Work Text:
[there's nothing you can do to alter destiny
--what will happen, will happen--
therefor fighting is useless and admittedly, kind of sad.]
~
"Bring Kylo Ren to me to complete his training."
Snoke's disquieting voice was a perpetual echo inside of Hux's ears from the moment he stepped foot out of the conference hall with the Supreme Leader. Endlessly thankful for the tracking device that Hux had ordered to be installed in Ren's belt, he repeated the coordinates silently in his head like a personal mantra as he all but ran down the shaking corridors of the Finalizer toward the shuttle hangar. It would be unbecoming of him as a general to sprint; the last remnants of order must be upheld for the sake of morality, and truthfully, for his own sake as well. In this disastrous wake of the Resistance's assault on Starkiller, he felt ill that his brainchild was dying beneath his feet. Never before had his despair and grief been juxtaposed so neatly. But General Hux couldn't dwell long on the technological carnage around him, no matter how heartsick he felt because of it.
Fortunately, as he stepped briskly through the corridors of Starkiller Base, the coordinates being transmitted to Hux through his datapad revealed that Ren hadn't gone far from the base itself, and was a stationary sonar blip somewhere in the planet's thick wintery trees. (An organic asset that had provided natural relief from the vicious winds this planet's atmosphere whipped up, they had escaped being culled by the First Order because of their ability to protect their technological structures from erosion.)
Though, Hux felt the icy raindrop of panic slide down his spine, if he isn't moving as the planet is literally being torn apart, he must be incapacitated, and if he is, it can only mean he's badly wounded.
General Hux had never doubted Ren's powers--though perhaps in the beginning of their co-commandership he hadn't understood or respected them--but he held little belief that Force-users were somehow immune to lava. (Especially if the stories about Darth Vader were to be believed.)
Starkiller Base quaked with the dividing earth outside. The planet had begun to collapse upon itself, and Hux did not want to be burdened with the responsibility of informing Snoke that he'd allowed his exalted apprentice to perish. (As if Hux didn't have his own personal reasons for being concerned with Ren's longevity, but it frightened him too much to speculate on that at the moment.)
When Hux reached the hangar, he steeled himself against the disorder of his troops and the compulsion to command them back into order, he himself still not breaking protocol, prioritizing first and foremost his mission from Supreme Leader Snoke. He flagged down the two nearest stormtroopers and directed them to board a small escape shuttle with him. As the stormtroopers seated themselves in the cockpit, Hux relayed to them Kylo Ren's coordinates; he didn't think he imagined the way they seemed to move tensely after knowing they hit the lucky jackpot for Ren-retrieval duties.
Below them, the gouged earth gushed lava as if it had deep, inflamed wounds. The brightness of the snow contrasted both the endless dark trees and hellish swaths of magma. Within ten minutes, but what felt to Hux like hours, maybe days, they approached Ren's location and spotted his distinct figure prostrate on his back in a puddle of shining, bloody snow. Despite his rough appearance, though, with immediate treatment he was likely to survive; therefor, Hux wasted no time in commanding the stormtroopers to fetch him from where he lay defeatedly. Hux followed behind them quickly, wrapping the fur of his coat around his nose and away from the blistering cold. He carried a thick woolen blanket, decidedly not standard-issue and special ordered from a shop his mother used to frequent on Arkanis, and as the stormtroopers dragged the Knight's considerable form back to the shuttle, Hux draped it around Ren's shoulders as thoroughly as possible. Only meters away, the earth roared deafeningly as it pulled itself apart. Nobody would walk away from this catastrophe unharmed, it seemed.
"I'll take him," Hux said briskly as he grasped Ren's shoulders gently and lead him to the shuttle's medbay the moment they boarded. "Get us out of here," he called over his shoulder as he staggered away beneath Ren's bulk, feeling the shuttle lift into and then past the atmosphere of Starkiller Base, before settling Ren gingerly onto a cot. It wasn't until the splitting inner core of the planet stopped rumbling in his ears did he realize the considerable amount of blood pouring from beneath Ren's robes.
"I'm going to tend your wounds as best as I can," Hux told Ren as steadily as possible, trying to suppress tendrils of panic from painfully constricting his chest. He found himself wishing he'd had the foresight to bring an actual medic or at least a med droid to this rescue operation, but what medical skills he learned in the Academy would have to be enough for the moment. Ren didn't seem to hear Hux very well, groaning and tossing his head lightly. His eyelids tried to flutter open, but a wave of sharp pain made him cringe deeply.
"I know what I'm doing," Hux quietly told himself as much as Ren. Recollecting everything he could remember on treating traumatic wounds, Hux hastily disinfected his hands, rolled up his sleeves, snapped on a pair of sterile gloves, and reached for medical shears to begin cutting away Ren's robes that were sticky and heavy with blood. The metallic tang was so thick it made Hux, who had absolutely no qualms about blood or its smell, unusually lightheaded; foggily, Hux detected that there had been an alteration in the properties of Ren's hemoglobin.
The harder Hux focused on him, however, the stranger Ren's injuries seemed to be. As he worked diligently through a cloud of panic, he began to realize that Ren's wounds seemed to be shinier than was normal of blood illuminated simply by standard-use fluorescence. He'd noticed its strange glittering properties as a puddle around Ren while he lay beneath the doomed trees, but had dismissed his brief concern simply as snow crystals intermingled with frozen globs of blood. Really, that should've been his first sign, seeing Ren gilded by his own plasma and platelets, but it's easy to sidestep such thoughts when faced with mortal peril.
But as Hux's nimble fingers applied disinfectant and began to suture Ren's slippery flesh closed, he noticed stray flecks of Ren's glowing blood pulsating brightly on his own skin. The sight of it sent his mind reeling, the scent sharp and incapacitating, but General Hux had not clawed his way to his status as General of the First Order, an organization renowned for ruthless technological terror, by having a weak mind so he reigned in his fears and speculations in order to be bombarded with them later. His immediate priority was to staunch, what appeared to be, the bowcaster wound in Ren's stomach. The gouge was deep enough that it swallowed his fingers mid-knuckle, but he worked tenderly if not a bit mechanically.
"You're a lucky bastard, I hope you know that," said Hux levelly, not taking his eyes from the bloody glittering hole in Ren's side. "It just missed your serous membrane." The fact that his gastrointestinal wall, or any other organs, had not been punctured was good enough news to ease some of Hux's tension.
"So my stomach's still in tact?" smirked Ren painfully, hoarsely. Hux's deft and methodological work had slowed his blood flow enough to take some of the pallor from his cheeks. Every second brought him farther away from going into shock from blood loss, which was Hux's second most pressing concern after major organ damage.
"Correct. How did you get such a nasty wound?"
"I killed my father," was his deadpan reply.
"I see." And Hux did actually see. "Why is your blood bioluminescent?" He still didn't pull his gaze from the raw pink meat of Ren's abdomen which he threaded his fingers through.
Ren's silence spoke volumes which Hux comprehended instantly.
"Since you're being treated immediately, I'm confident you'll heal well."
"Hux..."
Hux let his eyes meet Ren's for a flash, savoring the glossy amber they presented as in this lighting. Or perhaps there were little flecks of strange light in those, too. He glanced back down too quickly to tell.
"Ren?"
"...A bowcaster. The wound, I mean. A Wookie shot me." He was not looking in Hux's direction now.
"Thought so. The bowcaster, I mean, not the Wookie."
Despite himself, Ren huffed a short laugh and lapsed into silence. If it were anyone else but Ren, this entire situation would be inherently impossible to anticipate. It had taken time, but eventually Hux had begun to understand that between himself and Ren, they were an efficient, deadly force, and Hux quite loved those. Constantly tipping the scales between each other for Supreme Leader Snoke's grace blunted the true potential between them. Sometimes, secretly, he wondered if that was the intention of the Supreme Leader, to keep them at odds with one another. If it were anyone else but Ren, he could not be swayed to share his authority, to speak amicably with while performing impromptu surgery on, or to feel genuine concern for.
If it were anyone else but Ren.
It had taken a while, but finally Hux sealed the final layer of dermis around Ren's torso, snipping off the excess stitches neatly. There would be an ugly scar, but he would heal without complication. That gruesome facial gash was next to be treated. Ren hissed loudly as Hux applied a solvent of disinfectant to the inflamed tissue. From what Hux had heard of lightsabers they supposedly left cauterized wounds. This seemed to be the case with Ren, whose unsightly cut was bleeding only minimally. Hux busied himself by wrapping generous amounts of gauze over the gash and around Ren's head. Hux's heartbeat thrummed loudly when his fingers threaded over locks of sweaty, bloody curls. Ren could feel it through Hux's fingertips, and his heart began to beat in synchronicity.
Ren's tattered shoulder was last to be dealt with. Hux, no longer faced with the immediate threat of Ren bleeding to death, remembered that the medbay was, of course, stocked with anesthesia.
"Sorry I didn't remember before," he apologized.
"S'fine," Ren slurred. He was slumped into the cot, injured arm facing Hux. He looked as if he could sleep for a decade, with the haunted shadows beneath his eyes and tightly constricted pupils. Trifling through medkits until he procured a syringe and vials of a clear anesthetic liquid, Hux quickly prepared the needle and, based on an estimate of Ren's weight, measured out the maximum dosage that would be safe to administer. Hux sterilized Ren's inner elbow quickly and injected him with the serum. It didn't take long for Ren's dark eyes to become droopy and his voice husky with exhaustion.
"Thanks," he managed to say before slipping into a deep, medicated sleep.
Hux snapped off the gloves covered in Ren's carnage and disposed of them into a bin for biohazardous material. As the adrenaline began to fade from his bloodstream, hunger and dizziness slammed into him at once, head pounding and eyes sore. His solution was to sink unceremoniously into one of the medbay chairs, falling into a restless sleep only seconds after closing his eyes.
~
"Supreme Leader, please. There must be some other way." Ren clasped his hands together in respect from where he kneeled before Snoke in a nameless corridor of the Finalizer. He had been doing this every night ever since the first time Snoke had this conversation with him.
"You know, Kylo Ren, that this final test will complete your apprenticeship, and open yourself to an incredible power. The time will come soon, the moment after you kill Han Solo and solidify Ben Solo's death. Already, you are primed for the final stage of this task. You must prepare yourself, Knight of Ren, for the future that you have been seeing for so long."
Ren trembled where he knelt, beads of cold sweat running down his temple. He could only stare at the stone beneath him as he remembered, even here within this dream, the visions he had been having ever since Snoke had exposed him to what he had described as an "otherworldly being."
"Yes, Supreme Leader," Ren replied lowly, struggling to keep the tremor from his voice. But, truthfully and he knew Snoke sensed it, he desperately wished he could forget what Snoke had shown him all those days ago.
"Reflect on my teachings and meditate, Lord Ren," Snoke said from his holographic throne. "The time for you to be fully realized is not far away."
Ren stood, head bowed in deference, and when Snoke's hologram disappeared he fled the foreboding throne room.
In a haze, Ren walked the Finalizer's corridors. This part of the dream was always set around 1am, leaving him alone in the hallways; he would always run into Hux at the nearest viewport.
That was where Ren found Hux tonight. The general was still in uniform, but lacked his greatcoat and therefor the bulk he hid under. He stood in parade rest before the transparasteel, gazing onto the distant colorful surface of a nearby planet. The gleaming rusted terrain was the same shade as Hux's fiery hair alight by twin suns. As Ren stepped closer, the Finalizer slowly dissolved away, leaving nothing but space and stars to stand in.
"I'll miss you," Ren spoke softly to Hux's back. In the dream, he never wore his mask, and was acutely aware of the tears that stained his cheeks.
"Then don't leave," Hux would reply, back still facing Ren. He didn't want his tears to be seen, and he didn't want to see Ren's face here if there was no real possibility he would be seeing it again in the future. It would hurt him too much to know he was looking at a man living on a countdown. And Ren was not just any man he could look at that way.
"I don't have a choice," Ren breathed heavily, swallowing a sob. "I can't unsee it, I can't unknow it. Believe me, Hux..." Tears swelled in his dark eyes. "I want to stay with you."
"Is it okay to tell someone you love them in their dreams?" Hux asked, voice hushed with the painful lump in his throat. He continued to stare out the viewport into the continuous expanse of space, his pale green eyes reflecting the five dark holes in the sky that he would one day be responsible for.
"I love you, Hux," Ren whimpered,hand outstretched tentatively, heartbrokenly.
Ren would wake up hearing Hux's voice murmuring in his ear, "I love you, too."
~
Weeks preceding the firing of the superweapon, Hux could sense within Ren a steadily accumulating distress. Almost every night, the Knight of Ren came to him in his dreams and would tell him the same thing every time before they woke up.
An apex was culminating from the sheer knowledge that Starkiller was almost finished being constructed. Just as there was much for General Hux to do, as there ever was, Lord Ren was similarly preoccupied with locating a certain fragment of a map that was integral to the First Order's success. Considering how Luke Skywalker felled the Empire, it was unwise to let him run amuck.
General Hux didn't see Kylo Ren as often as he wished to, and during the rare moments he stole from him, Ren seemed distracted and uneasy. Even when his face was guarded by a helmet, Hux sensed the perpetual apprehension that followed him everywhere recently.
"Ren, if something is going on--" Hux tried to say one night, but Ren shook his head silently, unable to meet Hux's eyes. Whatever Ren felt the need to hide from Hux, the stress of bearing it alone had begun to take its toll on Ren's wellbeing. Deeper than just his frequent nosebleeds and disabling headaches lay within Ren a dread so prominent it had begun to afflict his mind. On more than one occasion, Hux had caught him speaking to the charred mask of his dead grandfather as if he were carrying on a conversation with another person.
Ren's eyes had darkened; not simply his irises, which had become tight bands of black, but the way the entire sphere no longer reflected light as well as it once did, like a normal human eye should. Shadows were ever present beneath them and indicative of his weariness. Even in the air that surrounded him Hux could feel a heaviness that made his skin prickle. At a level neither of them could control, Kylo Ren was being progressively altered by whatever it was Supreme Leader Snoke had shown him in his dreams.
Kylo Ren was fearless and foolhardy, a berserker who wielded an intricate weapon as a broadsword and could rend metal with his mind. Yet, Ren had internalized something that even he, as formidable as he was, could not affront. From what Hux understood, there was an inevitability awaiting Ren in the near future that he was not prepared for. Hux, for what it was worth, wished for Ren to take him wherever this future lead. But Ren, remembering in each dream the way Hux's hair shone with solar brilliance, couldn't justify taking from Hux something he himself was not wholly prepared to sacrifice.
Ren wondered with profound melancholy if Hux would still want to follow him into what awaited if he knew that it meant surrendering any last vestiges of his humanity.
(Hux knew. It didn't change his mind.)
~
The Elder Ones, Kylo had been told they were called. He'd first heard stories of Them when he was a child in skeevy taverns while flying across the galaxy with Han and Uncle Chewie. Han could hold a conversation with anyone, and sometimes they'd share a booth with aging pilots who recounted tales they'd heard when they had been young.
According to some of them, in the deepest reaches of the universe lived beings so great and incomprehensible to mortals that those who gazed upon Them would be driven mad. Others said that Their lurking tendrils had been seen by pilots brave enough to venture into the most eldritch recesses of this dimension.
Once, Han told a starry eyed Ben that, at one point in his life he never would've believed such a thing. But now, he had faith such monstrosities could exist somewhere. Uncle Chewie would nod solemnly behind his father.
The Elder Ones were what Luke and Leia called them. With a natural Alderaanian flourish, Leia would tell her son the myths surrounding the strange beings that her home planet had believed to exist. Ominous entities They were described as, too fantastic to even look upon lest They shatter any mortal's sanity.
They were never meant to be understood by us, Kylo remembered his mother's warm knowing voice warning him as a young boy. Back then he hadn't understood her advice, but now he fought back the urge to replay over and over in his mind her once soothing words. Now, however, her honeyed tone didn't ease the panic that spilled over the brim within him. The sound of her voice only reminded him what Snoke expected him to do, and that he was helpless before the fate that had been laid out before him.
Snoke had given Kylo a cursory glimpse at The Elder Ones, a darkness swathed in desolate infinity, and in doing so had drawn their attention to his most esteemed Knight of Ren. They were waiting for him, now. They had solidified his destiny in the same stardust he was composed of.
The moment you lay eyes on them your fate is sealed, Snoke's voice had echoed throughout the conference chamber the moment Kylo had returned from his ungodly pilgrimage. They are waiting for you to join Them, Master of the Knights of Ren.
Only once Snoke's hologram departed and Kylo was left alone in the conference chamber did he let himself fall to his knees and sob, paralyzed by the full weight of the future he'd signed off on for himself.
At that moment, crying breathlessly on the cold stone floor, Kylo's heartbreak was projected so distantly that even Hux could feel his entire being beginning to shatter; that was the moment he knew without any lingering doubts that Kylo Ren loved him, for he feared less the Elder Ones than the thought of being taken away, forever, from General Hux.
~
you will never be free of the knowledge of what you've done
you will never know forgiveness
~
For all of his insolence as an appendage of the First Order, Ren respected Supreme Leader Snoke and carried out his commands with something akin to fanaticism. Therefor, when Snoke informed Ren that he would begin the initiating step towards revealing his true potential, he accepted the task with fervor.
You will meet my own Master, Snoke had said in his shadowed voice. There is a temple on a planet unknown to anyone but myself where They can be communicated with. Once you meet Them, your ultimate destiny will be set into motion. You must be courageous. Once you have gazed into Their realm, They too will be awaiting the final step you must take. Kill Han Solo, destroy any vestiges of sentiment within you, and They will be ready to open the truth of your own power to yourself.
Only a few years ago, this order wouldn't have caused Ren to quake in his boots. Before, to him, sentiment was simply a folly of human nature that needed to be excised should one wish to rise above its weakness. Back then, sentiment meant Luke Skywalker weakening Darth Vader and toppling the Empire. It meant seeking Han's approval. It meant caring what any other human being thought or felt towards him. At that time, he was content, impatient even, to remove the weakest parts of his humanity in favor of this terrible untold power.
Disconcertingly, now, when Kylo Ren thought of sentiment, he thought of copper hair that reflected sunlight in brilliant shades and pale green eyes that were solemn, solid, steeled against the world. He thought of how, deep down in some tender part of himself that he thought had calcified long ago, that if sentiment meant he could kiss those lips that ordered the destruction of worlds and hold the slender hands that worked endlessly over a datapad to keep the entirety of the First Order running at peak effeciency, that perhaps it wasn't such a terrible thing after all.
But, Supreme Leader Snoke could never know of these feelings Ren held and thus far had not sensed them. And so it was with eternal grief that Ren exposed himself to the Elder Ones, those who had with the remains of black holes created the warped existence that was Supreme Leader Snoke.
~
As the two stormtroopers piloted their escape shuttle toward the coordinates General Hux supplied them with, he knelt beside Ren's patched up body with trepidation.
"Ren," he said as firmly as possible despite the tightness of his throat, "you need to tell me. Everything. I need to know what's going on with you." The truth of Ren's life was a prismatic sun over the perpetual tundra of Hux's mind. Without the truth, without knowledge, Hux was blind within his own mental landscape. It had not happened intentionally, but it was undeniable that an insurmountable Force bond had been forged between them. They felt one another's pain with a potency that was almost intimate and invariably tragic.
"They won't go away, Hux," Ren's lip quivered the profession.
"What won't, Ren?"
"Ever since I saw Them, Their voices haven't left my head. I can't stop hearing Them."
Carefully, as if he were afraid to accidentally handle him too roughly, Hux pressed their bare hands together against the sheets. This undid Ren's tersely repressed misery, opening torrents from his eyes. His left arm covered most of his face as he sobbed under Hux's gentle ministrations. He knew from the electricity under Ren's skin that the Force was reaching an apex they, as mere humans, might not be equipped to withstand.
"The Elder Gods," said Hux simply, quietly, rubbing his thumb slowly over the back of Ren's right hand. As Ren had begun to change over the past few weeks, Hux had had his suspicions. In a different life, Hux would never have believed in such pedestrian mysticisms. But as he grew ever closer to Ren, the more often he'd remember those bedtime stories in his mother's voice on the rare occasions he would try to fall asleep in the seldom used bed in his quarters.
Ren nodded tautly, focusing intently on gaining control of his breathing. The heaving of his abdomen and stress on his muscles threatened to reopen his wounds.
"In my dreams, I wasn't sure why, but I'd feel that you would be going away soon, and I'd ask to be taken with you. Ren, I know you have no choice but to leave. But you don't have to leave by yourself."
"Do you understand what you're saying?" Ren bristled with what looked like anger but in truth was fear.
"I can't go back to the life I had before..." He motioned between them. "..this. I understand the consequences of this decision that I'm making."
More tears spilled from Ren's nightsky eyes, wetness catching on his thick eyelashes and streaming past constellations of beauty marks on his face. Hux's heart lurched in a way that confirmed what he knew to be true: he was ready to sacrifice everything, his career and life and humanity, but not Ren. If he had to surrender all of these things in order to never risk losing Ren again, he would consider no price too great.
Ren could feel the way Hux's pulse thrummed harder and faster when he reflected on these feelings he had for Ren. At this point, Ren could no longer justify pushing Hux away to himself. Whatever eternity he was irrevocably bound for, he knew he didn't want to spend it without Hux.
~
They sacrificed themselves to each other and thus became a whole person, before being shred from the inside out to leave in its bonded bloody remains a consciousness bereft of humanity. The only one who can truly love a monster in its entirety is someone just as wicked.
~
"You're a monster," the girl from Jakku had said. She had heard Snoke's haunting whispers inside her head, baiting her to kill Kylo Ren as he lay unmoving on the cold forest floor, but she was a sun unable to be eclipsed. Ren hated and admired her in equal measure, jealous that Han Solo should appear in her mind as if he were her father--
It was only natural to savor that resentment, a deeply-rooted nerve so sensitive to this paternal figure that Rey--the scavenger--could subdue him with a simple twinge. Even when he thought the outline in his heart shaped like Han had cauterized itself, something that felt uncomfortably like sibling rivalry wrenched it open once more. It was an ironic pain that he knew was non-accidental. Nothing in his life was ever accidental. All the same, when the sun had nearly been drained and cast him in that tragic shadow, he let that foolish girl watch him kill Han Solo as his punishment for finally deciding to care about his sad, broken son.
I'm immune to love, is the secret code interlaced between the "thank you" that tumbled out of Ren's lips while his lightsaber's blade was still lodged in Han Solo's chest. He wondered if Han had finally accepted the shape of Ben Solo imprinted in his own heart, but decided that even if he had, that Ben Solo that still survived in Han must die, too.
When Han's grieving hand gave Ren's cheek a final caress, Ren knew that he had done what Snoke had said the Elder Ones were waiting for him to do. He hadn't realized that, the next time he would see with his own eyes and acknowledge with his own conscious the Elder Ones, he must have his humanity stripped away by Them in a process so violent and agonizing, there was a great chance he might not survive it. Even now, numb as he watched his father's dead body careening into the nothingness below, he realized dimly that he could never turn back.
Was he weaker for having done this? As a human, possibly. He felt Ben Solo would have been sickened by this action, but Ben Solo lay buried in Han's heart that Kylo had scorched thoroughly with his own lightsaber. But he also knew the time was upon him to meet the Elder Ones where They haunted the endlessness of unknown galaxies, rather than just through the Force at a long forgotten temple beneath a forgotten planet, and when he did so, the transformation from human to monster would be complete.
The Elder Ones gibbered cacophonously in Ren's ear, something that sounded like a vicious praise he knew he both did and did not deserve. He had doubted himself so strongly in the beginning, weeks ago when he was initially exposed to both the Elder Ones' accursed vocalizations and Snoke's order to murder Han Solo, that some days between then and now he felt himself wavering in the face of a morality he wasn't sure he had embraced, or fully understood yet.
Ren had known from the moment Han had said he'd do anything to protect Ren that exploiting his father's love would be the only way he could bring himself to commit this act. He could have left with his father and been reunited with his mother, he could have accepted his crimes and faced the consequences that were undoubtedly to come, but he didn't. Never again would human weakness be a blight upon his or his Master's goals. And maybe, Ren let himself think briefly and with only a hint of desperation, if Hux can be proud of him for this, then Ren could learn to be, too.
And then the world started moving again in a plethora of colors and noise and an abrupt agony in his left side. Chewbacca refused to kill him, only seeing Ben and his wet eyes after waking up from nightmares as a young boy, and with bitter humor realized the Wookie's mercy would be his undoing. It was kill or be killed, Ren knew, and if nobody had the resolve to kill him, that was okay, but he was certain he was capable of killing almost anybody, now.
Not Hux, supplied Ren's mind as he grinned maniacally up at the scavenger and traitor above him who glared in horror down at him. All three eyes reflected back at Ren what he was aware he had become: a monster.
But Hux is monstrous too, Ren corrected himself. He is useful, pragmatic, a mastermind. And I love him.
This was not to be his undoing, Ren realized with a heat that fueled his rage. In this world, he could not love or be loved by a human. But he could love a demon that looked like one.
He hunted Rey and Finn beyond Starkiller Base and into the snowy forests.
~
Love is a pure thing, but that does not mean it can't be a catalyst for the wicked. Ren knew this as he was dragged, bleeding, through the snow by two Stormtroopers, when he felt Hux's calculating hands smoothing a heavy blanket over his shoulders. If the love Ren felt for Hux only drew him farther into the arms of what waited for him beyond the stars in the darkest reaches of this reality, then perhaps he had a use for the wily emotion, after all. Unless Snoke or the Elder Gods thought otherwise, but feeling Hux's arms take him firmly and guide him to the shuttle's medbay, a quick plan was beginning to gain traction in his mind.
Ren didn't love Hux because loving was good; he loved Hux because Hux was irrevocably evil. If any being to ever become his Master could not see this logic, then they were not suitable to be his Master. Power was the ultimate goal, and Hux was the nervous system of power itself, and so all Ren knew was he must have it. If Hux could have such sway over his troops, his officers, over Ren, then that strength would be wasted should Ren not accept it. And he did want to accept Hux's greatness. By themselves, they were both equally terrifying in their own particular ways; but united, Ren knew that if Snoke objected, they could easily dispose of this obsolete Leader. Perhaps this surge in confidence for what Ren desired was not an intended effect of Han's death, but Ren no longer wished to strengthen himself by taking away problems, and instead wished to empower himself with the addition of a brilliant problem-solver. And what was Hux but a glorified tactitician?
The only clue that Ren had any iota of mercy left within him stemmed from the fact that, though he didn't ever want to live without Hux, he wasn't sure he could bear to ask Hux to join in him into the kind of unknowable darkness where he was destined to go.
~
The escape shuttle throttled forward. Ren sat hunched and bandaged over the edge of the medbay cot, watching General Hux sleep shallowly in a chair adjacent to him. Whenever the general slept it was not entirely restorative and on many occasions had accidentally projected his nightmares to Ren on certain nights. If given the chance to fall into a deep sleep, the general would begin to have night terrors where he'd thrash out in imagined conflict. On more than one occasion, he'd been known to accidentally headbutt, punch, or kick Ren whenever they shared a bed.
When Ren could steal moments like these where Hux looked disarmingly peaceful, he felt like he was allowed to see something private, a secret the universe told itself. Pale eyelashes fluttered too softly, like ginger butterfly wings, and Hux's jade eyes opened blearily. His slumped posture straightened slowly as his gaze fell on Ren's.
"You're okay," he mumbled.
"More or less," affirmed Ren. "You did such a clean job."
Hux nodded slightly.
They sat quietly for a few moments.
"We'll be on Snoke's planet within a few hours," Hux finally said. He looked up from the brim of his hat at Ren, suddenly overcome with the strong desire for his eyes to meet the wide dark bands of Ren's irises. Even in the garish glare of synthetic light, Ren's eyes only seemed to consume the wavelengths that reached them. It was as if they had lost the ability to reflect light, and if Hux were to be honest with himself, which he was not always wont to do, the ghostly void of Ren's eyes brought him a perverse comfort.
Ren nodded, as if his neck were stiff.
"Will he let me come with you?" Hux finally asked, unable to withstand the awkward silence any longer.
Ren didn't answer right away. Instead, he lightly patted the space on the cot beside him. Hux rose slowly as to minimize the vertigo he'd cultivated from hunger, lack of adequate sleep, and deeply rooted stress that sickened his heart and weakened his bones. He sat curtly next to Ren and they both stared ahead at the medbay doors until Ren's palm slowly eclipsed the back of Hux's slender pale hand.
"I won't leave for that other place without you," vowed Ren. Despite the hardness of his voice, Hux could see out of the corner of his eye that tears were falling silently down his cheeks. Even Ren's tears, like his strange new blood, were a queer iridescence.
"He might tell you to kill me."
"Then I will kill him, instead."
"Ren, you can't say such things. If he knew-"
"You know, Hux," Ren interrupted quietly with a smirk, "you need to learn to take 'yes' for an answer."
~
It was as the evacuation shuttle piloted by the two tense Stormtroopers was gliding over the ashen craggy surface of Snoke's planet that Hux realized the starshine in Ren's blood was all of the Light being purged from his body. Murdering his father had guaranteed Ren his own seat among the eldritch ghouls who watched from distant aeons the pitiful, insignificant toil of humanity. It brought Them a perverse joy to feel Ren's humanness slough off him like dead, rotten flesh. He was not long for this world, as he decayed further into the black hole of ego death. As long as the Light spiraled within Ren's double helices, illuminating the darkest recesses of his pyrrhic mind, he could never evolve into the writhing, whispering abyss that covered an expanse of space so ancient and unholy that had Ren not been given a glimpse into Their realm, he would never believe such horrors could exist.
General Hux, even for all of his pragmatism and obliviousness of the Force, had felt the evil shade of the Elder Gods' presence in Ren's mind. In his dreams, which typically were hazy and half-forgotten before he had woken up, he could always feel a looming ominousness melded into Ren's shadow, even when Hux couldn't actually see the blighted Knight.
The planet's dark and jagged mountains and stony, dead fields barely seemed to catch the brittle sunlight that seeped through endless oceans of thundering clouds. As the atmosphere worsened and shards of lightning pierced the sky beyond the cockpit transparasteel, Hux and Kylo decided to assume piloting; foreseeing no further use for the two Stormtroopers, they were cleanly picked off with a blaster shot to the head each by an expressionless Hux. Ren threw one corpse over each shoulder to carry down to and deposit in the medbay.
Hux's fastidious navigating evaded the worst of the storms, traveling towards the planet's global north, which only became more bleak and thunderous. Slate and hail blended with the racous cracks of lightning and resounding bellows of thunder. The cockpit transparasteel clattered with thick clumps of ice, their shadows flecking Hux's face like thousands of tiny, quick-fading bruises. Ren dazedly watched Hux's impassive face, skimming his mind only lightly to discover that he was much more nervous than he let himself appear. Yet, the steely glint Hux forced into his tight-lipped glare comforted Ren. If Hux were the unmoving boulder of iron and metal conglomerates, Ren was the glaze of frost drawn to its strong, binding surface. No matter how chilly Hux could look, the angular set of his jaw framed by his fiery hair melted the glaciers that spanned the entirety of Ren's heart.
Tightly woven coils in Ren's stomach knotted themselves over and over as his mind continually drifted towards thoughts of Hux and the way the voices that meandered ominously in his mind murmured Their assent; through Ren, They could feel the animosity that radiated from within Hux, a veritable inferno of vitriol that seeped from his barbed tongue. It is said the Force works in mysterious ways, even on those oblivious to its presence. The closer they drew towards Snoke's physical presence, the stronger the sinister ancients garbled in excitement. Towards Them came careening a pair of energies, somehow, a pair of humans, so volatile their very existence seared white hot across uncountable lightyears.
As they neared a sunken, desolate fortress that jutted in an ungainly fashion from the mouth of a primal, endless ocean, Kylo realized with a sickening terror in his stomach that the Light protected beings from these things that craved immunity to it. Perhaps when one loses their natural protection from whatever is out there beyond the edges of this reality, they are forced to become desperate, and living beings will do incredible things to remain as their own individual entity.
Hux, stoic and solid as always, navigated the shuttle through the typhoons and hurricanes that Ren remembered perpetually plagued this planet. He had seen Snoke's physical form only a handful of times, and he'd always been secretly left with the impression that Snoke was not exactly what he appeared to be. It was as if Snoke were shrouded in the same gray mists that spurted from the banks of rocky, paleolithic seas. It was as if who he really was, what he really looked like, were hidden as deep as the wrathful sea. As they drew nearer the benthic fortress, a white noise hummed deafeningly, painfully in Ren's ears, the pressure of it inside his head forcing blood to cascade from his nostrils. They would be landing on one of the fortress's many stone prism roofs soon, and as the shuttle brought him closer to the infernal evil that awaited him on this geriatric, warped planet, he pressed his palms harshly against his ears. Dawning on Ren was the sickening realization that Snoke and Snoke's deific Master were the same entity, and soon he and Hux would be devoured into their unity.
"...Ren? God, you're bleeding so heavily. What -- ?"
"Snoke is an Elder One," Ren replied heavily through his blood-stuffed nose. "He plans to absorb our power into himself. Without the Light to make us invisible to the Elder Ones, They can prey on us."
Hux shook his head, metallic green eyes focused pointedly out the cockpit transparasteel. A bead of perspiration trailed heavily down his temple. "What are you saying, Ren?"
"We will become eldritch monstrosities, Hux, there's no fighting against that. But." He fidgeted slightly, woozy from the nauseating scent of blood. "Wouldn't you rather we become Elder Ones together?"
Hux's knuckles tightened on the shuttle controls, teeth grit so hard his jaw ached. The streams of blood embezzled with Light that poured from Ren's nose put into perspective the prospect of losing himself to these ghoulish beings, and with determination replied, "Yes, Ren. If we are to lose ourselves, at least we can prevent losing each other."
~
Snoke's half-sunken fortress was as eerie as Ren had always remembered it. Hux tersely followed him through empty corridors once they descended from the brutalist pillars where they had landed the shuttle. Slanting rain pelted both men through the wide expanse of windows cut from the very stone of the walls. Whether they had been designed without panes or over millennia any transparasteel had since been shattered and swept out to the shadowed sea was anyone's guess.
Thousands of voices colluded in Ren's mind, each whispering with more malice than the last, the terrible cacophony swirling painfully between each ear. The closer they were to the subterranean chamber where Snoke dwelled, the louder Their bellows became and the more bioluminescent blood that seeped from Ren's nose and ears. Even Hux, as insensitive to the Force as he was, began to feel a lightheaded pressure behind his eyes. Many times Ren would stumble from the agony, but Hux would bring him back to his feet and continue their trek across this seemingly never-ending fortress.
After what felt like a lifetime, Ren finally brought them to a set of double doors engraved with symbols and patterns Hux had never seen before. They opened slowly of their own accord, and with a pang of anxiety Hux realized Snoke knew they were here. He had probably known since the second their shuttle had passed into the planet's atmosphere. He and Ren stepped into the room that was devoid of light.
~
"Thank you, General, for bringing Kylo Ren to me."
Snoke in person was similar to his hologram; aged, humanoid, unnaturally tall for any being Hux was remotely familiar with. But he couldn't displace the sensation that what he was looking at was a finely crafted illusion. He wouldn't have giving credence to such speculations had Ren not implied that that was indeed the case.
"Of course, Supreme Leader," he replied coolly.
"You are dismissed, General."
"No, he's not." Ren glared up at Snoke through messy bangs dried with blood that twinkled like the night sky. "He will be joining me where I am destined to go."
For a considerable time there was an uneasy silence until Snoke's gravelly laugh filled the dungeon.
"Don't be a fool, Lord Ren," the Supreme Leader sneered. "He is useless to us, now. Do you really think he has the fortitude to survive Them?" As Snoke spoke, the last remnants of light in Ren's blood faded away. Ice cold panic shivered down both Hux and Ren's spine. Below their feet, the earth beneath the atmospheres of ocean groaned, tremors running the entirety of the massive stronghold. Without thinking, Hux and Ren's fingers found themselves interlaced as they struggled to maintain their balance.
"The Elder Gods always underestimated humans. But you know nothing of our resolve." With a deftness that surprised even Ren, Hux snatched the lightsaber from his belt and strode toward Snoke on legs stealthy enough to neutralize the incessant trembling of the floor beneath him and the walls that, though high and unscalable, seemed too small to contain him.
"Ren," Hux instructed without taking his eyes off Snoke's beady slitted eyes, "hold him in place."
Without question, Ren brought both hands out in front of him and focused his powers so sharply his nose began bleeding once more. Snoke remained seated in his throne, unmoving.
"Do it, General," Snoke crooned with an edge of cruelty that he didn't bother to conceal. "If you think you can handle the consequences."
Ren stalked forward slowly, channeling every iota of his strength into restraining Snoke. Hux's mind was ablaze like a supernova, imagining nothing but a headless Snoke on repeat. It did not cross Ren's mind once to stop Hux from killing his Master.
Hux strode forward until he was only meters away before brandishing the plasma blade of Ren's lightsaber. The dungeon crackled with the ghostly light, highlighting his own manic grin.
"I can handle anything," Hux said simply before parrying and thrusting upwards, missing Snoke's face by a few millimeters as the Elder One who disguised himself as flesh and blood broke free of Ren's hold momentarily and thrust a static orb of power at Hux; he easily deflected and sent the powerful bomb careening into a wall where it left a gaping hole. Ren snatched back control of Snoke's physical form and Hux, ruthlessly efficient as he was, lunged forward with lightsaber above his head only to bring it down upon Snoke's skull, splitting it in half, before swiping sideways and disconnecting the weathered graying skin from his neck. Dark, foul smelling blood erupted from the fatal wound like a maroon geyser, coating him in a slimy layer of alien serum.
Ren dashed forward, eyes alight and glassy.
"It's time," he breathed shakily.
Where Snoke's body had fallen heavily onto the stone floor, it had begun to disintegrate in an undulating miasma of death and space. The lightsaber's sheen was swallowed into the blackhole that formed from Snoke's earthly remains. Abyssal galaxies poured from Snoke's neck, eyes and tentacles writhing from its mass, reaching for Hux and Ren. And then it happened.
The pain of millions of eldritch shadows digesting him cell by cell seemed to have knocked him unconscious, but it became apparent that wherever Hux had been transported, it was no plane of existence he was familiar with. Structures whose geometry was foreign and unsettling surrounded him as he struggled to determine right from left and up from down. Finally allowing himself to panic, he screamed into the nightmarish maw of the Elder Gods Ren's name.
The few seconds it took Ren to respond from whatever corner of this universe or the next he had been transported to felt to Hux like an eternity, and the fear that Ren had abandoned him here in this horrific place was more agonizing than the way he was being gnawed literally and figuratively from the inside out. But then Hux felt a large, familiar hand snatch his own and somehow, though Ren had to be lightyears away from him, he had found Hux through the insanity they were both slowly being dragged into.
"Fight it!" screamed Ren over a whirring in Hux's ears he hadn't noticed until now. He squeezed Ren's hand as tightly as he could in response. Snoke's laughter echoed in their ears, ricocheting off of the impossible geometry of this hellish realm.
Yet, when Ren drew Hux against his broad chest in an embrace, they no longer disintegrated into the vacuum of this galaxy but rather began to meld into one another. Where their bodies they had begun to fall apart they now grew into each other, painfully but intimately forcing themselves together.
To Hux, it felt like watching the world collapse upon itself and knowing that he could not escape. Billions upon billions of horrified shrieks roared in his ears as he realized they were the souls taken by Starkiller. These were the last things Hosnian Prime saw and felt before Hux gave the order to vaporize them. Snarling against the dying light, he steeled his mind and thought victoriously, Their fate was to die. Mine is to conquer.
Ren, holding onto Hux like the lifeline he was, held his breath as he was forced to live through again Han Solo's death, Lor San Tekka's death, of every Jedi youngling he had slaughtered with his own two hands. In a twisted breed of symbiosis, as the two dissolved into one another so did their memories and thoughts, before long creating a feedback system that only empowered one from the other's desire for control and unlimited strength. Hux's tyranny spurred in Ren his bloodlust. They had become their own cycle, their own nervous system, amongst the chaos of this unfamiliar universe.
They didn't realize their transformation had been completed, that they had been cleansed of any last lingering thread of humanity, until the din faded into nothingness.
Every otherworldly being of this dimension had perished but General Hux and Kylo Ren. If one were to fear them now, it would be because even a pantheon of ancient, malevolent gods could not defeat them nor keep them apart.
~
In the aftermath of General Hux, Kylo Ren, and Supreme Leader Snoke's disappearance, the First Order was sent reeling into disorder; Captain Phasma, the last Commander on board the Finalizer, had overridden the passcode to Hux's quarters and had been met by a ginger tabby cat sitting contemptuously on the General's pristine bed. Something in the way the cat had been left behind, and the mercy inherent in such an act, confirmed what Phasma had known to be true; wherever Hux had gone to, he would never be returning.
~
Sometimes, when Leia would tell Rey the same Alderaanian stories she had once mystified Ben Solo with, she swore she could hear a distant voice that sounded like her estranged son.