Chapter Text
General Armitage Hux sighed internally. Two weeks on this warship, and already Kylo Ren was punching holes in the walls. Hux loathed the way his nervous system still responded to him with a cocktail of flinching deference and arousal fascination, as if he were observing his own depravity from just outside his body. The bruises from the most recent Force-choking incident inflicted by Kylo Ren had faded, at least. The scars from the destruction of the Dreadnought Supremacy had… not.
He scanned the room, calculating. In a shadowed corner stood a woman of middling height, her dark hair pinned in a severe bun that emphasized her widow’s peak and the striking angles of her face. She wore the women’s regulation calf-length skirt paired with burnished black combat boots--the sort of footwear that screamed utility over decorum--and sharp black eyeliner that lent her a subtle intimidation factor. Strictly speaking, it might not pass inspection. Strictly speaking.
The simple black uniform jacket hanging off a sharp and elegant frame indicated some clerical position, he guessed, or perhaps Research and Development--though her presence in a tactical briefing made no immediate sense.
When had she even arrived? He hadn’t noticed… but he found himself uninterested in the content of the meeting. He told himself that it was advantageous to have something to focus on apart from Kylo Ren’s incoherent rampage.
Her expression was a practiced mask of neutrality, but the corner of her mouth twitched ever so slightly. An almost-smirk. Was that the barest raise of an eyebrow? A trick of the light?
Ren barked, spun, and stormed. Hux didn’t look at him. He kept his gaze on her. Yes. That was a flicker of an eye roll at Commander no—sigh—Supreme Leader Kylo Ren.
And then—she glanced at him just long enough to say yes, you saw that. I let you.
He was almost certain she’d just made a joke at Ren’s expense, silently, and had chosen him as the witness. That was… bold. Possibly suicidal. He could have her executed on the spot for that, but something stayed him. Did she know of his own secret contempt for Kylo Ren? If so, how? In any case, this tiny flicker of disdain was dangerous for her. And intoxicating for him.
The stormtroopers skulked out after Ren tired himself and sashayed out of the room as if Hux, the other officers, and the clerical woman were nothing but vapor. He glanced over to the corner where she had been, but she had slipped out silently like the shadows that surrounded her.
“Who was that?” The General demanded of Lieutenant Mitaka.
The Lieutenant stood at attention and saluted. “General?”
“The woman in the corner, in the black clerical uniform. Who was she?”
Mitaka swallowed hard, gaze dropping. “That was—Gissela Corvuu, sir. Archivist of the Imperial Relics.”
That did not seem relevant to Ren’s most recent storm.
“Why was she here then?”
“I-I’m sure she had her reasons, General. She’s appointed by the Sith Archivists’ Guild, not the usual chain of command. Archivists with her level of training are hard to come by, and we don’t interfere with her work.”
“You don’t interfere with her work?”
The Lieutenant dropped his voice. “The things she… catalogues, Sir. Some of the men say they’re cursed. That their energy clings to her. She keeps them contained, but she is not someone that we usually discuss. General.”
That’s when understanding dawned on him—the men were afraid of her. Superstitious fools, their fear gave her run of the base. And Kylo Ren, that arrogant bastard, didn’t even register her or her open insolence. This would not do. No, it would not do at all.
* * *
The lower levels of the base were long corridors of sterile fluorescents and echoing steel built for function over aesthetics. But the Archive felt... different. Older, even as it was being rebuilt from the wreckage of the Supremacy and Starkiller Base. Warmer, somehow in spite of the air that was artificially chilled for preservation purposes. The area was scented faintly with ozone and something organic, like dried herbs, old wood and… something vaguely mineral. It made no sense. There were no herbs on a military base. Hux stepped through the threshold, posture ramrod straight. He told himself it was because he wanted answers.
And then there was Gissela Corvuu, the newly appointed Archivist. Still impassive and maddeningly hard to read. She stood up slowly from a series of sealed, singed containers—each humming faintly, surrounded by arcane warning glyphs that couldn’t possibly be First Order regulation—and made a polite salute before clasping her hands in front of her.
“Zh’yennerl Hux. To vhat do I owe t'e honor? Are you here to entrust an artifact?” Her lilting tone was perfectly dry, and the way she said the word “General” sent a strange tingle down his spine.
“I’m here,” he began crisply, “to inquire what business an Archivist had in attending a tactical meeting concerning the Resistance’s last maneuver.”
She tilted her head slowly, considering him. “I arc'khive artifacts,” she said. “Some of vhich are, hm, entangled in the Force. That vas a Force incident, vas it not? There is no doubt that you’ve seen the footage. I t'ought it prudent to observe.”
What accent was that? He wondered. Somewhere from the Outer Rim on the surface, but her difficulty with "which," "was," “there” and “thought” suggested something older.
He narrowed his eyes. “That doesn’t explain your... countenance.”
She blinked slowly, letting the silence stretch just long enough for it to become uncomfortable. Finally she tilted her head again.
“Countenance…” She repeated the word as if tasting it for the first time.
“You were smirking,” he rephrased. “At the Supreme Leader. I may have even caught an eye roll, but I hope for your sake it was just a trick of the light.”
“Countenance. Yes. Mm.” she said, understanding crossing her face with an infuriating half-smile as if she had decided she liked the taste of the word. “Well you must have had quite a good look from across the room, Zh’yennerl.”
“I make it my business to observe everything in that room.” He stiffened. “It was unprofessional. Lucky for you, no one else saw it.”
“Luc'kky indeedt.” Her tone was unreadable. She tapped the lid of a container absentmindedly. Her vowels were longer than they should have been, consonants clipping a fraction too hard, as though she were still shaping them into Basic by sheer will. It should have grated on him. Instead, the faint foreignness made her words drag in his ears in a way that was…far too compelling.
He straightened a fraction, disguising the slip as severity.
They locked eyes. She came a few steps closer.
And then, casually, she said, “If it is professional discipline”—she pronounced it diskipline— “you concern about, General, perhaps start with whoever removed Lord Vader’s helmet from the Archives without authorization.”
Hux blinked. “What?”
She turned and began pulling up access logs on a glowing blue panel, completely unhurried.
“The Sith artifacts are heavily protected, as you’d expect. Access is limited, and records are automatic. No such request has been filed for the Vader relic since we rebuilt. Yet, it is not here.”
“You’re saying—?”
“I’m saying that if it is where I think it is, someone stole it from the archives, perhaps even back on Starkiller Base. Removed a sacred and highly radioactive object from containment for... personal reasons.” She looked at him then, narrowing her eyes. “That is a breach of protocol, isn’t it. General.”
“Indeed. An egregious breach of protocol.” He ground his jaw. “Any suspects?”
She regarded him briefly. “Not at liberty to say.” Her answer indicated a high-ranking suspect, and he had a reliable notion of who it might be.
There was a screeching sound coming from across the room—a cast iron tea kettle that may have been older than the Empire itself on a heating plate. She put on a heat-protective glove and turned to tend to it as if she hadn’t just exposed a gap in the armor of the entire system. She produced two ceramic teacups with hairline cracks along the edges and poured one out.
“Tea?” She asked, not looking at him.
This was irregular. But refusing would feel like losing ground just as she revealed something potentially interesting. And he did enjoy tea.
“Yes,” he said.
“Please, have a seat then. Sir.” The steam curled up from the ceramic cups in swirling patterns. He watched her take a sip. That maddening half-smile crossed her face again.
“I rather enjoy my work. Poisoning a general would uh, threaten that position.” She took another sip as if to prove that the tea was untainted. “If that’s what you’re thinking.”
He exhaled sharply through his nose. “Old habits.”
She studied him for a moment, appraising him like one of her relics in a sealed case.
“You do not sleep well, do you.”
He narrowed his eyes. “I sleep… adequately.”
“Mmm.” She didn’t argue, just pulled a brown pouch out of a drawer and slid it across the table with her crisp, precise fingers. “Valerian, chamomile, hops, and a touch of mugwort. No poison. At least not enough to administer a lethal dose, unless you drink bacta tank full of it.”
He took the pouch in his hand, studying it. “Where did you get this?”
“It’s personal supply from a previous post. I find it, hmm, helpful sometimes.”
His lip curled. “If you are trying to buy my silence about your presence or expression in today’s tactical meeting with tea, it’s going to take a bit more than that.”
Tilting her head slightly, she clasped her hands together on the table. “Why are you defending Kylo Ren? You are not the only one who has… history with him. Though mine is not quite as extensive as yours.” She took a sip from her teacup.
A sour feeling of horror settled in his stomach, his skin flushed, and a snarl crossed his face.
“You know about—”
Her brows lifted just slightly, her posture shifting in a fractional recalibration.
“I’m the Archivist. It’s my job to know the histories of my post.” Her voice was smooth, but the playful undercurrent had gone. “And it is not particularly noteworthy to me. Quite normal on many worlds where the women are… selective. The men, being practical creatures, simply keep each other entertained until someone changes her mind."
Hux cleared his throat as the tea threatened to go down the wrong pipe.
She continued, "I therefore forget sometimes that there are some who still considers it worth a moral panicking about.” She shrugged and sipped her tea. “In any case, decade-old gossip does not hold my interest,” she continued, setting her cup down. “I prefer radioactive and cursed relics I can put on my shelf.”
There was a beat of silence, heavy and sharp-edged. Then, her tone still dry but almost companionable, she added, “But I suppose you’re correct. I did not hide my thoughts as well as I could have done. The smirking at Ren wasn’t about his, hm, theatrics though.”
He narrowed his eyes, suspicious and still riding the edge of insult. “Really. What was it about then.”
She tapped a finger on her mouth for a moment, letting out a huff of a laugh. “It’s that cape of his. It’s…” her fingers grazed her lips as she searched for the right word, then exhaled in frustration. “What is the word when a thing is pretending expensive, but really it is ugly and cheap? Ticky?”
He blinked, the corners of his mouth twitching a bit despite himself. “Tacky.”
“Yes! Tacky! That’s it. Kylo Ren’s cape is tacky and not befitting a Supreme Leader.” She leaned in and dropped her voice conspiratorially. “He filed expense report for vintage hand-brocade Naboo silk. But I know the transparency of Kuat factory-grade textile when I see it. He is either lying about its origins, or someone gave him a swindle. Look for it the next time he swishes it around like second-rate mummer.” She made an unholy smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes.
He bit down on his knuckle as his shoulders twitched with a barely contained laugh — a soft “kkkhhh—” rattling in his throat. “That is delightful,” he looked at her over his fist, the curl of her smirk mirrored in the corner of his mouth, unwanted but impossible to resist. She shrugged and smiled off to the side, hugging the cup to her face.
A crackle from his personal comms broke the moment. He straightened instinctively, setting down the cup. “Duty calls,” he said, the mask of the General snapping back into place. “Thank you for the tea, Archivist Corvuu.”
“Any time, General.”
* * *
The canteen was its usual cacophony of clanging metal utensils and smells of questionable mass-produced food. Hux hated eating there, but he made a point of being visible to the rank and file at least once per week. Such was the burden of command.
The leg of a metal chair squeaked under the weight of its occupant at a neighboring table.
“Her whole ‘scary librarian’ thing is kind of hot though,” a squirrely radar technician mused.
His lunch mate, a ventilation system repairman, shuddered. “I don’t care that she’s hot. She’s Dathomiri on the maternal side, I think.”
Ah, Dathomiri, Hux thought. Explained the linguistic oddities.
“Don’t you know what they get up to on Dathomir?” The repairman continued. “The men live in colonies, where they fight for the right to be sex pets.”
The radar tech stared blankly for a moment. “Uh-huh. And what’s the downside?”
“Matt. Buddy,” the vent repairman laughed and shook his head. “You’re a freak.”
Hux nearly choked on his protein cube. His eyebrows raised involuntarily as he considered reprimanding them for the unnecessary vulgarity… but it seemed more strategic to understand what kind of chatter went on through the rank and file. That was the whole point of eating in the canteen, he told himself. Not because he now desperately needed to know what being a Dathomiri sex pet entailed. Certainly not.
The repairman continued. “They also do necromancy, baby sacrificing, blood-drinking, all kind of weird kriff.”
“I heard Kylo Ren can do necromancy. With his awesome lightsaber.”
The vent repairman managed a tight nod. "Sure, man!" Matt was a weird guy. Way too devoted to Kylo Ren. Eager to steer the subject away from Kylo Ren, he dropped his voice and leaned over the table. “Even without the witch stuff, though… there’s a rumor that she was top of her class in Medbay school, but got kicked out. You want to know what for?”
The radar tech took a bite of carb ration. “What?” He chewed with his mouth open, as if to catch the juicy morsel of gossip like a dog.
Hux had to strain to listen at this point, but it couldn’t be helped.
“Killing her own terminally ill mother—with some weird poison she distilled herself. And not only that,” the chair squeaked as he leaned forward, fully into the ghost story now. “Some say others started coming to her after she sped her mum along—wanting her help with their own sickly relatives. But targets expanded to blackmailing neighbors, drunken lout husbands, inconvenient pregnancies, you name it. She asked no questions, just brewed her basilisk venoms and blood of virgins or whatever, and sent them on their way.”
Hux rolled his eyes. Was that all? It was sort of comical, the things that scandalized these folk—what, did they think the First Order was running a kitten rescue? Even his father Brendol and the kitchen woman lover's perverse kind of honor had prevented them from employing the services of such a person. Even if it might have been more efficient--even kinder— than turning Armitage Hux into… well, best not to finish that thought. He locked it away with all the other ones he never wanted to see again.
And furthermore, he had to admit this Archivist was rather charming. He nearly snorted into his soup remembering way she’d eviscerated Ren’s “ticky/tacky” cape without hesitation. But then again, he allowed with a dry twist of thought, I did have my own father killed. So what do I know about proper company?
The ventilation tech was droning on about Dathomiri blood rituals and the alleged virility-enhancing properties of powdered rancor horns, but Hux had stopped listening. He’d seen her hands—so steady and precise. He didn’t believe much of what the men at the neighboring table said, apart from the bit about her being at the top of her Medbay class. Yes, those were the hands of a scientist. Not a fumbling witch, but the discipline of someone who catalogued, distilled, and recorded. A woman who imposed order on things others feared, and unflinchingly bloodied her hands when the situation called for it. If the others thought her monstrous, then good. Monsters kept lesser creatures trembling in line.