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I’m getting out of here today.
Rey sat cross-legged, eyes closed, spine rooted down through the stone floor. The clarity of this revelation radiated like a gem in her chest. She didn’t have the faintest idea how it was possible, but there it was, ringing calm and clear in the Force.
Certainty. Foresight. Escape.
She breathed in through her nose, out through her mouth.
Rey had a lot of time to meditate these days.
When she was studying with Master Luke, she would have grumbled about it -- why waste hours sitting on rocks thinking about the Force when there were lightsaber forms to learn?
But her training on Ahch-To was far behind her, and the lessons that seemed pointless back then had been keeping her alive and sane for months now -- a year, maybe. She hadn’t kept track. Once it sank in that no one was coming to rescue her, it had been too painful to imagine scratching another set of hash-marks into the wall, counting down the days to the unknown end of her sentence like she had so long ago on Jakku. So she let go of time and meditated instead.
The cell felt less like solid stone when she could drift off and connect to the vast pulse of the Force, hear the hum of the living galaxy in her skull instead of the unchanging drone of generators. There was freedom in the music of the spheres, and power she could never have guessed would come from letting go and sitting still.
Her prophecy buzzed in her brain, exciting but distracting. She needed to stay grounded in the present if she was going to figure out a plan. She stretched out with her mind, letting the bright point of escape dwindle away for now. There were the four walls of her cell -- she could find them so quickly now. She felt for where the texture changed; there was the edge, where her mind’s fingers swept from dead metal to the living stone the cell had been carved into, the bones of this planet whose name she still didn’t know.
There had once been an abbey here, the monastery of some forgotten brotherhood. She could sense its echo in the memory of the rock, incense and songs of praise. The First Order had built its brutal architecture right into the ruins, leaving an ugly seam around the crumbling monks’ cell. The front half of the cell was all hygienic brushed durasteel, harshly lit, a sanitary module with a lav and sonic shower in one corner. The back half stayed dim and damp. Water seeped from a spot in the ceiling and ran down the wall in a thin trickle, leaving white mineral stains and feeding a patch of fuzzy moss. Rey thought it felt like a cave, in a secret and comforting way.
Back on Jakku, there had been an abbey, too, out across the wastelands. Rey’s sense of religion went no deeper than offering a pacifying sprinkle of water to whatever spirits might guard the shipwreck she was about to loot, but other scavengers made pilgrimages there. You could buy prayer flags at Niima Outpost for the nuns to bless -- hang them up before a sandstorm so the wind gods would hear your wishes while they shredded the colorful squares to rags. That was fine if you were asking the gods for a good haul of hyperdrive capacitors in the Graveyard, or to find a wife at the Moon Festival this year. But if you needed serious spiritual firepower, the devout scavengers said -- if your little boy had the dune fever, or Unkar Plutt was calling in your debt -- you had to petition the anchorites.
When she first heard of the anchorites, it gave her nightmares. She had hoped it might just be a fireside tale: nuns who lived in the walls of the church, bricked up in cells to spend their days in prayer and contemplation, allowed to leave only through death’s door. She dreamed of screaming silently into the darkness with a single dying oil lamp as pilgrims’ pleas and the grinding slap of bricks into mortar echoed, brick on brick on brick, until there were only eternal walls around her.
Now, she supposed, she was one of them.
She shifted her pose, trying to ease the floor’s hard bite on her ankle bone. These walls seemed eternal too. If the Force had a plan for escaping them today, it wasn’t making it obvious.
Suddenly, her senses flared. There was a presence in the Force, glowing in ripples like banked coals. It was approaching rapidly.
Ah, she thought. My pilgrim.
The floor was sunken a meter below the hallway outside. Hewn stone stairs in the corner led up to the door, which had not opened once since she’d been tossed in here -- food and messages passed only through a slot. She could perch on the steps and peer out of the slot if she wanted, but it didn’t take long to get bored counting the shins of passing stormtroopers. She preferred her little hermit’s cave, where the Force seemed so alive in the dark.
By the time she heard his steps slow in the hall, she was waiting on the stairs. The hem of his long robe appeared in the slot, brushing the tops of his boots. The rectangular portal was eye-level for her, sitting on the landing, but the tall knight would have to kneel to speak to her through it.
She was patient. It always took him a moment. She imagined he was double-checking the hallway for gossipy troopers before he lowered himself to the floor.
When he had settled, sitting on his heels, she spoke lightly.
“Good morning, Kylo Ren. Do you suppose I’ll turn to the dark side today?”
“No,” came the reply. “You never do.” His filtered voice was gruff, but because she’d once known his sardonic father, she could hear the wry tinge in it. She almost smiled.
“Then why do you keep trying to convince me?”
“You know I must,” he said. “The question is, why do you refuse to come to the reasonable conclusion?”
“You know I can’t.”
“We’ll see.”
Many other days, they had simply left it there. They would sit in stalemate on either side of the door, running out the clock until he returned to his master, and she returned to her cave.
But today, she was going to escape. The Force shimmered around her.
“I wish you would let me help you,” Ren pressed. “It doesn’t have to be this way. I know you’re suffering here.”
It almost sounded like real sympathy. She’d heard it in his voice before -- under bright interrogation lights, soothing in her ears as he sank into her mind and unspooled the threads of her memories. How softly he’d held them up in front of her, looped around his fingers: her dreams, her fears, her sleepless nights. He’d named her loneliness aloud, voice gentle, before she pushed him out of her head.
She had believed, for a moment, that the pretty young man who’d taken off his monster’s mask for her might feel some compassion. That was before she watched him meet Han Solo on a narrow bridge. Before she saw for herself the fullness of his cruelty. Still, she wondered. In that sterile room, she’d seen the messy insides of his heart the same as he’d seen hers. He was simmering with fear and doubt - she could feel it seething in him even now, held back only by his desperate trust in his master’s firm discipline.
No wonder he clung to his tyrant. It was right, she thought, that he had to bend so low to speak to her. Men like Kylo Ren were made to kneel.
The wisp of an idea came to her. She left it alone in the corner of her mind, not wanting to look at it too soon in case it blew away like a puff of smoke.
Outside, he was going on. “There’s still so much you have to learn, so much I can teach you. You can’t be satisfied with the drivel my uncle passed off as Jedi wisdom,” he scoffed. “You’ve only opened the door. Let me help you step through, and you’ll see what true power is.”
True power. Rey, who had spent the last gods-knew-how-many months slipping her mind between the atoms of stars and stones, saw her opening. She leaned closer to the slot.
“I know more about power than you think, Ren.”
She felt him snap to attention; the sudden intensity of his focus on her prickled the hair on the back of her neck. “I could get inside the mind of any stormtrooper on this base. I’ve done it before. And that was before I was trained." He was listening. She plunged on, rallied by the confidence she heard growing in her voice. "I could -- I could pull this cell apart at the seams. I could tear this whole prison down stone by stone around us and walk out right now. I could--”
Kill you, she had been about to say.
She held her breath. Maybe she’d gone too far.
In the hallway, Ren knelt, saying nothing. His mind had gone hard and smooth like a polished sphere of chthonyx.
His mechanical rasp broke the silence. “Show me.”
Slow, apprehensive, Rey reached her hand towards the slot at the same time he did. Their fingers met on her side of the door. Bare skin, she needed to touch his bare skin -- it was more an instinct than a thought. She tugged at his glove, the leather binding up around his knuckles until, frustrated, she pulled his hand through the slot up to the wrist and peeled the glove free. She stared at the creases of his bare palm upturned.
Trust the Force.
Before either of them could come to their senses, she pressed her hand to his.
The cell tilted sideways.
Rey was lying on her back. She was gasping, heaving, and something was burning; she caught acrid air in the back of her throat. There were stars above her in slices of black sky framed by tree branches, more stars drifting down towards her, silent and white.
Everything, silent and white.
It was snow, she realized dreamily. I’m going to die in the snow. Wet, gory agony bloomed in her ribs, her shoulder, her thigh. Her face was on fire.
A blurry light shimmered in front of her, tinting the snow blue. She felt compelled to sit up despite the screaming pain, to look for its source, and as the ground shook beneath her and the figure before her swam into focus, she saw --
It was her. Herself, with the Skywalker lightsaber raised in victory beside her furious face, the hair flying loose around her head lit in terrible blue light like a halo, like a war crown. The other Rey looked for a moment like she was floating above the earth as it split into a chasm before her. Her eyes glittered.
From her place on the ground she gazed up, utterly enraptured, euphoria numbing her to the physical pain and the misery of defeat -- this glorious woman, flowing with power. She collapsed back into the snow, feeling hot blood pooling in her clothes, and a different kind of heat gathering at the apex of her thighs --
Ren yanked his hand from hers. Rey nearly tumbled off the landing, reeling back. She rebalanced herself and leaned forward to rest her forehead on the door, trying to get control of the wild emotions lingering from the vision.
His vision. His memory.
Was that truly how she’d appeared to him that night on Starkiller? She felt her cheek blush hot against the cool metal. The echoing heat of his arousal still hummed low in her belly, where it made unsettling harmony with her own memory of her triumph -- how powerful she had felt rushing against him. How he’d almost seemed to welcome her great, surging blows that sent him to his knees in a spray of snow.
Her dark hope each time he fell, that he would struggle back up so she could cut him again, again. His eyes on her face, desperate and awed. How he’d lain wide open at her feet.
How good it had felt to strike him down.
Rey shook her head and unfolded her legs, swinging them off the steps to stand up. This was dangerous territory, and distracting -- she needed a plan, not … whatever this was. Ren’s disturbing feelings from their shared vision must have contaminated her worse than she thought.
Ren, she remembered with a jolt. He hadn’t made a sound on the other side of the door.
She cursed under her breath. What had she been thinking, baiting him like that? She had one good card in a shit hand, and she’d overplayed it. He would go straight to his master to confess this humiliation -- although, she thought, cringing, there were some personal details he would probably edit out. Even so, she’d be executed by nightfall for the crime of witnessing Ren’s weakness -- or worse, be dragged before Snoke to face him in the flesh at last.
And just this morning, she'd been dreaming of escape. Was this one of those terrible ironies of the Force Master Luke warned her about, a clouded vision of the future that came true in a twisted metaphor? Death was an escape, from a certain point of view. She stared into the dark half of her cell. It was bleak humor, and she didn’t laugh.
Behind her, something clicked.
She whirled around and froze. The door had opened, just a few centimeters, a skinny stripe of hallway bright where there had been only solid metal. Gazing at it, she felt slightly unreal, gauzy, like she’d seen this all before and how it played out now was merely a formality.
The door hissed back into its mortise. Ren stood silhouetted there, his cowl pooled around his shoulders. The silver piping on his hideous mask glinted in the hall lights before he ducked under the low frame and shut the door behind him with a gesture. He’d put his glove back on, she noticed.
He could have easily stepped off the low landing, but he descended into her space one stair at a time, as if each step was a choice he wasn’t sure he should make. Rey watched in fascination. Even hiding behind his visor, she was certain he was avoiding her gaze. He crossed the cell to meet her in the middle and stopped one deliberate arm’s length away.
She rolled her shoulders -- it was hard not to take a step back from him. He was tall and broad, but in this space that belonged to her, something about him seemed to grow smaller, cooler, like a single ember raked out of the fire. She counted her breaths for a long moment.
He sank to his knees in front of her on the cold stone floor.
Rey’s chest flooded with something hot. It was like feeling the sun on her face, or the sparkle of snow around her in the dark.
“Take off your mask,” she said, trembling. She could see the tension in his straight-backed posture, how he swayed slightly with each harsh breath. The ticking sound of water dripping down the wall was very loud.
An eternity passed, and then he seemed to wrench himself to a decision all at once, raising both hands to the clasps of his mask and dipping his head out from under it in a single frustrated motion. Dark curls swung across his face as he set the helmet beside him; his hands fluttered for a moment between the dented black dome and his lap, like he wasn’t sure what to do with them.
“That’s very good,” Rey breathed. “Very good--” What should she call him? “Very good, Kylo.”
He sagged gratefully, closing his eyes.
“No, no, stay with me, Kylo,” she said, reaching down to tip his chin up. She stopped just short, her fingers hovering at the hollow where his jaw met his throat.
If she touched him now, it would be like popping a bubble. This delicate, iridescent suspension in the air between them would snap, and the truth would come rushing back into the vacuum: that she was the prisoner here, not him, no matter how sweetly he knelt before her.
She touched him anyway. She couldn't help it. Her fingertips hooked beneath his jawbone to tilt his face up, elongating his throat as he arched to follow her pressure. The bubble didn’t pop. If anything, it all felt more real with her hand on him: there was his pulse under her fingers, proof his heart was beating as hard as hers. There was the heat of his skin. There was the long scar she’d marked him with, silvery-pink from jaw to brow, and his long lashes brushing the shadows under his downturned eyes.
She stroked the backs of her fingers up his cheek, captivated. Had she ever been afraid of him?
He rubbed helplessly into her touch. “It’s okay,” she said, turning her palm to cup his face. She dragged her thumb across the corner of his lips, feeling him soften his mouth for her, the warm little breath he huffed over her knuckles when she parted his lips. “It’s okay.”
She combed her fingers through the hair at his temple, gathering it back at the crown of his head, and pulled gently, encouraging him to bend towards the building ache between her legs. He came eagerly, too eagerly -- she pulled him up short before he could bury his face in her thighs. She held him just there, fighting for control. His long nose brushed the seam that ran between the waistband and crotch of her roughspun leggings; he breathed deep, and she shivered at the thought of her scent on his tongue.
“Why don’t you ask me,” she suggested, trying to put some edge in her voice. He moaned softly and tugged against her fist in his hair. She tightened her grip. “Ask me, Kylo.”
“Please,” he whispered, lips barely moving. She pushed him down instead, doubling him over into his lap, chest to knees. He caught himself on his elbows, face bowed over her slippers.
“Ask me again.”
He kissed the side of her slipper, nuzzling the arch of her foot. “Please,” he murmured. She felt dizzy at the need darkening his voice. “Please.”
Please, she thought, and reached for his hair, mostly catching his cowl instead -- anything to haul him quickly up to her hips, to angle his head back so he fit open-mouthed against her, warm and seeking. He wedged his chin between her thighs, forcing her to shuffle her feet apart to keep her balance, and pressed the flat of his tongue to the thin elastic cloth over her cunt. She shuddered, feeling wet heat soaking through when he swept up her slit through the fabric, woven texture amplifying the drag of his tongue.
Kylo leaned into his work, nipping a bit of cloth between his teeth and tenting it away from her, rubbing the seam taut against her swollen lips, then letting it go with a sodden snap that made her hips jerk.
His hands had been politely folded on his lap, but now he grew bolder and ran them up the backs of her thighs, squeezing possessively as he kissed her belly, her pubic bone, the creases of her hips. Lost in the moment, Rey let him take ground. She sank into his broad hands as he kneaded her buttocks, drifting on ragged breaths. Suddenly, she felt smooth leather-gloved fingers probing greedily at her waistband.
Her eyes flew open and she took a short step back from him. He looked up, seeking her eyes.
“Did I-”
“No, it’s okay,” she said, for herself more than him. Her heart was racing. This was moving very fast. Another minute of his hands on her like that, and she might have let go, fallen to the floor with him. Under him. “Just...just stay there a moment.”
The air was cold on her wet leggings. On the floor, Kylo was breathing heavily. He watched her with a burning, open expression that made her muscles feel watery. His cheeks were flushed, full lips red and abraded, his chin glistening with spit that ran down to make a dark, sloppy half-circle on the leather pleats of his gorget. He looked drugged, brown irises drawn into a thin ring around his dilated pupils. His hands rested once again on his spread thighs -- the very picture of obedience.
But behind his parted lips, his teeth were clenched tight. In the Force, she sensed him throbbing with energy, something unstable and hungry, barely restrained.
The first time she’d thrown her leg over her speeder after installing an aggressive high-torque engine, she’d felt the whole frame vibrating just like he was now, idling with the menacing promise of power. It had almost blown her off the seat when she twisted the throttle open. But gods, it was a thrill once she got the confidence to lean into it, to balance against the wild buck of acceleration.
It was the kind of dangerous, roaring power you couldn’t ever control, not really. You could only point it in the direction you wanted it to go and hold on.
Rey swallowed thickly. He hadn’t moved -- that was reassuring. She would just have to take more care where she pointed him.
She cleared her throat. “I want you to do that again, but --” She cut him off with a sharp look as he started to lunge forward. “But you’ll keep your hands behind your back, until I say otherwise. Understood?”
Kylo chewed the inside of his cheek. “Yes,” he dragged out, and crossed his forearms at the small of his back.
She stripped her leggings off and revelled in the soft whine he let out when she stepped up to him, tangling her hand in his hair to pull him level with her cunt. His breath was hot against her damp curls. Awed arousal rang her nerves -- he was being so patient and restrained, so good. For her.
“Go on,” she nodded.
He kissed the seam of her outer lips with reverence. She sighed and opened her stance to draw him even closer, almost straddling his face so he could curl his tongue into her.
“Just like that,” she murmured.
Dimly, Rey thought she wasn’t sure this was about escaping anymore. She wasn’t sure it was about anything except the intoxicating feeling of Kylo and all his strength under her hand like a docile animal.
She slumped back, a wanton cant to her hips. With one hand, she stroked his bobbing head; the other, she raked under her loose shirt, up the slope of her own belly, playing at the edge of the band that bound her breasts. He was worrying tiny circles on the hood of her clit, slipping his tongue under it to flick just there, to suck. She cupped the small weight of her breast.
“Don’t stop. I want you to touch yourself now.”
She didn’t have to tell him again -- she heard the click of his belt buckle, the strap slithering to the floor, gloves tossed aside, his fingers scrabbling at his fly. “Don’t come before I do,” she said. He groaned into her cunt as he fought to yank his tight pants down his hipbones without breaking his mouth away from her.
He pressed into her with hungry, lapping strokes while he fumbled under his tunic to get his hand around his cock. “Don’t come,” she gasped. “Don’t come yet, don’t --” She clenched her fingers in his hair, breath stuttering on the rhythm of his tongue. Her awareness narrowed down, everything dark and muted but the tight heat uncoiling inside her. For a second, she felt like she was floating -- then she came in his mouth with a wordless cry and her blood like wind rushing in her ears.
When her heart calmed a little, she rubbed her palms down her quivering thighs and looked at him. Kylo’s eyes were squeezed shut as he worked himself. His quilted tunic was rucked up under one forearm to keep it out of the way. He’d managed to bunch his pants down halfway to his knees, where they restrained his legs just a little too close together; tendons in his pale thighs twitched as he struggled to keep balance against his frantic pumping. All his natural elegance seemed forgotten. He was a debauched creature with a high blush on his cheeks, sweaty-faced and panting as he slid his fist up and down his cock. He was beautiful, and she wanted to see him beg.
“Kylo,” she said. His eyelids fluttered. “Kylo, would you like to come?”
He made a choking sound between gulps of air.
“That’s not an answer,” she chided.
He grimaced. “Quit -- quit twisting the knife.” His hand worked faster and he wobbled on his knees.
“You’re hardly in a position to make demands,” she observed. She shrugged deliberately and turned to pick up her discarded leggings, feeling his eyes on her as she casually rolled the fabric up her legs.
“Please may I come now,” he said in a flat rush. She smiled. Almost good enough.
“Please may you come for me, you mean?”
“Yes, fuck -- please!” His head fell back and his chest heaved. “Please, may I come for you? Please!”
“Don't spill a drop,” she warned.
He hastily cupped his other hand around the leaking head of his cock. A few more quick turns of his wrist and he was thrusting into his grip, coming in shuddering pulses. He sat with a heavy groan, like he’d been held up by a string that was suddenly snipped, kicking his tangled legs out to sprawl next to him. Semen dripped between his fingers.
“Kylo,” Rey said softly. He held up his soiled hand and turned it as if carefully considering the pearly rivulets threatening to run down his sleeve. He licked his palm and then, looking her in the eyes, sucked each finger clean. A thrill shot through her as he swallowed, and for a moment, she had the urge to bend to him and kiss the bitterness from his lips.
But it was only a moment.
Turning abruptly to the back wall, Rey stared at the trickling water, at the tiny puddle it made on the stones. She told herself she was giving him privacy to dress.
Kylo grew more sullen as he tugged his uniform back into order, withdrawing into the layers of pleats and drapes. She could already feel the guilt creeping over him like a shadow -- his conflicted astonishment that he’d betrayed his master, and so intimately.
There was nothing for her to say about it. He was as much Snoke’s prisoner as she was, only he wore his chains by choice. She wasn’t even sure she felt sorry for him. She simply took his hand and led him silently to her sleeping pallet in the corner with its nest of blankets.
He laid down bonelessly. She curled around him, smoothing her hand over his chest. His boots hung off the edge of the thin mat.
In her memory, she always saw him with the same haunted look, while a planet died around them, while they broke against each other in a cold dungeon. Awed. Imploring. Like she could answer his voiceless plea and give him something he knew in his bones he didn’t deserve to ask for. If she didn’t know better, she’d say it might be salvation.
Well, he was looking in the wrong place -- she couldn’t even save herself. She smiled sadly against his warm back, remembering her hopeful prophecy this morning. It was one of those murky metaphors of the Force after all, nothing but some crossed wires in the ether.
But there would be other opportunities to escape. Her doubt had drained away like water in the sand -- she would be vigilant from now on. Maybe she could mind trick a stormtrooper. Hell, maybe she could pull the prison down brick by brick, just as she’d said. Maybe Kylo would stand in her way, and maybe she would cut him down again.
Or maybe, she thought as his breathing slowed against her breastbone, she would bend him from his tyrant, just like this. One betrayal at a time.
When Rey woke, the bed was cold and rumpled beside her, and her cell was dark except for the crack of light that shone along the unlocked door.