Refuge, part 4
Nov. 1st, 2019 04:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
potboyvia https://ift.tt/2N7i7Ec
I’ve been ill this week, so this has been an extra struggle. Nevertheless, here we are with another chapter in which Hux is briefly utterly disarmed and Poe may not be a wise man but he is a good one.
Previous chapters on Ao3 here.
~*~*~*~
“So, you going to tell me what that was about?” Poe seized Hux’s elbow as the man came close, on his way back out of the bridge. Instead of twitching his arm out of the grasp, Hux closed his eyes briefly and allowed Poe to take his weight.
Given the time to debate, Poe might have expected himself to recoil. He didn’t. His body seemed to take over with a practical compassion that he didn’t feel like arguing about. He stepped in closer, let the bony fingers clench in his sleeve and walked with as much smoothness as he could muster. Under the bow-taut rigidity of Hux’s upright posture, the man was trembling. “You want me to carry you?”
Hux gave a minute headshake. “I must not show weakness on the bridge.”
“But you can to me?” Poe wondered, flattered. “Because I’m special?”
“Because you are scum,” Hux’s amused expression made even the insult feel like an endearment, “and therefore your opinion of me is irrelevant.”
Poe made a note to kick himself later. He shouldn’t be finding that cute. “Oh Hugs, that wasn’t what you said last time I called. It’s like we’re best friends suddenly. Med bay?”
“Please.”
The bridge elevator took them two levels down, where a sleek, droid-driven aircar waited to whisk them through a vaulted, obsidian tunnel into the closest medical facility. There Hux and his murder-teens were ushered into a consulting room. Poe and Rey found themselves perching on a misericorde of dark metal that ran around the walls of the atrium, watched by a triplet of dangling diagnostic droids like hostile metal jellyfish.
“Are you going to tell me what that was about?” Poe asked Rey, who had drawn her legs up under her and was now almost floating against the wall, supported only by the narrow ledge and thin air. “Have you guessed what the plan is yet? I mean, there is one, right? I hate being left out in the cold on this stuff.”
“I don’t know either.” Rey put her feet down one by one, soundless in her soft shoes. “But it’s probably just as well. Hux seems to have had practice in guarding his thoughts. Leia has too. But if they told you, who knows what you might leak?”
I don’t leak, Poe thought, stung. But he did, of course. Anyone would, when they were tortured by a dark Force user. It didn’t feel fair to be blamed for that, or treated like it made him a security risk. “Come on, you can’t tell me anything?”
“I’m going back via the gardens. I always wanted to see the gardens on these things while they were still alive.” Rey was up and half way down the corridor before he had time to argue out the internal ‘wait, I’ll come with’ versus 'no way can we leave that guy unsupervised’ debate. But hey, she’d grown up alone, it was probably a lot to ask of her to be good in teams. And he could cope just fine with Armitage Hux. The guy was so naive. So gullible. It was Hux who needed protection from him.
Funny that. When Poe had time to sit and think, his mind wandered into uncomfortable places. Like—seeing the First Order kiddies in their little uniforms—he couldn’t help but wonder how many children had been on Starkiller. How many orphan kids, like Rey, had been on the dreadnauts he had destroyed? How many good people like Finn had never been lucky enough to find that pilot out of here when they needed one? How many—like Poe—had told themselves that okay it was wrong to kill people but there was a war on, and in war…? Everything was fair in war, right? All was fair in love and war.
Those thoughts got deep real fast. He had the Resistance dead on his conscience, but Force, he didn’t want Starkiller’s on top. He didn’t want to face the fact that if he’d been in Hux’s place, thinking the Hosnian system was the command and control centre of the Enemy, the armoury and the shipyard of its fleet, he would probably have pulled the trigger on it too and thought the resulting explosion was glorious.
There was a liquid rippling sound from behind the closed med-bay doors. His mind decided to distract itself from misery by flashing up an image of long, pale limbs buoyed up in bacta. Disgusted with himself all at once, he blew out a frustrated breath and grabbed his comm.
Leia answered in seconds, her blue holographic face drawn. “You shouldn’t be comming me, Poe.” But her expression softened at whatever she saw in his eyes. “Is there a problem?”
“I’m not in a position to know,” he growled, more aggressively than he intended, “Because I don’t know what the plan is. Come on! I’m going mad here trying to second guess everything, when I don't… I don’t know what I can believe any more. Can you—”
“Poe, we’ve been in this place before,” she said, firm and faintly disappointed.
“I’m not going to do anything stupid.” He got that out there as quick as he could. “I’ve learned that lesson. It’s just…” he sighed. “It’s not you I’ve got to trust here, is it? It’s the enemy.”
Leia huffed a little laugh. “And I’m not telling you not to be prepared for betrayal,” she said. “I’m sure I’m having the very same thoughts as you are, about this being a trap.”
Maybe not all the same thoughts, Poe hoped, listening to the splooshing behind the door where wet bare feet were coming down on a tiled floor.
“But one thing I have learned over the years,” Leia continued, “Is that you also have to be prepared for it not to be a trap. Did I ever tell you that one of the great heroes of the last war—one who I now regard as a good friend—began as an Imperial Loyalty Officer? A sneak, a torturer, a zealot. The very worst of the worst. But if we had rejected his help, insisted on seeing him punished instead of welcomed, I hesitate to say how many more people we would have lost. Perhaps the war itself.”
She raised a hand, obviously going for the communication toggle, readying to cut the connection, “Forgiveness and mercy are among the things that make us the Light Side.” She gave him a quick, almost imagined smile. “Consider this a recruitment opportunity.”
The comm cut off, leaving Poe with a strong impression that she was laughing at him. Because of course he knew Sinjir Rath Velus—he liked the man. He just hadn’t ever thought that the part of Sinjir’s life where he’d been a loyalty officer was even real. Like the man came pre-minted as a hero who’d been living under deep cover all that time.
Yet Sinjir was of the first generation of the Empire—he’d obviously chosen it on some level. Hux hadn’t. Hux had been raised like his little bodyguards, sucking in poison with his mother’s milk.
Poe shook his head, weary with it all. All he’d wanted to be was a hero. Why did that have to be so hard?
The med-bay door slid open, and Hux strode out, tugging at his gloves. His throat was green now, but his gait was easier, more fluid. There was just enough movement in his back to suggest a highly wound spring, rather than the rigidity of a man holding himself tight against pain.
Without the burst capillaries, the bruising around his eyes, their haunted expression was easier to read. He’s scared, Poe realized with a wash of relief. He’s scared too.
The jolt of empathy shook loose all the memories he’d been trying to repress. His wrists ached as though metal bands were cutting into them, and his head felt hollowed out, scraped raw inside, invaded at a deep and fundamental level that his body interpreted as violation. Helplessness hit him like a weight in the chest, threatening to collapse his lungs.
That had been the worst. The fact that there had been nothing he could do. His whole strength had been brushed aside as if it was nothing. He had been the fly struggling in the grip of a child, while a strength beyond his knowledge, beyond his comprehension, plucked out his limbs, his wings with insulting, godlike ease.
It was hard for a man to withstand that and not feel on some level like he’d been emasculated, unmade.
“If they set off immediately post my call,” Hux smoothed his collar down, “the fleet should be arriving in five minutes, with the Supreme Leader perhaps another three minutes behind them. We should be on the bridge. Where is—?”
“Rey’ll meet us there,” Poe managed, scrambling to pull back together all the bits of himself that still felt shattered. “She said she was going via the gardens? I didn’t know what she meant.”
“You’re not familiar with the concept of gardens?” Hux seized on the subject with the air of a man who also wanted to think about anything else but the approach of doom. There was a glint in his eye as though he wanted to talk down to Poe’s ignorance, but it was counteracted by a faint worry that Poe might still be making fun.
“Well, I mean, yeah. Places where you grow plants, right? For food–”
“And air. Indeed. The gardens contribute greatly to the ship’s efficiency and health. Numerous studies have shown that an exposure to the bioactive compounds and organisms in soil and growing things is–”
“Good for you,” Poe finished, unmoored again, but more pleasantly. “Yeah, my dad says that too. I just didn’t expect—” I didn’t expect you to care about health, or pleasure, or growing things or…
As they climbed back into the aircar, he caught sight again of the smooth band of green and yellow bruising around Hux’s throat, and that great hollowness inside him prompted him to open his mouth and let some of his thoughts out, unfiltered.
“I guess hardly any of this is like what I expected.” I don’t know what to do with the fact that you’re real. That those kids are real. That when you’re off duty you might go for a walk in the garden, like real folks. That when you think of going up against Kylo Ren, you’re scared too. And that you’re here doing it anyway.
“I’m sure the propaganda of the loathsome–”
“No,” he interrupted, possessed by the need to get this out, to break out—just for a moment—from the posturing they’d been locked into, the sense that they were both reading lines from some kind of score-sheet, not seeing or hearing each other as people any more. The bridge elevator was in sight, and in less than ten minutes they might both be smears of atoms across uncaring space. He remembered helplessness and he wasn’t playing any more.
“No. What I… I mean, you know he tortured me? Kylo Ren?”
Hux’s performative outrage fell from his face like the mask it was, leaving it oddly bare. “I know that.”
“It was the worst thing I’d ever felt in my life. And if-if you’re really going against him, well-” where had his eloquence gone? He wasn’t used to forcing out earnest, heartfelt things like this. He wished briefly he could have had this eleventh hour moment with almost anyone else, but…
“I just-I just want to say that—well, it must have taken a lot of courage to come to us. To go against him. He makes you feel like you’re nothing. Nothing at all. And I wanted you to know that I see your strength, going up against that. I admire it.”
“You’re mocking me again.” Hux’s eyes had widened and there had been a brief glimmer of anguish on his face before anger replaced it. “I don’t appreciate you tooling with me on the eve of—”
Something about the flinch of hope, of misery, was like watching a starved street-felinx refuse food because it believed it would come with a kicking attached. Poe let Hux tear himself away from his outstretched hand and jam himself into the far corner of the elevator as if he’d been offended, and his chest ached at the sight of it.
“I’m not 'tooling with you,'” he said gently. “I mean it.” He held out his hand, offering a comradely handshake, an acknowledgement across cultures of at least one kind of respect, just as the elevator doors opened and the viewscreen beyond them bloomed with hyperspace exit points.
Between one breath and the next they had become the bullseye at the centre of a ring of gleaming points. Kylo Ren’s First Order had arrived, and their weapons were charged.
“I mean it,” Poe said again, suddenly happy with all his heart that his last moment should be this—this gesture of generosity toward a man who’d obviously had praise so rarely in his life he didn’t recognize it when it came. “If everything goes south, it will be an honour to die with a man as brave as you.”
Hux looked at his outstretched hand as though he had no idea what it was for. His eyes, when he raised them fleetingly to Poe’s, were devastated. For a moment, a tiny, infinitesimal space of time, the universe stalled in its tracks.
Then the compliment rolled off Hux like water off a porg’s back. He straightened his shoulders. “I have no intention of dying today,” he said, and marched out alone to face the serried ranks of warships.
I’ve been ill this week, so this has been an extra struggle. Nevertheless, here we are with another chapter in which Hux is briefly utterly disarmed and Poe may not be a wise man but he is a good one.
Previous chapters on Ao3 here.
~*~*~*~
“So, you going to tell me what that was about?” Poe seized Hux’s elbow as the man came close, on his way back out of the bridge. Instead of twitching his arm out of the grasp, Hux closed his eyes briefly and allowed Poe to take his weight.
Given the time to debate, Poe might have expected himself to recoil. He didn’t. His body seemed to take over with a practical compassion that he didn’t feel like arguing about. He stepped in closer, let the bony fingers clench in his sleeve and walked with as much smoothness as he could muster. Under the bow-taut rigidity of Hux’s upright posture, the man was trembling. “You want me to carry you?”
Hux gave a minute headshake. “I must not show weakness on the bridge.”
“But you can to me?” Poe wondered, flattered. “Because I’m special?”
“Because you are scum,” Hux’s amused expression made even the insult feel like an endearment, “and therefore your opinion of me is irrelevant.”
Poe made a note to kick himself later. He shouldn’t be finding that cute. “Oh Hugs, that wasn’t what you said last time I called. It’s like we’re best friends suddenly. Med bay?”
“Please.”
The bridge elevator took them two levels down, where a sleek, droid-driven aircar waited to whisk them through a vaulted, obsidian tunnel into the closest medical facility. There Hux and his murder-teens were ushered into a consulting room. Poe and Rey found themselves perching on a misericorde of dark metal that ran around the walls of the atrium, watched by a triplet of dangling diagnostic droids like hostile metal jellyfish.
“Are you going to tell me what that was about?” Poe asked Rey, who had drawn her legs up under her and was now almost floating against the wall, supported only by the narrow ledge and thin air. “Have you guessed what the plan is yet? I mean, there is one, right? I hate being left out in the cold on this stuff.”
“I don’t know either.” Rey put her feet down one by one, soundless in her soft shoes. “But it’s probably just as well. Hux seems to have had practice in guarding his thoughts. Leia has too. But if they told you, who knows what you might leak?”
I don’t leak, Poe thought, stung. But he did, of course. Anyone would, when they were tortured by a dark Force user. It didn’t feel fair to be blamed for that, or treated like it made him a security risk. “Come on, you can’t tell me anything?”
“I’m going back via the gardens. I always wanted to see the gardens on these things while they were still alive.” Rey was up and half way down the corridor before he had time to argue out the internal ‘wait, I’ll come with’ versus 'no way can we leave that guy unsupervised’ debate. But hey, she’d grown up alone, it was probably a lot to ask of her to be good in teams. And he could cope just fine with Armitage Hux. The guy was so naive. So gullible. It was Hux who needed protection from him.
Funny that. When Poe had time to sit and think, his mind wandered into uncomfortable places. Like—seeing the First Order kiddies in their little uniforms—he couldn’t help but wonder how many children had been on Starkiller. How many orphan kids, like Rey, had been on the dreadnauts he had destroyed? How many good people like Finn had never been lucky enough to find that pilot out of here when they needed one? How many—like Poe—had told themselves that okay it was wrong to kill people but there was a war on, and in war…? Everything was fair in war, right? All was fair in love and war.
Those thoughts got deep real fast. He had the Resistance dead on his conscience, but Force, he didn’t want Starkiller’s on top. He didn’t want to face the fact that if he’d been in Hux’s place, thinking the Hosnian system was the command and control centre of the Enemy, the armoury and the shipyard of its fleet, he would probably have pulled the trigger on it too and thought the resulting explosion was glorious.
There was a liquid rippling sound from behind the closed med-bay doors. His mind decided to distract itself from misery by flashing up an image of long, pale limbs buoyed up in bacta. Disgusted with himself all at once, he blew out a frustrated breath and grabbed his comm.
Leia answered in seconds, her blue holographic face drawn. “You shouldn’t be comming me, Poe.” But her expression softened at whatever she saw in his eyes. “Is there a problem?”
“I’m not in a position to know,” he growled, more aggressively than he intended, “Because I don’t know what the plan is. Come on! I’m going mad here trying to second guess everything, when I don't… I don’t know what I can believe any more. Can you—”
“Poe, we’ve been in this place before,” she said, firm and faintly disappointed.
“I’m not going to do anything stupid.” He got that out there as quick as he could. “I’ve learned that lesson. It’s just…” he sighed. “It’s not you I’ve got to trust here, is it? It’s the enemy.”
Leia huffed a little laugh. “And I’m not telling you not to be prepared for betrayal,” she said. “I’m sure I’m having the very same thoughts as you are, about this being a trap.”
Maybe not all the same thoughts, Poe hoped, listening to the splooshing behind the door where wet bare feet were coming down on a tiled floor.
“But one thing I have learned over the years,” Leia continued, “Is that you also have to be prepared for it not to be a trap. Did I ever tell you that one of the great heroes of the last war—one who I now regard as a good friend—began as an Imperial Loyalty Officer? A sneak, a torturer, a zealot. The very worst of the worst. But if we had rejected his help, insisted on seeing him punished instead of welcomed, I hesitate to say how many more people we would have lost. Perhaps the war itself.”
She raised a hand, obviously going for the communication toggle, readying to cut the connection, “Forgiveness and mercy are among the things that make us the Light Side.” She gave him a quick, almost imagined smile. “Consider this a recruitment opportunity.”
The comm cut off, leaving Poe with a strong impression that she was laughing at him. Because of course he knew Sinjir Rath Velus—he liked the man. He just hadn’t ever thought that the part of Sinjir’s life where he’d been a loyalty officer was even real. Like the man came pre-minted as a hero who’d been living under deep cover all that time.
Yet Sinjir was of the first generation of the Empire—he’d obviously chosen it on some level. Hux hadn’t. Hux had been raised like his little bodyguards, sucking in poison with his mother’s milk.
Poe shook his head, weary with it all. All he’d wanted to be was a hero. Why did that have to be so hard?
The med-bay door slid open, and Hux strode out, tugging at his gloves. His throat was green now, but his gait was easier, more fluid. There was just enough movement in his back to suggest a highly wound spring, rather than the rigidity of a man holding himself tight against pain.
Without the burst capillaries, the bruising around his eyes, their haunted expression was easier to read. He’s scared, Poe realized with a wash of relief. He’s scared too.
The jolt of empathy shook loose all the memories he’d been trying to repress. His wrists ached as though metal bands were cutting into them, and his head felt hollowed out, scraped raw inside, invaded at a deep and fundamental level that his body interpreted as violation. Helplessness hit him like a weight in the chest, threatening to collapse his lungs.
That had been the worst. The fact that there had been nothing he could do. His whole strength had been brushed aside as if it was nothing. He had been the fly struggling in the grip of a child, while a strength beyond his knowledge, beyond his comprehension, plucked out his limbs, his wings with insulting, godlike ease.
It was hard for a man to withstand that and not feel on some level like he’d been emasculated, unmade.
“If they set off immediately post my call,” Hux smoothed his collar down, “the fleet should be arriving in five minutes, with the Supreme Leader perhaps another three minutes behind them. We should be on the bridge. Where is—?”
“Rey’ll meet us there,” Poe managed, scrambling to pull back together all the bits of himself that still felt shattered. “She said she was going via the gardens? I didn’t know what she meant.”
“You’re not familiar with the concept of gardens?” Hux seized on the subject with the air of a man who also wanted to think about anything else but the approach of doom. There was a glint in his eye as though he wanted to talk down to Poe’s ignorance, but it was counteracted by a faint worry that Poe might still be making fun.
“Well, I mean, yeah. Places where you grow plants, right? For food–”
“And air. Indeed. The gardens contribute greatly to the ship’s efficiency and health. Numerous studies have shown that an exposure to the bioactive compounds and organisms in soil and growing things is–”
“Good for you,” Poe finished, unmoored again, but more pleasantly. “Yeah, my dad says that too. I just didn’t expect—” I didn’t expect you to care about health, or pleasure, or growing things or…
As they climbed back into the aircar, he caught sight again of the smooth band of green and yellow bruising around Hux’s throat, and that great hollowness inside him prompted him to open his mouth and let some of his thoughts out, unfiltered.
“I guess hardly any of this is like what I expected.” I don’t know what to do with the fact that you’re real. That those kids are real. That when you’re off duty you might go for a walk in the garden, like real folks. That when you think of going up against Kylo Ren, you’re scared too. And that you’re here doing it anyway.
“I’m sure the propaganda of the loathsome–”
“No,” he interrupted, possessed by the need to get this out, to break out—just for a moment—from the posturing they’d been locked into, the sense that they were both reading lines from some kind of score-sheet, not seeing or hearing each other as people any more. The bridge elevator was in sight, and in less than ten minutes they might both be smears of atoms across uncaring space. He remembered helplessness and he wasn’t playing any more.
“No. What I… I mean, you know he tortured me? Kylo Ren?”
Hux’s performative outrage fell from his face like the mask it was, leaving it oddly bare. “I know that.”
“It was the worst thing I’d ever felt in my life. And if-if you’re really going against him, well-” where had his eloquence gone? He wasn’t used to forcing out earnest, heartfelt things like this. He wished briefly he could have had this eleventh hour moment with almost anyone else, but…
“I just-I just want to say that—well, it must have taken a lot of courage to come to us. To go against him. He makes you feel like you’re nothing. Nothing at all. And I wanted you to know that I see your strength, going up against that. I admire it.”
“You’re mocking me again.” Hux’s eyes had widened and there had been a brief glimmer of anguish on his face before anger replaced it. “I don’t appreciate you tooling with me on the eve of—”
Something about the flinch of hope, of misery, was like watching a starved street-felinx refuse food because it believed it would come with a kicking attached. Poe let Hux tear himself away from his outstretched hand and jam himself into the far corner of the elevator as if he’d been offended, and his chest ached at the sight of it.
“I’m not 'tooling with you,'” he said gently. “I mean it.” He held out his hand, offering a comradely handshake, an acknowledgement across cultures of at least one kind of respect, just as the elevator doors opened and the viewscreen beyond them bloomed with hyperspace exit points.
Between one breath and the next they had become the bullseye at the centre of a ring of gleaming points. Kylo Ren’s First Order had arrived, and their weapons were charged.
“I mean it,” Poe said again, suddenly happy with all his heart that his last moment should be this—this gesture of generosity toward a man who’d obviously had praise so rarely in his life he didn’t recognize it when it came. “If everything goes south, it will be an honour to die with a man as brave as you.”
Hux looked at his outstretched hand as though he had no idea what it was for. His eyes, when he raised them fleetingly to Poe’s, were devastated. For a moment, a tiny, infinitesimal space of time, the universe stalled in its tracks.
Then the compliment rolled off Hux like water off a porg’s back. He straightened his shoulders. “I have no intention of dying today,” he said, and marched out alone to face the serried ranks of warships.