Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There’s just something about the city at night. 

Rey’s breath curls in the air in front of her, dissipating into the darkness as the traffic signal at the corner changes from red to green. The light glows in the frozen over puddles, the chartreuse a harsh suffusion to the dimly lit alcove Rey finds herself huddling in. The back steps of Maz’s Palace are rickety under her weight, wood groaning as she shifts her numb ass on the top landing. Her body is propping the kitchen door open, letting cool air in for the cooks as the heat from the burners warms her back. Her puffer coat can only do so much against the frigid wind whipping between the buildings tonight. 

She’s had as good of a shift as she can ever have so far tonight, but if she doesn’t get a break in before eleven, her head starts to feel like it’s full of bees. Maz’s is a constant maelstrom of noise and drink and strange characters. Shady men asking her to make them drinks that don’t actually exist, and parties of six or more demanding pitchers and fish bowls and trays full of shots. She has taken five of them tonight with various patrons at their insistence. All of them have been water disguised as vodka. 

There doesn’t exist a quiet corner in the entire building. So she takes her breaks outside, no matter the weather, eating whatever kitchen scraps Finn is able to slip her. Tonight, holy grail of nights, she’s been given an entire rotisserie chicken, still warm and steaming in its plastic container. She’ll be able to eat on this for the rest of the week if she’s careful. 

Rey rips another strip of meat from the bone and sucks it past her lips. Fuck, it’s good. Apparently the left side of it had briefly touched the floor, but Finn had been quick to cut the skin off of that section and put it aside for her. He knows she isn’t precious about things like that. She can’t even remember the last warm thing she ate that wasn’t ramen noodles. 

A shadow in the corner of her eye shifts. Her alcove is bathed in red now, the traffic signal still on its perpetual vigil even with no cars left on the road, so the space feels oddly sinister when she notices the shivering creature huddling in the shadow of the dumpster. 

It’s a little black cat, sitting primly with its tail wrapped over its paws as it regards her with a calm, even stare. Has it been here this whole time? Alley cats are usually more skittish than this. 

“Oh. Hi.” Rey says stupidly, internally rolling her eyes at herself for talking to a stray cat like it understands her. She half expects it to bolt now that it’s been acknowledged, but it leans towards her to scent the air instead. 

Rey tears a chunk of flesh from the bird and holds it out. Steam dances from the surface of it in the frigid air, fragrant and spiced and enticing enough to make anyone’s mouth water. The little thing seems to weigh the risks and the rewards of this decision, eventually settling on slinking up to the edge of the stairs to brace its paws on the wood. Rey waits patiently, keeping her offering still as the cat touches its nose to the meat and sniffs. 

“Here you go,” Rey finds herself murmuring, “all for you.” 

Her heart twists a bit upon seeing it up close. An old scar curves down its little face, barely missing its eye before it slips down to disappear under its chest. She doesn’t think she’s ever seen such dark irises on a cat before: chocolate brown, nearly as dark as the pupil in the low light. Like this cat was birthed from the night itself. 

The cat gingerly takes the morsel from her fingers and wolfs it down in two big bites. 

Rey smiles and straightens back up, plucking off another mouthful for herself as she lets her eyes unfocus against the brickwall across from her. Somewhere, she can hear a song playing. Like a big speaker is blasting it from very far away. Her brows pinch as she tries to untangle what it is. 

A slight weight settles itself against her shin. Warm through the leg of her jeans. She looks down to see the cat sitting next to her, tail back to protecting its paws as it surveys the sidewalk to their right. Rey feeds it another strip of meat, which it gobbles up without question this time. 

“Rey! They need you back behind the bar! Bachelorette party!” Finn calls from the kitchen at her back. 

The sudden noise startles her little friend, who darts behind her calves and lashes a tail around her ankle. Rey doesn’t quite know what to do with the funny little feeling in her chest that elicits. 

“I’ll be right there!” 

Rey peers down, chancing a gentle swipe of her thumb along the base of the cat’s ear. It looks up at her with those big dark eyes, bumping its head against her thigh. 

“I gotta go,” she tells it for some reason. It’s not like it understands her. It’s not like it gives a shit what she does. She stands, watching as it slips back down to the pavement. 

Rey regards the container of chicken in her hand. She’s already eaten about half of it, gluttonous after so long without decent protein. It’s still steaming, crispy and juicy, smelling so very much like the home she’s never had. Rey sets it at the base of the stairs. 

The cat looks at it. Then back up at her. There’s something about its eyes. 

“Take care,” she says for the benefit of no one. 

Then she’s ducking back inside, pulling the heavy door closed behind her. 

---

Rey’s shift ends four and a half hours later, at around two thirty in the morning. 

Her hands are sticky and her vision is blurred from lack of sleep, body feeling like little more than hot garbage as she locks the backdoor behind her. As she turns to descend the short set of stairs, she chuckles to find her chicken picked clean. Rather expertly, if she does say so herself. Bones and the slightest bit of connective tissue are all that remain in the takeout container, tangled in a heap from the diner’s enthusiasm. She wonders if her little cat friend ate it all itself, or if it had help. 

When she rounds the corner to step onto the sidewalk, she’s greeted by a familiar face. 

An inarticulate oh slips past her lips as the cat in question pads over to her. It winds between her ankles when she pauses. “I see you liked dinner.” 

The cat doesn’t meow or chirp, but there is a distinct sensation against her calf that must be it purring. Rey grins despite herself and leans down to scratch under its chin. 

“I have to go home now,” she sighs as it batters her shin with its head. If she wasn’t wearing jeans, if it wasn’t so bitterly cold out, its long whiskers would probably tickle. “I’ll see you tomorrow, maybe.” 

Carefully she extricates herself from the body looping at her feet. When she’s all the way at the end of the block, she peeks over her shoulder as she turns the corner. 

The tiny shape of a black cat sits in the middle of the sidewalk, tail swishing as it watches her leave. 

---

“Listen, I can’t serve you another,” Rey insists from over the Kamikazes she’s making, fingers sticky with triple sec and hair falling out of her customary three buns. “It’s the law.” Or something? She doesn’t exactly know. But she isn’t handing over another drink to someone who can barely even stand with all that they’ve already had. This man is three sheets to the wind, flaxen hair sticking up at every which angle from fisting his hands in it, dress shirt halfway yanked out of his pants, flushed cheeks surrounding a wet snarling mouth. 

“It’s my fuckin’ money,” he slurs, leaning over the bar to try and get in her face. Rey sighs and studiously avoids eye contact, lifting the tray of shooters onto the overpass and signaling Kaydel to retrieve them. She immediately sets to work on building a whiskey sour in her shaker. “I can do whatever I want with my own. Fuckin’... Money .” 

“I could get you a soda or something? But that’s really the best I can do. Otherwise, I can’t help you.” 

Kaydel steps up to take the Kamikazes over to the booth in the corner, but right as she lifts the tray and steps back, this guy is lunging over to slap it out of her hand. Vodka and triple sec and lime juice is launched forward to cover Rey from neck to thigh.

For a small eternity, no one within a two person vicinity says a thing. Until the man is practically bending himself over the bar and jabbing a finger into Rey’s stony face. “You’re a bitch,” he spits, “a rude fucking bitch that needs to be shown her place.” 

“That’s enough!” someone bellows over the din. At the sound of Maz’s voice, the entire bar grinds to a halt. The tangle of bodies and unsavory conversation abruptly ceases. Everyone is frozen as Maz hefts herself to standing on top of the opposite end of the bar. “Poe!” The security guard straightens up, apparently having been dealing with his own problem customer by the front entrance. “Why don’t you come over here and show our guest the door?” 

---

Rey scrubs her arms and face in the industrial sink and dries them the best she can with the not-as-wet side of her apron. Then she is dropping onto the top step out back, coat sticking to the wet spots on her skin as she opens the wad of waxed paper Finn had pressed into her hands on her way out. 

It’s snowing tonight, the heavy wet kind of snow that clings. The hood she has drawn up over her ruined hair isn’t enough to shield her face from the weather - but at this point, her skin is so soiled with sugar and alcohol she couldn’t even begin to care. It feels sort of nice after the boiling hot water she’d just gritted her teeth through. 

Rey doesn’t hear anything because Cat never meows, not once in all the weeks she’s interacted with him, but somehow she knows he’s going to be there before she even lifts her head. 

Flecks of snow stand out against his black fur from where he sits next to her boot. Big dark eyes regard her in that same calm way they always do. His ear twitches when one particularly large flake lands on the tip of it. 

She smiles at him. A sad haggard smile, but a smile nonetheless. 

“Finn gave me a treat,” she tells Cat as she gets the paper unwrapped. “What do you think it is?” 

It turns out to be three succulent jumbo shrimp. All of which are brushed down with Maz’s garlic butter sauce.

The first she wolfs down in a single bite, too hungry to really savor it before the flesh is giving between her teeth. Rey lets her head tilt back and heaves a tremulous sigh. That’s good . 

The second she gives to Cat. She holds it out by the tail, not wanting dirt to stick to the sauce dripping from it as Cat sniffs. Then he’s gently nibbling away at it, until his rough little tongue is lapping the butter from her fingertips. 

The third one she tries to make last. But it’s gone in three quick bites anyway. 

She sets the paper down so that Cat can lick up the rest of the sauce, only after she banishes the thought of doing it herself. Cat keeps her company as he starts in on his treat, tail sliding against her wrist periodically as she stares out into space. 

She’d think he’d only hang out with her for the promise of a meal, but there have been many nights by now that she had nothing to offer him but her presence. Many nights she could only spare the corner of a poptart and some chin scratches. Rey doesn’t think most alley cats are this social. More than once she’s considered the possibility that he belongs to someone, but he doesn’t wear a collar. 

Is there someone that loves him in one of these trendy fire escape apartment buildings? Are there other people that feed him? Other sad broke bartenders that take their breaks outside, no matter the weather? 

She doesn’t know why, but a selfish part of her hopes that she’s the only one that’s special. 

“I’ve gotta go,” she murmurs on the end of a sigh, crumpling up the wax paper Cat has finished cleaning. It’s spotless. A chip off the old block. “Maybe I’ll see you when I leave.” 

She doesn’t see Cat every time she steps outside, sometimes shifts pass without encountering him at all, but he’s there more often than he’s not. Rey smiles at him even though he can’t possibly interpret it, and is careful to shut the door softly behind her so she won’t scare him. 

---

Rey can tell right away that something is wrong when she exits the backdoor. 

Cat is on her before she’s even removed her keys from the lock, pressing his ribs against her leg, making the strangest sound in the back of his throat as the fur at his nape bristles. 

“What are you -” Cat doesn’t move, doesn’t flinch, except for the erratic jerking of his tail. He isn’t looking at her. His chocolate brown eyes are pinned to the mouth of the alcove, where it opens out to the sidewalk. Confused but not yet alarmed, Rey steps over him and descends the stairs, being careful not to catch any ice under her boots. Before she can take another step closer to the sidewalk, Cat is darting in front of her, nearly making Rey trip over him. “Fucking - quit it -” 

She tries to get past him again, but he goes so far as to catch his claws in the weave of her jeans and dig them into her skin. He’s along for the ride when she swings her leg up, and he wriggles like some kind of pissed off insect, clinging to her even when she makes a valiant effort to shake him off. 

“Cat, what the fuck ,” she hisses, succeeding in removing his talons from her skin but not moving fast enough to avoid the little fangs he sinks into the meat of her calf. A pained grunt punches out of her, and just as she’s about to hoist him up by the scruff, she hears it. 

“Bitch. F-Fucking bitch. Dis… Disrespectful… lil nobody bartender… I’m gonna…” 

Rey stiffens, breath catching in her lungs as Cat finally releases her. The voice was a loud mumble, nearly a slur, uttered just loud enough to reach her ears before she passed by whoever waits for her around the corner. 

Because they are. Waiting. She can see the shadow of a lone figure swaying back and forth. 

Be quiet. Straighten up and stay against the wall. Don’t move. 

She doesn’t quite hear this as a voice. Doesn’t quite feel it as a compulsion. But the energy behind it is so urgent, so grave, she finds herself stepping back when Cat presses his tense body against her shins again. The brick is unyielding at her shoulder blades as Rey is swallowed up in shadow. 

Above them, the snow starts to fall faster. It isn’t the light fluffy kind anymore, but something closer to sleet. Wet and freezing cold. Miserable. 

Cat winds between her ankles, hackles raised, little shoulders tense. 

There’s a sound like shoes scraping at pavement. Fabric rustling. A hateful vitriolic snarl. “Goddamn rain. F-Fucking tired… of this. Stupid little girl.” Whoever is lurking around the corner leans over for something on the sidewalk, an uncoordinated sort of fumble. His hair is still a mess. His clothes still in disarray. But his lips are pulled back in a malevolent grimace. It’s the man from before, the one she cut off earlier in the night. The one who had to be dragged out of the bar kicking and screaming about what an ungrateful cunt Rey was. “She’ll see,” he promises to himself with a dark sort of conviction, straightening back up to lie in wait once again. “Fucking bitch. She’ll see.”

Rey runs through her possibilities in her head. The keys still clutched in one hand are a comforting weight, and so is the keychain (ironically enough, shaped like the head of a black cat) that’s designed to receive her fingers through the eyes and turn into a knuckle duster with sharp pointed ears. Rey slips her grip into it, gearing herself up to face him, ready to make a run for it and take a swing if she needs to. But before she can even take the first step forward, Cat is already darting towards her intended attacker. 

“Cat, no!” she hisses, hands too slow to stop him. 

An almighty yowl pierces the frigid night air. Rey has heard cats fight before, knows that they’re awful screeching can sound like something entirely hellish and otherworldly, pitching in and out of withstandability as they tear into each other. But what comes out of Cat seems impossible. That a tiny little body like his could make a noise so ominous, so loud and foreboding, knocks Rey back against the brick wall. 

The man must startle, because she thinks she hears him fall on his ass against the sidewalk, coat scraping against the side of the building his whole way down. 

“What the hell -” 

Cat disappears around the corner. 

The man’s shadow morphs and twists, contorting so wildly she can’t keep track of which parts of his body are which. Some shapes she wouldn’t even think the human form could make . He’s blubbering like Cat is really letting him have it, sharp claws and teeth and tenacity. 

Something thuds .

Cat’s unholy screeching has stopped. When did that happen? Is Cat okay? Has that man hurt him? 

Before she can think, Rey is skidding around the corner, eyes wide and panicked, knuckle duster raised and cocked. If that piece of shit tries to touch her cat, she’ll fucking - 

Rey is met with a blank wall. An empty sidewalk. In the distance, the light changes from red to green. 

She whirls around to see if he ran off the other way without her notice, but she is alone on the street. How could he have run off that fast? Where is -

“Cat?” she croaks, righteous anger deflating as her fist drops. “Are you okay?” she murmurs, knowing but uncaring that he can’t understand her. What if that man took him? Hurt him? Killed him? What if her little friend died protecting her? 

Rey can’t think of anything worse. She should have gone after that man first, she should have been braver, she should have been quicker about snatching Cat up, she - 

Something brushes her ankle. Rey’s eyes fly down, only to be met with slitted pupils surrounded by chocolate brown. A fuzzy little scarred face. 

“Cat,” she gasps, falling to her knees so she can scoop him up and press her face against his neck. She hasn’t ever tried to hold him before, mostly keeping things to a pet here and a scratch there. Most alley cats don’t like too much attention. But Cat is purring, she can feel it as a deep consistent rhythm against her chest. He rubs his nose against her ear until Rey giggles and pulls back. 

Fat freezing drops pelt them like shooting stars. Rey looks up at the roiling sky, then back down at her friend. 

---

“It isn’t much,” she says to the empty air as she locks the door behind her and flicks on the lights. 

The journey home had been… interesting. Rey had carried Cat all the way to the bus stop, tiny body zipped into her coat to keep the sleet off of him. Upon arrival, the bus driver had flung the doors open and given the pair of them an unimpressed look. Whatever, the lady had muttered, obviously too tired from a long night of dealing with nonsense to deal with a cat smooshed into a jacket. 

But when Rey had sat down in a seat towards the back, gathering her frayed nerves, Cat had wriggled out of her clothes like an angry toddler. You’re gonna get us fucking kicked off - But all he’d done was hop up onto her shoulders, paws pressed to her clavical as his tail brushed along the curve of her bicep. Regal. To say the bus driver had given them a strange look upon exiting would be an understatement. 

The overhead light takes a long time to flicker on, like it always does. Cat jumps from her shoulders to the counter, sitting primly as he regards her.

Rey stares at him for a long time. He had perched on her shoulders the entire way back, like she was a witch, like he was some kind of familiar, staying calm up the stairs and through the big sound the front door to the building makes when it closes behind her. Normal cats don’t act like this. 

Her gaze hardens on him. Cat’s tail stops swaying. 

God, is he a familiar? Cat just showed up one day. He fought off a grown man. He always stays by her side. Rey doesn’t really know anything about familiars, but it’s almost like he’s looking out for her … 

She squeezes her eyes shut hard and blinks them back open. Cat still looks the same, if not a bit more intent on her than he was before. 

“Sleep deprivation,” she tells him seriously, checking her phone to see that it is, in fact, after four in the morning. 

The apartment is ice cold, air still after an entire day of sitting empty. Her heat has been out for a week, the super shoving an ancient space heater into her hands when she complained and insisting that it’s just as good . Rey doesn’t take her coat off as she pads into her bedroom, Cat following on her heels as she plugs the sputtering metal box back in and waits for it to heat up. 

“Not too much better than outside,” she admits to him as she crosses her legs and sits directly in front of it. There’s a faint orange glow coming from inside, and all she wants to do is to absorb it, consume it, bury it deep in her chest and let it ward off the ice always. Maybe Cat does, too, because he delicately climbs into her lap and curls up there. 

It’s warming up much faster than it usually does. Soon Rey is shucking off her coat, her gloves, her thick sweater. She runs her fingers along Cat and luxuriates in how soft he is. Shockingly so, for something that lives outside. He’s rumbling with a purr, threatening to put Rey to sleep still sitting up. 

“You… You can get under the covers with me,” she slurs, vision swimming. “I know it’s cold. I’ll just stay here till this heats up, and then we can… we can…” 

Rey slumps to her side, descent slow and easy. She falls asleep curled up on the rug, her new friend pressed into the circle of her arms. 

---

When Rey wakes, she does so from the relative comfort of her bed. 

Which confuses her. Because didn’t she fall asleep in front of the space heater last night? 

Rey tries to sit up, intent on investigating why it’s still so warm in here (usually the heater has quit on itself by the time dawn breaks out over the horizon), but she becomes aware of a weight on her chest. A very fuzzy one. When she looks down, she sees Cat curled up tight, head under her chin and whiskers tickling her throat. 

Her hand comes up to pet him. And when she makes it to the end of her first stroke, the little body weighing her down starts to purr. 

Rey sighs and lets her eyes slip back closed.

Chapter Text

Rey had initially imagined Cat’s stay with her to be temporary. The night he saved her had been so wet and bitterly cold, the alley miserable and dark and foreboding in a way it never had been before. She couldn’t possibly have let him spend the night in such a place, not after what he’d done for her. 

So when she’s getting ready to leave for work the next afternoon, Rey considers bringing him with her and dropping him off at the back door. He could belong to someone else. He could have cat friends there. He could be missing out on all the food the other restaurants have probably been slipping him after lunch and dinner services. But when she exits her bedroom looking for him, dressed in jeans and a battered sweater, boots already done up past her thick socks, she pauses. 

He’s asleep on her lumpy couch, tiny and dark, curled up in a nest of throw blankets with one paw outstretched. Even his toe beans are black. 

After that, she can’t really work up the heart. He seems happy, doesn’t he? This would be a nice home for him. 

Wouldn’t it? 

They could be a little family. Just the two of them. If he’d like that. 

Rey isn’t even sure she’s allowed to have pets here. She hadn’t cared when she signed the lease because this was the only place she could afford that was on her bus line. Maybe if Plutt was able to heave his gelatinous body up the three flights of stairs it takes to get to her apartment, she would be more worried about it. But her super has never followed through on inspections the entire two years she has lived here, so she isn’t too concerned. 

Cat is a constant unobtrusive presence in her space, always there to keep her company while she’s watching Netflix or washing her clothes in the tub or trolling the free section on Facebook Marketplace from her cheap little laptop. She misses him while she’s at work, no longer able to share her dinner breaks with him now that he’s safe under the blankets at home, but it makes returning to her tiny little apartment in the middle of the night feel like it never has before. 

She’s never had someone to come home to. Never had someone she looked forward to seeing at the end of each day, someone who came to meet her at the door like they’d missed her as much as she missed them. Rey has never had anyone that was hers. 

“Pretty boy,” she coos, pressing her lips against the soft fur at the top of his head, right between his ears. Her nails scratch lightly under his chin, both hands framing his face as she smooches all over it. He tolerates affection surprisingly well. Again, she wonders if he belonged to someone else, if someone loved him, and quickly shoves down the thought. “Pretty pretty boy. My bestest little guy. New man of the house, huh? Gonna eat all the bugs?” 

He gives her a look like he will do no such thing. Can a cat look affronted? Do they have enough muscles in their face to form that expression? She thinks Cat must. 

She laughs, giving him another kiss when he butts his head up against her nose. “What about burglars, huh? Will you at least scare away all the burglars?” 

Like hell anyone would try to break into this building. But it’s the thought that counts. 

Cat’s little face changes again, but she doesn’t know how to interpret this look. So Rey goes back to smothering him. 

---

Weeks after Cat’s informal adoption, Rey has the strangest dream. 

When she wakes, Cat is no longer next to her. Which isn’t right, because Cat is always next to her. In his place is a man, big and broad, so broad that to share this bed with him means to be sleeping halfway on top of his body. Her arm is thrown across his bare waist, leg pressed between both of his. Rey’s face rises and falls from where it is against his chest, floating on the air of his steady breathing. 

The man’s dark hair is fanned across her pillow, head tucked against the blankets so she can only see a small part of his face. A strong brow. A constellation of beauty marks. And then, when his visible eye flashes open -

Rey gasps awake, sitting up fast enough to disturb Cat’s slumber in the crook of her arm. He makes a displeased sort of chirp, flopping back onto his side to curl up in the warm spot she’s just vacated. 

Rey drops an unsteady hand to Cat’s fur, and feels his side rumble with his contentment. When he blinks his eyes open to regard her, slowly, lazily, all she can see within the chocolate of his irises is that man. One brown eye framed in dark lashes. 

---

On her way home from a rare early afternoon shift, Rey stops at the grocery store to pick up some ingredients for dinner. While she’s mulling over the pros and cons of chicken versus shrimp ramen, she pauses with the two square packets clutched between her fingers. 

Should I be getting Cat actual cat food instead of people food? 

That’s what regular people do, isn’t it? Pets don’t exclusively get fed table scraps. Cats are supposed to have their own food. 

Which is how she finds herself in the small cat corner of the pet section, mind struggling to form an opinion around the different options in front of her. Regular bags of food are there like she had been imagining, but there are also a plethora of treats and wet food tins and something that looks like… soup? 

She guiltily picks the cheapest option. It’s when she’s dropping it into her basket that she first sees them. Hanging on the bottom row of pegs, next to the water bowls and toys and nail clippers, there is a selection of collars. 

Rey imagines Cat wearing one as he sits proudly upon her window sill, a strip of fabric letting everyone outside know that he has a home. That he has a family. That he has her. She could even order him a tag to go on it, one with his name, one with her phone number below it so that he would be returned to her if he ever got lost. 

Rey smiles and adds it to her cart, not even looking at the price. The one she’s picked out is black, just like him, with reflective stitching and a little black bell. 

When she gets home, she sits on the rug and shows Cat everything she bought. A cheap little mouse toy he seems to have no interest in. The bag of cat food, which he cares about even less. And finally, the collar she chose special, just for him. 

Cat cocks his head at this one, sniffing curiously at the material of it as she flicks the little bell. 

“For you.” Rey smiles. 

Cat looks at her. His dark eyes are piercing. For a second, she indulges the thought that this means as much to him as it does to her. That he knows what a collar represents, that it will make him her companion, that it will make her his human. 

Rey pulls the breakaway buckle open and loops it around his neck. It seems like a perfect fit, not too tight, so she clicks the tab into place to fasten it around him. She feels the weirdest sensation, then. Like static electricity at her fingertips. Lightning shooting up her arm. Her chest is warm and fuzzy, alight with contentment. This is right . This is as it should be. Cat nuzzles his head into her palm, so she gathers up his little face and gives him a smooch. 

A home. 

---

Rey wakes up the next morning and, for the first time since she brought him home, doesn’t find Cat sleeping next to her in the early light filtering through the windows. 

The sun is muted and watery in the sky, the kind of pale day that only ever graces mid winter. Rey drags the comforter off the bed with her when she rises, shivering against the cold Plutt’s space heater can’t banish. She scrubs sleep out of her eyes and pads thick socked feet out of her bedroom, wondering what it is that Cat’s gotten up to. His absence feels too much like the confusion of that dream. It makes her uneasy. 

When she crosses the threshold to her living room, she freezes. 

There’s a man sitting at her table. 

Her first insane thought is that he shouldn’t be able to sit like that in any of her chairs. She had unearthed this dining set from the dumpster behind the building, piece by piece, salvaging all that she could and probably some of what she couldn’t. She had come away with two out of the four original chairs, but even the ones she had taken were barely usable. Both need only the barest hint of ass to groan a warning, the slightest shift of weight to buckle on one side. Even Rey, as scrawny as she is, has to perch all the way forward on the edge of the seats to be able to use the pieces of furniture at all. 

But this guy is slouched back in it, weight heavy against the backrest as his long legs stretch out under the table. And he’s big , Rey can tell even sitting that he’s well over six foot. His frame is wide, boasting brawny muscle under the pale speckled skin of his chest. He’s only wearing pants, black and loose fitting, high on his waist and cinched at his crossed ankles. 

“Good morning.” He croons, the picture of unbothered. He hasn’t even looked up at her yet, only giving her his profile as he reads the newspaper partially unfolded in front of him. Where did he even get that? 

“Who the fuck are you? Why are you in my apartment?” 

She watches one corner of his mouth tick up. He’s sitting in the shadow cast by the entryway wall, untouched by the sun in a way that doesn’t sit well with her. A mess of dark hair falls to obscure his ear and curl around his cheek. He doesn’t deign to respond. 

“What. The fuck. Are you doing in here?” She demands through measured breaths. 

“Mh. The weather is supposed to get bad,” he frets offhandedly. Something about his voice causes a deep instinctual part of her to tense. All the hairs at the nape of her neck stand when she hears his silky smooth baritone, low and easy and latently dangerous. 

Rey bites the inside of her cheek hard. She doesn’t know if her heart will stop or explode or both. One shaking hand parts her comforter to reach for the object she keeps stashed behind the bookshelf next to the door. She doesn’t move her head, doesn’t dare turn or shift to attract his attention to the baseball bat she draws into her tangle of blankets. 

She had debated leaning this up beside the front door in case she ever needed to fend an intruder off from the hallway, but now she knows her instincts had been right. 

“Get. Out.” She growls. The bat is trembling in her grasp, hidden from view where it’s pressed to her thigh under the covers. The man peers over at her from the corner of his eye. 

“Don’t you want breakfast, little dove?” 

He has a cup of tea at his elbow. Her mind has a difficult time processing the sight of the steam curling up from the rim. The teacup is delicate and obsidian, with intricate ornamentation winding up the sides that almost gets lost in the darkness of its color. It’s sitting on a matching saucer, with a tiny golden spoon laid across it. These are all things that he could not have found in her cabinets, because she does not own them. 

She is so confused by the sight of this (did he bring these dishes from home? did he make tea before he broke in?) that she can’t fully make sense of his words. Or her own response, for that matter. “There isn’t any food in the fridge.” 

He turns a page over in his newspaper, and if he’s going to rob and murder her or whatever, he could at least have the decency to not be such a dick about it. “You’ll find that isn’t the case any longer.” 

The only things in that fridge are loose Taco Bell sauce packets and half of a block of dollar store sharp cheddar. She knows this as an absolute fact, because there are never more than four things in there at a time. What kind of burglar gaslights her about her own food stores? Is this a magic trick? When she opens the fridge, is an accomplice going to pop out with the duct tape and rope? 

He raises the teacup to his lips in one elegant sweep. His ease within her space sets Rey’s teeth on edge. Who does he think he is? Why won’t he just get on with this? 

Something tinkles. Cold dread sinks like a stone in her stomach. 

Around his wrist is the little collar she brought home from the store last night. The plastic breakaway buckle shaped like a cat’s head is clasped right above where his pulse surely beats, the bell dangling right below. 

“Where is he?” Rey hisses, agonizing fury clawing up her throat. “What did you do to him?” 

“I didn’t do anything, dove.” He chuckles. She hates how lilting his voice is, how effectively and unnaturally it attempts to soothe her. He still hasn’t even had the decency to look her in the eye. Or look her way at all. 

Rey’s blood is boiling. She doesn’t care how big or how scary he is. This is her apartment, and her little family, and her life. She’s fought hard for every bit of it she’s gotten, and she isn’t about to let someone waltz in and read their stupid newspapers and hurt anyone that’s hers. 

Tears are beading at the corners of her eyes. “Where is he?”  

The man sighs and stands, face and shoulders and chest awash in a sunbeam when he straightens to his full height. He’s even taller than she initially guessed, even broader with his spine straight and shoulders pulled back. His head tilts, just a little, and Rey ices over when she sees that there are horns coiling out of his skull, spiraled close like a ram’s. They’re the same jet black as his hair, having effectively blended into the shape of it from within the shadows. 

Once she notices that, she notices other things about him, too. Claws come to deadly looking points beyond his fingertips. The tip of an ear slips from beneath a lock of hair, and she sees that it’s pointed, too, golden rings punched through various pieces of cartilage. He’s folding the newspaper back up, face still in profile, but he must notice her horrified assessment of him, because his mouth twists with a grin. One lethal canine flashes against his plush lower lip. 

This predator is scarier than you. Run. Hide. Beg for your life. Show him your soft underbelly so that he may take mercy on you and decide not to rip it out entirely. 

He finally turns and takes a step towards her, but her mind is a maelstrom of fear and panic and indignation. Fierce heartbreak for an event she’s not even sure took place. She tries to picture Cat safe and sound, curled into a hiding spot under the couch as he waits out their intruder. But Rey already knows that isn’t where he would be. Cat would have fought. 

Rey’s jaw tightens. Cat fought someone ten times his size. For her, in the alley on that miserable snowy night. Rey can go up against this monster if it’s for him. Either in protection or in vengeance. 

When the man is close enough to touch her, the quick shift of Rey’s shoulders casts her comforter to the carpet at her feet, revealing nothing but Nightmare Before Christmas jammies and grim determination. She brings the bat down as hard as she can over his right temple. 

Except - 

She doesn’t.  

The man huffs, and she swears she sees steam curling out of his nostrils. His clawed fingers are closed around the end of the bat, arm corded as he keeps it at bay a scant few inches from his head. He’d caught it like nothing, as if doing so had cost him no effort. 

They stand there like that, at a standstill, for endless seconds. Rey’s heart is beating in her ears so loud she can hear nothing else. 

He’s finally facing her dead on, eyes boring into hers. He is… eerily pretty , which isn’t a word she’s ever used to describe a man before. But thick lashes and high cheekbones make any other word impossible, the soft line of his mouth pouty and inviting, his beauty marks scattered like little galaxies, like - 

“I’ve seen you before.” She breathes, hands shaking on the neck of the bat as he looms over her. “In a dream.” 

“It was no dream.” 

Rey’s gaze finds his. His irises are a rich chocolate brown. Brown like…

Rey pales. 

He has a scar. Old, but very prominent, like it had cut to the bone. It starts above his right eye and extends down his face, down his neck, all the way to his chest.

No. 

No. 

There is pressure behind her eyes that she can’t identify. She suddenly feels very small. Her voice is tiny and so deeply desperately uncertain, painfully aware of how insane this will sound if she’s wrong. 

“...Cat?” 

One side of his mouth lifts. She can barely hear what he says next over the pounding in her own skull. 

“I can’t say it was a very creative name, can I? Hello, little dove. You can call me Kylo now.” 

---

Rey leaves for work in a daze. 

She’s opening today, having traded shifts with Rose so that the other girl could go apartment hunting with her sister. Privately, she is relieved to have a good excuse for leaving home early. Something is wrong with her. Something must be really seriously wrong with her to think she saw…

Maybe she has a psychiatric condition she hasn’t been evaluated for, something genetic that she has every reason not to know about. Maybe that tab of acid she tried three years ago has finally kicked in in earnest. She could be hallucinating. There are a variety of things that could cause something like that, the most likely being some biological marvel in the walls of her building that Plutt knows about but hasn’t fixed. It’s possible that she was just sitting on her floor petting the wall the entire time while Cat looked on in quiet horror. 

Maybe Kylo won’t be there when she returns. Maybe Cat will be in his rightful place, curled up in the blankets on her bed, waiting for her to join him so they can watch Master Chef Jr. until she falls asleep. She’ll drop a kiss onto the soft fur on the side of his little face when she walks in through the door and know that all is as it should be. 

What she doesn’t expect is to see Cat during her lunch break. 

Obviously, he hasn’t met her here on the stoop since she took him back to her apartment. Rey had assumed he’d been lounging around her furniture all day doing whatever the hell cats did when their people weren’t around. But now she’s looking right at him on the sidewalk, broad daylight warming his shiny coat, collar tinkling as he pads up the steps. 

He sits at her side, fuzzy hip pressed into hers. She can feel his tail lashing at her back through her coat, making a soft slipping sound against the waterproof fabric. Rey stares straight ahead, not knowing what to do or how to react as she picks at the turkey sandwich she got from the gas station down the street. It’s Cat, but if it was just Cat, he wouldn’t have any possible way of being here. It’s Kylo, but if it was really Kylo, why does he look just like her bestest little guy? 

Rey feels exhausted and sad and confused. All she wants is to sleep for three weeks. She tears off a piece of turkey and feeds it to whoever is sitting next to her. 

Thank you. 

It’s that voice again, except it isn’t really a voice. Rey glances at him from the corner of her eye and finds that he is keeping his gaze pinned to the brick wall, right alongside hers. 

She has no idea where to go from here. How is she supposed to feel about this? Who is that monster back home with the blazing eyes, the sharp teeth? 

“What are you doing here?” Rey whispers, feeling insane as soon as the words leave her mouth. She’s directing a serious question towards a cat. Her cat. That was possibly never even hers to begin with. 

What, you don’t miss eating your meals with me out here? I’m hurt. 

She has no idea how to respond to that, so she doesn’t. 

---

Rey half-expects him not to be there when she pushes open her door, snow melting into the collar of her turtleneck as she shakes with the cold.

Neither of his forms had been at the back door when she left, and she has no other evidence to prove that any of what she’s experienced today ever happened at all. So when she sheds her layers and turns to face her living room, a big relieved breath gusts from her lungs upon seeing nothing at all. No monster. No Kylo. Maybe Cat really is hiding under the couch from her. 

Rey leaves her things in a big messy heap beside the entryway. She pads to the kitchen, intent on eating the rest of her block of cheese, but when she flicks on the light and opens the fridge, she finds… not that. 

Her cheese is gone. Either that, or it’s buried under all the other food that fills her refrigerator to bursting. 

There are condiments lining the door and vegetables in the crisper, a gallon of milk and a carton of eggs and plastic wrapped meats of various types and sizes and so much else. It’s all practically spilling out onto the floor. There’s even a little box of baking soda, top sliced open, tucked into the back corner behind a jar of pickles. Warily, Rey also cracks open the freezer. There are frozen pizzas and tv dinners, taquitos, ice cream . Rey can’t remember the last time she’d eaten ice cream. It’s her favorite kind, too - the mint chocolate chip that's green.

Her head feels light. There is a real chance she could pass out from the shock. She slips down into a sit before the open refrigerator door, the artificial cold warring with the outside chill clinging to her cheeks. 

“Did you have a good day at work, little dove?” A voice sing-songs from her bedroom. 

There is no way she could be imagining him. There is no cat wandering around. Her fridge is full of food. She can touch it and crinkle the packaging and taste the brine of the pickles when she tilts the jar back to take a sip. When she can finally stand without wobbling, she opens her empty cabinets that are empty no longer. They are piled high with nonperishables, pasta and peanut butter and chef boyardee.  

“What… I… Why did you do that?” Rey flounders when she crosses the threshold to her room. He’s lounging back on her ratty twin mattress like he owns it, a lazy grin turning up his lips as he watches her stop at the foot of the bed. 

He doesn’t pretend not to know what she’s talking about. “You were hungry.” He murmurs. “Poor little human. Didn’t have anything, yet still scraped together just enough to share with a stray cat. You went home hungry every night. I could hear your stomach growling. 

“It - literally none of this is any of your business, you - you -” 

“It’s absolutely my business.” He informs her. “I can’t have my human going hungry.” 

“ Your human?” 

He smiles at her, something soft and unguarded. It makes her pause even as his sharp teeth gleam in the lamp light. “A token.” He explains, and holds up his wrist, still shackled with the collar. “You gave this to me, to bind us together. We’re connected now.” 

“No, that - that is a cat collar. That I got for a cat. I was under the impression that you were one, not… whatever you actually are.” She jabs a finger at his wrist, something bitter threatening to come up her throat. “I gave that to… to what I thought was a cat so that he wouldn’t get lost. Never fucking mind. Consider yourself officially unbound.” 

He snorts. “It doesn’t work like that. Once you give a demon a token, once they accept it, a bond forms that can never break. There are no… what do you humans call it? No take backsies.” 

“A demon ?” Rey croaks. 

Kylo stands, approaching her like one would a wounded animal. He still isn’t wearing a shirt, just the same gauzy black pants from this morning. If he were a regular person, his toes would be blue by now. The space heater hasn’t been running since she left for work.

“Listen,” Rey continues, waving her hands in front of herself to ward off his advance. “A contract isn’t enforceable unless all parties consent to sign, right?” 

“You’ll find that supernatural laws aren’t as rigid as those of mortal design.” Kylo chuffs. He stops in front of her, too close, reaching up and delicately twisting his fingers through a lock of hair that’s escaped her three buns. “Besides. It wouldn’t have worked if you hadn’t meant it. Magic works through intention. There would be no bond if you hadn’t wanted your gift to bind me to you.” 

Rey opens her mouth. Shuts it. Opens it again. “I… I thought I was giving a collar to a cat. To my cat .” She reiterates, slapping his hand away. “So that someone would bring him back to me if he couldn’t find his way back to me himself.” 

Kylo assesses her stricken face, brown eyes wide and so very familiar as he lets all of this sink in for her. 

“Why the fuck did you accept it if you knew what it meant?” 

“Because I wanted to.” He tells her matter of factly. “And I’ve found that there isn’t anything to be gained in denying myself the things that I want.” 

Every word he speaks only baffles her more. She feels no closer to untangling this than she was upon very first catching sight of him. 

“Why make me think you were a cat in the first place? Is this what you were hoping would happen? Were you trying to trick me into this?” Were you trying to worm your way into some poor lonely human’s heart? Wait just long enough for her to love you, then pull the rug out from under her and show her it was fake all along? 

Kylo sighs. “Living as a cat all those months wasn’t ideal. Let’s just say that I have a… somewhat contentious relationship with a group of individuals that have finally left the area. The Guavian Death Gang was really doing their damndest to comb the city for me, and a cat seemed as good of a disguise as any, dampened the magic so they couldn’t catch wind of where I was. And then I met you.” He smiles. “You were a vision in that battered old coat on the back steps. Tiny little human huddled outside in the cold, curled around a warm meal like someone might take it from you. And then you catch sight of me, nothing but a feral animal by the looks of it, and you part with your dinner like I can’t tell exactly how starving you are for it. No, I didn’t keep you company to trick you. But I will never be sorry about protecting you from that scum lurking about in the dark. And I will never be sorry about going home with you and keeping you warm in this hovel you live in.” 

“But why allow a bond?” Rey bursts out. “If it really is unbreakable? Is my soul just another bauble for your charm bracelet, or whatever? Am I being added to your… to your collection? Wh-What’s going to happen to m-me -” 

“Shh.” He croons, cupping her face with one huge hand. The strangest thing happens. All of the ice eddying in her limbs, all of the chill suffusing her bones, all of it vanishes. In its place is nothing but warmth. His thumb slips against the apple of her cheek, and it comes away wet. “I’m here now. Nothing bad is ever going to happen to you again. I belong to nobody else, and nobody else belongs to me. There is only one bond.” He smiles, and she jolts when she feels the edge of a claw against her temple. “Sweet girl. Humans are not often kind like you are. Generous like you are. Fierce like you are. How could I not want to be yours?” 

“B-But - but I -” Rey blubbers, “what the hell am - am I supposed to do with a demon? This makes no sense.” 

Kylo lifts one shoulder. “What the hell were you supposed to do with a cat? It’s not that different.” 

She balks. “I’m not going to keep a grown man - demon - whatever - as some sort of - of pet!” 

He grins, a vicious little show of teeth. He looks delighted, and Rey doesn’t like it at all. “Who says I’m the pet?” 

---

Rey’s living room is frigid, even with the space heater pulled right up alongside the lumpy couch. 

It’s more of a futon, she supposes, with a broken half-splintered frame that won’t allow it to open flat. She lays with her knees tucked to her chest, arms pulled inside of all her layers to try and warm herself with her own body heat. She is buried under the comforter she’d ripped out from under Kylo’s unbudging mass. His cheeky pout is currently living rent free in her head. “Awh, you don’t wanna cuddle anymore? Won’t sleep next to me if I’m not small and fuzzy?”

“You take up the whole fucking bed!” She’d snapped, stripping as much of the bedding from him as she possibly could. If he wouldn’t let her have her peace, she wouldn’t let him have her blankets. 

“I can fit,” he murmured, dark eyes suddenly even darker, something in his honeyed tone she couldn’t quite identify. A feeling pooled in her belly like molten sugar, too hot to touch. “We just have to press very close. Come here, Rey. It’s below freezing outside.” 

“Maybe you wouldn’t be so cold if you'd put on clothes ,” she grated, yanking her pillow out from under his lower back. He sighed. “Seriously, don’t you have something you can put on?”

“I’m not the one that’s cold.” He purred. “Skin to skin contact is the surest way to warm up.” Rey scoffed, bundling her bedding in her arms and turning to hide from him in the living room. “Besides,” he continued, “it isn’t anything I haven’t seen before.”

Rey had halted in the open doorway. Looked over her shoulder to find him schooling his features into something deceptively innocent. 

She had lived with Kylo as a cat , not as a man. Not as a being who could perceive the social acceptability of the things she did while unobserved. She had undressed in front of him. Eaten linty food off the floor in front of him. Cried until she was gross and snotty during episodes of Grey’s Anatomy in front of him.

Rey paled. She’d used her vibrator as a microphone in front of him last week - right after cleaning it, in the trek between the sink and her bedside drawer. She thinks she might have even touched herself while he was laying next to her at some point in their roommateship. 

These are all things she’s trying not to think about as she hides under her pillow on the couch. She will be stiff as hell tomorrow, miserable from tossing and turning and the knots twisting up her lower back, but she doesn’t care. 

Until she wakes from a fitful sleep in the dark predawn hours, shaking horribly and able to see her breath. 

Her fingers fumble with the ancient metal housing of the space heater, toggling the switches and checking the chords and banging on the outside of it for good measure. It doesn’t even sputter, doesn’t even warm. Rey’s teeth chatter with the effort of moving even this much. 

“F-F-Fix this.” She demands upon bursting through her own bedroom door. Kylo is sitting up against her headboard reading a book by lamplight. When he looks up and sees her, he smiles and whatever he’s reading just vanishes from his open palms. Rey drags the useless appliance over and hefts it onto the foot of the bed to bang against Kylo’s exposed ankle. He doesn’t flinch. 

“Fix what, little dove? This… dismal mortal contraption? 

She sniffles and nods her head, jaw tight with the cold. “I can’t get it to work. I need you to fix it.” 

Kylo raises an eyebrow. “And what makes you think that is something I’m able to do?” 

She balks. “I… You’re a… Can’t you grant wishes or something?” 

“I’m a demon, not a genie.” He growls, as if she’s insulted him. “No, I do not grant wishes .” 

There’s a lump forming in her throat that she’s pointedly ignoring. She can’t tell if her teeth are grinding because of the cold, or because of this roiling feeling that’s been left to fester in her chest. “Then magic it, or whatever!” 

“That isn’t how magic works, little dove.” He sighs. “I meet your needs. The problem is that you are cold, not that the box is broken. I can keep you warm. You don’t need that… thing.”

She glares at him, shoving the space heater off the bed so that it clatters onto the floor. The noise makes her flinch, but Rey doesn’t care who she wakes up at this point. She wants her bed back. Her bed and her sanity and her boring human life. “Why even have you around, then?” She hisses. Kylo only raises his brows. “You take my things,” she makes a rough gesture to the mattress, “you don’t make my life better, you buy groceries one time and think that, what, that it -” 

“I provide for you.” He tells her patiently. “I take care of you.”

“This is the first place that’s ever been fully mine , and you’re just gonna come in here and make yourself at home?” She explodes. Tears are hot in her eyes, the whole world bright and quivering. “Act like everything I’ve worked so hard for is beneath you? Help yourself to whatever you want now that you’ve decided this is your life now?” 

“Anything you want, I can give you. Maybe not in the ways you’d expect, but you are the one that is limiting yourself.” 

He still sounds too calm. She wishes he would yell back at her, justify her wrath with some of his own. His even tone is only feeding the heartbreak spilling down her cheeks. 

“Why don’t you turn my goddamned heat back on?” She snarls.

“You don’t need me to make your insipid human technology work,” he insists. “All you need to do is trust me and come here .” 

“No!” She breaks. “I didn’t want this. I didn’t want you. I wanted the cat that I brought home from the alley. How dare you make me love him and then take him away? I can’t ever have him back now. Because now I know it was all just a lie. It was just you .” 

“Rey -” 

“You want to give me everything I need?” She sneers. “Go to hell. That’s what I need -” 

Rey’s body is suddenly wrenched forward, an unseen force dragging her into Kylo’s grip. She smacks into his chest, palms braced out to try and keep space between them, but it’s no use. The arms closing around her waist are like steel, crushing her close with no effort, pinning her thrashing arms between them. There is a palm heavy at her back, rubbing circles there like she’s a child throwing a fit. It just makes her cry harder. 

He waits until she wears herself out, bearing her struggling for long minutes until she sags into his embrace, wet cheek on his shoulder. “You will never want for anything. Not anymore. You have me now, and there is no changing that.” He drops a kiss to her temple, but she’s too exhausted to react. “However. I have no patience for these ridiculous human customs of yours. You deny yourself that which you most want. You live in misery, all because your desires don't happen as you expect them to. It makes no sense. If you would just give in, Rey, you would realize you aren’t even cold anymore.” 

Rey blinks. Then sucks in an unsteady breath. He’s… right. 

It’s not even that the chill has been banished. She feels warm . Cozy, in a way she hasn’t felt in so long. More comforted in the arms of this monster than she ever remembers being. There isn’t even any lingering iciness in her fingers and toes. It’s as if she has always existed like this, never neglected or overlooked or forgotten for even a moment. 

Rey sniffles, a loud wet sound that Kylo doesn’t flinch at. She presses her brow to his collarbone, tired enough to sleep for entire years without waking. 

“This is never going to work.” She sobs. 

He strokes his nails through her tangled hair, and it shouldn’t feel as good as it does. “Of course it will, little dove. Why would you think otherwise?” 

“I don’t even understand why you decided to do this.” She’s getting the skin of his shoulder slick with snot and tears, but she doesn’t care. It’s his fault. “How am I going to make friends? How am I ever going to go on trips or invite anyone over or throw a party with you around? How will I date? Or get into a relationship? Will I ever be able to get married and have a family? Have kids? When I die, do I even get to go to the great beyond or whatever, or is it straight to the lake of fire with you?”

Kylo sighs. “We may host and travel and celebrate with whoever you’d like.” He urges her back, urges her chin to tilt up. And the person she locks eyes with could be any man. Gone are the horns, the sinister teeth, the pointed ears and the viscous scar. She finds herself transfixed, fascinated. Utterly dumbfounded. 

Even more surprising is the thought, sudden and shameful, that she prefers the way he looked before.

“I blend in when I need to. It would give me no pleasure to make your life difficult or incomplete.” She gives him a tentative watery twitch of her lips. And in the space between one blink and the next, he is as he was once more. Otherworldly beautiful. Not that she would ever tell him. 

“As for the other things.” He works his jaw, seeming to consider his words very carefully. The set of his teeth is oddly predatory. “Those answers are simple. You will not be seeking out any life partnership or romantic relationship, because you are already within one. You will not be marrying, because the bond we share is far stronger than any mortal vow you could enter into with another. Though, I suppose if matrimony is important to you, we could have a human ceremony as well. But any human that catches your eye will be a human that dies by my hand.”

Rey feels all of the blood drain from her face. Kylo is deathly serious, eyes blazing with wicked promise. 

Is he under the impression that they’re… together? Are they the supernatural equivalent of husband and wife in his eyes? 

Kylo pauses and cocks his head, turning something over in his mind. “I’m unclear as to my ability to give you children. But I’m sure we’ll have ample opportunity to test my limitations or lack thereof, won’t we? I’ll admit, I’ve never lain with a human before.” He grins at Rey’s look of dawning horror, seeming to find humor in her terror. “As for the status of your mortal life - consider it taken care of.” 

Rey’s mind is spinning faster and faster with each point he makes. She thinks she might be sick. “T-Taken care of?” 

“You ceased to abide by mortal limitations the moment you fastened this to my neck.” He jingles the collar still around his wrist, the little bell heralding the finality of his next statement. “Welcome to immortality, little dove.”

Chapter Text

Rey wakes the next morning feeling warm and ensconced, sensations so utterly foreign to her they may as well be written in another language entirely. 

Her first instinct in the face of such comfort is to let herself slip back into sleep. It feels so good here, in this cozy liminal space between real life and dreams. She’s safe now. She doesn’t have to worry anymore, maybe even ever again. 

Then her first alarm is going off from the other room. Rey scrunches her nose against the consciousness trickling back in. Whatever is under her head shifts, and she lets one eye crack open to watch Kylo’s arm as it stretches out towards the door, fist closing in a lazy flourish that brings about the silence of her phone. 

She only realizes Kylo is hugging her to him when that arm curls back inwards to re-twine thick his fingers through her hair. Her cheek is pressed into the muscle of his shoulder, cradled against him even as she faces outward. His massive frame curls around her body, other arm banded tight around her middle with their legs hopelessly tangled together. When she tries to shift her weight forward to put some space between them, he only drags her back closer.

“What’s your game here?” She mumbles, one foot still within dreams as the other struggles to find a foothold in reality. “Are you trying to fuck me? Harvest some part of my soul? Trick me into asking you for something that eventually brings about my ultimate demise?”

The palm against her belly drags up and over, sliding along her ribs with the barest hint of thumb ghosting along the underside of her breast, then back down to dip below her navel before he starts up his path all over again. He does this a few times, never varying his lazy rhythm even as she squirms back into him. “Do you even need to sleep?” Rey accuses. 

He huffs a little laugh, and his breath is scorching against the back of her neck. It makes her shiver. “I’m able to sleep, but I don’t require it. I indulge when the circumstances permit.” When his hand comes to rest over her ribcage again, she realizes he can essentially hold one entire side of it within the width of his grasp. It makes her feel tiny. “As for your ultimate demise.” He pinches the skin right where it’s ticklish, and she jolts against him. “If I have to tell you that I’m not a genie one more time, there will be consequences.” 

He presses a kiss to the back of her neck, the touch so gentle and unexpected it forces a breathy little gasp out of her. His lips move to pillow higher, right at the base of her skull, and something in her core tightens. 

“I do not need to harvest your soul. It already belongs to me, as mine does to you.” She thinks she feels the slightest scrape of his teeth as his mouth moves. “You forget. I do not possess anything of yours that you do not possess from me in equal measure.” 

“But -” 

“Do all humans ask this many questions?” He grumbles against her skin. She might be angry with his dismissiveness if he didn’t also sound so teasing. 

“I think it’s only fair,” she tells him indignantly. “This all started with a lie. The least you can do is be honest from now on.” 

“Mh.” He curls his hand down to stuff his fingers between the dip of her waist and the mattress. She really doesn’t know if she could be pressed any tighter against him, but he seems to be trying either way. “I’m the same being you loved before, you know.” Kylo whispers into her hair. “Just because Cat turned into someone with a human body, a voice, it doesn’t mean any of it was a lie. It was still me who sat with you on the stairs. That kept you warm at night.” 

It’s so warm in the circle of his arms now that Rey has to fight not to just melt back into his body. To give in to his affections and let him have the pieces of her he wants. 

The fingers in her hair tighten, pulling her head back just enough to fully expose her throat to him. It makes her gasp, then bite the inside of her cheek when the heat of his mouth closes around her fluttering pulse. Too late she realizes that he never answered her first question. The one about -

“Why are you convinced that I’m playing some sort of game?” He breathes against the spit slicked mark he’s left on her skin. He blows on it, and she has to grit her teeth against the unexpected spike of pleasure that cuts through her. “Is it so impossible that all I want is you? My sweet little human, with her kind heart and her sharp tongue and her soft body?” His talons are dragging up the ladder of her ribs now, only hard enough to make her breath quicken in the lungs protected underneath. The muscles in her belly wind tighter and tighter, until his fingers are finally pressing into the soft underside of her breast, touch gentle and reverent. 

“I do want to fuck you.” He finally answers, a rasp against the shell of her ear. Rey fists at the sheets in front of her, face hot as she feels his hand cup the entirety of her breast. He groans as the slight weight of it settles into his palm. “But your body isn’t all that I want. I think you already know that.” 

She pants, fighting against the urge to arch up and press her chest into his touch. Her nipple is pebbling under his kneading grip, explorations careful in a way she wouldn’t have expected from him. Kylo’s hips are tight against her ass, the rigid shape of him nestled against her core. 

“I want you to give me everything. Every part of you that there is to have, I want it to belong to me.” His fingers slide inwards to roll her puffy nipple between his thumb and forefinger. Rey’s mouth drops open, hips pressing back into his body as a moan catches in her throat. 

A shrill noise makes her freeze, breaking her out of the spell Kylo has cast over her. The hazy desire bubbling in her veins dissipates as her phone’s ringtone tumbles in from the other room, a welcome intruder. 

It’s almost definitely spam. Maz waits until at least noon to call her about anything related to the bar, and nobody else has an important enough reason not to text first. She’s not close enough to anybody to be an emergency contact. 

Still, Rey seizes this opportunity with both hands and wriggles out of Kylo’s hold, half-falling out of bed as she hears the demon at her back huff something disappointed and amused. Rey skitters out of the room to answer her phone. 

She stays on the line for twenty minutes, knees tucked under her chin, body curled in on itself against the cold of the room as the lady on the other line insists Rey’s non-existent car still possesses an extended warranty.

All she can think about as they talk in circles is Kylo in the other room. He hadn’t made any move to chase after her, but she had seen him tracking her with his eyes as she fled. He had bitten his lip, one sharp canine visible against the plush swell, and smoothed his hand down his naked stomach, letting it slip below his waistband so that he could adjust the length of himself in his pants. 

Rey feels hot all over, even in the frigid air of her living room. 

---

Being saddled with a demon roommate is… strange, to say the least. 

She comes to a tentative sort of truce with him in her head, an uneasy acceptance as she grapples with the fact that he isn’t wrong in what he said. He is the same entity as he was before, just in a different shape. With a different voice than she expected. 

Part of her wants to reject the idea entirely. He’s a demon . With teeth and claws and bedroom eyes, horns that spiral out of his skull and magic that permeates the air all around him. He’s a monster. 

Isn’t he? 

She spends the rest of that second day cleaning the apartment. She scrubs at nonexistent grime and clean countertops, dodging his gaze as she keeps herself busy enough to avoid him. Rey isn’t used to having anybody in her space like this, someone so obviously conscious and aware. Observing. Assessing. It’s the same mind she was living with before, but the repackaging just makes her feel… uneasy. He wasn’t honest with her. She brought him into her life under false pretenses. 

But. Well. No matter how many times she tries to, she can’t deny the fact that he was right. 

People change all the time and still retain that which makes them who they are. Appearances change. Heart and minds and feelings change. Isn’t it up to the ones who love a person to continue loving them anyway? Even when they grow into someone else as time passes? 

Rey doesn’t know if anyone’s ever loved her, but she does know that she was a drastically different person even just two or three years ago. It took time to shed the layer of skin that had formed during her upbringing in the system. She was always tense, always distrusting, never willing to make friends or let anyone into her heart. Her eyes were hollow and a pit yawned inside of her that was too hungry to ever fill. It had taken her a year to thaw enough to make small talk at Maz’s after she had first started working there. The first time she had smiled at Rose over an exploded shaker full of cosmopolitans, the other girl had practically beamed. 

She had changed. Right before her co-worker's eyes. And they had accepted her. Grown their relationship with her. 

Kylo is still the one who has kept her company all these months. Who fought someone off who wished her harm. Who made her apartment feel like a home. 

She loved him before. Unconditionally. Could she still? Even if he wasn’t what she expected? 

Rey decides to make chili for dinner that night, marveling at her ability to find exactly what she wants in the fridge and cupboards without having to add anything to her mental shopping list. As soon as she starts searching for beans, she finds beans. The second she wants ground beef, her eyes find it in the fridge. Salt is on the back of the stove as soon as it enters her mind to look. 

Is it coincidence? Or magic? 

If she wanted something ridiculously seasonal and specific, would it appear between one blink and the next? If she wanted handpacked peach ice cream, would it materialize in the freezer the next time she opened it? 

She tamps down her urge to check. Kylo is leaning up against the counter right behind her, fingers idly trailing down her side, over her hip, up her spine. When he dips too close to the swell of her ass, she smacks his hand with the wooden spoon she’s using to brown the meat. He huffs, but his touch retreats. Cold immediately creeps back in. 

“What? You’ve never had a problem with me touching you before?” He pouts. 

Rey’s face reddens. “You were a cat .” 

“So?” 

She doesn’t dignify this with a response. 

When the ground beef is cooked through enough, she scrapes it into the pot to join her other ingredients. She’s never known much about cooking, has never usually had enough items for it, so this is a bit of an experiment. It’s surprisingly agonizing to leave her creation at a simmer. Whenever she microwaves something, it’s ready as soon as it can be. Whenever she boils water for pasta, she just cranks the burner up as high as it will go so that it will boil faster. But this recipe instructs her to let the flavors get to know each other . Whatever that means. 

She’s just about to say fuck it and ladle a bowl for herself anyway when she feels Kylo’s lips at her shoulder. She jumps, both for the contact and the unexpected rush of warmth it brings with it. She is wrapped in his magic once more, all feelings of chilled misery chased off and replaced with unnatural comfort. Her suddenly not-icy toes curl in her thick wool socks. 

“Where’s my good morning kiss? I haven’t gotten it yet.” 

She wants to be baffled by this, but the way his mouth is moving against her pulse is distracting. He has to be bent down pretty far to be able to put his lips on her like this, his back no doubt curved over her small frame so he can lavish attention under her jaw. 

“Since when are you entitled to any kiss?” 

“Hm.” His lips skim over the shell of her ear, and it makes her shudder. “You used to kiss me all the time.” His hands move, one sliding to press under her belly button as the other rises to flatten a palm to her chest, right against her sternum. “Here.” He moves his lips to the back of her head, smacking a deliberate kiss against her hair. “Here.” Rey’s arm raises up without her commanding it to, and Kylo kisses the back of her hand when it presents itself to him. “Here.” His lips pillow on her cheek, right where she used to kiss him the most. 

Rey forces the lump down her throat. “Yeah, well. You used to be cute.” 

Kylo pouts, his sullen little huff seeping into her skin as he buries his face in her neck and hugs her closer.

She drops her spoon into the chili, still unused to his bottomless affection as she is. Her face feels hot. She wonders if he can feel how fast her heart is beating in her chest, and then tries not to come to the conclusion that he probably can. Kylo goes with her when she leans over to fish a rag out of the drawer, body shifting with hers as she straightens and cleans off the handle of the spoon. He’s like a barnacle. 

The fingers of the hand against her belly are long enough to touch between her legs if he twists his wrist. Rey doesn’t think this has escaped his notice, especially when his full lips start working against her skin again. Worrying at her erratic pulse. Moving around his words. “Just one?” He simpers. “You know that I don’t bite.” The hand still flat against her chest slides up to pinch her chin between his fingers. “Well. Unless you want me to.” 

His teeth snap a hairsbreadth from the heartbeat lodged in her throat, and he laughs when her only response to that is to jump about a foot out of her own skin. Rey kicks him out of the kitchen with her next breath, embarrassment warming what the steaming pot of chili cannot in his absence. She finishes dinner with frozen toes and flaming cheeks. 

Rey had stomped downstairs to Plutt’s unit this morning after she’d gotten off the phone, banging at the door with all the wild abandon and righteous fury she’s accumulated over the years she’s lived here. The busted space heater had chipped the gummy white paint of his door frame when she tossed it down onto his welcome mat, her demands for his attention unanswered. Rey had left everything in a heap except the note she penned on the back of a credit card offer envelope. This she had tacked right under the peephole, stark in its demand to either fix her unit or procure her another one altogether. 

To no one's surprise, she still hasn’t heard back. 

When Rey crosses into the living room, she pauses. Kylo is lounging across her couch, laptop open on the coffee table and already lit up with the play screen for Master Chef Jr.. He’s reading that same book from before, the fingers of one hand idly rubbing at the line of his mouth as he concentrates. When he notices her, he glances up and raises his brows. 

“Um,” she begins, feeling small and a bit stupid for not thinking more about this earlier. Two bowls of chili are balanced against her chest, and two bottles of water are clutched in her opposite hand. The ceramic is beginning to burn through her sweater. “Do you even… want any? Do you need to eat?” 

She can’t decipher the expression on his face. The book disappears again as he straightens himself up to sit correctly. “I don’t require it to sustain myself. But I enjoy it.” 

Rey huffs, something half hearted about giving him all her food as a cat, all the shrimps and pieces of chicken she missed out on, but sits next to him on the couch anyway. It’s supremely odd to have him be the one to hit play on the show they’ve watched together for weeks. They eat in silence, Rey with too much sour cream mixed into her chili and Kylo with the hot sauce she somehow knew he’d want without having to ask. When one of the kids hits on Gordon Ramsey’s daughter, they groan in unison. 

There’s a funny feeling building in Rey’s chest. She peeks over at him when she thinks he isn’t paying attention and watches him eat his chili like any other human man. Besides the horns. And the claws. And the fangs that appear every time he closes his mouth around his spoon. 

Is this what it’s like to have a companion? An actual roommate? 

She will pointedly not think of other words he might use instead. Like bondmate. Or husband. She will not. 

---

The apartment is never dirty anymore. Dust doesn’t collect on any surface and dishes are magically done between one meal and the next. Laundry is always clean and folded, appearing exactly where it had been in her drawers, even seconds after she’s put something in the hamper. When Rey takes a shower and returns to the bathroom for something ten minutes later, water isn’t pooling on the tile or soaking the bathmat like it should be. 

Kylo eats with her whenever Rey is working, him as an unobtrusive feline presence at her side, and her feeding him scraps just like old times. She has a lot more to spare these days, what with a fridge that never empties and food that never expires. 

But even after multiple weeks of their confusing companionship, Rey continues to have no idea how to feel about it. About him . About the fact that she can’t seem to figure out how to get rid of him. 

She had googled it late one night behind the bar, bereft of patrons and drowning in time and anxiety. How to banish a demon. How to break a demonic bond. How to ward off a demon from partaking in your supple mortal flesh.

Rey makes a face. Not so mortal anymore, if he’s to be believed. But she shoves that thought into the box it’s been relegated to and focuses on scrubbing her search history of the evidence. She isn’t sure how good with technology Kylo is, and she hadn’t found any good answers to her questions anyway. No source that really knew the truth of the subject. Nothing that would supposedly work without hurting him. 

When she gets off of work that night, instead of heading straight home like she usually does, Rey gathers her conflicted feelings and goes to the twenty four hour diner a few blocks down. She can afford it now, she supposes. She hasn’t had to buy groceries in weeks. 

The waitress (a girl she recognizes, probably someone she’s served) smiles in that familiar way but says nothing as she leads Rey to a booth beside a window. It’s empty tonight, with only three other patrons around to share the dining room with her. Rey orders a cup of coffee and a stack of pancakes and settles back into her booth to stare out at the dark empty street. It snowed just a few days ago, so there are still slushy black piles of it clinging to the edges of the asphalt. It’s one of the things she hates the most about winter, or maybe living in the city in general - how dingy the pristine white flurries get when they overstay their welcome.

Rey doesn't know how long she sits like that, but her pancakes don’t find her long before someone else does as well, slipping into the seat across from her as their knees bump hers. 

It’s Kylo. Except it isn’t really. 

He could be anyone off the street the way he looks now. Gone are his demonic features, and in their place are seasonally appropriate clothing and a healthy flush on his cheeks from the cold. This is the first time Rey has ever seen him wear any sort of shirt. He’s dressed in a black pea coat worn over a black sweater, a black scarf wound around his neck, a black beanie stuffed over his riotous curls.  

“What are you doing here?” She asks, more curious than anything. 

The corner of his mouth twitches up. “Wondering what you’re doing here.” 

The waitress drops another cup of coffee in front of Kylo without him even asking for it. Without thinking, Rey unrolls her silverware and slides the fork past her stack of pancakes and over to him. She takes up the spoon and drowns her half in syrup, leaving Kylo’s bare. She presses a slab of butter on top for him instead and scoops up her own big spoonful of sugary syrupy carbs. 

He doesn’t say anything as he starts in on his side, and she doesn’t offer up any of her thoughts, either. Rey sighs at the simple pleasure of a hot meal she hadn’t cooked herself, eyes fluttering shut in the face of all her exhaustion. 

“You don’t have to continue working, you know.” 

Rey looks up at Kylo to see him demurely eating his own breakfast, eyes on the plate in front of him. He cuts his bites into neat little slivers and sinks them onto the tines of his fork. 

“What is that supposed to mean?” 

His gaze flickers up to her. “We are immortal beings, little dove. This life you’ve led is not all there is to discover. I want to take care of you.” He takes another bite and chews it thoughtfully. “There is no reason you need to continue holding a job that barely pays above minimum wage when I am more than capable of -” 

As her mind struggles to process what he’s saying, the first concrete thought Rey can form is that she’s surprised he’s familiar with the concept of minimum wage. The next is a solid wave of fear. Of the unknown, or of him, or of just the sheer amount of time stretched out before him is anyone’s guess. 

“I’m not ready to think about that yet.” She chokes out around a mouthful of food. “I don’t want to quit my job.”

Kylo stares at her for long seconds, not fighting it when Rey’s spoon begins to encroach on his half of their stack. The diner lighting is better than the lighting in her apartment. Harsher. She can see just how pale his skin is, how dark and shiny his hair falls. His eyes have flecks of amber in them. Maybe even a little gold. 

“Okay, Rey.” He tells her gently. “I can be patient. I’ll wait until you’ve had some more time to think about it.” 

Rey pays their tab and bundles back up into her puffer coat to brave the weather. When they exit out onto the street, Kylo strips off one of the gloves she’s just pulled on without a word. Before she can snap at him, he takes her bare hand with his, and when their skin meets, she is cold no longer. 

They walk home like that, Rey never once slipping out of his hold. 

---

“I’m going to make you pay rent,” Rey grouses as his head lolls against her shoulder. 

They’re watching a movie on her laptop, huddled under the blankets on her couch as the wind howls against the windows. His hair is soft against her cheek, dark and curling in a way that almost makes him seem… sweet. 

“Why is that?” He croons in soft confusion. A palm settles on her thigh under the blanket and Rey has to suppress a shiver. “Don’t I provide for you? Don’t you enjoy my company?”

She wonders if all demons are this physically affectionate. There has hardly been a moment Kylo isn’t touching her within the walls of their apartment unless she makes a specific effort to shake him off. Pulling her into his lap when she’s on her computer, holding her hand in the kitchen, wrapping his arms around her waist to peer over her shoulder when she’s playing a game on her phone. Not to mention how incessantly cuddly he is anytime they’re in bed. 

In a weird way, Rey supposes he isn’t that different from when he was a cat. 

Kylo’s fingers smooth up her inner thigh, skimming close to her molten center. She flicks the back of his hand and he pouts, ceding the ground he’s taken without argument. 

He somehow never goes too far, either through his innate ability to know exactly what she wants, or some other internal sense all his own.

However. 

He also doesn’t make it easy for her to hide her body’s reaction to his attentions. Rey doesn’t want him to know how flushed he makes her feel, how slippery-wet between her thighs she gets in response to his touch. She doesn’t want to give into him, to let him have her body when he’s already taken her life and her soul as his own. 

Kylo shifts to flop over with surprising grace, so that his head is in her lap and his legs are stretched off the side of the armless couch. He blinks up at her with those thick lashes, eyes big and brown, lips pouty and full and so unfairly inviting. She hasn’t kissed him, but she imagines it could only be the sweetest sort of surrender. Soft and ruinous. Like this, he looks almost like an angel. Gazing at her with wide eyes and a soft set to his brows. But Rey knows that looks can be deceiving. 

“You’re annoying.” She finally settles on. 

He laughs, nuzzling his long nose against the soft space above her belly button. She clenches around nothing. “You wouldn’t think I was so annoying if you’d let me just -” 

Rey coughs without really needing to and pitches forward to bump the volume up. Kylo stays where he is, not even turned to watch the screen, but his whole frame shakes with mirth. 

She can’t pretend to hate him anymore. Not when he continues to be such a dedicated companion, not when he keeps her so warm and fed, not when he whispers his adoring feelings to her within the scant space between them in her bed. 

It doesn’t mean she’ll tell him as much, though. 

“One kiss,” he beseeches when the credits roll. There are no cinematic explosions to drown out his softly mumbled words, no action scenes to distract her from the way his hand slides over her hip. Something shivery is settling into the pit of her stomach. “Give me one kiss. That’s all I ask. Then you’ll see.” 

She looks down at him, at his blazing eyes and the desire cracked open and raw in his expression. Every day he puts his lips to her skin, he wraps her in his embrace, he pulls her into his body like he physically can’t get her close enough. 

“See what?” She rasps. 

Kylo holds her gaze and sits up, crowding her against the back of the couch. He’s so near her eyes can’t fully focus on him. His forehead presses to her temple, nose skimming along the length of hers. “If you tell me to stop, I will,” he breathes. “If you’re not ready for my body… I can wait a little longer. But give us a chance, Rey. We are bonded. Irrevocably.” 

Butterflies beat against her ribs. There’s no way he can’t hear how fast she’s breathing. She tips her head to the side and kisses the apple of his cheek instead. A parody of how she used to smother him when he was a cat. 

“That isn’t the sort of kiss I had in mind.” He whispers. Astoundingly, the skin that was just under her lips flushes red. The sight makes something squeeze in her chest. He brushes the tips of their noses together, back and forth. “Try it. Go ahead. Take it from me.” 

All the breath leaves her lungs. Hesitant fingers slide up his shoulders, up his neck, up his jaw, to frame his face. He doesn’t move, just lets Rey have him at her own pace. It’s the only thing that gives her the courage to press her mouth to his. 

It’s just the barest contact of lips. Warm and soft and right . Rey’s insides tremble as she melts against him, one palm cradling his cheek while the other cups the back of his neck. Kylo whimpers, angling his head to better offer himself to her.

The decadent pressure eventually splits open into a delicious slide. His tongue draws a tentative path along her lower lip, begging for entrance, and hers wraps around it in response. 

She makes an involuntary little mewl when he pushes into her mouth, when he flicks against the back of her teeth and sucks on her tongue when she tries to explore him. The hand at his neck flies up to clutch at his hair, pulling him closer as she curiously traces the shape of one deadly canine. He groans and crushes closer. 

It feels like they spend hours like that. Days. It feels so good and whole and complete that it robs her of all thought, all reservation. Is this their connection? Their bond? 

Was he made for this? For her? 

They slide sideways down the back of the couch, until Rey is flat on her back underneath him. His palm cradles the back of her head, and his body slots between her parted thighs. He kisses her and kisses her and kisses her, mouth a sin against hers, hands touching everywhere they can above her clothes. The dip of her waist, the flare of her hip, the meat of her thigh. Her strong shoulders, her bony ribs, her delicate throat. 

Rey gasps at the first touch of his teeth, a gentle nip at her lower lip when they part. It makes fire surge through her veins. His tongue delves deep, flicking against hers in a way that has her squirming against him. Her knees clamp down around his waist without meaning to, pinning him in place as she sucks on his tongue and makes him moan. 

She’s panting into his mouth, and it takes her a moment to realize it’s because she’s grinding up against the hard planes of his stomach. Kylo isn’t moving, but he isn’t doing anything to discourage the motion either, just crushing her closer to kiss her harder. 

Rey’s back arches as she comes against the solid pressure of his body. It’s a shivering little orgasm, a jolt more than anything, but he must feel it in the tremor of her legs, the stutter in her breath. 

When she breaks away to try and draw oxygen back to her brain, Kylo rises just enough for her eyes to focus on him again. His hair is a mess around them from her questing fingers. He’s panting, too, mouth open against hers and looking half wrecked as he fists his hands next to her head. 

“ Baby. ” He says raggedly, body still motionless even as it vibrates with barely restrained lust. “Did you just come?” 

She’s too dazed to be obstinate. Too shocked to lie. She weakly nods her head. 

She can feel the shudder that wracks through him. The need. The desire. He shifts up until she can feel it, hard and hot and huge between her legs, right against where she is still messy and slick for him. 

“You’re everything I’ve ever wanted. Even the things I didn’t know how to want until I met you.” His lips are kiss swollen, somehow even more full and pink than they usually are. “You drive me insane, every second of every day. All I ever want is to be inside you. To be as close as I can possibly be to you. To give you everything. Will you let me, Rey? Can I fuck you?”

Her mind is spinning. She tries to school her features, steady her breath. Tamp down the lust boiling over in her body. Her hands tighten in his hair, feeling how silky soft it is, and she watches his face slacken with pleasure. 

This doesn’t mean I forgive you. This doesn’t mean you get to be my husband. 

It takes real effort to untangle herself from him. Not because Kylo makes it difficult, but because her mind and her body are so at odds with what they want. He sprawls back against the couch when she stands on shaking legs, watching her with a soft expression she can’t even begin to make sense of. He is hard as iron in his pants, the massive shape of him unmistakable through the loose material. Even if Rey wanted to take him inside her, she’s certain now that Kylo would never fit. 

“You said a kiss.” She croaks, averting her eyes and sweeping into the kitchen to look for a snack. To avoid him and all of his bottomless wanting. “ Just a kiss. That’s all you get.” 

She hears him hum, a sound that isn’t nearly as put out as she would expect it to be. 

When they get into bed that night, he holds her just as close as he always does. But this time, he lets his lips fall upon hers after her head settles against the pillow. Little more than a peck, but the affection he laces into it keeps her cheeks warm until she falls asleep.

Chapter Text

They’re calling it the worst storm in decades. 

When she wakes the first morning of it, already prepared to get the text telling her not to come into work, everything beyond her windows is white. Like the whole world has been erased. In its place are only the smudged outlines that have been pressed too hard into the paper, already halfway gone. 

“Nasty,” Kylo comments offhandedly, line of sight following hers past the curtains. Her brain is still fuzzy from sleep, realizing that in the night she’s rolled over to bury her face against his chest. One leg is hooked high on his hip, his wide palm cupping the swell of her ass while his other holds her to him by the back of her neck. Greedy. Possessive. His touches have become increasingly bolder, especially in the wake of their first kiss. When she woke up yesterday, it had been to his face pillowed on her tits, the underside of one breast framed by a heavy hand. 

Rey peels herself off of him, wincing and wiping away the drool that had stuck her cheek to his skin. His chest bounces in a fond chuckle, not seeming to mind, and he trails after her when she ventures out to fix a bowl of cereal in the frigid early light of her kitchen. 

“Won’t you give me my good morning kiss, little dove?” He pouts, chin on her shoulder as she procures herself a bowl. 

She sighs. Rey has indulged him a few times in recent days, but only with pecks on the cheek. Except for last time, when he had turned his head to catch her mouth with his. She had ended up pressed against the fridge, panting and weak kneed, scrabbling at his broad naked back until pink lines crisscrossed the whole length of it. She hadn’t been able to look at him without noticing them for the rest of the day. 

One sharp nail is suddenly ghosting along the column of her spine. From her neck down to her tailbone. She arches without meaning to, breath catching as his fingers slide around to press at her hip. He is suddenly a wall of warmth at her back, warding off the chill of the apartment once again. 

“Don’t you like kissing me?” He croons. “Keeping me fed on your benevolent affection? I do nothing but adore you. Worship you. I would do the same in bed, little dove, if only you’d let me.” 

“Kylo -” she grinds out, voice catching when she feels his hot open mouth drop onto the slope of her shoulder. 

“Haven’t I given you everything you’ve ever wanted?” He continues with his teasing edge. 

She would like her heat to work. But she also remembers what he said before, about his methods not always being in line with hers. She’s warm. She’s fed. She hasn’t hurt for money since Kylo started doting on her, and for all the ways he pushes her buttons, she hasn’t felt loneliness since she brought him home with her that very first night. The only thing left, stuffed into the deepest corner of her heart, is…

“Let me kiss you,” he begs, “let me taste that pretty pink mouth again, little dove. Let me make you feel good. It’s all I want.”

A sharp huff of breath escapes through her nose. The kitchen should be freezing, but it’s not. Her fingers should be icy where they peek out from her sleeves, but they’re not. 

He should be the worst thing that’s ever happened to her. But he isn’t. 

Kylo starts to say something else, but then Rey is gripping him by the nape of the neck and dragging his parted lips to hers. She can feel it when his breath catches in his throat, the soft tremulous way it fans across her cheek when he sighs his bliss. He moans when she tests the give of his full lower lip with her teeth. 

“Why do you call me that?” She mumbles against his mouth, bearing the absentminded way he continues to kiss at her. Top lip and then bottom, messy and unrefined. Drugged, almost. “Little dove?” 

His claws scrape across her neck light enough to pull the skin into gooseflesh. It feels like her heart beats a manic thread right against the tip of his ring finger. As if one press from him could halt it entirely. “Because you’re so lovely,” he whispers, ducking his head to suck that fluttering pulse into his mouth. To bruise it between his teeth. “And gentle. And strong. And so small.”

It makes her squirm against him, the heat blooming across her cheeks seeming to drip down into her core as well. The sharpness of his canines wrenches a grunt from her that leaves no room for misinterpretation. She’s already slippery for him, flushed and wanton and shaking. She doesn’t even fight it when he lifts her up onto the counter in one fluid motion, dragging her to the edge so that her thighs splay open around his hips. 

His hands are everywhere when he takes her lips again, tangling into her hair, wrapping around her throat, clutching at her waist. At one point she feels fingers pressing flat to her inner thighs, spreading her obscenely wide before switching direction to urge them around his body. Like he can’t decide which way he wants her first. 

“Let me make you come,” he pants, sounding like he’s on the verge of losing his mind. She can feel him, hot and hard and insistent against her empty cunt. She moans into his hungry mouth.  “My tongue. My fingers. Anything . Please.” 

He sounds like he might die if Rey says no. Like Kylo is clinging to the possibility of her surrender like it’s a liferaft. She leans forward to kiss him again, pressing him close with her calves behind his thighs until he’s whining and rutting against her. 

And Rey… can’t really remember why she’s still resisting him. 

“Okay.” She breathes. 

Kylo closes that last little bit of distance and crushes their lips together. The hand clutching at her hip fumbles between her thighs in his urgency, her sweatpants the only thing standing in his way now. She’s nervous about the claws, tensing when heavy pressure prods at the seam in her clothing, but even when he twists his wrist in a way that should have her feeling the cut of them, all she can feel is their absence. Like magic, his wicked fingers could belong to any man. 

Even though she doesn’t want them to belong to anyone else. Just him. 

Kylo rips the drawstring of her sweats in his haste, sinking his fingertips down her belly and into her panties like a hot knife through butter. When he first touches the molten wet center of her, he groans like it might send him over the edge. Like finally feeling the evidence of her desire will pull him apart entirely.

“Fuuuck.” Kylo’s middle and ring fingers circle at her clit in a dazed loop, forcing her breath to quicken and her thighs to shake from where they’ve fallen open for him. The boiling of her blood is reaching a roll. “Is this all for me, baby?” 

He doesn’t leave her any room to answer. He’s already pushing his middle finger inside of her, making her gasp at the stretch. Kylo’s fingers are thick, far more so than her own - and Rey is no virgin, but he’s a big man. Even just one filling her to the last knuckle leaves her gasping, fluttering around it in an attempt to adjust. 

“You’re so tight. ” Kylo grits out, like he can’t believe what he’s feeling within her body. This is when she remembers that he’s never been with a human before. Rey doesn’t know how different her anatomy is compared to a female of his kind, but if the vague shape of what’s between his legs is anything to go on, it’s safe to say they’re built a bit differently. She is small and frail when put next to him, no matter the gumption of her spirit. Soft and human and probably much more breakable than any being he’s ever slept with before. 

He gives her another digit, forcing her spine into an arch as her body squeezes against the added intrusion. Kylo curses like it’s his cock inside of her and not just his fingers, working her in a gentle but unrelenting rhythm as the grip he has in her hair tightens enough to draw her head back. She gasps as he arches her neck, shivering at the fire in his brown eyes as he watches her be taken apart by his touch. 

Rey’s fingers are white against the edge of the shitty formica counter, shaking with the strain of containing her desperation. Kylo rucks her baggy sleep shirt up to her collarbone, irises darkening as he watches her little tits heave in time with his ministrations. 

His touch pushes deep, curling up towards her belly button in a motion that drags a ragged keen out of her throat. It feels… strange. Like a come hither. No one has ever touched her like that before, and she can’t quite tell how she feels about it. Rey squirms, her knee briefly meeting his hip, and then he is brushing against something that makes muscles she didn’t even know she had clench . 

“Nh, right there,” he murmurs in a far off sort of way, rubbing that spot with relentless circles of his fingertips as she writhes atop the counter. One of Rey’s hands shoots out to clutch at his waist, dragging him closer as something ruinous and boiling hot builds at every point of contact between the two of them. “Fuck… yes, say my name again.” 

Rey blinks hard. She hadn’t even realized she’d done it to begin with. 

“K-Kylo,” she moans, thighs shaking in the face of his undivided attention, the walls of her pussy squeezing tight and needy around him. His breath is hot at her neck, little sounds escaping his slack lips like he’s the one being pleasured as he fucks her with his fingers. Rey is so wet that she can hear it in the slick sounds of Kylo’s ministrations. She doesn’t know whether to be more aroused or embarrassed. 

Desperation tightens low in her core. She’s panting so hard that dizziness is beginning to creep in. Everything is spinning except for Kylo and his big brown eyes and the lips tracing the shape of her name. The fingers heralding her ruin, utter and complete when it comes for her. 

“I… I think…” 

Kylo halts the back and forth he was giving her, stilling to press up against that spot in slight pulses instead. It makes her want to scream for a couple of very different conflicting reasons. 

“Can I give you my mouth?” He asks her lips in a rush, pressing sloppy kisses at them as she spasms around where he’s buried inside of her. His thumb pets a heavy half arc across her clit. “While I fuck you with my fingers? Can I eat you up, baby? Please?” 

Rey can’t refuse a request as sweet as that. She nods once, body jerking against his as he drags her sweatpants onto the linoleum. The article of clothing is followed closely by his knees. Her underwear is rent in two, but before she can gather her thoughts enough to decide whether or not to be angry about that, his lips are pillowing around her clit, soft like silk or velvet or any of the other thousand ways she’s tried to describe his mouth in her own head. 

She chokes out a gasp for him - of his name and her shock and the rapturous sensation blooming under his tongue. 

Sinful would probably be the right word to give this, but it’s either too on the nose or too far off entirely. Rey can’t explain it, but this doesn’t feel like something shame can touch. It feels sacred in the way an act so base never usually can be. 

Kylo’s tongue drags a hot path up her center seam, right above the fingers he still has stuffing her full. Rey’s fingers twist into his dark curls, guiding him to where it feels best as he starts working her in earnest from the inside again. Her thighs have to splay out extra wide around his horns, the tight coil of them unyielding against her skin as he moves his head. She already feels as if she’s unraveling, heartbeat thundering in her ears loud enough to drown out every other sound besides the soft moans he presses between her legs. He devours her, spreading her like a feast before him with one hand on her knee as he takes. Kylo’s lips close around her clit to suck, the tip of his tongue laving it in circles. Rey drags him closer by a rough grip around the base of one of his horns, and the shape of his hoarse cry against her flesh has her shaking apart. She rides against it, rolling her hips against his wicked mouth, pressing that sound against her as close as she can as she comes all over his perfect angelic face. 

She’s left gasping afterwards, nerves shot and legs weak as her fingers spasm at the curved and textured bone protruding from his skull. Obsidian. Beautiful. 

The fingers that aren’t working inside of her to draw out her orgasm clamp hard around her hip. Her inner muscles are squeezing almost painfully tight, fluttering around him so hard he can barely withdraw. 

“Fuck,” he pants, pulling back just far enough to watch his fingers disappearing into her. His mouth is shiny and wet, one delicate strand of saliva still connecting him to her throbbing core. “Fuck, baby, you’re so… you’re…” 

Kylo nearly tackles her back onto the counter, slick lips locking with hers again as his arms crush her to him. He tastes like her, Rey realizes deliriously, sucking on his tongue when it sweeps into her mouth. Kylo growls, jerking her forward with both hands at her back to press his cock against her molten center. The only thing between them is the thin material of his pants, wet now with the spread slick of her release. 

“Please,” he begs, choking out a moan when her nails scrape against the skin at the base of his horns. His hips work in small desperate pushes, splitting her around the shape of him. She feels a ridge she doesn’t expect, right above the head when it catches at her clit. Rey accidentally bites him, shivering all over when she realizes that he likely doesn’t have the same anatomy a human does. It would explain why he’s so big here. Kylo grunts into her mouth, and Rey tightens her legs around his hips to press him closer. “Please let me fuck you, little dove.” Her mouth drifts down his neck, teeth sinking into the chorded muscle at the junction of his shoulder. She grinds down against his erection, trying to feel more of what makes him different. He pants faster. “I’ll fill you so full you’ll never feel empty again. Please. Let me have you. Let me love you -” 

Rey opens her mouth against his skin. Yes, yes, Kylo, yes…  

There is a thunderous noise somewhere in the building, before sensible words can make their way past her lips. She jolts, lifting her head from the crook of his neck to look towards the door. Kylo whimpers and tries to guide her back, and she’s just about to drop her lips back to his pulse again there is another sound, similar to the first, and then -

All of the lights in the apartment die. At Kylo’s back, the fridge ceases humming. 

A power outage. During the worst storm in recent history. 

“FUCK.” She yells. 

---

Kylo sighs, cheek dropped onto one fist as he watches her dig into the mess at the bottom of her closet. It’ll be dark soon, the sky already so angry and overcast it looks like dusk. Rey has to have provisions somewhere. A flashlight, some candles, AAs, matches, anything. She has to conserve the battery on her phone. She’s already draining enough of it as it is lighting her way along her search. 

Unkar had been less than unhelpful, directing her and the other tenants of the building to look up whichever elementary school gymnasiums were setting up cots for the storm. Her landlord hadn’t even acknowledged Rey’s note, or the new gouge in his door. He’d just sneered at her outraged expression and told her that the electricians would be there whenever they got there . 

Now, at her back, Kylo radiates disapproval, but she’s not quite ready to face him yet. Her limbs shake and curl inward with the loss of his warmth, the absence of his magic. He may be able to stock the pantry and negate the temperatures, but that doesn’t mean they don’t need things like light and a way to communicate with the outside world. So she grits her chattering teeth and keeps digging, huffing a triumphant breath (that she is able to see) when she unearths a scented candle Maz gave her last Christmas, only half used. 

“Surely you recall what I said about you working.” Kylo drawls, as if it relates to a single thing happening right now. “Specifically, that you don’t need to.” 

“And?” She bites. 

“ And , that also extends to other matters as well.” She hears him huff, as if Rey is continuously jamming a square peg into a round hole. “This place is a death trap, Rey. We don’t have to live here. I can procure something far more suitable, if you’d let me just -” 

“Can you light this?” She bites, holding the jar out to him without turning her head. Pretending to shuffle through smaller debris scattered at her knees. “I can’t find a lighter. I think there might be some matches in here, but my phone is only at fifteen percent and…” 

The room is suddenly wrapped in a soft flickering glow. The heavy candle sags in her grip as Rey begrudgingly turns to inspect Kylo’s handiwork. Tiny orbs of flame drift and sway throughout the room like macro embers, dancing above their heads and falling at a speed that never stops. Motion arrested and perpetual all at once. Her brain struggles to make sense of the magic, but she knows it’s no use. She extends questing fingers to touch one and finds it to have no burn. No sensation at all. But when she touches the wick of her candle to it, the flame transfers and spits to life in her mortal plane of existence. 

It’s fascinating. Rey might be able to study Kylo and his magic for years, decades even, if he wasn’t so insufferable. 

“Why won’t you leave this place?” Kylo implores. She isn’t looking at him, but she can already picture the way orange light plays at the edges of his hair, dark and riotous. “Why won’t you stop working? Why won’t you let me give you the life you deserve?” 

Rey rolls her jaw, gazing down into her little pinprick flame. It isn’t much compared to all the other points of light in the room, but it’s hers. And it smells like coconut. 

“I worked hard for this place. And for that job. You don’t understand.” 

“You’re right,” he admits readily, tone fiery and ready for an argument, “I don’t. Make me.” 

“I didn’t have anyone growing up.” She informs him, chest wound tight. “I don’t know if you’re familiar with the concept of foster care , but it’s all I ever knew until I aged out of it. I had to sleep in a women’s shelter my last three months of high school. And after that it was couch surfing and hostel bunk beds until I could get a job that would pay me enough to afford rent anywhere.” 

Rey still can’t look at him, but she thinks she can sense an unfurling of his temper. A slight easing of his shoulders. “This is the first place that’s ever been mine . This is the only home I’ve ever had. And maybe it isn’t much to you, but it sure as hell is to me.”

The frame of her window groans against the battering wind. She almost thinks she can feel it from where she sits in a half-crouch across the room, like the old bones of this place are hers. Every splintered wood beam a rung in her ribcage, protecting her weary battered heart. 

“Home isn’t a place , Rey.” Kylo tells her, so softly that she almost can’t hear him over the storm. “I think you already know that.” 

When she finally looks up at him, she can see red and orange and gold dancing in his dark irises. Set ablaze by his magic all around them, even as her breath crystalizes in front of her. He isn’t watching her like she thought he might be. There is no pity in his eyes, no exasperation or derision or dismissal. She can only find something achingly tender.

Have they become that for each other? Has she found a home in him in the course of all these weeks? A real one, and not just the forced proximity the bond ties them together with? 

“That’s exactly what someone who’s never had to worry about where they would sleep that night would say.” She snaps, waving her hand towards him like she’s casting a spell. “You don’t even need to sleep.” 

Something between a snort and a sigh punches from his chest. An ember near the side of his face whirls off to the side with it. 

“Where would we even go, huh? Places don’t rent for free. Are you gonna get a job? Tie your hair back and wash dishes at Maz’s with me? As if.” 

“You’re limiting yourself again. I don’t need to be employed to give you a home. A safe place to sleep. You know that by now.” Rey is glaring at him hard enough to set fire to any regular man. But Kylo is no regular man. “You are allowed to want more, Rey. And I know that you do. I can feel it like a coal in your chest. Lodged in your heart. There’s one more thing, isn’t there?” 

Rey might choke on the fear that bubbles up at that. Does he know? Can he see it? The battered hope she’s locked away tighter than all the rest, stuffed down so deep it only surfaces during the coldest darkest nights? 

“Tell me what you want.” He presses. 

“It isn’t that easy.”

“Try me.” 

“I…” The flame in her hands wobbles, either along the gust of her breath or within the swimming of her eyes. Just one more closed door. One final outpour of hope before he tells her it can’t be done. Then she’ll lay it to rest for good. It’s what she should have done in the first place. It’s what she would have, if she weren’t so weak. “I want a family.” Rey admits with a shuddering sigh. She feels tears gathering under her chin. “One that loves me. One that wouldn’t leave me in a gas station bathroom and never look back. One that wants to know me, and misses me when I’m gone. One that would give a shit that I’m sitting in a half-condemned apartment about to freeze to death.” 

Kylo crooks his fingers, dragging Rey’s body to him from halfway across the room. She doesn’t fight it. When she sits right before him, their knees smashed awkwardly against each other, he cups her face in his big hands, claws skimming under her jaw and into her hair. The warmth his magic imparts is immediate and blissful. He urges her head up to look at him. 

“ I love you.” He tells her fiercely, brown eyes hard and suspiciously shiny. He rolls his jaw, and for the first time, Rey feels like she can peer into the depths of his sincerity. As if all he wants in the world is for her to believe him. “ I wouldn’t ever leave you behind, not in a gas station or anywhere else. I want to know you. It’s all I want. And I miss you every second that you’re not beside me. I give a shit that you’re living in this awful building, in these deplorable conditions, and I would do anything to give you a better life, Rey.” He drops his forehead onto hers, and she can feel how his fingers wind deeper into her hair to pull her in close. “I know that I’m not the one you wanted for this. You imagined your blood finding their way back to you. Birthing your own to join their ranks. But I’m right here, little dove. I’ll never leave you. Not ever. And I’ll love you enough for twenty people. A hundred. That can be enough… can’t it?” 

A stray tear falls to the flame on the candle, still held between them in the cradle of her hands. It hisses and flickers, but it does not go out.

“Let me give you a family.” He begs her, lips brushing the corner of her mouth. “Even if it’s just the two of us. Let me try.” 

---

It’s difficult for him to slip inside of her at first. 

Rey thinks they’ll just have to accept that his body is too big for hers. That her initial assumptions about him were correct. She is too small and unyielding under him, spread obscenely wide by the grip on her thighs as the tip of his cock prods her wet heat. Her little opening won’t even accept this much. 

For some insane reason, Rey feels tears gathering at the corners of her eyes. Kylo coos a sweet nothing, brows drawn tight in concentration. He dips a thumb between their bodies, pressing at his head in little back and forth motions to try and coax himself past that initial resistance. 

Just as she’s about to open her mouth and tell him it’s no use, the overwhelming pressure of him eases and gives. Kylo heaves a sigh, the hand at her thigh trembling as his head finally squeezes past that first quivering ring of muscle. Rey has the ridiculous feeling that she’s losing her virginity all over again. 

She hasn’t really gotten a good look at what Kylo is working with - he’s been too close to her, too eager with his mouth and his hands, too excited to have her pinned underneath him, too desperate to stuff her full of him - but the sheer girth of what he attempts to push into her threatens to pull her body apart entirely. Rey gasps, panting against the intrusion as her hand grips the top of his thigh for dear life. 

Kylo’s adam's apple bobs, eyes still riveted to where her body struggles to accept him. His thumb is still petting those little circles against where they connect, grazing just close enough to her clit to keep her blood roaring in her ears. The stretch burns , but Rey is so wet it feels like an inferno blazes in her chest. 

He gives her an inch with a deliberate nudge of his hips. Her open thighs spasm against his hold, quivering when that thumb keeps its steady circling. Rey watches the line of his brows slacken with pleasure at her surrender. He rewards her with another inch, which prompts a strangled whine to tumble past her lips. 

“You can take it,” he soothes, bearing the nails Rey has dug into his thigh as he holds steady for her. “I’ve got you.”

She thinks she can feel that ridge from before, except this time it’s from inside of her rather than through the material of his pants. It reminds her that he isn’t human, that this is not the dick of a mortal man, that she is not built to accept him inside like this - 

“You feel so good.” He groans softly, eyes closed now as his fingers twitch at the back of her thigh. His shoulders are shifting with how deep his breaths are. When he gives her a little more, she keens and strains to further widen her legs. 

Beyond her window, the whole world is black and white. Shadowed dusk over blinding snow. It’s supposed to be freezing. Inhospitable. Everyone else in the building was evacuated hours ago. But all she feels is so very hot. Like she’s never been left cold or wanting in all her life. 

Kylo meets a resistance inside of her on his next surge forward. Rey grunts and squeezes her knees shut on reflex, trapping him in place as his big brown eyes fly up to her face. He halts his steady progress without her having to ask. 

“I-I’m sorry.” Rey pants, head dropping back. She feels like she’s run a mile.

“Why are you apologizing?” He murmurs, voice deep and soft and dreamy. He doesn’t sound nearly as frustrated as she feels. 

“B… Because… I can’t take all of it.” 

An embarrassing sort of gurgle catches at the back of her throat when he leans forward just enough to test the give of her body. Both of her arms are pinned straight at her sides, fingers clinging to his thighs for dear life as he fills every empty part of her she can’t stand to hold onto anymore. 

“Oh, little dove,” he croons against her ear, slipping in a little further and wrenching a gasp from her lungs. “Don’t worry about that.” His words are assured, but his voice is wrecked. The grip of the hand still holding her open is almost painful now. He slowly withdraws all he’s given her so far, and before she can embarrass herself and beg for all of it back, he pushes into her to settle even deeper, forcing out a reedy moan. “I’ll make it fit.” 

He leans a bit more of his weight against the back of her thigh, urging the other one into a further outward splay with his elbow. It alleviates some of the strain, opening her up just enough to accept a few more inches. 

She whimpers, feeling tiny under the hulking visage of him as he works to join them together. His thumb is still swirling just under where she needs it, quick enough to drive her mad but not bring her to any edge. Rey squirms, and Kylo takes the opportunity to stuff himself deeper. 

“Maybe I should make you come, yeah?” He murmurs when she sobs his name. The gold through the shell of his pointed ear glints off the flame lighting the room. She would almost call the ambiance romantic if they weren’t in the middle of a deadly blackout. “Maybe you should come around my cock before you’re even able to take all of it. Doesn’t that sound nice?” 

His hips are grinding a bit, a slight back and forth as he works to press deep. Rey nods stupidly, desperate for the pleasure his thumb has only been hinting at, aching for the touch he has been teasing her with. He circles higher, her clit tucked just to the right of his thumb as he increases his pressure. Rey shudders hard. Something in her body gives as heat pools low in her core, her cunt swallowing up more of him on his next push. He grins wolfishly.

“I think that’s what we’ll do, huh? Make you even more slippery for me? Make your muscles pull me right in?” 

His hips have begun to rock in earnest, less of a singular push now and more of a gentle back and forth. Every time he pulls out she wants to claw him back to her. Every time he piles in she chokes on the syllables of his name. 

The stretch burns. It hurts. He is way too much for her to handle. All of her synapses must be misfiring, because all her brain can scream is how fucking good it is. 

His thumb finally - finally - slides over her clit. She can feel her heart beating under his touch, pounding and needy and so very wanton. The pleasure and the pain between her legs is mixing together to form something different entirely. She feels like a taut band poised to snap, stretched to the breaking point by his body. Kylo pushes in a little harder, and the hurt warps into sharp ecstasy. She gasps and bucks under him, not knowing how to process it, not being able to decide between leaning into the feeling or shying away from it entirely. 

“I… I…” Rey pants, eyes wide where they’re fixed on the ceiling over Kylo’s shoulder. Her muscles are fluttering, straining to be able to accept the intrusion of him and come around it at the same time. Every one of his withdraws seems to cost him more and more effort. 

She can see him searching her expression from the corner of her eye. “Does it feel good, baby?” 

Yes. 

No. 

It hurts. 

It doesn’t. 

Kylo’s thumb is a heavy pressure against her now, almost grinding into her clit as stars begin to form in her eyes. 

“I… I think I’m… coming -” she chokes out, barely audible. 

“That’s it, little dove,” he croons, eyes intent on hers as she locks their gazes together. “Go on. Go ahead.” 

Rey’s body spasms like it can’t quite figure out how. There’s hardly any give left for her muscles to contract. She’s spread too wide. 

He pushes in again, that twinge of pleasure-pain wrenching a moan out of her. Rey’s back arches as her legs struggle against his hold. She needs , she needs… “Please,” she gasps, “please, could you - push - deeper -” 

Kylo obeys, pinning her underneath him as he pushes past that resistance to stuff in another inch. 

The pain lights her up. The pleasure wraps around it. She comes hard around the length of his cock she’s taken so far, shaking around him, crying out and clawing at his arms. “Kylo - Kylo - Kylo -” 

“Oh, baby,” he growls, leaning over her to curl his fingers into her hair. He’s sliding in deeper and deeper as her body flutters around him, finally shoving forward on the last little bit. A deep and profoundly masculine grunt rings in her ears as he finally seats himself fully inside. “Fuck. Was that all for me?” 

Rey is too dazed to nod properly. He’s so deep she can almost feel him in her throat . Her lungs and her heart feel like they have to war him for space, her pulse thready and her breath shallow as he holds. Endless minutes pass like that, with him crooning praise against the shell of her ear, forehead dropped to hers as he makes a home for himself within her mortal flesh. 

Well. Not so mortal. Supposedly. But it’s still a struggle. 

“That’s my girl.” He sighs, nudging the barest bit back and forth as he tries to get her used to the absurd size of his cock. Rey feels taut enough to snap. On edge enough to fall. “So strong. So fucking tight .” 

Rey throws her arms around his neck to haul him down to her. He goes willingly, big body blanketing hers as she locks their lips together in a needy kiss. Her hands tangle into his hair, legs extricating themselves from his grip to wrap around his waist. Kylo moans, shifting on his knees to get the leverage he needs so he can start fucking her properly. 

He isn’t rough like she thought he might be. Kylo rocks into her gently - so gently - only ever pulling about a quarter of the way out before pressing back in, watching her face carefully as he works her open with unending adoration. 

She’s always been too embarrassed to meet eyes with any of the men she’s slept with before, but Kylo’s brown irises are hypnotizing. He’s so close she almost can’t focus on them, but when his thumb crests the apple of her cheek, when his eyelashes flutter on a particularly tight push, Rey whimpers out his name with all of the longing she can’t put into words. A tear streaks down her temple. 

His breath is hot at her ear as he tells her how much he loves her. How much he’s adored her since the very first moment he saw her. How much he never ever wants to be parted from her. How much he wants this life with her, and how much he wants to give her the family she never had. 

“Maybe…” he gasps, huffing when she tugs at his hair on his next measured stroke, “maybe it won’t always be just the two of us?” 

Rey cries out at his next push in, firmer than the rest, but just as slow. There’s a ridge rubbing against her g spot that isn’t supposed to be there. Her eyes are starting to cross, even though it feels as if he’s barely moving. 

“Would you like that?” Kylo murmurs, sitting up just enough to gauge her expression. Rey’s knees fall apart around his hips at a particularly lovely slide in. She struggles to focus on what he’s saying. “Do you want me to give you children?” 

Her nails sink into the skin of his shoulder and he hisses, rhythm stuttering as he grinds a harsh forward motion. Rey grunts when it knocks against her clit, fingers fumbling up for his horns in a clumsy attempt to pull him close again. 

All Rey’s ever wanted has been a big family. She’s dreamed about it since she could remember, a huge house filled with people, holiday parties bursting at the seams, celebration dinners with too few chairs for everyone to sit. Late at night, sometime after the fantasy of being discovered by her parents began to fade, she began wondering what it might be like to create her own.

Kylo groans when her fist yanks him down by the spiral of his horn. “You want me to plant them nice and deep in your belly?” He grits out, shaking above her as he fights to maintain his pace. She’s squirming now, begging him to give it to her, on the verge of shaking apart as he gives voice to her most repressed desires. A family. Warm and happy and loved. Someone who will give it to her. Her fingernails scrabble at the base of his horns, and he snarls, fucking into her harder. 

“Kylo, please,” she gasps, able to think of nothing else but his eyes and his adoration and his endless devotion. How quickly she ended up falling in love with him, no matter how hard she tried to fight it. “Please.” 

“You would look so beautiful. Full of my children.” He groans, crushing her closer and giving it to her with unsteady pulses of his hips. She doesn’t know that it’s possible for her to get any tighter around him stretched wide as she is, but her body seems determined to try. She’s shaking, all of her muscles winding up as devastation laps at her frayed nerves. “It isn’t something I ever knew I wanted,” he admits softly, one hand cradling the back of her neck as he breathes into her ear. “But ever since I plucked the desire from your heart, it’s all I’ve wanted. Let me give you a baby. Please. Let me give you one right now, little dove.” 

Rey claims his lips even as his own drop open in a wanton moan. She wishes he would fuck her faster. She’s shaking so hard he’s having to keep her legs steady, cunt trying to suck him in deeper as he languidly surges in. His cock lays claim to every inch of her insides, every curve and unfamiliar ridge of him hugged by her walls as he makes her take it at his own pace. 

“Tell me you want it.” He implores, eyes wild with pleasure and exhilaration and desire as he watches her body shift under his. “Tell me you want me to give you a family. Tell me that your biggest wish is for me to fill you full of my come, little dove. Tell me.” 

The fever pitch is drawing nearer and nearer. Her hands are shaking in his hair now, the knees pinned to his waist spasming and slipping out of place with sweat. 

“Yes, Kylo,” she sobs, pulling him closer and closer as her body riots. “I-I want you to come inside me. I want you to give me a family. Give me a baby. Put it right here.” Rey presses her palm to her belly, able to feel the bulge of him through her skin. 

Kylo snarls and shoves his hips into her on a rough upward motion. It sends her up the bed, almost out from under him entirely if it weren’t for his iron grip. Rey screams when he does it again. And again. And again - 

She comes in a rush of ecstasy, mouth agape in a soundless cry of his name as she clamps down around him and gushes . Rey can hear Kylo’s own groans of pleasure at her end, but she can’t stop her eyes from rolling back into her skull. Every part of her is pulled taut, back like a bow string, legs shaking, fists pulling desperately at his horns. Every bit of her quakes. 

He’s growling like a monster. Fucking her like one, too, unable to maintain his careful ministrations in the face of her release. Steam is curling from his nostrils, and she swears his pupils start to pull into slits. He’s bearing his teeth, sharp and wicked and gleaming in the low light. She can feel his claws drawing blood along the round of her hip. “Take it.” He rushes out, hips hammering into hers hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to send her spiraling towards another peak. “Take it all. Take me inside. Keep me.” 

Kylo looses a ragged shout, shoving himself so deep she thinks he might break her. A savage grind heralds his orgasm, and the teeth sinking into her neck keep her still enough to accept it. He pulses in her cunt, and then Rey cries out as she feels him filling her. It’s molten and sinful, the heat is so profound that it drags her into another wave of her pleasure. Her muscles work around him, desperate to take it all, to keep every drop of him inside, to never let him go. Kylo comes for what could be entire minutes, huge body trembling over hers, gasping as he pumps her full, until she’s leaking his seed even as he gives her more. He’s whispering feverish sentiments that she can’t understand, breath hot at her neck as he works through the last tremors of his bliss, as she writhes with the last pulses of hers. 

She holds him close and presses her open mouth to his jaw. All she can think about is this big man, and how he belongs to her now. That the belonging she’s always sought is not behind her. It’s right here in her arms.  

---

Even when it feels hopeless, all winter frost must eventually thaw. 

In the spring, the alley behind Maz’s blooms with weeds springing up through cracks in the concrete. Garbage smell, too, is no longer kept at bay by the cold air, and as a result, Kylo is no longer the only animal she sees tucked behind the dumpster. Bugs are starting to come back, and with them so is late afternoon daylight and fiery golden sunsets. 

Still, just as she did in the bitter cold, Rey takes her meal break outside in the cool breeze of April.

She’s eating chicken today, just a leg of it, when Kylo ambles up to her and takes up his seat at her side. Finn has been setting aside more and more food for her, ‘mistakenly’ dropping and salvaging from the kitchen’s surplus of ingredients, not knowing that her days of empty shelves and bellies are over. Rey pops open the takeout container Finn had given her, pulling out a strip of bacon that she holds flat in her hand for the little black cat next to her. His whiskers tickle at her wrist as he eats it. 

Thank you, little dove. 

Rey smiles, warming in the fading sunset, watching the top of the buildings catch fire with the last rays of day. She can see their new apartment from here - their specific bedroom window, even - way up on the tenth floor three blocks over. It’s a nice place without being too nice. The heat always works, but the radiator in the living room can be loud at night. The landlord is kind but enigmatic, a squat old man named Yoda that lives on the ground floor and speaks in an odd cadence. Their bed is bigger now, but Rey thinks any bed she shares with Kylo’s giant frame will always feel small. 

Rey scratches behind Kylo’s ears, letting her mind drift along the tides of the future as the sun sinks lower in the sky. Kylo is purring, she notices with a grin. She keeps forgetting to ask him if doing so is a conscious decision. 

When Finn next calls after her, a rowdy 21st birthday party crowding her bar this time, Rey takes two more big bites of her chicken leg and lays the rest in the takeout container. 

When are you going to quit your job? I don’t like you spending so much time on your feet. 

Rey leans down and smacks obnoxious kisses all over Kylo’s little face, pretending not to notice how thoroughly he basks in her attention, annoying as it’s supposed to be. 

Ah ah ah. What do I always say? He prompts as she shifts to stand. Their ritual for whenever she returns to work.

“To stab a bitch if I have to.” She recites.

Or? 

Rey rolls her eyes. “If I want to.” 

That’s my girl.  

She huffs goodnaturedly and drops one more kiss onto the top of his head. “Be good. I love you.” 

I love you too, little dove. 

Kylo watches Rey heave herself up onto her feet, the stairs creaking under her heavy boots. She disappears through the kitchen door, her chestnut hair shiny and golden in the late afternoon brilliance. Right next to him, not a foot from Kylo’s paws, sits the plastic container holding the remnants of Rey’s dinner. Half of a biscuit, an additional piece of bacon, and the remnants of her chicken, spiced and warm.