Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/13502156.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
  Category:
      F/M, M/M, Multi
  Fandom:
      Star_Wars_-_All_Media_Types
  Relationship:
      Armitage_Hux/Kylo_Ren, Armitage_Hux/Snoke, Kylo_Ren/Others_(casual),
      OFStormtrooper/OMStormtrooper/Dopheld_Mitaka, Kylo_Ren/OFC_(past_when_he
      was_underage), OMC/Armitage_Hux_(one_sided)
  Character:
      Armitage_Hux, Kylo_Ren, Snoke_(Star_Wars), Dopheld_Mitaka, Original
      Stormtrooper_Characters, Knights_of_Ren
  Additional Tags:
      Self_indulgent_navel-gazing_like_usual, Violence, Titles_are_not_my
      forte, Spoilers, Psychic_interference, Dreams, Casual_Murder, Past
      Exploitation, Past_Underage, Past_DubCon, Past_Rape/Non-con, Implied/
      Referenced_Brainwashing, Evolving_summary, Tags_May_Change, Barely
      leashed_writer_running_free_and_not_worrying_for_once, Confusion,
      Probably_not_how_one's_supposed_to_write_something, Slow_Burn, Visions,
      Trauma, mentioned_animal_death, Family_Issues, Grief, Past_Child_Abuse,
      Force-Sensitive_Hux, Regret, AU, Not_Canon_Compliant, Hux_Backstory, Poor
      Hux, Possible_Redemption, Film_canon_pretty_much_only_and_even_then
      questionable_in_places., Misunderstandings, War, Sexual_Violence, Kylo
      Ren_Being_a_Little_Shit, family_violence, Parent_Death, Sexual
      Harassment, Post-Traumatic_Stress_Disorder_-_PTSD
  Series:
      Part 3 of Descent
  Stats:
      Published: 2018-01-28 Completed: 2018-02-16 Chapters: 22/22 Words: 48572
****** Heavy is the Head ******
by runrarebit
Summary
     Kylo Ren and Hux return from their journey to the First Jedi Temple
     to a fracturing First Order. Hux is haunted by his experiences on the
     island, while Kylo Ren seems determined to ignore them in favour of
     focusing on the immediate threat. Tensions are running high,
     treachery abounds, and misunderstandings threaten to splinter things
     further.
Notes
     So I decided to split this here after all. Thanks you so much to
     everyone who stuck around for the previous fic, which I've renamed
     Long Live the King btw, especially those who left kudos and
     commented. I hope you enjoy this one too, but fair warning if things
     go as planned the ride's about to get bumpy.
***** Chapter 1 *****
The Fleet is gone. There is no way he can deny it. It is gone. It is not hiding
somewhere, certainly not behind the planet, not behind any nearby moon, or
asteroid belt, it is just gone. There are bodies out there, not from the
Supremacy, bodies of officers and techs who served on the surviving
Dreadnoughts. Scans show signs of a violent death, the weapons used belonging
to the First Order. One of those bodies is probably Lieutenant Fal Maroos. A
mutiny. Treachery. Treason.
He burns with the Dark Side. The air around him sits heavy, hazy. Hux is the
only one brave enough to get close.
The redhead primped and polished himself back into the shape of General on the
shuttle back to the Finalizer. He stands stiff backed, expressionless, beside
him. They both stare out onto remains of the Supremacy, the Dreadnoughts, the
dead.
“We have a reply from Dominion Base,” one of the commstechs all but whimpers.
He senses Hux glance at him. “Patch it through” he bites out.
“You have to be kidding yourselves,” a woman’s voice rings through the command
deck. Posh. Core world accent. “Snoke is dead. No one in their right mind is
going to follow Leia Organa’s mad Jedi son and Brendol Hux’s bastard brat. No.
We are the First Order. The real First Order. The Galaxy will be ours. You have
one ship, a skeleton crew, and no funds. What can you do about it? Nothing,
that’s what. The two of you will be lost to history, with the Jedi, with Snoke,
and with the bitches that birthed you. Supreme Leader Savim out.”
He draws deeper on the Dark, past that point where he no longer struggles to
tell if it feels freezing or burning. It might as well be cauterizing the place
where his heart once was. “How many is that?” he asks.
“‘Real’ First Orders?” Hux asks, voice as cold as he feels. “I believe we are
at five. Six if you count ourselves, arguably the only real ‘real’ First
Order.”
“That’s all of them?”
“We still haven’t heard from Marshall Pliadine on Pas Bbenoea, but I believe he
will fall into line behind Savim. There is still the High Council, but either
they’ll declare themselves one or more ‘real’ First Orders, or I imagine
they’ll join up with one of the others. Again, Savim seems a good bet.” Hux is
too calm for the outrage they’re facing. The redhead’s voice remains level, his
face expressionless. “Some of the others are probably waiting to see how things
progress in the next few weeks before they declare a side, if they declare a
side and don’t simply go independent. Then there are some of the smaller
planetary bases, who will probably be overthrown on a local level, or simply be
absorbed into the local power structure.”
“I am going to kill them. All of them!” the last ends on a roar. His lightsabre
is in his hand before he thinks, red light bouncing off the walls. The blade
looks as stable as he feels. He whirls around, looking for something to
destroy.
Hux steps in front of him. The man is pale, ghost-like. The red light of his
lightsabre bounces eerily off the planes of the redhead’s face. “Please. Don’t.
Savim was right, this is our only ship. We cannot afford to damage it now.”
The man is right. It galls. For a moment he pulls even more of the Dark Side
into himself, preparing to crush the redhead, but he can’t. Even the thought
feels wrong. He extinguishes his lightsabre. He feels defeated.
“We need to discuss strategy-” the redhead begins.
“What strategy?!” he snarls. “It’s all ruined! Everything is ruined!”
“This is a setback, it is not the end,” Hux’s voice is so measured. So calm. It
simultaneously pisses him off and makes him want to curl in close, to absorb
some of that calm himself.
He takes a deep breath. He forces himself to think. “Ok. Strategy. Talk.”
Hux glances around, “Not on the bridge. Perhaps, my quarters?”
He thinks about it, about being in Hux’s private sanctuary. No. He wants
something on his own terms. “No. Mine.”
“Understood,” the redhead nods. He starts to lead them back to his rooms as Hux
gives orders for their absence. “Remain vigilant. Report anything suspicious
immediately. Shields on maximum and ready cannons. Prepare for an ambush.” What
a mess.
Hux catches up to him easily. They pace the halls of the ship with the redhead
two steps behind him.
His quarters are the same as they have been all times he’s been stationed on
this vessel. Dark rooms. Small. His grandfather’s melted helmet still on
display. He feels a twinge of embarrassment at the latter. It seems childish
these days.
The door closes behind Hux. The redhead stands before him, at attention. Not
even his pale eyes wandering around the room. “Sit,” he says, gesturing to his
chair. He never has guests, so he takes his own seat on the berth. Hux sits.
There is a faint noise, a chattering sound. His possessions are rattling a
little. The Dark Side, as it flows through him, making the deck shake.
“So,” he says, looking at Hux, “What hope do we possibly have?”
“More than you think, Sir.” Hux replies. “What do you know of ‘Order 66,’ at
the end of the Clone Wars?”
He frowns, thinking. He’s heard of that before. A conversation, half overheard,
from his childhood. “Was it the order that made the clone soldiers turn on the
Jedi?”
Hux nods. “Yes. My father was obsessed with the topic, convinced his
Stormtrooper program was better than clone soldiers, but also fascinated by the
loyalty programmed into the clones. He was also paranoid, increasingly so over
the years, convinced that one day someone would betray him and try to oust him
from the Order he’d helped found.”
“Are you telling me the Stormtroopers are programmed with an ‘Order 66’?” Why
hasn’t he heard of this before. Perhaps Snoke didn’t trust him enough to tell
him.
“Something like that, though my father ensured that the target of the order
could be selected as required, depending on who he believed was betraying him
at the time, instead of as with the original ‘Order 66’ which was simply to
destroy the Jedi.”
“How do we implement it then?” he says, eyes on Hux’s placid, expressionless
face. “I want them dead.”
“It can only be implemented from the Stormtrooper Conditioning Centre,” Hux
says.
“We have Stormtroopers onboard, won’t whoever of our enemies in control of the
Stormtrooper Conditioning Centre just implement it against us?” He could kill
all the Stormtroopers personally. Maybe he’d feel better that way. The Dark
Side is crowing inside of him at the possibility of death.
Hux shakes his head, copper hair gelled so firmly into place beneath his cap
that it doesn’t even shift. “I doubt they know of it; I believe only my father,
myself and Snoke were ever aware of it. Brendol Hux did not want to broadcast
to his perceived enemies that he had the power to destroy them so easily. Not
that it matters, the order is genelocked to my father and myself from when I
was head of the Stormtrooper program, and the only person who had an override
was Snoke.”
“Didn’t he fear Snoke?” He never met Commandant Hux. He does not know what he
would have made of the man. His mother had despised him, back in the day.
“No. I don’t think he did.” Hux lets out a tiny, rueful laugh. “Foolish, as it
turned out.”
This is sounding promising. “So, we get to the Stormtrooper Conditioning
Centre, issue ‘Order 66’ or whatever it’s called, and the Stormtroopers destroy
our enemies for us. Simple.” It does seem simple, too simple. “Where is the
Stormtrooper Conditioning Centre?”
“During the time we were hiding in the Unknown Regions the SCC was an
independent ship, but recently it has landed on what one could consider its
spiritual homeland,” Hux sucks in a deep breath, something like discomfort
crossing his face. “Arkanis, and Snoke’s last orders had it being integrated
with the remains of my father’s Academy there.”
“So we go there, take the facility, issue the order, win.”
Hux looks apprehensive. The calmness finally breaking down. “Unfortunately it’s
not that easy, Sir. We do not have the fuel to make it to the planet. We do not
have enough munitions to take the facility, let alone defend ourselves from
attack, and we will be attacked, the Centre has always been well guarded and is
always full of Stormtroopers, and worst of all Arkanis is very near Dominion
Base. We are not in a position, right now, to pursue this plan.”
He draws deeper from the dark. Everything in the room seems to jump in place.
The air gets thicker. Light has trouble penetrating the shadows. Hux seems
pale, skeletal. “So what do you suggest we do?”
The redhead takes a steadying breath. “We need to refuel. We need to gather our
resources. We need to lay low. We cannot afford to get drawn into a battle
right now. It is a miracle we weren’t ambushed when we returned here, but I
suspect the ships of our fleet were probably going off to different masters and
didn’t value cooperation enough to stop and take us out first. The major
players, the five or more other ‘real’ First Orders will turn on each other.
Some will not survive the coming days. I suggest we let them do so while we
prepare for our attack on Arkanis.”
He doesn’t like the idea of waiting around, letting his enemies live when he
could be killing them. The Dark whispers to him. It wants blood, but it can
wait. He must listen. Hux is useful. The man continues talking. “Firstly, we
will need credits. I don’t have anywhere near enough in my small savings,
neither, I think, do you. I doubt anyone will be willing to give us a loan, as
precariously positioned as we are and I’m not sure how we would go about
gaining access to Snoke’s accounts, though I will think on the matter.”
One day the galaxy will be his. Then everyone will regret getting in his way.
He breathes in, out, exhaling Darkness.
The redhead takes another steadying breath. Hux is looking almost nauseous. “I
am aware that you ordered techs to cut free Snoke’s quarters and bring them
onboard the Rectitude. Scans show they had not completed this task when the
mutiny occurred. This is in our favour. The, the, the man had quite a
collection of treasures, and as you know I have the access codes. I suggest we
loot his rooms.” A gasped breath. Hux’s eyes are darting around. The Dark is
pressing close, closing in on the man, enveloping him in its embrace. “I am
also aware of who your father was. I ask, and only because of the dire
situation we have found ourselves in, if you have any knowledge of where to
sell such items?”
The mention of Han Solo shatters something. The Dark retreats. “Yes,” he bites
out. Memories he doesn’t want clawing at his mind. “I know places.”
Hux is pressed back in his chair, as far from him as the man can get. He looks
far too pale. His lips are tinged a little blue. One of those lips is sucked
between the redhead’s teeth. The man releases it, reluctantly meets his eyes.
“Are there any more resources you can think of that I haven’t considered?
Yes. There are. “I will call in the Knights of Ren.”
***** Chapter 2 *****
Chapter Notes
     This chapter might be a bit upsetting to some readers. It deals with
     family violence and the death of a parent.
     I just want to thank you all so much for the kind comments and all
     the kudos on the last chapter, I am very thankful, it really is a
     good feeling to know people are reading what I write, and even if you
     don't comment or leave kudos I want to thank you for reading.
War, war, war, war. Back to the art of making war. Back to the art of bringing
death. He feels sick. If he looks at the floor wrong he can see his mother’s
corpse.
Kylo Ren has retreated into the Dark. So far into the Dark that it’s seeping
out, sitting like miasma, contaminating the air around him. Hux cannot imagine
cradling this version of the man’s head on his lap, petting his hair, sleeping
in the same bed safe and unmolested.
The knowledge he’d hidden from himself, the knowledge the vision brought up,
keeps tearing at him. He’s going to die. Kylo Ren is going to see it, turn on
him, kill him. He almost welcomes it.
He steps over his mother’s corpse. He needs to return to the bridge.
The Knights of Ren. What a horrifying idea. Even more Dark Jedi tearing up the
place. Bleeding contamination. Bringing death.
His father had lost his temper. It was nothing different than all the times
before. He’d just gotten too rough, and she was getting too delicate. He broke
her. Left her on the floor. Why did he even drag her with them? She hadn’t
wanted to leave Arkanis, she’d only gotten on the ship because Brendol
threatened to kill him if she didn’t. His father’s hand had been so tight on
the back of his neck. Why hadn’t his father let her be free?
He doesn’t want to do this. He’s not sure he can do this. He hasn’t been
reconditioned since his father got Snoke to reinforce it with the Force.
Snoke’s dead. General Hux as was is no more.
She’d been going cold when he found her. He hadn’t needed to touch her to know
she was dead. He could feel it. Had known even before his ship had docked with
the SCC. He remembers lifting her head onto his lap. It had lolled there,
heavy. There had been no muscle control left.
The plan is a solid one. As solid as he can manage through the screaming in his
mind. There will be casualties, of course, every war has its casualties, but
they should remain fairly well removed. The people on this ship, his people if
he can bring himself to think of them as thus, will hopefully come through ok.
If the Supreme Leader and his coming companions don’t slaughter them all for
fun.
He’d packed the necessities. He’d taken her body, dragged it along the
corridors to the shuttle. The Commandant had found them, fought him, hit him,
stabbed him. He’d hit back. He’d managed to break free. He remembers flying for
days, not sleeping, the wound getting red and hot and throbbing. Then he’d
found the moon, an old abandoned Separatist Base.
He’ll check on the command staff while Kylo Ren terrifies techs into finishing
cutting the Supreme Leader’s quarters free and dragging them on board.
Hopefully nothing’s happened. If he had been in command of any of the mutinying
vessels he would have lurked around, just out of sight, and blown the returning
Finalizer to dust and vapour.
The moon had been mostly covered in jungle. It was hot. His mother’s corpse was
already starting to stink. The bugs had come for her. He’d given her to the
waters, as she would have wanted, though it had been river water and not sea.
He’d wrapped her in the craft’s only blanket, weighted her down, and submerged
her downstream from the base. There had been big turtles in the water. Life had
taken her, as was the way of her people.
They salute as he steps aboard the bridge. “Report,” he orders and watches them
as they have nothing to say. They’re afraid. Fear is almost as thick here as
the Dark Side was in Kylo Ren’s quarters. He wonders if they feel doomed. If
they wish they had been aboard another craft, a vessel slinking off at this
moment to report to treacherous masters.
He’d been delirious at that point. Sick with infection. He can remember walking
abandoned corridors, running fingers down plasteel walls being consumed by the
jungle. Life finds a way to return. It cannot be held at bay forever. There had
been room after room filled with droids. They had stared at him,
decommissioned, not alive but not dead. He can remember running hands over
their faces, imagining reaching into their processors and breathing life into
them once more.
He stares out onto the stars. Out onto Crait. An abandoned Rebel base, like so
many other abandoned bases in this galaxy. Has it ever known anything but war?
Is he just another cog in a machine that’s been going since the dawn of time?
Again the image of figures walking, fighting, dying.
He had found the communication station. He had sent out a coded message to
Senator Organa. He had told of Snoke. Of the First Order. Of their command
structure, their members, their weapons. Anything he could think of. He had
spoken until his voice was hoarse, until he had nothing more to say, and then
he had crawled off back to the riverbank to wait to die.
“Sir!,” one of the commstechs declares, saluting as he looks over. “The Supreme
Leader requests your presence at supply dock C.”
“Tell him I’m on my way,” he says, turning with a sweep of the greatcoat draped
over his shoulders.
His father had found him. Dragged him all but insensate aboard the man’s
shuttle. Dumped him into a bacta tank. When he’d come to they were on the SCC,
he was being dragged off to reconditioning. He can’t remember how many times
his father put him through the process. Again and again. He barely felt human
after, felt like nothing more than the urge to war. Then the Commandant had
dragged him in front of Snoke, and the man had done something, something with
the Force, and he as he was had died. No, not quite died. Had gone to sleep,
only to wake sometimes trapped in the horror of it all. Then Snoke had died.
Then he was free, but not really. Not free. Still a part of this infernal
machine.
The crew salute him as he passes. He wonders how many of them would love to
strike him down where he stands. Kill Kylo Ren. Free themselves of their
predicament. Up ahead he sees Lieutenant Mitaka, looking pale and worried.
Those two Stormtroopers are shadowing him, even though they are probably
supposed to be doing their duty somewhere else.
He thinks of FN-2188, her familiar face beneath that helmet. She looks so much
like her brother. Not as much of an impeccable record, not that impeccable
records prevent treason as the man had proved. She’s been recommended for
reconditioning once, though it was found to be unnecessary. He thinks of his
father’s hubris in numbering siblings sequentially. It made it too easy for any
rebellious Stormtrooper to discover family ties. He had made sure never to do
the same. He thinks FN-2187 is a fool.
He thinks of FN-2439, his records shown he’s been reconditioned twice.
Noncompliant. Disrespectful. Forms attachments. Unnecessarily vicious in a
fight. One more transgression and he’s facing execution. He thinks of the man’s
care, his worry, his affection for the Lieutenant.
He thinks of Dopheld Mitaka’s pale, frightened but brave face when confronted
by Kylo Ren, naked and enraged. They pass each other in the hall, Mitaka
glancing at him with something so much like concern.
He steps over his mother’s corpse, where his father left her on the floor. He
thinks of treason.
***** Chapter 3 *****
Chapter Notes
     As always thank you for reading, commenting and leaving kudos. Here's
     another chapter of Kylo Ren failing to cope with things.
Snoke’s quarters sit in the docking bay like a shiny, squat fungus. He watches
as the techs, bleeding distress into the Force, creep out of their tow-
transport. They had found the bodies of the techs he had sent out before they
left for Luke’s island, huddling in their own tow-transport until the
atmospheric regulators had died. They had been left behind in the mutiny.
It hadn’t taken long. The first lot of techs had nearly completed their work
when they’d been abandoned. He supposes it’s worth something that they didn’t
get a chance to finish the job. That the dreadful Savim woman, or some other
disrespectful cur, wouldn’t be using Snoke’s possessions to bankroll their
traitorous war. Cur. Cur. Cur. What a word. A word Snoke used for Hux.
Where is the man? He doesn’t have the patience for this. He starts pacing, back
and forth back and forth, where is he? He requested Hux’s presence. Hus isn’t
here. Next time it won’t be a request. He draws from the Dark again, letting
its strength comfort him.
“Supreme Leader, Sir!” Hux appears. Salutes.
“Your codes,” he demands.
“At once, Sir,” the man replies. They approach the door to Snoke’s quarters as
one. Hux inputs his codes. He feels anticipation, Snoke never allowed him so
deep into the man’s private world. He wonders how Hux was allowed.
Inside there’s an antechamber and already the part of him that was once Solo
can’t help noticing the wealth they can strip out and sell. There are paintings
on the wall, and tapestries, and the floors, walls and ceiling are clad in
tiles of slick, black stone, so well laid that he can only spot the joins by
using the Force. If they can strip the tiles off without damaging them too
badly he imagines quite a lot of petty warlords and local rulers in parts of
the Outer Rim will pay decently to have them for their palaces.
He imagines stripping the whole place down, taking every one of Snoke’s
luxuries, and even selling the material the rooms are made of as scrap. He
thought gives him an odd sense of satisfaction. Still he clings to the Dark.
His anger is such he can’t bring himself to let it go.
Hux leads on into a main room clad in such careless wealth that he hasn’t seen
since he was a small child, following his mother around the Core Worlds of the
New Republic, listening to her quiet criticisms of the way the wealthy and
elite were living in this time when there was still such inequality. His father
had found it amusing. Luke, when solicited for an opinion, had been grave. He
had always talked of so much more work to do.
“This is the main room,” Hux says, a vague gesture encompassing the space. He
points to door, “That is Snoke’s bedroom.” Another door, “The library.” A final
door, less glamourous “The kitchens.” Hux swallows, audible. He seems
uncomfortable. “The bathroom is accessible through the bedroom, as is Snoke’s
wardrobe. Now, if you’ll excuse me. I will return to the bridge.”
“No,” he says, curiosity is burning in him now. He walks towards the redhead,
eyes making subconscious catalogues of all the treasures he passes. Some will
be easy to sell, some will require finding specialised buyers. This room alone
will probably keep the Finalizer in fuel, munitions, weapons, rations and maybe
mercenaries for at least the next year. “How do you know all this? Why do you
have codes? What reason could Snoke have to allow you into his private
chambers?”
“It’s not important anymore,” Hux says, averting his eyes. A brush against the
man’s mind. Don’t look don’t look don’t look don’t look don’t look don’t look.
“It’s important if I say it’s important,” he snarls. Hux is hiding things from
him. He pulls the Dark close. He feels none of the familiarity, the affection,
the closeness to Hux of the island. Now it seems everyone is an enemy. “Tell
me.”
Hux meets his eyes. “No.”
The Dark lurches out of him without thought. It wraps around Hux, this creature
denying his dominion, and drags him close. It doesn’t throttle him, not yet,
but a strand of the Force curls around his throat in preparation. Hux is white
in his grasp. His eyes are huge, pale, red-rimmed. Still he doesn’t avert his
gaze.
He reaches out, crushing whatever weak mental defenses the man has, and takes
the knowledge.
Snoke on Hux. Snoke holding Hux down. Hux riding Snoke. Hux face down. Hux in
Snoke’s lap. Hux’s face in Snoke’s lap. Snoke’s fingers in Hux’s hair. Hux in
Snoke’s bed. Snoke in Hux’s bed. Snoke as a Force-projection. Snoke as a man.
Snoke’s fingers on Hux’s pale skin. Snoke reflected in Hux’s pale eyes.
He breaks away. Drops Hux, who lands with a soft sound of pain. A lance of
Force Lightning blasts a couple thousand credits worth of damage in those shiny
black tiles. He is disgusted.
“You were his whore,” it is a statement, not a question. So that’s what the
Force was trying to tell him, not that Hux was made for him, a comfort and
companion for him, but that Hux was Snoke’s. That Hux cannot be trusted.
He pulls hard on his connection to the Dark. It hurts. He is the Dark. He feels
empty. “Did you fuck your way up the chain of command?” he asks,
conversational.
Hux begins to get to his feet. He brushes the man’s legs out from under him so
Hux stays sprawled at his feet. The redhead doesn’t look up. “No.”
He laughs. The sound comes out sick, half hysterical. “If I told you to spread
your legs for me right now would you do it?”
“No,” the redhead repeats. The man’s form seems hunched, defeated. Something,
some part of him, some foolish, childish part, hurts to see Hux like this.
He channels more of the dark, crushing that feeling. “Not even to secure your
place in my new Order?”
Finally Hux looks up again. He almost flinches from the look in the man’s eyes.
He feels stripped down, known in a way he does not want to be. “No.”
“Get out,” he breathes, and then stronger. “GET OUT! I don’t want to see you
right now!”
Hux scrambles to his feet, arms wrapping around himself as he stumbles towards
the door. His body is so thin. He looks so fragile. The Dark pounds in him,
stronger than his own heart. “I will be considering what role someone like you
has in our future,” he means it as a threat. Hux simply nods. Resigned, not
even turning back. Then the man is gone.
Kylo Ren sinks down to sit on cracked, thousand credit tiles. He does not weep.
***** Chapter 4 *****
Chapter Notes
     I can't thank you all enough for your kind reception of this story,
     your kudos and reviews are keeping me motivated.
He is still alive. As far as he knows he is still General. He has not been
allowed on the bridge or in any command centre since he was dismissed from the
Supreme Leader’s presence. He does not know if Kylo Ren is still following his
plan. He has not seen the man since the scene in Snoke’s quarters.
He is still alive.
It won’t last. The man must have been so disturbed by what he saw, those
fleeting, flickering visions of his relationship with Snoke, that he must not
have looked any deeper. One day he will. On that day Hux will die.
He sits in his pyjamas, cross-legged on his berth, and nibbles on a rationbar.
It is dayshift. He has no need of bathing, dressing, reporting anywhere.
On the plasteel table welded to the floor by his bed a cup sits, steaming next
to the wooden box containing Luke Skywalker’s lightsabre. The smell of seaweed
sits lightly in the air. The cloth-wrapped parcel the creature on the island
had given him had contained strips of dried seaweed. He has been cutting small
pieces off and steeping them in water to drink. After the first three uses they
lose their flavor. They won’t last forever. He should throw the rest out. He
knows that indulging himself, even in such a small way, will weaken his resolve
and make things harder to endure. He lifts the cup, sipping the slightly salty
water, chasing down the flavorless pap of the rationbar.
It has been days since he spoke to anyone, days since he even left his rooms.
He can remember stumbling away from the Supreme Leader, can remember the man’s
words echoing in his mind. Kylo Ren is wrong about him, but there’s no point
trying to convince the man, no point trying to convince anyone of anything when
the very air around them sits heavy with the Dark Side. Whatever he was to
Snoke he doesn’t think he earned his rank on his back. Maybe he did, but of he
did it wasn’t because of his own choices.
He thinks of his mother, of her helplessness, of the credits she earned working
in the kitchen going back to help her people where they eked out their living
on the periphery of Arkanisian society. Living in small clusters on the
treacherous, rocky shores of the estuary, their way of life threatened even
before Imperial occupation. What his father had done to her made her a whore in
the eyes of much of mainstream society. The thinks maybe next time he runs
across Poe Dameron he will inform there are worst things to be than the son of
a whore. Being the son of Brendol Hux for one.
He is afraid. There are many parts of that fear that seem justified, after all
he is in an even more precarious position than everyone else aboard the
Finalizer. It is not justified that he finds himself afraid for Kylo Ren. Not
even Snoke lived so much inside the Dark as the man is doing now.
The man has turned on him, whatever tenuous connection he felt forging between
them on the island must have been an illusion, and if not, then not important
past the moment.
His communicator chirps. He looks at the thing, briefly considering taking it
to the bathroom and flushing it down the toilet. Instead he puts the cup back
on the table.
“Hux here.”
“General,” the commstech’s voice hesitates a moment over his title, before
strengthening. “The Supreme Leader requests your presence in the shuttle bay.
You are to be advised that you have a mission and should pack appropriately for
a desert moon.”
He pauses. Takes a deep breath. Wonders if this is his death he can feel,
breathing down his neck. “Were you to give me any more details?”
“No Sir,” the commstech responds.
“I see. Hux out.”
He finishes the rationbar, takes the cup and leaves it in his small sink. He
bathes and dresses mechanically, he has nothing suitable for a desert
environment, all heavy wool. For so many years he has been stationed aboard the
Supremacy, the Finalizer, Starkiller base. Cold places.
He shoves shirts, underwear, trousers into a bag; he has no idea how long he’s
expected to be gone. Stuffs the seaweed deep down inside, where it is hidden
like something shameful. He straightens the cap on his head, smooths his
greatcoat, looks around his rooms as if for the last time. He turns to leave.
He turns back. Hesitates. He glances at the box containing the lightsaber,
impulse making him want to reach for it, he forces himself to turn once more
and leave.
Officers avoid his eyes as he walks the corridors of his ship. His disgrace
must have spread throughout the Finalizer. For so many years they have
quivered, bodies convulsing to attention as he walked past, it is odd to move
among them and not be feared.
In the shuttlebay he finds the Supreme Leader, Lieutenant Mitaka, and a squad
of Stormtroopers including both FN-2188 and FN-2439.
“Hux,” Kylo Ren greets him, as if they were strangers.
“Supreme Leader, Sir,” he salutes.
Kylo Ren nods an acknowledgement. “You will be going to Maneshfva, one of the
moons of uninhabitable mineral planet Chyur, in the Fva Amuir system. There you
will be delivering several crates of the black stone from Snoke’s quarters to
the palace of a woman called Ememri Ri, at the edge of the Sunsnake Desert, who
will then transfer forty-five thousand credits to me. When you receive word
that I have received the sum you will travel to the Copper Bell Cantina in the
market city of Nfevrum, where you will meet a man who calls himself Sunny Adar.
He is the agent of the Hutt Bo Bukwiina who is interested in purchasing several
of Snoke’s collection of fragrances and aromatic resins, as well as some of his
artwork and other goods, but will only commit to a deal once his agent has
inspected them in person. The lowest price I am willing to accept for each item
has been uploaded to your pad, study it. I will tolerate no mistakes. Do you
think you can manage this task?” The voice is patronizing, the man doesn’t
quite meet his eyes.
“Of course, Supreme Leader,” he feels like a child. He wonders if Kylo Ren will
strike out, not with the Force, but with his fists the way the Commandant did
sometimes, randomly, when the man was giving orders and didn’t feel like he was
being attentive enough.
Kylo Ren says nothing. He can feel the man’s eyes on him, though the Supreme
Leader won’t meet his gaze. The sense of wrongness, of Darkness that the man
has had since they returned from the island and discovered the treachery has
faded a bit. For a second he has the impulse to say something, to find some
defense that would make things like they were before, but he has none and he
remembers that he too is a traitor.
“Take care Hux,” the man says suddenly. When his eyes flicker to the Supreme
Leader’s face he finds him grimacing. “I expect to hear from you soon.” With
that the man turns and stalks away, black robes swirling after him.
“Sir?” the Lieutenant’s voice draws his attention.
“The cargo is loaded?” he asks.
Mitaka nods. “Yes Sir.”
“I suppose we’d better board then.”
Mitaka gives the order. He turns towards the shuttle, watching as Stormtroopers
pile on. A noise catches his attention. Another shuttle coming in to dock.
There’s an edge to the engine’s sound, something sick, high-pitched. He blinks,
face scrunching up without his permission. He forces his expression back to
blank.
The shuttle lands. Its engines stop. The noise remains. Surreptitiously he
shakes his head, raises a hand to rub at his ear. The ramp extends from the
shuttle and two figures appear, dressed head to toe in black. Masked. One is
humming to themselves, something eerie, off-tune. The other is completely
silent. They make their way down the ramp. It feels as if the breath catches in
his throat. The humming one passes first, the Dark heavy, hazy around them.
Then the other. The other passes.
His world goes black at the edges. He feels hunger. A great yawning something,
something that would devour all light.
The silent one stops, turns its head, looks at him. He steps backwards.
Instinctive.
The humming stops. Everything stops. “Lightsider.” He blinks. The impression of
someone having just spoken to him lingers in his mind. He cannot remember
anything being said. The silent figure continues on.
“Sir,” Mitaka’s voice, quavering. He turns to look at the man. “Who were they?”
“Two of the Knights of Ren,” he says, voice stronger than he feels. He follows
the Lieutenant onto the shuttle.
***** Chapter 5 *****
Chapter Notes
     Just a quick chapter. Thank you all for still reading.
Hux is gone. That officer, Mitaka, is gone. Mitaka’s Stormtroopers are gone.
Good. He can’t deal with them being on the ship right now. Kill them. Not when
they have all witnessed his weakness on Luke’s island.
Kill them. Kill them, the knowledge goes with them.No, not Hux. Keep Hux. Kill
the others.
The Dark Side is making it hard to think. He needs it. He needs it or else
everything feels like it will fall apart. When he releases his hold, when he
stops drawing so hard on it, fear creeps in. The knowledge that he is
unprepared, that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, starts to strange him.
Forget Hux. Hux was Snoke’s. Foul. Grotesque. The thought of his old Master on
top of, inside, the redhead. Makes his teeth grind. He needs the Dark. Maybe
those dreams had come from Snoke. Maybe when he severed their bond, when he
killed the man, some ghost of Snoke’s memories had infected him.
Hux is Gone. Gone gone gone gone gone gone gone. Will he come back?
Of course he will. Doesn’t matter if he doesn’t. Hux is unnecessary.
“My Lord,” he looks up. The bridge is quiet, the command staff working as
silently as they can manage. Fear hangs heavy in the air. Fear and the Dark
Side. Before him stand Saiva Ren and Gydn Ren. The first of his Knights to
return.
“You seem stronger than the last time we met,” Saiva breaks off humming to say.
“One_with_the_Dark,” Gydn echoes, half spoken, half projected into his mind.
It has been years since they have stood face to face. Once, long ago, when they
were children they had played together, learnt together, been drawn to the Dark
together. For a while, after they left Luke’s temple, they had fought side by
side, rampaged an orgy of destruction on their path to their new Master, Snoke
on top of Hux. Fucking Hux. More recently he has been stationed aboard the
Finalizer, the Supremacy, Starkiller Base and they have been off doing errands
for the old man. Killed him. Good.
“We_felt_him_die” Gydn whispers into his mind.
“Snoke,” Saiva says out loud. “The First Order is yours now, My Lord.”
If I can keep it, he carefully avoids speaking the truth out loud.
“We have much to discuss,” he says, a glance around the bridge, at the Force-
nulls trying not to look at them. “Come,” he strides away from the window,
heading deeper into the ship. He should tell them about Luke, if they don’t
know already. He wonders of they’ll grieve. A twinge of something. He pulls the
Dark close around him, comforting.
“Yes My Lord,” they say, perfect echoes of each other, falling into step behind
him. Soon the others will be here. Maybe then he will actually feel in control.
“We_will_serve_you,” Gydn whispers in his mind.
The Finalizer is off to nearby Telbenefva to make its own set of deliveries to
the rich, powerful and morally dubious there. He wonders if it is fate. He
thinks of his vision where he found the island, thinks of her standing at a
gaming table. It was probably lies. Sent to mislead him like the vision misled
him into wasting valuable time, letting the Fist Order slip from his grip. Like
Hux misled him. In the vision, under Snoke. Like his mind misled him about Hux.
“What were you doing for Snoke when he died?” he asks, curious. He is not sure
where he’s leading them. If techs weren’t stripping Snoke’s quarters to the
bones he can imagine taking them there, standing before them in splendor and
glory.
”Killing,” Gydn’s mental/physical voice echoes.
“Raiding an old Sith archive,” Saiva says.
Together they say “Wasting our time.”
He nods. “I’m afraid there’ll be a bit more time wasting coming up, but soon,
soon I promise you blood.”
He feels their delight in the Force. The Dark calls to him, tells him to join
in, to revel in the future when he will have dominion over all. Something holds
him back. Making him weak. Hux.
As one they look towards the shuttle bay. Darkness is incoming. More of their
companions. He changes trajectory, leading the way. They arrive just as Jrii
Ren, Neiro Ren and Xatjt Ren disembark.
“My Lord,” the three greet as one, voices echoing. Echoing. Echoing like
something empty. He blinks. Pulls the Dark in close. Now there is only Rhadn
Ren to arrive and his Knights will be complete.
His communicator beeps. “What?” he snaps, then tries to modulate his tone.
“Report.”
“Supreme Leader, Sir,” a commstech’s worried voice rings through the shuttle
bay. “Sir, we are picking up readings from nearby, just out of the Fva Amuir
system. If these readings are correct it is the Rectitude, Sir. She appears to
be in trouble.”
A smile cracks across his face. “Prepare to engage,” he orders. He turns to his
knights “It seems there’ll be blood sooner than I promised.”
***** Chapter 6 *****
Chapter Notes
     Thank you all for reading, commenting and keaving kudos. I was too
     tired to post this last night.
The sun beats down upon the moon’s surface, white, burning. Already he feels
sweaty, a little sick from the heat. Mitaka is red-faced beside him, dark hair
escaping to stick to his skin. Overhead he can see the large, greenish mass of
the planet, hanging heavy in the sky.
The sunlight reflects off the white stone of Ememri Ri’s palace, carved from a
rocky outcrop at the edge of the desert. The building is like a large, white
cake, roofed in copper that is going green in the air. Covered parapets
protrude from the front of the building, from which hang thousands of tiny,
glass windchimes tinkling in the faint breeze. In front of the building is a
courtyard housing a lush garden, with trees, vines and flowering shrubs. The
large, domed rooves of water cisterns beneath the palace the only disruption to
the flow of space.
At the edge of the desert around the complex there are crops, livestock and a
small settlement of simple houses built out of the same white stone. There is
no water on the surface here, but the sound of pumps dragging it up from below
sits as a bass rumble beneath the light noise of the windchimes.
They were greeted at the heavy, defensible gate to the palace by guards, people
of many different species, all armed and armored the same and bearing an air
about them somewhere between suspicion and contempt. He’d stated their
business, the crates of stone standing behind him, between the shuttle and the
palace, surrounded by sweating Stormtroopers. Now they wait.
Eventually the sound of something metallic, tinkling, cuts through the air. A
blue-skinned Twilek appears from within the palace, dressed in pale yellow silk
edged with tiny copper bells. She is a little past her prime, her beauty aging
gracefully. “You are here with the stone?” she asks, eyes taking in their
uniforms. He has the feeling that she finds the situation amusing.
“Yes,” he nods. Gestures to the crates.
“I will inspect it,” it is not a question. She lifts a shawl hanging around her
shoulders to protect her head from the hot sun and walks outside of the palace
gates, guards moving immediately to flank her, hands on their blasters.
He orders the Stormtroopers to remove the lids from the crates so she can peer
inside. They do so, she takes her time, examining every crate, lifting tiles
from the surface so she can inspect those beneath.
“It is good stone,” she says, eventually.
“It is,” he agrees. “If you are happy we will accept your payment.”
She nods. “Your men will bring it inside the courtyard. I will get my wife, she
will pay.”
He agrees, gives the order, watches as the Stormtroopers shift the crates to
where one of the guards indicates. The Twilek pads gracefully back into the
palace complex. Time passes. The heat bakes through him. He wishes he could
remove his greatcoat. Mitaka is wavering a little beside him.
The Twilek returns, a white-haired woman with her. This new-comer is dressed in
white linen, embroidered with gold. She wears trousers, a tunic, sandals. Her
body is strong, corded with sun-baked muscle. Her gaze is flat, greenish as the
copper. “Ememri Ri,” she says, holding out a strong hand for him to shake. “You
must be hot, General. I will send for some water.”
He waves her off. “It is ok, once you have transferred the credits we will
return to our shuttle.”
“Liqa says the stone is good,” she says, her eyes flicking, affectionate to the
Twilek by her side. “Will you accept thirty-thousand?”
“Forty-five,” he replies. He is not going to get drawn into this. The Supreme
Leader will kill him.
“Thirty-five,” she counters.
“Forty-five,” he insists. “It is not up to me.”
She frowns, her eyes narrow. She inspects him, eyes roving over his face for a
long time. Her expression eases. She nods. “Always worth a try. Forty-five
thousand it is.” She takes a small pad from her pocket, presses a couple of
buttons. “It is done. Are you sure we cannot get you any water?”
“It’s fine,” he holds up a hand, indicating he’ll be right back. He walks a
little way from the gate, from the woman and Twilek, and comms the Finalizer.
“Hux here, have the credits gone through?” He glances at the automated message
that has appeared on his pad, confirming the transaction. Kylo Ren said he
wanted to be contacted in person, anyway, it’s better to be sure.
A pause. “The Supreme Leader says yes.”
“Hux out.” He returns to the gate.
Ememri Ri is standing under one of the trees, her arm around the Twilek’s
waist. They are whispering to each other, so glad to be in each other’s
company. He feels a pang. “Everything is in order. We will go now.”
The woman nods, turning to go back inside the palace. The guards move to close
the gate. The Twilek lingers, suddenly darting forward, grabbing his forearm.
“Brother,” she says, something strange in her voice. “Be careful, do not let
the hot sun burn you.”
“I, I won’t,” he says discombobulated. He means to ask her exactly what she
means, but she darts back inside the palace and the guards slam the gate shut
almost in his face.
He blinks. Sweat drips into his eyes. Stings. “Back to the shuttle,” he
commands.
The cool air is a relief. He feels like he’s wilting into his seat. Mitaka all
but collapses into the seat in front of him, taking off his cap and trying to
slick his sweaty hair back. “Sir?” the man queries, voice hesitant. “Sir, I
don’t think the Stormtroopers can cope for too long outside in their armour.”
“Our trip to the Cantina should be quick,” he says, not sure why he’s trying to
reassure the man. He shouldn’t. He should be reinforcing their difference in
rank and dressing him down for speaking out of turn. He is not his father.
Mitaka has a good point, even if that good point is probably informed by
fraternization. “We will be off this accursedly hot planet and back to the
Finalizer before we know. We just have to endure.”
Mitaka hesitates. “If we’re not?”
He feels the rumble of the shuttle’s engines, sees the sun gleaming off the
desert’s white sands, the heat shimmering in waves like the Dark shimmering off
Kylo Ren. “Then we’ll have to make accommodations for the heat. I’m sure more
weather appropriate gear will be easy to find in such a large market city as
Nfevrum.”
“Thank you Sir,” Mitaka breathes. When he glances at the other man he finds him
staring determinately out the window. What a funny thing attachment is.
***** Chapter 7 *****
Chapter Notes
     Atypically this chapter is Hux again.
     It's been a difficult day, though it didn't end so bad. We had a
     health scare with the other dog, but she's ok. I am so very thankful
     for it.
     I want to thank everyone who is reading this, as I try to do every
     chapter. I hope I'm not getting too annoyingly repetitive, but it
     does mean a lot to me.
Nfevrum sits in a natural valley, rimmed by high cliffs of white stone veined
in green. The city sprawls around a giant, artificial oasis, the water pumped
up from deep beneath the earth to gush into huge pools where life teems. The
water glitters in the sun, the same bluish-green as the copper roof of Ememri
Ri’s palace. Dwellings are cut back into the rock faces, piled one on top of
the other, with narrow walkways and steep staircases the only way to access
them.
The flat part of the valley has a few palaces, much the same as the one
belonging to Ememri Ri, but closer together, without the agrarian sprawl around
them. Much of the rest of the space is taken up with commerce. There are simple
wooden stalls with brightly covered cloth awnings, more permanent shops made of
the local white stone, pens containing livestock, lots containing vessels,
restaurants, food stalls, an abundance of cantinas. Over, closer to the water
there is a large park, some kind of pleasure ground, with a racetrack to one
side. In the distance he can see green fields, crops irrigated by the water
from below, standing almost luridly bright against the white sands of the
desert.
The shuttle pulls in to a bay. A beep from his pad. An invoice for parking; 10
credits for the first hour, 20 credits for each hour after, 60 credits for a
day, 100 credits for a week, 350 credits long term up to six months. He selects
60 credits, one day. Looking out onto the thronging masses, the myriad of
beings bustling around from at least a hundred worlds, makes him suspect this
might take longer than he wishes.
A beep. The money is withdrawn from his account. He wonders if he’ll be able to
claim expenses. Probably not.
He downloads a map, squinting at it, trying to get his bearings. Apparently the
Copper Bell Cantina is one of the largest cantinas in the Eastern Quarter,
known for its lacquered copper roof that never goes green. He peers out of the
window, trying to spot such a thing. A riot of colour confronts him. At least
he knows which direction is East.
He leads the way from the shuttle, leaving the Stormtrooper pilot behind in the
blessed cool. The Stormtroopers crowd around the chest carrying the goods for
this Sunny Adar to inspect, hands on their blasters. He cannot even begin to
imagine how the Supreme Leader will respond if the goods get stolen.
“Keep in formation, be vigilant,” he orders. Mitaka is fidgeting beside him.
The heat is something else. Here, closer to the water, it is not the aching
dryness of Ememri Ri’s palace, instead humidity sits heavy in the air, making
it feel thick and hard to breathe. Beneath his coat his shirt and vest are
almost soaked through with sweat. His hair is starting to escape, just like
Mitaka’s, to hang in lank strands and stick to his face. He cannot imagine what
it must be like beneath Stormtrooper armour.
“Brother, brother!” voices call out from everywhere. “This shawl brother. Best
quality cloth.” “A blaster brother, very nice.” “We have glass beads. Blue
beads. Green beads.” “Some sandals brother. Real Tauntaun leather. Imported.”
“Best quality. Best price. You will not find the same for less.” “Kyber crystal
brother. Guaranteed from Jedha. A necklace. Very nice around your pretty neck.”
“Windchimes. Brother, brother, keep the sunsnakes away.”
Every now and then beings pass with their hands on their blasters, eyes
vigilant, a gold-silk sash across their chest. Some kind of guard, he supposes.
Beggars approach and then veer away when the Stormtroopers reach for their
blasters, hungry eyes of a myriad species watching from a safe distance, eying
them up, sneaking glances at the chest. He looks back to make sure it’s well
guarded, but the Stormtroopers are doing their duty.
He cannot remember ever having so many sapient beings press so close. For a
moment he feels dazed, he blinks, light clings to the edges of his vision, but
he shakes it off. He can see a big copper roof in the distance, glowing in the
sun.
The Copper Bell Cantina is built around a central courtyard, a large tree sits
in the middle, something green and fragrant, with fat green fruits ripening on
the branches. Hanging over the gate that leads inside is a huge, round, copper
bell with ancient looking carvings inscribed over its surface.
As they push through the gate they fall under the shade of the tree. He could
almost cry with relief.
He goes to the bar, the Stormtroopers following, with Mitaka all but constantly
glancing back to check on them. “Water,” her orders from the thin, yellow
skinned being. “For all of us.”
“Ah,” the beings says, fixing large, lamp-like eyes on him, before glancing at
the Stormtroopers. “it is too hot for you military types. Come, sit in the
shade. I will bring you your water, and fruit if you want it. Fruit is good in
the heat.”
He nods, glancing at the Stormtroopers. They look like mollusks cooking in
their shells. He looks back at the being. “Ah,” it says “fifteen credits for
water and fruit.”
He transfers the funds. “I am looking for Sunny Adar?”
“Ah,” the beings says, taking a large jug, ceramic, yellow glaze, and filling
it from a cistern. “Yes. He says. He will be here soon. He says to make the
nice men from the First Order happy.”
“Will you inform me when he arrives?”
“Ah,” the being takes another jug, fills it with more water. “I will do so. You
should go sit. It is too hot for standing, talking.”
He goes to sit with Mitaka and the Stormtroopers, who have found a long bench
in the shade of the tree. Mitaka breaks off talking to FN-2439 as he
approaches, glancing up at him with concern. The Stormtroopers are doing their
best to sit at attention, but they are beginning to droop.
“Oh for-” he mutters. “Take your helmets off at least.”
They do so almost as one, each of them plopping their helmet onto the table
near the chest with something like relief. He looks at the revealed faces,
sweat beading up on their skin. In the future he is going to make sure every
ship had desert appropriate armor, not just the ones stationed near desert
planets.
A man dressed in white linen comes over bearing a large tray with the two jugs
of water, clay cups, and a large platter of the same green-skinned fruit that
hangs from the tree, sliced finely, the insides a shockingly intense madder-
pink. He places it on the table, glancing up at Hux while he does so. “Ah
brother,” the man says, his voice deep, “You have such beautiful eyes.” Then a
smile, fine wrinkles crinkling the skin at the corner of his eyes. “I am Sunny
Adar.”
The man straightens up. For a moment he’s struck by how much Sunny Adar looks
like an older version of a Kylo Ren who must have avoided offending the Gods of
proportion and aesthetic regularity. He’s not as tall, or as broad, and his
skin is golden instead of pallid. The eyes are nearly the same, so is the
black, wavy hair, though there’s a little silver at the temples. His features
are smaller, more regular, his face squarer and more conventionally handsome.
Hux blinks. The illusion vanishes a bit. Kylo Ren would never hold himself with
such easy confidence.
“Armitage Hux,” he says, then shakes himself. “General Hux of the First Order.”
“You should drink,” the man says, easing himself onto the bench between Hux and
Mitaka. “Tender flowers wilt in such a hot sun.”
He gestures for Mitaka to pour them all a cup of water. The Lieutenant does,
and he tries to ignore the fact that the first two vessels end up in front of
FN-2188 and FN-2439.
The water has a sharp, slightly metallic taste to it, very different from the
nothing taste of the filtered water onboard a ship or the slightly salty water
on the island. It is not quite cold, but still refreshing. He picks up a slice
of the fruit, examining dense, seedless flesh. He takes a bite. Juice bursts
onto his tongue, sweet and slightly tart, the flesh seeming to dissolve in his
mouth. He takes another bite.
“These are the items, your treasures?” the man asks, gesturing to the box,
after Hux has made his way through three more slices of the fruit. The man has
been watching him this whole time, dark eyes roving over his face in a way that
makes him uncomfortable.
“They are,” he answers, picking up another slice. Mitaka is nibbling away as
well, and some of the Stormtroopers. FN-2188 is looking on fondly as FN-2439
picks up another slice and hands it to the Lieutenant before he has finished
the one in his mouth.
“I will take a look then, my very great friend is eager to do a deal.”
He watches the man pull the chest over, unlatch it. His hand lingers near his
blaster, just in case they are betrayed. Sunny Adar unpacks the chest,
examining every item.
He unwraps cloth covered bundles to reveal ornate bottles, vials and jars
containing various liquids, oils and resins. One by one he opens them, sniffs
them, sometimes pokes them, before rewrapping them.
Next he examines in ivory statuette of an explicitly naked dancing Twilek,
ornamented in gold, that used to sit on a small shelf in the main room and make
him feel uncomfortable. He thinks of the Twilek earlier, wonders if she’d ever
been a slave like so many of them are. The statuette is placed carefully on the
table.
A long roll of cloth is removed, glistening gold in the sunlight, spider silk
embroidered with gold threat, fabric for new robes that never got made. The man
rubs the cloth between two fingers, hums to himself.
The next item to be removed is a thick cloth bag holding something heavy. The
man opens the bag and pulls out an ornate gold belt, big enough to fit a Hutt,
made of delicate filigree work and set with precious stones. He examines the
belt, turning it in his hands, before putting it back in the bag.
Then it is three scrolls, one unrolled after the other, beautifully painted
erotic scenes exposed briefly to the light. Sunny Adar’s eyebrows raise, the
man glances at him. He refuses to look away from those dark eyes. The scrolls
are rerolled.
A tapestry is next, the base fabric blacker than ink, so dark that it seems to
absorb light. When the man unfolds the cloth it exposes a glimmering, abstract
pattern picked out in coppery threads. A large, golden hand brushes the surface
delicately, then the man refolds it and reaches for the next item.
He pulls out a small, wooden frame. Inside there is a figure, a little
humanoid. Its skin is made of carved teeth, rust coloured liquid used to paint
in features. A nest of the finest, copper coloured braids is its hair, real
hair, from a real person, and it wears a little scrap of silk for a dress. He
shivers as the thing passes into the dappled light beneath the tree. It always
felt like it was watching him.
Finally Sunny Adar pulls out a leather folio, opening it to reveal twenty three
unframed pieces of art from various artists. Some acclaimed, some unknown, some
who only found fame after their death. The man flicks through all of them,
making soft sounds at some of them, and packs them away.
The man carefully places everything back into the chest. “I am impressed, my
very great friend and I did not think the First Order would have access to such
treasures. Your Supreme Leader Snoke’s collection, I imagine. We have heard
here that he is dead, is this true?”
“Kylo Ren is our Supreme Leader,” he replies. “Snoke is immaterial.”
“I suppose that is true. Your Snoke certainly never gave my very great friend
such an opportunity as your Kylo Ren has,” the man smiles, he seems to be
always smiling. Kylo Ren never smiles. He wonders if a smiling Kylo Ren would
look as much as if the man was contemplating eating you whole as a smiling
Sunny Adar.
“Will your friend be purchasing any of the items?” he asks, voice level. Mitaka
pours them all another cup of water. He watches the last drops from the first
jug dribble down into his cup.
“I will have to contact him,” Sunny Adar shrugs. “I will tell my very great
friend of the quality of the items, as well as the beautiful General Hux’s
great kindness in braving such heat to show them to me.” He blinks. Beautiful?
The man is fucking with him. If he thinks flattery will get him a better deal
he has another think coming. “I will go do so,” the man says, getting to his
feet, “and I will tell Hrjaea to bring you more water and fruit. Do not worry,
I will pay.”
“You do so,” he says. “We cannot wait around here all day. I am sure that
others will be interested in what we’re selling if your friend is not.”
A smile, rows of white teeth. “A good point, my brother, I will tell this to my
very great friend.”
He watches the man walk over to the bar, leaning in to the bartender’s face,
all friendly, before gesturing behind himself at their table. The yellow
skinned being nods. Sunny Adar walks away, hand going to a commsdevice.
All they can do is wait. He watches FN-2188 lean in close to Mitaka and whisper
something that makes him blush even redder. The other Stormtroopers seem
unperturbed. They must know that this sort of behavior should be getting FN-
2188, FN-2439 and Mitaka himself reconditioned. He wonders why they seem so
calm. This is their squad, they should be nervous about what their comrades do
in front of him. Stormtrooper squads tends to form bonds that not even his
father could program out of them.
The yellow-skinned being, Hrjaea comes over, bearing a new tray with jugs and
fruit. “Ah,” the beings says as he unloads it, placing two plates of the green
skinned pink fruit and one of something translucent and orange on the table.
“That Sunny Adar is a generous man. He says bring my beautiful friend and his
friends water, bring them fruit. I will pay. A generous man. He says to me, you
will have half customers on this day. I have friends coming. You will treat the
nice men well. A generous man.” He puts down the jugs, pale green glaze this
time, and loads the tray with the empty ones. The being’s lamp-like eyes meet
his. “A dangerous man. You remember that, my brother. A dangerous man.” Before
he can reply Hrjaea scurries off.
“What-?” Mitaka mutters.
“Yes, a dangerous man,” FN-2188 says, she shifts and he can see the hand she
has clenched around her blaster. A glance around, she’s not the only one. “Are
you sure we should go through with this Sir?” she asks.
A flash of Kylo Ren’s face if they return without the credits, just because the
locals were making them nervous. “I appreciate the concern. Remain vigilant.
The deal should not take too long.”
He picks up a slice of the translucent orange fruit. It feels slimy between his
fingers. He takes a careful bite. Shocking sweetness erupts across his tongue,
making him wince. He puts the slice back on the edge of the plate.
They wait. They drink the water, eat the fruit. He notices with amusement that
FN-2188 seems to prefer the orange fruit to the pink one. Eventually Sunny Adar
returns, all smiles and welcomes. “My very great friend, he says he will buy
all your treasures. This is good news.”
“It is,” he says, pushing a lock of copper hair out of his eyes. The man’s dark
gaze seems to follow his fingers. “Shall we arrange the transfer of credits?”
“Ah,” the man interjects, sounding a lot like Hrjaea for a moment. “Well, you
see, my very great friend he says that he will only buy your treasures if you
and your friends bring them to him yourself. It is only about eight hours,
across the desert, to his palace. There you can stay the night. Tomorrow I will
bring you back.”
He blinks. “We could cross the whole moon in eight hours by shuttle.”
“Ah, but you see my brother, my very great friend he has defenses. No shuttle
can get near. You will be shot down,” that smile again, a shrug. “Anyway, my
very great friend will not welcome anyone who I do not bring to him with my
transport.”
This is unbelievable. “The deal was for you to inspect the items here, and if
you and he were satisfied, then credits would be exchanged. There was no
mention of anyone going to his palace.”
“A man is allowed to change his mind,” those dark eyes rove his face “is he
not, beautiful?”
“I must contact the Supreme Leader,” he finds himself getting to his feet. He
looks at Mitaka. “Remain here, guard the chest.”
Mitaka nods. A couple of Stormtroopers, neither of them FN-2188 or FN-2439, get
up and flank him as he walks into the Cantina, heading for a quiet corner with
no patrons.
He comms the Finalizer. “Hux here. I need to speak to the Supreme Leader.”
There is a pause, then Kylo Ren’s voice. “Hux.”
“There has been a complication, the Hutt wishes us to bring the items to his
palace personally before he’ll agree to transfer the credits.”
“But he has agreed to purchase them?”
“Yes.”
“Then what is the problem?”
“This wasn’t what was agreed. It will be an overnight trip, at least sixteen
hours.”
There is another pause. He can hear something in the background, people
scurrying about. “I don’t have time for this,” the Supreme Leader’s voice is
cold. “Do what the Hutt wants. We need the funds.”
“But-” he thinks of Sunny Adar calling him beautiful. He feels uneasy.
“That is an order General,” the line goes dead.
He sits for a moment, breathes. In. Out. In. Out. Ok. He returns to the table,
Sunny Adar is sitting where he was previously, chatting with FN-1996. “The
Supreme Leader has agreed to your terms,” he says. “Before we leave we must
return to our shuttle and gather supplies.”
“I understand,” the man says, getting to his feet. Standing side by side he is
a little taller than the other man, an impression that may be exaggerated by
his cap, though the dark-haired man is broader than he is, wider across
shoulders, waist and hips. “But brother, my very great friend he must be
allowed to feast you tonight. You would not reject his hospitality.” It is not
a question.
“Of course not,” he replies, diplomatic, already dreading what the feast may
entail. He gestures for the Stormtroopers and Mitaka to stand. “Shall we meet
back here in an hour?”
“Oh, no,” the man says, shaking his head. “I think I should come with you. It
has not escaped my notice that you are all not dressed for this climate. I will
show you the best places to get better clothes, make sure they give you a good
deal.”
“I’m sure we can manage,” he replies, remembering what he promised Mitaka. He
glances at the officer, the Stormtroopers. Sweat drips down their faces. His
own underthings are drenched, only the thick wool of his overcoat hiding how
disheveled he’s becoming.
“Do not worry, my pretty friend, it will be no hassle. I have the time.”
Reluctantly he nods. Accepts the offer. As he follows the man, Mitaka and
Stormtroopers in the rear guarding the chest, dark eyes glance back at FN-2188,
at her hand still on her blaster.
***** Chapter 8 *****
Chapter Notes
     Thank you all for reading. I'm sure I warned for violence, but just
     in case- this chapter contains violence.
The Rectitude floats ahead, engines dead, shields down, weapons inactive.
Through the Force he can feel lifesigns panicking, scurrying around, desperate
to save themselves. The ship should be scrambling fighters, but the fighter bay
doors remain stubbornly shut. He waits, watches, tries to determine whether
this is a trap. It does not seem to be. He senses no treachery in the Force,
only fear.
Behind him his knights shift. He can feel them too, feel the Dark radiating off
them in waves. They long for blood. He ignores the way his mind wants to linger
on Hux, the last comm he had from the man, the complication. Hux overnight on
the moon. Hux will be fine.
If they take the ship, and getting her running again proves to be a relatively
easy task, they will have doubled the size of their fleet, and even if she
remains dead in the water if they permanently disable her and kill her crew
that’s a message sent, one lot of traitors punished. If they leave her here,
let her remain without experiencing retribution, that will only further suggest
their weakness.
How would Hux go about taking her? Probably a traditional space battle, but
then again she is defenseless. A boarding party would probably be best, saves
wasting munitions and prevents her from acquiring any more expensive damage if
she’ s repairable. Hux would take some officers, probably a couple of platoons
or a company of Stormtroopers.
Five of his knights, himself. He hardly needs as many people as Hux. Six will
do.
“Shields up, prepare to retaliate if it’s a trap,” he orders. Hesitates. This,
this right here is when he needs Hux. Hux is not here, he glances around,
frowning, which of the stupid little officers is next in line. He recognizes
the badges of rank on one woman, points at her. “You, Captain, have the
bridge.”
“With me,” he says to his knights, stalking towards the fighter bay. “We’ll
board her, kill anyone who opposes us, but try not to damage the ship. Our goal
is to take the vessel. Understood?”
“Yes my Lord,” they say as one. Gydn’s voice echoing after the others are done.
He draws on the Dark Side, pulling deep from the burning well. Purpose fills
him. Certainty. A gift in exchange for the promise of blood. They, all six of
them, feel as one in the Force. The Dark beats where their hearts should lay.
Silently they board fighters and take off, lancing towards the Rectitude. He
can hear nothing, not even his own breath, can see nothing but what the Dark
shows him. They dock as one across the ship, pulling in to service bays and
shuttle docks whose airlocks remain open, useless. They disembark. They reach
for their weapons. They kill.
It comes to him in flashes. Flashes or terrified faces, the sense of fear in
the Force. He lifts an officer, young, blonde, and crushes her with the Force,
flings her body into a squad of Stormtroopers, knocking them down. His
lightsaber is in his hand. It slices so neatly through armour.
He’s taking heads. Body after body lies slumped in the hall behind him, some in
armour, some in uniform. There’s a head hanging from his left hand right now,
black hair sticking to his glove with blood.
He curls the Force around a fleeing tech. He pulls instead of crushing, the
man’s scream breaks off as his body comes apart, spraying the hallway, himself,
the other techs cowering from him with blood. He drops the man’s parts, reaches
for another.
He meets Xatjt in the hall, the slender figure perched on a Stormtrooper’s
chest, twin daggers lodged up under the helmet. Their minds brush. Pleasure
from Xatjt. Darkness from him. They pass, his lightsaber cutting down a fleeing
officer.
He is on the bridge. Gydn is on the bridge. Everyone is dead, not a mark on
them, he came for blood and has been disappointed. He thinks of killing the
knight. Gydn meets his gaze, helmet blank, expressionless. He moves on. There
is more death to be had.
Saiva this time. That humming again. Crouched over a struggling officer, he
does not look. He is not interested in what the man’s doing. The officer is too
close to death to satisfy his need for blood.
The halls are empty, the rooms are empty, the barracks are empty, the medbay is
empty, the docks are empty. There is blood, bodies everywhere. He can still
sense life, feel it in the Force, he follows.
He finds Jrii and Neiro, standing contemplating the security offices. The door
is locked, barred from within. He can see figures moving around inside, an
officer, some techs, a squad of Stormtroopers. The officer spots him, an older
man, black hair going white, dark skin wrinkled into a look of distress.
“Please,” the man calls out. “We disabled the ship. We want no part in the
mutiny. We remain loyal to General Hux, to you Supreme Leader.”
Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux
Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux
Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux
Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux
Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux
Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux
Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux Hux
He gasps. He almost drops his lightsaber. His face itches. He lifts a hand,
smearing the sticky blood around.
“We should kill them My Lord,” Jrii says, voice pleasant, as if discussing the
weather.
“That’s true. She has a very good point,” Neiro adds.
“No,” he says, the word catching on his tongue. His lips feel numb. “No, we’ll
bring them back aboard the Finalizer, let Hux deal with them when he returns.”
“Hux?” Jrii says, head tilted to the side. “The redhead?”
“Yes,” he replies. Frowns. “Have you met?”
“Not me. Gydn, in Snoke’s mind, just once.”
“What do you mean?” The Dark surges once more.
Jrii dances backwards, hands raised, placating. “Just an impression, left by
accident. Snoke left his shields down just a little too low, and Gydn has a way
of getting in.”
“What was this impression?”
A shrug, “I think you should ask Gydn. These things are never accurate second
hand.”
Neiro nods. “She’s right you know. Very clever she is. You wouldn’t want to go
misunderstanding things would you, My Lord?”
“No,” he sighs. “I suppose not. Collect them,” he gestures to the people inside
the security centre “gently, I’ll comm for a transport shuttle to take them
back to the Finalizer.”
“As you say, My Lord,” Neiro replies. The knight creeps in close to the door,
peers inside. “Are you going to let us in? We promise not to bite.”
The officer peers out at them. “No, No I don’t know that I will.”
“Oh, well that’s ok,” Neiro says, reaching for something in their belt “You
just might want to move away from the door.”
The people inside the security centre scramble to the back of the room, the
officer stepping in front as if he could shield them with his body. A pair of
Stormtroopers try to pull him aside, but he just shuffles them in behind him as
well.
Neiro puts something on the door, little lights flash red. “Might want to stand
back My Lord.”
All three of them move away from the door and close their eyes just in time for
a beep, a flash of white light. When he opens his eyes the door is gone. Jrii
and Neiro step through into the security centre, attention on the people
huddling away from them. He turns and leaves.
He comms the Finalizer, requests the shuttle, walks back to the bridge. As he
moves he reaches out with the Force, feeling for life. He senses the cold, Dark
places where the knights are, the lighter, frantically fluttering lifesigns of
the people being herded from the security centre, and nothing else. Everyone
else is dead.
Bodies litter the halls, most of them in parts. He can remember killing some of
them. The world shakes around him for a moment, he almost loses his grip on the
Dark Side, but he endures. He draws it in close, keeps it as a wall between him
and the outside.
When the prisoners are back on the Finalizer he’ll have the corpses of the
mutineers flushed into space, then he’ll have techs come aboard to see if the
Rectitude can be repaired. He wonders what Hux will think. It doesn’t matter
what Hux thinks. Of course it matters what Hux thinks.
***** Chapter 9 *****
Chapter Notes
     The Hux on Maneshfva part of this story is rapidly spiralling out of
     my control. Oh well, I tell myself it's good world-building practise.
     Thank you for reading, as always, and for your comments and kudos. I
     hope you all have a lovely day, and many lovely days to come.
Hux stands beneath the midday sun dressed head to toe in white linen, loose
trousers and a tunic, blaster belted around his waist, sandals on his feet.
Beside him Mitaka stands, dressed the same. Behind them eight of the squad of
Stormtroopers stand guarding the chest, also in white linen, but with their
white breastplates strapped over the cloth. The remaining two Stormtroopers are
to remain with the shuttle, to guard it until their return.
Sunny Adar approaches across the parking bay, all smiles. While they retreated
to the shuttle for a quick sonic shower and to dress in their new garb the man
had retreated to a nearby drinks stall. “Brothers, sisters,” the mans says,
arms wide as if to encompass them, “and of course my beautiful friend. So much
more fitting you look. Come, my transport is this way,” the man begins walking,
heading west, before turning suddenly. “Ah, I almost forgot. Here, a gift.” The
man takes something from a pouch at his waist and thrusts it at him.
He takes it reflexively, almost dropping it as Sunny Adar withdraws his hand.
The present is a small, slippery parcel, wrapped in a piece of cheap linen. He
unwraps it, a length of embroidered, pale seafoam silk slithers out accompanied
by the tinkling of hundreds of tiny copper bells sewn to its edge. A shawl,
much like the one the Twilek was wearing earlier. “I can’t accept this,” he
says, trying to give it back to the man.
“No, no, my friend. I must insist,” the dark-haired man raises his hands,
refusing to take the shawl. “The sun is too hot for skin as pale as yours.”
“Then what about my Stormtroopers?” he gestures back at the blonde and blue
eyed FN-1996, the pale and brown haired FN-2311, the freckled face of the mousy
FN-2091. “Or Lieutenant Mitaka?”
Sunny Adar shrugs “We can find linen for them, a face as beautiful as yours
deserves silk.”
“No,” he snaps, once more trying to give the shawl back. “If they deserve linen
I deserve linen, and if I must have a shawl I can buy my own.”
“Why buy your own when you have such a one gifted to you?” the man gestures at
the object. “It is of the best quality, finest spider silk and real copper
bells.”
“I do not want a gift,” he argues. Gifts imply obligation.
“That is fine,” the man says, still smiling, almost amused at this point “But
you will keep it beautiful, because I will not take it back, and if you do not
accept it I will not take you to see my very great friend.”
His fist clenches in the silk. He wants this over with. “Fine.”
Sunny Adar relaxes, and it is only then that Hux realizes how tense the man had
become. “But, you are right my friend,” the man says, gesturing at Mitaka and
the Stormtroopers “I did not think earlier. We will stop and get shawls for all
your friends as well. Pale as you or not, we do not want them burning in the
hot sun.”
He takes a deep breath, trying for calm. “Lead on,” he snaps, gesturing ahead.
“As you wish.”
The man leads them back into the marketplace, back to a stall near the shop
where they bought their clothes earlier. “Quality is better, prices are better
for linen shawls here, not clothes,” he says when Hux looks at him,
questioning, “Clothes are better, prices are better where we went before. If
you want silk, well, you go somewhere else. If you want spider silk, somewhere
else again. If you want a shawl like the one I got for you, that is a very
different kind of shop.”
The man gestures at the shopkeep, a slender woman with saffron coloured tattoos
on her face, and asks for nine linen shawls. As he does FN-2188 steps forward,
“Actually,” she corrects, “eight. We-” she gestures between herself and FN-2439
“-would like to know where to buy a silk shawl.”
“Ok,” Sunny Adar says, glancing between the two Stormtroopers and Mitaka.
“Eight it is. How much would you like to spend?”
Hux feels a bit like he’s going mad. This whole business seems like such a
waste of time and money. The mission was to go down to the moon, drop off some
stone, get paid, go to the Copper Bell Cantina, show a man some items,
hopefully get paid again, and go back to the Finalizer. Now, hours later he is
standing under the hot sun in a huge marketplace while two of his Stormtroopers
discuss buying ornamentation for their lover, one of his officers, before they
get led off into the desert by a strange man who keeps calling him beautiful.
“-like this,” Sunny Adar is saying. The silk shawl is suddenly snatched out of
his hand and draped around his shoulders and over his head before he registers
what is happening. He splutters. The copper bells tinkle across his brow. “Ah,
my beautiful friend, it suits you more than I had hoped.”
The Stormtroopers clumsily mimic the man’s movements, draping white linen
awkwardly around their own heads. He transfers the credits, another 160 down,
to the shopkeep. “Are we done now?” he asks, hand inching up to remove the
shawl, before hesitating. The silk does seem to provide some protection from
the heat, though he cannot see why it would. He leaves it.
“One more stop, for a silk shawl worth about sixty credits.”
Mitaka looks embarrassed. FN-2188 and FN-2439 look determined. He feels
defeated. “Ok. One more stop.”
The next stall is tiny, only big enough to house the shopkeep, a slender being
of a species he hasn’t seen before. Four eyed and slightly insectoid, with dark
green, iridescent skin. The creature pulls shawl after shawl out and places it
on the counter, each of the four eyes moving independently, keeping an eye on
all of them.
FN-2188 and FN-2439 peer at the counter, glancing back at Mitaka and then back
at the shawls. “This isn’t necessary,” the Lieutenant says, voice soft. The
man’s dark eyes glance back at him “I really think we need to hurry up.”
“Let us buy you something Dopheld,” FN-2439 says, voice equally soft. “When
will we get another chance?”
He averts his gaze, eyes going back to the chest being guarded by the rest of
the Stormtroopers. He doesn’t feel like General Hux. He doesn’t feel like
anyone. For a moment he feels entirely empty.
Eventually they chose a shawl of a pale bluish grey, lightly embroidered in
white, with a cluster of three little copper bells on each of the four corners.
He watches them pay, and then FN-2439 takes the cloth and drapes it gently over
Mitaka under FN-2188’s watchful gaze. The Lieutenant’s hands go up, grasping
the Stormtrooper’s wrists. For a second, just a second, all three of them look
agonized.
“Very nice choice my friends,” Sunny Adar’s deep voice breaks the moment. “Now
come, my transport awaits.”
They follow the man as he leads them through the narrow, winding streets,
beneath cloth awnings and between stone shops. Everywhere around people call
out to customers, but oddly enough no one calls out to them. He sees merchants
eyes catch on their escort and then slide off them as if they are not there.
The golden-sashed guards nod to Sunny Adar as they pass. Even the beggars avoid
them, not even beginning their approach, simply lurking in the shade between
stalls and eying them warily.
Sunny Adar leads them towards the western cliffs, to a large gate carved into
the stone. There are guards either side, very well armed, who simply nod and
let them pass. Inside, in the cool space carved back into the rock, sits a
shiny white transport. Part shuttle and part sand-skiff, the bottom deck
enclosed, well-armoured, but the top open to the elements underneath a green
copper awning.
“The view is best from the top,” Sunny Adar says. “Will you sit with me my
friend, so I can show you the wonders of the desert? Your soldiers can stay
below with the chest if you want, it will be cooler down there.”
He hears a snorting sound behind them, and then Mitaka’s voice, quiet, almost
as if he doesn’t want to be overheard. “Wonders of the desert; do you use that
line often?”
“Ah my friend,” Sunny Adar rounds on the Lieutenant, still smiling. “Why don’t
you stay with us, you and your two dear companions?”
“I think we will,” FN-2188 replies for the Lieutenant. “If that’s ok with you
Sir?” She looks at him. He nods. This is all beyond him.
***** Chapter 10 *****
Chapter Notes
     More Hux again. Engineering isn't my strong suit, so please forgive
     me for making things up.
     Thank you, as always, for reading. I hope you enjoy.
The transport skims lightly over the white sand under Sunny Adar’s expert
control. The man sits on the upper deck, at the prow of the ship, controlling
the vessel from a simple touch pad. He sits beside the man, under the shade of
the copper awning, eyes on the horizon. A little way behind them are Mitaka and
the two Stormtroopers lounging on a bench seat, speaking softly to each other.
He knows, if he glances back, that FN-2188 will still have her hand on her
blaster.
The desert is a mindboggling expanse of nearly pure white sand, glittering
under a nearly pure white sun. Every now and then they pass an expanse of
equally white rocks, or perhaps a vein of greenish sand rich in copper, but
otherwise there is nothing on which to fix the eye. The heat haze obscures the
horizon, making shapes out of the juncture between earth and sky that turn out
to be nothing as they get closer.
He sips a ceramic mug of water mixed with the juice of the green-skinned pink
fruit from earlier, adritj fruit apparently, the first trees imported
generations ago to thrive under the blistering sun.
They have been travelling for almost four hours now. At first Sunny Adar tried
to engage him in conversation, but eventually the man gave up. He doesn’t feel
like talking. He feels like sipping on his drink, getting through this, and
returning to his ship.
The little copper bells on his shawl tinkle pleasantly in the wind of air
resistance. Every now and then he starts to feel self-conscious for still
wearing it, a hand raises to push it off his head, but before he does he drops
it again. He’s still not sure why, it is only a length of cloth, but the thing
does seem to offer some protection from the heat.
Out here in the desert the heat is blistering. Again it is dry heat, like at
Ememri Ri’s palace, but away from any life, anything other than reflective
white, there is nothing to temper it. It is nearly unbearable. He can feel a
headache begin to claw at his temples. He sips more of his drink.
“Ah,” Sunny Adar says, slowing the skiff. The man points at something in the
distance, over on the port side. “You see that movement my friend, it looks
like gold glistening in the sun, those are sunsnakes.”
He peers where the man is pointing. There is something, a couple of somethings,
out there, skimming across the desert and leaving great vees in their wake in
the sand. They glow under the sun, seeming metallic. Long bodies ranging from
electrum to gold, splotched with richer patches of copper.
“I see them,” he says. “They are what the desert’s named after?”
“Yes they are,” the man replies, getting the craft moving again. “Full grown
they are six times the length of a man, a tall man, with a venom that can melt
the flesh from your bones. Very dangerous my friend.”
He watches the creatures continue on their way until one suddenly stops,
swerves, buries its head in the sand and burrows down to disappear in seconds.
“They’re beautiful,” he says, voice soft. “I imagine they’re ambush predators?”
“It seems that beauty is not all you’re gifted with my friend,” he glances
over, censorious, but the man just smiles at him. “Indeed they are. They burrow
down into the sand and if you do not know the way to spot them then-” he claps
his hands together suddenly “-like that, you are dead. It is good you are with
me, the sunsnakes and I, we understand each other.”
He contemplates asking the man if that means he is an ambush predator as well,
but considers it might not be politic. They fall back into silence. He keeps
his gaze on the sand in case he spots another sunsnake. He thinks he would like
to get a closer look at one.
After a while one of the illusions on the horizon resolves itself into a
transport ship half buried in the sand, a fine scatter of debris around it. The
ship was obviously not in the best condition even before it crashed, the signs
of cheap repairs scarring its hull. “What is that?” he asks.
“A slave ship,” Sunny Adar replies, something in the man’s voice makes him
glance over. He has stopped smiling. “It crashed here almost sixty years ago.
My grandmother and my mother were on board.”
“Slaves?”
“Yes. This was back in the days of the Republic, the Republic before the last
Republic, near the end of the Clone Wars. Slavery thrived in this sector of the
Galaxy back then.” The man pauses, he doesn’t say anything, just waits to see
what Sunny Adar might add. Eventually the man starts speaking again, a pensive
look still on his face. “My mother was just a child. My grandmother pulled her
from the wreckage and walked hand in hand with her across the desert to
Nfevrum. They were some of the few to survive, most others perished in the
crash, under the sun, or because of the sunsnakes. They were reborn out here,
and I was born of them.”
There is nothing he can say to that. There is no point to saying he is sorry
that such a thing happened. Sorry will not plaster over it. Guilt rises in him,
he glances back at FN-2188 and FN-2439, then away, back to the horizon. They
both fall to silence. Behind them Mitaka and the Stormtroopers are also quiet.
They drive on. He sips his drink. Eats some more of the adritj fruit when Sunny
Adar’s droid, a small copper coloured thing on spidery legs called I-NN6,
fetches it.
“Ah!” Sunny Adar hisses, pulling the skiff to a sudden stop.
“What?” he asks, turning to the man, but he can already see the problem. Over
on the starboard side a small cargo skiff, nowhere near as fancy as the vessel
they are in, has overturned, spilling barrels, clay amphorae, parcels wrapped
in linen, and rolls of cloth on to the sand.
“Can you lend us a hand brother?” the captain, a young woman with brown hair
and a face more freckles than not, calls up to them. “The stabilizers are going
on this kriffing thing again.”
“I told you to take it to Mar Nyuka to get fixed, sister,” Sunny Adar calls
back, getting to his feet and bounding over to climb down and help. He stands,
going to help, but the man holds up a hand “Wait here my friend, the sands are
treacherous for those that don’t know them.”
“I did take it to him, brother,” the woman calls as Sunny Adar slides down his
vessel to join her. “He said they will need to be replaced. That he will have
to order in the parts, because it is not so simple for my skiff, and it will be
next week at the soonest. Business cannot stop that long, so I got him to do a
quick repair for now. Not much of a repair it turns out.”
He walks over to the starboard edge, watching them work together to try and
flip the skiff back over. It takes them a couple of tries, but soon the skiff
flips and skids away from them a little distance across the sand. “Pile of
scrap!” the woman snaps, rushing after it. She manages to get it back under
control with the engines idling. Both she and Sunny Adar stand, looking at it,
as it lists slightly pathetically to the side.
“Do you want me to come down there and try and fix it?” he calls out, not sure
why he’s volunteering.
“Do you know anything about repairing vessels beautiful one?” the dark-haired
man asks, peering up at him.
He thinks about replying that he designed Starkiller Base, a feat far more
complicated than fixing a simple sand-skiff, but even brushing against the
memory makes him shudder. Anyway, he does not want people looking at him and
seeing Starkiller. “I know some,” he replies, moving towards the ladder.
The woman and Sunny Adar look at each-other. The woman shrugs. “Ok my friend,
but be careful where you step.”
He climbs down, feet skidding a little until he gains his balance. The heat
from the sand scorches through the base of his sandals, making him curl his
toes away. Carefully he picks his way over, almost falling once or twice until
he gets the hang of it. The sand is odd, very slippery. He wonders at its
composition.
The skiff’s stabilizers are almost entirely burnt out, furthermore retrofitted
from an entirely different vessel. A close inspection tells him the thing is
patched together from whatever the person who built it could find, some of the
parts old enough to be pre-Imperial. He does what he can by tweaking wires and
applying insulation patches, and eventually the skiff sits nearly level and
only bobs and weaves a little bit. “It won’t last long,” he sighs, looking at
the mess that is the vessels systems. “You really do need to have them
replaced.”
“Thank you brother,” the woman says, grasping his hand in her callused one and
shaking it exuberantly. He waves off her gratitude and carefully extracts his
limb. His fingers are oily from the engine, and dusty from the sand. He wants
to wash them.
“I will help you reload,” Sunny Adar tells the woman. “Are you delivering to
the Palace?”
She shakes her head. “To Wahuir Djvat, he is trying to refurbish his mother’s
palace. I hear he wishes to marry.”
“Do you need help reloading?” he asks, watching as they begin shifting amphorae
and barrels.
“No, that is ok beautiful,” the man says, shaking his head. “You have done more
than enough. Someone like you is not made for hard labour.”
He scoffs. The man seems either truly delusional or is still labouring under
the impression complimenting him will somehow lower his defences and make him
accept a lower price for Snoke’s treasures. Still, his head hurts and he
doesn’t feel like lugging around heavy things, so he’s content to stand by and
watch.
He is very strong, Sunny Adar, he easily picks up barrels and carries them on
his shoulder to the skiff. They must be heavy, the vessel bobs in the air every
time one of them is loaded. The woman is strong too, but he finds his eyes
lingering on the man, the way he moves, the way his muscles bunch and shift.
He is reminded, all of a sudden, of being fourteen and watching some of his
father’s cadets wrestle. All of them older than him by a year or so. He had not
wanted to join in, he would when Brendol made him, but he had never enjoyed the
physical competition and their larger, heavier bodies had made him feel odd
when they pinned him down. He’d learnt strategies to win, learnt how to fight
dirty to avoid the sensation, terrified his father would see it in him.
There was one boy, taller than him, with dark skin and nearly black eyes, who
would smile at him sometimes and grind his face into the floor at others. He
can’t remember his name. His heart used to flutter in his chest whenever he saw
him.
Did Snoke see it in him? Was that why the man had made use of him the way he
did? Was there some part of him that had welcomed it?
A flash of movement. A hint of gold out of the corner of his eye. He turns,
facing away from the two vessels. A nose peeking out of the sand, as wide
across as the length of his forearm. He eyes the thin, slitted nostrils,
puffing open to exhale stale air. Around them he can see large, keeled scales,
silver at their peak, shading to rich, yellow gold.
The nose moves, shifts back and forth, the creature it’s attached to burrowing
up out of the sand slowly. The white sand falls away, revealing hints of gold,
of copper. More keeled scales. A shape emerging. Then green, green like the
colour of the copper rooves. Eyes. The eyes of the sunsnake.
He looks at it, it looks back. He isn’t afraid. He should be afraid. It’s
beautiful. He can see the fine filaments of colour radiating out from the slit
pupils of its eyes, mainly green, but there is blue there, silver, gold as rich
as its scales, and a faint halo of copper just around the black.
Slowly he crouches down until they’re almost eye to eye. His head buzzes again,
the headache fading. His mind fading. He feels like he is on the precipice of
something, as if he could just reach out-
A noise behind him. The sunsnake startles, disappears under the sand before he
can blink. He turns around, Sunny Adar is staring at him, pale faced. The woman
stands behind him, a blaster clenched in her hands. For a long moment there is
silence.
“We should get back on my transport my friend,” the man says eventually, his
eyes flickering past to rest on the spot the sunsnake once was. “It is getting
late.”
He stands, lets the man usher him back to the transport. The woman watches him,
standing next to her fully loaded sand-skiff, a strange look in her eyes. He
looks up as he begins the climb back onboard, Mitaka, FN-2188 and FN-2439 peer
down at him, eyes wide, faces as grave as the woman’s.
***** Chapter 11 *****
Chapter Notes
     Back to Kylo, Kylo's life choices and Kylo's past. Also there's smut
     in this chapter.
     Thanks again for reading, leaving kudos and all your kind comments.
See the end of the chapter for more notes
Hux had commed again sounding strained, seeking confirmation of the transfer of
credits from the Hutt. They’d gone through. Now he has his own credits to
gather. He leaves the Finalizer guarding the Rectitude as techs work to repair
her, it won’t take long, they said, no more than a day or so. He leaves his
Knights guarding both ships with orders to leave the crew in peace unless
there’s signs of further treachery. He takes a short-range shuttle and two
squads of Stormtroopers back to the Fva Amuir system, to Telbenefva.
The buyers of Snoke’s possessions had been irritated, short with him for
missing the meetings, but he’d been firm. If they still wanted a chance to
peruse and purchase he’d be on the planet soon, if not he could always find
someone else. It was satisfying how quickly their posturing had caved under the
weight of their greed.
The Dark sits uneasily with him after the events on the Rectitude. He keeps
remembering Rey calling him a monster, only sometimes Rey becomes Hux. He sits
in the plush chair of the shuttle, stares out the porthole. The temptation to
reach for her comes again. This time he lets it. He closes his eyes-
She stands before him, frowning. Like always he cannot see her surroundings.
“What is going on? We are getting the strangest reports- please, Ben-” he
breaks the connection. Sucks in a gasp. She let him, she let him- but no. She
only let him in because she must have heard something about trouble in the
First Order. She wants to use the knowledge. She’ll take it to his mother and
they’ll destroy him.
The shuttle begins to shake. Warning beeps come from the cockpit. He forces
himself to ease his grip on the Dark.
The planet up ahead is green, lush. Tall buildings peek out above thick jungle,
made of white stone with copper rooves, both imported from Maneshfva. His mind
flickers to Hux. His mind flickers to Snoke on top of Hux. He cannot disconnect
the two thoughts in his mind.
He feels distressed. He feels weak. Once more he thinks of Rey calling him a
monster. She’d say it and mean it now. The Dark, he needs the Dark, if he lets
go for even one second everything will fall apart.
The shuttle docks in the parking bay of the enormously wealthy Hotel Grindjura,
where he’ll be meeting all three prospective buyers. He disembarks, leaving a
couple Stormtroopers to guard the shuttle. The others follow him, several
carrying large paintings wrapped in cloth, another a statue made of
chryselephantine almost as large as she is, and two more chests much like the
one Hux took to Maneshfva.
Once they leave the garage and enter the hotel proper things change from plain,
grey concrete, to a glimmering and gilded world clad in stone from a hundred
other worlds. The staff are uniformed in green, pleasant, smiling, the patrons
wear silks and the finest linens, many so delicate he can see the lines of
their bodies beneath. Everywhere there is wealth displayed, unsubtle.
No one stops them, bothers them, or even asks questions as they stalk down the
shiny halls and up the elevator to the hotel bar on the penultimate floor,
where the meetings are going to take place. He wonders at this planet, where
Force users and Stormtroopers carrying treasure seem to be a sight beneath
people’s notice. He can’t conceive it would be so on any Core world, where
taking the treasures you intend to sell to the meeting with the buyer would be
considered vulgar. The people here seem a whole lot more straightforward.
As he steps out into the bar his feet land once more on tiles made of slick,
black stone. The same stone from Snoke’s quarters. He notes, absently, that
they are not laid nearly so well. He can spot the joins with his eyes, even see
hints of black grout between them.
He finds a seat looking out onto the balcony which protrudes into the jungle
canopy. It is getting dark, the sunset a deep pink, almost purple, which casts
colour through the window to reflect on golden furniture and the black floor.
Sitting in a high backed chair upholstered in gold silk, surrounded by his
soldiers and his treasures, he almost feels like a king, the lord and ruler of
some small world.
Beautifully dressed beings drift by, some as beautiful as their clothes, some
with only finery as their claim to the aesthetic. He watches a woman in a gauzy
dress of lavender silk swish by, the fabric not even attempting to conceal the
dark skin of her breasts. She smiles, knowing, glancing over to meet his eyes.
For a moment he considers fucking her, but then the first buyer arrives.
Things go well. One after the other the buyers arrive, inspect the goods, do a
bit of posturing but give up under the implacable weight of his gaze, agree to
his price, transfer the credits, take their new possessions. It is all over
after a couple of hours.
He watches the last one, a skinny little being with eerily long fingers, walk
off carrying the chryselephantine statue. The thing is nearly twice her height
and the way she’s holding it means those long fingers are cupping the statue’s
full breasts. Snoke had a surprisingly large amount of erotica amongst his
collection, even if a lot of it was the type of erotica respectable people
insist is only ‘art.’
He should be getting back to the Finalizer, but he finds himself wanting to
linger. This is the first time in a long time he has been able to distance
himself from all of it, to just be a man, not the Supreme Leader, or Kylo Ren
leader of the Knights of Ren, or Kylo Ren crawling around an island trying to
find purpose, or Kylo Ren under Snoke’s command. He’s just a man. Just a rich,
important man.
A gesture and a waiter comes over. He orders a drink, something expensive. The
Stormtroopers stay where they are, flanking him. He gazes out onto the world
beyond the balcony, dark now, stars in the sky as well as two moons. Nocturnal
animals and birds call in the distance.
The drink burns on the way down, softer, sweeter, different to the feeling of
the Dark Side. He feels someone watching him, he looks over. A young man with
pale skin, reddish hair a little darker than Hux’s, barely dressed in peach
coloured silk. The man flutters his eyes, lowering his gaze as if shy. A brush
over his mind, it’s calculated. He’s pleased to be looked at by someone so
obviously powerful.
He gestures to the man, inviting him to join him. The man rises from his own
chair and sways over, every move a calculated seduction. His eyes are darker
than Hux’s too, plain blue and not that indeterminate sea colour. “Can I buy
you a drink?”
“If you’d like,” the man purrs, leaning in close so silk slips aside and he
gets a good look at pale skin. He spots freckles on the man’s shoulders, his
eyes go back to his face, and freckles there under makeup. Hux doesn’t have
freckles, he mustn’t be in the sun long enough to form them.
He gestures for the waiter again. The redhead orders something he’s never heard
of, something very expensive. He’s younger than Hux too, no older than his mid-
twenties. Hux has fine lines around his eyes, his brow, from too much frowning.
“Do you want to go to bed with me?” he asks.
The man smiles. “If you’d like.”
He dismisses the Stormtroopers back to the shuttle and gets a room, 4000
credits a night, but he can afford it now. The man slinks inside, admiring the
stone-clad walls, the floor to ceiling windows, the large balcony, the bed
almost as big as Snoke’s. He wraps his arms around Hux’s, no the man’s waist
and pulls him close. He’s shorter than Hux too, short enough that the man can
tuck his head under his chin.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
“Lem,” the man murmurs, pushing his robes aside to kiss his throat. “Lem Umur.”
It’s not. He can read the shadows of another name in the man’s mind, Krae
Follarin, but the man thinks his chosen name sounds sweeter, so Kylo Ren
doesn’t quibble.
“I’m going to fuck you Lem,” he pulls at the peach silk, trying to ignore how
awkward the words make him feel. “Would you like that?”
“Oh,” Lem sighs, looking up at him with blue eyes. “Yes.” The man is wondering
if he’ll be any good, if he’ll get anything out of this encounter, whether he’s
looking for a lover and if he is how well kept that lover would be. He wonders
if Hux thought things like that with Snoke. He wonders what Hux was getting out
of their relationship.
The peach silk rips beneath his hands. There is a moment of double thought, of
delight at his strength and annoyance at the damage, before Lem moans, pushes
against him. He strips the man to the skin, his mind stuck on how different his
body is to Hux’s. He remembers the island, those last moments, Hux totally bare
to his eyes. So slender, so finely boned, skin pale and scarred in places.
Lem is a little softer, his shoulders wider, his skin smooth and unmarred. His
nipples are paler, more brown than pink, as is his cock. He’s bare, hairless
between his legs and beneath his arms, unlike Hux’s soft copper curls. This is
getting ridiculous.
He leans down to kiss the man, who squeaks and grabs at his shoulders. “Get on
the bed,” he orders, pushing him gently. “Prepare yourself for me.”
The man does, making a production out of it, every movement a swaying tease. He
strips off his own boots, his robes, his trousers, his underwear. Lem is lying
back, fingers buried up to the knuckle in his own ass, slick taken from the
bedside table where it is provided by the hotel. The man is moaning, breathy
and affected, though he can feel pleasure in his mind. Hux would be quiet. He
would only moan when he couldn’t hide from his pleasure.
He slinks onto the bed, moving between slender legs. Lem pulls out his fingers,
grabs at him. He thinks of kissing the man again, but finds he doesn’t want to.
He looks down, meets those disappointingly blue eyes. The image of another man,
tall and fair briefly crosses Lem’s mind. A sense of loss. Resentment. Longing.
He pulls back, tugs on the redhead until he’s straddling his lap. “I want you
to ride me.”
The man maneuvers into place, sinks down, hissing at the burn. He’s big, bigger
than the man had expected. Lem’s not sure if this feels good. He raises a hand,
gently strokes it down a pale, freckled side. The man’s body eases, he adjusts,
he begins to move.
They fuck slowly at first, but soon they fall into the rhythm, getting faster
and faster. Lem starts out moaning, theatrically, but as the redhead gets
distracted by pleasure the moans come softer, more breathy. The fair man of
before keeps flashing across Lem’s mind. He tries not to think of Hux. Hux in
Snoke’s lap. Eventually he’s not thinking at all. He grabs at Lem, hands
digging into the soft flesh of his hips and thighs. A thrust up, one, two,
almost unseating the redhead, and he comes. Lem squeaks, hand working
desperately between his own thighs, comes just after.
He collapses backwards onto the bed, gently pushing at the redhead until he
flops down onto his side beside him. They pant. Lem feels like crying, his mind
won’t stop lingering on the fair man. He feels tired. He lets himself sleep.
He sees Rey, “You are a monster,” she’s saying, again and again. At the same
time he sees his mother, she’s turning away from him and hanging her head.
There’s Luke, Luke shouting “What are you doing?!” His father, an amused look
on his face “Redheads, huh?” Rey saying “You are a monster, his mother turning
her back on him, Luke shouting “What are you doing?!” his father saying
“Redheads, huh?” Rey saying “You are a monster, his mother turning her back on
him, Luke shouting “What are you doing?!” his father saying “Redheads, huh?”
Rey saying “You are a monster, his mother turning her back on him, Luke
shouting “What are you doing?!” his father saying “Redheads, huh?” Rey saying
“You are a monster, his mother turning her back on him, Luke shouting “What are
you doing?!” his father saying “Redheads, huh?” Rey “You are a monster,” his
mother’s back, Luke “What are you doing?!” his father “Redheads, huh?” Rey
saying “You are a monster, his mother turning her back on him, Luke shouting
“What are you doing?!” his father saying “Redheads, huh?” Rey “You are a
monster,” his mother’s back, Luke “What are you doing?!” his father “Redheads,
huh?” Rey, his mother, Luke, his father, Rey-
He’s back on the balcony, standing in front of the brown-haired man wearing the
Kaf coloured robes. He opens his mouth to apologize, to say sorry for not
having the time to think about the questions the man asked. The man dismisses
him with a wave of his hand. He looks grave, dark eyes pinning his. The man
speaks, “What happens to someone when they channel the Dark Side for too long,
without ever letting it go?”
He wakes up. Lem is gathering his clothes off the floor. It’s still dark
outside. He watches the man dress for a while, pulling peach silk back over
pale skin. The redhead sighs, picking at the place where he tore the cloth.
“Let me compensate you for the damage.”
“Oh,” the thought not a whore briefly flashes across the man’s mind, before
acceptance. The garment was expensive. He’s in debt up to his eyeballs. The
cost of living is high on the planet. “If you insist.”
They agree on 500 credits, even though Lem knows the garment is only worth 350,
the man is thinking how the extra 150 can go towards the rent. He transfers the
money. “Let me give you my contact details,” the redhead purrs, pressing in
close “In case you’re ever planetside again.” He passes over his pad, watching
fingers shorter and wider than Hux’s input the information. He knows he’ll
never use it. It seems easier to agree than to say that though.
Lem lingers, contemplating trying his luck at getting him back into bed again.
The final impression of their encounter is a positive one in the man’s mind,
transient affection floating buoyed by physical closeness. He wants the man
gone.
He pulls on his trousers, dressed enough that he can escort the redhead to the
door without worrying about flashing anyone in the hallway. Lem pets at him,
pulls him into a kiss. He obliges, waiting for it to end. “See you around?” the
man cooes.
“Perhaps,” he opens the door, guides the redhead out with a hand on his lower
back.
“Ben?” He looks up. It’s her, half dressed and tottering out of a room on the
opposite side of the corridor. “Oh Gods,” she breathes. “You know about the
baby! I’m going to be murdered!” The last ends on a screech. She shoves the
shadowy figure behind her back into the room and rushes in after, slamming the
door behind her.
Baby?
“What baby?!” he roars, striding across the hall.
Chapter End Notes
     Also bear in mind that warning about Rey's parentage from Long Live
     the King.
***** Chapter 12 *****
Chapter Notes
     Back to Hux again.
     Thank you all, as always, for reading, leaving kudos and commenting.
As they approach Bo Bukwiina’s palace the sun is setting. It lies, heavy and
red, on the horizon and casts eerie shadows across the sand. The rest of the
journey has been spent in silence, he had no desire to speak, thoughts torn
between Snoke and the sunsnake, and Sunny Adar pensive instead of smiling, his
brows heavy and his eyes distant.
The palace is ringed in high walls of white stone, with guards patrolling their
parapets. There are towers here and there, and on those towers cannons of a
dated, but no doubt still deadly design. Buried in the sand either side of the
approach he can see other weapons, some kind of ground to air missile system.
This is not a good place to visit uninvited.
At the gate, a massive thing made out of wide planks of pale wood, guards peer
at them. They too are wearing gold-silk sashes over their armor. They spot
Sunny Adar and wave them through, no questions asked.
Inside the sun is setting on a green land. Fields, orchards, vineyards,
pastures stretch out in all directions. In the distance he sees structures,
storage facilities of some kind. There are beings of a myriad of species
walking in clumps towards a second wall, equally as high as the first, going
home for the night. He can hear water pumps again, a heavy, bass
thwumpthwumpthwump, and see the rooves of massive cisterns in a row up ahead,
just in front of the other wall.
Again they are waved through the gate without question. Inside they find
themselves amongst outbuildings, probably more storage, on a short road to a
shorter, more ornate wall with a large, well carved gate. There are still
guards here, still with yellow sashes, that still wave them through after a
glance at their escort.
Then they are in the courtyard in front of the palace. The road approaching it
is bracketed by tall, flowering trees. Either side he sees grass, flowering
bushes, vines, fountains splashing water into the air. There are people, beings
walking across the lawn to the building up ahead, most of them workers from
what he can gather.
The palace itself is at least six times as large as the one owned by Ememri Ri,
a massive confection of white stone and lacquered copper, every one of its many
floors ringed in covered parapets and balconies, from which hang thousands of
glass windchimes. The red light of the sunset casts uneasy shadows on the stone
and reminds him of Snoke.
Sunny Adar stops the vessel near the stone steps that lead up to the Palace’s
giant, copper embossed door. “We are here,” he says, all smiles once more. “My
very great friend will want to see the treasures, but I will tell him he must
wait if you want to get refreshed first.”
“No,” he gets to his feet, looking down into the man’s dark eyes “I want to get
this over with.”
“So cold, beautiful one,” Sunny Adar says, getting to his own feet. “You must
have been born on an ice world.”
The man leads them from the vessel to the entrance of the palace. The
Stormtroopers, fresh from the cool of the skiff’s bottom deck stand tall and
perky, ringing the chest. Mitaka, FN-2188, FN-2439 and himself must look a very
different picture. He feels like he is wilting, Mitaka seems half asleep and
keeps leaning against whichever of his two lovers is closest, FN-2188 has
finally released her desperate grip on her blaster but she doesn’t look happy,
and FN-2439 seems to be trying to grope the Lieutenant without anyone noticing.
The door to the palace swings open and a veritable wave of life washes out.
Humans and Twileks mainly, but also Rodians, Bith, Duros, Sullustans, Ithorian,
Zabrak, more of the dark skinned insectoid beings from the marketplace, and
others he doesn’t recognize. Children first, calling “Sunny! Sunny!” and youths
twitching at shawls and silks, smiling at the man in their best attempts to be
seductive. After that older people and more children and youths, those too shy
to put themselves so far forward.
Sunny Adar is laughing, greeting everyone he meets by names that flit in and
out of Hux’s mind without ever making an impression. He ignores the flirtations
of the youths, and some of the older people, rustling one particularly forward
girl’s hair and making her squawk. “Come, come my friends,” the man cries,
looking back at the awkward cluster they make amongst all this familiarity.
“This way, my very great friend is waiting to speak with you.”
He follows the man, Mitaka and the Stormtroopers following him after a moment’s
pause. As they step inside the palace the heat dissipates and they find
themselves comfortably cool. The walls and floor are made of the same white
stone, but the walls are decorated either by paintings and tapestries or by
scenes painted over a plaster finish. Some are of figures, dancing, moving,
engaged in religious worship, but others are fantastical landscapes,
beautifully detailed, of worlds he has never seen- if they exist at all. Behind
him he can hear the chatter of the palace’s inhabitants, but they linger back,
no longer crowding close to speak with Sunny Adar.
The man falls into step beside him. “Here my friend,” he says, a flash of
movement reaching out and flicking the shawl off his head to rest on his
shoulder. “We are far from the sun now.” He flinches at the imposition, glares,
but the man seems unperturbed.
They pass through countless halls, all the time moving deeper into the palace,
away from doors and windows. It is cooler here, the difference enough after an
afternoon in the hot sun that he feels himself shiver. The drop in temperature
tugs at his headache, worsening it instead of soothing it.
Eventually Sunny Adar stops them in front of a large, copper door inscribed
with detail so fine and ornate it takes his eyes a moment to focus on any one
part of it. It looks to be the illustration of a journey, or perhaps a
lifetime, events in the experience of one tiny little figure who is repeated
again and again across the door’s surface in different situations. Often the
figure stands between two sunsnakes, rearing up and facing away to strike at
their enemies.
Sunny Adar knocks three times on a round plate, free of decoration, at the part
where the two doors join and calls out “My very great friend, are you there? I
have brought the treasures for you to see.”
Bang. Bang. Bang. The sound of the knocks, deep and hollow, echoes a little in
the air.
“Come in, my dear boy,” a deep voice echoes back out.
The man pushes open the door, revealing a shadowy room beyond, and steps
inside, gesturing for Hux and the others to follow. Light filters down from
somewhere up above. The sound of water splashing dances lightly in the air. The
corners remain in shadow, but he can see glimmers of precious metals, precious
stones, the gleam of frames around pictures, the half-seen shape of sculptures.
Inside there is a massive platform, somewhere between a couch and a bed,
thickly padded and clad in silks. On the platform is a Hutt, huge, larger than
any Hutt he has ever seen before, but also older than he thought a Hutt could
get. The being’s skin is wrinkled and dry looking, patches of purplish grey on
faded green. His eyes are still golden, but milky, the film of cataracts
dulling their gleam. Bo Bukwiina breathes heavily, as if every inhale and
exhale is the greatest of chores, and moves slowly, raising his heavy head to
look at them with pleasant welcome. “Come friends of my friend, let me see what
you have brought me,” he says in perfect galactic standard.
They approach, he gestures for the Stormtroopers to deposit the chest in front
of the platform and then to fall back. He stays beside it, meeting the Hutt’s
gaze. “You must be the General Hux,” the Hutt says, watching him placidly. “You
are as I imagined when my friend described you to me. You should sit,” a
languorous gesture of a giant hand, and suddenly Sunny Adar is there with a
fatly padded stool upholstered in green silk. For a moment pride makes him want
to refuse, but he feels exhausted. He glances from the man to the Hutt before
taking the seat, sinking in to its softness. “I can see your head aches from
the sun,” the Hutt says. “I will get someone to fetch something for it.”
“It’s alright, I’m fine,” he says, trying to wave off the offer.
The Hutt ignores him, gesturing slowly. A yellow skinned Twilek seems to
materialize from the shadows. “Something for our friend’s head, and water for
everyone.” The Twilek nods, disappears from wherever he appeared from.
“You stay, you rest,” the Hutt says, eyes leaving him to look at the chest by
his feet. “My friend will show me the things you have brought, if you do not
object.”
“If that’s what you want,” he says, feeling too tired to try and wrest control
of this situation right now.
Sunny Adar opens the chest and begins bringing its contents to the Hutt. The
being examines them, turning things over in his large, slow hands, and making
comments in Huttese. Sunny Adar replies in the same language, a language of
which he knows next to nothing. From what he can tell things are going well,
but they could just as equally be calling the things rubbish and discussing how
best to kill their guests and what to do with their bodies.
The Twilek returns just as suddenly as last time, carrying a tray with finely
blown glasses full of water with blocks of ice floating in them. The man serves
him first, then Mitaka, then seems to randomly select several of the
Stormtroopers before distributing the glasses amongst the rest. He sips his
water, wincing a little at the cool, and watches until the man is done.
“Here, Sir,” a voice by his elbow makes him start. He whirls around to find a
young male Zabrak, yellow and black, holding out a box. He peers at it. It
looks like a standard mild pain stim. He hesitates, picks it up, examines the
sealed packaging. Everything from the writing to the little holographic label
seems legit. He glances at Sunny Adar and Bo Bukwiina, engaged in conversation
about an erotic scroll. Taking out his pad he scans the stim using a
counterfeit detection program. It beeps, shows green. He glances back at the
two males. If it kills him it kills him, he supposes, it would hardly be any
great loss. He uses the stim, sighing when the snare around his temples seems
to loosen. Nothing more happens. He doesn’t feel light-headed. He doesn’t drop
down dead. He feels a bit foolish.
The Zabrak takes the used stim from him, a look part way between amusement and
censure on his face. “Ch-ch,” the Twilek hisses, gesturing for the Zabrak to
stop lingering and to follow him out of the room.
“Your treasures are as my friend described,” Bo Bukwiina says as the Zabrak and
Twilek scurry away. “I will purchase them all.”
“Do you want to negotiate the price?” he asks, attention back on the deal.
“No,” the Hutt says, “I am happy to pay the price your Supreme Leader asked.”
Irritation sparks inside of him. He wonders what they are playing at, if they
simply enjoy wasting people’s time. Perhaps it is a show of power, to drag him
out into the desert, simply to show they can, because he needs the credits and
can’t say no. “Ok,” he says, watching his tone. “I’ll arrange for you to
transfer the credits.”
It goes smoothly from there, a huge sum of money changing hands without even
the slightest wince from the Hutt. He thinks of fuel, rations, munitions,
weapons. Months, if not years, of time bought for a few hours of annoyance.
When he thinks of it like that the price doesn’t seem so high.
Excusing himself he walks to a dark corner of the room, finding himself
standing next to a small copper fountain. Decorating the rim he sees sunsnakes,
picked out with delicate gilding. He contacts the Finalizer, gets confirmation
the credits have gone through. It is done. In the morning they will return to
Nfevrum, then back to the ship.
He glances back over. Both Sunny Adar and Bo Bukwiina are watching him,
contemplative. “Come my friends,” the dark-haired man says, “let me show you to
your rooms for the night, and then the feast.”
***** Chapter 13 *****
Chapter Notes
     Kylo again.
     Thank you all for reading, as always, you're all great. I'll just say
     that if some of you jump ship when you work out what I'm getting at
     there's no hard feelings.
“WHAT BABY!?” he slams his fist against the door. Inside he can hear her
screaming hysterically. He can also hear a man’s voice struggling to say
something, sounding as if he is being shaken back and forth. He reaches for the
Dark, draws it close, and blasts the door inwards. Behind him a flash of peach
silk, Lem Umur fleeing. “Tell me what you mean!”
Her dress has fallen most of the rest of the way off. She’s clinging to an
older humanoid’s shirt collar, shaking him, wailing as if she’s being killed.
She stumbles, the humanoid stumbles, her heels are too high and she can’t
regain her balance. “Let go of me, let go of me,” the humanoid is saying,
trying to pry her hands off. “I want you both out of here. This is my room.
This is my room. Let me go!”
“Be quiet,” he snarls, grabbing the humanoid with the Force and tearing him out
of her grasp, he flings the male out into the hallway to lie slumped against
the wall and uses the Force to close the door behind him. “What baby Dalie?”
“Oh no, oh no,” she’s wailing, struggling to shoulder her dress back on. “Oh,
I’m going to be murdered! Help me! Help me!” He can read an odd kind of terror
in her mind, mostly genuine fear but part exhilaration. Right now she feels
more important than she has in a long time.
“Stop it!” he snaps, reaching for her with the Force, curling it all around her
until she cannot move and giving her a little shake. “Be calm. Tell me about
the baby?”
“Oh,” she whimpers. “Oh Ben. It is good to see you. Look, you’re all grown up.
Oh, you got so tall. You were always such a handsome boy.”
Another shake. “The baby?”
“It’s just,” she begins, looking up at him from under lowered lids, “I don’t
want you to be upset with me.”
“I’m already upset with you,” he points out, squeezing her a little with the
Force so she squeaks. “If you don’t tell me I’m going to reach in and take the
knowledge. You know I can do that, don’t you?” He’s going to do it anyway, but
it will help if she’s already thinking about it.
“Oh,” she wails. “Oh, no. Please don’t!” She really is frightened. Thoughts
racing across the surface of her mind, rapidly formed and discarded plans to
try and seduce him into not being angry with her, or maybe hit him on the head
and flee, or maybe the hotel’s security staff will come in and rescue her and
then tell her how brave she is.
“I won’t have to, if you explain yourself,” he reasons. Her mind seems so much
less complicated than he would have expected. He thought her so clever, so
grown up, so sophisticated when he was thirteen. It scares him to think it, but
the mind he’s brushing against isn’t much more grown up than his had been back
then.
“You must know,” she wails, and he wishes she’d use a different tone. “Don’t
you know?” except when she does it comes out wheedling, edging into seductive.
“Dalie please,” he almost begs, shaking her again gently. “Just tell me what I
want to know and then I’ll go, it will be like this never happened.”
She takes a moment to think it over. Her thoughts seem almost a little
disappointed at the idea that he might leave, stop paying attention to her,
stop giving her a scene she can cry about later. The fear wins out. She does
want to escape him. “It’s just, you see,” she begins, lowering her gaze “I had
a baby. Your baby. All those years ago.”
“What?!” he snarls. The wall above the bed cracks. The room begins to shake.
The Dark. He is the Dark. He reaches for her mind, trying to prove it’s a
trick. She’s telling the truth.
“Please Ben,” she whimpers, crying in real pain. His grip on her has tightened,
making it hard for her to draw breath. He sees the baby there, in her arms. A
tiny, wrinkled thing with baby blue eyes and sparse strands of dark hair. The
memory is foggy though, everything around her seems to swim. One second the
baby is the most interesting thing in existence, the next it’s like she’s
forgotten she’s even holding it. Strong pain stims he reads from her, and then
shame. A sense of years lost after that point. She’s never getting them back.
He forces himself to ease the grip he has on her. “A baby, my baby? What
happened to it?”
Another sense of shame, followed up with intense self-justification. “I was in
a bad way. I couldn’t take care of myself, let alone a defenceless child. I
made sure it went to a nice family.” The truth, all her money spent, stuck on
the planet, traded the baby for a lift off-world. In a lot of pain after the
birth. She’d needed those pain stims. She’d given birth on the gods-forsaken
planet, things had gone wrong and the doctor had mucked her up. She’d needed
surgery to fix it, once she got back to civilization. The family had been nice,
it was true, even desperate she wouldn’t have given the baby to someone who
wasn’t.
“You don’t even remember what they looked like,” he hisses, probing at the
blank place in her mind where details about the ‘nice’ couple should be. “You
don’t even remember what planet it was.”
“What was I supposed to do?” she cries, tears welling up and smudging the dark
makeup around her still pretty eyes. “I wanted to give the baby to your mother,
but then it all came out that your grandfather was Darth Vader and I couldn’t
have that hanging over the poor thing’s head.” She’d though Leia might pay to
keep her quiet, if she was lucky pay to take the baby off her hands, but when
everything came out she couldn’t bear the thought that someone might find out
she’d slept with Darth Vader’s grandson and by then it was too late to get rid
of it. It was bad enough that her father had been a staunch Imperial,
embarrassing enough, had caused enough problems when she was growing up.
“You should have stayed!” he snarls, shaking her again gently to avoid the
temptation to crush her to pulp. “You should have told me! I would have taken
care of it.”
“No you wouldn’t have,” she snaps. Certainty in her mind. Men never take care
of the messes they make. “Anyway, I thought it was about time to leave. I
seemed to be outstaying my welcome.” A memory of Luke, catching up to her,
grabbing her by the arm to pull her aside so they could talk. Fragments, half
remembered, his uncle’s voice ‘He’s got a crush on you, that’s natural-’ ‘
(boys/children/young men/she can’t quite remember) get crushes-’ ‘you seem to
be encouraging him-’ ‘the boy is thirteen-’ ‘only a child-’ ‘a child-’ -
Resentment. Thirteen was hardly a child. She’d done more grown-up things at
thirteen than what she was doing with Ben- ‘no sign of this book you said you
were writing-’ ‘time for you to (go/leave/get out/fuck off/again she can’t
remember)-’
“Luke was getting suspicious,” he nods. He remembers Luke seeming happy when
she’d left. He remembers hating his uncle for it at the time. “Why did you even
come to the temple? And don’t tell me it was to write that book.”
“I was curious about the Jedi,” she replies, voice full of forced lightness. He
doesn’t even need to touch her mind to tell she’s lying. Her thoughts tell him
she wanted to marry a war-hero, Luke Skywalker seemed like the best bet, but
when she got to the temple she could tell Luke was- what? No!
“Jedi are forbidden from forming attachments, that’s why Luke wasn’t interested
in you,” he corrects.
“If you say so,” she replies, politic. A memory, clear as if it was happening
at the moment, the clearest memory he’s gotten from her, tinged with the
bitterest disappointment, flashes across her mind. His father, just dropped by
to say hello. Chewbacca in the background. Luke talking to Han, a slight flush
to his cheeks, looking up at the other man with something, something all too
recognizable in his eyes…
“No!” he shouts, the Dark escaping his control a moment and squeezing her until
something almost gives in her side. She lets out a tiny, hissed wheeze, before
he drops her. She lands heavily, a pile of too skinny limbs on the expensive
floor.
He forces the thought of Luke being in love with his father out of his mind. It
resists. He makes himself think about the issue at hand. “You must remember
something, anything about the baby, the planet, the people you sold it to- Do
you even remember if it was a boy or a girl?”
She doesn’t, not really. It’s all a blur in her mind. He can tell the planet
was hot, yellow, a desert. The couple were a man and a woman, dressed
practically. She thinks the baby was a boy, no, no it was a girl, or maybe it
was a boy.
“You’re completely useless,” he sighs, glaring down at her crumpled form. She
looks pathetic. He despises her.
She has taken from him. Taken something he never knew he had. Taken something
back before he knew such things could be taken. Taken from him back when things
were good, when he had the possibility of happiness. Taken from him before
Snoke took from him. A baby. A child. He is a father. A father. A FATHER, and
all these years he didn’t know. All these years the Force hid it from him. Why?
The room starts shaking again. The window shatters, raining lumps of reinforced
glass down onto the floor. Another crack appears, another, one in the floor.
The door falls off its hinges.
“I’m sorry,” she says, voice small. In that moment he can tell she means it.
That she’s saying it because part of her, part of her she always does her best
to push down, to ignore, does feel she’s done something wrong. It doesn’t
matter. She doesn’t matter. She’s no one. A ghost from his past.
He loosens his grip on the Dark Side. The shaking stops. Things stop breaking.
He looks down at her. He remembers what she felt like beneath him. He could
kill her, so easily. He wants to. What kind of man would that make him?He turns
to walk away. He hesitates, looks back. In her mind there’s Ben Solo, young and
vulnerable, living on as long as she does. He can’t leave that part of himself
there. Two choices spool out in front of him.
He strikes out, reaches for her with the Dark Side, closes it around her mind
and grasps for every memory, every moment of himself, of Luke, of the Temple,
of the baby, and rips them away. She screams, high and thin, convulsing on the
ground. Then it’s done. It’s as if they never met. He leaves her there,
unconscious but alive.
He feels almost calm as he returns to his room to dress. The calm lasts as he
walks the halls of the Hotel, past security officers who shout and buzz around
and make satisfying splats against the walls when they try to detain him. He
even feels calm as he boards the shuttle and sets course for the Finalizer-
He needs to talk to someone. He wants Hux. WHERE IS HUX?!
***** Chapter 14 *****
Chapter Notes
     This chapter gave me trouble. I hope none of you are too disappointed
     with how it goes, and continue to enjoy it. As always thanks for
     reading, leaving kudos and commenting.
He sits at a long, low banquet table between Sunny Adar and Lieutenant Mitaka.
The table is made out of pale wood with a coarse grain, on short legs that mean
they cannot sit on chairs, but instead on fat cushions on the stone floor. To
the right of Sunny Adar is an older Zabrak, probably the parent of the one who
gave him the stim, and to the right of the Zabrak is Bo Bukwiina on a padded
platform.
FN-2188 sits next to Mitaka, then FN-2439, but the rest of the Stormtroopers
are arrayed around the entire banquet hall, either at the head table where Bo
Bukwiina takes pride of place, or at either of the two side tables that form a
‘U’ from the head table’s ends.
“Come my beautiful friend,” Sunny Adar says, leaning close to speak with him.
“Eat. My very great friend keeps a fine table, does he not?”
“He does,” he has to agree. There is more food before him than he has ever seen
in his life. Meat of a dozen different varieties, cooked in a dozen different
ways. Tureens of stews and curries. Bowls of cooked grain. Platters of roasted
roots. Huge, squat loaves of bread. Salads of leaves and flowers. Plates with
boiled vegetables. Slices of more types of fruit than he can name, some of them
obviously imported from off world. Small cakes, decorated with gold leaf. Tiny
morsels of things crystalized with sugar. Multi-coloured jellies wobbling apart
in the heat. Whole cheeses, fresh and aged, many bigger than his head.
He sips at a finely blown glass of adritj wine and contemplates what he can
bear eating. Mitaka and his Stormtroopers don’t seem to be having any trouble,
their plates are all laden and they seem to take turns serving each other
anything they like the taste of. Fish stew is one thing, even flatbread he can
cope with, but this is something else entirely. FN-2188 cuts a great big slice
of some wobbly white cheese and plunks it down on her plate. It makes his
stomach turn.
Right now he almost longs for a rationbar.
He serves himself some fruit, the adritj and anything else that looks
interesting and isn’t that overly sweet orange fruit from earlier. He nibbles
at a cluster of small spheres, deep blue, which burst between his teeth and
taste a bit like almonds. The bread looks ok, and maybe he could try some of
the thick slices of roasted bluish-white meat that look not dissimilar to eel
but are probably some kind of reptile. He could probably manage some salad, or
maybe some of those boiled long yellow seedpods.
“What’s that?” he asks, pointing to the meat. He hopes it’s not sunsnake.
“Melfef,” the man replies. “A kind of large lizard that often comes to bathe in
the oases. It is very good.”
He takes a piece, slicing off a fine strip and raising it to his mouth.
Hesitantly he tries a piece. It is good, the texture pleasant, the meat soft,
but the taste is almost too strong in the wrong kind of way. A few days of real
food on the island- the kind of real food he likes personally- is inadequate to
the task of overcoming the sensitivity of his palate after years of nothing but
plain rationbars. Or perhaps it is just his own personal taste. Still, he
manages some more, and some bread, and some vegetables, and even one of the
small cakes before he has to give up, feeling nauseous.
Mitaka is actually giggling next to him, leaning heavily on FN-2188 to talk to
FN-2439. Too much wine, he thinks, observing the man’s flushed cheeks. All
around him people are laughing, chatting, drinking. He can see FN-2082 flirting
outrageously with a Duros, FN-1996 flirting equally outrageously with an older
brother of the young Zabrak, FN-2091 flirting even more outrageously with a
trio of Twileks, and FN-2515 climbing into the lap of FN-2316. By his side he
feels Sunny Adar, pressing in too close.
The shawl hangs loose around his shoulders.
He sips water. He waits for it to be over.
“You are tired beautiful one,” the man observes. It is true, he feels
exhausted, he can’t deny it. “Do you wish to take a walk in the gardens? They
are quite beautiful at night.”
He looks around at the hot room, the close air, the loud sounds of laughter and
talking, the strong smell of the food, then he looks past, to the courtyard
beyond, just visible past the balcony through the large windows at the far end
of the room. It looks cool out there, cool and quiet. A glance at Mitaka, half
collapsed in FN-2188’s lap, being petted by both his lovers as they talk
quietly to each other. A glance at his other Stormtroopers, eating, drinking,
having fun. He has no sense of danger for them, no sense that this is a trap,
and anyway they all still have their blasters. He glances at Sunny Adar, the
man’s dark eyes on his face. He feels uneasy. He reminds himself of the weight
of his own blaster at his side. “Alright.”
The other man makes his excuses to their neighbours at the table, laughing at
something the Zabrak says, while he stands. He thinks about telling Mitaka he’s
taking a walk, but the man is barely conscious, and the thought of reporting
his movements to his Stormtroopers feels a bit childish. They pick their way
around cushions and people having a good time, some of which try to grab the
dark haired man’s ankles until he convinces them to let go with a laugh and a
smile.
“Do you like it, beautiful one, this Palace?” the man asks once they make it
onto the balcony. He looks out onto the courtyard, the trees, the shapes of
fountains splashing in the dark.
“It is not what I’m used to.”
“I could build one like it,” the man says, leading them further from the dining
room, across the stone of the balcony to stairs that lead down into the
gardens. “Perhaps not so big, but big enough I think. I have more than enough
money.”
He wonders why he’s being told this. Different worlds have different customs,
so perhaps this kind of talk is just casual conversation here.
“I live here though, with my very great friend, and in his palace in the city
when I am there. He is a good man. Very generous. I owe him a great deal, he
has done more than can be said for my family.”
He hums, showing he’s listening, even if the point of the conversation still
eludes him. As they walk under the trees he can smell the perfume from their
blossoms. It is sweet, light, quite pleasant. The flowers are larger than his
hand, pale pink, with many ruffled petals.
“So that you understand, I will tell you that I work for him. Everyone works
for him, in a way, but I work for him in a more direct way. I enforce his laws,
collect his taxes, help keep the streets safe to walk for both the people of
this planet and the people who come to visit. He takes thirty-five percent of
everyone’s earnings to pay for his protection, for the use of his
infrastructure, and I get twenty percent of that as my cut. He also has mines,
both out beyond the desert and up on the planet, and I have a twenty percent
share in their profits too.”
The man is just droning on about money. He cannot understand it. Still he makes
another small noise to suggest he’s paying attention. Up ahead he spots one of
the fountains, made of green-veined stone. The water emerges from the mouths of
two large sunsnakes, cast of bronze, wrapped around each other.
“I have no family, no children, no other obligations, though sometimes I help
out my friends when they are in need, but that does not take up too much of my
income. I am in good health, very strong, and will probably be able to work for
many more years, but even if I can’t my savings and the money from the mines
will supply me with a good living.”
“I’m sorry,” he interrupts. “I am not sure what-”
Sunny Adar kisses him. The man presses in close, mouth to mouth, one hand going
to cup the side of his jaw. He freezes. He feels cold, so cold. His body gets
tired. He cannot move. He must cooperate. He must do what Snoke wants. He must
obey. He must submit. He must- This is not Snoke. It is. It’s not. This is not
Snoke. This is not a Dark Jedi. No one is using the Force on him to ensure his
compliance. This is a man. This is just a man. This is Sunny Adar.
His fingers tingle. They feel like they belong to someone else. There’s a hand
on the small of his back, travelling downwards. His blaster. He reaches for his
blaster. The other hand- he needs. He needs- the man is still on him. Licking
at his frozen lips. There’s a hand on his rear, squeezing. He gets his hand up.
Gets it between them.
“Get off me!” he snarls, blaster coming up, safety off, pointed at the man
stumbling away from him.
“Beautiful one…?” the man breathes.
“No!” he snaps. “Don’t ‘beautiful one’ me. No! Don’t! I don’t want you to do
that!”
“I’m-” the man begins, he interrupts.
“Did you think you could buy me? Is that it? Is that what all that blithering
about money was about? You thought that if you told me how rich you were I’d
what? Bend over and spread my legs? What do you take me for? How dare you?!” he
struggles with the shawl, ripping it off his shoulders and flinging it to go
fluttering to the ground under the nearest tree “And that? Is that what that
was about? You thought I’d be so grateful for a scrap of silk that I’d just let
you do what you want?” He’s shaking. Shaking like he’s going to come apart.
Every time he blinks it feels as if Snoke is on top of him. He keeps hearing
Kylo Ren calling him Snoke’s whore.
“No!” the man cries out. “No, not like that. It was a present, just a present.”
“I don’t believe you,” his teeth are chattering. He’s so cold. “I don’t believe
you. I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you.” He’s going to have to sit down
soon. His legs are trembling. Things are starting to feel very far away. “You
can’t do this, you can’t do this, I don’t want to do this.” Is that him
talking? He isn’t sure.
“I am sorry!” the man is saying. “I am so sorry. I just wanted to-” he starts
to approach. The world crystalizes. He squeezes the trigger, scorching the
ground just in front of the man’s feet.
What must be at least twenty guards, all with golden sashes, seem to
materialise out of the night, hands on their blasters. Sunny Adar’s hand goes
up to order them to stay back. “Everything is fine,” he says. “Go back to your
duties.” The guards stare, the eyes of many different species fixing on him, on
the blaster in his hand. “That is an order!” the man snaps. Like that they
comply, melting away into the darkness.
“I am sorry for that beautiful one,” the man frowns, “They are too eager at
times.”
“Don’t call me that!” he snaps. “I am not your ‘beautiful one’ or you ‘brother’
or even your ‘friend.’ I am going back inside where I am going to fetch my
Lieutenant and my Stormtroopers, and then you are taking us back to the city.”
“I cannot do that-” the man begins, raising his hands and hastening to add “It
is too dangerous to travel over the desert at night. Not even I would attempt
it!” when his finger twitches on the trigger.
“You bastard!” he hisses. “What did you hope to gain from trapping us out
here?”
“Nothing!” he cries. “Please, beautiful one- no, General Hux, let me explain
myself.”
“Why should I? I should just shoot you.”
“You will not leave this place alive if you do,” that smile is back, though a
bit strained around the edges. “and neither will your friends.”
They stare each other down. His hand does not waver on his blaster. Sunny
Adar’s smile does not waver on his face.
“Please,” the man says, after a long pause. “Just let me explain myself. That
is all I ask.”
“If I don’t want to? If I choose to return to my room instead?”
“I will follow you until you listen to me,” that smile is making his finger
itch on the trigger. “I do not want this misunderstanding hanging between us.”
“Fine. Talk,” he doesn’t lower the blaster. The sooner this is over.
The smile turns rueful “I only meant to ask you to marry me.”
“What?!” it takes a moment for that to sink in. “Why?! We only met earlier
today. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I have never met someone like you before-” the man begins.
He scoffs. “I doubt that’s true.”
“You are very beautiful,” the man protests.
He laughs, feeling more than a little hysterical. He is not. Not even Snoke
thought him so. “You’re mad. Go back inside and you’ll find dozens of people
more beautiful than me.”
“I have not seen these dozens. I see only you.” The man’s voice, his dark eyes,
are sincere. He feels disgusted. His skin crawls at the unwanted compliment.
His mind is racing. “So you saw me, and what? Fell in love at first sight?
Decided you wanted to marry me on a day’s acquaintance?”
“You understand me, I had hoped you would.”
“No,” he shakes his head. “No, I don’t believe you. Tell me, why are we here?
Why did your boss demand we bring Snoke’s treasures ourselves?”
“He is old,” Sunnay Adar shrugs. “The old have their ways. It is not for us to
understand them.”
A sense of something. “You are lying to me right now.”
“Please beautiful one-”
“Don’t call me that!”
“Please-”
“Tell me the truth!” he demands.
Sunny Adar deflates. The smile fades. Suddenly he is just a man, a little
desperate, obviously not as in control of the situation as he would like. “You
will be very angry with me, and I don’t want that.”
He gestures with the blaster. “I am already very angry with you
The man sighs. “He did so because I asked it of him.”
“Why?” he snaps.
“At first,” he begins, voice hesitant “I saw you and I thought you were very
beautiful, your face, the colour of your hair, your eyes even- with some of the
colour of green copper to them.” Of course, the bloody copper. Everywhere
copper and everyone going on about copper. Then thinking back, he has not seen
another redhead the entire time he’s been on the planet. Common as muck on
Arkanis, but obviously much rarer here. “As I said, my very great friend has
been very kind to me and my family. I wanted to show your beauty to him-”
His blood seems to freeze in his veins. “You wanted to give me to the Hutt?” it
comes out strangled.
“No!” the man shouts, but then wavers. “No, not as such. At first I just wanted
him to be able to see you, he is near the end of his life and beauty is one of
his consolations. Then I spent a little more time with you, and I started to
think maybe if I asked him he could help me find a way to keep you-”
“You wanted to enslave me?” he breathes out. His finger twitches on the
trigger. For a moment he doesn’t see Sunny Adar, he sees Snoke. He feels a
noose of the Force wrapped tight around his throat.
“Er, perhaps,” the man ekes out, bringing him back to the moment. Sunny Adar
raises his hands as if to show he is harmless, shrugs. “Slavery is not legal on
this planet, my very great friend finds it distasteful, but I thought maybe I
could convince him to make an exception. The things you have done, your First
Order has done, it is not like you are some innocent. You have killed,
billions, and we all know your kind steals children, whisks them away to vanish
behind white masks as if they never were.”
The truth of it sinks into him with a bite. Yes. He has killed billions. Yes he
has stolen children, conditioned them into soldiers for a war old long before
he was born. He thinks of some of those soldiers “What were you going to do
with Lieutenant Mitaka, the Stormtroopers?”
“I was going to offer them freedom, and if they did not want it-“ a shrug “Well
the desert is dangerous, people die out there every day.”
His hand is quivering a little on his blaster. He thinks of Mitaka, FN-2188,
FN-2439, the way he has gotten to know parts of the people they are. He thinks
of the other Stormtroopers, drinking, having fun, in so much danger. Why hadn’t
he sensed they were in danger?
He takes a lurching step backwards, back towards the dining hall. “No” the man
cries out. “Please do not worry for them, I have no intention of doing any of
it now. I was wrong!”
“Wrong?” he breathes. The world is swirling around him once more. He feels very
cold.
“I was a fool!” the man declares, inching towards him, arms extended at his
sides, voice placating. “My friend would not have gone along with my plan, no
matter who you were, and then I saw you with the sunsnake-” a pause, a strange
look on the man’s face, something like reverence. “They are sacred creatures.
To have one come so close to you without striking- I realised what I was
planning was a terrible thing. So then, then I began to hope that maybe I could
convince you to stay, stay because you wanted to. Stay because you wanted to be
with me.”
“And the best way you thought you could achieve that was bragging about how
rich you are and then kissing me without asking?”
“I was not bragging!” the man hisses, bristling with offence “A man should not
ask someone to marry him if he cannot support them!”
“A man should not do any of the things you did!” he snaps.
A rustle behind them. “Sir!” a sound of alarm. FN-2188 and FN-2439 appear,
blasters drawn. “Are you alright?” FN-2188 asks.
“I am not harmed,” he answers, glaring at Sunny Adar.
He glances at FN-2439. “Gather everyone, meet in my rooms, remain vigilant. We
will all stay together tonight, in the morning our ‘friend,’” he almost spits
the word “will take us back to the city. Won’t you?”
“Of course beautiful one,” the man replies, looking defeated. “I mean, General
Hux.”
They back away from him, blasters still drawn. He cannot help think of all the
guards, materialising out of the darkness earlier. They are outnumbered.
Horribly outnumbered. “Where is Mitaka?” he asks FN-2188, voice quiet so as not
to be overheard.
“In our room,” she replies, voice tinged with anxiety. FN-2439 peels away from
them, heading back to do as ordered, probably going to check on the Lieutenant
first. “He had too much to drink. We took him back and then realised we didn’t
know where you were, we checked your room and when we didn’t find you we came
looking.”
“Thank you,” he breathes, then regrets revealing his vulnerability. Then again
FN-2188 was with them on the island. She saw him after the vision the mirror
gave him, naked, curled up with Kylo Ren.
“Sir, forgive the impertinence; did he do anything to you?”
He glances at her. “What makes you ask that?”
“Sorry Sir,” she grimaces, eyes still on Sunny Adar. “But that man’s been
panting after you ever since he laid eyes on you, and the way he acts, the way
everyone acts towards him, he’s not a man used to hearing the word ‘no.’”
“No, I imagine he’s not,” he sighs, thinking back to what the man had said. It
seemed Bo Bukwiina ran Maneshfva, and Sunny Adar was his main enforcer. ‘A
dangerous man,’ indeed. “No real harm was done, and we’ll be gone tomorrow.”
“If they don’t let us go?”
He smiles, rueful. “Then we will have to hope our Supreme Leader finds us
worthy of avenging. I do not think that man,” he nods at Sunny Adar “will smile
so much if confronted with Kylo Ren.” She snorts out a laugh.
Sunny Adar watches them until they are out of sight. The man stands there,
shoulders slumped, a grimace on his face. The last thing Hux sees of him, as
they reach the balcony through which they can access their rooms, is him
raising a hand and covering his eyes.
They find Mitaka in his room, groggy and leaning against the bed, but blaster
in hand. FN-2188 rushes over to him and pulls him close. They exchange quiet
words that he chooses not to hear. The rest filter in in dribs and drabs, all
of them looking a little drunk and some of them more than a little debauched.
FN-2091 virtually swaggers in and he remembers the three Twileks hanging on to
her every word.
“I’ll comm you, I’ll comm you,” he hears out in the corridor, and then “Frak,
you’re gorgeous.” An annoyed grunt, familiar, FN-2439 he thinks, and a bit of a
struggle and then the voice from before saying, “Come on man, let me go, I’m
coming yeah, I just-” a bit more of a struggle. A sigh of irritation, and then
soft moans. “So fracking gorgeous- oi!”
The door swings open and FN-2439 enters dragging FN-1996. The Zabrak tries to
follow, saying “You’ll comm me? Promise you’ll comm me?”
“I will, I will,” the blond replies, trying to shake FN-2439 loose. “I’ll comm
you. Every night. I promise.”
“You,” FN-2439 says, pointing at the Zabrak, who shies away from his finger,
“Stay out there. You,” he shakes FN-1996, a man even taller than he is, “Get a
hold of yourself.”
“Fracking killjoy,” the blond hisses, but stops struggling. The man looks back
with longing until the door shuts, blocking his view of the Zabrak.
FN-2515 and FN-2316 are the last to arrive, stealing kisses from each other as
they slip in the barely open door. He spots the Zabrak, still out in the
corridor, looking forlorn.
“Ok kiddies!” FN-2188 declares when everyone has gathered, looking less like a
squad of Stormtroopers than a group having their night out interrupted. “Looks
like we’re in hostile territory, so play time’s over.” At that they all
straighten up, hands going to blasters. She glances at him, he steps forward,
locks the door, nods at her. She is the squad leader.
“We’ll sleep in shifts. I want eyes on the windows and the door at all times.
Ears open, hands on blasters. We’ve been promised a lift out of here in the
morning, but if that doesn’t eventuate we may have to fight our way out-” he
leaves her to her orders and walks to the corner, away from the door and
windows. Sinking down into a squat, overstuffed chair upholstered in a
patchwork of brightly coloured silks he comms the Finalizer.
The Supreme Leader isn’t there, he’s told, they’re not sure when he’ll be back.
They also aren’t sure if he still has the authority to order backup down to the
moon, but they’ll try to comm the Supreme Leader and check with him. He ends
the call.
He sits for a long time while the Stormtroopers shuffle around behind him,
before standing. “I’ll take first watch,” he says.
Nothing happens over the long hours of the night. Eventually Mitaka comes over
to him and insists he tries to get some sleep. Only the thought that he might
have to think his way out of there in the morning makes him agree. He curls up
on an edge of the bed, large enough for all of them and then some, like
everything clad in silks, and closes his eyes.
He falls into a fitful sleep. He dreams of Snoke. Snoke choking him, slapping
him, holding him down. Snoke grabbing at him when he was busy. Snoke ignoring
whatever he was saying. Snoke fucking him till he bled. Snoke forcing his legs
open when he had a migraine, when everything hurt to much to bear. Snoke
leaving bruises on top of bruises. Snoke fucking his face so he couldn’t
breathe. Snoke, Snoke, Snoke- He dreams and he does not want it. Does not want
any of it.
In the morning Sunny Adar knocks on the door at first light. “I wish to extend
my apologies for the way I behaved last night,” is what the man greets him
with, when he is let inside the room under the watchful eyes of a whole squad
of armed Stormtroopers. “I have reflected on my actions, and I am ashamed of
myself.”
“I don’t care,” he replies. “Have you come to take us back to Nfevrum, or are
we being detained?”
“I have come to take you back,” Sunny Adar says after a moment, looking
defeated. “My very great friend wishes to extend an invitation to breakfast. He
is very apologetic that you have found his hospitality lacking.”
He doesn’t say that it is not Bo Bukwiina’s hospitality that’s the problem.
“Tell your friend that we thank him for the offer, but we must decline. We must
be getting back to our shuttle, our Supreme Leader will be wondering where we
are.” In reality he doubts Kylo Ren cares, but perhaps the reminder that they
report to a man more powerful than even Bo Bukwiina could ever hope to be will
compel a bit more cooperation.
“Of course, he will understand,” the man’s hand twitches, as if about to reach
for him, but then drops back down to his side. A sigh, the man says “If you are
ready I will take you now.”
They leave the Palace with a lot less fanfare than when they arrived. Only a
few people come out to watch them go, curiosity on their faces, and the Zabrak
materializes to cling to FN-1996 and create a scene, but once they’ve been
separated with much promise of comm-ing and a bit of shouting from the Zabrak’s
mother, everyone piles onto the transport with no issues. This time they all
stay together, on the top deck where they can keep an eye on Sunny Adar.
Instead of sitting next to the man he sits with the Stormtroopers, between the
sulking FN-1996 and FN-2188. Sunny Adar makes no attempt at conversation as he
directs the transport away from the Palace and back to Nfevrum. The
Stormtroopers talk amongst themselves, but he doesn’t feel like saying
anything.
The trip takes less than half the time, the transport skimming across the sand
as light as air. It seems likely that the man was dawdling the day before. The
thought that Sunny Adar wanted to spend more time with him flashes across his
mind, but he shakes it away. It makes him uneasy.
Soon enough they pass the crashed slave-ship, the early morning sun lancing
almost green off its side. It is pleasant this early, the lack of clouds in the
atmosphere allowing the heat of the day before to dissipate over night, though
the warmth still trapped in sand and rock prevent it from becoming too cool.
The transport skims on, racing towards the city.
Sunny Adar takes them all the way back to their shuttle, picking his way
through narrow streets with ease, even though his transport is wide enough to
almost scrape the walls of some of the shops. He pulls up, stops the transport,
gets to his feet. They stand, moving towards the ladder to disembark. “Please!”
the man calls out. “Let me speak with you, just for a moment. Alone.”
“No,” he replies. The Stormtroopers shuffle, hands going to blasters.
The man moves forward, taking something from a pouch at his belt. “Please, take
it,” it’s the shawl. “I only meant it as a gift, no more.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Please beautiful one-” the man begins. He is interrupted.
“Ooh, lucky,” a voice says, filtered through a modulator. A head, masked in
black emerges as its owner climbs the ladder onto the deck. “I thought I was
going to have to go looking before long.”
As the figure steps onto the deck they bring cold with them. He shivers.
Another one of the Knights of Ren, not one of the two he saw before being sent
to the moon.
The Stormtrooper’s shift, they reach for their blasters. So does Sunny Adar.
“You can try it if you want, I’m just not sure it’s the best idea,” the figure
says.
“Stand down,” he orders. “It’s one of the Supreme Leader’s Knights.”
“Good guess pretty,” the figure says. Their voice is androgynous, as if their
figure. Short and skinny, with a loose way of holding their limbs. “Neiro Ren
at your service.”
“Why are you here?” he asks. His skin is crawling, as the figure walks towards
him he has the oddest desire to start backing away.
“Well,” Neiro Ren begins, “Our Lord and Master wants your presence, so he sent
me to fetch you.”
“It’s hardly necessary,” he says, “We’re about to get on the shuttle.”
“Well they might be,” the figure waves in the general direction of the
Stormtroopers and Mitaka, “but you’re not. Orders are orders you see.”
“What do you-” he begins. The Force curls around him, lifting his feet from the
deck. Sunny Adar pulls his blaster, which goes flying out of his hand and over
the rail.
“Naughty,” the figure admonishes. “I’d kill you for that, but I’m not sure I
have the time.” Neiro Ren darts backwards and jumps over the rail, landing
lightly on the ground below in front of a familiar, high-speed two-person
shuttle. He finds himself following, his body floating down towards the Knight.
“Sir!” Mitaka cries out, rushing to the ladder along with the Stormtroopers.
“It’s alright!” he calls to his troops. His skin is crawling. He feels so cold.
He doesn’t want the knight turning on them. “Return to the Finalizer, that’s an
order.”
He finds himself being bundled into the high-speed shuttle, watching through
the front window as Mitaka and the Stormtroopers rush down the ladder. “You
should listen to the man,” Neiro Ren calls out to them as he boards as well.
“He’s obviously not just a pretty face.”
The next thing he knows the shuttle is taking off. He watches Mitaka, his
Stormtroopers, even Sunny Adar and a collection of gold-sashed guards that
appear at the man’s shouting, as they get smaller and smaller and smaller. He
can’t move. The Knight still has him wrapped in the Force. He’s helpless.
***** Chapter 15 *****
Chapter Notes
     I've got writer's block, sigh, and honestly I was surprised I even
     managed to get this done. I'm afraid the pace of my updates is going
     to have to slow a bit, even if I can overcome the block, because the
     next couple of weeks will be a bit busier, and in March I'll be going
     back to Uni to do my Masters.
     Anyway, thank you all so much for sticking with the story to this
     point, and thanks as always for commenting and leaving kudos. I hope
     you enjoy the chapter.
That Captain and everyone else involved in telling Hux he couldn’t order backup
to Maneshfva are now floating outside the Finalizer in pieces. He watches them,
their parts, as they drift weightless in the vacuum. It is clear that the chain
of command has broken down. He will have to remind everyone that Hux is still
General, still his second in command, until such a time as he issues a formal
statement otherwise.
He sent Neiro to fetch the man. Neiro who helped move the prisoners from the
Rectitude to the Finalizer without undue harm coming to them. Neiro who he
ordered not to harm Hux, and to try not to harm Mitaka and the Stormtroopers
unless they got in the way, and whom the Dark tells him he can trust to carry
out the task.
He can see the Captain out there. He almost wants to go out, gather up the
parts of her corpse and shake her. Hux could have been lost because of her. Hux
may still be lost because of her. No. Hux is clever, Hux will be ok, and if
anything’s wrong Neiro will deal with it.
The baby. He needs to asks the Force. The Force must be able to tell him
something. Give him some clue. He can’t ask the Force. He can’t calm down
enough. The Dark Side won’t tell him what he needs to know. He’s shaking, he
thinks it’s him this time, not just everything else shaking from the Dark. A
baby? He’s a father. Or at least he was a father. What if he asks the Force and
the Force tells him the baby is dead? He needs Hux. He needs Hux’s calm, even
tone detailing what he should do next, just like when they returned and
discovered the mutiny. He doesn’t know if it’s him, or if the whole ship’s
shaking too.
He’s been a fool.
Snoke must have kept Hux around for something more than fucking. A cur’s
weakness- what was it? Something about being a sharp tool? Except that doesn’t
make sense. None of it makes sense. The Hux he has seen recently is hardly
rabid. Hux is quiet, calm, sensible… sad. Hux seems very sad. Is Hux sad
because his lover is dead? No. No! That can’t be it. If that was it Hux would
be vengeful, demanding Rey’s blood, not sad. But- What if it is. What if Snoke
and Hux were in love, what if Hux is heartbroken-? He can’t imagine Snoke being
in love. He can’t see someone who is in love calling their beloved a rabid cur
where they might overhear.
He doesn’t understand it.
It doesn’t matter. What matters is that Snoke was too ruthless to keep someone
just around to sate his lusts, so there’s no reason he should doubt Hux’s
capabilities, and there’s no need to demote the man just because he was sharing
the old Supreme Leader’s bed. So his reliance on Hux is perfectly justified.
His need to talk to Hux is perfectly justified. He’s a father. Oh Force.
Where are they? What if Hux is dead? What if Hux is dead and then when he
reaches out through the Force the baby is dead? He should never have ordered
Hux to deliver Snoke’s items to the Hutt in person. In fact Hux should never
have been on that moon doing deliveries at all. It was all beneath the dignity
of a General. He’d wanted to punish him. It was because of Snoke. Snoke in top
of Hux. He’d felt lied to, betrayed, manipulated. He’d wanted to show Hux how
unimportant the man was to him. Idiot.
He still doesn’t know why he started to dream of the redhead. He still doesn’t
know if it was Snoke’s influence. It doesn’t matter. In reality Hux has shown
no sign of even being aware of his complicated feelings, his lust, let alone of
wanting to use them against him. He could have, on the island, if he’d wanted
to. Naked, vulnerable, beautiful. Hux himself couldn’t have caused the dreams.
Such a fool.
He’ll do better. He has to do better. The position they’re in is too precarious
for him to continue to make mistakes.
A clatter behind him, something dropped. He doesn’t turn. It’s just the command
staff. He can feel their terror. Good. They should be afraid. Fools. What if
Hux is dead? Hux is not dead. Hux can’t be dead.
A presence. He turns. It’s Jrii and Saiva, watching him. He wonders how long
they’ve been there. He feels their curiosity in the Force.
“Not me. Gydn, in Snoke’s mind, just once.”
He wonders what Jrii meant. Does Saiva know? He has often been Gydn’s
companion. Gydn, he must ask Gydn. Later. He can’t think to ask right now. He
can’t leave to find Gydn. He needs Hux. A father. The baby would be grown now,
old enough to think itself an adult.If it lives.
“The Dark is roiling in you, my Lord,” Saiva says. “May we be of assistance?”
“No,” he replies. He wants them to go. He does not want to be observed. He
wants Hux.
Their heads move towards each-other, a tiny spasm of gesture. They must be
talking through the Force. A shrug of movement from Jrii, a tilt of the head
from Saiva, who then speaks. “I have the texts Lord Snoke sent me after. You
may want to examine them later, my Lord.”
He has no idea what that has to do with anything. It makes him want to lash
out, but no. No. When he knows Hux is safe, when they work out what to do about
the baby, then maybe old Sith texts will be useful. Strength, in the Dark.
“Bring them to my quarters.”
A flicker in the Force. Movement outside, seen from the corner of his eye.
Neiro’s shuttle returning. Relief. If Hux was dead Neiro would have comm-ed. A
glance at Jrii, at Saiva. “Remain here, keep an eye on them-” he nods at the
command staff, who flinch, stare up at him with terrified eyes.
“Of course, my Lord,” they echo each other.
He heads to the shuttle bay, long strides making a short journey of it. He
arrives just as Neiro is disembarking, and behind Neiro, floating along buoyed
by the Force. Is that Hux?
“Aren’t we lucky pretty, a welcoming committee,” Neiro calls over his shoulder
at the white-clad figure. “I have fetched your General, my Lord, just as I
found him. I guarantee no harm has come to him while in my care.”
Neiro floats Hux over to him and deposits the redhead gently on the deck. Hux
stumbles a little as the stupport of the Force is withdrawn, but soon
straightens up into his usual bearing. “You wished to see me Supreme Leader?”
Hux looks sweaty, dishevelled and tired. Instead of his usual uniform, or even
the informal collection of uniform parts he had worn on the island, he is
dressed in white. Loose white trousers gathered at his ankles, a loose white
tunic gathered at his wrists, his slender waist encircled by his blaster belt
in such a way that emphasises just how slender it really is. His toes are
peeking out from leather sandals. That copper hair is hanging loose, framing a
face so many times more attractive than Lem Umura’s.
Reality returns. “I must speak with you.”
“Of course, Supreme Leader,” Hux says, voice placid.
“My quarters,” he says, remembering the last time. Hux calm in the face of
adversity.
“I’ll leave you to it then, my Lord,” Neiro’s voice breaks the moment. “Nice to
have met you, General.”
He dismisses the Knight with a nod. They walk back to his quarters in silence,
Hux following at his almost customary two paces behind. They pass officers,
techs and Stormtroopers, all eagerly jumping to attention, each and every one
saluting Hux with an almost manic grimace on their face. Good, they have learnt
their lesson.
Once inside he drags his chair close to his berth, indicating Hux should sit.
The redhead does, looking up at him with those sea coloured eyes. “Is that the
Rectitude I saw beside the Finalizer?” the man asks.
He blinks. The capture of the Rectitude seems so long ago now. Could he really
not have informed Hux?
“Yes. It is.”
“Did you take her or did she surrender?” Hux asks.
“She was disabled by some of the people serving on her,” he replies. “We
discovered her just outside the Fva Amuir system, boarded her and captured
her.”
“Did we sustain many casualties?”
He is getting tired of this irrelevant conversation. “No! No, I took her
personally with the assistance of my Knights.” A deep breath. Calm. Focus on
the issue at hand. “It’s not important. I’m a father!”
***** Chapter 16 *****
Chapter Notes
     Still have writer's block. Double sigh. I have no idea why writing
     this chapter left me feeling so tired.
     Anyway, I must extend my customary thanks to everyone reading this
     and leaving kudos and comments. You are all wonderful. May you all
     have a lovely day, night, and future.
He feels exhausted. Nothing quite feels real. He spent the entire trip from
Nfevrum to the Finalizer bound by the Force, trapped stationary beside Neiro
Ren. The Knight hadn’t spoken, instead spent the time humming. Unlike the other
Knight he’d seen in the shuttlebay, the one who had been humming atonally, he
was almost sure this one had been humming popular music. It had been odd.
Incongruous.
“I’m a father!” the Supreme Leader declares. He blinks.
“I’m sorry?” He’s sure he’s misheard.
Kylo Ren drops down to sit on the edge of the berth in front of him. They’re
close, pressed almost knee to knee. It’s not like last time when there was a
respectable distance between them, this time the man has dragged the chair in
close. He can smell sex. Just the faintest aroma of semen, sweat, saliva
clinging to the other man. He wonders what Kylo Ren has been doing. Does he
have a lover? No. The only person he can think of that the man is close to is-
“Is it the scavenger girl? Did she make contact with you and tell you that
she’s pregnant?” His mind shies away from examining the thought too closely.
When could they have done it? Over Snoke’s slowly cooling corpse?
“What?” the man’s face scrunches up. “No. No! It’s not- No. I don’t mean I’ve
gotten someone pregnant. I mean I’m already a father. I have a child.”
“I don’t understand,” he can comprehend the concept, though his mind struggles
a little at the notion of Kylo Ren: Father, but the information seems to be
coming out of nowhere. He was sure, the entire trip, that he was being brought
back because Kylo Ren was angry with him, because either the man had discovered
his past treasons, or because the Hutt had comm-ed him to complain about his
rudeness. This is not what he expected.
The Supreme Leader sighs, slumps a little on the berth. The man raises a hand,
rubs his eyes, “After we took the Rectitude I went to Telbenefva to sell some
of Snoke’s possessions as I’d organised earlier. While I was there I met a
woman that I used to know and discovered that she’d had my child.”
Mind racing. The implications- “You’re sure she was telling the truth?”
Dark eyes meet his. “I’m sure.”
“Where is this child?” It will have to be well guarded, they have so many
enemies.
“She didn’t know,” a laugh, bitter. Horribly bitter. “She’d traded it for a
lift off the planet she was staying on when she gave birth.”
“That’s-” he doesn’t know what to say. What can one say to something like that.
“That’s very disturbing.” He wants to ask the man what kind of woman she is,
what kind of lover could he have taken that would do such a thing.
“I don’t even know if it’s still alive,” the man sighs. “I don’t even know
where to start looking. She couldn’t even remember the name of the planet.”
They will have to start looking, he imagines someone like Savim getting a hold
of it. It is not a comforting thought. “You must know something,” he says. “How
old would the child be?”
“I don’t know, it was eighteen years ago.”
The words screech across his mind. For a moment he can’t comprehend them. He
looks at Kylo Ren, a few years younger than he is. “Impossible. You would have
been a child. You were what, ten?”
“Thirteen,” the man corrects. That Is not any better. He thinks of spotty,
weedy little Stormtrooper cadets. He can’t imagine them as parents. They’re
children.
“How old was the girl?” This must have been while the man was studying under
his uncle, perhaps she was another Jedi student. If she was, she may not have
known what to do when she fell pregnant.
“I’m not sure,” Kylo Ren says, thinking for a moment. “In her early thirties, I
think.”
“What?!” he snaps. For once he is appalled for the man instead of by him. He
thinks of the Stormtrooper cadets again, he thinks of himself at that age -
a skinny little runt, then he finds himself imagining what Kylo Ren must have
been like. Young, young and awkward he imagines. The man still seems to be
uncomfortable in his own skin. The thought that a fully grown woman, a woman
near his own current age, would want to take someone so young to bed, someone
so much a child in comparison, disgusts him. He finds himself distressed for
Kylo Ren. “A woman in her thirties- I can’t imagine how your mother reacted.”
The Leia Organa his father used to rail against would have been furious.
He realises only as he’s saying it how dangerous it could be, mentioning the
woman to the man her son has grown to become. Kylo Ren grimaces, and for a
moment he braces for violence, but all the man does is say “She didn’t know.”
“Your uncle? Were you under his protection then?” another dangerous topic to
raise, but again the man doesn’t strike out at him. Surely the great Luke
Skywalker would not have let such a thing happen to someone in his charge?
“He ordered her to leave when he started getting suspicious.”
“But by then it was too late,” it’s sad, those great heroes of the last war
unable even to protect their own child, their nephew. “I see,” again he doesn’t
know what to say. He thinks for a moment, “This woman, did you kill her?”
“What?!” Kylo Ren snaps. “No! How could I? What kind of man would I be if I
killed the mother of my own child?” He doesn’t reply that he’d heard Darth
Vader killed the mother of Organa and Skywalker, but then it might not be true.
It was a rumour, passed about in whispers of the corruption of the Empire.
“Then where is she? Is she in the brig?” Surely the man cannot have been
foolish enough to leave her running around free. “We must make sure none of our
enemies can capture her. The consequences if they discover such a potential
weakness will be grave.”
A very long pause this time. The air starts to feel heavier. “Leia Organa would
never use my child against me.”
“Whether she would or not is immaterial,” of course he would think first of his
mother, and fail to think of those he should. “I can tell you with certainty
that Savim or any of the other so-called ‘Supreme Leaders’ will. They will use
the child against you and against the Resistance, and when they’re done there
won’t be much of the child left.”
Things start rattling again. The inside of his face tingles. It feels as if
there is a loud, high-pitched whine, just out of any register that he can hear.
He can see distress on Kylo Ren’s face. For a moment, a mad moment, he wants to
comfort him.
“I wiped her memory,” the man says. “Even if she is captured Dalie will not be
able to lead anyone to the child. She doesn’t even remember there is a child,
or that she and I ever met.”
“Good,” he says. “Good, but I think you should return to the planet and capture
her.”
“Why?”
“Because we need to make sure,” he begins, and then “Because she has committed
a crime against you. One that should not go unpunished.”
“Why?” the man asks again, those dark eyes pinning him in place.
He looks down. He wonders if this is a trap. He wonders what the man wants him
to say. “You were a child,” he begins. “I don’t know the details, the
particulars, any of it, but I do know that to a person in their thirties a
thirteen year old is a child. Her actions were against the law of the New
Republic, they should be against our law. That eighteen years have passed does
not absolve her. If you do not want her dead then she should be incarcerated.”
“You think she hurt me?” he cannot read the expression on Kylo Ren’s face.
“It’s not my place to decide that,” he says after thinking for a moment, “how
you feel about what happened is how you feel. I do think that she did a
terrible thing, a thing that could hurt you, could change you, impact on your
future, and it sounds like she is the type of woman who would not even care.”
For a moment he thinks of Kylo Ren, and in his mind the man’s not much older
than thirteen, just a boy, a child, the first time Snoke reached out and
touched his mind. He shudders.
Kylo Ren says nothing for a long moment. “I don’t want to see her again.”
That makes sense. However the woman could be detained without the man ever
laying eyes on her. “A squad of Stormtroopers might attract too much attention,
but you could send one of your Knights.”
The man shakes his head. “She’s not important, what is important is the child.”
He wants to argue, but at the same time he’s already more than pushed his luck
during this conversation. He nods, concedes. If they can find the child without
any of their enemies being any the wiser there’ll be little risk to the woman
running around loose. “What did you find out about it?”
A sigh of frustration. “Not much, it was all muddled. She was using strong pain
stims at the time.”
“There must have been something?”
A very long pause. The man stares off into the distance, a frown on his face,
before suddenly those dark eyes pin his. “I could use the Force to let you see
her memories.”
He freezes. Snoke, no, not Snoke, no. A mind in his mind. A mind altering his
thoughts. Compliance. No. Obediance. Making him a puppet. Opening his mouth so
vitriol can spill out. It hurts. He can’t fight it. Atrocity. No. No. No, this
is Kylo Ren. This is not Snoke. He can’t say no.
Every word feels torn from him, but he manages to say, “If you think it will
help.”
Kylo Ren hesitates, then his hand reaches out, brushes lightly against the side
of his face before settling to cup his jaw. The man’s hand is big, bigger than
Sunny Adar’s had been. He can feel calluses against his skin. He wonders why
the man isn’t wearing his gloves. He feels odd. Then-
Something. A breath. Not a breath, something that feels like a breath. An
exhalation across his senses. He shivers. The room shivers. He can smell Kylo
Ren. He can smell Kylo Ren as if he was standing in the man’s skin. There’s
warmth. Double vision. He looks back at himself. “Relax,” a whisper across his
mind. Then-
He is the woman. Dalie. She is fleeing. Fleeing from her mistakes. She is
afraid. Afraid what people will think of her if they find out. Darth Vader’s
grandson. Disgust. She needs to go to ground. Just until the baby is born. She
will work out what to do then. If only she had more credits. She needs
somewhere she can live cheaply. Somewhere she won’t be found.
Then. The baby is in his arms. He feels her attention wander but he ignores it.
Every time her gaze focusses back on the baby he examines it, every time her
eyes wander about the room he looks for clues. The baby is small. A warm
weight. It is sleeping, then it is looking up at him, then it is sleeping, then
it is crying, then it is suckling from his breast. Her breast. He has never
held a baby. Pale skin, dark hair, blue eyes- but the latter might change with
age. No sense of gender. The room is plain, old plasteel walls, marked with age
and grime. It smells of disinfectant. There is no one else there. Through the
small window he can see a desert of yellow sand that seems to go on forever.
The couple. Faceless. Obscure around the edges. Yellow sand on their clothes.
Plain clothes, dark colours. Nothing too distinct about them. A man, a woman.
Light skin. Sunburnt. Both have short hair. Strong hands taking the baby, the
woman? Blunt fingers. Grime beneath fingernails. He can smell machine oil.
Alcohol. Sweat. The baby is gone. Relief. The woman? Is gesturing towards a
ship. Details foggy. Worry. Looks old, in bad repair. Small ship. A shuttle. A
way off the planet.
The scene fades. “That’s all she remembered,” Kylo Ren says, but doesn’t say,
the words appearing in his mind and not from the man’s lips.
“It’s something,” he replies. His mouth feels dry, his voice hoarse. He can
still feel the man there, at the edges of his mind. He has the oddest
sensation, the oddest desire, to reach out, but not with his hands. There’s
cold there, a raging current, a sense of something sick, anger, heat,
unbalance, light, a golden thread like the colour of a sunsnake’s scales that
he wants to tease out. They are so close. Kylo Ren is still cupping his face.
He feels the man withdraw. Mind first, but then hand as the man sits back on
the berth. The brush of one final touch. A strand of his hair tucked behind his
ear. He sucks in a breath, forces his mind back to the issue at hand. “We know
that it is a desert world, probably a planet and not a moon, and that the sand
is yellow. We know that the world is not overly populated, and that where she
was staying was not very wealthy. We also have some details about the couple
she gave the child to, a man and a woman, human, light skinned, also not very
wealthy, and probably engaged in some kind of hands-on labour, possibly
involving machines. The clothes they wore were fairly standard, but that rules
out places like Maneshfva, which have distinctive local fashions. There was
also the scent of alcohol, which may help. We have a rough time frame for when
she was on the planet, beginning approximately eighteen years ago and lasting
no more than a year or so, since she left the planet when the child was still
an infant. We also know that she left the planet on an old shuttle in poor
repair.” He sighs, “This is not much to start with, but it is some.”
“There must be at least a hundred desert worlds,” the man groans, rubbing his
face. “Tatooine, Jakku, Ryloth- and that’s just the first three that come to
mind. What are we supposed to do, just set a course to the nearest one and hope
for the best?”
He gathers his courage. “I’m afraid not Supreme Leader.” The man frowns at him.
“We do need to find the child, but we need not to alert any of our enemies to
its existence in doing so. We cannot afford to be seen looking for someone.”
“Then what do you suggest?” the man snaps, leaning towards him, posture
aggressive.
He leans back, pressing himself into the back of the chair. Things had been
going so well. “We need a small team, one that can be covert and that won’t
automatically lead back to us.”
He would suggest Mitaka, FN-2188 and FN-2439, because he trusts them in a way,
a trust built on his recent interactions with them and not just because they
are members of the First Order and he is nominally their General, except before
he gathers the courage to Kylo Ren breathes “My Knights, Snoke trusted them to
find things much longer lost to history than my child.”
He has trouble imagining no one noticing the Knights. Their very presence seems
to pollute the air around them, but perhaps that is only because he knows what
they are. Kylo Ren is right though, about Snoke trusting them to fetch things
for him. He can remember, or half remember, several times the man mentioned
something about some treasure they’d recovered, and not that long ago something
about Saiva Ren finding some archive which Snoke thought destroyed. Perhaps
they really are the right people for the job.
“I’ll summon them,” the man says, and then stops. Frowns. “What happened on
Maneshfva? I returned to the ship to discover you had comm-ed for backup and
that you’d been refused.” Those dark eyes pin his, the room begins to chill. He
can feel the rumble of the Force. “Those that refused you have been punished-”
he knows without asking that they’re dead. He can almost see their deaths in
Kylo Rens eyes. “-and I doubt anyone is still labouring under the impression
that you are anything but our General-” obviously the man’s consideration of
what his role should be in the new First Order has ended in the conclusion that
it should be the same as in the old First Order, at least for now, “-but I
realise I still don’t know what actually happened.”
For the merest second he thinks of Sunny Adar. Sunny Adar’s hands on him. Sunny
Adar’s lips on him. Kylo Ren calling him a whore. He tries to bury the thoughts
down, down where the man won’t be able to see them. “Nothing, it was just a
misunderstanding.”
There is a long pause. The man is looking a him, assessing him. Then “You are
hiding something from me.”
“It is not important,” he insists. Things have been good between them, he does
not want to remind the man of his anger, his disgust, about his relationship
with Snoke.
Another long pause. He waits, holding his breath, for the man to lash out. To
reach into his mind and take the information. He expects it will hurt. He
expects it will be very different from earlier, when Kylo Ren linked their
minds gently. The assault never comes. Instead the man says “If I don’t press
for details can you promise me whatever happened on the moon won’t become a
problem for the First Order in the future?”
A moment’s thought. “I don’t believe it will be a problem, Sir.”
“Ok,” Kylo Ren nods. “Why don’t you go get cleaned up. Once you’re back in
uniform I’d like you to deal with the prisoners we took from the Rectitude.”
Dread. The prospect of more death. “Are you intending to execute them?”
The man shakes his head. “I’d prefer not to if their loyalty can be ensured.”
A flicker of thought, the idea that he could recondition them, crosses his
mind. Disgust follows, then worry at his own weakness. “You’ll read their minds
like usual while we interrogate them?”
“Of course.”
***** Chapter 17 *****
Chapter Notes
     TRIGGER WARNING: chapter contains rape.
     Thank you all for still reading, leaving kudos and comments. Writer's
     block is hard. Not sure I like this chapter, but here it is.
He sits in the chair where Hux sat earlier, lost in contemplation. He feels
calm, or at least calmer than he has in days. He is not sure why. Perhaps it is
because now there is a plan in place, because Hux has helped him take his
panic, his overwhelming sense of being a father and not knowing what to do
about it, and picked it apart into a logical series of actions. They will find
his child, keep his child safe. He will have a chance to do what his own
parents could not.
He feels like he’s calm enough that he could reach for the Force now and find
some answers. He will before he sends for his Knights and sets them to the
task, in case there is something more he can tell them. There just hasn’t been
time yet, or perhaps there was. There was time to do so while he waited for Hux
to bathe and dress, before they interrogated the prisoners, but he hadn’t done
it then. He’d been distracted, preoccupied.
His mind still lingers on what Hux might be hiding from him. He’d sensed shame,
something like fear, but nothing like treason on the surface of the man’s mind.
He could have reached deeper, could have ripped apart the man’s tissue-thin
mental defences, but he hadn’t. He’d found himself not wanting to. The memory
of their minds touching, gently, with Hux’s permission- even if that permission
had been reluctantly granted, had made him hesitate.
There had been warmth there, something light, something almost embracing, it
had reminded him of floating in warm water. Hux had- not given way beneath his
mind, because it hadn’t been a surrender, it was more that Hux’s mind had
naturally accommodated his. He’d wanted to linger, to push more of himself
inside, until the man’s psyche swelled with his presence.
The closest he can remember to the sensation was linking his mind to Luke’s,
back before that ugly distance had grown between them, back when he was a
child. He can remember a similar sense of light, of gentleness, of something
giving and not taking- very different from Snoke, from the painful, devouring
cold of the man’s mind, or even from Rey. There is light in Rey’s mind too,
light and hope and strength, stubborn strength. As odd as the thought is
though, Rey’s mind is too much like his own for him to find comfort sheltering
in it. Though they are different, though their feelings, beliefs, driving
impulses are different, where their minds met, they met with equal force, the
same give, the same take. Her a Lighter version of his Dark.
For a moment he longs to reach for her again, then for another moment he longs
to reach for Hux. He does neither.
For now he will let the man keep secret what happened on the moon, as long as
it causes no trouble. Then, if he wants to know but can’t bring himself to
invade Hux’s mind, he will take the knowledge from that officer Mitaka or the
Stormtroopers.
Their shuttle had docked as he and Hux had been walking to the brig to
interrogate the prisoners. They had passed a hall leading from the shuttle bay
just as the officer and the squad had walked out. He had felt relief in the
dark-haired man’s mind, relief in the minds of most of the Stormtroopers, to
see Hux. Curiosity had made him delve just a little deeper. They had been
worried, not certain what Neiro intended for Hux, and if Neiro had intended to
bring the redhead to him, as the Knight claimed, they had been afraid of what
he wanted with the man. It had annoyed him. He had wanted to strike out, but he
had restrained himself because Hux was there. Why had he restrained himself
because Hux was there? Is the redhead making him weak? No. Not weak. In that
moment it had seemed childish, so he hadn’t done it.
He can live with being feared. He likes being feared. Snoke would always say
the weak fear the strong.
The minds of the prisoners had been full of fear towards him. Some of them, the
techs mainly, seemed half mad with it, but he hadn’t sensed treason. He’d
sensed the officer, Commander Tchalrom had been telling the truth. They had
disabled the vessel. They were still loyal to Hux. They were less loyal to him,
but as long as Hux remained at his side they would not betray him. He wonders
when the redhead inspired such feelings. He thinks of Hux, wild eyed bellowing
General Hux, the Hux of Starkiller Base, and that’s not the man he saw in their
minds. That man is made of impressions years old. A quieter man. Sensible.
Steadfast. He finds it mysterious.
After the interrogation the prisoners had been released, not to serve back
aboard the Rectitude, as even the memory of that ship seemed to fill them with
dread, but to be stationed aboard the Finalizer. He has left Neiro watching
them, for now, because even if their minds do not read of treason he cannot
trust that treason won’t grow in the coming days.
It is worrying that even with the addition of Stormtroopers, techs and
Commander Tchalrom the ship is nowhere near fully staffed. If they split the
crew in two to staff both vessels they will each be running on the barest of
skeleton crews. It seems they will need to get more people, and soon, though so
far he has no idea how that’s going to be managed.
In the calmness of the afternoon he has found himself forced to admit that he
probably can’t afford to send all his Knights after his child. There will be no
point finding it at all if their ships are attacked, overrun and everyone
onboard killed because they cannot adequately defend themselves. The Knights
are too strong for him to afford to lose their protection just yet. It sounds
so rational, so reasonable when put like that. In truth his reasons have
something more to do with gut instinct, or perhaps the Force whispering to him,
than anything else.
When he thinks back to the battle onboard the Rectitude, to Gydn standing
surrounded by the unmarked dead, to Saiva crouched over that struggling
officer- he does not want either of them chasing down his child. It is weak. A
weak, Lightsider impulse. Perhaps he’ll regret it. Perhaps he’ll change his
mind. There is time to change his mind. He hopes there is time to change his
mind.
He’ll send Jrii and Xatjt. He can remember them from before, from when they
were children. They had been two of the most diligent, hardworking, attentive
and stubborn of his uncle’s students. He sees no great signs that these things
have changed, even if so much about them has. Jrii had not harmed the
prisoners. Xatjt’s bloodlust had been not so different from his aboard the
Rectitude. Perhaps he can trust them with his child’s safety. Perhaps.
This day he has realised that he doesn’t really trust his Knights. It is a
strange thought, a thought born of his contemplation of which of them he could
trust with those that are important to him. Those that are very vulnerable. His
child. Hux, for all that he might wish it otherwise. He didn’t think that it
was possible for him to lose faith in them. He remembers trusting them
absolutely, remembers knowing they would have his back no matter what, he
remembers fighting side by side, killing side by side, living side by side, but
somewhere in the years that have passed that trust has faded. They’ve all been
off serving Snoke, him included. Whatever closeness that once existed between
them has dissipated, and now that he thinks about it, when he really thinks on
who they have become, he no longer really recognises the children they once
were. Well, except for Neiro.
In Neiro he still sees skinny, little, pug-faced, auburn haired Narem Vhloe,
with the laughing brown eyes and the ancestry they’d always proudly declared as
mostly human, who’d been friendly and pleasant and never taken anything
seriously. Who used to sneak around behind the temple smoking strange herbs,
and who’d always share anything alcoholic they got a hold of with anyone who
asked nicely. Who had always been a bit behind everyone else in Luke’s lessons,
not because they were any less capable that the rest of the students but
because, as his uncle had insisted, they didn’t care enough to excel.
Maybe that’s why he sent them to fetch Hux and not one of the others, perhaps
that’s why he wants Neiro to stay. Neiro reminds him of his past. A weakness. A
weakness he thought he’d outgrown. Still, he feels if he needs a Knight to
guard Hux, or to guard any other vulnerable, Force-null people that he’d rather
trust Neiro to it than Gydn or Saiva. He worries that this means that
somewhere, deep down inside he feels like he doesn’t have power over them. It’s
ridiculous. He has always been much stronger in the Force as any of them.
In the morning he will give Jrii and Xatjt his orders, and perhaps send Rhadn
along as well when he arrives. Rhadn, Cmryt Zhva’adtm as was, was another of
Luke’s best and brightest. Another that believed effort could make up for the
shortcomings of nature. For now he should reach out with the Force, see if it
yields anything more to go on.
He gets off the chair and sinks down, sitting cross-legged on the floor in
front of his berth. He closes his eyes. A breath, another. He tries to clear
his mind. He tries to push the chaos ever lurking there to the very edge of his
thoughts. He thinks of the child. He reaches for the child.
The mirror. He is in front of the mirror. He is himself is himself is himself
is himself is himself is himself is himself is himself is himself is himself is
himself in front of the mirror. He is the approach. The steps split into
iterations. For a moment he feels infinite, but no, there is an end. An end. An
end. He pushes forward. He makes himself the self that approaches. The first
self. The self reaching reaching reaching reaching reaching reaching reaching
reaching reaching - He is the mirror. He looks back at himself himself himself
himself himself himself himself himself himself himself himself himself himself
himself...
He opens his eyes. That cannot be right. Again, again he closes his eyes and
reaches out.
The mirror. He is in front of the mirror. He is himself is himself is himself
is himself is himself is himself is himself is himself is himself is himself is
himself in front of the mirror. He is the approach. The steps split into
iterations. For a moment he feels infinite, but no, there is an end. An end. An
end. He pushes forward. He makes himself the self that approaches. The first
self. The self reaching reaching reaching reaching reaching reaching reaching
reaching reaching - He is the mirror. He looks back at himself himself himself
himself himself himself himself himself himself himself himself himself himself
himself...
He does not understand. That is definitely the Force, trying to tell him
something. He tries, one last time.
The mirror. He is in front of the mirror. He is himself is himself is himself
is himself is himself is himself is himself is himself is himself is himself is
himself in front of the mirror. He is the approach. The steps split into
iterations. For a moment he feels infinite, but no, there is an end. An end. An
end. He pushes forward. He makes himself the self that approaches. The first
self. The self reaching reaching reaching reaching reaching reaching reaching
reaching reaching - He is the mirror. He looks back at himself himself himself
himself himself himself himself himself himself himself himself himself himself
himself...
Annoyance. Another fucking obscure Force vision. He wonders why the Force can’t
just lay things out, nice and neatly, so that they’re easy to understand and
can’t be misunderstood.
He gets up. Finds himself pacing, back and forth, back and forth, in front of
his grandfather’s helmet. He wonders if Darth Vader had the same problem.
Perhaps he is tired. Perhaps it will make sense in the morning. Perhaps, if it
does not, he will be able to reach out then and find something that does.
Feeling resentful he gets ready and goes to bed.
He is more asleep than not when his door chiming wakes him up. He sits up,
reaches out with the Force and senses Saiva, a Dark presence, an absence, and
in the man’s hands something even Darker. He gets up and pads barefoot to the
door, gesturing with the Force to open it.
“The books, My Lord,” the man says, holding out a short stack of ancient
volumes. Ah, yes. The books from the Sith archive. He takes them and dismisses
the Knight,
They feel cold beneath his hands. Cold and almost alive. There is an energy
there, the faintest hum of something more than their material form. He brings
them to his desk, sinks down into his chair and takes the first from the pile.
It is bound in leather, the pages vellum. He wonders what animal died to
preserve the knowledge contained within. He wonders if that animal was sapient.
He lifts the pale, featureless cover, turns the first, blank page. Inside there
is writing, writing in a script he cannot read. He traces the glyphs with a
finger and for a moment they seem to writhe beneath his touch. He drops the
book. It slams closed. He raises a hand to open it again, but hesitates, he can
come back to it, there are others.
The second book is bound between two large, flat plates of bone, another
script, one he equally doesn’t recognise burned into the front as its title.
Inside he finds the same script, flowing, sinuous, scratched into sheets of
rough paper, along with strange symbols that make little sense. He puts the
book aside and reaches for the third, the final book.
This one is ornately bound in red leather embossed with an elaborate, floral
pattern. The corners are capped in gold, the edge of the pages gilded, and it
smells faintly of something heady, something like incense. The title is in yet
another script that he can’t decipher, but in hope he still opens the book and
peers inside.
The first page features a highly stylised, elaborately painted and gilded
illumination of a naked man with a massive, erect cock staring out at the
reader. At his feet kneels another figure, just as naked as he is, though
positioned as such that the reader can’t tell their biological sex, gazing up
at the standing man with abject adoration. A chain, or a rope, or something,
picked out in silver, extends from he standing man’s right hand to curl around
the kneeling figure’s throat like leash.
A blush rises to his cheeks. He flips the page. More text he can’t read
surrounded by illumination depicting little naked figures contorted into all
sorts of impractical sexual positions, all surrounded by flowering vines and
birds. He flips the page. More of the same. He flips the page.
In the top left corner there is a small image of the standing man from the
first illumination, naked and massively erect once more. He stands wreathed in
a gold and red border, holding the end of another silver chain and looking down
at the larger figure that occupies most of the page. This figure is of a naked
man, different from the first, stretched out as if lying on his back. The chain
extends from the small figure’s hand and enters the reclining figure’s open
mouth. A line of muted silver, as if an extension of the chain, follows the
centre of the larger figure’s throat down to his chest, where an image of his
heart is picked out in that same muted silver.
He finds his eyes caught on the look of helplessness on the reclining figure’s
face. He lifts a finger, runs it down the figure’s cheek to his open mouth,
turned down at the corners in an exaggerated expression of agony.
Lifting his hand he flips the page. More writing. He flips ahead to the next
illumination.
The image this time is of the standing man and the reclining man having sex.
The reclining man is on his back, legs spread, the standing man kneeling
between them. The reclining man looks up at the standing man with complete
adoration, both hands raised to cup his face. On his chest his heart is once
more picked out in silver.
He closes the book. He feels uneasy. Perhaps he should come back to them in the
morning.
As he falls back to sleep he thinks of Hux’s indignation for him, the man’s
insistence that Dalie should be punished. He is not weak. He does not think she
hurt him, or at least he does not think she hurt him any more than anyone else
he’s been attached to has, but perhaps he’s wrong. He does not want to pick
apart his feelings about her actions right then, so instead he thinks of Hux.
He thinks of evidence that Hux must care for him, at least a little. It makes
him feel odd. The last thing he thinks of as sleep takes him is touching his
mind to Hux’s.
He dreams. He is in a cavernous room, the walls, floor and ceiling the darkest,
most light devouring black. He cannot move. His body won’t obey. He begins to
panic. All he can tell is that he’s lying down on something soft, but the
softness gives him no comfort. A hand, he feels a hand on his ankle, cupping
the bone. He realises that he’s naked.
The hand moves up his leg, over his calf, to his thigh, where it begins to dip,
moving inwards. He tries to shake it off. He tries to shout. He tries to reach
for the Force and destroy the person touching him. Nothing happens.
Another hand, on his other thigh. Suddenly they grab him, shove his legs
upwards, pin his knees to his chest. “Now, now,” a voice says as he frantically
tries to make his legs press themselves together, “You know you’ll only hurt
yourself if you struggle.” He knows that voice.
Snoke moves over him, pining him down beneath the man’s naked bulk. He wants to
scream. He can’t scream. If he screamed no one would hear him, and if they did
no one would care.
One of the hands leaves his legs and moves downwards, towards Snoke’s groin. A
moment. A movement. A stabbing, killing pain up inside of him. A high, sharp
sound escapes between his lips.
The hand moves again, curls around his throat. “Enough of that,” the man
orders. The pain continues, intensifying in waves with the man’s movements.
His arm, suddenly he can feel his arm. He brings it up, clawing at the grip the
man has on his throat. The grip tightens. Snoke laughs. He can’t breathe. A
light slap to the side of his face. A reminder. “You should know better by now-
” Snoke leaning in close, as if to kiss him.
The man stops. Frowns. His head turns this way, that. “Who are you?” his eyes
narrow, he pulls back suddenly. A lance of pain up inside, then lessening to a
sting. Air rushing into his lungs. Somehow he manages to sit up.
His limbs aren’t his. They are too thin, the skin a different shade of pale,
fine reddish blonde hairs growing from them. He looks up. Looks at Snoke. Snoke
is looking back at him, something between fury and contempt on his face. “You
can’t have him!” the man snarls, striding in close. The man is no longer naked,
a robe of glittering gold concealing his form. “He’s mine. He will always be
mine!”
He wakes to a world gone white. He sucks in deep, heaving breaths, still
feeling as if he’s being strangled. He blinks, then tries to blink the after
shadows from behind his eyes. He smells smoke. His blanket is on fire.
He leaps out of the berth and grabs it with the Force, throwing it into the
refresher just as the sonic fire suppression system starts up. He shudders at
the noise. Looking around he tries to work out what happened. He sees scorch
marks, sees other evidence of small fires just extinguished. He must have
channelled Force lightning in his sleep. Snoke on him, inside of him. Another
lance of power from his fingertips, earthing against the plasteel floor.
He sinks back to sit on the edge of the berth, mind racing. He feels very cold.
Very, very cold.
***** Chapter 18 *****
Chapter Notes
     Thank you all for bearing with me whilst I've had writer's block, and
     thanks as alwats for your kudos and kind comments.
He sits at his desk eating a rationbar and reviewing reports that have built up
during his time on Maneshfva. By his elbow a mug of hot water sits, a small
square of seaweed bobbing about inside. The seaweed had still been in his
luggage, on the shuttle. He is glad the shuttle has returned, Mitaka and the
full squad of Stormtroopers onboard, none lost after those last moments when
he’d watched them shrinking to nothing down below.
Things are not good. Everyone aboard the Finalizer is horribly jumpy, almost
radiating terror. He does not know exactly what went down in his absence, but
it seems to have thoroughly put the fear of Kylo Ren into the crew. Not that
it’s much of a crew. They were understaffed to begin with, and now with a
second ship and the Supreme Leader throwing people out of airlocks the
situation has only gotten worse.
Their plan for the next few days is to sell of a few more of Snoke’s
possessions and then organise a refuel and resupply. He would consider also
organising some mercenaries, or perhaps a recruitment drive, but mercenaries
can prove exceedingly expensive in the long run and unless Kylo Ren is willing
to sit around reading minds to make sure no one is an enemy agent or harbouring
unhelpful ideology neither idea seems particularly safe right now. He has an
idea, or at least the idea of an idea, the sense that he’s forgotten something
useful. He hopes whatever the thought is it becomes clearer soon.
A chime at his door makes him look up. He checks who it is on his pad. It’s
Mitaka, back in uniform and looking uncomfortable. He goes to the door to let
the man in.
“General Hux, Sir!” the man greets him with a salute. He waves Mitaka inside.
“Yes Lieutenant?”
The man stands awkwardly in the middle of the room, one hand behind his back,
the expression on his face conflicted.
He’s contemplating telling the man to either speak or leave him in peace, when
Mitaka brings forward the hand that was behind his back and holds it out toward
him. In his grip is a familiar length of silk. That bloody shawl. “I’m sorry
Sir,” the man says. “He’d gathered all these guards around when the Knight took
you, and then he wouldn’t let us leave unless I promised to give it to you. He
also said to tell you, and I won’t use his exact words because I don’t want to
say them any more than I think you want to hear them, but it was something
about showing you the ‘sunsnake temple’ if you ever come back to the moon.”
He looks at the shawl. He looks at Mitaka’s uncomfortable face. He snatches the
shawl out of the man’s hand and dumps it on the desk. “Is that all Lieutenant?”
Mitaka pauses. An even more agonized look comes over his face. “Permission to
speak freely Sir?”
He wonders what the man could possibly have to say. He supposes there’s only
one way to find out. “Granted.”
“Sir, I really don’t wish to speak out of turn-” a pause, a breath while the
man gathers his thoughts. “On the moon, on Maneshfva, I believe there were
mistakes made. Mistakes made by me, mistakes made by the Supreme Leader,
mistakes made by the Command Staff onboard the Finalizer, mistakes made by you,
and mistakes made by the troops.” A pause, a slightly panicked look. “If anyone
is to be held accountable I would prefer it to be me instead of the squad, they
look to their commanders for direction and as a Lieutenant I should have done
better.”
“I am not looking to hold anyone to account,” he says, curious. “Continue,
Lieutenant.”
The man takes a moment to gather his courage, but when he speaks his voice is
firm. “None of us did enough to ensure your safety. We all knew Sunny Adar was
making you uncomfortable, we all knew he was sexually interested in you, we all
knew, or at least suspected, he was being dishonest in his motives for bringing
us to the Hutt’s palace, yet we let ourselves be isolated in a place where he
had the upper hand, we let our guard down, became inebriated, and lost track of
where you were. Anything could have happened to you, Sir. You could have been
killed!” Mitaka’s voice raises on the latter, and he wonders why the idea seems
to distress the man so much.
“We made it through the situation on Maneshfva with no losses, but I concede
that you have something of a point. Is this all you wished to raise with me
Lieutenant?” he asks, trying not to think of Sunny Adar’s mouth, his hands on
him.
Mitaka frowns, fidgets. It is obvious the man has more to say. He walks over to
sit in one of the steel framed chairs that serves as his small lounge area and
gestures for Mitaka to sit in the other. The man does, nervous, sitting as much
to attention as a person physically can. “Speak freely, I wish to hear your
thoughts.” He is curious. He cannot imagine Mitaka approaching him, a superior
officer, in such a way to share his concerns before Snoke died. He wonders
what’s changed.
It takes a while, but eventually the man gathers himself enough to speak again,
his voice low, urgent. “I do not want you to think I am being insubordinate, I
do not want you to think I am being disloyal to the First Order. I am loyal. I
am loyal to what we have the opportunity to become, but we won’t become
anything if you die.” A moment of confusion. He thinks through the implications
of what the Lieutenant is saying, the notion of ‘what we have the opportunity
to become,’ but the man is still talking, the words rolling out almost without
his control. “I accept if you feel you have to report what I’m about to say to
the Supreme Leader. I accept if you feel I need to be punished, or
reconditioned for it, or even executed, though I do beg you not to involve the
Stormtroopers if you feel that I have truly overstepped my bounds. The thing
that I must say, the thing that I think you need to realise is that if you die
it is all going to fall apart. No one is going to follow him without you. As
far as the crew is concerned he is more monster than man. They are terrified of
him, Sir, and without you as a buffer they will all either flee to one of the
other factions or, more likely, they will try to bring him down and die in the
attempt.”
A horrible feeling comes over him. The man is right. Kylo Ren would probably
kill him for thinking it, but he really can’t see the crew following the man
for long with only fear to ensure their loyalty. Especially when he has the
tendency to suddenly turn on them and start killing people. Is he really all
that stands between the real First Order and complete destruction? Mitaka is
staring at him, white faced, eyes huge and dark. The man is afraid, afraid but
still brave. “I won’t mention this conversation to him, though I cannot
guarantee he won’t read it in my mind.” Mitaka seems to get even paler, there
is one thing he can reassure him of however. “You will not be punished for
bringing your concerns to me, and neither will the Stormtroopers.” He frowns,
“You said mistakes were made on Maneshfva, and I think you have delineated
those you feel were made by yourself and the squad, but you mentioned the
Supreme Leader, the Command Staff and myself. I would guess the mistakes made
by the Supreme Leader were sending us without backup and insisting we went to
the Hutt’s palace to make the deal, the mistake made by the Command Staff was
denying us backup when I comm-ed to request it at the palace- though I think
they’ve more than paid for it- but may I ask what mistakes you feel I made?”
“I will say, Sir, that I also think it was a mistake sending you in the first
place,” Mitaka hastens to say. “You are one of the two most important figures
in the First Order, and as such it was reckless to put you in such a vulnerable
position when the Order itself is in such a vulnerable position.” Mitaka
swallows, audibly. “As to the mistakes you made, Sir, please forgive me for
this, but you showed an inadequate concern for your own safety. I am aware that
it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to argue with the Supreme
Leader when he selected you for the mission, when he gave you only one squad of
Stormtroopers to protect you, and when he insisted you go to the Hutt’s palace,
but you should have made sure you had a bodyguard of at least two Stormtroopers
at all times, you should not have gotten off the transport to repair that skiff
and put yourself in danger from that snake, and you should never, ever, have
gone off with that man unprotected and without telling any of us where you were
going.”
A pause. Mitaka looks like a man facing the gallows. He doesn’t know what to
say. When he thinks back to the choices he made the man does seem to have a
point, though he never felt any danger from the sunsnake. “I will take your
words into consideration,” he says after a moment’s thought. He is still
struggling with the notion that the survival of the First Order might depend so
much on his continued existence. For the longest time Snoke was the one who
mattered, and he would have assumed with Snoke’s death Kylo Ren took up that
mantle.
They fall to silence for a while. Mitaka is still looking at him, still looking
worried. His mouth opens once, twice, before the man shakes his head. Face
returning to a blank expression. “You may go Lieutenant, if you have nothing
further to say.”
“No Sir,” the man replies with a salute, getting to his feet and all but
scrambling from the room. He watches the door slide shut behind the officer
pensively. He feels conflicted. A little annoyed at being made aware of his
mistakes, confused that his life might mean so much, worried about what will
happen if he does die, even more confused by the conflicted feelings the
possible collapse of the First Order evokes in him, almost frightened about
what Kylo Ren will do if he discovers the conversation or the way Mitaka (and
probably other officers) are thinking, but also a little proud of the
Lieutenant. It cannot have been an easy thing, to confront a commanding officer
in such a way, when you know it might put yourself and those you care about in
danger. If Snoke was still alive, if he was still the man he was under Snoke’s
control, it is unlikely the Lieutenant’s bravery would go unpunished.
He returns to his desk, picks up his pad and appends a note to Mitaka’s
personnel file recommending him for promotion when the time comes. Then he
sinks back into the desk chair, troubled.
It is only later, as he is getting ready for bed that the idea from earlier
crystalizes. He remembers hundreds of blank, mechanical faces. Droids.
Decommissioned from the Clone Wars, unwanted, unowned, unprotected. If they are
still there on the moon where he gave his mother to the water they could
retrieve them, get them running, change their programming, that way they could
swell the ranks without it costing them thousands upon thousands of credits.
He will bring it up with the Supreme Leader in the morning. As he walks towards
his berth something else niggles at him, something seems wrong. Something he
didn’t notice earlier.
The box, it’s the box, the box is gone. The box containing Skywalker’s
lightsabre is no longer on the table by his berth. Someone has been in his
rooms.
Panic. He looks around, tries to spot anything else disturbed, but everything
seems to be as he left it before Maneshfva. His eyes go back to the spot where
he last saw the box. Perhaps Kylo Ren took it, the thing belongs more to the
man than to him. Perhaps.
He will ask the Supreme Leader in the morning, when he brings up the droids.
***** Chapter 19 *****
It took him a very long time the night before to fall back to sleep. He feels
wrong. Off. Exposed. Assaulted. He is afraid. He is very afraid. He knows those
limbs, that body. He has seen it. Admired it. Now he has been inside it.
He does not know if that was Hux’s memory, or the man’s nightmare. He does not
know if linking their minds allowed something to bleed through from the
redhead. He does not know if the dream was just some sick figment his own mind
made up, and he does not know how to ask Hux, because the only way he will ever
know is to find out from the man himself. He thinks of the images he took from
Hux’s mind. Hux and Snoke. He tries to think past his first visceral reaction,
his disgust and jealousy, and remember context. He can’t. He has no memory of
what Hux thought about what was happening.
He cannot bring himself to face Hux yet.
First thing, when he awoke and could no longer fool himself into thinking he’d
fall back to sleep, he summoned Jrii and Xatjt. They have already been gone for
hours, off on the quest to find his child. He hopes he can trust them.
He had told them what he knew, but he had also showed Dalie’s memories to them.
It was odd. As he projected the relevant recollections into their minds he
realised he could have just done the same with Hux, instead of linking them as
he had. With Jrii and Xatjt he created a one-way street, a way to give
information without also risking giving access to his mind. He had approached
Hux’s mind like the mind of a friend, an ally, another Jedi, as if he was still
one himself. It is only on reflection that he realises how vulnerable he could
have made himself. Has made himself if that dream originated in Hux’s mind. He
is not sure why he chose to do what he did. It just seemed the natural choice.
He has several buyers lined up for more of Snoke’s goods, a lot of them in
local systems, and he intends to try and make as many deals as possible before
the day is done. He’ll go himself, in a fast shuttle with a squad of
Stormtroopers. He needs the distraction.
Before he leaves he summons Saiva, Gydn and Neiro, telling them that Hux is in
charge while he’s away, but ordering them to keep an eye on things and to be
prepared to defend the fleet if they’re attacked. He chooses the same squad of
Stormtroopers as he took to Telbenefva. They load more crates of black stone, a
couple of crates of gilded panels from Snoke’s bedroom, some more chests full
of smaller items, more paintings, some tapestries, a nearly life-sized
sculpture of a naked youth being chased down by some monster headed god -prey
of one sort or another- and what seems like half of Snoke’s wardrobe. There is
a musty smell to the clothes, the smell of the man himself, gone stale. After
the dream it makes his stomach turn.
He starts closest, beginning with the ice planet Dra Ninfeifva, still in the
Fva Amuir system. There he takes the shuttle to first one ice palace and then
another. The world remains frozen all year round and its few, exceedingly
wealthy, inhabitants carve themselves elaborate dwellings out of the ice. The
first palace looks like a white, glittering dragon in the mid-afternoon sun of
the world. He is greeted by a woman clothed head to toe in snow-white fur over
a gown of equally white silk. Around her neck, her wrists, in her hair, in her
ears, piecing her lip and her nose huge white gems glitter.
Her guards watch him warily as he shows her the items they discussed. Her eyes
rove over the paintings, the sculpture, the contents of two of the chests. In
the end she chooses the sculpture, two of the paintings, and half the contents
of one of the chests. She tries to bargain him down, he remains stubborn, she
concedes with a laugh that bounces lightly off the ice inside her palace. She
transfers the credits, poking at her pad with her nails, long and plated in
white metal.
At the next palace, a confection of white ice shaped like a crown, he is
greeted by a matronly Toydarian. For a moment he worries, because of their
immunity to Force manipulation, but he reminds himself that he hasn’t had to
use the Force yet. “For my son,” she says again and again, to explain why she
is thinking of buying anything. “He lives on Coruscant. Terrible place
Coruscant. So crowded. He lives in this tiny little apartment, only three
bedrooms.”
She wants four of the tapestries, the contents of two of the chests, and a
large painting of a naked male Duros gazing out at the observer with
incongruously seductive vulnerability. “For my son,” she insists.
She also tries to bargain with him, except she’s stubborn enough that he
eventually gives her a 5% discount on his original asking price. He could just
kill her since he can’t use the Force to make her accept his terms, but word
might get around and make offloading more of Snoke’s things harder. She
transfers the credits to much “My son will be so happy. This will make his
little Coruscanti apartment so much nicer.”
The next stop is in a neighbouring system, the Syulmit System. There are only
three inhabitable worlds, one being one of the system’s two planets, Vraphro,
and the other two being moons orbiting Vraphro- Amch and Polnyru. He takes
Snoke’s clothing to a tiny apartment, not quite as wide as the shuttle and
barely any deeper, on the densely packed urban moon of Amch, where an excitable
young Gungan is happy to take them off his hands. The young male is apparently
the head of the wardrobe department of Amch’s major, exceedingly well funded,
theatre. Snoke would have been furious.
He then goes to the much more sparsely populated, agrarian moon of Polnyru,
which supplies most of the locally grown produce for the Syulmit System. The
man he meets at a sprawling villa there, human, going grey around the temples,
is only interested in a collection of tiny, carved stone statuettes.
“Alderaanian,” the man whispers, running reverent fingers over the delicate
figures. “Thousands of years old. Irreplaceable, as you can well imagine.” The
man’s hands shake as he transfers the credits, his eyes never really leaving
the statuettes. Inside his study, where he had led them and offered them Kaf or
some of the local tea, there are other such figurines, ceramics, textiles,
maps, trinkets, books, all from the destroyed planet.
The next stop is Vraphro, to a government building where a pair of bureaucrats
in matching black suits, with matching severe haircuts, and matching humourless
expressions transfer credits for the stone and gilded panels. They say nothing
to suggest what they want the material for and he doesn’t linger.
The final stop is about eight hours away by hyperspace. Canto Bight. Another
desert world. The thought occurs to him early in the trip, so he spends most of
the voyage sitting in his plush leather chair and trying to use the Force to
scan his destination for his child. He finds nothing.
In the silence of frustration his mind starts lingering on the dream. He thinks
of Hux, Hux under Snoke. That was Hux’s body, wasn’t it? He tries to think
back. Tries to remember if there was any sense of another consciousness trapped
alongside his. He can’t remember. The Dark rises, almost unnoticed. The shuttle
starts to shake. He forces it back down.
He meets the buyer at the casino, bringing the remaining objects to his private
room. There he’s met by a middle aged human with a barely dressed blue-skinned
Twilek hanging off his arm. The Twilek seems very young, and her movements are
slow, dazed. He can read in her mind that she’s taken something the man gave
her, but she’s not sure what it was. She thinks she wants to be there, because
Mr. Werinn is a much nicer man than the last one she was with, and he likes to
spend money on her and give her lots of nice things. She’s hoping one day to
save up enough to return to Ryloth. A memory. Ripped out of her mother’s arms
as a child. Forced on board a shuttle. Stuck in a small hold with at least a
dozen more Twilek women and children. Anger. Pain. Longing for home. He pulls
his mind away from hers. There is a wave, a ripple through the room. For a
moment everything rattles, from the gilded lounge suite to the numerous open
bottles of expensive wine to the crystal chandeliers hanging from the high
ceiling. He remembers the dream. For some odd reason his mind flicks to Dalie.
He forces down the Dark.
Werinn is a weapons dealer. Canto Bight has always been lousy with them. The
man is also almost painfully insincere, a smile on his face that neither meets
his eyes nor reflects his mind. “You want a drink?” the man asks, then answers
for him. “Of course you want a drink. Come, sit down,” a gesture at the gilded
lounge suite as the man pours them both a glass of something pale green and
bubbly. He declines both. The man then offers him the Twilek.
He feels her fear in the Force. Yet she still comes over to him, stumbling
thanks to whatever the man gave her, and tries to pull him into an embrace. He
pushes her away. Gently. Then grabs her arm when the action makes her stumble
and almost fall. He leads her over to the lounge and helps her sit down before
turning to the man he’s come to do business with.
A gesture and the Stormtroopers carry the two paintings, the one remaining
tapestry and the half empty chest over. Every now and then Werinn makes a sound
of disappointment, as though he expected Snoke’s treasures to be much greater
than they are, but he can feel desire, greed, envy in his mind. The greed
crystalizes when wooden box is removed from the chest and opened to reveal an
ancient, fragile, Mandalorian war helmet. The man wants it. The man must have
it. The man covets the power, the masculinity it represents. The man does not
let any of this on, his face remaining perfectly impassive. The man also does
not want to pay anything near a reasonable price for any of it.
It feels like they bargain for hours as he gets more and more impatient and the
Twilek dozes off to snore gently on the couch. Werrin will give him 100 credits
for a painting worth thirty times that. Werrin will give him 1200 credits for a
tapestry worth seven times that. Werrin will give him 7000 credits for the
helmet, worth ten times that. Eventually he resorts to telling the man that if
he doesn’t really want to buy anything there’s plenty of others that do. Still
the man tries, tries and tries until, frustrated, Kylo Ren accepts a 12%
discounted price for everything except the helmet. The helmet he demands full
price for, knowing how much the man wants it. Finally they strike a bargain for
both paintings, the tapestry and most of the contents of the chest, including
the helmet.
“You’re a shrewd businessman, I’ll give you that,” the man says. “Are you sure
I can’t offer you a drink?” He declines once more and the man shrugs, going
over to the gilded sideboard where he retrieves a plasteel crate. The man plops
it down on the low table in front of the lounge and sits, disturbing the Twilek
who makes a tiny squeak of fear before she remembers where she is. The man
opens the crate revealing stack after stack of gleaming credit chips. “I always
conduct these kinds of small deals in real cash,” the man says, “It’s a habit
I’ve had since I was a kid.”
He watches the man count out ten-thousand credit chips, thousand credit chips,
hundred credit chips, ten credit chips and finally one credit chips. Irritated.
The temptation to just strike the man down where he sits and take the money is
very strong. He doesn’t. It feels childish. He imagines explaining to Hux, but
then maybe Hux would understand. Maybe not. It really shouldn’t matter.It does
matter, and it’s probably time he accepts that.
There’s more credit chips left in the crate when the man’s done than there are
in the pile on the table for him to take. He doesn’t need to read the man’s
mind to know it’s something of a petty power play, Werinn enjoys forcing others
to see just how rich he is. Anyway, he doesn’t want to delve too deeply into
the man’s thoughts, because they’re mainly preoccupied with all the degrading
ways he’s going to fuck the Twilek before he dumps her.
The Stormtroopers pack the credit chips into the almost empty chest under his
supervision before the man dismisses them with a wave and a “Nice doing
business with you” and goes to grope the Twilek. They let themselves out. It’s
getting late, he’s hungry and it’s a bit of a walk to the shuttle bay. For a
moment he considers stopping to get something to eat, but Werinn’s put him off
Canto Bight and there’s rationbars on the shuttle.
They’re almost back to the vessel when he feels a warning in the Force. He
draws his lightsabre, gestures for the Stormtroopers to draw their blasters. A
group of men, mercenaries from the look of them, materialise from a dozen
different hiding places in the narrow street. The narrow, deserted street he
realises. A quick perusal of their surface thoughts tells him Werinn sent them.
He wants his credits back. In fact he organised to have mercenaries ambush them
and retrieve the credits after the sale long before they even arrived on the
planet.
He kills them, all of them, aside from the two killed by Stormtroopers. “Take
the chest, return to the shuttle. I will be with you soon.” he orders.
Werinn doesn’t even see him come in. The man is hunched over the Twilek on the
lounge, muttering obscenities against the skin of one of her lekku. She sees
him though, her hazy eyes half focus on him as he approaches the couple on
quiet feet. It’s only as he grabs Werinn, pulls him away from the Twilek, and
sticks his lightsabre through the man’s face that she reacts. She shrieks,
flinching clumsily away from him to cower by the lounge when her drugged body
can’t quite work out how to obey the instinct to flee. He can read in her mind
that the man gave her some more of whatever drug it was just after he left.
He drops Werinn, most of the man’s face burnt away, and looks at the girl. She
is so very young. Young and frightened.
The crate with the credit chips is still on the low table, he flips open the
lid, surveys the contents. At least ten times as much as Werinn paid for
Snoke’s treasures. He takes out ten ten-thousand credit chips and looks once
more at the Twilek. “Stand,” he orders, reinforcing it with the Force. The girl
does so, clumsily.
He knows there are ways to burn the influence of substances out of a being’s
system using the Force, he just has no idea how to do it. There are Light ways,
which are easier on the patient but require delicacy and finesse, and there are
Dark ways, which are dangerous and can lead to the patient’s death. He doesn’t
trust himself to attempt either.
“Take these,” he orders. Mechanically the girl holds out her hands to accept
the credit chips. She is terrified. She doesn’t know what’s happening.
Underneath it all she still longs to return to Ryloth.
The credits can pay her way one hundred times or more. Of course she may still
be detained in connection to Werinn’s death. “Summon the security forces,” he
orders. She does so. They wait.
Two security officers burst into the room. “There’s no one here but the
Twilek,” her tells them, using the Force to alter their perceptions. “She did
not kill Mr Werinn.” He uses the Force to change the Twilek’s memories as he
says “She was dozing on the lounge and when she woke up she found a man had
broken in. The man was wearing a mask. She can’t identify him. The man shouted
at Mr Werinn and accused him of cheating him in a deal, then shot Mr Werinn in
the face with a blaster. She was very frightened. The man didn’t see her
because she was lying down on the lounge. The man ran out. She got up and
summoned you. You will note down what happened and then-” he looks at the two
officers, choosing the one with seniority and connections “-You will take her
back to her residence so she can pack her possessions. You will then take her
to the shuttle port and make sure she gets on a shuttle to Ryloth, or a shuttle
to a world where she can catch a shuttle to Ryloth. Earlier today Mr Werinn
gave her 100 thousand credits for her services. You will not question this. You
will make sure she departs safely.”
He turns most of his attention back to the Twilek, still standing where he left
her. “Mr Werinn gave you 100 thousand credits for your services. You will use
some of the money to make your way back home to Ryloth. When you are there you
will make a new life for yourself. A life that makes you happier. This nice
officer is going to take you back to your residence so you can pack, and then
she’ll make sure you start your journey safely. You will forget you ever saw
me.”
He holds them in a web of the Force as he picks up the crate with the credit
chips before pausing, eyeing Snoke’s treasures where they lay around the room.
With a shrug he gathers them to him with the Force, floating them ahead of
himself as he leaves. There’s no reason he can’t sell them again.
He waits until he’s left the casino and is halfway back to the shuttle before
he releases the officers and the Twilek. He’s done what he can for the girl.
Perhaps she’ll be alright.
As they leave the planet he wonders why he did it. Not why he killed Werinn,
Werinn double crossed him, the man deserved death and more. No, he wonders why
he gave the Twilek the credits and then tried to give her a better future. Her
memories. A child. Stolen from her world and sold into a life she didn’t
choose. Perhaps he is getting soft.
The journey back seems to take forever. He eats two rationbars and drinks
instant kaf with too much sugar. It’s late. He wonders if he’ll be able to
sleep. He remembers the dream.
They are greeted on arrival by Hux, looking tired but determined. “Supreme
Leader, Sir,” the man greets him with a salute.
“Hux,” he replies. Suddenly he wonders what the man’s first name is.
“Were you successful on your missions?” the man asks.
“More than successful. I believe we are now in a position to arrange a refuel
and resupply. We will no longer be stuck in this sector of the galaxy.”
“Very good Sir,” a pause. Hux is frowning.
“What is it General?”
“Sir,” Hux begins, meeting his gaze with a slightly apprehensive look. “I think
I may know where we can get some decommissioned Separatist droids from the
Clone Wars.”
***** Chapter 20 *****
He heads from his rooms back to the Bridge, after lunch of a rationbar and a
mug of seaweed steeped water. He feels strange. A kind of shivering anxiety,
something bordering on horror clawing at the edges of his mind. He does not
know why so he tries to ignore it. It is not the same anxiety he feels, deeper
down inside, that the Supreme Leader might discover what he did the last time
he visited the Separatist base where they’re headed. He hopes if he keeps
everyone’s attention on the business at hand Kylo Ren won’t enquire as why he
knows of the moon’s existence in the first place.
The refuel and resupply has been completed. They are finally in a better
position, at least when it comes to weapons, rations and the capacity to move
beyond the local sector.
This morning, as he was overseeing cargo shuttles full of munitions dock with
the Finalizer, his presence was requested on the Bridge. He’d arrived to see
the Supreme Leader, the command staff and techs huddled around one of the
commstech’s stations. A declaration of war between Supreme Leader Savim and the
combined forces of Supreme Leaders Alnil and Rhovat. Reports are still coming
in of a battle at Dominion Base, two small fleets meeting above the planet,
Stormtroopers meeting on the ground. A victor has not been decided yet.
While this little war rages they will be going to the jungle moon to retrieve
the droids. The moon has, as far as he can tell by searching maps and planetary
databases, no official name. It orbits around the lone, uninhabitable planet in
its small system. Its location means it is neither near anywhere anyone would
want to go, nor on the way to anywhere anyone would want to go. He imagines the
Separatists chose it for this reason. If his fuzzy, infection muddied memories
of the place are remotely reliable he thinks the main, if not only, use for the
base had been storing, repairing, and supplying droids to other bases.
A noise. He is being comm-ed. “Hux here.”
“Sir,” he can virtually hear the tech salute over the line. “All the components
have been unpacked and double checked, and the program has been loaded to the
medidroids. Permission to begin assembly of the life-support armour for Captain
Phasma?”
“Granted,” he replies, then dismisses the woman
He had almost forgotten the Captain, lying unconscious in the medbay. He had
only really remembered her when he had been organising the resupply. It was odd
how he’d found himself hesitating before he’d made himself order in the parts
for the armour. He doesn’t know why. The woman is strong, fierce, and when she
regains her mobility and independence should prove a valuable asset. He hopes.
He feels apprehension. It will not take her long to work out he’s changed, and
when she does he is not sure how she’ll react.
Thinking about her brings up another issue, the chain of command. Or, really,
the holes in the chain of command brought about by mutiny and people
displeasing the Supreme Leader. Their crew is comprised mainly of Stormtroopers
and techs, with nowhere near enough officers to staff both vessels. Since it’s
unlikely at present that a large number of officers are going to flee the other
factions to theirs they are going to make some changes. If the droids prove
salvageable, useful, which he hopes they will, it may be an idea to promote
some of the Stormtroopers and techs to officers.
His father would have killed him for even having the thought of making officers
out of Stormtroopers in the first place. It may be that they have no choice.
As it stands the Finalizer is the better staffed of the two vessels, while the
Rectitude is mainly staffed by techs under the supervision of Neiro and Gydn
Ren. Neither ship has a captain, in fact their only surviving Captain is
Phasma, and she’s army not navy. So is he, technically, but when Snoke was
alive his rank didn’t matter. Wherever Snoke sent him he went, and wherever
that was he had authority second only to Snoke, and sometimes Kylo Ren. The
situation they’re in currently is one where the traditional hierarchy of the
First Order are not going to be all that helpful. They have no base and only
two ships, a reasonable number of Stormtroopers but very few Fighter Pilots. It
seems likely the whole hierarchy is going to have to be reconfigured in the
foreseeable future. Another thing to consult the Supreme Leader about.
He still hasn’t asked the man about the lightsabre. He’d brought up the droids
and then they’d started to discuss the resupply and then the conversation had
come to a close before he remembered to mention the lightsabre. He will, later,
when he sees the man next and they have the privacy to talk.
“Sir!” he is greeted by the command staff. Saiva Ren is lurking near the
window, humming tunelessly once more. He doesn’t know where the Supreme Leader
is.
“Anything to report?”
“Heavy losses at Dominion Base. The traitors Alnil and Rhovat have bombed quite
a large part of the local region, including towns, fields, pastures and supply
centres for the base. Estimated losses to the local population number in the
hundreds of thousands. This is apparently public knowledge as Leia Organa has
released a statement condemning their actions.” Another little shiver of
horror. It makes no sense. He, himself, has ordered the death of billion. Under
Snoke’s control.No. That fact is not enough to absolve him.Does he need
absolution? The firing of Starkiller was in the First Order’s interests. It_was
an_Atrocity._Unforgiveable.Thoughts like that are treason.
“Can we trace this statement?” His voice remains perfectly level.
“No Sir. It is very heavily encoded.”
“I see. Still, have one of the techs examine it in detail, just in case,”
Organa might have made a mistake in the encoding. If so they may be able to
trace her location. He is not sure what Kylo Ren would do with that
information.
The atonal humming is starting to get to him. The figure of Saiva Ren, clad in
black, is staring out into streaks of hyperspace. Blankness. That’s the
impression he gets. Blankness with something lying underneath, lying in wait
like one of the thorn-fish of his childhood. Almost impossible to see buried in
the sand before one stepped on them, pricking themselves with venomous spines
in the process. Not many of his mother’s people died because of the thorn-fish,
they knew the way of spotting them, but amongst mainstream Arkanisian society
it was a yearly danger for those who went to swim at their placid, white-sand
beaches, protected from most real dangers by nets the thorn-fish burrowed
under.
As if the Knight can sense him watching the figure turns towards him. He looks
away, instinctively and then berates himself for looking like a fool.
“ETA to our destination?” he asks a tech.
“Approximately fifty eight minutes, Sir,” the man replies.
He leaves the bridge, pacing the halls of the ship as he waits to arrive at the
moon where he gave his mother to the water. He finds himself thinking of her.
She was quiet. Gentle. Her voice was always soft, with the slightly rolling
lilt of her people, she never raised it. She never raised her fists either.
Her hair, in his memories, is always long and thick, with a slight wave, a soft
strawberry blonde. He cannot remember the colour of her eyes. When they were on
the planet and she was out in the sun too much she’d get an ‘Arkanisian tan,’
used derogatively even by mainstream Arkanisian society for the pale, slightly
reflective cast the skin of his mother’s people developed to protect itself
from the sun. He used to get it in little splotches, like his father’s
freckles. Still does, if what he saw in the mirror that morning is any
indication. Ugly. Inhuman, that’s what Brendol Hux called it. She was pretty,
he thinks, in a delicate kind of way. He thinks he must take after his father.
His early life was spent in some kind of limbo, part way between the kitchens
with his mother and his father’s quarters. Martelle would not let him live in
their rooms on Arkanis, so he had his own, a tiny room away from everything.
Once they left the planet things were different. His father had obviously given
up on siring a legitimate child by that time, so suddenly he found himself heir
apparent. It was then that his father had truly started training him to one day
take up a position in the First Order.
He had seen his mother less and less. She had seemed to fade. Her slender form
growing nearly skeletal. She had missed the water, she said the one time he had
the opportunity and courage to ask her what was wrong. It may have been that.
It was probably also his father’s brutality.
He wants to tell someone about her. He wants to tell them that his mother was a
wonderful cook, that she was gentle, that she had a lovely singing voice, that
the only times he saw her really smile was when she saw him or the few times
she took him back to the village where she was born, that his father was a
brute, that his father took what she wasn’t offering, that his father stole her
from her home to suffer and eventually die -at his hands- in space far away
from the waters of her home.
There is no one that he can tell.
***** Chapter 21 *****
Chapter Notes
     Happy Valentines-ish day, depending on your time zone and whether you
     think it's worth acknowledging or if you think the whole thing's
     nonsense. Thank you all for sticking with the story so far, and as
     always thank you so much for leaving kudos and comments. I think
     after the next chapter I might split things again and start a new fic
     for the next part of the story.
The moon is hot, lush, humid. It has no seas, the majority of its surface is
covered in jungle veined with wide, fresh-water rivers. The air smells of
plants, animals, rotting things, and fresh water, it sits close, almost
smothering. Readings saying the relative humidity is at 97%.
Before they could land they had to clear the elevated landing pad attached to
the base, already mostly reclaimed by the jungle. Standing on its edge and
looking down reveals a river, partially covering an old road. At some time its
course must have shifted, and where vehicles and droids once moved giant
turtles now bask in the sun. Each animal, a mass of leathery skin and shell
hard enough to deflect a blaster bolt, lifted its huge head to watch them as
they disembarked. He watches one of the animals as it slips off the river’s
bank and into the water with a loud splash.
“Sir?” that’s Hux. He turns to look at the man. The redhead is standing with
Lieutenant Mitaka and a squad of Stormtroopers.
“Show me these droids,” he commands.
Hux leads the way into the base. The jungle has been hard at work here too.
Windows have cracked, and even ones that haven’t have been worked loose in
their sills by branches and vines. In places the roof has caved in, and trees
are growing in the middle of some rooms. Even with so much of the base
compromised lights switch on, or start flickering, displays show pixelated
images or error codes. Their very presence seems to have triggered some
automatic power-on, the energy being drawn from thermal generators buried deep
into the moon’s crust.
The droids, when they find them, are housed deeper in the base, in rooms with
thick walls and no windows. They are in remarkably good condition, considering
the rest of the base, with only one storage room a complete write-off, the
ceiling caved in and small animals with prehensile tails making nests amongst
the remains of the droids.
He sees mainly B1 battle droids, B2 super battle droids, and Droidekas, but
there are a few other examples of models he doesn’t immediately recognise. He’s
never had the same interest in droids as Luke, or even his grandfather was
reported to have.
He approaches a B1 battle droid and reaches out with the Force, as he’s not an
expert in droids he’s not quite sure what the Force is telling him, but it
seems to suggest the droid is only powered down and not broken. “Get the techs
in here,” he orders. “Have the droids examined. If they’re salvageable we’ll
pack them, and anything else useful, on the shuttle to bring back to the
Finalizer.”
“Of course Supreme Leader,” Hux responds.
He does a quick, and not overly accurate, count of the droids in the storage
room, curled up and packed tightly against each other. With the number of rooms
he’s seen with a roughly equivalent number of droids in them, they might end up
leaving the moon with a few thousand troops to swell their ranks. All for only
the cost of fuel to the moon, repair -if much repair needs doing-, and
reprogramming.
“This was an excellent suggestion, General,” he says, looking over at the
redhead. The man looks a little stunned. He tries to remember complimenting him
for his plans in the past, his mind draws a blank. Surely he must have. At
least sometimes. When the man was coming up with plans that have vitally shaped
the way they’ve gone forward in the wake of the mutiny. Still his mind draws a
blank. He will have to think on it.
His direct involvement is not needed in inspecting and loading the droids. He
finds himself wandering the base, looking in rooms, watching techs and
Stormtroopers go about their business. It is almost peaceful. When it comes
time for the first shuttle load of droids to be shipped back to the Finalizer
he almost considers getting onboard, but Neiro and Gydn are watching the
Rectitude and Saiva’s watching the Finalizer, so he doesn’t feel any urgency.
Earlier, while they were in hyperspace on their way to the moon, he resumed his
exercise regime. He has let himself lose condition in the days, weeks now,
since Snoke died. Weights were harder than they should have been, and his
endurance is down. He sparred for a while with the training droids. He was glad
that he performed much as always, though he’d been more careful not to break
anything beyond repair in this new world where the expense of repair and
replacement now falls in his lap. With Saiva, Gydn and Neiro around he might
even be able to spar properly, with the closest to an equal he’s likely to find
outside of Rey. He has not fought another Force user since his stupid attempt
to fight Luke’s Force projection. If he’d only thought. Reached out. Sensed
properly, he wouldn’t have made such an idiot out of himself.
He’s standing in an empty corridor, staring out a cracked window at the turtles
bobbing to the surface of the river below when he sees movement out of the
corner of his eye. A flash. A flicker. He turns. A figure, stumbling down the
hall. He blinks, The figure disappears.
He grasps for the Dark, draws it in close, and then reaches out to sense what
that was. He senses nothing, no, not quite nothing. Something small, weak, a
shadow in the Force. Perhaps a Force ghost. Perhaps a memory.
Nothing attacks him. He lets himself relax. He turns back to watch the turtles.
Another flicker.
He whirls around, the Dark drawn tight around him until the floor rumbles.
There is a man, a young man, flickering in and out of existence. The details of
the figure are blurry. The man is faceless. Dressed in something dark though he
can’t tell the details of the outfit. The figure is stumbling down the hall,
one hand clutched to his side, disappearing only to appear a few steps ahead of
where he was or a few steps behind. Between one blink and the next there are
two of them, three of them, a whole series. Each trapped in one slice of the
journey from one end of the corridor to the other. Then a sensation like his
ears popping. The figure vanishes.
He breathes deep. Keeps the Dark close, ready to use, and heads down the
corridor in the direction the figure was going. He passes Stormtroopers and
techs, droids being examined and droids being taken to the shuttle. Every now
and then he sees a flicker of the figure, but no one else reacts. Definitely
something in the Force.
In one of the storage rooms the figure is kneeling by a droid, hands cupping
its face the way his mother would cup his to see if he was alright when he fell
as a child. It flickers. Its head is still a mass of something indistinct. A
blur. Techs walk past, walk through it. It no more notices them than they
notice it. He can sense them noticing him though, wariness rising in the room.
He ignores it, keeps his eyes on the figure. As it bends down, almost as if to
look the droid in the eye, a flicker of copper resolves itself in the haze of
its head. Hux.
He steps back. The figure vanishes. It’s Hux. He knows it’s Hux. The way it
moves, even injured as it obviously is, and younger, shorter, it’s Hux. He is
seeing some Force imprint of Hux. Is it Hux’s memories, bleeding in because he
linked their minds?
A flicker. The figure is back in the corridor. He must follow it.
It’s easier said than done. The figure, Hux, keeps vanishing. Reappearing in
different locations, manifesting as different moments of what is possibly the
man’s previous experience of the base. He gets turned around a few times.
Chases images that leads him back the way he came. Eventually, hours later,
hours in which techs and Stormtroopers ignore him and work around him, he finds
the figure in the communications room.
Here it is split. A collection of slices of time. There are some seemingly
stuck moving towards a commstation. There are some, a splintered, half merged
group imputing data at the commstation. There is another one, clearer than the
rest, standing there, hand clenching its side, talking. The face is partially
resolved. Fragments of Hux’s features shining through the blur. His gaze look
empty. His face is distraught. His eyes are red, and tears sometimes come into
focus rolling down his cheeks.
He can hear nothing. He knows Hux is talking to someone, but he can’t tell whom
or what the man is saying. He watches this for a long while. Until another
sensation like his ears popping. The manifold manifestations of Hux disappear
until there is one, trudging its way out of the room, wavering, arms hanging
weakly at its sides.
A glance at the commstation, it’s dead. Nothing to be learnt from it. He
follows the figure. It leads him out of the building, out of the base, down to
moon’s surface near the river. He can see turtles through it, see them raise
their heads to assess if he’ll make a nice dinner. He draws the Dark close,
lets them feel it, heavy in the air. They give up without an attempt.
Up ahead, on the white road, crumbling to nothing, being consumed by river and
jungle, he sees another figure. A real figure. Sitting cross-legged on the
ground. The turtles are ignoring it just as they ignore him, though he can’t
see why they should because it’s Hux. Not the Force image of Hux. The real Hux.
The man is staring out into the river water with a desolate look on his face.
He approaches. The Force impression vanishes, with another ear pop. Another
appears, inside, overlapping Hux. This time the figure is perfectly clear. It
is Hux, young, late teens at the oldest, wearing a dark, First Order uniform.
In is arms is a long bundle, wrapped in a blanket and strapped with stones.
He’s shaking. Tears are pouring down his face. He steps forward, to the water.
Wading in with the bundle. When he’s up to his waist he lays the bundle down,
into the water. A flash, faded reddish-blonde hair escaping from beneath the
blanket to lay on the river’s surface. The impression of Hux, clenching his
eyes shut, a soundless sob shaking him. He lets the bundle go. It sinks. The
figure vanishes.
The figure reappears, inside and overlapping Hux. Bundle once more in its arms,
headed once more to the river.
Mother mother mother mother mother mother mother mother mother mother mother
mother mother mother mother mother mother mother mother mother mother mother
mother mother mother mother mother mother mother mother mother mother mother
mother mother mother mother mother mother mother mother mother mother mother
mother mother mother mother-
He blinks, tries to shake away the idea. He can’t know for sure. Only Hux
knows. “Hux?” he calls out. That same ear-popping sensation. The figure
vanishes until all there is before him is the man.
Hux looks up at him. The redhead’s eyes are a little red. For a moment he
doesn’t know what to say. He could just let it go. He could. But something, the
sensation of being on a precipice, overtakes him. Maybe it’s the Force. Maybe
it’s his own impatient nature.
He goes over to the redhead and sits down on the remains of the road, next to
Hux. “The Force showed me things here,” he says, because that’s probably a
better way of putting it that accusing the man of letting his memories bleed
out because he was foolish enough to link their minds. Which might not even be
what is happening. It really might be the Force. “You have been here before,
when you were younger. Who was it you put in the river?”
There is a long moment, then Hux speaks, his voice soft, a little hoarse. “My
mother.”
His notion had been right. Hux had come here to dispose of his mother’s corpse.
The question is why? “What happened to her?”
“My father killed her,” the redhead replies. He can feel Hux’s distress in the
Force.
“Why?” he asks, and then regrets it when Hux grimaces. Looks away.
“An accident, I always assumed,” the man says, staring back out to the place in
the river where he sank her corpse. “Brendol Hux was a brute. He saw her as his
property, property he could treat how he liked.”
He feels sorrow. A horrible, yawning sensation in his chest. He wants to
comfort the redhead but he doesn’t know how. He thinks back to being unable to
shoot the command centre where he knew his mother was on the Resistance ship.
He imagines Leia taken from him, not by his own actions, but by the actions of
someone else. He then remembers that she almost was. A sick feeling begins to
claw at him.
Hux is talking again. “In truth he saw almost everyone as property. His wife,
my mother, me, the Stormtroopers. People were either property, enemies, or -if
they were strong enough- uneasy allies.”
“It’s a monstrous thing he did,” he says, softly. It is true. Hux hums in
agreement. More than half sure he should just leave it be he still finds
himself saying “So he killed her, and you brought her here?”
“She would have wanted to be given to the waters. I am only sorry that I
couldn’t bring her back to the seas of Arkanis,” the redhead replies. He feels
Hux’s fear in the Force, fear tinged with resignation. The redhead turns to
him, fixes him with those pale eyes. “What else did you see Supreme Leader?
Have you come to kill me?”
“No!” he snaps, and then softer when Hux flinches from him. “No, I have not.
Why do you ask?”
“Don’t you know?” the man says with a bitter laugh. “When he killed her, I took
her body and ran from him. I ran from the First Order. He’d stabbed me, I
thought I was dying and at that point I didn’t care. I don’t even know how I
found this moon, but I did, and after I sank her body I went back inside that
base-” the man gestures haphazardly over his shoulder “and I sent a communique
to your mother. I told her about Snoke. I told her about the First Order. I
told her everything that I thought might help her destroy my father and what he
believed in.” A pause. The redhead takes a deep breath. “I am a traitor. I have
been a traitor since long before we ever met.”
He should be angry. He’s not. Hux is shaking. He thinks of the injured,
heartbroken apparition walking the halls of the base, giving his mother to the
water. “Why did you come back to the First Order?” he asks.
“Huh?” Hux frowns, obviously not expecting the question. “My father followed
me, dragged me back, reconditioned me.” Gave me to Snoke. The last is an
impression, the whisper of a voice in his mind.
“Snoke,” he says. “Tell me about your relationship with Snoke. When I took
those memories from you I took only an impression, not the context.”
Hux draws his limbs in close, hunching down. “I do not think you want to hear
about that, Supreme Leader.”
“Please,” it’s too late to stop now. It’s started. Things lurking in the past
are being dragged into the light. “Tell me.”
It takes a while for Hux to speak. The man seems very small, his eyes gazing
into the middle distance. “If you insist, though I don’t know why you want to
know. When my father found me here, brought me back to the SCC and
reconditioned me he then took me to Snoke. I’d met the man before. I’d found
him… unpleasant. This time my father asked Snoke to use the Force to reinforce
the reconditioning, because it kept failing in the past. Snoke did so. Not long
after that the man initiated a sexual relationship with me that lasted until
you killed him. Half my life, or thereabouts.”
He feels very cold. Hux feels very cold, in the Force. “Was it your choice?”
Hux blinks. His face scrunches up before the redhead manages to smooth out his
expression once more. “No. Snoke was like my father. I was a possession.”
“He raped you,” he finds himself whispering. Hux flinches at the word. “For
sixteen, seventeen years?”
“I suppose he did,” Hux says, simply.
The road cracks beneath them. He feels furious. The Dark Side rises in him,
circling the two of them in a protective bubble, lashing at the air around
them. Hux stares at him, wide eyed. He can see turtles launch themselves in a
panic into the river on the other side and start to swim downstream as fast as
they are able, away from them. “He should not have done that,” he bites out. “I
am glad I killed him.”
A long pause. “Will you kill me now?” Hux asks.
“No!” he insists.
“Why?” the man asks, his face crumpling. “I told you, I am a traitor.”
“You loved your mother,” it’s not a question, but Hux nods, grimacing, tears
welling up. “I cannot blame you for doing your best to get revenge when she was
taken from you in such a way.”
“I don’t understand,” the redhead whispers. “Why? The you I have known all
these years would not hesitate to strike me down.”
“Things have changed,” he replies, “Since Snoke died. I have changed, you have
changed…” he trails off, part of what Hux said finally registering. His father
had reconditioned him. Snoke had used the Force to reinforce that
reconditioning.Does Hux even want to be here? Was this just another choice
forced upon him?
The thought of Hux leaving sends fury through him. The Dark lashes the air. The
cracks in the road spread. This is another moment. He has a choice. He knows he
has a choice. He reaches out, almost spasmodically, grabs Hux’s hand. The man
jerks backwards. Stares at him. “If you want to leave I will let you.”
“Supreme Leader-?” the man murmurs.
“Don’t call me that,” he says, voice as gentle as he can make it. “I am not
Snoke. I will not be Snoke. If you want to leave tell me, I promise I will let
you.”
Hux studies him for a long moment, those pale eyes roving his face as if the
man was trying to read his mind. “I don’t want to leave,” the redhead says
eventually.
“We have to change,” he says, thinking of what he said to Rey about the past.
Kill it if you have to. Snoke’s First Order has to die. They can become
something else, something new. Something not Empire, Republic or First Order.
“I am sorry for how I’ve treated you. I have assaulted you, terrorised you,
been profoundly ungrateful to you. We are only still here because I have had
you by my side to guide me. I want to make a better future. I don’t want to
bring the future Snoke saw into being, but I also don’t want a return to the
corrupt and bloated Republic, where individuals used so-called-democracy as a
means to power and privilege for only themselves,” memories of his childhood.
His mother’s frustrations. A pause, a breath. “Will you help me?”
Hux stares at him, assessing, then nods. “Yes, Supre-” the man breaks off,
obviously remembering his earlier order.
“My name is Ben, I might as well use it,” he says. It is time. Kylo Ren must
die as well.
A shriek and then shouting, the sound of blaster fire, cuts through the moment.
He drops Hux’s hand, only just realising he was still holding it. They get to
their feet, rush back towards the base. One of the Stormtrooper’s in on the
ground, the bottom half of one of her legs missing. Nearby a turtle plops back
into the water, unconcerned about the shots being fired at it.
Hux pulls himself back into the shape of General and marches onto the scene,
orders spilling from his lips.
***** Chapter 22 *****
Chapter Notes
     So this is the last chapter of this part of the story. The first
     chapter of the next part should hopefully be up in the next few days.
     Thank you all so much for sticking around, for reading, leaving kudos
     and all your lovely comments.
He does not know what the Supr- Ben? is thinking. Ben. Has the man crowned
himself Ben Solo once more? How will the crew respond to a leader called Ben
Solo? To the link between the man and the Resistance? He can’t just call him
Ben, even if the man no longer wants to emulate Snoke. He’ll need a title.
He watches as FN-3411 is loaded on to the shuttle, the stump where the lower
half of her leg once was well wrapped in bacta. He can remember warning
everyone about the turtles earlier in the day, either she hadn’t listened or
one had snuck up on her. Life can be so precarious.
For a while he thought his own life was over. His intention to stay focused on
business, to try and ignore his last visit to the moon, had lasted only until
he’d seen the river where he gave his mother to the water through the window of
the shuttle. Things had been odd. The S-, Ben had complimented him for his idea
about the droids. Ben never complimented him. Ben gave orders, sometimes
listened, other times attacked him, but never complimented. He’d found it
strange. It had added to his sense of emotional unease. No matter how hard he
tried to push down his feelings as the day passed he found himself becoming
more and more distressed.
There hadn’t really been anything for him to do. The techs had done their jobs,
the Stormtroopers theirs. Mitaka had gone back with the first shuttle, to
oversee the unloading at the other end. He’d found himself wandering the halls
for a while, before he’d found himself drawn outside.
He’d been to that part of the river twice in the past. Once to sink his
mother’s body, and once when he’d gone back there to die. That’s where his
father had found him. He’d sat, watched the water. The turtles should have made
him wary, but they’d no more bothered him this time than the time before.
After that he’d lost track of time. His mind had gone over the last time he was
there, fragments of memory that he’d tried to forget, been forced to forget by
Snoke, had caught at the edges of his mind. He thinks he might have cried for a
while, cried silently, but he’s not sure. The next thing he knew Ben was there,
and he had a sense, a horrible sense, that something was about to change.
The Force had shown the man things? Shown him putting his mother’s body in the
water? He can’t imagine why it would, why Ben would care. Ben does seem to
care. He should be dead, but Ben didn’t want to kill him. Ben was going to let
him go. Let him leave if he wanted to, or at least that’s what the man said. It
might have been a trap, it might have been a lie, it didn’t seem like a lie.
He’d actually thought about it. Where would he go? What would he do? The galaxy
is still in danger of ripping itself to shreds; factions of the First Order
fighting each other, the Resistance still out there, and undoubtedly local
rulers are gathering their strength, some more benevolent than others. No.
There was nowhere to go. He could not abandon the mess he’d helped make. He
could not abandon Mitaka, the Stormtroopers his father had created, the Sup-
Ben. He also found he did not want to abandon Ben. He doesn’t know why.
There’s a lot he doesn’t understand. The man’s anger, outrage it had seemed,
about what Snoke had done to him. Rape the other man had called it. He had not
had the courage to think of it as such. That what it was though. Rape. He had
been telling the truth when he said Snoke saw people as possessions, himself,
also- he suspects- Ben. In a different way, he doubts very much that the old
Supreme Leader made use of his student the way the man did of him, but he did
make use of him. He finds himself wondering exactly how much choice Ben Solo
had in where his life ended up.
Ben killed Snoke. He’d suspected, or if not suspected that the man had done the
deed himself, had certainly suspected he had a hand in it. Snoke must have
pushed him too far. Snoke deserved to die. A dangerous thought, but then he had
been a dangerous man.
Once more he remembers being led in front of Snoke the first time, not the time
the man had used the Force to reinforce the reconditioning, or the time the man
had pulled him into his lap, but the first time. There had been a scent in the
air, except it wasn’t a scent, it was something buzzing behind his eyes, a
sense, a taste, a sound, something like corruption. Like rot. Not the type of
rot that is part of the cycle of death and renewal, some other kind of rot. A
rot that nothing comes back from. He had been terrified.
He had thought his father had gone insane to welcome this creature into the
heart of the First Order.
Are they still the First Order?
Ben said they needed to change. Change into what? Is this what Mitaka meant,
when the man spoke of what the First Order might become? Can they still be the
First Order? For so long the First Order was Snoke, now it’s a bunch of petty
warlords attacking each other and raining death and destruction down on
civilians. He thinks of Starkiller Base. Nothing new then. Of course they’re
not doing that currently, they’re just planning on swelling their numbers with
droids- which neither Snoke nor his father ever would have approved of. Human
life first. Was Snoke even human? Often he didn’t seem human, but perhaps that
was just a result of his use of the Dark Side.
“Would you like a rationbar?” he looks over, Ben is holding one out to him
along with a bottle of water. It’s mid-afternoon, he hasn’t had lunch. He takes
them.
“Thank you,” he says. The man had also apologised to him. Apologised for
terrorising and assaulting him, but also for being ungrateful. The man had
actually said that they wouldn’t still be here if it wasn’t for him. He doesn’t
know what he thinks about that. It has some echoes of what Mitaka said to him.
For a while earlier he had wanted very much to apologise to the Lieutenant for
putting himself in a position to be killed so soon after the man told him to
have more concern for his own safety. “Do you want to eat together?” he asks.
“Yes,” Ben replies. Glancing around. “Where would suit you?”
“I saw a room earlier, it must have been a private officer’s lounge. It is
still structurally sound and has tables, if you think that would be
appropriate?”
The man nods, gesturing for him to lead the way. They pass Stormtroopers and
techs, still examining and packing droids. The room is small, light, two of the
large windows are partially covered with vines, but the one on the far wall,
overlooking the river is completely clear. He leads them to the table in front
of it, moulded plasteel bolted to the floor, across from each other on two
sides are chairs with dusty orange seat covers.
He brushes some dust from a chair and sits. Ben sits opposite him. They unwrap
their rationbars. Down below, in the river, he sees turtles bobbing along the
surface, absorbing the heat of the sun.
“I meant what I said,” the man says, swallowing a mouthful of rationbar. “I
want you to help me bring the future into being.”
“I am not quite sure what that means,” a pause, he tries “Lord Solo?”
The man shakes his head. “No. Ben,” a gesture at the outside world,
encompassing techs and Stormtroopers and everything else. “I suppose they
should call me Lord Solo, but I want you to call me Ben. I know I said it
earlier, but I am sorry for how I’ve behaved towards you. I need you with me.”
“I don’t know if me referring to you so informally will send the right message,
Sir.”
“It will,” the man says, dark eyes intent. “It will tell everyone that, next to
me, you are the most important person in the First Order.”
“Are we still the First Order?” he asks after a long moment.
A pause. The man looks away, frowning, then meets his eyes. “I don’t know, but
we are something. Something like the First Order, but better. We can do so much
better.”
“We will need to have a more defined identity if we are to meet and best Savim
and the other factions, as well as the Resistance-” he begins. Once more his
comm beeps, as does Ben’s.
They look at each other. Ben responds “General Hux is with me.” The man does
not bother to identify himself, assuming, probably rightly, that his voice is
immediately recognisable to the Command Staff he’s so thoroughly terrified.
“Sir, Sir,” the commstech acknowledges them both. “We have news of the battle
at Dominion Base.”
“Yes?”
“Savim has retaliated and won. Both Alnil and Rhovat have been reported dead.
Their army has been decimated, their fleet destroyed.”
“I see,” the man says. “Remain vigilant, if things change I want to be informed
immediately.”
“Yes Sir!” the commstech says, the salute almost audible even from here.
They look at each other. “You were right General, they are destroying each
other.”
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