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“Oy! Tage!” the little girl in black calls out to him across the battlefield. The laser ends of the double-ended kyber staff she whirls above her crack like living lightening.A single vicious downstroke, and the rebel pilot listing brokenly on his knees before her loses his head.She throws her long braid back over her shoulder and beams at him, shoulders back, chin proud. Her little teeth, set inside a face smeared with death, gleam in the hellish lashes of firelight.“Got him!” she caws. A chill wind carries her words eastward, with the ash. “I got Dameron! The one you really hated!”She spits gleefully on the headless corpse. Her expression shifts as she studies the rebel’s face where it has landed a few feet from his body. Her chin cocks, a little bird examining a worm.“Kinda handsome-” she hollers. Her voice is so small against the backdrop of brutal destruction, of which she is the very instrument. A paradox. “Like a pirate!”He sees her crouch and reach.“Do not pick that up.” In one smooth, elegant motion, he cuts the laser-toothed edge of his rapier and hilts it at his hip. With disgust he notes that his crisp hairstyle has wilted somewhat under the strain of battle. A fine bead of sweat trickles from his brow and trembles in his lashes before it stings his eye.There is a single smear of soot across his cheek, and a long, trailing handprint of blood across his breast that is only noticeable when the dark wool catches the light. Some filthy rabble-rouser had tried to grab his lapel. His gloves, of course, are steeped in blood. Besides these few mars, his presentation is immaculate. Imperial.His charge, he notices with a delicate grimace, is positively foul.Behind her, the skyline blazes, illuminating her outline in sifting ribbons of red-yellow light. The last known Resistance base burns beyond them against the greater night, turning the sky bruised and opaque with a heavy glaze of smoke rising like a winged shadow off a hundred million destroyed artillery shells. The flames project their violent revel against the swelling smolder.Their light licks her tanned face like forked-tongues, warring with the redder, angrier glare of her strange double-ended kyber staff. The very last dredges of a failed insurrection lie in ruins at her feet.Goddess, he wants to call her. To worship on his knees. My supreme angel of death.
My my, Brendol. What a pagan you have become.
“Rey,” he calls instead, measured and calm. He holsters his blast-gun, still sizzling at its greedy mouth, and raises his hand. Even through the soiled leather, his middle finger and thumb make a smart click-click sound. “That’s enough mucking about corpses, my dear. Come along.”The laser-ends of her kyber staff gutter out. She points at the roiling skyline and whines, “But the ‘splosions!”The soiled tails of his long great coat flourish grandly behind him when he turns as if to leave without her.“Wait Tage, I’m coming! I’m com-ing!”Her high, childish warble wrings his heart.In the same way a hawk watches its hatchling’s first flight, his sharp, clear gaze follows her footfalls as she hop-skips over corpses strewn like pieces of paper doll across the balding plain. She shrieks and revels, landing double-footed in the pockmarked earth where the blood collects like rain puddles and reflects back the towering flames from the skyline. Filth sprays and splashes.Since Leader Snoke found this little savage through that black magic its sycophants call the Force, his worthy apprentice and heir-apparent to the title of next great Sith, and sent the General to retrieve her from the broiling badlands of Jakku, ever since her bare sunburned feet first slapped aboard the sleek Supremacy, the General has earned quite the byname for himself.
The Tamer.
“Young Lady,” he affects a lordly tone in warning once she draws close enough to hear him clearly. His hands clasp smartly behind his back, he lifts his chin and regards her ridiculous game of hopscotch between limbs of dead rebels and Imperial soldiers down the bridge of his nose. “Stop that at once.”She leaps the last body, one he skewered by rapier through the heart, and lands with a sweet ker-splash so that she is nose-chest with him. Her slender arms ring around his neck, her two booted feet together are small enough to fit inside his stance.She pecks his lips, the little cheek.“Lady Rey, reportin’ for duty,” she beams. She smells like cauterized flesh and burnt marrow. Like her honeysuckle-scented bath soaps and his mild cologne. His heart kicks up, a sandstorm whipping off the hardpan, as he takes her tiny waist between his blood-soaked hands. Through the slick and slime and quilted polyfibers of her raiment, he feels the shape of her.
Home.
“How many you kill, Tage?” she lilts her chin, flames weaving flashes of gold through her hazel eyes. Her dimples laugh as she lies, “I killed at least a thousand.”He snorts, even as his gaze traces all the features of her face. “You certainly did not.”Above the collar of his great coat, her little fingertips tickle the sweat-drenched ends of his hair at his nape. He brushes her long braid back over her shoulder, come wildly undone in battle, thinking he will re-plait it once they are back aboard their lite-craft.“Are you injured?” he asks as he tilts her with his thumb beneath her chin to further examine her in the flickering light. If she is, he will find the culprit among the ravage and have its corpse quartered and fed to vultures.Ah, love. What a gallant emotion.Like a kitten that does not want to stay still for its lick-bath, she winces and wriggles. “Ahm’tage-”Heedless, his hands move expertly, clinically along her body, searching for injury. A brief tickle to her ribs earns him a short, huffed laugh.“You’re being ‘diculous,” she chides, then chuffs when his fingers catch a tender spot on her hip.“Ah-ha,” he murmurs, giving her baleful glower a knowing quirk of his lips as he stoops, “I thought you were favoring your right-”Before she can protest, he slots the backs of her knees into the crook of his arm and lifts. She weighs nothing cradled to him like a child. “What have I told you, miss wildling, about leaving your side-body open to counterstrikes? You must master your defensive forms.”“Chht,” she says, even as she nuzzles into his chest.“Tage?” she asked him once, as he was binding her wound after some brute scoundrel nearly broke her ribs in a skirmish on Takodono. Her peering eyes were half-suspicious, half-riddled with a hope that twisted his heart. “Are you my prince-darling?”He snorted at the notion. “The bastard son of an officer and a kitchen maid? Likely not.”Her pretty little lips twisted with a frown, large eyes glossing in the infirmary’s light. “But… you do love me. Don’t you, Ahm’tage?”He tucked the ends of the bacta tape smartly under her wrappings and laid his forearm across his lap where he knelt at her feet. For a long time, he looked into those big, beautiful eyes. “Oh my little wild girl. With all my heart.”She slapped the tears off her cheeks and leaned closer, baring her tiny teeth. “Then I’ll make you one, when I am Supreme Leader-” Her wrists crossed behind his neck. She pressed their foreheads together, the way she did when she wanted to be sure he was truly real. “You’ll be my prince-darling forever. We’ll never, ever be apart.”A sudden explosion erupts on the horizon, stalling his footsteps and jarring his thoughts. Its blast-surge bulges upwards to press apart the ruined sky. An electro-generator, he presumes, from the fissures of rapidly discharging electrons create blinding strikes of false lightening through the cloud. The fallout is harmless, if spectacular.Her breath catches inside his arms. “Tage-”He pauses, the tail of his great coat billowing in the blowback that rips across the plain, so that she may watch the lights fizzle out.When it is over, she picks the crumbs of soil off of his shoulder. Her little boots draped over the crook of his arm sway softly in time with his elegant stride, their fang-like eyelets flashing like quicksilver in the firelight.“Oh!” she tugs his collar, suddenly remembering, “Did you catch him? Mister Skyprancer and his stupid li’le ‘prentice, Solo-boy?”She means, of course, Luke Skywalker and his nephew, the Lightsided prodigy, Ben Solo. They are the Galaxy’s most powerful insurrectionists, and the reason he and Lady Rey still campaign. Leader Snoke has forbidden either of them to return to Base until both the Jedi mystics are annihilated.A Herculean task, if not impossible.“Oh yes, of course,” he hitches her higher. He keeps his tone feather-light, “They’re just here, in my coat pocket.”“Chht,” she gives him a sly look under her lashes. “Fibber. Lyin’s a sin,” she reminds him primly.“Yes,” he agrees solemnly, drawing a curtain over that part of his mind which keeps his secrets. About how he’s been drawing out these battles, choosing to chase down the last haggard stragglers of the loathsome Resistance over pursuing their true aim.Ben Solo, he fears, is the only man strong enough to take her away from him.He holds her tighter, lulled by the soft, pendulous motion of her body that matches his slow, stalwart pace. Several times, he has seen in too-sharp relief what the sorcerer Solo is capable of, his brutal, unbridled mastery of the Force. Entire legions of clone soldiers wiped out with the cast of his spell. His mastery of close-quarter combat and of his kyber weapon is unparalleled. The last time the demon met Lady Rey in confrontation inside the wintery forests of Starkiller, she barely survived. His saber sluiced through her fragile, soft-skinned body from breast to belly, slicing her open like ripe fruit. The General found her abandoned and dying on an altar of blood-soaked snow.How he fell trembling to his knees to lift her. How he wept as he bore his girl back to their ship. How he sat by her bacta cradle for three days, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, hands laced and fisted together so tightly the leather shrieked, wearing the very gloves still drenched in her blood.He had failed her.
Never again.
She had not been ready to face Solo then, and she is not prepared to face him now, whatever the Supreme Leader may say. Though powerful in means and magnitudes beyond the General’s comprehension, she is no match for the Jedi boy-Master. If ever they were to meet again in battle, he would destroy her. But the General is not overly concerned.He has his plans.“Tage, wait!”His charge wriggles in his arms like a pup wanting to be let down. Something has caught her eye among the ravage; as usual, she wishes to pilfer the dead.Ever the little scavenger, he thinks with affectionate exasperation as he sets her down.“Carefully,” he chides her as she slip-slides through the mud around a fallen Stormtroope and crouches at the body of a young girl. From this distance, he can guess the two girls are very close in age. The deceased’s dark, pretty eyes stare unseeingly at the starless night.“Look,” his little one wrenches her prize off the neck of the defeated and holds it up to the hell-light.A crescent moon pendent.“Otomokkian smelt, very rare,” he appraises mildly. He finds it easier to indulge her more harmless whims. “Well spotted.”She preens, then peers at the bauble as a miserly trader considers a barter over the counter of his stall. As if it is not already hers.He cannot help but think back to an even smaller girl he met only a few years before. Half-naked, wholly starving, covered in blisters from the furious leer of the Jakkuvian sun. She sensed his approach before he crested that last dune, leaping up onto the capsized belly of an all-terrain armored transport and notching her tiny fist into the gaunt well between rib bone and hip. With the other, she pounded her little stick against the hull. “Oy-oy, who goes there!”“General Armitage Hux, of the First Order,” he bade his armored escort fall back with a subtle motion of his hand. Then he folded both benignly behind his back. “Forgive me for trespassing. Are you familiar with these lands?"
"Chht. Course I am."
"Excellent. I wonder if you might help me, I am looking for a great warrior-” an angling of his chin, and the cut of his cold blue eyes from his sharp, pale profile silenced the sniggers of the troopers behind him. “A fearsome, noble tradeswoman." He squinted out at the endless stretch of languishing, pitiless hardpan.“And a foreigner, to these lands.”The little wild-child on the AT-Walker shifted uneasily. The butt of her staff ground the sand trapped beneath it like ash as she considered. “S’me. I’m the one your lookin’ for."She raised her chin. "But I ain’t done nothing illy-eagle, so if you come to arrest me-”“Arrest you?” at this, he finally scoffed. He came forward, ignoring the rivulets of sweat that menaced his person beneath his black regalia. The enormous sun blazed directly behind her, like a leering dragon’s eye. Its light wreathed her outline, some of its rays prisming to show their spectrum, spanning away from her small body as if she were their source. Her face, veiled in perfect shadow, was yearning, curious and bright. Her eyes flickered back and forth across his features the way little fish dance beneath the water’s surface, flashing their quicksilver scales. Discerning whether he was danger or salvation.He thinks he loved her from that moment on.“My dear child,” he peeled away his gloves. His hand reached to guide her, never wavering. Ever sure. “I’ve come to change your life.”“Little bird,” he teases her with cherish where she still haggles with herself on her haunches in the muck, “Take your spoils or leave them. We must go.”Her face turns up to his, as a seedling points towards the sun. One of her round, glassine eyes squints against the raging haze from the fire. “Do you think she had a fam’ly?”His heart wrings. “My darling, I can hardly say.”She stands, a whole head shorter than he, and slips the pendent inside the neck of her surcoat. Then her hand slips inside his own. Her eyes are still fixed on the girl. “I want to go home now.”“Are we bad?” she asked him once while they were standing inside a bazaar. He had taken her off-ship as a treat for good behavior. It was the only time she’d ever worn a dress. She was ravishing, all slender curves and small, sweet breasts beneath the dappled shade of her lace parasol.He had followed her gaze to a troop of urchins begging for alms. Their tiny, sooty fingers flexed and flexed as they beckoned passersby for scraps.“That is a difficult question which defies a simple answer.” He looked at her hand, not much larger than those of the street-children’s, tucked soundly in the crook of his arm. “I do believe that our ends justify our means.”“We’re meanly?” she turned and squinted up at him. Her hand laid over his heart.Behind her, several stalls away, a bull bantha being painted in brilliant colors of crushed carmine and zaffre blue chuffed and swayed its trunk. A groom-stead, it wore layers and layers of fragrant flowers upon its forehead.Looking down into her eyes, turned liquid-gold by the scattered rays sieving through the woven mat above the bazaar and through her parasol, he’d felt the most immense, wrenching pain inside his chest. It strangled the breath out of him so violently that even now, a year later, it shrouded him in coldness like the shadow of a wraith.The fear that they would never truly be together. That she would be taken from him before her time.“Ahm’tage-” she was calling his name. Loudly. “You’re holdin’ my hand too hard.”“Forgive me, my angel. My dear one. My most precious heart,” he gathered her up into his arms. “We cannot go home yet, my darling. Not yet. Not just yet…”It is only a matter of time before Skywalker and the boy Solo step into his snare. Each day he dallies with her on worlds far away is another that brings the Jedi closer to their inevitable confrontation with Leader Snoke. Once they set foot aboard The Supremacy, his trap will spring, crushing all three mystics with the cruelest stroke. Then there will be no more contesters, no more sycophants of the blasted Force, and the next great Sith can take her rightful throne. Under the counsel of her consort, her faithful, devoted husband and lover, she will rule the stars.They need only last out a little while more…“Come along now. This smoke is terrible for your lungs. And you’ll catch your death in this cold. Look at you, sopping in blood. My my, miss wildling, whatever shall I do with you,” he bows to lift her up into his arms.She goes without protest, accustomed to being carried like a little child too tired to walk on her own merit. After a lifetime of loneliness and the harshest self-reliance, she quite prefers it.The ship’s brilliant white maw looms up ahead.“You’ll have a bath straight after the infirmary, then a hot meal, and then it’s off to bed,” his tone brooks no arguments. And yet-“So you can mount me?” she flirts, playing sweetly with his collar.He sneers at the smears her grubby little fingers leave behind.“Certainly not,” he chides the ground, still picking their way carefully between the corpses, “you need a proper rest.”“Not fair!” she crows, feet peddling where they sway over his arm, “I want a mount! I killed at least fifty-thousand rebels-""Fifty-thousand, really-""So I should least get a mount!"“Such is life, my angel.”She huffs. “Rudely.”He shifts her weight, accommodating for her arms no longer wreathed about his neck but crossed over her chest, and scrutinizes her petulant mouth and downcast eyes before he relents. He is exhausted, muscles seizing with fatigue from a battle hard-fought. He thinks he could fall into bed from the refresher and sleep for a full cycle. Nevertheless-“If, and only if,” he glowers sternly at her sudden, radiant hope, “your injuries prove inconsequential, I shall give you pleasure.”“You mean a lickin’?” she perks right up, all dimples and self-satisfaction.He rolls his tired, smoke-stung eyes. “Yes, dearest. I shall lick you. Thoroughly.”“Two times?” she quibbles, already wiggling and pawing the air in one of her strange little dances.
The cheek on this child.
Still, he cannot help but smirk as he begins the ascent up the durasteel ramp and the bright-white lights of their return ship swallow them whole.“As many times as you may stand.”