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Proposal
Hux wanted to be Grand Marshal, and he wasn’t above any method of getting there. Honestly, it was Ren’s fault if he reacted to his attempts at seduction. Although many of Hux’s subordinates had tried the same with him, he’d never accepted. Naturally, he felt even more superior to Ren. As soon as their relationship had begun, Hux had begun to map out every way it could end or flourish. Ren running him through with a lightsabre, Ren abandoning him on the most lavish Republican planet he could think of, Ren throwing him out of an airlock, crowned Supreme Leader after throwing Ren out of an airlock… So, yes, Hux had always known marriage were one-hundred-fifteen out of eleven thousand outcomes. If Ren proposed, he’d get down on one knee and pull out a ring like the spoiled prince he was, he supposed. He himself would send Ren a form to fill out if he were the one to propose.
Ren had always thought he wanted a force-sensitive partner. Someone with whom he could train and meditate and discuss the force. He hadn’t been looking for anything more than a physical relationship when he first propositioned Hux. He spend the days chasing after the girl and the nights in Hux’s quarters, which slowly turned into his home. Hux promised he’d never make an attempt on his life within the confinement of his quarters or – after an incident - in a five feet radius around them. He was well aware Hux was still the same slimy sycophant he’d always been, but he even preferred it that way. The scavenger might have fallen in love with him, but Hux chose to love him – or at least act like it. And if he didn’t read his mind, he could pretend it was true. His life was nicer with him than without him and he wanted to ensure it would stay that way. Hux, however, was as force-sensitive as a brick and he couldn’t perform one of the many force rituals that bound one another for all eternity he had always dreamed of as a child. Besides, legal paperwork would work better on keeping Hux than any magic nonsense, as he liked to call it.
Blood flowed down Ren’s cut knuckles, pooling on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor. Shards of the mirror he’d hit laid around him. His screams of rage as he pounded his fists against the wall drowned out the sound of Hux’s footsteps.
“Ren,” Hux said.
“Ren,” Hux said, more urgently.
“REN! For kriff’s sake, you have a space view room. A hole in the wall will suck both of us out and end in gruesome death for us. If you want to vandalize something, destroy the kitchen wall. Mitaka’s quarters are adjacent.”
Ren stopped and growled something unintelligible. His clenched fists were shaking.
“What do you need? How can I help?”
“You can’t,” Ren snapped. “I’m being torn apart again. Both sides of the force battle in my head and I…” Ren lowered his voice to nothing more than a whisper, “and I just feel so helpless. Pain helps me focus in this whirlwind.”
Hux stepped closer, approaching him with soft steps like a lothcat would walk in proximity to a nexu. Although lothcats would try to flee and he was nearing the uncontrollable predator.
He took Ren’s bleeding hands in his and guided them to his waist.
“There. If you lose control, you’ll squish all my internal organs. Focus on not hurting me. Focus on being gentle.”
Ren breathed deeply. A finger twitched occasionally against his belly, making Hux wonder if this had been a terrible idea, but Ren never hurt him. After a few minutes, he loosened his grip on Hux’s waist and pulling him into a real embrace, nuzzling his nose against his neck.
“Marry me,” he mumbled. “We’ll be co-Supreme Leaders.”
“Yes,” he said while greedily thinking of all the old Imperials he’d make lick his boots and ways to dispose of Ren in a humane manner after he’d been so sweet right now.
“Once you’re co-Supreme Leader, I’ll step down. You can run the order better than me.”
The words hit him like a Star Destroyer running lightspeed. He wouldn’t need to assassinate Ren to end up on top and Ren wouldn’t kill him for his attempts.
As they laid next to each other in bed that night, Hux had an existential crisis because none of his eleven thousand scenarios had ended with him and Ren both alive.
Wedding Planning
Hux wanted a grandiose display of the First Order’s power with Stormtroopers marching and banners flying in the wind behind TIE-fighters zooming through the air. Maybe they’d destroy a planet for fun. Their wedding should serve as a reminder of how powerful the First Order was.
Ren wanted flower bouquets and champagne and all of the First Order’s officers who were once stationed on the Finalizer, which he intended to have repaired as a wedding gift to Hux, to attend. He wanted the grand ceremony his grandparents hadn’t been able to have.
“What is this?”
Hux squinted, at the datapad shoved into his face.
“That’s the script for the wedding.”
“The camera will be on us for two minutes in total. It won’t even be on us for our first kiss as a married couple. You can’t be serious.”
“I’m totally serious. You, on the other hand, think we are playing some fairytale for children.”
“I’m not! Weddings are supposed to be romantic, not a war tactic.”
“Now that’s just republican nonsense.”
“Hux, I love you. And the Force tells me you love me. At least since I told you of my plan to make you the one and only Supreme Leader. Why can’t the galaxy know that? If the display of power is so important to you, we can force all our, ah, sorry, your subjects to watch a propaganda video afterwards.”
Hux’s cheeks turned red. “I- No, their eyes will get sore from staring at a screen for that long.”
“Then they’ll have to watch it the next day. But, Hux, why don’t you tell me what’s really your problem here and stop searching for excuses?”
“Suffering at the display of us talking sweet nothings to each other for multiple hours while knowing what we’ll do once it’s over won’t boost morale.”
“I can’t believe it! You’re actually embarrassed for the world to know you feel love.”
“What? No! It’s not good for morale!”
“And forcing everyone to watch public executions is? I’m still Supreme Leader and I veto against this script,” Ren said, ripping it in two.
“I don’t want to have a republican wedding of overconsumption!”
“And I don’t want to declare my love in front of ten thousand stormtroopers!”
They glared at each other. It was clear neither was going to budge on it.
“What if we got a wedding planner? We’ll tell them what we want and what we don’t want and then they can try to find a compromise.”
“Right. Because they won’t take the current Supreme Leader’s wishes more into consideration.”
“Why don’t you ask Mickey? Or Mouse? Or whatever the name of that guy you trust is.”
“Mitaka.” Hux contemplated it for a moment. “I’ll ask him.”
When Mitaka got the order to be their wedding planner, he was swimming in excitement and drowning in nervosity. He was happy for the General and himself since it was something different than the usual breathless call to lock down whatever conference room Lord Ren and the General had convened in for creative conflict solution. Nevertheless, he was extremely scared for his life. It needed to be perfect. General Hux would accept nothing less.
Cake/Decorations/Skulls and Ashes
Hux wanted a red and black colour scheme, the colours of the First Order. A few banners around the altar. An arch made of Hux’s skull collection to be wed beneath. There’d be no cake, but ration bars, showing they’d focus not on their own pleasure, but that no one would go hungry during their reign. Maybe he’d indulge Ren and have them pressed into fun shapes for a change like a circle.
Ren initially wanted black and orange, but he knew Hux had already enough trouble with the fresh recruitment wave of red hair fetishists every propaganda video with him starring in it brought. Maybe he could talk Hux into a carrot cake. The flower kids should spread the ashes of their enemies. Ren’s and Hux’s enemies, that was. The flower kids were far too young to have mortal enemies, although Hux had started early, too.
Their preferences were taken into consideration, but Mitaka realised if the Order shouldn’t go down in flames the next day, he’d have to settle on something less chastising and morbid.
Mitaka arranged a black and gold colour scheme. Flowers would be at the entrance, but not close to the seatings in case someone was allergic. There’d be a chocolate cake with coffee cream. Ren had requested to put orange food colouring into the batter and although Mitaka was scared shitless as Ren destroyed his office in a fit of range after his request had been denied, he stood his ground.
Wedding Clothes
Hux wanted to wear his uniform. And he just begged Ren to wear clothes that weren’t smothered in blood.
Ren wanted to wear one of his grandmother’s dresses. Her wedding dress looked horrible with his complexion and made him look sick, but she had more colourful dresses anyway. In his ultimate fantasy, Hux would wear jedi robes, but he knew when the battle was lost before it had begun.
Mitaka dyed a red robe with golden embroidery of Queen Amidala black. He melted the golden headpiece and spun it to a fine yarn, which he used to upgraded one of the standard uniforms by using the golden thread to sew it together. He’d been contemplating to hand over the task to one of the First Order’s tailors, but he had mended enough injuries inflicted by Lord Ren to get the job done.
Family/Invitees
Hux laid an envelope on Phasma’s grave. He didn’t care if someone else found it. If anyone bothered enough to fly to Parnassos to visit her bones, he’d like them to be invited anyway.
Ren invited Rey via force. She denied his request. BB-8 came.
Mitaka send out invites to all high ranking officers of the First Order and other important funders. To those, he attached a gift list that would turn the wedding into the biggest fundraising event the Order had ever had.
If you wish for the couple:
…to go to hell, gift them your absence. (The First Order will take care your absence will be permanent. In all matters.)
…to have a happy marriage, gift them land for a vacation home. (Vacation homes might be used for military training.)
…to have a prosperous marriage, gift them a star destroyer.
…to crush the Resistance and obliterate their enemies, gift them a fleet of TIE-fighters.
It seemed no one dared but gift all three of the last gift requests.
Wedding Traditions
Hux would have liked to implement the tradition of Arkanis of beheading the enemies of their loved one, but then they’d have to kill all their guests, and the wedding would take hours.
Ren brought Mitaka a small piece of flimsiplast.
“Those are the wedding traditions I want,” he said and left.
On the flimsiplast was an access code to a room full of beeping computer servers and folders with no end in sight. Mitaka spend a week of his life reading through the weirdest marriage traditions and hadn’t even gotten through a tenth of Lord Ren’s suggestions. He grabbed a random folder, pulled out three random flimsiplasts and swore to never revisit that place again.
He had to, though, when he read through the traditions he had chosen. They were too lewd to put them into words and the General would suffer from a heart attack if he even heard about any of them. He spend another nine weeks of his life reading and traumatising himself.
In the end, one of the traditions he settled on was the Alderaanian weaving of the flower kids’ baskets together. Hux, after he had researched all there was to know on the flexibility and formidability of Alderaanian twigs for hours, weaved a perfect basket in the form of the First Order’s logo.
“Hux, I thought we agreed to keep the wedding appropriate for children. That looks to me like your- Ouch!“
Hux had kicked him.
“Shut up. You’re just jealous.”
Mitaka was convinced Lord Ren’s “basket”, which seemed more like a bunch of loose twigs, was held together by the force.
He’d planned on Tattooine’s tradition of throwing sand at the newlyweds, but he caught Lord Ren vacuuming his office the next day and the sand was nowhere to be found.
Corellia had the tradition of bathing one’s hands in blood before the ceremony and washing it off at the altar as the vows were spoken. He ruled that out quickly. During the wedding rehearsal, he left them before the altar for two seconds to see if he could find any emergency sand. When he came back, the prints of their hands on their clothes were very suggestive.
Ceremony
Hux had assumed they’d walk to the altar, sign the papers, speak a few promises that weren’t legally binding and leave.
Ren was too busy threatening Mitaka with his death if he dared to follow through on Hux’s wishes for him to have the time to think about what he wanted.
Mitaka made them sit down and write their own vows. The First Order standard vows didn’t seem very romantic: “I take you as my marriage partner and we’ll be married until one of us dies or we divorce.” No, they deserved something better. And although Mitaka had feared, he’d have to rewrite their entire speeches, he only had to cross out a few lines of Ren talking about features of Hux’s body that shouldn’t be mentioned during a public broadcast and of Hux comparing Ren to oats.
Their wedding was one a perfect balance of Hux and Ren and something resembling sanity that definitely came from Mitaka’s suggestions. TIE-fighters zoomed over their heads as the pair marched down the aisle together behind the Knights of Ren throwing tiny diamonds pressed from Ren’s enemies’ ashes and little flowers carved from Hux’s skull collection in the air.
There was no officiant. Their power derived from no one but themselves. If they wanted something, they could make it happen.
Ren took an ink pot and poured it over their joined hands on the altar. He carded the molecules through the skin around their ring fingers until they were weaved into their skin.
Ren’s vows concentrated on force metaphors and making Hux co-Supreme Leader. When he renounced his own title of Supreme Leader, every attendee held their breath. They all expected Hux to pull a dagger out his sleeve.
He didn’t.
“Kylo, I love you,” he simply said.
Reception
Hux hadn’t even considered there’d be a wedding event after the wedding and Ren had assumed they’d skip it anyway for a private celebration, but when he saw Hux’s shimmering eyes at his old crew toasting to them as they joined the reception, he promised he wouldn’t drag Hux away until he proposed it. Besides, the cantina band played and he had to show Hux some of his smuggler dance moves.
Ren had a great time with his Knights pranking the uptight Imperial guests they had only invited to boast their power and who had only come to show face. Hux had a great time joking around with his old crew and telling them they’d all be stationed on the Finalizer again once the repairs were through after their Honeymoon. Hux being Hux used the opportunity to demand them to swear their loyalty to him. He challenged them to get rid of one of his enemies. By the end of the night, every Imperial had dropped dead.
Elopement
Unbeknownst to all, General Engell had played her own game all along. She had arranged for every public viewing to serve incredible amounts of alcohol and to take place next to a wedding administration. The next day, their Empire recorded an incredible rise in marriages. Unfortunately, General Engells, who had wanted to harvest more children for the Stormtrooper Program, was amidst the poor Imperials whose celebrations had stopped short.
Wedding Night
Hux had thought they’d have a glass of wine together, cuddle on his couch and come up with new laws for their Empire. When Ren would make a particularly insightful policy proposal, he’d take things to the bedroom.
Ren had less steps in his plan. Clothes off. Bed. Love.
When they returned to their quarters in the morning, they were both too tired for anything and fell asleep still dressed in their wedding clothes huddled together so close that if they had died and their flesh rotted, no archaeologist would be able to know whose bones belonged to whom.
They caught up with what they missed that night during their honeymoon on Elphrona. A hundredfold.
Vow Renewal / Divorce and Remarriage
Hux had always known they might end in divorce. At least a forced one when he’d stage a coup, but then Ren had proposed for him to be Supreme Leader. After that, he clung on to the hope of keeping Ren until they both died. He hoped he’d die before Ren. He didn’t want to live a minute without him.
Ren assumed they’d be together forever until the force part them since Hux had zero chance of coming back as a force ghost. He’d already looked into graveyards for Hux. If he was going to ghost around where Hux’s body was buried for all eternity, he wanted a beautiful planet, at least.
They didn’t end in a divorce, but their marriage didn’t hold forever. It ended on the day the First Order lost to the Resistance and Hux had to fool a dozen therapists he couldn't be hold accountable for his crimes because he was just a scared, traumatised soldier with a hurting inner child.
Hux would argue that they were still married and Ben was just dramatic, but Ben insisted on another marriage after he turned from Kylo Ren to Ben Solo again.
“It’s just a name!”
“It’s an identity!”
“Oh, so now I am a widower.”
“Yes! You were married to Kylo Ren and now you’ll have to marry Ben Solo to be with me!”
“Are you saying I wasn’t married to you the whole time? Because I quite liked Kylo Ren and I’m not sure I want to be with a man who thinks a name change will clear him of all his sins because if that’s the case then I’ll just name myself Chad Heribert and the fact I killed billions will be forgiven.”
“That’s not how the force w-“
“KRIFF OFF!”
Hux did come around to registering himself as a widower and remarrying Be Solo, but he couldn’t be moved to do more than sign the contract. Ben was satisfied.
Wild Card
Hux thought death would be nothing. His brain would stop working and that was it.
So he was very surprised when he became part of the force after one of the Resistance members holding a grudge had shot him. The force was weird. He could feel everything. He spend the first weeks of being a force ghost apologising to every plant he had ever trampled on until he realised there was a difference between sentient beings and sentient beings with feelings. The plants didn’t care, but he ran from an army of Porg ghosts he had eaten when alive for a week.
On Arkanis, one of his classmates he had gotten rid of back in the academy sometimes appeared for a moment as a flickering force ghost, contorting his mouth to a scream full of anguish before fading away again. Every encounter shook him to his core, but he came back anyway. Maybe he’d find his mother. Or better not. If she had been force sensitive, he’d have to ask him why she let his father take him away anyway.
He avoided the Hosnian system at all costs.
On one of his nebulae walks around the Resistance Base he had lived on the last months of his life he saw his husband. His husband who was being hit by a small, green creature with their walking stick?
He waited and watched. Partially because he enjoyed it greatly and partially because he had all the time that was to come. He didn’t want to think about physics too much and that there may be an end to time if he chose to believe in the Big Crunch or Big Rip theory over the Big Freeze one. He should have looked those three up when he had been able to use a datapad.
Once the green creature had satisfied its rage and left, Hux came out of his hiding spot.
Ben gaped at him in shock. If he hadn’t been dead, he would have died from a heart attack.
“Hey.”
Ben was still motionless.
“So… when did you die? If that’s an appropriate thing to ask.”
“I- Hux, I can’t believe it. You shouldn’t be able to…” Ben took a deep breath without inhaling any air. They didn’t need air. It was very weird. He’d tried to figure out the biology behind all this but when he realised he was able to shove his hand through his chest, he was too grossed out for further experiments. “I was executed shortly after I executed the one executing you for executing someone he knew who’d executed a member of the First Order who had executed someone else. Probably someone who had executed one of the First Order guys again.” Ben shook his head. "I don't know what happened to your body. I'm sorry. I've been trying to find it since I became a force ghost."
Hux let the fact Ben had failed to protect his body from desecration - all his life he'd set things aflame but now he had failed? - pass and focused on the more urgent issue.
“This isn’t your doing? I thought you performed some sordid force ritual on me while I was asleep.”
“No, you can’t become force sensitive just like that if you don’t have any midichlorians in your blood.”
“Wait, what? Midichlorians are in your blood and they determine whether you are force-sensitive?”
Ren nodded.
Suddenly everything made sense.
“Do you remember the… uhm… that one night of our honeymoon where you indulged everything I wanted and I used my dagger? “Uh… This is weird. You know how ibuprofen or some other medicine works by being absorbed into your blood. I think midichlorians work the same way.”
“Yes, but I was the only one being cut. It’s not like we transferred… Oh my- you kriffing licked it up!”
Hux’s cheeks flushed bright blue, but his attention was pulled to the scar on Ren’s face. It had reappeared.
“Hah! I kriffing knew it! Kylo Ren and Ben Solo are the same guy!”
“Shut up,” Ren grumbled.
“No, you’ll be hearing about it forever,” Hux promised and kissed him.