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The storm had calmed beyond the transparisteel, though not yet departed. Hux would have preferred the stars. Instead the view gave him only frozen tundra, and the black-grey ruin of roiling cloud above. But beneath the hard permafrost, cold and unyielding, a knowing mind would find the truth: a vast mechanical body, fine-tuned in its perpetual technological motion. Then, if one dared travel to its deepest centre they would find the cold great heart, waiting to be filled to bursting with burning flame. Then, and only then, would the truth of Starkiller be known: arching across the galaxy in blazing brilliant blade to stab deep into the vulnerable depraved bodies of their enemies.
Before him now, the other began to stir. To an outsider it might appear their own passion had burned out – though Hux knew it had been quenched only to ember. It flickered still, warm in the weight of Ren pressed against his Hux’s body. Even before Starkiller, Hux had always felt the cold. That Kylo Ren generated heat like an over-fuelled furnace had been but a boon to their changed relationship.
And yet, he had been as ice when Hux had sought him out but a half-cycle earlier. Hux knew not the ways of the Force, cared not for such mysticism when he had been given charge of two of the greatest technological feats of the Order. But when Hux had come to Ren’s staterooms upon the base then, had found Ren in hunched and silent mediation, even he could not deny that he felt it. Pain and cold and misery: all had radiated from Ren as if he had become little more than a wraith upon the haunted remnants of the nameless planetoid that had become Starkiller base.
“Do you feel better now?”
Ren said not a word. It appeared simpler to first merely shift against the opened curve of Hux’s body, then settle again with the softest of sighs. The weight of him had become now lazy and sated, and that alone could be taken as answer enough.
Hux pressed no further. Through heavy, hooded eyes he instead cast over Ren’s body: the canvas upon which their passion had been painted, vicious and bloodied and brilliant. His own skin had taken it harder, Ren’s teeth rendering Hux’s chest a mottled riot of blue-black, the hint of red beneath like the blush of dawn below a storm-touched sky. Ren had been desperate. For all his so-called instinct, Ren had not known what he wanted, not really. But Hux had given it all the same, and freely at that.
Some part of him knew to fear such generosity. Hux chose to feel only the power in it instead.
And there was considerable power in this: to sit with his bare back to the cool durasteel of the windowframe, the coiled strength of Kylo Ren’s body laid out before him like a weapon offered up to a king. A still-gloved hand remained tangled in his hair; Hux shifted his fingers, felt Ren press into the touch without a word even as his lips brushed over the dark strands. They had not even managed to completely disrobe. Their trousers remained, though undone and opened.
His other hand began a slow movement; fingertips tracing the defined lines of Ren’s broad chest, and the well-disciplined muscle beneath the warming skin. A faint twinge of interest nestled itself low in his groin, even so soon after the last spending. As if in an answer to unspoken call, Ren’s left hand shifted, curling over his thigh. But Hux named it instinctive movement, too gentle for their preferred bedsports. And Ren’s eyes remained half-closed, as if upon a dream.
“Ren?” he prompted, his original question so long answered, now. He felt the chest fill, and then fall; with the sigh came only two words.
“Not yet.”
Hux heard that unspoken: don’t leave me. But Hux had never had any intention of moving. Their brief time together had taken them deep into the night cycle of the base; only the shift personnel for the most essential of functions would be wakeful now. For all there was work to do – as general, he might always find some job that required his attention – in this moment, only Ren mattered. Their strange and fragile partnership had conferred a terrible kind of responsibility upon him. Given the endless nature of his commission’s duties, it ought to be an unwanted burden.
Hux desired it all the same.
Perhaps the thoughts drifted too close to the surface of his mind; perhaps he was too restless to guard his thoughts, and Ren too tired to tune them out. Whatever the reason, Ren shifted against him again, the smooth hardness of his waist pressed close to the apex of the thighs he lay between.
Hux closed his eyes, breathed deep, fingers tightening in Ren’s hair to the point of pain. Ren did not draw back. He remained there, still in the unspeakable strength of that great body – and the uneasy soul that lurked inside of it. Even when he lay in so vulnerable a position, Hux could not deny the power of him.
And he is mine.
One hand drifted down the line of his taut abdomen; even through the fine leather of his gloves, Hux could feel the imagined rasping thickness of the hair trailing from navel to groin. It would be the work of a moment, to dip down. To take Ren in hand, again. To work his mind to white-out and wonder, to the point of lost memory never made.
To the point of no return.
“Do you wish to stop this?”
Perhaps his hazy thought had always been moving to this conclusion; Ren’s half-closed eyes barely flickered, no surprise in the low brontide of his answer. “I didn’t think that would be an option.”
“I didn’t say it was.” Hux’s fingertips brushed close to the quiescent weight of Ren’s prick, curled to softness now in damp underclothes. “The question still stands.”
“No.” And he sighed, as if he’d sold out his soul and never once considered the true cost. “No, I don’t wish to stop this.”
Hux closed his eyes, breathed deep against the rising urge: to take and take, and never once look back. A swirl of snow clattered sudden against the transparisteel, a rattle of fingertips by some unseen and distant voyeur. Hux did not shiver. The storm had already passed; this was but the last gasps of a tantrum already thrown. A clear morning would await them: the landscape a sheet of snow interrupted only by the upthrust of hill and crag, jagged broken black glass pushed up through white skin.
Eyes opened now, his hand traced downward over Ren’s pale arm, taking his hand about its widest point. Raising it to his lips, he found no resistance from Ren in the handling of his great body. There, Hux pressed a dry-lipped kiss to the inside of one wrist. Holding his lips there, he could sense the quickening of pulse, a flutter of sudden startled arousal; a second later, and it moved in shiver through the great body entire.
Smiling now, a curved and bright vibroblade, Hux turned the hand over and pressed new kisses to the callused uneven knuckles. And then, easy and languid, his tongue flicked out over his fingers, over and between. The faint taste, musk and salt, lingered yet; a ghosted memory of their earlier release. Ren had worked them both with these hands, cocks pressed together and flushed heads leaking, dripping, into the tangle of his fingers. And his eyes had been fathomless and dark, watchful, demanding as much as they pleaded.
Please, he’d said, and Hux still did not know what he had wanted. From the now uneasy shift of Ren against him now, wondered if Ren himself even knew.
“He doesn’t know,” Hux said, sudden, though it could only be rhetorically spoken. Had Snoke known of their arrangement, or even had he come to know of it just now, Ren would not have been granted leave from the holochamber. Hux could not pretend to know the vagrancies of the Force, let alone the thought patterns of Snoke himself, but the Supreme Leader would not put down his general quietly.
For all it would seem easier, for the general to merely disappear by silent assassination at Kylo’s own hand, Hux had become too well-known. He stood at the heart of the First Order’s propaganda machine. The oath taken by the military was to the Order, but many of them looked to Hux as they spoke it. Snoke could not kill him quietly. Not when rumour would become mystique would become legend.
And Snoke wished no legends but his own.
But then perhaps Snoke did know, and played such knowledge close to his chest, waiting for the moment to ripen before reaping his dark harvest. Hux certainly knew that Snoke had hurt Ren today. Even with no Force sensitivity of his own, Hux had felt it. Ren’s distress had trembled across the base, a sense of unease that thrummed through the air; several servers had inexplicably shut down, and a subspace radar array had simply exploded. The holonet had slowed, dragged, stuttered, come back on line only at sullen speed perhaps an hour after Hux knew the audience had ended.
But Hux had not answered immediately. There was no intention, no purpose in the electrochemical disturbance that seemed to move through the very air of the base itself. He would go to Ren, but not then. They had not such luxury, for all co-commandership of base and starship.
Later, he had come: in the dark, and the silence. They shared between them now no light, save for only the dim light of the floodlights beyond the transparisteel, reflected from the snow beyond. No stars had emerged even now. But Hux knew where he might find them. He’d memorised them long ago. They would never escape his mind now.
“I can’t hide this from him forever.”
The hoarse words hung upon the air, a condemned man kicking and twisting as he dangled from his noose. “Does he know you hide something from him?” It seemed to Hux that Snoke must, though logic always said otherwise. But then, Hux had never understood it at all. Ren emerged from these meetings staggering and half-blind, worked over to crippling exhaustion in all arenas: mental, physical, emotional. To Hux’s mind it seemed as though Snoke would take Ren all to pieces, examining them with those lidless liquid eyes before carelessly putting them back in some new configuration just to see what might become of him this time.
Ren’s eyes had slipped closed again, long lashes stark against the pale skin beneath. “Pain is cleansing.”
His hand had begun to stroke over the thick hair in mindless motion, unnoticed, unmeant. “Then why come to me for pleasure?” And now it stopped, fingers fisting in his hair. “Do I dirty you?” Hux jerked his head back, words turned harsh and demanding. “Is that what you want of me?”
The dark eyes opened slowly, somehow made all the darker by the dull light that flickered upon their surface. “This is pain.”
“Kylo.”
And even as he pulled harder, warning, Ren sighed, pressing his body closer still; Hux’s cock twitched to feel the warmth of Ren’s skin, familiar and hard. “It is pleasure, too,” he murmured, and again closed his eyes as a tremor moved through him like earthshock. “Please.”
Hux still did not know what it was, that Ren truly wanted. His hand moved instead of quite its own volition, curling around Ren’s cock. It only continued to harden under his slow ministration. The leather, still faintly damp from his earlier release and the remaining slick of their first encounter that evening, rasped over the skin in a way that tensed Ren in electric charge, the growing potential of gathering energy.
Hux’s fingers tightened, and Ren drew gasping breath. The dreaming face turned away, pressed into his throat. There, Hux felt the faintest hint of teeth; his own mouth curled to sly smile as he swept a blunt thumb over the leaking head. Pressured skin burned as Ren bit down, gifting Hux a new bruise to mirror that on the other side of a bared throat.
His own hardness twitched, disregarded. Instead Hux’s hand slipped down the long curve of Ren’s back, skittering over the tensed muscle, the laddered canvas of old scars. But for all those physical, and so easily seen, it was those wounds left on Ren’s mind that had cut deepest, disfiguring and disastrous.
Hux had always been practically minded – and to such logical thought, the state of Kylo Ren now seemed little else but tragic waste. There remained enough of Ren for Hux’s own purpose; their joint treason, the promise that Hux would ascend his imperial throne, with Kylo Ren his right hand. In that, he ought not to complain. Certainly it could not have been easier, had Ren not been so broken; surely Ren would not have approached him at all had he been in his right mind.
But Hux knew still the terrible tragedy of it. Of what had been lost, even as he himself took what remained in order to carve out his own successes upon the galaxy entire.
His hand dipped lower yet, two fingers seeking out the crease of his ass. Ren drew a hissing little breath, buttocks tight and tilted upward as Hux moved beneath the loosened waistband of his trousers. Sliding over the hard curve, Hux sought lower yet so that leathered fingertips brushed over his hole, a place as yet untouched tonight. Ren’s breath had turned damp and hot against the aching necklace of bruises about Hux’s own throat; the press of two fingertips, and he gave a light thrust against him, into his hand.
Withdrawing for but a moment, Hux slid the trousers down, slow and smooth over the swell of his ass. Even as a regretful whine keened from Ren’s throat, Hux slid his hand down, again. The warmth of him had returned; he had been as ice after the tender mercies of Snoke’s ministrations. But, hot or cold, Ren’s body would always hard and lovely. Hux had never cared much for art for its own sake, but could appreciate the aesthetics of something so finely made.
Even with what little lubrication remained from earlier, Hux slid two fingers in with startling and welcome ease. Kylo had been a virgin at the beginning of all this, though no innocent; he had taken to this act in particular with considerable pleasure, for all there were those who whispered of how it debased the one who received. Kylo saw it more as his due. He wanted Hux, and he would have him as suited him best.
Hux occasionally wondered if the appeal came in the dichotomy of it: Kylo could slip in his mind, while Hux slipped into his body. In that the door swung both ways; the connection held tight in both directions. But Kylo only brushed up against him in this strange blue-lighted morning, his mind mired in exhaustion, the memory of agony. Hux sighed as he crooked his wrist, stroking gently over that which had Ren trembling against him, eyes wet, fingers digging fresh bruises into his hips. It was all so very wasteful. He simply could not understand Force users.
But they could be of use to him, all the same.
“Kylo.” He bowed his head, whispered it against a sweat-damp forehead. “Stand.”
Even without actively reading what Hux might have offered, Ren moved upon swaying feet to the window. But as he made to turn his back, Hux clicked his tongue; with one hand upon his chin he stilled the great body, eyes fixed upon the drunken darkness of Ren’s own.
And he spoke with the easy command of one born to it when he said, soft, “Take off everything.”
Hux stepped back, arms folded across his chest; his own trousers still hung low on narrow hips, his cock hard and leaking against his belly. In a brief moment Ren stood naked before him, pale silhouette against window. Hux had made a statue of him, indeed; it brought to mind the decadence of the New Republic, moving their Senate from world to world in an orgy of spending and artistic self-stimulation. And all of it to be left to rot when the locusts had eaten the harvest to famine, moving on to their next pleasure while only neglected poverty remained to those in their wake.
Kylo Ren had been born of that place. And here, Hux could see it in him: he could have been one of their marble statues raised high upon a golden plinth, mindless and still and perfect. Even gloved, Hux could feel the heat of him; his open-palmed hands traced over the shoulders to the dip of his throat, fanning out over the heaving chest before skimming down the waist as he drew closer yet.
Hux tilted his head, found Ren’s lips even as he pressed them together the entire length of their bodies. They’d never indulged overly much in kissing, for all Ren responded as if a thirst-starved man to water; in all his previous partnerships, Hux had simply found it too intimate a gesture. But this had been too intimate from the beginning. Even when Kylo did not actively press into his mind, Hux could feel him there. In that, he had no idea at all how Ren shielded any of it from Snoke.
But we live.
And that, he knew his mad trust not misplaced.
With his back to the glass, Ren had nowhere to go. He didn’t appear to care, focused only on what lay before him. But Hux could see it: their dim reflections, ever behind them. But then, could stare right through them. And then he simply looked to Kylo instead, pushing up against him with rough demand. Their cocks, flushed and slick, moved in delicious friction between their bellies, and Ren’s lip, caught between his teeth, almost trembled.
“I want you in me.”
In return Hux only smiled; tangling their hands together he encouraged them up, stretching above their heads. His own, still gloved, were as perfect contrast to Ren’s, naked and so very white. Hux’s remained open where Ren’s closed, holding tight, a drowned man still awaiting rescue from the uncaring ocean that had already taken his life.
You are mine, Hux whispered, but only in his mind. The answering flare in Ren’s eyes was all the assent he required.
Powerful legs, corded with muscle and riddled with scar tissue old and bruising and scratches quite new, rose together, closed tight around his waist. Hux felt nothing of the weight of them, or of Ren himself. Hux himself had no personal interest in the Force, but he could thankful for even gifts as strange as these. Especially in this moment, given how preternaturally easy it was: to adjust his hips, to slide inside, to take and give what they both wanted most.
Above him, Ren mouth half-opened on a half-gasped cry; his eyes rounded, and then his head fell forward. With his hair tangled and sweat-damp, hanging in his face, Hux could now see nothing of his expression even as his massive body trembled as though set alight. But for all the position raised him above Hux, he could see it gave Ren no sense of superiority. Rather, he seemed a condemned man hanging upon his gibbet, begging to be cut down before life were stolen from him entire.
“Look at me,” Hux whispered. His own fingertips pressed hard against the windowpane; in turn, Ren’s tightened, long fingers bruising through even the tooled leather of his gloves.
And then Ren looked, and all was lost. His hips moved of their own accord: a wicked thrust forward and up, unerring in how his cockhead found that place to drive Ren half-mad, writhing against the window like a specimen upon the table, pinned and drugged and dying even as the one who had trapped it sought out the very secrets of life itself.
Ren’s eyes slipped closed, his face twisted; even as Hux shoved himself deeper still, he wondered if Ren looked this way before Snoke. He called pain and pleasure the same thing; he sought one from his nominal master, and then returned to Hux for the second. If they were the same to him, Hux had to wonder if he could ever surrender one for the other. This, the man trapped by his own inability to commit to either the dark, or the light.
And Ren came, shuddering and gasping, arms in useless spasm above him with head arched back, driving down on Hux’s cock; the tightening of his muscles there demanded of Hux what he had not yet decided to give. Still the heat of Ren’s release splattered first upward, then dripping down to the growing mess pressed between them.
And if Hux glanced sideways, to the transparisteel, he could look himself in the eye. Pale-featured, even in the flush of his arousal. Eyes with pupils blown wide, but knowing still. His mirror self seemed to smile to itself, calm and confident in what it knew, even as Hux’s mind trembled before the promised self-destruction of his release.
And Ren’s hands tightened on his, nails digging into skin through even the fine leather. “Hux,” his whispered. “Hux, please.”
Climax hit him hard; it twisted around his thoughts like durasteel chain, yanked so tight as to squeeze them to welcome oblivion. Ren’s body milked his cock dry by lazy contraction, his heat lazy and welcome and still somehow demanding. Hux’s own hands, still held prisoner in Ren’s unrelenting grip, at last tightened in return; when Hux pressed wordless lips to his jaw, he found only a taste of salt too strong to be sweat.
Even in the boneless satiation of release, Ren still supported his own weight through that unholy strength of his mystic power. But as Hux himself began to falter, slipping from his body, so gently he slid down. Following him, pressed against him forehead to forehead, Hux did not move. Their positions had reversed, and Hux knew he should rise. He knew he should leave. It could be but beneath his dignity, to be sprawled upon the cold floor with his latest fuck.
My last fuck.
There had been no-one else like Kylo Ren. Not before, and never again.
“Hux.” Ren shifted beneath him, broad arms moving around him with terrifying clarity of purpose even as the words slurred from numb lips, half-confused and uncertain. “Hux, I—”
“No.” He would regret it in the morning. But not enough. Never enough to stop. “Just…go to sleep.”
Like a child, over-exhausted and over-stimulated, Ren slipped so easily into sleep. It had never been that simple for Hux. But he’d long ago taken what could have been a weakness and made it into fierce strength. Let Ren sleep, now. He could dream enough for them both.
And Hux would be the one to make sure every single one of them came true.