If it appears that Hux is getting the piss taken out of him...again...
Well, that's because Elena can be an impulsive idiot and doesn't fully process that he's really quite a dangerous little shit.
Disclaimer: do I fucking look like I own anything? No. No I do not. Can't pay legal fees, not worth the effort.
Elena gazed at the back of her companion as he stalked away, over a dish she didn't recognize, but had rationalized with the handy maxim 'when in Rome.' She had a theory on food: if it was meat wrapped in a bread pocket, it was always good, and if it was meat on as stick, same thing—pasta could be iffier, but she was willing to be forgiving at the moment.
Meanwhile, ginger space Hitler was off having a serious existential crisis in the bathroom. That's fun.
Elena took a long draft of the fizzy drink she had ordered—she had pretty much worked 'I have no idea what that is but it looks pretty good to me' into the fabric of her psyche—but paused in drinking it when she heard a distant crash. Anger management issues, much?
Hux swept out of the bathroom again with malevolent poise, eyes burning as onlookers turned to stare. He pinned her with a searingly furious look and deposited himself on his side of the booth. He had removed his greatcoat which was now folded up in the corner of his seat. It added about a third in bulk to his slender frame, and its outsized martial cut had earned him curious glances all through the streets. Now, he just looked like a cosplayer getting his tendies, under the warm sunlight streaming in through the windows, beyond which was Coruscant.
"Everything okay?" she asked, sniffed, and took another drink of fizzy stuff. It kind of tasted like cherry root beer. She tried to sound cheerful, rather than call him out or draw attention to his anger.
For her quip she was rewarded with the coldest look of unmitigated loathing she had ever seen. Elena suspected it was wise to not push her luck any farther than she already had, and decided to poke at the orzo-like pasta on her plate, which she had decided was really delicious. Should she make a comment about Kylo Ren and consoles and pots and kettles and his evident favorite color scheme or would that get her strangled the old-fashioned way…
Probably not. He still had that blaster on him.
"I do not see how you are so calm," Hux snapped, his voice stilled on the surface, but running deep.
She studied him, making a vague gesture with the utensil in her hand, at herself and him and everything around them. "I've already come to terms once with what you're experiencing. It gets old pretty quick. And you're not even being thrown in prison. Lucky you!"
This got his attention. Hux stared at her for several long seconds, so intensely that Elena began to feel uneasy. He really wasn't the sort of creature a sane person should want to get the attention of.
"What do you mean."
"The prison thing or—"
"Don't toy with me."
But it's so easy, I can't help myself. "I mean this isn't the first time my time and space has radically altered."
Short silence. "Explain," he commanded tersely. "What happened. How did it happen?"
"I do recall I told you all about it, but you didn't believe me." Honestly though, I wouldn't have believed me either, so…
He flushed, a pale echo of his hair. "Because what you said contradicted rational possibility!"
"True, but nevertheless, here we are, and now you have no choice but to accept its reality."
He didn't look happy at all with that. "How can it be reversed?"
"If I knew, don't you think I'd have done something about it? I am, er, sorry, though, that you had to be along for the ride on this one. It wasn't intentional." She stuffed a forkful of pasta into her mouth.
"So it's you who causes it? Can it be reversed?"
I thought I just covered this. She held up a finger, finished chewing and swallowing, while waving that idea off. When she spoke, she was still trying to tongue pasta out of her gums, which earned her a very unimpressed look. "I have no idea if it's me who causes it. I know it's happened to me, twice, but so far as I know I've never done anything to trigger it."
"That doesn't preclude the idea that you cause it, somehow."
"I know," she said, and sucked on her tooth. She sniffed again, irritated at the dryness in the air that made her nose run, then set her wrists down on the edge of the table and leaned forward. "I'd have loved to get my feet under me enough to start poking around at what it might have been before I went too far down the rabbit hole, but I got a little bit tied up before that could happen, didn't I?" She raised her eyebrows over pointedly wide eyes at the totally unrepentant General. "Now that it's happened twice, I can look at the two instances and try to see parallels, but…Unfortunately, this world is shaping up to be a beast of a different color."
Hux, who had by now seemed to get ahold of himself completely, sat back and studied her. "…How so?"
She, too, sat back. "This is a different galaxy than the one you know."
"Don't dissemble with me, girl. This is Imperial Center. It is the same galaxy."
"My name is Elena," she said. "General Hugs." And also we're about sixty years in the past, so…no, it's not. Not like you're thinking.
"Hux," he snapped.
She grinned at him. "Not Hugs? No? How 'bout Armie? That one's cute! Little Orphan Armie! You're even a redhead!" She snickered. "Maybe you could teach your Stormtroopers to dance along to It's A Hard Knock Life. Go full Bollywood."
He stared at her for half a second, half in total confusion, half in utter incensed rage, and it was that half second that convinced her she really ought to learn some self-control, because she hadn't just crossed the Rubicon—she had catapulted over it with a big stupid grin on her face.
He slapped her hard enough to turn her head to the side, and fling her glasses from her face. Elena was more offended than actually hurt, and when she looked up at him, a cruel satisfaction burned in his eyes. "Disrespectful child. How dare you."
The diner had gone completely silent as Elena blinked away the stars from her vision, and she rubbed at her cheek to dispel the pain. I'm older than Kylo Ren, thank you very much. It's called moisturizer and sun screen, you pasty shit.
Both of them jumped.
A huge, hulking alien swept in, hauled Hux to his feet, and hurled him around. He reminded Elena of a large, greasy fry cook. He even had a bristly gray mustache.
"Take your hands off me!" Hux yelped indignantly. "Filthy alien—"
An angry murmur rippled through the onlookers, and Elena, too stunned to do anything other than gape at the scene, flinched reflexively at the gentle touch that fell on her shoulder. She looked up and around at a Togruta, leaning down with worry on her face.
"Are you alright?"
She was so surprised that she blurted out the first thing that came to mind. "Yeah, um…he hits like a bitch, so…"
"Does he do this often?"
It took her a moment to really catch up with what was going on, and then Elena started to feel distinctly uncomfortable. Hux was still arguing emphatically with the diner cook—whose face and voice she really felt like she should have remembered—who was warning Hux that he wasn't going to tolerate that kind of behavior in his diner.
Until a few hours ago, slapping was the least of what he could have done to her. Mere hours ago, he could have had her publicly executed by one of his Stormtroopers. He could have had her spaced. He could have been building up to any one of those, but he was building up to one of them—
First you have to get out of this pickle.
"…Yes," she said, sounding considerably more pathetic than she had a second ago. She let her eyes crumple. It was something of a physical effort to make herself look anguished, because she was trying not to burst into very uncomfortable laughter, but she sank her embarrassment into it and watched the Togruta's face contort in sympathetic alarm.
"Liar!" Hux yowled. "Unhand me!"
"Oh, you poor thing," the Togruta said. "Let me see." Elena let her peel her hand from her cheek. "You'll have a bruise."
"Uh, really?" she said, not entirely feigning her disappointment.
"I am the General of the First Order, and I will not be treated this way by aliens!" He really had the Starkiller shouty voice going...
Honestly, she almost felt bad about how easy this was setting up to be. Manipulation wasn't her default, she still felt somewhat uneasy about it, but…
But getting out from under this douchebag's thumb is being handed to you on a silver fucking platter. You'd be an idiot to forego it.
"Should we call the security forces?" asked a third person, a human. A crowd had gathered. Elena slowly realized they were asking her.
"Oh, no, that's not necessary," she stammered, suddenly nervous as well—though for different reasons than what they suspected.
"You can't just allow this kind of abusive behavior to continue," said the Togruta woman, kindly. "It won't get better. It's not worth it. And if he's this bad in public…I can't imagine what he's like in private…"
"Just let us call the security forces. They'll talk to him," the third person said.
Talk to him? I don't think that ever makes much of a difference. In fact I'm pretty sure that if we were in a relationship, this could get me in worse trouble. She strongly suspected that she would also get talked to, and that…
"…Okay," Elena said, with clear misgivings. It probably wasn't safe to get too close to the law; there was still rule of law, here, not law of rule. People followed it, in the main; the Empire opened avenues to illegalities accepted on the downlow, but the Republic had more malicious compliance issues. "Yeah, sure."
She didn't have papers. Shit, I can't believe it took me five minutes to fuck up again. Barely even five minutes. And this time I didn't pop up on a Star Destroyer.
Hux wasn't settling down; the diner cook suddenly shifted again and threw Hux against the bar. The chairs scattered, and Hux collapsed bonelessly.
She actually couldn't tell what the cook had in his hands, but it was small and black. It was too blurry.
"You tried to pull a blaster on me. Stay down." The cook sounded more irritated than hostile, as Hux twitched, and started to try and sit up.
Oh great, I hope my glasses are still in one piece.
She could hear him breathing and snarling, like some kind of trapped, vicious animal. He might have sounded terrified, if he didn't sound so wild. Part of her wanted to tell him to calm the hell down, bite his tongue and minimize the damage to himself. These things were like tar pits and if he got mouthy with the cops it was all over. Honestly, I never thought mom and popping my parents as a kid would pay off with a natural ear for manipulation in my adult life. The problem was, for all it was a reflex, it usually led her straight in over her head, and the follow-through was harder to stick.
Now she had to hope she was good enough to squirm out of this shitshow.
"I'll kill you," he snarled at Elena. "You did this to me!"
Elena felt ice slither through her veins; and she didn't have to fake the horrified look on her face when the Togruta wrapped her arms around Elena's shoulders and hugged her tight. Elena wasn't fond of hugging, but found herself clutching the Togrutan woman's arm, her unfocused eyes wide and staring at the dark, fiery blur. Shit! Her heart beat in her throat, and she sat there paralyzed.
"That's enough," the cook said firmly, stepping between them.
"It's okay, it's okay," the Togruta woman whispered, petting Elena's hair. "Shh…"
Okay, I've gotten this far…
His voice had gone absolutely shrill. "Fix this, you little—"
Shit, shit, shit…
Elena let herself fall back from the confrontation, though she found it difficult. After a certain point, it was important to just let the shitpot stir itself. She waited quietly while someone called the police, and within ten minutes, a pair of cops strode in through the door, while she tried to think up what she was going to tell the cops if they asked her problematic questions. Someone brought her glasses back to her.
She waited anxiously while Hux was dragged to his feet and pulled outside, where he proceeded to get his nose bent out of shape at the first opportunity—
Hux lunged, but was smacked upside the head with a baton and went down again like a sack of potatoes. She winced. Oh, you idiot, where did you think you were going to go with that?
Part of her was very aware that this was happening because of her.
On the other hand, Hux was an asshole, and would have had her executed.
Conflicted didn't begin to cover it.
"Don't look," the Togruta woman said, and covered her eyes. At first Elena started to squirm out of her grasp, then settled.
Oh, man. If I thought I was fucked before…
Okay, so if they ask about us, what's my story again?
And so, the fuckery begins.