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I’M NOT GIVING YOU ANYTHING
(we’ll see)
- what could have been -
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Kylo watches Rey at rest. Not sleeping, not quite. The Force helped him take her consciousness, and only the Force can give it back. He could wake her in much the same manner, if less naturally, but he doesn’t want to. She looks so peaceful like this, beautiful and relaxed, unaware that he’s taken her prisoner. She’ll lose that comfort in a few moments, and Kylo can’t stand to steal it away any sooner than he has to.
When Rey stirs it’s all at once. She jerks against the interrogation chair, testing the restraints. They don’t give, not even a little, and panic sparks in her expression, blooms across her pretty face. Kylo stays crouched on the ground, trying to smother the weak impulse to release her.
“Where am I?” Rey asks.
“It doesn’t matter where we are,” Kylo says. “You’re mine regardless.”
Rey glares at him, and there it is, a flash of the stubborn student he once knew. Once trained, taught, violated, fucked, loved, abandoned.
“I don’t belong to anyone,” she says. “Certainly not to a creature like you.”
Kylo stands, strides over to Rey, and leans down to her level, close enough that were he unmasked, they could kiss. “Bravado won’t get you out of this. I can see how scared you are. I can feel it all over you.”
And he can. Terror trembles around her in the Force, rippling through the air between them, like heat distorting the landscape on a scorching summer day. Part of Kylo glories in it, that even as her enemy, Rey still can’t look at him without being overwhelmed, consumed. Fear isn’t so far removed from love anyway.
She fights against the chair, trying to use the pure power of the Force to unlatch the restraints. But Kylo has been holding them closed since he walked in, and she never was as skilled as he is at such tricks. Rey tries to turn her face away from him, to hide her wet eyes, but there’s no room for her dignity here.
He traces the curve of her cheek, wiping away the first tear to fall. He’s gentle, but Rey still bares her teeth at him. “Don’t touch me.” Then softer, almost injured, she whispers, “I’m not yours to touch.”
“Then who does that honor belong to?” Kylo asks. “Ben Solo?”
“What do you know about Ben?” she asks, her voice weakening on the name he left behind with her. “If you’ve hurt him, I’ll kill you, I swear it!”
A surge of regret rises in his throat, threatening to choke him, but Kylo swallows it down. He’s wondered for three years whether or not Rey still loves the man he used to be. The bond between them broke when he turned to the dark, and he thought her love died with it.
“I don’t know your Ben,” Kylo says, and that’s true in its own way. He raises his hand to her face, strokes the corner of her mouth, and probes forward with his mind. The subtlest, gentlest of intrusions. Not seeking to take, only to look. It shouldn’t hurt at all, not if he doesn’t want it to—and he doesn’t. “But I see him, here, in your memory. I see everything.”
She blushes under his hand, but he can only glimpse the pink of her embarrassment on her skin, can’t feel the heat of it through his gloves. Kylo grasps the whole right side of her face and curls his fingers around her head, threading them through her loose hair.
“I can take whatever I want,” Kylo says, “but I’m willing to trade.”
“Trade?” Rey struggles against the restraints again, ignoring their steadfastness, as if she’s expecting them to suddenly weaken under the weight of her willpower. “Trade what?”
“I’ll help you remember him. Every moment together, every argument, flirtation, and touch.” Kylo takes a steadying breath, so that nothing in his voice will betray him. “Give me the map, and I’ll give you every piece of Ben Solo that you have left.”
Rey hesitates, pure want showing across her face for a moment, but then she buries it under her anger. “I don’t believe you.”
Kylo places his hand over her heart. It beats under his leather-clad palm in a frantic rhythm. “You miss him, your Ben. You hate him for leaving, almost as much as you wish he’d come back.”
Rey gasps, and he sees himself through her memories: a tall, forbidding man who frightened and awed her the day they met on Jakku; a thousand intimate moments as their bond developed, shared thoughts and feelings that grew too large for either of their singular hearts to hold; how his laughter would bleed into hers, her pain into his; the taste of his skin, but not of his mouth, because they never kissed.
“At night…” Kylo closes his eyes so he can see more clearly. He witnesses a hundred restless hours in the dark when Rey gave up on sleep. “You touch yourself, thinking of him. Imagining that day at the school, when he finally laid hands on you like a woman instead of a girl.”
He remembers how he’d hated himself for wanting Rey. For taking her, then hurting her when he left. They’re small sins compared to what he’s done since then, and it’s hard to worry about the girl who was once Ben Solo’s student. They’re strangers now, just a man and a woman, two enemies each holding something the other desires.
“I can give you what you want,” Kylo says. “Let me have you, and it can be like you’re with him all over again, right here, right now.”
Rey looks him up and down, and he watches her consider his offer. First there’s disgust, then anger, shame, and finally temptation, open need for the prize he’s dangling over her head. “Will you at least let me out of these restraints?”
“No,” Kylo says. “You’ll stay bound, just like this.”
He expects her to curse at him with her dirtiest scavenger vulgarities, to say no or at least hesitate. So it surprises him when Rey only nods. “Do it. Please, I want…” She licks her lips, her voice lower than a whisper but eager, so eager, when she says, “I want to remember him.”
This isn’t about the map to Skywalker anymore, and they both know it, but Rey is still saying yes.
There’s no chance for a kiss, not so long as he’s masked, but there are a hundred other intimacies he’s dreamed of since he left. There’s time now, at least, to exercise a few of them.
He taps Rey’s cheek open-handed, the lightest slap, far more teasing than threatening, and reaches again into her memory. On their last mission before his exile, Rey slapped him, her fury burning through the Force. Why don’t you love me? she asked. And Ben hit her back, although not hard enough to hurt. Just a pale, taunting shadow of the blow she’d struck at him with. He’d humiliated her with his hand and his words: Stop it. You sound like a spoiled little girl.
Rey—his Rey, the one that belongs to Kylo, here in this interrogation room—gasps, shaking her head. “I don’t want to remember that,” she says. “Why would you start there?”
“I said I’d give you all of your precious Ben. Not just the best of him.”
Kylo grabs her hair and brings another memory to the forefront of her mind: Ben dragging her out of a mudpit on Zerikos by her braid. He was nearly sobbing, deep voice pitched high and frantic, calling her an idiot for running ahead of him. For getting herself nearly killed in a mudpit of all places. Later, after she’d showered three times, Ben gave her some of his own ridiculously oversized clothes to wear and took her to buy something that would fit. Seventeen and stupid, she’d tried to seduce him by putting on a dress. Not even a skimpy one, but everything seemed scandalous compared to Jedi robes. And for one fleeting, delicious moment, she’d noticed his gaze lingering at her collarbone, sliding down to appreciate the curve of her hips. He scowled, barked at her for wasting time, and told her to find something appropriate.
Rey shudders as he loops the memory over and over, focusing in at the heated look he’d laid on her in that shop. It was the first time he’d noticed her as anything but a brilliant, brattish student, and she caught the desire he was unable to hide.
Kylo stops, and Rey blinks slowly, looking hazy, glassy-eyed, almost drunk.
“Do you want more?”
She nods, straining against the locks that hold her in place, now leaning toward him instead of trying to tear herself free. “Keep going.”
Kylo holds her face between his hands, as tender as his reach within her mind, and brings forth a flood of her memories from the day they met to the day he left. Breathing life into moments half-forgotten, until Rey laughs and cries, nuzzling against his glove.
He could stay like this forever, his hands on Rey’s cheeks and her mind caught in his grasp, spilling her most treasured secrets. “He loved you, Rey. So much he couldn’t breathe for it.”
She shakes her head. “You can’t know that.”
“I do know,” Kylo says, and Force be with him, it’s true. “It was written all over him. He didn’t want you to realize it; maybe he didn’t realize it himself. But he loved you.”
He nudges her back into the clutch of her sweetest memories before she can think too hard on what he’s just said. Rey blinks to wakefulness every now and again, surfacing only to beg for more, until she falls limp against the chair.
“Stop. It’s too much, it hurts now, I can’t…”
She said something similar after he made her come on the floor of his cell, and Kylo tugs at her pants, playing with the buttons there. “One more. You understand?”
Rey stares at his hands, then looks up into his masked face. “Yes.”
That one word is so quiet it’s nearly lost in the stillness between them, but Kylo catches it, clings to it, and tugs Rey’s pants down to her knees. Rips her underwear, the way he’d ripped them that day at the academy, and slides one, two, three gloved fingers inside her. She’s as wet now as she’d been then, but less relaxed, so he goes slower, gentler.
“He never saw you naked,” Kylo says, panting into her ear, the static of his mask’s vocoder shielding the strain in his voice. “He must have wanted to, though, a pretty thing like you.”
He remembers every detail like it’s been burned behind his eyes. Rey’s face as she came, the taste of her wetness bitter on his fingers afterward. How it felt when he worked her through the aftershocks of her orgasm, only stopping when she begged him to quit. Kylo doesn’t even have to search her memories, because he couldn’t forget a moment of their lovemaking if he tried—
Rey tenses around him and starts to sob. He pulls his fingers out of her and looks up to see her expression slipping from lust-softened to shock.
“Ben?” she asks. So tentative, so afraid of the answer, even though she already knows.
He lost control, let his own memories shift toward Rey instead of pulling hers forward—
The restraints spring open, and Rey stumbles out of the chair. She pulls her pants and ruined underwear up her unsteady legs, covering herself as much as she can.
Then she pushes him, beats at his chest, and says, “Take off your mask! Take it off right now.”
Kylo steps backward, and even though he knows he’s found out, that his face will only confirm what Rey has already seen, he still hesitates.
She’s blazing with light and darkness at once, her hope and horror bound together, entangled in the Force. “You’re shaking,” she says, and she’s right.
Kylo can barely get control of his hands long enough to unlatch his helmet. It drops to the floor with a metallic clang, and Rey stares at him, her lips trembling.
“You’re alive,” she breathes. “You’re alive, and it’s worse than if you were dead.”
Kylo recoils, but once the surprise of Rey’s cruelty fades, he grabs her by her arms and shoves her against the wall. Crowds close, brackets his arms on either side of her body, and bows low over her, so that he has her well caught. Caged like a beast, like the wild thing she was when he found her on Jakku.
Her anger wilts as she looks up at him, turning into something far worse: pity. “What happened to you, Ben?”
“Nothing,” he says, and it’s true, so true that he wants to disgust her with it. To make her hate him as much as he hates himself. “I was always this way, sweetheart. Without you, I’d have given in to it so much sooner.”
Rey buries her face against his chest, wraps her arms around him, and says his old name again and again, steady as a mantra. Like it might bring Ben Solo back from the dead, if only she prays hard enough.
Then she leans away from him, taking what little space he’s allowed her, and says, “Let me go.”
Kylo leans down and lets his lips brush hers. Fleeting, brief, teasing at the kiss he denied her a hundred times. “We’re not done yet.”
“You’re a monster,” she hisses.
Kylo tilts his head to the side, watching the rise and fall of her breast, the way she keeps stealing glances at his mouth.
“Such a monster that you asked for my fingers in your cunt,” he says. “What are you then, Rey? A monster’s slut?”
She closes her eyes, but he can sense her humiliation warring with desire. Kylo wraps his hand around her throat, feeling out the rapid rhythm of her pulse, sliding along the sheen of sweat between her collarbones. He wants to feel it, really feel it, so he rips off his gloves.
“I suppose that makes me a scavenger’s whore. I did offer you a deal: one good fuck with Ben Solo in exchange for the map.”
Rey’s smile shapes her anger into something petty. “Well you didn’t fulfill your half of the bargain. I don’t see why I should give you anything.”
“Is that so?”
Kylo probes her mind, reaching out with violence, the brutality of taking instead of giving, and Rey cries out. It’s different, everything clearer yet shadowed, every dark emotion underneath her memories pulled to the surface. Her loneliness on Jakku, neverending, suffocating, until he plucked her from it. The fear entwined with her love of him. The shame Rey felt every time she reached between her legs and pretended it was Ben’s fingers working her. Coming in her cell with his name on her lips, knowing that he’d be sickened if he understood what she wanted. And the very worst of it: that she saw him as the father she’d never had and was desperate for him to fuck her anyway.
“Get out!” Rey says, and Kylo releases her mind from his grip.
He grabs her wrists and holds them over her head, pinned against the wall so hard that she’ll have bruises tomorrow. Then he presses his lips to her brow, scattering tender kisses across the place where she hurts most.
Kylo says, “I’m sorry.”
For the pain he inflicted just now, for the heartache he caused her long before today.
Rey looks up at him, her gaze steady, determined. “Kiss me,” she says, and it’s a command, not a request.
When he doesn’t move, hesitating too long to suit her, Rey stands up on the tips of her toes, wrists straining under his grasp, and bites at his jaw. Sharp, unapologetic, demanding. The pinch of pain where her teeth caught him sends a lurch of heat down his spine, and he then he’s kissing her, finally kissing her. His first, their first, and like everything else about them, it’s backwards and inside out, to have fucked before this, an inversion of everything soft and good. Theirs is a messy, graceless kiss, more sucking and biting than anything else, but it’s perfect. Touching her has always felt perfect, right, a way to mark her as his. Teacher, friend, lover; his role in her life has never mattered as much to Kylo as being her only.
Then she breaks away from him and whispers against his mouth, “Say you love me.”
Love is a weakness, the domain of fools, fitting neither fully among the self-centered passions of the dark side nor the peace and tranquility of the light. Maybe that’s why he’s always been better at loving Rey than living out any of the tenets of the Force.
There’s no reason to deny her, not when he’s already confessed it. So Kylo says I love you, presses it against her lips, passes it onto her tongue like a wet secret too fragile to taste the air. He kisses it along the line of her throat, bruises it against her collarbone with deliberate, sucking bites.
Then they’re tugging at each other’s clothes, ripping and unwinding fabric, unfastening buckles and buttons until Kylo stands shirtless, his pants pulled just low enough to free his cock. He gets Rey naked enough, bare from the waist up except for her arm wraps, pants tangled around one ankle. It might look ridiculous if he wasn’t so hard that he can barely think.
Kylo hauls her up into his arms and tells her to wrap her legs around him. Rey does as she’s told, faster and more enthusiastically than he’s ever known her to agree to anything.
He reaches between them to line up his cock against her, and blushes when he slides along her slickness without breaching her.
Rey moans, clutches him tighter, and says, “Just do it already.”
Kylo pushes into her this time, and then they’re joined, hardness to softness, Rey wrapped around him everywhere. Arms and legs clinging to him, breasts pressed flat against his chest, her sex wet and hot. And tight, so tight that he fears he could be hurting her. Rey doesn’t look hurt, though, just lost and mindless, begging him to have her now. To have her however he wants, to use her, to fuck her so roughly that she’ll wobble on love-shaken legs all night.
Kylo gives her everything she asks for, and all the while he whispers in her ear, endearments and ridicule by turns. He calls her sweetheart and reminds her of the daydreams she used to have while they sparred, of him picking her up and fucking her against the wall.
“Just like this,” he says, thrusting into her slow and deep.
Rey clings to him more tightly and says, “You shouldn’t have looked. You should’ve let me—let me have some secrets.”
There's a slow ache building in his arms and shoulders, but Kylo doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about anything except for Rey, and that’s why he says, “I wanted to look. I liked it, knowing what you were thinking, what you imagined.”
Rey kisses his cheek, a startlingly innocent gesture when they’re bound together like this.
What am I doing?
Kylo can't stand to stay this way, cradling Rey in his arms, hearing her sweet little sounds, so close to each other that he can take a kiss whenever he wants. Besides, she’s right on the sharp edge of release, and he can’t get her there. Being held and teased is what she needs to feel cherished, but not what she needs to come.
He tells her to unwrap her legs from around him, and maybe because he’s rendered her boneless from fucking, Rey lets him set her on her unsteady feet without a fight.
Kylo pulls her over to the interrogation chair and tells her to hold onto it.
She throws a filthy look at the chair, then at him. “Are you serious?”
He turns her around, manhandles her until she has no choice but to grab onto the side of the chair or fall against it. “You said I could use you however I want. Remember?”
Kylo watches a shiver travel down her shoulders, the ridges of her backbone, all the way to her trembling thighs.
“Yes, but—”
“Do you want to change the rules?”
She doesn’t even hesitate. Just bends over and gets a good handhold, clinging to the place where he claimed her mind, putting herself on display for him to fuck her again.
There’s nothing slow or sweet about this anymore, nothing innocent. Kylo steadies Rey with one hand on her hip, the other buried in her hair as he takes her. It’s rough and fast, and he wonders if stormtroopers in the halls can hear Rey’s moans, if by morning everyone on Starkiller Base will know that he fucked his prisoner until she screamed.
Rey sobs his name as she comes, the name he hasn’t answered to in years. But all it takes is the sound of her crying Ben, Ben, Ben to take him apart in every way that matters.
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Kylo still has an interrogation to conduct, a map to coerce out of Rey, but he doesn’t have the heart to hurt her. Not again.
“Go,” he says, once they’re both dressed, and he can hide the ache in his voice under his mask. “Leave, now, before I change my mind.”
She doesn’t need to be told twice, and it hurts, watching Rey hurry away from him without a moment’s hesitation.
It’s no surprise, though, because Kylo has known from the beginning that he could never keep her. Rey is still a wild thing, and if he’s learned anything from her over their time together and apart, it’s that wild things cannot be kept, no matter how much you love them.
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