Archive of Our Own

When Kylo Ren is bundled into Hux's shuttle, his side a raw crevasse of pain, the wound on his face stretching with every scream, Hux hushes him with a cool palm on his unmarred cheek, whispering to him softly in the language of his home.

"Fan na luí ag mo thaobh," always stay by my side, "ná scar uaim," do not part from me.

Even if he is unable to protect his life's work, he will not fail to protect Kylo Ren. Never.

The first thing that Ren asks when he wakes, screaming in pain and clutching Hux's hand so tightly it might break, is, jarringly for Hux, The girl, did someone get the girl? And suddenly Hux realises that the last good thing in his life has been torn, irreparably, by the blue blade of a Skywalker. He drops Kylo's hand like it is the blade itself and trips backwards, gracelessly stumbling out of his chair until his back hits the medbay wall.

It is then that Kylo's eyes seem to focus and he stares at Hux, wild and senseless, and maimed by the girl.

"Hux. Hux- what's-" Hux squeezes his eyes shut, ears ringing, he can't be here anymore, not with this imitation of the man he once- well it never does to ruminate on the past. He should have known from the very moment that Ren insisted on the girl instead of the droid that he was no longer a priority. And he just didn't.

Maybe it's not such a surprise that the second to last saving grace in his life is splitting open mere lightyears away from them.

He runs his flat palms over his hair and straightens, striding out of the door with as much arrogance as he can muster, snapping at the nearest doctor that Lord Ren is awake and making a scene. It takes a lot to ignore the desperate screams of his name that follow him from the medbay. But Hux has an iron will.

He proves this well for the next few weeks, ignoring Ren so completely that he even manages to almost forget that he's on the ship at all. It doesn't stop Kylo from attempting to see him.

He changes the codes to his quarters, to his office, even to his favourite meeting room. He even valiantly ignores the humming of Ren's disgusting lightsaber as he ignites it outside his door. When he can sense the awful beast is about to strike, however, he sends out the most forceful thought he can, screaming in Ren's head as he tries to touch into Hux's mind. I'll kill you. He receives, from Kylo's end, a wash of absolute anguish that leaves him breathless for minutes on end.

Eventually the pain is coloured with resigned anger and Hux hears heavy footfalls stalk away from his chamber.

They do not speak once until they are both obligated to attend Snoke's chambers.

To say that the supreme leader is displeased is such an understatement that Hux almost laughs at himself but it is truly the best description of what he sees.

"Not only," hisses the hulking, fissured creature, "have you both failed in your duties to me, you have returned to your posts and you are not working together to fix your failures." He never raises his voice and Hux feels very much like he is being berated by a disappointed parent.

"You are co-comanders! Act like it!" The mania in Snoke's eyes is morbidly fascinating to watch. Hux is almost amused until Ren makes the colossal mistake of speaking up.

"Supreme leader, the girl-"

"The girl." This time, the volume of Snoke's voice does raise, "is not your priority, child, I want the droid. We have reason to believe that it's on Suantraí VI."

No it kriffing well isn't, Hux thinks, perhaps a bit too loudly, but he knows that planet and there is no kriffing way. It's well out of the Resistance's scope, with barely any natural resources- and it's rainy. Hux really doesn't think he can stand another rainy planet in his lifetime.

"As I was saying, " Hux cringes, realising that his outburst has been heard, "the two of you will work together to find out if that information is correct." And then the supreme leader is folding into a single pixel.

"Hux," Ren tries, but Hux is having none of it.

"I will gather necessary supplies, be at the hanger at 0600 hours, or I will leave you and take the Captain." And likely be relieved of my head on return, he thinks, but does not say.

The droid, predictably, is not on Suantraí VI, something that Ren states within an hour of trudging over the planet's pitted, slippery surface, struggling as they inhale the heavy, warm air.

It's when the first raindrop falls that it starts, as it always does.

The sky splits, suddenly, and water is immediately everywhere. As is the music.

It begins with a sweet, low humming of two voices finding their notes, and then the real melody begins, haunting and tentative, holding back until the drizzle turns to a downpour.

Hux stills, for just a moment, waiting for the chorus, his face turned up into the sky, letting teardrops of rainwater tap onto his cheeks. When it comes, when the rain should be so loud that it is all that he can hear, the voices mount until they are belting. There's so much agony in them that it hurts to hear.

He can hear a vague, static-edged noise from Ren, about not being able to find the shuttle in all this kriffing rain because all our tracks have washed away and Hux- are you listening?

His mother's clear, transparent harmonies slice through Maratelle's rich, tearful melody before they are rudely shattered, like the glass that they are.

"Do you hear that?" Hux turns to Ren, blinking raindrops off of his lashes, uncomprehending, "there's a signal, a sound of some sort," Ren rounds on him, awful mask looming into his face, "can you hear it?"

"Hear what?" Hux is aware, vaguely of taking a step away from Ren, not afraid, of course not, but wary of the sudden madness taking over the knight.

Suddenly, the the two voices meet on one, glittering, wrenching note, and hold it for one, two-

"Music."

-four.

There is one crystalline, broken second of silence before the song begins again, two voices in unison, to the gentle beat of the rain.

"Hux- is it you?"

Oh hells. Kriffing hells. Of course Ren can hear it, the bastard is always in his kriffing head. Hux has been unconsciously projecting the music and Kylo Ren can hear it.

"I didn't- I thought- I didn't know you'd be able to hear it." Hux hates himself in this moment, hates himself for his weak voice, for sharing his private memories, for ever letting Kylo kriffing Ren into his head.

Suddenly there's a palm, gloved and slick with rainwater, or blood, colliding with his forehead, coupled with the intense, crushing pain of Ren's mind pushing in.

In a moment, Hux is four-year-old Armitage sitting with the kitchen girl in the low light of the evening. The rain is more quiet in the kitchen, at the bottom of the house where Armitage isn't allowed to go, but Maratelle always lets him dry off by the only fire that they keep in the house when he comes in soaked right to his trembling bones. He still hears it though, you can always hear the rain on Arkanis.

The girl is smiling into her song, a soft Arkanian lullaby, as she glances up from her work at him. The timbre of her voice is weak and thin, scratching on the high notes, but Armitage picks out the notes carefully and copies them, humming along in his young, high voice, and together they make the music swell, even as his eyelids drop closed.

Another sharp wrench in his head and Armitage is six, and crying into a mug of bitter tea, eyelashes weighted with tears. He is in the kitchen once more, hiding like the bastard, coward, insolent boy that he is, and crying because he is weak. He doesn't hear Avlynn walk in, the tap of her boots swallowed by the downpour outside, but he does hear her start to sing.

This time, she opts for the harmony, letting Armitage sing the melody that he's learned, and she slips into the high notes with more ease, her shaking voice more confident. She clasps his shoulders and allows him to cry into her apron, dropping back to the melody as he sobs, louder than her, louder than the rain.

One more push and now eight year old Armitage is sitting cross legged on his bed with Maratelle, matching her obscenely bruised biceps with his own black eye. She is drinking nectarwine, it's contraband and Armitage knows it's from her lover because his father would never grant her such a luxury. He could turn her in if he wanted, just to see his father's face twist with displeasure at illegal activities going on in his home, but Hux thinks that the man might kill them both. He's capable enough.

In Armitage's attic bedroom, the raindrops don't so much patter on the rooftop but pound, the grey droplets snapping against steel tiles. It's so loud that he nearly misses the beginning of Maratelle's song, her rich, alto voice at the back of her throat, tentative. She doesn't ever sing the harmonies so that Armitage can try out his handful of notes but sings far enough below his range that their melodies are independent.

She won't look at him, even when Armitage moves closer to her, but allows him to pull her slim, shuddering shoulders to his chest, and throws her bottle onto the bed to clutch at his tiny body.

"I'm so sorry darling. I'm terribly sorry." Her voice is made thicker by tears and Armitage simply sings to her, sighing as she joins in with short, stuttering phrases. The bottle drips onto the floorboards, rainwater, blood.

She had apologised again, Hux remembers, for the stain on the sheets and the floor and hovered nervously by Avlynn as she had tried to scrub it out. She hadn't managed it, but in the end, it didn't matter.

Both Avlynn and Maratelle perish in the siege, along with the stained floorboards and the rains.

Hux has never been able to hear rain without them.

When Hux comes to, he is clawing at the arm Ren has stretched up to his forehead and being held up by the lapels of his coat.

"Hux-" Ren starts, but Hux steps back sharply, drawing up to his full height and using the rain to slick his hair back again.

"I have told you time and time again to get out of my kriffing head." Kylo reels as if slapped. It's not satisfying in the way that Hux wants it to be.

He feels like little Armitage again as he pivots around, heel sinking into the mud, and stalks away from Ren. It's petulant but he just doesn't care. The two voices hold their breath and do not sing.

Hours later, there's another intrusion into his mind, vastly more gentle this time, but he still shoves it away, messy, harsh.

He is losing the last piece of Arkanis, the precious collection of notes he has left are but a few shards of the mirror, cutting him as he draws them tightly into his grip, hurting him so he must release his hold and let them fall. He will not let the last note go though, pinching between finger and thumb and burying it beneath his skin. He needs it, he needs them.

All of a sudden there are footsteps, syncopated with the drum of rain, a few staccato breaths and then a hand, thudding heavily on his shoulder. Ren.

"I've set up the tent. Come back with me." He follows Ren wordlessly, his anger drained out and exhaustion settling over his saturated bones. They sit, either side of the tiny fire Ren has made from what looks like his disgusting cowl and some small twigs. Absently, Hux wonders how he found any dry kindling, seeing as every goddamn thing on this planet is more water than anything else.

The plastic sheeting over their head amplifies the pelting of the rain and shadows them completely from any remaining light from the planet's dying starlet of a sun. It makes it easier to strip down to their underthings (which are simply wet rather than drenched) and they huddle under crinkling plastic blankets from their emergency kit.

"We'll locate the shuttle first thing and get out as soon as we connect communications," Hux says smartly, clipped and formal like he hasn't been with Ren for so long, "I'll debrief the supreme leader to tell him of our failure, it's my responsibility for being so-" he blinks, Ren is staring at him oddly, like he isn't seeing him quite right, the final note of his lullaby is itching beneath his skin, "-distracted."

The note bursts out, bloody and piercing, two forsaken women screaming their last. Kylo Ren flinches, firelight jumping over the planes of his face.

"Tell me about them." It's earnest and searching, it makes Hux want to answer.

"You've seen it all," he says instead, snapping at Ren just for the sake of it.

"Hux-" He doesn't reply and they fall into another silence. Not true silence, Hux notes, but the kind he prefers, the ambient noise of the rain slowing in time with his depleting heartbeat. Ren looks so soft and sad and, slowly, Hux remembers they are in the same, parentless mess.

"We could have saved them." Ren's eyes snap up and lock onto his. "I had dreams about counting the empty seats on that kriffing shuttle for years." The water on his cheeks is nothing to do with the rain, now, "we had the time and the space. But we also had my father."

Sloane's eyes, Hux remembers, had been so gentle and apologetic when she told him that they couldn't get Avlynn or Maratelle. And yet Hux had screamed until his throat closed up and pounded the doors of the shuttle until they landed, and he fell onto hard, dry sand. He still remembers the scratching feeling.

"They're the only thing I cared to remember of that sodding rock." Ren is contemplating him carefully, as if he might bolt at any second.

"Do you hear them all the time?" It's a genuine question.

"Kriff, Ren, I can't hear them at all." He sighs, bracing himself against the drowning realisation that he's lost the song forever, even as that, final note lingers, suspended in the thick air, ringing in his ears. "But no, only in the rain." For if you could never hear an Arkanian lullaby without rain, it seemed fitting that Hux could never hear the rain without a lullaby.

Minutes later, Hux hears it, a third voice, swelling the note with a gravelly tenor. He looks at Ren in disbelief.

It is completely absurd to hear Kylo Ren singing, so utterly incredible that Hux vacantly wonders if he's finally let go of his sanity. Or if Ren is the one going mad.

And yet, clear as day, Ren starts to twist out a clumsy few bars of notes, flat and rushed, not in time with the beat of the rain, but enough, enough that Avlynn rushes in with her harmony, sanded glass shards soaring inside Hux's head.

"Oh Ren." Ren's smile is watery as he concentrates on the melody, but soon enough Maratelle's voice smooths over, sharpening flat notes and drowning out Kylo's quiet humming. "Ren come here."

And so he does, all too quickly and heavily, stumbling over the uneven ground, but then they are touching and it's the first time Hux has touched him, has touched anyone skin to skin, after Starkiller, and the stunning shock of Ren's skin touching his has him jolting like he's been electrified. There's a rush of something in his chest, a bright, pleased glow spilling into every corner of him.

"Thank you," thank you, thank you, thank you. He punctuates every one with a kiss, just a dry press of his lips to the corner of Ren's, but it is enough.

"I always cared about you more than the girl." It feels like it should be an abrupt change of subject and, truthfully, Hux doesn't even know how Kylo knows about that particular jealous flaw of Hux's but he doesn't care, pulling back to stare into wide, gold eyes.

"I know- Hells, Kylo, I've always known." It's not a good answer but it seems to please the knight and he drops his head to Hux's chest.

I missed you. Kylo pushes the thought into his mind like winding a gossamer thread round his spinal cord, they sing so beautifully.

The voices smile as they sing and suddenly the song is how it should be, how it was once, no longer a mournful, dragging croon but a sweet, light lullaby melody. Suddenly it doesn't hurt in his chest when he listens to them.

Hux never wants Kylo to leave his kriffing head if he can help it.

They do not look for the shuttle first thing, but rather lie on their terrible plastic blankets, Hux's laughter skipping through falling rain as Kylo tries his tongue to the words of the song. After watching Kylo struggle valiantly for a good few minutes, Hux takes pity on him, laughter fading as he takes his sharp face between his hands, murmuring the words into his temple as he wills his voice to stay steady. It is lower now, he can't quite reach the notes in the same way, but it's smooth and tuneful and Kylo's breath hitches until he doesn't breathe at all.

"What does that mean?" His eyes are soulful and dark but Hux just taps his nose and kisses him softly, brushing back still damp curls from his face.

"Nothing, darling, nothing."