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Just this once, she says.
Just to get it over with.
And the unspoken truth that’s easy enough to hear—Just to get you out of me.
He doubts it’ll work.
Not that he’d refuse.
It never was a secret in Skywalker’s academy, what padawans got up to in the night. Likely a mistaken interpretation of the Code on the old man’s part, to be so lax. Maybe it was willful ignorance. Or even, simply, indifference. But Ben when he was still Ben could sense them in the dark with little effort, how they would strain themselves into silence well into the smallest hours.
Energies binding.
Twining.
Fusing.
Becoming one.
And it was his fate to be nothing more than an unseen spectator. He never dared anything more, not with the voice in his head always watching.
It’ll be 42 weeks now, since the last time Kylo Ren heard it. 42 weeks too, since she slammed the door on him and his shattered pride.
Too bad for her, the Force is generous with its windows.
For the most part, they ignore each other or make a show of pretending to. She struggles more than he does—then again, she always has. Not once does she spare a glance in his direction, but the rest of her tells him enough.
Shoulders—squared.
Fists—balled.
Jaw—clenched.
He’s never weighed on anyone this much before. For once, just this once, it feels good to be a burden.
It means he’s already there, in the core of her core.
Only now, here she is, claiming that he’s overstayed his welcome.
“Get out of my head,” she spits out, venom hurled over her shoulder, eyes still downcast.
“I’m not in your head.”
“Go away.”
“Believe me, I’ve tried.”
“Well, you’re not trying hard enough.”
Fair.
These 42 weeks have been hell without her voice.
Say your usual piece, he goads—begs. “Murderous snake.” “Creature.” “Monster.”
She gives him nothing.
Fair.
Their secret walls verge, closing in around them—the damn Force, not being nearly generous enough. At the last second before he loses sense of her, she finally looks back.
Her eyes haunt him overnight. This is the first they’ve ever been a mirror to his hunger.
Let me see them again.
Please.
The Force refuses.
Hmph.
Fair.
She growls under her breath. “I’ve had it.”
“I know.”
Rage simmers from her end of the connection. Just hunger pangs.
Since that 42nd week, she hasn’t stopped talking. Her fury only comes in few words, in sentences cut painfully short.
But he’ll take more than silence.
Still, none of the old names are thrown his way.
“Monster.”
Call me “monster.”
Call me something we agree on for once.
She doesn’t call him anything.
He’s nothing.
The more she gives him, scraps they may be, the longer the bond lingers. The more he hears. The deeper he tastes. The louder he hungers.
Once, it cracks open as she trains with some dummy he can’t see.
Her sweat lingers long after she’s gone, making a welcome home on his tongue.
“Why?”
He glances up from an endless taxation report on his holopad. “Why what?”
She answers in a murmur that bounces off their walls.
….why…
….you…
“Why did it have to be you?”
A new slice across his face.
This time, the itching passes slower.
At times, for instance, when he’d wake up rock-hard from barely-sleep, he would fend off the urge to reach down under his icy sheets. Habit trained him to simply let it pass—the voice is watching, always watching…
But there is no voice now. Only her.
He doesn’t dare. She might see her name on his mouth when he loses himself.
He catches her, sometimes, on the verge of losing herself. For the sake of tempering her inevitable anger, he turns away and makes do with listening.
Her sounds are trapped behind her mouth, trained hard into silence.
Just as well. He can’t be sure whose name he’d rather hear between her mewls—the worthless boy, or the dead man walking. Either one is a bleak choice for her bliss.
“I can’t do this anymore.”
Good luck with that stays barbed behind his teeth. Perhaps in another life, where she had never scarred him.
“Ignore it,” is what he settles on, swiping away the glowing cross-section of a TIE prototype on his holoprojector.
“You think I haven’t been trying?”
He smells that familiar, boiling hunger rebounding from one wall to another.
“What would you have me do, Rey?”
He regrets uttering her name the second it spills out.
Between these walls, names have lost their meaning. It’s why she never calls him any, not even her ugliest favorites.
Heated confusion swims in her eyes, never quite sure if it wants to add salt water into the mix.
“You…” Her voice falters, then hardens again. “You never looked into how to end this? In your archives? Anything?”
She should know him better by now.
Besides… “You’re the one with the Sacred Texts.”
“They don’t have all the answers!” she snarls back.
Good.
Some things are best left unexplained. Answers hurt. Solutions erase.
The bond is snuffed out before she can say more.
Regrettably, she claims knowledge one night.
“I have an idea.” She looks about ready to vomit it out.
I hope it’s a bad one.
Then it would never work.
She narrows her eyes. Perhaps that thought came out too loudly.
“We have to…” She takes a thick swallow. “Get it over with. It’s what the Force wants. That’s why it keeps pushing… this. You and me—”
Us.
“—so we do what it wants, to put an end to it all.”
His stomach drops, in time with the foolish rise of… an inconvenience he can fix when she’s gone.
“Don’t be vague,” he says, just to say something. Just to set her off. Just to hide. “Say what it is.”
For that, she rewards him with a roll of her eyes. “We have to… bind… our… energies.”
“What energies?”
Say it.
Tell me what you need of me.
Why you need me.
Her next words are near-silent. They ricochet around him anyway, letters tingling along his arms.
“You know what I mean, Ben.” She shakes her head in the shape of regret, eyes squeezed shut. “Or is it ‘Kylo’ you want?”
“Nothing. I want nothing.”
“Liar. You want everything.”
If she means herself, then true enough.
Heaving a sigh, she draws closer—the craned-neck, black-swallowing-hazel kind of closer. Deadly.
But what is another blow to a dead man walking?
“Fuck me,” he thinks he hears.
Impossible.
It’s not possible…
His knees used to be stronger.
“Do it.”
His hands used to be steadier—
“Just this once,” she adds, palms hovering a hair’s breadth—a light year—atop his chest. For a split-second, she almost sounds tender. “Just to get it over with.”
Just to get you out of me, she means, in truth.
As though she ever could.
Binding energies.
As if they weren’t already bound, deeper than flesh.
He can’t tell which of them breaches the distance first. All he knows is that her mouth is on his, taking, draining… filling, choking him in delusions of false futures just as their last touch had before. And yet before his greed has had its fill, she shoves him back. One last ounce of sense, carelessly sacrificed.
Don’t leave me with another scar.
He dives in for her mouth to remedy that, swallowing her gasps.
She could easily use the Force to throw him backwards, drive the cursed saber at her belt through his gut. Instead, she pounds her fists against his chest, each useless punch growing forgotten by the second.
So this is what kissing is—teeth digging into chapped corners, tongue laving across bloody lines. So it isn’t that far off from the pang of a day’s worth of hunger. His head spins the same way, all balance lost—a moon with no gravity.
And when those calloused hands climb higher to yank on his hair…
She is hunger incarnate.
When was the last time you ate?
There would’ve been no hunger in the galaxy of his making. He would’ve made sure of that. Kept her fed, sated, quenched. Sacrificed entire systems to appease her appetite.
“This…” He groans at the way she peppers bites along his lip. “… isn’t the Force.”
It’s you.
Your basest nature.
The one I’ve always known was there.
“Monster,” she breathes into his mouth. The word tastes like hatred, the devouring kind.
She is welcome to him. He might even thank her for it.
One heavy blink, and their next kiss tastes like salt. She scrubs out the tear tracks with her thumbs—desert mouse, can’t even let sea water go to waste.
The first things he sheds from her are her hairbands, letting stale sweat and oil catch on his gloves, twining matted locks around worn leather. The first thing she rips from him is his belt, if only to let him breathe easier. While she’s at it, she does away with his tunic too.
He doesn’t miss how she takes his nakedness in. How she looks on at her handiwork.
The puckered scar on the shoulder—yours.
The gash from forehead to chest—yours.
The internal bleeding deep under the left rib—yours.
They are, and will be in every future, false or otherwise.
“Have you ever done this before?” he asks.
Maybe even in this, they are equals.
She doesn’t answer.
“Have you?” she asks back, slowly meeting his shaky, heaving gaze.
“No.”
The only currency he’s ever offered her is honesty.
She’s methodical about the rest, the way she’s pieced apart the carcasses of hundreds of starships. Her belt, unraveled twice over. Her boots, untied with measured pulls. Her trousers…
With a nod—then another—more to herself, she reaches for his hands and frees them. His gloves sink into the threadbare hill at her feet.
At that first touch of their fingertips, they gasp as one. He smothers away every good thing her touch burrows into his head—absurd futures, sham possibilities.
No.
There is only now.
He can only ever settle for the here and now.
Breath catching with a dry swallow, she shoves up his fingers between her thighs. He slides them forwards, backwards, along her soaked, hairy slit—Where has the universe been hiding away this much warmth?
Her wetness trickles down the length of his fingers, pooling on his palm, over his lifeline.
He staggers back a step when her head lands on his chest, shoulders trembling, moans cocooned against his skin.
More and more and more false images assault him—
A crease on her nose when she smiles…
Her eyes gone white as she moans out some name. It doesn’t even matter which, only that it’s his…
Their wrinkled, spotted hands clasped tight, both blessed by time…
Her head nestled against his shoulder, brown hair threaded with white—
No.
There is only now.
Only this one night to take and keep what he can.
He pushes her back against the edge of his desk, the base of her spine hitting the metal. And with quivering fingers, he unzips, unbuttons. Frees.
But before he can pry her thighs open, she turns over and presses her head to the surface.
So.
She can’t even bear to look.
As far as knives go, this one cuts deeper than most.
“Hurry up,” she whines.
“Get it over with.”
He is the face of her shame.
“Do you know which one’s the—?”
This is all she’ll ever leave him—wide-open wounds.
He presses his palm flat against her back, pushing, keeping… She gasps, squirms, kicks at the air.
“I know that much,” he says under his breath.
“Go o—”
He cuts her short with a sudden thrust that turns the rest of the word into a wail. Petty revenge, and useless—she squeezes, hard, around him to prove who truly has and has always had the upper hand. It’s all he can do not to lose again—eyes bolted shut, teeth drawing fresh blood, fingertips digging into her waist, anything.
Knowing she could easily humiliate him like this, he quiets down his thrusts to stutters. She meets each one with a greedy squeeze and a sigh.
So this is what fucking is.
It’s no different than being at the receiving end of her untrained swings and stabs. Just cloudier. More excruciating. And, in every way, not nearly enough.
No wonder, then, why the Jedi enforced that damn Code with a vengeance.
She reaches back, fingers splayed as she pushes him in deeper. Fuckkkk spills out of their mouths in bitter unison.
“Fas…ter,” she gasps breathlessly against the metal.
Their skin smacks together, the next time he rams into her. And the next. And the next.
Another and another and another future plays out before him, silent images of her make-believe happiness flashing in time with her moans.
Lies.
All of them.
Once more, her hand is outstretched. Reaching for what? For more? For less?
She catches his arm, taut as it clings with blunt claws around her waist. Her fingers move down—more stuttering than gliding—until they reach his hand and slot into the gaps between his own.
Her onslaught is worse than any before.
Too much skin.
Too many possibilities.
Too many missed chances—
The forest on Takodana. Her helpless blaster fire against his sure parries.
The interrogation room on Starkiller Base, where his parries were no longer quite so sure anymore.
The long trek to Snoke’s chambers, to tell him of a newfound equal. When he gave in to foolish hope that he would no longer be so alone.
The rainy night she cried to him over a fire. When hope’s tendrils wormed their way into his soul again.
The day she shut the door and left him with only regret and smoke and salt.
Enough.
He wrenches his hand free of her, attempts to freeze it in place above her head—
Nothing.
The Force refuses.
Not within these walls. Those have always been its rules.
Cursing, he summons his belt off the floor and binds it around her wrists, locked over her head, well away from his reach. It’s almost disappointing, how she doesn’t resist. But she’s almost in too deep now to do much more.
Her slack mouth is flush against the desk, saliva pooling around her cheek, hair catching on her lips. And her eyes, once the color of the forest where they first met—half-lidded, fully white.
“More.” Her teeth clatter against the metal. “I don’t… I don’t care if it h-hurts.”
It already does.
Has he shattered his knee against the desk, shoving himself into her cunt again and again? Has she made dents on the surface with her teeth, just for something to hold onto? Would they still linger there in her wake, a cruel memory left behind?
His thighs have gone red, swollen—a mirror image of her bruised ass. Their skin will be mottled purple by tomorrow, sickly yellow within a week. Equals, always, where it hurts.
“I’m gonna… I’m… B… Ben. Ben—”
No names.
No names.
Not the boy’s.
Not the dead man’s.
Nothing.
He thrusts his fingers into her mouth, one last brutal push before she comes.
He deserves the sting of his flesh splitting open when she bites.
He’ll claim to himself that he deserves this too. Her cunt—warm, so fucking warm, when all he’s ever known is the cold—throbbing around him, unrelenting in her greed. Her helpless, incoherent noises enveloping his fingers. Her body, writhing, begging, because of him. Him.
And the Force…
How it sings.
Collapsing on top of her, his thrusts die down to a gentle rocking. His mouth finds her sweat-beaded shoulder—why should only she collect their water? He bites, just the tiniest chunks first, before raw hunger sets in.
His release comes as he gorges on mouthfuls of her.
Only once that Rey-addled fog passes over him does he notice her fingers tangled in his hair.
So this is what fullness is.
But he has only this night, and he will stuff himself to brimming.
Limbs dead and spent, he crawls off of her and sinks to his trembling knees.
“What are you—?” It comes out of her in a sigh… and tapers into a sharp wail when he sends his tongue crashing against her cunt.
He laps it all up like he was raised on an empty stomach—hers, his, every last drop of that heady mix of them that leaks down her thighs. And simply for good measure, he goes after her hair too. He pulls until it stings, lets the strands get trapped between his teeth.
Not until he’s drunk her totally dry does he think to stop. No matter how many times she sobs. Never mind how he hears an unwanted name between her choked cries.
Now, this.
This is greed.
They are, both.
When he frees her wrists, she clings onto his thumb. One last torrent of images… from the far past and an impossible future.
A sagging tent, billowing in Jakku’s cold night air.
Sand between rags for sheets.
Bodies fusing—for warmth, for company, for another pack of rations.
Every being who has ever touched these hidden parts of her.
And him.
Him who reached the most hidden parts of all.
There is no one after.
Her eyes are veiled with tears when she looks up at him. In that water, he sees them.
Mouth over mouth.
Hand in hand.
Eye to eye.
Beyond these walls they’ve trapped themselves in.
“Ben.”
But he gave up hope too long ago.
“No.”
They’ve both made their choices.