((Please note: This chapter contains graphic depictions of rape. Reader discretion is advised.))

Three days.

Three days was all it took for Orion Hux to reverse the norm and go from grave to cradle. Somewhat metaphorically and somewhat literally so: Reborn, snatched from the jaws of death.

Three days of gradually building himself up from the first flickering of his eyelids, to eating solid food, to getting up and moving around. By the time the week landmark of his death came and went, the Grand Marshal had fully healed. Perhaps a little too much for his wife's liking.

"Orion, what are you doing?" Making the leap from comfortable, recovery-ushering pyjamas to a full-dress uniform seemed a little extreme and more than a little curious; particularly how he primped and preened himself with the utmost vanity. Only their reflections marked each other, and Lucilla's looked to pay more attention to her husband's than her husbands did for hers.

"Hosting a small gathering, darling." Orion's distraction carried into his tone, examining his reflection every which way to satisfy himself that those he hosted would see a perfect picture of health in their superior; the same superior they had inquired strategically after. "Just a few in the upper ranks that I feel have risen to the occasion and would have served the Empire well should my condition have been permanent." If you had stayed dead, you mean Lucilla scoffed internally. Sometimes your pretentiousness knows no bounds, my love.

"Very well." Without invitation to input on the matter, the little dove would make arrangements to eat elsewhere; perhaps invite Poe to join her in the parlour for a light supper with a heavy dessert cart to follow. Already, that idea had become a plan. "I will eat elsewhere this evening, if Annah doesn't mind-"

"I should think not, angel. It's her job." The redhead replied with an off-handedness that he ordinarily knew would upset her; degrading a palace employee, no matter what their station. But so preoccupied with the immovable scrutiny on his appearance, he seemed either not to notice or not to care. "We will be using the main dining room, then the reception room adjacent to it."

How could she not be suspicious? When the first she had heard of this gathering was when it was imminent? When a select few Imperial officers would be arriving at any moment? When he purposefully up scuttled her routine without even the consideration of speaking to her first? And the dress uniform… Why the dress uniform? Would his command attire not suffice? Who the hell could he possibly be meeting with that he, as Grand Marshal, felt it prudent enough to dress up for? No doubt some who sought to place themselves in line for advancement but surely Orion wouldn't be so shallow? Then again, watching him dissecting every inch of himself, maybe the events of a week previous had jolted him into believing he needed powerful allies as opposed to inferiors.

Experimentally, sceptically, the Little Empress began to retreat but watched her own (and her husband's) reflection as she did so; narrowed, heavenly azure flickering between the two as she went. As she predicted, Orion's heed remained on himself but now focused specifically on the small matter (but more pronounced to the Grand Marshal) of his eyebrows.

"I'll return to my own chambers tonight then." Lucilla offered, borderline mistrusting of the entirety of the situation and feeling for tell-tale signs to validate it. For now, she came up short. "Just so you don't disturb us when your gathering disbands."

"As you wish, darling." Orion uttered, side-tracked and lost in his own ostentation, too damn near obsessed by it to feel the radiation of cynicism. "I'll see you tomorrow. Give Lilia a goodnight kiss for me, won't you?"

"Is Dopheld at the gathering? I thought he might have come and said hello."

Soup and sandwiches: the light supper that Lucilla had promised; or simply an appetiser to a decadent, chocolate-based main course. Whatever the case, it had clinched Poe's attention over the com, and he arrived a few moments later.

With Lilia perched contentedly in "Uncle Poe's" lap while still nursing a cheese triangle, Lucilla still felt the idea of this "gathering" plaguing the back of her mind. It felt wrong but… how? What could be so… bad? Or important? Something so severe that he felt the need to keep it from not only his wife, but his Empress too? The one in whose name he allegedly did everything? It made her fidgety.

"Doph?" His friend's name echoed with confusion, his understanding struggling, and it appeared (to Lucilla, at least) that he knew more than she did without realizing it. Poe took a moment to comprehend the question, pausing his fork's descent into the gooey goodness of the cake. Like his cousin, his bowl and side plate sat empty and desolate off to the side (save for a few crumbs and a drain in the bottom of the ceramic) in favour of a thick, multi-layered gateaux. "Hell no. Dopheld has integrity, he doesn't need to drink and smoke with assholes like Pryde and Damten. Not when he actually does his job and gets recognized accordingly without crawlin' into Hux's rectum."

It was not the crass comment about her husband's rectum that prompted a look of thunder to cloud the Little Empress' magnificent features, rather the names that Poe had spouted with mocking derision. Pryde could be expected. That weasel would say and do anything to further himself, including splaying himself at Lucilla's feet and declaring himself entirely at her disposal; from there, he took it upon himself to find the Grand Marshal's remains. No doubt, that would be threaded into whatever conversation in a bid to manipulate Orion, that he effectively owed him his life. To that end, Pryde did not surprise her; in fact, "crawling into Hux's rectum" probably illustrated Pryde perfectly.

The other name, however, rather than surprising her, infuriated her. Cake forgotten, Lucilla's sapphire gaze snapped upwards and hooked into Poe's very soul; a rare, but not unheard of, display of fierceness from a normally mild and benevolent individual.

"Say that again."

Poe, immediately panic-stricken by his cousin's seething hiss and alarmed by her sudden overhaul in demeanour, scrambled to clarify on what he thought she zoned in on; almost hiding behind the infant as he did.

"C'mon, Luce, you know I don't like him! Never have! But he's been even more up his own ass since-!"

"Not that!" The "rectum" comment and the bumbling that followed was dismissed frustratedly with a frantic wave of her hand; the bark causing a flinch in the pilot. "Who did you say?!"

"Pryde and Damten…?"

Silence. Silence as the Little Empress slowly processed the seemingly throwaway remark, the information that was so widely known that it had garnered scorn. Information, clearly, that she had not been privy to. Information that everyone else would have assumed she knew but had purposefully been kept from her.

Lucilla's sudden thunder subsided in devastated realization; it hit her like a ton of permacrete, that second name. The dark-haired darling blinked through the rousing shadows of her past to one of the innumerable horrible things she had endured towards the ultimate goal of survival. A series of many degrading, dehumanizing things perpetrated upon her by her now-deceased father in law while a certain Colonel part-took with sick enjoyment. And why wouldn't he? When she, that then defenceless and hysterical creature, had robbed him of power and influence when the General refused his daughter's hand in favour of a pleasure slave?

As if that wasn't bad enough, and more to the point, Orion knew it. He had made a point of gently prying all those gory details from her in an effort to cleanse and heal her; if she could share them, her burden would be lessened and he, as her husband, was the rightful person for such an undertaking. Yet… He hosted Damten at an intimate gathering and went out of his way to ensure she remained ignorant of the fact.

"Luce…?" Poe prodded cautiously, his main focal point centred on his cousin but his secondary keeping tabs on the princess; said princess had finished her cheese sandwich (or a child's equivalent of gumming it until she got bored) and now surveyed the wedge of gateaux. "Luce, you okay…?"

No. She was not okay. Lucilla was far from okay. The faraway gaze of haunted sapphire focused on nothing in particular as dormant fear and dread rose again in her chest; unfounded, of course, as the most powerful woman in the galaxy but… it struck so deep.

She could still hear the snide, sneering snickers over her own petrified whimpers, the congratulatory clinks of pristine glassware for making it off Starkiller with a trophy to show; a trophy they would use, then toss aside. The jeering catcalls and demeaning hollers mingled with her own shrieks of violation still rung in her ears while she swore she could have felt the solid grounding of a desk against her stomach with her legs kicked apart.

The binding, immobilizing pressure on her wrists from then stiffened them now, her mind keeping them together out of terrified obedience. A plethora of triumphant, pleasured grunts drowned out soft sniffles of humiliated defilement; first her father in law, then another after that, then another after that, then… she lost track for the sake of her own sanity. Her rear numbed, like it did before, as a throwback to the uncountable thrashings from a cohort of officers who took their turns in showing her her place.

The bodily fluids collected on the floor beneath her; deterring none. Namely semen and piss that rolled down her thighs but there was no point stopping it, not even concern for the occasional string of blood threaded through the drippings. Cheek down on the desk, it was more of the same; more cum, but tears in place of urine. Not forgetting, of course, the blaster flush to her skull, should she misbehave.

Then, it struck her; the realization snapping internally and vanquishing the tormenting echoes in an instant. Stop it. A voice, her own, demanded with such fervour there was no ignoring it. Get up. Remember who you are. What you are. What you have fought to become. What you have survived.

So she did.

"Hold onto her for me, will you?" Poe straightened at the overhaul, the intensity of it and the sheer steel it was delivered with would make him a fool to argue. Having forcefully realigned herself with reality, Lucilla reclaimed her proud, regal stance and left that of a used, cum-stained toy far behind her. "I need to have a word with my husband."

The main dining room of the Imperial Palace exuded all the sounds one would expect to hear when a dinner party is in full swing. Cutlery dinning on plates, glasses clinking (either on each other or the tabletop when being set down), laughter, conversation; nothing outwardly sinister.

But tell that to the outraged Little Empress.

Amid a civil dinner being served and polite discussion as a backdrop, the gargantuan, ornate double doors of the dining room blew open with a brute force to rival that of an Eadu storm. Where she got the strength, even the little dove did not know, but one could assume it had been fuelled by pure rage.

It took everything in Orion's power not to eject his mouthful of exorbitantly priced wine back into his goblet at his wife's sudden tornado of an appearance; and even more not to buckle under her crippling glower. That said, he did visibly struggle to keep the liquid in his mouth.

"Darling!" He exclaimed, restraining a cough and half-rising from his chair in exasperated greeting while the entire room fell curiously silent; dominated by antagonized heel clicks. Curiosity or reverence, it mattered not; not when the face of the First Order claimed the room with dominant, vexed strides. Orion's overly honeyed tone had the opposite effect to its intention and only served to stoke her aggression further; hence the sudden drop of temperature in the expansive room, despite the abundance of bodies within it. "We weren't expecting you! May I fetch you-?!"

"You clearly weren't expecting me, Orion." Calm but bubblingly furious, her usual docility lay by the wayside while cutting diplomacy took its place instead; much to the ripple of confused murmurs of guests among themselves. "Otherwise you and your rat pack would have hidden yourselves better than in MY dining room."

Her brief, careless glance around the ancient oak table finally singled him out, the reason for her rampage: Colonel Damten, one of her many violators but the only one that mattered just then. Two places down from her husband on his right-hand side.

And he had the gall to hold her gaze. Smug, if a little (knowingly) out of his depth.

Before Orion could gather a flustered response out of sheer embarrassment but trying still to fawn over his blue-eyed beauty (who realized that whatever he might come out with was to simply save face), Lucilla was swift to mercilessly circumvent it.

"What are the gentlemen having for dinner this evening, Va'sha?"

Va'sha, one of the local girls in the palace's employment whipped her head to the Empress' gentler (if still somewhat irate) command like a tauntaun in the headlights; caught off guard by the sudden address.

"Plicto steak, Your Grace." The half-human answered meekly, radiating discomfort by being thrown into the spotlight; despite interacting with Lucilla (and Grand Marshal Hux) many times. Naturally, she found the Empress to be significantly kinder. All of the staff, droids included, did. "Endorian carrots, Antarian peas and Corellian potatoes; mashed, roasted and served with Gurreck gravy."

"Don't forget a generous helping of crushed glass, will you, Va'sha?" Tossing her Umbaran head, the Empress turned on her heel and began her departure, leaving flummoxed silence in her wake; partially from the present staff who did not know whether to obey or not. "And do ensure the Grand Marshal gets his fair share. I would hate for him to feel left out."

Battling through the stupefaction and in a last-ditch bid to convey some sort of control over his wife, Orion (moronically) called to her retreating back with its violently bouncing curls:

"You needn't wait up for me tonight, angel!" She stopped but did not turn; eager to see how he thought giving her permission to go to bed without him in front of his colleagues would work out for him. "We have much to discuss after dinner, it will be a late night!"

Then… Then… Lucilla turned, in all her tiny, petite and vehement glory. On the ball of her foot, with almost the military precision she had learned from her husband; in kitten heels rather than standard-issue uniform boots.

"That's quite alright, Orion."Lucilla's spat reply blistered scathingly, hitting her darling husband almost physically like a slap to his pasty cheek; truly, it would have sent a larger man cowering. "I wouldn't dream of keeping you from your own chambers. They will be very much open to you, and you alone."

With that savage blow dealt flawlessly and in the ruthless style of one of Lucilla's tirades, the Little Empress swept from the suffocating odour of betrayal reeking from her dining room. In her wake, she left the semi-stunned but exceptionally embarrassed Grand Marshal (not to mention his dozen or so guests); the same one who would spend the evening poisoning himself with wine and whiskey to forget the public scolding.

And it would end very badly indeed.