Rey spent most of her life starving. Whether it was because she could not find any scrap worthwhile or Unkar Plutt felt like making her miserable, portions were often scarce. She had become used to being too weak to realize her own debilitating thirst, what little rangy muscle she built up during her climbs on felled starships wasting away, and the relentless fatigue driving her to want to curl up on a sand dune somewhere to die.
She never did, of course; she had to survive so her family would find her. They would take care of her. They would hold her and love her and make sure she never had to be hungry again. They had to.
It is insulting, revolting, even, that Kylo Ren constitutes one of the handful of people that ended up caring for Rey instead. Certainly, Rey puts Finn and Han and Chewie and Leia and a lot of other people besides ahead of Kylo Ren on that list, but the fact remains that he is on it at all.
His was a sick, twisted sort of care, involving imprisoning her, forcing more food than she ever got in weeks on Jakku down her throat, and pressing his lips to the bruises that he himself had wrought on her.
And now, it seems, she is about to experience his special brand of care once more as the monster isolates her from her friends with the intention to abduct her.
Rey knows that she should not have broken off from the main assault against the First Order when they attacked the Resistance on D'Qar. She knows that she should not have caught sight of the blood red flash of Kylo Ren's crackling lightsaber in the heat of battle and run toward it rather than away.
The sounds of battle disappear into the distance and then all but cease completely with only the faint echo of explosions to signify its existence. As she follows him, she tries in vain to keep quiet, unused to having to sneak around on the jungle floor rather than yielding sand. She cannot seem to go more than a few steps without breaking a twig or crushing a mass of leaves, but he never turns around.
Worsening her awareness of how much noise she makes is her stomach, which cannot seem to go more than a few minutes without churning and gurgling to remind her it has not gotten the allotted meals she has become used to. Rey digs her fist into her middle. The idea of eating before battle made her nauseous, so she had skipped out on her meals for the past couple of days after they received intelligence about the attack.
Finn, Poe, and other Resistance fighters had noticed, of course, and they tried to offer her food. Rey could not bring herself to tell them how sick it made her feel to have someone hold out offerings of nourishment to her. Their hands were suddenly covered in black. Ribbed sleeves stretched out over the bottoms of their palms. They were not content to wait for her to accept the food but rather prize her jaws open and force it all down, making her taste acrid leather in addition to the food. She felt bile sting in the back of her throat. She started to make a habit of only ever eating by herself in her room, but with the impending battle she could not even manage to do that much.
Rey reasoned at the time that the hunger would keep her sharp, as it had on Jakku. On the contrary, she feels sluggish and a dizzy, as though she wades through a bog after a nightmare personified.
And then Kylo Ren turns around. Rey draws her lightsaber, but he does not yet respond in kind. Instead, he looks her up and down much in the same way he did during their first meeting.
"Scavenger."
His distorted voice may not allow for much of his tone to seep through, but Rey can feel his pleasure at seeing her in a soft gush of the Force. She fights the urge to rub away the gooseflesh that breaks out on her upper arms. Being able to sense others' feelings in her mind as if they were her own, the ability to read him even with his ghastly mask on; it still disturbs her even after all of Master Skywalker's training.
He tilts his helm. "Nothing to say?"
Rey scowls at him and turns on her lightsaber, readying a fighting stance. "I'm not interested in talking to a monster."
Kylo Ren's fingers curl into half-formed fists. Rey does not need the Force to realize he is irritated with her continual denial to recognize him as human. That is a feeling he will have to get used to.
He draws his lightsaber. They fight, then, and for a moment Rey can put aside her memories of what had happened between them before. Not Takodana with his initial kidnapping of her, not Starkiller where he kept her prisoner and force-fed her, nothing. There is only the next step, the next swing of her saber, the next attempt to cut him down so he can never hurt her or anyone else ever again.
And then Kylo nails her in the stomach with a well-placed shove of his elbow midway through one of his lightsaber spins and Rey is reminded of how much it hurts. She coughs up a mouthful of bile as she staggers back. Kylo does not take advantage of the huge vulnerability. Instead he looks on with what Rey can only guess is curiosity and—and—?
The Force makes the presence of feelings of compassion he exudes clear as transparisteel.
It sickens her. Why? Why did he have compassion for her, of all people? Why not Finn or—her eyes prickle for a moment—Han?
Rey has a headache. She cannot decide if it is the hunger or the Force at work, but her head pounds as if it has switched places with her heart. The incessant whir of her lightsaber and the inconsistent, garbled crackle of his does not help matters. The light causes spots behind her eyes. She cannot concentrate. She slips and nearly impales herself with one of Kylo Ren's quillons. He steps back, saving her from driving herself into the beam.
"Oh, stop it!" She snaps as she attempts to gather herself. "Fight me like you want to kill me or you'll never win."
That was how she had always fought on Jakku. How she had fought him on Starkiller, for that matter, up until the last moment when something stopped her. Perhaps it was how pitiful he looked. Perhaps it is how pitiful she looks right now that stays his own bloodlust.
"I do not want to kill you. I never have."
Rey is interrupted before she can make a retort by her stomach growling again. She cannot help but hunch over and grab at her stomach. After so many years of starvation, she thought that she would be able to cope with hunger better, but it only took a short while of semi-regular meals before her body could no longer handle the severity without them.
Rey looks back up at Kylo Ren to see him approaching her at a fast rate and she hopes he has not chosen now to take her advice. Startled, she makes a wild stab in his direction. He parries it with insulting ease, then twists his wrist. The lightsaber flips out of her hand to land on the ground a ways away. Rey readies herself to call it with the Force. Kylo grabs the hand that she extends to do so. She wants to turn and attempt to dive away from him to free herself, but she finds that her body has been immobilized.
No, no, not again.
Rey fights the urge to panic. Master Skywalker taught her how to get around this trick. She just has to—it is only a matter of—
Kylo Ren is close. Too close. She sees her parted lips, her sweat-slicked face, her wide eyes in the chromium outline of his visor.
Thinking properly with him in her face is impossible.
Rey can smell him. Sweaty and ashy. She remembers being made to wear his putrid capelet as the only barrier between him and her naked body. The softness of it belied its rough, harsh appearance.
Kylo turns over her wrist so that the veiny underside faces him. His hands are enormous to the point of him being able to close one of them around her entire arm. Is she too emaciated or is he too inhumanly enormous? It is probably a combination of both.
He deactivates his lightsaber, clips it to his belt, and uses his freed hand to trace the bones that stand out in her hand and arm. "The Resistance has not been feeding you."
They had tried, she wants to protest. They had tried their best. There is something wrong with her, not them.
And they had at no point forced her to eat drugged food. Or forced kisses and wandering touches onto her. Or choked her.
"I would never have you fight in this condition," he says, reaching out further to run his fingers up her side.
Kylo stops when her stomach gives another sound of protest. He fans his fingers out across her middle. In an expression of the miniscule range of movement she is allowed, the muscles in her abdomen clench beneath his touch. His reach is so big, Rey has no doubt he could crush all of her innards to a pulpy mess of blood and gastric acid in his fist. He does not, of course, instead going for the far gentler and thereby far more repulsive gesture of rubbing her sunken belly affectionately. He reaches up with both hands to cup the sides of her face. Her vision is filled with his mask as he leans in toward her until there is nothing else to see.
"I will take far better care of you than them." He says it like a promise.
Just before he knocks her out with an overwhelming concentration of the Force, Rey wonders how much sicker he will end up making her.