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Hux and Kylo were doomed from the beginning to never get along. Snoke knew, after all, having pitted the two alphas against each other, knowing that biologically, they would continue fighting for dominance time and time again until one of them killed the other. All Snoke had to do was sit back and watch the show.
Where Hux donned his mask of security through his manipulation of the troopers, and his steadfast engineering and strategic skills, Kylo donned his physical mask as the leader of the Knights of Ren, and burned his identity of Ben Solo when he killed his father. But only Snoke knew what they looked like when those masks came off - arguing pups who couldn’t cede territory that they had already claimed by pissing on it. He delighted in the game, and in being the puppet master. All he had to do was pull some strings, and they would fight to the death, giving him the ultimate pawn when they were done.
He had thought he was in control, up until the moment Kylo Ren severed him in half, protecting his eternal rival from Snoke’s abuse. What had gone wrong? That was his last thought before he died.
A month earlier, although Snoke hadn’t been paying attention to it because he was trying to track down Skywalker and the Scavenger on his ship, The Finalizer had gone into disarray because Hux suddenly stopped showing up for work.
Although it was true that most of these ships could function without their commanding officer, this was only taken as fact because most of these commanding officers did more relaxing than their official duties, and the staff were regularly used to working without them, and in fact often worked better when those commanding officers weren’t on duty.
On The Finalizer, the situation was the exact opposite. Hux had spent his whole life working for the people of the Order, and he took that responsibility onto his shoulders when it came to the running of his own ship. They relied on him, looked to him for guidance, and could trust him to always come through.
So when Mitaka, Hux’s most loyal but also most needy subordinate, discovered the General feverish and passed out in his personal rooms on an innocuous morning shift, with his datapad dead and his eyes glazed, he lost his karking mind.
Hux didn’t get sick. He was infallible, untouchable, and while most of them caught diseases on-planet and the regular flu made its way through the ship once in a standard year, Hux’s germaphobic tendencies and his consistent self-medication made him nearly impervious.
Everyone on-ship was immediately notified, and systems were in overdrive as people panicked and suddenly everyone needed Hux’s help right that minute. All of medbay’s officers were dispatched to taking care of the General, but all of them were befuddled by his condition - it wasn’t any sickness that they had ever encountered on the ship before, and General Hux hadn’t gone planetside anywhere but Ilum, which multitudes of other soldiers had been on without getting sick.
This led to the conclusion by the medical professionals and Hux’s underlings that someone had poisoned him, and The Finalizer went into further disarray as the people raged over someone trying to hurt their General, and made a hit list of people they suspected. At the top were both General Pryde, who had been visiting Starkiller with Hux recently and could have poisoned him then, or Kylo Ren, Hux’s everlasting rival and the last person to be seen with him before he got sick.
Pryde was galaxies away tending to his own ship, so there was not much the people of The Finalizer could do in terms of questioning him. Kylo Ren, however, was set to return this day. So when The Silencer came into port, Kylo Ren was not met with the normal silence he had come to expect from his trips, but from an angry mob of troopers, lieutenants, and even radar technicians, demanding to know if he had a hand in hurting General Hux.
They assumed that if they cornered him, Kylo Ren would either immediately take credit or not care. What they didn’t expect was for his mask to tilt, and out of the mask come an intimidating order - “Take me to him.”
Mitaka was loath to do this, less Kylo Ren hurt their beloved General more, but the Knight seemed adamant. “If this is a poison, I can do more for him than the medical bay. The force works in many ways,” Ren explained.
“Sir, all due respect,” Mitaka said, summoning courage and hoping Ren didn’t choke him out again, “we all thought you wanted Hux dead. Why are you helping us help him?”
There was silence for a moment as Ren stopped in the middle of the hallway. They were only a few paces out from Hux’s door, and Mitaka was ready to take out the blaster he kept under his tunic in case of emergencies.
“Hux and I have never gotten along in the past, that’s true. But I couldn’t run this ship without him, I’m not stupid enough to think I could do it on my own. If Snoke had given me The Finalizer instead of pairing me with him, everyone would have been dead within a week.”
Mitaka shivered, but the bluntness was effective. Kylo wasn’t a strategic man, but even he had to admit that without Hux, their entire operation took a massive hit, leaving room for them to be taken advantage of by the Resistance. They needed Hux healthy and alive in order to keep landing hits, and if he had to be the one to do it, he saw it as a necessary evil in order to eventually become a Sith Master like Snoke.
When Ren was led into the room, it was immediately obvious to him what was happening. It only took so long for him to process it because his brain had to mentally recategorize all of his previous interactions with Hux. Hux, who was an Omega, not an Alpha; which was obvious because he was currently in the throes of a very strong heat.
He was about to ask the medical officers how they could’ve been so stupid as to not see it, when several more obvious facts hit him: one, that Hux had been able to hide his identity from everyone, including Snoke; two, that he likely had altered all his medical documents to say he was an Alpha so there would be no reason why the medical officers would think this was a heat in the first place; and finally that Omegas were currently not allowed to hold positions of power in the First Order, an old doctrine from the Empire days that Hux had been trying to repeal for years now, which meant there was all the more reason for him to hide it. When he considered that last bit, he turned to Mitaka with an odd, foreboding feeling in his chest.
“If it hadn’t been me who did this to Hux, who was your other suspect?” he asked, despite having a sinking feeling that he already knew the answer.
“General Pryde, sir. He spoke to Hux at lengths in various private meetings while they were on Starkiller Base at Ilum, before it imploded. We thought that then was when he might’ve given Hux a poison… do you think that that could be the case?”
Damn it. His intuition was right. Pryde was a staunch supporter of the Anti-Omega doctrine, and fought with Hux viciously every time it was brought up. If he suspected Hux of hiding his designation, and had slipped him something before Starkiller fell… the timing added up.
“Has General Pryde made any attempts to communicate with The Finalizer?” Kylo interrogated.
“No, sir. Sir… should we be putting these allegations in his direction?”
“I can’t prove anything yet, but for now, have any comms he sends directed to me. If he asks, say Hux is busy dealing with orders direct from the Supreme Leader.”
“Sir,” one of the medical officers said, “do you recognize the poison? If you know what it is, we can treat it.”
Kylo could’ve lied for his own advantage, then. Kylo could’ve said he didn’t know, and left Hux to die in the worst way imaginable. Kylo could’ve taken the power structure for his own, and ruled over the Order like he had always wanted.
Kylo did none of those things.
Instead, what came out of his mouth was, “Yes, I know these symptoms. I’ve seen them before. It’s a common planetary poison, and it’s usually non-lethal, but in this case, someone’s administered so much of it that it’s affecting his major organs and will eventually move onto his brain. I’ll need to use the Force to help him through it - there’s nothing you can do for him now, it’s already started making its way through his system. But I can help. I can use the force to slowly take it out of him, until it’s in non-lethal doses. It’ll take about a standard week or two, though.”
Kylo was technically telling the truth. Heat was a non-lethal process, but when someone injected someone else with a heat drug, it could become lethal and go through the body, slowly exhausting it to death. But the medics didn’t need to know that.
“Oh, thank the stars! He’ll be ok!” Mitaka rejoiced, and the medics hugged each other, grateful tears spilling down their eyes. These displays of emotion rattled Kylo - he hadn’t realized how beloved Hux was until this very moment. A small, aching part of him knew, though. A smaller part that he hid deep, deep in the darkest part of his soul felt the same way. That admiration, worship, even love - it was natural around someone like Hux.
“I’ll need space to work. Everyone out, please.”
“Will you be required here the whole standard one to two weeks?” one of the medics asked.
“Yes. His body - er, his organs - will need constant help. His energy is all being directed to protect his brain, so I’ll be expending mine to protect the rest.”
“We’ll take care of everything in your absence,” Mitaka promised, “and thank you, Lord Ren. We wouldn’t be the same here without our General.”
With a salute, the medical officers and Mitaka left. And then it was him and Hux, alone.
Kylo took off his mask, and was immediately hit with the sweat and slick smells of heat, as well as the gentle odor of the sea mixed with one of fresh-cut greens. How typical of Hux to have such a homey, non-floral scent. How oddly sweet, for him to smell like a home they were both so far from.
He immediately rose to get loads of water - some for Hux to drink, others for him to wet towels for Hux’s burning body. The heat would get worse before it got better if Hux wanted to go through it without an Alpha. Kylo would not - would never, but this time was especially holding himself back - intrude into a vulnerable Omega’s bed without their full consent. Especially because Hux had likely had both his suppressants and birth control spiked - and Kylo wasn’t sure if the man kept knot-proof condoms.
“General,” he said, applying a wet cloth to the man’s head and giving him some water, “you’re in heat. You need to stay hydrated.”
“...Ren? No, you… you can’t be here… no one can know,” Hux whined, still somewhat conscious but obviously not fully present.
“No one knows, Hux. They couldn’t tell. Don’t worry about that right now - your secret is safe. Drink the water.”
Hux does drink - the whole bottle, at that - and when he’s done, asks (with much more clarity, thankfully), “Why didn’t you… tell them? It would’ve been the perfect… oh, fuck, I’m so hot… opportunity.”
Kylo removed Hux’s blankets. His body was heating up to promote his fertility and entice alphas, but since there would be no mating for the foreseeable future, there was no need for all the heavy and hot nesting blankets. Hux still needed them for his Omega-brain, though, so Kylo folded them behind his head, helping him sit up, and set a large, auto-cooling blanket on top of him instead.
“Oh… that feels nice,” Hux commented, and made grabby hands for more water. Kylo gave it to him, chuckling softly.
“To answer your question, I don’t think any less of you for it. I agree with you that we should let Omegas be in power here, and I admire your bravery in pushing that issue. Seems it got back to you, though, since I’m 99 percent sure Pryde spiked you with something that made your body reject your suppressants.”
“That fucker,” Hux said, a bit more coherent. “I fucking hate heats, haven’t had one since I first presented. Bet he went through Brendol’s old records and found it, then figured he could use it to both push me down and give himself and his Empire-age cronies more power.”
Hux hadn’t had a heat in… multiple years? That was very concerning. Their effects only got stronger the more they were delayed. Kylo didn’t want to press - it was Hux’s body, and therefore, his decision.
“You’re probably right, as you often are.”
Hux perked up, looking oddly smug despite the fact that he was covered in sweat and smelled like a courtesan - and a good one at that. “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you from over here,” he said, the little shit, “say that again?”
“You’re right, Hux. You’re right more often than not.”
“Am I dreaming, or did Kylo Ren finally start getting a brain in his head? Of course I’m right, as I always am.”
“Ehhh, not always.”
Hux stuck one of his legs out and kicked him.
“Fucker,” Kylo fought back with, but he couldn’t hide his smile. He had missed this. In a strange, awful way, he had missed the way that only Hux could hit his buttons and make him feel whole like this.
“So… what now?” Hux asked softly, looking strangely vulnerable.
“I fed medbay some bullshit about this being a parasite that I can help with the force, and got you two weeks of leave to spend rolling around and fucking yourself on dildos. Or eating a lot- and I mean a lot- of meat. That’s what my… someone I knew used to do.”
Instead of saying, “Oh! Thank you, Kylo, my savior! I’m forever in your debt and I love you!” like Kylo would secretly hope Hux would say; instead, the man devoted to internally being a pain in the ass cocked a brow and said in a mocking voice, “Oh, Ren, you wouldn’t understand the mysteries of the force,” and then laughed in Kylo’s face. Typical fucking Hux.
“Whatever. I didn’t have to help, you know. I could’ve let you die. If I hadn’t come back in time, you could’ve.”
Hux sobered at that.
“You think I don’t know? That’s probably what Pryde was counting on,” he whispered bitterly. “I’m a better asset to him dead than alive unless he can knot me and get a couple of slimy pups out of me.”
Kylo growled then, as if daring Pryde to try and see where he got. Hux’s face went from shut-off to shocked, and his hands gripped his bottled water harshly while his cheeks pinked.
“Are we going to talk about that?” Hux prodded. “When did you start giving a shit about me, anyway?”
“Let’s not. Not fucking now, I’ve already dealt with enough for today. But… I’ve always… knew you were nearby. And at one point that shifted from being inconvenient to being… not fucking awful. I can’t tell you when.”
What he doesn’t say is this: When there was a moment on the bridge when it was only you, me, and the stars, you looked at me and said “We’re going to rule the galaxy one day, Ren,” and then you smiled. How could I not fall? I’ve already fallen once, into the dark side. Falling in love with you was easier and more natural than that ever was.
Hux tilted his head and gave him another one of those genuine smiles, and Kylo had to duck his head to hide his burning ears. He did memorize the picture though, so he could carve a space for it later if Hux decided to hate him again after this.
“Alright,” Hux said, “I understand.”
“You do?” Kylo asked, his voice small. No one had ever understood him. That was why the whole fucking galaxy was so lonely, so awful.
With a lean, Hux took one of his hands in his. “Yes,” he simply answered, and interlaced their fingers.
He didn’t say anything after that, not even when Kylo started sobbing into his hand, and not even later on, when he joined him in bed with an excuse of “force-cooling powers”.
At some point, the innocent cuddle sessions turned more sexual, with kisses and then bites and then handjobs and then more, with Kylo memorizing every face Hux made.
Weeks later, when Snoke dared to touch what was his, to hurt the one who bore his mating scar with pride, Kylo made him pay with his life.