Chapter Text
The wind was blowing heavily around Kylo's clothes while he ponderously made his way through the sandy dead zone that Jakku was.
Being in a good shape, the sand underneath his feet didn't provide a huge problem when he first got there, but after almost an hour of fighting and walking around the not-so-tiny village, it became more and more exhausting with every step.
Kylo swore under his breath when his left feet sunk into an especially soft spot of sand which almost made him stumble, relieved that there were only a few houses left to check for him and his troops before he was finally able to get out of this awful place.
Even though the sun has already set, the air was still warm and heavy from the exceptional warm day before.
The thick air did nothing to lessen the terrible smell of death that got blown into the Knight's face. He and his troops were surrounded by dead bodys, some of them still burning from the heat with which their weapons had hit them. The stench of urine, feces and burnt skin was omnipresent and hard to ignore.
One of the more negative aspects of his profession, Kylo thought.
Finally, he reached the small house towards he was heading to, stepping over the corpse of an elderly man which laid face up in front of the door. The man's eyes were still opened, and his lips were slightly parted as if he was surprised about something.
Apparently, he got hit in the chest by a blaster. The wound was hard to ignore, and his blood was seeping into the sand underneath him.
Stopping for a second, Kylo took a closer look at the man's face. With a bit of fantasy, the person almost had some resemblence with Han Solo.
Mentally shrugging the thought off, Kylo continued with his work.
Technically, he knew that it was impossible for any of the inhabitants of this village to still be alive as Kylo had ordered his men to shoot down every single one of them, and to set their hutts on fire if there were still people inside.
A tiny voice inside his mind required him to feel regret for what he did, or at least to feel sorry for the people who had to die because they weren't able to give him the information he was looking for, but with the years, Kylo became a master of ignoring this annoying voice. Remorse was something he didn't allow himself to feel anymore.
When he entered the house, he needed a few seconds to get used to the dim light, only existing thanks to the flames that were still swallowing the neighbor's home. There was smoke everywhere and it got into his eyes and burned inside of his nose, his mask wasn't able to keep everything out.
Kylo coughed a few times before he noticed the corpse of a woman at his feet.
She laid face down, and Kylo pushed her head around with his boot, making sure that she was indeed dead. Her light blonde hair was covered by sand and ash at some spots, and there was blood coming out of her nose and mouth.
She looked a lot younger than the man in front of the house, Kylo noticed. Probably his daughter. She might have been pretty, even. But now she was nothing more than another corpse, irrelevant to him and the First Order.
The knight was just about to turn around and leave the rickety building when he heard an almost inaudible whimper, coming from the back corner of the room.
It was hard to identify anything through the thick smoke, so he decided to take a few steps closer.
If there was another person, he had to kill them, too.
'No survivors, no witnesses', the Supreme Leader had said.
Tightening the grip on his lightsaber that he held in his right hand, Kylo got closer to the back of the room.
Now that he was almost there, he was able to make out the situation in front of him;
There was a pile of blankets on the ground right in front of his feet, bundled up on a very thin mattress. To the right of that makeshift bed, he could recognize a table with two chairs next to it. The containers on the table must have toppled over when the blasters hit the unstable walls of the cottage, which mainly consisted of clay, supporting by a few wooden trunks here and there. Water was spilled all over the tables surface.
There was a huge hole in the wall to his right, and Kylo was able to see two of his stormtroopers searching a hut that was nearly burned down completely already a few meters away.
To the left of the mattress, Kylo recognized what must have been a crib, judging by its shape and the thin curtain that hung down from the canopy of the cot, covering it partly.
He didn't hear any noise coming from the direction anymore, but his curiosity got the best of him.
Slowly, he pushed the curtain to the side with his free hand, and revealed the content of the crib; there it was, a malnourished looking baby, its honey-colored skin pale and dark eyes wide open, looking frightened and confused. The tiny human didn't look healthy, but it was alive.
'No survivors, no witnesses', Kylo repeated Snoke's order in his head. He knew that his master does not wish to be disobeyed.
Shrugging any feelings of doubt and qualm off, Kylo decided to get this over with as quickly as possible.
No need to prolong the child's fate and his own remorse, it needed to get done either way, eventually.
With a sigh, Kylo took a step back in order to give his lightsaber the space it needed. He didn't want to hurt the child unnecessarily by not being carefull enough. Bad enough that it had to die, he didn't have to make it suffer beforehand, too.
With his right arm raised, weapon ready to be used, Kylo placed himself in the most practical angle. One fast strike, and it would be over. Easy. It wasn't the first time he had to kill an unarmed person.
The first time he would have had to kill a baby, though.
'You can do this, Kylo,' he tried to tell himself. 'You're a goddamn commander, a Knight of Ren, don't make such a drama.'
He was ready to bring his weapon down onto the crib, parting it into two pieces, but he couldn't. Only a twitch of his shoulder was possible to him, then he resisted to move his arm further.
Shaking his head, he raised his weapon again. Kylo started to get frustrated, it wasn't anything like him to make such a theater out of killing someone.
Whether it was coincidence or not, Kylo would never find out;
Just when he was ready to give it another try, just when he was starting to give the crib and the in there laying child the lethal hit, the babie's eyes wandered into his face, looking him into the eyes; and Kylo was unable to move.
He tried his hardest to just do it, but he couldn't. It was not possible for him, not while this innocent, lonely child was looking at him with those huge, brown eyes, full of life and fear. In the back of his mind, Kylo knew that a child that age wasn't able to understand what happened around it, and still he couldn't convince himself that the baby didn't feel that something bad was about to happen.
The Knight closed his eyes for a second and toned his weapon down.
When he opened them again, the child was still looking at him. It was disturbingly quiet, the way it just laid there, staring into his face, or rather his mask, not moving a limb.
„I can't do this,“, Kylo whispered into the silence around him.
The flames were still raging around them, and he could make out the shouts of his troops outside, but it was as if he was standing inside a cloud, where all the sounds and colors outside of this room were dulled.
„Master, forgive me, I can't,“, he mumbled again, before another wave of smoke entered his mask and he was coughing again.
Logically, Kylo knew that he couldn't just take the baby with him. The Finalizer was no place for a child, and he wouldn't be able to keep care of the baby's needs. But it seemed like all logic had left the Knight that night.
Without giving it a second thought, he put his weapon back to his belt, and carefully lifted the skinny child out of the crib. It was dressed in nothing but a cloth diaper, so he clumsily wrapped one of the blankets from the bed around the small body, before softly placing the baby in the crook of his left arm, supporting the head that looked way too big for such a tiny body with the inside of his elbow.
Kylo was pulled back into reality when he heard a loud crack behind him, and noticed that the fire must have reached the walls of the hut. He already saw the flames beginning to wander up the door frame, and through the holes in the ceiling he was able to recognize that a part of the roof was already burning, too. They needed to get out of there, and they needed to do it fast.
Making sure one last time that the baby rested securily in his arms, he hurried to get out of the building and towards the ship in which they came here.
It suddenly didn't feel nearly as hard to walk through the sand, anymore.
Kylo marched his way through burning houses and busy Stormtroopers, although many of them were already heading towards their ship, too. His men must have finished searching the hutts and killing the few survivors.
He noticed that a few of the men he passed followed him with their gazes when he walked by, but he didn't allow himself to feel pressured by this. He was their Commander, after all, and his decisions were his business, not theirs.
Before stepping onto the stairs that lead to the inside of the spaceship, he turned around, looking at the destruction they were soon to leave behind.
There were burning houses here and there, a few already burned out places from which smoke rised into the sky, and even from the distance he could see the corpses lying around.
'That's what happens when you chose the wrong side.', he thought as he took the last step inside, the baby still cradled in his arms.