The feeling of the metal against his finger was charming. He could not say the same for the feeling of it on his buttocks, back, neck and head, but a throne is a throne and it was something he could accommodate, knowing that it emphasized his new position.
"Supreme leader?" said a trooper as he entered the room.
"Yes?" answered Hux, a little smile blossoming on his face.
The dark circles around his eyes had just expanded since he was running everything. He felt older. But he felt wiser. He had changed his clothes, getting rid of the epaulets he once wore to make himself look bigger, of the signs of his ranks, of his glued back hairs. His red flocks were now in their natural position, forming a halo of copper around his head. He was wearing a fitted charcoal coat and simple pants of the same color, ending in some dark red boots. To honor Snoke, he wore golden over sleeves cut from the suit of his previous leader. he knew that his father would have been as proud as he was able to be.
"We are approaching the Clansmen den. Do you want the TIEs ready?"
"Hm. Yes, I will go with the fighters. Have a dozen ready and inform our best pilots that they will accompany me." He caressed the burned mark on the throne, left behind by the bitche's lightsaber. "We need this to work. Get General Phasma to come too. We never know."
When their previous ship was destroyed by the kamikaze from the Resistance, he had called in a recovering team to excerpt anything that could still be useful aboard. Meanwhile, another of their ships, who was now their flagship, had been made fully operational and filled with the remnant of the wreck. Amongst those things, then Captain Phasma was recovered and taken care for. In a couple of days, she was back to full health and promoted to his previous spot.
As he was flying to the humongous construction of ships, there was only one thought, invading every square inch of his mind.
He had to kill Kylo Ren.
Eight Warlords were aligned in the background of what once has been an operating Starfighter deck. They were sitting on wooden chairs of various formats – themselves being of pretty contrasting dimensions – each one right under an imposing backdrop of their clan. They were drinking from cups of wood or bone, slowly as they watched the new First Order Supreme Leader walk up to them. Hux was feeling sick, just for asking them for help. But they were rich and, as of this moment in time, neutral in the fight between the First Order and the resistance.
The first to talk was the Clawdite Clanslady: "What do you come here to beg for, human?"
Phasma grunted by his side, tightening her grip on her blaster.
"I come for two things, in fact. I am pretty sure you will end up giving them to me, lizard."
He knew that contacting the clansmen was a good idea. They were a coalition of eight armies that had let their original planet behind to grow only stronger. They were rich, influential and powerful, and they were all now following his lead. He knew very well that Snoke and Ren would have frowned upon taking mercenaries into the chain of command. But they were both respectively dead and deserted, so they weren't good examples of a good leader for the first order. From his throne room, he watched the cluster of ship disassemble to form eight individual motherships and a thousand of smaller fighters. He grinned as a handful of dark silhouettes stood out of the swarming mass to enter into hyperspeed.
Clawdites always made excellent bounty hunters.
It was now a couple of days since they first entered the orbit of Babali. They had a little difficulty finding the Institute at first, just to understand that the entrance was an excavation in one of the numerous mountains creating the landscape of the planet. The living quarters of the Archeological venue were above acceptable and the resources exactly what was needed to recover from the harsh last weeks. But they needed to move quickly in order to replenish their ranks.
A problem with an Intellectual's den was the complete lack of cells or anything to perform this function. Still having a prisoner on their hands forced the Resistance to lock him up in a shipping cargo in the basement of the facility. He was there ever since, getting visits only from General Organa and her entourage of the day.
Every possible team had been dispatched to a corner of the Outer Rim to contact the potential allies that did not respond to Leia's personal code. The thought behind this was that even if the commanders of these groups decided against helping the resistance, maybe a part of those groups was up to the challenge of keeping their flickering flames of hope alive.
Archeological cargo ships were taken to those planets. Slow but steady, as advertised by Daris, they would get the task done.
Rey was sent, with Poe Dameron, BB-8, and Chewbacca, to a Mid Rim planet where there was a potent black market. They hoped that they could find parts to reassemble Luke's old lightsaber there, and maybe other interesting things like ships or arms. Well, hope was a big part of this endeavor, but they were growing used to miracles as long as they worked for them.
"We are getting ready for the landing procedures." Said Rey, just before flipping a switch on the control board "Millennium Falcon here, permission to land?" They were all tensed. A planet full of criminals, traffickers and poachers was not the best place around to land the last parcel of machinery left to the resistance. But they had no more flexibility in their choices.
A gritty voice came through: "Permission granted. Please direct yourself to gate 6-EV"
Later, Poe and Rey were walking, face covered in stained rags, around what looked like an old spice market. Every stall was, instead of delicate aromas, exhaling gunpowder, oil, metal, and fear. They passed slave displays, organ parlors, and bounty hunter's booths. The crowd dispersed as they penetrated into a more eclectic region of the market. Things seemed more esoteric there, serpent skins, inflated eyeballs and jarfuls of fairy-like beings balancing from the ceilings of little stands, dry parts of almost any creature known gathering in wicker baskets here and there. Even the vendors seemed half-dead. A book dealer was venting the reputation of the works he had on deck. Amongst all the necromancy volumes, the magic tomes and the religious pamphlet was a complete shelf of lightsaber skeleton. Bits and parts scattered around the display, remnants of a greater time for the Jedi. Rey approached and sighed. To her, none of this was usable. Even if she bought parts from this probably overcharging merchant, she would almost certainly not be able to get anything out of her Kyber crystal. She had a moment of despair. She wasn't much, but without the lightsaber, she was almost nothing. She got back to Poe, who was dealing batteries with a half-plant half-fish kind of a man. If this exhibit had nothing of use in it, she was fairly certain that there was nothing for her on this planet.
And then she felt it. A terrible anger, an overflow of rage. Having had no time to anticipate it, she was tossed by the influx of raw emotion that she dropped to her knee.
The repented Sith burst the doors of what had become the center of command. Not satisfied with having ripped the door from its hinges, he crimpled it in the corner, not moving an inch whilst doing it. It felt like months since he had seen something else than a make-do cage with his hands bound by absurd pieces of metal. Him, the great Kylo Ren, a peerless warrior that had defeated armies by himself, was humiliated by four paper walls, like an obedient dog, waiting for his sentence.
Didn't he come to help? Was his message unclear? Was he not valuable enough?
His eyes gaged everyone in the room. Puppets, fools and feebles, that's all he was seeing. In the corner of the chamber, Organa was looking at him, half startled, half annoyed, with her hand's elbow deep in a box. Seemed like they were passing the archives under a fine comb to find anything that could serve them. Scroungers of the worst species, lost in the shallows, diminished to a vile gang of prideless scavengers. He was now not only humiliated but disgusted by their meek attempt at survival.
"You really think you will defeat the First Order with a lump of antiques?" his voice was not rumbling like thunder, more like a slippery serpent. The screaming, he had done while destroying the cargo in the basement, who was now a pile un rubbles and bent sheet metal. "You are that desperate? It's like a kid whose certain he would be able to defeat an endured warrior out of innocence and stupidity."
Right next to Leia, a slim man got a tool out of his belt, light it on and a faint buzzing sound, accompanied by small bluish bolts running along its extremity. Kylo laughed for a moment and made the tool stick on the nearby wall, out of reach of the glorified mechanic. While he was at it, he took the said mechanic against the wall too, having him wiggle his feet around to find a platform in the attempt to alleviate the chocking sensation.
"I will make it clear now. No attempt to attack me. Or even to defend yourself."
"Get. Him. Down." Leia's voice resonated all around the room. This crisp, loud voice that he had experienced every time he overstepped the line as a kid.
"No." He felt his answer was weak and continued "What do you want from me? Are you gonna let me rot in this cell until the war is over? Are you going to discard me like a little villain? Letting me wait in laughable restraints as I slowly die of boredom? Is that your masterplan? To discard all that I can give you?"
Leia took one step in his direction, then another: "Maybe I am desperate enough to searchthrough leftovers from another era. But I am not yet enough to give you a free pass. I know the restraints were too weak for you, I know it way too well. But your silent compliance was making my faith in your speech grow. You have now proven to be exactly what I thought you were. Just a disturbed, egotistical, no, narcissistic brat with a taste for violence." There was no pity in her voice, no love, no sadness. It was a war chieftain speech against a prisoner. "You can roam the entire facility if you want. Kill everybody. I have nothing to stop you. Every ship is gone. We are stuck here, on this dead end of a planet. You can go outside if you want, but I would recommend it as the living organisms out there are humongous and would eat anything. You can wait for a ship to come back, steal It and head to whatever planet you know the First Order to have a base. Return in the skirts of this Hux of yours, who will probably, spineless as he is, take you back because you canwaive a lightsaber around and scare his troops into submission. Or maybe you'll find another self-centered man of power for him to keep you as his little lap dog, as you did last time you didn't know who you were." She crossed her arms and stood on a solid base, as she always did: "Or you could be your own man, for once. If only you are able to stand up for yourself."
Poe was running as fast as he could with Rey in his arms, a handful of merchant creeping up on him from time to time to catch a glimpse of his cargo.
"Why is this big brute never there when you need him?" he raged, looking around for the path to their ship. "OH, look. An unattended pile of gold." His sight was far away, trying to get a pretty scary and pretty beefy grey-skinned humanoid coming his way to change his trajectory. Fortunately for him, the diversion worked just long enough for him to eclipse himself through a curtain of silks.
Rey regained the control of her thoughts, barely. She tried to construct the bridge between their consciousness she had experienced before. But she was overpowered by his fury. So she closed back her eyes and pictured herself on Jakku. She was sitting on top of a dune, her eyes seeing blinding gold for an eternity ahead. Nothing but the brush of the sand speckling against her cheeks, the sun on her hands and the complete silence. She harvested that calm. She immersed herself in it. And she projected it, as hard as she could.
While she was doing that, she understood. She accepted what was plainly before her eyes since the very first time they bridged their spirits. What Luke had told her, that the force was always in a balance, that she was the counterpart to Kylo Ren's dark, was not true anymore. She had darkness in her, as she had experienced in the dark cave. He had light in him, as she had experienced when they had touched souls. They weren't balancing each other ash opposite weights but needed each other to find equilibrium in them.
As like they were but one. As if they were, together, the Last Jedi.
[So, this chapter is a bit all over the place, but I have to put a lot in place before I can play out the real interactions I want to see for them to be realistic. Please bear with me, it's gonna get somewhere! Thanks for your support and I, as usual, love some feedback!]