"A TIE Silencer?" Rey exclaims upon entering Kylo's solar and spotting the grand piano engulfing a good fourth of the room. "This costs double my monthly rent. How did you…?"
"A gift," he says, then kicks himself in the silence that follows. He busies himself with sifting through the stack of primers he pulled in anticipation of her arrival. In his periphery, she runs a finger along the gleaming arm of the piano. It gleams in the sun streaming from every window bordering the whitewashed ceiling; he polished it twice as soon as they had set the appointment. When he turns to watch her worship, its ebony wood catches their faces, twisting their admiration and flinging it back gleefully. Their reflections' eyes meet, easier than turning to each other, and Kylo can't help but return the grin that Reflection-Rey so freely gives. Her hand still rests on the grand's arm, nails short and scrubbed free of grease. He wonders how her callouses might catch along his cheek.
He hesitates to break her reverie. "Ready?"
With visible effort, she drags herself from admiring the case to sit on the bench. "The first time I saw one of these, I felt something."
"I felt something, too," he admits, folding open the piano's top and propping it up.
"Whenever I play, I feel it again. Do you?"
He'd deny it if anyone else asked, but for this new student he nods, dropping into the chair next to her bench. She looks up expectantly. Something in his chest warms in her tractor beam stare. "Play me what you know."
She pauses, closing her eyes as if to summon up something from the bottom of her soul. There it is again: the simple melody from Music, First Order winding itself around the legs of the Silencer. Simple, one-handed, but it tugs at the back of his throat. As she plays, he notes her uneven rhythm, her arched hands.
Once the song trails off, she shrugs under his steady gaze. "I don't remember the rest."
"It's okay."
"It's not. But thank you."
After weeks of instructing grade school children desperate to earn stickers from the stash under the bench, Kylo marvels at her easy grace.
"Drop your hands." He models with his own. "Play like that for a long time and you're more susceptible to carpal tunnel." For a second, he's not staring at his new student. His father, hands bent, wavers before him. The vision disappears in an instant.
Rey follows his movements easily. "Like this?" He notes the new curve of her wrist, the adjusted spread of her palm. He looks for too long. But as her teacher, it's his job to notice.
"Perfect." He does not lie. "Where did you hear that song?"
"A long time ago." "I have this memory of a guitar, almost like a lullaby… My parents were musicians, I think." When she trails off and realizes that she's frowning, she laughs at herself, a giddy, apologetic thing that compels Kylo to join her. His laugh comes stiff, awkward, more of a bark than a laugh—still, it feels good.
"What else can you play?"
"The right hand part of a few songs. The C scale."
"Can you read music?"
"Never learned." That grin again. "But I'm a fast learner."
Flipping open a beginner's songbook, Kylo points to a scale. He plays it for her by memory. Without glancing at the sheet music, Rey's slender hands dance across the same scale, transposed two octaves up. He plays another scale; she repeats it after examining his performance. No hesitation.
He pauses, feeling the weight of her gaze as she tries to pick apart his face, an inscrutable mask. His fingers kiss a few keys without depressing them. A few strokes, and he has it. "Play your song," he commands.
When she strikes up the melody, his left hand joins in with a simple bass clef rhythm to complement hers. She stiffens, startled, but keeps playing. Their shoulders bump as she leans in. Kylo's thumb nearly misses its mark like a student attempting his first arpeggio. The exertion required to execute a simple harmony is negligible, but as the song draws to a close he's sweating like he just wrestled Schumann's toccata and won.
"Kylo! How did you do that?" Her grin is expected; the touch of his arm accompanying it shocks Kylo into silence.
All he can muster is a choked, "Try it," buying himself time to rediscover his composure.
As Rey introduces her left hand up to the keyboard, Kylo worries that some of her fluidity might disappear. But she manages to sync it effortlessly to her right hand. The rhythms she attempts aren't complicated, but her grace is unexpected. It appears as if she's had prior training, and yet—
Her uncertainty surprises him. She makes no attempts to show off for him. She does not introduce the pedals, or take her eyes off her hands. But she hits every note, old and new.
"You've got a great ear and you're observant," he says when they plunge into quiet again. She reddens at the assessment. "Let's work on your sight-reading and music theory."
"Next week?"
"Next week," he agrees reluctantly, noting the orange sunset reflecting off of the piano. Expecting her to balk at the workload, he hands her a beginner's book with thick notes printed big enough for him to read halfway across the practice room. After flipping through the first few pages, she reaches over him to grab a second sheet—a sonata, much too advanced for someone who can't sightread.
Kylo holds up a cautionary hand, tapping the sheet music in her grasp. "You won't be ready for this by next week."
"I think I can handle it myself," she snaps, reverently packaging both the beginner workbook and the sonata in her satchel.
What's he to say to that? She sweeps back the tendrils of hair escaping her buns and sweeps out of the music room, only to linger in the hall.
"Next week?" she asks again.
"I may have an opening on Tuesday." A lie, but he'll free up that afternoon to see her sooner.
Her fingers nonchalantly weave around the strap of her satchel, but the bounce in the balls of her feet belies her excitement. "I get off at six."
Rey's stomach growls again, just as she approaches the climax of the piece. She thumps the keys in frustration. "Maybe six wasn't a great idea. On the day I forgot to pack a lunch, too."
"You haven't eaten since breakfast." A statement, not a question, but Rey nods anyway.
"There's time after our lesson."
Kylo's on his feet—skin prickling at her choice of possessive—halfway to the fridge before Rey catches him with a shout. "It's alright, really!" Her protest does nothing to dissuade him from plumbing the depths of his fridge.
"Ravioli or leftover chicken stir fry—your choice."
"I can wait—"
"I can't. Ravioli or stir fry?"
"Ravioli, please… if it's not too much trouble." She stumbles over her apologies, repeats them like a rosary until Kylo hands her a bowl and fork and tells her to eat. Her mouth full, a companionable silence descends over the kitchen, almost enough to pretend that they're eating a proper meal and that she's a proper guest.
Predictably, Rey fights him over the dishes. When she wraps a hand around his bicep to forcibly drag him from the sink, he catches himself leaning into her touch and backpedals to the safety of his music solar. As he waits, he plays the first page of a composition so old he can't remember writing it. Then another page, and by the time she wanders in, wiping her hands on her pants, he's at the final measures: fast, staccato barbs thrown by both hands, leaving him caught in the crossfire.
A smattering of applause does nothing to disguise the wrinkle in her nose. "You didn't like it," he guesses.
"No," she says, crooking her head to one side. "You played it flawlessly. The notes just… fought you every step of the way. Doesn't it get tiring, all that fighting?"
He can't shake the sounds: a shattering bottle, a slamming door, and a boy seeking solace in the only instrument loud enough to drown out the arguments. "Yes, it did."
