Even after all this time, Kylo thinks of the throne room as belonging to Snoke. Though he’s inherited the creature’s title, his power, even his Navigators, it isn’t his. He has reluctantly come to accept it never will be. It’s only when he hears the familiar clip of a particular set of boots that it ever seems like home—or something approaching it. The plating has been peeled back so that he might see the distant stars, the vast, black void of darkness. They are saved from that darkness only by the mercy of their shield technology, thin metals, and the Navigators’ expertise, a people Kylo knows nothing about.
Some say they are stolen Chiss children who have grown up and retained the Force-sensitive abilities that allow the Chiss Ascendency to navigate in the deepest corners of the Unknown Regions and that explanation, for whatever reason, comforts them. Kylo knows this is wrong. He senses nothing of the Force in these beings, cannot even be certain that they are beings at all. They are, even to him, inscrutable. It’s possible they are Chiss, but he finds it unlikely. Chiss are hard to read, but not that hard.
Frankly, he doesn’t care. So long as they don’t trap his ships inside the event horizon of a black hole or fly the fleet directly into the path of a rogue, meandering planet, it makes little enough difference to him.
“Did you know more spacers die from Purrgil encounters than random asteroid strikes?” Kylo asks as Finn steps up beside him. Further details crowd his mouth, but he refrains from going into the explanation. It’s bad enough that this is a fact he learned from his father, one more irrelevant piece of him that Kylo’s not yet found a way to shed. Sharing the burden helps.
“That’s comforting,” Finn answers. He presses his hand against the cool transparisteel, knuckles and fingertips going a bit pale from the strain. Leaning in, he peers up and down, as though searching all of space for the threat. “I’ve always wanted a giant space whale to kill me.”
There is no one except Finn on the Supremacy or anywhere else who would think to joke with Kylo. Probably he should tell Finn to knock it off, but Kylo’s never fully rid himself of his weaknesses and he remembers a time when his family expressed their affection for him with playful teasing. Finn’s approach reminds him of that. This deep into the uncharted territories of the galaxy, he needs any lodestar he can get and he does not trust Snoke’s Navigators to provide it. Making due with Finn is not, in his heart, making due at all.
Theirs is a strange partnership and it was forged by lucky circumstances.
Finn was a stormtrooper once; now he is Kylo’s right hand, his most trusted of Knights, and all because Kylo happened upon him in a hallway once and recognized the faint flicker in the Force for what it was. They have been in simpatico ever since and inseparable.
“They’re vermin to most people, but they’re also the reason we have hyperspace capabilities. They allowed the people of the galaxy to understand they could travel the stars, too.”
“Sounds like you admire them.”
Kylo turns toward Finn, studies his profile. He is handsome and heroic in the distant starlight, so very different from Kylo. “They terrify me,” he answers, as honest as he knows how to be. He can’t explain that he has nightmares sometimes about writhing tentacles wrapping around the Millennium Falcon, pulling his father’s ship apart in hyperspace, all because he’d learned about them as a child, over half his life ago and hadn’t wanted to fly or let anyone else fly for weeks after he was told about them. Well, not told exactly. More like he overheard Han yelling about them with Lando, who was insisting he could fly through a wreck of them while blindfolded at the time of that fight.
That’s what sticks with Kylo the most. That and the fact that they are collectively known as wrecks. A wreck of Purrgils.
Everything in the Unknown Regions feels like a wreck.
“And you admire that,” Finn hazards.
“At least I know them,” he answers. They’ve all heard tales since beginning their journey about even worse things that linger in the silence. Every port of call—what few they can find—only drags more stories onto the ship. They rot like chum on every deck, spreading death and fear wherever they go. Rumors can be found everywhere they turn. In the Unknown Regions, it’s practically a form of currency. And Kylo cannot stop them. He can only do what he can to ensure nobody turns his ships into another cautionary tale, a horror story that other reckless adventurers tell one another. “I don’t know this place.”
They will not, as long as Kylo draws breath, become a ghost ship, even if he has to hold it together with his bare hands, the only ones left being him and Finn. There’s too much yet to do. And Kylo refuses to prove Hux’s early concerns correct, knowing too much about self-fulfilling prophecies already, growing past Hux’s fears into someone who can lead the First Order to the victory Kylo needs them to have.
They fall into a companionable silence, he and Finn. It’s the only comfortable quiet Kylo’s ever known and he lets himself focus on that for a time, rather than any of the other thoughts that would otherwise crowd his mind. He could, he thinks, love Finn for it if he let himself try. It would be so easy to do, tripping willingly into that inevitability if he’s not careful.
He doesn’t, because he is already far more compromised than he wants to be, but it is something he considers from time to time.
Love is a decision you make, not a thing that is done to you. It’s something that can be steered toward or away from if one is an expert navigator. Another taught Kylo that, long ago; Finn teaches him something else each and every day.
“Some of the other knights meditate on the nature of the void,” Finn says, conspiratorial. “I think they’re trying to commune with it or make a deal.” He offers Kylo a disdainful smile. Neither of them enjoy meditation, finding it of little use, Kylo especially. Mysticism is lost on them. Only power matters. Meditation didn’t save him from the fall even though Luke had promised him a panacea for his struggle. Maybe not in so many words, but he had been certain that meditation would save them all, and look where that got him. “Perhaps they wish to become one with the Purrgil.”
Kylo smothers the smirk that threatens to spill across his mouth. It’s not the first time he’s heard his people are doing ridiculous things to appease the darkness, but this is the first he’s hearing about any of his knights participating. He considers telling Finn to put an end to this nonsense before it gets out of hand. If anything is out there, they don’t need to draw its attention through the Force.
Then again, their journey has been free of strife so far, placid enough that it puts Kylo’s teeth on edge and dances him on the brink of gloomy expectation. Nothing in his life has ever gone smoothly and neither should this. And yet, it has. They’ve had time and so much space to regroup, rebuild. They will be stronger when they emerge from their self-imposed exile.
His mother’s Resistance will not defeat him for a second time and their new-old New Republic will falter, will crumble, will be turned toward the purposes Kylo sets for it, or no purpose at all, since he only wishes to take from his mother that which she holds most dear. It’s the only way now for him to fully come into his own powers.
This he knows, though no void has told him so.
“As long as they’re prepared to fight when the time calls for it, I don’t care what they wish to become.”
Finn’s shoulder rolls in an unconcerned shrug and dons an expression of grim determination. “I can make sure of that,” he asserts and Kylo has no reason to distrust him. He is as driven as Kylo on this score, a fact that Kylo has never questioned, offering Finn the same respect Finn offers him. Kylo doesn’t even feel the need to threaten him should he fail. He will not fail; he hasn’t failed yet.
They remain for a time, hushed, watchful. Intimate.
Kylo wishes it didn’t have to end eventually.
But it will.
These things always do.