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Chapter Text

Ch. 1: The Throne

Kylo slumps against the Finalizer's executive office door, grateful to be away from the crowds of stormtroopers grieving in the passages. His fingers comb through his hair and they come away damp, smelling of dust and the salt of Crait. 

Look at you, pathetic, cowering like a child.

Kylo wills himself to stand upright. The shattered fleet hovers in the center of the room above a hexagonal data-table, flickering bad news across all three axes. The latest numbers flash across the screen: two-hundred thirty-three thousand dead across a dozen ships, rising higher by the minute, and that barely a week after four hundred thousand died in the botched evacuation of Starkiller. There’d been a million souls aboard the Supremacy alone, with no telling how many got out before the hull fractured under the strain. At least the Finalizer survived--he prefers this ship. On the Supremacy, he always felt like his Master's apprentice, exposed and helpless.

There had been no plan.

How could he plan when his Master could read every thought, every breath of an intent? He only did what he always does: saw, felt, lashed out when the Force told him it was right.

He sets his jaw and forces himself to inspect the offices he seized along with the galaxy. The only furniture is a black desk, simple and functional with a nondescript chair. A potted plant, fake, huddles in the corner under the too-bright track lighting.

There is no throne.

He could almost laugh. His Master commanded that monstrous ship over that black floor so polished it reflected the individual strands of Kylo's hair every time he crumpled to his knees to beg forgiveness. The Praetorian Guard. Everything perfectly calibrated to evoke power and inspire terror.

But here he is. Supreme Leader Kylo Ren. Supreme Leader Ben fucking Solo. He has a desk, he has a plant. He has a flagship and a fleet sliced into a million tiny pieces, and everything his masters made is broken.

He ignores the desk and its aggressively mediocre chair. Instead, he swipes the pre-loaded datapad from its surface, glances around for security holos or hidden surveillance droids, and sinks to the floor.

His attention struggles to linger on the datapad, and after a few seconds he gives in. The steel of the wall is cool and soothing against his head, and he lets himself close his eyes.

His father used to taunt him when he’d smash something in one of his rages: you broke it, you bought it, kid. He broke the First Order in a blind fury. Now it’s his.

She’s probably laughing at him right now.

There's probably crowd around her in the hold of the Falcon, bent double and guffawing so hard that tears stream out of their eyes while she tells them how Kylo Ren, master of the galaxy, begged her to join him. She’s probably imitating that pathetic please.

And Organa's there, probably snorting: oh, Ben was always bad at talking to girls. She’d tell that story, when was nine and so nervous around a girl on HosPrime that he stopped mid-sentence, burst into tears, and fled. Organa would catch her breath and tell everyone how she’d looked two hours for her pathetic disappointment of a son, how she found him, the future Supreme Leader of the First Order, huddled in that storage compartment, right there, blubbering about how no one would ever want to be his friend.

Kylo frowns down at the datapad.

Hux is laughing at him, too, for Luke's final humiliation. The whole army is laughing at him.

Kylo exhales. He's unbalanced; he should meditate. His Master taught him to control himself better than this.

But his Master is dead, and without him Kylo feels like half a thing, like a cartoon man drawn without shadows.

Something brushes the edges of his awareness, and he shifts, listening to the Force. It dances against his senses with almost imperceptible lightness, bright but blurred and indistinct, sweeping very slowly through his X- and Y-planes as the Finalizer’s inertial dampeners shift the ship’s position in space. It stays anchored, like someone has stuck a pin in spacetime somewhere across the galaxy.

Its texture is familiar. Rust. Pale, stained linen, the burn of hot metal in the sun, the joy at the first time he saw an ocean, the melancholy of the last time rain touched his skin. It fills him with longing.

Rey.

His eyes snap open; there's no doubt it's her, and not just an impression, but a beacon guiding him to a real point in space thousands of light-years away. A compass.

His Master’s final gift.

It’s real. It’s real and his imagination runs away with it, feeding him the fantasy his Master would’ve dangled in front of him. Tomorrow, the day after—he’ll use her, their Jedi, the one Luke chose over him, to hunt them down and destroy them. He’ll make her watch.

He’ll whisper how it’s all her fault, and she’ll beg him to save the people who’ve conned her into believing they love her. Please, Ben.

But he’ll just stare straight ahead, and she’ll feel his pain before he kills her.

He wants the fantasy to fill him with rage, to make his hands tremble with desire, make him ache for revenge. It’s what his Master would’ve asked of him, what his grandfather would’ve done. But when he exhales, his breath shudders and leaves him empty.

Why didn’t she kill him, when he was unconscious on the throne room floor?

No time to wonder. The Force prickles with Hux’s presence just outside the door. Kylo disciplines himself to take two deep breaths, then he rises from the floor and strides to the uninspiring desk. He sits.

It’s not much of a throne. But his reign begins now.

***

“Supreme Leader, I don’t think you appreciate the precariousness of our situation.”

Every line in Hux's face radiates condescension as he stands with his hands behind his back, glaring down at Kylo in a way that makes him regret sitting. Kylo inhales and does his best to pretend this stupid chair is a throne. You broke it, you bought it, kid.

“We just destroyed the Resistance—” he ignores Hux’s sneer, “—except for a dozen survivors in one decrepit ship. With the Senate voting to join us, we’ll have control of the rest of the systems in days. What about that seems precarious to you, General?”

Again, Hux is silent for a long moment, and for a few seconds Kylo allows himself the cautious hope that Hux has finally learned some respect.

“Allow me to lay out the facts for you, Ren." Hux pronounces the syllables slowly, like he's explaining something to a kid. “With Hosnian Prime gone, we cut the head off the New Republic, but there’s still a military looking for someone to lead it, and you can be sure those ‘dozen survivors’ from the Resistance will be wooing the garrisons on the New Republic worlds within an hour unless we act.”

Wooing. Does Hux even hear himself?

“So act,” Kylo orders. “Blockade the most likely targets, sympathetic planets and the old Rebel bases. Find anywhere they might hide and turn it into a death trap.”

He says it evenly, ignoring the hitch between his ribs as he gives the order.

“Already done, Supreme Leader.”

Good. Fine. Excellent. Hux, however hard he tries, hasn’t managed to be entirely useless. “Then what’s the problem? Every trooper in the First Order should recognize that freighter by now, since you’ve managed to let it escape three times this week.”

“I let it escape? You just allowed your private family drama to interfere with the final destruction of the Resistance--”

“My private drama was always the real mission,” Kylo reminds him. He resists the urge to choke Hux. My apprentice, you must cherish the advisors brave enough to tell you truths you do not wish to hear. Vader did not; this was his downfall.

“Skywalker was the bigger threat,” Kylo continues. “The Supreme Leader was always clear on that.”

Hux's mouth twists into an ugly smirk. “Yes, well, I imagine Snoke thought you could tell the difference between a Jedi and a hologram.”

Self-control be damned. The general's hands fly to his constricted white throat, eyes bulging as his feet kick uselessly over the floor.

“Skywalker is dead. Wherever his body was, the effort killed him.”

That Hux is right only makes Kylo squeeze harder. But Hux is right. When the general's face has gone purple and his pulse begins to hammer against Kylo's power, he lets Hux drop to the floor. He leans back in his chair as the general recovers his composure with irritating swiftness.

“Even if you did kill him,” Hux says hoarsely, “what the army saw was their Supreme Leader flattened in single combat against the ghost of an old man. Not to mention allowing his mother and the assassin to escape certain death. If you think the officers will respect you after that, you are deluded.”

Kylo's nails dig into his palms at escape. Hadn’t he given the order? No quarter, no prisoners?

Hux interrupts him before he can speak. “The Resistance is about to be the least of your worries.”

In the second it takes Kylo to respond to this—he’s exhausted, and much slower at verbal combat than physical—Hux presses the advantage. “There are many in the upper echelons of the officer corps who won't accept your succession. We need to move quickly to avoid a power struggle.”

“Peavey,” Kylo says, referring to the commander of the Finalizer. “And Yago.” Commander of the Supremacy, or what’s left of it.

Hux nods, apparently thrilled that Kylo got this far on his own. “And others. But Yago is especially dangerous now that he doesn’t have a command.”

“I imagine he’ll be annoyed that you got his ship blown up.”

Hux presses his lips into a thin line. “That purple-haired bitch’s attack was hardly my fault—”

This may be true; Kylo can't drum up an interest in the play-by-play of whatever had happened to the fleet.

"It doesn't matter." Kylo leans back even further and grips the arms of his chair. “Whatever the danger is, these are your enemies. Not mine.”

“They will take the Order unless we act. Decisively.”

“We? Hux, I’m touched. I thought you wanted me dead.”

“While the prospect is thrilling, my best chance of survival for the next week lies with you. I have some recommendations on that score.”

“And why should I trust you, or your recommendations?”

Hux actually laughs. “Really, Ren. We both know trust isn’t going to be part of this relationship.”

Kylo meets the general’s light eyes, which are squinting in the artificial sunlamps. Hux observes him calmly, standing in parade rest with his gloved hands behind his back, expectant. After a moment, Kylo finally gets what he’s after.

“No,” he says, too sharply.

Hux belonged to his Master exclusively. Kylo was never allowed to punish him, which he always regretted, but he’d also been forbidden from going into Hux’s mind, which he hadn’t.

Kylo finds mind-reading revolting anyway, and the thought of going spelunking for betrayal in the hollows of Hux’s orange head turns his stomach. An interrogation is one thing. But to have a grown man stand in front of him and ask for it—it makes his skin crawl.

“I think you’ll find what I have to show you quite enlightening,” Hux says. “And it will reassure you that I don’t plan to poison you or murder you in your sleep. At least for now.”

Drained and unsettled as he is, Kylo has to admit it’s the most expedient thing to do. He detests Hux, but if he can trust him he’ll be a valuable ally.

Kylo stands, steps around the desk, and raises his hand, stopping just short of the general’s pale forehead. Looking into Hux’s eyes, so full of contempt, feels strangely intimate. He has to suppress a shudder.

He doesn’t want to be here. He wants to run back to his quarters and try to figure out what the hell he’s going to do. He wants to jump into his fighter and run full-throttle through the debris field that used to be his mother’s fleet and his Master’s fleet and feel in control of something.

He has all the power here. He tells himself that as he steadies himself to reach out to Hux’s mind. He can hurt him, rip through this man and take whatever he wants.

But he only feels alone, exposed and helpless.

Chapter Text

Hux knows not to fight. He’s lowered the walls around his mind as much as he can, but there's something in the most fundamental fabric of the brain that recoils from this kind of violation, and Hux’s jaw tightens involuntarily when Kylo punches through. Only Rey had managed this with so little pain.

Kylo realizes in seconds why his Master kept him alive: Hux is, there is no denying it, a genius.

The sheer number of things the general keeps track of overwhelms him. He accomplishes more tasks in a morning than Kylo does in a month, he knows more acronyms than Kylo knows words. He glories in all the tiny details that keep the blood pumping through the distended body of the First Order, from the Supply grunts who handle the laundry droids to the Safety personnel who teach the stormtroopers how not to blow up First Order property to Operations, Weapons, and Air Command.

Hux loves Engineering with a pure, childlike joy.

Kylo has to steady his hand when he discovers Hux likes this. It's a kind of exhibitionist thrill. In practical terms, he finds mind-reading much more efficient than the slow and fragile process of building a trusting relationship with a commander, but he’s also wanted Kylo Ren in his head to see personally how necessary Hux is. He’s lonely, in his stunted way.

Kylo scrapes past all this with a mental shiver, searching for what he needs so he can get the hell out of Hux’s head. Like a good subordinate should, Hux anticipates his commander's need and leads him to what he wants Kylo to see. It’s a disorienting sensation; he’s never had someone cooperate before.

Despite his annoyance at Hux's presumption, Kylo allows the memory to proceed. The firm texture of it, the crisp edges, dates it to about three years ago. 

Hux sits at a small table with another officer, dark-skinned and maybe ten years his senior, with fleet insignia that catch the light as he cuts his steak. Kylo doesn’t know the other man’s name, but recognizes him from the Supremacy high command. The stranger takes a messy bite, dripping sauce down his chin. “And Ren?” the man asks in a deep bass.

Hux scoffs. “Ren is a child.”

“You can't have more than four years on him.”

Hux makes a dismissive gesture with his fork. “The only reason he’s allowed within ten clicks of the throne room is because he’s the excretion-once-removed of Darth-fucking-Vader. He lives from tantrum to tantrum, and if he has any idea there’s a broader strategy for the Order or the galaxy, I’ve never seen any evidence of it.”

“Could we get rid of him, if the need arises?”

Hux swallows and dabs his mouth with a napkin. “We have to tolerate the Supreme Leader’s extracurricular projects,” he says. “Snoke has made Kylo Ren believe this carnival side-show with Skywalker is his central concern. As long as he believes that, he’s no threat. Ren’s job is getting rid of Skywalker, and if he doesn’t die in the attempt I assume Snoke will just kill him afterward.”

The other officer nods and fiddles contemplatively with the vegetable on his plate. “But he is powerful. That Jedi squadron the Supreme Leader was training, they answer to him, don’t they?”

“The Knights of Ren, yes. I believe he’s nominally in command. Snoke keeps them all separated, or at least he keeps them separated from Solo." Kylo's breath hitches at the name; his Master forbade him and everyone else in the Order from ever using that name. "He hasn’t been allowed to have any contact with the other Knights. Snoke sent them to the front, or on his special missions, to keep them from gaining too much power in central command. I’ve no idea if they’re even alive.”

 “But they’re young, and they obviously serve Snoke. They’d probably help us if it comes down to a fight between us and the Old Guard.” This is Hux's pet name for the group of officers who had been promoted during the Empire and the immediate aftermath—the group Hux now outranks, despite his young age.

“In the short-term. But they’re too strong; if they can, they’ll take command for themselves. Especially Apolin.”

Kylo swallows; his hand jerks against Hux's forehead. In the memory, the older officer’s eyes widen, and he nearly chokes on his steak. “Senator Apolin? Of Kuat?”

Hux takes a bite of violently puce starch. “No. His nephew, Gallius Rax Apolin." Kylo flinches in anticipation of his Master's punishment, but it doesn't come. All the Knight's names are forbidden, not that it matters since they're long-dead. "He’s one of ours, First Order. He went through the Academy and used to hold a commission. Unlike Solo, he has a brain in addition to a lightsaber. He fought Solo for leadership of the Knights, but, apparently, lost.”

“Why would Snoke let that happen, if Solo is so incompetent?”

Hux had wondered this himself. Not that he wasn’t grateful; anyone with ability would’ve caused him far more headaches in central command than Solo’s dogged obliviousness.

Hux shrugs. “To keep them weak, I assume. The Supreme Leader has been around for a thousand years and intends to last a thousand more. Kylo Ren isn’t meant to be Snoke’s successor. He’s meant to be his slave.”

***

Kylo detaches himself from the memory, but doesn’t break the connection. He needs to monitor Hux, see if he lies to him.

“Did you have a point other than showing me you plan to kill me?” he asks, not waiting for Hux to catch his breath. Kylo has not been overly gentle.

Hux is wrong, of course. About Skywalker being a side-show, about his Master training him to be a slave. His Master was wise; his Master saw that Kylo Ren had a destiny, even though he didn’t realize that destiny was to kill and replace him.

“My point,” Hux says, slicking his hair back into place, “is that we need each other. There are those who objected strongly to the Supreme Leader’s installation in the early days of the Order, and my part in it, who think both of us are forty years too young to hold command.”

“They can be controlled.” It’s amazing how persuasive a Force-choke can be.

The general raises an eyebrow, and from inside his mind, Kylo can feel the contempt coming off him.

“You are not Snoke. The instant you made the senseless decision to walk around without that mask, you lost. All they see, all the army sees, is a thirty-something zealot in a Vader costume, and they don’t fear you.”

Hux is voicing thoughts he’s had more than once since that day he destroyed his mask in the turbolift. There was power in that mask. He threw that power away to spare himself his Master’s contempt. He’s just a man, now.

Hux regards him, knowing he’s made his point.

“There’s something else you should see, Ren. A token of my trust.”

Without preamble, Hux whisks him away to another memory. This one is much more recent. His Master is there, but he is towering over Hux, impossibly huge. The holo-projector on Starkiller.

Hux is speaking. “More than once he has put his own priorities before your orders, Supreme Leader. That map would have never reached the Resistance if he had obeyed your order to allow it to be destroyed.”

Hux is ratting him out. Why would the man show him this to prove his loyalty?

Snoke’s hologram continues to frown. “I am aware of my apprentice’s indiscretions, General.”

Hux expects this to be the end of the conversation, but Snoke regards him with detached interest. “Ah, but you have more particular suspicions that you wish to share with me. Tell me what you’ve inferred.”

This is a test. Hux knows enough about the strange bond between Snoke and Ren to understand that Snoke knows the truth about the idiot’s motivations, if he has any beyond sheer impulse. Snoke wants to know what Hux, his chief advisor, can figure out.

“I believe he wishes to use the map to find Skywalker for his own ends,” Hux says. “To kill him for his own reasons, or even to join him.”

“Very good, General. My apprentice hopes to throw himself at the mercy of his old master. His allegiance to our cause is…fragile.”

Kylo, whose mind is completely absorbed in the memory, feels through the tenuous connection to his own body, standing in the office, that he has stopped breathing.

He knew. Even though Kylo never allowed himself even to think it, never let himself form the thought his mind, his Master had woven together the strands of fear and longing and self-hatred and betrayal and understood the depth of his aim, to beg Luke to help him. Of course he knew. His Master always knew.

Hux stands straighter. “If I may, Supreme Leader—”

“You question why I keep him alive at all.” He makes a trivializing gesture. “The fragility of his allegiance is precisely what makes him valuable to me.”

Again, Hux thinks this is a dismissal. He has no patience for the Supreme Leader’s mystical paradoxes. Kylo desperately wants to hear more, he craves his Master’s words, but Hux, in the memory, is only irritated.

 “I chose Kylo to stay by my side not because he is the strongest, but because he is the weakest. He has no mind of his own. He believes utterly in the destiny of his ‘ bloodline’,” the sneer in his voice is obvious, “and he believes that I alone can lead him to his true potential.”

In his own body, Kylo clenches his jaw and feels blood rush to his face. The Force surges within him, slamming against Hux’s mind with enough energy to force the general to one knee under Kylo’s hand, pressing him forward into the memory. These are lies, he reminds himself. To manipulate Hux. Just convenient lies.

Snoke continues. “But as a symbol of power, as an object of fear, his tantrums are useful.” He leans forward. “You understand the theater of power, don’t you, Hux? That is the motivation behind this weapon of yours, behind your speeches and symbols. Kylo Ren is a piece of theater. A character in a frightening mask for children to fear. We are not children, so we see him for what he is: a clown.”

The hologram leans back, at ease, even bored. In his real body, Kylo is shaking. Hux, kneeling on the office floor, is smiling cruelly.

“Kylo Ren is a rabid cur,” Snoke says in the memory, amused. “He is most useful to us when he’s snarling at the end of his chain. Let him snarl, let him lunge, let him try to break his chain and run to Skywalker. Rest assured I’ll dispose of him when he has outlived his purpose.”

***

Kylo rips his hand away, tearing the connection apart with enough trauma to wrench Hux forward onto his hands with a muffled groan. But as he recovers there, prone, facing the dusty floor, Kylo hears the groan transform into a laugh.

It takes every ounce of Kylo’s self-control not to pull out his lightsaber and swipe the man’s head from his shoulders. He steps back from Hux, pacing like a caged animal while the other man rises to his feet with surprising steadiness.

He tries to calm himself, tries to remind himself that Hux was the one being deceived. But the words his Master spoke cut him. For an instant he’d believed they were true and that instant had shaken him to the bone.

“You see, Ren.” Hux says as his laugh changes to a dry cough. “You need me. You blundered your way into a game that you have no idea how to play. But I can help you, if you help me.”

Kylo curses himself for showing Hux how much the memory affected him. The words hurt, but he knows better than to think his Master would place his trust in a man like Hux.

“No,” he says. “You think he would reveal so much to you? An accountant. A secretary.”

The cruel smile doesn’t leave Hux’s face. He raises an eyebrow, considering, but shrugs and lapses into his usual tone of contempt. “I pity you. Even now, you can’t see how much he made a fool out of you.”

Kylo does not respond. He does not pity Hux, only feels disappointment at seeing how deep the man’s denial goes. Still, it’s just as his Master said: his weaknesses can be a sharp tool.

He’d called him a rabid cur. His Master must have known that Kylo would see this memory some day—he’d left a message there, coded, for his apprentice.

 “As you like,” Hux says. “Whether or not you choose to operate in this reality, let’s be frank. You have no idea what you’re doing.”

Kylo returns to the desk, sits. He leans back and banishes all thoughts of his Master from his mind.

The fleet is a debris field after the Resistance attack, he might have a coup on his hands, and he’s got hundreds of planets voting to secede from the Republic and join the Order, the culmination of decades of scheming that he has never taken the slightest interest in. There is so much he doesn’t understand, so many things his Master tended to while Kylo was meditating and training and running missions that Kylo never knew anything about, and he hates Hux for knowing it.

“You said you had recommendations, General,” he finally says.

Hux’s voice turns professional, and Kylo is annoyed by how grateful he is. “A list, Supreme Leader. These are all the officers I’ve identified as threats who are currently stationed on the fronts or in the planetary garrisons.” Hux shows him his data-pad, on which he’s drawn up a spreadsheet containing the names of twenty or so officers. Kylo has heard of most of them but not met them.

He nods; he knows what Hux intends. “Do it. What about those who are with our fleet right now?”

“Another list, of all those on ships in subluminal range. As you can see, quite a few are casualties from the suicide attack. As of a few minutes ago a dozen are still missing. The timing is excellent.” Hux reaches over and taps the data-pad to show a fresh column of names, about thirty men and women, some with names crossed out. “I can prepare—”

“No,” Kylo says. Whatever Hux says about needing him, Kylo hates the overly-familiar, arrogant way Hux is addressing him. It reminds him of Rey. Both of them need to remember who they’re dealing with. “Leave these to me.”

***

That day each of the officers on Hux’s list receives orders to report to the Finalizer, where he has set up his temporary command, on the authority of the Supreme Leader. The guests are anxious. They’ve heard rumors of Snoke’s death in the catastrophe aboard the Supremacy, whispers that General Hux addressed Kylo Ren as Supreme Leader during the operation on Crait. But no one can confirm this and all agree it’s unlikely. Snoke must be alive.

Kylo has spent the afternoon in his new quarters making the necessary preparations with the security access Hux has already granted him. There is nothing on this ship that can’t control, no safety he can’t override.

He doesn’t want to draw this out. His Master taught him not to enjoy this.

Kylo stands near the edge of the room, as inconspicuous as he can be in his tunic. He’s not wearing robes. Hux stands beside him, surveying the room with disapproval. Kylo’s told him he brought these people here to talk.

When a protocol droid assures him all parties are present, a message marked urgent appears on Hux’s comm, and there are only a few anxious glances as Hux shows it to Kylo and they leave the room. The guests think that Snoke, not Kylo Ren, is in charge—but even so, they’re not going to stop two commanders from leaving a room to respond to an urgent message in the middle of a crisis.

Hux begins to say something about the irregularity of the message. 

“I sent it,” Kylo says calmly as he waits for the doors of the meeting room to close and uses the Force to jam them. There are no guards stationed; he has ordered this corridor to be empty.

Hux has no idea anything is happening. “Supreme Leader?”

“Walk with me, Hux.”

Hux follows, and they pace about twenty meters down the corridor to a window from which Kylo can just see the bulkhead of the meeting room jutting out slightly from the profile of the Finalizer’s hull.

“What is this?” Hux says.

Kylo says nothing, does not bother using the Force, only opens his data pad and engages the fire suppression system. He watches as a stream of vapor begins to leak from the vents near the floor of the meeting room, boiling off into space.

Hux follows his gaze. He draws in breath slowly and allows his ginger eyelashes to open a little wider, betraying surprise and, barely discernable, respect.

Kylo has shut off all transmission from that room; no sound leaks through the sealed-off fire doors, no wireless calls for help reach beyond the walls. It takes five minutes to smother everyone inside, but they stand in silence for ten, fifteen. The shredded remains of the fleet float past like leaves in the wind. He takes no pleasure in this.

What would she think of him, if she saw him now?

Hux begins to fidget, trying to hide it. Kylo understands; to him this is academic. Death is death. Standing around to watch it seems maudlin at best and a gross waste of time at worst. Hux breaks the silence twice, but Kylo ignores him.

We must not hide from the truth of what we do, my apprentice.

When he allows the vents to close and the room to re-pressurize, he enters with lightsaber ignited in case anyone has managed to stay alive.

No one has.

Satisfied, he opens his comm and types an order for the sanitation droids to handle the garbage.

He considers saying something ominous to Hux, something like, “I trust we understand one another, General.” But in the end, he simply turns away, silent, and allows the doors to close.

Hux follows.

***

Kylo walks back to his quarters feeling like his stomach is being vented into space. He strides through the halls with as much dignity as he can muster, ignoring anyone who salutes him.

When his door hisses shut behind him he breaks into a run and barely makes it to the ‘fresher to vomit profusely into the sink. The heaving in his chest shatters the mask of calm determination he’s been wearing since Crait and sends his mind roiling.

Hux is wrong about his Master. But he is right that Kylo is fantastically, monumentally unprepared to rule a galaxy. He’d seized power in a frenzied rage. Seeing himself from the outside, from Hux’s point of view, he sees his worst fears confirmed: everyone is laughing at him. His incompetence is completely transparent to everyone who’s supposed to take orders from him.

You’re no Vader. You’re just a child. In a mask.

But now he doesn’t even have a mask. Had his Master goaded him into taking it off to make him weak? To make sure that when the First Order looked at him, they saw the face of a man, a face they couldn’t be afraid of?

No. No. His Master had been right. He didn’t need the mask.

Except—it had been his father who said that.

Kylo wipes his hand across his mouth, washes his hands, splashes water on his face. It doesn’t matter, now. He’s shown his face and now he’ll look weak if he puts on a mask again. He is not weak. The bodies he left in that room prove that.

Let people see him as he is; mask or not, he’ll rule them.

He enters his separate bedroom, which has a real bed, not just a hard cot. He hasn’t slept on a real bed in twenty years. He takes off the bloodstained tunic and shirt he’s been wearing since Rey arrived, dabs some bacta on the small wound on his bicep, and sits down on the too-soft duvet with a vague intention of looking at the itinerary Hux has drawn up for tomorrow. More politics, more purges. But he can’t summon the energy. He just sits.

A narrow slit of a window cuts the back wall of his bedroom. Through it, he can see the supply drones fade into tiny motes against this system’s weak sun, speeding away on their pre-programmed courses. The atmo systems hum a steady low note that feels all-enveloping in the silence; the filtered breeze disturbs the hair on his neck.

He doesn’t rage, he doesn’t shed tears. He just stares out the window with his hands in his lap. He stares for a long time.

Chapter Text

Kylo contemplates the palm-sized bowl of unseasoned nutritional gruel that has been his dinner every day—except days when he was ordered to fast—since he first knelt to his Master six years ago. The realization that his first full cycle as Supreme Leader has been a complete failure weighs on his stomach, leaving no room for food.

Whatever Hux believes, Kylo is neither stupid nor oblivious. He’s perfectly aware that, in destroying the general’s enemies for him, he has made Armitage Hux the Supreme Leader in all but name. He just doesn’t know what to do about it.

He swirls his spoon through his gruel absently as the people Hux has chosen for this briefing argue about supply contracts and fleet repairs. He traces out little spiral galaxies in the gelatinous beige surface, trying to figure out where she would be if this were a real holo-map.

Her current location feels fuzzy, undefined, as it has for many hours, like her body is smeared over a whole quadrant of his oatmeal-map. She’s in hyperspace. She hasn’t appeared to him again and he wonders if that part of their connection has been snuffed out entirely, gone as mysteriously as it came. But the bridge his Master made is still there, guiding him to her.

Hux’s blockades have kept her on the run. This irks him, both because Hux has done something right and because it’s dashed his hopes of marching into his very first morning briefing with a triumphant announcement that he’s going to destroy the Resistance right now, this hour. There’s no point sending anyone after them if they’ll be safely frolicking through hyperspace long before the attack reaches them. If he starts chasing her too soon, if there are too many close encounters, they’ll figure out they’re being tracked. If she even suspects that she might lead him to the Resistance, she’ll go off on her own and wait for him to pick her off, ruining his chances of using her against them.

He has to sit patiently and wait for them to find either shelter, or death. He wins either way.

He takes a stabbing bite of his gruel to punctuate this thought just as Hux clears his throat to get his attention. He glances up, not bothering to conceal his distraction. It took every ounce of his strength to face these people this morning instead of hiding in meditation or in the training room. Commander Peavey, the lone survivor from the Old Guard, has obviously been speaking; he’s forgotten to close his mouth, leaving his long white moustaches trailing precipitously over his weak chin.

“We’ve now heard all the arguments, Supreme Leader,” Peavey says in his low baritone. Like Hux and seemingly everyone else not imprisoned in a stormtrooper helmet, he speaks with a thick Imperial accent and pretentious cadence. “Shall we honor our contract with Darfun or accept the competing, lower offer?”

Kylo frowns and glances down at his datapad. Peavey favors going with the competing offer, Hux wants them to stay with Darfun, a shell company affiliated with the Black Sun crime lords who fund too much of their enterprise to be casually tossed aside. Kylo doesn’t understand the tangled webs of financial details that his Master spun to hold up the Order—even going into Hux’s head late last night to try to sort it out had only confused him more.

“Perhaps you’d feel more energized if you ate actual food, Supreme Leader,” Hux says in a surprisingly passable impression of concern, daubing a morsel of something spongey in the velvety orange sauce speckled across his plate.

Kylo breathes out through his nose, a derisive half-laugh. He’s caught Hux popping stims like candy and Peavey tossing back tumblers of whiskey at the start of one-shift--though even he has to admit that after the purge in the meeting room, Peavey had a good excuse for taking the edge off on this particular morning. If Kylo starts eating rich food or sleeping in that soft bed, he’ll start craving it, and he’d rather keep sleeping, no more than four hours, on the floor of the executive quarters with no blanket and eating his gruel than share these peoples’ mediocrity. He’s seen no reason to alter the rituals of self-discipline his Master instilled in him to make him strong. Except one.

Every morning, his Master required him to kneel, in the full uniform he would wear to terrify the First Order, and, with his head bowed in supplication, scrub the floor of his cell until it shined. This had been the most difficult part of his early training, so much harder than the days when his Master would command him to run for days and nights across desert planets or scale sheer cliffs kilometers high for two, three cycles with no hope of sleep until he reached the top. He’d rather push his body to the edge of death, to endure torture, than to bow and wipe that fucking floor to show his obedience.

But gradually his Master had taught him to obey, and then to grovel, and then to abase himself on the floor as he reminded Kylo each morning that he was nothing.

He’d taught him so well that after two hours of morning meditation and an hour of physical training, the new Supreme Leader found himself showered and dressed at 0730 placing the little black pad under his knees as he always did. He’d been worrying, nearly panicked, about how he was going to scrub the huge executive quarters before his morning briefing at 0800. 

Kylo recalls that moment as he tries to consider the decision at hand. He isn’t ready to walk away from Black Sun, not yet, but he won’t allow these glorified warlords to exert power over him forever. He rules, now. He will not kneel.

“We stay with Darfun,” he says, not missing the huff in Peavey’s nod of assent.

Kylo had argued with Hux about leaving Peavey alive. Hux thinks there’s some usefulness to keeping him in command of the Finalizer. Now that he’s stripped of his allies he’ll almost certainly put out feelers for those among the younger officers who might think the Order is better off with a different Supreme Leader. Hux wants to let Peavey do all the hard work, identifying the officers unlucky enough to make it onto his next list, and Kylo reluctantly assented.

The meeting drones on for another half-hour. When it adjourns, Kylo rises with relief, but Hux stands in his path, forcing the droids and support staff to flow around him. “May I have a word in private, Supreme Leader?”

“No.”

Hux falls in beside him anyway, and Kylo allows him to accompany him to his office and shuts the door behind him.

“If the First Order bores you, Ren, I’d be happy to take it off your hands.”

Kylo stops himself from pretending to examine something on his datapad like he did when his mother had caught him unprepared for his lessons. He’d studied—actually studied, like an adolescent—the hundreds and hundreds of pages of files Hux loaded on to his datapad the night before, each filled with details of the Order’s operation that make his eyes cross. He’s not stupid, but he’s a man of action, not study, and none of it had helped in the briefing.

Last night he’d dreamed that Rey stood with him against the Praetorian Guard, but they all had orange armor and Hux’s face, and at the end of the dream she took his hand, but her face changed into Hux’s, telling him what a fool he was, and she’d been standing off to the side with all the officers he’d killed in the meeting room, laughing at him, and he heard his Master laughing at him too but no matter where he looked he couldn’t find him.

He hates that he’s begun to want this man’s approval. Hux controls him through insults: stupid, childish, uncontrollable toddler, that Kylo Ren. He wants to answer humiliation with rage, but that will only confirm Hux’s opinion of him, and everyone else’s. So he’s resolved to keep control.

But he won’t give Hux the satisfaction of tormenting him freely in his own office. “I want a strategy to cut our dependence on Black Sun,” he says, knowing this will pique the general’s interest.

“Feeling sudden qualms about working with criminals?”

“When they’re stealing from me. Riella undercut them by thirty million credits and we still had to turn them down.”

“We’re not in a position to start a war with Black Sun. They have us by the balls until we secure the rest of the Republic, and they know it.”

Kylo raises an eyebrow. “So crass, Hux. Those stims are making you cranky.”

“Some of us spend our days working instead of bench-pressing and contemplating the mysteries of the universe.” Hux had been extremely vexed by Kylo’s insistence on scheduling his days around meditation and training.

“I think you’ll like what I’m working on,” he says, referring to tracking the Resistance. “And I’m not out to start a war, yet. But after we finish with the Republic I want them wiped out.”

 Hux gives a derisive snort. “Like you wanted me to blockade every planet where a freighter might hide. Not even you, Supreme Leader, always get what you want.”

Kylo says nothing, and after a pause, Hux speaks again. “How has it been for you, Ren, realizing that there are problems in this galaxy that can’t be solved with a lightsaber?”

He wants to snap that Hux’s continued breathing is a problem he can solve with a lightsaber, but restrains himself.

“I assume you had an actual purpose for wasting my time,” he says.

“You need a staff.”

“A staff?” For a moment he thinks of Rey’s staff before he realizes what Hux means.

“Assistants, a steward, support. If you insist on interfering in the business of the Order, I have more important things to do than babysit you and make sure you get to your next meeting on time. Would you like me to appoint people or do you have candidates in mind?”

Kylo has no candidates in mind, or even a clear idea of what Hux means by a ‘staff.’ Hux knows this. He suspects that Hux must be groaning under the workload if he’s willing to delegate even something as minor as Kylo’s schedule to someone else—Hux, he knows, would like him to stay isolated from the First Order as much as possible, just as his Master had. But Kylo has no intension of retreating into the background and waiting to be assassinated.

“Draw up a field of candidates and I’ll review them,” he says. “Pull together short- and medium-term plans for reducing our reliance on Black Sun. And get out of my office.”

Alone, he returns to his quarters for evening training and meditation. It feels good to move, to work, to punch, to hurt, and then to shower and sit with the Force.

These are the hours he lives for, morning and night—utterly absorbed in the Dark Side, without past or future or identity, power without a wielder. He had fallen into this state naturally even as a toddler, much to his parents’ irritation, and his ability to synch his body with the Force had been one of the only things that had ever impressed Luke. It’s not that he has raw power, he knows, though even his Master slipped into that way of speaking—he keeps his body and his mind tuned and the power sings through him when it wishes to.

This had been the real lesson he learned in all those hours kneeling on the floor and degrading himself in endless scrubbing. He longs for power, but to achieve power, he has to submit. There is strength in weakness, and weakness in strength. But meditation is more difficult now that the pinpoint of light always sticks out like a huge orange buoy in the rushing river of his awareness. Almost unconsciously he sits facing it, facing her, following her through space.

After two hours he sighs and, neglecting the comfort of his little pallet on the floor, he puts on a shirt and walks through the private corridor back to his office and that stupid desk. Endless repairs of the fleet await him, and problems on distant worlds that he doesn’t care about but happens to own. Still, he feels an obligation to be at least minimally informed on them, if only to snuff out the look of contempt on Hux’s putrid face.

He’s midway through a dossier outlining measures for regulating unlicensed interplanetary commerce, whatever the fuck that means, when he feels a disturbance in the atmosphere, like a soundproof cage has slammed down around him. He feels his ribs contract and his face grows hot.

She’s crouching, holding something invisible and moving her arm in a way that he instantly recognizes as tightening a bolt. The scavenger, scavenging. He stands and approaches her, towering above her and forcing her to look up at him. He wonders if she’ll speak to him at all. But he refuses to let his face betray him as he did the day before, kneeling in the dust on Crait. There’s no surprise in her face, only fury as she jumps to her feet.

“How did you find that planet?” she demands, without preamble. She’s keeping her voice low. She’s still crammed into the Falcon, with, what, twenty other people? She doesn’t want them to hear her talking to herself. “I was there, there wasn’t any time for Snoke to tell you or anybody else where Luke was.”

It takes him a moment to think through his hatred and track. Right. Ahch-To. He’d sent a force there to intercept them, figuring that would be the first place they would crawl to to lick their wounds.

“When Snoke interrogated you he opened his mind to me,” Kylo informs her. “I saw everything he saw, everything you saw. He let me feel your pain,” he says, and there’s a sharp stab to his gut that he doesn’t want to wonder about. He’d been furious with his Master, then. “I saw Luke. I saw how he lied to you about what he did to me, how he refused to help you.”

He likes the way she squeezes her eyes shut in pain as he reminds her how much Luke failed her. He imagines her feeling him die, drinking in that saccharine joy and peace that made Kylo want to vomit because nobody deserved a good death less than Luke fucking Skywalker. He imagines how she stood there transforming him from half-cocked miscarriage of a father-figure to a martyr she could worship, just like Han Solo.

But she knows the truth, he’ll give her that—she knows Luke was just another disappointment. She’s used to being disappointed. She trails after people like a lost kid, just waiting for them to disappoint her. To betray her, like her parents did.

He’s happy to cater to her, there. He cannot fucking wait.

Yet she doesn’t take the bait this time. Instead, she assumes an expression that’s almost imperious. It reminds him of himself. “I thought we were done with this,” she says.

“This?”

“This!” she says again, waving her hand around vaguely. “Whatever this is.”

“I did too,” he admits.

She glares at him. “It was your—your master that did this. Don’t you know how to fix it?”

“No,” he says, honestly. Not that he’d fix it even if he could, now that it had produced such unexpected benefits.

She accepts this—the possibility that they might be bound like this forever, with no hope of escape—with the same senseless lack of interest she’s shown with everything else. As far as he knows, she never bothered to question where this connection came from or how it worked. He was just standing in front of her one day, arguing about why he killed his fucking father, and that was that, galactic distances be damned.

He knows why, thanks to that mercifully brief trip into her head. She’s never had the luxury to wonder why things are the way they are, or to wish they were different. She sees things exactly how they are, deals with them, and survives. It’s her strength. Maybe her only strength, though Kylo would never dream of telling her anything but her many weaknesses. She reacts, she survives, she doesn’t ask questions.

She’s not unlike he was, before his Master taught him.

She crosses her arms over her chest. “I don’t have anything to say to you.”

He resists rolling his eyes; she has too little self-discipline to ignore him, and the appearance of the Supreme Leader in some despicable corner of that junk-heap she’s riding in has to be the most interesting thing that’s happened to her lately, other than getting shot at.

“You could have killed me. In the throne room, when I got knocked out. But you didn’t. Why?”

She frowns, and seems to stand taller, defiant. “You asked me to join you. Why?”

Why indeed. He’s grateful she didn’t decide to follow him around while he tried to rule a galaxy. She’d only get in the way.

Yet he’s pleased. She’s learning his tactics, fighting back, feeling out weaknesses and testing them. She might learn to be interesting, if she lives long enough. But, of course, she won’t.

He's raving.

He changes his approach. As long as the connection holds, he can push further, and he sees an opening.

When your opponent is strong, hold your ground, my apprentice. When your opponent is weak, push until you can go no further.

“Have you told them about me?” he asks. “About this?”

Her expression turns wary. “Why would you care?”

So she hasn’t. Interesting. She’s lying to them.

“They’ll never trust you if they know you’re talking to me. If they know what I offered you.”

The last part isn’t easy to say out loud, and he fails to keep the hard edge off the word “offered.” She hears it. He knows she wonders if he’s vulnerable there. He isn’t. He’s moved on. But he can tell from the way her expression changes that he’s hit on exactly what she’s been thinking.

She’s worried. She’s thinking about how these people who have known her for all of three weeks will react when they find out she’s been secretly fraternizing with the Supreme Leader of the First Order. And now she’s had a whole cycle to tell them about it, but she hasn’t. She’s a spy, a security risk, a liar. That’s how his mother will see it.

She shakes her head, covering her worry with disdain. “Not everyone is like you. Of course they’ll trust me.”

“Alright,” he says smoothly. “So they trust you. Then my mother will ask you to spy on me. Get information. Maybe even assassinate me.”

“Your mother wouldn’t—”

“She would. She’d do anything for the Resistance and you’re the best weapon she has now, her Jedi. She’ll use you. Against me, against anyone who gets in her way. She’s backed into a corner. She knows the Resistance is finished.”

“The Resistance is not finished!” she shouts, and looks around. She continues in an insistent whisper. “You’re wrong about them—”

The Force cuts her off. Kylo exhales slowly. Unsteadily. His breastbone feels too tight, like it’s cutting off his heartbeat.

His hands are shaking.

He wants to shatter something. He wants to punch something. But his hours of meditation and his determination not to give in to rages gives him the strength to restrain himself.

What would his Master say, if he were here to guide him? He tries to imagine it. He almost hears his Master’s soothing voice in his head, ready to comfort or destroy him according to his pleasure.

You’re raving, Kylo. You don’t believe half of what you just thought. And you’re trembling. Why?

I’m angry, Master.

Are you a coward, apprentice?

No, Master.

Then why are you too afraid to admit the truth, even to yourself? Tell me the truth, boy. Why are you shaking?

His cheeks burn. I’m ashamed, Master. Because she made a fool out of me.

Not just that.

Kylo hated the way his Master would dig and dig. But he taught him well--Kylo refuses to hide from his own motivations.

She betrayed me, Master. It hurts.

Yes. Poor Kylo Ren, heir of lord Vader, made a fool of by everyone, even in his moment of triumph. Did it feel good to hurt her, after she hurt you?

Yes, Master. Better than anything.

How did you hurt her?

With your guidance, Master. I found her weaknesses. I exploited them.

And yet you allow others to humiliate you, when you have the power to hurt them. You’ve been Supreme Leader for one day and already you’ve proven once again that you’re a failure. Are you weak, Kylo? Have you forgotten your training?

No, Master.

Have you forgotten your destiny?

No, Master.

Then seize it.

Chapter Text

“Two days.” Finn can’t seem to stop himself from pacing, even though there’s hardly any empty deckspace in the overcrowded Falcon. He’s trying to keep his voice down while most of the crew is sleeping. They put Threepio in sleep mode two cycles ago just to keep Chewie from ripping him apart, so it’s quiet as the wastes at midnight. “Two days since anybody on this ship has had anything eat, and we’re down to, what, a half-liter of water for all us to share?”

“Don’t be a pussy.” General Organa doesn’t look up from her nav chart. The wiring diagram crinkles in Rey’s fist as someone behind Rey snickers, and Artoo beeps sassily. Poe’s head jerks up in surprise, and there’s no mistaking the disapproving frown that looks so foreign on his cheerful face.

Finn glares at the general. He hasn’t done much other than glare since they held their little memorial yesterday, where he’d kept his jaw clenched and his eyes straight ahead, and Leia hasn’t been much friendlier. Poe said some things about Luke’s sacrifice, and Leia said some things, and Rey pretended her silence was fresh grief. It was, mostly.

“No one’ll risk giving us supplies with the blockade, and this ship is a target. We’ve tried all our options. We need a plan.”

Poe half-closes his eyes and pinches his nose, breathing out slowly. Rey sees the exhaustion in his eyes; Poe’s been sneaky about it, but she’s caught him skipping his water ration so they can keep Rose hydrated while she lays unconscious. “We do have a plan, Finn.”

“Oh, really? Is it dying of thirst? Is that the plan?”

Rey uncurls and stands, abandoning a wiring diagram on the blanket that serves as her bed, resisting the urge to kick the tin where she’s stashed the dismantled lightsaber parts. She shoves the diagram into a drawer, between two ancient books she refuses to look at. Dehydration drills into her head like she’s been out on the badlands all day, and she can’t make heads or tails of the diagram. She doesn’t aim her voice in any particular direction, but for a fraction of a second she meets Leia’s eyes. “You can have my next water ration, Finn.”

Finn’s cheeks darken. “No, Rey, I didn’t mean that—”

“It’s fine.” She grabs at a wrench—she misses it the first time—and drifts toward the cockpit. “I’m used to being thirsty.”

Poe and Finn exchange a glance she supposes might be worried, and she catches a few of the others watching her with something like awe. She’s their weapon, after all. They need her tuned up, ready to swoop in and—what? Move rocks again?

 Rey steps over sleeping bodies, heading to the cockpit with a vague intention of working on the auxiliary intake switch for the O2 regulator.

But when she reaches the empty cockpit she sits where she always sits, in Han’s seat, shooting a resentful look at the water-recycling gauge that’s been parked on high-red since the primary scrubber burned out from overload two cycles ago. She and Chewie spent hours on it, but there’s no way to get it up and running without new parts. Leia locked up their last half-liter ten hours ago, and it’s another two hours before they each get a sip. After that, it’s game over unless they land.

A nervous cough makes her go stiff, but it’s only Finn. She lets the wrench drop to the deck beside her and leans back. It smells like electrocuted porg; Chewie left the oily bones from their last meal in a corner on the deck. The air feels suffocating, but Rey’s certain she imagines it, since they’ve got hours before O2 saturation drops to noticeable levels.

Finn tosses down a set of ratchets, which he’d apparently grabbed at random because they’re useless for anything in the cockpit, and collapses into Chewbacca’s chair.

She finds herself annoyed that Finn’s come after her. But of course that’s stupid—she’s just dehydrated and hungry and tired of Finn whining when they’re all in the same boat. Literally. For all his big talk about helping the Resistance after they left Crait, she half-expects him to start talking about running away again.

“I’m not gonna take your ration, Rey,” Finn says. His hands work like he wants to say something else. 

“You can, if you need it.”

“I was just frustrated. You need to hydrate. You’re our Jed—"

“I’m not. And I’d like to be alone,” she says, and hurt flashes across his face.

“I’m sorry, I mean, I shouldn’t have complained—”

“Stop apologizing.” She tries to school her face into a smile, but he noticed the hesitation. “Just—I need some space. Please?”

He nods and mutters an embarrassed apology, but hesitates before he leaves. The air sort of wavers around him, like the Force vibrates with unsaid words. There are so many since Crait, and Rey knows she’s not the only one who’s been keeping things to herself in the crowded freighter. Finn’s slept beside Rose’s bunk every off-shift. He reaches out to squeeze her shoulder, and she brushes her fingers across his before they disappear.

Rey listens to him go, then sighs to clear her head. She’s not angry at Finn, she just can’t be what he needs her to be right now. He’s right, about needing a plan.

What do you want me to do? Take a laser-sword and face down the whole First Order?

Luke could do that, but Luke was a legend. Peace and purpose, she told Leia. Good for Luke. He could’ve taken three seconds to share his kriffing purpose with Rey.

No rogue Jedi parents, no secret destiny in that sick-smelling carcass of a tree, not for Rey. Rey from Nowhere. Nothing from Nowhere. All she got was a bunch of moldy books, a broken lightsaber, and a pair of brown, contemptuous eyes—pretty eyes, Luke called them, because Luke saw right through her—telling her once and for all that she has no place in this story.

You need a teacher.

She doesn’t. She’s never had a teacher in her life, and she was fine, and she’s fine now. She doesn’t need the Force, she needs—what?

To fix the damn ship, that’s what. That’s what matters right now. Feeling sorry for herself isn’t going to get the job done.

She picks up the wrench and starts removing the panel for the aux access switches, hoping it’s just a problem with the wiring, but she doubts it. The ship isn’t equipped to handle the load they’re putting on it, not with all the fungineered pseudo-fixes she and Chewie and Han put in to substitute for necessary parts. They’re twenty-one people in a ship Rey stocked to crew two. Three, counting the extra rations she packed for Ben. But Ben did not come back with them. Ben is the reason they’re all starving, running, lost and alone.

And Finn is right; they don’t have a plan. If they don’t find a place to land soon, there’s not going to be a Resistance.

Rey jerks the switch box out of its holder and groans. It’s not a wiring problem; she and Chewie will have to get down in the hatch and look at the line again. If Han was here he’d probably have some workaround she would’ve never thought of. But Han’s not here. Ben ripped him out of her life, too.

A click sounds behind her, and Rey’s on her feet, fingers clasped around the reassuring grips of her staff. The hatch sneaks slowly open, like Han’s name summoned her.

 “Hi,” Leia says. She eyes the staff with a raised eyebrow, and Rey sets it reluctantly against the bulkhead. They watch one another for a moment. Leia’s face flashes intermittently orange and deep blue with the blinking of the O2 warning gauge.

“You shouldn’t have said that to Finn,” she says.

Leia’s frown deepens.

“I know this hasn’t been easy for you,” Rey continues, raising her chin, “but you shouldn’t take it out on him. He’s not weak. You know he’s not, and you know he already feels guilty for the transports.”

Poe pulled him aside and told him it wasn’t Finn’s fault, that he was the officer and somehow that made Poe responsible, even though it was Finn who came up with the plan. It seems like it made as much sense to Finn as it does to Rey.

“I do know,” Leia says. “And you’re right, I haven’t been myself. I’ll apologize.”

“In front of everyone.”

The general’s slight nod seems genuine, and Rey can’t be sure that she’s imagining a hint of approval there. Leia could tell her that she gives the orders here. Her son would.

Rey moves the panel off Chewie’s seat and lets the general ease herself down, belatedly wondering if she should’ve let Leia have Han’s seat. It doesn’t matter. Rey sits, back rigid, head pounding. A tightness around Leia’s eyes tells Rey she’s as unhappy about this conversation as Rey is.

Leia’s eyes flick up to the dice sagging over the viewport. “You skipped over some details in your story, that first day. I got the feeling you might want to say some things in private.”

She’d rather not say them at all. Rey hasn’t missed the way Leia watches her when her back’s turned, like she can smell her son when Rey passes by.

“It’s about Kylo Ren.” Leia says. It’s not a question, and there’s no emotion in her voice as she says it.

Rey plucks at a wire and runs her thumb along it like she’s checking for skittermouse bites. “I went to him. On Snoke’s ship. I thought I could turn him.”

Out of the corner of her eye Rey catches the way a muscle in Leia’s chin jumps. She and her son share that, at least, that iron control.

“Chewie told me.” There’s an obvious question, the one Luke asked her, the one Rey can’t stop asking herself ever since his miserable face popped back into her life: how could you ever be stupid enough to think you, a scavenger, could turn a man that evil? But Leia doesn’t ask the obvious question. Instead, she blinks resolutely at those dice.

“Did he hurt you?”

There should’ve been concern in her voice. Rey’s glad there isn’t. Leia needs her to be strong right now—they all do.

“No.” It’s close enough to true.

“Your arm’s wounded.”

“It wasn’t him.”

Leia nods. “Good.”

“Yeah.”

Rey pinches the wire out of its socket just to have a reason to hide from Leia’s eyes.

“And?” the general says.

“I saw him kill Snoke. I thought he’d turned.”

There it was. That was the heart of her stupidity, believing that he’d changed.

Leia looks out at the stars streaming by. “He hadn’t turned. He used you to kill Snoke.”

She sounds so much like Ben when she does that--asks a question that sounds like a command.

“Exactly,” Rey says. And then she tells Leia everything. The visions on Ahch-To, the trip in the escape pod onto Snoke’s ship, the confrontation with Snoke, how Snoke tortured her and then asked Ben to kill her.

“Don’t call him that,” Leia says sharply. “He’s not Ben.”

Rey holds her tongue, but it feels cheap to say that Ben’s dead and some beast called Kylo Ren destroyed him. That’s not what happened. It’s what Ben wants to believe, but Ben Solo isn’t gone, he’s just made his choice.

“Did you tell Luke about these visions?”

Rey hesitates. No. It’s not fair, to tell this woman the brother she loved tried to murder her son.

“Eventually,” she lies. The little wrinkles around Leia’s eyes twitch as her eyes narrow. “He told me not to go.”

“You ignored the warning, and he just let you go?”

“He refused to help.”

At the heat in Rey’s voice, Leia nods, and motions for her to continue.

She doesn’t mention their conversation next to the fire. Or that desperate please, or the moment she stood, remembering it, over his unconscious body, trying to make a decision. Those things are between her and Ben, for now. Not that she owes Ben Solo anything.

The only time Leia shows the slightest hint of feeling is when Rey had tells her that Kylo Ren stood in the throne room watching the Order pick off the helpless Resistance transports, and he could’ve stopped it, but he’d refused. The general closes her eyes and breathes out silently through her nose, and so quickly Rey almost doesn’t notice it. Nothing else seems to surprise her.

“I thought the visions had stopped. But, the thing is, they’re still happening. One happened last cycle.”

Leia’s still staring out at the blue and white steaks of hyperspace beyond the viewport.

“What do you talk about, in these visions?”

“He insults me, mostly.”

“Just insults?”

“He tries to get in my head.”

“Literally? Like an interrogation?”

“No, I mean, he told me not to tell you any of this, because you wouldn’t trust me if you knew I was talking to him. Or he said you’d ask me to spy on him.”

 “He said those things because they’re true.”

Rey swallows again, just a reflex because there’s no moisture in her throat. “Not that I think you’d do anything wrong, or that this is your fault,” Leia clarifies. “But this is a huge security risk. He can use this…connection…to get valuable information, information that could get us killed.”

“No he can’t,” Rey says, too quickly. She welcomes the anger that smooths over the fear rising out of the depths to wrap around her windpipe. “You can’t think I’m stupid enough to tell him anything, and I told you, he can’t see my surroundings.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I can’t see his.”

“And how much Force training have you had, Rey? Two days? He's been calling on the Dark side since he was in the womb, he's been throwing people across the room with the Force since he was two years old. Do you really think he’s not able to do things with this connection that you can’t?”

In the womb. Rey stops herself from shuddering, but she can’t quite keep her voice under control.

“But I’m telling you he can’t. That’s not how it works.” She’s certain of it. She feels it.

“Rey, I’m sorry to throw this in your face after you confided in me, but he’s already tricked you into willingly walking onto the goddamned flagship of the First Order. Alone, and against Luke’s direct instruction. I’m not going to risk the entire Resistance on your judgment.”

Rey knew this couldn’t last.

“You can trust me,” she says. “I promise.”

At the plea in her voice, Leia’s face softens. Rey looks away.

“You’ll send me away. If we survive this, I’ll have to leave the Resistance. He said that would happen. He said you’d send me away.”

An alarm beeps, and since there’s nothing Rey can do to fix it, she just silences it and leaves her hand on the toggle. After a few moments Leia’s swollen knuckles move to close over hers, but Rey withdraws her hand too quickly, pretending to fix one of the other switches.

“I’ll do everything I can to keep you with us, Rey. I promise.”

Rey manages a curt nod.

“But I respect you too much to lie to you. If he can use this against us—”

“I’d leave.” Rey starts nodding, because it’s not even a decision, is it? They’ll never let her stay. If she doesn’t leave they’ll abandon her. “Of course I would, I couldn’t put Finn in danger.”

The Force hums with Leia’s sadness. “You shouldn’t have to bear this responsibility. And you shouldn’t have to deal with—him.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“I know you’re not.”

There’s something odd in Leia’s eyes. Recognition, maybe. It doesn’t make Rey feel much better,  because she knows this can’t last. Soon she’ll be alone again.

Leia folds her hands briskly, and Rey’s glad. “I need to have a conversation with Poe,” she says, and Rey understands then: Poe doesn’t know that Kylo Ren is her son. “If one of these visions happens again, keep your ears open. Ask him questions. Find out what you can, be careful.”

“I have been careful.”

“He’ll try to sedu—to persuade you over to the Dark side. He’s already tried to make you suspicious of us. Don’t let him put a wedge between you and the Resistance, Rey. Remember you’re not alone.”

Rey flinches, and tries to cover it by pretending she pricked her finger on a wire. “I know.”

Leia observes her, but decides to ignore the strange response. “And don’t tell anyone about this.”

“I won’t,” Rey says, and then, immediately, “though I’d like to tell Finn.”

“No. Not even Finn.”

Rey draws herself up. She’ll go crazy if she can’t talk to someone about all this.

“With all due respect, General,”—she’d heard Poe say that and she’d been looking for an excuse to try it—“Finn has more experience than anyone else with people trying to brainwash him with lies. I need his help.” And if I’m going to die in the next two cycles, I’m not going to die keeping a secret from my only friend.

Leia considers her. Rey is about to tell her that she’s going to tell Finn no matter what, but Leia figures this out on her own.

“Fine. But Finn…Finn isn’t great at keeping secrets. Or following orders. Tell him how serious this is—I trust you, and I’ll do my damnedest to keep you with us, but we’re looking for allies, and if anyone finds out the Supreme Leader has a direct line into your head—”

“I’ll make sure he keeps it secret.”

Leia presses her lips into a thin line, then nods. “Are you done with whatever you were working on here?” She gestures to the disassembled switch box.

“For now,” Rey says. “It’s the O2, it’s not going to last more than a cycle or two.”

“Understood,” she says. “Rey. After Finn followed you, Poe and I made a decision. We need to land. Whatever we find when we drop out of hyperspace in an hour, we push through it. We’re out of chances. But I think we’ll make it.”

Rey nods. All of this back and forth about Ben, about the future, about allies—none of it is really going to matter if they don’t punch through the next blockade. It should terrify her.

But it doesn’t. Leia took the time to have this conversation, knowing she might die in an hour, because she believes they won’t. Whatever complaints Rey might have, she has to admire her. She has hope.

Leia glances up at the dice again, and stands. The general takes a deep breath of oxygen-poor air, and pinches the edge of her massive black coat sleeves.

“Is there something else?” Rey asks, following her to her feet.

The Force whispers around the general, and seems to wedge down into Rey’s throat, sticking in her parched windpipe like sand. It’s like she’s got a question that she doesn’t really want to ask.

Leia’s eyes fall to the floor, to the greasy porg bones in the corner, as if to remind Rey to clean them up. But instead she speaks so low the engines almost swallow her voice.

“How is he?”

Rey’s throat works, trying to swallow around Leia’s feelings.

“Is he happy?”

Rey shakes her head.

Leia brings her hand to her mouth, perpendicular, so that the side of her pointer finger arches over her lip. She nods, and keeps nodding even as she turns back to the hatch, even as it swings open.

“When we make planetfall,” Leia says on her way out, loud enough for everyone in the hold to hear, “you should replace the modulator alarm.”

“Sure,” Rey says. “You got it.”

***

In an hour, they drop out of hyperspace near a planet Leia knows has Resistance sympathies and a small Republic army garrison, expecting a barrage of First Order fire to welcome them like it has the last sixteen times. Rey’s hands are white-knuckled on the controls—even though Poe and Threnalli are seasoned pilots, Chewie insisted she sit in Han’s chair for these missions, and after Poe and Threnalli saw what she could do, they stopped arguing with Chewie.

But it’s quiet.

“I don’t like this,” Poe says, quietly enough that only she, Leia, and Chewie hear but the rest of the nervous Resistance doesn’t. Rey feels him squeeze the back of her chair.

All of them are frantically scanning the viewport, looking for the telltale shimmer of cloaked enemy ships. But there’s nothing.

Chewie growls a question, reluctantly, because Rey knows he hates this mumbo-jumbo. In response, Rey closes her eyes and tries to feel through the Force if anything is there. “No, I don’t feel anything,” she replies. “It feels—empty.”

Their hearts are pounding as they put in a coded query on a frequency the Resistance had used to call for help after Crait. When the coded reply comes back—Come on in, we’re glad to see you. Airspace clear, eagles left the roost two hours ago—only a few muffled shouts go up in the back. Leia’s anxiety comes off in waves in the Force, and she knows Leia feels hers, too.

This is too easy. This is a trap.

Rey catches Leia and Poe exchanging a concerned glance. They need to land. They decided to go for it, whatever they found when they dropped out of hyperspace. But they’d both been expecting a fight. They’re wondering whether to call it off.

Out of the corner of her eye, she watches Poe take Leia’s hand. Leia nods. “Take her in,” the general orders.

Rey and Chewie exchange a look. They don’t like this any better than Poe and Leia do. But they follow orders.

Twenty gut-wrenching minutes later, the whole Resistance is guzzling water in the mess of the Republic garrison—too fast. And vomiting because of it. Rey tries to tell everyone to slow down—she’s too used to water-hunger to make rookie mistakes like that—but everyone is so overwhelmed with relief and thirst and sheer joy to be alive that they take huge gulping swigs and promptly throw up on their hosts’ floor, but their hosts don’t care, they have headache medicine to spare that they pass around like candy, they offer intravenous hydration to the crew members who need it most, and whisk Rose off to medbay.

Leia’s already apologized to Finn, and Finn hugs Rey four or five times out of sheer jubilation. Poe studies them with interest. Rey sips water carefully from a canteen as she watches Leia embrace her friend, Colonel Sana Devi, who she knew from her Senate days.

When she starts feeling better, she returns to the hangar where they’ve parked the Falcon to run some post-flight checks and talk to the techs there about the parts they need. They’ll have to put the old freighter in more permanent hiding, since it’s the most-wanted ship in the galaxy. Gradually, the techs and the happy Resistance fighters, including Finn, peel off for a much-needed meal and rest.

Rey’s stomach roils from hours of crushing anxiety, so she stays in the hangar, putzing with small tasks that make her feel useful. Poe comes in while she’s fiddling with a sticky compressor valve. He’s been so busy she expects him to just walk through, but to her surprise he pulls up a crate and sits next to her. He’s got a very old-looking datapad with him.

“I talked to Leia,” he says. His voice is neutral, but Rey can feel, through the Force or just through her own intuition, that it had been a very difficult conversation, and that Poe was reeling from hurt and worry and grief for Leia’s pain.

Poe is the son Leia deserved.

“Hm,” Rey says. What do you say to someone when they’ve just acknowledged you’re the security breach that might get them killed?

“Here’s what I think,” he says, his voice assuming the get-to-it optimism she’s come to expect from him over the last three days. “I think you’ve got a thing going on here with Kylo Ren that you need to take care of—”

She snorts. The corner of his mouth turns up.

“But I don’t care about all that,” he says. Her eyes meet his, and they’re as serious as she’s ever seen them. “Rey. You’re a hell of a pilot. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the Resistance is a little low on pilots lately.”

Rey can’t possibly believe what he’s offering her.

 “Got a few minutes to start your flight training?” he asks.

She almost drops the compressor hose in her haste to put it down. “Now? Aren’t you exhausted?”

He shakes his head. “Mission days always get me a little wired. And this was a crazy mission. If you feel up to it, we can go over some of the boring ground-school things and I’ll get you in a cockpit tomorrow.”

Rey is practically quivering with excitement. Finally, something she’s actually good at. She’s glad her mechanical skills have come in handy, and it’s not like she doesn’t love sitting and solving a problem with her hands, but the thought of spending the rest of the war staying on the ground as a mechanic—or even worse, a useless half-Jedi—is almost unbearable. If there’s going to be a fire, she needs to be facing it.

He grins at her enthusiasm. “So I assume we don’t need to go over the parts of an X-wing,” he says. She shoots him a bland look, and the grin turns to a smirk. He hands her the datapad. “So we’ll start with some of the basic maneuvers and commands you might hear over the comm.”

She peers down at the datapad. It’s got one schematic of a maneuver that she can follow, but the rest—she frowns.

“I can’t read,” she says.

Poe raises an eyebrow. “Really?”

She shrugs. “It wasn’t really something I needed on Jakku.”

He doesn’t miss a beat. “Well, I’ll just go over it then.”

And he does. They sit for an hour, Poe running her through practice conversations on the comm and demonstrating maneuvers with big, sweeping motions of his hands. She reminds him of a kid with a toy fighter, making vroom-vroom sounds and pretending to use pilot jargon. It’s a thousand times better than Jedi training already, and she hasn’t even left the ground.

After she nearly dies laughing from a particularly animated explanation of in-formation barrel rolls, he pulls something out of his pocket. A flask.

“It’s just water,” he says apologetically, “but it’s fun to pretend, and I’m really happy about water right now. Want some?”

On Jakku it’s a gross insult to refuse water. When she lowers the flask, his downturned eyes are studying her.

“So,” Poe says with exaggerated casualness as he takes the flask back. “You and Finn, huh?”

With the preparations for dropping out of hyperspace and everything that happened afterward, she didn’t have time to talk to Finn. He’d been exhausted, so she let him go to bed with the resolution that she’d talk to him tomorrow.

She glances over at him. “Me and Finn what?”

“You’re a thing.”

It takes Rey a second to follow his meaning. “Oh. No, no. We’re just friends.” She’s not sure that’s true for Finn. She hopes they’re just friends.

“Really,” Poe screws the cap onto the flask and stuffs it back in his pocket.

“Really.”

“It’s just, you two are…huggy.”

Rey laughs again. They are huggy; she noticed that in the cramped arrangements. Everyone else seems to need a lot more space, but she and Finn stand together and touch each other in small, casual ways that the others don’t seem to mirror, just because they can. “I think we’re both happy to have someone we can hug. We didn’t have that, before.”

He makes a face. “I guess Jakku didn’t seem like a huggy place.” She snorts. “Neither did the First Order. Kylo Ren didn’t seem like a hugger; I tried.”

She’s so buoyant that even the mention of Kylo Ren doesn’t break her mood, and she half-believes Poe really did try to hug him. She can’t help but laugh at the image. It feels good to laugh.

Poe is flashing her a mischievous grin that makes her cheeks color. He really is handsome, in a rough kind of way.

Something seems to pass between them, but then he sweeps up the datapad and practically jumps to his feet. “Tomorrow, 0800, I want you here for flight training. Got it?”

She’s a little whiplashed by the sudden move to leave, but he’s smiling and she says that sounds great.

“Good,” he says with a suggestive smile. “I’m looking forward to it.” He strides out of the hangar without looking back.

It’s late; it must be around midnight. She might as well try to sleep, though the prospect of flight training, and talking to Poe, and not fighting for her life, makes her so excited she’s not sure she’ll be able to get any rest. She stands to leave.

Her hand is on the toggle for the hangar lights when the cage snaps down around her. His eyes are on her back.

Instinct tells her to reach for her staff, to face him and fight. Instead, she freezes, takes a deep breath in, then out. She turns to him, her cheeks still pink from relief and what she’s increasingly sure is Poe’s flirting. He’s wearing his usual expression of dull, hopeless misery. He's filthy, like he's been rolling around in an ash pit.

The tendrils of his sadness flick outward in the Force, wrapping around her neck, and it’s almost enough to make her feel sorry for him, until he opens his mouth to say something hateful.

“Shut up, Ben.”

To her surprise, he does.

Rey swallows against a sensation like ashes in her throat, then she turns off the lights, leaving him to dissolve, alone, in the dark.

Chapter Text

They won’t trust you. Ben’s words trickle through her mind, echoing like drops of water dripping slowly into an empty cistern, as she watches Finn’s face stretch and re-arrange itself when she finishes her story over the picnic lunch they’ve taken to the Falcon for a private conversation.

His expression finally settles on a sort of disbelieving sulk.

Rey just watches, waiting. She notices a pipe leaking coolant behind Finn, and adds it to her mental checklist of things to fix before they put the Falcon in hiding. They both need to report to Col. Davi in fifteen minutes. She feels her pulse in her hands, trying to keep it together, wondering if Finn is going to react the way Leia did. 

“I just—” Finn begins. “It sounds like you two have a pretty strong connection.”

Rey realizes that the coldness on her chin is water, dribbling down from her open mouth. She closes it and swallows. She can’t possibly be reading his expression right.

“Finn, are you jealous?”

“No,” he says, but Finn is the worst liar she’s ever met, and she’s met Threepio. “I just feel like a lot happened to you that I wasn’t a part of, you know? You’re—cosmic now. You’re epic.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It means that you went off to be a Jedi with this amazing legend and now you’re best friends with the Supreme Leader and it’s like the galaxy just sort of builds itself around you, sometimes, Rey. It’s hard to feel like I know you.”

She tries to hide how much his words hurt.

“You’re my best friend. The Supreme Leader is a madman who’s trying to kill me. And you. And you snuck onto the same ship I did on an insane mission of your own, remember? How is that not…cosmic?”

Rey’s heart had swollen with pride for Finn as Poe had relayed the story, with chagrinned glances at Leia, of their heroic mission to shut off the tracker. Well. It was near-heroic.

All right. Their mission was a total failure that put everyone in needless danger, really, but so was hers. She can see why Leia might be touchy about heroic-sounding solo missions right now.

Solo. Ha.

She frowns. This is all fucking ridiculous.

Finn takes a spiteful bite of sandwich that forces all the meat to slip off the bread, falling to his plate with an unappetizing plop. “He offered you the galaxy, Rey. And you share a magic bond. How much more cosmic do you get than that? It’s like I don’t even deserve to be in the same league as you, like I don’t deserve to be your friend. You’re like a romance holo waiting to happen.”

Rey doesn’t ask how a stormtrooper would have much experience with romance holos. Finn, she realizes with a sigh, just doesn’t get it.

She tears a chunk off her own sandwich, her third. After not eating last night, and missing breakfast, which she would’ve been too excited to eat anyway because of her incredible first training flight with Poe and Threnalli in the T-70, she’s hungry. But mostly she’s not used to having as much food as she wants, and every instinct honed from years of near-starvation on Jakku keeps screaming at her to eat as much as she can possibly stuff into her face to fatten up before the next round of horrors.

And she’s mad, damn it. Finn is supposed to understand.

He’s fiddling with his sandwich, trying to get the filling back in between the bread with a knife and fork. Rey reaches out with her grease-stained fingers and swipes the whole mound of lettuce and meat and vegetables off the soggy bread and shoves it into her mouth.

“Finn,” she says around the huge mouthful of sandwich filling, hunching her shoulders and glaring at him. “Three weeks ago I wasn’t sure the Resistance existed, I’d never even heard of the Force, I was pretty certain Luke Skywalker was a story the women in the market made up to scare us.” She swallows with difficulty and takes a huge gulp of Finn’s water. He’s staring at her in astonishment.

“Legally, Unkar Plutt still owns me. And he owns me because my parents sold me as a slave for drinking money.”

Finn’s eyes are wide. “Why are you saying this, Rey?”

Rey takes another gulp of his water, slams the canteen down, then steals his bread for good measure. “I’m saying it because the Resistance, and you, and Han, and Chewie and BB-8 and Poe and everyone else are the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Because I chose you,” she says, scooping bits of bread back into her mouth as they fall out.

“I didn’t choose the Force. I sure as hell didn’t choose Ben Solo. And I’m not going to let him, or anything he said to me, or offered me, or anything that happened to me because of him take you away from me. You do not get to let him win, do you understand that? You don’t get to.”

She refuses to acknowledge the tears that are forming at the edges of her eyes. She just wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and breathes in sharply, and loudly, through her nose, staring at the leaking pipe to the right of Finn’s shoulder.

And of course Finn gets up to hug her. Poe was right. Huggy is what they are.

“Hey,” he says, rubbing her back. He gets his hand awkwardly tangled in her X-wrap, and has to shake it to extricate it but tries to make it look smooth and she pretends not to notice. “Rey, I’m sorry. You’re still my best friend. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, too.”

Rey holds him tight, still looking at that stupid pipe. “This is all a secret. I asked Leia for special permission to tell you, because I know he’s trying to brainwash me. And I thought, maybe, with where you come from, you could help.”

Finn obviously doesn’t quite understand her thought process, but he pats her on the shoulder, pulling away from her. “Sure. Yeah. Anything you need.”

They both jump when a sound like a bomb reverberates through the Falcon. Someone is banging on the exterior. “You guys still in there?” a voice Rey recognizes as Connix’s yells. “You’re up with the colonel in five.”

“Coming,” Rey yells back.

“Is Finn in there?” Connix replies. “Tell him Rose is awake.”

Rey glances at Finn. He told her all about the mission to Canto Bight, and the kiss, and his conflicted feelings about it. His face turns a deep shade of purple, and Rey grins.

***

Seeing Rose has to wait until after the meeting with Col. Devi. Rey’d assumed that this was going to be a briefing for the whole crew of Falcons, as the regular garrison troops had taken to calling the survivors of the Resistance, so she and Finn share an uneasy look when they enter the small briefing room to see only Leia, Poe, Col. Devi, and a tall older man in a military uniform who Rey doesn’t recognize. Leia is looking at the unknown man with naked dislike, and Poe’s face is pink. Col. Devi looks like she’d rather be anywhere else.

“So. This is the defector and the Jedi,” says the newcomer.

Whether through the Force or because everyone is that obvious about it, Rey feels like she’s walking into a conservator when she enters the flat grey meeting room. Instinctively she stands tall in front of the newcomer, and Finn stands next to her, like they’re both trying to protect each other.

Leia doesn’t look at Rey. Poe didn’t say anything, but she got the feeling during their morning flight that Poe had left in such a hurry last night because Leia had paged him on his datapad, probably to argue about the decision to let her fly.

“Finn, Rey,” Poe says, seeing that Leia isn’t going to start them off. “This is General Lonno Desso of the Republic Defense Fleet. He’s in command of operations on this planet.”

Finn almost jumps, clicking his heels together and saluting so quickly that Rey’s looking around for a threat.

 “He’s in command of the whole damn planet, civilians and military, apparently,” Leia says, crossing her arms over her chest.

Rey has no idea what that’s about, but she does not salute. She moves closer to Leia and hooks her thumbs in her belt, determined to look unimpressed. It’s not hard.

“Well,” General Desso says with a sneer, “it seems the First Order, at least, managed to instill some discipline in their troops.” He returns the salute and Finn drops his hands to his sides, slightly bent. It looks uncomfortable. It makes Rey uncomfortable—it’s so easy for her to forget what Finn had been, before they met.

No one’s asked her any questions, so she doesn’t say anything, just looks at Desso with a neutral expression. She nearly does pull out her blaster when he rakes his eyes up and down Finn’s body, appraising him with a look she’d seen in the slave markets on Jakku. Directed at her.

“How long were you with the First Order, boy?”

Boy. She sees Poe’s jaw tighten. “Twenty-two years, sir,” Finn replies smartly.

“All in military training? As a stormtrooper?”

“Of course, sir.” Rey hides her skeptical expression. She’s not totally clear on Finn’s history with the First Order—he’s told her stories, but they’re mostly little anecdotes about life with his squadmates—but she knows he spent a lot of his time on sanitation duty.

“Excellent. I hear you’re quite the gunner. And that you showed great courage against the Order on Crait.”

Finn dislikes this man enough to manage not to blush. “I do my best, sir.”

Desso turns his gaze to Rey, leaving Finn to stand in that uncomfortable position. Rey surveys him with the same slave-market expression he’d used on Finn, like he’s a scavenger too old and weak to be worth the asking price.

“You’re a bit young for a Jedi,” he says to her. His air of contempt reminds her of Ben. You. A scavenger.

It’s still not a question, so she doesn’t say anything.

“Is it true you trained with Luke Skywalker?”

Rey risks a glance at Leia, who nods almost imperceptibly. “Yes. I trained with Master Skywalker.”

“And I hear you rescued the whole Resistance, what was left of it. By—what was it—lifting boulders? With your mind?”

Rey nods, once. She caught the sneering edge on the word “Resistance.”

But that doesn’t make any sense. Isn’t he Resistance? No, what had Poe called him? Republic Defense Fleet. Are they different? Apparently they don’t get along. She files it away in the growing list of things to ask Poe about later.

“I’ve never a seen Jedi’s powers in action,” he says, almost breezily. “Col. Devi, have you?”

“No, sir,” Devi responds, looking almost as uncomfortable as Finn, who seems to be fighting between the urge to stay in his military stance and the urge to spit in this man’s face.

“I’d like you to demonstrate your power, young Jedi. I’m sure you’ll understand the necessity.”

She does not understand the necessity; he just said he’d heard the whole story. He shouldn’t need anything more than Leia’s word, or Poe’s. Hadn’t they just all risked their lives against the First Order? Why would they lie?

“That’s an order, Jedi.”

She thinks she’s starting to understand what’s going on here. “I don’t take orders from you,” she says evenly.

She can see the words forming in his mind: You do now, you arrogant little bitch. That might be the Force, but she thinks it’s just his expression. But Poe, again seeing that Leia is just going to stare icily at Desso, inclines his head. “Go ahead, Rey.”

“Quiet, Dameron,” he snaps. “You’re lucky I don’t have you in court martial for desertion.”

Desertion? Poe?

He wants a demonstration? Fine.

She whips out her hand and Desso’s blaster is in her grasp before he even realizes what’s happening. He stares at her, licking his lips but managing not to look too surprised, to Rey’s annoyance. She looks right back at him and idly tucks his blaster into the back of her belt. She realizes belatedly she should’ve checked the safety so she didn’t shoot herself in the ass. Finn and Connix offered to help her drill with a blaster; it’s on her list of things she needs to figure out.

“Impressive,” Desso says evenly. “But Princess Organa has fed me stories out of a fairy tale about the Jedi and your Master Skywalker. Moving one blaster isn’t really the same as lifting boulders, or ships, or facing down the First Order, is it?”

Rey shrugs. “Most of the time, one blaster will get the job done.”

She catches Leia’s lip quirking upward the tiniest bit.

He’d called her Princess Organa. Not General, or even Senator. The scorn Desso puts into the word does not make it sound like a term of respect.

Finn is looking at her with wide eyes, and Rey notices in her peripheral vision that he’s standing askew, too distracted for military precision. Col. Devi’s hand has moved to her own blaster.

“General,” Devi says in a clipped, professional tone, “I think Rey has given us enough of a demonstration for a small meeting room. There’s not much for her to do, unless you want her to destroy our property.”

“Rey, return General Desso’s weapon,” Leia says, breaking her silence. Her face looks like weathered stone, but Rey can tell from the lines around her eyes and a tiny groove next to her mouth that she approves of Rey’s actions. Poe looks desperate to speak, but seems to decide it’s better if he stays quiet.

“Of course, General Organa,” Rey says loudly and clearly, then she uses the Force to return the blaster to Desso, who watches it float into his hands with a stern expression.

“Finn, Rey, you’re dismissed,” Leia says. Rey and Finn share a startled look. Neither wants to leave whatever it is that’s happening here. But Rey nods and turns to go. Finn salutes, but looks at Leia rather than Desso, and it’s Leia who returns the salute. Desso doesn’t bother.

“What the heck was that?” Finn whispers to her once they’re in the passage on their way to medbay to see Rose.

Heck. Finn never curses. It’s like the First Order is fine with blowing up five planets and letting their troopers murder innocent bystanders, but hell and shit really cross a line.

“No idea,” Rey says. “He’s Republic, right? I thought we were the Republic.”

“I know, right? Good, I wondered if I missed something. And Leia and Col. Devi are old friends, they were telling crazy stories last night. But it seemed like Poe knew Desso.”

“Yeah,” Rey responds, “And what did he mean about locking Poe up for desertion?”

“And the way he called her princess, I’m surprised she didn’t just shoot him.”

They’re outside the door of medbay. The air here stings with chlorine and bacta, and the passage echoes with the beep of medical equipment and the bustling whirs of med droids going about their rounds. 

“I’m going to let you two talk alone,” she says with a smile she hopes looks casual. “There are some repairs I need to run on the Falcon and I can’t find Han’s service records anywhere. Meet you later?”

Finn nods. He swallows, and looks so nervous Rey pats his arm. He walks into medbay like he’s walking into his own execution.

***

But whatever Finn and Rose say to each other, they both seem calm and comfortable when Finn escorts Rose to dinner, where cheers erupt in the mess at her return. Rose smiles at Rey and says she’s so glad to finally meet her, since Finn always talked about her. Rey senses that it might be a good idea to give Finn a little distance, so she makes an excuse about X-wing training and sits next to Threnalli and Snap, who spend all of dinner waxing nostalgic about the Republic’s fleet of shiny new T-85s, another casualty of Starkiller.

Neither Poe nor Leia stays for dinner, put Poe stops in to grab two plates to go and pats Rey on the shoulder. “Good job in there,” he says, low enough that Threnalli and Snap can’t hear him over their loud conversations about cockpit ergonomics. “Desso’s a real piece of work now that he knows he was wrong about the First Order not being a threat. He’s trying to seize control of the civilian government. I’ll tell you more later.”

Rey turns this over in her mind, pretending to listen to the pilots’ chatter. Desso didn’t think the First Order was a threat? How could anyone think that, when they had control of so many planets? Why was a General in the army of the Republic so against the Resistance? She knows she’ll have a chance to ask him, later. But after the bubbling happiness of yesterday’s rescue, it makes her sad to think that maybe this place won’t be a safe haven for long.

No sense worrying about it. Whatever comes, they’ll survive.

She returns to the Falcon after dinner and is surprised when she hears Finn and Rose trot up the ramp, talking excitedly. “Hi,” Finn says, popping into view above her on the main deck. She’s down in the hatch working on the lines for the water-recycling system. “I just wanted to show Rose the ship.”

“Go nuts,” Rey calls up from the hatch. “You’re not bothering me.”

“It’s weird,” Rose says, her voice echoing strangely in Rey’s tight cylindrical workspace, “that I lived on this ship, we all almost died on this ship, but I’ve never seen it. Oh my god, is that—what the hell happened with the valve design on this compressor?” Rose calls down.

Rey has a wrench clamped in her teeth, which she talks around. “I know, right? Han said it helped with leaks but I think he was just too lazy to machine the parts.”

“Hmm. I like what you’ve done with the cable management on the comm deck, though.”

Rey spits the wrench out into her hand, and smiles. “Me and Connix had a lot of time to work on it while we were starving.”

She stuffs her tools in her bag and crawls up the ladder, and for the next forty-five minutes Rey gives Rose the engineer’s tour of the Falcon and Han’s decades of quick-fixes and ingenious workarounds. Rey’d been so focused on the drama between Rose and Finn that she forgot Rose was a fellow mechanic. She’s used to working on huge cruisers and bombers, but she really knows her stuff, and she’s much better on the tech side than Rey, but loves the grease-monkey work, too, and appreciates the freighter Rey has come to think of as home.

They’re fast friends. Finn just follows them around, grinning. Rey tries to catch his eye every now and then, but he’s being cagey.

At one point Rey has a question on the wiring diagram she’d been looking at when they were still in hyperspace, and she goes to the little drawer under one of the main bunks where she’d stuffed it.

“Wow,” Rose says, looking over her shoulder. “What are those?”

Rose is staring down at the Jedi texts. Rey’s smile ebbs a little, looking down at their multicolored covers stretched out of animal skin. They have a smell unlike anything she’s ever smelled, ancient, musty, but also sweet, like roasted caf or a really crusty, over-baked biscuit. She strokes their spines, and pulls one out at random and hands it to Rose. Rose instinctively handles it with extreme reverence, inhaling the scent.

“These are the ancient texts of the Jedi Order,” Rey says.

“What?” Rose’s eyes go wide and she fumbles the book, nearly dropping it. She stares at Rey with awe, then very gently opens the ancient book to examine its brownish pages, all covered in hand-drawn letters and illustrations.

“See?” Finn says, addressing Rose. “Cosmic.”

Rey smirks despite herself.

“Have you learned anything from them?” Rose asks.

Rey shakes her head. They’d passed them around the Falcon the first couple of days after Crait, and people had taken turns reading passages out loud for Rey, at least the ones in a language someone on the ship could figure out. But it’s mostly just meaningless scribbles and old stories of Jedi dead thousands of years, if they ever existed at all. A few repetitive sayings about wisdom and balance that don’t really seem all that useful.

Rey’s not sure what she was expecting, really. Instructions for how to rebuild a lightsaber would’ve been a great start, or how to fix a hyperdrive with the Force. But it’s just more confusing spiritual talk like Luke gave her on Ahch-To.

She knows there’s wisdom there, and she wants it, but it feels like she needs to get it from meditation, from sitting with the Force, not from books. But she’s not sure what she’s supposed to do when she meditates. She’s tried it a couple of times, just sitting in the Falcon, but nothing amazing has happened yet.

“Nothing cosmic,” Rey says with a shrug. Rose hands her the book and she slides it back into the drawer. Rose studies books as Rey closes the drawer, and seems to be thinking deeply about something.

“That reminds me, though,” Rey says, “if you two have a minute, could I ask you to read something for me?”

Rose looks confused, but Finn nods. “Sure.”

Rey walks over to a console and pulls up some of Han’s old files. “I’m looking for the service records for the aux intake on the hyperdrive, but I can’t read the file names. Do any of these look right?”

Rey knows numbers, and can recognize a few words by sight—mostly words she learned from her flight simulator holo in her AT-AT back on Jakku—but the filenames might as well be those ancient Jedi texts. Finn lets Rose, who knows what she’s doing, scan through the files.

“He didn’t pick a very descriptive naming system,” she says with irritation, “but it looks like these are all small folders, so—hold on, here are some that are just listed as dates, I bet it’s one of those.”

Rose clicks through a few of the files, making annoyed noises and commenting on how well the ship works considering the repairs these records describe. Rey gets up on a crate to look at the leaky pipe while Rose searches, and then Rose lets out a sound she wouldn’t expect to hear on a ship, and Rey wonders if she’s found a cache of baby porgs that had escaped the starving crew.

“Aaaw,” Finn agrees. Rey jumps down and peers suspiciously over their shoulder, ready to prevent them from saving the rotten little bastards that had eaten her ship. But it’s not a porg nest. It’s a 2-d slideshow; holos.

Leia, looking so young and so happy, with Han’s arm around her shoulder, Chewie by his side, and next to Leia, a face that almost brings tears to her eyes, with a shorter beard with no grey in it. “Luke,” she says. “That’s Luke. Are there more?”

They crowd around the console and flip through the slideshow. It’s mostly pictures of Han and Leia that elicit all kinds of cooing and warm feelings, with an occasional piece of brown hair in the foreground to indicate that Chewie was running a hand-held camera droid. There are pictures of friends and babies captioned with names of Resistance fighters that Rose reads out, letting them connect the dots to stories Snap and Leia have told about the old days.

They start flipping quickly, looking for more happy pictures of people they know, when the color drains from Rey’s face, and Finn yells. “Stop! Go back.”

Finn recognized it too. Rose returns to the holo and full-screens it. It shows four people, apparently playing a game on a screen.

Han stands behind the other three, leaning against a doorframe with his hands in his pockets, looking smug as he watches the game unfold. In a chair, holding an old-fashioned flight-sim controller, is a bearded Luke, wearing an expression that clearly suggests he’s trouncing his competitor.

Sitting on a sofa are two boys. One is obviously developing into a handsome man, with skin a little darker than Rose’s and big, brown eyes, his black hair shaved close like a monk or a soldier, pointing in a bombastically exasperated way at the game display off-camera with one hand while his other hand is gripping the arm of the second boy.

The second boy is unmistakably Ben Solo.

As a teenager, he looks like someone took a normal human and stretched him out on a noodle-maker. The camera has captured his sullen eyes mid-roll over his too-long nose, showing him clearly annoyed at Luke, or whoever is holding the holocamera. His hair falls almost to his shoulders and looks like it hasn’t been brushed or washed in weeks. But his mouth is turned up ever so slightly in a smirk as he holds his controller, as though he’s just biding his time, plotting with the other boy.

“Is there a caption?” Rey demands, trying to keep her voice casual.

Finn reads it for her, eyes meeting hers. “It says ‘Ben & Rax, home for a visit, 17 yrs’.”

“Oh,” Rose says, putting a hand over her mouth. “That must be Leia’s son,” she says sadly, looking from Rey, to Finn, to the holo. “Ben. She doesn’t like to talk about him. I think he must’ve died.”

***

Rey feels terrible for putting Finn in the position of lying to Rose. Whatever happened between them, she knows he can’t be happy about it. But she trusts him to keep the secret.

Still, she’s worried when Rose asks about the Force.

Rose is happy to have any reason to be out of medbay and working on a machine, so Rey doesn't mind so much when the other woman asks to stay after Finn goes off to a late detail, to help Rey run repairs of the coolant line. It’s a two-person job, anyway, and they fall into easy conversation in between requests for tools.

“Leia sent you off to Luke to learn how to be a Jedi, right?” Rose is saying. “That means it’s important.”

“No, no,” Rey says, trying to unscrew a connector that someone, at some point, had apparently glued together. “I went to Luke to bring him back. I was never going to train as a Jedi, that wasn’t the plan.”

“But why shouldn’t it be now that Luke is gone? If Luke was useful, then there must be good reasons for you to keep training with the Force.”

Rey chews the inside of her cheek, thinking again of Luke’s question to her about laser-swords and the First Order. What good was it all, anyway? She was better off helping the Resistance as a mechanic, or a pilot, or as a spy on the Supreme Leader, than she was as some monk—what did they call them? Padawans?—training to be wise.

She doesn’t need wisdom. She needs firepower.

“And besides,” Rose says, “it’s cool. It would boost morale, to see you around the hangar practicing with a lightsaber.”

Rey sighs. “I don’t even have a lightsaber. It was broken.”

Rose looks up at her, and Rey can’t read the expression in her eyes. “I know. And that reminds me, Rey, I’ve figured out, talking to Finn, that a lot of things on this subject are—classified. I just want to let you know, it’s not weird, it’s not like you’re keeping secrets. I’ve been in the Resistance a long time. If something is classified, just say so.”

Rey almost drops her spanner in her surprise. She’s been feeling so guilty about all the secrets. But, of course. These people are used to secrets. Their survival has depended on secrets. “Thanks, Rose,” she says, honestly. “I appreciate that.”

Rose nods curtly and goes back to adjusting the line. “So I know it’s broken. But maybe you can remake it.”

“There’s no one alive who could help me do it. I’ve been over it hundreds of times. It’s not just mechanical; you need the Force.”

“You have those books, Rey. There’s got to be some way you can learn this stuff without a teacher. Someone had to figure it out for the first time, didn’t they?”

Rey sputters as the connection comes loose and she’s treated to stale coolant dribbling all over her face as the line falls free. She wipes her face on her sleeve.

Something in what Rose said struck a nerve. Without a teacher.

There is someone alive who can teach her, if she wanted it badly enough.

She shakes the thought out of her head. It's hard not to think of Ben, to wonder how that gangly, smirking boy had become the monster who torments her, who refused to save them, who tried to kill them all on Crait. He’d been happy. He’d played games. He’d had friends--though she can imagine what happened to that handsome boy, Rax. Ben would’ve been at Luke’s academy by then, wouldn’t he?

If that boy was one of Luke's students, Ben murdered him. Because he thought Luke betrayed him. So much death, all for a misunderstanding.

Not a misunderstanding—Luke’s moment of weakness.

Rey shakes her head and jiggles the line a few times, trying to clear it so she can work on the other end. Maybe Rose is right. She should study those books, figure out how to fix the lightsaber, figure out how to…be a Jedi. Whatever that means. There’s just so much she doesn’t know, and the books are written for people who’ve been learning about the Force even as little children. She needs someone to help her connect the dots.

She needs a teacher.

Chapter Text

“I remember when Ben was little, he must’ve been six or seven, he was in a play—”

“I was eight, mom, it was right after we moved to HosPrime. And I hate when you tell this story.”

“Fine, he was eight,” his mother said, ignoring him as usual. “And he was one of the tiniest kids in his class—well, you knew him before his growth spurt, Rax, you know how little he was—with this expressive face, and his teacher thought he did so well reading out loud from storybooks that she asked if he wanted to be in a play. Well, I was shocked when he said yes, because he was so shy, so I asked her what she’d said to Ben. I bet you can guess.”

“She told him he was talented and special?”

“Bingo.”

Ben wanted to hit Rax for the knowing smirk that crossed his friend’s face. He knew what he’d been thinking: Ben Solo would do anything to feel special. It wasn’t true.

Well, if Rax thought it was true it was probably true. But god forbid that as a little kid on a totally new planet he’d wanted someone, anyone, to tell him he was good at something for once, since his parents failed to notice he was there most of the time. They still did, and here his mother was, knowing he didn’t want to hear this story, knowing she wouldn’t get to see him for months and months when he went back to Luke, taking the few days they have together to make fun of him constantly.

Good, fine, mom. I’m glad I can give you a shred of amusement before you get back to whatever life I interrupted.

 “And Ben was a little thespian for weeks, studying his lines, practicing, really getting into character for this—what even was it, Ben? An Equinox Day pageant?”

Ben shrugged, though he still remembered every line of that stupid play. Of course it didn’t make an impression on her.

“And on the last rehearsal, I get a call on my datapad from the teacher, who said Ben had just gone ballistic at the other kids for laughing and joking around, ‘not taking their roles seriously’.”

Ben refused to blush or look ashamed. He’d hated those kids. They’d been jealous of him, because they knew he was the best, all the teachers said so, and they called him a nerd and lots of other names he didn’t know. Rax wasn’t exactly grinning into his cup of tea, but it was the closest he ever got to a grin, and he was trying to hide it from Ben. But when he caught Ben’s eye his expression was full of sympathy, and Ben felt it in the Force. Rax knew what it was like to be hated for being the best.

“Well, of course I had to punish him,” his mother continued, “because he’d tried to beat another kid with a stick, though he was too tiny to hurt him, and I thought the whole thing was so Ben I could barely keep a straight face when I told him off.”

Ben shook his head and broke his scone with enough force to send crumbs flying. “So you punished me even though I didn’t do anything wrong. Even though I was right.”

“I didn’t say you were right, I said I thought it was funny. You can’t beat the shit out of people when you get mad at them, Ben.”

“What about Jabba the Hutt? You murdered him.”

“Fine. If anyone tries to enslave you, you have my blessing to beat the shit out of them. But anyway, on the night when all the parents were there”—not all the parents, Ben silently amended, since Han was off-planet—“Ben’s about to make his big entrance and he just freezes backstage. Just starts shaking, from what the teachers said, face gone white, looking like he’s about to faint or throw up. But of course I was out in the audience, I didn’t know any of this. What I saw was the whole little cardboard set start to shake, and then fall over on top of the kids who were already on stage. He just got so nervous he started…leaking.”

Ben prevented himself from wincing, and Rax snorted. “I did not ‘leak.’ I accidentally called on the Force. It was a huge surge of power that most of the padawans couldn’t even manage now, after years of training.”

His mother rolled her eyes, utterly unimpressed with her son, the most powerful Jedi in a generation, who bends the fabric of the universe to his will almost effortlessly. And maybe—he’d begun to hear whispers in his dreams; hopes, promises—maybe he would grow to surpass even Luke. “All right, sure, little Ben Solo smote his enemies with the Force.”

Rax felt the spike of Ben’s rage in the Force and sent him a warning look—Breathe, Ben—even as his mother remained completely oblivious. She’d always denied her connection with the Force and anything that reminded her of it, including her son. She had no idea what Ben could do. She’d sent him away to get rid of him, to be a slave to Luke’s stupid rules, not realizing she’d given him something so much better than what she and her dull world could’ve offered.

“But the funniest bit was afterward,” she said, laughing, “when he was just shaking on the way home, and I asked him what happened, and he got very quiet and he just said, ‘my character was supposed to be their friend. But they’re not my friends. I couldn’t go out there and lie to all those people.’ And he was so serious about it, you wouldn’t believe—well, actually I guess you would believe. And that’s when I realized, there’s no way this kid is ever going into politics.”

***

Kylo loiters outside a small meeting room on P-deck on his third morning as Supreme Leader, feeling the same way he felt waiting in the wings of that musty basement stage on HosPrime. He rubs his palms across the front of his new uniform, annoyed that this does nothing to wipe the sweat from inside his gloves, and checks the pocket of the greatcoat a third time for the little grey box. This will work.

Kylo thinks it looks fine. The uniform. He’s never noticed appearances, his own or anyone else’s, but Hux’s quips about walking around in a Vader costume cut deep. He needs a uniform that inspires respect from his army, not one pulled out of thirteen-year-old Ben Solo’s fantasies of cool. He doesn’t need a cape to show his power. He is power. Besides, the huge robes his Master had put him in had bunched at the shoulders and limited his movement in combat.

He runs his fingers across the slim black rings of rank marking the inches from his elbows to the hems of his sleeves, trying to relax, trying to think through the shadow of a headache that’s fogged his mind since morning meditation, when he settled into her headache and all the pains in her body. He’s drunk so much water this morning he feels uncomfortable pressure against the greatcoat, but he’s still thirsty, because she’s thirsty. He realized when he felt it that he may not get a chance to kill her. She may just fade away, dying of thirst in some forgotten corner of space.

It doesn’t matter. His Master bound her to him to teach him a lesson. To teach him to dig into minds and souls and twist them into what he wants them to be. He’d managed that; she’d come to him on his Master’s ship when he required it. But she was too easy. He’d played his part well and he can discard her, his training project, and move on to the real test. He’s learned to find his strengths, find his enemies’ weaknesses. And he’s spent that last two cycles doing just that.

Kylo hates showmanship. He’s most himself when he’s sweating and bleeding with a lightsaber in his hand. But his Master had structured that conversation with Hux as a message to him, he knew it. Everything he said was a lesson, just as the bond with Rey was a lesson. You understand the theater of power, Hux; Kylo Ren is a piece of theater.

If they want theater, they’ll get it.

He takes a final deep breath and places his fingers on the door control. They swish open, and he steps into the room.

The officers all swivel toward him, surprised. “What are you doing here?” Hux demands from the chair where he’s hunched over his caf.

Only then does he notice Kylo’s new uniform. Kylo tries not to feel too smug when the general’s face contorts into an expression that’s equal parts fury, disdain, and approval.

“That’s my design,” Hux says. And it’s true.

Kylo plucked the black greatcoat straight from Hux’s fantasies of giving speeches and commanding armies from Snoke’s throne. The general had lovingly crafted a uniform that would inspire respect and fear from seasoned soldiers and civilians alike, not like those gold bathrobes Hux so disapproved of on his Master or the “monkish frippery” of Kylo’s robes. He’d made a uniform worthy of Supreme Leader Armitage Hux, General of the First Order, destroyer of worlds, master of the galaxy. Kylo had simply submitted the design to the uniformer droids after de-Huxifying it.

“I see you got rid of the epaulettes and still refuse to wear a cap. And you made everything black,” Hux says, curling his lip as he raises his caf to his face. “How original.”

Hux, Peavey, the newly-promoted Brigadier General Dopheld Mitaka, and the other officers who will be supervising the inspection of the troops watch him, expecting Kylo to say something cutting and sit down. Meekly. It’s what he’s done so far, so he supposes he deserves it. They all look relaxed, bored even, as though they’re grateful for the minor distraction the child-Supreme Leader has granted them.

Good.

He meets Hux’s eyes with a calm, level stare. “A superior has entered the room, General,” he says.

Hux allows his caf mug to drop to the table with a thud that echoes through the small meeting room, and then regards him in disbelief. The other officers all exchange a glance, waiting for Hux’s cue. In the hangar outside the meeting room, the soldiers have begun to file in, and their bootsteps vibrate through the floor.

Kylo meets Hux’s stare. He’d done some reading, and Hux knows it. He’d chosen the book that every First Order officer lives and dies by: the Officers’ Code of Conduct and Courtesy, by General Armitage Hux, universally known as the OC3.

Hux had personally slavered over every word, including the effusive sections on paying respect to the wise and powerful Supreme Leader, to whom every First Order officer owes total obedience. Rax had known the first edition (by Brendol Hux) by heart, thanks to the ten years of First Order academy he’d endured—well, enjoyed, really—before he’d fled to Luke. But Kylo had never so much as looked at it until last night.

Hux, staring at him with his fingers still wrapped around the delicate handle of his mug of caf, has immediately grasped the situation.

The first thing Kylo realized while skimming through the OC3 was that Hux has taken his lack of military training as an excuse to shirk the respect he deserves. Kylo saw in his head the satisfaction the general got from subtle signs of disrespect he allowed himself. Things the general would never tolerate in his own junior officers. Things that Kylo would never even think to notice, but that every soldier in the room instantly understood as gross insults to a Supreme Leader too incompetent to recognize them.

The man frowns. Kylo feels his rage through the Force, but, as Kylo had seen and counted on, a failure of discipline is not one of Armitage Hux’s faults.

Heux hesitates only a fraction of a second before he pushes back his chair in one precise motion, stands with heels together, and salutes. Everyone in the room follows suit. They’d been waiting for Hux’s signal.

Kylo knows enough to understand he should say ‘at ease.’ But he prefers to make them stand there with heels together, one arm uncomfortably at their sides and the other raised in salute. Kylo steps to Hux’s side, and then just behind him, forcing the general to glare at the holo-board on the wall straight ahead.

Kylo leans in close to Hux and uses the Force to strain his arms and spine. “From now on, you pay the proper respect when I enter the room, or I’ll make you pay it. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Supreme Leader,” he replies, his voice clear and sharp even as Kylo feels him seething with hate.

Kylo expands his power outward, wrapping invisible cords around the necks and vertebrae of every officer in the room. For many of them, this is the first time they’ve felt the direct touch of the Supreme Leader’s mysterious power, and he feels them all stand straighter, instinctively trying to get away from the ropes that bind them.

“As for the rest of you, I expect you to uphold proper discipline regardless of the behavior of your fellow officers. One man’s insolence does not excuse you from your responsibilities.”

“Yes, Supreme Leader,” they all say in unison, like cadets in front of a drill instructor.

So far, so good.

“At ease,” Kylo says in a voice so low it’s almost a whisper, releasing them from the Force.

He keeps his eyes on Hux as he shifts into parade rest, feet apart and hands behind his back, turning his head to try to face his superior as protocol demands. Kylo sees his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows a sarcastic retort.

Kylo stays behind him, looming over him, making it as difficult as possible for Hux to show the respect the OC3 requires while retaining any sort of dignity. “You’re welcome,” he says softly, but not so softly the other officers can’t hear it.

“You’re welcome, Supreme Leader?”

“For not reprimanding you in front of the troopers fifteen minutes from now. It’s more courtesy than you’ve shown me. And I’m showing extreme generosity for not crushing the air out of your lungs, which I won’t hesitate to do if you give me the slightest excuse.”

This had been another revelation in the wake of his conversation with the girl. Hux can make fun of his rages all he wants, but without them, Kylo is only a husk of a man. His rage is a tool. But the fear of his rage is an even more powerful tool.

He may have made Hux the Supreme Leader in all but name, but he can work with a name. He may be horrifically unprepared for politics, for military command, for subterfuge, for strategy, for anything that doesn’t involve the Force, but he can engineer situations where only the Force matters. Like this one.

“I apologize for my lack of respect, Supreme Leader.”

Kylo allows himself the most gentle, threatening pressure on the man’s windpipe for his tone.

“Spare me the ass-kissing,” he says, and Hux’s left eyebrow rises in a miniscule expression of surprise. Kylo moves in front of him, allowing him to shift his neck into a more natural position, but keeps his back to him, facing the officers but not looking at them.

He’s working through his Master’s training here, alternating between a whip and a velvet glove as he feels the texture of Hux’s emotions in the Force. Praise and blame, shame and flattery—he’s prepared his palette just as his Master taught him.

“You’re honest enough to tell me what I don’t want to hear, and that’s why I value you,” he says to Hux. “But I expect you to set an example of impeccable discipline, and I expect you to enforce that discipline in my soldiers. I will not tolerate further disrespect from you or anybody else.”

Impeccable discipline. He’s quoting Hux’s own words, and every officer in the briefing room has the OC3 memorized. They all see that Kylo is throwing Hux’s own pretty sentences about absolute obedience to the will of the Supreme Leader in his face.

And, Kylo realizes as he tests the currents of the Force in the room, they enjoy it. They despise Hux every bit as much as they despise Kylo, and seeing the general getting a much-needed dressing-down has sent little sparks of glee flickering through the officers and staff.

They may yet come to respect him, if only because he’s not Hux.

“Yes, Supreme Leader,” Hux responds in a more neutral, professional tone. Kylo still feels the fury wafting off him like steam from fresh dung. Hux can’t stand that Kylo Ren, the uncontrollable toddler who wouldn’t last a day in Hux’s training regimen, is criticizing his military conduct or his discipline. But Hux also knows he’s in the wrong.

Be grateful I don’t make you get down on your knees and polish the floor with your forehead in the dust, you arrogant, stuffy, orange-headed little shit. Take your rules and your respect and choke on them.

“You may address me as ‘sir’ when convenient.”

“Yes, sir.”

He studies Hux for another long moment, letting him seethe silently in his rage and humiliation. Then he moves behind Hux again, forcing the man to crane his neck.

“The rest of you, as you were.”

Everyone but Hux sits. Hux remains standing with his hands behind his back, on display before his junior officers. Exposed.

Kylo steps very close to him, close enough to whisper over Hux’s shoulder into his ear, but he speaks clearly enough for everyone to hear him. He’s seen enough of Hux’s fantasies to know that the shiver he sees passing down Hux’s spine is not entirely fear—but enough of it is fear. And the other things, however revolting Kylo finds them, may prove useful.

“General Hux,” he says. “Under your command, one ship, one cruiser running on fumes, destroyed our entire central fleet, including the Supreme Leader’s flagship.”

Kylo is not looking at the other officers, or at Hux. He keeps his gaze on a spot near the corner of the ceiling, but he feels excitement surge through the room. This is what they want, even Mitaka, who always seemed to respect Hux. No one got this high in First Order command without crushing their rivals.

 “Under your command,” Kylo continues, “a weapon you spent your entire career advocating for and building, a weapon made out of a planet, was destroyed. By a few dozen X-wings, General Hux. A few dozen.”

Hux’s face has gone purple. The other officers are leaning forward, ready to spring on Hux like animals scenting blood.

Kylo decides then and there not to execute his plan with the little grey box in his pocket. He skims the shifting surfaces of possibilities in the Force, he feels the tug of opportunities that haven’t yet materialized. Strategy, plans; these were necessary things his Master had to teach him to reach his full potential. But his Master had died. And he’d died because he’d been so focused on his strategy that he’d failed to see the world in front of his nose, he’d been blind to the danger and deaf to the vibrations in the Force that Kylo had heard like the sweetest music, inviting him to strike.

Let them enjoy Hux’s humiliation, Kylo’s instincts tell him. Let them compete for his favor. It’s risky—Hux will fight all the harder to kill him—but he’ll face that when it comes. And he owns Hux’s mind. He reaches out with the Force to brush the edge of the man’s consciousness before he continues, his mouth a hand’s breadth from Hux’s shoulder.

“I am considering executing you for insubordination and gross breach of conduct, as I’m in my rights to do, or at least having you stripped and flogged on the bridge in front of your peers for sheer incompetence.”

Like your father did.

He leaves that part unspoken; Hux knows why he brought up that particular punishment, though, to his credit, his expression remains stoic despite his flushed face.

Kylo leans even closer to Hux, pressing against the general’s mind with a soft, menacing force. He feels something he hasn’t felt before in Hux’s mind—resistance.

Hux doesn’t get to resist him. Ever.

He punches through into Hux’s thoughts and feelings, forcing the man to grit his teeth and squeeze his eyes shut in pain. There is nothing Hux can hide from Kylo. He’d asked for this.

Kylo sees, in real time, the hate, the furious churning of strategy to overthrow this ignorant upstart, and what Kylo had hoped to see—fear. Just a tiny bit. But enough.

He is his Master’s apprentice. He can make that seed grow.

“Convince me not to kill you,” Kylo says, slowly and softly. “I can be merciful. But you’ll have one chance, General.”

“Yes, Supreme Leader,” Hux says, still facing forward. In his mind, Hux is screaming at him.

You think you’re clever, Ren.

They’re loving this, Kylo replies, in the way they’ve learned to communicate these last few days. They hate you more than they hate me. They love to see you humiliated. Without me they’ll rip you apart. Again.

Kylo fishes through the depths of his memories and brings up what he wants. Hux, bloodied and shirtless, his father holding a whip, the late Commander Yago of the Supremacy, dead by Kylo’s hand, standing beside him. Hux, curled in a fetal position in a corridor at the Academy, the pale skin of his arms white and yellow in turns in the flickering florescent lights.

You don’t know anything, you can’t—

I can take anything I want.

Kylo considers breaking him here, now, using the memories he’s seen to tenderly pry open the faults in Hux’s mind until they crack. He knows how to do it. He’s done it before, six times. He remembers Juno’s body suspended in the air, his Master screaming break her break her.

But he isn’t allowed to think of them. Not Juno, not Rax, none of them.

And Hux is useful, yet. He’d rather keep him.

Get out of my head, you ignorant—

Kylo follows his instincts, now. Just like he did with Rey. He senses a weak spot and attacks.

You stumbled into a game you have no idea how to play, Hux. Your father intended for you to fail. Your father intended for you to die. But you survived. You will rule, Hux. But to rule, you will serve me.

Kylo abandons Hux’s physical body, walking to the chair and taking his seat, but he concentrates and keeps the connection between their minds alive. He leans back, appearing relaxed, leaving Hux to stand alone in parade rest for a few long seconds.

Fuck you, Ren. I’ll find a way to kill you.

No. Because I’m the only one who can give you what you want.

“As you were, General,” he finally says out loud.

Hux sits. He wants to glare at the table but instead he keeps his head up, not avoiding but not seeking eye contact with Peavey or Mitaka or the others, and takes a long drink of his caf. Kylo feels on Hux’s tongue that it’s gone cold, and, feeling magnanimous, waves his hand and enjoys the general’s irritation as the cup warms in his hand, sending fragrant tendrils of steam into the stale air.

Hux does not thank him. He’s had long practice dealing with reprimands gracefully and handles it better than Kylo would, but he’s not happy. It doesn’t matter. Let him simmer for awhile.

Kylo feels giddy, holding Hux’s mind like this without his hand at his forehead. He’s never done this before. He’s never been able to do this—this is power only his Master had, to hold a mind at a distance, to hold it without putting all his attention on it. But Hux’s thoughts, feelings, sensations, belong to him.

Just as his own belonged to his Master.

The thought shatters his focus and the connection tears with a suddenness that makes Hux spit out his caf. Kylo pretends to ignore it. He’ll have to practice this.

“I wasn’t notified of this inspection,” Kylo says, looking for a change of topic.

“Sir,” Mitaka volunteers, straining to keep his voice calm. “Supreme Leader Snoke never personally supervised—”

“Supreme Leader Snoke is dead. In the future I expect to be notified of major events aboard my own flagship.”

Mitaka swallows. “Yes, Supreme Leader.”

Kylo always liked Mitaka, as well as he liked anyone in the First Order. He’d shown courage when Hux had weaseled out of giving him the bad news about the droid’s escape and forced Mitaka to take the fall. Kylo had regretted choking Mitaka for that, even before his Master had punished him for shooting the messenger. The pain of that punishment had driven the lesson home, though—since then, he hasn’t hurt anyone for telling him about a military failure. He’s only choked Hux.

And now, when Hux most deserves it, he’s showing restraint. It’s put Hux off-balance. Rage, he can deal with. Command, he can’t.

There is silence for a long moment. Mitaka glances down at his datapad, ensuring they’re not late for the inspection of the stormtroopers.

“You will conduct the inspection in my name, while I observe,” Kylo commands. He feels the wariness in the room, the fear. He knows what they fear most is his unpredictability, his rages. And he will give them those, when the time is right. He’d decided that, too, in the long hours of reflection after his conversation with Rey. His rage makes him strong. He will restrain himself, but not forever.

***

The inspection goes according to plan. Kylo stands at one end of the massive hangar on P-deck on a small stage, Hux’s over-the-top banners streaming overhead. It’s the first time he’s stood on a stage in front of an audience. He does not give a speech. Neither does Hux. Neither does anyone else. The only words that are spoken for an hour are commands: shoulder, arms! present, arms! Ready, front!

He tries to keep his mind on the Force, not on his own sweating palms and pounding heart, feeling so exposed in front of all these people, feeling like he could make a fool of himself at any moment. His nervousness threatens to overtake him during the otherwise-boring review, and he feels himself sliding outward toward the Force—leaking. But no. All he has to do is stand and be silent, and give two commands.

At the end of the review, the staff officers Hux has chosen approach the stage and salute him. Hux stands front and center, waiting for the Supreme Leader’s nod so he can order the dismissal.

Kylo does not nod. He stands still. “General Hux, approach,” he says, calmly. He catches their confused looks before Hux, jaw clenched, marches to the side of the stage and up the stairs. He presents himself before the Supreme Leader and salutes.

They meet each other’s eyes, but Kylo does not enter his mind. This must be Hux’s decision.

The acoustics in the hangar are terrible, every bootstep reverberating off the distant bulkheads. But Kylo hears only silence. He senses the Force surging through the massive space. The fear and eagerness radiating from so many bodies flows into a rushing, coursing, thundering river of Dark Side energy, all flowing inward to his own body like he’s standing at the center of a vortex. He tries to ride it, but he feels it slipping away from him—or, no, he feels it trying to pull him under.

“Kneel, General,” he commands.

Kylo watches the muscles on Hux’s face twitch, and even without going into his mind, he feels the man’s rage. This is not a parade command; his Master had never asked Hux to kneel. Only the apprentices had to kneel, only Kylo.

Hux stands still. Kylo sees the hand that isn’t saluting him move a fraction of a centimeter toward his blaster. Time slows down.

Everything is still silent except for the roaring of the Force. It has been so, so long since he felt this, since he allowed himself to submit.

Kylo goes under. He is no longer Kylo. He is the Force. He is the Dark.

There is so much of the Force within him now that even Hux can feel it, and the General’s eyes widen in fear.

He kneels, down on one knee, then both.

“Bow.”

He sees Hux’s confused expression, and without even trying to Kylo conveys what he wants into Hux’s mind, and feels a surge of hate in response.

But Hux knows he’s beaten. He flattens his palms on the dirty, cold durasteel stage and slowly, slowly lowers his forehead to the floor, until the black surface of the stage compresses the cartilage of his nose. Kylo feels it. Hux’s ass juts out toward the assembled soldiers, and Kylo hears a new motif in the Force, a subtle strain of amusement underneath the complex harmonies of fear and boredom and curiosity drifting through the assembled soldiers.

Kylo does not smile; he’s too full of power to feel triumph.

This is the end of the script. He’s supposed to dismiss them now. But he feels the opportunity tugging him forward again, the gap in the future course of the galaxy just wide enough for him to step into it and crack it wide open.

In one smooth motion, he unhooks his lightsaber from his belt, ignites it, and lowers the sputtering red blade to within a centimeter of Hux’s neck vertebrae. He doesn’t so much see as feel the general’s breath hitch as Kylo freezes his muscles so he doesn’t get any ideas. He feels Hux’s determination not to be afraid, to face the end with dignity if this is going to be his end. He feels Hux’s trepidation as the power coils and swirls around him. Kylo holds him there, and looks up, his voice booming, echoing with the Force.

“Kneel,” he says to the assembled soldiers.

He feels, more than sees, ten thousand seasoned soldiers go down on their knees without needing a second command.

“Bow.”

They bow, just as Hux had. Kylo hardly notices.

The power in him is surging—not leaking, but the same feeling he’d had on that other stage, long ago—and it’s so much he’s not sure he can keep control. But he doesn’t want to control it.

The Force is fear, the Force is life, the Force is heat and consciousness and power, the Force is the blood thrumming through Hux’s jugular a finger’s breadth from the heat of his lightsaber, it’s the sweat on the fingertip of every soldier on the Finalizer, it’s the hum of the metabolism of every microbe on this ship and the wreck of every other ship in their fleet and the empty reaches of space, and he is nothing, he is its instrument, and it sings through him.

He closes his eyes. He is home. This is his coronation.

He feels the power crashing from one end of the ship to the other like a tsunami, crushing everything in its path. They all feel it. He’s there with them, every soldier on every deck shivering as the power slides over them like the caress of an invisible enemy, gone as soon as it’s noticed. For a moment he holds every thought, every memory, every echo of a wish that has ever been made anywhere near the iron that became this steel in his mind, all at once, a symphony written by gods, just for him.

It’s all he can do not to fall to his knees before the majesty of the Dark Side, the only Master that ever mattered. But he stays upright. While his army keeps their foreheads to the floor, he stretches out the hand that isn’t holding the lightsaber, though he leaves the grey box in his pocket.

The whip and the velvet glove. The Force is not enough to hold the galaxy together. He needs to transform the power of the Force into other kinds of power.

He struggles, barely afloat in the waves of Force crashing through the ship, to focus his attention on the general who is now shaking in terror, trying to control himself and die well, at his feet. Through the waves of the Dark Side Kylo can only vaguely remember who this man is or why he matters; for that matter, he can only vaguely remember who Kylo Ren is, or why he matters, if he ever knew. But his instincts tell him what to do.

“Rise,” he tells the army, keeping Hux pinned to the stage as the officers pass the command to their troops, and everyone stands. He feels their fear now, real fear that takes the melody of the Force and soars.

He flings his empty hand and the lightsaber outward, hurling the still-bowing Hux five meters into the air, spread-eagled above Kylo’s army, just as Rey had been under his Master’s power. Let them see him throw their General around like a rag doll.

But this show is only partially for them. It’s Hux he has to impress, Hux and the other officers. He takes the symphony, the awareness, the power, and he forces it into the heads of the suspended general and the officers standing below the stage. He sees Hux shudder and writhe in midair, knowing that the man can only perceive the tiniest fraction of the gift Kylo has given him. Force-sensitive, they call it, and Hux is not, but Kylo has called enough power from the feelings and fears of this army to force a blind man to see.

Hux is too high in the air for Kylo to see his face, but Kylo feels the tears form in the corners of Hux’s eyes, eyes that haven’t held tears for decades. He feels it in the other officers: tears, terror, awe. They all try to hide it; it’s not overwhelming as it is for Kylo, but they feel it and they know it’s real, and Kylo understands why his instincts guided him to do this. They called him a wizard, but they didn’t understand the Force, they didn’t understand that what Kylo showed them was such a small, insignificant thing compared to the power of this energy that flowed through them all. But now they feel it, and they know he’s not a wizard, he’s a prophet, he’s a god, bringing them knowledge of the truth of the universe.

His Master never did this. Only Kylo did this. Only Kylo took the knowledge and shared it.

He lowers Hux to the ground, not on the stage but the bare hangar floor, releasing him and letting him crumple to the floor, unable to support himself as the last dregs of power course through him. He struggles to get up; his cap has fallen off and his red hair has escaped its pomade.

The last notes of the surge of Force fade, the prophet fades, the god fades, leaving only Ben Solo, standing in front of an astonished crowd of ten thousand stormtroopers, realizing what he’s done, overwhelmed with his heart pounding and his palms sweating.

He does not dismiss the soldiers. He pivots, sending the hem of his new greatcoat swinging, and strides out, trying to hide his shaking hands.

***

Hux has a protocol for everything, and it turns out that the prescribed course of action following professional humiliation and forced spiritual attunement to the throbbing, bleeding heart of the universe involves a tactical retreat to his quarters for a mid-morning brandy. He’s not sure if Ren is watching him or listening through his mind as he congratulates himself for pouring the glass without shaking, but he assumes he is, and swallows it all with a mental curse at Kylo fucking Ren.

Nonconsensual enlightenment, Hux thinks as he pours a second glass. It would be Ren who engineered that particular form of torture. He’s not a spiritual man, almost as a matter of principle. What matters is this world, here and now. What matters is power. His father believed that and his father had been right, in that if in nothing else. Hux had no patience for mystical diversions, and little respect for anyone who chose to soothe the hurt of an utterly uncaring universe where only power mattered with fairy tales of a magical Force.  But, confronted with the reality of it, he had cried. It was absurd. It was terrifying. At least he managed not to piss himself with his ass hanging out in front of his entire army.

There’s a fact Hux never imagined would bring him such relief.

He takes a steadying sip of his drink, reminding himself that Ren’s little display does not change the essential facts of his situation. Ren remains an incompetent man-child with neither the expertise nor the inclination to take part in the actual day-to-day running of the galaxy, albeit an incompetent man-child with reserves of magical powers far more impressive than Hux had thought.

Hux has no real rivals among the officers on the Finalizer, though he’s annoyed that he has Ren to thank for that. Mitaka is ambitious but lacks the command presence and the will to violence that would be required to pose a real challenge to Hux. Peavey’s still a glorified shuttle-driver whom Hux allowed on the council for the express purpose of lulling him into a false sense of security.

Naturally Ren knows Hux wants to kill him, but Ren also knows that Hux won’t be able to hold central command long without a lightsaber at his back--though, he can’t help thinking, he’d prefer it to be much, much farther from his physical spine than it was on that stage. There are officers on the front that would turn and bring his armies home to attack the soft underbelly of the First Order while it’s unprotected.

And besides, there may be other lightsabers out there, dangling over his head. Which reminds him. There is one job that only Ren can do.

Ren, he ventures. Yes, he hates the man; yes, he’s humiliated, but he will not huddle away in his office. Judging by the slight tremble Hux had seen in the retreating Supreme Leader’s hands, Ren was the one who was hiding. This does not surprise Hux; of course Ren would cap off his moment of victory with an attack of crippling insecurity that sent him scuttling off to his quarters. Are you listening?

Cautious relief wells up in his chest for a moment, but after a long silence, he feels a sensation in his head that somehow reminds him of both the time he got stabbed in a mock duel at the Academy and the way it feels to slip on his silk robe after a hot shower, raw sensuality and power and pain.

What did you call me?

Fucking hell, are they really going to have to keep up with this charade even in his own head?

Yes, Ren responds, overhearing the thought.

Fine. Supreme Leader, he thinks, swirling his brandy in the glass. Had this been how it was between Ren and Snoke?

If Ren overhears the question, he doesn’t answer, so Hux continues. The Knights of Ren. They need to be taken care of.

A long pause, so long Hux thinks Ren has shut him off. Then: they’re dead.

And Rax Apolin?

I said they’re dead.

“Tone” doesn’t really exist in this way of speaking, but there’s something there, something final that indicates Hux shouldn’t go any farther with this line of questioning. But Hux can’t resist.

Really. For a dead man he’s making quite a name for himself in the Senate.

Hux sets down his brandy and pulls up the relevant record on his datapad. As his eyes fall on the personnel file, a stabbing pain wrenches through his head from occipital to forehead. Whatever Ren sees there, he doesn’t like it.

Fucking hell, Ren, that hurts.

Nothing.

Supreme Leader?

But he’s gone.

Chapter Text

Kylo throws the little grey box containing the Grand Marshall’s cylinders of rank into one of his desk drawers and slams it shut. The cracked screen of his datapad, the first casualty of his fit of rage, beckons to him.

Two voices now: coward, fearful boy wars with let the past die.

Swallowing, Kylo flexes his raw knuckles, the second casualty of his rage, since he failed to do any damage to the durasteel wall.

He will not kneel.

A personnel file bleeds across the cracked screen. Mendar Ren’s holographic face stares out at him, older than Kylo last saw it but with no bruises or blood, his eyes as dark and earnest and sad as Kylo remembers.

The file informs him that Lieutenant Colonel Gallius Rax Apolin—he’s undercover, and there is no mention of the name their Master had given him—is currently stationed in the capital city of his family’s home planet, Kuat, on a special mission from Supreme Leader Snoke.

The words “currently stationed” suck the moisture from Kylo’s mouth, which already feels parched with sympathetic thirst. He walks as calmly as he can to the refresher sink, cupping tepid water in his hands because he’s shattered all his drinkware, and gulps three big handfuls of stale recycled water. He sucks the blood from his knuckles and then pulls on his gloves.

That personnel file sparkles with accolades, commendations. Mendar—Rax—is a Senator now, and a Reserve officer, popular and capable, the leader that he and Luke and everyone else expected him to be.

Hux is right. He’s a threat, and Kylo has to kill him. Because he didn't know he was alive. His Master lied.

Kylo could’ve found him easily if he’d tried, but of course his Master forbade that.

“It’s time to let old things die,” his Master had said that night in the throne room. “You must not think of them, any of them, ever again.”

When he broke the rule, in dreams, or late at night lying alone when his control faltered, his Master would punish him. His Master broke through every corner of his mind, of his memories, of his dreams. His Master’s punishments were severe.

They were so severe that when Hux, without warning, let his eyes fall to Mendar’s face on the datapad, Kylo had recoiled from his mind in sheer terror. It took almost five minutes of pacing with his lightsaber out to convince himself that his Master’s ghost wasn’t going to storm into his quarters to punish him. It took another ten to get up the courage to type the forbidden name into the classified personnel database.

Kylo stares down at the sink, still running, vaguely aware that he should turn it off. There are too many threads coming unwoven, too many pieces of the puzzle he never knew about.

His Master lied to him.

Rax is alive. The others might be, too. Hux is under his control. In the hangar, he’d channeled power he never would’ve believed he had, power that could’ve rivaled Luke. Across the galaxy, Rey is dying and he feels it, and that power is new too.

He has to kill Rey. He has to kill Rax. He has to kill; it’s all he’s ever been able to do.

The water runs down the drain, and Kylo blinks when the chronology alerts him that briefing begins in five minutes. He swipes his new greatcoat from the chair where he threw it and leaves his quarters without turning off the sink.

His Master lied.

***

By the time Kylo steps into the briefing room he has himself under control, with his new gloves covering the fresh wounds on his hands. His officers rise and salute, reeking of fear, acute and fresh from this morning. They don't know his Master lied to him; they don't need to know. They only saw his power.

A brief experimental jump into Hux’s mind tells Kylo that word of his performance has spread through the ship. Hux is annoyed that every mess hall is buzzing with the story of the Ginger General spread-eagled mid-air by Kylo Ren.

This makes Kylo feel a little more centered. Moments of triumph are rare, and Kylo’s Master would be disappointed if he wasted one.

So despite the unsteadiness that lingers in his bones after the immense surge of power, Kylo forces himself to not just pay attention but take the dominant role in the conversation about the state of their intelligence networks. Still, at intervals Kylo catches himself pressing his gloves too hard into the arms of his chair to keep the world from spinning away underneath him.

“Sir,” Mitaka ventures after half an hour. The man swallows, accidentally drawing Kylo’s attention to the skin of his throat. Kylo doesn’t need to go into his mind to know Mitaka’s remembering what it felt like to be dragged across the room by an invisible noose. “Our informants report some strange rumors that you engineered the suicide attack to seize power from the previous Supreme Leader.”

Hux lets out a snort of amusement before he controls himself. “That’s absurd.”

“Indeed, sir,” Mitaka says in a neutral tone. “The rumors assert that you, General, masterminded this plan.”

Hux can’t suppress a cruel smirk at that.

“I would’ve come up with a plan that didn’t involve the destruction of my fleet.”

“Of course, sir. They're ridiculous, but they might hint at deeper unrest in the Order; we know some of the officers on the fronts have ambitions in central command,” Mitaka replies.

Kylo frowns. “Where are you hearing these rumors?”

“Sir,” Mitaka says, “General Hux put me in charge of analyzing some of our intelligence information from FOSB, from some of the other parts of the fleet. Obviously the sources of the rumors are being located and eliminated, but right now there are suspicions they're coming from fairly high up in the chain of command; otherwise I wouldn't bother you with them.”

The First Order Security Bureau, whose white coats had earned them the nickname ‘Snowmen,’ served as the thought police of their whole operation. They had their roots in the very first days of the First Order, the most fanatical among the Imperial loyalist refugees who fled to the Unknown Regions after the Battle of Jakku thirty years ago.

Hux had been one of those refugees; so had Rax, who told him all about the Snowmen pulling up in huge, windowless white speeders and carrying off whole families in the middle of the night for suspected disloyalty. Nowadays, they spend their time re-educating errant Stormtroopers, running background checks on contractors, and rooting out potential Resistance informants.

Kylo deals with FOSB only occasionally, in cases like Dameron’s where the usual interrogation methods fail. His master usually gave that work to Varra Ren, the only Knight who never trained with Luke, the only one who rivaled Kylo in loyalty. After Varra died his Master rarely had Kylo concern himself with their business.

And now, apparently, that business is to ensure universal obedience to the new Supreme Leader. To him, to Ben Solo. A whole agency of white-coated zealots ready to kill anyone who doesn’t like him. If he weren’t exhausted from the Force and vicariously half-dead from thirst, he might’ve laughed.

Instead, he speaks to Mitaka. “Are you sure that FOSB can be trusted?”

“Hard to say, Supreme Leader,” Mitaka replies evenly. Kylo appreciates Mitaka’s honesty; he could see this man wearing that Grand Marshall’s pin if Hux fails him. “Their loyalty is expressly to the Order, not to any individual. Their trust would only be in doubt if someone managed to convince a FOSB agent that your accession was illegitimate.”

Mitaka spoke the last part very carefully. What does he know?

Kylo checks Hux’s mind, deciding to go into Mitaka’s later. He notices that Hux gives no outward sign of the invasion—Kylo’s managed to do it nearly painlessly. He wonders if, with practice, he could learn to slip into others’ minds without them knowing, as his Master could.

He quickly finds the information he’s looking for. He watches Hux’s memory of telling Mitaka and Peavey that Snoke died in the suicide attack, along with all the Praetorian guard. Hux had set explosives in the throne room in order to cover this lie.

Kylo’s astonished at Hux’s forethought.

Do you think I’m stupid, Supreme Leader? Hux demands telepathically, shooting him a subtle glance from across the table. Even in Hux’s own head, he’s already disciplined himself to use his title instead of ‘Ren.’ As far as anyone but you or I knows, Snoke died in the atttack. As I said, the timing of the attack was excellent.

Mitaka continues. “Grand Inquisitor Phar died in the evacuation from Starkiller Base.”

“His replacement?” Kylo inquires.

Mitaka sends the relevant file to Kylo’s datapad with a swipe of his finger, revealing an aged face, pinched with discipline under serious brows. “Former Viceroyal Inquisitor Enric Pryde, sir.”

“Bring him here,” Kylo orders, scanning the man’s file: he’s in his 60s, so he would have been well-established when the Empire fell. If he can go into Hux’s mind, he can certainly go into Pryde’s, and it would be good to know who has a history of supposed disloyalty.

Mitaka nods, and gestures for SQ-3475 to note the appointment. The stormtrooper complies, issuing orders on her datapad, and when Peavey holds up his cup she fetches him more caf.

“Sir,” Mitaka goes on, “the rumors within the central fleet can be contained; the real challenge for our intelligence networks will be on the newly-acquired planets. There's already hints of a new Resistance.”

“I concur, Supreme Leader,” Hux says. “With the Resistance destroyed, our intelligence is outdated. We’ve annihilated every center of Resistance sympathy that we know about. Insurgency will spread from the Populist planets; we need better eyes and ears to penetrate their networks.”

Kylo stands, finding it too difficult to concentrate on the details as Rey’s headache and her thirst scrape at the inside of his skull. He walks to the wall of the briefing room, looking out at the stars beyond.

He hasn’t let the connection to Hux drop, and he’s unnerved to see his own profile through the general's eyes, standing in the eerie, diffuse glow of the ship’s exterior lights. Hux notes with irritation how sensitive the Supreme Leader always looks, his lips slightly parted, his eyes always gazing out with some private sorrow from under his unkempt hair, reflecting the stars beyond the window. Though Hux has to admit the new greatcoat suits him; it makes him look less like a lost poet and more like a military leader.

Kylo closes his lips and swallows, trying not to pay attention to Hux’s minute observations of his mannerisms and focus instead on what passes over the officers’ faces when the Supreme Leader isn’t looking.

Kylo has an idea. It’s a risk even to propose it, but his mother’s next move is obvious, and he sees a possibility opening in the Force. It won’t be as satisfying as simply killing them all, but he has to play the long game now.

When Kylo speaks, his voice is soft, but it carries. “Suspend the blockades. Let the freighter land.”

He’s not surprised to see, out of the corner of Hux’s eye, suspicious looks on the faces of the men at the table at the suggestion that they let his mother go free. They know what Organa is to him. Hux, in his mind, can’t hold back his private disbelief—Oh, for fuck’s sake, now Ren’s feeling bad for his mum. But this isn’t mercy.

“They’re desperate,” Kylo says, trying to bring his attention away from Hux’s thoughts and sensations while keeping the connection alive. A piece of debris floats by in the distance, and a section of the Supremacy slides slowly into view. It gives him another idea, one unrelated to the Resistance—but that has to wait. “They’re starving. They’re out of water. They’ll lead us to their allies, to the people who sat on the sidelines when no one believed the First Order was a threat.”

“How do you know this?” Peavey demands, adding a belated, “Sir.”

“That’s not your concern.” Let them think his knowledge is limitless.

Peavey blanches. “Yes, sir.”

Hux catches on first. Not surprising, since Kylo is thinking about the same strategy Hux developed for Peavey: let the vermin lead them to the nest. “It’s a valid idea, Supreme Leader,” he says, not managing to keep the surprise out of his voice. “Organa’s next move will be to fall back on her own networks from the Senate and from the old Rebellion, to locate sympathizers. If we can ease the blockade enough to track them, rather than kill them, we can let her lead us to any would-be insurgents.”

Peavey speaks, shaking his head so that Kylo sees, through Hux’s eyes, his moustaches jiggle from side to side. “But if we weaken the blockade, the chances of them slipping down to a planet unnoticed are too great. We might lose them entirely.”

Kylo takes a deep breath, looking toward a swath of space far, far too distant for him to see, where she sits in the Falcon, suffering.

“I know where they are,” Kylo says.

He’s still in Hux’s mind, and he feels the general’s unease at his admission. For Hux, knowledge is power, and he’d been certain of his absolute command of the First Order’s intelligence networks. That the Supreme Leader might have information he doesn’t is simply not possible. Not possible at all.

You can locate them with the Force? Hux asks in his mind, reaching the only plausible conclusion.

Kylo considers not replying, but decides there’s no reason Hux shouldn’t know he can track them. The other officers might believe that Supreme Leader commands a private spy network, but Hux won’t.

Yes.

Kylo senses what he can only call a mental eye-roll. You might’ve mentioned this ability earlier. Perhaps before we spent billions of credits developing hyperspace tracking.

It’s experimental, Kylo replies. But it’s enough.

Kylo threw out the word ‘experimental’ without thinking about it, but the word hits Hux like a blow. The General never thought to imagine the Force as another kind of engineering, with experimental procedures and new things to discover. He assumed everything there is to know about it lay entombed inside some thousand-year-old hardcopy books in a dusty temple somewhere. He figured Ren and Snoke memorized and chanted passages of the ancient texts when they sat in meditation.

But if the Force is another unexplored frontier, another technology Hux can use, well, that would be something. The problems he could solve if he could overcome space, time, gravity—the idea sets Hux’s heart beating fast. Kylo watches him imagine a future where Hux has used Kylo’s abilities to create as-yet-unimaginable technologies, he and the Supreme Leader working side by side to build weapons and ships that would bring the galaxy into a new age.

Hux is surprised by how appealing he finds this vision. Kylo is, too. He turns back to the table, greatcoat swinging. The two of them share a glance that contains, for the first time, mutual interest, a look that Kylo feels guiding him toward something as-yet-undefined in the Force, a new possibility.

The other officers around the table fiddle with their datapads, waiting for the Supreme Leader to speak after his inexplicable statement about the freighter. None of them want to question him, and all of them wonder why they’ve spent precious resources trying to locate this ship if Kylo could do it all this time. Kylo finds himself suddenly anxious to be done with the meeting, unable any longer to keep his mind off the questions tumbling through his brain.

Hux rescues him. Kylo’s not as annoyed by this as he should be. He’s still exhausted, and standing hasn’t helped ease his pounding head. His lips have cracked from sympathetic thirst.

“We have new, private intelligence concerning the freighter,” Hux says smoothly, feigning disinterest. “The Supreme Leader’s idea has merit. We’ll allow Organa to do our intelligence work for us, lead us back to the nests of Resistance sympathizers. We’ll send in operatives to infiltrate their networks. Then, rather than kill the queen and be done with it, we can destroy the whole colony at our leisure.”

Kylo sees Mitaka and Peavey exchange a look.

“Give the order,” Kylo commands.

Mitaka nods, and Peavey brings up his datapad and immediately conveys the order to dismantle the blockade and allow the freighter to pass.

Kylo breathes deeply into the sensation of Rey’s pain, marveling at how strange it is that a few keystrokes on a datapad will make the difference between that pain getting worse and worse until she dies and that pain easing as she slakes her thirst tonight on some distant planet and falls asleep, safe. He turns back to the window to stare at that distant point in space, letting the sounds of the meeting wash over him. He tells himself he’s not relieved.

***

As soon as the meeting finishes, Kylo orders his TIE-Silencer readied and snaps at Hux not to disturb him. Hux expects him to destroy Mendar Ren as soon as possible, and that would be the smart thing to do, but too many thoughts circle through Kylo’s mind, too many questions need to be answered. Questions his Master left him.

He flies to the ruins of the Supremacy, which have been mostly sealed off and re-pressurized for the construction crews. He doesn’t file a flight plan, he doesn’t request a guard, he doesn’t tell anyone where he’s going.

This ship was his home for six years. The crew knows who and what he is, and they know not to disturb him as he makes his way to the throne room.

After days of clean-up the passages have been cleared of debris, but the lights are still out in this sector, leaving only sparsely-hung construction lanterns that cast a flickering sulfur-yellow glow over everything. The O2 pumps drone like giant insects hovering just beyond his line of sight. The construction crews have authorized only minimal life support here; it’s freezing, and he pulls his new greatcoat tighter around him as he enters the throne toom, facing down the long, lonely walkway he cross so many times. He pauses in the doorway, arrested at the sight of the spot in front of the throne where he always knelt, trying not to give into a sudden fear of ghosts.

Kylo forces himself to step forward. His bootsteps echo through the gutted space, the soundwaves bouncing off the uncovered windows. It’s so dark, now. No red banners, nothing but the cold background of space.

The throne is gone. Hux’s explosives have done their job.

He can’t shake the feeling that someone is following him, and as he approaches the place where he always kneels, he breaks into a run—he can’t look at that place on the floor right now. He doesn’t stop until his palm smacks flat against the panel that leads into the Knights’ private quarters, and lets out a shaky breath when the doors groan open, responding to his touch and the Force.

No crew has tended this chamber; no artificial lights guide his way. Kylo fishes the comm out of his greatcoat and turns on the flashlight, watching the beam dissipate through the vapor of his halting, shallow breaths in the freezing air.

“Master?” he asks. He hates how childish he sounds, how desperate.

The comm lights his way as he picks his way through the dark chamber, watching his feet too closely, like his Master’s bones will crunch under his feet. But the floor is smooth, clean, and his boots echo like bombs in the sepulchral quiet.

Something hisses behind him. He whirls around, tossing the comm aside to draw his lightsaber. The certainty hits him like a vision: he’ll see his Master, furious, his hand raised in a gesture of vengeance.

But it’s only the door, swishing shut.

Kylo tries to calm himself. He feels safer with the lightsaber, and it provides more than enough light to guide him, so he picks up his comm and drops it into his pocket. The sputtering red cross makes the large antechamber flicker around him. This was his home. There’s nothing to fear.

He moves forward, ignoring the pounding of his heart, trying to call the Force to him but finding nothing. This should worry him, but he’s too focused on survival—he needs to find what he’s looking for and get out. Fear can come later. He bypasses the door that leads toward the Knights’ cells, a place he is no longer allowed to go, and presses his hand against the panel at the far end of the passage, which he knows leads into his Master’s private chamber.

He’s shocked to finds that it opens for him. Or, at least, it opens for the Force. Could he have gotten in at any time, but he’d just never tried?

Probably. His Master would’ve been certain he’d obey.

Kylo doesn’t know if his Master slept, but there’s a huge, soft bed, still unmade. Kylo has a mad urge to go smell the sheets, just for some desperate memory of the only person who ever made him feel safe, but he recognizes that the urge originates from a place in his mind just beyond the boundaries of sanity and refuses to give in to it.

There’s a ‘fresher, very normal despite the large scale. A bar stocked with liquor. Kylo swallows the tang of betrayal at seeing it. His Master was just that, a Master. Snoke didn’t need to starve himself to access the Force, didn’t need the discipline he subjected Kylo to, because he’d finished all that long ago.

Kylo raises the lightsaber, then closes his eyes. He reaches out with the Force, seeking anything digital—but there’s nothing. Nowhere where his Master might’ve kept a record of the Knights’ location. No technology at all.

But he does feel something in the Force. He turns to a cabinet on the left side of the large bedroom, just to the side of a large window looking out on the expanse of space. He opens it; it’s unlocked.

A single lightsaber rests on a dusty shelf, one item in a pile of miscellaneous junk his Master tossed carelessly into the cabinet. Kylo examines the junk carefully, with his eyes and with the Force, but it’s all mundane, and none of it is associated with the Knights.

He reaches out for the saber—it’s familiar. He stretches his hand out slowly, trying to preemptively defend against the memories he knows will flood him when he touches it.

His fingers touch the hilt, then wrap around it, and he turns Juno Ren’s lightsaber over and over in his hand. He ignites it, just to be sure: it’s red. Like him, she’d been forced to bleed the one she’d made with Luke. He closes his eyes, holding both sabers in front of him, remembering the little black-haired girl who had kicked him in the shins and ordered him to teach her to fight.

Ben whacked Jyun with the stick, circling her in the blue grass of the practice-ground. Rax pretended not to watch her, doing a terrible job of keeping the adoration out of his eyes.

“Stop thinking,” Ben ordered, smacking her in the ribs.

“How do I stop thinking?” she demanded. “Do you honestly go around not thinking?”

“Just act.”

“How am I supposed to know when to act when I can’t think about it?”

"Feel it. In the Force.”

Jyun rolled her eyes. “You know, I’m starting to understand why you’re such a fuckup, Ben. You’re exactly like Master Luke.”

He jabbed her left shoulder so hard she almost fell. “You’re still thinking.”

She jumped backward, spun, and launched a return attack at Ben’s legs that forced Ben to leap to the side before she took out his kneecaps.

Ben cursed at her. Rax rolled his eyes.

“Thinking,” she said with a grin, glancing at Rax. “You should really try it sometime.”  

Ben extinguishes Juno’s lightsaber. There’s only one reason it would be here, locked in his Master’s quarters, instead of in her very capable hands. She’s dead.

That’s not unexpected—after all, he killed her.

He tries not to feel whatever it is that threatens to overtake him as he drops the small saber into the inner pocket of his greatcoat. He’s not allowed to feel it.

He walks by the light of his own saber back out into the throne room, pausing to stand beside the place where he always knelt to his Master. He stares at the floor, now scratched and covered in dust from the explosives, but still smooth enough to reflect the red light of the saber. He sees Juno's--Jyun’s--body suspended in the air above him, screaming, but now it’s superimposed with Rey’s. He sees Rax’s lifeless face in his mind, as he always does when he stands here. He's not sure, in this moment, if it's a vision or a memory. But he warned Rax, didn't he? He warned him not to fight their Master. He warned all of them.

“Please, Rax, just do what he says.”

“Oh, it’s ‘Rax’ again, is it? So you will disobey him.”

He’ll be punished for that.

“Damn it—Mendar—“

“I’ll call you Kylo over my dead body.”

“That’s exactly what’s going to happen. He’ll kill you.”

“Fine. I’d rather die than be a monster. I’d rather die than be his slave.”

“No, please. Please. You don’t understand. He’ll make me kill you.”

Rax met his eyes at that. “Would you?”

“Never,” Ben said. “I couldn’t. Never.”

His friend’s blood was warm when Kylo knelt in it, warm on his knuckles as he picked up the lightsaber he hadn’t bothered to use once he could get at Rax with his fists.

One of his happiest memories. Kylo was reborn that night.

 “Master of the Knights of Ren,” his Master had said as he knelt in the blood before the throne, his head bowed and his lightsaber outstretched. “It’s time to let old things die.”

Kylo had almost wept with gratitude, with love, with pride at his Master’s praise. He passed his greatest test; he’d won; he would at last be the apprentice his Master required. For the first time in his life, he felt whole. Loved. Worthy.

Didn’t he?

“You must not think of them, any of them, ever again,” his Master had commanded. 

But his Master had lied to him.

But it had to be part of his Master's plan. There’s some clue here, and Kylo’s missing it. That power that surged through him this morning—it wasn’t his power. It had to be his Master’s, some new gift.

Unless his Master had been keeping him weak. Unless Snoke hid Kylo's own power from him, used his claws inside his mind to cage it off, and now it’s only coming back to him now that Snoke is dead.

No, that's not possible.

What good would a weak apprentice be? His Master had always and only tried to make him strong. If Kylo was weak, was his own fault.

But his Master lied about Rax. What else had he lied about? Could the other Knights have survived that night?

He stares at that place on the floor, bathed in red light. He should go to Kuat, kill Rax. He should leave immediately; there's nothing standing in his way, and it's time to let old things die. He turns to leave.

As he pivots, he feels something, something very far away. It's a feeling in complete disharmony with the Force currents wafting through the freezing throne room. Relief. Joy. Rey has found her shelter. She’s helpless now, waiting for him to kill her and everyone she loves.

The juxtaposition of what he feels and what she feels breaks something inside him, something he didn’t even realize was there. He has to kill Rey. He has to kill Rax. He has to take control of the galaxy. He has to seize the destiny his Master promised him, but his Master lied.

Kylo Ren is a piece of theater, a creature in a frightening mask for children to fear. We are not children, so we see him for what he is: a clown.

He's using you for your power.

I saw what all masters live to see, raw, untamed power. A new Vader.

When he gets what he wants, he'll crush you.

It was I who bridged your minds.

He can’t do this.

Kylo falls to his knees. The throne is gone, but he falls to his knees and he doubles over, pressing his forehead against the dirty floor, letting his lightsaber, still lit, clatter to the steel beside him, casting a red glow over everything. The ash floats through the shaft of red light like snow.

“Master,” he begs, in a quiet, ragged voice.

His breath blows the particles of ash away in little eddies of cold vapor; his voice fogs the floor. He takes the sleeve of his new uniform, engineered for the master of the galaxy, and rubs it on the floor, desperately trying to polish away the ash and the soot and the scratches and the blood and the ghosts.

“Master, please. I need you. I feel the light, and I can’t. I can’t.”

He polishes. He polishes and polishes until his wrists hurt, and then he gives up and laces his fingers together, resting the bridge of his nose on his thumbs in defeat, prostrate before the memory of a throne.

Please, he begs. But the ghosts in the throne room refuse to answer.

He doesn’t know how long he kneels there, bowing with his head in the ash. An hour, more.

His hands have long since gone numb inside his gloves; he can no longer feel his nose against the floor. He’s not meditating, he’s not losing himself in the Force. He thinks he might have fallen asleep there, huddled on the Throne Room floor, cold and alone.

But, finally, he rises to his aching knees. He’s not immediately aware of what has drawn him out of his reverie, or trance, or psychosis, or whatever it is he’s been doing here, but then he realizes his comm is buzzing.

He ignores it, keeping his eyes on the place where the throne used to be.

Then he stands, feeling suddenly that there’s something else in the room. Some other ghost. He doesn't grab his lightsaber, he doesn't try to defend himself. It’s hard for him to see the point.

He turns to her, vaguely wondering if she’s really there. Has he gone back in time? Is this a vision, an opportunity to do things over again, or is this a memory?

Kylo opens his mouth. He wants to say her name. Rey. He wants to reach out, take her hand and ask her to stand here, with him, in the dark. To help him, like she promised she would.

“Shut up, Ben,” she says. She turns, walks away, and he watches her fade into the ash, another ghost.

Chapter Text

"What in hell’s name happened to your uniform? Did you crawl out of a fireplace?”

“I need a new datapad,” Kylo says numbly, pulling the cracked one out of his greatcoat and handing it to the general, who’s waylaid him in the hangar when he returns to the Finalizer. Everything smells wrong, too sterile, too new. Clammy sweat dampens his tunic, making it stick to his skin under his coat despite the cold drafts gusting through the hangar.

Hux flaps the datapad open, glaring with disgust at the shattered screen and the one-hundred-and-sixty-seven unopened notifications, all from him.

“A new---Supreme Leader,” Hux says, clacking the datapad shut with an exasperated sniff. “You’ve been gone for half a cycle. The CO of the Supremacy demanded to know why Kylo Ren was wandering around his ship without a security detail.” Hux matches Kylo step for step as they exit the hangar. Kylo wonders if his bootsteps always sounded this loud. “I ordered him to stay out of your way, so you’re welcome, sir.”

Good. Good Hux. He’s in no mood to have to explain to anyone why he’d been lying near-prostrate in the ashes of the throne room for—how long had it been?

“Half a cycle?” Kylo asks, finally catching up with what Hux had been saying. He feels nebulous, not quite here. Hux shows Kylo the time on his wrist display, and Kylo stops, like someone’s refitted his spine with a shard of ice.

It’s just after 1800-hours; he’s only got forty-five minutes before evening briefing. With travel time, he must’ve been bowing with his head in the ashes for nearly four hours.

He checks again. But yes, that’s right. Four hours.

“That’s not possible.”

“Sir?” Hux asks, squinting at his face like he’s trying to see through Kylo’s mask, though Kylo isn’t wearing one.

It’s the surge of Force from this morning; it has to be. Maybe there’s a limit to how much power one person can hold. Maybe he’s burned out his body, strained himself. For the first time since he stood and saw Rey, he remembers his hopeless collapse, the despair and the aching need that drove him to ruin his new uniform trying to polish a shattered wreck of a room to appease ghosts he couldn’t see.

The words ‘psychotic break’ drift through his mind like icebergs, sluggish and deadly.

He stretches out his mind toward Rey. She’s sleeping now, he feels it; she’s sleeping and she’s comfortable and she’s hydrated and she’s safe. That’s real. He tries to center himself around that. His bootsteps on the durasteel floor of the staff-officers’ hangar on C-deck, those are real, too.

He meditates. Breathe in, breathe out. Left foot, right foot. More detail: left toes, left ball-of-foot, left arch, left heel. He surrenders himself to the river of the present, lets it carry him away from the moment he’d shattered on the throne room floor.

He’s walking with no clear direction, other than not toward Kuat. He’s not going there, not yet. He’s already killed Rax once, hasn’t he? It won’t be difficult to do it again. He knows Rax; the man won’t walk away from a ‘duty,’ even one as useless as the defunct Senate. He’ll stay where he is. Kylo doesn’t need to hurry.

“Did you at least find anything useful in the wreckage?” Hux asks, falling in beside him as Kylo strides through the passage at a quick clip. Kylo had forgotten Hux was there. “Financial records, perhaps? Obviously I looked before I set the explosives.”

“No. No records, nothing digital.”

“Disappointing. What were you looking for?”

What was he looking for? Answers. Certainty. Guidance. He’d found none of it.

He knows he’s just running away now, looking for a distraction. From Rax, from his Master, from the lead anchor in his gut that pulled him to the floor in the ash, the terror that Hux was right, his father was right, that he doesn’t have a destiny, that his Master only made that up to use him, that everything he’s ever fought for and suffered for has been a lie.

He doesn’t answer Hux. Instead, he searches for a distraction and finds Rey, sleeping somewhere across the galaxy. There’s something he needs to do. He’s not tired. He might as well.

“Where would I find the largest holo-map on this ship?” he asks.

“The War Room, obviously. What are you thinking—”

Kylo ignores him, speeding up to force the man to trot behind him. It doesn’t work; Hux is nearly as tall as he is. The general follows him all the way to the War Room, which Kylo finds full to standing-room-only with officers in grey uniforms. Not all of them had seen Kylo’s display at the troop inspection, but enough of them had; two dozen hands jerk upward into salutes, four dozen heels click together. The Force reeks with terror.

Covered in ash, Kylo must look like a madman. Of course he’s not sure he isn’t. Who could’ve survived what he’s survived without going a little mad?

“Out,” Kylo orders. In seconds, the officers scurry out, leaving him alone with Hux and the holo-map. Kylo uses the Force to dim the lights and centers the map on their current location.

The holo-map originates from the center of a massive, state-of-the-art table whose flat display stretches over three meters and, according to Hux’s preening memory, cost nearly four million credits. Ignoring Hux’s baffled, indignant sputtering, Kylo jumps onto the flat display, dirty boots and all, and strides to the center, where he folds into meditation position. He hears it crack but doesn’t care. Let that teach Hux to spend money on trivial things.

As soon as he closes his eyes, he feels Hux catch on.

“They’ve stopped,” Hux concludes. He’d surmised on his own that Kylo wouldn’t be able to locate them properly in hyperspace. Kylo nods, trying to concentrate, then opens his eyes half-way and uses the Force to flip the display to full-room.

Suddenly Kylo’s sitting in meditation at the center of the galaxy, surrounded by millions of holographic stars stretching six meters out in all directions.

Involuntarily he sees himself through Hux’s eyes: head back in his filthy coat, lips parted, hair and face smeared with ash, surrounded by nebulae like some ascetic caught up in ecstatic visions of eternity. He’s surprised to catch Hux thinking that it’s beautiful, and then immediately crushing the thought, telling himself his forced spiritual experience that morning has poisoned his mind with Ren’s persistent irrationality.

Irrationality. Hux has no idea.

But it is beautiful. Kylo allows himself to open his eyes fully for a moment, contemplating the galaxy as it swirls around him. His galaxy. The one he owns. He’s never noticed before that it’s beautiful. How strange, not to notice a thing like that.

Irrelevant.

He attempts something new: he tries to shut out his awareness of Hux’s mind without breaking the connection, like turning the volume down. It seems to work. He turns his attention back to the map and reaches out to the smell of seawater and the gentle, cold patter of rain on his skin, to Rey. He closes his eyes and almost feels the drops catching in the black hairs on his forearms. Her hair smelled like the ocean in the turbolift on the Supremacy, when she’d stood beside him and promised to help him, when he’d been drowning in fear of his Master.

He wonders what he feels like to her in the Force. If she ever seeks him out.

Focus.

She’s dreaming. Like all her dreams, it’s a memory, almost holographic in its detail and its accuracy. Even in her dreams she’s afraid to stray too far from reality, in case she misses something vital to her survival while she’s away.

It’s the same one every night: the very first mark she carved into her AT-AT. The salt in her tears stings the raw, sunburned skin of her cheeks as she scrapes a line into the durasteel; back then, she wasn’t used to the sun. Those tears had come because she couldn’t remember how many days she’d already been there, how many marks she’d scrawled into the stall where she’d been padlocked with the orphans and the children whose parents had sold them off. Not like her parents, she always told herself. Her parents had to leave her, it hadn’t been their choice, they had some vital mission too dangerous for a kid. They’d be back soon, victorious, to rescue their little girl. They’d probably be back before she carves even five more marks, they might even come for her that night and she could show them the little shelter she’d built and how brave she’d been for them.

But in the dream, she panics. The tears and the mucous waste water, and Plutt has only given her a small canteen. You get more when you’ve earned your share, girl. She tries frantically to drink the tears, to swallow the mucous, to breathe in, breathe out, calm down, conserve moisture.

For a few slow inhalations the rising and falling of his star-spattered, ash-streaked chest mirrors her own unknowing breaths on her unknown planet and the breath of her dream-memory-self in that skeletal walker on Jakku. The accidental resonance vibrates across the string that connects them, and in the dream she feels someone beside her, helping her breathe in, breathe out.

This has never happened before. She reaches out a hand, sensing an invisible friend, wanting someone to take her small fingers in theirs but not daring to hope.

Kylo tries to observe the hand with dispassion. It’s just a trap for him, like everything else about her, a trap his Master set. Deliberately, he holds his breath to bring them out of phase, pinching the string so it goes still and silent. In the dream, the girl chokes back a lost little sob and Kylo disciplines himself to feel only scorn for the pathetic need in that outstretched hand.

She’s no one. She’s ten years younger than he is, she’s exactly the kind of naïve, starry-eyed idealist he’d run away from, she’s never been through anything half as traumatic as he has, she has nothing in common with him except the Force. Any thoughts he’s ever had to the contrary, like this mad urge to reach out and wrap this little girl’s fingers in his, are nothing but the painful residue of a bond his Master created to weaken him, to torture him, and the only way to scrape the scum of it out of his heart is cruelty.

Snoke. Call him Snoke, a voice says in his mind. He’s not hearing voices, not yet; it’s his own thought. But the idea’s too dangerous and he sets it aside. Soon enough, he’ll put an end to her dull, miserable dreams, and this dull, miserable connection, and he’ll be free. The way forward is cruelty. He has to kill her. To do that, he has to find her.

But something’s wrong with the map. He knows where she is but he can’t match it to a place in the galaxy.

“It’s all wrong,” he snaps at Hux, glowering at the holographic stars.

“The display is stationary with respect to the ship; I’ll let it spin to reflect the true location of the stars, sir,” Hux says.

He does, and Kylo frowns. “No. It’s still wrong.”

Hux mutters something about inertial frames and absolute space as he tinkers with the controls; Kylo catches snippets of some ancient language he can’t understand running through the general’s mind. Math. Then the map adjusts and superimposes itself over Kylo’s awareness of those distant places in the Force.

“Better?” Hux asks.

Kylo nods.

“Interesting,” Hux says, and brilliant blue stars halo his red hair as he regards the holographic nebulae spinning slowly around Kylo, his eyes narrowed. Kylo doesn’t ask. He’s already annoyed by how effortlessly they’re working together. He expects Armitage Hux to be confrontational, arrogant, and pretentious, and he doesn’t know what to do with a useful, helpful, respectful, tolerable Hux, except hope that the general screws up soon so they can go back to trying to kill each other.

Kylo shuts him out more firmly and half-closes his eyes, reaching out to that far-away pin in space. He adjusts the zoom for himself, making everything as close as possible to what he feels in the Force. But it’s hard, matching an image to a feeling. She’s in front of him, two o’clock in pilot-reckoning, but the map shows thousands and thousands of stars in that sector, and it isn’t even close to full resolution.

He concentrates, allowing himself to sink farther into her dream-memory, trying to feel out where she is, to let her guide him to her. The scene has changed in Rey’s mind. It’s one he saw down deep near the bottom of her consciousness when he’d interrogated her, right next to that island. The slave market.

She dreams of the frayed ropes digging like needles into the thin skin of her wrists. She dreams of watching the blood falling and mixing with the dust on that platform, making a game of guessing when the next drop will fall because it’s better to focus on that than the fear. But she forces herself to stand tall and proud under the piggish eyes of Unkar Plutt’s Crolute factor—or at least in the dream she always stands tall and proud. There’s a shimmery quality to it that makes him think she hadn’t been as brave as she wants to remember.

In the dream, those eyes rake over her, and she feels the oily residue those ichthyoid fingers smear over her arm when they haul her off the platform, as oily as his Master’s fingers when they’d brushed his forehead in praise. She’d rubbed ashes on her face, mud and dung in her hair, because she knew she had to look strong enough to be worth a good price as a scavenger—the other kids warned her you didn’t want to be one of the sick ones—but she didn’t want to look pretty, because they said you didn’t want to be one of the pretty ones, either.

And he knows what comes next. This part, he’s seen over and over, every night since her dreams began to trickle through the bond: when she tries to run, when they catch her, when they whip her and she’s bent over, naked to the waist—she’s too little to be any different from a boy—and she’s holding in the tears with her back torn and bleeding from three quick lashes, and then Plutt drags her away to be a scavenger.

He swallows as he remembers how his Master had been so disappointed by how little this excited Kylo Ren. He’d wanted his apprentice to glory in her pain, to fantasize about taking a whip to the weedy, grown-up scavenger who had dared to defy him. Kylo had tried to desire it, to please his Master, but it only made him sick and his Master had ridiculed him for being too fragile, too squeamish, and he had hated himself for his weakness.

But he’s not squeamish. He wants to scream at her to open the eyes she’s squeezed shut, throw out her hand, and choke the life out of the animal who dares to think he can hold her, hit her, his mirror in the Light. Those oily fingers and that whip are personal offenses against him. No one can hold her with false promises of water, with ropes on her wrist, no one can hold her at all, this scavenger who’s too practical to cry. Not even him, and not even his Master. He wants to reach across their connection and spit lightening at everyone in that market, but it’s only a dream, and whenever he tries, he can’t.

What’s wrong with him? Kylo opens his eyes and glances down at the sleeves of his greatcoat, now mottled grey with ash from where he’d used them to polish the floor, speckled with the holographic stars of the Core. He shakes his head to clear it, sending ash tumbling out of his hair.

This is a trap. He can’t pity her. He can’t care for her. It only makes him weak. The way forward is cruelty, the power of the Dark.

Besides, these are her worst memories, and they’re so—pedestrian. She didn’t slaughter anyone. She didn’t betray anyone, not like he did. All the pain she’s ever experienced in her pathetic excuse for a life wouldn’t even budge the scales against the agony of one of his worst memories. It’s why she manages to be so disgustingly cheerful all the time. It’s one of a thousand reasons why they could never really communicate, even if either of them tried, even if she wanted to. And she doesn’t. And he doesn’t.

This is not helping him find her. Kylo sighs, tipping his head back and glaring at the Inner Rim. Kylo wrenches himself from her tedious dream and spins the wheel of the zoom on the holomap, trying to match the sensations in his head to an actual distance, but after minutes of trying, he shakes his head. He reaches his arm out and points at where she is. “Here,” he says to Hux.

“Do you have a distance?”

“No.”

Hux, who’s been standing with his hands behind his back, observing the strange spectacle of the Supreme Leader curled up in the middle of his holo-map, raises his head to look at the direction Kylo has indicated. The general frowns. “That’s essentially useless; that’s a very populated sector. Can you give me anything else?”

Kylo shakes his head. She was happy, relieved, excited. Her eyes shined so bright in the dead light of the ruined throne room. That won’t help him find her.

“If you go out there, can you follow the…the signal?” Hux asks.

“Yes,” Kylo says, and that’s what he’ll have to do. But later.

He closes his eyes again, more out of a desire to feel the Force like a comforting blanket across his shoulder blades than any attempt to meditate. The dream has left phantom pain across his back. It’s hard not to be reminded of the memory he taunted Hux with that morning, of the scraggy cadet naked to the waist, mortified, trying to hide his tears of pain under the fringes of his orange hair, willing himself to endure his punishment in silence as his father brought the whip down.

It’s strange; he can’t think of any two people less alike than Rey and Hux, but they bled from the same wounds, they carry the same scars. Three each, long, not jagged but graceful, the scars sweep across the skin of their backs, his nearly-translucent and freckled, hers sun-browned, smooth, and soft.

Kylo crushes these thoughts and keeps his eyes closed. He doesn’t want to think about either of them at all, and he certainly doesn’t want to think about the subtler qualities of their skin. He’s going to kill her, and with any luck he’ll kill Hux, too, when he can, and that’s all that matters.

“Supreme Leader,” Hux says, “if you aren’t going to the Resistance right now, we could discuss the meetings you missed, and the candidates I put forward for your staff, your steward—”

“Leave me.”

“Will you be at briefing, sir?”

Kylo nods curtly. He’s not tired, but he wants to be alone and keep pretending the galaxy is nothing but an artistic hologram for a few minutes before he has to deal with the actual hydrogen and flesh and blood of the thing. He couldn’t care less what meetings he missed.

Hux sends out a question in his head, as though he’s halfway to deciding not to ask it it all. You’re aware that briefing’s in fifteen minutes?

Get out, Kylo replies, eyes still shut.

“Yes, sir,” Hux says aloud after a long moment. Kylo gets the strangest feeling that Hux doesn’t want to leave him alone.

Kylo reaches out toward him, stopping just short of going into his mind, observing again that something feels wrong in his Force signature, but there’s no threat from him. This, in itself, is wrong; Hux has always radiated threat. But it’s something else. He doesn’t have the energy to investigate right now.

When the doors dilate shut behind Hux, Kylo sags backward, lying face-up on the cracked display with his filthy gloves laced behind his head and his knees tucked up, watching the stars. He used to lie like this at the Temple, when Luke had refused to promote him to Padawan and he’d refused to sleep in the Younglings’ hut so he’d slept outside out of sheer stubbornness and Rax had called him a pigheaded, whingeing prat. Kylo and Juno and Zan and Thero and Djorro sat by a fire all night, though they’d all had different names then. They’d shared a bottle of Corellian brandy that Kylo stole from Luke’s stash, and Rax sat with them, refusing the bottle, justifying his rebellion by telling them he was only there to make sure Ben didn’t go joyriding in the X-wing again. He’d seen Luke peering at them from behind a tree, trying to hide a smile behind a disapproving scowl. It’s the only time he can remember Luke smiling at him.

Rey never needed fake stars; she watched the galaxy wheel above her every night through Jakku’s crystal-clear atmosphere, sometimes taking her too-small, pest-ridden blanket and curling up in the sand, wondering where her parents were up there, hoping they were safe, hoping they remembered her and that they would recognize her when they came back. She’d never even changed her hair, so they’d recognize their daughter.

He watches the holographic stars revolve around him, breathing in, breathing out, using the Force to explore the map. He zooms in on places he recognizes: Chandrila, where he was born; a little red marker bobbing at their current location near Crait. A familiar sun and a necklace of asteroids. The red legend floating above his head identifies it: Hosnian System. Planets: 0. Habitable moons: 0. Population: 0.

Kylo freezes the map there, wondering if he’s losing his mind. He’s doubting his Master, he’s feeling the call the Light again, he knows that. After that night, when he’d killed them all—or thought he had—he’d known he’d made his choice. The slaughter at the Temple was shattering, horrifying, but he’d been under the Force, abandoning himself and letting the power surge through him. When he’d killed the Knights, he’d known what he was doing the whole time, he’d been proud.

He’s still proud. He took what was his, they stood in his way. His Master told him not to think about them because their memories would get in his way. And of course his Master had been right. He’s letting the memories get in his way, and his mind is cracking under the blunt force of the obstacle.

The way forward is cruelty, solid and sharp. He feels strong when he’s cruel, he feels weak when he wants to reach out and take her hand, when he wants her to take his, when he misses his friend, when he regrets all the ways he’s hurt them, all of them. He feels weak. He’s always felt weak.

He stands, noticing the dusty bootprints he’s left across the cracked screen of the table display in the same way he notices thoughts when he’s deep in meditation: noting their presence, then letting them go. He jumps down from the table, and with a wave of his hand, he extinguishes the stars.

He frowns at that. For a long moment, he considers the flat black wall where the galaxy used to be. Then he abandons the War Room, not caring when his boots stamp the polished floor with ash.

***

When Kylo reluctantly approaches the briefing room, he immediately realizes something is wrong. The strange cast to Hux’s signature in the Force seems to permeate the room, and before he even opens the soundproof hatch to enter, he can sense his officers are fighting inside.

At his appearance, everyone stands and salutes. They’re all too preoccupied to take much notice of the fact that the Supreme Leader is covered in dust and ash, and at any rate they’ve all worked with Kylo Ren long enough to expect him to show up to command meetings bleeding or filthy from whatever quest Supreme Leader Snoke sent him on.

It’s a small group tonight, the group he’s come to think of as his core: Hux, Mitaka, Peavey, and the Stormtrooper captain who serves them coffee and meals and handles requests, SQ-3475. It’s Mitaka who has been caught mid-shout, which causes Kylo to raise an eyebrow. He’s always taken the man as meek, someone who keeps his head down, does his job, follows orders. Not like Hux, who seems to take such pleasure in sticking his fingers through the bars of Kylo’s cage to try to make him bite.

But right now the Force around him teems in anger. Hux’s pale face has gone deep red, Peavey’s body language indicates that he’s on Mitaka’s side, and Escue hovers as always at attention in the corner, looking as though she hasn’t absorbed a word of the action, discipline embodied.

Sir, Hux says, accosting him telepathically, Mitaka has a mad idea that--

“Sit,” Kylo orders. He doesn’t look at Hux.

The officers sit, Mitaka looking like he’s compressing himself into his chair against springs that want to push him right out of it again. Kylo has never seen anything like this from the man. He likes it.

“Mitaka, you have something to say.”

It’s Hux who answers. “Supreme Leader, the Brigadier General can’t—”

“I asked. Mitaka.”

He doesn’t caress anyone’s throat with the Force, but his voice carries the threat of it, and Hux quails.

“Supreme Leader,” Mitaka begins. “Sir. I.”

“Spit it out.”

“May I speak frankly, sir?”

“If you don’t speak frankly, and immediately, I will choke you again. Don’t waste my time.”

He’s probably not serious about the choking. Probably. But the pointed reminder seems to put the fight in him, and when he speaks it’s like he’s trying to put out a cigarette on Hux’s face with his voice.

“It’s General Hux who’s wasting your time, sir. As Supreme Leader, you have more important things to do than supervise a salvage operation.”

Kylo furrows his eyebrows at the heat in Mitaka’s voice and strains to read the black-haired man’s emotions in the Force. Despite his lower rank, Mitaka feels emboldened against Hux after what Kylo did this morning, and the fury thrumming through him isn’t at Kylo, but righteous anger on behalf of the Order. On behalf of Kylo Ren, Supreme Leader. Odd. Gratifying, but odd.

Hux’s cheeks have puffed out in a way that Hux would describe as ‘apoplectic’ and Kylo would describe as an Ewok trying to swallow a sack of marbles. Peavey, who tends to keep his mouth shut during these briefings unless he’s asked a direct question, hides a ruthless grin under the pretense of smoothing his moustaches.

 “A salvage operation?” Kylo asks in a calm voice, though the accusation riles him.

“That’s what this is, sir,” Mitaka continues, straining to keep his tone professional despite the passion bleeding through it. He’s a small man, and he’s almost vibrating. “You should be commanding a Dreadnought, supervising our conquest of the galaxy. The Supremacy will be dead in the water for weeks before we can jump the sections to dry-dock, and it’ll be a standard year at least before she’s battle-ready. Let someone else deal with rebuilding her. Take control of the fleet before it’s too late.”

“You think I haven’t taken control of the fleet?”

 “You’ve secured the Finalizer.”

“Is the Finalizer not my temporary seat of command?”

This seems to placate Hux, who casts Mitaka a victorious glance. Mitaka’s having none of it, and looks like he very much wants to stand, but can’t without violating Kylo’s direct order, so he spreads his palms on the table as though trying to convince it he’s right through sheer force of will.

“With respect, sir, this ship, and whoever commands it, is irrelevant. Even with our recent losses—” Kylo doesn’t miss the contemptuous glance he throws at Hux, the man to blame for those losses, “—there are a thousand more out there just like her, not to mention the Dreadnoughts. So far no one has moved against us because they’ve been too preoccupied with the Populist planets and the remains of the RDF, and because we’ve kept them in doubt about the extent of the damage to Central Command.”

This is new information to him. He’d assumed the entire fleet knew their situation.

“But now they realize you’re issuing orders from a single Resurgent-class destroyer, Supreme Leader, and, put simply, if they choose not to follow those orders, there’s not a thing we can do about it.”

Kylo feels the shard of ice down his spine again. Suddenly, either from the Force or the effectiveness of Mitaka’s speech, he sees the same image the Brigadier General sees: Kylo Ren shouting that he’s the Supreme Leader, ordering the First Order to obey, and the First Order simply ignoring him, going about their business with thousands of destroyers and hundreds of Dreadnoughts.

He’s stunned he hadn’t seen how vulnerable they were before.

Kylo had thought, with his maneuver this morning, that the hard part might be over except for wrapping up loose ends like Rax, like Rey, like the Resistance. But he realizes he’s been a fool, listening to Hux. The Knights of Ren, the smoking ruins of the Resistance—these are tiny things, and he’s been content to sit here in a field of junk orbiting a junk-heap of a planet, pretending to rule the galaxy without paying any attention to it.

It’s the same mistake he made on Crait: letting his private drama blind him to the bigger picture. Though it gives him some petty satisfaction to know Hux isn’t infallible. Some.

 “What’s to stop the crew of this Dreadnought from murdering all of us as soon as we step foot on their ship?” Kylo asks. “Or just blowing us out of the sky?”

“Very little, sir. That’s why it’s important to act as soon as possible. You’re the Supreme Leader. There’s still respect for Snoke.” He leaves the rest unsaid: even if there’s none for you.

“Which of the Dreadnoughts has the largest escort right now?”

This is Peavey’s area of expertise, so he pipes up loudly, as though he’s trying to convince everyone at the table that he matters. “The Voratrix, sir. She’s sailing with an escort of six destroyers under orders to exterminate the rest of the RDF in the Inner Rim.”

“Who’s in command, and what do we know about their loyalties?”

“Admiral Omo Jacindi, sir,” Peavey reports.

Mitaka meets Kylo’s eyes, unflinching. It’s a positive change for him, and Kylo wonders where this backbone came from. “Jacindi’s a friend of Hux’s, but an ambitious friend. General Hux will trust him. I don’t, sir.”

It’s a name he’s seen in Hux’s mind several times, and he dips into to the general’s furiously-churning mind to retrieve the image of a dark-skinned man with long dreadlocks loosely gathered behind his neck—the man from Hux’s memory that very first day, the one who’d eaten a steak and talked about getting rid of Kylo Ren.

“Make the preparations immediately for a jump to the Voratrix. Don’t let them know we’re coming.”

Hux actually rolls his eyes. At that Kylo does touch his neck with the Force, a gentle caress, and he jumps, his fingers flying to this throat. Mitaka barely suppresses a cruel smirk, which is good, because if he hadn’t suppressed it Kylo would’ve choked him just to remind him to respect the chain of command.

“Yes, sir. Shall I assemble a guard for boarding?”

“Do you think we’re walking into a battle, Mitaka?”

Hux’s mind twitters at him like a bird flapping at a window. Jacindi wouldn’t dare—

I didn’t ask you, Hux, he replies, and turns down the volume on Hux’s mind.

It takes the Brigadier General a moment to figure out this isn’t a rhetorical question. “Possibly, sir. Two hundred stormtroopers who witnessed your power this morning, however, should even the odds.”

“Assemble a guard.”

“Yes, sir. And thank you.”

It’s a stupid thing for him to say. Thank you for what? For not choking him when he’d brought him important information? Had Kylo set the bar that low? Of course he had.

He dismisses Mitaka and Peavey to make the preparations, and puts Escue at their service. Hux seethes at him, still sitting, refusing to speak because he knows that anything he says will get him choked.

But when he does speak, Kylo doesn’t choke him. He’s shocked.

“I saw you. In the throne room. I saw you crying for him like a child.”

Kylo meets his eyes. In the dim light of the black-walled briefing room, they’re like charcoal. They’re burning.

“How.”

“Surveillance droids. Did you really think we’d leave the area unsecured?” Hux does stand, then. He’s completely forgotten himself—Kylo feels that in the Force. He’s so furious he’s not thinking about the consequences.

“You can sit there and pretend to be a king, Ren, but I know what you are. I know you’re weak. I know that late at night you’re calling for your Master.”

Kylo jumps out of his chair and uses the Force to drag the general across the room, closing his fingers around his throat. He squeezes hard enough to bruise, but he’s not trying to choke Hux. Instead, he holds him by the neck and punches him in the stomach--hard. When Hux doubles over, Kylo pulls back his fist, ready to shatter the General's pale, narrow jaw. But no--that's not the way.

Kylo stops. He just holds Hux's throat, and binds the rest of his body enough with the Force to keep him from kicking or retaliating. Kylo cards through the strands of Hux's mind.

Hux is lashing out because he knows he made a mistake. He feels stupid. He’s shocked, now that Mitaka has raised the point, that a Dreadnought hasn’t already popped out of hyperspace and blown them out of the sky. He was arrogant, and he needlessly endangered everything he’s worked for his whole life, and he knows it, and he hates that a junior officer has shown him up for it on this, a cycle where he’s already been abused and humiliated.

Cruelty is the way forward. Kylo has an opportunity now, to needle into this wound and use it to cement his power over Hux. But Kylo’s only being cruel because Hux saw him at his weakest. Kylo remembers the whip, the scars—he’s seen Hux at his weakest, too. Hux feels, right now, like he did then, mortified, degraded.

And Hux destroyed the surveillance footage. Hux could’ve used it against him, but he destroyed it.

Kylo opens his fingers, letting Hux fall. The general catches himself before he hits his knees. “I’m not ashamed of loyalty to my Master,” Kylo says. “I admired him.”

“You worshipped him. You still do.”

"I grieve."

Hux studies him; he, at least, was able to kill his father without grieving. Kylo has killed three fathers: Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, and Snoke. He's too proud to lie to himself; if he's not careful, he'll drown in this grief.

“Yet he had such contempt for you,” Hux says, his voice husky with anger and a bruised throat. “He made you weaker than you would’ve been without him.”

Kylo doesn’t respond. It’s too close to his suspicion, his dangerous suspicion, that his Master had somehow dampened his power. Kylo uses the Force to slide the hatch open, leaving Hux crouched over his stomach, and the sound of retching reaches him as the doors close. He's still in Hux’s mind enough to feel the pain of the convulsions on his bruised esophagus. It was too much, the punch. Kylo should've restrained himself.

He puts it out of his mind and strides past the guards in the passage. He needs to clean up, and then he’s going to take over a Dreadnought.

***

Surprise is in their favor, and the Dreadnought Voratrix doesn’t blow them out of the sky when they drop out of hyperspace a few hours later. No one contests his right to board with a full complement of stormtroopers, each of whom, he can feel in the Force, admires the Supreme Leader, with his incredible power, as a kind of totem. It's a novel feeling. They look forward to telling stories to their comrades on the Voratrix about all that’s happened on the Finalizer since the suicide attack.

Admiral Omo Jacindi meets him with all the pomp and circumstance the OC3 requires for a transfer of command, and kneels at Kylo’s order without thinking this is too strange. Kylo doesn’t bother with displays of the Force, not yet, not that he could after what he channeled this morning. It feels too easy.

After an agonizing tour of the command decks of the ship, which Kylo assents to only because they don’t have an office or quarters prepared for him, he’s satisfied himself that no one has planted a bomb in his new temporary quarters and he’s able shut himself away. It’s 0100-hours, deep three-shift.

The only possessions he’s brought are a few changes of clothes, including two more of the new greatcoat-uniforms, and Juno’s lightsaber. At a loss for what to do, he throws on a plain black tunic, unpadded, and after a moment of consideration, tucks Juno’s saber into the pocket, hooking his own to his belt. Then he does something he’s never done: he walks the passages of his own ship.

In the turbolift he lets his gaze pass over the buttons the decks where officers tend to congregate, and selects at random from the levels where he’ll never have an excuse to go, the endless warrens of Supply and Administration and Support and all the departments that only Hux ever cared about.

Down here, they’ve skimped on the cost of that shining black durasteel and built the bulkheads from of some pale grey polymer, giving the whole vast underworld of the ship a feeling of wan brightness, like a rainy planet under a blanket of clouds just thin enough for a watery winter sun to poke through. The effect reminds him of Gatalentan tea and soft drizzle, industrial, but cozy. It unnerves him, as accustomed as he is to the severity of a black, gleaming world. His bootsteps feel too soft without the durasteel reflecting the soundwaves, like he could walk and walk forever through these endless tunnels and no one would hear him pass.

Even on a Dreadnought that crews a hundred thousand, three-shift is downtime, and few people pass him as he wanders without a direction or a purpose. He checks the list of staff candidates Hux sent him on his comm, since Jacindi had pestered him about a steward, too. But he’s annoyed because he doesn’t know what a steward is or why he needs one, so he just wanders in a walking meditation. No one he sees recognizes this strange man with the scar.

Most people on this ship have no idea what their new Supreme Leader looks like, if they even know that Snoke is dead, and even if they’ve heard a description, he’s certainly not the only tall man with a scar. It’s not until he sees a group of contractors talking over caf in the passage that he realizes he’s dressed exactly like them, in an unmarked black tunic.

The anonymity thrills him. Even when he had a mask, he’d been known. He’s never walked through a First Order ship unrecognized. But here, now, he’s a nameless contractor. Maybe he works for Javanti Security, or Incomm-Freitekk, or Entralla. Maybe he’s a radar technician. It doesn’t matter—he could be anyone. He almost envies the stormtroopers, always having this.

He’s passing an open hatch in a sector he thinks belongs to Supply when he hears something that dilates his pores with cold sweat and sets his heart pounding. Something he thought he’d never hear again, something that belongs to another life, a dead world.

“No way, the Raiders could’ve wiped the floor with the Stormchasers with their ’23 lineup if they’d gotten the chance to run the last heat.”

Racing. The Republic City Raiders. Kylo lingers near the open hatch, his breath unsteady, listening over his throbbing heart to the sounds of mess droids fiddling with pots and pans.

A second voice pipes up. “Look, it’s a coaching problem for the ‘Chasers.”

Ben Solo knows more about the ins and outs of racing from the tiniest two-heater in the Outer Rim to the Sabres than pretty much anyone, and to this day he’d put credits on that. In a just galaxy, he would’ve been a racer right now, getting a little old for it, getting pressured to retire and move into coaching, forcing everyone around him to endure his petty existential crisis because at thirty he could still sit behind a throttle and outrace every single goddamned one of them. This had been his highest ambition, not long ago, and in some ways it always was.

This is dangerous, this desire he has. He’s got to be more than a man to these people.

Thinking of him as someone with parents, with a past, someone who watches racing, can only hurt him, even if no one knows that he’s the son of one of the presidents of the Galactic Racing Association. One of the worst presidents, true, but anyone who knowingly trusted Han Solo with administrative responsibilities—or anyone who trusted him at all, really—deserved what they got.

But, no. It doesn’t matter if they know, not anymore. They can see his face; it’s no secret anymore that he’s just a human male. So what if they know he had a planet once, a home, a family? They’ve seen his power. And, besides, as Supreme Leader, he deserves to get something he wants once in a while.

And if things go wrong he’ll just kill them.

He steps into view. Three junior officers barely out of the Academy, two women and a man, sit at a small table eating while the mess droids go about their business in the open kitchen behind them.

He expects them to salute, to stammer, to run away. But their expressions don’t betray fear or shock. He senses that one of them, the male Second Lieutenant, has a bad feeling about this man with a scar, but he’s never seen him before and can’t think of where he’s heard a description.

They stare at him. Kylo remembers he’s not good at talking to people he’s not in command of. And then he remembers he is in command of these people.

“Are you lost?” the blond First Lieutenant asks in a thick Coruscanti accent.

“I heard you talking about about the ’23 Core playoffs,” he says. “You said it was a coaching problem for the ‘Chasers. But Sando wasn’t any worse than Lin Hamm. The ‘Chasers lost out on the draft that year, the Association changed the rules.”

This seems to be enough. They wave him in and ask him to sit down. He doesn’t.

“Do you want something to eat?” the Second Lieutenant asks, and Kylo feels that he’s being polite even though he can’t shake his bad feeling about this tall, awkward, hulking man. “There’s some bacon left in the mess, and probably some toast.”

Kylo frowns at them, ready to leave with a wave of his hand and a Force-bolstered reminder that this conversation never happened. Greasy pickings from the junior Supply officers’ three-shift leftovers should make him turn up his lip in disgust. His Master required him to keep his body disciplined, and he obeys. There’s no reason to abandon the rituals that make him strong.

But his Master lied to him.

His Master kept a liquor cabinet in his quarters. His Master hid his best friend from him, just to torture him, just like he’d connected him with a scavenger. Just to torture him. He made you weaker than you would’ve been without him.

Snoke.

His name was Snoke, and he, Kylo Ren, killed him. He is Supreme Leader now. He commands from a Dreadnought. He does not have to hide in the shadows of his own ship.

Across the galaxy, the sun is about to rise on a planet he can feel but can’t see, and Rey is waking up, stretching in her bed. He feels soft sheets sliding against her skin, he feels the unfamiliar softness of a mattress—like him, she’s used to sleeping on the ground, not a soft bed. He inhales, absorbing the vicarious, pure mammalian pleasure of stretching aching muscles in a warm bed. He can almost smell her hair, but he can’t tell if that’s the Force or a memory. The sensations have never felt this immediate, and he wonders if bond is getting stronger.

She doesn’t hide from comfort, and the Force comes to her. It will come to him, too, when it wants to, even if he doesn’t starve himself, even if he doesn’t deny himself the petty comforts he used to enjoy, the desires Snoke told him would make him weak.

 In his own body, he smells something else, something he desires. He’s not too weak to take it.

“Bacon,” he commands.

 As the droid scurries to obey he sits down at the empty spot at the officers’ table. The droid, beeping in a long-suffering way, brings him a plate full of greasy, undercooked bacon that smells improbably good.

“You a contractor?” asks the blond First Lieutenant, her eyes scanning his unmarked black tunic for identifying marks.

Kylo shrugs, trying not to roll his eyes back into his head with the carnal elation of putting anything other than gruel into his mouth for the first time in six years. Of course it’s never been anywhere near a real animal, it’s all generic, cheap plant-synth, but Kylo doesn’t care.

It’s not the Dark side, but it’s close.

“More or less,” he replies when he’s finished absorbing every sensation he can possibly suck from the salty, fatty, meaty food in his mouth.

“I thought they fed you guys better over in the civvies’ mess,” the other First Lieutenant, a dark-skinned woman with black hair, also Coruscanti, observes.

“No.” Kylo turns to the droid. “More,” he says, still frowning.

He sees the officers’ amused looks as the droid happily refills his plate.

“You a Stormchasers supporter?” the black-haired Lieutenant asks. “You don’t sound like you’re from Coruscant.”

Kylo shakes his head, devouring the bacon. “HosPrime,” he says around a full mouth. He doesn’t even bother to care. “Republic City.”

“Me too,” says the Second Lieutenant, unable to keep the excitement from his voice even though his Force signature still radiates wariness. Kylo understands why. The Order recruited heavily among Imperial loyalists in the Republic for more than a decade; it’s not surprising they nabbed a few officers from HosPrime. Still, it’s got to be awkward for him, being an officer in the army that blew up your planet.

Everyone from HosPrime is a refugee, now. A survivor. It’s been a long time since Kylo had ties to the place, after he left for Luke’s, but it was as much home as anywhere except the Supremacy.

Both his homes have been destroyed. All three, if you count Luke’s temple, but he doesn’t.

“It’s a shame about the Raiders,” the Second Lieutenant says diplomatically. Kylo barely keeps himself from snorting around his bacon at the understatement. Forty billion dead; he’d watched those red beams streak across the galaxy from the bridge of his ship; he’d seen it on the holo-map earlier, blinking red zeroes.

“Yeah,” Kylo says.

They go back to racing, the two Coruscanti officers sensing that there’s not much more you can say about the destruction of a planet. Five minutes in, Kylo feels a stab of icy fear in the Force as the Second Lieutenant realizes who he is.

Kylo sees him glance, very discreetly, at his waist, and swallow when he confirms that the weapon there is not a standard-issue blaster. But he doesn’t look back at Kylo. He doesn’t betray anything at all for the rest of the conversation. Kylo finishes his bacon and allows himself to keep most of his attention on racing until the First Lieutenants announce they need to report to their scheduled sabacc game. Kylo expects the Second Lieutenant to make an excuse to follow them, but he stays.

A droid takes his plate with a metallic clang that resounds like a bomb in the sudden silence, then whirs into a back room, leaving him alone with the Second Lieutenant. The man’s still terrified, but his face betrays nothing. Kylo bets he’s amazing at sabacc, with facial control like that.

The Lieutenant wants to say something. His signature in the Force roils with not only terror, but anger, and pain. Kylo meets his eyes.

There’s a sensation in the Force like a breath of wind, like he’s walking across one of the slackropes Luke used to put them on to improve their balance, and whatever he says next will make the difference between spinning down onto the sharp rocks and the frothing waves, or staying upright and getting the chance to fight for another shaking, unsteady, grueling step.

“I didn’t give that order,” he says. His voice blends with the hum of the ship and the soft grind of the droid going about its business.

The Lieutenant’s eyes widen and his throat bobs with a nervous swallow. He doesn’t think the Supreme Leader could possibly be saying what the Lieutenant thinks he’s saying.

Kylo clarifies. “HosPrime. Starkiller. I tried to stop it. I was overruled.”

He’s not sure why he’s confessing this to a Second Lieutenant. It’s true he could’ve tried harder to stop it, if he’d thought there was a point once Hux convinced his Mast—Snoke—that it was necessary.

But he wasn’t happy about it, and he wants this man, who grew up in the same city he did, a city Kylo watched reduced to ions by the master he’d worshipped, to know that. He just wants someone to know, someone who might understand.

“Yes, sir,” the Lieutenant says, his face calm. Kylo discerns what he’s thinking: the young man doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know how he feels about the Supreme Leader confide in him this way. He’d heard Kylo Ren was a monster, so corrupted by his strange power that he didn’t even look human, if he’d ever been human.

“What’s your name?” Kylo asks.

“Second Lieutenant Yan Havel, sir. Supreme Leader,” he corrects.

“You didn’t stand at attention as soon as you recognized me.”

Not even this cracks the calm façade of his expression. The man simply quashes down his fear and begins to jump up before Kylo puts out his hand. “Don’t. Sit.”

Havel sits.

“You didn’t give me away,” Kylo observes.

“Supreme Leader. You seemed like a man who didn’t want to be recognized.”

Kylo’s mouth twitches. Astute of him.

But there’s something else happening in the man’s mind. “You have a question. Ask.”

“Sir,” he says, surprised that the rumors about the Supreme Leader reading minds seem to be true. “There’s a problem I’d like to bring to your attention, but I can’t ask without violating chain of command.”

Right. Kylo remembers this front and center in the OC3: never jump the chain of command. Talking to the Supreme Leader about a problem before he talks to his commanding officer will get him a reprimand, if not a court-martial.

“Lieutenant. I am the chain of command.”

He feels the man fight to hold back a smirk, then continues gravely. “Sir, it’s my troopers,” he says. “They’re anxious to know if their comrades on the other ships made it through the suicide attack, but there’s been no way to find survivors, no database. They’ve started making memorials and missing persons boards.”

Kylo frowns at this. He can instantly pull up a list of the current locations and assignments of all known survivors on his datapad; so can Hux. This isn’t a logistics issue, apparently, just a matter of no one bothering to care whether or not the stormtroopers or their officers have access to the personnel databases.

Havel has misinterpreted his frown, and Kylo feels the fear spike again despite the man’s perfectly professional expression. He’s got courage, Kylo will give him that.

Kylo nods. “I’ll look into it.”

He stands, and Havel stands as well. “This conversation never happened,” he says. There’s no Force in it; it’s just an order.

“Of course, sir.” He salutes as Kylo turns to go, and Kylo nods in acknowledgment.

He’s at the hatch, ready to open it, when it occurs to him. Astute, discrete, courageous enough to tell him what he doesn’t want to hear, and not chosen by Armitage Hux. These are qualities he’s looking for.

He turns back, and Havel returns to attention. “Havel,” he says. “Do you know what a steward is?”

***

It’s 0300-hours when Kylo heads back toward his temporary quarters on C-Deck enveloped in strange currents of the Force, as though he’s made the wrong decision and now he’s tumbled off the slackrope and about to hit terminal velocity just before he crashes into the slick rocks jutting up from the waves. The exhaustion from the pull of Force that morning—the previous morning—it’s been a hell of a cycle—has left him, and either the bacon or the Force is rushing through his veins and making the hairs of his arm stand on end.

As he steps out of the turbolift on C-Deck he makes a mental note to let Hux know he’s found a steward, and at the thought of Hux he unconsciously reaches out, surprised to find, first, that the general is awake at this hour, and second, that he even has the ability to know this.

Rey’s been awake for a long time now, and exuberant. There’s a sensation of movement on her end, and he wonders if she’s flying. Not much else would carry those twin feelings of total elation and intense concentration. It fills him with longing. How long has it been since he’s flown, really flown? Not since the battle where he’d failed to shoot his mother.

He could jet off to look for her right now. He briefly considers it, but decides he’s spent enough time in Rey’s head tonight and he feels too unstable to go zooming around in deep space by himself for hours and hours with nothing but her sensations to keep him company.

Company. The true nature of his desire materializes slowly, like a mirage she might see when she’d been out in the desert too long: he doesn’t want to be alone right now. The strange lost time in the throne room haunts him. Hux’s presence, as much as it annoys him, feels necessary at the moment. Snoke would call it weakness, and Snoke would be right, because Snoke was wise. But it’s necessary nonetheless.

Four hours. Four hours, laying in the ash, begging the ghosts to help him. He feels them, Rax and Juno and Snoke and the rest of the Knights—Thero, Zan, Djorro, Varra—all of them black shadows in the icy black of empty space. Yes, he needs the warmth of the living. In the Force, Rey in her happiness still shines like a sun—but she’s shut him out, and anyway she’s too much, her light only burns him. Hux is all he has.

Something really is wrong, if he’s clinging to Armitage fucking Hux like some orange flame in the darkness.

And it’s not just him, he realizes as he approaches the hatch of the general’s quarters. Something’s wrong with Hux, too. Even without going into his mind Kylo can feel the vibrations of the Force within his rooms, within Hux himself. They’re out of harmony, too sharp, as though someone has adjusted the amplitude unevenly.

It feels like—no. But yes.

He mashes his ungloved thumb against the call panel.

Even though he hadn’t been in Hux’s mind, he hears the answer, broadcast just for him. It’s very late, Supreme Leader.

And you’re awake, Kylo responds.

The doors whoosh open almost reluctantly, revealing the General in standard-issue grey sweatpants and a sleeveless white undershirt. Kylo, skimming his thoughts, suppresses a look of amusement when he sees how Hux thought of throwing on his jacket and then decided the attempt to cover his state of underdress would be more of a capitulation to the Supreme Leader’s maddening caprice than he cared to make.

Both of them agree Hux looks ridiculous saluting in sweatpants, but he does it anyway, and Kylo nods, pushing past him into his quarters. They’re as testily immaculate as he’d expect them to be.

“How’s your wound?” he asks Hux. He doesn’t realize until the words are out of his mouth that he’s imitating Snoke.

Hux resists rolling his eyes. “It’s hardly a wound, Supreme Leader.”

“I asked you a question.”

“It’s a punch in the stomach, sir. I’ll live.” He swallows and forces himself to meet Kylo’s eyes. “I was out of line. Sir.”

He’s apologizing. Hux. Is apologizing to him. For getting punched in the stomach. He had been out of line, of course, but it’s a novel thing, and Hux hates it.

“You met with Jacindi,” Kylo says, catching snippets of it in his mind. Jacindi had convinced him to apologize.

"Yes, sir," Hux says carefully.

"I found a steward. And I want you to give the stormtroopers enough access to the personnel databases to look up the locations of survivors."

"I--yes, sir."

Hux is wondering why the hell Kylo Ren came to his quarters at three o’clock in the morning, and Kylo is wondering the same thing.

 “Why did you meet me in the hangar, General?” he asks. "And how did you know to look at the security footage for the throne room?"

“You came to my quarters at three in the morning to ask me that?”

“No, but I’m asking now.”

Hux frowns. “You missed three meetings, and when the Supreme Leader disappears hours after humiliating me in front of my entire army, I do consider it my responsibility to take note. Sir.”

This is a truth, but from Kylo’s subtle presence in his mind, he knows it’s not the truth. The truth had set the general to grinding his teeth in irritation and mild self-castigation for the idiocy of the thought. Hux just had a feeling he needed to be in that hangar, a feeling about where he'd gone. An instinct. He suspected the Supreme Leader had summoned him in his mind, but it didn’t come through in words.

Kylo narrows his eyes and begins to circle the general like an animal sniffing its prey. Hux raises an eyebrow at Kylo, making a show of contempt for the Supreme Leader’s preposterous conduct, but Kylo senses that Hux, too, has sensed something very wrong. Hux has wanted to murder people all day, he hasn’t been able to concentrate. He feels like the hate and the fury he’s always been able to let go in the name of duty has gotten lodged in his throat and he can’t get it out, like a fist is holding it in. He feels barely-contained, overflowing, under pressure.

 It’s temporary—it’s already wearing off—but it’s there, unmistakable now that Kylo’s looking for it.

 “Supreme Leader,” Hux says when he decides Kylo is done psychically prodding at him like a madman. “If you’re finished, as long as you’re awake I can brief you on—”

“No.” Kylo arms himself against a wave of preemptive boredom, and decides whatever Hux needs to brief him on is less important than the subtle disharmony in his Force signature, or than distracting him from whatever it is he’s wandering around looking to be distracted from tonight. This new power he’s given the general is only temporary; an investigation can’t wait. Besides, it’s 0300-hours and Kylo’s missed his physical training.

“Do you fight, Hux?”

“Supreme Leader?”

“You do. You were pretty good at the Academy,” he says, dipping into Hux’s memories. Hux fought Rax dozens of times at the Academy, and Kylo jerks away from those images like he’s touched a hot exhaust pipe, skimming more recent experiences. “You keep up with it.”

“I hardly have the time to dedicate hours a day to it, Supreme Leader,” Hux says, and Kylo’s too jittery to press Hux on his tone. Of course Hux is no match for him, but he’s flesh and blood and Kylo wants to fight something more interesting than a hologram. He hasn’t fought someone alive since Luke, and, well.

“Sir,” Hux says, “Surely I must be wrong in thinking you’ve come to my quarters in the middle of the night to fight me.”

“And surely I must be wrong in thinking that you like the idea.”

Hux wonders what kind of power-play Kylo’s trying now, after that display this morning. He knows he should be terrified—Kylo Ren has prowled up to him in the middle of the night with some absurd bond of honor that makes him think he needs to kill Hux in hand-to-hand combat, probably, and of course Hux will lose. That’s the only logical explanation for what’s happening here.

But Hux doesn’t feel a threat. He just has a feeling like the Supreme Leader isn’t going to kill him, not right now. The calculating, Huxish parts of his brain protest that this doesn’t compute, given that all of Kylo Ren’s behavior since, well, ever, indicates that he’d like to run Hux through with a laser sword.

But Kylo isn’t wrong, because of course he isn’t, he can read Hux’s desires. He feels the Dark side coursing through the general, faint but persistent, a churning, pounding engine in the distance. He feels it, the urge toward violence, the madness, the reckless passion.

“Just practice,” Kylo says. He can’t keep the mockery out of his voice.

Kylo resists rolling his eyes when Hux wonders if the Supreme Leader is flirting with him.

 “Alas,” Hux says blandly. “I seem to have left my lightsaber in my office, sir.”

Kylo summons Juno’s lightsaber—no, he’ll just call it the other saber—into his hand, enjoying Hux’s trepidation and hunger at seeing it, realizing what Kylo has in mind.

Kylo tosses it to Hux, who catches it easily. Too easily.

“I thought only you people could use this,” Hux says, examining it carefully with an engineer’s eye. He adds a belated, “sir.”

“Making one requires the Force,” Kylo says, assuming a fighting stance, eager to start moving. “But it’s just a machine. Hold it vertical. Turn it on.”

“Why vertical?”

“So you don’t stab yourself.”

Hux frowns at the lightsaber. The he depresses the catch and ignites it.

It’s a simple lightsaber, single-bladed, the synthetic crystal giving it a vibrant, deep, steady red, not like the crackling and sputtering of his own cracked one. Juno made it extra-long to extend her reach against taller opponents, namely him.

It’s a strange thought, watching Hux examine the weapon Juno Ren had made to kill him. Hux is thinking of using it to kill him, too, but in an academic way. He’s wondering if he could. The general begins to swing it around, getting a feel for the strange sensation of a weapon where all the weight is in the hilt, where the blade creates no drag. Kylo walks behind him, keeping his distance. He remembers the first few times he held one after switching from the heavy practice rods: you feel a little stupid, like you’re thrusting and parrying with a beer-bottle. There’s no satisfying whip of the blade through the atmosphere like a real sword.

But that sound. There’s nothing in the galaxy like it. And the smell of the blade ionizing the air sends chills through his ribs every time it reaches his nose. It’s the feeling he imagines in the hearts of the very first sentient creatures when they held a torch from their own fire, like they’ve tapped into the power that runs the universe.

Hux, running through stances with his back to Kylo, seems adequate with a blade. Time to test his theory.

Without warning he ignites his own saber and sends it arcing toward the back of Hux’s neck.

The blades crash together with bone-jarring force. Hux hadn’t seen it, he’d felt it coming.

Kylo forces both blades downward and apart, stepping back from Hux, whose eyes have opened wide.

“You felt that,” Kylo observes.

“Is that the blade? Is there some kind of field around it that allows you to sense it?”

“No,” Kylo says, striding around him and forcing Hux to keep turning to keep him in sight. “You listened to your instincts. You listened to the Force.”

“That’s absurd, I—”

“You know it isn’t. You’ve felt off-balance since I showed the Force to you, like you have energy you can’t get rid of. It’s why you lost control with Mitaka. It’s why you can’t sleep.”

Kylo attacks him again before he can respond, proving his point without words. It’s a slow, sweeping series of blows, and he’s gratified by how well Hux anticipates and counters them. Kylo feels the Force swirling around the general, feels him start to get used to the new sensations. It’s similar to what he felt in Rey’s mind when she’d pushed back against him. Testing his power. Though Hux’s is meager, pathetic compared to Rey’s.

“Why can’t I move things with my mind?” Hux asks when Kylo lets him recover.

“I didn’t give you that much.”

“This isn’t…permanent, is it?”

“No. After a few days, you’ll lose it.”

“I’ll stop feeling like I overdosed on glitterstim, you mean.”

“Too intense for you, General?”

“Much. Yes,” he says with distaste. “I see why you’re destroying things all the time. But I like this,” he says, swinging the lightsaber. The Force around the general vibrates with the Dark side, an aggressive energy, but it’s an almost playful aggression, if anything about either of them could ever be described as playful. “I like this quite a bit.”

“You want to destroy something with it. You want to fight.”

“Well. I.”

“You want to fight. Don’t think. Just feel it.”

He’s on the edge of shouting now, circling Hux.

“Have you come completely unhinged?”

“You saw it. In the throne room. Do you think so?”

“Honestly, if you have this in you all the time, sir, you do a shockingly good job of controlling it.”

Kylo raises an eyebrow.

I asked you a question.

And as soon as Kylo sends the thought, Hux’s mouth twists into a grin, full of aggression, violence, abandon. Darkness. “Yes. It’s three o’clock in the bloody morning, I’m holding a Jedi sword, and yes, Supreme Leader, I want to fight.”

Kylo does something he hasn’t done in a long time. He allows his lips to twist up into a smirk. Then he raises his eyebrow and his lightsaber, an invitation.

He’d forced a blind man to see.

Chapter Text

“We need to talk strategy,” Leia says, like she’s talking about some Senate bill and not her son. The general hunches in the folds of her huge black coat, the one with the collar that hides most of her face, sitting just outside the circle of dim light from the single overhead fixture. Rey envies her the coat; Leia chose a room at the top of one of the outbuildings, an abandoned powerhouse. It’s secure, but unheated, and it’s so cold outside the mud in the parade ground crunched under their boots. Poe loaned her his jacket, though if they’re here much longer Rey will insist on giving it back before he freezes to death in his flight vest and jumpsuit.

It’s late. The airfield’s all but empty, just acres of naked, frozen mud. How many hours has it been since she jumped out of bed ready for her first training flight, feeling smug because she finally stood up to Ben Solo? She felt so certain about it, in that moment.

“I want to be clear,” Leia says. “This is an intelligence-gathering mission only. The objective is to weaken the First Order, not to bring him back.”

Rey makes a sour face and rubs her arms. Even with her shoulders wrapped in dark leather, she’s shivering.

“Weaken the First Order. You want me to torture him?”

Leia’s teeth clench, and Poe shoots Rey a warning look. “No. Just—find out what you can, and don’t let your sympathy get the best of you. If you start trying to turn him, he’ll use that against you.”

“He’s not going to turn me to the Dark side.”

“I didn’t say he would. But he got you to fly, alone, to the flagship of the First Order. Against Luke’s direct command. He used you to assassinate the Supreme Leader, all because you thought you could turn him. You can bet he’ll try something like that again.”

“Leia,” Poe says. “She knows she screwed up.”

Rey didn’t screw up, but she bites her tongue. If she hadn’t gone to Snoke’s ship, Snoke would still be in charge, and even though she failed she at least took a chance on Ben, and if she’d done something different, or said something, maybe Ben would’ve called off the attack on the fleet.

But Leia’s not totally wrong— if Rey hadn’t woken up in the throne room first, Force knows what Ben would’ve done to the Resistance by now.

Leia’s face betrays nothing and her energy in the Force might as well be durasteel, but Poe’s soft reminder seems to calm her.

“You’re a good person, Rey,” she says. Somehow she makes it sound like an insult. “You want to see the good in everyone else—but some people just want to hurt you.”

“There is good in him. I feel it, even now.”

In their last vision Ben looked like a man who’d been lost in the desert for years. Rey may not like him much right now, but she’s not letting Leia pretend all that’s left is a monster. He is a monster, but he knows he’s a monster, and he hates it, and that’s—different. Somehow. It’s not enough but it’s a start.

“I want to believe that as much as you do, but, frankly, it doesn’t matter if there’s good in him as long as he’s commanding the First Order.”

Rey throws up her hands in frustration. She didn’t mean to start defending Ben. There’s not much there worth defending after that stunt in the throne room, but still. “How can it not matt—”

“Good people do evil things. If you’re going to fight this war you’ll have to learn to pull the trigger on good people.”

Poe looks like he’s got sand stuck in his teeth. “That’s not what the Resistance is about.”

Leia doesn’t say anything. Her fingers slip into the well of her black pocket, where she stuffed the tiny drive Rose loaded with holos from the Falcon. The general accepted it without a word, and Rey got the sense she’d thought of tossing it into the mud without ever looking at the images.

Not that Rey blames her. Rey keeps going back to Leia’s face when she asked how Ben was doing. No, Ben isn’t happy, her son isn’t alright.

In the reflection, Rey can only just make out Leia's shadowed face.

“Something’s happening to him,” Rey says. “He could turn.”

“We both have better things to do than talk hypotheticals.” Leia crosses her arms over her chest, and meets Rey’s reflected gaze in the window. “Besides, what happens if he does turn? You think he comes home, fights with the Resistance, and everything is forgiven?”

Rey and Poe exchange a glance. Since ‘talking hypotheticals’ is back on the table, Rey leans forward. “Yes. Exactly. Han told him it wasn’t too late.”

Leia shakes her head, and even with her tight control she can’t manage to hide the despair in the gesture. “I told Han that, and now Han’s dead. No. Even when I told him to bring our son home, it was a delusion. If he showed up right now, if he came home and regretted everything he ever did and told us everything he knows about the First Order, if he fought for the Resistance every day of his life, he’d still be coming home to a trial and execution.”

Rey’s chair falls to the ground with a crash. Poe leaps up too, ready to jump between them. “That’s not fair. How can you even say that? He’s your son.”

Leia frowns at her, and Rey tries not to blush at the fierceness of her reaction. It’s not kriffing fair.

“You don’t think I’d try to make it work? I would. Whatever he’s done, yes, he’s my son and I love him.”

The words sag with all the layers of grief that must’ve built up like sediment over the years.

“You can’t forgive him,” Rey says. Why’s her voice so cold? It’s not like Rey forgives him, and Rey barely knew Han.

“Rey, I forgave him years ago. He could kill everyone in the galaxy and I would forgive him—that’s the problem.”

Rey stiffens and stares at her. There’s a motion in her periphery—Poe raises his hand, jerks it forward as if to reach out, but it hovers in the air for a moment, then drops back to the table. He doesn’t take his eyes off his general.

“He’s not Finn, following orders, jumping ship as soon as he figures out what the First Order is about.” Leia says this directly to Poe, who averts his eyes, and she turns to look back up at Rey. “ He’s giving the orders. He probably gave the order to fire Starkiller. Do you understand? You don’t remember Alderaan. But my son destroyed planets.”

“We don’t know that,” Rey says. She’s pacing across the dusty floor, kicking the dried-up carcasses of insects.

“Even if he didn’t give the order,” Leia continues, “he stood back and let it happen, and there’s a thousand other things he did that are unforgivable, including torturing both of you.”

“I was fine,” she snaps. She was fine. What Ben did to her was nothing like what he did to Poe, and even if it had been it’s nothing Rey can’t handle.

“A lot of people aren’t fine. They’re dead, or the people they love are dead, or their planets are space dust, because of my son. I know you want to believe in redemption, but he’s done too much. The only way to redemption for him is to walk out in front of a Republic firing squad.”

Rey shivers harder and paces faster. Is this Leia’s fantasy? To bring her son home and lead him, willing, to an execution?

“You’d forgive him, and you’re in charge.”

Leia’s eyebrows shoot up at that. “I’m in charge of twenty-two people, half of whom couldn’t follow orders even when thousands of lives depended on it.” A muscle in Poe’s jaw twitches. “We’re talking about re-founding the Republic here. Not a dictatorship. If he did turn--and you and I both know that's a huge 'if’—his victims deserve justice. They would decide, and we know how that vote would go.”

“Who cares what a bunch of strangers want? They don’t know him. How’s that going to help anybody?”

“It’s not about helping. Kylo Ren—no. My son deserves to die.”

Leia picks at her sleeves and peers out into the night. Her face has hardened into grim resolve, but her eyes reflect the naked bulb a little too much. Rey crosses her arms over her chest and stares at the dead insects along the wall. The Force moves through them, too, the living and the dead.

You’re not alone.

Neither are you.

Rey squeezes her eyes shut and runs the pad of her thumb across her fingertips, where Ben touched them. Was that a lie? Using her sympathy against her?

“None of this matters,” Leia snaps, letting out a deep breath. “If you’re going to get anything useful from him, we don’t have a lot of time.”

Because they’ll throw her out of the Resistance. Rey knew this was coming. She stops pacing and stands still, ready for the blow.

“He has a few days, maybe a week, before Hux turns on him, or one of the other officers. He’s not going to live long enough to turn, so we need to think about—”

“They’re going to kill Ben?” Rey uncrosses her arms.

“He probably doesn’t have enough support to hold the Order—”

“He’s afraid. He’s in pain. I hate him, but I feel it. And you’re just going to abandon him.”

“Rey.” Poe steps closer to Leia, who raises a hand to silence him. The general tilts her head up to meet Rey’s eyes, and in that moment, she looks every inch the queen she would’ve been one day.

“He’s made his choice.”

Rey’s overturned chair skids across the room of its own accord and smashes against the far wall. One of the legs rolls under Leia’s chair. Rey’s breathing too hard. The Force feels hot around her. “Parents shouldn’t abandon their kids.”

Rey digs her bitten nails into the sleeves of her jumpsuit and glares at the window, pretending she can’t see Poe’s alarm or Leia’s cold, cautious eyes appraising her.

The general starts to say something—then her comm buzzes. For a moment she stares down at it, then she types a reply and flips it shut, sinking back down into her chair with her hand over her nose.

She’s not looking at Rey, or Poe. She’s staring at her reflection in the black window, her chin raised like the royal she is, the lower half of her face covered by the oversized collar of that black coat. Her left hand falls into her pocket, and it moves slightly, rubbing the drive of holos like a lucky luggabeast tooth. Leia’s eyes gaze into her own reflection, intense, like she’s searching for something in the depths of an endless, lightless ocean.

Poe lowers his hands. “General?”

“Get out,” Leia orders. “Both of you.”

Rey moves toward the door so fast the rush of her boots sends a few insect carcasses skittering across the floor. The door slams behind her, and she’s grateful for the deafening boom of her boots on the steep stairs. Rey opens the heavy pneumatic latch with a screech like a mynock, and Poe follows her into the dark and silent night. It’s started to snow.

***

Poe shuts the door behind them, leaving Leia inside to deal with her comm or—whatever Leia needs to do.

Rey spots a fist-sized clod of frozen mud and kicks it as hard as she can, sending it sailing across the airfield. It doesn’t help. She has the ridiculous urge to start punching a wall, the way she used to do when she couldn’t get something working. Punching things never fixed an engine and it always left her knuckles raw for a week, so she made herself learn to take deep breaths and find the next useful thing.

“That was awful,” Poe says softly in the ensuing silence.

Rey forces herself not to suck air, to let the icy breath out slowly. “Yeah,” she agrees in a whisper, like the silence and the cold has tamped her voice down. Next useful thing.

Snowflakes waft through the cones of harsh yellow light on the deserted parade ground. It’s completely silent; a finger’s depth of snow absorbs their footfalls, hiding the crunching of the frozen mud.

 “Are you alright?”

It’s not a very useful question, and though he means well, it annoys her. She breathes in and molds her face into a smile. Poe raises an eyebrow, so she tones down her expression a little. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

They walk a few steps in the quiet. “Something else happened with him, didn’t it?” Poe asks. “Something you’re not telling us.”

Rey’s grateful for the darkness and the cold that covers her guilty blush. “Why would you think that?”

“Because you don’t jump out of your chair like that to defend someone who’s only attacked and insulted you. And I don’t care how crazy Kylo Ren is, you don’t offer the galaxy to someone you don’t care about.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t pretend to know why he does what he does.”

“What about why you do what you do?”

She glances at him. The snow’s speckled his hair. “You’re digging for something.”

“You want me to be honest?”

“Does anyone want anything else?”

He runs his hand through his hair again, and looks, of all things, embarrassed. “Well. When you left there was a little pot going, a friendly wager. Odds six-to-one that Luke told you he was your father.”

Rey’s snort is almost genuine. “You thought I’m his—what, his long-lost love child?”

“Well, yeah. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Then you and Kylo would be cousins.”

“I’m nothing like Luke. Nothing. And me and Ben are definitely not cousins.”

“Huh,” he says, like he heard something Rey didn’t mean to imply.

He clears his throat. “Look, I, uh. You’re new to the Resistance.”

It’s an odd observation. Rey hopes there aren’t any more theories about her parentage coming. “Yeah.”

“I promise you the general’s the most level-headed, best commander I’ve ever had. I’ve never seen her like this.”

Another slow breath. Rey’s got no good reason to be mad at Leia, but that’s not how anger works. “I’m sure she is.”

Poe coughs. The snow’s picked up, drawing little eddies in the yellow lights of the parade ground. “Can I change the subject?”

“That’d be great.”

His head bobs in a brisk, grateful nod.

“Your flying this morning was really something.” He reaches out and flattens a palm on her shoulder. She almost shrugs it off, but it’s nice, the soft touch. “These RDF kids are reserves, and green—”

“Not all of them,” Rey says, a little defensively. “And what difference does it make what color they are?”

Poe’s lips tug into a half-smile. “I didn’t mean that. I mean they’re inexperienced—and before you interrupt me again, yeah, I know you are too. But the way you fly, Rey, I’m gonna need you on missions ASAP.”

Her eyes open wide. “Really?”

“Really. Desso would never let me pull that, but you’ve got more raw talent than I’ve ever seen, and as a wise Jedi Master said, we don’t take orders from Desso.”

I’ve only seen raw power like this once before, in Ben Solo.

Rey tugs Poe’s jacket around her a little tighter, and casts around for something to say.

“What’s going on with you and Desso, anyway? He called you a deserter.”

Poe grins. He smells good, like leather and race-grade engine solvent, and some kind of spice.

“He was my commanding officer until I realized the Republic Defense Fleet was just going to ignore the First Order, and I ran off to join a certain princess’s ‘illegal personal army.’”

The whole base overheard Desso calling the Resistance Leia’s ‘personal army’ that afternoon, before Finn brought Rose in from the medbay, and they’d overheard Leia’s searing reply, too.

“But it’s not just having you in the sky,” Poe says, patting her shoulder. She lets herself drift a little closer to him. It’s cold. “As soon as we get some more birds I want you on squad leader.”

“Leader?”

She’s never been a part of anything in her life, much less a leader. There could be worse things, but just the thought of being called “leader,” of reporting to someone like Leia, makes her feel like she’s buried up to her neck in quicksand. She shakes her head.

“But I’m not even part of the Resistance, not really.” On the Falcon she could almost convince herself she was, but since they got to the base everyone’s started saluting and throwing out jargon she couldn’t even begin to guess at. She expected the training flight this morning to be spins and loops and crazy maneuvers, just in formation, but when they got up there it was…boring. Nothing but rules and formulas and commands, just straight flying, constant reminders to keep her wingtip at some exact distance and position relative to her wingman’s.

She always thought the Resistance was a group of friends following their instincts, going on mad missions to save the galaxy. That’s how it always was on the old Rebellion holos she’d catch when they played in Teeya’s cantina, and that’s what she saw on D’Qar. She figured everyone was like Han and Poe, straight-talking and quick to shoot. But here with the RDF, it’s clear the Resistance is an army. Finn’s used to that. Rey isn’t, and she doesn’t like it.

He squeezes her shoulder, guiding her to a stop, and she faces him. “You’ll be a hell of a commander someday, and I need you to start thinking of yourself that way now.”

He studies her with an expression that somehow manages to be weighty and playful at the same time, like he’s inviting her on a grand adventure. She looks at her boots and sighs. It floats away in a cloud of vapor. “Thanks, Poe. But—They only believe in me because they think I’m a Jedi.”

He thumps her shoulder. “They believe in you because you’re tough as nails and fearless.”

“I am not fearless.” She’s got so much proof of that in the last three weeks: cowering away from a box in Maz’s castle, trying to steady her shaking voice as she told stormtroopers to take off her restraints, igniting her lightsaber in the snow. Every time Ben appears, her breath stops. "I could never do what Leia does."

His face wavers between the cheerfulness that feels so natural and something that doesn’t seem to fit him, a deep sadness, like he’s been floating free for so long he forgot what gravity felt like.

“Leia…” he says, and clears his throat. “Leia’s looking at the day when she’s got to make the call to fire on her own son. She knows what call she’s gotta make—for the galaxy, for the future—and she’s driving herself crazy because she knows she can’t make it.”

There’s so much sadness in his voice that Rey can’t do anything but look down at the snow and swallow around the guilt. Rey got so caught up in defending Ben that she almost forgot what Leia’s going through. Leia’s not cold. He killed Leia’s husband, and Leia still loves him.

“I shouldn’t have said those things to her,” she says.

“You’re not telling her anything she hasn’t already thought of.”

Rey nods, but keeps watching the wind drawing waves of snow in the air above her boots. Something about Poe inspires her trust. He’s the first person who’s ever agreed to teach her anything. Is this what that feels like, to have a teacher you trust?

Poe straightens up. “Just—Leia’s a good leader. She does what she needs to do, even when it hurts like hell. This, today, that’s what a leader looks like when she’s making a tough call. It’s not always pretty. That’s a lesson you’ll have to learn, when you’re a general.”

When you’re a general. She sucks in a breath that feels fifty degrees colder than the snowy air around her.

“I can’t be a general, Poe.”

“Not for a long time. You’ve got a lot to learn, but as long as you’re with the Resistance, we need everyone with talent to step up.”

“No, that doesn’t make sense. Leia’s going to kick me out of the Resistance. I know it. This connection, with Ben, it’s a security risk—”

Poe’s laughing at her.

“I’m serious. I can’t stay here, can I, if the Supreme Leader’s in my head? And even if something—something happens to him, I see the way she looks at me, like I’m going to fall to the Dark side any second, and she knows I was stupid enough to go to Snoke’s ship—”

“Are you kidding me? Leia’s the one who told me to have this conversation with you.”

Rey jerks her head up so quickly Poe steps back in surprise. “What?”

“She believes in you. So do I.”

He pats her shoulder, and starts walking again. Rey follows, slowly, sliding along with his arm around her shoulders. Rey can’t let herself believe it. It would be too good to be true, to think she could have a home here, after everything, with these people.

“But I’m no one,” she says. “I came from nothing.”

“Hey, welcome to the Resistance. We don’t care where you come from. Finn’s a stormtrooper and he’s gonna be running this outfit someday.”

Her whole body suddenly feels warm enough to melt the snow, down to her icy toes. “Finn?”

“Finn. And that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. He screwed up, Rey. Just like we did. I talked to him about it on the Falcon, but Finn’s enough of a soldier that now that we’re on a base he can’t decide if I’m his friend or his CO.”

“CO?”

“Commanding Officer. Which, technically, I am.” Poe scratches his head, and for a second the Force is raw with emotions stronger than Rey’s ever felt from him. Something’s going on between Poe and Finn, that’s for sure. “Anyway, just talk to him, okay?”

Guilt curls Rey’s fingers. She’s been so caught up in her own pain over her parents that she’s given Finn about as much attention as a rusty engine, and that morning he’d just thrown his arms around her like his only job in the world was making her feel better. “Yeah. I’ll talk to him.”

“Just let him know he’s got a future here. I want him training Desso’s recruits, but he’s—he needs something I can’t give him.”

A future. She could have a future, and so could Finn. Her parents were nothing, they threw her away; Luke threw her away; Ben threw her away. But she could have something here, with Finn, with Poe, with Rose. Friends. She could have a life, even if it’s a short one, and she’s never really planned on living long anyway.

The leather on her back presses closer to her skin, and that wonderful smell permeates the freezing air.

“Rey, hey, are you—?”

The siren splits the silence of the night, and both of them turn without hesitation to the main building, scanning for the threat. Then they’re both running to the hangar, ready to face whatever comes.

***

Five minutes later Raptor Squad has finished pre-flight—Poe’s adamant that no matter how good a flier she is she’s grounded until she finishes her training—and takes off toward lower atmo. They’re running escort to the cause of Leia’s hasty dismissal: the arrival of a small fleet of civilian vessels loaded with Senators who survived the destruction of Hosnian Prime. Rey couldn’t believe it when she heard. The whole hangar buzzes with anticipation, joy. Hope.

Rey and Rose are standing-by in the rapidly-deepening snow with the rest of flight support when they spot the blinking lights breaking the cloud barrier, sinking into the snow. Poe’s voice crackles over the comm channel.

“Ground team, Black Two. Got thirteen birds for you. We’re bringing the New-New Republic in.”

“Black Two, this is DS-879 Corellian ZX. We took a hit before we made hyperspace and it looks like we’re coming in hot.”

“How hot, ZX?”

“Real hot. Give us room.”

“Shit,” Rose says. Rey senses it in the Force just before she spots it: a small vessel slicing through the atmosphere much, much too fast to land safely.

“ZX, we’ll recover you if you land off-target, use the air to slow you down,” Poe says in the eerie calm that all pilots seem to have in the middle of a crisis. “All other craft, no clearance to land.”

Rey can imagine what’s happening on the injured ship: someone’s down in a hatch desperately trying to fix the atmospheric flight systems.

“Rey!” Rose’s shout, jarringly loud in the silent snow, jerks her attention away from the craft. “Can you Jedi anything? Can you slow it down?”

Rey shakes her head. “That’s not how the Force works.”

“Try!” Rose shouts. It’s an order.

Rey immediately sees her point: no harm in trying. She rushes forward into the snow, casting out her awareness in the Force, trying to feel the hurtling craft the same way she felt the stones on Crait, huge but just another negative space in the Force that she can twist and change.

She breathes like she’s practiced, slipping into the place she’s come to think of as the Ocean. Teeming but still, soothing but powerful, the Force waits for her there. She lingers in the dappled sunlight, where Luke told her to stay, reaching out unconsciously to Rose and Finn and the little mice buried under the snow and the worms and the roots of the grasses lying dormant on the plain. But the ocean extends deep, deep down, and she feels a massive, threatening presence far below her, like a huge serpent slipping through the depths, waiting to pull her down and drown her.

She steadies herself in the cold, shimmering shallows and heaves with all her might.

Nothing. The ship hurtles along like she knew it would.

She shakes her head at Rose.

“Keep trying,” the other woman orders. Rey kicks at the snow, stubbing her toe on the frozen mud. She can lift things, float them through the air, contact Ben kriffing Solo across the galaxy, but she can’t actually use it to save lives.

Finn’s come to stand beside her, and his eyes are gentle, like they always are.

“Try, Rey.”

In the Ocean, the monster slithers in the depths. It’s angry. It’s raging, looking for something to grab, something to crush. She’ll do. But that’s fine, because she’s angry, too. She’s fucking tired of her helplessness, and the rage pulls her down like a stone.

It’s only a millisecond—the ship’s still in sight—but it feels so much longer as she plummets down toward the depths, away from the light. It’s not cold here. It’s hot. It’s teeming, seething, then it’s boiling around her but it doesn’t burn her, it feels good, like someone’s finally kickstarted an engine that’s been left to rust in the snow, like someone’s finally smashed open the damper that’s been starving the fire inside her, letting the oxygen roar in.

And it’s there, the monster, just below her. Watching. Raging.

She grabs the ship as it hurtles toward the ground, ready to explode. She doesn’t hold it, she pushes the fire in front of it, blocking its way.

It slows. Then it stops.

From the corner of her awareness she feels Rose staring at her, and Finn, behind her somewhere, and four dozen other people, and Leia. Poe and the rest of the pilots shout over the comm, trying to understand what’s happening, terrified someone’s caught the ship in a tractor beam, and she ignores it all, and guides the ship in.

She drops it the last few inches onto the tarmac, and falls over.

Below her, the monster has stopped raging. It’s full of sorrow. Ben’s full of sorrow.

***

Finn and Rose and the rest of ground support ordered her to sit on a crate at the edge of the hangar when Rey tried to walk and couldn’t. Finn stands guard over her as the crew rushes around seeing to the incoming senators’ ships, checking for tracking devices and pretending not to stare in horror at Rey.

Exhausted, Rey reaches out with the Force, doing her best to check for anything hidden, though she’s not even sure if the Force can do that. It gives her something to focus on other than everyone staring at her, or the writhing thread of sadness that is Ben Solo slipping around the depths of her mind.

“Rey,” Finn says. Rey realizes she’s been staring at a blank wall. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.” She’s said it about forty times to twenty different people by now.

That was the Dark side, she’s sure of it. Luke told her not to go there, he yelled at her because she never even tried to stop herself, though he never told her why she should.

Finn steadies her when she stands to greet Poe, who grabs her upper arms—she’s still wearing his jacket—and leans into her.

“That was amazing,” he says, a little giddy. “That was Senator Varish’s vessel—you have no idea how devastating it would’ve been to the Republic to lose her. Rey, we’re going to put the Senate back together. We’re gonna do it.” She tries to smile despite her unsteadiness, and Poe catches her when she totters. “Whoa, whoa, you okay?”

“Yeah,” she says, then glances to Finn. “Both of you, everything’s fine. It’s just…new.”

New and powerful. New and useful.

What if this is one of the things the Jedi were wrong about, this fear of the Dark? Even the temple on Ahch-To had that symbol, the black and white teardrops embracing. She meant to ask Rose about her necklace, the same symbol.

“Dameron!” Rose calls, and he rushes off to help with an apologetic smile, leaving her and Finn alone.

“You seem a little out of it,” Finn observes, waving a hand in front of her face. He’s still holding her upper arms. “Don’t say you’re fine, Rey, I know you.”

“I’d be better if everyone would stop staring at me.”

“Nobody’s staring at you.”

“Well maybe not with their eyes.”

He opens his mouth, then tilts his head, and shuts it. “I’m gonna take you back to the bunks, okay?”

She nods, and he pulls her arm around his shoulders and helps her off the crate where she’s been sitting. He motions to Rose, who nods.

“Rose doesn’t mind?”

“Why would Rose mind?”

“I’m not dumb, Finn.”

His cheeks flush purple. “We had a talk.”

Rey’s grateful for the support when Leia approaches. Finn straightens to stand as much at attention as he can while balancing Rey. Rey, out of sheer stubbornness, forces her weight to hold itself over her feet.

“Get some rest. Then we’ll talk,” the general says to her.

Nothing would please Rey less than another heart-to-heart with Leia.

“Sure. Great. Why is everyone staring?”

Her arm tightens around Finn’s shoulder. Everyone is staring, and quite a few people are closing in on her in a way that makes Rey regret not bringing her staff.

They’re afraid of her. She feels it. General Desso meets her eyes from where he stands in uniform, with Col. Devi beside him, crowded in among the haggard-looking refugees. His gaze isn’t friendly.

Leia’s face softens as she looks to Finn. Not with compassion—with worry. “I’ve got her,” he says, and the concern in his voice feels tainted somehow. Dark.

“We just want to thank the Jedi who saved us,” one of the newcomers says in the poshest accent Rey’s ever heard. She looks like Chewbacca, if he dyed his hair white-blond and got attacked by five or six stylist droids.

“Rey,” Leia says, managing to sound tired but not angry. Rey doesn’t know much about politicians except they’re supposed to be great liars, and Leia’s doing a fantastic job. “This is Senator Varish Vicly, an old friend. Varish, I think Rey could use some space tonight. Why don’t we do introductions in the morning?”

Rey offers silent thanks for Leia’s suave redirection. Rey’s not exactly experienced at meeting people, especially fancy Senators. She’s not thrilled to have to deal with even more strange faces, even if they are the faces of the future Republic.

Rey should really learn about the Republic at some point, since apparently she’s willing to die for it.

The crowds follow Leia and Finn leads her into the empty cinderblock hall. All hands are on deck helping the newcomers, so they get a clear run all the way to the little room Rey’s supposed to share with Rose. She’d only stopped by it long enough to drop off the Jedi books and the regulation jumpsuits she picked up from the little trading post—the PX?—on the base.

Finn deposits her on her bed, the first real bed Rey’s ever slept in, with a crinkle of light-blue fabric and a squeak of springs. It’s soft and warm and wonderful, though she’d rather sleep on the Falcon, really, where she’s got silence and space. But they cleared it out that afternoon to prep it for transit to its hiding spot.

“I hope it’s not permanent,” she says to Finn. He cocks his head to the side. “The Falcon. Tomorrow.”

“Oh. Yeah, it’s funny.” There’s no humor in his voice, and his smile looks forced. “When I was on it I wanted to see that piece of junk back on the scrap heap, but now it’s kinda like home.”

Home. A future. Finn’s smile mirrors hers for a moment, but it fades. He pops open a drawer and pulls out one of the Jedi books. Even on the Falcon, he liked to look at them. He said they smelled nice and he liked the idea of touching something that old.

“Something’s changed with you,” she says. “Since that planet.”

“We don’t have to talk about it now.”

“I want to.”

He swallows, and rubs his thumb along the yellowed cover. “I don’t.” He glances at her. “I’m fine.”

“No you’re not, I feel it—”

“Well quit feeling it, alright?”

He opens the book, flips a few pages, flips back, then shuts it. The sound echoes off the bare metal walls.

“Sorry,” she says.

“What did you and Leia talk about for so long?”

Rey bites the inside of her cheek. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Is it classified?”

“Not from you, I just don’t want to talk about it.”

“Are you okay?”

“For the fifth time, I’m fine.”

“Fine. Me too.”

“Fine.”

He sets the book on the table. “Rose really likes you,” he says.

It’s a peace offering, sort of, if they’ve been fighting.

“I really like her.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah. How’s she feeling? All healed?”

“Her head hurts, she’s got some bruised ribs, but she’s good.”

“Good.” At a loss for what to do, Rey shoves her hands in her pockets. “Threnalli said it’s a miracle either one of you walked away from that crash.”

“Yeah.”

“You must’ve been scared.”

“I was.”

“Poe told me you could be a general in the Resistance someday, Finn.”

“I better get back to the hangar.”

Rey watches the way his fingers curl and uncurl, and she nods. “Yeah. I guess you better.”

He shuts the door too hard on his way out, and yells that he’s sorry. Rey keeps her eyes on the metal door after he leaves. It could have nothing to do with her. Maybe the conversation with Rose didn’t go as well as Rey thought, or maybe Desso got on his case. She worries for half a second that Finn’s afraid of her, but crushes that as Ben’s paranoia taking root. Finn trusts her. The others might stare, but not Finn, not Poe. This is something else, something about his speeder crash on Crait. Poe was right; Finn doesn’t want to talk about something.

Nowhere in the camp has good heating, and Rey shivers when she takes off Poe’s jacket and peels off her ugly, frayed, holey, wonderful, beloved orange Resistance-surplus jumpsuit, folding it messily and stuffing it into the footlocker by her small bed. It’s too cold to sleep in her underthings—last night she stole the blanket from the spare bed, but now Rose needs it.

She briefly considers whether the embarrassment of Rose seeing her wrapped in Poe’s jacket like a lovesick teenager justifies the discomfort of being cold. She decides it does not. She pulls a pair of leggings under her standard-issue RDF undershirt and is about to slip on the jacket when she feels him behind her.

The back of the undershirt leaves her upper shoulders bare, and she whirls around before he can see her scars, feeling exposed in the thin fabric. But when she turns, he’s not looking at her, and he’s not in a uniform, just a plain black shirt. She’s grateful he’s not bare-chested again. She hadn’t mentioned that to Leia, either; she’s still humiliated at her reaction, tittering and blushing while he stood there completely ignoring her discomfort, making her feel like a fool. She pulls on Poe’s jacket and studies Ben’s broad back.

He’s not standing. He’s sitting on the floor, knees pulled up, both hands clasped to his temples, one of them curled tight like he’s holding something tiny, the size of a holo-drive, in his fist. Barefoot, with dirty hair, curled up like that without his robes, he looks diminished. Human.

Then she hears it. Suddenly she feels like she’s just hit upper-atmo and the bottom of her fuselage breaks off, leaving her legs kicking out high over the planet with nothing between her and an endless, deadly fall. Everything flies out of her head, leaving nothing but the relentless bounding pulse of Ben’s grief.

Ben Solo is weeping.

He curls in on himself even more, recoiling from her, trying to hide even as the wet gasping sounds give it away.

Every instinct in her body tells her to run to him, to put an arm around him, to tell him he’s not alone and cradle his head on her shoulder. She feels it in the Force, a desperation for some kind of comfort.

Leia warned her he’d do this. She warned her that cruelty was the only way to win. Now, if she makes the wrong move, if she trusts him, she could put the whole Resistance, everyone she loves, in danger.

She walks around Ben, wary, until she’s looking down at him from the front. He’s so small, compressed like this, like whatever he’s crushing in his fist is the last piece of light in the universe. She reaches out with the Force and feels him trying to fight for control, for some kind of dignity in this humiliation, and he’s enraged that he can’t do anything but what he’s doing, gasping for breath like someone’s trying to choke him.

How many people has he choked?

There’s a change in the Force, a sudden heaviness like they’ve both been thrust onto a planet with high gravity. She felt it before, by the fire: the weight of an ocean on top of them like a crushing, suffocating, comforting blanket. She knows what it means. She could reach out to him, and she would feel warm skin under her thumb, real tears as she wiped them away. She could reach out.

She doesn’t.

He disappears. For a long moment she keeps her eyes on the spot where he’d been, then she sinks down onto her cold bed and tugs the Resistance jacket around her like a blanket, like a shield.

Chapter Text

Leia wishes that, in the moments before her fate narrowed to the thirty tiny transports tumbling like dice toward that red forgotten planet, she’d thought to grab another coat. Not for the cold. She’d worn this one the day after the galaxy learned her birth-father’s name, just to be cheeky, but now the yards of black only hide her face and remind these people, and her, whose child she is.

That day, her friend Varish Vicly had liked her chutzpah but questioned her wisdom. It’s a family trait, that—a fair critique of Leia’s whole bloodline.

“General Desso,” Varish is saying, her shining golden moustaches swaying elegantly as she speaks, “we understand the military concern, but you’re talking about a gross, and illegal, expansion of the Senate’s powers—”

“I’m aware of that, Senator Varish,” Desso replies. “But you were the one who came in here singing the praises of Princess Organa’s illegal personal armada and their heroism.” Varish’s obvious eyeroll buoys Leia’s spirits, but they rapidly resume sinking. They’ve been at it for half an hour and they’re all exhausted. “Isn’t it about time we all agree that the Senate needs to expand its power?”

“Not at the end of a blaster, General,” Varish snaps.

“We don’t have a choice,” Desso responds. “You want to buy ships? Even if you had two hundred billion credits for a new fleet of T-70s, Incomm-Freitekk’s been destroyed, and the First Order controls Kuat-Entralla, so there’s no one to build them. A blaster’s the only option we have.”

It goes on like that for another half an hour, but it’s the Senate, so nothing gets done. Leia finally points out that the rest of them are on planetary time, not standard, and need some kriffing sleep. The motion carries. She doesn’t ask about sleeping arrangements; as far as she knows the two hundred new people are bedding down in their ships.

She’s grateful for her private room, but she ignores the promise of rest in her little bed and heads instead for the freezing, abandoned powerhouse and the small, dusty, but still-functioning console there. It’s after one in the morning when she slips her hand into the pocket of her black greatcoat and pulls out the two items inside.

She sets the tiny drive Rey gave her beside the console and flattens out the other object, a stack of smallish hardcopy flexiposters, the kind she used to print by the thousand for political campaigns, the kind you’d see slapped onto every blank plywood or durasteel surface in every city. Someone in the RDF got ahold of a big one with General Hux’s face and some slogan, and they tacked it onto the training droid to use as a target down on the firing range. But these are new, picked up by Varish during a brief stop on a First Order-controlled planet after her escape from HosPrime.

Leia thumbs through them, convincing herself she’s curious about how the First Order advertises itself but actually procrastinating on the other task in front of her.

The first shows Starkiller spitting out five beams of red light. The Vanguard of a New Order, it reads in a stark red font. Leia rolls her eyes; as though most people on the street know a word like ‘vanguard.’

Varish and some of the others reported that the official story from the Order on Starkiller is that it’s still out there, either undergoing repairs or fully functional. They’re saying that rumors about the Resistance destroying it are nonsense—how could a few dozen X-wings destroy a planet? It’s absurd.

Even most of the Senators don’t believe Leia. Desso doesn’t. It’s too far away, and their resources are too precious, to send a ship out to look at the ruins—and even if they did, all they’d see is an asteroid field. No one could verify it had once been a space station, not without running a minute survey of the whole debris field to find the tiny, tiny percentage of manmade material. Official policy in the Senate is to assume Starkiller’s still out there, waiting to strike.

Leia glares at the poster, finally allowing herself to process the implications of this. She already knows they’re going to vote to surrender. How could they not, if they think Starkiller’s waiting in the wings? If not tomorrow, then soon. She’s up here looking at posters and holos because she simply can’t face that. She can’t. And she can’t tell Poe, or Chewie, or Connix or Snap or Rey that they’re about to be on the run again.

Her jaw clenches as she gets a good look at the second poster. Never Forget, it says, and the image shows a chain-gang in ragged brown jumpsuits, skeletal, bent and haggard from swinging pickaxes, as though anyone would assign workcamp labor to use hand-tools when they could use droids for a tenth of the price. Small, spiky black letters identify the scene: The Graves of Kuat—The Republic’s Brutal Legacy.

Leia frowns, but doesn’t roll her eyes. There’s some truth to it, a fact that fills her with shame, but it was more complicated than that. At the time. She would’ve never authorized anything like this, ever. And she hadn’t known—well. It was complicated. She moves that poster to the bottom of the pile, revealing the third.

She’d glanced at the final poster already. Varish had flashed it with a contemptuous laugh at the stupidity of the First Order. It’s red, with a stylized black figure in a mask looking gravely down, haloed in the First Order’s bolt-and-wheel like he’s thinking deep and patriotic thoughts. As if he weren’t instantly recognizable from the mask, the figure holds a cross-shaped, fiery red blade. DEFENDING THE LEGACY, it reads.

It’s interesting to her because it suggests that Kylo Ren is a recognizable enough figure to be poster-worthy. Of course the Resistance knows about him, but do people on the street on some newly-conquered First Order planet? It’s been so long since she’s seen a news report—she doesn’t even know if the holo-networks are still broadcasting—that she has no idea if people know his name. None of the senators had been aware that the Order had a new Supreme Leader, and few of them had even known Snoke’s name.

She wonders if he’d find it embarrassing, to have so many people looking at his image. She remembers his meltdown on stage as a kid, the way he hunched after his growth-spurt because he hated being so tall, hated feeling all the eyes on him. She wonders if he still hunches.

But he’s not a kid anymore, is he? And now the whole galaxy’s looking at him. Without his mask. She’d closed her eyes and thanked the Force when he showed up on Crait without that mask, even though what he was doing was unspeakable. She’d needed to see his face again. 

The thought makes her so tired. So, so tired.

She sets the posters aside, face-down, and flips stoically through the holos. It’s not long before she’s laughing quietly at the candid, badly-framed images flickering across the screen. She’s long-since learned to look at these things without tears. Even the pictures of Han only make her smile. He’d been so young then, so sure about everything. So had she. And Luke. It’s hard to laugh at the holos of Luke.

If he hadn’t left, they might have avoided this. Even after they lost Ben.

Rey only told her that they’d found these images in the Falcon. She didn’t say what was on them, so Leia’s unconsciously holding her breath until suddenly he’s there, his holographic image hanging in the air.

There he is, sitting on a sofa, losing at flight-simulator with Luke that summer when he’d brought that serious, intense young man home, his first and only friend. She’d been so happy he had one, even one who grew up in the First Order, who spent four grueling years in the labor camps she’d unwittingly authorized, whose mother had been thrown into a Republic prison without a trial, her records lost.

Leia had denied it when Ben accused her. He was always throwing out anti-Republic conspiracy theories just to piss her off, and she couldn’t believe the Republic would let that happen. But not even Leia could ever find out what happened to her—she never told Ben, but she looked for days and days, and Rax had been right. She’d been disappeared. Leia found out later there were others. How many, she didn’t know. But digging up skeletons in the Republic’s closet would only help the First Order, now; that’s another crime she’s got to hold in her heart.

Rax is a good kid, Leia, Luke had promised her. He’s a good influence on Ben. But Leia had been skeptical; there’d been so much bitterness in him, all justified.

She flips forward. The holos aren’t in chronological order, so Ben gets younger (but no older, since there hadn’t been many happy memories after that summer) as she advances. It’s a picture of a three-year-old in Han’s arms that does it. He’s flying a little model T-65 with a huge, toothy smile on his tiny face, his nose already long like his father’s, his face smeared with something that’s probably chocolate because he was constantly asking for chocolate, his black hair cleaner than she’d ever seen it once he’d started washing it himself. She stares at the holo with her lips parted and suddenly there’s a huge swell of something inside her, something from the Force itself, and she’s gone.

She weeps for Ben. For her baby boy. She wants sweep him up in her arms and sing the old Alderaanian songs she sang to him when he was little. She wants to fold her legs on the floor while he braids her hair in the styles she’d taught him, the last relics of a dead world. He loved to braid her hair. Let me do it, mommy. I know how.

She wants to tell him it’s all forgiven, because it is. She wants to tell him that everything’s going to be alright. Everything will be okay, sweetheart.

But it won’t be. Not for him.

She sees the concern in Poe’s eyes when he looks at her. She knows he would be relieved to see her like this, even, weak and human, but he doesn’t understand. She’s not her own anymore. The decisions she makes as Ben’s mother can’t be the same decisions she makes as General of the Resistance. She loves her son so much she’s afraid her love might rip the galaxy apart. And she can’t let that happen.

But she hates him, too. For what he did to Han. For what he did to Poe. For what he’s doing to Rey. Especially that. She’d never share this with Rey, but based on his behavior she’s almost certain he’d been in love with her. And now that she’s rejected him she’ll get no mercy.

Leia would be the first to admit her son was always a…well, a creep. Especially with girls. He didn’t understand limits and he took everything personally. He’d be exactly the kind of man she’d expect to fall helplessly in love with the first female who showed him the slightest bit of attention and then put every ounce of his energy into making the rest of her life miserable because she didn’t agree to spend it with him. And who knows what kind of power this connection gives him?

She keeps flipping through the images, relieved that most of them don't include Ben. There’s the million-credit question, isn’t it? His power over Rey. This arrangement with her isn’t sustainable. The smart thing would’ve been to be to maroon her on a planet before they ever landed here, so that if he could use the connection to find her, they’d be long gone before he dropped out of hyperspace. The fact that they’re not dead yet suggests that that fear, at least, was overblown—but that’s just luck. She’d knowingly put all her people and all Desso’s people in mortal danger because she couldn’t stand to hurt Rey.

And she knows the Force well enough to recognize the Dark side. Rey’d used it to save one of her best friends, but it’s still the Dark side. That’s how it starts. That much power—the Resistance can use it—even Ben had seen that. That’s what Ben’s banking on, she knows it. He’s betting that Leia will be desperate enough to push Rey to the Dark side just because she needs the firepower.

It’s a solid bet. Desso’s already asking why they don’t have the Jedi out there mind-tricking people into stealing ships. At some point, at the very least, she’ll have to ask Rey to leave for her own safety.

She rests her head in her hands, burrowing down in the collar of the coat. Suddenly, she’s freezing, like she hadn’t felt the cold before this.

What if Poe’s right? If Rey can convince him to trust her, Rey might be able to get close enough to him to—

No. That’s not an option. She can’t ask Rey to do that, and she can’t do it. Facing him on a battlefield is one thing. Assassination is another.

But she knows that’s only weakness. They’re desperate, aren’t they? If that’s what it takes to save the galaxy from the First Order, what right does she have put her own morals above the needs of hundreds of trillions of people? What kriffing right?

She wishes she could stop crying. She stands, sighing as she turns away from the holo console. She needs something more solid to look at. Finding nothing, she sits back down and stares at her own lap, her own hands, swollen and starting to twist with age.

Since Han died, whenever she has a night alone, this is what she does. When the Resistance isn’t there anchoring her, reminding her of who and what she is, the General, she falls apart.

She’s supposed to hate him. She does hate him. How could she not hate a son who forces her to sit up here in the middle of the night sobbing because she has to think about these things? What mother should have to consider killing her child?

She picks at the hem of her coat sleeve, at the loose threads where the droids have repaired the coat before because it's a nervous habit, to pick at her sleeves. With no heating system clanking in the background and no wind outside, it's eerily silent in the little room. She should go to bed.

Does it make her a bad mother, to hate the monster her son became? Probably. There’s no question she was a bad mother. But is it so bad, to be a bad mother? She’d been so young. So stupid, in so many, many ways. Isn’t every woman bad at this, when they’re young and stupid?

And there’s that voice, the voice that whispers to her from the darkness, the voice she tries to keep at bay because if she listens to those whispers she won’t be able to protect the people she’s sworn to protect: Your fault. You’re his mother. This is all your fault.

She wipes her eyes and her nose with her black satin sleeve. The black reminds her. For others, maybe, being a bad mother might be forgivable. But no matter how much she tries to hide from it, she’s her father’s daughter. Spectacular, galaxy-shattering failure, failure that propagates outward from a single act of stupidity to ruin the lives of trillions for generations to come: there’s another family trait, there’s the legacy that Ben is so far doing a stunning job protecting. He’s only thirty and he’s already the Skywalkers’ most dazzling failure yet. Plenty of chutzpah, not a speck of wisdom. Like mother, like son.

At least he’s so awkward he’ll never reproduce.

The thought makes her snort a bitter laugh through her tears, until she considers that he possesses such an egregiously huge ego he’s probably already growing an army of clones.

She’s a terrible mother for thinking these things. Even if they’re true, they’re mean-spirited and she’s terrible for thinking them. Isn’t she? Or would it be worse to live in denial, but love him unconditionally?

She should go to bed.

This is how it always is. Every night, going in circles, doubting herself and talking herself back to sanity. She doesn’t know how much longer she can do this. Luke was supposed to be here, to help her. And Han. And Amilyn and Ackbar and all the rest of them. And Ben. Ben was supposed to be here, with her, a son to be proud of, to worry over when he flew off to battle, to be warm and solid and ridiculously tall for her to hold when he got home. She wasn’t supposed to do this alone.

Slowly, she straightens, feeling more in control. She smooths down the threads she's pulled loose on her sleeves. With a tap of a button she shuts off the screen of the holo-console and ejects the drive, dropping it back into her pocket. The grid of backlit keys goes dark. After a moment she folds up the posters and pockets them, too.

She’s never had it in her to put up with peoples’ bullshit. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t love them.

She stops.

There’s someone there. Just in front of her, but so far away.

She jerks her head up, toward the presence, and finds herself looking through her tears out the dark window back toward the main building where all the Resistance soldiers sleep. She knows most of them are still in the hangar working on the senators’ ships, except Rey, since Rose ordered her to go to bed after her stunt with the ship.

One dim light shines from the barracks, and she knows.

She looks out the window until her tears freeze on her cheeks, and she holds onto that light like a candle sheltered in her hands, but she can’t stop it from going out. When it does, she sighs, and crumples again into the folds of her coat.

***

Negotiations with the civilians really start to go downhill as soon as the little girl tugs out a blaster and angles it up at the grey leather flap of Finn’s jacket. “You’re takin’ that ship over my cold dead bones, son,” the girl’s mother informs them, pulling a matching blaster from the folds of her long winter robes. Four echoing clicks behind her indicate that her brothers and sons agree.

For a moment, nobody moves. The shipyard opens onto a marketplace crowded with stalls bustling with holiday traffic. In the plaza a few stalls over a children’s’ choir sings some traditional solstice song from the religion of this world, and the strains of it flutter over them, mingling with the snowflakes in the brisk wind. The foreboding that has weighed on Rey’s stomach since her encounter with Ben seems to shift, like it’s teetering on the edge of something.

Several things happen at once. Finn actually puts his hands up. Rey throws out her hand, not to surrender but to freeze every single one of them, or try to. And Poe, wearing his own jacket now since they're on an actual mission, steps into the no-man’s land between them with his hands up in a placating gesture.

The children rest after a soaring crescendo, letting the sounds of hawkers and hagglers take the melody for a few seconds before they start in on another off-key song. She’d love to stand and listen—on Jakku, the market women would sing in the evening sometimes, and she would edge as close to the outpost as she dared at night to listen to the strains of music warbling out over the desert. Their songs were always sad. Wailing. The childrens’ songs sound happy. Yeah, she’d like to listen.

But instead she’s here, stealing a family’s property at gunpoint, watching the early sunset and the holiday lanterns paint multicolored, dancing reflections on the dull surfaces of their blasters.

“Let’s all calm down,” Poe says after a few tense breaths. “Ma’am, this is a serious military need. We’re going to need every ship we can get to go out there and fight for the Republic.”

“It look like the Republic’s done shit for me lately?” the woman asks, adjusting her head-covering and jutting her chin around the desolate shipyard. She spits on the snow. It’s black, the saliva. “You people ain’t done nothin’ ’cept try to haul my girl off to the army and now try to steal my damn merchandise.”

Poe’s good at talking, and he does his best to convince the family that giving up their rickety but still spaceworthy craft for the good of the Republic is a fantastic idea. He fails. Rey’s not surprised. They’ve failed ten times already today.

“Ma’am, I’m authorized by the Republic Defense Forces to use force to commandeer this spacecraft,” Poe says. Rey thinks he gets farther when he cuts the fake cop-speak, but she can see in his eyes he’s already given up on this.

“You ain’t gonna shoot me, son,” the mother says, chewing on something that seems to be attached to her cheek. And she’s right, they’re not going to shoot her.

Rey exhales, trying not to show too much relief as they leave. She pulls her borrowed too-large orange polymer jacket around her as they step into the lights and food-smells of the crowded marketplace. She can’t shake the feeling that one of these standoffs is going to end in a firefight. So far the worst that’s happened is that they made an old widow sob because without her ship she couldn’t run her business and without her business she wouldn’t be able to buy her son’s passage home when he got out of prison—Republic sector-level prison—off-planet.

They’d walked away from that one as fast as they could; she saw Finn run back and give her his three credits, the ones he’d kept from Takodana when Han gave them money for a drink. He’d held onto them because he’d never had money of his own before. Thought they were lucky.

“Lethal force, my ass,” Poe snaps to no one in particular when they’re back in the marketplace. “Desso’s out of his mind if he thinks we’re going to go around shooting civilians.”

Neither Rey nor Finn say anything. Poe’s been in a shitty mood since this morning. Whatever happened at the classified Senate meeting—which started at 0600 hours after a night that kept everybody except Rey in the hangar until 0300—had made him furious, even before he learned he’d been commanded to go out and steal.

It’s only 1430, but the winter day-cycle this close to the pole is so short the suns are already sinking below the horizon. A gong shimmers from somewhere across the market as soon as the second sun disappears, and Rey watches with interest as the shopkeepers all set out some sort of native winter gourd, deep green, using the twisted, dry stems as hooks to hang them on colored ribbons strung up outside each stall. In the dimming light Rey realizes with delight that the gourds are infested with some sort of glowworm. Their flickering, slithering lights shine out white and orange and yellow through the thin skin of the fruit, creating beautiful, pulsing lanterns that shine out over the darkening snow.

She glances over at Finn, and he looks so sad. Neither of them has mentioned their awkward interaction from last night, and Finn's trying his best to pretend like nothing happened. She's content to let him.

“I don’t feel like one of the good guys right now,” he says quietly to Rey. They both know it’s not Poe’s fault.

“Me neither,” she says.

She hasn't felt like one of the good guys since last night. 

You failed him by thinking his choice was made. It wasn’t. She can’t stop thinking of those words, her own, as she stomps through the snow, her polymer jacket and jumpsuit swishing loudly with each step. She'd felt his conflict and his grief and she hadn't reached out to him.

She could give herself reasons why she hadn't--she'd stayed up most of the night, even after Rose came in and fell exhausted onto the other bed, giving herself reasons. But that doesn't change how she feels. Like one of the not-good guys. And this disaster of a mission hasn't helped.

Poe, who knows as well as anyone how desperately they need these ships, had asked her to try mind-tricking one of the civilians. He’d obviously hated to ask, and she’d hated that she’d been angry at him for it. He’s trying to do what he thinks is best for the Resistance. She knows that.

But she remembers Ben’s words: they’ll use you as a weapon, against anyone who stands in their way.

And she tried, she really tried. But she couldn’t do it; she’d just looked an idiot, commanding someone to give up a ship. She’s had trouble feeling the Force all day, like her desperate, accidental pull on the Dark side had changed something inside her. She wonders if that’s part of the reason she feels like her stomach doesn’t have enough room.

Rey sighs and wishes she could walk through the stalls, looking at the lanterns and the little toys and listening to the singing.

As she’d expected, the news that her son had appeared to her weeping on the floor hadn’t cracked Leia’s clinical composure. Rey gets the sense that she’s got her hands full with whatever the senators are talking about in their private meetings. Ben’s going to hurt no matter what, so no sense putting much time into it.

They’re in a relatively isolated section of the market, far from the crowded center where the children are singing. Poe’s walking ahead of her and Finn, studying his comm and looking for the next place they’re supposed to try to rob, when suddenly he throws it into the snow.

Rey and Finn both stop, wondering what’s wrong.

“Forget this,” he snaps, sounding very much like Finn. “This is a waste of time and it’s completely unethical and I’m not going to be a part of it and I’m not going to order you two to, either. I can’t.”

“Poe,” Finn says after a long moment of silence, “no offense, but can you really afford to be ignoring orders right now? She’s still pretty sore about the mutiny.”

Poe frowns and picks his comm out of the snow like he’s personally surrendering to the First Order.

“Yeah, Finn, she’s sore about a lot of things. But I take responsibility if Leia or Desso comes down on us.” Finn looks uncomfortable, but nods. He’s better at following orders than either of them, despite being a deserter. “Rey,” Poe continues, “I’m sorry I asked you to use your powers that way, back there. That was. That’s a bad direction for the Resistance to go.”

Something in the way he says it makes her suspicious. “Leia put me on this mission because she thought I could mind-trick people into giving up their ships, didn’t she?”

Poe frowns, not wanting to say something he shouldn’t, but he looks at Finn’s equally suspicious glare, and the he looks at her, and he cracks. “Desso did,” he says, having the grace to look embarrassed. “Leia was against it.”

Rey nods. That’s good at least. Sliding down to the Darkness accidentally was one thing, but she doesn’t know what she’ll do if they start asking her to do it on purpose. “Back to the speeder, then?” she asks.

Poe sighs. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

Finn clears his throat. They both look at him. “So, here’s a thought. We could go back to the base and freeze and get yelled at. Or,” he says with an anatomically unlikely waggle of his eyebrows, “we stay here and walk around awhile, maybe get some of those pastries they were selling back there. Some kind of hot drink that tastes better than the caf at camp.”

Rey grins.

But Poe’s still frowning, still angry at Desso and Leia and Kylo Ren. Neither Rey nor Finn have ever seen him this angry, and Rey feels Finn’s concern joining hers in the Force. “You know what?” he says, looking like he’s half a second away from throwing his comm in the snow again, “none of us slept, there’s no kriffing daylight on this planet, my morale is pretty damn low, this is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in years, and that’s a freaking fantastic idea, Finn, why don’t we just walk around and boost the hell out of our damn morale until our shift ends instead of stealing from civilians?”

At his words, that sense Rey has of everything teetering, about to fall, eases. Suddenly the snow underneath her feels solid and safe. Finn beams, and Poe finally relaxes enough to allow his usual grin to break through. Rey throws one arm around Poe’s shoulders and one around Finn’s, and the three of them walk over their footsteps in the opposite direction, heading back to the crowded center of the market, the smell of spices and meat and baking, the sound of children singing.

***

Of course none of them have any money, not even Finn since he gave his lucky credits away. But Finn’s cheeky grin and his promise that his friend Rey here could do a cool magic trick in exchange for a round of something hot had been enough to get them three paper cups of syrupy but delicious mulled wine.

Neither Rey nor Finn has ever been this happy. They both know it, and Poe’s lingering bad mood fades quickly into a determination to show them the best time of their lives since neither of them has ever had a holiday, much less a holiday market.

They stroll through the endless stalls of food and this planet’s traditional crafts, asking about the little toys and the glowgourds and the snowworms, and she takes Poe’s hand in one of hers and Finn’s in the other and for a moment everything is perfect, and then they hear fireworks and look east, toward the camp, where a column of smoke climbs into to the sky and several thousand TIE-fighters tumble down from the clouds like snow.

Chapter Text

They’re shirtless, they're possessed, they stink. With a blood-orange five o’clock shadow and sweat-tacked hair snagging his pale eyelashes, Hux almost looks human.

Around 0500 the situation deteriorates from lightsabers to bareknuckle boxing. By 0600, the timer marking the minutes of their rounds is the only thing keeping their feverish, gleeful violence from spiraling into a frenzy. They agree without words to obey that timer, to back up and gulp air, guzzle water, smear the coppery spit from their chins with busted knuckles. Because if they don't obey it, if they abandon the threadbare pretense of friendly sparring, they both understand that one of them won’t leave this room alive.

They don’t speak. Kylo prefers this. With words, Hux will always beat him, but in silence, saying what he needs to say with swings of a blade and jabs of his fists, Kylo is the master. Hux doesn’t mind this. Kylo’s figured that out over six years of working with him: he’s a thirty-something refugee with a shitty father who built an army from scratch and blew up five planets and took over the galaxy to prove that, after all, he was better. He might be weak, but he never gives up.

The door console chimes. They watch each other, waiting for the next punch, wondering if this will be the round where they finally go for the lethal strike, where they finally finish this. Hux’s pupils are huge against his grey irises. Eager. Waiting for the kill.

The console chimes again. They crouch, they watch.

After a third time, the spell breaks, and after hours of fighting, the Dark side lets them go, and the first thing Kylo feels as his conscious functions return is Rey. He feels her hands, her skin. He feels the cool press of metal against her palm, the ache of the burn on her shoulder from the fight in the throne room.

He scowls and tries to avert his attention, but the only other thing to catch his focus is Hux, who's slamming back a glass of water. The three arcs of white skin from his father's public lashing expand and contract as he swallows.

Hux lets the glass thud to the counter and sort of nods as though Kylo has said something. Kylo eavesdrops on the General’s thoughts as he comes back to himself. Hux catches his own reflection in the black durasteel wall of his sitting room, taking in the black eye, the rivulets of sweat, and behind him, the Supreme Leader, bare-chested, bruised, and breathing hard, but not nearly as physically exhausted as Hux. 

How the hell am I going to explain this? Hux thinks, not at Kylo, but Kylo hears it.

Kylo’s too deep in this strange meditation to give even a single fuck. He cards his fingers through his damp hair, letting the strands cut the raw skin, and opens the door with the Force to reveal an astonished Mitaka with Jacindi by his side. They both salvage a hasty salute. It would be hilarious if Kylo felt less like ripping something apart.

 “Sir,” Jacindi begins, addressing Kylo. He’s so absorbed in the Force that their thoughts ring out as though they're shouting them: they wonder if he and Hux are lovers, and then they wonder if the Supreme Leader beat Hux physically for his failure. Hux decides that, if they ask, he’ll say Kylo asked him to join him for morning training, which isn't entirely false. “We wondered why General Hux wasn’t at briefing.”

Kylo hears an uncharacteristic curse as Hux notices the time; briefing started at 0700 because of their impending ceremony at Sector Command. It’s 0715.

Kylo does not care about whatever Mitaka starts to say, and if he has to sit through a briefing right now he’s almost certain he’ll murder someone. So without a word he pulls on his tunic, sweat and all, and pushes past the two officers into the passage, ignoring their salutes.

He’ll shower and do—something. Take his fighter out, maybe. Shoot things. Or just find the executive training room on this ship and beat the hell out of a droid for a few hours until he calms down. If he calms down. He feels like a moth searching for a flame.

You are unbalanced, his Master would say.

Snoke. His name was Snoke, and yes, he’s completely fucking unbalanced, he's going in circles, he's not leading, he's not following, he's running. But at least he’s moving.

***

Kylo decides to hell with it, showers, and takes off in his shuttle to look for Rey. He doesn’t tell Hux or anyone else where he’s going; even from the hangar Kylo feels the drumming of Hux's low-level fury. Whatever madness has overtaken him, he's dragging his General down with him.

But the emptiness of space dampens the mania, leaving dread. After two hours following the rain and the ocean that is Rey in the Force, the giddiness seeps out of his bones, leaving him hyperaware, cringing away from the sensations of her.

She’s…solidifying. Even the papery scratching of her flight suit against her skin thrums across their bond, as immediate and inescapable as the dull pain in his bruised temple. She’s hungry, even though she already ate two large objects that he somehow, disconcertingly, knows are sandwiches. Before that she’d been flying and, judging from the nervous fluttering and hormonal confusion that hijacked his own body as he tried to listen to the Force and pilot the shuttle, she’d been flirting.

He wants no part in any bond that forces him to know how many damn sandwiches she eats, or compels his own body, against his will, to mirror her physiological responses to gods-know-what. These are not things he wants to think about, after what she did to him, much less feel as intimately as his own breathing, his own heartbeat. 

It feels like an interrogation, a real interrogation, not that delicate, repulsive, self-conscious tiptoeing through her mind he’d steeled himself for on Starkiller. He can’t read her mind, but he can read her heart, and he can read her body. She’s like him in that way: those are the parts that matter.

Soon he finds himself above a planet not far from them in the Outer Rim, so close he imagines the smell the seawater in her hair. He orbits until he fixes the sensations to a rough latitude and longitude, which he transmits to Sector Intel.

Only he doesn’t.

He types the coordinates, then lets his gloved fingers hover over the transmit key, casting dim shadows over the backlit display.

Her life and her body and her emotions jostle in the background like conversations in a crowded mess hall. He can't turn it off, even now, when he wants to because he can't stand to feel her this close. 

He can choose not to listen, but he can’t choose not to hear. Sometimes it’s so loud it drowns out everything else, and he can’t think about anything except the way it felt to touch her hand, the way it felt to wake up and find her gone. And sometimes it feels good, to have her there, like when he felt her stretching in her bed. In the quiet of space, he even allowed himself to relax into the mundane emotions of her mundane life.

When she sees someone she likes, and she likes everybody, she sort of--glows. Psychically. She's doing it now. It's a soft thing, a comfort. Rey's not soft. She sliced a Praetorian guard apart at the kneecaps and then beheaded him. But this thing she does, this glow, it's soft. It's the exact opposite of the way he's felt since he started his insane duel with Hux, and as much as he loves this violence, he likes the glow, too.

He forces himself back to the shuttle, because these thoughts lead to places he can't go.

He rubs his thumb along the black leather covering his fingertips, centimeters from the button that will put her life in the hands of the First Order. When she finds out what he can feel, she'll know he's getting some sick pleasure out of it. He buries the word, the shame.

Creep.

The name clings to him. It always has. The little girl crying because he read her mind, before he knew he’s not supposed to: you’re so sad—Shut up, creep, you don’t know me—Of course I know you, I’ve just never talked to you.  Jyun, squatting next to him in the blue grass by the temple, eating the chocolates Rax brought her from HosPrime when he’d gone to stay with Ben: yeah, you can seem creepy sometimes but it’s hard, isn’t it, when you can see so many things that other people want to keep hidden?

He reaches into his pocket and wraps his fingers gently around Jyun’s red lightsaber. He doesn’t know why he feels the need to carry it around, but it comforts him.

What had Havel said? It’s a shame. It’s a shame Jyun’s dead. It’s a shame he killed her.

He exhales, smelling his breath in the stuffy overly-oxygenated air, and fidgets with his flight path event though he doesn’t have to, trying to ignore Rey.

He sighs. The planet swings across his viewscreen, five hundred kilometers below. He reaches out to cancel his geosynchronous orbit and send the coordinates to SecIntel and then--

He can’t breathe.

Huge, ghostly arms envelop his shoulders, crushing the life out of him. It’s his Master. It has to be. This has all been a trick, his Master’s not dead, he’s alive, he’s alive and he’s choking him for his disobedience, he’s killing him for his failure. Something presses against his face, filling his nose, his mouth. 

No—his brain catches up a millisecond later. It’s not his Master. It’s Rey. Just Rey.

But he can’t get away.

He can’t get away and his head knows it’s just Rey but his lungs and his pulse and the sweat leaking from his dilated pores scream it’s his Master finally showing himself, finally telling the truth, that this is a test, and Kylo failed, because of course he did, he's a disappointment to his bloodline and a disappointment to his Master because he always fucking fails and he always will because he’s never going to be good enough and he deserves this—

No. He breathes.

He presses his eyelids shut and takes a shuddering breath. When he opens them, Rey’s coordinates still taunt him from the display. Rey’s—she’s—hugging someone. The traitor, probably. Nothing to be afraid of; he should laugh. But he can't. The bond purrs with her relief, her affection, her love, and Kylo breathes, and he's shaking.

He yanks off his gloves and reaches up to wipe the sweat from his forehead. The mending skin on his knuckles cracks open and the pain flashes him back to the fierce, violent joy of the fight with Hux. He grabs onto that pain like a lifeline, digging the raw joints into his bruised temple, grinding his nerves back to reality like his Master taught him. He is not helpless.

But Rey has to die. If she can do this to him, she has to die.

He sets a course back to the Voratrix, ETA just in time to rendezvous with the transport to Arkanis. He glances at the coordinates nagging him on the display, the insistent flashing of the transmit key. Her smile flashes through the bond as the traitor drapes a massive arm around her shoulder, and his shoulder too, and Kylo frowns. He reaches into his pocket, to the comforting, cool weight of Jyun's lightsaber.

Yeah. It’s a shame.

***

“—flag everything on Apolin, sir,” Mitaka says to Hux. “I think you should take a look.”

Kylo, meditating in the corner of the passenger compartment of their transport, snaps his attention to the officers plotting around the small holotable. He's not really meditating as much as obsessively monitoring Rey, trying not to flinch at any sudden moves that might bring on another choking attack. He hasn't said a word since he got back. Hux asked him directly if he had any plans to go look for the Resistance, and Kylo had passed him in silence. Kylo knows the coordinates. He'll use them when he needs to.

Hux, uncharacteristically not belted into his seat for landing, is scanning his datapad, a stylus hanging out the side of his mouth like a cigarette. He's buttoned himself back into his First Order uniform and re-imprisoned his hair in pomade, but Mitaka looks more than a little concerned to see the General slouching and swearing like a prizefighter with a bacta patch over his left eye. Jacindi's known Hux long enough to find this Force-driven madness endlessly entertaining.

“Kriffing shit,” Hux says, slurring around the stylus.

“Rather, sir,” Mitaka agrees.

Kylo uses the Force to snatch the datapad out of Hux's hands and bring it sailing into his own without comment.  Jacindi, who’s never seen the Force in action, raises an eyebrow, but Kylo’s only got eyes for the picture on the screen.

The embedded holo shows an imperious-looking woman in her seventies draped in a stately black and gold sari. He recognizes her instantly; several times in the last three years he'd escorted her into his Master's presence, annoyed that his Master always dismissed him like he was a child loitering around the adults' table. Beside her, wearing a diplomatic smile, a turban, a sword, a ridiculously ornate coat that he probably finds mortifying, is Rax Apolin. It’s a marriage announcement.

It’s all Kylo can do not to snap the datapad in half. Instead, he reaches out with the Force and smashes the first thing he finds, the mug of caf Hux slammed down on a side table. Mitaka jumps.

“He’s after Entralla,” Kylo says.

“He's got Entralla. As Onara's husband he's got a seat on the Board,” Hux says, as though he’s surprised Kylo knows about Kuat-Entralla Engineering or the damn Kuat Drive Yards, the most important military asset in his fleet, in the entire galaxy.

“You’re telling me Rax Apolin now controls the only facility in existence capable of rebuilding my fleet,” Kylo says slowly.

Snoke’s alliance with Lady Onara of Kuat and the Drive Yards she now controls had been the lynchpin of his Master’s whole operation. Onara got what she wanted—control of the Board of Directors that runs the Drive Yards—and Snoke got what he wanted—a fleet big enough to conquer a galaxy. 

“Onara is still in control," Mitaka begins, "and she has two other co-husbands who make up the rest of the Board, but—”

Hux interrupts him. He's scowling out the viewport at the first wisps of Arkanisian atmosphere, like the clouds offend him. “I suspect he used his—abilities—to secure the alliance.” He means a mind-trick, and Kylo agrees. He can’t believe it, because it’s Rax, but it’s the only explanation. “And he’s planning to move against us.”

“But he can’t take control outright, he won’t have enough support,” Mitaka says. He’s Kuati himself, one of hundreds of refugee aristocrats and millionaires that planet gave to the officer corps. No planet hated the Republic more, or at least no planet full of people wealthy enough to have connections to the Imperial officers and financiers who founded the Order. “The Apolins are nowhere near important enough to marry into the Great Houses, much less the House of Kuat itself, sir. The marriage is a scandal. He’ll operate through Onara.”

Kylo overhears Hux’s thought: if he had to make a list of people least likely to become embroiled in a scandalous marriage for money and power, Gallius Rax Apolin would’ve been near the top.

“More alarming, sir,” Jacindi says, stroking his beard in a way that Kylo finds painfully affected, “he controls the Kuat Sector Forces. That's dozen star destroyers at least, and the Dreadnought Malleatrix.”

Kylo’s not surprised they have a Dreadnought. It had taken thirty well-placed mind-tricks to get him and Rax through all the security around the system that time they’d snuck in. For twenty-five thousand years every petty warlord with a starship has wanted to control Kuat; it's learned to protect itself.

“Those are my ships,” Kylo says, because they are; he’s been aboard the Malleatrix a dozen times on missions for Snoke. That ship belongs to the Order.

“They will be as soon as Kuat signs the Act of Union," Hux says with a frown. He's removed the stylus from his mouth and is twisting it in a complicated, practiced motion that looks like a nervous habit he'd disciplined himself out of decades ago. "But so far they’ve been our willing allies, our firepower in the Core. They seceded from the Republic but, for the moment, the system is legally independent." As though he or anyone present cares about legalities.

Kylo frowns out the viewport as they punch through the cloud-line into a landscape of grey-green stubbly hills and grey cliffs and iron-grey water. The grey city spreads over the fingers of the fjord like some wasting disease infecting the land bridge by bridge. Rain pummels the ocean as far as Kylo can see; disdain and something very like fear arcs out from Hux as they approach they city. Rey would love this place.

“He may try to seize control of the Order,” Jacindi says, smoothing back one of his braids, “or he may try to seduce our officers to push for an independent Core. Either way, he needs to be dealt with as soon as possible to avoid a war on two fronts.”

Hux translates mentally, and Kylo overhears: nobody in their right mind would follow Kylo Ren if Onara presents a better candidate, and if she gets a dozen commanders on her side we’d be completely buggered.

“We’ll discuss this immediately after the ceremony,” Kylo orders as the transport whirs into a large hangar hastily constructed beside what looks like an ancient fortress. It was some Imperial building before the Arkanisian magistrate handed it over to the Order for Sector Command headquarters.

Even he can see that walking up to Rax and stabbing him is no longer an option. He’ll be under the best security in the galaxy, and if he’s smart, he won’t leave it. Kylo could get past whatever walls he put up, of course, but Rax would sense him coming from miles off.

It’s like playing hide-and-seek with a supernova, Rax had said about Kylo’s ability to mask his Force signature. A supernova who’s especially awful at hide-and-seek.

Hux is far enough gone after their descent into madness that he doesn’t bother to hide his real thoughts: I told you to take care of this a week ago, Ren.

Hux did. And Kylo should’ve, at least once he realized Rax was alive. Instead he’d had a meltdown on the throne room floor, feeling sorry for himself because he killed his friend, but Rax isn’t his friend. He hasn’t been for a long, long time.

He will take care of it. The galaxy belongs to him, and if Rax won't kneel to him, he'll die.

He remembers Jyun, not long before it all came apart, listening to one of his fantasies of people kneeling to him, the stupid cocksure rants he always launched when Luke pissed him off, all about how he’d turn to the Dark side and wreak his vengeance.

Ben, these power-trips are creepy as hell. No, look at me when I’m talking to you, goddamn it. This is not funny. You’re not this tiny kid anymore, you don’t know how scary you can be. Luke thinks so, Rax thinks so, I think so. I’m worried you’re gonna hurt somebody, like Rax did. I’m worried you’re gonna do something you can’t take back.

Kylo’s own comm, resting in his pocket next to Jyun’s lightsaber, buzzes. He ignores it until he realizes everyone with access to his personal contact codes is aboard this transport.

This message is coming from Arkanis.

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the device. When he activates it, it shows a single, short message from an encrypted source:

I want to talk, Ben.

He frowns down at it. He doesn’t show Hux, who hasn’t noticed.

He couldn’t have planned this; it’s almost a day from Kuat to Arkanis, and they’d only scheduled this trip ten hours ago. Rax must be here for some other reason. Gathering support, maybe. Kylo tries to think of any reason why he’d abandoned the most fortified planet in the galaxy, and finds none. But Rax hadn’t been expecting to feel Kylo’s Force signature here. 

Kylo will take care of it.

***

Rain.

Here on Arkanis it never lets up, and Hux takes each pelting drop as a taunt from the Force, as an insult, the galaxy’s whisper: I know who you are, I remember your beginning. In the distance the weathered hills aspire toward mountainhood, too inadequate to cast a rain-shadow where some life-giving desert might spring up. Not that Hux needs the sun. This world had given him that, at least—the independence to thrive in the dark, free from the sun-thirst that drives so many stronger men to drink and dose after years in space.

Hux destroys suns; he does not require them.

He raises a hand to his nose to ward off the reek of ocean and mold that follows him even inside this wretched building, and he clenches his jaw when the movement pulls at the bruises the Supreme Leader pinned to his clavicle like medals. Though the bacta patch healed his black eye in time for this meeting, he’s had less success restoring his unbalanced mind, and this nonsense with Apolin hasn’t helped.

What the hell has Ren done to him?

He doesn’t know. Hux hates that he has the power to do it, and he hates that it makes him feel so goddamned alive.

We keep this as short as possible, the Supreme Leader says to him for the fourth time. Hux imagines he’s keen to skip the theatrics and move against Apolin as soon as he can, but these theatrics are important, and there are too many important officers and civilian leaders on Hux's agenda for the day to drop everything and take care of it. If it does come to war with Kuat, Arkanis will be their center of operations. Hux has allies here.

Hux scowls at the glass canopy, a completely inappropriate addition to the stone walls of the ancient fortress that became his father’s Academy. It’s as though the inhabitants of this sopping wadded-up towel of a planet might shrivel and die if they lose sight of the rain for more than two seconds. He prefers the sterile durasteel of the First Order Academy on the Eclipse; this building, like the man who ran it, stinks of the ailing body of a past that needs to die. The whole place feels dropsied, unwell.

You’re not imagining it, the Supreme Leader says.

His voice in Hux’s head crackles, unstable, like his lightsaber; Hux can tell, somehow, that he’s looking for a distraction from the Apolin situation. Hux knows nothing about their relationship, but Apolin has General Han Solo and Princess Leia Organa to personally thank for the bombs that destroyed his planet and his legs as an infant, and the six years in the camps, too. He can’t have been happy when Snoke ordered him to play nice with an oaf like Ben Solo.

When Hux turns to the Supreme Leader, he finds him contemplating the windows set into the stone corridor, wearing the spitefully, unwittingly erotic sulk that comprises most of his emotive repertoire. Hux follows his gaze beyond the cliff edge to the causeway still mostly obscured by the gunmetal waves as the tide wanes. There, alone on a spray-lashed rock, stands the stone tower he’d always know as Area Null. The New Republic rechristened it the Rain Gardens; they studded it with flowers and lights in an absurd mockery of public art but the attempt to scour away the brutal truth of it only rendered it grotesque. Although, with Lady Carise Sindian in charge, he supposes he should be grateful the whole thing isn’t covered in glitter.

Imagining what? Hux responds, spying the bare steel plate where the plaque announcing his father as Commandant of the Arkanis Academy used to hang. He regrets that the Republic removed it; Hux would’ve liked to piss on it.

You’re feeling him in the Force. Your father.

Brilliant, Hux replies, as though he were meant to grateful that his father’s ghost really is prowling around.

His father was God within these bleak halls. Armitage can almost smell his cologne, the taint of stale cigarette smoke and the vodka he’d drink to medicate his way through shifts. But Brendol Hux is dead. Armitage is not Kylo Ren, falling to his knees to worship ghosts.

The Supreme Leader ignores the insult. This worries Hux. When was the last time the Supreme Leader choked down some of that gruel? What’s sustaining him, if not sleep or food? He’d fought with Hux for hours looking like he’d gone out for a brisk, if bloody, morning jog.

It’s not a ghost, Ren says, sounding for all the world like a schoolmaster. Hux so rarely knows less about something than Kylo Ren that it’s almost charming. Ahead of them, Jacindi is speaking to his local counterpart, the admiral managing Sector Operations here. Hux will meet with her later.

It’s a signature. An echo.

Of course it’s not a ghost. Ghosts aren’t real.

Ghosts are real, the Supreme Leader says, not bothering to feign interest. Ren seems to be sniffing the wind, trying to find something. But only for us.

‘Us.’ He means those lucky enough to be granted magical powers by the capricious whims of the Force. Naturally they enjoy a VIP afterlife as well. Hux cares nothing for justice, but the cosmic unfairness of it, that a man like Ren, or Vader for that matter, could exercise such power through no effort at all, offends his sensibilities.

Hux feels, in the strange quivering he’s learned to recognize as the Force, the first stirrings of Ren’s pathetic stage-fright weaving into the currents of his anxiety over Apolin, and he shakes his head. This is the ruler of the galaxy, this fragile creature. Hux’s own anger surprises him: Hux has seen, he’s fought, he’s felt this great throbbing power that courses through Ren—he could’ve been so much more than this. What the hell had Snoke done to him, to turn him into such a disappointment?

Before, Hux would’ve called him merely incompetent. But now he sees clearly what the galaxy might’ve made of such a man, what he might’ve made of such an ally. And the reality of it, this trembling, frightened creature beside him, is a disappointment. It’s a waste. It’s a shame.

Although, he reflects thirty minutes later as he surveys the Admiralty of the First Order groveling on their knees before him, his arrangement with Ren has its advantages. These people would never kneel for him. He remembers what Ren promised him—had it only been yesterday? You will rule, Hux, but to rule you will serve me.

He stands in front of the Supreme Leader, whose sole function is to hulk in a sufficiently intimidating way as Hux conducts his army like a symphony. For a few minutes he allows himself to forget these soldiers are kneeling to the trembling, insecure man behind him and not to Supreme Leader Armitage Hux. He hopes his triumph bleeds into the walls. He hopes the ghost of his father is watching.

You were a schoolmaster with delusions of grandeur, he thinks at the stone walls of the massive assembly hall. I am an emperor. I am an emperor, and I killed you.

He feels the Supreme Leader’s eyes on him and he’s certain Ren overheard the thought, but Ren is probably too deep in the orgiastic throes of his own Force-mediated power-trip to mind. Hux wonders what it feels like, for him.

And then, in the middle of the ceremony, Hux feels in the lingering wisps of his Force-sensitivity a sudden intuition: the Supreme Leader sees something that fills him with dread. Something he wants desperately. He risks a glance behind him and observes Ren glaring at the back of the huge assembly hall like he’s scented prey on the wind.

Hold my transport, the Supreme Leader orders in Hux’s head. I’ll be back later.

Supreme Leader? Hux asks, because surely he’s misunderstood, because now he’s standing in front of thirty thousand stormtroopers and hundreds of officers who have just risen from their ceremonial kneel and watch him in puzzled silence, but no, the Supreme Leader has pivoted and walked off the vast parade floor, heading out toward the cliff, toward the rain.

Sir, Hux calls, doing his best to maintain some dignity while also fielding the curious glances of the assembled officers, who know that the Supreme Leader has gone off-script. You need a guard—

If the Supreme Leader hears him, he gives no response.

Hux frowns even though he’s not at leisure to frown at Ren. Of course the ruler of the galaxy takes off, without a guard, to indulge in the mystical equivalent of sniffing piss on a tree.

Hux sighs. He knows what Ren find when he reaches the cliffside. A narrow, treacherous stone stair, eternally slick with salt spray, hacked into the side of the fjord and pitching down to the wind-lashed causeway. Hux’s father had once made him spend the night on that staircase—he must’ve been four or five, before they evacuated when the Republic attacked—to cure him of his fear of heights and his fear of the dark. He remembers clinging to the smooth stones, unable to find any purchase, trembling but refusing to move up or down because his father forbade it. He remembers being naked, but he might’ve just been very cold. At any rate he’s not afraid of the dark anymore. He still doesn’t like heights.

Naturally the Republic built a covered pedestrian bridge out to the Rain Gardens, clustered with bad paintings by local schoolchildren, but Hux has no doubt Ren will take the treacherous stair and the wind-lashed causeway because Hux can’t imagine a more natural goddamned habitat for Kylo fucking Ren. He probably wandered off just to savor the chance to brood every miserable drop of desolation from this wretched landscape.

Hux cleans up Ren’s political mess, as he always does, and after the ceremony he, Jacindi, and Mitaka stride through the stone halls on their way to their respective next engagements. Hux deserves better than this. Better than Kylo Ren.

 “Is he always like this?” Jacindi asks, stepping up discretely to Hux’s shoulder wearing an expression somewhere between indignation, worry, and amusement. One of his braids has escaped its tie, and Hux resists the urge to tuck it back into place.

“He’s only smashed one mug,” Mitaka replies, and he doesn’t fail to hide his smirk. Hux worries, not for the first time, that Mitaka genuinely likes the Supreme Leader. The Brigadier General thinks he’s a hero, the son of the two notorious terrorists who destroyed Mitaka's homeworld, a man who defied his family and gave up fame and fortune and a cushy life in the Republic Senate to fight for the right side.

A buzz of his comm reminds Hux that he, however, has a galaxy to run. He shakes his head at Mitaka’s absurdity.

Imagine. Kylo Ren, a hero.

***

Kylo doesn’t need to descend the lonely stone stair or brave the spray-battered causeway. He doesn’t need to approach the tower that throbs in the Force with a low, relentless despair, and he doubts he would’ve been able to, anyway. He’s already unbalanced. That place’s signature makes him feel like he’s about to fall off a cliff and keep falling forever.

He should’ve brought a guard. He should’ve set up snipers. This is stupid, what he’s about to do, but he’s always done stupid things for Rax.

He finds his quarry on a bleak expanse of slick grey rock at the cliff’s edge, gazing in contemplation, not at the gunmetal sea or the solitary tower, but at the stark concrete wall of what appears to be a public toilet.

The park is abandoned—the pain from that tower saturates the air here so much that even non-Force sensitives would avoid the place. It's open ground for hundreds of meters in every direction, nothing to hide behind but the ‘fresher building. He peers over the cliff edge and sees no squads of stormtroopers waiting to scale the cliff and assassinate him.

They’re alone. That makes Kylo even more nervous. He keeps scanning for the threat and coming up empty.

Rax stands still, facing the wall, while the energy of the Force jerks seismically around him, propagating hate. The hem of his cream-colored sherwani coat flutters in the wind, because of course he’s wearing white, and he’s got a pale gold sash draped smartly through the crook of one arm. His bare brown fingers grip an umbrella that does almost nothing to keep the rain off his hair, which is longer than Kylo’s ever seen it. A ceremonial Kuati dagger, fake, hangs on his belt, concealing a lightsaber.

Kylo’s boots squelch in an undignified way as he approaches the man and the ‘fresher wall, which, like all public toilets on all planets, is a collage of posters and graffiti. Rax sighs, collapses his umbrella, and tosses it to the ground. He draws his lightsaber.

It’s a charade. They both know it. Blade to blade, they’re evenly matched, but Rax is weak in the Force. Even after hours of fighting Hux, Kylo has the strength to crush him, just as he had the strength to override all Rax’s skill with a lightsaber that night in the throne room, ripping off his prosthetics and jumping on him with his fists.

Rax knows he’s got no hope of winning this fight. But Kylo knows he’s been fighting battles he’s got no hope of winning for six years, and doesn’t expect him to quit now.

He presses the catch and, looking Kylo in the eye with grim resignation, ignites it. The blade flares to life, electric against unrelenting grey—dazzling, blinding blue.

“Did you come here to kill me, Ben?”

Rax’s boots crunch against the muddy gravel as he shifts his weight, ready to fight. The boots are custom for his cybernetics, and Kylo hears the soft hisses as Rax moves.

The blue lightsaber sputters and crackles like Kylo’s—he’s used a cracked crystal, an unstable power source. Kylo, through the rush of adrenaline that sets his heart thrumming, wonders where he got it so fast, and how he modified the design to get rid of the side-vents.

Kylo ignites his own blade, and they begin to circle. With his black eyes shining blue in the reflected light, Rax looks possessed, like Kylo feels. They’re both stretching out with the Force, and wherever Kylo senses the vibrations of him they feel wrong. Or, no, not wrong. Right, but unfamiliar.

“Did you come here to take the Order from me?” Kylo asks. It’s hard to hold on to his lightsaber, his palms are too slick with sweat inside his gloves.

 “I came here to talk.” His First Order accent has gotten stronger; he sounds exactly like Hux.

“You think I’m going to negotiate for the Drive Yards.” Kylo’s heart pounds in his chest, and he feels Rax’s pounding, too. He can’t put his finger on what’s different about the way he feels in the Force, but it both unnerves and thrills him.

“No, Ben, I’ve got fourteen pins in my skull from your ‘negotiations.’ I couldn’t give two shits about the Drive Yards, or the Order. Piss it down the drain the way you do with everything else.”

Kylo feels the truth of it in the Force, but he doesn’t understand it. Rax loves the Order. As much as the man hated Snoke, as much as he loved Luke, he never lost his faith in the original Charter of the First Order, never lost his loathing for the Republic that destroyed his family and his life.

Mostly Rax feels desperate. Kylo hesitates.

“You married Onara,” Kylo says, advancing on Rax, forcing him to back up, to get closer to the cliff. Rax gives ground but circles to keep his back away from the sheer drop.

“Our Master’s orders. You can’t possibly think I’m a willing partner in that relationship.”

Rax feels Kylo’s horror and huffs a bitter half-laugh, mocking a polite bow with his blade. He shakes his head. “Your concern for my virtue is charming, Ben. I assure you I’ve done far more shameful things at our Master’s command.”

The way he laughs at it infuriates Kylo, and he presses Rax backward more aggressively, toward the poster-covered wall of the ‘fresher. Kylo holds his lightsaber steady as he advances, pushing Rax back until his heels are inches from the filthy concrete wall. With nowhere to retreat, Rax crouches, preparing to strike or defend. Kylo remembers all the signs, all the movements of his body, and knows that Rax is reading his, too. There’s no such thing as a surprise attack, not between them.

“Hux thinks you’re planning a coup.”

“Armitage Hux is a twat and you’re a twat for listening to him.”

The way he says it cracks something inside Kylo’s chest. How many times has he heard himself called a twat, a wanker, or a whinging prat in that clipped aristocratic voice?

Kylo stops. He takes three steps backward, letting Rax off the wall.

For a long, long moment, they stare at one another, bodies angled to the side to present smaller targets, knees slightly bent, ready to lunge. They’re breathing hard even though they haven’t done anything. It’s time to end this. They both know it.

It’s a shame. It’s a damn shame.

Kylo extinguishes his blade.

Rax stares at him, eyes wide, pupils crackling like blue plasma in the light of the saber. He licks his lips as Kylo slowly, slowly hooks his lightsaber to his belt and moves his hands away from it.

A twitch of Rax’s bare thumb--the blue light disappears, leaving only a burning afterimage. Rax exhales. His eyes suddenly look normal, too-large and sad and exactly as Kylo remembers. And afraid. Whatever he wants, Kylo realizes, he hadn’t expected to get this far.

Kylo drops his hands and opens his palm. The umbrella jumps to him, and he wraps his fingers around the wet cloth. Slowly, carefully, he picks his way through a puddle, approaching him until he’s close enough for Rax to accept it from his hand.

It’s almost comical: handing someone a dirty umbrella in front of a public ‘fresher. But for a moment both their hands grasp the wet fabric, not touching, and it feels sacred. Kylo turns to stare at nothing in particular, following Rax’s gaze, and stands with his Knight, shoulder to shoulder, in silence.

This close, Kylo finally understands what feels different. Rax’s Force signature plucks at his memory, achingly familiar: a flash of blue sky through barbed wire, the starched perfection of a cadet’s uniform, Jyun’s dirt-stained hands in his, and something new, something forlorn he can’t place, clean and powdery.

But eclipsing it all, for the first time, is Darkness. Before, Rax felt cold and shriveled in the Force, always huddling in the Light, pretending to be what Luke wanted him to be. But now his power sings out the way it was meant to, venomous and heartbreaking and strong. After so long fighting his darkness, Rax has fallen, and it’s beautiful.

Snoke broke him, in the end. Snoke won. Snoke always won.

Without acknowledging him, Rax gestures at the ‘fresher wall. They must look ridiculous, two grown men, one in black and one in white, standing in the pouring rain, staring at a public toilet like it holds the secrets of the universe.

Rax has indicated the biggest poster on the wall, crammed among the cheap 2-d stickers for musical acts and the years-old Sindian for Senate holos and the vulgar stick-figures etched in spray paint: a vibrant blue and red image, five pale planets and five red lines stretching back to one white sphere. Over it, someone has scrawled kriff this rain.

“Have you been out there?” Rax asks.

Kylo furrows his brow, confused.

Rax reaches up to his ear in a gesture that tugs at Kylo’s chest. Rax used to run his fingers over his Padawan braid when he felt the anger, like it was a rope he could use to climb out of the Darkness.

“To the asteroid field formerly known as the Hosnian system,” Rax clarifies. “Have you been out there?”

 “I have more important things to do than scavenge an asteroid field.”

“Scavenge. No, no, no, Ben. Just sit. Just take a shuttle and sit. Feel it.”

Kylo raises an eyebrow. “You’ve done this.”

“Every goddamned morning since that bastard left my head, yes, Ben, I wake up at 0400 like our Master taught us and I take the forty-five minute hyperspace commute from Kuat and I do my morning meditation in that silent hole in the Force. Yes, I’ve done this, and I will do it every morning until I die because how else can you fucking live with yourself?”

Kylo doesn’t respond. He thinks back to his first hours as Supreme Leader, taking in the fallout from the destruction of the fleet: his ships, his souls, his galaxy, and he did not care. He still doesn’t care, not really. He doesn’t approve of vaporizing forty billion people in the same way he doesn’t approve of orange, or Poe Dameron, or sand.

But guilt is Rax’s kriffing lifeblood. He even feels guilty for the camps they stuck him in. Who’s going to protect the billionaires who designed the Death Star, Ben? Who’s going to cry for the children of war criminals? No one. We deserved what we got, didn’t we, for the way our parents made our money? We deserved worse. Standing up for us would’ve been political suicide, your mother knew that.

“You said you wanted to talk,” Kylo says. He’s not sure why they’re here—Rax couldn’t have planned this, but he could’ve run as soon as he sensed Kylo, and he didn’t.

Kylo walks toward the cliff edge—he’s never been afraid of heights, and he’s not afraid Rax will push him off—and he’s relieved when Rax follows, tracing Kylo’s gaze to the end of the causeway.

“You feel it,” Rax says. “The agony.”

Kylo nods. “What is it?”

“The reason I’m here in your tender care and not safely huddled behind two light-years of security on Kuat. And the reason I ran away to Luke in the first place.”

Kylo says nothing, only raises an eyebrow.

“It’s called Area Null,” Rax says. He’s speaking slowly, like he’s inside a temple. Kylo feels it too; the place feels like a tomb, a haunted one. “At school, Armitage whispered about what went on here. Project Unity, for reeducating enemies of the Emperor. Project Harvester, where the Empire trained the Force-sensitives they rounded up to hunt down Jedi.”

Rax grimaces at the tower. He shakes his head.

“And when our Master took over the Order, Armitage would tell ghost stories about his father’s work for the Supreme Leader, that our Master was hunting Force-users and turning them into—well, into whatever we are. Loyal servants, I suppose. Assassins. Slaves.”

Kylo doesn’t comment. It’s what Hux thought, too: Kylo Ren isn’t meant to be his successor, he’s meant to be his slave.

 “I never found out if the rumors were true, but I saw enough that I ran, and you know the rest.”

Kylo does know the rest: the four months shivering in cargo-holds, hiding from FOSB agents until he got to HosPrime, following rumors of a new Jedi temple until, skeletal and out of options, he mind-tricked his way into the office of Leia Organa, the woman who authorized the camps that killed his siblings and his mother.

“But the rumors weren’t true,” Kylo says. “He only had Varra before we came.”

Rax knows who ‘he’ is; there’s only one ‘he’ with them.

“I almost feel sorry for you, Ben. He never told you anything.”

 Kylo ignores this; Kylo was the only one aloud to stay at Snoke’s side in central command, wasn’t he? Snoke told him more than anyone else—but this is new.

“He was hunting down other Force-sensitives?”

Rax shakes his head again. He keeps doing it, like his life has narrowed down to one long denial.

“He was breeding them.”

Kylo jerks his neck to look at him, but Rax only gazes out at the tower, at the sea. If not for the stark white of his knuckles on his umbrella, Kylo might’ve thought he was admiring the view.

“Or. Well. He was trying to,” Rax amends. “Force-sensitive children don’t do well in artificial wombs, as he found out. So he used a real one.”

Kylo’s eyes widen at the grey tone in his voice. “Jyun. She survived.”

Rax nods, and closes his eyes, but keeps his voice even. “She survived. Until eight weeks ago. We have two children, Ben. Two little girls. Eleven months and two years.”

Suddenly that clean, powdery note in Rax’s Force signature overrides everything else, and Kylo takes it in with a stab of recognition. Baby powder, baby shampoo, soft black baby hair under the pads of Rax’s reverent fingers, the warm weight of a sleeping infant on his shoulder. They always wanted a big family—Luke would remind them Jedi were celibate, then roll his eyes: I’m just saying, if you’re gonna hand me six or seven mini-Jyuns you better name one Luke and you better send each one with a crate of whiskey.

Kylo feels sick.

 “Where are they?” Kylo asks.

Rax doesn’t answer.

“Rax, where are they?”

“Jyun is dead. I don’t know where he took the girls. I’d hoped you know. That’s the only reason I risked getting this close to you. They’re alive, I know that, I would’ve felt it if—"

Rax keeps his voice reasonably steady until the end, but Kylo feels the pain and love and desperation in the Force, so thick he can’t breathe, like someone’s shoved a towel down his throat.

“He did the same thing to them that he did to you,” Rax says softly. “He got in their heads, twisted them to the Darkness before they’d even been born. Just like you.”

“No,” Kylo says. He pities Rax, but it’s different. “The Force chose me. He sensed my power and helped me, because he knew my parents would stop me from fulfilling my destiny.”

Rax’s expression twists from grief to naked disgust, and he ignores Kylo.

“I felt the girls, in that tower. They were here not long ago, but Varra died before I could find out where they’ve been taken.”

Kylo hadn’t known Varra Ren well, but he’d felt a kinship with her. She never trained with Luke. She alone understood his love for their Master, she alone shared it.

 “Varra was alive? She helped you?”

Rax makes a sound that might be a snort, or a laugh, but full of bitterness.

“She ran that place. She tortured Jyun there. So yesterday when I got here, I returned the favor. But she took one of those suicide capsules we give the stormtroopers, and she died before I could find out where she took my children. So I cut the head from her corpse and threw her into the sea.”

He says this like he’s reciting the agenda of a particularly dull committee meeting. And Kylo understands, then: this is how Snoke broke him. He coiled Rax’s love around his ankles like a chain and it dragged him down into the Darkness, and he’s still falling.

“I thought I’d feel better, after I killed her,” Rax says.

“Do you?” Kylo asks, because Rax wants him to ask.

“Yes. Yeah, I do. I play her screams in the quiet moments like a lullaby, and they make everything better.”

Kylo says nothing. He’s never enjoyed causing pain. He’s never enjoyed torture.

“It should scare the hell out me, whatever’s happened to me,” Rax continues. “But it doesn’t. I thought I’d feel guilty but I don’t, and Ben, I don’t feel anything, not a damn thing, until suddenly I do and there’s a constituent in my office half-dead because I lost control.”

“The guilt weakened you.” It’s true, and Rax knows it’s true.

“It did. But what if I hurt my girls? What if I find them, and I can’t control this thing inside me, and I hurt my children?”

Kylo has no comfort for him. Silence stretches between them for a few long minutes, broken only by the crashing waves. Rax has begun to shiver.

“That night,” Rax says, “at the Temple, I followed you because I loved you like a brother.”

Kylo hates that Rax can feel whatever it is that stabs through Kylo’s chest at those words. He doesn’t need to speak for Rax to understand that he’s listening, because Rax understands that words aren’t important, it’s the Force that carries the truth, and Rax listens to the truth. His Master did, too. It’s why Kylo loved him.

“I followed you because nobody else could follow me to the dark places, nobody else understood. And Jyun loved you, too, and we followed you because we still had hope, even after what you did. And now she’s dead, Ben, and I’m this. Because we loved you.”

Rax is more right than he knows: it had all been for love. Kylo loved their Master, and he would have given everything—he did give everything—to earn Snoke’s love. The Jedi never talked about that, when they talked about the Dark side. The love.

“Was it worth it, Ben?”

Kylo raises an eyebrow.

“This power you traded our lives for. Was it worth it?”

Kylo inhales and holds cool salt-scented air in his mouth, and when he blows it away he blows Rax’s question away with it. Yes, of course it was worth it. Power is the only thing that’s worth anything. Destiny is the only thing that matters.

But he can’t make the sounds come out, because his mind can’t seem to free itself from the burrs of I loved you like a brother.

"I'm losing my mind," Kylo says. It's not an answer to Rax's question. "Since he died. I haven't slept in two days, I haven't eaten."

"Me too," Rax says. "It's like he was the only thing holding me together and now that he's gone, it's all coming apart."

Kylo nods because yes, that's it, that's it exactly, and Rax could always do this. Kylo was never very good at words so he didn't use many of them, but Rax could always hear the truths behind his silences and speak for him. And no one else would ever understand what it was like, with Snoke.

There’s no pity in Rax’s expression when Kylo meets his eyes, but there’s something other than hatred. Longing, a nameless need.

“Ben, look. I’ve got no idea, no kriffing idea, where my children are, and I will burn down the galaxy to find them, and my life is about to become a living hell again if you let me off this planet alive. But there’s a bar not far from here. If you’re not going to kill me in the next hour, I could use your help, and I could really, really use a drink.”

“You’re joking.”

After this conversation, the horrors he’s describing, it seems crazy, what he’s asking. But Kylo wants it more than he wanted the galaxy, more than he wanted his destiny. Suddenly he’s drowning in the yearning that seized him when Rey sat by a fire and offered her hand.

 “I hate jokes. So do you. It’s one of the reasons no one could ever stand us.”

For a moment there is no sound other than the spiteful, relentless pounding of the rain. Rax sighs, and leads the way, knowing Kylo will follow.

***

The junior Senator from Kuat and the Supreme Leader of the First Order walk into a bar. It’s a dimly-lit bar in the Old Quarter with stone walls and a glass ceiling, where the hookah smoke floats thick enough to mask their faces as they talk among the gratuitous cushions in a recessed hollow in the floor, separated by a gurgling water pipe and a bottle of mid-priced wine. The bar overlooks the sea, which has darkened from gunmetal to charcoal, the only sign of night on this world without sunset.

Rax pours them each a glass with a precise motion he’d probably learned serving the officers at Academy soirees. He takes a long, practiced drag on the hookah before handing it to Kylo. He’s never smoked—tobacco, anyway; he used to share whatever Djorro passed around—and he hasn’t touched alcohol in six years. Between that and the thirty-six hours without sleep and the circadian disruption of jumping from standard to planetary time everything feels less than real.

Rax speaks to the fake candle in the middle of the table; it flickers as a serving droid jostles against it. “They found Zan. A few days ago.”

Kylo exhales, managing not to cough. He’s not surprised.

 “A battle?” Kylo inquires in a neutral tone. He’s picturing a bar fight, not a dogfight. Of all the Knights, Zanora Ren had always burned darkest, even darker than he and Varra. But for Zan the Darkness was stims and spice and sex, sucking so much from life that it burned her up and left her nothing but a hollow shell.

“Overdose.”

Kylo nods.

“Djorro?”

“On assignment with Black Sun, some kind of arms deal. He probably broke and ran with a few billion embezzled credits the instant our Master died. Thero too,” Rax says before he asks. Thero Ren is the least likely to ever try to kill him, but the mostly likely to pull it off. She’s paranoid, bookish, useless with a lightsaber. “If Zan’s dead there’s nothing keeping her from running. They’ll assume you’re hunting them down.”

Kylo agrees. Both of them only survived that night in the Temple because they’d had the sense to run from Kylo, and both accepted what Snoke asked them to do without a fight.

So that’s it. That’s his legacy as Master of the Knights of Ren: Jyun, Zan, and Varra dead, Thero and Djorro on the run, and he and Rax as broken as they’ve always been.

“It’s just us now,” Rax says. And Kylo understands: no one else will ever understand what it was like. He raises a glass and looks at Kylo expectantly. A toast.

“The Knights of fucking Ren,” Rax says, and drains his glass.

Kylo gestures with his own glass, but says nothing.

For a long time, both of them sip their wine and gaze out at the rain. A droid brings their food, all deep-fried seafood and mounds of starchy fried tubers as grey as the Arkanisian ocean. Rax, as a Senator, has been allowed to eat, and he watches Kylo with something between amusement and disgust as Kylo tries, unsuccessfully, to taste freedom in these morsels of grease and salt.

His focus on Rax had granted him some respite from Rey, but as they eat in silence she intrudes into his awareness again, doing something mechanical and utterly uninteresting.

“Do you know anything about the way he controlled us?” he asks Rax, because who the hell else can he ask now? “Or Force bonds?”

Rax shakes his head, tearing holes in the fabric of smoke. “No,” he says firmly. He gestures with the mouthpiece. “I wondered why you didn’t try to take my mind the instant I saw you. I suppose you’re tempted.” Rax, he knows, is thinking of his children, vulnerable, already fully absorbed in the Dark side, programmed from conception to serve the Supreme Leader and crave the voice of his love.

“I’m not tempted,” Kylo says, pushing his plate away as he fights a wave of nausea. He’s not tempted. He’s trapped. “I want to break one.”

Rax raises one perfectly-tweezed eyebrow, and in answer Kylo sketches out the situation in vague terms, not mentioning the Resistance. He doesn’t dare reveal the whole truth. As he speaks, Rax’s frown deepens.

“You care for this girl,” he says.

Kylo doesn’t bother to deny it, since Rax will feel it if he lies. Of course he cares for her; that’s the only reason Snoke ordered Kylo to kill her instead of doing it himself.

You are not an animal, my apprentice, who kills without thought. The ignorant will call you inhuman but you are more human than any of them, because you kill with love in your heart. Remember this, dear child: the only sacrifices that matter are those that char our souls as we throw them on the fire.

His Master hadn’t lied about that: Kylo killed Snoke with love in his heart—fierce, desperate love—and the love and the death made him stronger. If he’d hated Snoke, it would’ve been such a banal thing.

But it doesn’t matter if he cares for her, does it? She hates him. He gave her everything he could possibly give her, and she laughed in his face. She and Snoke agreed on that, at least: he’s a failure.

 “You hate it, don’t you?” Rax says with surprise, reading his vibrations in the Force. “Doing to this girl what he did to us. I would’ve thought you’d be delighted to have a pet of your very own.”

Kylo shakes his head, because no, he’s not delighted. It’s—unclean. Like someone’s glued his eyeballs to a window where she’s undressing and no matter how much he wants to look away, he can’t.

“Ben, you have to kill her,” Rax says, leaning forward and lacing his fingers together. He wears a huge iron wedding ring. “This is what he did to us. If you care for her, you have to stop this now, because soon you’ll be able to punish her like he could punish us, and she’ll wish she were dead.”

Kylo glowers at the fake candle sputtering in the middle of the table. He should be glad. He has a reason to do it, now, to kill her. It’s the rational thing to do. It’s a mercy.

Rax considers him. Kylo sighs; if Rax’s best suggestion is to kill her, it’s no use talking about it anymore, and besides, Kylo doesn’t want to talk about Rey, he can’t get away from Rey. Rey's a dead end, a false hope. This, with Rax, this is older and deeper and he can still get it back.

She’s talking to someone, though of course he can’t hear, and he feels a kind of warmth, almost burning, arcing out from the texture of her in the Force, to him, and from him to Rax. Unbidden, the memory of that summer floats to his mind.

“Do you remember,” Rax asks, “when I visited HosPrime with you and Luke? When we played Yavin: Aftershock II for, what, four days?”

 “Luke played as the Empire and beat us,” Kylo says, unnerved because he’d been thinking of the same thing, and he trusts his instincts too much to ignore the sudden certainty that Rey has something to do with it.

The serving droid brings out the massive tray of chocolate desserts Kylo ordered because he’s free and because he can. He closes his eyes when the first taste of it hits his mouth, and Rax must feel his ecstasy in the Force, because he smirks.

“And we ate three or four kilos of those little chocolate squares from that shop by the Senate complex, with the blue wrapper, you remember? Luke dared you to eat a whole bag in a sitting because you were so skinny, and you did.”

Kylo nods, not quite managing to hold back a smirk. That had been the agonizing year he grew half a meter and never stopped eating.

But Rax isn’t looking at him, he’s gazing into the smoke like he’s recounting some private vision from the Force. Maybe he is.

 “Jyun and I would’ve had a hut next to Luke’s by now, Ben,” Rax says, something perilously close to a genuine smile on his face. It's almost physically painful for Kylo to see it. “You’d mind the girls and change nappies and read them bedtime stories.”

“I absolutely would not.”

“You would. Jyun would watch you from the doorway and you’d pretend to be cross like you always do, but you’d love it, and the girls would be so excited for Uncle Luke and Uncle Ben to come over.”

Kylo frowns at him. Even for Rax, even in a fantasy, he can’t consent to ‘Uncle Ben.’

True night still hasn’t fallen, and Kylo suddenly finds the unrelenting grey of this planet unbearable. He lowers his gaze to the condensation-beaded table and, with irritation, notices a stain on it. He smudges his gloved finger across it, idly trying to wipe it away.

“You’ve got to be feeling what I’m feeling since he died,” Rax says after a long time. “The surges, the power.”

Kylo hesitates, because his words and their implications flood like ocean water into the hole in his chest that his Master used to fill, freezing him from the inside, drowning him. He nods.

“You know what it means, Ben.”

For a long few minutes, Kylo says nothing. He’d been too afraid to say it, too afraid even to think it, but here, with Rax, Kylo knows it’s true. On some level he’d known when his father had told him Snoke was only using him for his power. Han hadn’t realized just how right he’d been.

“He was draining our power,” Kylo says, and the words drift from his mouth like vapor, insubstantial over the ocean and the sloshing rain. “Keeping us weak. He was feeding off us."

Rax nods. Kylo presses his eyes shut because he feels the ghosts behind him again, ready to seize him, ready to choke him.

Kylo remembers the conversation Hux had shown him hours after he’d killed Snoke. The sneer in his Master’s voice when he’d told Hux: he believes utterly in the destiny of his bloodline and thinks that I alone can lead him to his true potential.

But he never had a potential. He never had a destiny. He only had power, and Snoke had sensed it across the galaxy, sensed it before he'd even been born, and molded it for his own ends.

There’s no feeling in Kylo’s voice; he’s only stating a fact, calmly, to the ocean, to the rain, to Rax, to Rey. She’s freezing right now, and shivering, and so is he.

“Everything he ever told me was a lie.”

Rax exhales slowly, like he’s trying to control himself. His grief scrapes at Kylo in the Force, scouring away the finish on his mind, leaving him raw, exposed, and helpless.

“Yeah. Yeah, Ben, it was.”

He could’ve said I told you so. I told you so a million times. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t need to. Kylo notices that he keeps repeating Ben’s name, as though he has to remind himself who he’s talking to, as though he doesn’t know that Ben is gone.

Kylo flexes the raw knuckles of his right hand because they feel numb. He takes off his glove and presses it against the table, using it to polish the stupid stain away, but he can’t. A brown hand falls across his forearm, stilling his hand. Rax’s dark eyes hold his for a long moment, daring him to do something stupid, and with a sigh, Kylo accepts, because he always does.

He reaches into his coat and withdraws his hand, grasping the datapad Hux secured for him the night before. He holds it out to Rax.

“What’s this?” Rax asks.

“Unlimited security clearance. If there’s a record of them anywhere in any Order database, you can access it from this.”

“You’d give me all the secrets of the Order?”

“Rax. I’m giving you the Order.”

He feels Rax’s shock in the Force. “Find them,” Kylo says. “Then come back. Forget whatever Onara promised you, if she promised you anything. Be my Grand Marshall.”

Rax swallows and opens his eyelids too wide, the desire naked on his face.

The galaxy would be better for it, to have a man who objected to destroying planets. And at night, they could fight. He’s never loved fighting with anyone as much as he loved fighting Rax—or, well, he didn’t, until he met Rey.

Rax wants it. Badly.

“I fucking hate you, Ben.”

“I know,” Kylo says, because it doesn’t matter, as long as he’ll stay.

But then that clean baby-powder scent hacks through the Force again. Rax masters his longing expression, and shakes his head. Another denial.

“Ben,” he says. “If I find my girls, I’m taking them somewhere where you will never be able to get your hands on them. You can’t think I’d trust you around my kids. With your rages, with what you did to me, to Jyun. I know you want their power--”

“I don’t.”

“You don’t now, because you’re lonely and you’ll say anything to make me stay, but what happens when you get mad? What happens when you get desperate?”

Kylo feels his eyes opening wider as he realizes what’s happening, as he realizes the future is going to trap him in the gutter his Master made for him no matter what he does.

“And,” Rax says, so quietly Kylo almost can’t hear it over the rain, “if I don’t find them, I can’t live with what I’ve done. I can’t live with the things he made me do. And I don’t have to.”

Kylo’s lungs seems to fill up with iron filings as he processes what Rax is saying. “You can’t.” It’s an order. But Rax doesn’t take his orders.

“I can, Ben. And I will. Either way, this is the end.”

Kylo wants to say something, anything. He wants to rage at him and force him to stay, because this isn’t how it’s supposed to work. Rey refused him, and Rax is refusing him, and it can’t be happening, it can’t be real.

But Kylo knows he won’t stop him.

Rax collects himself, then sighs. He tucks the datapad into the inner pocket of his damp white coat.

Kylo looks down at the table, resisting the urge to swish his coaster in the little rivulets of condensation there. Nothing feels real. His master lied, his destiny was a lie, his life is a lie, and nothing fucking matters anymore, and he might as well say it, because it’s true.

“I’m sorry,” Kylo says to the table, and to Rax.

Rax swallows. He takes a long, slow sip of his wine, and swallows again.

 “I know.”

“Then stay.”

“It’s too late.”

“No. You said, that first night on the Supremacy, after Luke’s, you there was a way back, even after what I did.”

“And maybe there is,” Rax says, finally meeting Kylo’s eyes. “I want to believe that. Because if someone like you could change—that would be something, Ben. It really would.” He sighs. “But Jyun, and Zan and the others, and my children have already suffered enough because I tried to save your soul.”

“No, no, you’re not listening. I’m sorry. I’m offering you everything--”

“It’s too late, Ben.”

Kylo’s eyes flash open at the words, and Rax leans forward across the table, so close Kylo can smell the wine on his breath.

“I believe you’re sorry. I really, really do. But I’ve seen you be sorry a thousand times. You’re addicted to sorry. You keep hurting and hurting just to sit in the rain and feel sorry. Stop being fucking sorry and be brave.”

Rax leans back. In one motion he drains his wine and stands. Kylo wants to rage at him, to choke him for daring to talk to him like this, but he doesn’t. Because he’s never going to be good enough, and he deserves this, and Rax is only telling him what he already knows, what he’s told everyone who’s tried to offer him anything else: it’s too late.

“For once in your flaming wreck of a life, Ben, be brave. Stop looking for someone to tell you what to do, stop telling yourself you deserve to die because you’re not living up to your destiny, stop looking for someone to love you, and do the right thing.”

Kylo studies the table like it holds the future of the galaxy, and he hears a shuffle as Rax bends down to pick up his coat and his umbrella. He’s really leaving. Kylo didn’t think he’d do it, not once he offered him Grand Marshall.

“Rax.”

There it is. That please. The same humiliating voice, his admission of failure.

“I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Rax looks down at him with something that’s not quite pity. It’s almost the look Rey gave him when he knelt in the dust on Crait, but there’s a hint of compassion in it. He holds on to that hint.

“You’re the Supreme Leader, Ben. Fucking lead.”

Kylo should say something. He should do something, anything other than stare down, paralyzed, as the only person would ever understood him walks out of his life forever.

“When you find them--” Kylo says to his back. Rax hesitates, then twists his neck to look sidelong at Kylo. “When you find them, if you need help—ships, soldiers. Me. If you need it, it’s yours.”

Rax regards him with a neutral expression, then, with a curt nod, walks out into the rain.

For a long time Kylo sits, nursing his half-glass of wine. He shivers because his tunic is wet and Rey is cold, and when he can’t stand it anymore because he’s just a thirty-something fuckup sitting alone at a bar, just a creep, he leaves the table, leaves the bar, and walks toward the tower, toward the cliff.

***

Kylo wanders the streets for hours before he settles on an overturned cargo crate on a cliff edge, but he doesn’t look out at the black ocean, he faces the row of cheaply-built industrial flat buildings built near the edge, studying one particular featureless tower. It’s a rough area of town, far away from Seccom, where the rain has plastered wet trash into the pockmarked pedestrian walkways at ground level and, high above, rusty speeders honk through the sky blaring music about dancing and sex. By the time he feels Hux behind him he’s soaked to the skin, shivering along with Rey. She’s with his mother. Kylo wonders what they’re talking about.

“How did you find me?”

“You’ll no doubt be cheered to hear I’ve no idea. Sniffing psychic piss, I suppose. I admit I was expecting something a bit more—majestic. More conducive to brooding.”

“Leave me.”

“What—on the planet?”

“Leave me alone, and leave me a transport, I’ll go back to the ship on my own.”

“I think not, sir.”

Kylo disciplines himself not to huddle despite the cold, and studies the overflowing dumpsters at the base of the building he’s been watching. “I gave you an order.”

“And as the closest thing you have to an XO I am well within my rights to ignore that order until you can assure me you’re fit for command.”

He should choke him, but whatever energy sustained this thirty-six hour power binge has abandoned him, and he’s only exhausted and cold. He is unfit for command, because he always has been.

“Supreme Leader. Frankly I’m not going to leave you by this cliff because I suspect that you're seriously considering throwing yourself off it.”

Kylo huffs, and hunches down into his soaking-wet tunic, trying not to feel his mother's presence.

“Are you concerned for my wellbeing, Hux?”

“Hardly. It would be very awkward for me if you turned up dead.”

“I’m not suicidal,” he says with a sigh, and is somewhat surprised to notice this is true. He doesn’t want to die, but he does want to stay here and shiver indefinitely, and never speak to anyone again. He could just tell Hux to take the galaxy.

The galaxy was never Kylo's destiny, anyway.

“Excellent to hear, sir. Then I’ll provide you with a list of acceptable brooding spots on the Voratrix. But I really must insist you come with me because I and the rest of your officers have a kriffing galaxy to run.”

“You just want to get off this planet because it reminds you of your father.”

Hux doesn’t take the bait. Kylo hadn’t intended it as bait; it’s just a fact.

“I want to get off this planet because my socks are soaking wet from traipsing after you.”

Kylo sighs and stands. Hux doesn’t give up, and at least he’s a distraction from Rey and her sadness and whatever else he’s feeling. Rax will be long-gone by now, wherever he’s going. Kylo should be worried that he's going to take that datapad and hand it straight to Onara, but Rax couldn't lie to him. He's going after his children, and as much as he pretended otherwise, he cares enough about the Order to destroy that datapad as soon as he's done with it.

“It is one of the more magnificent images,” Hux says conversationally, following Kylo’s gaze to the building he's been staring at. “We’ll need to discuss updating it as soon as we’re ready to begin Phase III.”

Kylo tilts his face up to frown at the four-story high holoposter clinging to the building, full of holes and illuminated with obscene graffiti. He meets the inscrutable eyes of the looming black image above the shining red cross. Defending the legacy. 

He’d never had a destiny. He never had a legacy, either.

He suddenly feels very small.

Hux splashes toward him through a puddle, kicking away a floating piece of trash. Kylo just stands there, trying to read the expressionless face under that painted mask.

“If you like it that much, sir, I’ll have one installed in your quarters. Now let’s get going before someone steals my transport.”

Kylo finally glances at him. Hux is grimacing, expectant, and when Kylo doesn’t move Hux makes a theatrical gesture toward the transport he’s parked at the edge of the rocks. “Please, Supreme Leader, lead the way.”

With a deep breath and last mournful look at the towering, invincible vision of Kylo Ren, Ben does.

Chapter Text

Ch. 12: Madness

“Sir. I think you might be experiencing a nervous breakdown.”

Ben doesn’t look at him. That sounds about right.

They’re in Hux’s office, a bad choice on Ben’s part since with Hux behind a desk he feels like he’s been called in to the headmaster’s office for breaking school property. You had that datapad for less than fifteen hours, what the hell do you mean you need a new one? 

But here they are: General Armitage Hux, destroyer of worlds, the improbably young genius in command of the galaxy—and Ben. Ben Solo, the hapless idiot with no skills and no allies and no kriffing clue what he’s doing. Ben Solo, who killed his master and choked Hux on a whim and took control of the galaxy as an afterthought. He’s sitting here, now. With Armitage Hux. In this office. Here they are.

“May I suggest a trip to medbay?”

“I thought you weren’t concerned about me.”

It’s more of a habit, the prodding. He’s not really listening.

“I’m concerned about the prospect of a madman using my mind as a playground.”

“It’s a unique experience.”

Hux raises an eyebrow, like he sees Ben's indifferent admission as some kind of victory. “Ah. Finally starting to resent your late master, are you?”

Ben says nothing, just gazes out at the ships loitering in the Voratrix’s airspace. They seem almost bored, the ships, like they’re waiting for something terrible to happen.

“Sir.” Hux wears an expression Kylo hasn’t seen on him before. Awkwardness. It suits him in a way that suggests he used to wear it a lot before he disciplined himself not to. “Perhaps if you confided in someone.”

Ben feels surprise tickle the edges of his awareness but it doesn’t really break through. “Are you offering to be my counsellor?”

“Absolutely not. I envisioned a droid, or I could have a companion sent to your quarters. In my professional opinion, a drink and a shag would do you wonders. Male, female, something else, sir, the contractors’ decks are crawling with options.”

Even Ben isn't so sheltered from life aboard his vessels that he hasn't heard stories about what the contractors bring aboard. Hux mirrors his disgust, but for different reasons.

“Right. I suppose you’re celibate,” he says, pronouncing the word like a curse. With resignation, as though it physically pains him, Hux reaches down to what Ben assumes is a locked drawer. Idly, Ben wonders if he’s going for his blaster.

Hux is wondering the same thing.

Ben observes his thoughts in real time: Hux is a good shot, he might have a chance before the half-mad Ren manages to stop him.

But, no. The general pulls out a bottle of some brownish liquor and two glasses that wink mournfully in the starlight as Hux sets them on his desk. “Rejoin the world of the living, sir,” he says as he begins to pour. “If you were ever part of it.”

Ben says nothing. He rests under the tumble of Hux’s thoughts: the situation isn’t stable enough yet for Hux to hold the galaxy himself. This Kuat business disturbs him, and Mitaka’s missives from FOSB hint at other enemies in the mist. Ren’s careless and it will be easy enough to dispose of him when the time is right.

All this sloshes through Hux’s mind as he pours two generous shots into both glasses, stands, and clinks one down in front of the Supreme Leader. The leather squeaks indecently as he drops stiffly into the seat across from Ben, who feels him conceal a grimace when the side of the chair scrapes the huge welt on his hip.

Ben watches Hux swirl the liquor appreciatively. Hux seems to enjoy this, musing on his plans to assassinate the Supreme Leader to his face. It appeals to the exhibitionist in him, it ups the challenge. But he does wonder why the Supreme Leader hasn’t killed him yet.

It troubles Hux. It troubles Ben, too.

Delicately, Ben reaches out with the Force. He wants to remind himself that he’s not helpless and it soothes him to wrap his power around Hux’s neck, softly, like one of the fine synthsilk scarves Hux treats himself to on the rare occasions he goes planetside in civilian dress. He likes fine things, Armitage Hux.

Hux swallows as he feels the Supreme Leader’s power ghosting down his windpipe to settle around his beating heart.

Could he use the Force to rip out a living heart? Probably not. It would be a glorious thing. If it could be done, someone would’ve done it already.

“Your father was a madman, wasn’t he, Hux?”

“I believe I just refused the invitation to be your counsellor, sir.”

“But he was.”

Ben considers him, and he considers his drink. The fear in Hux is delicious, and so is the defiance as the general lifts his glass and tries to take a casual sip while Ben presses the fist of his power around his beating heart. Ben’s raw lip burns as he, too, takes a sip, tasting the fear more than the whisky. Then he lets Hux go.

Hux frowns. “Whatever curiosities you have about my neuroses, Ren, you can satisfy them easily enough without my input.”

Ben decides to ignore Hux’s use of his name. Ben likes this, this game between them. They both do. And it doesn’t matter what anyone calls him at this point since all his names are imaginary. “I can. But you want someone to ask you about it. That’s why you enjoy having someone inside your mind, so you can feel understood.”

“Sir. We need to address the Apolin situation—”

“If you ever say that name again I will rip out your intestines, tie them around your neck, and have you hanged from the command bridge railing.”

Ben catches Hux’s subtle eyebrow raise and mental reply: Gold star for imagery, sir.

“Get out.”

“This is my office, Supreme Leader, and that’s my quite-literally-irreplaceable Hosnian whisky you just wasted.”

Ben thumps the glass down and wipes his stubbled chin, relishing the sting as the alcohol trickles into the cut Hux punched into his lip that morning. Of course Hux would’ve invested in Hosnian whisky before he blew the place up. The Order probably controls the whole galactic supply. Ben’s stomach protests the alcohol. It smells like Dameron’s cologne, smoky, vaguely industrial.

How the hell does he remember that? From the interrogation?

He spits the whisky out and stands so quickly Hux jumps up too. Dameron is right there. Glass shatters; he tried to slam it down on the side table and missed. The chair hits the backs of his knees as he tries to back away. Hux is leaning toward him, saying something, but Ben doesn’t hear it.

“Sir?”

“It’s nothing,” he says, even though Hux, in the last shriveled tatters of his Force sensitivity, can certainly feel the wall of his fury. “I’m leaving.”

“Very well. Shower and shave, will you? You smell like old seawater. It's an embarrassment to the Order.”

***

By the time he gets to his new permanent quarters he’s fighting nausea, and he’s grateful when he slams his fist on the panel to shut the door behind him. His few belongings have been transferred, the console informs him, and Lt. Yan Havel has officially taken up his duties as steward and is available whenever the Supreme Leader might require him. Good, great. Right now the Supreme Leader requires only privacy.

He’s too tired to take out his rage on anything more substantial than his sopping-wet greatcoat, which he throws at the wall, taking not a drop of satisfaction in the moist and disappointing smack of it against the floor. If he ever designs his own flagship he'll insist on a door he can slam.

Hux is right. He smells like the ocean.

No, it’s Rey. She's--here. Adrenaline spikes through her as she cranes her neck upward, looking at the sky. Her feet are cold like she’s walking through snow. Without realizing it he’s mirrored her posture, looking up and out the floor-to-ceiling window of his new quarters with his lips parted and his eyes half-closed.

And there she is. Rust, hot metal in the sun, rain on his skin, stained linen, the ocean, all woven together in the melody he knows so well--but transposed into a minor key. She’s reaching out to the Darkness. She’s reaching out to him, and before he can react she stretches out her claws and rips his power out of him.

He stumbles against the window; his hand flies to his chest, trying to keep everything inside, but he feels it slip through his fingers, leaving him hollow.

It’s familiar, this hollowness. She’s broken open the wound that his madness has been healing, the wound Snoke cut and re-cut and allowed to fester since before he was born. He's been so used to someone sucking away his power like a lamprey he never knew what it felt like to be whole.

He traces the contours of her quarry in his senses like his fingers are reaching across the galaxy. A ship. She’s trying to stop a ship. Because she has no training and so of course she has no idea what’s impossible. Still, somehow she’s drawing on his power just like he suspects Snoke would’ve done.

Then--he feels the ship slow, and stop. The strain of it pulls at every fiber of every muscle in his body. But he’s used to the strain. That’s not what drives him to his knees as she guides the ship to rest as easily as he might float a pebble across the practice yard at Luke’s temple. 

She's better.

She knows how to fight with a lightsaber because he does. She’s not some prodigy, she’s sucking every hard-won, agonizing skill he’s ever learned, his decades of training, the training he gave up his whole life for, like a parasite through this bond. It’s his. She stole it from him; he'd suspected before, but now he knows.

She’s better. She’s doing things he never could, not with the Light, not even with the Dark. He gave up everything for this power and she’s better. It’s not possible.

The Force has chosen her.

The Force is his only true Master, and like every other goddamn master he ever had, the Force has betrayed him. It’s chosen her now. Not him. Not him, after he gave up everything for it, after he suffered and killed for it.

He stands, because he’s not going to be on his knees for a single damn second longer. The stars swing lazily past his window, and he breathes as he looks at them and he tries not to fall apart, because this was the only thing he had, this bloodline. You have no place in this story. You come from nothing, you’re nothing.

The Force chose her, because of course the Force chose her. She’s only been in his life for a month and already his father chose her, his mother chose her, and Luke chose her, when they all rejected him. And what does that leave him? Exactly what Snoke always said he was: nothing. 

He breathes, and he watches the stars that he doesn’t deserve to own, and he hates her. For ten, fifteen long minutes, he inhales and exhales his hate. It’s all he can do.

Something twists like a vine around his lungs, suffocating him, and the thorns of it pierce his esophagus, his stomach, the muscles below. She’s with Dameron again; he’s got his hands on her arms, and she likes it. Ben closes his eyes and tries to shut the gates of his mind because he knows where this is going and he can’t, not now. Not ever. He does the only thing he can do: he runs to the emergency medical kit inside the cabinet in the ‘fresher, and rips out a syringe of sedative. He tears off the cap with his teeth and holds the needle above his neck, desperate to escape this.

And then it stops. The traitor's with her, and his mother, but Dameron's gone.

He stands with the needle poised above his neck for a few seconds, breathing hard, waiting for this to get worse, for those hands to creep over him. When they don’t he spits the cap into his hand and sets the syringe on his sitting-room desk with a soft tap. The nausea he’s been battling attacks again, and he stumbles to the ‘fresher and retches over the sink. His stomach rejects the whisky, the wine, the chocolate, all his culinary cries for freedom, as if to remind him that even though his brain might try to make a run for the free air, his body knows his true Master and will always obey.

This can’t go on.

A shower feels beyond his ability right now, but he scoops up the syringe of sedative just in case and stumbles into the bedroom without turning on the light. Blindly, he grabs for some of his loose black exercise clothes. He usually sleeps in his shorts and nothing else, but tonight he wants to be covered. He leaves his wet tunic on the ‘fresher floor and cleans his teeth, grateful to spit out the taste of whisky. He still stinks and he looks like shit, but he doesn’t care. He just wants this wreck of a day to be over.

“Lights thirty percent,” he orders as he walks into the bedroom, tucking the syringe of sedative into his pocket like a protective amulet.

The bedroom is spacious, ominous; the bed is large and looks too soft, and something anomalous rests on the pillow. There, above the regulation-folded sheets, wrapped in blue foil with that familiar golden logo smiling up at him, is a single piece of chocolate.

Ben walks to the bed and stares at it, dumbfounded. He picks it up and examines it like it might conceal a bomb. It doesn’t. Havel must have put it there; no one else can get into his quarters, and no one else would carry around chocolate from that little shop by the Senate complex in Republic City.

Something huge seems to well up in the space between his diaphragm and his lungs, and when he fails to choke off that first dry sob he finally, finally gives up. The tears start falling as he holds that little square of blue foil in his hand like a priceless artifact. He holds it until it’s melting and he can feel mucus on his upper lip. He clutches it against his temple like it's the last shred of human kindness in the galaxy, because as far as he knows, it is.

He sobs for minutes, a quarter of an hour, trying to hide from the voices. Somewhere across the galaxy he feels his mother, and her cheeks are wet, and she’s telling herself not to cry. In the Force she pulses with the Dark. She always did. It was the only thing they had in common and she hid from it.

He feels her there. Not his mother. Rey.

Not now. He can’t.

He grabs onto his fury and his hate because he can’t do anything but sob. So he hides in his hands, clasping that chocolate to his temple, and of course she pities him, because she’s so naïve, and so good, and because she saw whatever lie Snoke put into her head and she believed he was worth saving.

He killed his father for this, to crouch here sniffling in front of a scavenger, to throw up half-drunk into a sink because he tried to feed himself without his Master’s permission, to sob over a piece of goddamned HosPrime chocolate. He suffered six years of agony for this. Jyun died for this. He destroyed Rax for this. He killed his father for this.

She watches in silence, not reaching out, until he disappears. Numbly, he pads out to the kitchen and places the chocolate reverently in the conservator, then returns to the bedroom. He considers the huge bed. He hasn’t slept in one for twenty years, since he went to Luke’s. He sits down on the bedspread, black, and floats his comm into his hand.

The Force chose her. Not even she thinks he’s worth saving anymore, and that, he realizes as he strokes his thumb over the fingerprint recognition and enters his security code, was the only reason he was keeping her alive. He pulls up the empty black box, watches it blink at him, waiting for his order. He knows the coordinates. He puts it down on the nightstand.

She didn't reach out. Why should she? She knows what he is.

He doesn’t want to draw this out. He saw it in Rey’s eyes—she knows he can feel her now, soon she’ll suspect that he can track her, and she’ll run, and keeping her alive will be even more pointless than it is now.

He picks up the comm, types in the order, the coordinates. Puts it down.

He takes a long, deep breath to steady himself, resenting the wetness on his cheeks, the ache in his throat. He picks it up, double-checks the coordinates. Sends.

Instantly the communications officer on duty responds: Request security code to confirm strike.

He enters his code, sends.

Dual authentication required. Audiovisual.

He puts down the comm and stands, walks numbly to the console below the wall display, enters the separate security code. Then he holds his comm up to his face for the retinal scan and vocal analysis, speaking to the bored-looking comms officer on the screen. “This is Supreme Leader Kylo Ren. Confirm strike.” He repeats the coordinates.

“Yes, Supreme Leader,” says the comms officer. “Strike confirmed in--” He hits the button to send all further updates by text. There will be several hours of recon, planning, transit, all the tedious details of war that aren’t supposed to burden the Supreme Leader’s time.

He clinks the comm face-down along with the syringe of sedative onto the side table, kicks off the covers, and stretches out on the too-soft mattress. It shifts against him like quicksand but he doesn’t struggle.

Still, his body knows he’s defying his Master and it refuses to obey. For an hour he tosses and sweats but everything in this room smells like the ocean.

The starlight glints off the clear plastene cylinder on the side table. Next to it, his comm.

He doesn’t think. He grabs the comm and enters his security code, bringing up the comms officer directly. It’s the same one.

“Belay order for strike on KX-04,” he commands.

“Yes, Supreme Leader,” the comms officer replies, as though this doesn’t surprise him, as though stopping the attack won’t cause a massive inconvenience to several hundred people. “Executive strike suspended.”

When he’s certain she’s safe, he sets the comm back down on the nightstand and stabs his hand out toward the syringe. He takes a breath, and, with a wearied flick of his thumb, pops off the cap, places the micro-needle against the skin of his neck, and accepts the sharp stab of pain with relief. He drifts off with his fingers still touching cool plastene, and after almost two days of madness, the Force finally, finally lets him go, and he sleeps, and he does not dream.

Hours later he bolts upright with his lightsaber in his fist, ignited, ready to face—nothing. In the Force he scans his surroundings. Sweat-damp sheets under his thighs, the tickle of unshaved mustache, the dull and distant engines harmonizing with the crackling hum of the blade, an urgent need for the ‘fresher. His wall-display shows all readings normal, time 1037, forty-four notifications, briefing long-since over.

But power pulses through the silence. Dark power. It’s so thick, so beautiful, that he can’t focus on anything else, he takes huge, gulping breaths around it. Then—pain. It shocks through his thigh—skin, muscle, and bone—and then, a second later, his shoulder feels like it’s been set on fire. It hurts so much he doubles over, singeing the sheets with the lightsaber.

Rey’s down. Then she’s up. She’s a pillar of Dark energy, and her fingers struggle to grip a slick, smooth staff, and she’s fighting, and she’s slaughtering, and her body sings with joy.

***

She’s alone again. She’s good at staying alive on her own, sure. It’s just the bleeding she minds, and Finn, unconscious and covered in blood, and the blizzard. She Force-drags Finn gently off the ancient 74-Z speeder bike she stole and pushes him against the engine to keep him warm. “It’s gonna be okay, Finn,” she says as she tucks him against the casing. He doesn’t answer.

The blizzard’s a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it helped cover Poe when he raced back toward camp. She and Finn were right behind him, but the bombs broke open the marketplace like an overripe gourd, and then the villagers surrounded them, following the orders blared from the command shuttle: surrender the enemies of the First Order and your lives and property will be spared. And then Finn got shot. And then they lost Poe’s speeder trail in the snow. There were things in between, but she doesn’t think about those.

On the other hand, she’s freezing, and this stupid piece of junk speeder cracked a modulator and left her and Finn alone here, five kilometers from the village with no cover, night falling. The numb fingers of her left hand press her orange jacket against Finn’s wound, futile. No. Not futile. They can’t get back to camp but she’ll find some way to help him. Her tears froze a few kilometers back. The fingers of her right hand are numb, too, but she’s pretty sure it’s not from the cold.

Finn’s bleeding, and she’s got a hole in her shoulder. A hole. All the way through. The flexifiber jumpsuit has melted into the wound. She ignores it.

She shivers, and thinks, and refuses to give up.

Best option: take their chances with the First Order. There’s no survival, not out here. When she loses consciousness—and she’s not stupid, she will—Finn’s done for. Besides, maybe Poe got captured.

Sighing, she stands. Then she falls. Then she stands again. Takes a halting step forward through the snow.

The speeder engine’s metal. It’ll lose its heat fast, but it’s still heat, and it’ll keep Finn alive.

The rusty panels give way almost as easily as the snow under her soft boots, revealing the glowing heart of the thing, all sleek Aratech Repulsor construction, sleek but shoddy, lowest-bidder pre-Empire government contract work. She’s scavenged enough to know they came standard with blaster canons but this one’s long-since been stripped. Still, that generator’s hot. That’s why she wants it.

She thanks the Force for shoddy government contracts as a few kicks and twists with her weak left hand pull the power generator free. No rivets here, just screws apt to break if they don’t just vibrate out of the generator compartment. And break they do, letting the generator plop with a sickening sear into the blood-soaked fabric of her jacket, which she promptly stuffs against Finn’s chest to keep the important parts warm, crying out as the motion pulls at the exit wound in her right shoulder. Finn might lose some fingers and toes, and she’s almost certainly going to lose that arm, but they’ll worry about that later. It’ll be okay.

Instead of worrying about it she calls on the Force, and exhales with relief when Finn’s body rises off the ground. She feels the resistance of it. The heaviness of him. There’s no way she can do this for five kilometers back to the village; she can only hope they run into stormtroopers out on patrol, that they don’t have orders to kill on sight, and that they don’t have retinal scanners that will pick up FN-2187.

Even if she does manage to fix this, what happens next? If Poe made it back to camp there’s no telling if he survived the attack, and if anyone managed to jump to hyperspace they’re long-gone. Rey has no idea where they would’ve headed. They’d be stupid to come back for her and Finn. The planet’s crawling with First Order. It’s not worth the risk, not even for the Jedi, if that’s what she is. She just hopes Leia talks some sense into Chewie and Poe, who won’t hesitate to put their lives on the line to get her and Finn. If they’re alive. Can’t worry about that, either. She’ll find them again, she and Finn both.

Luke, she calls, remembering something the market-women had said about Force-ghosts. Luke, if you’re out there, I could really use some help.

She waits for six, ten, fifteen trudging steps, but no sound greets her but the howling wind. Of course he doesn’t answer. 

Milk-squirting bastard, she thinks in no particular direction. Her right arm hurts, which seems odd, since she’s pretty sure the nerves have been destroyed. She checks Finn’s chest to make sure the wrapped-up power generator isn’t burning his skin. It’s not. It’s not much warmer than her icy hands now. There’s not much time, not for either of them.

In the silence, she can’t stop herself from thinking. She tries not to do that, to think. It leads to self-pity and crying late at night, to wondering what her parents were like and why they gave her up. It only gets in the way. She likes to focus on the here and now.

That’s not helping, either—everything she’s come to love about these people is gone like a dream and here she is again. Alone. Surviving.

In her heart she knew it couldn’t last.

She’s too cold to reach out for Finn’s hand. She’ll keep him safe, whatever happens. And after that, if this is over, this interlude with the Resistance, she’ll be sad, but with her head down, fighting the snow and the pain and the darkness step by grueling step, she feels more like herself than she has since she left Jakku. Struggling. At ease. Alone.

No, she can’t think that. She’ll find them. The Resistance is all she’s got.

But it does feel good to remember she’s not weak. These people, this comfort, this world of friends and flirting and food and politics, it makes her weak. She feels so soft around Finn, around Poe. There’s lots of hugging in that world, lots of smiles and trust.

She loves her friends in the Resistance, of course she does. But it felt good, in that village, with the Dark side coursing through her, to remember she isn’t weak. It feels good now, to put everything she has into every single step and remember that underneath everything she’s always been alone and she’s always survived whatever comes.

Finn’s jacket, Poe’s old jacket, traces out a line in the snow as she floats him along. Every few steps she has to psychically readjust her grip just to tug him on a little further. She keeps falling down—her leg’s wounded too. A blunt impact, not much blood but maybe a fracture.

She gets up. She falls. She gets up. Finn’s body gouges a trench in the snow. It’s dark. No stormtroopers, no civilians, no help.

She falls again and she doesn’t get up. Finn falls too, but gently, because she catches him with the Force and cradles him into the snow. She kneels beside him, her jumpsuit soaking wet and quickly freezing against her skin. Even her undershirt is wet, crispy with ice against the goosebumped skin of her chest.

She places her good hand, numb and stubby in her massive orange glove, over the bleeding wound in his side and she has to hold herself back from crying because it’s Finn, he’s the best thing that’s ever happened to her, and he’s going to die. She feels it. She’s a survivor, she’s used to being alone, but she doesn’t want to be alone again. Not ever again, and she can’t lose him. Light side, Dark side, she’ll do what it takes to keep him alive.

But she stops the tears and rests her head on his strong chest. She is not helpless. She may be weak now but she doesn’t give up. After all, she and Finn have been hopeless in the snow before and everything was okay.

She closes her eyes, takes a deep, freezing, chattering breath, and lets the Force crash through her like a river, following its own course. It leads her right where she wants to be: a light. Soft, not raging like the fire she’d tapped in the village. Flickering. About to go out.

Finn? she says.

Rey, he says, and the relief of his voice seems to fill her up with power, with hope. Rey, are you okay?

Cold as she is, she rolls her eyes. Her eyelashes have frozen; when she sniffles, her lips are covered in icy mucus. Of course Finn’s worried about her when he’s the one lying unconscious. Yeah, Finn, I’m fine. How are you?

To be honest, I’m scared. Cold.

It’s alright. I’m here with you. It’s going to be okay.

She’s not good at lying. She doesn’t know what she’s doing at all. But she stays with him in his mind, and breathes in the Force, and tries to make it true, even if no help comes. It’s going to be okay.

***

No sight but snow streaking horizontal lines across the night, no sound but the wind. The floodlights of the bat-winged command shuttle behind him bounce uselessly off the wall of snow, blinding him, and he presses his comm to shut them off. There’s nothing but darkness and wind and Rey’s pain, pulling at him like a chain, drawing him deeper into the dark.

He brought no crew. He gave no explanation when he tore onto the command bridge of the Voratrix demanding to know about current operations on KX-04, the First Order code for this nothing of a planet. I belayed that order--Of course, sir, this was a local operation authorized by system-level command; they were never even notified of your strike order. He gave no explanation for ordering an immediate end to all operations. There wasn’t much of a fight, Supreme Leader, they’ve already secured the base and the civilian settlements around it. 

He ordered Hux to relay his presence on a highly classified mission to the commander here, which he seems to have done. Hux knows he’s after the Resistance, knows he’s come to finish them off. He’s annoyed Ben didn’t share their location, and he wondered why the hell Ben wanted to go out there in person, but Ben will deal with Hux later. Later.

The lightsaber and the Force light his way. Snow sublimates off the blade with a pelting hiss, blinding him with steam and forcing him to hold the blade low. Snow lashes his bare face, snow falls into the tiny gap between his pants and his boots, running down the waterproof fabric to soak his socks.

He feels her.

He walks for less than a minute before he hears her breathing. He smells blood. She’s not afraid—no, she is afraid, but not of him. She’s afraid for the traitor.

She was supposed to be alone. He’s not sure if he’s here to beg her forgiveness and run away to the Resistance or to stab her through the heart—he has his lightsaber and he has the package tucked safely in his coat—but he can’t think if the traitor’s watching. He doesn’t know why he came here, but she was supposed to be alone.

But the traitor’s not watching. In the Force, he’s ominously calm, heartbeat sluggish, his life spreading out over the snow.

The Force vibrates softly around her, like quiet music through a wall. The movements of her power are so slight, so precise, like she’s using it to guide a tiny silk thread through a needle.

Finally, the light of his saber resolves her form out of the darkness, just a suggestion of red lines, like she’s been painted by the same artist who made that black-and-red silhouette of Kylo Ren. One hand, bare, splays out across the side of the traitor’s body, resting in half-frozen blood and covered by snow she hasn’t bothered to wipe away. He watches, not knowing what else to do, as the red-glinted snowflakes melt and slide down the skin of her wrist. The other hand, gloved, hangs useless at her side below a horrific, shiny wound in her shoulder. One of her buns has come undone and snow-slicked strands of hair stick in the blood at her shoulder.

He shouldn’t be here. He should’ve jumped a couple of destroyers here and ordered them to open fire on the planet and exterminate every living thing on this continent. He should’ve ordered radiation-bombing to make sure nothing, no one, not this girl or anyone else, crawled away alive, because the Force chose her, and not him. But he didn’t. And here he is.

She doesn’t look at him because her eyes are closed and she’s so deep in meditation that his presence makes no impression on her; she just notices and lets it go. He studies her hand, fighting the ridiculous urge to brush the snow off her bare fingers.

What the hell is she doing?

He glances up at her face and sucks in a freezing breath: she’s watching him. When Kylo would meditate on the floor before the throne, sometimes his Master would sink down into depths of power that Kylo could never hope to reach, and then he would open his eyes and speak to his apprentice from that place, and in his dilated pupils Kylo would read the book of the universe.

And Rey’s looking at him just like that, here in the darkness, here in the snow. Like a master. Like his Master.

It’s curiosity, just curiosity, that drives him to unbutton his coat just enough to reach in with his free hand and pull out the waterproof package. There’s more in the ship, but she won’t come to the ship, because she knows better than to trust him.

He floats it over to her and her expression doesn’t change as she reaches out to pluck the medpack from the air. He knows she won’t use any of it on herself, and for him, that changes everything. Let her die for the traitor out of sheer stubbornness if she wants to, let her lay down her life for a damn stormtrooper who doesn’t even have a name. That traitor is nothing, just like she is, and they deserve to die here, and why the hell did he come?

He turns to leave. He’s already done too much. Even if she does use it on herself, this illusion of helping her now is only cruel, like an animal playing with its food. But the decision was made as soon as he felt her femur fracture, and he’s not going to think about it, he’s done this and that’s the end of it. It’s over.

Her voice sounds from behind him, deeper than usual, and so weak. 

“I don’t know how to use this,” she says. She’s talking about the medkit.

He stops. He doesn’t turn around. “There are instructions in the pack.”

The wind picks up and flings a wave of snow hissing against the lightsaber, so he can barely hear her whisper.

“Ben, I can’t read.”

He inhales, too hot and too cold from the steam and the snow.

“I didn’t come here for him.”

“I don’t care. You’re here now. You’re going to help me save him.”

“You don’t give me orders.”

“I just did.”

Through the spike of rage--he's Vader's heir, he rules the galaxy--he can't help but admire her. She's got a fractured femur, a hole in her shoulder, she's lying half-frozen in the snow, and he, the ruler of the galaxy, who towers over her even when she's standing, has a lightsaber ready to swipe at her head. But she's not afraid. She hadn't been afraid of Snoke, either, and he'd envied her that, too. He pulls his coat tighter around him and takes another step toward the shuttle.

“Ben.”

He closes his eyes. It’s the same voice she used in the turbolift, when she called his name. It’s so, so weak now.

“I need—” she begins. Her voice comes out mucus-thick, but she’s not coughing. That’s good; her lungs are clear. “Can you see what I’m doing? I’m trying something in the Force.”

He keeps his eyes closed. He’s trying not to scan her body through the bond to check how badly she’s injured. He clenches his fists at her words.

This is a Force problem and she’s asking for his expertise. She’s used the Dark side twice now. Maybe he could convince her he was right. He could turn her. Maybe. Not that it matters, since the Force chose her.

It’s curiosity that turns him around, curiosity that carries him back to the traitor, that drives him to kneel in the snow to study that tiny current she’s spun out in the Force. She says nothing and she doesn’t look at him.

He extinguishes his lightsaber and hooks it to his belt. Then he closes his eyes, blinking through frozen eyelashes, and listens in the Force as she re-weaves the net she’s made around the traitor’s wound. He recognizes it with a stab of fury that pushes him back to his bedroom, to the moment he collapsed with the chocolate.

She’s Force-healing. Luke taught him this, and he could never do it, and then Snoke taught him, and he could never do it, but she’s doing it. She’s holding the traitor together with the Force like she was born to it. But she isn’t. She stole this from him, from the hundreds of hours of frustrated, futile practice over a decade.

“Ben, the Dark,” she says hoarsely. “Do you see? Do you see?”

He sees. With his eyes closed, he sees. His anger, his envy, his bitterness have spun out their own bright red thread. It’s weaving through her net, wrapping around each fragment of it, constricting the delicate blue strands but making them strong. His power, his anger, branches out from the fine blue net and begins winding its way up the traitor’s skin, his spine, the arteries whose names Snoke had required him to learn but he can’t remember anymore. The blue threads chase it, intertwining with his power like the Alderaanian braids he used to weave in his mother’s hair. He’s not trying to do this; he’s never seen or heard of anything like this, not in almost twenty years of constant training in the Light and the Dark. She’s directing it, guiding his power, guiding him.

There’s no surge of strength. What she’s doing is infinitely precise, slow, careful but not directed by any conscious thought. She’s feeling her way in the Force, listening to it.

He hates her for this, for taking the only thing that was ever really his and doing it better. But he recognizes a master at work, and he watches her with his eyes closed and awe in his heart, watches her in the Force, and he listens like she listens, and he hears what she hears, and the Force speaks to him, and he knows what he has to do.

This was the lesson he learned on his knees, polishing the floor for his Master. The Force isn’t his. He only enjoys the illusion of power because he tunes his body and he tunes his mind and he submits, and the Force makes him its instrument when it wants to. He hates the Force for choosing her after he’d given it everything—but he’s always submitted to masters he hates.

“Your gloves,” Rey says, breathless. Ben understands, and he doesn’t think about what he’s doing because if he does he’ll ignite his lightsaber and stab it through her heart. He pulls off one glove with his teeth, eyes still closed, and he jerks in shock as her freezing, clammy fingertips brush his.

At her touch, whatever binds them springs to life. Rey sucks in a breath, he feels it, and he feels her heart race as the full brunt of his anger and grief hits her, but she’s too focused on the traitor right now to let it distract her. She’s breathing hard as the red and the blue strands twine around every vein and every bone in the traitor’s body, braiding him together, keeping him warm. He knows she’s talking to the traitor, he feels her drawing the thinnest possible strand of his power to weave with her own and slide under the traitor’s mind, supporting it.

He holds on to his hate, his anger, his bitterness, and he reaches into her and pulls at the strands of anger and hate and bitterness in her, coaxing them. They leap to him, almost joyous in their violence—it’s him she hates, almost as much as she hates her parents. She doesn’t know she hates her parents, she refuses to do anything but deny it, and that makes it even more powerful.

She understands and pulls at strands within him, too, things he doesn’t have names for but shine with the Light, and they are mirrors now, and they’re all mangled up together as they weave their net knot by painstaking knot. The snow begins to melt slowly on the traitor’s body, then it pours off in rivulets as their power—his power—warms the blood from the inside. Ben lets his power weave and bite into the traitor's beating heart, trapping it. For a moment he holds it. It's such a small thing. It would be so easy.

He opens his eyes, she opens hers. She’s wrapped her fingers around his and she’s squeezing as hard as she can and he’s never held anyone’s hand before. They watch one another, daring the other to act--then it’s time. He feels it first; he ties it off and settles back on his heels, never breaking her gaze. 

She doesn’t let go as she tries to catch her racing breath. He doesn’t want her to. He’s breathing like he ran a race, like he channeled extraordinary power instead of measuring it out inchwise in the thinnest thread. Her lips are flushed, her pupils are wide and round and black, and he’s sure his are, too. He can’t think about anything but the warmth of his hand in hers.

He swallows and forces himself not to look away. She didn’t work for this. She doesn’t deserve this. He doesn’t deserve to be forced to watch her take away the only thing he ever wanted. Or maybe he does. Maybe he deserves worse.

“Does that shuttle come standard with an emergency bacta suit?”

She breathes out the question in a haze of vapor under her wide eyes. She’s shivering so violently that she can barely keep her hand on his and he adjusts his grip so that her fingers are wrapped in his palm. Each shudder jerks open her shoulder wound a little more.

“What?”

She indicates the ship with her gaze.

“Ben. He's stable but not for long. You feel it. Bacta. He needs it.”

“He’s nothing.”

He watches the words condense in the air between them: a wall. Her expression hardens but she doesn’t let go of his gaze, she doesn’t let go of his hand. She’s so cold.

“He needs it,” she says again.

“You need it.”

He hadn’t meant to say that, and he hadn’t meant to punctuate it with a press of his bare fingers harder into her hand. He can’t tell if the liquid between their palms is sweat or melted snow or both.

“Ben.”

It’s a command. She won’t stop giving him orders.

She lets go of his hand like she’s finally realized who he is, like she’s finally come to her senses and remembered to hate him as much as he hates her. His fingers clutch at the freezing air, seeking her warmth. Through the bond he feels the moisture on her palm suddenly burning her like liquid nitrogen.

She gets up to start walking toward the command shuttle, but she falls. Without thinking, he catches her in the Force and lowers her gently back down to the snow. She says nothing, but can’t repress a soft grunt as a particularly ferocious round of shivering forces her to tense the muscles around her shoulder wound.

He shrugs off his coat, his greatcoat, the Supreme Leader’s greatcoat, and, taking the two shuffling steps to her side, he wraps it around her shoulders. He helps her slide her functioning arm through one sleeve, tucking the other beneath her useless right hand. Neither of them looks at the other. She doesn’t even nod her thanks, and he’s grateful. If he thinks too hard about what he’s doing he’ll kill her and the traitor both and jump back to hyperspace like he should’ve done in the first place. But he feels her shoulder muscles relax a tiny bit under the warmth, he picks up a pianissimo strain of relief in the Force as he wraps the huge coat around her as tightly as he can, raising the collar to shield her neck and her ears from the wind.

He doesn’t ask if she can walk—that fall told him all he needs to know. Without speaking, without looking at her, he bends down next to her and hoists her good arm around his shoulder, holding it secure with one hand while he slides the other around her waist to guide her to her feet. Through the bond he feels the sharp stabs of pain at the sudden movements, but he’s not going to carry her, and she’d kill him if he tried. Even without training she can handle physical pain as well as he can. That surprises him.

Once she’s adjusted herself, pressing her coat-draped body against his for warmth, he uses the Force to raise the traitor, wrapped in his net of Dark and Light, out of the snow. She’s got almost no strength left, but she reaches out with the Force and guides the traitor to her like she’s planning to catch him with her useless hands if he falls. Ben sucks in a breath as he feels her stretch out effortlessly and twine her power with his. She keeps doing impossible things, this scavenger.

He feels her take a deep breath, and when she’s ready, he steps out into the snow, supporting both of them and guiding her with an arm around her waist, trying not to think about how he’s never been this close to another person outside of combat, trying not to think about how Hux is right and he's gone completely mad, trying not to think about anything at all but the next step and the blinding, driving snow.

Chapter Text

Ch. 13: Medicine 

 “How did you find me?”

 “I felt your injury,” he says, sliding the huge coat off her to examine her shoulder as they sit next to one another on the shuttle’s fold-down cot. Finn, in his bacta suit, lies a few feet away, where she can keep a close eye on him. She feels suddenly naked without the coat, and much, much colder. “I asked about our current operations and I came to this planet first.”

“You expect me to believe that you just happened to attack the Resistance?”

She feels his thumb press into the skin below her collarbone and grits her teeth when he tugs at the jumpsuit fabric to get a better look at what’s under the mess of blood. He’s wearing gloves. She’s grateful; she breathes as deeply as she can without straining her shoulder, trying to remind herself that he came to her in the snow and he just healed Finn. Her brain keeps bouncing between sickening flashbacks to the awful things he’s said to her, wild hope that whatever brought him to tears had also brought him to the Light, and cold reminders that he’s always played games with her and he knows perfectly well that showing her kindness and vulnerability is the best way to needle his way into her trust.

It's his fault this attack happened. Her friends might be dead, Finn’s almost dead, she’s injured, and his army did it. But she needs medical care, so does Finn. These are the facts of her situation. She’ll play his game until she and Finn can escape. It’s a calculated risk.

“It was a sector-level decision,” he says, frowning at whatever he sees. “It wasn’t my order. They had intelligence on an RDF base here. Someone in the civilian government ratted you out.”

Rey frowns at this; he’s not lying. One of the Senators? It couldn’t be; there wouldn’t have been enough time for them to make a deal with the First Order. Not Desso; no one hates the First Order more than he does, except Leia. But Poe hinted that the Senators were losing hope, that the meeting hadn’t gone well.

Ben’s not lying, but he’s definitely hiding something. “We’re miles from the battle, but you flew straight to me,” she says, trying to catch his eye. She’s never been afraid to look him in the eye. But he’s avoiding her gaze, and annoyance snaps through the connection.

Instead of answering, he only slides a little on the cot and gestures for her to let him see the exit wound on her back. The fact that he’s here at all tells her that he can follow her through the Force as soon as he gets close enough. He probably circled overhead, looking for her. That's useful information--there's no sneaking up on him, no infiltrating his ship. So it'll be almost impossible for her to attack him when he's in space. All the more reason to strike him down now, when she's close to him, if she has to.

It's a possibility she has to consider, but, as he carefully examines her injuries, she has to admit she doesn't want to. Though that's exactly what he wants her to think, isn't it?

“This isn’t all your blood,” Ben observes.

He’s right, and it’s not all Finn’s either. She does her best to crush the memory of how that blood got there, and says nothing. He knows she called on the Dark side, to do what she did. Ben lets it drop, but she knows he won’t let it go forever. He twitches his fingers and summons the medical kit he’d dropped on the floor.

“What about the rest of the Resistance?” she asks, because that's what she really wants to know. The medkit accelerates mid-air and slams into the bulkhead over her shoulder, failing to explode in a satisfying rain of supplies. It’s well-padded, made to survive crashes and, apparently, the wrath of Ben Solo.

“Your uniform,” is all he says in response, indicating that she should pull down the shoulder of her jumpsuit.

“Ben, I need to know if they’re alive. You’re not treating me until you tell me.”

“You’d die of blood-loss. And if you do, the traitor dies, too. Don’t mistake this for a negotiation.”

On the Falcon Han had joked with her about the smuggler’s rules of negotiation. You gotta know when to bluff, kid. Han and Leia probably taught him to cheat at sabacc when he was four.

Ben watches her expectantly. Fine. She can’t bluff, but she feels his real concern for her through the bond, and she can use that. “Ben,” she says quietly, in the same voice she used when he’d been about to walk away. That’s all she’s doing, just using him, like he’s using her. That’s all.

He frowns, and she tries not to let her weak triumph trickle across the bond. “Some civilian craft got away.”

“Prisoners?”

“Some.”

Her heart leaps, and his annoyance rises to meet it.

“Who?”

“As of twenty minutes ago they hadn’t introduced themselves,” he snaps.

“Are they being questioned?”

His frown deepens, and the annoyance shifts to self-hatred. “Not harshly,” he says through gritted teeth, and she realizes what that self-hatred means. He’d ordered his people not to torture hers.

“Your uniform," he says again. "Unless you want to lose function in that arm.”

Figuring that’s the best she’ll get, she tugs the zipper down, trying not to notice how thin her undershirt is or how much her breastband shows through the wet fabric. She’s in too much pain to be embarrassed and she’s grateful that now, at least, they’re even. With her good hand she pushes the jumpsuit and the narrow straps of the undershirt off her injured shoulder in one quick motion, leaving it bare.

She cries out in pain at the same moment his fingers press into the fabric, stopping it from pulling. "Not that far," he growls, as though she should've known better. She looks down at the entry wound. The fabric’s melted into her skin and muscle, just at the top of her armpit, and she fights back nausea as she sees something white and shiny just visible under a slippery layer of blood. She swallows and looks back up, studying the cockpit, trying to distract herself by planning her escape. The shuttle has all the personality of a cargo-crate, except for one thing. He's modified the upper instrument deck for better control by a single pilot. She knows it was him, because he's copied the unorthodox but damned-sensible layout Han jimmy-rigged for the Falcon. 

Distracting herself fails utterly when Ben gently, carefully works a black-gloved finger between the fabric and the exit wound on the back of her shoulder, prying it off the skin millimeter by ruined millimeter. She feels the leather against her skin, slick with half-dried blood. She’s furious at the way the sudden rush of cold air raises goosebumps on her bare shoulder under the featherlight touch of the thin gloves.

She’s not surprised his touch is so careful. That’s probably why he learned to be so cruel, because everything about him is so gentle.

“Just pull it off, will you?” she says, gritting her teeth. She’d rather have it done all at once and not have his hands anywhere near her. At least she’s mostly stopped shivering, though she’s still freezing without that coat around her.

“It’ll hurt,” he says.

“It already hurts.”

He takes her at her word, and rips the jumpsuit off her skin in one quick motion, making her scream, and before the scream is even finished he’s moved his hands to the front and ripped the melted plastifiber from the front wound, too. Her mouth hangs open as she sucks in air, and she can’t keep the tears back. She can’t even find enough breath to curse, it hurts so much, and when she looks down a patch of skin the size of her fist is missing from her upper chest.

“Breathe. Relax,” Ben says gruffly.

"You felt that too," Rey says, her voice pained.

"I feel what you feel."

"Me too," she says, in too much pain to marvel at how strange this is, that Ben Solo's sensations are hers. "How long, for you?" she asks.

"A few days."

"I've only felt it since I grabbed your hand. It's like a connection sort of--opened."

He ignores this. He wedges his finger between the edge of the jumpsuit and her shoulder-blade, gently pushing the fabric down almost to her elbow. She presses the front of her jumpsuit to keep it from slipping too far, but if he looks over her shoulder he’ll get a clear view down the top of her breastband. He doesn’t look over her shoulder.

She feels something else in the bond, something he’s trying to crush, something she’d felt from him in the turbolift when they’d been inches from one another, whispering. But embarrassment follows, and whatever it was is gone almost as soon as she recognizes it, swept away by a wave of clinical coldness. She’s glad. His total disinterest in the physicality of all this, and the pain that takes up most of her attention, are the only things keeping this from being humiliating. She can pretend he’s Plutt’s meddroid, ready to jab a syringe full of vaccines and contraceptives into her back—a sick scavenger is a scavenger not making quota, girl—and yelling at her for managing to get frostbite in the desert winter. 

Ben prods at the wounds for no more than ten seconds before removing his hand and pushing her jumpsuit back up, like he's happy to get his hands off her. “You need a meddroid. A bacta patch will leave too much damage. I’m taking you to the camp.”

She opens her mouth to protest, but then realizes that the camp is her camp, now under First Order control. The Falcon is there, if it wasn’t destroyed or hidden in time. The Jedi books and the lightsaber are there. And if the Order took any prisoners, they’re probably there, too. Not to mention it’ll be much easier to steal a ship and escape from a chaotic military base than it will be to commandeer a heavily-secured command shuttle under Ben’s silent, watchful eye. Not that she really has a choice.

He closes the medical kit and moves to the pilot’s seat, starting the ignition sequence without another word. It takes a retinal scan and a thumbprint verification to start the ship, all that on top of the usual security codes. Good to know; even if he left her alone in here she'd never be able to steal the shuttle. The snow has coated the viewport, and with a flick of a switch it melts, running down the front of the ship in rivulets to reveal a near-solid wall of snow blowing horizontally across the plain. The flight takes no more than a minute, which Rey uses to lean back against the bulkhead and try not to worry about Finn or feel the pounding in her leg.

“Stop running from the pain,” Ben snaps as he brings the ship over the familiar lights of the parade ground. “You’re reacting out of fear. You need to feel it.”

 “You sound like Luke.”

“Luke is dead. So if you want to learn anything, listen to me.”

She looks out the viewport, seeing, first, nothing but the blowing snow, slowly turning yellow as they descend into the lights of the camp. He’s teaching her. Almost definitely for his own reasons, but teaching is teaching, and she can’t afford to spurn it just because she can’t stand that he’s got the gall to tell her she’s not feeling this pain. She gets what he means, anyway, about sensations.

“I feel heat,” she says through clenched teeth, taking another deep breath. “Tension, maybe. Something like needles in my skin.”

“Are any of those things pain?”

She sighs. He sounds like he's given this lesson before, and she wonders who he would've taught. “No.”

“Exactly," he says. "See it for what it is, without judging, without fearing. Accept it. Walk out to meet it.”

Meet it. She’s got no desire to meet a damned blaster wound, but fine, if this is the price she pays for getting out of this with Finn, she can play his game. She focuses on the sensations. The pain is there, but when she feels it instead of trying to get away from it, it becomes something she can tolerate. Make friends with it, almost.

“See?” he says to the viewport. “It’s better.”

It is. It is better. Damn him.

“Is this a Jedi trick, or one of Snoke’s?” She's not sure which would annoy her more.

They touch down in the snow, and stormtroopers rush to meet them. Ben leans back in the pilot’s chair, looking very much like Han. Through the bond, his emotions are blowing like the snow, first one way, then another. There’s hatred in there, and envy too. She knows they’re for her, and they’re new--what does he think she’s done to him now? But there’s something else, too, something she felt when they touched hands that first time. A crack in his mask.

“When I was seven, I broke my arm,” he says, looking out at the assembling troops. “I learned that from the meddroid.”

The yellow floodlights of the parade ground filter into the dim cockpit, illuminating one side of his face. Slowly, haltingly, Rey feels the gyroscope in her brain orient itself back toward hope, but then Ben stands and turns away, and the moment has passed.

From a side locker he pulls a pile of black fabric: a cloak. He helps her wriggle her good arm out of his coat and settles the cloak around her, pulling the hood over her head because she can’t do it with one hand.

“I assumed you wouldn’t want me to carry you to medbay,” he says as he adjusts the hood so she can see something other than black fabric.

“I’ll manage on my own.”

She expects him to say something like I’d enjoy seeing you crawl onto a First Order base, scavenger. But she doesn’t know why she expected that. Ben says horrible things to her, sure, but he doesn’t gloat over her and never has. Even when he’d had her literally over a cliff, he wasn't crowing about the power of the Dark side, he was offering to teach her. “I ordered a medical team to bring a levistretcher," he says. "Droids only.”

Ben doesn’t want to be seen helping her. But she's grateful for the gesture, since it means she doesn't have to endure being carried.

She nods curtly. Even if she wanted to thank him, he’d only hate himself more for doing something that earned the thanks of someone like her. A nothing. A scavenger. Still, he must sense her gratitude. She knows he does, because under his utterly impassive face the connection between blooms with warmth. It’s like no one’s ever been grateful to him before.

Maybe no one has.

“I suppose I’m your prisoner?” she asks before he can hate himself for doing something minimally decent.

He gives one final tug on the hood, settling it over her hair. “I thought you’d be pleased,” he says with contempt that only barely hides his--Rey can hardly believe it--amusement. “It’s been more than a week since you escaped a First Order facility. You're overdue.”

He’s dangerously close to smiling at her, but before she can voice her astonishment, he’s wiped it all away and shrouded himself in the aloofness of Kylo Ren. She hides her disappointment. He never needed the physical mask, not really. The mask is inside him.

He stands and starts to shrug on his coat before he notices either just how much blood Rey dripped on the lining or just how bad that coat smells, or both. He frowns and goes back to the locker where he’d gotten the cloak to fetch a robe for himself. It looks like one she’s seen before, like the one he’d worn when they fought in the snow on Starkiller. She wonders if he has a whole staff for his wardrobe. Does he have winter black and summer black? What had he worn on Jakku? As though he almost forgot, he fishes something out of the pocket of his coat and tucks it into his robe, but Rey doesn’t see what it is.

Ben stands in the hatch as it opens, a black outline against the harsh yellow glare of the floodlights and the snow. Two columns of stormtroopers salute, and suddenly, commanding from a ship as the freezing wind blows his robe with cinematic drama, Ben becomes the same person who attacked her in the woods on Takodana, the person she'd been terrified of. “No retinal scans,” Ben commands the droids who come aboard with two levistretchers.

“Yes, Supreme Leader.”

He doesn’t look at her, or Finn, as he steps down the gangway, ready to assume command of the last stronghold of the Resistance.

***

“I trust the facility has been prepared according to my command," Ben says to the important-looking officer who meets him at the bottom of the gangway. It's hard to Rey to hear, huddled as she is in the cloak against the fierce wind, with Finn’s levistretcher between Ben and her, but she's stunned by how different he sounds. She's glad for the hood because it lets her roll her eyes at his grandiose language. She wonders if Snoke schooled him to talk like that, or if he learned it from watching Leia.

“Yes, Supreme Leader,” the officer says, managing to look dignified while she trots to keep up with the much taller Supreme Leader and med-droids. “Is there anything else you require?”

“Only privacy,” Ben says that same dramatic voice, the words condensing around his head to give them extra drama. It sounds so natural, that's what surprises her. Like he was born giving orders. Through the bond she feels crushing anxiety and his usual moroseness, but he looks and sounds like a leader, and everyone on that parade ground fears him; their own anxiety mingles with his in the air. But Ben's afraid of them. He's terrified that at any moment they're all going to realize that he doesn't belong here, because he's a failure. Even Finn has more self-confidence than Ben Solo does.

 “Yes, Supreme Leader,” the officer says. She sounds relieved as she departs into the main building. Rey feels her shaking, and then wonders how she's able to do that. Is the bond giving her new abilities?

The droids lead them, not to the medbay where they kept Rose, but across the yard to one of the outbuildings. Rey, her vision partly shaded under the huge hood, lies back on the gurney and studies the camp. It buzzes with activity centered around three huge transports. The TIE-fighters, thousands of them, look almost quaint under a layer of snow, stretching as far as the sandstorm-like conditions will let her see.

The camp’s definitely been shot up, but hope swells up in her as she realizes the damage isn’t severe and the pattern of it is strange. The hangar's a pile of rubble. Her throat catches as she thinks of the Falcon, which Chewie and Rose were scheduled to move into hiding while she and Finn and Poe had gone out on their mission. With any luck, Chewie, Rose, and the Falcon got out before the fighters started firing and they'll launch a rescue soon. She searches for them in the Force, but finds nothing.

The rest of the damage is around the perimeter of the camp. They’d obviously been trying to hit the civilian vessels sitting in the snow-covered fields, but it looks like the TIE-fighters had tried to prevent escape, pen everyone in. They’d been looking to take prisoners. Why?

The Senate. They’d known the Senators were there. But how? They only landed, what, ten hours before the attack started?

The outbuilding the droids lead them to isn’t one Rey has ever been in. It’s not heated, but it’s clean, and a bacta tank has been set up in the small front room. To her surprise, her gurney keeps moving toward a simple metal door that opens to reveal a small back room and a harried-looking meddroid. She tries to sit up when Finn’s gurney stops in the front chamber, but Ben feels her alarm and looks at her. “You’ll be able to monitor his condition easily enough,” he says.

It’s not Ben, but the meddroid, that continues. “That suit your, eh, colleague is in is only designed for short-term use. He needs a full bacta immersion.”

Ben’s face betrays no expression, but she feels his question through the bond. He’s actually waiting for her to decide. It’s strange, and a bit terrifying, how quickly she’s getting used to sharing a mind with another person, how easily she knows what he’s thinking even though she’s not reading his thoughts like she did when she broke into his mind. She nods, and he commands the droid to close the door.

The droids help her into one of the rickety plastisteel chairs you could find all over the camp. This one looks like it could’ve come from the mess. The meddroid deploys her diagnostic appendages, and Ben holds out his hand. “No unnecessary scans,” Ben orders. He’s worried she’ll be identified.

“Of course, sir,” the droid replies a little testily, like Ben is questioning her ability to follow orders. “Ma’am—I’m sorry for the improper form of address, I was told your rank and status are classified—Ma’am, I’m going to remove your cloak to examine your injuries.”

Interesting. So Ben didn’t tell them she’s a prisoner. For all they know, she’s a First Order officer. He really is daring her to escape, and she needs to figure out why.

Rey nods, and grits her teeth through the brief examination, sitting with her shoulder bared under Ben’s gaze. He’s got a datapad out, at least, pretending not to watch her, but she feels the shadow of his attention as the meddroid finishes her diagnostics and gives her a nanojection that dulls the pain but, the droid promises, will not dull her mental function. It works as advertised.

The droid cuts off the pant leg of Rey’s jumpsuit to examine the blunt-impact injury on Rey’s thigh, and Ben pretends not to watch that, too. The skin is almost black from her groin to her knee, but a simple nanojection will heal it in a few hours, the droid says. Rey has no memory of how the thigh injury happened—everything went too fast.

Rey declines the offer of sedation when the droid tells her she's going to do surgery on the shoulder. For fifteen minutes Rey's joint is laid open to the freezing air and the droid’s uncomfortable, but painless, prodding. Since she and Ben have silently agreed not to talk in front of the droid, Rey closes her eyes and reaches out with the Force, looking for anyone familiar, but there's nothing, so she starts running over the schematics of the camp in her head and figuring out how to steal a ship.

TIE fighters are easy enough to steal, but they don't have hyperdrive. The command shuttle's perfect, but probably too well-secured, unless she really can break into Ben's head and somehow get his his thumbprint and his retina, willingly or not.

Ben raises an eyebrow at her over the datapad, coolly acknowledging that he knows she's thinking of murdering him. Can he read her thoughts? No. He must've guessed it from the play of her emotions, from some expression. She has no idea if she's good at hiding expressions, since she's never really had a mirror, or people to hide them from. But she wouldn't be surprised if she were rubbish at it.

Her brief consideration of murder doesn't seem to bother him; she supposes he's used to people wanting to kill him. And he must feel that she couldn't do it. Even before he'd healed Finn, she couldn't have done it.

Not long after the meddroid announces she’s closing up, something on the datapad catches Ben’s attention. He’s let his mouth fall open just a bit, and his eyes, illuminated in the soft, shifting blue light of the data-pad, are shining, the pupils dilating even as Rey watches. The swell of emotion from him is instant, powerful, and focused simultaneously in her heart, which sends the wireless monitor beeping wildly as her heart-rate chases his, and in her groin.

He’s full of hate. Hate and envy and awe and compassion and visceral, primitive desire. Ben's emotions take over her body and push all her physical systems from zero to full-throttle in seconds.

But he's got no idea what he's doing to her. He’s too absorbed in whatever the hell is on that datapad.

“What are you looking at?” she demands, and then regrets asking, because she doesn’t really want to think about what Ben Solo would be that excited about, in that particular way, when she’s sitting here half-naked and still unable to walk. The meddroid sniffs and tells Rey to calm herself and stay still while she binds the novaskin shut.

“Are you nearly done here?” Ben asks the droid coldly, letting nothing in his voice betray how unsettled he is. Something apologetic flits across their connection, warring with the bloodthirsty hate and the arousal he’s trying to crush.

“Forty-nine seconds, Supreme Leader,” the droid says.

Ben pivots like he’s mid-fight and walks out the door, slamming it behind him. Before Rey even has time to call after him, he’s back, carrying a small stack of clothes. He must have ordered them on his datapad while they waited. He slams the door again, with the Force this time. “Help her dress,” he commands the droid. “I’ll wait outside.”

“I have assistants for that—” the droid begins, but Ben has already gone.

The clothes are all black, because of course they are, but they’re approximately her size, not full of holes, and not covered in blood, so Rey doesn’t complain. They’re also well-padded against the cold, much more useful than her jumpsuit if she’s going to escape.

Rey, acutely aware that the ruler of the galaxy is standing less than ten meters away apparently trying to talk himself out of killing her, manages to strip off the hideous, wonderful jumpsuit mostly without help. She lays it aside regretfully, hoping it’s not her last tangible link to the Resistance.

Rey’s attention stays locked onto Ben and Finn as Ben breathes his way through the waves of envy and hate that try to drown him. The meddroid helps her into the clean black underclothes, the shirt with ribbed sleeves, the leggings, boots that pinch a little, a quilted tunic very much like Ben’s, the loose belt, and, over it all, a cloak that actually fits. The droid pulls up the hood for her at her request, informs her that she should stay off her feet for at least five minutes while the fracture heals, and invites the Supreme Leader back inside to see if he requires anything else.

When he sees her standing there, probably looking like some ridiculous imitation of himself, he swallows a choking tangle of emotions. Sadness is the thread she picks out first. Triumph, she expected, or maybe that desire again because she has no idea what he thinks of her, or that, now. But not sadness.

Giving away nothing in his expression, he asks about 'the other patient.' “He'll need at least three hours in the chamber, Supreme Leader, and then I’ll check him again,” the droid says.

Rey nearly groans. She has no intention of staying here for hours if, as the droid hinted, she’ll be able to walk out of here in less than one, but Ben knows as well as she does she’s not going to try to escape until Finn is safe.

The meddroid makes to leave when Ben orders her to stop. “Supreme Leader,” the droid says, sounding very much like Threepio, “this really isn’t necessary. As a medical professional my programing ensures total confidentiality—”

Ben ignores her and pops the catch on the back of her head. He quickly, efficiently, wipes her memory-banks. Rey's only friends for years were droids and she usually objects to this sort of thing. Still, the poor meddroid now possesses not only a visual record of the Supreme Leader’s disloyal half-hour with a known Resistance agent, but also very clear footage of that agent buck-naked trying to shimmy into clean underwear with a numb leg and a numb arm. She'd rather not leave that behind for anyone to find, including Ben. Not that it matters, since he could feel everything even if he couldn't see it.

She hates this bond.

Ben sends the slightly confounded droid on her way with orders to keep two nurse-droids monitoring the bacta chamber. Then they’re alone. They look one another in the eye, because they always do.

“My men salvaged the footage from the fighter’s holocam,” he says slowly, almost menacingly, and she stops breathing. Envy claws its way across the bond.

She’s disappointed, but not surprised. She knew in her heart that all that matters to him is the Dark side. He only came to her in the snow because he felt her call on it in her weakness.

The jealousy, though—that surprises her. She needs to understand what it means. It can't be because of what she's done, obviously. They might be equals in the Force, and she thinks that's what breaking the lightsaber meant, but he's got decades of training. She's not under any illusions about who's more powerful here.

“I counted twenty-six kills,” he says, “not including whoever was on that fighter.” 

 Twenty-six? No. it's impossible.

She remembers her power wrapping around that TIE-fighter like a fist and slamming it into the ground. That had been the first thing she did after she got that tent-pole in her hands, after Finn went down. She remembers the ball of fire, the screaming, the piece of shrapnel smacking her thigh face-on at high speed. She remembers the way she reached out, wanting to break the necks and crush the skulls of every single one of them for hurting them, the Resistance, for hurting Finn. And she remembers how they fell where they stood, some twitching, most not. She remembers stealing the speeder and fleeing into the blizzard.

She’d never really forgotten, she just wanted to block it out.

“You’re upset,” he observes calmly even as his emotions keep churning, “but you’ve killed before. I didn’t see you weeping over Snoke’s guards.”

“And I’m not weeping now, am I?” she says. She's not. Her breath is shaky, but she's fine. His resolve flickers at that. “But that was—that was different. I’ve never killed civilians. Some of those people were unarmed. But once they shot Finn and we lost Poe, I just—”

She stops. She doesn't owe him an explanation. And what the hell is wrong with him, reacting like that to seeing her murder a bunch of civilians? Not that it surprises her; if anything would move Ben Solo it would be violence, and even she’d felt a rush like that after their fight in the throne room. She’d half-expected him to sweep her up in his arms, blood and sweat and half-corpses and all, and kiss her then and there. She would’ve let him, probably, definitely, probably, if he’d saved the fleet first. Definitely. But he didn’t.

“Killing is killing,” Ben says, and he lowers his hood, revealing just how bright his eyes are in the dim light of the outbuilding. “Unarmed civilians, the guards, the stormtroopers on Starkiller who were taken from their families, all the people on the ships Holdo destroyed. All of it. It’s all just killing. Anything that makes you feel good about some and bad about others is just a story you tell yourself, to hide from the pain you cause.”

“No," she says, "that’s not true. What I did was wrong, back there, and I'm ashamed of it. But the others, those were always for a good reason." She’s always been good, not like Ben. That’s what he can’t see: that she’s one of the good guys, and he isn’t. Right and wrong aren’t just stories.

"You're not ashamed," he says softly.

"Of course I am," she says.

"No. You're running from it. Just like you ran from the truth about your parents."

As he looks into her eyes that bounding excitement drains away, leaving only concern. Grave concern, and something else, something like fear. For her. Of her. She's not sure. The nerve of him, to be concerned for her, like she’s the one who needs saving. 

Where there was conflict, I now sense resolve.

Slowly, like he’s waiting for her permission, he summons the other empty plastisteel chair and sits down beside her.

This is part of his act, too, the pretend change of heart. This is another layer of his betrayal.

“I can help you,” he says, reaching out to push her hood back. She hadn't realized she'd been hiding underneath it; she feels exposed now. “I’m the only one who can.”

She scoffs and pulls her cloak tighter around her. “You can help me turn to the Dark side, you mean.”

“No,” he says. His side of the connection feels hollow. “You’ve already turned to the Dark side.”

“I did what I had to do to protect someone I love,” she says. She turns away from him but he grabs her forearm, digging into the black sleeve until she looks at him.

His eyes are wide, innocent, shocked. He looks like he did after he killed Han. “It’s always for love, Rey. Always.”

She sucks in a breath. Something in the Force nudges at her, and it has nothing to do with the bond. It’s like she’s finally balanced an engine to get rid of knocking, like everything is running as it should be. He’s telling the truth. She’s done something horrible, and she doesn’t even feel it. She’s been telling herself she’s focused on survival, and she has been, but she sees clearly what he sees, like a vision but not a vision: a long road, a chain of decisions like that chain of images in the cave on Ahch-to, each one made to protect someone, never looking back, because after all every single one had been the right thing to do.

Ben reaches out toward her with his other hand. He’s still wearing gloves, and as soon as he realizes it, he rips them off and throws them to the floor and wraps his huge hands around her black-sleeved biceps, loosening his grip when she feels the injury revolt. She’s staring at him, trying to find anything she can grab onto in the barren space on his side of the bond.

She finally recognizes what he’s feeling. Grief. Final, irresolvable, unredeemable grief. But there’s something else there, something new: purpose.

They look at each other for a long time, and she can’t trust him, because after all he’s done this so many times, and he knows it. She opens her mouth to tell him that she thinks she understands, but they both feel it at the same time. Something familiar, like a friendly candle in the darkness outside this room.

Leia.

No. It’s much too weak, almost imperceptible, and much too close. No more than a hundred meters, and Leia would never be able to get that close without being seen. It's not familiar to Rey, she realizes; it's familiar to Ben. Ben turns his head, brows knitting, and then he drops her arms and jumps up. “You need to get out of here. Now. Can you walk?”

She doesn’t waste time with questions. She stands and yes, it’s unsteady, but her legs work. Ben’s energy in the Force washes over her—he’s reaching out, looking for exits. There’s only one, and whoever’s coming toward them might be able to see them walking out. She can feel enough anxiety from Ben to know this will be a problem.

“Keep your face covered. Pitch your voice low. Follow my lead, we’ll aim for the shuttle.”

"I'm not leaving Finn."

"We're not leaving," he says. "You're hiding."

Ben all but pushes her to the door, and she realizes as soon as she tries to walk fast that she overstated her ability.

They ignore the nurse-droids, whose memories are a liability now, and walk out the door into the snow that, unfortunately, has slowed from a whiteout to little more than a flurry. Ben looks confident, so Rey tries to match his stride. He helps her again with the Force.

She realizes they’ve lost whatever game they’re playing when she feels a strange pattern in Ben’s mind that’s equal parts fear—real fear now, not his usual anxiety—irritation, and the same feeling Rey had when she’d disappointed Leia. Ben changes direction abruptly guiding her toward a tall figure in a heavy black coat. With her hood and the harsh, dim yellow slight, she doesn’t realize until he’s less than ten meters from them that his hair is bright orange. It’s a face she’s only ever seen on a target droid, full of blaster holes. Ben seems like he’d like to add a few more.

Ben swallows and approaches the man. “Explain yourself, General.”

“Not until I know her security clearance,” he says, gesturing at Rey, who stands up as straight as she can.

Ben’s anxiety spikes as he struggles with a decision, and Rey is absolutely certain she’s about to be revealed as a prisoner, as a Resistance Jedi, because if he lets her go now, Hux will know he’s a traitor.

And Hux seems to be Force-sensitive, just barely. The Resistance has no idea.

She feels that resolve again, and then Ben turns to her and extends his hand, still ungloved, inviting her forward. She takes a few halting steps, trying to hide her injury as best as she can, but Hux is clever. He notices.

“It’s time you finally meet Hux,” he says to her, sounding reluctant but managing to imitate a kind of cruel cheerfulness. “I spared you as long as I could. Which reminds me, I still have this.” He reaches into the pocket of his robe and tosses her something. She almost reaches out with her stiff right arm, but catches it at the last second.

A lightsaber. Small, like it was made for a woman.

Follow my lead, he said. She steps toward the two of them. His eyes, locked on hers, are full of urgency, even as his body language and his expression feign more casualness than she’s ever seen from him. You gotta know when to bluff, kid.

“Hux,” he says, “this is Juno Ren.”

Chapter Text

“Three hundred credits for that thing? You’re out of your mind.”

“What if we throw in the girl?”

The girl was busying herself scraping rust off a speeder carcass, but at her mother's words she went still. It was important to listen, especially when her parents got like this, all trembly and pale when the stims ran out.

“I’m no slaver,” said the Crolute. The scavenger kids on the Graveyard called him the Blobfish.

The girl wasn’t surprised by the offer. Her mother threatened it often enough, didn’t she? Behave, you little shit, or we’ll give you to the slavers.

But they weren’t serious. They’d done this before, when she’d been bad, and since they’d come to the Graveyard three weeks ago she’d been very, very bad.

While the grownups' attention was elsewhere, she pocketed a shard of transparisteel that was already good and sharp, with a blunt end that didn’t hurt too much to hold. Just in case.

“Sure you’re not, Plutt,” her mother said, stumbling a little and offering a moist smile. The skin under her eyes was purple and her eyes kept darting semi-randomly up and down. A bandage on her cheek, and another one on her arm, acts as evidence of her daughter’s misbehavior. “C’mon. We—we’re all friends here.”

The girl pretended to look at the pile of broken einzel-lenses and f-cups in the corner where she huddled while she felt the Blobfish’s eyes on her.

The Blobfish shook his head.

“No. A strong one, desert-bred, I could use. But that tadpole? It’ll burn to a crisp as soon as I get it in the sun.”

The girl gave up pretending not to eavesdrop. “Hey, I’m strong! Yesterday I worked out in the Graveyard all day long and didn’t get tired even once. I seen what scavengers you got out there,” she said to the Blobfish as she climbed a huge junk pile to get out of reach. She was always a fast climber, and she never fell. “I’m better than all of them.”

“Shut up, girl,” her mother yelled, but the girl kept climbing.

She was better. Most of them that came through the pens here were refugee kids, half-starved, the kind that grew up with beds and sonics and all the water they could drink. Once, a kid told a story about a cistern so big it covered most of a planet, and when she asked him where the water came from the stupid kid tried to tell her it fell from the sky.

She would be humiliated if anyone found out how often she daydreamed about that story.

Her father crossed the distance to smack her, but the withdrawal-sickness slowed him down and he tripped and sprawled out on the floor. She laughed.

The Blobfish watched her with something she didn’t see very often: approval.

“I’ll give you two-fifty if you throw in that girl,” he said.

“Uh-uh. She knows her way around a junk heap, that shit’s useful,” her mother slurred. Her father had managed to get to his feet, and he stood shivering in the desert sun. “Two seventy-five.”

They were really going to do it.

“No!” she shouted. She began to leap down the pile, not caring any more if they were just trying to trick her into getting into reach for a whipping. “I’m sorry mum, I’m sorry, I’ll be good—"

But it was too late.

“Deal,” said the Blobfish.

*

The vision flashes through Kylo’s mind the instant their fingers touch in the light of a fire he can suddenly see. In the vision, young Rey tries to bolt after her parents and that animal Plutt grabs her arm, cursing and shaking her when she tries to bite him. Her father, pale and shivering, bends down to whisper that they’ll be back soon, and Rey starts to wail.

It seems cruel, to promise that. No wonder Rey is so eager to trust him.

And she is. She’s crying and he wonders if he could reach up and wipe away her tears, but he doesn’t want to move his fingers from where they slide against the tiny lines of her fingerprints, feeling her strong pulse below the skin. He’s not crying. He just wants to reach through time and rip apart Plutt and her parents and the entire planet of Jakku for daring to hurt the only person in the galaxy who will tell him he’s not alone.

As soon as his hand touched hers, his Master’s presence had gone silent, like she’s pushed his Master out.

The real Rey’s lip trembles and Kylo knows she feels his rage, and it scares her. Does she know he’s feeling it for her, because she’s forgotten how?

But she knew anger like this once. Kylo watches that little girl stretch out her hand, full of sadness, rage, hate, betrayal. There’s something more there, something she doesn’t recognize. Kylo understands then that the Force is letting him touch Rey’s skin across the galaxy, letting him see her pain across time, so that he will see the Dark side in her, and show her what she’s meant to be.

***

“This is Juno Ren.”

Hux sputters something else about security clearance that Ben doesn’t listen to because he can’t stop staring at Rey, who has instinctively angled her body away from his, shoulder to shoulder against an enemy. They’re following the Force now, working on sheer nerve to destroy anyone who stands against him.

But she’s afraid because of what he’d said, what he’d tried to make her understand. The Darkness is awake inside her and for a moment, holding her arms in his fingers, he'd been determined not to let it take her. It's such a fragile thing, this desire to help her.

But.

Defying Hux, she raises the lightsaber and presses the catch, sending red light splashing across the black ribs of her sleeves, dyeing Hux’s hair scarlet and the snow pink. The light flashes and wavers as she twirls the blade in her left hand like she’s had it for years, and when she speaks her voice is low and arrogant. She’s imitating the way he talked to her in the interrogation room.

“The Supreme Leader just threw me a lightsaber, General. What do you think my security clearance is?”

At that, the tiny glass box of Ben's resolve shatters into a million pieces. He’s looking at her like he did when Anakin’s lightsaber flew into her outstretched hand in another snowy plain not so long ago, like he’s just tossed her the security codes to his soul.

The arrogance of it, the brazenness, reminds him of the child he’s seen in her memories. Before his eyes she’s become his Knight, and she—a scavenger, a Resistance fighter—is swinging a lightsaber and demanding to walk right into the high command of the First Order.

And he—a prince, a Jedi, a Knight, the Supreme Leader of the First Order—is going to let her do it. She’ll stand with him and they’ll take the galaxy side-by-side, like he promised, and the worlds will bow to them.

How much power does she have over him, like this?

Too much. All of it. He’s getting carried away, he’s manic, but he doesn’t want to stop it, because if he does the only thing left for him is grief. He’s done pretending like he doesn’t want this. His Master told him he was strong enough to be alone, but he doesn’t want to be alone and he’s going to take what he wants.

She knows what she’s doing to him. Her eyes flash over the red blade, daring him to stop her. He won’t. Once she tastes the power she’ll never be able to walk away.

He’ll keep her from ever walking away.

She knows the game. He’s calling her bluff from the throne room, daring her to give up power once she’s got her hands on it. Power—she thinks she’d scoff at it. He knows better. Even now, watching him in silence in the snow with the hum of the lightsaber the only sound, she feels how much power she has over him, and she likes it. It flatters her, even though she’s probably telling herself this thrill is just hope. Hope for poor, lost little Ben Solo, almost ready for Rey of Jakku to lead him by the nose back home to the Resistance like a bantha who’s wandered away from the herd.

But she’s not the hero she wants to be, is she? She’s so much more dangerous than Ben is, and the Resistance let her in by the front door.

Ben, after the slaughter of the padawans, wanted to stand in the sonic for hours because he couldn’t get clean. He’d stayed up with nightmares, and he’d stayed up wracked with guilt over the nightmares that woke the other Knights.

But Rey. Rey doesn’t just deny the truth, it’s pathological. It’s psychotic. It’s intoxicating.

Rey just murdered at least twenty-six civilians, many of them unarmed, some of them young enough to be called children. She watched it on holo. She claimed to feel ashamed, but she’s lying, she doesn’t feel a damn thing. She never does, not if it’s inconvenient for her delusions of finding a happy life with her friends. It’s how she managed to hide so much of the truth from herself for so long.

If the traitor saw that footage he’d be horrified. If Dameron saw it, he’d be horrified. If his mother—

Yes.

The plan comes to him all at once, and he welcomes it. Rey needs to realize what she is, or she will live and die in a white robe calling herself a Jedi but more swollen with the Dark side than any Sith.

Something pathetic and insignificant patters at his mind. Hux. He suspects Ben is lying, but it doesn’t matter, with Rey by his side he doesn’t need Hux, he’ll choke him at the right moment and promote Mitaka or someone else and he and Rey will rule.

“Supreme Leader—"

“Enough, Hux. I have business with my Knight.”

That word startles Rey, and he realizes she has no idea what the ‘Ren’ suffix means. Rey’s eyes narrow as she figures out who the Knights must be, and she’s not happy about the possible existence of other Force-users.

“Can she…?” Hux makes a vague swirling gesture at his temple.

“No,” Ben says, though he’s not sure. Rey raises an eyebrow.

Hux frowns. Supreme Leader. Are you really so distracted that you can’t see what I have in my head?

“Put that away, Juno,” he orders Rey as he curbs his irritation long enough to dip into Hux’s mind. Rey hesitates, like she’s considering swiping Hux’s head off, but she seems to recognize that it’s in her best interest to keep up the charade. The smooth hum of the blade disappears, leaving only a green afterimage across his retina and silence swallowed by the snow.

When he sees what Hux wants him to see, Ben curses.

“I agree,” Hux says. Hux purses his lips at Rey while Ben scours the inside of his skull.

“You’re reading his mind,” Rey observes. Ben nods curtly, ignoring her until he feels a strange, tell-tale pressure on Hux’s mind. Hux flinches against a stab of pain.

“Mine,” Ben warns, throwing off her crude attempt at mind-reading with a wall of Force-energy. Ben regrets the juvenile command; he’s too absorbed in the swirl of Hux’s memories—and too alarmed by the implications of Rey having full access to Hux’s head—to put together a coherent sentence.

Rey frowns. Hux, for his part, notes that the Supreme Leader doesn’t entirely trust his supposed Knight despite letting her prance around with full security clearance. Her voice seems familiar to him for some reason, but Ben knows the general has never seen or heard her and he’s not worried.

“As amusing as it must be for you two to fight over my brain like mynocks pecking over carrion, I’m waiting for your orders, Supreme Leader,” Hux says.

Ben has no intention of saying this out loud in front of Rey. Your advice? he asks Hux.

Hux manages not to visibly preen. Implement Phase III early. Seize control decisively on the civilian front as well as the military. We’ve been too slow in implementing new propaganda.

Ben swallows. These were plans intended for his Master. Aside from Hux’s casual remark about changing Kylo’s propaganda posters, Ben had never, ever considered putting them into effect for himself. It’s not that he’s afraid. It’s just that he never thought about it, because he is not his Master. He’s Ben Solo, he doesn’t have a legacy, he doesn’t have a destiny.

No, he tells Hux. Not yet.

Getting cold feet—Emperor?

The word hits Ben like a snowball slamming into the back of his skull. Rey’s watching him with eyes narrowed.

He can’t be emperor. He’s been training for six years to follow his Master’s orders—Snoke, call him Snoke—while Snoke ruled the galaxy. He could never be Emperor alone. He doesn’t deserve it. He’s nothing.

But if there were two thrones—If she stood with him in black, just like this, on a balcony on Coruscant, not his Knight but his Empress—

She’s everything he isn’t: strong, charismatic, fearless. Ben will crush the galaxy under his boot to prove he isn’t weak; Rey will have the galaxy fall at her feet. Palpatine will be nothing compared to her—compared to them. Vader will be nothing compared to them.

They will slaughter their enemies together and he will burn the bodies just like he burned them for his Master, who made him keep the ashes in an altar on Starkiller. He’ll burn Hux. Alive. As a gift for her. And when the fires have cooled he'll ease the neck of her robe to the side, guiding the fabric down to her bicep, and he’ll take off his gloves and spread Hux’s greasy ashes over the brown curve of her bare shoulder. He’ll trace the grey lines across her skin with his lips, sending puffs of ash into her hair when he breathes against the hollow of her neck, and she’ll whisper to him that he’s done so, so well.

He holds back a shudder of pleasure and crushes the image, resenting the way his brain stumbled over the blood-smeared arch of her nude shoulder in the shuttle and refused to move beyond it. He’s a Knight of Ren; it’s not like he’s never wiped pus out of a girl’s wound before. These thoughts are black holes leading to universes he doesn’t want to explore. He doesn’t want to imagine what he’d be capable of if he gave free reign to the impulses Snoke mercifully taught him to control.

Rey’s looking at him with genuine concern—for herself, not for him. She feels his body rebelling against his control and she doesn’t like it any more than he does. But he won’t let himself hurt her. She will be his ally, his Empress, and he will make her happy. Their bond is too pure for the other things.

He turns to Hux, who regards him smugly. Hux has reconsidered his plans and decided that the role of vizier suits him well. He wants a title and he wants power; Kylo Ren can give him both, until Hux can take them for his own.

“Do it,” Ben says. Rey looks on, not knowing that he’s just given her the galaxy.

“Very well, sir,” says Hux with a last, suspicious glance at Rey. “But hurry. You shouldn’t be away from the ship long.”

***

Ben leaves Hux to deal with the galaxy. A holoconvention, a call for an independent Core, the first steps of a coup he has no doubt he will crush because he’ll have Rey by his side. In Hux’s head he caught wisps of rumors about the First Order Security Bureau and Black Sun and a dozen other things he can’t be bothered with right now, because he’s alone with Rey, and she’s walking openly beside him.

The stormtroopers kneel when they enter the main building. Rey tries to cover her discomfort by asking him about the red lightsaber and the real Juno Ren, and he answers her questions as perfunctorily as he can. Rey tries to hide her nervous swallow as she looks out over the stormtroopers.

“You enjoy this,” he observes quietly as they walk through the kneeling soldiers.

“I’m thinking about where they all come from,” she replies, but she’s lying; she does enjoy this. “They were all taken from their families, like Finn.”

“Would you like me to cancel the stormtrooper program? Stop drafting soldiers?”

She frowns, like he’s mocking her. “It’s not right to steal children from their parents.”

“Fine. It’s done. I’ll tell Hux to find another way to staff the army.”

“Are you joking?”

He feels her relief as they leave the hangar, exiting into an empty hallway.

“No,” he says truthfully, and stops, listening in the Force. Something is strange. It’s not just the reek of his mother in these walls, which he tries to ignore, and it’s not Hux, whose slight glow in the Force is receding in the opposite direction. But something’s calling him.

She observes him, puzzled. He’s almost offended by her surprise. It’s not as though he cares where the stormtroopers come from.

“Where are we going?” she asks.

“No more policy recommendations?”

“No,” she says, like he’s asked her for her opinion on the weather and not the future direction of the galaxy. “I want to see the prisoners.”

“They’re not going anywhere,” he says, murmuring into the curve of her ear to hide their conversation from passing stormtroopers, who salute as they pass. Rey practically jumps at the closeness of his voice, and he backs off, just a little.

“You know what I want,” he whispers against her temple.

She shivers, and in the bond he feels the muscles in her abdomen tighten. This, at least, is a power he still has over her.

But his triumph suffocates against the fear and confusion that passes across her face, and he's ashamed. She scowls when she finally realizes what he’s talking about. “They’re not yours.”

“Says the girl who took them from the temple where the Jedi kept them for a thousand years,” he says, swiveling in the dim hallway to pinpoint that strange call in the Force. “The girl who attacked Luke Skywalker. Who can’t even read them.”

“Luke wasn’t using them,” she says, her voice haughtier than she probably intends.

His lip quirks upward at that. She thinks she’s such a scion of the Light, the thief.

“You stole them for me,” he reminds her. He’d seen it in her head when Snoke tortured her, a memory he tries not to dwell on. “You trusted me with them then.”

“I thought you were going to be the last Jedi.”

“And now?”

“Now, I want to hate you. You’ve been nothing but horrible to me.”

“But.”

“But you healed Finn. And you saved me. And you told the soldiers not to torture my friends. And for some reason you’re letting me walk around the First Order with a real rank, and, Ben, what are you thinking? I know you have some game.”

It’s a good question. He’s not thinking. Let her believe he’s operating according to some grand plan instead of feeling his way moment by moment in the Force. Speaking of which—

He holds up her hand to silence her when she starts to say something. There’s a sound coming from somewhere. It’s familiar. Screaming.

“What?” Rey asks. She’s furrowed her brows, no doubt reaching out in the Force for someone she knows.

He moves left, then left again at the next T-intersection. It must be the right way, judging from Rey’s increasing irritation, and finally he arrives at a wide corridor with the unmistakable look of a barracks. The stormtroopers are throwing the detritus of the Resistance and the Republic Defense Force onto piles in the hallway. As they watch, one of them tosses a handful of holoflex portraits of children carelessly onto the floor.

They salute when Ben appears, and their terror in the Force is delicious when he tells them to get out. Rey manages not to cross her arms over her chest in annoyance, but by the time he reaches the right room, he’s too absorbed in the Force to pay attention to her.

He kicks aside a blanket on one of the piles and immediately sees what he’s looking for. Carefully, he levitates the pieces of the lightsaber to him, meeting Rey’s eyes as they watch the fragments revolve above his palms, twisted and broken and trapped in orbit around one another. The perfection of the metaphor irritates him, but not nearly as much as the trepidation he feels at the thought of touching them.

“It called to you, didn’t it?” Rey asks. “Like it called me.”

“The Force called me,” he says. “The lightsaber is just a thing.”

“Thanks, Ben. I didn’t actually think the lightsaber was talking.”

He likes that she can be sarcastic with him, but he has other things on his mind. After a quick check of the rest of the pile, he escorts the pieces of the lightsaber into what must be Rey’s room and allows them to alight on the small nightstand with a thud.

A crook of his finger opens a drawer, and the ancient books of the Jedi Order sail into his waiting hands. Rey stands like she wishes she had pockets to shove her hands into while she glowers at him.

Ben tries to pay attention as he flicks through the books. It’s mostly Jedi platitudes about balance, but he can’t concentrate because that screaming won’t stop. It’s a child. Some child screaming its head off.

“You’re not really going to stop the stormtrooper program,” Rey says.

“If there’s a reasonable alternative, I will. We’re not a conquering army anymore. As Emperor, I’ll need a smaller army, more local garrisons—”

“As what?”

He snaps the book shut and places the whole stack on the nightstand next to the pieces of the lightsaber, which he still doesn’t want to touch.

She’s watching him easily, wary in the way you might be wary around a practical joker, not a mortal enemy.

“Ben, what are you even doing here? What happened last night, when you were—upset?”

He’s grateful she didn’t say blubbering on the floor. Still, he has no intention of answering her.

But he doesn’t want to touch that lightsaber. It belonged to Luke. It belonged to Darth Vader. He’s not sure who he’s more afraid of; he’s done nothing but disappoint both of them.

The Force, however, has other ideas. The wailing has gotten louder, and more insistent.

Ben takes a deep breath, and reaches out. He wraps his fingers around the broken pieces of the lightsaber.

It’s not Vader he sees. It’s not Luke. At first he sees nothing. Blue sky, the flicker of a ship’s atmospheric thrusters. As the world of the vision comes into focus the sky settles over a featureless tan landscape and a harsh sun, and at the bottom of the image, a tiny hand.

The scene shifts toward red, like the sun’s gone nova, and the atmo thrusters sputter and spark wildly against the massive wind that sends the ship tumbling. Her parents’ ship. It’s a sandstorm. But, no, the sky is clear, just red. There’s nothing in the vision but that tiny hand.

In the waking world he grips the lightsaber so tightly the jagged edge cuts into his palm, because he knows what’s happening.

No. No, no, no. Not this girl. This will break her.

He remembers standing in his quarters looking out his viewport, falling to his knees when she ripped his power away from him. She stopped a ship.

And just hours ago, fighting for her life, she plucked a TIE-fighter out of the sky and hurled it down on her enemies like some avenging giant.

In the vision Plutt grunts in surprise as the red-tinted ship accelerates much faster than gravity should allow and explodes, and the girl screams, and the vision goes dark but the sound of a child screaming doesn’t stop.

She knew. She’s blocked it out now, but that little girl screaming in the vision knows exactly what she’s done. This will break her. The Force is showing him this so that he can break her.

A second vision. Rey, kneeling, calling him Master, looking at him in hatred over the bodies of the traitor and Dameron as he feeds her some empty cliché about killing with love in her heart and tells her this is her destiny.

It is her destiny. The Force called him to this lightsaber to show him that: he was born from the Light and fell to the Darkness, but she was born to the Darkness and she’s hiding in the Light.

A third vision, hazy. Rey in black, a black crown on her head, swinging a blue double-bladed lightsaber. She’s wearing a mask. She’s standing by his side. But he’s not fighting; he’s chained.

With a swipe of blue his skull detaches at the neck and goes flying across a smooth durasteel floor. Weak, her voice echoes through the vision. He was weak, sobbing, uncontrolled, unworthy. I don’t need him. I’m stronger without him. Hux kicks the head across the floor and the expression on his face is obedient, worshipful, but in the vision Ben knows she will kill him, too.

The scene changes again. And again. And again. It takes only a few seconds but he sees Rey in a hundred futures, wearing the clothes of a Light- or Dark-side-user, it doesn’t matter. She kills him. Sometimes quickly and efficiently, sometimes slowly and cruelly. Sometimes in public to the cheer of crowds, sometimes in the intimacy of a bedroom. Sometimes mocking, sometimes sobbing. Sometimes she watches while he kills himself. Sometimes, absurdly, he’s wearing the white robes of one of the old Jedi masters and calling on the Light.

In every single one, she pulses with the Dark side, no matter what she’s wearing, no matter what color her lightsaber is. In every single one, both of them are miserable and alone.

There's another vision. No--not a vision. Only a memory. Familiar.

A stone statue lolling on its side, rocking like it’s just been dropped. His father’s hair, the way it sticks to the blood. His mother’s white sleeve where it dragged through the wound. The tiny light-up shoes his father gave him for his forth birthday. The coolness of the keybed bench against his back where he crouched in the corner. Mouthing I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.

The Voice: yes, child, you meant to do it. You will always hurt people. But I can teach you to control it, dear child. They will fear you, but I will love you.

Early in his training his Master forced him to relive this memory a hundred times, a thousand, until Ben could watch it and feel nothing but shame at his weakness and pride at his power. His Master’s training serves Ben well. As he meets Rey’s curious gaze, there is no emotion in his eyes.

The fantasies, the hope, the giddiness drain away.

Ben knows what’s going to happen now. He’ll tell her the truth, just like in the throne room. Only this time, the truth will break her.

With tears streaming down her face she’ll shake her head, trying even now to deny it. Maybe she’ll say something like, I didn’t mean to.

And he’ll say, You did mean to, Rey. You reached out with the Force because you wanted to hurt them. You wanted them to suffer like they made you suffer.

And she’ll shake her head even more and eventually she’ll say something about her friends because she won’t shut up about her friends, and then he’ll say, You can’t possibly think you can go back to them. Even if they say they forgive you, you’ll always know that you might turn on them. And you know they won’t forgive you. They’ll look at you with fear in their eyes. You’ll always be alone with them. You’ll never be one of them.

And when he’s worn her down, when he’s scraped every trace of vain, delusional hope from her and replaced it with doubt and self-hatred, she will beg to stay with him. He will break her. He will turn her into the monster the Dark side wants her to become.

What did you see?  She asks. He doesn’t exactly hear it, but he knows she asked at some point.

He turns the lightsaber over carefully in his hand, examining the broken crystal with a clear mind. Both pieces of the crystal are cracked now. Any weapon that uses them will be unstable.

He opens his mouth to say what he has to say, because he gave everything to the Dark side, and the Dark side wants this girl.

What can he do, in the face of destiny?

“I saw what the Force needed me to see,” he says quietly. “To remind me.”

“Remind you of what?”

He swallows. It still tastes like vomit from when he threw up in the sink; he hasn’t eaten anything since.

“Never think you control the Force,” he says. “Never think you deserve it. Never think it cares for you.”

She has nothing to say to that. As Ben sits in silence, he notices a spot on the far wall. A ding, like the soldiers who moved the bunk-bed in here scraped it against the peeling paint. For a few breaths he stares at it.

Then he hurls the cracked pieces of his grandfather’s lightsaber at it as hard as he can.

It doesn’t shatter; it was well-made. Only a few flecks of metal and some bent screws ricochet across the floor. One bounces and skids toward Rey. It rocks back and forth for five, ten, fifteen silent seconds before finally finding its balance at her feet. She picks up the screw, considers it.

She is Vader’s heir. A desert rat, a slave, the chosen one of the Force. There can be no doubt now that the Dark side only sent Ben to prepare the way. That’s why it called him to these visions, to show him that. To remind him of his place.

And yes, he’s furious, he’s humiliated, he’s betrayed. But the real lesson he learned, the thing the Force shouldn’t have shown him, was that he cares less about his own destiny than hers. He is a monster, but he cannot do this. He will not do to Rey what Snoke did to him, and if the Force tries to make him, he’ll fight it every gods-damned step of the way.

The metal slats below the top bunk graze his hair as he sits on the mattress. “The lightsaber belongs to you,” he says.

She doesn’t make her bed, apparently. Luke and Snoke had both required him to fold up his pallet on the floor every morning for so long that even in his panic earlier he had to consciously remind himself to let his steward make his bed.

Rey tosses the tiny screw carelessly on the ground. “I don’t know how to fix it,” she says.

“Then throw it on a junk-heap. Burn the books. You’ll be better off.”

“Ben,” she says. She sits next to him on the bed, leaving a hand’s breadth of space between their shoulders. “I don’t care about the lightsaber. From what I’ve seen of the Jedi I don’t really want their—their legacy. All that’s just history to me.” She pauses, like she’s thinking too hard about what to say next. “I care about you.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“And you shouldn’t care about me, but you do. I feel it.”

He says nothing. They both watch the pieces of the lightsaber against the far wall like they’re staring into a fire. Ben feels her fear, and he knows she senses the shadow moving in the deep, something she won’t be able to keep down forever.

“Ben, I’m afraid. What you said—and what I did—it’s like there’s something inside me and I can’t control it.”

She looks down at her lap, like she’s ashamed to be afraid.

“I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“I know,” he says. “That’s the difference between us. I always wanted to hurt.”

For a moment he tenses, expecting an argument, but he’s grateful she doesn’t offer one. Yeah, maybe Snoke made him rotten, but it doesn’t matter. He’s made his choice, and now it’s too late.

The mattress shifts below them; she’s tucking her toes upward and holding them off the floor, stretching the sore muscle of her injured leg. The meager heating system in the barracks shuts off with a thud, leaving a suffocating silence.

“I don’t want this power,” she says, looking down at her black boots.

His voice comes out more softly than he means it to. “I didn’t either.”

Out of the corner of his eye he sees the loose strands of hair lift as she sighs.

“I’m sorry this happened to you, Ben.”

“Yeah. Yeah, me too.”

He wants to tell her he’s sorry this happened to her, too. Instead, he closes his eyes and begs to the Force, begs to the Dark side. I gave you everything. Don’t make me do this, not to her.

But Ben knows the Force doesn’t listen to prayers. It’s not even worth praying to his grandfather’s ghost; that was all Snoke, all lies.

The Force made him a monster for its own reasons, reasons he’ll never know. It will make him turn her into a monster a thousand times worse than he is. But it will make him love her first.

It’s not to punish him, it’s not even cruel, it’s just a machine grinding along, uncaring, useless, pointless, and unstoppable.

“I never thanked you,” Rey says slowly. “For healing Finn. For saving me.”

“You shouldn’t thank me. And you healed him, I was only following you.”

“Me? I don’t know how to—”

"You know how to listen. The Force showed you the way. I listened to my Master when I should’ve been listening to the Force.”

Her fingers curl on the edge of mattress. Neither she nor the medical staff had bothered to clean the blood from her fingernails.

“If I was listening to the Force,” she says, like she’s puzzling through some mechanical problem, “then the Force needed both of us, the Light and the Dark. Maybe—maybe Snoke didn’t make this bond. Maybe the Force brought us together.”

Suddenly he can’t stand looking at the half-melted casing of the lightsaber their power split in two. He cranes his neck up to study the slats of the top bunk. Some Republic soldier before her scratched an obscene limerick into the metal there, and it occurs to him Rey has no idea, since she can’t read it.

“No,” he says. “Snoke did this.”

She kicks her feet, scuffing them against the floor in a way that would be maddening if this were his own quarters. “Maybe. Or maybe a Jedi and a Sith never worked together, and the Force was trying to show us what can happen when they do.”

He shakes his head; he should’ve known. “You still think the Force wants you to save me. That almost got you killed once already.”

“You saw something, when you touched that.” Her fingers flex outward toward the lightsaber on the floor. “I think you saw yourself turning, but you’re afraid to admit it. You’ve already turned. You came to me here, you heald Finn—”

“This isn’t what you think it is.”

“You can’t hurt me. You keep saving me.”

“And you can’t trust me. You need to stay away from me. As far away as you can get, Rey.”

“Hard to do, since I’m your prisoner.”

He sighs. “You’re not.”

She twists her body on the mattress to face him. “You’re letting me go?”

He nods.

“And Finn? The prisoners?”

“I’m putting Juno Ren in command of interrogating the Resistance.”

His eyes fall again to the scattered components on the floor, but he feels the weight of her stare. Her side of the bond is a tumble of emotions, all of them strong.

He doesn’t notice until it’s too late that her hand has come up to rest on his shoulder. He stiffens, and he freezes completely when she leans over and rests her head on the folds of fabric there, close enough to his face that the curtains of his hair tickle her cheeks.

This is a trap.

This bond is a trap his Master made to break him. This girl is a spy his mother sent to break him. This moment is a move Rey’s only making to break him. And he was so, so close to breaking even before he set foot on this planet.

But. Is there any harm in taking this comfort, as long as he knows it’s a lie?

His hands are still bare. They move slow, halting, until his palm rests against her back. She sucsk in air, then blows it out and brings her arms up to circle his shoulders.

Her ear is warm against his Adam’s apple as he swallows. He’s never been this close to another person outside of combat. Even as a child he only remembers shoulder-squeezes, maybe a half-hearted there you go, kiddo, don’t cry.

This a lie. No one could want this, not from him. Knowing it’s a lie doesn’t stop him from needing this, but it allows him to master the pressure in his face, the heat at the corner of his eyelids. Tears are a humiliation he won’t endure again, not for a lie.

Instead, he allows himself to do something he’s wanted to do since they stood together in the turbolift. He tugs a few strands of hair loose from her lower bun, the style she still wears so that when her parents come home, they’ll recognize their daughter. The strands are still damp with sweat and snow as he threads them between his fingers.

When he tucks his chin, the flyaway strands at the top of her head tickle his eyelashes, they brush against his nostrils as he breathes in. It doesn’t smell like ocean anymore. It smells like sweat and salt and snow and some cheap regulation shampoo, and her.

Of course she feels what he’s doing, and if she objects, she says nothing. Why would she? She’s only trying to manipulate him. It’s in her interest to force him to show his weakness.

Besides, she’s doing the same thing, flattening her palm against the rough fabric on his chest almost surreptitiouslyt. For both of them it’s only a moment, and then her arms are around him again, and he rests his cheek on the top of her head.

This is not real.

All of this, it’s not for him. It’s for Leia’s lost son, the scared, abused little boy Rey thinks he is. She doesn’t even see him, not really. She doesn’t see the monster. Soon, he’ll drag her down to the Darkness no matter how much he wants to protect her from the thing the Force made him become.

“It’s not fair,” she says against his neck. Her cheek scrapes against the new growth there. “What this power does to us.”

His eyelids squeeze shut, but he controls himself like he always does. Even though it’s too much of a luxury and he’ll pay for it later when the emptiness overtakes him, he allows himself the softest possible brush of his lips against the invisible fuzz on her forehead. No, no, it’s not fair.

“Ben,” Rey says with her nose against his throat. She’s still holding him tight, rubbing little circles against his back now, almost like she enjoys his touch. But this is a lie. “Come with us. You don’t have to be alone.”

He only buries his nose against her hair, because he knew this was coming. This was the whole point of all of this, to bring him to the Resistance.

At least that had been the plan, his mother’s plan, Rey’s plan. In the thick of it Rey knows this is something he can’t give her, and despite herself she forgives him. He knows she does; she runs her fingers over his hair in long, comforting strokes, and he sinks into her exhaustion and he wishes he could fall asleep here. He’d like that, to sleep with her head on his chest, his cheek in her hair.

It’s a lie, all of this, a lie meant to break him.

“Ben,” she whispers again. “Come with me.”

He closes his eyes and breathes her in. 

When a murmur escapes his lips to ghost across her hair, it’s defeated, hopeless. After so long trying to fight it, Ben, exhausted, sighs a single word, and allows himself to break.

“Alright.”

Chapter Text

Rey’s first reaction—a dumbfounded certainty that of course she misheard, of course the word Ben wrapped up in that defeated breath wasn’t alright—gives way to her second: to grab Ben by his obscenely wide and warm and comfortable shoulders and tell him how proud she is and how wonderful his new life will be. But as soon as she pulls back to see his face, her joy sputters and goes out.

He always struck her as pale, but this close, Ben’s face is a muddle of color. Purple-blue under bloodshot eyes, lips swollen to a sickly red-purple, a faded yellow bruise congealing on his temple like he got into a fistfight. Eyes down, he contemplates a wet bootprint on the floor, probably his own. His moles stand out like boulders in sand, and when she reaches out to stroke one with her thumb, he jerks away.

“Ben?”

With a rustle of cloth he frees himself from her and stands.

There hadn’t been anything electric in their touch, not like over the fire, but Rey misses his arms around her. She’s tired. It would be good to sleep in those strong arms, or just sit there with him and feel right for a little longer. And sure, it would take a stronger woman than Rey not to think about what’s under that tunic. But that’s not something either of them needs to think about now.

He regrets standing, the air feels too cold when his nose isn’t buried in her hair.

He keeps his back to her, taking in the sparse room, the open foot-locker, the standard-issue blue-gray sheet spilling onto the dusty floor.

“What now,” he says. It takes her a moment to hear it’s a question.

The heating kicks back on as she pushes herself to her feet, still unsteady on her healing leg. Resting there for as long as they did—two minutes? ten?—she’d come too close to allowing herself to realize how exhausted she is. There’s too much to do now. With one word, Ben has changed everything.

Her brain stutters and struggles to accommodate the new reality: Ben Solo will join the Resistance. Supreme Leader Kylo Ren with betray the First Order.

And he saw something. He saw a vision that made him look at her with eyes full of pity, resignation, fear.

She considers reaching out to him, but settles for standing close behind, watching the crest of his shoulders rise and fall. He breathes so deeply, like he’s always meditating. It obviously doesn’t calm him.

Still, he’s calm now, like an open airlock.

 “Ben, it’s going to be alright.”

“I said what now.”

Rey imitates one of his deep breaths and starts to tell him exactly what now, but a buzz of his comm interrupts her.

As she steps around him Rey sees his eyes fixed unseeing on the pieces of the lightsaber he claims is hers, heedless of the comm. Rey bends to pick the pieces up, teetering a little, furious with her aching muscles and raw bones for failing to obey, but certain she’s too exhausted to use the Force.

The line of his shoulders softens as he glances at her. “You need to rest,” he says, more softly than he probably intends.

“You need to answer your comm.”

After a second’s hesitation, like he’s considering ignoring it just to spite her, he fishes in his pocket and pulls out the small device. Rey picks through the open foot-locker and pockets a small holo of a woman she’s almost certain is Rose’s sister.

“What.”

The voice patched through is a droid’s. “Supreme Leader, you requested updates on the patient.”

Finn.

“Get to it,” Ben orders. 

“Frankly, sir, the damage to his liver, kidneys, heart, and lungs is so extensive I’m shocked he’s alive. I have no medical explanation for what’s holding him together.”

It takes all of Rey’s self-control not to yank the comm out of Ben’s hand and tell the meddroid to spit it the kriff out.

“Prognosis.”

“He’ll survive. He’s healing uncommonly quickly, as a matter of fact. But since we put him directly into the chamber we weren’t able to run initial scans—or least that’s what I’m told, sir, you see, I can’t quite remember—” Ben grits his teeth and Rey stops herself from grabbing his black sleeve. “The initial estimate of three hours needs to be revised. I conservatively recommend seven hours in the chamber under intensive monitoring.”

His annoyance scrapes at her through the bond, and for once she agrees. That’s seven hours at least to sit on this suddenly alien base, talking awkwardly to Ben and pretending to be a Knight of Ren, whatever the hell that is, and dodging Hux. 

“Sir, he needs a proper medical facility—"

“Have it transferred to the Voratrix. Under your personal and confidential supervision, no exceptions, SL-DC protocol. I’ll have my steward contact you with further orders.”

“Sir, I am not a cargo droid—”

“Your programming can be altered. Dismissed.”

His finger’s off the transmit button before Rey can pluck it out of his hand. “What are you doing? I’m not letting Finn go to some ship—”

“The less attention you draw to that bacta chamber, the safer it is.”

Pick your battles, Plutt once said to her. Calling Finn an “it” can be a fight for another time. “The prisoners—”

“Are already on my Dreadnaught, locked securely in my brig,” he says, holding up the comm as he scrolls through the notifications. There seem to be hundreds of them. “You can’t possibly think I left them here under the care of a few stormtroopers with a Wookiee unaccounted for.”

“Chewie wasn’t captured?”

“What did I just say?”

“And the Falcon? Where is it?”

“I couldn’t imagine caring.”

Without another word, Ben scoops up the Jedi texts, looking suddenly ridiculous, like some ancient scholar so focused on his studies he’s forgotten to sleep.

When he reaches out for the door, a sudden dread clutches at Rey, like he’s about to break the seal on something fragile, something fluttering and weak that the world outside will only suffocate. He hesitates; he feels it too.

Outside this door the Resistance waits for her to rescue them. Outside this door are friends, flirting, endless things to fix. Just more wheels for her to her spin without going anywhere, more pointless missions, more days held together by nothing much more than Leia’s fragile hope and Rey’s own belief that she’s happy, because what else should she want?

“Ben.”

The tips of her fingers don’t quite manage to brush the dark hairs on the back of his hand before he grinds his teeth and pushes the door open. The draft from the hallway is cold and clean.

“Let’s get this over with,” he says, and leads the way.

***

Rey tries to start several conversations on the shuttle ride to the Voratrix:

“You’re going to be so happy in the Resistance.”

“This is the bravest thing you’ve ever done. I’m really proud of you, Ben.”

“Is there anything you need? Anything that would make you more comfortable when you leave?”

All that earns her is the same dull expression of hopeless emptiness. Rey changes tack:

“I know you’re worried, Ben, but everyone is going to forgive you.”

“I just want to talk to you. I feel like I know you, but we’ve hardly said a word to each other. Can we just have a normal conversation?”

Nothing. The situation deteriorates as Rey gets more and more tired in general and tired of Ben:

 “You know, Luke liked to ignore me, too. You have a lot in common.”

“When was the last time you washed your hair?”

“Fine, stay with kriffing Hux and die miserable.”

The last one gets a half-amused eye-twitch that Rey takes with a thrill of victory, then he lapses again into sullen silence.

After ten minutes of this Rey kicks back in the co-pilot’s seat, unable to keep from fidgeting and staring at the nav console that shows her little planet retreating behind them. How are the prisoners doing, are they afraid? Is Finn safe?

The clack of a datapad draws her attention to Ben, who wears the expression of someone fiddling unsuccessfully with a machine. It’s a look that brings out an almost unbearable resemblance to Han. After a minute and a half he shoves the flat display into her fingers, tapping a button so that a holographic display jumps to life above it. At first she can’t make any sense of the pictures, but finally she spots a familiar shape at the top left of the display.

“Is that—”

“Live feed from the meddroid’s visual processors,” Ben confirms. 

The video of Finn’s face blurs, and Rey blinks quickly to avoid embarrassing herself.

“Thank you.”

He nods. She expects him to sink back into his depression, but instead he jerks his chin toward the aft passenger compartments.

“ ‘Fresher’s there,” he says.

Rey frowns. “I know where to find the ‘fresher on a Lambda-class command shuttle.”

“It’s Upsilon now, and if you can find it, use it. It’s distracting.”

Rey’s been ignoring the increasingly urgent demands of her bladder. She wants to argue, but arguing won’t break the bond, so she gets up and takes care of it as spitefully as possible. When she returns, she sinks again into the co-pilot’s chair and stares stiffly ahead.

“This is extremely uncomfortable,” she announces to the blackness of space and the TIE-fighter escorts circling the shuttle.

“Yeah,” Ben says.

Rey places her palms on the cool, smooth console to keep from crossing her arms protectively over herself. “I suppose you’re enjoying this,” she says.

“Right, because intimate first-person experience of getting choked by FN-2187 is something I needed.”

"Nobody was choking anyone. I hugged him--"

"Very tightly. With no warning."

"That's not the same."

She’s arrested by the sensation of his long, rough fingers on her lips. But he’s not anywhere near her. He’s leaning back, palm over his own lips, just gently, like he’s about to blow her the galaxy’s angriest kiss. He exhales all his breath and doesn't breathe again, and she feels herself struggling for air, though she has plenty.

 Air rushes into her mouth when she understands, and he looks away.

“Oh,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t mean. I mean. I didn’t know.”

“I’m sure you didn’t."

She feels too guilty to argue with his tone. “Sure. Right.” She bites her lip, trying not to think about the fact that he can feel that, too, or how her teeth press into the exact spot where the phantom warmth of his fingers had just been. “Is that why you were so upset last night?”

He frowns, like the thought of Kylo Ren reduced to tears by an unwanted hug disgusts him. “I’m not that fragile. I was angry, the rest had nothing to do with you.”

This, at least, she believes. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Have I given any indication that I do?”

“If we’re going to be on the same side now, you can’t keep being a complete arse to me.”

“I’m sorry that admitting my entire life was a failure and sailing off to my own execution doesn’t make me squeal with joy.”

It’s a response, at least. “No one’s going to execute you, I won’t let them. And your life hasn’t been a failure.”

The dim red lights of the console reflect off his eyebrow as it rises.

“I mean, it hasn’t been really successful,” Rey admits quickly, “but you rule the galaxy, for kriff’s sake.”

“Ostensibly.”

“I don’t know what that means. Look, Ben—”

“If you tell me it’s going to be alright one more time, I will shoot a hole in the viewport and vent us both into space.”

“Fine. It’s going to be horrible and you’ll somehow manage to be as miserable as you always are, because you’re a stubborn idiot.”

Does she imagine the quirk of his lip? He inclines his head like he’s accepting her salute. 

She senses that he wants her to keep talking, so she doesn’t. A minute later, she tries to hide the sweet taste of victory when he finally breaks the silence.

“Why?”

Has he ever asked her a question before? Not just something arrogant and dismissive, but a real question about her thoughts and feelings?

“Why what?”

“Why are you—doing—this? Why did you?” Whatever he means seems to be too slippery to hold in words, but Rey understands. Why is she being kind? Why did she reach out to him?

She shrugs, like the same question hasn’t eaten away at the edges of her mind since she spared his life in that throne room. “I meant it when I said I feel like I know you. It’s this connection.”

“It’s not. The connection is artificial.”

Rey shakes her head. “I don’t think that, and I don’t think you do either, not really. The Force connected us for a reason, because there’s still good in you.”

“My Master connected us to torture me. That’s the only reason he did anything.”

It’s the first time he’s brought up his relationship with Snoke.

“What do you mean, he tortured you?”

Ben glowers at instrument panel as he starts running entirely unnecessary checks for the third time. How did Snoke put it? He ‘stoked Ren’s conflicted soul’? 

“Ben?”

“Stop.”

There’s something the command, a line Rey’s not sure if she wants to cross.

“Stop what?”

When he speaks, his voice is slow and measured. Tranquil. “You can’t see me. You’re talking to someone who never existed. I torture, Rey. I murder. I ordered villages to be shot. I beheaded children. I killed my only friends in cold blood with my bare hands. Four, five cycles ago, I don’t even remember, I suffocated thirty officers for being inconvenient. In the last cycle I’ve signed off on attacks that probably killed forty, fifty thousand people, and I didn’t even read the reason, I just gave the go-ahead. I stood by and let Hux destroy planets, because I don’t care. I’m not sorry about it. Any of it.”

Despite his calm tone, he grips the controls so tightly Rey’s afraid he might break the throttle. Gradually, the color seeps back into his knuckles. Tucked into her robe for warmth, Rey’s own knuckles are white. Who are these friends he killed? More importantly, why can she listen to this so calmly?

Is he right, about her and the Dark side? That she’s already given in?

No. No. Poe knows what Ben did, too, and Poe thinks he’s worth saving.

“If you’re not sorry,” she says, watching the crenellated hull of the Dreadnought resolving into view, “why are you confessing all that to me?”

“Confessing.” 

“You’re wrong,” she says. “I do see what you were. I called you a monster and I meant it. But I see what you could be, too.”

 “No. You think I’m going to put on a white robe and preach about the Light and fight heroically for the Resistance. You think one word I said in a moment of weakness changes what I was, what I’ve been. You think a kriffing hug changes everything.”

Contempt rings through every word, and Rey hates that he’s managed to make her feel ashamed for comforting him.

"You spoke to my mother," he says. "You told her everything. About the visions, us."

Us. Rey doesn't like the implication of that. "Not everything. Some things aren't her business."

"Everything is her business."

The bitterness there shouldn't surprise her, but it does. Rey remembers her horror when Leia said that her son deserves to die. That's not something Ben needs to know about. For the first time since he whispered alright, her faith falters. A moment of weakness, he called it. One he’s already regretting.

He can’t change his mind. He can’t.

“It wasn't a moment of weakness, Ben, it’s strength, the strength to do the right thing.”

“The right thing. You can’t seriously think I agreed to this because I came around to the Resistance’s politics.”

“Then why? Why come with me?”

“Because I don’t care and it doesn’t matter.”

“What doesn’t matter?”

“Anything,” he says. “Everything. When I go, the Order will rip itself apart. The Resistance is twenty people, no ships. You won’t last a month, and if you do it’ll be chaos. All you’ll have left to fight will be the little warlords and thugs on every planet battling it out for generations for some useless scrap of power.”

It’s not that Ben’s scaring her—they’re beyond that. It’s that he’s not trying to. This isn’t a taunt anymore, this is the naked truth.

She stands. It’s too quick—her wounded leg protests—but she’s not going to let him sit there like he’s on his godsdamned throne and pretend to know everything.

 “No,” Rey says. “That’s not going to happen. We’re going to start a Rebellion. And you’re going to teach me the Force, and we’ll be out there, together, on the front lines. We’re going to burn the First Order down.”

“Good,” he says. “Let it all burn.”

“You can’t mean that. Some things are worth fighting for. Some things are worth dying for.”

“Yeah? How did you do convincing the scrappers on that planet back there that the Resistance is worth dying for?”

Unconsciously she lets her attention flicker to the nav screen and the pixelated image of the planet with the holiday market and the children singing and the mulled wine and the villagers who didn’t want to give up their ships to the Resistance.

She’d been angry, then. It’s one reason she doesn’t feel bad about what happened—they were too apathetic to fight, and then they turned on Finn. She would’ve died to defend them from the First Order, Finn would’ve died to defend them. But they would’ve been happy to serve up the galaxy to the powers of evil because it was convenient.

“Tell me all about your vision for the glorious future of the galaxy. Tell me about your thoughts on representative government. Tell me why the Republic’s worth dying for, Rey. Even my mother thought the Senators were a waste of breath.”

Rey hates how much that stings, how much the arrogance in his voice makes her feel like exactly what he says she is: naïve, ignorant, scavenger, nothing.

He leans back even further, and actually has the audacity to cross his oversized legs like he’s relaxing with a drink and talking about the races. They’re on the same side now. It wouldn’t be right to launch a fist at his repulsive, swollen, fascinating mouth and add another break to that misfire of a nose.

“Give me one reason why it was the right thing to do. Why do you hate the First Order so much?”

“Because there are people like you running it!”

At that he stands and puts a sobering end to her pretensions of looming over him. He’s never stood this close to her, so that she either has to stare meekly at his chest or crane her neck almost vertical to look into his arrogant face.

“You fight for the Resistance because as a scrawny, starving little scavenger you once found a Rebellion helmet in the desert, and you made a pathetic little doll to keep you company while you waited for your drunk parents to come spirit you off to your pathetic little destiny.”

He recoils. Not because he’s suddenly overwhelmed with shame at the horrible things he’s saying, but because she punched him in the jaw. Or tried to.

He’s caught her fist in his palm and he’s holding it back almost effortlessly, like he’s trying to remind her just how weak and injured he’d been the last time they fought, and how she shouldn’t start to think they’re equals.

She kicks him, but he’s been training in hand-to-hand combat for years. He blocks it easily and she finds herself immobilized, not by the Force, but by some unbelievably fast movements that end up with her sprawled on her back on the floor of the transport with his boot on her chest. A puff of air ghosts along the back of her neck at the same time she feels a spike of anxiety; he pillowed her fall with the Force.

“You already had me beat,” she says gruufly. “That was overkill.”

“You punched me first. Then you kicked me.”

Where Rey comes from, that’s an unbeatable defense. She nods, giving him the right of it.

He peers down at her, his face almost comical at this extreme angle, all stubble-studded double chin and huge nostrils.

“Yeah, well. You deserved it,” she says.

He considers her, then reaches down. “Yeah. Yeah, I did.”

She wraps the fingers of her good arm around his massive wrist and lets him pull her to her feet, gently pressing his palm into her back to steady her. He doesn’t ask if she’s okay. Neither of them ever has to ask that.

“Besides, I didn’t defeat you,” he says as he helps her back into the co-pilot’s chair. “You forgot about the Force. You could’ve overpowered me easily, or summoned a weapon.”

Damn. He’s right.

She runs a hand over her hair, feeling patches of dried blood still stuck to the strands. He pretends not to watch, and she remembers the way he tried to hide his not-quite-kiss on the top of her head. “Are you going to tell me I need a teacher again?”

He glances at her quickly before returning his attention to the approach controls. “Consider that your first lesson.”

He bends over the console for a few minutes, fingers a blur of sentences, probably typing out commands related to their arrival. In the middle of one he crooks his long finger and an object comes sailing across the cockpit straight into Rey’s unsuspecting face.

Finn’s jacket, bloodstained and ripped in a brand new place, dropped where Ben had pulled it off his unconscious body to stuff him into the bacta suit. She runs her thumb over the artless stiches Poe made to cover the gash that the man in front of her made. He’d tried to tear Finn apart. It’s good for her to remember that, whatever else is happening. As much as she tells herself Finn will welcome Ben with open arms, she knows as well as Ben does it’s not going to be that easy.

Finally, Ben looks at her. The searching in his tired eyes reminds her of Luke, and under that stare she feels the monster raise its head deep in the Ocean, uncurling like she’s called it to life. The broken lightsaber in her pocket suddenly feels heavy.

He’ll help her make a new one. He’ll sit with her and show her everything she needs to know.

“You never told me why the lightsaber is mine,” she says, folding the jacket into a slightly more compact pile on her lap. The old hope, the one that drove her to scrape a line in the wall of her AT-AT every night, blossoms under the light of the approaching ship.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does, Ben. You told me I was nothing. You told me I didn’t have a place in all this. Is that wrong?”

“The Force can’t tell you your place. You choose.”

“You didn’t choose.”

Ben shakes his head as he reaches up to toggle the approach event timers. He gestures at her to take care of the co-pilot’s checklist, and after hesitating a second, her fingers begin to move over the controls and they fall into the practiced rhythm of all competent pilots on approach. “I did choose. I chose a thousand times,” Ben says after a moment.

“Snoke was in your head—”

“So what? You think falling to the Dark is like falling off a cliff, one shot? It’s not. Every choice is a choice between the Light and the Dark. The clothes you wear, the lightsaber you use, whether you call yourself Jedi or Sith, those are all just names. The Force is one.”

Rey she sighs and lets her head rest against the soft leather of the seat, eyes closed. There’s meaning there. Deep meaning. But she’s been through hell today, and her body is protesting the energy it’s being forced to expend keeping her brain focused.

“Is that that the second lesson?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll have to go over that one later,” she says. But he did see her in the Force. She's not nothing. She's not. 

He turns toward her. “You need to rest,” he says again.

“I’m not taking a nap in the middle of all this.”

“We have to plan and execute a mass prison break,” he says simply. “You’ve been shot, impaled, crushed, half-frozen, death-marched through a blizzard, and operated on. If you don’t rest you’re going to be useless. The Force requires balance.”

“I can’t just let Poe and Rose and everyone else sit in a cell and worry.”

“I assume Dameron would rather sit and worry than endure a visit from me.”

She glares at him. If Poe himself hadn’t joked about it—torture buddies! he’d exclaimed too-loudly in the Falcon one night—it would’ve been harder to let that go. Poe will bear the scars of that experience forever, but like her, he’s not going to spend the rest of his life crying about it.

Ben seems to know he’s crossed a boundary, and lets his voice soften. “It’s too much of a risk to let them know what’s coming. I’m already under suspicion—don’t ask, I’ll explain later. Frankly, I have more important things to do that babysit you for the next seven hours, so you might as well sleep.”

As the shuttle slips into the airlock, Rey glances at Finn’s feed—he’s still there, somewhere in the kilometers of corridors on that ship, his face peaceful in the chamber. She fights down another stab of guilt for forgetting about him. The flicker of Finn’s display softens her annoyance at Ben, since she has Ben to thank for that small comfort. 

“I’ll take care of the tra—I’ll take care of Finn.”

That one syllable, she feels, is causing him almost unspeakable humiliation. But he said it. For her. “You think it's safe?”

“You’re Resistance fighters. You’ll be on my ship under the Supreme Leader's personal protection. You've never been anywhere safer in your entire life, and neither has he,” he says flatly.

Ben’s scrolls through his notifications, and Rey feels that he's just as tired as she is but it’s a soul-weariness, not the physical exhaustion that’s making it hard for her to concentrate. She can’t help but feel like they’ve reached a ceasefire, like they’ve been able to actually talk to each other for the first time instead of yelling past one another. He's still awful, but he's Ben. She's starting to figure out what that means. She's starting to see him. And he's starting to see her, too.

“I won’t call you master,” she says, half-asleep when the shuttle ghosts down onto the hangar floor.

“No,” he replies quietly. “No, you won’t.”

Chapter Text

“General,” Organa says. Desso remains silent.

“General,” Hux responds.

Carefully, Hux sets the whiskey bottle and three glasses onto the black surface of the table. Organa leans back, affecting disinterest, resting her bound hands in her lap with courtesy befitting a royal. The cuffs are his nod to protocol; he’s not crass enough to bolt a tiny, sickly woman in her mid-fifties to her chair.

“Kylo Ren is listening,” she says. Hux observes Desso's response: nothing. She keeps her secrets close, Leia Organa. A pity her son didn’t inherit the talent. Kylo Ren would be a mighty emperor, then.

Does she know about their strange communication in the Force, or does she assume there’s a microphone in this room? On both counts, she’s wrong.

“For the time being, the Supreme Leader is indisposed.”

“He’s been injured?”

Her voice is admirably cold. Desso continues to frown at Hux, controlling his own rage—he’s probably entertaining himself with fantasies of a heroic martyrdom for the Republic.

“Perhaps you’ll be relieved to hear the Supreme Leader is quite well.” Hux shrugs. “Perhaps you won’t.”

She tilts her head, listening to something Hux can’t hear. The Force, no doubt; Hux’s own sensitivity is almost gone. “He’s not aboard.”

Hux can’t resist smirking.

“I’m afraid he’s enjoying a winter holiday. In the arms of his new apprentice.”

The color drains from Organa’s face, and Desso’s mouth sets itself in a hard line. Hux expects some argument—you’re lying, how dare you—but the only response Organa gives is a barely-perceptible tightening of her lower lip, a flare of her eyelids. Hux, it seems, isn’t telling her anything she didn’t expect to hear. Desso’s visibly struggling to hold in an I told you so.

No matter. Deprived of his victory, Hux decides to draw out the details.

“He dressed her in black and gave her a red blade. When I left they were huddled in her bunk—” He coughs and fondles the neck of the whiskey bottle suggestively. “Something about lightsabers.”

Hux doesn’t smoke, but he wishes he could light a cigarette to savor along with the disgust on her face. Instead, he contents himself with slowly pouring a glass of whiskey. Hosnian. Organa will know that.

“You can hardly blame her,” he says over the liquid whispering into the glass. “I spent some time on Jakku as a lad, during the war. It’s a desperate life, Generals, and that was before the Republic left the place to the slavers. The scavenger girls practically begged my father for his attentions in exchange for a little stale bread, a clean blanket, a sip of liquor that won’t make you go blind. The poor girl never had a chance, really, especially after he ran across the galaxy to save her in the middle of a blizzard. Quite the romantic, your s—our Supreme Leader.”

It’s a calculated slip. Organa knows he’s offering mercy, a secret shared. Her eyes harden.

“You know,” Hux continues, “he was tracking you the whole time? I don’t think either of us need to wonder who was passing him information. He bided his time, waited until the Senate returned to their nest.” He leans forward, spreading his hands on the table. “And now it’s over, Generals. The Resistance is dead. The Republic is dead.”

Hux raises his glass. The vapors waft across the table and he watches the Resistance leader inhale the bouquet of the planet that she made her home, the planet that he, Hux, alone, destroyed. With a mocking toast, he moves to sip.

Organa raises her cuffed hands and crooks one finger. The glass sails into her palm, and she returns his toast before taking a sip.

Impressive. Utterly useless. Desso seems to agree; Organa’s casual disregard for physics unnerves him, as though her fellow rebel didn’t know she had the ability.

She swirls the whiskey and sips, tasting Hux’s victory.

She’s too much; Hux doesn’t want to put this off any longer. He waves the guards in and points at Desso. “Take him back to his cell while General Organa and I discuss business.”

Two stormtroopers manhandle the soldier from his chair. “Like hell you’re taking me out of here—I told you the Jedi couldn’t be trusted. What are you doing now, negotiating with him? Don’t give him anything, Leia, not one damn—"

When the doors hiss shut behind the guards, Organa regards Hux over the rim of her glass. The harsh light winks prettily off the whiskey’s amber surface, like a topaz ring, complimenting the reinforced durasteel cuffs around her wrists.

“I think, Hux, this is the part where you temple your fingers and laugh maniacally. The lightsaber joke was a nice touch, though. Original.”

Hux snorts and pours his own glass. “I see where your son gets it.”

“My son and I are more alike than either of us cares to admit.”

At that, he salutes his captive with his glass. “Shall we drink to the Supreme Leader’s success?”

Her expression turns thoughtful, then grave. “To his happiness."

Hux inclines his head and clinks his glass against her own. Her restraints catch the light as they both take a long, contemplative sip.

“You’re not surprised,” he says. “About the girl.”

She exhales through her nose, something between an amused snort and an expression of bitter resignation. “You don’t know the half of it.”

This, he didn’t expect. It worries him, and he chastises himself for letting the façade drop for a moment. She notices, and continues.

“What do you want, Hux? I assume it’s something other than the pleasure of my company.”

“It’s not, actually. I don’t have his clearance to be down here.”

That, finally, gets some interest.

“You’ve always been something of a hero of mine,” Hux says, knowing she can sense the truth of it.

“I’m sorry to hear it. Looking for an autograph?”

He tilts his cup back and forth. “Advice.”

She snorts. “I’ve got plenty of advice for you, but it all involves large objects up your ass.”

Hux weighs a number of witty and flirtatious comebacks, but finally leans forward and slides the datapad wordlessly across the table.

Her jaw works for a moment while she looks at Hux and wonders where the trick is. But this has always been Hux’s trump card, honed by a life spent under commanders with access to his every thought, desire, and memory: in politics, absolute honesty can be the best deception.

Finally, she takes the datapad and frowns down at the holofiles.

“The galaxy’s coming apart.”

“Yes.”

“And you want me to help the First Order keep it.”

He dips his chin. “Precisely.”

“You’ve got a pair, Hux, I’ll give you that.” She sets the datapad down with a clack. “Go to hell.”

Hux says one word. More aren’t necessary to convey his meaning.

“Amnesty.”

“I’d tell you where to put your amnesty, but we’ve been over that.”

“Imagine. You, with the Supreme Leader’s ear. The reins of the galaxy right where you want them, in your hands, along with your son’s. A dynasty.”

He’s disarmed her, that’s for certain. The gentle, barely-perceptible ghost of his Force-perception hums with her unease. “I’m not interested in dynasties. And my advice isn’t worth that much to you.”

Hux watches her reason through it. It doesn’t take her long. She taps the datapad.

“Ah, I see. You’re not going to blow up Coruscant or Kuat. This is a civilian problem, a diplomatic problem, PR. It’s my name you want. You want to tell the galaxy I’m a collaborator.”

“Collaborator? No. Peacemaker. After all, what mother could possibly spend her life fighting her own son?”

The crepe skin on Leia’s hands goes taut as she grips the table. Now she understands. Now she glimpses the totality of Hux’s victory. “If you think he’ll let you do that, you’re in for a rough surprise.”

“The Supreme Leader has nothing to lose by telling the galaxy who he is. The First Order doesn’t care who his relatives are, not when he’s proved himself so loyal. You, on the other hand—not only Vader’s daughter, but the mother of the Supreme Leader himself? Half the galaxy would hate you for not killing him in his cradle, and the other half would hate you for refusing to wrap him in your weepy, forgiving embrace.”

She hides her fury in her drink. The surface of the whiskey vibrates. “If I say no?”

“Amnesty or exile.”

Organa’s jaw clenches.

“Exile? Not death?”

“We’re not animals, General Organa. Everyone who fights for the First Order believes in its mission.”

“After you brainwash them.”

“We educate them. If you refuse, you’ll leave on a ship to Wild Space, or the Deep Core. You might be alone, but you’ll be unharmed.” Hux shrugs. “As far as the galaxy knows.”

“You’ll kill me and say I went quietly into exile.”

“Not quietly. We’ve already sliced the footage of you rejecting your son, spitting and screaming.”

He’s bluffing now, but of course it’s not a difficult slicing job. It could be ready in a day, as soon as Organa’s been tossed out an airlock—for good this time. “Truly devastating, to see a woman say those things to her own son. The son who defied an entire army to bravely offer peace to his own dear, perhaps senile, troubled mother across enemy lines.” Hux looks across the room, mocking horror. “Our merciful Supreme Leader will live with that sorrow forever. What son should have to exile his own mother?”

Finally, he’s struck a nerve.

“You bastard. You absolute bastard. You can’t possibly think I’d help you.”

“I am a bastard, and I do think you’ll help me.”

“Not for my son.”

“Yes, for your son. Snoke is dead. I’m offering you the chance to hold Ben Solo again, if you can repair the damage you’ve already caused. I’m offering you the chance to see, gods forbid, your disgustingly attractive Jedi grandchildren. But even if you really are a monster who can’t forgive her own child, I’m offering you the chance to bring this galaxy back from a civil war that we both know will kill trillions. The details on that datapad should tell you how close we are to disaster, thanks to your son's complete irresponsibility.”

Organa’s rage is a beautiful cacophony in the Force.

“I’ll never work with you.”

“You expect a rescue. It won’t be coming.”

Hux’s chair squeals against the smooth floor, and as he stands he reaches into his pocket and flicks his wrist. The clatter produces the desired effect: Organa’s lips part in shock, covered a moment later by grim resolve. Hux sneers down at the golden dice.

When he dreamed of this encounter he thought of the perfect line, something for the history books. But Organa’s right—subtlety has its place. He leaves with no further words.

Still, he can’t help but think it as the door shuts behind him, locking her in: the die is cast, General. I await your decision.

***

“I’m not dead,” Hux croaks, struggling to hold himself up against the closed door of Ben’s quarters. The mound of the general’s Adam’s apple presses into Ben’s fingers. “I assume that’s a tacit endorsement of the status quo.”

The smug defiance in Hux’s eyes is almost enough to make Ben crush his throat.

Rey looks from one man to the other, pupils dilated with vicarious fury. “What’s going on?”

Ben motions her back and stares into Hux’s pale eyes for a long second, replaying the memory. The violence has knocked a lock of ginger hair loose and Hux’s cap rocks back and forth on his sitting room floor like a turtle on its back. Organa’s presence in the Force pulses all around them, cutting off Ben’s breath.

Hux, for once, isn’t the object of his rage.

Organa didn’t even try to defend Rey. His mother is so ready to see nothing but the Darkness in her, in him, that she didn’t even try.

“He knows,” he says to Rey as he loosens his grip on Hux’s neck. The general smooths back the stray lock of hair and straightens his coat.

“He knows what?”

Hux smooths his hands over the lapels of his greatcoat. “The difference between a Knight of Ren and a scavenger.”

In an instant Rey’s lightsaber’s at the general’s throat, vermillion and beautiful. It’s an image Ben suspects will torment him late at night, when his control falters.

“Oh, calm yourself, girl,” Hux says, standing tall and rigid. “I’ll tolerate the Supreme Leader’s dalliances as I tolerated his predecessor’s. If parading a scavenger around as a Knight of Ren is the price I pay for the galaxy, so be it.”

The implication that his Master had dalliances Ben didn’t know about threatens to send him into a blind rage, but he controls himself.

“She’s not ‘girl’ or ‘scavenger,’” Ben says as calmly as he can. “She’s my apprentice and my guest.” At the word  apprentice, he feels Rey’s side of the bond bloom with understanding and fury.

“She will be treated with the full respect of a Knight of Ren. I’ll reveal her identity when she’s made enough progress in her training. Until then, she takes orders only from me, as Juno Ren. Is that clear?”

Rey glances at him, something like respect in her eyes.

“Crystal. Sir. Shall I have the diplomatic suite prepared?”

“I’ve already made arrangements.”

Hux’s eyebrow shoots up, and Ben didn’t need to see his memories to guess what he’s thinking. It does look suspicious, keeping her in his rooms, but he’s not letting her out of his sight when Hux knows he’s harboring a Resistance agent. And it’s only a few hours. Just a few hours, and then this nightmare is over and he can go die in the Outer Rim in peace, suffocated by his mother’s stench in the Force.

Rey senses his embarrassment, and judging by the mortified anger in her eyes, she’s figured out the reason. Thankfully, she only glares at him.

He won’t tell her about Hux’s conversation with Organa. Not yet. It would only hurt her to know her friends think she’s betrayed them for Ben’s bed. Though Ben takes a certain pleasure in knowing Dameron might’ve heard by now.

“Very well,” Hux says, still eyeing the lightsaber. “I assume you’d like to—clean up—before briefing.”

“Yes,” Ben says, ignoring the leer in Hux’s voice.

“I sent all the relevant documents on the Core, but the situation is developing rapidly.”

Right. His empire is falling apart. He’s lucky Hux didn’t take advantage of his obvious negligence to launch a coup—he’s shocked, in fact, that he didn’t. Shocked and ashamed. It’s been almost two cycles since Ben spared the slightest attention for anything but his own pain.

His fleet, his galaxy. He should care more.

“With your permission, sir, I’ll have the droids make some proper uniforms for—your apprentice. Neither of you should come to negotiations looking like, well, scavengers.”

Rey ignores the barb. “What negotiations?” Ben asks.

“You’d know that if you looked at anything I’ve sent you in the last hour. The separatists in the Core are about to vote. The next few hours, sir, will determine the difference between peace and war. You haven’t meditated in more than two cycles; I suggest you do whatever you need to do to—center yourself.”

Ben stares at him. Since when does Hux monitor his meditation?

Of course. He understands the Force, now. He’s felt first-hand what it means to be unbalanced. Like I overdosed on glitterstim.

Hux clasps his hands behind his back, edging away from the lightsaber. Rey finally lets him go and extinguishes the blade.

“Do you require anything else, Supreme Leader?”

Ben can hardly process the question. His mother’s stench in the Force slows him down, and Hux’s mind feeds him dizzying details of the crisis Ben has done his damndest to ignore.

It’s Rey who speaks up. “Have you got caf on this ship?”

Hux arches one orange eyebrow. “We’re not barbarians.”

Rey ignores the insinuation. “Good. Get me some caf.”

“I am a general. Not a droid.”

She waves the protest away, and Ben would bet half the fleet she’s thinking about how much the general reminds her of Threepio. “Actually, can you make it so it’s a bit—sludgy? In small cups? Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Jakku-style.”

Rey beams, and it’s so radiant Ben practically stumbles into the stack of Jedi texts he laid on the table before he choked Hux.

“Jakku-style,” she says. “Brilliant. Get one for the Supreme Leader, too.”

***

Ben, who hasn’t had caffeine in six years, offers his tarlike Jakku-style caf to Rey. Hux is right; he needs to center himself. A lengthy argument with Rey over the impossibility of going to “check on” the prisoners didn’t help—if Hux knows who you are, the First Order Security Bureau definitely suspects, and they’re just waiting for the Resistance to mysteriously escape. They’ll be watching every move you make. And don’t even think about going to that bacta tank; the second you get near it they’ll run a retinal scan.

It was twenty minutes before she saw reason, and her guilt at enjoying premium caf and a private sonic while her friends sit in cells bites at him through the bond.

He can barely think through the awareness of his mother living and breathing belowdecks, filling him alternately with rage and terror. He can't crawl back to her. He won't. Whatever he said to Rey doesn't matter, he's not going to throw away ultimate power to kneel at his mother's self-righteous feet. She only saw the Darkness in Rey, just like she saw it in him.

He tries to balance himself by focusing on the mountains of reports and memos Hux gave him, but can’t manage to distract himself from Rey’s obscene ecstasy at experiencing a real water shower for the first time in her life.

Ben struggles to focus on galactic trade policy as Rey shivers under the sensation of ice-cold water—she loves it cold—trickling down her naked back, over her collarbone, down to the sensitive skin below—

He hates his Master. This is absurd. This is indecent.

Rey tries valiantly to ignore him, but neither one of them can hide their pleasure, or their embarrassment. Ben’s grateful he’s got his own cold shower ahead of him.

It doesn’t help when she gets out and he hears her rooting around in the single chest of drawers that holds his regulation exercise clothes.

“My shoulder bled onto the other shirt. Have you got something I can wear until my uniform comes?”

He pinches his nose. “T-shirts in the bottom drawer.”

She finds one, and her voice is muffled as she pulls it on. The action hurts her shoulder; the bleeding worries him. “I don’t understand how the First Order just wastes all that water,” she says as she pulls on the contractors’ pants.

He ignores this. It’s surreal to think about water while the future of the galaxy hangs in the balance. Does Rey have any idea what’s at stake when he leaves? Is she so blinded by the triumph of bringing him to the Resistance that she doesn’t understand what she’s done?

She emerges from his small sleeping area looking ridiculous in skin-tight tactical pants and a shirt that would’ve made a reasonably modest dress except that the neck is so wide it leaves one shoulder bare, her uninjured left one. At the sight of her loose hair tickling the freckled brown skin, Ben’s heart stops.

Rey’s embarrassment is instant and profound. She wraps her arms around herself, covering as much as she can. Ben knows how she feels, exposed and helpless.

Never helpless. Not her. Even bound in his Master’s power, she’d been fearless. She feels exposed and furious. But wary—and a little afraid.

“I don’t usually. This.” He gives up, too mortified to do anything but stare at the floor. “I wouldn’t hurt you.”

He’s not looking at her, but he feels her surprise and anger, so strong and unexpected he almost recoils. She sets her jaw and pulls her arms tighter around her body. “You tried to kill me. You tortured me.”

He refuses to flinch.

Of course. She’s remembering him standing over her restrained body, taunting her, whispering to her as he violated the deepest levels of her mind. She doesn’t know about the surgical precision he used, the horror he felt. As far as she knows, he went looking for her most degrading memories and then used them to humiliate her.

Ben turns on his heel, walks into the stifling, humid air of the ‘fresher, and slams the door. Ben, wait--

He doesn't. What's she going to do, apologize? He did torture her. He did hurt her, and he would've hurt her a lot worse if he managed to catch her on Crait. She should be angry, she should hate him. It's what he's been telling her this whole time.

He locks the 'fresher door, because she’ll appreciate a locked door between them, and starts stripping off his stale, sweat-soaked, slept-in clothes, throwing them into a pile on the damp floor. He activates the sonic and steps in, submitting to the unfeeling mechanical cleaning.

What is the fucking point? What is the point of trying to change if all anyone does is throw what you’ve done in your face?

There’s no real gentlemanly way to wash some parts, so he tends to it as perfunctorily as he can, ignoring her heated face and her rage, because he can’t avoid it. He hates his Master for this. This is exactly like being forced to get down on the floor and scrub it until it shined. This is degrading, for no other reason than to make him understand his own powerlessness.

He’s used to communal military sonics; it’s less than ninety seconds before he flips the sonic over to the dry cycle, trying not to enjoy the subtle tug of the drying combs on his now-clean hair.

She’s right, though, isn’t she? He’s hurt her and he’ll hurt her again. Is there anything, really, that he wouldn’t have done if his Master ordered it? Is there anything he wouldn’t do now if he got angry enough?

The thought pushes bile up his throat. She’s not safe with him. That was the whole point of those visions, wasn’t it, to remind him that whatever feeble good intentions he might cobble together for a few minutes at a time will never save him from who he really is. He’s rotten at the core. Whatever shell of redemption he puts on, he’ll always be rotten. His mother is right: he is the Darkness, and he'll infect anyone who gets near him.

He can’t go with her. He’ll destroy her. But he doesn’t want to stay. It’s over.

The smooth wall of the sonic is cool against his forehead, and he tries not to care that she can feel his emptiness. He closes his eyes until the uncaring buzz of the machine tells him to get out.

***

Ben pulls on clean pants and studies himself in the ‘fresher mirror. Washed, he looks slightly less like shit warmed over, but it’s still obvious he hasn’t taken care of himself in days. Three days of growth have turned stubble into a patchy beard and moustache.

With a sigh, he covers his face in lather and picks up his razor. Since he can feel her walking around, he’s not surprised when, a minute later, Rey knocks on the sleeping room door and asks to come in. He shrugs, knowing she can feel it, and she enters.

Thankfully, she doesn’t blush at his bare chest this time. She can’t conceal her interest, but now, at least, they’ve clarified it’s purely biological. Two desperately lonely people, young, forced together, it was bound to happen, nothing personal. His Master probably counted on that. Turning his own body against him, just another way to torture him.

For a few seconds there’s no sound but their breathing, the distant purr of the engines, and the soft scrape of a blade across his skin. She watches him.

He finally meets her eyes in the mirror. “What.”

“It’s just strange, seeing you do something so normal.”

He taps the razor on the sink and runs it through the stream.  “Have you ever seen me with a beard?”

“No.”

“Then I obviously shave.”

He stretches his chin upward. Her lips purse in the mirror, and she crosses her arms over her chest. He’s never seen her bare arms; they’re striped with tan lines marking the place where her wraps usually end.

 “I’ve been thinking. What you said, in the shuttle, about the Resistance not having any ships, about running away to hide—you’re right.”

She looks down at her hands and he feels her hesitation, her shame at what she’s about to say. “It doesn’t make sense for you to just leave with us, not when you already have the most powerful fleet in the galaxy.”

He lifts the razor to his moustache and huffs a half-laugh. “You want me to command the whole First Order to stand down. Surrender to Organa.”

“She’s not Organa, she’s you’re mother. And yes.”

There’s something else. He struggles to read it in the Force. “And you’re wondering if wanting that much power is a sign you’ve fallen to the Dark side.”

Anger floods the bond, mingling with the shame. “Yes.”

“It won’t work. These people have spent their whole lives preparing for war against the Republic. If I order them to surrender when we’ve finally won, they’ll kill me.”

“But you have the Force. And me. We could make them surrender.”

The conviction in her voice is almost endearing. You underestimate Ben Solo. And me.

“No,” he says. “It wouldn’t take more than a few days before someone managed it with poison, or gas, or a blaster from across a hangar. It takes more than the Force to rule.”

“But Hux said the galaxy is falling apart.”

“It is.” He can be certain of that, at least, since he saw his mother make the same assessment.

“What did he mean?”

Ben checks his face in the mirror, not failing to notice her shiver at the feeling of his thumb sliding over newly-smooth skin. After dabbing his face with a towel he walks out of the ‘fresher into the sitting room. With a sigh, he goes to the console and activates the holomap. The galaxy flickers into view around them, a vast blue expanse falling into a swirl of blinking red light. The red zone has expanded. Ben didn’t realize it was that bad.

He motions for her to join him on the floor. He needs to meditate, so she probably does too, though she doesn’t realize it.

Rey folds her legs and stares up at the map, lips parted, face speckled by stars, like she’s never seen a proper holomap before. Ben tries to ignore her hair on her shoulders because that is not relevant right now, and points at the ominous red dots.

“The big planets in the Core—Coruscant, Kuat, Corellia, a few hundred others—voted to leave the Republic and join us, but they made their deals with Snoke. Now that he’s dead, they think they can demand more. And if we’re distracted in the Core, the conquered planets in the Rims will rise up. It’s already starting.”

“They don’t respect you.”

Her gaze is intense. It’s a strange thing for her to say, almost like she’s offended by their impudence. Now that he’s taken off his mask they all know Kylo Ren is young, inexperienced, only human after all. A child in a costume. They smell his weakness.

Why should they respect him? They hated the Republic for neglecting important things. He’s done nothing but neglect.

“Alright,” Rey says, “so we sabotage the negotiations. We make sure the First Order falls apart. That way, like you said, the Resistance can rise up.”

“It’s not that easy. Most of those planets wouldn’t fight for the Resistance. Even under the Republic they were radical Populists—they wanted to separate from the rest of the galaxy. And none of them have a fleet. It’s all street marches, riots, guerillas with blasters.”

Rey frowns up at the map like she can pry the answer from the stars themselves. “But that’s better than nothing, isn’t it?”

“Would you rather fight one army, or five thousand?”

She crosses her arms and shakes her head.

“Your mother said we would be the spark that lights the fire that will burn the First Order down. This is the fire, Ben.”

Ben is quiet, staring up at the galaxy. “Yeah, well. A lot of people die in my mother’s fires.”

Rey looks at him with something so close to understanding, to sympathy, that Ben can’t meet her eyes. She reaches out, hesitant, like she’s about to take his arm but remembers he’s not wearing a shirt.

The bond flares with brash courage, a feeling so particular and familiar Ben can almost hear Rey’s mental words: fuck it, I’m too tired to care.

 She flops down on her back, and Ben’s chest feels too tight even as he looks down at her incredulously. It’s the way she always laid on Jakku to look up at the stars, the way he sees the little girl in her dreams, the way he kicked back on the huge holotable on the Finalizer to watch the galaxy spin overhead.

Feeling less stupid than he should, because he is the leader of the goddamn galaxy discussing high-level astropolitical strategy and he’s bare-chested and she’s wearing one of his t-shirts, he falls back beside her, pillowing his hands under his head. The floor is freezing on his bare back; her elbow brushes his tricep, and her shoulder still aches, and this is the stupidest thing he’s ever done. But fuck it, he’s too tired to care.

“This is ridiculous,” she says. Almost like they’re friends.

“Yeah. Yeah, it is.”

Rey laughs. At the way he looks, or at the play of emotion, Ben doesn’t know, he just closes his eyes to block out the galaxy and concentrate on nothing but that sound.

“Lights,” he says, “zero percent. Map, real color, no overlay.”

The room lights blink out, leaving nothing but the diffuse glow of hyperspace outside the viewport and the simulated galaxy painted out in dazzling whites and yellows and the smeared pink and blue of distant nebulae. The blinking red crisis recedes under the blue-white beauty of the Core, all the stars joyful and so bright in their youth.

Rey takes a deep, contented breath. How does she do this to him?

It’s the bond, a voice warns him. This is your Master’s trap, and you’re so weak you’re clinging on to the prison he made for you.

He banishes the voice and relaxes into the sensation of Rey’s breathing.

“You breathe so deep,” she says.

“You breathe too shallowly.”

“I think I’d notice if I was breathing wrong.”

“You have abdominals; use them. It will help you meditate.”

She rolls her eyes. In the dark, he only feels it. But she takes a deep breath from her belly, expanding the muscles of her lower back into the floor. They used to do this as younglings, and sometimes Ben had nightmares of spending the rest of his life on Luke’s floor, learning to breathe.

The bond synchronizes them. Inhale, exhale.

“You like to fly, don’t you?” she asks.

His forehead creases at the change of subject. “Yes.”

She smiles, and Ben hates that she can bring him to the edge of tears with her smile. This is a trap.

“How did you know?” he asks, crushing the voice. This will all end soon; there’s no harm indulging it a little longer.

“Because I’m a good pilot. Too good. Impossibly good, if I weren’t getting it from you.”

His eyes go wide. “You knew.”

She rolls her eyes again. “I’m not so stuck up I’d think I’m good at everything without trying. I mean, what we did in the throne room? I should’ve cut my own arm off by accident because I don’t know how to use a lightsaber. But I didn’t. Because of you.”

He feels, of all things, guilt. From her.

“Anyway, I--I usually work for things. I don't like that I got all that for free when you probably worked for years to do it. I can't fix it, but I want you to know that.”

“You’re welcome,” he says. He’s appalled that he means it.

“And you'll probably get skills from me. Fixing coolant lines and putting your hair up in buns. So don't say it's one-sided.”

He actually laughs, and pretends not to notice the warmth that spreads from Rey’s cheeks to her bare toes at the sound. Yeah. Almost like friends.

“There’s one thing I don’t understand, though,” she says, rolling up on her elbow to look down at him. Mercifully, the neck of the t-shirt is caught in the crook of her shoulder, leaving everything covered. She glances at his chest. “You’re, well, huge. Your fighting style shouldn’t work for me.”

It’s a clever observation. “I had a growth spurt when I was seventeen. Before that I was always small for my age. Really small. That’s when I learned to fight.”

Why the hell did he tell her that? She deserve to know any of them. He owes her nothing. Her smile doesn't change that.

“What.”

“Just, it explains a lot. You always had to work twice as hard for everything, fight twice as hard, everyone probably made fun of you for being small and weak, and suddenly you had all this power you didn’t know what to do with. That must’ve been hard.”

He closes his eyes. Has anyone ever said those words to him, about anything? That must’ve been hard.

“It took me almost two years to re-learn to fight.”

“And I bet people made loads of jokes and stared at you.”

“They did. It was pretty terrible, actually.”

As soon as it’s out of his mouth he’s overwhelmed by shame, and not just at the Ben Solo-ish casualness of it, the easy Hosnian accent that sounds too much like Han’s mocking.

“Of course it wasn’t like anything you dealt with—”

“It’s fine, Ben. We all have our own problems. And things weren’t so bad for me. Just lonely. And hungry."

He pictures the little girl in the dream, trying not to cry to save the water, huddling under that wall with its thousands of marks, and doesn't respond. The dismal stretches of her loneliness hang in the air before she coughs, nonchalant.

"By the way, there better be food at this meeting. You’re starving.” 

She always covers her pain by caring for others. Now, apparently, that includes him. Has he not kept down a full meal since before he collapsed in the throne room? No wonder he feels like shit.

She rolls back onto the floor and they lapse into silence. Inhale, exhale. Rey’s figured out how to use the Force to work the controls, and she spins the galaxy with sleepy waves of her arm. He’ll have to get her more caf.

After a minute or two, she takes a deep breath. “I wanted to burn down the First Order,” she says. “But we’re the First Order now. Maybe if we hold on to it, we can make things better.”

We. The visions float before his mind’s eye, the two black thrones, the galaxy kneeling at her feet. The Force balances on a razor’s edge, and Ben considers that this could be the first time she looks at her galaxy.

“Rey. This is the Dark side.”

“I know. I know. But you said yourself the Jedi were wrong about the Dark side. It’s the only side that makes sense. Who controls the First order if you leave? Hux? If we kill Hux, it just goes down the line until it’s like you said, warlords fighting over ships and planets. That’s how it was on Jakku. But if we hold it, we can change things. We can’t just run away.”

He worries the inside of his cheek. I want to run, I want to be with you, I can’t do this. I’m so tired.

She leaves him in the silence, almost like she hears his plea.

“Ben, can you show me Jakku?” she whispers.

He directs the holomap to the out-of-the-way system, nothing particularly interesting.

“It’s so small,” she says.

Ben doesn’t reply; it is.

“Luke called me Rey from Nowhere. He was right.”

The anguish in her voice seems to come from somewhere between his ribs. She called herself nothing for years and years and years before he did.

“It doesn’t matter where you came from.”

She hears the apology, and rolls her head to the side, meeting his eyes. Below her gratitude and gentleness is something he’s never felt from her before. Uncertainty.

“Ben,” she says. She can’t get enough of saying his name. “Maybe this is too big for me. I know you’re only leaving because of me, because you say you don’t care. But I think you do care. And maybe I shouldn’t be making these decisions.”

Ben frowns up at the holomap. Her insecurity shouldn't bother him like this, but it makes him hum with anger. At her parents, at himself.

“Yeah, I shouldn’t be making these decisions either.”

Does every ruler feel like this? Did Darth Vader ever lie back and wonder who the hell he was to be making the decisions that will change the galaxy? Did his mother?

He could ask her, if he wanted. He doesn’t. He doesn’t care.

Something warm brushes the hairs of his forearm. Rey’s hand. She coaxes his arm out from under his head and he allows her to lace his fingers in hers. He only realizes how hard he’s squeezing because he feels her pain, and loosens his grip. She rubs her thumb over his knuckles.

“Doesn’t it terrify you even a little, to know you’re responsible for all this?”

He wants to say something about it being easier when you don’t care, but there’s something about that word that nags at him. Responsible. He hasn’t been. He’s not. He can’t be, because he’s Ben Solo, he’s nothing, and he never had a destiny.

Instead, he only answers quietly, making his confession to Rey and the galaxy wheeling overhead. “Yes.”

Yes. He’s responsible, and he’s terrified.

Chapter Text

“Mom, you don’t seriously believe Darth Vader turned to the Light, do you? Uncle Luke’s full of it.”

Leia stiffened—Ben was too interested in Vader as it was, like something inside him already recognized a kindred spirit. Han sat at the table messing with some component, but his eyes flashed up to Leia’s.

Han coughed. “Easy, kid. You weren’t there, your uncle was.”

“Come on. You expect anyone to believe a man that evil turned against everything he spent his whole life working on for some kid he barely knew? No way. Luke murdered him and said he turned to the Light to destroy his legacy.”

Leia slammed down the data pad where she was reading a report on refugee activity in the Unknown Regions.

“Nothing Vader did qualified as a ‘legacy.’ We believe Luke, and so will you, and I don’t want to hear about it.”

Privately, she had her doubts about her father’s redemption. Luke wasn’t lying, but Luke hadn’t spent hours getting personally tortured by Vader, and Luke wasn’t standing there watching him calmly blow up a planet.

“Whatever, you’re probably in on the lie.”

“Don’t you have homework?”

“I’m writing an essay on Luke Skywalker’s lies after the Battle of Endor. I’m not the only one who thinks he made it up, there are tons of HoloNet stories—”

“If I find out you’ve been watching those Centrist extremist holos again, you’re not flying for a month.”

Leia would rue the day when that punishment wasn’t enough to control him. It would come one day, probably soon, but at eleven the thought of staying out of a cockpit made him blanche.

“Dad needs me. We’re doing a run to—uh, Denon.”

“Denon, huh?” Leia knew perfectly well Han took Ben on some less-than-savory runs. After years of telling Han that a Senator’s husband couldn’t get caught sweet-talking smugglers in cantinas with their pre-teen son, she finally agreed to plausible deniability, mostly because she couldn’t face Ben’s crestfallen brown eyes. Since she laid off and let him spend most of his time in the Falcon he’d been happier than she’d seen him in years.

It was the only time Ben got to feel useful instead of broken, since Han asked Ben to use his Force abilities to figure out who was lying. He’d even started to try out some of Han’s pilot swagger. He needed it, even though Leia hated the rebelliousness that came with it. Ben was always fragile, even as a tiny thing, the kid who talked to animals and cried at the drop of a hat.

Han waggled his eyebrows at Ben, then her, in a way that made her stomach tighten. “Yeah. Denon,” he lied. “Got a problem with that, princess?”

Leia smiled despite herself at Ben’s conspiratorial grin. He’d be handsome, when he grew into his features. Short like her, but handsome, with his father’s expressive face.

“Why can’t our son watch porn like a normal kid?” she lamented that night when they were in bed. “No, he’s got to be watching Death Star denialists. You know those people make a kids’ site? If it weren’t for the free speech amendment I’d shut them down.”

Han kissed her neck and she sighed into him as his hands wandered. “Maybe he’s better at hiding the porn. I was always pretty good at it.”

“I’m serious.”

“You’re always serious. He’s a kid, he’s experimenting, and he figured out it’s an easy way to get a rise out of you, so of course he’s gonna use it.”

He massaged his hands over her shoulders and rolled on top of her. “He’s not Vader, Leia. I know I don’t really get all this Force stuff, and I know you feel things in him—but he’s just a kid. He’s your kid. Listen to him in there going on about politics. You watch, sweetheart. He’s gonna be in the Senate when he’s twenty and I’m gonna be bringing you both noodles when you’re working late.”

Leia smiled at the image as Han kissed her. As much as she’d love it, she knew Ben would follow his father, or maybe Luke, and she hoped for it with all her heart. Her own life’s work was less tangible—the Republic, the end of the Empire. A chance, she hoped, for her son and billions of other sons to grow up without war. That’s what she wanted for Ben. That was her legacy.

***

Ben sits up, folding his legs into meditation position, and Rey mirrors him. She doesn’t let go of his hand. He glances at her shoulder, and she adjusts the neck of the overlarge t-shirt, but he’s too preoccupied and too disciplined to allow much reaction. Rey’s not as lucky. This is serious, she tells herself. This is the future of the galaxy. But her eyes keep slipping farther down his scar, and she’s certain her face has turned the color of his lightsaber. Looking into his eyes isn’t much help; he stares at her like he can see into the darkest depths of her mind, because he can.

A twitch of his chin and a slight protrusion of his lower lip would betray him even if the fear didn’t arc across the bond. Doesn’t it terrify you, to know you’re responsible for all this?

Yes.

But there’s resolve there, too. And something that makes her heart sing: strength.

“I am responsible,” he says.

"You couldn't have figured that out earlier?"

He doesn't look at her; he keeps his eyes on the holographic galaxy above them. And Rey understands, then, what caused that spark of horror a moment ago. It’s the same thing that shot through Rey when she looked at the hologram of Jakku, so small and insignificant and inadequate.

“I can’t run," he says. "I can't go with you. It’s too late.”

Her fingers jerk in his, but he holds them, almost defiant. There it is—the betrayal she knew was coming.

But she expected a tantrum. She expected him to stomp around and bluster that he won’t crawl back to his mother, she expected him to tell her it doesn’t matter, she expected him to ask her to join him again and spew something crazy about a New Order. Not this.

Is this redemption? A Jedi wreathed in stars, caught somewhere between meditation and prayer as he breathes out his sacrifice with his hand around hers?

She can't hope. But something has changed in him, and it's not in Rey not to hope. Not after all he's done.

She presses their palms tighter together. Their breathing never fell out of synch, and calm slips over Rey as the two of them sink into the Force. The power between them is neither Light nor Dark, but neither and both and something in between. The Force is One, he said in the shuttle. The Light destroyed Luke, and the Dark destroyed Ben, but together, she and Ben held a dying heart in their power and kept it beating.

His shoulders rise and fall, and in the bond she feels the weight of the galaxy on them. "You never wanted power, did you?" she asks quietly.

"No."

"Then why did you take the Order?"

"To get to you. To destroy you and everything you love."

His hand flexes over hers. That answer should disturb her. It doesn’t; that should disturb her, too. It’s nothing she didn’t know already and he knows she can handle the truth.

"There had to be another reason," she says.

"My Master told me I had a destiny. He lied."

"You don't have a master, Ben. You killed him."

He swallows, like he doesn't believe it. Sometimes, he probably doesn't. His hand is huge, and so warm.

She wants to tell him she can’t leave the Resistance. She wants to tell him he’s betrayed her again. Instead she holds her other hand out to him, palm up, and, cautiously, he takes it. For five breaths they look into each others’ eyes, until Rey starts to feel awkward.

“What will you do?” she asks.

“I’m the Supreme Leader,” he says with unnecessary conviction. “I’ll lead.”

She snorts. He frowns at her, questioning.

“Alone," she says. "And you'll keep fighting me.”

He doesn't reply, and his sadness feels heavier. They couldn't kill each other after all this. There's no point pretending they could.

“The First Order’s evil, Ben.” 

It is evil. It's important to remind herself. She doesn't understand all the politics behind it, but she knows it's evil. And Ben, well, Ben's--probably evil. Mostly. He's definitely a mass murderer and he's not especially sorry about it. He tortured her.

The last feels hollow; he read her mind but he didn't hurt anything but her pride, really. She only threw that at him because she'd spent twenty minutes in that glorious sonic with real water pouring over, covering herself in the First Order-issue grooming gel that her nose couldn't stop connecting to Ben. She tried to convince herself she wasn't hoping to see his huge silhouette at the unlocked 'fresher door, or that she wouldn't step back into the water and invite him in. She replayed the memory of Han falling off that bridge to push the thought of her head. It worked too well, and made her furious.

His face twists into a sneer, and she's almost relieved to see him doing something hateful. “The Republic—you think Organa’s so innocent—”

There’s the Ben Solo she knows. She shakes her head at her stupidity, thinking his epiphany about the galaxy meant he’s really changed. Fine, he wants to play king now, but he still thinks he’s right. She can't stand with him if he'll defend the First Order. She can't.

But when she tugs her hands out of his, he holds her—not restraining her, just gripping with a gentle pressure, begging her to stay. She’s about to yank her hands free and end this insanity when shame wells in the bond and he drops his eyes to the floor, then to their entwined hands.

He clenches his jaw and takes a moment to gather himself. He breathes in, breathes out, then his eyes bore into hers again, the shame naked on his face.

Has he ever done this? Tried to control himself?

“Evil things have been done in the Order’s name,” he admits stiffly. “But the Order is mine. It is what I say it is.”

Rey almost smiles at his posturing. She’s been there a thousand times in the last three weeks, smoothing over her terror with cocky certainty.

“You said you couldn’t make them surrender to the Resistance.”

“There are limits to my power,” he says in a near-growl. Rey gets it; it took a few dozen whippings and street-fights for her to learn that lesson on Jakku, and it pissed her off, too. It still pisses her off. He tilts his chin upward, arrogant, then down again. Why the hell is she letting him hold her hands while he blusters about his control over the galaxy?

He’s afraid to ask again, but the question haunts him. The please.

The door console buzzes. For a moment Ben wrestles with himself, trying to decide whether to ignore it. The bond expands and contracts with his breath. He sighs, and lets her hands drop, and pushes himself to his feet. She follows.

"Map out, lights seventy percent," he snaps. The galaxy blinks out, leaving them alone in the sickly artificial light. “When FN-2187 has healed enough to move him, take the terrorists and go before I change my mind. Until then, rest while you can. I’ll get you clothes, supplies, a ship. I’ll be in meetings for hours. They’ll take attention off you.”

His heart is breaking. But he’s letting her go, and his voice is so gentle as he tells her to rest even though his fist on the voice control is anything but gentle. A young man speaks from the console. “Supreme Leader, General Hux told me to tell you the Grand Inquisitor is on board." That sounds ominous, and Ben's anxiety flares in the bond. "Also, the droid is here with Juno Ren’s uniform.”

“Send it in, Havel.”

They stand in absolute silence while the droid deposits several hangers sheathed in black covers on the small side table along with a large box. It chatters respectfully about what to do if it doesn’t fit, but Ben only stares at the conservator with his arms crossed over his chest, and Rey watches the scars on his bare back.

When the door hisses shut and they’re alone, he plucks his comm from the pocket of his loose pants. 

“I’m not going to sleep. You need me.”

“I'm not allowing a Resistance agent to attend me at state meetings, particularly with the Grand Inquisitor of FOSB.”

Attend me. There he goes, talking like Snoke again. She doesn't know or care what FOSB is. "You're just going to lock me in here for five hours?"

"Yes." The cabin door closes behind him, leaving Rey alone in the sitting area with the uniform she doesn't need. There's no way he'll actually lock her in.

Rey pours herself a glass of water—it’s so cool and sweet—because she’s dehydrated from blood loss and she needs to figure out what the hell to do.

Ben’s reasoning is sound: the Resistance has no fleet, no army, no way to do a damn bit of good for anybody. Rey doesn’t understand the politics of it. Ben’s under siege, and she’s got no idea if he can even hold the Order if he tries.

It's hard to hate him for breaking his promise. After all, that half-breathless alright against her shoulder outstripped her wildest hopes for Ben Solo. She never in her life imagined he'd come with her that easily, and she would've forgiven him.

It's the future she mourns. He would've trained her. He could've meditated across from her, like they just did, his hands gripping hers. He would've helped her fix the lightsaber. They could've fought together, using a Resistance hangar like an obstacle course. She mourns the shy, awkward introductions to Finn and Poe and Rose she'll never get to make, she mourns the first time Ben would eat with them in the mess, the first time Ben smiles, the first time Finn asks to borrow Rey's lightsaber and swaggers up to him. "Ready for a rematch, Solo?" And Ben would flash a grin at Rey and the air would dance with red and blue and Ben would laugh to know what it's like to have a friend.

She mourns all of it. She mourns for him dying alone here, surrounded by people who hate him. If he stays here he might do some good, but he's got too many enemies. Even Leia thinks he'll die at the First Order's hands.

But the two of them, side-by-side, would have a chance.

She sets the black glass on the counter. The water slides down her throat, making her stomach lurch and reminding her of Ben’s hunger. He’s been fasting for days. Rey knows what that feels like, to go without food long enough that you don’t want it anymore. She shakes her head and strips the covers off the hangers, wondering what awful thing Hux has cooked up for her.

The black is no surprise, of course, and neither is the hooded cloak. A simple fitted tunic and pants. The armor-like leather pads at the shoulders and the leather sleeves, ringed like Ben’s, are subtle enough. Pleated leather strips cross the tunic, mimicking her usual X-wrap and protecting her ribs and heart.

She starts with the most unfamiliar item, a stretchy bra with straps cutting across her back. It takes some effort to get it on with an aching shoulder, but she manages, and as she puts on the rest of it she tries to figure out a plan.

Ben could end the stormtrooper program. He could open up the records—Finn could find his family, and so could all the other kids who were taken from the families who loved them. They could stop the war Ben says is coming. They could kill Hux.

Seven hours ago you hated him, with good reason. Whatever you’re thinking, it’s mad.

Rey threads the thin belt through the loops at her waist, pleased to see both a holster for a blaster and a hook for her lightsaber. She wishes she had her staff; it always makes her feel safer.

What is wrong with you? He just broke his promise to join you and now you’re thinking about betraying the Resistance. What will Finn think?

Finn. She can’t leave Finn, or Poe, or Rose. She puts it out of her mind.

She tugs on the boots that, mercifully, fit better than the scavenged ones the meddroid put her in at the base. She could run ten miles across the sand in these. Even the gloves are magnificent, embedded with chips that transfer touch sensations through the sweat-wicking material.

The leather rings on the tunic end a few inches above her elbow, and the symbol of the First Order is picked out in black thread on the elastic cloth on her bicep. When she looks down at her arm the effect is remarkably like her own usual arm-wraps. The cloak Ben gave her hangs on a hook by the door and she removes the holo of Rose's sister and the broken lightsaber parts from its pocket and stuffs them into her new tunic.

She wraps the new cloak around herself, leaving the hood down, and rolls her shoulders, testing the give of the cloth. She holds out her hand for the lightsaber on the table and ignites it when it comes into her hand.

She jerks in surprise and almost stabs herself in the arm when a crossguard shoots out inches from her fingertips. It’s Ben’s. She left the little red one in the ‘fresher.

When she called it in the throne room she’s been half-mad with panic and too focused on staying alive to appreciate the thing. But now she appraises it. It looks normal enough in Ben’s stupidly huge hands, but the hilt’s as big around as her forearm.

She twirls it in her left hand—she’s grateful staff-training made her proficient with both hands—and hums appreciatively at the feel of it, the crackle of it. With a suppressed grin she begins running through attacks against the viewport, noticing with approval that the cloak doesn’t swing in a way that distracts her and the leather on her tunic bends like silk to accommodate her. Even the over-engineered bra proves its worth, freeing her from the normal compression of her simple breastband. This uniform was designed for battle.

She attacks, parries, spins—and practically falls when her blade connects with another one, rapier-thin and steady.

Ben’s in a clean version of the coat she could just barely glimpse in the blizzard. His shoulders look huge, his hands almost engulf the hilt of the small lightsaber. His eyes are filled with hunger, blazing red. They stare at each other for a long moment before he sweeps her blade down and extinguishes his.

He swallows, visibly mastering himself. He’s faster at it than she is; her heart races, tripping along behind that expression in his eyes. Between the way he looks at her and his stubborn insistence on stomping around without a shirt and the loneliness that bores a hole in her chest, Ben Solo is going to kill her.

“You reacted quickly,” he says. “But you weren’t paying attention. I could’ve stabbed you.”

Rey’s breathing too hard to get out a witty response in time.

He jerks his chin toward the flickering cross in her hand. She hasn’t put it out. “You like that,” he observes.

“It sort of—fights me. I like that.”

Ben’s eyebrow arches upward and Rey’s cheeks heat. She distracts herself trying to add up how many portions the hardware in Ben's quarters would be worth.

“Not everyone can fight with a weapon like that. The other Knights couldn’t.”

She’ll ask about the Knights later. “It’s heavy,” she says, “but it feels…alive. Luke’s didn’t.”

“It will when you remake it. The crystal is cracked, so it will be unstable like mine.”

“How am I supposed to remake it if you’re not coming with me when I leave?”

He frowns and glares at the side table. “What’s in the box?”

It's a peace offering, almost. He doesn't know what he's doing, either, and he doesn't want to talk about it. For now they're here. In this room there is no war.

She clicks the blade off and almost sighs when the electric energy of it disappears. She tosses it to him, and he throws her the small one, and she marvels at how impossible this would’ve been even hours ago. She hooks the lightsaber to her belt and pulls the lid off the box as spitefully as she can, but at the sight of the box’s contents, her eyes blur and she has to blink away moisture. Concern flits across the bond. Ben hovers behind her, but a prickle of embarrassment lets her know he’s figured out what she’s looking at. He clears his throat and turns away.

Rey shakes out the brown leather, too overcome to pay much attention to the shining black metal underneath it. He must’ve sent it to the laundry droids when she ducked into his sleeping room to pull off the toe-crushing boots. The droids repaired the cuts and burns and cleaned off Finn’s blood, but they left the artless stitches Poe sewed to repair the place where Ben’s lightsaber sliced it open.

Rey folds Finn’s jacket against her face, rubbing her cheek against the leather, and turns to Ben, who radiates nervousness, shame, self-hatred.

“Why are you so ashamed of the best parts of yourself?” she asks softly.

He ignores her. She folds the jacket on the table and moves to stand behind him.

“Hux knows I’m with the Resistance,” she says. She swallows around the momentousness of what she’s about to ask, of what it means. “And there’ll be others who’ll figure it out. If I leave with the prisoners they’ll know you let me go. They’ll turn on you.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me.”

Whatever he feels in the bond makes him freeze, and slowly, like he’s afraid of a trap, he turns to her. He’s wearing the same expression he wore on Crait as he knelt in the dust, like it’s his own heart beating in her hands.

What waits for her, if she leaves here with her friends? Running, hiding, stealing ships from scrappers with nothing else to their name. No plan. Not even much hope. Ben could do more good from this room, right now, than the shattered relic of the Resistance could do in months, maybe years.

There’s good in him, but he’s not good, not yet. He’s cocky, impulsive, stubborn, angry, and so desperate for love he can barely think beyond his loneliness. Rey’s never met anyone so much like herself.

This is mad. They’ll call her a traitor, and they’ll be right. Finn won’t forgive her.

“I’ll help you,” she whispers. “I’ll stay.”

His ribs expand with a huge breath, and he lets it out slowly, waiting for the betrayal to come. His jaw moves like he’s working up the courage to do something. He takes a halting step toward her, and Rey stops breathing.

The bond opens between them, and there are the images Rey didn't let herself imagine: flying together, training, standing together against the galaxy--just sitting, just talking. Ben never wanted power; neither does Rey. They just don't want to be alone.

That's what this is, in the bond. Ben's hope. Hope. Joy.

As soon as she puts a name to it, it's gone. The wind of his fear scours the tracks, erasing any sign of his happiness. He turns away but she approaches him. He recoils, but doesn’t fight, when she reaches up to pebble her gloves over the moles on his cheek.

The bond. The press of her fingers unlocks it like a console pad.

Through him, she feels fingers on her own cheek: hers, cool and sheathed in leather; others, from Ben's memory. Long, rough, oily, and burning hot. Snoke.

“He’s dead, Ben. Look at me.”

He obeys and she strokes her thumb over his scar. He turns his face into her touch, but she can hear his self-hate like a sandstorm hurling itself against the thin metal skin of her mind: look at you, you’re pathetic, too weak to want anything but a prison. This is a lie. This is a trap.

“You can trust me.”

Trust me, child. I will make you strong.

Ben's eyes have gone wild, feral in their panic. Once, Rey tried to free one of the huge happabores in Niima Outpost when its trainer left the cage open, but every time she got the animal close to freedom it would rear and stamp and howl its rage, retreating into the shadows of its enclosure. She never forgot the expression in the animal’s eyes, the same one in the eyes staring down at her now.

“Everyone you’ve ever trusted has betrayed you, haven’t they?" she says. "Even me.”

From him, the memory of her face after he begged her to stay. His jaw works, and his face twists into a grimace. The bond slams shut and his fingers close over her wrist and wrench it away.

“Haven’t you humiliated me enough?” His voice is ragged, pleading, and he hates himself for that, too. He does what he always does, reaching for the anger to make himself strong.

Rey would offer him comfort, but she knows that if she so much as touches his arm he won’t be able to keep back tears, and that will only infuriate him more.

“Ben. I'm not trying to hurt you.”

He flinches. The Supreme Leader of the First Order flinches at the soft sound of his own name. How many people have hurt him when they promised to help?

He looks away, and when his eyes light on the box his eyebrows draw together and he grits his teeth. Rey steps to the table and lifts out the object that's aroused his anger.

“Don’t wear that,” he snaps. “Hux pulled it from Juno’s uniform records.”

Rey turns over the metal in her hands, admiring the simple silver lines etched into the black mask. It's a beautiful object, still laced with the sharp tang of solvent and solder and newly-cured enamel. If she stays, this is her future. Ben knows that.

But it's practical, too, isn't it? “My face must be all over the security footage from Snoke’s ship," she says. "They know I was with you, and him, before he died. You’re under suspicion, you said so yourself.”

“Don’t put that ridiculous thing on. I forbid it.”

“You’re afraid I’ll fall to the Dark side because of a mask,” she says. She steps across the room to a section of gleaming black wall and draws the mask over her head. “I covered my face on Jakku all the time; don’t be supersti—”

When the eye-holes slide into place she catches her reflection in black metal. There are no mirrors on Jakku, unless you catch the luggabeast trough at just the right angle, and it's strange to see herself at all, much less in a mask and a uniform that looks like it cost a thousand credits.

“It’s fine,” she says. The vocoder snaps to life, transforming the syllables into something male, and dead, and dangerous. Ben’s reflection appears behind her, his concerned face the only oasis of color in a vast field of black. He looks sick. He feels sick. “It’s fine.”

Ben’s not fine. He’s furious, but it’s almost habitual, like he defaults to anger when he can’t process what else to feel. But she’s fine, and whatever fears haunt the dark corners of Ben Solo's mind, she will stay to help him. The mask is just metal. Look at them, here, reflected in the gleaming wall: they belong together.

Ben turns away from their reflection in disgust, then freezes with one foot in the air. His eyes dart back and forth, then flash open wide. The threads of his contempt and dislike and strange affection in the bond are familiar. He's talking to Hux.

"I'm leaving," he says.

"You're not locking me in here--"

"I have to talk to Organa."

Rey has to consciously remind herself to close her mouth under the mask. "What? You're going to interrogate her--"

"There are things you don't know."

Wonderful, things she doesn't know. She's sick and tired of Skywalkers knowing things she doesn't. "Now would be a brilliant time to kriffing tell me, Ben."

"It doesn't matter, you're staying here."

"You're not going to lock me in your quarters." He's not, whatever he says, and she has no intention of following his orders. She swipes the datapad he gave her off the table to make sure Finn’s still safe in his bacta chamber before she goes. She's distracted; it takes her a moment to notice the feed is strangely still, and the indicators in the corners of the droid's visual display have stopped blinking. The bacta tank looks strange.

Empty.

Ben feels her alarm and his hand's on his lightsaber when she meets his eyes. "Finn's escaped," she says.

Of course he escaped. The droid said herself she had no idea what was happening to him. Their healing worked, he woke up, saw himself in a First Order vessel, and assumed he was captured. The meddroid's visual sensors still work but he must've disabled the droid somehow. "He's probably stolen armor," she says. "He could be anywhere. No, wait, of course he'll go to the brig."

Ben's comm's in his hand in an instant, but then he stops. "I'm sending you alone," he says quickly. He goes to the console and swipes something from a shelf there. An extra commlink. He fiddles with some controls and drops it in her hand. "Take off your glove. Put your thumb here." She does, and it beeps as it reads her fingerprint. "You know how to use one of these?"

"Yes." The single word sounds deadly in the vocoder. She slips her glove back on.

"It'll only contact me. I set it to voice. Everyone on this ship knows who you are, you're wearing a uniform of a Knight of Ren and they'll follow your orders. If not, ask for their comm and type my code. It's--"

"0981-2701-243686," Rey says without missing a beat.

He narrows his eyes. "The bond--"

"I can read numbers. I watched you type it on that comm ten times."

He nods, like he forgot she survived on Jakku for two decades. "I thought you said it was dangerous for me to be near the brig," she says.

"It's less dangerous than FN-2187 being identified. That comm will show you where the brig is--"

"Aft-V-deck section 34?"

He grits his teeth, and nods. "You took one of these apart."

Not an entire Dreadnought, but she did spend four years on it and she used to look at the old blueprints on her flight simulator, daydreaming of walking through one one day. "An Imperial model, but I noticed you haven't changed much." 

If she expected him to be impressed, she's as disappointed as she usually is. Ben takes a deep breath and wipes the emotion from his face, becoming Kylo Ren again. "Don't draw attention to yourself," he orders.

She could point out that she's dressed like mini-Kylo Ren and there's no conceivable way she won't draw attention to herself. Instead she says, "Ben. She loves you."

“She loves the Resistance. She loves the Republic. Nothing else.”

“That’s not true. Don't kill her."

Rey knows he won't. But his face doesn't change, and the fury of a caged animal dances through the bond, and she has to admit she's got a bad feeling about this. 

***

“I didn’t expect that bastard to keep you for another hour,” Desso says in his gruff voice, helping Leia to the bench that some of the Senators quickly vacate. She doesn’t really need the help, not physically, but accepts it anyway.

Poe slumps on the bench, too, conscious now but still wearing reconstructive apparatus over his frostbitten face and hands. One look at his puffed-up eye tells her Desso’s spilled the news about Rey. At least he’s got the sense not to say the wrong things under surveillance.

“Hux didn’t keep me,” Leia says. “Some Security Bureau whitecoats tried to get me to give up secret plans that definitely don’t exist.”

Leia’s not being cute for the surveillance droids. If they had any secret plans, they wouldn’t be in this mess.

“Talk amongst yourselves,” Varish orders the twenty or so other pairs of eyes. Most of them are red-rimmed, bloodshot, and unfamiliar. They all turn away, giving the commanders some privacy.

Varish’s long, furred fingers dance over Leia’s skin like she could fix any injuries if she finds any. Leia pats her friend’s arm. “They didn’t rough me up, Varish. It’s fine, I’m just wishing I got more than three hours sleep last night.”

This is only a half-lie. It’s Ben’s energy that’s sucking all the life out of her. She’d felt the moment he boarded the ship an hour ago, shining like a supernova in the Force. His power burns as furious and Dark and demanding as it has since she felt it that very first time, gasping around the energy with her hands on her belly.

And with him, there’s another star, young and blue and fierce, a presence she’d prayed she wouldn’t feel. But Hux wasn’t lying—Ben has Rey. Force knows what he’s done to her.

Leia can only discern their presence, not sense their emotions. Ben has the advantage, there; he’ll be able to untangle the threads of her feelings like he used to tease apart the strands of her hair, biting his tongue as he worked the comb through her braids. At two or three, he read people as easily as Leia read war briefs. His little heart always felt so much, and Leia could only watch him fumble through it, helpless.

“I don’t understand why they haven’t tortured us yet,” Desso says. They’d both endured an hour of interrogation before Hux slithered in with his sneer and his whiskey. They pressed Desso on his two children, a Republic Army captain and a cadet, both victims of Starkiller, with no apparent purpose except putting him off-balance.

Varish scowls at him. “Keep it down, Lonno.”

Desso eyes his cellmates with contempt. They’re Varish’s people, politicians and bureaucrats, most of them still deep in post-trauma from HosPrime. “They should have a realistic understanding of what we’re facing,” he says.

“Torture and death, I think they get the details, thanks. But they didn’t sign up for this shit, and you have no idea what we went through to get here. Not everybody’s got what it takes to watch a planet blow up and jump right back into the fight.”

“They better kriffing find what it takes—”

“Knock it off, you two. They’ll probably get to the real stuff soon.” Poe’s voice, muffled by the mask over his nose, sounds like he’s got tissues stuffed up his nostrils. Unconsciously, he chews on his lip, on the scar he got in First Order captivity.

Leia studies her second-in-command. So far he’s been spared even light questioning, forced to submit only to brusque but admittedly conscientious medical care. But he knows what Kylo Ren’s hospitality usually looks like.

Poe flashes her a grin that’s charming despite the mask. “I figure I’m up soon.” He cracks his knuckles under the bacta gloves and glances at the door. “Hugsy probably wants to talk about that incident with Black One and the Dreadnought.”

Leia senses his real meaning. Between helping Finn escape and pranking Hux in front of the whole fleet, Poe’s chances of escaping a slow and excruciating death are slim.

“Any word on the missing?” she asks him as calmly as she can.

“I was gonna ask you the same thing.”

“Only this,” Leia says, pulling the dice discretely from her pocket. After days trapped in the Falcon, any of them would know those dice anywhere.

“I don’t suppose you’re gonna tell me those are Jedi projections, too.”

“No luck there.” She drops them back into her pocket. “Nobody’s dragged in a Wookiee, have they?”

Poe shakes his head, and Leia adds Chewie’s and Rose’s probable death to the list of things she can’t think about right now.

The fate of her people, and Desso’s, is a mystery, but they’re the veterans, the ones who would’ve jumped into the the heaviest fire. Raptor Squadron, minus Poe, went up as soon as they got the Order on their scanners, and the rest grabbed blasters and ran to the fight. They bought enough time for some of the Senators’ civilian craft to break atmosphere, but who knows if they made it to hyperspace before the orbital forces picked them off.

“Leia?” Poe asks, like she’s the one they should be worried about. “The general asked what Hux said to you.”

Right. She sighs against the steel wall of the cell, grateful for the bench. Possibilities swirl through her mind. It’s not the Force, it’s a lifetime of trying to think past your enemy when they’re holding all the cards. She doesn’t like her odds and she doesn’t even have Threepio to tell her how bad they are.

“He offered me amnesty.”

Desso’s bushy eyebrows would be in his hair if he had any. “Why the hell would he do that?”

“He wants my name. He wants me to go on the HoloNet and tell the galaxy to submit to the First Order.”

Desso snorts. “You told him to go to hell?”

“In those exact words.”

“And the Jedi,” Desso says, his face darkening. He hasn’t figured it out. “You think she got the same offer?”

“We can only hope.”

“Can we? Better to be dead than a traitor.”

Leia says nothing to that. Over the past two hours her brain has tormented her with so many images of things Ben could be doing to her that would be worse than death.

Leia flicks her eyes toward the tiny flashing light of the surveillance droid, but Poe understands.

“I guess you’re not surprised,” Poe says. “You expected her to go over to the Dark side.”

Translation: no way in hell did she go to the Dark side. Leia almost smiles, though it would be a grim smile. Desso glowers at her, but Leia’s too worried about Rey to give anything away.

Hux said Rey was willing. If Ben feels about Rey the way Leia suspects he feels, and she could make Ben trust her, she’d have almost unlimited power over him. That was always Ben’s problem—he trusted too much.

The thought of Rey willingly doing that for the sake of the Resistance makes Leia’s stomach boil, but the alternative is too awful to contemplate.

Whatever Rey’s game is, the best way to help her now is to make her fall to the Dark side as believable as possible. It could take weeks, even months before Rey gets an opening to free them—if they don’t just kill them all in the next hour. If that happens, Leia has no doubt Rey will go down swinging.

Still, safer to avoid this topic in front of the droids. “I’d like to rest,” she says quietly, putting her hand over Poe’s bacta glove to tell him to stay with her. When Desso and Varish move off, she pats his hand and drops her voice to a whisper.

“You okay?” she asks Poe.

“Worried for her. And Finn.” Finn’s another unknown, but if Ben personally plucked Rey out of the blizzard, it’s not hard to figure out what happened to Finn.

Poe whispers, and his face is as sad as Leia’s ever seen it. “He figured out our location somehow. You know what that means.”

Yeah. Leia’s thought of that, too. She was right to be skeptical of Rey’s bond, she was right to worry that Ben could use the girl as a weapon. Whatever sacrifices Rey is making up there, no matter what she does she’ll always be Kylo Ren’s instrument. Her time with the Resistance is over.

“They were right on my tail, Leia, I shoulda never pulled away from them in such low visibility—”

“You are the second in command. They were watching your back so you could get your valuable ass back to your post where you belong. That’s exactly what they should’ve been doing. A squad leader protects his men, but a commander protects everybody. If you’re going to lead, Poe, you’ve got to make peace with people dying to keep you safe.”

“They’re not dead.” The obstinacy almost makes her smile. “And I don’t believe for a second you’ve made peace with it.”

“Damn right I haven’t, but it’s my duty as your CO to tell you to.”

Poe doesn’t exactly smile, but his face softens around the bacta mask. When he runs a hand through his hair he unveils another patch around his ear. Leia squeezes his arm.

“You made the right call, Poe. It’ll never be easy. But you made the right call.”

He lays his hand across hers, bacta-sheathed olive on vein-threaded pink. “Speaking of tough calls,” he says.

She throws him an innocent look. He’s not buying it.

“I know you’re thinking about it.”

“Not an option, Commander Dameron.”

“With respect, General Organa, that’s a steaming pile of bantha shit. I see that look on your face.”

It’s crazy, this hope, especially knowing that it’s Ben’s fault they’re in this cell, that Ben’s doing Force-knows-what to Rey. But it’s still hope.

“Alright,” she concedes. “I’m thinking about it.”

She’s more than thinking about it. She’s already decided. It’s the only thing that’s flashed through her mind since Hux gave that speech: yes, for your son. I’m giving you the chance to hold Ben Solo again.

“The only reason we’re alive is because he wants us to go on the HoloNet and tell the galaxy to stop fighting. If you give him that he’ll kill you.”

“I’m not gonna give him that. I’m gonna try to talk to him. And before you say it, yes, he might kill me, Poe, but maybe he won’t. You were the one defending him, telling me it made sense to hope.”

“Yeah, and I want to believe he can come back, but—” He scratches at the patch at his ear. Leia understands. Poe was happy to preach redemption when they were talking about Rey hypothetically trying to sweet-talk Kylo Ren from a safe distance in her visions. Sending Leia up to a near-certain death at the hands of the madman who hates her, knowing Rey is up there at his mercy, that’s another thing.

“I know. But even if there’s no hope and he’s really gone, I can’t abandon that girl to a monster.” Like I abandoned my son to a monster. “I can’t let anyone else die because—I have to try.”

“This is about Han.”

“And Luke. And all of them.”

It’s the truth, mostly. But it’s also about Ben. She’s still breathing, and that’s more than she would’ve hoped for. Hux offered her amnesty, for kriff’s sake. Her son might still be in there.

Poe’s eyes are shining down at her, pleading, a crack in the façade both of them wear every moment of the day and night for the sake of the people who follow them.

“We need you,” he says. “If this is gonna be the end, I—and if we do get out, I need you. So does Varish, so does Desso. We’re not ready to do this without you.”

She sets her jaw and squeezes his bacta-wrapped fingers. “No one’s ever ready.”

“Don’t make me do this alone, Leia. Please.”

“I still have hope, Poe.”

She drops his hands and wraps her arms around the man who’s been her rock for the past four years. They’re not this affectionate very often, but if she never gets this chance again, she wants her adopted son in her arms. Desso’s watching her from across the cell. He’ll call her a traitor, a collaborator.

“It’s always the same damn choice,” she mutters.

“What?”

The good of the whole goddamn galaxy against her son. How many times did she choose the galaxy—some report, or investigation, or bill, or battle—instead of Ben?

It’s Poe who deserves her loyalty, Poe and all the rest of these people who risked their lives willingly or unwillingly for the greater good. Ben doesn’t deserve it. But maybe that’s the point.

Poe lets her go and frowns down at her. He doesn’t frown often, and the apparatus makes him look wretched. “I hope you’re right,” he says.

She takes a deep breath and looks up at the surveillance droid, preparing for the inevitable round of shouting, the dreary goodbyes. Traitor. Coward. Collaborator.

For thirty years she put her faith in the galaxy. It’s time to put her faith in her son.

She speaks clearly and loudly, like she knows what she’s doing. “Tell Hux I accept. I defect to the First Order.”

***

Leia keeps her emotions reasonably under control until her stormtrooper guards open a pair of doors to reveal the Falcon.

Her boots fall heavy in the dim shuttle bay as they lead her to what will probably be her death. She takes pride in being so small and still making such a big sound in this massive, empty space. Some people move quietly through the world, but not Leia, and not her son. The Force vibrates around her like it did around Vader: bitter, arrogant, and full of murder.

He’s not wearing a mask. She manages not to falter when she sees it, but only just.

At Crait, she assumed he took off the mask for some quintessentially Ben reason, like wanting to look Luke in the eye as he killed him. But, no, now he faces the galaxy—his galaxy—as he really is.

He stands in the hatch at the top of the ramp. He’s ditched the Vader costume for a simple, tasteful, commanding military coat that makes his shoulders even bigger. Leia’s own coat flutters behind her in the drafty hangar. They couldn’t have coordinated better if they’d tried.

He must’ve doubled his weight since she last saw him. The robes and the wind and the salt obscured her view on Crait, hiding the transformation adulthood wrought on her child. At twenty-three, a few months before everything went to hell, he’d been strong but thin, with a chest like a stim addict, slatted and sunken below his skeletal cheeks. He looked like what he believed himself to be: a creep, a failure, hunchbacked and timid between the rages that only made the pain worse.

Power swirls around him now, the power he murdered Han and Luke to get. He may not dress like Vader anymore, but he feels like Vader, like his soul is a wind that could suck all the oxygen out of a room.

He looks like what he is: a prince. A goddamned king. The descendant of the Chosen One of the Force, of queens, of warriors.

And damn it, can she help being proud of him?

Look, Han. Look at our scared little boy. You told me he’d find his courage one day, didn’t you? You held me in your arms and promised me our baby boy was gonna be fine.

Just look at him, Han. Look at our son now.

Chapter Text

Chapter 18: The Revolution

As she steps into the turbolift, Rey calculates the Jakku market value of the components on the control console. She needs a distraction from her trembling certainty that every trooper she passes knows she’s a fraud and they’re going to surround her any second, blasters raised.

It’s a good distraction. The Voratrix is a glorious bloated beast of a ship and every inch of its gleaming black interior would make Unkar Plutt weep for joy. The parts Rey lovingly polished from the picked-over carcass of the old Ravager don’t even come close. Aside from one malfunctioning hoverdroid near Ben’s quarters, it’s obvious that whoever paid to build these ships spared no expense. That knowledge is another heavy weight on her heart. How can the Resistance fight this?

They can’t. That’s why she has to stay. Ben will see that, when he calms down, when he learns to trust her. She’s too physically and emotionally tired to track the waves of Ben’s pain in the bond. He’ll do the right thing with Leia. He’ll convince his mother he’s right, and even Leia’s not so cold she can’t see how much her son has changed. She’ll stand with him. The whole Resistance will stand with him.

Rey squeezes Finn’s jacket under her robe to remind herself that everything will be alright. Ben is kind, when he remembers who he really is. He’s good.

At least her exhaustion makes it easier to keep her breathing low and steady as the lift doors open onto V-Deck. A stormtrooper captain and a column of soldiers peer at her like a squashed bug on a viewport, and Rey can’t shake her bad feeling about this.

“Sir,” the red-shouldered stormtrooper captain asks as Rey steps out of the turbolift. “Can we help you?”

Rey allows herself half a second to ask what Ben would do, coughs in a mechanical sort of way, and pushes past them all without any further acknowledgment. Yes, they’re people under there, but Rey’s relieved to pretend they don’t exist.

The sterile gleaming whiteness of the passage pricks at her corneas after all that blackness, and she blinks a retreat into the shade of the mask. Dozens of stormtroopers part like steel around a torchsaw to let her pass. Where she comes from, the center of attention is the last place you want to be, and in her mask and black cloak, with a lightsaber plainly visible at her side, she’s impossible to ignore.

For all she knows Finn could’ve stolen a shuttle and jumped to hyperspace by now. Even if he’s on this deck, how the hell’s she going to find him in all this? And what the hell is she going to tell him when she does?

“The Force is attuned to your love for him.”

Rey whips around, expecting to see a shimmering spectral Luke, but her blaster is only aimed at a very alarmed cargo droid. This bit of wisdom about love comes from her comm. She presses her thumb over the control and speaks as quietly as she can into the device.

“What did you say?”

“You love him,” Ben says, his jealousy naked in the bond. He’s rushing somewhere; to Leia, or Hux, or one of his meetings. It hasn’t improved his mood.

Rey stops, turns to one of the consoles, and pretends to examine it, but really she just needs to not look at all the people staring at her.

“We’re just friends.”

She says it too quickly, and too loud, as if it really mattered here and now. Two passing officers swivel toward her and she shoves the comm up against her mask, under her hood. She hasn’t got any reason to defend herself to Ben.

“You’re not in love, but you love him, and your love joins you in the Force.”

Rey can’t believe what she’s hearing, or who she’s hearing it from. But why should she be surprised? Any idiot could see how much she cares for Finn, and Ben…she suspects Ben might know more about love than anyone she’s ever met.

Rey’s never felt it. Love. Not so long ago she would’ve taken her staff to anyone who said that, because, well—she loved her parents.

Rey spots an open console bay set back from the main line of the passage, dim except for the somber pulsing lights of the displays. She pulls back into the shadows that offer a little privacy. There’s a datachip there, probably empty, and a vacuum-sealed packet of purple fruit some stormtrooper left. Out of habit, she stuffs them in her pocket beside the holo of Rose’s sister and the parts of the blue lightsaber.

“Close your eyes. Concentrate.” Ben’s voice is more gentle than it has a right to be, considering how they parted. The expression in his own eyes haunts her: haven’t you humiliated me enough?

“Can you feel his signature?” he asks.

Rey struggles to bring her attention back to her body. “What?”

“Everyone feels different in the Force. It’s a blend of feeling, a memory, or a—smell.”

“Are you blushing?”

“No,” he lies.

She’ll ask later. “I can’t feel Finn’s…signature. I don’t know what to look for.”

“Can you feel mine?”

“I—maybe?”

“Describe it.”

She frowns under the mask and tries to run her psychic fingers along the grooves of Ben’s presence in the Force. It’s dark there, and lonely. Her mind catches on a black-domed mask and distant, heavy breathing. Golden dice. Looming shadows that quiver in shades of Snoke and Luke. But under it all, there’s something else.

Words disappoint her. “It’s—If the color black were a song. That’s you.”

That seems to please him, until, out of a place she didn’t know was there, the song speaks to her and she begins to hum. It’s a sad song, sad and slow.

The bond jerks with fear, but also something deeper, like a stim in his veins, or poison.

“Where did you learn that?” His voice is hoarse.

“I don’t know. I couldn’t hear it until I started singing it, but it’s you.”

He swallows.

“What song is it?” she asks, though she doesn’t expect him to answer.

“Mirrorbright. An Alderaanian lullaby.”

“Oh,” Rey says, disappointed. “What’s Alderaan? And what’s a lullaby?”

Her questions disturb Ben almost as much as the song. Fine, so she doesn’t know much about the galaxy because she wasn’t born rich. A lullaby is probably some fancy thing you go to a huge golden theater to hear, like the big Coruscant Opera they showed on holos sometimes at the cantina. Ben’s probably seen loads of lullabies on Alderaan and a dozen other planets.

“Never mind,” he says, and Rey makes a note to ask him about it later, if there is a later. Ben pulls himself together.

“Concentrate,” he continues. “Sense him like you sense me. The knowledge is there, from me; you only need to open yourself to the Force.”

It’s an intimate thing to hear over a comm so close to a crowded passageway, but she doesn’t think anyone heard, and if they did, they probably don’t want to know.

“Hux is almost here,” Ben says. “I have to go.”

She does, too, though she mirrors his own reluctance, and for a moment they both clasp their comms like a rope, reminding them the other is there, and safe. The Force wavers between them, then Rey exhales.

“Rey—”

There’s a choking in it, and a question. He feels it too, the dread.

“You can wait,” she says immediately. “You can wait until I find Finn, then I’ll come with you. You don’t have to do this alone.”

A moment’s pause; she feels him swallow. “I have to go.”

Fine. Fine, right, she’s just nervous because what she’s doing is completely mad, a Resistance fighter chasing after a traitor and pretending to command the First Order. Ben’s only talking to his mother. “Good luck, Ben.”

He nods, and Rey drops her comm back into her pocket. She allows her eyes to drift closed again and tries to summon the memory of Finn’s face when he came for her on Starkiller. Finn is…Sweat over First-Order-standard-issue grooming gel, the same smell on her own skin. Even covered in the grime from his desert trek, Finn was the cleanest thing she ever smelled besides the antibacterial gas-bath at her monthly medical exam. Finn was all leather and citrus and ozone. It’s impossible, now, not to associate that smell with Ben.

Something less than a feeling and more than an instinct moves her forward. It’s still fuzzy, but she follows it like a steelpecker sniffing out a buried wreck. Her reflection stains the pristine floor as she strides through the hallway, and here and there dawn-tinted lights interrupt the bleached-bone whiteness.

Rey jumps when Ben spins in surprise and pain prickles on the side of his hand, but he’s only collided with something—that malfunctioning droid, probably. One of its appendages must’ve nicked his skin. How anxious must a master of the Light and Dark be to run into things in a corridor? Still, there’s nothing she can do for him. He and Leia will work this out together, or they won’t. Either way, it’s Finn who needs her now. There are others looking for him; there must be. Ben said he was under suspicion. The Grand Inquisitor’s on board, whoever that is.

It’s another ten minutes of careful listening before she arrives at a high trapezoidal door that calls her. It doesn’t open for her hand, but it opens when she raises her comm to the scanner. The corridor beyond is deep grey, like the sea on Ahch-To, and dead silent. Slowly, cautiously, she approaches a corner and Finn’s there, just beyond.

His signature hums in the Force and she recognizes the minor notes: a blazing canon, silver armor, a bloody handprint. A fiery cross. The melody of him is Dark, and the Force is solemn here, like the undisturbed quiet of a ship carcass in the Graveyard, musty with old battles and faded hates. Finn’s deep in thought, and so sad it’s hard to feel much joy at finding him.

Rey pauses in front of the wall. The blue lights glint off her mask, her armor, painting her reflection with blue stripes. Black, solid black, and so much like Kylo Ren. What’s she going to tell him?

The vents of her mask hiss on release, but she’s too far away to attract Finn’s attention. Carefully, she sets the mask on the ground and steps around the corner, and there he is, fifteen meters away at the end of the empty, charcoal-paneled passage. Arches of recessed blue lights rib the walls, casting a pensive glow over his stolen white armor. He’s wearing a mask, but he’s not facing her, and he doesn’t see her. She tries not to feel relieved.

The deck at his feet looks like a garbage heap, piled to knee-level with what appear to be random bits of debris. A red sunburst soldered from scrap metal stands out like a flower in the desert. The wall is covered in scratches, letters she can’t read, each with four numbers behind it that she can. Names. Stormtrooper names.

This is a temple.

She takes a step forward, and the soft susurration of her cloak against her sleeve disturbs the silence. Finn spins, blaster aimed at her heart.

For a moment they look at each other over the glinting curves of their weapons. Finn breaks into a run first, and in seconds she’s in his arms, whirling through the air. He sets her down but doesn’t let go, just holds her tight, white armor to black.

“I heard your voice,” he whispers with his mask against her temple. “In my head. I heard you. I knew you had to be alive.”

Rey presses her eyes shut and squeezes her arms around his armored shoulders. He lay close to death when she went into his mind in the blizzard, and she didn’t know if he’d remember. “I’m sorry, Finn, I had to, I promise I didn’t look—”

He compresses the ribbed fabric of her sleeves and leans back to peer at her through his faceplate. “I’ve never been so happy to hear anyone’s voice in my life. How did you—?” he whispers urgently. It feels wrong to do anything but whisper here. “Is Poe—and Rose—? And what are you wearing?”

“Poe’s fine.”

“Rose?”

He’s worried enough that he doesn’t press her on the uniform.

“Missing,” she admits. “But Chewie’s with her.” They were together, moving the Falcon into hiding, and nothing could happen to Rose as long as Chewie was there. In some ways Rey believes in Chewie more than the Resistance; Chewie believes in her, too, and Ben.

Finn breathes out slowly, trying not to panic. To give himself some time, and probably some air, he lifts off his own mask and lets it drop to the floor.

“We’ll find her.” Rose has a part to play. “Leia’s fine, and Snap and Threnalli and Connix. They’re all fine. Are you okay? You were hurt—I thought—I was so scared—”

“I’m alright,” he says, and pride swells in Rey even as Finn wipes her tears indulgently. He’s alright because she healed him, she and Ben. Not even the meddroids could explain it. “They put me in a bacta tank, can you believe it? I guess they wanted to keep me alive so they could get information out of…or.”

He trails off, and the Force spikes with something she can’t identify, something about her. Rey’s smile would probably be convincing if Finn were looking at it; now isn’t the time to explain. But Finn doesn’t ask, and she’s glad.

She opens her eyes with her chin mashed uncomfortably against Finn’s shoulder-plate and her vision swims with hundreds of names scratched on the wall. It’s impossible not to think of her own AT-AT and all the marks there that carved out the years of her life. It seems so long ago, but it’s not. Finn was torn from his world—this world—the same day she was torn from hers, and they’ve both been trying to forget. Rey’s eyes fall on a crude drawing scratched into the wall, four stick-figures with lines across their necks, stretching upward.

“We better go,” Finn says, like he knows what she’s looking at. “I started scouting the brig, they’ve covered it pretty well, but we should be able to make an escape—”

“Wait,” she says, and not just because she doesn’t want to explain why they can’t run off and free the Resistance. Her eyes resolve the numbers below the smallest figure: 2187. She rubs her gloved thumb over the carving, but she can’t erase it, and this makes her more angry than it should. She’s seen a noose before, swinging in the desert wind.

“That’s you.”

He lets her go and looks at her hand, but not the carving. “Yeah.”

A holo peaks out from the carefully-mounded pile, and Finn takes it in his hand. It shows fifty or sixty stormtrooper cadets all standing in neat rows, fully armored except for their close-shaven heads. They can’t be more than nine years old.

“How did you find this?” she asks, something factual and simple for him to hold onto.

“I asked about the Resistance. I must’ve asked the right questions.”

“The Resistance? What is this place?”

“This is a Revolution,” he says, studying the holo.

Rey jerks her hand away from the grooves carved into the wall. “You mean there are more like you? Stormtroopers ready to join us?”

He shakes his head, and the blue-tinted archways above them cast a glare over the holo, so for a moment it looks like he’s holding a shard of Jakku sky.

“This is a grave,” Finn says. “For the people who died in the Resistance attack.”

With exaggerated care, he props the holo beside the red sunburst, a place of honor, and clasps his hands like he’s fighting the urge to kneel, or maybe to pray. Rey’s never seen much point in either.

What did she say to Ben? We’ll light the fire that will burn the First Order down.

Yeah, well, a lot of people die in my mother’s fires.

“You don’t know that,” she says. There’s not much effort in the denial, but Finn doesn’t point that out, he just gestures at the carving, almost like he isn’t scared.

“That’s me with a noose around my neck. It’s not exactly subtle.”

No, no it’s not. And if these are Finn’s enemies, they’re hers, and she needs to know about them. “What does the rest of it say?”

He traces his glove along a crudely-scraped circle emitting a cone of carved light. “That’s Starkiller, and here, it says ‘Rebuild and Retaliate’. And this—” he points to the four stick-figures with scratchy ropes around their necks. “The names are Snoke, Hux, Kylo Ren, and—me.”

It’s all Rey can do not to kick the pile of stupid trinkets these people left to honor their awful dead.“That doesn’t make sense. You’re nothing like Snoke, or Hux. Why do they hate all of you?”

If he notices she left out Kylo Ren, he must think he knows why, and he doesn’t comment.

Finn drops his hand to his side. “They think the Order shouldn’t have lost so bad—and they’re right. The Resistance was lucky, and we’d all be dead if the First Order didn’t stab the troopers in the back. Any stormtrooper captain woulda done a better job than Hux or Snoke or Ren, but they treat us like garbage.”

Rey doesn’t miss the present tense, like he forgot which side he was on for a second.

“But how can they think the Resistance is the problem?”

He sighs. “None of us know better.”

“You did.”

“Don’t say stuff like that, okay? I ran away, that’s all. I was a coward.

Something’s changed in him since Crait, since he ran full-tilt into a canon the size of a shuttle, ready to die. He seems—older. Of course it changes you, a thing like that.

“I checked my records,” he says. “before you found me, when I was looking for information. Phasma executed my whole squad when I left. To punish them for tolerating disloyalty.”

She threads her gloved fingers into his. “You said you wouldn’t kill for them, and you made the right decision.”

“I know I did.” He doesn’t hesitate, and Rey loves him for that, too. “But the right decision got my squad killed.”

“That was the First Order, not you.”

Rey regrets the words as soon as they’re out of her mouth. Reminding Finn, and herself, how terrible the First Order is won’t help her case to stay and change it.

Finn glares at the carving with an unreadable expression, but Rey can’t keep her thought to herself.

“I thought if there was a stormtrooper uprising they’d be on our side,” she says.

Finn snorts like this is funny. Even at Maz’s castle he talked about how there was no winning against the First Order, and at the time she put it down to cynicism and a lack of faith in the Resistance. But maybe, she has to admit, he was just more informed.

He turns her and takes a deep breath that reminds Rey of a happabore's sigh, resigned and afraid.

“So. What did you give him?”

Rey keeps her eyes on the little red sunburst until the tingle of his attention in the Force is too much.

"Who?"

Finn crosses his arms over his chest, like he's defending himself against something and he doesn't trust all that armor to protect him. He glances down at her uniform. “Those aren’t contractors’ blacks. I’m alive, the Resistance is alive, and we shouldn’t be. You made a deal with Kylo Ren.”

“I didn’t give him anything.”

He takes her elbow. “Rey. Did he hurt you?”

“No.”

It’s the truth, but it sounds suspicious anyway. She makes a conscious decision not to know what he’s really asking. Everything he’s thinking, Ben wouldn’t do. Ben’s very shy around me, she could say, and it would be the truth in a sense; he wouldn’t ask me for that.

“If he’s listening,” Finn says, “tell him I’ll kill him.”

“He’s not listening. And he didn’t hurt me. I promise. He’s—he healed you. Then he helped me and he’s going to let the Resistance go.”

Ben will never forgive her for telling Finn this, but Ben has been horrible and Finn needs to understand things have changed. She disengages herself from his arms and reaches under her cloak. The jacket smells like new leather when she places it reverently into Finn’s flabbergasted fingers.

“He had this repaired for you, and I didn’t even ask. And we were just laying on the floor, talking.”

“You were—on the floor—with Kylo Ren?”

Admittedly, that wasn't the most helpful detail to share, given his suspicions. “I--no, it's not--I. Was talking. With Ben. He agreed to come to the Resistance.”

“What?”

“I know, I can’t believe it—”

“Then why are you still here?”

“We were waiting for you to heal more—and.”

“And?”

She leans forward on the theory that he’ll be less mad if he’s hugging her, and because she can’t look him in the eye as she says it. She forces it out in a single rushing exhalation against his shoulderplate. “And-it-doesn’t-make-sense-to-leave-so-we’re-going-to-stay.”

Finn puts some distance between their faces and blinks at her. “Stay.”

She raises her chin. “Yes.”

“This is your idea. You’re gonna defect to the First Order.”

“I’m not defecting.”

“You’re gonna stomp around in a Knight of Ren uniform that cost more than the Falcon and hang out on the—floor—with—the Supreme Leader, but you’re not defecting.”

“Don't look at me like that. It's not like I've turned to the Dark side because I put on black clothes. My Resistance jumpsuit was completely ruined, I needed something, and--" The part of her used to talking her way out of Plutt's bad moods reminds her that making excuses about her stupid uniform is the least important thing she could be doing. "I—Even Poe’s lost hope. We were out in the snow trying to steal ships. The Resistance can’t do anything if we run off again. Ben can do something, Finn, and we can do something if we help him.”

Rey jumps when his hands frame her cheeks. “Listen to me. You can’t do anything good with the First Order. These are bad people, Rey.”

She points at the memorial and the hateful carvings. “I know they’re bad people, I was their prisoner, too, and I blew up a planet full of them—”

“It was a base.”

“What?”

“A military target. Starkiller. Not a planet.”

That’s an important difference, probably, for Finn, but not Rey’s problem right now. She extricates herself from his arms enough to glare at him, but his hands stay on her face. “But Ben’s in command, and he’s going to change things. He’ll stop the stormtrooper program, Finn, he said so. You could find your family.”

His eyebrows rise slightly, but only slightly, at this, like she’s describing a strange dream she had, or what she’d like to have for breakfast.

“And you trust him,” Finn says. Rey, belatedly, reaches up to pluck his hands from her cheeks because she knows where this is going.

“Of course I trust him, did you hear anything I just said?”

This is stupid. They need to get out of here, get back up to Ben. Finn can leave if he wants to; she knew, deep down, that it wasn’t going to be this easy. She knew her time with the Resistance couldn’t last—she’s not like them. In so many ways, she’s not like them.

But damn it, Finn should know better.

“You know more than anyone what he’s going through,” Rey says. “You left. You changed. But as soon as Ben tries it, he’s lying, is that it?”

“Kylo Ren is not like me.”

“You don’t know him.”

“I was on the same ship with him for five years—”

“You don’t know him.”

“Rey,” he says. “Remember when we were at Maz’s castle?”

“You mean three weeks ago?”

If Finn hears her sarcasm, he doesn’t show it. “Yeah. You remember what I said about when we first met?”

She studies the memorial more intently than necessary and says nothing, because she knows where this is going.

His fingers close over her shoulder. “You saw the good in me, even when I couldn’t see it in myself. And I’m grateful, you know, I really am. If you, and Poe, and Leia, if you all didn’t take a chance and trust a stormtrooper—when I lied—then I wouldn’t be here.”

Finn’s eyes are wide, and his pupils are blue in the soft light. “But this guy’s not some trooper running away from his first battle. He’s the reason I ran away. I saw him give the order to slaughter a whole village full of old people and little kids, Rey, and he said it like he was bored. I have nightmares about that voice.”

She glances at Finn’s boots, so white against the blackness of hers.

“He saved you, Finn.”

“And how many times did you have to ask him before he did it?”

Rey shakes her head, still looking at his boots.

“He’s changed.”

“In five hours? He’s a mass murderer. He stabbed Han in cold blood.”

“He’s changed.”

“Or he wants you, and he knows if you think he’s changed, you won’t be able to resist the bait.”

The echo doesn't escape her. You were not strong enough to hide it from her, and she was not wise enough to resist the bait. Why does everyone think she's stupid enough to fall into every trap they set for her?

Because she has, so far. She unclenches her jaw reminds herself she spent years on Jakku honing her instincts before she even knew about the Force. If she can't trust her own judgment, she can't trust anything, can she? “That’s not what it’s like."

“Then what is it like?” Finn's grip on her shoulder has tightened. He doesn't mean it to be threatening, probably, but in all that armor he looks like a different man, a dangerous one. “Because here’s what I see. I see my best friend, the one who told me yesterday that Kylo Ren tricked her into taking over the galaxy, the one who told me Kylo Ren’s trying to brainwash her through some cosmic bond—I see my best friend standing here in full Kylo getup trying to talk me into betraying the Resistance and fighting for the First Order. What am I supposed to think, Rey?”

Rey shakes her head again. Ben’s with Leia, and of course it’s going to be okay. Finn doesn’t know the man who lay with her on the floor and told her how he used to be a small boy, who told her he was terrified. She could tell him, but he'd probably have some reply that would make her doubt herself, and Ben. Needlessly.

But Ben is angry. So, so angry. And Rey, for the first time since he picked her up in the snow, is afraid of what he’s capable of.

The pity in Finn’s eyes makes her angry, too.

“You want to see the good in everybody, Rey. Even me. But some people just want to hurt you.”

“He can’t hurt me.”

She pivots and holds out her hand, feeling a bit guilty when Finn yelps at the mask flying into it. Now that she knows for sure this knowledge is all coming from Ben, it’s easier to tap into what he knows. The Force feels natural, like she’s had a hand tied behind her back her whole life and now she can’t wait to start using it to swing a lightsaber. She was born for this. Ben can teach her. Finn will see.

Finn glares at her. “Should you be doing that with everything? Isn’t that the power that runs the universe?”

“It’s mine, I can do what I want with it.”

It’s not hers, of course, the power. That was the only thing Luke taught her, and Ben taught her, too. But she’s angry, and Ben’s angry, and Finn’s angry, especially when he realizes what’s now in her hand.

“Is that—oh, come on, there’s a mask, too?”

“Yes,” she says. “Either you trust me, or you don’t.”

“Rey, you know I’m only saying this because I don’t want anything else to happen to you. I’ve got your back. Always. And if he really wants to change I’ll be the first person to shake his hand, I promise. But I—the Resistance died in those transports because I put my trust in the wrong person.”

This is what he wanted to talk about, before, a lifetime ago, and Rey can’t tell him it’s not his fault. He and Rose and Poe screwed up, they trusted that codebreaker, and yeah, thousands of people died.

“This isn’t the same,” she says.

“Maybe not. And I know you hate it when I tell you you’re our Jedi, but you are. You’re the best thing we’ve got right now, and if you betray--"

"I'm not betraying anyone."

"If you go over to the other side, it’ll end the war.”

She doesn’t point out that’s exactly what she’s trying to do; Finn wouldn’t understand, and if Rey's honest she's not sure she understands, either. She told Ben this was too big for her. Maybe Ben knows that, maybe he’s using her own ignorance against her.

He wouldn’t do that.

“Just, Rey, I care about the war but mostly I care about you, and I’ve got really good reasons to think this guy, Ben, Kylo, he doesn’t care about you. He wants your power, or something else. Just think a little before you do this, okay?”

At the look on his face, the break in his voice, the anger flows out of her, leaving only exhaustion, and shame. Like a fleeting shadow, Luke said; that was his failure. This is how the Dark side takes you, moment by moment, an unthinking word, a friend betrayed.

Ben’s fury, in the bond, is ice. Leia’s in front of him.

“I’m sorry,” she says quietly. She reaches out for his shoulder, but ends up caressing the jacket. “But I've got good reasons, Finn. I promise.”

Finn crosses his arms over his chest like he’s not sure what to make of her. He’s got every right to be mad at her, and Rey’s been an idiot for not expecting this. What did she think was going to happen?

He says something, but Rey doesn’t hear it. All the oxygen seems to have left the room, and invisible doors shut all around her.

She turns, knowing exactly what she’ll see. Ben is right there, facing away from her, speaking coldly to someone he can't see--his mother. The bond is open, Rey can see and hear everything he says. Ben has no idea.

He’s talking about Rey.

Chapter Text

“Don’t you fucking dare talk to my son. Don’t answer them, Ben, come on, you’re safe with me.”

Leia leaves the beachtowel and Ben’s toy tauntaun behind in her haste to get him out of there. She doesn't allow herself to curse at the paparazzi that dog her all the way to the speeder, making herself say soft words to Ben as she tries to focus on buckling him in. When she slips into the pilot's seat she has to remind herself there would be repercussions if an important public figure mowed down a bunch of leeches on a beach, so she takes a deep breath and lays on the horn before she slams the throttle.

It was stupid to try this. So fucking stupid to go out to a public beach, just the two of them when the whole galaxy knows their faces, but goddamn it, she’s not going to let her son grow up like a prisoner in his own flat. So what if he can use the Force? He needs to learn to control it, and he’s not going to do that if he’s terrified of the galaxy and all their loud, loud thoughts.

She watches her five-year-old in the rearview mirror. He hugs himself in his safety seat, staring down into his lap the way he does when he’s meditating. He’s gotten much better at that lately, calming himself, and Luke has told her it’s damn lucky he can do that, so she doesn’t disturb him. A few months ago he would've been crying, but he's grown up so much since the night she ran in to find him rocking in a corner and Han bleeding on the floor.

“I’m sorry,” Ben says, still looking at his lap.

She takes a breath, mimicking her son’s self-soothing. “Sweetheart, I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at those people with their camdroids. You had a right to a good time.”

“So did you, and I ruined it.”

“My little angel, they would’ve done that even if you weren’t there. It’s me they’re after, not you.”

“They were talking to me.”

Leia tries to explain, but he doesn’t believe her and he’s half-right; her own career is at its height and Han’s coaching in the Sabers for the first time this year. Rumors have been swirling that they’re splitting up and the holonetworks can’t get enough of it. Headlines about Prince Ben, the galactic darling since the day the Concordance was signed, the day Ben came into the world while the whole galaxy celebrated, suffering in the middle of his parents’ epic blowouts assault her every time she turns on the news. They're wrong, obviously. She and Han are fine. Parenthood is fine. They're just sleep-deprived, is all, and Ben is a very special boy.

“Mommy?” he asks when they’re halfway home.

“What, sweetheart?”

“Can Uncle Luke ask the Force to leave me alone?” he asks, like he’s hoping the answer will be different this time.

Leia would’ve closed her eyes if she’d turned on the autopilot. Her son has been inconsolable since that night, a prisoner in his own body, curling up in his room with toy droids and stuffed animals, playing games Leia doesn’t understand and listening to things Leia can’t hear. Leia tries to banish the image of him in his room, on his knees, begging the indifferent Force to abandon him, blaming himself because it doesn’t.

“No, baby, Uncle Luke can’t make the Force go away. It’s a gift, it’s one of the things that makes you special.”

Ben glances out the window toward the beach zooming past their speeder. Leia checks the rearview but it doesn’t look like any paparazzi are still following them. “I don’t want to be special.”

“It’ll get better, sweetheart.”

“I ask it,” he says. “I ask the Force every night to leave me alone. I thought, maybe, since Uncle Luke’s not rotten like me…”

“You’re not rotten, Ben.” He’s so good it’s killing him, and Leia’s torn between the need to keep the world away from her beautiful little boy and the knowledge that if he doesn’t learn to keep himself together, this galaxy will tear him apart.

“I wanted to hurt those people like I hurt daddy,” he confesses. “Because I’m rotten. There's something inside me that's rotten.”

Leia bites her lip and wills herself not to think the words Dark side, but of course Ben will feel it. 

“I was mad too, baby. Remember what Uncle Chewie told you? Anger can be good sometimes, because it tells you when someone’s doing something that’s not right—”

“You don’t have to lie.”

“I’m not lying, sweetheart—”

But he can feel the anxiety under her words, and for all she knows he can hear Vader breathing down her neck. When she talks to other mothers, they tell her how to explain things to kids, like ninety-percent of good parenting is figuring out how to lie. That's what politics is, anyway: lying in all the right ways.

“I left my tauntaun,” Ben says, shifting in his seat. Ben doesn’t like anger, and Leia can’t blame him, since bad things happen when Ben gets angry.

“I’ll get you a new tauntaun.”

“But those people will hurt it, and even if they don’t it’ll get lonely. It’ll think I abandoned it because I don’t love it anymore.”

“Oh, sweetie, it’s just a toy, it doesn’t have feelings.”

His eyebrows knit in the mirror, and he wrinkles the nose that’s already too long for his heartfelt face. “How do you know?”

Her comm buzzes; a quick glance at the screen shows it’s Varish, an update on the treaty with Kuat. Her fingers itch to answer it, because after all if she doesn’t she might miss something, but she forces herself to let it go and focus on her son.

“Trust me,” she says, trying to cover her distraction even though Ben notices it immediately. “It doesn’t have feelings.”

He leans against the side of his safety seat and pouts out at the beach he'll never be allowed to enjoy. “Okay,” he mutters, but he doesn’t believe her.

***

“The uniform fits?” Havel asks innocently as he stands at attention in Ben's office. It's the first time Ben's been in it, another sign of his negligence, and the plant Hux apparently had moved from the Finalizer winks spitefully at him from the corner.

It did fit, Rey's uniform. Appearances have never been of more than academic interest to Ben, whose Master’s psychic presence always reminded him not to waste time on trivial things. But it’s clear, academically, that black suits her, that years on Jakku gave her strong arms and legs, strong hands that looked so small on his lightsaber. Her eyes, flashing over bared teeth in the shuddering light of it, were wild, academically.

”Yes, it fit fine. Thank you."

The dread that's been clinging to Ben's chest since Rey left feels like a needle in his heart, and everything about this kriffing office, from the plant to the desk to the persistent and annoying lack of a throne to the Jedi manuscript raw in his hand, makes it worse.

The man is freshly-shaven, baby-faced, and nervous. He brought Rey her caf, but other than that brief and distracted interaction Ben hasn’t actually laid eyes on the Hosnian lieutenant since that crazed encounter belowdecks when he ate bacon and talked about racing. He sensed her then, Rey, for the first time, feeling the bond bloom with her body as she stretched in bed, warm and soft and inviting enough to tempt him to abandon the discipline Snoke required him to keep.

And that ended spectacularly, didn’t it? Ben finished the day dry-heaving into a sink, crouched and weeping on the floor. He hasn’t had anything to eat since.

"Will Juno Ren require anything else, sir?"

His steward expects to be ordered to prepare separate quarters, or maybe a ship to transport his apprentice off the Voratrix.

Ben absently thumbs the Jedi book in his hand as he considers his answer. Of course he could accept his failure. He could eat nothing but gruel for the rest of his life, he could enjoy the ancient privilege of Jedi celibacy every night in what’s certain to be an obscenely luxurious Imperial bed. He could send away the only person who might ever even consider tolerating his company because he’s terrified of betrayal and he’s terrified of his mother. He could live his whole life in fear, alone. That is one option; that is something he could do.

“Not at the moment, Havel.”

"Yes, sir," Havel says, and Ben approves again of his choice of steward when the man's face betrays nothing.

The Dark side showed him other futures, too, two pale bodies writhing and panting, a strangled ecstasy, a black throne. 

The lieutenant coughs, and Ben stands and indicates the Jedi manuscripts.A thousand generations of Jedi live in these books, in Ben’s hands, reduced to nothing but dry parchment and the faded record of their failure. Maybe he’ll burn these books as an offering; he’s thrown bodies on the fire for the Dark side, but never books.

“While I'm gone, have these scanned,” he says. Ben brought them from his quarters because he doesn’t want anything stinking of Luke anywhere near the place where he sleeps.

“Yes, Supreme Leader.”

“Dismissed, Lieutenant.”

The man salutes, gathers up the books, and turns to leave. His hand is raised to open the doors when Ben remembers something—something important. Crouching on the floor with the last piece of human kindness in the galaxy in his hand wrapped in blue foil.

“And Havel?”

He stops, spins, salutes as best he can with a stack of Jedi manuscripts in his arms. Hux stands waiting in the open door. “Yes, Supreme Leader?”

“Thanks for the chocolate.”

The lieutenant manages a nervous nod. “Of course, sir.” After Ben stumbling in half-drunk last night and then running like a madman onto the bridge, Havel must regret his new promotion. All his officers must think he’s unstable at best and a stim-addict at worst. Or maybe Havel’s just worried about him. Stranger things have happened.

When Havel’s gone, Ben motions for Hux to follow him into the corridor and they turn toward the bridge and the executive hangar where Ben will meet the Falcon and Organa. SQ-3475, Hux’s attache from the Finalizer, waits outside the door at attention, and she nods at Havel before tailing Hux and Ben at a respectful distance.

“What’s chocolate code for?” Hux asks.

“Chocolate. Plant-derived, brown, sweet.”

“I would’ve thought you preferred bitter.”

Ben increases his stride length to force Hux to fall behind, and nearly collides with a hoverdroid. He swats it away, hissing in irritation when a sharp edge punctures his new glove.

“Sorry, sir. I’ll have that droid taken for analysis,” Escue chirps behind them. Ben waves in a vaguely approving gesture and resists the urge to suck at the blood welling through the material of his glove. For a few seconds Hux walks beside him in silence. Ben already feels like he’s being pulled in five different directions and he can’t summon the focus to delve into Hux’s head, but he doesn’t need to to know the general’s trying not to scream in frustration.

“Say it,” Ben orders.

“Your steward restocked your medical kit. Did you really think two shots of whiskey and a standard dose of sedative would do the job?“

He’ll have to make sure Hux doesn’t have access to his records from now on. A quick dip into Hux’s mind reveals that Hux put Havel on a suicide watch the night before; both of them were surprised the Supreme Leader woke up. “I took the sedative because I needed it.”

“Honestly, Ren, I think you’re two soft words from defecting to the Resistance.”

Ben almost pulls out his lightsaber, but restrains himself. There are too many officers in this passage who already think he’s crazy.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ben says.

Hux lowers his voice to a whisper and pulls him aside in what must look like an intimate conversation to anyone walking by, but Hux’s expression is anything but soft.

“What are you doing? You ordered that attack and then cancelled it because you second-guessed yourself, you refused to allow standard interrogations of the prisoners, you ran across the Outer Rim to pluck that gi—woman out of a snowstorm, and the look on your face when she held that lightsaber to my throat tells me everything I need to know even if I hadn’t known you for six years. Frankly, Ren, it fits your profile to throw away an empire for love.”

The shock of the word in Hux’s mouth sticks in Ben’s throat, keeping him from coming up with a reasonable reply, or at least choking him.

“Are you out of your mind? That’s—”

“Perfectly accurate, and we haven’t even discussed how you’ve already failed to fire on Organa when you had her in your sights—I took the liberty of checking your squadmate’s blaster cam. And I see that look, you may choke me if you like, or you can act like a kriffing future Emperor and face facts.”

It’s one thing to carry his weakness inside, and another to hear his second-in-command detail his failures with clinical accuracy. Hux’s chin is raised, daring Ben to contradict his analysis.

For love, Hux said. Of course he’s wrong about the details since Ben’s not capable of love, but not the problem. Ben would kneel to Rey now if she asked, he would wrap his arms around her knees and bury his cheek against the freshly-spun material stretched over her thigh and beg her never to betray him. She deserves better than that. Better than him. The galaxy deserves better.

But she asked to stay. She looked into his eyes like she believed in him, and for a moment, he believed, too.

Ben shakes his sleeve out of Hux’s grip, annoyed at the sting in his hand from the stupid droid.

“I haven’t been myself,” Ben says. “It’s an effect of my Mas—of Snoke’s death, and the breaking of a very strong bond.”

“So I’ve observed,” Hux says, allowing Ben the courtesy of a small lie. “Is that an apology?”

“No. But I recognize I’ve been—negligent. Your advice has been—helpful. I’ve been studying the situation and I have some thoughts.”

“And you’re not delivering them at 0300 in my quarters?”

Ben ignores this, but for the next five minutes Ben goes over the details of their negotiations with the separatist faction and they come to a reluctant agreement on what to do about the Grand Inquisitor and FOSB’s long-term threat to Ben’s power. It feels—comfortable, this. Almost like he belongs here.

They stop outside the hangar. They’re so close now that Ben can practically smell the upholstery on the Falcon.

“Hux. Do you think I can stop this war?” Ben asks.

Hux’s hand twitches like he’s refraining from pinching his nose. “Isn’t the point of your ability to avoid wasting my time with stupid questions?”

Of course Ben is in his mind anyway, verifying that everything he says is true. Hux wants to kill him, but he’s less sure of it than he was ten minutes ago, and that’s something.

“Humor me,” Ben says.

“I—do little else, Supreme Leader.”

“In your opinion, can I hold this galaxy together?”

Hux clasps his hands behind his back.

“In my opinion, Supreme Leader, you’re the only one who can.”

Hux’s mouth turns down in a pout, like he resents this a great deal, and Ben takes a deep breath as he prepares to enter the hangar. Somewhere belowdecks, Rey has followed his directions and found her quarry.

"If it's redemption you're looking for, sir, you won't find it wiping your arse with leaves in wild space with the Resistance. Don't let yourself get distracted."

"It's not redemption I'm looking for."

Hux tilts his head slightly, like he's trying to see through Ben's mask, and shakes his head. Ben turns to toward the hangar.

“Oh, and Supreme Leader?”

“General?”

“Keep the girl. She’s a good influence on you.”

***

The buoyancy in Ben’s step as he leaves Hux doesn’t outlast his first glimpse of the Falcon sitting incongruously between his Silencer and Hux’s command shuttle in the executive shuttle-bay. It’s bolted down, of course, given its tendency to escape. Ben stomps up the ramp and waits at the top for the guards to bring Organa, telling himself he’s too deep in thought to look around his father’s ship.

He promised Rey he’d bring a new order to the galaxy. Not Snoke’s order, not Vader’s, not the Empire’s—something new. So far Ben has been so blinded by the destiny Snoke made up for him that he’s failed to see the alternative right in front of him. An alliance. A dynasty. Something new, something worth living for. Not like the ship behind him, rusted and decrepit; not like the woman bent in front of him between the stormtroopers’ hands, wasted and obsolete. Ben will not kneel to ghosts.

Ben dismisses the troopers that escort her and ducks into the oppressive dark of the freighter. The ship was always a piece of garbage, and Jakku hasn’t done it any favors. The bilge pumps gave out during their flight from his blockade, apparently; the whole interior smells like shit—human, wookiee, and porg. Of course it’s impossible that Han’s cheap cologne still clings to the place, the astringent crap he used to slather on for backroom deals in smoky cantinas. It’s just Ben’s imagination.

As Organa, shackled and bent, follows him into the Falcon’s hold, Ben reminds himself he’s supposed to be enjoying this. She stands in the shadows, pricked out only by the weak red glow of her restraint indicators, and worries at the inside of her cheek like she’s on the verge of saying something honest. Instead, she slumps into the rubbery cushion beside the dejarik table. For a mad moment Ben expects her to ask him to play.

“You look good,” she says. It sounds like there’s something in her throat.

There are so many ways she could've begun this conversation, but of course she went for the shallow, the obvious. It’s not a lie, because she knows he’d detect an outright lie, but Force forbid they ever say anything real to each other.

Her lip tightens, pulling the half-cracked makeup on her chin into what she probably thinks is a smile. The yellowed plastene of the wall panels paints her in shades of jaundice. Ben thought she was beautiful, once, but for six years all he’s seen of her are grainy shots in intelligence files, and they don’t do justice to her decay.

He should say something. He has all the power here, and a moment ago he had all the plans. Instead he releases her restraints with a wave of his hand, letting them fall to the table, forgotten.

She flexes her wrists as her gaze slides over his shoulder to the viewport, the cockpit, the worn pilot’s seat. “You told him Ben Solo was gone,” she says to the empty chair.

The grates below his boots rattle as he walks in a sluggish orbit around her, and he feels vaguely sick. It was a stupid thing to say; whatever name he makes up, he will always be weak.

“Is it true?” she continues, “or is my son still in there somewhere?”

Her son. The old Ben would’ve screamed and ranted just to deny his own weakness. Kylo Ren would’ve.

“Your son is right in front of you,” he says, more softly than he means to. “And you can’t even look at him.”

Her eyes, still focused on the place above the pilot’s chair where those stupid dice used to hang, fall closed.

“Look at me. Mom.”

The syllable detonates the Force. Her jaw clenches, because she thought she would weep with joy if she ever heard that word again. What better way to mock her?

She bites at her cheek again, thinking, before she finally, finally, looks at him. There’s something there, sparkling and raw behind the faded colors of her irises. Ben lets her hold his gaze for a long moment, then turns away, unintentionally finding himself without any excuse not to look at the cockpit.

His father’s seat is there, and Ben has a simple choice: take it or don’t take it. The only reason not to take it is fear, so he takes it. The narrow scoop of fake leather protests his body like it always did. Even as a rod-thin teenager, Ben was always the bigger man.

There’s no dignified way to sit in this damn child’s seat, so he settles for reclining with his legs stretched out full-length and refuses to feel like this is something momentous. It’s a chair. A dirty chair covered in wookiee hair and Rey’s stale nervous sweat. He crosses his arms over his chest, and his mother shakes her head because of course that makes him look even more like Han.

His mother presses her hands on the dejarik table and stands, and Ben expects her to play some power-game where she tries to loom over him as he sits, even though they’re almost eye-to-eye. But instead she walks with labored steps to him and sags into the co-pilot’s seat, eyes darting furtively up to where the dice usually hang. The lights shining through the front viewport feel too bright, and too unsteady. They still lie in her pocket, the dice.

“You used to love this ship,” she says.

He says nothing, because there’s no point protesting. It’s garbage, but it’s magnificent garbage, and no competent pilot would disagree.

“Your father would’ve wanted—”

“It doesn’t matter what my father would’ve wanted since I stabbed him in the heart and pushed his corpse off a bridge.”

She doesn’t flinch, because she’s Leia Organa and he shouldn’t be surprised when she meets cold with cold.

“I want to know why. You owe me an explanation.”

“I owe you nothing.” The rage he expected to fill the hole in his chest refuses to materialize, and he mentally kicks himself for trying to imitate Snoke’s cadences, the fearless elegance Ben Solo never had. She gazes at the throttle, worn by generation’s of pilot’s hands.

“Hux says Rey betrayed us,” she says, and the Force wavers with fear. “Is that true?”

Ben doesn’t need the Force to know what she’s really asking. He’s enjoying a winter holiday in the arms of his new apprentice. He’s not especially surprised his mother thinks he’s capable of…whatever she’s imagining. Ben would’ve done it if Snoke ordered it, and, after all, he’s done worse. Let his mother believe whatever twisted fate she's dreamed up for Rey. Rey is safe; let his mother hurt.

“What do you think?”

“I saw Darkness in her.”

“You saw me.”

“That’s not what I mean and you know it—”

“You wanted to kill her until you figured out you could use her to kill me. Do you deny it?”

“You want the truth,” Organa says, watching him in the strobing light of the hangar, and Ben resists the urge to shake his head to clear it. It’s not the hangar; it’s his vision that makes him feel like he’s standing in a nightclub, or in the wreck of the Supremacy with its flickering emergency lights. It comes and goes, and he wonders if he might actually be sick, or maybe it’s low blood-sugar after days without a real meal. He pushes it away to concentrate on Organa.

“Obviously.”

“Fine. Yes, I thought about it. I sat up at night and I thought about whether I’d have to give the order to assassinate my own son. I thought about asking Rey to do it. Is that what you want to hear? That I’m some kind of vindictive strategist, that I’m cold and heartless? Or do you want to know that I sobbed my eyes out for you? Because I did.”

This doesn’t surprise him, of course, that she wants him to die. It’s obvious, nothing he didn’t already know, nothing he hasn’t suspected since Luke tried to kill him. The Force around Organa solidifies with—guilt, yes; anger; but mostly, fear. Ben struggles to card his psychic fingers through the strands of it, and when he does, the truth hits home like a knife in his gut. He expected it, yes, but it still hurts to know she’s covering for Rey, trying to preserve the mission.

Haven’t you humiliated me enough?

“Did you hash it out in a briefing?” He stands and steps forward, caging her into the co-pilot’s seat, using his bulk against her the way he never could when he was small and she was so, so big. “Did you order her to get close enough to me to steal intel and then assassinate me—was that the plan?”

“Sit down, Ben.”

He doesn’t sit, in his father’s chair or anywhere else, though his heart is pounding and he's sweating. Of course Rey offered to stay; what better place to spread Organa’s disease than from the center of First Order command? Asking him to flee to the Resistance was probably another part of the ruse. The Order was always the target, and he was stupid to think anyone could ever care for him.

But Ben could take Rey from her. He could destroy them both, stop this futile quest to keep Rey from falling, to save her, because nothing between them is real. Rey is Organa’s apprentice, she’s never done anything but watch him and learn his weaknesses and use them to pry him apart. She doesn’t deserve salvation, even if he could give it.

He’s breathing too hard, but he can’t get enough oxygen—the Force has tightened around him and he recognizes it for what it is. If he turns around he’ll see Rey staring at him. She can hear him, and it’s obvious, isn’t it? The Force connected them in this moment so he could give her the truth the Dark side wanted him to give. Good.

At least his hands aren’t shaking. That’s good, too. The Force feels thin around him, like Rey’s presence is sucking it away. Even the ache of Organa in front of him has grown dull and distant, like a headache after a couple of pills. He feels—wrong.

“Rey never did anything but try to convince me you were worth saving,” she says.

“Don’t. Don’t try to cover for her.” That’s all she’s doing, trying to salvage the operation by convincing him Rey is worth trusting.

There was never going to be a homecoming, a reconciliation—nobody’s here to save his soul. Luke told him so to his face, didn’t he? Snoke told him, too, in those first weeks after Ben burned the temple and he waited, a shaking wreck using everything he had to protect the others from the Master who rejected them, for Luke or his mother to come to the rescue.

You were a fool to hope, my apprentice. You try to blame me for your sins, but you know in your heart you were always rotten, don’t you? Everyone else does, even your mother, even Skywalker. I told you so.

“This bond between you—”

“Is a noose. I used her to hunt you down, I used her to destroy that base. There’s nowhere in the galaxy she could go where I couldn’t find her. She’s mine, she belongs to me, she belongs to the Dark side whether she believes it or not.”

"Ben, what have you done to her?"

He pauses, just a moment, to think about whether he wants to say the words he can’t take back. His hands are steady, but it takes effort to keep them that way, like some palsy is crawling its way up the veins of his wrist.

The cut on his palm throbs, and finally, Ben understands. If he pulls off that glove, that tiny prick will be angry, swollen, maybe black. He closes his eyes.

He doesn’t even know who did it. That’s the irony, isn’t it? It wasn’t Hux, that’s all he can know for sure. When he reaches out unconsciously to see if the general knows something’s wrong, Ben only hits a wall, like the Force in him is too tired to travel the distance to Hux’s mind. It could’ve been FOSB, or some stormtrooper conspiracy, or a traitor working for the separatists in the Core, or someone from Onara, or maybe it was Rax. Maybe he’ll find out who did this before the poison takes its course. Maybe he won’t. He’s surprised by how little he cares.

How long does he have before he loses consciousness? Minutes? He could try to reclaim the ship. He could fight. But the galaxy doesn’t matter, Hux’s elaborate plans for Organa don’t matter, the only thing that matters is taking Rey and Organa down with him.

"What the hell have you done to that girl?" Organa demands, but he ignores her.

“She killed her parents,” he says, and the bond feels cold behind him, distant. Even as the words leave his mouth he feels her locking them away in that rotten place deep inside her, the swamp she calls the Ocean, where they can’t hurt her. But the Darkness is awake, because he woke it, and they can hurt her, now. That will be his last act before the Dark side finally spits him out—to hurt. It was all he could ever do.

“You saw her rip a ship out of the sky. She killed her parents and then the guilt kept her from sensing the Force for years. Even you sense the truth.”

He says it to Leia, because it’s true, but mostly he says it for Rey.

“Like you,” Organa says, like he’s revealed some secret. “You both hurt someone with the power you didn’t understand.”

No, not like him. That girl is nothing like him, she’s ignorant, she’s a thief and a liar, she follows Organa like a lost animal waiting for the love that will never come. Ben refuses to acknowledge what’s happening to his eyes. The moisture is a side-effect of the poison, probably.

The lightsaber is alive in his hand. It’s more unsteady than usual, like the crack in the crystal that powers it has grown, and in the light of it Organa’s eyes are rabid, like Luke’s, like Snoke’s, like Rey’s.

The bond grows colder and the connection between them goes slack as Rey disappears. The only sound is Organa’s breathing and his, strangely magnified in the ship’s interior, and the crackle of the lightsaber. Rey’s rage had faded to something hazy, an echo far away.

“I told her you deserve to die,” Organa says quietly. “Show me I’m wrong. Tell me you haven't hurt her.”

Wherever Rey is, she’s shaking with rage, speaking, running. He ignores her, and his mother waits with eyes wide, falsely innocent, like she really believes he could do anything other than fail.

“Tell me I was wrong, Ben.”

He raises the lightsaber to her throat.

“You weren’t wrong,” he says. Maybe it wasn't the answer she was expecting, but it probably was--he has so little of the Force now that he can't read whatever's behind her eyes, but she knows him well enough to know what he was asking for when he handed his lightsaber to his father and begged him to end the pain.

She swallows, flinching against the heat on her throat, and then a hot, dry hand closes over his clammy one, enclosing his glove and taking some of the weight of the lightsaber that suddenly feels too heavy to hold. These hands taught him to hold a blaster steady; these hands used to braid his hair.

“Let go, sweetheart,” his mother says, tugging gently at the weapon that’s a millimeter from burning through her windpipe. Her hair has come loose from her bun, and she looks battle-worn and tired in the angry light. He hurts, everything hurts. “Let go.”

He does not let go, but the lightsaber goes out, even though he was only half-conscious of his thumb moving. He swallows mouthfuls of air that feels suddenly oxygen-poor. Rey’s running now, pulling the mask over her head, and his mother is watching him like he’s a detonator about to go off.

“Let go, Ben.”

It doesn’t matter now, and he’s so, so tired of fighting.

He pulls out his comm. There are so many orders to give, if only he could focus, but if he’s about to lose command of the Voratrix, one has priority.

“Ben, something’s wrong—” Organa begins, but he jams his thumb on the screen. Rey will hear this through her own comm; that’s good. He can barely feel her, now.

“This conversation is over,” he snaps, then, to the comm, “have all the prisoners from KX-04 transferred to a secure ship under the command of Juno Ren. Get them off this ship.”

“Yes, Supreme Leader,” answers the nameless officer on the other end. That’s a relief, to still be Supreme Leader.

Rey’s voice punctures the comm a second later. “Ben—”

“Get the hell off this ship—”

The comm goes dead. Whoever’s orchestrating this, they’ve cut off communications, which means they’re probably standing on the bridge holding a blaster to Jacindi’s head, cutting the nerves that coordinate the vast ship’s appendages. It’s all a bunch of ants now, everyone moving independently according to their training. If he’s lucky the brig officers will follow Juno’s orders. If he’s not—

“You’re letting us go,” Organa says, but Ben waves her away. "Rey's safe." The Falcon is bolted to the hangar deck to prevent the Resistance from doing exactly what he’s about to let Organa do. He runs down the ramp and nearly stumbles when he jumps the last few meters. He throws out his hand toward the bolts under the ship, but the Force has abandoned him.

“Ben,” his mother shouts. She’s coming down the ramp too, moving faster than he would’ve expected, or maybe his mind is just slow.

“Stay in the ship,” he orders, but of course she ignores him. Is his voice slurred? Doesn’t matter. His gloves feel clumsy on the console, but he blinks at the obvious conclusion: the only way to free the ship is manually. That makes sense, to make the process as slow as possible, and as difficult as possible to do while someone’s shooting at you. Is there a droid? No, there’s no fucking droid; the hangar was cleared before this meeting as a security measure, because of course the kriffing Supreme Leader isn’t going to need to unbolt the ship.

As he stumbles to the first bolt and picks up the huge wrench he notes absently that shooting seems immanent, since a door whooshes and footsteps are pounding across the hangar.

“Supreme Leader!”

Even in his hazy state Havel’s voice is so urgent and so unexpected it makes him jerk up. The steward looks back and forth between Ben and Leia, both standing on the deck, but if he has any thoughts about the situation, he keeps them to himself.

“Sir, SQ-3475 managed to get a message to me from the bridge. Comms are down, sir, and Hux and Mitaka have been arrested. They’re coming for you—”

“Bolts,” Ben says. He could ask who did this, but he doesn’t care.

“Yes sir,” Havel shouts, and he’s already running, giving a wrench to Organa, too. This feels ridiculous, squatting here without the Force, without Rey, wrenching up bolts the size of his hand like his life depended on it, because Organa’s does. The fate of the galaxy, the Resistance, the First Order, it all comes down to eight fucking bolts.

He falls, and Organa’s on him, cradling him in her arms.

“Poison,” she calls, though to herself or Havel, he doesn’t know. “Ben, you’ve got to get up. You've got to tell me where Rey is so I can get her out of here with the rest of them.”

“Get off this ship.” His voice is far away. Whatever this is, it’s working fast now, sending his heart skipping toward cardiac arrest. It hurts. Her hand on his heart hurts.

“Got it,” she says, but she’s talking to Havel, not him, and there’s something in her hands. A medpack.

"Hurry," Havel calls. "They're coming."

If there was ever a moment for forgiveness, this is it; he'll never see her again. She’s daring him to do it, tilting her chin up at him, arrogant, smug, just like he remembers, though her face is blurry.

She takes something in her teeth and spits it out, leaving a huge syringe glinting naked in her hands. “Sorry, kid, this is gonna hurt.”

His awareness thins to the point of a needle, and his mother stabs him in the heart.

She’s right. It hurts, and he doesn’t know if he screams, but his throat is raw, and his muscles flood into involuntary relaxation. A hand holds him down. Hers, probably.

“I didn’t do this for you,” he says as the world fades out above him. He needs her to know that before it’s over. “This doesn’t change anything.”

He thought he’d push her away if she touched him, but he was wrong. He lays unmoving as she grips his glove between her palms and raises it to her cheek. He has a vague awareness of it hurting the tiny cut on his hand. “I know, baby.”

“I didn’t do this for you,” he says again.

“I know, sweetheart.” She kisses his glove, and she can’t quite hide the tears she leaves behind on the leather as she lets his limp fingers drop. “I know.”

Chapter Text

Leia’s son is not going to die on this hangar floor gunned down by his own men. Let him hate her, if he needs to, but Leia won’t let him die alone and bitter and afraid, not while she’s still breathing. She will live long enough to show him she understands, and she’s sorry.

A deep throb wavers up from the depths of the ship, startling her to her feet as she runs for the next bolt. The baby-faced First Order officer has moved fast and they’re both working on their last ones. But that sound fills Leia with horror. It’s one she’s only heard a few times, on official tours at the Kuat Drive Yards or the great shipyards of Mon Cala: the sound of a massive starship powering down.

“They’ve shut off power to this sector from the bridge,” Leia yells. “Lights will go soon. Did you seal off the entrance?”

“As best I can, ma’am. It’s sealed on my clearance.” Leia decides not to ask him how high his clearance is. If he’s following the Supreme Leader around, hopefully it’s higher than his 2^nd Lieutenant’s bars suggest. Not that it’ll matter much when power goes out.

The distant pinging of blaster fire in the corridor signals that someone, at least, has figured out there’s a coup going on, but there’s no way to tell if the winners are friends or foes, and Leia, for her part, doesn’t have any friends here.

She’s got to get to Rey. But—Ben. Ben. The nova of his power in the Force has collapsed. He needs more than a standard wall-mounted medpack and Leia’s rusty first-aid skills if he’s going to survive, and he is going to survive.

The bolt comes free and drops it to the deck, and over the crash there’s another sound, like thunder—someone’s pounding on the hangar door. “It’s sealed!” someone’s shouting. “Ren’s in here, get a torch before they escape!”

“Get him into the ship!” she shouts at the kid.

He runs to comply, and Leia jumps to the last bolt, keeping an eye on Ben’s body sagging up the ramp as she turns the wrench. Then a grunt and the creak of unused hinges makes her look up. A wall panel behind one of the bat-winged command shuttles has swung open.

It probably came from a panic room, judging by Hux’s expression. He’s canting to the side, struggling to hold the blaster that’s pointed at Leia’s chest. Leia hauls out the last bolt, and the ship is free. But she’s unarmed, outgunned, and out of time, and her eyes meet Hux’s across the hangar. The young officer is on the ramp holding Ben’s body, and he has no idea who’s just entered the room.

No. No, she is the daughter of Bail and Breha Organa. She is the daughter of Padme Amidala. She’s the daughter of Darth fucking Vader, the sister of Luke Skywalker, and she is. Not. Unarmed.

She throws out her hand and Hux’s blaster comes sailing into her palm.

“Lieutenant, shoot this woman,” Hux orders without missing a beat. The man holding her son’s unconscious body drops it on the ramp and goes for his own weapon. But he doesn’t shoot, not quick enough.

“Don’t kriffing move,” she says.

For a moment they stand like that, Leia with Hux’s weapon leveled at the general’s heart, the lieutenant with his own blaster pointed at her head. Ben’s head lolls backward, and in the Force Leia feels how little time he has. The pounding at the door gets louder.

“The power’s about to go out,” Leia informs Hux, and her voice is cold and dead, like she’s wearing a mask. “When it does, those doors are opening. You’re either leaving with us or staying with whoever’s on the other side.”

Hux considers this, but his deliberation is surprisingly brief. He’s been shot; his hand, free of a blaster, has settled on his side.

“It seems we’re all committing high treason this evening,” he says, making a mocking bow. “I need a weapon.”

Leia holds out her other hand toward her son, and a moment later something huge and cool smacks into her hand, and Hux’s eyes go wide.

“You know how to use this?”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me—”

She throws Ben’s lightsaber at Hux, and the image of it spinning in the air is the last thing she sees before the lights go out. Screams and blaster fire pour into the darkness, cutting her off from Hux and the Falcon.

“Get him on the ship!” Leia shouts again to the baby-faced officer. “Start the engines!”

“We need to open the airlock!” he calls even as he does his duty, pulling Ben’s body into the safety of the ship.

All she can do is fire into the darkness and vault herself with unnatural strength through the hangar, because her baby is on that ship and she’ll be damned if she lets him die here with these people.

A fiery cross erupts in the center of the fighting, illuminating Hux’s terrified face for an instant before Leia has to focus all her attention on shooting the people between her and her son. Adrenaline floods her veins, and so does something else, something she’s only felt in the most dangerous moments. Her darkest moments.

But she’s a woman, a tiny one, still strong but past her prime and recovering from massive decompression and radiation sickness, and she’s no match for half a dozen stormtroopers in full armor. A blaster bolt nicks her in the arm and the sound she makes is inhuman and raw and futile. They grab her arms. The blaster disappears from her hand, the sparking red cross clatters to the ground and goes out. Hux howls in pain; a young voice, the officer’s, yells too, like he’s jumped down from the ramp to get to the airlock console.

Ben is going to die unless these sons of bitches get out of her way. She can’t help it, she pictures Ben’s body splayed on the grate floor of the Falcon’s lounge behind her, but superimposed over it, all she can see is a sullen little boy floating two golden dice dreamily in the air, so beautiful that she and Han can’t help forgetting about whatever they were bickering over.

Leia can picture him, but she can’t feel him. Her son’s silence stains the Force, blotting over the shots, the plasma bolts, the anonymous death all around her.

Ben used his last moments to tell her how much he hates her, how much he deserves to die. Maybe his victims deserve justice, maybe his death will balance some cosmic scales of suffering, but Luke spent his whole fucking life balancing cosmic scales and now he’s dead, and Ben is alive, and she’ll slaughter anyone who tries to hurt her son.

May the galaxy forgive her.

Something metal and cold presses against her temple but Leia no longer cares. There is anger in the Force, and lightning in her hands.

***

When the power goes out the Dreadnought becomes a tomb, but Rey is glad for the shelter the darkness provides.

Finn’s fingers dig into her shoulder while she hunches over in a corridor they both hope is empty. After Ben gave his final, cut-off order and the comms went out, they ran toward the brig and found themselves fighting for their lives against stormtroopers shouting to kill Kylo Ren. They escaped, barely, and ran and ran until the lights went out and they found themselves here, cowering.

The only sounds as Finn and Rey crouch in the darkness are the soft squeaking of their gloves clasped together and Rey's breath in the black mask. It's a vacant sound, too fast, too loud, too wet, like something huge and devouring that sucks at the hairs on her neck, something pulled from a nightmare that isn’t hers.

Finn doesn’t dare ask what happened with Ben. They can’t make a sound.

Ben lied about not ordering the attack. He found the Resistance because of her, because she stood up to Leia and swore the bond wasn’t dangerous. How many people are dead because she thought she knew what she was doing? How many people are dead because she trusted Ben fucking Solo—again? And here she was, like an idiot, trying to convince Finn to trust him, too.

There’s nowhere in the galaxy I couldn’t find her, Ben said. If he lives, she’ll never be able to stay with the Resistance. Leia promised to do everything she could to let Rey stay, but Rey can’t put everyone in danger on her account. And now Leia’s trapped with Ben, in pain, because Rey trusted him. She’ll have to go off somewhere and be what she’s always been: alone.

Finn’s breath hitches, and Rey hears it, too: footsteps, stormtroopers arguing. They need to go. The Resistance waits, maybe, locked up in cells in the brig a hundred meters down the pitch-dark artery of V-deck. There was shooting, before, blaster against blaster, stormtrooper against stormtrooper. Comms are out and no one knows what’s happening. The Force quivers with it, the fear of thousands on thousands of armored soldiers lost in the dark, a dull inhibited panic that coats Rey’s tongue like bitter caf.

The footsteps pass by, and she and Finn skitter along the passage in the dark.

Ben probably won’t live. The bond stretched and sagged like solder pulled too thin and now he’s barely hanging on. She ought to be glad, after what he said, what he did. She ought to be glad.

Finn grabs her arm and jumps behind her, blaster raised. Stupid, stupid, Rey’s been too deep in her own pain to notice the troop of stormtroopers marching from a side corridor carrying lights. As soon as they round the corner their masked faces take in Finn leveling a blaster at them, and Rey’s black uniform.

“Juno Ren.” the red-shouldered captain says, hand hovering near his blaster.

“Yes,” Rey replies, a single low syllable in the vocoder. In the Force she can feel Finn’s armored finger on his blaster trigger.

A dozen stormtroopers salute and the captain steps forward. “The brig was told to expect you, sir,” he says.

“We ran into some trouble,” Finn deadpans. The captain nods and barks an order to surround her and Finn, and they begin to sprint the rest of the way toward the brig, and when they arrive outside a huge steel door she can barely see in the bouncing lights, he calls out his designation and that Juno Ren has command.

Rey’s sigh of relief fogs her mask.

“Officer on deck!” someone inside calls, and sixty stormtroopers stop what they’re doing and salute Rey and Finn as they slide to a stop outside the brig complex. Rey takes a moment to consider that she’s walking into a First Order prison, but there’s no sense of malice in the Force, only the stormtroopers’ guarded, edgy caution. Considering that her friends are in there, she doesn’t have a choice.

Someone’s touching Ben’s glove, wherever he is. Leia? There’s moisture on his cheek, pain in his chest, though he’s unconscious.

Ben is dying.

“Juno Ren, sir. This way, sir,” he says. Rey doesn’t bother correcting the gender. “The prisoners have been evacuated to the secure shuttle bay and the transport’s being loaded. This is your crew,” he says, gesturing to the dozens of troopers behind them.

Finn’s shock tickles the back of her neck, but she doesn’t have time to explain. Ben is dying, Leia is too far away to help, and they need to get to hyperspace, and she needs to make sure they don’t end up stranded again, starving.

“Provisions on the transport?” she asks, thanking the Force for the vocoder that makes everything she says, no matter how quivering and uncertain, sound like a command from Snoke himself.

“Enough for crew and passengers for seven days, sir. We can arrange more—”

“No. There’s no time. Take me to them.”

There really is no time. Finn and the stormtrooper captain catch her when she doubles over in pain. Ben, across the ship, arches his back and seizes and screams, and Rey clutches her chest over her heart, where it feels like a needle has stabbed her.

“Juno Ren, sir! Medical!”

Finn grabs her hand. “What’s happening?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine. It’s—”

Ben’s losing consciousness, fast.

She takes in the stormtrooper captain. She sags against a cell door and presses the heels of her hands against her temples, or tries to—she’s suffocating in the steel mask, and the jittery comm-lights bouncing off the reflective wall panels and floors make her dizzy. Should she say this in front of the stormtroopers? What if they betray her when they find out someone is challenging Ben’s command?

“The Supreme Leader,” she says. “He’s hurt. He’s…”

Think, Rey, think.

She can’t think. Ben is unconscious.

Doesn’t matter. You’re not dead, Finn’s not dead, the Resistance isn’t dead. Think.

She forces herself to straighten. The stormtrooper captain’s mask tilts with worry. “Sir, are you saying this is a mutiny?”

“Yes.” Her voice carries no emotion. “We need to get to hyperspace. Whoever’s going against the Supreme Leader will come after the prisoners—”

“Understood, sir. Come with me.”

They take the rest of the corridor at a run and slide into a hangar where stormtroopers hastily load about thirty hooded and cuffed prisoners into a large transport. Finn activates Rey’s comm-light and they run alongside the prisoners, betraying nothing, looking for anyone familiar. There’s Varish’s blond fur, Desso’s stocky legs in an oddly-clean uniform. Some of them—the Senators and their staff, the ones who never asked for more than a desk job—are shaking, begging, surrendering, but their fear and pain rings hollow to Rey in the Force. They’ll have to answer to that cowardice later, maybe, when the hoods come off. For now, there’s no time. They have minutes, and for Ben it’s already too late.

The stormtrooper captain shouts orders and Rey is, for once, grateful for the First Order’s chain of command, for the military precision the saves her from having to know what the fuck she’s doing.

Desperately, she surveys the prisoners, Finn by her side. No Chewie, no Rose, no Connix, no one from Raptor squad, not even a droid. These aren’t really her people, not anymore.

But she missed one—there, to the side, arguing with two of the stormtroopers. “Look, I’mb just saying I dever got to pass Hux that bessage about his buther—”

“That one,” Rey orders before Finn can shout with glee. “Hood off.” The vocoder masks the resignation in her voice, the—grief. They don’t have time.

“Yes, Juno Ren, sir.”

The stormtrooper captain nods, and one of Poe’s handlers rips off his hood, revealing a banta-mask covering his nose and gruesome bruises across his face. Was he tortured? No, Ben gave her his word—but Ben also said he didn’t order that attack. Poe arm’s in a sling, and he favors one leg.

Poe shakes out his curls with a motion he must’ve practiced in a mirror as he blinks in the too-bright light. “Oh, Juno Ren. Good to know you people come in small. Look, I need to talk to Kylo—”

“Quiet,” she says in the mask as she drags him aside. Finn watches the rest of the prisoners being loaded even though Rey can feel his anxious attention on her and Poe. “Poe, it’s me—”

“Rey? Holy—shit, Rey, that is one hell of a—I think I’m in love.”

She doesn’t need to tell him to keep it down. He’s no novice to escaping the First Order, is he? But she’s unprepared, and irrationally angry, when he starts laughing hysterically and opens his mouth like he’s about to comment on her outfit. Ben is almost dead. They don’t have time.

“Do you know the next rendezvous point?” she asks.

Chewie explained the system on the way to Ahch-To: the encryption system, the coordinates, the plans that allowed the Resistance to find one another without the First Order catching on.

“Yeah,” he says, sobering. “Standard protocol will keep everyone from the base there for twelve hours before they move on.”

Move on. Jump to the next encrypted location, un-traceable, lost.

“Get there. Finn—” Poe glances at Finn’s masked face with a knowing look, “—I’ll put you in command. As soon as you get to hyperspace, disable tracking and—”

“Get down!”

Rey doesn’t have time to follow the stormtrooper captain’s orders before he jumps on top of her, barreling them both down to the ground, while Finn does the same to Poe. Blaster fire pings overhead, searing metal and armor.

“Get them to the ship!” Rey yells at the rest of the stormtroopers, who automatically form a rear-guard action, defending the prisoners as they retreat up the ramp.

“Get off me,” she yells at the captain—but there’s no response. Rey, her shoulder protesting every movement, hoists herself up, and the captain and all his red-trimmed armor’s dead weight on top of her.

She doesn’t think. She grabs the blaster from his belt, switches off the safety, and fires.

The next minutes are a blur of light as Rey retreats toward the ship, a ring of stormtroopers surrounding her, forming a wall of fire and armor that protects her and Finn and Poe and the Senators. The stormtroopers already inside the ship call for her to come in, get cover.

But Rey doesn’t go up the ramp.

“Rey!” Poe calls. “We gotta get to Leia.”

“She’s too far away! We’ll never—”

“I’m not leaving this damn ship without her—”

Poe’s down on the ground, and with a shout of rage Finn sprints toward the stormtrooper who shot him, only to get slammed by a vibroprod in his already-injured side. Rey can barely see a thing in the darkness broken only by blaster-fire, but she spots Finn’s armor falling. He’s down. Without thinking, Rey vaults toward him, firing wildly into the darkness, logic forgotten, Force forgotten.

Something invisible hits her in the side, and with a sickening crunch of ribs fracturing she’s thrown out of the air to skid across the floor. Her steel mask hits the deck hard, and she blinks away the red spots in her eyes and tries vainly to check the back of her head for blood. Then she spots it, the flashing surface of white shoulder plate attached to a chrome arm attached to a blaster pointed at the gap between her mask and her tunic.

She’s too slow. Time slows down in her daze and in the strobing, throbbing, roaring darkness she can’t stop looking at the silver-armored finger flexing, curling, ready to pull the trigger—

Something blue and blinding splits the steel floor beside her left eye, and she rolls aside, not counting on the trooper to miss twice at point-blank, and as her knees hit the floor she comes-to enough to recognize that the roar has a rhythm, a language, familiar. The articulate, deafening, filthy cursing of a very pissed-off Wookiee.

The chrome-armored trooper pivots to target Chewie and it’s the last thing he does before a huge arm sweeps him out of the way—

And barrels toward Rey like a rabid happabore.

Instinct takes over. Rey’s still wearing black armor, still dressed like something out of a Resistance nightmare, but she can’t worry about that right now because she’s about to be dismembered by her co-pilot. Blindly she reaches to her side and her next conscious thought is that Chewie, in the stinging light of the red lightsaber, looks so, so sad.

He thinks she’s Ben. And in the instant he thinks it he jerks his weapon aside, swinging wide enough that the lightsaber doesn’t even connect with it. He’s trying to spare Ben.

“Chewie!” she shouts. “It’s Rey!”

He’s gone a little deaf in his old age but he hears her enough that without even breaking the momentum of his assault he swings his other arm down and half-hauls, half-tosses her to her feet, where she balances unsteadily, lightsaber arcing wide, fighting off the effects of a probable concussion.

She looks around desperately for Finn and Poe when the lights burst to life, flooding the hangar with whiteness more blinding than the dark. As she blinks behind the self-adjusting lenses of the black mask, she makes out Poe and Finn using a cargo crate for cover, but the passage beyond looks empty—they’ve won. But there’s shouting down the passage: more are coming.

Something zips by her calf—BB-8?—and Rey’s relief can’t stand up to the sinking realization that her decision has been made for her.

There’s no way to get to Leia and Ben. Not from here.

“Ship!” she orders, and Chewie goes, running now, and when he raises his blaster at the stormtroopers Rey screams again. “No! They’re with us!” and, to the stormtroopers, she shouts—“Wookiee’s with me! Let’s go, let’s go.”

It’s only when one of the stormtroopers catches her and supports her against his armor that Rey realizes she’s made it up the ramp. Someone else—Finn—is shouting orders to close the ramp and cover the entrance. The prisoners have all been thrown in a cargo hold, probably, still hooded and cuffed. All except Poe, who’s somehow managed to get a blaster but is smart enough not to use it on the stormtroopers who seem happy to follow Finn’s orders.

Rey blinks something out of her eyes that she fervently hopes is sweat—this day is not going her way—and forces herself to focus. Priority One is getting the hell into hyperspace, saving the Resistance. Priority Two lies unconscious a dozen decks above her.

“Poe, tell them the coordinates,” she says. “Somebody needs to disable the tracker manually.”

“On it!” The diminutive stormtrooper that fought beside Chewie shoots like a blaster toward the rear control where the transponder’s secured to the interior hull.

“Hi Finn, hi Rey,” the stormtrooper calls as she runs, “be right back—sorry we’re late.”

“Rose?” Finn calls, and Rey’s heart leaps. Of course Rose and Chewie launched their own rescue mission. BB-8, still wearing an overturned rubbish bin as a disguise, beeps his own greeting as he rolls after Rose to help.

“Sir, tower’s out. Permission to begin launch sequence without waiting for tower clearance?”

It takes Rey an unsteady quarter-second to realize the stormtrooper pilots are talking to her. She swallows coppery saliva and struggles to think.

Ben’s last act was to give her the Resistance and tell her to get the hell off this ship. Leia’s last act was to risk her life for a chance to talk to Ben. They’re in pain. They’ll be abandoned. Because of her.

“We need to go, Rey,” Finn says. “I know—Leia—I know, but we’ve gotta get these people out of here.”

Rey does not abandon people. Not even Ben.

When she reaches out in the Force all that comes back to her is the bare fact of Ben’s aliveness, and Leia’s, too. If Ben could find her across the galaxy, she can fucking find him in a ship. But there might be thousands of hostile stormtroopers between them.

Still. She knows the inside of Imperial dreadnoughts like the back of her hand, and if she just knew where Leia is, she might be able to do something stupid and incredibly dangerous to get her out. Her and Ben.

And then she feels it. Another dot, faint, soft, like a diminished star just at the cusp of visibility.

She bites her lip and closes her eyes, straining out like she did when she stood in the snow on a just-healed leg in front of a ginger man in a black coat. Sure enough the pillowy boundaries of Hux’s mind appear to her, porous and vicariously familiar. Rey never thought she’d be so happy to be in Hux’s mind.

She digs: where is Leia? Where is Ben?

In an instant she has what she needs. Hux is with Ben, with Leia, and Leia is…fighting. Monstrous. Beautiful and unbelievable.

Rey doesn’t have time for questions. She shoves the datachip from her pocket into the nav computer, and with a few snapped orders a stormtrooper has transferred the coordinates Poe entered and pressed it into her hand. She points at Finn and addresses the stormtrooper captain.

“This man’s in command,” she says. “On the Supreme Leader’s authority.”

“Rey, don’t do this—”

She throws her arms around Finn, running on instinct, trying not to imagine him waiting for her in some unknown system, drawing marks on a wall. “I’ll find you,” she whispers. “Keep them safe. Keep Poe safe, he’s an idiot.”

Finn’s laugh comes out a sob, but when she pulls back, he dips his mask in a brisk nod. Chewie catches her eye and his hoists his bowcaster over his shoulder.

“The Resistance needs you,” she says to the Wookiee, but his response is rude. This was always personal, for him, and Rey will be grateful to have him with her.

With a last lingering squeeze of Finn’s arm, she turns and sprints down the ramp with Chewie at her back, toward the fight, where she belongs.

***

“Put those on,” she tells Chewie, but he’s already fitting the O2-mask around his head and ripping open the foil packets on the bulkhead beside them. This is a stupid mission, very close to the top of the hierarchy of Stupid Things Rey has Done, right after shipping herself to the Supremacy. But it’s not like a Knight of Ren and a Wookiee can just walk onto C-deck during a mutiny, so cargo-lanes it is.

Flashes of light glance into Rey’s vision from the open space behind the huge airlock forcefield: the transport, the Resistance, is under attack. There’s no sound, of course, and neither Rey nor Chewie looks, because looking won’t help anyone, and because she’s got to get this panel off so they can get inside the cargo lane. Chewie shot the lock on the triple-secured brig door, but he keeps his eyes on it, ready for more stormtroopers to pour in, and Rey’s fingers move in a pattern so familiar it’s almost comforting. Her head’s clearing, so it’s probably not a concussion, but there’s almost definitely blood inside her mask.

The Ravager had four catches per panel; the Voratrix is better built, with six. The details of the construction are easier for Rey to focus on than the knowledge, from Hux’s mind, that Ben and Leia and that young officer who brought her caf are unconscious and shackled to the Falcon, or that Hux is being tortured because the mutineers want some kind of code. They need a retinal scan, and even though Hux is howling that he’ll cooperate, they’re talking about cutting out his eye.

Rey distracts herself with memories.

Now, in a living ship, Plutt told her once—he always talked about ships as living or dead in a way Rey found disconcertingly poetic—in a living ship these lanes are low-pressure, not vacuum, too many leaks, but low enough that most species gotta flush the nitrogen out of their blood with these babies. He’d held up a foil package in his rubbery paw, shaking it back and forth like he was trying to break its neck. One of the reasons he liked her so much was because she let him talk and always asked questions. Pretty valuable, too, for people doing high-altitude jumps into places they shouldn’t be.

Hux screams again as she loosens the third catch. Rey tries to close her mind, to stop listening, but she can’t avoid Hux’s pain any more than she can avoid Ben’s feverish dreams. Ben’s screaming, too, in the dreams.

The bond between her and Ben has thinned to a filament now, too narrow to transmit anything but the barest sensation of not-deadness, but even that is fragile. Rey refuses to pay attention to it, or the gnawing fear that if that bond snaps she will have lost something irreplaceable.

Chewie’s thick finger pulls the neck of her tunic aside, making room to smooth the De-compress over her jugular. A quick glance shows he’s secured his own to his palm, where the nanojectors will be able to pierce his skin.

The wall panel comes free with a click just as they cut off Hux’s right index finger.

Rey withdraws from him before she can vomit and recites the technical information she needs: her own mask, designed for flight, interfaces with any FO-standard O2-harness. This lane extends up four kilometers and down three, tracking, she knows from Hux, just under the skin of the Dreadnought’s starboard edge, from the point of the vessel near the bridge to the huge expanse of the rear thrusters. They’ll need to make one turn to hit the dorsal lane that will take them to the executive hangar.

Her fingers are shaking as she secures the O2 connection and double-checks it, inhaling with relief the pure, cold oxygen as Chewie helps her shrug the harness into place. She wraps her fingers around the massive airlock wheel.

“Ready?”

He gives a thumbs-up, and Rey spins the wheel. The seal breaks with a hiss as a force-field shimmers teal behind them, keeping the good air from rushing into the open cargo-lane. They step onto the narrow access-ledge that overlooks the cavern, and as soon as they’re clear the airlock sweeps closed behind them, sealing them in. They stand in a shining box of light and gravity looking out at an endless darkness punctuated by the pulsing red lights of the gravity-interruptors. Gravity is for biologics, and it only slows droids and cargo down.

Chewie mutters again as he takes her hand, and Rey has to agree: this is insane.

On the scale of stupid this is somewhere between leaping into the cavern of a ship’s compressor and diving headfirst from a Coruscant skyscraper into the speeder-lanes at rush hour. From what Plutt told her the average speed of cargo in these things is around a hundred kilometers an hour, more than fast enough to rip Rey’s arm out of her socket if she grabs one. And there are thousands of them, droids and drones hauling pressure-safe cargo crates, each sweet and untouched and delicious, too much for any one scavenger to carry, too much to defend. She’d only get one shot before someone bigger and stronger saw the load she’d bring to Plutt and turfed her out. They move with machine precision, centimeters between them, some of them skimming a hand’s-width from the edge of the five-meter-diameter shaft.

“Whatever you do,” she says, “don’t let go of me.”

Chewie says something sarcastic that Rey doesn’t catch through his O2 mask, which is just as well. Hand in hand, they step to the edge of the ledge, noses practically touching the inner force-field, and leap.

Rey, who understands the gist of zero-g but has never actually experienced it, is as unprepared for the sensation of her stomach slamming into her throat as she is for the way their momentum carries them into the center of the shaft—straight into an almost solid line of blindly-fast two-way drone traffic. She shouts, but Chewie’s got her, one furry hand griped around her wrist and the other clasping a rung of the access ladder running up and down the cargo lane. He begins to climb, but Ben and Leia are too far away.

They need speed.

She reaches up and pulls, and even though she pulls at nothing, they move faster. She’s exhausted and her head throbs and even reaching out to the Force feels like trying to lift her bodyweight, but she makes herself keep pulling, pulling, pulling. Drones beep wildly as their motion-sensors activate and the droids accompanying them hurl insults as they fly past, but Rey ignores them. They move faster and faster until the g-forces pull her blood to her toes and tug painfully at her hand in Chewie’s. It’s fast enough, probably.

She concentrates with her eyes closed, trusting the droids’ sensors to avoid a collision, because it’s not like she’s got a way to change direction if they don’t.

“Hold on,” she tells Chewie, who wraps himself around her in an almost-suffocating hug.

With her eyes still closed, she exhales—and closes her fist around the next droid that zooms by, centimeters from her face. She yelps when the sudden acceleration rips open her shoulder wound, but holds on anyway. Stupid, stupid, she should’ve had Chewie grab it. The droid’s lights burst to life, strobing in panic and fury, revealing just how insanely fast they’re moving and how close the other droids are to their fragile, flesh-and-blood bodies.

The droid curses at her.

“I’m really sorry,” she says through the mask, tightening her grip when one of its appendages knocks at her hand. She has to yell over the low-pressure wind, but she tries to yell politely, because if the droid wanted to it could alert security and they’d be picked off like skittermice in a cage. “I know this is really inconvenient, but would you mind giving us a lift?”

Yes it bloody well would mind, is she crazy? There are safety procedures in place for biologics—

“I know, but we had a malfunction,” she says, offering its visual sensors a smile as winning as she can make it before she realizes it can’t see her through her faceplate. “We’re heading to C-deck, the executive hangar.”

It continues to bluster at her, but doesn’t question her destination or ask for any kind of clearance, and when the droids around it start yelling at it for disrupting their flight paths, it blames the crazy contractors who grabbed its ass. Rey would laugh, if Hux would just stop screaming, if Ben would stop having nightmares of Snoke.

As it is she barely holds on with Chewie as they speed through the ship, nearly getting thrown off when the droid makes a hard right turn that seems impossible to Rey’s gravity-conditioned senses.

Hux, shackled to the Falcon’s dejarik table, has lost another finger, and he sobs because he’s figured out the people torturing him don’t really care if he answers his questions, they just want to hurt him. Rey mutes his thoughts as best as she can, because after what Ben told her she has enough to worry about without taking on Ben’s horrors and Hux’s pain.

She maintains only enough connection with Hux’s mind to know that the droid isn’t leading them the wrong way, and then she spots the target just ahead. She shouts and the droid veers slightly to the left, out of oncoming traffic, decelerating at a rate that’s absolutely not safe for organic lifeforms, sending Rey’s lungs crashing against her ribcage. Chewie grunts, then curses.

When she can speak again, she’s effusive with her thanks as she grabs the handhold by the narrow access ledge, but the droid zooms off without further comment. Chewie, winded, sort of floats into the force-field control, and when gravity re-activates around them Rey doubles over, reminding herself she can’t take off her mask to vomit without disrupting her O2 supply.

Thankfully this is an entry point designed for huge cargo crates, so there won’t be any prying open hidden panels, just a simple press of a button, and then mayhem. They’re walking into a fight against an unknown number of stormtroopers, they’re weighed down by their oxygen, and Rey’s shoulder is so wrecked she can barely lift her arm.

When Chewie, voice garbled behind the O2 mask, asks her if she’s got any Force-tricks up her sleeve, she shakes her head. The only advantage they have is surprise and whatever knowledge Rey can scrape out of Hux’s panic-scrambled mind.

Chewie’s known her—or, well, known Force-users—long enough that he doesn’t ask questions when she closes her eyes, and for the first time she lets herself sink fully into Hux’s head. Her presence there hurts him, and she regrets that, a little, but he’s in so much pain he hardly notices Rey puncturing the walls around his thoughts. She peers through his eyes, taking in his surroundings and his knowledge of the situation.

Four stormtroopers inside the Falcon with Hux, Ben’s steward, Ben, and Leia, along with two white-coated officers. An unknown number outside, but Hux estimates no more than six, because the fact that they’re running interrogations in a hangar and not a secure cell means they’re trying to keep things under wraps.

The details of the mutiny don’t interest Rey—she only cares about getting off this Dreadnought and getting to the Resistance.  The fewer stormtroopers there are in that hangar the better.

Juno, please, Hux begs, but Rey doesn’t dare tell him she’s here in case he gives something away. He was shot in the initial battle for the bridge when he escaped the guards who arrested him, and shot again in the shin while they fought in the hangar, then kicked in the ribs and dragged into the ship to be restrained. They cut off two fingers before they discovered Ben’s lightsaber where Hux dropped it in the fray. As Rey watches through his eyes, one of the stormtroopers raises the hilt and ignites it. The stormtrooper asks Hux what part she should take next, and glances between his legs.

The sight of someone else holding that weapon while Ben and his mother lie there dying on Han’s fucking ship drives away the last bit of Rey’s self-control. Chewie senses the change in her and presses a blaster into her left hand, just like Han did, and unslings the bowcaster from his shoulders. The O2 mask still covers his mouth, but she sees the question in his eyes, already familiar from so many fights in the Falcon:

You ready, kid?

Rey nods, and Chewie leans against the access pad, and the doors slide open.

Three stormtroopers loiter outside the ship, just three, and Rey and Chewie down them before they can utter a cry. The Falcon’s ramp is open, and Rey barely catches the female officer’s face contort into a startled “O” before a bowcaster destroys it, and though the stormtroopers inside manage to shoot Chewie’s wrist, he charges up the ramp at full speed and knocks them into the wall while Rey rains blasters bolts down on them, protected by her helmet and something in the fabric of her uniform.

And that’s it. It’s over. Rey wants to fall by Ben’s side—a completely irrational thought, because Ben tried to kill the entire Resistance, and it should be Leia she wants to save—but she can’t, because they need to leave now.

Chewie throws the bodies unceremoniously off the ship while Rey starts the engines. Every press of a button is agony, and she curls her right arm tight against her chest and does whatever she can with her left. Chewie moves to dispose of Hux, who’s screaming incoherently over the stump of his hand, and Rey opens her mouth to tell Chewie to stop. But Hux designed Starkiller. Hux killed billions. If anybody deserves a slow death, isn’t it Hux?

Rey sighs.

“We can use him,” she says, “he knows things about the First Order.” The look of contempt Hux gives her is so muddied by relief that Rey almost feels sorry for him.

Then Chewie asks about the Lieutenant, who seems to understand what it means when they both glance at him.

“The Supreme Leader’s last order was for me to get her off this ship,” he says, gesturing toward Leia as best as he can with his hands zip-corded to a stability bar. “I intend to do that. Besides—” His cheeks redden as he looks at Leia. “I once stood in line for four hours after a Raiders post-season to shake Han Solo’s hand.”

She and Chewie exchange a glance at that, and Chewie shrugs. Rey doesn’t need much of an excuse not to murder an unarmed man, so without a thought she uses her lightsaber to cut his zip-tie. He flinches, then shakes his wrists.

“Tie them to something so they don’t get their necks broken when we take off,” Rey snaps, keeping half an eye on the young officer while he salutes and runs for cargo-ties.

They take off, there’s a fight, Hux screams, the Lieutenant does a decent job on guns, and distantly, Rey understands all of this should feel more real to her, more important. But Ben’s mind is pouring through the bond and she can barely keep it out, drug-addled flashes of shadow and red fire and purple lightning, nightmares she’s increasingly sure are memories, everything soaked through with shame and fear.

Then hyperspace is blue around them, and the transport falls into an eerie calm, and Rey collapses to her knees on the deck.

She can’t breathe even though she’s still hooked up to pure O2, so she rips out the hose, shrugs numbly out of the harness, and throws her black mask aside. Ben’s body’s there, strapped to the bulkhead, jaw slack, mouth hanging open, and beside it, something incongruous, a First Order rucksack with a familiar, musty cover just peaking out of it. Is she hallucinating? No, Havel must’ve brought them, for some reason, it doesn’t matter.

Chewie growls and the lieutenant rushes to help her, but Rey waves them off. She stumbles to the ‘fresher, closes the door, and slides down the wall with her head between her knees.

She rescued the Resistance and the remains of the Senate, Leia’s alive, Ben’s mostly alive, and she’s somehow convinced a bunch of stormtroopers that she has a right to command—she should be elated. But Ben is dying.

Even after what he did, she doesn’t want him to die. Not after everything, not after lying back and looking at the stars, not after she heard the pain in his voice when he said he was terrified of his responsibility, not after she saw the haunted expression in his eyes when she offered to stay. Yes, he betrayed her, yes, he can use her against her friends, but his last words to her, get off the ship, that was a chance to escape. The Resistance and the civilians would all be dead if he hadn’t used his last order to put her in command.

But if he lives he’ll be able to use her as his weapon against the Resistance wherever he goes, and Rey won’t put her friends in danger, not again. If Ben lives, she’ll have to leave. She’ll be alone. Or maybe she’ll be with Ben, and she’s not sure what’s worse.

And when the vision of her tiny hand and a red sky and a downed ship fills her mind, Rey sees what the Force showed him and she remembers. She remembers everything, and she watches Ben’s vision of that ship crashing over and over again, and in the deepest part of the Ocean where she kept everything hidden, she finds the Darkness Ben promised to show her, the Darkness he wanted to save her from, and she understands.

Rey closes her eyes, breathing in the cool familiar mustiness of a ship’s ‘fresher. She tries to take refuge in sleep, but when she lets go of the waking world, all she sees are Ben’s dreams pouring across the bond, a little boy crouched on a floor, just like this, watching blood pool under Han’s body, sobbing—a grown man kneeling before Rey, standing over him like an avenging angel, all in black, shining with darkness, wearing a crown—and the refrain, over and over:

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

Chapter Text

Rey wakes up to the ‘fresher door pounding and the roar of a desperate wookiee, and she’s certain she must've passed out a lifetime ago. She drags herself across the grate to unhook the latch, and when the door falls open, huge furry arms catch her.

“Rey,” Chewie calls. “Rey.”

But the bond rages between her and Ben, and no matter how hard she tries to escape these nightmares and climb back up to consciousness, Ben’s mind pulls her down.

Ben, the Voice calls, and this is Ben’s memory, but she’s also Rey.

Ben curls up in the rain, his soft brown boots caked in mud and a slender lightsaber gripped in his white knuckles. The casing cuts into his palm but Ben lets it because it always helped him, before, when the Voice spoke. It helped him keep it out.

But what’s the point anymore?

Ah, child, now you understand. These desires are inside you. They’re in your blood.

The word blood triggers all the images Ben tries to keep out. All the things he could do. Will do? Wants to do? Can’t help but do?

He knows, now. The galaxy knows. Every holonetwork is flooded with the news that Leia Organa has just been outed as Darth Vader’s daughter.

He fears you, the Voice says. For the power in your blood, the power he was always too weak to use. Soon he’ll try to kill you. Mark my words.

The rot is in his blood. It’s Vader’s. It always was, and it always will be, and his whole life he begged his family to tell him the truth and they hid it from him.

Luke says he fought the Darkness and won, he tells the Voice, though he’s been fighting for so long, and he just wants to lay down and let the Voice tell him what to do. Luke says Vader was redeemed.

He lies, child.

Yes. Luke does lie. All Ben ever asked of him was help with this monster inside him and all Luke ever said was how wrong Ben was. Ben’s head falls to his knees as he swallows huge gulps of wet air, thick with petrichor.

The Voice lies too, he tells himself, because Ben isn’t a murderer. It lies.

Tell me how you feel, child.

Alone.

The Voice wraps itself around him like a blanket, seeping into every crevice, and Ben shivers and sighs and every instinct in his body tells him to rest in this and know peace.

My dear boy, says the Voice, you’re not alone.

For the first time, Ben believes it.

Rey, watching in the rain, feels her heart break.

“But I killed him,” says a voice behind her, and when Rey turns around, ready to attack, a fully-grown Ben stands in a black tunic, looking at his younger self with contempt. “He lied to me, so I killed him.”

Snoke’s bisected body appears in the grass.

“It wasn’t real,” Rey says. “When you reached out to me you were only following his script. You wanted to hurt me like he hurt you.”

This Ben, her Ben, the lucid man standing in front of her, looks out at the rain-lashed horizon.

“Ben? Was it real?”

“I don’t know,” he says, and he sounds so afraid.

The Voice drowns him out, and the scene shifts.

I told you, child.

Darkness swallows the scene, and young Ben in his white robe is running, stumbling away from the ruins of a hut. There’s shouting—Master Luke’s dead—it was Ben, Ben killed him.

I’m sorry, Ben’s repeating to himself. I didn’t mean to kill him, I didn’t mean to—

You’ve done well, boy. Now finish the job and assume your rightful place at my side.

No, no, no—

Ben tries to run but they catch him.

“He tried to kill me,” he shouts at the crowd of students.

“Liar,” one of them yells back. A black-haired boy steps between them, trying to calm everybody down, but the one who called him a liar draws his lightsaber and attacks. Five of them surge forward, ready to kill.

Something in Ben snaps. The black-haired boy and a girl who looks like Rose jump to defend Ben, trying to keep him from getting hurt without hurting the others, but Ben screams and he’s stronger than any of them, more powerful. There are bright lights and screaming and blood and when it's over Ben stands breathing hard.

The ones who live watch him as he sets the temple on fire and commands them to follow him, but Rey’s inside his mind, and she can feel his hands shaking, his terror. The relief the Voice promised him doesn’t come.

The night dissolves into the throne room, and Ben kneels, sobbing. “I brought them for you, Master. An offering.”

“I didn’t ask for spares, boy. Kill them.”

“Please, I’ll train them, I’ll make them obey, I swear it, please don’t hurt them—”

The same throne room, but Snoke is gone, and the girl’s hand is around his. Ben, it’s going to be okay. He said Luke’s alive. Luke won't abandon us.

Ben waited, prayed for Luke to come. He waited for the moment when a green lightsaber would flood the throne room, with his mother and father and Chewie flanking him with blasters. But it was a child’s dream, and no one ever came.

Snoke was the only one who ever gave him any comfort, and gradually Ben learned to trust it.

As Rey watches, ash falls from the ceiling and the red lights behind the throne disappear, replaced by flickering yellow emergency bulbs. It’s so cold she can see her breath. The throne begins to fade away, and the lucid Ben fades with it, replaced by something pathetic and shaking on the floor, covered in ash, crying out for his master.

There’s blood all over the floor, so deep it rises over Rey’s ankles, and she backs away. But suddenly she’s on a bridge, and Ben, mask off, is holding his lightsaber aloft and watching her fall and fall and fall, and then she’s the one standing in black, weapon raised, and he’s the one falling.

Thank you, he whispers, and she trips backward away from the sight of his dying face so quickly she falls over the edge.

She lands hard in something warm and gritty and soft. Sand. When she opens her eyes, she’s staring up into the stark purple and violent orange of a Jakku sunset, and she knows this dream.

She dusts herself off and walks on child’s feet into her AT-AT, and there’s something small and slender in her hand. Not a staff; a flower.

She tries not to cry, and like she does every night she feels the ghost behind her, alone and afraid. Like she does every night, she holds out her hand.

But she knows this is a dream, and she knows this happens every night. She knows why she's crying in this dream the little spinebarrel flower that grew in the joint of the AT-AT has died. She saw that flower and she put all her hope in it, once, because if a little spinebarrel could survive out here, so could Rey. It was the flower that gave her the courage to go it alone.

The other scavengers offered her protection, friendship. You don’t survive long out here alone, after all, not with the desert at your back. But Rey would survive. She had to, becaue Rey didn’t belong here, Rey wasn’t like them, she was different. Her parents would come back for her from their long trip and they would reveal the great secret that would've been too much for their young daughter. Were they renegade Resistance fighters? Deserters from the Republic army? Great smugglers on the run from the law? Or, best of all, spies from some distant Imperial remnant, waiting to whisk her off to a life of grand adventure and glamour?

No, that’s not right.

In the dream she touches her face, where she slashed her mother with a hastily-filed shank scavenged from the junk piles even the scavengers rejected, because that was the only pile Rey and her parents were allowed to pick. Here parents weren't adventurers, they were—

Filthy junk traders sold you off for drinking money—

She claps her hands over her ears and tilts her head back to look at the wall where she’s scrawled her marks. The dead spinebarrel rests in her lap. They’ll come back for her.

I know all about waiting—

Behind her, the ghost watches. It’s more afraid than usual tonight, like it knows something is wrong.

The other scavengers laughed at her. You think you’re so much better than we are? You’re nothing, kid, just like us.

She hates them. She hates them all, and she’ll survive without them.

She killed her parents.

“Rey. Rey.”

Rey looks down at her lap, where the spinebarrel has dissolved into dust, crushed by some invisible power she knows must’ve come from her.

They threw you away like garbage, but you can’t stop needing them.

There’s something inside me and it’s always been there, but now it’s awake, and I’m afraid—

Every night, the same dream. She waits for the ghost, and he refuses to offer her comfort. It watches her sob. It watches her in her helplessness, because deep down, Rey knew she was helpless. It’s always made her grieve, before.

Now it makes her angry.

She’s done sobbing. She pushes herself to her feet and stands staring at the wall. Every mark, a day of trying not to cry.

She killed her parents.

She raises her hands and rests them on the wall, and under her palms, they’re searing hot. The ghost’s hands close over hers, huge and hot and dry and solid. His body behind her is solid, too.

Rey. Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to.

Rey takes a deep breath of musty desert air, and when she looks at her hands, they’re full of fire. She can barely see through her anger.

Kill it if you have to, the ghost whispers. You are the spark that will light the fire that will burn it down.

Burn what down? She asks.

“Everything,” Ben says. “Everyone who hurt us.”

The vision is glorious in Rey’s mind: burn the wall, burn the marks, burn the AT-AT and the Graveyard and the Concession Stand, burn Plutt, burn the scavengers, burn the auction platform where they whipped her, burn the Jakku desert, burn the sky, light a red fire and burn out the stars themselves.

It would be so easy.

“You’re not alone,” Ben whispers in her ear, and his breath against her skin is hot and full of promise.

***

Unfamiliar hands grip Rey's arms, and her tongue stings from the bitter gel they put in her mouth to force her back to consciousness. Two furry fingers appear in her vision as Rey blinks her way out of Ben’s memories. There were so many. Did it go on for minutes? Hours?

The Ocean, the place where the Force lives inside her, is churning. Rey still feels the fire in her hands, and she wants to hurt something. A pair of human hands help her up as she rubs her head. Someone’s bandaged it, and it hurts less than it probably should if it was enough to make her pass out. Ben's steward, whatever his name is, offers her a bottle of water while Chewie supports her.

“Where are we?” she asks.

“Still en route," says the steward. "You weren’t out very long."

That's news to Rey. It felt like hours. A lifetime.

“Good,” Rey says, then her eyes fall on Ben. He's still secured with cable ties to keep him from getting hurt during takeoff. Rey, with Chewie's help, half-walks half-crawls to him, kneeling beside him between Leia, also secured, and Hux, tied with his now-bandaged hands above his head against the bulkhead.

“Ben,” she whispers, forcing her words through the bond as much as she can. But now that she’s awake she can see his mind but she can’t reach him, like there’s something primitive in her that’s thrown up a wall between his fever-dreams and her waking mind. There’s no response, not even a movement of his eyes under closed lids, even though she knows he’s dreaming. His jaw is slack, and Rey wipes her glove across his face where spit is leaking out. There’s no blood in in his mouth. That seems good. Doesn’t it?

“You’re wasting your efforts, girl. He’ll die.”

She whirls around to Hux. Someone’s taken off his shirt, revealing two large bacta-patches covering blaster wounds on his chest. He looks pale and miserable, like every breath hurts. Rey refuses to pity him.

She tries to dip into his mind like she did before, but even that proves too much. Letting even the smallest amount of the Force in feels like trying to hold a sandstorm in her speeder’s cargo-net. So instead, she grabs a blaster and points it unsteadily at Hux’s head. He gives her a look of pure contempt.

“You,” she says. “What did they give him?”

He snorts, and spits pink-flecked saliva. “Poison.”

Belatedly, she clicks the safety off, annoyed at Hux’s pained smirk. “What poison?”

“I’m an engineer, not a meddroid, girl. I’ve no idea.”

“What happened to Leia?”

“It was dark. I assume she got knocked out after she char-broiled a squad of FOSB troopers with bloody lightning from her hands.”

Rey remembers this flash in Hux’s mind, Leia channeling violet power from her fingertips. Hux leans forward with obvious difficulty, stretching his wounded body as much as he can. “He left you in command, girl. Juno Ren. You’re nothing, you’re nobody, but together we could rule the—”

She flicks the blaster to stun and fires.

“Not interested,” she says, and turns to the other man, the one who brought her caf.

He’s staring wide-eyed at Hux’s unconscious body, and sighs in obvious relief when he spots Hux’s bandaged ribs move with an inhale.

“What’s your name?” she asks him, still holding the blaster. “Haggle? Hagar?”

“Er—Second Lieutenant Yan Havel, ma’am, Executive Steward to the Supreme—”

“Right. Havel, did you see what happened?”

“He passed out, and he, er, appeared disoriented,” Havel says, visibly struggling to say all this in a professional way, “then all I saw was the prisoner—Organa—the—she gave him a standard injection for heart failure, ma’am—”

“Did he say anything?”

“He told me to unbolt the ship, and then he told her to leave the Voratrix. He said—he said he didn’t do this for her. That was the last thing he said, that he didn’t do this for her.”

Rey closes his eyes, and swallows. What does that mean? He didn’t save the Resistance for Leia. He didn’t turn to the Light. He used his last breath to tell the same lie he kept telling himself, that it’s too late, this isn’t redemption, he’ll never turn. Rey lowers the blaster and her hand, of its own accord, balls in the material at Ben’s shoulder. She won’t let him die like this, whatever he's done to her. She won’t.

“She called him sweetheart,” Havel continues, shaking his head. “She said, ‘I know, sweetheart,’ and he said he was from Republic City, but I never would’ve guessed—but—of course, her father was Vader—and she made lightning—”

“He needs a medbay,” Chewie growls, leaving Havel to his confusion. “We’ve got one medkit, we can’t treat poisoning.”

“How far to the rendezvous?” Rey asks, turning to Leia, who's out cold but breathing steadily.

“Six hours,” Chewie says grimly.

Six hours. Poe said they’d wait for twelve, but that’s twelve hours since the attack on the base. How long was she on the Dreadnought? Three hours? Four? They’ll just make it if they run straight there, but Finn and Poe are in a transport, and they'll be much, much slower. If the Falcon doesn’t get there first to tell whoever escaped from the planet to wait, they risk losing each other forever.

If anyone escaped the base at all, and if Finn and Poe are even still alive. Rey put them all on a ship full of stormtroopers with nothing but a command and a lie. If they find out she was with the Resistance, they’ll revolt and—

Can’t think about that now. Ben is the first priority, and it's far too late for her to second-guess that.

“We have to land,” Rey says. “Just long enough to get him off the ship to a medbay, then I’ll stay behind while you go with everyone else to the rendezvous and tell them where we are.”

Chewie growls and pulls up the nav screen. “I got a place,” Chewie says.

Rey nods and wraps her hand around Leia’s arm. Either Havel or Chewie saw to her head wound while Rey was passed out, and her pulse beats steadily under Rey’s glove. The material even transfers the warmth of her skin. Rey withdraws her hand too quickly. Something about touching the general feels wrong. It makes her remember her hands against the wall full of tally marks, thinking of burning everyone who hurt them.

“She’ll be fine,” Chewie says as he adjusts their course. “Just a nasty headache. It’s the kid I’m worried about.”

The kid. Ben. She watches Havel closely as he adjusts Hux’s unconscious body to avoid injury. Then he wisely retreats to the other side of the lounge, where he can’t sneak the general out of his restraints when no one’s looking. Though he feels trustworthy, so far.

“Where’s this place you’re taking us?” Rey asks, low enough that Havel can’t hear.

“Christophsis,” Chewie replies. “A friend has a house there.”

“We need a medbay, not a house.”

“A safehouse,” Chewie says, visibly annoyed at her tone, but that’s fine, even as sick and tired as she is, Rey’s itching for a fight. “Outta sight, basic meddroid.”

“How far?” Rey asks.

Chewie reaches up to toggle a switch and rests his hand on the HD-throttle. The hum of the vindicator signals a drop sequence, and Rey automatically flicks on the aux power to give it a little extra juice. “Right—here,” Chewie says, and pushes the throttle forward.

Space darkens around them and stars pop into view. Below, a pale violet star gradually resolves into a planet with thin, pinkish clouds. As they swing around away from the day-side, the light of whatever blue-green expanse peaks out from under those clouds is so blinding Rey has to shield her eyes.

Chewie sets his course and they descend into the night atmosphere. “Now we see if they’ve got a blockade up,” she says, and Chewie shrugs.

“They don’t,” Havel says from behind them. When both turn to look at them, he clears his throat. He’s probably Rey’s age, maybe a few years older, but he looks much younger, wide-eyed and scared. “I was an assistant Supply officer before I joined the executive, ma’am. I’ve never been here but I handled some transfers from Christophsis a few weeks ago—that’s Christophsis, right? The crystal?”

Rey nods, brow furrowed as they draw closer. Even weak as she is, something about the planet tugs at her in the Force. It’s like something in the ship is calling out to it, and it’s answering.

“There’s too much coming and going from the refineries for them to run close monitoring," Havel continues. "We should get in fine now that the blockade is down.”

“How do we know you’re not lying?”

“Ma’am, I just tied up a flag officer and helped Leia Organa kidnap the Supreme Leader, and before that I refused to participate in a mutiny. No one wants to see the First Order less than I do right now.”

Chewie snorts, and Rey feels briefly sorry for the kid. What was his job? Bringing Ben caf and making sure Ben has clean socks? And here he is, now everybody’s enemy. But at least as they slip into upper-atmo without a demand for clearance, Rey can relaxes; his info’s good.

She sees what Havel meant, too, about the crystal. The whole planet’s made of it, just kilometer after kilometer of huge shards and geometric structures shot through with shining bands of water-like liquid and the occasional river of magma, dotted with what might be seas. It reminds her of the salt caves under the surface on Crait where Chewie piloted his mad chase in the Falcon, but the structures are much bigger and blue-green instead of blood red. Their low orbit takes them back to the night, where Rey can see glittering cities set into spikes of crystal that must be tens of kilometers high.

It would be beautiful, if Rey could focus on anything but Ben.

Chewie keeps them low, and in her still-woozy state Rey’s grateful he’s piloting, since at low altitudes the crystals are huge and sharp and deadly in the night. As they descend even further, Rey closes her eyes. The planet sings.

Rey reaches into the pocket of her tunic and pulls out the two central pieces of the broken lightsaber. She can’t be sure, but—she tugs off her glove with her teeth, and when she places the two crystals in her palm, they’re warm. The shaft of the small red saber is pleasantly hot, too, but Rey feels a tension inside the cabin of the ship, like something’s out of phase, off-balance. The crystals are channeling some kind of field coming from the planet.

She turns to Havel. “Where is the Supreme Leader’s—” A split-second warning. “Get down!”

Chewie ducks, Havel dives to protect Hux against the bulkhead, and Rey falls over Leia and Ben just as red-white light spews tiny pieces of shrapnel across the Falcon, rebounding in the Force. The ship tilts almost ninety degrees as Chewie loses control, but quickly rights itself, throwing Rey against the deck. The three bodies are still strapped down so they jerk, but don’t get thrown in the explosion. In an instant Rey’s up, running to the source of the explosion to make sure all the power’s been discharged.

Ben’s lightsaber lies where it slid across the deck, smoking. Rey peers cautiously down at it, irrationally angry at Ben for building a lightsaber with a power source he knew was unstable. He told her his crystal was cracked, and she can immediately see why the thing was so huge: he had to install heavy shield-plating around the whole central cavity to direct all the excess power to the side-vents. Her anger relaxes. It’s a damn good thing he did, because without that shielding the explosion might’ve blown a hole in the hull.

Chewie curses a question as Havel checks on the three unconscious people to make sure no one was hurt. Rey picks a tiny screw out of her hair and squats down by the lightsaber, still too hot to touch.

“Some kind of energy field is activating the crystals,” Rey says to Chewie as she examines it. “His was cracked already, and the field was enough to split it.”

“He’ll be pissed,” Chewie says, a little breathless as he tries to fly around the treacherous landscape while his lounge is exploding.

Yeah, Rey silently agrees as she watches the red-hot casing cool around the two pieces of crystal, fighting off a sadness she can’t explain. If Ben wakes up, he’ll be pissed.

***

The safehouse is, as Chewie hoped, abandoned except for a caretaker droid and the meddroid, who keep a surprisingly well-stocked, if old, medchamber equipped with an ancient upright full-immersion bacta tank. Bacta’s no use against poison, so the meddroid sets to work. Just to be safe, they tied up Hux and Havel where they can keep an eye on them, and Leia’s on the second medical table getting treatment for her head wound.

“Can’t you just treat them on the Falcon?” Rey demands.

“The Millennium Falcon? Heavens no, Solo let that beautiful ship rust into a junk heap. I’m shocked it still flies. No, absolutely not, he needs intensive monitoring.”

She doesn’t ask how it knows Solo or the Falcon. Chewie said this place belongs to a friend, so it makes sense.

“How long?”

“How should I know?” the meddroid asks, and Rey finds herself annoyed that she misses the First Order’s cruel precision. “He's barely hanging on, and if it wasn't for whoever was smart enough to administer an intracardiac injection he'd be dead meat by now. If he wakes up at all it'll be days, probably, though he’s quite the strapping young thing, isn’t he, he might pull through—”

“Days? We can’t stay here for days, we have to get back to the Resistance—”

“The Resistance?” the caretaker asks. “We’ve been getting transmissions from a vessel using the emergency codes, including General Organa’s personal code—”

“You have a subspace transponder here?” Rey asks. It’s the first thing either of them has said that makes her take her eyes off Ben. She refuses to pay attention to if he wakes up at all. He'll wake up. Ben Solo won't die in disgrace on a dirty table on a strange planet.

“Yes, of course,” the caretaker says, offended. “We serve as a relay station for the region. It’s not powerful enough for a full base but it serves our needs well enough—”

“That was us using her personal code,” she says. Chewie sent out a burst to try to reach anyone who might be at the rendezvous in case any of the relays were still broadcasting. "You're saying someone answered?"

“A lot of someones, madam.”

Chewie’s eyes widen as much as they can and he looks down at her in seriousness. “Any way he could’ve gotten our codes?”

Rey tries to think. Ben’s nightmares have gotten frantic again, enough for the images to spark across the bond, and she's trying to think through the hyperreal sensation of Ben is crouched on a bloody floor staring up six bodies screaming. Rey shakes her head, trying to force him out.

“The Falcon has a decryptor,” she says, “but we would’ve known if they tampered with it, right? Chewie, does this mean—”

The caretaker stands tall. “Madam, I’ve asked the mainframe for the complete transmissions. They do seem to match the records of known allies. If that were somehow faked, they would’ve had to both decrypt our codes and procure a list of authorized codes. The pings match the star destroyer MC-Safe Harbor and a number of smaller craft.”

“A star destroyer?"

Rey's surprise knocks her out of Ben's dream for a few moments. A star destroyer crews thousands, tens of thousands even. If it's anywhere close to a full crew that's--that's an army. And even without it, the firepower actually gives them a chance. "Chewie, this is brilliant, we’ve got a fleet—”

Ben groans and the heart monitor goes wild. Rey squeezes Ben’s hand, and the heartbeat slows, almost like he can feel her.

Chewie tilts his head, watching their entwined hands, and Rey flushes at his knowing look. But he shakes his head. “Good for the Resistance,” he grumbles, “bad for—”

Rey doesn’t understand the next word. It’s like thief, but changed in a strange way. Thief-clever-child-family-beloved.

Little bandit. The nickname floats across the bond in Han’s voice. Ben.

Rey feels the anger surging into her hands again, the way it did in the vision when Ben asked her to burn it all down, when he told her she killed the people who hurt her. Leia’s voice bubbles up in her memory, telling Rey that even if Ben came home and fought for the Resistance he’d still be looking at a trial and execution.

But Rey can see it now, the scenario Ben was so certain awaited him when he sighed alright against her shoulder. Ben shows up at the Resistance, which is full of people who lost everything on HosPrime. Leia tries to protect him—Leia said herself, in that freezing meeting in the old comm tower, that she’d protect him from the law—but Desso and the Senate and the thousands of people in that star destroyer will only see the Supreme Leader, a man with incredible power who might just kill them all whenever he decides to. They know he’s too strong to keep as a prisoner, and this is war, they won’t risk everyone’s safety for the sake of one criminal, even if he is Leia’s son.

Ben’s heartbeat picks up again, and the bond leaks a vision of him in chains on his knees before Leia and Rey, both in white robes, and when a lightsaber flashes and his head goes rolling across the floor, Rey forces herself to loosen her white-knuckled grip on his hand.

“No,” Rey says, so sharply that the meddroid nearly drops the monitor it’s holding. “Snoke was in his mind, telling him lies—”

Chewie sighs. “Every bad guy’s got a sob story, kid. His mom knows that—”

“But you still decided to help me bring him home.”

Chewie growls in frustration. “If he walked in ready to fight, that’s one thing. You’re dragging him in unconscious—look, I still think we can do this, but he’s gotta be the one calling the shots—”

“Ben…”

The sound comes from Leia. Rey drops Ben’s hand and runs to her, but not as fast as Chewie, who murmurs a quick report of the situation while the meddroid tends to her.

“Don’t tell me the situation,” Leia says, and Rey jumps at the heat in her voice. Even with her dulled awareness of the Force, with Ben’s mind pummeling her and the damn crystal lattice on this planet buzzing in the background and driving her crazy, she can hear the darkness in Leia’s voice. “Tell me about my son.”

The meddroid updates her, and Rey's jaw clenches at words like brain damage and permanent and uncertain prognosis, and Leia forces herself with difficulty off the table and takes four wobbly steps to Ben’s side. She reaches out, and Ben’s heartbeat speeds up.

The bond fills with memories of Leia talking to Luke, Leia sending a message—a message—to him when the galaxy found out Vader was his grandfather, not even taking the time to come herself, and the anger Rey’s been keeping in check since she woke from that vision comes spilling out.

“Don’t touch him,” Rey snaps.

Leia’s eyes flare open, but then she swallows, opening her hands in a don’t-shoot-me gesture before slowly letting them fall to her sides. Rey doesn’t realize until Chewie’s in her face telling her to back off that she’s jumped off her stool and physically inserted herself between Ben and Leia. Rey’s not a particularly big woman, but she towers over Leia, and in her black uniform with the heavy swirling cloak, Rey feels like she could take on the universe, weak as she is.

She’s so angry. Maybe it’s Ben’s unconscious mind sensing Leia through the bond, but no, this is Rey’s anger. Your parents threw you away like garbage.

"Rey," Leia says. "What's wrong? Did he hurt you?"

"What did you say to him?" Rey demands, and Leia falls back, stunned at the vitriol in Rey's voice. "He was there. He was good, and then you--"

"Rey, I made some mistakes. I'll try to fix them--"

“Mistakes?” Spittle flies in Leia’s face, but whatever's possessed Rey is feeding on the fear in the room and it makes Rey feel less helpless so she runs with it. “There was a monster in his head and you just abandoned him. And all you’ve been able to think about are the things he did, did you forget he was your son? Did you forget you were supposed to protect him?”

Chewie roars, and he might be fond of Rey but there’s no question who he’s going to back in a fight between them.

But Leia’s not fighting. She rests a fragile hand on Chewie’s arm. The two droids have fled the room, and Havel stares at the ground, hands bound next to Hux’s unconscious body.

“She’s right, Chewie. It’s okay. She’s right.”

“She has no idea what it was like with him,” Chewie protests.

“And you have no idea what it was like for him. He fought Snoke, and he fought, and none of you helped him and even now he’s still fighting. He waited for you to help him. For six years he waited, but you just abandoned him—”

“You saw his memories,” Leia says. She’s crying. The General of the Resistance is crying. “I thought Luke could help him better than I could—”

“Luke tried to kill him,” Rey shouts, and the look of absolute shock on Leia’s face almost jolts Rey out of anger.

“That’s impossible,” Leia says, trying to keep her composure through the tears.

“I thought so too. I called him a liar, but then I saw--” She saw what she thought was Ben's humanity, but that moment by the fireside was exactly what she feared, wasn’t it? Another lie. But a complicated lie. Everything with Ben is complicated, that doesn't mean he's not worth trying to understand. “Luke admitted it. Ben ran to Snoke because he was terrified. You know it’s true.”

“Back off,” Chewie growls again as he wraps Leia protectively in his arms. Leia’s openly crying now, but Rey has no pity for her. Ben cried for years, just like Rey did, because Luke abandoned him. You created Kylo Ren, she’d shouted at the old man, but even then she didn’t realize how right she’d been.

Rey feels exactly the way she felt that night on Ahch-To, but at least then she had the satisfaction of threatening Luke with a staff, then beating him with his own lightsaber. Now all she can do is watch Leia cry and refuse to back down under Chewie’s expression of betrayal. She can’t quite handle the latter, so she squeezes Ben’s hand one more time and storms out of the medbay. There are no windows and Rey has no conception of where she is; the shuttle bay where they docked looked very much like a miniaturized version of one of the small garages on the base, and the medbay access came through a nondescript-looking door in the back of a storage closet, easily hidden.

Rey closes herself into yet another storage closet and, after standing for a moment feeling like a child having a tantrum, punches one of the plaster walls.

The crumble of drywall under her fingers isn't even close to satisfying, and this is not helpful. The rational part of her brain screams at her to calm down, to save this anger for Ben, who’s going to fight tooth and nail when he wakes up. Save it for the First Order, for Hux, for her actual enemies, not the head of the Resistance, the war hero who until an hour ago she respected, even if she didn’t always like her. But just like with Luke, the injustice of it eats at Rey’s insides and she can’t let it go, and all the tears in the world won’t take away a second of Ben’s suffering.

If Rey's own mother came back now with tears and apologies, Rey knows what she'd do. She clenches her fists at the thought.

Let the past die.

Rey breathes through her anger, and maybe she’s imagining it but Ben, trapped in another nightmarish memory, seems to calm slightly with her breath, just as he did at the touch of her hand. The anger begins to fade, replaced by shame.

Leia loves her son. In Hux’s memory Rey saw her call instinctively on the Dark side to protect him, crushing the people who threatened Ben with a power Rey's never seen. It’s too late, but that’s better than never, isn’t it? And Ben isn’t exactly innocent here, for all his pain. He all-but-admitted he was trying to trap her when he told her he wasn’t alone. He told her she killed her parents because, in his last conscious moments before he thought he was going to die, he wanted to hurt Rey as much as he could. And Chewie’s right: even from Ben’s memories she can tell that he would’ve been almost impossible to deal with, angry and unpredictable and violent and exactly the way Rey feels right now.

There’s a knock at the door, and Rey’s Force-sensitivity is so dulled she’s actually surprised when it’s Leia who enters, red-eyed and tired with a clean bacta patch on her head. Leia glances at the wall where Rey’s fist left a little galaxy of cracks in the drywall.

Rey decides it would be childish to say, what do you want, so she says nothing. This is Rey’s storage closet, damn it, and Leia’s intruding.

“Did you do that?” Leia asks, motioning toward the dent in the wall. The restraint in her voice pisses Rey off even more.

“Going to accuse me of falling to the Dark side?”

Leia swallows, holds out her hand, and when she pulls her fist downward, the general uses the Force to pull half the wall down with it. Rey coughs at the trail of gypsum dust and blinks at the bare studs, but Leia just stands and stares at it, looking wholly unsatisfied.

“My brother tried to murder my son,” she says, voice cold.

But she pounds her fist on the drywall, peeling away a chunk the side of Rey’s head. “And then, instead of telling me, he ran away. Luke left me to figure out where the hell my son was, he left me without any way to find my way through uncharted hyperspace to the Unknown Regions where Snoke took him, he abandoned—my—child—”

The venerable general, Rey’s model of icy composure, punctuates her words by punching the closet wall with a force and technique that tells Rey the princess is no stranger to street brawls.

“To a monster—”

It’s definitely not Leia’s fists doing the work this time; the entire wall falls in, leaving Leia covered in dust, looking very much like Ben looked when he appeared to Rey laced in ash on the throne room floor. Rey’s always thought of Leia as a general and Ben as the Force user, but looking at her now, in her black coat, humming with the Dark side, Rey has to remember that all Ben’s power came from this woman.

She likes this Leia.

“And I let him,” Leia finishes quietly. “I let him hurt my son, and everything you said is true, Rey. And I don’t know what I can do to make it right.”

Leia coughs at all the dust, suddenly small and weak and helpless again.

“I don’t know if you can make it right,” Rey says. It’s harsh, but honest. Ben's terrified of her, of what she represents. He's too proud to be angry at her for not protecting him--Ben Solo would never admit he needed to be protected, not even as a tiny thing, because after all in his mind he wasn't worth protecting. So he makes up reasons to hate her. The Resistance, the Senate, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that Leia was his mother, and she couldn't stop him from getting hurt.

Leia closes her eyes, clearly breathing through her anger just as Rey had done. “Does he trust you?”

“He doesn’t trust anybody.”

“I’m asking how he’s going to react when he wakes up in the middle of nowhere with you having seen his memories.”

Rey grits her teeth. Fine, if they’re being brutally honest here, Rey can take it as much as she dishes. “I don’t know.”

He probably won't kill her, unless his last conversation or the poison really did destroy his mind. But she's seen Ben Solo when he feels cornered, like on Crait. She's seen him when he feels betrayed. If he wakes up and convinces himself she made up everything between them as a plot to make him Leia's prisoner, he might actually get angry enough to fight her.

And Rey did betray him. She took him away from the world he knows, she made a decision for him that she didn't have any right to make. She saved his life but Ben is Ben, and he's not going to see it that way.

“Rey, did he hurt you?”

“You think I’d say those things if he hurt me?”

Leia glances at her, still breathing hard, and when she speaks, it’s exhausted. “People protect the ones who hurt them, sometimes.”

At her words, shame stains Rey’s anger. Yeah, they do. Ben did. Leia’s worried about her son, but she’s worried about Rey, too.

“Hux told us—” Leia begins, and Rey flushes, remembering Hux’s leer. Rey can guess easily enough what Hux thought, what Hux said.

“He didn’t hurt me.”

Leia looks like she wants to reach out, but stops. It should be ridiculous, the general of the Resistance, the hope of the galaxy, staring at her with drywall in her hair, but it’s not. It's only sad.

“We only talked," Rey says. "He’s—he’s just confused. I don’t know what he’ll do and I don’t think he does either. And I’m.” Rey swallows. “I’m sorry I said those things.”

“They needed to be said. I’m grateful that someone’s on his side.”

Rey’s startled at this summary, but it seems as good as anything else. She’s not exactly happy with Ben Solo at the moment, but yes, she’s on his side, whether he realizes it or not.

“That was a very stupid, very brave thing you did, coming through the cargo lanes to rescue us.”

“Anyone would’ve done it,” Rey says.

Leia raises an eyebrow at that. With so much difficulty Rey can’t help but lend her an arm, lowers herself down to sit on a cargo crate. When Leia pats Rey’s glove, Rey perches awkwardly beside her, suddenly conscious of how silly she must look in the overlarge cloak, the black leather, but she can't look any sillier than Leia does with dust all over her. Leia squeezes her hand, and the sensation fills Rey with feelings she doesn't want to understand, and hopes she doesn't want to remember.

“What happens now?” Rey asks to distract herself.

Leia, too, looks relieved to talk practicalities. “The fleet codes check out. We’re injured, and if we drag him unconscious onto a star destroyer full of Hosnian refugees, I don’t know if we can protect him.”

“We can’t just leave him here. Without the Order he’s got nobody. He might try to take back command—”

Rey doesn’t continue, because Leia senses what she means. If Ben goes back to the Order, if Ben does anything other than come and kneel to the Resistance and beg forgiveness, Rey will have to leave. She can’t trust him not to use their bond against her friends.

"Chewie will take Hux to the Resistance," Leia says. "I'll stay here."

When Rey glances at her, the woman is looking down at her hands. Rey tries to imagine Ben waking up, casts herself back into his memories.

"No," Rey says.

Leia blinks at her. "I'm not leaving my son. Not now. Not after all this."

"He doesn't trust you."

The words make Leia flinch, but Rey stands her ground. "I'm sorry, but it's true. He needs..." What's she going to say? He needs me? Who is she to think Ben needs her? But it's more than a feeling, more than an instinct. 

"He needs his mother."

"He needed you years ago, and you weren't there."

Rage flares in the Force. "I tried--"

"I'm sure you did. But that doesn't matter, not to Ben. You saw what happened when he tried to talk to you. I know there's good in him. You know there's good in him. But he needs time. And if you want him to trust you, he has to know you trust him."

The older woman takes a deep breath, like she’s trying to decide something, and nods.

Leia reaches up to the buttons on her coat. Rey observes her, curious, and then concerned for her sanity when she unbuttons the black tunic underneath, laying bare a wrinkled chest with prominent ribs. She only reveals enough to access the skin above her heart, and Rey sucks in a half-disgusted breath when she pinches the skin and, with a hiss of pain, rips it off.

“What the—”

But Leia peels the hidden chip off the patch of fake skin and holds it out to Rey with a chagrinned expression. “I told them I had a heart implant,” she says, shrugging. “Nobody looks too closely at an old woman’s chest. Here.”

Rey accepts the warm chips into her hand. “These are credit chips.”

Leia nods. “What’s left of the fortune of Alderaan. My personal accounts, the ones the Order didn’t manage to freeze. There’s not much there, but it’s enough for a decent ship, fake credentials, provisions for awhile.”

Rey’s mouth goes dry as she fans out the chips. She’s never even seen this much money in one place, much less held it in her hand. “This is everything the Resistance has left,” Rey says.

Leia’s hand folds over Rey’s, closing it over the credit chips. “Yes,” the general says, “it is. But it belongs to me and I can use it for whatever I think is most important. And if you’ll agree, I want to ask you, when the time comes, to give it to my son.”

Rey crushes the chips in her palm and stares at Leia. “What?”

Leia’s hand is small and moist around Rey’s sleek black glove.

“I couldn’t protect him then, and I can’t protect him now. I'll go back to the Resistance. I'll try to make sure if he wants to come back, he'll have a place there. He’s already suffered so much, Rey. So have you. There’s nothing I want more than to have a chance at life with him, and I’d give up the Resistance in a heartbeat if I thought he’d ever want to see my face again. Tell him if he wants to come home I will fight for him. Tell him there’s nothing in this galaxy I want more. But it’s his choice. Tell him if he doesn’t, I forgive him, and I love him more than anything. Tell him, Rey. Tell him I’m so, so sorry.”

Leia’s started to cry again, and Rey tries not to stare. It’s absolutely silent, just tears, no hiccuping, no sobbing. Leia’s hand has fallen from Rey’s, but Rey picks it up again, and squeezes it. Rey wants to rail at her, to ask the general why she’s trusting a scavenger, a nobody. Doesn’t she know Rey could just run off with all this money and leave her son to die? But here she is, trusting a nobody.

“I’ll tell him,” Rey says. “I promise. I’ll give him the credits.”

“Good.” Leia pats her glove. “Good, Rey. Thank you. Then Chewie and I will take Hux and Havel ahead to the rendezvous.”

"I need a week," Rey says.

“A week?”

A week alone with Ben, stuck in a strange house on a strange world? If Ben doesn't kill her when he first wakes up they'll probably end up killing either other by the end of day three. 

But the Force nags at her. Yes, they need time, and Rey has to face facts: even if Ben does wake up ready to talk to her, ready to embrace the good in himself, he has good reasons to never go back to the Resistance. And that's a big if.

Would she kill him if he didn't turn? Could she?

"A week," Rey says. 

Leia regards her seriously, then nods.

“Rey,” Leia says. “I believe my son is still there. I believe he wants to change, and I think you're right, I think you can help him. But if he doesn't want to change...I can't fight my son anymore. If he wants to rule, if he wants you to rule with him...the galaxy could do worse."

Rey bites the inside of her cheek. She was close to doing that anyway, but there's no need to tell Leia that. Still, there are things Rey doesn't understand, and with Luke gone, Rey doesn’t have anyone to ask advice from except this woman. “He saw a vision of me falling to the Dark side,” she confesses.

“Do you think that could happen?”

Ben said it already happened, but Rey doesn't say that.

“I feel so angry,” she says, swallowing.

Leia’s eyes flick to the destroyed closet wall. "I can't really fault you for that."

Rey's too overcome to fake a smile, but the general does have a point. Slowly, carefully, Leia tucks a piece of Rey’s hair behind her ear. It’s a gesture so tender, so motherly, that Rey has to press her eyes shut to keep back tears.

“Why is that a problem?” Leia asks. "To feel angry?"

The question startles Rey so much she looks Leia dead in the eye, and sees only curiosity there. “Luke told me to stay away from the Dark side.”

“Why should you trust Luke?”

There's bitterness in the question, and sadness. “Because he was a wise Jedi master and everyone seems to worship the ground he walked on." But he told Rey himself he wasn’t a legend. He told her he was a failure, didn't he?

Leia purses her lips, and buttons her tunic.

“I spent my life afraid of what my father became,” she says. “So did Luke. But maybe, instead of trying so hard to stay in the Light, we should’ve gotten up the courage to stand with the ones we love in the Dark.”

Rey’s cheeks flush, and she's grateful that Leia doesn't look at her while she smooths the placket of her coat.

“Maybe you and Ben know more about the Force than Luke did,” Leia says, levering herself to a stand. “Trust yourself, sweetheart. Tell Ben to trust himself, too.”

She leans forward, and Rey is shocked when the woman presses her lips gently to Rey's forehead. Her swollen hands clasp Rey’s cheeks, and for a moment Rey can allow herself to believe she deserves this. A family, however imperfect. A mother.

But it's a little girl's hope, and Rey lets it go.

***

Chewie mutters something about seeing her in a week, and Rey tells him to tell Finn—something, but she can’t finish. He promises to tell him.

Havel salutes, apparently pleased to be joining the Resistance, and Rey can’t help but pity Hux, who’s thrown unconscious onto the Falcon. Whoever’s at the rendezvous point won’t torture him—the Resistance doesn’t do that—but all the things Rey doesn’t think Ben’s guilty of, Hux is. He won’t live long, not among all those refugees from the system he uncaringly destroyed. She shouldn’t feel anything, but after all, she’s been in his mind, she’s felt his fear. And he was the closest thing Ben had to a friend, before Rey.

She keeps thinking about Hux, Havel, Leia, Chewie, Ben. It’s easier than thinking about herself.

Will she ever see any of them again?

She refuses to cry.

The droids offer to show her the rest of the house but she’s too tired. She ignores the too-polite questions about the storage closet wall and stumbles back into the small medbay. It’s her and Ben, now. The meddroid tells her it’ll check in every thirty minutes or so, is Rey sure she wouldn’t prefer to sleep somewhere more comfortable, but Rey waves them off and pulls out the side cot where Leia was lying. They gave Ben a sedative so the dreams have subsided, but even in her exhaustion the old insomnia rears its head.

At night, desperate to sleep, you imagine an Ocean—

Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.

The lights are too bright to sleep, and her thoughts are too distracting. Ben breathes too loud. Quietly, not wanting to endure forced conversation with the droids, Rey retraces her steps in the too-bright florescent lights of the hallway, back to the shuttle bay and the large door that leads to what she assumes is the main house. Ben’s under heavy sedation; he’ll be fine without her.

It’s dark in the stairwell. But as soon as Rey activates the heavy door at the top of the stairs, the dim light of pre-dawn forces her to blink back into the darkness, but when her eyes adjust Rey can only stand in the huge room, stunned.

What she thought was a functional, squalid Resistance safehouse is a mansion. She stands on a blue-green crystal floor in a blue-green crystal room carved right out of the geology of the planet. A set of clear crystal doors lead to a porch enclosed by a transparent force-field, open to the wind but shaded from sun and rain. Rey steps onto the clear crystal floor and when she looks down she can see the world stretching out under her feet for a kilometer. The air smells fresh and ozonic, like a lightsaber, and crisp discharges of energy crash from cloud to crystal in the far distance, sending out rolling peals of thunder, but the glow of the immanent sun arcs through a gap in the clouds.

In the pinkish dimness, a landscape of pure crystal stretches out below the house from horizon to horizon. The house, if you can call it that, must be a kilometer up, tucked into one of the huge spires that jut like knives from the glassy serrations below. One of the small seas stretches out in the valley, glittering with the first bright speckles of sunlight reflected off distant crystal towers. No artificial lights blot the landscape, no ships, and in the Force Rey senses that they’re alone, every bit as isolated as she was in the deepest wastes of the desert.

There are worse places to feel this alone.

A wide couch, carved from crystal, nestles against the window, and Rey settles herself on white cushions that feel like synthsilk, or like what she imagines synthsilk must feel like, since she can’t imagine anything softer and smoother than this. A pale grey blanket, quilted of the same material, lies folded at the foot of the couch and she pulls it up to cover herself while she watches the sun rise, but before the first sun’s light tops the horizon, she’s fast asleep. She doesn't cry.

Chapter Text

Ch. 22: Hunger

Rey bolts upright, instinct jerking her hand toward a staff that isn’t there. The shreds of dreams twist through her mind—a fiery planet, harsh breathing in a mask, infants’ cries. Ben tortured in a thousand ways, memories drowning in memories.

Someone’s pounding on the AT-AT. Probably one of the men from the village, the ones with moonshine breath, with sand-scraper beards and calloused hands, the ones who joyride out to the AT-AT and croon disgusting songs all night. They're getting bolder now that the Graveyard’s all but picked clean, eager to trim the competition. They all know Plutt protects her because she’s good but her haul’s been thinning like everybody else’s. Besides, last time they left one man behind with a staff-wound to the head. She didn’t check if he was alive or not, she just buried him in the desert.

But her staff's gone, and she won’t survive out here very long, not alone, not helpless.

“You’re not helpless,” she reminds herself.

She opens her eyes.

Watery sheets tangle around her arm. The bed—not her hammock, but a real bed—reeks of bacta and the ceiling is blinding blue.

Right, she’s not on Jakku. Christophsis. The Resistance, the Force, Ben Solo, and the bond. He’s still asleep, mercifully dreamless. The bond gives her only a direction, but a strange and annoying sense of rightness tells her he’s very near, maybe in the next room.

She opens her left hand and the small red lightsaber that flies into her hand. It's not her staff but it feels good to be armed, and Rey stretches her aching muscles, pulling at bacta pads over her cracked ribs. She drudges up a hazy memory of the safehouse meddroid wrapping her shoulder in bacta and herding her up to a proper bed, the biggest she’s ever seen. Her black armored shirt is gone, leaving only the bra and trousers and the cool silvery sheets that slip away from her skin as she stands. The glassy chill of the floor is a relief, chasing away the wisps of Jakku.

What is this place? How long has she been out? Is there any food? She’s starving.

Rey tenses at the sound of a distant rumble and small objects pinging against the crystal walls. She’s heard that sound before, when the Teedos used the downed ships as target practice for their ancient projectile-blasters.

The Order?

Rey clasps her lightsaber and stumbles to the massive window, just an open hole shielded by a force-field. The high-pitched clink deepens into a roar, and as she watches, a curtain of water shrouds the house, concealing it from the rest of the glassy world. She jumps at a sudden flash like canon fire, and then another peal of thunder shakes the floor and sets the tiny bones of her feet vibrating. The Force itself is alive with the energy discharging from the crystals deep below the surface, the ones responsible for the field that shattered Ben’s lightsaber.

Rain. Just rain. Rey makes herself breathe.

Luke showed her how the Force was life, but Rey seems to feel it most keenly in the dead things of the world. She tunes herself to the vibrations the way she used to tune herself to the dead starships before she knew about the Force, pressing her hands against the wall and pulling in the sensations from the balls of her feet. Rocks, sand, metal, water, carcasses, bones, energy, all the things that become life in the right combinations—those are the things Rey always needed to understand to survive. It’s Ben who naturally reaches out to the living.

As Rey calms herself she feels his heartbeat and breath adjust to hers. The relief that trickles through her makes her bite her cheek in annoyance as she studies her surroundings.

The light filtering in through the crystal suggests sunset, but whatever sun reaches this planet is so muted by the deep teal of the rock that most of the light comes from slim bar-diodes set into the walls. Plants, or something plant-like, dot the ceiling, sending delicate crystalline tendrils down into the room. In the oceanic light they feel ominous, like spiked crystal arms reaching out to trap her. Outside, wind howls. This is a new place, with threats she doesn’t understand yet.

There’s no furniture in the room that isn’t carved from the crystal itself, and in the low light her own reflection dominates the walls. Feeling exposed, she walks to the glassy drawers set into a nook near the bed. There are the bags full of broken lightsaber parts atop her black armored tunic and shirt. Her stolen blaster’s there too, and her belt.

The plant-crystal-tendrils follow her movements with apparent interest, and Rey squeezes the lightsaber handle to keep from slicing the nosy plants apart.

The droids left her a variety of colorful sleeveless tunics, ones that zip up the side so she can put them on without hurting her shoulder, and her hand reaches automatically for the orange one. Rey never saw much point in thinking about colors, since Jakku had few, but the blazing sunset orange of the Resistance jumpsuits, guaranteed to clash with all human skin tones, has become her favorite.

But Rey will probably never see the Resistance again. Finn—

She swallows around something in her throat and sets the orange cloth down. With a sigh she clips the lightsaber to her belt and pulls a glossy black tunic from the drawer, awkwardly dressing as she considers her situation.

She’s bound to Ben Solo. To a—well, she can’t call him a monster, can she, not even after he admitted to ordering the attack on her base. But at best he’s complicated, unpredictable, broken. Powerful, too. He’d been half-dead when she beat him last time, and she’s got no illusions about being able to defeat him again.

Rey shuts her eyes and breathes as she tucks her blaster into her belt.

What if he’s right, and the bond really is Snoke’s doing? If that’s true, he only made it to hurt Ben. She was expendable. Garbage. And now here she is, trapped. Just like Ben.

Rey blinks at her reflection in the wall. The face staring back at her from the crystal walls is tired even after days of sleep, rabid and unfamiliar.

Out of habit, Rey flicks her thumb against her wrist where she usually keeps her hair-ties, only to find they’re gone, forgotten in Ben’s quarters on the Voratrix. Her hair is still loose.

She squares her shoulders, steps into the ‘fresher, and snatches a comb from where it sits in a pretty, if dusty, arrangement with some candles—candles—on a platter. Carefully parting her hair around the bandage on the back of her head, she yanks the comb through the tangles. She kept those buns for her parents; she doesn’t need them anymore.

A part of her is glad. Let the past die, Ben told her, and Rey can see the wisdom in that now. The girl from Jakku who cowered in front of a wall trying to convince herself her parents loved her—that tiny fearful girl with her desperate hope—that girl kept her trapped for too long. Maybe Rey doesn’t know who she is anymore, if she ever did, but she won’t be that girl. She won’t wait around for hope to kill her.

Hope is like the sun, Leia said. But Rey and the sun always had a complicated relationship.

As she combs she fiddles with the unfamiliar controls and jumps when one of the buttons causes the wall by the sink to shimmer into a full-length mirror. She snorts at what she sees. The bacta patches on her shoulder bunch awkwardly under the too-large tunic, but with the blaster, the lightsaber, and the boots, she looks like some rogueish bounty hunter out of a holo, albeit one who’s seen wrong end of a beating. She looks like she belongs in the dark.

And the dark is there. It’s behind her, calling out to her, offering her a solution for the pain, the loneliness. Whispering burn it down, you’re not helpless.

She flinches when a fierce tug on the comb yanks out a chunk of hair. She stares at the tangle, swallowing, and drops the dirty comb in the sink.

She needs food. If this is a safe-house there are probably rations tucked away somewhere, right? Even if no one’s living here. She walks into the hall and turns away from the point of light in the bond that is Ben. There’s nothing she can do for him now.

The house is immense, and the light turns more eerie as the sun sets and the storm rages outside. Rey wishes she’d slept all the way through the night-cycle; she’s spent enough sleepless nights in her life without sitting vigil for Ben Solo in a mansion where the walls are alive.

Rey tries to avoid the droids, but finally the caretaker accosts her in one of the main rooms. Her name is Eusix, she’s thrilled to have some company, can she do anything to make Rey comfortable while Emdee treats Mr. Solo?

Mr. Solo. Rey’s too preoccupied to laugh.

“Nice to meet you,” Rey says wearily. “Have you got any rations?”

“Rations? For a space journey?”

“Sure.”

“I—well, I guess there’s some in long-term storage in the hangar, miss, but you’ll need a code…”

It’s the hangar they flew into, the secret one, Rey supposes, and she’s relieved to see six hyperdrive-equipped vessels and a number of speeders and land transports. At least she’ll have something to entertain her while she waits for Ben to wake up and kill her. When Rey emerges half an hour later with an armful of dusty long-haul ready-to-eats, Eusix joins her on the balcony while she sates her hunger.

“How long have I been asleep?” Rey asks the droid. She doesn’t feel like talking but there are things she needs to know.

“A day-cycle and a half.”

Rey swallows a bit of sandy carb-cake with a grimace. Distantly she remembers accepting Emdee’s offer of sedatives while the droid fixed her shoulder and the bacta did its work, thinking in her hazy exhaustion that staying awake seemed pointless.

“Emdee says Mr. Solo will make a full recovery,” Eusix tells her.

Rey tries to hide her relief, though she doesn’t know why. “When will he wake up?” she asks.

The droid’s sensors flash as it communicates with its friend. “Probably tomorrow or the next day. She says if you want to sit with him, you can—”

“That’s fine.”

Thankfully, the droid takes the hint and leaves her alone with her chalky food. Two days. Great. And now Rey’s going to be up all night from the space-lag.

Alone, Rey watches the storm. Her first storm on Ahch-To was a revelation. The Force was strong there, too, but the energy she felt in it was almost comforting, and the sight of water pouring from the sky brought her joy. It still does, but it’s muted, and the buzzing power of the lightning and the pounding of the rain mostly sets her teeth on edge.

Action, Rey can handle, but these were always the worst nights, where there was nothing to do but think. Rey always kept too many secrets from herself to risk thinking.

Ben knew that.

She leaves the balcony and, ignoring the droid, marches back upstairs. She bypasses her own room and follows the deceptively soft light of Ben Solo’s presence in the bond through huge double doors into what must be the master bedroom. There, in the center of a massive crystal bed, is Ben, the meddroid by his side.

“Give me a second alone with him,” she orders. Even without her Juno Ren mask, her voice sounds dead. The meddroid takes one look at her face and bustles out, easing the heavy doors shut behind her.

Chewie said this was a friend’s house, and this must’ve been where Chewie slept when he visited, because the bed is huge, making Ben’s body seem small against it. Tubes and wires snake out from the sheet, and monitors beep and flash with information Rey can’t read or understand. A small bacta patch covers a wound on his hand where the poison went in.

The mattress shifts under her as she sits next to him on the bed. He’s naked under the sheets, sweating, breathing shallowly, helpless.

All it would take is a flick of her thumb, and this would all be over.

The thought makes the food sit uneasy in Rey’s stomach but she forces herself to follow it through because she knows she has darkness in her and she has to be sure.

With Ben dead she could go back to the Resistance, she could have the life Poe offered her. A commander—a general, someday. Maybe, if this war ever ends and she makes it through it, she could be somebody important. She could have a ridiculous house like this. She could get married.

Rey’s never even considered that: a future. Even the fantasies of her parents ended with them hugging her and telling her they loved her. After that it was a blank space, because some part of her could never quite believe she’d live that long, or that she deserved to. But one swipe of a lightsaber could give her a chance.

She wants it to be easy. Ben said she’s already fallen—it should be easy. But when her hand goes to the lightsaber, she can’t even get it off her belt. Luke made that mistake, but she won’t.

Instead, relieved, she presses the back of her fingers to his fever-damp cheek, to the scar.

It’s strange, almost funny: she’s seen his memories, his dreams, she’s felt the sensations in his body and the terror in his heart, but she’s never let herself just look at him. How could she? It’s always felt like giving in.

Ever since the Force showed him shirtless he’s known exactly what he does to her. She’d bet a week’s portions that their unconscious memory-sharing went both ways and now he probably knows the stupid fantasies that ran through her head when she shipped herself to Snoke. Rey, he’d say, wrapping her in his huge arms, you saved me. You’ll never be alone again.

Little girl dreams. Pure desperation, latching on to a pretty face, some sad eyes. Of course all those childish hopes fell apart as soon as he called her nothing. But there are other fantasies that didn’t leave her, fantasies she tried to crush in the long hungry nights on the Falcon.

And it doesn’t help that she saw what she does to him. He feels as disgusting for wanting to hold her hand or fall asleep on her shoulder as she feels for wanting to push him against a wall and rake her nails across his back.

The heart monitor speeds up, and Rey jerks her hand off the sweat-damp skin of his chest where she followed the scar to where it disappears below the sheets. His forehead creases and Rey mentally kicks herself for thinking about that, for fuck’s sake, because Force knows both of them have more important things to think about, and anyway she was considering killing him not thirty seconds ago.

But he likes it when you try to kill him, says the swirling thing inside her, the thing that just wants to hit something and not worry about the consequences. Rey ignores this voice and sighs. She smooths her thumb across his brow, resisting the urge to touch the stubbly mustache and beard already coming in—Rey had no idea mens’ facial hair grew so fast—or trace the line of his over-long nose, the fascinating but not-quite-attractive curve of his chin. She stays until his heart rate steadies, and leaves.

The next two days pass glacially slow, not that Rey’s ever seen a glacier. The storms rarely stop for more than a few minutes and Rey sleeps when she can, spending her irregular waking hours in the hangar or the small machine shop, trying not to think about the future, about the past, about Ben, about herself.

There’s nothing behind her, there’s nothing ahead. Rey can’t bring herself to believe he’ll heroically join the Resistance—not that he could, since the Resistance might just kill him. And Rey from Nowhere won’t stand with him and save the galaxy by making the First Order into something good. Those were more little girl dreams, more fantasies to outgrow.

And Rey feels like an overfilled waterskin; the Force keeps leaking out of her.

Once she’s rebuilding a turbocompressor that she took apart out of sheer boredom when her canteen slips out of her hand. She jerks to catch it and ends up hurling it across the room hard enough to crack it, sending water spewing all over the workroom. Instead of calmly wiping it up she gets so angry at herself for wasting water she smashes the insulated canteen against the crystal wall until it cracks in half and cuts her hand, and she’s a hair’s breadth from collapsing in tears.

Emdee bandages her hand and looks at her like she’s crazy, and Rey’s not sure she isn’t.

The droids keep trying to engage her in conversation but she gives the tersest possible answer, and she can’t muster up even the slightest bit of curiosity about the house or the owner. She wants to make plans but she can’t focus on anything for more than five minutes, and the stupid crystal plants seem to watch her every move. The beautiful house makes her skin crawl, and the portions she’s surviving on are even blander and drier than the ones she ate on Jakku.

She works on the lightsabers, too. Making designs, mostly, milling parts almost randomly on the little fabricator unit in the workshop. But every time she tries to put anything together she gets so frustrated with the tiny parts she wants to scream.

The planet itself, or the kyber inside it, saws against her brain like a bow, screeching and wailing and making her feel like a prisoner in her own mind. Sleep isn’t any better because when she sleeps Ben’s dreams slip into hers, to the point where she’s not sure if the fiery planet with the dark fortress is one of his memories or her dreams, or some shared nightmare. But as Rey floats in and out of sleep over days, that fortress is always there.

So is Ben. Rey keeps finding things in the house without meaning to, she keeps remembering things that didn’t happen to her. She drops a spanner in shock after she was trying to size a bolt and she realizes the reason she guessed right the first time is because she read the size. When she runs for one of the consoles and tries to read something else, she can’t do it. It just came to her when she wasn’t thinking about it, the same way using a lightsaber did.

When Emdee finally announces Ben’s had his last dose of sedative and he’ll wake up in ten hours, Rey almost punches the wall out of sheer joy. She wants him to yell at her. She wants something to yell at.

With eight hours left, Rey decides she’s too jumpy to work on anything productive. “I’m going out,” she announces to the two droids. “I’m going to explore that lake in the valley.”

“At night?” Eusix exclaims. “There are Kyaddak down there!”

“Which are?”

“Fearsome beasts that can use the Force to—”

“Perfect,” Rey says. “I’ll be back later.”

Ignoring the droid’s sputtering, Rey takes the red lightsaber and the hoverspeeder and does something she’s never done: she throws on a hooded rain cloak and goggles and drives straight down the sheer crystal face of the spire, as fast as she can go, pulling up at the last possible second before she dashes herself against the jagged crystal. She takes the most dangerous path through the landscape, skipping between the shards with her eyes closed, using the Force to navigate. Dark or light-side, it doesn’t matter; the rain slaps her face and she feels reckless and free.

When she gets to the edge of the sea, she hops over the side of the speeder and immediately regrets her decision when she slips on the glassy surface of the rain-slick crystal ground. The Force breaks her fall without her even thinking about it, sparing her almost-healed shoulder, and she moves more cautiously, finding her footing with practiced ease in the dark. Moving on wet crystal isn’t all that different from moving on shifting quicksand.

She doesn’t get much exploring done, because it’s dark and, really, there’s nothing here but more damn crystal. But she pulls out the lightsaber and practices beating up rocks for an hour, maybe more, until she’s soaked to the skin with sweat and rain and she finally has to admit that she doesn't like this weapon. The grip's too small, the blade burns too clean. It fights her like Ben's, but where Ben's wrestles her like a drunk luggabeast this one's almost passive-aggressive, like the market women who used to turf her out of the scrub-tubs with big toothless grins, promising her they'd been done in just a little bit. Besides, beating up crystals doesn't fill her neat to really damage something. Her heart's set on a pack of Kyaddak, whatever the hell the are, and when something tickles at the edge of her senses, watching her, she thinks she’ll get to work off her frustrations with a real opponent.

But it’s not a pack of Force-sensitive animals. It’s too far, and too familiar.

Ben is awake.

His panic slices through her body as she vaults into the speeder, and in her mad chase back to the spire his emotions change from panic to confusion, sadness, pain.

Loss. Resignation and an exhaustion that Rey knows too well.

Wait for me, she thinks as hard as she can. Don’t do this. It’s not too late.

But she knows he can’t hear her, and he won’t want to. The speeder crashes into the hangar wall as she leaps out of it and sprints up the stairs, panting, and uses the Force to open the huge double doors.

Ben’s body is framed against the lightning, the rain. He’s sitting on the window ledge, looking out at the night.

***

Ben approaches the window. The lightning has quieted as the storm moves off, leaving only the numbing rain. He climbs onto the windowsill, stands a moment, then sits on the edge. A crystal gable blocks most of the rain, but an occasional breeze flicks a drop at his hair as he looks down at the barren darkness below. The shards glint in the distant flashes, sharp and inviting. It wouldn’t be fair if he left anything for her to clean. This will be for the best—just like the Jedi taught, leaving no trace. At least he managed to dress himself and disable the droids.

Rey’s coming. Rey, who didn’t betray him, Rey, who’s sprinting toward him as fast as she can because she’s actually stupid enough to care about him, to risk her life running through cargo lanes to haul his sorry corpse off a ship. Rey, whose dreams and memories now haunt his own so that he’s not sure where he ends and she begins, who shared his visions of a dark tower and a planet of fire.

And Ben used his last moments alive to try to destroy her, because all he can do is hurt people, and now there’s going to be a war and billions of people will die because he is Ben Solo, galactic failure.

He should’ve known better than to hope. He should’ve fucking known better.

He can’t even summon the energy to hate himself for ending the Skywalker bloodline by jumping out of a damn window in Lando’s Christophsis hideaway, because the sheer mediocrity of it fits. The footsteps behind him and the fury in the bond tell him that, as usual, he’s too late. He couldn’t even manage the courage to spare her from this.

“Ben.”

“Leave me,” he orders, but of course he’s not worth obeying.

The crystal vibrates under his hands, and warmth blooms on his wrist as she hoists herself up to sit beside him.

“Don’t do this,” she says, voice hoarse from running. She’s dripping wet, her loose hair plastered to her face, one lock of it just grazing her lips.

“Why shouldn’t I? I used you to get to the Resistance,” he reminds her.

“I know.”

“I would’ve used you to destroy all of them.”

“Yeah, I know, Ben.”

She kicks her boots, and despite the night and the lightning and the deadly fall this is like the old days with Jyun, when they used to sit on the dock by the lake and he’d ask her about what it was like in the Otomok system and she’d complain about Rax like they were just kids.

But Jyun’s dead, and it’s Ben’s fault, and Rax is probably dead too, and even the Otomok system is dead, ripped apart for minerals by a First Order dreadnought. Snoke made Jyun supervise that mission.

“Finn told me not to trust you. He says I don’t really know you, that he’s seen who you really are and you’re just manipulating me to get what you want.”

Of course he told her that. It’s true, isn’t it? And the traitor loves her; he’d try to protect her. “And what does a stormtrooper, in his infinite wisdom, think I want?”

“Don’t.”

Her tone doesn’t leave any doubt how close Ben is to crossing a line. Ben looks down at his hands, and beyond that, shaded in darkness, the valley floor.

“What do you want, Ben? Have you ever even thought about it, or have you always done what he told you?”

“I wasn’t a slave,” he snaps. “I chose.”

“Did you?”

“Don’t lecture me, not when you spent your whole life trying to please parents you made up.”

She’s silent for a moment. “I wasn’t lecturing."

Her eyes meet his, and he turns back to the landscape, watching another front roll in on a flood of light.

“There’s no point in wanting things,” he says, shaking his increasingly wet hair out of his eyes. He probably sounds like a teenager whining about the unfairness of life, but in this moment he doesn’t care. “The Force takes what it wants. None of the rest of us ever gets a choice.”

“You have a choice now,” she says.

He snorts. “What, joining the Resistance? Taking the Order back?”

If she's surprised he's not seriously considering the latter, she doesn't show it. Ben is surprised, or, well, disgusted really. The galaxy is his responsibility, and as much as he chooses to justify himself with probably-true excuses about getting shot with two hundred blasters if he got within two light-years of any First Order vessel, the truth is he's relieved. The galaxy is a burden he never wanted.

As for the billions of people who'll die from his negligence, well. There's a reason he's out here.

“No,” Rey says, her voice serious as she gestures out at the jagged landscape. “There’s always a choice. Jump, or don’t.”

“And what will I do if I don’t? You expect me to believe you’ll let me off this planet?”

She raises an eyebrow. “Do you honestly think I could stop you?"

Yes, but even if he were going to admit that she doesn't give him the chance.

"You’re not my prisoner, Ben. You’re free to go. Here.”

Rey pulls something small out of the pocket of her tunic. Credit chips?

“Your mother—”

“I don’t want to talk about my mother.”

He saw what happened on the Voratrix in Rey’s memories, or at least some of it. Leia Organa is alive and it annoys him that he’s this relieved. He tried to save her, in the end, but it was too little, too late, a final weakness.

“Your mother is fine. She gave you these,” Rey says, fanning out the chips. By the looks of it it’s an enormous amount of money, maybe his mother’s whole account.

Ben wants to be furious, and he dutifully rehearses the old rages--she's paying him off--but he knows better. He knows where this is going, and he grips his knees hard when Rey confirms it. “There’s two hyperdrive-equipped ships in the hangar and plenty of supplies. She asked me to tell you she’s sorry, and that she loves you, and that if you want to come home she’ll fight for you—but you know it’s not safe. So she gave you a choice.”

Ben’s inclined not to believe this for a second, because knowing his mother lied to him again would at least let him feel smug, but the Force tells him that at least as far as Rey knows, it’s true. His mother is sorry. Well, good for her. Fucking great.

And she gave him a choice, that's nice, like he ever had a fucking choice. What does she expect him to do, take the money and retire somewhere? She left Rey alone with him, knowing how dangerous he is, knowing he wants to kill her.

“I don’t want her money and I don’t want her choices,” he says, not bothering to look at her. “If you’re really letting me go, take it. Keep my lightsaber if you want it.”

“It’s—it’s broken.”

Of course it is. “Then take whatever you want and leave.”

“So, what, you can jump out a window in peace?”

It’s been a long time since Ben did anything in peace. He’s not sure why he’s offended that she takes his suffering so lightly, because what did he expect? She’s not a therapy droid.

“Obviously,” he says.

The silence gets awkward. With a sigh, she stuffs the credit chips back into her pocket like she was stupid to hope.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” she says. It’s very pointedly not an apology, just an acknowledgement that, in her eyes, he’s too fragile to handle the truth. “I’ve never—any of this. I never had a friend until three weeks ago. I’m not good at making people feel better.”

“You’re not,” he agrees, not that it matters because he has no interest in feeling better.

“I don’t know what to say,” she admits.

“It’s fine.”

“No, Ben, you think it’s fine because you’re used to everybody treating you like—like garbage.”

“We’re enemies—”

“We’re not.” She’s offended. “We haven’t been since that night.”

He’s quiet for a long second. “You know that was a lie,” he said, and he doesn’t need to specify. A fire, a hand, a secret confession and an offer.

“He was in your head,” she accuses. “Telling you to reach out to me. Wasn’t he?”

He closes his eyes. “Yes.”

“And I don’t care. Just because he ordered you to do it doesn’t mean it was a lie. He knew you meant it; he wanted you to mean it. If you hadn’t meant it he would’ve killed me himself—the only reason he made you do it was because he knew what you felt was real.”

Her reasoning is fair, and her insight into his Master’s sadism unnerves him. He’s so fucking sick of people using his own weakness against him, but it’s his own fault, isn’t it?

“You should hate me,” he tells her.

“I wish I could hate you, Ben. I really do.”

A flash of lightning illuminates her face just as a fat drop flecks her lower lip. Her tongue darts out, automatic, trying to seize the moisture before the desert takes it away. Ben follows her gaze, studying the distant clouds.

“It’s not that I’m not angry,” Rey says quietly, crossing her arms over her chest soaked. With the wind cutting through her thin shirt and the rain splattering their faces, she’s shivering. “I am. But I couldn’t leave you. On that ship, or just now, I thought you were going to—I couldn’t leave you.”

Ben clenches his teeth. “I know you only came back for my mother. You thought you could interrogate me—”

“Ben, just—don’t.” She sounds so tired. “Frankly I wasn’t a big fan of your mother’s until I saw her rip down a wall with the dark side and shoot lightning from her hands to protect you—”

“What?”

“But the important thing is I came back for you. Not your mother, not the Resistance, not the Light or the Jedi or the galaxy. For you, Ben. Just you.”

Ben swallows, or tries to. It’s difficult.

“Why would you do that?” he asks. He’ll ask about his mother later; he doesn’t want to talk about her now.

“Because I don’t abandon people, Ben. Because I promised you you weren’t alone.”

He shakes the rain out of his hair. “That wasn’t a promise.”

“It was.”

The Force vibrates with the truth of it. He squeezes his knees and presses his eyes shut, because it’s the mercy that’s killing him, it’s the fact that she means it. Every second of kindness is another knife in his gut, but like a real knife, it pins him in place. Maybe this is what happiness is, sitting on a ledge looking death in the face and saying soon, I promise, but not yet, not yet.

Finally, he manages to swallow. “You’re—not afraid of heights,” he says, because he has to say something.

Something between amusement and annoyance trickles through the bond. Of course she’s not afraid of heights.

How many times did the tiny girl she used to be huddle on some narrow ledge like this, high above the floor of some dead starship, dreading the dust-caked miles between her and and her next quarter-portion? Ben saw enough in her memories to know he’s not the only one who’s looked out into the darkness and wondered if it would be easier.

He wishes he could hate her.

A blast of wind throws rain into his face and he wipes his hand uselessly across his eyes. At first when he tries to talk, he can’t, so he clears his throat and grips the window ledge too hard.

“What if there’s no way out?” he says. This was always his weakness, that it felt good to fall on his knees and confess his failures to some higher power. Apparently now he’s fallen so low a scavenger will do. “If I give in to the dark the light punishes me; if I give in to the light the dark punishes me. What if I jump, and instead of becoming one with the Force I’m caught in the middle like this forever, with the light and the dark trying to rip me apart until the end of time?”

She rests a hand on his shoulder that feels both accusing and comforting, and he shrugs away from both.

Her attention burns in the Force for a moment before she turns back to the clouds. It must be monsoon season; there’s another storm rolling in, piling high in the atmosphere where the crystal pillars won’t rip it apart.

She holds out her hand, not to him but to the open darkness, and the bond expands between them as she settles into the Force. The droplets shift in their paths, diverting themselves to coalesce over her fingers. Soon she holds a ball of water, a miniature ocean swirling and teeming above her palm.

A bitter laugh floats through the rain, and she shakes her head.

“I could’ve taken all the water in Niima,” she says. “All the portions I could ever need. I could’ve just taken it.”

The ball of water heaves, then shatters. Rey watches the drops resume their fall as if they’d never been interrupted, and there are warm tears on her cheeks now along with the cold rain.

“We both wasted our lives, Ben.”

He doesn’t bother arguing; it’s not like he climbed up on a window ledge to enjoy the view. The wind picks up, fluting in the crevices above the house and spattering them both with more rain. He shifts his bodyweight on the ledge, putting his warmth closer to her, daring the universe to make him slip.

“I didn’t kill them,” she says quietly.

He keeps his head down, staring out at the mountains through a fringe of wet hair, futilely trying to conceal his disappointment. It shouldn’t matter that a scavenger keeps deluding herself, but it does.

“You can’t keep being afraid of the darkness inside you,” he starts.

“I’m not afraid.”

Ben studies her face, the set of the muscles in her jaw, the wild light in her eyes as she refuses to cry.

“But you keep denying the truth.”

“It’s not the truth.”

“I saw it.”

“You saw what the Force wanted you to see. I don’t know why it showed you that, Ben; I think the Dark side shows us what we want. But it’s not the truth.”

Ben wipes a hand over his stubbled chin. If she’s going to be this stubborn there’s no point arguing, but when she speaks her voice carries something he’s never heard before, something earnest and raw and real that pounds against his ribcage and makes it so he can’t look away from her.

“I wish I killed them, Ben. Do you understand? That would be the happy ending. The little girl who stood up to the bad guys and burned them and left them dead in the desert. I wish I pulled that stupid ship out of the sky, but I didn’t. You know what I did?”

Ben doesn’t. This part of her memory was too well-guarded to penetrate his dreams, so he shakes his head.

“I just stood there. I cried. And I loved them, Ben. I loved them as hard as I could because I thought if I just loved them enough, if I made myself into the thing they wanted me to be, they might come back. So no, I didn’t destroy that ship. This isn’t a story where the little girl stands up to the bad people. I was helpless, and they left me, because I was just something they could throw away, and nothing I ever do will make this better. Do you understand? I will never get to hurt them. I have to live with this forever, and I wasted my life—”

She stops and blinks out at the landscape, and the Force within her is so dark Ben can hardly breathe around it. His hands are shaking.

“You deserved better—” he begins.

“I didn’t.”

“You did—”

“Shut up. I thought if I could find out what made them leave me I could fix it, but it wasn’t anything I did, it was just me, I wasn’t enough, I was—rotten. And that—I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

“Rey—”

The power around her is collapsing, diluted with something weak and self-hating. She’s trying to dive back behind the candy shell she built to hide the rotten thing inside.

“This wasn’t supposed to be about me.”

“Rey.”

But she’s already trying to change the conversation, fishing in the pocket of her tunic.

“You’re starving,” she says. “You haven’t eaten in days.”

“For once in your life, could you think about something other than food?”

She pointedly ignores him and holds the object out to him.

“I think I sat on it,” she says, nearly in tears, and she opens her palm to reveal an ancient-looking protein matrix from a long-haul ration. She edges it closer to him, and his fingers brush her callouses when he picks it out of her hand. It looks vile. Did she not even ask the droids to make her some real food?

“You should eat, Ben,” she says. What she means is there in the bond, but she’s not him. Telling the truth about things doesn’t come easily to her, and it’s fitting, isn’t it, that offering food should be the vehicle for everything else she doesn’t know how to say?

But he shoves the disgusting thing back into her hand, and her fingers close over it, trapping it before someone tries to take it from her. Ben looks away.

“Why won’t you eat, Ben?”

“This isn’t about me.”

She scowls.  “You’re the one who came out here to—just tell me.”

In the bond her signature is wounded, naked. She’s begging him to stop talking about her; it’s too much, too soon.

“Ben,” she pleads softly, and the pain there is too much. He gives in with a sigh.

“I’m used to long fasts,” he says.

“So am I but that doesn’t mean I do it for fun—”

“I tried,” he says.

“You tried—to eat?”

“Three cycles ago, maybe four now. I have a—discipline. A ritual. I eat nutritional colloid and water, nothing else. That was my training. When I tried to eat real food, I threw it up.”

Rey sets her jaw and closes her fist tighter around the portion, latching onto anger to keep herself from having to feel. It’s a pattern Ben knows well.

“You think you can’t eat anything he didn’t give you permission to eat?”

He nods, still not looking at her.

“And you’d rather starve than keep following his rules,” she says.

It’s not a question, but he nods again, accepting this as one more well-deserved humiliation, to admit he ruled the galaxy but he can’t even feed himself. He doesn’t want to talk about this either; he doesn’t want to talk at all, but they keep fucking talking.

“Where did you even find that?” he demands, and the sharpness in his voice surprises her, but she ignores him. She probably scavenged it out of some dusty crate in the hangar, one of the old go-bags from the safe-house’s Rebellion days.

“You need to eat,” she says, ripping open the package. “We’ll share. Here.”

The matrix tears in half with a snap that protein portions don’t make unless they’re very, very old, and she extends one half out to him in her rain-soaked palm. How did he not notice how badly she was shivering?

And then she hesitates. That’s what does it—the way her fingers jerk reflexively around the food like she’s using every ounce of her self-control not to clutch it to her chest. It’s just a fucking cardboard protein matrix and it’s hurting her to let go of it, but she lets go anyway, holding it out to him like he’s going to think it’s some precious gift, because to her, it is.

He yanks it out of her hand and hurls it into the valley below.

It’s too fast for her to stop him, and before she can do anything but go white-hot with fury, he swings his legs back over the ledge and slides unsteadily back onto the solid bedroom floor. Standing hurts like hell, and walking hurts worse.

He jerks his chin toward the window where the stupid protein matrix is still hurtling toward the ground.

“You don’t eat that,” he tells her as he struggles to stand. Of course that’s the wrong thing to say because he always gets this wrong.

“Fine,” she says, and turns away, to the valley, face burning. “I shouldn’t have taken it without permission.”

“You come into this house and you’re eating fucking space rations,” he screams at her back. He’s been unconscious for days, and his throat is raw and painful when he raises his voice.

She pauses, holding the ledge stiffly. “I needed food, I thought—”

Ben can’t listen to her when she talks like that, like she’s ashamed to be eating twenty-year-old MREs from Lando’s storage closet. He pushes past her and hobbles downstairs to the kitchen.

Rey sits on the ledge, and he knows from her memories what she’s doing: exactly five breaths. Ben rips open the cabinets and turns on the burner and seethes when he realizes this is a ritual for her like the ones Snoke assigned to him.

Five breaths, that’s all the time she allowed herself to feel before she had to go back to being a skinny kid alone in the world. Five breaths to rage at how fucking tired she was of working to the bone just to drag herself back to that junk heap of an outpost and beg for water. Five breaths to feel betrayed, to feel like maybe it might be easier to just walk out into the desert and go to sleep.

He ignores his pain and practically pulls the conservator door off its hinges just as she steps into the kitchen, dripping water all over the floor. She folds her arms over her chest.

“What are you doing?” she demands.

“What the hell does it look like I’m doing?”

He pulls out a steak in a glass container, beautifully marbled. The conservator’s full to bursting, like Eusix, ever the optimist, thawed everything in storage in preparation for a grand dinner. Ben slams the steak onto the counter hard enough to crack the glass. None of his bones seem to be broken, and he's been on the wrong end of Snoke's lightning enough to recognize nerve damage when he feels it.

She clenches her fists. “You’re just going to make me watch you eat,” she says, like she shouldn’t have expected better.

It’s all he can do not to throw the hot pan at the wall.

When he knocks over a little stand of utensils, he throws most of them across the kitchen, and swipes up the tongs. The steak drops into the pan with a sizzle that makes her pupils dilate with desire, and then the air reeks of food, so strong it makes his empty stomach turn.

Ben throws the tongs on the counter and rounds on her. In two steps he’s looming over her, pinning her against the counter. She looks up at him like she did before everything changed, like she’s about to spit and call him a monster.

“You. You do not eat garbage,” he says, flinging spittle onto her soaked chin. “That’s over. That’s done. You don’t come into this house and eat space rations from the old Rebellion.”

He juts his hand toward the open conservator, curling his fingers into a fist when the food fails to come to him in the Force. Warily, she flicks her eyes toward it and swallows. She’s probably never seen that much food in one place in her life, and Ben stomps to the conservator because he can’t meet her eyes.

“This is yours,” he yells. “This is all yours. Look at this, there’s any kind of salad you want from the hydroponics but you don’t want a fucking salad, do you? We’ve got fried crispic, some kind of noodles, some starfries I think, Corellian sausages, I’ll make you anything you want. You want some bread? Here, eat some fucking bread.”

To save himself from this humiliating soliloquy, he pulls a crusty half-baguette out of the baking compartment, warm and crackling under his fingers, and hurls it at her. She snatches it out of the air and folds it to her chest.

At her bewildered look Ben stops himself from pummeling her with jogan fruit, but he grabs a little glass ramekin of chocolate mousse, no doubt the exact recipe Eusix used to make for him on every visit, one of the richest and best things he’s ever tasted, and slides it across the counter so carelessly she has to catch it with the Force.

“Ben, what…?”

He forgot to season the fucking steak.

Ignoring her, he grabs salt and pepper and the jar of seasoning Han always used when they cooked out down by the lake with Chewie. Ben seasons and turns the meat, and nobody says anything for the ninety seconds it takes to sear the steak to a passable medium-rare. He senses her wary attention on his back, and something else, something that threatens to come up from the dark things she’s trying to keep hidden.

He shatters two plates before he manages to slap the steak onto a third, decides to forget letting it rest because she’s hungry, and he shoves the plate across the counter to where she’s staring at him with a cup of mousse in one hand and a loaf of fresh bread in the other. It should be laughable, but he doesn’t laugh.

He stomps out of the kitchen, nearly falling on his ass in the puddle they’ve left on the floor.

The steak is probably badly seasoned, but how the hell would she know? Nobody’s ever given her more than mass-produced garbage, not even the Resistance.

The bond transfers the tightness around her eyes. Warm tears join the rain on her cheeks and the wave of humiliation as she wipes them away. Why does he do this? Why does he always ruin everything?

Something cool and smooth leaves her fingers, and cup of mousse tinks on the counter. He forgot silverware. What does he want her to do, tear at the meat with her teeth like an animal?

Setting his jaw, he marches back to the kitchen and manages to dig a steak knife and fork out of the drawer without looking at her. But when he holds them spitefully out to her she refuses to take them, keeping her eyes down at the bread in her hands, at the steak.

“I’m sorry,” she says, absurdly. “I—I didn’t know you could cook.”

“Rey,” he says, because he can’t think through what’s coming through the bond.

It’s what he felt in the throne room when he offered her his hand, it’s the broken thing he tried to talk to when he told her she was nothing but not to him. It’s the part of her that always knew she was nothing, the part that knew there was food in the fridge but ate garbage because she didn’t think she deserved better.

It’s the part that would’ve carved marks in that fucking wall on Jakku for the rest of her life.

She scrubs at her face, leaving a red mark and some crumbs smeared in the tears that keep falling.  Her dirty fingernails dig into the bread with a soft, aromatic crack. “I’ve never had bread like this, I mean, crunchy—”

“Don’t,” he says before she can change the subject, handing her a scratchy grey dishtowel. There are probably hundreds of beautiful synthsilk napkins around here but Ben doesn’t know what he’s doing, so he shoves a stupid dishtowel at her. “Don’t.”

She takes the towel and buries her face in it, hiding her burning cheeks. She doesn’t stop him when he takes the bread from her hands and sets it on the counter.

“I’m sorry,” she says again, this time with a choking sound that fails to hold back her sob, and Ben drops his arms to his sides because he doesn’t know what else to do. Should he leave? That’s what he wanted, when she saw him breaking. He wanted her to leave him alone.

No he didn’t. And he doesn’t want to leave now anyway, not when a three-minute meal has brought her to this, not when two days ago he was sobbing over a piece of goddamned chocolate for the same reason.

Hesitantly, he reaches up to finger the corner of the dishtowel, tugging it downward, urging her to let go. Her pinky grazes the hairs on the back of his hand. She blinks down, watching his hand as it pinches the dishtowel between two fingers and hovers, uncertain, between her cheek and her shoulder.

With a deep breath, Ben lets the towel fall to the floor and jerks his fingers outward, just brushing the armscye of her tunic, asking. Her puffy, wet eyes meet his, and for a moment he’s sure she’s going to choke him, but instead she does what he’s too ashamed and afraid to ask for. She falls against him, burying her face in the damp, cold folds of his thin shirt.

Ben slides his arms around her wet body and shields her from the things nobody ever bothered to protect them from.

“I know,” he whispers into the curve of her ear. “I see. I know.”

He knows what it is to sit awake all night and wonder what you could’ve done to make them stay.  What you could’ve said to convince them you were worth protecting. He knows what it is to tell yourself you don’t deserve to cry because it’s your fault, you failed, you’re nothing.

What he doesn’t know is what to do about it. Yeah, he feels this way too, but no one’s ever asked him for comfort.

It’s a stupid idea. But it’s the only one he has, and she’s in pain and she needs something, so he swallows his pride and presses his cheek against her soaking wet hair and begins to hum the only lullaby he knows.

She heard this song in the Force, Mirrorbright, the one an exhausted Leia Organa would sing to her broken son, a lullaby for a dead world. His mother’s sadness would resonate with his, and she felt human then, fluttering and fragile and as precious as Rey feels right now, and Ben doesn’t know what else to do.

Rey tenses and draws in a surprised breath. Ben tenses too, and falters. Stupid.

“Don’t stop,” Rey pleads into the fabric of his shirt. He tucks his chin to bury his nose in her hair as she presses her ear to his heart like she’s listening for the hollowness inside him, the one that matches hers. “Please, Ben.”

He would’ve thought he would’ve laughed to hear that wretched, broken please, but he keeps going. He still knows the words, of course, but they don’t make sense here, and anyway he can’t sing.

When the moon is mirror bright

We’ll take this time to remember

Those you have loved but are gone

Those who kept you so safe and warm—

No. Rey’s had enough remembering, and fuck the people who failed to keep her safe, or warm. Fuck all of them.

They’re less the children of absent parents than the children of their parents’ absence—it’s the nothingness that raised them both. And she, at least, deserves better. He wishes he could give it.

As he hums he hooks his chin in her hair, pulling her face into the bare damp skin of his throat, and stares dazed around at the mess he’s made of the kitchen. The conservator door stands open, pots and utensils and shattered ceramic lying ruined on the floor. He closes against his eyes against all of it, letting his world narrow to Rey.

You broke it, you bought it, kid.

How many times did Han tell him that? Hundreds, probably, and then this girl comes along who spent her whole life putting broken things together, and when she tried to fix him, he shattered her because that’s what he’s always going to be: Supreme Leader Ben fucking Solo, who takes everything good in this world and breaks it.

He pulls her body against him and stutters through the end of the song, and when he falls silent, stroking her cold hair, she swallows and retracts her arms from around his neck, resting them on his chest, hunching around her hands like she’s trying to feel small and weak and safe. She’s never been allowed to feel any of that, not even once.

“You’re not alone,” he whispers. “Rey, listen to me, you’re not alone.”

And there’s something small inside him that needs to say it, needs to mean it, needs her to know he means it, needs her to know it’s the truest and the bravest thing he’s ever said. He needs her to know how much he wishes she could have someone better, but until that someone comes, he’ll be here.

When she chokes and shifts against him he presses his lips against her wet forehead and lets his eyes fall closed because this thing inside him can’t fit into words.

Her response, when it comes, is moist and hoarse.

“Neither are you.”

WIth his eyes closed he kisses her hair and holds her against him until her tears dry and her food goes cold.

Chapter Text

They stand, still, and so long the lights go out. The house around them shivers against the rain and the thunder hammers at the walls, but she’s warm in his arms and nothing can touch them. 

“You’re freezing,” Rey murmurs into his neck. “You’re soaked.”

“So are you.”

Sill, they stand.

Ben blinks around the darkness that shrouds the ruined kitchen. The past is there, judging him from a thousand angles. His mother on that barstool, kicking off her heels with a martini in her manicured hand. The technicolor flash of Lando mixing drinks at that sink, a flutter of gold and a rich laugh. His father leaning against that counter like he owns the place. The soundtrack of his Master’s contempt, when Ben was ordered to remember.

Maybe his parents stood right here, holding each other just like this.

Finally, she pulls away. She sniffles at the floor, uncertain, and Ben prepares for the inevitable. This couldn’t last, good intentions or no. The future scratches at the windows, scenting blood.

Rey tilts her head up to him. Her eyes are bloodshot, tear-swollen, and looking anywhere but into his. She wipes them with the heel of her hand, and her voice is hoarse.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

What can you say, really, when you’re standing in front of someone, naked in every way that matters?

“Nobody’s ever sung to me.”

He pulls the edge of his sleeve over his thumb and reaches up to wipe her eye. The fabric is rough, wet, and useless for drying her tears, but it’s something.

“I didn’t sing. I hummed.”

She snorts and moves to cover her face, but her hand stops when it encounters his sleeve. It’s good, to see her laugh. It’s like fixing something. 

She tugs on his tunic, and he lets his head fall forward until they’re standing forehead to forehead, nose to nose.

A slight change in angle would bring their lips together. The bond vibrates with the possibilities, but neither of them has the strength for possibilities right now. This is something defeated. Something small.

His parents may have stood here, but not like this.

Han Solo wouldn’t have sagged in failure against his mother’s shoulder. They wouldn’t have clung to each other like this, like two kids, lonely and desperate and terrified of the dark, with their hearts beating together and their souls tied with a string. They wouldn’t have dared.

This is something new. This is holy in a way the temples and texts never managed to be.

“Snoke didn’t make this bond,” Ben whispers.

The horror of the situation is slowly dawning on him. The finality of it. If this was Snoke’s doing, they could fight it, but if it’s not...

“I told you so. I told you it was real.”

Real. Yeah. Yeah, it’s real, but she doesn’t act like it’s a victory. She knows better than that, now.

He bumps his crooked nose against her perfect one, and she doesn’t protest. The damp cloth over her stomach rises and falls against his shirt. Real. Another thing the universe wrote for him before he was even born.

Why can’t this be his? Why can’t a single goddamn thing in this galaxy just be his?

Ben exhales, his breath unsteady as his legs.

With the rage gone, he can’t ignore that he feels like shit. The poison and the sedatives took their toll and his legs keep him standing through sheer force of will. He’s colder than he should be, wet, and after days of starving, his metabolism hovers near zero.

He needs to sit down. He needs to eat. He needs to find some pain medication and figure out what the hell he’s going to do about the fact that the one person he wants to choose to be with is bound to him by some magic neither of them have control over.

He needs to do the responsible thing: we break this bond, you don’t deserve to be tied to me like this, this is no better than what he did to me and I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry.

But instead he curls his fingers behind her head: stay, just a little longer.

And she does. Her hand climbs up to his cheek.

“I don’t know what to do,” he admits.

“We’re stuck together.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“You’re--What?”

“That you finally got rid of him and now you’re trapped again. You were free, but now you’re not.”

He shakes his head, and his stubble tickles her cheek. “I’m used to having someone in my head.”

“That--doesn’t really make it better.”

Fair enough. But she doesn’t want to stop touching him, and that’s enough, for now. Maybe.

“You still haven’t eaten,” she says.

“I’m fine.”

The idea that either of them is fine makes her snort again, louder, more bitter, and Ben can’t help it; he mirrors her.

The stupid bond blooms with pleasure, like seeing him smile brings everything a little closer to fine. She’s so radiant he expects her to say something--I like your smile--but she keeps her silence and bites her lip, nipping back her joy. It’s an old habit; joy makes you careless. Hope leads to betrayal.

She deserves better.

“Will you go back to the Order?” she asks, breath warm against his face.

The knuckle of her uninjured hand strokes his jaw, and stubble scrapes under her fingers, at least a few days’ worth, long enough that whatever intel he might have on the Order has long-since gone stale.

Hux is dead, no doubt, along with most of his senior command, and whoever rigged the coup is probably spreading their thighs over his chair in the Briefing Room.

Ben finds himself wishing them well, whoever they are. For his part he can’t even muster the courage to turn on the holonews. As for Hux, well, it’s a shame. He was almost a friend, in the end.

“I should,” Ben says. “I should go back.”

“Because you feel responsible.”

“I am responsible.”

Billions of people he’s depressed to realize he cares about will die because he, Supreme Leader Ben Solo, captured an army on a whim and couldn’t manage to hold on to it. And now he can’t even bring himself to slaughter whoever’s responsible, not when this is the alternative.

He strokes her hair. She smells--awful, really. Ripe. Like slept-in sweat and medical adhesive and First Order shampoo, a Supreme Leader’s shampoo, the muted scent of a bottle from the life his Master taught him to want. 

“He’s gone, Ben. You'll die if you try to take the Order back, and you had no idea how to rule it in the first place. Let the past die.”

She tugs his head down and presses her lips to his eyebrow, bridging the white trench of the scar. It’s chaste, beatific, and in a moment it’s gone. Cold air rushes in to replace the heat of her hand, her body. Ben sucks in a breath, trying to steady himself.

The lights flick on, and he exhales. “You should go back,” he says.

A line appears between her eyebrows. “To that Dreadnought?”

“To the Resistance. If this--if we’re connected, it wasn’t our choice. The Force doesn’t want what’s best for you.”

“And you do?”

Yes, yes, he does. And what’s best for her is to stay away from him.

She sighs, glancing at the now-cold food on the counter. “I thought I’d want that,” she says. “I could go back, lie to all them, tell them you’re dead or--something. And you’d be safe, wherever you go. You could hide from the Resistance, from the Order. And I’d be with Finn and the others.”

He nods. She’s clearly thought about it more than he has. She hasn’t had much else to do, trapped alone in this house while he was out cold.

She studies him, and shakes her head. “I’m not going to do that. I told you, you’re not alone. I’ve come this far with you, and you just sang to me. I’m not leaving you.”

He opens his mouth to whisper thank you, but what comes out is, “I don’t deserve your compassion.”

“Maybe you don’t. That’s why it’s compassion.”

She picks up the cup of mousse, and the glass is smooth and cold against her fingers. Ben can’t stop watching her hands. She’s different, somehow.

“Is this chocolate?” she asks.

“Yes.”

He was too absorbed in his own pain to notice before, but there’s a confidence in her gait as she slips the food into the nanowave. Maybe she’s trapped in a bond she didn’t choose, but she’s dealt with worse. She’ll survive.

“Good. You’re going to eat it.”

His stomach clenches. Weak, pathetic child.

“I—”

“One bite. I’m tired of starving, and if I’m not allowed to eat garbage, neither are you. We’re free.”

“We are not free,” he says.

Her eyes are fierce, older than they seemed just a few cycles ago, like days alone with nothing to do but think have aged her, shaped her into something both more and less like herself. More like the hardened scavenger who buried her enemies on Jakku, less like the skinny child who huddled and waited and starved to please the ghost of parents she needed to believe in. The tears have stopped but the Darkness has only gotten stronger.

“You were right,” she says. “When you said I only followed the Resistance because I liked the idea of resisting something. You were right. The Republic never gave a damn about me, and I’m not going to die for it.”

Her thumb traces a facet of the cup of chocolate mousse, like she’s waiting for him to condemn her.

“You’d walk away from the Resistance,” he says.

“You’re walking away from the Order.”

“Because I’m a coward. I’m selfish.”

The muscles in her jaw bulge, then relax. “You’re a lot of things, Ben. But you’re not selfish--I don’t know, maybe I am.”

“You think you’re selfish.”

She glares at him, and then the anger ebbs, and she grips the little glass cup too hard.

“I should want to go back to the Resistance, shouldn’t I?” she asks. “That’s the right decision. It’s obvious, isn’t it? I should want to turn you in.”

“I’m the wrong person to ask.”

She smirks, and even though the tears threaten to fall again, it’s good to see her smile. But it’s only a moment.

“Finn, Poe, Rose—they have each other,” she says. “And I care about them, but—I’ve only known them a few weeks.”

He doesn’t bother pointing out how she hasn’t known him any longer. She feels it too; the unshakable sense that the other one has been standing there their whole lives, calling out through a wall they never knew how to break.

Real, she called it. But it’s not real. It’s completely artificial, manufactured by the Force for its own ineffable purposes. Everything they feel for each other is as real as breathing and a complete mirage.

“And they…” She straightens. Whatever she’s trying to say, it isn’t easy. “They wanted to join an army. Finn found his cause. I just wanted to find my parents. I’m...”

I’m different.

She says it with her tone, the angle of her head. And Ben understands; people like them are always different.

Ben eyes the knife on the counter, catching her reflection in the blade.

“I’ve been living my whole life for someone else,” she says. “And, yes, I care about Finn, I’ve risked my life for him and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. But now that I’m not there, the Resistance just feels like another thing to give my life to so I don’t have to figure out what to do. I didn’t choose this bond, but it’s ours. And I just...I want to stay. Is that selfish? I want to…”

“What?” he asks. He can’t hope. Not again. “What would we do?”

He fingers the hilt of the knife, tentative. It’s not a threat, it’s just something to look at.

“I don’t know,” she says. “We won’t hide on Ahch-To. We won’t make Luke’s mistake. And the Order will be looking for us, so we’ll have to cover our faces. But we’re pilots, and we have the Force, Ben. We could go anywhere. We could do...anything. Am I selfish? For wanting that?”

Ben has never wanted anything so much in his life. He has to close his eyes against the brightness of her hope.

“You deserve better,” he says. 

“I don’t care what I deserve,” she says. “All that means is that somebody else decided what I ought to want.”

She picks up the knife, wrapping her fingers around the hilt.

 “What do you want?” he asks.

“I don’t know. I don’t think you do, either.  I’ve never met anyone like you, and I know you’ve done awful things, but I thought nobody understood me...and you do.”

“Rey.”

“What do you want?” she asks. “You don’t want to go back to the Order. The Republic will kill you if you surrender. You’ve spent your whole life lying to yourself, trying to make other people happy. So what do you want?”

The question paralyzes him. It doesn’t make any sense. Her eyes are feverish and bright and they hit him like a drug.

“I don’t know,” he says.

But he’s getting some ideas. There were thoughts he kept locked in a corner, tucked away in the dark where Snoke couldn’t see them.

“Do you want me to stay?” she asks. Her voice is more tentative.

“None of this is real,” he says. “The Force is making us feel it.”

“But we feel it. That makes it real.”

Yes. Yes, it does. His heart pounds, and hers sets the rhythm.

“Do you want me to stay?” she asks again.

She’s asking for the truth, and he owes it to her. His palms are hot, and she’s very close to him, clutching the steak-knife like she can squeeze the answers out of it. 

“Yes.” He wants her to stay.

“Good. I want to stay.”

“Rey--”

“Eat.”

She stabs the knife into the cup. It comes out loaded with chocolate.

That’s not how silverware works, he wants to say, but he can’t form the words. He stares at the chocolate, the way the light plays over the velvety surface of the mousse. His mouth floods with saliva.

Her pupils are huge.

Ben watches the point of the knife. Swallows.

“You’re hungry,” she says as she holds the knife-point to his lip, chocolate-side-down. “Eat.”

Her lips part, and a wall Ben has been building since he was born finally crumbles.

His hand closes on her arm, feels it spasm around the knife. He takes it from her.

The flat of the blade slides against his tongue.

What did Hux say to him, a lifetime ago?

Rejoin the world of the living, if you were ever part of it.

The chocolate is as cold and sharp and rich as he remembers, and Ben is so tired of starving.

***

“Once,” she tells him, hours later, “I felt her hand on my ankle.”

“Whose?”

“My mother’s.”

Ben sips his third bowl of broth, slurping straight from the bowl because if she doesn’t need silverware, neither does he. He watches her face in the flickering green plasma-light and sets his bowl beside him on the floor. Her bare toes, which had snuck out from under the blanket toward the heat, retract protectively under the synthsilk.

She expected him to kiss her. That's become apparent in the hours since he ate that bite of chocolate, or maybe it's that she expected to kiss him. Whatever it was, the moment faded, but its echo is still there between them. It's for the best; they're tired, they're in pain, and not just physically. A kiss would entail things Ben's never let himself think about--but he's thinking them now.

They’re on the glass veranda, which Rey calls the porch, which is a good name, really. His stomach is full. His clothes are dry, mostly, and the pain stims Rey dug up for him have cleared his head.

Rey reclines against the front of the couch next to him, eyes closed, hands laced over her swollen stomach as she divides her attention between the plasma-fire and the rain. She’s eaten half the conservator and downed three pots of tea, but the painful fullness doesn’t cause her even a trace of self-consciousness. Neither do her insistent belches, which Ben finds he doesn’t mind. For her, a full belly was only ever a thing to be proud of.

In the hours since Ben took that first bite, they’ve learned a lot.

They learn it’s easy to talk to each other, except when it’s not. They learn that neither of them is afraid of silence; they’ve lived in it most of their lives.

Ben learns that Rey has not, in fact, used the sonic or changed clothes since she arrived on Christophsis. When they first sit down to eat she finally peels off her waterlogged socks and hurls them across the room, she reaches immediately for the bread, and Ben grabs one of the sanitizing clothes he brought from the kitchen and shoves it at her. She sniffs it.

“Do you eat this?”

“If you’re going to eat with your hands, at least wash them. You just touched your feet.”

“So? They’re not dirty. I don’t think there’s even any dirt on this planet.”

“They stink.”

“They’re feet.”

“Your whole body stinks.”

Her nose wrinkles in a way he doesn’t bother not to find charming. “I--well you don’t smell great, either.”

“I’ve been in a coma. You, apparently, refuse to clean yourself.”

“You’re just picky. Humans are supposed to stink.”

“So are corpses, but I don’t eat with them.”

“You’re just like Finn. He said when he was a stormtrooper he used the sonic every day.”

Ben frowns and scratches under his nose.

“How often do you bathe?”

She shrugs. “I scrape with motor oil and sand every few weeks, but Finn told me that’s not what people off Jakku are used to, so I use the sonic more.”

Ben grits his teeth, and remembers that, for a few ecstatic bites, they passed the knife back and forth to eat the chocolate.

“Do you brush your teeth?”

“Like this?” She grabs the fabric of her tunic and rubs it against her incisors. Ben’s hand flies to his mouth, fighting the sensation of cloth on his gums.

“Don’t--don’t do that. From now on you’ll brush your teeth twice a day and bathe once a day, with real water.”

“Don’t give me orders. Why would I waste that much water?”

“It’s monsoon season,” he says, gesturing out at the rain. “The planet will thank you for wasting water. If you’re going to stay with me you’re not going to smell like a garbage heap.”

Rey learns that Ben’s face gets very hot when he talks about her staying, and the blushing gets passed back and forth in the bond, like yawning, like laughing.

(Rey learns that Ben’s laugh is breathy, almost disbelieving, and that she likes it very much.)

Ben learns that the sounds she makes at the taste of real food are obscene. He stares, transfixed, as she takes fistfulls of bread into her mouth before she’s even swallowed the steak.

It’s the most disgusting display he’s ever seen in his life, but she’s so shamelessly ravenous that he stares in her awe.

“What?” she asks. She’s so distracted by the food she hasn’t seemed to process what she’s doing to him. 

You’ve awakened the sexuality I thought I suffocated at puberty feels inappropriate. Instead, he hands her a fork. She shrugs and sets it beside her plate, but Ben catches her smirk. She knows exactly what she’s doing to him. She enjoys it.

They learn they both prefer to eat on the floor. Rey, because she always ate curled up on the sand except when she had to choke down dry portions at the scrubtubs. Ben, because he’s been eating on the floor of a cell so long he associates tables with meetings and the endless Alderaanian Diaspora fundraisers he’d be forced to attend. Tables were for work, pain, for hypocrites and flatterers bowing and saying Supreme Leader and Prince Ben, what a fine Alderaanian man you’re growing to be!

So they sit folded under blankets with their toes pressed up against the crystal caf-table with its built-in plasma column, the tacky thing Lando installed for mood lighting back when they were all the rage in the ‘10s. 

Ben learns Rey slept out here because she likes to listen to the rain.

Rey learns that Ben did the same thing, for the same reason. The rain still patters endlessly outside the force-field, and the wall chrono, also tastelessly post-Imperial, alerts them that it’s well after midnight. 

(Rey learns that Ben isn’t ready to talk about whose house this is, or the boy who spent time here with his parents; Ben learns she’s very familiar with the smell of wet wookiee that still clings to the upholstery, and she can guess enough.)

They learn, after Ben takes an excruciatingly awkward trip to the ‘fresher, that dampening the sensations is an urgent concern, one neither of them has the energy to figure out right now.

“Tell me about Snoke,” she says when she comes back from changing into a dry tunic. Black. Ben tries not to read into that, and fails.

Rey learns Ben’s not shy about his relationship with his Master.

“You mean he was in your head all the time? Since you were a baby?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell anybody?”

Ben shrugs. It’s a casual gesture, a Han Solo-ish gesture, something Snoke insisted was too puerile for the scion of the house of Skywalker. He forbade it, like laughing, like “yeah” and “okay” and “alright,” like running a hand through his hair. Kylo Ren was never allowed to be human.

“By the time I realized it wasn’t coming from me,” he says, “I trusted it.”

She squints, like she almost buys the lie. It’s not entirely a lie. He did tell Luke, eventually.

“You still trust it,” she says.

“Snoke betrayed me. He was using my power.”

“That’s not what I asked. Do you still trust it?”

She deserves the truth. Ben runs his hand through his mostly-dry hair, filling his cheeks full of air before he breathes out a long sigh. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s his voice and what’s mine, if there’s anything that’s mine.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was always there. Him, and Luke, and my parents, and the Skywalker legacy and my grandfather and the Jedi and the Sith, and the press was constantly following me around telling me I was the prince of a planet that didn’t even exist anymore, like my life was just something for a bunch of ghosts to fight over.”

Ben is thinking out loud. He’s never said any of this to anyone before, and he’s so used to his Master knowing the innermost corners of his heart that finding words is difficult. It’s easier for him to think as he talks. It makes his half-baked ideas something real, something out in the world he can fight.

She pauses and leans forward, curling her blanket around her. Her hair, dirty as it is, looks beautiful around her face in the firelight. She looks like she did that night around the fire on Ahch-To, when she saved him.

“You were never just Ben,” she says, like she understands. Because she does.

“Exactly.”

She’s drinking her own tea and he feels her smirk into the mug.

“What?” he asks.

“Just thinking. From now on, if you want, you could use my last name.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Are you asking me to marry you?”

Her smirk broadens and her face heats. “I mean you could be Ben Nobody.”

His throat feels tight. “Just Ben.”

“Just Ben. Rey from Nowhere and Ben from...where are you from, anyway?”

“Chandrila, but I don’t remember it. So, Hosnian Prime.”

She frowns over her tea. “Isn’t that one of the planets that…?”

“Yeah.”

There's a beat of awkward silence, and then he laughs.

A moment later she realizes it, too, and spits out her tea, trying to hold in the laugh, but she’s not above some gallows humor, apparently.

“So we’re both from nowhere,” she says.

Ben from Nowhere. It has a good ring to it. It’s accurate, anyway. He’s never been able to live up to any of the other names.

He runs a hand through his hair, and she smiles at him.

“What?”

“Your ears,” she says. “I’ve never seen them.”

“Oh. They’re huge.”

“I can see that.”

He grimaces and shakes his head until it falls down into his face and he has to fight to urge to shake it out again. But she reaches up and tucks a strand behind his ear.

“I like them,” she says, and Ben feels his giant ears get very hot. He feels strange around her. He wants things he shouldn’t want.

Ben learns that, contrary to a lifetime of total indifference, he can actually imagine kissing someone and liking it. But--not yet. This is too precious, just having her here, just this. He would ruin it if he moved too fast.

“Are you really a prince?” she asks around a mouthful tea.

“Unfortunately.”

“And the press…you’re—famous?”

“You didn’t watch a lot of holonews.”

“The only holos I saw were in the cantina, and it was usually Crolute comedy, so mostly loads of really horrible jokes about Twi’lek girls and humans dancing about in Gungan costumes.”

“Riveting.”

“Apparently more riveting than whatever news they were showing about you. Why were you famous, anyway? Aren’t there a whole lot of Senators?”

“I was born the day the galactic concordance was signed, and the paparazzi snuck a camera droid into the delivery room and never left. They said I was the symbol of hope the Republic needed. And the Diaspora went crazy--”

“Diaspora?”

“Refugees from Alderaan.” At her blank expression, he remembers. “The planet my mother was from. It was destroyed by the Empire. By Vader. He tortured her and forced her to watch.”

“Vader--her father. So she had two planets--oh.” Her face falls, and a pang of sympathy wafts across the bond. It smells suspiciously like his mother, like she finally realizes the extent of his betrayal. But she doesn’t condemn him.

“So you were always being followed?” she asks conversationally.

Other than the voice in my head?

But he doesn't say that.

“Yeah. The Diaspora had a lot of money, a lot of rich people in the Core who liked to follow the royal news. I couldn’t go out except at official events or if they snuck me out. I could hear everything. Before I learned to block it out, cities were torture. And everyone lies to kids, everyone.”

“And...the Voice. Snoke. He helped you, didn’t he? He knew how to make it better.”

“Yes. When I started hurting people--he could make it stop. And he told me they were afraid of me. He was right.”

Ben stops. He’s been spilling his heart on the floor for her just because he’s never been able to tell anyone any of this before.

“You loved him, didn’t you?” she asks. “He was like a father to you.”

Ben nods. He remembers saying as much to Hux—I’m not ashamed—but now he can only think of her confession: her parents ruined her life and all she could think to do was love them harder.

Ben watches the storm, and ignores the hand Rey drapes across his shoulder.

“Tell me about Jakku," he says.

A line appears between her eyebrows. “I want to hear about you.”

“You’ve heard about me. It’s your turn. Tell me about Jakku.”

Her mouth turns sour, and she removes her hand.

“It’s nowhere. It’s great, if you don’t mind starving and having sand up your--”

“Not that,” he says. “Tell me something true.”

Ben learns Rey likes to answer questions about herself with “fine” and “it was boring.” She tells him funny stories about the markets, the antics of an incompetent Republic constable, the little goings-on in the outpost, and he doesn’t press. She tells him a legend about a man named Galli and an ocean trapped under the planet’s surface. She tells him about a ship she repaired. But there’s a darkness under all of it, and when Ben scratches, it starts to bleed.

“What happened to the ship?” Ben asked. “Did you sell it?”

“There was a big tower that everybody called the Spire. Once, I climbed it--”

“What happened to the ship?”

“It was stupid,” she says. “Bad luck.”

“What happened?”

“This is boring for you. You’ve been all over the galaxy, you don’t want to hear about Jakku.”

“No,” Ben agrees, “but I want to hear about you. I don’t want to hear how everything was fine, I want the truth.” 

“The people who helped me build it stole it and ran off.”

There it is. It's a small thing, in the scheme of galaxies and concordances and empires. But he can feel how important it was to her.

“That must’ve hurt," he says, trying it out. He used to be good at this, at empathy.

“Of course it hurt. But what difference does it make? I survived.”

They lapse into silence.

After a few minutes, she sighs and tells him that, once, she felt her mother’s hand on her ankle.

“It was when I’d moved out to the desert, but before I knew what I was doing,” she continues, watching the violet and green flames dancing in their column, their own captive aurora. 

“I was so hungry I couldn’t go to the Graveyard. I knew if I didn’t get up I was going to die, but I couldn’t decide if I cared enough. And then I felt it—her hand. My mother.” She shakes her head and huddles away from him, hands clutched around her empty mug.

“It was only a skittermouse. It thought I was dead, I guess; it was sucking my blood. And I just laid there because it felt so good to be touched. I pretended it was my mother. And I thought, if it stays there, I’ll just go to sleep, and wouldn’t it be nice to go to sleep while she’s here.”

Ben watches her. Her eyes are bright in the firelight.

“I thought, if I don’t get up, they won’t find me when they come back.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “I thought they’d worry. So I killed the mouse and I ate it, right there on the floor. I lived.”

The bond has gone quiet, and through it he can practically see what she sees: the skin of an overturned AT-AT, the hunger rasping at his ribs.

“I just wanted someone to touch me,” she says, speaking to her lap. “Sometimes, after that, I’d use a little blood and spit and I’d smear it on myself and stay perfectly still, just so they’d come. Just to feel a warm touch. So I wouldn’t be lonely.”

Ben reaches out, but before his hand brushes her shoulder, she stands.

“Your back hurts,” she says. “You don’t need to be sitting on the floor.”

“Your shoulder hurts.”

She rolls her eyes, like her pain is a secret joke, and begins gathering the dozen plates and bowls they’ve accrued over the night. He follows with difficulty, using the arm of the couch to steady himself, and stretches. She doesn’t look at him, not until he presses his palm against the small of her back.

“Come,” he says. She stiffens at the tone, the formality, and he sighs. “Rey.”

He so rarely says her name, and he’s never said it like this--soft, coaxing. The effect in the bond is immediate. He can see why she’s constantly saying his name; it could be an addiction, making a person feel this good.

“Rey,” he says again, and warmth surges from the crown of her head to her toes. Touch me. Let me help you. “Come here.”

He presses her back, urging her toward the couch, and when he sags into the cushions, she folds into the curve of his arm. He pulls his feet up onto the couch with difficulty and she mirrors him, setting her head on his deltoid in a way that’s already starting to feel familiar. He wraps her in his blanket and calls for the lights to drop to zero, leaving only the fire, the storm, the rain.

Her hands play over his chest, and the bond transmits her pleasure. He doesn’t need to ask if the traitor did this for her—her feelings tell the truth. No one in her life has held her this way. No one has made her feel this safe, this good. But he does.

And she wants to be touched. Neither of them has the strength, emotional or otherwise, to follow the vague urges they’re both trying to ignore. But that could happen. Maybe this is a prelude to that—maybe it isn’t. They hover somewhere between friends and something else, something deeper, deeper even than lovers. She holds his heart on a string, and he’s holding hers.

In the meantime, she does everything she can to be close to him, to touch his arm, his tunic, his cheek, his hair.

And he stops pretending he doesn’t need this as much as she does.

“Thank you,” he whispers.

She doesn’t ask what for; she knows.

“What will we do?” he asks her after a long time. “What’s the plan?”

“There is no plan.”

He smirks against her hair, despite himself.

“I want to stay until the Resistance contacts us,” she says. “I want to--I need to let them know I’m safe.”

“Alright.” It’s a fair enough request. And if she decides at the last minute to leave him, well, he saw it coming.

But he doesn’t think she will. Is that hope?

“After that?” he asks.

“I’d like to see a city,” she says, letting a smile play over her face. “I’d like to go to a real restaurant, the kind with pictures of food on the wall. I want to see…green. Gardens.”

Ben thinks of his mad desire to bring Rey to Arkanis, back when he never thought he’d see her again. But Arkanis will be crawling with the First Order. It’s out of their reach.

“Naboo,” he says.

“Bless you.”

He smiles, and closes his eyes when her fingers trace his ear.

“No, it’s a planet. My family has an estate there. There are cities. Beautiful gardens. Flowers as far as you can see, and lakes, and an ocean, but not like that rock Luke was on. Forests.”

“It sounds good. Really good, Ben.”

He closes his eyes and plants a kiss on her hair. “You’ll like it.”

“We’ve had a mad few weeks, haven’t we?”

He laughs. Three cycles ago, he ruled the galaxy.

“Yeah.”

His cheek rubs against her hair, and they breathe together. Their heartbeats are the same, lazy and calm. His eyes fall closed.

“You’re tired,” she says. “If you like to sleep here, I’ll go upstairs.”

But when she starts to pull away, he holds her. It’s an instinctive move, a pull.

“Do you want to go upstairs?” he asks.

“You said I stink.”

Her voice is light, but strained. She doesn’t want to be alone right now, either.

He pulls her closer, wrapping her in his arms until she relaxes on his chest.

“I can live with it,” he whispers.

"Arse," she replies. "Plasma off."

The column of fire winks out, and even the rain has slowed down. The ghosts are quiet. The monsters are still out there, waiting, but the galaxy has granted them one night, pulling back enough to leave space for them. Just them.

"Good night, Just Ben."

"Good night, Rey."

Ben smiles, and dreams of gardens.