Chapter Text
Their first civil conversation afterward is held at blaster- and sword-point, respectively. The second one goes worse.
Hux passed through conscious shakiness or disorientation some hours ago; he has long been worn down to what feels like two-dimensional nothingness but lacks the smoothness to be glass. Glassy calm he knows well, and fury like the flat of a good blade (his own, for instance), and this is neither. He’s something depthless and empty and abraded, lacking the wherewithal to find itself repulsive.
There are marginal advantages to this. For example, while he would normally take a running inventory of pain before moving on to not allowing it to affect him, Hux currently can’t manage to keep a listing of the damage in his head. This applies to all of the damage at hand, admittedly, but tabulations of what matters can be written down just as this is disregarded. He works easily through the due diligence of sacking the erstwhile Resistance base for all the nothing it has to provide, at any rate, and through their own forces’ withdrawal. He does not think about pursuit at this time, the way he does not think about the common features between one breath and the next.
It is not that he has ever forgotten the taste of blood, particularly his own, but that it is staying in his mouth beyond all reason, currently. This is odd. Psychosomatic, he presumes, unless he’s managed enough reverting to old bad habits to tear the lining of his throat. Irrelevant, at any rate, as in he will not permit it to become relevant. He does not stop.
By the time Hux can in good conscience return to the Finalizer he feels like Crait’s sanded off the surface of his skin the way it seems to have grated the contours of his mind. Not that anything hurts, save when he breathes. Merely that he seems to be lacking things he shouldn’t need to lack: edges, definition, grip; the ability to meaningfully distinguish stimuli that are himself from those that are not.
It does not notably impair his functioning, at least not to a degree that is intolerable; however, that is given the fact that the scale for said range of tolerance is currently a quietly horrible study in adaptation all its own.
Hux watches over the buzz of busy misery that surrounds him, not least because it wouldn’t do for him not to be tracking it, but he does not issue reprimands for individual acts of incompetence. None are irreparable—in fact (he may feel toward this later, should he remember to) people recover remarkably well, it’s merely the density of casual mistakes to recover from—and the apparent widespread agitated despair is too universal to selectively punish. Selection of particular actors would be unproductive even as examples to the rest. The solution, whatever it is, lies beyond mere individuals.
Beyond most individuals, anyway.
He knows better than to keep his distance from Kylo Ren now but Hux finds himself doing so anyway, at least for the duration before there’s a ship solid under his feet again. It is a somewhat pathetically short span of time, he realizes later, for all that it seems to stretch infinitely while he’s within it.
Ren allows the search and the withdrawal (Hux sternly does not call it a retreat; therefore neither does anyone else) to happen without any incident significant enough for people to bring to Hux’s attention. This is an acceptable state of affairs, though perhaps only in the way that inevitable things must be.
He waits, then, until he can corner Ren, and does not delude himself that Ren doesn’t know he is being cornered, in the particular manner that passes with little effort for drawing him aside into an unremarkable and vacant mid-level meeting room Hux knows the template for better than his own bare hand. There is a casually risible normalcy to it, of table and chairs and blank walls lacking sufficient importance to merit a viewport. If the lights were on it could be anywhere in spacetime after the first Resurgent launched.
Hux does have his blaster ready, this time.
(Armitage Hux’s gift is preparation in advance; likewise his curse. He is, however, not in the habit of making the same mistake twice.)
“I don’t know if you can stop a shot from this distance,” Hux says. His teeth still taste like blood, so mildly there’s the impression of it being just the natural state of things at this point. It feels almost more like a faculty of the air, especially given how dry his mouth is. “I don’t know if you do either. I do know—” Know what? Not what Ren’s willing to risk on the subject, beyond that it’s enough to have walked in front of Hux without complaint. For all Hux knows Ren wants to die outright. It’s as close to a working theory of what he’s been witnessing as any. “You killed Snoke.”
Ren turns to face him, slow, easy. This is in no way outside what Hux went in expecting, when Ren let himself be steered to leave his back open so easily as to be outright consent, when the door reformed behind them. Ren is an egotistical, hubristic idiot, but he is not dead.
Neither of them bother with light, and the ship is running on her mildest level of power conservation. It’s a preventative measure, while they determine how much damage there is for the unscathed and the functional to make up for, for how long. The trace available illumination is sufficient, both for this conversation and for operations throughout. What light there is collects in Ren’s eyes and, when he speaks, shows on his teeth.
“Do you now,” he says, his voice rough as well; from salt, presumably, and from screaming. Ren fumbles some of the emotional coordination he’d need to achieve a noteworthy level of cruelty, but Hux notes the symbolic effort of it as a matter of record.
The problem with standing close enough to Ren to not be backed against door or wall while promising a shot in the spine—or, now, the gut—is that Hux can’t evaluate him as a whole threat. He simply doesn’t have the needed width in terms of viewing angles. As such he has to choose: he can watch Ren’s face, like a man who is having a conversation.
Or he can watch Ren’s hands, like a frightened animal, and feel it in his neck.
Hux has considered before, generally in the context of early childhood education (and, more prosaically, particularly while illuminating others on why they have forfeited any right to tell him their opinions on early childhood education), how much of the distinction between sentients and subsentients can be demonstrated by way of death. A subsentient animal has no meaningful understanding, fear, or anticipation of its own demise. It cannot develop a conception of its inevitability in general, nor a particular preference between facing an oncoming death and looking away before the moment of impact. Nor can it act on such a preference—or against it—were it to somehow internalize one anyway.
Confrontation, cowardice, and the rest of that family of emotions are a sentient prerogative. This is naturally relevant at even the lowest levels of human acculturation, for reasons that should be patently obvious and yet still forced Hux into years of mere parodies of would-be academic debate.
He’s sure Ren would have an opinion on the subject, if prompted, for Hux to be irritated by, were he to be given the opportunity. If he hasn’t developed it, Hux is resigned to confidence in Ren’s ability to determine one on the spot. Ren, as a murderer and a telepath, is uniquely disposed to potential usefulness with regards to analysis by the living of the experience of death in general; it is Ren himself who would make the effort useless at best. He is an unreliable witness consistently more interested in finding ways to make himself an obstacle than in relevance or truth. That Hux has never had that particular debate with Ren does not change the fact that he knows this.
When Ren’s arm moves too fast and fluid to bother with, when his lightsaber hums to life at the corner of Hux’s eye, Hux does not particularly react. He flinches on some level, and he feels it on his face, but it’s doubtlessly both unimpressive and unimpressed: more a microexpression with delusions of grandeur than anything else. His blaster stays perpetually steady.
“Of course I know, Ren.” Hux couldn’t keep the tiredness from his voice to save his life; as such he doesn’t try. “I know everything.”
Ren does something like laugh, like he thinks the lie is for his benefit: short, barking, not quite wild. His features don’t reach wildness either, merely managing to reach for it, even with the advantage of drinking in flickering red plasma light as an intensifier. There is remarkably little of him left, all told, if only the excisions were relevant or permanent. In both of their cases the net effect is not dissimilar to the feeling invoked by surveying the wreck of the Supremacy: the vast majority still usable, patently alive, objectively a unique threat and enduring achievement, yet stripped of menace despite largely retaining its function. “No you don’t,” Ren says. Staring at him, and not swinging, like he thinks he’s managing to say something else.
“I know you’re hopelessly outmatched,” Hux answers, dry in both form and function. His own tongue slows him down, sticking to the roof of his mouth.
“By what?” Ren snaps, but the rage makes no travel down his sword arm; Hux only realizes belatedly that it could’ve. The matter didn’t cross his mind for—many reasons, but not least among them is the fact that neither of them are looking at their weapons at all. The hum of Ren’s saber this nearby sounds positively faulty, though Hux lacks enough experience with simple uses of kyber to know from that how much of it is due to flaws of the crystal or of the housing, or of the character of lightsabers more generally. “Organa has nothing,” Ren’s going on, making a solid effort at passion, his voice snagging roughly on itself, “and the girl is—”
“Irrelevant,” Hux says. Ren lets him. (Hux, for his part, lets that carry him away; it doesn’t occur to him not to.) “They are currently irrelevant. You’re outmatched by yourself. You are on track to burn down everything of value in this galaxy and, presumably, should you continue to—to miraculously survive your mistakes otherwise, in the next.”
“I should kill you for that,” Ren halfway growls, making no effort to do so. Something of the ambient loss gives the ludicrous impression that the idea is new to him.
Hux holds his gaze accordingly. “You should,” he says. His own voice runs more placid about it than he’d expected. “And you won’t.”
“Really.” Ren is trying; this is noticeable; it’s why he fails. He’s never been able to be the threat he ought to be in mere conversation, Hux has found. It’s not surprising that what serves him in power and menace on the battlefield isn’t recaptured into a static exchange merely by the presence of the sword that represents it.
If it were just Ren’s lethality in question, that aspect of him would never go missing; he is self-evidently a weapon more obviously than he is a man. But Ren doesn’t work as a sustained, present ultimatum any more than a lightning strike could, and his lightsaber is fixing to give Hux a headache.
“So why not just shoot me, General? You remembered a gun this time.”
It’s surprising that Ren’s aware, even that much, of what went through Hux’s mind in the throne room. Barely less so, come to think, that he didn’t contest being assigned Snoke’s death at all. Hux says, “I’ve no great interest in dying, Ren.” Pointedly.
“Then what’s this about?” Ren’s lip pulls back from his teeth; Hux can’t tell if the line of brutal light at his side shifts with a tremor of the blade or just with Hux’s own blinking, gaze too fixed on the fire that paints Ren’s face. “You’re right, I should j—”
“I am invested in my continued survival and that of the Order,” Hux cuts in. He does not have to try hard at all to make it cutting, an accusation of a contrast worth noting out loud. This is the only reason he manages to do it, the same way he manages this conversation’s fixed tableau largely through the kind of even immobile calm that can only come from holding a blaster steady. “And my assessment of your inevitable, contagious, and self-inflicted ruin—” It awes him to see Ren take even that with merely a twitch, which is why Hux keeps going. He’ll rationalize it into a test later. It is not a test now. “—was dependent on you taking up the mantle that would destroy you alone.”
“So you should—“ Ren shakes himself for a second, from the neck up only. It completely ruins any authority or composure acquired by rephrasing. The central problem being, of course, that he doesn’t need it. “No. You will help me.”
Hux will deny, later, to himself, that he then spends a second imagining saying no. It rips through him anyway; it is unexpected; it is wholly unmanageable. Left to his own devices Ren is in fact sure to drive the Order into the ground. It will splinter faster and with less hope of salvage than any Republican dream. And, curiously—given Hux doesn’t think he would’ve made this assessment a week ago—he thinks Ren really would even know it was his own fault. Maybe even entirely.
For a second he imagines that: Saying no. (Leaning into the saber blade he won’t deign to look at, even, before Ren thought to do something more elaborate. There’s something seductive about the furious plasma at the corner of his eye, a manner of drawing him in of a vertigo-like genre with the kind of hubris at which Hux succeeds as much as with flight at which the human body fails.) Turning the entire conversation into one last spiteful feint. Letting Ren, for the first time in his life, experience the consequences of his actions.
He imagines the consequences themselves by the end of the beat, though. What it actually means—anathema—for the Order to fall. (And for Hux, were he to do otherwise and survive to see it, a neo-Republican execution; even if they end the war with enough collaborators to form a jury he can’t imagine anyone would waste the time.)
Hux thinks of Rae Sloane wearing the blood on her uniform like rank insignia; of the first flash of certainty of knowing that his father was not the Empire, that his father was a disgrace.
Snoke was not the First Order. Hux is not the First Order. Even the millions dead today were not the First Order. And Ren certainly isn’t.
He’ll give Ren nothing else aside from this pause: let the man know Hux still had to think if he has to, if he’s even equipped to notice, but Hux offers no change of expression, no resigned or irritated breath. He wouldn’t be standing here if in the end he didn’t know already exactly how this story goes.
Clipped and atemporal, the words as at home in his mouth now as they would have been five days or months or years ago, he says, “Of course, Supreme Leader. What do you need?”
At that Ren still stares at him, oddly slow to adapt. “I’d be more convinced you mean that,” he says, “if you weren’t still pointing a blaster at me.”
The corner of Hux’s mouth twitches quickly, to an extent that may or may not be visible. “Naturally,” he says, already thumbing the safety back on. Shifting his gaze isn’t necessary for that, nor for holstering it, although he knows immediately that keeping the conversation up to standards is about to get vastly more uncomfortable. He expects mistakes, as such, like breathing. “Sir?”
“Incredible.” Ren’s voice is flat in a way that makes the Republican in him positively blare with it.
It’s harder to read his face once his saber retracts, but the last relatively detailed look Hux gets gives him the odd impression Ren reciprocating on the armistice has happened without his conscious assent. The surprise seems too deep and fundamental to merely be a (honestly unmerited) reaction to Hux himself.
Ren takes a step back as he returns his saber to his belt, spending the rest of the distance between himself and the room’s normalcy to the point that he almost walks into the table, the motions far less polished. “So this is a truce?”
“Truces are for enemies, Ren,” Hux says. Ren looks at him for long enough that Hux’s eyes readjust in the interim, so perhaps it was the wrong thing to say. Certainly Hux has pushed further and in more directions than he’d at any point intended, egged on by every time Ren let him. Presuming Ren’s not about to change his mind about that and snap Hux’s neck, he’ll have to reassess. For now, in order to watch Ren blink at it more than anything else, Hux pitches his voice away to add, “Lights to fifty percent.”
Fifty percent lighting on even slight ship-wide energy austerity is entirely forgiving; he catches Ren’s face on the end of the reflexive blink that lets him, too, school himself accordingly. “Right,” Ren says. “Enemies.” He sounds not sarcastic as much as like he was recently made aware of the idea of sarcasm and is still forming a conclusion on it. “So what do we need, General?”
Hux shifts into parade rest; he even allows his spine to have an opinion on doing so, briefly, before he dismisses it. “We need to know where we stand,” he says, wonders idly if Ren finds a double meaning in it. Then he immediately gets carried away again. “The majority of the dedicated fleet is intact but a full survey of the damage will take time. A full survey of the death toll will take longer. The rest of our forces are largely dispatched on the frontlines of invasions of what had been selected as vulnerable targets prior t—” Prior to Starkiller. Hux swallows the mourning viciously and clears his throat after. “We can expect them to begin reporting back soon if they haven’t already, and that will give us a better picture of what we have to work with for recovery. For now I r—”
Ren raises his hand and Hux stills. He stills immediately, giving the lie to his own performance, stopping so fast he feels his pharynx click. All Ren does with this, though, is to scrub his hand over his face; the other finds the small conference table he’d not quite backed himself against and leans slightly on it. Hux understands the impulse on both counts, but it does Ren no favors. He doesn’t need them; this continues to be the problem.
(He will. Will he know?)
“Better question,” Ren says after a moment, his tone an oddly fragile tangle of resignation and embarrassment. “Now that you’re committed to not shooting me if I do, does anyone need me, or can I—can I get some sleep.”
The tiredness in Ren’s voice scrapes along Hux’s own bones, which is overall unsurprising. Beyond the obvious of their recent exertions, even Hux’s rudimentary understanding of the Force indicates it must require some manner of energy tax from its practitioners. He blinks, though, waylaid enough in thought to answer on a slide further into autopilot prompted by the obvious mistake of it, like Ren’s an errant subadult or some uppity commander. “Even under crisis a significant disruption of sleep/wake cycles is a choice of last resort,” he says on blank didactic reflex. “And even for essential crew. The alleged gain in having any given person present can only be weighted against the cost of their absence after considering that loss of function from sleep deprivation is immediate, punishing, and progressive, as well as compounding on itself. The idea carries the same wretched cost-benefit ratio as returning injured soldiers to the field when others are available. A—”
Ren is staring at him. Differently, this time, the emotion gap produced by the drop-off in threat filled with Hux’s own belated humiliation.
Hux bites his lips savagely, resigned to the certainty that his face is coloring with embarrassment. Those debates had taken ages, immediate practical relevance making them worse and more protracted than the issue of death, back when Order command had been laboring under an even worse infection of old Imperials spoiled by upbringings where they’d had lives to underexploit—even to waste—than it currently is. So much of Hux’s life takes place in contexts where he can better things by explaining them that the reflex endures long after he’s lost his grasp on common sense.
(The only thing that curtails it is certainty of lack of understanding—that is, a guarantee of failure—and Ren is not Snoke. Of course that has disarmed him.)
“My apologies,” he chokes out. “Habit. There were—arguments. For a long time. About establishing priorities, by people who didn’t recognize—” Hux strangles his own voice again before Ren can, though at this point he’d probably welcome it as help, before realizing at last why he’s actually doing this.
Because Ren just blithely handed Hux permission to tell Ren to hurt himself and all but promised he would do it in the asking, and Hux still needs to tell him no. The good thing is Hux knew to talk himself out of doing otherwise before he even recognized the option. The bad thing is that the managing of it is so hard Hux has to spend his own dignity on necessity and do so out loud.
“We don’t,” Hux says, still drawn inexorably to take the long way of it, more so knowing now he’s hit on something Ren is crushingly, subhumanly inept with, to an extent Hux can’t yet so much as model. The realization that both the down payment on Hux’s continued survival and the delayed cost of him making it this far will have to be fixing Ren to at least manage to fake it, and the prospect of in any way fixing Kylo Ren is—”We don’t hurt our own unless it is necessary for the advancement of the First Order. And recovery efforts are already in motion. Yes.”
“An actual answer, Hux.” Ren is still staring: nakedly, some kind of upset Hux isn’t going to further disambiguate for as long as he can afford to read Ren as not planning on lashing out with it. For now Ren looks merely like an impending implosion, and Hux can not care. Any extent to which this manages to penetrate far enough to be refreshing is annulled when Ren remembers his own rank, though, even slightly. “And then you’re dismissed.”
Shifting to an actually pertinent routine distracts Hux from the knowledge of his off-script failures as much as anything could. Ren may not appear disposed to push on any of those fault lines currently, all the fight gone out of him with the decision that Hux doesn’t merit fighting, but Hux’s mind will surely pick up the slack. He nods sharply. “Sir.” Thinks before he speaks, this time. Not about the open wounds of the present, or about the other questions Ren has opened, unintentionally and in great density, thus far. “It’s… in everyone’s interest that you rest, frankly. We can reconvene when—”
When we’ve both recovered somewhat, he almost says. Hux himself isn’t sure quite why he opts to kill the sentence so viciously instead. It’s not too gentle on Ren; aggravating him further now has ceased to be useful. It’s not irrelevant; it is the strict description of his concern at hand. It’s not impossible; Hux can’t afford not to recover.
What, then?
“Right,” Ren says, into that emptiness, after a moment. “All right.”
The way his eyes fall shut seems more than anything like the action of gravity on a great and inert weight (seems like Hux has ceased to exist), not like the function of a mere human body, such that Hux can’t find him pathetic quickly enough to be affected. Instead he’s seized with the nonsensical urge to ask if Ren plans on falling asleep here, on his feet, in a mid-level conference room. Strictly speaking, as far as Ren’s poor decisions go, something that human is unlikely to be beyond him.
Hux leaves, instead, exactly as requested and without another word. Quickly, as well; it is somehow even more uncomfortable than being watched by Ren not to be. He is aware of no gaze on his turning back, not even of the air-pressure shift he has gathered is the Force as metaphor made real actor.
It’s not that Hux’s sense of such things has ever been inerrant, or even reliable; it is, instead, exactly enough to make him wonder, and nothing more.
He does hope that Ren has the sense to drag himself off and actually rest. It happens almost in spite of himself. Hux can recognize, regardless of the quickly-ignored opinions of his individual bones, that this has been brutal for Ren as well, because it has been brutal for everyone, to varying degrees.
Ren will be more bearable when he is more effective. At worst, when he inevitably gets in Hux’s way, that will enable Hux to act with the confidence that Ren meant to and proceed accordingly. At best…
Who knows? Hux thinks, so suddenly that for a moment it drags him almost to a stop. Who would know? Who has seen it? At Ren’s best—
Maybe he’ll even be useful.