Work Text:
The world muted to near silence.
Rey felt her small smile fade with the sudden onset of quiet. Gone were the distant voices drifting in from outside the makeshift storage facility. The hum of ageing generators had cut off with all other sounds of life on the Resistance base, the stillness so abrupt that her calm, even breaths suddenly sounded too loud to her own ears.
She waited in the quiet, her hazel eyes slowly sorting through the rows of empty metal racks glittering in the half-light. With a subtle roll of her shoulders, she tried to shrug off her nerves like an unwanted cowl, consciously forcing her fingers to loosen around the crate she carried. He would notice her white knuckles if she didn’t relax her grip. As anxiety over his imminent arrival gave way to irritation, she swallowed it down and schooled her features into a neutral expression. Instinct told her to give nothing away; anything he saw was something he could take.
His presence bloomed through their shared awareness until it had weight, the oppressive heaviness of unseen eyes watching her from somewhere in the dark. As his signature slithered up alongside her own, Rey suppressed a shudder at the darkness that wreathed his mental walls. He felt like the cooling caress of shade that brought relief from the desert sun, refreshing until she realized she had merely stepped into the shadow of a large, violent predator with its eyes fixed on her. So strong was the urge to recoil, it took everything Rey had not to dump the contents of her crate and reach for her blaster when her gaze finally found him.
The broad silhouette of the Supreme Leader of the First Order loomed among the few boxed supplies of the Resistance’s newest base. Sheathed all in black, he looked out of place, meant for deeper shadows than those provided by the damp, musty storage room. Though the light was too dim to read the expression he wore, his profile was lined by the cold glow of the datapad held in his pale hands. Without a word, Kylo Ren casually scrolled through its contents, drifting between the shelving units with all the grace of a wraith in the night.
Rey felt the soft pull of the bond between them, the gravity of their connection met at every turn by the familiar resistance of their mental shields. It was a quiet stalemate, each of them applying just enough pressure to guard their respective minds. This silent form of attentiveness kept his awareness tethered to hers, a constant vigilance against intrusion. All the more stark, then, was his utter refusal to acknowledge her presence. Lately, he behaved as though she weren’t there at all, the very 'nothing' he had reduced her to in the throne room of the Supremacy. When the bond flared to life, Kylo did not so much as glance up. Nothing in his expression shifted. Nothing in his posture betrayed awareness. He kept entirely to himself, remaining silent even during her past attempts to speak about neutral, harmless things. She had asked whether he had ever seen snow. Whether he had ever eaten a ration pack by choice. Whether rehydrated vegmeat was universally acknowledged as the most horrendously unpalatable invention in the galaxy.
Nothing.
She had debated telling him foolish things, ridiculous things — anything sharp or strange enough to pierce his composure. Perhaps she would insist the Millennium Falcon would fly faster if it were painted pink. Maybe she'd try telling Kylo he would look better bald. She had almost spoke up, reaching for something witty in the face of his never-ending silence, but her words were stalled by her nerves as she tried to make them take shape.
Before Rey could muster the courage to poke fun at her captive audience, she had watched via public holofeed as the First Order declared war on Khlarah. Sixteen billion lives extinguished, vaporized by sustained turbolaser fire scourging the planet's surface over the span of a month. Poe was the first to volunteer to fly to Khlarah's aid, but high command immediately instructed that he stand down. Rey didn’t need to be a strategist to understand the Resistance didn’t have the numbers for this fight.
As the assault on Khlarah continued, the light within her recoiled with their erasure, the genocide needling relentlessly at her mind as the body count climbed higher. For four long weeks, there was no escaping what was happening on the peaceful planet light-years away. Rey had begun to force herself to look away from the more grotesque images of destruction, but it was a tactic employed far too late. The faces of the dead followed her into sleep.
From orbit, the First Order's assault shrouded the planet in an ash cloud so thick it resembled a gas giant; on the surface, Khlarah became a wasteland of molten cityscapes and fiery open graves. Every mark of devastation bore the weight of Supreme Leader Kylo Ren’s will, carried out by the murderous regime that answered only to him.
In the end, Rey took inspiration from her bond mate and decided to say nothing at all.
Rey watched as Kylo's gaze continued to be anchored by the contents of his datapad. His fingers lingered over the screen as he scrolled past endless walls of text, his posture loose and unaffected. In a slow circuit of idle loops, he silently drifted by on the far side of her shelving unit—the picture of supreme indifference.
With a quiet huff, she turned her attention to the crate she had been carrying. After setting it on the storage rack before her, she began to sift through its contents with a pointed air of disinterest in her present company. Her hands moved over a collection of thumb-sized nav-computer components; some were so badly fried that not even a scavenger could have saved them, though someone had clearly hoped otherwise. Rey gathered the scorched parts in one hand, the pieces threatening to tumble back into the box while her free hand rummaged for more damaged electronics.
Determined to ignore her bondmate, she didn’t look up even as she registered the soft slide of his datapad being set down on a nearby table. She was almost proud of herself for resisting the urge to glance his way, holding her curiosity at bay while her stubbornness surged to rival his. If Kylo Ren wanted silence, she could give him silence.
She realized a heartbeat too late how close he was. Kylo had slipped up behind her, seeming to materialize from nowhere. The nearness was so jarring that her elbow was already swinging instinctively towards his face in self-defense.
Before she could make contact, his hand snapped around the crook of her arm like a vise, spinning her to face him. Rey barely had time to gasp her surprise before she was slammed into the rack behind her, pain flaring through the shoulder that took the brunt of the hit. She cried out as her body bounced with the force of the blow, the metal shrieking as the shelving unit lurched from the impact.
He caught her on the rebound, ramming her back into the shelving. One hand seized her injured shoulder, his forearm braced against her throat as he pinned her against the unforgiving metal. She tried to regain her footing but her feet were kicked wide. Every movement worsened the growing bruise blooming on her shoulder blade, yet she couldn’t stay still. She scrabbled at the rack behind her, searching for leverage. The scorched components that had been in her hands had scattered across the floor, causing her to slip when they rolled under her feet.
Kylo didn’t pause.
She felt the metal band before she saw it. His free hand had snapped around her wrist with something hidden in his palm, clamping down and sealing shut with an ominous series of clicks. Automatically, the band tightened using an in-built mechanism, biting into her skin without completely cutting off her circulation. The instant she realized it was some kind of machine, her breathing spiked as Rey was propelled from shock into near panic.
The darksider merely watched as she struggled against him, seemingly unmoved by the scavenger he had so easily subdued. When she gained the slightest advantage, a subtle turn of his wrist wrung a cry from her and left her pliant, her leverage stripped away. His grip tightened, deliberate and unhurried, making it plain he had no intention of ending the exchange quickly. For a humiliating moment he held her there, wearing the faint grimace one might give while forcing an unyielding piece of scrap through a narrow, twisting corridor — methodical, unrelenting, utterly willing to use force. The violence didn’t matter; he was a violent man.
He eventually loosened his grip by degrees, letting his arm drop from her neck and allowing her wrist to slip through his fingers as he drew himself back. He waited with his hands lowering slowly to his sides, cautiously watching her for any sign of immediate retaliation through the black curtain of hair that had fallen over his eyes. Rey’s pulse thundered in her ears, her body frozen still as a skittermouse under the stare of a pole-snake coiled to strike. She could acknowledge he had the upper hand here, even though it made her stomach turn. Still as she was, between heaving breaths she felt her features begin to shift from alarm to something harder as she found her resolve. Silently, she swore all kinds of oaths that he would regret breaking the unspoken sanctity of their bond. With half a dozen ideas already circulating in her mind, the next time he tried to lay hands on her she would be ready.
Satisfied with her stillness, he turned his back to her as he slowly walked off, his hand lifting nonchalantly to sweep his hair from his face. He gathered his datapad as he went, sliding back into his reading as though nothing more pressing than a minor task had been crossed from a list.
Having clearly been dismissed, it was then that the edge of her resolve gave way to a thundering rage. With every one of his idle steps, her anger only burned more brightly as she felt the cost of her arrogance. Her petty revenge of ignoring him had left her exposed—a misstep that could have gotten her killed, or worse, on Jakku. Though there was only an audience of one, letting him use her to display his power, dangling her uselessly before discarding her when he was finished, had reduced her to little more than a skin girl in her own eyes. With an understanding that stabbed viciously at her sense of pride, she had acted like something easily manipulated, left alive only to be preyed upon.
It was revolting.
Strained with anguish, Rey’s eyes dropped to the hand she had been unconsciously cradling. A quick inspection of the slim, silver band revealed two small blinking lights—one white, one blue—but offered no clue as to what he had affixed to her. Her free hand clenched around the metal, trying to slide it over the meat of her palm, but it gave no quarter. A slow, dreadful sense of understanding washed over her as the silver ring revealed itself to be less of a bracelet and more of a manacle.
“Oi! What did you put on me, nerfherder?!”
Anxiety laced her words, though she didn’t notice how fear had quietly crept into the cadence of her voice. Unable to remove the device, she clamped her hand over it, as if hiding the band could make it less of a problem. Her eyes darted between her wrist and her bondmate as she looked to him for answers, but instead of his face she found only the black of his armorweave stretched taut across his back and shoulders—severe and impenetrable. The high collar shielded the delicate skin of his throat, the fabric vanishing behind the loose tendrils of his dark hair. He was nothing but a shadow; she couldn’t shake the sense that she was being kept separate from the living man beneath his lifeless accoutrements, that the darksider had turned his back on her in more ways than one.
She had never felt so profoundly alone.
Rey reached blindly once more for the shelf behind her, her fingers closing around the first object they found while knocking others unceremoniously to the floor. Without a second thought, she hurled it at him faster than she could blink. The badly warped accelerator piston that flew into her view should have knocked him unconscious—but within the limits of their bond, the metal casing simply passed through him as though he were a holoprojection. It clattered to the floor of the storage center, echoing loudly; she doubted Kylo even registered that she had tried to throw something at him.
Her jaw clenched.
Rey drew the blaster from her thigh holster in one swift motion and leveled it at his head, her breath rattling as she took aim. Her finger tightened on the trigger—then stilled. The last time she’d tried to shoot him through the bond on Ahch-To, the bolt had done nothing remotely incapacitating. From what she understood of the bond’s warped physics, she would likely have to press the muzzle flush to his skull to inflict any real harm.
And oh, how she ached to do exactly that.
Her glare flicked from the blaster to the rigid line of his back as she moved to keep pace with his receding figure, scanning for the most opportune path to catch him unguarded. The cramped maze of scattered crates twisted her trajectory, but as long as he remained absorbed in that kriffing datapad, she had a chance. Move fast enough, and she could blast a crater to match the canyon she’d left splitting his face on Starkiller.
He walked on with unhurried steps while she shadowed him through the narrow aisles of shelving units, her weapon's aim fixed on his head. Despite his air of indifference, he must have sensed the shift in her silence. He was tracking her.
It was subtle. He angled himself to keep her in his peripheral vision as she followed, but once she noticed, it was impossible to miss how his profile never fully turned from where she waited. With a silent curse, Rey realized he wouldn’t be offering his back so freely again.
He came to a halt at a wall invisible to her, his gaze dipping briefly to the datapad before he lifted his hand, fingers tapping at empty air as though configuring a console only he could see. Rey saw her opportunity and tensed, her grip tightening on her blaster as she prepared to rush him—then Kylo’s voice cut through the bond like a hailing signal from a deserted ship.
She froze.
She hadn’t heard him speak in months. After so long enduring his deliberate silence, the sudden return of his voice—confident and clear—startled her enough to stall her attack. As her mind replayed the moments leading up to his unexpected break in obstinacy, Rey nearly rolled her eyes when she realized his words still weren’t directed at her.
“Divert all surrounding units to the Illurium system, sector four-zero-seven, quadrant zero-two.”
Gooseflesh prickled along Rey’s arms as his words sank in. Her eyes widened, snapping to the device he had forced onto her wrist. He was reading out her location.
"I've input the coordinates, General Khosenic. You will arrive prepared for a full assault. Have every turbolaser—"
Rey's finger clenched spasmodically on the trigger, the pull bleeding desperation as she attempted to silence him.
"—and ion cannon primed before reversion, as well as all TIE and Stormtrooper squadrons ready for immediate deployment. Any delays, and you'll answer to me, personally. "
When the blaster bolt sailed cleanly through him without effect, she fired again—and again.
"Orders are to report back for further instruction when mobilized."
Utterly immune to her attack, Kylo didn't flinch.
"The Finalizer is enroute."
At last, his eyes lifted to hers for the first time since the bond had opened, a quiet, victorious satisfaction smoldering in their depths. Slowly, he strode toward her as blaster fire rained uselessly through his chest, the corner of his mouth twitching into the ghost of a smirk before fading from the effort. Only then did Rey truly see his eyes, lit in the red wash of passing bolts—purple-rimmed and shadowed with the weight of exhaustion. He suddenly struck her as ragged, almost frail, despite how thoroughly he had overpowered her mere moments before.
Through the Force, his mind suddenly raked unseen claws on the surface of hers—not as an outright attempt to penetrate her shields, but as an insult wrapped in a terrifying promise. The pressure was painless, yet the unfamiliar sensation bore down with an uncomfortable intensity. Like flinching from a blow that stopped mere millimeters from landing, Rey's concentration faltered with her courage. Her blaster fell from her grasp when her hands flew to her head, clutching her temples as if she could physically fend him off. A low hiss was all the warning she had before he surged forward, exploiting her lapse in vigilance.
Within the space of a breath, he had closed the distance between them, capturing both her wrists and driving her into a wall. Her injured shoulder flared in protest as he wrenched her arms upward; when her lips forcefully parted on a pained moan, she noticed when Kylo’s gaze suddenly snapped to the shape of her mouth.
His mask of nonchalance had slipped completely and she found herself facing a man half-starved, restraint stretched thin over something ravenous. Through the bond, he openly bared his almost feral need to grasp and claim, to consume and dominate. A shiver of fear crawled up her spine at the depth of his want. The heat of it felt like a sickness, unclean and cloyingly putrid. With a vicious resolve he smeared its existence across her mental walls like he was trying to infect her with it.
With renewed fury, her nails clawed at whatever parts of his gloved hands she could reach, her feet kicking out a savage rhythm as she screamed in anguish, trying to catch his shins or crush his knee. He only crowded closer, intent on denying her the chance to land a strike while his body pressed flush against hers. In a twisted mockery of a lover’s caress, he buried his face in the hollow behind her ear with enough force to wrench her neck aside, keeping her from turning to bite. His voice was a low, guttural snarl poured directly into her ear as he finally broke the silence between them.
“This ends today.”
He vanished into the ether, the bond snapping away like the jolt of wakefulness that ends a nightmare.
Sound slammed back into the room, flooding her ears with a roar that strangled her every thought. Rey staggered, stumbling along the wall's length as sobs tore loose from her heaving chest. Her arm throbbed wickedly when it was finally free to drop, the pain and the overwhelm of her circumstances bringing her to the razor’s edge of collapse. The floor had never before looked so impossibly inviting, the cool duracrete seeming to promise relief for her hot, tear-streaked cheeks and racing heart.
Now was not the time.
Acrid smoke curled from where her spray of blaster fire had hit within the storage center, scattering a few of the supplies and gouging blackened scorch marks on the walls. The room reeked of burned metal and ozone as she gathered her feet under her once more, not even pausing to wipe her tears before bolting for the exit.
Rey burst through the doors, running at full tilt and shouting evacuation orders to anyone who would listen as she made her way to high command. Her pulse hummed like a cycling hyperdrive, a frantic counterpoint to the silver band’s slow and steady blinking—each flash a silent taunt as it blithely transmitted her location to the datapad last seen in the hold of her bond mate's hands.
Supreme Leader Kylo Ren and the might of the First Order were coming.