"Ah, you're awake!" an unwarrantedly cheery voice greeted him, laced with a grating, unfamiliar accent.
Hux's head was pounding – or maybe that was his heart – and his nose was filled with the pineapple stench of bacta. His upper lip curled in disgust, the scent bringing to mind his father's death as it always did. He looked around the room, only able to make out that it was a sort of medbay and not the standard colors and construction of the Empire or the First Order. It made him uneasy. His sight was blurry as well. He tried to rub at his eyes, but his wrists were restrained. He looked down at that with growing fear.
"Oh, don't you worry about that," the voice continued confidently. It was coming from a greenish-blue rodian who was wearing the most generic of plain white medical smock. It looked nothing like a uniform. "We'll let you go as soon as you're oriented. People who get stuck in stasis as long as you were sometimes come out a little wonky. Takes a while to restart the brain properly. Sometimes people report hallucinations or visions. You didn't have any, did you?"
He thought of the boy he'd dreamed of meeting in the desert. He thought of the hole in his heart, the pointlessness of his life, the bitter failure and unfairness of so much struggle and pain and fear only to be shot down by one of his father's cronies like a sort of delayed vengeance for offing his old man. He could smell his father's death and feel the shackles on his wrists. "No."
"Ah, well, too bad. Some people find it a spiritual experience. I've heard there're rich folks in the core who use stasis fields for non-emergency purposes just to induce that sort of thing. But that's not what happened to you."
"What … what did happen to me?" He distinctly remembered getting shot in the chest. The haze he'd felt over his mind during the desert vision was gone.
"Oh? I'm not entirely sure. You were in a stasis pod. When we cracked it open, you'd been shot a few times and there was some attempt to treat the wounds. I wouldn't have expected a general to get into combat personally, but that big battle was a mess for everyone. Anything could have happened. Do you remember it?"
He decided not to answer that one – at least, not while he was still in restraints and didn't know the situation. "Where am I?"
"On Exegol."
"Oh." Then he hadn't gone far after his last conscious position. "What about the Sith cultists?"
"They're being rehabilitated as much as we can. First thing up was disaster recovery. Even though their civilization is underground, all the debris and entire ships crashing into the surface wrecked their society. We've relocated refugees and organized survivors, dug out what we could – and that's where you come in! The medbay of a Resurgent-class ship was probably the safest place to be in all that, especially sealed up like you were. They have their own power supply, you know?"
He did know that. It was one of the many philosophical changes between the Empire (whose ships were war machines) and the First Order (whose ships were mobile cities). The Empire's most hardened spots were the guns. For the First Order, it was power, air, and water in that order; weapons were useless if your people were dead. Thematically, it was no surprise that Palpatine wanted to strap planet-killers to all their ships – as an imperial, he didn't see them as homes, only as weapon platforms. "Why was I in a stasis pod?"
"You tell me." The being stopped, stared, and waited for an answer Hux didn't have to give. Who had thought to stick him in a stasis pod? And for what reason? So Pryde could torture him further later on? Although he remembered plenty, his memories cut out after the bridge.
"What … what happened in the battle? Who won?"
"Oh, we did. All of us. The galaxy, that is."
"You mean, the rebels."
"No, not exactly. I meant what I said. The galaxy. All of us. We're all on the same side now. Remaining Final Order ships either suicided or defected to the New Republic."
"What? De-defected?" Or suicided. A year earlier, he would have thought suicide was the honorable solution. But then the Sith had rose to power. Snoke had been bad enough. Kylo Ren had been worse. And Palpatine would be worst of all.
"Yep. That was it. The First Order, Final Order, whatever – lost all their leadership here – except you, but they didn't know that – and thought they had a choice between trying to find another Sith to lead them or switching sides. Given there's a shortage of Sith these days, most of them switched. There's probably still holdouts here and there."
"Exegol is full of Sith."
"Cultists – full of Sith cultists. What good is a cult without a leader? They're … kind of in the middle of a cultural revolution at the moment. It's messy. But not your problem."
"What would my problem be?"
"Oh, I don't know. Getting on with your life, probably. I'm going to go ahead and release these restraints now, although it'd be funny to leave you strapped down and let them talk to you as you are. Probably not ethical, though." The rodian sighed and opened the cuffs.
Ah, the interrogators. Hux had wondered when they'd be mentioned. But if that was the case, then why release him? "Who are these 'them' who wish to speak to me?"
"Reporters. Journalists. Publicists. Whatever. I dare say you'll need to get an agent, maybe some staff."
"An agent? For what?" Hux sat up, swinging his feet over the side of the table. No move was made to prevent him from leaving. He felt stable enough – no longer dizzy or disoriented. His vision was sharp now, although he could still smell the repugnant bacta. He must have been submerged in the stuff.
"Well. You know. For you." The rodian doctor waved generally at Hux's entire body.
Hux looked up and down himself, not understanding. He wasn't dressed as a general anymore, or even a member of the First Order. He was wearing simple a cream-colored medical smock with similar trousers, loose, comfortable, and not very different from what the rodian was wearing. There was nothing distinctive or remarkable about it.
"You're the spy that saved the galaxy. You're a bigger deal than Luke Skywalker. Don't you know? You're a hero!"
"A what?"
"You're the reason why the Final Order ships all defected and the war ended. You died freeing Mighty Chewbacca and the last two generals of the Resistance. Or something like that, right? That's the story at least. It always felt a little played up to me, but they're the ones telling it. Had to be mostly true, right?"
"'They'? They're the ones telling it?" He had to mean Dameron and Finn. The Wookiee had famously said little after the Rebellion. There was no reason why he'd change that now.
"Uh-huh."
"What- What's the story? Tell me."
"You freed them and then you knew you'd be killed for it. You know, General Pryde or Parnassos … Malevolent … um, Palpatine! That's his name." The rodian tapped his sucker-tipped fingers together with a popping sound. "He would have done it. Story was you took control of the bridge from Pryde and piloted the ship down right into the planet, right on top of Parnapine's headquarters!" Hux blinked at him, baffled in this sudden departure from any possibility of fact. "But, you know, if that had really happened –" The rodian waved at his whole body again. "You wouldn't be here."
One thing Hux had going strongly in his favor was decades of experience in schooling his expression. He decided this was a good time to look mildly interested, as his mind tried to make sense of the alternate reality where he'd wrested control of a star destroyer and crashed it on top of a Sith lord. Was the story that he'd personally killed Palpatine? Himself? Intentionally?
"Like I said," the doctor went on, "medbay in a stasis pod was the safest place to be! But I can't really see how you managed both at the same time. I guess you saw some action between saving the galaxy and getting in the pod, huh?"
"I'm a hero, did you say?"
"Yep. Biggest in the galaxy. We've tried to keep things under wraps while you were convalescing in the bacta, telling everyone that obviously you can't talk to them as you were unconscious. But not anymore! You really should get an agent. People are going to be beating down your door to get your story!" The doctor leaned forward, antennae waggling distractingly. "You wouldn't happen to be willing to share some of that story with me, would you?"
"No."