Chapter Text
The reason Hux doesn’t notice the strange car in his driveway is because it’s Tuesday—one week since the last time he heard from Ren.
Six days since they let the sniffer dogs loose in the park, with the whole town inching behind, shouting the wrong name. Two days since the vigil, where simpering parasites lit Mother Mary candles and said meaningless shit about community and “pulling together in difficult times.”
When Hux woke up that morning with the same headache he’d had for the past seven days, he went to school wearing the hoodie Ren leant him and pretended he didn’t know it was Ren’s. He let everyone stare at him and pretended he didn’t know they were staring and whispering loudly behind his back.
“When do you think they’ll give up,” said Jessica in fourth period.
“Jessica,” said Emma G., glancing nervously at Hux, who was pretending that he couldn’t hear and that he wasn’t wearing his probably-dead best friend’s clothes.
“What,” said Jessica, “I just want to know when we can stop, like, tiptoeing around it. This is why people kill themselves, you know, because of the stigma.”
Hux dug the tip of his pencil into his thigh through a hole in his jeans, worn there from frequent use. It was just to help him stay awake, usually, not keep him from murdering half the class.
Despite the pencil, he spent the rest of the day imaging it—he’d start with Jessica and Emma, then the boys who’d snickered in assembly six days ago when Principal Holdo said, “I know we’re all praying for Ben’s safe return,” and then mild-mannered Ms. Tico, who’d stopped him before class with a patronizing hand on his shoulder and murmured, “Are you doing alright, Armitage? Have you gone to see the counselor?”
The reason Hux doesn’t notice the conspicuous black sedan in his driveway before he can get away is because he’s still got that fuck-awful headache, he’s still wearing that fuck-ugly hoodie, and he’d tried to listen to music on the ride home, except the only songs on his phone are the ones Ren added—stupid tragic emo shit that Hux hates.
So, it’s Ren’s fault, really, that Hux only notices the car after he’s let his bike fall sideways onto the lawn. The front door flies open, and his step-mother’s shrill, panicked voice shouts, “Armitage!” and then the suits file out, with their skinny black ties and squiggly earpieces just like in the movies. That’s when Hux finally sees the tinted-out windows and the government issue plates, and clues in.
Fuck you, Ren, he thinks.
Just before the first suit grabs him by the arm and pulls him into the car, spouting some bullshit about national security, Hux thinks it again, loudly—
fuck you, you fucking dumbass idiot
—just in case Ren’s still listening.
* * *
When they were fourteen, Ben jumped off a one hundred and thirty-foot concrete barrier into the reservoir. He broke his arm, sprained both ankles, and was featured in national papers with the headline, 'It’s a Miracle' - Skywalker Heir Escapes Watery Death.
That article was euphemistic and celebratory, but others weren’t. In the days after, Hux learned a lot about falls and Ben’s case.
The highest recorded dive from a professional diver was one hundred and ninety-two feet. Sometimes, when people leapt from the Golden Gate Bridge, they survived, and that was two hundred and twenty feet. But Ben wasn’t a diver, and there was no way to fall accidentally from that part of the reservoir, which was cordoned off with two different barbed-wire fences.
Hux accepted what anyone with half a brain already knew: no one jumped from that height and expected to live.
Ben was in the hospital for a few days and out of school for three-weeks. Hux never went to see him.
The first time he saw Ben after he tried to kill himself was during fifth period science. Ben smiled, crooked like usual, and did that dumb half wave, half salute that made him look like a douchebag. He seemed fine—a little paler than usual and his left arm was wrapped in an obscenely red cast with what looked like two hundred stars drawn on it.
Ben spent the better half of class doodling in Hux’s notebook and then, when Hux snatched that away, in the outdated textbook spread out between them. Hux kept his eyes fixed on the periodic table for the whole forty-five minutes, reading the elements over and over so he wouldn’t look at his dumbass friend and do something stupid like fucking cry.
After the final bell, Ben caught Hux’s arm as he was slamming his locker and said, “Wanna come play Xbox? I’ve gotten pretty good one-handed,” as if things were normal and Ben hadn’t literally plummeted to his death twenty-three days ago.
As much as he wanted to punch Ben in his stupid face for his casual attitude towards his own fucking life, Hux had a pretty good idea of how long he could go on feeling like a dying sun before he actually lost it. Better to have it out in Ben’s tiny attic room than at school.
“Whatever,” said Hux, which he knew Ben knew meant yes.
“Want chips or something?” Ben asked after they hiked the three flights up to his room. He dumped his bag carelessly on the floor and slumped into his beanbag chair, drumming a beat on his red-casted arm like it was fucking Guitar Hero.
But Hux was having trouble getting air into his lungs. It was being in Ben’s room after nearly a month, and realizing that, if things had been different, he might never have seen it again—the shitty band posters, the million glow-in-the-dark stars that constantly fell off because of their cheap glue, the dent in the wall from last spring when Ben threw an Xbox controller in a Halo-fueled rage. There was a camping mattress stashed under the bed for when Hux stayed over, and a box of Wheat Thins hidden in the closet, even though Ben didn’t like them, because Hux did.
Ben tried to take this from him, this room—probably his favorite place in the whole fucking world. Hux could barely see with the fury clogging his eyes and ears and throat, a molten wave of white noise.
“Hux?”
“Shut up,” he snarled, “you stupidfucking asshole.”
“Hux—”
“I could kill you, I could—”
“—just let me explain—”
“—strangle you actually dead and see how you like it—”
“—wasn’t trying to kill myself!”
Hux curled his fingers tighter into the collar of Ben’s shirt, which he’d somehow gotten ahold of. Ben was standing again, looming over Hux because of some bullshit growth spurt that had him looking like a fucking goth beanstalk.
“One hundred and thirty feet, asshole,” Hux said, shaking Ben with each word, his voice awkward and raw.
“I know,” said Ben, like an idiot. He reached for Hux’s hoodie and hooked the fingers of his good hand in the front pocket, just held it like that “Look, I can’t explain it, I just knew I’d be fine. Okay?”
Hux refused to meet his stupidly sincere eyes, stared at the mole on his cheek instead. “No, not okay—are you actually insane? So, you, what, had a premonition? You had one of your fucked-up dreams and thought ‘well, guess I’m fucking invincible,’ is that it?”
“They’re more than that,” said Ben, flat and low.
Hux liked Ben because they had the same fucked-up attitude and sense of humor, they liked the same games and Ben mostly didn’t suck at them. But the downside was he sometimes got like this—fucking melodramatic, like a made-for-Disney movie.
“More than what,” said Hux, not because he wanted to know, but if he didn’t keep talking he might actually strangle his best friend. His hands were already there, still clenched against the hot skin at the base of Ben’s throat. Hux could feel it when he swallowed.
“More than dreams,” said Ben, and then he frowned, like maybe he could hear the scream building behind Hux’s teeth.
When Hux’s step-mom told him over breakfast twenty-two days ago that Ben had jumped into the reservoir, he’d thought, Ben’s an idiot—incontrovertible fact—and that he’d had a moment of morbid curiosity, like Hux did sometimes, like, what if I just stepped in front of this train, but he’d actually let himself do it because he was a dumbass single child who craved attention and never thought things through.
And then, when Hux learned more about it, he’d thought, Ben’s suicidal, but that didn’t sound right. For all that Ben was moody and serious and wore a lot of black, he was also a wuss, who cared about his parents more than they deserved, and also stupidly loved his dumb little cousin, who Hux knew uncomfortably well with how often they bumped into each other at Ben’s house.
Ben was selfish, but only with things like eating the entire bag of Doritos or stealing Hux’s kills during campaigns. When it came to big stuff, like letting Hux cheat off him during midterms or pretending he didn’t care when his mom missed another one of his dumb recitals, Ben was actually a big fucking pushover. It was one of the reasons they got on so well. That he would do something this monumental, this irreversibly hurtful, without some big breakdown first—it didn’t fit.
But it somehow never occurred to Hux that Ben was just batshit crazy, the real kind, like he thought he was Jesus, or had wings and could fly. Now that Hux really thought about it, it sounded way more likely than suicide. Ben was terrible at making decisions and he had a lot of existential angst about the afterlife, but he’d once told Hux that he had dreams of a past life where they destroyed planets together in an intergalactic army.
“How is it a past life if it’s in the future, dumbass?” Hux had said, rather than what he’d wanted to say, which was “What the fuck, you crazy shit.”
“You need to get this through your over-large skull,” said Hux, when all Ben did was continue looking grave. “Everyone has dreams. Just ‘cause your fucked-up psyche is more imaginative than others doesn’t mean you’re psychic, or a mind-reader, or a telekinetic space knight—it just means you’re a fucking weirdo, okay?”
Ben took a breath like he was about to defend himself.
“No,” said Hux, “Shut up. Dives-off-fucking-bridges doesn’t get a say. Your dreams mean shit.”
“Hux—”
“Shut. Up.”
Hux.
It wasn’t that he was looking at Ben’s mouth, just that he was facing him, so Hux knew for a fact that Ben’s lips never moved even though that was definitely his voice.
“What.”
If you ever shut up for even a second, this could’ve been a lot cooler.
“You’re in my head.”
Yeah, no shit, dumbass, that’s the whole point.
After the initial shock wore off and Hux spent a few completely rational minutes making sure he wasn’t asleep, or in a coma, it started to make sense. For someone as dramatic and attention-seeking as Ben, he’d done an adequate job keeping such a life-altering secret, but in hindsight, there had been clues.
Ben never paid attention in class, ever, and barely listened to Hux on a good day, but he still got straight A’s and always remembered things, like Hux’s favorite movie, the jellybean flavors he hated, or the day his mom died. He broke things constantly and had terrible depth perception, but his balance was unnervingly good. He went to the skate park maybe once every few months, but the height he got on that thing was like he practiced every day.
“So,” said Hux, after his mind stopped whirring a little. Ben was back in the beanbag, but he kept bouncing his leg and fiddling with the Xbox controller even though it wasn’t on. “Mind-reading.”
“Yeah.”
“That it?” Ben opened the hand with the controller in it, except it wasn’t anymore, it was hovering six inches above his palm.
“Right. And the dreams?”
“I don’t know,” said Ben, still fiddling with the controller, spinning it in slow, wobbly figure-eights with his mind, because that was a thing he did now. “Luke says—I mean, it’s not like there’s a rulebook or anything. But, they’re not just dreams, Hux. I have those, too. I can tell when they’re different.”
“So, your fucked-up psycho dreams told you to jump off a bridge—”
“No, Hux. God. The dreams aren’t the point, okay? I just wanted to see if I could. I’ve done it before, just not from that high, and—if I can concentrate on the air around—”
“I don’t care, oh my god! Fuck your stupid powers, and your stupid dreams—”
“I’m telling the truth, Hux!”
“I know. You think I can’t see that with the—” Hux gestured at the still-floating controller. “Look. This is fucked-up, and weird, and I’m still not completely positive that I haven’t accidentally taken LSD, and this is some sort of fucked-up trip, okay? But I don’t care about your powers, or if you practiced beforehand, or whatever.” Hux’s voice didn’t break on the last word, but he turned his back on Ben anyway and shoved his knuckles into his eyes to stop their burning. “What’s fucked-up is that you jumped off that stupid bridge knowing you could die and you did it anyway, what the fuck—”
“Oh,” said Ben, because he was an idiot. “I mean—I was pretty sure it would be fine.”
“Shut up, Ben, just—shut up.”
* * *
“Can I get you anything, Armitage? Some water?”
The woman across from Hux is small and slight, probably on purpose, so he’ll spill his secrets, or let them pull his prints from a water glass, like some fucking idiot who’s never seen Law & Order.
“No, thank you,” he says, because it still doesn’t hurt to be polite to the people who’re holding him hostage and, from what he’s gathered so far, have little to no concern for his legal rights.
“If you change your mind, just let me know. So, Armitage, that’s mouthful, do you have another name you prefer?”
“Hux,” says Hux, trying not to grit his teeth, to come off as aggressive or like he’s hiding something, even though both those are true.
“Hux,” she repeats, graciously, as if she’s allowing him something by using the name. “I’m sure this is confusing for you.”
“Yeah,” Hux says, no fucking shit. “It is a bit.”
“We just need to ask you some questions, but the matter is . . . sensitive. That’s why the need for all this,” she gestures to the room, which is a generous word for it.
It’s an interrogation cell, clearly, with concrete walls and a concrete floor, the metal table and chairs nailed down, and a mirror on the far wall that may as well be a window for all it does to hide the fact that someone is watching them
“It must be hard,” she goes on, her voice sweetly sympathetic. It makes Hux want to bash her skull in. “With your friend missing—Ben Solo.”
“Yes,” says Hux. Hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium.
“When was the last time you heard from him?”
“I already told the police all this.” Boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen.
The woman smiles, plastic and brittle. “We like to be thorough,” she says.
“He texted me,” says Hux, “Tuesday night.” He knows they already would’ve tracked that sort of thing. If he sees Ren again, he’s going to kill him for it.
“What did he text you about?”
“Nothing,” says Hux. He knows his face is burning, red and terrible, can see it in the fake-ass mirror over the woman’s shoulder.
She smiles again. “Sometimes details that seem meaningless can crack the case wide open,” she spreads her hands open on the table. “What did he text you about?”
Hux tries to keep the flush from spreading to his neck. Fluorine, neon, sodium, magnesium. “It was nothing,” he says again, “really.”
Right around the time Hux realized he’d never liked girls and probably never would, was also around the time he started hanging out with Ren. The two separate developments had nothing to do with each other, but asserting this to anyone who was fucking stupid enough to ask him about it was always taken as shame at being gay, or maybe at being with Ren, which—fair.
When they got older and people starting mocking in earnest, making sly comments about never seeing them apart, calling them a matching set of fucked-up faggots, it stopped being annoying and started being no one’s fucking business. Rather than say, I don’t know what you’re talking about, or Ren’s not gay, it was so much more satisfying to say, yeah and what are you going do about it, you fucking dickwad.
It also happens to be the perfect alibi for why he and Ren are always sneaking off to the reservoir, to the park at night, to all the places they go to test Ren’s limits with no one looking. So, whatever. Let them think what they fucking want.
“Why do you care,” says Hux, before she can ask about the text again. “About Ren. Kids go missing all the time, and he’s sixteen. Everyone thinks he ran away,” he adds, though that’s not what everyone thinks.
The woman seems to know this, her expression souring with pity. “Do you think he ran away?”
“No,” says Hux. Ren had tried before and only lasted about four hours, as far as the strip mall three towns over. He’d texted Hux the whole fucking time.
“I’ll be honest with you,” she says, and Hux has to pinch his thigh to keep from scoffing. “We don’t normally get involved in missing persons cases, even when they involve minors. There are . . . special circumstances, that have caught our attention.” She pauses like this is meant to surprise him.
He uses the moment to try to decide how he should react when she asks him about the mind reading. Disbelieving? A classic, “Are you crazy”? Or angry, because they’re making a joke of his best friend’s probable death?
“We have reason to believe Ben’s disappearance is connected to other cases—other children around his age who’ve gone missing over the past few months.”
Turns out, Hux doesn’t have to fake his surprise. It never crossed his mind that this whole Guantanamo Bay situation was due to anything other than Ren’s powers.
“What reason?” says Hux.
Obviously, this is better, that the government has no idea. He should be relieved. There’s no reason for the hollow, sinking thing expanding in his chest, except that—if the authorities think this is just some run of the mill kidnapping, then no one with any sort of power has all the facts, and the odds of Hux figuring this out on his own are slim to fucking none.
Or—the heavy thing grows heavier—maybe they’re right, maybe it is just a small-town sob story, “local boy goes missing, never found.”
But—fuck that. There’s no reason Ren would’ve been out that night. He would’ve texted. It had to be something paranormal, something to do with the mess of dumb magic shit that his family has been caught up in for years. There’s no other explanation. Hux won’t accept one.
“I’m afraid I can’t go into the details of an ongoing investigation,” she says. “But we could use your help. You were close to Ben. Did he have any contact with anyone unusual, was he a part of any clubs, or online chatrooms, things like that?”
Hux wants to answer, “Ren doesn’t have friends, he doesn’t do ‘clubs,’ except for band, because he’s a fucking loser,” but the easy way she throws around past tense, as if Ren’s death really is a foregone conclusion—this federal agent who sees cases like Ren’s every day—
“No,” says Hux, hating how his voice comes out, hating his face in that fucking mirror, grossly pale now that the flush is gone. “Ren never talks to anyone.”
“Alright,” says the woman, and then she adds, “You call him ‘Ren’,” as if she’s only just noticed. “Why is that?”
Hux digs his fingers harder into his jeans, wishing he had a pencil or something sharp. “It’s just a nickname,” he says.
“Alright,” says the woman again, calm and placating. Hux wants to dig her eyes out with a rusty grapefruit spoon. If Ren were here, he’d pick the grisly image from Hux’s mind and send one back, something with more violence, but less finesse. Hux knows Ren’s alive, because the space in his mind where they go to share terrible things is still there, even if it aches, has ached for days.
The woman is still talking: “—like to ask you a few more questions, but, as I mentioned, this is an ongoing investigation, of an especially sensitive nature. This isn’t something to share with your friends or put on Twitter. This is a serious investigation that requires incredible discretion. We would appreciate it if you didn’t repeat these questions to anyone. If you do, there could be . . . repercussions. Do you understand?”
While Hux had been expecting this sort of threatening from the start, now he’s a little confused as to why, if it isn’t because of some supernatural fuckery. But, whatever, what’s one more secret to keep.
“I understand,” he says. “With Ren gone,” he wants to add, “who the fuck am I going tell?”
“Good. Did Ben ever mention the name, ‘Snoke’?”
All the stale, damp air gets sucked out of the room. Something in Hux goes very, very still. “No,” he says.
“What about, ‘Supreme Leader’?”
A distant, animal thing, like waking from a nightmare in the dark, the fear before you know if it was real. “No,” says Hux.
“No?” the woman echoes, her eyes gone sharp.
“Those names are weird as shit,” he says, ruining his efforts not to swear in a government facility. He feels like she must hear his rapid pulse in the thick silence of the cell. “I’d remember.”
“Alright,” she says. She closes the file on the table, some bullshit thing that he’s sure is just a prop, and stands.
“What,” Hux says, “that’s it?”
“We’ll continue our investigation, of course,” the woman answers, stopping at the door to look back at him. “But that’s all we need from you right now. Thank you for your cooperation. Someone will come to show you out.”
He wants to say, “That’s not fucking good enough,” and “I’m not leaving till you tell me who that is,” but the stupid, choking fear is still swirling in his blood, begging him to leave, to run, to hide away in the space beneath his bed.
The same suit from before comes to get him. He keeps his heavy hand on Hux’s shoulder for the entire winding walk out of the building, and they get into an identical black sedan for the drive back.
Thirty minutes later, Hux is under his bed, his back pressed to the wall, his knees tucked up slightly, so his feet don’t poke out at the end. It’s a snug fit—he hasn’t had to use it in years.
“They’re not panic attacks,” he said to Ren once, in a sleep-drunk whisper, the dark and the million star-shaped pricks of light making it easy to spill all the shit he never meant to share.
“Anxiety attacks,” Ren corrected in the same soft tone, like that was the point Hux was trying to make.
“Whatever,” said Hux, “they’re neither.”
“You’ve always had them,” said Ren, in the flat, low voice that meant he wasn’t referring to Hux’s childhood, but some time earlier. Ren always brought up his stupid fucking dreams whenever Hux was trying to be serious for once.
“Fuck off,” he said.
“It’s true,” said Ren, defensive. It pissed him off that Hux accepted the mind-reading and the telekinesis, and the “force-jumping” whatever, but refused to acknowledge his weird-ass dreams of other lives they’d supposedly had. It was just that Hux had to draw the line somewhere, for his own sanity, and he wouldn’t put it past Ren to sneak some extra bullshit in with the rest. Ren was already living in his own weird fairytale, so of course he wanted to make it even more dramatic, with past lives and destiny.
“Great,” said Hux, rolling over so he couldn’t see the outline of Ren’s face in the dark. “Even with hundreds of reincarnations, I’ve always been a fucking wreck.”
“I have, too,” Ren said, like that made it better somehow.
“Surprise of the century.” Hux pulled the borrowed blanket over his head to end the conversation.
“It’s easier with you,” Ren whispered quietly, ages later, as if he thought Hux might be asleep, as if he wasn’t a mind-reader with exactly zero boundaries. Still, if Ren could pretend then so could Hux, who stayed silent and kept his breathing steady until sleep came for real.
Under the bed, Hux takes his phone out from the pocket of Ren’s hoodie, the earbuds still attached from his bike ride home. He hesitates for only a second before putting them in and clicking open his messages.
The top conversation is from his step-mother, a panicked series of texts from this afternoon. The next two are from Rey and Ms. Organa, both dated Wednesday morning when Ren wasn’t in his room, wasn’t at Luke’s, or the garage, or the other usual places.
The fourth one down is from Ren. Tuesday, 10:52pm. No emojis, which is unusual, a detail Hux has obsessed over in the past seven days. Just four words:
you’ll hate this one
and then a link, the preview deliberately hidden.
Hux clicks it and digs his nails into his palms as it loads. The stupid, angsty, slow-ass music crackles in his old earbuds. Ren’s right, for once in his fucking life. Hux hates it.
You could be my unintended
Choice to live my life extended
You could be the one I'll always love
You could be the one who listens
To my deepest inquisitions
You could be the one I'll always love