meadowlarklogs

Entry tags:

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WHO: REY and YOU
WHERE: Abstract dream land or the Mt Everest ruins
WHEN: March 15 - 31
WHAT: Rey returns from her canon update despondent and distant, committing herself to hermitage in the ruins of the Mt. Everest gate rather than rejoining her friends in New Amsterdam. She can't hide her return, however, as her subconscious pulls others into her unpleasant dreams and memories.
NOTES OR WARNINGS: Child neglect at the very least, but also spoilers for the first half of The Rise of Skywalker

there are worse ways to die

[ She wakes up in her bed, while Daenerys is out. Her hair is longer, now, and brown again, but the starmap tattooed on her hand is still there, as are the burn scars that wrap around her wrists. She checks for all of them like someone checking that everything that happened in a dream was real.

It's been a year since she saw those scars, a year since she slept in this bed. It doesn't feel like it belongs to her anymore. It feels like a pretend life, one that she'd left behind. So do all the artifacts of it: the stuffed bat, the golden dice, even the unbroken lightsaber of Luke Skywalker, which peeks out from under her mattress like an accusation.

She grabs these things, and some spare clothing, some food, and she leaves before Daenerys can find her. When she sets foot outside her apartment, she doesn't know yet where she plans to go, but she knows that she can't stay here anymore. The apartment is full of too many memories, made painful now, and being in New Amsterdam feels like putting the Displaced at risk. Because she isn't a hero. She isn't a rebel fighter for Morningstar. She's a Palpatine. A Sith. It's only a matter of time before that side of her emerges. She won't subject any of them to that.

Messages try to change her mind. Han. Diana. The people she'd thought could be her family; she recognizes that now as an escape, a denial. She had constructed this life as an artifice to protect herself from the truth. So she doesn't reply. Instead, she pushes herself as far from them as she can.

That's how Rey winds up in the last place she'd been before the new memories of her galaxy pick up. She uses the New Amsterdam gate to get there. The ruins of Everest are as she left them, and the golden-eyed animals greet her with a familiar animosity that she thinks she deserves. There are no sherpas here. No fellow Displaced.

It's just her, and the empty stone chambers, and the valley. She shivers against the cold. Probably, she deserves that too. It's the closest she'll ever come to Ahch-to in this galaxy. No one would come find her here. Few could, and they wouldn't even know to look.

After a few days, it starts to look lived in. Rey has made up something like a bed with the supplies she had originally packed for the Everest trip. She does not think about how she'd shared that sleeping bag with Ben —with Kylo Ren. She only lay it out beside her lantern and beside the makeshift firepit she builds from rubble. Some of the days blur together. Some don't. When she's at her best, she does her meditative routine, the one Leia had taught her, and she sets up a training course in the ruins, and she scavenges food from the sparse wildlife. When she's at her worst, she doesn't get out of bed.

It's not much of a life. But it's a life. ]

dream #1 - the throne of the sith

[ When Rey becomes conscious of the fact that she's dreaming, she's sitting on the stone seat of the throne of the Sith. Angular and comically large, it stands on a large stone dais at the center of an enormous audience chamber in a stone temple. Stadium seating lines the walls, and a lightning storm crashes overhead through the open ceiling. The space is bitter cold and dusty, full of skeletons and shadows.

Rey wears a black dress with a hood, and at her side sits Kylo Ren. It would be impossible to know this man for the one who made a life for himself in New Amsterdam, for he wears a steel helmet that hides his face. Shattered once, glowing red spiderwebs hold the plates together.

Around them, in the audience seating, disfigured shadows and skeletons in hoods roar. It's support and approval, but it's cultish, fervid in a way that suggests more colosseum than true celebration. It is Kylo Ren's words, whispered in her ear with the helmet scrambling his voice, that brings her back to herself, and makes her aware of the Displaced person that now stands before them. His hand settles on her shoulder, the curve of her neck, with an intimate sort of possession as he says: When the time comes, you'll join me.

Rey leaps to her feet, tears away from him more in fear than disgust. The latter, where it appears, is with herself — with her own wanting. ]

dream #2 - i know all about waiting

[ Thinking about her family always brings up her worst memories of Jakku, and right now, it's impossible not to dwell on the family she'd lost. The family who'd sold her.

A woman's voice fills the abstract, intangible space of the dream first: I'll come back for you, sweetheart. I promise. But as it repeats, the voice grows clearer, and — It's Rey's own voice. A younger version of it, to be sure, but as it grows sharper and clearer, the scenery solidifies.

Rey — the child Rey, not the recently returned Rey — lies curled up on herself in the belly of a fallen siege weapon, an AT-AT. The interior has been converted into a generously-named apartment, more a den than anything, and the child whispers this to herself like a mantra: I'll come back for you, sweetheart, I promise. ]

Stop. [ The adult Rey, standing over the child, looks irate and grief-stricken. ] Stop it. They're not coming back.

[ She should have known it. She should have known it from the start. ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Riku doesn't find Rey in a dream. But then: he doesn't need to do that. Once Daenerys says that she took all her stuff, it gives him the answers he needs to know. He knows what it's like to chase after someone and be chased. He knows the urge to run away: to separate from his friends, to stand in a room with them and still be miles upon miles away, hoping they don't realize who he is. He's past that, long past it, but he's done it.

(And at one point, Xion had done it too. He had asked her to do it, had pushed her toward that eventuality.)

The important part is that she isn't gone. She hasn't vanished. She isn't giving him the cold shoulder for liking New Rio too much or disagreeing with her theories (which would've been odd, but he still has no idea if this was caused by Everest). He doesn't have to worry if he'll have to meet a new Rey one day, recognizing that she's not the girl he knew before. He doesn't have to worry that he'll never see her again.

He doesn't have to worry if another close friend of his will be gone for good, with him hoping that it's not like that.

It's already bad enough knowing that Sora is gone back home and is only here, and that he's waiting for the eventual collapse of recognizing that he doesn't know what to do. What can he tell anyone? Who can he tell? All he's done is promise that he'll make it right. Riku made plans with Aqua, had things in motion, and he trusts he can still do them.

But—it's a weight on him every day.

Being here feels like he's buying time with Sora.

He didn't want it to feel like he lost time with Rey and hadn't done what he needed to change that.

Seeking out Rey takes time. He doesn't hit Everest first (because that seems too obvious if she's trying to hide). And he can't do it all in one evening, because he needs to hit a lot of cities and try to figure out where she'd go when he doesn't know too much about where she'd hide before her time in this world. (A long sentence for a reason: a spiraling of thought, of uncertainty. Shouldn't he know?)

He eventually finds her.

Riku wonders if it'll be as—easy? as simple?—to find Sora. He can only hope that he can hop between worlds and find clues about where Sora's been.

It's only out of frustration with his failure that he heads to Mt. Everest dressed in the warm attire he had planned to wear the entire time for the trip that he missed, hoping that he can find clues.

Despite the fact that he had pictures, he doesn't know the area. It takes him a while off of the gate to find where she might be. But there are clues. Footprints.

He's got his hands tucked into his jacket when he finds her, and he's almost curled in on himself.]

Guess you figured this is the last place anyone would want to look.

[It's cold and he's suffering. But he sees her. She's right there, and her hair is what it was before, and she's okay. At least, physically.

He doubts that her heart feels the same.]

You shouldn't have come.

[ Somehow, she'd known he would, had believed that he would when he said it even though so few ever had. It wasn't a matter of whether it was possible — it was about whether someone understood her well enough, whether someone had enough persistence.

Truthfully, she'd wondered if Kylo would beat him. Feared he would. It's a relief, in this way, that Riku arrives first. Still, she doesn't welcome him. ]

I didn't want to be found.

[ This is an understatement, of course. Nothing could cover how deeply she wanted to avoid anyone who felt she meant something to them because — well, because she didn't think she deserved it. ]

I'm sure that's what you told yourself. What you're still telling yourself. [That she's hiding should say enough. Why else would she be here, trying to be away from others? But it's unlikely that Rey wants to be alone. He's still positive that she has a good reason for all of this. It might not seem like it to anyone else. He can get, for instance, why Daenerys is mad at her.

But—still.]

Too bad, though. I'm not good at listening to stuff like that. Not when a friend needs my help.

[Inwardly, he cringes at himself. Wow, he just sounded a lot like Sora.

Maybe that's not a bad thing?

It feels right, anyway. It's what he believes.]

I ...

[ She doesn't want to say that she doesn't deserve it, but it's what she feels. Memories had come back when she woke up in her basement apartment with Daenerys, memories of when she had been reckless and led to harm coming to other Displaced. She really is just a disaster waiting to happen, even when she's trying her best.

So Rey shakes her head, firm. ]

I'm not who you think I am.

[ Certainly not the kind of person that he'd be friends with. ]

Yeah? So, who are you, then? I know you went home. It must've done a number on you.

[If anything, it's good that he asked around before frantically trying to find her on his own. Riku's managed to put together a clear enough picture by this point in time, even if it isn't the best of pictures, or situations.

He knows he's out of touch, but he also knows that he might have the best experience and mindset for handling this. Be calm. Know that she has her reasoning. But also remember what he was told when it was like this.]

How did you—

[ It doesn't make sense, at first. That Riku would have concluded she'd gone home, necessarily. People disappeared all the time without that happening, and people who went home disappeared for shorter periods. It wasn't predictable, that way. The choice to run off, maybe, but ...

She has a worse assumption she can make. Paranoia encourages her towards it. ]

You've been talking to Kylo Ren.

[ Not Ben. Not anymore. Ben had never been real, not in the scheme of things. The shame of those memories burns through her. She'd been so weak, so foolish. If she returned to New Amsterdam, how likely was it that she would tread that same path again? She knows, now, what's at the end of it: the Sith. Kylo had been right about her turning, but she can still stop it. ]

["Kylo Ren," huh? Riku wonders if there's any meaning in calling him that. But there's the problem. For all that he's tried to get to know the guy, he doesn't know where to start. He knows there's darkness there, that it drives him and motivates him, but what does it mean? How far does it go? They both care for Rey a great deal and will do anything for her, but again: what does it mean?

He realizes now that he's never gotten the answers from him that he's wanted. (Realized it before he got here, for that matter.)

But then: it could be as simple as switching back and forth between Axel and Lea. Right? Probably.]

I was hoping to figure out what happened. I was afraid Everest had done a number on you. But that's not the story he told.

[Riku takes a step closer.]

You didn't answer my question. Who are you? And why should it change how I see you?

[ She doesn't answer his question now, either, too laser-focused on her critique. ]

It sounds like you've heard all you need to hear.

[ This is the cost of going into hiding, just as it was for Luke, for Ben. Other people get to tell the story. Other people get to speculate and make judgments. In her recluse, she surrendered the right to have any say in the decisions they made about the kind of person she was or even her motives.

She might as well be dead.

Still, resentment burns in her chest. Riku had gone to Kylo Ren, sought answers from him, and now he demanded clarification from her like it was his right to know. None of it was. These problems belonged to her alone. Everything she'd ever done was alone, why would this be any different? ]

Yeah? What do you think I heard?

[Getting a story out of Kylo Ren wasn't easy. (Isn't, currently, easy. It's probable it's ongoing even as he stands here, trying to reach out to her.) Obviously, there's something there that Rey thought Riku heard about, something that she thinks Kylo Ren would say that would trump something she would tell him.]

You don't have to answer that. Just like he didn't want to. He had his theories on where you'd be, though.

He thinks he knows me. Just like you.

[ It only follows that they'd unite on that point. Riku and Kylo Ren are, after all, so similar. Maybe her sentiment for Riku was the same as her sentiment for Kylo had been — a mistake. Something that would only mislead her, later. It's troubling and confusing to be confronted with it now, when she hasn't had time enough to figure any of it out.

She prickles, disagreeable, and grits her teeth. ]

I'm going to figure out the answer on my own. You can't help me. No one can.

You're not even listening, huh? [It's not the first time that he's dealt with her like this. Caught up in what she believes, not able to see past it. Everything around Cassius had been like that. The only reason they didn't address the problems there were because Rey had gotten hurt on the way out of the base. And then it just never felt right to bring it up again.]

I asked who you are. Did you forget to answer, or did you just admit that you don't know, either? It's fine, whatever the answer is. But I didn't say I knew anything. Saying a guy has theories—that's really not much, you know? Especially when he barely said much.

You think I need your help.

[ It's for his own good. That's what she tells herself as the deflection bubbles to the surface, a panic and frustration response that she can't help. He's too close to the vulnerable truth at the heart of it. Rey's fear of herself, of finding out what kind of person she really is and if there is some Palpatine buried there after all, responsible for the mistakes and aggression and bad choices and dark impulses that she has. Responsible even, maybe, for her connection to Ben. No. He's too close to it. She has to push him back. ]

I don't. I'm doing fine on my own.

[ This lie cuts her, but she spits it out anyway. She had never been fine on her own. The loss of her parents destroyed her. Jakku was a hell for her, and now she has put herself back in that purgatory — a perpetual reminder. It feels like what she deserves, though. For being bad. Wrong.

The figure in the Emperor's vault haunts her, feeling perpetually like it's only a step away. ]

Go home, Riku.

[Riku would like to tell her that maybe he was wrong to say she needed his help, but he wouldn't believe it. He could walk it back. But he knows this, knows what it looks like—has lived and breathed it. Just because she's not wearing a different face or a black coat and a blindfold doesn't mean that it's any less obvious to him.

The annoying part is where Kylo Ren wouldn't tell him what happened. It sounded like he knew. Now Riku has to play guessing games.]

You think I want to be here? [He turns, motioning to the surroundings.] I hate the snow. [Riku had agreed to climb Everest, but had been dreading the actual experience of it all. It was miserable.]

I'm here because I missed my friend. I looked all over for you. Guess I thought you'd try a lot harder with your hiding spot, but since you didn't, that just tells me you wanted to be found.

I came here because it's not safe for me to be anywhere else!

[ The blue light in her chest flickers, and some of the rocks around her tremble, lifting off the ground. It's not a promising sign of her emotional stability. Anger had been the first way she'd unlocked how to use her power, and now she can grasp why — the Dark Side came naturally to her, always within reach. Just as it had to her grandfather.

Hatred explodes in her chest at the mere thought of him, and it ripples through the unbalanced gravity fields surrounding her. ]

I am trying to protect you!

[So, it's like that. Shame, fear of hurting people she cares about. Riku barely notices the rocks moving. Obviously, he knows her power. He knows what she's capable of, but he doesn't really care right now.

Even though he's cold, Riku draws his right hand to himself, and he tugs off his glove, leaving his skin bare.

He extends it toward her, palm out. But the look in his eyes is searching, worried. He isn't smirking like he did that one day on the beach, his home dying around him.]

Let me show you something. A memory. [A beat. His mind shifts around, thinking through what her response might be here.] I promise it's not a trick. My power doesn't work in a way that would hurt you now.

[ She regards his hand, wary. ]

Mine does.

[ He doesn't scare her. Her own power does. The Force may be gone, but the gravity powers she has developed here, even the ones over plants, they pose their own danger. The stones suddenly tremble and plummet back to the earth as she clamps down on that. She can't let her feelings explode. She can't lose control and hurt someone.

The feelings ... they're less, here. Loneliness. Sadness. She knows how to manage all of these. But if she went back, and she were near her friends, and Kylo Ren ...

But she's selfish. She wants to feel connected to people, wants to feel like she belongs. She wants it more than she's afraid of it, most times. So despite this warning, she slips off her glove too. Slowly. As if she were grappling with herself the whole while. Then she reaches out, and settles just her fingers over his.

The surge of emotion is throttled by how hard she has worked to stow it all away, to clamp down on her powers. But the loneliness is like a void, and its gravity threatens to pull him to that darkness with her when the empathy bond opens up. ]

[Riku's been there.

So caught up in the fear that he couldn't protect his friends, he started to push them away, making them believe that it might be better if they went off without him. He started losing them to it. No, he did lose them. He became a braggart, believing that only he had the right and strength to protect Kairi, not Sora, even though it was Sora who sent him on that path in the first place.

After all, it was Sora who led to his own mantra: to seek the power to protect what matters.

Her ache and loneliness is like a tide washing up on a shore. He knows it, and instead of rejecting it, he welcomes it. Riku looks at her, staring her down, and he lets her see him. The part under the surface. It's calm, but there's a sense that the waves there are kept in check every hour of the day. The only reason it's easier now is because he knows what he wants. What he lives for, and who he lives for. He's known that for a while.

Even though Rey can't get his thoughts, he's hoping that she can—well, if not take it as a sign that this can get better, that there can be a light. She may not get it now. But sometimes these things take a while to sink in.

Then the memory starts. Riku isn't himself, not exactly. He's drawing so sharply on Darkness to remain strong that he doesn't know how to see things any other way. His heart kicks with adrenaline, even as he's trying to appear calm to Mickey. He enjoys knowing how strong he is, he enjoys knowing that he could beat most people with this form—

And he binds it with his blindfold, pulling it back, hiding it away.

Don't let him see my eyes. There's a sense of fear that Mickey will see the same eyes in Riku that he would have in Ansem (bright yellow, destructive, filled with Darkness and a pure determination to do only what feels right, no matter the cost). Right now: that's protecting Sora from the Organization.

There's fear. Fear in what lies ahead. In knowing what comes next. Even with the blindfold on, he misses that power. Misses what it offers him. The certainty that it carries. But he knows he could be lost in it. It's at the residual edges of his mind even as he and Mickey speak.

And then, eventually, the memory ends. Riku's hand has shifted ever so slightly to hold on to Rey's, to step in closer, eyes searching her face.]

There's one more I'd like to show you. Let me know when you're ready.

[ Rey's reaction cuts into the memory: a brief flash of her own memories, summoned by the heavy weight of Riku's hood, by the way the Darkness has changed the color of his eyes. She knows without ever having seen him what Ansem looks like, and she cannot help but link it to what she'd seen in the vault. Her momentary memories are spliced in like subliminal messages. A hooded figure sitting on an elaborate stone throne, shaped like a flame. That same figure, snapping piranha-like teeth at Rey over crossed blue and red lightsabers, her eyes flashing gold. Rey's eyes.

It's her future. She can't run from it.

She pulls her hand away from Riku's. ]

Memories won't change anything, Riku. I'm talking about the future. If I ... If I come back to New Amsterdam, I will turn to the Dark Side. I've felt it.

[Seeing it is hard, but understandable. A vision. Not the truth, not something that's happened. Riku doesn't know anything about how her version of Light and Dark works. He knows that it's different, but the similarities are there.

But then: would he have been able to stop himself if he knew the future? Would he have been able to protect Sora and Kairi, and keep himself from losing it? Or would he have been more desperate to prove it wrong, thus losing himself in the process?

Odds are, it would be that one.]

That's the thing, Rey. There was a time when that was my future. I hadn't lost myself there, but I did soon after. I couldn't just pull on a blindfold and make it go away. I made a choice.

[And the only reason he stands here now is because of Ansem the Wise's mistake. It was just the only one that worked out in someone's favor in a long time.

But that hadn't kept him from caring for his friends.]

It's only when I truly ... gave in to that feeling that I did stupid things like hiding from my friends, moving in the shadows, and turning away from them. I got so caught up—I didn't think to ask how they felt about it. Managing it isn't about running away from it. It's about learning how to handle it, how to look it in the eye every day and know that it's part of you.

[A beat.]

No one person is more light than dark, not normally. In my neck of the woods, only seven people on all the worlds I've been to are purely light. We can't try to be that, or we'll hurt ourselves. We have to accept the way we are.

[He extends his hand again, though it's not with an offer this time.]

As far as I'm concerned, running off like this? Hiding because you think you'll hurt your friends? It's you not facing who you are, and hurting yourself. It's letting that Darkness cloud your heart, instead of knowing why it's part of you.

[ The trouble with encouraging Rey to embrace the Dark Side as part of her is that it sounds so much like what Kylo Ren has been trying to get her to do for a year, now, more emphatically now that he knows the truth about her lineage. Sure, Riku is Sora's friend, Riku is someone who claims to have overcome the Darkness, and these things should make it impossible for him to be the kind of person who would deceive her, who would lead her down that path, but ...

The relationship she'd had with Ben here felt like it threw everything else into question too. How could she be so blind? She'd expected him to give up his power, had really believed him capable of it, and then he'd thrown it all aside for power. He'd gone to Palpatine. Knelt to him. He terrorized planets like Kijimi all to get what he wanted. If she had blinded herself to the danger in him, might she have also blinded herself to that in Riku?

Might that have even been what drew her to Riku in the first place? ]

You're not listening. [ She wants to believe Riku. She wants to trust him. But she's so afraid. ] I know what happens if I accept the Dark Side as part of me. The Force gave me a vision of it. Until I know that I won't give in, I can't— [ She chokes on the words, exhales heavily. ] There's more Dark than Light in me, Riku. And there's just too much at stake.

[It feels like he is listening, but she's so caught up in her fear that she isn't able to process what he has to say. So, she had a vision. So, she knows what she could become. None of that holds here. Rey says that if she goes back to New Amsterdam, she'll see herself go dark. But he knows that isn't possible, not while she's torn away from her powers.

But that's logic. When the Dark is infecting the mind, there is no logic.]

You've already given in, [he says, knowing that it won't be easy to hear. It wasn't how bluntly he wanted to say it before.] Hiding here. Being afraid. Telling yourself that that you have to stay here until you know you won't. Isn't that just the Darkness speaking right now? Isn't it already controlling everything you do? You're letting it infect your mind. You think you know what you're doing, but you don't. Not when it's like this.

[Riku knows that he's lucky. His mastery of the Darkness led to him being able to become immune to the most sour of its effects. It's a part of him, and he knows it could prey upon his mind if he let it—but that's just how he thinks. How he feels and handles things. How he assesses what's right in front of him. It's his own thought processes that made him susceptible to the Darkness.

Just like Rey's thought processes are doing the same to her.]

You aren't mastering it. You're letting it win. But if there's more Dark than Light in you—then you need to face it head on.

[He's already said, "You failed," essentially. He won't say it in other words yet again. The meaning is clear.]

How?

[ The shake of her head betrays the truth: she's so lost. There's no one she knows except Ben with so much darkness in his blood, and despite having just as much good in him, he'd turned towards the dark, cloaked himself in it like armor and dubbed himself Kylo Ren. She doesn't know how to do that. She doesn't want that for herself.

So as much as it's easy to accept what Riku's saying — that her own actions are driven by the dark too, that it already has its claws in her, especially given what Daenerys had said to her when she'd reached out in that dream — it's much harder to imagine that coming back to New Amsterdam will make it any easier.

Seeing Kylo Ren, she knows, will make it harder. It already had, in her dreams. ]

How am I supposed to ... [ She can't find the words. Reaching up, she wipes tears away when she realizes they're cascading freely, rolling in steady streams down her cheeks. ] You can't help me with this. No one can. And I can't change who I am. It's better if I'm out of the way. [ At least here, she can't hurt anyone. The image of Daenerys' slit throat haunts her. ]

You already are. I saw your power activate. [Right now, it feels important to break it down, bit by bit, so that she can see it. Riku isn't going to ignore the little things.] Given where we are, you could easily have used it already to hurt me. Right? [He meets her eyes, and he doesn't wait for confirmation. Instead, he looks over toward the rocks that fell. One given weight could easily crack open his head and kill him. He doesn't have the spells he had back before he showed up here. He doesn't have any of it.]

What are you afraid of doing? Darkness infects your thoughts, infects your feelings, making you feel—a certain way. But you still have a choice in it all. You just need to learn how to find that choice in your thinking, and isolating yourself isn't gonna help. Sometimes, the voice needs to be just outside, waiting to lead the way.

[That's what Sora had been for him the entire time. The light guiding him, the reason he got obsessed and the reason he pulled himself together. The one he gained power to protect. Once he pulled away the curtains and understood it, it made him feel better.]

Kylo Ren says that he uses it as a tool. That it's just a weapon in his arsenal. He's lying about that, too. It's a power you can harness and understand—but I don't even think any of us can do that here, anyway. Not with how it's been repressed in our hearts. So we'll see about helping you approach it in your mind, and in your heart, and deal with the rest of it later.

[ Needs to be outside, waiting to lead the way.

She thinks of Han, of Riku, of Daenerys. And Bucky and Ren and all the people who had tried to reach out to her, people whom she had for the most part ignored. Her heart aches for them, guilt sweeping in with the ensuing silence, like the tide. She hadn't let them close to her, and she might not have attacked Riku the way Kylo had pushed her to risk killing Chewbacca, but she had still hurt them.

If she were there, in New Amsterdam, the chances of her walking that power back, of resisting hurting them more while Kylo Ren was there to push her to it, would be less. She'd be more likely to hurt those same people. But she'd also have them there to try to help her.

It's been a year since she was in New Amsterdam, longer than she'd been there even if not by much, but she's beginning to remember what she'd lost sight of with the Resistance. She'd never really had this with them, not even with Leia as her master. She'd never let herself learn to depend on them, to work with them, because she was always other. The Last Jedi. Here, she's part of the Displaced. Here, she's trying to bury Jakku instead of carry it with her, trying to learn how to depend on other people.

That's the person she wants to be.

Slowly, reluctantly, she nods. The tears become fewer, then none, drying in tacky lines on her face. ]

Okay. [ Voice cracking, ] I'll come home.

[Relief floods through him. He smiles, briefly, but it fades to something more moderate and neutral. Riku extends his hand back to her, hoping that she'll come close. Unlike Sora, he isn't as physical with his affection, but if there's ever a time that Rey needs a hug? It's right now.]

Come on. [A thought occurs to him. Is it stupid because their apartment is crammed? Yes. But Riku also thinks of his conversation with Daenerys. It might not be the best time to go back to her while she's irritated with Rey. That'll just make her feel worse.] Do you wanna stay with me and Sora, and even Xuanyo Mo? ... Come to think of it, he might keep you from getting too dark just by annoying you enough.

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