Chapter Text
“—stronger than she knows!”
"And the droid?”
“Ren believed it was no longer valuable to us.”
The look on Kylo Ren’s face had been satisfying to the very base of General Hux’s being, even through the helpless rage that threatened to make his hands shake—his victory, the galaxy in the palm of his kriffing hand, was at stake because of Kylo Ren’s absurd fixation with this girl.
Ren’s childish anger had shifted down into shame faster than he thought possible, especially given that he hadn’t believed Ren capable of shame. Ren quickly averted his gaze, turning back to face the Supreme Leader as Hux continued. God, he had needed that.
“That the girl was all we needed.”
Even after, he found his thoughts lingering on Ren’s face. There had been something strange about those eyes. Some quality to them he couldn’t place.
In the snow, he found his answer. For a moment Hux was petrified they’d taken too long to find him, that his unfocused eyes were glazed with death, his face ashen where it wasn’t scorched. Snoke would kill him for this, he knew, would kill him slowly and publically for his failures. He let out a gasp of relief when Ren shifted, held out a hand to help him up, intending to carry him back if need be.
Ren didn’t respond.
“Don’t be a child, we’ve no time for your…” Ren’s head snapped suddenly toward him as he spoke and he stopped, struck by the realization, the links finally connecting into a perfect chain, snapping taut in the well-oiled workings of his reasoning.
“Your…”
Kylo Ren’s eyes were still unfocused, their pupils oddly foggy. Just as they had been before Snoke, staring off in what Hux had assumed was an attempt at steel indifference. It wasn’t, and everything felt like it had fallen into place.
Ren couldn’t see him.
He gaped for a moment, the planet’s death rattles seemingly distant, irrelevant.
“You’re blind.”
He didn’t wait for a response, instead reaching down and taking Ren by his least injured arm and hauling him to his feet. Ren swayed dangerously, groaned in pain, and Hux looped the arm over his shoulders and began to carry him back to the transport, nose wrinkling at his stench of blood and burnt flesh. The ground lurched and screamed under his feet, the troopers’ shouts becoming more and more frantic as the planet broke around them.
He allowed himself to relax as they broke the atmosphere, allowed himself to sag and bury his face in his hands. With no audience save for the unconscious Kylo Ren, he was free to be crushed under the weight of his defeat. It had felt like his whole life was leading up to Starkiller, and now it was gone. He’d had the galaxy on a silver platter for a short, glorious moment, and then Kylo Ren had come along and fucked it all up with one mistake. He wanted to crush Ren’s throat while he lie there being fussed over by a couple of med droids, wanted to scream profanities he’d consider spacing an inferior officer for. He had done everything perfectly, or nearly so, and Starkiller was still reduced to red-hot space debris.
It was like drowning, like being held underwater by the ankles as Ren dragged him down with him. He took a deep breath through his nose, focused instead on the last revelation.
Ren was blind. Had he always been blind? How could he have missed that? Another egregious failure, another of Ren’s complications.
No, he couldn’t afford to think like that. Humility was one thing, self-pity was quite another. He sent his thoughts back, trying to pick out every odd incident.
The first that he could remember was that Ren had never once interacted with a display. Every lift ride together, every datapad exchanged between them, every inane tantrum, and Ren had never once touched a single button, switch, anything. He’d seen him once, with something that looked like a datapad, one glove removed—pale, exposed skin shocking and nearly scandalous for its rarity—and he had assumed that what Ren was doing was tracing the words as he read them. He supposed he was half right.
Beyond that it was all tiny detail, head movements when someone spoke, the way Ren would often seem to be looking down as he walked. A minute incline of his head, but noticeable in hindsight.
Ren was blind. There was a factor he hadn’t been aware of. It would have to be addressed. It was calming, in a way, to have this one issue to focus on. He could do nothing for Starkiller, do nothing to strike back at the Resistance for weeks yet, if not months. This, however, this oversight, he could work with.