estrellamientos

[estrellamientos]

About the Present Destruction of the Person // opening // quick let’s go back to like 23 ABY for a sec

The very first time, after everything ends, Snoke waits for him flanked by the only two Knights he has.

And it is only for him, Ren knows. He could be here alone and it would be the same. He is grateful, though, not to be, but he tries not to consider it such; there are issues with the idea of gratitude to anyone beyond Snoke himself, however well-intended.

Snoke is flanked by the only two Knights he has: one obviously nothing like human, a willowy helmeted construct easily mistaken for a droid, the other a pale near-human sketched into the red darkness in silver grays and what feels like a lifetime’s worth of sleepless nights and unmitigated hate. Ben Solo would’ve been afraid of that fixed stare, maybe. It never leaves him.

Ren leads the other six into the huge chamber with caution but with an even step. They are singed and at least a bit battered, all, and Ren has been leading them since—

He has been leading them.

It let the others sleep on the way here, such as they could, and they needed it. When he could spare the effort Ren tried even to help, and maybe he managed it: certainly no one woke up screaming, and he felt the want to. Ren hasn’t slept and hasn’t stopped, but it’s not his place to, and he can manage. He brought them here unerring with his master’s help, Snoke’s will suffusing him when Ren alone would’ve courted nonexistence. Even if Ren hadn’t been alone in knowing the way it should’ve fallen to him to be their guide. He is their leader and will never be able to be anything else, and even alone Ren has the hands of a Solo and a Skywalker: he is an excellent pilot.

The nation-ship is so large. Something in Ren aches to pay it its due, but he can’t spare, right now, what the life and thought and care thrumming ceaselessly off the black walls deserves from him. He craves to. He was trapped inside Luke’s succession of impossible migratory lonelinesses for so *long*, and even aside from that the jagged clamor of lives he’s known before now always bled out into atmosphere. Sentience’s mark on *Supremacy* is shockingly pure and unmitigated, and he still can’t really spare it mind.

What he can do and what he does is walk. He keeps his face something like composed if graded on a curve, aware though he always is that no one ever will. If he is steady and he is sure then that is more than he could ever give the others by turning, by some attempt at help, so he doesn’t react when he feels Abi stumble behind him.

Zyel had healed some of them, as much as he could and then slightly more, until Ren made him stop, but even choosing to run up debt there’s only so much he could give. And Ren’s fairly sure Zyel played favorites. For Abi to be left to deal with the knife in his calf alone, given that, really isn’t much, given Abi, and Ren can live with that he feels it.

He feels the others’ shock as well, and doesn’t let it stop him. Hopes in Snoke’s eyes that will be enough. They’ll get used to him, Ren is sure, it will be *fine*.

[estrellamientos]

About the Present Destruction, chapter three: callout post edition

The last body is counted for the last time in the middle of the standard night.

Agent Major Kara Abner is, strictly speaking, not entitled to this information, not while it's still at secret clearance. Not before the count has been verified. The people entitled to verify it are off shift to a man and otherwise, though, a casualty of the fact that *the* casualties aren't the highest priority.

They have considered disapproving of this, but it's a worthwhile decision. They would choose no different. The dead aren't in a position to care and the First Order stays running itself ragged. It shouldn't have to; as the list they're now studying confirms, the losses were great and gutting but nowhere near incapacitating. Given the authority—a kind they've spent their life avoiding the specter of and one that would never be theirs, but in theory, given the authority—Kara Abner would have focused on triage and let the galaxy burn. It could be happy to see them on its own time. Abner’s worked controlling far worse and more avoidable damage under the auspices of the Security Bureau and they know people. The resentment of a delay in rescue is almost always wiped wholly away by the rendering of aid itself.

Kara Abner, if they ran the Order, would not have taken a shot through the living gut of them and opted to push through it and push harder. They're a senior officer, if barely, and barely on purpose. They know better than to opt for running on fumes when given an alternative.

They've allowed themself several indulgences, tonight, beyond merely staying up to watch the rendered verdict be unchanged from the last half-dozen automated double-checks. (It pays to be careful when handling that many bodies, even in the abstract. They were each human. It pays to remember. The First Order has no right to do anything less.) So they sit scowling in the dark and keep their hands to themself instead of reaching out, drumming fingers on the crown of a helmet they've not taken out of its last hasty swaddling in five years.

Kara Abner has learned caution over time and models it as an exemplar when it's asked of them.

Mecit Ren, though—

Mecit could always see the merits of walking straight into oncoming fire. They were just as happy to model that too: for a dare, for a bet, for the possibility of a smile.

Abner puts their helmet away; they do not hide it. They put their gloves back on, the scabs mapping their knuckles pulling with habitual unpleasantness on the scar tissue until they're settled. Then what isn't a dress uniform really but *feels* like it, the careful sharpness and bright teal of forcing themself presentable enough to make them briefly regret having come.

They put this effort into winding their way into the flagship for a reason and they will not waste it now by leaving. They have work to do. The work is more important than petty aesthetic discomfort with the transitive states of being what is necessary.

They check the deaths again. Nothing has changed.

There is some satisfaction in being, technically, the first to know.

Kara Abner has no reason to know where exactly the Supreme Leader is. What they do have, technically, is the ability to find out, assuming they theoretically put aside all orders; this is something Mecit is good at beyond skill worth mentioning, like breathing absent a Master’s commentary on the subject.

And Ren owes them. Ren *owes* them. At least he owes them this.

Mecit has news for him, almost like a gift.

It's dark, darker; Mecit walks too loudly through the empty corridors, because they can, and the emptiness outside is as reliable as ever and unchanged. It's enough to make them regret having spent so long planetside, more than enough, but the Order needed them there. And ships mean people looking at them and looking *to* them, where Mecit much prefers looking *at*; a capital ship doesn't sleep, but ship’s night is still quieter and kinder to their own tastes. The void of space is stable and black and unchanging but it touches them with more shadow to it than could be earned simply by Kara Abner’s having cleaved to living earth for a bit too long. They're sure they'd notice this even without Altan having first drawn their attention, but with that the awareness goes from noticeable to overwhelmingly factual.

It makes it easy to find Kylo Ren. This is new, and unexpected, enough to make an eddy of hope curl through them quickly spine to crown. Mecit didn't need to break clearance for that after all, it turns out, when following the gentle weightless orbit of dark-beyond-dark brings them to him without thought.

This wouldn't have happened before; they'll have to remember to tell Altan, assuming they don't acquire more than enough else to tell her first.

He is—for all that—still very much *Ren* with it: specifically, inexplicably, he's recognizable before the uniform or the singular now-bare face by that Mecit finds Kylo Ren with a nation at his disposal sitting in a gawky crumpled blotch of shadow on a hallway floor.

This is the kind of thing they only expected him to grow belatedly out of, they suppose, insofar as they forgot who he is, insofar as they’d tried to. Wrong and obtrusive choices without malice on what to do with his body are just what Ren *does*. Mecit’s reaction to this seizes their throat mercilessly, for all that they aren't thinking about how this is for the third of a meter he has over them his saving grace and always has been, but that's fine; they hadn't planned to announce themself anyway.

Though perhaps—perhaps, they think, significantly past too late, when they're close enough to trip past his apparent distraction and suddenly instead of an overgrown sprawl of a man he's a sharp dark wave of nothing but the concentrated controlled precursor to violence coming to face them in an instant��they should have done so.

He doesn't draw his sword but he wouldn’t have needed to a decade ago. Ren is a weapon unto himself and nothing less.

Currently, Ren is a weapon fixed on them.

For one long, lurching moment, Mecit wonders if they’ve made a mistake. Ren wouldn’t hurt them, even now: that is still certain. His *recognition* is not.

Tricks of the mind are tricks of the Light. Does it matter that Ren was always best at them, now, when it comes to what’s left in his repertoire?

Though Altan always managed… whatever Altan managed. That’s how Mecit knows to be concerned in the first place. So surely if anyone could force it to an extreme it would be Ren, it always is.

Then Ren says, a threat only by dint of its source, “Agent…?”

“If you don’t recognize me you can have the name back, Ren,” Mecit says coolly, a split-second decision among a thousand ways to play this. And they choose recklessly, too. But either this works or it doesn’t.

The thought is grimmer than they’d like. But Ren’s face folds, furrows, and then turns alight. “Mecit,” he says, “Mecit, what the fuck.”

“Great to see you too, fearless leader,” they answer tonelessly.

“Supreme Leader,” Ren says.

“Right.” They think for a moment—they make a show of it, even—before setting themself on the floor at his side. And Ren takes the hint and sits back down, finally, from how he’d frozen on the moment of recognition, the long strange lines of him immediately making what space Mecit does take up seem both moderate and mature by comparison. This bodes well, really. “Well done.”

“What do you want,” he says. Ren’s tone’s flatter than theirs is, and he wears it nowhere near as well.

“Hell of a way to talk to your loyal Knight,” Mecit responds, pulling their legs in to cross; their uniform complains at it slightly. It’s weird, really, to wear a uniform that does, after so long in the field and otherwise in settings where they could leave the field uniform on. But they concede: flagship, fine, ship uniform it is, and watching everyone react to them like an officer is not unenjoyable; nor perhaps is it dissimilar to how they expect the Order’s rank and file would respond to Mecit under color of office as a Knight.

If they could resume it. Presumably they would.

They meant the offer of their name, but by way of not wanting to have Ren take them up on it. It’s not something he would’ve done, before, but…

“Loyalty, right,” Ren says, “That’s why I haven’t seen you in half a decade?”

“Yes,” Mecit says, chin tipped up, and dares him silently to follow that thread. It’s not that they’re spoiling for a fight, in that a fight would be a suboptimal outcome, but—it’s Ren, and the chaos hasn’t even approached redeeming itself, and they hate this, and they’re spoiling for a fight, even one they’d lose.

Especially that, maybe. Make Ren prove himself instead of taking Altan’s guess and their own vague necessity-born hope and have it done with.

Not in a public hallway, though, and not in this uniform.

At any rate, Ren doesn’t take the bait. Mecit’s not entirely sure he so much as saw it go by, for all that they should wait a little longer before getting back in the habit of underestimating him. He says, “Mecit, what do you want?”

“Death,” Mecit says. They switch legs.

“I do not have the resources to spare for capital punishment right now,” Ren says, half a groan; he sounds disgusted on levels such that they refract on each other. By having to think in such terms about the situation, presumably, on top of the situation itself. Ren isn't the type. Mecit wonders who has managed to teach him—Mecit wonders who tried. “Not even on request.”

“Not like that, genius,” Mecit says, but lightest they’ve been yet, not levied by anything like pride. It’s needed. “As in we’ve finished accounting for the deaths. Finally.”

Ren turns to them for speaking purposes at last, and he’s gotten better, it turns out, at managing his perpetual open wound of a face, but only in a sense equivalent to the closed scar that spans it. In other words, he’s better by Ren standards and would be wholly absurd on anyone else. “Why are you the first person I’m hearing this from,” he asks, back to not bothering to inflect questions—Supreme Leader’s prerogative, maybe, Mecit can imagine much worse conversational choices under such a label—and then, without waiting, “Why are you telling me this.”

“Because presumably you have no way of being contacted on your person, given that you’d also decided to set up camp in a corridor and count on the majority of the crew being asleep despite the fact that capital ships as a whole don’t or we die and you’ve been making actual considerations of image because someone presumably broke it to you that your dignity is no longer just your own, and the time elapsed since the count finished is about as long as it took me to leave and find you.” They pause. “Add thirty seconds or so.”

“Well done,” Ren says. Mecit wouldn’t insult him by having wanted it to be anything but sarcastic, anyway. “My second question stands.”

“Baris is dead,” Mecit says.

It annoys them unduly that Ren doesn’t know. Mecit wouldn’t have known either but—that’s Mecit. Altan could tell *something* was missing; Mecit took weeks upon weeks to allow the data to be collated, even as the Order’s exhaustive databases worked at speed. (The vacuum of space and the frequency of atomizing immolation are mercies; otherwise accounting for the dead easily takes long enough that awaiting their burial along with it would be rank obscenity.)

Ren is supposed to be more than they are, eight times over. He should’ve been able to tell. Baris turned his back on everyone, Mecit turned their back on Ren, but Ren’s still *Ren*, he should’ve been more than that.

Whether or not it was possible. It’s his place to make it possible. That’s what Ren’s supposed to be doing with himself. He is *gifted*, it is his right.

(`I’m seeing two deaths and something else,` Altan had said, after she’d finally gotten a clear read on it, and Mecit hadn’t bothered with bacta so when their knuckles stop itching at them it will be for having scarred. They will have good company, Mecit and the tissue both, and can save the idea of reassurance, like that of healing, for things not inevitable, for things worth the noticing.)

It takes him a long time to summon a response, but at least Ren takes that opportunity to leave aside the most base form of incredulity; it’s scrawled into his face, Mecit had expected him to voice it. Instead he says, “How do you know?”

“Went down on the *Harbinger*,” Mecit says. “It just took a long time to be sure.” Longer to figure out what he’d disguised himself as. Ren doesn’t need to know that. They did the work in parallel, anyway; that’s the part Mecit *was* good for.

“Oh.”

“Hayri—” Speaking of names. Mecit has never been a saint. Zyel can get fucked. Maybe he had a reason worth something but he can still get fucked. Metaphorically, anyway—it’s beyond him now, obviously, nothing could possibly fall upon him worse than already has. “Hayri was on *Hosnian*, by the way. Don’t ask me why.”

“How do you know that?” Ren asks quietly. But he doesn’t even doubt them. He turns toward the wall, yes, but evinces no explicit doubt.

“How do you think?”

He lets that go. Mecit wonders therefore if he’s wrong. Ren says instead, “What about everyone else?”

Mecit takes advantage of Ren looking away to chew their lips and swallow. There’s the part they’ve braced themself against—all of this—and then there’s what they want to say. “Why do you think you deserve to know?”

Ren’s face twitches. “I don’t know, Kara, how’s my name going for you?”

That *stings*.

Mecit expected it, or at least didn’t not expect it, but it stings. Having been offered this offense Mecit takes it, and it gives them pause.

Good. They were getting comfortable.

They switch legs again. “Maybe you need to earn it.”

“Maybe you forget yourself,” Ren says, low and even. Which answers the question of whether he can be too drained to be violent, but that question has never needed validation. “Mecit Ren can die at will whenever they feel like it and I’ll be Kara Abner’s Supreme Leader all the same.”

“So you are aware of it,” Mecit says. They make it light, they make it bright, they are ultimately surprised that Ren doesn’t show his teeth in response. “Good. What are you going to do about it?”

“Aside from my job? Maybe I’ll mourn,” Ren says.

“Crass.” Mecit considers slapping him, actually, but they’re habitually reckless, not stupid. The Knights have someone else for that, anyway. “Crass and wasteful.”

“It was a joke,” Ren mutters.

“Bad joke.”

“I got the mourning over with when you all left. I don’t need redundancy.”

That does actually disarm them for a moment. Mecit hadn’t thought of how Ren would’ve—or they did, rather. They were quite sure they knew how Ren had taken it all. He seemed so hollowed out by his paradoxes and full of Snoke and thoroughly taken in all things that they’d been sure they knew how much nothing there was left in him for anyone else.

Mecit’s used to being wrong, though. They’re a professional.

“All right,” they say smoothly. “Then get to leading.”

“Do you think I need you to tell me that, Mecit,” Ren says, and the danger’s back and bright and clear. Mecit considers being afraid as well as wrong, but it seems counterintuitive when this is so easily made promising.

“I hope I don’t,” Mecit says. “What are you going to do, Ren?”

“You’ll know when you have orders, Mecit,” Ren says, with the air of a man who is not saying something else.

He pushes off from the floor before they can react. They suppress the instinct to scramble to their feet after him, barely; it’s less dignified even than staring up at him, though that’s a near thing.

This option, at least, isn’t far from the norm. Ren’s huge but Mecit’s used to this from everyone. They wear it well by now.

Height is not the hard part; rather it's the realization that following Ren was something they would've had to try to unlearn. Freezing against it takes effort, and hasty misuse of barely-there fear.

“You’re dismissed,” Ren says, pointedly, but he’s the one who leaves.

Mecit expects he’s aware of the irony there, but maybe they’ll tell him later anyway. If he can pull this off.

They take a moment to breathe, letting go of the brashness, looking for something useful again.

That was fine. It was fine. It could have been much worse.

Ren also could have been much sharper, when as it is he missed question upon question, but he’ll take what’s coming to him. He doesn’t get a choice about it.

Mecit doesn’t enjoy determining what story they’re going to tell about this, but they have the advantage of long habit. It’s not that different from a normal report. Mecit talks back to Intelligence, they get to make coherency and plot out of scattered bursts of insight and aggression; they talk back to Altan, a custom easily fallen into even after their long mutual silence, they don’t even have to lie much.

It’s ultimately unsurprising that this makes it harder, really. But at least it’s novel.

Kara Abner isn’t a loyalty officer, but that’s more to do with the fact that the First Order does not quite stoop to having them; certainly they have all helps and advantages their Imperial counterparts would be afforded, even without their own particular angle on things. They don’t command the Security Bureau, or even the little fiefdom of Intelligence they call home, by any means. They serve.

This is by choice, and with few downsides. It more than affords them, right now, the ability to have conversations that should by rights be both logistically impossible and formally illegal, and not just ones with Ren.

They pull their datapad out of their jacket, only fumbling a little—strange, all things considered, how much harder the uniform that is their right is to adjust to than any ordinary disguise—and set in to imitate Ren as far as entitlement to the assumption of empty corridors goes. Mecit can type while they walk. It’ll be fine.

`>He knows,` they say, after some consideration.

Vespera—Mecit does not like this, but that has no bearing on whether they know it—deals with the First Order, and the cartels, and her fellow independent operators, and even, on the rare occasions they can afford her, the Resistance itself. Or the Rebellion, or whatever they’ve decided they want to be called before they all die now. At any rate: presumably cryptic two-word messages like that are the kind of thing Vespera deals with a lot.

`>Do what you want,` Mecit adds, when she doesn’t respond immediately; presumably also that’s something a person like Vespera is told much less. Certainly Mecit isn’t, and they’re not dissimilar. (Maybe she’ll enjoy it.)

It’s an excuse to stop talking, which is really chief if not alone among Mecit’s priorities right now. They’re embarrassingly out of practice, for all that conversation is the soul of their work. Because of it.

No matter. They’ll deal with it as they go. Altan can take things from here. It's not like Mecit envies her the process ahead, or they'd have taken it on themself.

It's Altan, admittedly, but who knows; maybe she's changed. Anything's possible. She might get a move on before the end of the year.

Mecit’s part is done, and that's what really matters. At least tonight. They can give her the details—and humor the near-real humming crackle almost at the edges of their skin that seems only emboldened by this brush with the new and unchanged Ren, clinging acute and willing like has never been Mecit’s prerogative—and deal with the last missing piece that does have anything to do with them—and do their actual job before someone in white decides to have opinions—

They can do that tomorrow.

[estrellamientos]

the end of An Idea So Universally Terrible also exists

spoiler it’s Dark meditation but done better this time

Ren breathes in, a reflex, a sudden static shock, and even as he does the universe around him turns very still.

The Supreme Leader is *dead*. The Supreme Leader is dead and Snoke was the one who pushed him toward this balance he can’t control and can’t sustain, his only and impossible goal. Snoke was the only one. Snoke through whom Ren knew that nothing else would suffice despite that no one had ever done the like and few seemed to desire it. Snoke whose singlehanded overriding overruling nurture should outweigh history and evidence and nature and every desire Ren stifled half-formed and the few he didn’t manage to do that with.

Snoke whose reasons to hurt him seemed sound—whose reasons had to be—only when he struck Ren and shocked him and burned him it felt more like the Light than anything otherwise physical had ever managed before or since.

Snoke who in the end even Luke Skywalker has exceeded: who couldn’t even tell he was about to die. Snoke who welcomed his death open-handed because he couldn’t even discern Ren’s enmities enough to see himself.

And that’s not *hard*.

Ren breathes. He feels his eyelids flicker slightly but they don’t open, not yet. He would have no control, probably, either way, and when his back begins to straighten he regards this at most with vague interest. To his awareness of the scurrying lives around him he grants not even that, nor gratitude when it begins to fade: one does not practice gratitude for the obvious and the natural. At most one may instead practice resentment, for the time before when there is a time before, when they’re withheld.

Ren breathes, and he sits up, fluid and neat. His spine is very straight, for no one’s benefit. (Perhaps for his own.)

No undeserved gratitude, and no fear, not of things that are right, not even of suffering if it’s been earned. Ren knows this, knows it as one of the few things he’s always known, the bare fraction of himself he even thinks—he’ll never know, but he thinks anyway; and now no one, for better or for worse and for both, can stop him—one of the few parts of himself he still thinks would be present even if Snoke never had been.

He’d reconciled it, before, when merely anticipating almost any interaction with his master brought tears and tremors worse even than Luke ever could and the best Ren could do was get them out of the way and hope Snoke couldn’t tell and know he always would, that his own assessments of what he deserved were just short-sightedly skewed in his own self-serving favor. If the Supreme Leader knew and saw all he should see and know, what Ren was sure of—his wisdom and his base of reference, in this, besides, with knowledge of Ren longer than Ren’s own memory and more unerring—surely it just fell to Ren to understand, the fear another of those uncountable proofs of the failures he was to suffer for in the first place.

But the thing about perfect consistency is that it takes no skill to guess. It doesn’t even take luck. It barely takes a mind.

Snoke, meanwhile, couldn’t tell that Ren hated him.

Of course Ren was hiding it, even from himself, but it was always his master’s place to know Ren *better* than he knew himself, surely, as surely as Snoke had it easier than every other master twice over: first his running head start, and then the chance that granted him to shape Ren accordingly besides. It’s not as if Snoke didn’t exploit both in every way that occurred to him.

And he’s dead. Still. He’s dead, and Ren’s alive, and the screaming terror hasn’t *left* Ren, not even nearly, but it’s a false positive—it’s a lie.

By definition.

For the rest of his life.

So put aside Snoke’s last mistake—Ren does, with effort, and though the effort is great it is curiously distant, not by way of simplicity or of ease but instead through an utterly foreign certainty of the inevitability of failure—and the question of whether that mistake was his greatest. (It is. Ren doesn’t think this. He knows this. It seems, even—it seems that it sings.)

Put that unforced error aside, he made others—he made too many others to count—facing the thought is terrifying but this fear is almost new, this fear is *novel*, and Ren’s shallow breathing is even, even now, as he fears the conclusion but not its consequences because no one is going to force consequences on him now, if he can believe—that—he breathes—

Snoke made mistakes even Ren could’ve avoided, ones Ren forced from his mind at the time with panicked speed and practiced ease before Snoke could see.

And he didn’t. He didn’t see. It worked. Ren hid criticism without calculating it between one breath and the next and Snoke couldn’t even tell he was missing something there and Ren can know *that*, at least, because Snoke didn’t have it in him to detect a flaw of Ren’s and opt to keep it to himself, so Ren can know. He knows.

Ren breathes, through the awe, through what isn’t panic but is at very least as *much* as it, and it isn’t easy because it merely is.

It is, and then in the silence around and inside him something shifts.

Snoke made *Ren’s* mistakes.

Ren has made no error that doesn’t bear Snoke’s fingerprints, not in his life, and he would not have been capable: the mistakes he made were either under Snoke’s direct influence or in his efforts to escape it.

For a long, long moment, then, the rage stops his breath.

It at least should be familiar but somehow even this isn’t: it seizes him, hard and fast and too large, though, to compel him to violence; there is no need for Ren to strike it from himself when he can exist within it with rage eternal to spare; merely screaming would be an insult to its enormity and to himself. The anger dwarfs him and he doesn’t shrink and he is not humbled.

It is not that Ren can *be* this insofar as he is able. This anger *is* him. It is all he is.

He is a plucked bowstring, a neutron star, he is the blaze of Starkiller’s collapse beyond his sight as it seared itself into his mind through the blood and wrote itself into the pain.

He has wasted everything. He has wasted it for years. Six. Fifteen. Thirty. Everything Ren was and everything he had.

And he can’t—somehow—Ren can’t find a way to make it his own fault. Not for all that, reflexively, extensively, he tries. And he *tries*.

So Ren isn’t furious. Ren is his own fury. He is one single, perfect instant of refined righteous *right* and incandescent rage, and nothing more, and needs nothing more.

Then Ren exhales, and it leaves him.

He is nothing, and when he opens his eyes he sees nothing, and where this could harrow him he feels nothing.

Ren breathes, and finally—

*Finally*—

People who will say the Dark *takes* are plentiful, and they are easy to find, and it’s the clearest sign of one who doesn’t know what they’re talking about that Ren could imagine. It’s the Light that takes, that takes and takes and takes and expects to be thanked for the privilege; it’s the Light that leaves nothing behind it but wants then for that nothing to somehow be offered up to it as well, and for that offer, the relinquishment of the *having* and the *left* that remain in *having nothing left*, to be without boundaries or moderation or reason or constraint: to say that it’s demanding flatters it with the idea that the Light does anything like asking—permission or forgiveness, first or afterward or *ever*—it implies the Light would be itself if it were ever to act as if it needed them.

The Dark seduces: it *asks*. It offers. And it waits, and it waits, and then—once accepted—then the Dark gives.

Endless. Eternal. Whole.

And it’s been waiting for him for so long, and he’s been waiting for it, and Ren didn’t know this but the Dark *did*, and it knows him now, so he breathes it in and it fills him entirely and he knows now that brushes he had with it on such grotesque false pretenses were barely a parody of the Dark as it is in itself: cold and empty and emptying and perfect without limit and without compromise and without question whatsoever Ren could ever care to answer with anything but *yes*.

He didn’t let himself want it, just as it wanted him, and now the hatred earned by every single act and every being and every *second* that has kept him even slightly from this is beyond language. It is beyond thought. What they deserve is beyond death such that torture is barely a shadow because mere torture approaches death as well. It is impossible—even just among the living—for Ren to enact on even one of them, the most blameless, all that they deserve. But it’s enough—

*No*. It’s not enough.

It will never be enough.

It can never be enough for Ren to do all he can, but that inadequacy isn’t his, not to suffer or to pay for. It turns outward without taking Ren even as collateral. The Dark demands no penitence because the Dark demands nothing. It extracts from him no debt because Ren owes it nothing.

It offers itself, it offers everything, and Ren takes it, Ren takes it all, Ren takes all that it has to give. It isn’t enough. It will never be enough.

But Ren *is*.

Ren breathes, even, easy, deep. His eyes fall closed. And it’s cold and black and absolute, and it fills him completely, it is everything from his spine to his skin, it is in his mouth and it is flowing into his fingertips. It is everything. It’s what was stolen from him: it’s what he needed.

It fills his mouth and his lungs and his throat entire, not *like* air and not *instead of* air because it *is* air, whole but not solely; the Dark is passing through him, around him, inside him, still and ideal with none of the sick stasis of Light’s enforced idea of peace. He swallows the Dark and it swallows him whole and thus it always has, has always taken him just as it leaves nothing out now, leaves nothing left, nothing wrong.

It would be trivial unto inevitability, Ren supposes, to drown in it, as a smile takes his face with quiet inevitable ease. It would be all but necessary for another to drown, but he belonged to the Dark all along, and Kylo Ren knows how to breathe.

No forgiveness. No compromises. No mercy. No need for them and no tolerance and no space for them to occupy besides. Just power and certainty.

He’ll make it right. He’ll make them all bleed.

[estrellamientos]

do you like uhhhh dark side meditation but not very well-executed yet

fragment // angst I guess because that’s lowkey synonymous with ‘character study contains Kylo Ren’ // self-loathing etc. // child abuse implied etc. // source: An Idea So Universally Terrible

Ren squeezes his eyes shut, hard as he can, just as certain as he knows he’s supposed to be relaxed to get this anything like right. He breathes. (Or more accurate—maybe—to say: he tries to. He tries.)

Only when it works, it’s worse. The cold comes, like air, but it can’t fill him, and if he reaches for it further than the tantalizing ghost that barely exceeds the column of his own spine—curled in spite of himself, because he’s himself, like always—he’ll lose his balance, such as it even is. That gift, his rudimentary grasp of it, is the only reason he’s worth *anything*, Ren knew long before anyone else could truly fear it, only he’s had all but three decades to hone it as such and he’s still here. So he knows—how could he not?—he knows that his master will be furious if he backslides again just as he knows he always will and as he knows that Rey was right, that he’ll never equal his grandfather, either, because Anakin Skywalker suffered gifts upon gifts but greatest among them was that of *choice*, still, such that in wielding the Dark alone he was enough.

Ren doesn’t have that. Ren doesn’t get to have that. Only a compromise with the Light could make him good enough, and he at least has the potential to manage it, if he didn’t the Supreme Leader would have just left him alone; but he is, he is, at least, *capable* of it, capable of wielding the Dark and bending the Light to his will without it getting that horrible miasmic say in the matter alike, only at best his truce with it is uneasy—it shouldn’t be a truce, it should be *conquest*—and as soon as he thinks about it, which is often, it’s not even that, it’s nothing, except that can’t even mean the Light escapes him, because as soon as he can’t stop it any more it *overruns* him—

And it can’t quite shake the Dark at his core but that cold is cold comfort, comfort isn’t what it’s *for*; and the Light takes his mind, not his body, like when he was a child and Snoke just a distant everpresent mental companion, not a master, not even something known for certain to exist, and how Snoke ignored Ren’s body too until it could be used to prove a point against him when he deserved that and Ren took it and would’ve even without knowing already and always that he deserved worse from the master who saved him and who he couldn’t manage even slightly to pay back and knowing getting angry made it worse besides because you can’t resent what you deserve only if anyone could fail even in that of course it would be Kylo Ren so just like Ben Solo he got angry every time and he didn’t want it but that didn’t matter—

So the Light fills his mind when he lets it, when he fails to keep it away, and it hurts, it always hurts, it hurts worse than any mere injury could dream; pain lets him find himself but everywhere the Light so much as brushes is *agony* pure and useless and unrelenting, without features either distinguishing or redeemable. Neither of them are capable of anything else or ever will be, Ren’s had more than long enough to prove it. And the Light doesn't care: it sees any unguarded empty space of him he fails to hide, it takes.

[estrellamientos]

Damnum Ferre ch.1

So I mentioned on @canon-typical-violence that the first chapter of this fic exists.

Their first civil conversation afterward is held at blaster- and sword-point, respectively. The second one goes worse.

Hux passed through conscious shakiness or disorientation some hours ago; he has long been worn down to what feels like two-dimensional nothingness but lacks the smoothness to be glass. Glassy calm he knows well, and fury like the flat of a good blade (his own, for instance), and this is neither. He’s something depthless and empty and abraded, lacking the wherewithal to find itself repulsive.

There are marginal advantages to this. For example, while he would normally take a running inventory of pain before moving on to not allowing it to affect him, Hux currently can’t manage to keep a listing of the damage in his head. This applies to all of the damage at hand, admittedly, but tabulations of what matters can be written down just as this is disregarded. He works easily through the due diligence of sacking the erstwhile Resistance base for all the nothing it has to provide, at any rate, and through their own forces’ withdrawal. He does not think about pursuit at this time, the way he does not think about the common features between one breath and the next.

It is not that he has ever forgotten the taste of blood, particularly his own, but that it is staying in his mouth beyond all reason, currently. This is odd. Psychosomatic, he presumes, unless he’s managed enough reverting to old bad habits to tear the lining of his throat. Irrelevant, at any rate, as in he will not permit it to become relevant. He does not stop.

By the time Hux can in good conscience return to the *Finalizer* he feels like Crait’s sanded off the surface of his skin the way it seems to have grated the contours of his mind. Not that anything hurts, save when he breathes. Merely that he seems to be lacking things he shouldn’t need to lack: edges, definition, grip; the ability to meaningfully distinguish stimuli that are himself from those that are not.

It does not notably impair his functioning, at least not to a degree that is intolerable; however, that is given the fact that the scale for said range of tolerance is currently a quietly horrible study in adaptation all its own.

Hux watches over the buzz of busy misery that surrounds him, not least because it wouldn’t do for him not to be tracking it, but he does not issue reprimands for individual acts of incompetence. None are irreparable—in fact (he may feel toward this later, should he remember to) people recover remarkably well, it’s merely the density of casual mistakes to recover from—and the apparent widespread agitated despair is too universal to selectively punish. Selection of particular actors would be unproductive even as examples to the rest. The solution, whatever it is, lies beyond mere individuals.

Beyond most individuals, anyway.

He knows better than to keep his distance from Kylo Ren now but Hux finds himself doing so anyway, at least for the duration before there’s a ship solid under his feet again. It is a somewhat pathetically short span of time, he realizes later, for all that it seems to stretch infinitely while he’s within it.

Ren allows the search and the withdrawal (Hux sternly does not call it a retreat; therefore neither does anyone else) to happen without any incident significant enough for people to bring to Hux’s attention. This is an acceptable state of affairs, though perhaps only in the way that inevitable things must be.

He waits, then, until he can corner Ren, and does not delude himself that Ren doesn’t know he is being cornered, in the particular manner that passes with little effort for drawing him aside into an unremarkable and vacant mid-level meeting room Hux knows the template for better than his own bare hand. There is a casually risible normalcy to it, of table and chairs and blank walls lacking sufficient importance to merit a viewport. If the lights were on it could be anywhere in spacetime after the first _Resurgent_ launched.

Hux does have his blaster ready, this time.

(Armitage Hux’s gift is preparation in advance; likewise his curse. He is, however, not in the habit of making the same mistake twice.)

“I don’t know if you can stop a shot from this distance,” Hux says. His teeth still taste like blood, so mildly there’s the impression of it being just the natural state of things at this point. It feels almost more like a faculty of the air, especially given how dry his mouth is. “I don’t know if you do either. I *do* know—” Know what? Not what Ren’s willing to risk on the subject, beyond that it’s enough to have walked in front of Hux without complaint. For all Hux knows Ren wants to die outright. It’s as close to a working theory of what he’s been witnessing as any. “You killed Snoke.”

Ren turns to face him, slow, easy. This is in no way outside what Hux went in expecting, when Ren let himself be steered to leave his back open so easily as to be outright consent, when the door reformed behind them. Ren is an egotistical, hubristic idiot, but he is not dead.

Neither of them bother with light, and the ship is running on her mildest level of power conservation. It’s a preventative measure, while they determine how much damage there is for the unscathed and the functional to make up for, for how long. The trace available illumination is sufficient, both for this conversation and for operations throughout. What light there is collects in Ren’s eyes and, when he speaks, shows on his teeth.

“Do you now,” he says, his voice rough as well; from salt, presumably, and from screaming. Ren fumbles some of the emotional coordination he’d need to achieve a noteworthy level of cruelty, but Hux notes the symbolic effort of it as a matter of record.

The problem with standing close enough to Ren to not be backed against door or wall while promising a shot in the spine—or, now, the gut—is that Hux can’t evaluate him as a whole threat. He simply doesn’t have the needed width in terms of viewing angles. As such he has to choose: he can watch Ren’s face, like a man who is having a conversation.

Or he can watch Ren’s hands, like a frightened animal, and feel it in his neck.

Hux has considered before, generally in the context of early childhood education (and, more prosaically, particularly while illuminating others on why they have forfeited any right to tell him their opinions on early childhood education), how much of the distinction between sentients and subsentients can be demonstrated by way of death. A subsentient animal has no meaningful understanding, fear, or anticipation of its own demise. It cannot develop a conception of its inevitability in general, nor a particular preference between facing an oncoming death and looking away before the moment of impact. Nor can it act on such a preference—or against it—were it to somehow internalize one anyway.

Confrontation, cowardice, and the rest of that family of emotions are a sentient prerogative. This is naturally relevant at even the lowest levels of human acculturation, for reasons that should be patently obvious and yet still forced Hux into *years* of mere parodies of would-be academic debate.

He’s sure Ren would have an opinion on the subject, if prompted, for Hux to be irritated by, were he to be given the opportunity. If he hasn’t developed it, Hux is resigned to confidence in Ren’s ability to determine one on the spot. Ren, as a murderer and a telepath, is uniquely disposed to potential usefulness with regards to analysis by the living of the experience of death in general; it is Ren *himself* who would make the effort useless at best. He is an unreliable witness consistently more interested in finding ways to make himself an obstacle than in relevance or truth. That Hux has never had that *particular* debate with Ren does not change the fact that he knows this.

When Ren’s arm moves too fast and fluid to bother with, when his lightsaber hums to life at the corner of Hux’s eye, Hux does not particularly react. He flinches on some level, and he feels it on his face, but it’s doubtlessly both unimpressive and unimpressed: more a microexpression with delusions of grandeur than anything else. His blaster stays perpetually steady.

“Of course I know, Ren.” Hux couldn’t keep the tiredness from his voice to save his life; as such he doesn’t try. “I know everything.”

Ren does something like laugh, like he thinks the lie is for his benefit: short, barking, not quite wild. His features don’t reach wildness either, merely managing to reach *for* it, even with the advantage of drinking in flickering red plasma light as an intensifier. There is remarkably little of him left, all told, if only the excisions were relevant or permanent. In both of their cases the net effect is not dissimilar to the feeling invoked by surveying the wreck of the *Supremacy*: the vast majority still usable, patently alive, objectively a unique threat and enduring achievement, yet stripped of menace despite largely retaining its function. “No you don’t,” Ren says. Staring at him, and not swinging, like he thinks he’s managing to say something else.

“I know you’re hopelessly outmatched,” Hux answers, dry in both form and function. His own tongue slows him down, sticking to the roof of his mouth.

“By *what*?” Ren snaps, but the rage makes no travel down his sword arm; Hux only realizes belatedly that it could’ve. The matter didn’t cross his mind for—many reasons, but not least among them is the fact that neither of them are looking at their weapons at all. The hum of Ren’s saber this nearby sounds positively faulty, though Hux lacks enough experience with simple uses of kyber to know from that how much of it is due to flaws of the crystal or of the housing, or of the character of lightsabers more generally. “Organa has *nothing*,” Ren’s going on, making a solid effort at passion, his voice snagging roughly on itself, “and the girl is—”

“Irrelevant,” Hux says. Ren lets him. (Hux, for his part, lets that carry him away; it doesn’t occur to him not to.) “They are currently irrelevant. You’re outmatched by yourself. You are on track to burn down everything of value in this galaxy and, presumably, should you continue to—to miraculously survive your mistakes otherwise, in the next.”

“I should kill you for that,” Ren halfway growls, making no effort to do so. Something of the ambient loss gives the ludicrous impression that the idea is new to him.

Hux holds his gaze accordingly. “You should,” he says. His own voice runs more placid about it than he’d expected. “And you won’t.”

“Really.” Ren is trying; this is noticeable; it’s why he fails. He’s never been able to be the threat he ought to be in mere conversation, Hux has found. It’s not surprising that what serves him in power and menace on the battlefield isn’t recaptured into a static exchange merely by the presence of the sword that represents it.

If it were just Ren’s lethality in question, that aspect of him would never go missing; he is self-evidently a weapon more obviously than he is a man. But Ren doesn’t work as a sustained, present ultimatum any more than a lightning strike could, and his lightsaber is fixing to give Hux a headache.

“So why not just shoot me, General? You remembered a gun this time.”

It’s surprising that Ren’s aware, even that much, of what went through Hux’s mind in the throne room. Barely less so, come to think, that he didn’t contest being assigned Snoke’s death at all. Hux says, “I’ve no great interest in dying, Ren.” Pointedly.

“Then what’s this *about*?” Ren’s lip pulls back from his teeth; Hux can’t tell if the line of brutal light at his side shifts with a tremor of the blade or just with Hux’s own blinking, gaze too fixed on the fire that paints Ren’s face. “You’re right, I should j—”

“I am invested in my continued survival and that of the Order,” Hux cuts in. He does not have to try hard at all *to* make it cutting, an accusation of a contrast worth noting out loud. This is the only reason he manages to do it, the same way he manages this conversation’s fixed tableau largely through the kind of even immobile calm that can only come from holding a blaster steady. “And my assessment of your inevitable, *contagious*, and self-inflicted ruin—” It awes him to see Ren take even that with merely a twitch, which is why Hux keeps going. He’ll rationalize it into a test later. It is not a test now. “—was dependent on you taking up the mantle that would destroy you *alone*.”

“So you should—“ Ren shakes himself for a second, from the neck up only. It completely ruins any authority or composure acquired by rephrasing. The central problem being, of course, that he doesn’t need it. “No. You *will* help me.”

Hux will deny, later, to himself, that he then spends a second imagining saying no. It rips through him anyway; it is unexpected; it is wholly unmanageable. Left to his own devices Ren is in fact sure to drive the Order into the ground. It will splinter faster and with less hope of salvage than any Republican dream. And, curiously—given Hux doesn’t think he would’ve made this assessment a week ago—he thinks Ren really would even know it was his own fault. Maybe even entirely.

For a second he imagines that: Saying no. (Leaning into the saber blade he won’t deign to look at, even, before Ren thought to do something more elaborate. There’s something seductive about the furious plasma at the corner of his eye, a manner of drawing him in of a vertigo-like genre with the kind of hubris at which Hux succeeds as much as with flight at which the human body fails.) Turning the entire conversation into one last spiteful feint. Letting Ren, for the first time in his life, experience the consequences of his actions.

He imagines the consequences themselves by the end of the beat, though. What it actually means—anathema—for the Order to fall. (And for Hux, were he to do otherwise and survive to see it, a neo-Republican execution; even if they end the war with enough collaborators to form a jury he can’t imagine anyone would waste the time.)

Hux thinks of Rae Sloane wearing the blood on her uniform like rank insignia; of the first flash of certainty of knowing that his father was not the Empire, that his father was a disgrace.

Snoke was not the First Order. Hux is not the First Order. Even the millions dead today were not the First Order. And Ren *certainly* isn’t.

He’ll give Ren nothing else aside from this pause: let the man know Hux still had to think if he has to, if he’s even equipped to notice, but Hux offers no change of expression, no resigned or irritated breath. He wouldn't be standing here if in the end he didn't know already exactly how this story goes.

Clipped and atemporal, the words as at home in his mouth now as they would have been five days or months or years ago, he says, “Of course, Supreme Leader. What do you need?”

At that Ren still stares at him, oddly slow to adapt. “I’d be more convinced you mean that,” he says, “if you weren’t still pointing a blaster at me.”

The corner of Hux’s mouth twitches quickly, to an extent that may or may not be visible. “Naturally,” he says, already thumbing the safety back on. Shifting his gaze isn’t necessary for that, nor for holstering it, although he knows immediately that keeping the conversation up to standards is about to get vastly more uncomfortable. He expects mistakes, as such, like breathing. “Sir?”

“Incredible.” Ren’s voice is flat in a way that makes the Republican in him positively blare with it.

It’s harder to read his face once his saber retracts, but the last relatively detailed look Hux gets gives him the odd impression Ren reciprocating on the armistice has happened without his conscious assent. The surprise seems too deep and fundamental to merely be a (honestly unmerited) reaction to Hux himself.

Ren takes a step back as he returns his saber to his belt, spending the rest of the distance between himself and the room’s normalcy to the point that he almost walks into the table, the motions far less polished. “So this is a truce?”

“Truces are for enemies, Ren,” Hux says. Ren looks at him for long enough that Hux’s eyes readjust in the interim, so perhaps it was the wrong thing to say. Certainly Hux has pushed further and in more directions than he’d at any point intended, egged on by every time Ren let him. Presuming Ren’s not about to change his mind about that and snap Hux’s neck, he’ll have to reassess. For now, in order to watch Ren blink at it more than anything else, Hux pitches his voice away to add, “Lights to fifty percent.”

Fifty percent lighting on even slight ship-wide energy austerity is entirely forgiving; he catches Ren’s face on the end of the reflexive blink that lets him, too, school himself accordingly. “Right,” Ren says. “Enemies.” He sounds not sarcastic as much as like he was recently made aware of the idea of sarcasm and is still forming a conclusion on it. “So what do *we* need, General?”

Hux shifts into parade rest; he even allows his spine to have an opinion on doing so, briefly, before he dismisses it. “We need to know where we stand,” he says, wonders idly if Ren finds a double meaning in it. Then he immediately gets carried away again. “The majority of the dedicated fleet is intact but a full survey of the damage will take time. A full survey of the death toll will take longer. The rest of our forces are largely dispatched on the frontlines of invasions of what had been selected as vulnerable targets prior t—” Prior to Starkiller. Hux swallows the mourning viciously and clears his throat after. “We can expect them to begin reporting back soon if they haven’t already, and that will give us a better picture of what we have to work with for recovery. For now I r—”

Ren raises his hand and Hux stills. He stills *immediately*, giving the lie to his own performance, stopping so fast he feels his pharynx click. All Ren does with this, though, is to scrub his hand over his face; the other finds the small conference table he’d not quite backed himself against and leans slightly on it. Hux understands the impulse on both counts, but it does Ren no favors. He doesn’t need them; this continues to be the problem.

(He will. Will he know?)

“Better question,” Ren says after a moment, his tone an oddly fragile tangle of resignation and embarrassment. “Now that you’re committed to not shooting me if I do, does anyone need *me*, or can I—can I get some sleep.”

The tiredness in Ren’s voice scrapes along Hux’s own bones, which is overall unsurprising. Beyond the obvious of their recent exertions, even Hux’s rudimentary understanding of the Force indicates it must require some manner of energy tax from its practitioners. He blinks, though, waylaid enough in thought to answer on a slide further into autopilot prompted by the obvious mistake of it, like Ren’s an errant subadult or some uppity commander. “Even under crisis a significant disruption of sleep/wake cycles is a choice of last resort,” he says on blank didactic reflex. “And even for essential crew. The alleged gain in having *any* given person present can only be weighted against the cost of their absence after considering that loss of function from sleep deprivation is immediate, punishing, and progressive, as well as compounding on itself. The idea carries the same wretched cost-benefit ratio as returning injured soldiers to the field when others are available. A—”

Ren is staring at him. Differently, this time, the emotion gap produced by the drop-off in threat filled with Hux’s own belated humiliation.

Hux bites his lips savagely, resigned to the certainty that his face is coloring with embarrassment. Those debates had taken *ages*, immediate practical relevance making them worse and more protracted than the issue of death, back when Order command had been laboring under an even worse infection of old Imperials spoiled by upbringings where they’d had lives to underexploit—even to waste—than it currently is. So much of Hux’s life takes place in contexts where he can better things by explaining them that the reflex endures long after he’s lost his grasp on common sense.

(The only thing that curtails it is certainty of lack of *understanding*—that is, a guarantee of failure—and Ren is not Snoke. Of course that has disarmed him.)

“My apologies,” he chokes out. “Habit. There were—arguments. For a long time. About establishing priorities, by people who didn’t *recognize*—” Hux strangles his own voice again before Ren can, though at this point he’d probably welcome it as help, before realizing at last why he’s actually doing this.

Because Ren just blithely handed Hux permission to tell Ren to hurt himself and all but promised he would do it in the asking, and Hux still needs to tell him no. The good thing is Hux knew to talk himself out of doing otherwise before he even recognized the option. The bad thing is that the managing of it is so hard Hux has to spend his own dignity on necessity and do so out loud.

“We don’t,” Hux says, still drawn inexorably to take the long way of it, more so knowing now he’s hit on something Ren is crushingly, subhumanly inept with, to an extent Hux can’t yet so much as model. The realization that both the down payment on Hux’s continued survival and the delayed cost of him making it this far will have to be fixing Ren to at least manage to fake it, and the prospect of in *any* way *fixing Kylo Ren* is—”We don’t hurt our own unless it is necessary for the advancement of the First Order. And recovery efforts are already in motion. Yes.”

“An actual answer, Hux.” Ren is still staring: nakedly, some kind of upset Hux isn’t going to further disambiguate for as long as he can afford to read Ren as not planning on lashing out with it. For now Ren looks merely like an impending implosion, and Hux can not care. Any extent to which this manages to penetrate far enough to be refreshing is annulled when Ren remembers his own rank, though, even slightly. “And then you’re dismissed.”

Shifting to an actually pertinent routine distracts Hux from the knowledge of his off-script failures as much as anything could. Ren may not appear disposed to push on any of those fault lines currently, all the fight gone out of him with the decision that Hux doesn’t merit fighting, but Hux’s mind will surely pick up the slack. He nods sharply. “Sir.” Thinks before he speaks, this time. *Not* about the open wounds of the present, or about the other questions Ren has opened, unintentionally and in great density, thus far. “It’s… in everyone’s interest that you rest, frankly. We can reconvene when—”

*When we’ve both recovered somewhat,* he almost says. Hux himself isn’t sure quite why he opts to kill the sentence so viciously instead. It’s not too gentle on Ren; aggravating him further now has ceased to be useful. It’s not irrelevant; it is the strict description of his concern at hand. It’s not impossible; Hux can’t afford not to recover.

What, then?

“Right,” Ren says, into that emptiness, after a moment. “All right.”

The way his eyes fall shut seems more than anything like the action of gravity on a great and inert weight (seems like Hux has ceased to exist), not like the function of a mere human body, such that Hux can’t find him pathetic quickly enough to be affected. Instead he’s seized with the nonsensical urge to ask if Ren plans on falling asleep here, on his feet, in a mid-level conference room. Strictly speaking, as far as Ren’s poor decisions go, something that *human* is unlikely to be beyond him.

Hux leaves, instead, exactly as requested and without another word. Quickly, as well; it is somehow even more uncomfortable than being watched by Ren *not* to be. He is aware of no gaze on his turning back, not even of the air-pressure shift he has gathered is the Force as metaphor made real actor.

It’s not that Hux’s sense of such things has ever been inerrant, or even reliable; it is, instead, exactly enough to make him wonder, and nothing more.

He does hope that Ren has the sense to drag himself off and actually rest. It happens almost in spite of himself. Hux can recognize, regardless of the quickly-ignored opinions of his individual bones, that this has been brutal for Ren as well, because it has been brutal for everyone, to varying degrees.

Ren will be more bearable when he is more effective. At worst, when he inevitably gets in Hux’s way, that will enable Hux to act with the confidence that Ren meant to and proceed accordingly. At best…

Who knows? Hux thinks, so suddenly that for a moment it drags him almost to a stop. Who would know? Who has *seen* it? At Ren’s best—

Maybe he’ll even be useful.