annexedlogs | The number one drama causer is at it again. He's not really sorry.

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The number one drama causer is at it again. He's not really sorry.

Who: Vader
What: Self-surgery, healing, dragging people into his mess
When: Early month, prior to the mini-missions
Where: A room in a rent-by-the-day building in the Magitech, Obi-Wan's hut, probably other places as things develop
Content Warnings: self-surgery, blood (lots of blood), to be updated as needed

Given the chip implanted into them was at the base of their skulls, what it did, and the experiences he had with implanted chips - both in his men and in himself - it probably shouldn't surprise anyone he decided to handle it himself.

Not that he hasn't taken done preparations. A field surgery kit, mirrors, some kind of healing gel and bandages, a tarp on the floor under a cheap chair, and furniture moved away. The room was paid for a couple of days. After thinking it over before he started, he sent a text message to Padmé and a message to Obi-Wan.

Then he washed his hands, the back of his head and his neck, and sat in the chair, prepared so the mirrors allowed him to see the back of his head and neck clearly, even when his hands were in the way. And started cutting. Peeling. The scar tissue was thick, tough, and hard to pull apart. But pull it apart he did, because he didn't want to cut nerves or large blood vessels - there wasn't a bacta tank here. It took time, to get down to muscle, to scrap it away from the implants in his spine without harming his implants or causing too much muscle damage (what he thought was too much anyway).

He didn't winch or flinch, only swore when a blade broke. Angerly threw the disposable ones across the room and set a blade into the reusable ones.

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He waits, not really able to even guess what she might say. When she does speak, she cuts herself off. What had she felt, if not the darkness she surely knew was there already?

"Okay." It's an awkward reply, not satisfying to either his curiosity or concern, but he knows what it's like to not be able to articulate something, so he can respect it from her. From there, he doesn't know what to say, nor what he can usefully do in this situation.

"Are you-" he starts, and stops. There's no point to asking such a clichéd thing as are you alright, when it's so very obvious she isn't. The question that takes its place is a more difficult one to ask. But she had trusted him before. She had been willing to cry on. This time, he's the one who's less certain about offering.

Go Kylo. Calm her.

"Is there something I can do?"

She might be able to explain it to him later, once she sorts it all out for herself. His question catches her by surprise, and she searches his face for some sign of what's shifted again between them. He'd been holding her at a distance after their last encounter; she hadn't expected healing Vader to change that, not really, not when the thing that angered him hadn't changed.

"Aren't you angry with me?"

His presence helps her more than she wants it to, honestly, but she doesn't want him to stay out of some sense that he owes her. She'll be fine in another few minutes, enough to walk back home, anyway.

Did that stop him being angry at her about tethering with Luke of all people? No, not really. He doesn't plan on denying that. But it isn't solely a sense of responsibility, nor solely his grandfather's instruction, that brought him out here, either. Whatever this is, it's happening because she chose to heal Vader--something he hadn't expected she would do. And also, it's her. Kylo has long trained himself to ignore the suffering of others, but she's an exception, angry or not.

"You were angry with me when you bandaged me up before." He's not entirely certain what had motivated her then, but he imagines there must have been similarities. She might have written it off with the excuse of practicality, but he remembers the way she nearly called him back when he left.

She's been angry with him for most of the time she's known him. She probably still is on some level that has become too exhausting to keep up now that they're no longer at war. They'll need to reckon with it all one day, she imagines, but it had been a relief to stop blocking him out quite so hard, and she'd felt stung when she realized that he'd begun to shut her out instead.

Some of the tension drops from her shoulders, and she moves back to the front step of Obi-Wan's hut and sits, leaving room for him to do the same.

"Can you just sit with me for a few minutes? You don't have to say anything."

She's not sure if it's the same for him, if physical proximity, even though the Force, seems to help him feel somehow more right so long as they aren't trying to hurt one another, with words or weapons. She's not sure she can even explain it in words any more than she can explain what happened back inside, but she knows she can find her balance again if he stays a while, more quickly than if she just walks back home in her current state.

It's the same, and he can't say that blocking her out has done him any favors. That's probably a big part of why he's willing to forgive at least enough to not hold it against her in this moment.

For now, he doesn't say anything. He just nods and sits beside her, not close enough to be touching, but not putting noticeable distance between them, either.

She's quiet a while, too, at least until she settles enough that she can take a full breath without feeling like she's about to start shivering again. Vader's Force signature is still so very present in the Force that it's hard to shake the lingering sense of cold, but she's able to notice it and let it be, now, rather than feeling as though it'll overwhelm her.

The silence feels too loud after a while, and there's so much that had gone unsaid that she's not sure where to begin. An explanation of why she was here seemed as good a place to start as any.

"I don't hate him, you know. You can't heal someone you hate."

Not at the same instant, anyway. Maybe she could go back to hating Vader eventually, though it was honestly a difficult emotion for her to hold onto for long. Anger, yes, but not hate.

The silence does feel too loud. Probably sooner for him than for her, but he doesn't have any idea what to say, so he just doesn't. When she eventually speaks, it doesn't surprise him--after all, she wouldn't have done that if she did hate Vader--but it still doesn't exactly make sense to him why she had chosen to offer that healing in the first place.

"What made you decide to?"

It's a difficult question to answer. She's not even sure she knows, beyond the fact that she could, and it had felt like the right thing to do.

"He has people who care about him. Any one of you could've asked me to if you'd known I could do it."

They hadn't, but given that she would've done it if asked, she didn't see a reason to withhold the offer just because they didn't. It's the closest answer she can find to the more complicated one, which was that he felt like someone she ought to care about, herself. She's not sure if that's her bond with Kylo, her tether with Luke, or just the envy of all of them for having a family at all.

"Hm." He's not sure that entirely makes sense to him, either, but it's something of an answer, at least. He's quiet for a moment, until the silence starts to feel loud once again.

"He told me to go after you, when you left."

She frowns at that, unsure of what to make of it. She didn't hate Vader; she even saw the shadows of what must've been a good person, once. But she's not sure why that would extend to caring enough to send Kylo after her. Or why it would occur to him to do so to begin with, when she and Kylo hadn't even been speaking.

"Why?"

Why wouldn't he? Kylo wasn't surprised by it at all in the moment, only grateful that Vader had made that decision for him while he'd failed to, himself.

"You healed him. He saw how it panicked you." Even if none of them fully understood why, it was obvious that had been the cause.

"And he knows about our connection. He trusts the Force, like I do."

The implication that Darth Vader had demonstrated concern for her is one hell of a thing to come to terms with, so much so that for a moment Rey feels as though she might burst into either hysterical laughter or tears over the way it makes her feel. She's already so overwhelmed by everything she'd just experienced that it's almost one thing too many. But, once again, she finds Kylo's words pulling her back from that hysterical edge.

"You still trust the Force when it comes to our connection? Enough to tell him about it in a way that didn't make him immediately despise me?"

It's surprising, considering how few positive interactions they'd had, even here. She'd spoken reasonably kindly of Kylo to Luke when she'd explained things, then, but she hadn't been willing to let go of her anger at him back then, either. Or at the older Luke, for that matter. She supposes it's not so strange to think that Kylo would've done the same, even angry.

A slight nod answers the question. He hasn't been happy with her since the last time they talked, and hasn't wanted to let her in during that time, but he still believes there's ultimately a reason for whatever this is between them.

"He told me I should talk to you. Try to understand." That had been said about her stubborn connection to the Resistance and hatred of the First Order, before he'd even known about her choice of tethers. Still, he supposes it's advice he should follow, now that she's here. He draws in a bracing breath before asking, "Why Luke?"

Rey's still trying to process the fact that Darth Vader gave Kylo advice that seemed likely to help the two of them reconcile when he hits her with the question. She nearly flinches; she hadn't been expecting to talk about it yet. She's entirely too tired for whatever argument they're about to have, now that the adrenaline that came with panic has started to wear off.

Still, she supposes he deserves an answer. It hadn't been a complicated one on her end.

"I didn't want it to be a stranger, and I thought someone I knew, a Force user -- we already know how to get into other people's heads, and how to stay out. There weren't that many choices who were correctly aligned."

She'd offered to tether to Obi-Wan, for that matter, but she'd respected his privacy enough not to push when it seemed he was trying to gently deflect.

He can understand that answer, at least. Of any she might have given, it's by far the least likely to cause the argument she fears. It won't make him entirely forgive it, but it at least doesn't immediately set him wanting to yell at her about it all over again.

"It's unfortunate you and I weren't correctly aligned." A dangerous admission, perhaps, when it both indicates just how much more comfortable he still is with her than with others here, and leaves open the unasked question of whether she would have picked him over Luke if she could have. But if Rey had been an option, he wouldn't be so stubbornly resisting the idea of tethering at all. He doubts there's anything that extra link could add to their connection that doesn't already exist between them.

The admission surprises her, and she looks over at him with a slightly pensive expression. They'd been angry at each other, but she'd thought the same, briefly, before deciding not to dwell upon things she couldn't change.

"If we had been...?"

She lets the thought trail off with a minute shake of her head. It wasn't worth contemplating. They'd already proven how badly they could hurt one another. Another bond would've just complicated everything even further.

"Who did you end up tethering to, anyway?"

He doesn't quite know how he should interpret that head shake. Whether it means she doesn't want to contemplate that impossible thought, or whether it means the result would have been the same regardless. The latter possibility twists something in his gut.

Fortunately, her further question stops him from dwelling on that too much. He blinks.

"I haven't."

Her expression quickly goes through a range of small shifts from concern to mild exasperation and she huffs an audible sigh.

"Ben."

She hasn't even called him by that name since they've gotten here, not since she learned it belonged to Obi-Wan as well. It seemed better to avoid the confusion entirely and call them by their other names, and it hadn't mattered when they weren't speaking. Now she just continues to radiate concern and frustration in equal measure as she looks him over.

"Are you all right? You're not feeling any imbalance yet?"

She wonders if perhaps she ought to have waited to be certain that what they'd been told was true, but it seemed like a bad idea given that waiting meant her choices would be further limited.

The way she says his name (that name) has his eyebrows raising in surprise, and then mild incredulity.

"I'm fine." Truthful, not defensive. He hasn't felt anything yet. If there's any truth at all to what they'd been told, then it seems clear he still has time to figure it out. And he's still hoping to never need to figure it out, considering the only people here who he'd be willing to tether to are Rey, who can't help with the imbalance issue, and Vader, who could, but seems to have all of Kylo's skepticism and perhaps more.

She flushes slightly, realizing that she's shown her hand regarding how much she still cares for him. Not that she's been trying overly hard to hide it; she's just been angry and frustrated and hasn't wanted to start up an old argument without any clear solution.

He doesn't seem to be lying, though, and at this distance she's attuned to him enough that she could tell if he were more than slightly out of sorts.

"I suppose it could be less of a danger than they made it seem."

If that's the case, maybe she could untether entirely? She likes this version of Luke, but she can't say there's any particular benefit to being tethered to another person, friend or not.

"Can you promise me you won't be stubborn about this if it turns out they're not exaggerating?"

If nothing else she very clearly doesn't want him to slowly die of his own resistance to the idea.

Kylo isn't certain he can promise not to be stubborn about anything. But beyond that, the question throws him a bit, even knowing how she'd reacted a moment ago when he said he hadn't tethered. And how it seems like she'd come here purely because she'd picked up on his distress through the Force.

"You're worried about me." It's an observation, and his tone carries a note of surprise about that revelation. Not so much that she does care about his wellbeing, but that she's unusually willing to make it known right now.

Rey flushes even pinker at the accusation. She couldn't deny that she had been, and that she still cared about him after everything. She's too tired to even try to come up with a good reason that she ought to be.

"When I felt your grandfather come back into the Force, and your own reaction, I thought -- I'd only felt one person with that much Dark in him."

She stares down at her hands, not wanting to relive any of what she'd felt. The way all the blood had drained from her face and she'd flat out ran before she could form anything resembling coherent thought. She didn't even have her lightsaber, so what she'd even been planning to do is anyone's guess.

"I thought. If Snoke could come here. I didn't want you to face him alone."

He bristles a little at the implication of his grandfather being anything like Snoke. Even if he understands why she'd felt that, when all she'd noticed was the sheer darkness in either... there is no comparison, not in Kylo's mind. Vader's aura may be cold, but he's treated his grandson with more warmth than Kylo had ever expected.

But what she says further draws him from that thought. She hadn't wanted him to fight on his own. That's touching, in its own way.

His brows knit as he tries to make sense of it all, and as his memories go back to that moment on the Supremacy, when they had been so intensely unified for a moment before it had all promptly fallen apart. "You left," he eventually says. Not accusation, but confusion. She hadn't left him with Snoke, no. But she'd left him alone, on a burning ship, to deal with the rest of the First Order entirely on his own to deal with the mess left in Snoke's absence.

She'd sorted it out by the time she got there, and now that she's been in his presence a little while she could easily differentiate Vader from Snoke. Snoke had been fathomless evil, incomprehensible to her. There was something more to Vader. Something she could nearly understand.

She blinks at the sudden change of topic, taking a few beats to catch up.

"You know I didn't want to."

She'd come so close to taking his hand. Even knowing he was leaving the Resistance to die, she'd considered it.

She didn't want to, he does know that. But she had, nonetheless, and that somehow makes it sting even more. He's not as angry about it now. He's all too aware of his own faults in the moment, back then, and they've proven well enough that whatever this connection is between them still holds. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't still hurt.

"You just wanted to save the Resistance more." There is a bit of accusation in that one, though not as strong as it could be, with the echoes of his grandfather's advice still sitting present in his head - find out why.

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