Chapter Text
“You’ll be grateful to know it’ll be the firing squad.”
The girl leaned against the transparisteel that bisected his green-tinged duracrete block cell. It was cold meters and meters below the base. The cell was built to keep him in, not to keep the damp and the chill out. Her arms were crossed imperiously over her chest, but that might have just been an effort to keep warm. She was a creature of the desert.
“Thank you.” Kylo said, stiffly. His voice cracked. She likely thought it was because he was devastated by this revelation. It wasn’t. It was because she was wearing a thin, sleeveless tunic and he was wondering whether he could see exactly how cold she was if she just uncrossed her arms.
It was an unbidden, inappropriate thought. He shouldn’t have wasted a moment on it when he had so few moments left. He had poor judgment when it came to her.
Kylo didn’t move from where he sat on his narrow slab of a bench, slumped against the wall. He could feel a trickle of moisture run down his spine. It might have seeped in through the walls; it might have seeped out of his skin. He was sweating. His heart was beating very quickly under the thin white shirt that didn’t keep him warm at night – or rather, when he slept. He had no concept of time in his deeply-buried cell.
Rey’s eyes narrowed, as if she could not stand for him to think she bore him anything but ill will. She must, though. She was there. She didn’t pity him, but she felt… guilty. He'd delivered her from his same fate; she'd delivered him to the wolves of the Resistance, in blind faith that they would be as idealistic as she was.
Half-facetiously, she said, “I would have picked something slower.”
He heard the lie in her voice. She would have spared his life. A life for a life. That would be her credo, adopted on a harsh, sandy planet.
Kylo tilted his head back against the hard wall. He studied the green, faintly-flickering light above him. The sunlight would hurt his eyes when he went to the firing squad – unless he went to his death by night.
No, he was being made an example of. He would not die under cover of darkness. The tribunal of generals and admirals who had convicted him of seventy-two – he’d counted – war crimes were not ashamed of executing him. They were proud, as they should be.
He’d pled guilty to seventy-one charges. There was only one to which he had pled not guilty. He had not killed General Organa. He had not killed his mother.
Absently, he said, “I’m not thanking you because it’ll be quick.”
The girl’s throat bobbed. It was the first physical indication that she had not come down to his cell to gloat. She was affected by this. Her voice was distorted through the transparisteel. “Do you want to die?”
Kylo exhaled through his nose. “Yes.”
He could tell he’d infuriated her, inexplicably. He wondered if, moreso than she wanted him to die, she wanted him to suffer. If she wanted him to have everything taken from him, even the sweet peace of death.
“Will you be there?” He asked, hating how young he sounded. He didn’t need her to bear witness. He didn’t need anyone to bear witness.
He could have died alone in his cell, hung by a makeshift rope made out of his shapeless tunic and pants. The fabric of them might not have been too weak to support his neck. In any case, could have found some other means to kill himself, despite the drugs that were heavy in his veins, dulling his Force sensitivity. He hadn’t. He had some sort of noble notion that suicide was the coward’s choice when execution was imminent.
Rey’s breath fogged the transparisteel. She flattened her palm against it. Her hand looked very small, just as it had in his. “Do you want me to be there?”
Ben picked at a loose thread on his white pants. They were turning greyish, after two weeks without washing. They stunk. He stunk. He was absurdly glad that he and the girl were kept apart by a sheet of transparisteel. He shouldn’t have cared what she thought of him – he knew what she thought of him. She thought he was a monster. What did it matter if she thought he was a monster who stunk?
Still, they had had an uneasy alliance once – uneasy on her part, whole-hearted on his. “Stand where I can see you.”
Rey made a soft, scoffing noise. Kylo might have mistaken it for a laugh in any other context. It gurgled wetly at the end.
He knew he should have lied and said that he didn’t want her there. Then, maybe she would come.
***
They marched him out of his cell at dawn. Kylo felt oddly like an initiate into some sort of cult. He should not have been wearing all white. White was the color of purity. He was hardly a sacrificial lamb.
In white, he could be seen from meters and meters away. He shone like a beacon among the uniformed military officers who took it upon themselves to make sure that the deed was done. It wouldn’t be broadcast on the holonet. They would the sole witnesses to his death. They would assure the galaxy, after it was done, that it was a little safer.
The firing squad – all enlisted men, all nervous – wore black. They lacked military discipline. Kylo didn’t. He stood, straight-backed, against the dinged-up wall. The blasters that missed him – and perhaps those than pierced him, too, if they did so with enough force – would chip the wall even further. The riddled durasteel and the bloodstains would be all the evidence left by nightfall. They would cremate his body, surely. Not on a reverent funeral pyre, but in a discrete oven.
Rey was wearing nothing so conspicuous as he was. She was not wearing white, but she was white-faced. She was standing somewhere she thought he wouldn’t see her.
Kylo almost smiled. She was so stubborn. Contrary, even. He had asked her to stand where he could see her. Spitefully, she was doing just the opposite.
He would have what he wanted in the end, though. He would die here. He was intimately aware of the harsh breathing and sweaty fingers of every person on the death squad. They were so young and green. Some of them had never taken a life before.
It is easy, he wanted to tell them. He closed his eyes.
“At ease.” A feminine voice, heavy with authority, broke the agonizing silence. Kylo opened his eyes, half-expecting to see his mother.
General Holdo, who had replaced General Organa – usurped her, in Kylo’s mind – gave him a long, calculating look. She nodded, graciously, to the firing squad.
“Kylo Ren.” She began, formally. A camera droid buzzed and hovered in the air near her. A little red light blinked on its flank. The droid was recording. It was then that Kylo understood this was show of mercy. His execution would never have been broadcast.
The fledgling government of the Third Republic could not be seen to be bloodthirsty. It aspired to be merciful. Evolved. Enlightened.
Holdo lifted her chin, imperiously. She was not speaking to him. She was speaking to the galaxy. “By special intervention of Master Skywalker, your sentence has been – ”
Kylo lunged for the soldier nearest him and wrested the blaster from his grip. Even dulled by drugs, he had brute strength. Once the weapon was in his grasp, he backed towards the wall like a trapped animal.
Chaos erupted. The camera droid buzzed and twirled frantically, trying to record it all. Eleven blasters were trained on Kylo; their handlers looked, horrified, between General Holdo and the prisoner. The officers surrounding them fumbled for their sidearms. Rey broke through the crowd, her hand outstretched.
Kylo half-expected General Holdo to give the order to fire. He was surprised no one had fired on him yet, out of a sense of self-preservation or panic. If his would-be executioners thought he was making an attempt at freedom or a last stand, they were sorely mistaken.
Kylo lifted the blaster to his temple and pressed his longest finger to the cold trigger.
“No!” Rey sounded angry, rather than frantic. Her fingers clawed at the air impotently. The Force rippled around Kylo; the trigger didn’t budge.
Kylo bared his teeth at her before the death squad was on him and he was subdued. She watched, nostrils flaring, as General Holdo smoothed her brilliantly-hued hair and diaphanous dress and began to speak again.
“Your sentence has been commuted.” The General took a deep breath. She lacked the natural poise her predecessor had had – and, apparently, the nerve to kill. Leia Organa hadn’t lacked that. “The New Republic has cast off the brutal vestiges of tyranny.”
Kylo heaved under the grip of six men. He tasted blood in his mouth. The blaster was just out of his reach.
After a suitably self-satisfied and effusive speech from the new de facto leader of the Third Republic – there hadn’t been any elections yet, and half of the politicians were dead – Rey stomped over and kicked the blaster away. The tip of her boot nearly touched his chin.
Rey looked like she wanted to kick him.
It had been her special intercession that had saved him – twice – not Luke Skywalker’s. She’d not only jammed the commandeered blaster’s trigger; she’d pled for mercy on his behalf. She’d fought tooth and nail to deny him his dying wish – just to die, rather than to rot away in a cell, alone, cut off from the Force, haunted by ghosts, eaten alive with guilt, and, judging from her apparent predilection for sadism, tormented by her.
He’d underestimated the scavenger girl.