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I want to put my fist through this beautiful city.
- Rose Tico
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She'd always had a thing for the underdogs, being one herself. A plucky, earnest champion of lost causes.
It was how she was raised, all warm hugs and toiling and her chubby baby hand squeezed in Paige's as they toddled through life together. She was taught that there was a Big Bad and there were Good People and that generally that Big Bad stepped on the Good People so the best way you could help your fellow man was to push back hard enough to be felt. Then she got older and learned that the Big Bad was really a whole heap of smaller evils melted together like Corporations and Dirty Money and Arms Dealing and Slave Trading and on and on and the world became so much more complicated beneath that avalanche of wrongness but she still followed her big sister's lead. She wished she could turn back time and fit her hand back in Paige's and let her sister lead her to safety as she had always done before.
But that slim, pretty hand was gone. Her own was empty, scarred and stubby.
Paige had been the beautiful one, everything an exotic goddess was supposed to be, tall and slim as a reed with full lips and a slender nose and dark eyes burning up with rebellion, with purpose. She had been a force to be reckoned with, a gunner and a hero and so many other impressive things that Rose hadn't managed to live up to even tagging along behind Finn and Poe and Rey. Her mind had been more adept at tinkering with engines and optimizing the maintenance systems. She hadn't seemed fated to die for a cause like she could now see Paige had been. She was more like the clean up crew that came afterwards, sweeping away the dust and clutter of glory and clapping politely from the sidelines when the heroes trooped through. That didn't mean she hadn't wanted to be up there burning with purpose alongside them, look at her escapades on Canto Bight! It just meant she knew she wouldn't have been as good at it long term. Probably would have gotten herself blown up in the opening volley of her first dog fight, honestly.
Paige had loved her better than any sister deserved. They had been folded halves of the same piece of paper scrawled all over with words like Family and Honor and Dreams and Hope and no matter the shards of envy that had pricked Rose sometimes for the shallow things like beauty and talent there was nothing in this universe she had wanted more than for Paige to be happy. To live to see the good guys win.
But that hadn't happened.
And now the only Tico left was her, puttering through the aftermath of war trying to bandage and rewire and bolt down the remnants of a rebellion who no longer had to rebel. They'd crowned her with some military title that made her seem like she had done more than she had in the remaining battles against the Final Order which made her feel like a fraud and retreat deeper into the comforting routines of mechanics and engineering. She liked being able to witness change she shaped with her own two hands, metal and circuits and droids made to beep to life again. Men like Poe Dameron stepped up to the plate in the black hole left by the sudden loss of leadership, pulling on all the wisdom from Leia he could fall back on to bring a sundered galaxy together when billions of faces were turned upwards looking for new guidance. She didn't envy him, and he had Finn to be his voice of reason, Jannah to rally the troops, Rey to use as a figurehead and trot out symbolically whenever they needed to inspire.
That wasn't very nice of her, was it? Poor, emptied Rey who came back to them with hollow eyes and a fractured smile and somehow less than before. Rose recognized that thinning beneath her skin when nobody else did, the pain pressing up from beneath, bone deep and wet. Loss. Grief. Rey was mourning something none of them were allowed to touch, curling herself around it like she was gut-shot and trying to gather all her organs back within herself. She bled endlessly and could offer nobody anything in the way of a direction, a path to take to democracy or freedom or anything they'd been fighting for. She'd been the sword they wielded and now it was the armistice.
Here in the secrecy of Rose's own thoughts she could admit the unthinkable. Now, in this black hole of uncertainty and deficits and the completely knotted string ball of hundreds of government-less planets falling to anarchy and crime while words like New New Republic and People's Democracy were thrown about was the time for men like Armitage Hux.
They needed someone with years of experience and a unifying plan (just less oppressive) and the selfishness to make the ugly decisions because it was like the stories her mother had told her as a girl. No matter how pretty idealism was in the starry night, all transformed gourds and glass slippers, when morning came the ugliness of practicality, that of blistered feet and smashed vegetables were all they were left with. Budgets and laws and unions and bureaucratic red tape that was necessary for a functioning society... that was the kind of stuff she was pretty sure a guy like Hux would get off on if he had ever gotten off. Which was none of her business, if only she could remember that.
She isn't sure when after the Finalizer she had started dreaming about him, when the nightmares ebbed away and he settled himself inside her subconscious as though he had every right to be there with his chin ratcheted up and a sneer twisting his face. She was sure there was something in there about taking back her power and feminism and all that, her mind trying to dupe her into being the one standing above while he was on his knees before her, bound and defiant and at her mercy. She would have tilted his head back by yanking on his pretty red hair. She would have slapped his mouth. It was probably just like him to take up space in her imagination like he was entitled to it though she had absolutely nothing to go by to support that assumption aside from the taste of leather on her tongue. She had read the intel on him the same as she had on Kylo Ren and General Pryde and all the other bigwigs of the First Order they had to make sure were dead so they wouldn't come back to haunt them. She could tell herself that her heart hadn't tumbled into her throat just once when his file had been flagged as Compromised/Deceased in red across the screen. It had felt like a book had slammed shut before she had finished the page. Guillotined, dead headed, cut. She'd never gotten to spit in his sneering face when he came begging for Resistance help. She had never got to snub his snotty company in the mess hall or refuse him forgiveness for the atrocities he had committed (vanity to think it was something he would have ever looked for but this was her imagination.) She'd never even known he was the spy. She wasn't done with him.
They were all dead now.
Armitage Hux and Phasma and General Pryde and Ben Solo too. Rey had insisted on changing the file names, had been unhinged and catastrophic unlike any time her friends had ever seen her, either tearing at the world around her with pain forking off of her like lightening or as rigid and quiet as stone and so lost. She was like one of those ancient windmills all tilted askew, endlessly turning but now the wind was going a different way and she couldn't decide which way to face to catch it anymore. She had headed off into the galaxy without a new war to wage, without shadows nipping at her heels and she had told Rose that she longed for those shadows and half of her soul had died the day they won the war but she wouldn't tell her why. They had let her go, of course they had. They couldn't bottle the sea and Rey had become something listless and strange, empty somehow below that endless ebb and flow of Self now that the Force was finished with her. She was a tide reaching for a shore that was no longer there.
But Rose had read the files on all those dead juggernauts, a digital mausoleum of power and corruption (that had gotten none of them anywhere in the end) at her fingertips late at night in her bunker while she gnawed at her lips till they bled and told herself it was because Know Thy Enemy and Better the Devil You Know and any other platitudes that seemed to justify this intrusion into a dead man's story once and then again and again.
His father abused him and yes, her foolish heart swelled with bathwater warm, pillow soft compassion for a boy wrecked so terrifically that he had ended up smirking at her in a hangar while he reminisced on the glorious ruin he had made of an entire planet like he was remembering sunny days lolling about a sailboat on a summer sea. Along with her pity came a tide of outraged fury because this was the feeling she kept most alive for him in her day to day. He was a destroyer of worlds, had ordered the death of billions without batting an eye. He had done more damage with the push of a button and a snarkily ordered command than Kylo Ren had ever done in his dark reign. Hux had made an army out of children and raised Stormtroopers from the excised bones of their stolen lives. He was monstrous; a bogeyman that parents could use to bludgeon their children into being good. Behave or General Hux will snatch you up and seal you up in a white, articulated coffin and make you march for all eternity. His legacy to the world was a graveyard of a solar system and lost soldiers now jettisoned into a galaxy that had no use for everything bred into them by force.
This man had ordered the assassination of his own father and along with Kylo Ren and the Sith legends about killing their masters and ascending to their place this seemed to be the accepted First Order thing to do. That didn't make it right or less reprehensible. That didn't make it any easier to swallow than the poison given to Brendol Hux. Armitage was a fox, shifty and cunning and devious as he orchestrated a quiet rise to power, stealing eggs from the hen house whenever the guard dogs looked away. She saw in writing what it took to make a man as withered and brutal as that but she spent far more time than she should trying to understand his why.
Rose blames it on the leather of his glove soft below her chin as he mocked her in that snooty, cultured voice, gloating and querulous and somehow tender, like he had pitied her for her stupidity in thinking that they had ever stood a chance against such might and wasn't she just precious. She still remembered the buttery slide of that soft leather against her tongue, the coolness of his thin finger bones between her teeth and the satisfaction she had felt to shake him, her executioner, to see him run his hand through his ridiculous red hair and throw her a look of such betrayal she had wanted to laugh. How dare she not just die without issue like the rabble she was!
Sometimes she tries to humanize him, to picture Hux smiling and open but can only conjure up the discomfiting memory of his supercilious smirk, nothing but edged ice and the utter satisfaction of his own superiority. But she is a romantic at heart, as desperate and soft hearted as sinking your hand into warm porridge, sweet and wholesome and fierce in a way that she can never escape. And so she keeps trying to puzzle her way through his evil even though it's pointless and sad and somehow both infuriating her and tearing her tender heart to ribbons.
She wonders if maybe at some other point in time, some other past or future he might have been a different man. Something prickly, not piercing. Someone sharp instead of caustic and burning like battery acid down her tender wrists. She wonders this, idle and useless as she lays elbow deep in wires and engine grease or resets the power cycles on yet another shaky, stuttering X-Wing, what he would have been like had he been born on Hays Minor with her. If his orange hair had been long and shaggy and his face covered in copper stubble. The mining dust would have stained his pale skin, sank into his beard and left the dust on the pads on her fingertips when she reached for him. Would he have spotted her in the masses then? Would he have looked her in the eyes if she wasn't his prisoner? Would she have sunk her teeth into him differently?
She can imagine the feel of his beard soft and wiry between her fingers, how the tips of her toes would dig into the ground when she rose up to nip at his thin, joyless mouth. She can imagine his green eyes flashing over her with interest, with certainty. She can imagine the slide of his thin fingers curling around her warm, short ones as they walked side by side. She can imagine the whine of his polished voice as he breathed her name. She can imagine how he would grit his jaw and bare his teeth and close his eyes when he came inside of her, alabaster skin wrapped up in her gold. She can imagine the freckles on his shoulders and all the ways she would count them.
But even in the endless possibilities of her own imagination he is spiteful and never leaves her with a happy ending. She remembers only the blanks she fills, the ones she chooses to cherish that are only real to her and only because she is free to play within her own brilliant, lonely mind.
Hays Minor Hux would have been beaten down by higher ups, abused by the circumstances of her impoverished home world but she has no doubt that a man as waspish and cunning as he would have still risen high. His eyes would have stayed as sharp and cruel as they had when he had been standing above her. He would have masterminded his way up even in the Otomok system. A man bleeding ambition like a toxin into the air around him, he would have become more because a single woman's affection would have never been enough for a man like him. He was always facing Due North, facing horizons, facing the next ladder rung. Facing away, always even in the worlds she imagined where war was everything for all of them.
But what if there had never been these galactic wars? What if she hadn't grown up poor and incited to riot? What if he hadn't been raised by the fists of his father and the rigid suffocation of a military regime and the lure of absolute power? She likes to think that as a girl in a world like that she would have been bright, lighthearted, adorable. That how short she was would be considered charming, that the roundness of her hips and weight of her chest would be irresistible. She would swish her hair, long and sleek down her back the same way Paige had always done in her off hours in the cantinas, and dimple at him with her little bow mouth and square jaw and he would be struck speechless, shell-shocked; undone by her plain, homespun prettiness and rounded shoulders. He wouldn't be cruel, he'd be misunderstood. He wouldn't be power hungry, he'd be focused on a career because nobody had ever loved him enough to show him there was more to life. He wouldn't be elitist, he'd simply been too shy to show all of them that he was lonely.
The love of a good woman and all that junk.
She has played with the idea of finding him in dark wooded cafes where he slides her caff across the counter with a heart drawn into the frothy milk and meets her eyes with his cheeks red as berries. It would blotch across his pale skin horribly and she would be charmed. She has imagined him at government schools being educated alongside her, captain of debate teams where she won his acid heart over with her stunning rebuttals and zest for life. She has imagined him as one of the ancient barristers she'd read about in those funny suits with the colorful nooses around their neck, greedy as ever he really was and spitting venom across the courtroom until she swanned in all clumsy cute and showed him how life could mean so much more with the pureness of her Good Intentions. She has pretended he was a man who wore old fashioned clothes she had seen in the history holos; wool sweaters without sleeves and collared shirts beneath them where he was the keeper of stacks of old holodiscs on towering shelves that she came to borrow over and over while he searched her face again and again until one day when he checked her discs out he slid a note between the copies that just read Please? (Please what, return on time? Please quit staring, it's gauche. Were you raised in a cave? Please stop embroiling me in your sordid little fantasies, rebel scum. I haven't the time for this pathetic yearning or whatever this is, really.)
She knows she's borrowing his face to live out a romance that can never happen but over and over again he takes up the bulk of her imaginings. Sometimes Finn takes center stage but dragging him away from Poe's side never lasts for long. There is something inevitable between the two of them that's so pure in its hesitant longing. She can never borrow Finn without feeling guilty but nobody save her had ever wanted Hux. She's sure of that because even she didn't really want him, with his expression of a perpetual bad smell in the air and his oily, brainwashed First Order rhetoric. She just wanted his potential, savaged boy and grasping cadet and bloodthirsty General and finally clumsy spy that maybe she could have worked with.
Maybe even in this reality he would have learned to regret the things he had done if being a spy for the Rebellion had continued, seen the light and the error of his ways and learned that life was a gift too precious to squander. She is allowed to imagine herself as the catalyst to this change of heart, that her earnestness and the cowlicks in her hair would strike him like a lightening bolt and he would realize what a creep he had been the whole time and would she be so kind as to point him in the direction of a New Start? And of course she would happily do so, teach him to read in the flower garden beneath dappled sunlight and hold him against her breast while he wept tears of dignified regret. She would fix him like she did an intake manifold. She would bang out all the dents and take her wrench to him until he was teaching the Rebel kids to read and leading attacks against evil Kylo Ren in his very own X-Wing that she'd painted with his own call sign, and she'd get him one of those orange jumpsuits that wouldn't clash awfully at all with his hair and she'd tell him he was her hero and he would nod solemnly and lean down to capture her mouth.
She is embarrassed for herself even in her own mind, cheeks hot enough to scald. Re-imagining the motives of a monster simply because he was awkwardly handsome in a whey faced, anemic way was self defeating. Turning a snake into a prince purely for the romantic whims of her bruised heart was costlier than she could afford. Apparently hot rebel men were so thin on the ground she had to go scrounging through her memory for a dead man's sour face and what did that say about her in the end? Something about commitment phobia at the very least, pinning all her daydreams on a ghost who had never even known her name.
Because that's what he was, borrowed for her fantasies or no. Dead, shot without warning or pretext by a superior after his peevish little venture into espionage went sideways on him. He had been a greedy, spiteful, cross man, so caught up in his foot stomping, hold-his-breath-till-he-faints hatred for Kylo Ren that he had turned coat on the order he had given his life to out of pure spite. He had bit the hand that fed him. She wondered if he had been surprised when it had bit back. She wonders if he had seen it coming or if he'd been too arrogant to be afraid in those last minutes. She wonders if he had ever thought of her again after he had clucked her chin and she'd chewed him up and spat him out.
She wonders if her teeth had left a scar on his pale skin and he had looked at it and wondered about her too.
“Get a grip, Tico,” she snorts, and refocuses on the splayed out veins of wiring she's attempting to fix.
She pushes the thoughts of Armitage Hux far from her mind, saddened somehow. Lonelier than before, surrounded by new beginnings and tired heroes with worlds to shape.
And even in all her romantic fantasies or the alternate lives she had spun for him, for her, for them... she still could never imagine what his pale, pinched face would look like with a real, honest smile spreading across it.