Chapter Text
At this very moment, the waitlist for a Resistance-trained service dog is two years long. Rey’s health insurance will not cover the price, but she will be able to use her flexible spending account to cover a portion of the final cost once she secures a letter of medical necessity from her doctor.
A week goes by after her insurance handler answers her questions. Rey thinks nothing of it; as long as her premium doesn’t increase, she has no more concerns for the First Order. She can’t do much about the waitlist. Her friend Finn assures her that he knows a guy who trains dogs at the Resistance, and he can get a discount for her. There’s nothing to do but wait until this Poe Dameron makes a slot on his calendar.
One Tuesday afternoon, she receives a strange email that reads,
Your home care service provider will arrive tomorrow at three pm. You will receive a call. Please confirm your personal information below.
The web address is [email protected]. The First Order is her health insurance provider, so she assumes that because of her inquiries, a robot added her email to a listserv somewhere. As long as her premium doesn’t go up, she’s not going to worry herself over this.
The next day, at three pm sharp, there is a knock at her door. Rey jumps a little bit at the sound. She wants to ignore it, but then her cell begins to ring. She answers it. “Rey Niima?” he asks. The voice on the other end is deep and nasally. “I want you to know that I’m outside of your home. I parked in the spot directly in front of your townhouse; I hope that’s okay.”
“I – I’m sorry?” she blurts out. “Who is this?”
“Kylo Ren,” he recites. “You should’ve received an email notification yesterday from your insurance provider.” His tone is mildly pissed off, like he can't believe he needs to explain himself. Rey doesn’t want to anger somebody from her insurance provider, so she hustles to the foyer. She brushes potato chip crumbs from her shirt.
Rey opens the door and beholds a very large man, wearing blue scrubs. He fills up the entire doorway with his height and the breadth of his shoulders. His hair is cropped close to his scalp, revealing ears the size of mug handles, but there's nothing funny about the rest of him. His eyebrows are thick and turned downwards, and his mouth is twisted into a scowl. At a glance, this is a man who does not brook argument.
He looks her up and down, slowly. “You must be the girl I’ve heard so much about,” he says, and it’s hard to determine what he means because his tone is a perfect deadpan.
Panic washes over her. Rey searches her memory, but she can’t remember requesting any homecare service. Is this some sort of elaborate home invasion?
The man brushes past her and enters the house. He pushes the door closed behind him. The scent of clean laundry follows in his wake. An Alpha? Did her insurance company send an Alpha to her house? Doesn’t that present a liability issue?
She looks down at herself. She’s wearing sweatpants and a wrinkled shirt. If he swung a fist at her jaw, he could kill her outright – instead, he marches away from her and heads up the stairs.
He manages to reach the second floor, but Rey blocks him just in time from barging upstairs towards her bedroom. Rey herds him into a dining room chair and tries to make herself look busy by preparing instant coffee for the two of them.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “I think that there’s been some sort of mistake.” Rey sets a mug down for him and for her. “You see, as an Omega, I just don’t feel comfortable…”
He fixes her with a withering glare. “Alpha home care nurses have certain advantages over Betas,” he explains coolly. “An Alpha trained to the nuances of his patient can sense non-visible signs of distress.”
“What do you mean – you can sense my distress?” she asks. Can you sense me now? She takes a sip of her drink, trying to steady her nerves.
His nostrils flare as he explains, “You smell different when you’re about to have an episode.” He picks up his coffee mug using only his ring and pinky fingers and takes a tiny sip before grimacing. “This is too sweet,” he says accusingly, as if Rey can choose how much sugar goes into a packet of instant coffee.
Secretly, Rey would’ve preferred a dog. She has no idea if her benefits will cover for his services.
He must see the anxiety register on her face, because his expression softens by just the tiniest sliver. “Don’t worry about the cost,” he says, “I come from an accredited agency, and all my services are covered.” He adds, “I have nursing experience. If you want to see my credentials, I can have them printed up for you tomorrow.”
Rey feels she has no choice but to show the man around her house– a one bedroom, one bathroom townhouse. The ground floor is the entry way, the second floor is the living room and kitchen, and the third floor holds the single bedroom and bathroom. The square footage is further diminished by all her assorted crap lying everywhere – kitchen gadgets and As Seen on TV merchandise.
Rey wrings her hands helplessly. This is another reason why she would’ve preferred a dog over a person: she had enough living space for a dog, NOT an entire six foot tall man, unless he could contort his body into tight spaces.
After Kylo is done surveilling the house, he says nothing, but his nostrils flare. In a small voice, he asks if he can clean up the ground level and move her personal items into storage. Rey nods. She wants to help, but he refuses her; he orders her to remain upstairs. Kylo goes in and out of the house through the front door.
When Rey comes back down again, she sees her ground floor converted to a spartan Alpha-nest. He bought and assembled a four-post frame for a single size mattress. His corners are tucked very crisply.
A very clean smell fills the air, like laundry fresh out of the dryer. It hits her with a sense of déjà vu, but she chalks it up to the scent of expensive laundry detergent.
“I was working sixteen hours shifts with little to no appreciation for the work that I was doing. You could say that I suffered a burnout, and then I went to a career coach to determine what positions were out there and what would be right for me.”
Rey asks how long he worked at the hospital, and he cuts his eyes to the ceiling until he comes up with five years. Five years of hospital experience! Rey feels spoiled. If she falls and cracks her head open on the pavement, he will most likely know what to do in such a situation.
“For four years afterwards, I worked as a home-care nurse,” he adds, like he needs to continue selling himself to her.
“So you’ve worked with other Omegas?” she asks, but he shakes his head.
“Older people,” he says vaguely. “In-house hospice care.”
Rey wants to pry desperately, but she gathers that HIPAA laws prevent him from divulging too much. The look in his eyes is haunting, so Rey imagines cleaning up bedpans and tending to really ancient patients.
“The fainting spells started when I reached puberty. At first, they happened maybe once a week, and I would sit out PE. My foster father wasn’t very sympathetic, and he thought that I was just pretending.”
Kylo’s eye twitches, but Rey thinks she’s just imagined it. “Have you seen anything approaching a cure for this condition?” he asks.
Rey shakes her head. “They all have various theories, but the fact is that I have no family history to reference because I was adopted, and my foster father never sent me to the pediatrics as a kid.” She shrugs.
Rey is not the kind of person to look a gift horse in the mouth. The Republicans in charge of the local government have vowed to cut state expenditures and lower tax rates to allegedly incentivize businesses into moving into the state; that means that Rey’s benefits are in danger of being cut. Even the organization that found her current job is on the chopping block; she receives emails every day to contact her local representative.
Rey has a GED, and she has part-time fully remote work as a math tutor. Rey works in the afternoons and evenings, and sometimes the weekends, and she’s slotted to teach math up to Pre-Calculus. Her short term goal is to earn the privilege to tutor Calculus, so that she could teach high schoolers, and her pay per hour would increase.
Having Kylo around is both a blessing and a curse. In the past, she could stay focused on tutoring until her eyes hurt or she felt lightheaded; now, at a specific hour of the day, kitchen-smells would waft into her lungs and make her stomach clench painfully in the middle of a lesson. Instead of sitting in the second floor, she’s been forced to move upstairs in her bedroom where the scent of him and his food bombards her less.
“Rey.”
She breaks out of her lecture and spins around in her chair. Once her eyes adjust to the dark, she finds herself face to face with Kylo’s crotch in his denim jeans. He leans down, his eyes luminous.
It takes her a moment to find her voice. “What do you want?” she snaps, irritated. She is very busy and interruptions during tutoring sessions can leave her with a bad review on her record.
Kylo turns to the screen and the blinking camera light. A smile transforms his face. “Excuse me,” he says kindly. “Miss Niima needs her beauty rest.”
∅
She raises her head and finds herself tucked into her own bed. Rey leaps out from under the bedcovers and runs to her laptop. She wakes it up from standby mode and finds her session timed out.
“Shit - did I just pass out like that?” she cries, near hysterics. She looks at the clock and receives the answer to her question. Rey logs in to her tutoring portal and sees the ended session; she sends a message apologizing profusely to Lys’s parents. She slumps into her chair, her face falling into her hands. “Ohmigod,” she says. “Ohmigod, I’m gonna lose my job…”
Kylo walked up the stairs silently, and now he pats her shoulder. “The kid only had one question left.”
Rey stares up at him. “You mean… You finished the session?” she asks. She’s not sure if that’s even allowed, per the terms of both of their respective job contracts. Being a home care nurse and being a fully remote math tutor each have certain restrictions.
Kylo shakes his head. “The kid only had one question left.”
While hovering over her shoulder, Kylo pulls up an algebra question on the console. Kylo gives his answer, and Rey asks him how he reached it. When he finishes, Rey shakes her head. “You took PEMDAS literally,” she says. “You assumed that multiplication comes first, but that’s wrong. The multiplication and division are interchangeable; it’s whatever symbol comes first. The addition and subtraction are also interchangeable. You could also spell it PEDMAS, or PEDMSA.”
Kylo says nothing, but his ears turns from paper white to pink. “Oh,” he says, pulling away from her. Rey tries to very hard not to laugh; the Alpha in him must be very sensitive.
On Saturday, Rose invites Rey for a day out on the town. Kylo drives her to the mall. They get a big meal in the food court, and then they go to the antique row street to go thrift shopping. Rey finds a cool knight in black armor that stands at about three feet tall; she knows that he’s going to look great in front of her front door. Kylo hefts that into the trunk of the car, along with the transistor radio, a VHS tape player, and a cord of cables bound together that looks like a cat o’ nine tails whip.
Kylo’s mood gradually decreased after he needed to carry the knight into the car. By the time that he plunked the waffle iron, the bamboo steamer, the old box television, the bag of VHS tapes, and the bag of second hand books into the car, his mouth was set in a permanent scowl.
When they’re home again, everything needs to be carried up to the house. Kylo drops the bag of secondhand books next to her pile of secondhand books, and throws the tangle of cables onto the cable-pile. With a look of disgust, he yanks the bamboo steamer from her hands. “Rey,” he says at last, “what are you going to do with all this crap?”
“It’s not crap,” she says defensively. “I – I might have a use for these things.”
“Everything here is garbage,” he says. He points to her books. “Garbage.” He points to her old consoles. “These belong in a dump. Even if you fix these, no one is going to buy them from you. And what do you need all these cables for?”
“They are not garbage,” she says, her hackles rising. They were having such a nice day and now he had to ruin it.
“Hey,” he says. He raises his hand, like he’s telling her to shut up.
Rey gives him her back and goes back to the car. She’s tired and she feels crappy all of a sudden, probably from all the dust and mold spores she inhaled in those antique stores. He doesn’t know where the knight needs to go, next to the front door.
∅
The smell of dinner cooking wakes her up. Rey lifts her head, and nearly jumps out of her skin. She stares up into the visor of a knight in black armor.
Rey grabs the back of the sofa and hefts herself upright. The knight becomes significantly less threatening once she remembers that he’s only three feet tall and made out of resin. Her hair sticks to the back of her neck. Behind her, Kylo works studiously in the kitchen. The bamboo steamer spews out a hot mist. He must’ve unloaded everything from the car all by himself.
“I’ll get rid of some things,” she promises. Now that Kylo is living on the bottom floor, he needs room to put his stuff. He’s not just an automaton who cooks her food and judges her life decisions and sniffs out when she’s about to brain herself on the pavement.
“Thank you,” Kylo says in perfect monotone.
They help themselves to steamed broccoli. Kylo is a master at bland yet nutritious food, but there’s nothing that can’t be solved with a generous dose of hot sauce and a slice of prosciutto.
Kylo grabs the bottle of the hot sauce and recites the sodium content and the preservatives from the back label, while Rey ignores him. “You eat to live,” he orders her, setting the bottle back down on the table. “Not the other way around.”
Rey grimaces; the prosciutto flaps part way out of her mouth. She chews it thoughtfully. Kylo needs to understand something about her. “To be honest, I don’t see why I need to save for the future. Or avoid preservatives and nitrates and all that. I’d rather live in the moment.”
Kylo eats his bland broccoli with chicken breast like it’s a task to be accomplished.
“If I make over a certain cap threshold, the state will cut off my disability benefits.” Rey shrugs. “One day I might pass out and knock my head against a table, so why bother?”
Kylo is quiet for a moment, chewing slowly and methodically. Rey thinks that she’s made him depressed, or whatever ‘depression’ means to Kylo-bot 9000.
Rey had the old box television set installed on the ground floor, across from Kylo’s bed. She also gifted him with the VHS tape player, except she couldn’t frame it in the context of a ‘gift’; instead, she insisted that there was nowhere else for all this ‘crap’ to go, which was more or less the truth. She inserts The Sound of Music into the machine and sits on the floor with Kylo, because he doesn’t want to get his bedsheets ‘contaminated’. That’s the word that he uses.
Rey keeps glancing at Kylo to see if he’s enjoying the movie. The light reflects off of his pale skin. His thick eyebrows are lowered into a set scowl, like he’s a soldier being forced to endure psychological torture. He stands up in the middle of the goatherd song, apparently reaching his limit.
“Don’t you like movies where people can just burst into song at any moment?” she asks as he beats a hasty retreat.
“No.”
Now that Kylo is gone, the movie becomes a lot less fun now for some reason. She loses herself in the pace of the movie, but when Julie Andrews begins to yearn for Baron Von Trapp in earnest, she hugs her knees tighter to her chest. It’s dark now, and Rey wants to end the movie and go upstairs for water, and maybe talk to Kylo about what musicals he likes.
Rey feels his big hand grasp the back of her neck. “Hey,” he whispers.
∅
She must’ve passed out for a moment. Rey blinks her eyes open, and finds herself lifting her head from a hard, lumpen pillow. The smell of Alpha surrounds her; Rey looks around and at the images flashing on the television screen. The credits are rolling and music pours out.
Rey sits up slowly. Her pussy feels really… damp, like she’s wet herself. At the same time, Kylo walks down the stairs, so Rey folds her legs together and pretends she definitely probably didn’t wet herself in Kylo’s bed.
The scent of clean laundry fills her sense and stings her sinuses. Her pussy really stings and her skin is all gooseflesh. Rey lifts the covers, and the warm air hits her; it’s the scent of Kylo’s body. Her breathing shallows and her pulse thrums between her thighs.
The order of events is this: Kylo leaves her, Kylo returns, Kylo places her in his bed, Kylo leaves. But why does the air smell like that?
“Did we just have sex?” she asks. Her mouth is muffled from sleep, and it comes out as Didj’weyust’avesix. Immediately, she feels stupid for asking.
An asterisk forms in the middle of his eyebrows. He stands over his bed, glaring down at her. “No,” he says hotly, his ears turning a deep shade of magenta. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
Right. Ridiculous.