inappropriately timed force bond moments (both nsfw and humor approaches)
dream-sharing
emotional bleed/transference (from rey, involving other parties)
inappropriate force bond voyeurism on rey/poe or rey/finn
mid-conversation force bond interruption
The Rise of Skywalker- Cross-galaxy chase of the Resistance
anything related to ben solo, but especially:
snoke confessionals with family or friends of family
returning to the light
smuggler life style
jedi knight ben
resistance-fighter ben
The Rise of Skywalker- Force Ghost communications w/ Rey
anything related to supreme leader kylo ren, but especially:
fall via coup
resistance fighter reconditioning (gen or nsfw)
force ghost visits from anakin/luke/rey/leia/snoke
defeat by the resistance, and subsequent aftermath
The Rise of Skywalker- Mole Discovery w/ Hux
canto bight:
shady weapons deals
picking up prisoners
recruitment
obligatory dinner party
general casino shenanigans
beach party
basically any reason you can think of to use canto bight as a setting piece
A note on romance: I will ship all of the new trilogy characters with Kylo Ren (except Snoke/Family). But I have no interest in exploring domestic-style takes on them. Thank you for understanding.
[ for a purpose such as this, she's a lead from the front sort. the door slides open without any clear indication of what she did to make it happen, so it's obvious that she wants to remind him of the power she holds to keep him here.
there's a snappy purpose to her stride, but she's also not moving faster than he can follow in his present (pathetic) state. she had, after all, been the one to reduce him to it. she should be aware of the limitations it poses.
the halls of her shuttle are mostly empty, but for a pair of stormtroopers on patrol and what looks like a low level officer supervising maintenance work. there's little question where the rest are — FN-2187 and his stolen weapons would need their attention.
kira doesn't invite conversation, and her presence dissuades questions and commentary from the others around the shuttle as well. no one even gives them a second glance. it would be an easy getaway. would be. but anyone with a sense of a shuttle's layout would pick up quickly on the fact that she is taking them in the opposite direction of the ramp. ]
[He'd be a poor Solo if he didn't notice where she was taking him, which was away from the exit ramp. Mapping the way is easy enough to guess, even in spite of the fact that he'd never been on a First Order command vessel before. The layout was simple and efficient, not meant to guard any sort of precious cargo like the Falcon was.
He hadn't really expected her to release him to start with, so the fact that she isn't letting him loose into the wild isn't exactly a surprise.]
So...this is a nice ship.
[Because silence is awkward, and Ben Solo is twice as.]
[ she says it stiffly, the sort of defensive tone that demands to know why she's being expected to speak at all. perhaps once he had turned, she'd take him through the hangar bay where the TIE complement was docked. ben may be an idiot, but he was a clever pilot. he had to be, to have evaded them this long.
and he's right to compliment it. the cruiser is almost as spacious as its civilian equivalents despite the compacting that had to be done to outfit it with the weapons systems necessary to combat the resistance. but it's not so spacious that this conversation needs to drag out excessively long.
they reach the crew quarters soon. the cruiser runs a relatively small crew, but not so small that there aren't bunks built on top of each other in most of the rooms. most, but not all. she leads the way to the back of it and punches a code in beside one of the far doors.
it slides open. it's lived in, but still clean enough that it might have been fresh off the assembly line not so long ago. possessions are sparse, none of them giving notable personality to the room. a datapad here. a spanner there. she gestures for him to go in. it's not a real bedroom, of course. the bunk is built into the back wall. but there's a small bench and a desk-sized table. ]
[That's the last thing he bothers to ask before he's lead forward and the door to the crew quarters slides open. Right. Of course. He should have guessed.
Or maybe he's still lost in the fact that she'd been torturing him five minutes ago, and now she was offering him a bed. Granted, he doesn't really want it -- he'd rather be back on Canto Bight, enjoying one last celebratory drink before taking off for his next job. So much for those credits.
He gives the room a once over, and then looks down at her. She's already made the gesture, so there's no reason to ask for confirmation. Ben steps in, half expecting a nasty surprise that never comes.]
...thank you.
[What? comes a familiar and sarcastic voice in his head. You're her prisoner, why are you thanking her? wars with manners that were obviously taught to him by someone that wasn't Han Solo.]
Given your reputation, it's better that we keep you under closer guard overnight anyway.
[ he may not be smart, but at least he has social skills. it becomes readily apparent that kira, however, does not, as she follows him into the cramped space. even with nearly a foot of height difference between them — less with the way he slouches in exhaustion — she still manages to seem … big, crowding into his space like this. the very fact that she chooses to occupy this space with him forces him to shuffle closer towards the bed.
the door shuts behind her. ]
You can sleep here. [ she takes a seat at that little table and grabs for the datapad. turning it on makes it apparent that it … is hers. go figure, there aren't just spare rooms on a light cruiser. this time, it's an order: ] Sleep. We can continue after you've rested.
[She steps into his personal bubble and he tolerates it for approximately two seconds before he stumbles to put some distance between them. Fortunately, his deductive reasoning fills in the gaps before too long.
Right. Of course.
Ben can't stop his lip from curling slightly. He can't decide what's worse -- being strapped to a metal chair alone and being told to sleep, or having his apparent sleeping quarters invaded by a force sensitive person who just spent the better half of the past hour torturing him.
Still, he doesn't have much choice, especially now that he is in the room and the door is closed. So he gives her a long look as he wanders over to the bunk in the wall. It won't take much for him to sleep, if he could calm down his flight instinct. He could already feel the heaviness of his limbs even as he sits at the bed's edge to pull his boots off, followed by the fanciful jacket he'd picked for the affair down at the casino. The holster hidden beneath it comes next.
Belatedly, he realizes his blaster is still missing, and his frown deepens further.
When he finally rests down, he's left with a pair of dress pants and a white undershirt. And for a long time, his thoughts race, and he forces himself to stare at the wall instead of turning around to confront the fact that Kira was just a few feet away from him with a fucking datapad.
How mad would she get if he asked her to go somewhere else? Probably pretty mad.]
[ a pair of dark eyes lift from the datapad screen to watch as he strips down in front of her, paying careful and unblinking attention to his movements. is he surprised that he hasn't had his weapon returned to him? she almost laughs.
when he has apparently finished, she gives him a final once over. more comfortable than the interrogation chamber, certainly. to consider that it's perhaps for this exact reason that he puts his back to her expects a little too much social awareness from kira. instead, once he has turned away, she looks back down at the datapad.
it's nothing interesting. reports. ancient texts of a dead religion that even snoke does not follow. he's much more interesting, but if she were to reach out now, he would feel it. so instead she keeps herself open, listening for his breath and his pulse and feeling how the force moves around him.
she'll be able to feel it, when he falls asleep. and then it will be for only her to know why she had brought him here in the first place instead of leaving him in that interrogation chamber to howl and complain. ]
[For all Ben has managed to curb his tongue, anxiety clings to him, cramped on the mattress that only just manages to accommodate his height. It takes him ages to fall asleep. Its not his bed, for one, and something (or someone) in the room makes him feel hypersensitive. Everything sounds louder, feels awkward, and he finds himself slowly unraveling a thread on the sheet he's covered himself with to try and keep his hands busy.
The sounds of this ship are different than the Falcon, quiet enough that anyone who wasn't used to ships would say that it ran silent. But Ben picks up on every echo, every hiss of air, every oxygen scrub that ran in spite of their parked position. From far away, he could hear the single patrol of Stormtroopers making their rounds -- or maybe he wasn't hearing them at all, and he was going crazy.
Eventually, his circling thoughts run themselves into the ground, and he passes out.]
[ she gives it time, after he slips into consciousness. a part of her is not convinced, not fully, that the signs in the force are accurate, or that he isn't manipulating them at least. she doesn't want to fall into some trap.
but after a few minutes of solid, quiet breathing, she lowers her datapad back to the table and watches him. yes. he's out.
she rises from her seat and approaches the bunk, a looming shadow that blots out the blue light of the datapad across the cramped space. he's curled on himself — a habit or necessity because her bunk is so short, she can't tell, but despite it there's a deceptive peacefulness about him. without his mouth running, what she can make out of his face looks soft. younger.
she almost reaches out to touch him, but her fingertips stop just short of his cheek. if she wakes him, what's been the point of any of this?
instead she settles into a sitting position on the edge of the bunk, tightly restrained to keep from touching him. there's room for space jesus here, even if there's not much room in the cabin in general. she lets her palm hover at his temple, inches away, and she shuts her eyes, skimming just the surface of his dreams. ]
[As it turns out, Ben Solo is a vivid dreamer and a deep sleeper.
She might be able to feel the warmth of the sun on her face -- not the harsh, direct sort of unforgiving Jakku sunlight, but the warm embrace of Chandrila's sun. He seems a bit younger, lounging on top of the Falcon with one of its maintenance panels left open. There are some smears of engine grease on his clothes and hands. It seems he's fallen asleep during something he'd been doing.
He continues like this for a while -- peaceful, but alone. Eventually, a far off irritated wookiee call rouses him, and he sits up to stretch, no doubt in an effort to look busy as fast as possible.
But his perspective shifts when he tries to find Chewbacca's location, and the Falcon is no longer parked on Chandrila, but on the empty, desolate, and uninhabitable moon of Raada. The feeling of the sun disappears.
He finds the scenery shifting just as the cold and dread start to set in -- his mother puts her hand on his shoulder, and warmth instantly fills him as he turns to embrace her. It lingers, but after a long pause, he can feel something soaking through his shirt. When he leans back, he can see the tears on her face. "What's wrong?" he asks before spotting the golden dice of the Falcon in her hand alongside a hologram of his father -- a bounty claimed.
But before the details can be given, their meeting place is under attack. He absconds with her as swiftly as they had met. The sound of Stormtroopers are not far behind. Anxiety, grief, terror, hatred -- they're all perfectly clear and present. "You have to go."
When it seems like he might wake from the terror of it, the scene switches one last time. His mother is not getting any younger, but at least she has Chewbacca with her. She still makes time for him even in the middle of leading a Resistance. "You shouldn't" Ben says to her, impatient, before she confesses how much she misses him. Anything else they say is lost to forgotten mumbles. About the Resistance, about all the people who still needed help, about people the Resistance would never reach -- and about how he couldn't come back until it was all fixed.
And he sits there for the rest of the sequence with his last communique with General Organa playing in the dimly lit cockpit of the Falcon at some far off sand dune on Catonica, sick to his stomach.]
[ there is peace on chandrila. (well, in his mind, there is. not anymore; in the place of peace, there is order.) she sinks into it, and there is something profane in the fact that she indulges herself in this. the thrill of the forbidden entices her to further exploration.
this was not what snoke had commanded her to do. once she had believed that she could do nothing outside of his control, outside of his anticipation and awareness, but how could he have foreseen this? her fascination with ben is —
dangerous. some might say traitorous.
still she lets herself open up to the warmth of the sun and the ambient sounds. the seat of the new republic hides its dark edges, where rey had been raised. this—
it's gone. in an instant. instead she has the warmth of a mother. what she had come for, ostensibly, and yet it lasts only a short time. then there is fear and escape and … well, no. that's not true is it? this is all the complexity of what that warmth represents. the warmth is only the pleasant presentation. this is the dark edges. priorities and sacrifices and
kira resurfaces, gasping for breath, sweat beaded on her forehead, rolling down her face. she pulls her hand back from him, staring down at ben and feeling … conflicted?
organa had sent him away too. in a different way than rey's parents had — for his sake, not for her own — but it was the same in a way. ]
What have you done?
[ she asks it in a whisper, voice thick with grief and outrage and yes, conflict most of all. she balls her hand into a fist and lets it fall into her lap. she sits there beside him, watching from a mental distance, too afraid to reach back inside.
it would give him too much credit to assume this effect he has on her is deliberate, yet it's undeniable. kira should have — would have, were he anyone else — killed him in that interrogation chamber. spared herself the headache and suffered whatever punishment it earned her gladly because snoke could not be rid of her without a replacement.
eventually she shifts to prop herself up in a sitting position against the wall of the bunk near his feet, one leg propped up on the edge of the bed, the other splayed down over his discarded clothing. she doesn't realize that she passes the night there, because when she closes her eyes to regain some semblance of meditative calm, she loses herself in it, and drifts into a sleep all her own. ]
[He's completely balled up in the sheet when he wakes, but he doesn't try to move right away. For a time, he goes back to fiddling with the thread, not quite in his own head, but not quite out of it either.
It isn't long before the reality of his situation settles back in. He's still a prisoner on a First Order shuttle, and he needs to leave before Kira decides she's sick of him.
Slowly, he starts to untangle himself, but in the middle of it, accidentally ends up kicking Kira's leg at the edge of the bed. Karabast. What the hell was she doing there?
--actually, he doesn't want to know the answer to that question. So he holds his breath and waits, to see if she stirs.]
[ kira is pretty high on the list of predators that should best be left alone while they're sleeping. her startle response involves, in this case, throwing one hand out to pin him against the wall with the force like he's on the rack ready to be flayed alive. her eyes are wide and bright and fearful, rather than furious.
it takes several moments for her to come to the rest of the way, to ease back into full consciousness, and to recognize that it is ben who has stirred her, and not — ah. she releases her grip and lets him sink back to the bed.
hastily, she draws herself up out of it. a little too hastily. ]
Good. You're awake.
[ she doesn't sound like she thinks it's good. she reaches up to touch the collar of her tunic. how long had she slept? she can feel the weight of her lightsaber on her belt, and she hadn't carried his blaster on her anymore, so he couldn't be armed yet. could he? she watches him warily all the same. ]
[His reply is given after he lands back on the bed, grumpy as ever. Instead of getting up, he reaches up to cover his face and rub the sleep from his eyes.]
Didn't mean to scare you -- what were you even doing over there?
[He keeps his face covered after he asks, because something tells him that he won't like the answer. But its a distracting from "continuing" at least.]
[Ben rolls his eyes briefly and manages to untangle himself from the little hovel, standing to pull his socks and boots on. He doesn't bother with the dress jacket, but slips the holster on over his shoulders.]
Are we going back to the chair? Call me crazy, but I don't think formal-wear is necessary for torture.
[He throws the jacket over his shoulder, and stuffs a hand in his pocket.]
[ because her temperature is definitely rising. and not in the 'i'd like to see ben solo take his suit jacket back off' kind of way. though with that said— ]
I want to show you something.
[ she opens the door and leads the way out of it, if only to ensure that no one shoots him on sight when he emerges. ]
[Seeing Stormtroopers there to meet them causes him to pause in his steps and words (he wasn't really trying to be suave, he was just being a pain). Maybe it was a good thing he'd accidentally kicked Kira awake. Sneaking out only to get shot down by them would have been...unpleasant.
Eventually, he toddles after her, fingers nervously fiddling with the collar and tags of the jacket. He's so incredibly out of his depth.]
[ said flatly, without missing a beat. she leads him down the hallway. what she wants to show him is — well, not in any one part of the ship, really. but she needed to get out of close quarters. it clammed her up and left her feeling …
it left her feeling like she had when she'd touched his memories. conflicted. uncertain.
she'd had to get out of there. her heart is still racing from waking up like that. the trouble with a place like the first order is that the safety he'd shown her in his dream was a foreign concept to her. she'd never had a peaceful night's rest. if someone else was waking her, they were certainly trying to kill her.
until now, at least. she glances at him over her shoulder. surely he didn't have a weapon to her back somehow. he was so hapless, there was no possible way he'd found his way to something before waking her. ]
[He walks in silence for the next few moments, taking in the surroundings of the ship. Its hard for him not to realize how much his anxiety has escalated -- more than seems natural. After all, he'd imagined he was going to die the night before and--
It hits him then, when she glances back and catches his eyes. Abruptly, he stops walking, shrugging the jacket back on his shoulders just for the sake of having his hands free.
He'd realized that he had startled her when he woke up, but he hadn't realized that it was the extension of something else. Something that happened while he was sleeping?]
her heels click together and she spends a minute wrapped up in her own thoughts before she thinks to turn to him, before he even speaks. why was that? she hadn't reached for him. it wasn't the sound of his pause that drew her, it was a feeling. something …
he asks a question and she turns around, stares him down. what was it? she searches him up and down briefly, then turns the rest of her body fully to face him, making it clear she's going to hear him out. ]
If you're not going to let me go, can we at least -- I don't know. Do this not on the ship?
[He's spent the better half of his adult life chained to one ship or another, moving cargo or following one or both of his parents. Walking around on a First Order cruiser with possibly one of the most dangerous people of Snoke's entourage was definitely a mood killer and panic attack inducing.
At this point, he'll do anything just to smell something that isn't recycled air.]
[ it probably says a lot that her first instinct is to be like no you're just going to try to leave me.
which, like, he's her prisoner and he should try to leave for sure.
actually on further examination this gut instinct to be like nO, YOU'LL LEAVE ME is pretty embarrassing. so she clams up. glances around, then points back the way they had come. ]
This way. [ to the ramp, that is. ] Stay close to me. [ there's no or else. there doesn't need to be. ]
[The fact that its so easy to convince her is suspicious. But also: its his only chance to try and slip away, so he does not confirm or deny her question after she chooses to lead on anyway.
But her willingness to cooperate does put a little bit of a spring in his step, and soon they are nearly walking side by side. Not quite though.]
I can do that.
[For a few minutes, and then try to leave again, probably.]
[ he almost seems eager to do it. almost. but she is not so easily fooled, and she can feel the source of his joy as surely as she can feel her own conflict and confusion. hope generates this earnestness in him. hope of escape.
he's wrong to hope for it, of course. the more on her guard she is, the less likely he'll be able to slip away from her. but … ]
You'll be searched for weapons before we leave and after we return. [ she glances sidelong at him. ] I'm sure I don't have to tell you that everyone in this town will know you've cooperated with us. No one will harbor you, should you attempt to escape.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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there's a snappy purpose to her stride, but she's also not moving faster than he can follow in his present (pathetic) state. she had, after all, been the one to reduce him to it. she should be aware of the limitations it poses.
the halls of her shuttle are mostly empty, but for a pair of stormtroopers on patrol and what looks like a low level officer supervising maintenance work. there's little question where the rest are — FN-2187 and his stolen weapons would need their attention.
kira doesn't invite conversation, and her presence dissuades questions and commentary from the others around the shuttle as well. no one even gives them a second glance. it would be an easy getaway. would be. but anyone with a sense of a shuttle's layout would pick up quickly on the fact that she is taking them in the opposite direction of the ramp. ]
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He hadn't really expected her to release him to start with, so the fact that she isn't letting him loose into the wild isn't exactly a surprise.]
So...this is a nice ship.
[Because silence is awkward, and Ben Solo is twice as.]
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[ she says it stiffly, the sort of defensive tone that demands to know why she's being expected to speak at all. perhaps once he had turned, she'd take him through the hangar bay where the TIE complement was docked. ben may be an idiot, but he was a clever pilot. he had to be, to have evaded them this long.
and he's right to compliment it. the cruiser is almost as spacious as its civilian equivalents despite the compacting that had to be done to outfit it with the weapons systems necessary to combat the resistance. but it's not so spacious that this conversation needs to drag out excessively long.
they reach the crew quarters soon. the cruiser runs a relatively small crew, but not so small that there aren't bunks built on top of each other in most of the rooms. most, but not all. she leads the way to the back of it and punches a code in beside one of the far doors.
it slides open. it's lived in, but still clean enough that it might have been fresh off the assembly line not so long ago. possessions are sparse, none of them giving notable personality to the room. a datapad here. a spanner there. she gestures for him to go in. it's not a real bedroom, of course. the bunk is built into the back wall. but there's a small bench and a desk-sized table. ]
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[That's the last thing he bothers to ask before he's lead forward and the door to the crew quarters slides open. Right. Of course. He should have guessed.
Or maybe he's still lost in the fact that she'd been torturing him five minutes ago, and now she was offering him a bed. Granted, he doesn't really want it -- he'd rather be back on Canto Bight, enjoying one last celebratory drink before taking off for his next job. So much for those credits.
He gives the room a once over, and then looks down at her. She's already made the gesture, so there's no reason to ask for confirmation. Ben steps in, half expecting a nasty surprise that never comes.]
...thank you.
[What? comes a familiar and sarcastic voice in his head. You're her prisoner, why are you thanking her? wars with manners that were obviously taught to him by someone that wasn't Han Solo.]
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[ he may not be smart, but at least he has social skills. it becomes readily apparent that kira, however, does not, as she follows him into the cramped space. even with nearly a foot of height difference between them — less with the way he slouches in exhaustion — she still manages to seem … big, crowding into his space like this. the very fact that she chooses to occupy this space with him forces him to shuffle closer towards the bed.
the door shuts behind her. ]
You can sleep here. [ she takes a seat at that little table and grabs for the datapad. turning it on makes it apparent that it … is hers. go figure, there aren't just spare rooms on a light cruiser. this time, it's an order: ] Sleep. We can continue after you've rested.
[ :) ]
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Right. Of course.
Ben can't stop his lip from curling slightly. He can't decide what's worse -- being strapped to a metal chair alone and being told to sleep, or having his apparent sleeping quarters invaded by a force sensitive person who just spent the better half of the past hour torturing him.
Still, he doesn't have much choice, especially now that he is in the room and the door is closed. So he gives her a long look as he wanders over to the bunk in the wall. It won't take much for him to sleep, if he could calm down his flight instinct. He could already feel the heaviness of his limbs even as he sits at the bed's edge to pull his boots off, followed by the fanciful jacket he'd picked for the affair down at the casino. The holster hidden beneath it comes next.
Belatedly, he realizes his blaster is still missing, and his frown deepens further.
When he finally rests down, he's left with a pair of dress pants and a white undershirt. And for a long time, his thoughts race, and he forces himself to stare at the wall instead of turning around to confront the fact that Kira was just a few feet away from him with a fucking datapad.
How mad would she get if he asked her to go somewhere else? Probably pretty mad.]
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when he has apparently finished, she gives him a final once over. more comfortable than the interrogation chamber, certainly. to consider that it's perhaps for this exact reason that he puts his back to her expects a little too much social awareness from kira. instead, once he has turned away, she looks back down at the datapad.
it's nothing interesting. reports. ancient texts of a dead religion that even snoke does not follow. he's much more interesting, but if she were to reach out now, he would feel it. so instead she keeps herself open, listening for his breath and his pulse and feeling how the force moves around him.
she'll be able to feel it, when he falls asleep. and then it will be for only her to know why she had brought him here in the first place instead of leaving him in that interrogation chamber to howl and complain. ]
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The sounds of this ship are different than the Falcon, quiet enough that anyone who wasn't used to ships would say that it ran silent. But Ben picks up on every echo, every hiss of air, every oxygen scrub that ran in spite of their parked position. From far away, he could hear the single patrol of Stormtroopers making their rounds -- or maybe he wasn't hearing them at all, and he was going crazy.
Eventually, his circling thoughts run themselves into the ground, and he passes out.]
no subject
but after a few minutes of solid, quiet breathing, she lowers her datapad back to the table and watches him. yes. he's out.
she rises from her seat and approaches the bunk, a looming shadow that blots out the blue light of the datapad across the cramped space. he's curled on himself — a habit or necessity because her bunk is so short, she can't tell, but despite it there's a deceptive peacefulness about him. without his mouth running, what she can make out of his face looks soft. younger.
she almost reaches out to touch him, but her fingertips stop just short of his cheek. if she wakes him, what's been the point of any of this?
instead she settles into a sitting position on the edge of the bunk, tightly restrained to keep from touching him. there's room for space jesus here, even if there's not much room in the cabin in general. she lets her palm hover at his temple, inches away, and she shuts her eyes, skimming just the surface of his dreams. ]
no subject
She might be able to feel the warmth of the sun on her face -- not the harsh, direct sort of unforgiving Jakku sunlight, but the warm embrace of Chandrila's sun. He seems a bit younger, lounging on top of the Falcon with one of its maintenance panels left open. There are some smears of engine grease on his clothes and hands. It seems he's fallen asleep during something he'd been doing.
He continues like this for a while -- peaceful, but alone. Eventually, a far off irritated wookiee call rouses him, and he sits up to stretch, no doubt in an effort to look busy as fast as possible.
But his perspective shifts when he tries to find Chewbacca's location, and the Falcon is no longer parked on Chandrila, but on the empty, desolate, and uninhabitable moon of Raada. The feeling of the sun disappears.
He finds the scenery shifting just as the cold and dread start to set in -- his mother puts her hand on his shoulder, and warmth instantly fills him as he turns to embrace her. It lingers, but after a long pause, he can feel something soaking through his shirt. When he leans back, he can see the tears on her face. "What's wrong?" he asks before spotting the golden dice of the Falcon in her hand alongside a hologram of his father -- a bounty claimed.
But before the details can be given, their meeting place is under attack. He absconds with her as swiftly as they had met. The sound of Stormtroopers are not far behind. Anxiety, grief, terror, hatred -- they're all perfectly clear and present. "You have to go."
When it seems like he might wake from the terror of it, the scene switches one last time. His mother is not getting any younger, but at least she has Chewbacca with her. She still makes time for him even in the middle of leading a Resistance. "You shouldn't" Ben says to her, impatient, before she confesses how much she misses him. Anything else they say is lost to forgotten mumbles. About the Resistance, about all the people who still needed help, about people the Resistance would never reach -- and about how he couldn't come back until it was all fixed.
And he sits there for the rest of the sequence with his last communique with General Organa playing in the dimly lit cockpit of the Falcon at some far off sand dune on Catonica, sick to his stomach.]
no subject
this was not what snoke had commanded her to do. once she had believed that she could do nothing outside of his control, outside of his anticipation and awareness, but how could he have foreseen this? her fascination with ben is —
dangerous. some might say traitorous.
still she lets herself open up to the warmth of the sun and the ambient sounds. the seat of the new republic hides its dark edges, where rey had been raised. this—
it's gone. in an instant. instead she has the warmth of a mother. what she had come for, ostensibly, and yet it lasts only a short time. then there is fear and escape and … well, no. that's not true is it? this is all the complexity of what that warmth represents. the warmth is only the pleasant presentation. this is the dark edges. priorities and sacrifices and
kira resurfaces, gasping for breath, sweat beaded on her forehead, rolling down her face. she pulls her hand back from him, staring down at ben and feeling … conflicted?
organa had sent him away too. in a different way than rey's parents had — for his sake, not for her own — but it was the same in a way. ]
What have you done?
[ she asks it in a whisper, voice thick with grief and outrage and yes, conflict most of all. she balls her hand into a fist and lets it fall into her lap. she sits there beside him, watching from a mental distance, too afraid to reach back inside.
it would give him too much credit to assume this effect he has on her is deliberate, yet it's undeniable. kira should have — would have, were he anyone else — killed him in that interrogation chamber. spared herself the headache and suffered whatever punishment it earned her gladly because snoke could not be rid of her without a replacement.
eventually she shifts to prop herself up in a sitting position against the wall of the bunk near his feet, one leg propped up on the edge of the bed, the other splayed down over his discarded clothing. she doesn't realize that she passes the night there, because when she closes her eyes to regain some semblance of meditative calm, she loses herself in it, and drifts into a sleep all her own. ]
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It isn't long before the reality of his situation settles back in. He's still a prisoner on a First Order shuttle, and he needs to leave before Kira decides she's sick of him.
Slowly, he starts to untangle himself, but in the middle of it, accidentally ends up kicking Kira's leg at the edge of the bed. Karabast. What the hell was she doing there?
--actually, he doesn't want to know the answer to that question. So he holds his breath and waits, to see if she stirs.]
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it takes several moments for her to come to the rest of the way, to ease back into full consciousness, and to recognize that it is ben who has stirred her, and not — ah. she releases her grip and lets him sink back to the bed.
hastily, she draws herself up out of it. a little too hastily. ]
Good. You're awake.
[ she doesn't sound like she thinks it's good. she reaches up to touch the collar of her tunic. how long had she slept? she can feel the weight of her lightsaber on her belt, and she hadn't carried his blaster on her anymore, so he couldn't be armed yet. could he? she watches him warily all the same. ]
We can continue.
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[His reply is given after he lands back on the bed, grumpy as ever. Instead of getting up, he reaches up to cover his face and rub the sleep from his eyes.]
Didn't mean to scare you -- what were you even doing over there?
[He keeps his face covered after he asks, because something tells him that he won't like the answer. But its a distracting from "continuing" at least.]
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[ the specificity is careful there. not afraid of him, but of something else, maybe. she shoots him a look. ]
Get dressed. [ she's not going to entertain that distraction now, not after what just transpired. ]
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Are we going back to the chair? Call me crazy, but I don't think formal-wear is necessary for torture.
[He throws the jacket over his shoulder, and stuffs a hand in his pocket.]
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[ because her temperature is definitely rising. and not in the 'i'd like to see ben solo take his suit jacket back off' kind of way. though with that said— ]
I want to show you something.
[ she opens the door and leads the way out of it, if only to ensure that no one shoots him on sight when he emerges. ]
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[Seeing Stormtroopers there to meet them causes him to pause in his steps and words (he wasn't really trying to be suave, he was just being a pain). Maybe it was a good thing he'd accidentally kicked Kira awake. Sneaking out only to get shot down by them would have been...unpleasant.
Eventually, he toddles after her, fingers nervously fiddling with the collar and tags of the jacket. He's so incredibly out of his depth.]
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[ said flatly, without missing a beat. she leads him down the hallway. what she wants to show him is — well, not in any one part of the ship, really. but she needed to get out of close quarters. it clammed her up and left her feeling …
it left her feeling like she had when she'd touched his memories. conflicted. uncertain.
she'd had to get out of there. her heart is still racing from waking up like that. the trouble with a place like the first order is that the safety he'd shown her in his dream was a foreign concept to her. she'd never had a peaceful night's rest. if someone else was waking her, they were certainly trying to kill her.
until now, at least. she glances at him over her shoulder. surely he didn't have a weapon to her back somehow. he was so hapless, there was no possible way he'd found his way to something before waking her. ]
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It hits him then, when she glances back and catches his eyes. Abruptly, he stops walking, shrugging the jacket back on his shoulders just for the sake of having his hands free.
He'd realized that he had startled her when he woke up, but he hadn't realized that it was the extension of something else. Something that happened while he was sleeping?]
Can I make a request?
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odd.
her heels click together and she spends a minute wrapped up in her own thoughts before she thinks to turn to him, before he even speaks. why was that? she hadn't reached for him. it wasn't the sound of his pause that drew her, it was a feeling. something …
he asks a question and she turns around, stares him down. what was it? she searches him up and down briefly, then turns the rest of her body fully to face him, making it clear she's going to hear him out. ]
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[He's spent the better half of his adult life chained to one ship or another, moving cargo or following one or both of his parents. Walking around on a First Order cruiser with possibly one of the most dangerous people of Snoke's entourage was definitely a mood killer and panic attack inducing.
At this point, he'll do anything just to smell something that isn't recycled air.]
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[ it probably says a lot that her first instinct is to be like no you're just going to try to leave me.
which, like, he's her prisoner and he should try to leave for sure.
actually on further examination this gut instinct to be like nO, YOU'LL LEAVE ME is pretty embarrassing. so she clams up. glances around, then points back the way they had come. ]
This way. [ to the ramp, that is. ] Stay close to me. [ there's no or else. there doesn't need to be. ]
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But her willingness to cooperate does put a little bit of a spring in his step, and soon they are nearly walking side by side. Not quite though.]
I can do that.
[For a few minutes, and then try to leave again, probably.]
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he's wrong to hope for it, of course. the more on her guard she is, the less likely he'll be able to slip away from her. but … ]
You'll be searched for weapons before we leave and after we return. [ she glances sidelong at him. ] I'm sure I don't have to tell you that everyone in this town will know you've cooperated with us. No one will harbor you, should you attempt to escape.
[ let's kill that hope right now. ]
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