Work Text:
"Why do you wear that?"
"What?" she asks, even though she can see—no, feel—exactly where his eyes are focused. Sometimes the wound still feels like it's burning underneath the layers of scrap leather.
He doesn't answer, but his hand moves upward in a way that makes her draw back in a tiny flinch, even though she's not afraid.
She's not...not remotely afraid of this. Of him.
Fat droplets of water fall from the loose tendrils of hair that escaped the buns she'd carefully arranged this morning. Or was it yesterday? She's been awake for so long.
But to admit that she's exhausted and sore and weary would feel like defeat. And she's not going to show him the slightest bit of weakness.
Even though the darker-than-usual circles under his eyes are visible even in the relative darkness of the wreckage.
Maybe he's tired, too.
Rey does her best not to let her eyes follow the path of his hand, as he lifts it toward her right shoulder. She ignores the way he's looking at her—like a man who has nothing left to lose.
But sometimes she wonders if she's staring at him that way, too, without even realizing it.
It's just another provocation. He's good at getting under her skin.
She knows this, consciously, and yet she feels herself holding her breath as his fingertips graze the skin above the band, still damp with some combination of rain, seawater, and sweat.
He slides his fingers lightly down her arm and there's a familiar, pleasurable frisson on the back of her neck, like someone running a thumbnail from her spine to her scalp. Not that anyone's ever done that.
Funny thing about being the greatest hero of the Resistance: it's as if you have a hundred new acquaintances who are all afraid to touch you.
It suits her fine; she has no desire to be touched.
Most of the time.
Now, for example, she finds that she doesn't really mind the way his hand lingers unnecessarily just above the smooth edge of the tan leather, like he's testing her tolerance for it. At some other time, she'd pull away. Storm off. Draw a weapon.
But it's cold and wet in here, where they’re sitting on a fallen beam, as if it’s some kind of bench meant for two. Even the bluish light streaming in from the remnants of a smashed window is gloomy. And there's a deep, roiling undercurrent of fear knotting up her insides.
This feels like a distraction—maybe even a comfort—from whatever lies ahead.
So she remains very still.
"Is there—" he exhales, lowering his head "—something you don't want them to see?"
He doesn't need to be more specific about them and, judging from the confusing mix of pride and hurt in his tone, he knows it.
"Hasn't healed yet," she says, with a flat affect, keeping her gaze focused on a pile of rubble in the distance: a fascinating heap of durasteel and glass and rust.
"That's because you've been covering it up." There's an echo in here that gives his otherwise hushed voice a sonorous quality, like he's respecting the quiet of their lonely environs. She can hear every drip...drip...drip softly reverberating in an agonizingly slow rhythm.
It sounds like solitude. It's somehow both a comfort and a stressor, knowing that Finn or Poe or Threepio won't come barging in here. They're utterly alone this time.
"You have to let it breathe," he continues, his mouth dangerously close to her ear, "if you want it to heal."
She can't tell if he's actually moved nearer, or it's a trick of the Force that just makes it seem like he's whispering to her.
"We didn't have the—" she presses her lips together and stops herself from revealing more "—it's fine. I'm used to making do."
Truthfully, she could have had a medical droid work on the scar. But for some reason—a reason she hadn't wanted to think about, let alone talk about—salvaging a happabore leather strap from pile of trash and just...hiding it had seemed like a perfectly suitable option.
No one can ask her about the wound. How it happened. How badly it'd hurt. How unusual the shape is.
She prefers it this way. It gives her privacy.
No one knows that, for the last standard year, her skin has throbbed under the stiff leather. The scar is nearly as bright and angry and as it had been the day she'd stepped onto the Falcon.
"Do you ever take it off?"
Drip...drip...drip...
Rey bristles, instinctually, at these prodding questions. There's something frustrating about his pointed curiosity—like it's another round of interrogation. Like they're caught in a time loop, playing out their roles, again and again. Maybe it's the way he continues to look at her, while she stoically gazes somewhere beyond him. Or how the inflections of his voice still sound beautiful and a bit strange to her, when he's not speaking through the modulator in his mask.
But she's not restrained to a table this time. In fact, there's nothing to keep her from walking away, to the other end of the cavern-like space, and finding some other piece of flat, solid junk to rest on.
Except—
He lets his thumb rest on her tricep—like he's almost squeezing her arm between his thumb and fingers—and she catches her eyes darting toward his hand.
Rey doesn't like to be grabbed by the arm. To her, it's a disciplinary gesture, rather than an affectionate one. It conjures up the memory of Plutt's bloated, fleshy hands digging into her lean shoulder in this way that would always make her shudder.
But the way he's handling her now? It isn't like that.
His fingers and thumb begin to move in little circles. It's meant to be soothing. It is soothing. But it's also making her skin prickle and the tiny, soft hairs on her arm stand on end, as if her body is responding to something her brain can't make sense of.
She turns her head to the right, surprised to see that he's leaning forward in a way that should feel far too intimate for two people who were swinging deadly weapons at each other only an hour ago.
"At night." Her voice is little more than a whisper. "I take it off before I sleep." If I sleep.
He says nothing at first. But he runs his dark, concerned eyes across her face over and over again, like he's trying to crack a code. Or work up his nerve. Because all it would take would be one pull on her arm, ever so slightly, and for her to bend to the right a tiny bit.
Is that how these things happen?
There’s only the drip...drip...drip and the sound of both of them breathing at the same quickened pace without even realizing it.
He leans to the left and his shallow breath just catches the shell of her ear.
"Can I?"
Rey exhales three times without being conscious of taking in any air. She'd meant to answer in the affirmative, but it comes out like a strange squeak.
Closing her eyes, she waits for him to—well, surely he knows how to start this? Because her heart is pounding and he's gripping her arm tightly enough to feel her pulse.
Her lips part as she watches his other hand reach for the end of the leather band. The pleasurable tickle zips up the back of her neck.
He moves his eyes to her shoulder, examining the way she’s crafted the closure, turning her arm slightly with his left hand. It’s not her best work—she’d been in a rush—but considering the questionable craftsmanship of his own lightsaber, he’s hardly one to judge.
His face, serious with concentration, is uncomfortably close to hers. It feels like too much. Rey looks upward at the window, needing a momentary escape from whatever is passing between them because she can’t tell if the tightness in her belly is pleasing or unnerving. He uses his right hand to carefully ease the little tab through the loop she’d cut into the leather. She's so used to yanking on it open with her left hand, it doesn't even feel like the same band with someone else's fingers loosening it.
Except it’s still tight against her tingling arm.
“I—how do I…?”
Rey turns her head back to his fingers—fumbling and too big against the makeshift closure. Her eyes meander up to his jaw, his nose, his brow, now furrowed in concentration, his damp hair resting a bit limply over his ears. All the features that make up the face he’s hidden away from the rest of the world for so long.
But she’d know it anywhere. She can picture him perfectly in her mind's eye.
If she’s been truly honest, she’d know him by the sound of his breathing alone.
It’s loud—prominently echoing off the quadanium plates that are strewn around the chamber. Or maybe everything about him feels loud to her right now.
“It goes through the, um...the loop underneath,” she says, lifting her left hand to assist him. “I can—”
“No,” he insists, his voice tinged with frustration. He lets go of the leather and grabs around her left wrist, pulling it back down to her side. Breathing out again. “Let me do it.”
Rey bites her lip and exhales as he returns both hands to the task.
It take him a few more tries to free the end of the strap, but she doesn’t exactly mind that it’s a slow process. She likes how he’s grasping her arm. How he's careful, but not at all tentative.
He's still gazing at her face, like he wants to see every little change in her expression while he works at this. Like any man would. He’s not in her head, mining her thoughts, hunting for clues.
It’s not the Force pushing them together.
It’s something….simpler than that. This look that passes between them—the most human kind of longing that has nothing to do with magic and the mysteries of the galaxy.
Rey feels the band loosen around her arm. He lets out a little sigh of relief, which makes her mouth turn up in a tiny grin.
“You could have used the Force,” she points out, now that he’s pulling the leather through the second loop.
“No.”
Their eyes meet again as he starts to unwrap the last two layers.
One tiny bit at a time.
Deliberately.
When she’s imagined—well, not this, exactly, but something like it—it had felt like her undoing. Like something dangerous and foreboding overriding her autonomy. Her sense of purpose.
But he’s not taking anything away from her right now—
—except the stiff leather prison that encased the last tangible remnant of a memory. Bittersweet and triumphant and angry and...unfinished.
He unwinds the last bit, his right hand brushing up against the side of her breast, making her cheeks flush.
No one else has ever looked at her this way. Really looked at her. His eyes reflect back the tangle of emotions she’s pushed down in order to survive: wanting, disappointment, fear, hope.
Finally, the unraveled band falls to the ground, exposing a part of her that hasn’t seen natural light for months.
His thumb lightly caresses over the poorly healed scar, but his gaze doesn’t move from her face.
Drip...drip...drip…
“I thought you wanted to see it,” she says, after an eternity.
“I don’t need to." His exhales come out in short little bursts. "I know what it is.”
She feels her own chest rise and fall too quickly. He lowers his head a bit and Rey briefly curses her lack of experience with—
Well, no one had ever explained this to her. She’d spent a short lifetime dissembling mechanical implements and putting them together again, training herself on simulators, learning everything through trial and—often painful—error.
But this?
There’s nothing to draw on but pure instinct.
She’s frozen in place as his head moves toward her, but lower than she anticipates, dipping below her mouth and chin and neck. His nose brushes her shoulder and she feels something warm and soft meet the angry, newly revealed skin.
Her stomach twists as he runs his lips over the scar. So lightly. Just barely making contact.
His left hand grips her shoulder more tightly. Maybe it’s her imagination, or some secret wish of her subconscious, but Rey feels a tug.
On the periphery of her vision, she sees his right hand rising toward the side of her face as he leans toward her, his eyes in line with hers.
“No one ever fought for me before. Like that.” He works his jaw like he's still deciding what to say. "There's not an hour that goes by when I don't think about it."
Rey swallows, feeling a thick lump in her throat.
“I believed in something." She hesitates, before adding, "Then."
“And now?”
His hand suddenly cups her burning cheek.
“I wish I could.” It comes out like a whisper.
He looks crestfallen for a split second, before a little smirk creeps across his face. It reminds her of his father, which is a both a hurt and a comfort.
“Maybe if you stopped trying to murder me, it would be easier to—”
“To what?”
He breathes in like he's about to say something, but he doesn’t answer with words.
No, she definitely couldn’t have learned this alone. She couldn’t have known how surreal it is to have someone’s nose graze your cheek just before their lips brush against hers. She couldn’t practice when to properly close her eyes or open them again because she has to see. Because she needs to see him and know how real this is. There’s no way she could have anticipated where she’d place her hands, because they just find their way onto his shoulder and into his hair.
She couldn’t know how it feels to finally grab hold of that mysterious, amorphous thing that’s been just out of reach for most of her life.
It’s not as smooth or easy as it seems in legends and stories, or in her own vague dreams or visions: it’s messy and chaotic and unrestrained and they're probably getting everything wrong.
But it’s real.
Solid.
Like there’s an inevitable state they’ve each been marching toward in parallel, but now that they’ve come further, it’s clearer: their lines converge somewhere up ahead.
And just as she’s considering exactly how badly she wants more of it, Rey feels him pushing away.
He murmurs something that sounds vaguely like “Mmrrrrhhaaeeeyy” against her mouth and she pulls her head back with a reluctant little shudder.
“What?” she asks, breathlessly. Just how badly had she done with her first try at this?
“Promise me something.” She frowns—nothing good has ever followed those words. “Don’t put it back on.” He glances down at the leather band, now mingling among the crushed glass and plastic that litters the ground. “Just let it heal.”
It reminds her of something—a legend, or maybe something she’d managed to decipher in the ancient Jedi texts.
“Are you going to...heal it? With the Force?” She pictures him touching his fingertips to the scar and concentrating, letting the Force flow between them, mending the skin, making it whole again.
But he shakes his head.
“Some things should be healed with time.” He strokes his thumb over her cheek. “And air and sunlight.”
It does feel good to let the skin breathe out in the open, even in stale air and dim light of the wreckage. She leans into him again, taking his face in her hands. They kiss again—a little more gently, as if they actually have the luxury of time, and there's not something cruel and unforgiving looming their immediate shared future.
Rey runs her hand over his chest, feeling the texture of the heavy, damp material under the pads of her fingers.
He would know a thing or two about burying the wounds of the past underneath heavy layers. He's not exactly subtle. About anything.
She pauses and looks up at his quizzical, worried face. Maybe this is trial and error for him, too. Biting her lip, Rey reaches around to the back of his neck, pulling on something that feels like a fastener.
“Can I take this off?”
All at once, there’s panic and elation in his eyes, as she tugs at the black material.
“W-Why?” he asks, his own hands already working their way through the first of the buttons.
“I think you're hiding some scars, too.”