12. Chapter 12

            The next morning a droid brings Rey her food tray, and she eats breakfast alone. Sleep cured most of what ailed her; she feels less achy and much better rested than she has in ages. Much hungrier, too. She’s glad the breakfast is heavy on proteins: eggs and that sliced meat that had been served with the other day’s porridge, along with a fruit medley and tea. She really should start asking Kylo the names of the foods they’re eating. Were he here, she would. She can’t keep from wondering where he’s gone off to as she pops pieces of fruit into her mouth and licks every last drop of juice from her fingers.

            Kylo doesn’t appear until after the droid returns to clear her tray and deliver a parcel of clothes: a pair of trousers, her short boots, an undershirt and that set of underthings from Ordula’s she liked best. Rey dons it all and is just tying her hair back from her face when she feels him enter the recovery room. She doesn’t have time to look at him; the room is small, so he’s behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist with some care, before she even gets the chance to turn her head.

            “Rey,” he murmurs, kissing her hair, her ear. When she doesn’t flinch away from the hold and he’s assured the pain of her broken ribs is gone, he tightens his grip on her. She leans back against him and feels that his skin is warm and slightly tacky.

            “Good morning to you, too.” Rey turns her head to kiss him and notices that his hair has the lankness to it that perspiration brings. She follows through with the kiss before asking, “Training already?”

            “Always training.”

            He releases her so she can turn fully around to face him. He’s wearing one of those thin shirts again, sweat-darkened in places. He puts his large hands on her hips and makes to pull her in, but she brings her own hands up to his chest to keep distance between them. “You’re drenched.”

            “This? This is nothing.” Kylo ducks his head to kiss her neck. It feels so nice that Rey wriggles under his hands. “You don’t mind.”

            She wrinkles her nose. “Maybe not. But you smell.”

            From the juncture of her neck and shoulder, she hears one of those huffs that might be a short bark of laughter. And she knows he must know, too, that she likes the way he smells. Something inherent in his scent makes her want to drag him down to the bed with her. She might, if there wasn’t the danger of being interrupted by one of the medcenter’s attendants or a doctor.

            He takes a step back, keeping his hands on her, and looks her over. Just assessing her condition, no lust. Well, no more than usual. “You look well. How do you feel?”

            “Never better. I think the bacta might have healed some of my older breaks, too.” She looks down at her right leg. “Fell hard on this ankle once and it hasn’t felt like itself again until just now. Can bacta do that?”

            “I’m not certain. The exact science eludes me.”

            “No offense, but I didn’t take you for much of a scientist in the first place.”

            He gently knocks his forehead to hers. “I might surprise you.”

            “Might you?”

            “But I think I’ll give you the chance to surprise me first.”

            Rey’s lip quirks. “I’m listening.”

            His brown eyes glimmer with the beginning of a smile. “You’re technically supposed to avoid physical exertion. But I know you to be a rulebreaker.”

            “Is that so?”

            “Disobedient.”

            “I think you’re complimenting me, Ben Solo.”

            “All I’m saying,” says Kylo, voice tinged with dry humor, “is that if you wanted to investigate the ship’s training facilities, I’d be powerless to stop you.”

            Rey really smiles, now. “I understand. How unfortunate that would be.”

            “If I happened to walk past them with you in my company, and you used that opportunity to flee into the chamber, I would have to pursue you.” He presses his face down closer to hers. “And were you to pick up a staff and begin swinging it around, I’d have no choice but to defend myself.”

            “That does sound like something I’d do.”

            “Doesn’t it?”

            He smiles, then, the smallest smile, lips pressed together but turning up at the corners, eyes bright with affection. Rey feels her heart leap behind her newly-healed ribs. Is this what his laugh had done to her? It’s an unbearably pointed sort of happiness. She doesn’t call attention to that smile for fear that he might retreat back into himself, but she does lean up on the balls of her feet and kiss him right on it, unable to stop herself, unable to possibly think about doing anything else.

            “Best we not walk by there, then,” she says.

            “No,” Kylo agrees, smiling still. “Best not.”

            The training facilities on the Conquest II are massive, just like everything else the First Order ever builds. Rey walks through the doors to find herself standing in a chamber that must be at least three stories tall, with overlooking windows so passersby on an upper deck can observe the proceedings below. Much of the space within view of those windows is occupied by padded mats, for sparring, and half the walls surrounding the mats are mirrored. Beyond that area look to be heavy weights and other types of equipment for strength training. The wall nearest them bears racks upon racks of other gear, including protective padding and melee weapons. The chamber is constructed from the same gray steel as the rest of the ship, lending it a too-polished, impersonal feel; the only indicator that anyone had been in here earlier that morning is a droid wiping sweat up off the mats.

            Rey’s impressed by the size of the room and how well-stocked it is, although she’ll never admit that aloud. Kylo kneels to remove his boots at the door, and she follows his example. He is the first to finish undoing all of his buckles, and pads over to the wall of equipment in his socks. He takes a staff from the wall and tosses it to her as she gets back up to her feet. She catches it easily.

            “You really want to spar with staves?” she asks. The staff is plain, polished wood, not weighted exactly the same as the one she’s used since Jakku, or her saberstaff. It’s balanced, but slightly heavier than what she’s used to, probably because it was made for him.

            “Is that a problem?”

            “Not if you like losing.”

            He exhales derisively through his nose, and shakes his head, unintentionally tossing his shiny dark hair. Arrogance, maybe, or just confidence. “I’ve trained with staves since before you were born.”

            Rey squints at him and cocks her head to the side. “Sorry, but just how old are you?”

            He turns away from her and walks over to the mats. When he waves his hand, the droid skitters away.

            “Ben,” she says, getting a good two-handed grip on her staff and trotting behind him. “Oi.”

            Still no response.

            Playfully, she ducks down and swats his right calf with one end of the staff. “I’m talking to you.”

            He pivots without warning, sweeping his own staff out to try to hook her ankles and knock her over. Rey jumps back in the nick of time, able to read his intent once he’s moving in the minutest details, and lands in a crouch just out of range. “Don’t let your guard down,” he scolds, with a hint of mirth. “I’m thirty-two.”

            “Oh.” Rey plants one end of her staff into the mat to stand it upright, then straightens, leaning against it. “Huh.”

            “Older than you thought?”

            “I don’t know what I thought.” She looks at him appraisingly. He’s ageless to her, in a way: the threads of silver in his hair, mature; the quaver of his lip when something upsets him, youthful; the unexplored depths that his voice can reach, mature; his strong, muscular build, youthful. “Young to be in charge of the galaxy’s dominant military power, I suppose.”

            He shrugs, gets a solid grip on the staff, and plants his feet. “Does it bother you?”

            “Does what?”

            “That I’m so much older than you.”

            Rey frowns. “I never said how old I was.”

            “You didn’t have to.” He takes a step away from her, twirling the staff hand over hand as he does, just warming up. There’s an inelegant, brutal grace to how he moves even when he doesn’t put much power behind it. He ends up with the staff extended in front of him, and he looks over his shoulder at her. “I know.”

            She feels her cheeks heating under his gaze and picks up her staff again, holding it one hand over, one hand under. She doesn’t ask how he knows because she doesn’t need to. There are things she knows about him that she shouldn’t know either. She wonders idly how the Force decides which pieces of one to parcel out to the other. Why should he know her age and she not know his?

            “It doesn’t bother me,” she says, honestly. “Maybe if we weren’t equals, it would. But I don’t feel disadvantaged.”

            He nods, and takes a few more steps with the staff, trying out a couple of moves she recognizes: a couple of blocks, an attack swing or two. Rey finds herself regretting that even his training shirts are long-sleeved; she thinks she’d like to see his arms bare, see his biceps tense as he exerts himself. When he stops moving, the staff is tucked under one arm, behind his back. Rey smiles at him, and he says, “What?”

            “You’re showing off.”

            “Am I?”

            “You are,” she says, teasing him. The occasion seems to call for it. “I can feel it.”

            “So I am.” He brings the staff around to his front and relaxes. “And it’s your turn.”

            “My turn to what?”

            He jerks his chin at her. “Show off.”

            She gives him a little smirk and brings her own staff up. “I may be a bit rusty,” she warns him, keeping her eyes on the staff as she spins it one-handed, trying to get a feel for its weight. “I usually practice every day.”

            “With your pupils,” Kylo supplies.

            Rey swings the staff down to her side and turns her head to stare at him. She knew, of course, that he was aware of her mission, that he knew she was recruiting students for a new Jedi Order. After all, he’d been right on her heels, chasing her through the galaxy as she did so. But it’s another thing to hear him acknowledge her students directly, and despite the new ease to their relationship her chest tightens and her fingers clench hard around that staff. She thinks, for the first time in a few days, of the dread that sank in when she realized he’d trailed her across the galaxy, of the trail of devastation he left in his wake, of Taylin’s decimated village and of Shi’illa, his mother.

            Through their bond, Kylo senses her emotions spiraling out. He begins to say, “I didn’t—”

            Rey cuts him off by snapping, “Don’t talk about them.”

            Kylo watches her, frozen. Then he purses his lips, looks right in her eyes, which have hardened to him, and has the audacity to say, “You’re angry.”

            “I’ve every reason to be.”

            “If you’d stopped running, I wouldn’t have had to chase you.”

            “You do not get to shift the blame for the people you’ve hurt and the lives you’ve destroyed onto me!”

            The words echo off the walls of this cavernous room, and Rey checks herself. She hadn’t realized just how loudly she had raised her voice. But Kylo doesn’t recoil, instead standing his ground, continuing to watch her as the silence stretches out between them. Suddenly his face is difficult to look at. How could she have possibly gotten to this point? How could she have let herself even for a moment forget all that he’s done?

            “Hit me,” he says abruptly.

            Rey blinks, startled from her ruminations. Some of her anger slips from her grasp and surprise takes its place. “Sorry?”

            “You’re angry. Channel it. Strike at me.” He adopts a defensive stance, holding the staff out in front of him.

            She frowns hard, her brow creasing. “No, I’m not going to do that.”

            “You’ve done it before.”

            He means Starkiller Base, she knows. She can see herself reflected in his memories: shoulders squared, eyes blazing, gripping the lightsaber that had belonged to Luke and Anakin Skywalker. Determined, ferocious, fixated on him, with her lips curled back in something almost like a snarl, something savage. An avenging angel. How powerful she’d been that night, how terrifying, how enrapturing, and oh, how she’d awakened something in him—

            “This is different,” she mutters, recalling how she’d felt back then, remembering her white-hot anger at what he’d done to Finn and to Han Solo and the first time she’d channeled the Force after calling for it in the heat of battle. But she also remembers the other things Kylo can’t know from outside of her, her fear and pain and confusion. He couldn’t know how she’d despaired after their fight, kneeling in the snow next to Finn’s unconscious body, thinking they both might die there as the planet fell apart. How young she’d been, how strong her emotions, and how visceral.

            “Not so different.” Kylo hasn’t moved. He just waits. “Strike at me. You’ll feel better.”

            She shifts her grip on the staff and lunges toward him, but only at half-speed. He raises his staff in an easy parry. There’s a satisfying thunk of wood on wood.

            Even so, Kylo’s dark eyes hold a disapproving look. “You're holding back.”

            Rey steps across her own feet to make a three-quarter turn, a move to strike his side that might work were she doing it in double-time. As it is, he blocks her easily. When their staves connect, she says over her shoulder, “I’m not going to lash out at you in anger.”

            “Why?”

            “Because—” Kylo steps back from her to give himself room to swing, forcing her on the defensive. He isn’t reining himself in as much as she is, and when she parries his attack the force of it reverberates up her arms. She grunts through her teeth. “There are other ways for us to solve our problems!”

            “None so efficient as this,” he says, and she can’t tell whether he’s serious or joking, but it doesn’t really matter because he regroups and comes at her again. Soon, they’re locked in an old, familiar exchange, not of words, but of blows.

            As their staves clash, as they circle and whirl around each other, Rey marvels at how well-matched they are, despite her recent injury and his already having exerted himself that morning, despite their differences in age (which may benefit her) and stature (certainly him). He’s aggressive even when play-fighting, as they are now, but she is too, and as they attack and defend equally it’s difficult for either of them to get a real hit in. He comes at her harder, trying to goad her into doing the same, but she refuses to take the bait. Well, take all of it, at least.

            Perhaps this is how Snoke trained him, by rousing him to anger so that he would give his all, every time. As she thinks of her young students sparring with each other, how often they clasp hands after their matches and grin, the thought appalls her. It seems too much to sustain, the sort of thing that would eat a person up from within.

            “Anger is a tool,” he says, picking up on her thoughts and continuing them as they come face to face over their staves again. “You don’t shun yours, but you need to embrace it.”

            “I don’t need a teacher, I am one,” she replies, pushing against him, shoving him away. When she speaks, she’s surprised to find herself breathless. “And your way seems— cruel.”

            He swings at her again, but after she blocks she pays him back in kind, forcing him to dance back a few steps. “Does it?”

            She presses on, not letting up, and even though she holds back from striking him at full strength, the volley of blows is enough to keep him moving away from her. “To channel your anger and fear, you—nnh—had to have been so often angry. And afraid.”

            “There’s strength in—”

            Before he can rebut her properly, she taps his side with her staff, finally landing a hit. He looks down at it, then shakes his hair out of his eyes as if he can’t believe what he’s seeing.

            “My point,” she says.

            “Your point,” he concedes.

            Rey plants her staff on the mat so she can lean on it again. “Clearly you can fight without anger. You're not angry now.”

            “Neither are you.”

            She looks down at herself as if to look within, and finds that he’s right. She isn’t, not any longer.

            “You took it out on me,” he says.

            “It’s not that,” Rey protests. But how can she begin to explain that what had deflated her anger was his continued insistence that she strike at him, and the realization that this is what he must have come to expect? It’s so easy to think of Kylo Ren in the abstract as a force of nature, a storm whipping through the galaxy and tossing it about, tearing it up, and so difficult to reconcile that with the person standing before her, a man with dark clouds hanging low over his head.

            “What is it, then?” Kylo asks, quietly.

            Rey shakes her head. She’s discomfited by how she feels, the push and the pull between who he is to her and all that he’s done, but she lets it be for now. She doesn’t have to do the work of reconciling those things right now. Four more days, this one included, to just let it be. All she says is, “You just make it hard to stay angry at you.”

            He frowns. “Do I?”

            “You do,” she says. She doesn’t elaborate because she knows he wouldn’t appreciate her pity. “So we’re going to spar like normal people, and then we’ll talk about our issues like normal people.”

            “Talking,” he scoffs.

            “What— yes, talking.”

            “I can think of two better ways to resolve our differences,” he says. “Sparring’s the second one.”

            “What’s the first?”

            He looks at her through the bangs hanging over his brow.

            “Oh.” Rey places one hand on her hip. She can feel a little blood rushing to her cheeks, but just rolls her eyes. “I don’t think you taking me to bed really solves anything.”

            “I’d disagree,” says Kylo. He lets his staff drop to the ground, then begins tugging that thin shirt out from the waistband of his trousers and pulling it over his head.

            She stares at him. At the removal of his clothing, not at his exposed skin. Well, not entirely. “What are you doing?”

            “Like you said, this is drenched.” He finishes removing the shirt, shakes his hair out of his eyes again, and looks down at the fabric now in his hand. “Soaked through.”

            “That is not—” A smile creeps back onto her lips. “That is not fair.”

            He shrugs and bends to pick up his staff. She glances over the scars she had given him long ago, now slightly less red than they were when they were fresh, and feels a twinge of shame thinking about how he’d expected her to take her anger out on him. Of course she’d given him reason to think that. There’s precedent. And part of her is somewhat proud, or something like flattered, to see that he doesn’t bear many scars besides hers. Surely he’d faced some challenges in the years they’d been apart? Then again, he’s tough to wound.

            Before he can straighten all the way up she’s pulling her own shirt off. When it’s over her head and she has a clear line of sight again, she sees him staring back at her. She tosses her shirt to the side. “Is there a problem?”

            “Not at all,” he says, doing the same with his. He extends his staff out to gently tap the lower hem of her black mesh undergarment, the only piece of clothing remaining above her waist. “This can’t go too?”

            Her mouth twitches. “Sadly, no. I need it to keep everything in place.” She turns away from him and takes a few springing steps toward the center of the mats, looking back for him over her shoulder. “Come on, then. Best of three.”

            Best of three turns into best of five, then best of seven, then of nine, then... Rey doesn’t know how long they spend on the mats, dancing around each other. She loses track of time, of space, of anything beyond their interplay. Whenever she gets a hit in, he becomes more determined to retaliate, as when he lands one on her she, too, must repay him in kind. She knows all the moves he makes like they’re her own, which makes sense; she supposes they were his first. But this prolongs their matches, because they read each other’s intent and elude each other’s blows with ease. One only manages to find an opening when the other grows tired and careless.

            And as their sparring session wears on, they make more and more mistakes. That’s how she’s able to back Kylo up to one edge of the mat. When his back connects with the mirrored wall, he brings his staff up to shield himself from her. She crosses hers against it, right over its middle, and grins up at him, her face only inches from his.

            “So this one’s mine?” she asks, cheekily. Any of the earlier conflict within her has evaporated like the sweat cooling on her skin, replaced by delight and exhilaration. She hadn’t realized what she was missing all these years: a true partner, in skill, in bed, in— whatever else.

            “Tch,” Kylo says. “You didn’t actually touch me.”

            “I suppose we’re at an impasse, then.”

            “It seems so.” His eyes flicker down to her mouth for the briefest of moments. She doesn’t have to know his mind to know what he wants.

            She’s pressing up onto her toes when she feels the back of her neck prickle with awareness. Her instincts are too acutely honed through years of surviving alone for her to ignore, and without moving otherwise she lets her eyes roam around the space until she locates what it is that’s making her uneasy. In one of the observation windows far above them, just visible in her periphery, she sees a small knot of people, all wearing similar uniforms. One of them has striking red hair.

            Kylo notices her pause, but he doesn’t take his eyes from her face. “Rey?”

            “We’re being watched,” she murmurs, moving her lips as little as possible. And they are properly being watched. She can see that Hux has turned to face the window and peer directly down at them. He’s too far away for her to make out his expression, but he can’t be thinking anything good.

            Without turning his head, Kylo lets his eyes stray toward where she’s looking. “So we are,” he says.

            Rey doesn’t move. If those other people are attired similarly to Hux, it’s safe to assume they’re also high-ranking First Order officials, generals or otherwise. She doesn’t know exactly what Kylo has told them, but Hux, at the least, assumes she’s a reluctant prisoner. Seeing her sparring freely with the Supreme Leader won’t help her maintain that illusion, and she feels it’s important to keep him underestimating her. And Kylo… it couldn’t be good for him, either, to be viewed as soft toward a dangerous Jedi prisoner. She knows he’s making the same calculations that she is, even though they’re only frozen for a moment.

            Then his gaze flickers back to her, and their eyes meet. And they both know what to do.

            Kylo puts all the force he can muster behind his staff and shoves Rey away from him. Rey makes a great show of tripping and stumbling over her own feet as she retreats. She “recovers,” rolling into a backwards somersault and landing in a crouch, bringing her staff up in front of her, defensive. Kylo is already moving to “attack” her again, and she loosens her hold just slightly, imperceptibly.

            With his full strength, Kylo swings his own staff up, catching hers from below and knocking it from her hands. Rey mock-recoils, falling onto her backside and looking up at him wide-eyed. She can’t see Hux or the other generals over Kylo’s shoulder. She hopes they’re buying it. But just in case—

            She thinks grab my hair as hard as she can.

            He throws his staff aside without hesitation, takes a step toward her, and reaches down, getting a loose but convincing grip a couple of inches from her scalp. Rey grabs her hair at the root, just below his hand, to mitigate the pain of being yanked about, and pushes up to her knees to make it look like he’s pulling her toward him. This, of course, brings her face right to his crotch.

            Rey pitches her shoulders as if trying to struggle away from him, but doesn’t put much effort into it. Still, the visual should give any nosy observers a pretty specific idea of what’s happening in the room. Rey waits a beat, then asks, “Are they still there?”

            “Left in disgust, I believe,” says Kylo. He turns his head to look up at the windows. “Gone.”

            “Good.” Rey exhales, and Kylo relaxes his grip on her hair. She doesn’t move away from him just yet. Something about the position piques her curiosity in a very primal way.

            “We’ve probably sparred long enough,” he continues, still looking up at the windows. “You’re supposed to rest, and—”

            Rey presses her face to the fabric of his trousers and he cuts himself off with a sharp exhale. She nuzzles her nose into him. “You’re just saying that because I’m beating you.”

            “I…” She hears him swallow above her. “We were tied. Four-four, or five-five, or...”

            “Sure.” She can feel him growing hard, see the imprint of his cock through his trousers. She brings her hands up to his thighs so she can better balance herself and parts her lips, brushing them against him in an open-mouthed kiss.

            “Rey,” he breathes, practically swearing it.

            “Mm.” Rey keeps pressing her mouth to the fabric, moving it along the outline of him, and slides her hands up his hips to his waist. She peers up at him through her eyelashes and finds him red to the tips of his ears.

            “You don’t—” He pauses, seemingly unable to collect himself. “You don’t have to.”

            “I know,” she replies. “But I want to.” And upon saying it aloud, she knows that it’s true.

            She starts unfastening his trousers and peeling them away from him, pushing them down to his thighs along with his shorts, and then she’s looking at his cock, almost fully hard with minimal help from her, at an angle from which she’s never before contemplated it. She finds herself a bit intimidated upon realizing that while she knows what she wants to do and what it entails, she doesn’t know exactly how to do it in the way he likes best.

            “Ben,” she says, looking back up at him. “How do you touch yourself?”

            Hearing his name from her lips only seems to fluster him further, or maybe it’s the visual of her kneeling before him that does it. “I…”

            “You don’t have to tell me,” she adds. “Just think of it.”

            He catches on, and nods once, a short, brief nod. Then he closes his eyes, and she closes hers, just for a moment. When she opens them she nods, too, and she spits into her palm before circling him with her hand.

            She knows it’s the right grip, the right amount of pressure. A soft moan blossoms at the back of his throat as she begins to pump her hand up and down his shaft, steadily, slowly. Not quickly, not at first, although she knows he sometimes rushes it, doesn’t like to dwell. She’s glad to have his mind as her guide. It gives her a confidence she might not have otherwise had.

            “Is this good?” she asks, shifting her grip on his thigh as she strokes him harder.

            “Yes,” he says, voice a little strangled. He brings his hand back down, not to grab her hair again, but to caress the nape of her neck, gently, marveling.

            She can feel the heat her touch generates for him between her own legs. He’s so sensitive. She herself can’t go from nothing to this state of arousal in this little time. She wonders if it’d be this way for him with anyone or—

            “You,” he gasps, finishing her thought again. “Just you.”

            Rey smiles up at him, and then, just on instinct, she shifts her hand to the base of his cock and presses her lips to the head of it.

            Kylo swears. Rey decides she could stand to hear that again, so she flicks out her tongue, to taste him. Skin is skin, really, albeit a little salty and sweaty, but the reaction from him, the way his voice sounds, the way the hand not on her trembles at his side, the way her abdomen tightens with his need — she just wants to take him all.

            And she tries, a little overly ambitious. She opens her mouth to envelop him, and when she hears him moan again she leans forward to try to take him as deep as she can, but she goes too far and has to pull back to keep from choking on him. A flash of concern cuts through his arousal but she doesn’t want him distracted, so she just shakes her head and tries again, putting her mouth back on him, encircling him with her lips, taking in just a couple of inches of his length and running her tongue against the underside of his cock.

            Kylo cants his hips forward, desperate for more, more heat, more tongue, more touch, and she gives it to him, settling into a rhythm, bobbing her head back and forth. As he pants and moans her name and urges her on and presses his hand to the back of her head, she finally understands how there’s power in an act like this, in having this merciless man at her mercy, but she doesn’t care to exert it right now. She files the knowledge away for when she has a point to prove, a real argument to win, and focuses instead on savoring those sounds, and every jerk of his hips, and the tightness in his thighs, as she inches closer and closer to getting him off.

            It doesn’t take much. He lasts longer than he did the first time they had sex, certainly. But they’ve had nearly two days with no sexual contact, the longest dry spell since he took her aboard his ship, and the newness of her mouth, the suction, it’s all a little much. It’s a little much for Rey, who experiences it secondhand, too, and as he edges closer to finishing she feels dizzy with excitement. She doesn’t know that she’ll be able to get off without stimulation, but she’s barely thinking about herself. Just him.

            Even knowing him, feeling him, being him, his climax takes her by surprise. His abdomen clenches and his breath catches, and his fingers tense in her hair. Then he exhales in a needy whine and his voice is low and rough and shaped vaguely like her name and he spills over into her mouth. It’s uncomplicated and wonderous to be him, to feel what being him feels like, but she’s also herself and oh, that’s— quite a taste. He gets another half-thrust in after but she’s already pulling back to cough again, and because she doesn’t know what else to do she just spits his semen onto the mat.

            Kylo sighs his last moan as he basks in the afterglow, not yet noticing that she’s pulled away, then he blinks, comes back to himself, and sees her wiping at her mouth with the back of her hand. In a rare moment of dual vision she sees it too, his image of her overlaid with her own sight. She sees herself flushed and disheveled and half-naked and radiant, as he does.

            “I’m sorry,” he says, quickly catching onto what had transpired with her. “I didn’t think to warn you.”

            Rey shakes her head. “It’s just the taste,” she says. She turns her face up to look at him and grins, overcome with a sort of heady lightness at seeing how overwhelmed he is, knowing how much pleasure she’d given him. “My point, then?”

            “You wish,” he replies, and he grabs her by her shoulders to pull her up and—

            “Oh, no, wait,” she manages, before he crushes his mouth to hers in an eager, passionate kiss, copious tongue and all. Rey’s not opposed to the idea in principle, and she does kiss him back, but she’s also not remotely surprised when he pulls away.

            “That… is a taste,” he observes, with a slight grimace.

            “Isn’t it just?”

            Kylo chuckles, low, and kisses her cheek instead. “A droid will clean up.”

            “Honestly, that was the furthest thing from my mind.”

            He interlocks his fingers at the small of her back and kisses her temple, then rests his cheek against her hair. She knows what he’s thinking. In all the dreams he had of her, he never thought she’d put her mouth on him. “The things I’ll do to you when we get back to my bed,” he muses.

            She laughs, lightly. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

            “I’m not in the habit,” he says against her ear, and she shivers.

            They barely make it through the door to his chambers before they start stripping each other out of their clothes, and soon enough they’re back in his bed with her hands in his hair and his lips on her lips, holding each other like the final breath before drowning.

            She thought the gentleness with which he’d carried her to and from the bacta tank might extend to the bedroom now that they’d dropped their pretenses, but it doesn’t, or at least not this time. They’re so desperate to touch, and she’s so wet and wanting from experiencing his climax without her own release, that as soon as she’s naked their hips are pressed together and he’s inside of her and they’re fucking as if the galaxy might fall apart around them at any moment. It’s what she wants, it’s everything she wants, and she scratches her nails down his back as her mouth finds his mouth and his breath finds her breath and they lose themselves in each other.

            Something about this time is different, though. When he’s finished inside her before, he’s always taken a moment after to slump on her, or against her. This time he holds himself above her, arms extended, even after she’s come down from her own wracking blissful orgasm, after they’ve come apart. She blinks her eyes back open to see him looking at her face, not smiling, not exactly, but studying her with a warmth she isn’t accustomed to.

            “What is it?” she asks.

            He ducks her head down to kiss her ear, almost bashfully. “You’re beautiful.”

            Something tugs at Rey from the pit of her stomach. “Oh,” she says. One thing she hadn’t had to do much while growing up was take compliments. She’s still not sure she knows how. “Thank you.”

            Kylo falls off to her left, coming to rest on his side. He notes her unease. She’s not exactly trying to hide it. He pulls the covers up around their waists, then drapes his arm over her, and she brings one of hers up to rest on it, over it, her hand on his elbow. “Has no one told you that before?”

            “They have,” she says truthfully. “I’ve heard it said. But I always thought it was rather… beside the point, if that makes any sense.”

            This was something she had struggled to explain to other people, but Kylo seems to grasp it, maybe because they’d already come up against this misunderstanding a few times in small ways. “Beside the point of you,” he says, and she nods. “But that doesn’t make it less true.”

            “Even so.”

            “And it doesn’t diminish you,” he adds. “It doesn't take away from the other things you are.”

            She blinks at him, puzzling over how he’d reached the heart of the issue so swiftly, but says nothing.

            Kylo grazes his fingers up and down her bare side. “When I looked in your mind, the first time,” he says quietly, “I saw how you collected the flowers that grew in the desert, the spinebarrels and nightblossoms. You brought them into your makeshift home. You do find value in beauty.”

            “I do,” Rey agrees. “I just haven’t really figured out how it relates to me. You have to understand, this wasn’t something I thought about until a couple of years ago. Where I grew up, beauty was superfluous. It wouldn’t help you in the desert.” She traces an oval on Kylo’s skin with her forefinger, as if outlining a petal. “Those flowers you mentioned, it wasn’t just the way they looked that was beautiful. It was their strength and resilience, to survive such a harsh environment. The way they grew despite all the odds being stacked against them.”

            “But that’s you,” Kylo says, his voice rich with fondness. “Those qualities you named, you share them, too.”

            Rey huffs, more out of embarrassment than disagreement. “I suppose.”

            He casts his eyes up toward the ceiling, and then he says, “My father—” And he stops. Rey looks at him. She’s never heard him bring up Han Solo without prompting. He clears his throat. “I grew up— our upbringings were very dissimilar, yours and mine. My mother was raised a princess. Her cohort valued the kind of beauty that’s surface-deep. Gilded things, fine clothes. To politicians, appearance is tantamount. But, my father…”

            Rey waits while he gathers his thoughts. He plucks at the bedsheets, and finally says, “My father could have had any ship he wanted after the war. But he kept the Falcon.” He scoffs, or Rey thinks it’s a scoff. “You know she isn’t much to look at, that ship. Risky modifications, slipshod repair jobs over the years, they all added up. But he said she always came through for him. She never let him down.” Kylo’s mouth tightens, but he says, “To my father the two most beautiful things in the galaxy were that ship and my mother. Opposites, in a way. But he weighted them the same.”

            He looks back at Rey. “I’d think you were beautiful even if you were falling apart.”

            That renders Rey speechless for a moment, not just the sentiment, but the depth of feeling with which he says it. She wonders how she’ll ever disentangle herself from this, from him, or if she even wants to. Luke seemed to have faith that she would if she needed to, but no one could know how it feels to be on this end of that gaze and these compliments unless they were receiving them, too.

            “If you’re going to call me ‘beautiful,’” she says at last, “what do I get to call you?”

            He lowers his eyes and kisses her shoulder. With some hesitation, he says, “I thought you already had a name for what I am.”

            “Oh,” she says, with a pang of something almost like regret. “Of course.”

            “We agreed on that.”

            Rey recalls what she’d taken for conviction in his voice as she stood under the shelter of the Falcon, shielded from the rains of Ahch-To. Had he been trying to persuade her, or himself? “We did.”

            “I wasn’t certain you’d changed your stance.”

            She shifts. She isn’t certain, either. Only a few more days for which she can afford to set this question aside. Closer to three and a half, now. “I’m just not sure it’s appropriate for the bedroom.”

            “I think it has some use.”

            Rey picks up her head. He’s adopted that same dry tone he uses when making a clever remark, or a joke. “Do you? How so?”

            “You don’t know?” He shifts down and lowers his mouth to her side, just below her ribs. “I’ll devour you.”

            She sets her head back down on the pillow. “You can try,” she warns him, letting a little humor sneak into her own voice. “But you’ll break your teeth on me.”

            “I’m up for the challenge.” He moves a little lower, pushing the covers back and briefly resting his chin on her hip. “My hunger’s insatiable.”

            “I’ve definitely noticed that bit,” says Rey.

            She folds up her leg so she can pull it up and drape it over his shoulder, and he adjusts to more comfortably lay beneath it. He wraps a hand around the base of her thigh. “Does it frighten you?”

            “No.”

            “No?” He turns his head to suck a welt into her other thigh, making her gasp. When he releases her, he looks up and asks, “It doesn’t frighten you? Going to bed with a monster?”

            Rey looks back at him. His eyes, nearly black in this light, are too fixated on her for him to pretend that her answer means nothing. She sits up and reaches for him, letting her fingers trace over his facial scar for the first time. He stays perfectly still. As the pads of her fore and middle fingers brush down to his brow bone, then from his cheek to his jaw, she finds she knows just what to say.

            “Not when the monster is mine,” she replies.

            He turns his head to kiss her fingers, and he kisses the spot on her thigh that he’d sucked red, and then he ducks his head, to devour her.