Chapter Text
Rey woke up. She pretended she hadn’t. Kylo was accustomed to being alone; if he hadn’t been, he might not have been perceptive to the shift in her breathing, the slight stiffening of her previously lax muscles, the little twitch in the muscle of her cheek.
He wondered how long she would lay beside him, pretending to be asleep and whether she was biding her time, waiting for him to turn his back so she could bolt. She was a stubborn creature. But so was he. He stared, determinedly, at the rough-hewn rock above him, folding his hands over his naked chest and exhaling loudly through his nose in exasperation.
Hunched over on her side, she lay still. Too still. She was unconvincingly rigid, her sharp tailbone protruding from under her skin, just under the hem of her tunic.
Kylo reached out and rubbed his thumb across that nub of bone, stretching her hot, dry skin across it. Even in the damp, chill atmosphere of Cygnus II, she was hot and dry like the desert.
“No.” Rey didn’t move, but her voice bounced off the rock walls of his bunker. Ignoring her, Kylo counted her vertebrae, starting from the bottom. When he reached them bunched hem of her tunic, he’d counted six. She seemed so fragile and breakable. He was surprised he hadn’t left bruises on her.
When his hand slid under the fabric to continue its work, Rey rolled over.
“Ben, no.” Rey said, weakly, watery. She rested her cheek on her folded hands. Her hands were a poor substitute for a pillow, but he didn’t have one. He didn’t have any luxuries, and she’d clearly seen fit to distance herself from him, rather than rest her head on his arm or chest. That made his stomach hurt, for some reason. Stringy and muscular though he was, he was still softer than rock.
Rey didn’t look angry now, or as if she was pretending to be angry when he’d unceremoniously fucked her. She had tears in her eyes and blotches on her cheeks. She looked disappointed.
She was disappointed in him. She’d had some sort of expectation, and he hadn’t met it. He wondered whether she’d fantasized about sex. Whether she’d pictured the first man she’d have sex with. If she had, she hadn’t pictured him. She hadn’t pictured blood and tears and harsh words.
Kylo couldn’t resist. It was violation, but he had already, in some sense, transgressed. In a moment, he was crashing clumsily into her mind. He was out of practice. He rarely had use for the Force on Cygnus II.
In her mind, he saw something he hadn’t expected. She hadn’t fantasized about Dameron or some other sauve, bright-eyed pilot. She hadn’t fantasized about silky sheets and candles. She’d fantasized him, and this slab of rock and nest of blankets. She’d pictured every rivulet of sweat on his body, every grain of dust and dirt he couldn’t stand the cold water long enough to scrub off. She pictured his callouses on her skin, his stale breath, his jerky, unpracticed movements. All that, and she had fantasized about him worshipping her as if she was the center of his universe, not using and then discarding her.
“Kylo!” Rey had reverted to calling him Kylo. Her mouth screwed up around the two syllables as if they pained her. Her cheeks had flared red as if she was embarrassed to be revealed as anything but a martyr in this. “Stop.”
Kylo blinked at her. She had thrown him from her mind, panicked. He could feel her consciousness quiver and flex, as if preparing to sustain a blow. She thought he was going to be rough and selfish.
He had been rough and selfish, rifling through her mind. He wouldn’t be in this. Suddenly, he wanted to give her everything she’d come for, even if it meant that she never came back, longing for more.
“No!” Rey tried to resist as he yanked her back onto the bed, one arm around her waist, the other, pinning her trashing arms to her sides. She thrashed her legs, instead, and bit into the web of muscle between her neck and his shoulder. It hurt. She must have felt, rather than heard, the responsive growl of pain he made.
Falling back onto the bed, with her atop him, Kylo dug his nails into her backside and pulled her up her body. She was astride his hips, then his belly, then his chest. The expression on her face changed from anger intrigue as the apex of her thighs drew further from his cock and closer to his chin. Her repetitive no, no, no died on her lips in a little puff.
She stared down at him, confused. Even in her private fantasies, she hadn’t contemplated this – being on top of him, in a position to dominate, not to be dominated.
There was nothing submissive about Kylo, though, when he dragged her by her hips higher, higher, until his chin was notched between her slim thighs. She squeezed them, reflexively, and squished his cheeks. He thought he must look silly, but she didn’t laugh.
“What are you doing?” She asked him, finally.
Kylo craned his neck forwards, holding her in place with a hand on each bare buttock, and brushed his nose through the messy, ruined folds of her sex. He’d ruined them. He’d soothe them now. He’d worship her, just like she imagined. Even if she hadn’t imagined it like this.
His nose was long enough to trace from her clit to her cunt even though she resisted. When she stopped resisting, he tugged her forward and re-traced that same path with his flat of his tongue. He kept his eyes open. The shiver than convulsed her made even the scant amount of fat on her body jiggle slightly. She bit her lip, as if considering whether she ought to be bold, and then canted her hips forward, smothering him in her sex.
Kylo could have chosen not to mince words. She never did. She told him he smelled, or that he was a monster, or, her particular favorite, a nerfherder. He could have been just as brutally honest and told her she tasted like coppery blood and stale cum. He could have told her she was suffocating him.
He opened his mouth to say those cruel things, and found his mouth full of her. Their proximity made him sloppy. He hadn’t done this before. It was the only thing he hadn’t done. He was breathing out through his nose, short of breath and trying to keep up with the subtle gyrations of her hips, when Rey grasped his hair.
His eyes flew to hers. She looked flush with victory. She adjusted him, ever so slightly, so that he wasn’t licking the narrow, sore passage of her cunt, but instead, the hidden little nub above it. In a low, slow hiss, she said a syllable she’d never said before – certainly not when he’d had her flat on her back. “Yes.”
Encouraged, Kylo latched on and sucked. He liked that – the wet, rhythmic tug of lips around his cock – so why wouldn’t she? He’d never stopped to consider what a woman would like before.
He didn’t have to read her mind to know she did like it. She threw her head back, panting. Lacking oxygen, Kylo dug his nails into her lower back, out of habit. Pain helped him focus. It didn’t seem to bother her. She kept rolling her pelvis against him, her mouth hanging open and glistening.
When he smoothed one hand over her backside and then between the soft, muscular cheeks of it, teasing the little pucker there in counterpoint to the tempo of his mouth on her sex, she made a little inhuman noise. He poked his finger in, emboldened. As her back arched in response, the inhuman noise became a recognizable noise – his name. “Kylo.”
She drew out the last syllable, her face scrunching up. Just as abruptly, she hunched over herself, her stomach heaving, and huffed, “Ben.”
Ben stretched out his neck, easing his slick face back from between her legs. The back of his skull collided with the stone of his makeshift bunk with a crack. He winced. He wondered if he had her blood on his face now, too, just as she did. The blood he’d smeared onto her cheek had dried there like war paint.
Rey stared down at him, breathing hard. If he did have blood on his face, she made no move to clean it off with her fingers or mouth. She sat, slowly, back onto his belly.
After a long moment, Ben raised his arm, intending to use the back of his hand to wipe his face. At the last minute, he thought better of it. He wanted to make her taste. Reading up, he brought himself level with her as she fell back against his thighs. They looked at each other for a long moment, and then he kissed her.
Her mouth opened after a moment, and he felt her suck in a deep breath of his breath. He kissed her more boyishly and desperately than he meant to. There was nothing dominant about his kiss. It was a pathetic entreaty. Come back to me. Stay with me. Touch me. Love me –
When he drew away, breathing hard through his nose, she said, raggedly, “I told you not to kiss me.”
Kylo felt a stone settle in his belly. After what – what they’d done together, what he’d done for her – it had felt so intimate. He’d thought he had implicit permission. He thought they were on equal footing, now, like lovers, not enemies who fucked each other to make each other bleed. He thought –
“I told you not to call me Ben.” He said, lashing out to ease the sting of rejection.
***
Rey came back, two cycles later. She was exactly on time. Kylo heard the roar of her X-wing. It jolted him from the monotony of self-pity and tinkering with BB-8’s selenium drive – with the droid’s permission, of course.
He’d been sure she wouldn’t come back, sure he held little intrigue for her now. She’d had his body completely, and what’s worse, she’d had his soul. She’d found out that he wasn’t a brute who took and took and never wanted to give. She’d realized he needed something besides sex and violence. He needed affection. He needed to please her. She’d seen his weakness.
Kylo’s boots clanged heavily on his rusty metal ladder. He scaled it in a hurry, fumbling and nearly falling. Outside, atop the rock spire, Rey was perched on the lip of the duracrete landing pad. She was looking out at the flock of raptor birds circling in great lazy swoops. She didn’t turn around when he approached, though she must have heard him. His heartbeat alone was loud. He wiped his hands on his pants, nervously.
“You came back.”
“You stink.” Rey said, without turning around. “I should have brought you some more soap.”
There was a smile in her voice that he could hear. His legs trembled with relief. Nothing had changed between them. He hadn’t ruined anything.
Stink be damned, he sat down, wobbly-kneed, next to her. He folded his arms over his knees and thought of all the other panoramas she could admire – Theed, Coruscant, Canto Bight. Each of them would be more different than the next.
It was the middle of the day on Cygnus II, but the sky was, as it ever was, purple and hazy, low-slung over the craggy landscape and floodplains. Everything was cast in a dull, heavy light. The air even felt heavy with mist and the promise of darkness.
“It’s always dusk here.” Kylo told her, lamely. He felt they’d been sitting in silence for too long. They’d never been adept at talking to each other. They were better at doing other things to each other. But he wasn’t sure he was allowed to do those things. He wasn’t even sure he was allowed to touch her.
Rey’s lips twitched. For a long time, she didn’t say anything. Then, awkwardly, she leaned over – her arms still wrapped protectively around herself – and rested her cheek on his bicep. He breath tickled his skin through the fabric of his shirt when she spoke. “I think it’s always dawn.”