Fic: Life Sentence, Chapter 5

[galadhir]

Fic: Life Sentence
Chapter 5
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 is more than a match for some provincial prison governor.

He cancelled all his talk-show requests, his prize-givings and guest appearances, and went home to Yavin 4 to slob about his father’s house and try to get his head around his own feelings.

 

“You know, you could be doing more with your life,” Kes told him, after the third week in which he had crawled from his bed at noon only to doze on the sofa all afternoon, watching Clone War movies. “I don’t want to get on your case, because yeah, you deserve some down-time, but I’m not sure how much good it’s doing you. Are you okay?”

Am I? Poe wondered. Am I okay? I’ve somehow ended up emotionally entangled with a mass murderer who’s going to be in prison for the rest of my life—and his own. How did this happen? Me! Famous happy-go-lucky me?

“I don’t know, dad.” He heaved a deep sigh. “I don’t feel so hot, to be honest. Am I losing it? Did I never really have it in the first place? I’ve been so focussed on winning the war that—what the kriff do I do now? I’m revving my engines but I’ve got nowhere to go.”

“I hear you there,” Kes paused in the doorway with a washing basket full of clothes propped on his hip. “I remember how hard it was when I came home from war. Found out that peace was… kind of boring by comparison. Come and help me hang this stuff up. A bit of sun and wind will blow the cobwebs out.”

“It’s not that,” Poe said again, as though he could define the shape of all his problems only by taking away everything that they were not. “I’m not bored. It’s just that Hux was right, you know? The Outer Rim is full of hell-worlds, and the politicians don’t give a damn, and I can see another generation of the First Order coming out of there, and my kids having to fight them, and for what? Like maybe once in this karking cycle we could try something new. We could try helping them. Run food instead of drugs, you know? Why is the galaxy so karked up that we can’t just help each other?”

“That’s a whole bundle of grief,” Kes said gently, abandoning his basket by the door, and coming in to settle at Poe’s feet, facing the news channel that was broadcasting its flickering colours on the whitewashed wall. “You do know it’s not up to you to single-handedly fix everything in the galaxy, don’t you? You’ve already done more than your bit.”

“It is up to me,” Poe insisted, bowing his head into his hands. Because the whole galaxy thinks I’m a hero. And I’ve got to somehow make up for caring about one of the worst men in history. I’ve got to balance that, pay back good for that evil.
The weight of a billion stars landed on his back and crushed him. The Hosnian system’s dead were somehow on his conscience too now. They were watching him. They wanted him to make their sacrifice worthwhile. The enormity of it was back-breaking. “And I’m so tired. I’m so tired, dad. I don’t know what to do.”

He wished he could tell his father that the only man who made him still feel alive was behind bars, was beyond his reach forever. But then he would have to confess who that was, and his father would never look at him the same, just as he should not be able to look himself in the eye without shame ever again.

Kes’s hand landed on his socked foot, squeezing reassuringly. “You don’t have to do anything, son. Maybe see the doctor. You really don’t sound like yourself. You know, I’ve been hearing,” he nodded to the wall, where ‘Core Worlds News’ was running down the evening’s headlines, “that there’s an epidemic of mental health problems on most all the civilized worlds. So much fighting, so much war, and for what?”

Kes meant it for reassurance, Poe knew, for an affirmation that Poe was not alone in being unable to find his way through the darkness that had slowly seeped into him since Exegol. But he was. He was as alone as Hux had been when Poe found him, crouched in ashes, surrounded by the broken shell of his ship, and lit only by the furnace in which he was burning the bodies of his comrades.

At the end of one universe, and no idea what shape to make the next.


“The insurrection at Coruscant High Security Correctional continues tonight,” said the news, the name of the prison snapping his gaze back toward the screen. “Inmates have taken over ninety percent of the facility. Reports confirm that the governor and his staff are barricaded in the administration block while prisoners’ representatives negotiate for improved conditions. This is the second disturbance in as many months at this facility, and experts are concerned that it indicates a need for a fundamental shift in approach.”

“It has been proved, over and over again, that people become what they are expected to become,” said a talking head, described as ‘Professor Angevyn S!Ko of Prospects U.’ “Retribution has an enduring appeal to the human psyche, but is in fact counterproductive if what one wishes is to turn an individual back from their evil ways. I’m therefore recommending that a softer approach is tried in future, or this kind of upheaval is bound to escalate.”

“And yet they didn’t have any problems until three months ago,” Kes noted, switching the program off with a disgusted gesture.
The weight on Poe didn’t exactly lift, but it shifted into a darkly humourous mode. “They had the problems, dad. Didn’t you hear about the last governor killing off inmates for entertainment? They just didn’t have anyone with the balls to stand up and make it stop, until now.”

And now I will bet you a million credits that this is Armitage Hux’s work. Someone they can’t shut up and they can’t intimidate. Someone who talks a big talk about stepping up for the underdog, and amazingly, who actually follows through.
But that was another thought he couldn’t share without his dad thinking he’d gone dangerously insane.

Instead, he took his mom’s com-pad—the one they kept for anyone to use in an emergency—and lay on his bunk with it until night grew thick and silent around him, his father’s snoring like engine noise down the corridor.

Shouldn’t be doing this. But Sith-hells, wasn’t that the story of his life? He turned sideways, trapping the little device between him and the wall, muffling its light with blankets, and keyed the code for the com he had leant to Hux. It would be okay, wouldn’t it? In an insurrection there wouldn’t be guards around to be alerted, and kriff, if Hux had managed to keep their communications secret from Kylo Ren, he would surely manage it from a few puffed-up thugs.

Still, he shouldn’t use Hux’s name in case the comm fell into enemy hands.

“Hey, Monster,” he wrote, hoping the tone would come across as affectionate. “Are you there?”
The thought of a long wait, growing itchily certain of abandonment, of being unwanted, would grow on him as he lay alone long into the night, and then he would certainly--

“Ah, Scum, is that you?”

Poe took fistfuls of blanket, the best he could do for a hug, and tried not to think how pathetic it was that Hux was the one he could talk to, just as he had talked to his First Order spy, through long anxious nights before they knew one another’s names.
“You have the most flattering pet names,” he typed, almost managing to smile for the familiarity of this, the days when he had appreciated the obsidian sharp voice in the night before he’d ever known who it belonged to. “Really makes me feel wanted.”

“I am a little busy at the moment, but perhaps you can advise me. Burn the governor out or let him leave in disgrace? What do you think will buy me the best outcome long term?”

That relish of horror still made him want to laugh. “Bet your ‘protector’ is shitting himself over all of this,” he said, without the jealousy that he would have expected, because of the two of them he wasn’t the one being used.

“Nonsense. He’s positive it’s his own idea,” the words came back, painting the insides of Poe’s bedsheets with gold. “Does it bother you? I am now in a position to kill him, if you would prefer it.”

“Just my luck I fall for someone whose love language is murder,” Poe typed. But once they were outside his head, the words looked like a can of worms he didn’t dare uncap. He swiped them away without sending. “Nah,” he sent instead. “One more death on my conscience and I won’t be able to get out of bed at all. Besides, the news is saying it’s time for a gentler approach. You don’t want to jeopardise that with some kind of bloodbath.”

“Excellent advice.”

Poe didn’t know what the cells were like, but his imagination filled in a thin bunk, a grey durasteel wall, and Hux’s small smile like an ember beneath the conflagration of his hair. He wished he had had the courage to say something tender, but he didn’t have the strength, right now, for whatever mess of crossed wires and accusations might follow.

“Yeah, well. First good idea this century. Don’t get used to it.”

There was a long pause, everything around him so quiet he imagined he could hear the slow tide of Hux’s breath all those light-years away.

“You haven’t been as obnoxiously chipper of late.” If typed words could feel hushed, these did—tentative, even exploratory. “Is everything well there in the land of the scum?”

First his dad, now Hux. Poe guessed there wasn’t any point in playing coy about it. “Oh, I’m fine. Just depressed. Purpose of my life behind me, not sure what to do with the rest. You know.”

“Indeed I do,” the golden letters agreed, comforting in their very bleakness. “And yet, we persist. Come and see me, as soon as they let you. I may have something for that.”