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You taught me the courage of stars before you left.
How light carries on endlessly, even after death.
With shortness of breath, you explained the infinite.
How rare and beautiful it is to even exist
ミ☆ ミ★ ミ☆ ミ★
"Hux..." whispered the starlight from its infinite throat, a melody that had been composed explicitly for Hux and Hux alone to hear. His name had never sounded as beautiful as it did when it was orchestrated by the galaxies that spiraled behind his peaceful eyelids.
His copper hair was a striking contrast against the lush green meadow where he lay, arms propped behind his head and eyes cast upwards to the constellations. Hux felt the increasingly familiar voice of the heavens murmur in both his mind and all around him, simultaneously, in this soporific Eden. The stars above glittered mischievously, as if they had a secret to tell him, should he want to hear it. In his peripheral, sometimes, he could swear he saw the skies morph into curious eyes that gazed down on him longingly.
"Good evening," breathed the silvery winds that caressed Hux's cheek. "I see you've been letting yourself return to me every night."
"Why shouldn't I? You make good company," Hux said flippantly, yet enamored that his dreams could be so intricate. Whether these sequences he had been having nightly were simply a product of his own brain or not, these blinking stars provided more intimate conversation than Hux had been accustomed to for the longest time. It wasn't quite intimate in its content, but there was a certain lyricism in its tone that settled a little too comfortably within him. Part of him believed that this docile nighttime meadow was a fantasy conjured up by himself as a response to his lack of emotional stimulation in the waking world. However, for some reason, Hux thought it would be rude to speculate this to the starlight. He found himself increasingly sensitive to the feelings of this astral being.
"Even if I'm nothing but a dream to you?" the starlight then asked him quietly, unsure of itself, somehow.
"Well, is that not what I am to you as well?"
Another gentle breeze ghosted over Hux's skin, prickling the hair on his arms and neck. It was as if these celestial winds could unthread tension simply by touching him, its slightest pressure therapeutic.
"You are my dream, yes, but you are so much more than that to me. I...believe in you." The starlight paused, then inquired, that same doubt bleeding through its voice again, "Do you believe in me?"
"Believe in you?" mused Hux, his slim fingers massaging themselves into the long grass. "What do you mean by that?"
"Am I real? To you?"
Hux allowed himself a rare moment of introspection; moments later, he had the answer he felt was most honest.
"If you are stars and summer breezes then I suppose I do."
"And if I weren't stars and summer breezes? If I was something much more, something much different?" it countered.
"I think," Hux murmured, "that as long as you can speak to me, you are real."
The cool air seemed to swath itself around Hux, an embrace so sweet that he felt his eyes become heavy with exhaustion.
"You'll be waking up soon," replied the starlight as the meadow was already beginning to disappear and he was thrust into the transitory world between slumber and consciousness.
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"Phasma?"
"Hm?"
"How real do you think dreams are?"
Phasma took a hearty gulp of brandy, setting the glass down. She gazed towards the gilded sunset that gave her platinum blonde hair a brilliant sheen and replied without turning to face Hux, "As real as you let them be."
Hux nodded slowly with consideration. A few silent minutes passed as Hux absently swallowed from his glass of whiskey.
Phasma turned to study Hux for a moment, then draped one muscular arm around his shoulders.
"Sometimes believing is all you can do," she said pointedly, but he knew Phasma well enough to hear the kindness in her words. Hux nodded again, tipping his head to rest on her broad shoulder, continuing to drink as the sun descended behind the trees as it always had.
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A yawning chasm swallowed Hux as it did every night ever since the starlight had begun visiting him. The only difference tonight, though it was a big one, took him by surprise; instead of finding himself laying on his back in the middle of the meadow he had come to expect, he was standing atop a mountain that reached proudly from the inky blackness of space, its base nowhere in sight. It was possible that it didn't even exist.
The longer Hux looked below at the cosmic abyss, more stars would shatter the blackness with their opalescence, emerging as if newly born from the emptiness. Gradually, planets began to bloom in the nothingness with their own swirling atmospheres and fantastically colored oceans and terra.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" echoed the starlight from the endless heavens above Hux that flickered expectantly.
"Breathtaking," admitted Hux, then added, "Why are you showing me this?"
"Because I can!" snickered the stars above with a touch of smugness. "I knew you would appreciate the view," it offered more seriously, contemplatively.
"Thank you." Hux laid down on the mountaintop, closing his eyes briefly. When he opened them, he was once again lying in their meadow, though now it had been snuggled atop the mountain. When he looked up he saw millions of stars vying for his attention, while looking below offered him the sight of one planetary system after another. It could've been overwhelming as it felt hyperrealistic, surreal; but Hux could not experience fear when he was in the presence of the starlight.
"So, what exactly are you?" Hux asked casually, running his hands lazily over the petals of a small flower perched daintily on its stem, his mind drifting to their first encounters and remembering how they had rarely spoke. It had been a companionable silence where they could simply feel one another in this halfway realm.
Hux's question seemed to catch the starlight by surprise, as it was quiet for a few moments before responding, "It would take more than a lifetime to describe it to you. Our universes are different, with many differing laws between them."
Hux sat up. "Different universe? Is that...even possible?"
As the starlight chortled its confirmation, a few stars shot across the heavens. It sounded both soothingly human and mystifyingly alien to Hux's ears.
"There are many universes, Hux. I am just but one of so many. Tell me, do you believe that?"
Lowering himself back onto the ground, Hux let himself drift deeply into thought. He already knew his answer, but instead found himself pondering what its implications would mean should his beliefs be true.
"Yes, I believe that."
"Oh? I was not expecting you to believe me. What I understand of your natural laws and the particulars of your species, my existence would counter many things you would believe in."
"Well," Hux's voice was careful and tinged by sleepiness, "I've already chosen to believe this dream is real. It's still a dream, but that doesn't mean you aren't actually communicating with me. Although what confuses me more is why you seem to have chosen my company."
"I've explored the multiverse extensively, but never before had I realized a part of me was missing until your consciousness became known to me. Perhaps your atoms originated in a star from my universe, or your matter is simply destined to merge with mine."
"I'd never expected a universe to believe in destiny or fate."
"What you choose to believe in is important," the starlight rumbled cryptically. "Every living being believes in something."
"So you are a living thing?"
"In some sense, yes."
A warm gust carried the scent of lavender flowers toward Hux, imprinting him with a sweetness reminiscent of late summer, and that was when he realized that the entire meadow had sprung up with vivid purple. The delicate aroma hypnotized him, until all he could visualize behind his eyelids that fluttered shut was bright sunlight dappled through vividly emerald leaves, concerts of bugs crescendoing from the trees, the refreshing ripple of winding rivers.
When Hux opened his eyes again, he was nestled into his bed with sunlight streaming lazily through the window next to his bed. As he pulled himself to his feet, stretching away his drowsiness, the unmistakable fragrance of lavender seemed to fill his bedroom briefly. He caught its scent long enough to decide that he rather quite enjoyed it and how it made him feel.
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"Do you think more than just this universe exists?" Hux adjusted his newly potted lavender plant on his windowsill, fingering its little petals gingerly.
"I think," said Phasma from where she lay on his bed, flipping through one of Hux's old history books with only a trace of interest, "it would be premature to assume that our universe is the only one out there."
Hux hummed an assenting noise, then crossed the room to flop on his bed next to Phasma. "How's Rey?"
"Just fine. Busy with lacrosse and physics projects. I swear that girl never slows down for a moment."
"Would you love her even if she wasn't human?" The question escaped Hux's lips before he could decide against asking it.
Phasma quirked an eyebrow, leaning on her elbows. "Like what, an animal or mythical creature or something? Vampires, werewolves? That sort of thing?"
Hux cleared his throat. "Well uh, more like if she were something, uh, intangible."
Her eyebrow perked up higher, but when Hux offered no more explanation she answered, "I suppose I would. Isn't the basic concept of love itself intangible?"
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Hux's eyes opened and he sat up in bed, knowing immediately he was asleep. It was nighttime, but outside his bedside window countless stars and the imposing bodies of incandescent planets passed by as if he were in a rapidly moving spacecraft.
"Where are we going?" he called out into his dim room, lit only by the celestial lights of deep space.
"Anywhere you would like," the starlight said, and Hux felt as if it would be smiling were that a possible thing for him to see.
"Take me to see you. You must know what I look like, so I'd like to see you," Hux reasoned.
"Oh, Hux. I can't do that."
"Can't or won't?" Hux crossed his arms over his chest.
"Can't. Not yet, anyways."
"Ah, I see."
"I'm sorry."
There was a short pause where Hux felt rejected and the starlight felt lonely. "You bought lavenders," it pointed out.
"They remind me of you." Another pause. "Does anything remind you of me?"
"Everything," came the instantaneous affirmation.
Hux climbed out of bed and made his way to the window, where he leaned his forearms against the panel and breathed in the lavenders on their long stalks while watching planets orbit slowly and moons shine with light borrowed from distant suns.
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Sleep had barely washed over Hux like a dark wave before he found himself back in their meadow. The starlight above gleamed with an iridescence he had never seen before, one lovely constellation merging with another until the sky shimmered with colors he had never known to exist. Hux stood breathless beneath the expanse of starshine.
"Do you still want to meet me?" the starlight pulsed with ribbons of light, as if in excitement. "In the waking world?"
Desperately, Hux tried to summon words to flow from his tongue, but he couldn't will his mouth to speak, as he was so enthralled by the starlight and its omnipresent grandeur. Instead, he nodded feverishly, heart threatening to clamber its way out from between his ribs.
"There is a meteor shower tomorrow night, and that's when I will come to you. And then, perhaps we could...think of the future. Together."
"Are you going to stay with me?" Hux finally asked tentatively, quietly.
"Only if that's what you want."
ミ☆ ミ★ ミ☆ ミ★
A moody turquoise sky slowly gave way to navy blue, blotted by swollen gray clouds and the first arrival of stars. Hux moved outside to sit on his porch, a glass of brandy in one hand and its bottle in his other. For not the first time, he appreciated the isolation of his tired and color-faded home. The nearest neighbor was miles away and the town his property was legally located in, Arcadia, was even farther. There was no light pollution or the mental strain of urban life's constant noises. His hometown in Great Britain was an incessantly busy place, one that as a child he'd often wished to extract himself from when his senses became overstimulated.
Now, with only the constellations of fireflies and humming owls for company tonight, he felt a kind of peace that soothed a tiredness he'd long held within himself.
As his hopeful eyes remained fixated on the stars, he found himself remembering stories his mother had told him at night about ancient celestial beings who were sometimes seen in the dreams of those sensitive to their existence.
Waiting for the first opalescence of light in the sky, for the first time, he allowed himself to wish for something, to want something that couldn't be attained through hard work, something that might not exist at all. But Hux was one to stand by his convictions, and if he were going to let himself believe, he was not going to take half measures with his faith.
Perhaps, he thought idly, believing so firmly is the hard work.
Hux's father had not believed in the tales Hux's mother would whisper late at night to her son to help him sleep, always carefully out of his father's earshot. As Hux got older, he reflected his father's vocal disbelief in those fantastic tales, but late at night sometimes when it was dark and he was alone, he would still hear his mother murmuring to him about beings who were immortal and incomprehensible to humans.
It could've been Hux's loneliness from a career that dominated his life, the death of his parents but specifically his mother, or being unfavored by peers for his emotional distance and prickliness, but there came a point where Hux found it more convenient to believe those childhood mythos than to reject them.
He immigrated to the States and for once in his life let himself try to become a person he was naturally meant to be, not an artificial sycophant like he had been; too pliant, too willing to meet other peoples' expectations. He'd followed every one of the goals predestined by his father and yet the place in his chest where he expected to feel pride and honor remained empty. Military success was grueling, and yet he had rose to the task each time. Hux had always told himself he was happy, because he knew he was supposed to be, but at age thirty-four with both parents dead and an aimlessness he found to be most distressing, he couldn't truthfully say he was.
It hadn't been long after Hux had moved into this weary and secluded house on the forested outskirts of Arcadia that the starlight illuminated his solemn dreams for the first time.
Now, as he sat on the wood planks of the wraparound porch, back against his front door, his heart couldn't slow once the meteor shower began.
Hux watched breathlessly as gleam after twinkling gleam fell across the inky sky, framed by the elderly trees with branches that stretched adoringly into the heavens. A few friendly fireflies glowed around his face, one perching briefly on his nose; it was as if the universe were giving him an intimately orchestrated light show.
Hours passed while Hux's drowsy eyes watched the meteors fall in succession, some seeming to pass much closer than the others. He couldn't remember the last time had watched a meteor shower, fairly certain he had to have been a child. Perhaps with his mother. That seemed like something they'd have done together.
Long after midnight and into the early hours of morning, the meteor shower began to dwindle. Fogged with sleepiness, Hux had almost forgot what the starlight had said to him in his dream the night prior. Something clenched his heart in a vice, something renewing his faith in the starlight he had come to cherish. Finally, when his eyes took in the final meteor and reflected it in his pupils, he knew it was what he had been waiting for; he increasingly became aware he had actually waited his whole life for this moment.
This meteor was strikingly different to all those preceding it. Hux blinked and rubbed his eyes multiple times only to confirm that the light searing across the sky was a color he had never seen before in his life, a color that theoretically did not exist. It careened through the sky until Hux acutely realized that it was moving much closer and was projected to land nearby.
He underwent another wave of breathlessness as the brilliant color descended with a deafening and earth shaking impact within the woods behind his house.
Any normal person would've been too fearful to enter the dense woods where the color from space had taken residence. Hux, however, immediately stepped off the porch and made his way carefully into the dark maw of the forest.
The meteor had not landed far away and the tiniest sliver of otherworldly light Hux followed eventually became a pulsing effervescence that his heart acquiesced to. Its impossible colors reflected from the trees' waxy leaves, rippling through the grasses and wildflowers. The surface of the ivory half-moon even seemed to absorb the alien hues, casting this familiar earthly forest into something bioluminescent and unknown.
Yet, Hux still pressed forward, springy grass underfoot that only seemed to push him closer to the smoking crater. Finally, he stood at the rim of the impacted ground, hypnotized by the way the light danced, as if it were addressing him. He dropped to one knee, splaying his fingers out as he tried to touch the searing pulse of alien color, when the meteor seized violently enough that it shattered down the middle. More streaks of light swirled from the fissure and lapped at the air towards Hux. Stunned, he fell backwards onto the ground and watched as the strangely colored light moved in glitches from the split meteor, winding its way towards Hux with tentative purpose.
Blinking like thousands of fireflies at once, the color from space stopped in front of Hux. He took several heavy breaths before whispering hoarsely, "Are you the starlight?"
"I am." It's voice was quiet and too loud all at once, emanating from inside Hux's chest and working as a pressure against it.
"This is how you truly look?" murmured Hux from the ground, too shocked to bring himself to his feet. His legs trembled too harshly to stand, anyways.
"Sometimes," replied the color. Its voice was similar to a synthesizer, falsetto and baritone, airy and heavy, both soothing Hux and making the hair on the back of his neck erect. "But I can be something more familiar to you."
Before Hux had a chance to ask what that meant, the strange color had begun morphing into something distinctly human shaped. Then, the otherworldly shades began melting from the chromed human outline, leaving in its wake a gorgeous man with black wavy hair the color of infinite space, dark eyes with a gravitational force that pulled in and reflected any shred of light they took in, and beauty marks scattered carelessly over pale skin like stars in a galaxy. His naked body, broad shouldered and muscled, was belied by the expressive effeminate face that stared at him through lush eyelashes.
The human features adopted by the color out of space were immensely attractive to Hux. He was mesmerized in more ways than one by this impossible being standing before him.
"Is this form more comforting to you?" the alien asked, lowering himself beside Hux.
Hux nodded slowly, clamping his mouth shut when he realized it had fallen open in endless surprise. Hesitantly, he reached out to draw his fingers softly across a speckled cheek, gasping lightly when a barely perceptible shock jolted through his fingers. There was so much raw power beneath this malleable matter and it made him shiver with its potential.
"What is your name?" whispered Hux, eyes unable to be drawn away from this fantastic being.
The man that was not really a man looked thoughtful. In low, velvet tones he answered, with the tiniest smirk, "Kylo."
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If Hux thought the dreams he shared with Kylo were incredible before, now they were downright magical. He was with Hux the moment he drifted to sleep and the first thing he saw in the early sunlit mornings. Kylo being within such close proximity to him seemed to change something between them, as now he often both heard and felt Kylo in his own mind. At first the sensation had seemed invasive and disquieting, but soon he realized that whatever memory or thought Kylo plucked like ripe fruit from his mind was replaced by a memory or thought of his own. They learned a lot about each other this way, exchanging psychically their lives and the experiences within them.
In comparison to the endless galaxies and churning atoms Kylo projected into his mind, Hux's memories of hushed stories that fell from his mother's lips or the ragged terrains of where he had been deployed to during military service seemed trivial.
But then he realized these things were as foreign to Kylo as what Kylo showed to him, and amazed him all the same.
One night, nestled into Hux's bed with the sweetness of lavender filling his room, he asked into the darkness, "You can't die, can you, Kylo?"
"I cannot," he confirmed.
Hux swallowed a tightness in his throat. "What will you do when I die?"
Kylo leaned on one elbow to gaze inquisitively at Hux's face that was creased with uncertainty. "What do you want me to do?"
Hux shook his head. "I don't know. Honestly, I...I don't want to die, if it means we can't be together anymore."
Kylo's arms pressed Hux against his chest, lulled by the steady rhythm of his heart.
"When the time comes, Hux, I can bring you to a place where you will be forced to transcend your humanity. Is that really what you want? It can never be undone and we'll become an eternal singularity, destined to collude together against the disorderly, to live amongst and to dominate other galactic entities. I can feed you the farthest galaxies, dress you in shimmering robes of aurora borealis from the most lawful universes. These are the things I can do for you. Are these things... are they something you'd want?"
A slow kiss accentuated by warm breath passed between their mouths.
"I've never wanted anything else more in my life."
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Phasma,
You were my only friend for the longest time in my life, and I regret bidding farewell this way, but it is the easiest and least painful way, I promise. Remember when we would talk about dreams and just how real they were? I finally let myself believe in the starlight that spoke to me at night while I slept, and I've departed from this familiar world to be with it. I'm not in pain, I'm not dead. By the time you find this letter, I won't be able to die. Phasma, if a being comes to you in your dreams and shows you universes and colors and physics you could never believe were real, believe them. There are things that exist from parts of space so ancient, we are newborns in comparison. But they can love and think and feel, and sometimes, if your mind shines brightly enough, they will find you out of innumerable universes and share their unimaginable secrets. We are not so different from them in the ways that truly matter. Don't worry, Phasma, and know you were my best friend when I needed one most. But this is something that I must do for myself. I'll come back for you if you ever want me to.