#yellowsabered

“woah,” the reaction is more of a pleased surprise than genuine shock. poe’s an affectionate guy, and for all that he pokes at rey he still loves her, so a hug is nice, just a little unexpected. still, he wraps his own arms around her and squeezes tightly. “thanks, rey.”

he squints at her, like he’s tryin to decide how much he wants to humor her. luckily for both of them, and all of their friends, he’s in a good mood and happy to work with her here. his typical love of getting under her skin has been brushed aside, for the moment, by the importance of the situation. 

Despite actually never meeting, he does not like Rey, however if the TROS novel is anything to go off of he truly believes she can defeat Kylo. His hate for her is mainly because she is against the First Order, a member of the Resistance. He was raised on Imperial beliefs which are a bunch of lies and revisionist history, that Palpatine was a humble man from Naboo who rose to power and the Jedi betrayed him, which is why he thinks the new Republic and the Resistance are treacherous and war criminals; the siege of his home world help feed into these lies. That and the only force users he knows are Ren and Snoke who constantly use their abilities to they throw him around physically and reading his mind without permission making him hate all force users, believing they're all like that.

After exchanging words with her Hux will come up to the cynical conclusion that she's naïve and ridiculous for thinking there's good within anyone, he's an abused bastard who’s very paranoid and believes everyone is as bad as people in TFO. However, Kylo’s constant defeats by her is more enjoyable to him for petty reasons like how much younger she is, how he constantly loses to a starry-eyed novice. 

As for defecting; In the Before the Awakening novel, Hux was concerned about Finn because how he separated himself from the others after training so it wasn't completely a shock, it was more so that the program that his father spent years crafting that Hux ultimately altered after he took over his father's rule to rely on loyalty less physical punishments. He thought of him as a traitor, much like Kylo and Phasma did, that he was cowardly for carrying out orders on Tuanul in a very “ Oh. You won’t kill for us, but you will for the lying, loathsome war criminals ” way. Phasma was the closest thing he had to a friend so her demise helped fueled this hatred 

As for defecting himself and his beliefs changing; I have it where it's a number of things and not just I'm Petty(tm) fuck Kylo Ren like in canon. During the months leading up to TROS is when decided to leak sensitive information to the Resistance because the First Order was no longer the First Order, Ren’s rule solidified it as another Empire He never saw the FO as a continuation of the Empire, but rather its successor, believing the Empire fell due to internal flaws, whereas he sees the First Order as a more refined and pure version of what the Empire sought to become but never achieved and wasn’t too fond of the thought of repeating the mistakes of the past so Kylo Ren can live in a fantasy where he follows in his grandfather’s footsteps.

It started out as a plan to get rid of Ren by having the Resistance do the heavy lifting and claiming the throne so as he fell, however, when Gallius Rax gave him the murderous children from the Jakku mines when he was very young; He was told that the future of the Empire was within the hands of the children that he and his father would train but as more Imperial veterans were rewarded with unearned promotions (he hates old Imperials, see tlj novel) being stripped of commanding power, assigned a babysitter in the form of his father's friend and likely childhood abuser; General Allegiant Pryde, plus the secret regime that was formed on Exegol in the from of the Final Order proved that no longer true and felt used and betrayed.

“They’ll be looking for me. ‘Should be on my way.”