Hux tilts the jut of his chin upward, a haughty presentation he’s directed towards Ren in the past and a last stand to preserve dignity. “Ren, I wouldn’t trust you to prepare anything other than poison for my palate so no, carry on with being your usual primitive self and wasting time on personal interests. Some of us have work to do.”
The strange, rough and rasping, sound of Ren’s laughter holds Hux back from fully pivoting and walking off. The Knight sounds like a madman.
“There you go again. Attempting to chastise me. You hypocrite. Would you deny that we share a personal interest in who sleeps in this room?”
Hux doesn’t respond, doesn’t quite look at Ren either.
“Only one way to find out,” Ren says. A mocking, singsong offer. “I can’t promise I won’t throw you out, but I’m not going to stop you from coming in.”
In the silence that ensues, Hux finds his boots turning, stepping over the threshold as if motored not by his own command but by a foreign energy. Or perhaps, just the baser urges he’s muzzled within himself too long. Precise rationale escapes him, even as he tries to reason to himself -- as the officer overseeing this ship, the activities of two high-priority individuals are naturally a source of concern.
He would refer to the smell that suffuses the room as a stench, pungent and heavy as it is and not at all alleviated by the spray of violet flowers on the desk. The inhalation of the mixed aromas coaxes a curl of feral want in his stomach though, a warmth kindled only higher by the sight on the bed. All of the lighting panels are turned off, but the muted lamp by the headboard casts a honeyed glow across the surface. Habituated to military life and its metallic textures, Hux would admit that he has barely any appreciation for the aesthetic, but the golden-washed, supine form on the bed merits absorption more than any painting he’s ever laid eyes on. The slope of Rey’s bare back, a smooth bank of skin. A landscape he can trace from the recess of her waist to her lush bottom to the backs of her thighs, knees, calves. The valleys and dunes of the desert, half-emergent from the rucked up dark sheets, and the smears, milky and viscous, on her thighs assert to how much Ren’s already slaked his thirst on her. Oh. He supposes that's the only answer he'll get as to why Ren hasn’t been spotted around the ship for two days.
Resting above the cleft of her lower cheeks are her curled hands, bound together by what Hux can only presume is one of Ren’s thinner belts. His brows arch even higher as Rey turns onto her side, the dark spill of her hair falling back to reveal the blindfold secured around her head.
“Is this punishment for partaking in company other than your own?” she demands of Ren, her face angled as if she can see exactly the spot where he stands, despite her cloaked eyes. Her voice strained but surprisingly without spite or true rancor.
“I think you’d know if I were trying to convey displeasure,” Ren answers, circling the bed like a sand-panther appraising its game. His infernal, frustrating self seems to reach some decision because he retreats to the area of the desk and slouches into the chair. “An exercise in trust. In trusting each other to give up control and not slitting the other’s neck in the interim. Isn’t that what you wanted? You had your turn with me, harsh as it was. I’ll make sure whatever’s inflicted on you is much more...enjoyable.”
She gives a dry laugh at that. From the corner of his peripheral vision, Hux glances at Ren’s hunched posture on the chair, and notices for the first time the red tracks running from the top of his shoulders, angry diagonal swipes across his posterior deltoids and his upper back, grooved deep enough to have drawn some blood to the surface.
“I think you’re always asking more of me than I of you,” Rey says, as primly as if they were having another disagreement on the bridge, in full sight of the crew.
Ren’s visage darkens, his mouth thinning to a somber, grim line. “You’ve asked the world from me. Didn’t you say we need to trust each other absolutely? For what lies ahead? Do you think I’d let him hurt you? I’d sooner --”
“Break your vows?” she says, voice high and breathless.
“Isn’t that the point to which you’re determined to push me?”
A long pause, a string of silence, taut with tension between all of them but hanging ultimately upon her. The cryptic exchange, this fucked-up game, between master and apprentice means something, Hux is sure of it, but the air of lust and want has burrowed itself into his every pore by now, and he tries to focus his stare at the flowers, at the empty walls, at anything other than the two people driving him mad and making him wonder if he should just go back to his own room and take care of his needs there.
As if magnetized, his gaze always draws back to her though, and he sees the slight indent of her throat muscles as she takes a deep breath.
“I trust you,” she says to Ren. “I do.”
She turns fully over on the bed, her breasts and the line of her abdomen vulnerably visible now.
“Leave a mark of harm on her,” Ren says. “And you can be sure your hide will pay more than twice-fold for it.”
-----
Usually, the more difficult a task, the more Hux relishes seeing it through to completion. He’s never approached one of such nature though, and initially, it feels impossible to concentrate on worshipping a woman while her lover glowers at you from the shadows like he’s contemplating the various, creative ways to dismember you.
He’s not even sure how much contact is permitted, and thus, Hux sheds only the greatcoat as he lowers his body to parallel, then hover over, and finally brush against the slant of hers on the bed. Where to put his hands? Cheek, throat, shoulders, lower. Everywhere, he thinks, he wants to touch her everywhere, but he starts with his mouth skimming the juncture where her neck and clavicle meet. He stirs no reaction from her at first, none at all aside from the stiff clench of her jaw. The same face she wears when going over tactical strategies on the bridge. Crippling doubt suspends his body as he wonders whether this is all just Ren’s perverse way of making him into a fool and flaunting superiority in yet another skillset.
Pulling back, he hears a sound escape her as the front of his uniform skates against her bare body. Her lips seal shut again, the crack in her veneer erased. Rey. Unpossessed by either of them, serene as the eye of a storm of conflicting desires. A sneaking suspicion creeps along his spine -- that this was her goal all along. Saying yes to tea and appearing on the bridge and working alongside him on a half-dozen projects. To have the two men running the Finalizer consumed with the idea, the illusion, of controlling her.
No victory in sight does not turn this into an unworthy endeavor, he stubbornly decides, and he returns to mantling her form with his own. He knows Ren’s style, and while he can’t certify that the younger man’s unpolished, abrasive, and selfish behavior carries over to whatever he does in the bedroom, Hux resolves that he can at least make every effort in demonstrating how he works differently. He is willing to work with others, he can be amenable if his partners try as well, and he told her once already, but his hands and mouth tell her again without voicing a single word that he would welcome her as a more satisfying partner.
Keeping true to the boundaries, he is careful. Generous with the lave of his tongue, no scrape of teeth, in leaving circles of wet on the mounds of her breasts and the puckered nipples cresting her flesh. Dragging himself down her body, he thinks of how Ren’s referred to him as a sycophant before the Supreme Leader (Ren being ironic and delusionally blinded as usual). He thinks of the insult even as his tongue writes slick praises between Rey’s trembling thighs. He's been lauded by crowds of thousands for oratory skills, but this, the increasing sap sluicing from Rey's licked-swollen folds and clinging to his nose and chin, tastes more of reward than any applause.
She’s peaking, her hips surging underneath the heated suck of Hux’s mouth, when Ren’s weight interrupts the balance on the bed, dropping heavily to push the General aside. Ren mounts her just like that, tearing the blindfold off so that her startled, widened eyes flit to his face first, and then to the General, still within an arm’s reach.
Hux would leave, should leave, but that infinitesimal locking of her eyes to his anchors him to the bed. Even as she closes her eyes and shudders and shakes under the force of Ren’s plundering hips, he feels compelled to watch.
Control. Control. Which one of them really grasps the reins of control?
-----
He doesn’t see her in person for days after that. Nor Ren for that matter. Both of them absent from the bridge, the hallways, the docking bay, the mess-cabin though neither of them had regularly taken their meals with the rest of the ship’s personnel anyway.
He sees them only on the surveillance screens. How they monopolize use of a particular training room, without consideration for others who reserved it beforehand.
Ordering one of the monitoring security technicians aside, Hux sits down in front of the screens and watches, for a solid half hour, as Rey unleashes the full extent of her saber skills against Ren. She looks like she’s trying to kill him. Perhaps, she is.
Three beams of light, two blue and one red, cutting loops through the air and shredding the chamber’s quadranium steel plating with violent momentum. He watches Rey raise her hand, the same way Ren showed her once, and throw her master into a wall hard enough that his cracked mask falls off.
Hux wonders if any of them should feel triumphant. All that collects in him though is mounting dread. He’s already conveyed some of his concerns to the Supreme Leader. After all, what could he conceal?
The command remains unchanged. Bring them both to me.
-----
Insomnia drives him to leave his room in search of drink. He’s already consumed his cache, and he knows the officers’ area of the recreational facility comprises a cabinet stocked with more.
To Hux’s genuine surprise, he finds her there. Sees the back of her head, her hair loose upon her shoulders. He hesitates and with a sigh, redirects his feet to walk around to the front of the couch, taking in the sight of her folded, shrouded self. Legs and feet tucked on the cushions where he once drunkenly pressed his mouth to hers. One look at her ashen countenance, and he knows that she’s mulling over death and dying again, not reminiscing about any kiss.
Her eyes follow his movements warily, and thus, his first overture is as innocuous a question he can conceive in a flash of recollection.
“Where did you get the flowers?”
Rey blinks at him, an alternation of confusion and remarkably girlish embarrassment crossing her features. “From Kylo. He brought them back from one of his missions.”
A snort bubbles out of him at the mental picture her words provoke, and there’s a small quirk at the corner of her mouth as well. Her tone is both sheepish and annoyed as she says, “According to my subsequent Holonet research, archidia fragrance can produce some euphoric effects when inhaled. It’s even rumored that it has aphrodisiac qualities.”
His turn to flush with embarrassment. “Son of a bantha. Why haven’t you murdered him in his sleep yet?”
“We do in fact have two beds and a wall between us,” she replies archly. Her mouth twists, and she says a little more softly, “I would’ve tossed them all into the garbage, but there was a sprig of arallute in the bunch as well. They’re nearly extinct, you know. Native as they were to Alderaan.”
Her expression hardens. She will never forget who she’s speaking to when she looks at him, and the space between is fraught with guarded words again.
Clearing his throat with a cough, Hux swerves his attention to the starry vista outside the viewport, the knowledge of how close their trajectory is to the Supreme Leader’s sanctum weighing down on both of them with its own ominous gravity.
“When you come back from your training,” he says, as lightly as he is able. “We can pretend like that night never happened.”
Rey looks at him, then beyond him. Her gaze steady and sure now. “How appropriate. I’m always pretending these days.”
-----
From one of the decks of the docking facility, Hux observes the two figures, cowled in black cloaks like the night they first came onto the ship as master and apprentice. Only the two of them are permitted to board a shuttle to Snoke, and Hux isn’t surprised that it’s Rey who climbs into the cockpit to pilot the craft.
Tomorrow, he ponders, he might have a new leader to answer to.
While he hasn’t lacked for confidence in his own intelligence and capabilities, he has seen and felt enough of the Force during his lifetime and career that he wonders if any mortal could rule over beings like these.
-----
What happens exactly, he learns only later. In the cell of his prison. They are stingy with elucidating him on any updates relating to recent galactic news.
The truth as he comes to know it: Snoke expired on Kylo Ren’s blade, dead by Ren’s hand.
And Kylo Ren cut down by hers.
On the noon before his trial for war crimes is to begin, Rey manifests as one of his few visitors.
The Resistance uniform, its insignia upon her breast, it all looks wrong on her in his estimation, but he’s been proved wrong about several things in the past year. Strapped to her belt, he notes, are the hilts of two sabers.
“They tell me Ren’s still alive,” are the first words he can muster to say to her. “I’m surprised. Aren’t apprentices supposed to kill their masters to fully inherit the mantle of Dark Lord?”
“There isn’t another Dark Lord,” she replies calmly, setting a tray down where he can see it. Still-steaming tea in a foamed cup, crumblebun on a napkin, and lying at an angle askew to the edibles, a holobook panel. “For now.”
“Ren was tempted of course,” she continues, placing each item she brought into the receptacle that slides through the glass partition to be delivered to him. “Before and after Snoke fell at his feet, he was tempted. I sensed it, and I couldn’t take the risk. Didn’t I tell you I promised to bring him back to his mother? It was just easier to do so with him unconscious.”
He produces a hollow laugh, scratches the beard that rims his pale cheeks now. “So the Dark Side is vanquished in Snoke and...contained in Ren. For now, as you said. But what about in yourself?”
Her scrutiny cast inward, she studies her palms. “We’ll see,” she muses faintly before looking up at him again. “I assimilated quite a lot in terms of method and approach from all three of you. Unavoidable, I suppose, after so much time in your company.”
Unbuckling one of the saber hilts -- Ren’s as designated by the crossguard vents -- at her waist, she rotates the cylindrical shaft in her hand. “From Kylo Ren, honing control of the Force over mind, body, and the external.”
“From Snoke,” she says as Hux cringes. “How to encourage friction, competition, and divergence of priorities between the two commanders of the Finalizer.”
Her gaze falls on the crystalline panel she brought to him. A history on the Galactic Civil War. A newer edition than the one he had given to her. “I forget exactly how the literature phrased it,” Rey tells him. “But from you, I suppose I learned how winning a war can hinge upon how much of yourself you’re willing to give up.”
She leaves him like that, defeated, behind a wall of glass.
Re: Read this fill for pt. 4/4, not the one before (sorry, had to edit)
The strange, rough and rasping, sound of Ren’s laughter holds Hux back from fully pivoting and walking off. The Knight sounds like a madman.
“There you go again. Attempting to chastise me. You hypocrite. Would you deny that we share a personal interest in who sleeps in this room?”
Hux doesn’t respond, doesn’t quite look at Ren either.
“Only one way to find out,” Ren says. A mocking, singsong offer. “I can’t promise I won’t throw you out, but I’m not going to stop you from coming in.”
In the silence that ensues, Hux finds his boots turning, stepping over the threshold as if motored not by his own command but by a foreign energy. Or perhaps, just the baser urges he’s muzzled within himself too long. Precise rationale escapes him, even as he tries to reason to himself -- as the officer overseeing this ship, the activities of two high-priority individuals are naturally a source of concern.
He would refer to the smell that suffuses the room as a stench, pungent and heavy as it is and not at all alleviated by the spray of violet flowers on the desk. The inhalation of the mixed aromas coaxes a curl of feral want in his stomach though, a warmth kindled only higher by the sight on the bed. All of the lighting panels are turned off, but the muted lamp by the headboard casts a honeyed glow across the surface. Habituated to military life and its metallic textures, Hux would admit that he has barely any appreciation for the aesthetic, but the golden-washed, supine form on the bed merits absorption more than any painting he’s ever laid eyes on. The slope of Rey’s bare back, a smooth bank of skin. A landscape he can trace from the recess of her waist to her lush bottom to the backs of her thighs, knees, calves. The valleys and dunes of the desert, half-emergent from the rucked up dark sheets, and the smears, milky and viscous, on her thighs assert to how much Ren’s already slaked his thirst on her. Oh. He supposes that's the only answer he'll get as to why Ren hasn’t been spotted around the ship for two days.
Resting above the cleft of her lower cheeks are her curled hands, bound together by what Hux can only presume is one of Ren’s thinner belts. His brows arch even higher as Rey turns onto her side, the dark spill of her hair falling back to reveal the blindfold secured around her head.
“Is this punishment for partaking in company other than your own?” she demands of Ren, her face angled as if she can see exactly the spot where he stands, despite her cloaked eyes. Her voice strained but surprisingly without spite or true rancor.
“I think you’d know if I were trying to convey displeasure,” Ren answers, circling the bed like a sand-panther appraising its game. His infernal, frustrating self seems to reach some decision because he retreats to the area of the desk and slouches into the chair. “An exercise in trust. In trusting each other to give up control and not slitting the other’s neck in the interim. Isn’t that what you wanted? You had your turn with me, harsh as it was. I’ll make sure whatever’s inflicted on you is much more...enjoyable.”
She gives a dry laugh at that. From the corner of his peripheral vision, Hux glances at Ren’s hunched posture on the chair, and notices for the first time the red tracks running from the top of his shoulders, angry diagonal swipes across his posterior deltoids and his upper back, grooved deep enough to have drawn some blood to the surface.
“I think you’re always asking more of me than I of you,” Rey says, as primly as if they were having another disagreement on the bridge, in full sight of the crew.
Ren’s visage darkens, his mouth thinning to a somber, grim line. “You’ve asked the world from me. Didn’t you say we need to trust each other absolutely? For what lies ahead? Do you think I’d let him hurt you? I’d sooner --”
“Break your vows?” she says, voice high and breathless.
“Isn’t that the point to which you’re determined to push me?”
A long pause, a string of silence, taut with tension between all of them but hanging ultimately upon her. The cryptic exchange, this fucked-up game, between master and apprentice means something, Hux is sure of it, but the air of lust and want has burrowed itself into his every pore by now, and he tries to focus his stare at the flowers, at the empty walls, at anything other than the two people driving him mad and making him wonder if he should just go back to his own room and take care of his needs there.
As if magnetized, his gaze always draws back to her though, and he sees the slight indent of her throat muscles as she takes a deep breath.
“I trust you,” she says to Ren. “I do.”
She turns fully over on the bed, her breasts and the line of her abdomen vulnerably visible now.
“Leave a mark of harm on her,” Ren says. “And you can be sure your hide will pay more than twice-fold for it.”
-----
Usually, the more difficult a task, the more Hux relishes seeing it through to completion. He’s never approached one of such nature though, and initially, it feels impossible to concentrate on worshipping a woman while her lover glowers at you from the shadows like he’s contemplating the various, creative ways to dismember you.
He’s not even sure how much contact is permitted, and thus, Hux sheds only the greatcoat as he lowers his body to parallel, then hover over, and finally brush against the slant of hers on the bed. Where to put his hands? Cheek, throat, shoulders, lower. Everywhere, he thinks, he wants to touch her everywhere, but he starts with his mouth skimming the juncture where her neck and clavicle meet. He stirs no reaction from her at first, none at all aside from the stiff clench of her jaw. The same face she wears when going over tactical strategies on the bridge. Crippling doubt suspends his body as he wonders whether this is all just Ren’s perverse way of making him into a fool and flaunting superiority in yet another skillset.
Pulling back, he hears a sound escape her as the front of his uniform skates against her bare body. Her lips seal shut again, the crack in her veneer erased. Rey. Unpossessed by either of them, serene as the eye of a storm of conflicting desires. A sneaking suspicion creeps along his spine -- that this was her goal all along. Saying yes to tea and appearing on the bridge and working alongside him on a half-dozen projects. To have the two men running the Finalizer consumed with the idea, the illusion, of controlling her.
No victory in sight does not turn this into an unworthy endeavor, he stubbornly decides, and he returns to mantling her form with his own. He knows Ren’s style, and while he can’t certify that the younger man’s unpolished, abrasive, and selfish behavior carries over to whatever he does in the bedroom, Hux resolves that he can at least make every effort in demonstrating how he works differently. He is willing to work with others, he can be amenable if his partners try as well, and he told her once already, but his hands and mouth tell her again without voicing a single word that he would welcome her as a more satisfying partner.
Keeping true to the boundaries, he is careful. Generous with the lave of his tongue, no scrape of teeth, in leaving circles of wet on the mounds of her breasts and the puckered nipples cresting her flesh. Dragging himself down her body, he thinks of how Ren’s referred to him as a sycophant before the Supreme Leader (Ren being ironic and delusionally blinded as usual). He thinks of the insult even as his tongue writes slick praises between Rey’s trembling thighs. He's been lauded by crowds of thousands for oratory skills, but this, the increasing sap sluicing from Rey's licked-swollen folds and clinging to his nose and chin, tastes more of reward than any applause.
She’s peaking, her hips surging underneath the heated suck of Hux’s mouth, when Ren’s weight interrupts the balance on the bed, dropping heavily to push the General aside. Ren mounts her just like that, tearing the blindfold off so that her startled, widened eyes flit to his face first, and then to the General, still within an arm’s reach.
Hux would leave, should leave, but that infinitesimal locking of her eyes to his anchors him to the bed. Even as she closes her eyes and shudders and shakes under the force of Ren’s plundering hips, he feels compelled to watch.
Control. Control. Which one of them really grasps the reins of control?
-----
He doesn’t see her in person for days after that. Nor Ren for that matter. Both of them absent from the bridge, the hallways, the docking bay, the mess-cabin though neither of them had regularly taken their meals with the rest of the ship’s personnel anyway.
He sees them only on the surveillance screens. How they monopolize use of a particular training room, without consideration for others who reserved it beforehand.
Ordering one of the monitoring security technicians aside, Hux sits down in front of the screens and watches, for a solid half hour, as Rey unleashes the full extent of her saber skills against Ren. She looks like she’s trying to kill him. Perhaps, she is.
Three beams of light, two blue and one red, cutting loops through the air and shredding the chamber’s quadranium steel plating with violent momentum. He watches Rey raise her hand, the same way Ren showed her once, and throw her master into a wall hard enough that his cracked mask falls off.
Hux wonders if any of them should feel triumphant. All that collects in him though is mounting dread. He’s already conveyed some of his concerns to the Supreme Leader. After all, what could he conceal?
The command remains unchanged. Bring them both to me.
-----
Insomnia drives him to leave his room in search of drink. He’s already consumed his cache, and he knows the officers’ area of the recreational facility comprises a cabinet stocked with more.
To Hux’s genuine surprise, he finds her there. Sees the back of her head, her hair loose upon her shoulders. He hesitates and with a sigh, redirects his feet to walk around to the front of the couch, taking in the sight of her folded, shrouded self. Legs and feet tucked on the cushions where he once drunkenly pressed his mouth to hers. One look at her ashen countenance, and he knows that she’s mulling over death and dying again, not reminiscing about any kiss.
Her eyes follow his movements warily, and thus, his first overture is as innocuous a question he can conceive in a flash of recollection.
“Where did you get the flowers?”
Rey blinks at him, an alternation of confusion and remarkably girlish embarrassment crossing her features. “From Kylo. He brought them back from one of his missions.”
A snort bubbles out of him at the mental picture her words provoke, and there’s a small quirk at the corner of her mouth as well. Her tone is both sheepish and annoyed as she says, “According to my subsequent Holonet research, archidia fragrance can produce some euphoric effects when inhaled. It’s even rumored that it has aphrodisiac qualities.”
His turn to flush with embarrassment. “Son of a bantha. Why haven’t you murdered him in his sleep yet?”
“We do in fact have two beds and a wall between us,” she replies archly. Her mouth twists, and she says a little more softly, “I would’ve tossed them all into the garbage, but there was a sprig of arallute in the bunch as well. They’re nearly extinct, you know. Native as they were to Alderaan.”
Her expression hardens. She will never forget who she’s speaking to when she looks at him, and the space between is fraught with guarded words again.
Clearing his throat with a cough, Hux swerves his attention to the starry vista outside the viewport, the knowledge of how close their trajectory is to the Supreme Leader’s sanctum weighing down on both of them with its own ominous gravity.
“When you come back from your training,” he says, as lightly as he is able. “We can pretend like that night never happened.”
Rey looks at him, then beyond him. Her gaze steady and sure now. “How appropriate. I’m always pretending these days.”
-----
From one of the decks of the docking facility, Hux observes the two figures, cowled in black cloaks like the night they first came onto the ship as master and apprentice. Only the two of them are permitted to board a shuttle to Snoke, and Hux isn’t surprised that it’s Rey who climbs into the cockpit to pilot the craft.
Tomorrow, he ponders, he might have a new leader to answer to.
While he hasn’t lacked for confidence in his own intelligence and capabilities, he has seen and felt enough of the Force during his lifetime and career that he wonders if any mortal could rule over beings like these.
-----
What happens exactly, he learns only later. In the cell of his prison. They are stingy with elucidating him on any updates relating to recent galactic news.
The truth as he comes to know it: Snoke expired on Kylo Ren’s blade, dead by Ren’s hand.
And Kylo Ren cut down by hers.
On the noon before his trial for war crimes is to begin, Rey manifests as one of his few visitors.
The Resistance uniform, its insignia upon her breast, it all looks wrong on her in his estimation, but he’s been proved wrong about several things in the past year. Strapped to her belt, he notes, are the hilts of two sabers.
“They tell me Ren’s still alive,” are the first words he can muster to say to her. “I’m surprised. Aren’t apprentices supposed to kill their masters to fully inherit the mantle of Dark Lord?”
“There isn’t another Dark Lord,” she replies calmly, setting a tray down where he can see it. Still-steaming tea in a foamed cup, crumblebun on a napkin, and lying at an angle askew to the edibles, a holobook panel. “For now.”
“Ren was tempted of course,” she continues, placing each item she brought into the receptacle that slides through the glass partition to be delivered to him. “Before and after Snoke fell at his feet, he was tempted. I sensed it, and I couldn’t take the risk. Didn’t I tell you I promised to bring him back to his mother? It was just easier to do so with him unconscious.”
He produces a hollow laugh, scratches the beard that rims his pale cheeks now. “So the Dark Side is vanquished in Snoke and...contained in Ren. For now, as you said. But what about in yourself?”
Her scrutiny cast inward, she studies her palms. “We’ll see,” she muses faintly before looking up at him again. “I assimilated quite a lot in terms of method and approach from all three of you. Unavoidable, I suppose, after so much time in your company.”
Unbuckling one of the saber hilts -- Ren’s as designated by the crossguard vents -- at her waist, she rotates the cylindrical shaft in her hand. “From Kylo Ren, honing control of the Force over mind, body, and the external.”
“From Snoke,” she says as Hux cringes. “How to encourage friction, competition, and divergence of priorities between the two commanders of the Finalizer.”
Her gaze falls on the crystalline panel she brought to him. A history on the Galactic Civil War. A newer edition than the one he had given to her. “I forget exactly how the literature phrased it,” Rey tells him. “But from you, I suppose I learned how winning a war can hinge upon how much of yourself you’re willing to give up.”
She leaves him like that, defeated, behind a wall of glass.