Work Text:
Every evening General Hux checks Ren’s wrists, then the rest of his body. Slow deliberate fingers ghosting over uneven skin, counting the ridges of scars – his past mistakes and oversights. There is still a kind of tenderness in the mechanical process, the fingers probe “Tell me what distresses you.”
Tonight there is nothing to find, at least no physical marks, bruises, cuts or burns. Hux smiles gently, his facial muscles slipping through a sequence of familiar expressions: appreciation, slight awe, mirth, reverence. It is a little game they play, though Kylo might have forgotten the rules.
After the day’s duties are done (at least for Ren they are), Hux allows the Knight to settle into the filthy ravaged nest that he calls a bed and gingerly sits on the end of it. He relaxes his shoulders and matches his breathing to Ren’s, morphing from a fierce General into a sympathetic councillor in the space of several gestures. On orders from the Supreme Leader he is to keep the prize Knight sane (or approximating sanity) for as long as possible. That is, until Snoke sees fit to detonate this nuclear bomb in the guise of an overgrown teenager with maximum casualties. After that, nothing will matter, Hux will probably be expended, having outlived his usefulness. At least now he can occupy himself with something, even if it is only babysitting Ren. The General chuckles mirthlessly – what a fitting past-time for someone with zero self-worth.
“What’s so funny?” Kylo, of course, takes everything personally.
“Nothing.” He needs a cigarette, desperately, but Ren had recently quit and Hux fears a relapse. The Knight has no self-restraint. He also clams up when questions are asked, so Hux usually starts their sessions (as now) with some bland observation.
“The trip to Jakku yielded interesting results.”
Ren shrugs, watching Hux from beneath his lashes, his head bent down. There is a detail the General had noticed a while back – Kylo can’t hold eye contact for any period of time. He’ll look away, blink once, then try and look you in the face, fail, look down again. Hux isn’t sure whether it is a universal reaction or whether he holds the prime trophy for making Ren the most uncomfortable. There are several more awkward phrases, all building up to Kylo speaking of his dreams, or training, or whatever else bothers him and can be alleviated by the General’s carefully chosen words. He knows a couple grounding techniques to help Ren deal with insecurity and lack of motivation. Having tried to use those on himself, Hux is surprised anyone still falls for that kind of bullshit.
“You’ve got something on your cheek.” Ren reaches out, thumb flush to the General’s cheekbone, but Hux draws away, steady and sleek as always.
“Oh. I’ll be right back, then.” He gets up and beelines to Kylo’s en-suite, thankful for the darkness that hides whatever expression has broken through his mask.
It’s some sort of soot mark. Hux looks at himself in the mirror and feels like being sick. It’s hard to pin-point any particular piece of it, he just doesn’t like himself, not one bit, and never did. Perhaps something to do with his conditioning (he avoids calling it an upbringing), the fact he was never praised, or wanted, or noticed, really, for who he was rather than what he’s done.
The door clicks open quietly as he is scrubbing away the dirt, eyes still trained on the mirror mercilessly. Ren comes up behind him, resting his chin on Hux’s shoulder and snaking his hands around the shorter man’s waist. Hux feels uncomfortably dwarfed, hyper-aware of his protruding collarbones and thin arms. He watches their reflections for a while, then Kylo starts talking.
“Hey. Start fucking recognising yourself for what you are. You always think in advance, don’t take anyone’s shit, get stuff done and have you checked your motivation levels recently? Like that time we were finishing Snoke’s report in the mess and, I swear, you had proof-read it and shovelled half a bowl of soup into your mouth before I made it past the first paragraph.”
The General recognises the techniques he uses on Ren: focus on reality, segregate your traits and appraise each, stay grounded by using specific examples for each trait. His own lessons reflected back at him. Hux twitches the corner of his mouth up, “Thanks for seeing me this way,” it seems to have a beneficent impact on Ren’s attitude, makes him feel a certain degree of control and awareness of his surroundings. Good.
“Nah, I’m not even nice to you.” Kylo is bashful now, that teenage demeanour showing through; Hux endeavours to reassure.
“Nicer than many others.”
“No way!” the knight’s grip tightens around his waist, hot breath stirring a strand of hair across the General’s ear, “I don’t believe that.”
“Why would I lie?” oh, only a thousand reasons, “I just phrased this well. You treat me better than many others, but I am also treated better, than you treat me, by many people,” the phrase comes out clunky, damn his propensity towards loquaciousness, but Hux guesses he got his meaning across, “It’s a statistical thing, and you fall kind of in the middle.”
There it is, a tiny hairline crack in his defences, the slip-up of a man who is tired of projecting everything that is not himself. Ren still clings to him for dear life, relying on Hux to be strong, to be infallible, and the General is tired. This war machine has lost its momentum. Hux is perfectly motionless, lost somewhere between himself and his reflection, when Kylo slides both his hands up Hux’s arms, dragging up the sleeves, like a cat kneading for milk. Hux’s controlling mind is not there to stop him when Ren drops his hands and steps back, his heart-rate jumping up several tempos, eyes glaring and confused in the mirror.
“What is this?”
There are tight white bandages on both Hux’s forearms (people usually don’t check above the wrists, not unless they’re him, not unless they know), surgically precise like the long slashes under them.
“Hux?” Ren’s voice is uncertain, he does the ‘blink once and look away’ thing again, all to try and meet the General’s gaze, “You… why didn’t you tell me?”
Because you are weak, you wouldn’t be able to handle it, it might have triggered another episode, which I would have had to deal with, because you can’t help, because I don’t want help, because this is just to see whether there is anything at all under my projections, maybe one day I will cut through my skin and space will come pouring out. I’m just as much a child as you are, Ren, I’m lost and scared and can’t bear the look of myself most days. And you chose to lean on me, to trust me like I could change the lot given us. I can’t give up, not with you here.
“I was worried you might be upset.” Hux answers with a practiced shy smile, turning around, sweeping a palm over Kylo’s forearm. It’s the kind of intimate answer the Knight wants to hear, something he didn’t get enough of when his sunny childhood got cut short at fifteen. He allows Ren to fill in the rest: ‘and I did not want to upset you because I care about you. I want you to be happy, Ben.’ Would it be something his mother used to say?
After a calculated pause Hux ushers the Knight back into bed and dims the lights. “Goodnight.” He ruffles a hand through Ren’s hair before leaving.
As the door of the Knight’s quarters hisses shut behind him, Hux is alone, slowly dissolving into nothingness. He is the advocate of the idea, that if no one observes a tree fall in a forest, then it does not fall, there is no tree and no forest. But he will exist again, tomorrow, when Ren calls him.