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Hux couldn’t concentrate. All he could see through the scope of his rifle was Kylo and he shot. He shot and shot and shot and shot. Kylo lay prone in a heap of red leaves, limbs limp and drooping like a ragdoll. Hux couldn’t tell the difference between the leaves and the blood - maybe there wasn’t one. The blood-leaves crunched as Hux straddled Kylo’s hips and pressed kisses to his forehead, hands wavering over the gunshot wounds, silently asking for permission to touch, to enter.
Kylo’s clammy hands - dead, dead - guided Hux’s fingers to one of the wounds, slowly pressed them in. He smiled at Hux, a loving, blissful smile that said, “You may.”
It was warm inside - inside Kylo. Blood dribbled out of the wound as his fingers sunk a little deeper, syrupy and sweet. He savored the slippery texture of the connective tissue that held Kylo’s intestines in place, bumped a knuckle against the costal cartilage of Kylo’s eleventh rib. His entire hand had slid in somehow, but no matter. What was important was how Hux could caress Kylo’s sternum with his middle finger while trailing his outer digits along the tough striations of pectoral muscles on either side of it. Soon Kylo’s ribcage opened up like the shutters of a window, inviting Hux to rest his head on the bed of rhododendron within.
“Come inside, Hux. I’ll keep you warm, keep you safe.”
Hux was suddenly awash with gloom. “I can’t… I can’t. Even if I could, I wouldn’t fit. You’d have to take out your lungs. And your… your heart.”
“Then take them. I told you, you can have everything. Isn’t that what you said you wanted?” Kylo smiled benevolently, running a cold, marbling hand through Hux’s hair.
“I do want everything, but I don’t want to have everything. Do you understand?”
Kylo frowned, crestfallen. “Not really.”
The wind whipped against Hux’s cheeks, but did little to relieve the suffocating heat trapped in his chest. He wiped the cold sweat from his brow and took a deep, shaky breath. The wind died down, allowing the scent of blood and meat to curl itself around Hux’s head.
Kylo wasn’t meat. Kylo isn’t meat. Kylo is alive.
Glancing down, Hux realized that it wasn’t Kylo he was straddling, but the fresh carcass of a buck. Gloved fingers still probed absently at the glistening bullet hole. Only one. He slid off the buck to lay next to it among the leaves, trying to even his breathing.
The towering pines that surrounded Hux lost their leaves and limbs, slowly becoming like bars in a prison cell. He was lost. Lost in the woods and lost in his head.
Closing his eyes, Hux saw Kylo - alive, alive - leaning over him, overtreated hair falling in a curtain around their faces. Faces that inched nearer and nearer, whose lashes tickled each other’s flushed cheeks, whose noses bumped briefly before their lips met and before Hux was gored through the heart by one of the buck’s antlers.
He didn’t know how long he had laid there in the leaves - it could have been minutes, could have been hours. Hux thought that maybe the forest had taken him to replace the life he took. He wouldn’t mind if that was his fate. It was only fair.
Hux’s eyelids fell shut again while he waited to sink into the earth, but he didn’t sink. He didn’t sink at all. There was a rustling crackling crunching sound drawing near. Perhaps a butcher was wrapping him up. A small hand jostled his shoulder. Too small, not old enough to be a butcher, Hux thought.
“Brendon. Brendon! Hey!” Fingers pried one of Hux’s eyes open. Dorian. “I’d ask why you’re laying around with a dead deer, but I honestly don’t wanna know.”
Hux blinked a few times to clear his vision and sat up. “How long… have I been here?”
A gust of wind blew past the brothers, dead leaves tangled themselves in their hair. “I dunno.” Dorian paused to huff a warm breath onto his gloveless hands. “We heard a gunshot thirty minutes ago, but I dunno if you’ve been here for longer than that. Mom and dad were worried since there was only one shot and you didn’t come find us…”
“I don’t see what they’re so concerned about. It’s not like Julius is here…” To shoot me again.
Silence blanketed the boys as they recalled the day their eldest brother accidentally shot Hux in the leg.
Accidental. That was what Julius had said it was.
Accidental. That was what Douglas, the second oldest, claimed it to be.
Hux knew it wasn’t an accident, but never said a word about it; he had already begun to hate himself by that point.
Dorian attempted to warm his hands again. When Hux offered his own gloves, Dorian politely declined - they were covered in blood.
When Hux’s parents caught up to him and his little brother, he had decided that he wouldn’t shoot again for the remainder of their excursion. His father would have argued if it weren’t for the size of the buck Hux had shot in his dissociative haze.
While his family continued to hunt, Hux filled the back pages of his journal with drawings of his quarry. He smeared some of its blood onto a page, leaned against the carcass, and fell asleep.
He dreamt of planting flowers inside of himself, but he had no water to bathe them in. The flowers wilted in his cold, frigid corpse. He was foolish to think they would grow.