And We Live Again! Chapter One
Suggested Theme:
Main Theme- Birden by Yoko Kanno feat. Arnór Dan
For the first time in a long time, Kylo Ren is able to sleep without the Force sending him hellish visions of him being torn apart. And it all has to do with the fact that General Hux is suffering more than him. In fact, Kylo Ren is 66% certain that Hux is dying as he sleeps peacefully in his king-size bed. And he sleeps deeply for nearly seven, dreamless hours. When he wakes up, he isn't covered in sweat and notices that for once he hasn't torn apart his sheets while he slept. He then heads to his bathroom to do his morning routine, which takes him about an hour and thirty minutes, and then dresses himself in his normal attire.
Okay, what do I need to do today? Oh yeah, make sure that Hux doesn't die. But I probably should make him some breakfast. I'm 99% certain that the mess food might be slowly poisoning Hux's already dying body! Kylo then heads for his kitchen and opens his fridge and his small pantry to see what ingredients he has to work with.
Let's see eggs, milk, butter, cream, flour, strawberries, raspberries, one of the Emperor's Eyes, sugar, and etc. Hmm, I could make Hux some strawberry and raspberry crepes; those are light and should give Hux's body much needed sugar. But what if Hux is allergic to strawberries? I better check with his medical file to make sure that I don't accidently kill him! Kylo closes his fridge and heads back to his bedroom to get his datapad. He logs into the First Order database and pulls up Hux's file within seconds.
Wow, he graduated from the Academy at eighteen! At nineteen, his first assignment was to…the Intelligence division? Okay, I guess that would explain Hux's mastery of the ice-king face. But, there's a gap in his time there like from barely a month after he joined to twenty-one. Was what he did during that time so classified that it's not even on his file? Even with my clearance level? Kylo scrolls through Hux's military service, which was basically his service time on various ships and going through ranks like a death stick addict, to reach his medical records.
Okay, starts at ten and so far nothing wrong there except the (wise) doctor recommending him to gain ten pounds. Again, same recommendation at eleven. And twelve. And so on. Force, he has perfect health, minus the odd sick day, for most of his life! And apparently the inability to gain a measly ten pounds to his skeletal body. But that might have to do with the fact that he's apparently allergic to mammal meat, which might explain the weight problems. Oh, but there is something to note at sixteen and it looks like he was…
And Kylo drops the datapad.
Armitage Hux cried himself to sleep that very early morning. And he slept all the while clutching Darth Vader to his chest for nearly six hours. Or really the durasteel box containing Darth Vader. Either way, Darth Vader kept his promise. He made no comment when Hux decided to wake up at 0800.
"Oh, pfassk…you're still here?" Hux groggily asks when he sees the blue-tinted Force Ghost of Darth Vader standing beside his bed. Kriff, my head hurts! I need tea. No, wait, I need to brush my teeth, then clean my face, and then get dressed—
"I will always be here." I wish my parents told me that. Even if it would, ultimately, be a lie. Hux looks away out of shame for his traitorous thought. They did the best they could! Darth Vader feels the remorse radiating from Hux and decides to be silent.
"…I'll be back in twenty minutes." Hux is able to mutter as he finally pulls himself together and heads to the 'fresher for his morning routine. And it takes him exactly twenty minutes and thirty seconds. The additional thirty seconds was because he was considering changing into his uniform and heading in for morning shift. No, my head is still killing me and I would rather not have Mitaka incessantly worrying about me again. It was bad enough yesterday that I had to "negotiate" with him. He wanted me to take the rest of the week off, but I was able to get it down to just taking the morning shift off!
"Perhaps you should heed the advice of your Lieutenant." Hux rolls his eyes as he walks out of his 'fresher. Oh, please, I just need a morning of not doing anything except drinking some tea and watching Gargoyles and I'll be right as snow! He swears that he sees Vader shake his helmeted head a bit like the Commandant does whenever he did something unwise. Like breaking his combat instructor's arm on his first day at the Academy.
"You need sustenance." Hux wonders if Vader was this…compassionate during his life. More so than Kylo Ren! But at least Kylo didn't drag me to medbay like he wanted to…I wonder if he's sleeping. Or training. Well, he's not using the Force on his room because I didn't hear anything break…I really got to look into Force-soundproof-walls for him. His walls are just regular soundproof.
"I'm the kind of person who can't eat immediately after waking; I get nauseous when I do that. I promise I'll eat something an hour from now, but I really want to watch Gargoyles right now!" Hux promises the mother hen Force Ghost and heads to his desk. He goes to the last drawer and pulls out a red datapad about the size of an infant and thicker than a Condor dragon's hide.
"What is Gargoyles?" Wow, I think I'm in the same kind of situation I was in with Kylo Ren about Labyrinth. Well, except I'm more certain that Darth Vader won't judge me for my peculiar tastes. Okay, I should go with the short version because I would rather not sit through and watch season one again! Hux walks to his untidy bed and gets under the covers but sits up like he's reading a late-night report. He turns to Darth Vader, who is still standing by his bed, and gives him a puckish grin.
"Gargoyles is a cartoon about gargoyles who have been frozen in stone by a magic spell for a thousand years and wake up in the Isle of Manhattan. Goliath, the leader of one of the last gargoyle clans, has to do battle with Demona, his former lover, and Xanatos, and well a bunch of other minor villains. Luckily, he receives help from Elisa Maza, a badass detective with a sweet red car. Oh, and there's this sexual tension between them where it gets to the point that you have to shout, 'When will these two kiss!?' periodically!" Of course, Hux wants a reaction from the Force Ghost. But it takes a solid minute before Vader finally replies.
"I see." Huh, his reaction is exactly like mine when the Commandant first explained Gargoyles to me. He even used the same words. Well, I just better do what the Commandant did. Shut up and just play the damn show already! He turns on the datapad and hits a light-green icon that looks like a demon with bat wings. Immediately, a yellow searchlight illuminates the title of the show and then the magical, baritone voice of Goliath sounds:
"1,000 years ago, superstition and the sword ruled. It was a time of darkness. It was a world of fear. It was the age of gargoyles…"
Kylo Ren would have broken down Hux's door with the Force if it wasn't for the simple, innocent, fact that Hux left his door unlock. Most likely, anticipating that the Master of the Knights of Ren would be keeping his promise. Either way, Kylo Ren bursts into Hux's room unannounced.
Hux hears Kylo's heavy, speedy footfalls but refuses to revert his eyes from the screen. Right now, he is watching a chained-up Puck just teasing the ever-loving poodoo out of Demona. He's also in the middle of eating his third peach muffin and drinking his second cup of Stewjon green tea.
Darth Vader insisted that he needed to eat as much as possible; the Sith Lord wanted him to eat a lot of meat, but Hux set him straight by telling him of his mammal meat allergy. Plus, he does not enjoy consuming meat in the morning because it goes right through him like caf.
Hux felt full after eating half of his second muffin, but Darth Vader practically Force-glared him into eating another. It's not like I'll actually gain any weight from this! You're worse than Jacen! Hux nearly huffed at him.
"Who is Jacen?" Darth Vader asked and Hux was going to reply when Kylo stomped in. Oh Force, his footsteps sound angry! Great, what went wrong? Looks like I will actually have to return for the lunch shift after all. Mitaka is going to be so annoyed with me! Hux sets down his muffin and cup of tea on his plastic, black and red tray.
"Serving humans is fun. They have a sense of humor. You have none!" Hux hears Puck rhyme. He smirks like the free-spirited child that he can be. Sometimes.
"Take off your pants." Kylo practically growls.
"What!"
"What?"
Both Vader and Hux utter in unison, but Kylo can only hear Hux's disbelief. And obvious refusal.
"Perhaps not, Puck, but I have you." It is the last thing that Hux hears before having his covers violently torn from him along with his tray. He hears the tray hit the wall and hears the sound of his beautiful glass tea cup shatter. His red datapad falls to the floor and shuts off its projection, and Hux hope it didn't break on impact with the floor. But that doesn't quite matter now, since Hux is shocked by Kylo's paroxysm.
"Take. Off. Your. Pants." Kylo repeats slowly so Hux cannot possibly misconstrue the meaning of his words. Hux crosses his mismatched arms and glares at him with the full coldness of his ice-blue eyes.
"No." Hux puts the entirety of his will into that monosyllable. I refuse to be cowed by Kylo to do something as silly as strip—
Kylo decides to use the Force on him again. But this time, it is not to hold him down. No, he is making him float above his bed like he's in zero-gravity. Hux has always found zero-gravity sacred; from his time on Den Siva's ship, zero-gravity was his chance to be like the dragon he always wanted to be and fly. Or, realistically, float. Nonetheless, being in zero-gravity had always left him feeling blest.
But, right now, with his arms being forced above his hands and his feet being pulled down, he feels like he's being stretched on some invisible rack from the Old Republic. Or, in this case, from the Sith Empire. It hurts, but it's not the worst pain he's ever suffered for. And the tears only begin to well in his eyes when Kylo's left hand fingers the waistband of his pajama pants.
"Kylo, stop this madness!" And Hux feels almost happy at Darth Vader's evident disapproval of Kylo's actions. Oh thank the Force that this is something that even a pfassking Sith Lord would disapprove of! Hux opens his mouth to parrot Darth Vader's words, but Kylo Ren uses his right hand to gag him. Hux is mildly impressed that he's still floating, since Kylo Ren was using his right hand for the Force, but that is mostly overtaken by his distress.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, NO, PLEASE STOP, KYLO!
And Kylo Ren yanks down his pants.
This is…so much worse! Kylo nearly bemoans as he assesses the mutilation on Hux's thin, thin legs. It is like looking at red lightning forced from plasma into flesh; Hux's nearly white legs are marred by red, redder than his burned arm, jags. Like someone took feral, mutated, miniature Lamproids and inserted them into his legs. And left them in there for roughly twelve hours. Letting them squirm and tear their frenzied bodies through his legs. That really happened…oh, it really happened! But Kylo knows that's not all of the damage was caused by the Lamproids.
Chemical burns…the kind that takes months of Bacta treatments and at least a solid month in a Bacta tank to heal. But Hux only got only a week of immersion in a Bacta tank and month of intense physical therapy. And Kylo can feel himself being transported once more back to Hux's day-long torture session. At the beginning, he is dragged from his bed and stripped to his underwear. He is then strapped to a metal table in a room reeking of bleach. There is a clock counting how long he can last in the room before passing out or until he surrendered.
But Hux doesn't surrender. No, he stayed conscious, even after having his legs belted, even after they were hosed down with burning, burning chemicals, even after the assault of the Lamproids. Even after they ripped out his fingernails and toenails. Some tears and groans from his bruised face, but not a single word of surrender from his thin, split lips. Kylo can even feel the hideous protrusions through his gloves; they feel like the gnarled, deaden roots of trees on Malachor V.
Twenty-four hours. It took twenty-four hours of straight torture for him to pass out, and he only passed out because, "I could've gone on another day or so, but my sixteenth birthday finally began and I didn't want to spend my entire birthday being tortured, so I chose to pass out!" And that was the first thing he said to the doctors once he was out of the Bacta tank. Kylo believes, almost like a bygone fairytale, Hux had the prettiest legs in the Academy because they were long and beautifully sculpted. And so, his torturer took the most beautiful feature of Hux and rendered it hideous.
But his face, why didn't the torturer go for his face more? It was just a couple of punches and nothing else. Was the torturer actually under strict orders not to go for his face? Yet, he's allowed to go hog-wild on his legs? Or maybe it was because the torturer found Hux's face ugly? Hux's face is not ugly! His flickering eyes are so—Kylo's eyes reach Hux's face.
He's rendered breathless.
"Please, please, please, stop." Hux's eyes are red and pink from his tear; his small nose is leaking, mingling with the tears streaking across his trembling, pale face. His voice sounds hoarse like he's been chanting that phrase, those words, for hours instead of the mere ten minutes it took for Kylo Ren to stop looking at…. The proof of his manhood. The memory of the Commandant leaving his life.
And Hux retches his mouth free from Kylo's right hand and coughs, spraying droplets of blood onto Kylo Ren's mask.
Kylo Ren drops him with Hux's head almost hitting the durasteel box.
And he walks away silently,
While Hux continues his cycle of crying and coughing, certainly ruining his sheets.
And Darth Vader witnesses the wreckage his grandson left in his wake.
Lieutenant Dopheld Mitaka was as happy as he can be. He has not seen the General this morning or even at the start of the lunch shift. The General has decided to take the day-off. It's not a week, but at least it's not a mere morning like he wanted. Mitaka practically hums out loud.
And what's even better, Kylo Ren has yet to make his usual, destructive appearance. Then again, he's been away on a mission for the past three days, while the General has been working himself bloody again.
Mitaka is well-aware of Hux's tendencies to put himself in harm's way. Back in the Academy, through the crack of a bathroom stall, he saw a seventeen-year-old Armitage Hux coughing into a sink. At first, he thought Hux just had some horrible cold and couldn't contain his coughing anymore. But then he saw red painting the grey sink and the grey mirror.
It was blood, Hux's blood.
And Hux coughed, and coughed, and coughed…
Until he coughed no more. And then, Hux simply wet some paper towels and began furiously scrubbing until the grey was grey again. Until the grey was sanitized and untarnished.
Hux left, while Mitaka stayed in his stall for the rest of his lunch period. He was…lost in his thoughts. Armitage Hux the Prodigy, Armitage Hux the best student that the Academy has ever produced, Armitage Hux the Commandant's bastard…just coughed up half a liter of blood and cleaned it up like it was normal. Like he was giving one of his effortless speeches.
And he does this, behind closed doors. So no one can see him. See his sickness? See his weakness? Or, perhaps, he truly believes that no one would care. Because who would care about a perfect bastard like him? But Mitaka cared. Because…because he found someone else pretending to be fine. When he was anything but.
And he's successful at it.
And sixteen-year-old Mitaka made his troth: he would help Hux when he clearly wouldn't do it for himself.
Mitaka would leave green tea, which he would buy from the black market, out for Hux whenever the studious red-head decided to pull a late-night cram session in the library.
He would leave out hand-stitched handkerchiefs whenever Hux had a big speech to give. Because when Mitaka caught Hux coughing up blood the first time, he found out that Hux had to give a speech later that day.
He would leave out hot towels whenever Hux got sent to the Commandant's office. Mitaka always imagined that being the Commandant's perfect son was more trying than giving a speech.
He did all of that and more until Hux graduated at eighteen and left for some secret assignment at nineteen. And Mitaka had to wait many, many years before he was in Hux's orbit again. And he resumed his duty as Hux's invisible protector.
But then, Kylo Ren choked him and Hux had to intercede to be his protector.
He hadn't felt like such a failure since….
But that's all in the past. Hux is taking the day-off. Kylo Ren is actually quiet. And I am fine! And Mitaka believes this until Lieutenant Colonel Zack had to show him a video. A video recovered from a broken elevator. A video about General Hux and Kylo Ren.
Kylo Ren has General Hux pinned to the floor stained with blood that Hux coughed up mere moments ago. Kylo Ren rips through the latches on the General's greatcoat and on his tunic, revealing his pale and supremely underweight frame. His leather-clad hands roam across the General's chest like he's trying to find the chink in his boney armor. Hux is saying something, but Mitaka does not hear it. In fact, he does not hear any sound at all, except the intensity of his own psyche.
A man in black clawing and ripping through Momma's—
Blood under Daddy's red-head—
Stop.
Stop!
STOP!
NO!
It is happening again…..
Lieutenant Colonel Zack is terrified. And while that is a natural state of being thanks to Darth Tantrum, but he's with the last person in the galaxy that should be able to scare him shitless. Lieutenant Dopheld Mitaka.
Mitaka is the sweetest person aboard the ship and perhaps in the entire First Order. He can be strict, but he's not cold like General Hux or pfassking psychopath like Kylo Ren. No, Mitaka is like a cinnamon roll. He's warm to the point of being gooey; he even gushed like a school girl when Zack showed him holos of his son. He even smells like cinnamon for stars' sake!
But as the video plays, as General Hux is allegedly being molested by Kylo Ren, Mitaka's eyes change. They don't change colors like he's some kind of secret Sith Lord.
No, it's like watching a light slowly die. Brown eyes as light as milk chocolate go to hazel.
Go to caramel.
Go to gingerbread.
Go to hickory.
And stay at umber.
"Lieutenant Colonel." Zack freezes at the hollowness in Mitaka's voice. Zack tries to respond, he can feel his brain trying to supply words for his mouth, but he's unable to say anything.
"Tell Chief Petty Officer Umano to cover my shift. I need to speak with Kylo Ren." Zack's eyes widen at Mitaka, the protocol-abiding ball of sweetness, purposely disrespecting Darth Tantrum.
Zack can only nod his head like the good little subordinate who wants to keep his head. Mitaka, the Cinnamon Roll of the First Order, leaves the security feed room. And Zack has only one thought in mind as he watches the Lieutenant leave.
Someone is going to die.
Author's Comments- Here are the links:
This is what I imagined while writing Mitaka's scene. This clip is from School-Live, or better known as Gakkou Gurashi, episode six, so if you were planning to watch that show, I would advise you not to click on the link. Also, Mitaka is like Yuuki, or the pink-haired girl, in this scene. He goes from happy to…. : a href=" watch?v=jM3t6_9N0cE"Link/a
You know Dopheld Mitaka was supposed to be one of the few people aboard the Finalizer to have a loving, happy childhood free of any sort of tragedy. But then this thought popped in my head: "What if Dopheld Mitaka was the most tragic person on the ship?" Like Kylo Ren and Armitage Hux have tragedies, but Dopheld Mitaka's tragedy beats the ever-loving shit out of theirs. Also, I like to believe that Dopheld Mitaka "watched" Hux from afar while in their Academy.
Anyways, Kylo Ren fucks up….is anyone surprised by that? I'm not.
Oh, and in the next chapter you get to find out if Mitaka snaps and strangles Kylo Ren to death with ropes of uncooked cinnamon rolls!