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https://ift.tt/302ChHfYet again I’ve seen someone’s prompt and then written a thing that doesn’t really satisfy it. I don’t remember where I saw this one, but someone was calling for h/c in which Hux comforts Kylo after Kylo has been mistreated by Snoke and tells him how wonderful he is. I couldn’t help thinking “I haven’t seen a lot of fics in which Kylo comforts Hux and tells him how wonderful he is. And that kind of morphed into this:
~*~*~*~
Kylo is bundled like a ragged crow into the corner of Hux’s bed. Hux stops in the arch of his door, uncertain as to what is going on. There have been enough heated arguments that ended with one or another of them pushed against a wall, that his first thought is that this is a strange prelude to sex. But Kylo isn’t even looking at him. He’s just slumped there in an untidy pile like a forgotten load of laundry.
Also he’s making a noise. It’s a low, spasmodic, growling, sniffling noise.
Is he crying?
Both Hux’s fists clench involuntarily, the creak and stretch of the leather over his knuckles soothing as he digs his fingertips into bruised palms. A storm begins in his chest – a white hot plasma of unrecognised emotion barely contained.
He takes a step forward, as if forcing himself closer to Snoke, closer to something venomous, poised to destroy him.
Kylo raises his head, and yes, there are tears in his ridiculous dark eyes. The man is nearly thirty and he hasn’t yet learned not to cry.
“What are you doing here?” Hux asks, his voice winding tight against his own will. Scum. Scum. Republic born scum. Infecting my room with your weakness. Bringing that face here where I have to decide what to do about it. Why d'you have to be so selfish?
There’s a smell of scorching, something burned. And blood. “Are you leaking biohazard all over my sheets?”
The snap in his voice is like his father’s. He sounds like the old man so much these days. Everything the old shit had is now his, and some of it he doesn’t want. A lot of it he didn’t want but he’s made it his own regardless.
“I don’t know why I thought you would care.” Kylo shrugs off his tattered cape. His tunic is half-off, and as Hux watches he peels the smoking remnants away from bloody burns, hissing. “But Snoke…”
His voice wavers and falls silent. His jaw works as he chews his bruised lips. If he’s biting back some worse remark he’s more damaged than Hux imagined.
’Care’though? ’I thought you would care.’
Something is being asked of him. That’s clear enough. He just can’t imagine what it is.
Perhaps Kylo came here to Hux’s rooms because he believed they would be empty. Hux has thought many times that a Republican upbringing has stunted Ren’s emotional growth – that he’s as soft as a barely weaned child. As a child, Hux too would have yearned for somewhere he could crawl off to alone and tend his wounds in peace. Somewhere solitary. Somewhere where there would be no more shouting, no more blows. No humiliation. Somewhere safe.
So what’s needed is his absence. He should somehow have known not to come back at the normal time. He should leave - my rooms, my own fucking refuge, Ren, why didn’t you go to your own - so the man could pull himself together without mockery or threat.
“I’ll make sure a med droid is sent to you.” He’s trying his best to be thoughtful when he turns on his heel and heads for the door.
“No! Hux!”
And of course he was wrong about that too.
“What?” Hux snaps, swinging back in time to catch the unguarded look of desperation and reproach on Ren’s expressive face. The man has one hand out, as if he’s about to use the Force to pull Hux forward by the throat. “I don’t understand. What are you doing here? What do you want from me?”
Ren’s outstretched hand drops. “I don’t want a droid,” he says, surly. Spoiled. “I want you to do it. We… we sleep together. You know what he does to me. You know what it’s like. I want you to give a kriffing damn. Damn you! I want you to care.”
Hux is a seethe of caring. He is a hypermatter quintessence of caring, barely squeezed into stable containment. Too sensitive, they all said, and kriff, he would have changed that if he could. He didn’t ask to be sensitive. He didn’t ask for the sight of Ren’s seeping skin to engender the kind of furious, vengeful disgust it does. If only he could step forward and slap it aside. Dig his fingers in, tear it apart and get it out of his way.
“You won’t tell me what Snoke’s vulnerable to,” he protested, and this is care if Kylo could only recognize it. “You could make it so much easier for me to kill him if you chose.”
It’s not much of a confession. Snoke must know that every time he hurts Hux, and – lately – every time he hurts Kylo too, Hux furiously reviews his plans to murder the creature in cold blood. Or preferably to trick someone else into doing it for him.
If I could, I would luxuriate in tearing him apart for you. I would make him regret every time he laid a hand on you. Every undermining word, he thinks. He can’t say it. That kind of open sentiment makes his skin crawl, and he’s already betrayed himself enough.
“I don’t want you to kill him,” Kylo growls. His eyes are dry now, at least. The baleful resentment of his presence feels like a rancor in the room.
“Then what?” Hux asks, baffled again. There is still a white noise of protest going on in his heart, but he can’t make the signal resolve into anything understandable. His blood is humming in his ears as if with outrage or horror, but this is not unusual around Ren. “What do you want?”
Ren pushes aside his heavy cloak and tunic, shaking his head as if he too can’t believe how badly this conversation is going. “Never mind.”
“No, I want to know, princess. I want to know why you barged into my quarters and bled on my sheets and are now asking me for—”
“Comfort!” Ren shouts, bolting up from the mattress and making his wounds bleed again. “I came to you for comfort, because we have—but you really are rabid, aren’t you? The only thing you know to do with an outstretched hand is to bite it.”
At ‘comfort’ the containment field fails catastrophically. Hux can almost feel his insides shrivelling in flame as a wave of something he prefers to think of as fury bursts its way out of his skin. He must be glowing with it, trembling so fast that mass passes into energy over the surface of him. His mouth tastes of tin and his scalp aches as his hair tries to stand on end.
“Comfort!” he rages. It is rage. It is. “Of course you expect comfort. You expect the universe to stop so that it can provide you with some kind of salve for your hurt feelings? Your minor wounds? You are so important that I must drop everything to minister to your undisciplined, self-indulgent…”
It is fury. It is not grief.
“You expect that of me?!”
It is not anguish, even if Hux’s eyes are threatening to prickle and his throat to close up. His wrists sting, and for a moment he is blinded by the memory of his mother’s hands—the only part of her he now recalls—leaving gouges as he’s torn away from her grip, clouted across the back of the head to make him shut up screaming.
There is a whirlwind of antimatter within him, and if he breathes out he will destroy the universe.
Kylo closes the distance between them, lunges. Hux expects a blow, but the man catches him by the shoulders and shakes him until his teeth rattle. That is familiar enough to bolster him a little. He stays very still to try to prevent himself from fracturing into little pieces as Kylo’s bare right hand migrates to his bare throat.
Kylo takes a step back, the black hole intensity draining from his eyes as if something in Hux’s skin has bitten him, betrayed him through the touch. That would be right enough. Hux knows full well he’s poisonous to the core.
“You—” Kylo stammers, watery once more. He’s sensed something, obviously, with the Force. Something that lesser men like Hux are not permitted to understand or sully. Hux would gladly be angry about that too, if Kylo were not looking at him with that expression of terrible, inexplicable… whatever it was. “You really don’t know what I want of you, do you? You don’t know what comfort looks like.”
This is a ridiculous accusation, and if Hux could only breathe properly, he would say so. His nose is stuffy for some reason, and his chest aches. “I tried to get you a med droid fifteen minutes ago,” he protests. It comes out in a croak.
“Stars!” Kylo exclaims, fist knotting in Hux’s collar. He drags Hux forward, and Hux is so busy bracing for the slap it takes him a dozen heartbeats to realize that he is being hugged.
Arms like iron bands around him make him claustrophobic for a moment before the warmth hits him. The pressure around his ribcage provokes another emotion he can’t name, as the constant, devouring anguish that always runs in the back of his mind startles a sob out of him, and then Kylo is crying too, unrestrained and messy onto his shoulder.
It’s praise, in a way, he thinks, as his own arms raise themselves, automatically. One snugs itself around Kylo’s waist, and the other rises to allow him to bury his fingers in the man’s glossy, millaflower scented hair.
There is a certain vindication to the way Kylo shudders and presses closer. He came to you not to boast that he suffers more than you, but simply because he trusted you, a small voice says in the back of his mind. It doesn’t sound at all likely—too good to be true. But it lets him catch his breath nevertheless, get the unstable explosion of his personality back within its iron bonds.
This is all the man wanted? Just to be held while he wept? That’s not hard.
“They tell us how worthless we are because they fear us,” he finds himself explaining, Snoke and Brendol running together in his mind. For this moment he is going to pretend they are both boys together, and this outburst is permitted, is safe. “They hurt us to prove to themselves they can keep us down. But even as they do it, they know they are only sharpening our teeth.”
“No,” Kylo shakes his head. “No, I don’t want to hurt my master. I need him.”
Well. Yes. While there is more to learn, more to gain, it pays to patiently endure the abuse. Hux can understand that too. He finds himself smiling, feeling oddly light. This whole experience has been odd, in fact, like a dose of glitterstim and almost as addictive. “Perhaps you do. For now.”
He walks the clingy Force-user back to the bed and sits him down there gently, so he can go for the first aid kit he keeps in his refresher. Kylo too looks somehow eased when he returns.
“But you won’t need him forever,” Hux says, sharing a conspiratorial smile. He has been trusted with this. When has that ever happened before? “And on that day I expect you will be five times the terror that he is.
“Now if for some reason a droid is not good enough for your majesty, sit back and let me see those wounds. I suppose like everything else I will have to do this myself.”
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