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She cups his cheek in her cold hand. “What should I do with you?”
Even if it wasn’t rhetorical, Kylo wouldn’t answer. He raises his chin defiantly, ignoring the bright blue buzz hovering above his left arm. If she intends to cut him to pieces like his grandfather before him, he will fight the pain in silence; he will never give her the satisfaction of hearing him beg.
“You’re so dramatic,” she says, shaking her head, and he realizes that he’s projecting, nearly vibrating with the force of his anger and rage. “This isn’t revenge. This is justice.”
--
He is smaller without his mask, Rey thinks, looking down at him. Even though she knows he is older than she is, even though Finn has told her of the massacre on Jakku, even though he mind-raped Poe and tried to mind-rape her, even though he killed Han in cold blood, even though she knows everything he has done and everything he is, he still sometimes looks like a petulant teenager.
There was no room for petulance on Jakku. Scavengers live on the edge, forever one mishap away from disaster and a quick death from exposure or starvation; Jakku justice has always been harsh and final, retributive rather than redemptive. Perhaps Luke would have tried to reclaim his nephew, would have brought him home and pretended there could be forgiveness, if not absolution – but Luke died at Kylo’s hand, another crime to add to his ledger, and so Kylo’s captor is Rey. Rey’s justice is altogether more stark.
She thinks back to their final battle. Perhaps she should have killed him then, finished it; but he had been crippled after she severed his connection with the Force, and killing him in cold blood as he lay screaming, lost in the void, would not have been justice.
“You will stand trial for your murders. Perhaps they will even let you live,” Rey says. Neither in her life as a scavenger nor her life as a Jedi has she learned about civilian justice systems. She doesn’t know if they will spare his life. “But murder wasn’t your only crime.”
--
Kylo’s eyelid is twitching spasmodically, a visible betrayal of his resolve to be strong, and he blinks in irritation, trying to place the man Rey leads in.
He thinks he should know him. The man is obviously Resistance - he wears an off-duty flight blazer in some squadron’s colors, and Rey keeps a steady hand on his elbow. A friend, then. Kylo finds himself resenting the wide humor of the man’s mouth, the sharp intelligence of his eyes, the strong curve of his shoulders. Rey should have been Kylo’s; she should have turned and become his apprentice, and together they would have ruled the galaxy.
“Do you even remember me?” the man asks, his mouth tight with strain.
The voice triggers Kylo’s memory. “The best pilot in the Resistance,” he says. “Who cries every time he sees sunflowers because they remind him of his dead mother.”
Rey severing his connection with the Force only took away Kylo’s power. It didn’t take away his rage, his fury, or his desire to make them pay, all of them pay. He won’t grovel to them, begging for his life like some ordinary person on a backwater planet. He will fight in every way he can, for as long as he can; and if they think they can redeem him, they haven’t realized how hard he has fought to embrace the Dark.
The day with the pilot had been a good day. He can remember the satisfaction he had felt when he punched through the pilot’s mental defenses, burrowing through his mind until he found the memory he needed. Hux’s torturers hadn’t been able to make him speak; Kylo had done that, forcing his way in and taking what he wanted. He had succeeded.
The sunflower memory was collateral information, worthless until now; but watching the pilot bite his lip bloodless, Kylo bares his teeth in a snarl.
--
“I can gag him,” Rey says, watching Poe’s face. This is supposed to be retributive justice, cathartic for the victim as well as punitive for the criminal. She doesn’t want Poe to be hurt; he is part of the family she has made for herself, and she will protect that family with her life.
But Poe, though sweet, is not weak, and he is already shaking his head. “He can’t hurt me.”
Rey isn’t sure of that – she has faced Kylo many times over the past few years, and she has seen the full weight of his savagery – but she has also seen Poe in battle, and she knows that you have to let people fly their own missions. Nodding, she lets go of his elbow and steps back. “Take your justice.”
Poe walks forward and stands over Kylo, in the same position Rey was a few minutes ago. He is not a tall man, but with Kylo restrained in the chair, he has him at his mercy.
There is silence. Rey, observer and protector, stays alert.
Finally Poe leans forward, his face not far from Kylo’s. “I can do anything I want to you,” he says, and the softness of his voice is unsheathed steel. “You tortured me. You raped my mind. I can take whatever I want, and Rey won’t stop me.”
Rey can feel Kylo’s fear, but it doesn’t show on his face. He looks Poe up and down. “You? I don’t think so.”
The snick of the knife opening is loud in the quiet room.
--
Kylo is determined. He will use all of the meditative techniques he used when he was a Sith (I still am! he throws at the universe. My Force power is only severed, not permanently destroyed. I will rise again.), he will bite through his lip if he needs to, but that wicked-looking utility knife in the pilot’s hand will never make him cry out.
“I haven’t even hurt you yet,” the pilot says, conversationally, sliding sliced fabric out from under Kylo and dropping it on the floor.
He is naked when the pilot finishes, naked and restrained in a torture chair, which sounds like the beginning of the raunchy Imperial-themed holonovels his teenage friends used to hide under their mattresses. Except Vader wasn’t usually the one in the chair.
Vader and Luke both survived having their hands chopped off. Kylo has survived blaster wounds, lightsaber slashes, and Snoke’s tender care. Whatever this pilot has in mind, Kylo has known worse.
The pilot stands back and inspects his handiwork.
--
There are so many scars on Kylo’s body, not just the one on his face. Rey has many of her own; growing up as a scavenger is not an easy life, and training as a Jedi will always involve some mishaps along the way. She wonders which of Kylo’s are from when he was Ben Solo, cocky kid flyboy, which are from his Padawan years, and which are true Kylo scars.
Poe abruptly turns on his heel and crosses the room, holding the knife out to her.
“Are you sure?” she asks, making no move to take it.
He nods, short and sharp. “He took my privacy, so I’ve taken his.”
“He also hurt you,” she says, neutral. Mind-rape is one of the most heinous crimes in the galaxy, not least because the perpetrator is proceeding from a position of absolute power. When Kylo tried to reach into her mind, he knew instantly that she had the ability to at least try to resist; he would have known equally instantly that Poe had no such ability. In this case, vengeance would also be justice.
Poe bites his lip, but his eyes are calm. “Yes. But I refuse to be like him.”
Poe is not like Kylo. He is the Resistance’s best pilot: he fights in battle with all the skill he possesses, trying to win for his people. But he is also an heir to the strong pacifist tradition running through the Resistance; she knows that there are few happier than he that his battle skills will soon no longer be necessary, once they eliminate the remaining First Order holdouts. He loves easily, fully, folding his friends into his life without reservation. Outside of battle, she has never seen him hurt a living soul.
Rey takes the knife and lays it aside, touches Poe’s forehead with two fingers. “Go in peace.”
Finn will be waiting for him back in their room, to hold him and comfort him. She watches Poe go, a weight lifted off his shoulders, and feels the fierce gladness of it in her own veins.
When he is gone, she turns to Kylo again.
--
The pilot was weak.
Kylo watches Rey comes towards him, and knows that she is not weak.
--
There is no one to tell Rey to take her justice. There will be no one to tell her to go in peace.
She is the last Jedi, thanks to Kylo. It will fall to her to begin again, training a new generation to use its Force powers, teaching them what she learned on Ahch-To. She will have to fight to keep her Padawans from using their strength for evil, even as she moves beyond such binaries as Jedi and Sith, beginning a new era. It seems like a hopeless task to face alone; but if there is one thing Luke taught her, it is that there is always hope.
“So,” she says, looking down at Kylo, “where should I begin?”
She is the ruthless hand of justice, and before she turns him over to the Republic to face trial for his murders, she will take some of her own.
--
Kylo has fooled around before, both before and after his turn to the Dark Side. He remembers rolling around on camp beds, remembers sucking in his breath as his lover moved against him, remembers smiling against warm skin. His parents were the heroes of the Rebellion, and he was their only child; even if he hadn’t been darkly handsome, he would have plenty of willing partners.
(After, well, the powers of the Dark Side make everyone willing.)
Never in his previous experience has he felt anything like he does now.
Rey twists her hand, and the terror in his stomach spikes; one wrong move – or one deliberate move – and he will be dead, sliced in two from the inside. Yes, he can tell himself that he won’t feel it, that he’ll be dead before he knows it, that she’ll be the one who has fried Sith all over her, but his hindbrain only knows that he is in immediate and fatal danger, and he has nowhere to shunt the fear and rage, no way to turn it into power.
From the outside it must look comical. A Jedi, tall and remote in the desert robes she still wears; a naked Sith, holding himself freezingly still, paralyzed with fright; a lightsaber hilt all that connects them, shoved up Kylo’s ass.
To Kylo it is anything but funny.
“You mind-raped Poe,” Rey says, her voice still level, although he can hear the anger in it. “You tried to mind-rape me. I’m sure you’ve done it to countless others.”
A year ago, he would have seized on the rage in her voice. He would have told her to embrace it, to turn to the Dark Side, to learn from him and help him take over the galaxy. But that was when he still had his power – and before he found out that Luke Skywalker, voluntary hermit, had discovered the first Jedi Temple and come to a new understanding of the Force. Kylo doesn’t understand the whole theory (no one has bothered to explain it to him), but he does know that it means that Rey is mastering her dark emotions rather than denying them.
He tries anyway. “There is much Dark in you,” he says, his knuckles white as he clenches his fingers against the terror inside. “Embrace it. I can teach you how to use it, how to become more powerful than you can ever imagine.”
“I’m fine, thanks,” Rey says, and shoves the lightsaber another inch.
It’s painful – Kylo’s lightsaber hilt is too big for the use she’s put it to – but that’s a distant feeling, superseded by the existential fright it signifies. If she pushes that button…
She lets go of the hilt, lets it hang.
--
Rage, fear, terror – it rolls off Kylo in waves. Rey closes her eyes and centers herself in the Force, channeling her own anger towards justice. This is not evil. She will not be seduced into evil, into using dark emotions to hurt, maim, pervert, corrupt, and kill, terrorizing the galaxy like this man’s grandfather or this man himself. This is justice.
The lightsaber will not ignite. She has placed a guard on it to prevent accidental ignition, although Force-blind Kylo does not know that; instant death is more than he deserves, and she will not give it to him.
There is one more element to her justice.
She shifts her robes, and as Kylo’s eyes widen, swings a leg over his face. “You are nothing,” she says, as he struggles to breathe, panic and terror beating against her own mental shields. “You have no power. Bow to mine.”
--
It would be easier to die via lightsaber, Kylo thinks, than to slowly suffocate between Rey’s strong thighs. He knows intellectually that she is unlikely to follow through – she has been clear that he will face trial – but that doesn’t help the instinctive need of his body for air, or prevent the adrenaline flooding his system. (And there’s still a lightsaber that could slice him apart at any moment.)
What kind of an ending would it be, for a Sith to die like this?
Yet it is tempting to let it all be over, to stop this helplessness, to end his fear and terror and the constant void where the Force once was.
But he will get the Force back, if he can only get through this. This will not be the end of Kylo Ren. And he will make the Jedi pay for this indignity.
“You’re running out of air,” Rey observes. She is too calm. “I suggest you start.”
Keeping his mind obstinately off the reality of his situation, he opens his mouth as she wishes, and she lets him breathe.
It comes down to this – he wants to live.
--
Even if she could not feel his emotions, Rey would feel the resentment in every movement of Kylo’s mouth, every swipe of his tongue. He is being forced into this – she is forcing him – and he will deliberately do a bad job.
But it is not about pleasure. It is about power, and justice; so Rey keeps her weight bearing down on him and closes her eyes, finding her center.
--
The worst part is that once he begins, the anger is harder to hold onto. He is too full of fear and terror, and now he has added humiliation. Fear and terror, anger and rage, those are all emotions he knows how to handle – or knew; he could turn them into power, or in weaker moments, vent them through destruction. Now he doesn’t know how to handle them – and he has never known how to handle humiliation.
When he was tempted to abandon the Dark Side, when Han stood before him on that bridge and begged him to return to the Light, one of the things that kept him from turning was the knowledge of how much humiliation would be waiting for him back at home. He would have forever been Ben Solo, failed Sith, who came whimpering back with his tail between his legs.
Now he has to face that humiliation, and without even the Force to help him.
She is so strong above him, so solid and warm. Her scent washes over him, invading his body, and he breathes her in with every breath. Without his permission, his mind calls up all the wet dreams he has had of her; all the daydreams in which she turned, becoming his student and coming into his bed. He has wanted her since he first saw her on Starkiller Base, all grown up and beautiful, tall and lethal.
--
His technique changes, grows less angry and more effective. Rey doesn’t think it’s entirely on purpose; he is conflicted, and the violence of his emotions is exhausting even to watch.
“You’re good at this, aren’t you,” she breathes, and grinds down on him, winding a hand in his hair.
Justice and pleasure are awkward bedfellows.
--
Kylo’s treacherous body thrills at the praise, and he struggles against the urge to just surrender to the desire to make her fall apart against him. He could do it. He could take back the power in this situation, make her body tremble against him as he brought her to completion. It would be easy.
Part of his brain thinks that’s ridiculous. Part of his brain also can’t forget about the lightsaber.
But this is no punishment if he accepts it willingly, no hardship if he lets himself enjoy it. There is no one here except she and him – there is only humiliation if he chooses to feel it.
He hears her little bitten gasp, and smiles.
--
After she comes, she dismounts and steps back on wobbly legs. His face is wet, but his eyes are as defiant as ever, his mouth crooked in an insolent smile.
That did not perhaps go quite as planned.
Still, she feels her own justice slot into place inside her. He has paid for his actions toward her on Starkiller Base, and she has accepted the payment. They are quits, she and him.
“I have put out an official announcement,” she says, watching his face as it contracts, sensing a new fear. “Those seeking justice from you for past crimes will report to me. I am the witness.”
And his protector, in a way. The only thing forbidden in this room is the taking of his life, and she will stop that, if any victims try. She does not think many will; most, like Poe, will choose to release their vengeance unslaked. Even those who choose to take their justice will hesitate at murder, from vestigial fear and from the innate human regard for life.
The lightsaber comes out without ceremony and without any great care; he can’t suppress a grunt of pain.
She does think some of his victims will use the provided aids in the next room, and for that she is not sorry. He has killed people she loved, and some crimes can never be expiated.
Go in peace, she tells herself, and shuts the door behind her.
--
Kylo watches the door, waiting for it to open again.