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Rey sees his face before she sees the binders he dangles over her, and that is the only reason she doesn’t burst out of the escape pod with her lightsaber hot for blood.
Instead she rolls herself over, shifting until her cheek is pressed into the musty vinyl of her little coffin; after a few tense beats when nothing happens but her blood pressure rising, she crosses her arms behind her and waits.
If he is moved by her gesture of trust, he doesn’t show it; he ratchets the locks with no tenderness, as tight as they’ll turn on the bones of her wrists. The binders are thick with squared edges that hold her at a precise and unforgiving angle even as she allows the troopers to wrestle her to her feet. She makes her shoulders relax on the downslope of a reassuring breath and wills herself to stay loose, unbraced against the metal’s bite.
Kylo’s grip, or Ben’s, is tighter still around her upper arm.
In the lift, the light comes from every direction at once.
She feels stifled in its whiteness, more confined here than the narrow box she arrived in. The shadows it casts are wrong somehow, too soft for the cruelty of a Star Destroyer’s architecture. Too soft on him, black and hulking beside her with his hands clasped in front of his body. He sways with the rush of the lift the same as her, but where she reaches for him in the Force, he’s like a stone -- still, cold, unyielding. Unreadable.
“Ben?” It slips out, a tremor so slight she almost takes a breath to say it louder, but his gaze snaps back all at once from its distance and he turns to her, heavy and present. She’s suddenly grateful he didn’t look at her at all in the hangar, in front of the curious officers and staring blank masks of the troopers.
It's hard to hold his gaze, uncertain as she is about what lies behind it. She looks at his trembling mouth instead, the softest thing about him in the white haze. His lips are parted, lush. Obscene. Her stomach is five hundred meters down at the bottom of the elevator shaft but the platform keeps rocketing them up. She’s dizzy from the acceleration, unbalanced with her arms twisted behind her.
He steps closer, much too close.
In the shock of his nearness, she doesn’t understand until one binder clicks loose on her wrist, and she is almost ashamed at the relief that floods her then, hot and sweet as the blood rushing back into her fingers, that it’s Ben here with her after all.
She’s still smiling up at him when he gathers her hands back together in front of her, when he locks the cuff back around her free wrist with a resolve that freezes her to the spot.
There are so many things she needs him to say to her right now, as she desperately searches his half-lidded eyes -- This is the best I can do. This is all part of the plan.
Snoke will expect to see you restrained. I’ll protect you.
Trust me.
He says none of these but kisses her, starving and open-mouthed from the very start.
She forgets the strain in her arms, squeezed between their bodies, and kisses him back, as fierce as she can. She reaches her hands up between them and he makes a small bow to accept her captured wrists over his head, somehow regal as if she’s bestowing a medallion on him instead of her binders heavy on the nape of his neck.
She pulls him down to her but holds him back a moment before she lets him seek her mouth, just to drink it in: their breath mingled and rhythmic, their power crackling on her lips like the electric snap of static. This is not a promise. Not an answer, and she knows she can't ask him for one. But she realizes she’s been waiting for it anyway, deep in the greedy, hopeful part of her, the part that watched him strip his glove off and wondered what else he might bare for her by the fire’s light.
Everything.
When the lift door opens, spilling white and glossy into the red throne room, she doesn’t feel the binders on her wrists at all. She bends and strains against Snoke's invisible hands until her nerves ring with pain and adrenaline, but not from fear -- never from fear.
She kneels before him utterly unafraid.