apparare | i found something in the woods somewhere.

i found something in the woods somewhere.

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

[ Rey gets her arms under the knight's shoulder, begins to haul him with the squat of her thighs like she might if he were the dead weight of collected materials rather than a body, but she quickly realizes that this method only aggravates Kylo Ren's injuries, her height forcing him to squat further with each pull. Instead, she hauls the arm up over her shoulders in a hoist. Something in his elbow cracks. He's not using it anymore, so she says nothing of it, and continues to trudge in parallel with her should-be, would-be, could-still-be enemy to the offices.

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. ]

( He doesn't need the bond or even the Force and his partnership with it to sniff out the underlying implications within the confines of her tone, and Kylo finds, in some way, that he isn't disappointed or annoyed with the existence of them. He'd meant what he said as a compliment but it doesn't distress him in the slightest to sense her bristling, hackles raising, the thin layer of tight control wavering like heat coming off of scorched pavement, from the other side of the barrier that is Aurren's weight supported between them. Had he energy left, he might allow the full effects of one of those imitation grins to bloom at the corner of his mouth at what her indignation seems to imply, point out - if he had breath to spare - what it means to feel betrayed by the inherent suggestion that resides within the framework of a simple backhanded compliment.

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?

[ The silence he presents carries with it a smugness that clamps down on Rey’s last nerve, worsened when he breaks it; her gaze drags slowly and punitively towards him as she bears the weight of their burden for a few moments longer until she can ease it to the ground in a pose that offers the illusion of dignity in death. Only when the remains of the Knight have been lowered to the ground does she fix Kylo Ren with her full attention, gathering herself back to full height and, in doing so, strengthening her glower before she offers him a reply. ]

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. ]

( Kylo tips his chin up, breaking his gaze away from Rey for the sole purpose of gazing briefly at Aurren's prone figure on the ground between them, carving a shape like a comma into the in-between of their acknowledgements. He feels nothing and tries to feel even less, if it were possible, both because of his overall disassociation with his current group of subordinates - although his command and position as their head is certainly more debatable than it was prior to Corellia - and because the inevitable outcome of being part of a group such as this always tends toward death, whether at the hands of a perceived ally or an enemy. It's hard to say who has killed more Knights of Ren since he took up the mantle of leading them: threats or other Knights.

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. )

[ He manages to make her efficiency sound like an insult, and it does little to tamp down the fires of her anger, stoked by the image of his fingers curled around Ji's throat to choke the life out of her that has been branded on the back of her eyelids. Rey's gaze, as she turns it coldly on him to impress again the words only if you have to, an accusation that declares he certainly didn't have to make such a redundant comment writ across her expression. He is a predator. A monster. An animal waiting for the chance to get off his chain and find blood, and today she walked him into the hen house.

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. ]

( Anger, he knows better than most, has always been easier. Rey is alight with it. Out of sight, Kylo can feel it directed toward him, forming because of him, like a sharp, icy wind over a layer of permafrost, a different sort of sensation than the heat of his own ire that so often bubbles and bleeds. This comes sharp and crystal clear, leeching the warmth from his skin and spilling down into his bones. Her disgust, her contempt, her rage and indignation, everything that she feels toward him in these moments are things that he has felt from her before and yet somehow the sensation is wholly different. Before, he hadn't cared, before he had seen its potential, the boon that it could be, the great dark chasm that offered limitless possibility if she would only stare back into it.

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.

[ Something about him casting a spotlight on the tempered fury that stirs under her skin only aggravates it, like grit that she can't pry up from under her nails, and the effort of biting it back tightens Rey's jaw. Strong arms vault her easily out of the window, and her boots kick up dust as they plant back on the outside ground; the bones of the offices sigh and creak with the short-lived force of her weight.

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.

( Kylo wants to interject at any of the opportunities afforded to him by the natural breaks in her speech - about Ji, about Snoke, about himself - but he holds his tongue. He feels the slight drag over his mouth as his lip starts to curl, balanced between hysterical laughter and blind rage at her presumption, another gorge opening up within him and threatening to swallow him down, but the edges of the chasm are lined with sharp teeth that catch and pull and make the descent a messy affair as opposed to the smooth slide down into blackness that the Dark Side provides, a tempting, easy transition from the constant battering of high, wild winds that so often try to rip him right down the middle.

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?

[ Neither of them will fully emerge from this war without blood on their hands. Rey knows that as well as she knows violence’s snapping jaws at the back of her mind trying to lash out and take a bite of her enemies, the same urge that Kylo Ren had given into down in the mine. It was a warped mirror, showing her the snarling, bared teeth of a predator from the other side, watching through a lens what she had looked like when she tried to fell him on Starkiller, what she feels every time they fight.

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?

I want to be free. ( The statement tears itself out of his throat without warning, catching on his canines and gnashing his tone, a violent, desperate bark that sees itself leveled at the only other person available - worthy, brave, strong - enough to weather it. It's an admission that crackles with all the cold electricity of lightning in a bottle, a harsh realization for himself, if for no one else, and Kylo feels that if he weren't so thoroughly exhausted, wrung out, bone dry, the subsequent explosion of his rage and frustration would be enough to level the area. Rey's careful edging around it, and Kylo's own recollection of the last time he delivered such an embittered charge, could only ever call to mind that startled face, bathed in red, falling down and down and filling him up and up only to be left with -

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.

You don’t scare me.

[ Pride speaks abruptly with her voice, but it is thick and curdled with loathing, warped into something that can hardly be recognized as hers. Bitterness makes her intractable, but realization alone will not temper it because it is the conflict that she can see battling out across his features that she has become embittered to, by her own mirrored struggle with it.

The push and pull of both sides too often threatens to suffocate her: she is filled with well-grounded outrage and agony at her own abandonment, at more than a decade of undeserved misery that she was subjected to, the intrinsic unfairness of circumstance doing its best to turn her out, a weapon with its point raised at those who had contributed to her suffering. Only through the understanding and empathy afforded to her by a lifetime of misery does she tame it, remain stalwart in the face of its influence.

In that way, her pride lies plainly and boldly, for though Kylo Ren’s actions and the threat of his strength do not scare her in the way that they are precisely the traits that leave most people quaking in fear of him, she does feel afraid of what he embodies. A realized form of her failure, the threat of her missteps, he represents the worst of what she could be if she misjudged or lost her grip on that calm center at the eye of her misery. The notion that she could so easily be him paralyzes her in cold terror.

But this isn’t about her, as hard as Kylo tries to deflect it onto her fear and her inadequacy and her haranguing expectation; this is about his choices and his stumbling path out of the darkness. She cannot take the steps for him, will not coddle and hold his hand—Rey offers him only the possibility and light cast on the hard path that leads up out of the familiar territory of his own whirlpool of hate and sorrow and pain. No one had offered that much to her—she’d found her own way to suffer it without surrender—but she wishes they had, so independent of obligation, she sets it out for him.

In that context, it seems petty of her to grow angry and frustrated when he chooses not to take the path she has lit for him, knowing it is his choice and it is not her responsibility to push him along it. ]

You want to be free? Free yourself. [ For all her empathy and understanding, Rey unsympathetically spits the words at him, a wide sweep of her arm gesturing to him as the sole guardian of his fate. ] You cling to this idea of “who you are” as if it is stagnant, infallible, eternal, but it’s not. The person that you are is the choices you make in every moment; the past doesn’t chain you or define you, it doesn’t matter at all! But continue to choose the easy path, the one that is familiar to you in the dark where you’ve lived for so long, and that will always be the person you are.

( Her words are hollow echoes of a reality that he does not want to face. Not because it's difficult. Not because the long, slow climb out of the pit is just that: long and slow. Not because he sees any particular merit in what the Light Side philosophies might have to offer. Not because he doesn't see a place for himself among those ideologies, this boy who has lived with weight and expectation and monsters - real and imagined, outside invaders and internal demons - who can't reconcile the idea of who he was supposed to be with the person he has become, as if there were ever a way out. But because he doesn't know how.

Rey sees her own terror, her own paranoid fear, in the beast that he has turned into as a result of his inability to turn away from what has felt easy, what has felt right for so long despite knowing that it was wrong, and it occurs to him then that, despite their mirror similarities, despite the hard and lonely life she has had to live, despite knowing how perfectly she could like being what and like he is, she will never understand this perspective completely. And he has no words capable of describing it. Outside of showing her the way that he has in the past, there is no way to make her comprehend the complex assortment of disparity that he feels in doing something so simple as existing. The kind of man who believes his own absolution is to be found in the murder of his father and realizes too late the mistake that he has made. His life is a series of mistakes that he is barely beginning to right. )

We can't all leave the desert behind so easily, Rey. ( His tone is mean. The comment is a low blow, and Kylo knows it, given the horrible loneliness he has felt within her on more than one occasion, the sense of waiting, waiting, waiting for someone. A thousand, three thousand, five thousand and more scratches into the walls, fading white lines marking not the days until but the days since. Her decision to abandon such a fruitless endeavor, he knows, was not made easily or lightly, but he's mad at her and lashing out in the only way that he can despite the faith that she presents in him in saying what she does. Because of course that's there, too, that stalwart belief that this is not the end. She can scream and hiss and spit at him like a demon but it's intrinsically there at the heart of her words. Bundled up in anger and spun into a wicked web of disdain and superiority - at least, he interprets it as such, but then he is angry with her - it hides inside her barbs and the sharpness of her tone and behind the wall of her internalized fear that he absolutely does feel, too used to feeding off of in others like a breath of fresh air, but it exists.

He had told Han Solo that it was too late, and to the end he was insistent that it wasn't. They - Organa and Skywalker - have resolutely refused to give up on him, and Rey has dragged him kicking and screaming the entire way over a trail littered with broken glass and hot stones to wherever it is they are now, beyond his moon, beyond Concordia. Why she had not dropped him down off the ledge on Corellia, he will never know, but his own voice from moments prior resonates within him now. There is only forward. ) No path is easy. Good or bad, light or dark, it will never be easy. Our path - paths will never be easy. ( He glances down at Aurren's helmet gathered in his hands, feeling a strange urge to slip it on, to stare into the void and feel comforted in not having his face so exposed. The light from the fire throws long shadows over his features and distorts the shape of his face in the heavy visor. ) I'm not good, I'm certainly not Light, and I never will be, not entirely. ( After a moment, he tosses the helmet to Rey. ) I don't know who I am or what I'll be outside of what and who I've been. I need time to figure it out.

( But he's trying. He'd said as much previously, on the Falcon, and he'd been surprised then to know that he had meant it. Some of the fight goes out of him, drained through the hole in his leg and the pain of it that he calls on in an effort to keep the embarrassment of faltering at bay. He won't look weak. He won't submit. He needs to get away from her before she says anything else that sets him over the edge and drags him down again. She has the ability to do it, just as she has the ability to see right through him. One glance back at the blackening body of Aurren Ren sees him striding up to and level with Rey, giving her a wide berth as he makes to move past her. A thought occurs to him. )

I assume it won't matter when we return to the Resistance either way. ( They'll imprison him again, at the very least, especially if Rey discusses what has happened here, gives her thoughts and opinions on him as a person as she's presented them to him now. Kylo surprisingly feels nothing at the prospect. It looms too far ahead in the wake of what has transpired between them, somehow more important than his eventual death, to be of any consequence. )

[ Leaving the desert came with a fight, tooth and nail, against her very nature and every hope she'd clutched to her chest for more than a decade, the only thing she had to warm her at night and promise her that there was an end in sight. These and more, she had to give up, with no guarantee that the alternative would be better, and he spits it back in her face knowing full and well what he claims. The insult she takes is not indignation, not precisely, but it is comparable enough that there is a touch of it in the anger that flashes through her, oil in a pan that makes Rey want to claw at him and wrestle him to the ground and solve this with sweat and bruises and muscle fatigue, but that will not settle any matter so philosophical as this. Too bad, really.

But because she can rationally acknowledge that he knows better, Rey manages to rein in her temper and quiet the storm that threatens the teetering, fragile alliance that they have built out of paper and popsicle sticks. It's a wonder that the flames on Aurren's body have not ignited it already. It helps that, moments later, he makes acknowledgment that their difficulty in this life, in the path that stretches before them, is a mutual one, rife with grief and loss and loneliness, and it is only his childish bitterness that prompts him to try to undercut her experience with it, her struggle.

That does not preclude her desire to similarly undermine him, to hurt him as he has hurt her, but like many other impulses she shares with Kylo Ren, Rey demonstrates better restraint, tightening her grip on the helmet that has found its way into her hands rather than take it out on the man before her. ]

You make a lot of assumptions. [ Though she imagines the other leaders of the Resistance will favor the prospect, Rey has a hard time imagining Luke or Leia considering it with any seriousness—Luke out of doubt that such an environment could hold him for long, and Leia out of sentimentality. But they would be hard-pressed to make a good case, to prevent a trial, and to that end, even Rey must admit the high likelihood of an eventual execution.

She decides then that she won't let it happen, not only because Kylo Ren—for better or worse—is essential to her as he is now, because there is no telling what would become of either of them if one were to die with the bond as it stands, but also because she cannot stomach the mere imagining of Leia's grief, let alone the reality of it. They had already shared tears with one another over Han. She refuses to do it again, refuses to let the Resistance take her family from her all over again when it's so clear that it played a role in the division the first time. ]

We should stay here and keep the Falcon's systems off until you heal. [ She points to his leg, both avoiding the subject further and opting to solve the only problem that she can solve right now: time. ] It will keep us off radar, keep us from drawing further attention. [ If he needs to figure it out, better that he do it away from Organa and Skywalker—Leia and Luke, her mind corrects as if scolding it, startled by the smooth adoption of his monikers for them. It will also afford them the chance to make sure that Ji is really gone. ]

Concordia's mostly harmless, right? Barely inhabited since the mine shut down. I doubt we'll run into anymore trouble.

( The way that she views these monolithic figures that bookmark certain points of his life - Organa, Solo, Skywalker - sits in such stark opposition to the way that Kylo perceives them that it consistently puts him on the defensive any time there is so much as an implication as to their characters. In some ways, he can understand why Rey would look at them the way that she does: her experience with them is in complete contrast to his own. These are the people, the faces, the warm arms and full hearts that accepted a nobody made of sand and spare parts. Solo had endeared himself enough to her that she easily thought of him when prompted to fill the hole of a missing father, and Leia's kindness and acceptance in the face of her diligence and dedication, how rigid and unflinching and strong she can be, has certainly struck a cord with Rey as well. Skywalker is less difficult, still, to reason out, considering what he represents, what he can show her, what he can give her.

Kylo has none of those same experiences, and as a result he has none of that faith. The father who might have loved him but didn't understand or know what to do with him, how to relate; a mother too absorbed in the rest of the galaxy and too afraid of her own inadequacies and culpability in what her son was becoming to take it upon herself to fix it; and Skywalker an uncle who pushed and pushed in the only way he knew how, thinking he was doing the best that he could, only to have it shatter in a radius that took down an entire generation of possibility. Kylo is responsible for his own actions, who he is, and he knows that, but the assumptions that he makes are based in a history that Rey might never know, might never understands. Not rose colored glasses, necessarily, but she's been afforded a new lens through which to peer at the world as those three people inhabit it; his own perspective isn't as forgiving.

He isn't expecting to have attention drawn to his injuries, especially not after the volume and severity of their argument - it wouldn't be surprising if they shattered a few windows or fueled the fire in some way - but Kylo can't deny that he isn't exactly eager to return to the Resistance, as previously mentioned. Level enough with Rey to peer down at her if he leans slightly to the side, in her direction, he doesn't invade her personal space with his body language but comes close enough that he can see the precise way the orange light of the fire bends the shadows around her face. )

Famous last words, scavenger. ( His tone his much more mellow than it had been, though it carries the sharp edge associated with the death of screaming matches only moments prior. Finished but hardly forgotten. ) Are you sure you want to spend anymore time in the company of a monster?

( It might as well be a rhetorical question, since he already knows the answer. He gets the sense that without actively trying, it will be very unlikely that they are able to keep most things from one another in the future. )

[ Anger like Rey's—or more accurately, the potential for it—can only be controlled in one way; it needs direction, and like any wave, it will relax and quell given enough time and distance. On Jakku, she turned it into a mantra: they'll come back. As long as she subverted her anger with that simple statement, she could not allow the anger at her parents' abandonment to overtake her and mould her into some huddled, bitter creature.

She does the same now in the way she accepts that she has said her piece, expelled her discontent as far as it's safe to do so, and her mind should be redirected to the task they have at hand instead of her own ill will. After all, they have a body to burn, supplies to gather, and injuries to sleep off. When there's work to do, there's no room for thinking and hating—a good lesson, even if she came by it in an awful way.

But his tone snaps her attention up off the stinking mass of flaming flesh, and Rey's expression sours. ]

I have a name, you know.

[ The question, she doesn't bother with; it's better not to engage something like that for neither of them would enjoy the result of the answer. She won't correct him, dismiss the monstrous label, and she certainly won't lie and claim that she is content to remain in his company, but they don't have options, and Rey doesn't make a habit of wasting time complaining about her circumstances when it won't change anything. She focuses on what she can change instead. ]

Don't go anywhere. [ She pulls the blaster rifle down off her shoulder, tucking the stock against the crook of her shoulder and stretching long arms down the body to rest at the trigger guard and on the barrel. ] I'll get bacta from the Falcon, but it's better that we camp away from her in case anyone else followed. They'll see the ship, and maybe we'll get a heads up that they're coming that way.

I'm quite aware of that. ( Is his immediate response. Kylo is not so quick to put past transgressions behind him, however resigned and accustomed to their presence he may become. The retaliation is childish and unnecessary, but if it bothers her enough to vocalize the displeasure she feels at being called such a thing - and he knows the implication behind it eclipses the literal nature of that nomenclature; he's not just calling her what she's factually been for her entire life but twisting the word around his tongue like an insult, made more apparent when he'd spoken her name aloud only moments before - then he is more than happy to use it.

He knows better than most the power that lies in the naming of things, however much she might dismiss it while failing to dismiss the moniker that he's afforded to himself. That, at least, in this moment, with the black mark of what happened in the mine shaft not long enough ago to be resigned to memory and memory alone, is an accurate assessment, never mind his protestations and the argument spent defending himself to her. )

Leave the helmet. ( He says in response to her commands, after a moment spent considering the business end of the blaster she holds as if he might suddenly find it trained on him. It's a fleeting notion, conceived of a lifetime spent looking over his shoulder rather than beside it. Whatever their stance toward one another, that default position between the two of them has shifted with the formation of what exists between them, a blessing and a curse in so many ways. As for the helmet, Kylo is loathe to allow it on the ship, regardless of how little love he has for a vessel that Han Solo, in turn, loved. Aurren may not have been Force sensitive, but that bucket of rust is teeming with ghosts already, and neither of them need to be in the market for one or two more.

Kylo says nothing else, lumbering over under the slow drain of adrenaline to sit on one of the broken, crumbling steps leading into the administrative office that they'd been hacking away at for close to two hours now. He looks at the spread of his knees as he sits, resolutely not examining the injury to his leg until Rey has left and occupying the time until instead by looking up at her, tracing the lines of her face and the way the light bends as if to allow room for encroaching shadow. Blood has stained the side of her tunic, and although he cannot see the gash that Ji left in her side, his own skin tingles in a faint reminder. His leg throbs, and he closes himself away from her. )

[ For a moment, Rey considers carrying it with her for spite, but the helmet is bulky and interferes with her grip on the stock of the blaster rifle; it clunks as it hits the dirt, a plume of dust carried up around it as it creates a hearty dip in the landscape where it falls. Let him stew. Sand grinds beneath her boots as she turns heel and paces away from him without another word; concern that he will vanish into the dark while she is gone surfaces briefly, but she drowns it out by fixing her awareness on the steady throb of his thigh where it echoes in her own.

The hike back to the Falcon is tedious if not overly long, made longer by the way the heat of her injury spreads from one single point between her ribs, out through her lung and around her back. As worrisome as it is, it doesn't flag her step, for she knows the answer lies up on the creaking pile of garbage that had sat under a tarp just miles from her for years without her ever realizing what it could be to her.

When she boards, she moves past the cargo bay where the medical supplies wait, settling her palms on the back of the cockpit seats and staring out at the woodlands revealed by the front viewscreen. She presses her lips tightly together, quietly wishes that its original owner were here to offer her something, or at least forgive her for absconding with his murderer and leaving the Resistance to whatever fate befalls them. She takes small comfort in knowing that he's done the same, willingly and not, though it doesn't escape her that he recognized his avoidance for what it was and returned with them.

Turning away from the pilot chair, she hastens back through the central winding corridor and gathers up the bacta, stuffs an economical but what she suspects is sufficient amount into the leather pouch at her side, then strips off the linen that wraps around her body, disentangling the bands of fabric from her belt so she can pile it in a corner.

Dark brown and deep red stain a third of her tunic, the ivory canvas absorbing everything from mud to blood, and she pulls it up to slap a bacta patch against the smeared and dirty wound over sweat and dust from the mine. The back of her hand wipes sweat from her forehead, and she turns to leave her home behind and return to the wild ghost town whence she came to sift and scavenge once again through the hollowed relics of an age past. ]

( As Rey retreats back to the canopy of the ship, Kylo watches the shadows swallow her back and shoulders until she is nothing but the vague suggestion of an off-white shape in the distance. The Falcon is not stationed far enough away for her to fade completely from sight, but the shadows of the overhang and the encroaching evening do their part to obscure her, blot her out and distort what he can make out of her withdrawing figure. He turns his gaze away after she disappears underneath the metal hull of the ship, letting some of the tension created as a result of holding himself together with wire and screws drain out of him now that he's alone.

Gloved hands peel apart the hole in his pant leg to inspect the damage done to his thigh but there's little to be done in the half-light and even less to be accomplished without the supplies that Rey has left to retrieve, so he does stew. He stews for three full minutes in a muck of self-doubt and chastisement, of lingering anger and frustration and inward disappointment, a cavalcade of vitriolic energy that wants to snap its jaws and lash out at the next person available while it slinks away to lick its wounds and bide its time until the next outburst. The air smells like charred flesh and burning hair and the melted fibers of the clothing that hadn't been removed from Aurren's frame. The helmet glints up at him where Rey had dropped it, and Kylo finally lumbers to his feet in order to stride toward it.

Ultimately, he leaves it, and for no reason other than to be contrary, he doesn't not go anywhere, as she'd instructed him. Rather, he wanders his way through some of the other buildings, entering none save one of the last ones, which appears to have served as an administrative barracks for the miners at one point. The floor seems solid, and none of the rafters overhead come down as he picks his way through the abandoned items, all of which seem useless and exhausted with age and disuse. It's something to do other than watch Aurren burn, but even wandering loses its shine once Kylo finds that there is nothing to procure. Rey, no doubt, will be able to find use for each and every item that she pulls from the dust, but he hasn't spent his life scavenging for parts. Just for Jedi.

Back at the fire, he waits for her to return, standing rather than sitting, leg outstretched, as if any pain could be so great as to incapacitate him when he had drawn such strength from it previously. Kylo stares down into the tarnished durasteel of Aurren's mask and considers what might happen were he to put it on, what transformation might take place as a result of the association so easily made with the disguising of his face. He has now spent more unbroken time without his helmet than he has in longer than he can remember. What that says about him, about what is happening, about Rey, is beyond Kylo's level of comprehension and equally beyond his level of attentiveness, concrete thoughts draining away like meltwater and leaving vague approximations and hints of ideas and concepts behind instead.

After a long moment, he bends to press the helmet between both palms, examining the weight and shape of it, the way the dust and grit has overtaken some of the seams and cracks that mar the visor. There isn't enough adequate lighting to show Kylo his own reflection in its totality, but he can see the outline of his hair, flattened to his head, and the protrusion of what he assumes is his nose in the visor as he turns the helmet to catch more of the firelight. Lighter and somehow less scuffed and dented than the one he left on Corellia, it seems to grin at him, beckoning.

Kylo dumps it into the fire at Aurren's feet. )

[ Absently, in the back of her mind, she can feel him stir and pace, an aimless sort of wandering that comes not from need for anything in particular, but from insolence and impatience, and for that reason, Rey doesn't let it rile her. Strangely, it offers something familiar and understandable in him, a reminder of the man that he claims is one with the monster she'd seen that had frightened her to defensiveness. This is something she recognizes, at least, so she lets the pendulum of his pacing search soothe her nerves with the familiar before she hikes down the ramp of the Falcon and back into view.

The effort of suppressing her injury keeps her gait stiff as she approaches, none of her breaths quite expanding her chest to its full capacity before the sting sets in and blocks her, but pride keeps her stubborn. She finds him there, pale face glowing orange as the flames reflect in his features, casting long shadows that exacerbate the already awkward proportions of his face, and she looks down at the crackling, mechanical sound of the circuits of the helmet frying, a death rattle of its own for the mask that Aurren Ren wore.

For the first time, it occurs to her that Kylo Ren never really chose to leave that particular symbol behind on Corellia, but was forced to by circumstance and her. She doesn't pity him or wish for anything less, but it does give her some idea of why he'd demanded she leave the other Knight of Ren's helmet on her disappearance.

Quite suddenly and without a word, she crouches in front of him, granules of dirt digging into scuffed and half-bared knees as she reaches for his pant leg to assess the wound for herself. Her head tilts briefly and she gets brief hold of the material—enough to see the hole left in it—and lifts her gaze, not bothering to straighten her spine or extend her legs, for she'd never reach near his height anyway. Instead, she just nods to the mound of earth beside her. ]

Sit down. [ She doesn't deliver it like a command, yet the advisement brokers no argument. ]

( Kylo senses her approach long before he hears it, but he makes no move to retreat from the circle of soft orange that casts a wide halo across the overturned dirt. Through the film of smoke and fire, he can see the open mouth of the mine shaft, a blacker scratch on a blackening evening, and not for the first time and surely not for the last while they remain on Concordia, he casts his senses out, doubt tickling the back of his neck, the sensation of being watched peeling down his spine like skin pulled back from the meat of a bright fruit. There is, as there was before, nothing there, no sign of anything, no disturbances that aren't rock formations breaking apart and beams splintering as the chain reaction of their damage ripples through the cavernous space.

Nothing. Just the two of them: Kylo blotting out a section of the fire and Rey bringing up the rear with heavy footfalls, the fuzzy sensation of her healing injury warming across his own ribs at temperature wholly different from the blaze that climbs high in front of him. Rey comes to stand next to him, and for a quick moment, Kylo studies the give and take of the shadows that play over her profile out of the corner of his eye before averting his gaze completely back to the disintegration of Aurren Ren. The smell has abated somewhat, given over more to the choke of black smoke and the popping of wood, sparks drifting up into the air and burning out before they can reach the navy blue of the oncoming dark.

The silence that stretches between them, pockmarked by these pops and shifts of kindling, is something less than comfortable but more than awkward. An acknowledgement of sorts that negates the need for actual words. Rey breaks it not by speaking but by grinding her heels into the dirt and swinging herself around in front of him to crouch down, taking him by surprise enough that she's able to gather the flapping material of his pant leg to peer beyond the frayed edges of dark fabric and get something of a look at what lies underneath. Kylo steps back automatically, the uneven ranginess of his gait as a result of the injury giving him an off-balance tilt and a stagger in his step that rights itself in the same manner, no matter how hard he tries not to favor the leg that sports the injury.

Rey hovers there in the dirt, and Kylo looks down at her for a long moment, weighing his options. He could refuse her assistance and take care of the injury himself, or refuse her assistance in its totality and treat the wound with the same care and attention he had allowed himself following Starkiller, sparing his pride at the expense of his thigh. Part of him enjoys the authoritative quality of her tone, enough to want to sit as directed while his curiosity is satiated by seeing what it is that she does next, and still part of him longs to stand if only to be contrary, the same way that he had wandered despite her clear instructions to stay put, to exert some control over himself if not over the situation in its entirety.

In the end, there is little choice but to sit down as instructed. Kylo manages it in one fluid motion despite the pain that it inspires, gritting his teeth and bending his knees until his backside smacks unceremoniously into the dirt. He eyes the length and width of her hands, her fingers, the sharp angles of her face, then kicks his leg out and digs his fingers into the tear in his trousers, widening the hole himself. )

[ The stench of burnt flesh and death are thick in the air around them, but if Rey smells it in the smoke, she doesn't react, keeping her expression set and duty-focused. While tending to injuries for a political prisoner does not precisely fall under the purview of her duties as a Jedi Knight (padawan, technically), it does help extend the lives of them both should another fight arise, and her experiences with Aurren and Ji do not give her considerable faith that she would fair as well without his aid.

She does not admit these practicalities out loud, as much to spare her pride as to avoid inflating his.

Instead, she allows him the dignity of widening the tear in his own clothing and pulls a canteen from her leather bag, shaking some of the water out over the bloodied puncture that lies beneath. The skin has puckered, layers of flesh turned up like corners pulled away from the wound by an invisible force, a removed blade, and fresh blood bubbles out of it as soon as the water from her canteen temporarily washes blood and dirt away.

He should never have tried walking on it. Just one glance would be enough to tell her how deep it is, if the crippling pain she'd felt transferred to her own thigh hadn't given her some indication already; as it stands, it confirms what she already knows, that flesh and muscle have torn straight down the bone, that even with the miracles of modern medicine, it will be some time—days, she guesses—before his leg is fully functional again.

The cap goes back on her canteen before she swaps it out for a tube of bacta, which she applies judiciously with a smear of her fingers, his blood staining them through mine soot. As she applies it, she grows more conscious of the steady tingle, the latent cool burn, of the patch on her side, and she wonders if it is the bond transferring the feeling of application and her mind simply referring it to where it expects the sensation to come from or if it's merely a natural empathic reaction.

Submerged in silence, Rey is the most comfortable she's felt around him since he tried to choke the life out of a Knight in the mineshaft, a reminder of years in isolation where she merely tended to the tasks that required her attention as they came up and worried about little else, so she does not break it with evaluations or platitudes. Instead, she sets about wrapping bandaging tape around his thigh once it's lathered in the skimpy portion of bacta she'd opted to use—conservation as a habit dies slowly, painfully, screaming each step of the way—and winds it tight around his thigh. She pretends that she doesn't take petty satisfaction in the discomfort she undoubtedly causes him. ]

( Where Rey falls naturally into comfortable silence, Kylo sits on pins and needles, tension thick as soup and gathered in the taut line of his shoulders and the clenched, hard shape of his fists. It has little to do with physical pain. The sensation of water washing away blood and dirt and sweat and whatever else has compounded around the gaping hole in his thigh is undoubtedly uncomfortable, but it isn't the worst injury that he's suffered, and the sting and dull throb that have set in as extensions of the appendage, seemingly, have nothing on the way that his face and shoulder had felt as if they'd been separate entities from his body when she'd torn the blue beam of her saber down the length and width of both of them. Pain, as he had commented previously, is instructive, and as such he finds merit in every twinge, every bubble of blood, every splash of red that mingles with the pale clarity of the water.

So it isn't the tremble in his thigh as he bites the inside of his cheek in an effort to keep perfectly still, settles his eyes hard on the glint of the fire rather than the slope of her neck as she bends over to inspect her work but rather her presence in general that leaves him feeling so at odds. The last time he needed assistance with an injury bestowed had been after Hux had escorted him - he refuses to think of it any other way, given the way that ginger bastard's lip had curled after Kylo for days following - from the collapse of Starkiller, and his recovery at the time had been a difficult endeavor, to say the least. But Rey is not a droid that he can mangle, and she isn't a med officer that he can just ignore or intimidate into promptness and efficiency just by breathing. The ties between them run too deep for that, and her distaste for him and her anger with him had been too palpable prior to retrieving supplies from the Falcon for Kylo to just forget it.

Her decision to see to him now, personally, is an odd choice, and prickles under his skin and along the back of his neck as he watches her slather bacta over his skin with dirty fingertips and the smell of stale sweat hanging around the both of them. Her fingers are not careful around the mean hole that Ji has carved into him, but they are not purposefully rough in any way either. Rey's touch reminds him of his own, perfunctory but cognizant, the touch of routine, and he can see in the indifference she trains her expression in the small amount of pleasure that she takes in undoubtedly causing him some amount of pain, however small, as if it were an adequate punishment for the things that he had done in an effort to keep them both alive.

He frowns, first at the bridge of her nose and then at the motion of her hands, the back and forth hard pull of a swathe of bandages encircling the meat of his thigh. It's the closest that anyone has ever been, the closest that he has ever let anyone, in a very long time, and after a couple of passes of the bandage over his skin, Kylo bumps her hands away in an effort to take on the task himself. )

I think I can handle it from here. ( His voice feels rough with momentary disuse, choked and blackened by the smoke that pours ever upward, disappearing into the darkness of the evening. Dark eyes made amber by the light of the fire, Kylo lets his gaze skip from her hands up to her face and down to where he knows her own injury stains her side. His own skin buzzes faintly. The question he asks is rhetorical. ) Sort yourself out?

[ Her hands recoil as soon as his make contact, like an electric shock has passed between them or a venomous creature has bitten her, and Rey lifts her gaze to meet his eyes in the immediate aftermath of the disproportionate reaction. Not, she realizes, disproportionate to either of them or their circumstances; he will see that, even if her instinct is to assume that no one else would.

It takes her a moment longer to stop her heart from racing from the steep surge of adrenaline that comes with a presumed attack, but she does it as she withdraws from him, remaining crouched there while she waits for him to stop staring and continue the wrapping of his bandage. She averts her gaze first, lowering it in a gesture that she realizes too late reeks of submission. ]

On the ship. [ She shakes her head. ] It wasn't deep.

[ A lie, but not a maliciously made one; dismissive, rather, for the purpose of keeping the focus on the way his own wound would hamper their progress. She'd seen people on Jakku get left out in the desert and stripped by the elements for less, by scavengers who wanted to divvy up the sparse possessions they had. In those days, she'd blamed neither: people did what they had to in order to survive. But she doesn't entertain the thought of leaving Ren here. ]

You can't do that again.

[ She says it firmly, insistently, schooling the emotion out of her voice, even if she can do nothing for the passionate intensity with which she establishes the rule. There is no need to specify what she means for it hangs between them like a tightrope for them each to walk in unsteady paths back towards one another. Worse than his thigh, she can feel the gouged flesh of their bond like a torn ligament, strained and limping as if it had been rent from the bone, and the thought of another pull so jarring as to shred through their sameness makes her stomach churn. Bile rises in her throat, but she ignores it. ]

I know you think you had to, that it was right, but if this is going to work at all, you can't. Killing someone in the heat of battle is one thing, but restraining her and then— [ The words sound like they put a strain on her breath, the very memory of how she'd felt Ji's windpipe crumpling under her own hand winding her. ] I can't be a part of it, and I have to be a part of you. Whether either of us likes it or not.

( His hands stutter on the wrapping, long fingers tangling through the tapestry of off-white bandage while the opposite hand ensures that the dressing lies tight and secure against his leg. Muscles twitch and flutter underneath surface level skin and deeper down, as if jumping straight off of the bone. The licks of pain are secondary now, little twinges that pale in comparison to this weeping, damaged thing that spans the distance between them, larger than a gulf and smaller that a breath all at once. Kylo gets the impression that were he to raise his hand absentmindedly to hold it palm up, the bones and tendons required to mirror the motion in Rey's own hand and arm in order to press their palms together would spring into action automatically.

It manifests as an image in his mind but does not present itself as an actualization as he winds the bandage around his leg once more, but he understands what it is that she's suggesting even without having to hear the rest of what she has to say, which of course he does have to hear, seeing as there is nowhere to run and even fewer places to go. They've let the bond become too tangled, a knot of sinew and marrow, a combination of twisting and twining light and dark and the spectrum between both extremes. Right now his slide back into the familiar overwhelms and pollutes it, so that every word and breath from Rey's throat sounds as if it is being ripped from her, as if his hands were squeezing her trachea in an effort to snuff her out.

The idea perturbs him more than it would have a year ago, before he was acutely aware of her existence, before she was a flesh and bone person as opposed to a far off feeling, a star on a horizon, just a girl. So he cuts it off, shunts it away, and ties off the ends of his bandaging without bothering to admire their respective handiwork. The binding is secure, that's all that matters, but he'll have to find something else without a gaping hole to wear eventually. For the time being, Kylo falls quiet, dragged down in the whirl of Rey's grief - if it could be called that - enough not to take inventory of the submissive way in which her eyes had lowered. If anything, his aversion and preoccupation with his injury displays a similar reluctance, although he is quick to cast his gaze toward her again once he's finished. )

I can't promise you that I won't. I can't even promise myself that I won't. ( He delivers it quietly, most of the authoritative edge of his tone and the anger from earlier drained out of him and smothered by the fire and his own weariness. Even men like him get tired; juggling two consciences is exhausting. Kylo's throat feels dry, and although his voice doesn't carry the same qualities that it had prior, that dryness makes it rougher than he intends, a scrape of stone over a slab of rock. He stretches his palm flat over the bandaging covering his thigh, biting back the urge, for whatever reason, to curl his fingers around her arm, recalling easily the way that she had recoiled from him only moments ago, her horror at what he had done. He's quiet for a long moment, looking at her, mulling over nothing and everything.

Starkiller and Corellia, Yaga Minor and the ice caves, long stretches of desert and the lush green on Takodana. He did this. His relentless, reckless pursuit, his desire to prove himself, prove his worth, prove to the darkness in him and to himself that he could do this. This is his responsibility, as much as it is her load to carry in turn. He did this on Starkiller and she finished it on Corellia. Rey dragged him the rest of the way under, but not before Kylo stuck his head below the water in a desperate bid to come back up breathing the moment that Han Solo's death punched a hole right through him and let the light back in. The struggle manifests this time as a sigh, tightly controlled, quiet, pinched at the end. ) I'm trying. I'm going to try. ( Because at the end of the day, that is what any of them are doing. Trying. So he'll try, for her, for himself, and - ) I'm sorry.

( It's an awkward endeavor but it exists all the same, brushed under the heavy popping of the fire and the creaks and groans of the encampment around them. He hasn't apologized to anyone in so long that even Kylo questions whether or not it's genuine but in that moment, with the sound of her voice choked still in his ears and this fragile but strong yet incredible wounded thing pulsing between them, he finds that it is, and that no one is more deserving of the first acknowledgement of genuine remorse in years than Rey. )

[ Even without the bond, Rey would be able to feel the weight of the words in the implicit haunting image of his lonely mindscape, a barren and icy wasteland that afforded few fond memories, all far off, of other people. If Snoke had ever earned an apology out of him, it was a bruising command, not something freely offered, not something rich in conciliatory regret for the resulting pain.

The words press Rey's eyes shut to stave off the threatening trickle of tears—both empathic and personal, a result of the memory of the mine and its effects on her as much as the relief of his honesty and the transferred inner turmoil he feels. She draws a deep breath before looking back up at him, amber eyes glinting with the smoldering fire beside them that scorches the remains of the crime, and she presses her lips tightly together to collect herself while she nods. ]

Try is good. I'll take try. [ A lopsided, grim bastardization of a smile touches on her lips, haunting in its failed efforts to become even a shadow of the expression's intent, but she gives up on it quickly, eyes turning skyward. Each star glitters like the end of a blaster barrel pointed down at them, either light traveling years to reach them from another system, or an incoming shuttle that's eager to carry them, injured and off their prime, out to the Unknown Regions were Snoke awaits. ]

We need to move the body somewhere. [ She points towards the sloping hills of the refinery further south in the crater of the mine, where silt is carried and piled and strained through chemical smelting into refined ore. Even in the dark, the various minerals glint in the light as though winking at them from artificial mountains that roll out of sight and obscure the rim of the crater where the treeline continues. ] Then head further in to set up a camp. If anyone comes looking to finish the job, it will be to our benefit that they find the Falcon empty and the Knights gone; it might even give us enough time to recover before they catch on.

[ Doubtful. But she isn't up to getting them off-planet in her present condition, and Kylo Ren isn't up for another melee bout. Better that they firm up their plan for rest and take another go at it when the sun touches Concordia's forgotten mines. ]

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