Chapter Text
I.
Man made God
made man in the image
Of an endlessly hungry black hole
Inclined to seek
some great prestige
Profoundly and proudly alone
Die Shiny—Embalmed
It starts, as most things in his life do, out of spite. Ren and Pryde are gloating over newly-acquired coordinates to some Resistance something-or-other, passing out orders across the Council table that never once include him, and Hux finds himself thinking, I hope someone tips them off and they’re all gone when you get there, you feckless brutes.
—and then stops thinking it immediately, because Ren is only four seats away and his shoulder is still stiff and swollen from being tossed against a bulkhead two cycles ago. But the vicious want persists long after the meeting, through insomnia and the chalky residue of stim pills against the roof of his mouth and the way Pryde stares right through him like he’s not even worthy of acknowledgement. They think they can do this without him? They think they can cut him out of this, this thing he’s hurt and bled all his life for, and he won’t go down snarling and clawing at their faces?
Hux has never been too proud to fight dirty. He’ll use whichever weapon’s at hand to guarantee victory even if it blasts off his own foot in the process, and he’ll curl his lip just so as he does so his enemies know exactly what he thinks of them. Ren will bleed the Order dry if he’s left unchecked, so Hux will put it out of its misery first. He’ll make sure Ren goes down with it.
He knows exactly which weapon will sting the most.
~🩸~
He sends the initial contact by droid. It’s disgustingly poetic; the sort of grand overture the type of people he’s dealing with can’t resist. The message lacks both princess and operatic melodrama, but it does contain a summary of the planned attack and the access code to an encrypted chat. If they want more, they’ll need to come to him.
Three days later, the Steadfast and her fleet descend upon the Resistance outpost and find it hastily deserted. Ren smashes the navigation console in his rage and strands them there for an additional twenty-six hours. On hour nineteen, Hux settles himself at the desk in his quarters and finds a message waiting deep within the secure channel on his datapad.
Ok, we’re listening, it says.
Hux bares his teeth in a vicious approximation of a smile. Good, he types, and then he pulls up the maps he’s compiled of the Order’s weakest outposts and supply routes and drops them all into the chat.
Let’s see who’s gloating now, Ren. I’ll burn you to ashes and dance on your smouldering remains.
Everything auto-deletes after he closes the window, gone like it was never there at all. Hux brews a cup of tea and swallows down a stim pill, then stares sightlessly out the viewport at the black spread of space until the start of his next shift.
~🩸~
To give them some small iota of credit, the Resistance use the information he provides carefully. They take time to set up their strikes, maneuvering their forces in ways that could be put down to happenstance rather than a leak. If Ren or the rest of the Council suspect anything more than a string of rotten luck, they haven’t said it aloud.
Less ideal is the Resistance’s propensity to chat. Hux only checks the channel when he’s secure in his quarters, once at the beginning of each shift and once at the end, and more often than not there’s some inane drivel waiting for him there.
Freed the moon base in Seswenna, it says one morning. Thanks again! Hux ignores it and lets the message auto-delete. He’s not doing this for them.
This info is invaluable. Hope you’re keeping safe, it says another day, which is too ridiculous to even acknowledge. Hux sends them a turret schematic just to change the topic.
And then, one night after second shift: Good morning! I hope you’re having a nice day.
If Hux were in his right mind, he’d ignore it like the rest. But he’d spent his shift holding his shoulders steady under Pryde’s sneer, and then had to watch Ren take off in a ship on some harebrained vision quest that will only cost them more time and resources the Order can’t afford to lose. His whole body is buzzing with frustrated rage and half-burnt stims; his jaw is clenched so tight he can feel his pulse pounding in his molars. He won’t be sleeping anytime soon.
So against his better judgement, he settles back in his bunk with the datapad and types back a reply. Why would the quality of my day matter to you?
It only takes a few seconds to get a reply. Oh hey! Was beginning to think you were ignoring me. A moment, then, Just trying to build some rapport here. FO spies are in short supply. We want you to feel appreciated.
Hux glowers at the datapad. How typical of the Resistance to make it all about feelings. You can make me feel appreciated by using the data I’ve provided, and by otherwise not wasting my time.
Haha, you got it buddy! A beat; Hux thinks they might have actually gotten the message. But then another line, clearly just to spite him. Not a nice day then?
The only thing nice about it is that it’s over, Hux sends back before he can stop himself, then flushes in embarrassed anger and quickly closes the chat to wipe the history. The Resistance are clearly playing their own game here, and he has absolutely no intention of playing along. They can’t win over more than his intel with saccharine words on a screen. He’s not doing this for them.
Hux dims the lights and curls up tight under the blankets. Good morning, his contact had said. They must be planetside then, somewhere not on standard time. The ever-elusive Resistance base perhaps. Or maybe…
He only sleeps a few hours, but regrettably, infuriatingly, it’s the best sleep he’s had in days.
~🩸~
Things are both better and worse with Ren gone. The air feels clearer without the acidic crackle of his sullen anger seeping through the halls, and the edges of his thoughts are less ragged without the Force picking at his mind. But without the ever-present dread, Hux is far more cognizant of the emptiness.
Regardless of what Ren might have claimed, the Finalizer had belonged to Hux. He’d handpicked her command team from the Order’s best, had walked her corridors and run his fingers along her consoles until the hum of her engines sang in his bones. She had never been comfortable because the Order doesn’t concern itself with comfort, but she had been familiar. Hux had known her.
In theory, the Steadfast should feel identical. She’s the same model, manufactured within the same timeframe at the same shipyard. But there’s a groaning lower partial to her engines that that sets Hux’s teeth on edge, and there are no familiar faces in the crew when he walks her corridors. It wouldn’t matter even if there were; they’re looking to Pryde, not to him. He has no power here, and the hollow reminder of it echoes everywhere he goes.
You must be on a star destroyer, right? his Resistance contact sends one morning. What’s it like? Seems like a bleak place to live.
Hux never intends to indulge them, but, as in all things these days, he’s slowly ceding control. He’d spent his shift overseeing operations far below his pay-grade and reading reports on growing unrest that Pryde dismissed with a hand wave and patronizing smile. Throughout it all, the Steadfast had moaned around him like a wounded beast.
Some are less bleak than others, he types, then chases down the inevitable rush of hot shame with a mouthful of tea. He’s been rapidly depleting his stash since transferring ships, but the curling steam and sharp flavour feel familiar in a way little else does right now.
His contact replies immediately, not even passingly concerned with the concept of shame. Really? They all seem the same to me. Very…monochrome. Why are the floors so shiny?
Hux rolls his eyes. Because we clean them. A concept foreign to the Resistance I’m sure.
Ouch buddy, right in the feelings! Not our fault we don’t spend all our time floating in the pristine vacuum of space or whatever. A moment passes. Hux waits. Reliable as a ticking chronometer, another line of text appears. You ever live planetside?
Hux considers the question, chewing absently on his thumbnail as he does. It’s a bad habit from childhood, prone to rearing its head in times of stress no matter how many times it’s beaten back. A pathetic weakness; his contact would probably be delighted by the humanity of it. Hux sneers at the thought.
I was stationed briefly on Starkiller Base, he finally replies. More vicious than perhaps is warranted, but Hux isn’t built for conversations that don’t hold daggers up their sleeves. Better to draw blood now and shut this down before his contact convinces themselves he’s something he’s not.
(He could shut it down at any time by simply not responding, but the alternative is the sleepless cold of his bunk and the Steadfast’s low groan which is…)
His eyes have squeezed shut without his realizing. When he blinks them back open, a new message is waiting for him. Oof. Sorry for blowing it up. But also not sorry because, you know. Yikes.
All at once, Hux is exhausted. I somehow doubt you were personally responsible for its destruction, he types back with one hand, grasping desperately for his tea with the other. He should have stopped typing long ago. He shouldn’t have brought up Starkiller. The ache of his failure there is still scalded into the hollows between his ribs, and instead of chasing the Resistance away, he’s given them an opportunity to…
There’s your first fun fact about me then! I blew the oscillator myself.
With no small amount of relief, Hux feels the exhaustion cede to anger. There’s the familiar indignant rage, the seething frustration that such small-minded simpletons could know what’s best for the galaxy. Starkiller had been a marvel until they’d snuffed out its light. He could have triumphed with Starkiller! He could have finally put Ren in his place, he could have brought order, he could have driven back Snoke and Pryde and everyone else who dared to treat him like he was irrelevant—
How fun indeed, he returns, and it almost feels like he’s back on that dais with the sharp winter wind billowing in his coat and brilliant scarlet light flaring along the horizon. The Resistance might have won that day, but Hux has always known how to make his victors hurt too. There were nearly 400,000 personnel stationed on Starkiller. I’m sure you can imagine how many made it off unscathed. Congratulations.
A minute ticks by, then two. No new messages appear. Hux exhales in vindictive satisfaction and swallows down his last mouthful of tea, even as something within his chest he hadn’t even realized unwound starts to pull taut again. It serves his contact right, thinking a member of the First Order could be defanged with banal conversation.
I’ll let you destroy my Order, but I want you to feel every blow.
He washes his cup and gets ready to sleep, giving the datapad one last glance before he goes to his bunk. No new messages. Good.
Hux lies down and closes his eyes, but sleep doesn’t come. He lies still and silent in the dark instead, listening to the Steadfast moan.
~🩸~
I’m sorry, his datapad says after his next shift. That stuff about Starkiller was uncalled for. We’ve both lost a lot of people.
Hux glowers tiredly at the screen. He has a tension headache pounding in his temples, and his head is still fuzzy even with the stims working their way through his system. Ren is set to rendezvous with the Steadfast by the end of next cycle, and he can already feel the familiar apprehension prickling along the back of his neck. When he tries to summon the anger, this time it doesn’t come.
Still, he types a reply. Apologies are unnecessary and irrelevant. We are at war.
I’m still sorry, his contact insists. Hux bites back a sigh. One of my best friends used to be a stormtrooper. I didn’t mean to imply your lives don’t matter.
Hux lifts his eyebrows at that. An associate of FN-2187 then, or are there other defectors in the Resistance he’s unaware of? If Ren weren’t off on a wild bantha hunt through the Unknown Regions, maybe they could launch a proper investigation. If Phasma were here, none of this would have ever…
The tight knot in his chest cramps suddenly, sharp and hot. Hux flinches and ducks his chin down until it passes, sucking in slow breaths through his teeth. Too many stims maybe, or too little sleep. Just a fluke, just a physical malfunction. Nothing more.
I’ve received confirmation Kylo Ren returns to the Supreme Council tomorrow. I will send a report once I have more intel, he sends eventually, ignoring the previous message entirely. It’s irrelevant. It’s a waste of time.
(It’s incorrect. Their lives have never mattered, not to the rest of the galaxy and not to the Order either.)
Will keep an eye out for it. Stay safe, his informant says. Hux looks at the text for a full half-minute before closing the window and letting the message vanish.
~🩸~
After the meeting, he locks himself in his quarters and sits and stares out the viewport, fingernails dug deep into his palms so his hands don’t shake. He can’t reach for the datapad. He can’t swallow, can’t blink. The Steadfast wails around him and he understands now. Not a moan. A death rattle. She was never even alive at all.
~🩸~
I can’t send it to you here, he sends when he can move again. I will figure out another way.
That bad huh? his datapad says. Hux tries to laugh, but it comes out as a raspy gurgle instead.
Yes.
For a moment, he’s almost tempted to write more. None of it was real, or, The New Republic was never the real target, or maybe even, All my life I thought I was serving a cause, but I was actually being puppeteered by a soulless corpse. His fingers hover uselessly over the screen, but he can’t seem to remember how to form words. The room is swimming beyond the edges of the pad. His lungs are encased in blast door durasteel, crushing them flat. He’s chewed the corner of his lip so hard he can taste blood.
I’ll be in touch, he types finally, then closes the chat before his contact can send something infuriating in response like Stay safe or It’s going to be okay. It won’t be okay. It’s never been okay, and now it’s only going to get worse. Anything else would be a lie.
Hux is finished with lies.
~🩸~
After he’d unceremoniously removed him from active command, Pryde had put Hux in charge of supply routes and datawork. He’d clearly considered it demeaning—something you’re less likely to mishandle, he’d said with a mocking smile—but Hux has spent long enough creeping up through the Order’s ranks to know what really makes a military run. Starkiller might be his legacy, but planetary bases and dreadnoughts are not the weapons he’s most adept with. Where Hux truly excels is bureaucracy.
He’d started keeping a list of potential Resistance informants during the campaign to rout their base, and it only takes a few hours of sorting through routine inspection schedules to find a match. Between Ren with his Force-obsessed madness and Pryde with his delusions of grandeur, no one will notice if the Sinta Glacier Colony inspection suffers a slight personnel change.
Which brings him onto the next objective: selecting the correct person for the job. The Steadfast’s crew are still largely unfamiliar to him, but the sort of weakness he’s searching for is easy enough to sniff out. A younger, low-ranking officer who’s been overlooked and unappreciated, desperate to prove themselves to their superiors and too zealous to question anything unusual. A willing puppet. A decoy.
He settles on a Lieutenant Milla Finnall, a fresh Academy graduate newly posted to Comms. Good scores on her aptitude tests, Imperial parents who no doubt expect great things from her, and new enough to the Steadfast to have not yet sorted out the pecking order. If he’s read her correctly, she should be dazzled enough by his general’s stripes to overlook his recent disgracing. If he hasn’t read her correctly and she snitches to Pryde, he’s probably dead, but that’s hardly a new problem.
Hux breathes in, breathes out, then tabs over to this cycle’s shift rotation. Finnall is on third shift today, posted at the forward data centre: ideal for making contact without alerting any bridge personnel. He won’t have a better opportunity.
Some insane impulse nearly makes him check his encrypted messages before he goes. It’s nonsensical—he doesn’t have anything new to impart and he doubts his contact has anything new to tell him, plus it’s incredibly risky to open that chat while he’s on shift, when anyone could contact him at any time. He still thinks about it though, far longer than he should. Thinks about sending an update and receiving a Good luck! or Let me know how it goes! or even a Stay safe—
No. Enough. Hux stands, pushes in his chair, pats his pocket one last time to make sure the data stick is safely stowed, before sweeping out of his office and down the corridor to the lifts.
This, at least, feels familiar. He used to spend hours pacing the Finalizer’s decks after most of the command crew were off-duty, mapping a tight circuit through the upper habitation levels to the aft comms centre and back around again. Sometimes on particularly restless nights, he’d take the lift down to the promenade and roam further. Once he’d made it all the way to the barracks, so lost in the steady meditation of putting one foot in front of the other he’d walked for a full hour and nearly run straight into Phasma, who’d dragged him back to her quarters and forced him to nap on her chaise until his next shift.
But no time to walk tonight, as much as his frazzled nerves would welcome it. Hux moves briskly down the promenade to the mag rail, ducking inside the first empty compartment he can find. The rail will take him as far as the barracks, and then it’s only two lifts and a short walk to the data centre. He tips his head back against the seat and lets his eyes slip closed, the vibrations of the rail car humming through his skull. In here, he can almost pretend he’s still on the Finalizer. He can almost pretend that doesn’t know what he knows now and there’s still a way for him and the Order to win.
In the end, it’s almost laughably easy. Finnall is posted at an isolated console tucked near a bulkhead, and she snaps to attention with stars in her eyes when he addresses her. "Lieutenant Finnall, is it? You’re new to this posting."
"Yes sir." To her credit, Finnall almost succeeds in holding her voice steady. She’s nearly two heads shorter than him, plump and star destroyer-pale with her mousy brown hair pulled back into twin braids. She also looks very young; Hux forces himself not go dwell on it. "I graduated two quarters ago. I joined the Steadfast when the Allegiant General took command."
Unfortunate. A small black mark on her record, but not enough to dissuade him.
"Hmm," he says, drawing the sound out just to the edge of condescending. "Communications focus, with a specialization in Civil Affairs, correct? I have a task that’s well-suited for your skill set.
Hux has never been able to manipulate people like his father could, but what he lacks in false sincerity, he compensates for with bold, icy scrutiny. He tilts his chin and fixes Finnall with his very best general face—jaw set, gaze cold, eyebrow ever so slightly raised—and watches with a small twinge of satisfaction as she nearly sways. For a moment, he almost feels like himself again.
"I would be honoured to serve the Order in whatever way I can, sir," Finnall tells him breathlessly, and he can all but feel her life fluttering expectantly in the palm of his hand. To cast out as he sees fit, to squeeze as is necessary. As it should be. As the Order had promised him, before it had all rotted away and revealed the desiccated lie.
"Very good," he says, even though it’s never felt less true. "We’re conducting routine inspections of colonies under our jurisdictions. I have reason to suspect there may be Resistance informants among them, but we won’t know for certain without proper monitoring. I would like you to join the inspection team for the Sinta Glacier colony and transfer this," he proffers the data stick, "onto the overseer’s systems. It will let us see exactly what they know, and exactly who they’ve been sharing with."
It won’t do either of those things. It contains everything Hux has managed to compile about the Emperor and Exegol and his Sith fleet, and it will hopefully ensure that the informant immediately delivers it into the hands of the Resistance. But Finnall is saluting so hard her shoulders are vibrating, and Hux knows without a doubt that she fervently believes everything he’s just told her. He knows exactly how that expression felt on his own face, a lifetime and a Sith lord ago.
He wants to slap her the way his father would, swift and sharp across the cheek with the flat of his palm. He wants to lean in close and whisper that it’s all a lie, that she’ll never amount to anything no matter how much she scrabbles for it because the ones who promised them glory were only ever planning to grind them into chum. He wants to drag her to the precipice and watch her face fall as she realizes the truth for herself. But he doesn’t do any of those things. The Order has never dealt in mercy.
"I won’t let you down, sir," Finnall finally manages to squeak out, taking the data stick with trembling fingers and tucking it reverently into her pocket. Hux forces himself not to stare after it. "When should I report for deployment?
Hux offers her the bare skeleton of a smile. "Next shift. You will be expected on Sinta in two cycles’ time. You’ll have a team of two troopers assigned to you. I recommend you don’t discuss the particulars of your task with them; we’re trying to stop up leaks, not create more."
Finnall salutes again. "Understood, sir. Thank you for the opportunity."
Two years ago, his request might have raised some eyebrows, but between the rising instability of Ren’s rule and FN-2187’s notorious defection, people are far more willing to distrust their troopers.
For the first time in his life, Hux is briefly thankful for FN-2187.
"Thank you for your service, Lieutenant," he says briskly to distract himself from that frankly horrifying sentiment. "I will await your report."
On the way back to his quarters, he gets off the mag rail at mid-ship and walks the rest of the way. With the Steadfast fuzzed in his peripherals and her moaning engines buried by his footfalls, he can almost pretend things are normal again. An objective, primed for success and set into motion. Plans buzzing in his head, a star destroyer’s long corridors clicking beneath his feet. No revenants whispering in the shadows. No trails of Force energy trailing nitrogen-cold down his neck.
Don’t think about Ren. Don’t think about the Final Order. Everything is normal and I’m in control.
He doesn’t look at his messages once he’s arrived in his quarters. He flips back to the inspection schedule instead and checks them again, in duplicate, in triplicate, until the text is burnt onto his retinas and his eyes water when he blinks.
Everything is normal and I’m in control.