Archive of Our Own

The din of Kylo’s local coffee shop doesn’t usually grate on his nerves this much. 

“So this guy runs out of the building and he’s holding, I swear to the Mother, an ice cream maker,” says a girl in front of him, her voice high-pitched and too cheerful for Kylo’s pre-coffee ears.  

Kylo scratches absently at his stomach and yawns, staring at the undercut shaved into her hair.  Hux would look cute with his hair like that. Kylo picks at a scabbed-over bight sigil below his navel and winces. It had blistered up just before Hux had come for the third time. 

“No way,” says Undercut’s friend, taller, half her midsection swallowed up by a pair of mom-jeans. Her hand lands on the other girl’s shoulder as she laughs.  Her fingers aren’t as delicate as Hux’s.

They’re the kind of loud, earnest thinkers that almost have Kylo regretting his multivalence.  Reading minds sounds great until you realize that most people are incredibly, painfully fucking dull.  They’re both Fires, like his sister, and just like Rey, they both think they’re hilariously funny. 

“Like one of those old fashioned, white, boxy ones.  Running down the street. He’s not even wearing a coat, he’s just hauling ass with this fucking ice cream maker in his arms like it’s a baby.”

The chatty Fire girls take their oatmilk lattes from the pass bar and almost run into Kylo.  The taller one rolls her eyes and barrels right past him, while her shorter, undercut-sporting companion stares up at him, her mouth falling into a perfect O of surprise before she scuttles off after her friend.  

She’s in the way of his coffee, so Kylo rolls his eyes and strides right up to the counter.

“Red eye, Earth blend, double black, scalding,” Kylo says, digging through the lint in his pocket for cash  

When Kylo looks up, the blonde Earth boy behind the counter is staring at him, radiating so much unease Kylo can taste it in his mouth.  Unlike his fucking coffee.

Kylo’s about to say something truly uncharitable when he catches his reflection in the mirror suspended behind his horrified barista.

Hux had crawled out of his bed at some ungodly early hour before noon and left him to wake up alone, buzzing with enough magic to fell a giraffe, and a soul-deep craving for some caffeine.  Kylo had thrown on the same Tom Waits shirt he’d been wearing when Hux had come over Saturday. He’s pretty sure today’s Monday.

Showering hadn’t crossed his mind, although he’d piled his hair up once he felt a crust of what was most likely his own jizz.  In retrospect, he probably smells pretty ripe.

His eyes are dark and gleaming all at once, glittering espresso over the dark, sunken circles under his eyes.  Well, one eye.

His left orbital rim is puffed and purple with what promises to be a beauty of a shiner.  His lip has a matching swell, cracking copper as Kylo flexes it. Right. Hux had gotten an elbow free at some point, right about the time he started biting hard enough to leave pretty little posies blooming all over Kylo’s neck.  Fucking bitch had given him a black eye.

Nice .

Kylo smiles at himself before he beams down at the counter boy, whose screaming emotions flicker between abject fear and aroused, homosexual panic.

“Do I need to repeat that or are you just gonna stand there smelling my dick all day?”

Kylo leaves him a big tip and spends the rest of the day grinning to himself.

~

Nothing quiets his mind like working with caustic chemicals.

Over the deep, double farmhouse sink he’d salvaged from one of his estate sale trips to Lancaster, Kylo sprinkles pre-weighed lye over slushy, half-frozen goat’s milk.  Steam rises up, stinging his nostrils through the hasty filter spell he’d cast. 

This is simple magic, the kind of kitchen witch bullshit that quiets his mind like comfort food.  It’s rote, routine, but just dangerous enough to require his attention. He stirs his lye until it dissolves, sending heat radiating from the glass pitcher. 

Lye is squarely in his alignment, bending easily to the spellwork he threads into it as it molds to the fat and protein and water of the goat milk.  He’d milked it himself from one of Kira’s goats upstate when he’d visited last spring. What is it about lesbians and goats?

He sets his lye-milk aside to cool and turns to his oils.  Coconut laced with a spell to ground his Fire complement, almond oil enchanted for mental clarity, greasy kukui nut oil extracted with Kylo’s own sex-drenched hands for carnal-empathic alignment, stiff cupuaçu butter ground with homegrown aloe and spellwork to soothe the reservoirs of power tattooed into his skin.  He melts them together with a rudimentary heating spell until they’re a uniform golden liquid. He’ll marry them at a low temperature. Better to coddle the delicate bonds of the kukui oil and the more temperamental spellwork. 

Soapmaking is such an Earthen thing.  The hungry mouths of his lye snap at the chain-links in his oils, snipping esters and whirling the whole mess into creamy sludge.  A little natural disaster on his kitchen counter. 

He sets his spoon to stirring with the barest vein of his telekinesis.  It settles at the back of his mind, a gentle hum. He could speed this up with a stick blender but patience is as much a part of his work as the spelled lye or dosed-up nut butter.  It’s never been his strongest virtue, but the effort of minding it will only make the final product stronger.

Kylo straddles a bar stool and flagrantly wastes some energy pulling his phone across the room.  He swipes it on and queues up a good Talking Heads playlist. He smiles at David Byrne’s familiar, jubilant voice as Cities comes on.  Such an Air.

After checking the slowly-thickening consistency of his soap, Kylo opens his Bindr app to find three new messages.  They’re all from potential clients, two of whom he rejects outright for a lame username and a phenomenally disappointing dick pic, respectively.  He’s waiting on the third guy to respond to his usual weed-out-the-weak question of “top or bottom” before he decides on that one.

Hux’s last message sits under Dick Pic’s.  Kylo taps it, regretting it instantly.

Hux stares back at him from inside a steaming hot tub.  Even wet, his hair is still neatly raked into submission.  It’s darker like this, clinging to his scalp and illuminated from behind by a hazy cityscape.  He’s smiling, if you can call the terse, knowing curl of his lip a smile. His eyes are hooded and washed out, belying a lingering exhaustion that seems to cling to Hux when he’s not in Kylo’s bed.  Mother of God, Kylo could fuck him into oblivion and just watch him sleep for a week straight.

The picture crops out just above the warmed pink of Hux’s perfect, gorgeous, sensitive, delicious nipples and Kylo’s halfway to chucking his phone into his pot of soap when a new message pops up.

Oral top.

A picture of a fratty blonde follows.  His eyes are a vivid, gleaming blue. Water if Kylo had to guess, probably on his way to being a celebrity if Kylo gave half a shit about mainstream entertainment. 

“Back in NYC in 3 weeks” Hux had said, and that was only three days ago.  Kylo bites his lip and minds his soap. He cracks open the amber glass vial with his final extract.  The scent of Spanish Moss fills the air, a plant as much Air as it is Earth. An epiphyte.

Oral Top’s SwapID pops up, as clean on the inside as he is bland on the outside.  Still. He’s pretty.

Kylo quotes him double his usual price and turns back to his soap.  He lets his hand take over, stirring until it forms into soft peaks.  He mixes the Spanish Moss extract in, sighing at the wispy green scent of it, envisioning the easy spill of it from a rooted tree, taking what it needs and eclipsing everything around it.  Light as air and heavy enough to fell an oak.

He pours his final product into his wax-paper lined molds, chanting the last of his spellwork as he fills the long loaves and smooths the tops down.  Spanish Moss can cool a temper and calm a raging heart. 

Kylo rolls his eyes and sends Oral Top a selfie.

~

Plants have a language unto themselves.  Kylo can almost hear it if he listens closely enough.  The hum of cytochromes churning out energy, gibberellins bursting seeds to life, porphyrins drawing down the moon to flower at precisely the right moment.

If plants have a language, Marijuana has the best vocabulary.

Kylo pulls out one of his drying trays and smiles.  Fat, ice-white crystals gleam from the curled fists of bud coiled on the tray.  The fat, squat leaves of a classic Indica twist together, dulled from their live emerald splendor to an ashy, sage grey.  Kylo plucks a bud as fat as three fingers and holds it up to the light before he takes a deep, loving whiff.

An encyclopedia of cannabinoids and terpenes and sweet, soothing esters greet his nose, singing songs of painless oblivion and heady contemplation.  This is one of Kylo’s babies, hand-grafted and spelled from seed to flower and back again four times over. The crystals of pure, Air-laden THC glinting on the furled leaves are big enough to crunch between his teeth like old-fashioned rock candy. 

Working with his antagonistic element is painful, grueling work.  It fails as often as it doesn’t, as flaky and hard to grasp as the element itself.  But when he can coax it to work, trap it and shape it and convince it to cooperate? The results are glorious.  Poison is just another word for too much of a good thing. Most shitty Air-laced street drugs will make him puke his guts out as soon as get high.

This crystal darling will get him fucked up enough to talk to his ancestors, his astral selves, and the ghost of Oscar Wilde himself. 

“Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling,” Kylo mumbles, pursing his lips in concentration as he breaks off a piece of bud the size of his thumb.

Earth’s are known for their heavy tie to ritual, and Kylo is no exception.  He perches on his old leather couch and surveys his gear: the gleaming crystal grinder he’d grown himself, the creamy-hued rolling papers he gets on barter from a Fire at his gym, the hemp cardstock he makes himself from pulp and spelled water. 

He sits on the same cushion every time, the center one.  He’d fucked Hux over the arm of this couch two days before he’d left for Asia. 

Kylo breaks apart stem from leaf, dumping the soft, sticky bits into his grinder.  It’s one of the finest works of his molecular ability, the cylindrical, hollow container breaking open to reveal interlocking teeth.  He packs it full and snaps it closed to grind each half in opposite directions, pulverizing his leaves and crystals into a uniform, flaky mass. 

He sets it aside and tears off a strip of hemp card.  It hums between his fingers as he rolls it into a small, hollow circle.  Laced with spellwork to counteract the unfortunate necessity of combustion, it’s the perfect filter.  He tucks it at one end of a folded piece of rolling paper and dumps his grind in using a folded index card as his funnel to lay a neat track along the seam of his paper.  He rolls it shut, tapping and shaping it with his fingers before he licks along the overlap to seal it. He makes sure it’s sealed and runs it through his lips a few times, mumbling one last spell and dampening the paper just enough to make it hug the filling.  He flicks his lighter on, runs it up and down his work, from perfectly-sealed filter to pinched-off, tapered edge.

Now that’s a fucking joint.

Kylo leans back on the couch, his joint dangling from his mouth.  His lips had been bruised for a week after Hux had bitten him to a blackout orgasm.  Nasty bitch. 

He scratches under the hem of his undershirt.  The sigil carved under his left pec itches. He’s been tapping too many of them lately.

He sparks up his joint and sucks down as much as he can.  He holds it in, letting the burn seep into his lungs, warm him from the inside out.  Magic seeps into his blood until his face tingles and his fingertips feel numb. He blows out a plume of white, fragrant smoke, watching it curl up to the exposed duct work of his ceiling.

Zeppelin.  He should listen to Zeppelin. 

He swipes his phone open and swipes on the Lemon Song because there are songs you just have to listen to when you’re high.  His fingers are heavy, moving across the screen like he’s made of taffy. Lemon taffy.

Hux’s last response to his less-than-sober 2 AM “I wish I was fucking your mouth right now” text from two days ago was just a picture of that cunt-faced orange tabby cat Hux adores.  He bites his lip and swipes to the previous picture Hux had sent. Hux is devastating in a dark grey suit, reflected in an ornate mirror in some overwrought South Asian hotel. He’s got his middle finger up and the exact sneer he makes when Kylo gets two fingers in him.

This fucking guy.

Kylo slumps his head against the rolled back of his couch.  A Chesterfield, Hux had called it. He likes proper nouns. Kylo had just liked the smell of old leather and the deep cushions.

Kylo cups his hand over his balls, rolling them between his fingers.  He smiles, lazily wrapping a hand around his sac and tugging at it like he had the last time he’d pushed them into Hux’s wet, overcool mouth.

“Fuck,” Kylo mutters, taking another hit before he can think about Hux and his fucking mouth any more.  He holds it in until he’s almost choking, letting magic and good old chemistry crackle through his veins.  His tattoos hum, a low grade tingle that skitters across his skin and settles into the bars of kyber underlining his dick.

He’s getting tapped out.  Kylo’s seen two clients in the past twelve days, the (really bad at) oral top Water and one of his regulars.  Mitaka was usually a good fuck, nice and subby and the really tasty kind of afraid of him. Kylo usually got as much out of fucking him as he gave back, sometimes more.

He’d still been healing up from Hux and his fucking teeth when he’d called Mitaka up, figuring it would cleanse his palate.  It’s not like he and Hux are a thing. Kylo doesn’t have things.

He’d put Mitaka in a nasty tie that made him choose between his air supply and his balls, one of Kylo’s favorites where he can kick his boots up on Mitaka’s ass and watch him squirm while Kylo strokes his cock.  And Mitaka could squirm, Mother. Squirm and simper and do absolutely anything Kylo told him. Mitaka’s mind was a clear pool of Water-aligned management aptitude (submissives, all of them) and an endless echo of “Yes, Sir.”

Kylo had caught sight of himself in the mirror while he’d fucked Mitaka’s sweaty, rope-burned body on the floor of his shower, the grim expression on his own face so startling he’d pulled out.  He’d finished in Mitaka’s mouth, not getting a slip of tooth out of him no matter how hard he pulled his hair or smacked him around.

He’d done what he needed and loaded Mitaka up with enough magic to accomplish whatever small things it is that Mitaka wants from life.  The pleasure he usually got from Mitaka’s sniveling, supine body had left him drained, fostering a lassitude that sits in him still as he takes another hit and settles into slant-eyed couch lock.

You’re not supposed to miss the taste of blood in your mouth.

Cotton mouth sticks his tongue to the roof of his mouth and Kylo finds his water aeons away on the coffee table.  He pulls it to him with a curl of his fingers, rolling his eyes as half of it spills into his lap. Kylo’s magic is as sloppy as the rest of him when he’s fucked up.  It’s the sort of thing his mother would chide him for.

He swallows what’s left and sits perfectly still for a moment, suddenly, achingly aware of his physical body, of the healing remnants of his black eye and his fat lip. The three salt-in-stone sigils he’d cracked ache, but he’d needed to give Oral Top his money’s worth and salvage his wounded pride inside of Mitaka.  He grips his glass, testing the strange, pulsing numbness in his fingertips from the Air crystals, and stares down at the water seeping into his sweats like a child who’s wet himself.

His glass hurtles against the wall with a satisfying crash.  Kylo stares at broken glass and takes another hit.

~

Kylo’s gym is ten blocks from his house, a quick jog for him.  He’s sweating as he tramps down the stairs.

It’s one of the reasons he likes this place.  Being underground always soothes him. When he was a kid, he’d disappear and ride the subway for hours, headphones plugged into his first-gen iPod and a distraction spell to make sure he got his own seat, so he could burrow through the belly of almost every borough and be alone with his thoughts.

Tito, like almost every gym owner, is a Fire with no small martial skill and a good head for business.  He’s almost as inked up as Kylo, although he has significantly less hair. Kylo smiles at Tito’s bald, tattooed head as he passes the front desk.

Tito’s attracts a certain kind of crowd, probably due to it being in a basement and always smelling a little musty.  Most of the other patrons are Earths, with a few Fire and Water regulars mixed in. Kylo can’t recall ever seeing an Air in this place.  One of Hux’s gym selfies had featured a panoramic view of the South Street Seaport and two separate juice bars. Kylo had been more focused on Hux wearing nothing but a sheen of sweat and “yoga shorts”, which are a thing Kylo didn’t know he needed in his life.

Kylo sighs.  He needs to punch something and get this out of his system.  Kylo strips down to his ratty old basketball shorts and worn-out Chucks.  He stuffs his shit in his locker, #77, and slams it shut, not bothering to lock it.  No one’s gonna fuck with his shit here.

Billy and D’Andre are on the mats doing stretches, some Water is doing excessively grunty deadlifts in front of the mirrors, and a butch-Daddy Fire girl who barely hits five feet is dropping squat lifts like she’s going to crack the floor in half.  Kylo smiles.

“Kira, how’s the goat life?”

Kira and her wife, Annie, own a ramshackle farm in Clinton with a dozen goats and some truly evil chickens. 

“You know. Stinky, gay, kind of a hot mess.”

Kira drops her bar – 200, damn – and grins.

“Or maybe that’s just you?” she says, wiping the sweat out of her eyes before she opens her arms to give him a huge, muscular hug.  Kylo has to bend down to reciprocate, setting his cheek against her close-cropped black hair.

“You in town for business?”  Kylo settles down on the mat and stretches his legs out in front of him.  He’s been neglecting his hamstrings lately.

“Got a lead on something from Vig.”  Kira drops down next to him and goes straight into push-ups.

“She still with that pretty little Portuguese Water?”

There had been a time when Kylo and his trio of dark arcana dykes (their phrase, not his) had been inseparable.  They’d had a good couple of years – some grand larceny, a few close calls with the Ars Magica, some mild treason.  Kylo had done some of the nastiest, most beautiful spellwork of his life with them. Things had gotten sloppy when his sister had fucked all three of them, and they’d imploded when everything happened with his dad. 

They’re all better off without him.

“She is indeed,” Kira huffs, sparing him a look between reps.

Kylo switches legs, pointing his toes and rolling his hip until the back of his leg burns.  Mother of God, he’s fucking tight.

“Mother’s tits, Ren.”  Kira drops to the floor and rolls up to sit cross-legged.

She rolls her eyes.  “I’m about as empathetic as this mat and I can tell you’re mooning over someone.”

“You’re … mooning,” Kylo answers.  Kylo is not pouting. 

“Over my wife of eight years? Of course I am.  She fixed our pickup with her bare hands last week.”

Kylo believes it.  Annie’s got mech skills that will make engines melt in her hands.  Literally, that one time they’d tried to steal a Range Rover in Frankfurt.

“But I’m not the one who’s all…”  She waves one calloused hand in his direction.  “Who is he? And spare me the dick stuff, you know that shit grosses me out.”

Kylo reels back from his stretch.  Mother knows Kira’s peeled him off the floor a dozen times and never judged him for it.  He flops onto his back.

“He’s this … Air .”  He throws enough intonation and loose hand gestures behind it that she nods in understanding.

“And he’s such a … bitch? Not, like, being a bitch about shit, I mean, like, he’s fucking vicious.  He’s a money guy, heavy stats mage, drinks bottles of wine that cost more than this building, he wears these suits …”

Kylo trails off, truly unable to describe the complex and utter Huxness of his custom-tailored everything to a woman he knows for a fact wore basketball shorts to her own wedding. 

“It’s like he’s just … he’s fucking sharp, you know? Everything, his clothes, his face, his magic, fuck.  He’s strong, Kir, like, the spells he throws are all tight and crafted and, I don’t know, elegant?”

Kylo sits up and runs his hand through his hair.  “No dick stuff, I promise, but Kira.”

Kylo leans in, side-eyeing the dead-lifting Water nearby.

“He’s a fucking freak in bed.  Like, I don’t even mean kinky, it’s like … next level fucking shit.  He’s insatiable, and, I don’t know, rabid for it, like I can’t push him far enough and he just makes me fight it out of him and it’s so fucking good.  And his mind is…”

Kylo takes a deep breath, slipping into the icy-cool echo of Hux in his mind.

“He’s fucking brilliant, and he’s so clear in his thoughts? Do you know how much doubt and fear and weird Daddy shit most men have rattling around in their heads?  I mean he’s got some, and seriously, he’s lucky his dad’s dead or I’d fucking kill him myself, but he’s just … confident and ambitious and fucking hungry .  And he lets me in like no one, and it’s like he just pushes and pushes until I’m fucking crazy.”

Kira’s face is a war between curious horror and knowing sympathy.

“He gave me a fucking black eye.  On a random Sunday. And I think I fisted him after, I can’t even remember.”

Kira gives him a warning look.

“It’s just, it’s so fucked up, Kira, I can’t even.”

He buries his face in his hands.  “I had to tap my own shit just to juice a sex spell for some Murray Hill fuckboy.”

“Oh, honey.”  Kira shakes her head.  “You are all kinds of fucked up over this boy, aren’t you?”

She smacks him on the shoulder, hard, which is about the closest Kira comes to affection.  “I can’t believe my trash son is pining.”

Kylo rolls his eyes at his old nickname, which lands somewhere between “garbage baby” and “dumpster gay” in his least-favorites.  Kylo had ostensibly been the most powerful one in their makeshift gang and the mastermind behind most of their jobs, but they’d never taken an inch of his shit.  Vig had laughed so hard she’d almost pissed herself when he’d suggested they call themselves the Knights of Ren. 

“Am not.”  Kylo Ren is a dark arcana master, a multi-valent Earth mage, and one of the most powerful sex wizards on Earth.  Kylo Ren doesn’t pine.

“You’ve got NPE, babe.”  Kira shrugs, a knowing smile on her face.  She’s gonna make him ask. Bitch.

“And what, pray tell, is NPE, Kira?”

“New Pussy Energy.”

Kylo is always confounded by the stereotype of women being more prudish than men.  Every woman Kylo has known, from his sister to each of the DADs (their acronym, not his) has been absolutely crude about sex.  And it’s not like his mother had held anything back. Ever.

“It’s a sickness that gets us all eventually.  And the only cure is to hope you can keep fucking it long enough for it to become old pussy.  Or, you know, you can put a ring on it and buy it a herd of goats and a farm.”

Kylo snorts at the image of Hux, his face pinched as he glares at a wedding ring and kicks back a bunch of baby goats.

“You are still fucking him, right?”

The last time he’d seen Hux had been an act of war, high art, a cataclysm.

“Yes, I’m still fucking him, Kira.  He’s just been away for … a few weeks.”  Kylo catches himself before he says “fifteen days”.  He refuses to give Kira any more satisfaction.

“He travels a lot.  I don’t know, he controls, like, half of the Asian economy or some shit.”

“This guy sounds like he’s got his shit together.”

“Yeah, he does.”  Kylo can taste the self-possessed chill of Hux’s inner self.  “Until he’s hanging off my dick, then he’s—”

“No dick talk!”  Kira smacks him upside the head.  He’s missed her.

“I get it, he’s good at the freaky-deeky.”  She frowns at him. “How long? Till he gets back?”

Kylo sticks his lip out, miserable.  “Six days.”

His ears prickle as Kira throws out a vein of magic at him.  Kira’s energy-alignment is as strong and solid as her massive biceps.  He’s watched her snuff the light out of someone’s eyes just to bring another back from the brink of death.  She’s a few degrees of semantic debate from a necromancer, not that either of them has ever had much use for semantics.  He fucks people for money.

“Ren, you are not in good shape.”

He lets his eyes convey his, “No, shit.”

“You gotta be careful with that shit.”  She places her small, strong hand over the channel-link tattooed over his left wrist.  She’d helped design it. “You’re running on fucking fumes. Come on, get up.”

She hauls him up by the wrist, heedless of the foot of height difference between them.  She leads him over to the emptiest corner of the gym.

“Fucking garbage baby,” she mutters, kicking her sneakers off and motioning him to do the same.  “I can patch you up, OK, but it’s just to keep you from having a fucking stroke until you can get your dick wet.”

“Kira, dick talk,” he chastises, settling straight-legged on the floor.

“I’m trying to help you, asshole.  Your energy lines are being held together with … duct tape and safety pins.”

She settles across from him, pressing the soles of her bare feet to his.  Her’s might be half his size but even that gives him a jolt. “I’m just gonna pull a little from the kinetics and a few unsuspecting muscle-heads.”

Kylo smiles, faking a shocked gasp.  “Kira, they haven’t consented to participating in your working.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t consent to bleeding out of my twat once a month, life’s not fair.”

Kylo really has missed her.

Kylo’s done this before, but each time feels different.  Kira closes her eyes are brings her arms up into a perfect V, pressing the tips of her fingers into the mound of her palm and pointing her thumbs overhead.  The swell of energy toward her rushes past him, prickling every hair on his body. She sniffs in and out of her nose, her stomach pumping in time with her controlled breathing.  When she nods at him, her eyes flashing, Kylo mirrors her and matches his breath to hers.

Heat floods in through his feet and washes up his spine, tangling through his meridians and twining up to the base of his skull.  His skin burns as his tapped-out tattoos knit back together, swelling into scar tissue that will itch like a motherfucker tonight.  He’s dizzy and sweating by the time Kira abruptly stops and draws in a deep breath. He does the same, his teeth crackling with borrowed power.

This is the hardest part, letting it build in his gut like a sharp-clawed thing that wants out, wants to fuck something or kill something or both, forcing it into the keratinized traps wrought all over his body.

Kira exhales and he falls back, closing his eyes.  The last time he’d felt this good, he’d had Hux’s jizz drying in his belly button.

“Thanks, Kir.”

“Yeah, yeah, you owe me.”  She hauls him up again like he’s nothing, not a feeling he’s used to.

“Come on, I still gotta do burpees.”

“Burpees?” Kylo doesn’t whine.

“Oh, you think Air Bitch is going to be happy when he comes back to you looking flabby? Come on, drop.”

She starts in on her set, and his pride has him dropping next to her.  Women are fucking brutal.

“And Ren?”  She pauses at the top of a ten-set.  Her breath is offensively slow compared to Kylo’s huffs. “Don’t fuck it up.”

~

The burger joint on Grand has a decent free-range bison burger. 

Kylo’s mind is somewhat soothed after two punishing hours at the gym and Kira’s spellwork.  At least he has an appetite.

The kid who takes his order is so lovesick over some Fire girl Kylo can taste it.  He wills the kid’s florid internal monologue out of his head until it’s just a lingering distaste at the back of his throat.  The kid barely pays attention as he punches in Kylo’s rare, seriously, don’t overcook it, burger with farmhouse cheddar and whatever the fuck a tomato coulis is. 

This place is designed to look like some bizarre fantasy of a farmhouse, from the pressed-tin chairs to the live-edge tables to the chandelier made out of mismatched forks.  Kylo had spent enough time on Uncle Chewie’s farm in Roscoe to know that the decoupage faux-taxidermy hanging above each table is a crime against rustic design.

Still, they make good milkshakes.

“Kyle?”

Always.  Kylo rolls his eyes and plunks his ticket down at the pickup counter.  The counterperson (Water, some kind of visual skill, light manipulation maybe?) slides over his ostentatiously recycled bag.  She does not give a single shit about Kylo, his burger, or anything other than the creative project (something with coathangers?) Kylo can just sense leaking out of her psyche.  The feeling is entirely mutual until Kylo looks at her tits. Or rather, what’s stretched across them.

There, over the braless, pert tits of his bored hipster waitress is his mother’s face.  

Kylo has seen this picture a million times.  It’s iconic, and not just in a RuPaul way. Leia stares dead at the camera, her sunglasses pushed down her nose and her hair in the huge, teased mane of the eighties.  Her plain denim shirt is unbuttoned and there, swaddled in her arms and pressed to her breast is a baby named Ben Solo. Leia’s free hand is giving the finger.

Fire Mom Says Fight the Patriarchy

This image had hung on the walls of his family’s Vesey Street loft.  It’s been run with the hundreds of articles written about Leia Organa, Elemental feminist, political activist, patron saint of the Fire Flu refugee crisis, style icon, and, always last on the list, Kylo’s fucking mother.

“Fire mom?”  Kylo mutters under his breath. He’s seen many iterations of this idea, from slick corporate billboards to the mid-nineties street artist who’d spray-painted the stenciled image with “Leia Has a Posse” all over the city.  The fire mom shit is new.

“Yeah,” countergirl says, rolling her eyes. She arches a snotty eyebrow at him. “Do you even know who she is?”  

Kylo could bring this whole place crashing to the ground.  The kitsch on the walls vibrates. Car alarms blare out from the street.  A lightbulb pops.

“Not really,” Kylo says, grabbing his food.  He shoulders past two hipsters with dumb beards and ugly shoes until he’s outside.

His knuckles go white around his paper bag as glass shatters behind him.

~

Kylo occupies the next days coddling his plants, getting up to his elbows in the guts of his Mustang, smoking enough weed to shame the entire Wu-Tang Clan, a Kubrick marathon, and a dozen other busy-making, bullshit things until he wakes up one afternoon, rolls over to his phone, and sighs with relief.

Hux is coming back tomorrow.

Kylo has been ignoring his Bindr as much as possible, with an ever-mounting stack of clients and hookups waiting on his responses.  They’ll keep waiting. There, at the top of his list, is the only message he wants to open.

finalux: Back tomorrow PM

finalux: Are you free?

Of course he’s free.

ren77: yes

finalux: Good

finalux: Did you just get out of bed?

Kylo smiles, imagining Hux’s judgmental morning-person face.  He throws the covers off and takes a picture of himself.

ren77: still in bed

ren77: wish u were too

finalux: It’s 2 AM here, I should be.

Hux’s picture appears.  He has dark circles under his eyes and the hard set of his mouth that tells Kylo he’s been doing spellwork for hours.

ren77: i’d fuck u till u passed out

finalux: and they say chivalry is dead

Kylo tucks onto his side and smiles.

finalux: Will you send me a picture of it?

Kylo’s brain trips over how he could possibly send a picture of chivalry before he stops, his mouth hanging open.

ren77: u want a dick pic?

ren77: for real?

ren77: am I dreaming?

ren77: are u high?

finalux: Don’t be an ass about it.

Kylo’s already stroking his dick.  It’s pathetically easy to get hard just imagining Hux’s snotty voice and the felled, ragged look he gets when he’s two seconds away from choking out and the raspy groan he makes when he comes in Kylo’s mouth.  He snaps a picture and sends it to Hux, strangely self-conscious as he waits for a reply.

finalux: Thank you.

Kylo snorts.

finalux: will you save it for me?

Everything Hux says is some kind of triple-entendre-play-on-three-languages-obscure-literary-reference word play that charms Kylo as much as it infuriates him.  For someone so sharp he can be willfully obtuse. Hopefully Hux means what Kylo wants him to mean.

ren77: I haven’t come in a week

Kylo isn’t obtuse.  He twists in his sheets, his cock throbbing like he’s not aware he hasn’t blown a load in what might be his longest record.  He rolls onto his stomach, letting it rub against the sheets as he waits, nervous he might have put Hux off.

He grins like an idiot when Hux’s message pops up.

finalux: I’m coming over directly from the airport.

~

Kylo’s never liked the cold.

He tugs the drawstrings on his hoodie a little tighter before taking another hit off his superlative joint.  He’s been buzzing for hours just waiting for Hux’s car to arrive.

Kylo’s block is always deserted, it’s half the reason he’d bought the place.  He exhales, watching his breath curl into the air, disappearing into the dim halo of the streetlight at the end of the block.  Frost tickles in his lungs, crackling with the oppositional Air magic he’d woven into this particularly dank blend’s DNA. 

He hopes Hux likes it.

It’s a small thing, a sweep of cool against his cheek, a prickling of the hairs on the back of his neck.  Finally .  Kylo swipes his thumb into his mouth, generous with his spit.  He lets it slide down to hiss against the burning ember of his joint, extinguishing it as a car turns the corner. 

Hux emerges from the black sedan like it’s a chariot.  He slings his carryon over his shoulder and waits imperiously for the driver to deposit his suitcase next to him.  Kylo barely has time to tuck his extinguished joint behind his ear before Hux is strolling past him, his suitcase waiting on the curb like Kylo’s the help.  Kylo picks it up with one hand and grabs Hux’s carryon as he walks past him.

“Save your energy,” Kylo says, winking as he waltzes past Hux and up the stairs.  Hux follows in his wake, exuding a thread of prim approval as Kylo lugs his shit up the stairs.  He’ll pay for that.

Hux’s bags fall to the floor with a clatter when they’re inside, and Kylo assumes whatever luggage Hux has deemed expensive enough to house his stuff is also strong enough to keep it safe.  Or not. Kylo’s far too busy lifting Hux entirely off the floor to give a shit.

“Miss me, sweetheart?”  Kylo kisses the sneer off Hux’s face, barely able to contain his own grin. 

Hux’s jacket has the barest rumple at the hem, and his shirt collar has started to droop from its usual starched perfection.  It’s as close to undone as he’s ever seen Hux in public. Kylo drags his lips against the white cotton, ferreting out Hux’s scent as he kisses down his neck.  Hux is cool to the touch as always. It’ll take more than a transcontinental flight to shake the Airish chill off him.

Something crashes to the floor as he carries Hux to the couch, not that Kylo gives a shit.  There’s nothing in his house he can’t replace with money, a few black market contacts, or sheer blood magic.  Hux’s sighs are soft, pleased things as Kylo paws blindly at him, tugging his jacket off and sending at least two of his shirt buttons into the air.  Hux threads a hand into his hair, as aroused at its greasy snarl as he is delightfully appalled. His other hand rucks up Kylo’s hoodie, sliding over the cut of his waist to scratch up his back.  Kylo laughs silently into the hollow of Hux’s ear, thanking Kira for kicking his ass at the gym. There’s a flit of a thought from Hux, that Kylo is even larger than he’d recalled, that Kylo’s memory is dwarfed by his looming presence.

“So you did miss me.”

“Perhaps,” Hux says, the high points of pink on his cheeks lending him an air of cupidity he doesn’t deserve.  Kylo licks over the pulse-point beating hot up his neck.

“Liar.”

He gives Hux a filthy kiss, all spit and tongue-fuck, just to pull off and leave Hux gasping for air.  Kylo strips out of his rank sweatshirt and ratty old MC5 tee, dropping them in the same pile as Hux’s atelier shirt and jacket.  He steps back a hair, just to smile meanly as Hux leans toward him.

“Haven’t even gotten my pants off and you can already taste my dick in your mouth.”

Hux barely has time to curl his lip before Kylo’s on him.  He undoes Hux’s belt with one hand, sliding off whatever dangerous animal had sacrificed its life for Hux’s lofty tastes.  It’s soft and strong, whatever it is. Kylo grins and wraps it around his knuckles.

“Can’t taste anything if you insist on talking,” Hux says snidely, his delicate fingers scrabbling at Kylo’s fly.  A gentle press into Hux’s mind reveals a symphony of desire, a pornographic kaleidoscope with Kylo’s cock throbbing in the refracted center.

“Hungry little bitch,” Kylo snaps, slapping Hux’s hands away but only half-succeeding in hiding his own grin.  Hux is filthy. Hux has missed him.

“Can’t keep your fucking hands to yourself, can you?”

Hux’s eyes flash livid as Kylo grabs his wrists and leashes them together behind his back with his own belt.  Before Hux can give voice to the droll commentary brewing in his mind, Kylo smiles and back-hands him across the face.

“Shut up.”

Hux is so pretty when he’s hit.  That icy control rolls back for just a stunned second, leaving a flash of bare truth that melts on Kylo’s tongue.  Hux thrums all over as his cheek flushes and the adrenaline from Kylo’s blow washes down his body. Kylo spins him around, snorting derisively at the unsteady trip of Hux’s feet.

Someone half as sensitive as Kylo could sense it, the fever-want unfurling under Hux’s skin, how hungry he is for Kylo’s rough treatment after so many weeks with his hands tight on the reins of his life.  Kylo kisses him before Hux can recover himself, wriggling into the cracks in Hux’s composure and sinking threads of his magic into Hux’s mind. Kylo laughs darkly as Hux hisses at him, his hands still trying to claw blindly at Kylo’s fly.

“Not yet,” Kylo tuts, pulling off to frown at Hux.  He narrows his eyes as he roots around in Hux’s mind, flying through a dozen come-soaked, tear-streaked, bruise-kneed scenarios to chase the throbbing pulse of what Hux wants most – Hux on all fours, barely conscious as Kylo chokes him out on his cock.  Perfect. He’ll save that for last.

“You want to suck my cock, Hux?”

Kylo rocks up onto his feet, letting the fat press of his cock drag against Hux’s bound hands.  The “yes” that crystallizes in Hux’s mind is so loud he may as well be screaming it.

“Too bad.”

Over the full-body snarl Hux gives him, Kylo closes his hands over the jut of Hux’s hips, and grinds against him.  He buries his nose in Hux’s hair and smiles at the frustrated grunt Hux makes. It’s not that he’d forgotten how good Hux always smells, how meticulously clean, always fresh as a strip of newly-torn eucalyptus, but it’s so much better straight from the source.  Kylo knows the scent of his own body like a Zeppelin song turned to 11, but Hux’s sharp, Airish scent is something precious to be earned with hours of arduous sex and violence.

He tugs Hux’s pants off roughly, shoving them down his hips and letting the waistband catch meanly over Hux’s cock.  One hand on the graceful small of Hux’s back shoves him over the arm of the couch, ass-up as Kylo sinks to his knees.  Kylo curls his fingers into the waistband of Hux’s boxer-briefs, flexing the runes on his knuckles, the ink in his skin as hungry for Hux as he is.  Hux’s ass had been covered in bruises the last time Kylo had seen it. It’s perfect now, a blank page that makes Kylo salivate. The kyber through his tongue hums.

“I haven’t even showered,” Hux says, his voice thick where his face has landed on the couch.  Mother, Kylo’s missed that Hux mixture of horror and arousal.

“Good,” Kylo says, barely giving Hux time to huff in delighted revulsion before he licks into him.  He’s sure to make a mess of it, letting his own spit run down his chin, making obscene wet noises with his tongue.  Hux writhes against him, getting what purchase he can with his hands bound and his body pressed down under Kylo’s hands.  His toes curl when Kylo flattens his tongue and drags the spike of kyber embedded under his tongue against the soft pink of Hux’s hole. 

All of the kyber Kylo cultivates is connected.  From the mother seed he’d willed into existence to the thousands of propagations he’s grown from blood and sorcery, there’s a lineage of dark, ancient magic that traces back to Kylo.  The crystal in his tongue arcs back to the smooth, horizontal bars that underline his cock, pulsing as one. He throbs with it, the good kind of pain that whets Kylo’s magic. He focuses on one of the runes on his neck, just below the hillock of his adam’s apple.  It singes and sings as Kylo wills some power into it, tapping the sheer animal force of his own desire and trapping it under his skin. He needs more.

“Gonna fuck you filthy,” Kylo growls, staggering up and blindly reaching for the nearest jar of lube.  Something crashes as he pulls it through the air. Let it all break.

The air stings cool against Kylo’s cock when he shoves his pants off.  He slicks himself up, letting his homemade lube string sticky between his fingers.  He shoves some into Hux with rough fingers, not enough to count as prep but enough to get him wet.  He’s open enough from Kylo’s tongue. Hux wants the hurt as much as Kylo does.

It’s rough, searing, the first push into Hux, and neither of them are really ready for it.  Hux makes a galaxy of wounded noises as Kylo bottoms out. Kylo’s skin ripples with the animal power of it, his teeth finding the closest part of Hux’s body and sinking in.  He moves before Hux has any hope of adjusting to him and doesn’t stop until they’re both covered in sweat and his own orgasm is hounding at the base of his spine. 

“Don’t you fucking come,” Kylo snarls, snaking his arm down to clamp around the base of Hux’s cock.  He pounds into him, shaking the couch beneath them as it inches across Kylo’s floor. The hardwood and Hux will have matching bruises.  Fury rises off Hux in waves, contrary, combative, thrilled. Hux’s hands scrabble against Kylo’s stomach, scratching at whatever he can reach.  Kylo bristles at each slice, rides the pain out until it comes crashing around him and pours out of his teeth. He pushes Hux’s face down against the leather and comes buried deep inside him, screaming.

Kylo staggers to his feet, humming all over.  Hux is never biddable, but he puts up a minimal fight as Kylo unlashes his wrists and slings him belly-up on the couch cushions.  He crawls between Hux’s legs, eager for the animal smell of him, the pale skin of his inner thighs, the taste of his cock in Kylo’s mouth.  Hux writhes for him, chases Kylo’s mouth on his cock and his fingers in Hux’s used hole like a bitch in heat. 

“You’re already a fucking mess,” Kylo says, catching Hux’s eyes before he spits down onto his cock.  He lets Hux tangle cruel fingers into his hair, pulling meanly and pushing him down as Hux tries to force himself into Kylo’s throat.  A few curls of Kylo’s fingers and Hux is coming, arching up and tugging sharply at Kylo’s scalp. Kylo swallows, growling as warmth floods his stomach and trips back into the martial sigils that dot his hip bones.

Magic is so easy with Hux.  His mind is open, unabashed as he urges Kylo on, dares him to go further and take more.  He bristles and moans and flashes incendiary images with every thought, digs his nails and teeth and the sharp bite of his Air element into Kylo’s skin like a whip.

“If you don’t fuck me again right now, I’m leaving,” Hux snarls, wrapping his legs around Kylo’s waist and bucking up to make sure he gets the message.  It’s so easy to surge over Hux’s body, to clamp his hand around the dove-wing of Hux’s jaw and pry it open. He spits into Hux’s mouth and slides his cock back inside him in one long, slick drop that leaves them both shaking.

“You’re not going anywhere.”

There might be some flat surfaces of his home that remain unsullied, but Kylo gets Hux bent over all the important ones.  He fucks Hux’s mouth hanging backwards off the coffee table, fucks his ass bent over the footrail of his bed just to throw him on the floor and eat him out until Hux loses, regains, and loses consciousness again.  He bends Hux in half on one of his workbenches until Hux’s face is red and Kylo has pooled enough power in his skin to summon a minor natural disaster. He pierces Hux’s nipples over and over, sliding the kyber through the air in time with the measured thrusts of his hips, bringing Hux to the edge so many times he has tears in his eyes.  He brings Hux off with his mouth and his hands and his cock, spanks him until his palms sting, leaves a trail of hickeys and bruises and barbs all over him until Hux is lax in his arms.

“I made you something,” Kylo says, breathing in the still moments of a brief recovery.  They’d made it into the bathroom with some dim notion of shower sex, which quickly devolved into Hux bent over the rim of his tub and Kylo’s knees slipping on the tiles.  They’re slumped against his bathtub now, with Hux leaning back against his chest and pressing a towel to the fat lip he’d goaded Kylo into giving him.

Kylo’s got enough magic coursing through him to pull his car through the air.  Bringing a joint in from the next room barely takes any effort.

Hux watches him, eyes narrowed, as Kylo lights it.  He takes a deep hit, letting a chimney of smoke run from his open lips to his nostrils.  Hux sniffs the air.

“That smells … quite good, actually.”

“Open your mouth.”  Kylo takes another drag, sucking hard to fill his lungs.  He turns Hux to face him, angling Hux’s head back as Hux parts his lips.  He seals his mouth to Hux’s and exhales, tingling with the high of sharing breath with Hux, of forcing something into his body and catching the reverb as Hux lights up. 

“Fuck,” Hux sighs, his head lolling back against Kylo’s shoulder as a plume of smoke drifts out of his mouth.  “What the fuck is that?”

“I grew it,” Kylo says, taking another hit and sharing it with Hux.  He smiles as the familiar haze settles around his shoulders, a warm mantle.  “It’s laced with all the Air I could manage.”

Hux turns to him, his eyes a little bloodshot, a little softer.

“Doesn’t it hurt you?”

“I like it,” Kylo says, resting his head against the cool porcelain as Hux crawls into his lap.

~

“I’m stealing that soap, it smells marvelous,” Hux says, marching imperiously out of the bathroom with Kylo’s cleanest towel tucked around his waist.  Steam wafts out behind him.

“You hungry?”  Kylo looks up from his container of leftover drunken noodles and offers his chopsticks.

“Thirsty.”  Hux climbs over Kylo and plucks the nearest glass of water off his side-table.  “You shouldn’t eat in bed.”

“Really?” Kylo says, packing as much “you just sat on my face after I fucked you, Hux” as he can into the word.  Hux ignores him, sitting up and tracing one finger enticingly up Kylo’s arm.

“I have an idea.”

~

“Are you sure?”

Kylo rolls the kyber blade between his fingers, letting it glint in the light as he looks up at Hux.  They’re sprawled on Kylo’s bed, with Hux’s whippet legs snaking out from the mound of ruined sheets. Kylo cups Hux’s left foot, dragging his thumb along the graceful arch.

“Yes,” Hux says, imperious even in his nest of pillows.  He goes en pointe, flicking his big toe against Kylo’s blade.

“It’ll hurt,” Kylo says, his voice the kind of gleeful that would make another man bolt. 

Hux just snorts. 

Kylo has carved an encyclopediae of arcana into his own skin.  He’s explained the magic to Hux, what it takes to trap that much power in the flesh, the maintenance and care it requires.  What Kylo hasn’t told him is how rarely he’s done this for other people. A handful of friends, a few for Rey, one for an early lover – Kylo keeps his blades for himself, mostly. 

“Get on with it, I didn’t ejaculate into a goddamn shot glass for you to sit there staring at me.”

“Consecration is relative, Hux,” Kylo says, reaching over to pick up the offending shot glass.  Kylo keeps a box of them packed in salt, perfect for holding fickle potion-parts or precious bodily fluids.

Hux’s come gleams milky in the light.  It’s a good showing for a man who’s had at least four orgasms by Kylo’s hazy accounting.  Hux watches, wide-eyed, as Kylo mumbles the first words, sounds that come from his diaphragm and bypass his lips entirely.  The air around him hums, swelling with the nascent magic surging up from the Earth itself. Flecks of Kylo’s kyber swirl through the air, glimmering from red to green to churlish black before they dovetail down to mingle with Hux’s little offering.  As Kylo chants, the colors clash and hiss before fading to an icy white. The shot glass burns in Kylo’s hand.

Hux had been the one to suggest it.  “The bottom of my foot, anyone who sees that is either on my payroll or in no place to rat me out to the AM.”  Kylo settles Hux’s ankle between his knees, holding him steady. If anyone can take a tattoo without jumping it’s Hux, but it’s best to be safe.

Kylo dips his crystal blade and makes the first cut.

They’d picked a rune for clarity, one of the call-signs for Air Magic.  It’s a simple thing, symmetrical, with two horns curving off the top. Hux hisses, sending a stir of cold through the air as he forces himself still.  Hux has more self-control in one foot than most people could dream of in a lifetime. 

Kylo keeps up his incantation, stringing together the elements and the base molecular force of Hux’s own seed, willing them all into a prison of crystal and collagen.  He sends tendrils of his own magic to mend Hux’s flesh back together, tethering scar tissue and black magic to the milky-white of his secret skin.

Kylo presses a kiss to it when it’s finished.  Hux’s breathing is a steady rhythm in the background, reined through his sharp nostrils before cutting into the cloying air of Kylo’s bed.  They’ve just broken several laws and a dozen health codes, not that either of those are prices a man like Hux will ever pay. 

Hux is using him.  But Hux will carry a piece of Kylo with him forever. 

“Now,” Kylo says, turning his lips to the jutted curve of Hux’s ankle bone.  “Let’s will some real power into this thing.”

~

Hux takes his tarine at a terrifyingly hot temperature.  Kylo’s not sure how he has any skin left on the inside of his mouth.

“You’re sure you don’t want some sugar?”

“Cretin,” Hux says, wrinkling his nose at Kylo’s matcha.  He inches over as Kylo clambers back into bed, accepting a place under Kylo’s arm.  They sip their tea, letting warmth seep into the pleasant ache that only a night with Hux can inspire.  Hux trails one delicate finger up Kylo’s forearm, tapping it against a jagged scar.

“Did you get this in Burkina Faso?”

“Dusseldorf,” Kylo says, frowning.  “How do you know I’ve been to Burkina Faso?”

“Oh, I’ve done research on you, Kylo Ren.”

“What do you know about me, Hux? What did your little flunkies find out, hm?”

Hux leans his head into the crook of Kylo’s neck.

“Your birth name is Benjamin Organa Solo.  Your parents were radical activists, most notably your firebrand of a mother, who I needn’t tell you is to this day regarded as one of the most famous elemental feminist icons on earth.  And a socialist.”

Hux says the last word like it hurts his tongue.

“Your sister is adopted, and her storied past is an entire file unto itself.  You two got up to quite the trouble together, didn’t you?”

Kylo frowns.  “That was a long time ago.  What else?”

“You enjoyed a childhood of relative wealth and privilege.  You attended private schools, if you can call Friends Inter-Alignment Seminary a school.”

“Where did you go to school, Hux?  Like, high school?”

“Groton, naturally,” Hux scoffs, as if this should be self-evident.  “You know they still separate the dorms by alignment?”

Kylo snorts.  “Let me guess, the Air dorms had riots over who was stealing hair gel.”

“There were some skirmishes over grooming products, yes.  The Water dorms were just a big orgy, I did like sneaking off there.”

“Slut,” Kylo teases.

“I thought we were resting.”  Hux radiates pleasure, slut echoing lazily in his mind along with appreciation for the way Kylo forms his dental consonants.

“We are.  And you’re not telling me anything some mid-level googling couldn’t get you.”

“You come from a long line of MVs, your mother and uncle, your grandfather.”  Hux says this delicately, as if to say he’s not outright offended that Kylo is related to a war criminal.  “You presented at an early age and received extensive training, some might even say grueling. Some.”

Hux’s haughty melancholy peeks through, that even Kylo’s punishing lessons couldn’t compare to the torments of Brendol Hux.

“As I said, your parents were quite well-known, making you something of a first family in your set.  You were as troubled as you were gifted, a fact your parents seem to have gone to great lengths both to fix and to hide.  You went through healers and therapists and doctors the way other children outgrow shoes.”

This is all true.  Kylo shifts his leg, eager to change the topic. 

“I outgrew my shoes pretty fast, too.”  He nudges his big toe against Hux’s ankle.

“I can imagine.  Let’s see, what else.  Your parents seem to have had a number of … ”  Hux trails off, clicking his tongue.

“Lovers?  Yeah, I know.”  Kylo rolls his eyes. “They never used words like “poly” or whatever, but that’s what they were.  It’s bad enough walking in on your own parents. I found my mom making out with one of my therapists. And then I had to act like it was normal when my “Aunt” Amilyn came over for dinner and I had a brand-new shrink.”

“Mother,” Hux swears quietly.

“I didn’t know it was weird to have grown men sleeping over until my dad told me not to mention that Uncle Lando slept in his bed sometimes.”

“What an unsettling thing for a child to process,” Hux says, the sheet weight of his rare sympathy washing over Kylo.  The very few other people he’s ever discussed this with have always marveled at how cool and sexually liberated his parents were.  Hux, as always, is unimpressed.

“Sometimes I think the only thing I did right for them was being gay.”

Hux snorts outright at that.  “My father caught me with one of our gardener’s sons once.  He told me I was still expected to produce an heir, and that ‘cavorting with the help’ is unseemly.  I was fourteen.”

Hux is a wall when he discusses his family.  Kylo drags his fingers through Hux’s damp hair.

“Lucky boy.”

“Hardly.  His father got fired.  But we’re not discussing me, are we?”

Hux traces his fingers over the moon sigils at the tip of Kylo’s sternum.

“You went to Vassar, and at least had the good taste to drop out after a year.  You seem to have taken up with some rather colorful characters – mercenary fire mages, all women, all with truly impressive Ars Magica rap sheets.”

Kylo smiles at Hux’s description of Kira and her girls.

“You four are implicated in a number of suspicious deaths, violent robberies, various instances of political unrest, and an outright coup in Myanmar.”

Hux drags his finger down Kylo’s chest, softly sparking a line of herald runes.

“You’ve been arrested no less than twenty-eight times, and that’s only counting the countries with whom we have extradition treaties.  How you have escaped the long arm of the AM with your life, your magical ability, and most of your physical person intact is a mystery.”

Kylo nods.

“Family connections.  Or just my dashing good looks,” Kylo adds, smiling against Hux’s hair at the begrudging agreement he radiates.  There’s a quick image in Hux’s head of the scar above Kylo’s brow, that this is a pleasing addition to him, like weathering the veneer on an antique table.

“A table?”

“Stop that,” Hux hisses, playing at slapping his chest.  He likes it when Hux slaps.

“Your little gang seems to have disbanded around the time your father … became ill.”  Hux stills, quiet against him. Hux is rarely uncertain in his thoughts but he hesitates, assessing Kylo.

“What then?”

“Well, your family went to great lengths to find a cure but … I am sorry, Kylo.”

“Did you love your father, Hux?”

Hux takes a deep breath.

“No.”  Hux’s mind is sharp and bitter.

“I loved mine.  Fuck, I worshipped him.  He was always kind of in my Mom’s shadow, but I thought he was the coolest.  He taught me how to fix up old cars, that was his thing. He wouldn’t even let me use magic, said it was the only way to learn, even for a mech like him.  He was a Water, you know? People just liked him. I’d walk into a room with him and it was like, I don’t know, having someone throw you a birthday party. I could pretend everyone felt that way about me when I was with him.”

Hux throws off a carbonated burst of hating other people.  Kylo snorts. Hux wouldn’t have fallen for his father’s easy charm.

“I’d been away, got into some shit in Seoul.  My friend Kira had just bounced me out and we were in this karaoke titty bar at like four AM and Rey just … appeared.”

“She flew out to bring you home?”

“No, we used to do some astral projection stuff.”

It’s the grey area of magic, something so few people could master it was barely worth regulating.  Rey was always better at it than he was, and even she couldn’t do it without rebounding off his energy.  He can still see her, looking smaller and more pinched than usual.

Come home, Ben.

“Do you know what killed my father, Hux?”

“I believe it was pancreatic cancer.”

“Yeah, he had that.  It was fucking fast, too.  I’d seen him about a year before, and by the time I got back he was … he was gone.  Like, his soul had left and his body was just hanging on from all the shit my mother and everyone else had them pumping into it.  My Uncle Chewie got obsessed with finding this Icelandic Earth shaman. I came to the hospital one day and he was covered in fucking moss.  She wasn’t even doing any spellwork. I had such a big fight with her they threw me out.

“And my mother, she just ... it was like she couldn’t talk about it.  I looked at him and I saw a corpse, and all she could talk about was this Fire purification ritual or the new Water molecular geneticist who was crafting his millionth fucking round of chemo.

“I tried to heal him. Earth mage, right?  I got Rey to take Mom out and Mother help me, I tried every fucking dark arcana spell I could get my hands on.  I tried to pull that shit out and put it in me and … I’ve done some bad shit, Hux, things your little spies will never dig up.  But I felt that disease inside him and … I’ve never felt evil like that. And all I got for it was a comatose nurse and a grand mal seizure.

“When I woke up, I knew.  I knew he was never getting better.  That I was the only one who could see it.  I couldn’t see him suffer any more and I … part of me hated him for being so sick.  It was like someone stole my dad and replaced him with this pathetic shell.

“I waited until we were alone and … I did it with my bare hands.  I didn’t use magic, he wouldn’t have wanted that. I looked him in the eye and.  I ended it.”

He’s never told anyone this, not all of it, not in this sequence and never in the wide-open space above his bed.  He’s grinding his teeth, wishing he had Hux’s tight control over elemental evaporation as his eyes water.

“My mother wouldn’t speak to me.  And Rey, fuck. She threw me against a wall so hard I had a concussion.  And you’ve seen how well we all get along now.”

Hux turns, rising up onto his hands to look Kylo in the eye.

“I hope someone would care about me enough to do the same.”  He strokes his hand along Kylo’s cheek, forcing Kylo to look at him.  “I don’t care what your snide little sister or your narcissist of a mother say, you did him a kindness that few people could stomach.  Mercy can be cruel, Kylo.”

Kylo wonders if Hux knows any other kind.  Hux shakes his head and thumbs over Kylo’s cheekbone 

“I don’t think I would have gotten along with Han Solo, but he strikes me as a man of pride and independence.  Wasting away in some hospital bed with no control over one’s bodily functions is no kind of life. What are we if we have no dignity?”

Kylo stills his next thought of you crawled across my floor to lick your own jizz off my balls .  Even that, Hux had done with a steely kind of dignity, the strength that allows him to indulge in the nastiest shit and still walk around like he owns the world and everyone in it the next day.

No one owns Kylo, but no one has ever, ever heard this part of Kylo’s past and met him with such unflinching, unequivocal acceptance.  Something spills out from Kylo’s chest, over the lattice of scar tissue from all the sigils he’d cracked trying to save his father. He pours it into Hux’s mouth, kissing him furiously to stop all the stupid shit he wants to say.

Airs get a bad rap for being cunty and detached, but Hux’s cool, collected certainty soothes all the raw parts of Kylo.  He crawls into Kylo’s lap, straddling him like his thighs don’t ache and his ass isn’t sore. Hux can swallow anything.

Kylo’s mouth tingles, a pulsing, mentholated sensation that must be some small vein of Hux’s Air magic.  His lungs expand and his throat opens and his skin tingles with Hux’s comfort, a balm unlike anything Kylo’s ever known.

He goes to flip Hux over, greedy to get inside him and drown in all that numbing cool, but Hux stops him with a hand on his chest.

“Let me?”

Kylo’s done things with Hux, done things to Hux that no one’s ever really let him do, not the way Hux cracks himself open and lets Kylo suck down to the marrow.

This is a different Hux than the one he’s emptied himself into.  Cool, confident in his prowess, Hux starts at the matching fleur-de-lis sigils on his neck and works his way down, kissing at what is surely every inch of Kylo’s mapped skin.

Kylo has always been better at taking than receiving.  He holsters his hands behind his head and closes his eyes, his breath shaky.

Hux’s mouth tickles down Kylo’s happy trail.  He skirts past Kylo’s dick, which is hard because of course it is, it always fucking is when Hux is involved.  Hux kisses over the jut of his hipbones and the V’d crease of his thighs.

“Get on your stomach,” Hux says, a command in his voice that Kylo’s not used to hearing when Hux is between his legs.  Here’s the man who juggles fortunes in the palm of his hand.

Kylo rolls over, taking his sweet time to see if he can raise a snit of irritation off Hux.  All he gets is that same, cool confidence, and an indulgent willingness to give Kylo all the time he needs because he’s enjoying the view.

Kylo grabs a pillow and wraps his arms around it, smushing it under his chest and laying his cheek to one side.  He looks back over the blacked-out expanse of his back at Hux. 

Hux is stately even when he’s crawling, Kylo already knows this.  He stalks up Kylo’s body, spreading himself to straddle across Kylo’s hips and press himself to Kylo’s back.

His breath comes out in a rush as Hux sinks over him.  Hux is slim but he’s all vicious muscle. Kylo closes his eyes, weighed down like the sky above is crushing him.  Something in his Earth alignment sighs at this, curling up under the blanket of Hux above him.

Hux mirrors his detailed attention to Kylo’s body, kissing over the inky expanse of the Guruna mask on Kylo’s back.  He’d seen it in a vision after a week of peyote and sweat lodges. It had taken him weeks to finish. Kylo had kept passing out from the pain and dropping the spellwork.  Hux drags his lips across pin-pricked scars underneath the unflinching black, kicking up distant sense-memories of a hundred different spells Kylo had willed into his body.

Kylo sends a gentle thread out to Hux’s mind, longing for more of Hux’s Air-borne surety.  He gets it, along with a flood of thoughts about Kylo, each one a neat, crisp image: the tattoos on Kylo’s body for his endurance and fearless flouting of tradition, the muscles shifting under Hux’s hands for his strength, his lips pursed and pierced with his kyber for his beauty and his skill, the warm collar of his power squeezing around Hux’s throat for his maddening, brilliant magic, the furl of a leaf for his Earth alignment, the sense that his resinous weight soothes Hux the way Hux is soothing him now.  As Hux licks down the dipped ridge of his spine, he gives off the crystal-clear thought that Kylo, like so very few people on Earth, is worthy of Hux’s attention.

He pulls back from Hux’s mind, a wave of animal satisfaction washing over him.  Kylo doesn’t give a shit what anyone thinks of him, fuck, he goes out of his way to make people dislike him, but Hux’s esteem is intoxicating.  He rolls up to meet Hux’s mouth as he drags his tongue down to Kylo’s tailbone. Hux’s knee drags between his thighs, carving out a space for himself as he settles down between Kylo’s legs.

Kylo’s cock hangs heavy between his spread thighs as Hux guides his hips up, his touch deft and delicate.  No one touches Kylo like that. His fingertips brush over the casting sigils that run down Kylo’s thighs, the primitive Earth magic he uses as the foundation for all his spellwork.  Simple, animal power, the same force that growls softly in Kylo as he buries his face in his sex-stinking pillow and arches his ass up for Hux’s mouth. Hux’s breath tickles against him, that same soothing wave curling under his tailbone and echoing up his spine.  His time with Hux’s mouth is generally of the gasping, desperate variety – blowjobs that end with ropes of Hux’s own thick spit painting them both, Hux’s teeth gnashing against whatever surface Kylo allows him, Hux’s throat clenching and sputtering until the consciousness dims from his eyes just so.

Hux is as masterful and precise with his tongue as he is with his magic.  Slowly, he teases into Kylo, working him wet and open with maddening focus.  While Kylo usually does this like a dog on a bone, Hux is neat, tender, testing out swipes of his tongue and delicate sucks of his lips, cataloguing what Kylo likes best and weaving it into a pattern that has Kylo grinding against him and holding onto his pillow like an anchor.

Pride rolls off Hux in waves, a familiar taste on Kylo’s tongue.  Hux delights in his own skill, his mastery of technique and his ability to map all of Kylo’s preferences like he’s a complex piece of machinery.  Distantly, Kylo entertains the thought that it would be fun to watch Hux fuck someone, to see that vicious focus put to full force.

Hux shifts him up, hiking his hips up with the surprising strength of all that lithe muscle.  There’s a lot that brute strength can accomplish, and Kylo has thrashed and battered his way through life with middling success largely because people would rather get out of his way.  Lurking beneath that lacquer and liquid grace, Hux’s strength pulses where his hands dig into the substantial muscle of Kylo’s ass.

People’s assessments of Kylo run to two extremes: he is exceptional, gifted, immeasurably powerful, a mage for the history books; he is spoiled, childish, hideous, a piece of shit who should be put down for the good of society.  Hux digs his sharp fingers into Kylo’s flesh, his thought as clear as a bell.

Ah, we are well-matched, aren’t we?

There’s a puddle underneath Kylo when Hux rolls him over.  Kylo’s cock slaps against his stomach, kissing a clear halo of eager precome onto his skin.

“You gonna fuck me, Hux?”

“Not tonight.”  Hux crawls over him, feline.

“Do you want me to?” Hux asks, his legs settling across Kylo’s hips.

“I’d let you.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I want…”

Kylo looks up at Hux, at the elegant curve of his side as he reaches to Kylo’s bedside table for his lube.  He laughs at Hux’s open disdain for the repurposed Poland Spring bottle he’d filled with his latest batch.

“I want to watch you ride my dick until you come.”

“That can be arranged.”

Hux slicks him up and sinks down with his signature elegant arch.  He head falls back and his spine curves as he braces his hands backwards on Kylo’s bent thighs.

Hux is strangle-tight around him, barely prepped because Hux likes the burn, craves the aching stretch of Kylo’s cock inside him, a white-hot pain he can will into pleasure.  He rides Kylo with one hand stripping his cock and the other digging into the meat of Kylo’s thigh, using him for own pleasure. Kylo thrusts up to meet him, lets his hands roam over Hux’s strong thighs and his jutting hips, but does nothing to take the reins from where they’re squarely cinched in Hux’s hands.

It’s like being stoned.  He lays back, his body heavy and humming as Hux fucks himself in tight, sharp circles.  Hux spoon-feeds him wave after wave of smug pleasure when Kylo’s cock hits him just so, when his big hands span the bridge of Hux’s waist, when he hisses at Hux’s cruel tug on his balls.  Kylo pushes, wriggling as deep into Hux’s mind as he is on the other end, pathetically hungry for the reassurance that Hux likes this, likes him , likes the ugly curve of his face and his too-big ears and the ugly scars of his past sins curling across his chest.  Hux is magnificently, majestically pleased with the man between his legs, throwing off waves of cat-cream satisfaction as he chases his orgasm.  Feeling Hux come is good enough – the tight clench of him around Kylo’s cock, the heedless slice of his nails into the Earth-warding rune on Kylo’s thigh, the neck-snapping grip of his thighs at Kylo’s sides – but feeling him come is everything. 

Orgasm is different for everyone, even for the same person under different circumstances.  The way Hux comes when Kylo has him dangling an inch from consciousness and a foot off the floor is different from the soft, sated sigh Hux gives as he seizes up on Kylo’s cock and goes blessedly blank – a moment of perfect, beautiful silence, a sky with no clouds and a night with no stars, a breath held full of promise.  All of this is enough to jolt Kylo into spilling inside of Hux, but it’s the animal taste of his own body on Hux’s mouth when Hux curves down to kiss him that makes him nut like he’s a teenager.

Hux stays on top of him, lazily making out until Kylo slips out of him.  For once Kylo’s too lazy to chase his own mess. He’s boneless as Hux curls up by his side.

“Thirsty,” Hux grumbles, miming grabbing a glass with his hand.  He does it twice before he pokes at Kylo’s chest.

Kylo rolls his eyes.  Brat. He summons the nearest glass of water with a pull of magic, hoping it’s not too stale for Hux’s picky palate.

“Thank you,” Hux says, draining it and handing the empty glass back to Kylo.  Hux is a brat but he’s warm by Kylo’s side, a quiet presence in that hazy, happy state of post-fuck lassitude.  He’s yet to find a state where Hux’s hair doesn’t smell good. All that thousand-dollar baby seal fat or whatever the fuck Hux uses to wrangle his hair must be imbued into his pores.  On a whim, Kylo looses a vein of his mechanical ability and puts the Smiths on his ancient speakers.

“Oh, Mother help me,” Hux mumbles against his chest.  It takes a few seconds before Kylo realizes Hux is laughing.

“One of my little research Waters found something I neglected to mention.”  Hux rises to his elbow, raking a hand through his hair. It still looks good, post-fuck and bereft of its usual styling.

“I need my phone.”  Hux rolls over, reaching to the floor and presumably his pants.

“Oh, sure, you can move to show me some shit on your phone, but I have to summon water for you?”

“Yes,” Hux answers, snide and packing several sentences into one syllable as always.  But then he’s on his stomach and arching up onto his elbows and his ass looks incredible. 

While Morrisey does that excellent line about handsome someone’s caring, Hux opens an email on his phone and Kylo’s stomach sinks into his bed slats.  It can’t be.

“This was quite entertaining.”

In a weird back-echo, the same song playing on Kylo’s speakers rings tinnily out of Hux’s phone. 

Kylo doesn’t need to watch the screen, but he can’t stop himself.  There, with acres of pasty bare skin and a galaxy of chin zits and the utter abomination that was his bangs in the early aughts, some chunky, stupid kid named Ben Solo stands shirtless in front of his mirror and sings along with such painful sincerity it makes undiscovered parts of Kylo die.  He groans, steeling himself for the worst part.

“Oh, this is the good bit.”  Hux’s face is far too delighted, his lip bit between his teeth and his kaleidoscope eyes gleaming in the reflection of his phone. 

Kylo watches his younger self roll one of his nipples between two fingers, which is when Rey loses her shit and laughs so loud she drowns out Morrisey’s crooning finale.

“Get out of my room, twatwad!” young-Kylo shrieks, his face mottled with rage.

At that point the image goes sideways and cuts out, although only Kylo knows that it’s because he pinned Rey to the wall and tried to pull her hair out.  Sure, he’d gotten grounded for the totally mild concussion he’d given her, but had anyone punished Rey for the third-degree burn she’d left on his arm before Dad and Uncle Lando had broken down his door?  Of course not.

“Apparently you were something of an early Youtube sensation.”

Kylo rolls his eyes.  There’s a reason he only uses social media to get his dick wet.  “There are at least a dozen sex tapes of me and that’s the shit you find?”

“Oh, I saw those as well.  That one where you bottom for that gorgeous little Water twink was quite enlightening.”

“He was, like, a stage-five clinger.”

“Waters,” they both agree, shrugging.

“I think it’s rather adorable.  I never had siblings, and while it afforded me plenty of privacy to furiously masturbate in my room and do other distasteful teenaged-boy things, it could be rather lonely.”

Kylo pushes Hux’s phone out of his hands and pulls Hux back to his chest, jealous suddenly for the quiet weight of Hux on his body.  Lonely doesn’t always mean alone.

Hux’s mind is soft with memories of his own pubescent body, bony where Kylo’s had been awkwardly thick, silent in the face of his father’s truly sadistic abuse where Kylo had raged at even the smallest imposition of authority, as curious and hungry for the bodies of other men as Kylo had been.

Hux’s fingers trace over the swell of Kylo’s pecs, past the nipple he’d foolishly toyed with while he thought he was alone.

“I quite like what you’ve done with all this.”  He gestures up and down Kylo, like he’s a newly-renovated loft of some other thing Hux deems useful.

“I was thinking about doing bangs again, what do you think?” Kylo asks, his tongue firmly in his cheek.

Hux rises onto one elbow.  “I will kill you. I have people.”

~

Epilogue

Hux has barfed on his dick.  It happens. Kylo gets caught up in the moment, and Hux does eat solid food once in a while.

Still, he’s never seen Hux look quite this nauseated.

“How do you even know what’s clean and what’s dirty?”  He’s holding up one of Kylo’s t-shirts like it could bite him, although Hux generally likes that.

“I don’t know, I smell them?”  Kylo shrugs.

“You have money, Kylo.  You can pay people to do these things.”  Withering. Hux’s look is withering.

“Mother, you could probably enspell this entire place clean in an instant.”  Hux tosses the shirt to Kylo and turns back to the overflowing chest of drawers next to his woodworking tools.

“I guess.”  Kylo smells his t-shirt.  It’s clean. Maybe? “Since when do you give a shit about what I wear?”

“I don’t.  And you’re certainly at your best naked.” Hux frowns, ferreting out another shirt.  “I’d just … rather not have you stinking like a brothel in front of my coworkers.”

Hux is lying.  Or, not quite. Hux is parsing the truth of his words into discrete segments and doling them out as he sees fit.  It thrills Hux to smell Kylo’s body after they’ve fucked all night. It disgusts him. Both of these things are true, and the dissonance of this fact doesn’t seem to bother Hux in the slightest.

“You stink like a brothel,” Kylo offers back, childishly.  He still takes the shirt Hux hands him, a plain black V-neck he’s not sure he’s ever worn.

“Later, perhaps.”

Hux is sharp as always, poured into a suit that looks like a second skin.  It’s tailored so well Kylo’s half-sure it would rip if Hux sneezed too aggressively, which of course will never happen.  Not in public. It’s a blue too light to be midnight, a blue for inky skies and fathomless depths, for things only the brave want to explore.

“I’m still not sure why you’re taking me to this.  I thought you hated Phasma.”

“I don’t hate her.  I fear her and respect her, as anyone with an ounce of business acumen should.”

Hux makes an impatient gesture with his hand until Kylo pulls the shirt on over his head.

Hux snorts.  “If we didn’t live in a world steeped in pointless misogyny, she’d be my boss ten times over.”

Kylo nods.  His mom is an elemental feminist meme.  He gets it.

“It behooves me to maintain a social relationship with her.”

“So I’m your date to her birthday party because?”

“You’re not my date .” Hux frowns.  It does nice things to his cheekbones.  “You’re accompanying me. You’re my guest.”

Kylo arches an eyebrow and smooths his shirt down.  Hux is as precise in his language as he is in his dress.

Kylo’s thick hair takes forever to dry.  It’s still damp as he runs his fingers through it.  He’s halfway to piling it into his usual half-forgotten ponytail when Hux flicks his hands away.

“No, wear it down.  It looks better that way.”  Hux clucks his tongue and hand-combs Kylo’s hair into a messy part.  His scalp tingles as, unbidden, a memory of Rey braiding his hair flashes in his mind. He’d always liked that.

“This shirt’s too small,” Kylo says, suddenly aware of his skin and the tight cotton stretching across his pecs.  The V-neck yawns down to the abatement rune carved between his nipples.

“No.  It’s not.”  Warmth isn’t something Hux has in excess but it’s burning in his eyes as he looks Kylo up and down – the old motorcycle boots Hux had deemed the least offensive, skinny black jeans that hang low on his hips, his skintight shirt, his hair falling in its natural waves around his face.

“Good,” Hux proclaims, his lips pursing while some small part of his psyche thinks about sucking Kylo’s dick.

“You gonna fix my makeup next?”

Hux rolls his eyes.  “They’ve done studies, you know.  People who associate with an attractive, polar-aligned partner rate higher for leadership and competence among their peers.  And they make more money.”

Hux fusses at his hair, a small smile on his lips.  “You’re the least unattractive Earth I know, so tonight the honor falls to you.”

Hux’s compliments often unfold in the double negative.  Kylo ramps down his forays into Hux’s mind when they’re not being intimate, as much out of their unspoken boundaries about these things as to keep himself from getting frostbite.  Hux is hard on everyone, but he’s merciless on himself. It’s exhausting.

On the rare occasion Hux has a kind thought, it rolls off him in waves of pleased, Air-tingling mist that Kylo couldn’t shut out if he wanted to.

Kylo unfolds a hairsbreadth of his ability, brushing the barest fingertip against Hux’s mind.  Underneath Hux’s baseline hypoglycemic anxiety and the cast-iron grip he keeps on himself at all times, he drinks in Hux’s pleasure at Kylo’s appearance. 

Like most Airs, venturing into Hux’s mind is like flipping through the glossy pages of a pretentious design magazine, all stylized images and lush, balanced color palettes.  Hux, neat and trim in his ten-thousand-dollar suit, the envy of everyone as Kylo trails in his wake; Kylo, sneering, his tattoos and general dark aracana mien radiating danger and mysterious imposition; Hux’s hand on Kylo’s arm, this is mine , I put my hand in this beast’s mouth while you cower in fear ; Hux basking in the sidelong glances of his peers, these incompetent children who think him prudish and stiff reeling as they speculate about his sex life.

For all that they’re exhausting, Hux’s thoughts can be quite beautiful.

Beneath it all there is his lush, pleased assessment of Kylo – of the warm scent of his hair, the pleasing weight his Earth alignment exerts on the endless flight of Hux’s thoughts, of the proportions of his body and the power etched into his skin, the childish glee that he’s fucking someone his father would absolutely detest.  It’s this mutually appealing thought that drives Kylo to kiss him.

“So I’m your … arm candy?”

Kylo’s grinning so hard his face hurts.  For all his bitchy primness, Hux can be delightfully absurd.  Hux is the decorative one in their guesthood or whatever elision Hux will grant him.  Hux is stunningly, preternaturally beautiful, a boy Kylo would have tripped over in high school.  People fuck Kylo for the only reason anyone’s ever cared about him – his power. They don’t drag him to parties to impress millionaires and bolster their leadership rating or whatever insane thing Hux seems to expect.

“Arm candy, I like that.”  Hux smiles against him, radiating a feline pleasure so tangible it makes Kylo want to purr.

Kylo spends most of their cab ride pawing at Hux, mostly because it’s fun to watch him frown and act like he doesn’t like it.

Phasma’s party takes up the entirety of a pretentious speakeasy hidden behind an “old” hair salon.  Kylo knows for a fact that the front of the club was constructed from whole cloth by a developer just like the sleek chinoiserie bar humming behind the stylishly decrepit walls.  This place was a nondescript print shop until the mid-90s. His “Aunt” Amilyn lives a few blocks away. He’s been dragged past this very spot more times than he can remember.

He follows Hux through the narrow doorway and into a packed, soaring space.  Kylo is decidedly the minority element in here. Like most fancy-as-fuck places, the atmosphere bristles with Fire and Air, combative and snobbish and endlessly bored as they chase the next Thing.  Kylo mumbles a small veil spell to spare his mind from the egos alone.

Hux orders himself something white and expensive, and rolls his eyes at Kylo’s request for beer, whatever’s dark.  Hux navigates the room like a Nature documentary, his eyes alight as he assesses every person he sees. One of the downsides of fucking around in Hux’s mind regularly is the diminished efficiency of his veiling ability.  Hux thinks loud to start with, fucking Air, and he’s practically screaming as he smiles tightly at “Woodrow Aisles, CEO, Magica Concave, Fire, has a weird foot thing,” shakes hands with “Regina Chen, pharma venture capital, Fire, water flu scandal,” cheek-kisses “Miles Bernstein, developer, AquaCarta, Air, cokehead, need him on board for the Karachi deal.”

Kylo barely knows what half of those things mean.  He’s always had money, he’s a fucking Skywalker after all, but it’s never held much appeal for him.  As long as he can buy weed, he’s good.

“That’s Billie Oliphant over there,” Hux whispers over his drink, seething with a strange mixture of distaste and unbridled envy that Phasma had scored this person at her party.

“I have no idea who the fuck that is,” Kylo whispers back, trying and failing to keep his expression serious.

Hux scoffs at him.  “He wrote the code for every inter-alignment data spell you’ve ever used.  He was on the cover of Elemental Time twice last year.

Kylo shrugs.  “Don’t read it.”

“Of course you don’t.”

Beneath Hux’s surface eyeroll, he’s pleased at Kylo’s bristling, arm-folded disdain for everyone around him.  He doesn’t belong here, and there lies Hux’s subtle pride – he can master not only his own milieu, but also dip his toe into a seedy underbelly that these overdressed, pompous fucks fetishize and commercialize but ultimately fear.  Again, he’s subsumed with the tableau of Hux’s emotions, of Kylo-the-wolf with Hux-the-maiden’s hand tendered between dripping fangs, yes, he’s a beast and he’s soft for me and me alone .

Kylo puts his hand on the small of Hux’s back and follows him to the birthday girl.

Objectively, Phasma is terrifying.  She towers over Kylo and every lesser mortal in this over-styled hellhole.  She’s taller than Kylo in her bare feet and tall enough to box with the Mother herself in those boots.  Kylo entertains the brief, mad thought that Hux would look fantastic in them. Her pantsuit has a black tuxedo lapel and sharp, tailored shoulders.  It’s the sort of fabric Hux surely knows the name for, but which Kylo can only describe as “pretty wavy silky stuff.” Platinum hair is cropped close to her head and her eyeliner could stab a man.  She’s the kind of woman his sister would hate-fuck after a three-hour debate about the inevitable collapse of capitalism.

Kylo likes her.

“Phasma.”

“Hux.”

They kiss on both cheeks, Hux no less graceful for having to take to his toes to accomplish this.

“This is my friend, Kylo Ren.”

Only Hux can say “friend” like he’s disdainfully sucking a dick and gnawing on the bones of his enemies all at once. 

“Happy birthday.”

Kylo shakes her hand and meets her shocking blue eyes.  He lets out just enough of his magic for her to feel it when she closes her hand around his.  She gives it back just as good, tingling his skin with a wave of authoritative Fire. 

What a remarkable woman.  Kylo smiles and puts his arm over Hux’s shoulder.

“Great party,” he lies, trying not to laugh at the droll wave of Hux’s amusement.

“Thank you,” Phasma says, no less sharp for the polite smile on her face.

“Have you met Wolfgang? Wolfie!”  She nods her chin at a man to their left, beckoning him over with a warm smile.

“Blow Bar is Wolfie’s newest venue.”

Kylo has to actively stop his eyes from rolling when he’s reminded of that stupid fucking name.  Wolfgang himself doesn’t make it any easier.

“Phas, darling, happy birthday.  And who is this?” Wolfgang looks over his tortoiseshell glasses at Hux without giving Kylo a second glance.  He’s like some hellish, funhouse mirror version of Kylo – tall and muscular, with thick, dark hair and honeyed eyes, although that’s where the similarities end.  This guy couldn’t be more fucking Air, from the over-gelled ruck of his hair to the spotless shine on his shoes. His pants are ostentatiously tight and his shirt is unbuttoned almost as low as Kylo’s arm-candy t-shirt.  He looks Hux up and down, and Kylo wouldn’t need an ounce of telepathy to know that he’s vividly, gymnastically imagining bending Hux over the nearest flat surface.

Kylo could rip his head off and fuck the wound.

“This is Hux, Wolfie.  He’s my competition at work.”

There’s a cold chuckle at that.

“I’ve been meaning to introduce you.”  Phasma’s smile could sear the paint job off his Mustang.

“Charmed. Phas and I go way back, old family friends, Aspen, you know how it is,” Wolfie says, his eyes lingering on Hux’s mouth for far longer than necessary as he accepts Hux’s graceful handshake.  Kylo, 6’3” and covered in tattoos, may as well be invisible.

Phasma excuses herself to go mingle and Kylo drains the last of his beer.

“Paul Smith?” Wolfie asks, sliding the manicured tip of his index finger over Hux’s severe shoulder.

“Thomas Fong, bespoke,” Hux mildly sneers, to Wolfie’s obvious delight.

Kylo crosses his arms over his chest.  He doesn’t know who either of those people are, although this is clearly some kind of Air bitch mating ritual.  Kylo needs more beer.

“Of course, how foolish of me.”  Wolfie steps in closer to Hux. “It would look even better on the floor of my office.”

“Would it, now?”  Hux’s face is unreadable as he looks up at Wolfie.  He’s a cocktail of emotion – amusement, delight, vicious glee, bristling contempt.  He feels all of these things for Kylo regularly. Hux can flirt with whoever the fuck he wants but this is getting tiresome.

“Wolfgang, this is my date, Kylo.”

There’s something about the way Hux lets the L in his name linger on the back of his teeth.  For all that Hux is as beautiful as a statue and an abject whore in Kylo’s bed, he can be seethingly dangerous.  Kylo’s skin prickles at the battering-ram of Hux’s broadcast thought.

Let’s have some fun.

“I do hope you’re enjoying my place.”

Forced to acknowledge Kylo, Wolfgang smiles coldly and doesn’t offer Kylo his hand. A vein of influence magic niggles at Kylo’s skull, taking his social temperature and clearly finding nothing to his liking.  His smile falters.

“Love what you did with the front of the place.  I’m sure your office is just as nice,” Kylo says, letting some of his own carnal power crackle off him until Wolfie looks away.  Hux has been home for weeks and Kylo is well and truly laden with dark arcana. The kyber bars in his cock hum softly.

“Tell me, Wolfie.”  Hux angles himself so his back is pressed to Kylo but his attention burns snake-like on Wolfie.  “What would I have to give you to get you to suck Kylo’s dick?"

Hux’s eyes gleam in the low light.  Hux had begged for a load to his face with tears in his eyes last night, but it still thrills Kylo to hear him talk like this in the rarefied air of his own peers.

“Excuse me?”  Wolife looks back and forth between them, his surprise as genuine as Kylo’s.

“It’s just that I like to watch.  You know how it is, Wolfie, we Airs are such visual creatures.”

Hux leans in, all secret confidence and sidelong glances at the partygoers packed around them.

“What if I sucked you off afterwards, hm? Or—”  Hux straightens his right arm to ruck up his sleeve.

“What if I gave you my watch?”  Hux unclips it from his wrist, his fingers as dexterous and beautiful as they are when they’re in Kylo’s hair or scratching into his back.

“I dare you,” Hux drawls, dangling his watch like it’s one of Millie’s toys.

Waves of disgust and piqued interest roll off Wolfgang in an alternating current that makes Kylo want to hit him in the mouth.  He thinks he’s too good to suck Hux’s dick, let alone Kylo’s. He’s also not used to being so brazenly propositioned. Hux’s watch flashes and Wolife throws off so much sheer, ribald greed that Kylo’s fingers itch to start pocketing shiny things.

There’s a number fixed so clearly in Wolfgang’s mind that Kylo can hear it with no effort.  If that’s truly how much money Hux spent on a watch, both and he and Wolfgang are doing a splendid job living up to their Elemental stereotype of being materialistic whores.  Hux owns dozens of the damn things.

Kylo arches an eyebrow and stretches up to his full height as Wolfgang assess him again, making sure to throw off a good vein of Earthen, rutting menace.  As though Hux isn’t the one this idiot should really fear.

“I get the watch and I get to use that gorgeous mouth of yours when I’m done? Kinky,” Wolfgang says, some of his swagger returning as he stares at Hux’s smirk.  Kylo doesn’t have to try very hard to summon his Earthen jealousy. The things Kylo has done to that mouth would give Wolfgang an aneurysm.

“Bathroom.  Ten minutes.”

Hux snatches back his watch as Wolfgang reaches for it.  Wolfgang’s mouth hangs open as he watches Hux lead Kylo away.  Hux’s arm is firmly around his waist, earning them a trail of glances as they clear a path across the bar.  Kylo’s used to people being afraid of him, but the terror some of them exude at him and Hux together is novel and strangely thrilling.

He kisses Hux the second they’re alone.  “How did you know he’d go for that?”

“Wolfgang Cruz is one failed club away from bankruptcy.”

“And you just knew that?”

“I know everything I need to know about anyone worth knowing.  Not all of us need to read minds, Kylo.”

Hux’s mind spills before him like an open book, the gloriously disgusting things he’s vividly picturing such a contrast with the way he unbuttons his jacket and folds it lengthwise before setting it over one of the overstuffed chaise lounges.  Kylo’s never fucked in a place that has furniture in the bathroom.

“You don’t really expect me to let him suck my dick, do you?”

“Of course not.”  There are more varieties of sneer that Hux can conjure onto his eloquent face than Kylo could ever name.  This particular sneer gets Kylo’s dick kind of hard. “I want him to see what he’ll never have."

Hux breaks into such a biddable thing in Kylo’s hands, but he’s pushy now, bunching his hands in Kylo’s shirt and walking him back against the damask-papered wall.  He tucks the heavy weight of his watch into Kylo’s back pocket before he grinds his palm against Kylo’s quickly-fattening dick.

Kylo opens his mouth to the ice storm of Hux’s kisses, insistent and raw as he bites at Kylo’s lip.  He jacks Kylo’s dick through his jeans and scratches one nail over the martial sigil double-carved beneath his left collarbone.  With nothing but his own perception and keen gift for manipulation, Hux has his fucking number. Kylo arches into his hand, ready-to-fuck hard in less time than it takes for the horrible pop song playing over the speakers to hit the bridge.

In the corner of the Blow Bar bathroom, beneath a hideously ornate chandelier and positioned so anyone wandering in could see, Hux sinks to his knees and pulls Kylo’s jeans open.

Somewhere between pulling out the ready-drip of Kylo’s cock and sliding his tongue along the kyber bars burning underneath it, a thought crystallizes in Hux’s mind and sinks into Kylo like a fist to his mouth.

No one gets to use me but you.

Kylo’s chest trips when the impossible, snarling ginger cunt between his legs grabs his balls hard enough to make him bark.

“Fuck my mouth, Kylo.”

Yes, fuck.  Kylo’s fat fingers sink into the crisp order of Hux’s hair and push, not stopping until Hux makes a guttural noise and he can’t see anything when he looks down but Hux’s glassy, Air-strung eyes.

“Made- Mother of God, you were fucking made for me, Hux.”

He sinks his cock into Hux’s willing mouth and looses a fat, greedy curl of his magic into Hux’s mind with just as much force.  Hux is hard in his second-skin pants, hard and gleefully afraid that he’ll be seen like this – whorish, hungry for Kylo, easily swallowing the fat length of Kylo’s filthy cock.  Somewhere deep and throbbing inside him, Hux is charmed, thrilled that Kylo will treat him so roughly without a moment’s hesitation, that Kylo deems him capable of withstanding such abuse without question.  While others underestimate his strength, Kylo delights in it; where other men have stared into the abyss of Hux’s desires and found him lacking, Kylo only wants to dive in head-first and pull him deeper.

Even when he’s getting throat-fucked in a bathroom, Hux’s thoughts are elegant things.  Kylo retreats back to the animal growl of his own mind and bares his teeth to the wet, glorious squick of Hux getting skullfucked. 

“What the fuck?”

Kylo blinks back from the closed circuit of Hux’s mouth on him and fights the urge to slam this interloper up against a wall.  Oh right, this asshole.

Far from bashful, Hux pulls halfway back and lets out a hungry, raw groan that makes Kylo’s dick throb.

“Think we’re good, Wolfie,” Kylo growls, taking a page from Hux’s book and sneering as he forces Hux all the way down on his dick.  With both hands in Hux’s hair, he pulls a focused thread of his magic to pluck Hux’s watch from his pocket and dangle it in the air.

“He says you can keep the watch.”

Kylo flings it at him, reveling in the familiar flash of fear that bursts over Wolfgang, the old vague feeling that Kylo is something monstrous, something to back away from slowly.

Kylo’s been blocking that shit out since he was a child.  Somehow it’s easier with the wet, rhythmic choking of Hux on his cock.  He doesn’t watch Wolfgang leave but he smiles when he hears the door close.

“You fucking bitch,” Kylo sighs, fondly.  The roll of Hux’s eyes is pleased — with himself, with Kylo, with the entire situation.  This cruel humiliation tickles him. Kylo grabs a hank of his hair until his eyes roll all the way back.  Beautiful, he’s fucking beautiful and vicious and only Kylo gets to use him like this.

He pulls Hux off, trailing a line of spit that Kylo could write poetry about.  Wet-eyed and wet-mouthed, Hux gasps, raspy and ready for more. If the song of Hux’s thoughts has a chorus, that’s it, more more more , as insatiable as Kylo is infinitely brutal.

Kylo slaps him across the face and almost comes right there.

The red, animal wave of lust that rebounds back to him lands Kylo’s head against the wall with a dull thud.  He plants one hand on the back of Hux’s skull and grabs his chin with the other, holding Hux writhingly still as he fucks into his mouth.  Kylo works his jaw in empathetic strain, the sting of his hand throbbing across Hux’s face and flitting into Kylo’s mind in starbursts of pleasure.

Hux swallows everything.

“Why aren’t you afraid of me, Hux?”

Stupid.  It’s a stupid fucking thing to say, but Kylo is stupidly sated and star-eyed as he kisses the taste of himself out of Hux’s mouth.  He closes his hand over the back of Hux’s neck, possessive, dangerous, threatening, all the things that have given his partners and his own fucking family pause.  Hux is just plain old horny for him, tinged with something so foreign from the stylized snarl of Hux’s mind it takes Kylo a moment to recognize it. 

Sympathy.

“I’ve only truly feared one person in my life.”  Hux leans into his hand, gorgeous as he raises his lip.  “And he’s dead.”

Hux sucks at the fingers Kylo presses into his mouth, his tongue hot as he gets them wet with no urging.  There are words tripping at the tip of Kylo’s tongue, magic more dangerous than the kyber singing in his body and the hot press of Hux’s cock against him.

Hux opens his pants, mumbles “Yes, yes,” as though he can read Kylo’s thoughts for once.  There are things Kylo could say but his mouth is better suited for silence in these things.

He tucks Hux’s cock into his mouth and two spit-wet fingers into Hux’s ass.  How Hux is so tight after the endless attention Kylo had paid to him is a mystery for the Mother.  Hux grinds against him, fucking himself down onto Kylo’s hand just to thrust up into his mouth. Even Hux’s dick is perfect, neatly cut and thick in all the right places, just like Hux.  Kylo hollows his cheeks as Hux pets a hand through his hair.

“Kylo,” is the only warning he gets before Hux comes, but it’s long enough to mumble the quickest, crudest spell he can manage.  Hux barks out a curse as power flows into the little rune Kylo had carved into Hux’s foot. Selfishly, Kylo keeps some for himself, swallowing every drop of Hux and willing what’s left into the protection sigils sliced into his chest.  Heartsguards, the old arcana texts call them.

“Shh, you’ll get used to it,” Kylo kisses into Hux’s neck, pleased with the rough sound of his own voice and the way Hux slumps against him.  Healing isn’t one of Kylo’s strongest abilities, but something about Hux makes Kylo want to carry him to bed and kiss things better.

“I didn’t know it was going to sting so much,” Hux grouses.

“Let it pass.”

He presses his forehead to Hux’s and looks down at what is surely Hux’s best look – undone.  His cock lies soft and pretty over the broad waistband of his underwear, the bloomed pink of it a match for the flush on his face.  Kylo breathes him in, savoring the seconds before Hux starts to tuck himself back in.

Because he can, because Hux is the precise kind of sloe-eyed open that pries at the darkest parts of Kylo, he looks Hux in the eyes and sucks his freshly-fucked fingers into his mouth.  Nasty. That word is icy, crystal-clear in Hux’s mind, that Kylo does nasty things.  It’s a childish, puritanical word, heavy with the Presbyterian shadow of Hux’s father.  Just as a word is comprised of letters and more than the sum of its parts, the concept that seeps out of Hux’s mind is a string of associations – the icy, ever-present imposition of the Hux paterfamilias, a man Kylo has vividly imagined murdering before, during, and after sex with Hux, such is the poisonous strength of his presence; nasty , that this is something men shouldn’t be, something Hux fears he is as a wan teenager discovering the pleasure in his dirtiest places, nasty boy, a thread deep inside of Hux that no one has tugged at the way Kylo can.

Kylo licks between his fingers, obscene, hungry for all the parts of Hux that hide from the light.

“Please tell me I can take you back to my place and fuck you now.”

Hux smiles, loose, even as he peels back from the wall and tucks himself back into his pants.  “As long as I can make my flight in the morning.”

Hux dips out from under Kylo to grab his jacket.  He slips it on and holds out his right wrist. “I seem to be out a watch.”

Hux preening before a mirror is usually a sight that fills Kylo with feral, ruinous delight, but right now there’s nothing but an ache that swells up from his spent cock and cuts a lump into his throat.

Hux washes his hands while Kylo finally stuffs his junk back into his jeans.  Hux frowns, running a hand through his hair and batting down an errant cowlick.  His mother used to make the same face when she teased her hair before a big rally.

“You know, I still haven’t seen one of those cockfights you mentioned.”

Mother, that had been months ago.  There are threads in Kylo, too, things that unspool when Hux looks up at him.

Hux’s voice is soft.  “If you wanted to come, you could show me.”

Kylo licks his lips, too close to saying too much stupid shit.

“Unless you’re busy, of course, I understand—”

“Yes-- I mean, no, I’m not busy.”  Kylo smiles. It’s insane, going halfway around the world for a week of bloodsport and sex magic while Hux undoes entire nations with the stroke of a spell.

“Excellent.  I’ll have Lysa add you to the itinerary.  I assume you have a passport?” Hux buttons his jacket and draws up to his full height, regal for all that his thoughts are steeped in the muck and mire of his needs. “We can pick it up at your place in the morning.”

“In the morning? Where are—”

“I thought perhaps we could sleep at my place tonight.”

Of all the things Hux has ripped out of himself and offered up to Kylo in his own soiled hands, the simple promise of his own bed is what pulls Kylo up from the roots as Hux wraps his arms around Kylo’s neck.  His epiphyte. 

“Take me home, Kylo.”