It was an odd occurrence, Kylo thought. Hux, usually a tight-ass stickler when it came to punctuality and attendance, was late to his usual duties on the main bridge. In fact, he didn't even show up. Something was up with Hux. While he knew he would probably get chased out of his quarters like an alley cat being chased away with a broom, a little voice in his head kept telling him that Hux only stayed off the bridge if he was either in medbay or in great danger. He had begun homing in on Hux's room without even telling himself to, his instincts and the Force guiding him all the way there.
Hux's quarters were dimly lit. The sound of pitiful moaning and peaceful, deep breathing mixed in Kylo's ears and the fruity, electric aroma of cometdust and Chandrilan ravaa hung low and lazy in the air. Kylo knew the odor well. He knew what the smells were from the first breath he took in that room that day; they were scents from his childhood.
He remembered the smell of the ravaa berries from the vineyards he always used to pass on his way to and from school. There was one incident by the vineyards that stuck out in his mind, though, and every time he caught a whiff of the fruity, rummy aroma that ravaa tended to give off, the incident replayed again and again as if it had happened yesterday.
"Ben, the more you tell me about the flak your mom gives you about your midichlorians, convening with the force and doing Jedi shit with your uncle, the more I'm convinced that she's completely insane," Melia, a rather new friend of his, says to him as they gingerly walk past the vineyards as schoolchildren often do. The afternoon sun beats down on them as they begin to sweat from the heat.
Ben is quick to reply. "I've tried to tell her that, but she shuts me down every time."
"How does she not know that you're not interested? You've said it again and again. Besides, you don't look like a Jedi. Not with those giant ears!" She grabs one of them, tugging at the lobe as Ben tries to fend her off, chuckling.
"Yeah, I know," Ben says after his laughter settles. "I've tried to tell her that I want to follow my heart, like my teachers keep telling me to do, but she says, 'You're a Jedi like your uncle and his father before him! You don't have a choice! Meh, meh, meh.'"
Melia laughs as he mocks his own mother, twisting his face in ugly ways as he does it.
"By the way, what do you wanna do if, by some miracle, you convince your mom that the whole Jedi thing isn't gonna work out?" she asks.
Ben pauses. His eyes seem to darken as he becomes lost in thought.
Suddenly, he jumps up. His eyes go wide as he says, "I'd rather be an ace pilot, like my dad! I even know a little about how a YT-1300 freighter works already!"
"Like the Millennium Falcon?"
"Better. How about THE Millennium Falcon? Y'know Han Solo, the scoundrel turned famous war hero?"
She nods.
"You might wanna sit down for this, Mellie."
She sits on the ground, crossing her legs as Ben kneels beside her and positions himself to whisper into her ear.
"I'm his son."
She gasps. "Nuh-uh, you're lying!" She says before smacking him lightly and playfully on the cheek.
"I'm not lying! Doesn't the name Solo ring a bell?"
"Okay, okay, I'll believe you if you tell me this one little thing. Have you ever been in the cockpit?"
"He's let me in the cockpit only once or twice, but I'm a quick learner. I think well on my feet," he replies, trying to show off to her.
"Well, that would make you a perfect pilot!" she says, a flame of resolve burning in her eyes. "So, you go and tell your mom that you don't wanna be a Jedi! You wanna be a pilot, and no-one's gonna stop you from chasing your dreams!"
Ben smiles warmly at the remark as Melia gives him a pat on the back. He begins running home, preparing himself to tell his mother what's what. Before he is out of her earshot, he turns back to her. "Thanks for the pep talk!" he yells as he waves.
As he walks home past the shops and the cantina, he begins to think about the big news and how his mother will take it. His familiar surroundings lull him into a false sense of security, as he begins to wonder if his mother will let up on the whole Jedi thing.
Spoiler alert; she did not, and with disastrous results that Kylo tries to suppress to this day. He almost has it gone, to the point where all he remembers are the first few seconds of the fist fight.
The fist fight. The kind people had over glittering bottles of cometdust.
Cometdust was his father's favorite cheap drink. All the local cantinas sold it, and it was easy to get at any store in town. Han didn't consider himself an alcoholic, but taking care of a tiny human who needed his help to do everything except cry was exhausting, and by the end of the week, he needed something to take the edge off. Every Saturday night at about sundown for the first six years of Ben's life, he went to Kreak's (his cantina of choice) and ordered bottle after bottle of cometdust; the exact number was something neither Ben nor Kylo was sure of. Either way, he always came home around midnight looking like a hot mess and passed out on the couch before he could say or do anything. The first time he actually remembered this happening was the most memorable, as well as the last.
It's 10 o'clock on a Saturday. In the time between Han's departure at sundown and now, dinner had been made, eaten, and stored in the fridge; all of the interesting things on television had come and gone, and little Ben, then only six years old, is now being tucked into bed.
Well, almost.
"But why do I have to go to bed, mom?" he whines, bouncing up and down, still bounding with energy after a long day. "I don't wanna go to bed, I'm not sleepy!"
"Your body needs rest, Ben. Three hours on the playground and another at the pool can take it out of anyone," she calmly explains. "Now go brush your teeth and get into bed."
He groans and begins shuffling into the bathroom when, suddenly, there's a knock on the door.
"Honey? Are you there?" says a slurred voice outside.
Leia runs to the door and quickly undoes the latches and locks. The door swings open, and Han appears, messy-looking and absolutely plastered.
"Leia!" He yells as he runs in. He wraps his arms around her and latches onto her as if he's going to fall off the face of the planet if he doesn't hold onto her for dear life.
She looks at her husband's face and notices he has a black eye and a few fresh cuts on his cheek, still bleeding.
"Han! What in the fresh hell happened to you?" She asks, looking down at the various scrapes and bruises on his arms and fresh scabs on his knuckles.
"Nothing to worry about, hun. Got caught in the middle of a bar fight. It's just a few scrapes and bruises," he says, surprisingly calm for how scratched up he is. Leia can smell the ozone-like scent of cometdust on his breath as he speaks.
"No, you need some patching up. The only reason that you're not howling in pain is because you're drunk. If you were sober, you'd be begging for some bacta and painkillers," she scolds, taking an almost motherly tone.
"Yeah, but... I'm fine, really... I'm ok." He's tripping over his words and rounding out his vowels more than usual as he stumbles over to the kitchen to get something to eat.
Leia is quick to catch him. "No, no," she says, her voice more tender now. "Lay down on the couch and I'll patch you up."
As she turns to the door to get the bacta patches from the bathroom, she sees little Ben standing in the doorway, watching her every move and listening to her every word with the solemn, intense focus of a Jedi. He seems unfazed by the situation unfolding in front of him, but Leia can tell from the ripples his mind creates in the Force that he is intensely worried, wondering about why Dad is so scratched up and why he's talking so weird and if he's ok and what Mom means by drunk and if this is his fault.
Leia's expression softens. "Ben, go to the bathroom and get some bacta patches for Dad," she says, weaving what little Force she can use into her voice to pacify his unspoken worries.
His solemn manner seems to melt away a small bit as he walks away to the bathroom.
Almost a minute later, he returns with the bacta patches and a jar of turquoise gel.
"Got the bacta cream if you wanna use it," Ben mumbles as he sets the cream down at the foot of the couch.
"Thank you, dear," Leia replies. "Now, go brush your teeth and hop into bed."
He heads off to the bathroom and turns the faucet on. As he begins to brush his teeth, Han moans in pain and Leia shushes him gently. "Keep it down. You don't want Ben to hear you. You know, he's very worried about you," she says, almost whispering.
They wanted to keep it down, huh? Well, if his big ears were going to come in handy at any point in his life, it was now. He put his ear to the wall and listened in.
"I feel like shit. Like my head's gonna explode."
Silence. Someone sighs through their nose, then more silence.
"Han, you can't keep doing this."
"I only do it once a week, hun."
"I know it only happens once a week, but once is one time too many. We have a son! If he sees you drinking yourself under the table to forget the shit you've seen, he's going to start doing the same thing and he'll be worse than you! Do you want your son to end up a raging alcoholic when he's older?"
"Not really, no."
"Then you need to stop doing this every Saturday night! Be a good role model for him. You're the only one he's got. Now, sleep well, and if you're hungover in the morning, we'll take care of you. Goodnight."
"G'night, hun. Love you."
A smooch and a ruffle of cloth. Silence.
"BEN!" The sounds of his mother calling his name pierces the air like a dart. "Are you in bed yet?"
"Yes, mom," he says, making sure his voice projects out the room so his mother can hear him. "Goodnight. Love you."
"Goodnight, Ben. Love you too. Now go to sleep."
Little does she know, Ben is not going to sleep anytime soon. Seeing his father in such a sorry state awakened a kind of nurturing instinct inside him. He has to go check on him. As soon as all the lights go off and he's absolutely sure no-one's awake except Han, he scampers to the living room and the couch where Han lays, hoping no-one hears the pitter-patter of his little feet and the ruffling of the fabric of his stuffed loth-cat which he drags on the ground by its tail.
Ben plops down beside the couch. Han awakens ever so slightly at the thud of Ben's knees hitting the floor.
"Hey, kiddo," he whispers, his normally loud and proud baritone voice sounding hoarse and scratchy.
"Dad, are you ok?" Ben asks, also whispering.
"Yeah, I'm okay. I got a little scuffed up, but your mom was nice enough to patch me up."
"But why were you acting so crazy when you got home? And what does mom mean by drunk?" Ben cocks his head to the side as his eyes widen.
Han sighs audibly through his nose and pauses in thought. "Well, kiddo," he says before pausing again, "Drinks like cometdust make people do weird, stupid things, the kind of stuff they'll regret in the morning. It makes their brains a little mushy. That's what your mom means by drunk. I got drunk and got caught in the middle of something stupid. My brain got mushy."
Ben giggles at the sound of the word 'mushy.' "Yeah, mushy." He closes his eyes and yawns, opening his mouth wide as he brings his hand up to it to stifle the sound.
"That reminds me, you should be getting into bed."
Without even pausing for a second, Ben crawls up onto his father's back, using the couch below him as a foothold. He curls up, closes his eyes, and hugs his loth-cat tight.
"Or you can just do that. As long as you're sleeping, kiddo."
The memory becomes hazy after that.
Kylo snaps out of his mnemonic haze. "Why am I here again? Oh, right, Hux," he mumbles to himself. "Lights, 50 percent," he says, his voice soft yet commanding.
The lights reveal Hux, lying on the floor in an almost catatonic state and moaning in agony. A big bottle of ravaa stands tall and watchful beside him. One bottle of cometdust has fallen on the floor, spilling its electric contents so that they shimmer in the light.
"Hux!" Kylo cries out as he rushes to his side. "Are you okay?"
Hux slowly turns to him and just barely opens his bleary eyes. "I'm alright," he says, coaxing each carefully chosen word out of his mouth. "I just..."
"Did something happen earlier today?"
"I saw something..."
"What?"
He pauses, wondering if he should tell him what happened.
"It's okay," Kylo says gently, almost whispering.
"One of the captains was..." he chokes on his words before finishing. "He was beating on a cadet after a bad drill, kicking him in the stomach and the groin while he was down, calling him a fag, a mouse... a weak willed little boy who'd never become a man. You know I don't have a soft heart, Ren, but those aren't things First Order captains usually say or do to cadets. Those are Arkanis techniques. Things my father used to do to me, even if I wasn't at the academy."
A long silence between them, then a nod from Ren as if to say, "Go on."
"I don't know what happened. I felt so powerless, I just started shaking and... it came back to me so fast. The screaming, the insults, the kicking and punching... I was defenseless. I didn't want anyone to see me go back to that so violently. Everyone above me would beat me if I cried, I know that. So, I came back here and got some alcohol to take the edge off. One shot turned into two, then three... my memory doesn't serve me well after that..."
Hux can't hold it in any longer. He tries taking a few deep breaths, but nothing can stop the tears from rolling down his cheeks. They are silent, as he is biting his tongue to stop himself from letting out a sob.
Another long pause between them.
As sudden as a clap of thunder, Kylo's buried and forgotten maternal instinct, the last remnants of the sensitive little boy named Ben, springs into action. Without even thinking, he wraps his arms around Hux's small, lithe body and holds him close to his chest.
"No, no, no, it's okay. I've got you," he purrs into his ear, sounding like a mother comforting her child. "You're safe, you're here with me." He repeats these words like a mantra, gentler and gentler each time, as he slowly rocks him back and forth.
Soon, Hux becomes quieter. His breathing and heartbeat slow. Kylo doesn't have to look down to know that the man he loves is asleep in his arms. He's tired, and the day-night cycle is ending anyway; it wouldn't hurt to sleep here, not tonight. He lays himself down on the nearby couch and takes Hux with him, still holding him gently to his chest.
"Get some rest, General," he says softly in his ear as he runs his fingers through Hux's soft, copper hair. "You and I need it."