The day that he'd lured her to the cold storage unit had not been a proud one for him. Bringing her there had been a moment of weakness. They'd captured the resistance pilot after the incursion on Jakku, the same pilot that had been eluding him for so long, and one of his own storm troopers had helped him to escape. It wasn't a complete rout, grudging thanks due to Ren who had learned that they needed to find a droid, but it was a mark against him, certainly, that one of his own legion had defected.
That particular trooper, FN2187, had always shown signs of aberrancy though nothing egregious enough to act upon. Phasma had been squawking about him for a while. If the soldier had been a droid, Armitage would have felt responsible for the faulty programming. But ultimately what everyone failed
to grasp was that this was a man, and no matter how early he started training them or how deeply they were conditioned, there was always an element of free will that he would never be able to erase. He'd shown it himself, when he'd killed his father. Alcean MOs showed it when they couldn't suppress their expressions the way that they were supposed to. The point was to make the First Order such a monolith that it never occurred to anyone to defy it. He wrote the daily comm messages with that goal in mind, long live the great, unconquerable First Order and all that. But belief and patriotism and obedience, all of them ultimately were a choice. The real struggle was to make the choice obvious so that storm troopers would choose the First Order every time.
Ren's suggestion that they go back to using clones rankled. For all of his father's faults, he had been right in that their program was not only superior, but also substantially cheaper than using clones. The methods were sound: there were thousands of examples of it working and just this one instance where it didn't. He found himself using Brendol's arguments throughout the day and while he recognized that he could value the methods and not the man, his father's words had conjured their author, and it made Armitage jumpy.
Even now that he was dead, just the mention of Brendol was enough to set Armitage's teeth on edge. His father was a monster in the way of some gods, capable of great love and cataclysmic anger. When Brendol praised, it was hard not to feel like the center of the very universe. But his praise was miserly, which made earning it that much more precious. His words stung more than his slaps and all throughout the day the trooper defected, Armitage could hear his father's voice in his head. Brendol would have found the aberrancy sooner, Armitage missed it because Armitage was stupid, because he was distractable, because he was so close but not quite good enough, and unworthy of the armies and the program that had been bequeathed to him.
Ren made him nervous in the same way that his father made him nervous, though Ren's was all of the violence and none of the guile. His father's rage was precise and intentional, while Ren's was as indifferent as the ocean. But both men were dangerous in their way. When Ren's voice became still, it reminded him of the sucking of the grey sand as the tides came in back at the academy, of watching the seemingly solid surface collapse into runnels before the wall of seawater obliterated them completely, an awesome but dumb destructive force. His father, by contrast, would sidle closer like a stalking cat just before grabbing him by his collar, shaking him so that his head would rattle into the wall behind him.
He'd felt Ren on the outskirts of his mind and had noticed that sometimes Ren looked directly at him during meetings, as though overhearing his thoughts. He'd figured out that Ren could grasp his emotional temperature and had seen a few displays of his terrific power, of his ability to bring men to their knees merely by pinching his fingers.
But Ren was also fundamentally an idiot. He didn't know how to move troops around, didn't know how many men to commit to an engagement. His primary utility was as a weapon and in using his arcane religion the same way one would use a scenting hound. Find this, get that. When strategizing, he and Phasma spoke of deploying Ren the same way they spoke of the big artillery pieces. Ren at least felt flankable, if Armitage could only bide, adder-like, and wait for the right moment. But Brendol still seemed untouchable, for all that he was dead and that he and Phasma had killed him.
He'd maintained his composure, but the maintenance had been costly. When he finally retired to his quarters midway through the second shift, he was exhausted from willing himself to stillness instead of wincing at Ren's sudden movements, from trying to ignore his father's insults echoing in his head.
The notification of the arrival of the vaccines came just as he was about to pop the cork on a bottle of wine. The vaccines reminded him of her, and he considered that an evening being lectured at about viral infections might be better than drinking four or five glasses of wine alone until he drowned out his father's voice with alcohol. He could absolutely delegate this task to subordinates, indeed unloading shipping containers was likely performed by droids, but she didn't know that and wasn't in any position to ask questions. He wanted to see her tonight. Though flimsy reasoning, this was their particular project, and it made a kind of sense that they would have to deal with it together.
He'd regretted his weakness as he stood in the infirmary, waiting for her like a suitor, reading an uncomfortable poster about wearing rubbers during shore leave to prevent diseases. It made what he was doing vulgar. Everything thus far was completely above-board and would be faultless with human resources: an understaffed and toothless department anyway (though they might note that he had no reason to access her personnel file every night.) The poster had made him aware, however, of a dark undercurrent that made whispered suggestions: she had been on her knees beside his chair, he was about to ask her to come with him alone to the very depths of the ship.
She looked unsure when she came out to meet him. He had misjudged and now he couldn't un-summon her without looking ridiculous and strange. On the walk down to the storage units, he didn't look behind to see if she followed him because if he did his nerve would fail him completely. He also had nothing to say. On its face it was really quite sad: he was so starved for anyone's regard that he had fallen into an obsession because of a glance. He tried to soothe himself: he was the foremost officer on the Finalizer and she was nothing, but this was an empty comfort. He felt stripped of all of his titles and his every shame seemed to line the halls as he led her, to taunt him with his worthlessness. He half-believed that if he turned around, she wouldn't be there, proving how hollow his authority actually was. And without his title, who was he, exactly?
He had time to reflect on how he had bungled this in spectacular fashion as Beatrice searched the first shipping container. Mortified, he sank deeper into the shell of his title. At least he had that.
He heard banging as she climbed the inside and perched herself on the corner. She looked so small and cold up there that he was able to set aside his embarrassment for a second to try to get her down. She tried to climb down alone until she hurt herself on the side and fell into him. Her cheek grazed his jaw; she smelled like regulation soap and antiseptic. Under that, though she smelled vaguely familiar, like a spice drawer in the kitchens where his mother worked. Her body was warm as it slid against his and Armitage Hux was completely undone.
But she looked terrified: she kept her wide eyes to the ground, her body shrinking in on itself, a stiff apology on her tongue. He didn't want to hear an apology or to be frightening to her, he wanted her to look at him with fondness again, he wanted to hear his name carried on her voice and he wanted to see how she would react when he said her own.
She demurred at first but he could see plainly that she wanted to, so he pressed her, knowing that if he gave her a command, she couldn't say no. When she obliged him, his name, which ordinarily he hated, sounded glorious. The rest of that whole episode he had felt out of control, as though he were at the point in drunkenness where restraint slips its lead and one more drink multiplies into three, where the ground is unsteady because gravity itself becomes changeable. Shocked at his own familiarity with her, he marveled at how stupid and casual he had been. He had certainly not comported himself like a general. But if he had, she never would have taken his hand.
So he started taking meals in the rostral mess instead of his room, in hopes that perhaps he would see her there. In the shower, he imagined deft and cool hands and generally followed those thoughts to their embarrassing but satisfying conclusion. In the mornings, before the hall lights came on fully to indicate the start of the first shift, his habit had been to read the market reports with his first cup of tea when it was too early for anyone to disturb him. Instead, he learned about Alcea, attacking the problem of Bea the way he did everything else, reading everything that he could find. The pages of economic readouts remained abandoned in the corner of his desk.
He hadn't known much about her homeworld, other than it stayed semi-autonomous by selling off half of its yearly class of MOs and engineers to the First Order. Even by Imperial standards, Alcea was chillingly bureaucratic. Children stayed with their mothers until they were three, then they were sent to General Academies. By ten they were divided by attribute into specialized schools, which produced engineers, physicians, farmers and lawyers. They had a reputation for rigid utilitarianism and bloodless was a slur used to insult them. His research was not a complete waste of his time, and he made note of some of their training timetables, intending to implement some of their tactics in his own legions.
He felt insane, he felt like he had a fever, he felt like his bed was suddenly empty, he felt like he was touching himself too much. But he had never so badly wanted someone. Which was ridiculous and a form of weakness and why couldn't he get this insignificant MO out of his thoughts? Surely, he had built her up in his mind, had manufactured these feelings. Her hands were the first that had touched him in a very great while and that starvation was playing tricks on him. He liked to think his mind was stronger than his body, but he couldn't deny this urge. He could dispel it by seeing her again; then he would see that their jokes weren't funny or that her eyes were a weak grey instead of glacial blue. Maybe she had a moustache that he didn't remember over her animated mouth with her lovely white teeth. Or perhaps she was just as charming and pretty as he remembered but maybe their congress would not be satisfactory. How could it be, when she was obliged to perform for him? Her participation would be obligatory because her ranking was so far below his and her relative deference to him was proof that she knew that. She couldn't possibly live up to the succubus that had taken up residence in his mind. Getting it over with would allow him to go back to way things had been.