station72 | mental link, v important questions;

(I've seen yours, if that's what you're referring to.)

[Cry more dirty scavenger.]

[ not rising to the bait, nope. c'mon you can do better than that, sith jr. ]

( 'To have someone always there in your thoughts, in your mind.' Is that what your Supreme Leader was like? Always in your thoughts? )

[ ...the way he made an appearance in hers. ]

[That— is a keen observation he wasn't wholly prepared to face. It shows in how his thoughts stall for a moment, in how they're slow to start again, lodged against the pull of some distant, now-dead false star, as if its lost gravity still has a hold on him somehow.

In a way, it does.]

(Yes.) [Coldness. Silence. A palpable reluctance to say more, when the truth would only come spilling out like blood from an open wound. Still, tight-lipped, muscles tensed in a false sense of control, at least like this he can pretend to feel nothing for it.]

[ like most of their interactions, she charges on ahead. recklessly, perhaps. ]

( That was how he knew you felt the pull of the Light; you were linked to him that strongly.

But you must have come to depend upon it, given your focus on the purveyors of the Nest. You miss it. )

[ what was it like? she wants to ask, being mind-linked in such a manner, more intimately and strongly than what exists between broodmates and hosts from the sound of it. ]

[He twitches, lip pulling sharply upwards at the corner, shoulders shifting higher by degrees. The symbiote transmits sight and smell, agony and bliss, but he's unsure whether or not she can detect how deftly she's struck him to the bone with her assumptions.

He doesn't really want to know regardless.

And then, something in him slips into place, hard and unyielding like a lock against every fragile, shivering response that threatens to come rushing to the surface. He isn't resolute, nor is he graceful, but his bout of stunned silence comes quickly to an end.]

(I don't miss anything.) [Snoke had been easy to know, his every want was always made clear, and it was a rhythm that Kylo Ren had been attuned to long before he took up the mantle of the Supreme Leader's apprentice. Cathaway is different: her methods, her needs— she delights in watching him lash out as much as she appreciates his ability to adapt. She is untamed. Predictable in her unpredictability and the foreignness of her needs. There's more grace to be found in it, less lust for power.

And why wouldn't there be? Already the clustered network of infinite timelines is woven across her slender fingers like the threaded charms she keeps wrapped around her. Snoke sought a legacy, a power to be harnessed and leashed to his name.

Cathaway needs neither: she already has it.]

( —I don't need it.)

[A lie, but only just.]

[ A lie, even as little of his mind as she knows yet; nearly every response he'd given to those answering his message has been nearly begging, seeking any sort of mention of him by the being called Cathaway. ]

( You don't need your Supreme Leader in your head, any longer?

...Or are you speaking of Cathaway? )

(He served his purpose, and gave me mine: dwelling on the connection that's been lost between us would only weaken me.)

[Better to cull that temptation at the root as he had with Han Solo: proactive cruelty ever standing as a better option than passive commitment - the final lesson Supreme Leader Snoke himself had imparted when he pressed Ren towards confrontation with desperation at his heels. After all, how many times had he questioned his own apprentice, grim features already twisted in suspicion and doubt? A ploy, a lesson— possibly even sincere hesitation, all of it necessary to ensure Ren never faltered on his path to greatness. For him, there would be no redemption—

But there would be victory.]

(Cathaway is stronger, knows more— her reach is endless, so much so that it would put Snoke to shame.

And she chose me.)

[ His response discomfits her: ] ( ...I don't understand why you would need that connection at -all-. )

[ What she says is a more blatant lie than the one he's tried to convince her of; she's wanted nothing more than to fill the loneliness in her own head for as long as she can remember. Now that she's part of the Nest and has the cacophony of thoughts in her head — some more appreciated than others — she can't help but make the comparison of just how very alone she was.

Would she choose to go back to her exile on Jakku, to be free of the Nest's influence for good? She's not entirely certain, but it doesn't stop her from making more assumptions about Ren, either way. ]

( You're weakened already, by your dependence on them. )

[He scoffs quietly. Patiently. Nothing she can hear or feel, but a single thread of a response that's been dragged from him by a bold-faced lie.

What a desperate, stout-hearted child she is.]

(No, Rey.

But if it comforts you while you wait alone in the dark, think whatever you want.)

( You think yourself so superior, because you've had some shriveled up old man in your head?

Well guess what, he's been in mine, too. He told me to kill you. )

[ a pity now she hadn't listened to it, when she'd had the chance. ]

[The news doesn't shock him beyond belief: he'd known the apprentices that had come before him, struck down and discarded for their outlived usefulness, just as he's abandoned any desire to return to Snoke's side in favor of a greater power.

But that doesn't keep something burrowed deep beneath his skin from aching in memory of his failure, that grizzly scar marring fine features.]

( Did he. )

[Somehow he'd always suspected that Snoke intended to test the Scavenger, were she brought to him as asked. If she failed, he would likely be safe - her success would see him undone. He hunted for her regardless, did as he was told without questioning it. Another byproduct of self-destructive tendencies, adhered to years and years spent within Snoke's grasp.]

[ That slow, deliberate response from his thoughts to hers makes Rey think that while he hadn't known for certain that his Supreme Leader had spoken to her in her head, he might have suspected it. ]

( Yes. ) [ her response is a true testament to her iron, stubborn will. ] ( He said how it would be -so quick, so easy- to do; and it would have been. You were already on the ground, laid out before me. )

[ And then something else occurs to her: ] ( — Is that how he convinced you, drew you into the Dark? By convincing you of how -easy-, how -simple- it was? )

[If only it were so simple, how different his life would have been by comparison. A bitter, sallow thought, kept only for a moment before he withdraws into his own space— his own memories—

And then reaches out to take hold of hers.

This time it's gentler, not the willful pressure of his fingers on her spine but a mutual agreement made to offer knowledge where she might otherwise flounder: a child, his stubby fingers set to cool craftsmanship. Little ships scraped across flooring to the echo of his mother's voice somewhere off in the distance. She isn't near, but he hears her all the same. Just as he hears something else in the space between breaths. Narrowed, razor sharp and hissing, hissing in the dark. It doesn't frighten him (how could it?) but it stays there at his shoulders, drawn out long and thin like a shadow in bright sunlight.

He's older, then. Sharp enough to know when there's fear in his mother's eyes when she looks at him, and confusion in his father's when he looks to her; that they're unsettled by it— by him— and she won't say it, but it's the darkness in him that has her expression so gaunt. That she speaks to him about control the way someone speaks to a dying animal, half-convinced against reason it might somehow survive, but already certain it won't. The more frequent her ineffectiveness, the more frequent his own, and the whispers are stronger now. They form words, promise deception and betrayal, but he tries to cling to reason. Tries for her sake, for his father's, who doesn't understand what it feels like to know too much, to see through well-intentioned deception like paper. It aches, and it stunts him compared to his peers who live and breathe without exhaustion in their faces. But he tries.

And then he loses them both. Dismissed to his Uncle's side with selfish, sorry promises that it will somehow help. That they'll speak often, even though he won't be there with them. Unwanted, that voice hisses with conviction. Broken beyond their help, he's being discarded until he learns how to shed darker urges— the same ones they've denied, they've ignored, they've dreaded. It burns in his chest, stings his eyes, and there's too much truth in it to be denied.

Still, for a little while, as he suffers erosion through lessons in passive control, they do keep in touch. His mother takes up work in the senate, his father— replaces him. Takes on other students who want to learn how to fly as he would have, filling the void with faces he can strain to map if he searches through the Force. Those nights he feels better, hurts more, but at least he can feel something resembling control in it. Unlike his lessons, tainted with success in power and failure in finding calm. Calm. As if it's as simple as shutting out the other half of his body, his mind. He feels sick.

Sicker still when the calls stop. When he hears only Skywalker's toothless sermons without experience or understanding, and Snoke's comforting grip across his shoulder, soothing pain like nothing else ever had. Tormented, restless, alone— and never alone.

It cripples, the agony of duality. Seizes him with every breath, as it does to her now for living through him— if only for a moment. The abandoned child of Princess Leia Organa and the infamous Han Solo, wasting away beneath his Uncle's withered shadow. For twenty years that was his life, his mired, agonizing shame, the sum of all his efforts.

Until Ransolm Casterfo dragged Leia Organa's heritage to light in a cruel, decisive instant: publicly airing the proof that she was the daughter of Darth Vader. The senate recoiled instantly in revulsion and outrage, the galaxy intoxicated with the scandal, and Ben Solo— light years away from it all— was granted this revelation not from the mouth of his mother or his father, but a passing stranger. A holonet broadcast. Slander and mistrust on every passing corner and he could feel it, all of it— ]

[ — oh.

She's not fully prepared for the mental onslaught that Ren gives her, but as she had been when touching Anakin's saber, Rey finds herself unable to stop any of it; it plays out before her, all of it in an unyielding reel.

The hissing she hears over the child's — his — shoulders should frighten her and make her recoil, but she already recognizes it as the voice she'd heard in the snow, the sound of grating metal and crunching bones interspersed with harsh whispers. He's so small, just a youngling, all velvety black curls and soft skin, and she's suddenly and starkly reminded of her vision on Takodana, of her four-year-old self with her panicked, pleading eyes turned skyward, straining against the hold of the blobfish's pudgy fingers around her arm as he hisses angrily. Quiet, girl.

Already the sensitivity of seeing him as a child, alone and vulnerable, makes her throat constrict in horror; outside of her mind Rey's breath catches in a sobbing hiccup. The visions continue.

Leia and Han are powerless to stop whatever is happening to their son — indeed it's apparent that they don't know what it is he's being exposed to, slowly and cumulatively over time, and as his parents' confusion and worry deepens, Ben Solo's despair only grows sharper. Rey has never known this fear, this suspicion on the part of the very parents meant to nurture and raise, but she can see how it eats away at him until there's nothing left but a lean, gaunt, simmering anger.

By the time he's sent away to Luke, he doesn't need the voice whispering in his ear to tell him how he's been discarded.

Stop, she wants to whisper through the symbiote, through their bond forged by the Force; I don't want to know any more. His attempts at training with his uncle are fruitless and edged incessantly with frustration, for he can't learn control and the way of the Jedi unless he curbs his passions — and how can you just...stop. feeling? It's undetermined if the question is his or hers but it doesn't matter, because she doesn't have the answer either way. She's had to fight for too much; she's never been very adept at calm.

And then, on the heels of everything that's come before it; the obfuscation of the truth, of his legacy, of the true nature of his mother's lineage. In one fell swoop she's discredited before the entire Senate, the Republic, the entire galaxy, and Ben Solo watches the holonet display as his worldview shatters and over it all is disbelief, disdain, anger. Not even his uncle, Vader's own son, could come clean to him.

And still, the voice. They never trusted you to begin with. Unneeded. Unwanted. They wanted to hide you away where you wouldn't be a burden, a threat to anyone — ]

( — Enough, ) [ her plea is a wretched sound, her mental voice weakened by the images and emotions he's shown her, shattered and tremulous. ]

( You were just a youngling. When he started. )

( Unlike you. )

[Jealousy, contempt, bitterness or pride— even Ren isn't certain what mix of emotion he feels at hearing her reiterate that singular, vulnerable truth.

He'd never known a life without the Supreme Leader in his head, guiding his hand; he doesn't know what to make of a life without him now - or without Cathaway acting as a surrogate.

Still, whatever it comes to, he'll see it through.]

( I was never drawn to the dark side; it was always with me. Shielding me from the light. )

( You were always of the light, as well. ) [ His family was, at least, and therefore he had to have been by proxy, even if it were only when he was much younger.

And then she takes hold of his thoughts, much like he's just done to her; it's not a memory, certainly not one of his that she could pull up, but an imagined scenario she conjures up that she thinks must have happened at some point in his youth. That pilot's chair, of the Millenium Falcon? You remember that, don't you, Ren — the cloth of the seats, the smell of transparisteel and engine oil and bits of wookie sheddings; the throttle under his fingers, the yoke in both palms. The central display monitor showing navigational star charts, tiny holographic worlds spinning and dancing like jewels, while underneath it, Han — dark-haired this time, she imagines, face smooth and smirk half a galaxy wide — and a little boy with hair the color of obsidian and curling up at the ends, on his knee. Little stubby fingers reaching out with delight, at the projections of planets and stars.

Even though it's not her memory — perhaps not his, either, as it's just a guess she hazards — it aches, all the same. He'd offered for me to be part of his crew. ]

( Shielding you from something like this? )

mental link, v important questions;

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