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The fibra-ropes are cutting deep into his arms and wrists.
Trying to relieve the pressure makes it only worse. Every shift and twitch threatens to pull his shoulders out of their sockets, the rough durasteel column scraping at his back like sandpaper. Intentional, all of it. A message. They won’t treat him in any way that might warrant a price cut; but he’s not a guest, either—his comfort stopped mattering the moment he was hauled onto this planet.
Still, he wishes they had let him keep his tunic. Just tank top, even. The contraption strapped over his torso is biting at his stomach, drawing thin lines of blood; the coarse fabric, while hell on abused skin, would have helped prevent the worst of the abrasions.
Not that any of it will matter if the bomb does go off.
He doesn’t know how long he’s got left. The contraption has no external time indicator, nor has anyone bothered to tell him. Incentive for your friends to hurry the hell up, his captor had snarled when he dared to ask before slamming the door closed, a cam droid hovering far out of reach. As if a more tangible threat to his life would have his friends come running after weeks of radio silence.
The First Order is, at its heart, a machine—a carefully-designed mechanism that won’t be thrown into disarray by a single missing cog, for it has replacements ready for all but the most crucial parts. He wrote the protocols; he knew, from the moment he woke on a ship with a dozen others, what it would entail.
Still, the reality of his situation stings no less fiercely. He put those protocols in place thinking he would be exempt from them—that, if he were to ever fall into wrong hands, the Order would scour the galaxy for his faintest trace. How arrogant of him. How foolish. Thankfully his previous cell had no holocams trained on him; he’s ashamed of how long it took him to stop perking up every time the door opened, expecting Phasma to walk in wearing the blood of these sons of banthas and extend him a blaster instead of a helping hand.
Never mind that she can’t have healed enough to stage a daring rescue.
Ren must have, on the other hand. He was already on his feet when Hux delivered him to the Supremacy months ago; between bacta and training, he must be back to his full strength. Of the people who might halfway care whether he lives or dies, Ren alone has the power to clear this base with a thought and half and get Hux out of there, then return to his training like he was never gone—it’s merely that he won’t. Wherever Ren is, he’s there under orders; he won’t willingly draw his Master’s ire just to go after Hux.
Hux, his failure of a co-commander he sometimes falls in bed with. Hux, who obliterated billions of people with an order but can’t free himself from a base of a few hundreds at most. Hux, who must have been replaced within the first week of his disappearance anyway.
No. He’s not worth the effort. Bomb or no bomb, no one is coming for him.
On the other side of the walls, Kylo jumps off his stolen speeder with his lightsaber already drawn, praying up to any deity he can name that he’s not too late.