4/7/1

Kylo's standing at Rey's workbench, staring at the fundamentals of a light short sword. Unlike Rey, he built his lightsaber, instead of inheriting it. So, he's done this before.

And, he'll have to admit it tickles him to no end when she finally asked him for help putting one together. She's never run into a technical problem she can't just fix. And especially with her staff to build off of, she feels like this should be fairly easy.

She can see what all the parts look like, and how they should work, so the fact that all she can get is a small fizzle, or one time, the tip of the sword burst into flame, is frustrating her to no end.

So, he's standing there, next to her, looking at the assembled case in her hand, the power device on the bench, and the crystal in his hand, feeling fairly smug. The first thing he says is, "Part of it is this is a dark crystal."

"No, it's not." It's not Dark. It is dark.

"I mean it's a really dark color." He lifts it to the light, letting it hover above his palm, but he still can't see through it. "Whatever this is, it's going to take a lot more energy than a light crystal, like the one in your staff. Even my crystal isn't this dark." Once upon a time, his was one solid piece, and blue. It's not anymore. It cracked shortly after he left Luke, blooming red and jagged, and burned through most of his original casing. The one above his hand is almost black, and he's never heard about a kyber this dark, so he's got no idea if it even can be used for this kind of work. It does have a somewhat pleasant thrum to it, the feel of the energy buzzing through his hand makes him feel like he'll get along well with whatever weapon this makes.

Granted, as of this point, he's never met a blade, not even M'Gll's, that didn't seem to like being in his hand. Any kyber capable of being set to this sort of work gets along well with him.

"Isn't the one in my staff your original saber?"

He blinks at that, and then remembers, he'd told her that saber belonged to him. "No." And he realizes she's seen that fight with Luke, so she knows he had a blue saber at one point. "That one is mine by right. Vader took that with Luke's hand, and as his protégée..." It sounds stupid to him, now. "But it's not my original one." He lays his saber on the workbench. "Most of this is my original saber. The crystal changed along with me. Got more powerful, cracked, became less stable. I had to add the heat vents to the sides to deal with the amount of energy a cracked crystal lets off. But I built the skeleton of this when I was fourteen."

She glares at the pieces in front of her. "So, you're saying I can't manage to figure out technology a teenager could handle." She's gritting her teeth.

He looks at the light saber hilt she's opening. It's attractive. The colors are nice. But he knows metal and whatever this is… It's not going to do the job. "I don't think anyone could do it with this. Your alloys are shit. Melt point is too low. Too brittle. It'll turn to slag or shatter before you can get a decent blade out of it. And that'd be for a light crystal. The kind of energy you'll have to pump through this one…" he looks at her energy source, sitting on the charging disk… "And this sad little thing could barely coax a blade out of a clear crystal, it's not going to do it with this one."

Rey's gritting her teeth, harder. He can feel her frustration. She's got the best alloys she could scrape together, without scavenging from the Falconor Poe's ship. Same with her power source. She doesn't want to tell Chewie or Poe to go looking for better stuff, because it's so expensive.

He figures that if he's giving her bad news, he might as well get it all out. "And you don't have the tools for it." He glances at the mini-welder in her hand. Her ungloved hand. If she can hold the welder in bare flesh, it's not hot enough. "This thing can't get the kind of heat you need to melt the solder that can stand up to the heat of your blade."

She glares at her tools. He doesn't have to say it. Her mini-welder is more than hot enough to melt the solder she's got, which means part of why her short swords keep falling apart is her solder keeps melting.

"Tomorrow night, bring the crystal with you to the Supremacy. I've got the tools and materials you need in my bench."

"Of course you do."

He touches his saber, feeling very close to Han for a moment. "It's an old design, kind of tetchy. I spend more time fiddling with it than I should have to."

Rey offers him a little smile at that, also feeling his sense of the connection there.

The next night, standing at his workbench, watching her fiddle with the design, which is coming along a lot better now that she's got first rate tools and materials, Kylo's thinking about how little this costs him.

And he knows that she wants to build her settlement herself, so he hasn't dropped a troop of Order engineers on her settlement, along with a freighter of supplies, and had them build her a first class colony. But it would take him less than twenty minutes to make sure that everything she could ever possibly need or want ended up on Lirium.

Except of course, the need to do it herself. That's the one thing he can't do for her.

He's watching her carefully set the crystal, and begin shaping a casing around it. With good tools and good materials she's whipping through this, fast and elegant. If she'd grown up on any core world, she'd have been an amazing engineer.

She snaps the case shut, and says, "Test one."

He grins at her, and steps back. The first time he lit his own saber, he just about took his eyebrows and bangs off. His field was significantly less contained than he was expecting. "Don't point it toward your face when you light it."

She rolls her eyes and flicks the switch.

They both hear it hum, but… There's no visible blade. Kylo almost has an urge to pass his and over it, but he's awfully certain that's a bad idea. He can feel it's doing something. Rey's just staring at it.

"You can't see it, can you?" he asks, as he watches her stare.

"No, but… You feel it, right?"

"Yeah, it's doing something."

"Get the lights, and the window, okay?"

He does, and as soon as the transsteel window goes opaque, he sees it.

"Wow. I didn't know…" He can feel the way she's staring at it. He's staring at it, too. It's… he doesn't have words to describe it.

"That's a… black light," Rey says.

He turns the lights back on, and it goes back to invisible. "That's a black light, all right."

She turns it off. "I don't think this is the sort of thing I can train children with."

"No. They'd need to see the blade." He's grinning, picking it up, feeling it solid and real in his hands. "A master though…"

"Hey! I made it."

He's still grinning. It's not his saber, but if feels awfully right in his hand. And he can dual wield… "But you'll let me use it, right?"

She kisses him. "Yes. Feel good in your hand?"

He's holding it, swishing it around a little, unlit. "It really does. Smaller than anything I'd normally use, but, especially for an off-hand weapon, it's good."

"At your size, it's practically a lightdagger."

It's not that small on him, but it's certainly smaller than anything he'd normally use. However, there's something to be said for expanding your routine. "It's not a bad plan to have a hidden weapon." He tests it, and yes, it'd fit well against his forearm, on his sleeve if he needed something like that. He hands it back to her. The hilt fits better in her palm than in his, but he's got the sense that he gets along better with the crystal than she does.

"You know… you can't really dual wield with a staff."

That gets an arched eyebrow from her.

"Just saying, that's a two-handed weapon. My saber's a one-and-a-half-handed weapon."

She knows what he means by it, but it's a term she's never heard.

"Use it one-or-two-handed," he expands on the concept of one-and-a-half-handed.

"You really want this, don't you?"

He pets the casing again. "It just… feels right."

She turns it on again, and again, in the light, the blade is invisible. But the feel of it… She's sure it'll cut through things that her and Kylo's main weapons struggle with. "It's got a lot of power to it."

"That's probably why I like it."

"Not that it's black?"

"That helps, too." He gently strokes the back of her neck, and she places it back on the bench.

For a few minutes, they work on tidying things back up. Kylo's picky about his tools. He likes them kept in pristine condition and put back in the right place, every time. They're good tools, master's tools, worth more than half of her settlement, and they deserve that sort of respect.

He can remember the feel of her frustration at the cost of good materials…

He could help with that.

It wouldn't be doing it for her… Just… helping her do it herself.

"Would you take credits from me?"

She looks up from tidying and blinks, startled. She's usually at least partially aware of what he's thinking, especially if they're standing less than a meter away from each other, but she'd been so concentrated on cleaning up and enjoying having mastered the blade, she'd lost touch with any of his thoughts.

"You took it from my mother, and from Chewie, and from the rest of the Resistance, why not from me?"

Put that way, Kylo's offer of money makes a lot of sense.

"How balanced can this place possibly be if all your funding comes from one side?"

And that makes even more.

"And you're barely making any progress. You need money!"

More or less hammers it home. And, of course, she wants to keep Finn and Chewie safe, and the less money they need to bring in, the less danger they have to be in, so… "Okay."

Kylo was gearing up for yet another reason why she should take his money, and the okay, that fast, surprises him some. He'd been figuring it'd take at least a few more reasons before she got to admitting that maybe he had a point.

"Okay?"

"Okay." She nods. Though they can both feel she's unsure about this.

"How much do you need?"

"Ten thousand?" Rey has two issues on this. She's not entirely sure what things cost, in terms of credits, and she's not entirely sure what she needs to keep moving forward.

He rolls his eyes. "Think bigger." Kylo's also not exactly sure what things cost, because he doesn't buy things, but he does get reports on the Order's expenses, and he knows ten thousand credits does pretty much nothing. "That's one earth moving machine, or a barely functional speeder. Don't tell me what you need to get tomorrow's job done, tell me what you need to finish this."

"I…" she turns so she's back to the bench, leaning against it. She can't explain why the idea of asking for more than that makes her so uncomfortable. Beyond, of course, the most obvious level of having to explain where she got it.

Kylo steps in front of her, resting his hands on her hips. "Rey, I have everything I've ever wanted or needed, and all I have to do is ask. And a lot of the time, I don't even have to do that. Just noticing I need something seems to conjure it. They've been paying me a salary, not a huge one, but a salary still, since I joined Snoke. But I don't buy things. I pay no rent. I don't shop for food. Clothing just appears in my closet. My medical care is taken care of. Even fripperies, if I say I want something, it just appears." He looks over her shoulder to the bench behind him, half-covered in first class tools and materials. "I didn't even have to ask for that. It was just here when I started using these rooms. I've got nine years of income just sitting around and nothing to do with it. Let me transfer you the credits."

It's completely rational, so she says, "Okay," but she's still feeling a little off by having done so.

He decides to do it first, and then deal with why she's so unsettled by this. He turns, crosses his room, finds one of his personal datapads, and is opening his account as he walks back to her, standing next to her, hip to hip, he then looks at her, expectantly.

She looks back at him, blankly.

He groans. "You don't have a bank account. Of course not."

She shakes her head. "All in currency." She hops up, so she's sitting on the workbench, and he wraps an arm around her, tucking the datapad into his pocket.

"Why don't you want my money?" he asks, kissing her shoulder. "Because it's the Order's?"

She shrugs a little, and decides this isn't a good place for this conversation. This is a face to face, not side to side conversation. She hops down and pulls him to his bed, and nudges him, so he's sitting on it. Then she sits in his lap, facing him, hands on his chest. Her lips open a few times to start to talk, and then on the third try she puts it together. "You and I have always been equal. I help you. You help me… We balance. I've always been able to offer as much as I take. And for this… I can't. You'll never get this back. I can't repay it. I can't offer you anything of commiserate value. I can't… trade… for it. Chewie, Poe, the rest of them, I'm building them a place to hide. None of them are ever intending to be upright, law-abiding Citizens of the Order, or anywhere else, so they'll need an off-the-charts hideout. But I'm not building anything for you, not there."

He stares at her, not saying what he's feeling, You're building my home, and the safe, secure, surrounded by people who love them home, for my children. The place where they can grow up far away from this. The place they'll never be dragged away from.

She feels it, and nods.

He looks away, breaking the heaviness of that moment, and then pulls out the pad, tapping it. "You don't have another name, do you?"

"Just Rey."

"And you're not in any system… You wouldn't be."

She shrugs at that. It's possible the same people who sold her for drinking money could have registered her birth, but they likely didn't. "I can't imagine I am. Or if I am… learning that would likely cause trouble. I don't want to put my retina or finger pads into a computer to see who comes up."

He nods at that. "Do you want a name?"

She touches the token hanging from his neck. Her eyes drift to his as her finger lingers on the disk. She wants him to know she understood, and agreed with, the value he feels coming from what she's building. "I have one, and when the time is right, I'll claim it."

He understands what she's saying by that, smiles at it, kisses her, and replies, "Ren or Padme?"

She smiles back at him. "Ren."

He shudders with pleasure. It shouldn't still get to him, but it does. It always does. Every time she uses his name, every time she does something like this, accepts who he chose to be, it just floods him with warmth and approval and belonging.

His hands stroke over her arms, and he kisses her, warm and happy.

When she pulls back, she says, "Speaking of names, when you said Padme, it triggered a faint memory. It took me a while to hunt it down, and a while longer to find the links, but… I was reading a theory on the fall of the Empire, and it talked about a senator from Naboo, Jar Jar Binks, and how he was the one who ushered in the final vote giving Palpatine supreme power. He had a co-senator, one who did not agree with the War Powers act, and who was actively fighting against the rise of Palpatine, Padme Amidala."

He feels a thrill of right all through him at that name.

"She was the elected queen of Naboo, and after that, was a senator in the Republic, and was known for being closely allied with the Jedi.

"She died within days of the Jedi purge, pregnant, unmarried. Her child died with her. No one knew who the father was, or at least, not in what I could find. It was considered something of a scandal at the time, Naboon culture frowning on that sort of thing."

Kylo feels the sense memory of that. The Force pulling him back to a blurred image of a woman with dark hair, a beautiful face, and so, so sad, drowning in sorrow, letting it squeeze her heart and steal her breath. He yanks out of that memory, fast, feeling that if he lets it, it will choke him, too.

"Amidala…" he's almost tasting the name. "That's… right. The child… children, didn't die, obviously, but…" And he has a flash of that, too. Fear, the need for protection. He doesn't know who's feeling the fear… Soft, gentle hands, sorrow, the sense of very calm, very deep Jedi power… Holding… his mother… The hard, cold knowledge that the threat was out there, and stronger than whoever was holding her. "They needed to be hidden away. Palpatine would have had them killed if there had been even a hint of them."

That's another heavy topic, and he feels it settle around them. He can feel the memory, but he can't focus on his grandmother's face. She has one, it's in his view, but it's a blur. There's just feelings. "He said I have her eyes."

Rey shakes her head, not disagreeing, just indicating that she doesn't know. "There weren't any pictures."

He inhales, deeply, searching the line of feelings back through his mother, but there's not much there. What does a baby know of its mother? Warm and red, a blurred face, and apparently, sorrow. "I have access to what's left of Palpatine's records. He kept intelligence on… everyone and everything. Maybe he has something."

She shrugs at that, no idea what Palpatine may have had, or has left.

She feels the flash of resolve through him, before he moves.

Kylo takes the pad out of his pocket and clicks on it, moving through pages, reading, moving more, clicking, and then looks up at her. "Kylo Ren was added to the register as a person nine years ago. He's not attached to the Ben Solo person, not a name change or an alternate persona, though I suppose if you put my prints or retinas in, both would come up. Like everyone else in the galaxy, just a few clicks changes a name." He clicks something and then types, and clicks again, presses all five of his right fingertips to the pad's screen, and lowers his eyes to the camera for a retina scan. "Unfortunately, I'm sure at least a hundred people are watching any and all changes to Kylo Ren." He looks up at her. "On this ship alone. Ben Solo though, has been sitting there for nine years, doing nothing. Snoke forbade anyone from ever using that name again, but he didn't have it erased from the register. So, legally… Ben Solo is still a person, with retina and finger marks on file." He hits one more button, and presses all five of his right fingers to it. "But today…" Kylo clicks once more, and then looks up at her, "he officially became Ben Amidala. Adding a person to the register takes a few moments." Kylo puts the pad into her hands. Then he looks at her, eyes hot, intense, feeling the hot slither flush of the words he's about to say, "Would you consent to be Rey Amidala? Join the register as my wife? Let me name myself your husband?"

She feels the lump in her throat, and knows that any sound she tries will come out as a croak. So she nods, vigorously, and then scoots forward and kisses him, pushing every emotion into that kiss.

He knew she would say yes, but he still thrills at the feel of it. A wife. A family. A person who knows him inside and out and chose him anyway.

His hands tangle in her hair, and she wraps her arms around him, and for a breath they break the kiss, just looking at each other, feeling this moment, the thrum of now and right building between them.

Then they rush to each other again, lips caressing, bodies grinding.

Too much clothing… Too much distance between them. A wisp of silk a micron thick would be too much distance, right now.

There's tugging and shoving and pulling, and eventually their clothing is gone, and she's back in his lap, and there's the rush, the need for now,for more touch and more skin and more glide and… She slips onto him and they both groan, loud, at that, and there, settled, together, her body wrapped around his and his body supporting hers, they can slow down.

From there there's the supple glide and the wet slip of a gentle rocking thrust. There's the wet graze of his teeth against her breasts, and the dull pull of her fingers through his hair.

There's building friction earned one stroke at a time, one long, shivering pull or push or pull again as she rises and falls against him, and his hands cup her thighs, pulling her up, and slowly lowering her down, both of them working together, keeping the glide as effortless as possible.

There's the sound: counterpoint moans, his deeper, hers higher, broken by fast, deep breath, and the wet glide of skin on skin and lips on throat.

His head falls back at the tug of her hand in his hair, and she lays her own line of kisses down his jaw and throat and chest, tracing the mark she branded him with almost two years ago now. Neither of them knew it then, though they do now, that that's the day she marked him as hers. The day her light began to seep into him.

His hand tightens on her shoulder, on the ghost of the mark the Praetorian guard left on her, when they fought back to back, protecting each other and their future, and though neither of them knew this day was coming, they'd both seen hints of it in the shape of things to come.

He's not kneeling, can't be, not for this position to work, but when she finishes her line of kisses, he's looking up at her, hair wild, eyes dark, face entirely open to her. It calls memory back to another day, kneeling on the floor of an empty Rebel base, looking up at her, eyes still begging her to join him. The day his darkness caught her.

Their lips meet again, eyes closing, sight vanishing and feeling taking over. Glide and burn, stroke and tension, rising pleasure, rising passion, the need for more. More speed, more touch, more pleasure, more kisses, more each other.

Like often, when they commune deep and present, the line between his mind and hers falls away, and both of them find it difficult to know who's feeling what, but right now, it doesn't much matter. There's motion, and pleasure, soul-deep pleasure suffusing each muscle, each nerve, each breath, and love, so much love.

It gathers and swells, rises, seeking to crest, but not… quite… lulling, slow, waiting for ripeness and fullness, kisses passed from lip to lip, soft words unspoken but felt, and then rising again, higher, and again, and again, he's not even sure if they're still moving, or just riding the wave, swell and pulse, breath and moan, and once more, higher, yet.

And when the wave crashes, it leaves both of them limp, collapsed, breathless, stars dancing behind closed eyelids, contentment quieting any nagging voices that could even dare to think of disturbing this moment.

Later, before sliding out of the Supremacy to her… their home on Lirium, for a well-deserved sleep, Rey presses her fingers to the pad, lets it scan her retinas, and registers herself as Rey Amidala.

Billions of people are added to the official register every day. No one, outside of the people who registered them, and their friends and family, care much about any given new one.

She presses her fingers to the pad once more, as she registers again, as the wife of Ben Amidala.

And Kylo presses his fingers against it, too, registering himself as the husband of Rey Amidala.

So no one notices, or remarks, when Rey Amidala: Birthdate: 3/8/23 Years Before the Order, Parents: Unknown, Hair: Brown, Eyes: Brown, Skin: Light, Birth Place: Niima Station, Jakku, Husband: Ben Amidala, officially becomes a person in the electronic records of a galaxy wide system of head counting.

But they know, and for right now, that's enough.