TW: before this chapter starts i would like to warn people that there is some light detailing of needles and other related blood work!
•
After being lifted onto the kitchen island, Kylo is straight to work, pulling out a first aid kit and handling your leg between his long fingers with surprising agility.
"Lie down." He tells you, sending you an authoritative glare that orders you to do as he says.
You lie back on your elbows, watching his face while he works. The sting of the antiseptic has you irritated, but you let him continue. His eyebrows knot in concentration as he pulls out a sanitised needle and begins to thread it.
"I have something for you." His straight face gives nothing away but he seems hesitant, the way he phrases it, something you rarely see in someone who acts purely on instinct. Though it's almost like he's trying to decide if you deserve whatever it is.
"What is it?" You can't help feeling suspicious. The needle slides through your skin and a squeak escapes your throat. Kylo's hands steady you, soothing you, his thumb rubbing supportive circles into your thigh. Your throat contracts uncomfortably.
"That... book you draw in." He pushes the words from his mouth, seemingly a little frustrated but talking nonetheless. Your eyes widen, your lips curling up.
"Really?" Your toothy smile is difficult to hide when he looks up at you, and you worry for a second this is some sort of sick trick. You wouldn't put it past him.
"Yes." He frowns, tightening a thread and making you tense up. He smooths his thumb over you again to keep you settled. "I don't understand it, but it seems to calm you." He threads the needle again, and your skin being pierced again feels horribly scratchy. You focus on the idea of getting your notebook back. But why would Kylo care if you wanted it?
As if sensing your confusion, he clarifies.
"You can't fight for me until you are calm in your environment. I had planned to continue training you." His hands move skilfully, his fingers skating lightly over the sensitive flesh. "Ushar has made that difficult, but we will proceed nonetheless."
Your gulp is caught in your throat. Of course he wants you to train on a injured leg. You ignore the rage beneath your heart, connecting with the positive energy and happiness of receiving your book.
Maybe he has a plan for your leg. "What about my-"
"Don't worry about that." He interrupts you, finishing up and placing gauze and taping it.
You roll your eyes, unable to hold it back. Luckily, he doesn't see this.
"Up." Kylo beckons you forward, and when you sit up he slides his large hands onto your waist and hips to pull you forward to the edge of the table. The movement is swift, like he needed to bring you closer. He leaves his strained hands there, but you don't question it. He's touchy. There's something in his eyes you can't quite make out, though. You double check the walls to your mind, making sure that he can't slip past them while your guard is down.
Even sat up here, he's taller than you. It's ridiculous, and makes you feel a lot smaller than you'd like to. You look up at him with as much bravery as you can muster.
"Don't get it wet for now." A sparkle behind his eyes teased as a reminder of your steamy shower. "I'll try not to tempt you."
Arrogant asshole.
You flick your eyes down to his possessive hand placement. "I think we both know which of us can't keep their hands to themselves."
Danger flares on his face, excitement at the challenge.
"Do not test me." The air between you crackles, a thick taste of leather and masculinity chokes you as you seem to be gravitating closer together.
You let yourself smile in a small attempt to rile him up, "Why shouldn't I?"
A low, guttural noise sounds under Kylo's breath, "Because I'll rip your stitches open again if I'm allowed to fuck you the way you deserve."
The hands on you are suddenly a lot needier.
You can't control the tightness between your legs begging for his hands to be somewhere else.
You swallow your lust. Is he so incapable of being gentle? You can't help but think back to his soothing washing in the shower so long ago, his tending to your wounds, his calm handling of your face when he wants to.
"Do I not deserve your soft touch just as much as the rough?" Your words are barely audible, a whisper of a sentence under your heavy breath.
A beat goes by and Kylo watches you carefully for every second.
"Little padawan," Kylo's face darkens, one hand trailing up to your neck, his fingertips touching your padawan braid. You don't dare to inch away. He grabs you quickly, pulling your body into his chest by your throat. Your lips could touch his chin with how close you are. "Do not confuse me for someone who cares to be gentle."
You gaze up at him with rage. How inattentive does he believe you to be?
"For someone who insists so, you're awfully gentle with me."
The hand on your throat slips from a teasing, pleasurable squeeze into a warning strangle. You yelp and let a hand grip his, silently asking him to take your words as they are. You did not intend to test his boundaries.
Instead of letting you free as you'd hoped, he yanks your face to the side of his head. Your face is smushed against his collarbone as he leans his lips to your ear.
"Pets lose incentive without reward." He drawls, the words cutting into you.
He can't mean that.
You know that is precisely why he said it, and it twists you up inside anyway.
You yank your hand at his, trying to escape his iron grip.
Pets lose incentive without reward.
"Stop touching me." You insist, prying at Kylo's thumb in desperation. His lips caress the side of your face, planting soft, subtle kisses onto your cheek.
Something your heart may have jumped at before has morphed into a horrific symbol of 'reward'. The implication of him treating you kindly, this entire time, just to trick you into enduring the rough makes you sick to your stomach. "Stop touching me, stop!"
To your surprise, he lets you free. You slip off the counter at the side, barely noticing when your leg does not flare up in pain like it should.
The washroom door slides behind you. You glare at the data-pad. How do these things lock? Anger is bubbling under the surface of your skin. You smash your thumb into the screen as stray tears drop down your cheeks.
A dark, skinny hand of smoke has wrapped itself around your mind, and you can't seem to wriggle out no matter how hard you try. Weak. You're fucking weak. You ran from him when faced with the truth. You're being used. Which shouldn't hurt as much as it does, since you're supposed to be pretending here. What the fuck was the point of all this in the first place?
Faced with this truth, that you do care about his intentions, you come to acknowledge just how deep you are inside of this. Just how badly you'd hoped that he wasn't a soulless stranger. After sharing yourself to him so embarrassingly, just for him to discard you with ease, you are left with the knowledge that you risked yourself to try and find someone who only exists in your mind.
Your vision clouds with swirling grey, and you struggle to keep a sob at bay. You knew all of this deep down, and it's been growing like a tumour until this moment. The data pad continues to disobey, beeping deeply to tell you you're pressing the wrong thing. A whisper of hate, of darkness and evil, settles in the back of your mind. The absolute assurance it gives you feels like caffeine when you're tired, and a daydream when you're bored.
You strike the tech, punching through the glass. Your knuckles are bloody and charred, wires, metal, jagged edges and smoke left in your wake. You can't even feel your hands anymore.
You're kept as an amusement. You're a potential weapon. You could be a promised apprentice.
Kylo senses your attraction to him and plays with you like a cat with a mouse. Each time you wondered if his actions came from a place within him that held good, you were wrong.
Your head pounds. Ren is outside.
"Open the door." His impatience is so thick you can practically taste it.
"No," you mumble, barely registering your response.
You're done with his gentle, hopeful touch being an incentive to good behaviour. Lava is rising into a tower inside of you, and you lean into molten liquid and let it envelop you.
You drop to your knees in the bathroom you've forgotten even exists and let the tears fall. You are so alone. And theres no hope.
This is your life now.
"For fucks sake, open this door, NOW."
A pulse of power breaks away from you, the hatred building and building into a knot of energy. A tense bundle of that power forces its presence into your chest until you feel like scratching at your skin to free it.
You cannot listen to him. You're a prisoner.
His angry words fade into nothing.
Gripping your head in your hands, you let the bundle of power free from inside of you, a sob ripping from your throat as a wave of body-wracking energy explodes out from deep within.
The glass of the shower door shatters, the window shatters, the mirror shatters, the room becomes a tornado of glass and icy wind from the outside world. Your skin is sliced and nipped at, your hair is whipped around your face in a frantic dance.
Your heart is trying to escape from your chest, your body alight with energy and rage. Your fingers tingle, dark life awakening inside of you like never before.
The door to the bathroom is being wrenched open with a power eerily similar to yours. As it scrunches under the weight of Kylo's Force, you scramble backwards - ripped from your haze.
You panic, the door ajar now.
The fire in Kylo's eyes appear in the crack.
"Control yourself." His words slice into the blackness festering. But it only doubles. "I mean it."
The door holds, the winds still ripping into you and lifting chaos to encircle your body. You hear a string of curses from behind the metal before something large and heavy slams into it. The dent is bigger than you.
Kylo raises his voice, calling your name in a warning. He's ordering you to submit. But you won't do it.
"I wish you'd leave me alone," you cry over the roaring in your ears and the noise of the howling snow storm. "I HATE you. You're vile. You're... evil." You're sobbing now.
You barely consider the possibility of the danger you're in before a pulse of the Force blasts the door into the opposite wall beside you - filling the room with a thick slam of power.
The recoil breaks through the air, pushing you back in a boom of the Force.
You're ripped from the ground, the tidal wave pulling you through the wind and dragging you out of the confines of the base and into the harsh storm building in the forest.
You're falling.
Your throat rips with another scream as you plummet further and further through the air, tree branches ripping through the skin of your bare limbs. You barely acknowledge the fact your towel is long lost, pure life saving panic bubbling inside of you.
Bile rises in your stomach. You're so close to the ground now. Your bare skin is so frozen you can no longer feel it.
Any attempt at reaching out to the Force is lost with your sanity, crazed blinding fear of death taking over your mind completely.
Everything goes black before you can comprehend the pain of your crumpled landing.
•
Jarring beeps fill your ears before anything else.
You can't see, a blinding pain in your head slamming into your eyes too hard to allow you to lift your eyelids.
Hushed whispers and the sound of rolling wheels on hard floor.
The taste of cold water and blood mixed on your tongue.
You don't panic when you notice you cannot feel your arms. Or legs. Come to think of it, the only thing you can feel is the stabbing in your brain.
Maybe you're dead.
That'd be nice, you think. You don't have to worry when you're dead.
You falter. You don't do anything when you're dead.
You don't want that. To cease to exist like that.
You want something. Even if it is the harsh and conflicting pain entwined passion that is Kylo Ren. Even if it's a world without your friends. The dark, midnight swirling liquid soothes your worries for a second at the thought. The amount of power he could show you. You'd never be weak again, even to him.
You could kill him with the power he wants to teach you.
You force your eyes open.
You lay in a hospital bed, your arms above the covers. You stop breathing for a second at the sight of the bandages wrapping around the length of them, all the way down to your hands. The right hand is encased in a cast.
"Good. You're awake." A tight lipped nurse is to your left. You jolt, surprised as you hadn't seen her there. You don't like to be so unaware, it's not like you.
You pause before you speak. This woman will be under Ren's employment.
Before you can ask anything, she is leaning over you and inserting a needle in your arm. You watch the blood leave your body in horror and intrigue.
"Where is Ren?" You ask, hating that it's your first question.
"Busy." She responds in a practiced neutral tone. You almost want to scream at her.
"How am I alive?" Your eyebrows scrunch up, your body is starting to ache the more you try to move it.
"You landed in a deep snowdrift. The trees did most of the damage. You're very lucky." The woman busies herself with your blood and scientific instruments you've never seen before.
"My hair was wet. I was naked." You're in disbelief, not feeling the slightest bit cold after all of that. How much time has passed?
"You were hypothermic, but we found you just in time." She moves to write something down.
"Right." You vaguely recall the term. Hypothermic. Does this mean Kylo sent people to come find you and make sure you weren't dead?
"You've had some very insistent visitors, girl." The nurse raises her eyebrows at you like shes reprimanding you.
You go to sit up at this news, but your back screams in pain and your head throbs.
"Woah, easy there. You shouldn't be trying to move so quickly." The nurse pushes you back gently by your shoulder. You resent the control, needing to do something on your own.
"Visitors? What do you mean?" Your heart skips. Who here cares about you?
"The Commanders' Knights." She sends you a small, forced smile. She is clearly scared of them and doesn't understand why they would come here to see you. Truthfully, you don't understand either.
A moment goes by while the nurse keeps busy across the room. You eye the door, willing someone to walk through it and tell you what is going on.
"How long have I been out?" You ask, your throat a little dry. You look around for some water and find a plastic cup on the table next to you, bringing it to your chapped lips.
"12 hours. Not too long. Sleeping, resting, your body went through quite the shock." Her back still turned to you, you decide to sit up.
Easing onto your hands turns out to be a lot harder than you'd initially thought. Your right hand is practically useless in a cast, and your left is so pathetically cut up and achey that you can't stop it from shaking when you lift it.
The nurse turns before you can make any progress. "My name is Nurse Cora." She eyes your positioning. "Would you like to sit up?"
You nod hesitantly. She leans down and presses something and the bed begins to move into an upright position. You sigh with relief, feeling a little more in control now.
"Thank you." You say, lifting your cast to examine it. "Is my hand broken?"
"Yes, and your ankle, though that was able to be fixed almost immediately."
You frown. How is that possible? You wiggle your ankle. It's perfectly fine. In fact, you pull the covers down and the white gown you're wearing aside to see the wound from Ushar is completely healed. A white fleshy scar runs over where it used to be.
"The Force has blessed us with many healing properties." Nurse Cora nods toward me, then gathers a clipboard and other materials in her arms. You think she's about to leave.
"Wait, how?" You search her eyes for answers but she remains strictly professional.
"The Commander, of course. You may have died if not for it." Cora ducks her head politely, as if in respect, before she slips out the door and closes it. You notice the door clicks with a lock and the previous anger bubbles up.
He's instructed her to lock you up in here while you heal enough so that you're a useful asset to him again.
Well, you're not putting up with it.
You push the covers off your legs completely. They are mostly bandaged, bruising peeking out from underneath. You swing them over the side of the bed with a grunt, your head swaying your vision a little. There is an IV in your arm, so you un-tape it and pull it out carefully.
The mirror across from you makes you worried. You look disheveled, malnourished and afraid. Your hair is matted, having been packed with ice and snow then left to dry in a hospital bed. Your lips cracked and bleeding, and your red eye-bags make you look extremely unwell as you've lost all the colour in the rest of your face. You ignore it, about to slip off the bed when a horrible feeling freezes you in place.
Ren is coming. Your headache worsens. beeping crowds your brain as you struggle to remain calm.
The door opens a moment later, with Kylo Ren sweeping in. His mask on, his cloaks draping his large frame, you shiver.
He does not waste a second. He approaches you with conviction, taking your face in his hand and checking your head over for injury. You bat him away.
When he sees your hand in a cast, he takes it, the metal mask looking down at it as he holds it with intensity.
"It's broken." You say, pulling it away from him. "What happened?"
The door is shut, but you can sense he is unsure about prying ears.
You press him for answers, "What was that thing that I felt?"
Ren seems to shadow further. You cannot see his face but you're sure it's stone cold.
"The dark side." The voice modulator echoes around the room, prickling down your spine.
You suppress the urge to vomit.
"Why..." You want to ask how it soothes your worries the way you think it has been doing for a while. "Why does it feel so good?"
A dark chuckle sounds from under the helmet. You flick your gaze up to him.
Kylo lightly sweeps some hair from your face, "The dark is not what you think it is. It is... power. Beauty. Fear. Strength. Manipulation. Magic..." He takes your chin with a gentle pinch, "It is whatever you need it to be."
A breathe escapes your lips in a huff. So that cloudy blackness. The dark liquid. The raging thoughts that compel the sudden bursts of power in anger. That is how Kylo heals you. How he controls people. How his subjects fall to their knees for him.
You had wanted to trick Kylo. Make him believe you didn't want to leave.
After a taste of what you could have, you decide that while you're here you can learn. You can use him. You can build your power and hit him where he least expects it. You'll make him think you're a loyal subject. And soon enough you'll find a way to be treated like an equal. This will take time, and careful stepping. Knowing when to say no, and picking your battles carefully.
For now, you find yourself wanting to stay.
"I want more." You whisper, determination filling your veins. You're not lying when you say that.
"I knew you would, little padawan."