Fic: Life Sentence, Chapter 4

[galadhir]

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 Poe has a devastating revelation

The Hux who met him next month, behind a forcefield through which nothing could pass, reminded him of the spitting fanatic from the galaxy-wide transmission before the death of the Hosnian system, furious and alight with something very like righteousness. This was Hux at his least human, and Poe was glad of it, so he could hold on to his resentment with both hands.

“And he revoked all my permissions,” Hux wound up his complaints about the new governor, with all the venom of a Kadassi scorpion-beetle. “All my progress, wiped out in one stroke. Do you know how close I came to access to a datapad? Do you have any idea what I could do with that?”

Poe narrowed his eyes and leaned in to whisper-hiss, “Considering what you did with my gift? I gave you that for your protection, not so you could, what? Threaten me with mutual blackmail if it was found out? I tried to help you, not--”

“And you did help me,” Hux’s outrage disappeared so quickly and so completely, Poe almost missed how the flame of it endured in the backs of his eyes as he arranged his face into puzzled sympathy.

For all that Hux had ranted about being set back to the beginning, he was bruiseless, his spacer-pale skin unflawed by sleeplessness or desperation. He looked confident, competent, more like his old self. Easier for Poe to resent. “And in return, I made sure the com was not discovered, or traced back to you.”

“But you could,” Poe pressed. Stars, it was so difficult even to be angry. He was tired, tired and heavy, and hurt—hurt beyond anything he had expected to feel. “You could ruin me with it.”

“And you could tell the governor that I had it,” Hux leaned in too, the forcefield lifting the pale hair along his forearms, making his odd, translucent eyelashes glimmer like water. “An anonymous tip-off. And I would be put into solitary until the idleness and boredom drove me mad.”

He raised his blue-hot gaze and caught Poe’s eyes. It was like looking into the blade of a lightsaber; the thrum of power and heat and control was mesmerizing. “Poe...”

Poe’s first name hit him like a plea. He was angry, holding on with both hands to his anger, to the sense of having been used, of his trust being violated, yet still he couldn’t help but…

“Poe. Did I ever tell you about my friend Phasma?” Hux was watching him, half like a predator watching prey, half like a man begging to be believed. “We were teenagers when we met. She’d come off a hell-world, one of the many abandoned by the Republic, left to starve or cannibalize itself. And I’d been my father’s first experiment in proving how brutality and hunger made the best soldier...”

Poe’s resentment tried to tell him how unfair it was that this was what Hux chose for a friend over him, when he had done so much for Hux. When he didn’t have to be here at all, listening, playing the unthanked confident. But he couldn’t help remembering that giant woman, terrifying in armour stripped from Palpatine’s shuttle, and breaking his brain over the thought of how kriffing sharp, how lost, how deadly-cute the pair of them must have been as teenagers together.

“I liked her,” Hux went on, whispering. “She liked me. But how could we trust one another, we who had been brought up to be deadly to anyone but ourselves?”

“I, um,” Poe’s lively sympathy made another bid for control over his heart. He was trying to sustain a resentment here, but honestly, why hadn’t someone rescued them then? Or earlier? “You made a pact of some sort?”

“Exactly,” Hux smiled. “We agreed to kill my father together. That way, if one of us encountered good fortune, the other had the means to force them to share it. And if one of us went down, they could choose to bring the other down with them. We placed our fate in each other’s hands.”

More and more, Hux’s innocence felt like a kind of madness, or his madness like a form of innocence. Poe tried to be horrified, repelled, as he had been on previous occasions, but he only felt a kind of dawning… dawning…

“Do you understand? It was blackmail that held us together. It was the possibility of destroying each other that enabled us to function as equals, to be friends. Without that pact, the first time she found me weak she would have destroyed me. The first time I found it convenient, I would have destroyed her. But with it? We triumphed only together.”

Oh Force! It was love. Something like it, anyway. That helpless feeling Kes had told him about, ‘When it’s three am and the wailing, snotty bundle of a baby’s still crying and you want to bash your head into the wall, and something stronger than you, inside you, still wants, more than life itself, for them to be happy.’ Love like an inescapable chain. And for this monster!

“You set up a means to blackmail me,” he clarified, the terrible realization settling into him like poison, “so we could be friends? So that you would know you could trust me?”

I don’t want… I don’t want to be friends with you.

He did though. He did, and what the kriff did that say about him? What did it say that he was touched?

“Yes. If it’s any comfort to you, you don’t have any choice now. We’re bound together whether you like it or not. You can tell your conscience that, if it despises me that much.”

Poe wasn’t sure what his face was doing, but it couldn’t be good if Hux was backpedaling like this. He wanted… Force help him, he wanted Hux to be happy. “Nah, it’s not that,” he said, though it was. It really was. “I can always use a friend. And I’m flattered you’d consider me...”

His hands were trembling where they rested on his knees. His fingers and feet had gone cold, and yet again he had to get out of here before he put his fist through something, or fainted or threw up. Love! Force, he knew he had poor taste but this was--

“And of course I had to get rid of the governor before he got rid of me.” Hux was still bent forward, his bright eyes fixed on Poe’s face with something that looked very much like concern.

“Yeah, of course. Kill two birds with one stone,” Poe laughed. He stood up, appalled at himself, and immediately a nervous guard took him by the elbow and began to pull him away.

“Don’t come next month,” Hux said, and there was something in his shuttered gaze that read like a warning.

“But… the one after?” Poe didn’t want to come. He didn’t. But the Force knew he couldn’t bear not to come.

“Please,” Hux whispered, as he too was dragged from the further door.

It echoed in Poe’s head all the way home.