11/6/35

Done? Rey thinks to Kylo. Normally around now, she'd flash through to the Supremacy. Sometimes he comes to her, often if he's had the sort of day where he wants to do something physically hard after, he'll show up and help move rocks by hand. Moving rocks is boring, but it's hard, and helps him burn off the jittery, got-to-move feeling he tends to get after long days of dealing with minutia.

But, on normal days, going to him works better.

She's used to living rough, and she does have a tent and bed roll here, but having not done so for more than a year, she's starting to appreciate things like climate control, and beds, and pillows.

And a functional bath/shower. Yes, she's got the lake. The cold lake. How it could possibly be this cold she doesn't know. It doesn't get below 30C here, but the lake feels like it's barely above 4C.

Normally, when she thinks at him like that, he responds quickly. Like they're just talking across a room, but she's not getting any response. That brings up a quick spike of fear, but a moment of feeling lets her know he's busy and frustrated, but not in any danger.

Another moment later she hears him in her head. I wish. The R'Leah have offered us a compromise.

Are you going to take it?

She feels the wave of frustration. That's what I'm talking with my commanders about.

Ah.

We'll be talking late.

Okay. She feels his mind ease away from hers.

He knows all of his commanders' names by now. Kylo supposes that's moving forward. More than half of them are new to him in the last year, having either recently been promoted or moved to the Supremacy to join his general staff. And, at any given time, he's starting to feel… safer… about the situation. Some of them still want to kill him, but he's got the sense that they're getting less enthusiastic about it.

Or they're getting better at hiding it.

He's laid out the issue, and is just letting them talk. Twenty voices have narrowed down to the eight with the most concise opinions.

"If we take the deal, other systems, more important ones, will start to test us, too."

"We need the credits, my Lord. Offering us half of the taxes they owe, on the condition that we don't cancel the contracts with the other companies they do business with is better than nothing."

"And how many other systems will try to weasel out of their tax burden if we go along with this?"

"How many other systems will flat out attack us if we can't keep producing weapons, which we're not going to be able to do for all that much longer without income? Those droids we're buying aren't cheap. Some of the slavers are actually dropping old and infirm slaves on us to get new droids. Fuck, I got a report of out of Jurlgan IV that some idiot was trying to get us to take old livestock, claiming his dried up milk cow was a slave."

"Tactically speaking, it's a small enough system that we can dominate it militarily. It wouldn't take more than fifty strategic hits with the city killers to destroy the civilian government, but keep a decent amount of the manufacturing in place."

"And what do we do with it after we've dominated it? The idea is we want more resources, not to spend a huge pile of them keeping down a population that doesn't want anything to do with us, and really won't want anything to do with us after we've blown their capitol off the map."

Kylo knows he can't allow himself to show any weakness, but all he wants to do right now is drop his head into his hands and rub his temples.

It's been about two hours since C8 told him the message had come through, and once he got it, he called his generals and admirals together, and they've been doing this ever since.

The offer is simple. R'Leah remits half of what they owe. The First Order maintains its boycott of R'Leah, and drops its boycott of anyone who does any business with them. They both get about half of what they want, but no one gets everything.

And Kylo's got literally no idea how to handle this. Everyone around him is making good points, and…

And he can't afford to look weak.

And he can't afford to lose credits.

And he doesn't want… well, he knows he shouldn't, just blow them out of the sky.

And he's grinding his teeth so hard his head is aching.

People who think rain is romantic are maniacs.

At least, this is Rey's current opinion on the matter. And this opinion may be informed by the fact that she's outside, camping in the rain. (Yes, she could be under the roof in her chapel, which would be dry, but the floor is a mosaic of small stones, so it's hard, lumpy, and distinctly uncomfortable. Chewie's due in a few days, and he's bringing some pre-fab cottages, which will mark the beginning of the end of camping on Lirium.)

At Orlac's school, there were wishy-washy little romantics that liked to wander about in the stuff, getting bedraggled and damp, and then go inside, dry off, put on dry clothing, and write or paint or sculpt about how moving the whole experience was.

But really, it's just wet.

Cool and wet.

Cool, and clammy, and dripping through the fabric of her tent, making little puddles on her diner plate, running in a distracting rivulet down her back and across her cheek, and… It'd be one thing if she thought she might get something important out of lurking around in the rain, but all she's getting from this is wet.

She does it before she even really thinks about it.

Kylo's room might be light-eating black, but it's dry.

It feels a little odd to be in there without him, and she's half-thinking about letting him know she's here, but… She doesn't want to distract him. Even without intentionally brushing against his mind, she can feel his frustration.

Somehow, I didn't want to be wet, doesn't seem to be on par with I don't know what to do about this stubborn system trying to goad me into a war.

So, she pulls off her clothing, grabs one of his towels and dries off, and then settles into his bed with Orlac's library. Time for her own frustrations.

The physical work of building her settlement is tiring, but good. Every day she's a little closer to where she wants to go, and can see real, tangible improvement. Even if, like today, most of what she did was dig a drainage ditch so that her nicely laid floor doesn't get washed to the far side of her chapel. (Yet, another reason she's not a huge fan of rain. The stupid bloody stuff gets everywhere. Longer term, if it keeps raining, she's going to have to dig the damn floor up again, lay plastcrete down, and then put the rocks in it, because she's fairly sure that if the ground gets saturated, it'll get saturated under her dome as well as around it.)

But, at some point, theoretically, there will be other people here, and she's supposed to have something useful to teach them.

So, part of every one of her nights is at least an hour reading about balance and the Force, and other religions and… Searching for a map, and if there isn't a map to where she wants to go, at least locating the maps that lead to where she doesn't want to go will be useful.

Maybe inspiration for the right path isn't in Orlac's books, and a lot of what she reads makes her feel that way, but she can at least see where notto go, and that has to matter for something.

"They want an answer in twenty-six hours."

"We can have our entire fleet mobilized in twenty."

"What about the ones on the border with the Unknown Regions? You can't be suggesting we pull them out, can you? That's something we're doing people actually like."

"Something they pay for, you mean."

"Same thing."

"What would mobilizing everyone cost?"

"As opposed to not mobilizing them?"

Kylo takes a breath. "We're not mobilizing anyone or thing unless they actually attack us. Just not paying taxes isn't enough."

It's the first thing he's said in an hour, and it takes his commanders by surprise. They'd gotten to the point where they'd almost forgotten he was there. Actually batting around plans for an attack with some level of free range and orders beyond obliterate everything in your path is refreshing to them.

But, having reminded them that he's there, they all react to it, pulling back a bit, looking at each other, desperately trying to figure out which of them should risk his neck by talking. Finally, the oldest of the bunch, General Kinear, says, respectfully, "My Lord, economic warfare will hurt us just as badly, if not worse, than a physical attack. If we allow them to behave like this, and do not offer some level of response, the entire galaxy will decide that they can starve us into submission."

Kylo's shoulders do not slump. Because that would be showing weakness and that he doesn't know what to do next. That said, inside his head, he's half hunched over and rubbing his temples, because he doesn't know what to do next.

Kinear catches the eyes of each of the rest of the general staff. He served under the Old Republic, Palpatine, and now the First Order. He is, as best he knows, the last officer left who's military experience pre-dates the Clone Wars. He's not, officially, the highest ranked person in the room besides Kylo, that's Grand Admiral Schiff, but he's got enough respect as a professional and a survivor that the others take his hint and shuffle out, allowing him a moment alone with Kylo.

Kinear, who's ninety if he's a day, maybe 1.6 meters, and possibly, soaking wet 55 kilos, bald above the largest, hairiest, whitest eyebrows Kylo's ever seen, waits for them to leave, before standing up, striding over, pulling out the chair next to Kylo and settling himself down, facing Kylo.

His posture goes very informal. He's relaxed and easy in the chair, but his voice stays polite, aware of Kylo's rank. "My Lord, I understand not wanting to be Snoke. All in all, I think that's a wise course, but this will cascade. The systems with the kind of wealth to remit the taxes you need, are wealthy enough they don't need what we can offer them. They can and will secure themselves. Or they'll band together with each other to stand up against us. If you let one of them off easy, the others will flee, too."

Kylo closes his eyes and bites his upper lip. "And if they go?"

"We can't afford to keep flying. Not long term. We've got credits flowing out, but we've got to get them coming in, too."

"And how much can they keep paying us if we attack them?"

"Enough. Spoils of war, my Lord. We take whatever we want. Strip those planets bare, drain the coffers of every business we don't destroy, lay a levy on each person."

"Give the Resistance another recruiting slogan and all 13 billion people who live in the R'Leah system."

Kinear tilts his head, acknowledging that. "Or fight them with your purse. They're trying to get you to bend on the boycott… Maybe it's pinching enough. Maybe they're close enough to the edge they're offering this as a hope of saving face and getting some of what they need.

"But if they aren't… This has to end, sir. Not today or tomorrow, but it can't go past this week. The rest of the galaxy is watching, and they will act accordingly."

"What would you do?"

Kinear thinks on it. "What do you want to get out of this, in the long run?"

"Credits."

"Just credits?" Kinear's not exactly being disrespectful, but Kylo can more than feel the stop lying to me in that question.

Kylo blinks at that, too.

"We could have credits in minutes. You've heard us, we can mobilize enough of our fleet to beat them into submission before the end of tomorrow. Blow up one of their secondary planets, destroy their fleet, ring their home world with city killers, and in minutes they'll transfer you every credit you could want. You've already said no to that. So, what do you want out of this? All of us will do a better job as commanders if we've got an idea of what you're trying to do with us."

Kylo supposes that this is the sort of thing that would normally annoy him, but he's tired enough right now, and honest enough with himself that… He needs the advice.

Kinear seems to sense it and offers him a bit of a smile. "If I may…"

Kylo can feel that Kinear's attempting to offer him good advice without getting smacked for it. Kylo nods at him.

"Give it a night, sir. Get some sleep. Do… whatever it is you do… to clear your mind, and think on what you want out of this. You had a reason for taking over the First Order, and it had to be more than freeing slaves and revitalizing our weapons and tactics."

Kylo doesn't exactly smirk at that, but he has a feeling that Kinear would trip over his tongue if he said, "There was this girl…"

But there was a girl, and the Force, and a balance and…

"Snoke rose to stop the chaos, but he only made it worse. Instead of laws and order and a universe that worked… he just… killed people as it pleased him. It's been chaos since Palpatine fell."

Kinear smiles at that. And Kylo has the sense that he wants to call him child or lad as he says, "Sir, chaos is inevitable. I've lived through four regimes, you are my fifth, and chaos is always there. We can manage it, maybe tame it, hopefully use it to our advantage, but we'll never banish it.

"Take your time, sir, and think on it. What are you doing?"

Gritting his teeth, that's what he's doing.

Kinear waits, patiently, and Kylo realizes he's waiting to be dismissed. "Tell your men to be ready to mobilize, but not to do it, yet."

"Good, sir."

"Dismissed."

"Thank you, sir."

Kinear's almost out when Kylo says to him, "General, why are you here?"

"How do you mean, sir?"

"You're… ninety? Served with three masters before me… How did you get here?"

"Ninety-three. Here specifically, the New Republic wouldn't give me a command when the civil wars heated up because I was too old. Snoke didn't care if I was old, so here I am. Here in general, by being excellent at one thing, and only one thing. If you've got a problem, and it can be solved with an army, I will solve it."

Kylo stares at the old man in front of him, feeling bleak. "Can I solve this with an army?"

"Aye." Kinear says with a smile, and a hint of warmth in his eyes. Kylo doesn't know what accent just slipped out of him, but it's not the one he normally uses. "You can solve any problem with an army. Make a whole mess of new ones, and if you've got enough army, you can solve them, too. Question is, should you, and I don't know the answer to that. That's not part of what I'm good at." Kinear shakes his head, a little, and Kylo knows he's lying, at least about not being good at it. He is, or at least he thinks, he's telling the truth about the rest of it. "Figure out where you want to take us, and I'll plot a course for you. I did it for the Senate, and Palpatine, and Snoke, and I can do it for you, too. Just give me the lay of the stars, and I'll chart you a map."

What are you doing?

There was a girl, and she mattered.

There was a father, and he'd killed him.

There was a master, and he was a liar.

There was the Force, and it screamed out, begging for balance.

And those four things came together in the touch of two hands, a voice in an elevator, and in front of the Master, and the ghost of a memory, and the truth out of lies, and the need for balance all lit up in her eyes and…

And that's not a fucking plan and it's not a way to rule a galaxy and he's been playing catch up for a year trying to figure out what the fuck to do with this fucking mess that he fucking grabbed a hold of because he couldn't bear to see the light go out in another set of eyes that mattered.

Because there never was a plan, not beyond the whisper of a vision of both of them, together, in a throne room, ruling side by side.

Just the ghost, the shape of it, solid, but not fleshed out, a painting, daubs and blobs of color wild and blurry, but the shape was there. Him, standing slightly behind her, her seated on what had been his throne, now theirs, Lord and Lady Ren, together.

He looks to his bedchamber. He could meditate. He could try to quiet his mind and seek out some sort of guidance or plan.

But he knows what will happen. He's too hot, too angry for it. Right now the only plans that will come to mind are the ones that have been surging in the back of his mind since he got this missive. Crush, destroy, kill.

He could do it easily. Not as easy as with Starkiller, but… He has the forces. He has the power. He can level the R'Leah. Take them out of the galaxy completely. He can show off his power, and make the rest of the galaxy understand in one strike that they would be well advised to not challenge the First Order. He may be more humane than Snoke, but he is not to be trifled with.

You do what you do, and I'll abide, or not, as I can.

He can feel her on the far side of the door and is glad she's there. His hand rests on the plane of metal, about to hit the first of the spots he needs to touch to unlatch it.

He pulls his hand back. She wouldn't abide this. It'd be one thing if they attacked him. If he were to utterly crush them as a matter of defense that'd be fine.

He turns on his heel, fast, and stalks off toward his training gym. Meditation, thinking, everything has always worked better for him if he could hitto go along with it, and this likely won't be any different.

As a Jedi, fight training was painfully dispassionate.

They trained mostly against droids. The focus was primarily defensive. Use the training batons, and then, as Luke built more of them, lightsabers, to whack away little jolts of electricity.

The point of the Jedi's physical body was to move the saber around in a defensive sort of way. And though they worked on both strength and flexibility, on the ability to move fast and easy, their bodies weren't weapons.

The saber, a thing distant from them, was the weapon.

When he was thirteen, he and a few of the others convinced Luke to let them fight each other. The training droid was too predictable, too much a tool for a novice. And, as Kylo-who-was-Ben knew, training against the droid didn't sharpen their skills at reading an opponent's fight.

Fighting against people did.

There weren't a lot of Jedi skills Kylo-who-was-Ben picked up readily, but lightsaber was one of them, and any opportunity he had to get better, he'd grab with both hands.

Here, now, in his training gym, he puts his lightsaber down. There are times for it. When flame and force and Force combine in a perfect symbiosis of rage and attack. Times like that are beautiful, and he loves them unreservedly. Those are the moments he's made for. This isn't one of them.

When he joined Snoke, his fighting style changed. Kylo didn't have to try to shove himself into a Jedi-shaped mold of dispassionate fighting. He didn't have to distance himself from his weapon. He could be what he was, what'd he'd always been, and likely always will be, the weapon.

His saber is just an aspect of that, an extension of his will to destroy.

He unfastens his tunic, hanging it up, and pulls his shirt over his head. For a moment, he wishes he had something to tie his hair back. It's getting stupidly long, and he's either got to do something with it when he fights or get it cut short again. Something else he doesn't really have time for.

And since he doesn't wear the helmet, keeping it short doesn't matter that much.

C8 can likely locate some hair ties for him.

The training droids, something he can actually fight, as opposed to little electric currents he can swat away like so many annoying gnats, aren't ready yet. Soon supposedly.

Soon is too long away.

He goes to the punching bag. It's old and heavy, made of thick leather and filled with… Whatever. He doesn't know or care. It's sturdy enough to take a punch, even one, or especially one, thrown by him.

It's a good hit, jarring, satisfying. He feels the thrum of it all the way to his shoulder, feels his power, his dark, calling to him, begging to be released.

So he does.

Fist and foot, elbow and knee. No Jedi ever fought like this. There's no serene elegance here. No distancing blade. Just a man and his rage and his dark, channeled into strikes that can shatter plasteel should he desire, though tonight he doesn't. He'll have to stop when he breaks the equipment, and he doesn't want to stop, not yet.

He knows he'll hurt when he stops, but he doesn't care about that, either.

Hitting, hit hard, hit fast, hit deep and dark and bitter. Hit long enough and the problems don't go away, but they don't matter. Hit until he's shaking, sweat dripping down his body, hair soaked. Hit until he can burn enough of his dark away to see…

Anything…

Any solution that doesn't result in his enemies looking like the remains of the punching bag, broken and scattered across his gym.

He's tired enough when he's done he's fairly sure he can sleep.

At least, that's what he wants to do. Stagger off to his room, drop onto his bed, and not move until C8 reminds him of his first appointment of the morning.

He can tend to niceties like a shower, or taking off his boots, in the morning.

Except, as he's about to flop boneless into the bed that's in his all black room, his unlit, black room, he feels the presence in there, and knows that there's already someone in his bed, who may be somewhat irked to have 89 kilos of him just flop onto her.

His shoulders slump. If he gets a shower or undresses or… pretty much anything but collapses, his brain will start working again, and sleep won't come.

If he doesn't… He looks like a whomp rat who died in a swamp six weeks ago and, worse, smells like one, too.

He can't see her in the dark. He's got good dark vision but even he can't see someone in an unlit, black room. But he can feel her there, sleeping, but even in her sleep, welcoming, waiting for him to come join her.

Water. Hundreds of liters of it streaming down around him. Probably one degree shy of burning him. He didn't bother to turn on the light, so he's in the dark, feeling it pour over him, feeling sore muscles and joints thank him for doing this, even as they beg him to go lie down.

They all shriek in horror as he yanks the temperature to cold. And the only reason he doesn't give voice to that yell is that he's had decades of training of not allowing himself to show his pain.

He yells loud enough inside his head that he feels Rey wake up, though.

"Kylo?" she can't see him, but she can feel him.

"Shower."

The steam around him is rapidly clearing, taking the soft murk away from the dark, giving it clearer edges.

He hears her moving around, feels her placing her feet tentatively. She doesn't turn on the light, and he appreciates that. His body's unhappy enough with the shock of the cold water, adding searing light to it would just be punishment.

"Are you alright?"

"Enough."

He senses her near, and feels the door to the shower open, followed by her hand entering and then a yelp. "Why is it cold?"

"Helps with bruises and swelling."

"Why are you bruised and swelling? I thought you were meeting with your commanders?" He can hear the fear on her voice, both at what might have happened, and that, just a room away, she slept through it without coming to fight beside him.

"Training. I can focus the Force to hit hard, and it prevents most of the damage from doing so. No broken bones, for example, no torn ligaments, but I still end up bruised."

"Oh."

There's a moment of nothing but dark and cold and the feel of warm, moist air running away from the bathroom as quickly as it can.

She doesn't ask, but the opening to talk is there.

And it's not the throne room of his vision, not the shape, not the feel, but he's got the sense that it might be a step in getting there, so he lays it out, all of it, and, for the first time in… possibly ever, he opens up a problem, all of the problem, from R'Leah to the wider galaxy, to keeping his position and image among his officers, and explains what his options are, and asks for help.

She can't see him, but she can feel that this sort of thing is easier in the dark. Easier to just be two voices, two minds, floating along in shapeless black. Rey takes the time to think about what he's told her, and finally says, "Kinear's right. What are you doing with this? None of the pieces will be shaped right if we don't know what the whole looks like."

She feels his sigh and hears the, "Buggered if I know." But he does know, on the most basic of levels. "Surviving. If I screw this up too badly, they'll kill me, and that'll be that."

That's a squirm inducing thought. "You said you joined the Order to battle chaos… You've given your people the possibility of citizenship… Where does that go?"

His head is leaning against the side of the shower, and his body is all but numb now, so it's likely time to step out, but… This is easier in the dark. Easier without his body being part of the situation. He slowly lowers himself down, sitting back against the wall of the shower, and lets the cold water continue to stream over bruised skin.

"C8 asked me why citizens… What it's supposed to be… And all I've got right now is that it's a way to get the Resistance off my back. It…" She can feel the way he's working his lips, like his body actively fights letting these sorts of words and thoughts out. "buys me time."

"To do what?"

He exhales, deep and ragged. "Get this in order. Take men like Hux out of the equation." His voice drops, quieter, more thinking the words than saying them, "Get secure enough I can sleep at night without having to work myself insensate."

She doesn't move to touch him. He's still in the shower, under icy, falling water, but he feels a gentle brush of her Force against him. "You don't always have to guard your own sleep."

He snorts at that, and she sees Luke looming over him.

"Not again, Kylo."

She feels the little dismissive turn of his head. Ten years of fear don't go away with a few words and weeks. So she moves onto a problem they might be able to solve sooner than later. Rey inhales deeply, thinking… "Buy yourself time…" Like any of Plutt's scavengers, she was bound to him, could only trade her finds with him, but that doesn't mean she didn't see the other trading going on around her. Didn't mean she doesn't understand that the first offer is generally just there to feel the person out. "Did their 50% offer have a time frame?"

"No."

"And why do they pay taxes to you?"

"It's protection money. Theoretically: we protect them from anything that might cause problems. Practically: we don't attack them if they pay us."

"So you're protecting them from yourself?"

"More or less. If something were to attack, we'd blow it out of the sky, but it's a stable system in the core. No one's so much as raised an eyebrow at it since the fall of the Empire."

"Okay…" She's still thinking.

He's thinking, too, about where, supposedly, he's taking all of this. "You told me about freeing slaves… Where did you want to go with that? Why even tell me about it? Just to see if I'd do it?" he asks.

That takes her by surprise. "I… I was thinking about balance and… How to sort out balance from permission to do any shitty thing you wanted to do. The Jedi path is easy. You've got a code, you know what to do and how, and you don't have to worry about the implications of each act. As long as you're in the right mindset when you do it, it's fine. And… balance doesn't give you that. So, where's the line between good and evil and… And what do you do with power… And…"

"And you came up with something you'd do with power?"

"Yeah. Or, more importantly, I came up with the idea that if there's a shot of you fixing a problem, you can't just sit on your butt and not fix it. That, that's a difference between… whatever I am and the Jedi. So, problem. And, at least through you, I had a shot of fixing it. So, I asked.

"I don't have any… grand vision of this… It was just, something that could make life better for a lot of people."

"Maybe…"

"Spoken like someone who's never been a slave," her voice is sharp on that.

"Spoken like someone who's aware of how many half to two-thirds starved, infirm, or near-dead people are being tossed on my doorstep. If I'd just ended it… They'd be begging on the streets, likely dying there."

"Oh… I didn't realize that's what you'd meant."

And again she feels his little dismissive gesture. She spends another moment thinking, sitting back against the bathroom wall, feeling her way through the dark. "What do you think they're hoping to get out of this?"

"The R'Leah?"

"For right now, yes. Your officers are probably a different conversation for another night."

He thinks about that, too, and realizes that's a bigger question than one answer. "Ultimately, or by this offer?"

"Either, both… Why do this in the first place? How much are you charging them?"

"Enough so that it matters to their balance sheet. Not so much they're in danger of going broke from it. Snoke's accountants figured out how much a system, on average, given its size and danger level, would spend on its own military protection, and then set their tax rate at ten percent above that.

"The First Order would show up, destroy their local military, take over 'protection' duties, and then they'd pay us for it. It'd keep them complacent, and make sure that most of the systems he controlled couldn't get into fire fights with each other, or go up against us."

"So, you think they're looking to save money?"

"Maybe. Or get out from under us. Possibly both."

"And what do you get out of this?"

"Not so much that losing just them will break me."

"Losing everyone who sees them walk away is the problem?"

"Yes."

"And, 'Okay, you can go, just don't tell anyone what you did,' isn't going to work."

He almost laughs at that. "I'd be extremely surprised if it did." She feels him shrug. "I also don't have anyone I can use to give them that offer. Not only would the entire outside galaxy have to not know about it, but somehow my people couldn't find out about it, too."

"Your commanders would read it as a sign of weakness."

"Yes. Some of them are keen on diplomacy, about half of them think the answer to everything is kill whoever causes problems."

"And they get irked when you suggest diplomacy?"

"That's one way to put it."

She keeps feeling, him, them, this situation. "Are you… looking for my permission to attack them?"

Yes. But he doesn't say it. "It would certainly make things easier," comes out of his mouth.

"I'd rather you didn't." Please, don't.

He can feel there's a lot of depth to that. Not only would she, just as a matter of course, prefer him to come up with a different response, but that she wants to stay with him, she cherishes this time, and doesn't want to lose it.

But there was a girl, and a balance, and if she goes along with something like this, the balance starts to tip.

"I know." I won't.

Rey asks, "What happens if you take the deal they're offering? I mean… with your men. Not the wider galaxy."

"They go along with it, and instead of two of them plotting to kill me, I think I end up with three. Maybe a fourth when more of my systems revolt. Again, screw this up too badly, and sooner or later, one of them will keep his thoughts tightly reined enough to kill me. Or… worse, I suppose, he'll gain enough support that they just won't take orders from me anymore. Even if I could kill my entire command, which is unlikely, I can't run the damn thing without them.

"And if I keep my men in order, but enough systems revolt, I'll end up having to fire on them, because sooner or later one of them will decide to take back what they've paid and then some. But I'll have to make that attack with fewer resources and less chance of success than if I'd put the first one down and kept up my tax revenues."

They're both quiet for a long moment after that, then Rey says, "Do they have something you need that they don't value as much as credits? Raw materials or… Something they can give you, so you get goods if not income, and they save face by you making a deal?"

Kylo thinks about that. He needs practically everything to keep his empire flying. A system would be hard pressed to not have something he could use. "Maybe. I can find that out. Is that what you'd suggest?"

"A counter offer of some sort. That'll buy you time. Take… ships or… food… or… whatever. Make them pay for your recruiting stations."

"And if Kinear's right about them being on the edge of collapse because of my boycott of their suppliers… That'll increase the pressure on them, but I'm still negotiating with them…" He lets himself feel that, and decides that, at least for right now, for this moment in time, it will work.

He hefts himself up, and shuts off the water. Maybe he doesn't yet have an answer for his bigger question, but at least for a moment, the smaller one can be satisfied.

He hears Rey move, still can't see her, but senses her in front of him. He feels her call a towel to hand, and knows she's offering it to him.

He dries himself off, gingerly. He's long past the endorphin rush of his fight, and even with chilled skin everything is still sore.

"Come to bed, Kylo." Her fingers find his.

When he was with Luke, sometime around the age of sixteen, some of the other young Jedi began bed-hopping. Kylo-who-was-then-Ben wasn't the oldest of the lot, M'Gll was six weeks older than he, but that put him at more than close enough to the oldest of the lot.

But, for the boys, Ben was the oldest of the lot, so whatever "stages" the Padawans were going through, he went through them first. (Generally speaking, the vagaries of puberty were just as vague for Luke's school as they are at every other school.) And Ben never went through a bed-hopping phase.

Like every other non-asexual human male, Ben hit puberty and more or less turned into an erection on legs for the next few years. And he literally, figuratively, and metaphorically did everything he could to beat those desires into submission hard as he could. Sex was, at least according to Luke, an invitation to the kind of emotions that thrived in the dark, so it was the province of only the most accomplished masters, fully and truly grounded in their light. And of all Luke's students, he was the one who could least afford a dalliance with the dark. So, he behaved, and kept to the rules, and slept in his own little cottage, by himself, and generally did a fairly good job of not being a walking erection much past the age of fifteen.

But not all of the other Padawans did.

And like most young people forced into unwanted chastity, they had an extremely strict and limited definition of sex that covered, basically, nothing of the feast that is sex, and allowed them room to play. Maybe all of the Padawans were technically virgins, but that technically involved stretching the definition of what constituted 'not sex' to the snapping point and then just a hair beyond.

And thus, bed hopping. It either didn't occur to Luke to do bed checks, or he knew what was going on and figured that some level of blowing off steam was necessary to keep his students from exploding. Kylo doesn't know the truth of that.

Ben wasn't anyone's best friend. The other Padawans rarely confided in him, but he wasn't stupid, and he wasn't deaf, and they'd still whisper and talk, and gossip and…

Anyway, all of this has been the 'round about way of explaining that, sometime around his seventeenth birthday, Kylo-who-was-then-Ben had more than heard the rumors about how nice it was to sleep with someone else.

And, as someone who wasn't much past the walking-erection stage of life, he could understand, in hot, red, shameful, do it fast, get it done, and then feel bad about it later sorts of way, how nice it would be to have someone touch you. That part of the bed-hopping he understood on a visceral level, and very much didn't want to. But, the sleeping part…

He didn't get the sleeping part. It seemed… claustrophobic, really. Too much, too close, too little space, and, of course, at Luke's school, it was just as likely that you'd end up with visitors in your dreams if they got too close and… And he didn't get it.

But right here, right now, in a black room, after a long conversation, and no sex, he's starting to get it.

He's tired. He's sore. He wants the comfort of another body, another soul near his. And for once, his mind is quiet enough that he's fairly sure sleep will find him, without him having to hunt it down and kidnap it. For the first time in a long time, Kylo slips into sleep without hours of meditation, or the soporific of orgasm to lead him there.

In the morning, he sends the R'Leah a counter offer. Seventy-five percent of their taxes this year, fifty next year, thirty the year after, payable in credits or raw materials. At the end of three years, they'll reassess the value of the tax base. A piece of prime, already developed real estate of at least three hectares square, with an assessed value of not less than 6.5 million credits in each of their cities with a population of more than 5,000,000, for recruiting stations. Full title and sovereignty to two of their uninhabited, undeveloped, extreme outlier planets. And for all of that, they'll end the boycott on both R'Leah and anyone they do business with.

He gets word back, practically before he sends the deal out, that it's been accepted. Details of where and how, pending.

And when he tells his commanders about it, more than half of them, including Kinear, seem to think he made a good decision.