My buddy, my pal, it’s safe to assume that I’m ALWAYS taking prompts. (I might get to the point where I’m busy enough that it might take me a while to fill them, but I’m always taking prompts.) Now, I’ll admit that I’m not super well versed in Sith history, and the Sith Lord I’m most familiar with is…well, Vader, who failed to die a Sith Lord and didn’t get entombed on Korriban. I’ve always kind of liked the mental image of Darth Sidious being disappointed in Kylo, though, so yeah. Also, I don’t know what happened to Palpatine’s ghost and it appears that neither does anyone else, so we’re going to handwave some stuff because Force.
Personal shuttle crashes are, generally speaking, remarkably easy to survive. Battlestars or cruisers are bulky and built to survive damage in the black, but a planet-side crash turns them into an avalanche of wreckage. Fighters, small and quick and light, shatter like glass more often than not, and even when they don’t, their mostly-engine structure doesn’t play well with the heat of a crash. A personal shuttle, though, is small and sturdy and designed to survive an emergency landing, even if the emergency in question is ‘falling out of the sky.’
“Engines do not just kriffing fail,” Kylo Ren hissed as he pulled himself out of his shuttle and trying to adjust to the heavier gravity. He snarled a string of curses in a handful of languages, giving a sharp kick to the hull and repressing a grimace of pain. Snoke would be furious if he missed his ordered arrival time, no matter how good his explanation was, and Kylo felt a shudder down his spine. He refused to admit that it might be fear. “There isn’t even anything wrong with this piece of bantha shit,” he shouted, thumping it with a fist. He raked a gloved hand through his hair—the helmet was still inside the shuttle somewhere—and stared around him at the valley he’d wrecked in.
The sky over Korriban was dusty and orange, the pervasive cloud cover turning the light dim, and besides the wind the valley was silent. It had openings spaced through the sculpted walls of the valley, the ground littered with grand statues towering on plinths carved with strange letters. The cold air crackled with…something, like ozone on the back of his tongue, dizzying and on the edge of painful.
Kylo was the only student of Supreme Leader Snoke, the heir to his grandfather’s empire. He knew the power of the Dark Side when he felt it.
“My name is Kylo Ren,” he said, sweeping another look over the valley. “I am a servant of the Dark Side, the grandson of the Sith Lord Darth Vader.”
“Another Skywalker,” a voice said, and a shape shuddered into being beside him. “Such a…disappointing family.” The figure cleared until it was clear, dressed in funeral finery and eerily long and thin, with a narrow face and cold yellow eyes. Kylo stared in silent shock. Disappointing? His mother, maybe, his uncle, definitely, but Darth Vader? He wasn’t even sure how to respond to that.
“We did our best, Plagueis,” another figure said, the scowl audible even before his red and black face cleared. “The boy was weak.”
“Darth Vader,” Kylo Ren started to snarl, “was not–”
“Quiet, foolish boy,” snapped a third voice, and this one he recognized as Count Dooku, Darth Tyranus, from old holos. The white-haired old man had a face like a blade, dressed in a fine dark robe. “Your master has clearly failed to teach you respect.”
“For the dead or for your elders,” the red-and-black figure said disinterestedly. “Why did we agree to pull him down?”
“You’re why I crashed,” Kylo said, and all three of them gave him a very flat look. “What is this place?”
“The Valley of Dark Lords,” Plagueis said, giving him a disdainful look. “And Sidious wanted to speak with him.”
“Sid—Darth Sidious?” Kylo Ren demanded, and the three Lords gave him another concerted look.
“I see that some trace of history was passed on,” a new voice said, and the cloaked figure of the erstwhile Emperor took shattered shape. It took a long moment for his form to clear, longer than any of the others, and he wore the black cloak he had died in, no funeral finery apparent. His face was withered, hands bony, but his eyes were sharp and piercing. The other Sith Lords disappeared as if his presence stretched the Force thin around them, leaving him standing alone opposite Kylo. “Kylo Ren, I believe. Son of the whore Organa and the scoundrel pilot she picked up, yes?”
Kylo bit back an offended sentence, one that he refused to form fully—my mother, part of his mind snarled defensively, and he cut it off. “And grandson of your last student.”
“Ah, yes. My apprentice,” Sidious said. “Your idolized grandfather.” He studied Kylo Ren for a long moment. “My great failure. It seems that some things breed true. You are, like him, a complete fool.”
“My grandfather,” Kylo started angrily, and Sidious cut him off.
“Your grandfather—Anakin—was the perfect weapon for twenty-three years, but he never did have the steel to carry through on his most important commitments,” Sidious said. “The girl. His children. You could have chosen any number of better idols. Then again,” he said, reaching out and slashing a hand through the air along the scar slanting across Kylo’s face. “You think highly of yourself, boy, but that scrap of a sand-scavenger destroyed you in that fight, didn’t she?”
“She is strong with the Force and I–”
“And you,” Sidious interrupted with a sneer, “are a half-trained pup so desperate to be the great and feared Darth Vader that you have yourself half-convinced that you are. You have no respect for your enemies, and your men have no respect for you. They treat you like a mad rathtar, just waiting for your master to put you down.”
Kylo stood there, feeling as stunned as he had lying in the snow of Starkiller. He swallowed and asked, “Is he here?”
Sidious gave a proper, aristocratic scoff. “No. He failed to die a Sith Lord. His tomb will never be used.” Sidious linked his fingers together, the cuffs of his robes hiding his hands, and said, “I suppose, given your track record, it’s just as well you decided to idolize him. The rest of us would be ashamed to call you our apprentice—Anakin always was a sentimental fool.”
“The First Order, under my command, has destroyed an entire star system,” Kylo said, rage shaking through him like an earthquake.
“And I was quite impressed with your General Hux for that, but you had little to do with it.”
“I killed Han Solo,” Kylo snarled.
“He allowed you to kill him,” Sidious shot back without missing a beat. “And you grieved.” He watched with detached satisfaction as Kylo fought for words, breathless with the sudden gape of pain behind his breastbone. “You are not a Sith. You never will be, if your master keeps you trapped in this limbo of half-finished teachings. Honestly,” he said, his lip curling, “there was an advantage to taking trained Jedi, at least they were less of a catastrophe.”
“I–”
“Leave,” Sidious said. “Consider what I’ve said. Your shuttle will function properly now.”
He vanished without giving Kylo Ren a moment to respond, and behind him Kylo heard the telltale whine of the shuttle engines powering up. He stood alone in the valley for another long few heartbeats, silent and listening to the wind whip down the walls. The Sith were gone, back to their tombs, and the air still crackled with the half-dead edge of their power.
“I am the grandson of Darth Vader,” Kylo muttered under his breath as he Force-lifted the shuttle into an upright position. The words weren’t as powerful as they had been before. They tasted false. “I am the grandson of the last Sith Lord,” he said as he slipped back into the shuttle and sat down, flipping the switches for a planetside launch. The ground fell away as gravity dragged at him, and he headed for the black. “I am–”
“You are a laserbrained idiot,” a sharp voice interrupted as he broke out of the atmosphere, and Kylo Ren lashed out blindly with the Force. He missed, and only realized after his blow failed to connect that he couldn’t sense another life form on board.
In his defense, it had been a long day.
A long-limbed young man dropped into the copilot’s seat, dressed in Jedi robes, with shaggy hair the dusty gold-brown of sand at sunset. Glowing faintly blue, he dragged a Force signature like a star with him, but he was intangible and definitively deceased. He turned and glared at Kylo, a scar slashing down through one eyebrow—a lightsaber cut that had barely missed taking his eye, from the looks of it. He looked familiar, from dreams and half-formed mirages, always shouting furiously at Kylo’s back. Kylo Ren knew that his voice would have the same sandy-ass-end-of-the-galaxy accent that Luke’s did as soon as he opened his mouth.
“Are you ready to listen to me now, you stupid boy, or will you be demonstrating our family’s fabled hard-headedness again?”