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When Hux wakes up he is immediately disoriented by the dim light in his bedroom; he groans and tries to roll over and hide his face in his pillows but Ren appears to be pinning his lower half to the bed with a leg. Which is really rather offensive; a single limb shouldn’t be so heavy.
“Why’re the lights on?” he mumbles, pulling at Ren’s arm so that the larger man is at least blocking the light.
Ren chuckles, “because you’ve been sleeping for 9 hours and I think you might try to stab me if I let you sleep any longer.”
Hux decides that’s a ridiculous reason to turn the lights on and tries to ignore everything around him and fall back to sleep but Ren keeps running his fingers through his product-free hair and brushing the thumb of his other hand over Hux’s eyebrows and the bridge of his nose.
After several minutes of this Hux gives further sleep up for a lost cause, “Why’re you wakin’ me up then?” he grumbles.
“I’ve been awake for a while and I’m bored.”
Hux squints a single eye at him, “you’re a menace.”
“Your eyelashes are a lot longer than I thought.” Ren tells him, “I suppose that’s because of the near transparency of them.”
“You did not wake me up to talk about my eyelashes. If you did I will actually kill you.”
Ren smirks and rubs his thumb across the bridge of Hux’s nose again, “Did you know you have more freckles than you used to?”
“What are you on about?” Hux tries to swat Ren’s hand away from his face but gives in when the knight only laughs and goes right back to it.
“Across your nose,” Ren tells him softly, “you used to have freckles so faint that they were barely noticeable. They’re a bit darker now, you have some on your forehead too; and the tips of your ears.”
“Have you been examining me?” Hux asks incredulously, “While I’ve been sleeping?”
“Yes,” Ren smiles with his eyes and presses a short kiss to Hux’s lips, “You are very handsome; add the freckles and you’re rather cute.”
Hux struggles to respond to that and based on the way Ren’s lips slowly morph from his small, timid smile into his absolutely goofy, endearing, and entirely too honest grin he thinks that his inability to process being called ‘cute’ is incredibly obvious. There was something about the way Ren’s canines sat in his mouth, in the way his eyes scrunched up and his dimples framed his lips and chin that made it hard to look at this particular smile for too long.
Hux ends up pressing his face against the other man’s bicep and squeezing his eyes shut. He tries to keep his face straight so that he can properly express his displeasure but he knows Ren can see his lips are curled at the corners.
“I’m not cute.” He mutters petulantly.
Ren snorts, “No, absolutely not. Don’t know what I was thinking.” He murmurs before sucking gently on Hux’s exposed neck.
“It’s from the sun.” Hux explains.
“Hmm?” Ren's mouth moves on to sucking at Hux’s shoulder.
“On Joji.” Hux says, shifting so that Ren could reach more of his skin. “I may have been there for work, but I spent more time in the sun than I usually do.”
Ren hums and his hand follows the curve of Hux’s spine before cupping his backside and pulling their hips flush together. Hux mouths at Ren's bicep as his cock hardens fully where he’s grinding against the knight’s hip.
“Did you have them as a kid?” Ren asks.
Hux tries to remember what they had been talking about, “what?”
“Freckles.” Ren clarifies; shifting so that he’s kneeling between Hux’s spread legs.
“I didn’t see the sun much,” Hux manages before he’s moaning at Ren's fingers entering him. He’s still stretched and rather messy from the night before so Ren doesn’t wait long before he’s pressing his cock inside.
Ren pauses with a barely audible groan when he bottoms out and lifts his head to search Hux’s eyes. He still has one hand buried in Hux’s hair and he gently rubs the pads of his fingers against Hux’s scalp. He traces Hux’s jawline with the thumb of his other hand and keeps his weight from crushing the general by supporting himself on his elbows. Even so when he presses his mouth against Hux’s lips their skin is flushed together and Hux gasps when Ren gently sucks on his bottom lip and carefully moves his hips.
Ren fucks him slowly, as though he’s afraid of breaking him despite the way he had handled Hux the night before. Hux can’t stop gasping, there was a small burning sensation in the centre of his chest and it must be spreading to his eyes because he feels like he might cry. He wants to hide his face so that Ren won’t know if he does but the knight keeps massaging his scalp and rubbing his thumb against Hux’s cheek. He keeps watching, as though he can see everything inside of Hux and he finds it absolutely fascinating.
Eventually Ren reaches between them and brings Hux to the most languid orgasm he has ever experienced. Then Ren is kissing Hux’s neck and coming with a quiet shudder inside of him.
Hux doesn’t move even when Ren pulls out, which appears to be fine. He blinks at the ceiling, tries to remember how to breathe and convinces himself that this isn’t the most terrifying thing that he has ever experienced. He doesn’t know how much time passes before he realizes that he’s probably the reason Ren hasn’t moved away; the muscles in his arms are cramping from how tightly he’s holding the man and Ren is pressing soft kisses to his neck and rubbing reassuring circles on his temples.
It takes some work but he manages to convince his arms to relax and when Ren raises his head with a cocked eyebrow Hux shrugs and forces himself to meet the Knight’s eyes.
“I think,” he croaks, coughs and tries again, “I think I need to have a shower.”
Ren sceptically searches his face but nods and rolls away. Hux makes sure to take his time stretching and getting out of bed, wiping away the majority of the mess before looking back at Ren. It wouldn’t do to look as though he’s fleeing.
“You’re not coming?” he asks
“I had one while you were asleep.”
Hux snorts but breathes a sigh of relief as he exits the room – whatever just happened was intense and burning and it didn’t hurt but it aches and he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t want to understand, not yet, it’s too much too fast but his bones are screaming for more and he had dealt with this feeling months ago, he had gone to Phasma and they had talked about it and he had compartmentalized it and it was good; he could deal with that. Nobody ever told him it could get worse, that you could care for someone and feel practically consumed with the desire to protect them and then that desire would get stronger.
Hux forces his hands steady as he turns on the shower and washes away dried sweat and drying come. He’s the General of the First Order. He wasn’t supposed to fall to his own feelings like this; order, galactic prosperity and growth, his dreams of unifying the galaxy – nothing was supposed to be more important to him than that.
He had lost track, months ago, of what precisely was driving him to keep going after Snoke’s position. The odds weren’t in his favour, not exactly. He was basing his success more on the faith that people would prefer he lead them and that Ren’s reputation would serve as a point in his favour than on any real backing. But Ren’s reputation was dwindling the longer he spent on board the Finalizer and Hux couldn’t make himself send the knight into the field to decimate whoever stood in their way when Ren wanted to do something, anything else. Ren had been nothing more than a weapon to too many people and Hux was too…he liked…Hux wanted to give the man more than that.
The part of Hux that carried him through the ranks and kept him at the top screamed at the waste; Ren was a vengeful god on the battlefield, a one-man army and he could win this war on his own if he had enough faith in himself. But this new part of Hux – it was soft, it was gentle and it was needy. He hated how much its strength scared him; he felt weak when it was overwhelming but the ache felt like something he had always needed was fitting into a hole he didn’t know he had and he refused to try pulling it out so he could be as cold as he was before. He would rather give himself to the Resistance than feel that emptiness again. Hux didn’t even know any more if he was fighting to accomplish dreams he’d had for most of his life or to give Ren a world where he didn’t feel like he was being hunted anymore.
Hux watched the shampoo suds swirl around the drain and sighed. He either needed to figure out how to deal with these overwhelming moments fast or he needed to shove it somewhere in the back of his mind so he could try to parse it later – he didn’t trust himself to deal with it in front of Ren. The last thing the knight needed was to know how incredibly terrified Hux was.