Huxloween Day 22: Shared Nightmares
Kylo hears the dreams of everyone on the ship. It’s been a problem since he was old enough to realise that the adventures, horrors, and anxieties that woke him a dozen times a night were not his own.
As a younger man he fought to suppress or escape the nightmares that bled into his mind from the rest of his home. He’d watched Alderaan fall a million times, felt the Falcon disintegrate beneath his feet, fought his way through forests he’d never known with senses he didn’t possess.
The temple had been harder. The students had been all his own age and their fears were somehow more personal. More believable perhaps. Where before he’d lived through the nightmares of adults and all the unreality that entailed, in the temple everyone else’s dreams had been his own.
And in those dreams he was often the villain.
Everyone had feared his power. Even his uncle.
Snoke had shown him how justified that fear truly was and just how powerful he could be.
When he first arrived on the Finalizer he’d walked through the dreams of the crew with impunity. The rigid structure of the First Order created a uniformity of fears that was so much easier to deal with than anything he’d known in the Republic.
Every stormtrooper feared battle. Every low level officer feared their commander, and every high ranking officer feared the ambitious subordinate lurking in the shadows. The older crew had their war traumas, the younger ones their isolated exile.
And everywhere he went he was feared above everything else but Snoke. He’d learned to use that fear as fodder, a scaffold for his own anxieties. So much terror. So much frightened worship and uneasy adoration.
The first time he found himself in General Hux’ mind he’d felt as if he’d fallen into an icy lake.
Hux didn’t fear him. Hux saw him as an inconvenience. He dreamed of Kylo as if he was a fault in a machine that had been eradicated or bypassed, and nothing Kylo did in the waking world could fix that.
And then Hux first saw him without his mask.
Suddenly Kylo went from an object of contempt to something even more alien- a focus of desire. That terrified him in ways that flashbacks to long ago battles never could. To see himself placed in such a role- to be seduced, and used, and ensnared in a thousand lurid fantasies that he could never control- that was Kylo’s own true nightmare. Except that sometimes Hux was tender. Sometimes they simply danced, or kissed for hours, or simply laid in one another’s arms. Kylo hated it more than the fear. This weakness. This false affection.
Until the throne room. Until Snoke’s death and Hux’ forced subjugation.
That night the affection and desire were gone. Contempt came pouring back in, and Kylo was left with the realisation that the only person who’d ever considered him with anything but fear once again wanted him dead.
What might have been if he’d embraced the other dreams?
Every night after that Kylo fell into his own dreams, endlessly chasing a man that was just out of reach, and the feeling of affection that he knew he’d never experience again.
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