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Hux was leaning against the canyon stones, serenely almost, and smoking a cigarette when Kylo Ren awoke to himself half buried in the remnants of their wrecked ship. Fortunately he hadn't been buried under debris heavy enough to crush him alive, though his entire body screamed in pain.
"Hey, Ren," Hux murmured through a mouthful of smoke. His immaculate white emporer's robe was as dingy gray as the smoke he exhaled lazily. It was unmistakably stained with blood, and a lot of it.
"Hux...? This is...?" Ren had managed to pull himself out of the mangled metal and crawled over to Hux, his entire body yowling at him to stop moving. He sat upright, shoulder to shoulder against Hux, his backed pressed into the stony canyon wall. Ren knew without needing to ask that the entire ship had been totaled, lending no useful technology for their escape.
"C'mon, Hux," Ren shifted as if to bring himself and then the emperor to his feet, but he began a coughing fit that urged blood into his mouth, and Hux shook his head slowly, eyes glazed over with what Ren realized was pain.
"I'm paralyzed, Kylo."
"Wha---?!"
"From the waist down. The same injury that damaged my spinal cord also caused me to lose a lot of blood. I... I never mentioned it before, because it was never relevant and I had excellent medical care, but, I'm anemic. And I've already lost too much blood."
Kylo began stripping his robes off to use as a stauncher, frantically searching Hux for his wound. There was so much blood. Too much.
Hux sighed and shifted just enough to show the gaping wound in his back. With horror, Ren realized that a large metal rod of some design had impaled Hux clear through to the other side of his body. Out of the corner of his eye, Ren processed a bloody metal object a few meters away.
"It severely damaged quite a few vital organs. Do you...understand what I'm saying?" Even through Hux's stoic facade, Kylo Ren could see the agony and shock from blood loss beginning to pull at something deep and visceral within Hux, a fear innate in all living creatures. Kylo realized he was looking at a rapidly dying man, breathing weakly on borrowed time.
Hux's voice, rough and coppery like his stubble, choked out, "Just wanted to smoke while I waited for you to wake up." Fury boiled deep within Kylo and he brought himself face to face with Hux, holding him against the sharp rocky wall with both arms, foreheads pressed together in a gesture of tenderness stolen from death itself.
"Why? Why didn't you wake me up?! Why didn't you get me?!? Why didn't you..." Ren's chest was heaving, panic shining manically in his dark, heavy lidded eyes.
"Look at me, Ren," Hux's voice was his own eulogy. "I didn't want you to watch me die, to try and vainly save my life. I am as good as dead, even if we were able to leave wherever the hell it is we've ended up." Hux heaved a particularly bloody cough, feeling and tasting tangy iron on his tongue and lips, but didn't bother to wipe it away. "Listen, Ren, please."
And Kylo did listen, his head buried in Hux's neck, his ear devouring every syllable that Hux sighed through failing lungs. The sensation of Hux's blood seeping from his own robes through to Ren's twisted what was left of Kylo Ren's fragile heart into something irreparable and unrecognizable.
"I'm going to die very soon. I can feel it, and I know you can, too." Kylo was shaking, his sweat cold and muscles taut under his shredded robes.
"N-no!" Ren gasped as if someone had stabbed him. He would prefer being impaled than to watch Hux suffer, he thinks distantly, grimly. He should be in Hux's position, he should be the one to bear this agony. His Emperor should not bleed to death in his arms. "You're a genocidal tyrant!" Ren sobbed. Brokenly, Hux thought with a profound melancholy. "You decimated an entire solar system, you overthrew Snoke, you...seduced me to your cause, and to you. You rose to emperor, you ruled beside me, we've escaped every assassination attempt thus far, you are stronger than this---!"
Hux was laughing quietly under Ren's embrace. The low rumbling both sounded and felt unnatural. Ren realized he could hear the blood sloshing around in Hux's lungs.
"And even I cannot defy death his due." Kylo leaned back enough to stare into the steely green eyes that brimmed with wetness. Hux's face, a mask of pallor usually, was absolutely colorless. He could have been a ghost. "You served me well, Master of the Knights of Ren."
"N-no, no. Stop it, Hux. I'm gonna find you a medbay, a bacta tank, something---" But his words were silenced by cold lips that tasted of cigarettes and blood, and Ren could only melt into them with his own as he kissed the only man he had ever loved. He projected this thought into the fallen emperor's mind.
"I know, Kylo Ren. Th-thank you, for being the only one who could love a monster like me."
"We were monsters together," Ren whispered. Tears cascaded down his mole speckled cheeks. Hux lay his head back against stone, tears streaming quietly down his own face. His whole life had laid itself bare to him in these final moments, and before his demise it wanted to know: had it all been worth it?
Yes, thought Hux with soporific fondness. I was always meant to be a monster.
"Hold your arms around me one last time, Kylo," Hux pleaded, eyes fluttering closed involuntarily. His eyelashes were nearly translucent. He had become a gorgeous marble sculpture, still and very, very cold. "I want to feel your warmth before I leave."
One last time, Kylo Ren thought numbly, shielding himself around his lover's body as death overcame Hux like a predatory shadow, I will protect my Emperor.