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i found something in the woods somewhere.
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open post.
▬ action ▬ prompts ▬ continuing threads ▬ force shenanigans |
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open post.
▬ action ▬ prompts ▬ continuing threads ▬ force shenanigans |
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no subject
She drives him back like a siren wail in his head, and Kylo grits his teeth: in defiance, in anger, in retaliatory, childish petulance. This isn't her fight, he thinks, but just as quickly corrects himself with the knowledge that it's as much her fight as it is his own, pressing to the ground palms and fingers that feel the indentation of choppy gravel through his gloves as he scrambles to get up. His lightsaber screams in a heavy burst of red as it turns over in his grip, but there is no one there for him to fight. He drives deeper into the mine, turning back to throw a wild look over his shoulder just as the roof of the shaft over their heads explodes in a rainfall of rock and a rotted wooden beam and - there. He sees it. A brief, bright flash of a scope catching the last of the moon's sunlight, like a wink.
The green of Ji's saber rises, and Kylo lifts his blade with the intention of folding himself back into the fight but Rey reaches back and pushes him and it's enough to get his feet off of the ground again as he falls and hits the ground a moment later, knocking the wind right out of him. He's on his feet in no time, though he sends no small amount of resentment at her through the crackling connection of the bond as she runs ahead of him, and tears after her down the mine shaft, his mind a whirl of bright green and that single point of light across the way while Rey seemingly chooses pathways at random. His thoughts are hers and vice versa, making communication unnecessary as they plunge deeper into the darkness, and Kylo gets the sense that were he to sweep the ground with light other than the trembling glow offered by their sabers, he would see that his footsteps perfectly match the ones that Rey leaves behind.
Ji follows, though, always right on his heels, tracking them not necessarily by tapping into the Force and sniffing them out but by following the ripping of their breath through open mouths as they pull in stale, dusty air, by listening to the sound of their retreating footsteps and sliding rocks over ground that has not been disturbed in decades. She's quiet, herself, and when Kylo attempts to divert the flow of his attention harnessed on Rey down a different channel focusing on locating Ji, he's repelled as if she's batting him away, like bouncing off of a wall and back into position. The sensation startles him for its existence at all - she should not be able to do this - enough that he grabs one of the hanging, long-extinguished cords dangling bulbs for balance that is suddenly skewed, and rips it out of the wall, glass breaking under his feet as he steps on it.
At once there is a burst of green behind them, too close not to have been cloaked from them completely, and Kylo can't stop himself - he doubles back to level a hard blow. The ground underfoot groans, unhappily disturbed after all these years, and even in the dark he can see - they can see - that the structure is not at all sound. )
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That tether snaps all at once, and Rey can almost feel herself tumble forward towards the inky well of darkness that lies waiting for them, dust skidding up in a cloud around her and thickening it. He stops, turns, digs his heels in. The tunnels sigh. The mountain's foundation cries out, begging for respite, a groaning pain that sags with the weight of them, and the musty air stinks of something burning, the sediment spun to smoke by the path of their lit sabers.
The void left between them aches like a missing piece of herself, the Force closing its fist around her throat to shout her down from allowing that valley to grow between them. A shortened, wheezed breath floods her lungs. She whips around to watch and wait, panicked by the severity of the sensation as much as by the actual potential for loss that hangs heavy in it—this shouldn't happen. But then, there is no should or shouldn't for something that lacks precedent. It feels like he's been torn out of her to lose the uniformity with which they act, and Rey jerks to a stop, whipping around to peer after him.
A glow of green lights his silhouette on the steel and dirt and cobwebs of the tunnel wall where it curves around, and it cracks into a blossom of something hideous and near-orange as Kylo clashes with their pursuer. Rey gapes, choking back a cry of dread, and rounds the corner to reach Kylo's side: she finds Ji popping forward and back in a series of blows that reflects her acute familiarity with the fact that she can't best Kylo Ren in a battle of sheer strength. In some way, that emboldens Rey, leaves her feeling inimitable for driving his saber into the snow and ridding him of it.
Still. There's something sharp and targeted in the way Ji advances, something that searches out weak points and creates them where they don't exist. She lifts the saber with both arms, and Rey realizes that she's not in a position to get between them in time, so she takes the only other route she has to protect him: she raises her free hand, fingers spread, wrist tilted, and catches the blade on the downswing with thick tendrils of invisible energy to restrain it like a net. ]
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It feels like he's died. Or she's died. Even in knowing that they both still live yet - he can feel her eyes in the dark, even if he can't see them - the ache is substantial and alarming, and he can't immediately pinpoint the reason for it as he drives Ji back again and again with a series of hard, brutalizing blows meant to decimate her. She stumbles under the weight of one, and Kylo grits his teeth and almost growls through the unbroken barricade of white washed red-orange from the colliding light of their blade, but Ji slips free and swings wide and hard at his head, knowing that he will duck before she's able to score a blow but also knowing that it will put him on the ground.
It's so hard to see in the dark, and he can't sense either of the women in the tunnel the way that he should be able to. Kylo lets intuition guide him as he throws a hand up with the express purpose of shoving Ji and knocking her aim off only to find that the heavy ripple through the Force that he sends her way is not his own but Rey's, whose presence seems to roar to life the moment she manipulates energy and air and dirt and dust and debris to stop Ji's green blade from burning a hole three inches deep into his shoulder: a nice finishing piece to complete the set that Rey began on his opposite shoulder.
Kylo stares at her.
The coalescence of their blades creates a ripple effect of color along the wall, lighting the tight lines of Ji's shoulders as she struggles for a moment too long to break free of the hold that Rey - face cast in heavy shadow and wrists twisted under the force of her own ability - exerts over her. Kylo feels his pulse race with some unknown rush. No time to examine it, he takes a hurried breath as he propels himself to his feet with his saber in hand and slides in close to Ji's throat with the burning, shaking flat of his lightsaber. )
Drop it. ( His voice is low, rumbling up from somewhere deep, and he casts a quick glance at Rey to determine the state of her remaining strength, trying to gauge how long she can keep Ji held against the web of her power. When the Knight does not react with the speed he's looking for, the sharp edge of the anger that he has been keeping at bay since the Falcon splits open right down the center and spills everywhere. It fills the hollow ache in his chest and the hole in his mind where Snoke used to be and the bitterness of tasting dirt by the strength of Ji's reinforced swing. He replaces the smell of burning hair and melting fabric, heating metal, with the sharp curl of his hand around Ji's throat, throwing most of the innate physical power that he has without the assistance of the Force to back it up into the thrust of his arm as he pins her against the wall behind them. The toe of his boot snaps the ancient cord torn from the wall and a lightbulb bursts underneath his heel. He squeezes his hand. ) Drop it.
( Eventually, green falls away. Kylo doesn't - can't, won't - let go. )
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Watching the monstrous form of Kylo Ren advance on her, making even the intimidating, masked figure of a stranger look like a helpless victim, makes it easier and not. Rey cannot deny the release of tension that takes place as his leather-wrapped fingers squeeze around the meat of her neck allowing Rey to breathe and exert less of her own power over the knight, but she can not ignore the moral qualms she faces in allowing him this tactic of swaggering intimidation.
Worse, it doesn't seem to cap at intimidation.
Rey chokes out a gasp as the lightsaber clatters to the ground, and she drops her hand, doubling over to gulp down air, weary in a way that she has never been—a claim she's been able to make more and more since Kylo Ren secured a more permanent position in her life. But it's not only her own exhaustion that suffocates her now; the miasma of Kylo Ren's untethered anger, set free from its chains like a rabid animal, swells and threatens to bury them all here.
The tunnel trembles. ]
Stop. [ She rasps the words, pushing herself back to stand and striding forward to grab at his shoulder; the distant sound of rattling laughter, strained for breath, sounds like it's a million miles away; it's not the muffle of Ji's mask that dampens the sound, but the surreality that dazes Rey. ]
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Do it. The voice is back, whispering, and he still can't tell if it's a manifestation of something that always was there before or something else, something within him wholly separate from Snoke. It sounds like Snoke but doesn't, though if he were pressed to explain and list the differences, Kylo isn't sure that he would be able to. It rises in pitch and volume with the tandem rise of the darkness within him, drawing breath like a great storm about to crack on the nearby horizon. The tunnel seems to shudder with the anticipation of it, and Kylo himself feels heavier, somehow drunk with the power he clasps in his hand and yet steady enough at the same time to wield it. This is the perfect darkness that he had been looking for on the bridge, this is the clarity that he was promised. It lies in here, in this fluttering heartbeat, in this intake of breath, in his own hands. He is power, plain and simple, open and exposed like a stripped nerve.
This is Kylo Ren.
It's this that clouds everything, threatens to drag them all under. He feels an answering call in the girl he knows is still behind him, the same way that he had and has and, he knows, will continue to feel. His darkness eclipses hers but what builds in him recognizes like for like and sniffs it out in her like a bloodhound, magnetically pulled to her gravitational charge, feeding off of it and smothering it all at once. A fire consuming another fire to become larger, brighter, hotter. Whatever darkness there is in Rey that speaks to him is reduced by this, this onslaught, overpowered by these parts of him that he cannot deny, and it's this maelstrom that buzzes as hard and heavy in his head as the lightsaber in his grip that deafens the sound of Rey's sharp inhale, covers the tread of her boot, and muffles the rustle of fabric as she reaches out to grab his arm and pull him back. Someone is laughing, but Kylo ignores it and attempts to throw Rey off of him with a shrug. )
This is the only way it ends. ( He chances a glance back at Rey, eyes wild in the haze of green and blue and red. Kylo tries to reach for her, tries to make her see the inevitability, what happens next if they don't end it here and now: Ji pursuing them, the Knights regrouping, following them until they are eventually worn down, outnumbered, brought before Snoke; Kylo to endure the discipline necessary for his actions. Rey, forced to kneel. )
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She can see the final, tiring blow levied against him reflected in his eyes, a monolith toppled in a heap of heavy black robes, as similarly dressed masked figures haul her away from him despite her screams. She can hear her own screams tangle with Kylo Ren's howls of pain as the bond exacts his punishment in equal part on her, and it's that empathy that drives her onto her knees before the husk-like phantom that carries the stick. It is all very real, a three-dimensional nightmare projected into the hollow of her mind as vividly as the promise of their unified front had been, the one that had bent her to the belief that she needed him.
Now, it feels manipulative, and Rey growls, anger burning wet at the corners of her eyes as she tears herself out of the visceral experience Kylo projects through their mental link. ] Get out!
[ Rebuffing him comes hard, and it leaves her adrift in a numbing void, still latently aware of him in some distant way. Rey is positive that she will never be able to fully extricate her mind from his, no matter how hard she pushes, but she needs to save some part of her mind as her own and free herself from his influence and the haunting whisper that pervades it.
She knows the whisper—Do it, it suggests to him, in a voice that does not belong to Leader Snoke—because she has heard it in her mind as he tried to urge her towards his tutelage, towards his partnership, towards him, and Rey feels suddenly sick, the sour taste of bile stinging her mouth before she can choke off her own dizzied nausea.
When she sought to free him from that bond, from Snoke's influence, it was under the belief, the assumption made on what she'd seen there, that it was Snoke's whispers and nurturing alone that had turned Ben Solo away from his family and made him a tool for the Dark Side, the sharp edge of a blade that they pressed to General Organa's throat. But Snoke isn't down here with them, when the inferno of Kylo Ren's dark methods burns hotter and brighter than she has ever seen it, a firestorm of hate and vengeance.
Abject horror floods Rey as, in that moment, she accepts the terrible reality: she was wrong.
A staggered half-step carries her away from him, the weight of the blow flagging her resolve as she realizes that it's too late to see him for what he really is, lightyears from anyone who might help her muzzle him. She can feel the way he revels in it, and the way he tries to share that thrill with her, and disgust aside, it confuses her because she can hear him also trying to rationalize it—two sides at war with one another, one that demands to know that its actions are right, and one that celebrates them regardless. ]
No. [ She balls her hands into fists. ] It's not. If you're going to kill her, then do it, but I won't let you justify succumbing to fear by pretending it's the only way. [ The words come out in a snarl, unforgiving and accusatory, wide hazel eyes recognizing him for precisely what he is, probing unnervingly into him, and buried in him are all the reasons that this one act will make him into the coward she's accused him of being. ]
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The door between them closes with a snap that makes him physically recoil, a sensation not at all dissimilar to the way she had thrown him out of her mind on Starkiller. It's a perceived and physical blow all at once, and Kylo feels the whiplash effect of it as comes up dry and hard against the barrier of her thoughts, the mental fortifications that he has encountered before in various ways - not all of them the same as Starkiller, some with the careful consideration of his palm testing the feel and give of her ability and desire to keep him out - with equal amounts frustration and awed humiliation.
Rey leaves him alone in the dark, where he is carried on warm whispers that blow cool underneath the main current, and adds insult to injury by still existing in the milky, in-between world that comprises their connection when they are not facing in the same direction, and it is only through his dogged pursuit, this obsessive compulsion, that he glimpses very briefly - filtered through the dark and the dank and the heavy curtain of thought that urges him to do it, just do it, it can be over. - the nauseating horror that she experiences. It staggers him somewhat, enough that when she moves to step away from him, Kylo finds that the upper half of his body follows her, as if his breastbone were connected by string to her rib cage. Hardly the first time that he has experienced such a sensation while mired without the hurricane of dark energy that drags him down and down and swaddles him in inky black, the feeling itself is not unwelcome, but it is a distraction, as much as her answering accusation is, and within the enclosure of that distraction, Kylo realizes the folly in his own inability to dismiss it, boiled down to the barest sentiments and easiest translations: he does not want her to be wrong.
The thought calls out like shattered glass, a single, high note of perfect stillness. Darkness surges in retaliation, and with nowhere to go but into its embrace, Kylo relents and lets it smother him, much more willing to be engulfed by the ease of what comes naturally than to fight tooth and nail for a desire that has battered him raw and bloody for the better part of twenty years. His teeth bare, reflecting the conjoined light of their sabers and bending his face into a meaner countenance, almost wolfish in appearances. The completion of his half-turn back toward Rey reaches its apex, and his arm stretches long across his body to keep Ji pinned inexpertly where he has her. )
Don't be so nai - ( Kylo's hard look and spiteful tone are reserved for Rey only, and in that disadvantage, Ji finds her window. He realizes his mistake too late, when Ji moves quicker than he thought capable. She drops his hand and reaches for her belt, toward the back of the long sweep of her cloak, so quickly and so peripherally that the movements blur together. Then she jams the business end of a vibroblade into his thigh.
Kylo roars with the black agony of it, sending shockwaves down through tendon and muscle until it hits bone, and instinctively he caves inward and jerks up at the same time, slashing at the Knight with the flat of his blade. She's already moved out of fatal reach, coughing and gulping in deep lungfuls of air filtered through the mask, but he manages to glance the small of her back with the tip of his lightsaber, and Ji howls, too, the pain an enraging, open wound in the Force, in the tunnel, all of it around them trembling, rocks skittering, dirt falling like water, as their separate, individual energies clash against one another like conflicting currents. )
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For all her attempts to separate herself, drive a divider between them and isolate herself in the quiet of her own mind, Rey feels with perfect clarity the hum of the vibroblade as it cuts to bone, leaving a burning ache behind. It dazes her to a series of wide blinks long enough not to react as Kylo chases Ji with the beam of his saber, leaving a hot burn that mirrors a scar Finn bears. Let no one claim that Kylo Ren is an honorable swordsman.
Rather than waste time judging that move, Rey follows. She raises her knee and drives her heel forward into the small of Ji's back to knock her deeper into the mine, knowing full and well that a shallow slice across the back is far from fatal. In the worst escort mission from the worst video game ever, Rey attempts to wedge herself between Kylo Ren and his former second, taking up the task of the fight in a fervent effort to all at once keep him alive, keep him from killing Ji, and fight Ji off. She has two staggered steps to do it before Ji recovers, and turns with the vibroblade poised to defend herself.
Rey parries it with surprise, finding that the technology has sufficiently improved to help it deflect a lightsaber. It rebuffs her, the force of the collision ringing through her bones like reverb, but she continues to make horizontal cuts to keep Ji from landing a strike until her muscles howl disapproval—the horizontal slash becomes a sweeping arc that slips past the hilt of Ji's blade while she's got her arm extended to jab it. Rey takes the hit in her ribs, the knife cutting between her fourth and fifth with a sharp sting that dizzies her, in order to take advantage of the opening with that arcing motion and sweeping her blade straight through Ji's wrist, as though it were hardly there.
The blade, and Ji's hand, thuds when it hits the dirt floor, but it is drowned out by the sounds of pain. Rey pushes down the snapping wolf within her that wants to feed on the blood, to rejoice that it has been shed and laud itself for the violence of the act—it tastes like revenge, looming in defense of the monster that hovers like a shadow projected on the mouth of the tunnel behind her. ]
You can't keep fighting; you must know that. [ She kicks the vibroblade away. ] Surrender. Take your life.
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Rey, who steps in front of him and throws a high knee toward the twist of melted fiber and the smell of burnt skin that greets him when he looks up. The world seems to slip sideways down into a black spiral of hollow, hot pain, and he can feel his pulse in his leg where blood rises to the surface and turns the dull and dark fabric of his pant leg almost luminescent with the damp glitter of dark blood on dark clothing. Bile rises in the back of his throat at being shuffled to the side in such a fashion, and it gurgles at the thought of Rey trying - assuming - to protect him even while she's trying to stop him from ripping Ji apart limb by limb. His teeth grind together, rip apart just as savagely to let a sharp bark full of surprised pain issue forth as he looks up in time to watch Rey parry and drive the Knight of Ren back.
He imagines that this is what it might have looked like had their positions been reversed on Starkiller, had he been the one waking in the snow to watch her beat the opponent back and back. He has the recollection of his own time spent down and out across from her, waiting and wondering if she would take the window of opportunity to drive the solid blue beam down into him, stop the course of their intertwined lives from intersecting ever again in that moment, but this is different. Kylo is not unconscious, for starters, with one hand grasping the shaking hilt of his saber and the other palm-down in an effort to guide himself to his feet. He won't kneel, not in pain, not in obedience, not out of necessity.
The pain is not enough to distract him from the whirling turn of color and light converging that Rey becomes, swallowed by darkness on either side but still illuminated. Kylo knows when Ji lands a hit, slaps a palm against his abdomen as the sensation of Rey's skin splitting open right between her ribs hits him like a punch straight to the gut, but he also knows how Rey intends to use it and can't find it within him to critique her strategy when Ji's hand and blade fall away in one perfect motion from the mercy of Rey's form. He would have taken the same risk, employed the same strategy, in the interest of winning, and it's this thought that brings him to his feet, bent over and favoring his left leg as he is.
Rey is speaking, and he hears it through the haze of his own slide down into the darkness, shadows pulling and clawing at his arms and legs, wrapping around his middle, offering him the strength he needs to stand, to drive forward if need be. He hears the clatter of the vibroblade as Rey kicks it away, a sharp, metallic spin deeper in the shaft, completely out of sight and swallowed by the darkness. Ji is a ragged mess, a bleeding tear in the Force, cradling what's left of her wrist against her chest in an effort to stem the pound of pain rather than out of despair. He knows better than to think her movements are the anything other than strictly clinical, but the flow of her anger is strong and alarming, infecting the wound.
I would rather have yours, she says, before extending one hand with a power that is not hers. Ji's fingers spread out and turn inward in a jerking motion, and Kylo has just enough sense and energy left within him to grab Rey by the belt and haul her bodily away from the spot she has been occupying. The mine goes up in a thick cloud of dust, painting the both of them with brown-black soot and filling their nostrils and mouths with pulverized rock. )
Go! ( Kylo manages to roar it at her through the cough that erupts from his chest, throwing open the channel between them with a fierce shove that cracks an iron handrail next to them under the concentrated effort of reaching her in this way. His hand is still wrapped around her belt, and he uses it to shove her ahead of him, their red and blue blades the only light in the gloom. )
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Her heels pivot and she takes a series of skittered steps after him towards the mouth of the mine, only for him to shove her past his form on the way out. Rey uses the connection—blown open like splintered wooden doors under a concussive blast—to search him out in the haze of dust and debris without using her eyes, one hand closing around his where it clutches her belt, pulling him along with her back the way they came.
The Force and their shared senses—however hindered they presently are—help her to see through the blinding chaos and tumult, the echo of fallen rocks cuing her to the edges of the tunnel where the upheaval rumbles more quietly. She can feel the air where it wisps upward and outward, a gasping clamor for the open space of the basin carved in the mountain for the mine’s operations. They reach the messy and derelict ramp that winds up a steep cliff that Rey had, in her panic, taken at a dive on the way in, and only then does she stop to squint against the dust, all but unflinching as tiny grains of powder buffet against her eyes.
She searches for some sign of Ji, a green flicker, a shadow, a whisper of breath, a cry of pain through the Force, but hollow silence echoes back at her. It shakes Rey in a surprising way. She’d killed herself, hoping so desperately to take the two of them down with her; that kind of blind devotion goes against everything she could imagine, and makes Snoke more dangerous than she’d imagined.
The dust chokes the last of the oxygen out of the tunnel and Rey wheezes, hacks, as the deprival catches up with her. She doubles over, ushering Kylo Ren up the ramp with her in scrambled, haphazard movements; one foot slides off the ramp, and her opposite ankle gives with the effort of trying to recover her weight. She stumbles into Ren, recovers, and shoves him the rest of the way out of the tunnel in time to flatten herself on the ground, lightsaber dimming all at once, to sprawl out and catch her breath, skin and clothes and hair blackened by the plumes of minerals. A groan echoes out of her as she rolls onto her side, one hand flattening against the blackened slice in her ribs, but she can’t moan over the ache for long because a single thought pierces through her awareness, sudden and sharp: the sniper.
Casting a glance over at Kylo Ren does not hearten her to their chances. If the wound in her side aches, the wound in his leg is worse still, screaming for relief from supporting his weight on shredded muscle. She moves her hand up to grab his shoulder and push him to the ground with her, using the cover of the billowing dust that evacuates the mine with all their same urgency to keep fire off their backs. ]
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Adrenaline floods him, his fingers grip Rey's belt tight, and the anchoring grip of her curled fingers comes down across his wrist like a vice. Kylo's fingers tighten around her belt in response, his knuckles hard and driving against the curve of her waistline where he urges her forward and runs after her. There's no point in shielding his eyes when the dust and dirt and chipping rock is too monumental to hide from, so thick that in their haste to retreat and clear the area it becomes difficult to make out anything other than the pale slash of Rey's figure less than a foot in front of him. His thumbs the ignition switch on his saber and kills the beam just as Rey delivers them to the edge of the ramp and begins their climb up and up and up.
He feels her slip as she shoves him past her, the distribution of weight suddenly relocating in such a way that leaves him no choice but to look back in the event that her stumble should cost them both, but Rey is already climbing to her feet and pushing him in the same instant that she is crashing into him. The edge of the ramp surges in front of him, accompanied by even ground, and Kylo manages to keep himself aloft long enough to go down on one knee with as much dignity and pride intact as possible before overbalancing in the opposite direction and sprawling on the ground next to her.
Out of his peripheral vision, he can see the dark swell of blood where it seeps through her clothing, and his head hits the ground in a way that his body was denied, his bad leg contorted under the onslaught of pain that radiates outward and inward, one hand pressed to his ribs in the same spot Rey is mindful of now before he turns over onto his side with the intention of getting a better look at the blow Ji had landed. It's a move doused heavily in the lingering surge of adrenaline afforded by pain and the Force and the dark twist of that union, a hard palm bumping into her abdomen without ceremony or permission. Fortunately, he has little time to consider the ramifications of it, as Rey is shoving him down into the dirt not a moment later once again.
Recollection of the sniper crosses their mind at the same moment - whether by chance or because of the bond, he isn't sure - and Kylo winds an arm between her shoulder blades to encourage her head down under the heavy spray of two supressive shots. Red blaster fire from the mine's proper entrance sings over their heads and explodes into rock face not twenty feet from where they lie, closer to Rey's head than to his own. Kylo looks up just in time to catch the swagger of heavy boots and the broad shoulders of the sniper through the haze of settling dust as the high, distinct whine of a weapon charging, preparing to fire, rends the air.
Without warning, Kylo gathers up what anger and burning disdain hasn't left him, what range he knows he has and the power he has cultivated and nourished for the last twenty years, despite injury or suffering or pain, he has left and extends a long hand through the Force toward the advancing figure blocking their exit. He feels skin and bone sift under the pressure that he exerts, sinew and muscle snagging on fingertips that turn inward, inward, inward, digging down and in, and then tear out. The gun clatters to the floor. )
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It floods her then, the moment the threat is gone, a series of brutal realities all demanding her awareness at once: Kylo Ren’s thin restraint of and the visceral horror struck by his scraping, clawing, gnawing bloodlust; Ji’s willingness to fall on her own sword to bury them here in service to a phantom master who, Rey understands now, just as likely sent her as a threat and a message of the reach of his power than as any real threat. Had he wanted them both dead, now, she would have rallied every other knight at her back, and they would have swelled and overcome Rey and Kylo Ren easily.
This was a warning shot, and yet, the discharge it sounds when it tears through the air deafens her, dazes her, and she feels the coursing rapids of nausea rattle her apart. Rey pushes up onto her hands, retches over the dirt of the mine, and still choking, pushes the rest of the way to her feet to stagger blindly through the cloud of dust in a dizzy panic. Her thoughts are a jumble: a warning shot, a series of images of cold steel ship pathways and an armed guard of black-cloaked knights, the empathic screaming waterfall of pain of phantom punishment exacted on Kylo Ren.
No one can give her orders or training rituals or an objective to cut through the senselessness of the battle, the hideous chaos of the war that rages in a hurricane around them. Being quick-on-her-feet, determined, resolute, none of these things help her when she’s adrift in a vacuum of wandering suffering. There is only one answer, one end, to kill Snoke, but he is a phantom, coiling his fingers around their throats from across the galaxy, and for the first time, doubt strikes her.
They need to rest, regroup, heal, strategize, but the thought of doing any of those with Kylo Ren turns her stomach as surely as the slurry of panic and imagined futures that assaults her mind, and it’s frantically shoved aside just as quickly. Wrong. She was wrong. Leia, in her insistence, was wrong, and though she had allowed Rey to believe that the monster was inside of him, she sees now that he had become it long ago.
Rey stops in her tracks when her feet kick the barrel of the rifle. Bending over, she scoops it up without stopping to think about what she’s doing—scavenging—and pulls the harness over her shoulder, and diverts her attention back towards the clearing mouth of the mine where she expects to see the shadowy form of Kylo Ren. It feels a lot like being right where she started. ]
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The roughness of the ground slams into his palms, and Kylo catches himself in that way, refusing to sit or kneel but lingering at a crouch that allows him to catch his breath but does nothing to alleviate the blinding pain the vibroblade had left etched deep into him. The sniper is down fifty yards or so away from where he crouches, now stands again, but it's Rey's dry heaving that receives the bulk of his attention. He'd felt the snap, that quick sever, and while he makes no move to remove the helmet that winks at him from where the body itself has fallen, Kylo knows without having to check that it's Aurren Ren underneath the heavy armor, deadly with a blaster but worthless on the ground.
There's no room left within him to spare any amount of consideration for his subordinate's demise - keeping in mind what drove both Aurren and Ji here, tailing them through space, Kylo is of the opinion that neither of them deserve it, at least as far as the pain will let him have any opinion. Rather, he concentrates the bulk of his focus on what this means for him - for them - at the end of all things. He has destroyed the Knights of Ren, defied Snoke, killed at least one of his own men after a hasty pursual, abandoned the First Order in relative silence with no inclination as to what he intends to do with the information that he possesses, defied and abandoned Snoke. With Rey's help.
He turns to look at her, shouldering the heavy rifle and casting a glance toward where Kylo stands, either waiting for her or gathering his bearings. Not even he is sure. The deep darkness of the mine shaft stretches behind her, a swirling mass of dust and debris and loud, shifting crashes that still tumble from deep within. The light outside the tunnel they have traversed is waning but not dark, and it allows him to see some of the expression on her face although much of it is cast in shadow. There's no need to test the limits of the bond between them in an effort to determine what it is she thinks or feels. The set of her shoulders tells him what he needs to know, and while Kylo can't rightfully say that he finds anything disquieting about it, it does call to attention what it is that has ultimately shifted between them. It isn't the first time they have stood on separate ends of a dividing line, but this time there is nowhere for them to go but forward, with equal stride. )
Let's get back. ( He says it without bothering to pose it as a question, bending down after a moment's pause to seize Aurren's still form - not much bigger than Kylo's own - and drag him. Dead men are heavy, and Kylo has little respect for someone who would have put a blaster to his head years ago, unprovoked, and pulled the trigger were it not for Kylo's position at the head of the pack, but he's a warrior. He'll get a warrior's end.
Ji, wherever it is that she remains, is unreachable now. )
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What are you planning to do with it? [ Callous, perhaps, but years on Jakku have afforded Rey a sense of perspective—nothing dead is a “him” anymore. Whoever he was, he’s gone, and all they have before them now is an unremarkable corpse, wholly similar to any other. If Kylo allows her, she’ll take Aurren’s weight over her opposite shoulder, an act that burns the injury in her ribs and reminds her how deep into the tissue it cut, but at no risk of losing her footing. More than can be said for the last Knight of Ren standing.
She is ruthlessly pragmatic in this way, putting aside her own personal struggles to confront what she knows they must do—remain together. Without the other, neither of them has even the slightest chance of getting off the moon, and more to the point, surviving the onslaught that will follow the two they put down here. Her movements are mechanical but purposeful, concentrated on shuttering her emotions and considering only the benefits of cooperation in the immediate moment. Her horror at the pool of darkness that Kylo Ren steeps himself in is irrelevant—these knights are already dead, and one by her own hand.
That horror, she can’t suppress. It claws its way up her throat and sticks there to choke her. ] She killed herself. Why would she do that? [ No matter that she knows why—clear as day, to take them with her—but how could she do that? How is her survival not her first consideration, before her loyalty to some demagogue? For as much as she barely trusts him now, the pitch of her tone all the same seems to beg an explanation of her reluctant companion, as does the shake of her head. This radical, blind following is too far beyond her experience. ]
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Burn it. ( His agreement with her choice of words aside, it's still bestowing honor where Kylo isn't entire sure that honor is due. The other Knights wouldn't see it that way, given the strength of their opposition following the destruction of two of their own here on Concordia, but he very much doubts that he will win back any favor for disposing of Aurren in this way as opposed to letting him rot at the cave entrance. Kylo won't leave him much by way of accessories - he's already taking stock of what they can use between them other than the blaster that Rey has shouldered - and Aurren is roughly the same height as Kylo but not quite as broad about the shoulders and back. At the very least, they can afford to leave the armor, if Rey is not interested in it.
He eyes her now, at the dark spill of blood across her abdomen and the dirt that colors her face a darker bronze than it is naturally, a thin sheen of sweat making her shine somewhat sickly. The dirt and dust offers her artificial color but underneath it, she's paler than usual, whether from bloodloss or pain or something else entirely, Kylo isn't sure. He doesn't ask, just gives Aurren's heavy corpse a hard tug that has the frayed muscles in his legs screaming now that he no longer needs the pain to drive him forward, push him on. Sweat curls down the back of his neck and beads into his high collar. )
Grab his other arm. ( His voice is dry but firm, commanding, unyielding and unwilling to admit that he needs assistance while conceding the fact that he won't get far without it. Pride won't let him fall so far as to hand the bulk of this responsibility over to her, admit that the injury he's received is impeding him in any way, but at this point he knows better than to argue with her inclination to help in the interest of preserving whatever amicability they can generate between the two of them. He's too preoccupied with not falling over or stumbling to consider the harsher realities of what he's done here as they relate to his arrangement with Rey, what it might mean once they're out of immediate danger and back with the Resistance, the way she looks at him. As for Rey's question, Kylo finds that he has no answer suitable for discussion when he's half-dragging, half-carrying a dead Epicanthix behind him. Simplicity works best. ) She's a Knight of Ren. The explanation begins and ends there.
( For most. For all. But not for him, apparently. It's a thought that rests heavy in his sternum, making the already laborious task of breathing even more difficult. Kylo watches his feet as they retreat closer to the heap of administrative buildings that they have dismantled in their skirmish, ready to see this deed done and behind him. As behind him as it might ever be. He glances up once at the opening to the mine shaft once they have left it behind, listening to the muffled clatter of rock that still settles in the wake of their disruption. On an impulse, he casts out a wide net through the Force as well as he can in the condition he's in, looking for a trace, a ping on his radar. But there's nothing. He glances over at Rey. )
Your form leaves something to be desired - ( He grunts, stops a moment to press his palm against the hole in his thigh, then continues. ) - but you're impressive in a fight.
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Sweat beads in her eyebrows, trickles towards her eyes, but she shakes it away with all the gruff diligence and lack of grace owed to a wet dog. It also helps her blink some of the flustered, salty sting away from her eyes, dismisses that as sweat too and not overwhelmed sensation of such an emotional conflagration, an inability to understand and reconcile Ji's rejection of her mercy.
She feels the ripple of his sonar-like search, flinches instinctively away from it on her own part, but keeps her jaw set and her eyes forward when she feels his eyes bodily turn on her. Looking to him would require acknowledging that it's him she works with in this task, when really she's trying to cling to the dutiful productivity as a means of ignoring her greater circumstances. But his voice rattles around in her brain like it's off-key, an unpleasant tang that cannot be ignored, that reverberates in her molars and makes her teeth ache. ]
Don't you dare. [ Her own voice simmers with the thinly veiled rage of betrayal, an emotion she wouldn't have believed could be generated in her by Kylo Ren, for betrayal required some semblance of trust to begin with. It trembles and quakes, both under the restraint of her power, of the violence she wants to turn on him in her fear and anger of what his actions in the tunnel meant for him, for the Resistance, for them; and under the choking effort of getting words out at all when she's trying to quiet and calm herself. ]
If you have any respect for me at all, you'll keep your mouth shut.
[ Rather than appeal to the sympathy or empathy that she doubts he has, she appeals to the basest component of this cock-eyed relationship they've tumbled into. Even as far back as Starkiller, he'd offered that to her. She can't count on anything else anymore. A part of her, traitorous and mistrusting, wonders now if he has merely seen fit to drop some grand illusion, to drag her back to Snoke himself and make good on the lies he'd told and realize the vision they shared of their inevitable capture—not out of loyalty to Snoke, but out of a desire to regain his power and violence and freedom and to possess her all at the same time. ]
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If only. Kylo's silence speaks to all of that and unwittingly more, and it's unclear even to him the reasons that he has for saying nothing in the wake of her command, gritted out between teeth, trembling with the weight of her restrained ability and the tight wind of her own rage and frustration, her pain and anger. It threatens to overwhelm him and drag him down again, but where before, in the mine, that well seemed untapped and bottomless, extending forever in a downward spiral eager to receive the broiling, tumultuous roll of black thoughts and even blacker intentions, Kylo gets the impression that the depths are much more shallow now than they were previously. He's at his limit - they both are - and it's as much that as it is whatever has begun existing between him and the girl who trudges dutifully, inexplicably, by his side, hauling this dead weight in step with him.
Kylo says nothing and in the wake of having nothing to say, lets his mind go blank. Within that nothingness, the pain in his leg and in his hands begins to become burdensome, so that when they finally reach the dilapidated offices, he's eager to rid himself of the Knight they support between the two of them. Kylo drops his side like a sack of potatoes, pushing sweat-slick hair out of his face and, finally, affording himself the opportunity to glance down at his thigh. Even with his pants and armor covering it, he can tell that it isn't exactly good.
After a moment, he turns to Rey, lips pressed together though the faint suggestion of something not wholly volatile or even angry hangs around the corner. He quirks an eyebrow at her, cool as a cucumber. )
May I speak?
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Only if you have to.
[ She can imagine very little that she must hear in their present position, and as such, dismisses the notion while she finally clips the hilt of her lightsaber back to the leather strap of her belt and rubs sweat and dirt away from her forehead with an equally grimy hand. The worst thing he can do for himself right now is try to further justify the philosophy that led him to try and kill an enemy they had already subdued while her stomach was still turning, and she thinks—no, hopes, however futilely—that he knows that.
There’s no solution for the thick layer of silt that cakes to her skin, she realizes quickly, and gives up trying, instead approaching the offices to peer inside and search for something to aid the efforts of a proper burial—kindling, something to ignite it, or even some kind of fluid that would help burn him up faster. She has smelled burnt flesh before—Finn’s, as it so happens, as well as Kylo Ren’s—and she does not care for it, a feeling which encourages her to expediency as much as her own apathy towards the act does.
All of it keeps her from getting bogged down in the tremor of her fingertips, in the hitch of her breath, in the ocean slapping up at her waist and trying to drag her down and overwhelm her. She shunts it roughly from her mind just as much as she tries to wall off Kylo Ren’s pain, a distraction in its own right that she doesn’t want to waste sympathy on. He deserves worse. She uses the coverings around her forearm to clear the glass away from a window frame that she then climbs in to intensify her search and forget her anger. ]
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It's a long moment spent looking at the corpse between them, but it's a moment all the same, and when Kylo does look back up at Rey after having been given permission to speak, it's with the same haughty attitude that was present prior to looking away. He assumes that the effect is somewhat lost considering his visage and the way that he leans to one side and bends his arm at a sharp angle in front of his abdomen, fingers cured into a fist against the constant throb in his thigh. Rey, he knows, can't be feeling much better considering the harsh battering she'd experienced not only physically but as a kickback of his own internal grappling with the overwhelming desire to fall and fall hard. A little of that arrogant transparency falls. )
I was going to suggest going back inside to find something to use as kindling, but it seems your scavenger instincts have proved that to be an unnecessary waste of a suggestion. ( Kylo watches her clamber in through the window with a certain amount of grace and dexterity that he could never hope to possess. He isn't even sure that his shoulders would fit between the frames on either side, as he watches her feet disappear into the building beyond.
He falls silent after she retreats inside, leaving him alone with the bulk of his own thoughts as he shuts off and shuts out her end of whatever lingering remnants of their trembling bond exist. It is a long moment before he begins stripping Aurren's armor off, but he leaves the other man's helmet for last. )
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Rey refuses to carry the guilt of that act, already carrying some portion of the responsibility for Han's death on her shoulders—he was on the base, after all, to come find her thanks to Finn's encouragement—but she won't take up any other weight that Kylo Ren accrues as her own. Instead, it just leaves her bitterly, icily angry. She kicks a fitted connector, loose and discarded from some mining machinery, across the floor to spill some of it outward into the administrative office and alleviate the pressure that builds from her contained frustration.
She goes through a handful of cabinets before she finds emergency blankets, fuel, and lights; Rey piles it all together into a flimsy metal crate that may as well be built from the skeletons of canned drinks and carries it to the window where she shunts the crate over the frame to where Kylo Ren stands, waiting expectantly for him to take it from her without ever vocalizing the order. ]
Is this one another Knight? [ Her suspicions are strong, given Ren's desire to deal with the corpse in a more deserving way—Rey can think of few even she would go to the effort of burying in such a manner, given the position they're in—but she wants them validated. It'll put her in a better position, she hopes, to predict and understand him. Right now, she needs some kind of assurance of what to expect. ]
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He feels oddly hollow and displaced by it now, seeing no advantageous benefit to its appearance the way that he had before, despite being intrigued, a little amused, and somewhat enticed by it. Kylo assumes it has something to do with their connection, this bond, and isn't surprised to find disappointment rooting around in the interior of it as he slips gloved fingers underneath the thick fastening at Aurren Ren's neck to let the dead Knight's cloak fall away from his shoulders, but he is surprised to find that there is no headbutting anger of his own rising to meet Rey's lack of effort in disguising her opinions of his choices and his character. He won't make excuses or apologies for who he is or what he's done. They would ring hollow anyway.
Kylo keeps his head down as he removes armor and ammunition from Aurren's body - he has a number of flash grenades and a utility belt that would make a weapon's enthusiast aroused - and only looks up when Rey reappears at the window with a scraping sound, shoving a flimsy-looking metal crate through the frame at him. He's just in time to catch it, which he does with a scowl, flashing a wave of irritation at her and repressing the urge to send a rude hand gesture her way as well. Someone has to be the bigger person, here. )
Yes. ( His answer at first is simple, as she hasn't asked for specifics, intending to leave it at that as he sets the crate down at Aurren's feet. Sweat has soaked through his clothing around his neck and under his arms and at the small of his back, and his pant leg is sticky and unpleasant where the tear in his flesh gapes. Kylo presses a hand against it and wills it to stop throbbing in the interest of appearing less than invincible when she is this angry with him, and exhales, long, through his nose. ) Aurren Ren is a newer initiate, but not the newest. As you can see, he has a certain appreciation for firearms. ( Kylo kicks one of Aurren's boot heels and decides not to strip them off as they look too big for Rey and too small for himself. It's a moment before he speaks again, some of his irritation burning away in the wake of contemplative reflection. ) I have to wonder if Ji brought him with her, or if he tried to collect the glory of the bounty for himself.
( It seems a likelier reality than the two of them partnering up for this task when their styles of direct confrontation are so dissimilar. Kylo can see the tactical advantage to having a sniper but Ji typically prefers doing things on her own rather than as part of a unit. Even in the instances in which the whole of the Knights operate together, she keeps herself distant and separate - not unlike himself - where there is a version of camaraderie between the others that might be considered strange by Resistance or even First Order standards but registers as normal to the warriors he knows. The thought spurs the heaviness of his gaze toward the opening of the mine shaft, wondering, before he turns to look up at Rey again with his mouth pressed into a thin line. The flat shine of Aurren's helmet winks at him out of his peripheral vision. )
You're very angry with me.
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For a moment, her only reply is to shoot him a curt, impatient look that insults the necessary observational powers to declare something so obvious. Rather than clarify as he seems to want her to, Rey drags the blanket from inside the crate and begins to tear strips of it off in shreds. Each frayed piece drifts to the body that lies between them, its simple presence a glaring reminder of the reasons for her anger and mistrust, a bantha occupying the space between them without ever being addressed. ]
You lied to me. [ Perhaps most surprising is not that she has developed the capacity to consider his slights to be betrayal, which demands some measure of trust, but rather that he had done something she perceives as deceptive in the first place. That fact alone lends some measure of doubt to her interpretation, but Rey charges on all the same, now stubbornly ignoring the fact that, even as her enemy, Kylo Ren had not lied to her but told her his truths, or truths she was not ready to hear. ] You let me believe it was Snoke who brought the darkness in, but it wasn't. It was you all along.
[ Rey pulls the tank of spare fuel—a few quarts, no more, enough to shuttle a speeder to and from tertiary mines for additional supplies if an emergency came—from the crate and pops the lid off, then shakes it out upside down with vigor over Aurren Ren. The brackish, transparent yellow fluid splashes up onto Kylo in some part as she does. ]
She was helpless, and you were going to kill her. Because it was easy.
[ Hell, he did kill the man below them, and she doesn't for a minute believe that was a necessity either—but at least he'd been actively firing upon them. Ji was … Quick. Easier. A matter of diverging from the difficult path for something rooted in simplicity and clean breaks, something understandable. Rey throws the emptied metal tank across the dirt of the open mouth of the mine where they stand, kicking up more dust. It's always dust. She hates it. She's had enough dust for ten lifetimes. ]
Even you know that was wrong.
[ She knows because he wouldn't have done it to her. Rey doesn't allow the awareness to unsettle her like it tries to, and instead holds onto the comforting security blanket of her anger. ]
The monster in the shadows of your mind was never Snoke, it wasn't just his influence, it was you.
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He wants to say something, defend himself, but he finds that, save for the shift in his expression to open, active hostility - without the mask, he's just too expressive, both a good and bad thing considering what he's been trying to do for the last fifteen years - keeping his mouth shut affords him more ammunition against her, and there's something cathartic in watching her slam materials around, splash him with fuel as she dumps the canister on Aurren's lifeless body, as if coming to recognize that he is not the only one with a poor amount of control over his retaliatory instincts. Rey is so often the picture of controlled indignation and sometimes arrogant in that presentation that watching her fall apart in ways that Kylo himself is familiar with, albeit to a much smaller degree, is somewhat satisfying, but not satisfying enough to distract him from the abject offense that he feels as she continues to level charges at him one after the other, after the other.
The notion that he has no room to feel offense considering what he's done, what side of himself he's shown her once again, does not cross him. What he does feel is offense at her temerity to assume that he has been lying to her about who and what he is, and it's the recall back to that thought, the initial charge, that pushes the pain and any traces of the arrogant amusement he'd felt at her displeasure, the small amount of relief at seeing her slowly crumble under the weight of her own anger and the sharp smell of fuel soaking into his clothing, away from him as if caught in a heavy tide. All that's left is a high, long ringing whine that echoes in the forefront of his mind, a pinprick of anger that is so fine and so sharp it could cut diamonds with surgical precision. )
I have never lied to you. ( Kylo feels petulant saying it, despite the fact that it needs to be said in the first place. He hadn't lied to her on Starkiller, even though the differences in their opinions and perspectives may have created the illusion that he was at the time, and he has not lied to her since. Not on Yaga Minor. Not on Corellia. Not on Hapes. Not in the barren wasteland of their tandem efforts to see Snoke expelled from his head, from his thoughts, in the ghostly husks of Ilum, Yavin IV, Jakku and the praxeum and all the landscapes in between. It has to be said in the interest of establishing his honesty now, Kylo realizes, as he curls his fingers into fists and stares at the muted green-brown of her eyes and the tension wiring of her shoulders, though he doesn't know why.
A thought occurs to him, and it could be his or hers, considering the bleed between them. He wouldn't have done it to her. He wouldn't. )
You are the most stubborn person I have ever met. Do you really think that I could make you believe something that you hadn't already decided on yourself? ( Childish disgusts contorts his tone, but the anguished ire that he feels is raw and real, his voice rising in tone and volume the longer he goes on uninterrupted. ) I let you believe nothing. If what you saw when you looked back at me on Corellia was a blameless shell that Snoke filled up with his own intent alone, then you interpreted it incorrectly, and that is on you. ( It might not be the whole truth but it's the truth that he knows and the truth that he accepts, the truth that exists as a result of the reality that he has lived since Snoke found him, since the Dark Side found him. With or without Snoke's influence, Kylo reasons, there is a good chance he was damned from the start anyway, but he cannot and will not pretend that the choices that he has made, the things that he has done, exist in a vacuum that can be closed now that the path that he walks has changed. )
I have lived the most of my life in the dark. It has always been there, and it always will be. A few hours spent in a meditative state won't change that, as much as Snoke's instruction and acceptance of that side hasn't managed to snuff out the opposition. ( The light, always burning, blinding when he looks too long at it. Kylo takes a few steps toward her, and his leg drags in the dirt lamely but he barely notices it, letting the heavy weight of his gaze consume and feed off the fire of Rey's own anger, her disgust, her shame and betrayal, a hurricane swaddled in the white bones and bronzed cage of a girl. ) Ji wasn't helpless. Couldn't you feel it? ( The heavy timbre of his voice climbs again, and he doesn't have to say it for the implication of his question to be present: stupid, naive girl. ) She had help, and she very well might have killed us both, killed you, or brought you somewhere that would force you to wish she had! Is that what you wanted? To be brought before Snoke and made to answer for your actions against him? I was trying to -
( He breaks off, at the end of the line of his frustration, feeling the heady pulse of destructive rage uncurl in his gut like a series of claws opening and closing, tracing sharp, hot lines across his insides. A hand rips its way savagely through his hair, yanking it back where it's started to fall, damp with sweat, into his eyes, and Kylo turns away from her, unable to look at her and knowing, innately, that his reasoning might only infuriate her further. Saving her, saving them both, had been a motivating factor when he'd squeezed his fingers around Ji's throat and refused to disengage, but it isn't the whole of it, and in that recognition lies the suggestion of a lie if there actually were one. He had fed off of it, in the end, and there is no denying that, but Kylo won't make excuses for it. )
I see it, sometimes. ( He says, moving away from her, showing her his back. Aurren's helmet glints again in the dim light, and Kylo bends to remove it, unkind with residual anger, from the man's head, slipping his fingers underneath the jaw where he knows the mechanized latch is that will release it. Aurren's older face stares back up at him, washed with salt-and-pepper stubble, and his eyes are closed, but the area around them is bruised and black. ) I saw it on the General's face after we emerged from the meditative state on Corellia. The expectation that in the wake of Snoke's eviction from my thoughts, Ben Solo will return, as if Kylo Ren is some monster wearing that boy's face. ( Kylo turns back around to face her, voice quieter than he intends it to be. ) Who do you expect me to be?
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For the first time, it occurs to her that they might never clash in that way again, and the wistful sorrow that comes with losing something significant joins the relief of commiseration that she had already felt in their bond. That realization grows strong with the implicit understanding of his intent, flaring to full awareness now—he thought he could protect her (the both of them, yes, but her) and brackish disgust turns Rey’s stomach as it floods her mouth, thinking that he’d done what he did in some misguided defense of her.
Still, his accusations gouge the sails of her argument in deep slashes until her bluster is nothing but wounds in white canvas flapping lamely in the insignificant wind, but she won’t allow her discontent to be dismissed entirely while she can still feel the heat of Ji’s throat under her own hand, as if she had been the one to squeeze and squeeze, as if she had not stopped until the life drained out of her. Rey’s horror is as much a result of the transference as it is a result of her understanding of what had allowed him to indulge and celebrate in the unforgiving brutality of the act; it is gristle in her teeth that she cannot mull over in a satisfactory, easy way, resisting simple interpretation.
There’s nothing else to lash out at, she realizes sadly when she looks down to find her hands are not only empty of Ji’s throat, but of anything at all, and it leaves her with a white dwarf of agitation humming inside of her with no way to vibrate its way out of her skin and find peace. She paces away, raising her arm to wipe sweat away from her face, and she pretends not to notice the frustrated tears that come away from her contorted expression, tight with restraint, with the rest of the salt. The exhale that spills past her lips is not at peace, but seething, steam billowing out of an active furnace, and though she lifts her gaze to the darkened sky to find comfort, she finds nothing but emptiness. ]
No. Not blameless. [ She hisses the words as a defense, turning back towards him with the darkened scowl of a woman who knew precisely what she blamed him for: Han’s name goes unspoken between them not because she won’t dare utter it, but because she knows she doesn’t need to. He is not a piece of leverage to heft around between them. The loss is greater than that.
She uses the reminder now to block his efforts in painting himself the victim of expectations now, deliberately or otherwise, for she will not allow him to lob arms at his mother, the only mother she’s ever known, because she wants to recover what Kylo Ren has cost her: a family. Not only Ben Solo, but Han as well. She will not allow him to vilify Leia for that. Her tone turns scolding and impatient as she lashes back at him, voice raising while she hoists the lights she’d brought out, flicking them on and breaking open the bulbs so they’ll catch on the fuel-soaked scraps of fabric and consume Aurren’s body. Flames roar to life and try to drown out her speech as she drops the broken light, filament cutting her palms in carelessness. ] Stop hiding behind other people! You can’t justify what you do by claiming it was in defense of me when I didn’t want it, and you can’t disavow Snoke’s influence and begrudge your mother hers in the same breath!
[ So what does she want? Like it or not, he has narrowed down the real problem, that she got something she didn’t expect in this, but not in such a way that it’s different than anticipated, for that implies she had some fully manifested expectation. No, it’s more than she wanted, and not in a way worth celebrating. Looking at Kylo Ren and the life he offered her when he’d attempted to lure her to the dark, Rey saw the potential for the intimacy of understanding and the comfort of camaraderie—without him, she might never stop being alone.
But he understands more than the nature of her abilities, than the experiences implicit in them; he understands the darkness within her, the vengeful, spitting rage and the joy of the hunt and the bloom of satisfaction that comes with wielding power that you’ve never had before. She hates seeing the worst of herself in him, hates it because like any fire, she knows that it is catching and it could burn her up just as soon as warm her. She is afraid—paralyzed, really. She thought he might help her find a way that is their own—not Luke’s, not Snoke’s, but she realizes suddenly and sharply the unfairness of this projection of hers. Freeing him for her own benefit makes her no better than Snoke himself, let alone than Kylo Ren. So she grits her teeth, forces it away, and instead turns it back around on him, opening herself to reality rather than her blind hopes, rather than her needs. ]
It isn’t about what we expect; it’s about what you want. Did you want to be free of Snoke so you could escape the darkness that he has drowned you in, to find your own path, or did you simply want the power he offered you without the leash?
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Nothing. Nothing at all. The culmination of everything that she is charging him with reduced to ashes, cinder. A battle fought and waged and won but lost. Dark, dark blood on his hands, darker than he could hope to wash away, and then bright pain dragging him under. It had been too much then, and it is too much now, a confusing jumble of thought and intention that leaves him feeling scraped raw. The loss, greater than leverage, hangs open and gaping between them, the both of them gathered on separate ledges of the horrible chasm that has opened between them, a pit of loss and bitter hurt for reasons that are different and the same. That is them in a nutshell, he and Rey: different but the same, the warped and cracked mirror, the opposing sides of the same coin. What she sees of herself in him, she hates, and what he sees of himself in her, he cannot accept.
The inversion is strange and alarming and it won't, he knows, ever go away, no matter what happens to them. They could be locked saber to saber now, teeth bared and arms trembling, and he knows without having to even skim the surface of her mind let alone dive deep within it that the sentiment would not change. It's an acceptance, an understanding, that physically aches, and for as much as neither of them want to permit the other, there is no room between them for denial. He can't shut out the billow of hot, scalding anger that issues forth from the engine of her lungs, and he can't stop the oily slick of its counterpoint from slipping from him to her. They pushed too hard, too much, and there is no going back, there is no hiding from one another.
The opposition rips at him, not dissimilar to the way in which everything that he has ever done has torn him in two, but rather than sink down into it, give in to the brutalized anger and resentment that threatens to claw its way out of his open mouth, Kylo finds it easier to let the hard burn of her ignored tears find a mark within him as well. A tight heat that has nothing to do with with fire she has lit, nothing to do with the smell of burning flesh and melting hair, traces its way across Kylo's chest and chokes him. It is so different from the heartbeat of darkness making him smug, light, powerful not so long ago that he knows this can only be the agony afforded to him by the light, calling, heckling, demanding to be let in. He is a disaster. )
I am not hiding. ( The disdain that spikes any time that anyone mentions his mother returns, though it's clouded with an overall objective feeling of despair that he can't quell in the midst of this turmoil. Angry tears threaten, a solid, heavy lump rising in his throat at the thought of her - memories and imagined realities and the potential future that he cannot see beyond their jettison out of here - and Kylo - Ben is filled with as much abject misery and longing as he is hatred. They had not been good to each other, any of them, really. )
I don't know who else to be, and I won't - I can't apologize for who I am. You thought you could take the monster out of the creature and have the man left but there is no dividing line. There is no going back. There is no changing the outcome. There is only forward. I don't know what will happen. I don't - I just don't know. And you can't expect me to have it figured out yet. People don't - no one changes overnight. ( She expects him to, she worries that she herself will, and Kylo has a strange half-formed notion that he would, if he could. An idea that he might give her anything she wanted if she asked. But it goes as quickly as it comes, carried away with smoke and wind. ) This has been who I am for the last twenty years. Expecting it to go away because it scares you is naive.
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this is the worst tag i'm so sorry this weekend has been insanely busy and it's only saturday
NO WORRIES my life is a blur right now i'm so unreliable omg
MINE TOO it's fine it's fine. prayer circle for me and you. i hope you're surviving!!!!!
just barely./stares into the middle distance. why is the end of the semester so hard
i have never understood. i think making it to the end means things should be easier
finals week is finally here i can see the light
YOU ARE ALMOST THERE YOU CAN DO IT. also i apologize for short/crap tags i've been sick this week
i feel like the six days this tag took is enough of a "don't even worry about it"
and then i got pulled for jury duty this week so everything is a mess. I HOPE SCHOOL IS OVER
it is!!! also why can't civil service suit our schedules like "yes hello i'd like to volunteer"
HOORAY YOU MADE IT. you better sleep in until like noon every single day
8( two weeks of summer work + rey cosplay to make tho. BUT SOON. SO SOON.
summer work get outta here but that rey cosplay is gonna be amazing i am 100% sure. THEN SLEEP
SO MUCH SLEEP i conned a bunch of people into helping me with the cosplay so i have a prayer
ALL THE SLEEP hahahaha i am so proud of your conning abilities
it's been like 3 solid days of work + cosplay i'm actually dying. tomorrow too, then con
please don't die i will have to do some black magic to bring you back and i am just not prepared
omg i thought you were studying wtf
i was but i ran out of sacrificial lambs
i waS COUNTING ON YOU
WE WERE ALL ROOTING FOR YOU HOW DARE YOU
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ugh sorry for slow. i've been working 6 days so by thurs/fri i'm like x__x i see infinity
oh god that sounds horrible make it stop
but money is so nice
damn das true
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well a month later i'm the worst rper in the land
that's a weird way to spell best ???
you are legitimately too kind
routine is suuuuuper good for mindset i'm both fatigued by school and glad it's back
now i'm back. from outer space. i just walked in here to find you with that look upon your face!
now that you're back in the atmospheeere drops of jupiter in your haiiir mixes pop lyrics nbd
this is fine it's just the remix duh
club mix ntz ntz ntz
hahah this semester is killing me. i'm sorry if this tag is garbage. december can't come fast enough
honestly sets all of 2016 on fire is it over yet