Hux had not stopped talking since they began the interminable shuttle ride back to the Finalizer.
His diatribe against Kylo Ren ranged a gamut of topics, from his dim estimation of the utility of the Knights of Ren to the First Order, to his scoffing disbelief in the power of the Force itself, to his doubt of Supreme Leader Snoke's wisdom in general, to the prominence of Ren's very ears.
Kylo Ren had long since tuned him out, first attending to his split cheek with a thick smear of bacta from the meager medical kit, then locking himself in the tiny 'fresher to gingerly peel his blood-soaked tunic away from the edges of his wounded side with what passed for a modicum of privacy aboard the crowded shuttle. Hux's ceaseless commentary on his failings was annoying, but the silent looks of disgust from the few remaining brass who'd escaped Starkiller with them were worse to endure. He had to shutter himself from feeling them in the Force, it was making him so uncomfortable. He relied the technique so much, it felt like one of his hands had been cut off: a whole line of sensory input was temporarily gone.
The cloth was stuck to the deepest part of the wound, and Ren grimaced as a wave of nausea swept over him as he tugged it away from the center of the oozing, searing burn. He examined it carefully in the warped mirror, testing it with his fingertips to see where the worst of it was.
He groaned as he determined that his floating rib on the left side might be fractured, and the burn was nearly the size of his hand with his fingers spread wide. As physical injuries he'd sustained went, it was certainly one of the worst.
Still, he thought as he sprayed antiseptic onto it and breathed hard through his mouth to keep from yelling as he smeared another glob of bacta on the open wound, he'd been fortunate to survive the shot from Chewbacca. They'd been far enough away on the maintenance catwalk that the bolt had not been full strength, nor had Chewbacca's aim been accurate at that distance. He had been- he hesitated to use the word-lucky.
He didn't know any words, though, for what had happened after that in the woods. FN-2187 fighting him, with Vader's saber no less, was destined to be futile. The traitor had managed to score a glancing hit on his shoulder, but it was the girl's sudden strength that he should've anticipated. What was wrong with him that he had underestimated her so severely twice in such a short period of time? Her technique was understandably untutored, but when he'd seen how fiercely she tried to hurt him to avenge her fallen friend, he'd again felt a distracting, hot wash of desire to teach her instead of fighting her. She had no idea the amount of power she held in her slender limbs.
A sharp knock at the door interrupted his thoughts. "Some of the rest of us might want to use the 'fresher," Phasma's metallic, modulated voice reached him. "If you're done jerking off in there."
A chorus of snickers from the remaining crew stilled when he slammed the door open, still half undressed. "Does any of you care to say anything to my face," he snarled. "We have plenty of time in this hunk of junk."
He looked slowly from face to face, lingering until every one of them looked away or wouldn't meet his eyes. Several of them glanced at his wound and their expressions darkened, an eyebrow or two was raised, but no one offered to help him.
A few of the other survivors shifted uncomfortably in their seats, but said nothing.
"That's what I thought," he remarked, and gently shut the door again behind himself.
He took his sweet time after that. It would not do to come limping out in this state, looking like something half-dead that had crawled out the woods. It was bad enough already that his helmet was long gone into the guts of the imploded base. The indignity of sharing these close quarters with others for whom he felt no affinity, let alone much sense of fidelity, was a lot to swallow right now.
Ren tore open an antiseptic prep pad with his teeth and delicately extracted the small square of gauze. It felt absurdly tiny in his long hands, but he used it as best he could to mop the dried blood off his cheek and jawline. Again- he was stupid lucky. The saber was too big for her, and she hadn't had enough control over her Force push to aim remotely accurately. But she'd only missed his neck by inches. It could've gone differently too easily. By now the pad was well soaked in his blood and he still had a large smear of blood on his cheek. He peered at his wounded cheek in the mirror; it would undoubtedly scar, but hopefully not badly with this application of bacta so soon afterwards. The fruity note of the stuff made him notice his stomach growling slightly.
Once more he dared to peek at his side. The edges of the wound were already becoming pink, and the worst, deepest part of the burn was beginning to heal over. He used the already-ruined antiseptic pad to scour some of the rivulets of dried blood from the side of his abdominal muscles, grimacing as he got close to the edges of the wound. Perhaps hitting himself had not been the best course of action. It occurred to him then he might have broken his own rib in doing so.
Slowly he pulled his tunic back on, not bothering with his belt. This he slung over his shoulder, then grabbed his outer robe, drew it around him and pulled the hood up as far over the edges of his face as he could. He glanced at himself in the mirror once more. Objectively speaking, he knew he looked awful. He wondered briefly if the girl- Rey- was damaged from their fight, but stopped himself short of feeling regret for his actions.
Outside the fresher, he made his way unhurriedly to one of the few bunks available on the shuttle. Reclining delicately, Ren pulled the hood of his robe over his eyes, closing them for what felt like the first time in years. This had a been a very long day.
Hours later, he started awake from a dream, and would've sworn he'd felt Chewbacca's hand on his head. The sensation subsided as he slowly caught his bearings, but even as he relaxed again, he couldn't shake the strange, physical trace his dream left. As he curled onto his good side to relieve the pressure on his injured one, he noticed his upper back and shoulder blades ached terribly.
He then recalled the faint sting he'd felt as he'd uncuffed her in her cell, how his own wrist had burned at seeing the scrape on her own. What the kriff was this? Hours had passed since they'd been near one another, but he would swear he could still sense her through the Force, a glowing, bright beacon in the vast sea of living energy. He tested the wound on his cheek with his finger, and found it to be scabbing over.
The smell of the bacta was making him hungry, and that in turn only made him think of her more.
Rey stood in the sizeable med 'fresher, trying to decide how the shower worked. After the droid had returned and inserted the implant in the crook of her elbow before she'd had time to object, the kindly medic had come back to suggest she get cleaned up.
"Take as long as you like," Nice Eyes said. "You've got nowhere to be at the moment." With that, he'd pointed her in the direction of the fresher that was attached to the room. He'd also left a small holopad on the chair of the room without comment. She was so curious to see what was on it, but also apprehensive. That could wait.
It felt good to stand again, and she shifted from one foot to another as she examined the options for cleansing herself. Sonic, she traced the outline of the letters beneath the button with the tip of her finger.
Water, she read beneath the other, and glanced up at the showerhead suspiciously. Water from… up there? The thought of enough water to wash her whole self seemed decadent at best, downright wasteful at worst.
Eventually her curiosity outweighed her conscience, and she drew the flimsy shift over her head in one motion, tossing it onto the toilet and pulling the curtain around her in the shower stall. She drew the bands from her hair and slipped them over her hand to her wrist as always for safekeeping. She pressed the water button and shrieked in surprise when the spray hit her head. It was unexpectedly cold, and she stepped back out of the stream for a moment, instinctively covering her chest with one arm while testing the water again with her other hand. It warmed, slowly, and finally she dared to step back beneath the falling water.
Rey laughed at the foreign, ticklish sensation of water soaking her hair, going into her right ear a bit. She tilted her head to the other side to avoid it, only to get a bit in the other. Turning her face up to the spray, eyes closed, she opened her mouth and let it fill with water and for once, didn't swallow it. She let it run out, hot over her chin and down her throat, placing her hand around her own neck and feeling the water run over the back of her hand.
She looked at her hands then, noticing how dirty they were, coated with a base layer of grime around her nails and fingertips. A small ledge in the shower contained a tube of antiseptic soap, and she squeezed a healthy gob of the sharp-scented stuff into her palm. The smell of it cleared her sinuses as she rubbed herself with it. Once that had rinsed away, she took another portion of the soap and this time, rubbed it into her hair.
The sensation of her fingers on her wet scalp was intoxicating, and she felt as though she could've stood there washing her hair forever. A pang of guilt struck her as she went back for seconds, and washed more quickly a second time.
Reluctantly, she lingered under the hot spray a few minutes longer before guiltily shutting it off. She found a towel waiting for her on a hanger in the back of the door, and she wrapped it around herself after wiping herself dry. She wiped the condensation from the mirror with her hand and stared at her reflection.
Her hair hung in dark hanks, still dripping water from the shower, almost to her collarbones. It had been longer until recently when she'd found a new cutting tool in an old destroyer and wanted to test it out; hacking off her hair seemed as good an option as any. Her face and upper chest was fairly freckled, and she grimaced at her reflection to look at her teeth. They looked alright, she supposed, small and even and none missing.
Then she slowly undid the towel, and instead of looking down at her body, she looked at herself in the mirror. The experience of gazing at her reflection instead of directly at her body felt strange, as though she were looking at someone else than herself. She could make out the outline of her ribs when her breathing stretched her skin taut. Her breasts, if she was honest with herself, were quite small. She didn't see much difference in them since she'd grown older, but had noticed how sensitive they'd become, some times more than others. Her hipbones jutted out sharply, and her muscular legs narrowed to her knobby knees. The mirror was too high up to see her feet. She slowly turned to inspect her back over her shoulder, noting the sizeable scar that went over one shoulder blade from her mid-back, awarded to her when her rope had unexpectedly broken once as she descended into a tight port and fell against a jagged piece of durasteel. Her eyes traced the curve of her spine to where it ended in the soft triangle at the top of the cleft of her rear, then assessed her smallish but even buttocks.
Finally her self-consciousness reared its head at her momentary indulgence of vanity, and she turned away to finish drying, wondering what she might wear now. She pulled the scratchy medical shift back over her head, wrapping the towel around her hair in a makeshift turban to dry it further.