just another tramp of hearts

Finn’s heart is in his throat. His clothes are starting to feel kind of tight. “Are we gonna do this?”

Kylo Ren — damn it, Ben, always Ben now — makes a weird sound of assent.

“Okay, so we’re gonna do this. Are you going to get undressed, or what?”

“I don’t particularly care.” Ben’s flat on his back on the mattress, big legs splaying, and the shape of him there is both erotic and infuriating. His legs are thick with muscle and they are long, tapering down to his insolent bare feet — but Finn’s eyes flick back up to his crotch and he can’t really help but wonder…

“I care!”

“Then show me.”

He’s not going to undress him like some big, stupid training dummy — but in an instant Ben’s sitting up, pulling Finn’s leg down by the ankle and crooking up his knee. Finn kicks out, reaching for Ben’s wrist on reflex to yank him up for a fight — but now they’re clinched together, like some absurd grappling move. He can lever himself up against Ben’s body and press him back. Ben might be bigger but Finn isn’t a weakling.

Ben doesn’t resist him. He squares his jaw and gives Finn a vaguely haughty look down the slope of his long mug, but he doesn’t resist. Looking him in the face, looking at his big liquid eyes and ultra-busted nose and red raw mouth, Finn feels something — a tug, an affinity, something. Warm like wine, and full, and there — Finn pulls him in, chest to chest, and face to face despite the difference in their heights.

He puts a meaningful hand on the inside of Ben’s squirming leg. “You know how to do this part, right? I don’t have to teach you how to jerk off?”

Which seems like a good start, even if it only gets Ben mad. Well, he’s sure as hell not going to tell Finn he doesn’t know how this goes, right? And if he’s as much of a virgin as he seems like he is, he probably has lots of experience with this specific protocol, but he adds a lot of unnecessary bravado to it anyway. He must forget that Finn can see his face. Finn can watch him flinch and grimace and tremble.

Finn shimmies out of his pants but not his briefs; Ben makes the rueful concession of stripping off his shirt, or at least letting Finn tug it down off his shoulders in the throes of passion.The long hair is kind of surprising — short haircuts were standard-issue for Stormtroopers, and his own was only starting to grow out, Finn was going to have to do something about that sooner or later. And of course there were people, somewhere in the galaxy, who had long hair, but he’d never pictured Kylo Ren-the-guy-in-the-mask that way and now his hair is just long, falling everywhere and tangling over Finn’s hands when he puts his hands back to cup his neck when he kisses him.

It smells just the same as the soap in the barracks level showers — not like strange majestic woods from other planets’ trees, or like sweat and soot and something uniquely Ben, but just like soap. Familiar. And yet not.

Finn buries his face against Ben’s shoulder and feels him stiffen a little, feels him lift his hips against the new edge of contact. Ben makes a sort of breathless sound between his lips and Finn’s cock jumps.

Why’s he making this all so weird? What makes this weirder than anything else they’ve done so far? Finn can feel the brutal intensity radiating off him and somehow it’s worse than taking him down in a fight, because now he has to be afraid he’ll hurt him — and why would he even be able to do that, here and now? Finn’s not bad at sex, he’s actually by all accounts pretty good at sex, it’s just his former would-be murderer is looking at him with massive liquid eyes and his chest is pebbling up in the cold, his nipples are hardening —

Every muscle in Finn’s body is zinging with corresponding electricity.

“Please, touch me.” That voice is a deep low rasp. The vibrations of it travel down between their bodies, the tectonic line where they’re pressed together, and right there—

“Yeah.” Finn’s own voice comes out low and dry, without a trace of deflection in it. “Yeah, sure. How do you want it?”

“I don’t care.”

At least he said please. That’s a start. Finn’s blood is thumping in his ears and his undershirt feels too-tight and he doesn’t care that Ben protests how little he cares, he just wants to touch. Finn unzips Ben’s trousers in a hasty yank, already one move too many and a waste of time — he pulls him off in quick perfunctory strokes, moving back to familiar motions from the barracks washrooms in the expectation of doing all the work, but Ben’s hands are shaking when they find him in return. He touches Finn back, peeling down the edge of his briefs to free his erection, but he does all of it like he’s made of glass, like Finn’s too precious to touch except for the flinching of the long muscles of his legs as they tighten around him.

Kylo Ren’s cock is heavy in his hands — surely there’s something you say in situations like this, you tell someone how great they are or how great their dick is, all the stuff you say to barracks-mates and furtive fuckbuddies doesn’t fit in here in the space between them. Finn doesn’t know how to work him, doesn’t know what this guy needs out of this as desperately as he does, but he needs to be here, now, and not someplace else. Not in a simulation room or a rattling metal bunk or scanning the horizon hopelessly for somebody he knows.

He must do it right, or maybe wrong, because his thumb slips against the flushed head of Ben’s cock and Ben flinches up against him with the length of his body. “I’ve got you,” he says, as Ren — Ben, damnit, Ben — leans forward into his touch. He’s only using one hand to cup Finn now, but he’s gripping his bicep with the other to steady himself, not like a bruise but like a reverence. His dark eyes are narrowing to gashes and his mouth is open just a little bit, wet on the lower lip and really red - as his slippery hand brings Finn off with the hard edge of it snagging, the roughened callus-patch tugging at skin and making Finn stagger to catch his breath.

When Finn makes a sound, Ben furrows his brow and ducks his head. “Is this—”

“Yes,” Finn says, and he adds, “you’re doing great,” just to see the way it flinches across Ben’s lowered face like a spreading heat — he can feel it in his hands, the way that works on him. He can probably finish himself up fast, especially if Ben keeps raking him clumsily with his fingernails like that — an accident, or not an accident — but the two of them have all the time in the galaxy.

“You’re good at this,” Finn says. “That thing you’re doing. But there’s lots of stuff I could show you, you know that?”

Ben lifts his hips against him and edges back against the mattress, Finn lowers his head like he’s going to sink down and take the head of his cock between his lips. He’s not going to do that, not right now, but he wants Ben to think about it. A red flush is spreading down Ben’s naked chest, sweeping over freckles and scars.

“You wouldn’t,” Ben whispers through gritted teeth, but his head is bent stiffly against his own bare reddened shoulder like he can hardly stand it. Finn could laugh at him when he’s like this. He could kiss him.

“You want it, though. I like you like this. I like you better.”

That just about trips the switch, that takes him past the edge more than the hard work of Finn’s slick palm. Ben spills between his fingers, hot and wet, and Finn feels as if he’s on the brink of fainting — he’s trapped on the edge, trapped by a paralysis of pleasure. Finn leans forward with his slippery hands braced on the low ledge of Ben’s hips and tugs a kiss from his mouth. He can feel the groan Ben makes practically in his teeth, in his own chest, in the pit of him. Ben’s ribcage is heaving with gasps, and Finn slides up against the outer edge of his long-muscled leg, where the cloth of his trousers is chafing down, to bring himself off at last.

They lie together afterward, Finn’s cheek pressed to the center of Ben’s broad chest, feeling him breathe. Ben’s big hand is on his shoulder, and the scale of his bodies would make Finn feel small if he couldn’t feel the fluttering heartbeat against his skin.