clairza

This is in response to the @reyloprompts prompt: Kylo wakes in the middle of the night to hear Rey singing to herself in the Force Bond. 

This … is close? 

He was four when he told her he was too old to be sung to. She never did again.

* * * 

Kylo wakes up exactly two minutes before the wake-up call with the end of a dream drifting away like vapour. 

He knows better than to grasp at it. It’s been happening more and more, dreams that don’t leave him wracked with phantom pain or burning with rage but instead with a prickling yearning for something, and he thinks that might be worse. 

He hits his alarm off with more force than needed, and heads to the ‘fresher with a stinging palm and the start of a headache throbbing at his temples. 

An hour later, after he’s showered and eaten and read the morning update on the fleet status, he still can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong or missing or out of place, and there’s a snatch of something at his periphery, a three or four note melody that keeps looping endlessly in his head. It chases him through the day, through meetings and in hallways and in a routine check of his shuttle; just a few notes humming in and out, just not enough for it to turn into anything that he can grasp and make sense of. It’s driving him mad.

It’s well into night shift when he throws himself into bed and his head has barely hit the pillow when there’s the strange popping feeling of the universe expanding and contracting and he rolls over. Sure enough, the other half of his room is now half of hers; Rey’s standing with her back to him in the dim glow of one lamp with filmy material stretched from one hand to the other, and it takes him a second to work out that he’s caught her folding laundry. It’s so ridiculously domestic that he smiles before he can help it. 

She doesn’t turn around but she knows he’s there - he can tell by the set of her shoulders - but they’ve gotten very used to this, and she barely pauses, rolling the strip into a neat ball, ticking the ends in with practiced fingers, picking up the next, stretching it out. It’s oddly comforting, the mundaneness of it.

Hey, she says, after a while, through the bond, as if unwilling to break the silence. Long day? Yeah. 

Me too. 

He exhales. He hasn’t seen her like this in a while; she’s in a loose tunic with bare feet and arms, and he props his head on his hand and watches her crossing backwards and forwards from her bunk to her locker, all softness and blurred lines. It’s easy to forget for a moment who they are, easy to forget about uprisings and fuel and supply lines and strategy; it’s dangerously easy to lose himself in tiny things, like the way her calf muscles stretch when she reaches to hang her belt on a peg near the door, the way her hair shines in the light. The bruises on her ankle, the inside of her knee. The tiny flower next to her bunk in the smallest jar he’s ever seen. 

His headache has almost disappeared when he hears it again, that stupid melody and all the tension of the day comes roaring back and he’s about to throw something across the room when he realises where it’s coming from.

It’s Rey. She’s half-singing, half-humming under her breath, low and unpractised but sweet; it’s more sound than words but the melody is clear and all the fragmented notes he’s been hearing all day coalesce into something, something that he knows, and Kylo pulls a pillow over his head so she won’t turn around and see his face.  

It’s the lullaby that his mother used to sing him to sleep, and if he concentrates hard enough, he can almost see her, hear her voice, the smell of her perfume on her wrists, feel her hand brushing through his hair, just enough pressure to make him shut his eyes.

He was four when he told her he was too old to be sung to. She never did again.

It takes a moment for him to work out that something of what he’s feeling must be bleeding through the bond, because the room is now silent, and when he pulls the pillow off his face and sits up, she’s very carefully not looking at him, but she’s not doing anything else either.

“What was that?” he says finally; he’s aiming for nonchalant but he’s pretty sure he falls short because Rey flicks him a skeptical look and then goes back to folding one of her arm wraps.

“What was what?”

“What you were singing?”

She pauses, and he feels a sudden rush of self-consciousness trickle into the bond.

“It’s, um. It’s.” She stops dead, her throat working, and he could pry it out of her but they’ve been better at respecting boundaries lately and so he waits, waits as she runs a hand through her hair – it curls at her collarbones and he tries not to focus on that either, boundaries - and now Rey is looking a little panicked. “I don’t know?”

“How do you - not know?”

Her fingers are worrying the frayed edge of one wrap, a flush creeping up her neck, her eyes skittering to the corner of the room.

“I think I heard it in your head,” she says finally, all in a rush. “It was in your dream. Last night.”

Well.

He swallows.

It shouldn’t surprise him, but what is new is the unexpected sweep of spinning vertigo, feeling every nauseating inch of the yawning chasm of how far he is from who he once was.

Kill it if you have to. 

Rey’s face is red. “I’m sorry,” she offers quickly. “I didn’t even realise I was doing it, I’ll stop – “

“No.” His response is too fast to be casual, and Rey sends him a cautious glance from under her lashes. “I – it was - nice.”

They stare at each other until something in his face must reassure her.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

He hesitates, and then she smiles and looks down; the first real smile he’s seen on her in weeks, and he absolutely shouldn’t but he can’t help himself: “I – I can teach you the words?”

There’s a beat, a moment, where her eyes catch his and hold and something in his chest compresses and then expands into gold.