The library closes early on Fridays, and neither one of them has other places they need to be, so Rey starts coming over to Kylo's home as soon as she escapes work. If her playing hadn't improved so much, or if her weekly takeout wasn't so tasty, Kylo might complain.

"Maz is a culinary genius," he groans one Friday night, licking his chopsticks after polishing off the last morsel of beef. Now that his plate is empty, he's not quite sure where to put his hands or how to hold them. It's easier in front of a piano. The dinner table is still unfamiliar territory.

Rey's stomach grumbles audibly over the rain pattering on the roof. "Are you done with that?" she asks, prodding the container of rice noodles at his elbow. He dips his head—noncommittal—but Rey does not wait for permission before diving chopsticks first into the leftovers and slurping up every last noodle. She leaves the broccoli, a few forlorn stalks that peer up at Kylo when he examines the extent of her devastation.

"Two more bites left, but now you're done?"

"Mm-hmm," she mumbles between nibbles of an egg roll.

"You can't just scavenge the best parts of the dish!" he argues, picking up the container to shove in her face: proof of the broccoli she abandoned.

Her only defense: an extra "mm-hmm," filtered through a bite of sweet and sour pork. Kylo follows her trail of destruction to find the pork all gone and pineapple left soaking in the red sauce.

"You left the pineapple, too," he splutters. "Would it kill you to eat some fruit?"

She nods, chewing the last of the sweet and sour pork. "More for you!" Her chopsticks dart into the container he holds, withdrawing a juicy slice of pineapple balanced precariously between their tips and bringing it to his lips.

They freeze, all righteous indignation seeping out of Kylo and playfulness evaporating from Rey. This is unfamiliar, too familiar. An eternity passes, then another. She breaks it with a nudge of the pineapple against her target. The juice sticks to his lips.

Swallowing hard, he opens his mouth. The tenderness with which she deposits the fruit on his tongue surprises him. The smugness with which she crows victory does not.

"You can't just abandon the food you don't want," he lectures, a perfect imitation of a mother he won't admit he misses. His weak excuse for a joke doesn't land; Rey's celebratory smirk crumples and she stares hard at the empty takeout boxes as if she could refill them by sheer will.

With a brutal efficiency, she stands and clears her plate. "I came for the piano." Her brusque tone cuts through their attempts at camaraderie. "Let's play." At the piano some of the unexpected tension rolls off of her shoulders and into the Bach piece she's spent the last week butchering. ("It's too precise," she claims when he asks if she's struggling to sightread it.) The rain mimics her ferocity as it pounds against the solar's windows, increasing in intensity as she exhausts herself at the keys.

She plays and he watches, pretending to organize student records whenever she pauses under his observation. Tonight there is no jesting, no calls for him to play for her, and by the time the clock strikes eight, she packs up her satchel and closes the grand's top.

"Thank you for the food," he says, not knowing what else to say.

"Thank you for the piano," she says, and by way of apology: "It's been a long day." He walks her to the door and waves goodnight as she dashes from the safety of his porch. Unable to make out her shadow scurrying through the downpour, he closes the door and stands there for a minute, then two, cursing himself for his inability to dispel the awkward mood. Reliving the sensation of the pineapple bursting under his teeth.

A knock disturbs his reverie; he opens the door a beat too soon to find the object of his thoughts made material, on his doorstep for the second time this evening, albeit wetter than the first time. Rey moves to step inside, and he moves to let her.

The hem of her coat drips onto the wood floor. Puddles collect around her feet. When she pushes back her hair, a few drops speckle Kylo's shirt. How she managed to get drenched in a matter of seconds baffles Kylo, but he's pleased to see her all the same. "You swam back to tell me—?"

"My car won't start." No laughing matter, even for a mechanic. Her shoulders hunch; she stuffs her fists in her coat pockets and promptly removes them when she finds the fabric soaked through.

Misreading his sympathetic frown, she fumbles for her phone. "Don't worry, I'll call a speeder and be out of your hair in no time."

"No—no. I'll take you home." The rain renews its assault on the windows, drumming unsteady riffs across the roof. Peering out of the curtain, he assesses the situation. A clogged storm drain, a drifting mailbox, and a good eight inches of rain collecting in the parking lot. There her small sand-colored sedan sinks. His own car is up to its wheels in stormwater. Kriffing management, promising to clear the gutters before the rains hit. What a fool he was to believe it. "Your engine is wet," he guesses.

Her head snaps up from her phone, calculating. "What do you know about cars?"

"Enough to know it's too deep to drive anything out of this complex, speeder cabs included."

Again her shoulders slump. "Force knows that after a day like today the last thing I need is..." Then she cracks, a small gasp at first that Kylo mistakes for a laugh, followed by a sob too big to be mistaken for a shiver.

Torn between offering comfort and protecting her dignity, Kylo steps forward but makes no move to reach out. "Don't worry. We have what we need here—dinner, a roof, a dryer. Stay with me."

Kylo bites down a chuckle at the sight of a speechless Rey. She stares at him suspiciously until a hoarse approximation of her voice materializes. "I can't… You don't want…"

"I do," he says earnestly. Misliking the clench in his chest when her eyes soften, he adds, "Your lessons pay my rent. I have a vested interest in protecting you from getting swept out sea before next month's rent is due."

When she bends over to slide off her shoes, Kylo knows he won. "Fine, but only because you need to pay rent."

"Precisely." Her shoes are off, her expectant eyes on him. The evening yawns before them, a gaping jumble of possibilities that terrify and excite Kylo in equal measure. He wracks his brain for activities to fill the time.

"Hungry?" he offers weakly, although they ate only a few hours prior—apparently, a few hours too long ago for Rey's liking. The grin he receives is positively ravenous. Rooting around the kitchen cupboards, they attempt to cobble together a post-dinner snack.

"Corellian wine!" Rey gasps, cradling the forest-green bottle with the same reverence she approaches the Silencer. "This stuff's impossible to find. Have you heard the legends? At the peak of his career, Han Solo refused to go onstage without a glass… or two." She cocks her head, then hastily amends, "That's what they say, anyway."

His expression curdles harshly, and he snatches the bottle from her grasp without pausing to extract his nails from the skin of her forearm. As he slams the bottle in the back of a cabinet too tall for her to reach, she flinches. Monstrous, he knows, but he can't open that bottle tonight. So he wipes the scowl from his brows and dons his neutral instructor mask. "You're a lightweight," he says gently, trying to soothe the sting in both of their bellies.

"Am not," she protests, but she remains turned from him, one hand absently rubbing the skin he snagged.

"Please," he says, not entirely sure what he asks from her. She steps towards him, proffering her arm. Inspecting it turns into running a finger along the scratches, which turns into pressing his palm against the marks. Her pulse sputters, warm under his touch.

"It's been a long day," she says again. Excusing him. Inviting him. Pulling away demands more effort than Kylo intended. From a dusty cupboard, he scrounges a tin of sweet malla leaves: half apology, half excuse.

Reaching for the kettle that inhabits the back of his stove, he finds himself sharing, "My mother would make us tea on days like these."

Instead of asking questions that Kylo might bristle at, Rey nods solemnly. "Tell me more."

He turns on the faucet, filling the kettle for two. "She wore perfume that smelled like oro blossoms and chewed mint to help her sleep."

He ignites the stove. "This kettle was hers."

He sets down the kettle. It clangs against the burner. "She didn't cry when my father left."

"Did you?"

For a moment, there is only the rush of the gas, the flame. "You never talk about your parents."

"There's nothing to say." Water trickling down the kettle's sides sizzles, evaporating. Rey tracks the steam's progress enviously, fiercely, as if she wishes to escape the conversation. But outside the rain thunders on without signs of abating.

"I understand," he says, turning to give her privacy. He busies himself by measuring the leaves into cups, gathering spoons and saucers, and pouring water into cups once the kettle whistles merrily. Pushing a cup towards her, he shifts the conversation to a safer topic by leading her to the living room. "Let's play."

Her quizzical expression morphs into a groan when Kylo pulls out two decks of face cards from a sleek black cupboard. "Should've known," she mutters, but she accepts one deck and sits cross-legged on the rug in front of the couch, shuffling the cards with practiced ease.

Competition, Kylo quickly learns, fuels Rey. In the demo round, he beats her, ten cards to none, but after that she makes him pay for every card he slaps down. The tips of his fingers smart after a particularly rapid interchange that results in her stuffing the edge of her card under his and stealing a slice of skin from his knuckles. When their third game ends in a draw, Kylo laughs at her scrappy play style. When she beats him in game four, he's no longer laughing. He calls for a rematch, but she wins again with a triumphant crow. She's not a humble victor. Kylo relishes her celebrations, for persuading her to play is no small victory on his part.

When her onslaught overwhelms him, Kylo feigns exhaustion and taps out despite her protests. At his insistence, they clean up the cards and curl up on the couch in front of the TV, wrapped in separate blankets at opposite ends.

They jerk awake, a tangle of limbs, to a vibration from his phone. The rain drumming on the roof matches Kylo's pounding heart as Rey nestles her head into his shoulder. "I'm sorry," he murmurs, trying to soothe her back to sleep, but she shakes off her blanket with groggy determination.

"Bedtime," she croaks, twice before Kylo tears his eyes from the notification he received. His mother, again, this time with all the subtlety of a French horn. He leaves his phone on the couch when he ducks out of the room to prepare for his guest.

A pile of toiletries exchanges hands: a towel, washcloth, and extra toothbrush. He leads her to the spare bedroom that's part study and all storage, removing from the futon a stack of worn cardboard boxes, their lids taped shut. His muscles protest as he hoists up the boxes, then unceremoniously dumps them in a pile near the window.

"Leaving so soon?" she asks as he turns. Swallowing, he freezes until she nods at the stack of packages behind him.

He forces a laugh past the lump constricting his throat. "Someone… asked me to hold onto the boxes, just until he finds room to store them elsewhere."

"When will he come back?" He notes the concern in her voice, the worn stretch of carpet from the futon to the door, the angry dust coating the boxes. He hates the way his shrug mirrors the man whose belongings litter the room that should glow for Rey.

As she closes the gap between them, raising her arms to hug him, Kylo starts. To Rey's credit, she doesn't shrink back. She pauses until he looks her in the eye long enough to see the compassion that's not quite pity, until his arms reach up to meet hers. They stay like that for a while, his jaw resting in the crook of her neck, her head buried in his chest. The way her chest hiccups suggests that she's no stranger to loss. Kylo thanks the same rain he cursed only hours before. Tonight, he's not alone in a house too big for just him, with a piano haunted by ghosts.

"Call me if you need anything," he says after disentangling himself from her embrace. "I'm just down the hall."

She grins mischievously enough that Kylo begins to regret the offer. "How about a bedtime lullaby?"


On the road to drop Rey off next morning, Kylo swings through the Holdo Cup drive-through. Kaydel's working the window with a smirk wide enough to touch the braids framing her face when she spots Rey in the passenger seat. She snorts when Kylo slips her his card before Rey can reach for her wallet.

"This defeats the purpose of me paying for lessons," grumbles Rey, but the rose coloring her cheeks betrays her. Kylo would teach her for free to preserve this blush.

"You're my guest." He savors the warmth that spreads through his veins when he catches her grateful smile with a sidelong glance.

A bump at his elbow reminds him that they have an audience. Looks like Kaydel broke out a cardboard carrier for their drinks, no matter that it fits four cups and Kylo only ordered two. "Grande Americano," she sighs, her curiosity camouflaged as boredom. "And green tea for your—"

He won't take the bait, but Rey remains oblivious to the barista's fishing. "Student!" she finishes, reaching for her drink. "Thank you."

"Student," Kaydel repeats, eyebrows threatening to disappear into her hairline. "What's this guy teaching you?"

"Thank you, Kaydel." Kylo shifts the car into drive. She tosses the receipt into his lap before he has the chance to speed away. "Keep doing her," it reads in flowing script. Kylo crumples it and throws it to rest on the floorboards before Rey has a chance to squabble about the price of her tea. A glance in his side mirror shows Kaydel snickering as the car pulls out. Leaning out of the driver's window, Kylo thanks her with the flip of a finger.

Rey squeaks when she catches sight of his gesture. "I like her."

"That's just because she makes good tea," Kylo counters.

"Next time I'll buy," she swears, inhaling the steam and sighing after her first sip.

"Next time you get stranded in your teacher's home during a flood."

"You're not just my teacher," she says, so determined that Kylo almost believes her. "Tuesday lessons, sure. But Friday night takeout? Sleepovers? This makes us friends."

Until Rey points out the hammering noise at the next stoplight, his fingers drum a tuneless ode of joy on the wheel.


Soon the receipt from their morning coffee run disappears under the volume of overdue library books overflowing from the passenger seat, spilling onto the floorboards and threatening to spill out of the car each time Kylo opens the door. He stops to return them at the library on the drive home from a pit stop at Music, First Order (this time for proper music manuscript paper, not the copyrighted templates that Rey prints for fifteen cents a sheet at the library. He'll surprise her at the next lesson; her delight will bathe the solar in sun).

When he pulls up to the library, he spots a familiar sandy sedan with dents in the trunk and passenger doors that he could draw by memory. The same dented sedan parks outside of his house every Tuesday and Friday, and most Sundays, too.

Curiosity tugs him from the comfort of his car and the drive-through book drop into the library, up the staircase and past the science fiction shelves to the practice rooms. Three of them, he notes, poorly insulated and stocked with outdated equipment scrounged from wealthy patrons. Upon closer examination, all three of the rooms are full—one with a couple who seems more intent on making out than making music, another with a father on the keyboard urging his daughter on the flute to play the measure again but slower, and the third with Rey.

Despite the frosted glass on the practice space doors, he recognizes her not by the silhouette of her buns, but by the tune she draws from the piano, spinning silence into gold. This is the song that she played for him in First Order, the song he wrote a harmony for. He grips the knob before processing the motion, but hesitates.

Logically a small part of his brain understands that Rey must practice outside of his solar. Without extra hours on the bench, she couldn't achieve such rapid progress. But it stings, the thought of her waiting for a turn to sit at a donated upright in desperate need of tuning when his Silencer sits unused, longing for her touch after his students leave.

The notes she coaxes from this hunk of junk sound like she's playing a top of the line instrument, one of Hux's custom concert grands that he polishes daily. Not someone's secondhand garbage, gifted to a public institution as a tax write-off. Rey deserves better.

Just a few more minutes, Kylo rationalizes from behind the frosted glass. As her teacher, he has a vested interest in this practice. How else will he learn how she plays when he is not around to evaluate her performance?

A few minutes turns into a half hour, with Kylo shifting from foot to foot outside the little practice room and his overdue books forgotten in this car. Rey tackles the sonata that she stole during her first lesson before moving into the Chopin nocturne. Although Kylo only gave her the nocturne last week, her nimble navigation of the coda suggests that she has spent months acquainting herself with its minefield of sharps and flats.

One more song, Kylo swears, and then he'll leave—a small lie that even he doesn't believe. The next song pins his feet to the floor. He hasn't heard it before, not from Rey, not from any of the usual composers. It's simple, nothing quite as technical as the pieces she's played thus far, but etched into each note is a longing that settles low in his gut as he listens.

A few measures in and he's hooked. Then she opens her mouth and he's a goner. He has half a mind to burst in and demand that she reveal every secret talent she hasn't had a chance to share with him. He wants to know her from the beginning until now, pour through her memories and learn what makes up her soul.

Her voice sparkles, ice on pine needles, sunset over an ocean of sand. It slices through the notes that rise and fall from her hands, builds to a crescendo only to plunge into a bitter whisper. It sings of hunger, loss, and a hope thick like honey. Her voice is an island; the piano, waves that bathe its shores; Kylo, a swimmer willing to drown in her depths.

Though he wills it to continue, eventually the song ends. The library rushes to fill the void her voice leaves: clacking keys from a nearby bank of computers, the rustle of pages, and encouragement from the father and daughter rehearsing one door down. From Rey's room, he hears signs that her session is drawing to a close: the unlatching of a satchel, the folding of sheet music and the swish of a water bottle. Kylo hurries to his car, driving away before she discovers evidence of his presence.