finn, the clumsy blanket of her awareness grasping across the galaxy with such cloying desperation that she's sure to find some trace of him, but she turns up empty, and it only serves to sink her deeper into sorrow by meters.

Reality rushes back. She opens her hand and stares down into it, activating the sensor and leaving it on the copilot seat to be forgotten. If Kylo Ren would damn them both, she decides, let him.

As much as she doesn't want to chase him, there's only so much space in the ship, and isolation won't give her any answers or distract her from her demons. When she appears to him again, she has composed herself, a stern and steady look firmly set on her face but without the accompanying confidence and certainty. Regardless of what she has gathered to regain the impression of ease, the misstep of Hapes has shaken her.

She hovers a moment, warring with herself over whether or not she should even bring it up again by attempting justifications for her feelings and the presentation of them, if she needs to qualify her vulnerability before Kylo Ren. Resolving against it, she redirects. ]

They're already hunting us, aren't they? That's why I could feel you stirring in your sleep. [ Terming what he had done sleep seems generous, but she won't insult him by dragging his unpleasantries out into the open air when he'd done her the courtesy of leaving her tears unaddressed. ] You can sense them.

( He's in he main hold, crammed into the deepest curve of the sofa around the dejarik board with a holo open in front of him. It isn't his, but there's little else to do occupy himself with and he's sick of trying to keep the ship from falling apart after having worked through the night cycle on Hapes. For once, at any rate, the Falcon doesn't seem to be actively conspiring against them in an effort to dismantle itself while barely even into the navigational cycle, and Kylo considers that a boon worth taking. There isn't anything worthwhile programmed into the datapad, but he still scours the contents, however unsuccessfully, in an attempt to distract himself from the girl down the hall.

Giving her the authority and ability to choose to determine the usefulness of the location sensor doesn't absolve him of the reality of what happens once they drop out of hyperspace and into Mandalorian territory, nor does it act as an adequate peace offering to ease them through the strain they are sure to feel as a result of spending the next however-many-cycles in the presence of only each other. He knows that. He isn't even sure that he wants to create the illusion that what he's doing is extending a hand toward her in a gesture of good faith, knowing that she is just as likely to slap it away as she is to draw it toward her only in the interest of sinking her teeth in. Kylo can admire that about her, for as frustrating as he finds it, and in staring down at the dull contents of the holo, he's able to let that understanding wash over him for the first time, really, in its entirety since before they landed on Hapes.

He's alone in the hold and so there's no harm in pausing for just one second to stop and consider the gravity of what it is he's done, but in peeling back that curtain to peer behind it, a surge of bile rises sharply in the back of his throat and burns like he's swallowed acid. Kylo's eyes water from staring too long without blinking at the bright glow of the holopad, and he names the sensation clawing its way up his esophagus for what it is. Fear. Adrenaline and momentum have caught him up so completely that he's not had time to adequately label it, but just as Rey grapples with the weight of what she's done in abandoning the people that she loves to a fate she can't know, Kylo sits and lets the gravity of his actions and choices burn an ulcer in his gut.

Fortunately, he isn't alone in the hold for long, as he feels Rey hovering just outside the doorway even without the use of the Force telling him that she's there. He looks up at her when she speaks, wondering at the nature and intent of her question but not pressing it, and then glances back down at the very interesting content of nothing on the holo in his lap before responding. )

I believe so, yes. ( He shifts, still uncomfortable with the knowledge that she - that they - are able to sense each other even in this way. Not definitive images or concepts but sensations and feelings. Despite how frequently they have been in each other's minds, it still leaves him feeling exposed, but Kylo knows that it can be a blessing rather than a hindrance if they continue utilizing it correctly. ) I don't know where they are right now or what they're doing, but even if I couldn't sense something from them, I would still be a fool to think that they weren't coming. Snoke will have had enough time to call them together. He will have figured out the deception that we presented him with when we left Corellia, especially as I've not made a conscious effort or decision to let him in. Mandalore will serve as a decent detour, and the location sensor will give them pause, but neither will suffice as a diversion for long. They'll find us.

( Kylo studies her a moment, the set of her jaw and the angles of her face, the deep well that opens and gapes behind the brightness of her eyes, still lined red but a measure more composed than when he'd left her in the cockpit. He casts out, not toward her but backward, cycling through the bulk of their interactions and deciding on one in particular that draws his interest just as much now as it had then, and he sits up and sets the holo down next to him on the old, uncomfortable cushion. )

You said you'd seen them before, through the Force. You said that it was raining. ( He pauses long enough to let that sink into his own bones, reconciling it with what he has been able to retain from the nightmare he experienced on Hapes. ) What exactly did you see?

[ Finding him there cements the reality of their circumstance, settling cool awareness and resignation in around Rey like a heavy cloak that she must steel herself to wear. A flash of darkness deepens the lines of her expression, but it softens out as she comes to terms with the fact. Until something can be done, this will be the status quo, and she cannot decide in that instant if it's better or worse than the isolation and abandonment that stagnated her youth.

He incites the memory of the vision that flooded her when she touched Luke's lightsaber without fully understanding the turmoil that comes with it. Then, she hadn't been sure if what she saw was a dream or a memory, a vision of the past or the future, but now she feels like she's better able to sift through. Some of it was her history, some Luke's, and some of it was their shared future together, where the Force guided their paths to converge in one. ]

I already told you. [ That isn't quite true, not entirely. She lowers herself onto the bench beside him, adjacent and around the corner that it bends to around the dejarik board, affording the two of them a safe amount of buffer room. She folds her hands on top of the table, shoulders hunched, and weighs him with her gaze as if to determine if she trusts him with more than that, or if she has to hold it back.

When she examines the reason, she summons up that sense of uncertainty. If it is a vision of the future, with Kylo Ren standing with the Knights of Ren flanking him in the pouring rain, then it means that his presence on the side of the Resistance is temporary, a fleeting daydream. It leaves her to sift through what she can make of the cloaked Knight that he cut down while she crouched below, overwhelmed by the suddenness of the experience.

As much as she wants to dismiss her fears about him as unsupported nonsense, she can't stop thinking about the same nightmare vision that he questions her about now. ]

It was dark, and raining. You were there, and more than a half-dozen of them. I saw you run one of them through with your lightsaber from behind while he was coming towards me.

( He watches her openly, on purpose, in an active effort to discern what she might be thinking or feeling without parading around in her head. Darkness flashes there, and light, a series of contrasts that betray how much she continues to grapple with their intersecting existences. The bench makes a high-pitched and short-lived creaking sound as Rey sits, close enough that he can feel the high wall erected between them but far enough away that he can't count the number of bricks that comprise it. )

I dreamt something similar on Hapes. ( Kylo can't determine whether or not he's using the word similar by the loosest definition possible or not. He's certainly not eight-years-old anymore - despite sometimes acting the part - and Rey had not even been a light in her parents' eyes by the time he was that old, but that's the problem with trying to determine nonsense from insight when it comes to the Force. Like shifting sand through a sieve in an attempt to find a pearl, most of the time what you shake out is just more sand. Regardless, Kylo screws his expression up in an effort to chase the tail end of what he remembers ) The rain, in the dark. All of them, as you've described it, to a certain extent.

( Even as the words come out of his mouth, it doesn't feel like it's the first time that he's regurgitated them in some fashion, just as meeting Rey for the first time hadn't felt like the first time. Whispers and tremors around that word - girl - a yawning and stretching of limbs in the dark void that only he and his master were meant to fill. He couldn't explain it then, and Kylo isn't sure were he prompted any further than she's indirectly prompting him that he would be able to explain it now. Thoughts and feelings. The Force. It all muddles together and washes away in a swirl of dark colors and smeared, bright light. )

I saw one of them approaching you, and then I was behind him, and then I wasn't anymore. I was down on the ground, and you were above me, reaching out your hand. ( Dark eyes chase the pattern on the dejarik board over to where Rey sits, and the realization that he could kill the remaining Knights just as easily as he could rejoin them swims vaguely to the surface of his thoughts, a lone bubble from down below. He feels suspended, hanging above an impact point far below what his eyes can track. They will try to kill him, he's sure, but what if they try to bring him back? Will he go? He couldn't, not without knowing that his own end would be imminent, not without undoing everything that he and Rey - that he - has worked to do, chosen to do. He swallows and inadvertently sinks down further into the sofa. ) Some of it felt like it might be true. Most of it just felt like a bad dream. That's the problem with reading things through the Force, sometimes. There's no way to be sure of what's true, what might be true, and what is just the result of some bad holo you watched once.

( But Rey had never used the word dream, and that's what marks the difference between them. Kylo can't decide if he thinks his own experience is the result of the bleeding of her mind into his or something else, something different, some warning about what's coming. After everything - even before everything - he likes to think that he still has no intention of killing her, that he certainly wouldn't allow anyone else to kill her, other than himself if it came down to it. Certainly not Dryx or any of the other Knights. What that says about him and his thoughts and opinions toward Rey as a whole is something he still isn't willing to examine at length, despite having a decent idea since she woke on Starkiller. Regardless of what he thinks, however, he's never been more sure that something is waiting for them, coming for them. It pulls at him and fills his mind not unlike the way in which his inevitable default to Snoke's guidance and leadership had. Unavoidable. )

I think it's safe to say, though, that Mandalore might be our last stop without incident, if it ends up being without incident at all.

It wasn't a dream.

[ Stubborn and sure, Rey doesn't flinch as she defends herself against the accusation of uncertainty for the real, wracking fear of the vision was that she could feel that it was real, all of it. Right down to the far off voice whispering her name and urging her forward. The call it made was real, realer than anything she'd felt before that point, and its summons reified her departure from Jakku, from the life she'd known for so long. ]

It came to me when I touched Luke's lightsaber for the first time. I wasn't asleep or dreaming or anything like that: it was real. It will be real.

[ Acceptance of the verity comes with the unfortunate side effect of acknowledging that the haunting painting of Kylo Ren looming at the forefront of a squadron of Knights would be just as real, one day. For what purpose, she cannot guess, but Rey does not find herself in wistful anticipation.

Still. She can, and reluctantly does, agree with him on one thing: Mandalore will be the end of their relative peace, if it could ever be called that. They've moved so readily from one war zone to another, battle after battle, that she can hardly believe it qualifies, but the Knights of Ren make it more personal. There is no escaping, no hiding among an army of Resistance fighters to be part of a crashing wave: when the Knights of Ren come, they'll come for Kylo and Rey. ]

( A flash of white, hot jealousy rips through him like a solar flare, scorching everything else within him and making the back of his neck burn bright red and warm. He's long made peace - to the best of his ability, at least - with the fact that his grandfather's ligthsaber now belongs to her, but the fact that it carries with it knowledge and foresight of a seemingly inevitable outcome involving himself when he is not even seen as the more worthy of the two of them to posses it is an enraging concept. Weakness. Futility. Unworthy. His hands curl into one another on the dejarik board, though he's fortunate in that black leather swaddles the tightening of his knuckles from pale skin to nearly translucent as Kylo struggles not to anger impulsively.

He tells himself that it involves her, too, more so than it does him, given what she's seen and the perspective in which she's seen it. It does little to assuage the inferiority that he feels, but it does enough to keep his voice from winding tightly around itself, allowing him to speak somewhat freely. As freely as he can when trying to determine the future of things and their involvement in them. )

You have a great deal of conviction about that for someone who's done what she's done in order to get the both of us here. ( But it sounds real. It sounds more real. Sitting here on his father's ship with the girl who split his face into unequal parts, who outshined him and resisted him and dragged herself through hell to quiet all the noise in his head, even if it ends up being only for a short time, whose thoughts and feelings have the ability to rattle around in his own skull without provocation, seems like it should be the fiction. His place at the head of the other Knights as Rey has seen it seems more realistic than his distinct lack of effort to turn her, to bring her back before Snoke and present her. Maybe he's playing a long con and doesn't even know it yet, although the likelihood of that being true seems about as possible as he and Chewbacca absconding to distant stars together. ) It almost seems to make more sense to kill me on Corellia to make sure this vision you've had doesn't come true than it does to take the risk and fly all the way to Mandalore. So - ( Kylo pauses, and asks the question before he actually even realizes that it's a thought that has occurred to him. ) - why?

( Why try at all, if this is the outcome? Why try at all, even if it isn't? Another time, another place, he would have taken a knee in front of Snoke and asked for guidance, for further training and tutelage. But there is no Snoke in his head to lead Kylo down a path that makes sense of it all. There is no one, just silence. )

[ In the instant after he presses her, Rey’s mind goes blank, as if every reason she’d ever used to justify the scrambling process of dragging him by the ear back into the light fell to pieces under scrutiny. Multitudes surge in a moment later, a counterattack to beat down the presumption of their nonexistence, leaving her unable to settle on which is most accurate, on which drove her completely.

The day Kylo Ren slayed Han Solo, Rey and Leia shared the loss of their loved one, and Rey mourned him as if he were her own. She could not mourn with Leia if she were the one to take the General’s son from her, and then she would suffer the loss of the only maternal warmth she’s ever felt. It’s selfish, surely, but in the empathic way that Rey manages best.

Then there’s the paralyzing responsibility of being the Jedi’s hope for balance, for resistance against the dark shadow that looms at the edge of the galaxy. The isolation of being Luke Skywalker’s only apprentice while he gives her insight into the Force in part and parcel, only offering what he believes she can manage and holding the rest back as leverage of some kind. Leaving Jakku should have meant leaving her loneliness behind, but it grows and stretches in the void in her chest that swells with each expanded understanding of what it means to be a Jedi. Abstinence from companionship, from connections, while maintaining the rich well of compassion within her asks a lot of a girl who is clumsily drunk on the sudden flood of affection that comes with breaking out of her hermitage.

The Jedi code asks her to offer compassion to Kylo Ren rather than the point of her lightsaber, but that is even less valid than claiming Kylo Ren had spared her life out of the kindness of his heart on Takodana. She spared him because she fears being the only one, restricted by what Luke will offer her, carrying the weight of the Jedi code alone on her back and hoping to make the best of it.

The threat of being left adrift and alone is two-fold, then: the danger of losing the mother she’s never had to grief and blame on the heels of losing Han Solo, and the tremulous responsibility of being the sole carrier of the Jedi legacy. Both swirl together into a selfish, dark justification for the fact that Kylo Ren has been allowed to survive his father, and acknowledging that fact leaves Rey—not for the first time—wondering if she has made the right choice. ]

The first time I saw General Organa, we wept together. Even though she knew it to be true, could feel it in the pulse of the Force, she didn’t understand how Han Solo could be dead because she could still sense a light in her son, and she believed that it burned brighter than the darkness that Snoke had drowned him in.

[ Even with Kylo Ren sitting across from her, she speaks of Ben Solo as a lost boy, a forgotten memory of a third party that is far away from the dejarik board and the Millennium Falcon, for the light that Leia accounts for is not a light that Rey has seen firsthand, not a belief she can force onto him in the same way, even if she has no problem levying the name against him where appropriate, brandishing it as a weapon. ]

When I first saw that vision, I thought you were a nightmare, a haunting specter with an army at your back ready to cut me down. But like your mother, you showed me another possibility—on Yaga Minor, do you remember? [ She lifts her gaze, leans intently forward as the metal of the table sighs and settles below her weight. ] You and that cloaked figure were towering over me when you cut him down: I believe, when the time comes to destroy him, you’ll do it to protect me.

[ She has to believe that because the only other choice is to acknowledge that she’s made all the wrong choices, and the right one would have been to cost herself everything by killing him. ]

( It does him no advantages to disagree with her, to dismiss her charges as a mother's brand of denial or to register them as a misinterpreted fortune read in tea leaves or with a carefully illustrated deck of cards. The truth had been spoken aloud months ago, at any rate, gathered together in Han Solo's palms before the sharp burst of red through one side and out the other had snuffed him out and scattered that truth away. I'm being torn apart, Kylo had said, and recalling it now recalls the way in which his throat had constricted and his voice had come high and his vision had doubled and then tripled before blurring completely. It had only cleared when the sun dimmed and then died, allowing him to blink into the red emergency lighting that had striped the bridge and then drove a wall between himself and his father. Then the sharp nothingness, like a light going out inside of himself, had choked him before that fissure of intense agony had ripped him open from the left side out, and he had looked up to see them both standing there, the traitor and -

Rey. Sitting almost across from him now, sifting through her own emotions even as she presents her reasoning for her direction to him. Instinctively, Kylo knows that it's more than just the moral obligation that she feels toward his mother, more than just the civic duty she has as a new Jedi to expel whatever darkness has hooked talons into him and drag him - kicking and screaming, if need be - back toward the light, and for that reason he doesn't altogether understand her. Were their positions reversed, he would kill - but no, he can't even complete that thought without ultimately admitting that it's a bold faced lie. Because he does understand her, even without the bond. That knowledge in and of itself leaves him as conflicted as anything does, as much as her answer does, and he's forced to live with the tightening of his fist even as he brings it down to curl over the lip of the bench, rippling the old cushioning underneath the force of it. )

General Organa is misguided about many things at work in the galaxy, whether she's willing to admit it or not. ( Despite the resentment trying to claw its way out of his throat by way of his hand curled around the bench, it's a mostly internal sentiment that manifests in a way not dissimilar to his admission to Solo on the bridge: a recognition of who and what he has become in the wake of someone who believes that he's capable of better, who believes that he belongs. But there's no going back, and that's the fact that Solo and Organa could both never recognize. ) Organa thinks that her son will come back as she once knew him, but what she refuses to remember is that her son was never the boy she likes to pretend that he was. He was angry and afraid and weird and - ( Kylo's eyes skip over to where Rey sits, involuntarily drawn to her and her association with this one word. ) - alone.

( Of course his loneliness will never amount to what she has been forced to experience, but it still stands to reason that his own loneliness as a child was at least in part somewhat responsible for the ease with which he was drawn away by Snoke. But Kylo rushes to cover it, more at ease discussing the possibility of their future in each other's lives than he is with rehashing the very real past as seen through different sets of eyes. Kylo's own skip away from Rey's face and settle back on the checkered board between them, and he stretches his legs out long in front of them, so that they stick out on the other side of the table, out of his line of sight but probably visible to Rey if she looked. )

You managed to get one thing right in all of that, though. I have been quite the nightmare.

( He doesn't disagree with her, though, about the rest of it, about protecting her. Whether it's because he agrees with her or can't speak to the validity of her prediction as a whole, even Kylo himself can't determine. )

[ Rey never expected for him to agree with her or even validate her interpretation as plausible; no, that sort of silliness fell beyond the sort of optimism that she could rationalize. Still, she feels some of the wind come out of her sails when he reduces the worth of her explanation to a dated assessment of the monster he fashioned himself into. ]

I thought you might say that.

[ Though she shakes her head, Rey doesn't discourage or undermine any of what he says. Just as she will not expect him to subscribe with a committed heart to the cause or to her inexplicable understanding of the vision as it stood, she will not ask him to become Ben Solo again. She never knew Ben Solo. The loss she feels is only secondary, distant and mitigated by the fact that sitting before her like this, Kylo Ren has a greater capacity to understand and relate to her than Ben Solo ever could. Kylo Ren is a product of loneliness and isolation, just as she is, even if he came to it by will.

All the same, the disgruntled twitch of her mouth joins with a turn of her gaze in an expression that reluctantly admits that she knows what she says sounds— ] You think I don't know how mad it sounds. But mark my word: you're going to spare my life, just as I've spared yours. If I had to guess, I'll bet it's for the same reasons, too.

[ Not the ones she has given voice to, admittedly, but the other, deeper and darker purpose, the gnawing self-possessed loneliness that spins and commands her, driving a need for affirmation and understanding. Long before she reached out for him, Kylo Ren was grasping with spindly leather fingers for her, and Rey reckons now that he merely recognized it sooner—though whether that was a luxury of his age, his training, or the fact that he wasn't the one being hunted, she cannot say. ]

( Dark eyes track the change in her expression, starting at her mouth and working its way up to the inclusion of her own eyes as she turns it on him. Kylo is already waiting with a slight quirk at the juncture of his lips, not really a smile or even a smirk but the beginning of an imitation of one, gathered together at the expense of being able to guess what she might say next based on the look stamped across her face. He isn't wrong, but the truth is that they're both thinking the same thing, thinking how ridiculous it sounds. Kylo might put more stock in the Force and its navigational properties than anyone other than the girl next to him or their separate masters lightyears away from one another, but there are some things that just seem absurd no matter how learned the pupil is.

Sensing awakenings and people and thoughts and feelings is one thing, but stealing glances into potential future events is another, and for as many things as he's seen and experienced and felt by way of the Force presenting itself to him in the way that Rey is suggesting - though never with the kind of convincing solidity that she expresses - there's still a measure of doubt to take into consideration. The paths that weave together, crisscross and overlap and run parallel but never touch, are infinite, and it's never an easy thing to determine what will happen, how it will happen, when it will happen. But Kylo sits with the knowledge as Rey presents it for a moment before choosing to respond, letting it settle down into his bones under the force - lowercase f - of her conviction before conceding the point. )

I've spared your life more than once in recent memory. ( Of all the times he could have killed her, or at least tried to, Starkiller stands out with the sharpest edge. He'd thrown her into a tree like a rag doll and could have done worse but hadn't. It's the deeper and darker purpose that Rey alludes to, and it wells up in him like the crescendo of a cymbal crash, gaining in volume and pitch until it's all but a loud roar in his ears. Understanding. Affirmation. He extended a hand toward her more than once upon their initial encounter and what he found there was enough to snag his attention and keep it fixed. It's with his face turned away, studying where the leather weaves together as his fingers interlock, that he admits it. ) If you think your assumptions and your vision sound insane, allow me to even the odds and say that I've never wanted you dead, and I'm sure you've been aware of the fact. Yes, I wanted something different from you when we met initially, and you made it abundantly clear that that was off the table - ( Kylo glances up and over at her, showing her the healed scar bisecting his face rather than gesturing to it. It has the benefit of catching her in the crosshairs of his attention but also the downside of drawing attention to himself as a result. Still, he doesn't glance away until the last moment. ) - but even then I felt the galaxy would be far less interesting without you in it. Regardless of what's changed or what might happen as a result of our shared circumstances, I still think that's true, and I still believe that I won't ever come to a point in time where I believe that your death would be beneficial.

( Having straightened in order to fold his hands together over the dejarik board, Kylo leans back into the bench and relaxes them somewhat, letting the tension instead manifest in the tight line of his shoulders and neck. Despite the severity of the admission, he feels better - and much worse - for having said it. It isn't something she's likely to be unaware of, but maybe it evens the odds between them somewhat, regardless of how much or how little stock he puts into the validity of what she's seen of what waits for them around future corners. )

All that aside, there's still the issue of when the Knights will choose to make an appearance, and how many of them will be in attendance when the time comes. ( This is easier. It is so much easier to talk about logistics than it is to admit that he prefers her alive and breathing. ) The man that I saw - and the man I believe that you saw - is a man named Dryx Ren. He's proficient in hand-to-hand combat and carries a weapon not unlike a vibroblade. He's also an unmitigated pain in the ass. He'll come. It's just a matter of whether or not he comes alone.

[ The distraction of Dryx doesn't escape her, nor does it successfully draw the enraptured look out of her expression as she levels her gaze on him. Claiming that she had never been tempted by the pull he offered would be a lie, for he has always fascinated her in a way that cannot be explained or accepted by Rey or the people she calls family. Kylo Ren has his own gravity, no doubt in part due to the way he teeters on the edge of star-like combustion, pulling everything around it inward to increase its mass before it implodes.

In his confession, Rey sees something she understands, glinting from behind the black steel of a mask—sentiment. The inscrutable tether that links them in a way that traces back to before he'd ever touched her mind, to the moment she felt him approach in the forest. For as long as she has been the unsolvable thorn in his side, he has been the face peering out at her from the darkness, reaching towards her light, and they both effortlessly recognize the similar paradox of their inability to kill the other, struggling only with verbalizing it.

After a few moments, Rey permits a small smile to turn the corners of her mouth upward, finding humor in the way Kylo Ren decries his own team—it still jars her, to consider him scowling about Dryx with her over a game board rather than threatening and intimidating her (or at the very least, attempting to) with the inevitable approach of the Knight. Not lease of all on the list of uncomfortable items that she chooses to process as humor lies the fact that Kylo Ren's scowling report is paralyzingly normal, an easy conversation that exists outside of the context of the mad path they carve for themselves through the middle of the galaxy. ]

I hope to not spend enough time in his company to recognize him for the pain in the ass that he is. [ But with that quip aside, Rey takes the time to consider—hand-to-hand and a vibroblade. He's versatile, and probably physically powerful. ] If you're asking, again, if I'm going to be ready … [ Defensiveness warns him off the notion. ]

( Kylo does not roll his eyes but the idea and the threat of doing so is there. Yes, you're very tough and capable, I know, he thinks, before he has the wherewithal to consider the possibility that it might be broadcasted beyond the wall of his own mental constructs. Despite the fact that he has lived far longer than Rey with the knowledge that his thoughts are not always necessarily private, it will still take some getting used to when it comes to her. The bigger items deserving of secrecy and shadows are easier to disguise, to draw the curtain across, but the smaller, seemingly private thoughts that flit from one corner of his mind to the next, unbidden and barely formed for their brevity, are something altogether different. )

I know you're going to be ready. ( Kylo goes ahead and says it anyway, in some form, assuming that jumping ahead of the beast is better than being caught underfoot and unawares. ) I have about as much desire to draw you into a debate about it as I do to stick my head in a nexu's mouth.

( That of course does nothing to soothe the nagging feeling in the back of his mind that neither of them will be ready when the time comes. Rey's vision seems to lend credence to the fact that she, at least, will find herself at a disadvantage in some capacity. Never mind the apparent conflict of interest that exists as his inability to choose a side as it relates to where he stands and what he does in both his dream and what Rey has seen in a more solidified manner. The Knights or Rey. The Order or the Resistance. Snoke or himself. Sitting in the hold as the ship hurtles toward Mandalore, Kylo likes to think that he's sure of himself enough to say one way or the other, but he knows without having to cross-examine it that it's a notion that's never been true. )

Don't let it make you overconfident. ( His tone meanders toward a warning, but there's also latent annoyance threaded through it as a result of that desire to roll his eyes at her, the barb tossed her way only seconds prior, flat and sarcastic and unimpressed. ) He might be a pain in the ass but even at his worst, he's still a real opponent. All of the Knights are, and they won't go down easy.

[ If she didn't know better, she might read his humbling discouragement as concern. Luckily, she knows better. Rey does not afford him the luxury of self control, rolling her eyes with unadulterated distaste, and she skips right past annoyed frustration and into total dismissal of his warning. If anything, the manner in which he makes it only disinclines her to listen. ]

I've met real opponents before and won. [ Resolutely, she ignores that Kylo Ren has just finished explaining to her that he has often spared her life and never held an interest in killing her in the same way that these knights will try to. By the same token, though, Rey could easily argue that they are not as powerful as their leader, and the disparity of their bloodthirst and skill comes out in the wash. It's better than confessing her uncertainty to the unstable ally sitting before her, anyway.

The metal framework of the ship rattles and sighs under the stress of hyperspace, and Rey isn't immediately sure if it's from the added stress of their billowing frustration with one another. She pushes to her feet and turns away from Kylo, pacing a few feet to defuse some of the tension that permeates between them. It's only a matter of time before this pressure cooker combusts, but she'd like that time to be far, far away from now, on a planet where it won't kill them. ]

They don't have to go down easy. They just have to go down. [ That's as close to a compromise as she's likely to make, acknowledging that it will be a hell of a battle but still asserting certainty that they will win. Without certainty, she can have no steady frame of mind, and everything else will unravel from there. Already, Kylo Ren has interfered enough with her temperate calm. ]

( Her reaction is one hundred percent the reaction that he was expecting and sort of hoping for, and Kylo, though probably out of place and unwanted, feels a small smile creeping up the side of his mouth that he doesn't discourage. It's hardly nice in nature and entirely at her expense, which is why it seems more appropriate to let it manifest than to chase it away, but it doesn't reach beyond the apex of a smirk, and he finds himself nodding along to her assessment of herself in a similar fashion. He's reminded of their trek through the woods back on Corellia, her absolute rejection of assistance in the form of a lesson as if eager to prove that she didn't need the help in the first place, and the thought leads to the idea of Rey against a full battalion of his Knights with the same attitude.

His mouth is suddenly full of saliva and though the smirk at the corner of his mouth remains in half-bloom, he swallows sharply and opens his mouth to reply to her only to snap it shut again as the ship vibrates, like a speeder coming too close to a rock in the dirt and jumping as a result. Kylo tracks his gaze upward, wondering if some system is about to go, pitch them into darkness or drop them out of hyperspace or blow them up, and only looks over again once Rey gets to her feet and moves away from him. For once, Kylo realizes, the effects of tension and stress as it moves through the Force is not majorly from him, though he can't pretend that he isn't exacerbating it to some degree. )

You've met real opponents before and won? ( His voice is a little more incredulous than was leading himself to believe right up until the nanosecond before he decided to speak at all, and he has the overwhelming urge, despite his prior amusement at her reaction, to stand and crowd her as if to drive home the idea that he is trying to communicate. The ship continues to groan, however, and he is careful to keep his own frustration, so ready to jump to attention at a moment's notice, in check. ) Were you listening when I told you that I've never seriously tried to kill you before, or do you just choose to hear the parts that you want and ignore the rest? ( Some of the frustration is his affronted pride, displayed no better than it is in the great scar across his face. ) I could have killed you on Yaga Minor, you were paying such little attention to what was going on around you. And I could have killed you on Corellia if I wanted to. I could have killed you on Starkiller, if I wanted to.

( All points that are debatable, but Kylo chooses not to see them that way. The fact remains that at least on Starkiller he had the upper-hand for the majority of the battle and used it only in an attempt to subdue her, his injuries at the time notwithstanding. Kylo refuses to look at the tear from the bowcaster or the burn FN-2187 had scored prior to Rey's involvement as excuses for his performance, won't use them as a crutch in trying to drive this point home. )

You are about to come up against a faction under the Supreme Leader's command that does not adhere to the established rules of warfare, who are not part of the war itself. I didn't want to kill you on Yaga Minor, just as I didn't want to kill you on Corellia or Starkiller. You've seen it yourself. The Knights of Ren won't share my perspective when it comes to your involvement in my defection. In the event they don't come at you with everything they have right at the outset, if their goal is to capture rather than kill you, the real opponent you will face in the end won't be them, and it won't be me. It will be Snoke.

( Even as the words leave his mouth, he recognizes the potential for this reality even more strongly than the prospect of Rey's death at Dryx's or Ji's or any of the other Knights' hands. Kylo has gone rogue, from their perspective, and that to them is unforgivable. Even if he were to weave a lie complicated and complex enough at the feet of the Supreme Leader to satisfy his master's outrage and disgust, it wouldn't spare Kylo the punishment that waits for him as a result of his actions. But Rey. Snoke looked right into his apprentice's head as Kylo shook him free and it was Rey that he looked for, Rey that he saw, and it's Rey that he'll come for, as much as he'll come for Kylo initially. There's a bad taste in his mouth when he continues. )

Give the situation the respect and gravity that it deserves.

[ Trapped by the sting of direct confrontation with the fact that he wasn't trying to kill her, that he's never wanted to, Rey feels cornered into acknowledgment of a point she still won't agree with, and the reluctance grinds her teeth together with the same sawing sound that trembles through the Millennium Falcon's bones, though that's more likely a result of the ship's age than anything she's venting.

He forces her, in this way, to address the unease she meets his confession with. She cannot deflect and claim that he was trying to cut her down, can't declare that he merely wants her to die at another hand regardless of what intelligence he's offered, because he preempted it with a declaration that she still doesn't know what to do with, but nor is she ready to truly examine what that means. The conflict leaves her in an infuriating limbo of inaction, with a ramrod straight back and the stillness of an ancient oak as she weathers the hurricane of threats and warnings that he slings at her. ]

You think in order for me to take this seriously, I have to be afraid. [ A sneering accusation hangs on you, as if digging the knives of her words under his fingernails, calling him a coward in a secondary whisper. He registers everything, she concludes, in stages of fear—the fear of inadequacy and failure, the fear of confronting his past and his crimes, and his fear of retaliation by Snoke.

That last one, she must admit, chills her bones in a way that cannot be dismissed as the recycled air pouring out of a vent onto her, yet even in that threat, it's not a warning she hears but something very near jealousy, as though the attention of the Supreme Leader—even negative—is something that Kylo wishes he had, begrudges her. She would happily let him have it if she believed he could withstand it without being crushed under the weight.

A million voices in her head rally to join Kylo Ren in declaring her training, preparation, and performance inadequate to fact the demon that awaits them in the Unknown Regions, but she rebuffs all of them. Kylo Ren's injuries on Starkiller Base may have been a handicap, but they were one weakened by her inexperience; his goal to capture rather than kill her tempered not by the fact that she had no desire to kill him, for she did—and often—but by the fact that she chose not to try. ]

But fear has never accomplished anything, and I won't be calling on it now.

( Kylo visibly bristles at the accusation she hurls at him, sitting up so straight that his back begins to ache. He wants to stand, can feel the tension coiling through the muscles and tendons in his arms and legs sharking with the concentrated effort it has not to get to his feet in a hurry and advance, but the unlit game board in front of him prevents doing so with any fluidity, and clambering around it would just be an awkward-looking endeavor in his haste to extend himself to full height. As a result, his fingers curl into a fist that groans leather on the tabletop, and the ship lurches around them. Kylo knows that it's a byproduct of its tired framework and excessive years because it's the dejarik board that suffers as a result of his visible affront.

The whole thing collapses in on itself, crumbling down the middle like someone has just dropped a massive weight directly into the center of the board. It groans and screams and surprisingly does not erupt into a shower of sparks and black smoke signifying some mechanical failure and structural damage. It's almost as if the thing was being held up by sheer willpower alone, looking for an excuse to buckle under some external pressure. How fitting that Kylo Ren be that external pressure. He can think of several other things that have collapsed as a result of the force he exerted over them until they were diminished into nothing as well. )

You have no idea what I'm afraid of. ( It's the implied accusation apparent in her manner of speech when she tosses comments at him like grenades that earns the bulk of his attention, not necessarily the retaliation that she responds with. Finally, Kylo gets to his feet with all the broad-shoulder intent of trying to intimidate her into submission, though he doesn't immediately take steps toward her and, rather, lingers next to the destroyed dejarik board with his hands gathered together in fists at his sides.

But his response in itself isn't entirely true. She is the only person other than Snoke who has withstood the battering ram of his insistent willpower adequately enough to not only remain standing but to push back. Rey has seen what it is that Kylo Ren is afraid of, and it had startled him enough in return to allow her the opportunity to call him out on it. Looking across the hold at her now, he sees the same determined set to her jaw, can recall with perfect clarity the way she had gulped great lungfuls of air, the dark light in her eyes that would be seen again in swirls of snow and a haze of red-blue-purple light, and he has an involuntarily urge to push her, striking him with the same sharp precision that it had when he'd wanted to draw her into his fold on Starkiller. It leaves a sweet but heady taste in the back of his throat, and it takes everything he has within him to swallow it down.

Survive, he thinks, something thinks at him, and Kylo takes one step, two, three toward the girl across the hold from him before stopping. He allows the sweep of disdain and aggravation and anger he feels to flood through their connection, lets her feel it despite the fact that it might make him look weak and vulnerable to her implications. It's too late to hide it now, and he casts one look over at the dismantled dejarik board before stalking out of the room entirely. )

[ Neither of them needs to verbalize their recognition of his lie for it to hang between them as he swaggers over, the crumpled game board standing in testament to his fury and the power it holds. No wonder Snoke chose to cultivate his unhinged rage, to fan that flame until it was an unchecked inferno, one that Rey would be happy to see burn the Supreme Leader for his arrogance in believing that he could control it for a moment. Rey knows, looking at the wildfire that blazes before her, that she can't either, even though the Resistance has premised its acceptance of Kylo Ren's surrender on the condition that she can.

Regardless of how barely perceptible it is, she jumps ever so slightly when the board crumples, but her spine refuses to recline and lean back as he swarms her, a suffocating cloud of black ink that descends like locusts blotting out the sun. Her tongue darts out to wet cracking lips, and she lifts her chin as she swallows the lump in her throat, determined not to let her weakness show even as his pours through their connection in the reaction to her goading jab.

It's not as if she didn't realize while she did it that she was poking an already incensed wild animal, one who's already developed a taste for her blood.

The intensity of his anger assures her that this will be the time it goes beyond his limits, that she will be left to defend herself from suffering the same fate as the Dejarik board, and she's ready and—if she's being honest with herself—even excited by the prospect, her blood thrumming with the promise of a fight right up until the very instant he turns on his heels and billows out of the room, leaving Rey to deflate into sagging shoulders and heady confusion. Even if she wanted to lash back, she would not strike a blow on the swaggering titan that shrunk her like he did; he's already gone.

Instead, Rey makes her way to the cockpit and settles into the pilot's seat to find serenity in the busy streaking light of hyper space. She closes her eyes and imagines Han here, thirty years ago, warring with the Empire and either fleeing or seeking out Darth Vader's iron grip wherever it held pull over the galaxy, Leia packed into the cockpit with him. She wants to believe that can be her too, that she'll chase Snoke out of every dark corner that he can hide in within the known galaxy until all that's left is the small political scuffles fought in X-wings and TIE fighters by people like Finn and Poe, or by people like Leia who, at Finn's behest, has been pouring resources into deprogramming possibilities for the swayed stormtroopers.

She doesn't leave the cockpit, even after she extracts herself from dreams of eventual peace; instead, she pulls records from the Falcon's archives up onto the view screen, including a file on Mandalore. Her eyes gloss over the words, skimming it without committing much of it to memory beyond some that she can recognize by sight. Ultimately, it only stokes her frustration, and she closes it soon enough as well, scrubbing hands over her face in dissatisfaction with her own ineptitude, in a rare moment able to appreciate the fear of inadequacy she'd sensed in Kylo Ren those months ago.

A lot of people are counting on them to come back and promise security, offer hope. She can't afford to let them down. ]

( The problem with leaving in a huff aboard a ship that is currently careening through space is that there is nowhere to go other than different wings of said ship. The problem with leaving in a huff aboard a ship that belonged to a father you recently murdered, a father whose association is stronger with no object other than the metal box that currently surrounds you, a father whose many transgressions and faults and failures could not be contained by the volume of said ship alone, is that no alternative wing of the ship is safe from further reminder of the very thing that you are trying to storm out on. Kylo supposes that, realistically, he could be storming out on Rey and Rey's perceptions of his inadequacies and anxieties - not fears, he won't call any of it fear - but they both know how intrinsically incorrect that would be.

He has to walk away, though, not only for the sake of his own self-preservation in terms of saving face in front of her but also - if the game board is any indication - in a very literal sense as well. Storming out of the main hold does nothing to quell the trembling that threads itself down through his arms and extends into the tendons and bones of his hands. He can feel the skin that he'd patched with gauze tear open again as tight fists become tighter and then searing pain flashes across his knuckles and down into the back of his hand and wrist as he turns a corner far from the confines of the hold and slams his coiled hand into a section of metal paneling. It doesn't have the same therapeutic factor of release as reducing pieces of metal to rubble or crushing bone and stopping air, and it has the added disadvantage of sending a spike of pain shooting through his own arm, but it gets the job done in providing an outlet for the anger that he feels.

And it needs channeled into something - in both their cases, it needs channeled, he can feel it; Rey possesses the same tendency toward dark rage as Kylo does, just in a smaller, better controlled dose - or they run the risk of damage the ship in a way that spells imminent doom for the both of them. So he punches a console and then punches it again, until his hand feels bruised and his vague, hazy reflection in the metal is distorted beyond recognition. With each strike, his eyes close as if to absorb the intensity of the impact, and all that he can see in those brief flashes of darkness is the drooped and sagging helmet that belonged to his grandfather.

It's distorted, too, melted down to nothing but a shadow of its former glory, and Kylo can't help but think of all the ways in which he still has not lived up to that expectation, all the ways in which Rey's assessment of him might actually be correct. He knows better than anyone that he's afraid. He lived too long in the shadow of numerous fears as a child and has inspired it and used it as a weapon too many times in his past not to be intimately familiar with the feeling. It led him to Snoke, in a way, and it guided him to walk the path that Snoke laid out for him, and it made him powerful and strong, but it still exists within him, and that's the burn that fills the back of his throat and bleeds down into his gut. It leaves him cold and clammy with uncertainty, forces him to consider the idea that maybe he has made a mistake in allowing everything that has transpired since and on Corellia to take place.

Weak, is the only thing that he hears over and over again in his head, and Kylo bows his face to the metal paneling in an attempt to cool the sweat that has collected on his forehead. But deep down within him, where that cluster of light still lives, still breathes, takes great heaping drags and claws at him in a desperate attempt to be heard, he knows that what he's done isn't wrong, and it isn't weak. Weakness is sinking under the black tide that sweeps in and carries him out under a starless night. The inherent difficulty of the rest of it, of resisting the easier, darker nature that he has mired himself in all these years, that is strength. Han Solo's face lives there, and Kylo remembers the expression on it so acutely that it starts a high-pitched buzzing sound ringing in his ears, and that image washes away that dilapidated mask and all the inferiority that comes with it, leaving him feeling angry and hollow and weak and empowered all at the same time.

It's too many things to be feeling at once, so he finishes off the wall with one final smash of a sore fist and sits down, the rippled surface of the panel dotting his location as it hovers just above and to the left of him. He does not reach out to Rey. )

[ Even coiled in the cockpit on the other end of the ship, Rey finds the banging impossible to ignore—probably for the best, for she hears the grinding sound of rent metal and grimaces to think that he might be damaging the last vestige of his father's memory in what amounts to a tantrum. It feels wrong to designate Han as his father, when from their given perspectives, he properly feels more like he belongs to Rey.

That sense of ownership keeps her rooted to the pilot's seat for longer than she probably should remain, unable to trust herself to engage him in a reasonable manner, but soon enough, his desperate, conflicted scramble for an identity he's never built bleeds through into her sufficiently that she can't ignore it. He doesn't reach out in a traditional sense, but the entropy surrounding him and billowing outward acts like a beacon; it draws her to him.

On some level, she's always drawn to him.

Rather than examine it, Rey pops up onto her feet and chases him down in the hold, rounding the corner of the narrow steel corridor that rattles with the vigorous effort of the ship tearing through the fabric of space. She understands the feeling as she continues to smash her nose into the impregnable bubble of inculcated fear and hate that surrounds Kylo Ren; the very act of trying to smash her way through it shakes her until she wonders if she might be coming apart too.

Without making an effort to mask her presence, she moves just past him and stares into the warped metal that reflects only distorted, blended colors of flesh and hair and black robes, not any likeness of anyone. If Leia were here, she'd take the opportunity to try and pick him up from where he sits, urge him against the hate that he demonstrates for his own reflection, but gazing into the twisted, mutilated sheet of paneling, Rey doesn't find that kind of sympathy.

He stared in the mirror every day while he became what he is without flinching or stopping himself when the time came. It was too late, by the time he had. He deserves the punishment he doles out on himself, and she permits the way he stews in self-loathing. Turning towards him, she sizes the seated figure up, weighs and measures, and decides that he's not a broken shell of the beast he'd once been—whatever conclusion the metal panel had been sacrificed to bring him to contained at least some measure of resolve in it. For now, that's all she can ask. ]

I'm not afraid because I'm not coming up against them alone. [ It's the closest thing to a concession or an olive branch that she'll give him; it's hard to even offer that much, thinking of what he's done and all the reasons she has not give him any of her gratitude for the position he fills at her side. People don't have to earn that for her to give it, though, and Rey finds herself more enamored with the notion the further she considers it. For now, then, she puts it off. ] Now will you come help me or not?

( The acoustics of the ship mean that Kylo hears her coming long before she rounds on him, though the only liberty it affords him is time to gather his scattered pieces together into some semblance of order. With the sheet metal twisted as it is, having made the racket that it did, it's unlikely that his outburst will go unnoticed, never mind the fashion in which he had left the hold, but he's less concerned with that in the wake of his behavior on the Finalizer. His reputation for wanton destruction and seemingly random acts of violence had been assigned for a reason, after all.

As such, he's still sitting on the floor when Rey shows her face, knees drawn up and arms extended over them, fingers dangling and hands relaxed though they throb with the memory of how tightly wound they'd been. One more than the other. The pain is not instructional or useful in this case, and as a result Kylo finds it more annoying than anything. For a number of reasons but not least of all what it says about his own perception of himself than anything else. Reflection on that is as useless as the pain he feels, however, and he's almost appreciative of Rey's appearance as it detracts from the overall task of examining himself and his myriad failures and inadequacies while he sits on the vibrating floor and tries to get a grip on himself, like a child coming down from a tantrum.

Kylo meets her eyes as they sweep from the loose puckering of the wall and skip down to him, casting his own gaze in turn from the flat of her dirty boots on the metal grating underfoot and up past her knees to her midsection and beyond, until he arrives at her face and determines that he likes what he sees there about as much as she likes what she sees in him. There's no denying that she is not wholly repulsive as far as appearances go, though, and he can't deny that he'd been drawn to her in more ways than he cared to count from the moment she resisted him right up to and beyond the hand she'd offered him on Corellia. But listening to her voice rumble out from somewhere deep down and brimming with conviction, despite the nature of her approach, he's left wondering how much time remains until he turns and bites the hand that she's extended toward him, how long until he proves her doubts and suspicions right. It's inevitable, as Leader Snoke might say. )

If your vision proves to be correct - ( He clambers ungracefully and awkwardly to his feet, leaning the top half of his back and the breadth of his shoulders against the cool wall behind him. Eyes that are nearly black with the shadow from the corridor that eclipses them close the distance between them with far more ease than his legs and torso could hope to manage, and the wall soothes the heat from his skin until all that's left is stale sweat. ) - you will be alone. ( Kylo keeps his voice neutral despite the threat laced within it. They all think so little of him, despite what he's done. Vader, Luke, his mother and father. He'll never amount to their achievements despite the pressure placed on him to carry the mantle by name alone. What she's suggested is merely the most logical outcome, though he does not intend to take it lying down. ) But not yet. ( He cracks a smile, all teeth and not nice, and it fades around the formation of his next curiosity. ) How close are we to Mandalore? I'll help you bring the ship out of hyperspace, and then I should take the gunner seat.

( Not just because a surprise attack might be waiting for them, but because it might be beneficial to keep some distance between them until they're off the ship and out of space. )

[ Not yet. Even if his smile holds something of a sneer, those two words reassure her that he understands in some capacity what she is holding onto here—so tightly, in fact, that she stands fast under the belief that hiding the fact that he'd stood with the Knights to his back best serves his continued presence at her side. An explanation will manifest itself, she decides, one counter to the paradox of Kylo Ren being both her savior and slayer in the same breath, counter to the persistent fear that he might only protect her so he has the chance to bring her back to Snoke for the same treatment he warns her off now.

If she does not trust him, they will fail. With little other choice, she holds onto what she can use and deludes herself with it into the belief that they are secure in this tenuous truce they've built, one with a card house for a foundation.

Instead of bogging them both down in further argument, Rey curtly nods and turns her attention to the task at hand, casting her glance back to the cockpit. Pushing away the dissatisfaction she feels over anyone but Chewie taking the gunner seat these days, Rey focuses instead on prioritizing their survival by accepting the logic of the plan. ]

Close enough to drop out. Come on.

[ She leads the way into the cockpit, unconsciously bracing herself for the steadying breath she predicts he'll draw, a prediction that results from the narrow membrane that separates their minds, makes them all but one and, as such, makes her subconsciously aware of his ticks and pauses, even when not consciously considering them.

Desensitization should, eventually, ease the sight for him, but it hasn't yet, and his apprehensive tendency towards steeling himself has become hers, but Rey maintains an air of grace and comfort in spite of it as she lowers herself into the pilot seat and points to the lever on his side. ] Lower the throttle slowly. I want to give the scanners time to pick up whatever might be waiting for us before we're completely defenseless. Be ready with the shields.

[ The orders come out naturally, not exercised for the sake of power but for the sake of practicality, and patient besides. More importantly, though, she assumes he'll follow them, if the way anticipatory way she palms the hyperdrive switch on her side is any indicator, tight trip ready to bring them down slow in tandem with him. ]

Waits for the DVD like Fry's dog. So close. And so close to high res icons

ugh i want it so bad just for the iconnnnssss whyyyyy isn't it april 5th

2 more weeks so close

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reads about mandalore forever do do dooooo

Oops gives you homework. I should do that too probably because all I have rn is Boba Fett

hahah me too, basically. boba fett is the whole planet right? it's fine

it is in fact shaped like his helmet

hahahahah well now i'm just sad that's not true

anything can be true if you close your eyes and believe

i will just wizard of oz red shoes it into a reality

things i've learned about mandalore: everything is named variations of mandalore

they are a proud people full of proud mandalorian pride

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