One late September afternoon, a thundering at his door draws him from the warmth of his shower. He answers the door with only a towel slung around his waist. Rey peers back at him, hand raised to knock again. Sheepishly she drops her hand, wiping it on her coveralls, looking him up and down before her ears flush pink.

"Kylo!" she splutters. "Could you… do you have something that you can put on?"

Her unexpected arrival, her cherry-red ears, the way her eyes skimmed him head to toe—all he can croak out is, "Your lesson isn't until six."

She shrugs, following him inside. "I got off work early."

"Wait here." He points to the couch a few meters past the door. "I have… some business to finish."

"I can tell," she says, and if he wasn't so focused on avoiding her face, he might have detected appreciation woven into her reply.

Five minutes later, he returns, towel draped over his fully clothed shoulder and hair dripping down the collar of his button-up, to find Rey pressed nose to nose with the only photo on his wall. Not the only photo, exactly, but the only one featuring people: a younger Kylo with a shriveled husk of a man at his side; behind them, a battered upright.

When he joins her at the frame, she doesn't startle. Instead she rounds on him. "Snoke was your teacher!"

"Yes, he was."

"Composer of a dozen operas, director of the Coruscant Symphony for a season—even I've heard of him! You never told me."

Equal parts plaintive and ornery, her voice prods him to snap, "You never asked." When she hesitates, he grows cold. Not everyone comes from a family of barbs and snipes like he does.

But she laughs—sweeter than a symphony—and elbows Kylo with a familiarity he's not sure a handful of lessons warrants. "Fair. Let's play."


Rationalizing it as part of his official capacity as teacher, Kylo lets Rey educate him: which time signatures she prefers to play in, which fingering patterns come easy to her and which have her tripping over the keys, which leftovers she scarfs and which she leaves lingering in the back of his fridge. He learns that she balks at Bach, but takes to Beethoven with the same enthusiasm she brings to clearing out his secret ice cream stash.

When she arrives each week, they eat first, then move to the piano. Sometimes she pulls up a song on her phone to show him over dinner. Sometimes at the table, he pulls out the score to the song she showed the week prior. She smiles then, eyes crinkling and food forgotten. When she bolts from the table mid-bite, he has to remind her to wash her hands before laying so much as a nail on the Silencer.

Sometimes she asks him to play. Most of the time he declines, wary of eating into her limited time to practice. Occasionally he indulges her, thirsty to observe her intense concentration on his craft. He sticks to his favorites like Prokofiev and Shoenberg. When he slips in a composition of his own, he never shares its origin, but he wonders if she notices how the notes coat his fingers like a second skin.

For all the grease smudged across her cheeks and the coarseness of her mechanic's coveralls, Rey craves softness in her music. "For kriff's sake, Kylo, would it destroy you to play something happy?"

He stretches both arms to their fullest height, lowering them only when he senses his shirt riding up. "Sakamoto isn't unhappy," he replies, turning to find Rey glancing down at the sliver of stomach and back again. When he catches her staring, her lips purse.

"Well, he isn't happy, either."

"In three minutes with one instrument, he replicates a spring rain in the garden." He tugs the henley back into place, a strange smugness weaving itself into the fabric of his movements. "It's not happy or sad. Jarring, perhaps, but flowing in turn."

Now her eyes flit anywhere but his face or his torso, landing on the trees sprawling beyond the east windows. "Balanced," she whispers. "I see."


Hux studies Kylo suspiciously when the piano teacher wishes him a good morning on his way into Music, First Order. He frowns when Kylo finds a Tchaikovsky concerto buried in the half-price bins in the back of the store. He gapes openly when Kylo leaves the store without running his hands over the newly-polished Starfighter, just to smudge it on his way out.

The barista at Holdo Cup notices his new mood, too, when Kylo leaves the change from a fiver in the tip jar and smiles when she holds up his grande Americano. "Finally a smile!" she crows. "Only three years in the making."

Suppressing his scoff takes too much effort. "Maybe you spelled my name right. Only three years in the making."

She pulls back the cup from his waiting grasp, inspecting the name emblazoned across the cardboard cozy. "Kylie Ben? Really?"

"Listen, Miss—"

"Kaydel," she interjects.

"Listen, Kaydel, I come here for the coffee, Force knows why." She slides his cup across the counter; he takes a sip. "I don't tip you for your commentary."

Skepticism radiates off of her as she turns to the espresso machine and fills a small glass. "You don't tip."

"I do now."

"Whoever you're doing, keep doing them!" she calls as he walks from the register to his customary couch by the window. Her cackles follow him as he flips her off, but he doesn't actually mind.


It starts with a harmony that Rey plays three times in a row until determining that the fault is not in her playing but in the song itself. "It sounds wrong here. You hear it, don't you?"

He admits the chord progression sounds off, but what's one note in a practice piece from a forgotten primer that only students encounter? To Rey, one note is too much. Her fingers alight on his chest—so sudden, so brief—before scrabbling for the pen he always stashes in his breast pocket. Then she draws a sharp next to the offending note, tests the revised measure with a flick of her left wrist, and grins wolf-sharp.

Her audacity glues him to his seat, presses him against the back like a starship springing into space. Who is she, a novice of three months' lessons, to correct a Windu Studios publication? Yet he has to admit, when she plays her modification, that the offending note no longer jars his ears. It blends in smoothly, just like the brush of her hand against his when she returns his pen.


It progresses with Rey's complaints about the dissonance in the pieces he provides her. All Kylo finds in her complaints is a challenge, so he roots around in an old box of pieces to find an old modernist composition she'll have to acknowledge as genius. The last piece his father tucked into Kylo's backpack before heading out, never to return. He dusts it off, crossing out the name printed at the top of the cover before producing it at Rey's next lesson.

Snatching the piece before he can open it, she examines the cover. "'Ben's Lullaby.' It sounds pretty."

"It's not," he replies shortly.

Unfolding the first page, she hesitates. "E minor?"

Kylo nods in reply, nudging her off the piano bench. So she can appreciate the complexity of the piece without the frustration of puzzling it out for the first time, he plays it once through. His muscles warm up with each line; they've traversed this territory many times prior. Still he keeps his eyes glued on the instrument spilling forth a goodbye under his touch. He can't look up until he closes the songbook.

"Your turn." She plays the opening page without pausing. Sight-reading, it seems, is a skill Rey acquired at the speed of light. On the second page, as the notes squirm from their soft dance into battle, the frown solidifies that flickered into existence during the first listen. Slowly her hands still before tapping a soundless melody into the space above the piano.

"I would change this flat to a sharp, and this half-note here—" From her bun, she extricates a pencil, poised to cross out the offending note.

A handful of pages worn at the edges and yellowed with age should mean nothing to him—not anymore—but the speed at which Kylo yanks the pencil from Rey's hand causes her to yelp. He rummages through the stack of booklets on the floor before sliding a blank sheet of composition paper on the rack in front of her. "Here," he says, shoving the pencil back into her hand. "Compared to Han Solo, you're nothing. He captures the disintegration of a family and calls it a lullaby. Let's see what you can do."

For a moment, she just stares. Then her mouth narrows, brows furrowing, and the sparkle in her eyes calcifies. A flurry of scratches across the blank paper ensues. As her buns bob furiously over her work, Kylo traces the notes of his father's final gift—the squalling, the fighting, and the apologies documented for the whole world to hear, sold for a profit. What a fool he is for thinking this piece would be the one to hook Rey. He can hardly stand it himself.

In his mind, "Ben's Lullaby" ignites, and with it, all of his father's works, his piano, the whole damn room. When Rey shakes him, he starts at the warm press of her calluses against his bicep.

"You underestimate me," she hisses, so sharply that Kylo wonders if she has mainlined his rage and made it her own. Then he can't think at all, swept away in a composition too ravenous for his liking. She creates friction, not half as dark as he prefers, but serrated. Each moment of dissonance she resolves quickly, shifting into easy resolutions. But it's there, the intervals she chafes against, vibrating through Kylo's veins. Despite the simplicity of the song, characteristic of a beginner's attempt to write music, Kylo finds himself marveling at the prodigy who wandered into his life and holds court over his thoughts.

Sure enough, she brushes off his praise. "Save it for the next one."


True to her word, Rey sketches another song, and then another. Sometimes she brings drafts to her lessons and plays the half-finished sketches for him; sometimes she writes alone at Kylo's Silencer. Sometimes she gets stuck, and Kylo overhears a frustrated stream of muffled curses from his place on the couch two rooms over. Often he lets her work it out. When he hears thumps, though, he always intervenes.

Another crisp fall night, they're bent over a song that Rey has been fighting for the last two hours. "This note has no place here," Kylo insists, scratching it out lightly. "The measure is crammed full." A stroke of his pencil tears the cheap printer paper that Rey uses to draft.

"It's a song," she grumbles, running her thumb along the hole.

"Make space for silence."

"You sure seem to know a lot about writing songs." She drops her pen, arching an eyebrow. "Do you compose?"

"No," he snaps, a shade too harsh for banter like this.

His severity prompts a quirk of her eyebrow, but Rey doesn't push it. She just picks back up where she left off, scribbling and testing half-notes until the clock winds down and she disappears into the dark.


Instead of her customary knock, she greets him with a text: Sick. Next week?

Tonight his house feels empty without her music to fill it. To fill the void, he goes out for coffee. Kaydel accuses him of moping. As if Kylo Ren would ever be caught moping. He chuckles at her audacity, but catches himself doodling on his napkin: a treble staff and a collection of notes too symmetrical to be his.

Even in Rey's absence, her music takes up too much space.


He broaches the question at the end of a lesson. "What model do you play on? An upright?"

She can't disguise the clench of her jaw. He wonders if the question was too abrupt, kicks himself for disturbing the first truly companionable moment they've shared since she's started composing. "Keyboards mostly. An upright when I can find one."

"Rey, where do you play?"

"The library."

"The public library?"

"Yeah." She crosses her arms, shifting on the bench. Daring him to dismiss her. "You can reserve a room, 30 minutes or an hour. For free."

"You don't have a piano at home?"

"I'm a mechanic, Kylo, not a musician."

You could be. "If you ever want to practice and a room isn't open…" He shrugs and swallows, and fights back a blush when her eyes widen.

"You don't know what you're doing," she warns. "You'll be sick of me by the second day."

He wants to reply, "I'll never tire of you." Instead he slides a key in her bag and prays to the gods that he hasn't turned the whole thing—whatever this thing is—into bantha fodder.

The click of a key turning the deadbolt to his front door later that week assuages his fears. Rey smiles, plays for exactly an hour, and leaves him with a wave and a plate of chocolate cookies that he demolishes before she returns to play the next day.