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https://ift.tt/33wSXDMI had this done early, so I thought I’d post it straight away without making us all wait for it.
In which, without ever saying the words, two people crown themselves Queen and Emperor of the galaxy. For
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filigrankaWhole story available on Ao3
~*~*~*~
This was why despair was such a sin, Leia thought, sitting in an uncomfortable chair in the Finalizer’s infirmary and watching over the still bodies of Rey and Kylo. Of Ben, her son. If she had despaired the way Luke had despaired—run away to be miserable in private—she would have missed the moment when Poe swept in and scooped both unconscious force-users into the pressurized bomb bay of his oversized TIE.
As she knew very well herself, the vacuum of space was survivable for up to ninety seconds, though one paid a toll for it on returning. Both Ben and Rey had been close to the edge of death, and the Finalizer’s med-droids reported that their lungs were full of lesions where the oxygen had boiled out of their blood. Their eyes had frozen shut, and the water had boiled in their mouths and down their throats.
They would be scarred within, but they were surprisingly undamaged on the outside, floating, drugged and peaceful in vats of bacta. The usual face-masks had been deemed inappropriate and the Finalizer’s severe doctor had insisted that their lungs would have to be filled with bacta too. If the drugs faltered and they woke they would pass from the memory of suffocation to the sensation of drowning before they ever reached consciousness.
The doctor’s shift had ended two hours ago with a burst of disinfectant radiation and a disapproving stare. “It’s nothing to me if you choose to stay here,” they’d said. “The droids will monitor you. But I will be shutting off the lights.”
“That’s fine,” she’d replied, settling in for the vigil. They’d left her alone in this cavern-like room that stank of ozone and blood in what at first had seemed pitch darkness.
It was the quietest she’d sat with Ben for twenty years, though she scarcely recognized the boy she loved in the scarred and muscular body that floated before her. The pain of loss was omnipresent, the air she’d breathed now for half his life.
Despair was a sin. Hope was not a feeling but an action, a determination, a hard slog of endurance through the sleepless nights and the dreads of life because she simply refused to give in. So she sat by her son and remembered the happier days; there had been days when they’d played together, baked together. Days when she’d taken him to the Senate and explained how it all worked, and he’d seemed fascinated…
There had been days when she left him before he woke in the morning and didn’t return until after he was asleep. To her it hadn’t seemed to happen often, but now she looked back, it must have seemed to him like his whole life.
Had Luke really tried to kill him? Had Vader’s blood coming out in Luke, just for a second, really separated Ben from his whole family? Or had it been only the last straw? He hadn’t fled to her for protection from Luke, after all. She had obviously never shown him that she could be trusted, that she would put him first.
Of course she hadn’t. Because—looking back—he never had been first. The galaxy had been her favoured child, and he had been, and known himself to be, the afterthought.
Anguish overcame her in the dark. She put her face in her hands and wept. If only she could have the time again, she would do better. If only–
Most of the med-droids—black dangling things that reminded her of being tortured—had red running lights which illuminated the infirmary a little once her eyes adjusted, and a gleam of silver lighting ran around the inside of the bacta tanks. It was the tremble of the still liquid that alerted her first.
She raised her head and listened. There was no sound, but the bacta in the tanks rippled rhythmically to the pulse of oncoming footsteps.
Leia wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, sank her face lower into the hollow of her tall, charcoal collar and held perfectly still.
The tanks’ silver lights picked out an angelic face capped with hellfire hair, and ran along the hypospray in Hux’s black gloved hand as he raised it to the intake valve of Kylo’s tank.
“Stop right there,” Leia commanded, in her brassiest, most authoritative voice.
He jumped almost a foot into the air, came down wide eyed, but scowling. “Or what?”
She rose, drawing on her outrage and the shadows of this place of pain. She was old enough to be both furious and perfectly calm at the same time, monitoring herself to be sure she didn’t go too far. Her reflection in his eyes was that of a twisting shade, lightning on its hands where her rings gleamed. “You don’t want to test me.”
She’d been told she could be terrifying at times, but he didn’t buckle, just stood coldly assessing her for a long moment before his shoulders relaxed in surrender.
“I suppose I don’t,” he sighed. “But our agreement was that you would ensure that I and my people were safe—from him and, by extension, from others of his kind. How are you going to ensure anyone’s safety if Ren remains alive?”
His hand disappeared inside his greatcoat, depositing the hypospray in an inside pocket. It struck her with sudden certainty that he was carrying more than one dose of the poison—that he had intended to get rid of Rey tonight too, poisoned while she was unconscious and defenceless. He didn’t even have the gall to look guilty about it.
She badly wanted to despise him, but again he had a point. If he let either of the force users regain consciousness, he would be defenceless against them. So when else should he attack?
“I believe I am a match for him,” she said gently. “When we made our agreement, I thought I was willing to see him die, but I find I’m not. You probably don’t understand this, but he’s my son, and I love him. If there’s any chance at all for him—if he will listen to Rey or myself, then I’m willing to take that chance.
“And the rest of us will have to go along with it,” he said bitterly, clearing a stack of datapads from the top of a recharging station and sitting there primly. “Because when a Force-user makes a decision, we ordinary mortals do not have the choice to say ‘no.'”
The thought gave her pause. But no. She had never overruled anyone just because she could. She owed her victories to negotiation, to free-will and the good hearts of those who would not be ruled by–
“You’re a fine one to talk about not ruling by force,” she pointed out, unsettled at seeing herself for a moment as the threat to galactic liberty, to peace. “If you wanted a galaxy in which there were no slaves, you should not have created the Stormtrooper program.”
“They were made in imitation of the Jedi, did you know? Because my father believed the Jedi were the perfect soldiers. One of the deadliest armies ever to call itself a peace-keeping force. If we are placing blame, shall we talk about all the ways in which we are the true heirs to your precious Republic?”
Leia was tempted to get up and slap him. Or to storm out—which she supposed was his aim. Instead she laughed. “Let’s not talk politics. Not right now at least. If I want any chance of deprogramming your troopers I have to deal with you. With centralized government gone, if I want an army to protect the galaxy from pirates, traffickers and petty warlords, I have to deal with you. That’s clear. But if you want any chance of surviving when Ben comes around, you have to deal with me. Is that also clear?”
“It is,” he said, folding his hands together in a way that made the leather of his gloves creak. He fixed her with a direct gaze, burning icy blue like the aurora on Hoth. “Unless I can kill every one of you.”
She laughed. He showed his teeth even when he believed she could knock them out. She found it oddly charming. “I think you know already that you don’t have a chance. We’re stuck with each other. But I’m glad to have met you face to face. I wouldn’t have known otherwise that you’re…”
Honest, she thought, though it was not quite the right word. Sincere was better. She had expected him to be corrupt all the way down, but the Force was telling her he was not. Buried deep in the wasteland of his character, there was still something weight-bearing, solid.
“You genuinely believe in working for the betterment of the galaxy, don’t you? In an end to poverty, to starvation and slavery?”
“Even to war,” he agreed, soft voiced in the darkness, astonishing her. “We struck hard, once, because we hoped that we would never have to strike again.”
The outrage of a million Alderaani refugees demanded to speak through her. She knew from experience how long it would take the Hosnian survivors to begin to recover their cultures even though their homes were gone. But no amount of rage would replace what had been lost. It would only hinder the rebuilding.
He didn’t want to make war? Good. Perhaps it was time to try something else.
“I can work with that.”
The vastness of the task opened up in front of her—establishing a new government, working out what its shape should be, who should be represented and how. Giving the opportunity for worlds to sign up or secede. Laws to be made. Banks, conglomerates and billionaires to be deprived of their power for the sake of the people…
Stars! It made her tired just thinking of it. This was the hard work on the other side of victory. This was the work that this time would have to be done right, with no heavily armed dissenters fleeing to become the next generation’s threat. And it would have to be done by negotiation—slow, dull and safe.
Hux stepped back up to the tank. She watched him lay a hand on its surface, almost gently. He huffed a laugh through his nose, looking up at the spreading cloud of Kylo’s black hair and at his sleeping face.
“I thought of him as a peer,” he offered, opening a part of her son’s life to her like a gift. “We were not always in agreement, when Snoke ruled, but we were colleagues, and I… greatly valued having someone to whom I could speak freely, as an equal.”
She’d heard that kind of puzzled, baffled loneliness in the back of Finn’s mind too—the wish for some kind of human connection that their society had made impossible for them. For all its high goals, the First Order had been a monstrous place, even to those who lived in it.
“Yet when Snoke was gone, your son did his best to grind my face into the floor.” Hux gave her a smug, cold smile, as though the stalemate in which they found themselves was a kind of victory. She rather supposed it was.
“Now here he lies, at my mercy. I’ll give him to you, as a goodwill gesture. You and I will work out together how best to rule the galaxy from here. But if you think to cross me, and crush me and toss me around like him, then I can assure you, you will meet the same fate.”
“I won’t hurt you,” she assured him. He was a poisonous little snake, wasn’t he? He bit when he was scared. So perhaps it was time to try not scaring him. “I will make sure that he doesn’t either. And I will make sure that you don’t hurt him. It’s time all the pain that we’ve carried forward from parents and grandparents to end. Time for a new age. A new hope. Freedom. Peace.”
“Order.”
“Order too,” she agreed, because yes. Those were good aims.
Everything else was negotiable.