Work Text:
The remains of Omna’s capital city are entirely deserted, devoid even of animal life, just as Ren expected. The emptiness is welcome, but it lulls him into a false sense of complacency that departs with a sickening lurch when he sees the crumbling statue at the center of what was once the main town square.
The sight of it pins him to the spot where he stands, on paving stones that have been bleached clean by the sun. Thin grey clouds scrape across the sky, scattering aimlessly like the dead leaves that skitter past his feet. In the flickering light the statue almost seems to move in blinks and glances. Ren wants to flee its presence, to at least close his eyes, but it’s as if he’s been turned to stone, too.
Part of Hux’s right arm is on the ground. Ren’s left leg is similarly broken, and there’s a chunk taken out of Hux’s left shoulder that looks deliberate, as if someone threw a rock and left their mark on history when it connected with its target. Both faces are cracked, but not as deeply as Ren would have expected. In all of the years since The Fall, this is only the third statue of them that Ren has seen still standing on any planet, and it’s in far better shape than the previous two, which had been so defiled that his stomach had pitched before the rage flooded in.
This one must have been done late in Hux’s reign. It’s a daring composition, not the kind of thing anyone who valued their life would have displayed publicly in the early days. They’re depicted as if in the middle of a formal dance, the kind of thing that would have taken place in a grand ballroom while the other attendees at the gala thrown in their honor stood back to allow them the floor. It’s not something they ever actually did. It’s purely fantasy, like the fact that Hux is depicted as the taller one, due to a slope in the base of the statue. Ren appreciates that the sculptor at least didn’t make him short. He’s simply dancing on the lower side of the slope, while Hux seems to rise over him as if on air.
The expressions are the most striking thing about the sculpture, and the familiarity they evoke is more eerie to Ren than the fact that the statue is crumbling and standing alone in an empty square that once bustled with a thriving population. He wonders if the resigned sorrow on his figure’s face was the sculptor’s intent, or if they captured something this startlingly true only by accident. Hux appears resigned, too, but not yet in defeat. He maintains the regal, disaffected air he was known for, while Ren looks distant, as if he’s tired of putting on a show for whatever crowd views them, no longer interested in hiding some private injury that he’s given up on healing.
Ren scoffs when he catches himself projecting onto the statue. His expression could just as easily be read as smug, arrogant, or dryly respectful of the Emperor he holds in his arms. It’s also highly possible that his sculpted expression has been affected by the decay of the piece. Still, as he stands staring up at it he feels taken back to that time in their lives, as if those waning years are right there in front of him and close enough to touch, and when he’s finally able to avert his eyes and move away, he only makes it a few steps before a sense of loss makes him turn back and stare at the statue again.
On second look he realizes that this statue might be slyly mocking in nature. Toward the end of Hux’s rule, much of the art that depicted him contained subtle criticisms that could be explained away under questioning if necessary. Hux’s waist is very slender in this piece. No more so than it was in reality, but it seems to suggest a delicacy that Hux did not wish to project. Or maybe it’s Ren who is projecting now, again.
Ren moves around the statue, circling it cautiously, his heart pounding. He’s not sure what he’s afraid of seeing. Some secret, some hidden message, something about himself that he’d forgotten. What would any of it matter now? It’s all so long over. Ren almost wants to knock what remains of the statue down himself, though he knows he couldn’t bear it even if he was forced to, with a firing squad at his back. So odd that their faces are almost entirely intact. It’s almost as if someone has protected this piece, but whoever would?
He turns again, now surveying the abandoned buildings that look down into the square. A chill of alarm races across the back of his neck when he thinks he catches movement in the cracked glass of one high window, but it’s just the shadow of the clouds moving across the sun. The cold wind is picking up. The days here are very short, and in two hours it will be dark here.
Ren turns back to the statue, wondering what it looks like under moonlight. He needs to get moving and will likely never come back here. He wishes he had a holo recorder, though it’s probably wiser for him to forget he ever saw this than try to capture it in an image. The effect of standing alone in a desolate courtyard with it wouldn’t come across in a holo, anyway.
Again, he tries to walk away, and again he can’t. His hands curl into fists when he remembers being told to kill Hux. Before the reign, before any of it. Before they had even kissed. Ren couldn’t do it, even when he almost wanted to, just to have it over with as Han was over with. He’d been in love with Hux since he was sixteen, since Hux had snarled at him in a corridor at the Order headquarters that Ren visited with Snoke. Twenty years old at the time, a beanpole lieutenant with no greatcoat to hide beneath, Hux had asked Ren what he was supposed to be, and the gall of the question left Ren suddenly without an answer. What was he supposed to be? Under Hux’s piercing gaze he so often didn’t know. Loving Hux for so long had made Ren hate him, too, but it wasn’t the kind of hate that would allow him to do Snoke’s bidding that day. He turned on Snoke and killed him instead, and Hux’s eyes lit with opportunity almost instantly. Before they even kissed.
“You’re mine now,” Ren had said, grabbing the back of Hux’s hair, both of them stained with Snoke’s blood. “Because I’ve done this for you.”
“Is that how it works,” Hux said, not even a little bit frightened, not even then.
“Bow to me or perish,” Ren said, and when he heard the shake in his voice he knew it was over. He had thrust himself into Hux’s hands with this action, not the other way around.
“Hush,” Hux said. He spoke sharply, but cupped Ren’s face in his hands and stroked Ren’s first overcome tears away with his thumbs. “Your old master was inadequate. I’ll take care of you now.”
That he kept his word until he no longer could was more than Ren expected from him at the time.
Ren watches the statue as the light begins to fade behind the fast-moving clouds. He wonders if Hux was still taking care of him when it was sculpted. He wants to speak to the artist, wants to search these abandoned structures until he finds the sculptor's ghost. The piece seems to both celebrate and criticize them, and Ren can only wonder if the critical elements were there before the cracks and missing limbs. He would be disappointed to learn that they weren’t. He was a harsh critic of Hux himself, before the end, though he didn’t dare say so. Though Hux lacked the ability to read minds, he hadn’t needed Ren to tell him this traitorous truth. He knew.
A sudden gust of angry wind puts Ren on guard, and he almost reaches for his saber. He’s not sure what he would be trying to fight, were he to ignite it. The past? The progress of time itself? He shakes himself from his idiotic navel-gazing and looks up at the statue one last time. He’s positioned himself so he can clearly see Hux’s face. He feels like he’s waiting, even now, for Hux to look back at him. In the sculpture, though they’re dancing together, Hux seems to be reflecting on his own glory, moving through his steps as if the Ren figure is only there to fill the slot where a partner should be. That’s accurate. Ren wonders how close this artist came to them once, to know that this was their way together toward the end.
He moves away from the courtyard feeling newly bereft, also angry. He’s agitated as he enters the old power station and collects the fuel cells he came for, and not just because they’re fewer in number and lesser in quality than he’d hoped. He secures the passable ones in his pack and straps it across his back. By the time he makes for his shuttle the sunlight is almost gone, but he doesn’t look back at the statue. He feels watched as he boards, and cruel, as if he’s abandoning someone to starve here alone. There’s a familiar ache opening at the center of his chest. It’s the pressing desire to go home.
As he powers the shuttle on he thinks of some of the homes he’s had. The first one, with Leia and Han, a modest post-war bungalow where Ben learned how to take what he wanted with the Force even before he learned how to walk without wobbling. The Falcon felt like home once, too. A high-security estate after Leia was promoted, then the lonely austerity of Luke’s Academy. Hux had known cold loneliness at an Academy of his own, far away from Ben’s. The first home they had together may have technically been the Finalizer, and the grandest one was the largest structure in the galaxy at the height of Hux’s rule, a massive tower of gleaming security features that were tastefully designed to look like flourishes and grandeur, but the one place that really felt like a home for the two of them came long before that.
The first residence they shared that was not aboard a starship was a stronghold where they plotted their next moves together after Snoke’s demise. It was modest and well-hidden, sparsely staffed with droids and a few of Hux’s trusted officers. Ren had sometimes thought, to his own secret and profound embarrassment, that he could have been happy just like that with Hux for the rest of his life. He had so much of Hux’s attention then, as his co-commander and his bedmate during the long nights they spent waiting to make their biggest moves. Hux was so alive in those days that he almost seemed to glow in the dark, with hope and plans and paranoia, and in the deepest parts of the night he had let himself cling to Ren in their windowless, armored bedchamber, sometimes trembling with a kind of boyish excitement as he whispered his very sincere belief that he could personally save the galaxy from chaos. He’d already redesigned Starkiller with increased security measures, fewer flaws.
“We should marry,” Hux said one night, in the pitch dark of their room, his thigh clamped between Ren’s and his lips just a breath away from his on the pillow they shared.
“Who would we marry,” Ren asked, glum.
Hux had laughed so hard. He’d thumped Ren’s shoulder, kissed his mouth.
“Don’t be stupid,” Hux said fondly, his smile evident in his voice as he ran his fingers through Ren’s hair. “I mean we should marry each other. It would show strength, a more sophisticated unity. Your mysticism joined with my strategy. I know it’s sentimental, but the masses appreciate such things. That was my mistake with the First Order. Spitting at the troops like a madman. It wasn't nuanced enough, but I can learn from own missteps. I would be cooler, maybe I could even be stylish, and you would be at my side, pledged to me.”
“We’d be pledged to each other,” Ren said, his tooth snagging on Hux’s lip when he spoke. They were that close. “That’s what marriage is.”
“Right, that’s what I meant.”
Ren doesn’t wear the ring anymore. It would be unwise.
Even with the Force to help him stay unseen, he always uses care when he approaches what passes for his home now. On a cliff overlooking Maldon’s black sea, the slit in the glassy rock that serves as the hangar for his shuttle is sometimes hard to spot when he’s this tired, losing his focus and needing his bed. It’s difficult today, with thoughts of that statue haunting him still, but he manages to land smoothly enough and climbs out of his shuttle to hear the welcome-home sound of the brutal waves below breaking against the base of the cliff. There is lightning in the dark clouds that shadow the ocean, as usual, and pitching rain that disturbs some carrion birds calling shrilly to each other over the wind. Something must be dead, down on the sharp rocks below or in the jagged peaks above. These birds only come when there’s a carcass to pick apart.
Ren shoulders the bag with the fuel cells and doesn’t bother with a halo lamp. He can use the Force to find his way through the winding, lightless tunnels that lead deep into the mountain. He’s made this trek without light many times. Maybe too many. It might be time to change locations, but they’re getting so old. It’s wearisome to think about setting up a new hideout on an unfamiliar planet, starting over. He doesn’t like the thought of this as their final resting place, but it’s not as if there’s an untouched meadow beside a sparkling lake waiting for them somewhere. Most places like that have been burned away, even in the furthest reaches.
He puts the thought aside when he sees the light of their wall-mounted torches up ahead. He’s glad for the warmth of this welcome, but only on a sentimental level. He doesn’t like the idea of Hux getting out of bed and struggling to light the torches for his sake; Hux knows Ren doesn’t need light to find his way. And if Hux were to fall while reaching for a torch-mount, without Ren here--
The thought of Hux spending hours or days lying injured on the cold floor of the cave makes Ren hurry forward, and he drops the bag with the fuel cells in the front passageway, just inside the circle of light that the torches throw. He exhales in relief when he enters the room they use as their bedchamber and finds Hux safely under the blankets in their bed, though it’s startling when he doesn’t awaken at the sound of Ren’s footsteps. Usually Hux is sitting up by the time Ren reaches this room, trying to make his posture what it once was. Still prideful.
The halo lamps they’ve set up around the room are still burning but low, some flickering. Ren will replace their fuel cells later, and in a week or a month he’ll have to venture out again, to some other planet that hasn’t been scraped totally clean in the Post-Authority Era, to find more. He sits on the bed, not remembering that he’s still wearing his gloves until he touches Hux’s wan cheek, stroking him softly so he won’t be frightened.
“Mhmph,” Hux says, which seems like acknowledgement enough that he knows who’s with him. He shifts and winces when a familiar ache in his shoulder bites at him. “Welcome home,” he says, eyes still closed when Ren leans down to kiss his cheek, the side of his nose. Hux still manages to smell good, even here.
“Have you eaten?” Ren asks. He means at all, since he’s been gone. Hux lost his taste for food around the time of The Fall.
“I sustained myself in your absence,” Hux says, not a real answer. He rolls onto his back and smiles tiredly at Ren when he sits up to survey Hux properly, ordering his white-streaked hair. “Take your gloves off, at least,” Hux says, turning his face against Ren’s hand. “I’d rather have your body heat than whatever food you managed to scavenge.”
“I didn’t bring back any food.” Ren pulls off his glove one finger at a time. He still enjoys sensing Hux’s anticipation, his need to feel Ren’s touch. “I was on Omna. There’s hardly anything left there.” He thinks of mentioning the statue. Maybe later. “There are vultures outside,” he says instead, cupping Hux’s cheek with his bare hand. “I’ll kill one for dinner, more for curing.”
“Yum.” Hux snorts and reaches up to hold Ren’s hand against his face, kisses his palm. “You’re cold,” he says, and he moves over, wincing again. “Get in with me, come on. You must be tired.”
“I should really get some of those birds before they’re gone.”
“I’d rather eat canned squash than a scavenger with bits of a rotten corpse in its gut.”
But I wouldn’t, Ren wants to say. Instead he sighs and pulls off his other glove, removes his cowl and his robe, yanks off his boots.
“How was your trip?” Hux asks when Ren is bundled up with him under the blankets: their heads on the same pillow, Hux’s fingers in Ren’s hair. If Ren closes his eyes and pretends, sometimes it feels like those old days, but usually it’s much too drafty. “Did you see anything interesting on Omna?”
Hux is asking like he knows that Ren did. He can read Ren well, without need of the Force, and perhaps he’s always been able to. Having known Ren for just over forty years now certainly helps.
“I saw a statue,” Ren says, because he doesn’t want to hold it in. He was unnerved at the time, but now he feels fond of the memory, thinking of the way the pale light touched their cracked stone faces. “Of us,” he clarifies, though Hux is looking at him as if he knows, based on Ren’s expression.
Hux laughs. “How could you tell?” he asks. “Surely we didn’t still have our heads.”
“We did. It was strangely well preserved. A few limbs missing, but otherwise almost fully intact.”
“That’s-- Really a bit alarming. Unless it was some kind of satire?”
“I don’t think so, but. We were dancing.”
“Dancing?” Hux looks concerned, scoots closer to Ren. “And it wasn’t-- A joke?”
“No,” Ren says, though he had wondered when he stood there looking at it. Now it seems obvious that the sculptor was trying to capture something more than reverence but nothing as uninspired as snide derision. “We both looked sad. But not sad together. Separately, even though we were holding on to each other. I think it was about bitter sympathy. Not forgiveness, but. Maybe it was even done after the-- In the late period.”
“Listen to you.” Hux’s eyes are unfocused. His hand is curled against Ren’s chest, fingers twitching. “An art critic, suddenly.”
“Ha. Yeah. It was strange. But I’m glad I saw it. I wish-- You would have liked it, I think.”
“What sort of dancing were we doing?”
“Formal. Ballroom style, I guess. My hand was on your waist. Yours was on my shoulder. It’s funny-- Part of your arm had fallen away, but I still had your other hand clasped in mine.”
“That sounds about right.” Hux pushes his face against Ren’s throat and sighs. “I would--” He shakes his head.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Ren doesn’t often intrude on Hux’s private thoughts. He did it frequently when they were younger, but it only made him miserable. Even when reading someone’s mind, things can be misinterpreted. Ren had been petrified and also determined to discover that Hux truly despised him and planned to dispose of him as soon as possible, and even when he found deep wells of desperate, adoring devotion in Hux’s mind, he often overlooked those in favor of fixating on the petty criticisms and disappointments that flashed between Hux’s certainty that Ren was the only person who belonged at his side.
The day has been long and strange, and Ren is tempted to doubt the sense he gets, from a gentle skim of Hux’s thoughts, that he barely stopped himself from saying I would dance with you now, if I could.
But it makes a kind of sense, as uncharacteristic as this sentiment seems for Hux. He has trouble walking even very short distances with the help of his cane or Ren’s arm around him, and has since they crashed on a planet in another system, far away from here, after barely escaping the violent uprising that ended Hux’s rule at last. Hux would probably like to dance with anyone now, just to enjoy the fact that he could dance at all.
“I’m glad you saw it, at least,” Hux says, and his eyes are closed when Ren looks down at him.
“I could show you,” Ren says. He braces himself to live up to that promise when Hux’s eyes open. “With the Force, I mean.”
Hux shakes his head. His body is not the only thing that became splintered in the aftermath of his Fall from power. His mind is sturdier than his bones have proven to be, but he has trouble linking up with Ren’s thoughts now, whereas they used to do it so easily.
“Let me try,” Ren says. “Please? It was really quite remarkable.”
“Ren, I’m tired--”
“You are not, you’ve slept almost this entire time I’ve been gone. Come on, while it’s fresh in my mind.”
Hux grumbles a bit more but consents to close his eyes and allow Ren to try projecting the image of the statue into his mind. At first it seems fruitless, but when Hux gasps Ren can feel it, too: he’s seeing the statue as Ren did, with the cold light and the empty courtyard spreading out around him, the shiver of recognition at the sight of their younger faces preserved in stone.
“Oh, look at you,” Hux says, breathless. He laughs a little, and his hand shakes when he reaches up to touch Ren’s face: his real face, warm cheek, the Ren whose forehead is pressed against his here in their bed. But he’s seeing this other Ren, not as a statue but as a memory of a thing that never really happened, pulling at the thread of it and weaving it into a kind of lucid dream. They’re dancing together in this imaginary space, leaping into it from the statue’s sloping base, across an empty but glorious ballroom. Hux is focused only on Ren as they move together across its pristine floor, unable to look away from him. “My knight,” Hux says, in the vision and in their bed, his lips bumping against Ren’s.
What are you supposed to be, Ren thinks, the memory of Hux’s sneering first question for him darting into his mind without permission.
Hux laughs. He’s victorious in the vision, briefly mad with power again, because he’s redesigned the galaxy just as he wants it. Ren can’t deny that he looks best like this.
“I knew,” Hux says, whispering this against Ren’s lips. “What you were supposed to be. Didn’t I?”
“Yes,” Ren says, guiding him slowly back, because this surge in Hux’s confidence is making Ren fear a seizure. “You knew. Is that why you asked?”
Hux blinks the tears from his eyes, and the maniacal smile of his younger self fades into something softer as he remembers where they are, sniffling. He always had a cold now, a persistent cough and itchy eyes. But he’s still here, warm in Ren’s arms. When he dies, Ren will go with him. He decided so thirty years ago.
“You really don’t know why I asked that snotty question?” Hux asks, wiping at his face. “Couldn’t you already read my mind?”
“I was a novice mind reader at the time.” And Hux made him nervous. Ren hadn’t been able to gather even his own thoughts.
“It annoyed me that I thought you were handsome,” Hux says. “That’s why I asked. How dare you, that’s why.”
Ren kisses him, pitched into a state of disbelief that makes him feel sixteen again, gangly and lost and afraid to hope he would ever find his footing. What are you supposed to be?
Tell me, he’d wanted to beg, and fifteen years later he finally did.
**