Meet Yourself Coming In the Other Direction

by hollycomb

Summary:

Just when everything is falling into place in Hux's life and career, Brendol demands to be housed aboard the Finalizer. He also needs a room set aside for a mysterious 'passenger' who arrives with him and changes everything, including Hux's no-nonsense relationship with Kylo Ren.

Hux was poring over recon holomaps when the message appeared on his comm like a blemish, accusing and demanding all at once.
 
Will be docking with your ship around 23:00 this cycle. Do not make it burdensome for me to come aboard like last time. Have one passenger. Will both need private accommodation. I trust this isn’t too difficult for you to manage, though considering my previous visit to your ship I felt it was necessary to send instruction in advance this time.
 
Hux snarled at his father’s comm-sig and shoved the device away as if he could distance himself from the fact that he would of course comply with the old man’s orders rather than blowing his shuttle to dust and pretending later that it was a misunderstanding. Or not. Murdering Brendol with or without an excuse was really at Hux’s discretion now that he so highly outranked him. But he approved the transport’s landing request instead of ordering his officers to fire on it, and so his life changed forever.
 
Ren appeared, as he so often did at the worst of times, while Hux waited for Brendol in the shuttle bay. Normally Hux wouldn’t bother to personally greet his father, but he was curious about the identity of the passenger in his company and felt it prudent to personally vet this individual before allowing him to have private accommodation onboard.
 
“General,” Ren said when Hux refused to acknowledge the fact that Ren had loomed into his personal space.
 
“What,” said Hux.
 
“I sensed your fear of something ominous through the Force. Thought I might be able to assist.”
 
Hux scoffed. “Wrong about me as usual, Ren.”
 
“I don’t think I am. It has to do with the approaching shuttle, I suspect.”
 
“Since you have no regard for my privacy I’m sure you’ve already divined or discovered through more traditional snooping that my father is due to arrive any moment from hyperspace and that I’m not particularly enthused about entertaining him, as he is approaching something I fear is senility and I don’t have the time or patience for his antics, so yes, I suppose you could characterize that as a sort of fear, but no, I absolutely don’t need any help from you.”
 
Ren said nothing, but Hux knew him well enough to understand this did not mean he was considering what Hux wanted with any degree of sincerity. In fact Hux did expect to need Ren’s help later, during his rest cycle, in the form of vigorous fucking that would hopefully get his mind off whatever fresh hell Brendol was about to unload onto his well-ordered life, and Ren certainly suspected this and was most likely present only to prematurely gloat about it, which almost made Hux want to refuse him when he showed up later to collect on the Hux-in-emotional-peril sex that seemed to be his favorite flavor of fucking.
 
“Oh shit,” Ren muttered when Brendol’s shuttle flashed into view, as if he actually hadn’t anticipated all of this, or some element of it.
 
“What?” Hux asked.
 
“Uh. Nothing. I’ll see you later.”
 
“Ren!” Hux grit his teeth and watched Ren stomping away. He was above shouting after Ren to obey him in front of his crew, and wanted nothing less than for Brendol and Ren to meet, but his heart was pounding with dread after Ren’s outburst and he needed further information. Regardless, Ren left, and the door of the airlock that had sealed itself to Brendol’s shuttle was already opening. Apparently the old man was in a hurry.
 
It had been almost a year since Hux had seen his father, and Brendol looked worse for the wear: heavier in his bulging gut, the paltry remains of his hair streaked in greasy strands back over his shining scalp, he wore a too-small uniform jacket that needed washing. He was clumsy in his dismount from the shuttle and for a moment seemed to be alone, but it was actually just that he dwarfed his only company, who stepped out from behind Brendol looking wan and exhausted: a child with red hair.
 
Hux’s mouth fell open when the boy cast a cautious look up at him before returning his eyes to the floor. He was perhaps seven or eight years old, visibly underfed, dressed in rags and otherwise so resembling Hux’s memories of himself at that age that it took his breath away. It was not astonishment, it was more like an attack: a swift punch to the gut and then the sternum.
 
“No time to explain,” Brendol said when Hux turned his bloodless look of horrified confusion on him. “Kid needs a fresher.”
 
“A-- What? Who-- Why?”
 
“Articulate as ever, Armitage.” Brendol pushed Hux aside and waddled forward as if he was the one in need of a toilet. “Follow me, Leif, before you piss yourself. That’s your brother, by the way, the great General Hux.” He said this as sarcastically as possible.
 
“Get back here!” Hux shouted, finding his voice again when the two of them had nearly reached the hallway. “You don’t even know where you’re going, and how-- How are you still fathering children? You’re seventy years old!”
 
This was all very unbecoming behavior in the presence of two stormtroopers who were on guard by the door and one lieutenant who was overseeing the shuttle landing bay, surely already trembling with secret glee that he would be able to relate this melodrama to his bunkmates later. Hux almost didn’t care: Brendol had done many shocking things over the years, but this was the first bastard sibling he had dared to bring into Hux’s presence.
 
“He’s nearly eight,” Brendol said, waving his hand in Hux’s direction before turning his back on him again. “I was sixty-two when I was with his mother. Wait until you’re my age and see if you’re ready to stop going about your business, such as it is.”
 
“His mother-- Well, where is she? Why is he here? This is a working star destroyer, not your personal motel!”   
 
“The mother’s dead, why else would he be in my possession? Which way to the fresher?”
 
Brendol addressed this second question to the nearest stormtrooper, who looked to Hux with a kind of desperate terror that was palpable even through the helmet.
 
“Escort them to the hallway fresher and then to my quarters,” Hux said to the trooper. “Absolutely no detours. You can shoot the old man if he tries to break loose.”
 
“Very funny,” Brendol said. “And here I thought I’d whipped the sense of humor out of you.”
 
“You did in fact.” To the trooper: “That wasn’t a joke.”
 
“Yes-- Yes, sir.”
 
“Ha!” said Brendol, already wandering off. The boy cast a questioning look back at Hux before trailing behind him, and the trooper dashed forward to lead the way.
 
Hux took a moment to gather himself, feeling overly hot beneath the weight of his greatcoat. The look on that boy’s face had been like a personal affront in its familiarity. How had Brendol managed, at sixty-two, to find a woman who looked enough like Hux’s mother to bear him a son who so resembled his original bastard child? Hux’s mother had been a rare beauty.
 
He hurried to his room so he could throw back a drink before the trooper brought Brendol and the boy around. While gulping some of his best whiskey down he tried to formulate a plan of action, but by the time he heard the door buzz with an entry request he was still mentally floundering and wishing that this wasn’t happening to him, a familiar sensation when it came to anything to do with Brendol. He threw back the last of his drink and considered freshening his breath before going to the door, but then the buzzer sounded again, in a long, angry drag this time. Hux forced the grimace off his face and went to answer it.
 
“I thought I told you to have private accommodations prepared for the two of us?” Brendol said, pushing around Hux to get into the room. He was followed by the boy, who moved in an uncertain way that Hux recognized from his own youth spent trying to hide within Brendol’s ever-widening shadow. The trooper who had escorted them remained in the hallway, standing at attention and radiating a silent fear that he might be executed for having borne witness to all of this.
 
“You’re dismissed,” Hux barked, and the trooper left gladly.
 
Back in the room, Brendol had of course already helped himself to a glass of whiskey. The boy stood beside him, just close enough to appear obedient but not so close to give the impression that he really wanted to be anywhere near Brendol or took the slightest comfort in his proximity.
 
“Explain,” Hux said, keeping his place near the door.
 
“This is Leif.” Brendol gestured to the boy with his glass of whiskey. “He’s with me conditionally. I’m not one to sell my own flesh and blood off to slavers, as you well know. But as the Order is but a shadow of the Empire, I’ve not got the resources I did when I took you in.”
 
“I should think you at least have enough resources to afford contraception.”  
 
Hux almost regretted this remark, though Leif just went on staring at nothing in particular. Perhaps he was deaf; that would almost be a boon, as Brendol’s son. Hux had been spoken about as if he was an unfortunate inconvenience by surrounding adults for much of his early life. He hadn’t planned on ever doing the same to a sibling and even tried to imbue his speeches to their youngest stormtroopers with sentiments that would make them feel as if they had some amount of personal if not particularly individual value to offer the galaxy. But Brendol brought out the worst in him and well deserved the remark about his inability to at least ensure whichever wretched women were still willing to sleep with him used contraceptive stims.
 
“She tricked me,” Brendol said. “Same trick your own mother played.” He raised his glass as if to toast the women who’d outsmarted him.
 
Hux tried not to sneer, with mixed success. He felt his lip twitch.
 
“As refreshing as it is to know that women are still willing to do anything to bear the great Commandant’s offspring, for reasons mysterious to me, I fail to see why you thought bringing a child to an active star destroyer was the thing to do.”
 
“I’ve got business in this quadrant of the galaxy, that’s all.”
 
“What sort of business.”
 
“None of yours!” Brendol laughed at his own joke and looked at Leif as if to encourage him to do the same. To the boy’s credit, he remained stone-faced and avoided eye contact.
 
“You,” Hux said, stepping closer and addressing the boy-- His brother, somehow. Leif glanced up at him, and when Hux’s heart jerked with some kind of primal fear, as if he was in the presence of a clone who had been sent to destroy him, it felt as if he was also absorbing a reverberation of the boy’s own terror. Like some kind of invisible string was stretched between them already. “Can you speak?” Hux asked, trying to gentle his tone.
 
“Yes,” Leif said. His accent was like Ren’s.
 
“What happened to your mother?”
 
“She died.”
 
“So I heard, do we know how?”
 
Leif glanced at Brendol, who shrugged.
 
“Some sort of accident on their home planet,” Brendol said. “Two months back he turned up at my doorstep by way of the authorities there. Apparently she’d always told him I was his father. I had him tested, of course.”
 
“Of course.” Hux had no memory of it but also no doubt that Brendol had done the same to him.
 
“And he’s mine indeed, so here we are. I don’t know what use he could be at this stage of my career, and I suspect he’ll only be a burden. Maybe you could take him for the stormtrooper program, if you can get him to put on enough weight to keep him from snapping like a twig in combat training. Had the hardest time with that on your behalf, as you’ll recall. Strange thing, really. I’ve always been hearty as a bantha and all the women I’ve been with were full-figured.”
 
“Perhaps it’s a matter of nutrition.” Hux wanted to kill Brendol with his bare hands: not a new record, in terms of time spent in his presence before this feeling arose, but close. “Are you hungry?” he asked Leif.
 
Leif glanced at Brendol, again seeking permission to respond. Brendol was disinterested, however, wandering over toward Hux’s bedroom and poking his head in as if to check that the corners on the bed were done right. As if Hux made his own bed anymore.
 
“A little,” Leif said when Hux raised his eyebrows impatiently. The dirty tunic he wore had long sleeves that hung over his hands, and it was too big around the neck as well.
 
“Yes, yes, feed the boy,” Brendol said. He put the empty whiskey glass down and pulled his shoulders back, expelling a half-suppressed belch. “I’m going to need to sleep for a bit, and then I’ll need use of a workstation, and if you can spare a lieutenant to assist me--”
 
“Assist you in what?”
 
Brendol was essentially retired and increasingly incompetent in a way that Hux truly suspected was pathological; he was allowed to keep an office at the Academy only because he had carefully accumulated years of blackmail fodder on the younger leadership, Hux included, hence Hux’s tolerance of him.
 
“I have to be sensitive with certain information,” Brendol said, and he glanced at Leif as if he might be a spy. Hux had some concerns about that, too, and had plans to involve Ren in making sure that the boy wasn’t here under false pretenses, with Brendol’s help or not.
 
“I’ll have a trooper escort you to your room,” Hux said.
 
“No need, just point me in the right direction.”
 
“Absolutely not. You’re a civilian, and--”
 
“I’m your father!” Brendol shouted.
 
Leif flinched, and Hux feared that he had done the same, reflexively. Brendol’s raised voice still had the ability to briefly transport him back to that age.
 
“That may be,” Hux said bitterly, walking closer to Brendol. “But there are rules aboard my ship. Protocol. You once taught me to respect such things.” That was a lie; Rae taught him that, and when to skirt around them, too. “I will have a trooper escort you, and you will remain in the room provided for you until you have my permission to access a workstation.”
 
“Look at you, high and mighty.” Brendol smiled with a kind of sickening sneer, attempting to wield this like a threat. “You must really be getting off on this, eh? Trying to order me about?”
 
Hux didn’t take the bait. He lifted his comm and gave the order for a trooper to appear at the door of his personal quarters at once. When the answering buzz came within seconds, he wanted to smear Brendol’s fat face in how well-trained his crew was, how ready to jump at his every command, but the old man was drunk and wilting, already looking as if he’d forgotten what he was getting worked up about. Hux ushered him toward the door, gave the trooper instructions and was so pleased with the way he’d handled that, even while his heart rattled with rage in his chest, that he forgot Leif was still in the room until he turned back and saw him standing there, awkward and hungry.
 
“What do you like to eat?” Hux asked, trying to sound pleasant.
 
Leif looked alarmed by the question. His face was pinking up the way Hux’s did when Ren said something that embarrassed him.
 
“Um,” Leif said. Clearly no one had ever told him that speaking confidently was important, or good posture for that matter. “I like meat,” he said. “And bread.”
 
“Meat and bread. Easy enough, I’ll order you a sandwich. Do you have any allergies?”
 
“I don’t know what that is.”
 
Hux rolled his eyes, then regretted it. “Were you not in school, under your mother’s care?”
 
“No, sir.”
 
“You don’t have to call me sir. Do you understand that I’m your brother?”
 
“Yes.” Leif didn’t bother to hide the fact that this question insulted him. There was a sudden hardness in his eyes that Hux couldn’t help but admire, because it resembled his own. “I heard Brendol say it before.”
 
Hux couldn’t resist: “What do you think of him?”
 
Leif’s mouth quirked, and the hardness in his eyes cooled into something else. “I think he’s all I’ve got.”
 
“Yes, I remember the feeling. Do you want to clean up? I can find you some better clothes.”
 
Leif looked down at himself, and when he looked up again that insulted hardness had returned to his eyes. His cheeks had gone from pink to red.
 
“Okay,” he said.
 
“Good. Right. Allow me to make a few calls. The fresher is there, through the bedroom.” Hux opened his mouth to ask if Leif knew how to work a sonic, then reconsidered. “You should find everything you need where you’d expect it, but feel free to let me know if not.”
 
He heard himself sounding almost deferential to the boy, as if he was an honored guest, and realized it was probably not wise. Leif had a bratty streak already, not hidden as well as he thought, but Hux couldn’t help feeling sorry for the poor creature. He knew what it was like to lose one’s mother and then to be alone with Brendol. To date it was still the worst thing that had ever happened to Hux.
 
While Leif showered, Hux ordered food and clothing for him. He also sent a message to Ren.
 
Come to my room at once. I need your help with something urgently.
 
Knowing that Ren would interpret this as an invitation to fuck amused him. Ren had a certain look about him when he showed up at the door, helmet off and eyes blazing with intent. Hux held up a hand and stepped backward when Ren stalked toward him.
 
“Control yourself,” Hux said. “The child is in the other room.”
 
“The--” Ren made a face, apparently disliking that he’d been denied the opportunity to tell Hux that of course he already knew that Brendol had come in the company of a young boy of Hux-blooded origin: that was what Ren had sensed in the shuttle bay, what made him retreat to avoid Hux’s reaction. “What’s he doing in there?” Ren asked, glancing toward the bedroom.
 
“Cleaning up, because apparently Brendol no longer has the wits about him to concern himself with appearances.”
 
“Where’s Brendol?”
 
“Passed out in the room I arranged for him. I had one set up for his ‘passenger,’ too, but now that I know he’s just a child-- I don’t want a child left alone aboard my ship, doing fuck knows what, unsupervised.”
 
“What’s he like?” Ren asked, shifting his helmet from one hip to the other. He glanced toward the bedroom again. “Is he like you?”
 
“Not at all. Well, he’s thin. Anyway, my father is clearly losing what little is left of his mind. He claims to be on some kind of top secret mission for which he needs use of a workstation and a lieutenant. I’ll get to the bottom of it, but I suspect it’s some deranged fantasy or the work of colleagues who wanted him out of their hair for a few cycles. Meanwhile, he’s towing this child around with him like a droid and has no idea what to do with him. And what am I supposed to do? Put him in the stormtrooper program? Those kids would make a meal out of him. He doesn’t even know what an allergy is.”
 
Hux heard himself getting worked up and stopped talking. He looked in the direction of the fresher, where the sonic could no longer be heard. There was a buzz from the door, and Ren answered, helmetless, with his usual complete lack of discretion and respect for protocol.
 
Fortunately, it was just a droid bearing food and clothes for the boy. Hux put the food on the small table near his workstation, made Ren promise not to eat it and went into the bedroom, where Leif was standing in the fresher doorway, dwarfed by one of Hux’s towels.
 
“This is what our junior stormtrooper trainees wear when they’re doing athletic exercises,” Hux said, handing the clothes over. “I thought it would be comfortable.”
 
“Thank you.” Leif’s voice was small and tired. He looked like he might have been sobbing in the sonic; his eyes were puffy and he ducked Hux’s curious gaze. Hux considered that his mother had died just a few months prior.
 
“No thanks necessary,” Hux said, hardly believing himself. Of course gratitude was necessary! This urchin was at his mercy; if blood relation meant anything, Brendol wouldn’t be merely the curse that still hung with putrid regularity over all of Hux’s life.
 
And yet: when Leif emerged from the bedroom in clean clothes and sat down to devour the sandwich Hux had ordered for him, a kind of tender feeling that Hux hadn’t experienced since basking in his mother’s adoration during the too-brief months of their reunion began to grow into something that felt like an agenda. It was basic and impractical but getting stronger by the moment: the urge to take care of his own, the call to familial duty.
 
“Who is that?” Leif asked when he’d cleaned his plate.
 
Hux turned to see Ren lurking in the far corner of the room. Both he and Hux had been staring at Leif throughout most of his meal.
 
“My interrogator,” Hux said. “He’s here to make sure you’re not a threat to the ship.”
 
Leif looked suddenly like might vomit.
 
“Hux, what the fuck,” Ren said. “He’s just a kid. You’re scaring him.”
 
Hux turned to glower at Ren. “So you’ve scanned him? He’s not some stealth bomb Brendol has programmed to detonate onboard my ship?”
 
“Why would Brendol want to blow up your ship?”
 
“You don’t know him! I told you, he’s half-mad--”
 
Hux heard himself and smashed his eyes shut, willing the rage away.
 
“The kid’s not here to hurt you,” Ren said. “He’s frightened and grieving.”
 
Leif wilted under this diagnosis and stared down at his empty plate.
 
“I’m sorry,” Hux said, moving closer to Leif uncertainly. “It’s not that I suspected you in particular, it’s just that I have to investigate everyone who comes onboard my ship, for the sake of my crew. Do you know of the Force?”
 
Leif glanced from Hux to Ren and shook his head when he looked at Hux again.
 
“Ren.” Hux gestured behind him without looking. “Do something with the Force, to demonstrate. Move something around.”

Ren groaned. “You’re only scaring him more.”
 
“I’m not scared,” Leif said, sounding terrified. He put his shoulders back in a somewhat Brendol-like way and tried to look unafraid. “What’s the Force?”
 
“That’s a really big question,” Ren said. “There are towering galactic library shelves stuffed with holorecords trying to explain what the Force is and how it is perceived.”
 
“Oh, I’m the one who doesn’t know how to talk to children?” Hux snapped. He turned back to Leif. “It’s magic that grants an unfair but powerful advantage to certain people who are born with the ability to use it. Ren can move things around with it, without touching them. Show him, Ren.”
 
Ren used the Force to lift Hux off the ground without warning. Hux struggled within this grip and felt his face get hot while he cursed Ren. Leif smiled, maybe because Hux called Ren an arsehole.
 
“All right, demonstration over,” Hux said. He had an unfortunate tendency to get aroused when Ren moved him around like this, though it also infuriated him deeply, the usual combination when it came to Ren. “Put me down.”
 
Ren obeyed, forgoing the opportunity to humiliate Hux further. Hux straightened his hat and greatcoat, then reconsidered and took them both off, since it was his rest cycle and Leif might be less intimidated if he wasn’t dressed in his full regalia.
 
“Where are you from?” Ren asked, walking toward Leif while Hux put his things away in the closet near his bedroom door.
 
“Blinnini,” Leif said.
 
“That’s a mouthful,” said Hux. “What was Brendol doing there?”
 
“I don’t know.”
 
“That was a rhetorical question.”
 
Ren jabbed Hux with his elbow when he came to stand beside him.
 
“What’d you do on Blinnini?” Ren asked.
 
“Harvested cheerberries mostly.”
 
Hux scowled. “What are those?”
 
“They’re used in a potent liquor,” Ren explained, ever the expert on all things.
 
“So that explains Brendol’s presence.” Hux sighed and resisted the urge to tell the boy to correct his posture. He had enough on his mind already. “Do you want to sleep?” he asked instead.
 
“I don’t know.”
 
“That’s not an acceptable answer.”
 
“Sure it is,” Ren said. “Sometimes you just don’t know things. Sometimes I’m not sure if I want to sleep or not. Getting in bed and closing my eyes usually helps me figure it out.”
 
Hux looked at Ren, appalled. Ren seemed to think he knew what he was doing when it came to comforting a child. It was unnerving.
 
“What’s that thing?” Leif asked. He pointed to Ren’s helmet.
 
“I wear it,” Ren said. “Want to see?”
 
“Okay.”
 
Ren tossed his hair back with unneeded flourish and put the helmet on. “It changes my voice, too,” he said through the vocoder.
 
Leif recoiled and nodded, eyes wide. “Weird,” he said.
 
“You’ll find Ren is very strange,” Hux said, proud of him for that observation.
 
“Why does he have to wear that thing?”
 
“I don’t have to,” Ren said. Even through the vocoder Hux could hear that he’d taken offense at having this question asked of Hux, who was grinning, rather than himself. “I choose to wear it.”
 
Leif blinked and glanced at Hux again, then back at Ren. “Why, though?”
 
“An excellent question,” Hux said. He crossed his arms over his chest and turned to Ren. “I would have asked myself, years ago, if I thought I’d get a straight answer.”
 
Ren took the helmet off. He was scowling. Hux was again proud of Leif, now for looking less intimidated by Ren than he initially had, staring with open curiosity that verged on judgment.
 
“It’s part of a sacred tradition,” Ren said. “In the order I belong to.”
 
“The First Order?”
 
“No, it’s another sort of order.”
 
“Mystical,” Hux supplied.
 
Ren gave him a look but didn’t otherwise object to that characterization of the Knights of Ren, a company that Hux barely understood despite having had intense sexual contact with their leader for years.
 
Hux and Ren turned back to Leif, awaiting more questions. Leif fidgeted and began to go red-faced again.
 
“Where’s Brendol?” he asked.
 
“Sleeping, I think,” Hux said. “Locked in his room, at any rate.”
 
“You can tell him what to do?”
 
“Yes,” Hux said, pressing his shoulders back. “I don’t suppose you know what he’s up to.”
 
“He doesn’t really talk to me that much,” Leif said, mumbling. “Unless--”
 
He stopped there, but Hux could guess the rest.
 
“Unless you’re doing something that annoys him?” Hux said.
 
“Uh-huh.”
 
“Well, I won’t pretend he’s not a horrid trial of a person. I never had much use for him, but I had an excellent mentor within the Order who taught me to be a proper soldier and helped me manage Brendol’s attempts to interfere. Is that the sort of thing that would interest you? Having someone like that to guide you?”
 
Hux had always fantasized, secretly, about having an apprentice the way Rae once had him.
 
Leif looked confused, however. His face was bright red now, and he was playing with his napkin in a distracted way that belied his lack of training and manners.
 
“I don’t know,” he said, pronouncing this with trepidation because he knew Hux would dislike the answer.
 
“You know it’s pretty screwed up,” Ren said, suddenly bellowing, “To ask kids this young to make these kinds of decisions about their future.”
 
“Shut up, Ren,” Hux said, tightly.
 
He could see that Ren was right, however, at least partially. Leif was in no state to answer this question just yet; he’d clearly never been asked about his preferences on anything in a meaningful way and was probably raised in a manner conducive to continuing a life of manual labor until he dropped dead in a cheerberry field one day.
 
“You have some time to think it over, of course,” Hux said. “Brendol plans to be here for more than one cycle, as far as I can understand anything he plans to do. He mentioned a willingness to volunteer you for my stormtrooper program, but we don’t typically take children as old as you. So, alternatively, I could train you to be an officer. It would be an intimidating business at first, considering your lack of education, but I am particularly well-positioned to help someone in your--  circumstances. We could make it work, I believe.”
 
“You sound like you’re negotiating with an Outer Rim chieftain,” Ren said.
 
“And what should I sound like?” Hux snapped.
 
“Like a concerned sibling. He’s your brother. He looks like you.”
 
Ren made this third statement with a kind of wonder that Hux was inclined to interpret as mocking, but when he turned Ren was staring at Leif as if he was both impressed by and sympathetic to this Hux-resembling condition.
 
“I need a moment to consult with my co-commander,” Hux said to Leif. “If you like, you can go into my bedroom and rest. You may also use the holo projector if you swear to me that you won’t try to modify my settings.”
 
“Okay,” Leif said. He stood as if he was eager to escape their scrutiny. “I mean, I won’t. I won’t, uh. Your settings.”
 
“I suppose you know how to work a holo projector?”
 
Leif shrugged one shoulder. Hux followed him into the bedroom to demonstrate and then left him there, sealing the door shut behind him as he reentered the sitting room to rejoin Ren.  
 
“Well,” Hux said when Ren just stared at him, looking grim and holding his helmet as if he wasn’t planning to stay. “Here’s another pile of shit Brendol has pitched me into.”
 
“Don’t talk about your brother that way. He’s a little kid.”
 
“I’ve got nothing against that pitiful child, obviously! Did you not just hear me putting the blame on Brendol?”
 
“It’s not a pile of shit, though. He looks like you.”
 
“You mentioned that. Whatever he looks like, where have I got time in my schedule for tutoring a boy who lacks even a basic education?”
 
“I don’t know. You’re the one who suggested it to him.”
 
“I got promoted to General because I’m expected to carefully oversee the final stages of this weapon’s construction, because I designed it--”
 
“I know all this.”
 
Hux scowled and waved his hand in Ren’s direction, dismissing him. Of course he would be no help when it came to talking this out and forming some kind of plan. Ren was probably still waiting for Hux to unfasten his pants and bend over for the fuck he thought was forthcoming when he showed up here.
 
“What would you do in my situation?” Hux asked, pronouncing this with enough vitotrol to make it seem as if he wasn’t sincerely asking but attempting to insult Ren with the question.
 
Though he was sincerely asking.
 
Ren’s eyebrows went up. “Are you kidding? I’d love an apprentice, if Snoke would allow it. There are few things I want more than that.”
 
“Really?” Hux couldn’t keep the sincere surprise off his face. “Why?”
 
“For the same reason you want one. Why are we even having this conversation? You’ve made a career out of crafting people in your image. This is what you want, and it’s fallen right into your lap. Are we gonna fuck or what?”
 
“Not now!” Hux said, hissing this through his teeth and pointing at the bedroom door. “He’s right in there!”
 
“But the door is sound-proof. Walls, too.”  
 
“Yes, Ren, I’m aware, but-- Ah! I can’t get it up right now, I’m overwhelmed.”
 
“Bullshit,” Ren said, stepping closer. “I could get you hard in a swamp, under heavy fire.”
 
“Thought about it, have you?”
 
Now there was a kind of heat building between them that Hux felt it would be unwise to indulge, even while he desperately didn’t want to move away from it. This had always been the case when it came to his dalliances with Ren.
 
“I’ve thought about fucking you in all sorts of places,” Ren said. He grabbed Hux’s hips and pulled him closer. “And how you’d let me take you, no matter what. Because you always do.”
 
“No, I--”
 
But that was a pointless lie, because Ren was right, to Hux’s great shame. He let Ren kiss the protest away and flattened his palms onto Ren’s chest, feeling the heat of him and the strength of his heartbeat. After absorbing this for a moment, taking it in like stolen energy, Hux moaned as quietly as he could into Ren’s mouth, pulled back and shook his head.
 
“Not now,” he said, out of pride as much as concern for the child in the other room. He didn’t like that he could picture himself in a swamp, under the blaze of enemy fire, making time to get Ren’s cock up his arse, because it was such a reliable way to clear his head. Of course it was unrealistic, not a scenario that would ever actually happen, but there was something horribly accurate about the symbolism. Perhaps this whole thing had gotten out of hand.
 
Ren’s expression darkened before he stepped back and put the helmet on again.
 
“Are you really doing this?” Ren asked, bitter through the vocoder.
 
“Yes,” Hux said, adjusting his belt. “I’m actually rejecting you, it’s really happening. Are you going to vow to never touch me again because I’ve offended your princely feelings?”
 
Ren snorted. “I meant the kid. Taking care of him. But it’s good to know that you’ve been nursing this fear that turning me down once might chase me away forever.”
 
“I haven’t-- That was a joke!”
 
“You don’t really tell jokes, Hux.”
 
Ren turned away with his usual performative flair, robe spinning back in Hux’s direction. Hux wanted to grab it and use it to pull Ren to the ground, to wrestle him like an unhinged cadet, snarling and spitting until they were biting and then kissing, then fucking. They’d done it before.
 
But Ren had a point: Hux needed to think about what he would do next. Having Ren’s dick up his arse could only go so far toward clearing Hux’s mind, and in fact framing sex with him as a mind-clearer might have always been indulgent, wishful thinking. He let Ren go without even trying to get in the last word.
 
 
 
**
 
 
Hux sat down on his sofa to think and fell asleep in his clothes without meaning to. He was scheduled for his regular five hours of sleep per rest cycle, but it still seemed like a bad omen that he was already growing sloppy enough to sleep in a haphazard fashion that left his neck sore and jaw aching, because he’d slept without the apparatus that kept him from grinding his teeth. His comm was blinking with new messages from Brendol when he woke. The door to his bedroom, where the grinding-proof apparatus and his pajamas resided, was still closed, Leif presumably still inside. Hux needed to piss and was fairly sure he’d had a bad dream about wandering around in a cheerberry field, looking for a fresher or at least someplace private to relieve himself and finding dirty locals peering at him every time he thought he’d located the latter.
 
Need to get started on my work now was Brendol’s first message. Six increasingly irate messages later, he’d sent, YOU WILL REGRET IMPEDING ME IN THIS YOU SPITEFUL INGRATE BASTARD.
 
“Right,” Hux said. He deleted all of the messages and stood, stretched his arms over his head and knocked on his own bedroom door before entering, feeling more and more like he’d already made a decision that would ruin him, as if he’d bolted the lid onto his own coffin while he slept.
 
Leif was still sleeping when Hux entered, curled up on his side and so motionless that Hux crept close enough to make sure he could see the boy breathing. When he’d thusly reassured himself he went into the fresher, emptied his bladder and returned to the room to collect clean clothing before taking a quick sonic. He emerged dressed and found Leif sitting up in bed, groggy and rubbing at his eyes.
 
“I guess you were tired,” Hux said. He imagined Ren laughing, hearing this. Everything you say is wrong, Hux. It wasn’t the sort of thing Hux should be ashamed of, this inability to relate to a child. He’d barely ever been one himself.
 
“Can I have water?” Leif asked, his voice a sad little scratch.
 
“Yes,” Hux said, hurrying back into the sitting room for one of the glasses from his bar set. He felt stupid, like he’d miscalculated on a schematic, forgetting some very basic detail: humans need not only food but also water. He filled the glass in the fresher sink and brought it to Leif.
 
“Thank you,” Leif said after he’d gulped it all down. “Where’s Brendol?”
 
“Having a tantrum in his room,” Hux said.
 
Leif’s expression immediately dropped into terror. Hux thought of asking if Brendol had hit him yet, but he’d never liked that question when he was a boy. It had always seemed like there was no right answer.
 
“Don’t worry about him,” Hux said. “As I said, he’s under my command here. I should probably confront him. You can join me or stay here. It’s up to you.”
 
Hux remembered well how it had felt like an insult or a test in those first days when it was suggested to him that he wasn’t just his father’s cringing little slave, that he could make decisions for himself and had some kind of power of his own. Leif looked as if he was afraid to reply, like he feared every decision he could possibly make for himself would of course be wrong.
 
“Can I stay here?” he finally said, after Hux had twice rejected the impulse to snap at him and ask him to speak.
 
“I just told you that you can. Get more water for yourself if you like. I’ll have more food sent in. I shouldn’t be long.”
 
Hux turned to go and immediately felt like it was the wrong move, leaving a stranger alone in his room. Even if he was a child, even if he looked almost precisely like Hux had when he was trying to cling to Rae as circumstances finally pried them apart, even if Ren claimed to have looked into the boy’s mind and seen nothing of concern: there was extremely sensitive information on Hux’s private workstation, and he didn’t really know what this child was capable of.
 
Though he couldn’t fully rely on Ren’s reassurance that Leif was harmless, there was no one Hux trusted to monitor Leif except Ren himself. Therefore, like he had so many times in the past, many of them happening in bed, he had to trust Ren in order to get what he needed. He sent a message asking Ren to please check in on Leif while Hux dealt with Brendol.
 
So is he our co-apprentice, Co-Commander?
 
Try to teach him how to use the Force if you like Hux sent back. He put his comm away and imagined how fearsome he would have been if he’d had the Force at his disposal at Leif’s age. He’d have ruled the galaxy by his late teens. But it was only a fantasy, or a ploy to keep Ren busy: there was no Force sensitivity in the Hux line. Whatever Leif’s mother might have contributed, Brendol’s blunt weapon genes would have killed it off. Brendol was the opposite of a magic person. The antidote to anything exceptional.
 
“You dare show your face after keeping me locked up here like a stowaway?” Brendol shouted as soon as Hux had stepped into his room. The old man looked more poorly than before, seething and red-faced with shame, knowing he could froth and curse all he liked but that he was still at Hux’s mercy. Hux kept this in mind, hands clasped behind his back and face passive even as his heart rate picked up and something in him shrunk and put its tiny ghost arms over its head, as if Brendol might still hit him.
 
“You are unraveling,” Hux said. “When’s the last time you had a psyche eval?”
 
“Please! Are you submitting to those now? Explains a lot. Worthless waste of time. Where’s the boy?”
 
“What do you care? Maybe I enrolled him in the stormtrooper program while you assaulted my comm with your impotent whining.”
 
This was the barest disrespect Hux had ever dared. Brendol looked shocked, almost impressed, then murderous. Hux’s heart was pounding while he waited to see which of them struck first, and how: literally, or in some more permanently severing blow.
 
“He’s my property,” Brendol said.
 
“Mhm, no. By your own design, any child born in our territories is subject to enrollment in the program.”
 
“He’s too old for the program, and too weak.”
 
Thin as a-- Useless as a-- Hux kept his face still, allowing himself only one blink.
 
“That’s my concern,” Hux said. “Not yours.”
 
“You sentimental fop. You haven’t put him in any program. Do you think I’ve forgotten how you hunted your pathetic mother down, hindering your own career to spend precious hours with a dying wench?”
 
Hux took a step forward, understanding in the moment how Ren could destroy whatever was in range when he felt like this, like what stood before him was begging to be torn apart and if he had the power to reduce it to a smouldering pile of wreckage, why shouldn’t he? Brendol stood his ground, upper lip raising. He’d never known when to back down from a fight that he would lose: Hux had seen Brendol beaten to a bloody heap by his rivals multiple times. Rae did it herself once, while Hux hid in the shadows and waited to know if he wanted her to kill him or not.
 
“You must have been envious,” Hux said, nearly nose to nose with Brendol, a bit taller than him now. “Seeing as I never sought you out, when all that would have required was a comm call.”
 
“Envious!” Brendol sputtered. His eyes had gone a bit wild. Hux hated the smell of him, which was just the same as it had always been: curdled milk and booze, starched fabric damp with sweat. “What was there to envy? I’ve summoned you whenever I needed something, and you’ve always done your duty to me. The one you know you owe me, for letting you live at all.”
 
“That’s an interesting view of the charity I’ve shown you as I’ve found you more and more pitiable, the older and more irrelevant you become.”
 
“Oh, yes, your great charity! And now you mean to show it to that berry-stained wretch? I’ll watch with great amusement while you trip over yourself, trying to make something of him and damning your own ambitions in the process. What do you think happened to me, boy? I’ll live another fifty years if that’s how long it takes to see him turn on you the way you did on me. No good deed goes unpunished, Armitage. You’ll learn that quickly.”
 
Hux opened his mouth to tell Brendol that he didn’t plan to treat Leif the way that Brendol had treated him. Before he could speak he was struck with a dizzying sensation of again being unable to remember when he’d made this decision. Was he actually keeping this child? Rather than sending him away with Brendol and forgetting the whole thing had ever happened? Surely he couldn’t. This was some temporary madness, or a foolish need to take something that wasn’t worth having from his father. Brendol wasn’t wrong. Assuming sole responsibility for an uneducated, friendless child would slice into Hux’s plans like a surgical knife, cutting essential pieces away and consuming them. Leif would grow stronger for having eaten them up. Hux would weaken into something like Brendol, meanwhile: bitter, sidelined, laughed at for his lack of vision.
 
“You understand me perfectly,” Brendol said, grinning when he saw the trepidation in Hux’s eyes. “You’ve always thought we were so unalike. That you were like her, your beloved Admiral. Ha. You and I aren’t so different. Learn from my mistakes and don’t be a fool. If I were a smarter man I’d have left not just him but you to dry up in the dust like untended saplings. But I couldn’t, so now I’m here. Asking for a favor from my son, the General. And you won’t even give me this morsel, will you?”
 
“No,” Hux said, moving away from him. “I want you off my ship at once.”
 
“I might have known.” Brendol straightened up, trying to rise to the height he’d once commanded. He’d shrunk slightly in recent years. “I can’t say that I’m not a bit proud to see you’ve finally grown a spine. Thought you’d be rolling over for me all your life. Fine. Bring the boy to the shuttle and we’ll leave you to your glories, General.”
 
Hux could protest. He had every right. But what would he be protesting on behalf of? A child who was a stranger to him, in favor of his own carefully arranged life? Already he was behind schedule on his morning tasks. Already he’d had to forgo recreation time with Ren because they hadn’t really been alone. There were two things in his life that he enjoyed: military victory and celebratory fucks with Ren in the aftermath. To sacrifice his time for his half-brother’s well-being would mean compromising on the quality of both, and Brendol wasn’t wrong about the potential for the boy to always be plotting to use what Hux had taught him against Hux himself.
 
He ordered a stormtrooper to take Brendol to the shuttle bay and hold him there. The walk to his quarters made him queasy, as if the ship was rocking against waves of enemy fire, and by the time he arrived, braced to do the smart thing, to make the only choice that was right for himself and his agenda, he’d forgotten that he’d ordered Ren to keep Leif company.
 
Leif was laughing and levitating about a foot off the floor while Ren sat on the sofa, eating the omelet Hux had ordered for Leif’s breakfast. When they both turned to look at Hux, Ren eased the Force hold off of Leif and set him carefully on the floor.
 
“He was using the Force on me,” Leif said, still smiling.
 
“He asked me to,” Ren said, as if Hux would be angry about this.
 
“Fine.” Hux swallowed the urge to vomit. “Come, Leif. I have-- I’m sorry, I looked into some things and unfortunately the timing for my taking on an apprentice is not right-- Not possible. So you’ll be going now.”
 
A kind of ashen veil fell over the room. Hux felt accused, more by Ren’s angry stare than Leif’s alarmed confusion.
 
“Going?” Leif said.
 
“With Brendol, back to wherever you two came from, for now. I could perhaps be your benefactor from afar.” He thought of Rae saying the same to him, how maintaining contact with her from a distance wasn’t even a shadow of what it had meant to have her at his side every day, guiding his steps. “But in the meantime, I’ve got to get Brendol off my ship, and--”
 
“I need to speak to you,” Ren said, standing.
 
“Ren, I can’t--”
 
“You can. Now, follow me.”
 
Ren went into Hux’s bedroom. Hux could feel Leif staring at him. He was too ashamed to look back, which enraged him. As if he owed this boy anything. He hadn’t asked for any of this. He never even asked for what Brendol thought was best for him: to be taken away from a mother who loved him and made into someone who served a singular purpose. But that was what had happened, and his singular purpose left no room for child rearing.
 
He went into the bedroom with Ren mostly to stall things, feeling as if he’d already been surgically taken apart by the knife of this situation.
 
“What are you doing?” Ren asked when the door sealed shut behind Hux. “I thought--”
 
“Yes, I had a momentary lapse of judgment and regrettably I mentioned it to the boy. I do wish it hadn’t happened that way, but I’m not accustomed to the delicacy of these situations--”
 
“What situations? What changed?” Ren’s eyes darkened. “What did Brendol say?”
 
“He tried to rile me, but in the process he reminded me that I should be less like him. Unwilling to take on a child who will only hinder my own designs, that is. I’ll make sure he’s provided for, I’ll only assist Brendol in the future with the understanding that he must--”
 
“You can’t control Brendol. From afar or otherwise. He has a sickening influence over you, still. It’s like you’re coated in slime, just from having contact with him.” Ren’s nose twitched. “Your Force signature is-- Wrong. Wounded.”
 
“Oh, fuck off with your Force signatures and your assumptions that you know everything about me! What you do know, as well as I, is that this is no place for a child and that I have no time, energy or desire to care for one, ever. If I had suggested to you during the previous cycle that I was capable of being a supportive caretaker for so much as a pinfish, would you not have laughed yourself sick?”
 
Ren didn’t deny it, or that the idea was a wholly bad one. He still radiated a new sort of contempt for Hux that was unfair and unhelpful.
 
“Who the hell do you think I am?” Hux asked, voice rising. He felt his face blazing and wondered if he looked like Brendol; they most resembled each other in the throes of rage. “I’m the man who’s creating the next generation of planet killer, this thing that will make the Death Star look quaint! That’s my nature, my destiny, as you might say, and I must have been out of my mind to think-- Even Rae admitted, eventually, that she didn’t have time for me.”
 
Hux felt himself go white, then the heat rose back to his face too fast, making him feel faint. He turned away from Ren. They had talked about Rae only once. Ren had curled around Hux with uncharacteristic tenderness after hearing him confess, after drinking too much, that the Admiral had been his mentor and that it had meant more to him than professional advancement, because he had been alone before her and again when she moved on. You’re ready now, she’d said, and squeezed his shoulder, and had she been wrong? No, of course not. At ten years old, Hux had been ruthless and hard as stone, remade in her image, and just a few years later he had excelled in the Academy, starting the junior program earlier than most of his peers. But he’d been no more ready to lose Rae’s presence at his side than he had been to watch his mother succumb to the illness that he might have saved her from if he had found her sooner.
 
“You should comm Admiral Sloane,” Ren said. “Before you do this.”
 
“Fuck you,” Hux said weakly, and he reached for the door panel. “She would tell me to get rid of the boy at once. You don’t know her. I had leverage, at four years old. Something she needed. That boy out there offers nothing but a burden I can’t carry, and it’s too late for him, he’s already too soft to survive here. Anyway, my mind’s made up. Stay out of it.”
 
Hux opened the door and felt his face heating, as if Leif had heard all of that through the sound-proofed walls. He was seated on the floor and staring down at the carpet, hands in his lap.
 
“Stand up,” Hux said, disliking the way his voice had tightened. “Let’s go. Unless--” Hux looked at the half-finished omelet on the sofa. “Do you want the rest of that, before you leave?”
 
“He doesn’t like eggs,” Ren said, looming behind Hux.
 
“Oh.” Hux thought of offering to order something else. But what in hell was he doing? Delaying, acting like a coward. He pointed to the door when Leif got to his feet. “You can keep the clothes,” he said, and he imagined even Rae wincing at his cruelty, but that was absurd. Brendol was right that he had become sentimental somehow. Maybe it was that half-year spent caring for his invalid mother. Or Ren and his vile Republic upbringing, spilling into Hux a little more with every ejaculation.
 
“Can I stay, though?” Leif asked, his voice already a tattered ribbon, flagging in the wind. “I could be a stormtrooper, I’d try hard, I promise--”
 
“Did you not just hear me? I’m sorry I got your hopes up, but I looked into it and it’s not possible. You’re lucky I’m your brother and that Brendol is your father.” Those words tasted so bitter in Hux’s mouth that for a moment he was sure that Ren had wrapped the Force around his throat in disgust, but when he tugged at his collar there was no pressure there. “We’ll see to it that you’re provided for,” he explained. “Come now, follow me.”
 
Hux expected Ren to trail after them, projecting searing judgment all the way, but he remained in Hux’s quarters. The better to berate him upon return, Hux supposed.
 
Leif walked at Hux’s side, eyes cast down. When Hux took a sharp left turn toward the shuttle bay corridor, Leif bumped into him and apologized, glancing up at Hux’s face, fearful and red-cheeked, before turning his gaze back to the floor.
 
“It’s all right,” Hux muttered, wishing that he could stop feeling like he was going to be sick. Once the boy was gone, maybe. Once Brendol was far away from him again, all his misdeeds trailing behind him.
 
Only you’re one of his misdeeds, too, something said. It wasn’t Ren in his head, but it was an organic thing within Hux that spoke with Ren’s accent.
 
“At last!” Brendol said when they arrived in the shuttle bay, where a stormtrooper waited dutifully at Brendol’s side. “I’ve been standing here for an eternity. Of course you dragged your feet as much as possible, maker forbid you ever think of anything but yourself. Armitage can tell you how many lashes it takes to beat that out of a boy, if he remembers.”
 
Up until that statement, Hux had assumed Brendol was talking to him, not Leif. Hux felt locked into place, sent back in time, and like he wasn’t alone in the tractor beam of Brendol’s spittle-flecked ranting. There was someone here with him, suddenly. Leif lingered at Hux’s side as if he was frozen, too. His arm was touching the sleeve of Hux’s greatcoat, and Hux could feel him trembling.
 
“Get over here!” Brendol shouted, heaving himself toward the airlock where his transport awaited. “Witless brat, you’ll shave ten years off my life with your dawdling alone.”
 
Hux put his hand on Leif’s shoulder the way that Rae had done to him, squeezing. Only that was ludicrous: Hux had five years with Rae before her steady promotions finally precluded the presence of an apprentice so young, and one who would soon leave for Academy training regardless. Hux had known Leif for less than a full cycle. The words they exchanged wouldn’t even fill one scroll of data screen. Furthermore, Leif was trembling like a-- Well. Hux had been as still as a rock under Rae’s grip, desperate to demonstrate that she was right, that he was ready, even though his bones screamed that he wasn’t as he fought the urge to give her some signal that she should stay. As if it were ever up to Hux, who stayed and who left him.
 
At some point Hux realized that he was holding Leif in place, tight enough to keep him from moving even if he’d wanted to. Leif didn’t budge within Hux’s grip.
 
“What’s the matter with you?” Brendol shouted when he turned back and saw Leif still standing with Hux. “Move your stupid arse! I’m already half a cycle behind schedule thanks to your useless brother.”
 
“He’s staying here,” Hux said. He heard the words as if they came from a holo film he was watching, but just having them out strengthened his resolve, and he held Leif by both shoulders, easing his grip so the boy didn’t bruise. He probably bruised easily, like Hux. “You’re dismissed, Commandant. No one here needs you.”
 
Something twinkled in Brendol’s eyes. It was as if he thought he had tricked Hux, or posed a test that Hux had failed. Hux didn’t care. He felt the nausea that was rollicking in his gut begin to ease when Leif sank back against him, the folds of Hux’s greatcoat enveloping him like armor.
 
“Fool,” Brendol said. There was something strangely fond in it, not directed at Hux but maybe to himself, or some past version of himself. Surely he still thought he was a great man to have taken in the kitchen maid’s boy. He probably expected Hux to unleash the same brutal preparation for a life in Brendol’s world onto Leif. But Hux no longer had to live in Brendol’s world, pathetic as it was. He hadn’t since Rae rescued him from it, even after she left. Hux had gone so much higher than Brendol ever could have taken him, and there was room enough, from this height, to lift another person clear of what lurked down below.
 
Leif had tears in his eyes when he finally turned and looked up at Hux. His lips shook and he pressed them together. Brendol had been sealed onto his transport; it blasted off and then into hyperspace. Neither Leif nor Hux watched it go.
 
“Come with me,” Hux said. His throat was tight again, but differently now. He patted Leif’s head. “I’m sorry, I’ll-- Explain. Just come along now.”
 
On the walk back to Hux’s quarters, Hux kept the corner of his eye on Leif and saw him carrying himself differently already, even as he continued to fight off tears all the way there. By the time they got to Hux’s front room, a few had escaped and had been hastily wiped away. Hux was surprised and then disappointed to see that Ren had gone. Ren would know what to do next, maybe. As it was, Hux stood awkwardly and looked down at the crying boy, trying to come up with some kind of apology, or instruction, or anything.
 
Hug him, said the voice in Hux’s head that sounded like Ren. His mother used to hug him, it said, And she’s gone.
 
It wasn’t really Ren’s voice: it was Hux, thinking of his own mother. Projecting, of course. Still, he lowered to his knees and held out his arms.
 
“Sorry,” Leif said, blinking more tears down his cheeks.
 
“For what?” Hux was still waiting to be hugged, feeling like an idiot.
 
“I don’t know.”
 
Admitting this made Leif full-on sob. Hux made an admonishing, sympathetic sound and walked forward on his knees. He pulled his little brother into his arms and was surprised by how relieved he was when Leif grabbed him and clung hard, wetting the shoulder of Hux’s coat with tears and probably snot, too.
 
“All right, all right,” Hux said. His face was burning again, but this was indeed all right, somehow. He was filled with an insane, adrenaline-like feeling of having narrowly avoided catastrophe when he thought of how Leif might be aboard Brendol’s shuttle right now, had he not changed his mind. Or rather, not allowed Brendol to change it before remembering himself. He held Leif tighter and patted his trembling back. “I’m sorry about your mother,” Hux said. “Mine died, too. Her name was Malleri and I still think of her every day.”
 
Leif made a high-pitched sound of agony and then deflated, sniffling against Hux’s shoulder. When he sat back he was very puffy-faced but no longer shaking. He rubbed his eyes dry.
 
“My mother was Tilma,” he said, as if Hux might have heard of her, as if there were only one Tilma in the galaxy, and of course there had been, only her.
 
“Brendol turned my head around for a moment,” Hux said. He reached into a hidden front pocket of his coat and produced a black silk handkerchief. Leif took it and held it in both hands like it was a precious gift. “I’m sorry about upsetting you,” Hux said. “That was needless and wrong of me. Brendol makes it so I can’t think straight, but I do want you here. With me, you’re better off. And he’s gone for good, all right?” Hux had to swallow something down before he said the rest, because Rae had said it to him once. “I won’t let him hurt you again.”
 
Leif blinked rapidly, his eyes filling. Hux took the handkerchief from him and used it to dab fresh tears away before they could fall. This was the scene Ren barged in on, short of breath and not wearing his helmet. It wasn’t even in his hands. Instead he held a duraplast container from the kitchens.
 
“I brought you something,” Ren said, looking to Leif and then Hux. He opened the box and lowered down onto one knee, showing Leif what was inside: pastries sprinkled with sugar. “Since I ate your omelet,” Ren said when Leif looked up at him, boggling.
 
Hux was confused, too, but only for a moment. Surely Ren hadn’t brought him pastries to apologize for the way their argument had gone. He had gotten these things for Leif, knowing he would still be here. Ren had known Hux wouldn’t go through with sending Leif back to hell with Brendol, however impractical the alternative was. Perhaps this certainty was only possible through the Force, but when Hux met Ren’s eyes over Leif’s head as he selected a pastry from the box, he thought perhaps Ren just knew him well enough, without use of his mind reading powers, to understand which evils Hux was capable of and which he couldn’t bring himself to do.
 
“So I missed the chance to meet Brendol,” Ren said while they all sat there on the floor near the front entryway, eating pastries and getting sugar everywhere.
 
“Yes,” Hux said, noticing how Leif tensed at the sound of that name. “He’ll never be back.”
 
“Will I be a stormtrooper?” Leif asked. He looked nervous at the prospect.
 
“No,” Hux said. “They’re expendable. You’re not. I’ll help with your education and we’ll make an officer of you. Do you know how to read?”
 
“Yeah. My mom taught me.”
 
“Good.” Hux wiped sugar from his lips. “And don’t say yeah, that’s something lazy Republic children say.”
 
Ren snorted. “I say it,” he said, raising his eyebrows at Leif. “I say it to Hux all the time.”
 
“No, he doesn’t,” Hux said, though it was true, usually in the form of yeah, yeah, as Ren dismissed some valid concern of Hux’s while walking away, or during sex, when Hux actually found the way Ren said it arousing.
 
“Do you live here, too?” Leif asked Ren. “In this room?”
 
Hux was impressed. It was a tactful way to ask what the kid really wanted to know: did Ren’s partnership with Hux, which apparently included the sharing of pastries on the floor with a child, constitute some sort of romance?
 
“I have my own room,” Ren said.
 
That remained true, though he was in it less and less as cycles passed and Leif’s care continued to require Ren’s cooperation. Even with Ren’s help, Hux found himself pulled away from his most essential duties more and more: when Leif got shipbound sickness, Hux was at his bedside for a full cycle, sick with worry that he resented but couldn’t ignore, unwilling to leave him in the care of droids and instead personally administering medicines and reading to him from historical holorecords, his favorites. When Leif was back to full health, Hux felt accomplished, though he’d missed an important meeting with a weapons dealer and it had gone sour in his absence.
 
“Snoke isn’t happy about how things went on Takk,” Ren said when they were alone together, sharing the evening shower that was sometimes their only privacy, often their only chance to fuck. Ren offered this information gently, as a warning, his eyes full of concern when Hux looked up into his face. Things had changed between them since Leif’s arrival. They talked like this in the shower just as often as they fucked, holding each other.
 
“I know,” Hux said. “But we’ll-- I’ll find another source. I’ll cut my rest cycle down to three hours until I do.”
 
“You know you can’t function with less than five, no matter how many stims you pump into your blood.”
 
“Don’t lecture me,” Hux snapped, already feeling overtired after the ordeal with Leif’s sickness. “I have limits, yes, but they can be stretched for a certain amount of time, until I’ve fixed things.”
 
But he couldn’t fix things. Ren was sent away by Snoke to undergo some sort of mystical trial and Hux was without help in attending to Leif, who was well-behaved and not demanding but nevertheless a real drain on Hux’s free time. Leif could entertain himself while Hux was on duty, but on Hux’s rest cycles he was full of questions about things he’d read or seen throughout the day, bored of being alone and talking nonstop. Apparently cheerberry harvesters were allowed to talk while they worked. Leif and his mother had talked to each other all day long, telling stories and singing little songs that Hux couldn’t help but find charming when Leif was finally bold enough to share them with him.
 
“When is Ren coming back?” Leif asked, for the fifth time in five cycles, while Hux tried to read recon reports from his data pad. They were having dinner, and Hux was attempting to multitask. He was also trying not to think overmuch about all the important personnel intel he was missing out on by not eating meals amongst his officers.
 
“Same answer as yesterday,” Hux said tightly. He felt guilty for his tone when Leif shrunk, but it couldn’t be helped. Hux was just as disappointed as Leif to not yet have word of when Ren would return.
 
“What if he gets hurt on his mission?” Leif asked. “Would you know?”
 
“Yes,” Hux said, a lie. “So we at least know he’s uninjured, since we’ve had no word. That’s a relief, yes? Are you finished?” He nodded to Leif’s half-eaten dinner. “You can watch the holo projector if so.”
 
“Will you watch with me?”
 
“I can’t, I have work to do.”
 
“Oh.” Leif remained at the table, legs swinging in a distracting fashion. He pushed food around on his plate, making an unpleasant scraping noise with his fork. “What’s the longest Ren was ever gone for?” he asked.
 
“I don’t remember. Please, I need to concentrate on this. Either eat your food or go watch something.”
 
Leif left the table with the nervous energy that sometimes still consumed him, as if he was afraid that he would be ejected from Hux’s life without a second thought if he annoyed Hux enough or pushed him at the wrong moment. Hux knew he was partially to blame for this lingering anxiety. He wasn’t a particularly warm person, though he could admit that he cared deeply for his little half-brother now. He spent another hour staring down at his data pad and feeling distracted by Leif’s moping, wanting to rebuke him for this but knowing he shouldn’t, or couldn’t.
 
“What’s this?” Hux asked when he went into the bedroom. Leif was stretched out on Hux’s bed and watching the holo projection on the opposite wall. It showed what looked like some Ewok-type creatures performing circus tricks for a crowd.
 
“I don’t know,” Leif said. “It’s stupid.”
 
“Let’s find something better then, eh?”
 
Leif looked up with surprise. Hux stripped down to his undershirt and shorts and sat on the other side of the bed. They often spent evenings like this when Ren was away. Leif normally slept out on the convert-bed that Hux had in his sitting room now in place of a sofa, but sometimes he fell asleep in Hux’s bed while the holo projections glowed down over them. Hux usually let him stay there, though Leif had nightmares and woke Hux up regularly, occasionally even when he was in the other room. Hux had grown accustomed to leaving the door between their rooms open, unless he needed privacy with Ren. He would never be warm, but he had gotten good at efficiently calming Leif after a bad dream, promising him that all those ghosts were behind him. Hux could relate to the persisting subconscious sensation that they were still too close.
 
They found a Tulgian sporting match to watch and Hux let Leif hover near his shoulder when he returned to the bed with mugs of birch tea for both of them. Leif liked that he was allowed to use the machine that made it, and he liked bringing Hux his mug as if he was being very grown up. Hux enjoyed the sight of it. Leif was more confident every day, and though his hovering was antithetical to the way Hux was raised, apparently Leif’s late mother had allowed it, and Hux didn’t have the heart to tell him to move off. He remembered well enough the times he’d tried to sit or stand just a little closer to Rae than was necessary, because the closer she was, the safer he felt.
 
That night they both fell asleep while watching the holo, and Hux didn’t wake until he heard the door opening out in the sitting room. He sat up with alarm and exhaled with relief when he recognized Ren’s footsteps. He was too tired to force his expression back to neutral before Ren could see how glad he was to see him, and had mostly stopped wasting energy on pretending he didn’t care about Ren beyond the use of his cock. Ren smiled back, standing in the doorway. He looked like hell: tired and dirty, there was a cut that sliced through his left eyebrow. He was missing a glove and the left knee of his leggings was torn.
 
For a while Hux just held Ren’s gaze, something dangerous gaining volume in his chest, stretching to a bursting width and wanting out.
 
“You’re back!” Leif said brightly, surprising them both when he woke.
 
“I am,” Ren said, and he held up a black package that he’d concealed under his robe. “And I brought something.”
 
Hux recalled Ren having brought him a skull after a mission, early in what might be considered their courtship. He hoped this wasn’t another of those, though he had loved that present so much that, after receiving it and granting it a place on the display shelf where it still resides in the sitting room, he hadn’t allowed Ren to leave his bed until they’d fucked three times.
 
“What is it?” Leif asked, already clapping.
 
“I’ll show you.” Ren bound into the bed, dirty boots and all. Hux thought of protesting, but instead he allowed Ren’s weight at the center of the mattress to roll him against Ren’s side. Hux clutched at Ren’s arm while Leif did the same to Ren’s opposite shoulder. Ren smelled like dirt and blood and also so perfect, so good that Hux wanted to kiss his face. He restrained himself and watched Ren dig into the bag and hold its contents overhead.
 
“A holoscope!” Leif said when Ren flicked the thing on, projecting a galaxy of stars onto the ceiling of Hux’s bedroom before switching to an ocean of fish.
 
“That’s some antique tech,” Hux said. “Where’d you find it?”
 
“Someone we, uh. Met on the mission, they had it with their personal effects. Though Leif might like it.”
 
“I do!” he said, reaching up to change to a view of undulating musical notes. “Is it really for me?” he asked, squeezing Ren’s shoulder. Like Leif, Ren was raised with a surplus of physical affection. He took to it more easily than Hux, and Leif was always grabbing at him with enthusiasm.
 
“Of course it’s for you,” Ren said. He passed it into Leif’s hands and leaned over to kiss Hux between the eyes while Leif was distracted with the toy.
 
Hux needed to get up; he was already behind on work. He knew he shouldn’t even close his eyes, that he would drift off again, but it felt so good to breathe in Ren’s unwashed, battle-weary scent and lie there against the warmth of him after so many cycles spent wondering if this would be the time that Snoke chose to keep him away forever or dispose of him without bothering to consult Hux. He let himself have one more moment, then another, until Leif’s babbling questions about the mission and Ren’s answers were like soft background music, soothing Hux into a far too comfortable sleep.
 
Just a few cycles after the three of them had a modest celebration to mark the one-year anniversary of Leif’s arrival, Hux received his official summons to meet with the Admiral of the Fleet and discuss his demotion, effective immediately.
 
Hux was shaking with humiliated rage outside of Rae’s office as he awaited the start of said meeting. He hadn’t seen her in person for almost five years, and they rarely had occasion to exchange comm messages, but every time she reached out to him it filled him with a childish but undeniable pride. This was the first time a message from her had accompanied crushing defeat.
 
“Don’t look at me like that,” Rae said when he entered. She was leaning against her massive desk, arms crossed over her chest. “You had to know this was coming.”
 
“I had no warning!” Hux said, knowing he shouldn’t raise his voice or talk to her like a petulant child but suddenly unable to help either thing.
 
“I don’t do warnings,” Rae said. “And you’re too smart to need one. Come here and sit. I’ll pour you a drink.”
 
Hux fell into a chair across from her desk and allowed his posture to deteriorate, fists drilling into his eyes and elbows on his knees as he bent over onto himself like the defeated idiot he was. He knew she was right. He had lost something: an edge, a sense of purpose, his mind. He’d gone soft, had gotten lazy, and he deserved worse than a demotion to Chief Commander in Charge of Engineering Development, whatever the hell that was.
 
“Chin up, Armitage,” Rae said, nudging his jaw with a glass of brandy. “You’re still overseeing the stormtrooper programs, and this position will give you more freedom to work outside of traditional shift schedules. It involves research and design and everything you’re good at.”
 
“I’m a good leader,” Hux said, staring down into the glass. The brandy sloshed invitingly within it, but his stomach was clenched so tightly he didn’t dare drink.
 
“You can be,” Rae allowed, leaning against the desk again and bringing her own glass to her lips.
 
“It’s this child, it’s-- You know my situation, with my brother.”
 
“Yes. And you could have placed him in any number of situations where his primary care didn’t fall to you, but you made the choice not to, and this new position will allow you to live the life that you’ve already designed for yourself, which is not the life of one of my leading generals. I gave you a year, waiting to see if you would change your mind and send the boy away. You did not. I don’t have any more leeway to give.”
 
“I’m ashamed,” Hux said, staring down into the glass. “And I know you-- You must be so disappointed. You wasted your time on a-- I don’t even know what I am. Brendol’s son, I suppose, after all.”
 
“Quit feeling sorry for yourself. I’m not disappointed, just surprised. I know what it’s like to want a family.”
 
Rae raised her eyebrows when Hux sat up to give her a look of disbelief.
 
“Do you think it’s beneath me?” She sipped from her glass. “I don’t. It’s just a choice I didn’t make. And perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised that it’s something you’ve always wanted, considering how Brendol denied it to you.”
 
“But it’s not what I’ve always wanted. I want to rule the galaxy.”
 
It sounded flat and ridiculous. Hux swallowed a gulp of brandy, then another.
 
“You will, as part of my team,” Rae said. “I’m close to a final agreement with Holdo. At this rate we won’t even have to fire Starkiller. I’m halting construction for now.”
 
“You-- What!” Hux stood, then sat again when Rae’s eyes hardened. Whatever she said, she did give warnings; Hux had always been able to read them in her eyes. “Sorry, I-- I still believe Starkiller is valuable.”
 
“We’ll see. We’d lose a lot of traction with Holdo’s people if we destroyed planets.”
 
Hux withheld comment about Admiral Holdo, whom he assumed Rae was still sleeping with on occasion. Rae seemed to hear what he didn’t say out loud, based on her answering look, which told Hux without words that she could offer quite a few criticisms of the person he chose to share his bed with, if he liked.
 
“I’m at your service, of course,” Hux said. “I’m just in shock.”
 
“I’d have thought you’d be relieved, in part. I need you working on new designs at once. Things we can offer our allies to sweeten the deals that I’m trying to broker. Ships, acceleration tech, even distribution systems that would appeal to the big manufacturing unions. And I know you’ve never given up on your teleportation devices.”
 
“Those are just a hobby,” Hux muttered. “They’re not likely to work.”
 
“But if they did, and my top engineer invented them, the Order’s rule in the galaxy would be guaranteed.”
 
“So I’m just to be your pet mad scientist? Tucked away with my charge and--” Hux remembered with a lung-twisting pain that he would no longer be Ren’s co-commander.
 
“It’s up to Snoke if you have access to him,” Rae said, lifting one shoulder. “He’s never been mine to command. Regrettably.”
 
Hux returned to the Finalizer desperate and lost, also a little drunk. He took his time on his way to his quarters, not wanting to move beyond this moment of disbelief and into a future that he kept trying to frame as a complete failure, though in truth there was no particular aspect of it that he abhorred, outside of the disgrace and the possible loss of Ren, which he felt suddenly sure he wouldn’t survive. This was the danger Brendol had berated him about and Rae had steered him away from: going soft meant losing one’s reputation, sooner or later, and without the greatcoat, without those bars on his sleeve, Hux had no form to fill, no identity.
 
The door to his quarters opened and he braced himself to put on a brave face for Leif’s sake. He wouldn’t take his failures out on someone smaller than him the way Brendol had on him. But Leif wasn’t there: Ren was, waiting for Hux with a look that told him he knew everything.
 
“Where’s Leif?” Hux asked, remaining near the front door as it sealed shut behind him.
 
“Doing sims with Mitaka. I thought you might want-- That you might need-- Hux. Come here.”
 
Hux tried to find words, to deny that he needed anything Ren could give, but he had nothing left in him except the truth. His legs were shaking. Ren crossed the room when he didn’t move, pulled Hux into his arms and picked him up entirely.
 
“I had a vision,” Ren said. He was shaking, too.
 
“Of what.”
 
“Our future.” Ren moaned and pressed his face to Hux’s neck. “Can I fuck you? I just-- I need to be inside you, I want you to feel it, too.”
 
“So our future feels like your cock in my arse? That figures.”
 
“Don’t joke.” Ren set Hux back on his feet and fixed him with a stare. “This is real.”  
 
“Yes, I know. Feels a bit like a waking nightmare, though, to me, so far-- But of course you can fuck me, fuck my kriffing brains out, I don’t want to think, I don’t want feel anything but, except-- You inside me, yes, please--”
 
They were kissing sloppily already, Ren backing toward the bedroom and Hux letting himself be pulled along. Hux was half out of his shirt before they even crossed the threshold. Ren closed the door with the Force. Hux usually told him not to; it was clumsy and messed up the mechno tracking. Now he didn’t care, didn’t care about anything but getting Ren into him and being taken to the place where Ren felt like his entire reality, deep inside him and all around him.
 
“So good,” Ren said, murmuring this against Hux’s panting mouth when he sank into him. “Do you feel it yet?”
 
“Yes, fucking-- yes! Fuck, keep going, deeper, tear me apart on your dick, I need it--”
 
“I don’t just mean my dick.”
 
“Well, I don’t know what, ahh-- What else you’re talking about!”
 
For a moment Hux thought he would burst into tears, something he hadn’t done since he was around three years old. He whimpered instead, pinched his eyes shut and tried to concentrate solely on the feeling of being filled, his seams stretching and straining to contain the perfect bulk of Ren, the things hidden deepest inside him lighting up, sighing with relief, opening to this feeling of being taken, had, filled up and known completely.
 
“We were so close to disaster,” Ren said when Hux opened his eyes and tried to clench up around him, Ren’s balls hot and heavy against his twitching rim. “And now we’re saved.”
 
“Saved from what?” Hux wondered if he might politely ask Ren not to speak during this. Sometimes Ren got obnoxiously prophetic during sex; it was unnerving. He claimed that being inside Hux made him feel closer to the living Force. Hux had always assumed that was just a line.
 
“Shhh,” Ren said. He kissed Hux on the lips, long and slow, and began to move his hips in a shallow shunting motion that sparked against Hux’s prostate. “You’re right,” he said, whispering this into Hux’s open mouth. “Let’s not speak. Just feel it. You’ll see.”
 
Hux wasn’t sure what he was supposed to see, but he hardly cared when Ren started moving in deeper thrusts, Hux’s cock dragging against Ren’s hard stomach with every roll of his hips. He clung to Ren’s neck and brought his legs up as high as he could on Ren’s sweaty back, let his eyes fall shut and his noises grow desperate and shameless.
 
Don’t leave me, he thought. Not you, too, oh please.
 
And then he did feel something. It was a strange sort of certainty, accompanied by a rushing blur of images when Ren fucked him harder and made soft noises of laboring astonishment. At some point during this increasingly frantic rut Hux felt he understood what Ren had seen: some alternate future where Hux wasn’t demoted and everything fell apart anyway. Ren stood in dimming sunlight that faded to nothing. He stabbed someone with his lightsaber. Hux howled with a kind of grief he felt like a wave that rushed over him and then rolled away, leaving him clean, because that would never happen now. He saw Starkiller crumbling to nothing, taking most of his crew with it. Somehow these images were arousing; Hux came hard when Ren leaned back to plow into him with reckless fucking that felt like encouragement, as if Ren was saying, yes, good, perfect, just like that.
 
As Hux came back to himself he realized that Ren really was saying a lot of those things, his head thrown back in ecstatic abandon as he neared his own climax. Hux wasn’t sure what he was doing so right other than lying there, letting Ren have him, but it felt like a shining accomplishment when Ren groaned and came inside him, collapsing into Hux’s arms as he rode it out.
 
They stayed locked together, sweating and breathing against each other, reeling. Hux wanted to ask questions but wasn’t ready to break the spell. He dragged his fingers through Ren’s damp hair and felt himself drifting so far from where he’d once thought he would be, moving irreversibly away from what he’d tried and failed to want more than anything, more than this.
 
By the time Leif returned they had cleaned up and kissed for a long time in a quiet daze that was both reverent and anxious. Hux was afraid to believe what Ren was trying to tell him, that things could possibly be better this way. This fear lessened when Leif wedged himself between them on his convert-bed, currently acting as their sofa, and described the simulation he’d run through under Mitaka’s supervision.
 
“It was a diving challenge,” Leif said. “The water feels so heavy, you can feel it kind of screaming in your ears, and you have to keep going and not panic, and it’s hard because it feels like you can’t breathe, but you really can. If you stay calm enough and don’t set off the heart rate sensor, you can take a breath and keep going and get the treasure at the bottom.”
 
Hux was not raised to believe that anything good resided at the bottom of things, low on the ladder or hidden in some murky depths as opposed to ascended to aboard a ship and grabbed for while one reached ever upward. It was a hard lesson to learn, and he had moments of doubt as he found himself doing things he once never would have dreamed of. He worked with Rae and Ren to oust Snoke, invented a near-instant terraformer that allowed the Order to spread through the newly viable Outer Rim like wildfire, attended the wedding of Rae and Holdo that was sold to the galaxy as a symbol of lasting peace under joint Order-Republic rule, and met Ren’s mother during an extremely tense political summit.
 
“I heard your father died recently,” Leia Organa said to Hux during a break in the negotiations. Hux was there as a Terraforming Authority Advisor to Empress Holdo, whom Organa clearly loathed. Like Hux, Organa was a retired general, now involved in politics.
 
“Yes,” Hux said. He was still good at pretending to be stoic while his heart raced, but this was a new challenge. She had eyes like Ren’s. They cut right into him.
 
“Condolences,” Organa said flatly, studying him.
 
“Mhm. Thank you, but we were estranged.”
 
“That’s to your credit. Is Ben here with you?”
 
“He’s on-planet. Our son wanted to tour the university in Caridia.”
 
“Your son.”
 
Organa’s arse-kicking unflappability faltered for a moment. Hux frowned. Ren had seen his parents several times over the years. These meetings had been rocky and awkward at best, but Hux had always assumed that Ren had at least mentioned that he’d adopted Hux’s half-brother almost ten years ago.
 
“Yes, I-- His name is Leif.” Hux looked over his shoulder, as if Ren and Leif might saunter into this high security meeting hall any moment. They wouldn’t be back to the hotel until evening. Hux had made a dinner reservation that he was already worried they would be late for, as everything with politicians always ran behind schedule and overlong.
 
He looked back to Organa and saw that it wasn’t surprise on her face so much as disbelief: that things had turned out this way, that she was speaking to her semi-estranged son’s husband, that the same semi-estranged son was a retired ex-assassin who lived in the Republic of Order that she so despised. At least they’d never blown up any planets. That would have likely made this conversation very different. The half-finished Starkiller base was a national park now, most of its guts ripped out. This was Holdo’s idea, to demonstrate that the Order had ‘changed,’ which was at least partly true. Hux had never had the stomach to visit. Rae had scrubbed his name from all records that might have indicated he designed the weapon, another thing he once never could have anticipated wanting.
 
“I’d like to meet him,” Leia said after a long moment of what seemed like difficult consideration. “Your son, I mean.”
 
Hux didn’t like the idea. He felt himself sweating under his heavy jacket. Her gaze was as merciless as a desert sun, searing.
 
“I think that could be arranged,” he said, against his better judgment. Ren had told him she was a Force sensitive. Perhaps she’d used a mind trick.
 
“Good,” Leia said. “My social secretary will be in touch.”
 
She walked away and Hux waited to feel defeated, but the sensation didn’t come. He checked his chrono and saw there were still ten minutes before the scheduled reconvening, which would probably actually happen in closer to twenty. Holdo was chattering with two diplomats from the Hosnian system on the other side of the grand hallway, doing the fake laugh that made Hux’s skin prickle. He decided he had enough time to go out to the balcony for a smoke.
 
Empress Sloane had beat him to it. She smiled when she saw him coming and motioned for her security detail to let him through.
 
“I think I just agreed to dinner with my mother in law,” Hux said, accepting a light.
 
“Something I never thought I’d hear you say,” Rae said. “Even post-marriage.”
 
“Yes, quite. But it’s for the good of the galaxy, like all of this.”
 
“Of course.”
 
Hux opened his mouth to say something about the vision Ren had shown him once, the alternate future where everything had crumbled under their feet. He wasn’t sure why he’d thought of it or why he imagined he could ever put it into words, that feeling of having missed a step and just nearly gone tumbling down into the waiting jaws of something that was hungry for him.
 
“At least the weather’s good,” Hux said instead.
 
Rae smiled just at the corner of her lips and nodded once, still looking out at the marble-white city that was spread out below them. They stood there smoking in comfortable silence for a while, some unspoken acknowledgment passing between them, and then went back inside to continue rebuilding society, one pain in the arse summit meeting at a time.
 
 
 
 
 
 
**