badspacebabies:

reserve:

@pidgy-draws and @generalgingersnaps, and some other cool dudes were looking for Hux-at-the-Academy head canons and it just so happens, @badspacebabies and I were talking about this today. Here’s an attempt to make that coherent.

–

Brendol Hux doesn’t have a lot of friends. His classmates give him a wide berth, partially because of his name, which he can’t hide, partially because he’s got the look of a tattle-tale about him, and who wants to be friends with a rat?

He has a lot of “accidents.” He breaks his arm in two places his first year, and when the medic, and then his father, ask what happened he tells them he fell down the rocky path beyond the gymnasium, the steep one, that leads down to the creek. He had the lie in place before his tears dried. He refuses the bacta healing and insists on a cast.

“But how did you get a black eye, love?” wonders the medic as she helps him to his feet. “Just bad luck, ma’am,” Hux tells her.

He is especially proud of the black eye and every subsequent black eye. He likes anything that takes the softness out of face, anything that disrupts his features and makes him jarring to look at and not just a too-small kid with a name that follows him around like a curse.

“You’re not so bad, red,” says the boy (Ellery) who shoved him hard enough down the steep, rocky path beyond the gymnasium that he broke his arm in two places. Hux is rubbing at his face where Ellery cuffed him gently after weeks of taunting. “I bet that’ll never happen again.”

It doesn’t, because Ellery Blaize (tall for his age, well-bred, one year older with a handsomely crooked face and dark hair) makes sure it doesn’t.

“Don’t let those shits get to you,” Ellery tells him a year later, one hand in Hux’s hair, the other pontificating. He groans while Hux bobs his head, only half listening. Ellery tugs at his hair a little when he forgets to watch his teeth. “D’you hear me, red? Kriff the lot of them.”

He is always red, never Hux or Brendol. The one time he gets a black eye after taking up with Els, the sithspawn brat who did it has to get a steel cheekbone implant. He transfers. Hux is grateful the only way he knows how to be; he’s also meaner, his sneer more pronounced, the anxieties of his earlier years falling away.

He’s a third year, tall but still too thin, class treasurer and a budding tactician when Ellery dies in the most banal way a boy can: hubris and infection. Hux had told him to get the cut looked at time and again. He was so good, exemplary. What a bright star to have lost. He was bound for greatness. That’s what all of Ellery Blaize’s eulogies would have you believe. But Hux knows better. Ellery wasn’t good; he was cruel and sometimes slow. He only knew how to be kind in the dark, but he never mentioned the commandant and when he cupped Hux’s cheek in one of his soft rich boy hands, Hux had to hold back one sigh after another.

No one looks at him like they did before he shot up, but he buzzes off his hair anyway, worried that his swept back fringe makes him look like an easy mark. It’s only after Ellery is gone that Hux realizes they’re all afraid of him too.

He spends three months breaking down when he least expects to. Sits by the creek and touches the scars on his arm from that first accident and feels a creeping nostalgia that makes him sick to his stomach. He’s livid, having to miss someone who used him, having to mourn for him. At night he makes lists, under his thin blanket his torch in hand. Pros and cons of caring. Matched sets. The pair listed for number five: it’s possible no one will ever touch you again versus being touched has made you weak.

He makes more lists and fewer friends. He graduates top of his class, he grows out his fringe and slicks it back severely from his face. The next time he lets someone into his bed he’ll be as broken as his arm was all those years ago, and equally unsure about this new monster.

But, it will be different, and it’s inevitable anyway.

IM SCFEAMING CHLOE ELLERY BLAIZE THIS IS PERFECT