apparare | i found something in the woods somewhere.

[ it’s a staggering defeat - as much of a blow to the ego as a dent in their numbers, and they slouch homeward, he goes to collect the fallen apprentice (blood on the snow, black clad limbs spread across the forest floor - his hair congealed in the dark liquid, clumped and matted) as he is told to.

(He had recoiled, when he had first seen the other man - something about the quiver in the other’s hands, shoulders - it had been an instinctual reaction; witnessing something so unbridled; broken but livid - the anger was a heat haze, just short of visible).

Defeats for the First order are rarer than sunshine on Arkanis.

He retrieves Ren himself, hoists him onto the floor of the shuttle’s docking bay, his own uniform soaked with the dark blood that has pooled beneath the man’s body.

What a defeat indeed.

But this is a single battle in a season of wars, and it may sting now, but the First Order is as resilient as a parasite, and they will lick their wounds. ]

You are a damned fool.

[ He grits it out at the force-user, panting into the simulated air of the hanger, a strand of Ren’s hair caught in the cufflink of his greatcoat.

The man’s face is a wreck, streaming from a long cut that will inevitably scar. He imagines that Ren will like that - a proper mark to wear, the first component of a new mask. Who knows though, he’s as unbalanced as that lightsaber he carries (it sparks with glitches, he remembers, buzzing as if touched by water). ]

Can I get some assistance, or are you all going to stand around and look useless?

[ Hux barks his orders at the troopers. Some things do not change. Defeat or not. He looks down at Ren, taps him on the uninjured cheek. ]

Stay awake, you idiot, Snoke will have my head if I turn up with a corpse.

[ he untangles the strands of black hair from his cuff, but finds that they are wound tight. ]

[ She's sent on a very low-key, quiet mission for the Resistance, testing her own newly acquired Jedi training, the Force a new and familiar thing all at once. The Falcon is exchanged for some non-descript ship, less noticeable, less conspicuous despite Chewbacca being her co-pilot, firmly stationed with the ship itself while Rey sets out to seek her own information. Her lightsaber ( it's Luke Skywalker's— it's Anakin Skywalker's ) is tucked securely at her left hip and entirely out of sight, her hair down and curled around her shoulders, seeking that certain junk dealer with the information she needs—

And then, she feels him: a burning in her veins, a throb in her temple, a hum in her ear she can't shake, hackles raised and immediately launched into the defensive, hissing a soft: We've got company, Chewie into the slim communicator at her wrist. Kylo Ren is here and if he doesn't doesn't realize she is as well, it won't take very long.

Evading him is improbable and she dreads and seeks it all the same, everything her new master wishes for her to avoid, everything she foolishly, actively seeks. She's not afraid of the adversary, a boy she's faced before, petulant and angry and flushed over the sharp bridge of his nose, too truthfully human to be a real monster, too much of a shade of his parents and she stupidly postpones the mission to find him, darting in and out of stands, eyes keen and watchful, feeling him near.

Rey reaches out with the fingers of the force, her touch gentle, prodding: ] Kylo? Are you looking for me?

Edited 2015-12-30 13:49 (UTC)

[ she starts from an unplaceable dream one night ( —dark colors, swirling, her vision obscured by a low lying mist, the path before her tenuous and uncertain ) and she's in near agony, the skin on her face stretched and raw and overwarm, a diagonal cut, a low, simmering pulse of throbbing pain in her side above her left hip. Rey lingers in a few terrified moments of confusion before it abates and she realizes these sudden wounds are not her own, the healing remnants of a saber cut, a purposefully missed blaster shot.

Drenched in sweat in her cramped little bunk on base, the small of her back damp, she lifts a hand to touch her own face, smooth and unmarred, a phantom pain that eases the longer she's conscious until it's only a memory— a memory that isn't truly her own to begin with. Knees bent, her elbows sling across them, head bowed between them as she reigns in her focus, dredges up that infinite well of calm deep within in.

It finds her and her pulse evens out. She can hear Finn's endearing snoring a room away, grateful someone is having a peaceful night's sleep, BB-8 on lower power mode at the foot of her bed while Poe's away doing secret reconnaissance for the Resistence, a sincere promise to keep the faithful little droid by her side in his absence. They keep her grounded, her unexpected trio, a family she'd never anticipated finding, hodgepodge and mismatched but fitting together just the same, and stronger for it.

Her attention shifts back to the present and Rey closes her eyes again, inhaling slowly through her nose, exhaling out through her mouth and she inches up that carefully constructed wall damming her mind shut, a tentative prod across the bond to him, ghosting at the back of his neck, the curve of one wrist. Unbarred, the connection is as strong as ever, the channel between them open and obvious even as she shields the most important places in her mind from him.

Are you there? And of course he is. ]

[ All around the base, Resistance fighters scrambled, a flurry of disconnected parts that could not work in concert with one another, each trying to address the same problem. Even those without the appropriate skillset hummed, incapable of standing still, but for the flight commander, who insisted firmly that the problem lay in their old, secondhand equipment, barely updated since the last Rebellion.

At least, he kept saying it until Luke Skywalker climbed into the pit of a x-wing grounded for a blown engine and confirmed that the problem lay in a jamming signal. Without a way to reach the parts of the fleet in the air, it took him and Rey another three hours to get the engine overhauled and flightready so that Luke could go up and find it.

Leia and Rey both hated the idea, each arguing for different reasons that Luke was too valuable to the Resistance, and to them, to risk heading up there alone, but he did it. And Leia, strong as ever, took it without letting it bow her back. She even smiled at Rey when she told her to go get some rest, promising any updates.

But Rey didn't trudge back to her bunk. She started that way, distracted by trying to reach out for Luke with the Force, to get a sense of where he was so she could track him out there, but she diverted as soon as she broke the tree line. No matter what the Force-sensitive leadership of the Resistance had to say about it, an aura of distrust still centered around the barracks where Kylo Ren was quartered, permeating into the physical world through the squish of the 24-hour guard's boots in the soil around the perimeter, through the several rooms of buffer between his bunk and any other Resistance fighter, through the soldiers who are chosen to stay there.

Rey might be the only person in the camp who actually wants to be there. She announces herself with a knock on the door, an anxiousness thick in the air around her. Worry for Luke. ]

omg first I feel so privledged / sorry this is so long oh god

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