potboy

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I had this done early, so I thought I’d post it straight away without making us all wait for it.

In which, without ever saying the words, two people crown themselves Queen and Emperor of the galaxy. For filigranka

Whole story available on Ao3

~*~*~*~

This was why despair was such a sin, Leia thought, sitting in an uncomfortable chair in the Finalizer’s infirmary and watching over the still bodies of Rey and Kylo. Of Ben, her son. If she had despaired the way Luke had despaired—run away to be miserable in private—she would have missed the moment when Poe swept in and scooped both unconscious force-users into the pressurized bomb bay of his oversized TIE.

As she knew very well herself, the vacuum of space was survivable for up to ninety seconds, though one paid a toll for it on returning. Both Ben and Rey had been close to the edge of death, and the Finalizer’s med-droids reported that their lungs were full of lesions where the oxygen had boiled out of their blood. Their eyes had frozen shut, and the water had boiled in their mouths and down their throats.

They would be scarred within, but they were surprisingly undamaged on the outside, floating, drugged and peaceful in vats of bacta. The usual face-masks had been deemed inappropriate and the Finalizer’s severe doctor had insisted that their lungs would have to be filled with bacta too. If the drugs faltered and they woke they would pass from the memory of suffocation to the sensation of drowning before they ever reached consciousness.

The doctor’s shift had ended two hours ago with a burst of disinfectant radiation and a disapproving stare. “It’s nothing to me if you choose to stay here,” they’d said. “The droids will monitor you. But I will be shutting off the lights.”

“That’s fine,” she’d replied, settling in for the vigil. They’d left her alone in this cavern-like room that stank of ozone and blood in what at first had seemed pitch darkness.

It was the quietest she’d sat with Ben for twenty years, though she scarcely recognized the boy she loved in the scarred and muscular body that floated before her. The pain of loss was omnipresent, the air she’d breathed now for half his life.

Despair was a sin. Hope was not a feeling but an action, a determination, a hard slog of endurance through the sleepless nights and the dreads of life because she simply refused to give in. So she sat by her son and remembered the happier days; there had been days when they’d played together, baked together. Days when she’d taken him to the Senate and explained how it all worked, and he’d seemed fascinated…

There had been days when she left him before he woke in the morning and didn’t return until after he was asleep. To her it hadn’t seemed to happen often, but now she looked back, it must have seemed to him like his whole life.

Had Luke really tried to kill him? Had Vader’s blood coming out in Luke, just for a second, really separated Ben from his whole family? Or had it been only the last straw? He hadn’t fled to her for protection from Luke, after all. She had obviously never shown him that she could be trusted, that she would put him first.

Of course she hadn’t. Because—looking back—he never had been first. The galaxy had been her favoured child, and he had been, and known himself to be, the afterthought.

Anguish overcame her in the dark. She put her face in her hands and wept. If only she could have the time again, she would do better. If only–

Most of the med-droids—black dangling things that reminded her of being tortured—had red running lights which illuminated the infirmary a little once her eyes adjusted, and a gleam of silver lighting ran around the inside of the bacta tanks. It was the tremble of the still liquid that alerted her first.

She raised her head and listened. There was no sound, but the bacta in the tanks rippled rhythmically to the pulse of oncoming footsteps.

Leia wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, sank her face lower into the hollow of her tall, charcoal collar and held perfectly still.

The tanks’ silver lights picked out an angelic face capped with hellfire hair, and ran along the hypospray in Hux’s black gloved hand as he raised it to the intake valve of Kylo’s tank.

“Stop right there,” Leia commanded, in her brassiest, most authoritative voice.

He jumped almost a foot into the air, came down wide eyed, but scowling. “Or what?”

She rose, drawing on her outrage and the shadows of this place of pain. She was old enough to be both furious and perfectly calm at the same time, monitoring herself to be sure she didn’t go too far. Her reflection in his eyes was that of a twisting shade, lightning on its hands where her rings gleamed. “You don’t want to test me.”

She’d been told she could be terrifying at times, but he didn’t buckle, just stood coldly assessing her for a long moment before his shoulders relaxed in surrender.

“I suppose I don’t,” he sighed. “But our agreement was that you would ensure that I and my people were safe—from him and, by extension, from others of his kind. How are you going to ensure anyone’s safety if Ren remains alive?”

His hand disappeared inside his greatcoat, depositing the hypospray in an inside pocket. It struck her with sudden certainty that he was carrying more than one dose of the poison—that he had intended to get rid of Rey tonight too, poisoned while she was unconscious and defenceless. He didn’t even have the gall to look guilty about it.

She badly wanted to despise him, but again he had a point. If he let either of the force users regain consciousness, he would be defenceless against them. So when else should he attack?

“I believe I am a match for him,” she said gently. “When we made our agreement, I thought I was willing to see him die, but I find I’m not. You probably don’t understand this, but he’s my son, and I love him. If there’s any chance at all for him—if he will listen to Rey or myself, then I’m willing to take that chance.

“And the rest of us will have to go along with it,” he said bitterly, clearing a stack of datapads from the top of a recharging station and sitting there primly. “Because when a Force-user makes a decision, we ordinary mortals do not have the choice to say ‘no.'”

The thought gave her pause. But no. She had never overruled anyone just because she could. She owed her victories to negotiation, to free-will and the good hearts of those who would not be ruled by–

“You’re a fine one to talk about not ruling by force,” she pointed out, unsettled at seeing herself for a moment as the threat to galactic liberty, to peace. “If you wanted a galaxy in which there were no slaves, you should not have created the Stormtrooper program.”

“They were made in imitation of the Jedi, did you know? Because my father believed the Jedi were the perfect soldiers. One of the deadliest armies ever to call itself a peace-keeping force. If we are placing blame, shall we talk about all the ways in which we are the true heirs to your precious Republic?”

Leia was tempted to get up and slap him. Or to storm out—which she supposed was his aim. Instead she laughed. “Let’s not talk politics. Not right now at least. If I want any chance of deprogramming your troopers I have to deal with you. With centralized government gone, if I want an army to protect the galaxy from pirates, traffickers and petty warlords, I have to deal with you. That’s clear. But if you want any chance of surviving when Ben comes around, you have to deal with me. Is that also clear?”

“It is,” he said, folding his hands together in a way that made the leather of his gloves creak. He fixed her with a direct gaze, burning icy blue like the aurora on Hoth. “Unless I can kill every one of you.”

She laughed. He showed his teeth even when he believed she could knock them out. She found it oddly charming. “I think you know already that you don’t have a chance. We’re stuck with each other. But I’m glad to have met you face to face. I wouldn’t have known otherwise that you’re…”

Honest, she thought, though it was not quite the right word. Sincere was better. She had expected him to be corrupt all the way down, but the Force was telling her he was not. Buried deep in the wasteland of his character, there was still something weight-bearing, solid.

“You genuinely believe in working for the betterment of the galaxy, don’t you? In an end to poverty, to starvation and slavery?”

“Even to war,” he agreed, soft voiced in the darkness, astonishing her. “We struck hard, once, because we hoped that we would never have to strike again.”

The outrage of a million Alderaani refugees demanded to speak through her. She knew from experience how long it would take the Hosnian survivors to begin to recover their cultures even though their homes were gone. But no amount of rage would replace what had been lost. It would only hinder the rebuilding.

He didn’t want to make war? Good. Perhaps it was time to try something else.

“I can work with that.”

The vastness of the task opened up in front of her—establishing a new government, working out what its shape should be, who should be represented and how. Giving the opportunity for worlds to sign up or secede. Laws to be made. Banks, conglomerates and billionaires to be deprived of their power for the sake of the people…

Stars! It made her tired just thinking of it. This was the hard work on the other side of victory. This was the work that this time would have to be done right, with no heavily armed dissenters fleeing to become the next generation’s threat. And it would have to be done by negotiation—slow, dull and safe.

Hux stepped back up to the tank. She watched him lay a hand on its surface, almost gently. He huffed a laugh through his nose, looking up at the spreading cloud of Kylo’s black hair and at his sleeping face.

“I thought of him as a peer,” he offered, opening a part of her son’s life to her like a gift. “We were not always in agreement, when Snoke ruled, but we were colleagues, and I… greatly valued having someone to whom I could speak freely, as an equal.”

She’d heard that kind of puzzled, baffled loneliness in the back of Finn’s mind too—the wish for some kind of human connection that their society had made impossible for them. For all its high goals, the First Order had been a monstrous place, even to those who lived in it.

“Yet when Snoke was gone, your son did his best to grind my face into the floor.” Hux gave her a smug, cold smile, as though the stalemate in which they found themselves was a kind of victory. She rather supposed it was.

“Now here he lies, at my mercy. I’ll give him to you, as a goodwill gesture. You and I will work out together how best to rule the galaxy from here. But if you think to cross me, and crush me and toss me around like him, then I can assure you, you will meet the same fate.”

“I won’t hurt you,” she assured him. He was a poisonous little snake, wasn’t he? He bit when he was scared. So perhaps it was time to try not scaring him. “I will make sure that he doesn’t either. And I will make sure that you don’t hurt him. It’s time all the pain that we’ve carried forward from parents and grandparents to end. Time for a new age. A new hope. Freedom. Peace.”

“Order.”

“Order too,” she agreed, because yes. Those were good aims.

Everything else was negotiable.

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In which we find out what the heck Rey was thinking, and it is Kylo’s turn to reject an outstretched hand.

~*~*~*~

“Ben,” Rey called, watching his head turn and the light of the instruments slide blue over the sleek metal grille of his helmet. Oddly, she couldn’t see the bridge of the shuttle behind him. He was isolate against a smooth dark background like a pane of plasteel.

It hurt to see him back in the helmet, confirming that it was a thing he’d chosen for himself—that he wanted to go through life with his face hidden, never risking recognition or vulnerability. She felt as though he had been hanging over an abyss and she had tried to take his hand. As though their fingers had just missed touching, and now he was falling, falling back into the dark.

Should she have stayed? Could she have talked him into a better way of life, a better frame of mind if she had stayed and accepted the First Order like some kind of dowry? They had come to her anyway through Hux—an unwanted gift she couldn’t seem to refuse.

“You!” Ben exclaimed with a noise like a burst of static behind his mask. “Did you just save my life?”

“I did.”

Hux’s resentment formed the birth of a new star beside her, the pressures and heat enough to forge kyber.

“Why?”

She wondered that herself. She had merely felt the death blow coming and reached out to thwart it out of instinct. Maybe because she knew that Leia was watching from behind the shadow of a nearby moon, and Leia’s perpetually downtrodden stubborn hope for Ben had broken her heart quite enough, without being in the blast radius of his death.

Maybe too it was for herself. Because the Force had terrified her when she had been alone with it and he had spoken to her gently, as one adept to another. Because she had sought teaching and he was the only one willing—eager—to offer it to her. Because he had overthrown his master in part—she would not be convinced that it had not been at least in part—for her.

Even now, beyond the wall she built in her mind, the bond Snoke claimed he had made between them gaped like the phantom pain of a lost limb. If she killed Ben, would some part of her die with him? Even the thought ached.

“I don’t know,” she said, unable to pick a pithy oneliner out of that tangle of regrets. “Maybe I wanted to ask you to come back to us. Maybe I wanted to change my mind. To rule the galaxy with you. To find some way of ending this without war. I don’t–”

“It’s too late for that,” he growled, voice like the roar of an X-wing engine. “I offered that before. You rejected me. I have the knights now. Other friends, other companions. I don’t need you. I’m going to kill you all. You, the Rebellion, the First Order. And then I’ll finally be free.”

“I’d like to see him try, in a single command shuttle,” Hux scoffed, shoving his resentment of her down into a pit where all his other monsters lived. “Those things are barely armed.”

“Yeah, Hugs,” Poe spoke from beside her, looking troubled, as though he wasn’t sure she’d made the right call either. “You need to stop underestimating the damage a single ship–”

In the middle of empty space, the command shuttle’s wedge shaped rear door lowered. Wings sharp as sickles sliced out from within, and following them came the bulbous body of a heavily modified TIE fighter.

“He had the Silencer in the cargo bay,” Hux spat, pinching the bridge of his nose. He gave her a glare that attempted to peel her skin from her bones. “Oh, excellent. I well recall how much damage Poe was capable of inflicting in a single fighter, and Ren has the Force. Your compassion for a single man—if that’s what this was about—has endangered the lives of the eighty thousand people who serve on this vessel. I hope you’re–”

She didn’t want to hear it. The thought of this living, breathing ship, the flowers in the vegetable gardens, the infants in the nurseries, being left a broken backed hulk like the ones on Jakku was intolerable. And also she didn’t like being yelled at. She turned and ran for the fighter racks. “I’ll take a TIE out there and fight him myself!”

“I’m coming too,” Poe called behind her. But his footstep faltered. She had the sense that he had been snatched by the elbow, turned. She heard the muffled slide of leather on palm as something was passed over.

“I’ve needed a test pilot for this for some time. Go to bay nen enth fifty-seven. Unlock it with this cylinder. Take the prototype.”

She lost Poe’s answer as the bridge elevator’s doors closed behind her, whisking her out to the fighter stacks, but as she was climbing into the first cockpit she found she saw him stumble out behind her with a startled smile. He gave her a jaunty salute as she strapped in and First Order personnel secured the ship from the outside, uncoupled the tether.

Everyone loved Poe, even after his disgrace. Apparently even First Order generals looked at him and couldn’t be mad for long. It was probably the Will of the Force.

Flying a TIE was a thousand times more thrilling in reality than it had been on the simulator she’d rigged at home. The First Order version was nimbler, more responsive. Faster too. She was thankful for its shield, protecting her not only from enemy fire but also from pointless accidental death by micro-meteorite. She threw the little craft into a tumble just for the sheer joy of watching the stars swirl like ribbons.

Behind her, Poe’s ship streaked out of the Finalizer’s dock. It was the largest TIE she’d ever seen, having what looked like a cargo or bomb bay beneath the pilot’s pod, but it was even faster. He caught up and overshot her with a whoop of delight.

The Knights’ command shuttle held position as Kylo’s Silencer swept in toward Rey in what was not quite an intercept course.

He was going to go round her, she realized suddenly, insight or the Force dropping it into her mind like weighed certainty. Despite his words, he didn’t want to kill her either. But he would, if she gave him no other option.

She felt his mind dwell on Hux, angry that he couldn’t turn his back for a second without betrayal, angry with himself that he had known this but he had let it happen anyway. Should have killed him, he was thinking. Should have killed him before he had the chance to–

Before he had the chance to activate the Stormtroopers’ conditioning, Rey thought, thinking of Finn. She hoped that the plan to keep Finn with Leia, away from Hux and his words, meant that Finn was fine. But what about the other troopers? What if, now, Hux died? Would that not cut the head off the  sand-snake entirely? Would it leave the First Order’s common soldiers finally with the ability to make their own choices?

“Poe,” she said, switching the intercom to a private channel. He was already in an attack run, swooping between the Silencer and the Finalizer like a sparrow defending an eagle.

The Silencer’s Arakyd warhead launcher belched blue flame as it spat out a concussion grenade, but a shot from Poe’s laser-cannon burst the thing into a ring of fire which he barrelled through, laughing. “Little busy here, Rey.”

“Poe,” she tried again. “We should leave. Let them tear each other apart. Take out the loser when they’re done.”

His voice had sobered when he spoke next, as though he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “That's… Kind of sneaky, don’t you think?”

How else do you think a five year old survived the Jakku wastes, she thought, stung. This was strategy, and he was a general now. It was something he should be doing for himself, instead of turning in a roll that must have nearly made him black out, and strafing the Silencer’s shields with an inferno of green plasma. “Sneaky is good! Sneaky means you don’t get killed.”

“We gave our word,” he insisted. “That’s the difference between us and them. You can trust us. We don’t break promises. We don’t–”

“If Hux dies, won’t the stormtroopers be free? All of them?” Think of Finn, Poe, she thought, but she knew he always was.

She could almost feel the temperature drop between them. She’d hurt him, disappointed him.

“Rey, we don’t do that. We promised him protection. We’d never have any more recruits if they knew we’d just hang ‘em out to dry whenever it was convenient. Besides, we need Hugs alive to dismantle the conditioning safely. We don’t know what would happen with him gone. Maybe they’d go berserk? Maybe they’re primed to self-destruct or something? It’s not worth the risk.”

He barrel-rolled out of the way of a proton torpedo with a bare instant to spare, and she realized she was distracting him. She was going to get him killed

“Let’s just do what we said we’d do.”

A mag-pulse warhead bounced from her shield and detonated. Her instrument panel flickered. Sparks rained from above her head, singing her hair and cheek. As she reached for the extinguisher, a second went off. The lights and gravity cut out. The extinguisher, spiralling, hit her in the teeth.

Kriff it. If Kylo didn’t want her to blow him up then maybe Kylo could run away. She’d tried. She’d saved his life once already and still he was firing at her? Yeah, maybe he did have it coming after all.

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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.

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In which I still don’t let anyone know what the plan is, but Rey gets some clues via the Force. Space battles are 90% waiting for the enemy to arrive from half way across the galaxy, 99% awkward introspection and heart-to-hearts, 150% Hux being extra ™ and then 1% full on screaming and dying, but we haven’t got to that part yet.

~*~*~*~

Chapter Three

(Earlier chapters on Ao3 here)

There was something rather homelike about a Star Destroyer, Rey thought, not paying a lot of attention to Poe and Hux showing off for one another. It wasn’t just that she’d spent so many years of her life in them, or that she couldn’t help but regard them as a treasure-trove of almost infinite abundance. It was the atmosphere.

The Resistance’s bases were a heady mix of zealotry and brotherly love—a cloud cuckoo land where everyone was willing to die for everyone else, and small gestures of kindness were expected to be made hourly without any payment or recompense. Which was lovely, but also disorienting. In her experience, life didn’t work like that.

The Finalizer though—Rey’s awareness spread out into its corridors and sampled the currents and undercurrents of its inhabitants—was more like Niima Outpost. A healthy level of fear and determined self-preservation ran through its hundreds of thousands of minds, and—particularly among the Stormtroopers—there was a thankfulness for food, for shelter and warmth, clothes and medicine that Rey found compelling.

A weird nostalgia ached through her the more she saw.

Young Brond had clearly been fortunate enough to be taught a living tradition that Rey had to figure out for herself, for example. She’d probably had classmates, instructors, even friends, where Rey had been forced to pick up the same skills alone, from half shattered Imperial Martial Arts sims recorded by the dead.

Rey had learned a lot from these people. Their voices had shaped her own, replacing her native accent—whatever it had been—with their clipped tones. Their archives had formed her bed-time reading. The corpses of their ships had fed and sheltered her, even while the other scavengers told her wonderful stories about their defeat.

Seeing the culture alive with purpose always made her feel that she had in some part grown up here, and that was an unsettling thought.

The bridge doors slid open. Hux braced himself and strode through. The lancing spikes of pain she had been feeling from him were temporarily dulled by whatever he had just injected, and Rey was thankful not to have them as a distraction as she came into the disapproving glances on his heel, Poe staying so close to her that he jostled her knife arm.

Hux’s aide stepped gingerly over a blood trail that lead to the Captain’s station, stationed himself at the communications desk. All the raised gazes that had been examining her—the little whispers of “Is that her? The one who killed Snoke? She doesn’t look—” broke off as the bridge crew avoided Hux’s searching gaze, dropped their eyes to their stations. Rey could feel their hearts racing from here, and her own picked up in sympathy.

Opening a comm channel to the rest of the FO fleet would give away their position. If he wasn’t already on his way here, warned by the Force, Kylo would be summoned. If this was an elaborate trap laid by Hux, she and Poe would be delivered into his hands. If not, they might be destroyed when every laser-cannon and every Force User the First Order possessed was turned on the Finalizer…

This was one of the reasons Leia and Finn had been sequestered apart on the Falcon—an insurance policy for the Resistance if all else failed.

She closed her eyes briefly, breathed in in one of the exercises she had copied from her observances of Luke—she’d had to steal that knowledge for herself too. Why was the only person willing to teach her the one from whom she didn’t want to learn?

The pulse of resentment left her with her exhale as if she had breathed out fire. She breathed in calm. She was ready for whatever came.

“Hail the flagship please, Captain Mitaka.”

The starscape on the viewscreen flickered out, replaced briefly by the First Order logo, and then by the figure of a man in the centre of his own, far grander bridge.

Old enough to be Hux’s father, he was nevertheless well-preserved, slim, neatly put together as all these men were, holding their ravening hunger in check with an armour of propriety. But there was something overdone about him too, his hair too black for his age, his tunic an array of heavily starched folds that suggested opulence—a touch of unexpected luxury.

“Oh, it’s the traitor,” he said with a small, patronising smile. “Armitage. I hardly expected you to call.”

“General Pryde.” Hux’s mouth twisted as though the taste of the name was bitter, but she sensed it was his own name he objected to. All these old bastards who thought they were entitled to it.

“Allegiant General Pryde, boy. Get it right.”

Hux’s nostrils flared. Rey had a sense of peering into a well of resentment so hot it had been capped and used as a reactor. He opened his mouth to say something cutting back and she dropped the thought don’t get distracted into his mind, as if it was his own.

He jerked, his eyes narrowing and his hand coming up to his collar once more.

Kylo had throttled him, she read in the gesture. More than once. When he had dared to point out a distraction, Kylo had hurt him, damaged him, kicking him aside because he dared to speak the truth…

Rey’s own thoughts turned inward then, toward Leia’s son, with whom she’d had the strangest bond. She’d seen Kylo gentle, persuasive. She’d been willing to believe he was a troubled soul, a scholar, an exiled prince destined to do great things, who thought himself wrongly cast out from his family. She’d been willing to believe that he’d gone to Snoke because he’d thought he had no other choice, and she’d hoped that when Snoke was destroyed, Ben’s essential sweetness of character would have been freed. He would have been freed to return to the light.

Instead he had just shown himself to be a bully and an abuser. He had chosen the darkness and set himself on its throne.

She can’t help feeling it shouldn’t have ended like this. He should have taken the outstretched hand. He should have come back to his mother, to those who grieved for him and—

And now it’s her getting distracted.

“'Allegiant’ General.” Hux sneered. “What? Did he promise you a fancy uniform and a swagger stick if you’d just betray your oath to the twelve principles of the First Order and give your loyalty to him personally?”

Pryde looked aside to where a young lieutenant had walked into shot, was handing him a datapad.

The universe woke up and focused its gaze on Rey. She felt it move. Fumbling out with her mind for the lines of connection, she felt other minds on her than those of the Finalizer and the flagship. It was as if, in the darkness, the eyes of every First Order ship had fixed themselves on her.

Pryde drew himself up, becoming even more theatrical, and she understood that he had opened comm channels to the rest of the fleet, that the First Order Armada was now watching and… yes, she felt them speeding toward her, like a furnace blast on her cheek.

“They’re listening,” she whispered to Poe. “And they’re on their way to intercept us. I feel it.”

“Yap all you like, Armitage,” Pryde smiled, cold eyes dismissive, “We know better by now than to listen to a man the Supreme Leader himself called a rabid cur.”

Hux put his chin up, eyes aglow. “Better a cur than a lap dog.”

A deeper note sounded in the Force as a presence, further away but infinitely more powerful, also turned its attention to the confrontation. Kylo’s presence groped for Rey’s own. She flung up walls of durasteel, but not before she could feel that he too was now racing toward her, storm-dark riding on his ship like a black hole.

They’re on their way. They’re listening, she repeated for Hux’s sake. Whatever this plan of yours is, you’d better get on with it. It didn’t startle him this time. He merely gave a slight nod.

“Your father would have been so ashamed to see you now,” Pryde snarled, slapping the thin stick he held against his palm. “Consorting with the worst scum of the galaxy, with the murderers who brought our beloved Emperor down.”

“My father, may his legacy be sempiternal–”

It happened again, a sense of stirring, awakening, like a long dormant machine flicking on lights one after another. Rey shivered with a sense of wrongness, like seeing Starkiller for the first time, marvelling at the forests only to realize that the heart of it was entirely artificial. Was this part of the plan or part of the backstabbing? She really wished Leia had told her what the plan was, even though she understood the necessity of having it only in minds that Kylo would not wish to touch.

“Will never be disappointed again. In fact, out of the three hundred and seventy two souls entrusted with the imperforate details of Emperor Palpatine’s final command…”

The wrongness wound itself up. Rey could feel it hanging in the corridors of the Finalizer as much as in the enemy ships hurtling towards them, a smear of awareness, like the awareness of swarming creatures, distinct from the thoughts of each individual drone. She shook her head as it tightened around heart and skull like the need to vomit.

“I am the only one left alive.”

Hux’s face was blank and exultant at once, with the solemn joy he had shown on Starkiller’s firing.

Pryde shifted, as even he seemed to sense, belatedly, that something was wrong. He should have asked himself long before this, surely, Rey thought, why Hux had chosen to break his cover, why he simply stood there talking when he could be running away. But Pryde had wanted his opportunity to gloat, and now he didn’t seem to be able to work out why it wasn’t feeling as glorious as it should.

“I,” Hux went on, in increasing triumph, “Am the guardian of the Emperor’s last orders. I hold the fifteen-twenty one precepts and the twelve subheadings—”

Rey touched the skin beneath her nose, brought her fingers away, found them clean. She wasn’t the one whose nose was bleeding, then. What? What was—?

“I am the past and I am the future sui generis of this Order, and those who will not obey me will not be permitted to live. I give you this condign, signal, golden—”

A fist seemed to reach into her brain and twist. She staggered back against the wall, and Poe caught her, kept her standing. A gasp later, and it was gone, a kind of euphoria and clarity flooding in to take its place.

“Opportunity to return to your true loyalty, or destroy those who stand in your way. It will not be offered again.”

“Well, thank goodness for that,” Pryde mocked, though she could see him swallowing, could see the other officers on Pryde’s bridge check one another out nervously, as if waiting for disaster. “You’ve always had such an inflated idea of your own importance, boy. Let’s see how it holds up against the massed turbolasers of the entire fleet and the dark strength of the Supreme Leader. He’ll have you squealing for mercy again soon enough. Pryde out.”

The screen fell dark, then flooded once more with stars. Rey rubbed her aching head and wondered what exactly had just happened.

“Did we win?” Poe whispered to her, still holding her arm—giving support or asking for it. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but are there, like, still an entire fleet of homicidal madmen hurtling straight towards us?”

Rey shrugged, hopelessly. The twist in the brain had gone away and now everything felt normal again. It was hard to remember that anything had changed at all. An unease was on the tip of her tongue, but she couldn’t pin it down.

“And all we’ve done is to make them extra angry?” Poe huffed an incredulous laugh. “Great job, Hugs. Couldn’t have done it better myself.”

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So, I did in fact end up writing more of the fic where Hux allies with Leia, and I still didn’t finish it. Touch wood, this may mean that my fic writing block is over and I’m writing a multi-chapter story again :)

Refuge, Chapter Two

( Chapter One here on Ao3 )

In which Poe gets to learn more about First Order culture. Hux gets to explain how he got out from Kylo’s thumb for long enough to run to Leia, and apparently there is a plan.

Hints of gingerpilot. Is it requited? IDK yet ;)

~*~*~*~

“Man, I hate this smell,” Poe muttered to Rey as they followed their new ‘ally’ through the Star Destroyer’s corridors. Hux was still leaning on his aide – whose name, according to brief introductions, was Mitaka. The kiddies still flanked him, a solemn little pair known as Cadets First Class Kaleo and Brond. Brond was the girl, who’d been eyeing Rey’s stola and slouch boots with a mix of disapproval and fascination whenever she thought no one was watching.

“Smell?” Rey asked as they crammed into an elevator to ride up to the bridge.

Poe tried not to notice how Hux breathed in sharp at the tiny shift of gravity as they began to ascend. The whole thing was reminding him of torture, and that wasn’t a memory he wanted to encourage.

What had happened to the man? Had he been in a fight with Kylo Ren? No, he wouldn’t have survived that. Had he too been tortured by Kylo, by Leia’s son, Ben? Unwelcome sympathy made Poe’s chest ache. Torture buddies, he thought, looking to Rey for reassurance. Sometimes it seemed everyone in the universe existed just to be tortured by Ben.

“Star Destroyer smell,” Poe said, trying to keep his mind on the present. There really wasn’t a better way to sum it up – that stench of disinfectant, boot polish, ozone and blood.

“It’s fresher here than in the ones on Jakku,” Rey observed, snuffing the air. Brond and Kaleo exchanged a narrow eyed glance behind her back.

The First Order contingent kept their silence, but Poe thought he detected a minute increase in total sneering. They were used to the stench, probably, but it made Poe’s spine want to creep up out of his mouth and hide. “It doesn’t remind you of death?”

“I suppose it does,” she agreed. “The ships I worked in were full of bodies. But they were dried out, mostly. It was only in the less damaged areas that you got blood or decay. Unkar used to sell the uniforms to collectors. A full set with the blaster and the hat was three whole portions. It was always a lucky day when I found a–”

The elevator door hissed open. Poe tried to flee from the aura of increasing disapproval only to be shoved aside by a man barrelling in. Poe hit the wall, turned. The incomer raised a blaster, aiming for Hux.

What the–? Poe struggled with his instincts. The part that told him he should watch this happen with pleasure met the part that said, “but we had plans.” In that moment of doubt, Brond hurled herself forward. She set one small foot on the attacker’s knee, grabbed his blaster arm for support and plunged a small dagger into the sinews of his wrist.

His hand opened. The blaster fell. But Brond continued her movement, swift and practised, setting another foot in the crook of his elbow, climbing him until she could get a grip on his head with her thighs. He tried to pry her off, but it was already too late. She twisted until his neck broke, fell with him, landed in a neat and prissy crouch, as the body voided its bowels behind her.

Hux had not moved during the whole incident. Now he smiled. “Good. I thought for a moment you were going to slash the throat. It would have been quicker.”

“No sir. I didn’t want to get our uniforms dirty before the call, sir.”

The smile broadened, almost indulgent. “Excellent,” Hux said, his voice even rougher than it had been when he spoke to Leia. “One should always be neat.”

Brond blushed like a fourteen year old being complimented on her dress, attempting to smooth down her face but radiating glee. Hux lifted his fond smile over her shoulder and met Poe’s horrified eyes.

“Perhaps there is something to be said about the smell, however.” Motioning for Poe to leave the elevator, Hux stepped over the body. As he passed, he brought his heel down firmly on its outstretched fingers and ground until they snapped. The children were less delicate about it, eeling past Poe to kick the corpse across the corridor like a ball, their spotty faces alight with enjoyment.

“You must excuse our temporary disorder.” Hux caught Poe’s swallow of disgust and raised his eyebrows. “There is a little mess still to clear up. When the 'Supreme Leader’ took his 'knights’ to Mustafar to chase down some ghost, he intended to take me with him – to prevent me from moving against him. I was forced to provoke him into incapacitating me before he would leave me behind.”

He bit off his own smile, his eyes warming – perhaps at the thought of how clever he was. He was a beautiful man, but it was hard to forget the little crackle of joints bursting under his boot. Poe liked to look at him but felt unclean when he did.

His Supreme Leader did this to him? Had beaten him until he could barely walk, until he sounded like his ribs were in his lungs, until he winced at the jolt of an elevator floor? Poe hated his own sympathy, and hated that he hated it. He wanted a target, wanted his mind to be clear. But even if these people were monsters, it was obvious now that these monsters were also people. And stars, that just made his flightpath so jinked he was afraid to do anything at all.

“I gave orders to be taken out of the bacta the instant the Rens departed,” Hux continued, smug despite his bruises. “And we came to you immediately afterwards.”

He shot the corpse a reproachful look. “Some of my crew were unhappy with this decision, however, and the process of their retirement is ongoing. I believe a few scores are also being settled. Youthful high spirits—you know how it is. But we’ll have the place hygienic again in no time, and you will no longer be troubled by the smell of our honoured dead.”

“What will happen to them?” Poe found himself asking. He didn’t know why this was what he blurted out, out of all the choices open to him. Maybe everything else was too huge, too monstrous to process.

There were a million things he’d wanted to know about how the Star Destroyers worked. What it was like being in the First Order. What the enemy really thought and believed, when they were at home and unmasked. But Finn went damp and grey when he was forced to think about it, so Poe had left it alone. He was glad Finn had been given the chance to stay in the Falcon with Leia and Rose—to get to the rendezvous outside the belly of the beast. Kriff, if this was Finn’s life, no wonder he was scared to come back.

“What will happen to our corpses?” Hux’s self-satisfied expression faltered, like he couldn’t see what kind of move this question was in the game of power. Like he wasn’t used to simple curiosity. Or maybe like he was just wondering if Poe was asking this to make some kind of joke. “They go in the nutrient tanks to be recycled into food, of course. We are not savages.”

We eat our dead, Poe heard. We’re not savages. “See that just breaks my brain.”

What was Leia thinking, making an alliance with these people? What good could ever possibly grow out of a soil so poisoned as this?

“Not an uncommon occurrence, I’m sure.”

Poe huffed, startled into bleak laughter. After watching the Resistance being mown down behind him, decimated because of his actions? Yeah, that was fair.

“I guess I have been known to make a bad call or two at that,” he conceded, wishing he could learn to like Holdo now she was a hero. Wishing good decisions came easier. He raised his hands. This was all too much for him. He was going to trust Leia. Even if it meant—on some level—trusting these human rathtars too, “Okay then. No tricks, no jokes. I’m still on board with the plan. Let’s go do this thing.”

The sound of approaching stormtrooper boots made the kids scurry back to Hux’s side, straightening their tunics, looking prim despite the blood on their shiny boots and gloves.

Hux nodded. He coughed blood into the centre of his palm.

“Whoa!” Poe’s mouth ran away with him again. “Are you going to stay upright for this?”

“Of course.” Hux seemed to take the concern as criticism. He levelled a gaze on Poe that could have stripped skin, holding out the damp hand to the other cadet. “I am not weak.”

Kaleo passed him a handkerchief and then an injector, which he applied to his throat.

I never said you were, Poe thought, tapping his foot with the jitters. Okay. Okay. Time to either take over the First Order fleet or alert them all to where the Resistance was. Time to find out what kind of a ruse this was.

Hux took a deeper, easier breath, a haunted expression coming into his eyes. He raised a hand to toy with his collar, then pulled his shoulders back, turned and strode out onto the Finalizer’s bridge.

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Yet again I’ve seen someone’s prompt and then written a thing that doesn’t really satisfy it. I don’t remember where I saw this one, but someone was calling for h/c in which Hux comforts Kylo after Kylo has been mistreated by Snoke and tells him how wonderful he is. I couldn’t help thinking “I haven’t seen a lot of fics in which Kylo comforts Hux and tells him how wonderful he is. And that kind of morphed into this:

~*~*~*~

Kylo is bundled like a ragged crow into the corner of Hux’s bed. Hux stops in the arch of his door, uncertain as to what is going on. There have been enough heated arguments that ended with one or another of them pushed against a wall, that his first thought is that this is a strange prelude to sex. But Kylo isn’t even looking at him. He’s just slumped there in an untidy pile like a forgotten load of laundry.

Also he’s making a noise. It’s a low, spasmodic, growling, sniffling noise.

Is he crying?

Both Hux’s fists clench involuntarily, the creak and stretch of the leather over his knuckles soothing as he digs his fingertips into bruised palms. A storm begins in his chest – a white hot plasma of unrecognised emotion barely contained.

He takes a step forward, as if forcing himself closer to Snoke, closer to something venomous, poised to destroy him.

Kylo raises his head, and yes, there are tears in his ridiculous dark eyes. The man is nearly thirty and he hasn’t yet learned not to cry.

“What are you doing here?” Hux asks, his voice winding tight against his own will. Scum. Scum. Republic born scum. Infecting my room with your weakness. Bringing that face here where I have to decide what to do about it. Why d'you have to be so selfish?

There’s a smell of scorching, something burned. And blood. “Are you leaking biohazard all over my sheets?”

The snap in his voice is like his father’s. He sounds like the old man so much these days. Everything the old shit had is now his, and some of it he doesn’t want. A lot of it he didn’t want but he’s made it his own regardless.

“I don’t know why I thought you would care.” Kylo shrugs off his tattered cape. His tunic is half-off, and as Hux watches he peels the smoking remnants away from bloody burns, hissing. “But Snoke…”

His voice wavers and falls silent. His jaw works as he chews his bruised lips. If he’s biting back some worse remark he’s more damaged than Hux imagined.

’Care’though? ’I thought you would care.’

Something is being asked of him. That’s clear enough. He just can’t imagine what it is.

Perhaps Kylo came here to Hux’s rooms because he believed they would be empty. Hux has thought  many times that a Republican upbringing has stunted Ren’s emotional growth – that he’s as soft as a barely weaned child. As a child, Hux too would have yearned for somewhere he could crawl off to alone and tend his wounds in peace. Somewhere solitary. Somewhere where there would be no more shouting, no more blows. No humiliation. Somewhere safe.

So what’s needed is his absence. He should somehow have known not to come back at the normal time. He should leave - my rooms, my own fucking refuge, Ren, why didn’t you go to your own - so the man could pull himself together without mockery or threat.

“I’ll make sure a med droid is sent to you.” He’s trying his best to be thoughtful when he turns on his heel and heads for the door.

“No! Hux!”

And of course he was wrong about that too.

“What?” Hux snaps, swinging back in time to catch the unguarded look of desperation and reproach on Ren’s expressive face. The man has one hand out, as if he’s about to use the Force to pull Hux forward by the throat. “I don’t understand. What are you doing here? What do you want from me?”

Ren’s outstretched hand drops. “I don’t want a droid,” he says, surly. Spoiled. “I want you to do it. We… we sleep together. You know what he does to me. You know what it’s like. I want you to give a kriffing damn. Damn you! I want you to care.”

Hux is a seethe of caring. He is a hypermatter quintessence of caring, barely squeezed into stable containment. Too sensitive, they all said, and kriff, he would have changed that if he could. He didn’t ask to be sensitive. He didn’t ask for the sight of Ren’s seeping skin to engender the kind of furious, vengeful disgust it does. If only he could step forward and slap it aside. Dig his fingers in, tear it apart and get it out of his way.

“You won’t tell me what Snoke’s vulnerable to,” he protested, and this is care if Kylo could only recognize it. “You could make it so much easier for me to kill him if you chose.”

It’s not much of a confession. Snoke must know that every time he hurts Hux, and – lately – every time he hurts Kylo too, Hux furiously reviews his plans to murder the creature in cold blood. Or preferably to trick someone else into doing it for him.

If I could, I would luxuriate in tearing him apart for you. I would make him regret every time he laid a hand on you. Every undermining word, he thinks. He can’t say it. That kind of open sentiment makes his skin crawl, and he’s already betrayed himself enough.

“I don’t want you to kill him,” Kylo growls. His eyes are dry now, at least. The baleful resentment of his presence feels like a rancor in the room.

“Then what?” Hux asks, baffled again. There is still a white noise of protest going on in his heart, but he can’t make the signal resolve into anything understandable. His blood is humming in his ears as if with outrage or horror, but this is not unusual around Ren. “What do you want?”

Ren pushes aside his heavy cloak and tunic, shaking his head as if he too can’t believe how badly this conversation is going. “Never mind.”

“No, I want to know, princess. I want to know why you barged into my quarters and bled on my sheets and are now asking me for—”

“Comfort!” Ren shouts, bolting up from the mattress and making his wounds bleed again. “I came to you for comfort, because we have—but you really are rabid, aren’t you? The only thing you know to do with an outstretched hand is to bite it.”

At ‘comfort’ the containment field fails catastrophically. Hux can almost feel his insides shrivelling in flame as a wave of something he prefers to think of as fury bursts its way out of his skin. He must be glowing with it, trembling so fast that mass passes into energy over the surface of him. His mouth tastes of tin and his scalp aches as his hair tries to stand on end.

“Comfort!” he rages. It is rage. It is. “Of course you expect comfort. You expect the universe to stop so that it can provide you with some kind of salve for your hurt feelings? Your minor wounds? You are so important that I must drop everything to minister to your undisciplined, self-indulgent…”

It is fury. It is not grief.

“You expect that of me?!”

It is not anguish, even if Hux’s eyes are threatening to prickle and his throat to close up. His wrists sting, and for a moment he is blinded by the memory of his mother’s hands—the only part of her he now recalls—leaving gouges as he’s torn away from her grip, clouted across the back of the head to make him shut up screaming.

There is a whirlwind of antimatter within him, and if he breathes out he will destroy the universe.

Kylo closes the distance between them, lunges. Hux expects a blow, but the man catches him by the shoulders and shakes him until his teeth rattle. That is familiar enough to bolster him a little. He stays very still to try to prevent himself from fracturing into little pieces as Kylo’s bare right hand migrates to his bare throat.

Kylo takes a step back, the black hole intensity draining from his eyes as if something in Hux’s skin has bitten him, betrayed him through the touch. That would be right enough. Hux knows full well he’s poisonous to the core.

“You—” Kylo stammers, watery once more. He’s sensed something, obviously, with the Force. Something that lesser men like Hux are not permitted to understand or sully. Hux would gladly be angry about that too, if Kylo were not looking at him with that expression of terrible, inexplicable… whatever it was. “You really don’t know what I want of you, do you? You don’t know what comfort looks like.”

This is a ridiculous accusation, and if Hux could only breathe properly, he would say so. His nose is stuffy for some reason, and his chest aches. “I tried to get you a med droid fifteen minutes ago,” he protests. It comes out in a croak.

“Stars!” Kylo exclaims, fist knotting in Hux’s collar. He drags Hux forward, and Hux is so busy bracing for the slap it takes him a dozen heartbeats to realize that he is being hugged.

Arms like iron bands around him make him claustrophobic for a moment before the warmth hits him. The pressure around his ribcage provokes another emotion he can’t name, as the constant, devouring anguish that always runs in the back of his mind startles a sob out of him, and then Kylo is crying too, unrestrained and messy onto his shoulder.

It’s praise, in a way, he thinks, as his own arms raise themselves, automatically. One snugs itself around Kylo’s waist, and the other rises to allow him to bury his fingers in the man’s glossy, millaflower scented hair.

There is a certain vindication to the way Kylo shudders and presses closer. He came to you not to boast that he suffers more than you, but simply because he trusted you, a small voice says in the back of his mind. It doesn’t sound at all likely—too good to be true. But it lets him catch his breath nevertheless, get the unstable explosion of his personality back within its iron bonds.

This is all the man wanted? Just to be held while he wept? That’s not hard.

“They tell us how worthless we are because they fear us,” he finds himself explaining, Snoke and Brendol running together in his mind. For this moment he is going to pretend they are both boys together, and this outburst is permitted, is safe. “They hurt us to prove to themselves they can keep us down. But even as they do it, they know they are only sharpening our teeth.”

“No,” Kylo shakes his head. “No, I don’t want to hurt my master. I need him.”

Well. Yes. While there is more to learn, more to gain, it pays to patiently endure the abuse. Hux can understand that too. He finds himself smiling, feeling oddly light. This whole experience has been odd, in fact, like a dose of glitterstim and almost as addictive. “Perhaps you do. For now.”

He walks the clingy Force-user back to the bed and sits him down there gently, so he can go for the first aid kit he keeps in his refresher. Kylo too looks somehow eased when he returns.

“But you won’t need him forever,” Hux says, sharing a conspiratorial smile. He has been trusted with this. When has that ever happened before? “And on that day I expect you will be five times the terror that he is.

“Now if for some reason a droid is not good enough for your majesty, sit back and let me see those wounds. I suppose like everything else I will have to do this myself.”