Reconcile

There are little blue tiles on the floor and slit windows narrow enough to accommodate a hand. There is a ‘fresher in the shallow adjoining room, and there are sheets on his bed, and there is a console in the corner where he can receive briefings regarding his case or relay valuable intelligence without even getting up to activate it. It’d be no good, anyway, none of the controls work from the inside. The room is empty and impersonal enough to be comforting; it smells of cut wood in the mornings and when he closes his eyes he can imagine himself on the pyre, ready to burn. Or beneath one, unseen. He doesn’t know why he thinks of this — he must have dreamed it once as a boy, before this whole nightmare unfurled — but it brings him something like peace.

Snoke is dead — obliterated beyond any hope of recovering a relic. Burned up, like Alderaan or the husk that made up the foundation of Starkiller Base. Ren is cut loose, blind to the Force, but not deaf to it. There are still tremors. Something to look forward to.

“You look pretty different. Without the mask, I mean.”

Kylo stirs at the sound of another man’s voice, though not a lot. He feels Dameron’s presence before he looks up — like a heat signature. He’d left a little of himself behind, maybe, in probing so coarsely through somebody else’s brain. The bulk of his rare visitations come by viewscreen — house arrest in a living space that is not his own is only a little less humiliating than being kept in actual chains. But he is accustomed to confinement. Perhaps it will do him good.

Poe Dameron has made it only so far as the doorway, but already his intrusion is palpable. His hands are in his pockets.

“Go and turn your life around and they stick you in here, right? Doesn’t seem fair.”

“My position had become untenable,” Kylo says as he rises, with all the severity he can martial up from a throat aching from disuse. Untenable is putting it gently, what with Hux undercutting him at every opportunity, his fellow Knights of Ren jeering at him. With Snoke using him with every intention of discarding him.

He is weak now. Sick, now. But free.

“Well, I’ll tell you what—” Dameron makes an expansive gesture, closing the distance between them with noiseless tread. “I think you owe a couple people an apology.”

Kylo does not say, You seemed more than willing to lay down your life at the time, or anything else, but raises a hand to reflexively sweep him aside. He doesn’t mean to do anything, he just doesn’t want Dameron touching him, but Dameron’s grip closes around his fingers with bone-grinding solidity. He isn’t a large man by any means — and he’d seemed smaller still, strapped in for interrogation — but he’s angry, and the struggle against the reflex to hurt him right back is enough to make him see spots.

He’s only trying to get a rise out of him, nothing else. This is the legacy of what Kylo Ren has been and done, a sorry state of affairs but completely warranted. Doesn’t a high-ranking pilot have something better to do than rattle cages? His other visitors have all been serious diplomats and droids — any day now he’ll be on the receiving end of a tongue-lashing from Threepio, if they haven’t disassembled him for parts yet.

Kylo twists his hand into a grip around Dameron’s, though he cannot make it look or feel particularly affable; it isn’t a threat. (Dameron’s hands are warm and callused, and completely unflinching.) He tries to summon up as much tranquility as he can, without the aid of a barrier to screen his face.

“Leave. I wouldn’t want to hurt you.” He regrets these limping words as soon as they’ve left his lips. Ren’s lips are splitting; his voice is unnaturally deep in his throat.

“That’s generous of you.”

Dameron shakes loose and strikes him with the side of his hand, fetching him a hard cuff. It’s not enough to rattle his teeth, but the sting of it against his cheek is a jolting indignity on its own. Stripped of the mask, he is hopelessly bare — his expressions read too plainly without any barrier. (An air of mystery, someone once said, a long time ago.) His lips part a little at the indignation, his nostrils flare; he is aware of these alterations in his expression but not in control of them. His own body is always just out of his control.

It would have been easy — if this were back then and not now, to swat him like an insect, rather than steel himself for symbolic indignities meant to aggravate him into shattering his bond. That is what Kylo Ren would have done, a decade ago — a year ago. A month ago. The days are longer now. That is the only way he knows that time has passed at all — pretty soon he’ll be scratching lines into the walls, like a convict. They execute convicts every day on the more populous planets — child-killers and father-killers, as common as grains of sand. Nothing special. Nothing interesting.

(He had quarreled with his old master once about the necessity of capital punishment, and now he is looking down the blade of it. Time to put those boyhood principles to the test.)

Sizing the man up, he cannot help being frustrated with what he sees — Dameron isn’t exactly pale and quaking at the sight of him; Resistance-born and bred, he radiates informal contempt, from his untucked shirt to his shoes. The Resistance fear Kylo Ren still, this much he knows, but they know only dimly what it is he can do without an armada behind him. Dameron should fear him most of all — he has tasted Ren’s power firsthand, and alone. But the terms of Ren’s defection and imprisonment are clear — he is not to resist, he is to cooperate with all lines of Resistance questioning to the best of his ability, there will be no special treatment in accordance with his rank. The better part of his power died with Snoke, if it had ever been his to begin with; it had burned out of him like dross.

“A glutton for punishment.” The words are a nasty little Hux-ism, hard and clumsy in his mouth like a stone. “If I said I was sorry, would it make this more bearable for you?”

Dameron makes a gesture with a movement of his head. “Don’t act tough. If you could do anything, you’d have done it already — you can’t even levitate that little teacup of yours without raising the alarm. It’s just weird seeing your ugly face, that’s all.”

(It isn’t a teacup, it’s a hard metal mug full of the same bitter brew the General loves and Kylo hasn’t touched it. If he were in a cell that aspired to the old Imperial standard — as he may some day be, paying the kind of price the First Order customarily extracts from traitors — he wouldn’t be able to trust the food and drink not to be spoiled or worse. Here the water is sweet and no one’s tried to gas him or slip a thousand-legged insect under his pillow.)

If it were Kylo in his place — standing over a hated enemy — he knows what he’d do. Poe Dameron is here to kill him.

“If you harm me,” Ben who is no longer Kylo says, “she’ll know.” The word he is avoiding is hurt. It’s a childish word. Children fear being hurt.

“Make this easy on yourself. I’ll let your mom know how good you’ve been. You haven’t wrecked anything in a while, you haven’t headfucked anybody —"

“What do you want me to do?”

Dameron’s eyes are bright, and they watch him closely. They are a kind man’s eyes. They are laughing at him.

“Start undressing. Standard weapons inspection just like the guys in lockup. We can do this slow and easy, or I can run and get some friends, your choice.”

It is all he can do not to sneer whether that is all. In comparison to himself, to Snoke, to Hux, to anyone else who isn’t under Rebel aegis, Poe Dameron is an amateur. He has seen Poe Dameron, torn through the layers of shame in his mind as brittle as dried leaves, he has dredged up a core sample of a lifetime’s humiliations great and small and laid it out for him to examine. There is nothing Dameron can do to equal that, Kylo thinks to himself as he undoes wooden buttons and peels off his outermost layers of clothing. There is nothing he can do, equipped with such blunt instruments. Killing him half-undressed won’t satisfy him any more than doing so any other way.

Ren’s clothes are a loose parody of Jedi garb, hacked together from somebody else’s cast-offs, too short for him at the wrists. He is built on larger than average lines, for a human, but this much is too ridiculous to be truly unintentional. Removing them is almost a relief — almost a liberation from the chain of small mockeries his garments represent.

Almost.

“Hold out your arms. Roll up your sleeves.” Dameron makes a gesture like he’s rubbing his wrists, as if Kylo is in too-tight binders. He hasn’t even unholstered his blaster yet.

When it occurs to him what Dameron is looking for — not only weapons, but new injuries, like he’s some high-strung first-timer. If he were to escort himself out of his new position as favorite hostage, it wouldn’t be like that. Better to burn up in some unmemorable dead-end sun or plunge from an impossible drop than do something so pitifully ineffectual. He’d break his spine first, before that. Ridiculous.

Ren grimaces, showing teeth, and complies.

He’s bare to the waist now, exposing the worst of his injuries to inspection. The blackened gouge in his shoulder smarts in contact with the air; the welt of the bowcaster round that broke his ribs still shows up green on his bloodless skin. Letting the injuries of a voluntary prisoner go by without treatment is a war crime by a dozen different interplanetary treaties — but Kylo Ren is a war criminal, so those strictures can hardly apply like they were meant to. They can’t spare the resources, not on him. His hands find the deep cauterized gouges left by the girl’s saber blade — another unbidden image in his mind of the girl as she is now, overlooking a staggering vista illuminated only by lightning, her master a few paces behind her. The vision wells up like blood, as clear as anything.

Does she see him now? Wasted and weak, unplugged from the direct line that his affinity with the Force had given him. Any visions he receives are erratic and broken. He hates this body, damaged as it is now. He has always hated this body, he has always striven to transcend it — two meters of pathetic blood and bone. The night air pebbles the skin on his chest, and he can feel Dameron’s eyes on him like the pass of a hand, very close to the surface of his skin yet not quite touching. Insolent eyes. He had been insolent then, on Starkiller Base, and it had been a pleasure to break him.

He has stripped to the waist and his hands are on the fastenings of his trousers, unsure whether to affect lewdness or absolute indifference, when Dameron calls out.

“Alright, that’s enough.”

Such strange abruptness — Kylo may no longer be permitted to use the Force in an active manner, but its passive use is part of his nature he can’t shut out, and the strange flinch in his mood that accompanies the order is troubling to interpret. Perhaps he only means to beat him — how ridiculous would that be, as if superficial injuries could rattle him now?

And that is that, for the first night. He locks the door behind him when he leaves; Kylo is already bending down to pull on his shirt and tie his belt. He can hear the code keying in, the slip of metal bolts to secure him like an animal in his little room.

Odd, but not frightening. Inconvenient more than anything, and too baffling to lose one’s temper over.

**

Ben Organa knew Poe Dameron once, when he was a boy — that is the distasteful truth throbbing like a burst blood vessel in the back of his mind. Kylo Ren does not remember if he was a kind boy, or a cruel boy, or funny or loud or pugnacious or shy or whether he simply did not make an impression at all. Those are the kinds of things Ben would know, and Ben is dead; his carcass rots in a little room.

(Had he thought that it would be easy? Had he thought he could simply return to the place he had fallen from, did he think he could rest easily in the Light—)

The second night, Kylo hardly notices him enter.

“General’s orders. Everybody up.”

Poe Dameron’s sing-song voice, light and humorous in the dark, makes Kylo Ren’s skin crawl worse than Snoke’s grimmest pronouncements. The shock baton lies across his thighs like some grotesquely unsubtle symbolism — Kylo knows exactly what to make of that, he isn’t blind. Psychological warfare, just the same as his own subjects finding themselves thrust onto their backs, legs apart, bound. Vulgar posturing, that’s all.

Kylo holds up both his hands — he is unarmed, the datapad he has been reading lies where he left it on the thin smooth bedspread. It’s only loaded with one document, a painfully dry history that has been enough to divert him here without putting dangerous thoughts in his head. This man is here to be sure he isn’t corresponding with agitators, or meditating, or finger-painting in the blood of younglings, or hanging from the ceiling by a rope. This man is here to monitor him. That is all.

Kylo’s shirt is coming unfastened; the cool air licks down his chest. Somehow it feels more obscene than deliberately stripping down in front of a power-tripping martinet with a grudge. Dameron’s eyes are on him again. Soft eyes, warm brown eyes in an affable face.

Kylo sticks out his chin and lets those warm eyes dwell on him. If it gives his captor some thrill to catch him off-guard, at least he’s unlikely to like what he sees. His technique needs work; that’s the sick joke in it, the contorted mirror-view of when it was Ren in his element and Dameron dawdling for time.

“Am I to your satisfaction?” Let him look. Kylo would rip him apart, if he weren’t so committed to goodness.

“She wants to see you.” She, as if there is only one woman on this entire resistance base. The mention of his mother makes his heart leap, in a sick kind of way, and it’s all he can do to quell it back down again. Her, here? He doesn’t know if he’d throttle her or cry all over her shoes.

“Tell General Organa she can interrogate at her leisure once it’s light out.”

“Don’t be like that, Ben. I told her you were gonna cooperate.”

He says it so softly, and he makes no showy prelude, there is no crackle of sound to herald what is coming next and Kylo does not realize what is happening until the baton deploys its charge into his shoulder at full strength. He goes from seated on the edge of the mattress to sprawling on the floor, electrified with white pain, vision gone — Dameron shocks him a second time, and the convulsion sweeps his heavy body like a wave, numb and burning.

His muscles take an agonizingly long time to unlock, not all at once but piece by piece, leaving him in his prone sprawl with his calf muscles spasming and his heart like a stone in his chest. Dameron’s boot is parked against his hammering ribcage.

There is bile in the back of his mouth, threatening to spill up completely, and his father’s voice is in his head, always hated those things. So much for reflex.

He must have made a sound when he fell, because Poe Dameron is laughing.

“All right, all right, get it together, big guy. Get on your knees. Back to the wall. You remember how to do that, right? You kneeled in front of your mom, right? You couldn’t stand up.”

He is shaking too much to dredge himself up, soft palms scraping on the tile — where are his gloves, he needs gloves, see how soft he’s grown, how weak—

My mother would never condone this. The words slip out of his mind unbidden and carves into Dameron’s like the scratch of a fingernail — he can gouge no deeper. And back, quick and clear as the crack of a whip, comes the retort: the butt of the shock baton strikes him hard enough to chip his teeth. His head knocks back against the stone wall and in the instant that his vision shorts out, snapping like a strained wire.

His right ear blossoms into pain. Dameron is cradling him now, crouching down, one hand in a fist at the back of his head, shaking him by his hair — not roughly, distinct individual shakes. Ren’s head is loose on his neck.

“She doesn’t want to see you. She never wants to see your fucking face.” Muffled, now, like it’s coming to him through deep water: “Never go in my head like that again. Now you’re going to get on your knees, okay? This is just inspection, round two. Okay?”

Dameron doesn’t even sound angry. He sounds like he is struggling to be patient with a child. Perhaps in his eyes this is reasonable. Rebel depravity, that’s a Hux-ish phrase.

Ben. He’d called him Ben. Poe Dameron remembers him, and he isn’t pleased.

Breathing is impossible; his battered ribcage heaves like a bellows, ripping his lungs raw with each breath, and none of it affords him anything by way of relief. Kylo does not kneel the way he knelt in front of his mother — kneeling was an exaggeration there, he had crumpled, he would have landed on his face if it’d happened a moment sooner. He had been weak, then. Injured and damaged, without control. He is weak now.

Time to let his breaths come shallowly, now, to stop just short of slipping into meditation with the blood singing in his ears and the familiar twist of rage too much for his brittle body. He does not raise his face in mock-adoration, or cower; he adopts the attitude he has held before his erstwhile master a thousand times. Spine stiff, thigh muscles locked, shoulders back. Arms at his sides, bent crookedly back so that Dameron cannot see his hands shake. He does not look up.

Poe is close already, but he closes the distance between them with easy confidence as he undoes his belt. The baton remains present for the threat it presents, hanging from his shoulder by a strap — it would be easy, it would be so easy to overcome him, but he cannot raise a hand against this man any more than—

This man is guarding a tremendously politically significant criminal in the days before his trial, one whose sincerity has been openly questioned on just about every level of these rebels’ organization. He ought to know better. Dameron himself has had no shortage of daring escapes, overwhelming his guards and relieving them of their weapons in no time flat. His carelessness is a test of its own; he is daring his prisoner to try it, daring him to raise a hand against him and get fried to a crisp. If it is easy it is only because Dameron makes it easy.

Kylo spits a stringy slug of blood, but it doesn’t make it past his chin. “You’re acting beyond your pay grade, commander.”

“Yeah, well. There’s a war going on, what do you want?” Dameron rolls his shoulders a little in boyish indifference. (Dameron had a jacket once, but he’s not wearing it now. Where’s his jacket?) His hand fumbles impatiently at his thigh. “I’m gonna need you to cooperate here, buddy. I don’t want to zap you again. You might piss yourself.”

Kylo is opening his mouth to make some furious retort when Dameron catches at his face with one hand, pressing down between his teeth to force apart his jaws.

Dameron’s hands are square and serviceable. They bear all the calluses and scars of an experienced pilot, they are like the hands that taught him how to repair speeder-bikes and aim blasters; there is a faint pink burn on one knuckle and suddenly it is pressing into his cheek. Kylo wants to be sick.

He possesses immeasurable strength, still, even here — he could crush him without rising from his knees, he could emasculate him without laying a hand on him and leave him bleeding, he could rip his throat out and paint all the little blue tiles in the floor red. He longs to call down Force lightning like the Emperor did so long ago and give him a taste of his own medicine, to leave him convulsing on the floor. But he isn’t Kylo Ren any more, he is the Ben that died, the child that suffocated on its own blood— he is a corpse, he is a walking skeleton now, a foul thing. His breath is a horrible rattle in the back of his throat.

This is the test of his docility.

Poe forces his blunt thumb between Kylo’s lips — like he’s looking for something. They’ve already probed him a dozen different ways for self-destruct mechanisms and poison pills. Dameron will find nothing. His thumbnail chips against one of his front teeth.

“If you bite me,” Dameron says, “I’ll make sure she sees you like this.”

The pad of his thumb tastes like engine oil.

He’s not hard at first, though Kylo is trying not to look. He has himself cupped in his hand loosely enough that the warm dry flesh falls against Kylo’s cheek with a definite heaviness. His other hand no longer holds apart his awful jaws, but it grasps at the limp mat of Kylo’s hair — Kylo has been too sad to bathe, like a heartsick idiot, like a child.

It’s just like a medical exam; he has nothing to be afraid of. The discomfort, the orders, all of it. Dameron wants access to his mouth, but he has no way of invading Kylo’s mind if he doesn’t let him — Kylo is weak now, but the barriers he has built up for decades are strong. He will never be inside him like Snoke was inside him; anything short of that should be laughed at.

This is what the Light costs. His teeth part, and his tongue displaces a little to make room. Like an exam, just like an exam.

“Take it in your mouth. Don’t be shy about it.”

The hand on the back of Kylo’s head draws him forward. The taste is all the way down his throat already, before he’s even begun — the stink of raw masculinity.

“That’s nice. That’s it. You know what to do.”

He does not know what to do — he has never been so close with another man, or with anyone, he knows sex only by way of scattershot visions and the feverish imaginings Snoke had chosen to impart, when he had been a teenage boy overrun by rampant chemicals and involuntary access to the minds of other adolescents. Perhaps this part is the test, seeing if he’ll abase himself patiently rather than do harm. Perhaps — his mother arranged this, she would never, she would never stand for this if she knew. For anyone else, maybe. Kylo Ren is a special case.

(—and Dameron had called him Ben—)

The girth of it is an obscene surprise. He gags once, with Dameron murmuring small praises and thumbing at his exposed ear. He does not call him by name, but his hands are warm — his cock is warm, flush with blood even while Kylo is clammy with horror.

He knew Poe once, when they were boys. What had he ever done back then to make Poe hate him like this? It isn’t hate that simmers off him. It’s something else.

Dameron’s grip adjusts on the back of his skull, working Kylo’s mouth against his erection as if he’s a thing and not a person — it forces him forward a little, so his hands must grasp for purchase against the tile and the tops of Dameron’s scuffed boots. Fucking into his mouth in earnest now— he wants to make him whimper, he wants to make him gag, Kylo is Master of the Knights of Ren yet, he has endured worse than this, this is hardly pain at all—

He blinks through the smudge of involuntary watering eyes; the blood still trickles from his nose, making it difficult to breathe, but he is in no position to be wiping it away. His jaw is beginning to cramp, straining to accommodate this man’s leaking cock — the awful sensation of dribbling slickness has him swallowing and swallowing again, he can feel the cartilage in his own throat leap and his gullet go tight and Dameron’s small sounds of satisfaction,

He gags again when it is withdrawn from him. His chin and his cheek are wet with shame now, throbbing with humiliation in the midst of other more concrete pains; Poe’s voice comes down to him dimly, like an echo down a long corridor.

“I always wanted to do this.”

The tiles are the irregular smoky blue of a midday winter storm. His eyes fix on them, between Dameron’s boots like slivers of sky.

His body is slack now, like one of those dolls children make out of rags. Poe dries off his cock with a fistful of hair — he is an obscenity, he is unthinkable.

(Now he can be wholly Kylo again, alive with pain and crackling with anger. The pain is like an anchor.)

The pad of a thumb presses deliberately into Kylo’s bruised temple. Fingers splay across his face, his cheek, his dripping nose — slick with Kylo’s blood and Poe’s own come, exerting benign pressure like Kylo is some domesticated animal that must be muzzled before it can sink in its fangs.

“Your mom’s coming through in the next couple days. You fell getting out of your bunk. It happens all the time.” (Kylo wants to say, I’m sure it does, with Poe in charge, but all that comes out between his raw lips is a low occluded rasp. Poe’s knee nudges him sharply back. He sounds more distracted than anything.) “See you tomorrow night, buddy. And take a shower, for fuck’s sake.”

Kylo falls back against the wall, his hands unfolding slack against his thighs.

**