Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Hux doesn’t so much toss the book aside as let it fall. He slings one arm over the side of his cot and releases the only nonfiction title they’ve brought to his cell, Chandrila: A Zoological Compendium. Four hundred thirty-five flimsiplast pages printed sometime during the Old Republic’s decline. Battered spine, faded, technicolor holos of long-tailed preepnobs and sharp-clawed pripraks. He’s gotten no better look at the planet in his first six weeks here.

This is his second time through the Compendium in the past four days, but it’s a sight better than the other four selections: more Old Republic hardcopies that are decidedly antiques rather than classics. (The penitentiary apparently doesn’t trust nefarious one-time engineers with even a totally disconnected datapad.)

Regardless, he’s stacked the four books in the far corner of his cell, across from the alcove serving as his 'fresher. The Compendium needs to rejoin them--Hux can’t have his few possessions scattered all over the floor.

Bracing himself with an inhale, he swings his legs over the side of the cot. First he bends to grab the discarded book, then stands as slowly, as cautiously as possible. It doesn’t work: the blood drains from his head immediately, his vision tunneling to fuzzy blots of shadow. He gropes for the wall, splaying his hand against the white paneling to steady himself. He stands wax-still until it passes, blinking as the dark blurs recede.

“Fuck,” he says aloud, sight recovered but legs still treacherous.

Three days out of the infirmary, and he’s still this weak. He even ate breakfast this morning, everything on the tray, but his body is apparently still recovering from the shock of thirty-two days on water and the occasional vegetable. He wouldn’t be eating now if not for the protocol officer’s threat of a feeding tube, after his collapse and transport to medical. They’d said he didn’t get to terminate his own sentence.

Yes, they’re keeping him alive. They’ll spend their hard-won taxpayer credits to make sure he suffers until natural death. (Congratulations, galaxy, it’s working.)

He crosses the narrow strip of floor to his book stacks, braces himself against the wall again as he stoops to replace the Compendium and select one of the other, even-less-refined titles. Half-bent, half-crouched, he thumbs through Splintered Heart; Dearest, You Said; The Symphony of the Spark; and a real treasure called The Impossible Spindle.

He’s managed just Spindle in the first month of his sentence, the plot too bland, the prose too florid, and his concentration wrecked by malnutrition. The rest are from the same defunct publisher, so his hopes are infernally low. He picks through them, nonetheless: even Splintered Heart beats staring at the wall and remembering. He finally lands on Dearest because at least it’s gay.

He thumbs back the cover, and it flops limply open to a lurid first line about a Twi’lek hooker. Good gods. Of course. He’s staring down the barrel of the rest of his life, and the one string tying him to sanity is fucking xeno porn. He rubs his temples, feels hysterical laughter building inside him at the absurdity of it

He doesn’t laugh, he doesn’t, because Armitage Hux may faint of hunger, but he won’t be caught laughing alone in his cell like his mind has already shattered. (“Didn’t take much,” they’ll say. “He always seemed delicate.”)

Ren would laugh, though, if he were here. Hux can almost hear him, the sardonic smirk and the rumble of amusement: “Your taste has slipped without me.”

But Ren would laugh at the book, too, then they’d laugh at it together, like they did at eight out of every ten holodramas in their rare spare moments. Ren counted the flat characters’ dimensions, and Hux scuttled new and bigger holes in the flimsy plots. They enjoyed nothing, and therefore everything.

But Ren isn’t here (Ren is gone), and Hux needs something, anything, to look at besides the blank walls. He’s shut Dearest, You Said and resigned himself to his fate when a voice at his cell door startles him.

“Zero Six One Nine Nine.”

That’s him. Hux turns and takes the few short steps to put himself in view of the transparent panel of the door. Outside stand two unfamiliar wardens in cortosis body armor.

"Zero Six One Nine Nine," repeats the taller of the two wardens, with the distinctive relish they all seem to take in reducing him to a number. (CD-0922. FN-2187. 06199.) (Turnabout. Fair play.) "You have a visitor."

It’s all Hux can do not to sigh, roll his eyes, and tip his head toward the ceiling in exasperation. Will the deluge never stop?  

His first month saw a flurry of invitations to meet with visiting journalists, high on freedom of the press and looking for that exclusive interview with the shade of a tyrant. He’d turned them all down, of course. It looks like he’ll have to keep up the pattern until they catch on.

“I decline,” he says, primly, like he has every time before.

"You're not allowed to decline. Not for this visitor." It's the shorter guard this time. He has a Core accent--Corellian, if Hux isn't mistaken. A volunteer, then. And from a less-than-political culture--a true believer. Charming.

“I am allowed to decline,” Hux starts. “I’m under no obligation to grant press interviews during my term.”

“This ain’t press, Zero Six One Nine Nine,” drawls the taller guard, as the shorter one keys the transparent cell doors open.

“Then who's asking for me?” Hux asks, starting to fidget with the book. He works his fingers over the spine, and steps backward reflexively as the cell doors slide apart.

The guards, both mostly muscle, enter with a pair of magnetic binders, and don’t answer. There’s a finality to the silence, and Hux has no desire to humiliate himself by persisting.

Out of habit, he gives the guards a cursory once-over once at arms-length, a two-second threat assessment. Blue and white uniforms meshed with the body armor. Tasers at their belts, a model with a built-in safety that prevents the weapon from ever reaching a fatal voltage. It'll run out of battery after a single stun. Fucking useless pacifist shit.

In the space of a second, he imagines trying to resist, getting stunned and passing out for a few hours to avoid whatever the hell this is about, but before he can ball a fist, they've seized his wrists. The binders click shut, and a red light blinks on in the strip joining them, denoting locked position.

They steer him out into the corridor, where dozens of identical cell entrances gape out of the silvered walls. Behind them, dozens of fellow solitary-confinement inmates languish in identical grey uniforms with a black Republic phoenix blazoned above the right breast. Not only do you spend the remainder of your life dependent on whatever their feeble tax system can scrape together for a penitentiary budget, you wear their symbol, too.

"Private Conference Two?" the taller guard confirms, a Chandrilan lisp slipping into his pronunciation. Local boy, likely co-opted into the job for shit pay and no benefits. The newest New Republic can't possibly afford much in the way of personnel expenses.

"Yeah, that's what VisControl said in the request comm," returns the second guard. They walk in silence.

Hux would have done right by people like them. Hell, he had (or would have, anyway, with more time), on his and Ren's planets. It had worked for a while, their little constellation of government done right: fences, conveyor belts, heads down, full stomachs, universal curricula. Everything under control.

Of course, they had lost to entropy. The laws of the universe win, every time.

The guards veer aside and lead Hux through a slim gate and pedway out of the solitary confinement annex and into the facility's main building.

The pedway is narrow and windowless, which is almost disappointing. Chandrila was supposed to be a beautiful planet, from what Hux had gleaned from Ren over the years - all mist-topped mountains and dense evergreen forests. Even the urban zones, Ren had said, retained that organic sense, as if deftly grafted into the local ecosystems, rather than built on their charred remains.

Hux had caught only a brief glimpse of the landscape between the detention room of the Republic transport and the penitentiary speeder that met it at Chandrila’s main military spaceport. The air had been warm and humid, typical for a deciduous world. Sweat had prickled his skin under his greatcoat, but he didn’t take it off. His guards wouldn’t react well to the sudden movement, and besides, they were going to take it from him soon enough. (In hindsight he should have whipped it off and let them blast a hole in his skull. When they next took him out, for the trial, it was too late.)

Beyond the spaceport, beyond the city limits, had stretched dark forests, topped with shreds of spring-morning fog. Far past them, mountains held up the horizon, white-capped and indomitable.

At one time, Hux had wanted to rule from here--build their palace on the ashes of the broken system that originated on Chandrila--but Ren had adamantly refused. He cited strategic rationale at first, but Hux had doubted him. His sentiments were unpredictable, unstable, whether from legitimate attachment or lingering bad memories.

But whatever it might have implied, Ren had still agreed with Hux that Chandrila was beautiful, though he’d seen little of it outside nursery walls.

But when Hux had asked about simply visiting it, after its government surrendered, Ren had clenched his fist until the glove seams strained, and looked down. “You know I’m not going back there,” he’d said.

Hux had let it drop, permanently. Now he’s got more time on Chandrila than he’ll ever enjoy. If Ren were here, he would smirk and say the will of the Force is stupid like that sometimes.

But if Ren were here, Hux wouldn’t be. Even if the Order had still fallen from under their feet, they’d be anywhere but here. Ren would--

Stop. Hux cuts off that line of thought, as he always tries to. The notion of missing him doesn’t help. It won’t keep Hux from falling on his face in this hallway. He stares at his feet instead, stupid soft rubber shoes padding across the tile.

Once they've entered the main structure, it's a lift ride and a few sharp turns into a corridor whose rooms are alternately labeled 'conference' and 'interrogation.' What the hell can the difference be, in prison.

"How long has she been waiting?" asks the Corellian guard as Hux's escorts begin to slow their pace.

She. Hux doesn't catch the response. She. Out of the several prominent women within the Resistance-turned-central-government, any one of them would carry enough clout that she couldn’t be turned down. But he’s already got his life sentence, and their judiciary prevents double jeopardy. They’ve as good as killed him--why come gloat over the corpse?

His legs feel vaguely insubstantial, either like two streams of water holding up his weight or like a pair of rogue cybernetics staggering along beside him, readily observable but not attached to himself. Somehow, he stays vertical.

The guards finally stop outside what must be Private Conference Two, and they guide him through the open entrance. There's no alternate exit, he notes, before anything else. In the center of the sterile-white room sits a narrow rectangular table with a magnetic dock for binders on the near side. In the chair opposite sits the Jedi. The blood drains from Hux's head again.

Something like anger flares in his chest, but even that feels distant, a blip in the white-noise static of his thoughts, yet still inaccessible and ill-defined. It shouldn’t be.

This is the girl. Who’d loaded Starkiller with explosives and smuggled her co-conspirators off Crait. Who’d quietly incited rebellions on world after world, until freedom fighting had spread like a cough through a starship’s crew, and there was nothing left of everything he’d built.

This is the girl. Who’d insisted on prodding at Ren’s imbalance, had gathered from a few snatches of shared connection the vulnerabilities that Hux had struggled till the end to understand. (Hux himself, Ren had told him once, was the only weakness of his she hadn’t searched out.)

This is the girl, of course, but she’s no longer the feral scavenger from the security holos on Starkiller and Supremacy. This is a warrior, who knows it. (A warrior, not a soldier, and there’s a world of difference.)

She sits straight-backed but angled forward, hands folded in front of her on the tabletop. Both her feet are on the ground, planted far apart, as if to intentionally take up as much space as she can. Under the table, there’s the glint of a lightsaber hilt at her belt, an extravagant dual-bladed model that Ren would have reluctantly admired.

As the guards steer Hux into the chair across from her and secure his binders to the tabletop, he idly wonders how she got it past security. Part of him is flattered. At least someone brings a real weapon to an interaction with him.

She meets his eyes for a brief, piercing second. Her gaze cuts in a focused way that Ren's never had, not even in the throes of rage, Force or no Force behind it. It doesn't have the oppressive presence of Snoke's glance, either. It's sharp, harsh, like something freshly iced over.

However, she has no chance to speak before the guards confirm that everything is satisfactory.

"It is," she tells them, "and please lock the doors behind you." They do. She doesn't speak again until after the hiss and click of the closing doors has faded.

"Armitage Hux," she says slowly, appraisingly. Her gaze searches the hollows of his face, the prominent contour of his collarbone, then falls to his wrists. She must be noticing the faintly yellow tint of the skin. "You're unwell," she adds, as if that's some great Force-revelation.

Hux summons nearly a decade of practice, and ignores the theatrics. "I have already cooperated with multiple interrogations prior to my sentencing. If this is another, I hereby invoke my right to legal counsel before responding to any questions."

There hadn't been much left to cooperate on at the original interrogations. There hadn't been anything of the Order left to betray, but he'd mostly been too numb to think of his oaths, his non-disclosure agreements, or even to play hardball and hope they broke their code of ethics to introduce potentially-fatal torture.

"This isn't an interrogation, Armitage," Rey says. "I mean, not in the legal sense."

"An illegal interrogation, then." Hux picks at his palms despite the binders, jagged nails grating against the skin. "Splendid."

Rey shakes her head. "This isn't about a crime. It isn't even about you. Consider it..." She leans forward, looking suddenly very young and very eager. "...a conversation. In which I'm asking you a favor."

"A favor." Hux tries for a disdainful echo, but his tone falls flat and weary in his own ears. But he’s curious despite himself: "And what do you think I have to offer?"

Rey glances at the tabletop, then back up at Hux. “Kylo Ren."

She might as well have struck Hux. Drawn her lightsaber and ignited it. Plunged it through the pit of his stomach. He bites his lip, hard, on reflex. It's been a solid nine days since he last wept (counting the time unconscious in the infirmary, but still). He's fully planning on making it to double digits this time. He digs his nails deeper into his skin, focuses on the sting of it.

"What about him," he manages, without affect. Because he had better learn how to say it, he forces himself to add, "He's dead."

He's dead, he's dead, he's dead, and I couldn't stop him.

"Yes," says Rey, softer now, "and I want to know what happened."

Hux swallows, forces himself to meet her eyes. If this is somehow a roundabout, misguided assassination charge, there’s evidence against it. Even Republic labs should know a self-inflicted wound when they see one.

"I'm sure they did the- forensics," he manages.

The word tastes rotten. Hux blinks back images of yellow tape in their quarters on the Finalizer, a body bag, an autopsy Y-cut to match the rest of Ren's scars. His vision swims briefly with black fuzz. He blinks, and doesn't faint or vomit.

"The forensics aren't the whole story," Rey is saying, "I understand the two of you had your differences, but you were the one with the closest access to him in his last days, correct?"

"Yes."

Hux's 'why' must be implicit. Without breaking eye contact, Rey explains: "As you may know, I'm...studying the Force.” (Hux didn’t, but it takes no leap of logic.)

Rey goes on, “I’m hoping to train others someday. To do that properly, I need to know where things went wrong for Kylo Ren. To make sure neither I nor my future students make the same mistakes."

Heat swells in Hux's stomach, a sort of burning beside the gut-punched, impaled feeling. It takes him a moment to realize it's offense. Hux’s life’s work was to evaluate, criticize, and verbally eviscerate Ren’s every decision, but Rey has no right to sit here and clinically slap the label ‘mistakes’ on it all. (Who cares how right she is.)

"I can't help you," he says. And means, I won't, you bitch.

"I realize you don't know everything, but I'm desperate for anything you do. Any piece will help." Rey spreads her hands. The layered, off-white armbands around her wrists, Hux realizes, are the one piece of her attire he recognizes from the security footage.

“I’m sure my insights-” Hux starts, then corrects himself, sealing the Ren-shaped chink in his mental armor, “-my limited insights into his demise would give you no help your Force already hasn’t.”

“Not your insights.” Rey leans back a bit. “Your memories.”

Hux’s pulse shoots up, a spike of adrenaline at just the thought of violation.

“You want to get inside my head?” There’s nothing stopping her from reading him right now, barging into his brain and taking whatever she wants.

“Only with your consent, of course.” Rey shifts forward again, a suppressed eagerness running under her tone. “I won’t see anything you don’t purposely show me. But that way I can... glean my own insights, if you want to put it that way.”

“No.”

“Armitage,” she says, and his given name rankles almost as much as 06199 . “I wouldn’t be here if this weren’t...critically important.”

Sure, the future of the Jedi Order must be important, avoiding having all of your students massacred by a depressed man-child must be important, but to come to Hux for help? Without even knowing about himself and Ren, and what they had? Well. Desperation is clearly a bad look on her.

“I have absolutely no reason to help you, Master Jedi,” he says. “Surely even you can understand that.”

Rey ignores the barb and sits quietly for a moment, wetting her lips. “The game’s up, Armitage. There are no more sides to take.” She leans forward, bare elbows on the table between them. “Don’t you want to do something that will help people for once?”

Hux would recoil if not for the cuffs. He didn’t offer much defense in court--it would have done nothing but further humiliate him--but here, the implicit accusation feels personal. “I was helping people,” he retorts.

“By sowing violence and oppression in the name of a bankrupt concept of security.”

Good gods. Apparently even prison is no escape from the Republic’s propaganda machine.

“Does Organa have you memorize that line, or do you sometimes get to paraphrase?”

“Nobody had to teach me to believe in freedom,” Rey all but spits back, with a vehemence that evokes a desert orphan who stared up at the stars and wondered.

As if Hux is supposed to be impressed by her capacity for independent thought.

He smirks despite himself. “Well, no one taught you anything at all without a standard public education system in place.”

Rey bristles visibly at that, pausing as if to dredge more prop lines from a teeming reservoir.  The tension, however, dissolves quickly into an exasperated sigh. “I’m not here for a politics lesson from the losing side ,” she snaps, then inhales, appearing to gather herself and recall that the war is over. “I just need your help.”

Hux scoffs. “Insulting my politics is some way you’ve got of securing it.”

“Then how would you propose I do it?” There’s something fierce and barely restrained in her tone.

“I already told you,” Hux says. “There’s no benefit in it for me.” He presses his lips into the thinnest possible line.

“There shouldn’t have to be a--” Rey cuts herself off, closes her eyes for a moment. “Okay.” She inhales.  “What do you want?”

In the silence before he answers, Hux erects the strongest mental shields he can conjure, music and schematics and formulas in the fore of his consciousness--anything to tamp down Ren . Not his presence, not anymore, but the void where he used to be that’s constantly screaming his name.

Hux does his best at dismissive arrogance. “Nothing you can give me.”

Rey studies Hux’s face in silence, as if vivisecting his bloodshot eyes and the bruise on his left temple, faded since his fall four days ago. “I suppose not,” she agrees, after a few moments.

Hux doesn’t answer, but Rey adds, “I’ll be back, though. Something might change your mind.”

“Doubtful,” Hux all but murmurs, fighting for equilibrium. The image of y-cut lines resurfaces, unbidden, at the back of his mind, just present enough to make his stomach light, and his eyes wet.

Rey rises, grabs the commlink mounted beside the door, and calls for the guards to escort Hux back to his cell.

In the week that follows, they bring him fresh entertainment. It’s probably Rey’s doing, but it’s too welcome a relief to scorn on principle. The first day, it’s nothing particularly enthralling--five new and shitty novels he dumps in the corner for a day when he has less to process.

He turns Rey’s visit over and over in his mind. She almost has to know about himself and Ren to even come to him for such a favor, but if she does, she made no sign of it. And there’s hardly any way she could know.

Perhaps Hux is one of many sources. He can picture Rey trotting around the Core with her elaborate lightsaber, interviewing anyone with a clue about Ren. She’ll go to Organa; slice into comms with his knights from his first year in the Order, while they were still alive; maybe chat with some underlings serving lighter sentences than Hux’s. (Mitaka could certainly give her some sensational accounts.)

She’ll take a story here and a memory there, pastiche them into a crude mosaic of a profile and title it Kylo Ren: Disambiguation, as if she--or anyone--could truly pin him down.

Hux stares blankly at the heap of new and unopened books, and breaks his nine-day record.

The next day, matters somewhat improve. They bring a blank flimsipad and a stylus to write in it. That confirms Rey’s behind this: if she can’t get at his brain directly, maybe he’ll start a journal she can confiscate and psychoanalyze.

Ren would have loved it, but then again, knowing his sense of discretion, he’d have probably filled the thing with an autobiography in stunning free verse and calligraphied Sith mantras. Hux will give Rey no such satisfaction--but he’s too bored to squander this.

So he folds himself onto his cot and does the least personally identifiable, most time-consuming thing he can think of: coats a page in a grid of miniscule dots, each no wider than the tip of the stylus. Once the sheet is fully covered, he traces geometric patterns between the points. He figures it suits whatever’s left of his public persona: precise, dispassionate, obsessive-compulsive. No surprises for Rey or the psytechs there.

By the second day, he can stretch a page to an hour, if he erases every dot that’s even a fraction of a degree out of line and carefully redraws it as he goes. By the third day, he’s averaging an hour and a half. He allows himself three sheets a day, one after each meal. The pad has a hundred sheets (the label on the cover says so, but he counts to make sure), so by the time he’s filled them all, front and back, a fourth month here will have almost passed.

He’s halfway down page twenty-one when the guards return. Visitor for 06199. Can’t be refused.

They take him down to the same room as before, latch his binders onto the same dock on the same table, across from the Jedi. Her hair is piled on top of her head today, just a few stray wisps curling down onto her neck. The guards seem not to notice that she’s fidgeting with her lightsaber. She turns it over and over slowly on top of the table.

She looks up at Hux when he enters.

Maybe she’s planning to threaten him. Who knows--if he can manage to piss her off enough, she might run him through in a fit of rage. It would be a shitty, humiliating way to go--killed by her after everything--but whatever consequences her conscience and this justice system would heap on her for circumventing the law might just be worth it. Knowing she’ll suffer if she kills him--it allots him just a bit of power here. (That does, and the fact that he has what she needs.)

Rey dismisses the wardens, and they rush out, locking the door behind them. Hux makes a point of meeting her eyes, and says nothing of the books or flimsipad.

Rey sets her lightsaber down with a thump that reverberates faintly in the empty room.

“Armitage,” she says, very crisp, very controlled, as if she’s fighting for neutrality, “you lied to me last week.”

Hux can appreciate the glaring absence of small talk.  “Did I?”

Rey folds her hands behind her lightsaber, inhales. “You told me there’s nothing you want that I can give you.”

“I did,” he agrees.

“But there is. You just didn’t want to ask for it.”

“Oh.”

She could end him right now, one blow to the chest, then retract the blade. Leave a tidy, smoking hole where the heart used to be.

“I heard about your hunger strike,” she says. “By definition, that means there’s something you want.”

“It wasn’t a hunger strike.”

“I know.” Rey purses her lips and breaks eye contact with him for the first time since he entered the room. Then she reaches into her armband and extracts a second contraband weapon. It’s a monomolecular dagger, sheathed, silvered case gleaming under the lampdisk, catching the reflection of the stark white walls. The blade’s a few centimeters longer than Hux’s used to be, but apparently still easily concealed.

Rey sets it on the table with another prominent clack, between her lightsaber and his bound hands.

This can’t be what it looks like.

Hux affects a sneer. “You think I want a sharp object?”

Rey meets his eyes again, and her tone is level. “You want this to be over.”

Holy fuck. This is exactly what it looks like.

Hux’s pulse picks up, but he refuses to express enthusiasm. He raises his eyebrows.

“Doesn’t assisted suicide run contrary to your principles?”

“It does.” Rey’s voice tightens. “So if I give you this, I will do everything in my power to convince you not to use it. But I’m desperate, Armitage. I’m...willing to make the compromise.”

Hux realizes he’s sat forward in his chair, as much as is possible with his wrists mounted to the tabletop. He leans back with what he hopes is a calculating air.

This is an escape route--no more starvation, no more infirmary runs. No feeding tube, ever. It’s exactly what he needs. But it’s also a risk, a trust exercise with a hostile party.

A part of him wonders if this is being recorded, if it’s some kind of psychological experiment. But it doesn’t read like that. Surely it wouldn’t take an elaborate ruse involving illicit weaponry for them to figure out he’s suicidal. Isn’t that the point of a damn life sentence: you’re supposed to spend the rest of your life wishing for death?

She must mean it, which sends a rush of exhilaration to his head. This could be over. But he needs to keep questioning.

“What changed your mind?” he asks. She tilts her head to one side, waiting for elaboration. “Last week you came in here appealing to my better nature, this week you’re trying to bribe me with a suicide weapon. Something’s changed.”

“Just reflection.” Rey shrugs, and it looks like a practiced gesture. She’s almost as open a book as Ren. “I was reminded how much I need what you know. It merits a higher price than I first offered.”

“I should think so.”

His memories are all he has. He won’t sell them so cheaply.

“Your life, or at least your ability to control it, for your memories,” she says. “Is that fair?”

He doesn’t answer, not quite. “If I do this,” he starts, slow and controlled, “at what point will I receive my payment?” He nods toward the knife.

“Whenever you’ve shared enough to answer my questions.”

“And when will that be?”

Rey sighs. “I don’t know. I have absolutely no way of knowing until I’ve seen what you have.”

“Clever,” Hux says, dully.

If she were to see everything Hux has witnessed--every doubt Ren entertained, every moment of weakness and conflict--this will never be over. He’ll be spilling the entirety of the last eight years of his life into her mind, and he can’t wait eight years to end this. Unless, perhaps, she won’t need to see it all.

“I’m not trying to be clever.” Rey’s hand strays to her lightsaber again, skinny fingers curling idly around the knobs. “I just don’t know how much you’ll be able to help me.”

“But you clearly think it’ll be substantial,” he prompts. He isn’t sure if he wants her to hear how far will you push me , or not.

“I hope so.” Her gaze hardens. “But as I’ve said, I’m desperate for anything you have.”

She’s still obsessed with Ren. Hux has never been sure of the nature of the fixation--whether it’s romantic or philosophical, or just a result of pure dogged insistence that she was right about him. (Maybe she was.) Regardless, Hux shouldn’t betray him to her like this. It’s wrong. It’s a violation of trust.

But Ren was the one who left. He forfeited his say when he ran his lightsaber through his chest and abandoned Hux to entropy. (And besides, there’s Kylo Ren: Disambiguation to consider. Ren deserves better than to go down in history as Mitaka’s monster or Organa’s wayward little boy.)

“When you give me this--” Hux says, still testing. He nods again toward the knife. “--and after I use it, where are they going to think I got it from? If you’ve been my primary visitor, isn’t that a bit incriminating?”

“I said I’m gonna do all I can to prevent you from using it.”

“And what if I use it anyway?”

“You won’t.”

“What if I do?”

Rey swallows. “Then I’ll use the full extent of my abilities to ensure I’m not suspected.”

“You aren’t going to give it to me.” Hux lets his lip curl into a provocatory smirk. “It isn’t worth the risk.”

“I told you it is.” Rey’s hand is curled loosely around her lightsaber. She’s quiet for a moment, and for fuck’s sake, she could just switch the thing on and end all of this. She won’t, though. For some inscrutable reason, she needs Hux too much for that. “Will you do it, Armitage?”

Hux studies the dagger. The durasteel case reflects the light, catching it in accent lines running vertically down it. The blade release is a nondescript black bump near the top. Press it and the blade will extend, glinting, sharpened to the width of a single molecule.

He’ll have two options: the heart to stop it all at the source, or the inner thigh, where he’ll bleed out efficiently--he can decide on that when he gets it.

“Yes.” Hux laces his fingers together as best he can, despite the binders. “I’ll do it.”

Rey nods once, sharply. “Good.” Her mouth twists into a sort of sad smile. “Thank you.”

“I expect you to follow through.”

“I will.” Rey clears her throat, stretches her arms briefly. “Well. Would you like to get started?”

“Now?” He didn’t come in here prepared for mental rape. Not rape. He’s consenting. But it remains a less-than-welcome intrusion.

Rey frowns. “I mean, if you’d rather not jump right into it, I can come back tomorrow.”

The knife glints between them, and Hux is struck by a sense of urgency. He considers, wracking his brain for something, anything, he could show her that wouldn’t be the equivalent of stripping naked. He draws blank upon blank--everything is too intimate.

Hux stiffens, imagines putting on body armor. “May I ask what exactly you’re looking for?”

“Like I said,” Rey explains, “pretty much anything will help.”

“I worked--” Hux starts, and manages not to falter. “--very closely with him. I need some sort of threshold for what you’re interested in.”

Rey dips her head, a concession. Her bun bobs with it. “I suppose what I’m getting at is whether there were any signs, you know, toward--” She hesitates. “--toward the end?”

“Yes,” Hux says, “of course.” His voice is cold, and he schools his expression. Armor , he thinks.  (The mask is the last and most important piece.)

“So,” Rey says, seeming to summon her patience, “I’m interested in what that looked like. Was there any point when you thought, ‘this is it, he’s acting so strangely, something’s off’?”

The first time I caught him talking to ghosts in his sleep, Hux doesn’t say, before Snoke was even gone. Or every time I held him because he said the Light was too strong. The worlds he abandoned, the worlds he cracked down on, techs’ corpses on the hangar floor. The incorrigible bad feeling about every mission; sometimes the apathy; sometimes the rage.

One particular point? (Hardly.)

“He was,” Hux says, sharp enough to let her know she’s been unhelpful, “not a predictable person.”

“No, he wasn’t,” Rey agrees, with more vehemence than is strictly necessary. She pauses for a moment, before asking, “But was there any one point, especially as we were--or any Resistance was, really--starting to gain ground, where he made, well, a turn?”

Hux considers. He can’t show half of Ren’s ‘turns’ without giving Rey more than he ought, but he lands on a particularly nasty one.

He names the planet, not without hesitation: “Falleen.”

Rey hmms almost fondly. “Good campaign.”

“On your end,” Hux replies, blase for a moment. “It was always jarring for m-- for High Command when he was the one wanting to retreat.”

“He ordered the withdrawal from Falleen?” Rey sounds genuinely shocked, brows knit, gaze eager.

“Yes.”

Rey tilts her head again. It makes her look young and curious, the true student. “Will you show me?”

“I was on the Finalizer.” Hux instinctively backtracks. “I only have his explanation, not the fight itself.”

Rey waves a dismissive hand. “No, that’s perfect,” she says, and stretches a hand toward Hux’s wrist. “May I?”

He recoils, pulling as far back in his seat as possible. She clucks her tongue. “It’s easier with physical contact.”

Easy is what Hux needs from this. Besides, it’s hardly any different from the guards manhandling him, the medics sticking needles in him. In fact, it’s more equitable: a transaction, not a mandate. He forces his muscles to relax.

“And you’ll take only what I show you?” Hux verifies, still half-withdrawn.

“Start and stop as you like.”

Hux inhales, closes his eyes. “Go ahead.”

Rey touches his wrist lightly, fingertips warm on the near-constant gooseflesh there. “Breathe,” she says. Hux does.

And she presses in.

It’s vastly unlike the grenade fire of Ren breaking through his mental barriers. It’s just as strong, just as effective and inevitable, but softer somehow, like feeling heat leech back into your frostbitten hands.

Her presence flickers on the edge of the darkness behind his eyelids. It’s uncomfortable, stifling, having another mind within his own, after so long without Ren. Rey says nothing, and Hux gropes in the blackness until he finds where to begin.

.

.

Ren has a lieutenant on comms for the mission, and she's the one who relays the news to Hux.

"The planet has fallen, General. The Supreme Leader has ordered our return to the fleet."

Hux could ask to speak to him, but it would be futile. If Ren had wanted to have this conversation via comlink, he wouldn't have left the lieutenant on her post. That's fine. They'll have it out when he gets back to the Finalizer.

Half a cycle later, word comes that the transports are docking in the hangar.  There's no excitement in Hux's step on the way down, no thrill of back-from-an-away-mission. Ren had better have something to say for himself.

A heaviness hangs over Hux as he cuts through corridors to take the lift directly into the hangar. It only presses further down on him when he sees Ren. His aura - his presence - is dark, with all the deceptive calm of a hurricane's eye. Hux has known him long enough to sense icy rage radiating from him, Force or no Force.

Judging by the extra distance the troopers keep from him, though, Hux has barely missed the inferno of it. The interior of the Upsilon-class must be in tatters.  It’s a wonder the thing's still flying.

Despite the warning signs, he catches Ren's eye, walks toward him at the end of the shuttle's ramp. Their chests are mere centimeters apart. He all but whispers, "How did this happen?"

"We were overwhelmed."

"We don't get overwhelmed. You don't get overwhelmed." Hux searches his face. "You should have called for reinforcements."

"They would've been slaughtered."

Hux lowers his voice further. "Last I checked, that's what troopers are for."

Ren bristles. The ice over his anger seems to crack; a wisp of steam spirals up out of the faultline. "I brought eight fucking battalions down with me!" He gestures to the meager ranks filing out of the transports. "This is all that's left. What the fuck should I have done? What the fuck would you have had me do!"

The spike in Ren's volume has drawn a few gazes. Hux takes a step back, says stiffly, "We should speak in private, Supreme Leader."

Ren nods, once. He orders one of the colonels to oversee the dissembly process, record the casualties, then follows Hux out of the hangar.

Once Ren falls in step with him, Hux risks a peripheral glance at him. His face is clean, but he missed a crust of dried blood along his hairline. It's dark green. There's a fresh tear in his tunic sleeve, skin and fabric singed with the telltale of a blaster graze. A bolt got that close to him. (Bad sign.)

A few silent paces more, and Hux keys them into a vacant conference room. Ren dials up the lights, without touching the dial. They sit at the far end of the table. The mounted displays on either side of the room show readouts of the Order's emblem. One behind Ren frames his head like a strange blue halo.

Hux folds his hands on the tabletop. "Tell me again," he says, tone measured. "What happened?"

"They had every advantage." Ren's voice is low and dangerous. His foot taps arrythmically under the table. "Numbers, terrain, surprise. I don't think there's a single Loyalist on the planet, or at least not in the capital. They were waiting for us."

Hux purses his lips. "What about their weapons?"

"Top of the line. Probably Resistance-provided. Same for their intel on our attack formations..." He takes a sharp breath. "Damn it to hell!" He slams his fist on the tabletop.

Hux wants to slam his own fist into Ren's face. "I can't believe you let this happen." He enunciates each syllable like a barb.

"There was nothing else I could have done." Ren sounds defensive now, all snarling canid, all raised hackles.

Hux crosses his arms, leans back in his seat. It's a comfortable pose, but meant less to defuse than to irritate. "So you couldn't just get inside the leader's head? That's what I sent you down there for."

"You didn't 'send me.'"

Hux doesn't have a semantics fight in him today. "Fine, that's why I advised you to go . Why didn't it work?"

Ren glances down at his hands, appearing to gather himself. "There was no single leader who could sway the actions of the rest. That's what I'm trying to tell you. It was the whole. damn. planet. against us. Not a single Falleen on our side."

"Then why didn't you get inside all their heads?" Hux pops his lips, and that does it. Ren's gaze sparks, and there's a subsonic ripple in the air. Hux eyes the screens behind Ren, but none of them shatter.

"If I could pull off mass mind control, we wouldn't be having these problems!" 

"Then perhaps you should start studying it." 

"In what spare time?" Ren shoots back.

Hux exhales, shuts his eyes briefly. He's being unreasonable, and he knows it, and he can't help it. His whole life is slipping out of his hands, and Ren's just letting it go. He inhales before responding.

"I don't know," Hux says, and shakes his head. He twists his lips into a sneer. "I don't know. All I know is that even when retreating you clearly didn't consider the full ramifications of your actions. I shouldn't be surprised."

"Call me irrational on any other decision, fine." Ren straightens in his seat, the muscles of his throat tighten. "Not this one."

"You failed to think through the symbolic consequences of losing this particular planet. Our reputation couldn't afford to lose Falleen.”

Ren is quiet for a moment, tips his head to one side inscrutably. "Sometimes you're unbelievably arrogant."

"You're unbelievably ignorant," Hux retorts, without qualification. "Falleen was our last Mid-Rim territory. Do you have any idea what that means?"

"We're back where we started," Ren says. "In Wild Space."

"And you're just fine with that, apparently."

Ren runs a still-gloved hand through his air. "We'll get it all back." 

Good gods. He’s so stupid when he plays the optimist.

"How, Ren? When?” Hux steeples his fingers. “Enlighten me, please."

"At some point their new government will fail. Then we’ll make our move."

"Yes, after a decade, when they get sick of anarchy. Provided we haven't been captured or killed, and have retained our resources. Terrific wager, that."

Ren's tone simmers. "We'd be a lot fucking closer to running out of resources if I'd stayed and tried to win down there."

Ren doesn't get it. He doesn't get it, though he should. He's never been one for strategic analysis, but the implications here should be intuitive. Still, it must be that he doesn't get it. (The alternative--that he doesn't care--is too terrifying to consider.)

"We needed that foothold!" Hux insists. "It's worth the expenditure."

Ren stiffens, but leans forward slightly in his seat, as if he’s trying to loom over Hux. "I'll decide what's worth the expenditure, Grand Marshal."

"Now you’re pulling rank on me," Hux observes, nonplussed. "That's hilarious."

"I can pull rank whenever the fuck I want.” Under the table, Ren’s foot has stopped bouncing. “I could relieve you of command if this insubordination keeps up."

Hux would hardly call justified after-action criticism insubordination, but he skips to the point. "What are you going to do, punish me with extended shore leave?" He has the wherewithal not to add, to scarcely even think, 'Then come back down the next day, whining to be fucked.'

"I can do as I like with you," Ren says, almost fiercely. He holds up a finger and thumb; he doesn't pinch them, but it's a warning shot.

Still, Hux's throat constricts slightly, pulse racing on the adrenaline of memory, and he finds himself short of breath. He imagines invisible fingers on his neck, the world graying at the edges.

"Brilliant, Ren." His voice is embarrassingly unsteady. "This will really help my opinion of your judgment."

Ren's eyes narrow, but the Force releases Hux's throat. "Don't think for one second you can question everything I do just because I--"

No. Fuck.

.

.

Hux diverts the memory just in time, recalled to himself by the chill of the binders against his wrists.

Just because I love you. Ren had a bad habit of blurting it out in the middle of arguments, not as a confession or winning card, simply a mutually accepted fact. Hux could only think of twice he'd said it outside a fit of some sort, during one of which he was delirious, which effectively nullified it.

He'd say it almost with bitterness, vitriol, as if it were the whole reason he was angry. Unaware he was weaponizing it. Nonetheless, it chipped at Hux's defenses every time it escaped his lips.

Countermeasure: Hux, for his part, had a bad habit of never returning it.

"Why did you stop?" Rey says. "What was he going to say- did he say?" she corrects herself.

"Nothing of use," Hux returns. "It devolves into petty insults from there."

Rey eyes him keenly, then her posture slackens, and she appears to accept he's telling the truth.

He is. After a few rounds of 'impulsive fool,' 'coward,' 'stubborn idiot,' and their equivalents, Hux had announced he was going to bed, and Ren had said he'd take over the bridge. Hux had been so put out he'd allowed it. Let him remember how much he needs me.

When Hux emerged early next cycle, Ren had shoved a mug of tea into Hux’s hand, with his go-to commentary on Tarine: "This stuff smells fucking terrible."

Hux had rolled his eyes and bitten back his usual retort ("I don't see it stopping you from kissing me"). He had bumped Ren's shoulder as he walked past him. But he had taken the tea.

At least he had taken the damn tea, had let the fight rest. Some part of him had known it was the beginning of the end.

"There's still more," Rey observes.

Not that you're getting. It's a bit ridiculous to keep the truth about himself and Ren from her. With her pilfering through his memories, it's only a matter of time before he accidentally shows her something indiscreet, but Hux can't bring himself to break their confidence. No one had ever known, or at least not because they’d been told directly.

In another form of government, it would have perhaps been beneficial to 'go public' - a morale booster for the war-fogged masses. They’d briefly entertained it once or twice, but let it go as a joke or fantasy. The Order required no such cult of personality--no celebrity rulers here.

Besides, Ren was even more deeply private a leader than Snoke. He'd never said so, but Hux imagined he didn't want his family privy to his face or his personal life.

More importantly, however, a public announcement would have cut off Hux's means of escape. Trapped in the shell of a dead relationship, putting on a show for the crowds, unable to end it without an outcry - Brendol and Maratelle. Hux didn't want that. Not with someone as unpredictable, as dangerous, as Ren.

It doesn't matter anymore, of course. Ren's gone, and nothing matters, full stop. Hux likes the secret, though. It's the only thing left between  them.

“Nothing of use,” Hux repeats. He realizes his voice is shaking.

“So his abilities to influence individuals started failing him once the revolutions got going,” Rey summarizes. If she’d brought a datapad, Hux could imagine her jotting it down.

“I suppose,” Hux agrees.

“And he suddenly started caring about stormtrooper casualties,” Rey continues, with the same clinical air. “And he let a planet have its independence.”

Hux’s stomach clenches. That sick, hollow feeling has returned, and he babbles a reply on instinct, defensive before he can process why. “It wasn’t like that. He never-- It wasn’t that simple.”

“I figured that much.” Rey drums her fingers on the table, two lonely taps, then coda. “Lots of gaps to fill, I know.”

Hux sighs, swallows. “What else would you care to see?” He manages to steady his voice somewhat.

But not enough. Something in Rey’s glance softens. She frowns briefly down at her hands, then looks back up. “That was plenty for today, don’t you think?”

Without waiting for Hux’s assent, she rises and goes to comm the guards.

Hux dreams tonight, for the first time since before they lost Falleen and everything went slowly to hell. He dreams of Ren, because what else is there.

His hands are in Ren’s hair, fisted till his knuckles go white. Ren’s tongue traces starlines up his inner thighs, while he just grows harder. It’s hell, Ren tantalizing him like this, avoiding his erection in favor of the soft skin below it, so pale it’s shot with veins.

“For fuck’s sake, Ren--” He all but gasps it, voice hitching as he can’t stifle a moan. “Just--” Heat flares in the pit of his stomach.

Ren tips his face up, mouth twitching, eyes bright. “Just what?” Before Hux can answer, his head is back down, and he’s kissing the skin, no more tongue, pressing his perfect lips against the horrible webbed veins like an act of veneration.

“Ren, I can’t--”

Ren doesn’t look all the way up, just lifts his mouth from the skin and breathes onto it, “Ask for it.”

“Ren, now .” Hux tugs his hair, and Ren winces.

“Ask, or you’re gonna come before I’ve even started.”

“Fuck you.”

Ren doesn’t respond, just keeps kissing. His mouth is hot, and Hux can imagine it leaving black imprints behind, like a brand. The pressure of it is too much, he’s only moving higher, and his hair is brushing the skin, which feels impossibly electric. Hux has a perfect view of the knotted scars on Ren’s collarbone, and at this rate he’s going to come in his hair--which Ren deserves--but would ruin the softness of it, and his mouth is hot, and fuck--

“Please.”

Ren takes him to the base. Stars erupt behind his eyelids.

And dissolve into darkness.

He wakes up murmuring Ren’s name at the ceiling panels. He’s hard, heavy and aching with it. It’s hot in here, and he’s sweating under the standard-issue bedding. He flings off the synth-wool blanket, leaving only the topsheet. In the corridor outside, the dimmed lampdisks hum quietly; they throw a gray shaft of light into the cell.

Fucking hell, he thinks in Ren’s general direction, three months dead and you’re still turning me on.

Nothing. No response. Just his own words pinging back and forth in his head like a bad transmission. Delivery failed. (What else was he expecting.)

Hux turns over, tosses until he’s staring at the ceiling again. He can feel his pulse in his groin. His fingers toy with his waistband, but he can’t bring himself to reach further down and take care of this.

What’s he supposed to do, jerk off to memories? And he can’t think of Ren, not like this, not awake and sober and needing.

I miss you, he thinks, futilely, and is immediately disgusted with himself.

Because he’s hard as hell on his prison cot at zero dark thirty.

Because there isn’t a thing he can do about it that wouldn’t leave him in tears, hopelessly unsatisfied.

Because right now he isn’t missing Ren’s combat savvy, or his sarcasm, or the amused twitch of his lip, or his rare, quiet laugh. He just wants to fuck Ren into the mattress, and what kind of shallow consort-thing does that make him. Horny and depressed, pouting that his lover’s too dead for sex.

This is absurd. It’s ridiculous and humiliating, all of it. He clenches his eyes shut and forces his hands to his sides. He breathes deeply for several minutes, until his mind is blank, and the pressure between his thighs has begun to ease. He drifts back into an uneasy sleep, dreamless, but shot through with an indistinct tinnitus, a faint note thrumming through his skull.

It lingers behind his eyes like a migraine when he wakes. For the foggy moments until it disappears, he blames Ren.