Ch. 11: The Knight
They're shirtless, they're possessed, they stink. With a blood-orange five o'clock shadow and sweat-tacked hair snagging his pale eyelashes, Hux almost looks human.
Around 0500 the situation deteriorates from lightsabers to bareknuckle boxing. By 0600, the timer marking the minutes of their rounds is the only thing keeping their feverish, gleeful violence from spiraling into a frenzy. They agree without words to obey that timer, to back up and gulp air, guzzle water, smear the coppery spit from their chins with busted knuckles. Because if they don't obey it, if they abandon the threadbare pretense of friendly sparring, they both understand that one of them won't leave this room alive.
They don't speak. Kylo prefers this. With words, Hux will always beat him, but in silence, saying what he needs to say with swings of a blade and jabs of his fists, Kylo is the master. Hux doesn't mind this. Kylo's figured that out over six years of working with him: he's a thirty-something refugee with a shitty father who built an army from scratch and blew up five planets and took over the galaxy to prove that, after all, he was better. He might be weak, but he never gives up.
The door console chimes. They watch each other, waiting for the next punch, wondering if this will be the round where they finally go for the lethal strike, where they finally finish this. Hux's pupils are huge against his grey irises. Eager. Waiting for the kill.
The console chimes again. They crouch, they watch.
After a third time, the spell breaks, and after hours of fighting, the Dark side lets them go, and the first thing Kylo feels as his conscious functions return is Rey. He feels her hands, her skin. He feels the cool press of metal against her palm, the ache of the burn on her shoulder from the fight in the throne room.
He scowls and tries to avert his attention, but the only other thing to catch his focus is Hux, who's slamming back a glass of water. The three arcs of white skin from his father's public lashing expand and contract as he swallows.
Hux lets the glass thud to the counter and sort of nods as though Kylo has said something. Kylo eavesdrops on the General's thoughts as he comes back to himself. Hux catches his own reflection in the black durasteel wall of his sitting room, taking in the black eye, the rivulets of sweat, and behind him, the Supreme Leader, bare-chested, bruised, and breathing hard, but not nearly as physically exhausted as Hux.
How the hell am I going to explain this? Hux thinks, not at Kylo, but Kylo hears it.
Kylo's too deep in this strange meditation to give even a single fuck. He cards his fingers through his damp hair, letting the strands cut the raw skin, and opens the door with the Force to reveal an astonished Mitaka with Jacindi by his side. They both salvage a hasty salute. It would be hilarious if Kylo felt less like ripping something apart.
"Sir," Jacindi begins, addressing Kylo. He's so absorbed in the Force that their thoughts ring out as though they're shouting them: they wonder if he and Hux are lovers, and then they wonder if the Supreme Leader beat Hux physically for his failure. Hux decides that, if they ask, he'll say Kylo asked him to join him for morning training, which isn't entirely false. "We wondered why General Hux wasn't at briefing."
Kylo hears an uncharacteristic curse as Hux notices the time; briefing started at 0700 because of their impending ceremony at Sector Command. It's 0715.
Kylo does not care about whatever Mitaka starts to say, and if he has to sit through a briefing right now he's almost certain he'll murder someone. So without a word he pulls on his tunic, sweat and all, and pushes past the two officers into the passage, ignoring their salutes.
He'll shower and do—something. Take his fighter out, maybe. Shoot things. Or just find the executive training room on this shipand beat the hell out of a droid for a few hours until he calms down. If he calms down. He feels like a moth searching for a flame.
You are unbalanced, his Master would say.
Snoke. His name was Snoke, and yes, he's completely fucking unbalanced, he's going in circles, he's not leading, he's not following, he's running. But at least he's moving.
Kylo decides to hell with it, showers, and takes off in his shuttle to look for Rey. He doesn't tell Hux or anyone else where he's going; even from the hangar Kylo feels the drumming of Hux's low-level fury. Whatever madness has overtaken him, he's dragging his General down with him.
But the emptiness of space dampens the mania, leaving dread. After two hours following the rain and the ocean that is Rey in the Force, the giddiness seeps out of his bones, leaving him hyperaware, cringing away from the sensations of her.
She's…solidifying. Even the papery scratching of her flight suit against her skin thrums across their bond, as immediate and inescapable as the dull pain in his bruised temple. She's hungry, even though she already ate two large objects that he somehow, disconcertingly, knows are sandwiches. Before that she'd been flying and, judging from the nervous fluttering and hormonal confusion that hijacked his own body as he tried to listen to the Force and pilot the shuttle, she'd been flirting.
He wants no part in any bond that forces him to know how many damn sandwiches she eats, or compels his own body, against his will, to mirror her physiological responses to gods-know-what. These are not things he wants to think about, after what she did to him, much less feel as intimately as his own breathing, his own heartbeat.
It feels like an interrogation, a real interrogation, not that delicate, repulsive, self-conscious tiptoeing through her mind he'd steeled himself for on Starkiller. He can't read her mind, but he can read her heart, and he can read her body. She's like him in that way: those are the parts that matter.
Soon he finds himself above a planet not far from them in the Outer Rim, so close he imagines the smell the seawater in her hair. He orbits until he fixes the sensations to a rough latitude and longitude, which he transmits to Sector Intel.
Only he doesn't.
He types the coordinates, then lets his gloved fingers hover over the transmit key, casting dim shadows over the backlit display.
Her life and her body and her emotions jostle in the background like conversations in a crowded mess hall. He can't turn it off, even now, when he wants to because he can't stand to feel her this close.
He can choose not to listen, but he can't choose not to hear. Sometimes it's so loud it drowns out everything else, and he can't think about anything except the way it felt to touch her hand, the way it felt to wake up and find her gone. And sometimes it feels good, to have her there, like when he felt her stretching in her bed. In the quiet of space, he even allowed himself to relax into the mundane emotions of her mundane life.
When she sees someone she likes, and she likes everybody, she sort of-glows. Psychically. She's doing it now. It's a soft thing, a comfort. Rey's not soft. She sliced a Praetorian guard apart at the kneecaps and then beheaded him. But this thing she does, this glow, it's soft. It's the exact opposite of the way he's felt since he started his insane duel with Hux, and as much as he loves this violence, he likes the glow, too.
He forces himself back to the shuttle, because these thoughts lead to places he can't go.
He rubs his thumb along the black leather covering his fingertips, centimeters from the button that will put her life in the hands of the First Order. When she finds out what he can feel, she'll know he's getting some sick pleasure out of it. He buries the word, the shame.
Creep.
The name clings to him. It always has. The little girl crying because he read her mind, before he knew he's not supposed to: you're so sad—Shut up, creep, you don't know me—Of course I know you, I've just never talked to you. Jyun, squatting next to him in the blue grass by the temple, eating the chocolates Rax brought her from HosPrime when he'd gone to stay with Ben: yeah, you can seem creepy sometimes but it's hard, isn't it, when you can see so many things that other people want to keep hidden?
He reaches into his pocket and wraps his fingers gently around Jyun's red lightsaber. He doesn't know why he feels the need to carry it around, but it comforts him.
What had Havel said? It's a shame. It's a shame Jyun's dead. It's a shame he killed her.
He exhales, smelling his breath in the stuffy overly-oxygenated air, and fidgets with his flight path event though he doesn't have to, trying to ignore Rey.
He sighs. The planet swings across his viewscreen, five hundred kilometers below. He reaches out to cancel his geosynchronous orbit and send the coordinates to SecIntel and then-
He can't breathe.
Huge, ghostly arms envelop his shoulders, crushing the life out of him. It's his Master. It has to be. This has all been a trick, his Master's not dead, he's alive, he's alive and he's choking him for his disobedience, he's killing him for his failure. Something presses against his face, filling his nose, his mouth.
No—his brain catches up a millisecond later. It's not his Master. It's Rey. Just Rey.
But he can't get away.
He can't get away and his head knows it's just Rey but his lungs and his pulse and the sweat leaking from his dilated pores scream it's his Master finally showing himself, finally telling the truth, that this is a test, and Kylo failed, because of course he did, he's a disappointment to his bloodline and a disappointment to his Master because he always fucking fails and he always will because he's never going to be good enough and he deserves this—
No. He breathes.
He presses his eyelids shut and takes a shuddering breath. When he opens them, Rey's coordinates still taunt him from the display. Rey's—she's—hugging someone. The traitor, probably. Nothing to be afraid of; he should laugh. But he can't. The bond purrs with her relief, her affection, her love, and Kylo breathes, and he's shaking.
He yanks off his gloves and reaches up to wipe the sweat from his forehead. The mending skin on his knuckles cracks open and the pain flashes him back to the fierce, violent joy of the fight with Hux. He grabs onto that pain like a lifeline, digging the raw joints into his bruised temple, grinding his nerves back to reality like his Master taught him. He is not helpless.
But Rey has to die. If she can do this to him, she has to die.
He sets a course back to the Voratrix, ETA just in time to rendezvous with the transport to Arkanis. He glances at the coordinates nagging him on the display, the insistent flashing of the transmit key. Her smile flashes through the bond as the traitor drapes a massive arm around her shoulder, and his shoulder too, and Kylo frowns. He reaches into his pocket, to the comforting, cool weight of Jyun's lightsaber.
Yeah. It's a shame.
"—flag everything on Apolin, sir," Mitaka says to Hux. "I think you should take a look."
Kylo, meditating in the corner of the passenger compartment of their transport, snaps his attention to the officers plotting around the small holotable. He's not really meditating as much as obsessively monitoring Rey, trying not to flinch at any sudden moves that might bring on another choking attack. He hasn't said a word since he got back. Hux asked him directly if he had any plans to go look for the Resistance, and Kylo had passed him in silence. Kylo knows the coordinates. He'll use them when he needs to.
Hux, uncharacteristically not belted into his seat for landing, is scanning his datapad, a stylus hanging out the side of his mouth like a cigarette. He's buttoned himself back into his First Order uniform and re-imprisoned his hair in pomade, but Mitaka looks more than a little concerned to see the General slouching and swearing like a prizefighter with a bacta patch over his left eye. Jacindi's known Hux long enough to find this Force-driven madness endlessly entertaining.
"Kriffing shit," Hux says, slurring around the stylus.
"Rather, sir," Mitaka agrees.
Kylo uses the Force to snatch the datapad out of Hux's hands and bring it sailing into his own without comment. Jacindi, who's never seen the Force in action, raises an eyebrow, but Kylo's only got eyes for the picture on the screen.
The embedded holo shows an imperious-looking woman in her seventies draped in a stately black and gold sari. He recognizes her instantly; several times in the last three years he'd escorted her into his Master's presence, annoyed that his Master always dismissed him like he was a child loitering around the adults' table. Beside her, wearing a diplomatic smile, a turban, a sword, a ridiculously ornate coat that he probably finds mortifying, is Rax Apolin. It's a marriage announcement.
It's all Kylo can do not to snap the datapad in half. Instead, he reaches out with the Force and smashes the first thing he finds, the mug of caf Hux slammed down on a side table. Mitaka jumps.
"He's after Entralla," Kylo says.
"He's got Entralla. As Onara's husband he's got a seat on the Board," Hux says, as though he's surprised Kylo knows about Kuat-Entralla Engineering or the damn Kuat Drive Yards, the most important military asset in his fleet, in the entire galaxy.
"You're telling me Rax Apolin now controls the only facility in existence capable of rebuilding my fleet," Kylo says slowly.
Snoke's alliance with Lady Onara of Kuat and the Drive Yards she now controls had been the lynchpin of his Master's whole operation. Onara got what she wanted—control of the Board of Directors that runs the Drive Yards—and Snoke got what he wanted—a fleet big enough to conquer a galaxy.
"Onara is still in control," Mitaka begins, "and she has two other co-husbands who make up the rest of the Board, but—"
Hux interrupts him. He's scowling out the viewport at the first wisps of Arkanisian atmosphere, like the clouds offend him. "I suspect he used his—abilities—to secure the alliance." He means a mind-trick, and Kylo agrees. He can't believe it, because it's Rax, but it's the only explanation. "And he's planning to move against us."
"But he can't take control outright, he won't have enough support," Mitaka says. He's Kuati himself, one of hundreds of refugee Kuati aristocrats and millionaires in the officer corps. No planet hated the Republic more, or at least no planet full of people important enough to have connections to the Imperial officers and financiers who founded the Order. "The Apolins are nowhere near important enough to marry into the Great Houses, much less the House of Kuat itself, sir. The marriage is a scandal. He'll operate through Onara."
Kylo overhears Hux's thought: if he had to make a list of people least likely to become embroiled in a scandalous marriage for money and power, Gallius Rax Apolin would've been near the top.
"More alarming, sir," Jacindi says, stroking his beard in a way that Kylo finds painfully affected, "he controls the Kuat Sector Forces. That's dozen star destroyers at least, and the Dreadnought Malleatrix."
Kylo's not surprised they have a Dreadnought. It had taken thirty well-placed mind-tricks to get him and Rax through all the security around the system that time they'd snuck in. For twenty-five thousand years every petty warlord with a starship has wanted to control Kuat; it's learned to protect itself.
"Those are my ships," Kylo says, because they are; he's been aboard the Malleatrix a dozen times on missions for Snoke. That ship belongs to the Order.
"They will be as soon as Kuat signs the Act of Union," Hux says with a frown. He's removed the stylus from his mouth and is twisting it in a complicated, practiced motion that looks like a nervous habit he'd disciplined himself out of decades ago. "But so far they've been our willing allies, our firepower in the Core. They seceded from the Republic but, for the moment, the system is legally independent." As though he or anyone present cares about legalities.
Kylo frowns out the viewport as they punch through the cloud-line into a landscape of grey-green stubbly hills and grey cliffs and iron-grey water. The grey city spreads over the fingers of the fjord like some wasting disease infecting the land bridge by bridge. Rain pummels the ocean as far as Kylo can see; disdain and something very like fear arcs out from Hux as they approach they city. Rey would love this place.
"He may try to seize control of the Order," Jacindi says, smoothing back one of his braids, "or he may try to seduce our officers to push for an independent Core. Either way, he needs to be dealt with as soon as possible to avoid a war on two fronts."
Hux translates mentally, and Kylo overhears: nobody in their right mind would follow Kylo Ren if Onara presents a better candidate, and if she gets a dozen commanders on her side we'd be completely buggered.
"We'll discuss this immediately after the ceremony," Kylo orders as the transport whirs into a large hangar hastily constructed beside what looks like an ancient fortress. It was some Imperial building before the Arkanisian magistrate handed it over to the Order for Sector Command headquarters.
Even he can see that walking up to Rax and stabbing him is no longer an option. He'll be under the best security in the galaxy, and if he's smart, he won't leave it. Kylo could get past whatever walls he put up, of course, but Rax would sense him coming from miles off.
It's like playing hide-and-seek with a supernova, Rax had said about Kylo's ability to mask his Force signature. A supernova who's especially awful at hide-and-seek.
Hux is far enough gone after their descent into madness that he doesn't bother to hide his real thoughts: I told you to take care of this a week ago, Ren.
Hux did. And Kylo should've, at least once he realized Rax was alive. Instead he'd had a meltdown on the throne room floor, feeling sorry for himself because he killed his friend, but Rax isn't his friend. He hasn't been for a long, long time.
He will take care of it. The galaxy belongs to him, and if Rax won't kneel to him, he'll die.
He remembers Jyun, not long before it all came apart, listening to one of his fantasies of people kneeling to him, the stupid cocksure rants he always launched when Luke pissed him off, all about how he'd turn to the Dark side and wreak his vengeance.
Ben, these power-trips are creepy as hell. No, look at me when I'm talking to you, goddamn it. This is not funny. You're not this tiny kid anymore, you don't know how scary you can be. Luke thinks so, Rax thinks so, I think so. I'm worried you're gonna hurt somebody, like Rax did. I'm worried you're gonna do something you can't take back.
Kylo's own comm, resting in his pocket next to Jyun's lightsaber, buzzes. He ignores it until he realizes everyone with access to his personal contact codes is aboard this transport.
This message is coming from Arkanis.
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the device. When he activates it, it shows a single, short message from an encrypted source:
I want to talk, Ben.
He frowns down at it. He doesn't show Hux, who hasn't noticed.
He couldn't have planned this; it's almost a day from Kuat to Arkanis, and they'd only scheduled this trip ten hours ago. Rax must be here for some other reason. Gathering support, maybe. Kylo tries to think of any reason why he'd abandoned the most fortified planet in the galaxy, and finds none. But Rax hadn't been expecting to feel Kylo's Force signature here.
Kylo will take care of it.
Rain.
Here on Arkanis it never lets up, and Hux takes each pelting drop as a taunt from the Force, as an insult, the galaxy's whisper: I know who you are, I remember your beginning. In the distance the weathered hills aspire toward mountainhood, too inadequate to cast a rain-shadow where some life-giving desert might spring up. Not that Hux needs the sun. This world had given him that, at least—the independence to thrive in the dark, free from the sun-thirst that drives so many stronger men to drink and dose after years in space.
Hux destroys suns; he does not require them.
He raises a hand to his nose to ward off the reek of ocean and mold that follows him even inside this wretched building, and he clenches his jaw when the movement pulls at the bruises the Supreme Leader pinned to his clavicle like medals. Though the bacta patch healed his black eye in time for this meeting, he's had less success restoring his unbalanced mind, and this nonsense with Apolin hasn't helped.
What the hell has Ren done to him?
He doesn't know. Hux hates that he has the power to do it, and he hates that it makes him feel so goddamned alive.
We keep this as short as possible, the Supreme Leader says to him for the fourth time. Hux imagines he's keen to skip the theatrics and move against Apolin as soon as he can, but these theatrics are important, and there are too many important officers and civilian leaders on Hux's agenda for the day to drop everything and take care of it. If it does come to war with Kuat, Arkanis will be their center of operations. Hux has allies here.
Hux scowls at the glass canopy, a completely inappropriate addition to the stone walls of the ancient fortress that became his father's Academy. It's as though the inhabitants of this sopping wadded-up towel of a planet might shrivel and die if they lose sight of the rain for more than two seconds. He prefers the sterile durasteel of the First Order Academy on the Eclipse; this building, like the man who ran it, stinks of the ailing body of a past that needs to die. The whole place feels dropsied, unwell.
You're not imagining it, the Supreme Leader says.
His voice in Hux's head crackles, unstable, like his lightsaber; Hux can tell, somehow, that he's looking for a distraction from the Apolin situation. Hux knows nothing about their relationship, but Apolin has General Han Solo and Princess Leia Organa to personally thank for the bombs that destroyed his planet and his legs as an infant, and the six years in the camps, too. He can't have been happy when Snoke ordered him to play nice with an oaf like Ben Solo.
When Hux turns to the Supreme Leader, he finds him contemplating the windows set into the stone corridor, wearing the spitefully, unwittingly erotic sulk that comprises most of his emotive repertoire. Hux follows his gaze beyond the cliff edge to the causeway still mostly obscured by the gunmetal waves as the tide wanes. There, alone on a spray-lashed rock, stands the stone tower he'd always know as Area Null. The New Republic rechristened it the Rain Gardens; they studded it with flowers and lights in an absurd mockery of public art but the attempt to scour away the brutal truth of it only rendered it grotesque. Although, with Lady Carise Sindian in charge, he supposes he should be grateful the whole thing isn't covered in glitter.
Imagining what? Hux responds, spying the bare steel plate where the plaque announcing his father as Commandant of the Arkanis Academy used to hang. He regrets that the Republic removed it; Hux would've liked to piss on it.
You're feeling him in the Force. Your father.
Brilliant, Hux replies, as though he were meant to grateful that his father's ghost really is prowling around.
His father was God within these bleak halls. Armitage can almost smell his cologne, the taint of stale cigarette smoke and the vodka he'd drink to medicate his way through shifts. But Brendol Hux is dead. Armitage is not Kylo Ren, falling to his knees to worship ghosts.
The Supreme Leader ignores the insult. This worries Hux. When was the last time the Supreme Leader choked down some of that gruel? What's sustaining him, if not sleep or food? He'd fought with Hux for hours looking like he'd gone out for a brisk, if bloody, morning jog.
It's not a ghost, Ren says, sounding for all the world like a schoolmaster. Hux so rarely knows less about something than Kylo Ren that it's almost charming. Ahead of them, Jacindi is speaking to his local counterpart, the admiral managing Sector Operations here. Hux will meet with her later.
It's a signature. An echo.
Of course it's not a ghost. Ghosts aren't real.
Ghosts are real, the Supreme Leader says, not bothering to feign interest. Ren seems to be sniffing the wind, trying to find something. But only for us.
'Us.' He means those lucky enough to be granted magical powers by the capricious whims of the Force. Naturally they enjoy a VIP afterlife as well. Hux cares nothing for justice, but the cosmic unfairness of it, that a man like Ren, or Vader for that matter, could exercise such power through no effort at all, offends his sensibilities.
Hux feels, in the strange quivering he's learned to recognize as the Force, the first stirrings of Ren's pathetic stage-fright weaving into the currents of his anxiety over Apolin, and he shakes his head. This is the ruler of the galaxy, this fragile creature. Hux's own anger surprises him: Hux has seen, he's fought, he's felt this great throbbing power that courses through Ren—he could've been so much more than this. What the hell had Snoke done to him, to turn him into such a disappointment?
Before, Hux would've called him merely incompetent. But now he sees clearly what the galaxy might've made of such a man, what he might've made of such an ally. And the reality of it, this trembling, frightened creature beside him, is a disappointment. It's a waste. It's a shame.
Although, he reflects thirty minutes later as he surveys the Admiralty of the First Order groveling on their knees before him, his arrangement with Ren has its advantages. These people would never kneel for him. He remembers what Ren promised him—had it only been yesterday? You will rule, Hux, but to rule you will serve me.
He stands in front of the Supreme Leader, whose sole function is to hulk in a sufficiently intimidating way as Hux conducts his army like a symphony. For a few minutes he allows himself to forget these soldiers are kneeling to the trembling, insecure man behind him and not to Supreme Leader Armitage Hux. He hopes his triumph bleeds into the walls. He hopes the ghost of his father is watching.
You were a schoolmaster with delusions of grandeur, he thinks at the stone walls of the massive assembly hall. I am an emperor. I am an emperor, and I killed you.
He feels the Supreme Leader's eyes on him and he's certain Ren overheard the thought, but Ren is probably too deep in the orgiastic throes of his own Force-mediated power-trip to mind. Hux wonders what it feels like, for him.
And then, in the middle of the ceremony, Hux feels in the lingering wisps of his Force-sensitivity a sudden intuition: the Supreme Leader sees something that fills him with dread. Something he wants desperately. He risks a glance behind him and observes Ren glaring at the back of the huge assembly hall like he's scented prey on the wind.
Hold my transport, the Supreme Leader orders in Hux's head. I'll be back later.
Supreme Leader? Hux asks, because surely he's misunderstood, because now he's standing in front of thirty thousand stormtroopers and hundreds of officers who have just risen from their ceremonial kneel and watch him in puzzled silence, but no, the Supreme Leader has pivoted and walked off the vast parade floor, heading out toward the cliff, toward the rain.
Sir, Hux calls, doing his best to maintain some dignity while also fielding the curious glances of the assembled officers, who know that the Supreme Leader has gone off-script. You need a guard—
If the Supreme Leader hears him, he gives no response.
Hux frowns even though he's not at leisure to frown at Ren. Of course the ruler of the galaxy takes off, without a guard, to indulge in the mystical equivalent of sniffing piss on a tree.
Hux sighs. He knows what Ren find when he reaches the cliffside. A narrow, treacherous stone stair, eternally slick with salt spray, hacked into the side of the fjord and pitching down to the wind-lashed causeway. Hux's father had once made him spend the night on that staircase—he must've been four or five, before they evacuated when the Republic attacked—to cure him of his fear of heights and his fear of the dark. He remembers clinging to the smooth stones, unable to find any purchase, trembling but refusing to move up or down because his father forbade it. He remembers being naked, but he might've just been very cold. At any rate he's not afraid of the dark anymore. He still doesn't like heights.
Naturally the Republic built a covered pedestrian bridge out to the Rain Gardens, clustered with bad paintings by local schoolchildren, but Hux has no doubt Ren will take the treacherous stair and the wind-lashed causeway because Hux can't imagine a more natural goddamned habitat for Kylo fucking Ren. He probably wandered off just to savor the chance to brood every miserable drop of desolation from this wretched landscape.
Hux cleans up Ren's political mess, as he always does, and after the ceremony he, Jacindi, and Mitaka stride through the stone halls on their way to their respective next engagements. Hux deserves better than this. Better than Kylo Ren.
"Is he always like this?" Jacindi asks, stepping up discretely to Hux's shoulder wearing an expression somewhere between indignation, worry, and amusement. One of his braids has escaped its tie, and Hux resists the urge to tuck it back into place.
"He's only smashed one mug," Mitaka replies, and he doesn't fail to hide his smirk. Hux worries, not for the first time, that Mitaka genuinely likes the Supreme Leader. The Brigadier General thinks he's a hero, the son of the two notorious terrorists who destroyed Mitaka's homeworld, a man who defied his family and gave up fame and fortune and a cushy life in the Republic Senate to fight for the right side.
A buzz of his comm reminds Hux that he, however, has a galaxy to run. He shakes his head at Mitaka's absurdity.
Imagine. Kylo Ren, a hero.
Kylo doesn't need to descend the lonely stone stair or brave the spray-battered causeway. He doesn't need to approach the tower that throbs in the Force with a low, relentless despair, and he doubts he would've been able to, anyway. He's already unbalanced. That place's signature makes him feel like he's about to fall off a cliff and keep falling forever.
He should've brought a guard. He should've set up snipers. This is stupid, what he's about to do, but he's always done stupid things for Rax.
He finds his quarry on a bleak expanse of slick grey rock at the cliff's edge, gazing in contemplation, not at the gunmetal sea or the solitary tower, but at the stark concrete wall of what appears to be a public toilet.
The park is abandoned—the pain from that tower saturates the air here so much that even non-Force sensitives would avoid the place. It's open ground for hundreds of meters in every direction, nothing to hide behind but the 'fresher building. He peers over the cliff edge and sees no squads of stormtroopers waiting to scale the cliff and assassinate him.
They're alone. That makes Kylo even more nervous. He keeps scanning for the threat and coming up empty.
Rax stands still, facing the wall, while the energy of the Force jerks seismically around him, propagating hate. The hem of his cream-colored sherwani coat flutters in the wind, because of course he's wearing white, and he's got a pale gold sash draped smartly through the crook of one arm. His bare brown fingers grip an umbrella that does almost nothing to keep the rain off his hair, which is longer than Kylo's ever seen it. A ceremonial Kuati dagger, fake, hangs on his belt, concealing a lightsaber.
Kylo's boots squelch in an undignified way as he approaches the man and the 'fresher wall, which, like all public toilets on all planets, is a collage of posters and graffiti. Rax sighs, collapses his umbrella, and tosses it to the ground. He draws his lightsaber.
It's a charade. They both know it. Blade to blade, they're evenly matched, but Rax is weak in the Force. Even after hours of fighting Hux, Kylo has the strength to crush him, just as he had the strength to override all Rax's skill with a lightsaber that night in the throne room, ripping off his prosthetics and jumping on him with his fists.
Rax knows he's got no hope of winning this fight. But Kylo knows he's been fighting battles he's got no hope of winning for six years, and doesn't expect him to quit now.
He presses the catch and, looking Kylo in the eye with grim resignation, ignites it. The blade flares to life, electric against unrelenting grey—dazzling, blinding blue.
"Did you come here to kill me, Ben?"
Rax's boots crunch against the muddy gravel as he shifts his weight, ready to fight. The boots are custom for his cybernetics, and Kylo hears the soft hisses as Rax moves.
The blue lightsaber sputters and crackles like Kylo's—he's used a cracked crystal, an unstable power source. Kylo, through the rush of adrenaline that sets his heart thrumming, wonders where he got it so fast, and how he modified the design to get rid of the side-vents.
Kylo ignites his own blade, and they begin to circle. With his black eyes shining blue in the reflected light, Rax looks possessed, like Kylo feels. They're both stretching out with the Force, and wherever Kylo senses the vibrations of him they feel wrong. Or, no, not wrong. Right, but unfamiliar.
"Did you come here to take the Order from me?" Kylo asks. It's hard to hold on to his lightsaber, his palms are too slick with sweat inside his gloves.
"I came here to talk." His First Order accent has gotten stronger; he sounds exactly like Hux.
"You think I'm going to negotiate for the Drive Yards." Kylo's heart pounds in his chest, and he feels Rax's pounding, too. He can't put his finger on what's different about the way he feels in the Force, but it both unnerves and thrills him.
"No, Ben, I've got fourteen pins in my skull from your 'negotiations.' I couldn't give two shits about the Drive Yards, or the Order. Piss it down the drain the way you do with everything else."
Kylo feels the truth of it in the Force, but he doesn't understand it. Rax loves the Order. As much as the man hated Snoke, as much as he loved Luke, he never lost his faith in the original Charter of the First Order, never lost his loathing for the Republic that destroyed his family and his life.
Mostly Rax feels desperate. Kylo hesitates.
"You married Onara," Kylo says, advancing on Rax, forcing him to back up, to get closer to the cliff. Rax gives ground but circles to keep his back away from the sheer drop.
"Our Master's orders. You can't possibly think I'm a willing partner in that relationship."
Rax feels Kylo's horror and huffs a bitter half-laugh, mocking a polite bow with his blade. He shakes his head. "Your concern for my virtue is charming, Ben. I assure you I've done far more shameful things at our Master's command."
The way he laughs at it infuriates Kylo, and he presses Rax backward more aggressively, toward the poster-covered wall of the 'fresher. Kylo holds his lightsaber steady as he advances, pushing Rax back until his heels are inches from the filthy concrete wall. With nowhere to retreat, Rax crouches, preparing to strike or defend. Kylo remembers all the signs, all the movements of his body, and knows that Rax is reading his, too. There's no such thing as a surprise attack, not between them.
"Hux thinks you're planning a coup."
"Armitage Hux is a twat and you're a twat for listening to him."
The way he says it cracks something inside Kylo's chest. How many times has he heard himself called a twat, a wanker, or a whinging prat in that clipped aristocratic voice?
Kylo stops. He takes three steps backward, letting Rax off the wall.
For a long, long moment, they stare at one another, bodies angled to the side to present smaller targets, knees slightly bent, ready to lunge. They're breathing hard even though they haven't done anything. It's time to end this. They both know it.
It's a shame. It's a damn shame.
Kylo extinguishes his blade.
Rax stares at him, eyes wide, pupils crackling like blue plasma in the light of the saber. He licks his lips as Kylo slowly, slowly hooks his lightsaber to his belt and moves his hands away from it.
A twitch of Rax's bare thumb-the blue light disappears, leaving only a burning afterimage. Rax exhales. His eyes suddenly look normal, too-large and sad and exactly as Kylo remembers. And afraid. Whatever he wants, Kylo realizes, he hadn't expected to get this far.
Kylo drops his hands and opens his palm. The umbrella jumps to him, and he wraps his fingers around the wet cloth. Slowly, carefully, he picks his way through a puddle, approaching him until he's close enough for Rax to accept it from his hand.
It's almost comical: handing someone a dirty umbrella in front of a public 'fresher. But for a moment both their hands grasp the wet fabric, not touching, and it feels sacred. Kylo turns to stare at nothing in particular, following Rax's gaze, and stands with his Knight, shoulder to shoulder, in silence.
This close, Kylo finally understands what feels different. Rax's Force signature plucks at his memory, achingly familiar: a flash of blue sky through barbed wire, the starched perfection of a cadet's uniform, Jyun's dirt-stained hands in his, and something new, something forlorn he can't place, clean and powdery.
But eclipsing it all, for the first time, is Darkness. Before, Rax felt cold and shriveled in the Force, always huddling in the Light, pretending to be what Luke wanted him to be. But now his power sings out the way it was meant to, venomous and heartbreaking and strong. After so long fighting his darkness, Rax has fallen, and it's beautiful.
Snoke broke him, in the end. Snoke won. Snoke always won.
Without acknowledging him, Rax gestures at the 'fresher wall. They must look ridiculous, two grown men, one in black and one in white, standing in the pouring rain, staring at a public toilet like it holds the secrets of the universe.
Rax has indicated the biggest poster on the wall, crammed among the cheap 2-d stickers for musical acts and the years-old Sindian for Senate holos and the vulgar stick-figures etched in spray paint: a vibrant blue and red image, five pale planets and five red lines stretching back to one white sphere. Over it, someone has scrawled kriff this rain.
"Have you been out there?" Rax asks.
Kylo furrows his brow, confused.
Rax reaches up to his ear in a gesture that tugs at Kylo's chest. Rax used to run his fingers over his Padawan braid when he felt the anger, like it was a rope he could use to climb out of the Darkness.
"To the asteroid field formerly known as the Hosnian system," Rax clarifies. "Have you been out there?"
"I have more important things to do than scavenge an asteroid field."
"Scavenge. No, no, no, Ben. Just sit. Just take a shuttle and sit. Feel it."
Kylo raises an eyebrow. "You've done this."
"Every goddamned morning since that bastard left my head, yes, Ben, I wake up at 0400 like our Master taught us and I take the forty-five minute hyperspace commute from Kuat and I do my morning meditation in that silent hole in the Force. Yes, I've done this, and I will do it every morning until I die because how else can you fucking live with yourself?"
Kylo doesn't respond. He thinks back to his first hours as Supreme Leader, taking in the fallout from the destruction of the fleet: his ships, his souls, his galaxy, and he did not care. He still doesn't care, not really. He doesn't approve of vaporizing forty billion people in the same way he doesn't approve of orange, or Poe Dameron, or sand.
But guilt is Rax's kriffing lifeblood. He even feels guilty for the camps they stuck him in. Who's going to protect the billionaires who designed the Death Star, Ben? Who's going to cry for the children of war criminals? No one. We deserved what we got, didn't we, for the way our parents made our money? We deserved worse. Standing up for us would've been political suicide, your mother knew that.
"You said you wanted to talk," Kylo says. He's not sure why they're here—Rax couldn't have planned this, but he could've run as soon as he sensed Kylo, and he didn't.
Kylo walks toward the cliff edge—he's never been afraid of heights, and he's not afraid Rax will push him off—and he's relieved when Rax follows, tracing Kylo's gaze to the end of the causeway.
"You feel it," Rax says. "The agony."
Kylo nods. "What is it?"
"The reason I'm here in your tender care and not safely huddled behind two light-years of security on Kuat. And the reason I ran away to Luke in the first place."
Kylo says nothing, only raises an eyebrow.
"It's called Area Null," Rax says. He's speaking slowly, like he's inside a temple. Kylo feels it too; the place feels like a tomb, a haunted one. "At school, Armitage whispered about what went on here. Project Unity, for reeducating enemies of the Emperor. Project Harvester, where the Empire trained the Force-sensitives they rounded up to hunt down Jedi."
Rax grimaces at the tower. He shakes his head.
"And when our Master took over the Order, Armitage would tell ghost stories about his father's work for the Supreme Leader, that our Master was hunting Force-users and turning them into—well, into whatever we are. Loyal servants, I suppose. Assassins. Slaves."
Kylo doesn't comment. It's what Hux thought, too: Kylo Ren isn't meant to be his successor, he's meant to be his slave.
"I never found out if the rumors were true, but I saw enough that I ran, and you know the rest."
Kylo does know the rest: the four months shivering in cargo-holds, hiding from FOSB agents until he got to HosPrime, following rumors of a new Jedi temple until, skeletal and out of options, he mind-tricked his way into the office of Leia Organa, the woman who authorized the camps that killed his siblings and his mother.
"But the rumors weren't true," Kylo says. "He only had Varra before we came."
Rax knows who 'he' is; there's only one 'he' with them.
"I almost feel sorry for you, Ben. He never told you anything."
Kylo ignores this; Kylo was the only one aloud to stay at Snoke's side in central command, wasn't he? Snoke told him more than anyone else—but this is new.
"He was hunting down other Force-sensitives?"
Rax shakes his head again. He keeps doing it, like his life has narrowed down to one long denial.
"He was breeding them."
Kylo jerks his neck to look at him, but Rax only gazes out at the tower, at the sea. If not for the stark white of his knuckles on his umbrella, Kylo might've thought he was admiring the view.
"Or. Well. He was trying to," Rax amends. "Force-sensitive children don't do well in artificial wombs, as he found out. So he used a real one."
Kylo's eyes widen at the grey tone in his voice. "Jyun. She survived."
Rax nods, and closes his eyes, but keeps his voice even. "She survived. Until eight weeks ago. We have two children, Ben. Two little girls. Eleven months and two years."
Suddenly that clean, powdery note in Rax's Force signature overrides everything else, and Kylo takes it in with a stab of recognition. Baby powder, baby shampoo, soft black baby hair under the pads of Rax's reverent fingers, the warm weight of a sleeping infant on his shoulder. They always wanted a big family—Luke would remind them Jedi were celibate, then roll his eyes: I'm just saying, if you're gonna hand me six or seven mini-Jyuns you better name one Luke and you better send each one with a crate of whiskey.
Kylo feels sick.
"Where are they?" Kylo asks.
Rax doesn't answer.
"Rax, where are they?"
"Jyun is dead. I don't know where he took the girls. I'd hoped you know. That's the only reason I risked getting this close to you. They're alive, I know that, I would've felt it if—"
Rax keeps his voice reasonably steady until the end, but Kylo feels the pain and love and desperation in the Force, so thick he can't breathe, like someone's shoved a towel down his throat.
"He did the same thing to them that he did to you," Rax says softly. "He got in their heads, twisted them to the Darkness before they'd even been born. Just like you."
"No," Kylo says. He pities Rax, but it's different. "The Force chose me. He sensed my power and helped me, because he knew my parents would stop me from fulfilling my destiny."
Rax's expression twists from grief to naked disgust, and he ignores Kylo.
"I felt the girls, in that tower. They were here not long ago, but Varra died before I could find out where they've been taken."
Kylo hadn't known Varra Ren well, but he'd felt a kinship with her. She never trained with Luke. She alone understood his love for their Master, she alone shared it.
"Varra was alive? She helped you?"
Rax makes a sound that might be a snort, or a laugh, but full of bitterness.
"She ran that place. She tortured Jyun there. So yesterday when I got here, I returned the favor. But she took one of those suicide capsules we give the stormtroopers, and she died before I could find out where she took my children. So I cut the head from her corpse and threw her into the sea."
He says this like he's reciting the agenda of a particularly dull committee meeting. And Kylo understands, then: this is how Snoke broke him. He coiled Rax's love around his ankles like a chain and it dragged him down into the Darkness, and he's still falling.
"I thought I'd feel better, after I killed her," Rax says.
"Do you?" Kylo asks, because Rax wants him to ask.
"Yes. Yeah, I do. I play her screams in the quiet moments like a lullaby, and they make everything better."
Kylo says nothing. He's never enjoyed causing pain. He's never enjoyed torture.
"It should scare the hell out me, whatever's happened to me," Rax continues. "But it doesn't. I thought I'd feel guilty but I don't, and Ben, I don't feel anything, not a damn thing, until suddenly I do and there's a constituent in my office half-dead because I lost control."
"The guilt weakened you." It's true, and Rax knows it's true.
"It did. But what if I hurt my girls? What if I find them, and I can't control this thing inside me, and I hurt my children?"
Kylo has no comfort for him. Silence stretches between them for a few long minutes, broken only by the crashing waves. Rax has begun to shiver.
"That night," Rax says, "at the Temple, I followed you because I loved you like a brother."
Kylo hates that Rax can feel whatever it is that stabs through Kylo's chest at those words. He doesn't need to speak for Rax to understand that he's listening, because Rax understands that words aren't important, it's the Force that carries the truth, and Rax listens to the truth. His Master did, too. It's why Kylo loved him.
"I followed you because nobody else could follow me to the dark places, nobody else understood. And Jyun loved you, too, and we followed you because we still had hope, even after what you did. And now she's dead, Ben, and I'm this. Because we loved you."
Rax is more right than he knows: it had all been for love. Kylo loved their Master, and he would have given everything—he did give everything—to earn Snoke's love. The Jedi never talked about that, when they talked about the Dark side. The love.
"Was it worth it, Ben?"
Kylo raises an eyebrow.
"This power you traded our lives for. Was it worth it?"
Kylo inhales and holds cool salt-scented air in his mouth, and when he blows it away he blows Rax's question away with it. Yes, of course it was worth it. Power is the only thing that's worth anything. Destiny is the only thing that matters.
But he can't make the sounds come out, because his mind can't seem to free itself from the burrs of I loved you like a brother.
"I'm losing my mind," Kylo says. It's not an answer to Rax's question. "Since he died. I haven't slept in two days, I haven't eaten."
"Me too," Rax says. "It's like he was the only thing holding me together and now that he's gone, it's all coming apart."
Kylo nods because yes, that's it, that's it exactly, and Rax could always do this. Kylo was never very good at words so he didn't use many of them, but Rax could always hear the truths behind his silences and speak for him. And no one else would ever understand what it was like, with Snoke.
There's no pity in Rax's expression when Kylo meets his eyes, but there's something other than hatred. Longing, a nameless need.
"Ben, look. I've got no idea, no kriffing idea, where my children are, and I will burn down the galaxy to find them, and my life is about to become a living hell again if you let me off this planet alive. But there's a bar not far from here. If you're not going to kill me in the next hour, I could use your help, and I could really, really use a drink."
"You're joking."
After this conversation, the horrors he's describing, it seems crazy, what he's asking. But Kylo wants it more than he wanted the galaxy, more than he wanted his destiny. Suddenly he's drowning in the yearning that seized him when Rey sat by a fire and offered her hand.
"I hate jokes. So do you. It's one of the reasons no one could ever stand us."
For a moment there is no sound other than the spiteful, relentless pounding of the rain. Rax sighs, and leads the way, knowing Kylo will follow.
The junior Senator from Kuat and the Supreme Leader of the First Order walk into a bar. It's a dimly-lit bar in the Old Quarter with stone walls and a glass ceiling, where the hookah smoke floats thick enough to mask their faces as they talk among the gratuitous cushions in a recessed hollow in the floor, separated by a gurgling water pipe and a bottle of mid-priced wine. The bar overlooks the sea, which has darkened from gunmetal to charcoal, the only sign of night on this world without sunset.
Rax pours them each a glass with a precise motion he'd probably learned serving the officers at Academy soirees. He takes a long, practiced drag on the hookah before handing it to Kylo. He's never smoked—tobacco, anyway; he used to share whatever Djorro passed around—and he hasn't touched alcohol in six years. Between that and the thirty-six hours without sleep and the circadian disruption of jumping from standard to planetary time everything feels less than real.
Rax speaks to the fake candle in the middle of the table; it flickers as a serving droid jostles against it. "They found Zan. A few days ago."
Kylo exhales, managing not to cough. He's not surprised.
"A battle?" Kylo inquires in a neutral tone. He's picturing a bar fight, not a dogfight. Of all the Knights, Zanora Ren had always burned darkest, even darker than he and Varra. But for Zan the Darkness was stims and spice and sex, sucking so much from life that it burned her up and left her nothing but a hollow shell.
"Overdose."
Kylo nods.
"Djorro?"
"On assignment with Black Sun, some kind of arms deal. He probably broke and ran with a few billion embezzled credits the instant our Master died. Thero too," Rax says before he asks. Thero Ren is the least likely to ever try to kill him, but the mostly likely to pull it off. She's paranoid, bookish, useless with a lightsaber. "If Zan's dead there's nothing keeping her from running. They'll assume you're hunting them down."
Kylo agrees. Both of them only survived that night in the Temple because they'd had the sense to run from Kylo, and both accepted what Snoke asked them to do without a fight.
So that's it. That's his legacy as Master of the Knights of Ren: Jyun, Zan, and Varra dead, Thero and Djorro on the run, and he and Rax as broken as they've always been.
"It's just us now," Rax says. And Kylo understands: no one else will ever understand what it was like. He raises a glass and looks at Kylo expectantly. A toast.
"The Knights of fucking Ren," Rax says, and drains his glass.
Kylo gestures with his own glass, but says nothing.
For a long time, both of them sip their wine and gaze out at the rain. A droid brings their food, all deep-fried seafood and mounds of starchy fried tubers as grey as the Arkanisian ocean. Rax, as a Senator, has been allowed to eat, and he watches Kylo with something between amusement and disgust as Kylo tries, unsuccessfully, to taste freedom in these morsels of grease and salt.
His focus on Rax had granted him some respite from Rey, but as they eat in silence she intrudes into his awareness again, doing something mechanical and utterly uninteresting.
"Do you know anything about the way he controlled us?" he asks Rax, because who the hell else can he ask now? "Or Force bonds?"
Rax shakes his head, tearing holes in the fabric of smoke. "No," he says firmly. He gestures with the mouthpiece. "I wondered why you didn't try to take my mind the instant I saw you. I suppose you're tempted." Rax, he knows, is thinking of his children, vulnerable, already fully absorbed in the Dark side, programmed from conception to serve the Supreme Leader and crave the voice of his love.
"I'm not tempted," Kylo says, pushing his plate away as he fights a wave of nausea. He's not tempted. He's trapped. "I want to break one."
Rax raises one perfectly-tweezed eyebrow, and in answer Kylo sketches out the situation in vague terms, not mentioning the Resistance. He doesn't dare reveal the whole truth. As he speaks, Rax's frown deepens.
"You care for this girl," he says.
Kylo doesn't bother to deny it, since Rax will feel it if he lies. Of course he cares for her; that's the only reason Snoke ordered Kylo to kill her instead of doing it himself.
You are not an animal, my apprentice, who kills without thought. The ignorant will call you inhuman but you are more human than any of them, because you kill with love in your heart. Remember this, dear child: the only sacrifices that matter are those that char our souls as we throw them on the fire.
His Master hadn't lied about that: Kylo killed Snoke with love in his heart—fierce, desperate love—and the love and the death made him stronger. If he'd hated Snoke, it would've been such a banal thing.
But it doesn't matter if he cares for her, does it? She hates him. He gave her everything he could possibly give her, and she laughed in his face. She and Snoke agreed on that, at least: he's a failure.
"You hate it, don't you?" Rax says with surprise, reading his vibrations in the Force. "Doing to this girl what he did to us. I would've thought you'd be delighted to have a pet of your very own."
Kylo shakes his head, because no, he's not delighted. It's—unclean. Like someone's glued his eyeballs to a window where she's undressing and no matter how much he wants to look away, he can't.
"Ben, you have to kill her," Rax says, leaning forward and lacing his fingers together. He wears a huge iron wedding ring. "This is what he did to us. If you care for her, you have to stop this now, because soon you'll be able to punish her like he could punish us, and she'll wish she were dead."
Kylo glowers at the fake candle sputtering in the middle of the table. He should be glad. He has a reason to do it, now, to kill her. It's the rational thing to do. It's a mercy.
Rax considers him. Kylo sighs; if Rax's best suggestion is to kill her, it's no use talking about it anymore, and besides, Kylo doesn't want to talk about Rey, he can't get away from Rey. Rey's a dead end, a false hope. This, with Rax, this is older and deeper and he can still get it back.
She's talking to someone, though of course he can't hear, and he feels a kind of warmth, almost burning, arcing out from the texture of her in the Force, to him, and from him to Rax. Unbidden, the memory of that summer floats to his mind.
"Do you remember," Rax asks, "when I visited HosPrime with you and Luke? When we played Yavin: Aftershock II for, what, four days?"
"Luke played as the Empire and beat us," Kylo says, unnerved because he'd been thinking of the same thing, and he trusts his instincts too much to ignore the sudden certainty that Rey has something to do with it.
The serving droid brings out the massive tray of chocolate desserts Kylo ordered because he's free and because he can. He closes his eyes when the first taste of it hits his mouth, and Rax must feel his ecstasy in the Force, because he smirks.
"And we ate three or four kilos of those little chocolate squares from that shop by the Senate complex, with the blue wrapper, you remember? Luke dared you to eat a whole bag in a sitting because you were so skinny, and you did."
Kylo nods, not quite managing to hold back a smirk. That had been the agonizing year he grew half a meter and never stopped eating.
But Rax isn't looking at him, he's gazing into the smoke like he's recounting some private vision from the Force. Maybe he is.
"Jyun and I would've had a hut next to Luke's by now, Ben," Rax says, something perilously close to a genuine smile on his face. It's almost physically painful for Kylo to see it. "You'd mind the girls and change nappies and read them bedtime stories."
"I absolutely would not."
"You would. Jyun would watch you from the doorway and you'd pretend to be cross like you always do, but you'd love it, and the girls would be so excited for Uncle Luke and Uncle Ben to come over."
Kylo frowns at him. Even for Rax, even in a fantasy, he can't consent to 'Uncle Ben.'
True night still hasn't fallen, and Kylo suddenly finds the unrelenting grey of this planet unbearable. He lowers his gaze to the condensation-beaded table and, with irritation, notices a stain on it. He smudges his gloved finger across it, idly trying to wipe it away.
"You've got to be feeling what I'm feeling since he died," Rax says after a long time. "The surges, the power."
Kylo hesitates, because his words and their implications flood like ocean water into the hole in his chest that his Master used to fill, freezing him from the inside, drowning him. He nods.
"You know what it means, Ben."
For a long few minutes, Kylo says nothing. He'd been too afraid to say it, too afraid even to think it, but here, with Rax, Kylo knows it's true. On some level he'd known when his father had told him Snoke was only using him for his power. Han hadn't realized just how right he'd been.
"He was draining our power," Kylo says, and the words drift from his mouth like vapor, insubstantial over the ocean and the sloshing rain. "Keeping us weak. He was feeding off us."
Rax nods. Kylo presses his eyes shut because he feels the ghosts behind him again, ready to seize him, ready to choke him.
Kylo remembers the conversation Hux had shown him hours after he'd killed Snoke. The sneer in his Master's voice when he'd told Hux: he believes utterly in the destiny of his bloodline and thinks that I alone can lead him to his true potential.
But he never had a potential. He never had a destiny. He only had power, and Snoke had sensed it across the galaxy, sensed it before he'd even been born, and molded it for his own ends.
There's no feeling in Kylo's voice; he's only stating a fact, calmly, to the ocean, to the rain, to Rax, to Rey. She's freezing right now, and shivering, and so is he.
"Everything he ever told me was a lie."
Rax exhales slowly, like he's trying to control himself. His grief scrapes at Kylo in the Force, scouring away the finish on his mind, leaving him raw, exposed, and helpless.
"Yeah. Yeah, Ben, it was."
He could've said I told you so. I told you so a million times. But he doesn't. He doesn't need to. Kylo notices that he keeps repeating Ben's name, as though he has to remind himself who he's talking to, as though he doesn't know that Ben is gone.
Kylo flexes the raw knuckles of his right hand because they feel numb. He takes off his glove and presses it against the table, using it to polish the stupid stain away, but he can't. A brown hand falls across his forearm, stilling his hand. Rax's dark eyes hold his for a long moment, daring him to do something stupid, and with a sigh, Kylo accepts, because he always does.
He reaches into his coat and withdraws his hand, grasping the datapad Hux secured for him the night before. He holds it out to Rax.
"What's this?" Rax asks.
"Unlimited security clearance. If there's a record of them anywhere in any Order database, you can access it from this."
"You'd give me all the secrets of the Order?"
"Rax. I'm giving you the Order."
He feels Rax's shock in the Force. "Find them," Kylo says. "Then come back. Forget whatever Onara promised you, if she promised you anything. Be my Grand Marshall."
Rax swallows and opens his eyelids too wide, the desire naked on his face.
The galaxy would be better for it, to have a man who objected to destroying planets. And at night, they could fight. He's never loved fighting with anyone as much as he loved fighting Rax—or, well, he didn't, until he met Rey.
Rax wants it. Badly.
"I fucking hate you, Ben."
"I know," Kylo says, because it doesn't matter, as long as he'll stay.
But then that clean baby-powder scent hacks through the Force again. Rax masters his longing expression, and shakes his head. Another denial.
"Ben," he says. "If I find my girls, I'm taking them somewhere where you will never be able to get your hands on them. You can't think I'd trust you around my kids. With your rages, with what you did to me, to Jyun. I know you want their power-"
"I don't."
"You don't now, because you're lonely and you'll say anything to make me stay, but what happens when you get mad? What happens when you get desperate?"
Kylo feels his eyes opening wider as he realizes what's happening, as he realizes the future is going to trap him in the gutter his Master made for him no matter what he does.
"And," Rax says, so quietly Kylo almost can't hear it over the rain, "if I don't find them, I can't live with what I've done. I can't live with the things he made me do. And I don't have to."
Kylo's lungs seems to fill up with iron filings as he processes what Rax is saying. "You can't." It's an order. But Rax doesn't take his orders.
"I can, Ben. And I will. Either way, this is the end."
Kylo wants to say something, anything. He wants to rage at him and force him to stay, because this isn't how it's supposed to work. Rey refused him, and Rax is refusing him, and it can't be happening, it can't be real.
But Kylo knows he won't stop him.
Rax collects himself, then sighs. He tucks the datapad into the inner pocket of his damp white coat.
Kylo looks down at the table, resisting the urge to swish his coaster in the little rivulets of condensation there. Nothing feels real. His master lied, his destiny was a lie, his life is a lie, and nothing fucking matters anymore, and he might as well say it, because it's true.
"I'm sorry," Kylo says to the table, and to Rax.
Rax swallows. He takes a long, slow sip of his wine, and swallows again.
"I know."
"Then stay."
"It's too late."
"No. You said, that first night on the Supremacy, after Luke's, you there was a way back, even after what I did."
"And maybe there is," Rax says, finally meeting Kylo's eyes. "I want to believe that. Because if someone like you could change—that would be something, Ben. It really would." He sighs. "But Jyun, and Zan and the others, and my children have already suffered enough because I tried to save your soul."
"No, no, you're not listening. I'm sorry. I'm offering you everything-"
"It's too late, Ben."
Kylo's eyes flash open at the words, and Rax leans forward across the table, so close Kylo can smell the wine on his breath.
"I believe you're sorry. I really, really do. But I've seen you be sorry a thousand times. You're addicted to sorry. You keep hurting and hurting just to sit in the rain and feel sorry. Stop being fucking sorry and be brave."
Rax leans back. In one motion he drains his wine and stands. Kylo wants to rage at him, to choke him for daring to talk to him like this, but he doesn't. Because he's never going to be good enough, and he deserves this, and Rax is only telling him what he already knows, what he's told everyone who's tried to offer him anything else: it's too late.
"For once in your flaming wreck of a life, Ben, be brave. Stop looking for someone to tell you what to do, stop telling yourself you deserve to die because you're not living up to your destiny, stop looking for someone to love you, and do the right thing."
Kylo studies the table like it holds the future of the galaxy, and he hears a shuffle as Rax bends down to pick up his coat and his umbrella. He's really leaving. Kylo didn't think he'd do it, not once he offered him Grand Marshall.
"Rax."
There it is. That please. The same humiliating voice, his admission of failure.
"I don't know what I'm doing."
Rax looks down at him with something that's not quite pity. It's almost the look Rey gave him when he knelt in the dust on Crait, but there's a hint of compassion in it. He holds on to that hint.
"You're the Supreme Leader, Ben. Fucking lead."
Kylo should say something. He should do something, anything other than stare down, paralyzed, as the only person would ever understood him walks out of his life forever.
"When you find them-" Kylo says to his back. Rax hesitates, then twists his neck to look sidelong at Kylo. "When you find them, if you need help—ships, soldiers. Me. If you need it, it's yours."
Rax regards him with a neutral expression, then, with a curt nod, walks out into the rain.
For a long time Kylo sits, nursing his half-glass of wine. He shivers because his tunic is wet and Rey is cold, and when he can't stand it anymore because he's just a thirty-something fuckup sitting alone at a bar, just a creep, he leaves the table, leaves the bar, and walks toward the tower, toward the cliff.
Kylo wanders the streets for hours before he settles on an overturned cargo crate on a cliff edge, but he doesn't look out at the black ocean, he faces the row of cheaply-built industrial flat buildings built near the edge, studying one particular featureless tower. It's a rough area of town, far away from Seccom, where the rain has plastered wet trash into the pockmarked pedestrian walkways at ground level and, high above, rusty speeders honk through the sky blaring music about dancing and sex. By the time he feels Hux behind him he's soaked to the skin, shivering along with Rey. She's with his mother. Kylo wonders what they're talking about.
"How did you find me?"
"You'll no doubt be cheered to hear I've no idea. Sniffing psychic piss, I suppose. I admit I was expecting something a bit more—majestic. More conducive to brooding."
"Leave me."
"What—on the planet?"
"Leave me alone, and leave me a transport, I'll go back to the ship on my own."
"I think not, sir."
Kylo disciplines himself not to huddle despite the cold, and studies the overflowing dumpsters at the base of the building he's been watching. "I gave you an order."
"And as the closest thing you have to an XO I am well within my rights to ignore that order until you can assure me you're fit for command."
He should choke him, but whatever energy sustained this thirty-six hour power binge has abandoned him, and he's only exhausted and cold. He is unfit for command, because he always has been.
"Supreme Leader. Frankly I'm not going to leave you by this cliff because I suspect that you're seriously considering throwing yourself off it."
Kylo huffs, and hunches down into his soaking-wet tunic, trying not to feel his mother's presence.
"Are you concerned for my wellbeing, Hux?"
"Hardly. It would be very awkward for me if you turned up dead."
"I'm not suicidal," he says with a sigh, and is somewhat surprised to notice this is true. He doesn't want to die, but he does want to stay here and shiver indefinitely, and never speak to anyone again. He could just tell Hux to take the galaxy.
The galaxy was never Kylo's destiny, anyway.
"Excellent to hear, sir. Then I'll provide you with a list of acceptable brooding spots on the Voratrix. But I really must insist you come with me because I and the rest of your officers have a kriffing galaxy to run."
"You just want to get off this planet because it reminds you of your father."
Hux doesn't take the bait. Kylo hadn't intended it as bait; it's just a fact.
"I want to get off this planet because my socks are soaking wet from traipsing after you."
Kylo sighs and stands. Hux doesn't give up, and at least he's a distraction from Rey and her sadness and whatever else he's feeling. Rax will be long-gone by now, wherever he's going. Kylo should be worried that he's going to take that datapad and hand it straight to Onara, but Rax couldn't lie to him. He's going after his children, and as much as he pretended otherwise, he cares enough about the Order to destroy that datapad as soon as he's done with it.
"It is one of the more magnificent images," Hux says conversationally, following Kylo's gaze to the building he's been staring at. "We'll need to discuss updating it as soon as we're ready to begin Phase III."
Kylo tilts his face up to frown at the four-story high holoposter clinging to the building, full of holes and illuminated with obscene graffiti. He meets the inscrutable eyes of the looming black image above the shining red cross. Defending the legacy.
He'd never had a destiny. He never had a legacy, either.
He suddenly feels very small.
Hux splashes toward him through a puddle, kicking away a floating piece of trash. Kylo just stands there, trying to read the expressionless face under that painted mask.
"If you like it that much, sir, I'll have one installed in your quarters. Now let's get going before someone steals my transport."
Kylo finally glances at him. Hux is grimacing, expectant, and when Kylo doesn't move Hux makes a theatrical gesture toward the transport he's parked at the edge of the rocks. "Please, Supreme Leader, lead the way."
With a slow, deep breath and last, mournful look at the towering, invincible vision of Kylo Ren, Ben does.
Thank you all SO MUCH for the comments, and for letting me know you're still reading. I really, really appreciate them! I hope you liked this version of the Knights of Ren, who definitely get most of the darkness in this story. This was a beast of a chapter to write-so much galactic politics!-so please let me know what works for you and what doesn't.