Work Text:
"I have an odd request."
The man, Organa, had made an appointment three days prior; polite, if terse phone voice, reasonably curious, no indication whatsoever he was the size of a brick shithouse with the muscle to match. He's wearing a tank, unsurprising with the weather lately, and the way he awkwardly scratches at his elbow makes his bicep flex in a rudely distracting manner.
He is also devoid of any visible tattoos or piercings, so it's very likely what he considers odd is downright vanilla. Or, he's a giant freak who only tattoos his dick, only time will tell.
"Okay," Lessie says, putting on her friendliest service smile. "Lay it on me."
Organa grimaces awkwardly and pulls out his phone, sliding it open and turning the screen toward her without a pause to search – he must have been looking at it while he was waiting.
Lessie blinks, raising a single eyebrow with an impressed hum. The image is of a very pronounced set of bite marks into the side of a neck, clearly human and definitely taken directly after some seriously fun exertion, if judging by the vague ruddiness crawling up from a very bare chest. She glances up quickly, tracing her eyes down the customer's neck just to confirm he's definitely the subject of the selfie. The area doesn't have even a hint of bruising, so he must have taken it a while back.
It is maybe a little weird, but it's far more sweet... Well, if he isn't some sort of stalker to whoever owns these teeth.
"I kinda got to ask, for my own peace of mind," Lessie says, speaking low and just slightly wary of an overreaction, especially from a guy this big. "But the person who you're getting this for knows, right?"
"It's a gift," he says, a small frown pulling at his lips.
"They know you like them this much?" Lessie pushes, trying to get a clearer answer. She doesn't want to aid any sort of twisted guilt trip to entrap some poor victim.
"Oh, uh," Organa stutters, pulling at the chain around his neck. It has a dark, silver inlaid ring attached to the bottom, "Yeah."
Aw, and it's turned right back into being sweet. Lessie hums and looks back down at the image with renewed interest, thankful and impressed at the apparent care he took taking the picture with good lighting. It was clearly captured before the imprints of teeth could fade into little more than bruised smudging, and she should be able to easily grab a passable tracing.
Someone must have a very possessive partner.
"Where do you want it?"
"The same place," Organa says, lifting a hand and covering the edge of his neck, just under the jaw. "Same size."
Lessie clicks her tongue, raising an eyebrow, "Sensitive area, and very visible. Are you sure? Your employer might not... appreciate it."
"Oh," Organa says, a short twist appearing on his lips. "I don't have a job."
"Can you pay for this?" Lessie asks, grimacing slightly at her own impolite tone. She wants him out of here if he thinks he's going to get charity, but at the same time... Probably shouldn't be an asshole about it.
"Don't worry about that," Organa says, reaching backward and revealing a thin black wallet. He unfolds it and pulls out a card, practically waving the plastic in her face.
Lessie feels her eyebrows raise entirely on their own accord. Organa is holding a Black card between two fingers, and wearing a smirking expression like he knows exactly how special that makes him. Well, this certainly places a lot of Lessie's worries to rest, ignites a few others, but now she just needs to concentrate on making this experience so pleasant that he tells all of his friends.
Lessie hums, tipping her head and pretending to be unimpressed. "So, did you want just a black outline of the visible teeth, or something more fancy?"
"Red outline," Organa says, taking barely a moment to think.
Lessie furrows her brow, but a quick glance down at the picture easily determines exactly why he'd want such a color. Even the deepest red would be subtle against this kind of bruising. "The pigments have gotten better, but red is still pretty likely to fade in twenty years or so. You okay with that, High-roller?"
"I can get it retouched," Organa says, his lilting voice suddenly brokering no room for argument.
"Alrighty," Lessie says, smile turning just slightly tight as she slides the phone back to him. She points to the sign at her side, "Email that picture to the shop address, and I'll get started on the outline while you're doing the paperwork."
Organa is mostly quiet after that, only speaking to have her shift the angle so that the impression is further away from his jaw, neatly curled against the tendon. Renae walks past as he's explaining it, sneaking a peek out of curiosity, and Lessie just shrugs up at a their incredulously raised eyebrow. Admittedly, it is a little odd, and somehow more than if it were vampire teeth, but not the worst thing someone's asked for by far.
"Now, I need you to be still, even though it hurts," Lessie says, after the everything's been cleaned and wiped, the outline an inky mark under his jaw. "I'd tell you not to talk, but seems like not a problem for you, eh?"
Organa narrows his eyes, looking half a second away from rolling them before he just turns his gaze at the ceiling. He shrugs shortly, wide shoulder giving barely a twitch of muscle under her palm, "Not really."
"Alright, I'm gonna start now," Lessie says, picking up the machine, and then pausing, "If it hurts too much, feel free to say something whenever the needle isn't touching."
Organa flinches when the needle first penetrates, jaw tightening as Lessie carefully follows the first line of a tooth, but he seems to grow looser after only a few seconds. He even gets that slightly glazed look in his eyes, a sort of pain high that Lessie is a little jealous of, and when she wipes it with the alcohol, all he does is gasp quietly and tremble slightly under her hands. A visible flush appears above his scooped shirt collar as she starts in on the third tooth, and she won't embarrass him by looking lower than his waist. It's not a huge surprise that a guy who wants his partner's teeth permanently traced into his neck is a little into pain.
The area is sensitive, but Organa doesn't stop her once, nor does he bleed nearly as much as he could, so she gets it done far quicker than the time he reserved. She tips his jaw more to the side as she finishes on the last point, and then wipes it down with another delicate swipe of alcohol. The red looks good even against the swelling, and she has to admit it stands out far less than it might with black.
"Gotta say," Lessie says, clicking her tongue and pulling his jaw back into a more comfortable position. "If they don't like it, dump 'em."
"Won't happen," Organa says, humming a short rebuff with his eyes still closed.
Lessie huffs low, unsure if he means the odds of them disliking it, or of him dumping them. "Get up when you're ready, okay? You reserved about a half hour longer."
Organa sighs, showing the first sign of discomfort as he throws an arm over his face from the untattooed side. It doesn't seem to be from pain. "Is it normal?"
"Yup," Lessie says, grabbing a needle to look down at and clean, if just to seem even more apathetic to the question. "Hardly the first."
Organa is quiet for a long time, enough for her to get done with the needles and the machine. "That doesn't help."
"Usually doesn't," Lessie agrees, standing and unsnapping her gloves from her hands. "I'll just go get your aftercare packet, okay?"
"Thank you," Organa mutters, exhaling slowly and spanning a large hand across his forehead, thumb and fingers against both temples.
~
Hux is surprised to find the garage empty when he gets back, then disturbed to find the garden equally so, and nearly has a stroke when he finds the object of his search in the darkened den of the lower level.
Ren has a bright, white bandage around his neck. The width of it spans across one side and ends at the jugular, taped down messily to his skin. He looks peaceful enough despite it, lain out and snoring on the sofa, but it does little to erase all the worst case scenarios streaking through Hux's mind. He stares a few moments longer, taking in secondary details: the midday nap, the lack of carbon black stains, the careless disposal of boots on the buffalo leather ottoman across the room.
It can't be anything serious if Ren’s not sequestered in some emergency room, but that's hardly a comfort.
Hux takes a deep, mildly shaking breath and presses his fingernails hard into his palms, centering himself in a stinging cloud of calm. He exhales slowly, rehearsing, then reaches out and pinches a little too hard at that giant beak, cutting off Ren's air supply.
Ren jerks awake almost immediately, startling in strangled panic, then curling up and trying to shove Hux away at the same time. He groans into his own arm, “I’m telling the cops."
"That's Mitaka's job," Hux snaps, taking another breath and forcing his hands to cross against his chest before they do something without permission. "What have you done?"
Ren languidly rolls onto his back, blinking upward through a few messy tangles of hair, "Leave me alone."
"Did something happen in the garage?" Hux asks, glancing downward again and eyes practically magnetized to the bandage. "You could have... texted, at least. I would have made time."
Ren blinks and tilts his head, only to wince and bring up a hand, like he's somehow forgotten the giant wound on his own damned neck. His eyes go wide, then dart up, "Oh. No. It's not – I didn't need you."
"Obviously," Hux says, stilling his tongue against the inside of his teeth.
Not long ago, Ren delighted in manufacturing emergencies, anything to draw Hux away from work, but now he doesn't even care to call when it's a real one? Hux doesn't know if this should be viewed as another sign of odd behavior, pinned up next to the sudden, rather disheartening irritation at Hux's leaving marks, or if Ren was simply ashamed at suffering some accident in his own garage.
"Why are you making that face?" Ren says, shoving up on the sofa and settling his feet onto the floor.
"I'm not making a face," Hux says, pointedly glancing toward the office, then gesturing dismissively with an upturned hand. "I have a bid going up tomorrow. I'm reflecting on it."
"Sure."
"It's not as if I don’t..." Hux sighs, pausing to trace along his brow for a short moment. He glances again to the bandage, then lets the hand drop and looks up to catch Ren’s eyes in a glare, hardening his tone, "I rather don’t like coming home to find you've mangled yourself. Call next time."
Ren blinks a few times and then narrows his eyes, "...Mangled?"
"Did you almost take your damned head off or not?"
"Not," Ren says, his hands falling to his lap as his mouth curls into a wide sneer, "I can't actually do that."
Hux huffs lowly, narrowing his eyes as he points outside toward a mangled stack of bicycles and bed frames, "You build literal contraptions – I don’t know what they all do."
"So do you," Ren snaps, standing from the sofa and pointing at his own chest, "Do mine not count because they're not part of the fucking DOW index?"
"I build devices," Hux says, scoffing under his breath and trying not to feel an odd sort of relief at the resurgence of an older, more comfortable argument. "Devices that serve a purpose passed just looking – passed being useless art."
"Useless art," Ren repeats, huffing and suddenly looking anxious, pulling harder at the edge of the bandage with fidgety fingers. He even starts to peel off the tape, wincing as it pulls at sensitive skin and leaves irritation behind.
“Stop messing with it,” Hux says, his voice barely an echo to his own ears when he finding his eyes caught as the thin gauze slowly falls away.
The side of Ren’s neck is a splotch the color of blood, stretched messily across a tendon and barely treated with more than ointment, as if whoever Ren went to simply wanted to slap a plaster on but had to find something bigger. He feels his mouth nearly drop open just a moment later, his alarm renewed when he recognizes the shape of the wound, “What on earth is that —were you bitten?"
“Kind of,” Ren says, tilting his neck a little further so that the mess of red reveals itself to be deliberate and bright lines, ones simply stained with a thin layer of plasma from sensitive skin. It's undeniably a tattoo, a permanent etching of...
Hux leans in closer, feeling an epiphany working its way up into his skull as he slowly realizes those aren't just anyone's teeth. He doesn’t know how it’s possible – any bruises would have been far too smudged for such detail, but there it is in living technicolor.
"Hux?" Ren says, letting his head fall back prematurely and mouth falling into a small frown. "Do you even know – "
"Yes," Hux says, silencing the veritable insult and reaching forward to press a few fingers near the upraised edges of his own bite. The slight crook of an incisor looks nothing like an imperfection from this angle.
"I'm supposed to keep it –" Ren's breath stutters, jaw tightening as Hux gives into to the urge to trace more boldly around the lines, "Bandaged for a few hours. Avoid touching it for a few weeks."
Hux pulls his hand back, an urgency overwhelming him to keep this new addition in pristine condition. "A shame."
“It was for, uh,” Ren exhales hard, glancing at the corners of the room with a frustrated turn of his lips. “You know.”
Hux frowns in mild confusion, then realizes that a few weeks lines up fairly well to their unofficial anniversary – little more than a drunken fling lasting far longer than expected. “Were you planning to hide it?”
Ren shrugs tightly and pinches his lips together, jaw tightening into at tense, ticking line. It's clearly not something he thought too long about, now come back to bite him.
Hux rolls his eyes, turning on his heel and debating slightly before turning toward the bedroom and it’s en suite. “Come along,”
“It’s fine.”
Hux forgets to hold back a huff of disbelief, pulling out his phone and – Oh dear, seems he shouldn’t have touched it… Well, he’s cleaning it now, which should help a little. It also seems his incapacity to wash with artificial fragrances is going to be a boon for once, rather than a frustrating restriction in the hygiene aisle.
“How long were you asleep,” Hux asks, frowning at the too-long list of threats for infection.
“I don’t know,” Ren mutters, tone quickly becoming surly. “You’re seriously looking this up?”
“Clearly you didn’t,” Hux says, tapping open the door with a short exhale and a backward directed frown. “I doubt you listened to the artist, either.”
Ren exhales hard and smacks his lips, but declines to respond in any real manner, which is answer enough. He even allows himself to be shunted toward the edge of the stone tub, slumping against the edge with a sour look.
Hux narrows his eyes and leans into the shower to grab his soap, ignoring the churlish huff at his back. He has half a mind to throw it, but that would be immature, not to mention the idea of the soap touching the floor strikes him with an odd sort of revulsion.
Ren flinches back at the first touch of warm water, curling in his shoulders and tightening his grip on the edge of the tub, “You know, she warned me that it would sting.”
“How kind,” Hux says, wiping the pads of his fingers over Ren’s neck, feeling each upraised edge of the tattoo with a quiet thrill striking through him. He should be more disturbed at the nature of the gift, but for their first anniversary Ren saw fit to stick a literal ring on Hux’s finger in the middle of the night, which rather set a bar for lunacy.
“She gave me other stuff,” Ren says, after the actual washing is over, awkwardly digging in a pocket and bringing out a crumpled piece of cheaply printed 8x11 – stashed inside are a few packets of ointment tied together with a rubber band.
“How was the pain?” Hux says, watching the short twitches of discomfort work across Ren’s face as the skin is patted down to dry. “From what I remember of Phasma’s whinging, you’d think her skin was being flayed off.”
"It was, uh…" Ren trails off, eyes skittering across the room as he drags his teeth hard along his lip, voice lowering to a murmur, "I got hard."
Hux ignores the juvenile urge to glance down, instead raising an eyebrow and flattening his voice, "What was that?"
"Getting it done," Ren snaps, standing up from the tub and practically turning away as he lifts a hand to gesture at his own neck. He starts to look ashamed in a way he usually does, like it could turn to defensive anger at the drop of a pin.
"I’m not sure what to say," Hux says, looking down to stare across the shape of the tattoo for another few moments, the skin looking shiny and a bit tender around the edges. “Other than that it’s quite the relief.”
Ren glances back up, catching Hux’s eyes and narrowing his own in something almost like suspicion, a little more like hurt. He clearly thinks it’s some manner of tease, which isn’t necessarily an unreasonable conclusion.
Hux considers the last couple weeks of being shoved away when he’d gotten any rougher than a light press of lips, of feeling like he’d started doing something wrong when nothing had changed, and exhales softly, “You gave an impression that you no longer appreciated that sort of thing.”
Ren pinches his lips, visibly biting them together, then glances away, “I couldn’t tell you.”
Hux twists his mouth into a sneer, “Oh, did you take an oath?”
“It’s a gift,” Ren says, a hand curling at his side with obvious aggravation; the flush of his temper spreads and bleeds favorably into the fresh lines of the tattoo. “If I had told you, it wouldn’t have been.”
“All the same,” Hux says, reaching backward to grab a packet and tearing it open, pressing a little too hard to quiet Ren’s rambling and spreading the ointment thinly along the tattoo. “I prefer to avoid the lie next time.”
Ren makes a quiet noise in the back of his throat, though it could be from either the pressure or the implication, not that he seems to be giving a straight answer with the veritable sulk he’s quickly lurching toward. The petulance rarely makes Hux feel anything more than vaguely spiteful, but the tattoo is a very… meaningful gesture, and he’s been resisting a very strong urge to give it a twin on the other side since the moment he saw it.
It’s such a shame that he won’t be able to fit his mouth on the proper one for a good month.
“You said you got hard,” Hux says, folding the half-empty packet of ointment and throwing back to the counter, then reaching to force Ren to look back with a knuckle against the jut of his chin. “I believe that is firmly under my purview, don’t you?”
“Right now?”
“Always,” Hux says, barely trying to hide an emerging twitch of a smirk. He traces a finger slowly around the outside of the tattoo – a habit is already forming. “But I meant for the next one of these.”
Ren swallows, tendons tensing against Hux’s touch, “I don’t have anything planned.”
“I’m sure you will,” Hux says, sliding his fingers across that thick throat and giving into the impulse to draw his nails down the unmarked side, leaving four pale tracks in his wake and satisfied at the ensuing gasp. “You’re not particularly known for setting limitations.”
“You do like it,” Ren asks, hands lifting and curling around Hux’s hips, thumbs tracing along his pelvis, “Right?”
“I’m getting there,” Hux says, shifting his hips forward when Ren lowers his grip to the back of his trousers, overlarge hands barely fitting into the slim pockets. “It’s certainly a statement.”
~
Lessie is hardly surprised to see Organa again, as the customers who have his sort of reaction usually get a little addicted, but she is surprised to see him at the time she does, because the reservation was definitely made by an Aldous. She's in the back when he arrives, gossiping with Renae and cleaning her station, and looks up when the desk bell rings to see him standing next to a stiff redhead that is, admittedly, definitely an Aldous.
A. Aldous Hux. Wunderkind CEO of First Order.
Lessie has the insane urge to rush over there and put her laptop and phone in a drawer before she realizes that he probably wants her to keep buying them. Forever. She belatedly realizes that she may have already sold her soul to him.
"Hey," Lessie says, pointedly addressing Organa with her pleasant service smile and legitimately happy to see that his neck has healed perfectly. "Didn't expect to see you again so soon."
"Neither did I," Organa mutters, running a hand through his voluminous hair and sending a sideways glare at his... No way, his partner?
Oh.
Oh.
"Oh," Lessie says, attempting to cover her wide-eyed surprise by looking to Hux. She can feel her voice pitching to chipmunk levels without her consent, "Are you getting something done?"
"I'm afraid not," Hux says, a rather amused smirk curling at his lips.
Lessie raises her eyebrows, looking back to Organa and feeling a little bit like she's in a tennis court. "Okay?"
"Yeah," Organa says, pursing his lips so hard they turn white before he reaches backward and pulls out that wallet again. He hands over a piece of paper, heavily creased from time in the billfold. "Dual outline. Inside red, outside black."
Lessie nods, taking the paper and finding inside a rough sketch. It depicts a pair of cubic stylized longswords cutting into and creating from some hexagon what is undeniably the beginnings of the First Order logo, and it only takes her a moment to realize that the crudeness of the drawing is purposeful. She even has a feeling that she already knows where he wants it: a shoulder blade. It has that symmetrical quality that means he thinks that he'll be seeing it in the mirror a lot.
"Well, you know the drill," Lessie says, reaching back for a standard agreement from the pile. "I'll get this ready while you do the paperwork."
She flees with the sketch held in hand to the back, going straight past the tracing table, ignoring Renae's audible confusion, and slamming into the door to the bathroom. She takes a few deep breaths, pinching the bridge of her nose, then pulls out her phone.
Aldous Hux isn't the type of celebrity she keeps up with, but he's young and cute and rich, so it seems almost everyone else does, if going by the wealth of recent articles on Google. She clicks the first one to mention Organa, only to click back with a scoff when it is mostly about how they're due for a split.
The next one seems to actually be about Organa himself, featuring a picture that is supposedly him donned in an elaborate welding helmet and wielding a lit welding gun next to what looks like a melting metal tree. He is some sort of well-known artist, though his most famous attribute is being the unpredictable, downright volatile boyfriend of CEO Aldous Hux. The article highlights a series of marked events, and the most recent occurred only two weeks ago and involved an obscene amount of Cristal in even more obscenely priced crystal glassware that totaled into a bill that was purportedly somewhere around $45k.
She hisses in shock, leaning back into the wall of the bathroom and exhaling as she runs a hand over her mouth. She has a sudden worry that the tattoo today is some sort of twisted punishment, but it's clear that Organa designed the new tattoo and also that he's probably going to get laid afterward, so she's not seeing the punishment part. Although, it might not even warrant a punishment to someone like Hux, who has probably made that much just in the time Lessie has been hiding in the bathroom.
She takes a deep breath and exhales slowly, rationalizing that this is very good for the shop. A tattoo on a man intimately connected to the third richest individual in the country has to be a good thing, especially if he likes it enough to get another one. Then again, she now also knows the third richest man in the country is a biter, and that he could probably have her killed for it.
Lessie exits the bathroom with a slow exhale and a short nod to herself, shuffling awkwardly to the tracing table with her head down and pretending not to see the sidelong look on Renae’s face. She grabs a pieces of transfer paper and manages to accurately mark the design with a quick enough hand that Organa seems not to notice the slight detour, though Hux does raise a brow that makes her feel like she’s back in school.
“I want it on my chest,” Organa says, lifting a hand and setting it right atop his heart.
Lessie raises an eyebrow, but dutifully nods her assent; the customer is always right. “Okay, I can – ”
“Tacky,” Hux interrupts, shaking his head shortly and sending a downright haughty sneer toward Organa. He reaches up and around Organa’s back, plainly pressing him forward, “Between the shoulder blades.”
“I’d never see it,” Organa says, visibly tensing his jaw and starkly reminding Lessie of all those articles; she glances down to her laptop and resists the urge to slide it away from his giant hand.
“And I could hardly care,” Hux says, his voice going low as he gives a smirk that is absolutely vindictive… or filthy – Lessie isn’t particularly qualified to judge.
She also has no idea how to decipher the thirty seconds of quiet glaring, but thinks she manages to cover her own awkwardness with a timely slide of the cursor across the blank screen of the shop computer. Right click, chance display size…
“Fine,” Organa mutters, turning back forward with his mouth twisting into a grimace. He shifts his hand down his chest few inches, curling it into his side, “On my ribs.”
“No problem, just hope you’re okay with taking off that tiny little tank this time,” Lessie says, glancing sideways and then quickly focusing back on Organa, hoping her smile hasn’t become too manic; she’s fairly certain Aldous Hux is giving her the most unsettling stare of her life.
“I assumed,” Organa says, already pulling at his shirt and completely unaware of the glower to his left.
Lessie gives a twitch of a nod and gestures them to the back, resolving to curb her personality for the next few hours, as much as her nature demands otherwise when she notices Organa seems to have an impressive and hairless chest. She doesn’t want to end up in a dumpster.
“Just lay down like last time and I’ll – “ Lessie stutters, gaze flickering sideways as Hux walks past her to settle into the guest chair, pulling out his phone without a word. She swallows. “…I’ll get started.”
She's wiping down the inside pommel of one of the long swords when it hits her: the shop definitely hasn't become the center for a weird billionaire sex thing. Organa and Hux are barely even looking at each other.
Hux is still on his phone and scrolling through some undoubtedly important technology things, and while Organa is in a largely similar situation to the last time, he’s just as quiet about it. She once had a pair come in here and sort of stare at each other for the entire two hours that it took her to lay down a pair of F-35 fighter jets with chemtrails in the shape of a heart, so she knows the vibe, and this is not it.
Lessie's reaching for the black when she notices it: a large hand curled around the front of Hux's knee and nearly completely hidden by the angle of the table. She slowly finishes fitting the color and starts in again, tracing around the first corner of the logo, and as she wipes it down she glances over just in time to see Hux reach down and stroke the back of Organa's hand with a slow thumb before returning to his phone.
Alright, maybe her assumptions about the sex lives of rich people are a little fantastical.