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caiminnent · 4 years

Text

not designed for the cynical [kylux with side phasma/rey, rated T]

PROMPTS: communication suddenly cut off (@badthingshappenbingo, 8/25) & bed sharing - pet - delivery (@kyluxxoxo)

SUMMARY:

Whenever Snoke calls upon only Ren’s service, Hux sends word to all his relevant contacts that he’s available. The job offer he accepts turns out to be far more than he's bargained for.

(This is a low-key Inception AU that requires little to no knowledge of the movie.)

FANDOM: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy

TAGS: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Sharing a Bed, Mutual Pining, Alternate Universe - Inception Fusion, except not really, Armitage Hux Has Feelings, Kylo Ren and Rey Are Related

NOTES: This was written mostly during commute and/or sleep-deprived within an inch of my life and edited under the same circumstances. As such, I don't have the faintest clue what this is, but I love it.

5K || ALSO ON AO3

Hux isn’t prone to worry.

He is prone to stress, and he’s got the blood pressure to prove it—but that’s a necessity of the life they lead. It’s got its uses. Worry, however, is for when you don’t have an alphabetised, colour-coded list of plans for every situation that may arise. Worry is for the under-prepared.

Worry is a waste of time.

Knowing this doesn’t stop the fist around his heart from squeezing tight every time he hits redial and finds Ren’s phone still switched off, however.

Then again, there’s no real reason to worry about it. It’s a perfectly Ren move to go off the radar for weeks on end and turn up three countries away from where he was supposed to be, shrugging off all reprimand like he can’t understand why they’re so angry about it. It’s just what he does—he disappears, then he shows up at your doorstep when you least expect it.

He will this time, too. He promised—he will be back by Hux’s birthday.

----------------

Contrary to the popular (re: Ren’s) belief, life doesn’t stop just because Ren is off doing what Ren does somewhere else.

Even with all the safe houses and personas they maintain all across the world, the unreasonable amounts of money Snoke throws at them to be at his beck and call is more than enough to keep them afloat. Ren would be fine with not taking another independent job ever again; but Hux knows better than to rely on Snoke alone. He’s been burned enough times by fickle employers; he’s not ready to bet on the wrong horse and have to build his reputation up from scratch yet again.

That’s part of why, whenever Snoke calls upon only Ren’s service, Hux sends word to all his relevant contacts that he’s available. It keeps him in the game, on the occasion he gets an offer worth considering—and if he doesn’t, he calls it getting a feel for the market and moves on.

Monday morning finds him curled on the sofa, going through the responses on his phone. Most offers he received are below his notice like he expected, some downright insulting—and then there’s the e-mail from Enric Pryde himself.

He sits up so fast he almost knocks over his empty cup.

Among the dreamshare community, the First Order is as revered as it is despised. They reach out to very few and pay three times what they should; but the cost of failure is equally severe, growing proportionately to the project’s worth. Which seems to be a lot, in this case. While he can’t tell from the sparse details in the e-mail whether this Project Starkiller is meant to be a moving city or some sort of weapon—perhaps both, knowing the First Order—he already estimates at least two layers, more likely three, and a special blend of stabiliser for the dreamer and the architect both, who cannot be the same person for this design.

Because they want him on board as the main architect and his dreams never hold steady after the first layer, special blend or no.

Whatever he was looking for as a quick job, this is not it. It’s far more involved and challenging than he could have imagined—and, he’s finding, everything he needed. He could do this for himself. He could work a job he enjoys, instead of running point to Ren or Phasma’s picks all the time to keep them from working with incompetent point men.

Ren and Phasma, who might be working with incompetent point men halfway across the world this very moment.

No. No, he’s not thinking that. His birthday is only three days away. Everything is fine.

----------------

He e-mails back to say he’s honoured and asks for one week to get his team together. Pryde gives him five days and a thinly-veiled warning that there are others who would jump at this opportunity.

Stomach at his feet, Hux throws his phone on the coffee table and gets up to make more tea.

----------------

As expected, research gives him little of substance about the First Order’s operations and nothing at all about the Starkiller, although he finds a low-quality close-up of Pryde to glare at as he sketches out some ideas. They will get binned once he gets his hands on the self-destructing dossiers or whatever ridiculous security protocols the First Order may work with; but it keeps him busy. Better than watching the hours tick by.

When the clock turns from 11:59 to midnight on what is now Thursday, he considers texting Rey to ask if she’s heard from Phasma recently—changes his mind before he even picks up the phone. Ren wouldn’t like it. Hux has been accused of being a control freak more times than he can count as it is; he doesn’t want to add clingy to the list of his unattractive qualities.

----------------

At two in the morning, the doorbell rings.

He is going to murder Ren.

The door had never felt so close or so far as he rushes to it, heart hammering in his chest. He’s going to let Ren in, he’s going to check him for injuries and he’s going to disembowel that infuriating, thoughtless, selfish piece of shite if he’s had Hux fret all this time for no reason—

“Hi,” Rey chirps, looking up at him with damp eyes and a brittle smile. She raises a bottle of whiskey—Phasma’s favourite. “Happy birthday?”

He opens the door wider.

----------------

Admittedly—not out loud; he would never hear the end of it, from her or her cousin—Rey scores high on the short list of people whose company he enjoys. The booze helps, too. They drink in front of the television Hux hasn’t switched off in days and talk about everything but the aching holes in their chests.

She falls asleep on the sofa. He puts a blanket over her and goes to bed.

----------------

In the morning—practically afternoon, if he’s being honest—he tells her about the Starkiller. The plan was to pitch it to Ren first, to see what he thinks before bringing in the others. As it is, Ren isn’t here and none of Hux’s messages has gone through since their interrupted conversation and Hux is going to bloody explode if he doesn’t tell someone.

“I’m not sure, Armie,” she says around a spoonful of breakfast cereal he certainly didn’t buy. “He will never agree to work for the First Order.”

“Why the hell not? He works for Snoke.” Rather happily, in fact. Ren never prepares more carefully for a job than one of Snoke’s plentiful errands, no matter how simple. “Why wouldn’t he work for Snoke’s own company?”

She considers him for a long moment, chewing slowly. “He hasn’t told you the story.”

The implication—accusation—stings deep. “What story?” he demands, pushing his tea away to lean closer. The words held the intonation of capital letters, which means missing information that could potentially blindside them down the line. His respect for Ren’s private business isn’t greater than his responsibilities.

“Not mine to tell,” she says sternly, pinching her lips in disappointment like he should be ashamed to have asked to begin with. “Ask him.”

He snorts. Ren is hardly the sharing type, especially where Hux is concerned. Everything he’s ever learned about Ren has come through other means—and vice versa, he imagines.

She frowns, a question rising behind her eyes. He tenses on instinct. “Anyway,” she continues, shaking her head—and he can breathe more easily again. “My point is, if we’re doing this, we’ll need another forger.”

We. He doesn’t suppress his smile, relief coating his insides. “I suspect we won’t need a forger for this one. A chemist, on the other hand…”

----------------

She doesn’t leave and he doesn’t ask her to. They polish off the whiskey and pretend not to check their phones every ten minutes while binge-watching Star Wars, including the newest releases even their resident space nerd couldn’t finish.

He visualises Ren’s horrified expression when Hux reveals how he and Rey bonded over their shared love for big guns and hot villains in Ren’s absence. Laughter gets stuck in his throat, forming a painful lump instead.

He bids her good night and slinks away into his bedroom to stare at the ceiling.

Barely ten minutes pass before the television switches off in the next room, soft footsteps echoing lightly in the corridor. He turns his back to the door and feigns sleep as it opens and closes—which is a coward’s way, but he’s never claimed to be a particularly brave man. If he were, he would have asked Ren to stop working for Snoke instead of stewing in his misery right now.

Compared to her cousin, Rey’s weight barely shifts the mattress as she climbs in, sliding under the covers without fanfare. He shuts his eyes tighter and allows himself to imagine, just for a moment, that Ren is back.

“I haven’t heard from Phasma in over a month.”

Over a month? Hells, no wonder she sought him out. “Ren and I talked two weeks ago,” he says—realises with a sinking feeling that it sounded like he was rubbing it in. “Closer to three, actually.”

“What did he say?”

“Not much that I could understand. The reception was horrible.” Bits and pieces through constant breaking: Hux, shit, in case, person and, inexplicably, home. “I didn’t get the impression they were in danger—just inconvenienced.” As is often the case with these missions. Snoke’s got a small army of trained private security under his command and he still sends Ren to the most out-of-the-way places.

That Snoke’s hired Phasma as well for this one is a little more concerning, but not overly so. Reckless as they both can be, Ren and Phasma are forces to be reckoned with on the field—Hux would be more inclined to feel sorry for their adversaries.

Rey sighs. “Hope you’re right, Armie.”

----------------

If Mitaka is surprised to see Rey strut about in Hux’s shortest joggers she still needed to fold at the ankles and an old shirt, he politely doesn’t mention it. He and Rey exchange banal pleasantries over coffee and day-old cake while Hux finishes typing up his notes, then they get to work.

Mitaka listens to the briefing with unwavering attention, his fingers stapled in front of him like a front-row student. Like everyone else in their extended team, Mitaka is an experienced, accomplished dreamer—and yet, Hux can’t help looking at him and seeing the fresh-faced cadet Phasma had dragged in ages ago, barely into his twenties and all the more naive for it.

They’ve gotten old—Hux most so.

Once Hux finishes, “If you both are building this time,” Mitaka starts, looking between the two. “Who will be taking point? The Captain?”

Next to him, Rey inhales sharply, her face mostly hidden behind the curtain of her hair. Shame crosses through Mitaka’s face at the realised misstep.

“She’s otherwise occupied,” Hux responds before Mitaka can break into apologies. No need to make this more painful or awkward than it needs to be. “I will be running point as usual, and Rey is here to help with the heavy-lifting.”

Mitaka nods, glancing at Rey with concern before turning to Hux fully. “Where do I sign?”

----------------

They sign a heavily-encrypted stack of documents digitally, sending them through the First Order’s own communication system. The next day, they receive a link to a private cloud service with a convoluted unlock sequence that can be accessed by one device at a time, read-only.

Hux alone works on three different devices.

On the bright side, the project they receive is well-worth the inconvenience. Their objective is to design and build a superweapon out of an extensively described ice planet in the dreamspace, which must be capable of hitting five targets simultaneously and obliterating all affected life forms on them without causing a single non-predetermined casualty. Controlled chaos, if you will. The First Order wants a catastrophe they can tame and leash.

Hux can make it happen.

Whether he can make it happen in eight weeks is a different question entirely.

----------------

Without Ren to drag him away from work, he’s free to divide his waking hours between his screens and the sitting room, which they repurposed into a workshop-slash-dream den. While Hux is a decent architect in a pinch, he could never build the way Rey does—the way she bends the dreamspace to her will and creates cities that feel alive around them. Between the two of them, they have the groundwork laid out within days, quickly moving on to revising the base design according to the specifications in the main file and the numbers Hux runs.

Instead of using pre-mixed batches, Mitaka mixes their Somnacin from scratch on the kitchen table, reworking the formula per the reactions. None he comes up with works to keep Hux’s dreams steady, although a couple seem to ground his control over the dreamspace. Most just turn the dreams into nightmares for everyone involved.

Many of the nightmares are about Ren. Every time they manage to wake up from one of those, he looks at Rey to apologise. She never meets his eyes.

----------------

Unlike the two of them, Mitaka has family to return to and so he does when it gets late, leaving them to eat take-away and talk around the elephant in the room. On the rare occasion they do talk. Even though Hux gets the most shit for his workaholic tendencies, they all are guilty of it in different degrees; most nights are spent hunched over desks or tablets until they come close to shooting each other over the smallest noise or mistake, then they retire for the night.

The bedroom is where the worst fears come out.

“They might need our help,” she murmurs, lowly enough that the words could get lost among the howling wind outside. “They might be injured or—or lost, waiting for rescue. And we would be here arguing about heat transfer.”

“They aren’t.”

“But how do you know?”

He sighs loudly, turning to face Rey. Her eyes are big and eerily bright in the darkness, shining. “Look, Ren and I have been through this before. We’ve got contingencies in place for any kind of emergency—strategies to scarper and regroup as needed, fake identities with paper trail, codes to slip into lines of communication that will find their way to the other’s ear—all of which tied to systems that would alert us both if ever used. So far?” He gestures vaguely to his phones on the nightstand. “Complete radio silence.”

“Well it might be because he’s—”

His stomach lurching, “Don’t,” he bites out. He’s had enough nights contemplating that possibility himself, reasoning himself out of that line of thinking with more effort each time; he can’t handle someone else saying it.

Especially not Rey, whose unfailing optimism has seen them through many a dark spot.

“They will be back soon,” he says with conviction he forces himself to feel. They always do. This is just taking longer than expected.

Rey’s silence rings in the room.

----------------

At the end of the third week, Enric Pryde reaches out to him. His voice is as cold and serpent-like as he looks.

They talk for two and a half minutes—more accurately, Pryde relays his demands for two minutes and rebuffs Hux’s protests for the next half, then hangs up unceremoniously on him.

Fuming, Hux tries to glare a hole into his phone for about as long before going to wake Rey up.

----------------

“What do you mean, they are relocating us?”

Latching his fingers tight to keep from scraping at his already raw palms, “I mean exactly what I said,” Hux grinds out. “They want to move us into some safe house where they will provide us with everything we’ll need for the rest of the project. We don’t have the option to refuse their generosity.”

“They want to monitor us,” Mitaka says on the other end of the line, ever fond of pointing out the obvious. “Can they do that?”

“Would you like to be the one to tell them they can’t?” Hux shakes his head. They are not small fish; but the First Order is big enough to swallow them whole and not suffer for it. He knows to pick his fights. “If you’d like to drop off the face of the earth, now is the time.”

Rey snorts—as much of an answer as Mitaka’s bitter laughter.

“Well,” Rey says, scraping her chair back. “I should pack some clean underwear. When are they coming to get us?”

“As we speak.”

----------------

Before they leave, they make sure to sketch out First Order insignias on every available place. Just in case.

----------------

The safe house is, for all intents and purposes, a veritable villa in the middle of nowhere.

“A little excessive,” Mitaka comments as they tour the place, noting the bolted down furniture and darkened windows, locked conspicuously on the outside. The cupboards and the fridge are well-stocked enough to keep them fed for several months.

There is no mobile coverage.

In fact, there is no wireless connection of any sort. The multitude of devices strewn about in the house are all connected to the First Order’s own network and communications system, which provides access to every archive they might need for the project and nothing else.

The dread coiled in Hux’s guts grows heavier.

So much for his alert systems.

----------------

Progress is much faster with so much information at their fingertips.

Hux is envious of the berths of the First Order databases. Effective as his own methods of gathering intelligence are, his network couldn’t hope to have the same reach as a well-funded PMC—which he could have been a part of, had he not gone freelance instead of corporate after leaving the military.

The idea is tempting, still. He’s ruined for the civilian workforce—has been since childhood, with a father like General Brendol Hux was—but he seeks the structure and order that comes with being part of an organisation. Under different circumstances, he may have considered applying to the First Order after this project.

As their prisoner in everything but name, he wants little more than to be as far away from them as possible.

----------------

Everything they’ll need doesn’t involve a private chef or buffet, but it involves private delivery people who pick up whatever they want, no matter what they want, in a timely fashion. Because they are spiteful opportunists, they order the most extravagant and unreasonable meals they can think of. The food always arrives hot.

Hux marks the potential restaurants for each food item and how long it took to arrive on a small map every time. Just in case.

----------------

Sleeping in the same bed while Mitaka is in the next room feels too awkward, so they don’t. They don’t sleep much in general, either—not with the question of how to power a machine of the Starkiller’s scale without it overheating hanging heavy over their heads. Dreamshare mechanics are a lot more forgiving than their real-world counterparts; if they can’t pull it off down there, they sure as hell won’t make it work topside.

They have to make it work topside, they now know. The First Order wouldn’t have poured so much money and resources into what is merely Pryde’s pet design project.

“They probably have people looking into it,” Rey says, spinning her pen around her fingers with smugness dripping from her expression. He’s not petty enough to dare her to replicate it in the real world, but the thought is there. “Some super high-tech R&D division working on preventing a weapon of mass-destruction from exploding instead of, like, climate change.”

Watching her fingers like the secrets of the universe lie between them, “I don’t think so,” Mitaka responds. “It’s too much of a commitment. I bet they just wait for someone else to figure it out, then steal the designs from them.”

Something flares at the back of Hux’s mind like static, a connection he doesn’t want to make forcing itself into his awareness.

He shakes his head hard to clear it. Even with the dilation, he doesn’t have the time to dwell on things he’s got no control over.

“If you two are quite done gossiping,” he cuts in, smoothing over the blueprints in front of him for effect. “We’ve got work to do.”

----------------

We’re going to take something someone else worked very hard for, was all Ren had said the night before his departure—the only time Hux dared ask about his new job, once it became apparent Ren wasn’t going to say a word about it on his own. It’s such a non-answer that Hux couldn’t tell if Ren wanted to leave him space for plausible deniability or simply didn’t want to tell him.

He still can’t. As a matter of fact, he can’t say for sure Snoke’s job and this project are connected, either; all he’s got is a hunch.

A hunch he desperately wants to see proven wrong.

----------------

Mitaka’s newest blend is the most successful yet. They go down as far as the third level with only minor tremors under their feet—a huge leap of progress, after weeks of the ground swallowing them up whole.

Knowing better than to push their luck, they call it an early night and celebrate by ordering a feast they’ll have to take their time with. With the dinner table and every other horizontal space that could reasonably hold food covered in their work, they sprawl about the sofa set that hasn’t seen nearly enough use over their involuntary stay.

Once their food arrives and Rey realises what he ordered, a soft look crosses over her face. He ignores it. There’s only one place that serves Ren’s favourite food; it makes for a good reference point on his map. It’s not sentimental if it’s also practical.

----------------

He knew, from a logical standpoint, that having access to communication systems meant people could communicate with them and vice versa. On account of the fact that Pryde and the delivery people are the only ones to use it, he didn’t particularly care.

When the name Blysma pops up on the main screen, he realises what a gross oversight that was.

Heart at his throat, he accepts the request with shaking hands, grateful that no one is awake to see him like this. “Hux speaking.”

“Hello, Hux.”

Oh.

Oh, the ever-loving—

“Don’t say my name,” Ren adds quickly, as if he sensed that Hux was about to curse his name six ways to Sunday. “Or any other names. They don’t actively monitor your communications, but we’re pretty sure some keywords are flagged. Best not to take any chances.”

“We,” he repeats dumbly. So many questions are buzzing in his head that he doesn’t know which should take priority. “You and—ah, our mutual terrifying friend?”

Phasma’s melodic laughter rings through the other end of the line. Hux’s heart soars.

“Yeah,” Ren says, a little breathy. “Yes, we’re both here. And fine. The job ran late. Where the fuck are you?”

About that… “I don’t actually know,” he admits, the truth of it settling dark and deep into his gut. Trying to map out their location left him with more questions than answers. “Near the ocean. Far north of the city, I think; but we shouldn’t have crossed any borders.”

“That doesn’t narrow it down,” Ren says.

Irritation rising in him, “We were hardly given a tour guide for the road,” he snaps. You should have been there to take notes, is on the tip of his tongue—he swallows the words. Ren is here now, in a way. They’ve found Hux and the others. The insignias must have pointed them in the right direction; but figuring out how to contact Hux through the First Order’s own systems? That’s all their doing.

Taking a long breath to calm himself down, “How did you contact us anyway?” he asks.

“By calling in more favours than your sorry life is worth,” Phasma says, amusement lingering in her tone. He has never been happier to hear her mocking drawl. “So you had better give us something concrete to work with before we decide to leave you to rot there.”

Racking his brain, he takes a deep breath to ground himself. He’s got to focus. However Ren and Phasma managed to get into the First Order’s systems, they are unlikely to remain unnoticed for long. He needs to make the most of it.

The answer is so simple, he wants to smack himself upside the head.

“At noon, we will place an order for three servings of Bivoli tempari from the Hosnian. Track whoever is delivering it. They should lead you to us.”

----------------

He doesn’t tell the others about it. For one, he’s not fully sure his stress-addled brain didn’t make up the whole interaction—for another, they have a check-in with Pryde scheduled at 3, during which they’re going to disappoint him again with their lack of progress regarding the overheating issue. They are on thin ice as it is; he can’t take a gamble on the quality of the others’ poker faces and risk attracting Pryde’s suspicion.

At exactly noon, he contacts the delivery people and relays the order. In his periphery, Mitaka and Rey share a look.

Once he takes his seat again, “I thought the Hosnian was eat-in only,” Rey says.

Hux shrugs. “They said everything you’ll need.”

----------------

He orders something different from the Hosnian at the same time for the next four days, just in case. Mitaka is too polite to protest, despite the cuisine clearly not agreeing with him.

Rey eyes him suspiciously every time but says nothing, waiting for him to come to her instead of forcing an explanation out of him. He appreciates it more than he can put into words. He can only hope she understands.

----------------

Dying in an explosion ten times in a row tends to throw a wrench in group morale.

Unwilling to kill themselves just to wake up in the safe house, they wordlessly agree to wait out the timer. The burnout has settled deep onto their bones; Pryde’s implicit threats after every check-in don’t help their mental state, either. If Ren and Phasma hadn’t made contact, Hux might have considered taking his chances with a desperate escape attempt instead of sticking around to see what punishment the First Order would dole out for their inevitable failure. It might prove the better end, at any rate.

“I am going back to my children after this,” Mitaka says with more conviction than Hux has been able to muster up about anything in months. “I don’t care what happens. I don’t care if they kill me for it—I won’t die without seeing my family again.”

“We are not dying,” Hux reassures him. With three real-world seconds to the scheduled kick, he explains everything—Ren and Phasma making contact, the bare-bones of the plan and Blysma’s carefully vague progress update texts, the precautions they’re taking to keep Mitaka’s family safe should something go wrong.

Mitaka cries silent, happy tears at the news. Rey gives Mitaka a warm smile and pulls him close.

“That’s it,” she tells Hux, rubbing at Mitaka’s arm in sympathy. “I’m not letting her take a job without me ever again.”

Raising a brow, “You would be announcing to everyone in the community that she’s the best leverage against you,” he points out, not unkindly. He understands the sentiment—truly, he does—but it’s woefully impractical. Not to mention the kind of commitment it would take.

Her eyes gleam, smile turning secretive in that way he’s learned not to trust. Reaching into her pocket with her free hand, “I was already going to do that,” she says airily, taking out a small, velvet box.

Ah. Fair enough, then.

----------------

Hux is above lying to his employers.

Rather, he likes to think he is. Dreamshare, sophisticated as it may be at its heart, is an underground science—as such, it attracts a certain crowd. In a community where lying through one’s teeth is a survival skill, Hux knows to look someone in the eye and spin a tale truer than the truth as well as the next crook; he just prefers to tell the truth as long as it will leave his head connected to his body.

As it happens, this is the last scheduled check-in before the deadline. Giving Pryde bad news now would be signing their death warrant.

When Hux reports their success, Pryde smiles. The sight haunts Hux’s nightmares for days.

----------------

Blysma’s communication request comes the night before the grand plan, unscheduled.

His mind racing with possibilities, he grabs the tablet sitting on his nightstand before the notification wakes the others, accepting the request with, “Hux speaking.” As far as he’s concerned, there’s nothing left to talk about. Phasma has already laid out all she could of the plan without tipping off the First Order; a recap now would do more harm than good.

If this is about a last-minute change—well. Adaptability is another survival skill in their line of work.

“I missed your birthday.”

Hux blinks at the screen in his hands. “I—yes.” By a couple of months, at this stage. Where did that come from? Surely Ren didn’t realise it only now? “If you contacted me to wish me a happy belated birthday…”

“Of course not. I—uh, I called to hear your voice.” Hux’s lungs tighten, all too aware of his heartbeat. “Since we never finished our conversation.”

Their conversation. The handful of words Hux has been turning over in his head for months, to no apparent meaning or answer.

He’s bloody desperate to ask and finally, finally find out; but they’ve waited this long. They can be patient a little longer. “This is neither the time nor the place,” Hux says, as gently as he’s able, biting down on the instinctive Ren at the end. Now would be the absolute worst time for a slip-up. “Whatever it was, you can tell me tomorrow. In person.”

“That’s just it,” Ren mutters. “The last time I tried to tell you, we kept getting cut-off until signal completely went away and I thought, it’s fine. I’ll be back in a few days, I’ll just tell him then. In person.” He laughs, a breathy, bitter sound. “But then…”

But then Ren couldn’t get back until a few weeks after—and when he did, Hux wasn’t there anymore.

He clears his throat to get out the lump lodged there. “Then you’ll just have to be there this time,” he says firmly—his point man voice. “Because I will be, and I won’t accept any excuses.”

After a long beat, “Yes, sir,” Ren says, a smile in his voice. “See you on the other side.”

“Sleep well.”

#Kylux Summer Fest 2020 #Bad Things Happen Bingo #kylux #Armitage Hux #Kylo Ren #Rey #Dopheld Mitaka #Phasma #Star Wars #Cai does words #finished fics #I know I say this for every fic #but this fic was a ride #I can happily go back to my KBB fic now #not designed for the cynical

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mondofunnybooks · 6 years

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MONDO FunnyBooks: Bunker Down.

Were you a recent visitor to the wonderful world of comics fandom and discussions between professionals in the business, you might have the idea that comic customers were essentially a superstitious and cowardly lot.

Current sources of outrage, retweets and outbreaks of delusional authority run riot have been ranged from the fairly embarrassing to the downright worrying. Arguments in this writers memory have been about: 'Is The Joker doing something not very nice to a human being?', 'How dare a movie studio choose to cast who they like in the film they're paying to make without consulting US first?', 'This man who draws and has been drawing people in a particular fashion has drawn this person in his particular fashion. How dare he?' We reached peak David Icke/Alex Jones levels of hilarious Othering this week when an X-Men artist referred to SJWs as 'Nazis'.

Irony and Satire have apparently given up on humanity and gone for a pint.

The usual conservative, tribal viewpoints of people who've confused an artistic medium with a constant stream of politically free distraction designed only to anatheize rather than engage and stimulate thought, then. It's more important to harass Ruby Rose for being cast as 'Batwoman' until she feels compelled to leave Twitter or be upset at the news of Michael B. Jordan playing Johnny Storm for reasons that were absoultly nothing to do with racism but rather the...uh...misportrayal of the modern American family which defintly traditionally couldn't contain a black man. Also something something tradition or something.

When we've brought this up before, we're usually countered with something like 'Oh, you should see Harry Potter/Overwatch/Hunger Games/Fortnite fandoms, they're JUST as bad.' Which we are willing to assume is true, having seen YouTube comments, but it does seem that the entertainment industry has a bad habit of emulating the worst excesses of the comics industry.

Whether it's Empire or TV Guide running variant covers, Toy producers doing convention exclusive figures and then selling them at a premium afterwards or even, HighFather Keep Us From Laughing, the application of the words 'Limited' or 'Collectiable' to a product to imply both a scarity that requires instant purchase and a possibilty of high resale value when in fact those are words that could be applied to any physical product ever.

We can almost guarantee that there are only a limited amount of copies of 'Night Rocker' by David Hasslehoff in the world and should you decide to purchase one or more copies, you have collected them, but neither fact is hard evidence that anyone will offer you more than you paid for them ten years in the future.

This is a rather..odd state of affairs to have come about. With the exception of poetry or graffiti, Before the medium was hijacked into becoming one more vehicle to sell corporate superhero products, work like George Herriman's 'Krazy Kat' explored the nature of language via abusive animals against the unrelenting tedium of the desert. Little Nemo In Slumberland by Windsor McCay was a continous attempt to map the subconscious in a strip adaptable to any format thrown at him by publishers. Sigel and Shuster commericalised the Jewish notion of a charismatic Golem who would maintain balance against an American society that had been taught to hate them. Fly By Night publishing types would use the form to glamourise the world of true crime and vaguely condemning tales of drug abuse to create an entire sub-culture by showing a willingness to adapt to the times.

These were the early days of comics and sequential story-telling and by now there ought to be work making these masterpieces look like the plinkings of Woody Gutherie against the all out assault on the cortex that is an Atari Teenage Riot. Instead the front end of the medium seems more concerned with dotting the I's and lining the t's of it's previous output (our favourite example being Marvel's 'Secret Wars Too: A comic that explained to readers why the comic it was parodying would be late. They charged money for this, as well.)

Comics were long considered the Outlaw Artform, so capable of shaping the public psyche that the content and distribution were brought up in Congress to see if it was necessarily to regulate the avalibilty of them to children. It's a longer story than will run here but the essence of the events is that while the 1954 hearings saw Congress conclude that comics were NOT a harmful product that would negatively influence children's minds, the comics industry decided that it would be best to settle public hysteria by establishing 'The Comics Code Authority', which would impose a series of standards and regulations upon comics seeking to be distributed on the newsstands.

Ironically, one of the people on the earlier incarnations of the board that would make up The CCA would be John Goldwater, one of many who takes credit for the creation of Archie Andrews'.. This writer likes to think Mr Goldwater was probably a little resentful of EC Comics's Archie parody 'STARCHIE!' (MAD Magazine Issue 12. Remains funny but now also looks like any episode of 'Riverdale'.) and was more than happy to choose the phrasing of a code that also happened to regulate the key words in EC Comic's top selling comics out of publication. All the resentful little men in comics complaining about being mocked are 'Happy Days''s Howard Cunningham wearing his Grand Poobah hat in our head.

We say 'ironically', because the current Ickeian theory is that comic sales in the direct market are so low due to Marvel and DC 'giving in' to the demands of the 'SJWs'. What with their unreasonable demands for more realistic representation in mainstream comics, we can see how 'Could you produce more comics we'd be willing to buy?' would definetly be an agenda designed to bring down the entire comics industry.

Because we are given to facts, we can't dispute a lot of the problems the new comics industry faces. Sales on New Comics to The Direct Market ARE down.

It would take the same sort of mind that blames Barack Obama for his Presidential inaction during Hurricane Katrina to think that the problems of new comics are the work of those damned SJWs, though. Not unless Heidi MacDonald has a time machine.

Unless Laurie Penny staged a hostile takeover of The Marvel Editorial Summit and said 'Right. Here's what we want: Please keep raising the prices of your comics by roughly about a dollar every few years, do more $150 crossovers that will have no significance in about 4 years or so. Please spin off as many comics as possible from one of your prime brands. Make sure your top staff behave like Obnoxious King Nerds on social media whenever possible.Instead of focusing your sales team on promoting the comic as a good read, keep pitching your comics as must buy investment issues aimed at speculators who won't be back for the next issue. As soon as your readership have begun to settle into a book, it's direction and it's creative team, that's probably the best time to relaunch your titles.

Be sure to confuse readers and retailers by pretending each relaunch is a 'Season' without ever referring to which season is currently published in advertising or trade dress. Come up with any justification whatsover to publish an anniversary issue that's triple the price of a regular comic as frequently as possible. Try to devalue the contribution and sales cache of your creative team over the amount of variant covers offered to retailers. Have your top writers actively and vocally hostile to the notion of second printings and finally publish no comics that even vaguely resemble the TV and Movie versions of your characters so new readers can come into a shop after seeing "Avengers Assemble" and be offered 7 books called "Avengers" but they'll mainly be about some men chatting at a table.'....then the reasons why new comics are failing aren't at the hands of SJWs.

They're at the hands of the publishers. The above list is the main reason for the decline in sales of new comics in specialist shops that we saw in our days behind the till. All things we were saying over a decade ago at retailer meetings with Marvel and DC. We were brushed off in order to try and wave shiny new 3D variants back then.

A few years later, when it was apparent that the law of diminishing returns was in full effect, was when finally The Big Two turned to the 'gimmick' of appealling to a wider audience. When oddly, that half-hearted effort to win over a new readership by publishing the books in the same venues as usual didn't work,with little support from their publicity and advertising departments both Marvel and DC quickly threw these efforts under the bus as proof that trying to expand your salesbase beyond a Wednesday crowd was a waste of time.

Except that''s nonsense of course. Any analysis of pre-order charts will tell you that the sales have been in heavy decline since 2007's 'Civil War' from Marvel. The constant attempts to repeat that success in that format are the problem. Marvel and DC trying the 'Social Justice' route and it's subsequent failure is a shameless attempt to rewrite history for the benefit of an agenda of tired Poobahs scared of time and their limited views of the comic medium making them irrelevant.

In fact, Marvel's recent attempt to appeal to Muslims,AND teenagers (imagine.) at once was quite late in the game with 2013's 'Ms Marvel' while the 'Feminazi Bible' Mockingbird wouldn't begin threatening Poobah Egos until around late 2016. Meanwhile, Archie Comics had smelled which way the wind was blowing several years earlier....

Archie Comics were always smarter than the ongoing superhero titles because they never set themselves up to tell an ongoing story, but rather worked like an extended cartoon strip. If you read three random issues of any Archie comics, you were probably as clued up on the cast of Riverdale as you were going to need to be to understand the dynamics of what was going on. Archie was perptually out of sync with the world around him, Betty was goal driven and meant well, Moose wasn't quite sure what day it was but loved Midge more than anything, etc. etc. All you had to do was set up a situation, add two or more of the characters and let the rest play out.

Even better, since the characters weren't obliged to be a certain age given the backstory (Peter Parker can't be worrying about teenage problems since he's been around long enough to get married, be a lecturer, etc.) the backgrounds and fashions could simply be updated to reflect the times of publication.

So no awkward retcons such as Reed Richards and Ben Grimm starting off as veterans of World War 2 and suddenly having gone through The Gulf War instead, prompting questions like 'Which comics have and haven't happened, then, because The Avengers definitely went to Saigon in the 70's but the existence of The FF precedes The Original Avengers finding Captain America in the block of ice and Cap turned out to be fighting Richard Nixon during The Secret Empire Saga so...argh!'

Archie managed to stay on the newsstands long after the self absorbed and inside baseball nature of superhero comics rendered them unsaleable in your average W.H.Smith's or Wal-Mart, since any issue of Betty & Veronica could be read by anyone with no need to check out previous issues. It was very rare that any one tale would run more than one comic and the few times it did, it was with fantastic results. We'll get to that.

In 2010, Marvel was wasting everyone's time and money on 'Siege; or 'What If Asgard wasn't in space but in Oklahoma instead?' while DC insisted on spreading the myth that people who grew up in Liverpool talk like they're from Shoreditch by adding John Constantine to the line up of 'Brightest Day'.

During the same year, Archie dragged mainstream comics kicking and screaming into the future with 'Kevin Keller', a comic featuring an openly gay male lead out in the real world and everything. This annoyed some American Mary Whitehouse wannabes called 'One Million Moms!'. They campaigned against the title being sold in children friendly areas such as Toys R Us but only really proved their basic inability to count to 1 million.

In the same year they published covers featuring Archie kissing Valerie, the black bassist from Josie & The Pussycats. If this doesn't strike you as a big deal for a comic being published in the mid-west of America, well, you might be one of those guys suggesting that there's always been adequate representation in comics.

They didn't sell as many comics in specialist shops, but while The Big Two continued to tread water, Archie kept moving forward, kept looking to crossover with big name brands, parodied the biggest comic crossovers, featured the likes of Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, paid homage to EC Comics and got Adam Hughes to draw covers. They even explored exactly what WOULD happen if Archie finally chose Betty. And Veronica. And heartbreakingly, how deep Archie's love for his fellow man ran in the conclusion to the marriage stories in 'The Death Of Archie.' Oh, and he also met the Predator.

Then they stepped everything into higher gear with our second favourite horror comic of the 21st Century with Afterlife With Archie. It was a book we'd recommend to new readers as a good alternative to the horrendously overpriced, badly drawn horror or just too boring to be scary books glutting the market with 'Torture Porn Variants'. AWA would feature at least one chilling moment per issue likely to stay with you long after you finished reading. One issue of tie-in book 'Sabrina The Teenage Witch; is worth 3 or 4 'Walking Dead' trade paperbacks in terms of actual horror instead of people talking around a trailer park.

If you had been a fan of the Archie world before and hadn't read it for a while, though, our glee would be magnified. While the horror/jump scare bits of AWA are genuinely well done and actually quite intense, the bits between undead assault are where the real horror lies as relationships between all the characters are twisted forever, new angles and revealations would stop you ever being able to see Midge, Cheryl, Reggie and more in quite the same light.

This moving with the times meant that the Archie readership were quite capable of seeing the characters they loved for so many decades in different modes of storytelling and art styles laid the groundwork for two things: The relaunch of the line in 2015 with high profile creators such as Mark Waid, Fiona Staples, Chip Zdarsky and Adam Hughes doing new and interesting takes on a universe we all knew so well (A bit like The Ultimate Universe but with a point and a plan.) and also the hit show 'Riverdale'.

It will not surprise many of you to learn that the Grand Poobahs Of Comics (TM MONDO FunnyBooks 2018) hated 'Riverdale' and frequently grumbled 'Not MY Archie.' but then, by folding their arms and threatening to hold their breath until the artform of comics goes back to being what THEY want, they've proven time and again that they're constantly wanting to find a straw man to blame for the world moving on without them. These were the same people who moaned about 'Archie Vs Punisher' for not taking Frank Castle seriously enough and thought the parody crossover 'Love Showdown' (Which promised that Archie would finally choose a permanent girlfriend) would break the Archieverse once and for all.

There are lots of ways to improve the state of comics. Indulging the whinging of grumpy old men and refusing to believe the rest of the world might be interested in comics are not on that list of ways.

And as a wise man once said 'The people want BeBop. And who I am to tell them that BeBop is wrong?'

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emeraldnebula · 6 years

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Thoughts on the comic book industry, Part 2

One of the biggest gripes about comic books is one that’s gotten a lot of traction since the end of the big 1990s comic book boom. And it’s only become a much bigger, much more unavoidable issue since then:

American comics are inaccessible to the general public, largely inappropriate and/or incomprehensible for all-ages audiences and newcomers, and are prohibitively expensive for anyone who isn’t already a die-hard collector.

Let me put it this way: For about $5 to $7, you can buy at your drug store or supermarket a 300-page paperback novel that tells a complete story. For $4 or $5 bucks at minimum, your money will get you a 22-page comic book that more often than not is part of a prolonged story arc that even upon completion probably won’t be a complete story. And you won’t be able to find said comic anywhere but a comic book store, so you have to put out the extra effort to see if there even is a store in your area. Which is the better value for your money? The complete story that’s easily accessible and reasonably priced, or the 22-page booklet that won’t be a complete story, will likely be impossible to understand unless you’re already a fan, and will be much harder to come by?

Obviously, the devolution of American comics from something easily available and accessible to all to the impenetrable mess they are today is the result of the industry switching over to the direct market system exclusively. In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, comics started abandoning newsstands, grocery stores, and drug stores in favor of comic book stores. That transition bled a lot of readers over time, and gradually led to comics catering almost exclusively to an audience of aging die-hards. Dick Giordano commented around the time of John Byrne’s Man of Steel that they were playing to “a much smaller and much more demanding audience” than had existed before. So there was no more incentive to make comics reader-friendly for potential newcomers or to bother with wide distribution. Just play to your captive audience and call it a day.

The consequences of this have been playing out for the last 32 years. Since 1986, when Alan Moore and Frank Miller made their names by shaking up the public perception of comics (for good and ill), the major publishers have adopted soap opera-style storytelling as the default model, a nihilistic and mean-spirited overall tone, lots of graphic violence and shock value gimmicks, and the default assumption that their readers are the same people who’ve been with them all along. Little to no effort is made in publicizing their wares to appeal to a larger audience; any publicity that’s done is purely to pimp the latest bad idea the editors are stuck on at any given moment to their existing readership. (This is even more baffling when you remember DC and Marvel are both owned by major studios, and could have used those resources at any time.)

And by not even bothering to make themselves available on a mass scale, comics have abandoned any notion of being reader-friendly, relying on convoluted, incomprehensible “continuity” and seldom bothering to open issues with even a brief recap of previous events to get new readers up to speed. The assumption is that anyone who’s reading today’s comics has already been doing so for years, is already an adult, and is more than likely somebody who gets off on material that can best be described as malicious. The high price of modern comics is even more of a problem when you have franchises with multiple books to their name, as crossover events either within said franchises or within the publisher’s entire line force readers to buy multiple books just to follow one storyline. And God help you if there’s a book or even just a creative team you don’t like, because you’ll be faced with the choice of buying stuff you don’t like or not buying anything at all. At $4 or $5 a pop for 22 pages at a time, that’s not an investment worth making.

This all assumes, of course, that there’s even a comic book store anywhere near you. In the last 18 years or so, comic book stores have been gradually dying out with the emergence of digital media. (In my neck of the woods alone, at least four stores have bitten the dust.) Again, availability is a major issue. And since the overall idea behind crossover stories is essentially double-dipping – profit off both the individual issues and the eventual trade collection – missing out on the individual issues automatically means having to wait for the trade. But by that time, any potential new reader is likely to lose interest and move on to something else. So again, the industry is still playing to the same aging, ever-shrinking audience.

Another failing of the direct market system and the overall inaccessibility of comics is that new readers more often than not won’t have any idea what all is really out there and how much variety there is. In the olden days where comics were available everywhere, it wasn’t just DC and Marvel running the show. You had stuff like war comics, funny animal comics, crime comics, horror comics, romance comics, comedy comics...anything and everything you could imagine was available on the newsstand. And while there is still some variety in the comic book industry from the smaller publishers, it doesn’t get nearly the exposure it should because DC and Marvel both stand to benefit from the limited availability of comics in general. If all you’re aware of is those two companies, you won’t know to seek out anything else. And if you find those companies’ output to be absolute shit (and it is), you’re not going to want to bother looking for anything else. So again, the other, smaller publishers end up suffering for it.

And let’s be honest, there’s really no reason for the comic book industry to be so exclusive and inaccessible in the age of social media. With Facebook and Twitter alone, promoting and bringing awareness to comics should be a snap. It’s even less excusable when you remember we live in a time where digital downloads for books and music are the standard, and movies and TV are gradually following suit. But since the industry by and large doesn’t want to be accessible to a bigger audience and doesn’t care about appealing to anyone outside the tiny clique it already has, a golden opportunity to bring in new fans is being wasted. Then again, as gruesome and nihilistic as DC and Marvel have become, would parents even want their kids reading this stuff? Would kids really want to see the heroes they watch on TV and in the movies making deals with the devil, being humiliated/torn down/killed off and replaced with alternate universe impostors, being dismembered and having loved ones killed off needlessly, having their romantic relationships destroyed out of the blue on a whim, turned into glorified villains in heroes’ clothing, or changed beyond the point of recognition?

(Yes, I’m fully aware that there are still kid-friendly comics in existence. But those books don’t get nearly the publicity and the attention as the event-gimmick crap I just mentioned, and tend to fall by the wayside. Again, another opportunity to get new readers on board is being largely wasted.

And yes, I also know that as of this time of writing, DC’s planning a series of 100-page digest comics for distribution with Wal-Mart. But since it’s just going to be more of the same shit they’ve been doing and failing miserably with in the direct market, I’m not holding my breath on it.)

The biggest sin with the current setup of the industry? Everybody who’s currently in the fandom was a newcomer at first. They all, in one way or another, benefited from the industry at one time being accessible and easy for a newbie to understand. By making comics so impenetrable, hard to find, unappealing to anyone who isn’t maladjusted, and expensive, the industry has effectively cut itself off from the people who could, in theory, keep it alive for years to come. You can’t expect comics to stay in business when you’ve made them too costly, too unpleasant and confusing, too far under the radar for anyone not already in the know to be aware of them, and too hard to come by. And by clinging to a dying brick-and-mortar system in a digital age...well, we all know how that sort of thing ends.

It’s not rocket science. The 22-page pamphlet format of comics is obsolete. In the age of digital, it’s not worth the inflated price tag and doesn’t give you any real value for your money. Digital comics made widely available thru a variety of distributors AND complete paperback graphic novels on sale at retail stores and/or newsstands would be a far better bet. Greater convenience, more satisfying formats than the old model, more value for your money, and a cool-looking graphic novel available for a decent price at your grocery store or drug store would be an enticing impulse buy for kids (provided, of course, the content wasn’t nihilistic garbage). But that would require looking beyond the ever-shrinking core audience of entitled fanbrats the major publishers cater to, so thus we’re not seeing anything like that happening. They won’t take advantage of digital media (if they do digital comics at all, it’s in the most half-assed way possible), and they do not want in any way, shape, or form to reach a wider audience. This goes beyond leaving money on the table; this is the industry saying they don’t want to make money at all if it means actually putting forth anything resembling effort. Forget long-term business sense, this is idiotic even in the short term. And it’s ignoring the most basic truth of the comic book industry: Without new fans, without another generation to carry it along, the industry will die.

But as we’ll be discussing soon enough, neither the major players of the industry or its ever-shrinking core audience of aging, lunatic fringe fanboys and fangirls see anything wrong with that at all.

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