Work Text:
Take My Breath
Mos Eisley was dripping in sweat and silver. Mercury rivulets, gritty with tinsel, clung to a feverish crowd. The music shivered through the air. Static crackled, cutting the haze and making the light jump. Ben leaned against the wall and let the shadows paint him seven shades of blue.
You’ll find her on the floor this Saturday. She likes to dance.
A bottle girl passed by with a tray of aquamarine shot glasses. The women beside him were kissing obscenely, hands grappling and occasionally brushing him in their haste. Everything smelled of salt and sweet musk, the cloying perfume of a hot night. Ben could taste something like liquored jasmine on the back of his tongue. He needed a smoke.
She’s a pleasure model. Discontinued. Causing problems? No, not really. She’s only on our radar because Plutt found her and figured there was a bounty.
It was hard to make out individual bodies within the crush; arms and lax jaws and slips of skin blended where lines met. Ben wasn’t known to frequent clubs, but there had been some nights in his youth that ended well past noon the next day, drawn out by the ever-present darkness of the city and music that moved on a loop and a healthy dose of amphetamines. (Later, when he rolled out of bed – his, someone else’s – Ben would walk the oily streets in a vain bid for that last patch of fresh air. But sweet breezes were even rarer than sunlight in the belly of Los Angeles.)
She blended well, and not in the way they all did, by design and with explicit purpose. This girl was of another kind of anonymity. The distinction was subtle, and an untrained eye would find it impossible to distinguish. People thought catching replicants was a matter of parsing the human from the human-made. And sometimes that was true, but that’s not what Benjamin Solo did. His skill lay in finding those who had learned how to be people, sometimes better than their creators.
Small, was his first thought. Lithe but firm, cropped hair lending an air of androgyny that complimented the square cut of her jaw. There was something nubile in the flat lines of her chest and the high apples of her glitter-smudged cheeks. Her movements weren’t practiced, and her smile was unconscious (it moved, growing sporadically, open and prone to falling on a breath before spreading wide again.) She had a woman at her front and a man at her back. Hands skimmed her wet skin, though her hazel eyes betrayed a faraway mind.
Hux was right. She liked to dance.
****
I’ve always known. There’s no not knowing. I think…maybe I was mad, in the beginning. But there’s no point in getting upset. It doesn’t change anything. It only wasted my time.
****
The first time they spoke, she stood half hanging over the bar. Her shirt was gone, and she held two bottles of absinthe in sweaty hands.
“You like to watch?”
Ben scratched his chin, not bothering to look away. She wore bejeweled pasties over her nipples, but her sweat shined brighter. A little shimmy made the tassels dance.
She led him with thin fingers around his wrist to a narrow hallway behind the DJ booth. A short flight of stairs brought them to a single door. It wasn’t a room, more like a closet stuffed with boxes and broken furniture, but the chair she sat down in was solid. Ben pulled up the stool she pointed to and waited.
She didn’t tease him. Only herself, and only for a breath. Her hands found place on her body from memory, quick with anticipation. A palm on her tit, the tassel falling between her fingers. The other hand slipped beneath the hem of her skirt, and when she pressed the heel of her boot to the piped armrest, Ben saw everything.
They didn’t speak, and it was over rather suddenly. Short breaths broken by a sharp gasp; Ben was out of there within seconds. It didn’t turn him on so much as startle him, though he couldn’t say why. Hours later, hunched over his coffee table with a cigarette between his teeth and the television burning static, Ben stared at the file Hux gave him until his vision blurred.
****
They never gave me memories. I don’t really know why. But I’m glad, because I don’t have to wonder what’s real. I know my design, and I know my time is borrowed. But everything I’ve seen is through my own eyes.
****
Ben went back three days later, and she was waiting for him.
“Do you do this?” He nodded at the closet, eyes finding hers when she settled into the chair, “Is this your thing?”
“I like it.”
“To be watched?”
“I like it when you watch me,” She spread her legs, but her palms stayed on the armrests, “You’ve been watching me for a while now.”
“You know why I’m here,” He pulled out the stool, “You know who I am.”
“No.”
“But you know what you are?”
Her throat bobbed, but her smile was giddy. “Yeah.”
Ben sat down. “Then you do know who I am.”
And that was the end of talking. Her hands assumed position, and Ben’s folded between his knees. She moved slower this time, drawing it out (for whose benefit he couldn’t say.) Her skin parted – pink, wet and swallowing her fingers with every pass through swollen folds. Her chest shivered under her silver mesh top. Her delicate throat and her puckered brows, the tremor in her thighs. All of this Ben observed with clinical scrutiny even as his heart raced. Untouched while she was touching herself.
Until she whispered, “Give me your hand.”
****
Every time I say yes, I am real. Every time I say no, I am real.
****
He didn’t expect to like it that much. At first, he didn’t. Her bones were so fragile under his calloused fingertips, breath fluttering, skin pebbled when he gave an experimental squeeze. He loosened his hold and her eyes flared with panic.
“Don’t.”
Ben frowned, but did as he was told. The girl relaxed. He gripped her throat tighter, and her shoulders sagged.
There were a few seconds of quiet in which neither of them moved. Only the thrum of her pulse beneath his palm betrayed the tension. Finally (suddenly) the girl’s fingers wandered along her inner thigh. Ben didn’t let go, watching with a bunched jaw as she started to play her cunt again.
What followed slipped into a dream. The red light of a dying bulb overhead and the music coming through the floorboards. Dust jumping to the beat filled the air like smoke. Ben was sweating under his trench; he could smell her on the air between them. The girl’s breathing shallowed as her fingers sped up, and Ben’s grip contracted instinctively. Her eyes blew wide—
“What’s your name?”
****
I think I fell in love once. Her name was Rose. We only kissed; she was running away the night we met. Something about a farm in the desert. She had a sister, but they retired her. I never saw her after that night.
I hope she found the farm.
****
“You’re back.”
Ben closed the door. His hand lingered on the knob, flexing arrhythmically. Like it was practice.
Rey sat in the chair. That was her name, she’d given it to herself. I heard it on the TV. This woman was talking about the stars. She said that sometimes, when a star dies, it releases this burst of energy. They call it a gamma ray. It’s the most powerful thing in the universe.
“Why do you do it?”
“Do what?”
He threw her a bitter look, and Rey smiled. “I dunno. Why do you hunt replicants?”
“If this is hunting, it’s poor sport,” He flicked the pull chain of the red light, “You came to me with belly bared.”
“Would you prefer I fight back?”
Maybe, he thought. The others had run, at the very least. He watched Rey stretch her legs out of the corner of his eye; arms falling over the side of the chair, that slender neck tipping to bear a tender jugular. Sometimes he wondered what it would be like to sink his teeth into all that warm flesh. He wanted to taste her, blood and bone. Would there be salt? Sugar? Iron and spice and the ghost of death that thrummed in his own veins? She wasn’t human, but they were both mortal.
“They always beg. For mercy. For me to be quick. For a chance.”
Ben turned to Rey. In the red light, her eyes glowed. “But you only beg me to squeeze tighter.”
She stood, and in two steps they were chest-to-chest. He still couldn’t get past her size, how something so small could move with such confidence, crowding against the beast and his dripping fangs. Rey brushed the hair at his nape from his coat collar, not quite a caress.
“We are both made. In a womb, a factory. We come to life, and we feel.”
Her hand found his throat, and Ben barely checked a shudder. Rey pushed up on tiptoes until he could feel her breath on his lips.
“I want to feel. It’s the closest I come to knowing my maker.”
They kissed each other. There was no first move. Ben gathered Rey in his arms and Rey wrapped him in hers just as tightly. He pressed her to the wall and she pressed back. His stomach on hers, her legs around his waist. Hands and tongue and breath hot in aching lungs.
She felt real. It bent his mind – how she whimpered when he found her wet and warm, fingers sliding easily into a tight and shivering heat. Rey pawed at his belt, desperate, and it made no sense. This was not the need programmed into her DNA, a biological conditioning for sex and service. She shuddered as he fell heavy into her palm. Ben had fucked more women than he could count in the mere seconds it took for Rey to bring his cock to where his fingers played her. He knew when they were faking.
****
Maybe I’m lying. Maybe I just want to pretend for a while.
****
He was mean about it. He liked to make it hurt, and he didn’t ask. Sometimes Rey had barely opened the closet door before he had her by the nape. She gasped, falling against him as Ben dragged her across the wall, feet tangling over his boots and nose wrinkled on a wince. It made her obscenely wet, and he taunted her with it.
You like it rough, little girl? I can make it worse.
Ben couldn’t place his anger, nor could he parse it from his need. And he needed Rey so much it made his teeth crack. It went beyond a good fuck (still, she was everything she’d been made for.) He didn’t delude himself, and Rey didn’t insult him with pretty words and promises that he was different, that she’d never felt like this with anyone else. Maybe that was what made it easier to believe, and the hope left Ben feeling something more shameful than foolish.
“You gonna come again?”
“Don’t—”
“Hush,” He bit the cap of her shoulder; Rey slapped the wall in place of a cry, “You don’t lie. You can’t with me, can you? Show me I’m wrong.”
She needed his hand on her throat, and sometimes Ben held her on the edge until Rey was sobbing for it, tugging pitifully at his wrist as she begged him to “do it, please, I need – I can’t…” Her breath was precious. Puttering exhales, soft moans on a trembling bottom lip. The short gasps she sucked off his collarbone when he spread her over his lap and told her to bounce. These sounds and this life she dragged into her fabricated body seared his skull, echoing long after he left her.
A month after Ben accepted the assignment, Hux called him down to the office with a tired frown.
“Are you playing with your food, Solo?”
“I’ve always delivered, haven’t I?”
Armitage sighed, eyes drifting to the rain-spattered window behind his desk.
****
“When are you going to kill me?”
Ben lifted his face from the crook of her neck. Rey was looking at him with those big, glowing eyes.
“I’m still inside of you.”
She bore down on his cock as if to affirm. Ben sat up in the chair, arm tight around her waist even as his head fell back on the musty cushions.
“I’m not afraid to die,” Rey traced the vein running from his temple to the hinge of his jaw, “I never thought I’d make it this far.”
“Is that why you came to me that night?”
She didn’t feign shame. “I knew what you were – you weren’t dishonest about it, and I liked that. It felt like you gave me a choice.”
“Does that make it easier? To choose to die?”
“I don’t know,” She folded her hands over his chest, “I’ve never done it before.”
****
There was a knock at the door.
“Yes?” Armitage Hux didn’t look up from his desk, pen scratching at paper. A migraine was brewing behind his eyes; the rain made it impossible to tell how late it was.
“Sorry to bother you, sir,” Kaydel’s heels clicked across the tiled floor, “But this just came up from Records.”
Hux lifted a hand, still writing. “Thank you, Kaydel.”
He finished his notes, head throbbing to the echo of Kaydel’s footsteps fading down the hall. Armitage wiped a heavy hand down his face and opened the file.
It’s handled.
Armitage stared at the note stuck to the middle of the page. He pulled it off to expose the picture of a young woman – blurry, taken at a distance – and hummed.
“Good man, Solo,” Hux crumpled the note and closed the file, “That’s a good man.”