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Fic: Life Sentence
Chapter 3
Fandom: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Pairing: Armitage Hux & Poe Dameron (kind of pre-slash, kind of just emotional entanglement)
Rating: PG
Follows on from my From the Ashes
In which Hux's effect on prison life becomes visible even from the outside. And it begins to become clear that Poe is not well.
On the third month, all visiting was unexpectedly cancelled. Having taken the usual day off and been turned away at the door (where ‘door’ meant forcefield-shielded durasteel portal between watchtowers,) Poe went to see Rey instead.
When she came to Coruscant, she stayed at a cheap boardinghouse on the edge of one of the main traffic corridors, where she could sit in a corner seat above the canyon of lit and unlit buildings and feel as though she was floating among the lines of speeding lights.
Finn’s jacket lay over the back of her sofa, though Finn himself was absent, giving another interview on the difficulties of deprogramming the thousands of Stormtroopers surviving from the war.
“You two are a thing now?” he asked, happy for them in a strange, melancholy way that he didn’t want to contemplate. “That’s great! I know you don’t need my blessing but you totally have it. You found that closure you wanted in Tattooine, then?”
“Yes!” Rey grinned. “I buried a whole load of stuff that I’d been holding on to there. Bringing it back full circle, in a way. Now it’s time for something new. The Skywalkers gave us that gift, and I intend to take full advantage of it. What about you?”
Poe settled next to her, relishing the sense of being suspended miles in the air, surrounded by flight. It was dark in the room—as dark as ever Coruscant with its constant illuminations could ever get—but the blue flicker of a news hologram met the streams of passing gold outside the window and gave the darkness a moving, underwater quality.
“I don’t know what’s happening with me,” he confessed. “I enjoyed the fame at first—all that ‘hail the conquering general’ stuff, and I could step into lucrative sponsorship deals for anything from podracers to hair-oil and make my fortune. But well… Leia… Leia didn’t die for that.”
Nor had all those Resistance fighters whom he had lead into battle and killed there. Their memory would not be honoured by Poe Dameron, the face of luxury private shuttles. The thought made him want to set his head down on the earth and let it be absorbed by the darkness of the soil, just to flow back into the planet and gently stop existing at all.
Kes had told him to come back home, to literally get his hands in the soil and see if the Living Force, which pulsed through growing things, would somehow get his sap rising again, but that felt like failure too. The whole damn galaxy had turned at his hand only months ago. He wasn’t ready to give that up and go back to being a lowly no-name nobody. He was born to be the sharp point on which the universe turned. There should still be something vital only he could do.
“You’ve lost your joy,” Rey said, and Poe didn’t know what it said of him that he wasn’t even impressed. Here she was, using holy Jedi powers to read his mind and he was just tired about it.
“Yeah. The only time I feel anything, lately, is when I go and visit Hux and he always finds some new way of shocking or repelling me, or making me worried about him. I kind of hate going, but I… it’s also the only time I still half recognize myself.”
“Speaking of which,” she said. She nodded at the news projector, which was now showing a view of the outside of the Republic’s number one security prison. “This must be why you weren’t allowed in.”
The reporter was a Twilek woman in a severe business suit, who stood to one side of the frame while—behind her—members of Coruscant’s security force were expertly bundling a middle aged human man into an armoured vehicle.
“Law enforcement officers were alerted last night via an unregistered com, and following an immediate investigation, Governor Nyl-Sol was arrested on charges of running a snuff ring with governors at five other institutions, in which inmates serving life sentences were tortured to death on holo for the entertainment of paying clients.”
Poe covered his face with his hands, his first reaction a kind of giving way inside himself, as if the floor of his very being had opened onto an unexpected pit. “Who would do something like that?” he protested. “It’s sick! We’re supposed to be the good guys! How does someone who would do something like that get through the screening?”
Rey huffed at him and pulled a bag of snacks out from beneath the couch. It wasn’t until she had launched into an affectionate tirade about how very sheltered he was that his mind caught up with the implications of the news, in two lurching steps.
“Kriff! Do you think he would have done that to Hux? Maybe not while I was visiting, but as soon as I stopped? As soon as the public scrutiny was off him?”
“I’m sure he would,” Rey said, calmly eating fried sliced tubers. She offered him the packet, and he pushed them away. “I’m sure there are a lot of people who would pay good money to see it.”
“A sweep will be made of the prison for the unregistered com involved in the tip-off,” the reporter was saying, now transported through the miracle of editing to a sleek news desk in front of the golden logo of Coruscant Quadrant E4 News. “And an investigation will be made into who has been smuggling interdicted tech into the prison. The new governor, Colonel Kren Neem Biggly, has promised to reduce corruption--”
“Even in the smallest of cases, the regulations can be tightened.” The shot was now of the Twilek woman nodding seriously as a cold-eyed, uniformed human man spat out words like slugs from a slug thrower. “We must crack down on whistleblowers and malcontents amongst the inmates, as well as illegal activity among the guards, and I know that with the emergency measures accorded to me I can soon have this place squeaky clean again.”
Kren Biggly stared straight into the camera and seemed to catch Poe’s eyes. His stare was like life support cutting out, as if Poe had been jettisoned into space and the cold of it was blistering his face. He stopped breathing. His hand clenched on a firing button that wasn’t there.
“Oh, he’s trouble,” Rey said, licking grease from her fingers, and Poe’s heart galloped back into life.
“Kriff,” he said again, guilt and panic roiling in his chest, his fingers cold. “I gave Hux my com. He’d been… he said he’d been victimized. Said he’d be grateful if he could call for help, and I…”
An overwhelming sense that he had done wrong again, and a helplessness to correct it, like sitting safe in a fleeing ship and watching his friends be blown out of the sky around him. “I thought ‘what harm can it do?’ I didn’t realize he was going to use it to get the governor fired!”
“Probably a good thing, though. Don’t you think?”
He supposed it was. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that Hux had deliberately put him in the path of this void-eyed fanatic. Poe was still the face of the Resistance, the hero of the battle of Exegol, and he knew what happened to heroes the moment they slipped. Every week or so another social media icon toppled from their pedestal, where they could do no wrong, and were instead ripped to pieces in the court of public opinion.
What would his screaming supporters think once they found out he had smuggled tech into Starkiller’s prison? What would become of the little power that he still had? Wouldn’t it open him up for questions of what other stupid decisions he had made in his high-handed belief that following the rules was for other people?
It’s no more than you deserve he thought, remembering Paige Tico’s blazing hope, her faith in him before he sent her off to die.
But it felt like a betrayal even so.
Chapter 3
Fandom: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Pairing: Armitage Hux & Poe Dameron (kind of pre-slash, kind of just emotional entanglement)
Rating: PG
Follows on from my From the Ashes
In which Hux's effect on prison life becomes visible even from the outside. And it begins to become clear that Poe is not well.
On the third month, all visiting was unexpectedly cancelled. Having taken the usual day off and been turned away at the door (where ‘door’ meant forcefield-shielded durasteel portal between watchtowers,) Poe went to see Rey instead.
When she came to Coruscant, she stayed at a cheap boardinghouse on the edge of one of the main traffic corridors, where she could sit in a corner seat above the canyon of lit and unlit buildings and feel as though she was floating among the lines of speeding lights.
Finn’s jacket lay over the back of her sofa, though Finn himself was absent, giving another interview on the difficulties of deprogramming the thousands of Stormtroopers surviving from the war.
“You two are a thing now?” he asked, happy for them in a strange, melancholy way that he didn’t want to contemplate. “That’s great! I know you don’t need my blessing but you totally have it. You found that closure you wanted in Tattooine, then?”
“Yes!” Rey grinned. “I buried a whole load of stuff that I’d been holding on to there. Bringing it back full circle, in a way. Now it’s time for something new. The Skywalkers gave us that gift, and I intend to take full advantage of it. What about you?”
Poe settled next to her, relishing the sense of being suspended miles in the air, surrounded by flight. It was dark in the room—as dark as ever Coruscant with its constant illuminations could ever get—but the blue flicker of a news hologram met the streams of passing gold outside the window and gave the darkness a moving, underwater quality.
“I don’t know what’s happening with me,” he confessed. “I enjoyed the fame at first—all that ‘hail the conquering general’ stuff, and I could step into lucrative sponsorship deals for anything from podracers to hair-oil and make my fortune. But well… Leia… Leia didn’t die for that.”
Nor had all those Resistance fighters whom he had lead into battle and killed there. Their memory would not be honoured by Poe Dameron, the face of luxury private shuttles. The thought made him want to set his head down on the earth and let it be absorbed by the darkness of the soil, just to flow back into the planet and gently stop existing at all.
Kes had told him to come back home, to literally get his hands in the soil and see if the Living Force, which pulsed through growing things, would somehow get his sap rising again, but that felt like failure too. The whole damn galaxy had turned at his hand only months ago. He wasn’t ready to give that up and go back to being a lowly no-name nobody. He was born to be the sharp point on which the universe turned. There should still be something vital only he could do.
“You’ve lost your joy,” Rey said, and Poe didn’t know what it said of him that he wasn’t even impressed. Here she was, using holy Jedi powers to read his mind and he was just tired about it.
“Yeah. The only time I feel anything, lately, is when I go and visit Hux and he always finds some new way of shocking or repelling me, or making me worried about him. I kind of hate going, but I… it’s also the only time I still half recognize myself.”
“Speaking of which,” she said. She nodded at the news projector, which was now showing a view of the outside of the Republic’s number one security prison. “This must be why you weren’t allowed in.”
The reporter was a Twilek woman in a severe business suit, who stood to one side of the frame while—behind her—members of Coruscant’s security force were expertly bundling a middle aged human man into an armoured vehicle.
“Law enforcement officers were alerted last night via an unregistered com, and following an immediate investigation, Governor Nyl-Sol was arrested on charges of running a snuff ring with governors at five other institutions, in which inmates serving life sentences were tortured to death on holo for the entertainment of paying clients.”
Poe covered his face with his hands, his first reaction a kind of giving way inside himself, as if the floor of his very being had opened onto an unexpected pit. “Who would do something like that?” he protested. “It’s sick! We’re supposed to be the good guys! How does someone who would do something like that get through the screening?”
Rey huffed at him and pulled a bag of snacks out from beneath the couch. It wasn’t until she had launched into an affectionate tirade about how very sheltered he was that his mind caught up with the implications of the news, in two lurching steps.
“Kriff! Do you think he would have done that to Hux? Maybe not while I was visiting, but as soon as I stopped? As soon as the public scrutiny was off him?”
“I’m sure he would,” Rey said, calmly eating fried sliced tubers. She offered him the packet, and he pushed them away. “I’m sure there are a lot of people who would pay good money to see it.”
“A sweep will be made of the prison for the unregistered com involved in the tip-off,” the reporter was saying, now transported through the miracle of editing to a sleek news desk in front of the golden logo of Coruscant Quadrant E4 News. “And an investigation will be made into who has been smuggling interdicted tech into the prison. The new governor, Colonel Kren Neem Biggly, has promised to reduce corruption--”
“Even in the smallest of cases, the regulations can be tightened.” The shot was now of the Twilek woman nodding seriously as a cold-eyed, uniformed human man spat out words like slugs from a slug thrower. “We must crack down on whistleblowers and malcontents amongst the inmates, as well as illegal activity among the guards, and I know that with the emergency measures accorded to me I can soon have this place squeaky clean again.”
Kren Biggly stared straight into the camera and seemed to catch Poe’s eyes. His stare was like life support cutting out, as if Poe had been jettisoned into space and the cold of it was blistering his face. He stopped breathing. His hand clenched on a firing button that wasn’t there.
“Oh, he’s trouble,” Rey said, licking grease from her fingers, and Poe’s heart galloped back into life.
“Kriff,” he said again, guilt and panic roiling in his chest, his fingers cold. “I gave Hux my com. He’d been… he said he’d been victimized. Said he’d be grateful if he could call for help, and I…”
An overwhelming sense that he had done wrong again, and a helplessness to correct it, like sitting safe in a fleeing ship and watching his friends be blown out of the sky around him. “I thought ‘what harm can it do?’ I didn’t realize he was going to use it to get the governor fired!”
“Probably a good thing, though. Don’t you think?”
He supposed it was. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that Hux had deliberately put him in the path of this void-eyed fanatic. Poe was still the face of the Resistance, the hero of the battle of Exegol, and he knew what happened to heroes the moment they slipped. Every week or so another social media icon toppled from their pedestal, where they could do no wrong, and were instead ripped to pieces in the court of public opinion.
What would his screaming supporters think once they found out he had smuggled tech into Starkiller’s prison? What would become of the little power that he still had? Wouldn’t it open him up for questions of what other stupid decisions he had made in his high-handed belief that following the rules was for other people?
It’s no more than you deserve he thought, remembering Paige Tico’s blazing hope, her faith in him before he sent her off to die.
But it felt like a betrayal even so.
