Chapter Text
what do we need to make our world come alive?
what do we need to make us sing
while we’re waiting for the next one to arrive?
He hadn’t wanted the Bacta tank. He’d tried to refuse at some point, but he had little recollection of how Hux had found him in the first place, let alone how they had even escaped Starkiller Base. It was a blur of shifting plates and shattering rock and scorching wounds, the coppery tang of blood and sharpness of pine needles on ice that filled his nostrils giving way to the sterile brushed steel and antiseptic of the Finalizer’s medbay.
He’d blacked out when the base exploded, he knew. The ripple it sent through the Force hit him like a blunt strike to the back of the skull. So many insignificant little lives crumbling into dust with the rock, and yet he couldn’t take the sound of their collective screams.
Because you are weak.
Not Snoke’s voice, for once; while the Supreme Leader’s slithering baritone had been ever present in the shadows of his mind since his early youth, winding itself sinuously around his thoughts and constricting ever tighter, the Bacta fluid seemed to muffle everything but the noise he created in his own head, sealing his consciousness in silent, blissful warmth. He did not dare open his eyes. He knew what they saw--a mangled, pitiful mess where there had once been a commanding presence cloaked in darkness. He was suspended before them practically naked, bobbing up and down like a cork. Wholly at their mercy. It made him cringe inwardly; it made him rage.
Yet he found he could not move. Nor did he particularly want to.
She had been so strong, and he so foolish. He had had her backed up to the edge of a cliff, on the brink of death, and he had been the one pleading. Begging. You need a teacher.
And oh, how he wanted to show her--there was so much more than what she had seized upon and drawn out of his head, when she’d beaten down the doors. That had been his failing, too. She had seen nothing but his fear and inadequacy, how he trembled in long shadows cast by men greater than himself. Why would she think he could offer her anything?
He’d begged her just like he’d begged Snoke for the chance to pry into her mind. He knew there would be no more such concessions from his master. Or from Hux, for that matter.
He could feel the general standing there, lip undoubtedly curling in a sneer as the medical officers pulled him from the tank and extracted him from that suffocating bliss, leaving him cold, exhausted and raw, his once grisly wounds now shiny and pink with new tissue. He gasped and spluttered inelegantly as they extracted his breathing tubes, filling his lungs with caustic recirculated air; they cloaked him swiftly in loose dark lounge robes, and he wondered idly what had happened to the blood-soaked ones he had been wearing. In all likelihood Hux, in all his passive-aggressive priggishness, had sent them to the trash compactor.
Two stormtroopers stepped forward, as if to escort him back to his quarters, but Hux summarily dismissed them with a wave of his hand. “I need to speak to Kylo Ren.”
Had mind and body not been still so raw and vulnerable, Ren would have unleashed cold fury on the man instead of following him out into the corridor, but he found it difficult enough just to speak, his throat thick and voice almost slurred. “You’ve no authorization to override my medical decisions.”
“I’m through allowing you to subvert my missions, Ren.” Oh, he’d clearly been scripting this in his head since they arrived on the Finalizer, and he was enjoying it as much as any rallying speech he gave his men. “Calling on my troops to retreat and abandon the search for the droid, all so you could play mind games with the little desert rat that you were so convinced you could crack open. And instead, your glaring lapse in judgement allowed the Resistance to infiltrate and destroy Starkiller Base. You faltered--”
Hux faltered himself as his face reddened, struggling for breath. Kylo Ren flexed his fingers, although the gesture was stiff and painful.
“You forget who you’re addressing, General.”
A wave of sudden exhaustion hit him and he sagged, his control diminished enough to break the chokehold. The depleting effects of being in the tank for so long were rapidly setting in. Hux coughed, eyes flashing with hate as he straightened back up. “Supreme Leader Snoke has expressed a desire to complete your training,” he gritted. “I assure you, I had no such express desire to have you coddled. But the Supreme Leader has other plans. You’re of no use to him riddled with holes.”
It was only when he had safely reached his quarters, leaning heavily against the pneumatic door that slid shut behind him, that Kylo Ren allowed himself to recall his father’s words. Snoke is after you for your power. When he gets what he wants, he’ll crush you.
“It’s too late,” he repeated, aloud, to the cavernous empty room, to the man who wasn’t there, who was never coming back.
His cheek still burned where his father had stroked it. A caress that had come years too late to make any difference, he told himself. Too many mornings of his youth had dawned with his father already having departed alongside the Wookiee, usually after nights in which he’d lain awake in bed listening to the rise and fall of his parents’ voices, barbed and poisonous, and the name Ben always hanging conspicuously in the air between them. No goodbyes, just his mother’s tired eyes and mouth stretched into a hard line, insisting everything was fine before she disappeared into another war room and left him to his thoughts, bitter as the pot of caf growing cold on their breakfast table.
Han Solo had never had any idea what to make of his quiet, brooding, Force-sensitive son. The man could only diffuse difficult situations--or people--through smooth-talking and wisecracking, both useless against a boy who rankled against the touch of an unseen hand, who prickled with an energy his small body hadn’t been able to comprehend and still struggled to control after thirty years. Even if that boy were his own child. It had been far easier for them to send him away, to allow Skywalker--the one they assumed would just naturally understand him--to take him in hand instead.
And yet--there had been a moment, however fleeting, when he’d given his father’s offer considerable weight. The chance to turn his back on years of suffering. To throw it all away and start again, reborn as Ben Solo once more.
A moment of weakness, that had passed as all the others did.
Come home, Han had said to him. Home. He mouthed the word to himself; it stuck in his maw like a rotten tooth.
What home? Whatever far-flung crumbling Resistance base his mother and her subordinates were currently squatting on? The Falcon? The ship was in Rey’s possession now, he knew that too; but the freighter was an heirloom of no significance to him. The lightsaber, on the other hand…
Shuffling in slow motion over to the refresher, his gait stiff and awkward, he examined in its mirror the brand-new scar that cleaved his face in two, grimacing as he prodded gently at the tender skin with a fingertip. The charred edges were gone, but the pain remained fresh, and he was grateful for it.
She’d circled him like a beast intent on devouring its prey, baring her teeth, pupils dilated, irises dark with hatred as they reflected the plasma glow. You’re a monster, she’d said, all the while the shadows lashed themselves to her and smiled. She was stumbling blind in the dark, swinging and missing with all that incredible power surging at her fingertips, and it drove him mad.
He’d seen the quiet despair inside her, that vast loneliness that stretched across countless years, etched like hashmarks into rusted metal. There was only calm at the center, in that diamond sea she’d conjured to try and sleep at night, and it was a relatively small oasis in a sea of prickling heat and desolation. So much space for the darkness to build a home, and, oh, how he yearned to be the one to crawl inside and stake his claim. The only one. He knew the Supreme Leader would eventually demand that right, but until that day, it would be his dominion.
He slid gingerly onto his narrow conform mattress, letting the slab mold itself to the contours of his aching body, and closed his eyes.