Chapter Text
It helped that Asher was dressed as a maintenance technician instead of a gruesome Knights of Ren, Finn thought as he and the others with them, Peng, Lai-da, and two other deserters — Bonn and Trex renamed from their ID BN and TR — sat together in the still-stocked kitchen, eating warmed-up rations.
It was like getting to know someone completely different from his reputation. Still, Finn wouldn’t forget what he had been for years.
“So you killed your brother to get in.”
“It was that, or eventually be turned over to the village elders and be hacked to pieces and then burned to ashes.”
“Why didn’t you just run away?” Finn was asking the tough questions, but he already sympathized with the young man who had been found when he was barely a youth. Run where?
“There was nowhere to go. I hid in the Jedi temple for a few days, and that’s where the Knights found me.”
“The villagers scattered but my brother and father came to get me. My father yelled and cursed the Knights and waved his hands in the air in those warding patterns, while my brother grabbed me, saying I was his little brother, and no one else would get me.
“I made my choice then. I stabbed him with the blade one of the Knights — I think it was Kuruk Ren — gave me, and plunging it into his belly felt like returning all the abuse he had done to me since he had found out I was Force-sensitive, three years before. The Knights killed my father. They wanted to burn the whole village down.” After a short pause, he added, “but I don’t remember if they did. I was thirteen.”
Surprisingly, Asher’s story sounded a lot like some of the conscript stormtroopers’ own stories: ‘come with us and survive’.
“Ben Solo joined us the year after that. I’d learned what it was to be a Knight of Ren by then. It was different after Kylo took over. More chaotic but also less bloodthirsty. We’d get in, get whatever artifacts we’d come for, destroy the temple or repository, and get out faster. If Jedi cultists were present, we would kill them. If a Jedi survivor was found, Kylo would duel them. He said it was for study.
“I always wondered about that,” Asher fell silent at that.
“About what?” Finn prompted him.
“If he was hoping the Jedi would kill him. He had terrible bouts of… depression, I guess. Anyway, we weren’t allowed some of the things we had been under the first Ren. Like sport with the prisoners. But Kylo brought us to pleasure houses more often and paid for it.”
It was a strange deal the Master had made with his disciples, trading bloodlust for another, hopefully less destructive one.
“If things got out of hand, the knight would get disciplined. It was hard going, getting used to the new rules. I’m not surprised we finally turned on him.”
“And you?”
“I’d like to find my mother and my sister after the war is over.”
Sometimes, simple things keep us alive.
“Ah. I see. I remember a sister, too,” Finn said. “They didn’t take her.”
A rebel stormtrooper came back into the kitchen from the office down the hall.
“There, your ID has been updated,” he said, handing the data cylinder back. “Congratulations, Ishford Foxglove, you’re no longer dead.”
…
The Absolution, restored almost to its former glory but carrying a debilitating virus unbeknownst to the new crew and captain, launched on the day after. Like the virus it carried, Finn’s cell of rebels lay dormant, hidden from sight and diagnostics tools. They weren’t ready yet.
Using Kyl0 R3n’s secret access, the team members could communicate together. The intel the Resistance headquarters received was mostly encouraging. Finn and the others had identified dozens of resistant troopers and crew, and made contact with them. They’d gotten some precious intel from them.
“The Supreme Council has ordered the First Order to carry on and conquer a few new minor systems,” Connix ko Kaidel reported, “but the new recruits are more resistant to the basic programming than anticipated. There have been almost uninterrupted battles over the last two weeks — since the mutiny, or whatever you want to call it — and the troops are exhausted and hard to control.”
“Some of the ships have been restored to full service, but many are in barely functional shape, like the Absolution they’re traveling on. They expect to rejoin the main fleet within the cycle.”
Later that day, more news came in.
“They made it onto the Steadfast!”
Rose, standing beside Rey and the others, left the communications to head back to the hangar where the starfighter she was working on was waiting. Rey followed her.
For the next half hour, each woman tightened bolts that didn’t need to be tightened. Finally Rey spoke.
“We’ll get them back.”
“I don’t think they want to come back just yet.”
“Then we’ll join them.”
“You can’t go anywhere near the action now. You’re too important.”
That surprised Rey, who didn’t know how to take her new status.
“Finn is doing what he was meant to do, Rey,” Rose told her friend, and Rey felt the truth of it, and her friend regain hope. “He’s trying to find as many dissident stormtroopers as he can, to neutralize the First Order from within. It’s what Rebels do.”
Rey hesitated a moment, but finally nodded. Her role was something else. Something only the Jedi — or whatever they would be now — could achieve: take care of the gifted individuals they would surely find over the years. Not let them be corrupted or abandoned, like she had been.
Poe walked in, and waved at them when he saw Rey. “Solo wants to spar.”
Rose made a face, and Rey blushed.
“No, I mean practice martial forms,” Poe almost laughed at their discomfiture. “Geez. Women. He says it will help calm him down. He’s worried, like all of us.”
Rey looked over at Rose, who blushed in turn, then waved her friend away. “Go. Learn what you’re supposed to learn, since that’s part of it, the Force and all that.”
Rey put her tools away and ran out.
On a space of beaten ground, Ben Solo sat waiting for her in a meditative trance, though Rey felt it break as soon as she reached him.
He opened his eyes to look at her and she was instantly breathless, caught in that smoldering gaze. But she saw how unnerved he was and that helped give her some confidence. They were both smitten with the same feelings.
Passion, he’d called it, but he had nuanced the notion, differentiating it from the Sith definition of wild energy and lust. Ben’s expression of passion was soft and affectionate. Loving.
He got up and walked over to get the wooden practice swords. Using non-lethal weapons meant that Ben Solo was a lot less inhibited with his strikes, and Rey came away with multiple bruises after each session. It told her much about her opponent’s restraint that he hadn’t maimed her in their earlier, less friendly, confrontations. He could have killed her anytime, even when hurt himself, but he had chosen to try to subdue her instead.
Today, however, after the past days of intensive training, she finally felt the progress she had been making. She had resisted his attempts at disarming her, parried more than a few attacks, and even managed a few scores on him, for which he had let out a satisfying yelp.
By the end of the session, though, she was beaten, the wood hitting her in the ribs, painfully dragging across them and signaling her death by bisection. She was tired.
“Well, you would be hand-less after today,” she responded to his laugh, “which is just as bad, if you ask me.”
“Bah, it runs in the family. I’d get used to it,” he retorted, massaging his wrist.
Rey put her hand on his. “I wouldn’t. I like your hands. I like your fingers, keep them.”
And as usual, whenever Rey made any sexual innuendo, Ben only stood and gaped at her, shocked.
Shocked that she had been so ready for him. Shocked that she had wanted him at all. It only made her bolder.
“Well, I’m tired, but still worked up,” she squeezed his fingers; “Let’s see if you have anything left in you. Maybe make up for all the bruises you left on me.”
…
Aboard the Falcon, it was magical; the way he kissed her and she melted into his arms. He found every one of her bruises and kissed them softly, and then he kissed her in places she hadn’t been kissed before, tasting her for the first time.
At first, shy and unsure about the caress, Rey had pushed him away, but he hummed his appreciation of her and the sensation was maddening, almost overwhelming… and she finally understood it was better to let him give her the pleasure he promised.
And pleasure, it was.
As he laved at her, Rey found herself needing to grasp the sheets tightly to keep from floating out into the night sky. She squirmed and he held her down, and she felt some new energy emanate from him, a beast of pleasure, wild and hungry and only her soft touch could tame it.
When she finally reached climax, he held her softly in place, drinking in her pleasure like a long-awaited reward.
Afterwards, they lay together. The feelings were right, good. Like finally coming home.
…
Everything was in place. Everyone was looking at General Organa, hand hovering over the launch button. People around the console held their breath.
She pressed it, in one decisive movement. Today, the First Order would be muzzled; by the end of this cycle, it would be neutralized. Everyone shifted their attention from the aged hand that cast the die, to the screen, where the communication network overlaid the weapons systems nodes on the Steadfast.
From a tiny green dot on the blue hologram, a web spread out quickly, reaching red nodes in strategic places: each node reached then turned orange, meaning they were compromised.
“General,” A call came in over the radio, “I’m going to draw fire from the starboard ion cannon battery, wish me luck.”
Captain Dameron, in his now fixed Black One X-Wing, plunged and flew across the Steadfast’s starboard wing, firing lazily into its shielding, not expecting to make any damage.
The cannons soon targeted him and fired a volley at him, which he easily dodged, quick and nimble.
On the projected hologram, the orange node turned green. A side visual showed the canons ejecting charge after charge of un-fired ordnance into the space before them.
When Dameron made a second pass, the area had turned into a veritable minefield. He shot into one, banking hard starboard, away from the field.
The effect was devastating. The whole area erupted into a chain reaction of conflagrations, imploding quickly inwards to the canons at the center of that cloud. The whole turret ripped apart.
“Alright, squadrons, this is Black One speaking… you know what to do… target all artillery cannons and Open Fire!”
X-wings and all types of agile starfighters that had joined the Resistance jumped out of hyperspace. They immediately flew like clouds of Hosnian wasps and fired small volleys of laser blasts or torpedoes on the great ship’s hull, easily evading return fire.
Everywhere over the First Order’s capital ship, turrets and canons became surrounded by clusters of their own ordinance, and as the starfighters made a second pass, most were set off by Resistance fire.
The Steadfast’s shields faltered, punched through by their own ammunition. Their weapons were destroyed in fantastic chains of explosions. The fighters thrived, lighting everything up like fireworks.
TIE-fighters came out, much fewer than expected, and just like their main Star-Destroyers, their guns locked up after the first shot, merely ejecting round after round or creating reactive plasma clouds around them.
First Order communications erupted in panic calls to ‘CEASE FIRE! CEASE FIRE!’ to stop late fighters from blowing themselves up with their own munitions.
“This is the most extraordinary use of coding tech I have ever seen,” Ben exclaimed, standing beside his mother, flabbergasted at the implosion of his old command.
Leia took his hand and squeezed it. “Best tactic I’ve seen in a long time. And did you notice how few TIEs came out at all? It must be chaos on board those ships right now. Mutiny.”
The First Order comms channels they had hacked were a cacophony of contradictory orders, yelling, and the cries of the wounded.
“The officers must be completely overwhelmed. I can’t imagine what’s going on on the Bridge.”
“Do you think they’ll surrender, son, or turn tail and flee?”
“They’ll try to retreat, but I don’t think the rebels will let them. This ends today.“
As they watched, they saw that the hyperdrive engines did fire up… and then sputter out, just as Ben predicted. Rey, standing beside him, squeezed his hand in mute support.
The other Star-Destroyers, meanwhile, after testing their own armament and seeing it equally compromised, sat there, useless as a jammed blaster. One ship turned around, and for a moment, it looked ready to ram into the Manicouagan, but even that maneuver was stopped as it started.
The group standing around the command console watched the battlefield render from the holo-projector before them, saw each ship outline turn from red to orange… to green. The Steadfast was orange, still.
They waited in silence. It was still a dogfight out here, though the tactic employed by the First Order pilots was now to lure Resistance fighters into clouds of ammunition. They heard Poe give the command:
“Fall back, all squadrons. They’re disarmed now. Don’t pursue them into that minefield. Give them a chance to surrender.”
Ben, still beside his mother, gave an approving grunt, quickly echoed by Chewie.
“Mercy,” Leia repeated.
Some of the TIE fighter pilots, perhaps too broken by years of conditioning, chose to kamikaze against the hull of the Manicouagan, but their fragile skiffs merely scratched the hull of the Resistance flagship and did minimal damage.
Now TIEs stopped attacking altogether, floating in space, lost.
“What are you doing!?” they finally heard General Hux’s screech over the comms, distorted and hysterical. “Attack, attack, Attaaaa—!”
It was mercifully cut off.
In the relative silence — the fighter squadrons and mixed troops on the still-orange ships a frantic background noise now — they heard Finn’s voice, loud and clear: “Surrender, Hux, or I’ll shoot you and ask Pryde here to do it.”
“The First Order will not submit to a ragtag army of— Ah!.”
It was unclear what was happening aboard the capital ship.
“Who will do it, then? Hurry up! Would you rather get shot, or get tried in a court of justice?”
“I’ll do it,” claimed a soft voice from the background. Then a message was announced, a call to attention, loud and clear across every communication channel.
“First Order Officers and troops, this is Captain Edrison Peavey of the Star-destroyer the Steadfast. Stand down and surrender to the Rebel forces. I say again, this is Captain Edrison Peavy of the capital ship the Steadfast: the First Order surrenders its military forces to the Resistance. Cease fire— I mean cease hostilities immediately!”
Over the comms channel, the Resistance officers heard a succession of “Aye, we surrender,” spoken resignedly over the air, by the officers of each ship still functioning, until everyone who had the power to do so had called in.
The bridge of the Manicouagan erupted in cheers and claps across the backs of those who had organized this surprising — almost surgical — tactic.
…
Both the Resistance and the First Order had sustained minimal casualties, or at least it appeared so. Finn gave a preliminary situation report at the end of the next hour, medical personnel working hard on every ship. In parallel, the dead were gathered and tallied on each ship parade ground. The ones dead in the vacuum of space were recuperated.
The defeated were stripped of rank and tagged for further interview. The support personnel: cooks, maintenance, techs, would probably find useful employment post war, if they showed proper repentance for siding with the would-be imperial forces. Not surprisingly, many had joined due to lack of opportunity in the time of the Republic, then later had been conscripted under First Order rule.
“I warned them, those senators that thought everything was settled and optimal, that they were leaving some systems behind,” Leia told the people gathered near her in the post-war debrief room. “I also warned them that a centrist approach was disrespectful to the diversity of the Galaxy. That it would breed xenophobia.”
Lando Calrissian had made it back at the tail end of the confrontation, astounded by the rapid implosion of the First Order it had been hard, sitting with Chewbacca in the Millenium Falcon, to mostly let things play out with minimal interference. Now the forces he had amassed were busy participating in a cleanup effort.
He stood with Leia and Ben Solo, who was getting ready to interview a small group of First Order members that maybe were sensitive to the Force.
“We should have paid more attention at home too.” Lando said quietly. “We knew what Dark forces were like. We were complacent ourselves, thinking our families were so far removed from conflict, we would be safe from whispers.“
“He made himself discreet, that Dark whisperer,” Leia tried to explain. “And I believed Ben was safe with Luke. I thought Ben needed a strong teacher, when he really only needed someone to let him know he didn’t have to carry all the weight of legacy.”
Ben straightened, attentive, but not saying anything.
“I should have told him the truth. I should have told everyone the truth. I should have risked my precious reputation and be freed from extortion.”
Chewbacca whined approval.
“You didn’t want to sully the Organa family name.” Ben finally said.
“For all the good that did me. Us. I clung to power, son.”
Ben fell silent again, surprised by this sudden admission.
“I should have traced those Knights of Ren back to their Master when Luke mentioned them to me. We could have discovered Snoke years before he caught you. Luke could have been better prepared to deal with your turmoil.”
“Luke was overwhelmed, mom. He was caught up in the Skywalker legacy too. Trying to be purer than pure. To purge all darkness from himself, and he blinded himself to my own conflict.”
“And that’s why the school is doubly important now, Ben,” said Lando. “We have to reach out to all those witch hunting cultures and accept their scapegoats and freaks, and also teach better ways to the First Order troopers that repressed their power just to stay alive. It’s a good thing you spared that young man…”
“Asher. Yeah. I think he’s grateful.”
Just then the young man himself arrived, with three people in tow. He nodded silently to Ben and his family as they caught his eye.
A new era would begin today.