He took measured, unhurried strides towards the detention wing of Starkiller base, choosing the stairs over the lift to the fourth level. Being off-world wreaked havoc on his physical conditioning and he took every opportunity to do things the less convenient way to challenge himself. His quads were burning ever so slightly by the time he rounded the corner of the second hallway and the Troopers stationed outside #1114 came into view.

A tray with a meager portion of greying meat under a thin-looking sauce, a starchy pile of slop, and a multi-colored medley of unrecognizable vegetables was waiting on a cart just beside one of the Troopers. They straightened up noticeably when he stopped in front of them.

"Give her the food," he commanded, and one of them passed the tray through a tiny slot in the wall into the cell.

They all waited for several minutes, expecting her to respond, to draw the tray further into the cell.

Nothing happened.

The Troopers stood awkwardly in front of him, shifting silently from one foot to another, and he finally asked, "Is the prisoner still restrained?"

"Yes, sir," one of them mumbled. Ren held out his hand, wordlessly, for the keys. "Leave us."

He waited until the clanging of their plastoid boots on the metal grating had subsided before stepping forward to the slot through which the tray had gone. He could just make out the curve of her back, facing slightly away from the door, where she perched on the bench. Her energy felt subdued now, a hollow shell of the bright, resonant feel she had given off when she'd forced him from her mind an hour back. Still, he could feel her reaching out around her through the Force, and felt her brush the edge of his consciousness. Interesting.

She stiffened visibly at her recognition of the contact, her spine straightening to attention as she stood up, facing away from the door. She knew he was there, and her breathing moved higher and shallower, into her chest and less into her belly. She was afraid, but he didn't want to provoke her more as he suspected it would only strengthen her use of the Force even further.

He drew a deep breath as he keyed the door's code, calming his radiant energy and drawing a cloak over his thoughts. All the First Order detention facilities were programmed to use the same dumb code pattern for their cells: the first two digits of the cellblock, combined with the last two digits of the cell number itself, then one. 4-2-1-4-1. The door hissed open, and he stood in the doorway for a moment assessing things before stepping inside.

He silently swore at how kriffing small the cell was. Did no one take into account tall individuals when designing these things? He had to hunch slightly to keep from hitting his head on the apex of the ceiling. The crown of her head barely reached his collarbone, and she stood resolutely in front of him, not moving, barely breathing.

"Are you not hungry?" he asked.

She bowed her head, then tilted it to the side. "No. As if I could eat with my hands like this, anyway."

The cell was deeper than it was wide, and she took a step further away from him before turning slowly around to face him. Her eyes raked over him once, quickly, before she cast her gaze down and a bit to the side. She was deliberately avoiding eye contact, or what could pass for it with his helmet on.

"Give me your hands," he held out one of his in offering, the key in his other.

She glanced suspiciously at his outstretched palm, shifted her weight between her feet as though she might be considering charging him, but thought better of it and closed the gap between them just enough to stretch out her wrists to him. He cupped her hands with his, tiny but calloused with dirty, mechanic's fingernails, and rotated them gently to turn the lock face-up to him. The hex key turned the mechanism and the cuffs popped open. She jerked back so quickly the teeth of the restraint scraped her wrists where they were already raw from the interrogation room. Instinctively she put her stinging flesh to her mouth, and turned away again.

He ignored the slight burn he felt on his own wrist, under his glove, tossing the cuffs on the bench beside her leg. It annoyed him to have to hunch like this while standing. "You should eat," he tried again. "You might be here awhile."

Her shoulders sagged a little, almost imperceptibly, at the truth of that statement. He was getting to her, he could tell. She dropped her arms back to her side and rolled her neck a bit, trying to keep calm. He could feel her energy returning though, beginning to coil in her center as she wrestled with her fear, her desire to strike out at him, to run, to do anything to get away from him, off this planet, and back to her new-found allies.

Slowly, he sat down onto the bench. It was set ridiculously into the wall so that he couldn't sit upright, but she was taller than him now, and he figured it might make him seem less threatening.

"I know you're hungry," Ren said, this time projecting onto her a bit, "Maz's place doesn't have very good food."

"It certainly doesn't now that it's a pile of rubble!" she spat back. "How many innocent people had to die for you to drag me here?"

He refused to take that bait. Her indignation was frankly a bit amusing. Instead, he wordlessly took the tray from its perch and placed it beside him on the bench. "It's getting cold."

She heaved a sigh and glanced suspiciously at the soggy offering. "What if it's drugged, or you poisoned that? Why should I do anything you tell me? You can't just go inside other people's heads and-"

She broke off mid-rant when she heard the low chuckle that was the only appropriate response he could offer. Her righteous anger at him was by turns amusing and annoying; here she was, barely 2 days off that backwater planet she'd been dumped on for how long? And she dared tell him what he could and couldn't do? It was simultaneously insufferable and invigorating to have a challenge like this. An excitement that was beginning to feel dangerously close to desire was starting to twist his guts a little.

"I can't go in other people's heads? That's ironic coming from you, Rey," he said pointedly. Her eyes went wide at his use of her name, then narrowed out of hatred. Good.

Her resolve seemed to weaken at his acknowledgment of her ability to invade his mind, and she finally sank down on the bench too, with the tray between them. A rudimentary utensil, a device that was bizarre combination of a spoon, a fork and a knife, but lacking any real tines or sharp edges that could be used for self-harm or self-defense, lay next to the plate. She ignored it completely, testing the mound of what he guessed to be a tuber starch with her pinky instead. It was perhaps the least dirty of her fingers.

He watched her carefully in his peripheral vision, not actively staring at her, but keeping his body angled away from her as she gingerly examined the food. She took a dollop of the starch on her pinky and shoved it into her mouth, sucking the last of the goo off her skin audibly. She repeated the motion, again with the starch, then with the gravy languishing on the meat. She poked at the meat with her index finger, ignored it and moved on to the vegetables. Each lump she picked up individually, sniffed it, peered at it, then gently put it onto her tongue - green, orange, yellow, purple. A few more dollops of the starch, this time swirled in the meat gravy for good measure. Her expression was beginning to soften ever so slightly, particularly near her eyes, and he briefly wondered when she'd last had this much to eat at one time. Her memories had been shot through with an abiding, unadulterated sense of hunger that he'd never felt himself, or from anyone.

"What is that," she asked abruptly, around a mouthful of vegetables. She pointed to the meat with her filthy index finger.

"Meat?"

"From a real animal?" she cocked her head to one side. "One that was alive in this millennium?"

"Yes?" He wasn't sure if she was joking.

She made a gutteral noise that was a cross between a grunt and a moan before seizing the topmost slice of meat between her thumb and forefinger and lifting it, dripping its disgusting gravy, to her small, even teeth. Her eyes closed and he could see her eyes roll back a little as she bit it, tore off a chunk and chewed it, mouth slightly open.

He had to look away then, couldn't stand to spy on her anymore. Even having to hear the sounds she was making was brutal enough. Watching her eat was making him feel very, very strange. It was both intimate and alienating, like watching a pack animal brought in from the desert shamelessly eating its fill at the feed trough. She looked like a human girl, but he was having trouble identifying with her at all in this moment. He closed his eyes and very gently, he felt for the edge of her mind, and found her open, distracted by the meager feast, not expecting him whatsoever.

Her mind was a confusing jumble. He had expected to find the map in her recent memories; if the blasted Resistance droid had only been marooned on Jakku when that shit Dameron had been taken into custody, after the ambush on that old fool Tekka, she would've seen the output in the last two day cycles. Instead he found himself flicking through her endless, useless forages into scuttled destroyers, feeling the ache in her fingers as she scrubbed 30 years of desert grime from precious metals, tasting the fibrous, starchy insta-portions she'd subsisted on for who knew how long. Where was the map? He saw the traitor FN-2187, helmet-less and sweating as they worked feverishly to fix the motivator of the Millennium Falcon. And then, he saw Han Solo's face in the Falcon.

He drew a sharp breath under his helmet at this recollection, and she stopped chewing, looking at him sharply. He was suddenly feeling overly warm, even sweating a bit under his robes, but refused to remove his helmet again for this scavenger. Why had he done that? Perhaps if he'd not had that moment of weakness - and it was weakness, not even he was so arrogant so as not to see that - he wouldn't be sitting here next to this girl as she slurped down the revolting prison portions he'd served her.

"Were you raised by bloggins?!" he exclaimed, breaking the silence. "You eat like a kriffing animal!"

She looked stricken at this, dropping the remaining piece of meat she'd been clutching back onto the plate. She opened her mouth to retort, but snapped it shut again and turned away to lick her fingers some more. "You can forget about finding Luke Skywalker if you keep talking to me like that."

He stood up abruptly and stopped just short of banging his head on the ceiling. "You," he said, his temper rising, "You have no business saying anything to me about Skywalker! 6 hours ago you thought the Force was a myth, and now you have the nerve to threaten me, girl?"

Her eyes were wide now, but she didn't break eye contact as she stared him down. He could feel her stumbling about, trying to get into his mind again, and he clamped down his defenses against her. "Don't even try to do that again," he warned. "You won't like what you find."

Wordlessly, she shook her head and turned her back to him again. "You want to hunt Skywalker down… the same as Vader did. You know how that ended, I suppose."

He would not listen to this from her, from a nothing desert scavenger who had simply been in the wrong place at the right time, a half-starved waif biding her time until someone long gone came to retrieve her? How dare she? He whirled and pressed his hand to the access panel, opening the door and striding from the room silently. He waited a fraction of a second until the door closed between them before he unleashed a final assault on her mind.

This time, he made sure she knew he was there - he used no finesse, and showed no deference to her fragile, human dignity. He saw things she didn't think anyone would ever know, things she'd forgotten herself or had shoved down so deep inside they could no longer disturb her sleep in the hovel she called her home. He raked through them, discarding each fragment as casually as worthless scrap metal and moving on to the next. Only when he sensed her slide onto the floor and actually felt her bare knees touching the metal flooring as though it were his own, did he withdraw from her mind.

We're not through yet, he projected into her mind, and he knew she heard him when he felt the hot tears beginning to sting her eyes.