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Hux isn’t prone to worry.
He is prone to stress, and he’s got the blood pressure to prove it—but that’s a necessity of the life they lead. It’s got its uses. Worry, however, is for when you don’t have an alphabetised, colour-coded list of plans for every situation that may arise. Worry is for the under-prepared.
Worry is a waste of time.
Knowing this doesn’t stop the fist around his heart from squeezing tight every time he hits redial and finds Ren’s phone still switched off, however.
Then again, there’s no real reason to worry about it. It’s a perfectly Ren move to go off the radar for weeks on end and turn up three countries away from where he was supposed to be, shrugging off all reprimand like he can’t understand why they’re so angry about it. It’s just what he does—he disappears, then he shows up at your doorstep when you least expect it.
He will this time, too. He promised—he will be back by Hux’s birthday.
Contrary to the popular (re: Ren’s) belief, life doesn’t stop just because Ren is off doing what Ren does somewhere else.
Even with all the safe houses and personas they maintain all across the world, the unreasonable amounts of money Snoke throws at them to be at his beck and call is more than enough to keep them afloat. Ren would be fine with not taking another independent job ever again; but Hux knows better than to rely on Snoke alone. He’s been burned enough times by fickle employers; he’s not ready to bet on the wrong horse and have to build his reputation up from scratch yet again.
That’s part of why, whenever Snoke calls upon only Ren’s service, Hux sends word to all his relevant contacts that he’s available. It keeps him in the game, on the occasion he gets an offer worth considering—and if he doesn’t, he calls it getting a feel for the market and moves on.
Monday morning finds him curled on the sofa, going through the responses on his phone. Most offers he received are below his notice like he expected, some downright insulting—and then there’s the e-mail from Enric Pryde himself.
He sits up so fast he almost knocks over his empty cup.
Among the dreamshare community, the First Order is as revered as it is despised. They reach out to very few and pay three times what they should; but the cost of failure is equally severe, growing proportionately to the project’s worth. Which seems to be a lot, in this case. While he can’t tell from the sparse details in the e-mail whether this Project Starkiller is meant to be a moving city or some sort of weapon—perhaps both, knowing the First Order—he already estimates at least two layers, more likely three, and a special blend of stabiliser for the dreamer and the architect both, who cannot be the same person for this design.
Because they want him on board as the main architect and his dreams never hold steady after the first layer, special blend or no.
Whatever he was looking for as a quick job, this is not it. It’s far more involved and challenging than he could have imagined—and, he’s finding, everything he needed. He could do this for himself. He could work a job he enjoys, instead of running point to Ren or Phasma’s picks all the time to keep them from working with incompetent point men.
Ren and Phasma, who might be working with incompetent point men halfway across the world this very moment.
No. No, he’s not thinking that. His birthday is only three days away. Everything is fine.
He e-mails back to say he’s honoured and asks for one week to get his team together. Pryde gives him five days and a thinly-veiled warning that there are others who would jump at this opportunity.
Stomach at his feet, Hux throws his phone on the coffee table and gets up to make more tea.
As expected, research gives him little of substance about the First Order’s operations and nothing at all about the Starkiller, although he finds a low-quality close-up of Pryde to glare at as he sketches out some ideas. They will get binned once he gets his hands on the self-destructing dossiers or whatever ridiculous security protocols the First Order may work with; but it keeps him busy. Better than watching the hours tick by.
When the clock turns from 11:59 to midnight on what is now Thursday, he considers texting Rey to ask if she’s heard from Phasma recently—changes his mind before he even picks up the phone. Ren wouldn’t like it. Hux has been accused of being a control freak more times than he can count as it is; he doesn’t want to add clingy to the list of his unattractive qualities.
At two in the morning, the doorbell rings.
He is going to murder Ren.
The door had never felt so close or so far as he rushes to it, heart hammering in his chest. He’s going to let Ren in, he’s going to check him for injuries and he’s going to disembowel that infuriating, thoughtless, selfish piece of shite if he’s had Hux fret all this time for no reason—
“Hi,” Rey chirps, looking up at him with damp eyes and a brittle smile. She raises a bottle of whiskey—Phasma’s favourite. “Happy birthday?”
He opens the door wider.
Admittedly—not out loud; he would never hear the end of it, from her or her cousin—Rey scores high on the short list of people whose company he enjoys. The booze helps, too. They drink in front of the television Hux hasn’t switched off in days and talk about everything but the aching holes in their chests.
She falls asleep on the sofa. He puts a blanket over her and goes to bed.
In the morning—practically afternoon, if he’s being honest—he tells her about the Starkiller. The plan was to pitch it to Ren first, to see what he thinks before bringing in the others. As it is, Ren isn’t here and none of Hux’s messages has gone through since their interrupted conversation and Hux is going to bloody explode if he doesn’t tell someone.
“I’m not sure, Armie,” she says around a spoonful of breakfast cereal he certainly didn’t buy. “He will never agree to work for the First Order.”
“Why the hell not? He works for Snoke.” Rather happily, in fact. Ren never prepares more carefully for a job than one of Snoke’s plentiful errands, no matter how simple. “Why wouldn’t he work for Snoke’s own company?”
She considers him for a long moment, chewing slowly. “He hasn’t told you the story.”
The implication—accusation—stings deep. “What story?” he demands, pushing his tea away to lean closer. The words held the intonation of capital letters, which means missing information that could potentially blindside them down the line. His respect for Ren’s private business isn’t greater than his responsibilities.
“Not mine to tell,” she says sternly, pinching her lips in disappointment like he should be ashamed to have asked to begin with. “Ask him.”
He snorts. Ren is hardly the sharing type, especially where Hux is concerned. Everything he’s ever learned about Ren has come through other means—and vice versa, he imagines.
She frowns, a question rising behind her eyes. He tenses on instinct. “Anyway,” she continues, shaking her head—and he can breathe more easily again. “My point is, if we’re doing this, we’ll need another forger.”
We. He doesn’t suppress his smile, relief coating his insides. “I suspect we won’t need a forger for this one. A chemist, on the other hand…”
She doesn’t leave and he doesn’t ask her to. They polish off the whiskey and pretend not to check their phones every ten minutes while binge-watching Star Wars, including the newest releases even their resident space nerd couldn’t finish.
He visualises Ren’s horrified expression when Hux reveals how he and Rey bonded over their shared love for big guns and hot villains in Ren’s absence. Laughter gets stuck in his throat, forming a painful lump instead.
He bids her good night and slinks away into his bedroom to stare at the ceiling.
Barely ten minutes pass before the television switches off in the next room, soft footsteps echoing lightly in the corridor. He turns his back to the door and feigns sleep as it opens and closes—which is a coward’s way, but he’s never claimed to be a particularly brave man. If he were, he would have asked Ren to stop working for Snoke instead of stewing in his misery right now.
Compared to her cousin, Rey’s weight barely shifts the mattress as she climbs in, sliding under the covers without fanfare. He shuts his eyes tighter and allows himself to imagine, just for a moment, that Ren is back.
“I haven’t heard from Phasma in over a month.”
Over a month? Hells, no wonder she sought him out. “Ren and I talked two weeks ago,” he says—realises with a sinking feeling that it sounded like he was rubbing it in. “Closer to three, actually.”
“What did he say?”
“Not much that I could understand. The reception was horrible.” Bits and pieces through constant breaking: Hux, shit, in case, person and, inexplicably, home. “I didn’t get the impression they were in danger—just inconvenienced.” As is often the case with these missions. Snoke’s got a small army of trained private security under his command and he still sends Ren to the most out-of-the-way places.
That Snoke’s hired Phasma as well for this one is a little more concerning, but not overly so. Reckless as they both can be, Ren and Phasma are forces to be reckoned with on the field—Hux would be more inclined to feel sorry for their adversaries.
Rey sighs. “Hope you’re right, Armie.”
If Mitaka is surprised to see Rey strut about in Hux’s shortest joggers she still needed to fold at the ankles and an old shirt, he politely doesn’t mention it. He and Rey exchange banal pleasantries over coffee and day-old cake while Hux finishes typing up his notes, then they get to work.
Mitaka listens to the briefing with unwavering attention, his fingers stapled in front of him like a front-row student. Like everyone else in their extended team, Mitaka is an experienced, accomplished dreamer—and yet, Hux can’t help looking at him and seeing the fresh-faced cadet Phasma had dragged in ages ago, barely into his twenties and all the more naive for it.
They’ve gotten old—Hux most so.
Once Hux finishes, “If you both are building this time,” Mitaka starts, looking between the two. “Who will be taking point? The Captain?”
Next to him, Rey inhales sharply, her face mostly hidden behind the curtain of her hair. Shame crosses through Mitaka’s face at the realised misstep.
“She’s otherwise occupied,” Hux responds before Mitaka can break into apologies. No need to make this more painful or awkward than it needs to be. “I will be running point as usual, and Rey is here to help with the heavy-lifting.”
Mitaka nods, glancing at Rey with concern before turning to Hux fully. “Where do I sign?”
They sign a heavily-encrypted stack of documents digitally, sending them through the First Order’s own communication system. The next day, they receive a link to a private cloud service with a convoluted unlock sequence that can be accessed by one device at a time, read-only.
Hux alone works on three different devices.
On the bright side, the project they receive is well-worth the inconvenience. Their objective is to design and build a superweapon out of an extensively described ice planet in the dreamspace, which must be capable of hitting five targets simultaneously and obliterating all affected life forms on them without causing a single non-predetermined casualty. Controlled chaos, if you will. The First Order wants a catastrophe they can tame and leash.
Hux can make it happen.
Whether he can make it happen in eight weeks is a different question entirely.
Without Ren to drag him away from work, he’s free to divide his waking hours between his screens and the sitting room, which they repurposed into a workshop-slash-dream den. While Hux is a decent architect in a pinch, he could never build the way Rey does—the way she bends the dreamspace to her will and creates cities that feel alive around them. Between the two of them, they have the groundwork laid out within days, quickly moving on to revising the base design according to the specifications in the main file and the numbers Hux runs.
Instead of using pre-mixed batches, Mitaka mixes their Somnacin from scratch on the kitchen table, reworking the formula per the reactions. None he comes up with works to keep Hux’s dreams steady, although a couple seem to ground his control over the dreamspace. Most just turn the dreams into nightmares for everyone involved.
Many of the nightmares are about Ren. Every time they manage to wake up from one of those, he looks at Rey to apologise. She never meets his eyes.
Unlike the two of them, Mitaka has family to return to and so he does when it gets late, leaving them to eat take-away and talk around the elephant in the room. On the rare occasion they do talk. Even though Hux gets the most shit for his workaholic tendencies, they all are guilty of it in different degrees; most nights are spent hunched over desks or tablets until they come close to shooting each other over the smallest noise or mistake, then they retire for the night.
The bedroom is where the worst fears come out.
“They might need our help,” she murmurs, lowly enough that the words could get lost among the howling wind outside. “They might be injured or—or lost, waiting for rescue. And we would be here arguing about heat transfer.”
“They aren’t.”
“But how do you know?”
He sighs loudly, turning to face Rey. Her eyes are big and eerily bright in the darkness, shining. “Look, Ren and I have been through this before. We’ve got contingencies in place for any kind of emergency—strategies to scarper and regroup as needed, fake identities with paper trail, codes to slip into lines of communication that will find their way to the other’s ear—all of which tied to systems that would alert us both if ever used. So far?” He gestures vaguely to his phones on the nightstand. “Complete radio silence.”
“Well it might be because he’s—”
His stomach lurching, “Don’t,” he bites out. He’s had enough nights contemplating that possibility himself, reasoning himself out of that line of thinking with more effort each time; he can’t handle someone else saying it.
Especially not Rey, whose unfailing optimism has seen them through many a dark spot.
“They will be back soon,” he says with conviction he forces himself to feel. They always do. This is just taking longer than expected.
Rey’s silence rings in the room.
At the end of the third week, Enric Pryde reaches out to him. His voice is as cold and serpent-like as he looks.
They talk for two and a half minutes—more accurately, Pryde relays his demands for two minutes and rebuffs Hux’s protests for the next half, then hangs up unceremoniously on him.
Fuming, Hux tries to glare a hole into his phone for about as long before going to wake Rey up.
“What do you mean, they are relocating us?”
Latching his fingers tight to keep from scraping at his already raw palms, “I mean exactly what I said,” Hux grinds out. “They want to move us into some safe house where they will provide us with everything we’ll need for the rest of the project. We don’t have the option to refuse their generosity.”
“They want to monitor us,” Mitaka says on the other end of the line, ever fond of pointing out the obvious. “Can they do that?”
“Would you like to be the one to tell them they can’t?” Hux shakes his head. They are not small fish; but the First Order is big enough to swallow them whole and not suffer for it. He knows to pick his fights. “If you’d like to drop off the face of the earth, now is the time.”
Rey snorts—as much of an answer as Mitaka’s bitter laughter.
“Well,” Rey says, scraping her chair back. “I should pack some clean underwear. When are they coming to get us?”
“As we speak.”
Before they leave, they make sure to sketch out First Order insignias on every available place. Just in case.
The safe house is, for all intents and purposes, a veritable villa in the middle of nowhere.
“A little excessive,” Mitaka comments as they tour the place, noting the bolted down furniture and darkened windows, locked conspicuously on the outside. The cupboards and the fridge are well-stocked enough to keep them fed for several months.
There is no mobile coverage.
In fact, there is no wireless connection of any sort. The multitude of devices strewn about in the house are all connected to the First Order’s own network and communications system, which provides access to every archive they might need for the project and nothing else.
The dread coiled in Hux’s guts grows heavier.
So much for his alert systems.
Progress is much faster with so much information at their fingertips.
Hux is envious of the berths of the First Order databases. Effective as his own methods of gathering intelligence are, his network couldn’t hope to have the same reach as a well-funded PMC—which he could have been a part of, had he not gone freelance instead of corporate after leaving the military.
The idea is tempting, still. He’s ruined for the civilian workforce—has been since childhood, with a father like General Brendol Hux was—but he seeks the structure and order that comes with being part of an organisation. Under different circumstances, he may have considered applying to the First Order after this project.
As their prisoner in everything but name, he wants little more than to be as far away from them as possible.
Everything they’ll need doesn’t involve a private chef or buffet, but it involves private delivery people who pick up whatever they want, no matter what they want, in a timely fashion. Because they are spiteful opportunists, they order the most extravagant and unreasonable meals they can think of. The food always arrives hot.
Hux marks the potential restaurants for each food item and how long it took to arrive on a small map every time. Just in case.
Sleeping in the same bed while Mitaka is in the next room feels too awkward, so they don’t. They don’t sleep much in general, either—not with the question of how to power a machine of the Starkiller’s scale without it overheating hanging heavy over their heads. Dreamshare mechanics are a lot more forgiving than their real-world counterparts; if they can’t pull it off down there, they sure as hell won’t make it work topside.
They have to make it work topside, they now know. The First Order wouldn’t have poured so much money and resources into what is merely Pryde’s pet design project.
“They probably have people looking into it,” Rey says, spinning her pen around her fingers with smugness dripping from her expression. He’s not petty enough to dare her to replicate it in the real world, but the thought is there. “Some super high-tech R&D division working on preventing a weapon of mass-destruction from exploding instead of, like, climate change.”
Watching her fingers like the secrets of the universe lie between them, “I don’t think so,” Mitaka responds. “It’s too much of a commitment. I bet they just wait for someone else to figure it out, then steal the designs from them.”
Something flares at the back of Hux’s mind like static, a connection he doesn’t want to make forcing itself into his awareness.
He shakes his head hard to clear it. Even with the dilation, he doesn’t have the time to dwell on things he’s got no control over.
“If you two are quite done gossiping,” he cuts in, smoothing over the blueprints in front of him for effect. “We’ve got work to do.”
We’re going to take something someone else worked very hard for, was all Ren had said the night before his departure—the only time Hux dared ask about his new job, once it became apparent Ren wasn’t going to say a word about it on his own. It’s such a non-answer that Hux couldn’t tell if Ren wanted to leave him space for plausible deniability or simply didn’t want to tell him.
He still can’t. As a matter of fact, he can’t say for sure Snoke’s job and this project are connected, either; all he’s got is a hunch.
A hunch he desperately wants to see proven wrong.
Mitaka’s newest blend is the most successful yet. They go down as far as the third level with only minor tremors under their feet—a huge leap of progress, after weeks of the ground swallowing them up whole.
Knowing better than to push their luck, they call it an early night and celebrate by ordering a feast they’ll have to take their time with. With the dinner table and every other horizontal space that could reasonably hold food covered in their work, they sprawl about the sofa set that hasn’t seen nearly enough use over their involuntary stay.
Once their food arrives and Rey realises what he ordered, a soft look crosses over her face. He ignores it. There’s only one place that serves Ren’s favourite food; it makes for a good reference point on his map. It’s not sentimental if it’s also practical.
He knew, from a logical standpoint, that having access to communication systems meant people could communicate with them and vice versa. On account of the fact that Pryde and the delivery people are the only ones to use it, he didn’t particularly care.
When the name Blysma pops up on the main screen, he realises what a gross oversight that was.
Heart at his throat, he accepts the request with shaking hands, grateful that no one is awake to see him like this. “Hux speaking.”
“Hello, Hux.”
Oh.
Oh, the ever-loving—
“Don’t say my name,” Ren adds quickly, as if he sensed that Hux was about to curse his name six ways to Sunday. “Or any other names. They don’t actively monitor your communications, but we’re pretty sure some keywords are flagged. Best not to take any chances.”
“We,” he repeats dumbly. So many questions are buzzing in his head that he doesn’t know which should take priority. “You and—ah, our mutual terrifying friend?”
Phasma’s melodic laughter rings through the other end of the line. Hux’s heart soars.
“Yeah,” Ren says, a little breathy. “Yes, we’re both here. And fine. The job ran late. Where the fuck are you?”
About that… “I don’t actually know,” he admits, the truth of it settling dark and deep into his gut. Trying to map out their location left him with more questions than answers. “Near the ocean. Far north of the city, I think; but we shouldn’t have crossed any borders.”
“That doesn’t narrow it down,” Ren says.
Irritation rising in him, “We were hardly given a tour guide for the road,” he snaps. You should have been there to take notes, is on the tip of his tongue—he swallows the words. Ren is here now, in a way. They’ve found Hux and the others. The insignias must have pointed them in the right direction; but figuring out how to contact Hux through the First Order’s own systems? That’s all their doing.
Taking a long breath to calm himself down, “How did you contact us anyway?” he asks.
“By calling in more favours than your sorry life is worth,” Phasma says, amusement lingering in her tone. He has never been happier to hear her mocking drawl. “So you had better give us something concrete to work with before we decide to leave you to rot there.”
Racking his brain, he takes a deep breath to ground himself. He’s got to focus. However Ren and Phasma managed to get into the First Order’s systems, they are unlikely to remain unnoticed for long. He needs to make the most of it.
The answer is so simple, he wants to smack himself upside the head.
“At noon, we will place an order for three servings of Bivoli tempari from the Hosnian. Track whoever is delivering it. They should lead you to us.”
He doesn’t tell the others about it. For one, he’s not fully sure his stress-addled brain didn’t make up the whole interaction—for another, they have a check-in with Pryde scheduled at 3, during which they’re going to disappoint him again with their lack of progress regarding the overheating issue. They are on thin ice as it is; he can’t take a gamble on the quality of the others’ poker faces and risk attracting Pryde’s suspicion.
At exactly noon, he contacts the delivery people and relays the order. In his periphery, Mitaka and Rey share a look.
Once he takes his seat again, “I thought the Hosnian was eat-in only,” Rey says.
Hux shrugs. “They said everything you’ll need.”
He orders something different from the Hosnian at the same time for the next four days, just in case. Mitaka is too polite to protest, despite the cuisine clearly not agreeing with him.
Rey eyes him suspiciously every time but says nothing, waiting for him to come to her instead of forcing an explanation out of him. He appreciates it more than he can put into words. He can only hope she understands.
Dying in an explosion ten times in a row tends to throw a wrench in group morale.
Unwilling to kill themselves just to wake up in the safe house, they wordlessly agree to wait out the timer. The burnout has settled deep onto their bones; Pryde’s implicit threats after every check-in don’t help their mental state, either. If Ren and Phasma hadn’t made contact, Hux might have considered taking his chances with a desperate escape attempt instead of sticking around to see what punishment the First Order would dole out for their inevitable failure. It might prove the better end, at any rate.
“I am going back to my children after this,” Mitaka says with more conviction than Hux has been able to muster up about anything in months. “I don’t care what happens. I don’t care if they kill me for it—I won’t die without seeing my family again.”
“We are not dying,” Hux reassures him. With three real-world seconds to the scheduled kick, he explains everything—Ren and Phasma making contact, the bare-bones of the plan and Blysma’s carefully vague progress update texts, the precautions they’re taking to keep Mitaka’s family safe should something go wrong.
Mitaka cries silent, happy tears at the news. Rey gives Mitaka a warm smile and pulls him close.
“That’s it,” she tells Hux, rubbing at Mitaka’s arm in sympathy. “I’m not letting her take a job without me ever again.”
Raising a brow, “You would be announcing to everyone in the community that she’s the best leverage against you,” he points out, not unkindly. He understands the sentiment—truly, he does—but it’s woefully impractical. Not to mention the kind of commitment it would take.
Her eyes gleam, smile turning secretive in that way he’s learned not to trust. Reaching into her pocket with her free hand, “I was already going to do that,” she says airily, taking out a small, velvet box.
Ah. Fair enough, then.
Hux is above lying to his employers.
Rather, he likes to think he is. Dreamshare, sophisticated as it may be at its heart, is an underground science—as such, it attracts a certain crowd. In a community where lying through one’s teeth is a survival skill, Hux knows to look someone in the eye and spin a tale truer than the truth as well as the next crook; he just prefers to tell the truth as long as it will leave his head connected to his body.
As it happens, this is the last scheduled check-in before the deadline. Giving Pryde bad news now would be signing their death warrant.
When Hux reports their success, Pryde smiles. The sight haunts Hux’s nightmares for days.
Blysma’s communication request comes the night before the grand plan, unscheduled.
His mind racing with possibilities, he grabs the tablet sitting on his nightstand before the notification wakes the others, accepting the request with, “Hux speaking.” As far as he’s concerned, there’s nothing left to talk about. Phasma has already laid out all she could of the plan without tipping off the First Order; a recap now would do more harm than good.
If this is about a last-minute change—well. Adaptability is another survival skill in their line of work.
“I missed your birthday.”
Hux blinks at the screen in his hands. “I—yes.” By a couple of months, at this stage. Where did that come from? Surely Ren didn’t realise it only now? “If you contacted me to wish me a happy belated birthday…”
“Of course not. I—uh, I called to hear your voice.” Hux’s lungs tighten, all too aware of his heartbeat. “Since we never finished our conversation.”
Their conversation. The handful of words Hux has been turning over in his head for months, to no apparent meaning or answer.
He’s bloody desperate to ask and finally, finally find out; but they’ve waited this long. They can be patient a little longer. “This is neither the time nor the place,” Hux says, as gently as he’s able, biting down on the instinctive Ren at the end. Now would be the absolute worst time for a slip-up. “Whatever it was, you can tell me tomorrow. In person.”
“That’s just it,” Ren mutters. “The last time I tried to tell you, we kept getting cut-off until signal completely went away and I thought, it’s fine. I’ll be back in a few days, I’ll just tell him then. In person.” He laughs, a breathy, bitter sound. “But then…”
But then Ren couldn’t get back until a few weeks after—and when he did, Hux wasn’t there anymore.
He clears his throat to get out the lump lodged there. “Then you’ll just have to be there this time,” he says firmly—his point man voice. “Because I will be, and I won’t accept any excuses.”
After a long beat, “Yes, sir,” Ren says, a smile in his voice. “See you on the other side.”
“Sleep well.”