On day three of what some would later call The Battle of Yontu, Kylo Ren felt General Organa's death at the hands of lone stormtrooper RT-6192. The blaster shot to her neck became a flash of light behind his closed eyelids. He breathed in, continuing his meditation, as she crumpled. The impact made a thud in the pit of his stomach.
Ren sat up a bit straighter, tipping his head a little towards the ceiling of the cave. Breathe in, he thought, and out.
She was alive for three seconds after that. Her smoking throat and rattling lungs became a dull ache at the base of his skull. A younger Ren might have felt lightning in his bloodstream. An even younger Ren might have blacked out from pain. Ben Solo would have died if he hadn't been dead already, but as it was, the Force energy in Leia Organa gave one final shriek that Kylo Ren couldn't hear and dispersed without disturbing him further.
Ren opened his eyes. He breathed out.
The Battle of Yontu was a decisive victory for the Resistance. The planet itself was a only small moon, and elsewhere the First Order captured several key Resistance territories on more populated planets, but General Organa's death was the stricken nerve that made the Resistance into a sort of revenge-drunken hivemind - a power whose every clever little scheme happened to work that day. Some surrounded Organa's corpse, shielding her with their bodies. Others lashed out, and everywhere Stormtroopers piled up.
For his part, Kylo Ren meditated through the whole event. He had only enough Force energy spared to place minimal physical protection around himself. The rest he gave away, dutifully trying to channel it in Leader Snoke's direction. It was a last hoorah for the Knights of Ren, of sorts - a technique that only ancient Sith lords could perform. The steps were basic enough. Kylo sat, meditated, and for most of a week Leader Snoke sapped Kylo of all that he was until one or both of them died. The rest of the Knights did the same. Later, Kylo would find out that only three of them survived. When the victorious Resistance fighters found the casualties in their own remote hiding places, they encountered corpses so hollow and used that they'd crumbled half to dust.
Snoke died a long time before they captured Kylo. Where his mother's departure was a puff of warm air in his ear, his master's was a hurricane that bowled him over and had him screaming into the fists he'd used to tear out his own hair. In the end, dirty, gloved hands grabbed him somewhere in the middle of his agony, dragging him out of the damp cave that was his hiding place. He struggled and spat and screamed at them as his feet dragged the rocky ground until one of the rebels finally got the message and knocked him wonderfully, blissfully unconscious.
When he woke, he was in Force-dampening chains, there was bloody skin hanging off of his ankles, and someone who was not Leia Organa was staring at him through a transparent shield. Kylo squinted at the other man through the greasy curtain of his own hair.
"I am General Matthias," the man said. "Do I need to inform you as to why I'm here?"
Kylo's tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. When he finally worked his jaw open, his lips split open and bled.
"General Organa is dead," said Kylo. He let General Matthias search his expression for remorse. Finding nothing, the man closed his eyes and seemed to catch himself before he could start shaking his gray head.
"Yes. But contrary to what you may think, I am not her direct successor. That would be General Dorian, and she…." Again, the general caught himself. He straightened where he stood, and suddenly looked several times older. Kylo could only imagine what he might have said next. Probably some poor attempt to make him feel something, from General Dorian is too torn up inside over Leia to see you. to General Dorian is overseeing funeral preparations. But surely, General Matthias would know better than that.
"Hells, I'll just cut out the bantha shit and get to it." Ah, so he did know better. "You stuck with the First Order until the end, and now the First Order is gone. There are still holdouts on Lindus and Thresh, and we know you all wanted them badly, but our TIE fighters are converging on them as we speak."
"And?" Kylo hissed. The Force power within him pulsed at his wrists. It was a small, pathetic amount, the stuff of making pockmarks in snow rather than black holes in space, but it was all that Snoke had left with him, it seemed. Any effort on his part only made it shift to another place in his body, still under his skin, unable to escape.
"We have elections to hold and distribution of authority to establish," Matthias said, as if any authority the Resistance put in place could be something other than doomed, "but the people have been very clear about wanting you tried very soon."
"You said you would cut the bantha shit." The Force moved to his shoulders, concentrating there, making him straighten. "How does the Resistance execute its criminals?"
Mathias's lip curled under his bushy mustache.
"It doesn't," he said through his teeth. "But the New Republic that the Starkiller weapon destroyed used to hang its worst criminals. I'd imagine the tradition will stand."
The urge to laugh bubbled in Kylo's chest. What a lack of imagination.
"Is that all?"
Matthias shook his head. He straightened.
"Not quite."
Kylo heard something click. A soft beep. Then he was seizing and vomiting and screaming in pain as the chains holding him down came to life.
Somehow, Kylo's situation eventually became very satisfying. Once, after the electricity was off and Matthias was about to leave, the general let slip that there were people watching this, watching Kylo Ren being tortured and languishing in his own stinking piss and shit. A few credits, Matthias informed him, could get one access to a live holofeed that came online whenever Matthias was inclined to visit. And of course, people with more power than the general could dream of knew about the whole thing and didn't care. Later, when he was alone, Kylo processed the whole thing by giggling at the wall, letting himself feel validated that the "mercy" and "kindness" the Resistance valued so much were little more than idealistic lies. It hurt to laugh - pain was radiating through him with each breath at this point - but he managed it well.
Time passed. How much time, he didn't know. There wasn't enough strength in his arms to let him scratch marks on the floor as a way of keeping count.
"-and as we celebrate your life and legacy, we lay you - Leia Organa, Princess of Alderaan, General of the Resistance - to rest with the ranks of all those chosen by the Force and made strong by the call of Light."
The scavenger girl's ceremonial robes were far too big for her. Kylo couldn't help but snort at the grainy video feed as she set his mother aflame.
Somewhere along the way, Kylo did have enough sense to think no, of course not, this cannot be. He had to be trapped with some radicalized Resistance sympathizers, if Matthias wasn't alone here in this building or hell, on this whole planet. And the man himself was no general, Kylo thought for only a moment, just the dullest-mannered psychopath in the world. Better yet, this was punishment - a true punishment at the hands of Leader Snoke. Yes, the powerful being had to be alive somewhere outside of Kylo's consciousness, already ruling the universe, and Kylo was languishing in a First Order prison as Snoke created a nightmare world for him in which the Resistance had won. Either way, he'd failed.
He was in too much pain to become truly bored with Matthias's presence. He gagged at his own body odor with every shallow breath. A knawing hunger set in. He hurt, he itched, he shivered all over. The next time Matthias visited, another video feed ready at his side, Kylo could only cast his eyes in the old man's direction and stare.
"Trials," Matthias said simply. The screen flashed on, showing Kylo a courtroom. Chandeliers hung from a cieling that glowed with shining gold designs, sending out a light that made the stained glass paintings on the windows blush out into the night sky beyond the building. It had none of the cold efficiency of the First Order, none of the purpose. And it was certainly much nicer than any Resistance vessel or base. But that was just it, wasn't it? All of the Republic's finery had produced a ragtag, underfunded army because the people on top knew they'd still be in power when it was all over. The First Order would have seen those Republic riches dispersed fairly among the populace. The First Order would have seen to so many things.
Uniformed in gray shirts and trousers, the line of prisoners marched to their seats, stepping carefully to not trip over the short chains that linked them together. Kylo had no strength or desire to focus on their faces. Besides, their heads were all bowed, whether from shame, or anger, or pain and torture similar to his. He recognized the outlines of hairstyles, their shapes and statures and skin tones. General Kali sat down, then General Faroon, but then Kylo's eyes were skipping over several others, as if gravitating toward-
Kylo's body went rigid. The Force within him leaped, crawling right underneath his skin. It beat against the edges of Kylo's being until finally, he felt a piece of it leave him. A thin thread of energy stretched from him, past his Force-dampening chains, across the galaxy. It leaped through stars and asteroids and the cold vacuum of space until it struck its target in the middle of the forehead.
On the video feed, General Hux looked up.