13. Chapter 13

            There’s a part of Rey, the part that wants to forget her mission, forget their allegiances, forget the war, that could get used to being roused by Kylo Ren. This morning, like the first morning they’d managed to successfully navigate having sex, he crawls into bed and caresses her until she opens her eyes. Unlike that first morning, she notices the telltale signs of his daily training regimen: sweat-dampened hair, flushed skin. When she questions why he wouldn’t wake her for her company, he claims that she still needed rest after her near-fatal encounter with a glass of poisoned wine.

            Ironic, then, that today’s romp culminates in Rey on top of him, straddling his hips, with one hand planted on his chest and the other braced next to his head for support as she rides him. She doesn’t mind. Kylo with his eyes shut, his lips parted, black hair spread out on the black pillowcase, is an unbeatable view, and she wouldn’t trade anything for the way he writhes and moans beneath her.

            The boundaries of their bodies tend to shift and blur when he’s inside of her, but Rey manages to maintain just enough of herself, this time, to appreciate the newness of the experience. She savors rocking her hips up and back on him, how when she pauses he seamlessly picks up the slack, bucking up into her, how he seems to fit against her and into her in all the ways she’s come to like.

            She could get used to this, too.

            But the moment is broken by the sound of a commotion. Outside, beyond the glass panes separating the bedchamber from the sitting area and beyond the two black doors, someone is shouting. Instinctively, Rey looks over her shoulder toward the source of the ruckus, and in that moment Kylo shifts his grip on her hip and flips her onto her back.

            “Oi!” she exclaims, bracing her hands against his chest. “Not fair.”

            “Don’t worry.” Kylo rolls his hips into her, slowly, effectively stifling any of her complaints. He spares the doors a quick glance, then turns his attention back to her. “Just Hux. I’ve said I’m not to be disturbed.”

            “Mm.” Rey closes her eyes and lets her head fall back against the pillow. “Well, that’s fine.”

            “Except for an emergency.” Kylo doesn’t stop moving, and he plants one hand on the mattress for leverage. His eyes narrow slightly as he concentrates, listening for something beyond sound, seeking out Hux’s intent in the Force. “Ah— hmm, he seems to think this is one.”

            Rey’s eyes spring open. “Sorry, do you mean he’s coming in here?”

            Instead of answering her question, Kylo lowers himself to press his chest against hers and nibble her ear. Rey lets her hands slip around to his shoulders. Admittedly, this is very distracting, and under most circumstances it would successfully divert her attention. But not this one.

            “Ha— no!” She smacks his shoulder, a little too hard to be just a swat. “Answer my question!”

            “Every once in a while he gets fed up with me and argues his way in here, yes.” He grunts against her neck as he thrusts into her again and Rey presses her lips together to stifle the moan she knows he wants to draw out of her. “But as we established—nngh—yesterday, I’m to play the role of the tyrant with you.”

            “You are a tyrant.”

            “And I don’t think a tyrant would stop for the likes of Hux.”

            Kylo sucks gently at the side of her neck as he plucks one of her hands from his shoulder. He circles her wrist with his own hand and pins her arm up above her. Instead of resisting, as she knows she should, Rey just sighs, exasperated, a little amused, but not quite angry. “You just don’t want to stop,” she accuses.

            He picks up his head to look down at her, his eyes practically glowing. “Do you?”

            Rey frowns hard up at him, because he knows her mind, so he knows she doesn’t. They’re well started down this path, both a little too drunk on each other to want to stop for anything. But he also knows she’s not thrilled about being seen like this by anyone who isn’t him, and especially not by Hux. Still, the idea that they have to keep selling their relationship as one thing while it’s actually another is compelling for reasons she’s thus far managed to keep hidden from Kylo. It plays in her favor for Hux to view her as an unwilling captive. That way he won’t suspect her of being anything else.

            Even so.

            Kylo senses her reservations, although Rey keeps her exact thoughts obscured. He says quickly, “I’ll make it up to you.”

            “You’d better.”

            “I will.”

            With a sigh, Rey flicks her fingers, willing the Force to lift the covers and drape them over Kylo to his waist, shielding their lower halves from the view of any prying beady eyes. Kylo huffs, looking mildly put out, and she says, “You can save your measuring contests for when I’m not around.”

            “There’s no contest,” he assures her.

            Rey looks at the ceiling. “I really do hate you.”

            “No,” he says quietly. “You don’t.”

            He lowers his head again, this time to get in one last kiss before their unwanted guest arrives. Rey kisses him back, enjoying it while she can. When he moves to pull away, she murmurs, “How hard should I struggle?”

            The corners of his mouth turn up against her lips. “My offer from yesterday stands. Strike at me if you wish.”

            “I might. You deserve it.”

            “So I do,” he says, rocking his hips into hers once again.

            The doors hiss open, and Rey hears Hux stride in. He can’t immediately locate them, obscured as they are by the glass panes, but he makes the correct assumption that Kylo must be in his bedchamber and starts toward it. Kylo, looking down at Rey, can’t see the intruder, but Rey can, just a bit, over his shoulder.

            And she has to admit that the expression of utter shock and disgust on Hux’s face when he comes into view does make this a little bit worth it.

            “Oh, good god,” he blurts out.

            As if they’ve rehearsed it, Rey immediately flings her free arm across her chest and tries to squirm out from under Kylo, but he grabs that arm with his unoccupied hand and pins it, too, above her head. Rey hisses at him, even though through their bond they both know that his shoulder shields her breasts from Hux’s sight. Without turning to look, Kylo says, “General. I said I wasn’t to be disturbed.”

            Hux clears his throat and tries to smooth his features into a mask of disinterest, but he can’t quite rid himself of the wrinkle of distaste in his nose. “I understand that,” he says, and to Rey’s horror, instead of retreating, he paces around to one side of the bed, hands folded behind his back. “I am only here because there are certain events you have mandated that I report directly.”

            Kylo, perceiving Rey’s growing discomfort, lowers himself to her again so Hux can only really see her face. He shifts his hips, and Rey groans. She makes a show of attempting to yank her arm out of his grip without actually using too much force, her face contorted by feigned fury. Kylo says, “What events?”

            Hux lets his eyes slide over Rey on his way to casting them up to the ceiling, where Kylo would want them. When his gaze meets hers, Rey bares her teeth at him, but that just makes him smirk. “Rebel troop movements.”

            Both Rey and Kylo still.

            “Merely a blip on our radar,” Hux continues, his smirk spreading. His eyes flicker back to Rey’s face, noting the distress she now doesn’t need to fake. “In the Western Reaches. Could be nothing, but I presumed that you’d rather stay informed.”

            It’s not nothing, Rey knows, although she shields that thought from Kylo. Navigating the Unknown Regions’ maze of gravity wells and black holes requires a number of complicated hyperspace jumps; Rey knows this from journeying to Ahch-To in the Falcon. Wherever the Dreadnoughts the Resistance is targeting are located, it would take the fleet days to reach from Akiva even with faster-than-light travel. They must have already started moving.

            Kylo lifts his head. “You might have hailed me via hologram.”

            “I might have, Supreme Leader, but you weren’t responsive,” says Hux, and although he’s taking some pains to moderate his tone he still practically snarls it. “Aside from your... morning exertions, no one has seen you in days.”

            Kylo’s eyes narrow. “I don’t need to justify myself to you, General.”

            “You certainly don’t,” says Hux, carefully not looking at Rey.

            Rey is less concerned with what’s in Hux’s mind and more concerned with what’s in Kylo’s. He guards his thoughts too, which is never a good sign but especially not in this moment. She senses in the Force around him that even the newfound peace he’s gained with her in the past few days isn’t enough to completely divert him from his quest to destroy those who oppose him. That worries her. Isn’t she here, after all, to prevent him from calling off that gala and chasing down the Resistance fleet?

            “What is your command?” Hux prompts.

            When Kylo opens his mouth to respond, Rey seizes the opportunity, wrests one of her wrists from his grip, and slaps him across his cheek, her palm briefly connecting with the rough line of his scar tissue. It’s a light slap, more for show than anything else, but it pulls his attention away from the problem at hand and back to her. Moreover, she feels his arousal spike, and his cock twitches, which she isn’t anticipating and doesn’t intend to happen. But it works for her purposes, because he seizes her arm again and bucks into her, hungrily. For a moment their playacting fades away, and Hux fades away, too, as they reconnect in the heady, needy way they always do when they have sex.

            Rey almost forgets to fake her loathing when he makes her whine from the back of her throat until she feels Hux’s eyes on them again and knees Kylo’s thigh to remind him to focus. He slows, and manages to grit out, “What’s your— assessment?”

            This might be no better, Rey realizes. From what she knows of Hux’s tactics, such as they are, they’re engineered to show off the First Order’s military might. Surely pursuing and eliminating the rebel fleet would accomplish that goal. But Hux surprises her by saying, “If Organa’s rabble are coming, let them come.”

            Kylo raises his eyebrows.

            “We’re two days away from the gala,” Hux elaborates. “The greatest demonstration of our capabilities. It would be suicidal for them to stage an attack now.”

            Kylo studies Rey, pinned underneath him. “Indeed. But the Resistance is determined to self-destruct.” He jerks his chin down at her. “This one certainly seems to have a death wish.”

            “She just needs more taming,” Hux remarks.

            “That is not up to you,” Kylo barks. “Leave us.”

            Hux bows his head with deference that may or may not be mocking. As he does, he catches Rey’s eyes again. Rey doesn’t know how to interpret the look he gives her, although she knows she doesn’t like it. It’s not quite lustful, more assessing. Curious.

            “Yes, Leader Ren,” he says, the smirk returning to his lips. “Rey, always a... pleasure.”

            She growls at him and makes as if to sit up, but Kylo pushes her back to the mattress. Rey looks up at him, meeting his eyes, and they very nearly hold their breath until Hux leaves. The moment they hear the doors close, they both start moving again in a frenzy, him bearing down on her, her pressing up to him, tangling her hands in his hair, knotting her legs around his waist. Rey had expected the interruption to weaken their mutual arousal, but it had the opposite effect, perhaps because it delayed their gratification, or because of the slap, or both. It only takes a minute of frantic activity before orgasm pulses through both of them.

            “You said I could hit you,” Rey says, breathless, as Kylo sprawls out bonelessly on top of her.

            “You can hit me whenever you like,” he pants. “Kriff, Rey.”

            Rey’s never heard him swear before, and she presses her nose to his cheek, nuzzling into his scar. “You’re so strange,” she says. “But I’ll take it under advisement.”

            “For when I’m particularly egregious?”

            “As long as we both understand that egregious means ‘pinning me down in front of someone I can’t stand,’ and not anything worse,” Rey says firmly. Even so, she can’t help snorting. “But you should have seen his face.”

            “Would that I could have.” Kylo moves, shifting his weight off of her and propping himself up on his side, resting his palm against her stomach. “You were very convincing.”

            “As were you,” she tells him. “A very convincing monster.”

            He leans back down to kiss her, and they continue kissing for a few luxurious minutes. Rey idly wonders how she could ever explain the relationship they share to anyone else. It would be difficult. Sexual chemistry someone would understand, she thinks, even between enemies. But everything else? The jokes? The thoughts? The unspoken agreements? The insults that aren’t insults at all? Impossible.

            When Kylo begins pressing kisses to her jaw, Rey realizes that Hux said something that should raise questions, that she should feign ignorance she doesn’t have. So she asks, “What gala?”

            “Hm?”

            “He said something about a gala.”

            “Oh.” He pushes back up to his side. “It’s an annual tradition. Hux is wedded to it. Planetary government representatives attend and pay tribute to the First Order. Most of the Navy gathers to fly past this ship in formation. There’s an extravagant dinner, dancing. I’m expected to attend.”

            “Sounds awful,” says Rey.

            “It is,” Kylo agrees. And then, “Come with me.”

            She blinks. “What?”

            “Come with me,” he repeats. “It would be better than enduring it alone.”

            Rey’s mind swirls. Attending the gala with him will keep him preoccupied and leave the Resistance an opening to execute their maneuver, but somehow, that’s not the thought that surfaces first. “Are you asking me to be your date?”

            “I am.”

            She exhales. Something about that makes her chest tingle with elation. But, cautiously, she says, “If I accept, that doesn’t mean I’ll rule the galaxy with you.”

            “Of course.”

            “Just that I’ve consented to making your life less miserable for one evening.”

            “Rey, I know.”

            It’s tempting. But one of them has to be thinking about this with care, and it won’t be him. Rey notes, “I don’t think Hux will like this.”

            “He knows where he can shove his opinion,” Kylo says dismissively. Perhaps too dismissively. “Let him think I’ve tamed you. We’ll both know better.”

            “So long as you do.”

            “I do.”

            Rey is quiet for a minute, her lips pressed together, turning over the scenario for any other possible downsides and finding none. “Okay,” she says at last, a smile spreading across her face. “All right, Ben. It’s a date.”

            Their route to the training room is different this morning since they aren’t coming from the medcenter. Kylo takes them on a winding path, pointing out chambers on the Conquest II that he thinks might be of interest to Rey. He walks them across a bridge entirely walled in by glass, allowing them a view of one of the ship’s vast open spaces, where Stormtroopers practice their drills. He begins to explain what drill, exactly, they are executing, but watching the armored soldiers march in rows just makes Rey think of Finn. When Kylo feels her melancholy seeping into their bond he quickly ushers her off the bridge.

            When they’re far enough away, Rey asks him, “How can you stand it?”

            “Stand what?”

            “Using the Stormtroopers.”

            He blinks at her. “Why shouldn’t I stand it?”

            “Children are kidnapped at birth, stripped of their names, and indoctrinated into a program that brainwashes them to kill,” says Rey, her voice rising, taut with disbelief, “and you’re asking me why you shouldn’t stand it?”

            Kylo falls quiet, and he walks a few more steps down the hall, arms at his side, with obvious stiffness. Then, he says, “I inherited the Stormtrooper program. It was an invention of Hux’s father and continued by the son. I had no part in formulating it.”

            “I don’t think that matters one whit when you yourself have the power to bring it to an end.” Rey sets her jaw and makes herself look up at him. “You are complicit in continuing it through inaction.”

            He swallows and keeps his gaze fixed forward. Rey senses his discomfort brewing in the air between them. She imagines that no one had ever made him think about this before, or at least not in these terms. “This is about FN-2187,” he says, and she can almost taste his jealousy on her own tongue. “Your— friend.”

            “No,” she insists. “This about basic decency.”

            “You’d have me give them their freedom?” he asks. “Allow them to choose names for themselves?”

            She nods. “Yes, I would.”

            “They’re happy to serve.” But even as the words leave his mouth, Rey can tell he doesn’t really believe them. “And a government with no army is no government.”

            “That’s Hux talking.”

            Kylo scoffs.

            Rey presses on, picking up her pace to keep up with him as he walks. “You’re telling me that the First Order couldn’t attract conventional recruits? With your reach and all of your resources?”

            A pair of officers deviates from their path to give Rey and Kylo a wide berth. Kylo concedes, “There are some recruits in the Stormtrooper Corps.”

            “So what’s difficult, then?”

            “Say I do as you ask. Then what? Freeing the Stormtroopers now—” She can practically see the hydraulics working in his mind as he struggles to rationalize this. “—would be chaos. They don’t know how to survive outside the system.”

            “Finn’s doing just fine, thanks,” says Rey flatly. “And a life without freedom is no life at all, Ben. You know that.”

            “Don’t—” His voice edges louder, just a little, but it’s jarring because he hasn’t raised his voice to her in the past couple of days, and they’re both taken by surprise. He clenches his hand into a fist at his side, then unclenches it, stretching out his fingers. When he speaks again, it’s soft, but firm. “Don’t use that name if we’re not alone.”

            “Fine,” Rey mutters. “Have it your way.”

            Kylo turns his head to the side and seizes upon a door across the hall. “We’re here.”

            “I won’t be distracted that easily.”

            “No, this is where I meant to take you.” He strides to the door with purpose. “Come on.”

            Rey growls and starts after him. “I’m not finished—”

            But as soon as the door opens before them, Rey is hit by a blast of warm air, and she stops in her tracks. This room that stretches out in front of her is unlike any other she’s seen on a starship. It has high, domed ceilings, like the training center, and the same walls of cold metal, but the space is warmed by yellow lights and heat lamps. The walls and floors are lined by rows of soil-filled troughs from which sprout plants of many different colors and varieties, most green, some blue or red or purple. Toward the back stand a few fruit trees. A few white-clad gardeners tend to the plants, watering or pruning them with care.

            “I thought you might want to see this,” Kylo says quietly.

            Blinking, Rey shakes her head slightly. She can’t afford to lose the train of thought she’d had before entering this room. Still, she’s struck once again by how life can be found in even the most hostile environments. “What is this?” she asks. “An arboretum?”

            “A biodome,” Kylo says. He steps inside, and Rey goes with him, trying to take in all of the different plant species. The door closes automatically behind them. “This ship was built for self-sufficiency. The food you and I have been eating is grown in this room. There are others like it aboard the ship.”

            “It is beautiful,” Rey concedes, a bit begrudgingly. While the colors tickle her sight, she most relishes the heat of the room, and she closes her eyes momentarily, basking in it. The rest of the ship is so chilly, and Rey is not a creature of cold.

            “Come,” says Kylo softly. “There’s something here I think you’ll like.”

            He begins walking among the rows of plants. The gardners stop their work to kneel before him until he waves a hand indicating that they should carry on as they were. Rey follows on his heels until he comes to stop before one of the walls, nodding down at one of the lower shelves.

            “This is for you,” he says.

            Rey gives him a questioning look, then crouches down to study the plant he indicated. And she finds, baking under a couple of special heat lamps, a single nightbloomer, a plant native to Jakku, potted in sandy soil. The plant looks healthy, healthier than many of the ones she found while wandering the desserts. She spies a lone red nightblossom bud, which she knows will only open in darkness, on one of the plant’s arms.

            It’s such a simple thing — this plant, its flower — yet so familiar to her. Rey reaches out with her fingertips to touch the nightbloomer’s tough rind, gently.

            “You did collect these,” Kylo says, and she thinks she detects a hint of nervousness from him. She recalls how his early attempts to impress her, with military might, with fine clothes, with a fancy dinner, had failed.

            “I did,” she says quietly. “Just the blossoms.”

            “Well, I—” He clears his throat. “I had this one brought aboard.”

            But when? Rey doesn’t ask him that aloud, but she wonders privately. Surely the plant must have been here prior to their conversation the previous day about flower collecting. He wouldn’t have had the time to arrange for it. But then, when? A few days ago, when they started getting along?

            Or before that? He had access to her memories. He knew about her flowers. Rey wonders if he dispatched someone to Jakku, or if he went himself, to harvest something that reminded him of her. Perhaps even as he marinated in his hatred for her, the hatred that masked his true feelings, he crouched here, gazing at this nightbloomer. Perhaps he told himself that the day he killed her he’d smash it to pieces, knowing, secretly, that that day might never come.

            Rey rests her cheek on arms folded over the shelf as she studies the plant. It’s smaller than she remembers, but she hadn’t previously had much to compare it with. In the years since she’d last plucked the blossom from a nightboomer, she has seen more plants than she ever imagined she’d see. She has no desire to go back to Jakku anymore, nor even to visit, but seeing something so warm in a place so cold…

            “I’m not finished,” she says again, but softly, this time. “Not with the discussion we were having.”

            Behind her, Kylo says, “I’ll think about what can be done. If anything.”

            It’s not much of a promise, but it may be the most she gets out of him. For now. “Thank you,” she says.

            He crouches down next to her, and rests one hand gently at the small of her back. They spend a few minutes in contemplation of a desert flower that has no right to be here, but grows all the same.

            Rey loses track of time training with him again; all she knows is that they spar until they’re both too exhausted to continue. As they make their way back to his chambers, Rey feels that distinct prickle at the back of her neck that means the Force is trying to call her attention to something. She walks at Kylo’s side down a long, corridor: brightly-lit, industrial, cold, like most of the ones on the Conquest II. Ahead of them, this hallway is empty but for a cleaning droid rolling back and forth, polishing the floor until it shines. Their two sets of footsteps echo between the walls: the steady thuds that heeled boots make against this hard, reflective flooring.

            She looks to the left to see Kylo walking beside her, seemingly unaffected by whatever it is she perceives. Rey is surprised how familiar this all feels, and how strange that maybe once, upon seeing him at her side, she would feel alarm, or gut-wrenching revulsion, or anger, but now feels only calm.

            He walks, and she walks too, keeping pace with him easily although his strides are longer. They’re both sweat-drenched, in their light training clothes, and tired in the satisfying way that only sparring brings. She knows that he thinks only of returning to his chambers, of spending the day with her, but the ship is massive and the way back long. They continue on for a few minutes, passing countless rooms and branching hallways, before they begin to approach two large, heavy double doors, sealed shut. She gets the sense that these doors partition off a sizeable chamber, but has little time to interrogate that feeling because all at once she realizes that she saw this place in a dream, a dream she’d had before ever arriving on this ship.

            “What’s in there?” she asks.

            Kylo seems a little more taken aback by this question, and he turns his head to look at her. “Nothing you should concern yourself with,” he says, and if it’s not an outright lie it’s a half-truth at best, which unsettles Rey. He doesn’t lie to her. As far as she knows, he may never have.

            She doesn’t let it go. “Can we go in?”

            “Not now.”

            “But if there’s nothing of consequence inside—”

            “I’m famished,” says Kylo. “You must be, too.”

            Rey nods and lets the matter drop, but commits the doors’ location to memory as best she can. “Right.”

            Apropos of nothing, a full minute after they leave those doors behind, Kylo says, “I was thinking about what you said yesterday. About how you don’t need a teacher.”

            Rey looks at him over her shoulder. “I don’t.”

            “I know.” He pauses. “Would you also agree that a wise teacher never stops learning? That they admit there are yet concepts they have not mastered, secrets they do not yet know?”

            She frowns a little. “Well, sure. It’s a lifelong process. I’m learning as I go. I’m not about to claim I know everything.”

            “You don’t,” Kylo says. “And— neither do I.” He stops walking so he can pivot to face her, and then he purses his lips like he does when he’s nervous. “But I am trained in both the Dark and the Light, and you must be trained in something else entirely. No one is left to teach you the old ways.”

            Rey, obviously, does not volunteer the fact that she possesses the sacred Jedi texts, and just says, “Mm.”

            “Think of what we could create together.”

            It’s difficult for her to keep from rolling her eyes. She closes them instead, and sighs, “I don’t want to get into this with you again.”

            “No, that’s not what I’m asking.” His voice has a strange urgency to it, and she opens her eyes to look at his face. “The ability to channel the Force doesn’t stop with you and me. There are others. As… you know.”

            “Careful.”

            He doesn’t acknowledge her warning and reaches out to touch her shoulder. She looks at his hand. “If we combined our knowledge,” he says quietly. “If we made something new, better, for those who come after us, they would never need to learn like we did.”

            By the seat of their trousers, she thinks, like she’s learning. Or in fear, like he learned. But she’s wary. “I’m already doing that.”

            “But you only have half the picture.” It’s said nervously, not with obstinacy. Kylo swallows. “Rey. Forget the galaxy. Forget anything else. If you and I were to—”

            “Supreme Leader!” an unfamiliar voice calls.

            Kylo blinks, then sighs and turns toward its source. Rey does also, and sees a blue-skinned Chagrian in elegant but slightly wrinkled robes rushing toward them, the two Stormtroopers flanking him quickening their steps to keep up. Before the Stormtroopers can intervene, the Chagrian casts himself down at Kylo’s feet and takes his hands.

            “Supreme Leader,” he says. “I want to thank you for the mercy you’ve shown me, and beg your forgiveness for any inconvenience I have caused.”

            The Stormtroopers move to pull the Chagrian away, but Kylo works one hand free from his and holds up to halt their approach. Rey looks at him. When so often the Resistance likes to use his name as a curse or a punchline, and when she and he have spent so many days together in relative isolation, it’s easy to forget just how much influence he wields. A simple gesture or a word from him contains so much power, even outside of his ability to channel the Force.

            Kylo just says, “Thank the lady. She decided your fate.”

            The Chagrian releases Kylo’s hand, turns on his knees toward the deeply confused Rey, and clasps hers instead. “Dear lady—” he begins.

            “Please stand,” says Rey, uncomfortable.

            “Dear lady,” he continues, getting to his feet without letting go of Rey’s hands, “Thank you for the mercy you have shown. I am so deeply sorry for the pain that you experienced.”

            Rey just says, “Um.”

            Thankfully, Kylo cuts in. “This is Kars Akaanas,” he says. “A collector.”

            “An antiquarian,” Akaanas corrects, but very gently. “I collect, but I am also a student of time’s greatest teacher, history. More precisely, I specialize in Imperial-era and pre-Imperial-era artifacts.”

            The situation becomes clear to Rey all at once. “Oh. You gifted him the bottle of Toniray.”

            Akaanas bows his head. “And I cannot express how much I regret that my gift caused your suffering in any capacity.”

            “No, it— didn’t,” says Rey. “Really, it’s fine. You couldn’t have known someone would seize the opportunity and replace the bottle with a lookalike. There’s nothing to apologize for.”

            “But it is because of my gift that there was an opportunity in the first place,” says Akaanas, who Rey is quickly coming to understand to be a bit of a sycophant. “And for that, I do apologize.”

            “I can’t accept—”

            “I think that’s enough,” Kylo interjects, nodding at Akaanas. “She accepts your apology.”

            “There is nothing to apologize for!” Rey insists. She looks at Akaanas. “If anything, I am sorry that my having been poisoned led to your needless interrogation and detention.”

            “You are far too kind,” Akaanas says, squeezing Rey’s hands, then releasing them. “Far, far too kind. Should you ever need anything, know that I am at your service.”

            “That is very generous, but—”

            “It is my great honor.”

            Rey gives up. “Well, thank you,” she says, awkwardly.

            “Of course, of course.” Akaanas turns toward Kylo once more. “Supreme Leader,” he says, “How fortunate you are, to have found a partner who possesses such beauty and such grace.”

            Rey, wearing rumpled training clothes, with stray tendrils of hair sticking to her sweaty forehead, feels herself go red for many, many reasons.

            “That she does,” Kylo says, agreeably, before Rey can contradict anything that Akaanas said. And then, perhaps because he’s feeling particularly gratified to have her called his partner, he adds, “Safe travels.”

            Akaanas thanks them both profusely before the Stormtroopers escort him down to the hangar bay. Rey watches him until he’s out of sight. “You did spare him,” she says quietly.

            “I did.”

            “Do you expect thanks from me, too?”

            “I know better.”

            Rey shakes her head. “It was the right thing to do,” she huffs. “There was no need for him to die.”

            “Yes,” Kylo says. “You were right.”

            “I was. So.” She wipes her forehead with her wrist. “Good. It’s good that you listened. That’s as far as I’ll go.”

            “I’ll take it.”

            Rey adds, “You could stand to listen to me more often.”

            Kylo’s mouth twitches. “Isn’t that a grievance all wives share?”

            He begins to walk again, leaving her at a loss for words, but only for a moment. “Oi!” she yelps, but when she starts jogging to catch up with him he only walks faster until he, too, is jogging, staying an easy couple of meters out of reach. Curse his long legs.

            As Rey chases him, she calls, “I’m not your wife! Are you even listening?”

            Although he doesn’t laugh, she can feel him smiling.

            They shower together in Kylo’s chambers when they finally return, for once tired enough that nothing else happens after they strip out of their clothes. Facing each other under the showerhead, they occasionally exchange kisses through the spray but mostly just take each other in. When the panel for the shampoo dispenser slides aside, Kylo gives it a couple of good pumps and starts lathering Rey’s hair for her, and she closes her eyes as he works the shampoo into her roots, warm with the water and the touch. He cranes his head down so she can return the favor, and she does. As her fingers massage his scalp, Rey is amazed by this casual act of intimacy, one that she could not have possibly anticipated, one that feels even more meaningful, somehow, than sex.

            Once the shower finishes its cycle and they’re both rinsed and blown dry, Rey wraps herself in one of those big, fluffy towels he keeps on hand; Kylo takes the other and ties it around his waist. She sits on the long counter while he stands in front of the sink, chin jutted out as he begins to shave his face and neck with a razor.

            “Bit old-fashioned of you,” Rey remarks, to disguise just how enraptured she is by watching him scrape the blade over his throat with care.

            “When you start growing facial hair in a remote location with no access to any other depilatory, you learn there’s merit to old-fashioned.” He shaves another line down from his jaw, scraping away the shave gel he’d smoothed onto his skin. “I also sometimes write by hand.”

            “By hand!” she exclaims, sitting forward a bit. “With pens?”

            “I know calligraphy.”

            “You’re joking.”

            “I’m not.”

            Rey doesn’t know how to sort that information, but for some reason, it tickles her. She can only grin at him.

            “You’re amused,” Kylo says, reading both her expression and her emotions. “What’s funny?”

            “I don’t know. You are.”

            “Me?”

            “You know calligraphy.”

            “Most people take me very seriously.”

            “Well,” says Rey, leaning over to stretch her arms out past her knees, “most people don’t know you like I do.”

            Kylo stops shaving for a moment to look at her. Most of the shave gel is gone; just a few more patches to clean up. He says, quietly, “No one does.”

            She peers back at him over her shoulder, disarmed by his sincerity. But then, she realizes, it’s likely true. His mother, the last of his living relatives, hasn’t known him since adolescence. He won’t let his underlings get close enough; that isn’t how he operates. It’s just her, the only person to get under his skin, who has ever slept in his arms, woken up beside him, watched him shave his face.

            Then again, he has seen her in ways no one else has. He’s seen her flushed and wanting, and convulsing at death’s door. He’s seen her anger, felt her fury, but also experienced the gentlest touches of her hands. It’s been barely seven days. No one knows her like he knows her, either.

            They dress, but not entirely. He dons a shirt and trousers but nothing more. Rey decides to try slipping into that green robe again, this time wearing a sleeveless shirt over her underthings, which she finds more comfortable although Kylo grumbles his complaint. They eat a light lunch together — Rey jokes that she could eat the fleet — and then they return to the sitting room. Rey thinks that now he might depart to attend to his duties. After all, Hux of all people had admonished Kylo for disappearing to be with her. In the days before his proposal and her poisoning and her recovery, he’d always vanished for a few hours, leaving her bored, restless, and alone.

            Instead, he summons a droid, which arrives bearing the A280 blaster rifle she’d salvaged from Hoth. He sets it down on the low table in front of where she sits in her chair. She looks down at it, then up at him, standing before her.

            “I thought you might want this back,” he says. “You said you could fix it.”

            Rey can’t help breaking into a grin as she leans forward and runs her fingers over the old blaster, then looks up at him. “Some might accuse you of being suicidal.”

            “Would you?”

            “No, I wouldn’t.” She looks down at the blaster again, contemplates it. “But there’s another project I’d rather spend my time on.”

            “Anything,” he says.

            Rey holds out her hand, and his lightsaber flies out from where he’d stashed it under his discarded cloak and springs to her palm, as it had once before in Snoke’s throne room. Like that time, Kylo doesn’t move to stop her. He just watches as she turns the hilt over and over in her hands, as he had the other day before he replaced the external power cable.

            “I can help make this more stable,” she says.

            Kylo blinks at her, but then he nods and goes to retrieve his toolkit, pushing the blaster aside so she has room to work. He takes his place on the sofa, sitting as close to her as he can, and watches as Rey pops open the toolkit and sets about her task. She unthreads the red wire and pries off part of the lightsaber’s casing with care, in order to diagnose what ails it, as she would with any other tool. In this moment, it doesn’t strike her that this is the weapon that killed his father and so many others, a weapon that grievously injured her dearest friend. It’s also the weapon that’s come to her aid, the one he wielded as they fought beside each other as allies.

            A lightsaber is a killing tool, but the hand that holds it matters most.

            “Oh,” Rey breathes when she finally sees its exposed innards. “Ben.”

            “I had to improvise after the crystal—”

            “I know,” she says, “but it’s honestly a miracle this hasn’t blown up in your hands.”

            He shifts, a little discomfited, but he says, “I’m very good at improvisation.”

            She shakes her head. “Risky modifications and slipshod repair jobs,” she mutters under her breath.

            “What was that?”

            “Nothing.” Rey exhales and strokes the pads of her fingers over the internal wiring. “You wouldn’t happen to have an extremely high-output diatium power cell on you, would you?”

            Ben looks at her and says, deadpan, “I left it on my other flagship.”

            Rey presses her lips together in an ineffective attempt to hide her smile. “Don’t get cheeky with me. I was just thinking if you did you wouldn’t need the reserve cell.” She taps the bottom of the hilt, just above the pommel cap. “You could power both the blade emitter and the quillion emitters. It would take a little reconfiguring of the circuitry, but then you’d have room for...” She frowns, chewing on her lower lip for a second. “Hm. Well, right now you don’t really have a blade energy channel, but I’m not sure where you’d put one with the crystal mounted so close to the emitters. I suppose you could move the crystal lower… then you could add some cycling field energizers to improve efficiency...”

            Up to this point, he listens, nodding, but now he interrupts her. “These are ambitious plans,” he says. “What can you do today?”

            She scrunches her nose. “I suppose I could rewire it so it’s less likely to explode.”

            “I’d appreciate that.” He frowns a little, thinking, and rubs his chin. “I can look into locating a higher-output power cell. I know that Vader’s lightsaber had one.”

            Anakin Skywalker, she almost says, but doesn’t. “Well, you’re Supreme Leader of the First Order. You should be able to get your hands on anything you want.”

            “My concern,” he says, “was that a higher-output power cell might make the blade even less stable. Separating out the power sources to generate the same total output—”

            “All you’d have to do is play around with the resistance of each circuit a bit,” she says. “Honestly, Ben, you’re missing a few important bits. The Jedi have been using single power sources for millennia for a reason.”

            “That argument won’t persuade me.”

            She sighs. “Then this one: you want to keep both your hands, don’t you?”

            Ben considers this for a moment, and then he says quietly, “Vader lost an arm on Geonosis.”

            Rey swivels her head to look at him and finds him smiling. Whatever expression she’s wearing on her face makes him chuckle, then laugh outright. Rey presses her mouth together more tightly to keep from doing the same, but she can’t help herself. It’s infectious. “Pfft—”

            “Please, you don’t think I’d go that far.” He throws his head back and lets out a deep, full bark of laughter. “Ha!”

            “Well, I don’t know, do I!” she exclaims. “You wore that—” She has to pause to take a breath. “That mask, for ages!”

            “The mask was— menacing.” He ducks his head down, but his shoulders shake with the force of his laughter even as he fights to regain his composure. Rey giggles watching him. She wonders when the last time he laughed was. Probably not for years.

            “Mm.” She closes her eyes and slumps back in the chair as her mirth subsides. “Ha, oh.” She places her free hand on her abdomen and presses it against her aching muscles. “Ow.”

            Ben’s laughter recedes back into a chuckle, then just a smile, and he turns his head to look at her through hair that’s fallen into his face. “I’m through aspiring to someone else’s legacy,” he says. “Besides, I’ve surpassed his. With my hands intact.”

            Rey rolls her eyes. “Setting that whole legacy bit aside — don’t give me that look, you know what I think of it — I would certainly prefer that you keep both your hands. For selfish reasons.”

            He places one of his hands on her knee. “What reasons?”

            She pushes the hand off unceremoniously. “Not now. I’m working. Here, help me.” She leans forward to pick up the piece of casing she’d removed from his lightsaber and holds it out to him. “Polish this until it shines.”

            Without protest, he takes the casing from her. The next few hours pass in comfortable silence as, seated next to each other, she works and he observes, not speaking unless she has a question. There’s no need otherwise for either of them to say a word.

            When they retire for the evening, Rey finds that someone has placed the nightbloomer’s pot on the end table next to her side of the bed. She sets her head down on her pillow, facing it. As the lights dim, she watches the single nightblossom’s petals unfurl over the course of a minute or so as the flower strains to drink in moonbeams it can’t find.

            “It belongs planetside,” she murmurs to Ben as he draws back the covers and slips into bed beside her. “See how it looks for the stars?”

            He wraps his arms around her waist and picks up his head to study the flower. “This suits it,” he says. “It was meant for you.”

            Rey shakes her head. “It should be outside. Or at least outside of a pot, where it can grow and breathe.”

            He sets his head back down on his pillow. For a while he doesn’t respond, and she thinks he might have fallen asleep. But then, in a husky near-whisper, he says, “It might yet flourish in unexpected places.”

            She doesn’t have a reply. Behind her, Ben does drift off to sleep; she knows that he sleeps more soundly next to her than he has in years, perhaps ever. The room comes into focus for her as his breathing grows steady against her neck, and she realizes that this is her side of the bed, and the chair in the sitting room is her chair, and that she has her place at his long dining table. It’s barely been seven days.

            Rey could get used to this.

            Maybe she already has.