actual shounen hero (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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meadowlarklogs2020-03-01 11:34 am
forcevisions) wrote in meadowlarklogs2020-03-01 11:34 am
Entry tags:
[open]
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
dream #1 - the throne of the sith
dream #2 - i know all about waiting
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. ]
no subject
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. ]
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.]
no subject
[ 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. ]
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
[ A rental agreement is a promise, and Rey needs to make good on that. It's good to feel welcome, though. So good, in fact, that she turns away from Riku's offer of a hug to hide the feelings welling up in her expression. Feeling wanted is new to her. Foreign.
She doesn't know just how grateful she'll be for that offer, once she sees the state of her old living situation. ]
Let me just get my things.
[ Without the resolve of all her anger and pain to steady her, she shivers through packing up her small camp. ]
no subject
Riku could understand that, too.]
But I know I can't force you, so I'll just stay right here and wait. [And, well, he pulls back on his glove. It's cold!]
no subject
[ Recalling this is like recalling a childhood memory. New Amsterdam and her knowledge of all the people in it feel far away to her, memories that were unused and put in cold storage. Anchoring herself in amiable chatter about them helps pack some of her darker feelings away. If she can stamp them down, suppress them, then maybe ...
Maybe she'll get through this. Just like she got through Jakku. Maybe she can be the person her friends need her to be. ]
I don't think she'd even seen a shuttle before she came to this world. One of those. [ She waves her hand, then hooks her lantern to a carabiner on her backpack. ] It'll be better in person. [ Plus, she'd left her in the lurch with rent, and most of Rey's stuff was still there.
But Riku's already admitted he won't press the issue, and that's for the best all around. It doesn't take her long to get things packed up and ready to go back to New Amsterdam via the gate. It feels a little like restarting, back to where she had been before she'd gone home, taking another stab at the year that followed, that had driven her to flee. Maybe she'll do better this go around. ]
no subject
He'd offer to be there for her, to help her through it, but that doesn't seem like the answer, either.
As it is, he just falls into step beside her, helping her where he can.
As they're about to head back, he adds,] Let me know if you need me for anything once we get back.
no subject
[ she's put her gloves back on, the ones that have kept her warm enough to survive up here, and with that security, she reaches out to squeeze his hand, as finn had taken hers. together, he'd said. and for a moment, just a moment, she tries to imagine that could be true, here. ]
I promise.