pain, blood, tears, and bruises were how Hux could describe the first seven years of his life. each day was a bruising blur, a cruel joke played on a child who hadn’t asked to be born. it’s still a mystery to him why the sheer fact of his birth seemed to be considered his personal fault, as if, somehow, he had orchestrated the affair — forcing his father to cheat on his proper wife and sleep with the kitchen woman, without even the decency of contraception. no one ever asked him if he wanted any of this — he didn’t. he only existed because two careless adults made a decision, and he paid the price for it every single day of his early childhood.

but all this self-questioning and ache ceased to matter on a particular afternoon, one seared into his memory like a brand — when his own father, Brendol Hux, in a final show of true cowardice, pushed his son, a scrawny, wide-eyed seven-year-old boy, under the boots of approaching republican soldiers to buy himself time to escape. that precise moment changed Armitage forever. that was when young Hux realized, definitively and irreversibly, what kind of man his father really was — and suddenly, all the years of neglect, the beatings, the verbal abuse, and the constant undercurrent of disdain made a sick sort of sense. Brendol Hux wasn’t just a bad man, he was scum, pure and absolute. There was not a single valid reason for the way he'd been treated. But there were a thousand consequences born in silence from it.

and perhaps the least expected and best of those consequences was that Armitage finally came under the care of the New Republic.

at first, integration wasn’t easy. of course not. he pushed people away, growling at anyone who tried to speak gently to him. he lashed out, even talked about offing himself once or twice, swearing he’d rather die than let the confidential information he’d overheard fall into Republican hands. but to his own great confusion and eventual relief, no one treated him like a prisoner or a tool for intelligence gathering. they treated him like the scared, lonely child that he truly was. it disarmed him in a way nothing else could. and it paid off. thanks to what he revealed, Brendol and his loyalists — who had been secretly plotting to decimate Jakku with a latent superweapon — were arrested. the destruction of Jakku was prevented just in time, and he unwittingly helped save thousands, perhaps millions.

that’s when Han Solo took an interest in him — not as a mission, but as a person. The infamous smuggler-turned-general saw something in the boy. maybe he recognized the way Armitage recoiled from praise or flinched at sudden noise. maybe he just saw a kindred spirit—someone born into a harsh fate but stubborn enough to survive it. Han practically adopted him, unofficially at first: rough guidance, late-night chats aboard the Millennium Falcon, flying lessons, and stories from the Rebellion days. Hux doesn’t quite remember how it happened, how he went from being a wary, feral child to someone who could fall asleep, soft and snoring, curled up beside Han on that ship’s worn-out seats while the familiar hum of engines carried them through hyperspace. but it did happen. the hum of those engines became his metronome, his lullaby, his only constant.

Armitage grew up in the shadow of war and the hopeful light of what came after. while much of the galaxy scoffed at whispers of remnant Imperial fanatics calling themselves the First Order, the Resistance didn’t laugh. they prepared. and Armitage — young, clever, and rapidly growing — trained. he devoured Solo's piloting lessons like scripture. and, slowly, that skinny, haunted boy transformed into something else entirely. the bruises faded. the nightmares lessened. the fire in his heart found purpose.

he became a captain. a good one. calm under pressure, disciplined yet empathetic. sometimes still shy — but honest, decent, and brave. he was nothing like Brendol. nothing like the man who tried to throw him away. no — he became someone better. made not from bloodline, but from choice.