"This is the worst idea you've ever had." Hux hissed, looking up at the balcony four floors above and then to Phasma.
She shrugged with a giddy laugh.
"You'll never get alone with him otherwise." She whispered.
"If I get caught by anyone, I'm dead. If I can't make it up there, I'm dead."
Phasma waved her hand.
"You'll be completely fine, you just need to jump to the emergency escape from here, and then from the top of it to his balcony."
Hux glanced down at the ten floors' worth of balconies under them.
"This is idiotic." He groaned.
"Hey, you wouldn't even change out of your uniform, what was I supposed to do? You want to see him, don't you?"
Hux didn't respond.
"You want to marry him, right?"
"Obviously. That'll happen no matter what." Hux snapped, glancing back at the open door that led to a nice, safe elevator, back to the first floor, back to his ship, back to living a blissful life of arranged marriage and meaningless wedding vows.
"Well, do you want to love him? Fuck him?"
Phasma pressed, still glimmering with excitement.
Hux set his jaw.
"That's very inappropriate, Phasma."
"But I'm not wrong!" She preened.
Hux scowled, and in a few choppy, awkward movements, scaled the railing.
"I'm going to die." He groaned.
"You can do it!" Phasma insisted.
Hux took a deep breath, though his heart was pounding against his ribs anyway, and leapt.
He shrieked shortly in a very undignified way, but then his chest made contact with metal, and he was holding a rung of the fire escape ladder for dear life.
Phasma cheered quietly.
"Now just climb!"
Four floors went by too quickly, and all of a sudden, Hux was hanging underneath Kylo's balcony. He could just barely peek his head up between the railing, but paused.
The doors were wide open.
Kylo wasn't alone.
The balcony lead straight into a living room, sleek and fashionable, with the several different screens mounted on the wall and most of the seating recessed into the floor.
Thanks to that, he had a clear view of the kitchen, equally sleek, where Kylo Amidala was sitting on a countertop, a bowl next to him, and a man had pulled up a chair, Kylo's leg in his lap.
He lifted a cloth and dunked it into the bowl, which Hux realized was full of bloody water.
"You really should just use your medical droid...these wounds are…"
Kylo gasped in a sharp breath abruptly. He twitched, and the man stopped moving. Kylo wasn't wearing anything, Hux realized, and had a blanket resting in his lap. All of his makeup had been cleaned away; his hair had been loosely tied up.
He was coated in bruises and cuts, which were slowly being bandaged.
Who was this man, that Kylo trusted him so closely?
Hux stared. He risked another step to get a better view, and stared.
Kylo looked so utterly different without the makeup, without the lavish clothes.
Hux couldn't help but have the urge to burst into the room, scoop up the Amidala, his Amidala, and whisk him off to the nearest medical droid himself. He seemed nothing short of battered, wincing just to lift his arm to wipe blood away from a slowly oozing cut on his shoulder.
"The droid records every injury it treats, and they're remarkably easy to hack...if anyone knew that information, it could easily be linked to-ah!"
Kylo cut himself off with a strangled cry as he pulled a sharp piece of what looked like shrapnel from the wound on his shoulder. It clattered to the counter from trembling hands.
"Hell, Benny! How close were you?!"
"Closer than Rey, thank the Force. Most of it landed in my shoulder, but the pieces are...everywhere."
He swallowed another pained sound as the man wrapped his leg in a long stretch of bandage.
"How are you supposed to keep this a secret when you get married? Not even Rey gets this badly wounded."
Kylo tried to shrug, but it seemed to cause immense pain.
"Well, Rey is also quite intimate with her wife. She takes great care to use medical droids from other places. I'll just...clean up my scars once they're almost healed. Almost all my clothes cover any wounds I could possibly get."
The man set his jaw.
"You know what I mean. The Emperor...takes what he wants. Can't you tell?"
"Of course I can." Kylo suddenly sounded defeated. The man finished wrapping his leg and looked up, beginning to poke at his shoulder. "But he's...so strange. Besides, Poe, do you really think I would let someone touch me if I didn't want them to?"
The man, Poe, didn't respond right away.
"I just…I don't even want to think about him touching you. He's...he's not good enough for you, Ben."
Kylo laughed weakly.
"I'm sure you think nobody is, but that's your job. What else is a good friend good for, if not thinking too highly of you?" He teased. But his mood changed quite abruptly. "I tried to make the separation, you know. Where the emperor ends and the man starts. But...it was so blurry, so uneven...it was like there wasn't a separation at all."
"So call off the wedding." The man nearly snapped, clearly tense. "Rey hates him, you know."
"I do know, but that's just part of her. She's far more like my father than her own."
"You're too much like Luke, then." Poe responded. "Why won't you just call off the wedding? You can pass the rest of the treaty without the marriage, I'm sure."
"I'm not." Kylo responded honestly. "I truly do think that, if I do not give at least the sacrifice of my ring finger, then Emperor Hux will refuse the sacrifice of the privacy of the plans of the First Order. We cannot lose the chance to have such valuable information."
"If you still plan to take apart the First Order, what happens to you when you're in bed with its leader?"
Kylo laughed.
"You act like I'll ever be in his bed. The man thinks of nothing but conquer and command; you act like I would ever actually be even remotely intimate with someone like that. I've never been intimate with...anyone. For good reasons, and you know them."
"Rey didn't follow the rules, and she's fine."
"She's fine because her wife doesn't want children! I'm already oversensitive because not only my mother, but also my grandfather, broke that rule, and you know as well as I that a man like Hux will someday demand a legacy, and probably a biological one. I could never have a biological child; they would be destroyed just from existing."
"So what happens when Hux wants children even if you refuse? He's the Emperor until he either steps down or is murdered; you'll only be Queen for another year, at most, and after that the best you can be is a Senator. You won't be on even playing ground anymore."
"I'll use mind control." Kylo said casually, like it was even a real thing, and Poe laughed.
"Alright, this conversation is not over, but you're beginning to scab; come on, that shrapnel needs to come out."
He stepped away. Kylo made a short sound and dropped his head, closing his eyes.
The countertop trembled just barely, and Kylo made weak pained noises as bits of metal began to float out of him.
Hux gaped.
There was no way he was seeing what he was seeing. An almost familiar heaviness came pressing into his senses, a blanket of calm draping over his mind.
Suddenly, though, all the bits came crashing down, and Kylo jumped up, almost collapsing with a shocked noise.
"Someone's here!"
"What?!" Poe cried, immediately scanning the room and reaching towards a small tube of metal on the counter.
"Wait." Kylo demanded, grabbing Poe's wrist and draping the blanket over his body. He looked down at the floor, seeming to concentrate hard.
He gasped again, and suddenly seemed to flush.
"Go home, Poe." Kylo murmured softly. "I'll take care of this."
Poe looked uncertainly from the bloodied counter to Kylo, but saw the look on his face and retreated slowly.
"I will see you again soon, Poe. Goodnight." Kylo said calmly.
"Good...goodnight." Poe responded, still tense as he left.
Kylo limped away, deeper into the flat, and called out,
"Won't you come in, Emperor Hux?"
Hux's breath stopped in his throat.
There was a sound from inside, and Kylo spoke again. "I know it's you out there; come inside, before my security shoots you off that ladder."
Hux briefly considered his options, and upon discovering that he really didn't have any options, climbed up a few more rungs and leapt awkwardly from the ladder to the balcony railing.
He stepped into the living space obediently, unable to bring himself to speak or try to defend himself.
The balcony doors closed behind him, but when he turned, he didn't see any automatic sensors. He looked about with admitted curiosity.
Out of view of the balcony, the open space split into a third 'room', with a dining table and a long bench on one side, chairs on the other. The room backed up against the kitchen's counter, with stools neatly pushed up to it.
There was a wall separating the living room from what Hux assumed was the bedroom, if the other balcony outside and the paper sliding doors set into the living room wall meant anything, but it did not go all the way up to the vaulted ceiling; he could see the exposed rafters on the other side.
There were two bookshelves loosely framing another door on the same wall as the door that lead out of the flat, across from the wall to the bedroom. These bookshelves were filled with mostly books but a few trinkets, too, though nothing blatantly personal. There were additional individual shelves placed impossibly high on the wall in the dining room opposite the bedroom, above even where the partial walls to the bedroom stopped, yet they were somehow stuffed with books too.
The space was mostly blacks and whites and chromes and glass, but each room had an accent color; the kitchen's was red, with the tile backsplash having a few crimson squares here and there, a bright red knife block, and, ironically, the blood still splattered on the counter; the living room's was purple, deep indigo in a glass bottle on the bookshelf and softer yet equally rich lilac in the pillows on the couches; the dining room's was green, vibrant lime in the light fixture and the seat cushions.
Light danced behind the paper doors, and Hux fought the urge to throw them open, catch Kylo while he was still covered in wounds, force him to tell the truth and seek true medical help.
No sooner had he thought that than Kylo's voice filled the air.
"So, Emperor. I did not take you for a stalker. Or a pervert, for that matter."
"I'm neither of those things." Hux tried, sounding like a child with his hand in the sweets jar.
"No? Why, then, may I ask, were you in such a dangerous position, just to spy on my home? I thought you would have hired someone else to do that, at the least."
There was a sound like a pen being capped from within the bedroom.
Hux cleared his throat.
"I...I had wanted to see you. I-I mean, not see you, I...wanted to speak with you. To, er, be in your company." He finished awkwardly.
There was a long stretch of silence, and then Kylo's voice came back, pitchy and almost shaking.
"Are we not still working on security resolutions? We would have seen one another in a little under five hours, but considering that it is the middle of the night, that's not terribly long."
"That's exactly why I wanted to see you, now. I...I wanted to leave politics at their table."
Another long silence.
The door suddenly slid open, and Kylo stepped out, arms crossed.
He had put on a floor-to-chin house robe, but it was made of moderately sheer black fabric and edged with heavy black lace; clearly, it was the first thing he had seen that would hide his bandages.
He seemed to have spent the rest of his time applying makeup, and rubbing at it until it looked like he had been wearing it for hours (Hux had to admit, he had done a good job). His hair was loose and hanging partially in his face.
Had Hux not known better, it would have looked like he had just woken up.
But, heavily made up and hidden under dark fabric, Hux felt like Kylo was trying to mask every part of himself.
"Oh?" Kylo asked, and Hux had to think hard about what he had been saying. "And what, then, did you want to discuss?"
Kylo stepped into the room, closing the door to the bedroom behind him.
"Anything else." Hux responded immediately. Kylo hummed softly, as if nothing that had just transpired had.
Indeed, Hux's own memories were beginning to fade sharply; what was that man's name, again?
"What man, Hux?" Kylo asked softly, and Hux's eyebrows shot up, his whole body tensing.
"I-I-Did I say that aloud?" He responded.
"Say what?" Kylo asked, tilting his head calmly.
What had Hux said?
How had he gotten here? Why was he here?
"You wanted to speak to me, I'd asked you about what." Kylo spoke, moving past Hux and into the living room. Was he limping? Why?
Kylo slowly reclined into one of the corners of the squarish couch, softly lifting a hand to his temple. He winced almost unnoticeably, a glistening dark ring blooming from his shoulder. Hux knew why, he knew, but it was like he was trying to see his own memory in water in his hands, and it was trickling away.
"I suppose...I would like to talk about you." Hux said lowly, dumbly pleased with how surprised Kylo seemed.
"Emperor, you know everything you must about me, I'm sure."
"I don't think so, not if I'm to marry you."
Kylo laughed suddenly, a sharp bark.
"I should hope that you're to marry me, considering you asked! Really, now, don't make me regret agreeing."
Kylo ended with a dainty sort of sigh, closing his eyes and yawning.
Had Hux woken him? It was certainly quite late out.
Hux looked up, and saw a bowl on the counter, surrounded by blood, and through the stupidity of his own thoughts, recognized it.
"What happened? Why is there so much blood?"
Kylo looked calmly from the kitchen back to Hux, and stood again.
"That isn't blood, do not worry. Don't you remember? I was working when you came in, you startled me. I knocked over my inkwell."
"My apologies." Hux responded immediately, though he admittedly remembered nothing of the sort.
Kylo's lips curved up gently. "Where are your handmaids? Aren't they supposed to always be by your side?" Hux asked blankly.
Kylo laughed.
"They do not stand around me at the discussion table, do they? Won't you sit down, Emperor? I'm sure you've had a long trip up here."
As obediently as anything, Hux stepped down into the recessed space, sitting in the opposite corner. Kylo seemed pleased.
"We're going to be married." Hux stated dumbly, just trying to start with something concrete. Kylo looked down, looked away. "Do you honestly want to be?"
Kylo looked up. He moved forward. His brown eyes seemed to flash with red.
"Do you?" He asked back.
Hux swallowed heavily.
Kylo smiled darkly. "I thought so."
Slowly, wearily, Kylo closed his eyes.
He sighed softly, and the painful heaviness slowly retreated from Hux's thoughts, but as soon as it was gone, it was as if it had never been there.
Kylo slid just slightly closer. He looked past Hux, to the stars outside, melancholic.
Hux watched in silence until it was unbearable.
"Your mother doesn't want you to get married to me. Your friends don't, either." Hux continued, feeling his confidence trickle away. Kylo made a short sound, like he wanted to laugh but didn't have the energy.
"It's not just because of you." Kylo began softly. "My mother is...a strange, brilliant woman. She knows full well of the situation, but as much as she believes in doing what is right for one's people, she also believes that you should only intimately attach yourself to people you truly care about...that you should only become close with someone because you love them, I suppose."
"Now, wait, which one does she feel you are doing?"
Kylo looked at Hux, unimpressed, and Hux did his best to shrug it off. "I'm just trying to ease the tension." He admitted.
Kylo almost smiled.
He moved slightly closer again.
"I can't say I honestly have much reason to marry anyone outside of politics. I've little to no interest in such attachments."
"Well...what would you like to happen, after we're married?" Hux asked, watching Kylo's face.
It seemed that Kylo hadn't thought that far ahead.
"I...I should like to remain quite as I am, though I know we are required to at least have a home we say we live in together. I must always be attentive of my people."
Kylo's shoulders eased, and the robe fell open just enough to expose a partial bandage. Hux had a single flash of recollection.
"Your people and your secrets. What are you hiding, Amidala?" He demanded.
Kylo sighed, resigned, and slipped closer. His shoulder was now almost touching Hux's.
"I hadn't wanted to do this, you know." He said softly.
Hux didn't have the time to ask what before Kylo had held his face with both hands. He brushed Hux's hair back, gently pressed his thumbs into his temples, and Hux collapsed forward against Kylo's chest. He found that he could not move, and Kylo shushed him briefly.
Hux blacked out.