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Fic: Life Sentence
Chapter 8
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 future historians are baffled
“You see how that looks, though,” Rey tried to pull Poe’s hand away from his communicator.
He had chat show hosts on hold who would be gleeful when they heard about this. The galaxy had loved him as a hero of the wars, and now, well, he just knew he could turn that goodwill into votes.
He wouldn’t trust himself so much this time. He’d find good people to advise him. He’d listen to experts. He wouldn’t give in to lobby groups or entrenched interests, because he was outside all that. He wasn’t a player of that game.
“Yeah,” he acknowledged, wheeling so he could take her by both arms and lift her off the ground, spinning her. “Yeah, yeah, I get it. You think ‘oh he went into Hux’s machine and now he’s trying to rule the galaxy. He’s been reprogrammed to bring the Empire back and I’m gonna need to stop him somehow…’” He set her back down and smiled, trying to make her see how very healed he felt. “It wasn’t like that. I met the Force. It--”
Blessed me. Anointed me. No, those words sounded too mad. “It helped me to see how I could help, and I’ve wanted that. I’ve wanted to pay back...”
The words ‘pay back’ gave him pause. They were an echo of Hux’s s
peech, the way Hux thought. A cold, deep qualm paused his heart in his chest… Was he thinking like Hux now? Was that proof he’d succumbed to propaganda he hadn’t even been aware of taking in?
Or was it possible that Hux too just wanted to do good with his life? Poe thought of the man spending weeks alone in the graveyard of his ship, struggling to give his people the last rights they deserved, and then of Hux resolving to do good to spite his evil past. He stamped the doubt down. What was so suspicious about wanting to do the right thing? Everyone wanted that, right?
“I didn’t feel the Force at work,” Rey said, doubtfully.
The pang of doubt again, quieter this time. Poe threw mental arms around the memory of his experience--that golden dragon, the thing which had loved and accepted him so much. He was not letting anything take that from him. “Would you though? I mean, if it was speaking to me. In private?”
She shook her head, her brows pinched. Some of the heaviness that he had shed seemed to have settled on her. “I suppose…” she admitted. “I wouldn’t. Not necessarily.”
She breathed out the long, releasing breath of meditation and squared her shoulders back to their usual straightness. That was acceptance, he knew, and he spun her again for the sheer glee of it.
“It’s okay. I get why you’re concerned, and you can keep an eye on me. In fact I want you to. Just give me a chance to prove myself first, okay? I promise you won’t regret it.”
~
A year after his first visit to the jail, when Poe visited Hux as he still regularly did, the guards guided him to a secure elevator instead of to the visiting room.
“What’s this?” he asked, his hand falling to his blaster. No one had treated him with anything other than adulation for the last six months, but old war habits died hard.
The guards weren’t the slab-faced brutes they once had been. The new governor must have taken on new staff, and these two were clean, approachable, with confident and forthright eyes.
“Nothing to worry about, Senator,” said the smaller of the two, whose name tag read ‘Ylk, human (F)’. “The governor heard you were interested in the issue of prison reform. He thought you would want to see what we’ve been doing with the roof. This kills two rathtars with one bolt.”
Ylk rubbed her hand across the stubble of her haircut, making a rasping noise. She was blushing, despite the cuffs at her belt, the night-stick in her hand, like any fan in the presence of her idol. “Can I just say I would totally have voted for you if I was on Yavin? I’ll vote for you for Chancellor when that comes up. It’s time we had real people in the Senate, not just queens and aristos and conglomerate sons.”
“Oh,” Poe took his hand off his weapon—maybe he was not being abducted at all—and smiled. He’d had a lot of this recently, and even Rey had conceded that maybe his subconscious had not been brainwashed at all, maybe it had just tapped into an idea whose time had come. “Oh yeah. That’s what I think too. All the old Houses have just got too comfortable with--”
But the door slid open on his anecdote, and the words died on his tongue.
Coruscant. On this upper level, it rose around him in cliffs of bronze. The sky was a far off trapezoid of forget-me-not blue, but the sun reflected from every skyscraper and bathed the prison’s roof in a burnished glow.
Poe would have expected the upper surface of the jail to be a wasteland of stained concrete and ventilation grills. Or maybe squares of exercise yards between electric fence. He would never have pictured the garden.
Mixed grasses and flowers had spread over the flat roof like a hay meadow. Prisoners in grey jumpsuits were digging beds of vegetables, pruning fruit bushes. On the farther edge of the roof a droid assembler was building a massive trench of bronze slabs, and sacks of soil lay ready to fill it. Closer to them another planter had already been filled with chestnut trees, and the dancing green flutter of their leaves made a breathtakingly vivid backdrop to the flame-crackle orange of Hux’s hair.
The sun had brought out a small spray of freckles across the bridge of the man’s nose, and his white skin had a faint toasted gold about it. His long, slender frame was relaxed, and he moved toward Poe with a new fluidity. The effect was of a man who was in his element. Coruscant’s brass cliffs and blue sky bent around him as though he stood in a throne room and the city-world was his court.
“Welcome to my garden, Poe.”
“This is your idea?” There were even bees, Poe saw, up here in the thin air of the most polluted, most urban world in the galaxy. They were foraging in the flowers with a gentle, musical drone.
“Among other things.” Hux came to stand at Poe’s side, and the guards fell in around him like a stormtrooper escort. “Let me give you the tour.”
Hux walked him through the strawberry beds where the scent of soil and the touch of the sun soothed a hunger in Poe that he had not been consciously aware of. “Rey told me there were gardens on your ships too,” he said.
Hux’s steel and fire beauty mixed with the beauty of the day and left him exalted and regretful. If only he had kept Hux out of prison, somehow, they could be closer now. They could be… he still balked at ‘lovers,’ but every time he did so, the jolt of impossibility grew less.
“Of course,” Hux replied. “Now I have access to the galactic feed, I was able to present the governor with evidence that exposure to nature would have a beneficial effect on the inmates’ temperament and behaviour. And indeed, it’s already led to fewer incidents. It’s paying for itself in terms of reduced medical bills and lower staff turnover.”
“I used to think you were a joke,” Poe admitted, his mouth running away with him. He was trying to say something nice, to express his sense of admiration, even wonder. But it wasn’t coming out right. “The general who managed to lose a dreadnaught to a single star fighter.”
Hux’s flexible mouth lifted at one side into a sneer, but he didn’t snap back with the quick defensiveness Poe had expected.
“You know? How could someone that all the reports called a genius be so...”
“Where are you going with this?”
Poe waved his hands, trying to convey that this was going to be praise. “But that was because they never trained you for that, did they? Your field was the human brain, and how to hack it. And now I’ve experienced that for myself I-- Kriff. Did I say how grateful I was? Did I say how you literally gave me back my soul? And- the people on the street are--”
Hux’s brittle stillness thawed, the sneer sliding into an almost coy smile. He was visibly trying to play it cool, and he still didn’t know how to handle praise gracefully, but at least he no longer seemed to automatically take it for an attack.
“The booths are proving popular?”
“I can’t manufacture them fast enough.”
Poe hadn’t meant to make a business out of easing the galaxy’s misery but when he mentioned the venture on Core Wide News the demand had been staggering. He had taken huge sums from some of the richest people in the galaxy to let them go first, and used the money to buy more booths, to set up clinics and recruit staff to run them. His aim was eventually to have enough to roll them out for free in the slums of the Rim, but he was not quite there yet.
“Right now, I’m paying myself a salary, running an election campaign and pumping a million credits a month into food banks throughout the galaxy.”
“Which is undoubtedly helping to buy you votes,” Hux lead his little entourage to an elevator on the far side of the roof and punched in a series of destinations. His whole demeanor struck Poe as odd, but he couldn’t immediately put his finger on why. Perhaps because it was more like a man in his own house than a prisoner at the end of a leash.
“I’m not doing it for that,” Poe said, a trifle defensively. A lot of interviewers had made that connection, and he had hoped to find… what? Greater understanding? Here?
“I know,” Hux agreed, opening the elevator door and ushering him through another level, bright and citrussy with the smell of new paint. Poe passed bemusedly through a library, a gym, and a large open area where a group of inmates seemed to be working on some kind of cooperative art project. None of it fitted the grim place of punishment he had been picturing in his guilty imaginings.
“You merely want to set the world aright, to reduce unnecessary suffering, and to give people tools to better their own lives.” Hux’s smile was half impish, half mired in layers of satisfied spite. “The thought of my years of study beneath my father’s hand being used for such softness! To bring such joy! I like to think my father would be rolling in his grave, although—in the end—there was not enough of him left for that.”
By now, Poe had heard enough about Brendol Hux to react to that with a snort of laughter. Hux’s strange, murderous idealism was beginning to feel familiar to him, even benign. Perhaps a worrying thought.
Hux stopped outside a door indistinguishable from any other. Ylk unlocked it and swung it open, and it took Poe a long moment to realize that this was the action of a jailer and not that of a lower ranked officer smoothing out her superior’s path.
Inside was a cell. For a moment, as he passed beneath the lintel, he felt the weight of all the floors above him, the crush of that heavy door and all the chains, bars, barriers and electric fences between himself and freedom. The thought of lying in the narrow cot with the door locked by someone else’s hand—dependant on their mercy for whether he ever saw the sun again—made his breath come short. His fists clenched as he felt again the panic he had felt when he had been clamped to the Finalizer’s torture table.
But then something went, “Mrow.” A patch of shadow at the end of the bed opened golden eyes, pushed itself up on scaly, chicken feet, and stalked toward him over the scratchy grey blanket with tail and long ears held high. He gaped at its toothy grin, upended again. “Is that a loth-cat?”
“Augusta is a ‘therapy animal,’” Hux swept the cat up into obviously experienced arms. It nuzzled its round bullet head ecstatically under his chin. He managed to give the words ‘therapy animal’ verbal quotation marks even as Ylk was enthusiastically nodding along.
“It was felt that giving me something to ‘bond with’ might teach me empathy. And of course the threat to take her away gives them something else with which to control me. Not that I need to be controlled. I am an exemplary inmate.”
“What happened to your protector?” Poe found himself asking. The little room was so sparse and clean, so austere and so obviously occupied by only one person, he couldn’t ever imagine another body in here. He’d rather bite off his own arm than imagine it, in fact.
“Oh,” Hux waved a hand dismissively. “He was a ringleader in the riots, you know. A bad influence. They transferred him elsewhere.” The little raise of lips was as smug as Augusta’s grin. “I no longer had any need for him anyway. No one who knows what’s good for them would think of hurting me now.”
A savage satisfaction battled with Poe’s fear that Hux was using him in exactly the same way. But no. The protector had clearly been given no blackmail material in return, had been used and discarded without any assurance of mutual destruction. Funny, how Poe clung to that now, when he had not even recognized it as a gesture of affection at the time.
Cheerless, depressing. Not a lot worse than Poe had had on deployment with the Resistance, but then that had been war.
There was so much Poe wanted to say: I’m glad you’re alright. I’m sorry you had to fight to be treated humanely even here, in the heart of what I thought was civilization. You shouldn’t have had to prostitute yourself just to get to a place where you were safe.
He smoothed the single blanket and almost blurted “Maybe I could stay--?” But Ylk and her partner, Ainto, were so very right there that he couldn’t get it out.
“Good,” he managed, and then, nodding at the desk, “and you’re keeping busy?”
Standing over him, one hand wrapped around Augusta’s taloned front legs and the other supporting her back—she was belly up like a snoozing baby—Hux was watching him with something that might almost have been tenderness, as though he too had words that he might have spoken. For a moment the silence between them was as charged, as eloquent and as wordless as Poe’s vision of the Force.
And then Hux tipped his chin up, proud. “Human reprogramming was my father’s area of expertise. Though I was required to become adept in it, my own preference is for the harder sciences.”
He dumped Augusta in Poe’s lap, where her hard, twiggy feet wrapped like skeletal fingers around his thighs. Poe looked down into the creature’s ugly-cute face in shock and it stretched up to lick his nose with a hot tongue.
“I am in correspondence with several universities regarding my research into quintessance hypermatter theory,” Hux was saying, grabbing for a sheaf of incomprehensible maths. “I should be able to provide you with a device to produce inexhaustible power within six to eight months. And that’s only the beginning of the applications I can think of.”
He snatched the papers back out of Poe’s hands, with a stern air. “Now that you have capital, I expect this invention to be deployed to benefit the Rim first. The Core already hogs ninety five percent of the galaxy’s energy. There is no need for it to have more until everyone else has caught up.”
Poe’s melancholy dissolved around him. He would dream of the two of them being together some other time. Perhaps later tonight, when he was in bed and they could talk on the com, hushed and private. But for now? Hux was planning to destroy the energy monopoly the Core held over the undeveloped systems. Fuel lobbies would be foaming at the mouth. If Poe could get this prototype developed and distributed, he could save billions—maybe more people than Hux had killed—restore worlds, give the Republic a chance to be the true place of equality and plenty that it had only dreamed of being.
Awe made the little room glow around him. “I guess I didn’t used to believe that you wanted it too.” he whispered. “To make the world right, I mean. Always thought you wanted power only for your own sake, even though you said—”
“And now you do believe it?”
“Yeah,” Poe conceded, Augusta beginning to purr on his knee. The shades of the Hosnian system tried to pull the words out of his mouth but he wouldn’t let them. “I know it makes no sense to say this, but I think you’re a good man, Armitage Hux. Terrifyingly good. And I wish I could get you out of here, but—”
“No need.” Hux brushed this off again, as though freedom was a triviality to him. “I told you, I am accustomed to this. In fact, it is a better life than I have ever had. No Force users with their boot on my neck. No sadistic superiors. I have useful work to do and resources to complete it with. I was brought up in the military, on a spaceship, Poe. I couldn’t go outside there either. This feels like home.”
He reached down and took one of Poe’s hands between his, and for a moment Poe thought he saw the man Hux might have been before the brainwashers made a murder weapon out of him. One capable even of love. “And I have a friend.”
“Yeah,” Poe choked out, his mouth full of things that could not be said. We’re going to save more people than we ever destroyed. And I’m going to save you too, when I’m Chancellor. Everything’s going to work out for us then. “You do have a friend. Of course you do. Let’s fix it all together.”
~
The golden period of post-war prosperity quickly became a contentious issue once Chancellor Dameron’s death allowed Republic historians access to his private papers .–“They Changed Our Minds: A Treatise on Brainwashing, Social control and Social Reorganization in Early Final Era Politics,” Dr Waru Plashun, RFiH, university of Corellia, 2380FE
One is tempted to call Dameron the greatest chancellor in history for his hand in ushering in an unprecedented era of galactic peace and happiness. His campaigns of rebuilding in the Outer Rim, his reforms against slavery, drug cartels and homelessness, and the quite astonishing explosion of artistic and scientific creativity at all levels of society during his term are well known, and during his lifetime his popularity only continued to grow.
At the same time one is forced to concede that many of the man’s ideas and successes depended on the shadowy influence of the galaxy’s most infamous war criminal, one of the Imperial remnant charged with Palpatine’s final plans. This inevitably alters our interpretations of his motives and even his results.
How much of the apparent good Dameron did was simply evil in disguise? Would any of us have undergone his ‘New Hope’ treatments if we had known they were the brainchild of Starkiller? And having undergone them, can we trust our opinions on any issue thereafter? Did the First Order in actuality win through stealth the very war they spectacularly lost by force?
There are those who say it doesn’t matter, and the good that Dameron and Hux did together should be celebrated for its own sake. And there are those who say good cannot come from an evil root, so everything the Starkiller touched should be torn down on principle, and burned in purifying fire.
History will remember them both, that much is certain, but as what? Visionary or dupe? A hopeful exemplar of the possibility of redemption, or a cautionary tale about the plausibility of evil? That remains to be seen.
