#after cursing him out i send the most incoherent audio ever to my friend explaining wtf i just woke up from and immediately pass out again

[lukasadss]

Funniest part about having an hyperfixafion on Sandman so far is the multiple instances of me waking up in the middle of the night half delirious(ha) and saying some variation of 'what the fuck is that about??' into the darkness of my room after an out of pocket dream as if the man has personal beef with me or something

[dracox-serdriel]

The New Order - Chapter 2: A Long-Expected Arrival

The New Order

Title: The New Order Author: Dracox Serdriel Word count: 2,000 Rating: R Spoilers: All Star Wars films through The Last Jedi. Warnings: pregnancy, extreme illness

Read the The New Order on AO3.

Chapter  2: A Long-Expected Arrival    

About twelve standard months ago... Kylo sat on his meditation platform, his legs folded and his back straight. He focused on his breathing until the Force eclipsed all else. Then he reached out with it, seeking an once-familiar thread that kept eluding him.

It wasn't there.

She wasn't there.

How? How could she just be gone without the faintest hint, without a trace? How had she severed their bond?

No, not sever. He would've felt the Bond break, just as surely as he would've felt her death.

His eyes snapped opened, revealing the emptiness of his personal chambers. After hours trying to reach her - to even sense her - he'd had enough.

Normally, such a setback would send him into a rage, and pure molten anger would drive him to his feet so that he could lash out with unfettered destruction on whatever he could reach.

But not this time. This time, he felt... subdued, resigned. Crushed.

Rey had promised him that she would return, and he'd been foolish enough to believe her promise. Of course she hadn't kept it. Why would she? The people he cared for most always abandoned him.

He'd accepted her excuse - her need to follow the Force to something, alone - wanting to believe that the Force had actually called her away, wanting to believe her promise.

Perhaps he'd been more willing to accept her excursion because the Force Bond tethered her to him. Or, rather, it had tethered them. Maybe that's why he felt so defeated now. It wasn't just Rey who'd betrayed him this time, it was also the Force.

The empty parts around his heart swelled to twice their size, and for a few minutes, Kylo Ren was again Ben Solo, the boy who'd been left behind, who'd always been alone.

No, he'd killed Ben Solo a long time ago for exactly this reason. Ben Solo sat around pondering the nature of his misery and isolation, always asking Why me?

But he knew how irrelevant why really was. The only question that ever mattered to Kylo Ren was What next?

With the right question to engage his energy, Kylo Ren rose from his meditation and donned his old uniform, the one he'd earned back when he became the Master of the Knights of Ren.

Rey could run and hide, and she could even keep their Force Bond closed, but he'd find her anyway. It was time to summon his knights.

........

Now... Kylo went through the motions of his day like an automaton, somehow making it to lunch before he'd even noticed how absent he was. Even then, he only recognized the situation when he glanced back down at the report he'd been filling out.

It was a kriffing mess.

It would've been better if he'd tasked a droid to do it, but, of course, he couldn't. He'd have to review everything he'd done that morning, probably redo it all.

No, he didn't have time, not with all his preparations for the dozen or so meetings scheduled over the next week.

But a droid couldn't create these reports; in fact, he'd never considered such a possibility, given the sensitivity of material, which was far too dangerous to entrust to a semi-conscious machine. However, he could delegate this particularly unpleasant task to someone else. Only high-ranking officers had enough clearance, though.

Kylo felt a ghost of a smile pass over his lips. Hadn't he wanted to reprimand Mitaka for his latest bungle? Forcing the man to check and recheck merciless paperwork would be nothing short of torture.

Feeling slightly better, he commed Mitaka with written orders then ordered four guards to deliver the materials directly. Wanting to punish Mitaka and wanting to speak to him were two very different things.

So he departed for his chambers for lunch in fairly high spirits, which plummeted to a crash when he found his quarters empty. Where was Reymond?

Before parental panic could lay waste to his reason, he snapped his eyes shut and reached out desperately with the Force, and -

Reymond was in Kylo's private medical bay... and in pain.

The tiny bit of comfort he'd felt went sensing his son's force signature evaporated. He raced to the medical bay, cursing his choice of caretaker. How could he have been so foolish to trust anyone but himself with Reymond's safety?

..........

About eight standard months ago... Kylo stared down the console before him, willing the screen to change before his eyes, but like yesterday and the hundred or so days before it, there were no updates.

Never had his knights gone so long without a single scrap of information to report. After four months of reconnaissance missions, they had discovered absolutely nothing on Rey's whereabouts: no leads, no sightings, no trace.

He'd finally succumbed to opening lines of communication with former resistance members. He'd ordered the two most even-tempered of his knights to contact Poe Dameron and the rebel formerly known as FN-2187.

In turn, he received no answers, but instead a series of direct comms from both men, first accusing him, then questioning him, then plying him with concerns. How long had Rey been gone? Where was she last seen? Why did he wait so kriffing long?

He ignored all of it. What little spare time he had was devoted entirely to finding Rey. And if they weren't putting up a front - if even her former resistance "friends" truly had no idea where she was...

What if she hadn't run? What if something happened to her?

His comm alerted him to an incoming message on his private, encrypted channel.

Only one person in the galaxy knew how to contact him like this.

"Rey?" he asked as soon as he opened the link.

There was no video or audio, though, only text. The message read:

THE HUTTS TRAFFIC IN PORGS.

Then very specific coordinates followed.

Rey had insisted on establishing code words for distress signals, even over an encrypted channel. "HUTTS" indicated he should come alone. "PORGS" meant that she was by herself and in imminent danger. That could explain why she didn't simply call him, resorting to a brief text message.

Or, more than likely, it was a trap.

The coordinates were for a small planet in an unremarkable system only about ten hours away, less than that, if he used the smuggler's hyperlanes.

If it was a trap, then whoever was behind it was in for a big surprise.

........

Now... Kylo held his bawling son close, tucking Reymond's head below his chin so he could stare daggers at the culprits he would soon decimate for harming his son.

"Don't glare at Doctor Vera, she was only doing her job."

He spoke in a rumbling growl, "Her job? And what about your job, mother?"

"It was a vaccination, not - "

His eyes darted to Medical Officer Vera when he said, "He completed his vaccinations two months ago."

"The initial rounds, yes," Vera replied calmly. "But some of the more... exotic vaccinations require additional booster shots for efficacy."

Kylo clenched his teeth. Were it not for his son's distress, he would've happily raised his voice, but for now, he fought to keep his voice even.

"And why wasn't I informed of this?" he hissed.

Before the doctor could reply, Leia interrupted and asked, "Doctor Vera, could you take Reymond for a moment?"

Kylo's first reaction was to keep hold of his son, but having stemmed the tide of his tears, he decided to relinquish him to the doctor so he could deal with his mother in private.

As soon as Vera was out of earshot, Leia rounded on him and said, "That poor doctor does not need you glowering at her."

"I trusted you to watch my son," he snapped. "And you do this?"

"This?" she repeated, making it sound like a foolish word to save, just like when he was a child.

It was maddening.

She continued, "He needed the vaccination. I thought I could spare you the sight of your son in pain." She mumbled something else - something about Kylo being more of a baby than Reymond - but he refused to let himself get distracted.

"Next time, I expect to be informed so I can be here with him."

"Absolutely not."

"That wasn't a request!" he shouted. "He's MY son!"

"And my grandson!" she responded. "The last time you came with him, he was scared before we even arrived because he could feel how anxious you were."

"I wasn't anxious," he groused, knowing full well that it was a lie. "Why aren't you anxious?"

"I am," she replied. "But I hide it much better than you do."

Kylo ground his frustration out on his teeth. Why had he accepted his mother's offer to nanny his son?

......

Approximately eight standard months ago... Kylo opted for a slightly larger ship than his TIE Silencer, taking instead the latest stealth transport models. Anyone who did see it wouldn't recognize it as a New Order ship.

He approached the planet on a smuggling vector to give himself as much time as possible to check for any indications of a trap. The planet had densely populated cities teaming with movement, but outside of those pockets, there was nothing but sparsely settled areas with scattered, low-tech housing.

The coordinates led him to a particularly empty region of open fields with a small house that had a transport pod parked outside.

Kylo never thought he'd be disappointed that the Millennium Falcon was absent.  

Not sensing any danger, he set down behind a hill, just far enough away to mask his landing.

As soon as he opened the bay door, he felt it: Rey's force signature. It was weak, though, very weak. And it wasn't just hers. There were two others, one that he knew far too well.

Fury struck him at the thought that Rey went to Leia instead of him.

It didn't matter who the third party was. They'd regret being part of whatever plot his mother had set into motion.

He burst through the door without knocking, following Rey's signature into the next room, where his mother sat holding a washcloth over Rey's head.

It took him a moment to truly see what was happening. Rey was mumbling incoherently, her clothing soaked though with sweat, and her belly swollen -

No, no, no. It couldn't be. She couldn't be.

"Ben," Leia said, snapping him out of his confusion. "Ben, please."

He went to Rey and took her hand, allowing himself to really look at the third force signature in the room. It was unmistakable. How had he missed it? At the moment, their child's force signature was overpowering Rey's.

"How long as she been like this?" he asked. Then, for no other reason than to avoid his mother's quip, he added, "Feverish and incoherent, I mean."

"Since she landed, nearly four ago."

He felt a tug on his hand from Rey. He leaned over as close as he could, putting his ear to her lips.

She mumbled, "Don't let him... be alone... like... like we were..."

Rey struggled with a few more syllables before falling back into incoherence, and not long after, she went completely silent.

"I have to get her out of here," Kylo said.

"We have to get her out of here," Leia insisted as she got to her feet.

"Absolutely not. She needs a medical bay and a doctor."

"Do you plan to leave her unattended for hours as you pilot to... where ever it is you're going?" she asked.

The very last thing he wanted was to bring his mother - the former leader of the resistance - back to his flagship, but he couldn't watch Rey while traversing the smuggler's shortcuts. If he used the autopilot, it'd be almost ten hours before they'd arrive, and he wasn't willing to gamble with Rey's life.

"Fine. But you don't leave the docking bay. We land, I take Rey to my medical bay, and you get on the nearest unarmed transport vessel and leave. Immediately."

She nodded her head, yes, but Kylo could see the defiance in her eyes. But that was a problem for another day.

He scooped up Rey and carried her back to the ship.