Hux’s bright eyes burn with shame and hate and something more than hate–hate tipping toward something that raises the hair on Kylo’s neck.
His breaths come ragged, past swollen, bloody lips. His cheek is scratched. He wants to keep glaring at Kylo but can’t, eyes drifting shut–such strange, long lashes–then snapping open.
Hux had kicked and spit and bit. He’d fought dirty. He’d lost. Cornered, now, he shifts his weight against the wall, big coat falling from his slight shoulder like a broken wing. Kylo can’t remember how the fight started.
“Surrender?” he asks.
Hux heaves a breath, straightens up, tries to yank the coat onto his shoulder. It slides down further. He shakes his head, hair a mess. He swallows, “No.”
Kylo shouldn’t be proud of him. His heart shouldn’t swell. Another thing he can’t remember–growing fond of this sneering stranger. His easy way with cruelty. His vicious angles.
Kylo steps closer. Hux shuts his eyes, ready to be beaten further. He jumps when Ren touches his jaw. Keeps his eyes squeezed shut and ducks his head, as Kylo’s fingers trace over the cut on his cheek. Shame rolls off of Hux and, also, something more than hate.
“What should I do?” Kylo asks, “if you won’t surrender?”
Hux’s eyes burn, “Just kill me,” he says, but doesn’t mean it. Like how their fight was never a fight at all, but more an excuse for touching. So Kylo leans in to taste his torn lips, then licks the salt from his jaw, from his neck, from the tender place where his collarbones meet, until Hux breaths, “Ren,” and pulls him closer.
Ben Solo is the son of Leia Organa, who caused a scandal in her time by wedding Han Solo, a man of much lower birth, poor nobility with a scandalous reputation. He resents that.
Hux is the son of Lord Hux, who was once a high ranking officer in the Queen’s army. An almost caricature of a proper gentleman, only much less charming. He is cordial at parties, but nothing more and seems to just look down on every one.
Ben Solo often goes roaming the less reputable areas of London, getting into fights and rumor says even killed a man once. He calls himself Kylo Ren in those times, which only fools those who have never seen Ben Solo before.
Hux too goes to those seedy places, because he is gay AF and there are only so many places he can go to have the sex he really wants without getting caught. He once had a night of intense, violent sex with a low life named Kylo Ren. It was really good. He is not going to stoop so low as to go looking for him again.
Except Hux and Ben Solo meet at a social gathering, and oh.
They pull each other to the side, fight, snap at each other and agree “I won’t tell if you don’t.”
Hate sex.
Keep meeting, keep fighting in a very aggressively polite way. The word goes around that they hate each other, which surprises no one. So when they come back together with their outfits ruffled and hair unkempt, everyone thinks they just fought.
It all ends in an affair between, hate sex that turns not so hateful, and slow despair that the illicit rendez vous are all they will be able to have.
dispatches from the dumpster 