5. Chapter 5

            The First Order’s new Mega-class Star Dreadnought, the Conquest II, is grander than even Snoke’s destroyed Supremacy. It looms large in the sky over Hays Minor. Rey spends the mercifully short flight up to it standing stiffly between two of Kylo Ren’s personal guards, wondering why you would bother launching a bigger version of something that had already been decimated by the Resistance. But she supposes the Conquest II fulfills both core tenants of the First Order’s strategy: repeat the mistakes of the past, and bigger is always better.

            Ren watches the stars with his hands at his sides, standing between his seated, uniformed pilots. The other members of his guard lurk in pairs by the sides of the shuttle. Unlike Snoke’s Praetorian guard, they are robed in a rich, regal purple. These are not the Knights of Ren, she knows, although she does not know where the Knights of Ren are or what real distinction there is between the two groups. It doesn’t matter. None of them look at her, not even Ren himself. Anything he wants to say or do to her, she assumes, will wait until they have privacy.

            Rey takes this time that she has to steady her breath and remind herself of everything she possesses, even in these circumstances. Her brief lessons with Luke Skywalker laid the groundwork for an enduring meditation practice, and she’s worked on honing the techniques through self-instruction. She is not afraid, she tells herself. She is bolstered by the knowledge that she’s defeated Kylo Ren before, and that there is so much still under her control: her feet, grounding her; her hands, constrained but only for now; her heart, her intent; her mastery of the Force. Calm. She is calm. Outside her borders, she can feel the flickering rage of his aura licking at hers, so fiery that she questions when, not if, he’ll burn himself out.

            The shuttle docks in the Conquest II’s massive hangar, and the hydraulic systems vent sizzling steam as the door folds down into a ramp. Rey looks out and sees what must be a full division of white-clad Stormtroopers standing at attention, anticipating the return of their Supreme Leader. She wonders if he makes them do this every time — stand there in formation, wait for him, even when he’s only been away on brief and inconsequential trips. The ego on him could fill the entire hangar bay.

            Ren leaves the shuttle first, and his guard follows; the two flanking Rey pull her forward. They pause at the foot of the ramp as Kylo Ren takes in the army that awaits his command. Then he turns around to look at her, as if impressing upon her the magnitude of the force that she’s committed to defying and just how fruitless any resistance to it—and him—is.

            She just looks at him. She doesn’t say anything at all. One of his hands tightens into a fist, and she can feel his flash of irritation. Why, this time? What did she do?

            Oh.

            He must be trying to impress her.

            “Supreme Leader,” says the guard to Rey’s right, “What shall we do with the girl? Take her to interrogation?”

            “No,” Ren says, but it takes him a moment to respond, and Rey can tell that her blankness has unnerved and infuriated him. “No, the chair won’t hold her. Bring her to my chambers. I’ll deal with her there.”

            Rey feels like any reasonable person would be slightly taken aback at the request, but the guard only says, “Very well, Supreme Leader.”

            Ren turns, his cloak swishing behind him, and walks through the ranks of his army. He hands her saberstaff to a tall, chrome-plated Stormtrooper captain and utters an order Rey can’t quite hear, presumably to lock it up tight. The captain turns and leaves, and the two guards escorting Rey push her along before she can see where to. There’s no opportunity here for her to escape—as strong with the Force as she is, she still can’t take on an entire division alone—but he’s leaving her a number of openings. She could slip an access card out of that officer’s pocket, there, or the knife out of the arm holster of the guard to her left. Items she could use to attack, to escape.

            She doesn’t do any of that. She’s not here to get in and get out. She’s electing to stay, and to stay for some time. Whatever that entails.

            The path to Kylo Ren’s chambers is winding, and she tries to make note of all of the turns in the hallways, of how many floors they climb on two separate elevator rides, but she only manages to memorize part of the route. At last, they draw up to two black doors, sealed shut. One of the guards reaches around Rey and punches in the access code, angling her away so she can’t see it. There’s a beep, then the doors hiss open and the guards shove her inside.

            Kylo Ren’s personal chambers are spacious—perhaps he received an upgrade when he assumed the role of Supreme Leader—but unwelcoming. The doors open into what appears to be some sort of sitting room, but it’s sparsely furnished with the most uncomfortable-looking black furniture that Rey has ever seen, all shiny sharp edges and very little cushioning. There’s a closed door that she assumes leads to a refresher, and then on the other side of the sitting area, half-concealed by panes of semi-translucent glass, is where he sleeps. It looks almost as uncomfortable as the sitting room. In fact, it looks as though no one has slept there at all for some time. The black sheets on the bed are pulled taut and unwrinkled. The sole sources of color in the room are lights embedded in the floor, soft red illumination shining up sloping walls.

            Ren steps around her and comes to stand in front. He holds up one hand. “Leave us,” he says to the guards. “And no disruptions.”

            The guards do leave, wordlessly, obediently, closing the doors behind them.

            And then they’re alone.

            Kylo jerks his hand, and Rey’s feet lift off the ground. She doesn’t resist. That’s part of the deal that she made with herself, part of what she’s resolved. Don’t resist it. He walks forward, leading her deeper into the sitting room, and then through to the bedchamber. He pulls her around so that she stands parallel to him before setting her down. There’s still a wide gap between them that he hasn’t bridged yet.

            “I suppose I can be rid of these,” she says, tapping into the Force to open the binders around her wrists easily. She lowers her arms and lets them drop to the floor with a thunk.

            Kylo doesn’t stop her. Once she’s free and massaging the circulation back into her hands, he turns around to face her. “Tell me the plan.”

            He doesn’t try to compel her to do it. He knows that won’t work. So Rey just shrugs. “You already know the plan. I was a diversion. Right now, your forces are taking heavy fire on the other side of the galaxy, and you aren’t there, so I’d say it worked.”

            He sniffs. “I don’t like your tone. You’ve been spending too much time with Dameron.”

            “I have. It’s because I know you hate him.”

            “He’ll be dead soon enough.” Kylo pauses, for effect. “They all will.”

            “How long have you been telling yourself that? Three years?”

            Kylo takes one step toward her. “Those three years,” he says, “have given me the time I needed to devise the most humiliating and painful deaths for all of your friends.” He doesn’t advance any further, but he does draw himself to his full height, trying to loom over her. Rey is not outwardly cowed, and she knows that bothers him. “Tell me which one is your favorite. Is it Dameron? Or the traitor? I’ll make sure they suffer the most. I will make them beg for the end.”

            Rey waits patiently for him to finish. Once he does, she jerks her chin up at him and says, “I don’t think we have much to say to each other.”

            He looks her over from head to toe, a lingering look. The fury in his eyes gives way to something else. Hunger. It’s been three years since she denied him her power, her partnership. He’s wanted her all that time.

            And now she’s here.

            “I agree,” he says simply.

            He reaches out, still standing across the chamber from her, and directs the Force to pin her against the wall so vigorously that it knocks the wind right out of her. Her arms splay out from her sides, immobilized, her fingers spread. And she doesn’t fight back. She could, if she wanted. Could match him, be more than a match for him, counter his will and make him stop bending the Force to it. But she doesn’t. She just looks at him.

            That seems to only cause him more frustration. He flicks his wrist downward and Rey feels her belt snap. Her trousers drop down around her boots, although for whatever reason he leaves her underthings in place. He performs the same flick of the wrist, up this time, to unlatch her cloak and push her tunic up to her collarbone, but neglects to unwind the band binding her breasts. Through it all she only watches him, trying to read him, face stoic. She can feel his energy wavering, faltering. He’s wondering what she’s thinking. Does she want him to touch her? That’s what he’s asking himself. Is that why she’s not pushing back, defending herself? But then why is she not instead embracing him?

            He takes one step toward her, then another, his face twisted, furious. He’s trying to draw on his anger, she senses. Not to keep her pinned — he’s doing that fine. For some other purpose. He tugs at the fingers of one of his gloves to peel it off his hand, then tosses it onto his bed and follows suit with the other. By now he’s only two feet in front of her, surveying her, looking her over again, taking in her bare skin. She thought he might smile, having her at his mercy. He doesn’t.

            Rey can move her eyes, and she keeps looking up, keeps them locked on his as well as she can. Her heart is hammering against her ribcage; she doesn’t want him to know that, but he can probably sense what she feels with minimal effort at this close range. She can sense what he feels — she barely needs the Force for that — but she also senses that her unwavering eye contact unnerves him. He pulls one of her shoulders toward him, still keeping her immobilized, then pushes her around so she’s facing away from him with her cheek pressed to the wall. He holds her there with the Force. Then he takes his hand back, and Rey can hear fabric shifting and the clink of something metallic hitting the floor. The belt around his tunic.

            She closes her eyes now. What’s about to happen is not something she wants to witness.

            Not seeing him barely makes a difference, though. He presses against her from behind and places a warm, bare hand on her side, sliding it around to the front of her belly. She gasps at the touch, and, behind the tingling she also felt when they made contact through the bond years ago, something squirms in her gut. Revulsion, maybe. But she doesn’t protest, doesn’t push back against his binds, and doesn’t say anything more. She can feel his breath, hot, rasping next to her ear.

            Kylo starts to move his hand down her abdomen, below her navel, toward the band of her shorts, and Rey steels herself. He presses his hips against hers, for— friction? Stimulation? She isn’t sure. But just as it strikes her that he’s not actually hard, he mutters, “No,” and pulls back from her, his hand retreating to her side again.

            “No, no,” Kylo says, to himself. Rey remains silent. She assumes he’s chastising his own inability to perform. He moves his hand up, as if he’s thinking about groping one of her breasts, then quickly decides against it and stops touching her entirely. “This is wrong. Why are you doing this?”

            “Doing what—” Rey inhales involuntarily as he releases his hold on her and she can take a full, deep breath again. In, out. The spell passes quickly enough. She opens her eyes and looks at him over her shoulder as she pulls her tunic back down. “Doing what?”

            “Nothing,” he snarls, as if the very act of doing nothing is reprehensible to him. “Why aren’t you fighting me? I know you can.”

            “You want me to fight you?” Rey asks, incredulous, as she turns around to face him.

            He shakes his head. “You’re playing some Jedi mind trick on me. It’s not honest.”

            “Honest,” she repeats. “Since when have you ever cared about honesty?”

            “Either fight me or embrace me,” he says, staring at her as he always does, as if there’s so much to this universe that she just fails to understand. “Don’t just bear it.”

            “Fighting you is so much better?” she asks. “Is that what really gets you off?”

            “If I defeat you, I’ve earned you,” he replies, flatly. “And if you reciprocate, I’ve earned you differently. I can’t abide you merely rolling over for me.”

            “You can’t earn a person.” She looks up at him defiantly, the squirming in her gut now turning over into anger, into heat. When he backed off, it wasn’t far. He’s still towering over her, only a few inches away.

            “But by now I have earned some right to you,” he says, and she doesn’t need a connection to him to know that he sincerely believes that. “Almost enough to take you. But it has to be real.”

            “There is so little chance of you besting me or somehow compelling me to reciprocate your advances that you might as well just—”

            He cuts her off, taking a step forward and looping an arm around her back, crushing her to him, crushing his mouth to her mouth so quickly that it catches her by surprise. The force of it seems to startle him, too, and they stumble against the wall, barely keeping their balance. The part she loathes most is that whenever he touches his skin to her skin in any way there is such a sense of rightness, as if they were meant to always be touching, and she knows now that she’s older and wiser that it’s the Force trying to bring them together, trying to balance his darkness with her light.

            Since he stopped her mid-word, her lips are parted, and he tries to swipe his tongue between them, a sensation so alien to Rey that she recoils instinctively. She brings her hands up to his chest and pushes him back, without the use of the Force, just desperate to get air and distance between them. He’s breathing heavily. So is she.

            “Yes,” he growls. “You feel it too.”

            “Shut up.”

            Kylo leans forward to kiss her once more, but he’s only able to hold it for a moment before she pushes him away again. Now that she’s resisting him he seems to feel more comfortable grabbing at her. One of his hands slides to her hip, grips it, and the other flattens at the small of her back, pressing her to his chest. Both her hands are between them, keeping him at a very short distance.

            “Rey,” he says.

            “You have no power over me.”

            “Then prove it.”

            “Tch.” Her eyes, avoiding his, trace the jagged scar that mars his right cheek. One of the many ways in which they’ve marked each other. “I don’t think I could convince you of anything unless I cut you down where you stood. And then you’d be too dead to be convinced.”

            Kylo Ren inclines his head toward her. “Kiss me.”

            Her immediate reaction is to wrinkle her nose in distaste. “No.”

            “Kiss me, and if you don’t want to kiss me again when we’re done, I’ll believe you.” His brown eyes glow with a demented fervor. “Then we’ll fight and you’ll submit to me by force.”

            “You and I have very different ideas about what the outcome of that fight would be,” says Rey. On one hand, she’d come here accepting that she’d likely end up in his bed. She just hadn’t expected him to be so averse to her passivity, which was the armor she’d chosen to wear for this encounter. Vulnerability, desire, she doesn’t manage those well. On the other hand, she doesn’t want to start a fight now and give him any opportunity to probe the full extent of her ability with the Force. He’s grown in strength, but so has she.

            “Kiss me,” he challenges her for a third time. “Open your mind to me and let me feel your disgust.” His gaze flickers very briefly down to her mouth, then back to her eyes. “If there is any.”

            “Take a walk out an airlock,” she spits.

            “Ah,” he says. “Fear.”

            “I am not afraid of you.”

            “I didn’t say it was me you feared.” He leans in, his face mere inches from her own, but doesn’t close the gap between them.

            “Shut up,” Rey says again, before she kisses him to make certain that he does. She doesn’t want to hear anything about her true fears or her true self or her true desires from him ever again. She knows her own mind.

            But the moment she makes contact she’s struck by how different kissing him is to enduring him kissing her. She doesn’t just smash their mouths together senselessly; she leans up against him with moderate pressure, lips slightly parted. Somehow, it works. She doesn’t feel smothered or stifled, and there’s an unwanted warmth in her chest that, given room to expand, now flows through the rest of her body.

            Kylo Ren takes a moment to read her, to learn her, before responding, with similar technique, not bearing down too hard on her. His lips are full and soft in a way that’s almost ironic given his roughness and indelicacy. That feeling of rightness, that if the universe had its way their bodies would never be uncoupled, is almost too strong to ignore. To drown it out, she tests something, tasting his lips with her tongue to figure out if that, too, is better when she leads. He seems to be anticipating it, opening himself to her and meeting her tongue with his own. The overall effect is strange, messy, clumsy, but not — not completely repulsive.

            She doesn’t realize her fingers are curling into the front of his tunic until she forces herself to break away from him, to take a moment remember who she is, who he is. The only comfort she can find is that whatever embers of desire smolder in her from years ago also burn in him. She takes a breath, collects herself as best she can, then looks up at him. His face is mostly neutral, jaw clenched, but it’s almost impossible for him to prevent what he’s feeling from reaching his eyes. They reflect her own emotions. Both of them have been caught unawares, having not imagined that they might mesh well outside of twisted fantasy; they’re shocked, finding that they actually do.

            Rey is struck by the realization that he’s likely only thought of the act as transactional, as forcing himself on her in anger, to punish her. She’s mostly thought about it as acquiescence, resignation, something she’d endure to survive him. Neither of them assigns much passion to their motivations. Yet there it is, there’s that little spark of want between them that they can neither ignore nor deny.

            “So,” she says softly. “There. As you see.”

            Kylo says nothing. He kisses her again, this time with a little more urgency. Every kiss is less awful than the one before, and she finds herself kissing him back. Kissing him back. Now that he doesn’t have to hold her against him, he shifts his hands to her upper arms and pulls her back toward the bed.

            Once they’re moving, everything happens quickly. While stepping out of her trousers and boots, Rey realizes how overdressed he is compared to her, and that can’t stand. She waves her hand and detaches his cloak, sending it flying across the room; it hits the wall with a thud and crumples to the floor. Kylo’s hands move to her elbows, awkwardly, and finally to her waist, which he seems to decide is the best place to touch her. Rey, who is preoccupied with getting his already unfastened trousers out of the way, isn’t thinking about touching his body as much as she is exposing it. When she succeeds in pushing the trousers down past his thighs, he trips over them, onto her. They both stumble, falling to the floor and reaching an unspoken agreement to remain there.

            Before Kylo can do anything else, Rey grabs his tunic and pushes it off his shoulders, then pulls the shirt underneath over his head. Now they’re on more than equal footing. She may be on her back, but she still has her tunic and breast bindings, which he never managed to actually remove. He hovers above her on hands and knees in his undergarments, his trousers down around his shins, far more naked than she is. In retaliation, he grabs one of the scraps of wool keeping her hair out of her face and tugs it out. Her hair, longer now than it was when they last met, unfurls around her head as she looks at him, as he leans down to kiss her again. When she imagined what he would do when he got her alone, she never thought they would end up on the floor with their mouths pressed together.

            And she certainly did not expect this all-consuming need. The more layers they shed, the more insistent the urge to just pull him down on top of her, cover herself with him, and she doesn’t want to give him that satisfaction. But he shares that urge, because all at once he’s on her, his hand snaking up her tunic to feel her breasts, his mouth against hers, sharing her breath. Sharing more than that.

            The more skin he presses to her skin, the more she can feel the swirling maelstrom of his mind along with all of the sensations alight in his body. She knows it’s reciprocal; that’s how he knows to cover her breast with his hand and squeeze, although he does so a bit too hard. And that’s how she knows to press a palm between his legs, feel his cock. No performance issues now. Being touched by her, even through fabric, affects him so much that he gasps and lurches forward. She feels the flash of heat in her own belly, like his body is hers.

            Kylo’s face is flushed, his hair mussed, and once he recovers from her palming he moves his own hands to her shorts. She lifts her hips so he can pull them down, but knees him in the side while trying to disentangle her legs. “I don’t usually undress at this angle,” she says, an excuse since he doesn’t speak the language of apologies.

            He just nods sharply and continues what he was doing, pressing a hand between her legs and ungracefully slipping a finger inside of her to test whether she’s ready. She’s not sure what constitutes ready in his mind, but she’s warm and a little slick — she doesn’t know when that happened; it must have been building all along — and he seems to take that as a good sign. He pushes what’s left of his own clothing down to his knees and positions himself back between her legs.

            Kylo looks down at Rey. Rey looks up at Kylo. And then he aligns himself with her and presses in.

            She groans, and he’s only partially inside when she feels that the angle is wrong, which is a shame because she can also feel how good he feels to be inside her. At least when he realizes she’s hurting he retreats, although she can’t be sure that’s because he cares at all or because her discomfort is now his to bear as well. Rey, guessing at how to fix the problem on her own, plants both her feet on the floor so that her legs are bent and she can cant her hips upward. Kylo realigns, tries again, and this time when he enters her — and it’s not easy, her body isn’t used to this — she breathes, breathes, until he’s all the way inside. They let out a simultaneous sigh as everything clicks, as they feel universe shift into focus around them, well and truly balanced. Rey closes her eyes, savoring that moment, thinking he’ll wait, that he, too, needs time to adjust.

            He doesn’t. He starts pulling back almost immediately, and Rey lets out a breathy “oh” of surprise that becomes a gasp as he slams his hips back into her, a little too hard. Self-control was never his strong suit. “Kylo, slow down,” she says, intrigued to hear that she mostly just sounds annoyed.

            Kylo doesn’t nod or otherwise acknowledge her, but his next thrust is a little less clumsy, and the next, and Rey thinks this is going to resemble whatever sex is supposed to feel like until he abruptly picks up the pace again and grabs her hips to pull her forward. Fighting to sort his feelings from her own is like trying to pluck individual grains of sand from a sandstorm, but she can tell he’s already close to finishing. “Ah, slow down—” she repeats, cut off when he bucks into her again, wildly. “Kylo—”

            He grunts and, on the next thrust, spills over. She can feel his orgasm secondhand as it floods his body, which is at least some small comfort. He shudders through his climax still buried to the hilt inside of her.

            Once it passes, he collapses bonelessly, half on top of her, his face pressed to her shoulder. Rey doesn’t move, not at first. She lets her heartbeat slow, gets back in touch with herself, grounds herself again. She thought there would be, she doesn’t know, more to it, and she can tell by reaching out for his thoughts that she’s not the only one who’s disappointed. He’s thinking, with twinges of mortification and shame she can sense under the fading glow of his orgasm, that he should have lasted longer. She doesn’t understand that. She’d felt his release cascading down through him like a waterfall, and wasn’t that all that he wanted?

            “It’s not like I had a benchmark,” she says, continuing the conversation aloud. She isn’t trying to comfort him, just… informing, perhaps. Making small talk. That’s called pillowtalk when it’s after sex, isn’t it? Even when there are no actual pillows involved.

            Kylo picks up his head to look at her. There’s a crease between his brows. “You hadn't— you—” He stumbles over the right words to use, then settles for, “No one else had claimed you.”

            “‘Claimed’ me? It’s not like you have either, just because of— this.” She also sits up, just a little, so she can squint at him. “But I thought you knew my mind.”

            He shrugs. “I do. But it was always possible that one of your Resistance flunkies had deflowered you already, and you were concealing it from me to spare that person a prolonged, gruesome demise when the time comes.”

            Rey puts her head back down and looks at the ceiling. This was such a mistake.

            His mind is still open to her, though, and she can see that he really is being candid. The accusation surfaces brief images of her embracing Poe, their lips locked together—of her lying in bed naked facing Finn, smiling, their thighs overlapped—before he pushes them down and out of her sight. Frankly, it shocks her a bit. She spends so little time thinking of herself as a sexual being; there are much more pressing things to think about. It’s almost ludicrous, then, that he does.

            He smooths a hand down her side, down the light fabric of her tunic, and she’s suddenly relieved that she was able to keep it on. “I do own you now,” he murmurs. “You must know that. I was first.”

            She turns her head back, staring at him. “By that logic, I own you.”

            The hand freezes. “What.”

            “Wasn’t I first? You’d never done this before either.”

            He scoffs, but doesn’t deny it. She knows she’s right. “It’s immaterial.”

            “It can’t be immaterial when it pertains to you but not when it pertains to me.”

            “I’m still looking to set a date for your public execution,” he snaps. “Maybe I’ll choose tomorrow.”

            Rey sighs and drops the subject. “Fine.”

            He sets his cheek back down on her shoulder. Neither of them makes any effort to get off of the floor for some time.