Chapter Text
(now)
Hux dials up the radiator more for noise than heat.
The pops and hisses of steam through the valves are nothing compared with the clamour of briefers, the chime of datapad alerts, or even the persistent, underfoot thrum of a hyperdrive, but they’re better than the silence of night outside Bonadan City.
(Anything is, at this point.)
Hux braces his hands on his knees and stands to the burnt-sulfur scent of the wall unit’s boiler crackling to life. The sound won’t get much louder than this--than clicks and whispers--but it will fill the quiet of his housing pod.
He chafes his clammy hands above the radiator’s slats, then pulls his sweater tighter around his shoulders.
For now, the silence may be the most unbearable part of night here, but with winter drawing on in earnest, the lack of centralized heating in the company housing pods may become stiff competition. It’s a basic fucking amenity, but it isn’t as if AndTec cares about anything but producing as much plasteel droid plating as mathematically possible.
Fortunately, that also means their employee vetting standards are practically nonexistent.
As long as you’ve got functioning limbs and the mental wherewithal to pull a lever or seal a crate, the foreman will hand you a tinted protective visor and the lock cylinders to a vacant pod. Few questions asked besides “Can you work from six to six tomorrow?”
When you’re a newly-unemployed military officer with nothing more important to do than earn credits and hide your face, your answer is yes, sir.
Pathetic , his head had hissed five months ago, standing across from the foreman’s cluttered desk, in a chem-lit office with mold crawling up the wall. You’ve come to this, yes-sir-ing an oily Duro for eight credits an hour and a roof over your head.
But even then, even with the blaster holes to his chest and thigh still healing, still aching at night, he’d known this was--this is-- no one’s fault but his own. (Not even Ren’s.)
The radiator diffuses its first wave of heat; the warmer air leaches into his fingertips like a numbing agent, slow and all but unnoticeable. His dry, splitting knuckles will start to feel it in a moment, but for now the warmth is a relief from the perspiration that’s cooled on his palms, his forehead, down the sides of his neck.
(The dreams always wake him up like this, off-kilter. Sweating in the cold. Gasping in the silence.)
Moonlight refracts through the frost on the window above the radiator, white on Hux’s hands, white on the radiator’s dark, chipping paint. Steam pops inside the metal valves. He’s freezing cold, and the silence has seeped into his pores like an itch.
He can’t just stand here. If he stands here all night, he will lose his mind.
And the heat’s started to sting, anyway.
He puts his back to the radiator and the window with an inevitable chill, facing the tangled knolls of his mussed bed. And the chrono beside it.
Fuck.
The blue-glowing display blinks 1131.
2331 hours, his conditioning still translates.
2331.
That’s it .
He has the whole night ahead of him.
(Sleep won’t be returning, not tonight, not after waking up from that. )
He runs a hand through his hair, scoffs disbelief into the stillness of the room.
Insomnia is a low-level blip compared to the rest of the shitshow that began when Starkiller crumbled under his feet. It isn’t even an unfamiliar concern.
But in the past, he hardly noticed it. When there were reports to read, commissions to sign off on, or talks to schedule, the time filled easily, until he was so exhausted sleep came heavy and dreamless.
There was always work. There was always something.
(It took him weeks on Bonadan to stop his hand from straying to a datapad that isn’t here, to compulsively check the gamma-shift whereabouts of Ren, who’s dead.)
But now there’s no inbox clutter. No task left for alpha shift. No unstable mystic who might be roaming the halls, damaging the ship or the crew or himself.
There’s the quiet.
Hux picks at a loose thread on his sleeve, stops himself before a row of stitches unravels around his wrist. ( You’ve only got one sweater, idiot.)
One sweater, one blaster, one pan for instant polystarch bread.
A year ago, he could never have imagined any of this.
A year ago, the Order was winning.
(But a year ago, the Finalizer was still intact.)
(A year ago, Ren was--)
Stop.
Hux never meant to choose this. He never meant to .
But six months ago, he woke up.
###
At first, the ceiling looked white.
The ceiling looked white, but Hux blinked again--twice--and it was just the glare of lampdisks dialed above eighty percent.
The light stung his eyes, sent a new frisson of pain through the throbbing in his skull.
His head.
Fuck.
He must have hit it when he--
Memory rushed back over him: the captured Resistance operatives, the bolt to the leg. The tattered shreds of a plan gone wrong. The bridge. Pryde.
The bolt to the chest.
A glance down showed a bacta patch centered mere centimeters off from his heart, charmarks surrounding the bare skin.
This was medbay.
Obviously.
He didn’t die on impact, so he was transported to medbay.
It explained the harsh lighting, for one thing, but for another it explained the unfamiliar bed he was lying on, the white sheet covering everything below his freshest wound, and the needle jutting out of the crook of his right arm, connected to--he squinted to read the label on the bag--a saline drip.
The bacta on both of his wounds must have been doing its job, as the only pain he felt was--for the moment--the dull ache in his skull.
The stringent scents of bacta and disinfectants, however, hung heavy on the air, nauseating. Hux shut his eyes against a wave of vertigo, opened them only when it had passed.
His breath came shallow, unsteady. He forced an inhale--deep, prolonged--then an exhale, attempting to calm his fluttering pulse.
All right.
All right.
He was alive.
He was alive, and he wasn’t supposed to be.
(Which was nothing new, but still.)
Pryde’s shot--he was reasonably certain--had been meant to end him right then, right there. Traitor publicly denounced, traitor publicly--immediately, ruthlessly--exterminated. (Hux could only guess that that was an Imperial policy resurrected with the Emperor himself.)
There could be only one of two reasons why Hux hadn’t yet been finished off:
1. Pryde was too preoccupied with his masters’ preparations to check the status of a man he personally presumed dead; or
2. Hux was being saved for Ren’s return.
“Fuck,” he breathed, over a beep from the vitals monitor beside the drip. “ Fuck .”
So it would be a proper execution.
He had known this was a worst-case possibility from the moment he’d started typing his message to the Resistance. But he’d imagined that--if it happened--it would be immediate.
Ren would take one look at him, see right through him like he always had, and impale him on the spot.
“ Why? ” Ren would ask, through his furious, childish tears. “Why would you do this?” (To me.)
Hux would have no answer that he hadn’t already given a thousand times over the years, in a thousand arguments.
He would have none now, either. No defense, definitely no plea for mercy. (As if he’d even be given the chance to speak when he’d committed a crime worse than murder.)
It might as well have been murder--
(Stop.)
He twisted his fingers into the sheets, sat up straighter with a shock of pain to his ribcage, to what must be bruises along his spine from where he hit the floor. His heart rabbited as the truth coalesced: You will be executed.
If discovered alive, you will be executed. You will be made a public example of. Ren will cry, and Ren will kill you, and you will deserve it because--
No.
Perhaps.
It didn’t matter.
And even if he weren’t to be executed, it would only be because the Steadfast --medbay and all--would be blown to stardust by Resistance forces over Exegol.
He knew that.
The one scenario he hadn’t calculated was the scenario in which he had an out upon discovery.
Or, more precisely, in which Pryde was the one to put the pieces together, not Ren. (He wasn’t sure yet whether that stung: whether Ren’s obliviousness was the result of apathy or of total trust.)
(It didn’t matter.)
He had an out. A margin in which there was possibly a way to escape a second public punishment for a failure greater than the loss of Starkiller.
Adrenaline surged through his bloodstream, combat-wired survival instincts kicking into full throttle.
Get out, run, go--
But why? Go where?
One doesn’t come back from being declared a traitor to the First Order. What would be the point, now that everything was over.
Now that you fucked it up like you fuck up everything you idiot--
“ Stop,” Hux said aloud, collecting himself. “All right.” He breathed in. Then out. “All right.”
His pulse pounded crazily in his throbbing skull. What came next didn’t matter yet. The only thing that counted was the imminent threat to his life (and more importantly, to his dignity).
And his window to act was narrowing by the second.
He sat up fully, flexing his fingers. His gaze darted around the stark room, catalogued a single entrance, locked--fortunately--under codes no higher than standard. His jacket lay on an in-wall counter beside the door, his datapad on top of it.
Apparently, he was fully expected to die in here. There appeared to be no procedures in place to detain him as a prisoner or criminal or dishonorable discharge.
That helped matters. Now just to get to his effects.
He sucked in a breath, bit his lip, and wrapped his left hand around the needle port jutting out of his opposite arm. He forced his eyes to stay open, despite the initial flare of pain--medically inadvisable procedures shouldn’t be done blind.
He could do this.
He set his teeth and pulled.
The needle emerged from his arm with a sting and a bead of blood. He slapped the medical tape that had been holding it in back over the puncture before he could start bleeding out. A single drop of red, however, fell from the tip of the needle onto the white sheet, the only color in the room.
Whatever.
Hux let the needle fall, lowered the bed’s rails, and swung his feet over the side. Gooseflesh spread across his chest and arms at the burst of cold, but he didn’t have time to pay it attention.
He was still in his torn jodhpurs, and his boots were on the floor beneath his jacket and datapad.
Great, fantastic, perfect.
He splayed his hands on either side of him, bracing himself to stand.
But as soon as he was upright, the room reeled around him, blurring into a circle of gray, a single point of light at the end of his tunneling vision as the blood drained from his head.
You’re going to pass out, you’re going to pass out and hit your head again, they’ll find you--
“Damnit,” he hissed. He clenched his fists and held still until the dizziness had passed.
His pulse thudded in his ears like running footfalls. Now that he was putting weight on his leg again, the pain had returned, the plasma burning through the wound all over again.
But he was standing.
Without the cane.
The bacta must have done that much for the tissue damage, at least.
Time to test it.
He splayed his fingers at each side for balance, then took a small, experimental step forward, barefoot and unsupported on the black tile.
It worked.
He ignored the shockwaves of pain rippling up his thigh and crossed the floor to the counter and mechanically grabbed his jacket. The plasma hadn’t damaged the clasps, so it was still wearable, except for the massive fucking charhole in the left breast.
But whatever. He’d have to change out of it as soon as he got to--
Shit.
(Don’t think that far ahead, just move.)
To wherever. It would do to cover him on the walk to the escape pods a deck away.
There was no undershirt--that, he assumed, with a flare of shame he tamped down, they’d had to cut off of him. But it would be fine to do without it temporarily. It would have to be.
He set aside his datapad and shrugged on the tattered jacket. The hole gaped directly over the bacta patch, but whatever. He clasped it with shaking fingers and a jolt of pain as he moved his left arm, but he got it done.
His dogtags lay on the counter. He slipped them on and under his jacket, cold against his skin, for disposal later. It would look suspicious if they were the only thing left.
What’s going to look suspicious is your hobbling down the corridors, when you just got publicly denounced as a traitor and shot, what’s going to look suspicious is--
He cut off the panic mid-thought. It wouldn’t serve any purpose.
It was either definitely die if he stayed in here, or only probably die if he attempted to escape.
And it’s only one deck away--
He inhaled.
His boots were next to his feet, and he was going to have to bend down to put them on. He was going to have to bend down, and then have to stand back up, and the torn tissue next to his sternum was already screaming in protest.
But it wasn’t as if he could leave the room barefoot.
He braced himself--as if for a blow, as if he were five years old again--bent, and snagged them in a single fluid movement. The pain flared as black static fogged his vision again.
He waited it out, then limped back to the bed, boots in one hand and datapad in the other. He perched on the end and slipped a jittering hand inside the left one for the sock. There was nothing.
Your socks, they took your fucking socks, they took--
Hux jammed his foot inside without one. There wasn’t time to worry about socks.
Or anything but getting out .
He laced first one boot, then the other, with jittering fingers, then picked up his datapad.
Please let my biometric still work, please let them not have deactivated--
It worked, even despite the quiver of his thumb as he pressed down on the print reader. The personnel system’s administrative snags had their benefits.
His mind spun at lightspeed as his home screen opened, outpacing the bacta haze.
Were he to die in here, the uniform would be incinerated with his body, but the datapad would be wiped and reused. He had two things to do on here, then he’d leave it as it was.
First, he pulled up the Steadfast ’s inventory application.
Escape Pods >> Delta Bay >> Number 871 >> Delete Record
There was no longer an Escape Pod 871, officially speaking. When it launched, therefore--and immediately jumped to hyperspace--no alarms would sound, no guards be alerted.
No one would be taking inventory with preparations for Exegol in full swing. (And after Exegol, if the Resistance succeeded, there would be no more Steadfast. )
The pod clear for use, Hux opened the personnel application, pulled up his own file.
A slightly dated holo portrait stared up at him, blue-cast and unnatural. Surrounding data boxes listed his promotion record, clearances held, stipend earnings statements.
The past thirty years--his life, all he’d ever had--reduced to a handful of pop-ups in twelve-point type.
He wasn’t here for any of it. He couldn’t think about it.
There was an imminent threat, a monster charging toward him and no Ren to step in between. (Ren was the monster.)
He couldn’t think about that, either.
Could think of nothing but the next sequence of taps. He brought up the Personal Details tab. He stopped at the first dropdown box.
He didn’t think.
Status: Active Duty, it read.
His hands shook, but he pulled down the options. Selected the second. Saved the change.
Go now, you have to go --
He spared the details tab a final glance:
GEN Hux, A , it read.
Status: Deceased
###
Hux gives up and turns the light back on, at least in his bedroom.
A single yellowish lampdisk fizzles above the rumpled bed, shows out the grime on the walls, the chipping paint of the radiator, the door and window frames.
He turns on his heel and paces back into the relative darkness of the rest of the pod. He can cover its length--to the shadows of the living room and back--in less than twenty standard seconds. He knows from experience.
It’s always like this, after the dreams.
In another five months, he’ll have paced footprints into the cheap linoliplast flooring, if the insomnia keeps up like this.
And the dreams, at any rate, show no sign of stopping.
He crosses into the short, dim hallway then into the living room. Clouds have covered the moon, throwing the room into deep shadow, but Hux would know these steps blind.
Rounding the room’s far end, he shivers in the relative cold, away from the radiator, gooseflesh crawling under his sweater. He pulls it tighter.
It would be warmer in bed--
It would, certainly--if he could stand the slow dread of lying there in the still, cold darkness, waiting either for sleep to come (and with it more of this ), or for the hours to pass.
He’s still waiting this way, but it’s more natural to keep moving. He’ll stop when he gets tired. If he gets tired enough to risk it.
He reaches the far wall of the living room and loops back, passing the darkened entrance to the small kitchen, then heads into the hall and past the ‘fresher.
It shouldn’t be like this.
He’s no stranger to nightmares. They bothered him well into his twenties: the Commandant, the combat sims, the first sniper missions, strange distortions of his body.
But mostly the Commandant. Mostly memories.
What’s taken their place is...something else.
Just dreams.
That should be better.
It should.
But not when every other night he’s waking up to--
(Earth collapsing under his feet--)
(The Supremacy, cleft, above a darkened ecumenopolis--)
(Red--)
(Ren--)
(Cracks running up the walls, the columns, the altars, of a temple he’s never seen; the claustrophobia of falling, crushing rock; burial alive--)
(“Hux, wake up--" )
Waking up to silence, nothingness, unbearable calm .
Back in the bedroom, he fidgets with the light control, considering. He works tomorrow, and he should really try again. It’s not even oh one hundred; he could still get in a few solid hours.
It’ll catch up with you tomorrow--
But it isn’t as if work requires any actual exertion , mental or physical.
He leaves the light on, but the bed unmade, and circles the frigid bedroom floor, hardly warmed by the radiator. The gray linoliplast has cracked in places, revealing seams of yellow glue and duracrete foundation beneath.
The whole pod is in shambles. (Hue gets exactly what he pays for.)
(He gets exactly what he’s due.)
you fool, you failure, could you plan no better than--
Hux shuts his eyes and walls off the thought, pausing by the radiator to warm his hands until they sting. He flexes his fingers over the metal, and heat leaches into his skin.
He has a plan.
(Never mind that it’s a sad shadow of those that came before it.)
It is a plan, and it’s more than what he had when he fled the Steadfast for the temporary shelter of Nar Shaddaa.
###
“--this Primeday only at the Netherworld Gentlebeings’ Club!”
“Buy one Deela’s Jet Juice, get the second for the low price of--”
“Breaking News--”
The cacophony of Escape Pod 871’s public HoloNet feed woke Hux slowly, infecting the darkness behind his eyes until he couldn’t ignore it anymore.
His whole body felt stiff, as if he’d been encased in carbonite. A dull ache pulsed between his ribs. He blinked once, twice. The blur of the pod’s controls resolved in front of him.
Above the dash, out the viewport, sparkled the sallow lights of Hutta Town, yellow beacons in the smog. A few duracrete cloudscrapers aspired above it, strung in between with flimsy skyslums, wreathed in smoke and exhaust.
“Breaking News: a resurgent Imperial fleet reportedly commanded by none other than--”
“Now for a classic hit from Snograth and--”
Hux turned his attention to the HoloNet receptor, clearly searching for the strongest signal now that it was back in range of open broadcasts. He dialed it back to the news frequency as strangled electroharp notes crackled onto the airwave.
“--on the obscure world Exegol, located deep in the Western Reaches. Multiple First Order ships deployed throughout the galaxy have already been captured or destroyed in follow-on Resistance operations, liberating worlds by the dozens from--”
Hux’s breath snagged in his throat. The city lights blurred to silver swirls. It had started.
You loaded the rebels’ fucking gun, you personally rallied them, it’s over it’s on you it’s over it’s over--
“We’re receiving reports that Resistance casualties are high--”
(While adversary casualties are total .)
“--and sadly include the son of Princess Leia Organa, herself deceased of natural causes in the hours before the operation. The Galaxy Beacon is investigating additional--”
Hux’s heart stuttered.
Ren was dead. (Of course he was.)
The Order was falling to pieces, crumbling behind Palpatine’s fleet. (What else could Hux have expected?)
(What else could he have done?)
Hux’s hands shook over the controls.
The escape craft was on autopilot, sinking steadily toward the spaceport in the distance, but the ground below still seemed to spin.
###
Hux had known what would happen. What could happen.
Six months ago, when he made the ugliest decision he ever had, and dual-encrypted the information that saved the galaxy and destroyed his life, he calculated all possible trajectories.
But no formula, no evaluation, no statistical assessment, could have prepared him for this particular eventuality.
The version of reality where he’s still alive, somehow, but works six to six at the plant like he’s just another refugee.
Where he’s chafing his hands over a radiator older than even the Empire, and it feels like the only sound in the parsec.
Hux picks at the split in his knuckles, the bead of blood where the dry skin has cracked. He seriously needs to get away from the radiator and the window. To sleep , because this is just irresponsible, at this point.
He turns from the window, but his feet only carry him for another circuit of the pod.
It isn’t forever here.
He knows that. Has known it since the day he arrived.
He has a plan: save up, buy a ship and take up some kind of criminal lifestyle that at least keeps him moving.
But in the oh one hundred silence, with winter coming on, the plan--see the galaxy, if he can’t rule it--seems both far-off and empty.
Far-off, he’s never had a problem with, but empty?
What are you going to do about it, then? You coward--
Hux digs his nails into his palm, letting the sting clear his mind.
He can’t worry about this right now. He has to go shopping after work tomorrow, and the least he can do is go over his list.
Before he gets so worked up at being out, exposed to possible recognition, that he forgets half of what he came into the store for. (As always.) It's some Ren-level shit, getting so lost in his head he can't function.
(Isn’t this, too?)
It isn’t. Sleep has always been difficult for him; it isn’t just the dreams.
He redirects that thought, as well, before it can veer off into the irrelevant.
Hair dye. Polystarch portions. Ration bars. Tea.
In large enough quantities that he won’t have to go out again for another several weeks.
It’s all he needs. He lived on effectively the same in the Order (at least for the last six months, when ‘real food’ over meetings with Ren ceased to be a thing that occurred).
But Ren is gone, and so is the need to sociably eat expensive, non-instant food, when he could save the credits for the ship and the pass off of this fucking rock.
At maximum thriftiness, he could possibly clear Bonadan in another two years. It certainly won’t be more than three.
He won’t be able to take more than three.
(Even six months is pushing it.)
###
Out Hux’s hotel room window, the lights of Nar Shaddaa burned yellow and orange in the mirk.
Somewhere above the polluted atmosphere, day was drawing on--the chrono on the night table read 0430 local--but the city wouldn’t see much of it.
Not that it mattered.
It wasn’t as if Hux could go out.
But it also wasn’t as if he would ever have anywhere else to be again, except a cell, an execution chamber, or the center of a mob seeking justice for war crimes.
His wounds still throbbed dully--improved by symoxin and fresh bacta patches from the escape pod’s medpac--but it wasn’t as if he could just lie down to rest.
He’d slept en route, and while a part of him wanted to curl up under the ratty blanket on the room’s single bed and sleep for the next fifty years, he knew rest would elude him.
Instead, he paced the length of the hotel room--limped, really, on an unsteady leg. He looped around dark stains on the carpet that he hoped weren’t blood. His breath came harsh, and it didn’t matter if it was the exertion or the chest wound or the strangling tendrils of panic wrapping around his ribs, all on their own.
He couldn’t sit still, so he was pacing, passing his cocked pistol from hand to hand.
The metal was void-cold to his touch, heavier than it had felt since the throne room on the Supremacy, with Snoke in pieces and Ren vulnerable.
And even then you were too slow too hesitant too weak --
He had meant to do it.
He had.
But you didn’t, you couldn’t, you let it go too far, too long, and see where it’s landed the Order, see where it’s landed you--
He ran a finger up and down the ribbed interior of the pistol’s grip.
In the alley out the window, a storey below, voices shouted in what sounded like Huttese, then blaster bolts whistled through the air.
Pick the right moment, during the right gang fight, and no one would even hear the shot that ended him.
Pain throbbed dully through Hux’s leg as he crossed the small room again. He needed to keep weight off of it, if he wanted any chance for it to heal at a normal rate.
If he were back on the Steadfast, he would have still been in medbay right now. Or he would have been if the Steadfast weren’t charred debris raining to Exegol’s surface with the rest of the Emperor’s fleet.
(It had all been the Emperor’s, all along.)
There was no blow like knowing your life’s work had been designed to be supplanted, that Sloane and the Commandant, that Snoke himself, had been mere pawns.
That Ren had, too, and Hux had accepted it all too late.
(If he’d only believed Ren sooner; dismissed, mocked, cajoled him less, over the past year--over the past seven years--)
But he didn’t.
Hux didn’t, and now Ren was dead.
There was no way to know whether the return of ‘Ben Solo’ was mere Resistance propaganda, or some sign that in the end, Ren too had realized the Order was a scuttled ship, taking on vacuum and plummeting like a meteor to the surface of the nearest world, burning and unstoppable.
But it didn’t matter about Ren.
It had never mattered about Ren because Ren had been a lost cause, an incurable head case, from the moment they met.
(It had only taken seven years and the dissolution of the Order for that to sink in.)
The Order was done .
Hux had shouted as much at him only twenty-four hours ago (and Ren, the idiot, had still trusted him too much to suspect), but in some ways, it already felt like a different lifetime.
Like the mold-ridden walls of this hotel room were the only shelter Hux had ever known. Like Starkiller and the war and Ren were scenarios in some holosim he’d watched ages ago, picking at the loops of the stained carpet and wishing for an out-of-here .
But his blaster wounds were too fresh to imagine he’d never been anyone else but the vagrant in the hotel room, with the loaded blaster, nowhere left to go, and no reason to go there.
You did this, you did this, you have done this to yourself--
He hadn’t had a choice.
He knew that.
But it hadn’t been supposed to go this way.
Hux was supposed to escape the wreck of the Steadfast, yes, but not like this. Not as a traitor, running for his life, with his ships already being picked off like carrion.
“Fuck,” he breathed into the quiet of the room, the low hum of a window cooling unit. “ Fuck.”
He stopped moving, traced his thumb up the blaster’s grip, and started to lift the gun.
Stopped.
Lowered it to his side again.
Kept pacing toward the bed.
You fucking coward, you had the nerve to betray the Order but not to accept that it didn’t work, you failed you have nothing you--
His eyes stung. The black streaks on the wall blurred to gray against the peeling paint. He swallowed back the emotion like a crystal in the back of his throat. He tightened his grip on the blaster.
He had to do this.
You save yourself, you put forth all that effort, only to die here--
He knew when he was beaten.
Best to take it like a fucking soldier.
His right hand twitched upward again, but he checked the motion in time.
The blaster’s muzzle pointed downward. If his finger pushed even slightly against the trigger, the shot would blacken the carpet, sear through the thin plaster ceiling, and land in whatever collateral damage was trying to sleep at 0430 local.
He didn’t take his finger out of the trigger well, but he pointed the gun toward the window, more or less a safe direction.
His skin looked pink, the veins in the back of his hands blue-green, against the stainless white of the grip.
He’d had this same fucking gun customized four years ago: scope mount, replaceable barrel, automatic fire release. Combat specs.
He’d been going to win a war, not off himself in a hotel room in disgrace.
(Like he was Ren or something, and had finally been torn so far apart he snapped.)
His hands weren’t shaking, but his palm had started to sweat against the plasteel. His knuckles ached, yellowed, locked in place. He was clutching the gun too tightly, but he couldn’t loosen his grasp.
Go on and do it, what the hell are you waiting for--
Every second wasted was another that he might be found. Recognized.
If not by the Resistance or the Republic, by someone whose significant-whatever died on Hosnian Prime, by some remnant of the Order that wanted to legitimize itself by ending a traitor.
That wouldn’t understand that this was for the Order. It simply failed.
Who are you fooling, the Order died the day Ren started basing policy off the voices in his--
It didn’t matter anymore: the when, the why, the how and whom.
The Order was over.
Hux swallowed back emotion and pressed the blaster’s muzzle under his chin.
The durasteel was as cold as an open air lock against the soft skin. It was fine. He wouldn’t have to feel it long.
His hand was steady, trigger tremors long conditioned out. He squeezed his eyes shut, worked his finger toward the trigger well.
He moved his finger to the plasteel trigger. He knew how this would go.
He would pull it, and a plasma charge would sear through skin, tongue, palate, skull. It would burn for an instant: third-degree, like lightning. The shock of it would deform his face. The gray matter would absorb the entire charge.
And then, nothing.
His mind should have stopped the projection there--nothing beyond mattered--but the inevitable aftermath unfolded like a sim. The mess on the wall behind him. The cleaning droid or housekeeper entering the locked room in the morning.
Finding... that.
Scrubbing the wall for a biometric sample. For official identification of the corpse.
(They might recognize him at the first, despite the unmarked clothes, if his face wasn’t too fucked up.)
Regardless, the whole galaxy would know within hours.
(Know that he’d succumbed to the ultimate weakness.)
“Ben Solo died a Resistance hero. In other news, First Order fugitive Armitage Hux has been found dead on Nar Shaddaa of a self-inflicted blaster wound. That’s right, folks, this traitorous war criminal blew his own fucking brains out.”
(Pathetic, isn’t it?)
It didn’t matter.
Pull this trigger, right now, and he would know nothing.
Be nothing.
(Nothing, that was, except a salacious footnote in every history book for the next century: the man who took ten billion lives, betrayed his organization when it spun out of his control, then ran like a coward and shot himself in the head.)
Everyone in the galaxy would see right through him, or imagine they did.
Being seen through is something he has never allowed.
Just do it, you’ll be dead, it won’t matter what they think, why are you afraid of--
Hux bit his lip. His finger slipped out of the trigger well, though the blaster’s muzzle stayed against his skin, pressed tight enough to restrict his breathing. He inhaled deeply to compensate. Opened his eyes. His knuckles on the grip were as white as the plasteel.
His heartbeat thudded in his ears. One-two, one-two. Deafening.
He couldn’t .
He crumpled to his knees on the carpet, jarring both blaster wounds.
His chest heaved, and emotion wrapped hot between his ribs, snagged in his throat.
You can’t.
His fingers uncurled from the blaster grip. It thumped onto the floor, next to his knee, and he let it lie.
Not here, he decided. Not now.
###
Somehow, Hux postponed it all the way to Bonadan, slowly piecing together the plan.
See the galaxy.
(He can hear Ren laughing through space and time: Really? You only ever cared about one thing. That wasn’t it.)
Hux has stopped by the radiator again. He thins his lips, brushes an experimental finger over the hot metal of the valves. His breath fogs a circle of steam on the window pane.
He taps out his shopping list in the palm of his hand.
Hair dye. Rice. Polystarch. Tea, black if they have it. Ration bars, whatever’s on sale.
When he came back into the bedroom a moment ago, the chrono read 1:25.
The alarm will ring in four hours, but the night isn’t a lost cause yet. He could just try and get back to sleep. Try.
At least sit down and read something, anything, on his datapad.
It isn’t connected to anything but a basic local comms network right now, but he’s reasonably sure there are a couple of novels left downloaded from his last HoloNet uplink.
Pacing and remembering never solved any problem, and they won’t start to now, past oh one-hundred in company housing.
He stiffens his spine with practiced discipline, puts his back to the radiator and the window. The cold stings his face and arms again, almost sharper for having been warm for so long. He chafes at his sleeves and crosses to the bedside.
Reading will be better than this. More productive.
He opens the night table drawer to extract his datapad, a thick, unwieldy thing bought third- or fourth-hand after his arrival on Bonadan. He makes to sit down with it on the edge of the bed, when a noise from the living room shatters the pod’s quiet.
It’s a thud.
A knock.
On the thin duraluminum of the front door.
Hux’s pulse picks up. Fight-or-flight charges through his bloodstream, against all reason.
No one in the galaxy is looking for him, not the Republic. Not any random citizen who’d want justice on their own terms.
Armitage Hux is presumed dead to the galaxy.
He breathes in. Out.
The knock resounds a second time.
It’s almost certainly a drunk who’s come to the wrong pod. They are all identical. In his first weeks here he wound up in the wrong block after a single bad turn here or there more times than he can count, and he was perfectly sober.
Ignore them and they’ll go away, or at least pass out on his slab of porch and crawl off stiff before he goes out tomorrow morning.
It’s nothing.
Hux fixes his gaze on the datapad, presses his thumb to the bioreader. He ought to sit down already.
Another three taps ring out, short and all but succinct. No slurred shouts of lemme in. The raps themselves are anything but sloppy.
Damnit.
(It doesn’t matter, let them break in, let them end this--)
Instead, Hux grabs the other item in the still-open drawer: a BlasTech DL-18 pistol, late Imperial model. (Unlike the SE-44C he swapped it for six months ago, the DL-18 has yet to come anywhere near his head.)
The pistol is loaded and charged. Hux cocks it as soon as the next knock comes, the click faint in the knock’s reverb.
He leaves the bedroom light on and slips back into the square of hallway he’s been looping through for the past two hours, then into the gray living room, blaster at his side.
His combat instincts, every muscle in his body, stands on edge. He’s halfway to the door.
You survive hell on Steadfast and Nar Shaddaa, and now you’re panicking about--
The knock rings again, bone-jarring in the short snatch of silence.
Hux flinches, but doesn’t stop moving until the sequence of taps has stopped.
Until he’s flush against the door with his finger on the trigger, but hasn’t yet looked out.
Until the voice he’d know at the heat death of the universe comes low from the other side:
“It’s me.”
Before Hux can shout fuck off , before he can shoot through the door, before he can so much as think, his hand has slipped to the door’s control pad. The duraluminum slides right with a frigid burst of night air.
On the other side, under Hux’s fizzling porchlight, stands a ghost.
Absent his voice, Hux might have passed him by in the street. His hair, still long and unruly, is less kempt than Hux has ever seen it--oily and tangled, now nearly brushing his shoulders, as if it had been hacked shorter at some point and grown back out.
Under a patchy layer of stubble, the bones jut out of his face. His frame, even under baggy layers, is skeletal, emaciated. Thinner even than after the harshest of Snoke’s training.
A battered black jacket sits loose on his shoulders. The right sleeve hangs empty below the wrist.
This cannot be.
You’ve finally gone as mad as he was, you need to shut the door right now--
(You know damn well it’s all over.)
Hux blinks. Meets the specter’s eyes again, and protests all of this.
“You’re dead.” You’re supposed to be.
Kylo Ren doesn’t quite smile. “You too.”