Title – and style – shamelessly cribbed from Richard Siken’s Snow and Dirty Rain. It’s for @brawlite, just because.
They’re lying in bed and sharing a smoke. Shirtless, sweaty, stealing a furtive moment in the interstices of time between meetings-training-drills. There’s slippage in a ship’s routine if you know where to look for it. Or you create it. Hux creates it because he can; nobody to stop him. It’s as easy as an obscurely-titled diary entry and a feigned excuse and a surreptitious message to Kylo. Back to Hux’s quarters and whatever-may-happen and then the stolen cigarra, almost more intoxicating than the illicit fucking. The taste lingers for longer, too. Hux takes another drag and hands the cigarra back. Kylo mirrors him, drag, hold, pass. Left handed, though – sinister.
The lights are off and the viewport looks out into the flat black of space. It’s a metaphor, Kylo says, sleepy-drunk with smoke curling from his nostrils.
Shut the hell up, Hux replies. He hates that romantic crap, that Jedi nonsense. Kylo is monstrously melodramatic, insufferable almost always but muscular and rough and malleable in the way Hux likes, so the meetings keep happening and the box of cigarras empties one by one.
Cigarra smoke and sweat and regulation leather boots. Kylo smells musky and dark. He’s shut up, finally, but the cigarra’s almost done, almost spent, almost burning Hux’s fingers. Time’s almost up. Hux takes the last drag. He’s selfish that way. Kylo doesn’t care – he doesn’t even smoke. Didn’t smoke. Didn’t, until Hux got his hands on him. Didn’t do a lot of things until Hux, but Hux doesn’t care about that either. He’s got a ship to run, and melodrama and emotions are for children. He’s here for Kylo’s body, not his soul.
Kylo stirs next to him, arching like a cat. He’s gazing out the viewport and he asks where are we, like a child, as if he couldn’t use the datapad to find out.
Mortis, says Hux, recalling an ancient history lesson about the star system.
Mortis – of death, Kylo says with dreamy interest. Rigor mortis, livor mortis, pallor mortis. He stretches a hand out and follows a blue vein in Hux’s arm.
Keep your morbid fantasies to yourself, Hux says severely, but Kylo is too fucked-out to care, fucked-out and fucked up from some pills he took earlier. Do you have to be high to fuck me Hux asked once and Kylo had grinned and said yes and declined to explain further.
He keeps coming back, though.
Do you know all the star systems asks Kylo and Hux shrugs against the mattress and stubs out the cigarra.
I have a good mental map he says. Kylo takes Hux’s hand and makes his index finger trace unwillingly from mole to mole on Kylo’s chest, A to B to C. What’s he doing, what nonsense does Hux have to endure now, what are you doing he says, long-suffering.
This is the map of my heart Kylo says, and he stares out the viewport and laughs at nothing, nothing at all.
Welp, now I have a ‘bombed out of his head on Force-suppressing tranqulizers’-Kylo kink. I hope you’re pleased with yourself.