faderift | Closed | We Were So Sure

Entry tags:

Closed | We Were So Sure

WHO: Nari, Kylo Ren, and Rey
WHAT: that time you found out your friends broke up. and also why.
WHEN: Current!
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES: nooooone

The only broken things Nari had expected to find at the Hanged Man were the three chairs (and one barstool) she'd watched get utilized in a fight the other night and had returned, as she often does in her spare time, to repair to the best of her ability.

Instead, she finds the chairs, the barstool, and Kylo Ren, the last half-slumped over a tankard at a corner table looking like a slightly disheveled, forlorn stormcloud. So she pulls over a broken chair, pulls up a (relatively) sturdy one, cocks her head to the side with a raised eyebrow and watches him expectantly for a bit before turning to the work of replacing the legs of the chair that had been used for distinctly unchairlike purposes. If he wants to talk, she expects he will. If not, at least she's company.

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For several moments he doesn't even register Nari is sitting in front of him. When he does, his head jerks in surprise and he stares blearily at her. He looked like he hadn't slept, let alone left this seat for hours. His hands were gripping his tankard for dear life as he shoved more burning liquid down his throat.

"What are you doing here?" He croaks out, having not spoken to anyone - save for the waitress who cast him a pitying look when she served him another drink - for several hours. Why was she here? Of all people he could probably spill his troubles to it certainly shouldn't be one of Rey's friends. It couldn't be anyone, honestly. They'd all look at him the same way: dangerous, frightening, disgusting. He was a monster, after all. He deserved the solitude.

Yet, she had chosen to sit by him while she worked. His gaze drops from her face to the chair. Distantly he tries to recall if he's broken this or another chair. He wonders what might be broken back at the house that she might fix, lest he tell Rey.

Edited 2018-10-18 20:02 (UTC)

"Fixing chairs," she replies with a nod at the waitress who's on her way over again to see if she wants anything. The woman smiles and turns back halfway to the table to retrieve a glass for Nari, who in payment for her continual efforts has a bottle of decent whiskey on standby behind the bar. "How about you?"

"Drinking." He raises his tankard a bit so that she can clearly see he has it and has been drinking from it. He sets it down again and sits up a bit straighter, running a hand over his face. He probably looked like garbage, slumped over a table with the smell of alcohol on his breath.

"Not working this time," he mumbles, meaning that he is not working at the Forges today, where she might normally find him. She or Rey would bring him food and make him stop and take a breath now and again. He couldn't help but feel like she was doing it just because she was Rey's friend and not for him. They had interesting conversations and he respected her, but that didn't make them friends. It certainly wouldn't if she knew why he was so upset.

"Probably for the best, if you're drinking." There's no judgement in Nari's tone, just the good humored dry observation she so often employs. If he's skipping out on work, that means whatever it is that's made him despondent is more serious than something he can beat into the metal he forges. He'd been out on mission, hadn't he? There'd been so much bad news coming home with people who'd gone out on mission recently, it might well be that.

"Something go wrong out there?" she prompts gently.

"Mm. Probably shouldn't tell you about it, though. Probably be breaking a rule if I did." They gave a mission report when they got back and he really would have been fine not thinking about what happened and just ignoring it had Rey not known the minute he set foot in the door. Their connection was a curse and a blessing.

He looks at her for a long moment, really taking the time to look at her. The pointed ears, the soft features that didn't quite match her calloused hands. He wonders where he went wrong in doing what he was told to do, killing elves like her. They might have even been kind and listened had they not expected a fight. Diplomacy was far from one of his strengths. He didn't pick up that talent from his mother, unfortunately.

"We killed refugees on the road. Rey knows about it." That's all he really needed to say without elaborating that they were elves, that they had been no match for their human killers. He'd gone home not feeling an ounce of guilt now he was guilty for the fact that Rey now refused to be with him because of it.

Edited 2018-10-18 20:59 (UTC)

The rhythmic tapping of Nari's hammer stops when he mentions killing refugees. Not bandits, not soldiers, not rebels, not deserters; refugees. Why in the void would the Inquisition have sent its members to do that? Had those running from the war been making trouble in the towns they'd run to? Been violent? Her brow furrows in troubled confusion, and she looks up from her work.

"...That would make me drink too," she says, finally. "Do you... why did they send you to do that?"

"They were stopping travelers on the road, I think. Taking what supplies they could. I don't know. They were expecting a fight, though. They refused to leave, so we made them. Our orders were to make them leave however necessary and they wanted to fight." Not that they had fought very hard to avoid the fighting. He always thrilled at a fight. It was where he was most in his element.

They had spared the children, of course, but the adults had all died. That probably didn't matter in this situation. He rationalized with himself that their deaths had been necessary. It got them favor with Orlais. He didn't want to care about the Inquisition but he wanted them to stop looking down on Rifters. He would do what needed to be done, whether someone disagreed or not.

"I'm drinking because Rey left. She's staying with Obi-Wan to 'take some time to herself'." Probably not the nicest thing to admit, that killing elves wasn't what was driving him to drink. He had just been following orders. Rey didn't see it that way at all. "I was doing what I thought we were supposed to do. We all were."

Now he's not so sure. He didn't like feeling guilty about it. He had done his part. Why couldn't Rey understand? He had never felt this badly about something until his father's death. When he put his sword through his stomach, he had wanted to believe it would free him from the conflict within himself. Instead it made it worse. This made it worse too. It made him uneasy to think that he was making the same mistakes over and over, despite firmly believing that doing what he was told couldn't possibly be a mistake. The Inquisition was their home now.

"Rey left?" Nari's eyebrows raise at that, although upon thinking about it, she's not all that surprised. If Rey had thought what had happened was wrong, she was not the kind of woman who would bend around that. Whether or not something she thought was wrong was done on orders was irrelevant to Rey; an aspect the two women shared.

But, at the same time... this was something she'd watched Cade struggle with. Needing to entrust the rawness of himself, his capacity for wild brutal destruction, to someone else. Someone who gave orders. To let those orders then be what was right. To need them to be what was right. There's more underneath that kind of need than simple flippancy, not caring. Even if it's hard to look at.

Her drink shows up, and she accepts it with a quick smile before running the glass back and forth across the table in a simple pattern between her fingertips, frowning with thought.

"I'm sorry," she says first, her eyes full of simple sincerity.

He looks thoughtfully down at his own drink, feeling that familiar pit in his stomach creep up. It had come and gone a lot lately. This wasn't the first time he'd been left behind and it wouldn't be the last. He should have known better than to think that he and Rey could ever work.

"She had the right to. She thinks I crossed a line." What did he think? That was even harder for him to decide. At the time he hadn't given a single thought to the elves he'd killed. As soon as he knew she would feel it through their connection, roughly when he set foot in their home, the anxiety ate him up.

"I didn't care, at the time. Elves, humans... it didn't matter to me at all. I thought the mission was most important. I feel like it still shouldn't matter, but then I think of how upset she was when she left the house and I keep turning it over and over in my head." He could still see in the back of his head the way she looked at him before she left. He sighs, feeling a wave of self loathing creep up on him. She wouldn't be happy to know that he was only upset about her leaving versus the fact that he'd killed refugees who could barely defend themselves.

"I think this is the most I've said in days. Clearly I need more alcohol." He's only partly being sarcastic as he downs more of his drink. He can't help but feel anxious, wondering how Nari thinks of him now that she knows what he's done. Surely any elf would be outraged, he expects.

"Terrible things happen in war."

It's not as if she has a leg to stand on. She'd murdered defenseless traders in cold blood whose only crimes were being in the wrong part of the forest and being human. Of course, those had been crime enough, then.

"It's just that... it's still important to remember they're terrible. Even if you still do them. And it's important that if you take lives you have a reason. One that isn't 'because I was told to'. Do too much without reasons of your own, or without thinking about why you were told to, and you stop being you and start just being a sword." She sips at the whiskey.

"And Rey cares for you."

"I was a sword, until I killed the person who tried to wield me." He looks sullenly across the table, not quite meeting her eyes. His stomach felt heavy and aching. Not even the alcohol could dull that. Just thinking of Snoke, of the things he's done at his orders, left him knotted up inside. He'd never let himself feel anything beyond anger in front of other people but the drink was enough to make him bow his head so that she wouldn't see the tears stinging in his eyes.

"I didn't care who I killed. There were more where those elves came from, long before I got here." He sighs, remembering Lor San Tekka and the village he'd slaughtered on Jakku while looking for the piece of the map. All the faces tended to bleed together, but he remembered what the old man had said to him. "I followed what I thought were the right actions because I want the Inquisition to stop looking down on us - or the Chantry - or whoever. We don't belong here."

More accurately he didn't belong here. Rey had found a place for herself and he was glad for that. He was just basking in her presence. She was the only familiar thing he had and now that was gone. He was too weak to turn away from what she offered and he'd gotten hurt because of it.

She listens, thinks for a while. There was a lot in there. Being a soldier, being a killer, being a Rifter, being a soldier and a killer again, but talking about it like something had changed. Like he did care, even if it was just because of how Rey had felt about it.

"Do you mind if I..." Nari trails off, thins her lips a little, and slides the glass back and forth again. "Why did you kill them—the person who tried to wield you—if you didn't care about who you killed for them?"

"I killed him to seize power, originally. I thought Rey would join me. We have different philosophies but we're not so different. We both know what it feels like to be alone. She grew up without parents and mine were never there even though they were alive. It's why she and I have always... worked, I guess. Though I wouldn't say that holds entirely true." He smiles almost derisively, taking in his current situation.

"There were other reasons to kill him, but I doubt you'd want to hear them." He also wasn't quite ready to even form the words. His father was a touchy subject, one that usually made him tense. He'd spoken of it once with Iorveth, but otherwise kept that one sin close to chest. He was already exposing himself to her as it was. Perhaps when he was sober he might regret it.

"Fighting about things doesn't mean not working. I mean, she uh..." Nari gestures on her own face the path of the scar on his with a little smile that she doesn't mean to be unkind or hurtful in the slightest. "And you still ended up with a house together."

She stops sliding the glass to sip from it again. "What would you have done, with that power? Just had it and kept on, or would you have changed the way things were led?"

"She would have saved herself the trouble if she'd just killed me instead of cutting my face." A little blunt, perhaps, but it was true in his mind. She would have saved herself the pain of realizing that deep down he really was just a monster, just as his parents had feared and Luke had instinctively known. Luke had tried to warn her, of course, but that didn't stop her from trying to join him that day in the Throne Room.

"I would have burned it all down and built around the remains of the galaxy. It would have been something new - better - but she didn't want that. I gave up on notions like that when I came here. This place... I feel like we'll never leave. She shouldn't have to leave, though. She has a place here." He only has her, really. Sure he's become somewhat friendly with a few people - Nari included - but that didn't mean he had a place in all of this. She had Obi-Wan to teach her the ways of the Jedi. What did he have? He had nothing.

That's... dramatic. Of course, an excess of ale makes anyone dramatic, even if they're the sort of person who doesn't feel things deeply when sober.

As far as burning everything down and reasserting order? Well. That's... what they're fighting to stop right now, isn't it? Or at least what the Inquisition is. Not for the first time she considers that that's sort of what everyone fights for. Like nobody thinks growth and change are possible without a clean fresh start—if there even is such a thing. She sighs through her nose, rubs the side of it contemplatively with her thumb.

"Do you want one? A place?"

"I think anyone does. Even someone like me." He motions for the waitress to bring him another drink, having somehow downed his current one during their conversation. "Not that I have the best track record for people wanting me around."

When his drink arrives he stares down at it, as if he needed to concentrate on the liquid that promised a burning throat and numb senses. He should probably slow down, but he wanted to stop thinking and feeling. Alcohol seemed like the best option for that at the time.

"I wonder if Rey will be able to feel the hang over tomorrow..." He hadn't meant to say that aloud, of course, but it was too late for that. Explaining a connection he barely understood would be interesting conversation compared to his past transgressions.

Nari's mouth opens and shuts several times, a similar number of expressions moving across her face. Saying he does have a place isn't going to help if he doesn't feel like he does, and even gently contradicting the inebriated doesn't have a great record for working anyway. She might be able to help him get there, if she keeps asking questions, but he might also not want to feel like he has a place right now. Sometimes you just have to be lonely.

She's considering how best to proceed when he says something curious about Rey to his ale.

"Is... she... also drinking?" Nari asks haltingly, her brow furrowing slightly. Rey didn't seem the type, but if she was, Nari'd be looking into tracking her down to see if she'd talk too.

"No." His answer is immediate as he shakes his head, like shaking away cobwebs. "We can sense things about one another - it's part of our abilities within the Force. We're connected to one another. It doesn't always work that well here. The Fade dulls it, somewhat, I think. It's stronger when we're close together but we still get glimpses."

Essentially: she can probably feel how drunk he is and he would likewise feel her worry. That is, if he was trying to feel anything at all. He didn't want to keep feeling things. Feeling things only made him feel more sad and he was terrible at that particular emotion.

Sighing, he gulps down some ale. It was pointless to try and explain the cosmic joke that was their connection, created by the Force. He had been curious about it once and had even wondered if it might fade over time as they lingered in this world. So far it hadn't and he wondered if that had been due to their growing feelings or perhaps the strength of their abilities. He knew that her abilities had grown far past what they'd been when they had last met back home. Her time in Thedas had changed her.

It's outlandish, but so were their other powers. So were Rey's stories of ships that soar through the air with no sails, no wings, and they way her eyes glowed when she talked about flying made Nari believe her. It was enlightening, though, to the quantity of ale.

"Is that why you're trying to drink yourself senseless?" she asks, "So that you won't? Sense her, I mean."

"Only partly so. I'm also hoping it will stop me from feeling guilty. I don't see why I should, when I was just trying to follow orders." He sighs and then swallows another mouthful of ale. He understands why she's upset, but she hasn't lived the way he has. Murder sometimes came hand in hand with survival. He didn't question what he was meant to do until Snoke had ordered him to kill his father.

"No one explicitly said to kill the elves, but they wouldn't leave." He realizes it might be futile trying to make her understand, just as it had been with Rey. They were better people than him, after all. "She wouldn't even know about it were she not able to sense my thoughts when we're near."

Not that he would have lied to her but he wouldn't have wanted her to actually see it. He would have wanted her to hear the events from him, not through some distorted image of events through their connection. While it was truthful, he would have spared her of the painful details.

Elven refugees. That'll still her. He'd said elves and humans before, or just refugees, and she'd assumed it was a mixed group. Or multiple groups. Now, though? The Inquisition sending people to kill elves?

"Was this mission for us?" she asks, sounding more careful now, "Or on behalf of someone else."

"It was for some lord or something. He requested aid because they were attacking people on the road and taking supplies." Not the smartest move, but he understood it. They'd been displaced, so of course they would run out of things eventually.

"We tried to tell them to leave. They refused. I think when they saw that we were all humans, they knew why we were there and reacted accordingly." Surely it would have been better to send diplomats or an elf? It was much too late to ponder that now. They were gone.

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Closed | We Were So Sure

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STILL HERE!!??

IM STILL HERE I GUESS lol