Chapter Text
What little light there was in the chamber came from the last sputters of a dying saber blade.
He was twenty now. The killings were getting routine. It was remarkable how easily a slate could be wiped clean, how swift the Jedi teachings were to wash away once a little pressure was applied. The only thing that still clung to the fading memories was the cracking crystal in the hilt of his blade, and even that would forget soon enough.
One step forward and his foot slid through the grease of brain matter. Ren shook out his boot.
Two years ago, he had stepped over the burnt, broken corpses of his friends. Now he waded across the bodies of strangers in the dark underground of a temple-turned-tomb. It was not his last time killing in a sacred place. Jedi went to ground like snake to the burrow; Ren was the mongoose that laid chase.
He walked back the way he came. Light from his blade clung to the fog of dust and blood that now swirled heady in the air. There were scours across the wall, most old, but some dripping still with magma from a saber’s heat rending the stone. Few scars lined the deepest passages, but they hatched the temple’s main hall in such quantity that the reliefs which once lined the great room were now an indecipherable mess of slag and fast cooling lava. Whatever history the Jedi had chosen to decorate their walls lay in ruin.
Ren passed through the room swiftly. The last motes of daylight illuminated the rubble enough that he could deactivate his shuddering lightsaber and tuck the hilt away at his side. He shook his hand out. The grip burned against the leather of his glove and burned further still until the meat of his palm stung from the heat. The crystal inside was growing increasingly unstable. One more excursion and it was liable to give out. He needed a solution.
The upsilon-class shuttle lay a few hundred paces beyond the threshold of the temple’s grounds. Against the dying light, its staggered silhouette cut into the horizon like the hunched form of a hunting beast. Ren surveyed it then looked back at the Jedi temple.
It was smaller than most he had torn though, but in that respect, it mirrored its home planet. Flame would not raze its stone façade, but Ren had other methods. He eyed the Jedi symbol etched on either side of the entrance as though contempt alone could quake the foundations. When no such thing happened, he turned from the temple’s open doors and made his way across the gardens to the lurking shape of his shuttle that lay beyond the gates.
The shuttle’s lights glittered awake when Ren keyed the ramp open. He trudged into the open fluorescent maw of the ship and dragged a bloody trail of boot prints behind him to mark his path. The blood followed him into the cockpit where it smeared across the console as Ren flicked the buttons and levers necessary to coax the shuttle to life. The hyperdrive rumbled under his boots and Ren found himself sighing in a type of relief. The job was almost over.
He sat in the pilots seat and fiddled with the controls for a few more moments. Through the windshield the temple stood like a disapproving monolith, its hallways sullied with stench of death and betrayal. Ren cocked his head back to meet the temple’s imagined gaze. He steadied his breath, a pounding echoing in his head and chest. The shuttle was off the ground with a hiss of the engines and the whine of the twin laser canons as they warmed to a shooting temperature in the cooling dusk air. He looked into the computer read out that blinked placidly. There were no enemy ships, no anti-spacecraft munitions whizzing by to trigger the shields. So far as the computer was programed to understand, there were no dangers to be seen, and all was well on the sleepy surface of the Outer Rim world.
Ren flicked the readout. It let out an agitated buzz before settling again. Ren narrowed the controls on the readout with a few twitches of the flight sticks. The output blipped, a single orange box against a field of green latticework that provided the illusion of depth. He glanced up through the glass viewport of the shuttle one last time before he pulled the triggers and the Jedi temple exploded into a neon red haze against the dark sky.
It took a number of rounds from the shuttle’s blasters, but eventually the structure was reduced to a glowing smolder. Ren stared into it, his expression still and placid. What reflected in his eyes was a different fire from a different time all together, and the screams of Jedi padawans falling into smoke and rubble. The blaze was his own, the temple once his home. Now it all smoldered on its own far-off world, the debris forgotten to all but a select few.
Ren released his hands from the triggers now that his target was leveled. The memories wafted away with heat steaming off the shuttle’s blaster barrels. A few practiced button presses later and the hyperdrive computer was primed to chart a course into the Unknown Regions. Ren pulled the nose of the shuttle up, eased the small ship into the atmosphere and left the planet behind in a stretch of white light as stars pulled past him into hyperspace.
When the ship’s calculations cleared, Ren stood from the pilot’s seat and dragged himself out the cockpit. He had a few hours at a maximum. The jedi had been hiding out on the very edge of the Outer Rim, as though obscurity would have protected him from his fate. As such it was only a small hop back to the First Order shipyard where the Supremacy remained under constant construction efforts.
He peeled the outer layer of his tunic off in the shuttle’s narrow hall. The fabric reeked of blood and burning ozone, but it had for a year now, and no quantity of industrial washes and steams would pull the scent out. Even the layers below had a distinct iron twinge to them that would once have made Ren’s lip curl. Now it was routine, and he was relieved to not smell like the uniform starch and hair gel that plagued the aura of every Order officer he crossed paths with. The fabric had a hole burnt into the chest that Ren frowned at once his fingers pulled over the melted threads. He put his hand to the corresponding place on his torso. Sure enough, his fingers found a matching hole in his undershirt and in his skin.
Ren looked down. Hot blood clung to his gloves, seeping from the half-cauterized saber wound that lanced—ten inches by his estimate—across his chest and abdomen. The pain registered now: dull and far off in his mind despite the grisly appearance of its source. Ren pulled off his undershirt as well with a slight grimace where the melted fabric that had congealed with his own flesh tugged. He had no patience for delicacy and ripped his shirt and skin apart. Fresh blood flowed from where the scabs were unsettled, but Ren paid it little mind. There was not enough bleeding that he needed to be concerned. Medics and bacta could do a lot. What was one more saber scar?
He stripped the rest of the battle-soaked garments from his body and availed himself of a quick shower in the shuttle’s sparse living quarters. The water ran as cold as a glacial stream without fail, but Ren stood still in the stream with the icy water slicking his hair to his face and coaxing the running blood across the contours of his body in pink sheets.
With the shower out of the way, he collapsed to the thin cot to sleep until he felt the ship shudder out of hyperdrive.
Shortly after the shuttle lurched, Ren heard the radio hiss to life in the cockpit. He pulled himself off the bed and shook out his still-damp hair. The tinny pitch of a stick-up-the-ass officer was unmistakable even before Ren opened the door to the cockpit.
“I repeat,” whined the comms, “provide your ship’s clearance codes or you will be fired upon.”
Ren gave the computer readouts a cursory look. Some bluff. There was a Resurgent-class Star Destroyer on either flank of him, none of whom had their ion canons primed or had so much as locked onto his ship’s position. Of course they hadn’t. Ren had the only Upsilon-class shuttle in existence. The threat was nothing more than a charade for the officer’s benefit. Such things—rigid attention to protocol despite common sense and a disregard for the obvious—were a favored past time amongst the Order’s ranks, it seemed.
He said nothing, only shut the comm off and sent off his superfluous clearance code off. If the officer said anything on the comm frequency that signaled Ren had been allowed through, he didn’t hear it. Instead, he gunned the engines so the shuttle jumped past the shadow of the Star Destroyers and slid further into the shipyard.
The shuttle moved through the school of ships as through it had found a slipstream through a pod of whales. A ping caught his attention as it blinked to life on the console. Bright red, it read out that the supreme leader was expecting Ren in the throne room of the Supremacy. No surprise, Ren was headed there anyways. At one point he had been offput by the knowledge Snoke could sense his presence in nearby space nearly as soon as he had come out of hyperspace. Now Ren anticipated it the way a well-trained soldier expected a shot after the click of a hammer. There was no intrusion in his mind, but he felt the prickling sensation of Snoke raking over his emotions. As such, Ren kept them as neutral as possible. It was a skill he had become well practiced at, at least when the supreme leader was looking. The job had been a success. He had nothing to hide. The prickling faded and Ren kicked the shuttle into an autopilot that would steer the ship until they approached the massive bay doors of what existed of the Supremacy, which at the moment was only essentials. A forward and aft bridge, the throne room, and one of what would be six Star Destroyer docks, all held together by impossibly long miles of durasteel.
Ren pulled himself away from the controls to find an extra set of his robes. He tugged them on, not bothering to mind the gash across his chest. He could be fairly certain his sternum was not involved, nor were his major muscle groups since he could still pull his arms over his head with little issue besides an ache. One day in the medical wing to patch up the worst of the burns and he could forget the whole affair.
He had just pulled on another slip of his outer robes when the shuttle sputtered out of its autopilot route and Ren had to make the trip once again from the small living quarters to the cockpit. He took the controls and guided the shuttle through the massive bay door and into the hangar, a maneuver he could have done dead. The hangar was big enough to accommodate the docking of a Resurgent-class Destroyer, after all. The shuttle was little more than a speck of dust in the vastness of the loading bay.
Ren shut the engines off but waited to move until he heard their rattle and thrum die down. There would be at least one more moment he could call his own before he had to step into the hangar bay and deal with the scurry of officers and the weight of Snoke’s demands. He took in a breath, flipped the switch to extend the shuttle’s ramp and made his way past the living quarters for a final time.
The hangar sizzled with activity, a thousand people traveling in disparate directions. Sparks from welding crews rained down from the airspace, and droids whizzed along the ground to tally the efficiency of their human co-workers. Ren paused for a moment when a MSE droid bonked against his boot heel, turned and skittered off with a shriek of terror.
He crossed the floor quickly before there could be anymore interruptions, lest someone else bumped into him without the sense to go running off after. Beyond the threshold of the hangar, things were quieter. The Supremacy was to be the largest ship the Galaxy had ever seen, but for the moment it existed in a lifeless, skeletal state with an estimated decade to go before it could be self-sufficient. Outside of the docking bay there was only a network of hallways connected to turbo-lifts connected to more hallways, or in the case of Ren’s personal authorization code, the supreme leader’s throne room which anchored the ship’s construction as its center.
The trip in the lift took a while seeing as how it was crossing several kilometers of space in one go. Ren leaned against the back wall of the enclosed space and fought back flashes of memories. His quarry’s face swam before him when he closed his eyes. Lifeless in the soot and smoke. Blood smeared across his leathered sun-worn face. Ren had met him before. Once, as a child at his mother’s hip. He hadn’t looked so old back then.
The lift shuddered across a threshold in the tracks and Ren opened his eyes again. There were no more ghosts from another life when he focused on the seam in the lift’s doors, only a certainty that when they opened, he would see the haggard face of his new master.
The throne room was a wash of red that shone bright enough in the naked light of a nearby star that Ren could all but feel it saturating his skin and bones. He stepped through the open door of the lift to see the supreme leader in a golden robe sitting partially hunched as though speaking to someone. Ren followed his gaze.
With no shortage of shock and confusion, Ren registered the man standing on the dais at Snoke’s feet. He wore the grey jodhpur uniform of every other First Order officer, but his hair was a bright enough red that Ren had struggled to distinguish it from the crimson banners on first blush.
The supreme leader and the stranger looked up from their hushed conversation, and Ren grit his teeth. He trudged forward into the room, his heavy boots slamming against the durasteel floor and echoing into the otherwise silent room.
“Kylo Ren,” Snoke’s voice rumbled over him in a hoarse, familiar growl.
Ren’s gaze shifted to the stranger as he stepped onto the dais beside him. Close now that he was, he could get a better measure of the man who couldn’t have been much older than him. He was wound tight, like every officer was, like a wire tense enough to snap at a touch. The officer—whose uniform’s rank code betrayed he was a captain—eyed him with a glacial hate: a distaste that culminated in a curled lip as though he had just watched Ren walk into his house and spit on his floor.
“This is Captain Hux. You will be interfacing with him on matters regarding the further development of the Order."
Ren said nothing. He held the captain’s biting gaze for only as long as was necessary to appear unimpressed before turning from him. What officer could be worth his time?
Snoke made a low sound and his cracked lips pursed in disapproval. He waved a gnarled hand, and the officer dipped his head, turned away and walked the narrow pathway back to the lift.
Ren and Snoke both waited in a tense silence until the doors closed and the lift slid out of sight.
“Your quarry?” the supreme leader’s hollow eyes found their way back to Ren. A cold weight sunk into his mind, and he knew his thoughts were being pulled apart before he even voiced them.
“Eliminated, Supreme Leader.” Ren’s voice was still. Each knew the other was already aware.
“And?”
“He had no leads.”
Snoke intoned again, and Ren forced himself to keep his nerve. There was a pinching sensation at the base of his neck as his master rifled through his thoughts. Visions swam through his mind’s eye again. The target pleading, calling Ren by his false name. Nothing. The torture continued.
“Pity, but so be it. We will find another.”
“Yes, Supreme Leader.”
“You will be on the Finalizer until I have need of you again.”
Ren’s pause was enough for Snoke to see an opportunity, and a spike of agony like an ice pick drove into his mind. It was all Ren could manage not to flinch or stagger as his train of thought unraveled.
“You will heed me, Ren. Or there will be consequences.”
“Yes, Supreme Leader.”
The stabbing pain went as quickly as it had come, and Ren blinked to find his mind again.
“Go.” Snoke gave him the same dismissive wave he had shown the captain. Ren didn’t need another excuse. He nodded and stepped back off the shallow rise to make it towards the exit with a measured haste. The doors eased open, and Ren stepped in. Snoke’s voice followed before the lift closed.
“Oh, and Ren.”
He looked up to meet his master’s eyes from the other side of the audience hall.
“Fix your pathetic lightsaber.”
⏃
The shuttle had been thoroughly cleaned by the time Ren was back in the hangar. The blood had wiped off the polished floors as though it had never been there and the dark durasteel now shone back a perfect reflection, save for the slight warping around rivets. The battle-torn robes he had left behind were scooped up and carted off by a droid to either be repaired or incinerated, and the sheets lining the small cot were pressed back into perfect corners and edges.
Ren ignored the small miracles it took to keep a ship in such pristine condition and headed for the cockpit once more. The Finalizer lay just outside the bounds of the shipyard. It would only be a short flight, but Ren could not help but feel a creeping unease snake up his spine. His mind replayed the image he had stumbled into in the throne room. The stranger and Snoke speaking in hushed tones, their shared silence once they realized he had arrived. Ren had never seen anyone else in the throne room beyond the handful of guards that remained ever vigilant. But an officer? That was new indeed.
He grabbed for the controls as the readouts flashed to life and tried to forget his anxieties. The supreme leader did only what was best for the Order. Ren should not question his actions.
The heading towards the Finalizer blinked on the console, and Ren accepted it. The computer ran a quick computation to make sure it was still up to date with the Finalizer’s position, and when it chimed to let Ren know everything was ready to go, he already had the shuttle in the air and out of the hangar. A few minutes later he had cleared the Supremacy’s construction airspace and was passing the handful of other Resurgent Star Destroyers that hung in the vast space like sharks circling prey.
The Finalizer swam alone juxtaposed against the light of a fluorescing red nebula. Twice as big as its Imperial-class predecessors, the Finalizer was the first of the Resurgent-class ships that had been completed in the wake of the New Republic’s disarmament treaty. It was, of course, not disarmed, but seeing as how it mostly trawled the Unknown Regions, the New Republic politicians were willing to turn a blind eye. It helped that more than a few were in the Order’s back pocket, no doubt.
Ren sent the bridge his clearance codes before his comm could buzz with the grating tone of someone demanding it. He stalled the shuttle and waited. The thoughts returned.
Was Snoke positioning the officer to be some sort of replacement? No, that was impossible. If anyone was to be his replacement, it would be one of the Knights, not a no-name officer without the Force. Ren leaned back in the pilot seat and scowled at the massive ship lurking ahead of the shuttle. He was about to try and break himself out of his reverie when the notification that his clearance codes had been accepted beeped at him from the console display. He pushed the concerns aside with a huff through his nose and brought the engines back up to a cruising speed.
The bays of the Finalizer were much smaller, meant to accommodate a respectable fleet of TIE-fighters rather than a Star Destroyer. Things were not a flurry of construction noise when the shuttle touched down. Instead, there was a serene stillness to the choreographed movements of droids, officers and stormtroopers crisscrossing the spotless floor. Ren guided the shuttle down in the middle of the strange dance and cut the engines.
As he waited for the ramp to descend, his gaze found a figure in the crowd. He might not have noticed them had it not been for their height, glimmering reflective armor, and the fact that they were rapidly approaching.
Ren waited. First Order officers had a fetish for uniformity. A stormtrooper decked from helmet to boots in chrome with a cape snapping behind them was not something he could have predicted would greet him. When they stood across from him at the foot of the ramp, Ren had to tilt his head back a hair to meet the shining helmet’s gaze.
“Kylo Ren.” It was a woman’s voice that crackled at him, a statement more than a question. Ren said nothing.
“Welcome aboard the Finalizer. I have been instructed to show you to your quarters.”
He remained silent, which suited the strange stormtrooper fine, as she turned and began to walk before allowing for a response. Ren followed and wondered dully who might have provided such instructions. Was Snoke interfacing with everyone in the Orders these days?
“You will have a direct comm line to Captain Hux should you require it.”
Ren’s step didn’t falter, though he felt a twinge of anger that he snuffed before it blossomed. He said nothing.
The stormtrooper’s helmet swiveled some to glance at him over her shoulder. “The captain is aboard the Supremacy currently. I was told you had met.”
He did not reply, and she did not fish for more information. That much, at least, he could appreciate.
Despite being nowhere near as vast as the Supremacy would be, the Finalizer took more time than Ren would have liked to travel across. He kept pace no issue, but the passage upon passage of identical hallways became grating. That officers didn’t go mad after spending entire professional careers aboard the same vessel was a mystery beyond Ren’s comprehension.
Finally, they came to the sector that hosted most of the living quarters, and the trooper guided Ren to a hall no different than all the others. She stopped abruptly at a door and Ren got the sense she was irritated under the armor’s reflective surface. A code was keyed into the pad beside the entrance, and the door slid into the ceiling. She said nothing, only indicated that the code could be reset to whatever he wished, and then left.
Ren waited to step inside until she had turned the corner. The room was slight and unassuming, the sort a lieutenant might get. There were no frills. In fact, it seemed purposefully engineered to be as bland and inhospitable as possible while still maintaining the necessities. There was a bed which amounted to a thin foam mattress over a durasteel slab, a closet Ren would never use, and a washroom tucked away to the side as though the designers forgot it wasn’t superfluous. The quarters’ spartan nature suited him fine. Ren had few belongings, and the room would be used for little more than sleeping and the occasional meditative session.
He finished his appraisal and eyed the keypad used to release the door. It was only an illusion of privacy. No matter what code he programmed it for, Ren knew the captain and others would have a manual overdrive should anyone get curious and wish to snoop through his life. He narrowed his eyes at the small blinking pad and bit back the urge to plunge his sputtering saber blade into it.
The saber.
Ren turned his attention to the hilt clipped to his belt. He knew he could put it off no longer. Every clash against a Jedi’s blade had hewn another crack into the kyber crystal. If Ren listened closely, he could hear it shrieking, pleading with him to stop, screaming in the agony of a never-ending betrayal. So, he didn’t listen at all, but now the crystal was at the end of its tether, and it would be Ren who would suffer once it snapped.
With a restrained sigh, Ren sat on the end of the cot. He slid his tongue along the backs of his teeth and thought back to his trail in getting the crystal to begin with. Thirteen, alone in the darkness of a cave and scrambling against the shadow of his own fears. The kyber had been his reward for being true to himself, but now it was hissing a death rattle at his side. Another shallow promise shattered at a whisper of dissent.
Ren eyed the hard cot and thought about sleeping. He had no idea what time it was, not after bouncing around between on an unnamed planet and the Star Destroyers. Things were busy on the deck of the Finalizer, but that meant nothing. A ship like this never had down time.
He pulled himself back to his feet and rolled his shoulders. The wound in his chest was still bleeding, and Ren could feel the warm sticky fabric clinging to his skin. No sleeping yet, not until he got this solved at least. An infection would not do if he was to track down another kyber crystal.
Ren keyed the door open again and stepped into the hall, which in this moment was mercifully vacant. The strange woman in the chrome stormtrooper armor had offered no further directions, so Ren would be on his own to find the medical wing. Thankfully, Star Destroyer engineers tended not to deviate much from a set standard. Ren glanced at the hallway’s label and started on his trek to track down the medics.
This was a task he managed fairly well for someone who had not been aboard the ship before. The medical staff was startled when he appeared. There had been no call ahead that someone was expected, and Ren was in neither trooper nor officer garb. Ren took note of their anxious glances between one another and felt a grating irritation at it. One medic suggested they need to clear it with their superiors, but the rest had the sense to figure that if Ren had gotten this far, he was supposed to be aboard the ship.
They guided him to a room where he pulled his shirt off and let them work on the gash. It was clear none of the medics had seen a lightsaber wound before, but they were too nervous to ask questions. Someone stitched up the deepest parts of the wound while a droid applied a generous amount of bacta. Ren worked to ignore it all, and soon it was over. The medical officers showed him out hastily. None recommended that he might return for a checkup, which sat fine with Ren. He would have ignored the suggestion had it been made. With his shirt tugged back on and the wound no longer bleeding, he took back to the endless sweep of identical halls to crisscross the ship back to his room.
Ren tuned out the majority of the commotion though there was decidedly far more than when he first crossed the decks. A glance out one of the loading docks suggested perhaps the captain had arrived back from the Supremacy. A thought flickered in Ren’s mind; the captain’s ribs sprung from his chest like the tines of a birdcage. He pushed the notion away. Snoke did not appreciate the violent murder of his subordinates, despite how difficult Ren found it to resist.
He gritted his teeth and continued. Something in the chatter spiked into his mind, an ebbing concern that washed over the higher-ranking members of the crew. Ren tried to tune it out, unsuccessfully. It was a nervous itch in their minds, one Ren assumed stemmed from the captain given his reappearance on the ship coinciding with the anxiety, or at least, from the captain’s dealings with Snoke. Ren saw flashes. A snow-covered planet. The schematics for a massive laser weapon. A stache of kyber…
Ren blinked. He had halted in his tracks and a stream of troopers and officers passed him like nervous fish catching the slipstream around a shark. When he looked up, there was no sign of the captain or his entourage. This project—whatever it was—might hold the answer to his disintegrating saber crystal, its kin kyber slumbering untouched underground. Not like the crystal from his youth which branched from the walls of caves like teeth in an impossible maw and had offered nothing but visions of heartache in his trials. Why Snoke had not looped him in on this when it was perhaps the solution to his directive was something Ren would have to worry about later. For now, at least he had somewhere to start.