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He is staring at the ceiling. He's been staring at the same square of metal for… hours, maybe. Days.
They’d dunked him in bacta, soon enough that he’d lived, but not soon enough to keep most of his blood in him. Then they’d washed him clean and laid him here, on clean sheets, in a quiet room away from everyone else.
He hasn't moved since then, except to breathe. He wishes he didn't have to do even that much. Perhaps it's the blood loss that makes him feel incapable of it, that makes his bones leaden and his muscles soggy. He can feel his pulse; it is strange. He's never noticed it before. The machines take care of the rest, fluids in, fluids out, something in one of the bags of liquid that makes him disinclined to think, or speak, or move, but his heart is still going even when the rest of him has stopped.
He is a body.
He breathes in.
He breathes out.
He used to be Kylo Ren. Now he's not sure what he is, whether he's just Kylo, or whether he is something there is no name for. Who will name him now that he has failed one father and killed the other; who knows him enough to call him what he is?
He turns away from the thought. He can't, he won't think about it - he must not. That way is too dangerous. Only the ceiling, now, and nothing else.
It is grey.
It is grey, and it does not change. If he were capable of feeling things right now, that might be a comfort. But he is not, and it is grey.
He is staring at it when the door opens.
It doesn't matter who it is.
Their steps are hurried, unsteady - they stop on the other side of the room and there is a frantic pawing, a crinkling of packets. Perhaps there is something wrong with him and he simply hasn't noticed, and in a minute it will be an orderly with a too-sweet smile and whatever they're searching for held out in a carefully unchallenging hand, before they apply it or inject it or do whatever they are going to do that they assume he will care about.
The ceiling is grey. He breathes in.
Whoever it is on the other side of the room catches their breath sharply, and the crinkling changes to the sound of whatever they've located being unwrapped.
He breathes out.
The steps move over to the wall. Fabric rustles and fasteners clink: they make a little noise in their throat, and an autoinjector hisses, the twin to their own hiss.
He breathes in.
“Hells,” he hears, the word floating over a breath, “- nnh -”
A slide of fabric-covered weight over metal, then a tumbling series of thuds, hands and knees on durasteel decking.
He breathes out.
The room is small. There are only a few shuffling sounds and a breath through a nose before a hand makes the bed dip, and their weight is hoisted onto the edge of the mattress.
He thinks about looking. Perhaps they are relevant, if they are sitting on his bed.
He breathes in.
The whole bed shakes as they shudder.
At first he doesn't recognise the person, doubled over with their shoulders hunched and their hand clamped tight over their mouth. The stripes on the rumpled jacket mean little - it could be stolen or borrowed, after all.
The red hair is more decisive. There is only one person he knows aboard the ship who has that hair. But he supposes there could be someone else, given that most of the crew wears helmets.
In the end it is the hand that convinces him. This is Hux, with his eyes screwed shut and his fingers white against equally chalky cheeks, holding back sickness or tears or simply whatever noise might have gone with the trembling that courses in racking waves through his body. Only Hux would try so hard, with just the nothingness that used to be someone here to see him.
When the initial rush of the drugs settles out and the shivers ease Hux sits up a little, still slumped farther than he has ever seen Hux slump. Hux does not glance at him, but he must know he is being watched.
“Hux,” he whispers, a dry rasp. It is the first word he has spoken since he was brought back aboard.
Now Hux does look. “Ren,” he offers in return, and so he must still be Ren, he supposes. At least to Hux.
Hux’s eyes are too bright, feverish and dark-shadowed, and Ren says, “Stimulants?” because it is what makes the most sense.
“I’ve hardly sat down for four days,” Hux snarls. “Never mind sleep. I can’t afford to stop, not now.”
It is not phrased as an admission of weakness, but as a challenge: what are you doing that compares?
He feels the space where his anger would be like a missing tooth.
“I stopped,” he says, in answer to the question Hux didn’t exactly ask.
“Well. You had a variety of excuses.” Hux isn’t sneering, not quite, but. “I don’t. I just have to keep going.”
Ren looks at him, at his grey-white cheeks, at the hands that still shake even where he has them clasped in his lap. “Until you can’t.”
He is entropy, he is the heat death of the universe, he is the eventual spin-down and cessation of all things.
The ceiling is grey.
Hux’s shoulders twitch, a hiccup. “I don’t stop,” he says, “until the job is done.” It is final.
He levers himself up from the bed, wavers on his feet - clenches his jaw and pulls himself straight.
Ren breathes in.
Hux crosses back to the cart full of medical supplies, the debris of a medkit spread out, and rummages until he comes up with another couple of injectors, which he considers for a few seconds before tearing one packet open. When he pulls the flap of his uniform tunic up Ren can see the blotchy bruises clustered along the soft line of his flank; he presses the injector carelessly, too hard, to a mostly unscathed patch, and glares at it as it discharges its contents. He tosses the empty injector into the waste disposal hatch.
Ren can already see the new bruise forming as he smoothes his undershirt back down.
He breathes out.
“Vitamins,” Hux says, all fangs. “In case you were thinking of telling the Supreme Leader how I’m using pharmaceutical resources irresponsibly.”
Ren shakes his head minutely. He can’t imagine ever speaking to the Supreme Leader again. He knows, distantly, that he will - that he must. And probably it will be soon. But it is impossible to think about, and so he doesn’t.
Hux’s hands are still shaking. He tries to slip the second injector into his pocket, but he can’t get it at the right angle to slide into the hidden slit in the fabric, and it clatters to the floor with a noise that seems to ring off the walls, too loud.
The noise Hux makes is mostly vowels and Rs, pure frustrated rage completely uncommensurate with what he’s just done, and he kneels like falling, like he fell, he fell -
The sharp edge of something pushes through the grey, and Ren pushes himself up on an elbow and says “Hux,” as though it should lead to something.
His eyes and teeth glitter as he looks up at Ren from the floor.
“I can’t,” he says, and Ren feels the drip of his own blood over his knuckles, sees it spot against white snow. “Everything else can pfassking break, break down and disintegrate and fall to pieces and fail, everything else - it all has. It’s all gone. Everything but me.”
Ren breathes in.
Hux’s mouth twists. He fights it, bites down on his lips; goes horribly still for a long moment, eyes closed; opens them again, the glitter of them slicing into Ren like his weapon.
Ren can smell burning trees.
“Hux,” he says desperately, because the grey is clearing, and he can feel Hux’s despair, crushing and total and held back only by the very slimmest thread of will and a hefty dose of stims, as though it were his own. “Stop. You have to - you have to, I can’t -” and he can’t, he doesn’t have the strength to not feel it. His own shields are weak, and Hux is silent, but he’s screaming -
Hux sips at half a breath, holds it, and he whitens further, until Ren genuinely thinks he might faint; but there is something like a shield hazing into being between Ren’s mind and his, not strong but enough.
“I’ll go,” Hux says, though he doesn’t move. It’s not an apology; an apology would mean admitting how sheer the cliff edge is that he is walking. It would mean admitting that he wants more than anything in the whole world to lie down, that he hasn’t slept in four days, that there is water in his throat and in his belly and if he stops kicking he will drown and that will be the end of it.
It would mean admitting that he knows Ren knows all of that.
When he finally gets his shields in place again it is like the drugs - a grey emptiness in Ren’s head, echoing with all the dangerous things that are gone from it, and Ren is reeling with the lack. He falls back against the pillow, feeling as drained as Hux looks.
“I have four to six hours,” Hux says, as he stands, slowly and painfully. This time the injector goes into his pocket. “Which I need very badly. And then… I’ll sleep after that. If I can. I can’t take much more of the stims - the droids won’t give them to me anymore, which is patently ridiculous. They think I’ll stop my heart. As if there weren’t easier, faster ways to die.”
One of the machines beeps and chuffs, and Ren feels a cold flood poured into his vein, not a moment too soon.
“I won’t tell them,” he promises, thinking of the bruises, thinking of Hux’s eyes, thinking of scales and balances. “Just be careful.”
“What would you know about careful?” It’s said with almost no venom. “But I’ll live. And so will you.”
He breathes in.
“Yes,” he says.
He breathes out.