When it came to the dark side and the light side of the force, skimming the surface of another person’s mind, like dipping just your hands into a deep lake and feeling for whatever you can reach, fell on one side. Not very far into that side, but it was there. It was acceptable. Forcing your own consciousness in alongside someone else’s was like diving in and swimming for the bottom. It fell, according to Uncle Luke, very definitively on the other side.
Normally, pushing himself into someone else’s mind feels like digging his fingers into an overripe fruit. It’s messy and organic. Almost sexual.
Entering General Hux’s mind is more like slipping down a lift shaft, all cold, clean lines and neatly defined spaces. It’s dark, and Ben realizes this is because the General is very carefully thinking of nothing. It takes a huge amount of effort to think of nothing- truly, absolutely nothing. To not allow even a flash of recollection. No reminder to trim his nails, or snippet of a half-remembered song stuck in his head. It must be exhausting, especially for someone who isn’t Force sensitive. He is almost impressed at the effort.
Oh, you are good, Ben thinks, delighted. Unfortunately, I’m better.
There were two ways around this kind of rudimentary mental blocking technique. He could simply push his way through the darkness. He could latch onto Hux’s thoughts and tear them out, messily, one by one, until he found the one he wanted, like picking the petals off a flower. But doing it that way would not, technically speaking, fall under the directive of ‘leaving him in one piece’. The people Ben had practiced that method on in the past still had a tendency to gibber.
He would do it the hard way. Harder for him, anyway. Not that General Hux would appreciate the extra effort.
“Will the Order pay to ransom you, do you think?” Ben asks. “Are you important enough to them? Or have they already picked your replacement?”
Questions begged the mind for answers, thoughts that he would be able to use to orient himself, but there is not as much as a flicker in that cold, dark space. Ben reaches out, careful but just short of gentle, expanding his presence in the General’s mind. Testing the boundaries of it. Hux makes a choked sound in the back of his throat.
What Ben had thought were walls reveal themselves to be smooth, black metal doors. It takes him a moment to realize that they belong to old-fashioned filing cabinets. Row upon row upon row of them, the kind that people used to keep ancient paper documents in. He tugs at the door to one, curious, and is unsurprised to find it locked.
Feeling around in the pitch-black, he discovers there is an opening just to the right of him; a gaping, empty space in the darkness. Ben steps through it, moving carefully until he senses another barrier. More walls. More cabinets.
“It’s very well-organized in here. I’m impressed,” Ben says, unthinking. His own mind wasn't this tidy.
“Thank you,” Hux bites out, insincere. “I do try.”
There is a sharp right angle and the sensation of empty space stretching out ahead of him.
This is ridiculous. He needs to be able to see.
“It must be embarrassing to the Order, to have someone of your rank captured by the pathetic Resistance.” Ben taunts. A flare of irritation somewhere ahead of him, quickly smothered. He alights on it like a hunting animal catching a scent. “It was a complete accident, did you know that? They weren’t there for you. They just saw the opportunity and took it.” More irritation. Stifled embarrassment. Ben follows them until he sees another wall. Another right turn.
The General is beginning to lose his careful blankness. Thoughts begin to flicker around the far edges of his mind, illuminating the space around him.
More openings branch off, twisting away into the dark space. A maze. His mind is a maze, Ben realizes, delighted and impressed in spite of himself. The level of self-control required to maintain such organization, the sheer pedantic fussiness to even try, was staggering.
“Unsurprising,” Hux mutters, through his clenched jaw. “Everything you do is an accident. Every victory you’ve had due to nothing but chance.”
“And yet, here you are.” Ben follows the General’s seething embarrassment like a distant beacon in the darkness. “Maybe the First Order isn’t as powerful as you think.” There is something at the center of this maze. Something Hux is curling all his defenses around, trying to protect from Ben. The deeper he goes, the more detailed the mindscape becomes. He has an impression of his own footsteps echoing on the hard floor as he moves, bodiless, through the space, and of air that smells like the climate-controlled, recycled O2 on a spaceship.
One bright thought, quickly smothered. Not for long. Smug, victorious. It’s connected to whatever’s at the center of General Hux’s mind. Ben pushes at the wall of filing cabinets, just to test the resistance there. He could tear them down easily, but he won’t. They need Hux in one piece. He moves on, following the path the General has so thoughtfully laid out for him.
“What are you hiding from me, General?” Ben murmurs, low. It’s a moment before he realizes he’s said it out loud. “You know I’m going to find it. Save yourself the trouble.”
“Then what would I do with my time? I’m so enjoying your company,” Hux bites back, half playful. He is breathing hard through his nose. The strain of resisting, of having Ben inside his head is getting to him. Soon he would start to become confused, to lose identity and his sense of awareness. Their minds would become tangled together, until separating them would require ripping them apart. Ben knew how to protect himself against that sort of damage, but Hux didn’t.
In the mindscape, Ben hits another wall. A dead end. Time to change tactics.
Uncle Luke would never approve of Ben using this sort of trick, but Uncle Luke wasn’t here.
When Ben was younger, he used to play a game with the Resistance pilots. Borrowing fighters for a joyride, racing across the surface of the planet and seeing how close to a cliff side they could fly and still pull up before it was too late. Ben usually won. Everyone said he pushed things too far.
That’s what this feels like. That terrifying, exhilarating moment when the proximity sensors started screaming in his ear and a canyon wall was stretching out in every direction in front of him. How long could he wait? How far could he push it? It was the delicate balance of finding that perfect very last second before he became a messy stain on the planet’s landscape.
How far did he have to go to get the information he needed? How much damage could he do before he broke their prisoner completely?
Ben rips the filing cabinets out of the walls, dumping them out and scattering their contents across the floor. Suddenly, General Hux’s orderly mind is in complete disarray, a tangled mess of thoughts and sensations. Unrelated memories thrown together in the mess. It’s chaos. Confusion. Frantic impulses tossed together with flashes of memory. Fear and excitement and the smell of boot polish. A sunset on an ice planet painting the sky in vivid reds and oranges. A lieutenant’s birthday- a small flashing remember to say something on the date. Hux laughs, sharp and choked, unsure of what’s funny. His thoughts are a jumble. He can’t think. Keeps forgetting to breathe.
His grip on whatever it is he’s trying to hide loosens. Ben worries at the edge of it, trying to slide the memory from his grasp without ripping it out completely, but the General has such a death grip on it that he’s afraid just pulling the thought out would tear him irreparably-
Ben races down the empty corridor in Hux’s mind, scattering thoughts and memories as he goes. He picks another cabinet door at random, tearing it out of the wall and upending it all over the floor. Snatches of conversation echo through the space, voices talking over each other.
The General’s grip gives a little more. He’s nearly there, nearly has it-
Ben holds on to the mindscape as he pushes back his chair, walking around the table until he is standing behind him. Hux is clutching at his hair, tangling it, and making strangled pained sounds. He presses his forehead against the cool metal surface of the table as his boots slip against the floor. He’s an absolute mess. Ben places one hand on his shoulder to steady him in the chair. The other palm he lays against the exposed back of his pale neck, the skin-to-skin contact focusing him, letting him push more of himself in.
Hux squirms under his hands, groaning at the feeling of being spread open. It hurts. Ben feels the thought flick by as soon as Hux does. Like something stuck in your teeth. Like the worst migraine imaginable. Hux wonders how he can possibly survive this pain.
Ben bites his lip a little, thinking. Every instinct is shouting at him to stop- to pull up now, right now before he went too far, before he crossed that line, but it’s drowned out by that part of him that screams that he’s almost got it. He can just make out the shape of the thought in Hux’s mind. A secret project on a planet covered in ice. Something big. Something that filled the General with a glowing combination of terror and pride, like a parent watching their child’s first murder.
He pulls, agonizingly slow but steady. He’s so close.
Everything he’s learned has been through trial and error. He can’t afford for this to be an error.
Gritting his teeth, Ben stirs up the chaos in the General’s mind. Blindsides him with a whirlwind of remembered emotions, battering him with them. The delighted, near-giddy pride from when he made captain, the bone deep fear he felt looking on their Supreme Leader for the first time. Sharp joy at seeing his own command ship for the first time through the viewport of a shuttle. A message from his father, designated low-priority, your mother died at 0430 last-
Hands in his hair, a drunken kiss. Bitterness at being rejected by a lover. Sitting bent over his desk with the lights dim, exhausted, but unwilling to sleep when there was so much work to be done on the new base-
Starkiller.
The word slips out of his mind, unbidden.
They are simultaneously in the empty Resistance store-room and in Hux’s memory of his spartan office. “What is it, Hux?” Ben mutters into the man’s ear, leaning over him from behind. Use his name, not his title- it’s more personal. Comforting. He runs a hand up and down his back, through the starched fabric of his uniform. “It’s alright, shh. What’s Starkiller? Tell me. It will stop if you just tell me.”
A wet sob that might have been a desperate, “no…“
Ben pulls again, but this time the thought begins to slide. Starkiller base: working compliment 120,000 men. 250,000 droids. Fifteen ship hangers. Ten Stormtrooper barracks completed. Five more in progress. Five floors above-ground, mostly living and administrative, forty floors subterranean. Expansion of the south wing: in progress, on schedule.
Hux standing on an ice planet, the wind whipping at his coat as he watched a massive dark energy containment unit lowered into the ground.
Hux riding in a shuttle, drafting a speech on his datapad. ‘This fierce machine which you have built, upon which we stand, will bring an end to the Senate.’ He backspaces, deleting an earlier section-
“How? How is it going to destroy the Senate? Tell me,” Ben snarls in his ear, digging his fingers into the back of Hux’s neck hard enough to bruise.
The memory slips free in a rush. He pulls out of the General’s mind immediately, retreating with his prize. His first reaction is triumph. He did it, he got it, he's won.
His second is horror as he realizes just what it is he's uncovered.
Ben is suddenly aware of the blood pounding in his ears and the General’s quiet whimpers. His mouth is dry.
He covers the distance to the door in two long strides and pounds on it. Three sharp knocks.
“Get General Organa,” he says to the guard who opens the door. His voice sounds strange in his own ears. The guard is May Barnard. Ben knows her well enough say hello. “Tell her … the Order is building a superweapon. Something that uses dark energy to destroy entire systems.” He swallows. “Tell her I know where it is.”
May curses and shuts the door in his face.
Ben takes a couple of breaths to steady himself, in and out through his nose. He is in shock, he realizes dimly.
No wonder the General put up such a fight.
No one knew the First Order was capable of this. They shouldn’t be capable of this. Shouldn’t have been able to get the funds to do this. Not without someone noticing. Yet there it was. Every statistic, every budget report, every technical specific kept neat and organized in the General’s tidy little mind. Now it was in Ben’s.
Starkiller Base. The name had to be Hux’s idea. Somehow both precise and overwhelmingly melodramatic.
If the Order had a weapon like that, they could destroy the entire Resistance in one blow and they would never even see it coming. His mother was right- this was bad. This was very bad. Ben balls his hands into fists to keep them from fidgeting.
It wasn’t projected to be operational until next quarter. They could handle this. One problem at a time. He turns back to their captive.
Hux is shaking all over. He makes a low whining sound, his face buried in trembling hands.
“No, look at me,” Ben says briskly, walking around the table to him and slowly forcing his hands down away from his face. His pupils are different sizes, one of them blown so wide the eye looks nearly black. Ben waves one hand in front of his face slowly, watching his eyes. After a moment, they track. “Good. That’s… good. Can you talk?”
“Nnh.”
“Let’s try words. How about your name? Can you tell me your name?”
“Fuck you,” Hux mumbles, his tongue thick in his mouth.
“Close enough,” Ben says.
Hux mutters something unintelligible under his breath. Ben leans in to catch it, “What?”
“…you could have at least bought me dinner first.” Hux repeats. He lays facedown on the table, his nose crushed into the worn metal, and covers his head with both arms. Ben feels him slipping into unconsciousness.
“Hey, no- stay awake, General.” Ben gives him a gentle shake with both hands on his shoulders. Hux whines. “We need to get you checked over by medical. Then you'll get the best accommodations the Resistance can spare for a prisoner.”
Hux makes unintelligible sounds that Ben feels safe in just assuming are some kind of sarcastic response.
“If you promise me you’ll stay awake I’ll go get you some Comaren for that headache.”
“…fnn-“ Hux says into the table. Ben takes that as agreement.
FILL 4/4 - Ben Solo, Resistance interrogator
Normally, pushing himself into someone else’s mind feels like digging his fingers into an overripe fruit. It’s messy and organic. Almost sexual.
Entering General Hux’s mind is more like slipping down a lift shaft, all cold, clean lines and neatly defined spaces. It’s dark, and Ben realizes this is because the General is very carefully thinking of nothing. It takes a huge amount of effort to think of nothing- truly, absolutely nothing. To not allow even a flash of recollection. No reminder to trim his nails, or snippet of a half-remembered song stuck in his head. It must be exhausting, especially for someone who isn’t Force sensitive. He is almost impressed at the effort.
Oh, you are good, Ben thinks, delighted. Unfortunately, I’m better.
There were two ways around this kind of rudimentary mental blocking technique. He could simply push his way through the darkness. He could latch onto Hux’s thoughts and tear them out, messily, one by one, until he found the one he wanted, like picking the petals off a flower. But doing it that way would not, technically speaking, fall under the directive of ‘leaving him in one piece’. The people Ben had practiced that method on in the past still had a tendency to gibber.
He would do it the hard way. Harder for him, anyway. Not that General Hux would appreciate the extra effort.
“Will the Order pay to ransom you, do you think?” Ben asks. “Are you important enough to them? Or have they already picked your replacement?”
Questions begged the mind for answers, thoughts that he would be able to use to orient himself, but there is not as much as a flicker in that cold, dark space. Ben reaches out, careful but just short of gentle, expanding his presence in the General’s mind. Testing the boundaries of it. Hux makes a choked sound in the back of his throat.
What Ben had thought were walls reveal themselves to be smooth, black metal doors. It takes him a moment to realize that they belong to old-fashioned filing cabinets. Row upon row upon row of them, the kind that people used to keep ancient paper documents in. He tugs at the door to one, curious, and is unsurprised to find it locked.
Feeling around in the pitch-black, he discovers there is an opening just to the right of him; a gaping, empty space in the darkness. Ben steps through it, moving carefully until he senses another barrier. More walls. More cabinets.
“It’s very well-organized in here. I’m impressed,” Ben says, unthinking. His own mind wasn't this tidy.
“Thank you,” Hux bites out, insincere. “I do try.”
There is a sharp right angle and the sensation of empty space stretching out ahead of him.
This is ridiculous. He needs to be able to see.
“It must be embarrassing to the Order, to have someone of your rank captured by the pathetic Resistance.” Ben taunts. A flare of irritation somewhere ahead of him, quickly smothered. He alights on it like a hunting animal catching a scent. “It was a complete accident, did you know that? They weren’t there for you. They just saw the opportunity and took it.” More irritation. Stifled embarrassment. Ben follows them until he sees another wall. Another right turn.
The General is beginning to lose his careful blankness. Thoughts begin to flicker around the far edges of his mind, illuminating the space around him.
More openings branch off, twisting away into the dark space. A maze. His mind is a maze, Ben realizes, delighted and impressed in spite of himself. The level of self-control required to maintain such organization, the sheer pedantic fussiness to even try, was staggering.
“Unsurprising,” Hux mutters, through his clenched jaw. “Everything you do is an accident. Every victory you’ve had due to nothing but chance.”
“And yet, here you are.” Ben follows the General’s seething embarrassment like a distant beacon in the darkness. “Maybe the First Order isn’t as powerful as you think.” There is something at the center of this maze. Something Hux is curling all his defenses around, trying to protect from Ben. The deeper he goes, the more detailed the mindscape becomes. He has an impression of his own footsteps echoing on the hard floor as he moves, bodiless, through the space, and of air that smells like the climate-controlled, recycled O2 on a spaceship.
One bright thought, quickly smothered. Not for long. Smug, victorious. It’s connected to whatever’s at the center of General Hux’s mind. Ben pushes at the wall of filing cabinets, just to test the resistance there. He could tear them down easily, but he won’t. They need Hux in one piece. He moves on, following the path the General has so thoughtfully laid out for him.
“What are you hiding from me, General?” Ben murmurs, low. It’s a moment before he realizes he’s said it out loud. “You know I’m going to find it. Save yourself the trouble.”
“Then what would I do with my time? I’m so enjoying your company,” Hux bites back, half playful. He is breathing hard through his nose. The strain of resisting, of having Ben inside his head is getting to him. Soon he would start to become confused, to lose identity and his sense of awareness. Their minds would become tangled together, until separating them would require ripping them apart. Ben knew how to protect himself against that sort of damage, but Hux didn’t.
In the mindscape, Ben hits another wall. A dead end. Time to change tactics.
Uncle Luke would never approve of Ben using this sort of trick, but Uncle Luke wasn’t here.
When Ben was younger, he used to play a game with the Resistance pilots. Borrowing fighters for a joyride, racing across the surface of the planet and seeing how close to a cliff side they could fly and still pull up before it was too late. Ben usually won. Everyone said he pushed things too far.
That’s what this feels like. That terrifying, exhilarating moment when the proximity sensors started screaming in his ear and a canyon wall was stretching out in every direction in front of him. How long could he wait? How far could he push it? It was the delicate balance of finding that perfect very last second before he became a messy stain on the planet’s landscape.
How far did he have to go to get the information he needed? How much damage could he do before he broke their prisoner completely?
Ben rips the filing cabinets out of the walls, dumping them out and scattering their contents across the floor. Suddenly, General Hux’s orderly mind is in complete disarray, a tangled mess of thoughts and sensations. Unrelated memories thrown together in the mess. It’s chaos. Confusion. Frantic impulses tossed together with flashes of memory. Fear and excitement and the smell of boot polish. A sunset on an ice planet painting the sky in vivid reds and oranges. A lieutenant’s birthday- a small flashing remember to say something on the date. Hux laughs, sharp and choked, unsure of what’s funny. His thoughts are a jumble. He can’t think. Keeps forgetting to breathe.
His grip on whatever it is he’s trying to hide loosens. Ben worries at the edge of it, trying to slide the memory from his grasp without ripping it out completely, but the General has such a death grip on it that he’s afraid just pulling the thought out would tear him irreparably-
Ben races down the empty corridor in Hux’s mind, scattering thoughts and memories as he goes. He picks another cabinet door at random, tearing it out of the wall and upending it all over the floor. Snatches of conversation echo through the space, voices talking over each other.
The General’s grip gives a little more. He’s nearly there, nearly has it-
Ben holds on to the mindscape as he pushes back his chair, walking around the table until he is standing behind him. Hux is clutching at his hair, tangling it, and making strangled pained sounds. He presses his forehead against the cool metal surface of the table as his boots slip against the floor. He’s an absolute mess. Ben places one hand on his shoulder to steady him in the chair. The other palm he lays against the exposed back of his pale neck, the skin-to-skin contact focusing him, letting him push more of himself in.
Hux squirms under his hands, groaning at the feeling of being spread open. It hurts. Ben feels the thought flick by as soon as Hux does. Like something stuck in your teeth. Like the worst migraine imaginable. Hux wonders how he can possibly survive this pain.
Ben bites his lip a little, thinking. Every instinct is shouting at him to stop- to pull up now, right now before he went too far, before he crossed that line, but it’s drowned out by that part of him that screams that he’s almost got it. He can just make out the shape of the thought in Hux’s mind. A secret project on a planet covered in ice. Something big. Something that filled the General with a glowing combination of terror and pride, like a parent watching their child’s first murder.
He pulls, agonizingly slow but steady. He’s so close.
Everything he’s learned has been through trial and error. He can’t afford for this to be an error.
Gritting his teeth, Ben stirs up the chaos in the General’s mind. Blindsides him with a whirlwind of remembered emotions, battering him with them. The delighted, near-giddy pride from when he made captain, the bone deep fear he felt looking on their Supreme Leader for the first time. Sharp joy at seeing his own command ship for the first time through the viewport of a shuttle. A message from his father, designated low-priority, your mother died at 0430 last-
Hands in his hair, a drunken kiss. Bitterness at being rejected by a lover. Sitting bent over his desk with the lights dim, exhausted, but unwilling to sleep when there was so much work to be done on the new base-
Starkiller.
The word slips out of his mind, unbidden.
They are simultaneously in the empty Resistance store-room and in Hux’s memory of his spartan office. “What is it, Hux?” Ben mutters into the man’s ear, leaning over him from behind. Use his name, not his title- it’s more personal. Comforting. He runs a hand up and down his back, through the starched fabric of his uniform. “It’s alright, shh. What’s Starkiller? Tell me. It will stop if you just tell me.”
A wet sob that might have been a desperate, “no…“
Ben pulls again, but this time the thought begins to slide. Starkiller base: working compliment 120,000 men. 250,000 droids. Fifteen ship hangers. Ten Stormtrooper barracks completed. Five more in progress. Five floors above-ground, mostly living and administrative, forty floors subterranean. Expansion of the south wing: in progress, on schedule.
Hux standing on an ice planet, the wind whipping at his coat as he watched a massive dark energy containment unit lowered into the ground.
Hux riding in a shuttle, drafting a speech on his datapad. ‘This fierce machine which you have built, upon which we stand, will bring an end to the Senate.’ He backspaces, deleting an earlier section-
“How? How is it going to destroy the Senate? Tell me,” Ben snarls in his ear, digging his fingers into the back of Hux’s neck hard enough to bruise.
The memory slips free in a rush. He pulls out of the General’s mind immediately, retreating with his prize. His first reaction is triumph. He did it, he got it, he's won.
His second is horror as he realizes just what it is he's uncovered.
Ben is suddenly aware of the blood pounding in his ears and the General’s quiet whimpers. His mouth is dry.
He covers the distance to the door in two long strides and pounds on it. Three sharp knocks.
“Get General Organa,” he says to the guard who opens the door. His voice sounds strange in his own ears. The guard is May Barnard. Ben knows her well enough say hello. “Tell her … the Order is building a superweapon. Something that uses dark energy to destroy entire systems.” He swallows. “Tell her I know where it is.”
May curses and shuts the door in his face.
Ben takes a couple of breaths to steady himself, in and out through his nose. He is in shock, he realizes dimly.
No wonder the General put up such a fight.
No one knew the First Order was capable of this. They shouldn’t be capable of this. Shouldn’t have been able to get the funds to do this. Not without someone noticing. Yet there it was. Every statistic, every budget report, every technical specific kept neat and organized in the General’s tidy little mind. Now it was in Ben’s.
Starkiller Base. The name had to be Hux’s idea. Somehow both precise and overwhelmingly melodramatic.
If the Order had a weapon like that, they could destroy the entire Resistance in one blow and they would never even see it coming. His mother was right- this was bad. This was very bad. Ben balls his hands into fists to keep them from fidgeting.
It wasn’t projected to be operational until next quarter. They could handle this. One problem at a time. He turns back to their captive.
Hux is shaking all over. He makes a low whining sound, his face buried in trembling hands.
“No, look at me,” Ben says briskly, walking around the table to him and slowly forcing his hands down away from his face. His pupils are different sizes, one of them blown so wide the eye looks nearly black. Ben waves one hand in front of his face slowly, watching his eyes. After a moment, they track. “Good. That’s… good. Can you talk?”
“Nnh.”
“Let’s try words. How about your name? Can you tell me your name?”
“Fuck you,” Hux mumbles, his tongue thick in his mouth.
“Close enough,” Ben says.
Hux mutters something unintelligible under his breath. Ben leans in to catch it, “What?”
“…you could have at least bought me dinner first.” Hux repeats. He lays facedown on the table, his nose crushed into the worn metal, and covers his head with both arms. Ben feels him slipping into unconsciousness.
“Hey, no- stay awake, General.” Ben gives him a gentle shake with both hands on his shoulders. Hux whines. “We need to get you checked over by medical. Then you'll get the best accommodations the Resistance can spare for a prisoner.”
Hux makes unintelligible sounds that Ben feels safe in just assuming are some kind of sarcastic response.
“If you promise me you’ll stay awake I’ll go get you some Comaren for that headache.”
“…fnn-“ Hux says into the table. Ben takes that as agreement.