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"I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
Without knowledge, or lustre, or name.”
-H.P. Lovecraft
Hux flounced through the snow behind the Stormtroopers when the ground opened its hellish maw and swallowed them into the inner fathoms of the planet. He teetered on the precipice, feeling the magma heat his face, before remembering the jet pack strapped to his back. He tumbled to the other side of the chasm in the earth from the air he had been thrust into, meters from where Ren lay immobilized. There was scant time left; great, moaning faults were reaching toward them, earth giving way to fire and great trenches of molten rock.
"I swear to God--!" muttered Hux as he rushed to his feet, displeased that since his Stormtrooper grunts had tumbled into the recesses of this dying planet, the task of sparing Ren the same fate fell on his padded shoulders. There wasn't much time to think. Hux simply grabbed the barely conscious man under his shoulders and smashed his jetpack's thrusters to life.
By now, entire swaths of trees were tumbling around them. A branch clipped his shoulder, knocking one hand free from under Ren's armpit; Ren dangled, unconscious, above the spitting lava, Hux's hands fisted under the tightly woven material of Ren's outer layer of robes.
"Fuck," Hux hissed, struggling to regain his grip on Ren. They were nearing the shuttle, but the ground around it had already begun to break apart, negating a safe landing before the ramp. It was certainly not the way Hux would've preferred to board the shuttle, but he flung Ren into the hatch, perhaps a little harder than necessary, and then shut off the jetpack midair as he threw himself in after him. Ren had slammed against the metal of the inner wall of the ship, falling to the floor in a groaning, black heap. Hux was a flurry of greatcoat and jetpack straps, all but diving into the cockpit to close the ramp and ascend into the atmosphere.
More snow laden trees toppled, crushing into the transparasteel of the cockpit. Hux grit his teeth before sharply snatching the controls to angle them upwards, as far from the ground as possible. Just as the earth gave way beneath the shuttle, its autopilot launched them into the air harshly, throwing Hux back into the belly of the ship and crashing into Ren's twitching form.
Right. Ren.
He was hemorrhaging profusely from his abdomen, as evidenced by the torrents of blood that slicked the steel floor. It took Hux a few tries to gain his footing through the viscous puddles, sneering with dark amusement as he slipped and slid through Ren's blood in an inarguably comedic fashion. Finally, he contented himself with stumbling, half standing and half crouched, pulling Ren along by his cowl. His face was twisted in pain, made further unsightly by the fresh, mostly cauterized wound that now zagged diagonally from the side of his chin and just shy of his eye.
Once his boots stopped slipping over the glossy floors, he was able, with considerable effort, to drag his charge's dead weight into the small medbay section of the shuttle. Using the last ounces of his strength, he finally heaved Ren onto a cot.
"Nnhnhn," was all that came from his dazed prostration.
From the sleeping quarters of the shuttle, Hux could hear Millicent yowling in displeasure. He shared her sentiment, half tempted to screech his frustration away, too. But that would have to wait. He tasked himself with the next urgency: stopping Ren's organs from tumbling out of his side. Fortunately, Ren's attire was layered and form-fitting enough that any organs that might've been blasted loose were held snug against his frame. For once, Ren's ascetic proclivities made Hux's life easier.
Medical shears revealed the gouge in Ren's side. The stench of blood made Hux's head swim, but he snapped on a surgical mask and sterilized gloves before sinking his hands into the ghastly wound in order to begin sewing it up from the inside.
Any lesser man would've bled to death or fainted from the agony, but even with chagrined reluctance, Hux admitted to himself that Kylo Ren was not a lesser man.
Knuckles deep in flayed tissue, Hux worked adamantly until the terrible, meaty hole in Ren's side was sutured completely. He'd had to carefully push a few ropes of intestines back into their rightful position, but even the agony of semi-evisceration couldn't kill this towering beast of a human.
Bandages were wrapped neatly around the side of his head sporting the cauterized slash -- his mind flitted instantly to the word lightsaber -- and finally he hung Ren's limp, nerve damaged arm in a tourniquet. Ren couldn't seem to move it very well, as if he could move anything well in this state, and the absence of broken bones concluded that important tendons had been shredded.
"You're a goddamn mess, Ren," Hux muttered, falling back into a seat and snapping off his bloody gloves.
After a few moments to catch his breath, Hux slipped out of the medbay, believing Ren to be asleep.
"Thank you," came a strangled whisper from the cot behind him; Hux pretended he didn't hear.
Millicent was Hux's one true luxury. Animals were not permitted aboard the Finalizer, but if he could disappear Hosnian Prime in a matter of seconds, then he felt he deserved the company of a pet. The moment Starkiller Base underwent destruction, he'd rescued Millicent first, enclosing her within the sturdy cage built into one of the walls of his personal escape shuttle. Naturally, she had been very frightened, undoubtedly able to sense the calamity emanating from within the earth itself.
He'd expected her to have relaxed even a little bit once they had departed, but she pressed herself into the back of her cage, growling under her breath in the direction of the medbay.
The orange tabby cat had never had any issue in particular with Ren before, yet now she refused to move from where she crouched in her cage. Hux placed food and the tiniest bit of blue milk in front of her, but she pointedly ignored it. He sighed, resigned. She'd have to come around on her own, he decided.
With nothing else better to do, Hux made his way to the cockpit and took the pilot's seat.
The stars seemed too bright in this region of space, thousands of tiny eyes staring at them in their little metal shuttle. How far had they managed to go? The shuttle indicated they had been in motion for around three and a half hours, but, to Hux's confusion, the distance they covered was greater than what a simple escape shuttle could accomplish in such a time frame.
"Need to get that fixed," Hux yawned to himself, leaning back into the pilot's seat. He turned off the autopilot, abruptly seeing a belt of asteroids in the distance, and assumed control of navigation. Once he'd swam them around the immediate danger of collisions with space debris, he reset the autopilot back to its coordinates once more and slumped into an uneasy sleep.
Stars.
Stars.
Stars. eyes
watching
pulling
knowing
Hux awoke with a jolt, the remnants of words echoing into nothingness inside his ear. His head whipped around, expecting to find Ren speaking lowly in his eardrum, but he was alone in the cockpit. When his eyes adjusted, what lay beyond the transparasteel made him inexplicably nauseas.
"It wants us to follow the path it's laid out for us."
Hux almost jumped out of his skin. Somehow, Ren had appeared behind him in the cockpit without a single noise.
"What are you going on about?" Hux snapped, taking in the bandages soiled with blood and lymphatic fluid still wrapped about Ren's body. "And why in God's name are you up? Your intestines were hanging out a few hours ago."
Ren titled his head, expression unchanging and unreadable.
"I was bored," he sniffed, in a tone that was, surprisingly, convincing to Hux.
"I don't care. You were wounded badly, you need to go back to the medbay--"
Ren dropped heavily into the co-pilot's seat. "I think I'm good here, actually."
Hux tried to resist rolling his eyes but couldn't. If Ren felt well enough to be so insolent, he couldn't be in immediate danger of keeling over, so Hux relented. At any rate, getting into an argument might rile him up into reopening his wounds. Hux didn't want that.
"Worried about me, General?" purred Ren, the smarmy bastard, in implication of having skimmed Hux's mind.
"I can't have Snoke Force choking me to death for letting you die, can I?"
"Whatever you say, Hux," Ren gave the tiniest of smirks.
They both sat in silence for some time; Hux glad to no longer be distracted, tried to work out logistically how they had ended up back before the same asteroid belt he had avoided before his nap. Had the coordinates accidentally been changed? No, they were blank. He tried to reenter the coordinates to the planet Snoke was expecting to meet them at, but the system wouldn't accept the numbers. Hux cursed to try and stifle the creeping fear in his spine.
"I already told you," Ren said simply, "it wants us to follow the path it laid out for us."
Hux let his elbows slam onto the control panel, holding his head in has hands, before whirling on Ren. "Okay, Ren. What Force related trickery have you gotten us into?"
He finally seemed affronted, eyes narrowing to dark slits. "It's calling to me. It's bringing me to itself."
Hux pinched the bridge of his nose, exhaling loudly. "What is, Ren?"
With a wild, manic brightness that radiated from within his eyes, that did not seem to come from reflecting light, Ren breathed heavily, "The Hellstar."
Ben Solo sat up in his bed, staring into the darkness. Had his mother called to him? No, he could hear her, feel her, sleeping a few rooms away. It took him a few moments to become lucid and realize that the voice had come from within his own head. What had it said, again? He couldn't remember, only the vivid and terrifying dreams, the endless fires, a black mask outlined in chrome, a crimson laser searing through the skies, a man with red hair and sharp pale eyes, a crackling red lightsaber, that lightsaber being held by the chromed mask's figure, a phantom draped in black, the lightsaber being raised above their head, poised to strike down Ben where he stood--
"Kylo," came the voice again, and he remembered. It had said that name to him. His name. A special name only they shared.
"Y-yes?" he whispered into the empty room.
But it did not speak again, and Ben did not sleep for the rest of the night.
Hux tried sixteen more times, Kylo Ren had been keeping count, to enter the coordinates into the control panel terminal. He would give up, and then try again, over and over, until at long last he surrendered to the fact that he could not change the shuttle's course of action. It had taken them through the same asteroid belt, but veered in the opposite direction that Snoke's coordinates indicated. It was as if their course had been programmed into the shuttle in such a way that it was impossible to alter.
"You're controlling this ship with the Force, aren't you?" accused Hux angrily, his face starting to tinge red. He jabbed a finger against Ren's chest, even though it was more of a light prod as opposed to the damning shove he usually gave him.
"I already told you twice now," Ren replied coolly. He gently swatted Hux's hand away with his left, uninjured arm.
Hux looked ready to spit red laser from his mouth, so frustrated that Ren was waiting for steam to blow out of his nostrils. Instead, he stormed out of the cockpit and towards Millicent's cell in the wall. "You're on pilot duty," he shouted from the belly of the ship.
"I told you Hux, we're going the path it chose. It... you're not understanding, clearly. It is drawing us toward itself. We might as well be its polar magnetic opposite."
At hearing this, what was to him an actual explanation, Hux came stomping back to the cockpit. He folded his arms over his chest. "I'm listening."
"That's... that's all I know," Ren concluded lamely, looking away from Hux, anticipating his scornful glare.
However, Hux only sighed deeply, as if he carried a weariness that sank to his bones (he did) and replied without venom, "Why do I even bother with you?"
Ren grinned foolishly as Hux huffed again and returned to Millicent, who still leered and yowled in Ren's direction.
"What about Snoke? What if he finds out about you--" Ben whispered hoarsely.
"Don't worry about Snoke," crooned the voice. "When the time comes, I will call for you, and he will be powerless before your true potential."
Hux placed Millicent back into her cage. Normally he would let her wander the shuttle, but her aggressiveness towards Ren precluded Hux's decision to keep her confined when he wasn't watching her. Ren was still in the cockpit, sitting in the pilot's seat while his long legs stretched out to rest in the co-pilot's seat. It was likely he had fallen asleep. Hux still wished the stubborn man would've taken to the cot in the medbay, but he seemed well enough, and Hux was exhausted.
Without preamble, he let himself fall into one of the monochrome beds bolted to the wall in one of the shuttle's few sleeping quarters and was snoring almost as soon as his head hit the papery First Order regulation pillow.
There was no way to determine how long he had slept. Hux jolted out of the compact bed, senses abruptly alert. Something he couldn't identify had prickled the hair along his neck and arms, sharpening his eyesight and erasing any hint of drowsiness from his mind. But the dark sleeping quarters were empty.
Quietly, he emerged to check on Millicent. Perhaps he had heard her crying out?
What he saw stopped him mid-stride. All the power in the ship had defused, and a quick check of the engine room confirmed that even the backup generator was not working. A slow, sour, boiling panic settled in the bottom of his stomach.
"Ren?" Hux called out tentatively, moving about the ship slowly with only the glistening, staring stars to see by.
staring
"Kylo!" Hux cried out this time, sensing something was deeply wrong. The starlight shimmered with a reddish haze that could not be emitted from a normal, distant star.
Clambering into the cockpit, what he saw beyond the transparasteel transfixed him where he stood for a solid minute -- in the distance was a glitching, wavering sheen of red light that enveloped the stars beyond. Like a wall of red electricity, it simply cut off in the middle of space. Craning his head as far as possible, Hux saw with sickening realization that the red wall of light stretched on and on in all directions -- and their shuttle was ever steadily being drawn towards its perimeters. Soon, they would be pulled into the other side of that strange, undulating prism of crimson energy.
"Kylo!" Hux went to shake the knight's shoulder, but he was already standing beside Hux -- how was able to move within Hux's peripheral yet not be seen? -- staring at the wall of light.
"Kylo, we need to do something--" Hux was cut off by Millicent, who wasn't yowling, or hissing, or crying, but screaming from her cell.
"We can't," he barely heard Kylo murmur as Hux rushed to free his cat to comfort her. Instead, she bounded from her cage the moment it was opened and charged towards Kylo, screeching in a way that made Hux's heart tremble. His cat had never shown such aggression towards anything or anyone before.
Millicent lunged for Kylo in an uncharacteristic act of bloodthirstiness, but Kylo simply levitated her with the Force, watching her thrash with rage in the air.
The darkness of the ship cast Kylo's face in shadows, while from behind he was illuminated by the red light. In an awful, eldritch way, to Hux, he looked beautiful.
"I wouldn't hurt her," Kylo Ren promised as Hux snagged Millicent from where she floated with great displeasure, holding her tight enough that she couldn't break free, and deposited her within the cage once again.
"Why is she being so aggressive towards you?" Hux asked quietly.
"She takes after her owner, it seems."
"Ren--"
"Animals can sense it. The Hellstar."
Hux balked. "She's been upset at you since we left Starkiller, though."
Kylo's dark, round eyes seemed to droop in something akin to sadness.
"How do you think it could call me back to it with such force, if I were not a part of it?"
"I don't understand."
"You will," Kylo promised again.
The red light sizzled like so many inextinguishable plasma blades before the transparasteel. They would soon be crossing its boundaries into an ancient part of space where few had ever ventured before. Nobody told Hux this, but he knew anyways.
that is not dead which can eternal lie
and with strange aeons
even death may die
something was creeping
and creeping
and waiting to be
seen and
felt and
h e a r d
but some day
the piecing together
of
d i s s o c i a t e d
ǝƃpǝlʍouʞ
will open up
such
t̴̢e̢̡rr̢͞ify͞i̶ng̢͜
vistas of
reality
his heart beat so loudly
he feared it could be heard
across the universe, and into the next
Leia awoke as if she had been struck, cold sweat coating every inch of her skin, plastering her nightgown to her weary form. For a few seconds, she wasn't sure what had roused her so violently from her slumber, until in her mind a distant vision of her son flashed jaggedly. Her hand flew to cover her mouth in a wordless, voiceless scream, silent tears streaking her face.
Bring our son home, she had told Han that fateful day, and now, neither Han nor Ben would ever return to this familiar world, and the weight of this knowledge sunk her tired heart into a cold, nocturne sea of grief and acceptance.
Wherever her son had gone, whatever untrespassable barrier he had permeated, Leia knew in that instant whoever her son had been before did not exist anymore; and this, to her, was more agonizing than any true, natural death he could've faced in a universe where she could at least bury his corpse.
Leia prayed, to who or what she didn't know and didn't care, that her son's journey would not be purposeless, would not be in vain--that regardless of whatever endless abyss he had fallen into, he could reveal to his eyes even a shred of Light.
A flash of fiery hair shocked her inner eye, and she understood. No matter how deep into the void the man she knew as her child had gone, there would always be one, shimmering star of light to guide him. It was a minuscule comfort, but one that Leia clutched to her heart with a death grip and a sobbed, "Thank you," to no one but that gleaming pointed ginger star in Ben's--Kylo's?--mind's eye.
Exhausted, afraid, Leia fell back into a dreamless rest, the connection she shared with him through the Force dissipating as quietly as one dies in their sleep. Her last thoughts that night were of a new hope she decided to place in the piercing edges of a star with a man's (a general's) soul that orbited with a stubborn power within the blank galaxies of her son's heart.
"Anakin. There's nothing more we can do. In the end, everyone must choose by themselves the path they will take. You, of all people, should understand this."
Anakin wanted to shrug Obi-Wan away, he would've cried if he hadn't long lost the ability to do so.
Instead, he replied as evenly as he could with his trembling voice, "There is one flickering candle of light still present within him. The Starkiller."
"We cannot always anticipate the Force, or the methods which with it operates. If he ignites within Ben even a fraction of light, we should be thankful that his soul is illuminated as such."
"His path saddens me," Anakin finally admitted.
"I know," Obi-Wan said quietly. "I know."
Ruby prisms scorched Hux's retinas, blinding him momentarily as the shuttle entered the region of eldritch red light. There came the terrible sound of rendering metal, and Hux was consumed by sheer panic, positive that the shuttle was being torn apart and would soon expel its contents into the salivating mouth of freezing abyssal space.
But when Hux opened his eyes and stumbled about frantically, inspecting the shuttle for damage, he found that it was still in one piece. The engines and generators were still unresponsive, but there was no danger of immediately being killed via explosive decompression.
In his urgency, he hadn't noticed the figure slumped over in the co-pilot's seat; or, perhaps he did, but had naturally assumed it was Ren. Pushing the hair out of their face, it was apparent that this was not Ren. There was no garish scar running the length of their face, and the person, upon feeling Hux's fingers, awoke to reveal eyes that weren't pools of still dark water. No, these eyes still reflected the light of the red haze like eyes were supposed to do. This was not Kylo Ren, Master of the Knights of Ren, even though otherwise he looked exactly like the Kylo that Hux had come to know.
"Ben Solo?" he whispered with more courage than he felt.
The young man quickly withdrew from Hux's touch. His head swiveled around, taking in his surroundings, and asked with a drop of hysteria in his voice, "What is this place?"
"I was hoping you could tell me," Hux frowned, moving slowly to sit in the pilot's seat. "You are indeed Ben Solo, correct?"
Ben nodded, eyeing Hux suspiciously. "And you're... you're that guy from the propaganda posters. The First Order. You're..."
"General Hux, yes." His waved his hand dismissively. "You really don't know where we are?"
Ben shook his head, amber eyes wide with confusion. "I... was at Uncle Luke's temple. The voice called to me again, I thought... it wasn't you, was it? It must've been Snoke."
"It wasn't me," Hux confirmed. A cold stone of dread plopped into his stomach. That horrible sound of something being wrenched apart rang in his ears. He glanced into the belly of the ship, but only saw menacing shadows that didn't dissipate in the presence of the ruby energy they'd been swallowed into.
"Where's Kylo?" he asked. Ben blanched.
"Th-that's what Snoke calls me," Ben whimpered.
"No, you're not... no, you're Ben. Kylo Ren, he was... he was here before the noise."
"Noise...?" Ben's round, perplexed puppy dog eyes tugged at something nameless inside Hux. It was cute how innocent he looked. And that was how Hux understood what he had to do to sever Snoke's hold on this iteration, of any iteration, of the man he knew as Kylo Ren.
"Listen to me," Hux said lowly, taking Ben by the shoulders and trying not to focus on how the young man's fringe outlined his trusting, near golden eyes. "Snoke knew we'd be coming here. He knew the red light was a nexus point, an aberration in time and space. He used it as a conduit to separate you from Kylo Ren. He knows... he knows that me and him, we aren't coming back. So he wants you. He wants to start all over again. That... you deserve better than that, Ben."
Hux almost couldn't believe what he was saying. But he knew in his gut that he was correct, and the only thing left for him to do was protect Ben from the same fate as Kylo Ren.
"Let's go. There should be one small emergency escape pod aboard this shuttle."
Ben followed after Hux tentatively, but they both hesitated as someone emerged from the darkness.
"Kylo, what in God's name -- holy hell!"
Kylo's eyes were eclipsed by his dilated pupils, black and only tinged slightly with the deep brown they usually were. What stunned Hux's muscles into frozen terror was the change to the man's body; Kylo Ren was naked from the waist up, skin riddled with past scars, but where Hux expected to see a stitched up bowcaster wound and nasty facial cut was a blackness that melted into the darkness around him--until its eyes opened within them.
Hux and Ben both reflexively covered their mouths with their hands, staring in wordless horror at the series of leering eyes that blinked open where Kylo's newest wounds should've been. His side wound had morphed into one grotesque eye rooted in the blackness of Kylo's insides. His human body was a relief of flesh against the evilness of the shadows, alien in this hazy world of stars who, too, were staring at them from beyond the shuttle.
"Kylo!" Hux exclaimed with barely constrained relief. Perhaps a conventional man might not've felt the desire to hug this being, but what part of Hux's life was conventional anymore? He let himself hug Kylo, who flinched as if he had been smacked by Hux, instead.
"Wh-what're you doing?" trembled Ben and Kylo at the same time. Kylo's voice seemed to echo into the void that the rest of the ship behind him seemed to have become.
"What's it look like, Kylo? Wait, what're you--Kylo, no!"
Snaking from the walls and corners of the ship, along from every hidden edge and sloughing out of the ghoulish air of the void itself, while the void remained as unseeable and hopeless as before, were tendrils under his command. They moved towards Ben, sharpening at their ends and poised to strike like so many deadly serpents.
"I can't let him live, Hux," snarled Kylo, his teeth those of a predator's. He poised forward, pushing Hux aside. "Move."
"Stop!" Hux pushed back, a desperate plea in his eyes. "Let him live! Kylo, let him live."
But Kylo shoved him away once more; twisting around as fast as he could, Hux dashed forward and threw himself in front of Ben, snatching the tendrils as they drove forward to kill Kylo's doppleganger.
"Ben, run into the ship! Look for the escape pod!" A brief afterthought. "Take Millicent with you." Somehow he knew Ben would understand the request.
"I have more tentacles, Hux," Kylo snarked, looking at Hux in disbelief.
"You won't use them!" Hux threw back, smiling manically.
"And why's that?" Kylo deadpanned.
"Because if you do, I'll impale myself on your--tentacle?"
"Tentacle, yeah. Or whatever."
"If you kill Ben, you effectively kill me, too."
At this, Kylo seemed to tense up, but his shadowed tentacles didn't move.
"Why would you try to save him?" Kylo loomed forward, Ben long gone, having snatched the orange cat from her cage, tucked her firmly inside his smuggler's vests, and sprinted into the warped dimension that was now their shuttle.
"Because he's you, you idiot!" cried out Hux, never letting go of the tendrils. He suspected at any moment Kylo could snatch them away with ease, so it seemed more likely he had been diverted from Ben by way of Hux's mercy for him.
"That's not me, I killed Ben Solo, he was weak and foolish--"
"You never killed Ben Solo, don't you see?! Snoke is just using you, Kylo, to do his bidding!"
"If I let him go, then all of this happens again! I'll have to kill Han again!"
"No! He will resist Snoke this time."
"How can we make him live without ever meeting you, then?"
As Kylo drew closer, Hux confirmed what he had expected by the shakiness in his voice; heavy human tears sopped down his cheeks.
"He'll meet me again, I believe in that." And Hux truly did believe this. Mere hours ago, he never would've believed in destiny or soul mates. But now to him, it seemed inconceivable that each incarnation of themselves should never meet one another.
Something tenderly pushed against Hux's mind, while he could see in Kylo's eyes recognition of those feelings.
"He can live a life where Snoke doesn't force him to kill Han, the same one where we will meet again. Under different circumstance, but I'm sure his, our, lives will be better for it."
Kylo blinked out fat tears, sparkling despite the lightlessness, and trickling over the beauty marks on his face. At last he nodded his head minutely, frozen by Hux's words. Hux's oratory skills were always one of his stronger points, his passion a flare that burst against the awful light behind him.
The light.
Kylo felt his blood turn to ice, as behind Hux, over his shoulder and beyond the transparasteel of the cockpit, was a planet, the only planet he realized, in this quadrant of lonely, lost space. It radiated the red haze, and undoubtedly through its own concept of physics, was also the source of the ruby prism they had been drawn into. The Hellstar, perhaps, was the nucleus of this surreal reality.
Hux caught Kylo's horrified stare, turning around to peer out through the transparasteel, too. What he saw helped him understand why the more distant, whiteish stars seemed like they could see him; they could. But their supervision was not as worrying as the giant fault that raised up, wound-like, on the Hellstar's surface and cracked open to reveal an ugly, squid-like eye that glared directly at the shuttle.
"Hux! You need to help Ben to the escape pod. I'll try to stall our pull into the Hellstar but Snoke is trying to force his way inside my mind--there's not much time. Help Ben!"
Kylo had taken hold of Hux's shoulders with his own two human hands, pleading with his dark eyes. He didn't have to ask any further, and Hux replied, "Of course." How could he see Ben and leave him to die?
With the briefest of hugs, Hux was off into the tunneling void that stretched ahead of him into the hatch of the ship. It was too far, too deep. But after huffing a few preparatory breaths, he was sprinting off into the dark after Ben and Millicent.
Ben's footsteps echoed around the nothingness he was surrounded in, his only source of light the small, drifting inklings that reminded him of fireflies. Of summer. But these tiny spheres, though they drifted languidly like fireflies, were not the familiar sunny hue as they were back home. These spheres were soporific and blueish, as otherworldly as the bottom of an ocean. Ben was as fascinated by them as he was appalled. Millicent was afraid of them, of this hallway, and remained concealed within his clothing.
How long had he been running? The stitch in his side suggested it had been for a long time, but he had no concrete way of determining that. He'd decided to run straight ahead towards the back of the shuttle where he assumed an escape pod would be held, but the void didn't seem to correspond to same sense of direction as Ben anticipated.
So far, through his winding and running, he'd only been able to find the medbay. A guttural, gurgling growl had come from a rather large pile of bloodied bandages, and so he'd promptly closed the doors and continued running through what he presumed to be the ship's corridors. That wasn't really what they were, not here, but Ben thrust away thoughts of him tearing across extra dimensions and alternate realities in order to keep his mind from splintering, and focused on the corridors he had cleared.
When Ben came upon the next doorway, he slipped in to see if it held the escape pod he so coveted, but only found it to be the sleeping quarters. A few beds, cots really, were bolted to the walls. Ben had only peeked in for a moment, but it was enough time for whatever had been lurking just beyond to snag its spiraling claws into his clothes, barely missing Millicent, and pull him into the room. It was distinctly human shaped, he noticed, as it pinned him to the floor. Throwing its faceless head back, the column of flesh from its neck and down to its chest cleaved open, revealing a salivating mouth with rows of knived teeth. The monster leaned itself on sickeningly long arms down towards Ben, the mouth distending ever further, drool splattering onto his clothes. Just as he screamed, feeling the horrendous creature's vile, hot breath on his skin and Millicent thrashing beneath his vestments, a blaster fire shot through the room and struck the monster's carapace. It screamed from that abominable maw, reeling backwards. This gave Ben precious seconds to scamper away and towards the doors, being pulled through the last few feet by Hux.
"You--" he tried to say, but Hux ignored him. "Close the doors!" Ben yelled, backing down the corridor. "Hux, come on!"
"Wait!" Hux snapped, sweat beading at his temples. The monster was bounding towards the doors now, spitting and shrieking, and just as its head stuck out from the doorway, Hux slammed on the control panel. With a conclusive chop, the decapitated head rolled off into the darkness, while the lifeless body within the room slumped over.
"I'm sure those claws could rend metal," Hux answered. "Safer to have it dead. Now let's go." Hux snatched Ben's wrist and pulled the younger man along, feeling his face go warm as his fingers enclosed around the soft skin of Ben's arm.
"Thanks, for coming back. For me," Ben panted as he was yanked forward by Hux.
"How could I not?" Hux managed to huff a laugh, though somehow it sounded sad to Ben's ears.
Kylo Ren felt like he was being torn apart. It was as if he were bisected between the gravity of the Hellstar's calling and Snoke's waning grip on his psyche. His Master struggled in vain to maintain his control on his apprentice, realizing now, much too late, that there had always been another contender for young Ben's soul; whatever it was, beyond even Snoke's power, was uncompromising and struggled to monopolize Kylo's very being.
Kylo bristled before the transparasteel, fixating the ungodly fault line eye with his own furious glare. If Hux believed in Ben's capability to sidestep the same chronology that Kylo had been forced to endure, then Kylo had no choice but to believe, too. If there was a world where Ben could love Hux without Snoke, without Hellstars and patricide and genocide and Jedi-cide, then Kylo would war against any world to secure that chance.
Even though at this moment Kylo was the focal point between the Hellstar and Snoke, where his mind lay was with Hux, barreling through the unreality of their shuttle's hatch with Ben Solo and Millicent in tow. Both greater powers had to war against one another's influence to secure its influence over Kylo Ren, yet both paled when juxtaposed to General Hux. Hux was the star at the center of Kylo's universe, had been cycling into that position for a while now, and no matter how many alien planetary bodies collided into Kylo Ren, he could not be erred off his orbit around the gleaming sun that was the general of the First Order.
The Hellstar may have possessed more raw, brute power than anything else across all of the unknown regions of reality, yet even that was not enough to divide Kylo's allegiance from the only man he knew that was smart and ruthless enough to kill stars.
Like a giant, swarming sea urchin, Kylo drove his tendrils to hold tautly against the inside of the ship. With great exertion, he steadied the ship as best as he could, satisfied that its descent towards the Hellstar had been slowed, however minutely. For all the power that the Force had imbibed him with, all Kylo Ren could do at this moment was prolong their trajectory.
The Hellstar felt Kylo's resistance. A nightmarish sound of earth shattering and metallic collisions, underlined by a beastly roar of fury, came from the Hellstar as Kylo stood off against it with defiance.
Hurry up, Hux, Kylo thought as cascades of sweat glistened across his body. The newly budded eyes in his skin narrowed with effort, the tendrils straining in all directions to stop the shuttle's movement as much as possible against the gravity of the Hellstar. I can only buy us so much time.
"What is this place?" Ben whispered raggedly as he and Hux whirled down corridors surreal with familiarity, but decidedly not of any world they were familiar with. The tiny orbs of light were ever present and lingering, uncaring. The hallways, as Hux had noticed immediately, were not structured the way the shuttle was under normal physical circumstances. Where the rooms were located corresponded little to how Hux remembered them, almost as if something had taken the blueprints of the shuttle and reset the location of each room. Thus, this necessitated that he and Ben survey every doorway and twisting hall they came across--while never assuming that they were alone.
Hux felt a pressure in his skull that preceded a familiar voice: Hurry up, Hux. I can only buy us so much time.
Heaving, Hux struggled to control his breath between the freshly kindled panic and exertion of running. With a mind primed for schematics and logistics, Hux's brain prattled off, searching for a pattern that the shuttle had rearranged itself according to. When no such obvious answers came to him, he tried a different approach.
"Ben! What rooms have we found so far?"
"Medbay, sleeping quarters, some kind of storage space, the engine rooms," he panted in response, doubled over with his hands on his knees, Millicent bulging from the layers of his abdomen.
Hux drummed his fingers irately against his thighs, pacing.
"We need to turn around," Hux announced suddenly, taking hold of Ben once again.
"What? We just came from that way!" protested Ben, following behind Hux all the same.
"I know, but this shuttle has been warped by the Hellstar," Hux threw over his shoulder, catching Ben's widening eyes.
"Hellstar," Ben choked.
"I don't know any more than you do," Hux shot back.
Their footsteps echoed unsettlingly over the hazy black steel of the shuttle's flooring. Just when Hux began to think he had miscalculated, that he had just wasted a huge chunk of their already scant time in securing Ben's escape, a familiar artificial light glowed from the end of the hallway.
"The escape hatch!" Hux cried.
"Uhhh--behind us!" Ben screamed, gesticulating wildly with one arm at another faceless, soulless monster that had materialized from somewhere behind them, supporting Millicent's sprawling weight within his shirts with his other arm.
"Fuck--"
He didn't think it was possible to run any faster, but somehow Hux's long, thin legs propelled him forward at a speed he didn't know he could achieve. Ben's gangly legs pulled him ahead of Hux by a small margin.
"Go go go!" It was almost like a prayer that Hux wasn't sure came from his mouth or Ben's. Maybe both. Behind them, a slick ripping sound signaled that the faceless monster was opening the mouth in its abdomen. The light filtered in from the escape hatch ahead, piercing the dark corridor he and Ben came barreling down.
"I'll shut the doors!" Hux yelled, preparing himself to quickly turn around once they reached the open doorway awaiting them like a vista of safety.
It all happened in a blur; Ben dove into the escape hatch, immediately beginning preparations for the escape pod to deploy, holding Millicent's terrified body taut against him. As he did this, Hux spun on his heel so rapidly he went slightly dizzy, but instantly began dancing his fingers over the control panel. The metal doors began hissing shut, leaving Hux to stare in terror at the faceless thing careening towards them, blaster trained at its head. He let out a series of shots, successful in repelling it somewhat, before the grotesque humanoid launched itself at Hux, gaping maxillofacial orifice flowing with drool, and as Hux flew backwards onto his back, arms raised defensively, the doors slammed shut in the beast's face.
"Hux!" Ben called, relief potent in his voice.
Hux rushed forward, hands cusping each side of Ben's face, not understanding the wistfulness rising in him from focusing on the sensitivity in his eyes. The beast clawed frantically at the doors with its crescent nails, slashing through the layers of metal.
For a moment, they stared at each other wordlessly. Before he could even think about what he was doing, Hux pulled Ben's lips to his, savoring the soft, surprised moan that came from Ben's throat.
"Go," Hux commanded coarsely, a mournful tinge in his jade eyes.
Ben nodded once, clambering into the escape pod with Hux's beloved pet.
"Come with me," Ben said in a way indicating that they both knew what the answer would be.
"I can't," Hux smiled sadly. "Ben?"
Before Ben could close the escape pod with clangs of finality, still holding the shaking tabby cat against him, Hux said so softly he feared he might actually shed a tear, "May the Force be with you."
Tears brimmed over the young man's expressive eyes, ghosting over the beauty marks that Hux had memorized from a different, yet the same, face. Ben nodded again, before shutting the escape pod's doors. His wide, unyielding eyes never left Hux's face through the pod's transparasteel as it was lowered into the airlock chamber below. Moments later, there was the familiar sound of jet engines whirring to life, and then Hux found himself alone except for the monster that had almost shredded through the last layer of durasteel.
"Kylo!" Hux shrieked, hoping that somehow his voice would be carried to the Knight of Ren, wherever he was in this strange, alternate, shifting reality.
When the doors of the escape hatch had been shorn away, Hux aimed his blaster at its featureless head again, realizing with an uncanny serenity that he had been backed up against the walls, and had an almost non-existent chance of weaving around the monster and back into the breathing lungs of the corridor. He shot at it multiple times, but this particular beast was much larger than the others, and at this point only seemed enraged by Hux's blaster assault.
Hux's heart hammered painfully in his chest. This wasn't how he has expected to die, but with increasing resignation anticipated that he would, right here, in some unheeded section of space warped by the presence of an impossible, preturnatural planet. He vaguely wondered if these decrepit faceless things were once humans who had, somehow, been called into this realm that was so inhospitable, so unforgiving, to the living. His eyes clamped shut tightly, ready to meet his end, choosing to spend the last few moments of life in dreamy focus on Ben's warm lips.
A shriek reverberated off of the walls, down into the corridors, and Hux opened his eyes to see rows of sharpened tendrils puncturing in a vertical line down the ghoul's spine. It fell forward with a sticky thud, saliva coating Hux's boots as it crumpled at his feet.
Kylo rushed forward, spindles of shadows raveling and unthreading in endless agitation. With unimpeded relief, Kylo threw his human arms around Hux, a set of smooth, non-weaponized tentacles embracing him as well.
"I know what we can do to stop the Hellstar," Kylo said, eyes gazing intensely, as if they were ever devoid of their intensity, into Hux's eyes.
They snaked back through the corridors, somehow bringing them to the hatch before the cockpit much too quickly. By now, the shuttle was being dragged into the Hellstar's atmosphere, miasmas of violet and crimson matter obscuring the view of the planet's surface.
"So what's the plan, Ren?" Hux asked, grasping the severity of their situation. He hoped against hope that they had helped Ben and Millicent escape quickly enough. Kylo took both of Hux's hands into his own.
"I need you to be a conduit," Kylo said intently, searching Hux's face imploringly.
"H-how?" Hux gawked, unsure what that even meant within the context of this situation, let alone what purpose it would serve to deter this hulking, evil star luring them in towards its ravenous center.
"You're the Starkiller, Hux," Kylo said as if it was obvious. "You birthed the technology necessary to obliterate an entire planetary system."
"Yeah, regular planets! Not this hellacious monstrosity!" Hux was aghast. "At any rate, what good will my memory of the blueprints do you? It's not like we have Starkiller Base strapped to the shuttle!"
"Let me worry about that!"
"Care to favor me with an explanation at least?!"
"No! I mean, not now!"
Tremors began to rattle the shuttle as their descent into the Hellstar's atmosphere began. Hux feared the transparasteel would shatter inversely into the cockpit, shredding them to a million ribbons each. Kylo's eyes shone desperately. "Do you trust me to do this?"
"...Yes."
The shuttle bared down on the Hellstar. With another wrenching screech, a great chasm began to open up on the planet's surface, ready to devour, devour, devour.
It was necessary for Hux to lose consciousness. Assured the general's mind was preserved safely within the fortress of his own mental fortitude, Kylo stretched out his hand in order to aid the rifling through the memories of Starkiller's blueprints he knew were in there. He was thankful, not for the first time or certainly the last, that Hux's mind was so pristinely articulated and easy to navigate.
The shuttle roared in Kylo's ears. He sifted thoroughly, absorbing every scrap of information about how Starkiller as a weapon functioned, his new, grotesque eyes aiding in the search. Ideally, he'd have more time to understand it more intimately, but that was not a luxury afforded them.
Then, he took Hux's arms, pliant in his trance, and spread them out in a grand gesture of receiving. The bloody clouds and molten streams below illuminated Hux's pale countenance, casting him in a golden sheen and lighting fire to his red hair.
Kylo mimicked Hux's stance, gripping Hux's wrists so they shared one form, almost that of a messiah; that of insolence in the face of the unknown, the unknowable.
Strengthening his mind against fear, against the knowledge that they were close, so close, now, to the Hellstar's mouth, Kylo began to seep to the surface from within Hux the raw, dismantled power that was the manifestation of Starkiller's existence; Hux was the Starkiller, and Kylo was correct in assuming that the spirit of such bloodshed, of such un-apprehended scale of mass murder would lie latent within Hux, with no Force ability to channel it otherwise, but through Kylo himself.
The light of the world below them shone, and yet Hux shimmered with more light than that of the Hellstar; brilliant, blinding wavelengths began to radiate from within Hux himself, Kylo drawing out the dormant energy to simmer furiously as an aura around the general's body. Hux's body began to generate high intensities of heat, burning into Kylo even through the general's uniform. It stung, but his grip didn't loosen, and he continued to charge the terrible energy within Hux, until Kylo was certain his teeth would be torn from his head, his limbs scattered by the strength of the Starkiller that Hux harbored in his lithe body.
Blackness, the inside of the Hellstar's throat, now obscured the entirety of the cockpit's transparasteel; it was now or never.
Violent, ear shattering torrents of lasers, glaring as red as Starkiller Base's beams of destruction, exploded from Hux's eyes, his mouth, his ears, targeted directly into the Hellstar's starving maw. Kylo clung to Hux's body, screaming as after-effects of fallout threatened to sweep him out into the atmosphere of the Hellstar; the shuttle was blown to smithereens, Hux's quaking, firing supernova body the only thing that held them suspended over the Hellstar's grim, understanding eye and mouth freshly irradiated with lasers.
It was agony, to feel the billions of souls shrieking and pleading in mortal fear bleeding from Hux's godly posture, his face turned toward the unforgiving heavens. Below them, billowing clouds of acrid smoke and thunderous firestorms raged as the Hellstar collapsed upon itself, following the same path as Hosnian Prime.
And then Kylo Ren and General Hux were sinking, submerging into the void the Hellstar left behind, consumed in unfathomable darkness.
For the first time since he was a young child, Snoke's presence no longer lingered like a cureless disease in his mind. He had been expelled like so much venom from Kylo's veins. Whether the dilapidated humanoid had withdrew of his own accord, or had been forced out by the sheerness of Kylo's newly fueled hatred for that who had manipulated him so seamlessly, was unable to be determined, even by Kylo himself. In a way, he wondered if the velocity of Hux's energy discharge had sterilized his mind of Snoke. It certainly appeared that way. Maybe the force of that star-killing light within Hux had been so awesome and awful that it had been the antidote to Snoke's affliction upon Kylo. That Light created by Hux stayed within him.
Suspended, wherever it was they were, in the bowels of the universe or somewhere beyond that entirely, Snoke's departure from within his unhinged mind left behind blissful silence and a new allegiance to bind himself to. Hux arranged the cosmos as he saw fit; it would be no difficult task to manage the expanse of neurons that composed Kylo's consciousness.
"Do not stray towards the edge of the farthest galaxy. The Sunkillers wait as phantoms, immune to prayer and blind to all light but the endless flicker of fire within their nebulous core. Do not go gentle into those strange aeons, rage against the night that never dies."
No one would ever forget that night the sky tore itself apart, somewhere far enough away they could, with trepidation, mourn.
"This dimension is ours, my Emperor. Create the laws of this lawless place and I will uphold them. Create order in this disordered realm and I will enforce it. And never may you be usurped, for to do so would be to collapse the reality which you will weave. Align these loyal constellations into the story that it is you wish to tell."
"Then," replied the Emperor of Dying Stars, "all of existence shall know of us, timeless as physics, unyielding as truth."