6. Chapter 6

            They still haven’t moved when a tinny voice comes over the comms toward the front of Kylo’s chambers, the part that she thought might have been a sitting room if it didn’t look so uncomfortable. “Supreme Leader,” says the voice, “General Hux is here to see you.”

            Kylo pushes up onto his hands and knees, and Rey thinks she sees him wince. The connection that grew through whatever it was they just did hasn’t yet faded, and Rey feels a sudden sear of irritation as strongly as if it were her own. “I didn’t send for him,” he growls.

            “He is adamant.”

            “Fine. A- moment.” Kylo pulls his shorts back up and retrieves his shirt from the floor, pulling it over his head. Then he quickly fixes his trousers and glances at Rey, who has pushed herself up to sit back on her elbows, and clearly wonders what exactly to do with her.

            “Is this awkward? Because I can go,” she says flatly.

            “No.” He looks her over, from her completely bare lower half to her wrinkled tunic to her mussed, undone hair, and Rey feels her stomach tighten in a way she isn’t sure she likes or dislikes. Kylo smooths his own hair back from his face.

            “You look uncomfortable,” he says. He calls his tunic to his hand, but doesn’t put it on just yet. “Get in the bed.”

            Oh, that’s funny. Rey actually snorts.

            “Fine.” Kylo flicks his hand, idly, and she rises up as easily as she if were a leaf borne by a breeze. Rey kicks out at him with one of her legs, but doesn’t otherwise fight it; there will be a time and a place for the things worth actually fighting over, and something at the core of her is so achingly, existentially exhausted that she’d rather save her strength for now. Picking battles. That’s something a lifetime of experience on a hostile planet teaches you.

            He lowers her to the bed as the covers draw themselves back, and once she’s settled down they cover her to the waist. Then there’s a snap, and the set of cuffs she had left discarded on the other side of the room breaks in half and comes flying over to him, hovering above his open palm. He looks at them, looks at her.

            “Raise your arms,” he says.

            “I will not.”

            He frowns, visibly frustrated. “I keep asking. Isn’t that what you want?”

            “It’s not really an ask if it’s an order. It’s especially not an ask if I say no and then you make me bend to your will afterwards.”

            Kylo just looks at her, and something invisible tugs Rey’s arms up above her head, against the headboard. He sends the cuffs flying toward her. She doesn’t even flinch as they clamp themselves around her wrists. He presses on them harder with the Force, and they burrow into the smooth, dark, almost unidentifiable material of his headboard — a volcanic glass, maybe — without otherwise breaking it.

            Rey glowers at him. It’s in her best interest to play along, obviously, and make Hux believe she’s a helpless prisoner. She doesn’t have to like it.

            “I want you to know that I truly cannot abide you,” she says.

            “You certainly believe that’s true,” he replies. Then he turns to the door, still holding his tunic. “Send the General in.”

            The double doors whirr open. Rey has never personally met this General Hux, but she knows him well enough from surveillance footage and holovids, an almost comedic, perpetually infuriated, pale, redhead approximation of a man. He enters in impeccable military dress with his hands clasped behind his back as Kylo pulls his tunic back on. “Supreme Leader, I—”

            He stops, takes in the scene. Kylo Ren, almost fully dressed, calling his cloak back to his hand. Rey, clearly visible in Kylo Ren’s bed, cuffed, disheveled, spitting mad but not defeated. Optics. In this moment, Hux’s mind is not difficult to probe, and as he looks at Rey she sees within him the conflicting emotions of disgust and admiration. It’s the disgust that intrigues her the most, because she can’t fathom that a man who’s had billions murdered at his behest would draw the line at what he presumes to be rape. When she probes deeper she finds it’s more the mental imagery that disturbs him, which is fair, along with a distaste for that “behavior.” Oh, he’d like to think himself above Kylo Ren’s level. He isn’t, of course.

            “That’s the girl?”

            “Mm.”

            “Looks like a feral thing,” Hux sneers. “Hard to believe she’s caused all this trouble.”

            “Is it?” Kylo narrows his eyes, and Hux nearly flinches. Rey can tell that he makes Hux nervous, and that Hux loathes him for it. “Don’t underestimate her, General. Too many have already made that mistake.”

            “Of course.” Hux looks from Kylo to Rey again, then chooses wisely to smooth over any displeasure by channeling the admiration he felt a moment ago, “With all due respect, sir, I’m impressed. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

            “Hmph,” says Kylo, fastening his cloak, but he is pleased. He’s not concerned with impressing Hux, who, Rey can sense, he views as a pain in the backside, but rather with being perceived as generally impressive by everyone who crosses his path.

            And perhaps he’s a little too preoccupied by that, and Rey a little too preoccupied by reading into the exchange, because before either of them say or do anything else Hux crosses to the bed and backhands her, hard.

            There’s a second of dead quiet. Then it’s Rey who, in her shock, sends him flying backwards across the room. His back meets the wall with a loud thud. When he starts choking and sputtering, though, that’s not her doing. She looks at Kylo and sees him standing with his hand outstretched, his face twisted with unbridled rage.

            “You— do not— touch her.” Kylo practically bellows it. “She is mine.”

            Rey releases her hold on Hux, not that it does him much good. He stays plastered to the wall, his feet no longer touching the ground, pulling at his jacket collar as if that will do any good. “She killed— the Supreme— Supreme Leader Snoke—” he chokes out. “I— I thought to—”

            Rey’s eyebrows shoot up, but Hux takes no notice. He’s too busy having his windpipe constricted by Kylo, who snarls, “You thought wrong.” He closes his hand a little tighter, and Hux makes a gurgling sound. “I dictate her punishment, not you.”

            She nearly calls his first name, but is cautious of coming off as overly familiar. “Oi!” she shouts instead, loudly enough for him to hear over the blood throbbing in his ears.

            He looks at her and lets Hux drop to the floor. Rey can tell that this isn’t the first time this has happened between them, nor will it be the last. That’s something to file away, confirming what the Resistance had long suspected: the two heads of the First Order are often at each other’s throats, quite literally. For now, she just looks at Kylo, as his lips uncurl and the angry creases in his forehead fade. Killed the Supreme Leader, did she? That’s something to pursue with him later. For now, he gets the message: it’s distasteful to asphyxiate people in front of guests, even if Rey wouldn’t mind seeing the end of Hux. Her cheek stings.

            Hux takes a minute to gasp, to regain his composure. When he stands, the first thing he does is pull the hem of his uniform jacket down, back into place. A very particular, peculiar kind of man, this Hux. “As I came here to say,” he says, calling both her and Kylo’s attention back to him, “the Resistance fighters have fled. Our casualties were minimal. A few TIE fighters, and surface damage to the Star Destroyer.”

            “And the Resistance losses?”

            Hux hesitates.

            Kylo breathes heavily through his nose. “I see.”

            “I thought you might have extracted usable intel from the girl.”

            “It’s a process.” Kylo glances at Rey, then turns his back to her. She marvels at how easily they’re discussing her as though she’s just a thing, as though she isn’t even there. “She is strong with the Force. She won’t break easily.”

            “You seem well on your way to breaking her, Supreme Leader,” says Hux, a bit sardonically. “When you finish and extract what she knows, we’ll crush the Resistance once and for all.” He looks at Rey, rubs his throat. “She can watch.”

            “Yes,” Kylo breathes, as if the very thought of Rey watching everyone in her life die is enough to arouse him again. “Yes, that would be something.”

            From the bed, Rey glares at both of them. Kylo is walled off to her now, except for his occasional outbursts of rage, but she can feel that Hux is surprised by how unintimidated she is. Foolish, he’s thinking. Foolish girl. “Are you two done?” she asks.

            Hux straightens, but otherwise pretends that he hasn’t heard her speak. “I have a debriefing to attend,” he says, and suddenly it strikes Rey that there’s a reason Hux has survived this long. He doesn’t seem to navigate Kylo Ren’s capriciousness with anything approaching grace, but he has his uses. Kylo must have absolutely no patience for debriefings. “If I may take my leave, Supreme Leader. Leave you to… it.”

            “Yes,” Kylo says stiffly. “Go.”

            Hux turns on his heel and exits, the double doors automatically opening before him and shutting after him. The moment he’s gone, Rey reaches through the Force and yanks the cuffs out of the headboard, freeing herself. Kylo is watching the doors, frowning. She’s certainly not going to be the one to tell him he shouldn’t receive his intel in front of prisoners, but she has a chit, now. Something to bargain with.

            “So,” she says. “I killed Snoke, did I?”

            He glances at her, but says nothing.

            “That’s surprising,” she continues. “I mean, I certainly didn’t know as much three years ago as I do now, and he was at the height of his powers. I wouldn’t have thought myself capable of such a thing.”

            “And why wouldn’t you be?” he retorts. “You’re a rebellious little snake.”

            “Of course.”

            Kylo begins pacing the sitting room, walking behind his obsidian furniture set. Rey watches him. His hands fidget by his sides. “No one would believe you,” he says, “if you said otherwise. If you proclaimed your innocence. You must know that. Killed the Supreme Leader, slaughtered his guard, that was you.”

            Us, she thinks. It was us. That intoxicating few minutes where they’d moved as one unit, as a whirlwind, a maelstrom, cutting down the members of the Elite Praetorian Guard until they and they alone remained in Snoke’s throne room. She knows he hasn’t forgotten. She certainly hasn’t, and she’s tried.

            Rey looks at the doors. Hux has only just left, after all. “I’m not sure,” she says. “Perhaps if I could find an audience with the right person—”

            Kylo Ren crosses to her from the sitting room, arm outstretched, not stopping until he reaches her side. He looms over her, and his hand — his actual, ungloved hand — closes around her throat. It’s more intimate than the treatment he’d afforded Hux, because this is personal. With her, it always is.

            “I don’t need an excuse to snuff out your life,” he snarls quietly, “but you’re presenting me with one right now. Such a gift.” He leans over, speaking right into her ear. “It’s a simple truth that no one hears a dead woman’s words.”

            Rey gasps, and her head tilts back, but otherwise she fights to remain poised and doesn’t so much as cough. Control, keep control. She closes her eyes and visualizes his hand on her neck. It’s enough restrict her airflow, however briefly, but it’s really a loose hold, more symbolic than anything else. He doesn’t want her dead just yet. After three years of hunting, he wants to take his time. It’s possible, although he would never admit it, that he doesn’t want her dead at all, that part of him still believes the notion Snoke planted in his mind, of her at his side, might yet be realized.

            She reaches out to the Force, directing tendrils of it to each finger as if prying her own fingers under his. And, taking advantage of the fact that he’s not expecting her to do anything at all, she jerks her head down and yanks his hand off of her throat without touching him.

            Kylo staggers back, just a step or two, as if he’s the one who has just been slapped. Rey falls back too, against the headboard, inhaling deeply as air rushes back into her lungs, oxygen to her blood, blood to her brain and her heart and everything else her body needs to keep fighting. Once she’s recovered herself, she looks up at him, meets his large brown eyes defiantly with her own.

            “You don’t get to do that,” she tells him calmly. “Not to me.”

            A flicker of surprise crosses his face that quickly boils over into rage. “Your tricks won’t save you,” he barks. “And in case you didn’t hear, your little plan failed. Our forces suffered no major casualties. You revealed yourself and surrendered to me for nothing.”

            Rey looks at her knees. She knows it’s not for nothing, but keeps that thought carefully walled off from him. Lets him think, for a moment, that he’s right. That he’s won.

            Kylo keeps his eyes on her. It’s hard to ignore the heat of his gaze. “I should attend the debriefing,” he says, which surprises her. Part of her had believed, perhaps naively, that he wouldn’t want to leave his chambers as long as she was in them. Maybe she overplayed her hand with the truth about Snoke, pushed him a little too far.

            “You’ll be sealed inside,” he continues. “And unless you’ve also developed a knack for slicing since we met last, you won’t be slipping out anytime soon.”

            Rey says nothing. He waits for her to speak, but she says nothing.

            “Fine.” Kylo Ren turns away from her and picks up his gloves, pulling on one and then the other as he strides to the door. Before he leaves, he pauses, looks over his shoulder, and barks, “Wash. You smell like detonite.”

            And then the doors hiss, and he’s gone.

            Once alone, once it’s safe, Rey lets out a frustrated little cry and covers her face with her hands. Just for a moment. She allows herself that. She just needs to get it out of her body, and then she’ll be fine. She’ll be fine. The old Jedi texts are full of archaic rules and outdated thinking, but there’s a line in one of the books that she likes and she reminds herself of it now, a moment when she’s full of frustration and foreboding and doubt.

            “All things will pass,” she murmurs. “All things will pass.”

            She stretches out her legs under his covers, then swings them around to plant her feet on the floor. There’s a creeping soreness in her body that she can’t ignore and a stickiness between her thighs that she tries desperately hard to. Poe had said she might bleed, although it wasn’t a given; she’s not sure if this is that, or if it’s semen, or something else she’s just not thinking of. She doesn’t really feel inclined to check. Any possibility she can imagine nauseates her slightly.

            As much as she doesn’t want to give Kylo Ren the satisfaction, washing sounds ideal right about now. She sighs, strips out of her remaining clothes, then pushes herself off the mattress to investigate the refresher.

            When she pulls back the door, she inhales. Obviously, with the scale of this ship and the rest of Kylo Ren’s chambers, she was expecting a sizable room, but she thinks the refresher alone, really a proper washroom, may as big as her entire living space in the AT-AT on Jakku. The flooring is, of course, cold black tile, and to the side of the door is the sink and a very long countertop with an almost equally long mirror. To the right of counter there’s a bathtub, and then directly across from Rey is a shower; she does stare a little, having never seen a washroom with a separate tub and a shower before. It seems like the very height of luxury.

            To the left of the door there’s another door which presumably separates the toilet from the rest of the room — pointless, Rey thinks, although he has so much space that he must not be concerned with wasting it. There are also a few shelves and cabinets beyond that, along the wall, and some additional shelving next to the mirror over the sink. On one shelf she recognizes shaving tools, on another what she assumes to be hair products, and on yet another sit two folded, full-size black towels, although she knows a shower this modern and sophisticated must have an automatic drying system. Just another one of his incongruities, she supposes.

            Rey presses the washroom door shut behind her. She doesn’t stop to contemplate herself in the mirror and instead steps straight into the shower. As soon as she closes the door, she triggers an automatic process. Water rains down from a showerhead in the ceiling that she hadn’t noticed, which makes her jump; she’s used to the sonic showers on spaceships, where vibrations bounce off the walls of a tight, uncomfortable chamber in order to provide the most efficient possible cleaning. But Kylo’s shower has steam jets instead, and just as she’s getting accustomed to the rain from above, they spray her from the sides. The temperature is scorching, which is must be how he likes it. That is so unsurprising.

            “Oh, hot,” she exclaims aloud, looking for some sort of control panel on one of the walls. She finds it, and dials the temperature back a few clicks until it’s more tolerable. Then she just stands there and lets the shower work, standing underneath the veritable waterfall that pours out of his ceiling, watching the water swirl down the drain at her feet. Even though she’s now visited many planets where water is anything but scarce, she can’t help but find this wasteful.

            Still, it does feel good, to have her body soothed by the steam, massaged by constant rain from above. A panel slides back, revealing a pump mounted on the wall; she holds her hand under it and presses, thinking it might give her body wash, but the consistency is more that of shampoo. She massages it into her scalp without really thinking, and it’s only when she pulls her hands away and rinses off that she realizes she’ll smell like him now. Her hair is going to smell like his hair.

            Something inside of Rey cracks, something that she’d tried very hard to hold together, and tears well up in her eyes, spilling down her cheeks and disappearing down the drain. She’s not proud of it, but she also can’t seem to stop them from flowing. The crack isn’t so deep that it touches her soul or puts her in any danger of losing herself, but it leaves her off-kilter. Usually it’s a beautiful thing, feeling the Force around her, feeling its tug, knowing that she is a part of something much bigger than herself, but she can’t help but feel that this—this is ugly irony, that she should be so drawn to him. She had thought, prior to arriving here, that if he were to sleep with her she’d merely endure it, divorce herself from her body and retreat to some happy memory. But she had participated. She was active. That had to be the work of the Force, right? She could feel it connecting them, commingling his feelings with hers, pressing them together, pressing her lips to his lips and teeth and tongue. That has to be the Force.

            The other possibility is that she truly wants him, which is almost too much to bear.

            At least the water mixes with her tears and quickly washes them off her skin, out of sight, out of mind. She puts out a hand to brace herself against the shower wall and lets herself cry. All things will pass, all things will pass. She’s been so busy lately taking care of everybody else that she can’t remember the last time she cried. Perhaps she was merely overdue.

            The tears ebb soon enough, and Rey wipes at her eyes. Those romance novels Rose had recounted sounded so simple: infiltrate the Empire, seduce the officer. Rey wondered if the protagonist-who-was-not-actually-named-Rose had ever had regrets, or if it was all fantastic sex and unlikely connections turning bad guys good. Maybe she should have read them.

            At the very least, she might have learned about seduction. She envisions half-lidded eyes, whispered, witty conversation, and whatever the appropriate amount of bare skin is that’s considered exciting but not distasteful. Rey is anything but a seductress. It’s simply not a part of her skillset. She doesn’t even think this mission involves seduction, not really, even though they’d had sex. Whatever is going on with Kylo, it has more to do with him being convinced of a part she’s to play in his life than something she actively did, aside from maybe listening to him once, three years ago.

            Maybe seduction is just active listening. Rey laughs at the absurdity of the thought. Still, she’d have to be better at it if she was going to accomplish what she’d set out to do, which was, she reminds herself, to distract Kylo Ren for a full nine days. Her presence clearly has him thrown, but she couldn’t even keep him away from his duties for a full day because she just can’t stop provoking him. Rey doesn’t regret provoking him, though, and that’s the problem. She doesn’t want to make any attempt at placating him, at bending to his whims. The thought churns her stomach a bit. No. She won’t compromise.

            She thinks it likely that true seduction involves pretending to be someone else, and she doesn’t know how to be anyone but herself.

            While she reflects, the shower takes care of washing for her. The steam jets run through a cycle where they sting her skin a bit — probably disinfecting — and a small metal claw unfolds from the side of the wall to comb through her wet hair. Rey lets it be. Once the cycle ends, the water shuts off on its own. The shower gives it time to drain away, and then a few mobile dryers slide out from the wall on metal arms, circling her as they blow hot air, one by her hair, one at about chest height, and one jerking up and down the lengths of her legs. Rey closes her eyes and thinks about the scorching, stinging desert wind. Jakku was never her home, merely the planet she’d spent the longest amount of time living on, but she sometimes remembers what it was like to be simply Rey from Nowhere all the same.

            After a few minutes, the dryers wind down, blowing her with less and less air, until they finish and, with a whirr, retract into the wall. Rey misses them immediately; it’s too cold without the bombardment of heat. She crosses her arms over her chest and tucks her hands under her armpits to keep them warm. The shower door unseals itself without her having to touch it, and she steps out onto the mat. It’s soft, and she takes a moment to curl her toes in it. Three years after leaving Jakku, she still relishes new sensations, even ones she finds in places as bleak as this.

            Rey looks around for something to cover herself with. There are the two black towels, folded, on one of the shelves, and… that’s all. Not a robe in sight. She frowns. She has no particular desire to be naked when Kylo Ren returns—

            The washroom door opens, and he steps across the threshold. Too late.

            It’s funny — Rey had thought that being the Supreme Leader of the First Order would have caused him to modify his posture, or at least put a little bit of a spring in his step. But he still has something of a tendency to walk with his head bent forward. He has to pick it up to look at her, and when he does it’s as if he wasn’t expecting to see her there at all, that he’s almost gratified to find her still in his chambers even though there is nowhere else for her to go.

            Rey calls upon the Force to float one of his towels over to her hand, and she unfurls it and clutches it to her chest. She doesn’t particularly relish being undressed while he’s fully clothed, but she stands her ground, unwilling to let anything like discomfort slip through to him.

            Kylo examines her, and it occurs to her that he’s never seen her like this, not the split second after a proper wash with her hair blown straight. He takes in the sight for a moment as she squares her shoulders and stands there, then he begins peeling off the layers of his clothing. He hangs the cloak on a hook on the back of the door and sets his gloves aside, but when he removes his shirt he pushes it through a flap she hadn’t noticed. Must be a laundry chute. All Rey can think is that it’s definitely too small for her to fit down if she ever needs to make a quick escape.

            He continues to undress methodically, unceremoniously, as if she weren’t even there, unlacing his boots, stepping out of his trousers. Everything cloth goes down the laundry chute to become someone else’s problem. Rey doesn’t move. Whether he realizes it or not, he’s blocking her path to the door. She can’t help but be aware of it. Her skin crawls with awareness. And when he finishes undressing and looks back at her, she realizes how little she wants to be touched, and how overwhelmingly she longs to be alone again.

            Kylo takes a step forward, in her direction. Rey’s belly clenches, and for a moment the animal instinct that kept her alive for years overwhelms her. She takes one very small step away from him, and her back connects with the shower door.

            And he stops. There isn’t much distance between them, and Rey can feel her heartbeat pick up again, not from thrill, or from anticipation, but from dread. She doesn’t want them to start something, not right now. She doesn’t know where it will go. He seems to sense that. His brow creases. He reaches out with a hand, above her, and—

            He presses open the shower door and steps around her to go inside, sealing it shut behind him.

            Rey exhales and scurries out of the washroom, shutting the door tightly. What she wants to do more than anything in this moment is to put her clothes on and leave, not just his chambers, but the Conquest II entirely. She wants to somehow summon the Falcon and jump on it, make the leap to hyperspace, and cross the galaxy. She wants to find herself in the easy presence of her friends again, not have another interaction fraught with tension and double entendre.

            She won’t do that, though, no matter how much some part of her longs for it. She won’t run. This was the deal she struck, with the General, for the Resistance and her students and her friends, with herself. She’ll stay. The feeling just needs its moment, and then, like all things, it will pass.

            Besides, there’s another flaw in her plan. Her clothes are not on the floor where she left them. They’re gone.

            Rey wraps the towel around herself, securing it in place over her chest, and commences a thorough search of the room. Have they been moved? Folded? Did someone set them out on the bed? No, no, and no. They have disappeared entirely. Either Kylo Ren moved them or another entity came into the room while she was in the shower. There is no trace of them anywhere.

            With a small grunt of frustration, Rey walks into the sitting room and flings herself down sideways in one of the uncomfortable chairs, draping her legs over one of its arms. She hears steam hiss from the washroom, and she crosses her arms over her chest again. That’s just fantastic. She’s locked in these chambers with a sworn enemy bent on breaking her and doesn’t have a stitch of clothing to speak of.

            Rey feels him tug at the corner of her consciousness, as he always does just before he appears before her through the Force. She picks up her head and there he is, standing just there, leaning one arm against the wall furthest from the washroom door, shoulders hunched, head bent. He’s completely naked, and she can see rivulets of water from the shower running down his back. His hair is soaked through. She’s not sure he connected to her on purpose. Over the years this almost happened, very rarely, when one of them was giving the other a little too much thought. Rey had always managed to shut it down.

            “You’re in the next room,” she says. “Why not just come out and talk to me if you have something to say?”

            He looks up, visibly startled at seeing her there. She wonders where she’s sitting, from his perspective. Possibly on the counter next to the sink. It wouldn’t feel much different than sitting on this hard chair, just like the cold floor of the shower likely feels no different from the cold floor of his sitting room. She watches a little water begin pooling at his feet, and feels the unmistakable spray of unseen, phantom steam on her face.

            Kylo just regards her for a long moment. And Rey regards him back. Obviously she had a chance to survey him naked a very short time ago, but that was different. With everything happening, she didn’t really have a chance to get a good look at him. She’s seen parts of him bare before — his chest, his shoulders — but the entirety of him just standing there unclothed impresses upon her how powerful his body is. Of course the way the water navigates the planes of his body emphasizes the musculature of his arms, his core, his legs. Rey briefly recalls how those parts of him felt against her bare skin, and makes herself think instead about how he must never have stopped training, waiting for the day that they would face each other again. She feels a twinge of satisfaction that she denied him that showdown at the munitions depot. All of it for naught.

            “Was it really so horrible,” he says, almost tonelessly. It’s not even a proper question, the way he asks it.

            “What?”

            Kylo’s voice crescendos to a shout. “Was it so horrible that you can’t even bear to touch me now!” He pounds the wall with his fist, but the resulting thud is muffled behind the washroom door. “That you couldn’t stand to be in the same room as me!” He strikes the wall again. Another thud.

            Rey just looks at him, and she sighs. She’s not going to get into it with him. It wouldn’t be worth it. Besides, she’d die before soothing his wounded ego. “Where are my clothes?”

            He’d been running a hand through his hair, distracted, but when she speaks he stops and actually makes eye contact with her. “What?”

            “Where. Are. My clothes,” Rey says, enunciating each word very clearly. “They were here and now they aren’t and I want them back.”

            “Oh,” says Kylo. He straightens and turns to face her. Rey keeps her eyes fixed on his face, despite the temptation to look elsewhere, so slight that it’s almost not worth mentioning. “A droid may have taken them for laundering. They were filthy. Covered in soot. Wear mine.”

            “I don’t want to wear yours,” she says, and she can’t succeed at keeping the rising irritation out of her voice. “I want my clothes.”

            “You’ll have to wait for them.”

            “And do what, in the meantime? Wear nothing?”

            “That won’t be so objectionable now that you’re clean,” Kylo snaps.

            He seems to realize that it’s a mistake as soon as he says it, but that doesn’t matter. Rey severs their connection immediately. She hears a howl of rage from behind the washroom door, but all she does is press her cheek to her knee and sigh again.

            After a minute, the water stops hissing. She hears the dryers turn on, then abruptly shut off, the cycle preempted. The door bangs open, and Kylo stalks out of the washroom, bypassing her chair to walk toward the bedchamber. Then she hears a panel slide open, possibly a closet door. She has a pretty decent guess at the contents of his closet: a dozen black outfits, all identical, and two spare cloaks. Fabric rustles, then he strides back to the sitting room and stands in front of her, now wearing a fresh pair of trousers.

            “Rey.”

            She ignores him.

            “What I said. I didn’t mean it.”

            Rey lets her gaze flicker over to him. She raises one eyebrow.

            He sighs. “You aren’t— objectionable. And you weren’t when you had grime in your hair. I don’t care about such things.”

            “And?”

            “And…” He grasps for something to say while she waits. “I said that because you were vexing me.”

            “And?”

            He says nothing.

            “And?”

            “And.” Kylo clenches his teeth. “I am. Sorry.”

            Rey sits back against the arm of the uncomfortable chair. “Fine.”

            “Fine.” He takes two steps closer, then leans over her, grasping the back of her seat with one hand. “So.”

            She looks up at him, thoroughly unimpressed. “So?”

            “Let me bed you again.”

            Rey barks out a short, harsh laugh. “Ha. No.”

            He frowns. “Why not.”

            “Because I don’t want to.”

            “I apologized,” he points out, as if a begrudging apology makes all the difference in the galaxy.

            “I still don’t want to.”

            Kylo pulls his hand back, straightens. His arms hang awkwardly at his side. There’s something pitiful, but not pitiable, about him. “I could make you.”

            “You could try.”

            “So you would resist me, this time?”

            The prospect sounds a little exciting to him, though not as exciting as it was before when he practically begged her to fight. She looks him over, and all she feels is apathy, weariness. Her plan, what she came here to do, may be working — he’s distracted by her, agitated by her, focusing only on her, and he hasn't killed her yet — but she’s struggling, once again, to think back and understand that alien need to have him inside her. She almost can’t believe he was inside her, even though there’s physical proof; parts of her ache from that encounter that have never ached before.

            It’s easy enough to think the phrase “he was inside her” like it means nothing, but it doesn’t. Not to Rey, who for most of her life was alone by default, who values her connections. She allowed him a place within her body, something she’s never allowed anyone else. For a brief time, he was part of her. They connected in more ways than one. And she had wanted it to happen.

            She’s hard pressed to remember why, now.

            Rey shifts onto her side, away from him, and curls up tighter. “I don’t care, Kylo,” she says, not defeated, just tired to her bones. “Do what you want.”

            For a second he stands there, looking at her, the tempest of disappointment-fury-frustration-humiliation brewing inside him impossible for her not to feel as though it were her own. Then he storms away from her abruptly, like a petulant child, and disappears back into the bedchamber. She hears the unmistakable crash of glass breaking against the wall and he lets out another frustrated, growling yell. Then she senses him sit down heavily on the floor on the far side of the bed, putting as much space between them as he possibly can.

            The Force bond makes their shared regret hang that much heavier over the room.