Chapter Text
“Phas, I told you—I’m not going!”
The books in Armitage Hux’s arms threaten to go sideways, and he does a strange little shuffle before managing to tip them onto the ‘be gay, do crime’ display in a semi-respectable pile. It’s at least the sixth time he’s repeated himself, and he winces when he realizes exactly how whiny he’s beginning to sound. He busies himself with the display, switching the places of one title with another until the covers don’t clash—definitely not at all because he’s avoiding making eye contact with Phasma.
She’s at the cash register in the corner, and her platinum hair reflects the light from the overhead lamp when she turns to fix a glare on Hux, who pretends not to notice. Phasma bumps the cash register drawer closed with her hip and crouches to fiddle with something under the counter, but her voice carries anyway.
“Don’t be such a pussy, Hux. Besides, you told me you’d come and I refuse to let you lie to me.”
Hux sifts through a box of rainbow-colored pins and glowers at her. Phasma isn’t wrong—he had promised her that he’d go with her, but that was Monday Hux—a Hux who was coming off a relaxing weekend of not-a-damn-thing and who still had hopes and dreams for the week. But today, he’s Friday Hux. And all Friday Hux wants is a sheet mask, a glass (bottle) of crisp white wine, and to not speak to anyone besides his cat for at least twenty-four hours.
The pins make a pleasing clink-clink-clink sound as he lets them fall from his fingers back into the box before he forces his spine into military straightness and turns on his heel to face Phasma. She’s closer than he expects, and Hux quickly schools his face into something that he hopes doesn’t look as startled as he feels.
“I don’t want to watch grown men prance around in dresses while they lip sync to songs from old racist musicals,” he sneers, trying to sound confident. Phasma reaches around him and stacks the books he dropped in some semblance of order, making sure the spines and edges line up perfectly as she does. She’s letting him stew, and he knows it. Phasma is a master at the silent treatment in any and all situations, and since she’s the sort of person who’s comfortable in uncomfortable moments, she’ll just wait for you to wilt under the pressure and give in to whatever she wants.
But he won’t fall for it—because, truly, Hux cannot think of a worse fate than watching a man with a name like Pussy Deluxxxe perform a routine to Hello, Dolly with a bright red feather boa around their shoulders. He’s resolved to stay silent, to keep his chin tilted up so it reads just this side of imperious, and he won’t even make eye contact—
“Is that—Oh, sweetie, no. You sweet, innocent baby! ” Phasma’s voice cuts through Hux’s hard-fought confidence and she fucking laughs at him. Her palm slaps against the hardback cover of 365 Gays of the Year, and she hoots and wheezes until tears gather in the corners of her eyes.
Hux barely restrains himself from tapping his foot and pointedly looking at his watch, but settles for crossing his arms over his chest and glaring down his nose at Phasma. “Are you quite finished, or shall I pull up a chair?”
“You really are obtuse, Armitage—”
“Don’t call me that,” Hux snaps, more riled up over the use of his first name than Phasma laughing at his assumption of what drag is.
Phasma’s voice softens, and she cuts off her laughter when she sees him bristle in front of her. “It’s just that—you need to get out more. Meet people who aren’t paid to hang around you all day, you know?”
Annoyingly, he does know. His social life is a circle that’s drawn so tightly it doesn’t have room for anyone outside of his co-workers, and for the most part, Hux likes it that way. He’s never been one for crowds or large social groups, and prefers to keep his own secrets rather than to let more than one or two people into his confidence. Just another lovely little personality quirk he can lay at the feet of his father, may hell consume the bastard in its fiery depths.
“Phasma, I really don’t think—”
“I refuse to let you wallow alone for another weekend. I’m letting you out an hour early—go home, change your clothes, adjust your fucking attitude, and I’ll swing by to pick you up.”
“But—”
Phasma is—once again—closer than he thought, and Hux’s words die on his tongue as her nails dig into his bicep like neon orange knives. She propels him towards the door before he can argue, and he can’t even dig in his heels before he’s outside the shop, staring through the glass door and listening to the welcome bell tinkle merrily from the inside.
“You utter cow—this is workplace abuse!” With his hands cupped around his mouth, Hux’s voice carries more than he expects, and a couple holding hands crosses the street to avoid him, casting worried looks over their shoulders as they quickly walk away.
Phasma gives him two middle fingers and laughs when Hux jiggles the handle to the shop.
“You’re technically still open, you know!” He shouts again, but Phasma grins manically at him through the window and mimes an explicit-looking striptease, much to the delight of the group of teenage ne’er-do-wells that scatter as Hux growls and stomps around the corner towards his apartment.
$$$$
The comforting silence of his home is broken when Phasma knocks and leans on the doorbell in a strange sort of duet. Hux is pretty sure she’s trying to do “shave and a haircut”, but she rushed the two bits portion so much that it's just a cacophony of noise that has him practically running to the door to make it stop.
When he opens the door, Hux has to take a second to fully take in the scene on his doormat. Phasma spent her time between work and his apartment wisely, and she looks…incredible, despite all of Hux’s misgivings. She’d teased her hair into some sort of faux mohawk, and between the tower of hair and her silver platform boots, she’s got at least a foot of height on Hux, and he has to look up-up-up if he wants to speak to her.
But before he could get a word out, Phasma uses her height to her advantage and barrels past him and into his apartment, dropping a bag that appears to be made solely from soda tabs and sequins the size of quarters onto the floor. She spins with a flourish, and with her hip cocked out to best display the skintight leather leggings she wears, Phasma looks Hux up and down with an inscrutable look on her face.
She doesn’t speak, just catalogues every single inch of him, and Hux takes the opportunity to do the same. He’s suddenly acquainted with far more of her body than he’s frankly comfortable with: her thong is visible, pulled high to rest on her hips above the waistband of her leggings, and when she turned, he caught sight of a rhinestone cherry that connected the strings, before the bright red elastic disappeared into her pants.
Phasma’s breasts are…mostly covered, thanks to a top that’s been cut and slashed so intricately that it could be swapped with one of Hux’s net produce bags that he bought at the farmers market. He’s pretty sure that it's being held in place with tape and a prayer to a benevolent god, because when she spun in a circle, not a single nip had been slipped.
Before Hux can drum up an adequate comment (her outfit? No, her hair. No, the shoes?), Phasma looks him up and down and says quite possibly the rudest thing Hux has ever heard.
“Is that what you’re wearing? To the club? With me?”
All of Hux’s kind thoughts towards Phasma dry up in an instant, and he can feel his face fold in on itself in a sneer. It’s not enough to shut Phas up, because she ignores him and purses her lips to croon down at him in a baby voice, “You poor little baby gay!”
If he were being honest with himself (and Hux does generally think of himself as an honest sort of man), he’d admit that he’s barely scraped the surface of his sexuality personally, and Phasma is the only one who knows—or at least, the only one that knows and matters, really. His father knows, and confirmation of that aspect of Hux’s life was the straw that broke the camel’s back, severing any hope of a relationship the two of them could have had with a jagged-edged knife. Hux hadn’t been careful with his PornHub use one time, and it was enough for his father to disown him and leave Hux stranded the summer after high school.
It was a small miracle that he’d already gotten into university, so it was just a matter of finding a place to live for the few summer months until he could move into the dormitories on campus. A scholarship and a small trust fund from his mother’s people had lasted him through university and beyond, thanks in large part to his frugal nature and his stubborn refusal to ask his dear old dad for anything whatsoever.
Sometime during those endless-seeming years of studying and ignoring his roommate and a vague sense of perpetual dread (that may have actually just been hunger, in hindsight), Hux met Phasma at the very bookshop in which he is still employed.
Tall, elegant, vicious, hard Phasma, who’d taken one look at him in his sweater vest and pressed khakis and stepped around the cash register to steer him to a quiet spot in the back of the store for their scheduled interview. She’d spotted him right away, she told him later: a pink-faced man barely clinging on to any sense of propriety as he’d strode into the bookshop she owned, without noticing at first that it was a Very Queer Bookshop. Each carefully curated display had books and corresponding thematic elements ranging from sex toys to travel coffee mugs, and it only took Hux 15 seconds before he came face-to-face with an anatomically correct clitoris plushie for him to lose all of his talking points and completely bomb the interview.
Still, she’d yanked him close and brought him a cup of tea, laughing the whole time—and that was that. Seven years on and Phasma was still torturing him, if the look on her face and her raucous laughter were any indication.
“Hux,” she manages to get out between wheezing gasps of air, “You’ve got to change. Please. Think of my reputation if nothing else!” Collapsing against the wall and jostling a framed black and white photograph of a mountain lake, Phasma wipes tears from her eyes.
“Overdramatic, much?” Hux glares, imagining daggers or swords or battleaxes shooting out of his eyes to adjust Phasma’s attitude while he straightens his polo shirt with all the aplomb he can muster.
“You can’t—CAN NOT, Hux, are you listening to me?—wear a polo shirt tucked into your jeans to a club.”
The fact that Phasma wants him to change so badly makes Hux definitely not want to, and despite her trying to herd him back to his bedroom, he ducks under her spiraling arms and makes it into the hallway, snagging his wallet and keys on the way.
“If you want me to come so badly, this is what you’re going to get,” he announces haughtily over his shoulder as Phasma gathers up her bag and slams the door behind her. She overtakes him in a few strides and, grumbling the whole way, leads him down the hall and out onto the dark city streets.
They don’t even make it halfway down the block before Phasma’s fingers are in his hair, ruffling the strands and loosening the gel that Hux had meticulously combed through that morning.
“Oi!” He shouts, but it’s too late: she’s off like a shot, cackling as her curb-stomping boots slam against the pavement while Hux stops in front of a shop window to inspect his reflection for damage. No matter what he does, his hair still swoops over his forehead, and Hux is halfway tempted to bang his head against the cool glass of the window.
He looks slightly ethereal in the streetlight—or at least softer than normal and less severe—but it's like looking at someone he doesn’t recognize, and Hux hates it.
“Don’t be a cunt!” He shouts after Phasma, but she’s turned the corner and her laughter fades. Sighing, he swipes a copper strand of hair off his forehead and watches as it falls back into place. Nothing he does will keep his hair firmly in place, and he sighs again as he starts down the street, following the sound of Phasma’s gleeful giggling.
She’s waiting for him when Hux rounds the corner, and despite the fact that he stiffens his spine so abruptly that he may as well be lying flat on his back on the hardest floor known to man, all Phasma does is throw her arm around his shoulders and tug him against her body.
“I didn’t take you for a coward,” she whisper-shouts into his ear, steering him around a sign that advertises BOGO tattoos.
Hux rolls his shoulders, but Phasma sticks to him like glue (or a leech, he thinks), and he glares sideways at her.
“I’m not. Like I said earlier, I just don’t see the appeal of watching grown men mouth along to Broadway songs.”
Phasma’s steps falter, and her tone softens a little when she asks, “Hux…is that really what you think this is going to be?”
It’s the gentleness of her voice that annoys him most, like he should be handled with kid gloves or like he’s a child at sleepaway camp who misses their mommy, and he falls stubbornly silent, wracking his brain for any other examples of what a drag show could be. He’d meant to use his extra time at home to scour the internet so he’d have at least the bare minimum of an understanding, but Millicent had needed feeding and he’d gotten caught up with petting her (and then lint-rolling cat fur off of his pants), and before he was ready, Phasma was at his door.
“Is it…not that?” He tries to suppress the curl of his lip when he asks, but clearly he’s unsuccessful, because Phasma pinches his side and he yelps in surprise.
“Haven’t you seen Drag Race? RuPaul? You have to have seen Ru at some point. Or Trixie Mattel?”
“Phasma, you know as well as I do that I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You’re in for a treat, sweet, sweet Armitage! Even if you are dressed like you’re going to do someone’s math homework for them after getting shoved into your locker.” With that final barb, Phasma drops her arm and saunters ahead, leaving Hux in the dust while she sings something about ‘working’ and being on a runway, her hips swaying exaggeratedly as she executes a turn and stomps back to his side.
It truly would be so much easier to hate her if she weren’t the only person in the world who seemed willing to put up with his moods and soul-crushing self-doubt.
“Fine,” Hux grumbles, slapping Phasma’s hand away from where it had inched to his collar. He’s a split second too late, and she’s managed to flip the top button open, exposing a tiny strip of his pale throat. He hates it. He’s also too worn down to argue with her anymore, so he leaves the button undone and reminds himself to plot his revenge.
“Let's just get this over with.”
“Oh honey,” Phasma laughs and plants an overly affectionate kiss on his cheek as she steers him towards a neon-lit club entrance surrounded by loud people and louder music. “This is going to change your fucking life.”