11/1-30/35

"If you don't like it, why do you do it?" Rey asks as Kylo starts his morning shave.

He's feeling rather grumpy. He's finally, sort of, most nights, sleeping for more than three hours and his body has responded to this by begging him for more sleep, and now when he wakes up he feels dead on his feet, eyes and joints glued shut, and loathing any and everything that pulls him out of his bed. So, right now, just about everything in the morning annoys him, and having to rasp a blade over his face is just the top of the pile of his morning shit list. So, he's annoyed about having to shave, and not looking forward to the rest of morning, where he gets to go to more meetings and try to somehow make this fucking regime work. "You don't have to comment on every thought I have," snaps out of him.

Meanwhile, right little Rey of sunshine is looking up at him, insufferably perky in the morning, because she gets to go do fun stuff today.

"Well, if you weren't thinking about it so loudly, I wouldn't have said anything."

She's leaning against the sink, cleaning her teeth, as he's standing in front of it, holding his razor, about to shave. He glances at his razor, and then glances back at her, and back to the razor, which he doesn't really like at all.

"You're the man in charge now, it's not like you've got to make yourself look a certain way to please anyone else."

He sighs. That's not why he shaves, even though he doesn't enjoy doing it.

She reaches over and lightly touches his chin, which is rough with stubble. "It doesn't stay that rough, does it?"

"No. It'll get fairly soft. Not like my hair, but, softer than most beards."

"You've grown it before, then?"

"A master could have a beard. That was… part of the look." He rolls his eyes viciously and begins to shave, almost taking a chunk out of his chin before he makes himself focus and calm. "But it doesn't come in all that well other than my chin and neck and mustache area." He taps his cheek between his ear and jaw. "Five long, scraggly hairs there does not a beard make."

She gets a flash of him, impossibly young, younger than he was when Luke attacked him, trying to make himself look like Master Ben. Trying to be Master Ben.

"I shaved it off when I changed my name."

"Oh."

If asked, Kylo is aware of the concept of poverty. He knows it's a thing. He knows that a decent number of people joining the First Order are doing so to get out of it. He's just… sketchy… as to what's actually involved in being poor.

It's not anything he's ever really seen or felt or been near beyond say, walking through a poor town, or being told that not everyone has enough to eat, so…

He just doesn't know.

And it's not even anything he's ever given much (any) thought to until his third or fourth real meal with Rey, the first one that required cutlery, when he notices that she doesn't know how to use a fork.

It's not that she can't stab her food and shove it into her mouth. It's that that's exactly what she's doing. She's got her hand wrapped around the whole of the end, it's in her fist, and she is stabbing her food with it.

And this is when it occurs to Kylo that no one ever taught her how to use one, and that it's entirely likely that she may have never, before her time where the books were, ever had a meal that required one. And that's where the vast, gaping chasm between anything he may have ever imagined poverty to be, and what it actually is, becomes achingly clear to him.

He reaches out to gently show her how to hold it, and she glares at him, hard, before he gets his fingers halfway to where she is. So he stops, raises his hands in a peace gesture, very much does not sarcastically think something along the lines of if you want to eat like a savage, more power to you and she very much does not think something like fuck you and your fancy manners, your lordship. And he doesn't almost smile at that because it reminds him of a moment of his… joking with his mother, irritated, but not angry, because he didn't know something that was second nature to her.

But the next few days, he eats carefully, and slowly, and she picks up his table manners, which are more formal and finicky than most, but that's what happens when the person teaching you to eat was trained to flow through political circles from her girlhood and expected him to be able to do so, as well.

It's probably their twentieth meal together, maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less.

Breakfast. C8 knows to leave a tray, with coffee, whatever breakfast is (He tells the chef to just give them a large portion, say 2000 calories, of whatever he's making for himself for breakfast and dinner, and at least as of this point, it's been something different every day.), and a datapad with whatever he's got on his schedule for the day at his door.

Today it's coffee, porridge of some sort of grain with spices and dried fruits, and eggs next to it cooked with a smoky-salty meat mixed into it. Normally, they eat from the plate together.

He rather likes it, and it looks like Rey does, too. And she does normally eat less than he does, but she'll normally get almost half the plate and he'll usually wrap up the rest of it.

But today she's had about a quarter of the food on the plate.

"Don't like it?" he asks.

"No, it's fine. I'm just not hungry."

He nods and continues on with his breakfast.

A moment later, he's staring at the food still on their plate. He's eaten his 'comfortable' amount, and she doesn't appear to be in any hurry to eat what's left, so he does what he's been trained to do since he was a child, and keeps going, working on finishing the plate.

He's about three bites into what she hasn't finished when Rey says to him, "Why are you still eating?"

He's staring at her like this is blatantly obvious. "There's food on the plate."

"I know. But you aren't hungry."

He doesn't have to dig deep into her mind to find a million memories of clawing hunger. "You're going to tell me to waste food?"

"Uh…" She blinks, and then pokes a little in his, because she can't relate how both of them, full, on a ship, secure in not just the next meal, but the one after that, and after that, and after that, fits with eating beyond feeling full. She does have to dig a bit to find a series of nannies lecturing a young Ben about how some people don't have enough to eat so he should always clean his plate. She sniggers. "Spoken like someone who's never been hungry. Like someone who's never looked at a person with enough fat on them to jiggle when they're just scraping by. Eating when your body doesn't need it is wasting it."

Kylo blinks, he's never even begun to think of it that way.

Rey takes the plate. "I'll take it back with me, eat it as a snack, or add it to the compost pile. Something that needs the calories can have them."

At meals they don't just learn about each other, but also about themselves. For such a long time, neither of them really ate. Kylo had his collection of protein bars and tubes of vitamin mush. Rey had her portions. Same thing, every night, every day, over and over and over.

The portions kept Rey at just a hair above the amount of food she needed to keep going. Any less and she'd have been losing weight. Kylo ate exactly the amount of calories the med droids said he needed to keep his body in the shape it was in, and not a bite more. Eating involved indulging his wants and he may have been allowed to do that with Snoke, but he still had the feeling that indulging any want beyond anger and violence was a shameful thing, so, whatever the minimum amount of food he needed was, he ate it.

So, neither of them actually really know what they like to eat. And each new meal is opening up not just the idea of food as something with interest and variety, but also a source of pleasure beyond sating a need.

That said, unlike sex, where they're fairly in synch on what constitutes pleasure, food is different.

Tonight the chef has made them a mix of vegetables and broth and… Rey has no idea, whatever those things are, they do not live on Jakku. It's some sort of ocean-going creature. It had eyes and wiggly bits, and all of those eyes and wiggly bits are very much eyes and wiggly bits and are not, in any way, camouflaged into the rest of the meal. Each one is about the size of her thumb, and they're awfully tasty, and she's happily slorping them down with a little sucking sound because they're kind of squiggly and soft, and a few little hums of pleasure, because they just taste good, and Kylo actually bolts out of the room because if he watches her snarf down another eyeball on a stalk while grinning at him because they're so yummy, he's going to be sick.

Apparently, blood is not the only thing that makes him squeamish. Which, not only did she not know about him, but he didn't know about him, either.

They learn that while Kylo will eat meat, and fish, and honestly, just about anything put onto a plate in front of him, he would deeply prefer not to be able to identify what creature it came from just by looking at it. (Rey finds it amusing that he's got enough empathy for their dinner that if he can imagine it alive, he doesn't want to eat it. He glares at her, and pushes his half of the frennian game hen to her, pulling her potatoes to him.)

Rey meanwhile will happily eat just about anything, looking at her or not, but she does not like anything that's too spicy-hot, and whatever that herb is that makes everything taste like soap. (The only reason Kylo believes her about the soap thing is that he can share how it tastes to her. She's rather jealous about the fact that it does not taste like soap to him.)

If there is meat in a meal, Kylo prefers it well-done. (He does not like his food to jiggle. Likewise he'd prefer it not squish between his teeth. That texture just puts him off.) Again, this is an area where Rey doesn't have much preference. It's possible there will be a time when a texture gets to her, but so far, it hasn't happened.

If it were entirely up to Kylo, most of the food would likely be vegetarian. (Properly cooked vegetables do not jiggle or squish. And while he may not like everything the chef makes, it's always properly cooked.) Rey would prefer that at least some meat show up in every meal. It's satisfying in a way veggies and synth-protein just aren't. (And, again, if it weren't for the fact that Kylo can literally feel it's true, he wouldn't believe it, but… It is true. She can go longer between meals if there is real meat in them.)

They're halfway into their thirtieth or fortieth meal together, and his fork is halfway to his mouth as he's digging into a vegetable and nut mix with lots of noodles in a sweet-sour sauce that they both like, really enjoying it, when Rey asks, "So… no meat?"

"Not in the house I was raised. It wasn't forbidden. My—he ate meat. My mother probably did, too, when she was away. But it wasn't part of Alderaan's culture, so my mother's staff never kept it in the house. Then Luke's: eggs, dairy, the occasional cock, usually cooked into a stew. All of the animals were worth more as milk, eggs, or fiber producers than as meat. So, we rarely ate them."

"We'd get portions. That's what Plutt'd call them. One portion was about a full day's worth of food. Maybe a day and a half if you were small. They came in little packs. You'd rip them open, dump it in a mug, mix in your water, which you also got paid in, and then it'd bubble up and cook itself. One lump of food. Sort of halfway between your protein bars and bread."

"What did they taste like?"

Rey has a hard time answering that. She knows what it tastes like, but translating it… She lets the flavor, smell, and feel of it fill her head. He nods, letting the sense of it fill his own head. It's not bad, but he wouldn't want to live on it. She smirks at that. "That's how I feel about your protein bars."

Women are different.

He feels a little stupid to just be figuring this out at the age of thirty, but… He's never had what anyone could come even close to calling an intimate relationship with one before.

The eight years he lived with his mother… near his mother… sometimes. She was gone more than she was home, and that's not an intimate relationship.

Training, on and off, for four years with Phasma did not an intimate relationship make.

And his two female knights spent just as much time, if not more, swathed in black, and hidden behind a mask as he did. The mask made it easier to live with having failed at being Master Ben Solo, after all, if he ever caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror or window, he didn't have to see his own face. He imagines they found a similar solace in their masks, too.

He wonders if that's part of not begrudging Rey the scar she left on his face. He never glances at himself and sees Ben, not anymore.

But he does glance at her, a lot, and see this person, who's just different.

She's so small. As they spend more time together, just in the same place, and touching, he gets a vibrant sense of her body against his, and casual things, like when he's spooned up behind her, that that tip of his elbow can rest at the crest of her hip, and his fingers can wrap around the top of her shoulder, hammer home how small she is. Her whole torso fits into the length of his forearm.

She smells really different. And, yes, Rey's a person, who often does really hard work, outdoors, in the hot, humid summer sun, so she doesn't always smell good. There have been more than a few days where getting into the shower is the first thing on the list of what they're doing. But she always smells different. When he's been working hot and hard and sweaty, he feels like he smells like something that died in a hot, humid place. She just smells sharp and sour. And when she's clean, or they've been taking an easy night, or touching each other, she smells like herself, sometimes stronger, other times fainter, but it's a very right smell. He likes how, if he doesn't get a shower in the morning, he can smell her skin on his throughout the day.

And she's smooth. Not her hands and feet, they're rough with callouses, but the rest of her… Her skin, her hair it's all so smooth. He'll spend hours, often when she's asleep, just stroking her skin, feeling it under his fingers, and how he's never touched anything this smooth before. Not anything alive, that is. He'll spend moments, when they're awake, trailing his lips and cheek and tongue against her skin, just reveling in how smooth it is.

And stroking her skin leads him to another difference. She's curvy. The round of her breast, the jut of her nipples, the dip of her solar plexus curving into the gentle swell of her belly. Her hips curve out into a line that feels like it was just made for his palm, swell into the round of her bottom, dip down into the long convex plane of her thigh or slip up to the concave line of her back.

And for as much as he'd prefer that his food not jiggle, he could happily watch all of her curves jiggle all day long.

And if said curves are jiggling, say with the extremely pleasant sway of her body on top of or under his, he finds himself contemplating how soft she is. How his hand can squeeze around one of those curves and feel the soft, gentle give of her flesh. There's hard, taut muscle under all of those curves, but her hard strength is covered over with a soft, smooth layer on top, and though he's not nearly philosophical enough to enjoy this sort of thought while he's squeezing one of those curves, later, when she's sleeping next to him, he knows that her body is a metaphor for her spirit, a strong, solid core with a soft, gentle, golden-flushed layer on top. He wonders if that means his spirit is pale, and hard, and scarred. (And, though it's a thought he won't allow himself at any time other than when he's almost asleep and his guards are down, he wonders if there won't, perhaps, be a time where that's not true.)

And later, when they're lying together, when their bodies have cooled, and she's asleep, she fits against him so perfectly. The back of her and the front of him, and a smooth, gentle line of breath and touch… He hasn't written anything in years, but it almost makes him wish he had his calligraphy set, if for no other reason than to trace that curve onto paper, and then tuck it into his tunic, worn against his chest, keeping it close to his body at all times.

Women are different. He's enjoying learning that immensely.

But they're also not that different.

"Why don't you have hair here?" he asks a few days later as they're lying in bed together, and he's gently stroking his fingers over her underarm. They shower together almost every day, and he's never seen her shave, and he can't imagine she waits to shave until she's on Lirium and her near-frozen lake. Not when he's got uncountable liters of hot water here.

She rolls her eyes a little at that. "Hair on Niima is… problematic. Mites. Little insects eat skin cells, and live in dark places, and their eggs stick to hair. I got a bad case of them when I was younger, and had to take everything off to get rid of them."

He winces at that.

"Once the hair's off, they don't have anywhere to lay eggs, so all you've got to do is kill the ones on your skin, and you're free of them. It takes about ten days."

That gets a harder wince as he imagines shaving his entire body every day for ten days. In a desert. With no water. "Everything?"

"The only hairs on my body were my eyelashes. And in really bad cases, people will take them off, too. Otherwise you might go blind."

Kylo's almost thinking that destroying Jakku was worth it just to eradicate those bugs. He traces his fingers across her underarm, and gently rubs her leg with his knee. "So, you shave? I've never seen you shave."

She shakes her head vehemently. "You don't shave in a desert if you can avoid it. I built a laser device. It zaps the hair off. Keeps it off for a few months."

He perks up at the idea of that. Because if he could take care of his face once every few months… "Could I…"

"Sure. If you want. It stings a bit."

"What's a bit?"

"You try it and see. A bit. Enough I do my underarms and legs, but nothing too sensitive."

"Why'd you keep doing it after you got rid of the mites?" He doesn't have a lot of experience with female bodies, but the few he's gotten close to had their body hair, or most of it.

"It feels nice. So much of Jakku was harsh and rough, and… this isn't."

He kisses her underarm, and her ribs, and hip, and then along her leg. "It does feel nice." He shifts up a bit and kisses her muff. "Not so nice here?"

"No, the zap's too strong for that. And you have to shave at least once, otherwise the hair on top of your skin catches fire." He feels a flush of horror at how she must have learned that. "And if you shave there…" She thinks about it. "Have you ever gotten sand in your shorts?"

"Thankfully, no." Though the idea of it makes him squirm.

"It's an experience I could have skipped, too."

He's looking at the little plexicup. It's been sitting in its bag, on the shelf, in his bathroom since Rey finished with it, and he's just… curious… about it.

She sees him eyeing it as he's brushing his teeth at the end of the day.

"You can look at it. It won't bite you."

He half shrugs.

She goes, takes it out of the bag, grabs his hand, and dumps it on his palm. "See, just soft, clear plexiplastic. Poke it a little, it's squishy."

He does, feeling like this is probably the single most surreal experience of his life. But, it is kind of squishy, and the rim is a little firm, and it's bigger than he thought it'd be, but still fairly small and… "Can you… feel it… you know…"

"Sometimes. Depends on the cycle. Some of them are really annoying and everything is sore, and, yes, I can feel it then. Other cycles, no."

"So… it's not the same, each time?"

She shakes her head. "It'll generally last about the same amount of time. And it'll generally come every twenty-sevenish days, but that means anywhere between twenty-five and thirty. I usually know when it's getting close by how I feel. But each one has different feelings."

"Physical or emotional?"

"Both. I didn't get my usually crabby and annoyed right before this last cycle, but my breasts were tender."

He pokes it again, and looks at it. "How do you get it out?"

She touches the little nub at the bottom, and pinches it with her thumb and forefinger. "It's easier if you squat. Same with putting it in." She shows him how she folds the rim. "And in it goes."

He's still looking at it like he might have to drop it fast so that it doesn't attack him. Then he looks at her, and she feels him sort of mentally blush all over.

"You're thinking loudly," that seems to be a good way to indicate she knows what he's thinking, and he can ask, without, like she had before, just picking the thought out of his head.

He bites his lips, rolling them together, not really sure if he wants to ask, but… He knows where it goes, so… "Does putting it in feel good?"

"Doesn't feel like much of anything…" She tries to think of any experience he might have that's even remotely similar. "Like… when you shake it off after you pee. That doesn't feel good, right?"

He quirks a fast smile, handing her the plexicup back. "Generally, no. Though there was a joke that used to go around the boys at Luke's school. If you shake it more than twice, you're playing with yourself."

She giggles a little about that, but feels there's some tension in that line.

In bed, she asks him, "Did you used to… play with it… a lot?"

It's dark, so even if he weren't curled up behind her, she wouldn't be able to see his face, but she can feel his expression, that tense, lip rub he does when he doesn't exactly want to say whatever it is.

"What's a lot?"

She'll admit that's not the focus she was aiming for with that question, but… "Uh… I'd do it every night or so, so… more than that?"

"Every night?" He's stunned at that.

"It's good for going to sleep. Or… I mean… It works that way for you, right?"

He's still trying to wrap his mind around every night. "Every night?"

"Well. Not every single night, but… most of them, yes." She rolls over to face him, and then catches what he's thinking, and… "Oh. Uh… No one ever told me not to. It was just… a way to go to sleep, nicely."

He blinks, slowly, and his lips rub together again. "It's not that… The… sex part… wasn't that big of a deal. I don't think Luke cared much one way or another if we… But we were trying to be calm and serene and passionless and… We weren't supposed to want things. Masters… well-grounded in the light… could 'physically commune together in mutual accord and affection,' but..." He places her hand on his shaft, right now it's just lying between them, not doing much of anything. "For a few years there, it was more or less always hard, always wanting, and it was… annoying, really. Anything… anything could set it off, and… it didn't matter what I was trying to do, there'd just be this constant, clawing want and… And we're not supposed to give into our wants. We're supposed to meditate, and calm ourselves, and control our desires, master them, and…. And all it wants is to fuck. All the time. Anything even vaguely female and human. And, of course, everyone around me can feel my desires because just about the time it woke up and decided what it wanted, my ability to keep my feelings hidden also went to shit." He rolls his eyes. "Luke said that was a normal part of puberty, but," he shakes his head. "And the others got there sooner or later, but I was the oldest of the boys, so I got there first. Then, the others start to catch up, so it's not just me. There's three other pubescent kids, and that's a lot of wanting flowing around, and... of course, just like they could feel me, I can feel them, so now it's not just my wants, I've got all of theirs sloshing around and… And Luke's telling Yoda about it. He's laughing, and Luke's muttering about how his hair is turning gray and he's not training anyone under twenty ever again."

Rey's trying not to laugh, because living through it wasn't funny, but, like Yoda, she's sniggering a bit.

Kylo rolls his eyes again. "So… not a lot, not by your scale, but it felt like I was doing it a lot more than I should have."

She kisses him. "I'm sorry."

That gets an eye roll, too. "Uh huh."

"Hey… I can think it's funny and still wish you didn't have to go through it."

He accepts that. They're quiet for a moment. Then he says, "So… you just… did it whenever you liked?"

"Pretty much. I lived alone, so it's not like there was any reason not to. But… I generally didn't want to unless I wasn't doing something else."

"I'd have had an easier time if that's how it worked. I could have kept myself distracted. But… Making dinner, cutting up peaches, doing fine, paying attention to the knife and the fruit, talking a little, then… wait… The peach is ripe and soft and juicy and… Gosh… it feels good against my fingers and in my hand… It's got a nice, soft, supple give to it… And… It's about the size of M'Gll's breast, and maybe I could steal off and pick one later, and… Now everyone else is staring, including M'Gll, perfect, calm, serene, never, ever wanting anything, M'Gll, and I just want to die because apparently I just blasted that feeling to everyone near me. And now, not only am I randy, because my shaft still hasn't gotten the go-back-to-sleep message, but I'm also boiling with shame, and I'm angry because she's glaring at me, and they're all staring, and I just want to curl up and vanish or kill all of them, and, wait, yes, that feeling also just went thundering through the room, so half of them are terrified now, ready to run away, and… It's a mess."

Rey winces. "Ouch."

He nods. "Yeah."

"Did she… like you?"

He laughs at that. "No. Never. She was afraid of me at first. And I didn't… like her… I didn't. I really didn't. We had no common interests and mostly just annoyed each other. But she was female and my age, and the only one of the girls who had any sort of… body… visible under her robes and… I didn't want to be having thoughts like that about her. She was too… light, to hate anyone, but she pitied me for being dark, and honestly, that was worse. I can take hate, but, 'Luke's poor nephew, just can't help it, doesn't belong here…' not that. And that was what she told herself to get over the fact she was afraid of me. Eventually she got over her fear, but she was never easy around me. She marked me as an enemy the first time we met, and that was that. And me being the fruit-fucking maniac thinking of her naked didn't do anything to improve her opinion of me."

"Wait… did you… with a peach?"

"Does that… shock…" she can feel the word he's thinking is disgust "you?"

Rey thinks about it, not shocked, not in a bad way, mostly just curious, not exactly grasping the mechanics of how it would work, likely because she's a bit vague on what, exactly, a peach is. "Did it feel good?"

Kylo's very relieved that she's not disgusted. "Better than I expected. It's got to be really ripe, though. Not the sort of thing I could do often. They're only that sort of ripe for a few weeks."

"How… Like…" She knows peaches are round, and about a handful, and apparently somewhat soft and juicy, and has a mental image of him just rubbing against one, but she's sure that can't be right.

"Take a spoon, scoop the pit out, hold it in your fist, and… it worked." He flashes her the image of the hollowed out peach. That makes a lot more sense. "Messy… but it worked."

And like that, she can imagine it does work. She leans up for a moment, taking the pillow from under her head, rolls over again, so she's back to him, and folds it in half, stuffing it between her legs. "I'd rock against it, do it until everything feels good, and fall asleep hugging it."

He strokes her back. "Were you thinking about anyone when you did it?"

"Not usually. Just how it felt."

"Usually?"

Her turn to roll her eyes a little. She puts the pillow back and turns again to face him. "Over the years I'd sometime see someone who would catch my interest. But… I wouldn't let myself get to know them or like them or… anything that might make it harder to leave. It's… easy not to have little attachments if you've got one really big one."

"I was thinking about every girl I saw or read about."

"Just girls?" She's curious about this. Until… she had the bad time, she used to think about both.

He's curious, too. Girls think about boys, right? "Just girls. Weren't you thinking about boys?"

"Before… I thought about both. After, if I was thinking about someone, it'd be a girl."

He spends a moment contemplating that before saying, "Someone safe?"

She nods. "Someone soft and gentle and… There weren't a lot of people like that, girls or anyone else, at Niima."

"The kind of place that steals the soft and gentle from you?"

"Yeah. Some of the traders looked nice."

He snuggles in against her, making his very not female, soft, or gentle body as pliant as it can be. She feels what he's doing and kisses his collar bone. "Did you ever… get to do anything more than think about the girls there?"

"No. Not until I left Luke. I was twenty-six the first time I kissed someone." Which is both true and misleading. He was twenty-two when he joined the First Order, almost twenty-three, and he did visit the pleasure specialists within the first month of getting there, because he could finally do it and he was more or less rebelling against any and every rule anyone even remotely like a parental figure had ever offered him. But it was three years into his run with the First Order before he decided to actually take his mask and the rest of his clothing off and see what having someone touch more than his penis felt like. It was… nice… enough. He enjoyed it, but not enough to switch out of his habit of keeping his desires clamped down as hard as he could and only meeting his needs when he just couldn't take not meeting them anymore.

"You're my first kiss."

He smiles at that.

"You like that."

"Yeah. I probably shouldn't, but… yes, I do."

"Was I your first good kiss?"

He smiles, a little chagrined… "Um… the way you mean it, yes, but… Not exactly."

She raises an eyebrow, and he can feel she's curious about it.

"It's hard to train here. At least, at my level. You don't want anyone to know your weaknesses and flaws, and I'm too big and dangerous for most people. Snoke would…" he doesn't fill in the details of what Snoke would do, but she feels hot, electric pain shatter through him at the memory, "if I 'damaged someone valuable,' and… Anyway, Phasma and I were well-suited for each other. I had no interest in anything she ruled. She had no interest in anything I ruled. We weren't competing for anything, which helped, a lot. We could fight to fight, not fight angry or jealous. We were the same height, and if she had her armor on, she outweighed me by a kilo or two. She used a quicksilver baton which is a good match for my training blade, and her armor was tough enough to take a good solid hit.

"So, we'd train with each other. She'd knock me down. I'd knock her down. We'd go until one of us couldn't get back up again."

"You kissed Phasma?"

"Only the one time."

He can feel this shakes her. He could have fucked a whole orchard full of peaches without getting this sort of a reaction from her.

"Phasma? Two meters tall, covered in chrome, killed people at a whim, tortured new recruits, Phasma?"

"Let me tell the story." She's still beyond skeptical, but he can feel why. All she's got in her mind is blinding chrome and danger. His voice is gentle as he says, "She was a person, Rey. Just like… All of us. There's a person… or maybe a monster… but most likely a person, behind every mask here. Your Finn, he was one, too. They all are. And Phasma was a person with her own likes and dislikes and sense of humor and voice and…

"And we weren't exactly friends, or got on all that well, or shared a meal, or had conversations involving more than fifty words that weren't about our duties, but… we could fight. And that was worth something.

"And I could feel she was pissed at Hux. That's one layer of red between them. There's another one, deeper, surging. They were… fucking each other. She was his second-in-command. I don't know if it ever went deeper than that. I honestly don't think he could go deeper, and I'm not sure what she got out of it. But she was pissed at him for something, and I'm game to fuck with Hux if the opportunity arises, because he's just so… fuckwithable. He was like a great, big, ginger kick me sign. Always so stuffy and perfect and…"

She's looking very disturbed by this. And also realizing that if M'Gll was everything Luke wanted, Hux was probably everything the First Order wanted, but by the time Kylo got here, he had enough power to do something with it.

"You want the one who wasn't actually a person, it was him. Just a bright orange ball of scheming hate stuffed into a perfect uniform."

She's still looking disturbed, and not sure if he's complementing her theory or ignoring it.

"Anyway. I've got her pinned. And neither of us is in our armor for this one, so I outweigh her by a good twenty kilos. Hands on her shoulders, knees on her thighs, she's down. And Hux is lurking, watching us. I can feel he's pissed at her, too. Maybe they liked fucking angry. Maybe she liked fucking after training. But… she's under me, and I know she's angry at him, and I can feel he's angry at everything, and I'm looking to stir the pot, so I raise an eyebrow at her, and think hard about what I'm going to do, and she nods. So I leaned down and kissed her, and kissed her good, and then next thing I know I'm on my back and she's on top, because she flipped us, and that is fucking hard without the Force, and then she's kissing me, and… Hux is about to explode. I can feel his rage spike, and her lips are warm, and… uh… yeah…" He smiles a little. "That was a good kiss."

"What did he do?"

"Clench his fists. Fantasize hard about stalking over and kicking me in the ribs until they shattered under his boot, then going after my face. He had a really vivid image of breaking my teeth and crushing my face under his boot, but he knew I could stop him dead if he tried. Eventually she stopped kissing me, got up, smirked at me, gave me a quick salute, sauntered off, and he followed her. She had bite marks on her arms and shoulders the next time we trained, but… I mean… If she didn't want him biting her, she wouldn't have gotten bitten. Hux was a killer, not a fighter, so if she had marks on her, it was because she let him put them there."

Rey swallows hard, not sure how to deal with that. Kylo's just matter-of-factly explaining the world he used to inhabit and… It mostly makes her want to curl up and hide.

"What did you do?"

He blinks.

"After…"

"Oh… Uh…" He hasn't thought about that kiss for years, and about after that kiss ever. "Got a shower and supper and meditated and read reports and… just a normal night."

"So, you didn't…" She trails a finger down his shaft.

"No. Like I said, it wasn't that sort of good." He kisses her, soft and easy. Good. "I'm not saying, that in the right circumstance or mood I wouldn't like it, but as of this point in time, I prefer not fucking angry. Or sad. Or loathsome. Or hating myself and my desires and the person I'm with. Or feeling broken and weak and inadequate because I have desires." He kisses her again, lips grazing over hers as he says, "I like this. I like being able to want… things and feelings and sensations. I like soft and gentle and together and talking and seeing the same body more than once and getting to know all of your bits and you learning mine and…" His hand skims along her skin. "Maybe it's too much Jedi training, but… I like physically communing together in mutual accord and affection."

She wraps her leg around his hip, and holds him close with arms and legs. "Me, too."

It is a well-known fact that the fastest, easiest way to take out a modern sky-borne armed force is its kitchens.

At least, it is now.

Once upon a time, there was a General in the First Order, and he was in charge of the system that would eventually bear his name, and create the largest, most order-following force of soldiers the galaxy had ever seen.

That man was Brendol Hux.

He had a son. A bastard he got upon a serving woman who wasn't exactly interested in having a child with him, but she was significantly less interested in what happened to the women who didn't go along with his wishes.

And when the child was born, he disposed of her.

And he began to test his theories.

He didn't use all of them upon the boy. That would be counter-productive. He needed the child pliable, capable of great cruelty, and able to serve any whims his master may have. That he was intelligent, paranoid, good with technology, and utterly devoid of empathy were just cherries on the sundae as far as he was concerned.

The ones he did use proved to be successful, and his son rose high and fast among the First Order, in danger of outranking him by the time he was twenty-seven.

And that would not do.

He was contemplating what to do with that when he ate what appeared to be a lovely bowl of stew, and was dead before morning.

It was then that Colonel Armitage Hux sent a report to the Supreme Leader, showing him how easily his kitchens could be subverted, and with just a few drops of the correct, slow moving, chemical mixture that their entire ship could have been murdered.

Said report also offered the steps necessary for a state of the art upgrade of the kitchen services, along with a suggestion that perhaps a generous promotion for the man who ordered said report would be useful. (And it didn't outright state, but it certainly suggested that if that promotion wasn't forthcoming, the antidote to said chemical compound wasn't going to be finding its way into the food supply, either.)

Thus it is, now, that almost the entire kitchen staff of the Supremacy and any other First Order ship is made of droids. Droids to not use the restroom and forget to wash their hands. Droids do not get lazy and forget to properly sanitize their tools. Droids do not go to work with a cold and sneeze on the food. Droids cannot be bribed into looking the other way while a few drops of a specific and rare chemical compound find their way into a bowl of stew. Droids can cut costs by always making portions the same sizes and minimizing waste by always using the most efficient cuts.

In fact, the only things droids can't do is smell or taste or hunger.

And, while Snoke wasn't going to be getting the Boss of the Year award, he was fully aware that hungry soldiers make stupid mistakes, but well-fed ones had an easier time obeying orders and doing what was needed when it was needed, so he thought making sure the food was good mattered.

That said, there are people who work in the kitchens to make sure that things taste good. There is a Chef of the Supremacy, and his rank is about the equivalent of a general. These days most of his job is logistical, making sure that enough food of the right type at the right time gets to the right places and then fed to the right people. These days he's making sure that 2.3 people are fed at least three times a day and snacks are available, too. He hasn't actually cooked anything in a decade.

He has a herd of sous chefs, and they actually do cook things. Making up recipes and menus from everything they get in, keeping the rotation fresh and varied, making sure the supplies don't just sit in storage and go bad, and programming the army of droids to make the actual meals.

So, when he gets a request from C8 to keep a standing order for strawberries open for the Supreme Leader, he's got someone to talk to about it.

They find the request for strawberries amusing. Apparently the Supreme Leader has something of a sweet tooth, and getting them isn't horribly difficult. They stop near planets that produce them at least once a month, so… Sure.

Sweet cream. That one's also easy enough.

Chocolate… The Supreme Leader has bizarre eating habits. All he appears to want is… dessert?

Coffee… Every day… That gets them talking like mad. Every day. When he first asked for it, they only had a few ounces of it on board. Getting more took a little while, but… If the Supreme Leader wants coffee, the Supreme Leader gets coffee, and the accounting department can deal with how much it costs.

Finally, a week into this, the Chef gets a request for a large portion of whatever it is he is personally eating for breakfast and dinner.

So, he does that.

After the first breakfast he gets back a note saying More.

So, he adds more to dinner. The Supreme Leader is a big man after all.

And after dinner, C8 sends him another note, saying More.

The next breakfast is bigger, yet. And this one gets another note saying, More.

So for the next dinner the Chef just piles it on. And that one gets a note saying, Good.

Which is what causes this conversation: "Have you ever seen the Supreme Leader?"

His top Sous Chef, the one who is actually cooking all of this, shakes his head. "Only pictures."

"He's got to be huge."

He shrugs a little.

"I mean… that's got to be what, forty-five hundred calories a day?"

He nods again.

"No one needs that much food. I don't care what you do, you do not need that much food."

Another quick shrug. The Sous Chef is not about to add any voice to this conversation. You never know what the droids around you are picking up.

"You think he's…" He makes a quick gagging himself gesture.

The Sous Chef puts down his spatula and says, voice very low, "My buddy in laundry says he's got a companion."

And that's when the Chef gets it. A huge smile spreads across his face. And the next bowl with strawberries that finds itself in one of the delivery droids also has a collection of edible violets arranged in a very pretty spray nestled among them, fresh mint leaves, a bowl of not just the sweet cream, but also one of melted chocolate.

Kylo certainly didn't ask for that, but it doesn't mean he, and Rey, didn't enjoy it when it showed up.

And that got a note of Appreciated to go with it.