12/8/1
Kylo tidies his outfit. He hasn't felt this… nervous probably isn't the right word, but it's in the neighborhood, in years. This interested in making a good impression. In not just having approval, but wanting them to want to give it to him.
That's probably it.
He sees Rey watching, and says, "We're not meditating."
She laughs, remembering. "Perish the thought."
He nods to her, and steps out of their cottage into the sunshine, walking, in his full blacks, with his lightsaber on his hip, cloak and cowl on, because it's bloody cold, alone, through her town, for the first time.
It had occurred to him, oh, about ten hours after he got back to the Supremacy after deciding that he could teach saber, that it's not exactly like he's got to wait to get twenty-two training sabers. And yesterday, two very surprised looking Stormtroopers, in their new, non-armored uniforms, delivered two boxes full of small training sabers to him.
He's got one for himself. The hilt is an exact match for his light saber. The blade isn't, but it's the right length, as light as possible, and heated. Hot enough to let you know you've been hit; it'll raise a blister if it hits bare skin, but nothing that'll do any permanent damage.
Getting 22 more of them in a variety of sizes from smaller than he probably should have (After all, who trains a five-year-old how to use a lightsaber? He does. That appears to be the correct answer.) to an adult-sized one-handed saber, took about five hours. The one-handed one is lighter than the blade he uses, lighter than the one Anakin built, but since the oldest of the lot is sixteen and has never done this before, a lighter blade to build up strength with makes sense.
So, now all he's got to do is go off and be… useful.
To a group of children.
He's about twenty meters out of their cottage, which is fifteen more than he thought he'd get when Rose marches up to him. Paige, in the snuggli on her chest, sees him and offers up a pleased gurgle.
He's a centimeter from saying "Hello to you, too," and petting the underside of her chin, but the wall of determined pouring off of Rose stops him short. So, he thinks it instead, and Paige smiles at him.
Rose catches at least some of the interaction, and determined shifts a bit, a layer of frustrated and irked on top of it. Kylo's trying not to be amused by the fact that those emotions are as much aimed at her as him.
She's looking up at him, eyes narrowed. The top of her head just about comes to the top of his sternum, so she's looking up, a lot.
"Be worth our trust."
He blinks, not expecting that, but he can certainly work with it.
"I intend to."
"Don't intend, just do it."
He nods at her, and slowly extends his hand, looking to give Paige a little pet. She's reaching out for him, so Rose, grudgingly, allows it.
He kneels, stroking Paige's cheek, and she grabs for his nose. He smiles at her thinking, Maybe Aunt Rey was right. Maybe I'll get to be Uncle Kylo. Would you like that?
She coos a little, squeezing his nose.
Rose is watching this in amazement. "You like babies?"
"I like this one." He gently removes Paige's hand from his nose and stands up. He strokes her face again, black-gloved finger gentle on chill-reddened cheeks.
Rose's eyes narrow again, and he gets a sense off of her that of course he should like Paige, she's the perfect baby, everyone should like Paige.
He blinks a little, rubs his lips together, nods, and then thinks to Paige, You're lucky to have her.
Rose doesn't know what just happened, but she can feel it wasn't bad, so she offers Kylo a curt nod, and heads toward the shed where they're keeping the insulation field generators. Time to get the last few cottages dug out of the snow, and insulation generators installed.
Kylo heads to the chapel, where the kids are waiting for him. He pulls off the cowl and cloak, not needing them in here, and even if it was cool enough for them, he'd likely take them off just to make it easier to see what he's doing.
Granted, seeing isn't likely to be an issue here.
They are definitely staring at him. Really staring at him. All of them are deeply curious, and the ones who didn't come from the Supremacy are, at least a little, afraid. And he's feeling a bit nervous, too. He… sort of… taught some level of lightsaber work when he was Master Ben. Luke did most of the teaching. Mostly he just sparred with his fellow trainees, made them use what they'd learned.
But for the youngest of the bunch, he did spend some time showing them how to hold the saber correctly, and how to swing it around, and how to position their feet.
Part of him wonders if he's going to go into this just offering up standard Yoda-approved Jedi technique.
After all, that's how he learned it.
He looks down at the floor beneath them. The swirl of light and dark.
It's time to shed what he learned and show them something new and, hopefully better.
And… If he doesn't start talking soon, the little, squirmy ones are going to start asking him questions.
"You've all heard Rey talk about the light and the dark. That they exist in all of us and balance each other out."
He sees a lot of little heads bobbing up and down.
"But, do some of you ever get the feeling that when Rey talks about the dark, she's talking about the sky before a thunderstorm, and when you feel the dark, you're feeling that same sky, at night, from inside a cave, a thousand feet under the ground?"
Two heads bobbing up and down, Critt can really feel what he's saying and the other darkling, who isn't Force sensitive, can imagine it. Kylo can feel enough of the other one to sense the same little seeds that made Hux so dangerous.
He doesn't look away from the children, but he feels Finn enter the chapel, and eventually he wanders to the back, where Kylo can see him, leaning against the wall of the dome, watching.
Kylo nods. "Not everyone is as dark as everyone else. How dark you are is just a thing that happens. Rey leans more toward the light side." He stares them all down, making at least a second of eye contact with each one. "I don't." Twenty-two kids jump at that. He amped his power, and he's Kylo Fucking Ren in his full blacks standing before them, saber at his side. Half of them look certain he's about to use his saber to slaughter them all.
"Hate, anger, envy, disgust, these are dark side feelings. Everyone has some of them. Some of us have more of them. Some of us have an easier time finding them, or a harder time shutting them off. Some people think these feelings make us evil." He doesn't look to Finn as he says that. "Some look at these feelings and tell us we're broken or wrong. That we shouldn't have these feelings, or that we need to pretend they're not there.
"They're wrong." He amps that, too, though he doesn't use any voice compulsion on it. "These feelings are there for a reason. Content, happy people rarely do great things. They have no reason to, they're content and happy.
"Hate, anger, envy, disgust, these give birth to rage." He had set the chapel with a few props last night, and he pulls one of them. A rock hovers into the air in front of him. It's a good sized one, probably weighs about 20 kilos. He wiggles his fingers at them. "The glove has some padding and heat protection, but it is a glove, not a gauntlet." He takes a moment to call his dark, and he knows the Force sensitive children can feel him doing it. One more moment, it's not as easy as it was when he was Master of the Knights of Ren, Snoke's enforcer. There's less rage in there, now, but it's not, by a long shot, gone. Then he punches the rock, shattering it into a million pieces and sending them flying. "Rage gives us power and motivation. And with rage, we can do anything." Then he takes the glove off, showing that his fingers are scratched and reddened. "They'll bruise, but aren't broken. Rage, allowed to flow indiscriminately will hurt you just as easily as everyone else. If I hadn't held my hand correctly, and channeled my rage properly, I'd have broken my fingers, hand, and wrist, probably arm, and maybe elbow, and the rock would have sat there, unmoved, while Master Finn laughed at me so hard he'd sprain his back."
Finn does smirk at that, because fuck yes, he would have.
He looks at the children. "Any of you can hit a rock right now, and all you'll do is hurt yourself. Rage has to be tamed, tempered, married to a cause, focused, and when you've done that… You can do anything."
"But isn't the dark side evil?" one of the little lightlings, a non-Force sensitive one, he thinks that one's name is Opal, but he's not sure, asks, staring at Finn. Kylo can feel that lines are already being drawn through the town, and he's got the sense that trying to nip those sooner rather than later is a good plan.
"No more so than the light. The person wielding it, and how they wield it, that will earn it the mark of evil or not."
"How can the light be evil?" the oldest of the group, Jacen, who's, from what Kylo can tell, fairly well balanced in himself, asks. And Kylo realizes that Jacen's asking this as a way to get Kylo to keep talking about it, extend the lesson, make the point clearer.
He blinks his thanks and feels Jacen sense it. He nods. I've got your back.
Kylo's not expecting that, but he appreciates it.
"I trained as a Jedi. I was a Jedi. Believe it or not, ten years ago, I was Master Ben, in my beige and brown robes, with a blue lightsaber. That came to an end the first time I was attacked. In my sleep. Because of a premonition. By my uncle, a man so firmly grounded in the light that most people consider him to be a near-god. Would we consider attacking a young man in his sleep to be evil? I certainly did. He, at the time, didn't. He was 'protecting' a version of the future.
"That moment not only didn't work out well for anyone, but it also set much of what he'd been afraid of into motion.
"And that near-god, so deeply shamed by what he had done, ran away, cutting himself off from the Force, and allowed the First Order to grow in leaps and bounds for the next decade, slaughtering every would-be Jedi we could find. Would we consider that evil? The slaughter? Absolutely. Running away? Maybe.
"Fear is of the dark. Luke feared a future. He attacked me to prevent it. He didn't attack fast enough to kill me, so he set that future into play. Fear makes men easy to manipulate. I was asleep, and someone I loved tried to kill me. My knights were the other members of the school who joined my side in the fight that ensued. When we left, we'd been attacked and betrayed by the Jedi. When we'd done nothing but protect ourselves. We were afraid, and Snoke hopped in to use that. Afraid, hurt, hate bubbling up, because everything we'd been taught for years was a lie, we were easy to convince that any other Force users were a threat. So we hunted them down and killed them.
"That was dark used for evil.
"Rey and I stood in front of Snoke. He was droning away about how I was going to kill her. How he owned me, and all I could feel was rage, and pain, and hate, and a tiny little spark of something that would eventually be love.
"I cut him in half, and Rey and I fought off the Praetorian Guard. Would any of you challenge the idea that that was dark, let alone dark used for good?" He's looking directly at Finn as he says it, and Finn holds the gaze, not blinking.
"How about light used for evil? Go back further, beyond my personal timeline, the Jedi, with calmness and agape, love for everyone, sought out the dark and executed it, throwing the entire galaxy out of balance, resulting in almost a century of war and the deaths of trillions. Each and every person in that drama had their own part to play, made their own choices, decided issue by issue to be good or evil, but at the core was the idea that light is good and dark is evil, so let's get rid of the dark.
"Some of you, like Rey, naturally bend toward the light, and there's great value to that. Healing, counseling, strategy, building, all of those things flow naturally from the light, and all of them are vital.
"But some of us were made to destroy, and there's a place for that, too."
Kylo nods to Finn, who's glaring at him, not liking Kylo's version of dark and light and recent Skywalker history. "Master Finn is watching us. He's fairly well balanced between his dark and light tendencies. He and I have a longer history than either of us would like, I'd say. And right now, he's experiencing some very hot, very dark feelings. I've hurt him in the past, and his friends. I've killed some of them, one with my own hands, so he has every right to those feelings. They are beyond warranted."
Finn rolls his eyes, annoyed at the idea that Ren's giving him permission to be angry at him.
"The question is, what will he do with them?"
Kylo's eyes meet Finn's and the children all watch, even the non-Force sensitive ones can feel the tension crackling between them.
Finn keeps watching him, and then rubs his lips together, before saying, "I don't know."
"Fair enough." Then he returns his attention to the children. "Light and dark will often find themselves in conflict, but they don't have to be. Used well, and they'll complement each other. Your dark feelings can tear down the old, and your light ones can build something new. Your dark feelings can be fostered, nurtured, to give you power when you need to protect that which you've cherished. But they have to be controlled, to prevent you from tearing everything down, including yourself." He wiggles his fingers which are starting to purple from the force of his hit.
"Doesn't that hurt?" Kven, one of the children he took off the Supremacy asks.
"Yes."
"Then why do it?"
"Mastery of anything worth mastering will cause you pain. Obtaining anything that matters will cause you pain. Pain is not to be feared, or avoided, it's just pain. You can and will survive it, and if what that pain gets you matters, then you go through the pain." He nods to them. "Now, up you get. Day one lesson one, how to hold a saber."
The absolute last thing Finn wants to do is talk with Ren. He'd rather muck out the Favier's stalls with his tongue.
But he's feeling drawn to watch.
Ren's got all twenty-two of them standing, balanced, holding appropriately-sized training blades, and making sure each one of them has a proper grasp.
"A lightsaber is a one-and-a-half-handed weapon. Meaning that most of the time, you'll use it two handed, but if you want or need to, you can use it one-handed. If you can't hold this, one-handed, comfortably, you need a lighter one." He's got them holding them out, one-handed. "Just hold it, right now. You've got little arms, and you need to build up strength."
Whatever the children were expecting, this isn't it.
And for that matter, that's true of Finn, too.
"When you build you own, you'll have practiced long enough to know what sort of grip works best for you. Until then, dominant hand—The one you use to eat with—on top."
Rugh pipes up, "I use both!"
Finn sniggers at that.
"Which one holds the fork?" Ren asks, having come to the conclusion that everyone with two hands uses both of them to eat.
"What's a fork?" She's staring up at him, eyes bright, and he's looking down at her, brows scrunched together.
The sniggering gets louder as Kylo Ren, Master of the Order, attempts to explain a fork to a child who's only ever used chopsticks and a spoon, while six of the other twenty-one children around him start bonking each other with their practice sabers, hissing when they discover he wasn't kidding about the blades being hot.
Ren's glaring at Finn, because there's what he'd like to do, which would likely result in twenty-two young people all wetting themselves in terror, and he's fairly sure that constitutes overkill for this particular situation. And there's what he needs to do, get them under control, but he's not exactly coming up with any good ideas for that.
Finn's smirking like this is the best thing he's ever seen, because, at least right now, it is. It's stupidly gratifying to see that Ren is not, in fact, good at everything.
He startles a little when he hears, Do better, if you can echo in his head.
He raises an eyebrow at Ren, challenge in his gaze, and then nods.
"'TENSHUN! UP STRAIGHT AND QUIET, ALL OF YOU!" Finn's voice barks out in a perfect training-sergeant shout.
Ren blinks. He almost straightened up at that command, too.
Finn walks up to the children. "Straight lines, now. Eyes forward. Holding those sabers!" He looks down at Rugh. He takes the practice saber from her and says, "Hands down."
She puts her hands down.
"Okay, quick, grab for it." Then he drops the saber.
The first hand to reach is her right one. "That's your dominant hand."
Then she's got the correct hold.
And Finn returns to the back, a very smug smirk on his face, to watch Ren teach them how to stand, holding the saber, and how to balance their weight on their feet, with... varying degrees of success. And how to do a few, basic, defensive moves. No one hit any of the other ones hard enough to cause a bruise, so… that's probably a good lesson, and all of them are looking forward to the next one, and half of them are already planning their own sabers.
At the end of it, Ren comes over, eyeing Finn. "You weren't an officer."
"Nope. They said I would be, though." He's eyeing Ren back, just as hard. "You were never enlisted. Never had a sergeant barking orders at you."
"Never a sergeant." Finn's almost on the verge of thinking about that comment, but he can feel Ren sorting through his head, and tries to stop it, but he's got no talent for that. "You like the excitement of being on the Falcon. You miss your family when you're there, and you think it's too dangerous for them to be on there. That causes tension with Rose, because she disagrees. You'd like to be with them every day and night, but you want them safe, and you want the danger for yourself."
Finn doesn't nod, because what would be the point? Obviously, Ren knows he's right.
"It'd be easier if you had some sense of purpose off the Falcon. You don't think there's anything to do here, though. Not that matters. You can lug rocks as well as anyone else can, but you're better in the sky, helping Chewie make the deals that let you keep supplying us."
"Us?" There's not, in any universe Finn wants to be in, a situation where us is an appropriate word to describe him and Ren.
"I'm here. You're here. We're both working toward a mutual goal of improving this settlement. A plural personal pronoun would be appropriate, hence us."
Finn rolls his eyes. "Are you always a flaming asshole?"
Ren doesn't respond to that. "Maintaining adequate supplies is not going to be an issue, soon. Being able to train more than a handful of children at a time will be." Ren rubs the scar on his arm from where Finn got him. "You're ranked in all of our basic combat skills."
"And most of the advanced. I can use any hand to hand weapon the First Order had."
Ren nods. "Baton, too."
"Of course."
"They're not that different from a saber."
"I know." His voice is pointed, after all, hours of baton training is how he managed to put that mark on Ren.
Ren just looks at him. "I'll do better one on one, or with small groups. Jacen's big enough that I can really train him with a saber, Critt, Magiit, Savarah, and Elias will be in a year. There are two of them I need to spend more time with, working on not letting their dark eat them. For the rest of them, I'll be more use to them once they have the basics."
"Are you asking me something?" Finn says, voice dry.
"I'm assessing the situation, pointing out what we both know is true. What you do about that is up to you."
Finn's eyes narrow. "Would it kill you to ask me to help?"
There's a tiny flicker of something that could possibly be humor in Ren's eyes. "No, but like not being a flaming asshole, I imagine it'd make both of us uncomfortable."
Finn decides Ren's likely right about that. "Chewie'd miss me."
"Probably, but Poe has a skill set of greater value to him. And since we won't be needing someone to run the galaxy looking for cut rate supplies that can be talked out of the hands of whomever owns them, perhaps the two of them can turn their skills to scouting for people we can benefit?"
Finn's eyes narrow, he decides to give Ren a centimeter. "Perhaps."
The conversation doesn't feel done, but neither of them have anything to add for a moment.
Then Ren comes up with, "Did you want to be an officer?"
"I did, until I watched one cut down an unarmed man and order the massacre of everyone in a town."
Ren doesn't physically shrug that off, but it's clear he's just letting it float by him. "Then don't do that, Commander Finn."
Finn doesn't hit him, but it's close. He feels his fist clench, and his arm start to swing but he forces it to stay at his side. And he knows Ren caught it, because he's already a step back, hand on his saber. Finn pulls himself out of his fight, and holds his hands up, visibly, intentionally moving himself out of fight mode. Ren moves his hand away from his saber, taking another step back.
Both of them eye each other, waiting for a moment, seeing if the tension will break, badly. But it doesn't. Once it's clear they're both in detente mode, Finn speaks again, "Okay, let's get a few things clear. You do not run Lirium. The fancy fucking title you've got on the Supremacy is worth fuck all here. Here, at best, you're just like any other adult. And best is going to require a fucking kiloton of toeing the line, because you already give me nightmares and any hint you might do something that puts my family in danger is going to result in a lot of pain, for you."
Ren's beyond dubious of that statement, and it shows on his face.
Finn glares at him, for a heartbeat before saying, "Yeah, I know, you can stop me dead if you know I'm coming, but," and Finn smiles, and it's the gesture of a predator protecting his cubs, of a killer pulling a knife he intends to enjoy using, "after all, like you said, even you sleep."
For a second, Ren's quiet, and Finn's got the sense he's thinking of… bloody things, and making himself not say them. Then he's not thinking about that, intentionally not. He's… trying to calm them down. He comes up with, "With Rey," as a way to defuse things.
Finn's eyes are hot, and steady. "If you thought I was a threat to your family, Rose wouldn't stop you for a second, would she?"
Ren half-inclines his head. Finn gets the sense that he's thinking about it. That he wouldn't… intentionally… hit Rose, if she were between him and a threat for a family. He'd certainly try to avoid her, but if she couldn't be avoided… "For a second."
"And I'd try not to hit Rey."
Ren nods. "So we understand each other."
"Good. Second of all, even if you did run Lirium, which you do not, you'd have fuck all say over anything involving me and my family. Whatever the hell chain of command you think you're part of, I'm not in it. You can't promote me, demote me, order me around, or anything else, because I'm not, now or ever, yours."
Ren holds his hands up in a peace gesture. "Noted. That doesn't make this any less true though. They still need to learn the kind of things you know, and you appear to be better at teaching, or at least maintaining class control, than I am, so you might as well teach. Be Master Tico if you like. Or Finn. Or Lord of the Baton. Or whatever term you desire."
Finn doesn't glare at him, but there is a grudging acceptance that Ren might be right.
"I'll think on it."
"Good."
Kylo can feel Rey in the back of his head as he's moving away from Finn. He knows she's continuing to work her way through the town, applying more and better insulation to the cottages. A job that's getting a lot slower because they've got to dig each cottage out from under the snow before they start.
Getting sorted? she thinks to him, aware that he and Finn are still feeling each other out.
Maybe? I find the posturing boring.
I'm sure you do. What's up next?
Back to the ship. You going to come with me?
Probably not. Our place is next. Wanna help?
For a moment, the idea of getting to do something, hard, physical, and useful just sings through him. Yes, but I can't. Legal's got the 'colony contracts' written up. Supposedly finished. I get to read them, decide if I like them, and mark them up. Then meetings until my eyes bleed.
He sends her the sense of his kiss as he takes a moment to center himself, and shift to the Supremacy. He steps over, unwinding the cowl, draping it over his chair, picking up the stack of new datapads on his desk. He's staring at them, wondering how it's even possible for them to multiply this fast, when he feels her kiss back.
He finishes his cup of coffee, rubbing his eyes, looking at the pad. This is the third time he's sent the proto-contract back, and… with any luck, this one is finally what he's looking for. With any luck it's also somewhere in the neighborhood of what the different colonies think they agreed to, but… That's for what happens after their legal departments get done with them.
"More coffee?" C8 asks.
Kylo blinks, noticing the droid hovering over his shoulder. "No." Looking at the empty cup does give him an idea, though. "Can you get an extra bag of the beans for me?"
"Yes, sir."
"Thanks."
C8 pauses, just at the edge of Kylo's peripheral vision. "You're not intending to start eating them straight, are you?"
That gets him to look up. And then look at the cup next to him… How many of them has he had? Three? Six? Shit, he's got to pay more attention to this. He's got the sense that he drains a cup, and C8 just pops up and pours him more. "No. I was… going to give it to someone."
"Oh. Yes. Would you like it wrapped?"
Kylo blinks. "Wrapped?"
"It's traditional to encase presents in a nice package."
"It's…" He's about to say it's not a present, but, he guesses it sort of is, so. "No. Just, one of the bags I take home."
"Yes, sir. Anything else?"
"No." And he gets reading the contract.
An hour later, he's leaning back in his chair, holding the data pad, feeling… Content, he guesses. He likes this one. It's a ten year 'Gradual Emancipation' contract. The Colony in question will, for the first four years, give them 90% of their output in exchange for protection, tools, machinery, and, as needed technical specialists. Years five through ten, that percentage will drop, but the amount of protection, tools, machinery, and technical specialists will drop, too, as the Colony takes over more and more of its own management. By year eleven, the Order will have completely detangled itself financially from the colony, and it will be officially independent.
People though, that's a different story. In perpetuity, as many recruiting stations as they wish to put on the planet will always be welcome, and, any member of the Order who wishes to settle there will always be welcome. Likewise, if at any point the population on the planet becomes more than 2/3rds Order citizens, should they desire a referendum to formally join the planet to the Order, it will be held.
It's slower than gunships and battles, but he's got the sense that when The Order "conquers" a planet, it's going to stay "conquered."
The green sun is still in the sky when Kylo gets back to Lirium. Low in the sky, but that's normal for his usual getting home time. He places dinner on the table, notices that Rey's not there yet… Finishing up something in the group kitchen with the kids, which is fine with him, because he's got one more job for today.
He takes a moment to get a feel for where Poe is, in his ship, and then sets himself near the hatch. It's down, but Kylo's not sure what the decorum is for this. No door to knock on, so…
"Hello."
A few moments later, Poe comes to the top of the hatch, and waves Kylo up. "You in the wrong place?" he asks when Kylo comes up.
"I'd say that's unlikely." He holds out the bag of coffee.
Poe stares at it. "Are you… attempting to be neighborly?"
"Maybe." He shrugs a little. That's probably part of this. Another part is making sure the pilot doesn't show up at the crack of dawn and cut into his morning cuddle with Rey time again. "Or maybe, pretty as you are, you're not the first face I want to see in the morning."
Poe laughs, and takes the coffee, leading them to a small table and benches. "Not looking to rise and shine for me," he says as he sits down and motions for Kylo to join him.
"Not for you," Kylo says with a bit of a smirk, as he settles in.
As soon as he's said it, he can feel Poe thinking, Oh yeah, no Leia in there, at all. "I'll bet." Poe looks at the coffee. "Thanks."
"You're welcome. That said… dinnertime visits are fine. Getting extra food isn't a problem as long as I know a few hours ahead of time."
"I'll keep that in mind." Poe's quiet for a moment. "You know, you could at least attempt something like this with Finn." Unspoken but understood is Poe's He's a really good guy and you'd be lucky to have him as a friend.
Kylo shakes his head. "No. He wouldn't welcome it."
"Or you can't make yourself do it?"
Kylo looks at the ceiling and shakes his head as he says, "If I say, both, will you leave it be?"
"If you say both, will you think about why you can't do it?" Poe asks, but it's more of a command than a question.
"He finds the idea of me being an actual person deeply disconcerting if not outright painful, and I'm done trying to get people who don't like me to change their minds about it."
Poe looks at the coffee in his hand, then back up to Kylo. His voice is painfully dry as he says, "Really?"
Kylo rolls his eyes. "I'm done trying to make people who think I'm going to murder their families in their sleep for giggles stop seeing the monster. Is that specific enough? When he decides me just breathing isn't a threat, I'll start trying."
"Fair enough."
Stepping back into their home, Kylo notices that Rey is home, and… There are things, good smelling things, good smelling things he did not bring here, on their kitchen table.
She's in their bedroom, and he's also realizing that… Yes… It's warm in here.
Rey comes out a moment later, in just a pair of trousers, and one of the sweaters she got on the Supremacy.
"Like it?" she says, meaning the sweater, but, right now he's awfully pleased with a whole array of things, not the least of which is being able to take off his cloak and cowl and tunic and boots when he's indoors again.
"Yes." He heads to their bedroom to hang his extra clothing up. A moment later, he's back, looking at the things on the table, next to the roasted mushroom pasta he put there. "Did you… bake?"
She grins at him. "Poe's muffins were good, and his comment about cookbooks got me thinking, so…" She gently touches the things. "Cookies!"
Kylo nods, reaching a hand out. These are very obviously cookies made by someone who's never seen one before, but they smell good, so he's got no need to harp on the point.
He's almost to one of them when she gently whacks the back of his hand. He looks up at her confused.
"Later," she says.
"Later? What am I, eight again? Adults get to eat dessert whenever they like, in their own home."
She laughs at that. "Fine. One."
He rolls his eyes at one, and reaches for it, and bites into it, enjoying the flavor. Okay, it's the wrong shape, whoever heard of flat, round cookies? But the flavor is right, buttery, sweet, crispy. "This is good."
"Thank you." She sits down and begins to put the pasta on plates for them. He heads to the sink to pour them water.
"So, why aren't we having cookies for dinner?" he asks as he puts the glasses down and sits next to her.
"Because we're having cookies for dessert, along with guests."
He blinks. "Okay. Who's coming over?"
"Critt and Ostrae."
"The darklings," he says, twirling his fork in the pasta, spearing a mushroom.
"Yeah. Ostrae's kind of shy, but she's got a sweet tooth, so…"
Kylo looks at her, shaking his head. "Welcome to the dark side, we have cookies?"
"If it works…"
He sighs. "Why not… Certainly better than how I learned it."
If he wasn't sure about the emotional sensation he was experiencing this morning, he's sure about it now. This is nervous.
Yep. No mistaking this for anything else. It's nervous.
He supposes the only good thing about this is that the kids are kind of nervous, too. They're all sitting around the kitchen table, and the cookies, just sort of looking at each other.
Critt and Ostrae.
Ostrae's the youngest of three, and she's the only non-Force sensitive of the bunch. He can feel the resentment coming off of her. Her older brother and sister can do… all of it. He thinks that it's possible Poe might be a better mentor for her. Someone who can show her that it's okay to not be able to float rocks or whatever. Him standing… sitting actually, they're all around the kitchen table, eating the cookies… there being the embodiment of dark Force isn't doing much for her.
But… she's seven, and he can remember being a seven-year-old who felt like he didn't fit in with anyone, and he certainly remembers being not all that much older, and being the odd one out at Luke's school.
Still, seven. He's not exactly widely experienced with little kids, let alone dark ones.
He's fairly sure he'll have an easier time with Critt. He's a fourteenish-year-old boy whose parents disapprove of him with every cell of their being and ran off rather than deal with him in person. Kylo's sung that song before.
Rey's in the bedroom, reading, giving them 'alone time.'
Kylo's got bugger all idea what to do with it, so he takes a cookie, and eats it.
Finally Critt says, "How's your hand?"
He's not wearing his gloves, so it's clear that the bruises are there. "I've had worse." Both of them look at the scar across his face. "Rey'll probably fix them later."
"You can't?" Ostrae asks. From her point of view, Force sensitives can do anything.
"Too dark." He wiggles his fingers. "Can't heal to save my or anyone else's life. I can take less damage than a normal person, but I can't fix it after I've taken it."
"What else can't you do?" Critt asks.
Kylo half-shrugs. "I'm probably not the guy you want to call if you need someone to calm things down. Keeping my temper in check isn't easy. I'm generally not great at feeling like I belong in places. That's getting better, though, temper is, too. I was never good with plants or animals."
"The Faviers don't like me," Critt says.
"That's because you keep coming up from their blind spot and clump around like a blatterfluth."
Kylo doesn't know what a blatterfluth is, but he's going to guess it's not known for easy grace. Granted, neither are fourteenish-year-old boys. "You'll probably grow out of that."
Critt rolls his eyes. But he does take a cookie and eat it. "Drinks?"
"Sure." Kylo gets up. "Water or milk?" The he remembers something from being young. "My dad showed me this." He gets the milk and pours three cups. Then he sets them down, and sits across from the kids. He takes a cookie. "Dip it in the milk. Then eat it."
The kids don't seem to be sure about it, but they try it.
"See, it's good," Kylo says as he sees and feels them enjoy it.
Critt looks at the cookie, and Kylo, and the milk, and he shakes his head, halfway between tears and laughing. "My parents would throw up if they saw this. Milk and cookies with the Jedi Killer."
Ostrae's eyes go wide. "Jedi Killer?" Apparently she hadn't exactly understood all the nuances of Kylo's earlier lesson.
Kylo doesn't roll his eyes. "Like I said earlier, rage used indiscriminately can hurt you, and a lot of other people. Back in the day, I hurt a lot of people." He takes another bite of his own cookie. "As I was taught, when I was a Jedi, by my uncle, Luke Skywalker, fear, anger, pain, jealousy, aggression, wanting, attachment, they all lead to the dark side. And the dark side is, according to him, bad." This time Kylo rolls his eyes. "He was wrong about the dark side is bad part. He was right that all of those things can lead you to do things you wish you hadn't."
Both of them are staring at him.
"You feel angry, and there's just so… much of it. Like you can't breathe or think… Just always angry."
Critt's nodding along, then says, "Or sad." Ostrae looks like she understands, and Kylo knows all about that.
"And if there's nothing good to do with it, you do something bad, just… so you don't feel that way anymore. And if they're constantly telling you that angry is bad, or a moral failing, or some sh—stuff," Critt smirks at Kylo's almost slip, "like that, you just get angrier."
"What's a good thing?" Critt asks.
"Fighting makes me feel better. If I'm having a hard day, I go beat on the training droids until I feel better. It doesn't solve the problem, but it helps burn off enough anger to get into a mindset where I can at least start to think about solving whatever's putting me off balance. And once I solve it, it's even easier to stay in balance."
"Rey says I'm not allowed to hit Muni and Elias."
"Your older sister and brother?" Kylo asks. He's fairly sure he's got the right family, but it's a good idea to be right.
Ostrae nods. "Yes."
"Rey's right, you're not allowed to hit people, or animals, or anything that can feel pain. I don't hit people, anymore, either." He can feel Critt seeing the holovids of the fight on Qualee Prime. Just go with it. Some lessons probably aren't appropriate for a seven-year-old. We can talk more, later, when it's just us, okay?
Okay.
"But…" he can feel her sense of the emotion for a second before she says it, "it makes me feel better. They yell or cry, and I feel good."
He's been there. And he's felt that same joy of pain in Hux, too. Felt the joy in hurting Hux, too. "I know. You hurt, so you hurt them, and it makes you feel good, for a little bit, right?"
"Yes!" Her eyes are bright. "They can do… everything… But they can't make me not hurt them."
Kylo nods. "Yeah. I know." And he does. He can remember feeling… better… in control, powerful… for a little bit, at least. He remembers the huge surge of it after he killed M'Gll. That lasted for days, until Snoke proved that control was the top of the list of things Kylo didn't have. "Doesn't last long, does it?"
She shakes her head. He hands her a cookie. "Things that make you hurt less, not just pass it around, or hurt other people, but genuinely make you feel better, they last longer. What do you like doing?"
She shrugs. "I don't know."
"Eating cookies?" Kylo asks, watching her snarf it down, fast.
"Cookies are good."
"Want to learn how to make them?" Kylo asks.
Ostrae blinks at him. "Make cookies?"
"Why not? We've got a kitchen. We've got ingredients. They don't take that long. And the sooner you find something you actually enjoy, the easier everything else gets. So… come on. Let's go make some."
Ostrae blinks at him, and Critt is astonished. "You know how to make cookies."
"I trained as a Jedi. I know how to do a lot of things."
"My parents wanted me to be a Jedi," Critt says.
"Yeah, well… As educations go, it wasn't a bad one, just… not particularly well-suited for what I'm doing now. At least, not the way Luke taught it," Kylo says, getting down a few bowls, putting them on the table. "If you've got any desire to go live off in the middle of nowhere, and survive well, it's handy."
"So, you got the education Rey needed," Critt says
"I've got some skills she could have used." He feels her amusement at that idea. She's 'reading' but mostly paying attention to what they're doing, but keeping herself absent so her darklings can have some time on their side of the balance. "Okay: eggs, butter, sugar, salt, flour, bicarbonate of soda…" He's looking around. Rey eats her midday meal here every day, and these days they tend to do breakfast here, too, but neither of them do a lot, or any, baking. That said, there's got to be something to liven these up. Nuts, or dried fruit, or… "Uh… This'll work." He grabs a chocolate bar and puts it on the table. "Ostrae, crack the eggs into the bowl. Critt, turn on the cooker, put it at 180."
"You really know how to do this," Critt sounds astonished.
Kylo half-shrugs. He's always had something of a sweet tooth. And because on the days when they were working hard, they needed a lot of calories in a dense, easily eaten form, he and the other kids were able to convince Luke that some sort of sweet, fatty, yummy thing was important on work days. (Luke, may have had a sweet tooth. He didn't always manage to cover how much he liked the cookies, too.) Kylo sets the butter on the cooker. This'll work better if it's soft. "You good enough with a knife to chop this into small pieces, without cutting off a finger?" he asks Critt.
Critt nods, taking the chocolate, a cutting board and the knife and getting to it.
Kylo's showing/helping Ostrae measure out the ingredients when she says, "What do you like doing? What makes you feel good for a while?"
He feels Critt smirk and think Rey.
Kylo smirks back at that, and thinks at him. Yes, quite a lot, and as often as we can. He feels Rey sniggering in the other room at that, too.
Critt's eyes widen. His parents would have never admitted something like that.
Being married is good, but that's another conversation for later, Kylo thinks to him. He answers out loud with, "I like fighting. I'm really good at it, so it makes me feel good for more than a few minutes. I like what I'm doing with the Order… Trying to make something… good. That's a lot harder than fighting. I'm not naturally talented at it. But it's satisfying in a way that, when I feel like I'm doing it right, feels really good." He puts the butter in the bowl Ostrae dumped the sugar in, "Okay, we're going to mush these together."
Ostrae likes mushing them together. She's got her fork and is whacking and mixing with glee. Kylo's pretty sure that if he can get her fighting, too, she's going to like it a lot.
"What about when it's not going well?" Critt asks as he continues chopping up the chocolate.
"I go through a lot of training droids." He pours the eggs over the smashed up butter and sugar. "We're going to mix them up." He shows Ostrae how to do it. "And then come home and snuggle with Rey. It might just be me, but I find it easier to balance when there's someone I enjoy being with. That said, being able to do it alone is likely important, too."
"Can you do it alone?" Critt asks.
"I sincerely hope to never have to find out." He eyes the butter, sugar, egg mixture. "I think that's mixed enough. Let's put the dry ingredients in."
"What do you wish you hadn't done?" Critt asks.
Speaking of conversations that are not appropriate for a seven-year-old… Really, later.
Critt blinks at him, and nods.
"That's harder to answer. There are things that I look back on and wish I hadn't done, but I don't know how I could be here if I hadn't done them, and I think being here matters, so… I don't know. Do you think the Force has a plan?"
Both of the kids are used to Rey asking open-ended questions like that, so they take the time to think about it as Kylo mixes in the chocolate, and then shows them how to make the dough into little balls.
"If it has a plan… Why not me?" Ostrae says, voice quiet, looking at the cookie dough. "My brother and sister were good enough for it. Why not me? Why don't I get to be part of the plan?"
Kylo gently rests a hand on her shoulder. "I don't know why you or not you. I do know good has nothing to do with it, at all. The worst person I or anyone else ever met had more Force power than the rest of us put together. And plenty of the people around him, happily off doing evil left and right for the fun of it, had no Force powers. The Force may have a plan. Sometimes I'm afraid it doesn't. But I know it couldn't care less about how good, or kind, or smart, or anything positive a person is before it loads them up with powers."
"Afraid?" Critt asks.
"Do enough evil, survive long enough to look back at it, and you'll start to hope there's a plan, too."
"Oh," Critt says, and Ostrae's looking up at him.
"And, powers or not, if there's a plan, you're part of it. I know you've heard the story of Chewie and Luke rescuing my father from Jabba the Hutt, right?"
They blink. Neither of them knew Kylo Ren is the son of Han Solo.
"Uh… Yeah. Second-hand. I wasn't here when Chewie told the story," Critt adds.
"Okay, so… Why was Luke even able to put that plan into play?" He gives Ostrae's shoulder a little squeeze. "Because my dark, non-Force-sensitive dad swooped into the battle at the last possible second and shot down the Imperials, saved his life, and made sure he could take the shot at the Death Star.
"And how did the war end? Vader tosses the Emperor into the power array?" Kylo scoffs. "That's the way I always heard it. But that's wrong. That's Luke's version of the story, focusing on the fancy magic bits and the redemptive power of the light side," there's a lot of sarcasm in Kylo's voice as he says that, "but if Vader hadn't turned, if Luke had died up there, the war would have ended exactly the same. Because my dark, non-Force sensitive Uncle was up there in the Falcon, taking the core out. Even the Emperor couldn't survive a Death Star blowing up under him. And how did Lando Calrissian get to do that? Because down on Endor, my dark, non-Force sensitive Dad, and my dark, Force sensitive, but completely untrained Mom, with the help of my other dark, non-Force sensitive Uncle, took out the shields. Yeah, we all hear about Luke Skywalker's heroic turning of Vader at the last moment, but that didn't win the war. That did nothing to alter the course of the war. That's… Jedi propaganda."
Kylo looks at the little blobs of cookie dough, all rolled into tidy little balls. "Let's get these in the oven." Critt grabs the tray and slides it into the cooker. Kylo returns his attention to Ostrae. "Maybe you really like making cookies. Maybe, like my dad, or Poe, you decide you want to be a pilot, maybe… There's something out there you're going to really like, and when you find it, you can turn your dark to it. Passion, attachment, desire, all of those things will give you the power to become very good at whatever it is you really like doing. It lets you look at what you're doing, and see how it can be better, instead of just sitting back and saying, 'That's good enough.' You've just got to find it."
"How do you find it?" Ostrae asks.
"I suppose that's another advantage of a Jedi education, or a Maji one, you're going to try your hand at a lot of things. Sooner or later, one of them will stick."
Fifteen minutes later, when the cookies are out, and cool enough to eat, Ostrae looks at Kylo, munching one of them, and says, "I like making cookies."
Kylo smiles at that.
"Well," Jacen says as soon as Critt gets back to the cottage they share.
Critt holds up a plate with several cookies on it, and sees his friends all goggle at him. Technically speaking, the cottage is just his and Jacen's, but Elias is there any given time, and Magiit and Savarah tend to be along as well.
And, like usual, they're there as well, all of them waiting to see how his 'after dinner chat' with Kylo Ren went.
"We made cookies," Critt says, putting the plate down on the table, as his buddies crowd around to get some.
"Kylo Ren makes cookies?" Savarah says, doubt arcing through her.
"Kylo Ren makes cookies, without having to look a recipe up. Apparently, learning this was part of training as a Jedi," Critt adds.
That stops all of them as they sit there, munching away on some fairly tasty chocolate chunk cookies, pondering the idea that making cookies was part of Jedi training.
Critt sees them all thinking about with wonder in their minds and says, "Yeah. That. All of that. For like an hour. He's…"
"Not what you were expecting," Jacen adds. "First time I met him, I was expecting to have to fight for my life."
"You mean talk for your life," Elias says.
"Well, yeah. I wouldn't want to actually fight him."
"But you're going to. He's going to be doing some real training with us. I could feel that. We're big enough he thinks he can really work with us," Critt adds, and again his friends all contemplate that.
"So, did you just make cookies?" Magiit asks.
"Nah. I don't think he was planning that. Rey made some, and we were eating them, and we got talking about… how to…" he's never tried to explain the dark to any of his balanced or lightsider buddies, "not… feel angry and hurt and… just dark all the time." His friends all sort of nod at that. Magiit can't feel his dark, but the rest of them can. And even though he hasn't talked about it before, but they all know. "He was talking about finding something you like doing—"
"What does he like doing?" Elias asks.
Critt sniggers. "He said fighting and the stuff he's doing with the Order, but I thought Rey at him, and he looked me full in the eye and thought back at me Yes." The rest of them all break into scandalized giggles at that idea. They're all old enough to know that Rey and her man don't just snuggle at night, but… There's knowing and there's knowing.
"How do you get from doing Rey to cookies?" Jacen asks, very amused by this.
"Ostrae was with me." They all share a look. Critt is dark, and they know his feelings can get awfully twisty and hurtful, but he keeps them bottled up and aimed at himself. When he's in a dark mood, and projecting it, he makes them sad. Ostrae scares them. Her feelings get twisty and hurtful, and then she aims them at other people. "And she didn't know what she liked. But she's just tearing through the cookies, so he asks if she might want to learn how to make them."
"Did she?" Elias asks, excited. If there's a chance that there's something his little sister likes doing, something that makes her feel better than hitting or pinching or biting other people, he's going to be all over it. "I mean, we've got room, we can get a stove in our cottage."
"She did. You think it'll help?"
"Assuming she doesn't burn down our cottage, it won't hurt." Elias rubs his shin. He doesn't have a bruise there because he could heal the damage, but a non-Force sensitive would. He and his sister Muni have been trying for years to keep Ostrae in some sort of line, and when she was a toddler and baby, they could just pick her up and hold her, but she's getting too big for that, now.
"So… It was good?" Savarah asks, eating another cookie. "These are."
"Yeah," Critt says. "Weird. We've got, like… I don't know, a bunch of things to talk about later. Maybe one on one, maybe with us," he gestures to mean them, the older members of the group, "but I think it was good."
"What didn't he want to talk about there?" Elias asks, and the conversation rolls on from there.
Somehow, from one child to another, it's before dawn that the entire settlement at Lirium knows that Kylo Ren, Master of the Order, the one-time Jedi Killer, makes cookies.
Notes:
Hey Guys,
So, if all goes well, we should have our usual Sunday update.
But...
See, I'm (as of this moment) about a hundred miles north of the edge of where Hurricane Flo is gonna hit. Now, I'm on high ground, and have enough provisions to see out the end times, and a car full of gas if we need to bug out, so we're in no real danger, but the power goes out here if someone sneezes wrong in the vicinity of the wires, and we've had both a long wet summer and a billion and a half trees right next to power lines.
Anyway, gods willing, I'll be posting on Sunday, but if you don't hear anything from me, it just means that one of those billion trees took out my power. If you want updates on when I may be posting again, go online and see how much of Virginia is without power. When central VA is lit up again, I will be, too.
Oh, and yeah, Come to the dark side, we have cookies, is my last, 'I spent 300,000 words to set up a joke' joke. ;)