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There had been something affronted and furious in Armitage Hux's eyes when he left. Accusatory, as though he was holding her accountable for something she hadn't even been aware of. He'd almost delicately placed his cup on the table behind them and reached for the coat hanging tidily on the chair without breaking eye contact with her. He had tossed it over his arm and backed away from her as though afraid to turn his back before snapping about-face with military precision and striding out the door. He hadn't said another word. He hadn't said goodbye, as though the mere thought of her understanding something about him was an extremely offensive epithet in his narrow view. Rose stood by the window frozen with indignation, the warmth of the store barely reaching her. Fingers of cold sank into her skin from the rainy glass. She leaned into it, hoping it would chill away the burn of his red hair against her eyelids.
Something had just happened, something sharp and potentially lethal to the easily bruised flesh of her heart but she couldn't quite shake it out into the light to examine it. She didn't have the tools necessary to smooth the jagged edges of a man made of broken glass and metal teeth. She had missed a step she wasn't even aware she was taking and she knew without a doubt he wouldn't catch her if she fell.
She blinked, blind, and listened to the rain.
“Excuse me, do you work here?” a voice intruded on Rose's solitude and she turned, forcing her focus back on the present.
One of the most beautiful girl's Rose could remember seeing even in this vast city stood behind her, brown hair damp and curled no doubt by the rain. She wore a cozy purple sweater that hung artfully off one slender shoulder, black leggings and little yellow sneakers. She smiled, bright and white, and her beautiful brown eyes crinkled. After a moment the smile fell, concern darkening her brow.
“Are you alright?” she asked, and Rose finally registered the smooth British accent.
“Yeah,” she said, swallowing. “Do you need a hand?”
“I'm looking for some books about botany, actually,” the British girl smiled, a tad rueful, “though I'll be the first to admit its more for show than study.”
Rose returned the smile, she couldn't help it. There was something strong and pure that leapt off the page with this other girl. Rose wanted to smile with her, lean into her, let her take the lead to better things. At the very least she was glad to be forced to think of other things.
Guiding the way to their small plant section Rose gave herself a mental shake while the girl continued to chatter. Hux and his cold shoulder didn't matter, couldn't matter. She didn't even know him. He was like acid dripping hot and direct onto her tongue; he would only do her damage and it would be so much worse if she swallowed it.
“I have this idea of a shelf of plant books on display behind the counter covered with pothos and maybe a string of pearls. I've passed by this place a few times but haven't had an excuse to come in until now,” the girl said warmly.
“You own a store to?” Rose asked, impressed.
“Just starting out,” the girl said shyly. “A little garden store a couple blocks away. Its mostly just bare wood floors and plants right now but every day I get a bit closer to what I want.”
Rose grinned, pushing aside all the strange, despondent emotions Armitage Hux had left behind him.
“I've got this gorgeous book with illustrations of herbs! I've got a few, actually. Some really old ones that would look great on a bookshelf!”
She gestured to the shelf with a wide smile of her own, feeling more like herself by the second. “Do you sell cacti? I love those! I'm Rose, by the way.”
The girl grinned, dimples appearing in her cheeks.
“I'm Rey,” she said, sticking out her hand to shake.
--
He is a terror at work. He has always been known as a man with a precise and exacting temper but now he is a viciously cracking whip of orders and rebukes in all directions. He expects nothing less than perfection from his subordinates and has no qualms about letting them know that they are just that; Subordinates, lesser, weaker, inferior to him. He has scraped and bowed and connived and manipulated his way to the position he holds now with nothing but sheer cunning and determination. He is intelligent, obscenely so, and has labored behind closed doors with drying ink and copious amounts of money and underhanded machinations to slip his way to power. This is why Solo's unearned trajectory to success irks him so wildly. Ben Solo was born privileged with old money and major connections to back him. He was born with all the right cards stacked into his deck and never had to count them to turn the hand his way. Hux always has to know which cards are in play lest he lose the game entirely. His poker face is nothing less than polished perfection while Solo's clumsy, ham handed approach is more akin to slamming his head against the door while merely knocking would suffice.
But he feels as though the cards are spilling from his hands and he is not only losing the game now, he's throwing it over something he cannot even define. His temper is threadbare, frayed. His viperish tongue is so poisonous that the junior members have taken to ducking behind doors to avoid him. Not even Phasma's cool amusement at his expense or Solo's derisive concern have managed to snap him out of this foul temper. He can't concentrate. He can't focus. He finds himself staring at his paperwork one moment then he sees that little bookworm's sleek hair in the black ink of the crisp print before him. He sees her eyes in the warm brown of his morning tea. He sees her indignant spine in the narrow books that line his shelf and he hates that he's finding her everywhere because that means he's looking and he never gave himself any such consent.
He doesn't go back to the bookstore for that dishwater they call tea. That would mean be akin to losing, and he would not have it. That piqued interest, that strange, aching deja vu when he was close to her was not in his carefully laid plans. A distraction of her magnitude had no place within his cold, orderly world of numbers, bank accounts, high powered lawyers and seedy dealings behind closed doors. Like buttering a fluffy lamb and tossing it into his own cavernous, tooth filled maw; self serving, indulgent. He was not a man who could afford to indulge.
“You seem troubled, Hux,” Solo finally scoffs one day in the slow glide of the elevator, glancing briefly at his watch. “Snoke is starting to hear things. Better look sharp, you're slipping.”
“I'm perfectly fine, I assure you,” Hux replies through gritted teeth.
Armitage straightens his posture and adjusts the knot of his blue tie. Solo's is far more expensive, far better tailored despite all the money he indulges in the finer things. The mop haired, temperamental sop is always a step ahead, always a cut above him. How galling. He wants to dig at the exposed nerve he knows lays before him, knows one of this adversaries many weaknesses and exploits it mercilessly because it is in his toxic nature. Friends and enemies are separated by a very poorly defined line in his mind. Hux has seen Benjamin Solo slamming his fists into walls and kicking aside chairs after poorly done meetings, perhaps a punch to the jaw would serve duel purpose. Solo would face penalty and it may yet knock some sense into Hux himself and cease this infernal mulling.
He knows Solo is hopeless in one arena. Women have remained a distant concept to him; his aloofness and gloomy features draws them like bees to honey but he has always been too broken to even try getting stung. Some overblown whinging about absent fathers and neglectful mother's hellbent on success or some such tripe, as though Solo had cornered the market on Broken Home. Such hedonistic self-flagellation. Hux might have had more sympathy if Solo had not had the creature comforts of mansions and money at his disposal since birth. He took some smug satisfaction in feeling superior in the throes of his own upbringing of poverty and pain. His will was iron and his power was earned, however dirtily. He didn't sit around feeling sorry for himself because Mommy didn't hold him enough.
He has observed the late nights Ben has spent hunched over his desk in his stunningly modern office full of glass and artificial lighting and utter loneliness. He would consider it pathetic if it didn't so perfectly mirror his own. Armitage knows that Solo hasn't yet found the only thing he has ever wanted so helplessly, so openly, so woundingly.
But Hux has.
He made it a point to.
“I have a date, you see,” he says, pretending to check the cufflinks he knows are perfectly aligned at his wrists. “A delicious little brunette I met at that bookstore on Wall Street.”
Solo shoots him a sharp look as Hux lays his trap. “A quaint little store owner actually. She's uncommonly beautiful but a tad rough around the edges. Dimples, brown eyes, slim as a reed with a smile so bright it practically blinds. She even rides an adorable little yellow bicycle with a basket like some picturesque little street waif.”
He turns to face Ben, his face foxlike and cruel as he meets the other man's laughably wounded eyes as comprehension dawns darkly.
“Say, weren't you looking for a girl exactly like that?” he feigns surprise badly, his voice a low purr. “Whatever were the odds that I would find her first?”
He steps off the elevator as soon as the doors to his floor slide open, leaving the huge, brooding menace mute and reeling and radiating a stabbing, forlorn pain so palpable that Armitage can taste it smooth and rich on his tongue.
He feels much, much better.
--
He has no such date.
He's never even spoken to the skinny little chit that Solo is so twisted up inside about. He sent Mitaka to track down the owner of a yellow bicycle with a basket around that area of town. It wasn't particularly difficult and if Ben hadn't been so focused on projecting angst and thwarted rage onto the universe perhaps he would have scrubbed the several brain cells he supposedly had together and done so himself. She is young, bright, warm and strong from the little he has seen in his voyeuristic forays into her neighborhood. The perfect foil to Ben Solo's older, darker, colder, weak skinned heart. Honestly Armitage doesn't really see the appeal. The woman is about as alluring as a bulrush, all stick limbs and collarbones and dimpled cheeks like some vintage child ingenue. She ought to be fed more, and if Solo ever gets his massive, clumsy hands on her it would be like watching a trained circus bear protect a wiry rabbit.
On the rare occasions when he does indulge his baser instincts Hux wants to be able to sink his fingers into a woman, to luxuriate in skin and glut himself on flesh. He wants plush curvature and silk. What good were hips and thighs and breasts if you were going to whittle them away to toothpicks and bone? When he wanted a woman he wanted a release, a purging, a sinking in of softness and warmth. For just a moment his vicious, cunning brain would be silent and he would be empty of the seething riot of anger and manipulation and strategy that filled his every waking minute. Just a drop of calm in an ocean of organized chaos and calculated power. No woman he had encountered thus far was willing to take much more than his money, not that he had the time nor inclination for seeking more. Let Solo have his drama, there was work to be done.
Besides, he could admit that what he wanted was unattainable.
What Hux wanted was to be seen and known for all the cutting edges and bitter poison he was and accepted anyway.
What he wanted was a savior that he would never allow close enough to save him.
What he wanted was a warmth he did not have within himself.
What he wanted... what he wanted...
He swallows in the cold glass confines of his dark office and looks out over the glittering cityscape of Seattle.
The night sky is as black as her hair.
--
Armitage spots Rose in the crowd at Pike Place Market on a blustery Sunday despite her diminutive height, her presence screaming at him like a lighthouse hailing a ship in a storm. He towers above most of the crowd and suddenly feels naked, conspicuous. All she would have to do to see him is turn her face his way.
But she does not, she's otherwise engaged.
She's laughing, a Styrofoam cup of coffee clutched in one hand as she wraps the other around a long red scarf that's blown about by the heavy wind in an effort to catch it before it escapes. A bitterness surges through him at the sight of her pretty face unmarred by the wary frown he has always seen from her. He withdraws to the edge of the crowd near the wall, the wind whipping his hair into an intolerable disarray that he doesn't even register. He drags his eyes away from the girl to the man beside her, dark skinned and handsome as he helps wrap that red scarf back around her shoulders. She holds her hands away with the coffee still in one, open and vulnerable to this other man's gentle touch. Betrayal scorches through his veins like a forest fire, decimation left in its empty wake. He seethes, jealousy sick and sour in his stomach at the sight of the other man's face. He loathes him, this stranger, this nothing who the bookstore girl that knows him somehow, sees him in a way he cannot unravel is giggling with like a fool. How dare she brazenly cavort through the tourist clogged miasma of this filthy, hill ridden city like a tart on the arms of some... some traitor! Armitage realizes he is gritting his teeth, forces his sore jaw to unclench. He blinks, looking away as he shoves a hand through his hair and tries to smooth the red strands down. Control, order, discipline. He will have them. His hands are shaking. He stills them by making a fist and draws in a deep breath through his nose.
When he looks up again they're both gone and he stands frozen by the wall staring furiously at the empty place they'd been, a stone in the stream while the current of the crowd sweeps on around him.
--
He's not soaking wet when he bursts through the bookstore door at closing, he's far too meticulous and careful to be caught out the same way twice. He has timed it as carefully as a stalker, making sure nobody has seen him slip inside. She really ought to tighten up her security or the naïve little thing was going to get robbed of her pennies. There's nobody left in the store, just her. His plan tonight is ill conceived, irrational, pointless. He recognizes that but is borne upon a wave of jealousy and discontent too torrential to fight against. He's covered in a heavy black coat that drops to his ankles, pale hands covered in leather gloves and a sopping umbrella clutched within one fist. He drops it into the bucket she keeps beside the door just for that reason, staring at her hard.
Across the room Rose lifts her chin, defiant. Somehow she isn't surprised to see him. Somehow she knew that he was always going to break. She's wearing a soft pink sweater and a pair of jeans torn at the knees and somehow feels bare beneath his pale, furious stare.
She hasn't seen him since the day he took off without a word two weeks earlier. He strides forward and halts right in front of her, glaring down at her tiny height so hard he nearly hunches.
“You're appalling,” he hisses without preamble. “The gall of you to...”
“You're ridiculous,” she spits back. “I don't even know you and you think you can just -”
“But you do,” he interrupts. “Somehow you know me and I know you, like this, this echo of an echo in my head and despite everything inside me screaming at me to ruin you before you -”
“Ruin me? Ruin me? Are you a mob boss? Are you my maidenly reputation?” she mocks him, hands on her hips.
“I'm speaking,” he hisses, leaning so close into her space that she can smell the cinnamon and black tea on his tongue. A part of her feels mildly betrayed that he's obviously been getting his tea elsewhere. She sways forward towards his heat despite her fury, the length of him damp with rain and smelling of water and wool and expensive aftershave. “You'd do best to listen.”
“I'm done listening,” she snorts, yanking herself backwards and settling her hand on the comforting familiarity of the old books on the shelves behind her. No matter how attractive he was he always had the awful habit of opening his cruel mouth. “So you'd best leave because I don't have to stand for whatever weird, snobby British bullshit this is.”
“Rose,” he snaps. She freezes, fingertips digging into the hard cover beneath them. She hadn't even known that he knew her name. “Who was he?”
She is utterly confused. He's so close that she could press into the rainwater on his coat and soak him into herself, “Who?”
Despite his best efforts to halt the telling words spewing from his mouth they pour forth, flaying him bare before her.
“I saw you at the market, laughing like a jackal with some slack jawed ignoramus you no doubt call your boyfriend,” he spits the word out and his fingers, long and pale and so naturally elegant she wants to bite them off, wrap around her arms. “He was helping you put on your red scarf.”
She should feel furious. She should feel frightened. Some man she hardly knows is hurling vague accusations at her like a lunatic in the empty confines of her closed store. He's pressing closer into her space with his dark height and his usually perfect red hair is falling over his forehead because he's leaning over her, curling above her like a crescent moon; white and cold and just as untouchable.
Instead she feels excited, empowered. She feels as though she has just sunk her teeth into him and caught him in her jaws. She wants to bite down harder. She wants to break skin and taste blood.
“Finn,” she breathes, narrowing her eyes at him. “His name is Finn.”
There is that feeling again, that ache of familiarity, of knowing, as she looks up at his haughty face, recognizes the uneven knot of his tie and the rumpled collar of his shirt as the flashing neon warning signs they are. He is off-kilter. He is spiraling somehow and she is being swept into the fall because somehow she is the fall. Simple, content little Rose Tico leading her simple, content little life has somehow caused this enigmatic, waspish, dangerous stranger to unravel like a siren calling a sailor to sea.
She has never been this close to him before but she knows the angled bones of his cheeks, the sharp jut of his nose, the heavy line of his red brows just the same. His mirror, there's a hunger she's never felt before eating away at the hollows within her. She tilts her face upwards and feels his harsh breath across her cheek. His Adam's apple bobs as he swallows, searching her face with narrowed eyes for a long moment. He dips his head down closer, hesitates. She can almost feel the pride and anger quivering in the line of his lips and vibrating through his tensely held shoulders.
Exhausted by his internal raging war Rose reaches her small hand up to cup the back of his neck, surges onto her tip toes and yanks him down hard against her own mouth. The heat between them is instantaneous and incendiary, the thread of ill intentions snapping at the first touch of his lips to hers. He pulls her roughly against his body and sinks his fingers into her hair, feeling the cool strands slide over his skin. He shivers, groans, knowing he is hunched over her petite frame like a twisted gargoyle, knowing he has just sold whatever remnants he still had of his soul to a far gentler deity than he would have assumed, knowing that he would do it again if it meant tasting her just like this, like he had wanted to the moment he had first set foot in the store and met her dark eyes. Her hands flutter downwards, clutch his shoulders, anchoring herself to his lanky height and lean body. He moves his hands over her, taking every liberty possible like a starved man at a feast. His fingers dig into the curve of her waist, he nips the edge of her lip, traces his tongue against her own and wonders if his knees are going to buckle when she whimpers. How undignified he must seem. How hungry, as ever he is, for everything that isn't his to devour.
He releases her sharply and she gasps so sweetly he wants to swallow it, pivoting on his heel and taking several steps away so that he can regain some semblance of control. The breadth of his black clad back is so straight is almost hurts to look at. Armitage feels the pull of her behind him, the no doubt softened look in her pretty brown eyes that would make him want to take her right there on the floor of her bookstore. He sucks in a breath, furious with himself. There is a beat of pregnant silence before he reacts violently, snatching a handful of poetry books that she had been about to reshelf when he came in from the table and hurling them across the room. They thud, skid, scatter noisily. The spine of a particularly old one breaks from its brittle glue and pages flood the floor in all directions. He can see a torn leaf filled with Tennyson's florid pain flutter restlessly beside his shoe and something within him cracks helplessly.
For a moment she is stunned into inaction. She had never thought that Armitage Hux would be the type to throw a temper tantrum. Then again she barely knows him. She wipes her lips with a trembling hand, shivering pleasurably.
“His name is Finn,” he breathes softly, swallowing. Rose can hear the tremor in his edged voice.
Finn is a friend. Finn is a fantasy. Finn is as out of reach as starlight and very much in love with Poe Dameron. Finn is as warm and comfortable as hot chocolate on a winter day. Finn is friendship.
“Why does it even matter?” she asks cautiously.
“It doesn't,” he drawls flatly, lying to them both.
A page crumples beneath his foot as he turns back to face her, the lie ringing hollow between them. His eyes are wrecked, void. He isn't looking at her, he's looking through her now, and Rose knows that if he leaves like this she will never see him again. She wishes the idea didn't feel so natural. He is a path she shouldn't take. She bites her lip, weighing his intensity and vitriol against the wistful ache that bloomed through her whenever she met his eyes.
“I'll be sure to let Finn's husband know that you were interested,” she jokes weakly, glancing at the windows behind him. Her cheeks flare with heat. His cunning eyes light with understanding, sharpen with annoyance. He is suddenly unsure of her angle. Why she would allow him to think that she had a man for as long as she did.
The simple human truth is she wanted to see how far he would go.
“I am... I will pay for the books,” he says stiffly.
He is thwarted and thrown, the incomprehensible pull of this tiny woman has steered him so far off course that his internal map has been rendered useless. He does not know what step to take next.
After a long pause while his uncomfortable words register Rose giggles, the sound bright and sweet in the cool silence of the bookshelves. He shoots her a sharp look, his face pinched. He is instantly aware and offended at the idea of mockery when he feels as though he has splayed himself open before her like a fool, when he is shaking with the restraint of holding himself back from snatching her up again. She walks forward slowly, stepping heedlessly on pages as she comes back into his space. He imagines the purple prose of long dead poets marking the soles of her feet, the words exquisite, beloved, winsome, yearning, sinking into the tender skin.
My dust would hear her and beat, Had I lain for a century dead; Would start and tremble under her feet, And blossom in purple and red.
He despises himself but his arms pull her to him as soon as she is within reach. He is vine, he is rope, he is cuff. He will entrap her. He will enthrall her. He must have every inch of her or he will remain hollow for the remainder of his life in this and all things, a never ending hunger gaping wide within whatever it was he called a heart.
“Rose,” he says between grinding teeth. If he were a better man he would warn her, give her a chance to escape. But he is not a better man. His gritting of her name is all the warning she will ever have.
“Come on,” she breathes back, sliding fluidly against his chest and winding her soft arms around his neck. He thinks he has trapped her and can't see the web she's threading around him for all the softness in her eyes. "I'll make you some tea."
He swallows, nods his head jerkily, adrift. Something inside of him was lost the moment his lips met her own and when she unwinds her arms from his neck he feels as though he is tottering over the edge of a cliff with only the stream of a red scarf in a grey world to pull him back. His intentions in coming here had been to crucify her on her own behavior, to insult her and slam the door shut on whatever strange hold she had upon him. He had come here to eliminate an obstacle. Instead there was this.
"Yes, " he says quietly, "Please."
She smiles, threading her small hand with his own pale one and tugging him after her.
He allows himself to follow her into the warmth and quiet of the bookstore, scattered pages full of flowing, ardent words he will never bring himself to say rustling beneath his every step.