Chapter Text
“Sign this,” the black-haired woman in a white lab coat says, pushing several sheets of paper toward Hux. Her tone is brisk, not expecting any arguments, like she just wants to get this over with and move on to the next step of the procedure, whatever it is.
Hux isn’t in the habit of signing things without reading them first, though.
He takes his time studying what apparently is a disclaimer. By signing this, he forfeits any right to sue the First Order for any harm he may come to while participating in what the document politely calls the Experiment. In simple terms, whatever injury he may sustain, up to and including death, the First Order won’t bear any responsibility for it. If he signs this, while being of sound mind and memory, he agrees to become a Lothal pig with even fewer privileges.
It smells so fishy, it downright reeks. But it’s not like Hux has much of a choice.
When Snoke first made him this offer, which sounded more like a command, Hux wondered briefly if he’d been chosen because, in view of the Starkiller fiasco, he was now expendable. No one needs a disgraced general. No one needs someone who let the work of his life crumble into nothingness, felled by a handful of dirty rebels.
This experiment may be Hux’s only chance to redeem himself. It may also be the shortest way to his early grave. Briefly, he wonders if anyone but Millicent will miss him.
He re-reads the disclaimer three more times, mostly to delay the inevitable. He wills his hand not to shake as he leaves his signature on every page. As soon as he’s done, the woman in the lab coat snatches the papers from him and walks toward a door behind her, motioning for him to go through it. If Hux were a religious man, this would be the moment for a quick prayer, but Hux doesn’t believe in any God apart from the cold indifference of space, and space doesn’t listen to anyone, so he sets his shoulders and steps over the threshold.
He finds himself in a bright cube of a room. The wall behind him is painted white and filled with various digital panels. The other three walls are transparisteel. The overhead lampdisks almost blind him, but he can distinguish a shape moving on the other side of the transparisteel. It seems to be standing with its arms crossed, but Hux can’t make out any more details. The head of the figure looks large and misshapen, and Hux guesses it must be Snoke, coming all the way from the Supremacy to the Finalizer to see the experiment with his own eyes.
It must be important, then. Hux may yet live.
Unless the Supreme Leader wants to watch his execution, which isn’t that far from the realm of possibility.
Hux swallows thickly and crosses his hands behind his back in a parade rest. Whatever comes, he’ll meet it with his chin held high. It’s the least he can do under the circumstances.
Frankly, it’s the only thing he can do under the circumstances.
In the middle of the room there is a white one-legged desk with a gleaming silver tube with transparisteel viewports resting on it. There’s something inside the tube, and Hux shifts slightly toward the desk to get a better look. He sees a dark clot of matter, rippling with impatience, swirling inside the tube and smashing against the transparisteel. Whatever it is, it wants out, and Hux is suddenly wary of being in the same room with that thing.
“Subject zero oh nine,” a mechanical voice announces from somewhere above him. Instinctively, he looks up and around, but of course, there’s no one. The voice is cold and dispassionate, as if it isn’t talking about a human life.
Hux may have forfeited his rights to be considered human when he signed that damned disclaimer, but it doesn’t mean he has to like it.
He shudders inwardly, determined to show nothing to whoever is watching. The figure outside the room changes position, coming closer to the transparisteel walls, and it’s definitely Snoke, Hux can discern his garish golden robes, incongruous in the stark lab.
“Subject zero oh nine,” the voice repeats, and it sounds bored. “Are you ready to begin?”
Hux licks his lips. He feels sharp dead skin under his tongue.
“What happened to the previous eight subjects?” he finds himself asking, stalling again, watching the moving mass in the tube in front of him. He doesn’t get scared easily, but he feels terror flood him from the center of his chest, spreading all the way to the ends of his limbs.
“That is none of your concern,” Snoke responds instead of the disembodied voice, and he comes even closer. Hux can finally see his face through the transparisteel. “Subject zero oh nine is ready,” Snoke tells the technician, and Hux can do nothing except clench his teeth and steel himself for whatever is coming for him.
“Initiating the experiment,” the mechanical voice says, and something hisses in the room, like air being released from a punctured lung.
Hux doesn’t close his eyes. His right hand tightens around his left one where they’re crossed behind his back. He watches fate rush toward him as the tube opens and the black mass slithers onto the floor.
“This is the essence of a legendary Force user,” Snoke says from behind the wall, his voice steady and casual as if he’s telling a bedtime story to a child he doesn’t love. “It was found in an abandoned Sith temple and brought here to be studied. It carries a lot of power inside itself.” The black clot writhes on the floor, shooting out short slick tendrils that grope blindly at the air. “Now that power can be yours,” Snoke finishes, looking straight into Hux’s eyes.
Hux doesn’t let his gaze wander. He keeps monitoring the black matter out of the corner of his eye, but he doesn’t look at it directly. The mass makes its way toward him, slithering across the floor in convoluted eights and zigzags, drawing back, then darting forward again. It doesn’t look friendly. If Hux is being honest with himself, it looks terrifying as all fuck.
He grits his teeth and keeps his posture rigid.
The thing on the floor keeps writhing, something hungry in its erratic movements, something that makes Hux hold his breath. He feels blood drain from his face and start pounding in his ears, panic covering his skin in a thin layer of cold sweat. He will not be intimidated by this accursed witchery, he will not give Snoke the satisfaction of seeing him frightened out of his mind. The black mass reaches out a tendril that almost touches the tip of Hux’s boot, and Hux has to suppress a gasp.
It might be the last seconds of his entirely underwhelming life. If that’s true, he’s going to die a failure, barely a footnote in the history of the galaxy, and the thought makes his heart turn to stone. His lips curl in a snarl. He’s not going to end like this. He’s destined for greatness, and nothing will stop him from fulfilling that destiny, not all the Force in the world. His hands ball into fists behind his back, and he fixes the black thing on the floor with a cold, killing glare.
Let it come. Let it do its worst. Hux is ready.
As soon as he thinks that, the black mass erupts, throwing itself at him in a mess of glistening tendrils, attaching itself to the hard lines of his uniform and seeping through it. He feels something vague, like a tickle, where the tendrils come in contact with his bare skin, at his neck, his wrists, his face. It’s simultaneously hot and cold, and it feels like nothing Hux has ever experienced. The blackness dissolves into him, slithering between the cells of his skin, burrowing itself into Hux’s body like it’s water and he’s a sponge.
He thinks he should feel violated. Instead, he barely feels anything at all. His skin tingles lightly where the tendrils had touched it, but he has to concentrate to register it. In less than a few seconds, he’s absorbed the black mass, and he’s still alive and breathing.
A mad joy starts rippling through his body. He has survived. Even if it was supposed to be an execution, he’s come out victorious.
“The assimilation is complete,” the mechanical voice announces in the stillness of the lab.
Hux drops his hands to his sides and looks around. The displays on the back wall show rows of digits and letters that he doesn’t examine too closely. Snoke is hovering by the transparisteel in front of him, his colorless eyes intent on Hux’s still upright form.
“The subject’s vitals are within the norm,” the technician continues, and Hux feels his heart beat rapidly.
He’s okay. Whatever they planned on doing to him, he’s okay. He’s going to live.
There’s a sliding sound behind him and he turns around to look. A niche opens in the white wall and something like a shelf appears. It has a few round gray stones lying on it. The stones look strikingly ordinary, like something one could have found on a beach anywhere.
“Lift them,” Snoke orders, his voice taut. Hux takes a step toward the little shelf, but Snoke stops him. “No,” he barks, and Hux freezes mid-motion. “Use the Force.”
That’s right. The entire purpose of the experiment was to make Hux Force-sensitive, assuming that the process didn’t kill him.
He’s alive, which, he guesses, should mean something, even if it doesn’t mean absolute success. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to feel, what Force-sensitivity feels like, whether he should be experiencing anything extraordinary. He listens for a sensation of power rolling through his body, maybe splashing inside his veins, but he gets nothing. He’s the same Armitage Hux, just the way he was before the black foreign thing seeped into his body and stayed there.
The stones lie in front of him, just ordinary gray pebbles, and yet imbued with so much meaning. Hux lifts his hand, not knowing what else to do. He focuses his entire energy on the stones, willing them to fly. Distantly, he feels something like electricity roll through him, but it’s faint, almost not there at all.
Nothing happens.
He strains his outstretched arm, curling his fingers in a desperate gesture. “Move,” he mutters, not quite registering that he does so as he pushes with his mind. He imagines invisible tendrils shooting out of his palm and weaving around the stones, picking them up and lifting them in the air. He feels beads of sweat dot his forehead while he concentrates.
The stones don’t budge.
He feels nothing. Whatever the black thing inside him is doing, he’s still Force-null, just a useless human without anything special about him. He clicks his tongue in frustration. His hand drops to hang by his side, defeated, and he’s suddenly afraid to turn around and meet Snoke’s eyes.
“It didn’t work,” he says, fighting desperately to keep his shoulders from drooping.
From behind him, he hears Snoke smack his lips.
“A pity,” Snoke’s voice says, and Hux knows disappointment when he hears it.
At least I’m still alive, he thinks, but he doesn’t say it. He knows that, to Snoke, it doesn’t mean anything.
Silence descends onto the lab, with Hux still facing the rocks and Snoke hovering just outside the experiment box. Hux doesn’t know, has no idea what is going to happen next. The possibilities are endless, and he’s never been so frightened in his life, not even when his father turned his red face toward him, screaming at the top of his lungs. At least then he knew what to expect.
This situation is brand new. Anything may happen, and Hux isn’t sure he’s ready for that.
Something moves inside him, a vague feeling, a sort of presence that doesn’t feel altogether foreign. He latches onto the sensation, but it’s gone sooner than he can really focus on it. He doesn’t say anything.
Maybe it was just a trick of his imagination, a bit of wishful thinking, a mad bout of hope.
“Very well,” he hears Snoke say from behind him. Rigidly, he turns around, keeping his gaze low. “You are dismissed.” Snoke waves his arm in front of him, and Hux hears the door hiss open. “You will never talk about what happened in this room,” Snoke adds, when Hux turns around to leave the white box. “You will never tell anyone about what you have seen.”
“Yes, Supreme Leader,” Hux says over his shoulder and walks away.
It takes him twenty minutes of stalking through the Finalizer’s corridors to get to his own quarters. Once inside, he almost stumbles over Millicent, who’d been waiting for him anxiously by the door. She gives him one wary glance and bristles, hissing at him with all the hostility her small body can produce.
“Hey, darling,” he coos, bending down to pet her on the head. She draws back, batting her paw at his hand, claws out. “It’s me, what’s up?” he pleads, but she doesn’t calm down. With an uneasy yowl, she puffs out her tail and bolts away, hiding under Hux’s desk, her round eyes glowing uncannily in the low light of the room.
Disturbed by Millicent’s greeting, Hux walks through the door to his bedroom, where he strips all his clothes and stands in the middle of the room completely naked, feeling his body with trembling fingers. His skin is space-pale and soft, as usual, and he can’t sense anything different about his body. He looks the same. He feels the same. He glances himself over carefully, gliding his hands over every centimeter he can reach. He’s the same Armitage Hux as he was when he left the room this morning.
He wonders if the black mass squirming its way into him was just a product of his imagination.
His head swims, and he suddenly feels very weak, stumbling backwards until his knees hit the bed, then sagging tiredly onto the mattress. He puts his head in his hands and drags his fingers through his hair, messing it up.
“Get your shit together,” he whispers to himself, venomous, angry with himself for showing such deplorable signs of weakness. He’s survived the blasted experiment. He should feel invincible, not swoon on his feet.
He still doesn’t know whether Snoke is planning to punish him in some way or if the Supreme Leader is done with him now. Maybe this already is his punishment: an elaborate way to show him how useless he really is, how he will never amount to anything worthwhile in the First Order. He dismisses the thought. Even if Snoke were devious enough to pull off something like that, Hux isn’t that important to bother. No, the experiment was exactly what it was, and it failed because Hux wasn’t the optimal specimen, and that’s all there is to it. There’s nothing more Hux can do than proceed with his life as if nothing has happened.
Standing up, he stills for a moment, feeling queasy. His skin feels sticky, like he’s covered in some kind of foreign goo. He looks at himself again, but there’s nothing out of the ordinary, at least nothing visible. He drags a hand along his forearm and for a second, he feels as if he has two skins, one shimmery and paper-thin spread on top of his usual, soft, human one. Shaking his head to dispel the illusion, he decides to take a shower and forget all about this weird morning.
He walks into his refresher and switches the shower into the water mode. Sonic is good for a quick cleansing, but he needs something more solid, something resolutely tactile, something that he can really feel. Streams of hot water pelt his skin, and he relaxes under them, feeling infinitely better with every second.
The water washes the gooey sensation away, and his body feels like his body again, lithe and pristine. His skin is pinkish and unblemished, not counting the smattering of freckles over his shoulders. There’s nothing to remind him of the white box or the black writhing mass, and Hux is content to leave it at that.
He finishes washing himself, then turns the water off and reaches for the black standard-issue towel. Drying himself, he steps out of the shower and shakes the water out of his hair. He feels light and clean, like nothing bad has ever happened to him and never will.
Humming under his breath, he comes up to the sink, catching a glance of himself in the mirror above it, and immediately freezes, the cheerful tune forgotten, his limbs filled with leaden weight in an instant, cold dread spreading through his insides.
The face that stares at him from the mirror is not his own.