Hunted

XXIII. The Transformation

Sleep. He had been asleep for so long he wasn't even sure he remembered when he had first laid down. His mind, usually a jumble of conflicting emotion and voices calling out to him interchangeably from the Darkness and the Light, was strangely silent, devoid of anything at all.

When he tried to look inside his own heart, lying there with eyes still closed in his new state of semi-consciousness, he could see nothing, for inside it was completely Dark.

The reconditioning had worked. For the first time in years and years he could feel himself brimming with whole-hearted devotion to the Dark side; no nagging thoughts of Light vs. the Dark. There was only the Dark now, and it filled him with purpose.

His breathing was measured, the steady rise and fall of his chest seemed to pump new vigour into him and his lungs. The blood in his veins seemed to have darkened too in way, as if every vein were filled with the power of the Dark down to the last nerve ending. Slowly, he cracked open one eyes, looking at the room around him.

Kylo had no memory of being brought here, but he looked at his surroundings and found blue-tiled walls with overhead lighting so bright it burned his eyes after weeks asleep. He squinted against the glare, allowing his eyes to adjust to the new sensation.

A two-way glass window on his left side and a set of double doors on his right were the only variables in this blue room, his body and the table he rested upon the only occupants.

He heard a beeping sound behind him and strained his stiff neck to look, seeing that there was one more item in the room; a large metal box covered in screens and buttons with various tubes connecting it to his body, pumping him full of whatever formula must be responsible for his new found clarity.

Anxious to get up and test his legs again, Kylo laid still as a board, listening as his whole body hummed with the adrenaline of his freedom from the Light, the absence of internal conflict that had threatened every day to tear him apart. His memories were intact now, both the good and the bad, but he viewed them with indifference as he struggled to sit up and remove the tubes from his body by himself, eager to resume his work for Snoke.

Suddenly the doors to his right opened, admitting a female orderly. She approached him with a clipboard under her arm, her blonde hair pinned up in a tight bun and her lab coat so starched and bleached the color hurt his already sensitive eyes to look at.

"Lord Ren," she addressed him, using her index finger to push the black rims of her glasses back up the bridge of her nose as she said it.

"Speak," he ordered her, and he heard his voice for the first time, still the same, but also somehow darker, more menacing. It was as if even his vocal cords had been affected by the process he had just undergone.

"My Lord, your reconditioning was enormously successful according to your test results. General Hux instructed us to begin weaning you off the sedation a few hours ago."

Kylo felt his throat tighten at the mention of his nemesis, his chief competition for Snoke's praise and admiration. He began to recall how Hux had spent the past months questioning him at every turn, gloating at every failure and doing his best to usurp Kylo's power, undermining his position in front of Snoke. As if that were even possible.

I am all powerful, he thought, and, and Hux, like all the others on this ship would kneel and bow before him, standing in his rightful place at the right hand of Supreme Leader Snoke, his son and apprentice on Snoke's left.

We will be unstoppable.

"How long have I been in reconditioning?" he asked snappily.

"About 3 weeks, sir."