AN: Inspired by the song It Will Come Back by our favorite sex crooner, Hozier.
Rey did not believe in "words to live by."
Words were fragile things, easily broken and easily used for ill means. Words talked her down on the value of her finds, words saw to it that she went hungry more often than not, and words were nothing to build one's life upon.
But, if she had to choose a motto, it would be this: Never feed a bloggin. It will come back.
She had made this mistake early in her life as a young scavenger. The vaguely avian thing had waddled up to her make-shift shack and, taking pity on a fellow lonely wanderer, she had fed it a few crumbs from her hand. The next night it returned, another bloggin in tow. She had been wary of this: she barely had rations enough for herself, let alone two hungry birds. She gave them a scant scattering of water bread before slamming the door-what door there was-in their beaked faces.
She did not feed them again, but they returned, each night with more and more of their squawking comrades, always demanding more. Eventually she was forced to abandon her shack and make a literal run for it. The gutted AT-AT became her new refuge after she had picked it clean of anything valuable. And, ever since, if she saw a bloggin approaching, she threw rocks at it.
Never feed a bloggin. It will come back.
So, really, she should have known better.
Rey slept on the floor. Or rather, she made her pallet on the floor. The bed wasn't something she could stand, no matter how hard Finn insisted the regulation pilot mattresses were. (She didn't pry into why he knew this fact so acutely. Poe was a good man.)
But anything other than the hard grit of the floor made less cold with layers of blankets was too luxurious for Rey. A softness that felt too cloying and left her sore the next day-a stiff, aching reminder of the comfort her body simply refused to accept.
Every night started with the dragging of her blankets to the floor, the careful arrangement of them. Then she would lay on the thinnest slice of soft her body could tolerate and waited for sleep or morning-whichever came for her first.
It was usually the morning.
Then she would pick up her blankets from the floor and dump them back on the bed. Not making it up too neatly, so it might seem to her friends that she had slept there.
She wasn't alone anymore, she wasn't waiting. Rey didn't understand why she still could not find rest. In Jakku, with the logic of a child who never learned the meaning of wasted optimism, she rarely slept in case those that left her would come for her in the night. The softest of noises would wake her, and she'd run out into the blue-black of the desert night, searching the sky for her life's continuation.
Eventually, like her hard learned lesson with the bloggins, she stopped jumping from her pallet in blind excitement. But still she woke.
The mystery of her abandonment was still left unsolved, but she left! She wasn't waiting. Jakku was behind her and she was looking forward.
Why, then, was she still awake?
Kylo Ren went for walks. Back on Starkiller, he would walk those clinical hallways endlessly, as if searching out the sleep that evaded him. He sought sleep in the library, through reading about the rites of passage that might grant him the peace he so desperately wanted.
These ancient tomes, old enough to still be bound in books rather than projected by holos, spoke of any number of tasks he might take to find relief. To find solace in the complete Dark.
But once he killed his father, all he found was another set of footsteps echoing in the empty hallways on his nightly sojourns. The senseless death of Han Solo kept him company now, and was a chatty companion.
The grief of his mother. Of Chewbacca. The failure of a mission fifteen years in the making. No opportunity to apologize. No way to make it right. Still that pull to the Light, you foolish boy. No father. No father. No father.
Rey felt especially restless that night. Plagued by a guilt she didn't understand, like walking in a room but forgetting why she had come in. She felt a need to go for a walk.
He killed his master next, as the books directed. Surely the death of Snoke would bring him peace. Pull him fully into the embrace of the Dark. Isn't that what was done? Isn't that how it worked?
But now he was untethered. Where the death of Han Solo gifted him a constant companion to remind him of his failure, Snoke's absence was that alone: an absence. A void he had grown so used to being filled with goading, snide encouragement, derision at Kylo Ren's weakness-it was silent now, and he didn't know how to place one foot in front of the other without his master's direction.
Rey threw off her thin blanket with a grunt. Her skin was practically crawling.
Something wasn't right. Something more than her aching loneliness was propelling her out of the relative comfort of her pallet. A feeling she thought she recognized.
Then he came to his mother, those useless tomes be damned, with a list in hand. This First Order base. These officers who might pose a threat to rise in the absence of a Supreme Leader. Schematics. Battle plans. Training exercises. Homes of dignitaries. This, and this, and this!
But the memory of Han Solo followed Kylo Ren to the Resistance base, made all the more corporeal in this close proximity to his mother, to those that missed his father most. His father was quieter now, but insistent.
Not enough. Never enough. No father. No father. No father.
There was something else that plagued him on this distant planet, this heart of the Resistance. A wrenching longing that seemed to swell with the coming of night. The saddest of hope.
So he walked.
Rey went to the window.
She saw him pacing slowly on the beaten path that joined the outcropping of barracks. Recognized the sour tang of guilt that needled at her.
He turned to her, saw her through her window, and remembrance washed over them both.
She walked out onto the small porch that was attached to her modest housing. The night was pleasantly warm around her. He stood still on the path before her house, waiting for her to say something.
He hadn't expected her to say: "Come in."
She didn't know what to do with him once he was inside, but the crush of his own pain was duller, and she felt less alone with him here, so she lay down on the pallet.
He watched her for a moment, wondering at the empty bed, then lowered himself to the floor beside her. Not touching, but sharing space.
It was light and restless, but they slept.
He left early, but not without waking her up. Just a small nudge through this fragile link they shared and she opened her eyes. She was silent as she looked up at him as he knelt beside her on the floor.
She should say something.
But he just reached out a cautious hand instead, touched shy fingers to her cheek, and left her quarters.
Finn remarked how rested she looked that morning. For some reason, she felt guilty for why that was so.
The next night was much the same, though Rey had a name for her restlessness. She felt him outside her window and almost laughed at his audacity. Did he think this is how it was now? That one night set a precedent?
When she opened the door for him, she was reminded briefly of breadcrumbs in an outstretched hand.
He lay down first this time, near the same place on her pallet that he had lain the night before. It was as if he is giving her an option. Waiting to see how closely she would lie down next to him.
He noticed the scant few inches she drew into him from the night before, and slept all the deeper.
He left in the dark morning with a nudge and a touch to her cheek, and Rey buried her face in her thin pillow as if trying to grind the feel of his fingers deeper into her skin.
The next night, he took off his dark grey outer shirt, leaving him in trousers and an undershirt that showed the strength of his arms, the vastness of his shoulders. She looked at him for a long moment before settling into the very middle of the pallet, waiting.
He aligned his body to hers, his front to her back and laid a heavy hand on her hip.
They slept until morning, almost too late for him to escape without detection.
Rey slept deeper now, small noises passing undetected over her. When she did wake, she felt no need to look for them, no need to just check.
She had something, she had someone-someone who seemed more whole every night he came to her, brought less pain in his wake-and all she had to do was snuggle closer.
Han Solo visited less often. At first he would sit in the corner of Rey's room, keeping centry over Ren's attempts at absolution.
Eventually, he left him alone at night, only pacing behind him during the day, remaining silent. This was likely because the whispers that followed Kylo Ren on the Resistance base were worse than what the spectre of his father could muster.
Jedi Killer.
Once he had preened at the shoddy moniker, and now it struck him low and hard. He killed Sith, too, but that counted for little when there were empty bunks in the barracks due to him, weathered headstones on the distant planet where Luke used to hold academy for those who would not join Ren as a Knight.
But that slipped from him like a heavy cloak when he crossed the threshold of Rey's rooms, shucking his boots and crumpling to her floor.
Her ache was lesser, too.
One night, after several weeks of this shared vulnerability on the floor of her room, Rey was jostled rudely awake. Ren slept with her tucked into him, the curve of her filling his hollows, his arm clasped firmly, almost possessively around her middle.
Now he was dragging her body to him and up into his arms. In her delirium, she was barely aware that he had stood up before she was dumped unceremoniously into her empty bed. He threw the blankets in a heap on top of her before climbing in after them. She looked at him bewildered as he arranged the blankets with the sparest of movements and snatched her back against him.
He was still for another moment before disengaging from her again and tugging off his undershirt and throwing it to the floor. When he pulled her back to him this final time, the unsettling warmth of his naked chest burned through the tunic she slept in and set her heart to racing. He held her obscenely tight, the softness of the mattress seeming to pool their bodies together even closer.
"Comfortable?" she asked coolly, though this nearness of him, the heat from his broad chest made her anything but. A warmth crept over her, originating somewhere below her belly. Her heart hammered so fiercely, she was sure he could feel it through her back.
"Yes," he grumbled into her hair, before falling decidedly back to sleep.
They slept in the bed now, and Ren without a shirt. It was a different sort of closeness than huddling on the floor together, hoping to find relief from grief, from loneliness.
This was a grave sort of intimacy, one that was difficult to retract once it had been extended. Now Rey needed the hot of his skin to feel lulled to rest. The softness of her bed wasn't cloying now, but inviting, reassuring.
She'd taken to turning into him, pressing her face to his skin just below his collarbone. Her tunic she's traded for something much...less. Thin straps that held up loose cotton, leaving her arms and shoulders bare to feel more of him.
His fingers slipping beneath the waistband of her muslin pants, just so. Not indecent, only an inch lower than what her rucked up shirt showed of her back, but still more. Touching just that much more of her body as they drifted off together.
It was comforting until it was not, and the night she couldn't stand to sleep with his body pressed into her was the night that he reached suddenly to her face. Roughly knocked a knuckle under her chin, bumping her face upward.
Kissed her.
It was different now. Before, they could play at just sleeping, though they clung tighter each night, their nightclothes dwindling to expose more and more hungry skin. It was comfort. It was solace. It was innocent. It had nothing to do with bodies, but with company. Not intimacy, but amity.
But he kissed her. And she was kissing him back. It was bodies, it was intimacy, it was need. Those long fingers were creeping just a little more and more beyond decency.
She was kissing him hungrily and was no better than the hordes of bloggins that ran her from her first home. She had extended her hand, she thought, her palm full of crumbled water bread-but perhaps he had extended his. And now the consequences were nudging hard against her thigh, tickling curious fingers up her bared stomach.
She broke away, scrambled back away from him on the small bed. He sat up, panting, his dark hair mussed and his full lips fuller from her avarice. Bed sheets pooled at his waist and she could almost imagine he was naked beneath them. Naked and panting in her bed.
All because she wanted to sleep.
They weren't sleeping now.
"I don't want this," she said, her voice quavering as her body began to shake.
"You shouldn't want this," he corrected with labored breath. He didn't move toward her.
She shook her head. "I want sleep!"
His mouth quirked into what she assumed was a smile, so disused the gesture seemed. "We can sleep after."
That rocketed a tremor through her. Doubt flooded her for a moment, wondering at his intentions. But she dismissed it as the playful grin dropped from his face, was replaced with something like fear that she might send him away. Months spent sleeping in her bed, only sleeping, seemed a long gambit for her seduction.
"I'll go," he whispered, and stood before she could think differently. She watched in silence as he pulled on his shirts, his boots. He didn't seem angry, but that crippling pain, that guilt over so many ill deeds was rising like a dense fog around him.
He did reach to her cheek, that silent farewell usually saved for the morning, and touched her briefly.
Once he was gone, Rey felt as isolated as if she were curled up in the oxidized corpse of a fallen AT-AT, waiting for the sun to rise.
He was back to walking, night after night, wearing ruts in the paths between the buildings. Every now and again he'd stop, swing a fist into a tree in silent anger, then turn that bloodied fist to his own skull, beating the failure from his mind.
The memory of his father watched and said nothing.
Rey was back on the floor, back in her long tunic. The bed never seemed like hers, but now for some reason it seemed like theirs and she couldn't stand to be in it by herself. She was sleeping feather-light, starting at the too loud sound of her own heartbeats. She only just resisted the urge to go to the window. To just check.
It couldn't be unlearned; she knew the warmth of his body and how readily sleep could come if she just let it.
It hurt, walking this close to her window. But he couldn't keep away, like a migrating animal following the path tread by his kind for thousands of years. He could feel her, feel how alone she felt. It tore at him, and he nearly howled at the pain of it.
He was out there. She could feel the tortured company he kept, the name he would murmur against her skin on those particularly difficult nights near the beginning. She curled up into a tight knot on her tangle of blankets, wondering why she had wanted him gone in the first place.
He knocked a gored fist against the side of his head, making his ear ring, willing himself to just turn around and leave.
She finally ran to the door, could feel him approaching it from the other side. Yanked him into her room.
She slammed the door behind them and turned to him.
Her breaths were heavy and labored as she looked at him standing there. He was so large in her small room, his broad back completely blotting out the spill of moonlight through her window.
"I'm tired, Ren."
He nodded, his breathing coming in difficult heaves as well. "I am, too, Rey."
She wet her lips, her eyes trailing over him without her really understanding why.
Then she nodded. "So, sleep with me."
He reached tentative hands to his shirt, pulled it off slowly, taking his undershirt with it as he toed off his boots.
Barely breathed as he watched in surprise as Rey pulled off her tunic, leaving her naked to the waist.
Waited only a moment before pulling off his trousers. Another moment before peeling off his fitted underwear.
Rey's hands shook as she hooked thumbs into the waistband of her muslin pants. He watched those shaking hands drag the pants, and her own underwear, down slender legs.
She stood up quickly, and rushed past him to the bed, scooping up the wad of blankets from the floor. Sat stiffly in the middle of the cot with the blankets piled in her lap.
He walked slowly to the bed, the smallest of swagger in his steps. He gave Rey time to see him, to see how he wanted her already. Smiled at her apparent nervousness as she clutched the crumple of sheets in her hands. He came to the very edge of the bed
"We can just sleep, Rey," he said, voice soft. "I'll put on my clothes and we can just sleep."
Her eyes roved over his chest, her lip caught loosely between her teeth.
"Do you want that?" he asked.
Her eyes traveled lower, then came quickly back to his.
She shook her head. "No."
Bending forward, he swiped the blankets from her lap. He steepled fingers on the mattress on either side of her and leaned forward. "Then come here and kiss me."
She rose to her knees, her mouth meeting his at his words. Her hands went to his hair as his large hands encircled her waist, drawing her flush to him. They were closer in height with her kneeling on the bed and him standing beside it. She had never really noticed how disparate they were in size, as they were always the same height lying down.
In one swift twist, a steel arm wrapped around her waist, he landed on his back on the bed, swinging her atop him. She laughed as she tumbled onto him and settled her knees on either side of his hips. The sound squeezed at his heart and he made special pains to remember what her joy sounded like. Swallowed the taste of it as he kissed her again.
When she settled onto him, her hands planted on either side of his head, he could feel how wet she was against the skin below his navel. He groaned into her mouth at the feel of it, reaching fingers to her center. She surged up his body at the contact, breaking their kiss to cry out. At her forward movement, he was able to duck his head, find a pebbled nipple with his lips. The sound of her laughter again, in surprise and startled delight.
"Oh, Rey," he mumbled against her breast. "Do that again." He used the slightest scrape of his teeth this time and she did, that enchanting, unbridled laugh.
If he'd known how thoroughly loving her body would wipe him of his demons, if he'd known that is was more than scratching an itch but a salve to his wounds, he might have kissed her sooner.
But had he kissed her sooner, she might not have responded quite like this.
He slipped a finger inside her and she fell to her elbows, her cheek along his as she breathed hot, heavy breaths into his hair. He settled his other hand on her hip, guiding her back. She was losing control now, and needed little prompting. Reaching a shaking hand down their bodies, she grasped him lightly, guided him to her.
His hand still on her hip, he helped her lower herself onto him, turning his mouth into her cheek to whisper assurances to her, to not go too fast, to take only what she wanted.
But she seated herself to the hilt and he pressed his head back into the mattress at the feel of her.
Once she had him, really had him, she rose again to her hands. Looked down at his face twisted in oversensitive rapture.
This changed things, and she was glad for it. The air around them was lighter than she had ever remembered it, and there was nothing in this room but the two of them, and their enjoyment of each other. As she began to move on him, feel the steady stretch of him within her, she marveled at the look in his eyes when he finally managed to open them.
He looked at her like he found something he had been searching for. Like a long journey was over and he was finally home. At peace. He raised up on his elbows and knocked her off balance, forcing her to wrap her arms loosely around his neck. She kept moving on him, rolling her hips in the way that made her body clench around him.
He sat up farther, watching her face at the changed angle.
It sent stars across her vision.
He was getting close, the height of his derangement and the tight, wet grip of her body bringing his end about much sooner than he wanted. He wanted to enjoy her forever, feel her come around him, but with the noises she made and the generosity of her body, he didn't think he would make it.
He wrapped his arms around her body, suddenly determined, and lowered her onto her back on the mattress. His scabbed knuckles had cracked open and he left a bright streak of blood on her narrow waist. She was losing her control, squirming beneath him to gain that perfect amount of friction. He pressed a wide palm into the softness of her above her pubic bone, applied pressure just there, and arched into her in slow strokes.
She unravelled in seconds, her clear voice ringing off the walls as she clamped down on him. He let go, then, and followed her down.
She wrapped her arms around him as best she could, and enjoyed the aftershocks quaking through her, wondering absently if she could remember the feeling of loneliness when she felt so complete.
When he regained his sense, he pulled her with him to a position more suited for sleep. (Somehow their heads had ended up at the foot of the cot.)
"Are you still tired, Rey?" he asked as he arranged her body into his, tucking her head under his chin.
She groaned against his skin, placing a soft kiss at the base of his neck. "Exhausted."
He tucked the thin sheet around them, stifling a yawn. "So am I."
She burrowed in closer, her voice thick. "So, sleep with me."
They slept through breakfast the next day.
Han Solo would likely never leave Kylo Ren-or was it Ben, now?-entirely alone. But his father liked the girl, and the girl was a good start.
Rey still refused to feed the wildlife that frequented the woods beyond her window, but she was back to living life without a motto. Back to learning her own lessons, instead of relying on the wisdom of others.
She also had taken to setting alarms on her holo. She kept sleeping through breakfast.
End.