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Kylo Ren was cold and wet and angry. Stagnant water squelched in his boots and streamed from his robes, ran down his mask in tiny rivulets before he pushed his soaked hood back so the heavy fabric would not obscure his vision as it sagged from the extra water weight. The air around him was damp and still, freighted heavily with the smell of soil and the spicy rot of leaves. The smells were pungent even through the filters of his mask, and the only sound around him was the tiny drip-drip-drip of water splashing on the stones at his feet.
This buried ruin had once been a Sith temple, a set of rooms carved out in the branches and tributaries of a naturally occurring cave, but it had not been used for its former purpose for a very long time. Ren was alone in this place. He had ordered his bodyguard to stay with the command shuttle two kilometers away. He had not wanted any company on this mission, nor would those pathetic Stormtroopers have been any help in any event. This was something he had to do alone.
Centuries of flooding and erosion had at first effaced the courtyard that had once stood before the gates to the temple, then filled in the former site of the river with silt and flood-borne debris and flooded in repeated cycles until the entrance to this ruin was now waist-deep in a shallow bow-shaped lake. Ren had waded through the water, mindful of his lightsaber (which had not been modified to ignite underwater), and then hauled himself up a mossy face of tumbled stone to reach the place he currently was standing on.
His physical senses told him that he was alone, but the Force hummed and sang, bright and vibrant with life – tiny insects and worms and the great slate-colored ball-trees floating on their gasbags in this forest, tethered to the bottom of the lake by great webs of aerial roots. Deeper in the cavern there pulsed something greater, more ponderous than the myriad buzz of tiny life around him. Under the dampness was a distinct ammonia smell tinged with a savory stench, the scat and spoor of some large creature or creatures that lived in this abandoned catacomb.
Ren took a deep breath and closed his eyes briefly, woke his rage up from the banked embers of his frustration and held on to it, seized it like a burning brand and used it to light his way through the ache and confusion that lingered slick and heavy in the pit of his belly. His back stung under his robes, fresh welts itching and burning from the salt in his sweat and the brackish water he had just waded through. Ren savored the pain as he started to go further into the cavern, into the humid dark.
---
Another room aboard the Finalizer. Another place, cold and sterile from the bluewhite glow of a hologram, lifeless except for the feeble beacon of Ren’s own self.
“Master,” Ren had taken off his mask and returned the Supreme Leader’s magnified stare. He would not flinch. “I have done as you have bid. Hux is mine.”
“Truly?” Snoke, when he replied, seemed almost to drawl, and Ren tried to read those gross features looming over him in hologram.
Disinterest and skepticism, and the faintest hint of mockery in those great pits of eyes, and Ren sucked in a short breath to reply, “I believe so.” Did Hux not call his name while they fucked? Clawed at his shoulders and hips, bent over for him, lost that impenetrable composure in private? He thought of the bruises they left on each other; flush of pleasure on the General’s pale skin, that short red hair in disarray under his fingers. Icy blue eyes almost black from pupils dilated with arousal and pleasure.
“Is that really so, or are you his?” Snoke asked, his tone almost jocular. “I can sense it within you, Kylo Ren. I can taste the weakness that has grown within you. You need Hux and his approval of your feeble affections,” Snoke’s expression hardened, his voice thick with sarcasm and disappointment, and Ren felt the shout rumble deep in him even as fear and doubt and a terrible shame rose up to twine cold around his neck and choke him. Even now Ren thought of the taste of Hux’s skin on his tongue, the bumps of his spine under his touch, the way he loved to tease Ren and leave him frustrated, eager with longing and lust. Snoke was right, Ren realized. Those awful truths flashed and popped in his head like blaster bolts at night, tore away at the raw and bloody pulp under his armor of rage and hate.
“You told me, Master, that you would teach me how to manipulate him that way,” Ren forced those words out of his narrowing throat, resentful of the slight break he heard in his own voice. That had been part of the plan, had it not?
Ren had presented himself as bait to Hux, and reeled him in with it. That intimacy had been part of the plan. Except that Ren knew that Snoke was speaking the truth. He didn’t just want Hux; he needed him. Needed his careful touch on the weals on his back, that sweet skin against his own, that fine cock sliding up his ass, opening him up to unknown pleasures that he had not dared imagine, let alone dared to partake of. Those thoughts made Ren nauseous from fear, and then incandescent rage and pain bloomed within, around the sick core of anxiety. He did not need anyone, would not need anyone or anything. Needing others was for fools who did not understand the inevitability of betrayal. His hands felt clammy under his gloves and he clenched them hard, knotted his fingers until his knuckles hurt.
“No, Kylo Ren. I said that I would show you how to break someone with love,” Snoke did not relent. Not that failures deserved mercy, Ren thought, and knew in this moment that he was a failure. “And has General Hux not demonstrated how well he does it upon you?”
“I am not weak enough for someone like him to break to his will,” Ren growled, marshalling his rage. I will not be weak, he thought. How could I have stumbled into such a trap? Ren would not cry. Crying was for weak children, that weak little boy named Ben alone and crying for his parents in memories that Ren chose to push away and ignore.
“Perhaps you are stronger than that,” Snoke mused in the silence following Ren’s outburst. “I propose a wager, then.”
“Master?” Snoke’s voice tugged at Ren, promised him some kind of relief from the morass of his self-inflicted pain and his own weakness. Yes. My master’s teachings are all I need. Ren would be strong. He would prevail.
“Test the General. Pluck the truth from his mind,” Snoke said, his expression hard and unreadable. “I will watch your resolve. If you are truly as strong as you say, then it will be a trivial task for you.”
“I will not disappoint you, Master,” Ren had said. It had been the only thing he could have said, then or ever, and he wished then, very greatly, for the anonymity of his mask. But Kylo Ren had conviction, and strength, and bitter hate and anger, and he would not retreat, not even from the agony of strangling that infant longing he felt for Hux.
Ren left the conference room wanting to set Hux on fire and embrace him at the same time, the both of them immolating themselves on a mutual pyre of rage and loss. He settled for destroying a training room with his lightsaber instead, felt a kind of queasy satisfaction at knowing the inconvenience he had caused Hux.
---
Loose bones crunched hollowly under Ren’s boots as he stepped purposefully onto them, the low-light amplification in his helmet’s visor compensating for the darkness automatically as he did so. He stopped and considered the half-ruined walls about him and the scattered detritus at his feet, scraps of rotting hide, ribs and femurs split for the marrow. This had once been a great sparring hall where apprentices had once trained. Now something else had moved in to live here, and Ren grinned savagely under his mask as he felt something stir itself in the dark. There was a hoarse, atonal snort, the sound distorted by the tunnel walls, and he only lifted his lightsaber in a two-handed ready stance, ignited the blade to illuminate a trio of blazing eyes, a massive, scaled head set low in the darkness before him.
The creature snorted again, and then charged, its six legs setting the bone fragments a-rattle, dice in a bowl as Ren dodged aside and then flicked his lightsaber blade outwards, almost carelessly. Red light licked at its flank, and there was a sickening smell of burning hide and scale and a high whistling roar as he cut a gouge into the creature’s side. He could have buried his lightsaber deep in its torso and wounded it badly, killed it even, but he had not.
Come on, he thought at it, watched as it passed him and wheeled around to face him more cautiously this time. Its great maw yawned open again, and he watched the glow of his lightsaber bounce off multiple rows of teeth, each as large as one of his fingers curled inwards. Ren felt his pulse quicken in response, a strange wild joy filling and suffusing him as he prepared to deal out a slow and painful death. He was not in the mood to kill anyone or anything quickly today.
The creature’s second lunge was much closer, its powerful spring much faster, and it came close enough for Ren to smell its thick rotting-meat breath before he dodged away again, leaving a new charred furrow in its shoulder. Those two strikes had allowed him to take the measure of the beast – of its speed and power. It was agile, fast and powerful, but so was Kylo Ren, and the size of this hall granted him ample room to dodge around its bulk. Better still, his lightsaber cauterized the wounds he had caused, which meant this predator would remain strong enough to keep him entertained until he tired of the fight.
---
Hux had come down to the training room that Ren had destroyed and overrode the codes that Ren had entered into the door lock. He watched wordlessly, expression unreadable as Ren fired shot after shot across the room with a commandeered infantry-issue blaster, slowing each one down with an effort of his mind. A trick of the room’s damaged lighting made his red hair gleam as though freshly wet with blood.
Ren’s practice had paid off in recent days, and he had gone from slowing the plasma bolts down to stopping them temporarily. Soon he would be able to hold them in the air and walk around them before letting them pass again, but this ability was impractical unless he could also control blaster bolts fired at him by someone else.
Kylo Ren was thankful for the practice today. It gave him something to do other than think of what the Supreme Leader had told him about Hux. Could Hux really have been manipulating him all this time? Ren thought of the careful touch of Hux’s hands and the sweetish smell of bacta mingling with the astringent hint of disinfectant. Along with that scrap of sensory memory came another seductive call from the light, a thought back to a time when he had been Ben, his mother putting a fresh bandage on his skinned knee, and Ren pulled hard on the trigger of the blaster, missed catching that bolt.
“You missed that one,” Hux said, and Ren focused instead of the ambition and restraint he sensed in Hux’s direction, remembered those details in the dossiers. Thoroughly dangerous, the Intelligence Directorate had reported, and ambitious enough to have discreetly arranged for the elimination and murder of his predecessors. That could have been me, Ren thought, and then he dropped the blaster he had been holding on the dented metal floor.
Ren wanted to ask Hux then, wanted just to cross the room and lean against his strong shoulders and beg him from the truth of the matter. It was highly tempting, but Ren also knew that if he asked, he would also have to tell Hux what Snoke had told him, and also about how this affair had begun with orders from the Supreme Leader, and he knew that Hux would grow to hate him no matter what he did. In seeking to entrap the general, he had also trapped himself, and now he would be forced to gnaw away at himself to get free. So be it.
“Take a shot at me,” Ren said instead, hardening his resolve. He cast his mind wide and waited, waited through Hux’s caution and curiosity and fear, fear that he had never tasted in the general’s mind before. He suspects that I know, Ren thought, and it twisted and rent at the weakness in him.
“Why?” Hux drew his blaster and aimed, his stance perfect, but he did not fire. Dark plasteel gleamed dully under the training room’s remaining lights.
“Do it.” Ren would have reached out and forced Hux’s finger down onto the trigger if he had hesitated any longer, but there it was, heat and a snap in the air boiling away at the touch of Ren’s mind, and he stilled himself, let his pain close his mental fingers around the slippery not-solid heat of the blaster bolt, pinned it into place. At last, he thought but did not say. “You need more time on the range, General. You would have missed me,” Ren said at last, turning to look at him.
“No,” Hux reholstered his blaster, stepped up to stare sidelong at the jittering, twitching jolt of plasma hanging in the air between him and Ren. “I don’t miss what I don’t aim at.” The blaster bolt’s pale glow illuminated Hux’s eyes, played along the bones of his face, each second, each delicate shift of light a tiny starburst of rage and pain for Ren.
I don’t need anyone else, Ren told himself, least of all him.
---
Ren limped breathlessly away from the training hall, his face locked into a skull grin under his mask as he did so. He had dropped his guard little by little during each pass as he had gotten bored with merely baiting the beast, and the dying predator had responded in kind. They clashed and circled each other in some kind of ancient atavistic dance, some kind of blood sacrifice by combat that allowed Ren to shed thought and emotion and simply exist.
He had felt reborn as the great creature sprang at him, its great maw glistening with spit, and then a wild inexplicable joy as it snapped at the trailing edge of his cape. For once he wanted, he realized, to die, to let this thing bite deep into him and spill his blood all over the ancient flagstone floor. Then he thought of what would happen after. Of Snoke’s sheer disappointment in his feeble apprentice. Of how Hux would simply move on with his life, change his taste in men. He thought of the general in someone else’s arms, other fingers tousling that rufous hair, and a gout of pain and longing spilled hot through his consciousness, dripped and cooled against the rusting plate of his conviction.
Ren was not going to die before he left his mark on this indifferent galaxy, wounded it and scarred it so the ugliness remained to remind others of his existence. This thought fed and fueled him as he took his thumb off the ignition stud of his lightsaber and waited as the creature wheeled about at the far end of the chamber, stopped to lick at the charred wounds in its shoulder and flank. He could feel its pain all around him, leaden and heavy, and to know that he had managed to hurt it and cause a reaction – any kind of reaction – was sickly exhilarating.
He watched as the beast gathered its strength, and then matched it pace for pace as it charged against towards him, his lightsaber still off, and then closed his eyes as it came within striking distance in the absolute darkness that now surrounded them. He did not need physical sight any more, sensed only possibilities and probabilities with his inner eye. Instead of attacking he let it draw closer, thrust his right arm into its fanged maw, and then depressed the ignition stud on his lightsaber as it attempted to bite down.
The crackling blade of his lightsaber emerged, burned through the roof of the predator’s mouth, through its skull, to carve a steaming trench through its brain and out the top of its head. The creature did not even have time to anticipate or appreciate its death – it simply sagged heavily, Ren dropping to his knees beside it as its massive weight bore him down. Sharp fangs pricked against his armored sleeve, punched through to sink into skin as the beast thrashed briefly in death throes. Ren pulled his arm out of its mouth, bisecting its head unevenly with the blade of his lightsaber, heedless of the pain of those teeth raking against his flesh. He wore the blood dripping on his robes as a badge of strength, survival, and guilt. This sense of guilt and nauseating loss that not belong to him, not Kylo Ren, no. This weakness was Ben Solo’s, and he thrust it away, turned uncaring away from his inner pain even as it tore at him to do so.
“My hate is strong,” he whispered hollowly to himself as he ventured further into the ancient temple.
---
“I don’t miss what I don’t aim at,” Hux had said simply as they stood together and alone in the wreckage of the training room, and Ren had crossed the room to stand before him, unable to speak. Instead he removed his helmet, let it drop to the damaged floor with an echoing clang, and then taken hold of Hux by the chin.
Hux looked up at him calmly, coolly, but Ren could taste his fear, smell it underneath the resinous ghost of his cologne along with pain – pain from Ren’s fingers digging in, pain that Hux would sooner die than show. Without thinking Ren let go of Hux’s face, pinned him up against the wall with the Force, disarmed him with the flick of a hand. Ren’s grip had left lines of red blooming along Hux’s jawline, red that would soon turn the bluish-dark of bruises against his pale skin. Hux had always bruised easily, exquisitely, but this was the first time Ren had marked him beyond the layers of his uniform, and the thought of Hux wearing those bruises on watch made him feel giddy, oddly excited.
Hux did not resist when Ren leaned in then and kissed him hard, sucked the breath from his lips. He only gulped for air in between kisses, tried to pull free of Ren’s Force grip and retake control of the situation, but Ren was merciless, unrelenting. Buttons popped, landed on the floor beneath them as Ren unfastened Hux’s uniform jacket and pulled savagely at the front of his shirt.
“Ren,” Hux gasped. He did not manage to complete the sentence – he only shuddered, his eyes rolling back in his head, as Ren pushed his way into his head, gloved fingers gripping his short hair brutally tight.
Kylo Ren wasn’t sure what he would find in the depths of General Hux’s mind. Discipline he knew. Composure. Coppery ambition, bitter hate. But what lay beneath? Ren pushed himself through Hux’s considerable will, silenced his screaming with his own mouth in another savage, hungry kiss. He had never experienced anything like this in his entire life, to push beyond someone else’s boundaries and sense of self and to lose himself in their very being. It was erotic beyond belief, the sense of power and want suffusing him with an eager, aching heat. This was as different from his previous interrogations as Corellian brandy was from water.
Dazzling thoughts diffused into Ren’s own mind, flick-flicker of memories scattered in the violent wake of Ren’s psychic thrust; a small, ratty stuffed toy shoved in the back of a closet so long ago – a girl named Aleena, the heat and slick wetness of her and always the smell of nlorna-flower perfume – Mother’s bantha loaf and gravy, Father’s strength tall, always taller in the mind. And then beyond those shredding-paper thoughts lay something else.
Ren saw himself, memories of him, that first moment of intrigue when they had first spoken, small pleasant appreciation of the warm slippers, curiosity and nerves and lust during their first assignation. The way they crashed together and then parted like waves on the surf, white-hot pleasure, and then Ren was shuddering coming, hot and wet without being touched as he pushed through those thoughts to the deeper, innermost layers of Hux’s self.
What lay beyond those private memories was oddly uncomplicated, as bare and simple as the way Hux kept his personal quarters. A deep vulnerability, hard fragile discipline wrapped around it. A fear of disappointing, of loyalty, and fading rapidly, the first traces of trust and regard, a love that bled hot crimson, taste of salt into Ren’s own soul as it ruptured under his touch.
No.
Ren let go of Hux’s mind, of his body and caught him sagging dead weight in his arms, limp but breathing, hot tears soaking into the fabric of his robes. Ren listened to each whooping breath, realized that he too was crying.
No.
Hux had loved him. And now he did not, and never would again.
---
The ghosts of long-gone Sith stirred uneasily on eddies of the Force as Kylo Ren headed further into the catacombs. They were no coherent figures, those figments, merely ancient echoes of repeated thoughts and feelings clinging to ancient flagstone and bones. Many of the rooms had been decorated with ribs, knobs of vertebrae, skulls belonging to a host of species, all sapient, and Ren ran his mind along the crumbling surfaces of each ossuary, shivered faintly at the last hollow cries that had lingered on them through unimaginable time.
The former temple had once stood in a natural well of dark side energies, and even now Ren could perceive the million exquisite torments that had gone into each skeleton lining those walls, the indignities and screams and each salty, bitter tear wrung from each soul that had perished here. Glowing faintly in the darkness was a small crystal pyramid, held together with an elaborate filigree of gold wire. A Sith holocron. Its glow waxed and waned slowly like some kind of reptilian heartbeat, cold despite the deep-crimson hue of its sides. Kylo Ren reached out with his mind and his hand simultaneously, seizing it and trying to unlock its secrets.
In response the room bloomed white with spectral light, glowfly points surrounding Ren even as the visor on his mask compensated for the sudden blinding light. He felt the whispers growing in volume and intensity; rising to a sandstorm scream in his head as each of those lost souls probed the depths of his being for weakness and guilt.
Was this what it had felt like for Hux? Ren dropped to his knees as tears ran hot down his face, and the holocron in his hand glowed only hotter and brighter as it battened on his grief and self-hatred. He tried to shy away from it, pull his mind away from its merciless grip, but it did not relent – memories flashing like lightning against the dome of Ren’s skull.
“I don’t want to go, Mom, I don’t want to go, please.”
Rain. Rain and the hiss of his lightsaber, the other Knights of Ren standing behind and around him.
Wood smoke and resin and shrapnel bouncing off the surface of his mask, blood running in fat drops down the fabric of his robes.
Kiss of a scourge hot and sharp against his back.
Hux, Hux, all the perfect heat and warmth and friction of him, eager mouth and rough hands and the smell of his skin.
“Grandfather, show me the way. Show me the power of the darkness.”
The heat and wetness of love dying against his untouch, not-senses filling with sick warmth, taste of iron.
Ren dropped the holocron, and it pinged, tiny hard sound on the cold stone beneath as he crouched beneath a welter of pain and nauseating guilt. The slow beat of its glow faded, slowed, and then winked out as the remnants of this temple’s guardians bore Ren under, choked him with his own guilt.
Darkness. Silence. And below it a thin thready heartbeat as Ren huddled into himself, hugging himself, trying to conserve his strength, his life force, his dwindling sanity against this merciless onslaught. The holocron’s defenses knew him, knew the pathetic weakness of Ben Solo hiding beneath the mask and cowl and armor of Kylo Ren.
Distantly he felt a distant bloom of pain as the fingers of his left hand found the gashes in his right arm. The feeling felt unreal, whetted on the surface of his consciousness like a blade against a stone, and its rasp made him shiver, straighten against the smothering morass of thoughts.
Ren dug his fingers into the wounds on his arm, tearing at them, and the pain blazed, closer this time. His pulse quickened, beat hard against his sternum, and the pain cleansed him, cleared his mind.
Yes.
Kylo Ren squeezed harder on his bleeding arm and let the pain push him up and outwards against that onslaught of souls, and his rage obliterated the feeble ghost-echoes around him. He shouted, screamed as he opened himself up and welcomed the shame and agony, let it scour him from within and purge the weakness from his soul. It hurt. Each second brought a miniscule death blossoming within him, a tiny cold point gnawing away within, but he embraced the pain, embraced the new emptiness within, and cauterized those fresh hurts with the purity of his rage.
If monster he was to be, then he would embrace his monstrosity and cast aside his humanity. The holocron flickered bright as he picked it up, tasted his passion and his hate, and then blazed brightly in response, a hot point of pure crimson in the depths of the temple as Kylo Ren snuffed out every last vestige of thought under the force of his rage.
---
It was late in shipboard night when Ren returned to the Finalizer. He dismissed his bodyguard, brought the holocron back to the security of his own quarters. He wrapped the pyramid in a soft piece of cloth, and then tucked it safe into a footlocker that would open only for his touch.
And then silently, without telling anyone, he left his room, deserted his grandfather’s helmet and let himself into the sterile order of Hux’s quarters. The rooms were dark and quiet, but Hux remained awake despite the late hour, cold blue eyes darting left and right as he read reports off a dimly glowing slate in his hand.
They did not speak to or acknowledge each other, and had not since their confrontation two weeks ago. Ren crossed the room to Hux’s side of the bed, knelt and took off his helmet, and then leaned his head against the yielding side of the mattress.
“You don’t love me,” Ren whispered, his lips shaping a shaky exhalation. “You shouldn’t.”
“But you need me,” Hux said coolly without looking away from his reports. He lifted a small glass from his nightstand, sipped at its amber contents. Coronet Amber, peppery and astringent to the nose.
“I need you,” Ren whispered as he closed his fingers around the sheets. “I need you so much.”
“I know,” Hux said, and he reached down absently to stroke Ren’s head, his movements slow and deliberate as he did so, and it was only then that Kylo Ren appreciated the exquisite Hell that he had built around himself, brick by heavy brick. Monsters deserved nothing better, he thought, and he shut his eyes as Hux continued to stroke him gently, indulgently, like one would a pet.