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“You know,” the investor starts, leaning in over her gin and tonic with an unsubtle, mocking laugh. “If you're having trouble with your… Well, your private life, then I can help.”
Hux can easily guess what she's referring to, a short angry burst to Ren about the state of his attire having occurred not ten minutes ago. It hadn't been a fight so much as a scolding, yet Ren had taken it as opportunity to ditch the entire affair. Frankly, Hux envies him, but he actually has to be here despite already delivering speeches and promises alike – tonight is all about networking, at least according to Unamo..
“Can you, now?” Hux says, keeping his tone light as he chooses to entertain her company. She has too much money to outright threaten for boldness, so he simply implies apathy by keeping the majority of his attention on the view of decanters along the bar.
“Oh yes,” she says, “I don't know how serious you are with that volatile Organa boy –“
Obviously, or she would remember the much worse incident from not two years ago, where Ren had upended an entire $45k pyramid of crystal champagne glasses. Hux had left him tied and wanting for near three hours after that particular tantrum.
He takes a sip of the present’s whiskey, fondly remembering the incident.
“– But I know a lovely man who works for a partner. I just know he'd be interested in you.”
Hux blinks hard at his reflection and nearly turns to outright frown at her; he'd thought she was going to try and offer a counseling service or something similar, not an opportunity to destroy his relationship. He's even wearing a ring, as symbolic as it is, custom forged by that stroppy child of a man in a fit of college whimsy, so please kindly fuck off.
“He's from a very good family,” she continues, unsolicited and seemingly unaware of Hux's expanding urge to throw her under a literal bus. “And very intelligent. He's just a darling, really, and not just in reputation,” her voice lowers, though not by much, “He also doesn't sport such unfortunately disproportionate features.”
Hux exhales slowly, closing his eyes a scant moment and reminding himself of her money. He needs her money; he needs said money to support Ren's lifestyle.
Who is he bloody kidding? Ren's an heir.
“He was hardly a looker before, but now,” she scoffs, her hand gesturing upward dramatically, in a remarkably similar fashion to his blood pressure. “I assume you're after his money, going out into public with that Phantom.”
“It was a vehicle accident, he could have died,” Hux snaps, finally turning to look at the moron of a woman straight on. His hand is still curled at the lip of his glass, and he imagines that he can feel it begin to crack, “And I'll have you know that I –“
He feels his stomach drop straight through to the floor, catching at the corner of his eye a familiar pair of wide shoulders turning from not two yards behind the offending woman, dark head just slightly bowed. Ren makes it across the thick crowd and back out the glass double doors before Hux can even inhale the breath to call after him.
“Yes?” She says, seemingly eternal in her stupidity.
“You are insulting my – My partner,” Hux says, forcibly swallowing the sudden, bizarre urge to say husband and standing from his place at the bar to glare at her from full height, absolutely furious in a manner he hardly gets to experience. “I am tempted to forcibly buy back your measly shares if only to get you out of my company.”
“I - I only saw you fighting …”
“You have not seen us fight,” Hux says, lowering his voice and deliberately threatening. “An event such as this wouldn't survive his anger, let alone mine.”
She stares up, breath going satisfyingly shallow.
Hux ignores every attempt at conversation as he marches through the crowd, following Ren's trail to the rising numbers at the top of elevator doors. He jabs at the up button, allowing himself to acknowledge the nervous prickling in his throat.
How long had Ren been there; had he heard only the insults, or also Hux humoring her suggestion? He will find a way to have that woman killed if she –
A loud crash startles him out of his thoughts, the telltale splinter and shatter of glass, and he spins on his heel to stare at the door to the men's toilet with wide eyes. He starts walking just as the elevator opens with a quiet ding, and ends up getting shoved aside at the toilet door when a harried-looking man with thin-wired spectacles bursts out.
“You should –“ the man stutters, trying to block Hux from entering the door. “Sir, you really shouldn't go in there, I was just going to call the police –“
“If you call the anyone, I'll have you sacked,” Hux says, putting a firm hand under the man's elbow and lifting upward until the man practically scuttles to the side.
“I don't know who you are, so I don't think you can actually… sack me,” the man says, either showing some ill-timed defiant reaction, or really just this stupid.
“I own the company that's throwing this event, you imbecile,” Hux says, leaning down to menace over the man's still-trembling shoulders. “I'm sure I also own part of whatever company owns this hotel, so go ahead and test me.”
The man shrinks back, eyes scanning down to Hux's feet.
Hux pushes into the toilet with a scowl, only to stop and take a deep breath when the door falls fully shut behind him. He can't see anything broken from here, the frosted glass partition perfectly whole, but that probably means Ren chose a mirror, which is far too psychologically dramatic for Hux’s liking.
Directionless violence is one thing, purposeful destruction another; it threatens to form habit, and he has a two thousand dollar Italian mirror at home.
"I told you to leave,” Ren says, his voice that thready, uneasy pitch that is meant to sound apathetic, but is clearly just the opposite. He doesn't turn, just lifts his hand and swings at another mirror with clear intent.
Hux steps forward quickly and reaches out to wrap a hand around that wrist, slightly wary, but with experience to know if Ren was truly in a rage that he wouldn't have spoken so much as roared. Hux tightens his fingers, digging nails into the delicate space between tendons, “Do not speak to me in that tone, Organa.”
Ren seizes, every muscle turning practically to stone under Hux’s hand; his chest is the only part of him moving, heaving with barely restrained fury. His knuckles are bloody and torn, a few visible glints of mirrored glass reflecting off the dim lighting from where they're embedded in his skin.
The silence lasts only a few moments, until Ren breaks it with an angry growl, pulling away from Hux’s grasp and curling over the hand like an injured beast. He still hasn't turned to look at Hux, head bowed and much of his face unseen even from the angle of the mirror. “You should be entertaining your guests.”
Hux stares, finding himself stunned and baffled in equal measure. Ren should have said something aggressive and confrontational, implied unkind things about Hux's fidelity or threatened to go find a young man for himself, not just… avoided the subject altogether. Ren never shies from an argument, is perhaps the least passive man that Hux has ever met, and Hux has… He has no idea how to react to this; he came in here expecting a fight.
“I went to get the tie,” Ren says, quickly betraying his unease as he speaks in short, stilted sentences. “You were right. I was being difficult.”
Hux forces his own tense shoulders to loosen, trying again to catch Ren's face in the mirror, but only seeing dark hair at all angles, and sighs, “I didn't expect you to come back down. It would hardly have been the first time.”
He realizes in both an instant, and far, far too late that it was the very worst thing to say. It implies intent.
Ren takes a short breath, shoulders somehow hunching further around the buried shape of his head, and his voice is little more than a hoarse murmur. “Obviously.”
“I want you to look at me, Ren,” Hux says, reaching up and sliding a hand over the planes of Ren's back, curling his fingers around the shape of a shoulder. “Why are you staring at the ground?”
“What does it matter?!” Ren snaps, finally showing some semblance of himself. It disappears only a few moments later, beneath heavy breaths, “I’ll talk to the concierge. I thought that … The attendant was getting security, not you.”
“Ah,” Hux intones, hand falling back to his side. Ren must remember how much Hux appreciates the implication of a secret. “You know, I'd find out eventually. The company would be billed.”
“Does it matter if it's now, or eventually, or ten minutes ago?” Ren says, shoulders hunching further as his voice grows markedly more flinty. “The damage is done. It's broken.”
Hux exhales slow, reaching up and pressing his fingers to the bridge of his nose. He thought… They've been together for years, Hux shouldn’t have to keep validating Ren like a bloody parking pass.
“Please,” Hux says, trying to keep the irritation from his tone, “Turn around. I can’t talk to you like this.”
Ren exhales slowly, unsteadily, and the muscle under his suit jacket flexes just before he turns around, spinning slowly on his heel. It becomes immediately apparent that Ren definitely took what that woman said to heart, because there are three red lines bisecting his scar, clearly made by his own hand, and severe enough to raise the skin.
“Oh, look what you've done,” Hux says, reaching up and gently ghosting his fingers along the reddened, ropy flesh of the scar, parts of it swelling with shallow pricks of blood. “You can be such a beast.”
“I don't want to be,” Ren says, expression crumpling into something truly miserable. “I just... I can't change – “
“No,” Hux says, shaking his head slowly and letting his fingers curl along Ren’s jaw. “I'd be terribly bored with someone who behaved.”
“I heard you talking,” Ren says, his eyes focused somewhere over Hux's shoulder. “Gossiping about how I looked.”
“You heard an imbecile talking at me,” Hux says, frustratingly unsure how to reassure Ren any more – he reaches up and threads a hand through Ren's hair, forcing his head to tilt down, so Hux may press lips to the highest point of the scar. “I've already decided to have her removed.”
Hux leans back and turns his attention to the hand, brushing a few shards away and feeling with some relief that it's mostly bruising and a few minor cuts. He's not sure he could stomach seeing Ren in an A&E so soon, even for something this minor.
“Would something more official dissuade your insecurity?” Hux asks, mere memory of the accident pressing the inkling into an urgency of an idea. He suddenly wants it all, a grossly sentimental part of him even envisioning an overwrought ceremony; an opportunity to silence any doubt, from Ren's cousin to Hux's investors. “We could be legally wedded.”
Ren freezes up under Hux’s hands, gaze flickering up from under his hair and eyes narrowing just slightly as he gives a low, startled laugh. “Us? Seriously?”
“Or, or perhaps not,” Hux says, ignoring the sudden, terrible split in his chest as he drops Ren's hand. He forces his voice to stay even, though, as he looks to the ground, he fears it's gone too reedy to disguise. “You can forget I said anything.”
“…Hux?” Ren says, his mocking, curious expression having descended swiftly into something more like panic. “You weren't serious.”
"I'll leave you to the concierge,” Hux mutters, glass crunching as he turns on his heel. It hardly makes him feel better, but he's an adult. He doesn't need to feel anything to distance himself from his own mortification.
The elevator is still on the bottom floor when he shakily presses the up button, and he exhales with relief when the doors slide open in barely an instant. He steps in and leans into the wall, wraps his knuckles around the railing, and forces his hands to stop their embarrassing trembling.
"Hux – Aldous!”
Hux keeps his shoulders taut to prevent his head from snapping up at the unused name, refusing to give into the instinct to reach out and stop the elevator doors from closing. He can't be stuck in a small space with Ren right now; he might do something horrible and unfixable, and he's sadly old enough to realize it.
A ring is meant to be a someday, isn't it? It's not supposed to be a look like he's grown two heads, an uncomfortable laugh like it’s a bad joke. Hux feels a thick something well in the back of his throat, but swallows back before it becomes more than a discomfort. Ren doesn't even wear the ring; he keeps it hidden away on a chain. The matching pair might be nothing more than a decade-old project to him.
Hux curls his thumb and finger around the ring on his own hand, trying to work himself up to pulling it off, but a strong, stupidly sentimental part of him refuses to comply. He screws his eyes shut and allows his hands to drop, fingers curling until the nails dig hard into his palms.
It had been a humorous justification earlier, but now it resurfaces like a taunt: Ren is an heir. It's not like he really needs him.
Hux swallows hard, staring at the warped reflection in front of him, and resolves to drink a gallon of liquor and just work for the next sixty or so hours, until his mind is such a mush of code that he forgets Ren doesn't see him as the proverbial end. He had…
It doesn't matter; Hux always thought Miss Havisham knew what she was doing, anyway, only Estella might be a cat – no one will be around to exaggerate deathly allergies if Ren leaves him.
He feels that crack in his chest widen, but ignores all bodily impulses besides the urge to breathe. He is an adult.
The soft ding of the elevator startles him out of his despondent reverie. He sighs, glancing up as the doors open, only to find Ren is standing in front of them at the hall, chest heaving with obvious physical exertion. Hux blinks at him, glances up at the softly glowing ‘7’, and finds himself so reluctantly impressed that he nearly allows the doors to slide closed, their movement only stopped by a large hand wrapping around the edge.
“Hux,” Ren says, his voice barely over a hoarse, shattered breath. His eyes are wide, boring into Hux like a laser focus. “You were serious? Do you… Did you really mean it?”
Hux refuses to submit again to the urge to look at the ground, “Of course I did.”
“I'm sorry,” Ren says, blinking rapidly and shaking his head a few times, “I can't just – ”
“You don’t need to explain,” Hux interrupts, finding his voice to be at an uncomfortable pitch, a sharp line dragging higher up his throat with every next word, “I would much rather you didn't.”
“What?” Ren says, brow pinching just slightly before he takes a sharp breath, moving closer with a shuffling step and lifting a hand, “No, n-no, I didn't – Fuck. I didn't mean to make it sound like that.”
“Good,” Hux says, dragging his eyes past Ren and focusing at the hall of silver-trimmed doors. “Wonderful, please move.”
“Damn it,” Ren mutters, then reaches forward and actually grabs Hux, pulling him out of the lift against his will. He curls his overlarge arms into a vice that presses Hux to his chest, “Damn it. Don't.”
“Let me go,” Hux says, ignoring the small creak in his voice and willing Ren to do the same.
Ren outright ignores him, squeezing tighter and almost awkward just by the fact that this is probably the fourth time they've shared a real hug in eight years, and none of those constituted as a precursor or a follow-up to a good time. “Fuck, you're shaking?”
Hux bites at the inside of his lip and stares over the shoulder far too close to his face, forcibly scouring away a childish urge to bury his face on the crook of Ren's neck. The last real hug had been in the hospital. “No.”
Ren doesn't seem to hear, digging his nose into the underside of Hux’s jaw and rousing untimely memories while simultaneously sullying them. “You can't expect me to switch moods like that, without any warning.”
“…I wasn’t aware all that medication started to work,” Hux says, his earlier dejection quickly turning vindictive; he should have just gone back to the party and its overpriced bar.
Granted, Ren definitely would have staged similar dramatics in the middle of that, so at least here Hux can suffer without losing any sense of public decorum. The only thing witnessing him in this hallway is a mildly judging painting of some eighteenth century general and his wolfdog.
“Shut up,” Ren says, punctuating his words with an over tight squeeze around Hux’s shoulders, making the joints ache under the pressure. “Stop trying to ruin everything.”
Hux pins his eyes to the seam of Ren’s jacket collar, the soft curl of dark hair against the pressed fold that hides a particularly intimate tattoo, and exhales slowly, “You’ve already ruined it.”
“I know,” Ren murmurs, voice lowering until the words are barely more than vibrations against Hux’s skin. “When my mother asks, it happened on the balcony. I didn't break anything.”
“You were still an ass,” Hux says, swallowing hard and feeling the line of his shoulders loosen against his will. He takes a short inhale and lifts his hands, curling his fingers around the belt at Ren’s waist, and ignores the long puff of breath against his neck.
“I didn’t mean to say no,” Ren says, still muffled against the line of Hux's jaw. He breathes for a few moments longer, then exhales with an odd noise low in his throat, “I love you.”
Hux feels a hard mass settle low in his gut, entirely different from the stabbing ache and misery of earlier, and finds himself struggling with thoughts that emerge as little more than a tense few swallows that and the scrambling of his hands at Ren's waist. He inhales and wills his mouth to open –
“Don't strain yourself,” Ren says, and his low huff is like the slam of a proverbial gate, the retreat of his body as he leans backward settling cold in Hux chest. “You mostly already said it.”
Hux doesn't disagree, only gives an affected eye roll even as he swallows against the sharp edge of inadequacy pooling in his throat. The shortfall puts in stark relief one of many reasons Ren declining seemed the far too obvious conclusion.
“Hux,” Ren says, only a few meters down and stood in front of their penthouse room, obviously holding the door open in front of him. His voice draws down into a sulky grumble, “You’re not going back downstairs.”
“Ah,” Hux intones, glancing backward at the lift doors and realizing he probably should, but looking back to Ren has something else entirely shifting his feet further down the hall. “No.”