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It doesn’t do to get too attached, and it certainly doesn’t do to get attached to someone even half as volatile as Kylo Ren. The man lacks control, lacks substance, almost, and Hux tries frantically to distance himself even as he feels the magnetic pull of his feelings drag him under.
“You love me,” Kylo states, his tone flat and unsurprised, and Hux stiffens on his side in the sheets. He’s turned away from Kylo, their cooling bodies making indents in the cotton, the inches between them like miles. “You love me,” Kylo repeats, as though Hux might not have heard the first time.
Hux sighs, admits defeat even as his fingers fist into the sheets. “And what of it?” he asks between gritted teeth. “Is that a problem?”
“I don’t,” Kylo says, finally. Hux’s heart skips a beat. “I don’t love me, I mean. As for you, I’m undecided.”
“Undecided?” Hux asks, frowning in irritation when he fails to keep the wretched note from his voice. “What’s so undecided about this?” He gestures vaguely over to where the sheets barely cover the spread of their bodies, long limbs bare and glistening in the dim light from the panels overhead. “It’s not like this is a new thing.”
They’ve been together for months now, and Hux can’t lie; it cuts him to the bone to find out that Kylo is still uncertain, is still gauging and measuring the weight of emotion when Hux has already decided it for himself long ago.
“No,” Kylo replies slowly, and Hux reminds himself that in many ways the man is still all but a child. Emotionally stunted. Foolish. Rash. The insults and all the ways Kylo Ren infuriates him pile up in the back of his mind, and he tries to keep them focused in preparation for the blows that are coming. “But what’ll happen when you die? It’s better for me not to get too close.”
“When I die?” Hux snaps. This makes him push himself out of the sheets, makes him look over at Kylo sternly. He can’t make out Kylo’s expression in the dark. “You have some plans you’re not telling me about, Ren?” The last word is all but a hiss, and he can hardly believe that he had this man beneath him only minutes ago, begging him never to let go.
Kylo shrugs laxly in the sheets, his movements languid as though his words mean nothing to him. “Weren’t you the one who said we had to prepare for all eventualities, General?” He lays emphasis heavy on the last word, mocking, and Hux has to grit his teeth to keep himself from saying something he’ll regret, to keep himself from driving Kylo from his bed sooner than is absolutely necessary. “I’m just preparing for mine.”
He refuses to say anything else, still and silent beneath the force of Hux’s scrutiny, and eventually Hux sighs and lies back down on his side. The night cycle passes, gently, and all too soon daybreak comes, bringing with it an empty bed whose sheets have gone cold around him.
They skirt around each other for days afterward. The weight of Hux’s confession lies heavy on them both – or, rather, the weight of the confession Kylo’s spelled out in black and white before Hux can even quantify it with himself. Hux finds himself starting to get snappish with the other officers, his patience running thin with everyone and everything, and not even the destruction of the Hosnian system can dispel the storm clouds that have gathered thick over his heart.
The glow of the destruction paints his face red, paints his hands redder, and he knows he should feel victorious. Everything is going according to plan, the puzzle pieces all falling neatly into place, but there is a gaping spot in the assembly room next to him where Kylo Ren should be and where Kylo Ren isn’t.
We should be sharing this, he thinks bitterly to himself as the cheers of the assembled soldiers and officers around him break and crest over him. He allows himself one small, tight smile, accepting a hearty handshake from Captain Phasma and some other superior officers before turning swiftly on his heel and marching away down the corridors.
Kylo Ren comes to him that night, bypassing the security code on the door with an ease and impunity that Hux envies even as he despises the other for it.
“What do you want?” he asks, more snappish than he’d intended, and he bites the inside of his cheek to keep himself in check. It won’t do to beg, to be the one left wanting. Kylo toes off his boots by the door, which swishes closed with a soft hiss, pulls off his cloak and cape to drape them unceremoniously over the small grey couch to the side of the room. “And what do you think you’re doing, coming here unannounced?”
“I heard about the destruction of the New Republic’s capital,” Kylo says, simply, wriggling out of his dark layers of undergarments and leaving them to pile on the floor in puddles of shadow. “I know…” He chooses his words carefully, Hux can tell, and he wonders with a sort of bitter satisfaction if Kylo Ren is finally growing up. “I know that it was a significant accomplishment for you. For us.”
“Don’t talk about us,” Hux mutters, but his hands are already reaching out for Kylo to pull him down into the sheets. “Don’t.”
“I know you wanted me to be there,” Kylo whispers, his voice almost lost beneath the frantic rustling of sheets beneath them. “I know you wanted to share it with me.”
“Silence,” Hux commands, but his voice wavers, and he settles himself for laving bites over the slender column of Kylo’s neck, the vibrations of Kylo’s words heavy against his tongue. Kylo’s fingers card through his hair, pulling it out of order and turning him into chaos.
“I know you are disappointed.”
“Shut up, shut up,” Hux hisses, on the edge of losing control, and he bites harder, kisses more roughly until Kylo’s mouth is bitten to the quick, swollen, his face flushed.
“Hux,” he breathes, the beginning of a sentence. Hux reaches up to clamp a hand over Kylo’s mouth.
“I don’t want to hear it,” he breathes back, and Kylo’s eyes flutter for a moment. Accepting. When no other words seem forthcoming, Hux takes back his hand, resumes his ministrations. He pinches and licks and bites Kylo’s nipples into tight points, red and rosy and prickling, revels in the looseness of Kylo’s moans as he leaves scarlet crescents everywhere. The heat and weight of Kylo’s cock presses against his wrist as he reaches down to touch, to stroke, and Kylo stiffens beneath him, arching up with a soft gasp that has Hux grinning triumphantly. Slowly, slowly, the tension starts to leach out of him in favor of other things, the pleasure of anticipation starting to pool in the pit of his belly.
“I missed you,” Kylo admits, in between stuttered gasps and moans as Hux’s strokes grow rougher, his thumb massaging at the head and rubbing sticky fluid back into velvet skin.
“Save the sentiment,” Hux mutters without any real venom in his voice as his fingers leave Kylo’s cock and trail down to where Kylo’s already stretched and waiting, much to his surprise. When he looks up to catch Kylo’s eye, he finds Kylo staring back at him, dark eyes clear and free of sarcastic amusement at Hux’s eagerness. At Hux’s questioning look, Kylo just shrugs, a soft quirk of freckled shoulders that Hux wants to bite red all over again.
“As I said.”
“Clearly,” Hux scoffs, but his voice is unsteadier than he’d like as he leans over to the nightstand, fingers scrabbling along the wooden bottom as he searches for a vial of oil before reaching down to tug off his silk boxers and fling them unceremoniously to the side. It glistens and turns his hands honey and goldenrod as he pours small pools of it over his fingers, turns flushed skin luminescent as he reaches down between his thighs and gives his cock a few gratuitous strokes, thrusting lightly into the tight circle of his fist. Kylo watches with unabashed anticipation, gnawing lightly at the swell of his lower lip, and Hux has to stifle a breathy laugh at how eager the both of them seem. “It’s nothing new, Ren,” he reminds the other man as he nudges Kylo’s long legs apart to position himself comfortably between them.
“I know, Hux,” Kylo replies, a bit of his old sass coming back in the sarcastic twinges of his voice, and once, just once, Hux wishes Kylo would call him by his first name instead of his last. He chases away the fleeting thought by nudging Kylo open, the flared head of his cock slipping in easily, followed inch by inch by inch, each one making Kylo writhe and squirm in the sheets.
Much to his embarrassment, Hux is too impatient to wait, and begins to thrust before Kylo has fully adjusted. The other man hisses beneath him, fingers tightening in the sheets and around Hux’s hip, leaving long-fingered bruises that Hux is sure will stain his skin for days, but he revels in the soft aching pain of it as Kylo begins to loosen and stretch around him, accommodating.
The pleasure races through him, a burn an ache an agony, and Hux reaches down to wrap a hand around Kylo’s leaking cock, flushed and rosy in the tight space between them. Kylo’s gasp is wet, ragged, and Hux strokes him without finesse, without grace. Now is not the time for that, and Kylo seems to know that as well as he does. Niceties fly out the window, and Kylo whines deep in his throat as he pushes up into the press and grab of Hux’s fingers, leans down into the way Hux’s thrusts have the head of his cock nudging up against Kylo’s prostate.
Mere minutes of this and it’s over as quickly as it’s begun, Kylo crying out and tossing his head back into the pillows, giving Hux a clear view of his bitten throat as he comes, sticky strings over Hux’s hand and his abdomen. Hux grits his teeth, tastes blood as he pierces his lip as he comes, frantic, desperate. He circles his hips lightly against Kylo’s as he rides out the gentle aftershocks, the sweat already starting to cool along the curve of his back as he finally pulls himself out and falls into Kylo’s waiting arms.
“Thank you for coming, Kylo,” he says, finally, when his pulse has returned to some semblance of normal. Kylo’s fingers card softly through his hair, fisting softly in the short strands at the nape of his neck.
“It was nothing, Hux.”
Hux stiffens, but says nothing, and the soft soothing sounds of Kylo’s heartbeat lull him to sleep.
Hux’s feelings and the stilted nature of their relationship become more of a way of life than a set of new uncertainties, and start to fade into the background as battle against the Resistance forces becomes ever more of a priority. Kylo no longer comes to him at night, battling problems of his own, and for once, Hux is glad for the lack of a distraction. His thoughts are dominated with warfare, with power, and the soft malleability of emotion distills, crystallizes into a near hatred.
Kylo does not come to him at night, but Hux is only made all too aware of the emptiness in his bed, of the sense of nothingness in his head that exists only when Kylo is not trying to pry into him. He once took comfort in the blank slate of his mind, but he has come to be so accustomed to the gently probing fingers kissing at his thoughts, soft and tender like lover’s kisses, that he has forgotten what it means to go without.
But he does not have time to dwell on it for long; the events happen all at once, seemingly, and before he knows it, his neatly ordered world is thrown into chaos. The base is starting to collapse beneath his feet, beneath the onslaughts of Resistance fighters, and Kylo Ren is nowhere to be seen.
He skids out into the corridor, grabbing a discarded blaster for some semblance of defense, and curses Ren for putting them both in a position of danger.
No rational person would do that, he thinks to himself, even as something in the back of his mind whispers that Kylo Ren is far from rational. The snow and wind sleets down in icy sheets, crawling down his collar, and he hurries through the wreckage of structures and bodies, single-minded, and tries not to notice how he leaves bloody boot prints in the newly fallen snow.
Help me. Kylo’s voice prods into his mind, and Hux waves his hand in irritation as though he can break the link Kylo has forced upon him. It’s no use, it never has been; rash and insecure as he is, Kylo has always been secure in this one thing, and it annoys Hux to no end even as he hurries through the snow and trees to follow the chain Kylo’s thrown around his neck.
Blood spatters in the snow make him stop short before his footsteps start up again, quicker this time. Blood, there’s so much of it, makes the snow go dark around Kylo’s head, and for a second he thinks that maybe Kylo Ren is dead.
One of Kylo’s eyes cracks open, looks at him through the storm that’s starting to howl around the two of them. Hux’s head is filled with silence.
Help me, Kylo implores him, layering a filter over his thoughts. Help me, Hux.
Kylo loses consciousness and the tether frays, the chain link falls apart to scatter like metal in the snow. Hux readjusts his grip on the blaster while he considers, while he tries to measure the weight of emotion.
Slowly, slowly, he raises the blaster to eye level, assuming proper shooting position. His finger curls around the trigger.
Before he can lose his nerve, he pulls it. Once. Twice. Again, then again and again and again.
His laughs go hysterical as he drops the blaster a heavy weight in the snow. It’s jammed, he probably knew that ever since he picked it up, and it does no more good than a toy slingshot. The wind wipes away his anguish, numbing him to the bone, and he hunches down to drape one of Kylo’s arms around his shoulder.
They leave bloody tracks through the snow, and it is only when they’re safe on a ship bound quickly away from the collapsing base that Hux finally admits that the line between hate and love is one too fine to tread safely.
The first words Kylo Ren says to him when he regains consciousness are, “You hate me, Hux.”
Hux sighs, shaking his head and pushing Kylo back down onto the cot he’s spent the better part of the last week recovering on.
“You are mistaken,” he says, quietly, and is only barely satisfied by the way Kylo’s eyes widen in realization before he turns away again.