Chapter Text
It was just at the end of his shift.
Mitaka had spent most of it trying to mediate between the Captain and Kessel - at this point he simply assumed that the two of them were getting into each other's hairs on purpose.
Sure, they were lucky to have the Senior Lieutenant and their slightly less-than-legal connections to numerous crime syndicates. But they sure as fuck knew how to push buttons, that was for sure. Sometimes Mitaka wondered if Hux had hand selected the Finalizer's crew for their shock value. It would not be out of character.
What was out of character for their recently more-and-more hermetic Admiral (unless you were the mechanics and engineers of Nern Deck, then you were graced with his presence almost constantly) to storm onto the bridge, grab Mitaka by his arm and wordlessly drag him out.
For a moment he thought that Unamo would do something, as the woman all but jumped from her cubicle. But then she saw who this officer-stealing wraith was and stopped. The last thing he saw was her gaze full of pity and her hand on her chest, as if in mourning. What a karking traitor.
Hux meanwhile did not seem inclined in the slightest to offer an explanation of his own, so, whilst still being dragged towards the nearest turbolift, Mitaka tried his best to wiggle out of the iron grip. "Hux? Admiral?," he tried, “What’s goi-”
Mitaka was unceremoniously tossed into the turbolift.
And while he was still getting his legs back under him, Hux stepped in after him, mechanically selected some buttons and stood ramrod straight until the doors closed. The humming of the lift started, but then was stopped as quickly as it had begun. Because Hux had, apparently, used his command codes to stop it right between levels.
And as if the day couldn’t get stranger, the man, after staring at the blinking panel for roughly 3.5 seconds, simply crumpled to the floor, curling into a little ball in the corner opposite to Mitaka.
Mitaka who, understandably he hoped so, was shocked .
He hadn't seen something like this from Hux since… well, since he’d been really fresh in the Academy. This was first week material . Not ‘ten plus years in command’.
“Uh, Hux?,” he slowly stood up, moving towards his friend-slash-commanding-officer.
“It’s back .”
Mitaka stilled. Then he frowned. “What do you mean?,” he asked eventually, because he could not think of anything that would throw Hux out of the loop this much. And the man looked proper horrified.
Hux’ head snapped up and his eyes were bloodshot and sunken. “It’s,” he hissed, “ Back .” He let out an almost feral scream and dug his fingers into his knes. “Why is it back ?! It’s been gone for so long ! Why now ?!”
Mitaka hesitated. Hux in this state was… well, he could be very dangerous when he lost his inhibitions like this. And he did not want to do anything to become the focus of this anger - not while literally being locked into a turbolift with him.
So he crouched down, hands on his knees but still with a healthy distance between them (as much as the layout of the lift allowed at least).
"Hm, Admiral?," he said, voice calm and neutral, even as Hux stared at him with wild eyes, " What is back?"
Hux flinched .
Not a good sign. Hux never flinched. Ever.
"I assume you wish to talk about it," Mitaka continued, always cautiously observing the other man's microexpressions, "otherwise you wouldn't have… spontaneously relieved me from my duties on the bridge, yes?"
He could see the muscles under Hux' gaunt cheeks working - actually, he might have to get back to Dr. Niles about that. Get a meal plan going etc.
"I-," Hux eventually started, seeming uncharacteristically insecure. As if he was trouble putting it - whatever it was - into actual words. "My… father."
Oh .
So this was a Brendol story. Okay, Mitaka had dealt with that before. He could do this.
Probably.
"He…," he trailed off again, eyes glazing over.
"Brendol is dead, Hux." Mitaka's voice got lower, more insistent. "Whatever it is he did, whatever he said, it's over now. He doesn't have shit on you now and you're twice the man he ever was." Maybe a bit of a white lie, the whole desertation thing was kind of a stain on Hux' carreer, but hey. Dire circumstances…
Slowly, very slowly Hux' head turned towards Mitaka.
"Don't lie to me," the pale, more pale than he'd ever seen him, man stared at him. Through him.
Mitaka grimaced. "A white lie," he argued.
Hux scoffed. Which - all things considered - was a good sign. It meant that he still could be reasoned with.
" Mitaka ," and oh , there was that ever so slight arkanian drawl that Brendol had worked so hard to completely eliminate from his dirt-blooded son, "Brendol would cull me right this moment if he had the chance. No questions asked." Hux' eyes unfocussed again and a tiny giggle escaped him. That giggle swelled to full on laughter, hysterical and desperate, wrecking the wiry man's frame.
"I don't see how that's funny," Mitaka eventually said, pointedly keeping his voice level. He knew Hux. In such situations he'd prefer cold professionality over any sentimental displays of compassion or, Stars beware, pity .
"It isn't, I guess." Hux sighed deeply and slumped back. He raised one of his hands against the ceiling, seemingly observing the sterile neon light passing through his fingers. A felt eternity passed like that, Hux staring at the ceiling and Mitaka just observing him do that.
Then, rather suddenly, Hux’ head rolled to the side and that piercing pale gaze locked back onto him. Immediately, Mitaka felt pinned. There was but a split second where the hairs on the back of his neck rose, before a pale hand shot out towards him and -
The next thing the Lieutenant's brain processed was the air being pressed out of his lungs as he collided with the turbolift doors behind him.
For a split second all that Mitaka could think of was Ren .
Because that all-encompassing feeling of being crushed? That sense of utter helplessness and inability to fight back? The way your body just froze up because somewhere in the very most primal areas of your brain something told you this was not a fight you could win?
That was all Ren .
Not Hux.
Because Hux was dangerous, sure, but it was always calculated. It had method.
It wasn't a spontaneous combustion, like a pressure valve left unchecked for too long.
And it certainly wasn’t magic .
Mitaka fell to the floor, pain lacing up his knees as he landed rather unfortunately. Air snapped back into his lungs and there was a moment where it took all of his rigorous training to not attack Hux in turn.
Hux, who - almost disbelievingly - whispered, “Oh, that worked.”
…
Discipline was going to the banthas here.
And Peavey was not sure what he should - what he could - do about it.
Kessel certainly wasn't going to move, not since they had been given what practically amounted to a permission blanco-check for steering the Finalizer. The bridge crew all seemed more and more infected by the growing manic energy Thanisson brought to the table every shift start and apparently even the fucking Admiral was slowly going off the rails now. Why else would he just… spirit away Mitaka?
Peavey just hoped there wouldn't be a murder. It really would not look good on their track record.
And they were running low on officers as was. Capable ones especially.
Although, he guessed, Captain Liz had shown that there were some hidden gems amongst the stormtroopers, so maybe he should look into contacting General Phasma. She seemed to have made the prudent decision to stay far away from any and all places where she could be drawn into the nerfbrained ideas that seemed to gain overhand lately.
If Peavey were thirty years younger and at all interested in such things, he would be tempted to ask her if she was open to a relationship. Just to bring some semblance of stability back into his life.
Alas, he didn't think it would work out like that now.
…
Phasma really wasn't sure what she should do with this new… pet project that her troopers had picked up.
Yes it was Hux' prisoner, technically. But. It had almost been 48 hours and no one from the navy side of things had turned up on their decks and demanded the return of the twi'lek. Phasma's troops were of the staunch opinion that that meant that they officially would get to keep her. And Phasma was inclined to let them, simply because Hux' behavior lately had been so kriffing weird that she really wasn't sure she should let the prisoner back into his not-so-tender care.
After all, her troopers had already scrunched up an (almost) full set of armor for her.
Where they had gotten it from was a mystery, but it showed initiative.
How exactly they planned to accommodate her lekku in the bucket was a question they still seemed to be working on. The current solution seemed just 'leave it off', with her sporting a modified (read: two holes had been cut into it) undercap.
The prisoner herself had not at all seemed put off by her troop's insistence on her getting armor. Quite the contrary, she seemed elated by every new piece they had produced.
Such enthusiasm had to be rewarded, Phasma agreed on that front.
Plus, it wasn't like Hux would be opposed to her putting qualified personnel to work in a time where they were short staffed on literally every front. He might be mad about her pulling the twi'lek away from Engineering, where she seemed to have made a name for herself. Too bad he wasn't here to complain.
And Phasma always could need more people to put on security rotations.
With troopers getting pulled off to do odd jobs left right and center (one had even gotten claimed by Virdant and her goons. Virdant! ), finding people to walk up and down the endless hallways was getting harder and harder. It might seem like a superfluent job, but Phasma would have to use both her hands to count the instances where her troopers had stumbled upon suspicious activity in the corridors in the last week .
On the other hand, putting a prisoner on guard duty was… probably not a best practice in any capacity. It was downright paradox, actually.
Yet that prisoner in question seemed excessively polite, so Phasma was inclined to make an exception for her.
Also, if the last few weeks had shown anything, it was that beggars ?
Really couldn’t be choosers.
Still, she probably should schedule a meeting with their honored Admiral to discuss this… allocation of resources in an official capacity. Or semi-official, because lately that seemed to be the vibe everything had. But that was exactly the reason why she and her troopers had kept to their decks since the explosion. Here it was a lot easier to ignore whatever nonsense those spaceheads were coming up lately. Plus, ever since some of the more crafty heads in her divisions had managed to switch out one of the officers' lounge kaf dispensers with one of their regular shitty ones, there was exactly zero reason even for her to brave the upper decks.
The rumors of some sort of cult spreading only reinforced her beliefs.
Her troopers didn't need that sort of thing in their lives.
… right?
Phasma stopped pacing. And an idea started to form in her head.
They weren't in the First Order anymore.
Certain… restrictions she'd had so far had fallen away. And instead of letting her preciously raised troopers fall victim to some second-grade navy cult, there was a much better solution
She started tapping away on her datapad.
The first things would have to be the language modules.
As for the prisoner…
Well, she could just join the class. If for nothing else than moral support – her troopers seemed to have adopted her as some sort of weird, sentient, incredibly directionally confused mascot anyways.
And Hux would come barking if he started missing her too much, he always did. Until then Phasma would use her very handy General-privileges to declare the prisoner free real estate and up for grabs for anyone who wanted to make her a useful member of society. (Society in this case being a contributing factor to the unharmed journey of this very ship from point A to point B, preferably without being detected by their various enemies.)
…
Hux stared at the empty cell.
Behind him Mitaka skidded huffing and puffing around the last corner and stopped to catch his breath the moment he realized that Hux was standing still for once. The Admiral himself might even have been tempted to feel bad about how his colleague was yapping for air, had he not had more pressing problems.
Several problems.
Actually, now that he thought about it, the oxygen saturation of Mitaka’s blood was at the low end of a very long list.
And ‘where the absolute kark has my prisoner gone now?!’ was steadily climbing the same ranking. It just had overtaken ‘find Pryde and kill him before he kills me’.
“Where is my prisoner?,” he asked aloud, because maybe the universe would deign him with an answer. After all, stranger things had happened in the past hours. So if the walls started talking now, well, what was one more?
“I- I don’t know, Admiral,” it was Mitaka who answered in the walls’ stead. Boring but acceptable.
At least unless you counted the contents of his answer.
Hux whirled around, facing his not-friend and definitely-lieutenant. “What do you mean, you don’t know ?!,” he pressed out, panic (a base emotion and something he had thought very well repressed and under control ) bubbling for the second time that day, “I left you in charge of her!”
“Last I saw her she was elbows deep in some relays again!,” Mitaka threw his arms out in an equally uncharacteristical show of emotion on his part, “I’m on the bridge most of the rotation! I don’t know where she went to now!”
“Well, you should have put a tracker on her!,” Hux screeched back.
Mitaka matched the volume, “ That’s against sentient rights! ”
The sheer absurdity of that statement shocked Hux long enough out of his spiral to regain his wits.
He closed his eyes and breathed out, imagining all his frustrations and angers packed away into little boxes with Ren’s face on them, run through with a jagged iron pole and dropped into a deep, deep abyss never to be seen again.
When he opened his eyes he actually felt better.
“The New Republic would be thrilled to know that you like their work this much.”
“Sentient rights are hardly a concept unique to that bumbling convocation of fools,” Mitaka soured back, before turning to a wall panel and accessing what looked to be the security footage of that entire section of the brig.
Hux let him have this one, mainly because he knew that spending time on this discussion would lead nowhere. Dopheld had always been more concerned with bodily autonomy and the right to one's own decision than most – and unlike most, he actually had valid reasons to. At least valid in Hux’ eyes, since he knew intimately what it was like to be one of Brendol Hux’ little experiments. Only for Mitaka, Bendol’s interest in him had meant physical ‘augmentations’, where the games he’d played with Hux himself had mostly been on a mental level.
Thus, he let the matter drop.
They were good at that, anyways. Showing each other their soft underbellies and then never speaking of it again.
It was what he was counting on for the Lieutenant to do in regards to the… magic thing.
Otherwise he’d have to space a good man. And good men were painfully hard to come by lately, so the economist in Hux did not like that idea at all.