3/22/2
When they land, Jacen makes a straight bee-line for Rey and Kylo's. He knocks, and Kylo opens the door. "Good, you're here."
Kylo's a bit surprised to see him. "Hello?"
"Look, I know Chewie's going to be here soon, and I'm not supposed to butt my nose into this, so—"
"Butt your nose into what? What happened?" Kylo's looking confused.
"Tonight. Big talk? Where we all go from here?"
Kylo relaxes a bit. "Oh, yeah. For a minute there, I was beginning to wonder if you'd done something with those transistors."
Jacen blinks. "Uh… No. I mean, I can tell you where they landed, but…"
Kylo waves it away. "Don't worry about it. Two million credits worth of goods is a big deal to Chewie and Finn, and a significantly smaller one to me."
Jacen looks surprised. He hadn't had any idea they were that valuable. "They just moved them. I know we didn't get that much for it."
Kylo's nodding. "Later. I've got something for you."
"Good, but…"
He's heading into his room. "But? You wanted to tell me…"
Jacen can see him rooting around in there. "Finn. He's not going to like anything you come up with."
Kylo comes out with a package wrapped in black cloth. "Amazingly enough, I had figured that out."
"Don't be a smartass, Kylo. If you've got something you want him to say 'yes' to, make sure it goes through Poe or Rey. He won't agree to living on the Supremacy, but short of that, he'll at least listen to it if it doesn't come out of your mouth."
Kylo sighs. "Wonderful."
Jacen's eyes narrow a bit. He's trying to be helpful here. "Look, planning. Making people do what you want them to. That's part of what you're working on, right?"
"Yeah."
"Well, you want to get into a fight with him, or you want to work this out?"
Kylo kind of wants the fight, if for no other reason than Finn appears to be wanting one, too. Rey and Poe won't like that, though. And if he gets into a fight with Finn, then that means he's in a fight with Rose, and… "Work it out."
"Good. Get his idea first, and if you hate it, have someone else counter it. That's good advice."
Kylo nods. "Yeah, it is." Not just for Finn. Any situation where people are prickly about me… His idea of who Rey is in the Order of the Maji continues to coalesce.
Jacen's nodding, and Kylo realizes he might have just as well said that out loud. "Can you project thoughts, well enough to—" Jacen starts.
"I'm fully telepathic with Rey, and not sure about Poe."
"Okay. If you need an assist with Poe, I might not be physically here, but I won't have to be." Then he looks at the black bundle Kylo's holding for him. "What's that?"
"A wrist knife. Your future last-ditch weapon. Mono-molecular blade. Like I said, this is dangerous." He unwraps it.
"Is that a pillowcase?"
"Yes."
"You have black pillowcases?" Jacen's looking up at him in amazement. Though there is a black blanket on the bed in the room behind them, from what Jacen can see, the sheets are light green.
"Obviously." Kylo holds the sheath, and wiggles it a bit. "Focus." He points the side the blade comes out of toward Jacen and down. He doesn't have to say to Jacen to stay back, he knows. "Blade comes out there." He hits the button and they both hear the snick.
"I can't see anything."
"Exactly. The blade is one molecule thick. No one can see it. But that also means it's sharper than you can imagine. This is the blade you, me, anyone else, cannot defend against." Kylo shifts his hold on the pillow case, drawing it over where the blade should be, and they watch it flutter to the floor cut in two. "To stop this blade, you've got to stop the sheath." He gives it a little squeeze, and they hear the snick again. "This is something you're going to need to be extremely careful with. No playing with it on your own. I'll get you something like it to train with, but—"
They hear knocking at the door, and Kylo doesn't even glance at it, he just flicks a hand and it opens.
Neither of them were expecting Chewie to bow his head and enter Kylo and Rey's home.
Jacen… Chewie's growl has a bit of an edge to it.
"Yeah, I know, I'm not invited to this thing. Kylo had something for me, okay?" He gestures to the blade, that Kylo's rewrapping for him.
Kylo's fairly impressed at how smoothly Jacen's not exactly lying, but misleading. He's not sure he could, even now, pull that off without a single tell or straight face.
Kylo nods at him. "I do training stuff with the kids, too." He hands the blade to Jacen. "No fucking with it until we're together, okay?" Seriously, neither of us want to explain to Rey why you need new fingers, got it?
Jacen grins at him, and Chewie nods. He doesn't exactly buy this, but he knows at least the surface level is true.
"Ta, Kylo." Jacen flips him a ironic, two-fingered salute, and is off.
For a long moment, he and Chewie just stand there, staring at each other.
Kylo's almost tempted to try some sort of small talk, but he knows he'll be useless at it. He's wishing that Rey or Poe would show up, but the Force, or universe, or something seems to think he and Chewie need to be in the same place at the same time, alone, so neither of them appears.
Kid likes you.
Kylo almost startles at the sound of Chewie's voice, but it's not an attack, accusation, howl of rage, so he nods. "I like him, too."
He thinks you're a good person under all that black. Again, the voice is calm, and a bit wary.
Kylo doesn't have to glance down to see he's still in his command blacks. He does run his fingers through his hair and bite back his first response. The thing that seventeen-year-old Ben would have said to start a fight…The thing seventeen-year-old Ben would have felt with that comment. He thinks; you don't. He shrugs a bit and lets himself actually feel what Chewie's trying to communicate, not just go blasting off at him in a defensive rage. "Trying to be."
Chewie's eyes narrow. He too was expecting some sort of insulted, angry flare in response. I know. You're doing good by Rey, too.
Kylo takes a long, slow, deep breath, feeling his eyes burn. He swallows, hard. "Thank you." It's easy to see how grateful he is to hear that from him.
Chewie growls at that.
Kylo looks shocked that that's what is bugging Chewie right now.
Chewie waves that away and shakes his head. Kylo can feel the disappointment, aimed at… everyone and thing. Mostly at himself, and Han, and Leia, and Luke, that Kylo could get to years past thirty and be that grateful for that mild of a compliment. Hell, that's not even a compliment, not really, that's just acknowledging reality.
Chewie sits down, in the big, comfy chair, the only one that really fits him. He was talking about you. Trying to… make Finn understand, I guess. Or me. I… let what happened with Luke slip. Didn't mean to, but the kid reads minds, and he was talking about you wanting to be a better mentor for him than Luke was to you.
Kylo sits at the kitchen table, back to the table, facing Chewie and nods, slowly. "You… know?"
Chewie growls, and Kylo feels forced back by the amount of anger aimed at Luke.
He blinks. "Oh… He… didn't give Rey the real story. Only told the truth after she had it from me. And… even then… I don't think it was dead on."
You woke up from a dead sleep with a lit saber glowing a few centimeters from your head while he had a heart to heart with his own dark. That's the story we got. You think he was going to try to lie to Leia and Han?
For a moment, Kylo's literally dumbstruck at that. When he can speak he says, "I… didn't think he'd have told you that… told you anything."
What did you think happened?
"He ran away. One day… I guessed Mom or Dad finally noticed that even I got back to calls in less than six months, and they investigated and found… nothing left."
He came after. There was still ash in hair and smoke in his clothing. He told us he almost attacked you, was getting ready to turn the saber off, but you woke up right before he turned aside. You blasted in into next week, and then killed the other students. Your mom went dead white. Your dad punched him so hard he knocked out three teeth, broke Luke's jaw, and his own fist, and then I grabbed him because he was reaching for his blaster, with his left hand, and he couldn't shoot for shit with his left hand, and we left.
"To go where?"
To Luke's. To find clues. See where you'd gone. Took us a while to track you down. Almost a year. Then Lando. He had the largest force at his command of anyone we knew, and… If we were going to make a strike on the First Order, it was going to take a lot of manpower.
"Did you… Think I'd been kidnapped or something?"
Chewie snorts, because it's clear Kylo's asking, 'Why go after me?' And, of course, to Chewie, the answer to that is so blindingly obvious, it's not even worth asking. Or something. We learned more about Snoke as time went by. He was rising fast by then. The dark voice… That started to make sense. Luke… That began to make sense, too. He'd likely been playing all of you since before you were born… Then we got rumors of the Knights of Ren hunting down other Force sensitives… It all sort of crystallized, and… If we were going to get you back, we were going to need a lot of men.
Kylo rolls his lips together, and blinks very slowly. "Oh. I… Lando said, 'No?"
He only had five million guys under his command, and no combat ready navy.
"Not enough."
Not enough.
They're both very quiet, and then Kylo says, "I…" he rubs his lips together, hard, and makes his voice work, because he can't just feel this at Chewie, he's got to say it. "When the cabin blew, a third of them were sure I'd murdered Luke for no good reason. Just woke up in the middle of the night and murdered him. Another third of them… M'Gll… If Luke thought I needed to die, then I needed to die, and that was that. Didn't matter if I'd done anything or not. For them, Luke was always right.
"And… I was screaming, at him, and them… And they were going to kill me. Try at least. I knew he wasn't dead… I wanted him to see it all… fall… die… burn. I needed him to see that, but… They… didn't know, couldn't feel him, didn't care if he was alive. However, it worked. I was too angry to really feel them.
"I got it enough together to start yelling about what happened.
"They didn't believe me. Most of them. We lived together, studied together, worked together, I'd trained with all of them, and trained more than half of them in… a lot of things… Saber forms to calligraphy, but… Luke was gone, my cottage was in ruins, and…
"I didn't kill all of them. Or most. Just… M'Gll. She was the only one good enough to require someone who could really fight to knock her down, though." Kylo doesn't know if he'd have killed any of the others if it'd been up to him. But it wasn't. By the time M'Gll was done, so were the others. "Kammun, Rona, and Mark… They joined me.
"After, we had a ship. I still couldn't fly then, but Kammun could, so he asked me, 'Where now?' and for a second, I almost said Chandrilla. But… I was covered in blood, had just killed M'Gll, and…" he's biting his lip hard enough it's bleeding, and the sting and taste of blood is centering for him, pulling him to here, and now. "People who saw me every day thought it was my fault. People who knew me." And again, he doesn't have to say that his parents, and Chewie, didn't know him. "They would have… Mom would have thrown me out, and taken Luke's side and… If I'd showed up, covered in blood, with three friends… She'd have never believed Luke was at fault, not on my say so, or theirs. Dad would have gone along with her; Dad always went along with her, if it was about me. You know that.
"And the voice in my head gave me coordinates, and then we were heading to the First Order."
Chewie just growls. No words. A lot of sorrow.
There's the feel of Rey followed by a moment of her appearing in their home, and a heartbeat of extremely confused emotions followed by her immediately springing over to Kylo and pulling him into her arms.
"What the hell did you do?" She's glaring at Chewie, who's also a few beats behind on what's going on and looks very startled to see Rey just appear out of nowhere and put her physical body between him and Kylo like she's getting ready to fend off an attack.
Just talking.
Kylo doesn't mind snuggling into her embrace, but he does squeeze the hand that's on his shoulder, too. "Just talking."
Her eyes narrow as she looks at him, wipes the blood from his lip, and rests her fingers on it, healing the damage. "What kind of talking involves you chewing a hole in yourself."
He kisses her fingertips. Hopefully, the good kind.
She raises a brow at him. Really?
He nods.
Chewie inclines his head, watching the two of them commune silently. It's clear he's getting ready to say something, but there's another knock on the door, and the meeting is on.
Slipping into the Ren house, Finn looks nervous, Rose looks wary, and Paige, who had a really lovely afternoon nap, and now gets to play with Daddy, is having a blast.
What Finn immediately wants to do is grab Paige and run out of the house, back to his own place, and spend the rest of the night there.
He grits his teeth and makes himself not think about that. He busies himself getting Paige out of her snow gear, and trying to actually see Kylo, who Jacen does not seem to think is nearly as much of a threat as he does.
His Highness and Mightiness the Lord Supreme Commander is in his blacks. Which, apparently, are not all black now. There's some grey on there. He's standing next to Rey, who's also pulling off her cold weather gear, and sort of looking like he doesn't know what to do next. His eyes flick to Finn, and then he sort of curls in on himself, hunching a bit, and… Fuck. Jacen might possibly know what he's talking about and…
Okay, calm. Finn makes himself breathe deep and slow. And focus on Paige again, because he's gotten one bootie off, and she's not loving the lack of attention to detail.
Rose is at the cooker. "Smells good."
Kylo says to her. "Uh, thanks. I didn't know what everyone liked so it's probably kind of bland, but…"
What is it? Chewie asks.
"Beef stew. I'm not sure what a beef is, but it's warm and looks filling," Kylo says, opening the cooker, and levitating a huge bowl of something brown and bubbling to a hot pad on the table. "Biscuits, too, and there's some salad in the cooler."
Rose looks over to him, and smiles, a little. "Cows. At home they were cows."
Kylo's eyebrows knit. "Beef is cows?" It's abundantly clear that he thinks that's a beyond weird name for the animal a beef comes from.
"Yeah, don't ask why, I don't know."
"What are cows?" Rey asks, once she's got her jacket hung up and boots off.
"Uh…" Rose has never tried to describe one before. "Think smaller Faviers, with hoofs, and horns, and smaller ears."
"Smaller like," Finn holds his hands out, about shoulder width apart.
"Smaller like, twice the size of Chewie if he were on all fours," Rose responds and Chewie flashes her a look. She shrugs, "They are!"
Rey takes Paige from Finn, so he can get out of his own cold weather gear, and nods Rose toward the bowls on the shelf near their door. "I'm thinking we just put everything on the table and serve ourselves?"
"That'll work," Rose says, reaching for the bowls.
Kylo being temporarily edged out of the supper business, decides that maybe this isn't a meeting for his command blacks, and sidles out to his own room to change.
As he's doing it, he feels Rey in the back of his mind, Good plan.
Not looking like me.
Looking like you're relaxing at home with your family.
This is not my idea of relaxing.
I know, love. I know.
It's several hours later when he notices that he didn't challenge her on the family bit.
By the time he's out, in his Padme non-blacks, Poe's here, too, opening the bottle of whatever he brought to drink.
"No Jon?" Kylo says as he sits next to Rey, and Poe passes over a glass of what smells like some sort of wine.
"Shockingly enough, he decided that this conversation might not be the one to get introduced to 'the family' with."
"We're the family?" Rose asks.
"Aren't you?" Poe shoots back with a grin, handing her her glass.
Finn rolls his eyes, and mutters something about the Order under his breath. Paige is in his lap, and looking very bright eyed and interested in all of this. He takes one of the biscuits and breaks a small piece off. "Here, baby. Pre-dinner snack."
The smell hits him like the Falcon going from a full stop to hyperdrive in under a second flat, and leaves him just as leveled.
He's never had beef stew before. It was never on the rations. But the biscuits. That's… memories. Hundreds of them. Breakfasts and suppers gulped down between shifts. Slow meals at the start of his eight off. Bitching with his buddies about commanders and jobs and equipment while chawing down on dinner. Hunched over a data pad, studying, studying, studying. He had to be the best, had to know everything, had to… He hasn't thought of one in years. Wouldn't mention having eaten them before. They were just a thing he'd grab a few of while walking down the line in the canteen.
Ren's staring at him, muttering something about he should have gotten something from the F-Deck, looking like a kicked puppy. How someone who's almost the size of Chewie and personally ordered the destruction of an entire planet can get away with looking mortally sorrowful about bringing the wrong breadstuff to a dinner is light years beyond Finn, but… It's fucking real. Ren's about to take the damn things off the table and go find something else, if he doesn't respond soon. And just to make matters worse, Finn, of course, hasn't actually said anything about this, Ren's just reading it off of how he's watching his daughter nom the biscuit on down and make grabby hands for more.
"It's… no… Don't." Finn grabs the bowl they're in and makes sure they stay on the table. "Fine," weakly slips off his tongue. "Just… memories. Haven't thought about them in forever. Didn't think about them even when I was eating them every other day, but…"
"Every other day?" Poe says, maybe a beat behind on what's going on, but determined to leap into position to help those two build some empathy.
"Uh, yeah… The canteen… It's a really long room. Lots of tables and chairs, but you don't have to eat there. At the far end there's a wall covered in food stations. Four main ones, veg, protein, starch, sweet, and then over and over and over again. Each station will have at least six options a day, and they'll change from day to day. You grab a tray, load it up, and then go eat wherever. At the tables, in your room, on the D-Deck, wherever." He glances up at Ren who's staring at the biscuits like he's never seen anything like them before. "Let me guess, that's not how it works in officer land."
Finn doesn't see, but he does feel Rey sort of poke Kylo to get him talking. "I don't know. Maybe? The first few weeks food got brought to us, and then… Hux and I never got along, and by a few weeks in he realized I wasn't leaving, so he started thinking about ways to get rid of me. I knew he'd had his father poisoned, so I stopped eating anything I didn't open for myself. Three protein bars, two vitamin mush packs, and water. That's what I ate. I'd go fetch it from storage, and make sure it was sealed, and…" He picks up one of the biscuits. "I think I had my first one of these last year?" He looks to Rey, and she nods. "We ate it together, so not more than two years ago."
"Kresh rations?" Finn's eyes are wide. "You lived on Kresh rations?"
Kylo nods. Then he shrugs a bit, pulling the bowl of stew toward him, and spooning out portions for him and Rey. "I like food, like eating, but it's not like it was a big sacrifice. I was coming off of fifteen years of eat to nourish yourself, not for pleasure, so it's not like I was going from carefully crafted delicacies to packaged nutrient bars. If Luke had known about Kresh rations… Okay, no. I'm sure he knew about ration bars. He thought having us nurture plants and run the farm was important, circle of life, and how the Force twines into everything, but… It wasn't like the quality of food suddenly dropped, just the variety."
Kylo feels like this is surreal. He knows he's home. In his house. With Rey.
And Rose, and Finn, and Paige, and Poe, and Chewie.
And, apparently, they're going to talk, and make decisions, like… a family… maybe… if that's the sorts of things families do, about what's going to happen next. Granted, as best he knows, families don't do things like that. One of them makes a decision, and then the others yell about it for a while, and then they storm off to the ends of the galaxy and pout about it.
He glances around the table, and realizes that Poe and Rose might have the kinds of families that did things like make decisions together, but the rest of them don't… Or didn't.
But, Finn and Rose make decisions together. And he and Rey do. Chewie and his dad always managed it. So… They aren't doomed at this. Just… rusty… or unpracticed, with each other, maybe.
But, because this isn't a thing they do, or at least, have ever done before, none of them really seem to know where to start. Especially with that light and fluffy conversation about food to start this up. Kylo could feel the mood of the table drop like a rock, but he couldn't figure out how to get out of that bit of conversation without killing everything and…
Rey's holding his hand. It's okay. Not everything has to be light and happy all the time.
He kisses her, and then looks, really looks, past his own stuff and sees her and… Oh… Shit. Are you?
I'm okay, enough. Later, we can talk about me, later.
And he knows that's a lightling distraction technique. He knows it's plastering a smile on a scream, but he also knows that she's not wrong on the timing.
He squeezes her hand. Later.
So, right now, there's a lot of quiet chewing.
Poe's the one who breaks the silence, "I guess, first question is, how bad is this going to get? Are we talking about ninety-three more years of—"
"Ninety-three years?" Kylo asks, looking stunned. "I'm sorry. I just got Rey's comm about us talking about having to leave. Spring comes in ninety-three years?"
Only on the most literal of levels. Chewie puts his holo-projector on the table. Everyone recognizes the two stars of Lirium's system. He highlights Lirium. We're here now, just zipping out past the blue star. But we're going to keep zipping, for ninety-three years, and then ninety-three years back, and then there's a forty-year warm spot, followed by twenty-six years of much too hot where both suns are heating the planet, then another forty year warm spot by the green sun, and then another hundred and eighty-six of winter, and… They watch Lirium zip around in it's long oval.
Kylo puts his fork down and rubs his eyes. He's suddenly understanding why Rey said nothing beyond that everyone was gathering for dinner at their place, because a decision needed to be made on where to go next.
He kisses her temple. "Like Poe said, how bad is this going to get?"
Chewie throws up another planet with another orbit. This is Hoth. It also has a long oval of an orbit, but its orbit doesn't go nearly as far out. Granted, it doesn't get nearly as close to its sun, either, but that's not exactly important right now. The Rebellion used Hoth because it was an extreme outlier planet that was so cold just about nothing could live on it. There were deep caves with some level of vegetation due to the hot springs, but on the surface… Things would crawl out now and again, but they didn't stay out.
We were there in what passed for summer, and it was so cold that if you were outside at night… Well… You've heard that story, right?
Kylo's wincing, because Ben also winced at that story. Finn knows it, too. Rose, Rey, and Poe don't. And it's clear at how they're looking between Chewie, Finn, and Kylo that they want to know.
Kylo shakes his head. "It's… gross."
Finn's staring at him. "Gross?" Yeah, it's not his favorite story ever, but gross isn't how he'd describe it.
"You got Chewie's version of it, right?" Finn nods. "Which is really my Dad's version, and that's big on swooping in and saving the day and the million to one shot coming up roses again. I got Luke Skywalker's, 'I woke up, choking, inside the corpse of a Tauntaun, with my body covered in cooling viscera, hands and feet and face on fire from frostbite, half frozen to death.' And if that's not enough, he could project that sensation, so most of us got to feel what it's like to wake up with a chunk of intestine in your mouth, gasping for air, freezing."
Everyone else winces, including Chewie, who mentions that Luke left that part of the story out when he told them, and Poe says, "Okay, yeah, that's gross."
"Dad cut the thing in half with Luke's lightsaber and tucked them both in so they wouldn't freeze."
"Uglh," Rose shudders. "And that was summer?"
That was summer.
"Dad talked about that." They're all staring at him in amazement. "Hoth, he talked about Hoth, not using Tauntauns as heaters. He didn't enjoy being stationed there," Poe adds. "Granted, Mom was on Yavin, and I was a year old, so that was part of not being happy about being stationed there, but the weather sucked, too."
None of us did. So cold any machine not rated for deep space would freeze solid. And even the deep space ones tended to get tetchy out there.
"He was a mechanic, and... so cold the lubricants would freeze. So cold the buildings were carved out of snow and ice. He had a mustache, and it was always covered in ice crystals because the moisture in your breath would freeze. And, like I said, he was a mechanic, so all of that was inside. Not like they were sending him outside."
That gets more wincing.
Finn's watching the orbit. "And we'll be there…"
"In a year," Rose says. "Colder yet the year after."
"So…" Kylo says, tentatively, not looking to start a fight, but feeling like this is the kind of thing someone has to say. "We've absolutely got to be out of here in two years?"
"Or go underground," Rose says. She scoops up the last bit of her supper, and then takes Paige from Finn. "Good girl, waiting for Mommy to finish eating." Paige, with smears of biscuit on her chin, grins up at her mom, and then happily settles in for her evening nurse.
Kylo, who's never seen Rose nurse Paige, isn't exactly sure if he's allowed to watch. It's not like he can see much, Paige's head is providing beyond adequate coverage, but this still feels intimate in a way that sharing a spoon of beef stew with their daughter didn't. Granted, no one else is looking at the walls, or away from Rose, but no one else isn't sure if they belong here.
It's your home, Kylo. You belong here. Rey strokes his hand. He nods at her, and resettles to watch the couple across the table from him. Watching Finn stroke his daughter's curls as she cuddles in against her mama sets off a bright flare of wanting deep inside of him. The envy is hot enough that he might be projecting it, because Finn looks up at him with a jerk, but, for once, doesn't seem alarmed.
Chewie shakes his head, drawing his attention back to the conversation. Underground's not good for anyone. But humans need to see the sun. It'd be one thing if we were going under for a year or so, but… This is the entire rest of your lives, and the kids' lives, and their kids' lives. Fuck, probably the rest of mine, too. That's… He shakes his head.
"Not tenable," Finn says.
"We've got… us… and twenty-four kids… to find a home for." Kylo's being intentionally vague with us, he could just mean him and Rey, or he could mean the six of them.
"And let me guess, you've got a plan for that?" Finn shoots back.
Kylo mentally thanks Jacen, because his immediate, first thought response is, Fuck, yeah! I'm the one with the great big ship that can fit all of you in comfort and ease without even having to blink. But what he says is, "The start of one, but plans can always be improved. How about you? Ideas, Finn?"
He can feel Rey's surprised by him doing that. Jacen gave me a heads up before everyone got here. I'm trying to be… diplomatic.
Rey squeezes his hand.
"Comments, Rey?" Rose says, not having missed, at all, the silent conversation.
Rey sighs. He can feel her first thought, to just brush over it, slap that smile on her face, and look like this is okay. He squeezes her hand again. It doesn't have to be okay. Not here, and not now. She licks her lips, and then says, "I hate the idea of moving. I… It's just a place, but…" She's holding Kylo's hand, he bows his head, resting his lips on her shoulder. "Its our home, you know? And… I… years working on this, and giving it all up, and… I don't want to leave. But want doesn't matter, now, does it? Want isn't going to make spring magically appear." Kylo's stroking her back as she says it.
Rose has a soft look on her face. "I know. I'm not thrilled with the idea of packing up or leaving, either."
"Less thrilled at having to move underground," Finn adds. He looks discouraged by all of this, and for a moment Kylo's wondering how much Rey's projecting, or how much of this is everyone taking off the brave face.
"We're not moles," Poe says, and then notices that no one else knows what a mole is. "They're little rodents that live under the dirt back on Yavin. Anyway. Underground is off the table."
Chewie agrees with that. Just a matter of where to go next. So…
Kylo intentionally stays quiet.
Everyone is looking at him, waiting for him to offer the Supremacy, but he holds his peace for another long beat, and then finally, when it's clear that no one else is going to say anything first, he says, "I know… it's not ideal. But, I have, literally, hundreds of square kilometers that are currently empty. I've got apartments that are still set up from the Last Night celebrations with no one in them. Say the word and… The Maji," he looks at Finn and Rose, who aren't wearing Maji pendents, "and friends, have a home."
Finn's not glaring. He wants to glare. He was prepared to glare. He had a mental script of how this was supposed to go, because there's a way officers behave, and Ren, who is not just an officer, he's the fucking officer, His Lordship the Supreme Highness, seems to be awfully good at just marching on in and ordering everyone around. And he was ready for that. Ren would order everyone to the Supremacy and he'd draw his line in the sand, and they'd argue, and maybe he'd get the better of Ren, win a point or two and…
It would have felt good.
But no, the bastard gave him the chance to come up with a place first, then waited to see if anyone else had any other ideas, and on top of that prefaced his idea with the fact that he's aware of the fact that there are issues with it.
Which means Finn's got to play nice, too.
So, he's not glaring. He's… thinking.
Rose leaps in to the rescue. "Kylo, we're not comfortable on the Supremacy. Finn did not have a good time the last time we were there, and… It's one thing to visit for a bit, but Finn…"
"Were you stationed there?" Kylo asks.
"Yeah. At least some. Wasn't there the whole time. Don't wanna go back, not… to any of it."
Kylo nods at that, too. "I haven't been back to my rooms on the Finalizer, either. Too much… everything, there."
Finn's not loving the common ground, but he does nod at it.
"What do we need, for a place to be home, for all of us?" Poe says, looking pleased that this hasn't devolved into a shouting match, or worse a shooting one.
Can't be anywhere with a warrant out for me.
"Does that cut half the galaxy out?" Poe asks, flip.
Chewie rolls his eyes, then says, quietly, for him, A third.
"There are no open warrants out for you, any of you, in Order territory," Kylo says. "And, currently, we're not opposed to bounty hunters coming into our territory. Schiff decided that making them pay a small fee for a license to hunt in our space was an easy way to make some money, but…we make the price of going after an Order citizen exorbitantly high."
Chewie blinks. I know you killed the warrants; you didn't make us citizens, did you?
It never even occurred to him to do so, but Kylo says, "No. But C8 set Rey up as a full citizen in less than five minutes, I can't imagine it'd be any more difficult for the rest of you."
Chewie relaxes a bit and nods.
Kylo thinks about it for a moment… "Finn… uh… I didn't do it, but… I also never checked. Everything blew up less than a week after you left, so… You've got your five in, you might be a citizen."
Finn's got no idea what to do with that. "The warrant out for me was for desertion and treason."
Kylo shrugs. "Yeah, but… Like I said, I don't know how they did it, but I think everyone on the roll with five in got a citizen's chit. And since you can leave anytime after your five now, and still qualify, I don't know how they did it. You didn't have to be active duty when I changed the rule. Hell, I was encouraging people to leave at that point, just to get rid of old Imperials and Hux-grads. You just had to have your five in. I can… check… if you'd like."
Finn groans and rubs his forehead. "No. I… Don't want to know." He's got no idea, at all, what he'd do with the idea of being an Order citizen.
"Finn… if not for you, let me check for Paige. I get you don't want it for you, but… Anyone fucks with one of my citizens, the entire Order shows up and fucks them over just as hard, if not harder. Any one who did their five, and their children, became citizens."
Finn shakes his head.
Kylo nods. "Okay." But he doesn't miss the way Rose looks at him. He's got the feeling the two of them are going to be having a one on one conversation at some point in the future.
Finn lets out a long breath. "I can't… do Order territory." Then he bites his lip. "Not… unless there's nothing else. I…" He does glare now, but… He can feel, or at least imagine, Rose thinking at him, compromise. "If it's just us… Not Order space. That's… I can't do that. But, safe place for the kids, right? Hidden enough that people who want to weed out Force users can't find them. Protected for the same reason. So…"
He lets that dangle, and Poe says, "You don't like the Order, you've got good reason for it, and we're all fine with that, but you acknowledge that there might be a good reason for the kids to have a shit ton of guns pointing away from them to make sure they don't end up with more of them pointed at them."
Finn nods. "Yeah."
Rose says, "Are you… hearing anything like that?"
No one's talking about hunting for Force users. Not now. But if history is anything to go by, every third jacked-up dictator or Emperor wanna-be goes looking for them as a scapegoat or a weapon. And, even with you, Chewie looks at Kylo and Rey doing this Order thing, there's something of a power vacuum starting, so… Soon. Three years, five tops.
Rey inclines her head. This is a more comfortable topic than them having to uproot and move. "That's in the Jedi histories. Part of why they formed the Jedi in the first place. Protection. People who can levitate or read minds in some backwater, tend to get burned alive."
Kylo quietly says, "So not… primarily Order territory, but perhaps, Order protection, and… If we have to move before somewhere else can be found…"
Finn nods. "Yeah, as a… stop gap. For the kids. If we've got to bug out fast…" He looks to Chewie, who nods. The Ticos always have a home on the Falcon.
Kylo almost smiles at that, but decides not to, because he doesn't want to be seen as patronizing. He feels Rey give his hand a little squeeze.
Diplomacy huh?
Apparently, he thinks back. Then he says, "The primary advantage of Order space is… we don't have to pay for it. And I don't know what planets cost, but I do know they aren't cheap, or if they are, it's because they're not suitable for humans."
"We don't actually need an entire planet," Rose says. "We probably don't need an entire continent, or… Honestly, a few thousand square klicks somewhere'll do."
Kylo doesn't want to budge on that one. "Security is better if we've got a whole planet, or moon, or something like that. It's easier to control the airspace than—"
"We can shield a space just fine," Poe says. "That's easy enough to do. And—"
"Get burned to a crisp when they bombard us from atmo. I personally command thousands of ships that will take a few thousand square klicks right off the surface of a planet like," and he snaps, "shield and all." Kylo replies. "A whole planet gives us a much bigger buffer zone."
"You put the generators under the shields, Kylo, then you can't burn them from atmo," Poe says.
"You shoot the planet on the fault lines and the bloody thing cracks to pieces, Poe, and then it doesn't matter where the shield generators are, everyone is dead!"
Chewie's rumble shuts that conversation down. And all of it's moot. The best defense is no one knowing where we are. A significantly motivated enemy is not going to be put off by a planetary defense versus city defenses. He just looks at them, and, well, given what they'd all spent the last five years doing, and what Kylo and Poe's parents did… They've got the point.
Subtly, through a series of buffers, buying a plot of land will work just as well as grabbing a spare planet somewhere, and likely be a shit ton easier than getting a spare planet, because planets that support human life, in any level of comfort, already have piles of humans on them. Chewie rumbles a soft laugh. You little scurgls are like mold. Once one of you touches down, the next thing you know the whole fucking place is covered with you.
Rey thinks about that for a moment, says, "Not always," and it's clear she's not sure if she should continue, but she does. "We know one that isn't."
Chewie blinks. They do know a place where a human touched down, that didn't then immediately sprout thousands more. Then he slowly nods. True. And, I guess, it's sort of yours? He glances to Kylo. Maybe. Not sure how that worked.
"I think it belongs to the Jedi, not Luke," Rey replies.
Kylo shrugs. "I'm the last living Jedi in addition to the last Skywalker."
(Finn and Poe both roll the fuck out of their eyes. There's only so much pretentious bantha shit one guy can claim.)
"And you're a prince, too," Poe says with more eye rolling. "Your high and mighty-ness."
"Only she gets to call me that," Kylo fires back.
Chewie sniggers at that, feeling whiplashed by family history in this moment. This is very much the sort of Ben he and Han had hoped for.
Rey sighs a bit, any other time, she'd probably like the teasing, but right now it's just annoying her. "It probably belongs to the Caretakers now."
"The… Where the cottage was?" Kylo asks, realizing he never found out where that was.
Ahch-To. It's way the hell out in the bloody middle of nowhere. It does have native sentient lifeforms, but they're local and from what I can tell don't have the tech to get off world. It's obviously stable enough in it's orbit we won't all die there. What happens if you try and put… this… on a Force hot spot?
Rey thinks for a moment. "I think we'd look for a different island. I… The caretakers didn't like me, and… It's not like there weren't thousands, if not more, islands there. We could… See if there's one a little more hospitable for us."
"The caretakers didn't like you?" Rose asks, though Kylo's thinking it, too.
Rey rolls her eyes. "I might have… almost… accidentally, killed a few of them, totally by accident, and kind of broke a few things."
Kylo arches an eyebrow, remembering that second of clutching at himself, sure he'd been shot, and then realizing that the blast didn't touch him. "Did you, perhaps… shoot through something you shouldn't have?"
Rey almost smiles. "I might have, just possibly, shot through a wall of a building, and badly scared a few people."
Poe's looking from one of them to the other. "Okay, one day, you'll tell that story, but today is not that day. If we've got a potential out of the way, fairly well-hidden planet, all we've got to do is set a new place up, and then move."
Kylo rubs his lips together, then says to Finn, "Would I be correct in assuming, that, in addition to not being in Order space, you'd prefer the Order didn't bankroll this?"
Finn nods. The last thing he wants to see is a pile of Order transports show up and move them from point A to B. That completely kills the point of trying to do this secretly. "I get a lot of your personal funds are in this, and… appreciate it, but…" He's quiet, thinking, even just moving will cost them, and then setting everything back up again, and who knows what sort of new stuff they'll need for islands, and… Money. It always comes back to money.
But… they had an answer to money. They're still, supposedly, working on that, so… "Canto Bight. We haven't talked about that for a while. That was the plan, right? Work on our gambling skills, stick you two in… I don't know, a mask or something, so people won't recognize you, and then go off and fleece the parasites? We can still do that, and more than cover what'd it cost to set up a really nice neighborhood."
Poe grins. "We've got time. It's not like we've got to bug out tomorrow. We can get this planned up right, scout out a really nice island, set weather satellites so we've got some idea of what we need in a place to land, actually get our homes built before we move… This is doable." He glances to Kylo. "And I for one wouldn't mind if some extra manpower showed up to help put things together. I can ferry them around so they won't know where they hell it is they went, but if you can provide people to do things like get us proper water treatment and power set up, before we begin to put houses down…"
Kylo's nodding at that. "I just might be able to find someone to do that. Especially if you're providing transport…" He glances to Finn, making sure he's okay with that.
Finn nods. "I'm still… uneasy… about your people knowing where we are. Back in the day… If Hux had had a little hidey-hole, I could think of a lot of people who would have paid well to know where it was and then use that to end him."
Kylo inclines his head. "Yeah, I know. I wasn't one of them because… Not my style, and I was under direct orders not to kill him, but I knew at least a hundred who would have paid you very well for that, and ninety of them likely would have stabbed you in the back before you left the room so how they got the information couldn't leak. If it's any comfort, most of them are dead now, and a few ran away." He doesn't mention the one who's the highest ranked officer of the Order, technically his second-in-command, the Grand Admiral who runs his entire fleet, or that Kinear would have just… known.
Finn blinks. "I'm… not sure if that is."
Kylo nods. "So… scouting trips? Looking for… what? A place with a decent beach, but… big enough hurricanes aren't a problem? We're probably going to want the settlement inland, but… I don't know, something near water, for… fun or something."
"We get a decent dome over it, the kind that retracts, or the ones generated by a field, hurricanes won't be a problem," Poe adds. "We could be right near the beach, and just put it up if the weather looks like it's taking a turn for the worse."
Those are really fucking expensive, Chewie adds.
"Well, if we leave Canto with less than fifty million credits, I'm calling it a bust, so…" Poe replies.
Chewie nods. That'll cover a field-generated dome, at least one of the size you're likely thinking, and the start of a decent settlement.
That gets nodding. Finn's looking at Ren curiously. "You just… like beaches, or is this a Maji thing?"
"Yes?" Kylo answers. "I like beaches, and," he glances to Rey, who nods, "There's something about the place where water meets earth. It feels… right."
"Warm," Rose says. "I don't mind a place where we can go visit snow if we like, but if I never have to dig out again, I'd be thrilled."
That gets some chuckling.
I like trees. They make everything more expensive, though. Gotta cut a bunch of them down for a landing place, and cut more of them down, or build in and around them.
"Home had a lot of trees," Poe adds.
"Is that a good thing?" Rose asks.
Poe shrugs a bit. "It's not a bad one. Unless you're trying to land a bird that's dead at the stick. Then it's bad."
They're quiet for a moment, the Poe says, "Rey… Thoughts?"
She looks bleak. "No good ones. Once we get moving, I'll be okay. I'll probably like looking for a new place, and doing the work to set it up, but right now…"
Kylo's rubbing her back. He can very much feel the difference between his dark and her light right now. He's perfectly fine with picking up and heading off, and is rather looking forward to finally seeing the place he's only glimpsed through the Force. Meanwhile, Rey's mourning a lost home, and fighting her desire to be settled, to stay put, in order to get up and move.
"Is there anything you want in a new home?" Finn asks.
Again, she shrugs. "Probably not a desert. And I know we're talking about Ahch-To, and… It's a planet, so the whole thing can't be like Luke's island, but that was cool and damp and… Remember fall? When it was the cool, rainy damp?" They all nod. None of them liked that. "I think it's like that year 'round where Luke was."
"Try to find somewhere a bit more comfortable," Finn says. "I mean, the entire planet can't be one climate. Any world with enough liquid water for form oceans has to have multiple climates. We've just got to find a nice one."
"I've got…" Kylo realizes he doesn't, not literally, have, weather satellites. "Okay, I assume I've got to have, or at least can get, weather satellites. If I can get them to Poe, he can get them orbiting Ahch-To, and… if we've got a year or so, we can take the time to find out what the different biomes are."
"Can't we just look this planet up?" Rose asks.
"By the time Luke was looking for it, it'd been scrubbed from the records, and once he found it, he hid himself away there," Rey adds.
Chewie thinks about that. He scratches his chin. Do you have Palpatine's records?
Kylo blinks. "Uh… Some of them. I don't think we have the whole thing, but I know some of his people brought their equipment with them. Schiff defected wholesale, brought his whole armada and equipment in, if he had copies, I can ask."
Chewie shakes his head. Don't ask. Run it through R2. If it's in your files, he can find it, without you getting your slicers wondering what you're looking for and why. And without… Schiff? Admiral Joshia Schiff?
Kylo nods. "Grand Admiral now. He… uh… runs my entire navy."
Chewie growls deep and low at that.
"He's good at it."
I wouldn't be growling if he wasn't. Han and I spent a year-and-a-half spearheading the expedition to try and bring that bastard in. Couldn't do it. Slippery fucking nerf and lucky as sin, too.
"Oh. Uh… probably."
Can you get a copy of his navi charts?
"Uh…"
He knew the outer rim and unknown regions better than anyone else. That's why we couldn't catch him.
"And you wouldn't mind knowing, too?"
Chewie's got a very satisfied smile on his face. And Kylo knows that the Falcon has one of the most complete navi charts in existence, and if he can offer something to make it even better… Not at all.
"I'll put the question to R2, and he'll get what he can get, okay?"
Chewie looks pleased at that.
Rose says, "So, scouting Ahch-To. Maybe we all go, do our own recon, see what kind of places look good. If we're lucky, we agree. And, if we aren't… Well, we don't have to live right on top of each other." That's likely a nice way of saying that the Tico branch of the family may decide to be on an entirely different island than the Ren branch, which… Actually… Might be a good solution.
Close enough to visit easily. Far enough away so they aren't tripping over each other.
"And, once we've got some sites… I can start to get estimates for putting in a functional settlement," Kylo says.
And Poe finishes, with a gleam in his eye, "And then to Canto Bight, where we'll fund this endeavor."
That gets a collection of satisfied smiles.
Jacen looks to Critt, Magiit, Elias, and Savarah.
"Ahch-To?" he asks.
The rest of them just shrug.
"No… Jedi stories?" he looks to Critt.
Critt shakes his head. "Nope. Beaches and weather that's not constant blizzards sounds good, though. It's been too damn long since I had a swim."
The others all sort of nod. "Wouldn't mind heading back to the Supremacy, especially if you all were coming with," Jacen adds.
"Gonna flounce around and make us salute you?" Elias asks with a grin.
"I do not flounce!" Jacen sounds appalled.
"Oh please, you'll be wiggling your bum around looking for Grand Marshall Wet Dream," Critt says, smirking at him. He knows how Jacen reacted to Jon.
Jacen rolls his eyes. "Yeah, well, according to Ren, Poe's got a claim on Grand Marshall Wet Dream, and that I'm supposed to keep my bum to myself on that one."
That gets some very surprised looking kids. Finally, Magiit says, "Wait, Poe and the Grand Marshall. Like… really?"
"That's what Ren's saying, and he'd know, I'd assume," Jacen says. "He's close with the Grand Marshall, and apparently friendly with Poe, so…"
"Why is Ren saying that to you?" Savarah asks.
"Because he's the fucking empath, right? Apparently, everyone on the bloody deck, not just you all, noticed me noticing him, so…"
"So he…" And Elias is sniggering at this. "Set you down for a talking to?" That's got all the kids giggling.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah…" Jacen rolls his eyes. He takes a sip of his cocoa. "You wanna talk spit about me and Wet Dream and what isn't going to happen, or you want to hear the real story I got while I was with Finn and Chewie?"
"Real story?" Critt says. "Real? We've got you and Ren, and we've got we're all bugging out in the next year, what's more real than that?"
"You ever wonder why we aren't Jedi?" Jacen asks.
"Because they were flaming twits when it came to this dark/light stuff," Critt replies.
"Probably that, too, but… Ren's training with Luke Skywalker, back when he was like, our age, and Luke tried to cut his head off for being dark."
That's so shocking the other four of them go silent for a long moment, followed by four voices, all at once, clambering for more details.
Once it's just the two of them, Kylo says to Rey, "Well…"
She sighs at that.
He steps up behind her, drapes his arms over her shoulders, and lies his chin against the back of her head. "Moving. It'll be good."
She exhales long and slow at that, looking around their home.
"And, we'll get a chance to actually set up a home, together. This is your place, and there's my place on the ship, and this new one, it'll be our place."
He's not getting a sense of wild enthusiasm off of her.
"Space for both of us, and maybe a kid or two?" He floods her with a version of the mental image of the Ticos having dinner together, but them, with their baby. "Put it near the water… Maybe have that wedding, the one for us, as part of celebrating building a home, for both of us, for our family."
Another long exhale. He can feel her just ache. He holds her near, lips pressed to the top of her head.
"Do you just need some time to be sad about this?"
Rey nods.
"Okay. Does it bother you too much that I'm not?"
Rey finally speaks. "You don't have to be sad about this. Like you said, this is my place, not yours."
He looks around their home. It's white and cream, and there are a few bits and pieces he's brought over with him, but… "That's… not… exactly true."
"Yeah, but it isn't wrong, either. You never really liked this place."
That gets a sigh from him. "I didn't love it at first because it was a place where you were that I wasn't, and I was still kind of afraid that one day you'd just run away." She leans her head back against his chest. "I liked the fact that you liked it. I liked that it made you happy." He half turns her, half turns him, and kisses her. "My home is with you. And I'm looking forward to building a new one, for both of us. But… here, there, in the Supremacy, as long as you lay your head there at the end of the night, it's my home, too."
She gives him a little half smile, and lays her head on his shoulder. "I'm probably not going to like packing."
He shrugs. "Win an extra hand or two at Canto, and we'll buy new stuff."
Rey looks scandalized at that. "Just… leave it?"
He turns her to fully face him and kisses the tip of her nose. "I'm not exactly joking, but I'm not dead on serious, either." He glances around. "I mean… do you actually love any of this stuff, or are they just useful tools?"
She rolls her eyes a bit. Sometimes, it's abundantly clear that Kylo has never, ever wanted for any thing. He draws her closer for a tighter snuggle.
"It'll be good."
She sighs a bit. "Tomorrow or the day after."
"It'll be good tomorrow or the day after."