[ Kylo hadn't noticed it right away, but since he plucked them from Rey's mind he has spent many hours meditating over the stolen memories to find some weakness that would ensure he comes out on top next time. As a result, he did notice that it looks an awful lot like he's killing in defence of her. He has promptly denied this reality and replaced it with his own with the same stubbornness with which he has reinterpreted his grandfather's story in his mind. ]
I'm sure two against seven are excellent odds.
[ He has always assumed they would meet as enemies. But now Kylo can't help but doubt... And that's just as frightening as her witnessing his innermost fears and yearnings every night. ]
I'm not joking, scavenger. Make it stop, or I will.
[ two against seven are anything but excellent odds, but Rey isn't about to admit that.
she's still not sure herself of what that Force-laden dream means — whether it means that Kylo Ren would ally himself with her somehow, saving her life as she'd seen him literally do in that lucid moment, or whether it's her own subconscious playing tricks on her. but she chooses to believe the latter, given who he is and what had happened the last time they'd met. ]
You're older and more experienced with the Force — [ she'll give him that much, at least ] — you figure out how to stop it!
...Master Luke says it cannot be stopped, but there must be a way.
[ At least that's one thing they can agree on. The vision can't possibly mean what it seems to mean. ]
I'm sure I could find a way to stop it, if you would like me to get my Master involved. Would you really like him to be poking around whatever connection we have?
[ Not that he actually intends to ask Snoke for help, since that would mean admitting to this mess... and he's not very keen on being used as a conduit for his Master to reach Rey, either. ]
Of course "Master" Luke would say that. He has always been supremely useless when it comes to keeping people out of your mind.
[ momentary panic sets in. just the remote suggestion of Snoke makes Rey's skin crawl; she'd heard a disembodied voice while she'd stood over Ren's prone form in the snow on Starkiller, with the mark of her saber slashed across his face and shoulder, telling her to kill, it would be so quick, so easy. she'd withdrawn from it, but she can't deny she'd heard it.
she's never heard Snoke's voice, but she would imagine it would be what the words in her head had sounded like — cold, wretched, unforgiving. ]
— No. I don't want him anywhere near my mind, again.
[It's the thing that immediately catches his attention, causing some strange, disconcerting mixture of alarm, jealousy and even a hint of sympathy to well up in him. Rey deserves to suffer, but nobody deserves to face Snoke's ire.]
Rey. Please try to remember. It could be my Master's work, though I don't know why he would connect us instead of reaching out to you himself.
[ that please is different; it's cajoling, coaxing, making her want to lower her defenses even for a moment, whereas until now Ren has all but ensured they would stay up.
she decides honesty is for the best, and especially because they're both dealing with the fallout from this problem. ] I heard...something. [ suddenly she's hesitant to explain the details — how it urged her to end his life, during what was unarguably his weakest moment. ] A voice, in my head. When we fought in the forest. I don't know for certain whether it was actually his voice or not; part of me doesn't wish to know.
But I don't believe he's responsible for us seeing into one another's minds — I saw your thoughts and fears during the interrogation, and I heard what I thought was him in my head much, much later.
[ something else occurs to her: ] If your supreme leader knows of it, of whatever this is that we share in our heads, what would he do?
[His reply takes a good long while, first because he doesn't know if he wants to answer at all, then because he doesn't know what to say. It's not easy admitting to the complicated, contradicting feelings he has for his Master, least of all to someone he still thinks of as enemy. Even if he is talking to her more like to an ally now, albeit an undesirable one.]
I can't say for sure. Maybe he would further encourage me to kill you, but it is more likely he would use it to pull you onto the Dark Side.
[And that's what he wanted on Starkiller Base, sure, but not on these terms. Not if he has to witness her be dragged down as if he were fighting this war a second time. Besides, Rey defeated him. What's to say the Supreme Leader won't wish to replace him with her?]
He might have me make you Fall, as he did with me.
Maybe it wasn't his voice you heard on Starkiller. It sounds like you faced your own temptation [And then, because he can't permit himself too much pity for this enemy.] You should have listened. It would have spared you greater suffering.
[ like him, she takes a few moments to absorb what she reads and to formulate a response. this is more information she would have ever thought to glean from Kylo Ren, especially after their exchange in the forest — and while she knows his interest is piqued from the mention of Snoke, some of what he's saying almost seems...sympathetic. to her.
that is more perplexing than anything else — that Ren could foster anything remotely similar to sympathy — even if it's short-lived. ]
He could only use whatever exists between us to pull me toward the Dark, to make me Fall, as you mention, if he thought you held any sway over me. Which you don't.
And since when did you care about how much I or anyone else suffer? Is that what you meant by you 'worry about my feelings'? [ she still hasn't forgotten that little throwaway comment he'd left earlier in their conversation. ]
[Oh, this is very, very uncomfortable. He's not used to being questioned like this, and now learning that it's really not something he enjoys. But he's brought this unto himself, hasn't he? Somehow, Kylo always does.]
Maybe. You chose for us to be enemies, but I'm not completely without sympathy for your circumstances. Everybody who has the Force has been where you are now.
[Yeah, that's better. He nods to himself, as satisfied as can be. Make it about Force users in general, not so much about them. Much safer.]
Holding sway over someone comes in many forms. Why don't you ask your so very helpful how the Emperor and my grandfather almost lured him onto the Dark Side? I know he used to bore us endlessly with that tedious morality tale.
[ he's brought it unto himself, but Rey is just as determined to get the answers out of him that she desires as he is to withhold them.
at his suggestion, she can't help but bristle: ] I didn't choose for us to be enemies, you know — if you recall, you kidnapped me to probe my mind for the star map. I didn't have any choice in that matter, did I.
And I know the story of Master Luke's temptation, already; some stories did make it to Jakku, particularly the ones about the Jedi that most of us had dismissed as myth. Perhaps he felt the particular need to drill it into your head because he felt you needed a lesson on sentiment.
...Although if you truly have some sympathy for me as you say you do, then who would you say might have sway over whom, between the two of us?
[ can you hear how tongue-in-cheek her response is, Ren. ]
[It's her spirit that set her apart from the many enemies he had crushed without a second thought, but right now as he scowls at his communicator he really wishes she could be a little bit less cheeky. It's frustrating when she's right, and she has this tendency to be right very often.
But weakness is something to be eradicated within yourself. He will succeed in that, just as soon as he stops seeing sands and water whenever he closes his eyes.]
You hold no sway over me, scavenger. Don't mistake pity for mercy. I will show none the next time we meet, and I would have you show none either.
Whatever is happening between us, it changes nothing. We are enemies.
[And when did all of this become all his fault, anyway? Well, maybe around the time he decided to chase down a girl and a droid on Takodana, and came back with the girl instead of the droid.]
I wouldn't have probed your mind if you'd surrendered the location of the droid. I gave you a choice.
I'd just as soon you show me hatred rather than pity. [ that's the last thing she'd want from him — next to mercy, of course, because that would go against everything she's convinced herself that he's comprised of.
his point about having given her a choice, though, is a bit irksome. ] You knew I would choose otherwise. I wasn't about to betray Master Skywalker's location if I could help it. So essentially, you left me no choice.
It probably would have been easier for you if you'd simply captured BB-8. Instead, you chose to capture someone you had to put temporarily to sleep in order to subdue. [ which suddenly begs the question... ]
...How did you bring me aboard your shuttle, if I was asleep?
I didn't let you choose if you surrendered the location of the map, but I let you choose how. I would have just as soon not entered your mind, scavenger. It's not a particularly interesting place. [Spiteful little jabs now? Yes. Kylo Ren hates a little that he's been reduced to this, but Rey's entire line of questioning has him distinctly feeling like he's the one who is being interrogated. It's not a particularly pleasant experience.]
As goes to show by you wondering how I brought you about the shuttle. [Which he has no interest to divulge in detail. It had been perfectly reasonable at the time to carry her himself, but she's already mocking him for being under her sway. There's absolutely no need to give Rey further ammunition.] I brought you there safely, did I not? Not a single dent. We used to play a game in the praxeum when I trained with Skywalker. We floated another through an obstacle course, like the woods. I was terrible at it, nobody wanted to be my partner. [There. He nods to himself, satisfied. If she can deduce it for herself she deserves the right to gloat.]
[ his little sharply-worded jabs don't hurt her — they've done plenty of verbal sparring in this conversation already. if anything, Rey gloats a little bit with the fact that she's brought him to this point. she feels progressively more and more comfortable turning the tide on him, as she had on Starkiller. ]
Funny, you seemed to find it endlessly interesting. You were after the map that BB-8 had shown me, but instead you lingered in my head, drawing out my feelings and my dreams as if they were of interest to you.
[ at the mention of the Praxeum he'd trained at with Master Luke, her gloating dwindles a bit. she absently finds herself wondering just what other games he remembers from his training as a young child and a teenager — how it was to be part of a group of Jedi learners under Master Luke's kind tutelage, working together, all bright-eyed and fresh-faced and all but aglow with their newly-granted Force-laden powers.
...she wants to ask him, and then she remembers — with a bitter tang in her mouth — that he'd single-handedly destroyed it all. ]
You've apparently improved at it, then. I didn't have a single scratch on me.
I'm sure it was more your personality and less your problems with levitation that were why no one wanted to partner with you.
[And if that isn't a perfectly aimed hit, a critical one. Not that she would know, or so he hopes, she can't know of the self-imposed loneliness that is his life these days, or that the days at the Praxeum had been just as lonely only much keener felt. The only true company the voice in his head... He dreads the day when Rey will uncover even these deeply buried memories.]
I had always had different priorities than my fellow padawan. But then, you were not very popular on Jakku either, were you, scavenger? You would know all about solitude. [Not that he expects this jab to wound anymore, he's used it too often already. But it's still infuriating, that they should have this in common, and that it had intrigued him.]
Either way, I'm sure you will see all there is to see in your dreams soon enough. [Yes, he is bitter about it. After having finally grown strong enough to block out his Master, there is now a new unwanted presence lurking in the back of his mind. How could he not be bitter?]
these two just love coming back to punch the other in the feels
[ she does already notice that Ren's nightly dreamscape is a relatively quiet place, all things considered; there are his thoughts and memories she visits, as well as Leader Snoke's lurking at the peripheries — cold, sharp and piercing, their content rendered purposefully vague and obfuscated from her even as she can tell their origin — but she doesn't ever see or feel the presence of either of his parents, or uncle, or others that she would expect. no close friends, no trusted camaraderies...no lovers.
it's about as lonely a place as her own dreams are. and as much as a part of herself is loathe to admit it, aloud or in her own thoughts, there is something strangely profound in the realization of it; I am here, where no one else has been. ]
I would know it, yes. [ the barb stings a little more smartly than it should; she's had a hard, lonely life, she's never claimed otherwise, and she's accepted it. Ren throwing it in her face like this shouldn't affect her, but it does, and especially because her solitude wasn't thrust upon her by her choice. ] But even so, I still embraced companionship when it was dropped unexpectedly into my lap.
[ ...Finn. as far as embracing it, she'd have to admit that it wasn't instantaneous — she'd railed at him for having the audacity to hold her hand — but despite all of her misgivings about trusting someone, something instilled in her from hardened years on Jakku, Finn had wormed his way in. ]
What is that supposed to mean, exactly, 'soon enough'? If there's more in your head, I don't want it. It's already depressing enough.
[It's a blessing in disguise he doesn't know yet how much Rey has already stripped him of his façades and looked beneath, if he realized it he might just lash out at her and never stop running. For now he can hold on to his hope that she sees nothing but the monster in the mask. And isn't it quite ironic that he wishes to be seen only as such now, after he tried so hard to convince her there is more to him.]
Yes, of course, your companionship of traitors and rebel scum, not to forget the Jedi Master who ran away from his responsibilities. Quite the illustrious round of friends you've gathered there. [So what if there is some envy mingled in with his derision - he could have that, too, he tells himself, but he chooses not to. He knows better. His Master has been very clear on affection being nothing but weakness.] Trying to protect them will be your downfall. Powerful people like us can't afford to let ourselves be tethered by affection or compassion. The Jedi of old were right to forbid attachment, but it is not the path to the Dark Side, it is the path to weakness.
[Half a galaxy away from her, he frowns at the screen, vaguely embarrassed by his own rant, and the lengths he went to to preach a point which Rey had never truly contested.]
Of course there's going to be more. Can't you see? It's getting worse. This must be stopped soon.
Traitors and rebel scum — your family included in that description, of course.
[ except for your father, she thinks to herself but doesn't say, who's never coming back. Han Solo's death haunts her, even now after the fact. she suspects it will for some time.
Ren says people like us, acknowledging her power as though she were his equal and not some untrained desert scrap of a girl who'd bested him on Starkiller with sheer luck. it surprises her, as does his long-winded rant about how affection will ultimately make her weak. ]
It must have been your residual compassion, then, that made you weak in the forest during our fight.
[ ...along with his bowcaster wound and in the face of her sudden burst of rage-filled adrenaline, but still she has to wonder if he'd been emotionally compromised in addition to his injury. ]
[The answer is he had been compromised a lot, which is only further proven when the mere mention of his family has him wincing. As they do so often, his thoughts return to that bridge on Starkiller Base, that moment when he could have activated the lightsaber - or let go.
Every night when he lays in bed in the darkness and quiet, he wonders what if he had let go.]
Compassion is a sickness. My Master has taught me that it must be killed. I eradicated the last of it within me when I killed Han Solo. [But the scavenger still lives, and keeps feeding this weakness. It's enough to send a better man than him into a rage.]
My family will die, as will you. There will be no mercy next time. I will show you how much compassion I have left.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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[ Kylo hadn't noticed it right away, but since he plucked them from Rey's mind he has spent many hours meditating over the stolen memories to find some weakness that would ensure he comes out on top next time. As a result, he did notice that it looks an awful lot like he's killing in defence of her. He has promptly denied this reality and replaced it with his own with the same stubbornness with which he has reinterpreted his grandfather's story in his mind. ]
I'm sure two against seven are excellent odds.
[ He has always assumed they would meet as enemies. But now Kylo can't help but doubt... And that's just as frightening as her witnessing his innermost fears and yearnings every night. ]
I'm not joking, scavenger. Make it stop, or I will.
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she's still not sure herself of what that Force-laden dream means — whether it means that Kylo Ren would ally himself with her somehow, saving her life as she'd seen him literally do in that lucid moment, or whether it's her own subconscious playing tricks on her. but she chooses to believe the latter, given who he is and what had happened the last time they'd met. ]
You're older and more experienced with the Force — [ she'll give him that much, at least ] — you figure out how to stop it!
...Master Luke says it cannot be stopped, but there must be a way.
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I'm sure I could find a way to stop it, if you would like me to get my Master involved. Would you really like him to be poking around whatever connection we have?
[ Not that he actually intends to ask Snoke for help, since that would mean admitting to this mess... and he's not very keen on being used as a conduit for his Master to reach Rey, either. ]
Of course "Master" Luke would say that. He has always been supremely useless when it comes to keeping people out of your mind.
I'm going to try meditating before sleep.
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she's never heard Snoke's voice, but she would imagine it would be what the words in her head had sounded like — cold, wretched, unforgiving. ]
— No. I don't want him anywhere near my mind, again.
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[It's the thing that immediately catches his attention, causing some strange, disconcerting mixture of alarm, jealousy and even a hint of sympathy to well up in him. Rey deserves to suffer, but nobody deserves to face Snoke's ire.]
Rey. Please try to remember. It could be my Master's work, though I don't know why he would connect us instead of reaching out to you himself.
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she decides honesty is for the best, and especially because they're both dealing with the fallout from this problem. ] I heard...something. [ suddenly she's hesitant to explain the details — how it urged her to end his life, during what was unarguably his weakest moment. ] A voice, in my head. When we fought in the forest. I don't know for certain whether it was actually his voice or not; part of me doesn't wish to know.
But I don't believe he's responsible for us seeing into one another's minds — I saw your thoughts and fears during the interrogation, and I heard what I thought was him in my head much, much later.
[ something else occurs to her: ] If your supreme leader knows of it, of whatever this is that we share in our heads, what would he do?
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I can't say for sure. Maybe he would further encourage me to kill you, but it is more likely he would use it to pull you onto the Dark Side.
[And that's what he wanted on Starkiller Base, sure, but not on these terms. Not if he has to witness her be dragged down as if he were fighting this war a second time. Besides, Rey defeated him. What's to say the Supreme Leader won't wish to replace him with her?]
He might have me make you Fall, as he did with me.
Maybe it wasn't his voice you heard on Starkiller. It sounds like you faced your own temptation [And then, because he can't permit himself too much pity for this enemy.] You should have listened. It would have spared you greater suffering.
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that is more perplexing than anything else — that Ren could foster anything remotely similar to sympathy — even if it's short-lived. ]
He could only use whatever exists between us to pull me toward the Dark, to make me Fall, as you mention, if he thought you held any sway over me. Which you don't.
And since when did you care about how much I or anyone else suffer? Is that what you meant by you 'worry about my feelings'? [ she still hasn't forgotten that little throwaway comment he'd left earlier in their conversation. ]
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Maybe. You chose for us to be enemies, but I'm not completely without sympathy for your circumstances. Everybody who has the Force has been where you are now.
[Yeah, that's better. He nods to himself, as satisfied as can be. Make it about Force users in general, not so much about them. Much safer.]
Holding sway over someone comes in many forms. Why don't you ask your so very helpful how the Emperor and my grandfather almost lured him onto the Dark Side? I know he used to bore us endlessly with that tedious morality tale.
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at his suggestion, she can't help but bristle: ] I didn't choose for us to be enemies, you know — if you recall, you kidnapped me to probe my mind for the star map. I didn't have any choice in that matter, did I.
And I know the story of Master Luke's temptation, already; some stories did make it to Jakku, particularly the ones about the Jedi that most of us had dismissed as myth. Perhaps he felt the particular need to drill it into your head because he felt you needed a lesson on sentiment.
...Although if you truly have some sympathy for me as you say you do, then who would you say might have sway over whom, between the two of us?
[ can you hear how tongue-in-cheek her response is, Ren. ]
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But weakness is something to be eradicated within yourself. He will succeed in that, just as soon as he stops seeing sands and water whenever he closes his eyes.]
You hold no sway over me, scavenger. Don't mistake pity for mercy. I will show none the next time we meet, and I would have you show none either.
Whatever is happening between us, it changes nothing. We are enemies.
[And when did all of this become all his fault, anyway? Well, maybe around the time he decided to chase down a girl and a droid on Takodana, and came back with the girl instead of the droid.]
I wouldn't have probed your mind if you'd surrendered the location of the droid. I gave you a choice.
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his point about having given her a choice, though, is a bit irksome. ] You knew I would choose otherwise. I wasn't about to betray Master Skywalker's location if I could help it. So essentially, you left me no choice.
It probably would have been easier for you if you'd simply captured BB-8. Instead, you chose to capture someone you had to put temporarily to sleep in order to subdue. [ which suddenly begs the question... ]
...How did you bring me aboard your shuttle, if I was asleep?
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As goes to show by you wondering how I brought you about the shuttle. [Which he has no interest to divulge in detail. It had been perfectly reasonable at the time to carry her himself, but she's already mocking him for being under her sway. There's absolutely no need to give Rey further ammunition.] I brought you there safely, did I not? Not a single dent. We used to play a game in the praxeum when I trained with Skywalker. We floated another through an obstacle course, like the woods. I was terrible at it, nobody wanted to be my partner. [There. He nods to himself, satisfied. If she can deduce it for herself she deserves the right to gloat.]
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Funny, you seemed to find it endlessly interesting. You were after the map that BB-8 had shown me, but instead you lingered in my head, drawing out my feelings and my dreams as if they were of interest to you.
[ at the mention of the Praxeum he'd trained at with Master Luke, her gloating dwindles a bit. she absently finds herself wondering just what other games he remembers from his training as a young child and a teenager — how it was to be part of a group of Jedi learners under Master Luke's kind tutelage, working together, all bright-eyed and fresh-faced and all but aglow with their newly-granted Force-laden powers.
...she wants to ask him, and then she remembers — with a bitter tang in her mouth — that he'd single-handedly destroyed it all. ]
You've apparently improved at it, then. I didn't have a single scratch on me.
I'm sure it was more your personality and less your problems with levitation that were why no one wanted to partner with you.
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I had always had different priorities than my fellow padawan. But then, you were not very popular on Jakku either, were you, scavenger? You would know all about solitude. [Not that he expects this jab to wound anymore, he's used it too often already. But it's still infuriating, that they should have this in common, and that it had intrigued him.]
Either way, I'm sure you will see all there is to see in your dreams soon enough. [Yes, he is bitter about it. After having finally grown strong enough to block out his Master, there is now a new unwanted presence lurking in the back of his mind. How could he not be bitter?]
these two just love coming back to punch the other in the feels
it's about as lonely a place as her own dreams are. and as much as a part of herself is loathe to admit it, aloud or in her own thoughts, there is something strangely profound in the realization of it; I am here, where no one else has been. ]
I would know it, yes. [ the barb stings a little more smartly than it should; she's had a hard, lonely life, she's never claimed otherwise, and she's accepted it. Ren throwing it in her face like this shouldn't affect her, but it does, and especially because her solitude wasn't thrust upon her by her choice. ] But even so, I still embraced companionship when it was dropped unexpectedly into my lap.
[ ...Finn. as far as embracing it, she'd have to admit that it wasn't instantaneous — she'd railed at him for having the audacity to hold her hand — but despite all of her misgivings about trusting someone, something instilled in her from hardened years on Jakku, Finn had wormed his way in. ]
What is that supposed to mean, exactly, 'soon enough'? If there's more in your head, I don't want it. It's already depressing enough.
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Yes, of course, your companionship of traitors and rebel scum, not to forget the Jedi Master who ran away from his responsibilities. Quite the illustrious round of friends you've gathered there. [So what if there is some envy mingled in with his derision - he could have that, too, he tells himself, but he chooses not to. He knows better. His Master has been very clear on affection being nothing but weakness.] Trying to protect them will be your downfall. Powerful people like us can't afford to let ourselves be tethered by affection or compassion. The Jedi of old were right to forbid attachment, but it is not the path to the Dark Side, it is the path to weakness.
[Half a galaxy away from her, he frowns at the screen, vaguely embarrassed by his own rant, and the lengths he went to to preach a point which Rey had never truly contested.]
Of course there's going to be more. Can't you see? It's getting worse. This must be stopped soon.
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[ except for your father, she thinks to herself but doesn't say, who's never coming back. Han Solo's death haunts her, even now after the fact. she suspects it will for some time.
Ren says people like us, acknowledging her power as though she were his equal and not some untrained desert scrap of a girl who'd bested him on Starkiller with sheer luck. it surprises her, as does his long-winded rant about how affection will ultimately make her weak. ]
It must have been your residual compassion, then, that made you weak in the forest during our fight.
[ ...along with his bowcaster wound and in the face of her sudden burst of rage-filled adrenaline, but still she has to wonder if he'd been emotionally compromised in addition to his injury. ]
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Every night when he lays in bed in the darkness and quiet, he wonders what if he had let go.]
Compassion is a sickness. My Master has taught me that it must be killed. I eradicated the last of it within me when I killed Han Solo. [But the scavenger still lives, and keeps feeding this weakness. It's enough to send a better man than him into a rage.]
My family will die, as will you. There will be no mercy next time. I will show you how much compassion I have left.