epidemiology | [closed]

Entry tags:

[closed]

CHARACTERS: rey and kylo
DATE: before the return to hq
WARNINGS: wounds, blood, stitches, medical stuff
SUMMARY: rey finds kylo after loki comes after him with gram

[ It's too late for 'don't,' obviously. She is here, and she has made her way to him. Rey's hands close around fistfuls of Kylo's kimono both to steady him and to navigate him protectively behind her, as though her slight form could shadow him from view. Loki gets her attention only until he is out of view, and then she turns to peer up at Kylo, her eyes on his injuries.

It's not hard to guess what happened here, given how her conversation with Keith had gone and the clear slices of a blade. That pain she'd felt from Kylo — was that what Keith had been asking her to withstand? It stokes her bitterness and hurt to consider that. And there's something worse, too. ]

I couldn't reach you.

[ Whatever else Gram did, it had neutered the bond for a time. A palpable fear floods her voice as she describes this. But she can feel his fear now, too, and she's less conscious of her own. He's …

She's never seen him like this. She can barely take it in. ]

What happened? What did he do?

[ There's concern there, and … guilt, if he has the wherewithal to examine it. ]

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Stop talking.

[He bites down the "please" that wants to follow up after that.

He's still quiet, all of his focus spent on keeping himself from appearing even more of a wreck in front of company while simultaneously refusing to meet her eyes. He senses Loki's departure in between his attempts to find his footing within himself again -- but there is a lot.

Loki had done him the unasked favor of digging up something (no, several things) he'd been refusing to acknowledge for weeks. First, that the Force bond itself scared him -- the sort of intimacy it provided with another person was overwhelming. Second, that the potential for it to be abused by people who were not him was there. It could be severed, which meant it could also be manipulated.

And finally, that he needed Rey more than she needed him.

Rather than confront any of that verbally right away, he falls back on academia and curiosity.]

He had a sword -- it distorted my ability to connect with the Force. That must be why.

[The Dark Side and the Bond specifically -- but he's so entrenched in both that he can hardly tell the difference. Slowly, he reaches up to try and remove her hands from him, and only then realizes that his hand where he had tried to push Gram away is also still struggling to heal.]

Edited (i'll get it right eventually) 2018-03-14 16:12 (UTC)

[ Instinct bites down on rebuffed injury when he tells her in no unkind terms to shut up, but a moment later it occurs to her that — well, he's not just being snappish and dismissive. As much as she expects that from him, this is something else. So she softens, searching his face, trying and failing to meet his gaze. ]

Gram. [ With a bitterness in her voice, she says, ] Keith tried to raise it against me as well. He said that it made people speak the truth. He didn't mention — [ She looks Kylo over. As hesitant as she is to draw attention to his distress (given how he has managed his own emotions in the past), it's unavoidable in this context. ] Any of this.

[ And saying this means accepting the rest, too. She works her jaw for a moment, letting go of him but only so she can take hold of his injured hand. It's not a soft, loving gesture. Not the intimacy she had offered him like this before. Though still nurturing, this is an examination.

It doesn't look bad, so she lets it go quickly enough. This cut was not the source of the pain she'd felt. It was the rest. ]

This is my fault.

[She mentions Keith, and he bristles visibly. Perhaps the usage of Gram had not been such a bad idea in that moment, as the sudden ugly surge of hatred fails to find true purchase in Kylo Ren's otherwise stubborn and shriveled heart. It does, however, coax the Dark Side back into him some and allows him a bit of calm familiarity.

He wants to reach up and dry his face, but that would also continue to draw attention to the fact that Loki had managed to pull tears from him -- so he doesn't.]

Yes.

[This time, he meets her eyes when he says it. In spite of that, he doesn't seem angry with her. If he were to unpack that, he'd realize that the absence of the Dark Side that often cloaked him made his more common emotions more difficult to reach.]

But you needed to see it for yourself.

[He understands that now -- he hadn't been communicating his fears properly because he didn't have the words for them. But now he has the actions in hand instead. Not only does he feel them validated, but he has the means to confront them -- some of them.

Perhaps in a few months, he will thank Loki.]

[ Some part of her had expected him to lash out, to take spiteful joy in the fact that she had been proven wrong so completely, so when he doesn't, she's left feeling … hollow. Hesitant. She searches his expression, his tear-stained face, and finds it softer than she had anticipated. More understanding.

The tears she had been holding in since her conversation with Keith threaten to resurge. She tries to hold them back, but it's hitting her all at once that at this point … she and Keith have positioned themselves in opposition to each other. Her best friend, her reason for staying here instead of going back to the war that needed her, and it had turned to violence on all sides.

She cannot question that Keith and Loki were justified. Kylo had been the one to escalate. They had only reacted. But that they had reacted in kind meant it wasn't going anywhere. It wasn't resolved. And things weren't just going to be okay, no matter what Rey had hoped.

And if Keith has rallied Poe (and Poe, of course, will take Finn with him) to the same cause, the same fervor, then Kylo is all she has. And she doesn't even have him. She'd tried to protect everything, to hold it all together, and it slipped through her fingers like sand. ]

I thought I could trust him. I thought he could help me.

[ But all it's done is hurt worse. Maybe in some ways alone is better. Safer, surely. ]

I'm so sorry. I never wanted this to happen.

You can only trust yourself, and what you know.

[Maybe he was making excuses for himself, in that reply. But it was also how he felt, which was why all of this suddenly truth was...disturbing to him.

"Disturbing" is putting it nicely. Its an active fight not to examine it further. If he looks at it too long and too deeply, he's sure he'll come to conclusions that he doesn't want to confront.

And then, she apologizes. Rey apologizes to him so much, and so often. He'd never really had the presence of mind to consider it before then, but even Kylo Ren is able to recognize the absurdity of her reply.]

You wanted the truth. You have it now.

[He swallows at the end of his statement, still keenly aware of the tears clinging to his lashes. Thinking about them digs everything up again, and subconsciously his hand moves up to cover the shallow cut across his chest.

They are at a crossroads. With the lies that Gram had cut through, he finds a pressing urgency to have it answered for, and if Rey is still paying attention to his face, she might notice him attempting to navigate it.]

And...I was wrong. About the bond.

[He wants to say more, but admitting he was wrong (and implying that he still wants her company, by proxy) takes the wind out of his sails and he falls awkwardly silent.]

[ She's been replaying his words in her mind for days, trying to pull them apart and find answers in them, trying to work out what she could have done differently. To hear him recant them now when things have only gotten worse since then throws her. She searches his face, finds something struggling and awkward and stilted there.

He doesn't know, either. Or at least, he doesn't know how to articulate it, much like his hesitance on the matter of trusting anyone but them with information about their relationship to one another. She understands that better now.

He was hurt because of her. Suffered pain that screamed through the binds of the universe all the way to her, that severed their connection entirely and put her through the terrible if temporary grief of what it might be like to lose it. The stakes are higher than ever. And still, he —

A few of tears that have been brimming in her eyes fall. A leak, not a flood. She blinks them away. She is afraid of her own hope and leans instead on the assumption that she must be misunderstanding something. ]

I don't understand.

[ Any of it. What they're supposed to do next, how he could apparently forgive her for bringing this down on him, how she's supposed to cope with this sudden chasm ripping between her and Keith, but mostly— ]

This is everything you knew would happen.

[ Everything he had feared. It makes sense, now. She shares that fear. She'd come here thinking he was right. They'd hurt him because she had made it possible. Doesn't that only validate his efforts to pull away? Kylo doesn't care about her, so it's not like she's worth that. She's nothing to him. This is nothing to him. ]

Because I failed--

[He verbally trips over his admission to failure, choking on the word itself.

She's not making it easier. Even as he tries to agree with her words, something lingers in his wounds that makes them burn all over again deep in his subconscious. He wants to tear into something, wants to run as he had before--

But the Dark has returned to him enough that it doesn't feel so awful. The pain loops and refuels some of his energy reserves, but he is still weak from all the exertion and what the Force had taken away when Gram had severed the corruption.

Yes, she validated all of his fears, but she also now understood the root of them in some part -- that's what he wants to believe. In spite of the destruction it wrought, she gets it. So, just maybe, they could cross this bridge they've forever been on opposite ends of.

Or at least he could stop feeling like he has to defend himself around her.]

It seemed to be the only way to protect myself.

[And it had done the opposite. Or perhaps it was always inevitable, and this was what the Force had wanted. But right now, he needs another path -- some kind of safety net, a backup plan.

The clawing hysteria and paranoia that he's been spending energy on suppressing threatens to resurface when he thinks about having nothing else, if she chooses to deny this truth, as he had.]

I do not think it is going away.

Edited 2018-03-14 18:58 (UTC)

[ Even now she wants to demand that he explain more, that he give to her what he wouldn't give to her that night when he went after Keith, but —

She'd accepted that pushing him was the wrong call. It had led to this just as much as telling Keith had. Patience. She could do patience, when every nonverbal sign communicated what he couldn't. Those were the pieces she had clung to when she'd tried justifying this to herself. Little signs, like withholding information from Thrawn.

He's right: she can trust only herself and what she knows. She had known that this was valuable to him, and that by extension, so was she. Keith had made her doubt that, and her fear had driven her to push him away, injure the trust he had shakily offered. And he had given her something that night. She surrenders the compulsion to push it now. ]

We can protect each other.

[ She says this with clarity. It gives way to real cracks running through this effort to hold herself together. She'd been so afraid that she had lost him in that moment when she couldn't reach him, couldn't feel him; she'd thought that something terrible and irreversible had happened. ]

[Slowly, he nods in agreement, inspecting how his bandages had bled through. He would need to get them redressed again, and likely would need to erase their memory afterward since this would be the second time. He lacks the energy to be furious about it, but his anger does start a gentle boil somewhere deep in his stomach.

He's so tired of -- everyone. But he'd watched Rey put herself between him and Loki, and while that wasn't the same thing as putting herself between him and Keith, it was something.]

We can try. But you are correct -- I believe my position in this has strengthened.

[If nothing else, they'd done a decent job of appearing tenuous allies up until Rey had chosen to press him for more. They could return to that, without the risk of giving someone access to the link between them.

Protecting Rey meant protecting himself, and that was always his highest priority.]

We shouldn't tell anyone about this.

[It comes out faster than he means for it to, because that's what really scares him. Someone getting the access that Rey suddenly has. He motions between their foreheads to demonstrate his meaning -- the Force Bond. He never planned to share, but he wants to hear Rey say it too.]

I understand.

[ Now, she does. How different would this have been, had she told Keith about the bond? He had already been willing to take up arms, cause them pain, and that sword had proven capable of cutting them off from each other. It would be foolish to assume Keith would not sever it by force.

She wouldn't let that happen. That fear she had felt today, that loneliness … Rey never wanted to feel that way again. Once, Poe had accused her of being on Kylo Ren's side, and now … it occurs to her that maybe he's right. That she has been trying this whole time to convince Kylo that she is on his side, and maybe he's finally starting to believe her. ]

I could feel your pain again. Just for a moment. [ This segue as a result of the risk the bond poses to them both: if they are sharing pain as well, it can be weaponized. Her voice gets soft, ] It was excruciating.

[ She tries not to be emotional in saying this, tries to focus on it with the diagnostic distance that she knows he wants. That she had promised herself — not counting on him, not expecting too much of him to fulfill her emotional needs as she had before which had led to Keith getting hurt — but it is hard. Impossible, even, with the wound from Keith so fresh still. She succumbs, despite her better judgment, and her voice is thick with her fear of losing him. ] And then it was like you were gone.

[ She'd thought he might be dead, for a moment. Rey draws a shuddering breath, pushing those feelings back down to get at what she really wants to know. ]

That wasn't from being cut off from the Force, or your injuries. [ Someone needs to look at these, but they're not dire. Not cut through the Force like a knife dire. ] What happened?

It was the sword.

[Not the injuries, no -- that question was probably inevitable, he realizes, but trying to think back on it (and how to answer her, without being wholly honest) just makes his muscles seize up in terror again.

What are your intentions with Rey?

He could barely remember what he'd said, for a moment -- but it quickly comes flooding back, and he has to make a noise and shake his head to dispel the feeling that threatens to snake back into his veins.]

I don't know how to explain.

[He'd been -- powerless, at the utter mercy of a sword at his neck and the ugly truth that came with its power. The deeper the denial, the more involved the lie, the more it hurts. That's what Loki had said to him.

But that was a lot to unpack for him, let alone to unpack in front of Rey.

Is that what you want to be? Someone molded by other people?

Finally, he reaches up to wipe his face clean with his sleeve, because that suddenly feels less overwhelming than trying to admit the full truth of what had happened.]

Try. [ The word sounds strangled. ] Please.

[ This is hard for her to ask, knowing she had already asked too much of him and Keith both, knowing that her fight is in figuring out what she must handle alone and what she is allowed to depend upon others to provide her with. But this, she thinks, she can ask. ]

Not now. [ It's too fresh, she thinks. ] But Keith brought that thing to meet me. He offered me the choice. [ Loki, it appears, did not. ] If he decides not to next time, I want to be ready.

[ The possibility that there could be a 'next time Keith brings a sword against me' utterly terrifies her, but Rey has always (in most things) been more practical than sentimental. She delivers this firmly, though it's clear it hurts her. And she allows that the chance to be a way out for him — for the moment, at least.

Of course, the last time she'd given him a pass for the moment, he'd never gotten back to her with anything. She still isn't sure what he wants from this. From her. He seems content to leave such things unexamined, while Rey repeatedly feels the penalty for trying to evade such self-reflection. It's frustrating, but easy to put aside now for the relief that he is alive after all. ]

[She offers him the option to leave it alone, and he plans to take it -- until she chooses to expand further on why she needs to know. That if the sword comes into play again, she wants to be ready.

That makes sense. It wouldn't hurt him beyond the initial interrogation perhaps, just as he'd been cut off from Rey when the sword's magic was finally permitted to flow. But she could offer up her own truth, and that could mean his truth as well. That couldn't stand.

So he swallows some of that fear and looks back at her, suddenly severe and more focused.]

Loki claims that it seeks truth, and causes pain when you resist it. The harder you resist, the more pain it causes.

Edited 2018-03-14 23:09 (UTC)

[ Her curiosity is a light, bright and clear. But it's not petty. Even this is layered thick with compassion. Her desire to understand his pain, to know the truth that he flinched away from until it lanced through her, comes quite clearly from her desire to connect with him.

She lets it go. It's not easily done, but … She is learning when to push, a little at a time. ]

Thank you.

[ That's something. He had given her as much as he could. It's time she started accepting that as enough again, and stopped demanding that people give her as much as she needed.

She wipes her cheeks neatly, a hasty gesture that wants to put that away and be done with it, but also can't quite. Back to more business. ]

Keith also told Poe. I'm not sure how much or which parts. [ There's some evident discomfort in the way she says this because honestly if Keith told Poe the most recent bit, the most confusing bit, she'd probably just eject herself from one of the Headquarters' airlocks. It's better. ]

[Well. That sucks -- at least for her, it does. It doesn't effect him much at all.

In fact, it might even be a good thing, for the wedge between her and Poe Dameron to be driven deeper. He does not communicate that. After all, his desire to be put in front of others was the catalyst that started this entire mess, and he is not eager to revisit it.

He notices her discomfort. There's some vague desire to make it go away, but no knowledge on how to follow through with it without making things stupid awkward, so he just

Offers her his bloody hand, since that seemed to do something earlier. And in the past.]

It doesn't matter. He's already seen that we must work together, for the time being.

[Keith didn't know the most important part, as far as he knew. So long as that was true -- they could deal with the rest.

Also, while he doesn't necessarily stress "for the time being", he definitely means it. This isn't his first multiversal rodeo, after all.]

There's a difference between working together and … [ She finishes lamely with a gesture at his offered hand (which she has yet to take because she hasn't figured out what he thinks she's going to do with it???), ] This.

[ Isn't there? Suddenly she doubts herself. He might have just meant that bit about the bond in terms of cooperation. Killing Snoke, right? That's still, ostensibly, what this is about.

She backs off of that thought quickly. Thinking of going home, of killing the Supreme Leader, starts her down a path she doesn't want to go down. A path she isn't ready to go down. One that Gram would have pulled out of her, one that she doesn't—

No. Safer thoughts. Safer—

I'll come back for you, sweetheart. I promise.

No. Not that one. That had been a lie. One she told herself in the quiet of the bed she'd made herself in an AT-AT.

I’ve only given myself to one person more than you.

That was real. Yes. That's more than just assassination. She still feels uneasy, even telling it to herself. Stars, she doesn't want to go down this road at all. ]

Nobody knows about this.

[He doesn’t know what “this” is, but she is geaturing at his hand and — as far as he can guess and infer, she is talking about the Force Bond. He is completely serious when he says it.

But it only takes a second of examination for him to realize that its not what she’s talking about at all. If he weren’t so focused on trying not to think about everything that is causing him stress, he might have allowed more change in his facial expression when her meaning hits.

He gets a little paler, and lets his hand drop to his side with no further change in expression. Until that point, he had been quantifying everything Rey was feeling and dealinng with as proxy to the Force Bond but — if that were the case, she wouldn’t be concerned because Keith didn’t know about that.

Cool, now he doesn’t know how to deal wih this conversation any further.]

Do they?

[What could they possibly know?]

[ There's a very thin, flat expression on Rey's face that simultaneously gives nothing away and gives everything away. In that it makes it too clear that she's surprised and not sure what to say when he assumes that nobody knows about this.

'This.'

As he blanches, blood rises in her cheeks. ]

Keith does.

[ He wishes he didn't, but he does. It occurs to her only after she has said it that she could have lied about it. Karabast. She really is bad at this. But then, Kylo would have caught it anyway, so maybe not. ]

Don't be angry. [ This is said not nervously, but stubbornly. ] I didn't mean to tell him. He insinuated, and I was caught off guard. [ And then he ran away. So like, all things considered, probably not a concern. Keith working up the wherewithal to talk about relationships could be marked an intergalactic holiday. ]

[She should have let him kill Keith. That’s the first thought that crosses his mind.

The second — is nothing. He doesn’t know how to even start with this. His curiousity is a living beast, something that seems to want to inspect this unspoken thing they are now talking about without actually having to engage with it.

The pieces are slowly coming together, but what slots it in place is — those more sudden conversations, where they had interrupted one another preparing for other, quieter activities that they had not shared with company often. She wanted to be closer to him, yet couldn’t stand the way he carried himself or the things he stoodfor.

So:]

What did you tell him?

[They probably shouldn’t be talking about this here. Right now. At all.

But there are two distinct parts of him that want the answer: the more vindictive part of him that wants her to confess her mistake, and the more desperate part of him constantly thirsting for validation.

And then there’s that other voice of panic reminding him that Keith had managed to find a crack in Rey that lead back to him.]

[ Some part of her had just expected him not to ask. She supposes it's because he has been so quick to evade actually speaking about his own feelings and qualifying anything that has transpired between them for himself, but she should have known better. He has always been more than happy to pry her open for scrutiny.

And she has always given him honesty in return. Spilled out her secrets knowing that he understood. This is the one thing that she's not positive he understands, the one thing that her fear still has a hold of. But that fear comes from Keith, not Kylo.

She draws a breath and is surprised to hear it tremble in her chest. Stutter. It hasn't done that except when he's—

No, don't think about that. ]

The truth.

[ What a shock. Saying so, though, buys her time to ascertain how to put that. She mulls it over for a moment, massaging that truth into something more palatable and … well, and something less pathetic. ]

That you probably didn't want to talk about me because it's ... private. [ Thank you, Hayame. Her throat tightens, trying to make her voice small; she has to fight against it. ] And that my feelings for you were … are complicated. [ But they sure do exist. Her stomach is crawling up her throat, she is sure. And any minute now she'll be sick. Either that or she'll spill a hundred excuses and distractions so that she doesn't have to think about how hot her face feels. ]

[She is right — this is something he doesn’t really understand, and so he doesn’t think to refute her assumption.

Its not really an explanation that gives him any information that he can extrapolate from (due to lack of experience with it himself), but he is mostly fine with that. The more he examines her reply, the more he decides he doesn’t want or need the gritty details of her complicated emotions. She gives him what he wants in that simply reply, and he exhales outward in something that might have been exasperation were it not for the way he rubbed his thumb over his bloody palm.]

And you believe he would share that?

[His eyes flick up, continuing their studious observation, weighing her response. Perhaps she already knows what he is going to suggest next.]

That's what you're asking?

[ She spits it out a little too flatly. Up until now she has been patient and understanding with him — he's obviously emotionally distraught, he's been through a lot, a significant part of the blame for which can be ascribed to her. But when that's what he comes back with, she can't help but snap a little.

She can't be surprised, though. Not really. Being surprised has nothing to do with looking incredibly peeved, however, that she had just made herself vulnerable to him and he'd barreled straight past it. Particularly when it's the precise topic that had started this mess rolling in the first place. ]

That's all you have to say?

[If Kylo Ren was at all honest, he might admit that he preferred Rey when she was angry. It was easier to understand, easier to quantify.

But this time, his eyebrows furrow, and he looks up at her with some scorn, his bloodied palm curling into a fist. She wants to spend all her time unpacking her vulnerabilities instead of finding a proper way to make it so that she isn’t ruled by them, even after coming upon him curled into a pathetic quivering ball.

Maybe he will never understand her after all.]

You are distressed that I choose to focus upon how we might avoid further exploitation of...“this”?

[After all, he agreed with her assessment. It is private, as much as it is complicated. Its also the very line of thinking that invited the end of several dark siders before him. Was that what she was after? His verbal confirmation of a conclusion she has already come to?]

You have already quantified my reply. What we share is complicated.

[And that’s fine. Trying to navigate that just coaxed that horrible sword to the front of his mind again, and he has to swallow it down.]

Edited 2018-03-15 04:59 (UTC)

[ By all rights she only looks more frustrated with that reply. This time, though, it's not for what it lacks, but for the fact that it's perfect logical and — well, Rey prefers being practical. Her entire life has been nothing but practical. It's only her inexperience with — with all of this — that makes her lose sight of that in the worst moments.

She wrestles that down.

Right. She'd been wanting to not project those emotional needs onto other people and then hold them to invisible standards and—

His addendum draws her up short. Her breath catches in her chest just as she begins to speak, this stopping her. For a moment, she only searches his face. Then, uneasily, she nods. This point to him; she gives no further indicator of relenting beyond this nod before she launches right to her actual answer of his previous question. ]

I don't know. [ She says it just as much to get away from unpacking what he has said — does this mean she should just assume he feels the same as she might guess, barring correction? — as to move back to the matter at hand for more constructive reasons. It takes time for her to anchor herself there, but when she does, she admits, ] Probably not.

[ That demands some explanation. ] He ran off after I said it; he didn't want to deal with all that. [ Rey puffs out a breath, frustrated with being left in this vulnerable place, but wholly clear on the role she had to play in getting them here. ] But I never thought he'd share any of it in the first place. Evidently I was wrong.

[The silence hangs between them. He can feel her frustration and discomfort with his reply, but true to his need to compartmentalize and march forward, he continues:]

There are ways to remedy that.

[He almost doesn’t say it, but its out in the universe now. She had done it before, though the motivator was selfless as opposed to the selfish motivator that is tied up in this issue.]

Some of it, if he has not shared.

[Or if Loki had not uncovered it himself goes unvoiced, but there is a distinct quiver in his spine as he considers the possibility.]

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