Refuge Part 3
Oct. 24th, 2019 05:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
potboyvia https://ift.tt/32LMZPF
In which I still don’t let anyone know what the plan is, but Rey gets some clues via the Force. Space battles are 90% waiting for the enemy to arrive from half way across the galaxy, 99% awkward introspection and heart-to-hearts, 150% Hux being extra ™ and then 1% full on screaming and dying, but we haven’t got to that part yet.
~*~*~*~
Chapter Three
(Earlier chapters on Ao3 here)
There was something rather homelike about a Star Destroyer, Rey thought, not paying a lot of attention to Poe and Hux showing off for one another. It wasn’t just that she’d spent so many years of her life in them, or that she couldn’t help but regard them as a treasure-trove of almost infinite abundance. It was the atmosphere.
The Resistance’s bases were a heady mix of zealotry and brotherly love—a cloud cuckoo land where everyone was willing to die for everyone else, and small gestures of kindness were expected to be made hourly without any payment or recompense. Which was lovely, but also disorienting. In her experience, life didn’t work like that.
The Finalizer though—Rey’s awareness spread out into its corridors and sampled the currents and undercurrents of its inhabitants—was more like Niima Outpost. A healthy level of fear and determined self-preservation ran through its hundreds of thousands of minds, and—particularly among the Stormtroopers—there was a thankfulness for food, for shelter and warmth, clothes and medicine that Rey found compelling.
A weird nostalgia ached through her the more she saw.
Young Brond had clearly been fortunate enough to be taught a living tradition that Rey had to figure out for herself, for example. She’d probably had classmates, instructors, even friends, where Rey had been forced to pick up the same skills alone, from half shattered Imperial Martial Arts sims recorded by the dead.
Rey had learned a lot from these people. Their voices had shaped her own, replacing her native accent—whatever it had been—with their clipped tones. Their archives had formed her bed-time reading. The corpses of their ships had fed and sheltered her, even while the other scavengers told her wonderful stories about their defeat.
Seeing the culture alive with purpose always made her feel that she had in some part grown up here, and that was an unsettling thought.
The bridge doors slid open. Hux braced himself and strode through. The lancing spikes of pain she had been feeling from him were temporarily dulled by whatever he had just injected, and Rey was thankful not to have them as a distraction as she came into the disapproving glances on his heel, Poe staying so close to her that he jostled her knife arm.
Hux’s aide stepped gingerly over a blood trail that lead to the Captain’s station, stationed himself at the communications desk. All the raised gazes that had been examining her—the little whispers of “Is that her? The one who killed Snoke? She doesn’t look—” broke off as the bridge crew avoided Hux’s searching gaze, dropped their eyes to their stations. Rey could feel their hearts racing from here, and her own picked up in sympathy.
Opening a comm channel to the rest of the FO fleet would give away their position. If he wasn’t already on his way here, warned by the Force, Kylo would be summoned. If this was an elaborate trap laid by Hux, she and Poe would be delivered into his hands. If not, they might be destroyed when every laser-cannon and every Force User the First Order possessed was turned on the Finalizer…
This was one of the reasons Leia and Finn had been sequestered apart on the Falcon—an insurance policy for the Resistance if all else failed.
She closed her eyes briefly, breathed in in one of the exercises she had copied from her observances of Luke—she’d had to steal that knowledge for herself too. Why was the only person willing to teach her the one from whom she didn’t want to learn?
The pulse of resentment left her with her exhale as if she had breathed out fire. She breathed in calm. She was ready for whatever came.
“Hail the flagship please, Captain Mitaka.”
The starscape on the viewscreen flickered out, replaced briefly by the First Order logo, and then by the figure of a man in the centre of his own, far grander bridge.
Old enough to be Hux’s father, he was nevertheless well-preserved, slim, neatly put together as all these men were, holding their ravening hunger in check with an armour of propriety. But there was something overdone about him too, his hair too black for his age, his tunic an array of heavily starched folds that suggested opulence—a touch of unexpected luxury.
“Oh, it’s the traitor,” he said with a small, patronising smile. “Armitage. I hardly expected you to call.”
“General Pryde.” Hux’s mouth twisted as though the taste of the name was bitter, but she sensed it was his own name he objected to. All these old bastards who thought they were entitled to it.
“Allegiant General Pryde, boy. Get it right.”
Hux’s nostrils flared. Rey had a sense of peering into a well of resentment so hot it had been capped and used as a reactor. He opened his mouth to say something cutting back and she dropped the thought don’t get distracted into his mind, as if it was his own.
He jerked, his eyes narrowing and his hand coming up to his collar once more.
Kylo had throttled him, she read in the gesture. More than once. When he had dared to point out a distraction, Kylo had hurt him, damaged him, kicking him aside because he dared to speak the truth…
Rey’s own thoughts turned inward then, toward Leia’s son, with whom she’d had the strangest bond. She’d seen Kylo gentle, persuasive. She’d been willing to believe he was a troubled soul, a scholar, an exiled prince destined to do great things, who thought himself wrongly cast out from his family. She’d been willing to believe that he’d gone to Snoke because he’d thought he had no other choice, and she’d hoped that when Snoke was destroyed, Ben’s essential sweetness of character would have been freed. He would have been freed to return to the light.
Instead he had just shown himself to be a bully and an abuser. He had chosen the darkness and set himself on its throne.
She can’t help feeling it shouldn’t have ended like this. He should have taken the outstretched hand. He should have come back to his mother, to those who grieved for him and—
And now it’s her getting distracted.
“'Allegiant’ General.” Hux sneered. “What? Did he promise you a fancy uniform and a swagger stick if you’d just betray your oath to the twelve principles of the First Order and give your loyalty to him personally?”
Pryde looked aside to where a young lieutenant had walked into shot, was handing him a datapad.
The universe woke up and focused its gaze on Rey. She felt it move. Fumbling out with her mind for the lines of connection, she felt other minds on her than those of the Finalizer and the flagship. It was as if, in the darkness, the eyes of every First Order ship had fixed themselves on her.
Pryde drew himself up, becoming even more theatrical, and she understood that he had opened comm channels to the rest of the fleet, that the First Order Armada was now watching and… yes, she felt them speeding toward her, like a furnace blast on her cheek.
“They’re listening,” she whispered to Poe. “And they’re on their way to intercept us. I feel it.”
“Yap all you like, Armitage,” Pryde smiled, cold eyes dismissive, “We know better by now than to listen to a man the Supreme Leader himself called a rabid cur.”
Hux put his chin up, eyes aglow. “Better a cur than a lap dog.”
A deeper note sounded in the Force as a presence, further away but infinitely more powerful, also turned its attention to the confrontation. Kylo’s presence groped for Rey’s own. She flung up walls of durasteel, but not before she could feel that he too was now racing toward her, storm-dark riding on his ship like a black hole.
They’re on their way. They’re listening, she repeated for Hux’s sake. Whatever this plan of yours is, you’d better get on with it. It didn’t startle him this time. He merely gave a slight nod.
“Your father would have been so ashamed to see you now,” Pryde snarled, slapping the thin stick he held against his palm. “Consorting with the worst scum of the galaxy, with the murderers who brought our beloved Emperor down.”
“My father, may his legacy be sempiternal–”
It happened again, a sense of stirring, awakening, like a long dormant machine flicking on lights one after another. Rey shivered with a sense of wrongness, like seeing Starkiller for the first time, marvelling at the forests only to realize that the heart of it was entirely artificial. Was this part of the plan or part of the backstabbing? She really wished Leia had told her what the plan was, even though she understood the necessity of having it only in minds that Kylo would not wish to touch.
“Will never be disappointed again. In fact, out of the three hundred and seventy two souls entrusted with the imperforate details of Emperor Palpatine’s final command…”
The wrongness wound itself up. Rey could feel it hanging in the corridors of the Finalizer as much as in the enemy ships hurtling towards them, a smear of awareness, like the awareness of swarming creatures, distinct from the thoughts of each individual drone. She shook her head as it tightened around heart and skull like the need to vomit.
“I am the only one left alive.”
Hux’s face was blank and exultant at once, with the solemn joy he had shown on Starkiller’s firing.
Pryde shifted, as even he seemed to sense, belatedly, that something was wrong. He should have asked himself long before this, surely, Rey thought, why Hux had chosen to break his cover, why he simply stood there talking when he could be running away. But Pryde had wanted his opportunity to gloat, and now he didn’t seem to be able to work out why it wasn’t feeling as glorious as it should.
“I,” Hux went on, in increasing triumph, “Am the guardian of the Emperor’s last orders. I hold the fifteen-twenty one precepts and the twelve subheadings—”
Rey touched the skin beneath her nose, brought her fingers away, found them clean. She wasn’t the one whose nose was bleeding, then. What? What was—?
“I am the past and I am the future sui generis of this Order, and those who will not obey me will not be permitted to live. I give you this condign, signal, golden—”
A fist seemed to reach into her brain and twist. She staggered back against the wall, and Poe caught her, kept her standing. A gasp later, and it was gone, a kind of euphoria and clarity flooding in to take its place.
“Opportunity to return to your true loyalty, or destroy those who stand in your way. It will not be offered again.”
“Well, thank goodness for that,” Pryde mocked, though she could see him swallowing, could see the other officers on Pryde’s bridge check one another out nervously, as if waiting for disaster. “You’ve always had such an inflated idea of your own importance, boy. Let’s see how it holds up against the massed turbolasers of the entire fleet and the dark strength of the Supreme Leader. He’ll have you squealing for mercy again soon enough. Pryde out.”
The screen fell dark, then flooded once more with stars. Rey rubbed her aching head and wondered what exactly had just happened.
“Did we win?” Poe whispered to her, still holding her arm—giving support or asking for it. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but are there, like, still an entire fleet of homicidal madmen hurtling straight towards us?”
Rey shrugged, hopelessly. The twist in the brain had gone away and now everything felt normal again. It was hard to remember that anything had changed at all. An unease was on the tip of her tongue, but she couldn’t pin it down.
“And all we’ve done is to make them extra angry?” Poe huffed an incredulous laugh. “Great job, Hugs. Couldn’t have done it better myself.”
In which I still don’t let anyone know what the plan is, but Rey gets some clues via the Force. Space battles are 90% waiting for the enemy to arrive from half way across the galaxy, 99% awkward introspection and heart-to-hearts, 150% Hux being extra ™ and then 1% full on screaming and dying, but we haven’t got to that part yet.
~*~*~*~
Chapter Three
(Earlier chapters on Ao3 here)
There was something rather homelike about a Star Destroyer, Rey thought, not paying a lot of attention to Poe and Hux showing off for one another. It wasn’t just that she’d spent so many years of her life in them, or that she couldn’t help but regard them as a treasure-trove of almost infinite abundance. It was the atmosphere.
The Resistance’s bases were a heady mix of zealotry and brotherly love—a cloud cuckoo land where everyone was willing to die for everyone else, and small gestures of kindness were expected to be made hourly without any payment or recompense. Which was lovely, but also disorienting. In her experience, life didn’t work like that.
The Finalizer though—Rey’s awareness spread out into its corridors and sampled the currents and undercurrents of its inhabitants—was more like Niima Outpost. A healthy level of fear and determined self-preservation ran through its hundreds of thousands of minds, and—particularly among the Stormtroopers—there was a thankfulness for food, for shelter and warmth, clothes and medicine that Rey found compelling.
A weird nostalgia ached through her the more she saw.
Young Brond had clearly been fortunate enough to be taught a living tradition that Rey had to figure out for herself, for example. She’d probably had classmates, instructors, even friends, where Rey had been forced to pick up the same skills alone, from half shattered Imperial Martial Arts sims recorded by the dead.
Rey had learned a lot from these people. Their voices had shaped her own, replacing her native accent—whatever it had been—with their clipped tones. Their archives had formed her bed-time reading. The corpses of their ships had fed and sheltered her, even while the other scavengers told her wonderful stories about their defeat.
Seeing the culture alive with purpose always made her feel that she had in some part grown up here, and that was an unsettling thought.
The bridge doors slid open. Hux braced himself and strode through. The lancing spikes of pain she had been feeling from him were temporarily dulled by whatever he had just injected, and Rey was thankful not to have them as a distraction as she came into the disapproving glances on his heel, Poe staying so close to her that he jostled her knife arm.
Hux’s aide stepped gingerly over a blood trail that lead to the Captain’s station, stationed himself at the communications desk. All the raised gazes that had been examining her—the little whispers of “Is that her? The one who killed Snoke? She doesn’t look—” broke off as the bridge crew avoided Hux’s searching gaze, dropped their eyes to their stations. Rey could feel their hearts racing from here, and her own picked up in sympathy.
Opening a comm channel to the rest of the FO fleet would give away their position. If he wasn’t already on his way here, warned by the Force, Kylo would be summoned. If this was an elaborate trap laid by Hux, she and Poe would be delivered into his hands. If not, they might be destroyed when every laser-cannon and every Force User the First Order possessed was turned on the Finalizer…
This was one of the reasons Leia and Finn had been sequestered apart on the Falcon—an insurance policy for the Resistance if all else failed.
She closed her eyes briefly, breathed in in one of the exercises she had copied from her observances of Luke—she’d had to steal that knowledge for herself too. Why was the only person willing to teach her the one from whom she didn’t want to learn?
The pulse of resentment left her with her exhale as if she had breathed out fire. She breathed in calm. She was ready for whatever came.
“Hail the flagship please, Captain Mitaka.”
The starscape on the viewscreen flickered out, replaced briefly by the First Order logo, and then by the figure of a man in the centre of his own, far grander bridge.
Old enough to be Hux’s father, he was nevertheless well-preserved, slim, neatly put together as all these men were, holding their ravening hunger in check with an armour of propriety. But there was something overdone about him too, his hair too black for his age, his tunic an array of heavily starched folds that suggested opulence—a touch of unexpected luxury.
“Oh, it’s the traitor,” he said with a small, patronising smile. “Armitage. I hardly expected you to call.”
“General Pryde.” Hux’s mouth twisted as though the taste of the name was bitter, but she sensed it was his own name he objected to. All these old bastards who thought they were entitled to it.
“Allegiant General Pryde, boy. Get it right.”
Hux’s nostrils flared. Rey had a sense of peering into a well of resentment so hot it had been capped and used as a reactor. He opened his mouth to say something cutting back and she dropped the thought don’t get distracted into his mind, as if it was his own.
He jerked, his eyes narrowing and his hand coming up to his collar once more.
Kylo had throttled him, she read in the gesture. More than once. When he had dared to point out a distraction, Kylo had hurt him, damaged him, kicking him aside because he dared to speak the truth…
Rey’s own thoughts turned inward then, toward Leia’s son, with whom she’d had the strangest bond. She’d seen Kylo gentle, persuasive. She’d been willing to believe he was a troubled soul, a scholar, an exiled prince destined to do great things, who thought himself wrongly cast out from his family. She’d been willing to believe that he’d gone to Snoke because he’d thought he had no other choice, and she’d hoped that when Snoke was destroyed, Ben’s essential sweetness of character would have been freed. He would have been freed to return to the light.
Instead he had just shown himself to be a bully and an abuser. He had chosen the darkness and set himself on its throne.
She can’t help feeling it shouldn’t have ended like this. He should have taken the outstretched hand. He should have come back to his mother, to those who grieved for him and—
And now it’s her getting distracted.
“'Allegiant’ General.” Hux sneered. “What? Did he promise you a fancy uniform and a swagger stick if you’d just betray your oath to the twelve principles of the First Order and give your loyalty to him personally?”
Pryde looked aside to where a young lieutenant had walked into shot, was handing him a datapad.
The universe woke up and focused its gaze on Rey. She felt it move. Fumbling out with her mind for the lines of connection, she felt other minds on her than those of the Finalizer and the flagship. It was as if, in the darkness, the eyes of every First Order ship had fixed themselves on her.
Pryde drew himself up, becoming even more theatrical, and she understood that he had opened comm channels to the rest of the fleet, that the First Order Armada was now watching and… yes, she felt them speeding toward her, like a furnace blast on her cheek.
“They’re listening,” she whispered to Poe. “And they’re on their way to intercept us. I feel it.”
“Yap all you like, Armitage,” Pryde smiled, cold eyes dismissive, “We know better by now than to listen to a man the Supreme Leader himself called a rabid cur.”
Hux put his chin up, eyes aglow. “Better a cur than a lap dog.”
A deeper note sounded in the Force as a presence, further away but infinitely more powerful, also turned its attention to the confrontation. Kylo’s presence groped for Rey’s own. She flung up walls of durasteel, but not before she could feel that he too was now racing toward her, storm-dark riding on his ship like a black hole.
They’re on their way. They’re listening, she repeated for Hux’s sake. Whatever this plan of yours is, you’d better get on with it. It didn’t startle him this time. He merely gave a slight nod.
“Your father would have been so ashamed to see you now,” Pryde snarled, slapping the thin stick he held against his palm. “Consorting with the worst scum of the galaxy, with the murderers who brought our beloved Emperor down.”
“My father, may his legacy be sempiternal–”
It happened again, a sense of stirring, awakening, like a long dormant machine flicking on lights one after another. Rey shivered with a sense of wrongness, like seeing Starkiller for the first time, marvelling at the forests only to realize that the heart of it was entirely artificial. Was this part of the plan or part of the backstabbing? She really wished Leia had told her what the plan was, even though she understood the necessity of having it only in minds that Kylo would not wish to touch.
“Will never be disappointed again. In fact, out of the three hundred and seventy two souls entrusted with the imperforate details of Emperor Palpatine’s final command…”
The wrongness wound itself up. Rey could feel it hanging in the corridors of the Finalizer as much as in the enemy ships hurtling towards them, a smear of awareness, like the awareness of swarming creatures, distinct from the thoughts of each individual drone. She shook her head as it tightened around heart and skull like the need to vomit.
“I am the only one left alive.”
Hux’s face was blank and exultant at once, with the solemn joy he had shown on Starkiller’s firing.
Pryde shifted, as even he seemed to sense, belatedly, that something was wrong. He should have asked himself long before this, surely, Rey thought, why Hux had chosen to break his cover, why he simply stood there talking when he could be running away. But Pryde had wanted his opportunity to gloat, and now he didn’t seem to be able to work out why it wasn’t feeling as glorious as it should.
“I,” Hux went on, in increasing triumph, “Am the guardian of the Emperor’s last orders. I hold the fifteen-twenty one precepts and the twelve subheadings—”
Rey touched the skin beneath her nose, brought her fingers away, found them clean. She wasn’t the one whose nose was bleeding, then. What? What was—?
“I am the past and I am the future sui generis of this Order, and those who will not obey me will not be permitted to live. I give you this condign, signal, golden—”
A fist seemed to reach into her brain and twist. She staggered back against the wall, and Poe caught her, kept her standing. A gasp later, and it was gone, a kind of euphoria and clarity flooding in to take its place.
“Opportunity to return to your true loyalty, or destroy those who stand in your way. It will not be offered again.”
“Well, thank goodness for that,” Pryde mocked, though she could see him swallowing, could see the other officers on Pryde’s bridge check one another out nervously, as if waiting for disaster. “You’ve always had such an inflated idea of your own importance, boy. Let’s see how it holds up against the massed turbolasers of the entire fleet and the dark strength of the Supreme Leader. He’ll have you squealing for mercy again soon enough. Pryde out.”
The screen fell dark, then flooded once more with stars. Rey rubbed her aching head and wondered what exactly had just happened.
“Did we win?” Poe whispered to her, still holding her arm—giving support or asking for it. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but are there, like, still an entire fleet of homicidal madmen hurtling straight towards us?”
Rey shrugged, hopelessly. The twist in the brain had gone away and now everything felt normal again. It was hard to remember that anything had changed at all. An unease was on the tip of her tongue, but she couldn’t pin it down.
“And all we’ve done is to make them extra angry?” Poe huffed an incredulous laugh. “Great job, Hugs. Couldn’t have done it better myself.”