Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

You were, at the moment, bitter and annoyed and unarguably exhausted, but, even in this state, you were not ignorant. You had missed your dinner for two days in a row already, being forced to work through the time allotted for you to relax and choke down the food served in the cafeteria (still eating cafè food after all this time, no matter how far you had come you were still only allowed tacos every other Tuesday). Your Force training had become exponentially more intense over the past week, with the ongoing and everlasting meetings considering the future of the Supreme Leader’s other apprentice, Kylo Ren. By the time Snoke arrived for your training, he was harder on you than ever before, keeping you hours after you were scheduled to start your other, less extraneous duties such as eating or sleeping. Today, in fact, he had not even been there, instead sending General Hux in his place. Despite the fact that Hux had little understanding and no skill when it came to the Force, he was allowed to boss you around, ordering you to smash object after object into the walls and even play a “What Am I Thinking?” game where he only thought snide comments about you. That said, while you were greatly upset at your current circumstance, you were not ignorant.

You had just sat down with your plate of various flavors of mush when two Stormtroopers approached you and, hesitantly as you glared at them, told you that Supreme Leader Snoke had requested you see him immediately. As in “you will be murdered if you don't come right now” immediately. As in “no time for food we are trying to save (or destroy?) the universe” immediately. You stared longingly at your portion of mashed potatoes before standing, inwardly enraged but outwardly calm, and following the troopers.

Unlike some other, higher-up officials in the First Order, you were not a child who felt the need to throw temper tantrums when things didn't go your way, and you despised those who did. Therefore, you did not have the strongest of relationships with Commander Ren. He acted, at least in the way you saw it, more often like an exasperated toddler denied of naptime than one of your superiors, and, while you were respectful to him on the surprisingly sparing times you saw him, as Snoke preferred to keep your training separate (you didn't even know if he could pick your face out of a line up, and you knew you couldn't return the favor, only having ever seen him masked in passing on the ship), his hissy fits angered you to no end. The only difference between you and him, in your eyes, was that he had been trained as a Jedi and you, less fortunate, had not discovered your sensitivity until you were already working (as a mere builder) for the Order and therefore hadn't had the opportunity to hone your skills until now. And just as you were stewing in this anger you had for the masked middle schooler, the door to Snoke’s quarters slid open and your eyes landed on the man himself. Your throat locked, more upset to see him than the Leader, but you kept your head high and walked forward with level steps. “Hello, Supreme Leader,” you said, ducking your head to Snoke directly in front of you and ignoring Commanders Ren and Hux standing, now, to either side of you. You briefly imagined how small you must look, not only dwarfed by the giant hologram in front of you but also by the men to either side of you, one (your least favorite) over a full head taller than you and the other (your second least favorite) at least half of that.

“You have been called here, Apprentice L/n, because I am rescheduling your training with me to be alongside Apprentice Ren’s, once weekly. Due to circumstances of late, his duties when not training will now consist of teaching you what he knows of the Force, and you will have new responsibilities in teaching him your ways in the more practical forms of combat.”

You resisted the urge to whip your head around to the man on your left, instead simply nodding with your eyes aimed at your feet. “Yes, Master,” you said, trying your hardest to keep your voice level as you stared at the gloved hands of Commander Ren, his fists clenching and unclenching quickly. You could imagine how it must feel to him, not only having to learn combat techniques from a much less experienced woman but also having to go through more training alongside her, and you would have smiled if you didn't despise the idea of being near him so much.

Snoke stared down at both of you, his pale eyes lingering a second on yours before moving to Ren, beside you, his hands finally still, though even through the gloves you knew they were white with strain. “That is all for now,” he dismissed you, and you both turned on your heels (a bit too in sync for your taste) and walked straight-backed out of the room. Well, you walked. Ren more sulked, his head bowed, angry as usual, like a toddler scorned for coloring on the walls of his bedroom.

When you reached the hall, you maneuvered off to the right, intent on stopping by the kitchen to bribe a male cook you had caught staring your way into making you a sandwich (or four). The masked man once behind you now stalked past you, giving you no glance over his shoulder, no acknowledgement of your existence as he stomped his way off to the left toward his quarters. You rolled your eyes, continuing on to the cafeteria with a fleeting thought that, for a grown ass man almost a foot taller than you, he sure reminded you of your little brother.

*****

You were dozing in and out of consciousness in the morning, your brain all fuzzy around the edges and your fingers and toes constantly numb. You had slept criminally little the night before, your mind racing with images of a crossguard lightsaber plunging into your chest, of your family standing around a grave with their faces stoic as always, of the words scrawled across your tombstone reading “Dearly Wasted” instead of “Dearly Beloved.”

Finally rolling out of bed after the seventh scream to wake you, you stripped down and climbed into the shower, hoping the water would calm you. It didn't, of course, because why would it? It did wake you, though, and you had finally stopped taking ten second blinks when you stepped out, quickly drying your body off before wrapping that towel around your hair and reaching for another one in the cupboard. Much to your dismay, your hand found only air, and you sighed, making your way back into your bedroom anyway to gather your clothes for the day.

You had just set a single foot outside of your built-in bathroom (one of the only perks you were allowed, mostly because you complained to Hux for months about having to share one with the Stormtroopers) when the door to your quarters slid open. There you were, naked as the day you were born, towel in your hair, bags under your eyes, and, directly across from you in the doorway, there he was, the man you wanted to see you naked least, head first held high but, as he seemed to see you, swiveling around so as not to face you in a split second. You were grateful as you grabbed the duvet off your bed and wrapped it around your naked form but also insulted. He couldn't even stare for a second longer? Was your body that atrocious?

“Apprentice L/n, why exactly are you naked?” He asked, back still turned to you. You wondered briefly what his voice sounded like without the helmet, finally landing on an idea you liked: the mass murderer’s true tone squeaky and lispy and perpetually prepubescent.

“That depends, Apprentice Ren.” His shoulders slumped at the word, used to the moniker of ‘Commander.’ You were used to ‘Officer,’ too, but if he insisted upon talking down to you, you would make it clear to him that you were on the same level. “Why exactly are you barging into my room without permission?” You retorted, tucking your blanket under both of your arms. “And you can turn around now. I am covered.”

Ren shook his head, still not turning to look at you. “No need. I came to tell you that your training with me will begin in one hour.” Then, not waiting for a response, he stalked off down the hallway.

You sighed, Force-shutting your door before pulling on a shirt for the day. He could've at least closed it behind him when he left.

Chapter Text

For someone who was so unfortunately on time before, Ren was easily ten minutes late to your training session. You weren't counting, of course; that would be obsessive, but it had been 11 minutes and 14 seconds exactly. You counted/didn't count silently as you swirled the hilt of your lightsaber in your hands. The aforementioned tardy toddler was so good at it, but your fingers tripped and almost switched yours on every time you tried to even pretended to swing it at an imposing enemy. As if to prove a point, the saber dropped from your fingers that very moment, and you bent at the waist to pick it up. Just as you were reaching for the hilt, you heard the ‘woosh’ of the training room doors opening, and you cringed, sure of who it was by the heavy, brooding footfalls. You snapped up quickly but knew it was too late. Your ass, granted covered in black tights, had been readily visible to him the minute he entered the room. This guy really had a knack for catching you in questionable positions. Much to your amusement, though, you were probably the only girl he'd ever seen naked. The child of the First Order didn't have many female admirers, most likely because no one ever saw his fucking face, or maybe it was because he had a small-

“You must remember I can tell what you are thinking,” He practically hissed, and you had to look away to hide the smirk on your face. Serves him right for being in your head anyway. “A power you have not yet mastered, I am told.”

Your mind raced with rude remarks you could say about General Hux and his bullshit bragging about the one (and only) time you thought he was thinking you were grass and not trash, but instead you just nodded, clasping your hands in front of you. “Okay, let's practice that first then.”

Although you couldn't see his features, you could feel the smugness radiating from the man in front of you. “You may begin.”

Slowing your breathing, you focused on reading into Ren's brain, able to feel a small give before the walls closed up in front of you. It was like a pressure on your mind, and no matter how hard you pushed against it, it held steady. You did not give up, though, instead pushing even harder.

“You must calm yourself first,” the droning (but softer now, as if he was almost okay with suffering through your company when it seemed like you needed him there) voice in front of you said, then continued about how important inner focus was. You had stopped paying attention by then, though, because you happened to notice that when he spoke, the walls eased a little, giving when you pushed against them. (They weren't walls, really; it was just easier to call them that. It was more like watching a movie with your eyes shut and ears plugged and trying to figure out what was going on by the light warming your face alone.)

“It's hard to be calm,” you said, making an attempt to have your voice sound strained as you tried your damnedest to get him talking again.

Shockingly, it worked. “Try thinking of total blackness, or imagine what silence sounds like. Then, let it spread through-”

The laughter bubbled out of your chest before you could stop it. “Candles!” You said, giddy with your success. “You were thinking about candles.” He opened his mouth to speak, but you continued. “White ones, in little glasses on your bedside table. They smell like…” You trailed off, and you could feel him trying to slam the wall back down, but you managed to hold it up just long enough. “Pine.”

You were pretty sure a master was supposed to be pleased when his pupil had a breakthrough, but the man in front of you clenched his fists tight at his sides, his spine stiffening like an angry cat’s. “Target practice,” He spat, nodding to the stacks of just-hard-enough rocks to your left. “Throw those stones at the mannequins.”

You shot him a look out of the corner of your eyes. Really? This was juvenile. You had been tossing around rocks for months. If this was really all Ren had to offer as a trainer, it made sense that he would be beaten by an untrained girl. You wished he had heard that musing, you thought as you plunged a stone at one of the dummies on the opposite of the room.

It was aimed perfectly and had just the right amount of force (or Force) behind it, and yet it didn't hit. Instead, it stayed stuck in the air an inch from the dummy’s unpainted face, floating only a millisecond from its target. You knitted your brow as you looked over at Ren, who was holding his hand out toward the rock. You grimaced, launching another stone toward the same mannequin, only this time lower, toward its abdomen, but he stopped that one too. Growing quickly frustrated, you threw five more rocks at three more dummies before your teeth started to grind against each other. He was blocking every one of them with ease, and you were getting tired of it. At last, you had an idea. You picked up a single stone and, without changing your stance at all, launched it right at Ren's face. The other rocks fell as he managed to stop the one headed for him just before it reached his nose (or where his nose would have been, mask and all), and you took advantage of this moment to throw three more simultaneously at the same target. Two of the rocks embedded themselves into its core, the other hit the wall beside its head. But, hey, two out of three was better than nothing.

“You only hit your target twice,” he stated, as if you needed him to tell you. His voice sounded not only angry but tense, as if he was trying very hard to hold something back. “And you cannot just distract me every time the Force is not strong for you.”

Your jaw clenched tight, but you simply shrugged. “You cannot keep getting distracted, if you are so strong with the Force,” you retorted, and you noticed his fist twitch toward his lightsaber. A smug smile broke out across your face, and you did not try to hide it as you reached for your bottle of water. Just as it was about to touch your lips, it was ripped by some invisible hand from your grasp. It landed against the wall with a wet crash, the bottle breaking and the water spilling everywhere. A single droplet of it landed on your cheek. Your jaw fell slack for a moment before you reached behind your head and tied up your hair. “That was just bitchy,” you muttered, and you could have sworn you heard the six-foot serial murderer behind you giggle.

*****

After a quick break for lunch (which, you noticed, Ren took in his room, something that suggested strongly to you that he didn't have to eat cafeteria slop), it was your turn to play trainer. You'd never done this before, teaching someone else your techniques, but you were surprisingly (even to yourself sometimes) good at hand to hand combat. And Ren should not always rely on the Force.

You were twenty-two seconds late to your training session, but you were not exactly worried since your partner had been 11 minutes and 43 seconds late to his. That said, the moment you walked in, the masked middle schooler himself stood in the middle of the room, arms across his chest. He quickly shot them down when he saw you, noting, “You are late.”

“Eleven minutes and twenty-one seconds less than you were, so we're even,” you replied, setting your (new) water bottle down on a bench. Reaching behind your head to tie your hair back in determination for the second time that day, you looked back at the other in the room. “You can't train in that mask. You have to know that.”

There was an exhalation of air that clearly came from the man and then an exhalation of air that clearly came from the mask being removed, but you kept your back turned, slipping on the gloves you hardly ever wore and sliding off the cowl you wore around your shoulders only because it was cold in the ship cafeteria. When you turned around, so was he, his back to you as he set his helmet down on the bench nearest him. His hair was dark and left to his shoulders, and you realized that you had pictured him differently: old and grayed and, as he turned to face you, deformed, but he was none of those. He had a Roman nose and brown eyes, full lips. His jawline was soft and square, and his face was more the face of, say, a radar technician than a mass murderer. That said, you didn't let it trip you up, reminding yourself that no matter how marginally attractive you found him, he was still a crybaby of a commander.

“The most important part of hand to hand combat is not offense but defense. No matter how pissed you get at your opponent, you have to remember that you're trying to make it out unharmed, not just the least harmed,” you said, making your way over to him. As you did, you noticed a thin scar across his face, barely noticeable except when it glinted in the light. “Hands up,” you ordered, and he responded by doing as you said (which surprised you, although you figured he had been following orders for a while).

You stared at his stance for a moment, noting his left foot wasn't quite as far forward as his right, and shot out a punch that landed on his nose. He barely even tried to defend himself, but, when the punch hit, slammed a hand up against his face, shooting a glare at you that almost made your blood freeze. “Defense,” you repeated, then nodded at his feet, turning around. “And you need to straighten up your stance; it's too uneven.”

Ren's jaw clenched, and you thought that maybe it wasn't so soft after all. It was still not glass cutting, but it looked strong at least. The minute you turned back toward him, he lunged forward and clocked your jaw, causing you to almost fall backward. “Defense, Apprentice L/n,” he said, proud of himself, but his mouth twitched a little when he saw the blood on the edge of your lips when you straightened. His voice, much to your dismay, was low and warm and smooth, not the squeaky mess you had hoped it would be.

He also had a smear of red under his right nostril, but you simply shook your shoulders, hands back up, and sent a blow to his left eye just before a kick to his ribs. He coughed a little, and you tossed your weight from one foot to the other. “You can tell where someone is about to throw a hit, usually, by their eyes,” you said, then, nodding at him when he righted himself, continued, “You try to punch me again.”

The man paused before throwing his fist at your jaw again, and you ducked under before your fist landed against his gut. “Try looking at some other part of your opponent and just knowing where you want to hit without giving them a hint.”

He tried again, but his eyes flickered to your left side just before his fist went flying there, and you kicked it out of the way. This continued for an hour, him trying to pretend his intention wasn't to hit your shoulder or jaw or ribs, but his eyes giving him away just a second too soon. “Why is this important for me?” He spat at you after you replied to a swing at your shoulder with a kick to his calf. “I have a mask.”

You cocked an eyebrow at him. “Do you expect to always have that mask on?”

He didn't answer, simply cracking his knuckles before attempting to hit your other shoulder. You stepped back to dodge him and then sighed. “Would you like to practice with the sabers instead?”

His jaw was tense again when he spoke, nodding along to your words as he wrung his gloved wrists. “Yes.” He sounded like a child again, even despite the voice.

You went to grab yours from your side then turn it to the low setting so it couldn't kill him, but Ren already had his out and ready. “Did you turn it to ‘Low?’” You asked, and his mouth turned down as he switched it off and fumbled with the settings. You shook your head to yourself, remembering your dream the night before.

Chapter Text

You were almost ready for bed, washing your face in front of your mirror, when you heard a knock on your door. You opened it without moving, calling out, “What is it?”

Two Stormtroopers stood in the doorway at attention. “Officer L/n, Commander Ren has requested you in his quarters,” one said, his voice hesitant.

You stared at your own reflection for a moment, trying to figure out what this could possibly be about before you spoke. “Did he happen to say what for?”

“N-no, Officer,” the other ‘trooper replied.

You shrugged and nodded where they could not see, drying off your face quickly. “Thank you for notifying me,” you dismissed them, and your door slid shut.

You made your way to Ren's quarters in your pajamas (a black tank top and black pants, the Order not too fond of many other colors) slowly, hesitantly, all the while trying to figure out why exactly he would request you this late. When you arrived, you rose your hand to knock when the door slid open in front of you. You could not immediately see anyone in the room, the walls pockmarked with first-sized holes you ignored, but a voice came from the bathroom to your left. “Thank you for coming.”

The doors closed behind you, and the cold air that rushed past made you suddenly aware that you had no bra on. But this time, him catching you in your pressing (vaguely sexual) situation was entirely his fault, and you didn't cross your arms over your chest when he walked out of the bathroom, his face bruised and swollen. You noted his eyes flickering to your chest before you nodded to the bottle of wine on his bedside table, next to the candles he had been thinking of earlier. “You get wine?”

He nodded, looking where you had been as you stared up at his face. “Yes. I do.” And then, suddenly, his fist shot out at your nose, and your hands slapped up to your face, feeling blood run down your fingers extremely quickly. “Defense,” he said simply, watching you run off to the bathroom with your head held back on your neck.

You searched his cupboards before you managed to grab a towel and press it against your face, but it soaked with blood quickly. Ren had moved to the doorway of the bathroom, leaning against the frame cockily, but his face wasn't quite as smug as usual. There was a hint of regret in his dark eyes that you noticed before he looked away. “Would you like me to call the infirmary?” He asked.

You removed the towel and looked at your nose quickly before grabbing it and pushing it to one side and then the other. It hurt, of course, so horribly that tears streaked from your eyes the moment you touched it, but it was decidedly not broken. You shook your head, using the clean edge of the towel to wipe your eyes. “No, I'm fine,” you said, your voice choked, then looked his way. “Good form.”

He smiled for just a second before his face fell back to its normal stoic stance. “Thank you.”

You grabbed another towel and shimmied past him in the doorway, again noticing his eyes drawn to your chest. “And just because I can't read your mind as easily doesn't mean I can't see you staring at my breasts,” you said, standing with your back to him at the doorway. “Is that all you needed?”

Ren's voice was tough and angry when he spoke again, no longer as proud of his achievements as he was annoyed at your comment. “Yes,” he said, and the doors slid back open. You walked out, back straight, ignoring the fact that he almost caught your ankle as he slid them back shut, smiling behind the towel you still held to your face.

Chapter Text

Over the next three days, you fell into a sort of rhythm with Ren. Your Force training would take place in the morning (during which he would always grow annoyed at your successes and radiate with happiness at your failures) followed by his combat training (during which you would always go much too hard on him and he would reciprocate as best he could, being quite a bit below your level) followed by your dual training with Snoke (during which he would always get more attention than you and you would mostly sit and watch as the two had intense silent mind conversations you were not invited to partake in). You had, frankly, grown bored of trying not to step on Kylo Ren’s overgrown temper-filled toddler toes, always having to bite back comments about his flaws as he mercilessly mocked yours in the same steady, stoic tone as always. You realized, as you walked briskly down the long, empty hallway, that he brought out the

child in you. You knew, from the one or two happy couples you had actually met, that that was something happy couples said to each other, but you had meant this in the most degrading way. You hated that he made you feel like an infant, that he made you do such childish things. That said, as you reached your destination, you looked both ways quickly before Force-opening the door to Ren’s quarters, by-passing the usual code locks that would have tripped you up.

His room was almost exactly like you had seen it before, minus the fist-sized holes in the walls that had apparently been patched. You figured if whoever cleaned up after the countless tantrums he threw had found a way to fix the damage he did with his lightsaber, they could easily patch up a few punch holes. Shutting the door behind you, you realized that his wall-hitting had most likely been the result of him perfecting the punch that still left your nose sore and right eye bruised. You stopped thinking about that, though, when your wandering eyes landed on the object of your desire, the reason you had snuck into the private quarters of an official much higher up on the chain of command than you (whom you hated): the wine.

You had spent years (months, really) drinking water and the occasional lemon-lime soda from the onboard cafeteria, and, when your eyes had landed on the bottle of wine on Kylo Ren’s bedside table only seconds before he almost broke your face, you had been filled with want. Need. It filled your every waking moment, and it was even starting to affect your relationships. Whenever you saw Hux or even fellow officers of your own rank, you wondered if they had wine delivered to their rooms every night, if you were the only one denied the simple pleasures of life like getting drunk alone in your quarters at night.

The night after your first visit to Ren’s room, you had snuck back in for the first time to snatch the bottle on his dresser and run just before he stomped down the hallway to retire for the night. You heard him scream from thirteen doors down.

You had managed to make that bottle last two and a half nights, but the last sip came too soon today, when you needed to forget your name (or at least his) after a long day of training. So, logically, you had returned for another bottle, vaguely tipsy already. You reached out for the bottle and popped the cork off the best way you knew how to without a wine opener (hint: it's the Force) before tipping your head back and gulping it down like ambrosia.

Your brain was considerably blurry from the alcohol you had already consumed, and maybe that was why the best idea you could think of was to hold the bottle up to your lips as you fumbled through Ren’s things. In the bedside table drawer, you found nothing but a leather bound book with a lock on it (you giggled when you realized it was most likely his diary). You tossed it between your hands for a moment before setting it back down neatly and scanning the room idly. There was not much else in the room, really. His closet had little to nothing in it other than standard uniforms, and you were running out of ideas when you snatched up a candle and walked into his bathroom, searching the cupboards for something to light it with.

You were on your knees looking into the cabinets under the sink when you heard the door slide open. The footsteps, heavy and angry, it seemed, entered the room, and you did not look his way as you peeked up over the counter at your own reflection. The last time you had looked at yourself like this, he had just come dangerously close to breaking your nose, and that was after he invited you to his room. Your mind raced with ideas of what he might do now, of what he would say when he noticed you with a half-empty bottle of wine in one hand and a candle in the other. There was a slight movement and then a pause. The entire room was quiet except for the sound of your breathing and the sink slowly dripping water.

“Apprentice L/n.” He spoke, and your heart stilled. That mechanical twinge in his voice terrified you. You stood, slowly, carefully. When you finally looked to the side and saw him, masked and fully robed, you understood why people saw him as a killing machine. He looked like one. And maybe he was one. You wondered how many people’s last sight had been just this, the man standing there in front of you with no light or sense of humanity behind his mask, looking like his main purpose in life was to end yours. You took a deep breath to steady yourself and thought of your dream, of him plunging his lightsaber into your chest and you having no defense against him.

You felt him there, in your mind, even though you knew you weren't projecting, but you ignored it, too busy wrapped up in the image of your own death to pay attention to the presence of another in your thoughts. You had dreamt of him killing you before ever seeing his face, so aggressively human it shook you to your core. Now your nightmares were of it, of him without the mask or saber, just the man behind it all with a hand to your throat as you tried helplessly to cry out against him.

In front of you, Ren reached up and removed his mask, the hiss of the lock releasing making you flinch more than the sight of him moving. He set the helmet on the bed before turning back to you and stepping forward. He was so much larger than you; it only took him three or four steps to cross the gap between you. Your breath caught when he stopped just in front of you and raised a hand to your temple without touching you, his gloves having disappeared somewhere along the way. You were so close his breath hit your face, the smell of it clean but male, so clearly coming from a man's throat. You let him search your brain for whatever he liked, staring at his dark eyes, still sure any second he would simply flick his wrist and send you flying against the back wall, mangling you worse than he had his own walls that night, but that made you remember you had taught him physical tactics too. He could probably just as easily drop kick you as he could Force choke you at this point, and you saw your eyes watering before you felt it. You were sure this was it, even as he lowered his hand from its spot so close to your face and slid open a drawer to your left to pull out a tiny box of matches and place them on the counter.

You still did not move to grab them, only stared at him, eyes wide with disbelief, and he, to your surprise, stared back at you. The two of your stood there for a long moment, staring at each other before he finally released you from your trance and turned away. “I will not kill you,” he said, but you didn't find much solace in it until he continued, “Supreme Leader would not will it so.”

You released then that no matter how many tantrums he threw, Ren would not disobey an order from the Leader, and you nodded slowly as you reached for the matches and struck one. You lit the candle while still staring at him, his back to you as he set his helmet down on a table on the opposite side of his bed from the candle one. After the wick was supporting a strong enough flame, you took a deep breath (it smelled better than you thought it would) and grabbed the bottle of wine in your other hand before you walked back into the main room, avoiding Ren's gaze now as you set the candle in its rightful place and lit the others with it. His footsteps shuffled around behind you and stilled, and you swore you could smell his breath again, clean and male, before you ducked out of the way and towards the front of the room. He slipped off his cowl and placed it on his bed before he turned back to you and stared.

You stared back, eyes much stronger than your ankles, which were weak and shaking. He blinked, and your eyes fell to his hands, which also shook slightly at his sides. You remembered all his ticks and tiny hand movements you had already seen before your eyes fell to his boots and then back up to his face again. His hair was falling into his face in the front, although he made no move to fix it. Your own hair was down, and your hands twitched to pull it back before you stopped them and simply took a long sip from the bottle of wine.

“You took the bottle the other day,” he said, his voice not strong and angry and strained as you were used to but simply curious. It was not exactly a question, but you answered with a nod of your head anyway. He stared at you for another long moment before he spoke again, his voice even farther from the terse tone you were used to. “You could kill me almost as easily as I could kill you. There is no need for you to be afraid of me.”

Your heart lunged to your stomach, and, though you did not necessarily believe his words or understand why he felt the need to say them, you nodded again.

“Speak,” he ordered, although not with his usual inflection when ordering.

“I don't want to kill you,” you choked out, knuckles white as you gripped the bottle in your right hand.

The edge of Kylo’s mouth twitched, though you were not sure which way, and he was the one nodding now. “I am aware,” he responded before his head tilted a little to the side. “Yet you still hate me. Why is that?”

Your jaw clenched. “You are…” You trailed off, looking for a word other than ‘temperamental’ or ‘childish.’ You felt the pressure of him trying to get into your thoughts but pushed him away quickly before speaking. “You inspire me to do… unprofessional things.”

Ren stared at you for a long moment before responding, “Like the wine.”

You shook your head in agreement. “Like the wine.”

He was quiet again for a while. You remembered the feel of his breath on your face and were filled with both fear and something else you could not place in the box marked attraction but, you realized, some might. You still despised his childish actions, but you could admit he was not entirely atrocious at times. The fact that you were even daring to think these things was a clear sign of your drunkenness, and you took another gulp of the now almost empty wine. In front of you, Ren shifted his weight. “It does not seem as if you were too professional to begin with, what with the fact that I continue to find you in such pressing positions.”

You thought back to the entire wine situation that had just occurred and then to the one before that when he had entered the training room to you bent over conspicuously and before that to him walking in on you stark naked. Your face flushed red, and you opened your mouth to defend yourself before your mind landed on the time you had caught him in your head as you thought of the (still amusing) idea that you were the only woman he had ever seen in such ‘pressing positions.’ It seemed a solid thought to you, taking into account the years he had sacrificed for the Order and then for Jedi training before that. There was, of course, the chance of him having a female partner in those years, especially since he was clearly not unattractive, but you found it unlikely due to his fits of childlike anger. Only virgins threw tantrums like that, you thought.

Ren cleared his throat in front of you, and your eyes that had been previously staring at his chest went back to his face. He reached up and pushed his hair back from his eyes. The door behind you ‘whoosh’ed open. “You are wrong,” he said, then followed it with, “And you are not the best either.”

Your jaw dropped. You went to answer, but an invisible hand pushed you out of his room. “I do not expect to see you in my quarters again, Apprentice L/n, and I will not be as kind the next time you return without permission,” he spoke, but you could not look back at his face before the door shut between you.

The hand left you, and you stared at his closed door for a long moment before screaming at it, your voice strong with anger, “I am not leaving!” You were sure anyone down the hall might hear you, but you stood still anyway, intoxicated and infuriated, your hands balled into fists at your sides. You heard him huff through the door and felt him attempt to use the Force to move you, but you stood still, willing him away. He seemed to give up after a while, and you sat (or more so fell) against the wall opposite to his room, arms crossed over your chest. If he wanted to act like a child, so would you. You were, after all, equals.

Suddenly, the door in front of you opened, and the man stepped out, his helmet and gloves back on, though his cowl was absent. He grabbed you by the arm and hauled you up and down the hall, your feet struggling to keep up with his. “You say I am childish,” he spat, his eyes not staring at you writhing in his grip but instead straight in front of him. “And yet you are the one who must be dragged to their quarters by their superior.”

“You are not-” You went to protest, trying to yank your arm from his grip, but his hand only tightened before he cut you off, glaring at you and shoving you against the door of your room. The bottle of wine fell from your fingertips and clanged against the floor of the hall, spilling its contents.

“I am. And you would do good to remember that.”

You remembered when he said you could kill him just as easily as he could kill you, and your eyes squinted before your arm shot out to punch him. It seemed to hit a wall before it hit his face, and you let out a squeal as you grabbed your now aching knuckles in your other hand. That's not fair, you thought, for him to use the Force like that when you were simply trying to bloody him up, as he had you only days ago, but he shook his head in front of you. You couldn't see his face, but you could feel the annoyance radiating off of him.

“It does not have to be ‘fair.’” You were not sure if you simply thought it in his voice or if he had said it, but you did not quite care. Your head was swimming with drunkenness as you felt yourself being pushed back into your door as it slid shut in front of you. The last thing you saw before it shut were Ren's hands at his sides, tightening and untightening in synchronization.

You wanted to scream, but you simply turned and crawled into your bed, thinking that no matter how pleasant he was to look at, Kylo Ren was infuriating.

*****

You received a message the next morning that your training sessions with Kylo Ren had been cancelled for the day. Instead of releasing your anger by physically or mentally beating the shit out of him, you would have to find other ways to release tension. You took a shower almost every two hours (seven before the day was over) and spent twice as long as usual in the cafeteria for meals. Two hours before you usually retired for the night, you had built a Kylo Ren sized dummy out of pillows and your two bedside tables stacked on top of each other. You threw your duvet over the top of it to soften the ache in your hands when you punched it, everywhere, in a frenzy. It did not do much to relieve your anger for him, but it did tire you. By the time both of your hands had started to bleed, you were exhausted, and you had just barely wrapped your knuckles and rearranged your room to its normal set up when your door slid open.

A cleaning droid stood in the doorway, but, seeing as you had just straightened your room back up, you told it that you would not need it to prepare your quarters for you that day. Your back was turned to it when it stepped back to the cart it had brought with it and returned to your doorway with something.

You watched, silent, mouth hanging half-open, as it carefully placed a bottle of wine on your dresser and left the room.

Chapter Text

When you arrived for your Force training in the morning, you found General Hux, not the six foot serial murderer you were expecting, standing in front of you. “Commander Ren is meeting with Supreme Leader Snoke. I will be working with you today.”

You stared at him for a long moment, realizing somewhere within you that, despite yourself, you had actually been looking forward to seeing Kylo Ren this morning. You had only been training with him for a couple of days, but he was an actual opponent. It felt good to have someone to fight with, someone who was an actual challenge, someone who you could (sometimes) win against. And the wine last night confused you. He had insulted you and practically thrown you into your own room, then went out of his way to send a bottle of wine to you. You knew it had to be him behind it, but you wondered what his intentions were. Was he actually being kind to you, or was it just his way of ensuring you did not sneak back into his room at night? Or was it something else entirely? Was he simply proving to you that he had the power to get it, that he could pull the strings you could only grab blindly at?

You blinked, realizing you had been staring at Hux this whole time. With a nod, you turned and readied yourself for training, pulling your hair back tight. “What would you like to start with?”

General Hux stared your way for a moment too long before nodding himself. “Let's see you throw something.”

*****

After lunch, you were on the way to your room to relax when a Stormtrooper approached you and told you that Commander Ren was waiting for you in your training room. When you arrived, he was sitting on one of the benches, unmasked and ready. Your eyes met his, and you shared one long look before you clasped your hands and nodded. “So where did we leave off last?”

“Defense,” He answered smugly, the edges of his mouth turning upwards, and you nervously pulled your hair back. You were starting to realize this was one of your ticks, similar to his hand movements. Just as you thought this, you saw his fingers twitch at his sides.

“Every now and then your attacker will not be cool and calculated. Sometimes, they will run at you with all they've got, and anger can do crazy things. The trick,” you said, “Is getting your opponent trapped.”

You cracked your knuckles and stood up straight, chest forward and shoulders back. “Come at me like you're going to hit me.”

Ren looked at you for a second, blinking, before he approached you in quick strides, his arm reared back. You ducked away from his hit with a huff and grabbed his leg, swinging it out from under him as he fell into a pile of limbs. “Now,” you chastised him when he stood, your hands on your hips. “Come at me like you're going to hit me.”

He tried again, but there was no blazing anger in his movements as usual. You figured he was distracted from his several serial meetings with Snoke, but you still remembered his insult to you two nights earlier and wanted him to fight. You straightened up again after kicking his hand away and pushing him back to the floor. “Okay, if you can't come at me, I'll come at you,” you said, and he sighed in his chest.

You took off running at him from across the room, landing against him with a thud as you landed a punch to his right shoulder. He fell back, tripping over his own legs, and you landed on top of him, your knees to either side of his waist and your nails digging into the flesh of his biceps. He bared his teeth at you, thrashing beneath you for a while before finding a weak spot and flipping you over so he was trapping you with his body.

The sudden unexpected movement made the breath escape your chest, and you struggled with it as you threw blind fists at the man propped up above you, his arms on either side of your head. He managed to grab one wrist and then the other, pinning your arms above your head. You turned and sunk your teeth into his wrist. Hissing, he adjusted himself so that your arms were stretched tight, your shoulders aching, and his legs were between yours, his right arm propping him up so he was not resting his entire weight on the only spot your bodies truly touched: your hips. His breath washed over your face as you writhed against his grip on your wrists. You smelled him, Pine and Spearmint and maleness, and noticed as his eyes flickered to your half-open lips for only a second. As if he was just thinking that he could, he might, press his against them for a brief moment while you struggled against

him, and you wondered if you would have continued fighting or stopped, stilled, your muscles releasing their strain and your eyes closing tight as he-

You shut your lips tight against each other and shoved your left knee against his ribcage, and, his grip now loosened, you flipped the two of you over again. It had clearly been too long since you had slept with anyone, you thought as you planted your knees against his biceps, sitting on his chest, watching as his face distorted with pain. You needed to get laid so badly you were imagining making out with Kylo fucking Ren, winner of the shithead of the year award ever since he was born.

Ren kicked his legs under you, but you dug your toes into his thighs. He punched your cheek only once before you grabbed his hands in yours and buried your nails in his skin through the gloves, him letting out a small cry beneath you. He was, in fact, stronger than you, but he was trapped. “Tap out,” you ordered, but he only jutted his chin out in response. Your nails dug deeper into the back of his hands. “Tap out,” you repeated, your jaw tight and teeth clenched now. He shook his head, eyes squinted shut, defiant.

Suddenly, the training room door slid open, and General Hux entered, his face first emotionless, then smug as he saw you sitting on Kylo’s chest, both your faces white as you looked back at him. “Supreme Leader Snoke has requested you in his quarters, Ren.”

Beneath you, he nodded, and you nudged back, removing your knees from his biceps. He, suddenly, flipped you back over, and your head smacked against the floor. You hissed in pain as he stood, staring at you all the while. Hux had left by the time you managed to stand, your head aching, and caught Ren just before he placed his helmet back on. “Thank you,” you said, then quickly continued, “for the wine.”

He paused, his back turned to you, then continued to place his helmet on his shoulders and lock it into place. He swiveled to face you, staring at you for a long while behind his mask. You wondered what his face looked like behind it, what way his lips were turned at the edges, where his eyes landed on your face, if his jaw was tight or soft, if he looked like the man child you hated or the other one you weren't quite sure about who, eyes on your lips, would go out of his way to send you wine when he knew you wanted it. No matter who it was, the simple fact of him staring your way made your heartbeat slow, your anger cease. You felt him in your head, and your cheeks flushed as he answered with a simple “yes” before striding out of the room, leaving you standing there, your head aching as you stared after him, once again frustrated and confused.

Chapter Text

Your late day training with Snoke cancelled, you had returned to your room before dinner. Lying on your bed, you stared at the ceiling above you, your chest sighing with heavy breaths as you tried to make sense of yourself. You were not the sort of girl to get your stomach wrapped in knots over some man, and you were sure, even now, that that was not what was happening here. Still, you were clearly becoming much too close with Ren. You had dreamt of him every night since your first true introduction. When he was gone, you missed him, not in a sentimental or kind way but in a primal, aggressive way, like without him you could no longer remember how to be yourself. He infuriated you and then would manage to calm you with a single look.

Passion. That had to be the word. Attraction, hatred, frustration, angst - they all fit into the category. You were passionate about him, whether you liked it or not. And he… How did he feel? You had always thought yourself the sort of person whose face was easy to read, often when you wanted to understand yourself you stared into a mirror. (You only took a different position now because you were afraid of what you might see.) Kylo Ren, though, was different. You couldn’t read his statuesque features, see behind his dark eyes and full lips into the mind beyond without a fight. It felt wrong, too, using the Force to tell what he was thinking, even though he seemed to have no problem with doing so.

Even more worrisome, you felt him in your head more often than not lately, as if he was always there, shuffling through your thoughts like playing cards. You tried to stay away from sneaking inside his head as much as possible, but you could feel something sometimes, like a pull towards him, as if he was asking you to crawl inside his thoughts.

You closed your eyes and breathed in deep, deciding that you might as well try. You pushed your mental power forward to find his brain, and you knew he felt it when you reached him, but, surprisingly, you did not feel him push you away. He was just leaving Snoke’s quarters. You tried to thumb through his memories back to a time earlier, to his lips so close to yours or to him sending you the wine, but he cut you off, speaking directly to you in the present instead. “General Hux informed me that you were upset with me missing your Force training this morning.”

It was so strange having him speak to you without his voice in your ears (even though, you now realized, he had done it before the night he caught you stealing his wine). Your cheeks burned red, and you were grateful he could not see you. Before you could respond, he continued, “I will not miss it again.”

You wondered briefly, not directly to him but somewhere in the back of your mind, why he was even worried about how you felt. He seemed so cold sometimes, so harsh, so emotionless, but then other times he was so close to being gentle and kind to you. It confused you to no end. He seemed to begin to address it, but you asked him a question first. “Why pine scented candles?”

He felt confused, now, and you realized you could sense his emotions as if they were your own. “They smell…” He did not purposefully think the word warm, but he may as well have. Instead, he started over again. “They calm me, and I like the flame.” He paused, and you felt him pressing through your memories, back to the first time you smelled them. “You like them, too.”

“Yes,” you offered up in response too easily, and you could have sworn you felt your fingers twitch as if they were his own. It so strange, so personal, being so close to someone like this. It filled you with… Something you were not sure of. Passion, you settled on.

“Passion,” you felt him repeat to himself, but you could not find the feeling behind it. Was his face stoic and still again or was his mouth turning up at the edges, his eyes soft brown instead of pitch black? Was he pleased with the word or annoyed at you for using it? Did he want to punch the walls or simply lay back like you were and melt into his own bed? Frustrated again, you sighed and wondered if his chest moved along with yours.

He pushed you out then, and you lied there for another moment, not trying to crawl back inside his skull as you knew it was hopeless, but instead simply mulling over the way you could hear his voice in your head, the way your eyes saw him when he was not around, unmasked and unarmed with his hair falling just slightly into his dark eyes.

You stood after a moment and walked to the cafeteria to eat. You sat alone, as usual, the others either too intimidated or too busy to sit with you. When you finally arrived back at your room, you had a hand pressed against your forehead while the other typed in the code to your door, too tired to use the Force to open it. It slid open, and your eyebrows raised as you found Kylo Ren, masked and turned away from you, placing a half-burned candle on your dresser. You stared at him, and he stilled for only a second before continuing to set it next to the bottle of wine. He made his way to the door, pausing to stare at you behind the inhuman helmet. When he reached the doorway, he stopped again, tossing something over his shoulder that landed with a soft thud on your bed.

The door slid shut behind him. You turned to your bed. Matches. Walking forward, you struck one and held it to the wick until the flame licked your fingers. You hissed a little at the pain, sucking your finger into your mouth. Feeling him in your head again, you leaned in to smell the smoke, like burning forests, pine and warmth. “Thank you," you thought, finding your mouth moving along to the words happily.

Wherever he was, Kylo Ren answered with a simple “yes.”

Chapter Text

That next morning, when you awoke from your first dream including Kylo that involved no bloodshed, neither him fighting you or you two fighting someone else, instead simply the two of you playing holochess (you were winning, but he wasn’t angry, instead laughing with his head back every time you grabbed up one of his pieces), you had thought it was a good sign. Turns out, it was a bad one.

Your Force training had gone smoothly, the two of you more in sync from your thought transfer the day before. By the time his combat training had started, you were sure there would be no problems. You had wrestled more, the two of you rolling around until he landed on his back with you in a ball on his chest. The air was knocked out of his chest, and the serial murderer beneath you laughed at the feeling. His chest shook with the sound, and you laughed along. He had stared at you for a long moment, smiling, and your heart had jumped to your throat. He had never smiled at you, not really, not like he was now, all teeth and good intentions. All of a sudden, he was flipping you over again, but you shoved him on the way, hoping he would fall back down under you. He didn’t, of course, instead pushing back even harder and launching you back with his knee. That knee had, then, embedded itself into your ribcage with a crack, and, combined with your head slamming back onto the floor, you had been out of it from then on.

You had just now woken up in the infirmary, your mind woozy from the drugs in your system, half-listening as Kylo Ren listed off the events of the past couple hours.

“...to check your ribs. Only one was broken. They set it back, but you shouldn’t be moving around the ship for several days,” He said, helmet on and gloved hands in fists beside him in the tiny chair he had been given. When he spoke, it squeaked, and you giggled a little at it when he paused for a moment. The next time his voice rang out to you, it was lighter, with a kinder inflection. “I told Supreme Leader than you would do better sleeping in my quarters rather than having a nurse stay with you while you recover.”

Your eyes went wide, and you slapped a hand on Kylo’s shoulder, shaking your head as you stared at the ceiling. “That’s not a good idea, Commander Ren,” you said, laughing again as you called him ‘Commander.’ It seemed so strange in your mouth, knowing him better now.

“Why not?” He asked. You looked at him. You couldn’t see his eyes, but you knew they were filled with pure confusion and curiosity. He really didn’t catch your drift.

You smiled and leaned in, placing your cheek on his shoulder. His head turned to look at you. Your smile widening, you simply reached forward and fiddled with the collar of his shirt. “You remember,” you started, staring up into the spot where his eyes should be. “You told me I’d be in trouble if I returned to your room.”

“That was if you returned without permission,” He responded, voice quiet and gentle, and you closed your eyes at the soothing sound.

Your fingers finally pushed away the fabric and hit his skin, and he suddenly seemed to be aware of your proximity. “Stop.” You heard his voice in your head, and you leaned your head back a little at the sound of it, seeming purer without your ears in the way, coming straight from the source into your brain.

You continued to rub your fingertips against his collarbone, ignoring his protests. “But it’s so much fun,” you retorted in a whisper, rubbing your thumb against the tight muscles in his shoulders.

He seemed to tense up then, and he answered back in your head, too quickly, before you had even finished speaking. “At least stop talking. You don’t need to.”

You paused to stare up at him for a moment before sliding your finger along the skin just under the edge of his mask. Your finger skipped over his Adam’s apple. You imagined the face beneath it, eyes soft brown and lips perfectly full. You had grown nostalgic for his face, what with the drugs in your system making your usually tough walls crumble. Your thumb followed late after your other fingers, and you felt his chest stop rising and falling as you realized your hand was around his throat to strangle him. You wondered what that might be like. You did not want to kill him, no matter how much you hated him sometimes, but you had never choked anyone before, not sexually. You knew he was hearing your thoughts, but you simply ignored him as you mulled over having him pinned down beneath you, your hand around his throat, trapping him as he had when he had a hold on your wrists yesterday (although it didn’t feel like yesterday; it felt like years ago) when you imagined he imagined kissing you.

He stood suddenly, his shoulder banging against your cheek roughly. “I will send some Stormtroopers to escort you when you are released,” He spoke, his voice forceful and uncompassionate again, and you groaned at the sound, throwing your head back onto the pillows. “And don’t do that,” he chastised you, already walking out of the room. “You have a concussion.”

As soon as he stood to leave, a nurse had arrived next to you, checking your vitals. “Do I really have a concussion?” You asked, eyes wide, and she quietly answered no, her face down as she wrote your blood pressure onto her notepad. “I hate him,” you swore, closing your eyes again and leaning back to return to sleep.

Chapter Text

The Stormtroopers had arrived only minutes after your quiet nurse told you that you were allowed to leave for the night, something that made you think he had been watching your thoughts, waiting for you to say a mental “Thank God.” You frowned when you saw them, since, the drugs having barely rubbed off, you were sure you could walk fine on your own. You stood with their help, but once you were upright you were pushing their hands away. “I’m fine,” you sneered at them, taking only a single step before almost tripping and falling to your right. One of the ‘troopers caught your arm, and the other followed behind you, making sure you didn’t slip backwards. You only made it about halfway to Ren’s quarters before you stilled, telling the ‘troopers you just need “one second, like a single second” as you leaned against the wall to your left, your eyes fluttering shut.

“Get up and let them take you the rest of the way,” Ren said (or thought) to you, his silent voice annoyed with your actions.

You frowned, reaching up to tie your hair back before your hands exhausted themselves and fell to your sides again. “I’m tired, Kylo.”

You knew it was your first time calling him directly by his first name because he thought so, surprised and pleased at the sound of it, even if his ears weren’t truly hearing you. You smiled, liking his clear attraction to your words, and you could almost feel him sigh as if he was standing right behind you. “You’ll get an even better reaction if you say it to my face,” he offered, and, immediately, you tried to push yourself up off the wall. You felt his happiness at your movement, and then his annoyance as you fell back. The ‘trooper previously behind you tried to grab you in his arms, but you shoved him away with a glare. You could feel Kylo sigh again. “Please just let him carry you here,” he thought, and you, reluctantly, obliged to his request, letting the Stormtrooper pick you up bridal-style and carry you the rest of the way to Ren’s quarters.

The ‘trooper without you in his arms attempted to punch in the code when you arrived, but the door slid open before he even touched the number pad. Kylo Ren stood in the doorway, mask on, arms outstretched to grab you. You were transferred between the two men, and you noted mentally that Ren’s arms were stronger than the Stormtrooper’s. You felt his chest rumble a little at this, and the door shut next to you as you stared up at him.

He turned to carry you to the bed, and you fingers reached out to mess with his collar again. He laid you down on his mattress, so much bigger than yours, but kept himself bent over you so you could continue to run your fingers along the edge of his helmet. “Can I take it off?” You mentally asked him.

His head moved as a ‘yes,’ and he reached down to grab your bare, trembling hands in his gloved ones. His palms were much wider and his fingers longer, wrapping around the edges of yours. He pressed your hands against the buttons that undid the pressure lock, and you pressed them simultaneously. His hands stayed on yours as you lifted it off his head and set it on the bed beside you. It was heavier than you thought it would be, and you were grateful for his help holding it. Your eyes lifted back to his face (you could finally see his eyes again, no longer hard black but a softer deep brown, and his lips, full and so goddamn kissable it almost hurt), and you grinned, resisting the urge to place a hand on his cheek. You had remembered in the past few moments who he was, and you grew hesitant again. You spoke aloud now, trying hard to keep your eyes from straying to his lips. “I don’t like that thing.” You ended up sounding more childish than you liked to admit, and he smiled at the sound, the second time he had grinned at you that day.

“That’s too bad,” he said, shrugging as he sat sideways on the edge of the bed. “I do.”

Your head turned to the side to stare at him, and you suddenly remembered how he had bribed you to come to his room in the first place. “Kylo,” you half-whispered, your lips barely moving, and his head turned too quickly to meet your gaze. You were amused at the reaction it evoked from him. That is, until he spoke again.

“Yes, F/n?” He replied, cocking an eyebrow at you. Your throat locked up at the sound, and your stomach dropped to your toes. It sounded downright sinful, his lips wrapping around the syllables in an almost angelic way. He chuckled a little in his chest at your reaction. “And you wondered why I liked it.”

You stared at him for another long moment before you felt yourself falling backward. You snapped back up as quickly as you could, but Kylo had already noticed, laying one hand in the small of your back and the other on your shoulder as he laid you back against the bed. “You should sleep,” He said, turning away from you now, not looking you in the eyes as he went to slipping his gloves off his hands.

You nodded slowly along with his words, tucking yourself under the covers and then holding them up so he could climb inside too. He turned back to you and shook his head, removing his left glove and pointing to a mat laid out in the corner. “I will sleep there tonight.”

Your eyebrows knit together, and he smiled again before he turned back to undressing for the night. He shed most of his clothing except for a shirt and pants (you admired his butt while he untied his boots and he used the Force to make you stare up at the ceiling until he was done), then he grabbed some sleeping clothes and walked into the bathroom.

You heard the shower turn on, and you closed your eyes. You honestly tried to sleep… For about fifteen minutes. Then you heard the water turn off and him step out of the glass, and you imagined him naked, dripping with water, and there was no way you could sleep after that.

He left the bathroom shirtless, and you admired the hair in a line from his stomach down to his groin. He shook his head at you soon after, pulling a shirt over his shoulders. “You have to stop that,” he said, his voice even but clearly a little strained, and your eyebrows knit together again.

“Stop what?” You asked, but he had already cut off the lights and started to lie down on the mat on the floor in the corner.

He pulled his blanket up over his shoulders before turning away from you. You closed your eyes again, trying to will yourself to sleep. After checking to make sure he was still conscious too, you spoke up, your voice low in your throat. “Did you mean what you said about me not being the best?”

You could feel his slight confusion, and you purposefully remembered the insult he had given you when you had brought up the idea of him being a virgin. He sighed a little, then turned over to you. “Do you really wanna know?”

You stared at him for a long time before sighing too. You did not even have to answer before he said, “I didn’t think so.” You were both quiet for a while before he spoke up again, gentler now. “You really need to go to sleep. You’re going to be in some serious pain when those drugs wear off.”

You watched his lips as you spoke, and he stared at you for one more long moment before closing his eyes. “And I told you to stop thinking about kissing me. It’s distracting.”

“I wasn’t just thinking about kissing before,” you noted, but he shoved you over onto your side with the Force.

You huffed at him, and, your hatred for him reawakened, you used the same power to pull his blanket off of him. Now, he made a noise of annoyance, and you felt yourself being pulled to the end of the bed by your toes. “Hey,” you cried out, throwing your pillow at him and sitting up. “Watch it, Commander!”

You had called him by his formal title as a sort of joke, but it made him raised his eyebrows and smirk in a way that made you want to throw your fist at him too. Then, as quickly as it had broken out, his smug look disappeared, and he spoke to you more harshly. “Sleep. Now,” he ordered, knowing better than to push you back down now but glaring at you in a way that made you retreat back onto the mattress.

You were just about to meekly ask for your pillow back when it went flying into the headboard beside you, narrowly missing the tip of your nose. You tucked it back under your head, then spoke for the last time, your voice low and rumbling in your throat (partially because you were tired, partially because you could tell from earlier that he liked it). “If you had read me a bedtime story, I would have been asleep an hour ago.”

“You haven’t been in my room for an hour,” he corrected you, and you opened your mouth to make a witty reply but had already lost your voice (and sarcasm) for the cozy warmth of sleep.

Chapter Text

You woke slowly in the morning, the drugs in your system having mostly disappeared from your bloodstream. You heard Kylo beside you before you opened your eyes to see him, bent over his bedside table, lighting the candles one by one. You briefly remembered your burned fingertips and thought how lucky he was to wear gloves all the time. He turned to you and gave you one long look before turning back to his task. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” you answered, moving to sit up. Suddenly, you felt the ache on your right side, like no pain you had felt before. You hissed and rearranged the pillows behind you so you could sit up against the headboard. All the while, Ren watched, his eyes almost careful, aware of your pain in a way you could not understand.

“I will call a nurse,” he said, turning and walking to the holopad at the end of the bed. You sighed and looked around the room, so new to you even with your past trips. Last night, your head had been blurry, and you hadn’t took the time to notice that the mat he had placed in the corner was not truly one mat but two stacked on top of each other. The blanket he had slept with was fluffier and seemed to match his sheets better than the one pooling at your waist, and you wondered if he had taken his to his corner mat and fetched you another one. The thought made the edges of your mouth turn up.

All at once, you remembered the events of the last night in detail. Your incessant flirting with him, the fact that you had let him see you think of him naked (or in even more pressing positions), his having to ask you to stop picturing his lips on yours. Your cheeks burned bright, and, in front of you, you could see Ren’s hands balling into fists.

“I’m really sorry,” you spoke up, trying to situate yourself comfortably in bed without disturbing your aching ribs. “About, you know, what I said last night. I didn’t mean any of it. I was on some serious drugs, and-”

He held up a hand, and you silenced yourself, watching as he placed his helmet on without turning to you. “It will be forgotten.”

Your head tilted to the side as he turned back your way for a single second before making his way to the bathroom. “Are you angry at me?” You said, but he had already slammed the bathroom door behind him.

You sighed once more, laying your head back against his headboard and closing your eyes. You were contemplating sneaking your way into his thoughts (he seemed to always be in yours; it was unfair that he blocked you out all the time) when you heard a loud crash and your eyes shot open. You stared at the door for a moment before there was another noise, this time like several smaller things were being knocked to the floor. “Kylo?” Your voice rang out and was followed by the sound of glass breaking. You forced yourself up and painfully swung your legs to the edge of the bed.

“Do not get up,” he mentally called out to you, his voice harsh and unforgiving in your mind, and you would not have moved another inch even if he didn’t use the Force to make you lay back as you were.

The nurse arrived after a couple smaller crashing noises and the faucet running, and you let her check your bandages and feed you pills, all the while staring at the bathroom where Kylo stayed. “Did you hurt yourself?” You thought in that out loud but not truly out loud way, but he did not answer. You sighed, ignoring the look the nurse gave you.

“Is that all you needed, Officer?” She asked, and you nodded, dismissing her with a wave of your hand.

Kylo emerged from the bathroom when the nurse was out of the door, wordlessly typing a message into his holopad. You started to ask him about his outburst but then realized you ought to be afraid, as you could not fight back at him if he turned his anger on you. At this thought, he turned back to you, and you knew he was glaring from behind his helmet. You stared silently back at him until he huffed and left the room, shutting the door behind him without pausing.

You were still for several moments, wondering what you should do. You could barely sit up, much less walk, without the extreme drugs you had been given yesterday coursing through your veins. What did he expect you to do all day? Just sit around and wait for him to return and throw another hissy fit? You were just letting this thought remind you that you did despise Kylo Ren deep down, underneath all the attraction and confusing drugged thoughts, when the door slid open. You readied yourself to yell at the caped killer you were expecting, but, in his place, a cafeteria worker came in.

She had mousy hair and shy eyes that bulged when she saw you. When she seemed to wrap her mind around your presence in the Commander’s quarters, she simply walked forward and placed a tray at the foot of your bed. You looked down at it. Bacon, eggs, and sausage. She turned back to the door for a moment, and you stared after her, your own eyes bulging when she returned with another plate of food. And another. And another. The King-sized bedspread was covered in trays of various morning foods - pancakes and hashbrowns and cereal - the breakfast of champions. When she finally returned for the last time with a glass of water, a glass of milk, a glass of orange juice, and a small cup of coffee, you looked up at her in confusion. She smiled sheepishly at you. “Commander Ren ordered me to bring you everything we knew how to make for breakfast.”

He didn’t know what you liked, you realized, so he got you all of it. You couldn’t hold back the smile that broke out across your face. “He did the same for lunch,” she told you. “And dinner.”

You shook your head quickly. “No need for all of that. I can just tell you what I want now,” you said, then trailed off a bit. “What are my options?”

“Anything you like,” she replied, laughing a little.

You grinned at her across the bed, taking a strip of bacon from the plate directly in front of you. “Anything?”

*****

Your day was not only excruciatingly boring but long too. All of your hobbies required movement, and, while you did beat Ren’s highscore time in Solitare (one minute and forty-two seconds), you were now so tired of counting ceiling tiles that you were desperate to do anything. And you smelled. So you had maneuvered your way to the opposite end of the bed and, upside down, typed out a message requesting “two nurses (preferably female) to help me shower. Please and thank you :-).” The smiley face might have been too much, but you were starved for human contact.

The nurses arrived in about fifteen minutes, but only one was female. The other apologized and promised to be professional, and you eventually allowed him to help. They lifted you off the bed, and you entered the bathroom to see the entire place a mess. The mirror was broken; the shampoo bottles and contents of all the shelves had been knocked to the floor; and even the shower rod was torn down and lying on the floor. You leaned up against the counter while the two of them cleaned things, and the female nurse helped you undress. The man seemed uncomfortable, and you put him on towel duty to make sure the floor didn’t get wet while the woman, politely looking away at the right moments, helped you bathe yourself, working around the bandages strapped to your side. They both helped you stand and wrap yourself up in a towel. You didn’t catch the male nurse staring at you even once, which made you very happy, as you weren’t sure you had the strength to punch him if his eyes did linger too long.

You were staring down at your feet as you entered back into the main room, your side causing you to squint your eyes and clench your teeth against the pain, and it was a shock to you when the nurses stopped walking, standing still as statues next to you.

“You are dismissed,” Kylo Ren’s harsh voice said to them, and your head snapped up to look at him, standing in front of you, his fists tight at his sides.

“Kylo,” you started to argue, but he cut you off, his voice even angrier now.

“I said, you are dismissed.”

“Ren,” you cried, your own voice similarly aggressive as the nurse to your left let go of you. “I can’t stand by myself!”

The nurse to your right stilled as Kylo approached you and ducked down to take her place. “Now, go,” he ordered her, and she scurried out of the room, the door sliding shut behind her. He walked you to the bed, the one of your arms not holding onto him tugging your towel up every now and then. He sat you down and turned his back to you, removing his mask and setting it on the bed next to you.

“What the fuck was that about?” you asked, annoyed, but he just stood in front of you.

“Did someone bring you a change of clothes or must I go fetch them?” He asked, clearly pretending his outburst never happened.

“They’re in your closet on one of the shelves,” you answered, adjusting yourself on the bed, your eyes glued to him as he went to retrieve them.

He returned to you with them in hand and reached for your towel. You slapped his hand away. “What the hell?” You practically screamed at him.

His eyebrows knitted together. “I’ve seen you naked before,” he noted, reaching out again. “If you are willing to let a nurse you don’t know see your body, you must be willing to let me.”

Your cheeks heated up, and you slapped his face this time, the sound of it ringing throughout the room. He simply stared at you for the moments after. His eyes flickered to your lips. Your heart stopped.

You stood, carefully and with one hand still on the bed, and dropped your towel. You paused for a moment, focusing on entering his thoughts. He either didn’t notice you there or was too distracted to push you out. He was admiring your figure, his eyes tracing from your Achilles heel up to the nape of your neck. You cleared your throat, and you felt him push you away from his track of mind as he grabbed your tanktop you slept in. You spent a moment wondering how you would get both of your arms up to slip it on before he thought to you, “Lean back.” You did, your shoulder blades against his chest, and he kept his eyes on your hands as he helped you shrug the shirt on. Then, he placed a hand on the side of your stomach not bruised and broken and, with the other hand holding your pants and you still leaning back against him, helped you get fully dressed.

He paused for a moment after, half of his hand on your exposed hip, then let go and helped you into bed. You slowly made your way to the headboard, all the while staring at him, confused by his actions throughout the day and more than a little annoyed with him.

Kylo stared at you for a long moment, as he seemed to do so often now, before replacing his mask on his shoulders and leaving the room. You turned to the clock to your left and realized, begrudgingly, that you still had hours left before he would return for the night.

Chapter Text

You had expected Kylo Ren to return to his quarters later. You had (mistakenly) thought that he would return in about half an hour, giving you just enough time to hide the evidence spread across the sheets in front of you. But, alas, your mouth was still full of cheesecake when the door slid open, revealing the six foot serial murderer in all his masked glory.

You stared at him with wide eyes as he paused, took you in, and then entered the room, shutting the door behind him. Scared, you watched silently as he set down the books in his arms (you paused to wonder- Books? In his arms?) and removed his mask, remembering his tantrums from the night before. Would he be that upset with you? And you had slapped him earlier too. Was he still upset about that?

The helmet slipped off his shoulders, and you could now see his eyes engulf you in all your drugged, half-drunk, dinnertime glory. Your nurse had returned about an hour ago, and you had begged her to give you the good drugs, the ones that had you actually mobile last night. She gave you them but in a smaller amount. Still, they made your brain blurry enough to message the cafeteria and order… this: two pizzas, a cheesecake, and a bottle of wine. You had finished half of one pizza and three pieces of cheesecake (along with a third of the bottle of wine) before you had been caught. The man in front of you stared for another moment. Just when you were sure he would barge off into the bathroom and ruin it again, even after a couple of workers had arrived to fix everything, he let out a short chuckle. His shoulders bent with it, and he was soon bent over the foot of the bed, his body shaking with laughter as you watched, still shocked but giggling along a little too.

When he looked up at you, all the anger he had shown earlier was gone from his eyes, and he nudged the plate of pizza with the back of his hand. “I can’t believe you,” He said, but, while they were angry words, he said them fondly. He leaned down, placed the books previously in his arms on the foot of the bed, and sat down in front of you, legs off the mattress. He took a swig of wine straight from the bottle before, again, laughing and shaking his head, staring over your shoulder.

“What?” You asked, peeking over to where he was staring.

“You lit candles,” He said, noting how they were blown out when he had been here after your shower.

“Oh,” you replied. “Yeah.” Your cheeks were burning, and you grabbed another piece of pizza to give yourself a task: eating it without getting embarrassed any more.

To distract yourself (and Kylo) from your current situation, you pointed to the books he had brought with him. “What are those?”

Kylo stared at you, confused. “Books?” He answered, clearly wondering why you would even ask.

You squinted your eyes and leaned into him a little before rolling your eyes. “Yes, duh, but why are they here?”

He rolled his eyes in return, and you thought of slapping him again. “You said you would sleep better if you had bedtime stories, so I brought you some.”

You swallowed thickly before staring at him as he took another sip of the wine. He was… serious. Kylo Ren was really going to read you a bedtime story.

“If it’s reading or a repeat of last night, I will gladly read to you.” He shot you a smile, but you were distracting yourself with the cheesecake in front of you.

It was quiet for a moment (you knew he knew his dig at you hurt) while you both ignored each other. Then, he spoke, staring down into the bottle of wine as he twisted it in his hand, creating a tiny tornado inside. “Did you enjoy your breakfast?” He asked casually, pausing to look up at you.

He was such a child sometimes, asking you a question like this just to have his good deed recognized. “I did,” you answered, placing a hand on his arm as you grabbed the wine from him. “Thank you.”

He nodded, grabbing a piece of cheesecake for himself and inspecting it. “Yes.” He took a bite.

You watched his face as he ate it, and he ignored you, staring at the books in the corner of the bed. With a move of his hand, he spread them out in front of you and stood. “Pick one,” he said, and you were just about to ask him where he was going, really not wanting him to leave again, when he disappeared into the bathroom.

You stared down at the books when you heard the shower start to run. One was a fairytale, a damsel in distress saved by her knight in shining armor. You laughed, remembering that you also knew a knight who never really did much saving, and shoved it to the side. You never liked stories like that. Then, there were two (count ‘em: TWO) history books about the Sith. He would pick out books like that, you thought, rolling your eyes as you pushed them aside. And then the last book: a novel, about a mother haunted by the ghost of her daughter.

You set that one aside and tossed it to him when he emerged from the bathroom, half-dressed again. You tried to keep yourself from thinking anything specifically obscene about his naked chest, and he caught the book, stared at you, and then moved to the foot of the bed. You went to move the plates and wine off the bed, but he did it himself, placing them on the floor beside you in case you woke up and were hungry. The fact that he thought of your wants like that made you smile.

You tucked yourself in, closing your eyes as he sat beside you, shirtless, feet off the bed, and started to read. You listened earnestly to his voice, calm and low and smooth, for about fifteen minutes before your eyes flickered open again. He paused for a moment to look at you before he continued, turning the page without lifting a finger. You stared up at him, his soft eyes and full lips but also, now, his jaw and nose and hair, falling just a little into his face. You thought about reaching up and tucking it back for him, and his tongue stilled around the syllables he was reading to you. You took that as a sign of approval, and you brushed the section back with the rest, his eyes staring into yours the entire time. His hair was softer than you thought it would be, and you tried to keep yourself from imagining tangling your fingers in it.

He turned back to the book quickly, continuing to read before you cut him off, speaking over his words. “You acted upset with me this morning, and you’re doing all this,” you motioned at the book in his hands. “Because I kept thinking about kissing you, but when I was changing, you-”

He shook his head, and you stopped speaking, shutting the book in his lap. “I can appreciate that you are attractive without wanting to… do things with you.”

God, he was a baby. He couldn’t even say the word ‘sex.’ Your eyes squinted, and you snuck your way into his thoughts before he could slide the walls in on you. “But you do,” you insisted, arms reaching up to cross over your chest. “You do want to do things with me.”

For the first time, you saw his cheeks redden, his hands tightening around the edges of the book he still held. “You… infuriate me,” He said, and you knew he wasn’t lying.

“Passion,” you said slowly, lips wrapping around the syllables carefully, trying to feel each one as it left you.

He stared at your mouth again, and you, despite all your hatred for this man, leaned in a little. He stayed still, eyes still glued to your lips, and you leaned in more, attempting to close the gap between you. Your lips were insufferably close to his when he touched your shoulder, stilling you, his breath washing over your face clean and male and wine-soaked.

His eyes moved up to yours, and your heart sank. You could see his hesitation, his resistance, the fact that no matter how much he wanted to, he would not. He was such a child!

As you thought those words, his eyes squinted, and he grabbed your jaw in his hand and kissed you, hard. His full lips were soft against your own, even with his teeth gnashing against them every now and then. His grip on your jaw was tight but easy to ignore. You felt like you couldn’t breathe, or at least didn’t want to. His kiss knocked the life out of you, and you did not forget about your hatred and annoyance of him but were reminded of it. It was so insanely aggressive and passionate, you could hardly believe it was truly happening.

Your hands reached up to tug at his hair, and his teeth sunk into your bottom lip as he pulled away from you. The pain mixed with pleasure, and it shot straight to the perfect spot between your legs. He released your lip back to you with a popping noise. Your breath was still escaping you, but you found it bit by bit, your fingers still entwined in his dark, soft hair. He tweaked your chin before standing, your hands falling dumbly to your sides.

“A child,” he scoffed, a little out of breath himself, grabbing his blanket and laying down on his mat in the corner.

You stared at his back for a moment before closing your own eyes. If all you had to do was piss him off to get him to kiss you like that, you thought, you would have to work on angering him more often.

Chapter Text

You woke to the sound of cabinets opening and shutting in the bathroom. You laid still for a moment, trying to picture the man you knew was behind the door, looking through the cupboards for something that seemed to be important. After a while, you stretched out on the bed (with a grimace; your side seemed to hurt even more now than it had yesterday) and yawned. As soon as the little noise left your left, the sounds behind the door stilled. You hoped the sound wasn’t entirely sexual as you carefully stood and walked toward the door.

When you opened it, Kylo shared a look with you before turning back to rummaging through the drawers and cabinets. You shuffled past him. His hands stilled, and he slowly looked back up at you as you opened the door above the sink and grabbed his toothbrush. “What,” he said, voice still rough and gravelly with sleep, “exactly, are you doing?”

You shot him a halfhearted glare and squeezed a little toothpaste on the brush before popping it in your mouth and talking around it. “I have to brush my teeth somehow, don’t I?”

“Did you do this yesterday?” He asked, now fully turning to look at you head on.

You continued to stare into the mirror. “Yes,” you said, and you heard him groan in his throat. “And you’re lucky I did, or your little stunt yesterday would have been much less pleasant.”

He continued to stare at you for a moment before slamming the drawer he had open shut and storming out of the room. You jumped at the sudden sound, but then you simply rolled your eyes at him and continued to brush your teeth.

You could hear him being too aggressive while he did his tasks in the other room. It wasn’t until you heard his closet door slam shut that you realized he still hadn’t even been wearing a shirt.

Walking back into the main room, you kept your eyes on him as you climbed back into bed. “Are you going to show your ass again if I call someone to help me shower?”

His back to you, you saw his muscles tighten and tense. It was quiet for a beat, and when he spoke again, his voice was carefully level-toned. “I did not ‘show my ass’ yesterday. I could have done much worse.”

“Well,” you started, but he held up a hand to stop you.

“A female nurse,” he said, pulling on his gloves, facing you now. “And make it quick.”

You thought of (and even opened your mouth to say) a rude comment about how he had no right to pick and choose who could see you naked, but then you remembered something you had to ask him.

“Kylo?”

He had already turned away from you, shrugging his cowl onto his shoulders. “Yes?”

“I, uh, I wanted to know what you were doing this morning,” You said, staring down at the blanket over your legs, picking at the little balls of fuzz. You felt like the child now.

He paused in his movements, his head tilting a little to one side before he answered, “I have Force training with Supreme Leader Snoke and combat training with General Hux until you are recovered.”

Your eyes closed tight, and you leaned your head back against the wood of the headboard. “Oh,” you sighed out, hands falling limply at your sides.

“Why?” He asked, turning to face you now, and you stared at his dark eyes as you explained yourself,

“I wanted to try to do some Force training, like, here, maybe.” You saw his mouth turn up at the edges a little. “I’m just tired of not doing anything all day.”

“It’s only been a day since you got hurt.”

“Two,” you corrected him.

“Not yet. At three o’clock, it will be two days.” He was fully smirking now, and he made his way over to sit next to you on the bed.

You frowned. “I hate sitting in bed all damn day,” you confessed, and he stared at you before nodding.

“If you can walk to Snoke’s quarters tomorrow, I will speak to him with you about reinstating our training.”

You smiled a little, nodding as he did. “Okay,” you agreed.

He looked into your eyes. You tried to look away, but he grabbed you by the back of your neck and kept your eyes on his. He leaned in a little, his mouth half open, and you felt his breath wash over your face. You thought once of the night before, of his lips so firm yet soft against your own. He paused, seemed to think better of kissing you, and stood back up. “A nurse is coming with your medicine, and your breakfast will be here momentarily.” After that, he slipped his mask onto his shoulders and strode out of the room, and you were left there, cheeks burning, confused and frustrated in a new way.

*****

It was just past lunchtime before you finally decided it was time to shower. You messaged the infirmary about a nurse, and they sent you the girl from your stay in the doctor’s bed two days ago. She smiled at you, gently, and helped you undress before watching you carefully as you stepped into the shower. You were able to this on your own, and you were feeling quite proud of yourself as you washed your hair. She shaved your legs for you, and you were grateful to her for it. By the time you were wrapped up in a towel, you remembered Ren’s outburst the day before. You peeked out of the bathroom door before she did and sighed in relief when you saw the room empty.

In your head, you heard Kylo’s voice, a little annoyed. “I am still here,” he complained, and you rolled your eyes at him, sitting down on the bed.

The nurse stood by the edge of the bed, hands clasped in front of her. “Is that all you needed, Officer?”

You thought for a moment, then smiled at little, looking at her with your most puppy dog eyes. “Would you mind doing something with my hair? I’m really tired of it getting knotted, and it hurts to tie it back myself.”

The nurse paused before nodding and striding over to you, sitting on the bed behind you and running her fingers through your still-wet locks. It was quiet between you for a while, then she spoke, carefully quiet, as she braided a section of your hair. “He- Commander Ren, I mean- He sleeps in the corner over there?”

You went to nod, then stopped yourself, staring up at the ceiling. “Yes.”

“Can I- Can I ask why?” She asked, and you expelled a little air past your lips.

“He’s not quite the cuddling kind,” you said, although you weren’t sure that was really why. Behind you, the girl laughed.

“I can tell. Jai and Fern, the nurses yesterday, they were terrified when they came back to the infirmary. Jai thought he was going to get lightsaber-ed.”

You giggled a little at her word choice. “K-” You cut yourself off before calling him Kylo, instead correcting yourself. “Commander Ren isn’t that violent, really. I’m the one who throws most of the punches between the two of us.” (No, you thought, he preferred to hit inanimate objects that couldn’t hit back.)

The girl behind you was silenced, half of your head already up in something that, when you touched it, you recognized as one large braid with smaller braids intertwined in it. “I don’t just hit anyone, though. Mostly just him. And mostly when he deserves it.”

“Oh,” she said, clearly relieved, and you smiled a little at the sound of her voice.

Kylo spoke to you in your head now, annoyed as usual. “Tell her all about us, won’t you? The lowly nurse must know everything about our…” You didn’t not explicitly hear the word ‘relationship,’ but you knew he meant it.

You were silent until the girl finished braiding the other side of your hair. “Is, um, I mean- Am I dismissed now, Officer L/n?”

You nodded, running your hands down over your hair, tucking yourself under the covers. “Yes. You are.”

She left the room, and you lied back in bed, staring up at the ceiling above you. “If you have such a problem with me talking to other people,” you thought in Ren’s direction, still feeling him inside your skull, “Then you ought to be here for me to talk to.”

It was quiet in your head for a moment (you had almost forgotten how that felt, to not have someone else’s thoughts living inside of your own brain) before he answered, inaudible voice level yet clearly attempting to pacify you. “I will return an hour early tonight. Is that good enough?”

You didn’t reply with any specific response, instead turning on your side and closing your eyes, a light smile on your lips.

Chapter Text

Kylo had disappeared from your mind about an hour ago. It was nearing the time he would be coming back (home, you thought, then retreated from the word like it was poison), and you were anxious to see him. It was so strange how it felt to have him be without you, to be without him. You weren’t sure when it had happened (The kiss? The candles? The wine?), but all of a sudden there seemed to be a gap in your head when he wasn’t there, as if he was not crowding your thoughts but simply fitting perfectly with them. There was a spot in your skull dedicated to him, you realized, and it was too late to fill it with anything else.

And then came the worst part: you didn’t even know if he felt the same. He blocked you out of his own thoughts more often than not, while your mind seemed to be his own personal playground nowadays. You just wanted to understand him. You wanted (no, had to) understand what made him tick, why he did the things he did, why he didn’t do the things he didn’t. Why did he look at you like you were nothing more than a simple annoyance and then go out of his way to make you happy when he wasn’t around? Why was he so aggressively insistent about you not getting other people (especially men, you noted, which was silly, since girls were just as susceptible to being attracted to you) to help you shower but never offered to help himself? Why did he kiss you like it hurt to hold it back and then hold it back again this morning?

You sighed, grabbing your side as you sat down on the edge of the bed. You had been walking (or mostly taking small steps and almost tearing up from the pain) to prepare for tomorrow’s visit to Snoke’s quarters, but thinking like this was causing you even more stress than usual.

It wasn’t fair. He had free reign on your every thought, every word, every memory, but you hardly even knew if he wanted to see you on the short instances that he did. You could… Find out, but you weren’t sure if your usual tactics would even work on him. They weren’t ‘usual’ tactics anyway; you hadn’t had to go to such great links to figure out if a man was attracted to you in years. Most of the time, now that you were older, men were upfront with their feelings, and you would let them down gently every time, stating that you ‘had no time’ or ‘weren’t good with relationships’ or ‘just wanted to stay friends, you know.’

But Ren, of course, had to be difficult with this. He could not simply be honest about how he felt. He could not simply tell you, no. He had to punch you, then insult you, then give you gifts, then break your fucking rib (an ‘accident’: sure, whatever, but damn, Kylo), then show his ass when you let another man look at your body (in a professional way, thank you), then insult you more, then kiss you like it was the last thing he would do, then get pissy with you again for using his damn toothbrush. You weren’t sure what the negatives and positives added up to, but you, now, were bitter and curious enough to find out.

The door to the room slid open while you were still leaning back against the mattress, one hand on your side, one hand on the bed, strands of your hair loose and hanging around your face, one braid over your left shoulder and one behind your right. Kylo Ren paused in the doorway, staring at you in your sleeping pants and tank top. You stared back, eyes wide, until he decided he had taken enough of you in and shut the door behind himself. When it was shut, he removed his helmet, cowl, and gloves. All the while, you stared at him from the bed.

He finally turned to you, and you felt strangely at ease as soon as you saw his face. “Your hair,” he started, his eyes scanning your locks. He crossed the distance between you and reached out, tentatively, to tuck a lock of loose hair behind your ear. “I don’t know if I like it or not,” he confessed, his eyebrows knitted together a bit in concentration as his fingers trailed down your braid, stopping just before it curved over your breast.

Your heartbeat skipped when his fingers brushed your cheek, but your eyes didn’t leave his face. “I do,” you countered.

He nodded, slowly, as if he was still thinking very hard about something (it clearly wasn’t just your hair). “Have you eaten yet?” He asked, and you shook your head.

“I thought I would wait for you.”

A pause, followed by another nod. “What would you like?”

You shrugged, leaning back on the bed slowly, brushing your other braid over your shoulder before your back hit the mattress. “You pick. I don’t care.”

He chuckled a little. “You wouldn’t. You’ve been eating Stormtrooper food for months,” he said, turning to the holopad and sifting through the menu.

His back was turned to you now, and you tried not to think about your actions before you did them as you reached out with shaking hands and traced a line down the back of his bicep. He tensed at first, but you simply continued, your fingers skidding along the muscles in his back until he relaxed into your touch. You traced random lines onto his skin through his shirt until your fingers felt numb. He had finished sending off your order minutes ago, and now he was just sitting there silently, leaning a little into your touch.

Your fingers trailed lower now, and you reached around to the front of him to grip the bottom of his shirt. You gave it a soft tug. He hesitated before raising his hands above his head, giving you permission to slip it off. You did, happily, and sat up behind him too, hissing quietly at the pain in your side.

Now, you ran both hands down his back, and his head rolled back a little on his shoulders. You wondered how long it had really been since he’d been touched like this. You had given up on the idea of him being a virgin, but he couldn’t have had many partners, his life being first dedicated to the Jedi and then (when he killed that part of his life, along with many innocent people, off) to the First Order.

You traced letters into his skin, first his name, then yours, then a question. You weren’t sure he was even paying attention to the words you wrote across the skin of his back, and you were even less sure he would care enough to answer you, but still you wrote out the sentence letter by letter, slowly, lingering too long after you finished a word.

D-O I S-T-I-L-L I-N-F-U-R-I-A-T-E Y-O-U?

After you drew the invisible question mark, you trailed your fingers back up to run through his hair, softly entangling your fingers in it and tugging. His hand drew back to grab your wrist, his grip gentler yet colder than you expected, and he turned to look at you long and hard.

You opened your mouth to speak, and his icy hand dropped to your leg. “Yes,” he answered, and then he was kissing you, hard, again. He gripped your leg tight, leaning into you and using it as a grounding point. Your own hands grasped at his shoulder blades as he laid you down on the bed, one hand in the small of your back, his teeth grazing gently across your bottom lip. His hips fit perfectly between yours, and the hand he had used to help soothe your landing on the mattress now ran up to wrap around your breast. Even with your shirt still keeping your skin from each other, it felt like freedom, like the peak of all the tension that had been building.

His head turned, and he kissed his way down your neck, sucking harshly in spots, sure to leave marks. “You are so fucking infuriating,” he whispered against your skin, but his voice wasn’t angry, just wanting, hungry.

There was a knock on the door, and his grip on your leg tightened. He leaned back to get it, giving you a look when you were only touching at your hips, his hand squeezing your skin and his hips pressing tight into yours. “Do not move,” he said.

You stared at him for a moment as he set his helmet on and grabbed the tray of food and bottle of wine from the man at the door. Your shirt was hiked up on your stomach, but Kylo blocked the guy’s view of you entirely. You looked back up to the ceiling when the door shut, not wanting him to catch you staring at him, and only heard him taking gulps of wine straight from the bottle. You only looked at him when he held it out to you, offering silently, and you sat up, drinking from it and handing it back to him. He gave you no time to think before his lips were on yours again, his body pressing yours into the bed.

His hands were on your hips now, just under the fabric of your shirt, and you laid there beneath him for only a moment. You rolled over on top of him after a beat (careful not to break any of his fucking ribs), your knees on either side of his waist, and pulled your shirt off in one smooth motion. His hands quickly grabbed your breasts, groping at them as you kissed him again, sucking his own bottom lip into your mouth. His hips lifted up into yours until you released it back to him, and he leaned forward to growl into your ear. “You drive me fucking crazy,” He said, and you simply turned your head to make your own marks on his perfect porcelain skin.

The hand not on your breast moved to your hips, grinding them down onto his own, and, even though you both still wore pants, you had to admit it did feel amazing. Especially since, for once, you could tell exactly how you were making him feel, if not by his (surprisingly large) already hard member, then by the fact that he was practically telling you, mentally. You could feel everything he was feeling, your own nerve endings tingling as you kissed along his collarbones.

All of a sudden, he rolled you back over, his hands on your hips, dragging you to the end of the bed as he stood. His hips rolled into yours, and you imagined how you looked now, the First Order’s only two Force-users (other than Supreme Leader Snoke himself) dry-humping on a bed at only half-past 7. His teeth sunk into your shoulder, and your body shook against his, mind completely empty for a second from the shock. “I hate you,” you hissed through gritted teeth, one hand pulling his mouth to yours and the other pressing his body tighter to yours.

“The feeling is mutual,” he retorted, talking into your lips as his hips grew quicker against yours, and you thought you ought to stop him but didn’t. Instead, you simply tilted your head to watch his face as it screwed up in pleasure.

You didn’t think it could be so arousing to watch a man come in his pants above you, but he proved you wrong. You yanked his head back from your neck to see him better, and you mentally took note to remember the sweat on his forehead, the way his bit his own lip in a seemingly painful way, his eyes screwed shut tight, no longer staring at you.

His body stilled above yours, and his head fell into the crook of your neck. His breath washed over your bare skin, causing goosebumps to rise in a line from your collar to your breast. It was quiet between you for a while, and then he lifted himself up on one arm, mostly back to his normal self except for his still hurried breathing. He toyed with one of your braids, flipping the end of it between his fingers before placing it so it curved over your breast, just barely covering your nipple. “I like it,” he said, as if he was just now realizing it as he told you. You smiled at him, and he smiled back for a moment, his smaller than yours but still a genuine grin, before standing and wordlessly making his way to the bathroom.

You laid there for a moment, shirtless and staring up at the ceiling, before you heard the shower begin to run and went to slip your shirt back on and retrieve the tray of food in the corner. Noodles, peppers, and chicken for the both of you and two slices of cheesecake sat on it, and your smile grew as you placed it on the bed, grabbing the wine too, grateful you hadn’t tipped it over during your… escapades. You drank it from the bottle and ate the cheesecake first, thinking jokingly that you had already broken several unspoken rules today.

When Kylo emerged from the bathroom, only a towel wrapped around his waist, you were already done eating, sitting cross-legged on the bed, staring after him. He dressed quickly (his bare butt was only visible to you for a very short period of time) and ate silently, sitting on the bed across from you. You held the wine, sipping it when he was not, and watching him. You had hoped that your experience would have cleared things up, but it only muddled them even more.

You found yourself sighing (a bit too loudly) when Kylo retreated to his mat for the night. You curled up in his bed yourself, after cleaning off the tray and now empty bottle of wine. He started talking just as you were drifting off to sleep, and it pulled you back into consciousness. He was mumbling to himself, just too quietly for you to hear. You tried to block it out, but then you grew even more upset when it continued. Closing your eyes, you snuck your way into his thoughts and saw him yelling with… Someone. You didn’t recognize them yourself, but it was a man, tall and older looking, with the same basic bone structure as Kylo but a different disposition about him. He didn’t have the fire in his eyes that Kylo had. Instead, he looked almost sadder. He yelled back, angry too, but he wasn’t exactly saying anything. It was more the tone of his voice, boiling with the rage of someone who had been disappointed one too many times. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, Kylo plunged his lightsaber into the man’s chest, and you heard the man on the mat gasp, sitting up.

He was awake now, and his breathing was extremely heavy and fearful. You kept your eyes shut, retreating from his thoughts back into your own. You didn’t hear him walk over to you, but you felt it as he grabbed the covers and pulled them down off your shoulder a little. He paused, then climbed into bed beside you, tucking one hand behind his head and wrapping the other around your waist, his fingers intertwining with yours. You did not speak, but you let your head lean back against his chest, and his arm around your waist squeezed you. His hands were still cold, but his breath was warm as it blew past your cheek, his face turned down to look at yours even while your eyes stayed shut.

Chapter Text

When you woke, the man you had been sharing a room with was still asleep for the first time since you had arrived. His arms were dead heavy around your waist, and you placed your hand over his, just above your belly button. He stirred a little. Now, you could feel him waking when you leaned your head back against his shoulder and peeked up at him. His eyes looked different, tired, and you wondered if he had had more bad dreams since he had laid down next to you the night before. He looked at you for a moment then tensed to move away. You saw this, and your hand over his moved to grip his wrist. “No. You’re not going to pretend last night did not happen, and you’re not going to pretend you didn’t just wake up with me,” You said, voice certain, strong in a way even you had not been expecting. “I’m tired of you only being nice to me at night, Ren.”

Kylo stared at you for another short while before nodding. Your jaw almost dropped as he agreed and squeezed you against his body. He was still for a long while, and you were still beside him. You stared at the ceiling, taking note of how your breaths seemed to match up, the rise of his chest and yours somehow in synchronization, like you were together one sentient, slow-breathing being. All of a sudden, his breathing stilled, then continued opposite of yours, his chest falling just as yours rose, and while you knew he was doing it to separate you, you found you liked it better, just as fond of the places you touched as the spaces inbetween. He sighed, and you felt his warm chest against yours as it pressed into your back. “Can I move now?” He asked, his voice shockingly small.

You nodded, slowly, and he took his time in extricating himself from you, his hands lingering on your skin, his toes still pressing into the soles of your feet until the last second. He sat up with his back to you, and you watched the rise and fall of his shoulders, deliberately matching your own to them. When he stood to get dressed, you moved to sit up too, figuring it would do you good to get ready yourself. He threw you your normal clothes, and you realized suddenly that you had only worn pajamas for days now.

Slipping off your shirt without hesitation, Ren looked over his shoulder to glance at your naked chest. It didn’t shake you, and you only paused to take a deep breath before tugging your bra on, followed by the two shirts you wore under your cowl: a tight t-shirt and a long-sleeved loose one over it. (You didn’t have the armored layer Kylo did, and you were half-grateful, seeing as your clothes were already almost too heavy on you.) You stood then, stepping into your leggings slowly, purposefully turning your ass towards him if he chose to look at it, which, you noticed, he did, his head tilting a little to the side. Once they were successfully on your hips, you turned to look for your boots.

You had almost convinced yourself to painfully lean down and look under the bed for them when they slid into view just in front of your feet. The man in the closet doorway stared at you, nodding for you to go ahead and put them on when you looked over at him. You sat on the edge of the bed and tugged them on, tying the laces while you stared up into the bathroom across from you. You remembered the tantrum he had thrown what felt like weeks ago, and you wondered how the same man who had spent the night with you last night, the same man who had spoken in such a small, tentative voice to you, the same man whose cold toes had pressed into the soles of your feet as you slept, could punch his way through mirrors like that.

When you slowly straightened up and stood, Kylo was still staring your way. His gaze trailed from your eyes to your lips to your neck. He stepped forward, paused, and then moved to close the distance between you. His hands pulled the rubber bands off the end of your hair, looking at you after he did so. “Do you know how to do your hair back like this?” He asked as he ran his fingers over the edges of the loosened braids.

You shook your head, and he paused. “Have the nurse teach you then,” he eventually said, sticking his fingertips through the holes and straightening out your locks as best he could. They stayed wavy, curling around your face and under your chin, but he seemed happy with his work as he turned back to get dressed himself.

Sensing your confusion, he spoke again after he had shrugged his own clothes on. “You have… marks on your neck. I would rather not explain them to the Supreme Leader.”

With a light smile, you pulled your cowl onto your shoulders, and he did the same. “Are we meeting with him now?” You asked, gently, carefully, leaning against the bed and trying to push away the ache in your side that has awoken just from the effort of dressing yourself.

“Yes,” Kylo answered simply, grabbing the mask and placing it over his head. It was locked into place, and you stood, taking slow, strong steps toward the door of the room. Kylo watched you again; you could feel his gaze on your neck as you tried to keep your back straight with your stride.

Ren’s eyes did not leave you as you winded your way through the halls to Snoke’s quarters, but he did not say a word either, not when you had to take breaks to breathe or when you started limping and placing one hand tight against your side, as it to smother the pain. When you neared the door, though, he sped up to stand by your side.

He stared down at your hand on your side and reached out to put a hand on your shoulder just as the doors started to slide open.

Your eyes opened wide, and you shoved his hands away just before the door moved to reveal you to the Supreme Leader. “Are you kidding me?” You thought to him, outraged at the idea that he would let you look weak in front of Snoke. Your own hand fell from your side, and you stood tall and proud as you strode confidently over to speak to Snoke, nodding respectfully to him.

Kylo trailed behind you, and you spoke first, taking a deep breath first to steady yourself. “I believe I am ready to start training again, Supreme Leader.”

Snoke stared down at you, his face expressionless as usual. Then his eyes moved to stare at the man beside you. “Apprentice Ren has told me that the two of you have been communicating directly with each other through the Force. Is that true, Apprentice L/n?”

You paused then nodded, realizing that, while you never thought of it as being through the Force, that was, technically, correct. “Yes.”

Snoke nodded himself, looking pleased with you for the first time in a long while. “Are you aware of what that could mean?”

Beside you, Ren’s hands tightened by his sides, a token tick you had not seen in awhile, and you searched your mind before sighing, your side aching, and admitting defeat. “No, Supreme Leader. I am not.”

The pale hologram in front of you nodded again, seeming more pleased now with himself. He did not speak for a while, instead staring down at the two of you in turn, and you tried to breathe as lightly as you could to fight the knife of pain stabbing into the space between your fifth and seventh rib. “You may return to your training immediately,” Snoke said, but you did not thank him right away, sensing he had more to say. “But,” he started, and your eyes closed for a quick moment in exasperation before snapping open again. “You will be careful with each other. Emotion is useful in battle when you know how to harness it, but you are allies, not enemies.”

“Yes,” you and Ren spoke in synchronization, sounding a bit like scorned children.

“And Apprentice L/n,” Snoke added. “You will work on healing your side even when you are not training. In two weeks, you will leave with Ren on your first mission.”

Your breath caught, and through your shock and aching ribs, you could barely manage another “yes,” before Snoke dismissed the two of you. You turned, and pure adrenaline got you out of the door before you barely stopped yourself from collapsing, landing against the wall of the hallway with a thud. You gasped for air, gripping at your side again as if it would help, and Ren stood beside you, a hand on your shoulder now as you had no reason or strength to slap it away.

When you finally regained your composure, your eyes were teary, and footsteps echoed down the hall toward you. You straightened your back and looked past Ren as whoever the steps belonged to grew nearer. Just before they rounded the corner, an invisible hand swatted your hair down in front of your shoulders. General Hux appeared in front of you, giving you and Ren one long look(his eyes thankfully not lingering on you any more than your partner) before continuing into Snoke’s quarters without a word. You reached up to run your fingers over the tender skin on your neck and took the first painful step down the hallway.

Chapter Text

Throughout the walk to the training room, Ren was silent beside you. He kept pace just to your left, reaching out to touch your arm encouragingly when you seemed ready to fall over, but never spoke. You didn’t either, instead focusing on the feeling of the ground beneath your feet, hoping it would distract from the knife in your side. He slid open the door when you arrived, and you were grateful, not wanting to exert the mental force (Force?) it took.

He stood just outside the doorway when you entered the room, so close you were surprised his robes didn’t get caught when the door slid back shut. You continued over to what had become your side of the room, slipping off your cowl. You reached up your hands to pull your hair back, but the splitting pain in your side stopped you. You choked a little, but you had only halfway turned back to the man previously in the doorway before you felt a pressure on your shoulder and saw his gloved hand reach out for the rubber band. Pausing for only a second, you placed it into his palm, and he took his time tying your hair back, his fingers moving swiftly and softly through it. When he was done, he quickly turned away, walking to his side of the room and slipping off his helmet.

It wasn’t until he turned back to you, when your gaze landed on his dark eyes and full lips tight in a line, that you realized he was still mad at you for pushing him away before you entered Snoke’s quarters. You could tell he was just trying to help, but you needed to look strong, and he, the man who wore a fucking mask so no one could tell what he was thinking (or feeling), had to understand that.

Kylo rose a challenging eyebrow at you, and you rolled your eyes, knowing he was following your train of thought. “You shouldn’t be in my head all the time, and you wouldn’t hear things you don’t want to,” you said, head high, voice level yet clearly annoyed with him.

He stared at you for another moment, then sat down on the bench behind him, balancing his elbow on his knee and resting his face on his fist. It made his cheek bunch up near his eyes, like a little kid who didn’t know yet not to smile so big. Your frustration was almost soothed by the sight of it, but he smirked then, and the fire in your gut was officially lit.

“And you need to get better at reading my thoughts. You are very easily blocked out more often than not, Apprentice L/n.”

You almost snarled at the sound of him calling you by that title just to anger you. Instead, though, you sat down on the floor where you stood, halfway from your bench to the center of the room, and closed your eyes, focusing on breaking into his thoughts.

The walls he put up seemed stronger than usual, fuelled by his anger at you, but you were significantly more pissed than him, and you threw everything you had against them. You tried this for several minutes, Ren chuckling when he managed to block you even as you tried your hardest, until, tears in your eyes, you realized what you were doing wrong. You took a deep breath to calm yourself, pushing against the pain in your side, and calmly, coolly, focused on your task, no longer on your hatred for the man in front of you.

All of a sudden, you broke through, and you could feel his own focus and pressure trying to keep you out. Once you were there, though, you stayed, picking through his thoughts and emotions like files in an office drawer.

In front of you, Kylo growled. “You did it. Now get out of my head.”

Your eyes opened, and you stared at him for a long time. His lips were almost drawn back over his teeth, and his eyes were watery from the effort it took to keep you out. You just winked at him, looking at the memories between the two of you from his point of view, surprised by how your breasts looked from below, how you tasted to him, how he used to look at you in the morning before you woke.

A cozy, comfortable warmth spread throughout you when you saw these things, from your toes to your scalp, like he had wrapped you up in the kind gentleness of these thoughts. You were either so distracted by the feeling not to notice him picking up the practice stones without moving or he did it in a fraction of a second, but, either way, you were busy revelling in the warmth the memories gave you when the rock slammed against the floor beside you. It shattered, and pieces of it exploded all around you, hitting you from your cheek to your calf.

Your eyes whipped up to his. You opened your mouth to speak, but he beat you to it, jaw tight and eyes even darker than before. “I told you to get out,” he said, his voice clearly straining to stay even, and you reached up and touched a spot on your cheek that felt too cold. When you pulled your fingers away, there was a touch of blood on them, and you glared at him once more before standing and grabbing your things.

“What are you doing?” He asked, but you simply turned to the door, striding towards it angrily.

“I asked you a question, Apprentice L/n,” he said, and you could see his fists clenching and unclenching in your head. You raised a single hand and flicked your wrist toward him, and he gasped as three rocks flew at him, landing just close enough that he could feel the impact hitting the wall next to his head.

You heard him screaming at you as the door closed behind you, but you didn’t even flinch at the sound, instead stalking your way to your room, your fingers pressed against the small cut on your cheek.

*****

After lunch, you reluctantly returned to the training room, knowing you were under orders to do so. When you arrived, you saw that one of the walls had been attacked with what was clearly Kylo’s lightsaber, and you rolled your eyes, walking over to your bench and pulling out your own saber, placing it beside you as you sat. You waited for Ren for awhile, but you were still too angry to count the minutes. Instead, you drummed your fingers against the still tender cut on your face. It hadn’t bled very much, but it was enough to piss you off completely.

Kylo strode in roughly fifteen minutes late, pausing for a second to glare at you (you could tell it was a glare even from behind the mask) before going to his bench and readying himself.

“Today we’re gonna work on offense,” you said, and you saw him pause his movements, the muscles in his back stopping their strain for a moment. “If we’re going to go out on a mission in two weeks, we will both need practice.”

He turned back to you, and you turned on your lightsaber, eyes staring into his, and, even though you both knew he was better than you at this particular kind of battle, you saw hesitation in his eyes before his hands moved to his belt to grab his own.

You were, honestly, a bit unfair with the way you swung at him, before he even had his weapon out, but you weren’t going for the kill (and you had switched yours to the low setting, so he wouldn’t have been killed even if you hit him). The saber simply flew past his head in an arc, and his eyes squinted as he pulled his own out and slammed it against yours, pressing back at you with a force you weren’t expecting. You lost your footing a little but regained it quickly, jumping out of the way (adrenaline and anger dulling the pain in your side momentarily) and swinging again at his left calf. He blocked you again and swung at your shoulder, but you ducked out of the way just in time.

This continued for a while, the two of you almost hitting each other but not quite, until you met one of his blows halfway through, your sabers clashing between you. Your eyes met across the beams of dangerous light, and, while you were unaware of it, he had looked at someone else like this in the moment before the scar that you only sometimes noticed had been cut into his face. His jaw set in place, and you had no time to react as he brought his saber down on your wrist and knocked yours out of your hand, it skidding across the floor to the corner of the room. He dropped his own and grabbed your face in his hands, staring hard at you.

You were just about to twist out of his grip, even more pissed at him now with the dull burn in your wrist, when he leaned forward and pressed his lips not against yours but onto the cut on your cheek. His lips were warm and soft, and it was such a clear sign of affection, such a fond movement, that you were frozen for a moment. You stared up at him as he leaned back, stared at you again, then turned, his lightsaber back in his hand, and left the room.

*****

That night, you wrapped your wrist in gauze, blisters beneath the skin small but still enough that they would hurt if they burst, and sat in your own bed for the first night in what felt like forever. You wanted to feel at home, like you had finally come back from some long journey, but instead you felt alone. Your bed didn’t have the largeness his did, the sense that you should be there with someone else, that you were there with someone else, and your bathroom, on the opposite of the room as his, had no matches in it. You had no way of lighting the candle that sat on your bedside table, no want for the wine that was beside it.

You were lying in the misery of this, of the fact that, no matter how much you loathed Kylo Ren, you still felt lonely without him, when his voice spoke through your thoughts.

“Can you walk to my room yourself or do you need me to assist you?”

You tried to be annoyed, at him for being in your mind and at him for just assuming you would come to his room instead of asking you to, but you were getting good at seeing past his words into their meaning, and he didn’t protest when you thought that this was his way of saying he wanted you there.

Not answering him, you grabbed a change of clothes and walked out of your room, down the halls, to his. The door slid open just before you arrived in front of it, and you saw Kylo sitting on the bed, a bottle of wine and a slice of cheesecake in front of him. You tried to hold back your smile as you placed your things in his closet and sat on the edge of the bed. He stared at you, silent, as you took a bite of the cheesecake and looked around the room. You thought of bringing up how you felt like you belonged more here than in your own room, but he simply held out the wine to you when you opened your mouth to speak. You took it, swirling it around inside the bottle before taking a little sip.

He spoke now, voice careful, words seeming explicitly chosen. “I am… not proud of the way I acted earlier today.”

Your eyebrows rose as you looked to him, and you slowly realized this was his way of apologizing. “Okay,” you said, your voice uncomfortably accepting and small in your throat as your fingers ran over the cut on your cheek, remembering less of the pain that he had put there and more of the kiss after.

He stared at you for another long moment before grabbing the plate and bottle of wine and placing them on his bedside table. He shrugged off his shirt, not facing you, and tucked himself under the covers, closing his eyes comfortably. You looked down at him, unsure of what to do next, until he lifted his arm and the sheets with it, welcoming you into the bed with him.

You slowly moved to crawl under the covers with him, surprised at his offer and even more surprised at the way his arms wrapped around you, tight and possessive, the way boys when you were younger used to hold you in front of their friends.

You were both quiet and still for a long while, but you couldn’t convince yourself to sleep, too aware of the fabric separating your skin. You reached down and, moving around his arm on your waist, pulled your shirt up on your stomach and then eventually off of you, aware of the fact that you had no bra on but not hindered by it. His fingers twitched against your skin, showing you that he was still awake too, as you moved back to press the bare skin of your back against his chest.

You remembered the way he had looked at you the day he helped you change, and his hand rubbed against your bare stomach now, inching their way up toward your chest. In retaliation, you pressed your butt against his crotch. His grip tightened, and he reached up to run his fingers over your nipple, seemingly amused with the way it tightened under his touch. You rocked your hips back against him, taking pleasure in the fact that he kept his own pressed against you until you pulled away. You stayed like that for a moment, his fingers toying with your nipples and your hips rocking back against his, until you took initiative.

You turned, slowly, to face him. He was closer than you thought, his eyes just in front of yours when you were on your other side. His hand was still on your breast, and you leaned up to catch his lips in yours. This kiss was different from the others before, not angry or hungry but gentle, soft, wanting but willing to wait. His other hand reached up to grab your face, his thumb running over the cut on your cheek as he squeezed your breast. A small mewl left your lips, and his hips moved forward just a fraction of an inch. Your own hands twitched their way toward the bulge in his sleeping pants, and, when your palm pressed against his hardening member, he leaned back from your lips, breathing heavy.

You palmed him through his pants for only a few seconds before your fingers inched his pants down, tips brushing gently against his erection. He let out another heavy breath as his own hand trailed down your stomach to tug your own pants down a bit to allow him access inside of them. His fingers, still just as cold as they had been the last time he touched you but larger than you remembered, ran their way up your slit slowly, gently, not touching anything in particular but still causing your own breath to catch.

Wrapping your fingers around the entire girth of him, you realized for the first time how large he was, much bigger than you had thought, and he smiled a little against your cheek as his index finger pressed against your bundle of nerves. Your own hand slid up his length, your thumb running along the tip before trailing back down again. His breathing grew heavy again as his fingers ran down to gather your wetness and then back up to brush against your clit once more.

“Harder,” you whispered, voice almost begging, and he nodded slightly, doing as you asked. Your own hand sped up its movements, and you felt a bit of pre-cum leaking from his tip the next time your fingers ran against it. You twisted your hand around him, and he let a little groan escape his throat, pressing a finger into you without warning. You moaned, low but still loud enough for him to hear perfectly. His head tilted in response, and he kissed you again, hard now, the hunger reawakened.

You continued your movements along his length, feeling his hips buck up into your hand now, clearly not used to not being the one in control of these things. You didn’t toy with him, though, instead speeding up, which elicited another groan from him, this time directly from his mouth to yours. Another one of his fingers pushed inside of you, his thumb rubbing against your clit with every thrust upward. He repeated all the actions you loved until you were practically squirming in place beside him. You pulled away from his lips, breathing heavy, your forehead against his. He stared into your eyes as his hips bucked up into your hand, and you were so close. You could feel every movement his body made, and you knew how it felt to him too, him allowing you into his mind without a fight.

His breath grew too heavy now, and your legs twitched around his hand. Your eyes shut tight, and his hand grabbed your chin tight, pressing your lips against each other as you came, the world exploding into colors and lights around you. He followed quickly, feeling the same things you did, his cum painting stripes across your hand and stomach.

You stayed there for a while after, still kissing, your fingers now running gently against the underside of his shaft and his still brushing up and down your slit. When he finally pulled away from you, he did so slowly, lingering there a moment too long, planting one final peck on your half-open lips before he pulled back the sheets and extricated himself from the bed.

He disappeared into the bathroom, and you looked down at his seed on your stomach and then on your fingers, mind still empty and gasping from your orgasm. When Kylo reappeared, he had a wet rag in his hand, and he ran it along your stomach slowly, gathering up his mess. You stared down at him as he did so but sucked a finger into your mouth before he could clean it too. He watched, eyes wide, as you licked up the remnants of his climax that ran down your fingers and palm.

When you popped the last digit out of your mouth, smiling a bit at him as you swallowed quickly, he kissed you again, hard, both of his hands on either side of your face. “You’re so fucking hot,” he growled at you when he pulled away, his hands gripping the back of your neck as you gasped breaths onto his face. “You make me want to do things I can’t even say."

You tilted your chin up and kissed him again, softer, before turning on your side. “Later. Now I’m sleeping.”

He was still for a moment, staring as he always did, and you could feel the warmth of him smiling down at you before he crawled under the sheets beside you, his arm tight and possessive again around your waist, and placed a gentle kiss against your shoulder.

Chapter Text

The morning came too soon, although later than usual. Your eyes opened to a bedside table with candles and a half-empty bottle of wine beside an empty plate. You sat up slowly, careful not to disturb your side, and brushed your loose hair back from your face. There was a slight soreness between your legs, and you remembered in a flash what had happened the night before. Smoothing your fingers over the sheets gathered around your waist, you looked around the room for the man missing from the bed (you knew he was missing the moment you awoke, having been laying on his side of the mattress).

There was a knock on the door, strong, demanding. Your eyes widened, and you drew up your hands to cover your naked chest. You parted your lips to call out for Kylo, but he emerged from the bathroom before you could, still shirtless and his hair dripping onto his shoulders. He gave you a look, but you didn’t get to say anything to each other as there was another knock, louder, stronger, and even more demanding, against the door.

“Bathroom,” Kylo said simply, and you hopped out of the bed as quickly as possible. You quickly scanned the room for a shirt, and he did the same, but you snatched his up before he could. He shot you another look, for a different reason this time.

Outside the door, you heard the code being punched in. “Go,” Kylo ordered now, pushing you toward the bathroom door as you shrugged the too-large long-sleeved shirt onto your naked chest. You had just barely closed yourself into the bathroom when you heard the main door slide open, and the slight hiss of Ren’s mask locking into place. There was a moment of silence as the door opened, and you took a quick second to think about the absurdness of it, the fact that the man would hardly think twice about someone seeing him shirtless but never let them see him without that damn helmet. (His face was arguably the best part of him, and, while his chest was Knight muscular, he wasn’t exactly shredded.)

“You missed your morning meeting with me, Ren,” Hux’s voice rang out, and your spine tightened as you leaned back against the door, trying your hardest to catch every word that was said. “Do you have a reason why?”

You tried to sneak your way into Ren’s head to see what was going on, but he pushed you out with a mental “Not now.” You huffed lightly, then caught yourself, trying your hardest not to make any noise until you heard Kylo respond.

“I overslept.”

You could picture the look on the General’s face, eyebrows high, mocking smile on his lips, arms behind his back as he paced in front of the door (this part you knew was truly happening; you could hear his footfalls, although none of them approaching you). “Overslept?” He repeated, questioningly, then waited for an answer.

Kylo’s voice was angry now, and you knew from the sound of it that his jaw was set tight, the way he looked at you when you annoyed him a little too much. “Yes, General. I am allowed one mistake, am I not? If I remember, you have been late to several meetings with the excuse of feeding your cat.”

Your eyebrows knitted together. You didn’t know that Hux had a cat. You had to eat cafeteria food every night for months, and Hux got to keep a fucking cat?

“Yes,” Hux spoke, and you pushed away your anger to listen again. “I have.” There was a pause, and you held your breath again, hearing his footsteps grow a little nearer to you, though you were sure Ren wouldn’t let him enter without warning you, your breasts halfway visible in his shirt, the strings at the neck loose. “But you have always been on time in the past.” Another pause, and you could picture the shit-eating smirk on his face, the same way he grinned at you when you messed up training in the few times he had been sent to watch over you. “Except, of course, for the times when Apprentice L/n was with you.”

Silence followed, deafening, and you breathed slow and quiet, despite your heart racing in your chest. Finally, Hux continued. “You were late to our meetings every day when she stayed in your room, and now, even after she has been released from your watch, you are absent.”

Footsteps grew even closer to the door, then stopped abruptly, and you pictured Hux stopping just in front of Ren. It was quiet again, and you wondered how long Kylo would give him the silent treatment. Your answer came next.

“It will not happen again,” Kylo said simply, but you could tell his jaw was still set tight.

You heard a deep breath being taken and wondered which man it came from, if it was the general with his arms tight behind his back or the commander with his hands bunched into fists at his sides.

“I checked Apprentice L/n’s room before I arrived. She seems to also be hiding from me.”

Your breath caught, and you had to stop yourself from slapping a hand up over your mouth. “Stop being so dramatic!” Kylo mentally screamed at you, and you nodded slowly, trying to regain your composure behind the wooden door.

Kylo answered now, “I assure you I have not seen her.” A pause. You weren’t sure if he was a bad liar or if you just knew him too well. “And I was not aware she was also due to meet with you this morning.”

“She was not,” the general said. There was a very long silence now, the longest. You could not hold your breath throughout it. Instead, you settled for placing a hand over your stomach to try to shallow out your inhalations. Eventually, thankfully, Hux spoke again, sounding a little farther away now, though you had been so focused on your breathing you had not noticed his footsteps. “Supreme Leader tells me that the two of you have formed a- What is the word? Premature Force bond.”

You weren’t sure what that meant, but you could tell how angry it made Kylo, even if he tried to push you out of his head. The rage radiated from him to you, and you realized you were pissed too, even if you didn’t know why.

“That is only one option. There are many-”

Hux’s voice cut through Kylo’s for a moment. “Yes, well-”

Kylo was louder now as he repeated himself, finishing his thought, the tone of his voice strange and scary in your ears. “There are many things the connection between us may mean, and it certainly is not a true Force bond. She is not able to read my thoughts unless I wish her to.”

“Yet,” Hux added, and you heard the anger in his voice too, so curious to you, having never seen him as pissed as he sounded. “She is new with the Force. You have trained for years. Supreme Leader and I are both sure when given, say, a month or two of training with you, she will be exponentially stronger.” He paused, and you imagined that snarky look on his face again. “Perhaps even as strong as you. What about then? Shall we call it a bond when that time comes, Ren?”

It was silent again, and you heard Kylo’s voice in your mind. “Find somewhere to hide. I have to let him look for you.”

You tried to protest, but Hux spoke again, his footsteps approaching the spot where you assumed Kylo stood. “I am told that in these Force bonds, if that is what you possess with the girl, Ren, it is not uncommon for the two people to become… Shall we say: entwined with each other?”

“I am not sure what you mean,” You heard Kylo say, but you weren’t truly listening now, instead busying yourself with trying to find somewhere to hide. The only option (other than the shower, which Hux was sure to check) was the bottom cabinet under the sink, almost too small for you and certain to cause your rib distress.

“It evokes, or so I am told by the Supreme Leader, a level of attraction between the two souls, which sometimes may manifest itself into a romantic or sexual relationship.” He paused, and you sensed Kylo ready to respond. Hux chuckled before the commander could speak, and you pictured him shaking his head as if to himself while you squatted and tucked your legs into the spot beneath the sink pipes. “I am sure you are not capable of romance, but even someone like you is prone to fall victim to the… sins of the flesh.”

Your cheeks reddened, and you paused in your shutting of the cabinet door next you, rib aching, blood pulsing through your veins. Hux’s words evoked an anger in you almost inhuman, and you pictured his head severed on the floor beside you, eyes wide open, mouth no longer in that fucking evil smirk he wore. “I know,” Kylo thought to you, and you slowly eased the cabinet door shut, your rage a little relieved by his acknowledgement of your emotions.

“If you truly have not seen the girl this morning, would you mind me looking for her? Just a simple check. She was not in her room, of course, and I am sure we would both hate for her to be unaccounted for.”

“If you so please,” Ren answered, and you could not hear the sound of the movement he made next, but he let you see the image of him sitting on the bed as Hux turned to the closet door and opened it, popping his head inside.

You breathed as shallowly as possible, ignoring the sharp pain in your side, more occupied with trying to speak to Kylo through your thoughts. “I have a lot of questions. What’s a Force bond?”

He didn’t answer, so you repeated yourself, trying to angle the words to be angrier now. You heard Hux’s footsteps approach the door as Kylo looked down at his nails absently, picking at the edges of them. “It is not my job to explain that to you,” He answered.

You started to respond, but the door to the bathroom creaked open before you could. The general’s footsteps were slow as they entered the room. You thought, breath locked in your throat, that he could sense you there, like how dogs could smell fear. He knew you were there, right there, as the shadow of his boots stopped just in front of the sink, and you were frozen with fear, eyes locked on the pipe just in front of your eyes, so close your nose almost touched it.

There was a horrible, high-pitched squeal and ‘swoosh,’ and you recognized it as Hux shoving the shower curtain aside. He exhaled, clearly disappointed, and turned around. You held your breath as his shadow stilled, knowing that if your knee so much as twitched, the cabinet door would swing open and hit his shin. You thought about doing it, just to hurt him, but Ren’s voice sounded off in your mind, full of disapproval.

The top of the counter shook all of a sudden, and you imagined Hux placing his hands on either side of the sink. Above you, the pipes rumbled to life, the one in front of you knocking your nose and inciting a dull pain there as the general washed his hands before the shadow of his boots disappeared in front of the cabinet.

“We are all wrong sometimes, Ren,” Hux said, and the bathroom door creaked back closed. You moved to crawl out from under the sink, but a voice in your head (not just any voice, Kylo’s) told you to stay put. “I will look for Apprentice L/n elsewhere.”

There was a moment of silence before the sound of the main door sliding shut. After just four more beats, the cabinet door opened, and Kylo’s face stared in at you, his cheeks still flushed with anger, and he helped you extricate yourself from beneath the pipes.

“Thanks,” you mumbled dumbly, standing upright and pressing a hand against your side. You leaned back against the sink as he straightened the shower curtain back out in front of you. “Kylo,” you started sweetly, and he turned to face you. “What is a Force bond?”

His eyes fell, and he stalked out of the room. “That is not my job,” he repeated himself. You followed behind him, watching as he entered his closet, slipping off his pajama pants and replacing them with his normal ones.

“Okay, well, why does Hux get a cat and we don’t?”

He turned back to you and rose an eyebrow. “Not we. I am allowed whatever I like.”

Your jaw fell. “Then why don’t you have a pet?”

“I don’t like animals,” he answered simply, walking over to you and holding out his hand. You stared down at it until he sighed and tugged on the collar of his shirt, still scalloping across your shoulders. You frowned and pulled it off of you, not moving your arms to cover your chest after.

“Why not?”

An invisible hand tossed your own clothes from their spot in the closet to a new spot: beside you on the bed. You wondered briefly how Hux had not noticed them, then realized he probably simply mistook them for Kylo’s.

“Stop asking me questions.”

You huffed, pulling on your bra and frowning harder. “Well, I want a cat.”

Kylo turned back to look at you as you slipped on your undershirt. “Well, that’s too bad,” he retorted, returning to your side, now fully dressed, only to grab his helmet off the table behind you. “Do not leave until I’ve been gone for five minutes,” he ordered, in the tone he always used with others but you hated him using with you. As if he knew you hated his voice like that (which, of course, he had to), modulated by the mask and bossing you around, his gloved right hand reached out to you. The back of his hand pressed against your cheek briefly before he pushed your hair back down around your neck. Then, he walked to the door.

Feeling strangely used and empty, you turned back to dressing yourself. Just before he exited the door, though, Kylo spoke to you again, in the same tone you had thought he had realized you hated. “F/n?”

“Yes?” You replied, not even looking up from your legs as you pulled your leggings up them.

“Our training begins in one hour. And you will not return to my room tonight.”

You made a noise of shock and horror in your throat, but the doors were already sliding shut behind him. You felt the tears well up in your eyes, and you tried to think of a reply but couldn’t. Instead, you simply sat down on the bed beside you, your sight blurring at the edges, and cursed yourself for being so immature as to imagine a man like Kylo Ren, a man you still hated half of the time, having actual feelings for you. As General Hux had said, people like him were not capable of romance.

Chapter Text

You were insane. You had officially gone clinically, criminally insane, and they were going to send you to get a psych evaluation and be told how clinically, criminally insane you were, and you would be thrown into deep space or shoved into the trash compactor or, better yet, lightsabered to death by the very six-foot-two serial murder who had made you so fucking crazy. And yet, you continued to walk away from General Hux, even as he followed you, his legs longer than yours and therefore quicker.

“I asked you a question, Officer L/n, and you will answer me,” He spoke angrily, but you held your head high, marching away from him.

When you didn’t answer, he reached out and grabbed your arm, tight, his fingers sure to leave bruises in their wake. “What is he doing?” Kylo’s voice echoed around the walls of your skull, awakened by your anger and mental shriek of pain.

You tried to push him away, surprisingly successful, and spoke levelly and calmly to Hux as you clawed his hand away from you. “I was in the training rooms, alone, working on my side. I woke up early to do so. Now, if you could kindly release me, I need to speak to the Supreme Leader.”

You turned to walk away, but Hux grabbed your wrist in his vice grip, unfortunately applying pressure and pulling against the bandages you had put there, bursting the blisters underneath it. You hissed through your teeth and mentally cursed in pain again, but Ren was quiet this time. Hux rose an eyebrow at your reaction, then tightened his hand even more. “You are forgetting that I am your superior, Officer L/n.”

“He is forgetting that I can kill him with a single thought,” Kylo thought to you.

“And you are forgetting that you are no longer welcome in my fucking head,” you mentally responded, pushing him away. Then, you carefully spoke aloud, again removing your wrist from his hand. “I have not forgotten anything, General Hux. This is simply an urgent matter, and I am sure Supreme Leader Snoke would not appreciate you keeping one of his only two apprentices from him in her time of need.”

Hux glared down at you, but when you turned back around and walked away, he did not reach out for you again. Instead, he simply cursed under his breath and stood still, watching as you hurried down the hallway to Snoke’s quarters.

“Why are-” Kylo started, but you pushed him out of your mind again, focusing mostly on that as you reached out and tentatively knocked on the door. It slid open only a fraction of a second later, the hologram across the room looking down on you emotionlessly as usual.

“Apprentice L/n, I’ve been expecting you. I assume you are here to ask me about Force bonds.”

Your jaw fell open a little, but Snoke simply nodded. “I knew you would come eventually. I just did not think you would be so soon. What would you like to know?”

You paused, shock running through your veins, before you could form a question, half of your mental power still being used to block out Kylo. “What.. is it, exactly?”

“Apprentice Ren did not tell you,” he said, his large, pale eyes narrowing.

“He said it was ‘not his job,’” you explained.

The hologram in front of you nodded again, slower than before, as if thinking hard on something now. “That is true. I simply assumed he would take it upon himself to explain it to you, but I must have been wrong about that.” There was a long pause as he stared down at you with his terrifyingly large eyes, and you remembered how insane you were, seeing as you had, in the past five minutes, stormed away from your superior and arrived unannounced at the Supreme Leader’s quarters.

“A Force bond, as we call it, is a connection between two Force-sensitive beings, through which they may influence each other. The pair may share thoughts, feelings, memories, and images through this connection. In a true Force bond, the two beings are completely linked, the Force flowing through the two of them easily, allowing them to support their partner in battle or draw upon their strength.”

You didn’t respond for a moment, suddenly understanding of the reason why Ren had said your connection was not a true Force bond. You were not “completely linked;” there were still many pieces of him you hadn’t seen, and even some of you that you hadn’t allowed him access to.

Snoke continued, “You and Kylo Ren have experienced something similar.”

You nodded slowly in response. “Yes, but not quite… to that extent.”

“I am aware. I am sure that that is due to your inexperience with the Force. A Force bond can only be as strong as the Force is in both of you, and Apprentice Ren’s prowess with it may only take you so far. When you grow stronger in the Force, as I have no doubts you will, as you are already after only months excelling in your training, the connection between you will, as I believe it will, grow or, perhaps, shrink. Either way, it is simply a matter of training and waiting to see.”

You nodded again and stared down at your wrist, the bandage twisted to the side, half of the line of blisters exposed. You were silent until Snoke spoke again, a tinge of something in his voice you did not recognize quite as curiosity but something like it. “It is not uncommon for two within an incipient Force bond to become increasingly passionate about the other. Yet you and Apprentice Ren are…” The hologram above you paused, seeming to be looking for the right word. “Unanticipatedly passionate about one another. He has told me about how you have very mixed emotions for each other, extreme hatred which I assume is paired with extreme attraction.”

Trying to hold back the gasp in your throat, you were silent again until Snoke continued, “I do not regard it as particularly important which path you take with him or even if you attain balance between the two, although I doubt you will manage to, as you are both at times slaves to your emotions."

“If that is all you have to ask of me, you may be dismissed, Apprentice L/n.”

You paused again, still staring at your wrist until you turned your eyes up to the Supreme Leader and bowed your head. “Yes. Thank you, Supreme Leader.”

You left the room with your head high and back straight, the pain in your side thankfully dull as you made your way to your own quarters. It was late, and you hadn’t yet eaten today, not even in the breaks between your training sessions with Ren in which he was not as angry as you would have liked him to be, but you were tired after the stress of your own insanity and wanted nothing more than to collapse into your own bed.

When you reached your door, you felt the pressure of Ren in your head again, but you didn’t push him out this time, too busy picturing yourself melting into your mattress, even if it wasn’t as warm and soft and large as his. The doors opened, and your hand flew up to cover your mouth as your eyes landed on an orange tabby cat sitting on the corner of your bed. Its head lifted up to look at you lazily, and it slowly rose up, stood, and walked over to rub itself against your legs. You shut the door behind you quickly, not wanting it to escape, and wrapped it up in your arms. Its head tucked into the spot between your neck and shoulder, and you carried it to the bed and sat it in your lap, running your fingers along its back.

You realized that Kylo must have done this too when you felt his pleasure at your happiness with the cat. You pushed him out again then, still petting the cat gently, and wondered if he had gotten one just for you or if this was Hux’s. You figured it was probably the latter, as they couldn’t have just had cats on the ship and, as he was already angry at the general for other reasons, stealing his cat would have been nice payback.

The animal’s fur was unbelievably soft under your fingertips, and you laid down on the bed next to her (you checked its gender when it laid down for you) as you pet her. “How can someone not like animals?” You asked her, and she purred in response. “You are so beautiful and fluffy, and anyone who doesn’t like you is a big dumb asshole, right, kitty?” She purred again, rubbing her head against the palm of your hand, and you thought of keeping her in your room all night, of sleeping with her beside you, curled up into a pillow-soft ball, the warmth radiating from her helping you sleep even in your not-comfy-enough bed.

But then you had a better idea. You ran your hand along her back one last time before standing, grabbing her in your arms again, and heading out the door and down the hallway.

When you arrived at Ren’s quarters, you Force-opened the door, holding out one hand to it while the other scratched the cat’s head. On the bed, on top of the covers, completely naked and glistening with sweat, Kylo Ren had one hand wrapped around his hard cock, the other tucked behind his head. He looked up at you when you entered, and you paused only for a second before continuing over to the corner of the bed. His hand on his dick stilled, and you stared into his eyes.

He was not able to push you out of his head this time, not at least before you could tell he was thinking of the way you looked in his shirt, the collar scalloping around your shoulders, the strings in the front untied and revealing the valley between your breasts, the fabric just barely covering your nipples. You stared at him for another moment as the cat turned its head to him and then jumped off the bed and walked to the bathroom. He opened his mouth to speak, but you rolled your eyes, turning away from him. He was pathetic, and you didn’t care if he knew it. He deserved to know it for being so horrible to you earlier, sending you mixed signal after mixed signal. You paused just before you exited the door. “What’s the cat’s name?”

The naked man on the bed cleared his throat before he spoke. “Millicent,” he choked out, and you nodded.

“Return Millicent to her rightful owner. I’m tired of your idiotic gifts,” You said, chin high as you shut the door behind you and walked away down the hall, fighting back the sob of desperation in your chest. You could pretend to be tough all you wanted, and he could be as pathetic as you wished him to be, but you still could not deny how it hurt to have him treat you like he did.

Chapter Text

When Ren entered the training room the next morning, you were drinking from your water bottle, your hair tied back (you may or may not have called a Stormtrooper to your room that morning to do it for you), feeling even more insane with anger than you had been before. Kylo stopped in the doorway to stare at you, but you didn’t look back at him, instead busying yourself with checking the wrap around your stomach, gently edging around your sore side. You heard the footsteps as he walked over to his side of the room, clearly given up on the all too common prolonged eye contact with you.

“I returned the cat,” he said, passively, as if he was simply stating a change in the weather and not trying to appease your aggravation. You didn’t answer.

He was quiet again for a while, then he spoke again. “And there are new matches in your room. I know you were missing them.”

You ignored him again, instead stepping forward and looking at him expectantly. He stared back, looking confused for a moment, before he sighed and continued. “You’re ignoring me?”

Looking down at your feet absentmindedly, you crossed your arms over your chest, pretending to be preoccupied with running your toes along the cracks in the floor. Kylo eventually gave in, throwing his hand out to the side. “Fine. The rocks.”

You looked up again and worked on pushing past his Force-blocks in front of the dummies, like you did on your first day with him. You knew, realistically, that it hadn’t been that long, but it felt like months ago that you first saw the face behind the mask and picked the image of the candles out of his mind.

You felt his eyes on you, his brain following the direction of yours, but you didn’t care anymore. Let him find all he wanted; you were done with him. You wouldn’t see, touch, or speak to him anytime other than explicitly necessary, from now until the foreseeable future. Launching another rock at the dummy to your far left, you remembered his tantrums whenever you didn’t do as he wished; Hux’s certainty that he was incapable of romance; Snoke’s indifference toward your relationship with him, either hatred or affection, as long as the feelings stayed strong. You literally had the O.K. from the Supreme Leader to despise him.

You stopped yourself before thinking “and yet…” You didn’t want him to hear that part. Instead, you threw another rock at another dummy, biting your lip, thinking that you had never heard Kylo be so quiet as he was now.

At that thought, he spoke, looking right at you even as you stared straight ahead. “Did Supreme Leader honestly say that to you?” He asked, seeming angry but not quite at you.

When you were quiet for another five minutes, he retreated back to his bench, picking and choosing which rocks to block now as you launched one at each of them in turn. You kept your lips shut tight, the edges of them turning up, happy to see you were getting to him.

*****

After lunch, Kylo was waiting in the training room for you, sitting down on his bench. He shot up when you walked in, his hands clenching at his sides. “You can’t lock me out of your head too,” he protested, but you simply ducked past him to your bench.

You had been putting extra effort into keeping him out of your thoughts ever since you had left training with him an hour ago, and he was clearly not pleased. You didn’t care, but he still followed you to your side of the room, arms stiff at his sides.

“You’re acting like a child, L/n.”

You looked over your shoulder at him, slipping off your gloves, and moved to the center of the room. He trailed close behind.

“I did nothing wrong.”

“Hands up,” you ordered simply, correcting your own stance and raising your fists. He reluctantly did the same, and you swung at his right shoulder. He moved out of the way, twisting back to avoid your jab. Your jaw locked, and you stood taller, angrier as he avoided your hit.

Kylo was still staring into your eyes, even as you looked everywhere but into his. “I entered a General’s quarters without permission and stole a-” He started, but your fist had already shot out at his face. He tried to raise his own hands to block it, but he was too late. Your knuckles made impact with his nose, hard. His head flew back, and he pressed a hand up under his nose.

You saw the blood before it started running down his hand, but you did not let him see how it upset you, looking him in the eyes now. “I didn’t ask you to do that. Don’t say it was for me.”

One of his hands reached out and grabbed your chin, rough, and you felt the blood smear along your jaw. You tried to be more bothered by it as you tilted your head away from his grip. It only tightened. “What do you want from me?” He roared. He threw his head back a second after, never pulling his hands away from his nose or your chin. “Do you want me to buy you a fucking cat? Do you want to stay in my bed every fucking night?” His eyes squinted at you, and his voice was even more rage-filled when it boomed out of him. “Do you want me to get you fucking cheesecake and wine every fucking day?”

You were silent still, staring up at him, feeling the coolness of his blood just below your bottom lip.

“What do you want?” He yelled and shook your face in his hand. Your brain rattled in your head.

His voice lowered now, and it rumbled out of him like a freight train, angrier than it had even been, the voice of a devil, a murderer, a monster. “Do you want me to fuck you?”

You yanked yourself out of his grasp and quickly grabbed your things. He tried to grab you, but you were just fast enough, and he only had one hand to reach for you with. You stormed off down the hallway, your tongue darting out to taste his blood on your bottom lip, ignoring the tears that fell down your cheeks, chalking them up to the pain in your side.

Chapter Text

Balance. Supreme Leader Snoke had spoke of balancing your feelings for Ren, although he seemed unsure it was even a possibility. You leaned more towards his argument with every passing second, every slip of your fingers through your hair. Your nurse (you had taken to calling her your nurse by now, although in truth she was simply a nurse) sat cross-legged on the bed across from you, watching as you twisted your hair into a mirror image of the twin braids she had first given you over a week ago. You had called her to your room to correct you if you made any mistakes, although you were sure you wouldn’t, determination one of your most defining traits. After almost an hour of braiding and unbraiding, you were just slipping the rubber band around the bottom of the last section of hair when she spoke up, her hands folded neatly in her lap.

“May I ask why you like your hair like this so much?”

Your eyes darted to hers, and you answered “no,” before even thinking. Her face fell, and she turned her gaze back to her fingers entwined between her knees. You thought of Kylo, of how he could be pleasant one second and cruel the next, how he was so good at giving those kind of short simple answers, how his anger seemed to be turned to whoever was closest more often than not, even if they were an innocent bystander. With a sigh, you ran your fingers over the top of your head, pushing back the baby hairs around your forehead. “Ponytails get boring,” You said quietly, and the nurse looked back up at you.

“Oh,” she responded, clearly not much for conversation anymore after you snapping at her.

You frowned a bit. “Does it look right?”

She tilted her head to look at each braid in turn, then asked you to move your head so she could peek at the back. When you looked back at her, she was smiling. “It’s perfect. How did you do that?”

“Stubborn insanity,” you thought, but you didn’t answer her aloud. Instead, you simply nodded politely to the door. She caught your drift and stood, leaving the room without another word, although she did glance for a moment at a spot by the foot of the bed for a moment too long.

The door slid shut. You sighed again. You did not have to check to know what she was looking at. Kylo Ren had not been deterred by his nose being almost broken, and your anger had only been increased by his outburst after. It had been five nights since your fight, and you had fallen into the pattern of only speaking to each other through direct orders during your training sessions, but he had still sent wine, candles, and matches along with dinner to your room each night. You had not eaten any of the food, poured the wine down the sink, and broke the candles and matches. You knew he knew you were doing so, as you had realized you could only keep him out of your head when you were awake, and you could feel him there in your dreams, flipping through the catalog of your feelings and memories.

You stood with another sigh, running your hands over your braids. You had decided what you would do hours ago. Up until now, you had only been creatively putting it off.

Balance. You walked down the hallways silently, head held high, fists clenched at your side. Even if you hadn't spoken to him in days, parts of Kylo were still inside you. He had rubbed off on you, and you on him. You were too much alike already. You dreaded become any more like him, any more angry and unhinged, any more murderous.

You reached the door sooner than expected. You realized you still did not know the code to the door and reluctantly used the Force to slide it open. It looked like always, give or take a few things. The candles on his bedside table were gone. He had, apparently, not just sent you matching candles to his own but actually sent you his own. The wall to your left was also ravaged by what you assumed was his lightsaber. And on the left side of the bed (your side, you thought), four pillows were laid in a row, a child's dummy of a body. Your body. You sat down on the edge of the mattress.

You knew he would be back soon. You waited still and silent, jaw tight, eyes burning at times. You were so tired of crying, but it seemed second nature now when you thought of him. You couldn't understand yourself why he hurt you so much, but you knew it only made you hate him more. And you did, you had decided, hate him. Unbelievably much.

The door opened after only a few minutes. You kept your head high, staring at the man in the doorway without any emotion.

Kylo stared back at you from behind the mask. For the first time in days, you stopped pushing him out of your thoughts so you could invade his. He didn't try to push you out; whether he was too busy to notice you there or he simply didn't dare to shove you away, you weren't sure. He stepped forward, and the door slid shut behind him. He had been waiting for this, you saw, and the thought made your blood boil. He had been expecting you, sooner or later. Your jaw locked into place.

The man in front of you walked over to the side of the bed and pulled off his helmet. “I was not expecting you. I simply wished you would be here.”

You bit your lip, then simply crossed your arms over your chest, not wanting him to see how your heart jumped at his words.

“I know you feel it too. The pull. We cannot just ignore it.”

You turned back to look at him. He stared back at you blankly. You rose an eyebrow.

“You're still not speaking to me.”

You turned away from him again, staring at the door.

“Do you know what happens when a Force Bond is fully realized?” Ren started, and you felt the bed move as he sat on the other corner of the foot of it, just far enough that if you reached out your arm, you could brush his cheek. You didn't move a muscle. He continued, “The pair is constantly in communication. They know every thought the other thinks; hiding thoughts becomes a strenuous task, an almost impossible act. If one dies, or tries to end contact, the other becomes lost within themselves, as if a piece of them has been severed.”

It was quiet between you for a long while, the silence pregnant with the meaning you both saw behind his words. You replayed the cracks in his voice in your mind, wondering what they each meant. He stared ahead and clenched and unclenched his fists at his sides. When you check to see what he was thinking, his mind was empty.

“I do.”

The words hung in between the two of you like a noose. With a sigh, you slid your neck in. “You asked me if I wanted all of those things. I do.”

Kylo turned to look at you. You stared back at him. “I hate you, Ren,” You said, quietly, in a single breath. You did not have to say the “But…” You knew he knew you meant it.

His eyes softened. “We cannot stop speaking like we have. You know that. Not if Supreme Leader is going to send us into battle together in only a week. He will expect our bond to be much stronger than it is.”

You stared at him for a long moment more. He stared back.

Slowly, you leaned in to him, and he moved closer to you at the same time. He wrapped an arm around your shoulders, and you tilted your head up. Your lips landed on the corner of his mouth.

Kylo growled. His arm around you shoulders tightened, and he pulled you closer, kissing you as hard as he could, his teeth sinking into your bottom lip in only seconds. A moan escaped your lips before you could stop it, and his free hand reached down to grip your ass as he tugged you onto his lap. You moved your head a little to the side, kissing down his jaw and nibbling on the edge of his ear. Kylo growled again.

He reached down and grabbed your chin in his hand, as he had the first time you kissed and the last time you fought. “Do you want me to fuck you?” He asked, voice shockingly low and wanting.

Your knees shook on either side of his waist. “I do,” you whispered back, leaning back in to kiss him.

He pushed you back though, keeping you there inches from him, his hand on your jaw firm and unmoving. “Say it,” he ordered, and you felt your stomach flip.

You reached up and dug your nails into his wrist. He didn't react at all, and you squinted your eyes. “Kylo Ren, I want you to fuck me until I scream,” You said, staring straight into his eyes, determined and not even the least bit embarrassed.

The man in front of you simply rose an eyebrow before abruptly flipping you over onto your back. Your side screamed in pain, but you let it hurt, still fighting against his grip on your chin. “Your wish is my command,” He replied, capturing your mouth in his the next second. You kissed him back harshly, arching your back off the bed to press yourself against more of him. He responded by pushing his hips down into yours. You moaned into his mouth, and his head turned to make its way down your neck. You clawed at his shoulders, trying to bunch up his shirt enough to rip it off as he sucked harshly on the pale skin of your neck, sure to leave marks just after the last of them had faded.

Your fingers finally struck his skin, and you drug your nails down his back as he bit down on your shoulder, harder than you expected. You let out a squeal in protest, and he shoved two of his fingers into your mouth to drown the sound. You sucked on them, hard, before biting in retaliation. His head popped up, and he glared at you, pressing his hips down into yours again.

“Watch yourself, Officer,” He warned you, yanking your shirt up your torso until your bra was exposed.

You snarled in response, your chest rising and falling rapidly, shaking at times. One of his hands tugged your bra up over your breasts without unhooking it, grasping one in his hand and squeezing. You squirmed beneath him, half in pain and half in pleasure, your back arching off the mattress at the feeling. He smirked down at you, catching your other nipple between his teeth and sucking. One of your hands tangled in his hair while the other scratched down his back, drawing blood. He moaned against your breast, then dropped his hand to your pants and shoved them down your legs. He leaned back just a little, and you pulled down his pants and underwear too, until his member was there before you, long and thick and throbbing. You gasped at the sight of it, and he ran his hands up and down the entirety of your body, feeling as much of the exposed skin as he could.

“I want you,” He confessed, kissing his way down your stomach sloppily.

“I hate you,” You answered, just before his lips closed around your clit and he sucked. Your breath caught, and both of your hands tangled in his dark hair as instinct.

He continued his assault on your heat, his hands locked onto your thighs and keeping them spread wide. “You want this,” He hummed against you. “You want me.” And you wished you could have said he was lying.

He reached up with one hand to grope your breasts as you moaned much too loud, your chest heaving. He stared up at you with hunger in his eyes before reluctantly pulling his mouth away from you and positioning himself between your legs. He leaned over you, his large frame eclipsing yours, his own breath hurried and short. “Do you want me to go easy on you?” He asked, a smirk in his voice, his lips brushing your earlobe.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” You punched his arm and drug your nails down his back again. “Ruin me,” You ordered, voice strong and angry, and he obliged, pushing inside you so fast it hurt. Your walls ached around him, and he let out a guttural moan as you screamed, your nails drawing blood on his back once more. It was almost too much, the fullness of him inside you along with the way you could feel what he did, your own tight warmth around his cock. He drew back out and rammed in again, and you screamed with every thrust, fisting the sheets beside your hips and biting the side of his neck. He pistoned his hips into yours with such force that you both were shaking after only minutes, your legs quaking against his.

“Fuck, you're gonna make me cum,” He almost whimpered into your skin, his voice rumbling in your throat. You gasped for air, grasping wildly at the sheets and his shoulders for something to hold onto. He leaned back all of a sudden and wrapped a hand around your throat, and you coughed at the sudden restriction on your windpipe. Your own hands found their way around his throat, and you were both silent when you came, staring into each other’s eyes and gasping for breath.

He filled you with his cum, and you slowly released your grip on his neck, as he did his. You just laid there for a while, staring at each other, your throats burning and eyes tired. He slowly extricated himself from you after a moment more, and you watched as he walked to the bathroom again, pulling his clothes the rest of the way off. The marks you had left on his back and neck were ghastly, love bites the size of fists and scratches so deep they were sure to scar. The faucet ran, and you stood yourself, making your way to the bathroom before running yourself a shower. Kylo watched, silent, as you undressed completely before climbing in behind you.

You watched, a bit shocked, as he lathered up his hair and then reached out to yours. He seemed to notice the braids then, and instead spread the soap down your shoulders. “You taught yourself to do them,” He noted, and you nodded silently, reaching behind him to gather some soap in your own hands before rubbing it over his chest and then yours.

You were silent for the rest of the time, needing no more words and not knowing which ones you would use if you did. The water was warm on your back, and Kylo’s gaze was even warmer, his hands running over every inch of your naked body rough but as soft as you knew he could.

When the bubbles were washed away and the water was turned off, he threw you a towel and dried his own hair off before wrapping one around his waist. “You will stay the night.” It was not a question, nor was it phrased like one, but he looked back at you after he said it, and you nodded in answer, scratching at your collarbone as you followed him to the bed. You wondered if you would be awoken by Hux as you were before. You wondered if you would care enough to hide this time.

Chapter Text

  You were stirred awake when the strong arms released you from their grip, but you kept your eyes shut for a long while after, listening to the sound of the mask locking onto him, the door sliding open, the rattle of something you didn't recognize, and the door shutting again. You had to imagine the sight of him, freshly awoken and beautifully disheveled, walking back to the bed, but you felt the mattress dip as he sat down just in front of your hips. Lying there, you realized you had underestimated the effect your bond had had on you. He had hurt you so badly, and you had still come running back. You wanted - no, needed - to know his every waking thought, and the simple fact that there were secrets between you made your stomach turn. As Kylo stared down at you, his gaze burning onto your cheeks, you got the sense that you should leave. You wanted to run, to go hide under the sink again, the man you had lied naked with last night and the feelings you had for him more terrifying to you then the General.

  Your eyes opened slowly, and you stared back up at Kylo until his own eyes flickered away. He stood and made his way to the bathroom. “I ordered you breakfast. You may leave if you like.”

  As you heard the faucet run, you turned to the tray in front of you and picked up a piece of bacon, nibbling on the edge of it until he emerged from the bathroom, his face wet and shining in the fluorescents, the scar that ran along his right cheek and over the bridge of his nose more apparent to you now. You spoke as he rid himself of his shirt and sat back down on his side of the mattress. “Why does it matter to General Hux?”

  Kylo rose a single eyebrow at you. “Why does…” He lifted a single finger and gestured from his chest to yours. You nodded simply.

  Ren cleared his throat and rubbed the back of his neck with his palm, his eyes diverting from yours. “Hux believes a relationship… of this nature may hinder my abilities in battle.”

  You opened your mouth to respond, but Kylo rose off the bed. “However, Supreme Leader Snoke believes it can only strengthen our bond, and I do not take direct orders from Hux.”

  The man walked over to the closet, and you watched him, the muscles in his back straining as he reached up for his things. You let your eyes wander over the red marks scratched across his back, the bruises and love bites on his shoulder and lower neck. Yours were, luckily, easier to hide, but you knew that without the mask it would be obvious what the Child of the First Order had been up to the previous night.

  You took a sip of the orange juice in front of you. There was one thing he had not kept secret from you, something big, something you thought he would have kept your wandering mind away from him. Instead of blocking you from it, it seemed he had simply avoided it. It made your stomach turn with confusion.

  “You liked her,” you said simply, staring straight at his back as the strain of his muscles grew, then released instantly, as if he was trying to hide his nervousness from you. “Didn’t you? The Resistance girl?”

  The man in front of you only skipped a single beat before shrugging a shirt over his shoulders. “I found her interesting. She was very skilled-”

  Your mouth turned up at the edges, and you sat up straighter. “You liked her. I know you did.”

  Kylo looked back at you now, his eyebrows knit together a bit as he pulled a pair of pants over his legs. You could he was surprised by your reaction. “You’re not upset,” He said, not asking, simply stating. You were growing used to these non-questions.

  You shrugged, taking a bite of another piece of bacon. “Should I be?”

  He stared at you for another moment, then turned away abruptly. You rose your eyebrows. “You would be,” you said, your own non-question, and his shoulders slumped a little as he threw his cowl over his shoulders.

  “I do get… impatient when you linger on others.” A pause, and he turned back to you, fully dressed now. You still sat naked in his bed, the sheets pooling at your waist, your breasts and stomach exposed, and you were surprised at how you were not for a moment embarrassed by this. “The Force Bond,” He said before he stepped to approach you.

  You looked down at your hands as the bed dipped under the weight of him sitting beside you. “Is that it, you think? Just the Bond?”

  In that moment, you were acutely aware of his eyes drinking you in entirely, from your now messy braids to your visible breasts to the outline of your toes beneath the sheets. “Yes,” he answered, but your heart didn’t sink like you thought it would. He was a bad liar.

  Kylo leaned in, pressing the back of his gloved hand against your cheek, making you tilt your head up and meet his gaze. You let yourself smile again. “You think I’m more beautiful than she is?” The opposite of a non-question. You weren’t sure if you had read him right.

  He kissed you, his lips hard and meaningful, making your stomach flip and turn on its own accord before he pulled away. He leaned away to stand, then moved back to brush a stray hair from your cheek. “You should probably get dressed. You have training in an hour.”

  You watched as Kylo stood and turned away from you. “Hold on, wait,” You stopped him, standing yourself, now stark naked behind him. You reached up and tugged on the collar of his shirt until it just covered the reddish-pink mark in the crook on his neck. “There.”

  Kylo placed the mask on his shoulders before he turned to look at you. His fingers twitched when he did, not inward but outward, an explosion instead of an implosion. “Get dressed.” His voice came out monotone and emotionless, but you imagined how it might sound without the filter: A demand but also a plea, his way of telling you looked so good it hurt. You did not have to look into his mind to know the things he was thinking of doing to you. You reached out and ripped the sheets off the bed, wrapping them around yourself with one hand. You turned away from him and walking towards the bathroom, feeling a breeze on the outer section of your butt, a sliver of it you knew he could see.

  You brushed your teeth, not looking Kylo’s way until you heard the door open and shut behind him. You let out a short gasp of air. He thought you were more beautiful than her, the girl you knew he thought of in your early days of training, the girl who had shocked him with her sensitivity, the girl he had actually wanted to train. You weren’t sure why this felt like such an accomplishment.

*****

  Kylo was late to your training, and, when he did arrive, you were washed over with a wave of anger. You watched, silent, as he shrugged off his cowl and mask and turned to you, the door barely shut before he approached the center of the room and looked expectantly at you.

  You knew something was wrong. You could see it in the set of his shoulders, the tight fists he held at his sides, the slight downward twitch of his lips, but even if you had been blind, you would have known he was upset. You could feel it. It was as if a fire was lit in your own gut. You weren’t sure why the two of you were angry, but you knew you were. Your own jaw locked into place.

  As you walked toward him, you didn’t have to try very hard to find the source of your mutual aggression. You could see the meeting in Snoke’s quarters, Hux and Kylo standing in front of the Supreme Leader. Hux stood straight-backed, enraged and doing a bad job of hiding it. Kylo had said something to set him off, but you couldn’t tell what, just that it was about you. “The two cannot train together without injuring each other! We can hardly trust them in battle! I strongly suggest, Supreme Leader-”

  “It does not matter what you suggest, General Hux,” The cool grey figure above him spoke over Hux’s protests. “It is my decision to make, not yours.”

  All of a sudden, the memory switched, and you (truly Kylo, you knew that, but it felt like you) were stalking down the hallway when you felt a hand grip your shoulder. “You will regret this, Ren,” the General spat at you, still so angry for reasons neither you nor, you thought, Kylo were sure of. “You are making yourself weak, and it will be the end of you. You will die for this.”

  Suddenly drawn out of the vision (memory), you stared up at Kylo. “Why?”

  He looked back at you blankly. “I don’t want to speak about it.”

  You rose an eyebrow. But he showed you it? You were confused.

  “I did not show you anything. You did that yourself.”

  You were taken back. You had never had it come that easily to you before. You knew why Kylo would say it happened:  the Bond, but you liked to think it was more. You were growing in your relationship with him, but you were also growing in your own abilities - at least you thought you were.

  Snapping out of your own mind, you ran your fingers through your freshly unbraided hair. “Well, you can’t be angry with me today, because we’re not going to be training against each other. I got ahold of some robotic dummies. We need practice fighting the same enemy if we’re going to battle together.”

  “I agree,” Kylo said, his voice still harsh but less so than before.

  You were standing beside him moments later, hands itching at your sides, as the first green-faced humanesque dummy approached the two of you. It was slow at first, but soon it was running at you (you, specifically) with a great force. You steeled yourself to land a kick to its gut, but before you could even plant your feet, Kylo charged ahead of you, his elbow connecting with the dummy’s face and sending it reeling backwards. He then punched its now-yellow glowing face twice before sweeping its feet out from under it and stomping on its stomach. A buzzer sounded, and its face turned bright red. He had killed the enemy. You watched wide-eyed as Kylo straightened himself and returned to his place beside you, chest heaving, hair falling into his eyes.

  “The whole point,” you started, your tone hesitantly reprimanding, “is to defeat the enemy together, Kylo.”

  The man beside you nodded. “Yes. I apologize. We will share the next one.”

  After that outburst, he was better at letting you get your own licks in, with you usually being the one to ‘kill’ the enemy when it approached him first, but whenever the dummies swung or even landed hits on you, he kicked into great action, ending the fight in only a handful of blows. You pretended not to notice.

Chapter Text

 You returned to your room with six days left before the battle to find that all of your things were missing. The bedside table was cleared, the closet empty, the bed rid of your duvet and favorite pillow. Even your bathroom cabinet was vacant, your bandages and medicines all gone. You immediately turned and marched off to Kylo’s room, knowing he was most likely not there but willing to wait for him to show up. He was, in your mind, someone who could do something about this. Your heart raced. Were you getting a larger room like his? Were you going to have your meals brought to you now? Would you have your own walk-in closet? Of course, to mirror these thoughts of grandeur were thoughts of panic. What if you were being moved to a smaller room? What if you were being moved to another ship? What if you were so blatantly incapable of growing in the Force that Snoke had assigned you your old job back and was making you move back in with three female subordinates who all spoke about Hux like he was a god and Kylo like he was a devil?

 When the door slid open to Kylo’s room, your breath caught. His large, decadently soft bed was replaced by an even larger, more pillowy one, and your duvet was placed on the left side of the bed, tucked under the edge of his. Your pillow was laid just above it. You stepped inside, cautious, and noticed the marks he had made on the wall during your fight were also fixed. Turning to the closet, you peeked inside. Your things were arranged on the left side while Kylo’s mirrored them on the right. Your bandages and medicines were arranged on the left side of the bathroom cabinet. The left bedside table had your candles, matches, and books, along with a fresh bottle of wine and a note.

 It was written in scrawling script, a child’s writing, and you knew it was Kylo’s without ever having seen his handwriting before. “You will stay in my quarters from now on. I will be out late tonight in meetings. Feel free to sleep without me. Kylo Ren.”

 He signed his name just like that, as if it was simply another sentence. You folded the paper up and held it in your hand as you settled into the bed and drank from the bottle of wine. You lit a candle and thought, for hours. When it grew so late that your eyelids were heavy on your face, you lied on your side, the note still in your hand, and imagined Kylo in bed next to you, pulling you into his chest with strong arms. You drifted off into sleep like drifting down a river, slowly, lazily, and without any strong design or purpose.

*****

 Four days before the battle, Kylo led you from your training room down a series of long hallways. “You need to be fit for armor, since you’ve never had a purpose for any before,” he explained. “And I was designated to escort you.”

 You thought it was silly that after all this time he still felt like he had to have excuses for being around you, but you didn’t tell him that. Instead, you followed him, silent, until you reached a large room with several doorways and coat racks filled with uniforms. You’d been here before, you realized, on your first day working for the First Order, but when you had been given your more comfortable and distinguished Officer clothes, they were simply delivered to your room. You wondered why you had to be measured again now.

 “Armor is much more fit to a person’s body than your normal clothes. You will see,” Kylo explained as a petite man with blonde hair and green eyes approached you and smiled politely.

 The man asked for your name (a nicety of course, he knew who you were) before requesting you strip. You looked back at Kylo with wide eyes. He nodded. “Would you like me to look away?” The masked man asked, his tone mocking but even a bit playful.

 You sneered at him, turning away before you slipped your cowl off your shoulders. The small blonde man had disappeared, and you realized suddenly the walls weren’t white or dull grey like they were throughout the rest of the ship but instead reflective: mirrors. You could see every inch of your body as you stared straight ahead and slipped off your overshirt, and so, you realized, could Kylo and the tiny man, along with a group of tall, beautiful girls who stood in the corner whispering to themselves.

 You had never been especially self-conscious, but you were certainly not very comfortable here, now, being naked in front of all these strangers. You had your undershirt halfway up your stomach when you felt large, strong hands helping you glide it off. You looked straight ahead to see Kylo’s form, tall and dark and tough, standing behind you, easing the shirt off of you. You let him do so, didn’t protest even when he unclipped your bra and knelt down to help tug your leggings down your legs. Your eyes wandered over to the group of girls in the corner as you pulled your bra off your arms. They were all watching, wide eyed, as Kylo undressed you, untying your boots before slipping your pants off of each ankle and foot. When he slipped his gloved fingers under the waistband of your underwear, one of the girls gasped. You grew so nervous you just looked over at him, the masked man kneeling beside you and tugging your underwear off, his face angled up at you. “Be calm,” He thought to you. “They see girls naked every day.”

 “But they’re so beautiful,” you thought, not to him. Whether he heard it or not, you weren’t sure. He placed a hand against your thigh to steady himself as he stood. “They don’t see girls undressed by Kylo Ren every day, do they?” You directed this one to the man now standing beside you.

 He chuckled aloud, letting his hand brush around your thigh as he moved back to sit where he had before. “No,” He answered you, again aloud, not caring if no one else understood.

 The blonde man walked back into the room and spoke to the girls in a quiet but reprimanding tone before approaching you. “There we go,” he said, smiling pleasantly, not too wide but not too subtly. “Now, if you’ll step forward for me…” You took two or three tentative steps, putting more distance between you and Kylo, who nodded and continued to watch you in the mirrors. “Perfect. Now raise your arms and plant your feet shoulder width apart…” He said, pulling a tape measure from his shirt pocket and kneeling beside you himself.

 Your eyes widened, and you looked to Kylo again. He stayed still, but you noticed his hand tighten at his left side. You weren’t sure if it was in response to your nervousness or the jealousy he had hinted at earlier. The blonde man wrapped the tape around your ankle, tight, then a bit more loose, and a girl arrived beside him to write down the numbers he mumbled under his breath. This continued over every curve of your leg until he reached your thigh, where he finally spoke to you, clearing his throat first. “This is the part where I like to make small talk. Women especially get nervous when I take these next measurements.” His hand brushed around your leg and against your inner thigh. Your spine tightened.

 “How about him?” The blonde man started, nodding towards Kylo sitting behind you, still staring right at him. “Would you like to talk about him?”

 Silently searching through his mind to make sure Kylo was okay with this (you remembered how angry he had been before when you had answered a single question a nurse asked about him), you eventually nodded. The man moved to wrap the tape around your lower hips, just above your vagina. Kylo rearranged himself in his chair. “Are you two dating?” The man asked, smiling up at you kindly.

 Your eyes widened, and you stared back at Kylo. You weren’t sure what to say. You didn’t know if you were dating or not; you hadn’t dated anyone in years, and Kylo only showed you affection when he felt like it. Sure, those times were increasing lately, but you knew at any moment that could reverse. You could be left in the cold again just as easily as you had been brought in. “It’s difficult…” You answered, hesitant, and the man nodded, moving the tape up higher to wrap around the pudge of your stomach.

 “We’ve all been there,” he sighed out, mumbling another number to the girl before moving the tape just below your breasts. He was quiet for a few more beats, wrapping the tape around the curve of your breasts and then your shoulders before he spoke again. “I don’t want to upset you or Commander Ren so excuse me if this offends you, but you have a wonderful body. You are Officer L/N, correct? You train with Commander Ren?” You nodded sheepishly. “Well, I can tell. You’re very fit,” The man said simply.

 He moved the tape around your neck, and you saw Kylo rise a little off of his seat. You checked his thoughts but weren’t sure if it was the vulnerable state it put you in or the reddish-pink lovebites and bruises there that caused him to be so upset. “You know, ice does wonders for these marks,” the man whispered to you, reaching up and pulling your right arm down until it was straight out in front of you. You watched him now, calmer, knowing it was almost over. You didn’t even notice the doors opening or the man in the doorway until Kylo was marching over to him and slamming the doors shut behind the two of them so hard the walls shook. The blonde man paused for one moment, looking over to the now shut doors, before continuing to measure down your forearm. “He does have a bit of a territorial thing about him, doesn’t he?” You nodded. The man chuckled and raised his eyebrows a little. “It’s cute, but I do hope he doesn’t get himself in trouble showing out to General Hux like that.” Your cheeks burned. General Hux had been the man in the doorway. He’d seen you naked like this, but not only had he had enough time to notice your bare breasts and ass in the mirrored room, he had also had ample opportunity to take note of the marks on your neck and shoulders, the purple and red and blue and pink bruises.

 The man took the last measurement of your wrist and then released you, telling you that you were now allowed to get dressed and return to your quarters. You dressed in only seconds, rushing, and hurried out of the doors to find Kylo standing there, waiting for you. No sign of Hux.

 “And?” You asked, but Kylo simply shook his head and grabbed you by the wrist, hurrying you down the hall. “If you don’t tell me, I’ll figure out some other way,” You mumbled to him under your breath as you passed the cafeteria.

 Kylo stopped abruptly beside you, staring at your set jaw and emotionless face, before returning to his normal pace. “General Hux came to tell me our battle plan meeting for tonight has been cancelled. He assured me he was not expecting to see you… in that state.” He did not speak his next sentence, instead thought it, knowing it would be wrong to say such a thing aloud. “He is a liar.”

*****

 Two days before your battle, you accompanied Kylo to one of the meetings that had kept him from you every night for almost a week now. It was in a large room dominated by a single table with nine chairs on either side. There was a single chair at one end and two at the other: for Hux and then for you and Kylo, you realized. You arrived early, and watched as officers and officials piled in, each sitting either closer to your side or closer to Hux’s until the last four, who sat nearest to the middle.

 You watched as Kylo and Hux discussed plans, listened to what this set of troops or that set of troops would do, watched as people’s faces rose or fell, determined or disappointed, until Hux cleared his throat and looked directly at you. “Now, Officer L/n and Commander Ren, the two of you will be in charge of recovering the main subject of this mission: Lieutenant Karte. He fought for the Order until he was stolen by the Resistance one night after a battle, and it seems that he has now been… converted. You will capture him and board him onto the ship with you, alive.”

 You wanted to ask what would be done with him when you got him here, but Kylo turned his head towards you, masked and emotionless. You understood. He would be interrogated for whatever information he had and then killed, both by the man next to you. You nodded to Hux. You didn’t want to speak, the lump in your throat already painful enough without the added stress.

Chapter Text

 You woke slowly, without a start, when strong arms lifted you up off your mattress. You knew it was Kylo just by the feel of his grasp on you, and you didn’t fight it, instead letting him carry you off for a minute or two in silence before you spoke. “Where are we going?” You asked, voice small and infantile in your throat, drunk with sleep, eyes still shut.

 “It’s time to board the ship, and you wouldn’t get up,” He said simply.

 There was your start. Your legs pushed down on his arm, itching to stand, but he simply held you tighter. “What are you doing?” He asked, but you pushed against his chest as your eyes snapped open.

 “Put me down, Ren!” You demanded, pushing against him again until his grip loosened and you stood by yourself in front of him, straightening out your clothes and shoving him away from you. You were suddenly aware of the others around you, the Stormtroopers and workers and pilots all standing around the loading dock, staring at you in shock as you pushed around Commander Ren. “I can walk by myself,” You said strongly. “I am not a child.” With that, you reached behind him and grabbed your things from the blonde woman Kylo had carrying them and marched onto the ship in front of you, chin high, chest out. Kylo stared after you. You knew he was more than a little upset. You felt it.

 When you were on the dimly lit ship (barely more than one long room with benches and medical service areas on either side and little cargo space behind the pilot’s seat), you set your things down and let a worker tell you where you were supposed to sit. You crossed your legs and waited as seconds turned into minutes turned into half an hour. Kylo finally boarded the ship after everyone else had. ‘Everyone else’ was the group of extremely high rank officials you had seen in the meeting two days ago. You realized this must have been the fancy ship. How crowded were the others then?

 Kylo sat down next to you silently, his mind empty, and you stared over at him until you felt the ship take off. You’d never been on a ship this small before, this given to turbulence and things, and you dug your nails into your palms. Kylo tensed beside you, and you wondered if he hated it too.

 “The Bond,” he mentally explained to you, his tone sharp and annoyed. You sighed.

 “If you didn’t attempt to make me look weak in front of my superiors so often, I wouldn’t have to show out about it,” you thought to him.

 He rearranged himself in his seat, moving his leg away from where it was touching yours. There was just a slight gap now, a millimeter of no man’s land between you. “That wasn’t what I was doing,” He replied.

 You were quiet for a moment while he let you see what he was thinking then, when he had grabbed you and carried you to the loading dock. He hadn’t wanted to wake you; he liked how sweet (innocent?) you looked when you slept. He had carried you to prevent disturbing you, and also, deep down, he had wanted to show off that you were his. Your heart skipped a beat or two.

 “I am not yours,” you thought in response without helping yourself. You could tell how it cut him, and your breath caught. “Are you mine?”

 Silence. He didn’t even think anything in response. You sighed. He couldn’t block you out as easily anymore, but he had still found a way to keep you in the dark: Simply clearing his mind and ignoring all your efforts to get answers from him.

 The ship hit another bout of turbulence, and you placed your hand on Kylo’s knee. He looked down at it, up at you, and back down. “I thought you weren’t mine?”

 “I don’t belong to anyone. I’m not property.”

 The next thought felt less like the real Kylo and more like something else inside of him. “You belong to the First Order.”

 Before you could respond, the ship shook again, harder now, and you realized you were landing. You looked out of the windows in the cockpit at the planet below you. The sky glowed orange and yellow and red, so red it almost burned your eyes. The land was green, dotted with its own orange and yellow and reds, the trees all brown and yellow. Three suns hung diagonally in the sky, each burning a slightly different shade of red. As you approached a huge cliffside, the stone walls opened up before your eyes, and a loading dock much like the one you had left appeared in front of you. Your grip on Kylo’s leg tightened as you landed.

 The rest of the passengers unloaded before you and Kylo, each going off in one direction or the other, none of them even pausing for a moment. You grabbed your things without diverting your eyes once from the sky, painted in all the colors of anger, love, angst, and most of all - passion. Kylo stood behind you as you looked out of the cliff’s edge, staring across the horizon even as the walls slid back shut, leaving you in artificial yellow-white light again, like you were used to.

 “You’ve never seen a sky like that,” He said, quiet, just behind you. A non-question. You nodded. You felt him smile as if it was your own face moving, but then again, maybe it was. The excitement of it all had almost made you giddy.

 An officer approached the two of you and escorted you to what they said would be your quarters. It was a dark room with nondescript rock walls and a single bed half the size of the one you usually shared. “You have six hours until you are due back at the ships for attack.”

 You nodded. Kylo simply continued to unpack his things as if the officer had never spoken.

 When the door was shut behind him, you turned to your bag of things and stripped, grabbing your new underclothes and stepping into the leggings with one foot before Kylo grabbed your wrist. “Wait,” He said, and you slowly removed your foot from inside the fabric. He had already half-stripped himself, and he felt around in his bag before retrieving his overshirt, the one had had so enjoyed you wearing before, and handing it to you.

 You rose your eyebrows. You weren’t sure what he was implying you do.

 “Just put it on,” He said, reaching up to remove his mask.

 After a moment’s hesitation, you obliged. He walked over to the holopad at the end of the bed and pressed a button. A mirror flipped around from the wall to your left. You stared into it, sitting down on the edge of the bed. His shirt hung low on your shoulders, barely covering your nipples and slightly sheer so you could still see the outline of your breasts. You back up on the bed and rose onto your knees. It hung just below your ass, but you could see the outline of it too. Kylo sat on the bed behind you, staring at your reflection instead of your face. He wrapped an arm around your stomach, just below your breasts, and brushed your hair back from your shoulder, letting his chin rest there.

 “What do you look like?”

 You had several snarky or even self-deprecating answers, but you knew instantly what he meant. With his shirt covering only the most essential parts of your body, his arm pulling you into his bare chest, his lips pressed against the bare skin of your shoulder, you knew how you looked.

 You looked like you were his.

 Taking a deep breath to steady yourself, you let your reflection stare back at you for a moment more before turning, facing Kylo now, and pressing your lips against his. His entire body responded to it, the reaction chemical just as much as physical, his heart rate speeding up as his hands bunched up in the fabric at your hips and he pulled you closer to him. You grabbed his cheek in your palm and maneuvered the two of you so that you were sitting on his lap, your lips against his neck, your fingers wound in his hair. You couldn’t see the reflection anymore, but you didn’t have to. Pulling away for air, you gasped against his collarbone. “What do you look like?” You whispered in his ear, your breathing rushed and heavy.

 Kylo’s grip on your hips tightened, and he did not have to answer you just as you did not have to answer him. Just then, there was a knock on the door. You jumped away from Kylo, but he jumped into you, holding you even closer to him before he stood, hesitantly, and, instead of taking his shirt back from you, just slipped on his mask and answered the door. That was the third time he’d done that. You weren’t quite as naked as the last time, but you still panicked about your state of dress until an invisible force threw your duvet up over you.

 Behind the door was a sweet looking brunette girl with wide blue eyes. She looked down at Kylo’s naked chest and behind him to you on the bed before speaking up, her voice small and anxious. “I- I was told to a- ask if the two of you needed anything from the cafeteria,” She said.

 Before you could even think about how cute she was, Kylo slammed the door in her face. He turned back to you, reaching up to remove his mask again, clearly wanting to get back to what he started. Your jaw dropped, and you reached over and threw the nearest object you touched (a pillow) at him.

 You didn’t have to say a word, and he didn’t either, instead simply turning back around and opening the door again. The girl was still there, her eyes teary now, terrified. “We do not need anything at this time, and we would like to be undisturbed until we report for battle.” He waited until the girl nodded, less scared now, until he shut the door again, softer this time. He turned to you. “Better?” He asked.

 “Yes,” you answered, untangling yourself from the cover and letting him crawl on top of you again, kissing you and lying you down on the small, hard mattress.

 “Good.”

*****

 When it neared time for you to return to the ships, you and Kylo finally emerged from the bed and got dressed, him helping you into your heavy (but less heavy than expected) armored layer and you watching him dress himself in his, fascinated with the way the clothes fell so perfectly over his huge frame.

 You walked side by side down the dimly lit halls back to the loading dock. You knew how you looked next to him: small, fragile, meaningless. You would have to prove yourself to everyone here. You didn’t have to try very hard to tell that the superior officers were not expecting much from you. They thought of you as simply Ren’s girl. And he wondered why you hated him being so possessive.

 He approached a huddle of officials and nodded towards the ship. You knew he expected you to board it, but you stayed beside him, listening as they talked over plans, not wanting to be told it all secondhand. You would arrive just over the mountain before dawn. The ‘troopers would storm the simple sentry camps while you and Kylo (along with your own group of ‘troopers) would be led directly to the Lieutenant's quarters, a large building just behind the main camps. The two of you would capture him (mostly unharmed) and get out of there (completely unharmed).

 You listened as Kylo listed out orders you didn’t quite understand and boarded the ship when he was done, his hand pressed into the small of your back, barely stepping past the doors before they closed behind him and the ship lifted off. You had the ship all to yourselves this time, and the two of you stood just behind the pilot, watching as you exited the cave made a sharp U-turn over the cliff. The first of the suns was just seconds before shedding its light across the horizon. Fog covered the ground. The world burned grey and blue instead of red and yellow.

 You watched, silent, until the ships in front of yours tipped downwards and eventually landed. A single man exited a small brown tent and was shot before his eyes could even widen in reaction. As you flew over the camps, you watched as more and more soldiers exited their quarters and were subsequently shot, or worse: they didn’t exit, and the Stormtroopers rushed in, guns at the ready. They had no hope. There were no more than thirty or so tents before the building: a two-story place with several windows and guards posted out front. Two more ships that had been flying on either side of yours rushed ahead and landed just beside the doors. Swarms of ‘troopers exited and started firing, the guards barely being able to fight back. More soldiers came rushing to poke their weapons out of the doors and weapons and fire out at you.

 The ship turned suddenly, and you were not facing the building any longer but instead the camps, where those ‘troopers were making quick work of the soldiers. Kylo grabbed your arm and spun you around the face the door at the end of ship just as it started to lower. “Are you ready?” He asked, reaching around for his saber. You did the same and nodded.

 “Yes,” you answered, voice strong and determined, empty of fear or uncertainty or hesitation. You were ready for this. You were ready to show them you were not just Ren’s girl.

Chapter Text

 There were guns pointing out every window, door, or crack in the wall. Stormtroopers fell to the ground left and right. Your heart was in your throat, making you gasp for air. A man dressed in no particular uniform (unless the uniform was dirt and sweat) poked his head out from behind the entrance, his eyes wild as they looked at the man next to you and then down and left, to you. Suddenly, he ran out of the door, weaponless, arms outstretched, towards you. You felt panic in your head, whether it was yours or Kylo’s, but you didn’t let yourself linger on it. You swung your lightsaber out and down without thinking, staring straight ahead as the man was sliced practically in half.

 It didn’t feel like you thought it would. You felt Kylo’s hand on your elbow, dragging you forward, into the building, and you rushed along with him. It took little fight for plenty of the ‘soldiers’ in your way to give up and reatreat to another room or even run out the doors or windows, where they were promptly shot. You lost count of the ones you had killed, the bodies blending in with the floor beneath you. The sight or action of it hardly bothered you, and you weren’t sure whether to be worried or proud.

 Finally, you were far enough into the house to see the stairs. Up those, that was where the Lieutenant would be. “Wait for me,” Kylo’s voice sounded off in your head - not a request but an order, a command. Over your shoulder, you saw him swinging his blade through the air, fatally injuring or instantly killing rebel after rebel. You didn’t answer, your mind empty as you rushed up the stairs. You had no time to waste, and he knew that, no matter how worried he was for your ‘safety.’

 There were only about twelve rebels still upstairs when you arrived, and you had struck down four in the mere seconds before Kylo appeared beside you. He made quick work of the one man in front of you before you could, and you stepped forward, noticing one soldier, a female, shivering with her back to a door. “You,” you said, approaching her and putting away your saber in one swift motion.

 “What the hell are you doing?” Kylo thought to you.

 You didn’t respond, focused on the woman (or girl, you weren’t sure). “Move and I’ll make sure you die quickly.” You wished your voice was strong and fearful like Kylo’s, mechanical and murderous.

 You saw the man running at your right side but didn’t react, Kylo striking him down with a single blow before you could think to tell him to. You understood now how the Bond helped in battle. Screams echoed in your ears. The female soldier in front of you didn’t move. You were wasting time.

 “Alright, then,” you said, plunging your fist at her face before you were done speaking. Her head hit the door behind her so hard the wood split, and blood poured down her face, from her nose, mouth, forehead, and somewhere else you could not recognize. You felt Kylo’s pride at your actions before you had even raised your hand to Force choke her. She fell forward, away from the door, and you opened it before she took her last breath.

 Inside it, a man stood to one side of a closed door, a gun in his hand, and you ducked down and charged at him without ever thinking of being hit. His scream, more of anger than fear, was cut short when your shoulder make impact with his stomach. There was a crack, either from his head hitting the rock wall or one of his bones breaking. His body bent over yours, and you coughed, barely able to hold up under the weight. As you shoved the now unconscious lieutenant off your back, you looked out the window to your right.

 The First Order’s powers had obliterated the camp. There were bodies upon bodies covering the ground, hidden among the orange and yellow and red (most of all red) leaves. Stormtroopers were already ransacking tents and burning them once they had been searched. They didn’t burn the bodies, though, and you knew why. The Resistance needed to see what happened here.

 Kylo burst in the door, and you suddenly noticed the worry you felt making you nauseous and lightheaded. He thought your silence meant death, or you thought the same about him. You weren’t sure. You could hardly think at all.

 You felt his want to hold you, and that was enough. You searched the drawers in the room quickly before retrieving a rope just as the lieutenant woke and began screaming again. His gun had fallen out of his hand, and he was a man in much worse shape than you or Kylo. He knew what the two of you could do too. Kylo raised a hand over the man’s face, stilling and silencing him so well that you would have thought he was dead if you couldn’t see his chest still rising and falling. You grabbed both his hands and tied them behind his back, staring down at the back of the man’s head, which was bleeding rapidly.

 “Get him to a ship before he dies.” You opened your mouth to say the words, but Kylo had already lifted the man to his feet in front of you, leading him out the door. When the man fought against his grip, Kylo caused him any kind of blinding pain, causing him to scream out and walk with him until he grew brave enough to struggle again.

 You trailed behind, watching as the fires raged outside the building. It looked like… war. It was exactly that, and you weren’t surprised at what you were seeing exactly but moreso how it made you feel. They deserved this, for fighting against the Order, against order itself. The fire and bloodshed excited you. The warm suns and clearing fog calmed you. You ignored all else.

 As you exited the room, you glanced down. The woman laid just to the left of the door. She was red, all red, blood covering her face and throat and hands entirely, only interrupted by the white and pale blue of her eyes. They were exactly like your mother’s eyes, so much so that it stopped you, distracted you, engulfed you.

 You didn’t see the soldier running towards you, didn’t sense his arm swinging at your face. The pain of the strike muted and deafened you, and you could hear nothing for a moment but Kylo’s voice in your head, no words, just a guttural scream. You didn’t have time to examine the emotion behind it. Instead, you straightened yourself up, ignoring the blood running slowly past your eye and down your left cheek, and swung at the man yourself. He fell quickly, already wounded, weak. You stared down at him and saw Kylo running back to the building at full speed, but you wanted to handle this yourself.

 Raising your foot without a thought, you stomped down on the man’s face, thankful for your deafness as you knew the room echoed the wet crack.

 You had just reached the bottom of the stairs as Kylo sprinted inside the door. He didn’t have to ask the question, and you wouldn’t have heard him if he had. You simply nodded and walked past him, towards the ships, one hand pressed into the cut on your forehead to stop the bleeding.

 Seconds later, Kylo pulled a nurse away from a Stormtrooper to assist you on the ship. You laid down on a bench inside and stared up at the ceiling, wishing you could see the sky or the fires or the bodies, anything but the black metal of the inside of the ship. Kylo stood next to the nurse, watching silently (or maybe not silently, you couldn’t tell) as she wiped blood off your face again and again. You heard his voice in your head.

 “You’re in shock.”

 You ignored him. This wasn’t shock. This was victory.

 It seemed like hours of needles and wet towels before the nurse left. When she did, you and Kylo were alone again, or so it felt, even as he told the pilot something you couldn’t hear. The pilot didn’t exist. He didn’t know what it was like to have this bond with someone, to feel your pain in your head and their pain in their calf and both of your pain in your hearts, to feel so much so severely, so synchronously. Kylo sat next to you. You felt yourself collapsing into him, leaning gently and tenderly as possible, afraid to feel any more of the pain that still muted you even as you heard the ship take off.

 He placed a hand on your knee and squeezed as you panicked at the turbulence, feeling that emotion for you, easing your burden. You tried to breathe, surprised that you still remembered how.

 “You fought very well,” Kylo said, really said, to you.

 You heard it in your ears as well as your dead tongue. You wanted to respond, but you couldn’t remember the words to say. The feeling of Kylo’s first time in battle (real battle, one he has not started or finished) rang through your head, whether he wished to show you them or not: anxiety, uncertainty, pride, excitement, and  pressure from all sides, all at once. You could see him, younger than he was, hiding behind his mask and his lightsaber and his ‘troopers. You tried to breathe again. You had forgotten.

 When you landed, Kylo pressed his hand into the small of your back, walking you off the ship. You looked out at the world in front of you, the sky, the trees, the ground, red, orange, yellow. This entire planet was burning.

 You turned around to face Kylo. “I want to go back.” You weren’t sure if you said it aloud or not.

 “Back where?” He asked, wondering if you meant the battlefield or the base ship you had left what felt so much longer than only hours ago.

 You looked to the sky, unsure.

Chapter Text

 Kylo decided the two of you should return to the base immediately. You didn’t argue, staying silent throughout the flight back. When you arrived at the loading dock, you exited the ship first, head high. The workers around you watched, silent and still, as you walked away down the hall without Kylo behind you. He trailed behind, checking flight records and plans for the day. You had no interest.

 You arrived at his room (your room now, you knew that, but it still felt wrong to you) minutes before he did. You looked around and set down the bag you had been carrying on your shoulder. There were two bottles of wine on your bedside table. Two. You opened one quickly and gulped down a third of it before walking into the bathroom.

The mirror was clean, and you looked in at yourself. The cut and bruise on your forehead was worse than you thought, bulging and dark.  Your hair was messy, chunks of your braids pulled out and hanging down on your shoulders. Half of your face was streaked with the light red that came from a mixture of blood and water. You reached up tentatively and slipped off your overshirt, then your undershirt, then your armor and underwear, even the bandage on your rib. It was horribly bruised, blue and yellow and green, but you pressed your fingers against it anyway, until the pain made you woozy. You turned. The back of your thigh was also bruised, from what you weren’t sure. Your feet and hands were blistered. Your elbow had small bruises from Kylo dragging you along with him for only seconds.

 You turned and started a shower for yourself. You tried to wait for the water to grow warm, but it never did. You stepped in as you heard the door to the room open.

 Kylo entered the bathroom wordlessly, staring down at your clothes on the floor before he looked at you through the glass shower door. You stared back, eyes and mind empty. “General Hux has requested us in his quarters. I am telling him you are injured and in need of rest. I will return as soon as I can.”

 You didn’t answer, instead turning to let the water wash over your face, even over the stitches you were told to keep dry. You watched as the water ran red.

 The door slid open, and Kylo looked at you harder now, clearer. When his hand reached out to touch you, his glove was gone, and his bare skin pressed against your cheek. You reached up and placed your hand over his on your face. The water was so cold, but he was so warm.

*****

 By the time you willed yourself out of the cold shower and wrapped a towel around your naked body, Kylo was inside your head again. “Only a couple minutes more,” He reminded you as you sat on the edge of the bed, wishing he was back with you. You drank from the open bottle of wine and shuffled your feet along the floor in front of you. The thoughts in your head, the memories you couldn’t quit replaying, the woman with your mother’s eyes and the pain that followed after you recognized them as such, they all confused you. You drank more, to forget them, to forget the things you’d done.

 “You shouldn’t want to forget it, Y/n. You did so well.”

 You knew it was Kylo’s thought, but it felt like your own too. You reminded yourself of the fire, the excitement, the blood red suns. You thought of leaning back against the mattress and sleeping but were scared of what dreams might come.

 “Come back,” you thought to Kylo, running your finger over the lip of the bottle.

 He did, a few minutes later, to find you in the same spot, facing the closet, staring in at his and your clothes inside. You kept thinking of how they were separated. You could plot the exact point where yours stopped and his began. He slipped off his helmet and opened his mouth to speak, but you shook your head, cutting him off before he could start.

 “The man you had the nightmare about,” you said, still staring emptily into the closet. “Who was he?”

 There was a long, long silence. Kylo didn’t speak, and neither did you. Your heart swelled, and you weren’t sure if you were afraid or if he was. You knew the answer before he spoke it, somehow, somewhere inside you.

 “He was my father.”

 Even you were surprised at the clarity and strength of your voice when you answered. “You killed him.”

 It wasn’t a question. The man beside you didn’t answer. You sat in silence.

 “My father tried to kill me.”

 Kylo’s fists tightened beside you. He didn’t ask you to go on, but you felt his want for you to. Your words tumbled out of your mouth easily, almost lazily. It felt like a sort of exhibitionism, to tell someone your innermost secrets, the things no one else knew. He felt the same, you knew it, egged you on with his mind.

 “I was young, twelve, I think, when my younger brother died. A struggle broke out on the planet where we lived between the government and the people, rioting and arson and stealing. My brother left the house without telling us in the middle of a riot, and our neighbors killed him. Just like that. I never saw him again.

 “My mother was terrified. My father drank himself into hating both of us, me and my mother. He didn’t hit us, but he wanted to. We both knew that. I started fighting boys at my school to be strong for whenever he did decide to hit me or my mother. I got in trouble a lot for that. He hated me more for it. One night, he came home, and a man who worked with him had told him that his son had been recruited to work for the First Order. He hated that. He told my mother I would never amount to anything, that I would only be a disappointment to them, that I should have died instead of my brother. Then he came after me with one of the kitchen knives.”

 You were still looking straight ahead without a hint of emotion. Kylo was still staring down at his hands.

 “And the next day I joined the Order, to make him proud.”

 Kylo paused for a long while, looking up at you beside him. Then he spoke, too, quieter, and you knew he’d never told anyone else what he said. “My mother cried for a decade after I was born. I disappointed her. She saw the worst parts of herself in me, and my father couldn’t stand that I hurt her the way I did. They always wanted me to be someone I couldn’t be. I...” He paused for a long while. You thought about what he said, what he meant. “I killed the person I was then. He was useless to me.”

 Your heart ached. You knew he was lying, whether he did or not.

 It was quiet then, neither of you knowing what to say or when to say it. Kylo placed his hand on your knee. You felt safe, comfortable, warm. You ignored the bodies laid all around you, the people you had both killed or watched die, the souls who could never come back, the fires burning their homes to ashes. Kylo leaned in to kiss you, and you let him. He brushed the hair back from your face and laid beside you, staring at the bruises like patchwork covering your body.

 You thought of passion, of desire, of love and of fear and of the insignificance of it all. If his Supreme Leader told him to kill you, that it would make him stronger, you were sure he would. You felt his heartbeat against your back and closed your eyes, leaning into him. If he tried to, you were not sure what you would do, what you could do. He was the one thing in your life that made you feel alive. He shook his head against your shoulder, a silent protest to one of the hundred thoughts racing through your head. He shoved the image of the three red suns into your head, not letting your mind move away from them, to the bodies or the fire, engulfing you in the sight of the red and orange and yellow world, the warmth of it all. You let yourself fall asleep instead of decrypting what it was he had disagreed with. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.

Chapter Text

The morning came slow, aching. The pain of a long day’s sorrow, reawakened by the silent stirring of a lover beside you in a bed that still didn’t feel like yours. Your eyes opened, and you watched him, his face blank, peaceful, his body moving incomprehensibly, like a moon, lying next to you but also towering above you, changing the tides of your mind. You thought of the significance of it all. Your love was birthed from violence: broken ribs and bloody noses. Now, your love turned its thirst for blood to others. Weeks ago, you had seen Kylo as a killing machine, trembled before him, terrified for your life. A shiver ran down your spine as you realized that strangers now may think of you the same way. The woman. Your mother’s eyes.

You snuck out of bed as carefully as possible, extracting yourself from Kylo’s grip and placing a pillow in your place. If he had nothing to hold onto, you knew he would wake. In the bathroom, you stared into your reflection’s eyes. She looked brave, ambitious, strong. You knew she was not.

As you checked the stitches holding your forehead together, you thought of the scar that branched across and up Kylo’s face. He had had more sophisticated treatment for his wounds, not to mention it was a burn scar while yours was a cut that was hastily tied together on a moving ship. Still, your mind lingered on the symbolism, the mirror image of your small scar and his large one. Yours would most likely be dark pink, his silvery and barely contrasting his skintone at all. The man who had given you yours was a part of the Resistance, and so was the girl who has given Kylo his.

You didn’t know much about her, other than the things you could feel through Kylo. She was gifted with the Force, probably more than you were, and Kylo had felt a connection to her like he felt a connection to you. He had wanted to train her, to be her teacher. He had resented the idea of training you. He hated her now, by principle, but you knew he thought she was beautiful. It was probably just the power coursing through her, so palpable, so obvious even he had noticed it.

Running the sink full of cold water, you splashed some onto your face, this time avoiding the stitches on your forehead, deciding you didn’t want it to be any worse than it had to be.

Kylo called your name from the bed, his voice low and rumbling in his throat, and you both heard his worry. He knew you were just one door away, could feel it in his bones, but he was still concerned with the distance between you two. Perhaps he could feel how far away your mind was. In any and all ways, he brought you back.

You made your way back to bed, your feet tumbling over each other along the way. Once you climbed onto the mattress, he pulled you on top of him, onto his chest. “I know it’s hard for you,” He thought to you, the closest thing to compassion you had ever received from him. He flinched at that idea, whether it was true or not. You tried not to think of all the people who had been strangled by the gentle hands on your back.

The words bubbled up inside of you and burned the back of your throat like vomit. You stared at the muscles in his arms tensing and relaxing beautifully and thought of saying them, but there was no need. He felt them. You both did. You knew if either of you said those three insignificant words aloud, the other would run.

Instead, you sighed, closed your eyes, and said something else.

“It would be easier to hate you.”

His breath blew your hair into your eyes. “I agree,” was his only answer.

Chapter Text

Kylo was absent from your training for the next two days, interrogating the Lieutenant who you had recaptured, and you were told on the morning of the second day that you would be required to meet with General Hux after your lunch. There was no talking your way out of this one, no one to defend your mental state. You had to do this - alone. You were alone in what had become your quarters, braiding and rebraiding your hair until your fingers felt numb. Every time you closed your eyes, you saw the woman's eyes.

Occasionally, they were replaced by the image of Kylo’s eyes, and while you knew this was his attempt to ease your suffering, the vision of them only upset you more. You wanted yourself (and him, by proxy) to be better. You wanted to be proud, confident, villainous. You wanted him to be angry at you for feeling the way you did. But neither of you could find that within yourselves.

When you reached the door of Hux’s quarters, you knocked hesitantly, your spine straight, nervous but pretending not to be. The door slid open shortly after, and you were grateful he was not gifted the way you and Kylo were. Still, you sensed he could smell your fear in the air, the way you thought he could when you had hidden from him under the sink.

The room was long and important, a table and four chairs and a glass wall behind it. Through the glass you could see his bed, a litter box off to the side, meticulously folded clothes just inside the closet door which stood half open. Hux sat across the table from you, at the head of it, reading from files of paperwork and running his hand along the back of the orange tabby he didn't know you had already met.

“Officer L/N,” he stated simply, not even looking up at you for a moment before motioning for you to sit.

“General,” you answered, taking a seat carefully in front of him.

After a quick pause, the man set the papers down on the table and looked up at you, removing his reading glasses from his face. “Supreme Leader Snoke is interested to know how you are dealing with the aftermath your first battle. Your very own…” He paused, still stroking Millicent, looking for the right word to use. “Partner, Commander Ren, had quite the tough time after his own first battle for The Order, and there is a certain increasing concern for how well you are dealing with the stress.”

You took a deep breath, then spoke calmly, with a strength somewhere within you that wasn't there only weeks ago. It was something Kylo had placed there himself, with a careful design and patience, over your time with him. “I completed my mission. I captured the Lieutenant. I was only cosmetically injured-”

“One could call it more than cosmetic,” Hux interrupted, his eyes on the still-stitched-together wound just below your hairline.

You took a very slow and patient breath, trying your hardest to regain your composure before you spoke. “And my Bond with…” A pause. Even without the Force to guide him, you knew Hux noticed you were refraining from calling him Kylo. “Commander Ren is stronger than ever.” Another pause. Hux waited for you to continue, though you weren't sure you wanted to. “In my eyes, I don't have much to be stressed over.”

Hux stared at you for another long moment before looking back to the paperwork. “How many did you kill?” He asked, without looking up from the pages in front of him.

You thought back, your heart banging against your still-broken rib as you tried to count, but the faces swam around in your mind, blurry, the image of the bodies causing your inner self to flinch. You were not the only one flipping through these memories. A voice sounded off in your head, helping you remember, and though it seemed too high, you kept your stomach from turning as you repeated it aloud.

“42.”

The man in front of you nodded, slowly, before looking back up at you. “That is all. You are dismissed.”

You stood slowly and left the room without another word. Numb legs carried you blindly back to your quarters.

The voice in your head - Kylo, of course, it was always Kylo, the most twisted form of a conscience you had ever imagined having - told you “No. Don't do it. You'll only regret it.”

You didn't answer. The door to your shared room slid open.

“I can't leave now to stop you, Y/N.”

You made your way to the bathroom.

“Don't you fucking dare. I'm giving you an order as your superior officer. Do not-”

You stared at your reflection in front of you. He was still screaming, but you didn't hear the words, only the tone of his voice. Angry. Adamant. Already disappointed.

You stared down at your hands gripping the corner of the sink and, without even a breath’s pause, plunged your fist into the face of the woman in front of you, bags under her eyes, hair twisted and pulled from her twin braids, bruises patching her skin. The pain was immediate, gripping. It shook you to your core, and you knew your knuckles were broken before you even looked down at the twisted, cut fist you know held in your lap. The blood leaked out slowly, pooling in the palm of your other hand.

The voice in your head, which had quieted for a moment, roared at you again. “What the hell would make you do that?”

Before you could even think of an excuse, your stomach jumped to your throat, and you barely had time to turn around before you puked, your chest heaving, ridding you of the lunch you had forced yourself to eat. Your broken knuckles gripped the edge of the toilet bowl, your head pounding, your throat burning, your stomach aching.

"Baby…” You could hear his voice, small and defeated in both your minds, fear and disappointment realized. Your heart jumped. He had never spoken to you like that before, much less called you that name. Neither had any other man.

You coughed, wiped your mouth with the back of your non-broken hand, and stood, spine straight. You just had to go to the medical ward now and get bandaged up. You already felt so much better. “I'll never be mad at you for that again,” you said, aloud, as if he could hear you.

He waited until you walked inside the ward doors to speak again. “I'll be home before dinner,” he told you, sure of himself, and as the nurse (not your nurse, another - a blond girl with bright eyes and a smile that turned down at the edges) cleaned the blood off your hands and picked the glass from your cuts, you thought of how he said that word: “home.” You thought of all the meanings behind it, of all the times you had felt it in your bones, of all the nights you had stayed up missing the places you had once called by that name.

You had been homeless for years, but now you knew you had found a new one - not the room, but the man who resided there, both inside you and around you, so present, so constant, so warm.

Chapter Text

“I have begun to worry about Apprentice L/n,” the tall gray figure spoke, and you stopped short. You had been back in your (formerly Kylo’s) quarters taking a short lunch before your daily combat lesson with Ren, but, unlike usual, he was not with you, instead having been called into an impromptu meeting with the Supreme Leader. It had been weeks since your first battle, and the image of blood soaked bonfires and your mother’s own eyes staring up at you from the body of a dead woman only haunted you in your sleep now. But you and Kylo both were not shocked to hear these words, and, as he unknowingly shared them with you, his own heart sank just as yours did. Worry.

Two weeks ago, you were sent on what General Hux called an “eradication mission.” This was new to you, and you were quickly informed that you would be used as more or less a weapon. The Order was going to attack and eliminate a group of rebels that was hiding out on an abandoned, rocky planet. And, for the first time, Kylo was not coming with you.

He had his own work cut out for him: interrogating and deciding the fate of several spies that had been rounded up and imprisoned over the past few months, more and more of them being added every few weeks. Hux had had more than one meltdown over the situation before this mission had ever even been planned, and there was no room for negotiation. Kylo was to stay, and you were to go. And that was all.

But you weren't worried. Kylo had always been with you before, sure, but you had become inseparable over the past weeks, both physically and mentally. You were now, somehow, always conscious of his actions, his every thought sounding off in your own brain, and it was the same for him. Being apart was never truly possible for the two of you. He wouldn't admit it, no matter how many wine bottles you forced him to down, but you had a feeling deep in your gut that this strange, terrifying man loved you. Really, truly, life-changingly loved you. It both scared and excited you in a way you had never felt before. You tried to think of it as little as possible.

That said, it was a soft goodbye. Kylo kissed you awake the morning of your leave, gloves and cowl already on, already almost late to his first meeting of the day.

Your eyes flittered open to see him smiling down at you, and you quickly stole a kiss from him yourself. “I'm gonna miss you, Commander,” you whispered against his lips, and he quickly pulled you into his chest, hands warm and flat against your bare back.

“Just be safe,” he answered and placed another chaste kiss on the top of your head. You blushed. He didn't even turn away as he placed his helmet on, wanting every last look of you he could get.

“I promise.”

“That's an order,” he said, his voice filtered through the mask. You stood naked from the bed right in front of him and walked to the bathroom. He sighed, the sound of it like a child breathing into a microphone. You giggled around the toothbrush in your mouth.

“When you get home, I'm going to ruin you, Apprentice L/n.”

“Then I guess I'll have to hurry home.”

*****

By the time you were boarding the ship, you were already missing him and yet determined to do your absolute best on this mission, to prove that you didn't need him to be a great fighter. The flight was fine; you caught a quick nap before the battle; you were prepared and practically chomping at the bit by the time you were finally allowed to unsheath your lightsaber. And you fought gracefully, triumphantly. It was the best you had ever done in battle, and you knew it. Then you saw her.

The ‘troopers had rounded up all the rebels and had them lined up on the cliffs beside their campsite. You exited your ship after an obligatory med check to overlook the rest of the mission, and your eyes landed on hers.

She was so young, just barely three or four, with bright eyes and someone else's blood smeared across the front of her dirty dress. She was crying, sobbing, as her mother held her hand, chin high, defiant in the face of sure death. The little girl could not turn her despair into rebellion, though, her sobs and screams drowning out all else as she shoved tiny fists into her mouth in an attempt to quiet them. Then, a louder sound.

A gunshot rang, and the little girl dropped to the ground with a sick, dull thud. Her mother screamed, grabbing her daughter’s body in her hands. Then, she was shot too, and so were the others, one by one.

Soon, there was no one else to grieve the dead girl and her defiant mother. No one else to remember her tiny fists and dark curls. No one else but you.

Remember her you did. In every hallway you walked down, every empty room you glimpsed into, every rebel hideout you entered, you saw that poor crying girl, her face so innocent and desperate, her life only just begun. And then you saw her murdered each time, shot again just before your eyes. You could never save her. You never had a chance.

It wasn't like the woman or the burning planet. You were not darkly proud of this sight; there was nothing in you that wanted this. It shook you right down to the core, and every time you saw her, you had one sole thought: How was this order?

Your entire paradigm had shifted, your view no longer clear. She was not a rebel fighter. She was not a part of the Resistance. She was not defiant against The Order, was not hateful for your Leader. You could have saved her, you thought. You could have loved her and cultured her and raised her to be a wonderful soldier for the cause.

This was not what Snoke was worried about.

He was worried because you had stopped thinking of him as your Supreme Leader. You had started defying General Hux’s every command. You had started doubting your alliance with the Order altogether. Who were you, who was anyone, to support the blind murder of such a beautiful, pure soul?

Of course, only Kylo knew this. He had not approached you over it, but of course he knew. He knew everything, just as you did about him. But he ignored it, for both of your sake, and you both tried not to panic when you woke up screaming from dreams you could not remember, or when you found yourself gasping for breath after a regulatory post-battle briefing left your head spinning. You simply leaned into him, and he didn't bend under the weight, only quieting you when the seeds of doubt in your mind shifted into defiance itself. He would shoot you a single look, or grab your wrist in a tight hold, and you would know to clear your mind and nod along to whatever order Hux or Snoke was barking out, no matter how inhuman and malicious it seemed to be.

“She seems to have lost her ambition, and, most of all, her respect for the Order. This is not good news to me, Apprentice Ren,” the grey figure told him, staring emotionlessly down at him. “Tell me… Your Bond with her… Do you feel it is stronger than your bond to the First Order?”

Kylo didn't skip a beat. “Of course not, Supreme Leader.” You told your heart to stop aching, that he was only saying what the Leader wanted to hear, whether it was true or not.

Snoke smiled down at him, in Kylo’s eyes wise, in your eyes vile. “And if you were to have to choose between the two of us?”

You mouthed the words as Kylo said them, seeing them coming from rooms away. “I would choose you, Leader. Every time.”

You pushed his thoughts away, not caring to hear what the Leader spoke next. Your spine ached as you leaned back against the mattress of your shared bed.

He would chose the Order. Every time. And that was as it should be.

He could never follow you on what you now knew you must do next. He could never even know.

Chapter Text

 You weren’t as naive as you once had been. You knew that if Kylo even had a sliver of a sense that you were hiding something from him, he would search every last thought you had ever had to find what it was. You thought of your plan as little as possible, only working out the details when he was soundly sleeping beside you, his breath blowing onto your bare back as you searched his own mind to gather as close to a map of the ship as you could. When he stirred, you stilled, instead thinking of your favorite candy or an old story your mother used to tell you. Still, he seemed to suspect… something. Neither of you were sure what, but one night, the very first night you ever slipped out of his room to walk the halls, he followed you.

 You made it all the way to the loading dock before he said (or thought) a word, and you were silently staring down at the workers when he pressed his hand into your lower back. “What exactly are you up to?” He asked, voice modulated by the mask, and your breath caught in your throat. You stared back at him, eyes wide, mind blank, caught red handed in every way. Before you could think of an answer, he turned and walked back down the hallway.

 You could feel him fighting to read your thoughts, but you pushed back, terrified, the image of the Kylo you had first known flashing in your mind’s eye: the six-foot serial murderer whose humanity only further horrified you.

 Seconds later, his voice sounded off in your mind. “Don’t tell me then.” He backed off then, retreating like a wounded dog, and you returned to your shared quarters soon after. He was not asleep but pretending to be when you climbed into bed beside him. He shoved off your gentle hands on his back, threatening silently to return to the mat he slept on when you were hurt if you didn’t drop the subject.

 So you did. You turned your back against his and lulled yourself to sleep with the memory of the moments before your first battle, before all of this begun. It was so much easier then, when your biggest internal conflict was whether you belonged to the man you loved or not. Now, you more often thought of how long you will still be his, as if your relationship was a time-bomb, dangerously nearing its explosion.

*****

 Kylo did not kiss you awake the next morning. He was not even in bed beside you when you awoke, but instead sitting at the foot of the bed, undressed, his eyes and hair wild. He looked upset, like you had never seen him before. Normally a man in control of his emotions, you got the odd feeling that now they controlled him. Your heart ached at the sight of him, and you sat up immediately, reaching out for him. He let you touch him now, grabbing your small hand in both of his.

 “Please,” he started, and you almost collapsed into his chest, the desperation and fear in his voice so raw, so new to you. “Please don’t leave me.”

 The tears fell down your face before you noticed them brewing, and you quickly used your free hand to bat them away, wanting to be strong for him. Before you could even answer, he cut you off.

 “I know you want to,” he said, his voice small and fragile in his throat, and as you noticed it, he cleared his throat, trying to sound more like himself. “But please don’t. I’ll change. I’ll…” He trailed off, and you let the tears fall, placing your other hand on top of his. “I don’t know what I’ll do. I’ll do anything.”

 You bit back a sob, shaking your head. “I don’t want to leave you-”

 He turned his head to the side, no longer looking at you as he tried to regain his composure. You could feel in every thought in your own head, most of them reminding him that he was a god amongst men, a knight, a child of vikings. He would not cry. “Stop. Don’t lie to me. You can’t lie to me.” He stopped, his throat closing up again, and your shoulders shook as you stared down at your hands holding each other and sobbed, feeling both his pain and yours, easing his burden just enough for him to continue. “I need you. You can’t leave me. I can’t live without you.”

 He said those last words with such conviction that you both felt your heart break. One of you, you couldn’t be sure who, remembered what General Hux had told him about you before this all began, “You will regret this, Ren… You are making yourself weak, and it will be the end of you. You will die for this.”

 You prayed he was wrong.

Chapter Text

 It was morning. Kylo had just been called to a meeting with Supreme Leader Snoke, and you were dressing silently, braiding and rebraiding a section of your hair that just wouldn’t lay right. Your talk with him the day before had left your chest aching and mind fuzzy over what to do next. He knew you wanted to leave, to leave not only the Order but your lover himself, and you knew he would do anything to stop you.

 You didn’t want to leave him . He had been left so many times before, and even being only rooms away from him felt unbearable at times. But you couldn’t stay here, couldn’t continue to defy your superiors and hate yourself for the sins you were committing. That would kill you .

 As you laced up your boots, you noticed the lack of Kylo’s thoughts in your brain. He was pushing you away, hiding something from you, and all of a sudden you could feel it in your bones.

 You sat as still as you could on the bed, putting all of your energy into reading his thoughts. The bathroom sink dripped slowly. The flame of the candles on the bedside table crackled. Above you, someone moved a chair. You focused on breathing as little as possible.

 An image appeared before you, Kylo standing at the foot of the huge grey figure as he had millions of times before, his hands clasped in front of him, his chest shaking with each breath he took as he focused on the words he was saying.

 “It’s very hard, Master. She is being pulled to the Light. I cannot…”

 It faded out and back in as he pushed against you and you pushed back, like a radio signal barely able to connect to its source anymore.

 “.... And I believe for you to do so would be the largest testament to your dedication to the Order.”

 Kylo was silent for a long, long moment, his hands shaking uncontrollably within each other. Snoke spoke again, smiling now, knowing already that his Apprentice would agree to whatever he asked of him.

 “If you cannot do it, of course, we can have her tortured, or perhaps-”

 “No,” Kylo spoke up, his voice strong and murderous in his throat. “I will kill her myself. How long do I have?”

 The creature’s smile spread as he stared down at him. “I would prefer it to be done…”

 It faded out again. Your hands shook at your sides, Kylo’s ticks spreading to you. You rushed to the bathroom, bending and gagging over the sink uncontrollably before you fell to the floor, letting the sobs and screams pour out of you for only seconds before you somehow regained your composure and stood, staring at the door of your shared quarters.

 He would kill you himself, just as he killed every other weakness he had ever had, from the boy he used to be to his own father.

 You couldn’t imagine hurting him, feeling the pain of hurting one you love and feeling the pain of each blow you struck them with. You loved him, viciously, with every bone and muscle and nerve in your body. Even just to push him away the way you were, to be alone in your own head, felt like absolute Hell. You could never hurt him, could never put anyone before him, could barely even make yourself leave him.

 You exited your quarters and walked, head down, to the loading dock, knowing Kylo would soon be heading there himself. You had no choice now, could not sit waiting at home for him to return like a lame dog. You would leave this ship, or you would die trying.

Chapter Text

The anger and fear burned like a wildfire across your mind, blocking out all else. You started off towards the docks walking, silent, eyes on the toes of your boots as they blindly carried you forward. Soon, though, the adrenaline hit, and you could feel Kylo running down a similar hallway somewhere across the vessel. You could feel in your mind as well as your body, your heartbeat quickening and muscles straining as he picked up pace. In line, you followed, taking off into a sprint yourself, your hands clenched into tight fists, a mimicry of his strength within you.

You thought nothing, felt nothing, and neither did he. Both of your minds were empty, racing toward your destination. You felt a tear fall down your cheek, but as you reached up to wipe it away, you found nothing there. A drum beat between your eyes. Your toes curled as you took as sharp turn and hurried down a set of stairs to the loading dock.

Kylo was close. You could feel it. You rushed over towards the ships, but quickly noticed the complete lack of maintenance workers and pilots around you. You could feel him in the room now, watching you. Your eyes landed on a ship with its back entrance sitting open, just to your right. You took only one step before you were stopped completely, each of your muscles freezing with only one word.

“Stop,” he said, and you did, your body being obedient to his without even a moment's hesitation.

You turned and saw him, masked and armed, standing tall and murderous before you. You tried to read his thoughts, but nothing came to you. There was nothing there. Even he did not know what he would do next.

“I have to kill you,” He said, approaching you slowly, with calm and calculated steps, his saber swinging fluidly in his right hand. You fumbled for yours as he grew closer and closer. “It'll be easier if you don't fight back.”

Your hands shook as you wrapped them around the base of your lightsaber, lighting it up in a split second and straightening your spine to prepare for him. You had no words to say, no thoughts, no anything. Your love, your dream, your entire world was ending. There were no words to describe it. You stood silent, stoic, defiant.

Ren came to a stop before you, his saber at the ready. “I never loved you,” he said, his voice sharp as nails, and without another word swung his saber down at your head.

You ducked out of the way just in time. He seemed to wait then, wanting you to make the next move. You stared back at him, the man you had learned to love now here to kill you, for a long moment.

The lightsaber dropped from your fingers with a metallic, stinging thud. He stared down at it rolling along the floor, burning the tile beneath it as you took off running towards the open ship. You could not, would not hurt him. It wasn't in you.

“Fine!” Kylo suddenly roared, and you knew him well enough to hear the distress in his throats before you turned to see the tears streaking down his cheeks. “I’ll kill you with my bare hands if I have to!” He screamed, quickly following you to the ship.

He grabbed you just before you reached it, his body overtaking yours and sending you plummeting into the side of the ship, your head contacting the metal with a sharp noise that made your ears ring. You felt blood drip down your face in only seconds, but you felt nothing.

Above you, Kylo was grimacing, grabbing you by the hair and yanking you away from the ship. “Put up a fight! Let's make this fun!” He said, his voice sinister and sickening in his throat, the sound of it almost demonic to you.

You stood, ripping yourself from his grip more easily than expected. You still couldn't feel the phantom pain that should have been blinding to you, the blood pouring from the same spot you had hurt your first day in battle, the wound reopened from the trauma, the incision ripped open by your lovers hands. “Just let me go!” You screamed back at him, landing a punch to his cheek as you ducked under his shoulder and into the body of the ship.

Suddenly, you felt warm, comfortable, safe. The world paused around you, calm and patient, and your eyes were drawn to the control panel of the ship. One thought flooded your consciousness.

“I am.”

Chapter Text

You could not see the source of the shots that rang out next, but you felt them as they impacted with a thigh that was not yours and grazed past ears larger than your own. Your heartbeat rang in your head, and in a split second you suddenly understood all Kylo had done for you. He had lied to his Supreme Leader, risked his own life, taken on your pain and suffering, all to go with you on a journey even you did not know why you had to make.

He had known he would go with you ever since he saw the thought of flee in your mind, despite his own inhuman hatred of traitors. He would follow you into Hell itself if that was what it took to be with you. Your heart ached as the pain you had quickly felt dissipated, leaving you again warm and lovely. Several more shots rang out, most of them striking the side of the ship.

“Start it!” Kylo prompted you silently, and you followed as he said without a second thought, his memories of how to pilot the vessel aiding you in your own efforts.

Without thinking, you flipped the switch for the back doors to shut, just as Kylo fell inside them, shots narrowly missing either of your heads as the doors lifted shut. Attacks sounded against both sides of the ship as Kylo stared up at you from the floor, his arms holding him up off the ground, his leg clearly horribly wounded. Your head began to swim, woozy from your loss of blood, your fingertips growing numb on the control panel before you. Kylo quickly strode over to you, and you focused on feeling his pain in his thigh yourself as he lifted you off your feet. “You've lost a lot of blood,” He said simply, placing you on a cot behind the pilot’s seat. “I didn't mean to…”

“Just get us out of here,” you whispered, and your eyes closed for the first time.

The world that engulfed you was all pain, all of the suffering you had both ever felt. You saw your own father’s disappointed rage, Kylo’s mother’s empty hatred. You saw the face of everyone either of you had either murdered or left behind, the abandonment and end of a million innocent souls. You felt so cold, the feeling of it creeping into your every pore. The ship took by off.

When your eyes flickered open, Kylo effortlessly piloted the ship past the already closing loading dock doors and into the great space beyond. You gripped helplessly at your leg as the ghost of pain there reared its head.

Kylo looked back at you for only a second, and, suddenly, everything changed. The second and last time you closed your eyes, you felt only all the passion in the world. You saw yourself meeting him for the first time, this man who would change your entire world, this time through his eyes. You were so beautiful to him, you saw. So pure, so perfect. You were everything he had ever wanted.

The bond between you was palpable. You could touch and tug on the strings that connected you, plot the exact points where you were so irreparably intertwined.
You felt every emotion either of you had ever had for the other: the love, the hate, the belonging, the betrayal. You felt it all, everything that had ever been between the two of you. Most of all, you felt how much he loved you, how he had never had a doubt, from that very first kiss you shared. The feeling spread all over you, and you could see everything he saw, feel everything he felt, in this moment as well as all other moments.

There was no more darkness, no more separation, no more strangeness invading your space with him. There was no one else in the entire world. Only you and your Kylo.

You were bonded to him, truly, the essence of it truly indescribable to the both of you.

Slowly, another feeling crept over all of you, a strange, soft warmth, and, while you still did not know where the two of you were headed, you knew one thing without a doubt.

Kylo was going to save you, no matter what, just as you had saved him.