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They’ve been walking for what seems like hours and they haven’t come across a single living creature besides themselves. Rose’s body has grown stiff and cold from the wind that slaps at her uncovered cheeks, her face itches with tears that have frozen right there in the creases of her eyes; pfaff, even her hair hurts. Her hair had been damp with water—as tended to happen when one crash-landed in a giant pile of snow—and now it’s a frozen helmet atop her head.
“I’ll have you know this is your fault,” Hux mumbles at her through numb, flapping lips.
He hasn’t said but a single word to her since they abandoned their damaged landcruiser to set off for help. That had been ages ago.
“How is it my fault?” Rose snaps as she tucks her fingers under her arms.
“You tampered with the navsystem somehow,” Hux accuses. “I saw you.”
“You must have hit your head on the way down,” Rose says, lashing out to kick him in the shin. “You’re spouting nonsense.”
Hux narrows watery green eyes at her. “Do you suggest my own eyes deceive me?”
“I suggest you shove your head up your—”
Hux flicks out a hand, catching Rose by the shoulder and jerking her nearly off her feet. “Hush,” he demands, as Rose scowls and reaches up to knock his hand away. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?” she asks, wriggling out of his grasp. She strains to hear what Hux claims to be hearing, but—well, she hears nothing. Nothing but the howling of the wind and the pattering of clumps of snow atop their heads. “We’ve got more pressing issues at hand, anyway. If we don’t find some sort of shelter, we’ll die before the Resistance finds us.”
Hux sighs and runs a gloved hand down the front of his black coat, then flicks his eyes over Rose’s shivering form. “Here,” he says, sliding one of the gloves off his hand and offering it to her pinched between his thumb and forefinger.
Rose eyes the glove and then glances up at Hux’s pale, impassive face. “What do you expect me to do with one glove?” she asks, but she snatches it away anyhow.
“Better you should keep one hand warm than none,” Hux sniffs, disdainfully.
“Oh, joy. I’ll only lose one hand to frostbite and not both.” Rose slides her small hand into Hux’s glove and flexes her stiff, frozen joints. “What good is a one-handed mechanic?”
“Prostheses have come a long way,” Hux mutters.
Rose turns, shading her gloved hand over her eyes, but all she sees is blankets of white snow. “There has to be a shelter somewhere,” she murmurs, mostly to herself. “We’ll die otherwise.”
Hux begins to move his long, slender fingers down the front of his coat, undoing the shiny buttons. “Here, we can share my coat. That’ll do for now, at least,” he says, opening the coat and gesturing for Rose to huddle under it with him.
Rose scowls, but she squeezes herself against Hux’s side and he starts buttoning the coat back up as best he can. “We probably look ridiculous,” she says, when they start shuffling again, away from the wreckage of the landcruiser, toward an uncertain fate.
“I’m certain of it,” he huffs, squirming beside her.
“The things one does for the Resistance,” Rose complains.
“I’m beginning to regret my life choices,” Hux says. “I could have been the Supreme Leader or even the new Emperor, sitting atop a cushy throne, surrounded by subordinates. And very warm and toasty.”
Rose scoffs lightly. “I think you made the right choice in defecting,” she says, burrowing even more into his side. “Now you have a somewhat clean—well, somewhat less sullied conscience.”
“And that somewhat less sullied conscience is going to freeze to death beside an overly talkative one-handed mechanic,” Hux snarks, his breath puffing against her ear.
Rose shivers—from the cold, she’s sure. “Imagine the stories they’ll tell about us, though.”
“I think I’d prefer not to die,” he says. “At least, if we had to die together, why couldn’t it have been on a resort planet or at a tourist destination?”
Rose frowns. She can barely feel it on her face. “Like Canto Bight, you mean?” she asks.
“I wouldn’t have minded a spy mission to Canto Bight,” Hux sighs wistfully.
“Of course you wouldn’t,” Rose sneers.
Hux kicks at her ankle. “No, no, you’re perfectly correct, Miss High and Mighty. We might have nothing but the promise of a miserable death ahead of us, but as long as we can claim the moral high ground…”
Rose jams her elbow into his bony ribs. “I’m not high and mighty,” she insists.
“Hmm,” Hux says.
“I’m not,” she insists. “But that place was horrible and I felt unclean just spending even a few minutes inside its casinos. Out here, I feel… like I’m doing good. Or at least, I did until we crash-landed in that snow drift.”
“You feel better being in my presence than you did in Canto Bight?” Hux asks, with a wry laugh. “I’m the living expression of Canto Bight.”
Rose glances up at him, nearly stumbling over her feet in the process. He grips her firmly by the waist to steady her.
“You—you’re trying to change,” she says, allowing him to keep hold of her. “You defected. Would any of those stuffed shirts and death-dealers give up their ill-gotten gains to do what’s right?”
“I didn’t defect out of a sense of… righting wrongs, or doing the right thing,” Hux says. His hands sit cold and heavy above her hips. “I did it all in the name of self-preservation. I could see my future, and saw that my life ended in front of a firing squad, or in a tiny cell.”
Rose can’t help the tiny burr of dissatisfaction that crawls under her skin, but she’d known this already. She’d been well aware of his motivations, and their less-than-altruistic nature. Maybe she’d been hoping he’d joined them because he believed in their mission now, that his heart hat been turned.
“You’re disappointed,” he says, slipping his hands away from her, finally.
“Enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that,” Rose says, forcing a smile onto her face.
“I’m afraid I don’t really believe in much of anything,” Hux says, as he slips an arm around Rose’s waist and urges her forward, kicking at her feet to start walking again. “I believed in the Order, I gave myself over to it, and the mission, completely. It gave me control over my life I’d never had before, but that’s gone now. Now, I have nothing.”
Rose isn’t sure what to say to that so she keeps silent.
They walk together for a very long time, huddled together under Hux’s coat. Rose isn’t sure how much time has passed when she finally catches a glimpse of a shelter, a dark squat structure barely visible through the blinding sheets of snow that whip in her face like curtains.
“I see it,” she says, grabbing onto Hux’s arm. “We’re saved!”
Rose slips out from under Hux’s coat before he can react and begins bounding her way through the snowdrifts, toward their salvation. Perhaps, if they’re lucky, there’s wood for kindling or even a furnace or a generator of some kind. Maybe there’s food and drink, even beds for them to sleep in. And in the morning, they’d be rescued and they both could put this experience behind them.
Rose reaches the entrance to the shelter and leans heavily in the doorway, panting for breath. She hears Hux crunching in the snow behind her, and then his shadow darkens the pure white snow at her feet.
“Get inside, you fool,” he snaps at her, reaching around Rose to push the door open. “Before you catch your death out here.”
Rose lets Hux usher her into the shelter and then he shuts the door behind them. It closes with a finality that she feels juddering in her heart and stomach like nerves.
The building must be quite old because lights don’t snap on at the intrusion. When Rose strains, she doesn’t hear generators kick on at their presence, nor does she hear the usual low hum of electricity that indicates anyone currently occupies this place.
At least it’s marginally warmer than the blizzard they’d finally escaped, so that’s something.
“Let’s look for wood for a fire,” Hux orders her. “And maybe some dry clothing we can change into.”
Rose bristles at taking orders from Hux, but she simply nods and goes off in search of firewood and bedchambers. Bedchambers promise wardrobes full of clean clothes, yes, but also beds.
After a fair bit of exploring, Rose comes across a large bedroom at the end of a long, dark hallway. This place must be quite old, because it has a light switch on the wall rather than motion sensors. Rose flips the switch and the room is instantly bathed in warm, golden light. A large bed sits in its center, and there’s a wardrobe on the other side of the room.
Rose goes right to the wardrobe and opens it to warm coats, sweaters and pants, every manner of clothing one could possibly desire. Rose pulls out some fluffy sweaters and coats, a few pairs of sturdy work pants. There are rolls of socks and underwear on a shelf underneath, and pairs of boots.
“I wonder who this place belongs to.”
Rose turns to find Hux lingering in the doorway. He’s removed his dark coat and undone a few buttons on his shirt, exposing a long strip of pale skin.
Rose looks away from the strip of skin to the piles of clothes she’d deposited on the bed. “It feels strange to steal their things,” she admits as she reaches up to twist her hair away from her face. She drops her arms and begins to unbutton her damp blouse, ignoring Hux’s presence in the door.
Rose quickly strips out of the rest of her wet clothing, shivering uncontrollably at the assault of frigid air on her numb skin.
“I think I’m going to take a warm bath,” she says. “Gonna try to feel less like an icicle.”
“Mm,” Hux says.
He sounds closer than before, and Rose glances over her shoulder at him. He’s moved away from the doorway, standing close enough that he could reach out and touch her now, if he wanted. If she wanted, which she doesn’t.
Rose turns back to the piles of warm clothes. Her hair spills across her cold skin, and then something else, some other sensation: gloved fingertips touching her lightly, between her shivering shoulder blades.
When Rose doesn’t outwardly react, Hux withdraws his hand and she hears him slipping the glove off.
“What are you—” she begins, but he heads her off at the pass.
“You’re shivering,” he says, softly.
“Of course I’m shivering. I’m cold,” she mutters, crossing her arms over her breasts. “We just spent Force knows how long, trekking through mountains of snow and ice.”
“It’s not just that,” Hux says, but he moves away from her, over to the clothes she’s spread out over the bed.
“I—I’m going then,” she announces, pointlessly, and she practically flees to the fresher.
After Rose has scrubbed the cold out of her skin, she’s shivering considerably less, but every now and then a tremor overtakes her. She can’t help but tremble, just a little bit, as she steps out of the fresher and wanders back over to the bed, where Hux is lounging, and picks through the items of clothing.
She tells herself it’s because she can still feel the snow biting into her skin—sinking its fangs into her very soul—but she knows that’s not it, not entirely.
Rose drops Hux’s long coat—that she’d put on as a robe—and slips an overlarge sweater over her head. After that, she steps into a pair of men’s trousers and rolls them up over her hips, but they’re too big for her and sag at the waist.
“It’s a shame, really,” Hux says, from his position at the head of the bed.
“What is,” Rose asks, as she sits on the end of the bed and slips her feet into woolen socks with a rapturous sigh.
“I’d quite liked the view,” he says.
Rose turns and glares at him. “You’re disgusting.”
Hux shrugs his shoulder at her. “I’m just being honest.”
Rose hurls a pair of rolled-up socks at his face, which he dodges effortlessly. “I despise you.”
“I can think of other ways to get warm,” he sings out, a wicked glint in his eyes.
Rose tosses a pair of underwear at his head. “I really despise you.”
Hux’s face turns uncharacteristically serious for a moment. “Sharing body heat is a proven way to fight off the cold though,” he says. He opens his arms and wiggles his fingers at her.
Rose eyes him, eyes the welcoming expanse of his chest and the circle of his arms, before sighing and crawling onto the bed next to him. She curls into his side and Hux drapes an arm over her shoulders.
“There. Isn’t that better?” Hux asks.
“Not really,” Rose lies.
“I’d never known you to be a liar, Miss Tico,” Hux scolds her playfully.
Rose rests her cheek against his chest. “I’m not,” she mutters, slipping an arm around his waist. If he comments on it—on how she presses her face into his chest or tangles one of her legs with his—she’ll feed him to porgs.
There will be time for that—and more, if she wants—later, after they’ve been rescued. She feels Hux’s arm tighten, however briefly, around her shoulders. His head dips until his chin presses lightly atop her head, in her hair. There will be time to consider how much Rose wants to luxuriate in his arms, without a mission dangling over their heads.
For now, though, Rose will let herself soak up all the warmth he offers.