XXXVI

Rey fights like a cornered dog, slavering, rabid, lashing out with her fists and the Force. It's useless. Hux has enough lackeys to bury her in bodies, and if only one in five lands a blow on her, it's finally enough. They treat her the only way they can; by putting her down, without mercy. The blow to her head dazzles her, makes her see mirages like she's lost in Jakku's sinking sands, and she sinks down, down, down, until she can't make any resistance when they stick her with enough sedative to calm a charging wyldbeest.

The world slows to a crawl, her body weighted as if she were pushing through mud. The Force recedes from her, too far to reach, or even consider. In slow motion, colors blurring before her stricken eyes, Rey collapses to the ground and lies still, shallow breaths panting in her throat her last remaining sign of life.

Hux watches it all, every brutal minute of it. Rey swears he grins every time a drop of her blood rains onto the deck.

"Bring her," he orders them. Rey can't even get her feet underneath her; they have to drag her, toes rattling up the stairs, to a little operations room above the hanger of his ship. Hux indicates a chair and Rey's captors deposit her there like a sack of grain. Her head rings and she grasps the armrests to avoid tipping onto the floor and spilling open at the seams.

Hux stands, looking down. Always looking down.

Rey spits blood in the direction of his boots, grinning in momentary satisfaction as he flinches back. It won't be the last time, she swears, that she'll make him sorry for his smug superiority.

"You are in a precarious position, Lady Rey," the title is a sneering insult, "Don't make things worse for yourself."

"I'm alone in a room with you. Things can't get any worse." Still, discretion being the better part of valor, she swallows the blood that's building in the back of her throat. She must have bitten her cheek, or maybe she's lost a tooth; her whole mouth reeks of copper.

"Please know your sentiments are entirely reciprocated. Yet, do remember you are alive only because I wish it."

An excellent point. "And why do you wish it? My being alive can't gain you anything. Once Kylo Ren knows what you've done it me," it feels like a betrayal to call him that, but Rey knows Hux won't be intimidated by Ben, "he'll tear you to pieces. If you're lucky."

"Foolish girl," he tsks in mock pity, "You haven't yet grasped the severity of your situation, have you?"

Rey can't think; her ears are ringing too loudly, drowning out any semblance of coherent thought. She reaches for an expression of careless defiance, but at that moment she sneezes through her broken nose and howls with pain.

At least her pitiful state is too gross for Hux to grin about.

"Your traitorous stratagem provided me—and the other Marshals, by the way—with the perfect plan. After all, you and your usurping master are surrounded by enemies. How could you be so idiotic as to suppose I would throw all my power away in a treaty with a handful of insignificant Force users? No. You may be powerful, but what is power if it is not to be controlled? Ren and his Knights were only useful insofar as Snoke leashed them. And you, desert rat," he croons, "have never had any value at all."

That's not true, she wants to snap, but she has no strength for it. She has no strength for anything…not even to strangle a tiny, traitorous voice inside her that whispers that Hux is right, that she's nothing, and nobody, and no one would ever care whether she lived or died. Why would they? Her own parents threw her away.

He sees his victory and presses his advantage like a constricting serpent putting pressure on a shattered bone.

"Little thing," he murmurs, "How Ren inflated you with his false promises! It must have seemed like paradise, going from the lowest of the low to whore of the First Order's Supreme Leader! But you know it could never have lasted. Even Ren would have tired of you at last."

Rey can bear insults to herself, but she won't let this piece of bantha shit say a word against Ben.

"That's not true," the words grate against her ribs. "You kriffing liar."

"Hmm. Well, you'll never know. My men are staking Ren's head on the Primacy's bridge as we speak. Perhaps, when we return, you can ask it."

Her heart goes cold within her, a lump of ice that hasn't the life to beat. Mustering all her power, every ounce of will, she silently screams his name across the galaxy.

There's a faint sense of acknowledgement, but nothing else. She can't tell if he's there or not.

Her head reels and sinks forward on her chest. For a moment, her agony and despair crash in with such intensity she might be standing unguarded on the edge of a hurricane.

"Why do you care for him so? He never had any intention of keeping his promises to you, I can tell you that. You forget, I knew Ben Solo when Snoke first brought him into the Order. He may once have been a Jedi, but his heart always craved power. He might have shared it with you, but he never would have relinquished it altogether. There will never be a utopian, democratic galaxy, not while men are men and their hearts are—"

She cuts him off with a groan, equal measures pain, exasperation, and scorn. "Shut up. I'm not a sounding board for your damn speeches. I don't care."

"You might, if I told you I had a place for you in the reformed First Order."

Lifting her head is a titanic struggle, but she makes it. His expression is hard to parse; perhaps because her blackened eyes are rapidly swelling shut.

"I don't care," she repeats, grinning as fury turns his sallow skin jaundiced as old cloth.

"You are a scavenger. Surely one who lives by such means has no quarrel with remaining alive by whatever methods she can?"

Rey's eyes drift close. In the red, burning darkness of her beaten mind, she tries again to reach for Ben. It's weak, it's pitiful, it's every insult Hux could possibly throw at her, but she wants him. She longs for his voice, for the sense of him, more than she's ever wanted anything in this accursed world. If he's gone…is Hux right? Can she do anything it takes to save her own life? Could she live on as an automaton in whatever role he plans for her, breathing, eating, and walking, when her heart is entirely absent?

"General?" It's a new voice, muffled and processed—a stormtrooper's. "There's a squad of Resistance fighters approaching. We've been hailed by," he pauses, "Commander Dameron, sir."

"Well, well. Let's give Dameron fodder for his jokes, shall we? Bring her."

Rey is lifted, carried, out the door and down the stairs, head jolting with every step. It's impossible to distinguish anything now but the broadest outlines of the things around her, and the sedative is swirling in her bloodstream, deadening everything else. Words rumble around her, midnight thunder, and she can't catch any words at all.

But the face on the viewscreen is large enough, even for her eyes to see. Poe's own widen as he sees her—or what must look like a mashed clay doll of her, by now—and he says something to Hux that swears of vengeance and bloody death.

He can't, he can't. Rey doesn't know much, but she knows he can't. She's already taken, already lost, and if Hux has a plan for her, at least she'll stay that way. She can wait.

"Get to Ben!" the words scream up her throat, scraping her raw, turning her inside-out.

"Poe!" they're injecting her again, the world is shrinking to a pinpoint of brilliant certainty, and she only has one breath to inhale and cry one last, desperate time:

"Get Ben!"