Chapter Text
1.
There are two philosophies in the Galaxy. Two philosophies that are made to guide every sentient being throughout the course of their existence, two philosophies, neither light nor dark, governing the universe finitely. Finn has, over the course of the war, come to know both philosophies with an intimacy he’d never desired-- he left the Order because he wanted to escape, not because he had any longing to become another side’s pawn. A soldier in another army, upholding ideals of the Resistance’s supposed “good nature” that were intrinsically all too familiar.
The First Order. The Resistance. Of course, each had different principles, each was divided based on their method of warfare, the promotion of order versus peace… but it hadn’t changed that the Resistance was an army too. Sure, they were an army with ethics, less bound by a script of rules and regulations... that didn’t change the fact they were at war. The knowledge that they were soldiers in war, on a battlefield, upholding the goals of their own High Command.
Perhaps, Finn considers, that is the reason why he’s never felt truly at home, even here on D’Qar.
Perhaps this… dim, grey paradigm is why, even when the war is long over, the conflict coming to an end, he can hardly stand the hours in the barracks at night, listening to his friends drink and laugh and reminisce. And it isn’t that Finn doesn’t want to join in, that he isn’t one for post-war merriment; it’s simply that he can’t reminisce the way Poe can, or Jess, or Snap.
So he finds himself withdrawing, holding in his emotional whims, the memories he so desperately wants to express yet is unable to-- he tries to smile more, makes comments in jest, attempts to cover up the hole shorn through his chest, the missing part of his being that he could never recapture. It’s always there-- nameless, orphaned, trained for one purpose-- a weight on his chest that wakes Finn at night, gasping for breath and straining against a presence he can’t see.
The irony is that it’s only when Rey comes back, late that year, a lightsaber clipped to her belt and dragging two shackled figures behind her, that Finn realizes how out of place he’s been through these months-- how, regardless of what the pilots, the footsoldiers, any of the Resistance forces go through, they will never understand what it is like to be alone, to be owned, lacking autonomy, degraded to nothing more than a mound of flesh in a metal uniform --!
When Rey returns, and Finn grips her about the waist, hugs her close to him and tells her how relieved he is that she’s safe, how much he’s missed her, he wonders if the void will close, if he’ll be capable of finding himself, whoever Finn is supposed to be, separate from FN-2187.
And yet it is only when his gaze--dark, filled with spirit and yet utterly lost, hopeful, though hopelessly yearning-- meets the cool, overcast green of the captured General Hux’s eyes that Finn feels any relief.
Finn does not want anything to do with General Hux.
He supposes it shouldn’t be any surprise. Leia is very accommodating to keep him from even setting foot in the same room as the man, and Poe is always there to sling an arm about Finn’s shoulders, pat him on the back with a reminder of “hey, it’ll be okay, buddy.” They tell him that Hux (it’s Hux now, not ‘General’) is facing execution; that execution is a sure fate, with all the strife he’d caused. Starkiller was only the beginning.
It’s all well and good; Finn should feel reassured, should feel at ease, that he’s not being asked to confront the sole remnant of the Order he’s come to loathe more than almost anything.
He doesn’t.
He finds himself, on more than one occasion, sitting on the other side of a dimmed-glass screen, watching the former General toss and turn in his bed, his hair messy and fragile, pale arms gripping the sheets tight enough to rip them. Hux is smaller without his uniform, and far less intimidating when his skinny, translucent legs are on display and his face is lined by short stubble from a lack of shaving.
Were the officers allowed to shave? Stormtroopers were injected to prevent the growth of excess hair; it came along with their vaccinations, everything clean and sterile and lifeless. Like they hadn’t wanted any of them to have personality, so they’d taken away their definitive traits just as they took away their names.
Finn’s nails dig deep into his own palm.
He wants to talk to Hux. He wants to scream at him, grasp him by the shoulders and throttle him and ask him, why, why did you do this to us, why do you treat everything like it’s disposable, why are you acting like this is a game, why are you able to sleep at night, I hate you, I hate--!
Hux moves.
He’s sitting up now, in his bed, and his eyes are so dull, bloodshot and leveled by the black-purple circles underneath them, a testament to how little he’d been able to sleep. Good, Finn wants to say, good, because he doesn’t deserve it, he’s a murderer, a psychopath. But then, he stops; mid-thought, Finn’s eyes wander, trail along Hux’s protruding ribs, how sickly he looks now. Tall, yes, but not imposing—more a sycophant than a psychopath.
He thinks to leave; tells himself he should, because he shouldn’t be here in the first place, late at night, watching his enemy’s chest heave as he pulls the thin blanket further around his waifish form, lip curling in a deep-set sneer. Finn steps back, his boot scuffing against the floor, his eyes wide, as though waking from a trance, wondering why he’d come here in the first place. Hux looks exactly the same, when he sneers like that, a look of contempt and utter revulsion that makes Finn’s skin prick from terror.
And then he smiles.
It’s an unpleasant smile, more devious and wicked than anything, as though Hux was in the midst of plotting Finn’s demise without even seeing him. The ex-Stormtrooper lets out his breath, a labored sigh in the taciturn room, and averts his gaze.
“Hello,” Hux begins, “FN-2187.”
Hux doesn’t talk to anyone.
The interrogators, the negotiators, the General... no, he remains painfully silent, always with that odious scowl plastered onto his pasty features, his glum, dead eyes glinting as though he knows something nobody else does.
Finn isn’t sure whether it’s horrifying or alleviating, to realize that the only words Hux has uttered since being captured are Hello, FN-2187. He isn’t sure if it’s wrong, that he’s been suddenly entranced, affixed with a need to hear Hux speak, a need to have his own thoughts affirmed, his innermost fears, emotions and desires acknowledged by the only other person on this base who is capable of understanding.
Finn doesn’t want to negotiate with Hux, but he wants to speak with him, and it’s a dreadful contention, this indecision.
He attempts to settle his own mind, speeding like the Falcon through hyperspace, over lunch with Rey, sitting knee-to-knee across from her, listening to the story of how she caught the last remnants of Order command, how Kylo Ren killed Snoke with the help of Luke Skywalker, only to be grievously wounded. She tells him she can’t forgive him, what he did to her-- “ having someone so deep in your mind like that, Finn… it’s a violation I can’t even describe.”-- even if Leia still wants to, clinging to the feeble remains of her son, just like her husband.
Finn understands. He doesn’t think he could forgive them, either-- could never forgive the people who brainwashed him, who tortured him, who made him stand idly by as his friends died without being allowed a single thought of his own unless he wanted to be reconditioned.
He visits Hux’s cell again, anyway.
It’s eerie, the isolation ward late at night, hardly a soul awake to pass through the halls, not that there was a need to in the first place. The guard is half-asleep at his monitor, but he knows Finn, and he nods to him, mumbles something about can’t wait until we execute that Order scum as Finn takes a seat by the plexiglass shield once more.
Hux is lying on his side, but his eyes are wide open, and he’s staring straight at Finn.
Hello, FN-2187, he mouths, and Finn is gripped by the urge to retreat, get away before Hux turns on him further, walks to the edge of the transparisteel barrier and breaks through it and kills him, all the while spitting, traitortraitortraitor.
But he can’t move; he sits there, and he leans forward, and he watches as Hux resettles himself, the edge of a bony hipbone peeking from under the line of his sheet, his undershirt worn and riddled through with holes. Finn adjusts the lightweight jacket across his shoulders in a moment of self-consciousness.
“Can you hear me?” he questions.
Hux doesn’t answer. Not for a good few minutes, until Finn is nearly ready to give up altogether, his aimless wandering as fruitless as ever.
“Sometimes I wonder,” Hux begins, and Finn jolts. “How you did it, FN-2187. How you went against the orders that had been… programmed into you from birth. Why was it so easy for you to turn? Misplaced judgment? Empathy? I remember the Captain telling me you were… predisposed to compassion.”
Hux is facing away from him now, his usually neat ginger locks matted with grime and grease. “I wonder why I didn’t turn out like you. You see, I was also indicted young… five years old, to be exact. My father didn’t even think I had the capability to serve, but I’ve proved him wrong. The fool’s dead, anyway, and incapable of defending himself. He made me sick, Eight-Seven-- the same way I must make you sick, vile as I am. How amusing.”
Finn stands, and his hands ball tighter and tighter, blood dripping from his palms. Quit talking-- quit talking, I don’t want to hear your voice, I can’t listen--
“I don’t think anyone else could understand us,” Hux murmurs. “The way we understand each other.”
“I want to talk to him,” Finn tells Leia that morning, when he finds her in her office once again, ending a rather lengthy, windswept conversation with Luke. Her face betrays no formal surprise at the request, but her eyes are watchful, searching, as if questioning his true motive—the very action makes Finn stiffen, his back arched and rigid in a facsimile military stance.
“Who?” Leia asks, then, her lips pursed and her face a mask of elegance as she stands, a commanding presence if there ever was one.
“Hux.”
He doesn’t need to say another word, for the single syllable of Hux’s name carries a tone to it, bearing desperation and exhaustion and vitreous vitriol. Leia pauses a moment, then nods, a quick motion of her chin as she stands and waves Finn toward the door.
She doesn’t ask why he wants to talk to someone with a hand in ruining his life, nor does she attempt to question him or undermine his motives aloud, and for that, Finn is grateful. What Leia does, with a thin, tight-lipped smile and wizened eyes, is grip his hand tight in her own and nod.
Before he can walk through the door, she whispers, shrewdly, “Take care of yourself. May the Force be with you.”
The metal door slides open, vacant and beckoning. Hux sits on his bed, still as ever, a man made from glass but held together like stone; he turns his head, and Finn refuses to shy away under the derision, the loathing in that gaze. He steadies himself, visage neutral and uncaring, as though he is at all capable of hiding his hatred for the man before him. Hux smiles, again; soft, but not genuine, chapped lips parted to speak.
“FN-2187. What a lovely surprise.”
For the first time since Hux’s capture, since Finn’s defection, the once clear-cut borders of Resistance and Order are unclear.
“Please. Take a seat, won’t you?”
“On your bed?” Finn asks, disbelieving.
“Excuse me for not thinking to have a chair. Your Resistance friends tend to prefer bringing their own.” Hux flexes his wrists, exposing the mottled scars lining his pale skin-- recent, apparently, and poorly healed. Finn denies that the sight has an effect.
“So even isolation can’t make you nice, can it?” Finn snaps back. “I don’t know why I expected otherwise. Is this just some sort of power play, Hux? Is that what this is?”
“Shouldn’t you tell me, soldier? I didn’t make you come here. I didn’t force you to talk to me. Petty accusations. Not sure what I expected from a Resistance brat.”
“Petty!” Finn scoffs. “Have you listened to yourself, Hux? Throwing around insults like they’re some sort of defense against interrogation? You’re here. You were captured. So I’m not sure why you seem to think you have the right to insult me when I don’t even have to kriffing talk to you.” The ex-trooper halts mid-sentence, adjusting his stance, fidgeting somewhat awkwardly in the now tense silence beside his former superior— commander, even.
“You’re right,” Finn says then, continuing, and Hux’s eyes shoot up, laced with an amalgamation of mirth and scorn. “You’re right, Hux, I don’t have to be here. I wasn’t forced to talk to you—I came here of my own accord. And it’s obvious now that… that coming here wasn’t even worth it to begin with.”
As Finn turns his back to the irate red-haired man, still slumped half on his side in the hard, metal bed, disheveled, sweaty and clearly frustrated by the scenario at large, he does not expect to hear a laugh.
Hux is haughty, and his short bark of laughter is the sort to prick at Finn’s ears, draw him back to a defensive manner, unnerved and uncertain. “I hadn’t thought you had it in you—to lash out like that. I… I can see why Phasma always said you were different. She spoke quite highly of you, for a time.”
“Did she?” Finn questioned, thoroughly confused, training his eyes on the older officer, waiting for him to continue.
“Oh, yes. Highest marks during simulations and training… devout willingness and a desire to succeed.” Hux pauses, draws his tongue over his lips. “I was top of my class as well, you know, going through the Academy. It was a different kind of rigor, I suppose—as you can see now, I’ve always been… somewhat ill-favored, physically.”
“And did they recondition you as well, if you stepped out of line?” Finn quests, finding it impossible to quell the sudden hostility within him. “Did they mock you for treating your fellows with sympathy, did they rip away all sense of your humanity, your independence? Hm, Hux?”
“No.”
For a moment, Finn considers that those words might be it, that Hux will clam up once more, draw his pale pink lips tight together and refuse to speak.
But he continues. “My father implemented the Stormtrooper program, you realize? It was—inherited, I suppose, once I was old enough to continue with my career. But it was not built on independence, FN-2187, as you of all people should know. To think the officer’s regimen was any different, in that regard, is laughable. They enjoyed goading us into inflicting violence for the sake of pride; my skill was primarily academic, and therefore, I was often confronted and beat . I daresay the experience is incomparable to yours, but you should realize that even the Order’s current methods could have been much worse.”
Finn can’t find himself able to muster a response; his feet step backwards, edging toward the door until his shoulder bumps the transparisteel again, startling.
“At least… at least you had an identity.”
It is a full month before Finn sees Hux again.
The aftermath of the Order’s systematic destruction and the Republic’s inevitable dismissal of the Resistance once more has left him tense, from high up in his shoulders to the deeply-sore soles of his feet, always aching. Finn wishes for nothing more than a day of solitude, a few moments to lock himself away in his rooms and not emerge until after the negotiating has finished. He hasn’t had any desire to deal with Hux’s ineloquent sarcasm or the egotism he brims with.
But Hux is a dead man walking, and Finn seems to be just as painfully aware of it as the General is himself. The speeches, the interrogations, the mindless drivel… “none of it matters,” Hux tells him one day, confidently, as he picks at one of his chipped nails, a fixed expression of loathing smeared over his face, only adding to the expression of perpetual disgust usually displayed. “The Resistance is a leechpit, the Order monotonous… but both are dead now, FN-2187. Surely even you’re aware of it.”
To say he was aware is an understatement; Finn has never felt more on edge, more uneasy than he does in the midst of conferences, at General Organa’s side or sitting with Poe, listening to how freely he discusses the atrocities they’re still in the midst of.
“It’s war,” someone tells him, and Finn wants to remark, the war’s over, the fighting’s done. It’s the diplomacy that is making everything fall apart, don’t you understand?
“-- we need to enclose upon the Order’s territory--”
“-- Starkiller should be executed; it’s not as if he deserves any better. He’s a kriffing murderer, billions of people--”
“-- the Republic wishes to reintegrate the galaxy. Sympathizers will be banished in the Outer Rim, under strict watch-- propaganda halted, they can’t--”
“The Empire needs children,” Hux says, a soft mutter through the air surrounding them. Finn’s eyes snap up to his face, even, pallid features so still it’s as if he’s wearing a mask. The silence of the room they’ve been keeping warm has left little space for anything but thought; internal musing and mental cries of irrationality. Hux had been despondent that day, hardly speaking a word as he lay there on his side, fidgeting with his hair, clothing and the metal bar of his cot.
“What?” Finn stammers, finally, astonished.
“The Empire needs children,” Hux swallowed. “That’s what she said. And my father agreed. It’s the reason the Order began, all of it-- the Stormtrooper program, why I wasn’t cast aside for being a weak-willed bastard. They said it would be better to… to mould them, as they grew up, and shape them into something better, something pliant and useful . I thought it would work. I never imagined-- the programming, the training, the relocation… it was all so precise.”
Finn snaps to alertness; his eyes feel strained, bloodshot and rubbed dry from lack of sleep that Hux appears all too well-acquainted with. He pulls in on himself, glances to the door.
“Why are you telling me this?” He begins. “And-- and why now? Why do you act like… like you have some sort of remorse about what happened? Is that what this is, remorse? Or-- or is it all an act? The Order is-- they steal us from our families, they brainwash us, they--”
Finn can’t tell when he begins to cry; the tears sting like venom as they trail over his cheeks, and his dark eyelashes flutter, grip on his chair so tight it could nearly rend the metal apart with a bit more pressing. He gasps, once, allows his eyes to fall shut, until the only thing he can see is the pitch across the inside of his lids, shuttered tight to block out the world.
“I don’t know.” Hux confesses, somewhere in the distance, floating about in the oblivion. “You were an anomaly, a testament to… to the wrongness of it. A flaw in the system, glitch in the machine. I didn’t- I didn’t think it was possible, you understand? I never thought… all my life, I listened to what my superiors told me, I took control over others and did what they told me so my father would leave me alone. They told me they’d keep him away from me… they wouldn’t let him beat me or humiliate me or-or use me anymore, as long as I did what they asked and helped them instead. They used that tactic for years, until I was thirteen, until I’d… become this. And the Stormtroopers- you were the same. You carried out tasks to avoid pain, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”
There’s something cold locked around his wrist now, a chill along his skin, the pressure of giving flesh beside him. Finn opens his eyes, stares to find Hux’s hand on his forearm. Abruptly, he feels a longing, deep within his chest, stirring and flaring to life once more. The desire to be understood, for someone to recognize his pain, his loss, his melancholy. But it wasn’t supposed to be Hux-- it was never supposed to be Hux!
The sentence slips out before Finn can stop it.
“It’s… irrational.” His tongue is tied in knots, stomach doing flips beneath his skin; he feels sick, on the verge of lurching forward and retching with each passing second. “It is. That I- that I left. I just… somehow I felt it, y’know? That what the Order was doing-- what I was going to do-- was wrong. And I thought it would change, once I was gone. I thought that I’d have a chance… a chance not to be scared anymore, not to hate myself.
“I thought you were a monster, I thought you made me a monster, but it’s all the same! It never ends, not even here-- there’s always another line, another rank, higher and higher up, each trying to program the next generation of people, trying to fit them into some niche so they comply and they obey. They hand down orders, over and over again, until they’ve shaped their children into whatever they want, and then the children command, and do the same, take others and twist them and bend them to the will of the hierarchy because-- because that’s just what happens!”
The dam bursts and Finn reaches for Hux, seizes the man about the waist and presses his face against his stomach. “Why is it like this? I don’t understand-- why are you like this?” His fist lands against a bony ribcage, once, then again, across Hux’s gut, pounding futily against that icy flesh, watching the throng of purple-black wounds mottle the surface as Hux bites his lip until it bleeds, grips Finn’s shoulder and pushes him away.
He doesn’t speak, not for a long moment. When he finally does, he’s pulling Finn closer, burying the younger’s face in his skinny chest as Finn clutches to him with bruised knuckles and twitching fingers, suddenly wanting Hux closer, his cold skin and messy hair and callous eyes, all of it. And it’s for reasons unknown, something he can’t even fathom, why is Hux here, why does General Starkiller understand, why is he suddenly making so much more sense than anyone ever has?
Hux runs his fingers along the back of Finn’s head, along the shell of his ear until the ex-Stormtrooper tilts his face up, bores into him with all the sorrow and hatred and desperation of a man as damned as he is himself.
“I speak to you…” Hux sighs. “I speak with you because I understand. You’re different, aren't you? Hollow, bitter and agonized, struggling with your own mentality. I feel it too; the blistering pain of memory. But I chose my path… and you chose yours, FN-2187.”
“Finn,” Finn states, bluntly, pulling away, gathering himself once again as he attempts to reseal the cracks in his exterior, patch them up before he leaves once more. “It’s Finn.”
“Finn.” Hux’s lip curls in acknowledgement. “I’m Armitage.”