Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Rey!” Tassu booms down the hatch, startling her out of a fitful half-sleep atop her pile of dusty old blankets. His voice carries like thunder in the arid cellar, echoing around all of his half broken furniture and old wooden crates. Rey watches the dust motes swirl down the shaft of light that’s been let in by the trap door, trailing down the rickety ladder propped against the dirt wall. “There’s more parts dropped off, get to cleaning!” 

Rey scrambles upright, blinking hard out of a dream she’s already half forgotten. The only thing she can hold onto from it is that safe feeling she only ever finds in unconsciousness. A body at her back, big and warm, with thick arms wound around her wiry frame. She blinks the sleep out of her eyes and loses all hold on it, leaving her oddly bereft of something that she never even had to begin with. 

For as long as Rey can remember she has existed this way. Missing someone without a face or a name. Claimed by a being she cannot even recall. She hasn’t been here long in the grand scheme of things, but to her it is her entire life. All nine hundred and ninety two days of it. Nine hundred and ninety two lines etched into the crumbling dirt wall behind her makeshift bed, hidden by a grimy tapestry tacked up by the owners of this half-forgotten shop on the outskirts of this backwater settlement. This barren and absolutely overlookable planet in a system nobody even cares about. 

“I’m coming!” she shouts back, sighing as the hatch above her slams shut again. She scrubs her hands across her face in the near-darkness, stuffing her shoes back on and staggering over to the ladder. Her fingers scratch down the side of her face, back and forth across her jaw, along the width of her throat, until one of her nails catches on the ridge of the scar there. 

Her mating mark, set into the shape of her other half’s teeth. 

The only proof that her life was ever any different than it is now. That and the tenuous connection she can feel bridging her mind to someone else's. Rey strokes along the bond, and at its end something unfurls and sighs. 

She pulls her hood up over her head and hauls herself out of the cellar, closing the hatch behind her as she kneels on the kitchen floor of Tassu and Nena’s home.

Nena is a vision perched on the countertop, sharp-eyed and cunning, kind only in the moments she’s sure no one else is watching. Her delicate blue fingers curl around a steaming cup, and Rey’s dry throat swallows around nothing. 

“The load they dropped off is particularly ill-obtained, it seems,” the omega twi’lek murmurs. “Be prepared to be at it all day today.” 

“Yes ma’am,” Rey replies with a nod of her head, rising to her feet and brushing aside the beaded curtain in the hall that leads out into Tassu’s junk shop. 

“I want this all cleaned up by the time you stop to sleep,” Tassu tells her when she comes out to the side of the building. It is as sweltering as every other day on Tatooine, with mirages dancing against the horizon and sunlight bouncing from the walls of the buildings. Tassu’s more disreputable customers loiter under the awning at the front entrance to mumble amongst themselves, and beings both humanoid and not cut through the alleyway at Rey and Tassu’s back to avoid the meager crowds in the square. Rey nods and the leathery human alpha leaves her to her work, clapping a stout weequay on the back as he disappears back into the shop.

Rey surveys her task without so much as a sigh. The crate they’ve brought her is spilling over with small durasteel mechanical pieces, each caked in red-hued dirt that she will have to spend the rest of her day scrubbing off. 

It is all she’s known since the day she woke up blinded by the twin suns, skin blistering against the sand as junkers tore through the wreckage of the escape pod she’d laid amongst. Everything in her vision had been overblown and stretched out into double. Her mouth had tasted of iron, so much so she’d nearly choked on it. And in the space of one blink and the next she had found herself in Tassu and Nena’s dwelling, spread out on their kitchen floor covered in sunburn and blood. Her head had been held together under three layers of bandages, split open so severely Nena told her she’d seen the pale curve of Rey’s skull. 

The pair had saved her life that day. 

All they ever asked for in return was for Rey to pay them back. 

So she does. Faithfully and without complaint. Every single day. And she’ll continue until the day her mate finally comes for her. 

She’s been scrubbing at scrap for hours when a crolute barrels through the alley and kicks a thick sheet of dirt across Rey’s clean pile. He doesn’t even stop, he might even laugh as he keeps on his way, and Rey sees red . 

She’ll have to go back over all of those now. 

All of the durasteel fanned out around her trembles, shaking harder the closer it gets to her body. The tiny pot of sludgy water she uses to scrub with ripples and dances, and she shoots out to grab a hold of it before her rage can tip it over again. 

She feels like something is winding up inside of her, something she doesn’t know how to let free. All of the potential energy spiraling under her fingers drives her mad, as if a limb of hers is missing she doesn’t know how to identify. She doesn’t understand why these strange things happen at the mercy of her emotions. Acid rises in her throat -

Somewhere, someone hushes her. Rey’s shoulders shake, and whoever is on the other end of her connection caresses the length of their bond. It could almost be a phantom brushing of fingers through her hair. Who is it that soothes over her ire, who pushes love through to her every lonely night, who receives her own clumsy comforting with a desperation bordering on feral? 

The scar she bears over her gland leaves no room for interpretation. Nena had once mused about just how possessive Rey’s marks were, gesturing to her own silvery scar Tassu had given her years before Rey ever came to be here. Nena had procured a mirror so Rey could compare, and the difference between the two was… stark. Tassu’s claim was almost demure next to the vast expanse of Rey’s mate’s. It’s faded with age like Nena’s, but the ridge of it is raised enough to tell her that her mate had gone deep . The shape is wide enough to tell her that her mate had not held any part of themselves back. That they had wanted anyone who set eyes on her to know that she belonged to someone. 

That she belonged to them . 

Rey is still catching her breath, clinging to the lifeline her mate is threading to her, when Tassu comes back to check on her progress. He shakes his head disapprovingly at the freshly dirtied pile of parts. 

“Will there be dinner tonight?” Rey hesitantly asks when he makes to return indoors. 

Tassu sighs, and she already knows what his answer is going to be. “I’m sorry Rey, but there simply isn’t enough to go around tonight. Nena needs sustenance to conceive, her heat is coming soon. You understand.” 

She does. Really. But it doesn’t make the hole ripped through her stomach stitch shut. 

Fresh light is bleeding over the horizon by the time Rey finishes cleaning the last of the merchandise, one sun being lifted into the sky by the other to herald a new day. Tassu will sort through the crate and re-sell what pieces he can. Anything that won’t make money will be added to the horde of junk she sleeps amongst in the cellar, stored away until he finally decides to scrap it. 

Deliriously, Rey drags the bin back into the shop in the early morning stillness, shoving the bulk of it behind the counter as she trudges toward the kitchen. 

Nena has left a small cup of water out for her and Rey is upon it immediately, drinking it so fast she hardly even feels it wetting her lips. 

She drops into the cellar to surrender herself to her dreams. Before she lets her muscles go slack, she reaches up to add one more mark to the wall. Nine hundred ninety three. 

---

“Rey!” Tassu thunders. It only feels like minutes later, as if her eyes have barely fallen shut, but the light that finds its way into the cellar is blazing now. At least mid-afternoon. Rey gasps, heart slamming beneath her ribs. 

Something is different. In the very air she breathes, in every molecule that makes up her body, something has changed . On reflex, she reaches out across her connection. 

Her mate reaches back. She can almost feel their touch like a physical thing, skating across her neck, heavy and warm and right over their mark. It forces her bolt upright. 

“Yes?” she answers when he calls down again, so breathless she can barely hear herself over the roaring in her ears. 

“Troopers are combing the outpost! They’re looking for a young human female. An omega. Get out here so they don’t tear the place apart!” 

Rey flinches horribly when the trap door crashes back into place. 

Her other half is buzzing with energy at the end of their connection, enough for it to seep into her bones as well. It makes her jittery, looking down at her shaking hands as if they belong to someone else. Whatever the New Empire wants, it’s got nothing to do with her. But her mate could be folded into their ranks - shelled in white storm trooper armor, or even shrouded in an officer’s uniform. She has to find them. This could be her only chance. 

She doesn’t even have time to yank on her boots before the cellar’s hatch is bursting open again.

Two troopers descend into her space, knocking things over in their haste to get to her. Tassu is yelling from above them, demanding to know the meaning of their intrusion and screaming when his precious crates of junk are toppled. Rey lurches up from where she’s fallen, only just getting her feet back under her when one of the troopers hauls her up by a bruising grip around her bicep. She knocks against their helmet so hard she nearly wrenches it off, but then the other one yanks her into submission by her hair. 

She is blinded by a beam of hot white light. It starts to shift off of her after a second, but then it is coming back to blaze even closer. Holding. 

For an endless moment, nobody moves. Nobody speaks. Except for Tassu continuing to lose his mind through the kitchen floor. 

The light drops to the side of her neck. 

“Requesting officer verification,” the trooper chokes out against a commlink. 

“It better be fucking valid this time,” a static tinged voice grumbles back. “Granted.” 

Then they’re prying her from the earth, dragging her out of the dirt cellar and passing her from one set of hands to another as they make to take her. She fights , kicking and biting and clawing against the smooth surface of their armor without finding any purchase. She can’t be taken. She can’t . Not now. 

“What is the meaning of this?” Tassu bellows, waving a hand at Rey as she is dragged outside between two beta troopers. Nena is at his elbow, wrenching him back from picking a fight he won’t win. “The girl is my laborer! You cannot take her!” 

The troopers pay him no mind, simply force her through the threshold of their dwelling and into the misery of the all-seeing twin suns. 

The soles of Rey’s bare feet burn against the sand. All around them, the streets teem with Imperial personnel, black and white eating up the perpetually tan landscape as she is shoved forward. The New Empire isn’t actually new . It’s just rebranded from the previous regime after the Emperor and Empress’s ascension. After they wrenched galactic control from the previous Supreme Leader of the First Order and ushered in a new era. The royal family apparently never got around to changing any of the uniforms. They’re the same as they have been for decades, just with different emblem pins. 

“Where in the fuck are we going?” Rey snarls, struggling against their hold hard enough to have them straining against her. One of them grunts and twists her arm far enough to have her gasping. 

“We need to verify your identity… ma’am,” the other trooper tells her, hesitant to address her for reasons Rey can’t even begin to fathom. 

Rey growls, fear prickling at the back of her neck, desperation gnawing away at her until a feeling like agony swells beneath her breast.

Rey flings her arms up and forces them back down in an arc to break their hold. Inexplicably, the two troopers go flying, knocked back several feet to crash against the buildings to either side of her. They all stare at each other, stunned beyond words, before Rey is tearing off down an alleyway up ahead. 

“Stop!” they scream, almost a perfect unison behind her fleeing back. Their armor rattles as they struggle to their feet and give chase. Faster than Rey would like. 

“Subject is fleeing,” one of them huffs into their comm. “Requesting backup in sector four.” 

Rey ducks behind buildings and beings alike, heart pounding so hard it might break bone as she stuffs herself between a vaporator and a roughly hewn half wall. She can’t catch her breath, can’t catch up to her racing pulse as she crouches and tries to silence her gasping. 

Distantly, she feels that touch again, running gentle fingers along their connection, down each individual notch in her spine. Her mate doesn’t even understand how close she is to never finding them. Frustrated tears gather in the corners of her eyes as she tries to let them soothe her. But she just can’t - not when they’re so close, not when hope that she’s been choking down for years surges fresh once again. 

She takes a deep halting breath. Then, when she’s gotten a hold of herself again, she pulls her hood over her head and briskly doubles back towards Tassu’s shop like nothing’s happened. They’re looking for someone else, anyway. Someone who matters, someone who has some sort of value to the New Empire. 

Not her.

Troopers stream past her, all hollering about a girl matching her description. They don’t notice her as she hugs the walls of the alleys, one sad soul out of a thousand on Tatooine. When she’s mere buildings down from where she’s called home all these years, she barrels head first into the chest of a black officer’s uniform. 

Shit. 

They both stumble back a step, the officer glaring at her as if she is dirt beneath his boot. 

Until he gets a good look at her. Then his jaw hits the ground. 

He’s an alpha, tall and lanky, with pale skin and a severe sort of face that looks prone to scowling. His eyes are light, and his hair is a striking slicked back orange. Rey’s never seen such a color on a human before, but something about it is eerily familiar. 

“My identity has already been verified,” she lies carefully, falling back half a step as the officer straightens. He never tears his pale gaze from her. As if she’ll evaporate if he doesn’t keep her within sight. 

He scents the air. Obvious and rude.  

“Kira Ren,” he breathes.

Her head is spinning. Rey doesn’t know this name, only knows that it bears the moniker of the dreaded Knights of Ren - 

The officer is suddenly shackling her wrist in his grip, black gloves creaking with the force of it. 

“Prepare the ship,” the officer barks into his commlink, pulling Rey further into the main square at his side. “We have what we need.”

For a fleeting moment, Rey wonders if this man could be the one. He smells like the cold, and like pine, with an undercurrent of something not quite pleasant wound through it. Gunpowder? His touch is gloved, so it can inspire no feelings of ardor. He is brusque in his regard for her, utterly utilitarian in the way he leads her forward. His eyes hold no particular feelings for her. Only a determined chill frosting over his irises. 

No. She would know. If he was hers, she would know it immediately. She’d be able to feel it. 

Rey rips her arm from his grasp when she comes to this conclusion, backing away as his eyes sharpen and narrow. 

“What do you think you’re doing?” he bites. 

“I’m not whoever you think I am,” she insists, almost faltering in her steps when she feels the bond suffuse with warmth, ghosting its touch all across the skin of her shoulders. “I cannot go with you.” 

The frigid red haired man stalks after her, never allowing more than a few yards to open up between them. “You are , and you will be coming with me posthaste. You do not have a choice in the matter.” He must see what flashes in her eyes, because he grits his teeth and adds: “If I am truly mistaken, you will be returned. But rest assured, I never am.” 

Rey bares her teeth at him, something wild and desperate and cornered. He bears his right back. 

“I do not know what the meaning of your reluctance is, Kira Ren. But regardless you will be boarding that shuttle, and you will be doing it now. I won’t ask again.” 

He isn’t asking now , but his countenance makes her think he rarely ever lowers himself enough to do such a thing. Rey makes to whirl around but he’s faster, fisting her arm in his grip and wrestling her close when she screams and attempts to shove her knee into his gut. They both fall to their knees when she pitches them off balance, kicking up sand that sticks to his pristine black uniform which only seems to enrage him even further. When she forces his head up to an awkward angle, heel of her hand smashed under his jaw, he growls and rips something from his side pocket. 

When he shoves the rectangle into her side and discharges it, she realizes it’s a stunner. 

Everything melts away after that. 

---

When Rey wakes, it is to the inside of a vast and unfamiliar bedchamber. 

She can’t feel her tongue or the tips of her toes. Can’t scent the air or rid the edges of her vision from darkness. The muscles at her waist are tender and stiff, skin scraping raw against the inside of her tunic as she sits up to take in her surroundings. She’s been laid out on a bed, decadent with plush white covers and a mountain of soft pillows clustering the headboard. It is by far the most comfortable thing she’s ever felt under her touch. The rest of the room is all stark shiny white and hard angles, flat dashes of light set into the walls running down much of their surface to light the room. All of it a pristine brilliant frame for the black viewport that takes up one entire wall, struck through with pinprick stars.

Rey’s heart freezes and thaws and freezes again, unable to decide between beating and shutting down entirely. She can’t be in space. She can’t. She has to be planetside - they were right there at her fingertips - 

Yelling thunders in through the closed door of the room. She whips her head around to stare in the direction of the great bellowing voice raising hell in the chamber beyond. 

They’re tearing into someone else, she realizes. And drawing closer with every savagely wrought word. The durasteel floor under her trembles with their footsteps. Something crashes. 

“Get out of my sight!” the voice shouts. Clear enough to be right outside the door panel now. 

Rey scrambles up and onto her bare feet, soles raw and scraped red from Tatooine’s gritted surface. Her chest heaves as she backs away from the entrance, something odd starting to drag against her half-numb taste buds, something in the air sticking at the back of her throat… 

She hears the keypad chime around its numbers. There is nowhere to flee - no other door, no furniture to hide behind, nothing. So Rey spins around, wrapping her arms around herself like it will keep her together. Like the bandage around her head all those years ago. She will keep herself from being torn apart by whoever this Imperial official is and whatever it is they want from her. Maybe if she squeezes her eyes shut tight enough she’ll wake back up in her cellar. 

Rey hears a sound that can only be the door rushing open at her back. Her breath is arrested in her lungs, trapped in her throat. She cannot breathe, fright grips her so tightly. When the entryway is sealed behind whoever now beholds her, she hears a stuttered metallic rasp. 

Slowly, carefully, she peeks back behind her shoulder. 

And - 

Rey drops to her knees so hard she may damage them, bowing her head to the floor just as fast. 

The man before her - impossibly tall and wide and imposing, even more so than in his holos - is Kylo Ren, the galactic Emperor. His mask is chillingly sinister, something cut straight from a nightmare as it blankly regards her shaking shoulders. His cloak falls over his shoulders to his boots, shrouding the fists he has balled under heavy leather gloves. Not one sliver of skin shows anywhere on him. Nothing to give away that he is a living being at all.

After an eternity he steps forward, only stopping when his boots are within her field of vision, close enough to touch. 

Why has she been brought before the ruler of the entire galaxy? What could her life possibly mean to him?

She hears hissing, a mechanical whirr, and then his helmet is dropping to the floor so hard she jumps. Gloved fingers gently brush under her chin, causing her shoulders to draw tight. He tilts her head up. 

The Emperor mostly exists as a creature in a mask in the media and on the holonet. In all of his speeches and public appearances. Not many depictions of his face circulate. But there are a few, and she has seen them, and she has always been plagued with the same thought. That he looks too gentle to exist under such a severe visage. Something so foreboding couldn’t possibly reveal a face as lovely as his. Rey had half believed that they couldn’t possibly be the same person. 

But they are. 

His hair is all wild dark curls, almost sweet in the way they brush against his face. His eyes are dark and deep like night, set above high cheekbones and a strong nose. A plush mouth. A deep scar runs down one side of his long face, sliding down his throat to disappear into the collar of his tunic. 

In person, the effect of him is nearly debilitating. He’s so beautiful it hurts. 

Is it considered treasonous to think such a thing? 

Wasn’t it rumored that the Emperor could read thoughts? 

She flinches hard when his thumb traces the curve of her lower lip. Wetness lands heavy on her cheek, sliding down the curve of it like a tear. His eyes are wide and wet, shiny and glimmering as another drop escapes his dark lashes and lands at the corner of her mouth. Panic explodes somewhere deep in her chest. 

“Y-Your Majesty, I -” 

Before she can finish, he’s falling to his knees. It shakes the whole room, maybe even the whole ship, but she can hardly focus on it because he is before her now, reaching out to cradle her face in his big hands. 

“Beloved,” he breathes. 

He presses his full lips desperately to hers.

Chapter Text

Kylo Ren’s lips are a brand, all consuming and absolute. Like the rest of him, they offer no mercy. He kisses her like he is starving, like she is a dream he never wants to wake from. She can taste his desperation like blood in the water, and her mind spins in confusion about what he could want so badly that he does not already possess. 

He’s the Emperor. She is nobody. Nothing. 

When Rey feels his tongue slide along the curve of her lower lip, she jerks back with a gasp, finally inhabiting her own body again. 

He has claimed her very first kiss in this life. 

“Rey?” he asks softly, still half drunk on whatever he’s feeling as he strokes his gloved thumbs across her cheeks. How does he even know her name? She feels small and insignificant in the universe. Tiny in his huge hands. She knew the Emperor was a big man, that he was an alpha, but she had no idea how intense his presence was. Like he has his own gravity. His pheromones would probably bring her to her knees in supplication, but her nose still hasn’t entirely come back to her. “Sweetheart? I was told in the hangar that you were behaving strangely when they found you. What’s wrong?” 

“I-I’m not - I really don’t think that you -” 

He pulls her closer into him, pressing the side of his nose into hers. His touch is so reverent. How is it that the most feared man in all the galaxy is capable of being this… sweet? He exists as a fair and just Emperor, reasonable in the ways that matter most, but no one has ever heralded him for his kind demeanor. His temper is almost as well known as he himself is. Kylo Ren’s rages are the stuff of legends. The Empress is the kind one. The omega that softens all of his cutting edges.

Rey wrenches back when he makes to lock their lips back together. This seems to be what he needs to finally snap out of his delirium and assess the situation with his brain . 

“What is it?” he murmurs. 

“I’m not whoever you think I am,” she finally articulates, shaking within his hold. “I can’t be who you think I am. There’s been a mistake.” He has a wife. A mate. The Empress . He never seemed the type to stray. The intensity of his love for the Empress is a story whispered amongst many. 

Rey’s eyes widen, welling with horrified tears. Was she Kylo Ren’s mistress in her other life? Did he hide her in some far corner of his star ship and seek her out under his mate's nose like some dirty secret? Leaving Rey behind without a backwards glance when he went to be with his true mate again? 

What does that say about her? She bears the imprint of her own other half. 

“There is no mistake,” he says firmly, an odd undercurrent lurking beneath his tone. He tilts her face up to observe her more carefully. “Rey. My beloved. Do you not… remember me?” 

She thinks of the crash and the bandage plastered onto her head wound and all of the long confusing days that stretched on after. This cannot be the life she dreamed of returning to. An existence of deceit and illicit stolen moments with a man that belongs to someone else. An existence filled with lies and betrayal and the dishonoring of the love Rey’s other half has given her. She fights him off of her, but his hand latches itself to her wrist before she can go very far. 

Her brain is receiving too much information too quickly. It can’t handle it. She is one half of a whole, destined to always be missing from the rest of her pieces, and now she’s supposed to believe that she has been Kylo Ren’s long lost mistress all this time. “I am not who you’re looking for. I’m mated. To someone else. You have to let go of me, I don’t want -” 

Suddenly she’s being yanked into his wide chest again, one gloved hand fisting into her hair to yank it aside and expose her mating mark to him. 

Rey has surreptitiously admired it in every reflective surface she’s passed since she first discovered it was there under all the crusted up blood. It had made all of her confusing feelings make sense. The misplaced panic, the curling agony, the sharp longing. The rage and howling despair that wasn’t hers. 

This doesn’t belong to him. She doesn’t care that he’s the Emperor, that he could kill her as easily as snapping a toothpick. This mark is her other half’s and no one else's. She knows she wouldn’t ever betray that. 

Acting on wild instinct, Rey punches him in the stomach. Kylo Ren snarls, but when she wrenches herself back, he only drags her in again to savagely sink his teeth against the imprint already embedded there. 

She opens her mouth to scream, to curse him, to do any number of things. But the only sound to come out is a faint warbling cry. He doesn’t break the skin, but it’s a very near thing. For reasons she doesn’t understand, she goes limp. Utterly pliant in his grasp, and with her submission he softens his touch into something kinder. He closes his plush lips around her gland to suck, and her fists find themselves closing around the collar of his tunic to force him closer without her permission. He goes willingly. 

“ I put this here,” he insists against the mark, sending fire licking down her spine at every brush of his mouth. “This is the scar from my teeth. I claimed you myself, Rey. Five years ago.” 

Her head is spinning - she might get sick from how fast. 

Wouldn’t that make her the…. 

Is he insinuating that she’s -

Before Rey can say anything else, his commlink is going off. He ignores it, hypnotized by the taste of her gland, content to mouth and kiss and worry at the skin there for as long as she’ll allow him. But then the beeping takes on a different cadence and he’s roughly pressing the button. 

“What?” he growls, voice angry and strained. 

“Apologies, sir,” a female voice demures. “She’s asking for you again. Quite insistently.” 

Kylo Ren presses his forehead to Rey’s collarbone and takes a deep breath. Then answers in a softer voice than she expects: “I am unavailable. Please convey my sincerest apologies, and tell her I will meet with her as soon as I can.” 

“Yes sir.” 

The connection dies and Kylo Ren straightens back up to look at her. 

Neither of them say anything for a long time. 

“Where is your Empress?” Rey chokes. 

Kylo Ren looks… profoundly sad. Then he offers her a slight smile. “She is right here before me, beloved.” 

---

Rey remembers tiny shreds - bits and pieces, really - from the life she has never known. Not enough to do anything with, but enough to keep her feeling incomplete. Lost. Giant sunken starships swallowed by sand and hollowed out into husks. A salt planet bleeding red. A hand held out for her across a great insurmountable distance. 

Not a throne. Not the weight of any galaxy. Not Kylo Ren. 

Something in the pit of her stomach squirms. An agonizing fluttering feeling she can’t identify. One that sears through her..

“The Empress has been by your side all this time,” Rey tells him, heavy with distrust. If the great Kylo Ren really was missing his mate, the galaxy would have had to answer for it by now. This she knows. 

He works his jaw. “I wanted to tear the system apart until I found you. But I was advised against releasing that we had lost contact with the Empress to the public. I didn’t want anyone to capture you for ransom if you were too hurt to defend yourself. Or harm you out of misplaced anger towards the New Empire. When you didn’t come back… when I felt the echo of your pain through our bond, I knew something was wrong. That something terrible had happened. But I never ceased in my efforts to bring you home. Not for one second, no matter how quiet I had to keep them.” 

Rey stares at him hard. The sincerity is not something she thinks he could fake. The Emperor does not strike her as a particularly gifted actor, not when his tantrums are so prevalent. 

She tries to scoot back from him - wanting space, not knowing how to order her thoughts with him so close - but he grips at her thighs to keep her in place. “No - please, I… please.” Rey blinks at him, and he averts his gaze to the sliver of floor showing between them. Where his hands touch her through her breeches, through the thick leather of his gloves, it feels… hot. Warm and tingling in a way that doesn’t make any sense to her. “It… is not my wish to make you uncomfortable. If you truly do not remember our life together. If you truly do not remember me,” his face falls. “But I’ve torn this system apart for three years trying to find you. If you move too far from me, I don’t believe I’ll be able to withstand it.” 

Rey wriggles under his grip. Kylo Ren seems unable to decide between squeezing her tighter and giving in to her wishes. 

“I’m sorry. I know how certain you believe to be. But I am certain in the knowledge that you cannot possibly be mine. Such a conviction isn’t grounded anywhere in reality.” 

His glare is the stuff of legends, so she’s heard. Kylo Ren is rumored to have killed full grown men where they stand with just a look. Just a thought. But the man in front of her looks heartbroken in his anger. Like one stiff wind could scatter his ashes across the whole galaxy. 

“What are your reasons, then? I will prove it to you.” 

He looks so fiercely determined for her to be wrong. “It’s not that simple.” 

“Isn’t it?” he snaps. Kylo Ren roughly takes her hands and presses her palms flat against his chest. She feels the fluttering heart he protects within his ribcage. “You’re right here ,” he hisses. “You’ve been here this whole time, beloved. Right on the other end of the bond. I would know you anywhere, in any timeline, with any face, bearing any name.” 

The bond. She watches him unsurely, squeezing at that connection wound around her own heart. A soft smile blooms across his face and whoever is on the other end squeezes back. 

Coincidence. It’s just coincidence. She will not betray her other half simply because her Emperor spun her a pretty tale. 

“Can’t you scent it on me? Don’t you at least recall that much?”

Rey wrinkles her nose like she’s testing it. Trying to shake the numbness from a limb. “I can’t really smell much yet. Or wiggle my toes. The stunner made me feel very strange when I woke up.” But now that she considers it, she can smell… bergamot? Just a hint of it, but for some reason the nape of her neck flares with heat. 

Kylo Ren is silent for an uncomfortable amount of time. Then:

“Stunner?” The way he says it is low and deadly. 

Rey is unapologetic. “Well, I didn’t know what the New Empire was doing in the outpost, or why they were hauling me off. I didn’t exactly come quietly.” 

“Who stunned you?” he demands around a growl. 

Rey makes a face, wondering why it matters. 

“Who. Stunned. You?” Kylo Ren enunciates. 

Alpha laces between each syllable. None of the compulsion, that only works between mates, but all of the dominance - the raw and assured power. She hates herself when it settles deep into her core, prompting her to squeeze her thighs together so he can’t tell. Then hates herself even more when his eyes drop to catalog the movement anyway. 

He takes a deep breath. Rey can’t tell if he’s scenting her or trying to gather his inner peace. 

“How much do you remember?” he asks her softly. 

She hates this day. Hates it for everything it represents. Every thought that carries her back to it makes her feel hollow and alone. Like she will never cease being empty. But if Kylo Ren really is the alpha he claims to be, she will push through and she will try. 

“I recall the remains of an escape pod. Lying within the rubble. Then eventually waking on a shopkeeper’s floor with my head being bandaged. There was… a lot of blood. Bacta is scarce there, so it took many days to determine if I would survive my injuries. As soon as I was able to stand again, I worked on paying the shopkeeper back by scrubbing all the parts he intended to sell.” 

Kylo Ren looks haunted. Like he’s looking through her and into the past, helpless to change it. “I searched for so long,” he rasps. Eyes suspiciously wet. “They calculated the likely trajectory of your escape pod and I sent battalions to every planet even tangentially aligned. And all this time you were on another wretched desert planet surviving off of scraps. Four planets away from the furthest estimation.” 

Something prickles, dancing along the edge of her gland. Kylo Ren’s eyes snap back to hers like he can feel it himself. It’s as if all of Rey’s clothes are too tight. Like the fibers are tearing at her skin. Rubbing it red and raw. Her fingers come up to claw at her collar. 

“I went through twelve ruts without you,” Kylo Ren murmurs. His line of thinking makes absolutely no sense to her. “Each one was worse than the previous. It felt as if my body would pull itself apart without you there to hold me together. Like I would burn through our bedding and the floor and the hull of the ship until I was claimed by the freezing stars. And that even still fire would consume me. As if I were a dying star. I can’t… even imagine what you’ve been through.” 

He says this last part like a horror he’s never been able to face. 

“I’ve never had a heat,” she tells him. 

“You… what?” 

He looks gobsmacked. Utterly disbelieving. Rey shrugs her shoulders, too aware of the way her tunic is sticking to her back with sweat now. “I don’t remember ever having one. I was never afflicted with them on Tatooine.” 

“That’s not…” 

“I was told it’s common. Among omegas that do not receive adequate nutrition. Who do not have a mate to see them through it.” 

Kylo Ren looks as if she’s ripped his supposedly black heart right out of his chest. Something is buzzing in the back of her mind, something vicious and molten and unbearable. Rey wants to tear her skin off. Wants to crack her chest open and rip out whatever organ is malfunctioning enough to make her feel this way. 

“You do not know what one feels like.” Kylo Ren tells her. It should be a question, but it isn’t. 

“I don’t.” 

He reaches up to cradle her cheek then, and the leather of his glove is cool against her face. Their difference in temperature shocks her, but Rey’s head is immediately dropping further into his touch. It is a balm for reasons she cannot explain. 

He still isn’t doing well with the distance between them it seems. Kylo Ren grips the back of her neck to pull her in slightly closer. When he presses his thumb into her mating gland, it’s to find it puffy and tender and so unbearably sensitive it forces a shout from her throat. 

“Then I will need to be the one to tell you, beloved,” he says gently. “It is what’s happening to you now.” 

Chapter Text

They don’t say anything for many moments. 

Rey’s heart might give out under the strain of his silence. But Kylo Ren seems content to hold her like this, with his gloved thumb tracing circles against the apple of her cheek while his other hand blankets over her gland. She wonders if he can feel the traitorous throbbing pulse it’s adopted under his attention. 

“Adequate nutrition hasn’t been provided,” she intones woodenly. Because she can’t be going into heat. She just can’t. “It must be something else.” 

“You were not… provided food upon boarding the ship? From Tatooine?”

“I only woke up a moment before you entered the room.” 

Kylo Ren looks… odd. Like he is trying very hard to smooth his expression over. Fisting at his frayed nerves so tightly his body vibrates with the strain. When he speaks it is slow and soft, filtered through his clenched teeth as it is. “And why were you unconscious, beloved?” 

“I told you. I was stunned.” 

“Who, may I ask, took it upon themselves to stun the galactic Empress on a setting so high she lost consciousness?” 

Rey tosses her shoulders up in frustration, clothes sticking to her uncomfortably as she struggles backwards. He lets it happen, but only because his body chases hers forward. There might even be less space between them now. 

“It’s not like I know. This is your military, I don’t know anyone’s name .” 

Kylo Ren is… also starting to look flushed. His chest is rising and falling as rapidly as hers is now. Who decided to make this room a thousand degrees? 

He growls and squeezes his eyes shut. “Airax,” he barks into his commlink, “Send a droid in with a platter of the Empress's favorites. Inform Soren, Hux, Leia, and everyone else that neither of us are to be disturbed for the next five standard days unless an emergency arises. If they need to know why, instruct them to consult my physician.” A reply comes in through a language Rey doesn’t understand. Kylo Ren chews on the inside of his cheek. “Launch an investigation regarding how the Empress was procured on Tatooine. I wish to know who took it upon themselves to stun her.” He cuts off the comm and mutters something that sounds like Maker help them under his breath. 

Everytime Rey tries to shuffle away, he follows her like a shadow. Frustrated, she braces her toes on his shin and pushes, trying to create distance between them that way. 

“Where are your shoes?” he asks, rolling her ankle in his grip until he can see the angry red soles of her feet. 

“ Your military dragged me out of my dwelling without them.” She finally wriggles out of his grasp enough to back away from him, shuffling towards the far wall to give herself some space. He braces his hands out to crawl after her, but she bears her teeth and growls. He hesitates, dark brows furrowing. 

“Why will you not permit me to touch you, beloved?” 

“Because I do not know you,” she snaps. 

Rey feels something unsettling crackle in the air between them. Like a tentative pressure against her mind. 

“Your body has known me many times, Rey. You need me.” 

“What I need is to be returned to the surface.”  

“You’ll be lucky if I ever allow you outside of our rooms again in this lifetime.” 

Fear trickles down her spine. Kylo Ren rolls his jaw and sits back to cross his legs loosely in front of him. Rey takes advantage of his relaxed position and scoots away even further. 

“That’s enough,” he bites when she makes it about ten feet from him. Without really knowing why, she relents and ceases, pulling her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. 

She’s shaking, she realizes. Breathless and burning up everywhere, an ache so deep she couldn’t possibly ever touch it. Her stomach knots. 

“The physicians told me this was a possibility. Upon your rescue.” 

Rey looks up at him, trying to make her eyes focus on his face. They suddenly want to eat up every part of him. The breadth of his shoulders, the taper of his waist, his thick thighs, his luscious dark hair. Lips so pouty she thinks they might lull her to complacency with one more touch. The feeling against the inside of her skull intensifies, skitters along the curve of it. It’s so strange that she whips her head to the side in her attempt to shake it loose. It dissipates. “I don’t know what that means.” 

“Mates parted for so long have the ability to send each other into heat and rut upon their reunion. It’s fairly common in the few instances it’s been observed.” 

Her eyes widen. “You - are you going into -” 

Kylo Ren lets out an unsteady breath. “Yes, beloved. I am.” 

Shit. Shit. 

“Rey,” he continues upon her stricken expression, “My love. My wife. My Empress. My ever glowing starlight. What else do you need to know before you can believe that it’s me? That I’m the one that’s been waiting on the other end of the bond for you all this time?” 

Truthfully, Rey does not know if she could ever believe it. 

But now that he’s mentioned the bond, it feels… different. When she reaches out, the thread nearly scalds when she closes her fingers around it. Sparks shoot down to her core, lighting up all her synapses, and from where Kylo Ren sits across from her she hears a tight groan. 

She smells… something. Something bright and spicy. Black pepper? Gardenia? 

Rey huffs at the simple pleasure of that smell. The bone deep release of tension it elicits. Where has she experienced it before? 

The service hatch dings, and a squat droid is roving out balancing a covered tray atop its body. Kylo Ren unburdens the droid, the tray floating up to glide across the space until it settles at his hip. He doesn’t move his body to do it, but she knows it has to be him. Only the force could do something so ethereal. The cloche lifts off of the plate and hovers back to the droid, who takes it out of the air like it is just another day. Kylo Ren calls it’s dismissal and the little thing returns to whence it came without question. 

“Come here, beloved. I will feed you myself.” 

Rey peeks around his knee to catalog an assortment of foods she has never experienced before. Fluffy pastries and hearty meat skewers and so many different fruits . She’s never eaten anything that grew from the ground, but she is still wary to be in such close proximity to him. Her stomach clenches in a way she doesn’t quite know how to interpret. Rey shakes her head and Kylo Ren looks profoundly unhappy. 

“A taste, then?” Kylo Ren entreats. He makes a slight motion with his fingers, and then something is drifting to her. She is transfixed, utterly in awe with the magic he can weave through the air. She holds her hands out and the object gently settles into the cradle of them. 

It’s a fruit, she knows that much. Only half of one, so she can see the shiny orange flesh under the skin. 

“It’s a muja fruit,” Kylo Ren tells her. He’s watching as if her opinion of the snack is paramount. “They’re your favorite.” 

It is profoundly strange for someone to tell Rey what her favorite things are when even she doesn’t know. Regardless, Rey takes a deep breath and bites into it. 

Then bites again. 

And again.

And again.

Until the entire palm sized piece of fruit is gone and only her sticky fingers remain. She pushes her digits into her mouth to try and suck up every last bit of juice the fruit has wept. 

Kylo Ren moans . “Come here, beloved,” he implores again. 

Even with how badly Rey wants the rest of what’s on that tray, she doesn’t. Desperation blooms upon Kylo Ren’s face. She never thought she’d witness such a sight. That the Emperor could ever want something so badly that only she could give him. 

As she’s considering their proximity, a cramp seizes low in her abdomen. She whimpers and feels the fruit roil oddly in her stomach. Kylo Ren hunches like he’s about to fall forward towards her. 

“No - I’m - I’m fine -” 

“You are not ,” he growls from where she has halted him, weight shifted onto the palms he has braced on the floor. “You are going into your first heat after three years. Let your other half help you. Your mate has searched for so long -” 

A shudder wracks through her. “No -” 

“What more proof do you need?” he beseeches. His face is open and nearly tortured. He exudes something bordering on agony. Like he is ready to beg her if that will end their slow descent into madness.

She’s too scared. She’s too unsure. What if it isn’t him?

What if it is? 

“I don’t - I don’t -” 

“What do I need to -” 

“I’m afraid!” she hurls out, arms recrossing over her shins, balling up before his scrutiny. “Okay? Kylo Ren? Emperor of the galaxy? Master of the Knights of Ren? Most powerful man in the known universe through politics and the force? If… if you are really my other half… I am afraid .” 

She is panting in the wake of her confession. But a scent like cedar is starting to break through to her now as well. And the mix of everything together is so… it’s…

She knows this smell. 

Rey’s eyes fly up to his, wide and wet and looking over his face like it is the first time seeing it. He holds her gaze with the kind of single mindedness that can only stem from something like love. 

“Beloved,” he melts, “I am your husband. I am your other half - I am . And I love you. I never stopped loving you. Why are you afraid?” 

“I -” Rey drops her forehead onto her knees and sniffles. “I’ve spent so long waiting. But I…I don’t know you. I always thought when my other half came back for me I would know .”

Kylo Ren’s plush mouth twists. It looks as if he’s chewing on the inside of his lip. “You called me Kylo Ren. Earlier.” 

Rey huffs. Her clothing feels like sandpaper against her skin. “That is your name.” 

“This is true,” he concedes. “But you’ve always called me by a different one. The name I was given before I became Kylo Ren. I am Ben to you.” 

Tears suddenly streak hot and heavy down her cheeks. Meteorites trailing across the night sky, tails burning in their wake. Her vision swims before her, distorting her surroundings until it feels as if she inhabits a dream. The same dreams she used to have curled up in her cellar. She raises her head and meets his eyes. Her voice is very small. 

You’re still holding on. Let go. 

“...Ben?” 

She sees him suddenly, haloed in red and sparks of flame. Skin shiny with sweat, eyes big and brown enough to drown entire star systems. Hand outstretched to her with much the same plea he extends to her now. 

I want you to join me. Together we can bring a new order to the galaxy…

He smiles. A gentle thing, wobbling and unsteady like he’s not a man to do it often.

She remembers when her hand slipped into his in the midst of the First Order’s ruin. 

Rey knows that he’s telling the truth. That he’s never lied to her. Deep in her bones. Only solidified by the scent she can better smell every minute that goes by. Complex and spicy and bright. 

This man is hers. This alpha before her is the one that has been looking for her, all this time. She may not yet remember anything beyond that, but she can almost see the shape of it. Solid and clear. 

Her head spins. 

When he shifts forward again, she flinches back. Ben’s eyebrows drop in confusion. 

Rey feels small and grimy and inadequate stood next to him. Like an unfit match in every way. She isn’t special like he is. She’s just a sand rat from a backwater desert planet. She can’t imagine ever being anyone else, no matter what circumstances she was actually born into. 

“I-I’m not strong like you. I’m not sophisticated like you. I don’t know what I was like before, but I know I cannot possibly be that person now.” 

“You would be surprised.” 

Another bolt of agonizing heat licks down her spine and she shakes her head. She doesn’t know what that means, but every second they spend talking is another increment of her brain deteriorating into boiling soup. Ben is definitely not unaffected, the strands of hair touching his forehead are plastered to it with sweat, hands shaking where they hang between his crossed knees. His shoulders rise and fall in great heaving motions. 

The fever threatens to consume them both, and Rey is terrified. 

“I’ve never had a heat before. I’ve never even copulated before. And suddenly I am to do so with the most feared man in all the galaxy? Whom I have just met within the hour?” 

He huffs out an amused sound that bewilders her. Ben gestures to his face, to the long scar bisecting his cheek. “Do you know how I got this scar?” 

She shakes her head, body trembling as he grinds his teeth together in the face of her misery. “You gave this to me. The very first day we met.” 

Rey balks. “Surely not.” 

He smiles at her. “Absolutely. A little slip of a thing on the opposite side of the war. Felled the great Kylo Ren, future Emperor of the galaxy, Master of the Knights of Ren, with powers you barely knew how to use and a lightsaber you’d never held before that day. You were the most extraordinary vision I had ever seen. You still are.” 

“I…I bested you?” Rey is horrified and enraptured and exhilarated. She feels so many things she could not possibly name even one of them. 

“Yes. And you have many other times since then. When you are well enough to spar, I’ll show you just how powerful you are.” He looks reassuring. Almost safe, even with how many titles he possesses. 

Powerful.

“Powers?” 

Ben regards her, eyes begging for something she cannot parse out. 

“Yes, Rey. You have the force. Didn’t you realize?” 

“I…” 

It is becoming increasingly difficult to think. Some part of her knows that this revelation should be among the most important she has learned today, but it simply isn’t sticking. She feels half-mad, driven to insanity by things she doesn’t know how to want. 

“Now. Come here, beloved. I will answer every single question you have after I’ve soothed your fever with my knot.” 

“I’ve never… done that,” she tells him frantically. Her mate . Her other half. Ben. “What is done during a heat. I remember nothing.” 

“It’s alright,” he tells her gently, “I will remember for you.” 

Rey stares at the floor separating them. Her breeches are stuck to her in all the wrong places, making her fold into herself with hot shame in effort to conceal it from him.

“Take off your clothes,” he murmurs. When she gapes at him, Ben continues. “They always feel horrid against your skin when your heat takes you. You once likened the sensation to gravel and wire bristles. You will feel better when you take them off. If it is truly what you wish… I will stay right here for now.” 

He looks starving, and Rey burns for him even with as much as she tries not to. His scent wraps around her like home, like all the fantasies she’s ever allowed herself to have about him on Tatooine. She begins with her arm wraps, Ben’s eyes eating up every inch of newly bared skin, entranced by her shoulders and biceps and slim forearms. Next goes her belt. 

“All of it,” he says hoarsely when she stops. 

Rey eyes him warily. Not knowing how to be so vulnerable in front of a man such as him, no matter that they are each other’s. 

But she feels as if she will die if she is confined by this fabric shot through with glass shards a moment longer. 

She wrestles her tunic and her breast band off, rasping the material against her nipples and wrenching a grunt from her lips. When she bares herself to him, Ben moans and fists his hands so hard that his gloves creak between his fingers. He looks taken apart, and she hasn’t even done anything. 

“And your pants,” he breathes. 

The garment he refers to is absolutely ruined. It is soaked through enough to stick to every subtle curve of her - agonizing to her raw and burning skin. She shucks them off along with her underthings.

“There you are.” Ben is shaking, straining forward over the tangle of his legs in an attempt to look closer. “Open your legs for me, beloved. My starlight. Let me see you.” He is coiled like a spring, his unraveling self control barely holding him in place. His cheeks and the bridge of his nose are an adorable pink. She wants to kiss a path across all that color. 

Rey feels out of control. Sloppy and unrefined in her body’s desperation for her other half. Something in his voice convinces her knees part for him, and she shivers at the absolutely feral expression that transforms his face. 

“Please,” he begs, “Let me make you come, darling. Sweetheart. I can soothe your fever if you just let me -” 

She shakes her head in two quick motions, pulse jumping in her throat, gland on fire under the silvery imprint of his teeth. The most possessive claiming scar that multiple people in Rey’s short second life had ever seen. He growls and glares up at her with a heat that rivals even that which spirals through her own body.

Then he is unclasping his cloak, stripping out of his tunic, movements rough and determined. She can’t decide whether to succumb to nerves or elation as she watches more of his skin bared to her. His collarbones and the elegant column of his throat. His sleeveless undershirt comes off next, and this he rubs slowly across the crook of his neck. Rey watches, transfixed, as the muscles in his torso flex and bunch with his movements. Ben is… beautiful. Miles of pale skin and scattered beauty marks covering a wide chest and taut stomach. His arm guards and gloves are still on, left in place like he cannot possibly be bothered with them in his current state.

He glides the shirt he’s just scented over to her with a stirring of the force, letting it settle between her open knees in offering. 

Her nose catches spice and bergamot and amber, so intense her legs would buckle if they weren’ already spread out for him like they are. And she ignites . 

“That’s it, beloved,” he coos when she snatches up his shirt. “See what you’ve done to me.” 

Rey presses it to her face before she can make any conscious decision to do so, instantly plunging into an incinerating sort of paradise. So good and sharp and edged in unbearable heat she can do nothing but bury deeper into it and moan. He is everything she has ever wanted. Every good memory she can no longer recall. She lurches forward towards him and only remembers to hold back when her hands have slapped against the floor. 

“Come. Here ,” Ben grinds out. He looks physically pained, flushed and tense as he is. His hands drop to his pants to unfasten them, and she wonders if he even realizes he’s doing it. “Don’t you want me to make it better? Don’t you want to let your other half make you come? Because that is what I am, beloved. I’m yours.” 

His weight falls back onto the arm he has propped behind his hip. It allows her to follow the ladder of his abdominal muscles all the way down. He delves his gloved hand into his opened fly and fishes out his cock. 

Rey’s mouth floods with saliva. 

Ben is the perfect specimen of an alpha. Tall and wide, built with strong muscles surrounding a commanding presence. His cock is thick and flushed. She considered his hands massive blunt things, but his cock makes them appear almost normally sized as he fists himself. She can’t even see the knot surely starting to fill out at the base, covered by his pants as it still is, but something deep inside of her screams for it. 

How could this man possibly be hers? 

“A-And you say we’ve done this before?” she wavers, comparing the size of him to that of her. 

Ben grins wolfishly. “Yes, beloved. You’ve taken me inside of you many times. There have been instances in which you’ve begged me for this cock. And being your loving other half, I was only ever too happy to give it to you.” 

Heat and pain knife through her again, forcing her to double over around it. Ben snarls, and when she looks back up she realizes his eyes are riveted between her legs. When she follows them, it is to see her own fingers rubbing through her messy cleft. She is so wet that her slick pools under her, dripping heavily down her soft inner thighs. 

“You will only be coming for me ,” he snaps. “There has been enough of this.” 

He throws a hand out to her and claws his fingers. Rey gasps as she is lifted and pulled forward with the force, only halting when she is spread under his body. His hands come down hard at either side of her head as he cages her in, pressing himself to her and claiming her mouth in a harsh kiss. Her thighs are parted around his lean hips, and she feels the throbbing heat of his cock press against her aching clit. Both of them cry out at the contact, Ben grinding into her in pursuit of more. Rey scrabbles at his back, nails catching on the strap spanning his shoulders that connects his arm guards. Ben moans and arches when she draws four long pink lines down his flank. 

She opens her mouth to say something - to give some sort of shape to her anxiety - but then two gloved fingers are pushing into her. Rey’s palm smacks down onto the durasteel of the floor in her shock, back bowing at the stretch of them. 

Rey can now see how tightly Ben has been holding himself under control. Because she sees in his eyes the instant it finally snaps. 

All the breath rushes out of him. Slick coats his gloves in obscene amounts, making itself known in the filthy sounds he’s making as he pumps his fingers into her cunt. Rey keens, head whipping to the side, body already coiling around something she’s not sure she can survive - 

“You’re not coming unless it’s around my cock,” Ben growls. Then she’s left aching and empty again, accepting his fingers into her mouth when he pushes them past her lips. 

Gone is the gentle patience he’s extended to her thus far. In its place is a man undone, brought to his knees by lust and love and the writhing body of his lost other half. 

Ben pins her down, and Rey finds herself writhing under the weight of him. That last frontier of her mind is unwilling to accept that her waiting is finally over. That she is found and whole and loved. He shushes her, but when she wriggles against his hold he growls and clamps his teeth down hard against her bonding scar. It forces her body to go limp against the floor, pliant and relaxed and panting up at him as he fits his thick head against her entrance.

Her body receives his in a swift merciless push. Rey nearly screams in pleasure before he’s given her even half of that perfect cock. She is wet and needy and so fucking ready to be filled, but there is so much of him. The stretch is so intense that it burns. Rey isn’t sure she was built to take this much. 

When the beginnings of his knot press into her, testing her capacity even further, she sobs. And then, when he finally bottoms out inside of her and grinds - 

An orgasm takes her so viciously she can do nothing but claw at his sides and gape at the ceiling.

“Oh, Maker, just like that, beloved,” he gasps against her neck as her cunt flutters and squeezes around him. “Ah. Fuck. It’s so… it’s…” A full body shiver wracks through him. Rey is mindless, still bearing down on all that’s inside of her, potentially drawing blood with her nails at his skin, unable to believe that she has found her end within a single stroke of his hips. “It’s so good. It’s so good.” 

He starts up a punishing pace, leather grip heavy at her waist and shoulder to keep her in place under him. She nearly crosses her eyes at the feeling of his overwhelming thickness battering against her inner walls, every curve and ridge of him dragging her deeper and deeper into insanity. 

Ben angles his hips, Rey’s fingers scrabbling to seek purchase against the smooth surface of the floor. And when he pushes deep again, growling his pleasure as he angles himself just right - 

Rey’s arm spasms downwards with the shout of his name, and with it so does the cruel mask of Kylo Ren five feet away. It is jerked so violently that it cracks against the opposite wall of the room. 

Rey stares wide eyed at its sinister visage, eyes vacant and haunting. “I… Ben… Ben, I -” 

He grunts, pressing her open for him until her butterflied knees touch the floor. Ben pulls back from her, gaze black and devouring and utterly lost to this. To them. All rational light is gone as he looms over her body to wrap his fingers around the slim column of her throat. 

“I will tell you everything you wish to know -” Ben grinds out with no small amount of effort, fucking into her so hard she is pushed upwards into his iron grip again and again and again. “Later.” 

His gloves creak as he tightens his fingers. She can still breathe for the most part, but some secret part of her wails in ecstasy at the indisputable might of his control. At how strong and capable Alpha is, how completely and utterly he is dominating his other half. Rey can smell her arousal still coating the leather over her burning gland.

Rey buries greedy hands into his hair, just like she’s wanted to since she first set eyes on him unmasked. He is panting into her ear, hot and unsteady, the heat of it only stoking the fire that consumes them both. She never wants him to stop, never wants her other half to be anywhere that isn’t inside of her. Her fists tug at his curls with her toe-curling ecstacy. 

Ben chases her grip from his hair, gathering both wrists in one huge hand to pin them above her head. It bares her small breasts to his gaze, which he dazedly drinks in. He watches the way they jiggle against the force of his hips as if fascinated by it. 

“Does it feel good, beloved?” he slurs, giving it to her even harder so he can watch her body bounce against his. “Do you feel better with your other half’s cock inside of you? Knowing you’ll have his knot and his come and all of his love flooding this little cunt so soon?” 

“Ben, please -” static is beginning to race up her fingers and toes. The twin sensations collide in her core, wrapping around where he’s splitting her open and forcing her back into an upward arch. She feels as if she could shake apart right here under him - like her body could dissipate into the air and become the very oxygen filling Ben’s lungs as he found his release. 

Ben sounds half-crazed, drunk on pheromones and rut and her . He is groaning what could be her name or an endearment or a declaration of love. Or perhaps even a fevered combination of all three. 

“I will always be right here, beloved. I will always bring you back to me. In this life and the next.” 

Rey keens. She isn’t big enough to hold this feeling that’s building inside of her. She might die like this, with her other half buried so deep inside of her. Reclaiming her body for himself with his hands and his cock and his endless amounts of devotion. She can feel it now in every way he touches her. The way his eyes drink her in, the way his lips form her name and repeat it like a prayer. It winds through their bond like a vein of gold - and she can see now that it’s the one thing that kept them going all these years in their search of one another. 

“Let go,” he pants into her hair as she fights the devastation coming for her. Her breath comes hard and fast, air barely filtering up to her brain as he stretches her around him, as their ruin looms closer and closer over them. If she thought her orgasm before was life changing, this might just end her life altogether. “I’m here. Let go. I’m right here to catch you, beloved.” 

Oh -

Rey screams as she comes around the thickness of her other half’s cock. Ben coos and shushes and murmurs desperate sweet nothings against the shell of her ear as he guides her through it, never ceasing the steady and devastating movements of his hips as he tells her how good she is, how perfect, how very his . He is drunk off of her surrender, slurring professions of his love and affection and mad desire for her body - all the ways she takes him into her. It all stretches out on an endless amazing terrible moment. 

She didn’t think it possible to make even more of a mess, but now she is gushing around him and onto him and all over his lap. And Ben snarls, dropping desperate hands to her waist. He doesn’t even slow his pace as he looks down to take in how sloppy his wife has made him. Her newly freed hands scrabble at the durasteel floor, too slick with the sweat of her fevered skin to gain any purchase. She’s squeezing around him so hard she fears he’ll slip out of her. She might die without the length of him, she might not survive being empty - but Ben just blankets over her and gathers her close. He gives her short and demanding strokes of his hips so that he can stay buried as deep inside her as he can. 

Rey can feel his knot starting to form. She sucks in a sharp breath as the shape of it catches on her entrance with every outward thrust. It hasn’t even fully taken, and it’s already big enough to begin restricting the motion of his body. Big enough to make Rey’s spine prickle with fear.  

Among other things. 

“Oh Maker, Rey,” he rushes out, voice low and breathy and so completely different from any holovid she’s ever heard him speak in. He has his arms wrapped around her now, the thick forearms across her back forcing it into an even more dramatic bow. When he ruts forward on his next push, the fat head of his cock strikes something in her that’s - 

That - 

Fuck, is it even possible to - 

“I’m gonna come,” he moans feverishly, “gonna knot you, my beloved. My mate. My beautiful wife. Love of my -” His eyes slam shut, shoulders curving forward over her as he opens his mouth in a cry robbed of all breath, all sound. He shoves his hips forward hard, jerking her body up into his crushing grip, burying his knot into her cunt as it swells to lock them together. Rey’s fingers twist into his hair, desperate for something to hold onto as she accepts all that her love has to give her. 

Her husband, her other half - he looks utterly lost to it, this bone deep pleasure he’s found inside the heat of her body. He groans long and low, the sound rough at the edges as she feels him pump his come into her. His hips keep working against hers, little unsteady pushes that tug at where his knot traps him. It seems like he comes for entire minutes, sucking at her gland as Rey’s cunt flutters around him, stretched so tight she feels as if he’ll split her in two. 

Fuck, there is so much of him. 

She writhes with the feeling of it. Of his come filling her belly, of this big fearsome man so lost to his ecstasy inside of her, of the knot that takes up every inch of space and then some within her messy cunt. And on the next twist of his hip, she’s wrenched over the edge of another orgasm. 

“That’s it,” Ben chokes. Rey pulses and spasms and clenches around him, driven to insanity as she pulls his seed even deeper into her body. He moans against her mating mark like he is delighted by her surrender, utterly at peace buried so deep inside of her. Finally made whole. Ben sucks at the gland under the mark of his teeth like it is a balm for him, a siren’s song he has gone without for years. 

Rey is soothed into a puddle by the time he comes back to himself, splayed out across the durasteel floor under his massive frame, utterly boneless. He grunts and uses the arms he still has wound around the curve of her spine to pull her with him as he sits back, melting into a half-sit half-sprawl with his shoulders braced against the foot of the massive bed they’d forgotten about. The leather covering his fingers is warm enough to match her temperature now. It makes her shiver when he pets at her sides, traces the flare of her hips. 

They pant against each other as they luxuriate in the glow of their union, the roaring fire temporarily diminished to hot coals as Ben fills Rey to the brim. He cradles her to his wide chest like something precious, weaving his fingers into her hair as she pulls him closer with a hand at the back of his neck. Rey nuzzles her nose to his gland, smelling traces of amber and sandalwood and ginger under everything else - so many different facets, so many new things to discover within him. Ben huffs a contented sigh as she licks him, shivers when she sucks. 

Then she opens her mouth wide to bite down. Not breaking the skin, but it’s a near thing. 

Ben whines and tenses up underneath her, and Rey only realizes that he’s coming again when her belly practically swells with it. He’s crushing her close with shaking hands, giving her so much of him Rey can feel some leak past his knot. He snarls when he feels it, too, and forces their hips together until there is nowhere left for it to go but deeper. 

“Take everything I have to give you,” he breathes deliriously. “Take me. Take me. Take me…”

Chapter Text

“I had always wondered why I couldn’t feel you in the force,” Ben murmurs, somber and hushed as he feeds her another brightly colored pastry. Rey has never tasted anything so good. Has never felt anything so good as Ben locked inside of her, pushing all of these little delicacies past her lips. Ben is still reclined back against the side of the bed, bracing his boots against the floor so that Rey may relax her spine against his thighs. 

“What do you mean?” Rey asks around a mini fruit tart. 

Ben levitates another treat from the tray, catching it with his fingers and seeming to speak more to it than to her. “After you went missing… I was no longer able to sense you within the force. I could feel our mating bond - it was the only way I knew that you still lived - but none of the ways we had ever reached out to each other through the force worked any longer. It was like a hole cut into my head where your presence used to be. I was never able to figure it out… However, after taking into account what you’ve told me, it makes sense.” 

He holds the bun he’s been conversing with to her lips after she swallows, his eyes tracking the movement of her throat. Rey eagerly accepts his new offering into her mouth. He pauses there, thumb brushing along the shifting swell of her lower lip as she chews. 

“I still don’t understand.” 

He hums and lets his other hand drift up the ladder of her ribs while he searches for the words. “There is the bond we share through our union, through our biology - but there is also the bond we share through the force. There was a connection forged between us even before I claimed you as my own. Our minds have been bridged through the force since the very first day we met. My heart was bound to you the very second my gaze met yours.” 

“But I thought the force was…” Rey’s mind works, hindered by the bliss of the pastry in her mouth and the water now wetting her tongue. By the overwhelming pressure of Ben inside of her, stuffing her full, pumping his devotion as deep as it can go. Truthfully, Rey wasn’t really sure what she thought the force was. To her it was only a power that let you control people and… make things float.

“It isn’t entirely just lifting rocks,” Ben huffs, watching her tongue brush the crumbs clinging to the corner of her mouth. His breath catches as she feels him twitch inside of her. “It’s… it’s what connects every living being. It’s the space between every life force and intention. The thread binding all things. It is balance. And we exist as that balance.” The hand Ben had been framing the underside of her breast with slides down to her hip, then lower still until a seam in his glove is rasping over her soft inner thigh. Rey squirms when his thumb traces a delicate circle around her clit, but all Ben does is shush her. “We exist as one. A dyad in the force. One soul in two bodies. When I could no longer feel you in that way, I…” 

A shadow passes over his face. And in it, Rey can see everything he cannot bring himself to say. 

“I’m with you now,” she breathes, her body caught between pressing further into his touch and shying away from it entirely. With every stir of her hips, his cockhead pushes against her front wall, fanning the flame within her anew. “I… I am alive and well. I know that… there is much that I still do not know. But I’m not going anywhere.” 

Ben hums, and she makes a noise at the next press of his thumb that he seems to be amused by. Then he is grinding his hips up in a way that has her seeing double. Literally. He’s here in front of her, under her, teasing her mercilessly with his wicked fingers - but in her mind’s eye, he is also trapped between her thighs in an unfamiliar bunk. His hands are bare, his clothing a dark gray, his hips nearly forcing Rey’s head to hit the top of the bunk as he struggles to reign in his passion. 

“What is it?” Ben breathes, his free hand smoothing up her back. Rey shakes her head and tries to focus on his touch. Right here, right now. Not all the years of him her battered mind cannot remember. 

“I’m sorry.” Heat starts to gather in her cheeks again. As it pools deep in her core, around where he is already buried. “It sounds like we had a whole life together. You had an other half that you loved and built something with, and now I fear you’ve only gotten half of her back.” 

“Don’t say such things.” He nuzzles the underside of her breast with his long nose as one hand splays flat against her lower back. “My other half is right here in my arms. No amount of memory or lack thereof will ever change how I feel about you.” 

“What if I never remember?” 

Ben stares up at her without saying anything, brows furrowed. It makes her nervous. Is he reconsidering? Is she not enough like herself anymore? Has he only realized it after the words have been spoken aloud? It feels like something is prodding at her temple. That feeling again, from before. That strange caress against the inside of her skull. Then it slips through some invisible barrier and dives under the surface, sinking even deeper. 

Hush, beloved. Rey hears. Ben grunts when she jolts and tugs at the knot keeping him tethered to her. Your mind is so much like it was when I first met you. Before it knew the force. Before you knew what power you held and how to use it. 

Is that such a bad thing? 

No. It is only more difficult for me to get past your mental shields. You do not know them well enough to lower them. The force is still within you. I can feel the currents of it singing along your bloodstream. It is only knowledge holding you back. 

Maker, has the Emperor, Kylo Ren, her other half, been reading her mind this whole time? 

No. He repeats in her head, tone light as if amused. There were a few times I took a peek. But it isn’t as easy when you’re shutting me out. Even if you don’t realize you’re doing it. 

Rey tries to figure out what to make of that. Wondering what all he can see in her head right now. “What about…” she says aloud, not quite sure how to actively translate her thoughts into words he can perceive. “What about this? What is this?” 

Rey thinks of that split second scene that had flashed in her vision, trying and failing to lay over her current view of him prone under her body as it is. His clothes had been different, more casual than what she’s seen him wear, in complete disarray as she rode him. He had been flat on his back, bare fingers clawing at her hips as his hair fanned out scratchy dark colored sheets, his hand blocking the top of her head from bashing against the low ceiling above them at the last possible second. 

Ben blinks as he sees it too, eyes widening as they stare into the middle distance. She can see him turning the scene over in her mind, then lengthening it with the further reach of his own recollection. Only now, she sees herself seated above him, eyes bright and cheeks flushed. Her soft curves being molded by her other half’s tight grip. She pitches forward and laughs at her near miss, not ceasing even as his hips piston up into the molten heat of her, even as Ben’s lips seal over her nipple and her orgasm robs her of breath. 

Rey gasps as the Ben here with her lights up in a grin. She wonders how many people realize that the formidable galactic Emperor has dimples . When all she can do is stare, Ben huffs a little laugh and focuses his attention back on the thumb still tucked against her clit. Fuck. 

“We were returning from a diplomatic mission. The New Empire’s first one. We sat down with the leaders of the Resistance to discuss a ceasefire, and to plan the way forward from there. They let us fly the Falcon home as something of a wedding present.” 

“Th-This is a memory?” 

He outright beams at her. “Yes, beloved. It is. You still have memories of our life from before. All you need is time.” He leans forward and trails his lips up her jaw, pillows them under her ear as she whimpers under his touch. “And I will give you all the time in the galaxy.” 

Ben savagely pinches her clit and tugs down. Rey shouts her release, sudden and violent and so unexpected she pitches forward into his chest. He wraps his free arm around her back and groans as she squeezes around his knot, as she milks another ribbon of his seed from him. 

“That’s it, sweetheart. That’s it. Come all over your other half’s cock. Wring every last drop out of me. It’s yours.” 

She lays there panting against his collarbone afterwards. He seems to luxuriate in the afterglow of her orgasm, content to feel the heat of their skin meeting as the muscles of her cunt flutter around him. Rey turns her head to better catch her breath and rediscovers the wide tray of finger foods at his hip. 

Maybe…

Attempting to avoid his detection, she stretches her fingertips towards them, remembering Ben’s easy manipulation of the force, the way he had floated the little morsels to her waiting mouth like it had cost him no effort at all. Rey closes her eyes. 

Up. 

Nothing happens. None of the food moves, and she feels no different. 

Arise. 

Lift.

Levitate. 

Ascend. 

Float. 

“It doesn’t quite work that way,” Ben muffles against the top of her head, trying and failing to stifle his mirth. 

“Stop reading my mind. Get out,” she growls, trying to figure out how slamming a mental door shut on him would even work. Then, feeling haughty: “When does your knot subside? You’re bothering me.” 

“Am I?” he growls, digging at the ticklish spots along her ribs until she is wheezing. Ben grunts when the twisting of her body pulls at their connection. But then he is slipping from her, knot subsided just enough to come free when Rey wrenches back, trying to escape his evil fingers. 

To say that this results in a mess would be an understatement, 

So much of his spend drips out of her that she leaves a pool of it on his abdomen. A slick white trail down his cock. A creamy sheen is smeared across the insides of her splayed thighs. Ben makes a rough sound as he glares at her sloppy folds, and it takes her a moment to realize that he isn’t upset about the mess - he’s upset that she’s so empty now.

When her merciless other half grabs for her again, fingers dangerously close to where he was just tickling her, Rey’s instincts have her neatly dodging his hold. 

“Rey.” 

He tries again, going for her hip this time, but she twists so his fingertips can’t find purchase. Ben glowers, but it’s more petulant than terrifying now that she knows him a bit better. “Come here, beloved.” 

Ben snarls when she slips out of his lap entirely and settles back onto her haunches. “You really shouldn’t do that,” he warns her darkly. 

“Do what?” 

“Flee from me, while we’re in this state. I will chase you.” 

“You’ll chase me?” Rey simpers, eyes bright with interest. 

Ben curls forward, lips twisted into a disapproving frown. A pout . 

“I will,” he tells her slowly. ”I’m losing myself to rut. After being parted from you for so long.” 

He’s no longer lounging back against the foot of the bed. His muscles are tight in anticipation of her escape, torso canted to the side so he can quickly roll to his knees if she chooses to bolt. His muscles are chorded under his arm guards, his fists clenched within his gloves, and his cock, still shiny with slick and come, rests hard and ready against the wide expanse of his thigh. 

“What would you do if you caught me?” 

“ When I caught you,” he growls, either a threat or a promise or both. “I’d be powerless to resist instinct. I would pin you down and fuck you until you begged me for mercy.” Rey makes a strangled little sound in the back of her throat, and he leans further towards her to glower harder. “But I would have none to offer. Just my cock and my knot and more come than your little body could handle right now.” 

Something within her quivers. And then she’s up on her feet. 

Ben snarls, immediately vaulting up into a crouch. Faster than she really thought him capable. “Beloved. I am warning you. Wouldn’t you like me to be kind? Take my time warming you up to take me again and making love to you in our nice big bed?” 

Rey bolts.

The fever in her veins is thrumming and twisting and so very hot . She feels like a sun, like every sweltering day she spent on Tatooine multiplied to infinity. Ben must not be too terribly surprised by her choice, because he is up and after her in less than a second. There will be time for gentleness later. Right now she burns bright and wild.. Her heart wants his, and her heat wants his cock, and her mind wants all of him. 

She must pass along the side of the bed to escape, the door he came in from being framed between it and the massive viewport. Ben cuts her off rather expertly, sidestepping her attempts to duck around his wide frame and making a quick swipe for her waist. Rey skitters back out of his reach, whirling to the side when he barrels forward to try and haul her over his shoulder. She squeals in delight each time she evades him, and he growls viciously. 

When she finally ducks under his arm and circles around him, putting herself closest to the door, she grins and dashes towards her escape. 

She doesn’t end up making it. 

Her bare skin is suddenly pressed against the freezing surface of the viewport, shocking a gasp out of her as Ben’s labored breath fans across her ear. Her nipples pull into hard little peaks where they’re molded flat against the ice cold transparisteel, but Ben is a wall of heat along the length of her spine. His skin is soft where it’s wrapped around thick slabs of muscle. It is a study of contrasts. 

Ben pins her hips in place with a hard motion from his, one hand keeping pressure at the back of her neck, pressing her cheek into the viewport, while the other forces her wrist against it as well. “Where in all the hells do you suppose you’re going?” he snarls, bearing down on her even harder. Like he really is afraid she’ll try to leave him. His teeth sink back into her gland, perfectly lining up with the old silvery scar. Like he wants to rip it open and make his claim fresh all over again. Rey sobs at the pain, at the pleasure - at being so fully and utterly possessed by him. “Say that you’re sorry, beloved.” 

“I-I’m sorry,” she hiccups. 

Ben forces her knees shut between his. Rey can feel the worn leather of his pants against her bare skin, so similar to the grip of his gloves holding her in place. He still hasn’t gotten to removing most of his clothing, only having lost what covered his broad torso. “Why are you sorry?” he bites out as he releases her wrist to pull himself back out of his undone pants. When his hips press in close against her ass, she feels the rigid length of him part her cheeks, slide against the tight little hole there. 

“B-Because… I…” 

He ruts his hips like that, slow and torturous, while his other hand presses her face harder to the transparisteel by the nape of her neck. It’s refreshingly cool, at maddening odds with what he is doing to her below the belt. She wants his cock lower. Wants him to fuck between her closed thighs, rub the fat head of himself against her cunt until he shoves inside of her to fill her back up. When she reaches desperate hands back to claw his hips forward, he snatches her wrists up in one fist. He slams them against the viewport so hard it makes her breath catch. Makes the fever spiral even higher. 

“You don’t even know what to be sorry for,” he huffs, taking his hand away from her neck to crack it against her ass. She keens, shivering when he does it again. And again. Whether to punish her or to watch the flesh jiggle under his attentions, she doesn’t know. “My long lost little wife doesn’t want me to be nice, hm? She doesn’t want me to lay her down in our nice comfy bed so I can worship her?” He spanks her again, harder this time, and Rey realizes she’s drooling against their view of the stars. “No. I suppose she doesn’t. She wants me to force her down and make her take it. Fuck into her little cunt until she cries. She wants me to take her like some sort of monster.” Then he’s slipping down, the silky skin of his cock bullying its way between the thighs he is still pinning shut with his own. He crowds her even closer so that he envelopes her entirely, no part of her body left uncovered by his frame, the empty landscape of space before them. “She wants Kylo Ren,” he growls, shoving forward even as he’s speaking the name, impaling her on the unforgiving thickness of his cock with one rough stroke of his hips. 

Rey cries out as his body forces her open. Held like this, she feels even tighter around him. She can barely accept the girth being fed into her, even without his swollen knot. Ben groans from behind clenched teeth, fist crushing around her wrists as he gives her everything he has anyway. 

True to his word, he is not gentle. Ben immediately sets a punishing pace into her, like the deepest he can go is not deep enough. One gloved palm is firm under her navel to keep her in place, but the pressure he’s putting there makes his cock bump up against something that has Rey crying out his name. When she tries to turn her head to look at him, he hauls her wrists up higher against the transparisteel to force her cheek closer against the surface. It isn’t even cold to the touch anymore, the scorching heat of her body and her stuttered breath having seen to that rather quickly. 

“Fuuuck,” Ben shudders, the steel in his voice slipping as pleasure floods his veins. “Oh Maker, it’s so fucking good.” He’s somehow able to pound into her even harder, causing stars to burst in her vision that form new constellations with those already within her field of view. Space wavers, the freezing dots of light seeming to flutter and swirl. Like she’s looking upwards into a dark roiling sky instead, watching new snow make its descent to the planet. 

Like that day. The one that she met him, as the planet collapsed beneath their feet. He was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, even under all that black. Even with all of his misplaced anger and fear and heartbreak. Snowflakes catching in his dark curls. Purple lighting up his features as he stared into her soul. His plush lips forming those words - you need a teacher…

Ben’s hips slam in again, the angle just right to make her scream for him and lose the thread of that strange half-formed thought. He leans forward to suck at her scar again, and the wet seal of his lips around the mark of his claim has her practically sobbing. He moans against it, the vibration humming in her ear, racing up her spine in a threat to undo her entirely. Somehow, she’s already teetering on the edge of climax again. 

“My love,” Ben moans against the imprint of his teeth. It seems to her like he’s a bit too love struck to play his game very effectively. His body is as ruthless as he promised it would be, but the fingers on her belly are already dipping south to slide between her thighs. He’s angling his hips to put pressure along her front wall, readjusting every time he finds a spot that makes her moan louder. His full lips are everywhere he can place them, along her shoulder, up her neck, at the shell of her ear, against the notches of her spine. His every stuttered breath speaks to how he burns for her, his every thought holds the shape of her. 

Her eyes blur and unfocus, the white pinholes of light beyond the viewport swaying in time with the pace he sets into her body. Like sparks. Swaying down from the tapestries to the mirror-polished floor as they look at each other, as they - 

Rey suddenly sees herself somewhere else. Surrounded by red and flame and the blackness of space kept at bay just beyond it. 

Bloodlust and retribution boil into an all consuming lust, which distills down further into desperate clawing need . A hand is outstretched to her, and Ben is there, looking so sad and hopeful, offering her an entire galaxy she has never even wanted. Her feelings are all bubbling up in her throat, hot and chaotic, threatening to spill out because the only thing she does want in this galaxy is - is - 

“You see it,” Ben gasps against the crook of her neck.

“S-See what?”

“It’s right there, in your mind.” Ben’s rhythm smooths out, losing its edge from earlier to curl into a roll, long and decadent into her clutching heat. Both of his hands let go of her to slide lovingly down her ribs, over the swell of her hips. “This is a memory as well. This is from the day you became mine.” 

“I didn’t come here for the galaxy,” Rey hears herself breathe. “I didn’t board the Supremacy and fight alongside you for the galaxy.”

Ben pulls out of her then, and Rey could cry for the loss. Don’t go. Don’t leave. Please. But then he is whirling them around, scooping her up and pushing her face down into their huge bed. 

She cannot believe how soft the blankets are, or how badly she wants to push them around and bundle them up and arrange them until they’re just right. But before she can even consider doing so, Ben is kneeling behind her, hauling her hips up and positioning her body until it is spread before him like a gift. Shoulders against the bed, back arched at a delicious angle, cunt open and molten between obscenely spread thighs, dripping wet just for him. Ben anchors his hands at her hips and gives her the entire length of his cock again. 

“Keep following it,” Ben mumbles, pleasure muddling his deep voice. “The memory. See if you can make it to the end.” 

Rey lets out a tremulous breath. She closes her eyes and sees his, big and brown and beseeching. Haloed by death and destruction and mad desire. 

The air tastes like blood and new beginnings. Like him. 

Ben is watching this memory right alongside her, a solid presence in her mind as she tries to uncover this piece of her life. He never stops fucking into her heat addled body as they follow the breadcrumbs of the past. 

As soon as Rey says it, Ben is taking great lurching steps towards her, his long legs eating up the distance as his eyes search hers. “Say it, Rey.” he chokes out, already able to make out the shape of her thoughts. 

“We still have time to save the Resistance fleet,” she insists instead, and his expression momentarily shutters closed. Rey shakes her head. “Don’t do that. You already know what I want. But Ben, you cannot hope to build an empire on ashes. This generation cannot make the same mistakes as the previous ones have.” 

Simmering with impatience and begrudging acceptance, he pulls Snoke’s comm to him with the force and bites out an order to cease fire. 

His eyes don’t leave hers for a second. As soon as he receives verbal confirmation, as soon as Rey loses sight of the green bolts of light streaking across the viewport, he roughly turns her gaze back to his with one huge hand framing her jaw. “Say. It.” 

Please. 

“I didn’t come here to bring you back to the Resistance.” Rey gasps when Ben’s long nose brushes up along the side of hers. Spice and cedar and the home she’s never even let herself want. “I came here to bring you back to me .” 

“I was so in love with you,” Ben sighs into her hair, pressing her body down into their bed even further. “From the second I saw you. It was so immediate, so deep and profound, I thought it would kill me. I thought an emotion that big could only bring about my own death. But then, when I offered myself to you that day…” 

Ben’s mouth claims hers in a kiss like no other. It says more than any combination of words ever could. It robs her of sense and sound and thought, her world beginning and ending at every point their bodies touch. Entire lifetimes play out between one brush of their lips and the next. The entire galaxy grinds to a halt - stars form and swell and collapse, bursting to form the sacred shape of their union. Something like this can only be destiny. It can only be the force and what it’s always intended. Two halves finally coming together to become whole. 

They are a mess of grasping hands and tangled limbs and heady desperation. When Rey’s knees buckle, Ben goes down with her in a slow controlled fall. They gasp and whimper against each other’s lips, Ben pulling her closer, Rey holding him tighter, drowning in heat and need and this and now and him and them . He rips three of her belt loops straight out of the waist of her pants in his haste to undo the buckle, and Rey does nothing in response but tear at the fastenings holding up his own.  

Rey gasps, utterly scandalized. Then does so again as Ben presses into her more urgently. His breath is ragged against her gland, his muscles shaking with every movement as he does what he’s promised not to do - make love to her in their nice warm bed. 

 “We - did we really -” 

“I took you right there on the throne room floor,” he groans, driving in at an angle that makes her sob. “You were so fierce. So brave. So ripe and soft and untouched. That place inside of you - the one you had saved just for me - it was the best thing I had ever felt.” Ben straightens his spine, tugging her hips further up so he can fuck her in longer strokes. He pulls nearly the entire way out before giving it all back to her. Again and again and again. Until the drag of his skin against hers threatens to drive her mad. 

Rey’s body nearly splits in two around his, that first time. Her newly awakened desire wars with the limitations of her own body, so much smaller than his in every way. He has to work in short fevered motions, struggling to be careful even as his mind is consumed by his lust. His blistering love. 

By the time he is finally able to bury himself fully inside of her, stuff himself in to the root, touch every part of her there is to be touched, Rey is clawing at his clothing and sinking her teeth into his skin. They are fully clothed upon the throne room floor, Rey’s pants still clinging to one leg and Ben’s still held up by the suspenders under his tunic. Haloed in victory and triumph, grasping each other as hard as they can, pulling their bodies close as they finally finally join together. 

“You’re mine,” Ben snarls against her shoulder, fucking her deep, rutting his hips along with the force of his desperate ardor. “Say it.” Rey cries out her agreement, one hand tangled in his dark hair while the other clutches at his thigh in a vain attempt to steady herself against his relentless rhythm. “You will never be anyone else's. I will always belong to you, and you will always belong to me. There isn’t any going back. I’ll have you right here. Right now.” 

Rey keens on his next brutal thrust in, fisting the sheets as he rides her hard, as he makes her take all the love he has to give her. His hands are going to leave bruises where they’re clutching at her hips, but Rey doesn’t care. 

“You… you mated me that very first time?” 

“Yes. I did.” Ben pitches forward again to reclaim her broken gland with his plush lips, like he’s acting it out again. Utterly unapologetic. “While your innocence was still freshly broken around me, as your tiny little cunt struggled to accept all I had to give it. Where anyone could have walked in and watched me make you mine . I did.” 

When his teeth tear through her skin, mouth wide and greedy, consuming, Rey screams her release. It is blinding and white hot, the most profound ecstasy she has ever experienced. This feeling is bigger than anything that has ever come before it. Rey wonders if she’ll die, if her body will evaporate, if she will ever recover from the divine devastation of him. Her other half. 

While she is still in the throes of her orgasm, Ben shoves all the way inside of her with a grunt, hips bearing down on hers. His knot pops so thick and fat that it forces her muscles to lock up, body quivering around him with the strain. 

Fuck.

He’s tearing her apart. She doesn’t have nearly enough space inside of her to accommodate him. Rey squirms on instinct, gasping as she tries to find an escape, some way to relieve the pressure, some way to survive her other half even as his tongue continues to lap at her new mark. 

“You can take it,” he soothes in a ragged murmur, shaking above her as he comes and comes and comes . She can feel him stuffing her even more full, anxiety ratcheting up as she feels his liquid heat pumping into her belly. His breathing is shallow, voice scraped raw as he coos comforting half-sentences against her ear. Rey struggles to breathe at all, any intake of air fighting Ben for space in her body. He growls and presses closer, grinding against her clit as he does, and then she is mewling for something she cannot name. Her nails tear at his arm guards and her legs fall open around his waist. “I’ve got you,” he promises roughly, twisting his gloved fingers into her hair and pulling her into another searing kiss. “I’m here. I have you. I love you.” 

“My darling girl. My beloved.” Ben is just as solid against her now, chest hot at her back as he holds her and fucks her and loves her. He whines and shifts to press her onto her back, like he cannot stand to be without the sight of her face a second longer. He urgently reclaims her lips, wide palm cradling the back of her head as he pushes back inside. Taking her just like in their shared memory. “You could barely accept me into your body that first time, and now look at you. Taking all of it. All of me.” 

Ben makes her come with another twist of his hips when her struggling becomes too much. His teeth sink into the fresh mark at her gland, forcing her convulsing body to fall limp beneath him and accept the pleasure it’s given. 

“There we go,” he croons, pressing her down into the floor under him as she twitches and pants like a wild thing. 

One of his hands is suddenly shooting up, clawed out before him as his lip pulls into a sneer. She hears a sputtered cough, and then her head is falling back to see the redheaded general standing before them, face turning purple as his fingers spasm inches away from the blaster at his belt. Her new mate shoves his hips forward to draw out the last aftershocks of her release, to fill her even further. “That isn’t any way to address your Emperor,” Ben hisses. 

“Oh,” Rey realizes dumbly, mind caught somewhere between being horrified that their union was witnessed and elated that her other half proved to be so strong as he took her that first time, so capable. “I’ve seen him before. That’s the same man that stunned me. On Tatooine.” 

Ben’s hips grind to a halt. 

“ Hux is the one who turned a stunner onto you?” 

“Yes,” she confirms dismissively, still watching the life she’s only just starting to remember play out. 

“L-Long live… The Emperor…” the general chokes out around Ben’s force hold. 

Her other half looks down at her, delicately tucking a strand of her sweaty hair behind her ear as he releases Hux’s throat and brings him down to his knees before them. “And to your Empress?” 

Rey’s eyes fly back to Ben, finding his to be already trained on her. It’s a promise. A vow. Yet another title that binds their lives together. Twining until they are inseparable. 

Hux heaves before them, all but forgotten. “Long may you… r-reign…” 

“I can’t,” Ben gasps, pressing her down even harder and rutting his hips forward in fevered desperation. “I need to come again. Need to give you my knot, beloved, need to fill you full just like you need -” He is breathing hard against her neck, pulling in huge lungfuls of her scent as she feels him start to swell. His hands are shaking, clutching at her curves in his attempt to keep her in place underneath him. 

Rey has been too lost to her new memory, reliving the life she lost, peeking into a window that reveals the origins of her bond. Her body burns for him, but she isn’t teetering on the edge of her surrender like he is quite yet. When he angles her hips and slams into her at just the right angle, she cries out his name as she loses hold of the throne room in her mind. It’s as if even watching their first time together again ignites a fire in his blood. Like experiencing the day he claimed her has gripped a hold of his rut and dragged it to the forefront of his being. 

“You are mine , beloved,” he snarls against her ear, fucking her so hard it hurts. The brutal stretch of him, the full ache, it has her spiraling into euphoric bliss as her nails claw at his back. “Your little omega cunt is mine. Your pleasure is mine. Your desire is mine . I will never let you out of my fucking sight ever again. Gonna… gonna give you everything… everything …” 

Ben’s body seizes as he comes, hips pinned to hers by the massive knot he pops on his next push in. He cries out as he spills his love deep inside her body, crushing her close enough to force the air from her lungs. Every one of her quivering muscles is squeezed to stillness in his grip. The seed he’s filled her with before is joined by his ardor anew, his knot swelling even bigger as he descends more completely into his rut. 

“Shh,” he comforts, nuzzling at the skin behind her ear and dropping a kiss to the jut of her jaw. This is the most blissful agony, the most unbearable stretch of ecstasy. “You’ve always had trouble accepting all of it, beloved. You’re so tiny, my precious little wife. Our physicians have even theorized that I’m simply too big for you. But I know better.” Rey gasps when another rush of him pours into her. Her belly feels tight, like she would be able to observe a swell if there was enough space between them to look. His thumb slips down to where they’re joined and starts rubbing light circles into her clit. “You’re a fighter. You are,” he croons when she breathes his name, the depth of his voice marred by a slight tremor. “You have never allowed me to best you before, and I know you will not start now.” 

Rey is panting like she’s just run a race. Like she’s fought her way through an entire military regiment. Slicing through armor with a yellow saberstaff that comes to mind without recognition. Her body is beginning to hum again, the space between her legs burning for him under his nimble fingers, dragged further and further towards the depths of his devotion. He presses his hips forward in a needy motion and she bites her lip. 

Maker, I would never be able to bear this man’s children.

“Don’t worry about that yet,” he murmurs, clearly having heard the thought for himself. “Focus on being good for me. On letting your other half take care of you. On letting me make you come around my knot, beloved. This is easier for you if you come. I need you to be able to take it.” He kisses down her neck to her gland, sealing his lips around it to suck hard right as he presses the pad of his thumb just so …

Rey screams his name when she comes, spine arching in a dramatic curve as her inner muscles convulse around him. As much as they can, stretched taut as they are. Her thighs squeeze around his restless hips and he growls when her writhing tugs at his knot. She can feel him filling her even more full, claimed by another orgasm within the tight clench of her cunt, flooding her insides with his blistering pleasure. But he was right before - even now, his knot and his endless stream of release are a bit easier to take. Her fingers scrabble at his broad shoulders, but she is soft and pliant from her orgasm underneath him as she takes everything he has to give her. 

“Yes, sweetheart. So good. You’re so good.” He rolls until he’s pulled her onto his chest, basking in her bonelessness. Her easy bliss around him, her ready acceptance. Ben’s heart riots under her ear, his lips at her hair as his hand urges her head onto his shoulder. 

“Rest now, beloved. I am right here. And when you need me again? I will give you anything you want and more.” 

She wants to argue. Wants to stay awake and ask him the questions she has about their life together. She has hundreds of them burning at her tongue. Thousands. 

But, like a light, the second she closes her eyes, unconsciousness is rising up to pull her under. 

---

Rey doesn’t know how long she’s been asleep when her eyes finally drift back open. 

There is no setting of the sun in the blackness of space, but the overhead lights have been extinguished. She’s still draped across his chest, head tucked under his chin, with his thick arms still clothed in their guards and leather gloves circling her torso. His breathing is steady as it lifts and lowers her, but not slow enough to be within dreams. 

His knot must have gone down, because he is no longer inside of her. The place between her legs feels tender and messy, dripping with him and her alike. But it aches. It aches without him. The emptiness threatens to swallow her whole. She needs him filling her, stretching her to the point of white hot pleasure-pain, pouring his love inside of her so deep she -

Before Rey can voice her distress, wriggle her discomfort atop his body, let the frustrated tears trail from her eyes, one of his hands is lifting from its splay against her back. The skin there is chilled immediately without him. She almost thinks him readying to leave her, but there is a little click from somewhere above her. Then the low timber of his beautiful voice, pitched so quiet she can barely hear him. He must think she’s still asleep. 

“Soren. Status report. Codewords apply.” 

A high voice on the other end of his comm begins talking, but Ben must have it pressed to his ear with the volume all the way down with how quiet it is. She cannot make out the words, only the light cadence of the other person. The fingers of Ben’s other hand, still splayed possessively at her hip, idly squeeze as his thumb starts up a slow brush back and forth. Whoever he is contacting speaks for a long time before stopping. 

“Thank you,” Ben dismisses in a voice barely above a whisper. “As you were.” 

Chapter Text

Ben makes it out of his clothing eventually. First his boots after another knot, then his pants and underwear after the next. His guards and gloves come off after he makes her come so hard she sees stars, after he knots her and fills her so full she is shaking beneath him. 

“You - ah -” Rey gasps, limbs wrapping around him as he grinds his hips against hers, even spent as he should be from already giving her so much. “You said you’d answer my questions.” 

Ben huffs against her gland and bumps forward, making her jolt at the clumsy pressure against her clit. “I told you I’d answer your questions later .” 

“It is later.” She whines, fisting her hands into his unruly curls and pulling him back enough to look at him. His eyes are glazed with lust, nearly mindless as his body struggles to keep taking that which already belongs to him. 

She knows that after a knot is when he will be at his clearest. But still, he seems to struggle with anything that isn’t the feeling of her insides clinging to his cock. He sighs, and she watches his lashes flutter as another ribbon of his seed pours out of him. 

“What would you like to know, beloved?” 

So much. All of it. Where do I even start? 

“You said we were on opposite sides of a war?” 

Ben’s breath is still heavy from where he’s curled over her, chest filling full as he struggles to catch up to his racing heart. 

“For a brief time.” He murmurs. 

“Why are we no longer?” 

He rests a possessive hand over her ribcage as he considers how to answer, feeling her own lungs inflate in time with his. “You’ve already seen our joining. The day you gave yourself to me. That was the day our reign began, what is considered the unofficial end to the galactic war. In the time before, all systems were slowly but surely being consumed by the First Order. I was indoctrinated within their ranks for quite some time, and you had just been taken in by the Resistance.” 

“And we… fought?” She presses hesitantly, tracing the line of his scar with one gentle thumb. 

His lips curve, and she feels them pillow against her thumb when he turns his head to intercept it. 

“We did.” He tells her with no trace of bitterness. He almost sounds wistful. “You were magnificent. All around us, the planet was crumbling. I begged you to let me show you the ways of the force, but you were devoted to your cause.” 

The snow. The black visage of him, bleeding red like a wound. His eyes lit up purple in raw desire. 

“Yes,” he continues, eyes far off as he looks through hers. “You remember.” 

She squeezes around him, seeking that fullness only he can give her. Reminding herself that he is right here within her body. He groans low in the back of his throat, hitching his wife even closer. 

“I… I joined you? Atop the ruins of the First Order?”  Ben nods his head, lips drifting down the column of her throat. His gaze had been the same, both in the collapsing forest and among the flames of the throne room. But where one had been a vicious battle, the other had been fierce teamwork. An unmistakable joining, before their bodies even had the chance to touch. “I changed my mind…?” 

He huffs. “No. Not exactly.” He sits up again to smile down at her, gaze so soft and body so decidedly not . One thumb dips down to rub across her clit and she squirms. “I changed mine.” 

Rey opens her mouth, but before she can say anything, Ben is losing whatever internal battle he’s been waging with himself and flips her onto her stomach, knot finally having eased enough to allow him to slip out of her. She lets out an undignified little whimper, scrabbling to try and stay upright even as he pins her in place and traps her knees shut between his. 

He spears her on his cock as soon as he’s sure she can’t wriggle out of his hold.

“Ben,” she whimpers, frustrated and aroused and so very in love with him. 

“Yes, beloved.” He twists his fingers into her hair and gives her an eye-crossing roll of his hips. “The previous Supreme Leader fell before our combined strength, in the moments right before I claimed you. He was cruel and self-serving, utterly unfit to rule. You took my hand, and we brought a new order to the galaxy.” 

“And… ah -” Ben angles himself just so into her, Rey’s fingers fisting against the sheets. “But… But the Resistance? What became of them?” 

He fucks her harder, breath hot at her neck. “Integration. They were spared from annihilation that day by your word. Many of the Resistance upper command now hold seats on our council. Most crew and pilots joined the New Empire’s ranks at your example, as well.”

“So… the war ended through compromise? Both sides formed one being?” 

“Sweetheart,” he pants against her ear, somehow succeeding in crushing her even closer. She can already feel the desperate pulsing of her own inner muscles, eager to give him another orgasm. “The war was ended through love.” 

---

If it’s even possible, Ben’s rut burns even hotter than the fires of Rey’s heat. 

He seems almost helpless to it, pinning Rey down to receive his body over and over again, mounting her and pushing inside of her and forcing her to take his seed into her overfull cunt like he’ll die if she doesn’t. Fever has written itself into his bones, boiling his blood and scrambling his every thought. 

“Can’t wait for my knot to go down so I can fuck you all over again,” he tells her deliriously as he crushes her hips close, stopping Rey from tugging at him with her squirming. He’s been locked inside of her for the past twenty minutes, bare hands everywhere as he mouths at her gland. That silvered scar he gave her. 

Rey is held immobile, trapped beneath him to accept his burning ardor. He hasn’t stopped cooing his love to her, not once, never ceasing in ways to tell her how he’s missed her, how he loves her, what he wants to do to her during every minute of every day. She is panting against the strain, the fullness, but still he gives her more. He might kill her with how tightly she’s stretched. But every time she’s convinced she’s unable to accept any more of him, he surprises her by proving her wrong. 

“Wanna fuck you full and give you another… another knot. Wanna be so deep inside you we’re never parted again. Not ever.” 

Rey whines as he sinks his teeth into her again. Her other half only growls and presses harder into the cradle of her hips. “Be a good girl. Be my good girl. Perfect ripe little omega mate, takes her alpha so well - takes all of it so well - always makes just enough room for me inside her tiny little cunt… Oh , beloved, I’m - I’m giving you more -” He rolls with an all-body shudder as he comes again, filling her so utterly full she feels pulled taut by it, pulled apart by it. 

---

There is a gaping maw within her belly. Something cold and desolate, raw like a wound, deep enough to be without end. She clutches at it, tears streaming down her face, skin warmed by nothing but the fire lit before her, weak as it is from the howling wind cutting across the island. 

When she imagined coming here, she never thought it would be like this. Rejected by the one person able to help her. Unable to understand this power inside herself; why this piece of her was suddenly awake, and what it wanted when it thrashed so violently at the inside of her skull. 

Rey thought she would find answers here. She hadn’t. 

Her one hope, set back into the sheer cliff face of land, fighting against the beating tide, had promised her something it never delivered. She was left shaking and soaking wet instead, miserable all the way down to her desert dweller’s bones as she dragged herself back to her hut. 

How does she fit into all this? 

Where is there left to go, if the answer to that question is nowhere ? 

“You’re not alone.” He tells her. 

She looks up. 

Eyes that she shouldn’t know, a soul she shouldn’t resonate with, keeps her company enough to banish the solitude. Even though he isn’t actually here. Not really. It’s all a cruel trick of the force, isn’t it? Making her feel as if she’s found a home in someone she can never have? 

But he is so soft in this place. So open and willing to shoulder all of her old hurts. So kind to the girl he is supposed to hate. Supposed to strike down. Supposed to either turn or kill. 

I could never ever kill you. No matter who ordered me to. I think you know that by now . 

She does, somehow. But it only makes her more confused. 

She’s still trembling, pathetic in her naivete, when she stretches out her fingers and extends her hand. Rey doesn’t really know what she’s doing, or what she expects. But when the man in front of her - whatever his name is now - slips off a glove and reaches back, she knows that all she wants is contact. His skin against hers. Connection and belonging and intimacy. Everything she’s never had. 

When the pads of their fingers come together, a touch that’s barely even a touch, she sees it all. A future. Not his. Not her own. But theirs . Solid and clear. Her gaze flies up to meet his, wide and wet and too battered to conceal her hope. 

The eyes that look back are an echo. 

—-

Rey gasps awake, face wet and limbs curled in on herself. Her body is tangled in sheets that are shared by no other.

She is cold and alone after all. None of it was real. He was banished away from her just after their shared vision, wasn’t he? Their connection was severed by the crumbling of the stone walls keeping out the rain. She never gets to keep anyone. 

Just as she begins to sob in earnest, a door is whooshing open. And she finally remembers where she is. The galactic royal family’s star destroyer. The Emperor’s quarters. Said emperor kneeling at her side, one hand clutching a bottle of water as the other swipes across her forehead. 

“Darling,” he rushes out, looking her over for injury as if she could have sustained one within the cloud that is their great big bed. “What is it? What’s the matter?” 

She doesn’t have the words. Doesn’t have a coherent train of thought to convey this hurt, this aching sense of loss and loneliness. So she shows him instead, in the clumsy inelegant way she knows how. He watches her dream play out with hands on her cheeks, his forehead pressed to hers. 

“This is a memory.” He tells her. And she could have guessed, really. But it still makes her sob out a broken approximation of his name. He only pulls her closer, climbing back under the covers with her to reestablish as much skin to skin contact as is possible. “Shh, beloved. It’s okay. We’re right here together. See?” 

But there was so long that they weren’t. Three years, on top of how long it took to find each other in the first place. All that waiting. A cruel joke the universe has forced them to endure. His lips trace a soothing line down her neck as she clings to him. As she wraps her arms and legs around him like he’ll disappear from her again at any second if she isn’t vigilant enough. 

“You came to get me that same day.” He tells her, nosing at her scar. What binds him to her. Rey sniffles and takes a deep breath. Bergamot. Cedar. Spice. “You dropped out of hyperspace into a battlefield. Boarded an escape pod and jettisoned yourself right into a hostile First Order hangar. From there we would defeat Snoke and save the Resistance and claim each other within the rubble of the galactic war. Beloved, all of that led us right here.” He squeezes her, laying a sensuous kiss in the crook of her neck. “To us. In this bed. Together.” 

“I…” She gasps, smothering her tears into his hair as his hands smooth up her spine. “I’m sorry, I… don’t know why I’m crying.” 

“It’s normal, during a heat.” He tells her gently. “Your body is on fire, and your emotions are alight with it. It’s the same during rut.” 

She wipes at her nose in a way that’s supremely unsexy. “Well. I don’t know about that. You’re not actively trying to fuck me right now.” She jokes, attempting to lighten the mood. 

Ben doesn’t take the bait. He just seems to melt into her, tongue dragging up a tendon he’s found running through her scar. Perhaps she spoke too soon. 

“Outside of what my body would normally desire, my main biological imperative is seeing that your needs are met.” He mumbles, gripping onto the back of her neck as he pulls her under him. Ben’s wide frame eclipses everything, his shoulders blocking out the light, his eyes capturing hers. 

“I thought your main biological imperative during a rut was fucking babies into me?” She teases, wiping at her eyes. Her attempt at levity doesn’t work. He shivers at her words, his erection filling out once more against the soft skin of her belly. 

“It’s giving you everything you need .” He asserts, pressing close to kiss her quiet. His thumbs take over in wiping her tears, that emptiness in her filled in by his love, his steady unwavering presence above her. “I’m here,” he promises, settling between her thighs when she drops them open around his hips. “I will always be here. Right next to you. To catch you when you fall. To bear all of your pain. To be your faithful companion and ardent lover whenever you’ll have me.” 

Rey pulls his mouth back down to hers, kissing him breathless as her fingers tangle into his dark hair. He’s right here. He’s right here. He’s right here. 

He won’t leave. 

“Will you?” He asks in a strained voice, fingers clutching at the thigh she’s pulled up to frame his ribs. 

“Will I, what?” 

“Have me?” 

Rey nods, urgent, and he rushes out a sigh, dropping his head to her shoulder and gradually filling her up with slow strokes of his hips. 

When she’s taken all of him, to the hilt, he turns his head to let his lips brush at the shell of her ear. “You have me. Always.” 

---

The lights heralding the beginning of the day cycle flicker on and wash across Ben’s open features, his mouth slack with pleasure, eyes fallen shut as he focuses on the feel of his beloved riding his cock in the early morning hours. Rey has just come, but she’s desperately holding on to finish off her other half, needing him, needing his seed. Ben’s lips pull into a snarl, grip bruising at her splayed thighs as his hips start to drive upwards to meet her. It’s getting more and more difficult for him to withdraw from her body, the stretch of him testing her limits, which can only mean -

“Fuck, darling - Rey, Rey, ” he gasps, eyes flying open to watch her above him like she hung all the stars in the galaxy. She can almost see them reflected in his irises. “I’m coming, beloved, I’m - coming -” 

He shouts, shapeless and half-formed, echoing in the spacious room as he fills her body full again. He forces her down with both hands on her hips, savagely grinding up as he falls apart trapped between her thighs. He throws his head back against the pillows and slurs a breathless exultation, drunk on his orgasm and lust and love. 

Rey collapses forward, legs shaking as she falls to his chest. He bears her weight with nothing but a delighted groan, wrapping his arms around her waist to pull her closer. Her mouth finds the pulse fluttering in his bared throat and kisses at it until he shoots another rope of come into her fluttering core. 

He keeps her like that, cushioned atop his chest as they bask in the glow of their union. She’s finally beginning to feel sane in the spaces between his knot forming and the inevitable fanning of her own flames. But only when his breathing starts to even out does she finally give voice to the question burning its way through her throat.

“…What happened, Ben? To me?” 

Her other half’s big hand splays out to put heavy pressure between her shoulder blades. It gives her the sense that if it were physically possible to pull her inside himself, keep her safe beneath his breastbone, he would. 

“There was an attempt on my life.” He whispers into the soft space under her ear. “Our empire was still in its infancy. Perhaps a year and a half old. With many crucial and delicate transitions of power still taking place every day. Leia has been essential in securing many of the systems peacefully. I have you to thank for recruiting her to preside over the council.” This name - Leia - means something to her. Something that pulses deep in her heart. But Rey, despondently, cannot parse out what exactly that is. Who it represents. 

“The general of one of our dreadnoughts - the Undaunted - staged a coup. Our star destroyer was forcibly boarded by one of their battalions, and chaos erupted from there. You and - you and Leia, were in the residential wing of the ship at the time. I was on the bridge. I commed you to board an escape pod immediately, but you wouldn’t do so without - without -“ Ben wipes his hand down his face, features drawn in residual agony. “All of the royal family’s escape pods were rigged to blow. One detonated before it even left the bay. Yours, however, didn’t detonate until you were out of range of the ship.” His forehead falls onto hers. “I can’t be certain, but I think you held it off. I think you were able to contain the explosion until you knew you had a chance of surviving.” 

Rey wraps him tight in her arms and stares off into the middle distance over the top of his head. She can’t explain it, can’t even begin to understand how she could feel this way about something she can’t even remember, but something about his story is… wrong. 

He isn’t lying, she knows that immediately. Ben has never lied to her. But something isn’t right. 

There is a lot she doesn’t know. Many things Ben will have to reintroduce her to. And she can’t expect him to do it all at once. 

Still. Something gnaws at her from the depths of her ruined memory. There is a piece of this puzzle that is missing. 

“I’m right here,” she soothes him, brushing gentle fingers through his sweat damp curls. His arms crush her closer. “I’m right here with you now.”  

---

Rey startles awake from a dream that dissipates as soon as consciousness finds her. It feels important. It feels like something lost, so similar to everything else she’s grasped at straws for, but it refuses to resurface. 

She sighs, sitting up amongst the tangle of filthy blankets. How long had they been holed up in here? Days? Weeks? 

The heel of one hand scrubs across her eye. She feels… good. Sane. Heated at the edges, but nothing so all-consuming as she’s harbored thus far. She is sated and oddly energized for the amount of strenuous activity she’s been participating in. Unmistakably sore in the soft place between her thighs. 

And filthy. Covered in Ben’s seed and her own slick. Sweat mats her hair and wets her skin. 

Rey looks over her shoulder and sees Ben, dead to the world and looking similarly wrung out. Utterly at peace. He is pressed snug along the line her spine used to occupy, the dark circles under his eyes looking not quite so dark anymore. She can’t help but tuck a lock of hair behind his ear, drinking in how young he looks like this, how soft and untroubled. 

She can’t bear the thought of waking him. He should have a moment longer to rest within his dreams. So she slowly extricates herself and stands on trembling legs, padding over to the en-suite ‘fresher he’d shown her previously in search of a bath. 

Rey has never before tried to make sense of water faucet controls, but somehow she knows just how these need to be twisted, exactly how far into a clockwise turn she wants it to stop. The water that bursts forth from the pipes is so perfect she wants to cry. 

She still can’t believe this is all hers. 

Rey submerges herself with a blissful sigh and sets about washing the grime of her heat from her skin. She unabashedly luxuriates in her bath, eyes slipping shut as she marvels at having so much water in one place. At having such a luxury that so many in the galaxy take for granted. 

After she has drained the tub, stepping out of it and leaning over to towel off her hair, Rey hears the door hiss open and feels the cool air from outside the steamy ‘fresher draw in. She looks up and sees Ben filling the entryway, not wearing a stitch, pale shoulders heaving as he regards her with dark eyes. His nostrils are flaring. His cock is hard against his thigh. 

“I didn’t know where you’d gone,” he chokes. 

“I. Um. Took a bath.” She assures him. 

“Why?” He sounds pained in a way she doesn’t understand. 

“Well… I needed one. I was a bit of a mess. I think my heat has broken.” 

She makes to hang her towel back up, but as soon as she is shifting away from him, Ben is twitching to the side to mirror her. Compressed tight like a spring about to pop. It makes Rey remember their game from before. How he’d told her through gritted teeth that if she ran, he would chase her. Still within his rut, he is still powerless to resist his prey drive instincts. If she fights against them, he’ll only have her harder. 

“What if I haven’t stopped needing you?” he rasps, flushed like he’s still firmly in the grip of his biological impulses. 

Rey bites her lip, not needing to think too long before she’s darting a step to the side and making him bear his teeth. He lurches to match her, clutching at the edge of the counter hard enough to turn his knuckles white. She meets his eyes and sees they are half-lidded now, and black with fever and lust. 

“What did I say about sudden movements, beloved?” he purrs in a deadly tone. Rey’s breath hitches, neck prickling as her other half works his jaw. 

“I don’t remember,” she says flippantly. “But I’m busy. I have things to do today.” 

The corner of Ben’s plush lips twists up. “Things?” 

“Things.” 

“I see.” Rey backs up as he advances, twisting away when he makes a grab for her wrist. “My poor little mate already wants to make up for lost time, is that right? Been away from our empire for too long?” 

“Perhaps.” 

She ducks under his arm when he reaches for her again, in a rather expert (if she does say so herself) move that has her whirling out of his second attempt at a hold. Now she’s between him and the door, and his eyes track her carefully. Rey feints left and Ben abandons the jerk his muscles make to follow. She can see where his knot is already starting to swell at the base of his cock, body hot as it still is for her. 

“My Empress has gone without her responsibilities for too long?” 

She nods her head gravely, biting her lip as she backs away from him. He stalks closer. “What about her responsibilities to the Emperor, hm?” 

“And what would those be?” 

“To love and honor me, for starters.” He grumbles, faking out a right-leaning lunge. He growls when she doesn’t fall for it. “To submit to me - to take all of my love and come into your tight little body. Among other things. There were vows.” 

“I don’t recall submitting to you being in my vows.” 

Ben hesitates. Then his brows come together in outrage. “You don’t remember any of your vows.” He accuses. 

Rey dashes out of the bathroom, laughing hard enough to pull a stitch in her side. But Ben is right there behind her, roughly bending her over a desk set against the far wall with a hand fisted in her hair. He doesn’t waste any time toying with her now. His need burns too hot between them. 

“Fucking take it,” he growls, deep and ragged, shoving himself into her cunt with one merciless stroke. It knocks the wind out of her, frantic fingers gripping at the edge of the furniture to brace herself, bearing his brutal pace as he uses her body to quench his thirst. She’s not in the throes of her heat anymore, but that doesn't stop her orgasm from building under his attentions. Rey cries his name, muscles cinching around him when he gives her the pressure of his teeth again. Circling the silvered brand of the claim that halos her pulse. “Take all your other half has to give you. Take me, beloved.” 

—-

Eventually, Ben’s fever also breaks. 

On the sixth day of their reunion (so the chronometer tells them) they are finally able to redress and put themselves back to rights. Ben in the same black he always wears, and Rey in the white her wardrobe from three years ago seems to favor. It’s too big on her in places, little as she’s eaten on Tatooine, but Ben smiles something soft, something wistful, when she steps out into their living space to show him. 

She hasn’t made it beyond the door he entered through all those days ago until now. Beyond it is simple but well inhabited living quarters that include a kitchenette, a spacious seating area, and three other doors that lead to places she’ll be sure to discover later. The furniture is cozier than she would have expected for an imperial ship, but she does suppose this is the New Empire. Her Empire. Because all of this belongs to her, somehow. 

The shelves are littered with curious items. Books and bottles and knickknacks. Bursts of color that liven up the black and white of the space, and pieces of scrap that both confuse and delight her. Some she recognizes, and some she doesn’t. Some she can recall in the frustrating half-remembered way that has been plaguing her the more she discovers about herself from her husband. 

“You look lovely.” Ben tells her, taking her hand and leading her into a slow turn, like they’re dancing. Rey grins and chews on the inside of her cheek. Fighting down the nerves that threaten to claw out of her throat. 

How strange. Before, she was terrified at the idea of fucking the man before her. Now, she’s terrified to stop. 

“What do we do now?” Rey asks in a voice smaller than she’s happy with. Her gaze shifts to the side, to the corner of a soft patterned rug she’s sure didn’t come standard with their quarters. “I… I know what I said. Before. About getting back to my duties. But I don’t even know what those are.” 

Ben takes her hand, smoothing his thumb over work worn knuckles. Cataloging every new scar. “You can start slow. You don’t have to do anything you’re not ready for.” He pulls her forward, into his lap, and she goes willingly. Greedy for the comfort he offers. “We’ve gotten by in your absence with a lot of help from those closest to us. And while I’ll readily admit that no combination of persons has been able to replace you, we will continue to get by while you focus on your recovery.” 

She shakes her head. “I don’t even know what recovery looks like. What if… What if I never remember?” 

Ben’s expression sets. Conviction blazing in his brown eyes. “Then I get to know you all over again. You get to know me. You get to meet every single one of your friends and family for a second time. And if it’s what you want, you get to know the dealings of the New Empire just the same.” He presses his lips to a scar on the back of her hand. One she acquired in this life. From a spanner. “Easy. No one is asking you for anything you cannot give. All we want is all that you are.” 

Rey gazes at a vase of dried flowers, deep in thought. “Promise?” 

“I promise, beloved.” He drops a kiss to her hair. “Are you ready?” He stands, and she reluctantly mirrors him. “I have much to show you.”

Chapter Text

This ship seems to be made up of a thousand winding halls and a hundred different crisscrossing turbolifts. Rey is on edge as soon as they leave the sequestered comfort of their private quarters, gluing herself to Ben’s side like a white shadow as they make their way through the Steadfast. His mask is back on, something that makes her uneasy for reasons she doesn’t fully understand, but she can see the justifications for it in his mind without even having to search for them. 

A face like that is too gentle for any emperor , she remembers thinking when she first set eyes on him unmasked. Soft and beautiful and kind . She wonders if he feels the same way about how he looks. If he thinks it makes him appear weak. 

“You have many people eager to see you again,” Ben’s vocoder tells her as they make their way through the corridor. “They’ll be happy to know that you’re feeling better enough to venture out of our rooms.” 

“What have you told them?” she asks, a heavy pit forming in her stomach. “That I’ve been sick? Malnourished? Injured? Or that I’ve forgotten them?” 

“I’ve told them nothing yet,” he informs her. “I leave any explanations or lack thereof up to you. Beloved, you owe nothing to anyone. You know that, don’t you?” 

Once they make it to more populated sections of the ship, Rey feels eyes on her everywhere. From every person they pass, and every horde of storm troopers that straighten in their armor at the sight of them together. The officers all stop in their tracks to bow at the waist, curious gazes boring into the back of her skull intensely enough to sting. 

Rey never expected her return home to be so… isolating. Now that she’s exited the bubble her and her mate have sealed themselves up in, she is nothing more than a desert orphan masquerading as the empress aboard this massive ship. She is a ragged little nobody, having known nothing but dirt and sand and the floor of one forgotten cellar in a little outpost on Tatooine. Who do they think they are bowing to? 

The big gloved hand Ben has splayed across Rey’s lower back starts a slight motion up and down. Feeling her anxiety welling up through the bond and attempting to soothe it back down. She can’t smell him very well through the layers of his regalia, but he pets along that string pulled taut between their minds. 

“We’ll start slow today. If that’s what you need.” He assures, too quiet for his vocoder to kick on. “We’re going to visit Leia. All of your other friends - Finn and Poe and Rose, Kaydel, Jess...” Rey doesn’t know who any of these names belong to, but the thought of meeting so many new faces today turns her stomach. “They’ll have to wait until you’re feeling more up to it. After we’re done, if you’d like to, we can stop by -“ 

“What is it that you’re keeping from me?” She finally bursts. It’s been a creeping frost in the back of her mind ever since that first night, warmed over enough to be forgotten in the midst of her heat, but coming back with a vengeance now that it’s finished. Ben stiffens, but doesn’t look at her. He stops in the middle of one deserted walkway when she does. 

”What do you mean?” His vocoder rasps. It makes Rey wonder if part of the reason he wears a mask is because he’s a particularly ungifted liar. She doesn’t even have to respond before he’s immediately shaking his head and reconsidering his response. 

He seems to struggle with it, but she gives him time to collect his thoughts, anxiety like a tangle of bees in her chest. She can feel in their bond that he wants to be truthful with her. That he wants to give her everything she asks him for. But there’s something holding him back. 

All around them, the silence echoes. Rey sets her jaw. “I heard you. Speaking into your comm.” 

“It’s… delicate.” Ben explains. His gloved hand raises to rake through his hair, dropping as soon as he remembers that isn’t possible with the helmet. She thinks this conversation would be easier without it keeping his face from her. “It isn’t that I don’t wish to tell you. I do. It’s only that…” 

Rey sighs, gaze dropping to the polished floor. She hates being handled like she’s fragile. Because she isn’t, no matter what Ben or anyone else thinks. 

“Please,” her other half continues, taking up her hands in both of his, looking into her eyes through the soulless visor of his mask. “ Please know that I will discuss it with you as soon as I feel it is wise. Please trust me.” 

And maybe she wouldn’t, in a different life. In this new life, devoid of memory or connection. But she can feel the sincerity kept at bay by his mask. Can peer into his heart through the thread of their bond and see that his intentions are pure.

“Alright.” Rey acquiesces after a long moment. Ben laces their fingers together, hers stretched wide between his. “Who is Leia?” 

“She presides over our council.” Ben tells her carefully after a moment of hesitation. “She’s also my mother. The former leader of the Resistance. She was very important to you, in the time you were with them.” 

Rey’s heart lurches. And then shudders to a stop.

---

Leia ends up being kind and motherly, with a strength of character that seems written into her very bones. A true leader if ever Rey had met one. 

It’s baffling to her, how this tiny woman could have created a man so large. When Ben leans down to hug her, mask off, having been deposited onto the entryway table, his frame dwarfs hers so completely Rey loses sight of the woman but for the olive color of her dress peeking out from all of Ben’s black. 

When Leia hugs Rey, it is with tears in her dark eyes. Rey holds the tiny woman carefully, chin atop her braided hair, and all she can think about is the vacant space this amazing woman is supposed to fill in her mind. How so very unfair it is to be wept over by someone she can’t even remember. Guilt gnaws at the space below her breastbone, weighted and sickly. Black at the edges. 

“She knows you’ve lost your memory, Rey.” Ben tells her later, sitting over the edge of one of the suspended walkways overlooking the hangar as they watch ships of all different shapes and sizes venture in and out of the bay. 

Her hand is held by both of his in his lap, her legs swaying in the air over the sheer drop below. Ben’s helmet is conspicuously off, sat on the floor by his opposite hip where she can’t see it. This is how she knows for sure that he’s using the force to shield them from notice. There hasn’t been a single soul that has passed them in this narrow path. Not even a droid rolling by in its daily tasks. 

It makes Rey wonder if this is something they’ve done before. Resting in a peaceful corner of the ship to observe its goings on without having to be in charge of them. The doc workers below them are also none the wiser, continuing on in their duties as if it is any other day right after lunch. 

“I know that,” she tells him, biting the inside of her cheek against the pressure building behind her eyes as she watches a woman roll out from under a ship on a creeper, round cheeks stained with smears of grease and spanner still resting on her chest. Because Rey does . Know that. Logically. They had sat her down and told her after she finally let Rey go. And her happy tears had quickly turned to sorrow. 

The mechanic sits up next to the ship, wiping at her face with one too long sleeve and heaving a sigh. Rey watches as two men amble over to speak with her, one curly-haired and roguish, the other with dark skin and kind eyes.  

“But?” Ben prompts gently. 

“But it doesn’t stop me from thinking… from thinking…” 

The mechanic throws a heavy rag at the rogue, the one in the faded orange flight suit. But he dodges and lets it hit his companion in the face instead, who goes wide eyed and affronted. He has a black smudge almost all the way across his forehead now. The mechanic laughs so hard she falls back flat onto her creeper.  

“I shouldn’t have forgotten.” Rey tells him, watching this display with an odd feeling unfurling in her chest. “All these people that love me, that looked for me, that - that waited for me,” she chokes on her assertion, voice slipping down her throat as it starts to work, “they deserve more. They deserve more than a girl found under a junk shop who doesn’t remember any of their faces or names or happy memories.” The tears come then, shimmering and heavy at the corners of her eyes. “You should have just left me on -” 

“ Don’t finish that sentence.” Ben cuts in sharply. She looks away from the group in the hangar bay to find him already glaring down at her. Once he sees the surprise on her face, his features soften, even if only slightly. 

“You have people here that need you. No matter how much you remember.” He tells her urgently, pulling her hand up to his lips to press them against the freckles there. He never releases her gaze. “ I need you. And I don’t care if you can’t remember me. We’ve gotten along well so far, haven’t we?” 

“We’ve done nothing but have sex.” She quips. “We’ve been out of our minds with heat and rut. I can’t even remember half of what we talked about. Obviously we’re going to be amiable.” 

He smiles, a purer expression than she would have expected from that statement. He lifts her wrist until he’s nipping at the tip of one of her fingers. “You let me into your body,” he tells her plainly, “I can think of no action more vulnerable than that.” He grins and fans out her fingers, playfully biting at the tip of each one. “And if you can let Kylo Ren into your heart, the emperor of the galaxy, the dreaded master of the knights of ren, the most powerful man in the known universe through politics and the force,” he parrots, using her own words against her, “then I see little reason for you to be scared to meet your friends.” 

Rey twists her mouth nervously, but she can’t deny that the way he’s mouthing at her fingers is making her squirm in her seat. “They’re going to be disappointed. They deserve better.” 

Ben raises his eyebrows, pressing his plush lips to the pad of her ring finger. She watches the lovely pink shape of them form to the contours of her skin. 

“ I wasn’t disappointed,” he tells her matter of factly. She can feel the warmth of his breath against her palm. “And I could live a thousand different lifetimes after this one and still never deserve someone as wonderful as you, beloved.” He kisses up her wrist, making something flutter deep within her belly. She can feel her cheeks pinkening. 

Did she want him like this outside of her heat, in her lost life? Or is it the last vestiges of it clinging to her bones? 

“As the person who benefits most from your memory, don’t you think it’s an encouraging sign that I will still love you, in this life and the next, no matter how much you remember? Even if you never do?” 

Rey’s vision swims. She twists where she sits, trying to smother the flames licking at her. She wants him. All of him. Every which way possible. His heart, his mind, his body. 

And he wants her. Even if she never gets to be herself again. 

--- 

“Are you certain?” Ben checks through his vocoder for the eleventh time, leading her to the bridge of their star destroyer with gentle fingers on her lower back.

He needs to make an appearance after nearly a week spent indisposed, especially with news spreading like wildfire through the ranks of the ship that he’s been reunited with the Empress. On this day, both of them are returning to the helm of the New Empire, and Ben has not tried to keep from her just how pivotal this is for them. No matter how active a role Rey plans to take on for the time being, showing her face to all those who admire and oppose them is of the utmost importance. She is still here. She survived. She found her way back home. Even if no one outside the ship realizes that she was ever gone. 

Ben knows all of what must happen. But it doesn’t mean he likes it. 

Rey can see in his mind that he would much rather seal her into their quarters so she can never be taken away from him again. Or chain her to his side so that he may kill anyone foolish enough to try. Rey would laugh if she couldn’t sense how very seriously he was considering it. 

“I’m fine,” she assures him. Ben had informed her that no one close to Rey’s heart mans a station on the bridge. She will have to do no pretending or explaining. She won’t need to worry about not recognizing anybody. 

To her infinite surprise, however, she does end up recognizing one face in particular. 

The bridge is dark, favoring the shiny blacks and moody dark grays of the rest of the ship. Officers sitting ramrod straight fill the sunken stations flanking the main gangway, lights blinking red, radar showing nothing worthy of reporting. 

“Your Majesty,” a familiar voice addresses. When Rey looks over, she sees the redheaded officer from Tatooine, put back together in his crisply pressed uniform. Not a hair is out of place as his cold eyes regard her husband. 

She thinks of the memory, vague to her now through the boiling haze of her heat, of him knelt before her as Ben pumped her full that first time, clutching at his throat as he wished her a prosperous reign. Then the clearer recollection of his knee in her gut as he struggled to subdue her in the sand. 

“Negotiations have continued with Bespin in your absence, and appear to be going well. The criminal uprisings in the Western Reaches have been losing traction, and we are still on track to have them dealt with in a matter of standard months. Counselor Organa has handled all royal duties in your absence, though I find her decisions regarding three key trade routes going through the mid rim to be highly disagreeable. I’ve outlined them in my written report. And your inquest as to the procurement of the empress has, unfortunately, produced no leads. Things were very chaotic on the ground in the outpost, you understa-” 

Rey can tell the second he notices her at Ben’s side. She has to commend him on his lack of outward reaction, but she can see the way what little color he has drains from his face. Her brows raise to her hairline as she watches Hux grapple with his potentially fatal misstep. 

And then, as if remembering, himself, Ben’s fist clenches at his side. Hux’s mouth gapes open like a fish, and his chest expands like he’s struggling to draw in a breath. 

“It produced no leads?” Ben bites, sinister and deadly through the vocoder of his helmet. But probably not as much so if they could hear his real voice. “You dare to harm my wife, my mate, and you have the gall -”  

“Darling,” Rey murmurs, laying a hand upon his bulging bicep. Ben falters, looking over to her sharply. She doesn’t know where she’s gotten this pet name from. She wonders if she’s used it for him in the past. “I may have been mistaken.” 

Ben lets up, but only enough for Hux to suck in a thready tortured breath. “Mistaken?” 

He sounds incredulous. But she doesn’t think he’s seen that day on Tatooine in her mind, only her recognition of the general in their memory. 

“Now that I’ve set eyes upon him in person again ,” she continues, keeping up with the ruse of her intact memory, “I’m sure he wasn’t the one. It’s been so long, after all.” 

Ben is still for an endless tense moment. Hux is slowly getting more and more red. Then purple. Then blue. 

Finally, Ben releases him. Hux gasps for air, but, admirably, keeps his legs under him. 

“Search harder, General Hux” Ben bites, harsh voice warped harsher within crackling static. “Whoever is responsible must answer directly to me. I don’t care how long it takes.” 

“Yes, your Majesty,” he chokes.

"Apologies," Ben amends, mask tilted towards her and not the man he’s almost killed on sight. The hand at her back slides up her spine. “General, welcome back the empress, Kira Ren.” 

Hux locks eyes with her, him in a heaving cold sweat and Rey with her eyebrows still raised. Hux bows at the waist, as low as he’s able without getting down to his knees entirely. 

“Empress,” he wheezes, straightening again to search for the end of his life within the hazel of her eyes. “I’m honored to welcome you back aboard the Steadfast. May this era be a prosperous one.” 

Rey smiles, and she can see him waiting for it, the final blow. 

But it doesn’t come. 

“Indeed,” she agrees, inclining her head at his efforts. “Wonderful to be back, general. I look forward to working with you again.” 

This, she infuses with just enough intention to get her point across without alerting her ever vigilant husband. That her kindness is granted freely, happily, but with the understanding that he will owe her a favor one day that will not be easily completed. Hux nods so slightly she almost misses it. Then turns to lead them further onto the bridge. 

---

For some reason, Rey hadn’t expected for the Emperor of the galaxy to have something so pedestrian as an office . 

The room is spartan and devoid of any personal identifiers, attached to the far side of the bridge by a force-locked door. It is so small and sparsely furnished that it could belong to any mid-level officer. 

“Don’t you have a throne room or something?” Rey asks, sitting on the edge of the desk as he gives a blinking holopad a cursory glance. “Like the one we -“ 

Ben’s eyes tilts up in interest, duties momentarily forgotten as he slides one big hand onto her thigh. His mask has been discarded onto a low table at his side, already forgotten.

“The one we…?” 

“The one we - well - the one we defeated Snoke together in.” She hastily amends. 

Ben hums. Rey feels her knees press together on reflex, the last stirrings of her broken heat still warming the coals. Ben has to feel it, because the fingers against her thigh squeeze. 

“We do. Have a throne room.” He tells her, dropping his data pad in favor of palming at her other thigh as well. “We only have the one throne, however.” 

With this, he seems to lose some sort of fight with himself, grabbing her by the hips and sliding her across the surface of the desk until she’s sat directly in front of him. Rey winces when she hears a stack of datapads clatter to the floor, but Ben doesn’t give any indication that he’s noticed the commotion at all. He pries her apart with insistent hands at her knees, fingers smoothing down the length of her inner thigh to the center seam in her breeches. 

“Do we?” She squeaks.

His thumb starts to pet slow circles against her through the fabric. She wriggles under the attention, but he holds firm with the hand he has keeping her open. 

All he needs to do is lean forward and down the slightest bit and his mouth could - 

“We’ve found through experience that having two thrones would be a needless expense, seeing how we usually elect to share.” Ben’s gloved fingers work their way under the waistband of her breeches, pulling them down her hips and humming his pleasure when she lifts them up to let him. “We so seldom find use for the throne room, either way. Most of our duties are done right here in this office.” 

“Are they?” She asks wryly, kicking her bottom layers from her ankles when he finishes shoving them down. “Have I really been gone so long, then? That you’ve seen fit to remove my seat from your office entirely?” She asks him, playful and only a little put out by the realization. There is nothing more in this office than the desk they’re currently defiling and a low sofa against the far wall. 

“Who says I rid you of your seat?” 

His lips are hot against the skin at the inside of her knee. The leather seams in his gloves rasp against her soft thighs, making her think of when he first took her in their chambers, the way they felt sliding into her wet heat. 

“You used to prefer the sofa,” he continues, breath leaving goosebumps progressively closer to her center. “Half of it would be covered in datapads, and you would curl up in whatever space was left over. You would get very cross with me when I’d lay you out over the length of it to have my way with you. It would disrupt your charming organizational system of piles and stacks.” His temple nidges her hip. “You’d sit on my lap, also. Whenever we’d have to review policy together.” 

She’s sure that led to a lot of productivity. Heat starts to trickle back into her body, a flickering flame where there was once an inferno, but still a fire that has not yet died out. 

“Why did you call me Kira Ren?” 

The hand holding her thigh open drags upwards, touch firm and insistent as his thumb meets the molten cleft of her. Already wet for him. 

“That is your royal name,” he explains, “the name everyone in the galaxy knows you by. Just as mine is Kylo Ren.” His thumb presses harder, tip just barely breaching her entrance. “But to me, to the force, your name is Rey Solo. And you are mine. Not the galaxy’s.” 

Rey’s hands slide up to his hair, letting her legs fall open wider to invite him close. When he pushes his thumb fully inside, she mewls. 

He groans sin against her thigh and shoves her tunic up over her breasts, bunching the fabric under her arms as he tugs a nipple between two gloved knuckles. He pushes her flat against the desk

Rey moans for him, biting her lip when he reaches down to push her thighs even further apart. She is practically naked and spread like an offering, yet still he keeps his seat in his chair, every stitch of clothing he walked out of their chambers with still covering him sans helmet. It’s a rush to her head, a shiver down her spine - at being so exposed to him when he could walk out the door right this minute and bark orders at someone passing by. 

He watches her features pinch and her body writhe with impatience. His mouth is still teasing her, never quite pressing to where she really wants it, always crowding closer and always skirting away to bite at her thighs and drag his tongue along the crease framing her pussy. He watches the slick gather between her legs with something like awe. Rey bites her lip, having spent too long without his body even if it’s barely been half a day. 

Did he ever use his mouth on her during her heat? Or were they too gone to their fever, too desperate to take and fill and fuck? 

What a waste.

She fists hard at his dark curls, feeling the vibration of his groan against the sensitive skin at her inner thigh. She pulls his head to the side until his lower lip is brushing at her wetness, and then she is hauling him forward, forcing his mouth to her slick center. He loses the fight, loses the thread of control he was teasing her with to finally finally eat her like his mouth was made to. 

---

When Ben leads her back to their rooms at the end of the day, Rey is exhausted enough to fall asleep still standing. Her eyes are heavy and dry, like the desert her weary soul might never truly escape. 

Where was she born? Was it beautiful? Green? Run through with water? Or was it gleaming with skyscrapers? With big dark oceans? She’ll need to remember to ask. 

“You did well today,” he praises softly, brushing his gloved fingers along the small of her back. Something prickles in the back of her mind, within the feeling she’s starting to be able to identify as the force. Rey stops in her tracks, and Ben’s mask tilts curiously as he halts with her. 

Her breaths echo in the polished black hall. The force thrums within her bones. Rey wonders if this place ever really stopped feeling foreign and sinister to her. The stylings of the old empire and the First Order persevere like a sickness, contaminating every corridor, every room and instrument panel and officer uniform. 

“I feel like I didn’t,” she admits to him, curling her index finger around his gloved pinky when he offers his hand. “Do well. I feel like an outsider. I feel as if I don’t belong here.” 

Ben’s mask shakes side to side, his vehemence obvious and nearly frantic. “That couldn’t be further from the truth, beloved. Don’t you realize that all of this was built just for you?” 

Over Ben’s shoulder, Rey sees someone turn the corner just ahead of them. She doesn’t get a good look before they whip back around, struggling with something as they try to disappear back into the hall they came from. But then a separate smaller shape is breaking away from the first, and that’s when she realizes it wasn’t a singular strangely shaped being, but a human female leading a smaller body from behind. They’re wearing the same color, a neutral mid wash gray. 

The woman doesn’t vocalize the panic written into her face, but she scrambles after the little body with an urgency that has Rey tensing. She doesn’t know what to make of this. The smaller one is humanoid, but with their hood pulled so low over their face as it is, she can’t tell what exactly they are. Slow creeping dread settles as a pit in her stomach. She thinks of vengeance, of second attempts on Ben’s life, coups and mercenaries and assassins sent to finish the job they couldn’t so many years ago. 

But when the little creature gets close, they just crash into Ben’s legs, clumsy and uncoordinated, clinging to his thigh as he turns and peers down at them through his mask. 

“Your Majesty,” the woman gasps, all wide green eyes and abject horror as she closes the distance between them. “Please forgive me, I didn’t -”

Ben puts his hand up, stopping her short before she pulls the body at Ben’s feet back to herself. He is a blank wall, impossible to read under the mask as he navigates this strange situation. There is nothing of his gentle face in the sinister visage that regards the little figure. Rey tenses when he lowers himself down to one knee, forcing the being to give up their hold and clutch onto his cloak instead. When Ben ducks low to peer under the shadow of the hood, the tiny thing pitches forward to throw their arms around his neck. They bury their face against the crook of his shoulder, wedged into the scant space under the flared lip of the helm, right where his neck seal protects his gland. 

Rey is struck dumb by this unique sort of brazenness. Ben is the most feared man in the galaxy, able to petrify the toughest of soldiers with just a glance, able to annihilate enemies with nothing but a flick of his fingers. Rey flinches back, bracing herself for his reaction. He doesn’t like to be touched, she had seen it in his mind, Rey herself the only exception she’s been able to observe thus far. 

Ben sighs, defeated and tired. It filters strangely through his vocoder, scattering into static, but the being pressed right up against the sound box doesn’t react at all. He scoops them up in his arms and stands, propping them on his hip and supporting their weight with one burly forearm. Little legs struggle to wrap around his wide torso. 

Rey’s vision starts to white out at the edges. 

“It’s alright, Soren,” Ben tells the woman who’s come to hover at his side. She looks uneasy, contrite, but not afraid. Her hands are clasped respectfully in front of her, waiting for her next instructions. “I can take it from here. You are dismissed.”  

The woman nods, bowing her head before she turns on her heel to retrace her steps back down the hall. 

Rey’s stomach is rioting, enough so to make her think she might be sick from the nerves swelling and crashing over her head. 

She realizes that Ben is saying her name. Has been, at least for the few moments of time she’s lost. She jolts back to the present with his free hand engulfing hers, mask tilted in her direction like he must be searching her face. The being he holds to his chest continues to hide against his neck. 

“Come,” he says gently. Their fingers twine together, but the writhing feeling in her chest refuses to be soothed. “We’ve nearly made it back. It seems as if I can keep this secret no longer.”  

---

When the three of them finally make it back to the royal family’s residential wing and step into the same little living room from before, Rey jumps about a foot in the air when the door hisses shut behind them. The sound seems to echo, seems to bounce around the room and grow louder and louder with each pass. Ben starts to say something, but then the little figure in his arms is digging its fingers under his helmet, finding the latch to release the mouthplate with deft precision. They push it off his head, revealing Ben’s mussed hair with a crack of metal against the floor. Ben sighs, and Rey braces herself for anger, for wrath, but all she gets is a long suffering expression. Something they might share between each other in commiseration, if only she actually knew anything. Like this happens all the time. 

She’s relieved to see his honeyed irises again, shoulders loosening slightly when she can see the soft set to his mouth. If he isn’t nervous, there isn’t anything to be nervous about. 

Right? 

Ben steps closer, watching her like he’s afraid she’ll bolt. Then he’s taking down the hood of the little creature in his arms, face still buried against his neck. Riotous chestnut curls immediately spill over their shoulders and brush at Ben’s cheek. He jounces them on his hip slightly in a bid to try and get them to look up. 

When they do, pulling back to regard him, he turns his body so that Rey can see. 

Someone gasps. And when Ben’s eyes flick to her, she realizes the sound has come from her own throat.  

The being clinging to her mate is a little human girl. She can’t possibly be any older than two or three. 

And Rey… she could be staring at a mirror that’s peering back into her own past. The only difference would be the hair, not stick-straight and bound up in three buns, but framing her little face in barrel curls. Darker than hers already, but not ink black like Ben’s. 

Rey’s mouth falls open, her vision swimming at the edges. She has freckles along the bridge of her little button nose, and a heart shaped face, and a wide pouting mouth. Even her own eyes, big and hazel, blink back at her from the unreadable expression the little girl wears. 

Rey is looking at a carbon copy of herself. Unmistakably. If Rey were to have any doubt as to the identity of the child in her husband’s arms, the resemblance would decimate it entirely. Her whole world feels like it stops. 

“Rey,” Ben murmurs. “Beloved. This is Hana. This is your daughter.”