new note: I published this on my ao3 back in December, but forgot to cross-post here.
original note: According to my Evernote info, I wrote most of this back in 2017 and then abandoned it for reasons unforeseen. So, like, yeah. [cough] It kind of shows in the quality of the work, it has very little polish imo, but tbh, I just wanted this out of my drafts so I pulled a speedrun and finished the oneshot in one day. #Not Beta Read, We Die Like Men
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It ends in blood, as it began.
Most days, Jon Snow tried not to think of his mother. Thinking of her only brought pain and shrouded him in sorrow, and he has long since choked on both to willingly bring more upon himself.
But as he was dragged — bloody and beaten, and wretchedly breathless; falling in and out of consciousness like a twinkling of a distant star on the horizon — by two stormtroopers to the interrogation rooms somewhere deep within the belly of Starkiller base, Jon could not help but dazedly recall the words his mother spoke to him not long before her passing: I dreamt it, Jon; the end of ends. It ends in blood, as it began.
But some hours prior, he had been running through a humid, dusky forest to warn Gendry and Brynden Tully of the enemy ships boarding onto the planet, only to be chased by General Baratheon of the First Order and his stormtroopers towards a tall, black-clad figure whom Gendry had referred to as Alayne Stone, the First Order's Enforcer, with enough trepidation and hostility in his voice the one time he spoke of his past, to convince Jon that he would regret meeting her strongly.
He had.
Jon had been crouching behind a bolder, hiding away from the prowling General Baratheon, tightly clutching a blaster and favouring his left shoulder. Blood trickled down from a cut on his forehead Jon had gotten during a brawl with a pair of stormtroopers.
Then, stepping out of a treeline like a phantom of a distant nightmare, Alayne Stone appeared before him, activating her lightsaber — a jagged length of blazing, sizzling red — and spun it in a lazy, practiced arc, singeing the air with a sharp hiss. She had stalked after a hastily retreating Jon through a narrow path snaking through a network of rock formations, with an oppressive, heavy presence surrounding her that sent jolts of dread and alarm through Jon. His hands shook, his hair stood on end. With a whirl of a lightsaber, she deflected all five blaster shots he had swiftly fired at her, sending them to explode into a nearby rock.
Jon ran.
He hadn't managed to run very far.
Alayne Stone's gloved hand shot up and Jon was paralysed. He struggled as she approached him carefully, the hum of her lightsaber growing stronger with every step, managing only to twitch and shake. Whatever was seized him held him tight and would not yield, no matter how much he fought.
With a flick of a wrist, she deactivated her lightsaber and tucked it into a holster on her belt. "The droid," she asked as softly as she could in that unnatural, mechanical voice of hers, circling around him. "Where is it?"
Jon twitched, fruitlessly straining against whatever hold she had on him, but remained quiet, resolute. He shut his eyes and felt her gloved hand touch his arm, his shoulder, his chest. Her presence was heady and overwhelming, and Jon's head spun. Then, he felt dreadfully cold; his mind felt slow, dazed, confused, and the cold crept deeper and deeper, settling in his bones, engulfing his heart.
"The map," she said. He could feel the cloth of her hood brush against the back of his neck as she leaned in closer, as if listening to a whisper. "You've seen it."
Jon's hands grew numb.
A pair of stormtroopers emerged from the dense forest to their left. "My lady, Resistance fighters have engaged. We need more troops," one of them said.
"Pull the division out," Alayne Stone commanded. "Forget the droid. We have what we need." She fanned out her fingers then snapped them into a fist, and Jon collapsed into an unconscious heap into Alayne Stone's waiting arms.
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Jon came to with a start.
Disoriented, he looked around. He was strapped to… something. His hands and legs bound tightly with leather cords to a structure that kept him upright.
"Where am I?" It hadn't escaped his notice that his voice came out shaky. Jon felt unmoored. But moments prior his head throbbed with his pulse, and he had but a tenuous grasp on consciousness. Now, he felt oddly rejuvenated. It made him apprehensive.
Across from him, Alayne Stone sat perched on a tall stool. "You're my guest," smoothly came her reply, almost mocking. Ah, Jon thought with an internal wince, poor choice of words.
"Where are the others!"
"You mean the murderers, traitors, and thieves you call 'friends'?" Alayne Stone asked, pointedly. Then, "You'll be relieved to hear that I have no idea."
How dare she? Jon fumed, wishing he had his staff or at least a blaster. A weapon to wrap his hands around, to feel secure. To defend himself. To hurt her.
Her voice was as cool as space itself: "You still want to kill me."
"That happens when you are being hunted by a creature in a mask," Jon spat.
Deliberately and with a disquieting sort of delicacy, Lady Stone removed her monstrous mask; and Jon felt all his faculties desert him.
Alayne Stone was young — several years younger than Jon, most likely — and she was alarmingly, heartbreakingly lovely. She is a girl as brilliant as she is devastating, Blackfish's grim words about the First Order's Top Enforcer briefly flashed across his mind.
Her deeply red hair tumbled into her hood and down her shoulders in long, fulsomely coiled curls; and as she brushed matted strands away from her forehead, she tucked the gruesome helmet into the crook of her arm. Alayne Stone's skin was smooth as glass and pale as milk, and her well-favoured face was composed of angular, sculptured features and clean, sightly lines. She had a full, red mouth that drew the eye and it was twisted into an odd half-smile.
A monster, he had called the implacable Lady Stone. But the girl before Jon was neither; she was very human and very beautiful and very sad. She pulled on his heartstrings; the poignant loneliness radiating from her tasted bitter and sharp on his tongue.
Calmly, she turned and set her helmet onto a pile of ash. Jon's eyes lingered on it for a moment and he swallowed, hard. He had a faint idea of what, of whom, those ashes were. Edging towards him, Alayne Stone persisted with her inquiry, "Tell me about the droid."
"He's a BB unit with a selenium drive and a thermal hyperscan vindicator—"
"It's carrying a section of a navigational chart," she interposed, a purse to her lips. "And we have the rest, recovered from the archives of the Empire, but we need the last piece." She studied Jon for a long moment, wringing the silence dry of air, fuelling the tension. "And somehow you convinced the droid to show it to you. You — a pirate."
Then, snidely, with a sly smirk curving in the corner of her mouth, she said, feather-soft, "You know I can take whatever I want."
Her hand hovered next to his face and Jon felt something foreign — a sensation not unlike the one he experienced in the forest of Takodana, but quieter and tender like a bruise: soft as silk, hard as stars; cold and soothing, and full of a roaring flame. His mind dizzying, Jon began to feel displaced. Dissociated. He was trying to think, but his mind evaded him like wisps smoke, slipping through his fingers.
"You're so lonely," she whispered, "so afraid to live. To… ah, yes, I see. At night, desperate to sleep, you dream of them. You think it's your fault, their deaths — your crew, your responsibility."
Jon tried desperately not to think of Ygritte, of Tormund and Mance and Edd and Val and Satin, of his mother; but he could not — the memories were being forcibly dragged to the forefront of his mind, the ghosts of his past resurrecting one by one to torment him once again. "Get out of my head!"
Whatever ground he gained but moments prior, had been won back twice over; and any advantage he might have had, had been eradicated.
She circled him and her hand, a delicate and slender thing, wielded the Force with precision of a laser-scalpel and gentleness of a sledgehammer. "I know you've seen the map. It's in there, and now you'll give it to me.
"Do not be afraid, Jon Snow," she cooed, soft and honeysweet. "I feel it, too."
What, he considered asking, but did not. He was, unfortunately, too intimately familiar with what she was referring to, to deny its existence. For all the chance he had hiding his emotions from her, he might as well have voiced his thoughts. "I'm not giving you anything."
She smiled. "We'll see."
Alayne Stone probed his mind again, and Jon struggled against her, recognising the feel and the taste of her — cool and bitter, like salt-water. He could feel something inside of him, swelling up and surging forward, like a great tidal wave. It sent jolts of electricity throughout his body, giving him strength. His mind refocused, clearing and adopting a crystal-clear, wondrous clarity.
Jon pushed.
"I can see something, too," Jon barked, gaze narrowing as he gritted his teeth. "You are afraid—" Flashes of disjointed images flickered through Jon's mind: children, red-haired and red-cheeked; a planet, greener than Jon could ever dream; an echoing, boyish laugher; a pair of hands, warm and comforting, an tender embrace; then, something, sharp and hot and piercing, then, red red redredredredred, only red.
Memories were impossible to sort through. Emotions, on the other hand, were not. "—afraid you'll never be a match for your brother!"
Alayne Stone reared back, her face momentarily twisting into a delightful, flushed expression of pure shock, before she rearranged it first into a flint-eyed sneer and then a smooth, unperturbed mask. But it was too late, Jon had seen her weakness and that made him triumphant.
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"The droid will soon be in the hands of the Resistance, giving the enemy the means to locate Brandon Stark and bring to their cause a most powerful ally," The Lord of Light said, slowly. His hollow, low voice echoing in the vast, open chamber. "If Stark returns, the new Jedi will rise.
"Prepare the weapon," The Lord of Light commanded.
Alayne Stone turned to look at Melisandre of Asshai, their Lord's most trusted priestess. Melisandre, too, was pale and red-haired, but that's where their similarities ended. Alayne Stone was taller, younger, her visage sweeter, her power greater; and Melisandre's face had an unnervingly still, unblinking quality to it, her thoughts were as hard to gauge as her age and origins. Most disturbingly, her eyes were inhuman — deep and hungry, insatiable and red, terribly red.
"Yes, sire," Melisandre said, voice as serene as a fawn by a brook, and Alayne Stone closed her eyes.
Behind her eyelids, the Blackwater star-system bled red.
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"I'm sorry, Uncle," Sansa Stark said, voice breaking, "but I can't come home, not until I'll finish what Robb started."
Then, in the bowels of Starkiller base, bathed in red simmer of emergency lights, Alayne Stone killed Brynden Tully.
As the old man's body tumbled from the bridge, into the steel depths of the star destroyer, Jon's rage flared, his heart throbbing in his head with an urge for vengeance, but Gendry grabbed him by the shoulder and dragged Jon away. But not before they saw Davos level a bowcaster at Stone—
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—and miss the shot.
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They stood alone, teetering on a cliff-edge, bathed in shadows, cloaked in snow.
"There's darkness in everyone, Jon Snow, just as there's light. I've come to accept it, and I grew stronger for the knowledge," said Alayne Stone, her voice still even and oddly modulated, despite the discardation of her mask. "There is no Light. There is no Dark. There's only the Force."
She extended her bone-pale hand towards him, and Jon was struck dumb as her fine features adopted an inviting expression and the startling deep-blue of her eyes seeming almost hypnotic. "Come with me, Jon Snow, and let me show you.
"Let me teach you."
You will never be lonely again, her voice whispered sweetly in the dark recesses of Jon's beleaguered, guarded mind. Her haunting presence lurked, wrapping around him in sinuous coils that tightened with every breath he drew; luscious and luring and lulling.
I could, Jon realised, as an old want he thought he no longer harboured flared-up; bright and hot and full of insatiable longing. And she would deliver on her promise.
The gnawing hollow inside him stretched and yawned, ever yearning. What he had always wanted was but a step away.
All he needed to do was to give in.
"Never," he hissed, and lunged at her.
But he was too late, for Alayne Stone had already surged forward, drawing her lightsaber in a smooth arc upwards, with grace and precision that spoke of years of training he did not have.
"As you wish," Alayne Stone said, belatedly; her words drowning in the overwhelming, piercing sound of Jon's ragged scream as her lightsaber burned a clean path through his flesh.
Jon staggered backwards, gripping the hilt of his weapon, desperately searching for the soothing flow of the Force within him. She had sliced his shoulder and torso open with ease and little care, while his attack had only slid off the lightsaber-resistant surface of her armour's shoulder guard.
He'd been a fool to think he could defeat a Master of the blade. She'd cut through like a ship through water — within minutes, he was flat on his back after she'd smashed his head against a rock and it was a struggle to stay conscious.
Jon heard Alayne Stone rip the ruined tatters of her robe as she approached him; peripherally, he could see her unbound hair snapping in the wind like a bloody tail of an angelfish, stark against the darkening sky. Soon, she stood above him; her unreadable expression illuminated by the blistering-red glow of her lightsaber.
Jon's face burned something fierce. He could feel his blood leaking unto and into the snow beneath him. The warmth of it pooling around his head, dripping into his ears. Jon breathed hard and fast, snowflakes and icy crystals melting before his shallow gasps.
She will kill me, Jon determined, glaring hotly at a stone-faced Alayne Stone hovering in the shadows of the dark edges of his sight; just as she had killed Brynden Tully.
He had thought her human, back in the interrogation room on Starkiller base — but she repaid him with blood and death, and called it clemency. Jon would never make that mistake again.
Then, she leaned slightly forward and Jon immediately tensed. But Alayne Stone only dipped a hand into the folds of her black robes. Out of its recesses, she plucked out a cool jar of bacta, and placed it onto his open palm, wrapping his fingers around it with a disturbingly gentle touch.
"You can't die just yet, Jon Snow," was all she said.
Disoriented, Jon scrambled to his feet, but as soon as he took a step forward, he fell onto his knee with a sharp gasp and a low groan. Jon clutched his side with his left hand; and the other fell limp at his side, even as it gripped his lightsaber tight, its blade burning away the snow.
He could no more fight than he would follow her, and Jon wondered if Alayne Stone had decided to leave him here to die out of some sick sense of humour.
Although she spoke softly, Jon heard her words as clearly over the roar of the snow storm and the groaning, splitting earth beneath his feet, as he would have had she whispered into his ear.
"Remember what I said, Jon Snow," Alayne Stone's voice echoed hauntingly across the multitude of chasms of his mind. Jon shivered. "Brandon Stark will not help you learn the true power of the Force, Light or Dark."
The girl that had once been Sansa Stark turned, and in the dusk of the dying planet, her blue eyes burned brighter than the stars above. "I look forward to our next meeting."
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Only later, squirrelled away in the depths of The Blackfish, did Jon begin to feel a faint, familiar prickle in the back of his mind, and tried not to think of Alayne Stone's fathomless, haunted eyes. A monster, he told himself again and again, choosing to focus instead on Brynden Tully's death, on his and Gendry's wounds, on helping Davos pilot the ship.
That was all she was.
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note: In theory, I have a sequel to this; emphasis on the theory, which covers and expands upon that wrights aspect of the summary.
Information No-One Actually Needs, But I'm Giving Anyway:
— Brynden Tully is Han Solo, sort of. He is a smuggler, he is decorated for his services in the war with the Empire-stand-in, he does pilot a famous ship that most refer to as a glorified rust-bucket. But that's as far as similarities go.
— Davos Seaworth is Chewbacca, sort of. Again, artistic license.
— Snoke, or rather, Snoke-stand-in is The Lord of Light, Heart of Fire, God of Flame and Shadow, the red god.
— Melisandre is Armitage Hux and Stannis Baratheon is Captain Phasma. Petyr Baelish is also part of the First Order, skulking somewhere on Starkiller base.