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Chapter Text

Nobody ever asked Armitage Hux whether or not he believed in afterlife. And if they did, his answer would be scoffing and to the point. Promises of afterlife was the pathetic sugar coating for those too weak to bear the harsh reality of here and now. 

The truth would have been a little different. Deep down in his soul, Armitage Hux fervently hoped there was no such thing as an afterlife. What sense would it make to survive, then? What point would there be in destroying people who stood in your way? He certainly didn’t suffer and plot and risk the murder of his father only to have to spend an eternity back under that old bastard's thumb. 

No. You had your one chance, you either took it or you blew it, and then you died. End of story. If there was any justice in the universe, it had to be in this. 

Armitage Hux's last life lesson taught him that when it came to him, the universe was anything but just. 

When he first woke up… no, waking was a decidedly wrong word for it. When you woke, you were generally aware of having been asleep before. Nightmares, cold, never-lifting fatigue deep in your bones. All that had been there and you just changed your way of ignoring it. Even asleep, Armitage Hux was always conscious of his misery. So to enter something out of a perfect nothing was… 

"Could you stop screaming?" 

The world immediately dissolved into non-existence and plunged back several times like a fluttery image on a faulty screen before it finally settled. Hux clamped his mouth shut and held his breath in, staring wildly around himself. 

He was surrounded by a wreckage. 

The cold surface he now sat on must have been the ceiling of an air lock chamber. On one end, the hatch door was splintered and broken in, black grainy soil spilling through the cracks on random gusts of freezing wind. On the other end, the armoured hand of a Stormtrooper patrol guard still grasped the safety lever meant to seal off the chamber and open it to the vacuum of space. The rest of him was sprawled several feet further down the twisted and charred corridor. There was no sound anywhere except for the hiss of wind somewhere outside. 

The ship, the Steadfast , crashed onto some planet, exploded and burned down. And Hux…

His gaze dropped to his own chest. The lower part of it sported a circular burn, the fabric of his uniform vaporized away, exposing a scorched and raw mess of a wound. Hux stared in horrified fascination at the bits of bone embedded in the torn flesh. None of it bled anymore. None of it hurt. 

When he looked again and better, he could see the patterned paneling of the surface he sat on through his own legs. He lifted his hand and peered through it. Yes. Definitely translucent. He had died, and now he was a ghost. 

“No,” Armitage Hux said, with as much conviction as he could muster, and his surroundings flickered out of existence once more. 

*

The second time he came to, he found himself on the blanket from his bed, curled up as comfortably as he could amids the shattered light fixtures on the ceiling of his bedroom. Somewhere from below, a lonely red light shone about as enthusiastically as Hux felt. His battery powered mobile holo terminal, he remembered leaving it slotted into the wall mounted charger just before - before . Now the dying battery was the only light illuminating the contours of Hux’s pitiful temporary quarters on board the Steadfast . 

The door was left ajar, probably an automatic evacuation measure. Hux was grateful for it, he didn’t feel like experimenting if he could pass through walls. The evacuation fluorescent stripes on the corridor floors still shone, albeit faintly. It must have been several hours since the power had gone out.  

Aside from everything being upside down, this part of the ship seemed to escape the brunt of the destruction. The walls were still blackened by fire but the distortion of corridors caused by the impact was minimal, and Hux’s quarters were almost intact. There was very little dead bodies, too. High command quarters were bound to be mostly empty during battle. Hux suspected that the Stormtroopers barracks and Starfighter hangars would be an entirely different matter.  

He climbed through the door back into his rooms and that’s when he noticed he wasn’t limping. 

By all accounts, he should have been. Wasn’t he shot in the leg, shortly before he… fatally miscalculated? But the wound in his leg was gone, the fabric smooth and without a smudge. 

He realised he wasn’t thinking about it. He had completely forgotten about it. Now, that was an idea…

The mirror in his ‘fresher was cracked but mostly still holding up in its frame. Hux half didn’t expect to see his own reflection but it was there, paler and bluer than usual, but there. He concentrated on that image, going from top to bottom like with a cadet on inspection. 

Hair, smoothed back, not one strand out of place. Collar regulation stiff and adjusted to sit tight. Shoulder pads level. The front seam of his uniform…. without a single wrinkle,  flawlessly running down to a shiny belt buckle. 

He looked down at the sudden absence of his chest wound, just to make sure. It worked. He could control his appearance with the strength of his will.  

“You figured that out so fast. I’m impressed,” said a voice behind him. Hux screamed in panic and the world dissolved again, as if he flipped a lightswitch. 

*

The third time he materialised in the Supreme Leader Ren’s quarters. If there was any rhyme or reason to his metaphysical tour through his last breathing days, Hux would have preferred to skip this particular stop. 

Maybe as the next step in mastering his new existence, he should learn how to control where to appear, and how not to lose all grasp on his own essence when he got scared or upset. Being a plaything of his own emotions was Ren’s weakness, never Hux’s. 

“So spite is not an emotion?”

“Shut up,” Hux muttered out of habit. There was nobody to talk to. Despite the all too familiar voice he kept hearing at the very edge of his perception, there wasn’t another soul on the entire ship. Maybe he kept imagining the voice, a little madness in exchange for the worse one that would surely creep upon him as soon as he let his situation sink in. 

He was alone. 

Ren’s quarters were empty, void of any presence. Somehow, Hux could now tell the difference. Earlier when he kept finding dead bodies in the corridors, their feel in Hux’s world was still warm . Recently passed souls left behind an echo of warmth. But Ren’s quarters were stone cold, and wrecked beyond recognition. Some of it didn’t even look like fire or explosion - that pedestal that used to hold Vader’s ugly relic was definitely slashed through with a lightsaber. Hux had six years of experience recognising those burns. 

Funny how the room looked more Ren’s now than it ever did before. 

He didn’t want to be here. Last time he saw this room, it was still the right side up, immaculately white and glaringly unlived-in. Just a poise, a place to showcase relics, and to instill an impression of power and control. Last time he was here, Hux was on his knees, sucking Ren’s dick to try and make him rethink the demotion. It was just as showy and hollow gesture as the room around them. 

Hux closed his eyes and tried to wish himself away. Preferably somewhere he wouldn’t imagine Ren behind every corner. He was apparently on some planet, there must have been at least one private place on it. He didn’t know why he kept lingering on the wrecked ship instead of going where everyone else went, but he wasn’t very keen of finding that other place. 

“Why, general? Afraid that you’d meet sixteen billion Hosnians wanting a piece of your throat?”

“Shut up!!” Hux yelled and punched the nearest wall. His arm flung into emptiness and he nearly overbalanced before his eyes adapted to the new level of darkness around him. 

*

He wasn’t on the ship anymore. A multiplied echo from his shout still resonated in the huge, bottomless abyss at his feet. Similarly over-proportioned, cavernous space was drowning in shadow all around him. 

High above him, the walls rose up and up but didn’t meet, leaving a gaping hole instead of a ceiling. Hux could see the dark clouds ever-brewing on the sky, lighting up every now and then with unpredictable bursts of electricity. 

So he was on Exegol. 

He remembered the endless tactical discussions about the difficult atmospheric conditions on this planet, the abrasive dust, the low visibility, the constant charged storms jamming the navigation. What served well to conceal the massive fleet ended up becoming their downfall when they couldn’t get the ships cleared into space fast enough. 

What was odd, was that Hux didn’t know this, and yet he knew . He had been - removed - way before the actual battle started, he could’ve had no memory of how it unfolded. But it was here, in the tremors of the stone structures around, in the cracking of the barren ground, in the sharp, punishing wind. The echoes of the battle painted themselves on the back of Hux’s eyes and he would weep, if he still could, over how stupid all those idiots who replaced him had been. 

Hux remembered hundreds of ships, lined up as far as eye could see in an impressive display of power. All of them now disintegrated or crashed to the ground just like the Steadfast . Hux shivered. Not from the wind - weather couldn’t affect him, it was just muscle memory, something his body would do when faced with such waste, such devastation. 

His new perception of cold and warmth was tied to the spiritual level. Steadfast had been freezing with death. This place, however…

The walls of the gigantic hall might have been hidden by shadows but to Hux, they still shimmered with warmth. People have been here, not so long ago. Living, breathing people. Many and many of them, far more than Hux was able to count. 

Were they the survivors? Did they gather here, a handful of them from every crashed ship, drawn by the glimmer of safety from the poisonous atmosphere and explosions raging outside? There must have been someone who survived. Thousands of souls on each Star Destroyer. Hux’s mind rebelled against the possibility that he might have been the only one left alive. Well… differently alive. 

“But if the survivors came here, where did they go?” Hux said aloud to himself.

“They didn’t. First Order survivors laid down their arms and left on the Republic ships. Palpatine’s army fought to the end. There’s no one left.”

Hux whirled around. The jagged structure in the far end of the room that he originally passed off as a piece of debris from the collapsed ceiling was, as he now realised, an exceptionally ugly throne. And on it, reclining sideways with his legs propped up on one of the hand rests, lounged Kylo Ren. 

Of course. The anger rose up in Hux so fast it nearly gagged him, words he kept ready for so many of their arguments clogged half-way up his throat. The world around him started to darken and he dug his heels in, squeezing his eyes shut, willing to calm himself. 

He only opened his eyes when he was certain he wouldn’t poof away again. Kylo Ren was still there, now leaning forward, elbows propped on his knees and hands clasped under his chin, staring at Hux with something between concern and fascination. 

“You’re learning so fast,” Ren said. It sounded slightly begrudging. 

In the face of absurdity, Hux decided to start with the obvious. 

“You’re glowing blue. Have you finally died?”

“Says the man who’s translucent,” Ren deadpanned. 

Hux wished he thought about his customised blaster when he was willing his current appearance into existence. But then, even the best mental projection would probably do no harm to another ghost. Or would it? Hux was willing to try. 

“Is this your fault?” he pointed his finger at Ren, at least.

“What exactly?”

Of course there had to be a list. Ren never made a single mistake in his life, they always came in droves. 

“This!” Hux gestured at himself. “This stupid, farcical, preposterous-”

“In a way.” Ren was walking down the dais now, towards Hux. 

“I suppose I’m partly accountable for your death. You were my subordinate, I shouldn’t have allowed it to get to the point where you thought that treason was the only option.” 

Oh, Hux wasn’t angry before. He was angry now. The gall on this man-

“You fucking prick, that’s not what I meant!” 

“One thing leads to another, Hux. You wouldn’t be a ghost if you hadn’t died, and I feel guilty for that-”

“If you think I wouldn’t have killed you if I had the chance, think twice, Ren!”

That had finally worked. Ren swallowed whatever platitude he had in store next and for the first time in this conversation lost some of his infuriating smugness. 

“Oh.”

“If you’re keeping me here just so you can ease your fucking conscience by apologising for mistreating me, you can shove it right where you don’t glow anymore!”

“I’m not.” 

“What?”

“I’m not the one keeping you here.” And seeing the peeved pout Ren said it with, that someone or something had got one over him on the spiritual level, it finally hit Hux that he might be saying the truth. 

“Well, fuck.”

Ren had stopped a few steps away from Hux and just stood there, arms folded and thoughtful expression on his stupidly smooth face. Apparently he figured out how to do away with his scars as well. 

“I wonder if we could, you know,” he said eventually. 

Hux was so deep in his own thoughts that it took him several seconds to place that remark. Then he closed his eyes in exasperation and willed himself away.

Chapter Text

He really should sit down at some point and work out exactly how to control where he appears next. For although he was no stranger to griesly displays, opening his eyes out of darkness and finding himself face to face with several rotting Snokes stacked in a cloning tank counted as a sight Hux never wanted to encounter again. 

“What in hells-”

“He was just a construct.” Ren appeared next to Hux, glaring at the contents of the tank with the same disgust Hux felt. Also with shame. 

“A mockup of a Force user, controlled by Palpatine.” 

Death was apparently full of surprises. To find that the monstrous being that used to pull the strings from afar and to throw Hux around the bridge like a rag doll was in fact a puppet too...

He couldn’t help it. Once the laughter started he just couldn’t stop, doubled over and laughing until his eyes blurred with tears. Funny how they still came - probably the same way he kept breathing. Mental projection of reflexes.

“What’s so damn funny?” 

Oh, he almost forgot. Hux hated Snoke, hated him with cold calculation of someone looking up the power ladder and with hot fury of someone squirming on a too tight leash, but Ren… Snoke was his mentor. His Master. The one Ren once turned to for comfort, and then held onto the delusion as long as he could even after the comfort turned into a trap. 

“I’m just imagining,” Hux wheezed, rubbing his sides cramping from laughter, “the face you’d make if Palpatine had just sent in another clone after you cut the first one in half. Stars, that would be priceless .”

The pain and shame on Ren’s face was the most genuine emotion Hux had seen on him in a year.

“Of course you’d find that funny,” Ren growled. 

The semi-hysterical mirth finally left Hux, replaced abruptly by anger. Never too far these days, that one. 

“I wish he’d done that. Just so you’d know how did it feel, to finally get rid of one abuser only to have him replaced by another!”

Ren’s chin dropped, a little wobbly twitch. “I didn’t mean-”

Hux rounded on him. “All my life, I had someone’s hand around my neck, physical or metaphorical. My father’s, Brooks’, Pryde’s, Snoke’s. And then I find him dead, and I think, finally I can breathe. But oh, look - you’ve made the jump ahead of me! And the very first thing you do-”

“And why should I have considered your precious feelings?” Ren shouted. “It was either me or you. We were enemies!”

“We haven’t always been that.”

From this close, Hux could see the moles on Ren’s face. Fainter, dull black on washed out blue, but still there, still familiar. He used to count them absentmindedly while Ren dozed off in his bed, in those precarious times between arguments. They were a bad match as co-commanders, their style and views just never fitted together. But in bed… they fitted just fine.

Maybe Hux was just reading too much into it. 

“Don’t act as if you wouldn’t have done the same.” Ren took a step back. “You did grab your blaster when you found me unconscious on the floor. The Force warned me then, you would’ve killed me otherwise.”

“Always so quick to trust the Force.” Hux laughed at the irony. “I stalled my hand back then. I hesitated.”

He scoffed at himself, looking away. “It was a mistake. If I had the chance now, I wouldn’t hesitate at all.” 

When he looked back, Ren was no longer there.

*

Hux’s aimless wandering took him eventually back in front of the creepy throne. Something kept nagging at him there, as if the very air was thicker in this place, clinging to his feet like molasses. 

The walls around were streaked with lighting, mapping out the last moments of the battle that transpired here. Hux stopped, his gaze drawn to the ground. The cracked stone still thrummed with the echo of souls that passed here. Palpatine’s, obliterated into a gaping black hole. That Jedi girl, teetering on the edge for a while. Kylo Ren. The ground was still shimmering where he let out his last breath.

Hux felt sick to his stomach. He wondered if ghosts could throw up. 

He felt the tingle in reality as Ren appeared next to him again, without even having to look up. Like a subharmonic thunder deep below the horizon if it was a sound. 

“You helped her,” Hux said bitterly. “You brought her back to life.”

He knew Ren heard the unspoken question in his tone. Why. Why her. 

“It was the right thing to do.”

Hux rolled his eyes. “Oh please, spare me that shit.”

Beside him, Ren huffed. His words came out mumbled as he spoke with his head hanging low. 

“I felt… compassion for her. It was her - predestination. The will of the Force. She was the one who would defeat Palpatine. And then die. The Force only cares about balance...”

He sighed. “It was the least - no. The only thing I could do. I have lived with predestination for so long - but this was my own decision. Not someone else’s.”

Hux understood, in a way. But he found it hard to relate. If Ren could defy the universe’s plans, he could’ve done it much, much sooner. 

“You never helped me.”

And that was it, deep down, everything what Hux didn’t want to spell out. How he was never important enough for Ren to change the course of fate for him. Where were Ren’s bolt-stopping abilities when Pryde aimed the blaster at Hux? Where were his resurrection powers when Hux’s body was being airlocked out of the ship?

The silence coming from next to him shouldn’t have been as painful as it was. 

“I’m trying now,” Ren whispered eventually. 

Hux just had enough. 

“If you really want to help me, I suggest you find what keeps me here and then help me destroy it. I’d rather be dead and gone than to face eternity with you as the thorn in my side.”

He half expected Ren to disappear but the prick seemed to have grown a thicker skin. 

“That could be it, actually,” Ren said with a speculative frown.

“What would be what?”

“Your hatred for me,” Ren winced. “This place - this whole planet is a focal point for the Dark side. Hate is one of its strongest feeds. I guess if you want to leave this world, you’ll need to let go of your grudges.”

Hux stared at him. “So you’re saying that what I actually need to do is to forgive you,” he deadpanned. 

Ren shrugged. “I’ll ask for it, if it helps,” he offered.

“Fuck no,” Hux barked out. “Don’t you have other people to pester? Go ask your dear mother for forgiveness, even after you killed her husband she’ll be more likely to grant it than I’ll ever be!”

And that was when Ren disappeared, with nothing more than a mute pop in the space where he was only a moment before.

Chapter Text

Hux must have hit a particularly sore spot with his words the last time he saw Ren. It’s been - he couldn’t exactly tell how long it has been - but it was long. Long enough that the corpses littering the battleground started to turn black and dessicated under the never-stopping winds of this planet. 

During that time, Hux experienced several periods of non-existence. He hadn’t figured out where he kept going when he left the plane of the living (or rotting, when he looked around) but as a small compensation he got better at appearing back where he wanted to. At least within the confines of this planet. 

Ren might have been right in his assessment of Hux’s reasons to haunt Exegol. Tried as he might, he couldn’t will himself anywhere else. What wouldn’t he do for a short visit to Finalizer - but his beloved flagship had been dry-docked for repairs after the Batuu incident, and by now probably decommissioned and scavenged to pieces by the New Republic forces. It was likely for the best Hux couldn’t see it. One less reason to cry. 

Stars, this place was lonely . 

Somehow he always ended up in the ravaged throne room. Something about it kept nagging at him. Those wide galleries all around it, with steps, almost like an auditorium… But where was the audience?

The remnants of Palpatine’s life supporting fixtures still hung from their frame. Hux eyed the proportions. The thing was massive, in fact, most of it was out of human reach. Did people who cared for him regularly bring ladders, or was he using exclusively droids? And if so, where were the machines now?

“It doesn’t make sense,” Hux grumbled to himself, scowling at his own annoying habit to think aloud. It was a recent development. The eternal silence was getting on his mind. 

“ We may have the answers you seek ,” boomed a voice behind him, reverberating through the room with a strange growling distortion. Deep, throaty, hissing on its sibilants almost like, like…

Hux jumped at the sound and almost flickered away but willed himself to stay, cautiously turning around. A figure of a stranger in a doorway that wasn’t visible before was beckoning him closer. Hux could just barely recognise the shape of a vaguely humanoid but much larger than life figure wearing a cloak and a hood, framed in a greyish light coming from somewhere behind them. The feeling of warmth hit Hux again, and this time it was strong, and coming from that doorway, like a scent of water in a desert.

“Who are you?”

“A child of this world,” the stranger replied. They took a step into the hall, into the ambient light of electric storms raging outside under the clouds, and pulled away their hood. Hux’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. 

So this was a native Exegolian. And from the look of things, when Palpatine created Snoke, he used their DNA. 

The being waiting patiently across the expanse of the room was a younger, less ravaged and apparently female version of late Supreme Leader Snoke. The same size, those same deep set reptilian eyes, widely arched cheekbones and claw-like hands. But where Snoke’s head was bald, this alien sported a crown of scales running from their brows down to their nape, like a brightly coloured lizard.  

Shit, the tactical reports didn’t say anything about the natives.

Come to think of it, Kylo fucking Ren hadn’t said anything about them either. Kriffing lying ghost-

Wait. Hux was a ghost himself. 

 “You can hear me? You can… see me?”

“ We saw the Emperor’s glory and the power of his spirit when his body was nothing more than a withering vessel,” the alien said, completely unperturbed. “ Bodies are just a temporary matter, what is important is the spirit that rules them. Come with me.”

*

Hux knocked back a glass of the worst brandy he ever tasted, shuddered and started pouring another. Despite its industrial taste, somehow both rubbery and metallic, he needed several more after the conversation he just had. 

His hand on the glass shook only a little when he heard-felt the tremor in reality announcing Ren’s presence. He didn’t bother looking up. 

“I was wondering when you’d show up,” he lifted the glass in mock-toast and then knocked it back. At some point, it had to become an acquired taste. He hoped for it. 

Ren eyed him with a mix of begrudging curiosity and clear distaste. 

“How did you get a drink?”

Hux leaned back on the bench in the natural alcove he was absolutely not hiding in before Ren found him, overlooking the vast underground dome covered in a carpet of glowing mushrooms as far as eye could see, and threw his arm in a wide arch around like a theatre host. He only overbalanced a little. 

“Wonderful people, these Exegolians,” he exclaimed. “So obliging. Did you know they used to bring offerings to their dead? They have a whole fucking obsession with death.” He peered into the empty glass and decided another was in order. His skin was still randomly crawling over with goosebumps from what he saw down here.

“Anyway, I found out they could ritually burn alcohol so that its essence got transported into the spirit world. Imagine that - fucking Force magic like yours, but making something actually useful. You could call it twice distilled spirit, ha!” Laughing at his own jokes was certainly bad form, but this was a cracking one.

Ren didn’t seem to share this sentiment. 

“I always hated it when you drank. You get even meaner than usual.”

“And you’re a liar, as usual. You said there’s no one left!”

Ren scowled. “No one of interest.”

Hux laughed again. “Well, I happen to think that an entire nation who wants to make me their new eternal emperor is pretty fucking interesting.” 

*

It was a shock, discovering the underground nation living in secrecy several hundred feet below the planet’s surface, safe from the storms and mutagenic levels of radiation. After that, the shocks just kept coming. 

Despite their overall look that kept making Hux try to reflexively cower whenever any of them approached him - years of chasing Snoke’s approval while trying to evade his rage couldn’t be erased so fast - he soon learned that Exegolians were actually very kind and hospitable people. Yes, their entire culture revolved around a cult of death, and their grasp on common sense was questionable at best, but they welcomed Hux warmly and as one of their own. 

And it didn’t stay at that.

They were very appreciative of the fact that he, in their words, stayed here as the last child of the Empire . They weren’t happy that Palpatine vacated their throne without the basic decency to leave behind a successor, so they saw Hux as a gift from the Dark side itself. 

They didn’t seem to have any problem with the most fundamental flaw in their reasoning. 

“But I’m dead,” Hux told them. 

“Death is just another step. Now you are eternal.”

*

Now Hux was trying to find a better angle of looking at his situation, preferably through the bottom of the bottle, and Ren’s nagging was definitely not helping.

“You’re not perturbed by the fact that they all look like Snoke’s extended family?”

Hux closed his eyes. He was so tired. 

“You of all people should know I don’t care about looks. Your face looked like it went through a meat grinder after Starkiller and I still fucked you twice a week. Ruling an empire of people looking like gourds would be actually easier.”

Ren huffed. “What empire? You’re trapped on this planet.”

Hux tilted his head back and stared upwards, as if he could see through the mass of rock between them and the surface. Maybe he should try the passing through walls trick, one day.

“There’s plenty shipwrecks up there to find enough functional parts for one ship, I’m sure,” he drawled. 

“You’re a ghost. Even if you could escape, you’re still dead.” 

Hux wondered if drinking that twice distilled muck could be tuning his brain into Exegolian way of thinking, because suddenly he had an idea. 

“They seem to be very proficient in cloning technology,” he mused. “Maybe they could make me a body. There must be some Sith ritual to reanimate it with my spirit.”

The growing alarm on Ren’s face was priceless to watch. “May I remind you that the only human DNA available around here is Palpatine’s?” Ren asked. “The bodies on the surface have been exposed to radiation for too long. All you have it’s what remains from Palpatine’s experiments in the cloning labs down here.”

Hux shrugged. “And what’s wrong with that? I heard he was quite a charming man in his youth. Red-haired, too. Looks like we gingers are destined for greatness.” 

Messing with Ren was so easy. Hux just couldn’t stop grinning. His head swam. Was he even still messing with Ren? Or did he mean all that? 

Ren certainly seemed to believe Hux meant it. He plucked the glass out of Hux’s hand, knelt down by the bench and laid his hand on Hux’s arm. Hux’s thought screeched to an abrupt halt and he stared, dumbfounded, at the point their two translucent forms touched.

He could feel the touch. It was stronger than a memory. It felt real. The most real thing since… since the blaster bolt in his chest. 

“Hux,” Ren said imploringly, “You can’t be the next Palpatine.”

Hux jerked his arm away. His cheery mood was gone. “Why not?” he spat out. “Just because you were too weak to become the next Vader?”

He didn’t quite catch the expression on Ren’s face - anger? hurt? shame? - because in the next moment, the space next to the bench was empty. 

“You’re just scared I could get back to life on my own!” Hux shouted after him. It was futile. Ren was gone again. 

Chapter Text

Life - or, how Hux often had to correct himself, the existence - amongst the Exegolians wasn’t so bad. It was nice to be acknowledged, to have someone to order around. Those gentle giants were making good progress on combing through the graveyard of ships on the surface for some functional shuttle or starfighter that might have escaped the explosions unscathed. So far, they haven’t had any luck, but Hux kept telling himself it was only a matter of time. 

Ren continued to appear at random, stubbornly unhappy about Hux’s life… um, choices. 

He never revealed himself to the natives. The more time Hux spent with them, the less he saw of Ren. In a way, he was almost regretting it. The Snoke-alikes were meek and obliging but also dull as rocks, their conversation bored Hux to tears and although they could see and hear him, their hands would pass straight through Hux if they accidentally touched him.

Not that he wanted them to touch him, oh stars no. Though colourful and oddly graceful, their reptilian stare was still too cold and unsettling. But how did he miss being touched. A warm hand on his skin… plush, generous lips… 

“Dreaming about something nice?”

Hux snapped his eyes open, rearranged the corners of his mouth from a dreamy smile into his customary sneer, and turned his head to the side to glare at Ren. 

“I was trying to sleep.”

Ren propped himself on one elbow where he was lying next to Hux on the very nice bed. The covers didn’t sport a single crease. Hux couldn’t feel the softness of the fabric. It was maddening. 

“You know ghosts don’t need to sleep, don’t you?” Ren said, cocking an eyebrow.  

“When I still needed to, I was often denied,” Hux said pointedly and closed his eyes. “Now I can, so I’m going to make up for the lost time.”

“...Can I stay?”

Hux resolutely did not open his eyes. He just knew from the tone the kind of face Ren must have been making. And he didn’t trust himself to be able to resist it. 

“Why don’t you go to sleep in the bed you’ve made? Go ask that Jedi girl. She seemed willing to have you there.”

No sound came from next to him - even Force ghosts moved silently - but when Ren spoke next, it was from a different angle. He must have been sitting now, his back to Hux. 

“Seriously, if I could, I’d do it just to piss off your jealous ass, Hux.”

Now, Hux opened his eyes again and frowned. The obviously untrue assumption about jealousy aside, the rest of what Ren said was intriguing. 

“I thought Force ghosts could go wherever they pleased.”

Ren’s head hung low between his shoulders. “Well, I can’t. I’m just as stuck here as you are.”

Hux recalled his own periods of non-existence. Not that he would recall them - he was just aware of going somewhere, and returning from there, but he has no idea where there was. It was as if someone cut out a chunk of his time and glued together the loose strings from either end. 

He sat up too. There was no point in sleeping anyway. 

“So where do you keep fucking off when you disappear on me?”

Ren gave him a sad look, but the corners of his mouth were turned up in a tiny grin. “So you have been missing me.”

“If you want a conversation, don’t make me angry,” Hux warned him. “You know what happens then.”

“No, please, stay.” And there it was again, Ren’s hand on the top of Hux’s, and all the words gone from Hux’s throat, all the rebuking thoughts drowned in the tingle under his skin, touch touch touch warmth weight softness hold on please hold on. He barely registered the buzz of Ren’s words in his ears. 

“I don’t know where I go,” Ren was saying. “I know it’s a place, but I’m deaf and blind and bodiless there, I can’t speak or move, and it’s frightening. I’d rather stay here with you even if all you do is yell at me.”

Then he caught up with the blank expression on Hux’s face and pulled away his hand. Something in Hux’s chest hurt for a moment even though it shouldn’t. 

“Huh,” Hux said, mentally cursing his momentary ineloquence. “Fine then, stay here, whatever. Could you perhaps take a walk then? Get somewhere out of my sight?” 

Ren pursed his lips. “I could, but I don’t really want to.”

“Well, that sounds more like you,” Hux snorted. “So much for you actually asking for a favour.”

“I can’t control where I appear,” Ren continued. “But it’s always near you. I’m drawn to you. And with you, I’m feeling at my most… real. And I think you feel the same.”

And there it was, that face Hux was avoiding to see. He looked the other way and thought of blasters and monomolecular blades to get a grip on himself. But the worst was that Ren was right - Hux had been feeling his most clear-headed and solid when Ren was near as well. 

“I still want to sleep,” he repeated even as he scooted over, making more room on the bed. It was wide enough that both of them could fit there without having to touch even a single hair. He folded his hands over his middle and demonstratively closed his eyes.

There wasn’t any dip in the mattress next to him - Hux wasn’t distorting its shape either. But when Hux next sneaked a glance through his lashes, Ren was lying there, with his head in the crook of his elbow, eyes closed and - blast him - peacefully asleep. 

Life wasn’t fair even in death. 

*

It took Hux some time to get the proper sources - Exegolian wasn’t a language any of the still functional protocol droids would know and those among them who knew Basic tended to have a very limited vocabulary - but something of what Ren mentioned the other night got him thinking; and Hux wasn’t one to stop at just thinking. 

Translating and studying the materials the natives had on Dark Force magic was, if nothing else, a good way to kill time. As the Eternal Emperor of a completely isolated and culturally homogenous world without any insurgencies he had very little to do otherwise. Cycles of day and night lost all meaning under the impenetrable clouds and several hundreds meters of rock. The natives apparently had a very long lifespan, or Hux was just very bad at telling one from another, but they didn’t seem to change at all. All this, combined with the periods of his disappearing, Hux had only a vague idea about how the time in the rest of Galaxy was going by.

He only realised how bad his grasp on the passage of time was when the natives brought him yet another piece of machinery from the surface they thought he’d like, and it disintegrated as soon as they laid it out on a table. 

Hux dismissed them absentmindedly and just stood there, passing his hands through the dust. So fine, but still not even a speck would cling to his skin. 

“This is weird,” he observed to the empty air. As expected, it was not so empty in the next second. 

“The radiation and electric fields on the surface must be much harsher than our reports indicated,” he showed the crumbled relic to Ren. “This is durasteel, even with the winds out there it should hold out decades.”

Ren stared at him. “Hux, it’s been nearly three centuries since we ended up here.”

“What?!”

“You never noticed? That woman who brings you drinks is the granddaughter of the one who brought you the first one!”

“And how am I supposed to tell? They all look the same!” Hux shouted. Three centuries, what in hells? It couldn’t be that long. He must have been missing time-

“Wait,” Hux narrowed his eyes. “When I go away, how long am I usually there?”

“Anything between half a second and twenty years.” And the dejected, drained tone he said it with convinced Hux more than anything that he was telling the truth. But still…

“But what about them? Don’t they miss me? They never say anything!”

Ren shrugged. “I don’t know what goes on in their heads. They know you will always come back as you can’t go anywhere else, and that’s probably enough.”

Hux thought wildly of Ren sleeping at the edge of his bed most of the nights, I’m at my most real when I’m with you, and twenty years of him withering away alone. Possibly several times worth of twenty years. 

“You never said anything!”

Ren hadn’t changed. He still looked his damn smooth thirty years as he did when he died, impossibly younger than the last Hux remembered him alive. And the weight of every single day of those three centuries seemed to settle briefly on his face when he looked to the side and said-

“You always come back. It’s enough.”

“No it’s fucking not!!” Hux roared. Ren wasn't supposed to suffer in silence like a noble hero. If he hoped for redemption through patient penance, without ever having to beg, he wasn't getting it. Not on Hux's watch. 

At least Ren wasn't too proud to get annoyed, because now he looked furious. 

"Since when do you care? You said, repeatedly, that you wished for me to have survived only so you could kill me yourself. You want me to hurt, so why are you mad when it's happening?"

“Yes, I want you to hurt,” and Hux had to take a deep breath as he could feel the world starting to flicker dangerously, “but I want to be the one doing it! You’re not supposed to be punished by something I have no control over! And you’re not supposed to just fucking take it! You used to fight back, you used to-”

And that’s what he missed, if he’d be honest with himself. They used to be equals, bad on every account and the worst together, and it was fine because neither expected anything else from the other. They used to trade barbs, underhanded tactics and open screaming, a bruise for every bruise, a then a kiss for every kiss, sweet obedience for silent forgiveness, and that’s how it had always been until Ren took it away with his grab for the throne, and even then Hux hoped he could have that back, one day. 

But what he got instead, was an eternity with a self-deprecating ghost content to sit on his hands. 

“No matter what I’d do, I can’t change this, Hux!” Ren looked on the verge of tears again, and Hux could feel the rising tension in the air, the impending snap that would take him away. “You died, and it’s my fault. And no amount of ancient books you could read won’t change that. Even the greatest, wisest, most reckless Sith couldn’t cheat death-”

“You, Kylo Ren,” anger was getting the better of Hux and the world started to fade around him, along with the faint tingle in his ears of the non-sound of Ren’s own disappearing, “are such a fucking coward -”

Snap. 

Hux’s breath rushed out of him on a gasp as he opened his eyes and immediately his head spun with the worst vertigo he ever experienced. He was holding Ren’s hand, and for the first time since he woke up dead he wasn’t surrounded by the scorched and crumbling rocks of Exegol. 

Chapter Text

Ren’s face was open and slack in honest surprise, eyes wide and his grip on Hux’s hand squeezing to the point of pain. All around them, from under their feet until blurred into glimmering haze in a distance, spread glowing walkways lined with strange symbols, like bridges over the blackness of an universe where all stars have burned out. The paths led up and down, branching out into a maze, and every now and then there was a strange circular structure, like an ornamental mirror frame with nothing but emptiness inside. 

“Ren,” Hux breathed out. “What is this place?”

Ren didn’t reply at first, turning his head this way and that, eyes searching. Almost as if he was… listening for something. 

“It’s the place I go to...” he said at last, disbelieving. “Only I’ve never been able to see… to hear them.”

“Hear who?” Hux asked, but at that moment Ren’s gaze dropped to their joined hands and something very quick flitted over his face, embarrassment followed by regret, and he loosened his muscles to let go-

-the silver lines filling Hux’s vision began fading almost immediately and he choked in alarm, grabbing Ren’s hand with both his own. Ren stared at them, and then he looked up sharply, eyes alight with understanding. 

“You don’t haunt Exegol.”

“I haunt you,” Hux realised almost at the same time. 

This was what the ancient Sith texts said. The spirit of a Jedi would become one with the Force and carry on within it, staying in touch with the living, but the spirit of a Sith was cut off, either gone entirely or bound to his tomb by whichever threads of Light were pulling at him when he died. By dying for Rey’s cause, Kylo Ren might have done something selfless for the first time in his life but it wasn’t enough to deliver him, and even as he died, a part of him must have still belonged to Hux. And so the Dark Force imbued in Exegol caught Hux’s spirit and kept him there, kept them close like two incomplete parts, waiting for them to figure it out. 

And it only took them three hundred years. Thank stars that death was eternal, Hux thought and tried to swallow down the hiccuping laughter rising up his throat. He didn’t entirely succeed. 

“Looks like we’re only working when we’re together,” he snorted. “That’s priceless. Back to the starting line.” It was almost like in those first days after Ren joined the First Order and Snoke saddled them with each other, raving about their equal importance to the cause and their complimentary powers, mystical and intellectual. 

“Two parts of a whole,” Ren said, his voice a bit dazed. “Almost like a dy-”

“Don’t you dare to use that word.”

It was Ren’s turn to grin. “It’s been centuries, and you’re still jealous.”

Hux didn’t even notice Ren steadily pulling him closer until something brushed at his ear. A fragment of a voice. So faint he’d miss it if not for the words, and for the way Ren’s head shot up in alarm.

Ben, no!

“What was that?” 

But Ren was already mid-stride away, pulling Hux along by his hand, and Hux stumbled and had to jog a little to catch up. Ren walked them both swiftly along the pathway they first appeared on, brows furrowed and mouth in a thin line, eyes scanning every circle they passed and Hux was starting to have enough. 

He dug his heels in and yanked at Ren’s arm. “You’re telling me what we’re doing here or I am letting go.”

Instantly, Ren’s focus was back on him, his body crowding in Hux’s space. He looked apologetic. Impatient. Torn. 

“You can’t hear them?”

“Not when you’re dragging me behind like a dog,” Hux snapped. “I heard something, back there.”

“Like this?” Ren used his free hand to cup Hux’s face and bring their foreheads together. Hux’s breath caught, his mind suddenly aware of every one of those years spent barely touching each other - when he heard it. 

...Go. You must walk a different path...

...When I left you, I was but a learner…

...You must unlearn what you have learned…

...bring balance to the Force! Not leave it in darkness!...

...Never be afraid of who you are…

The voices continued to echo around them, some of them he recognised from recordings he used to watch, some of them he guessed from the involuntary flinches of Ren’s body as they must have cut into his memories, deep and raw. 

“Are they all Jedi?”

Ren nodded. “All of them. This place… I’ve only read about it. Very few have visited. It’s the World Between Worlds, a place which connects the past and the future. All the moments that mattered.”

“Those circular things...”

“Portals.”

“To places… in time?” Hux couldn’t hide his excitement. “We could go back in time and change it? Ren, this is amazing!”

Ren kept fidgeting, turning to look over his shoulder, as if afraid that his mother would jump out from one of the portals and bring him to heel. 

“I don’t know what happens if you change anything. What if we won’t end up here?”

“That’s rather the point.” Hux was willing to deal with any time paradoxes when - and if - they happened. “Now, we need to find one leading to a moment when we are both alive, hopefully-”

“There’s something else,” Ren interrupted him. His voice was hushed, afraid. “Some of these portals can be a trap, he’s always known about them-”

Ben, no!

Now when they were practically breathing each other’s air, Hux heard the scream loud and clear. He didn’t get a chance to ask who the he Ren talked about was, he had to concentrate on holding onto Ren’s hand as the man all but jumped ahead, skidding to a halt in front of yet another portal. 

At first, Hux couldn’t see any difference between this one and the others. But as he stared into the darkness within, it started to change. The shadow inside was no longer a hollow void but a natural darkness of night, softened with stars shining from above and moon reflected off a serene sea below. Shapes of rough stone-hewn huts slowly stood out from the dark, candlelight flickering behind the curtained windows. Hux watched as a man, smaller in stature but moving with grave purpose, approached one of them. He stopped in front of the door to pull off his hood and the moonlight glinted off the sleek, utilitarian components of his metallic hand. He stood in front of the door, hesitating, as if battling with himself. 

“Is that...” But Hux already knew the answer. The man looked exactly like that apparition that had fooled them on Crait. 

“Luke,” Ren confirmed in an unreadable whisper. “In a moment, he’s going to step in there, sense my sleeping mind, and find the darkness within. I’ll wake up with a lightsaber burning above my head, and fear of me in his eyes.” Ren’s mouth curled into a bitter shape and looked sideways at Hux. “Years later, he’ll tell Rey that he didn’t really want to do it. That he stalled his hand.”

Hux knew what he was hinting at. Their old argument about who was more in the right, Hux almost shooting or Ren almost choking him to death. 

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry,” Hux told him. “But I’d probably do it again. Let’s do something so I won’t have to.”

The image in front of them abruptly changed. Gone was the peaceful scenery, the quiet whirr of insects in the grass, the night at the Jedi temple. In its place now hung yet another kind of darkness, but this time cold and threatening. Bluish shine illuminated the contours of a throne below a huge circular viewport, and on it, a black hooded figure. Yellow eyes stared back at them from a white, unnaturally disfigured face. Ren took an unwilling step back.

“At last,” the Emperor hissed with malicious delight. 

*

“All right, let’s get the fuck out of here,” Hux murmured. But Ren wasn’t listening. He looked petrified with dread. 

“You have waited so long, my heir. But the time matters not. Because I have foreseen everything, your rise, your struggles, and your betrayal. I have always known you would come back to me, the full circle.”

Hux had shaken off the first shock at seeing Palpatine alive again. Now he realised: this was a moment in the past. That viewport, that throne: this was during the construction of the second Death Star. Ben Solo hadn't been born yet. Brendol Hux was still the Commandant, fucking a kitchen maid. Did Palpatine always have access to the World Between Worlds? Did he know all the time that he would die, twice, in order to finally get what he wanted?

“I want nothing from you,” Ren choked out. Took another step back, his hand in Hux’s stone heavy and shaking. 

“But you don’t know what I can give,” the Emperor crooned. “That moment you have just seen: the moment that caused your condemnation. The loss of your friends. The rejection from your family. So much pain, I can feel it crushing you, still after all this time."

So this was the trap Ren was talking about earlier. Hux tugged at Ren’s hand. “Ren. Kylo.” But the man ignored him. Both of the Force users ignored him. 

“I can help you turn around the outcome.” the Emperor spun his poisonous sugar. “I can teach you how to hide the darkness within you from Skywalker’s prying. You will be the most beloved student, the most revered apprentice. Your apparent foresight will defeat the attackers I will have sent to your Temple. You will rise to fame and power and no one will doubt you.”

Of course, Hux could see what the price would be. Ben Solo would be Palpatine’s secret apprentice, working in the heart of the New Republic on its downfall just as the former Senator turned Chancellor used to work within the Old. 

The war that Hux waged for so long would not be needed. The destruction of Hosnian system would not happen. The building of Starkiller base would be obsolete. Hux would never rise through the ranks as fast as he did. The entire First Order would be just an afterthought, joined and dispersed within the Republic through Ben Solo’s machinations. No need for weapons and armies in a Galaxy united in corrupted peace. And Ben Solo would once again be a puppet, just like Kylo Ren had been, with Palpatine pulling at the strings. 

Surely, Ren had to see this, didn’t he? He wouldn’t even consider that offer, would he? He couldn’t be such a massive fool.

“You can’t hide it,” Ren said, voice trembling as if he had to convince himself and was failing. “The darkness was there from the start, my mother had felt it even as I was in her womb.”

Well, obviously he could. 

“I was hiding for years in the plain sight of the entire Jedi Council on Coruscant,”  the Emperor cackled, “do you think I wouldn’t be able to fool Vader’s untrained daughter?”

Hells, it looked like Hux would have to play by the logic of those lunatics. 

“Ren would be of little use to you,” he announced without preamble, ignoring the surprised growl from next to him. “His power is but a half of a whole, and your granddaughter who possesses the other half will never obey you.”

That was a gamble. Hux nearly regretted it when Palpatine’s icy stare shifted on him. His body had felt at his most solid ever since they entered the World Between Worlds, almost losing its translucency, but Palpatine’s gaze still cut straight through him. 

“We won't need her,” he hissed. “Just like Ben Solo won’t need you. A pitiful deadweight, a spirit trapped in the mortal world, nothing but collateral damage. You have no place here.”

His gaze lingered at their joined hands, Ren’s white-knuckled and Hux’s digging his nails into the flesh, and he smiled. Goosebumps ran down Hux’s spine at the sight. 

“I can sense your compassion for him, my boy,” he addressed Ren again. “The guilt you carry over his death. Do as I say now, change your past, and he’ll be safe. You’ll never hurt him.”

He'll never know me, Hux screamed internally. He'd never even meet me. His memory flailed back to that first day of his afterlife, when he accused Ren of never stopping to change Hux's fate for the better, when he still could. And now it was about to happen, and Hux realised he didn't want it. He didn't want never knowing Ren. With a clarity as stark and startling as the glowing lines cut into the darkness around them he understood that he'd rather take death side by side with Kylo than a lifetime without him at all.

He had three hundred years to realise that, and he had wasted every single one of them.

And now he was about to lose everything, because the fool he loved was determined to make up for his mistakes. He looked at Ren, already dreading what he’d find in his eyes. 

And it was all there. Heartbreak. Sadness. Determination. Stubborn folly. 

“I know what I have to do,” he mumbled. Hux shook his head, numb with disappointment so crushing he thought he’d disappear on the spot. The only thing anchoring him here was Ren’s unrelenting grip on his slackened hand. 

He couldn’t even muster up a protest when Ren brought their faces together and kissed him. He’d felt the kiss, after centuries of chasing and denying himself the simplest touch he finally got it and it was a fucking good-bye kiss. 

“ You know what you have to do,” Ren whispered into the kiss, bringing his free arm around his shoulders, and Hux suddenly knew. Ren was right, he was a fast learner, and he’d figured out how to do this ages ago. 

The whole portal in front of them shook with Palpatine’s shriek, pale flames burst out of there to lick at their flickering forms, but the Emperor’s fury was too late. Hux squeezed his eyes shut, bit into Ren’s lip for good measure, and willed them both away. 

*

“I think we could stay here for a while,” Hux stretched his arms behind his head and settled back into the pillows. Above the bed, the rain kept beating at the window panes, water sneaking down the glass in dirty rivulets and blurring the view on the monotonous grey of Arkanis sky. 

Kylo lifted his head from where it rested on Hux’s stomach. “You’ll get bored after two hundred years or so.”

“Then we’ll just go somewhere else.” 

Hux felt Kylo’s smile against the skin of his belly and quirked a smile himself. Yes, they would, now when they finally knew they could. They could go anywhere in the universe, except for that one place. Through mutual silence they agreed never to visit the spider’s web, the World Between Worlds, again.

A moan and a laugh echoed from a room on the storey below them. Slow-beat music and clinking of bottles could be heard from the basement. 

Brendol Hux would turn in his grave - if he had one - if he knew that his beloved Academy would be eventually turned into a pleasure house. That thought still made Hux laugh at random times of the day.

They took over the little used rooms in the top floor. The local whores soon learned not to go in there and the management used the rumours to put a clever spin on the advertisement. Some people apparently got a thrill from fucking around the supernatural. Although Hux was a ghost invisible to human eye and Ren avoided showing up for people, Hux's electromagnetic interference was still enough to make him appear on recordings. And neither of them counted in the fact that droids were just machines with cameras for eyes. 

"Sirs, I wish you wouldn't frolick on the bed that I just finished making. This room is listed in the books as available for guests."

Kylo barely opened his eyes. "Calm down, it's not like the guests can see us naked."

The droid heaved a tinny sigh. "I can, sirs. And it bothers me on a level I find myself unable to communicate."

Yes. The cleaning droids hated them.

The Force was slowly regaining balance, with the Sith gone and Jedi inevitably going extinct. But even after millenia, when both sides of the war would be little more than a faded myth, people would still tell legends about two ghosts with a penchant for mean humour and too restless to stay in one place. Two spirits bound with love and death, flickering in and out of reality, but no more lonely.