49. Chapter 49

Imja Tse, Eastern Nepal

September, five years later

It is so cold here, in this vast system of caves beneath the Himalayan peaks, that Rey’s Warming Charm keeps petering out every ten minutes. The sixth time that it fades, she has no opportunity to recast—Ahsoka Tano gives the signal from up ahead, and Rey has to charge into the next tunnel along with the other Aurors.

They spread out in the formation that they’d tirelessly practiced after studying the maps, the routine that they’ve been using in various incarnations to navigate the seemingly endless stone labyrinth for the past hour. Each pair of dueling partners rushes into their designated grotto from out of the many that branch off from the main tunnel, left and right.

Rey comes to a halt a few steps past the entrance of her grotto, back-to-back with Finn, their wands at the ready. No spells or dark creatures fly at them from out of the gloom and she swiftly illuminates the carven chamber with a nonverbal Lumos. A half-circle of bare rock face gleams in the wandlight that also shines on an empty dirt floor. There is nothing here, and it’s a dead end.

“Clear!” Jessika Pava’s voice drifts into Rey’s ears through layers of stone and icy air, followed by other similar declarations in quick succession. Rey waits for Bazel Warv’s booming tones to emanate from the grotto next door, and then it’s her turn.

“C-c-clear!” she calls out through chattering teeth.

“Will you at least try to keep that up?” Finn mutters after Rey recasts the Warming Charm on herself. “Solo will have my head if his precious Miss Niima catches a cold—no, scratch that, if she experiences so much as the slightest flicker of discomfort—”

“Oh, sod off,” Rey grunts as they reconvene with the rest of the team back in the main tunnel.

“Are we talking about how Solo will have our heads if Rey gets hurt?” Kaydel Ko Connix asks in a stage whisper. Beside her, Jess giggles, a sound that instantly transports Rey to late nights spent teasing and trading secrets in the Gryffindor dorms.

“He’s not that bad, you lot,” Rey chides with a roll of her eyes as they continue further down the passageway.

Seff Hellin speaks up from behind her, his tone mournfully accusing. “He threatened to turn the German Minister of Magic into a horklump and juice him for Wiggenweld Potion after you got caught up in the detonation curse that flushed Lumiya and her army of giants out of the Black Forest.”

“That was two years ago,” Rey says archly. “Ben is much improved. Trust me.”

Finn shakes his head. “Still can’t get used to you calling him that, and I don’t think I ever will. It’s weird—”

“Will the people in the rearguard kindly stop discussing Auror Niima’s love life?” Ahsoka hisses from her place up front. “You can do that when we’re not in the middle of a dangerous mission to retrieve a powerful dark artifact.”

“Yes, Auror Tano,” Rey and her friends chorus, then they start silently shoving and nudging one another in reprimand while the team members who aren’t Hogwarts graduates exchange long-suffering glances.

For all of the head of the International Security Task Force’s concerns, though, another hour passes without incident, save for a few minor and easily disabled magical traps. It seems that their information had been good and the fortress is deserted, the Acolytes of the Beyond gathered somewhere out on the snow-laden slopes for one of their occult biweekly rituals. Rey begins to harbor the hope that they’ll be able to find Broodica’s Grimoire and spirit it away to the Nepalese ministry in Kathmandu with no actual combat breaking out. Over the years, she has learned to appreciate the few missions that come and go in relative peace.

Unfortunately, almost as soon as the team leaves the stone tunnels behind for the magical ice caverns that honeycomb the Imja Glacier, danger chooses that moment to rear its head.

To be more precise, its huge, furry, fanged, very ugly head.

“Bloody hell!” Finn cries out as the yeti emerges from the frozen depths, charging at the Aurors with a fierce, guttural bellow. It is fifteen feet tall, covered in white fur that had disguised it amidst the ice walls and outcroppings until it chose to move. The ground shakes with its every step.

The Aurors scatter. Attacking from all sides is a time-honored technique when battling a singular opponent that can only be brought down by a volley of concentrated spellwork, but Rey soon discovers to her chagrin that it’s not particularly effective against the yeti. The creature is fast despite its size and it is incredibly powerful. Magic glances off of its hide as it knocks Auror after Auror to the ground or sends them flying into the glacial walls with each sweep of its long, hairy arms.

“Use fire spells!” Ahsoka yells over the chaos. She catches Rey’s eye. “Niima, the Grimoire should be in the next cavern. Take Evans and go!”

Rey does as her superior commands. She and Finn break out into a run, down the passage that the yeti had come from, and it’s not long before the path opens up and they’re barreling into a chamber that’s almost the size of the Hogwarts Great Hall, made entirely out of ice. The cave system had been dark up until this point; here, everything is gilded in a silvery blue luminescence, emanating from a wide underground river teeming with glowing algae.

Rey casts her Warming Charm again, then she and Finn trawl the place with detection spells. Their source, a former Acolyte of the Beyond, had indicated that Broodica’s Grimoire was most likely stored here, but he’d never risen high enough in the ranks before defecting to know where and how exactly it was hidden.

The ground shakes once more when they’re searching on opposite ends of the cavern. Finn and Rey have only enough time to look at each other from across the distance and mouth “Bollocks” before the yeti crashes in through the yawning entrance, roaring and swinging its fists.

There’s no one to help them; the rest of the team has fallen behind. Finn reels off Stunners and bewitches the creature’s path with the Flagrante Curse as it makes a beeline for Rey, but it’s too late. It catches up to her at the very edge of the icy riverbank and lifts her off of the ground, one gargantuan fist clamped around her torso. Stars of pain explode before her eyes and she definitely hears a bone crack, but it’s all drowned out by adrenaline as the yeti opens its fanged maw, preparing to bite her head off in a sense that’s not figurative in the slightest.

Rey gags on the odor of decaying gristle and old blood that assails her on the crests of the beast’s hot breath. An idea occurs to her and, without pausing to think twice, she jams her wand into its mouth with a cry of—

“Incendio!”

A jet of red and orange fire streams out of the tip of the carved aspen wood. The yeti recoils as the flames sear through its innards. It drops her into the river, and the icy white walls and the creature’s singed and crumpled form and Finn’s panicked expression all blur together in front of her eyes before the freezing water closes in over her head, and there is only darkness.

✨✨✨

Or, well, perhaps it isn’t that dark.

It’s murky in the way that only significant depths can be, but the phosphorescent algae provides a pale, waxy light that’s enough to see by. Maybe squint by, to be more accurate. Through the shifting blue currents, her lungs bursting from the effort of holding her breath, Rey spots a wooden chest chained to the bottom of the riverbed, the runes inscribed all over it glowing bright scarlet amidst shadows that unfurl like a wash of black ink. Her every instinct screams at her that that is where the Grimoire’s been locked away.

Finn will be all right. If the yeti isn’t already dead, it’s as good as, and Rey silently casts a quick healing spell to mend her broken rib. She follows it up with the Bubble-Head Charm and inhales a huge, blessed gulp of air as the bubble coalesces over her features, fueling oxygen into space that the water can no longer permeate, before swimming further down.

There are no magical tripwires or anything, and the chest itself doesn’t appear to be cursed when she runs the basic tests on it. The Acolytes of the Beyond had probably figured that storing their prized world-ending artifact underwater in a glacial cave guarded by a yeti was security enough. Rey cuts the chains with a few well-placed Diffindo incantations and gathers the chest in her arms, then kicks her way back up to the surface.

The rest of the team has made it to the cavern, and several of them help her out of the river and onto the icy shore. Ahsoka casts the Hot Air Charm over Rey, quickly drying off her soaked dove-gray robes, and she runs a diagnostic, looking visibly relieved when nothing alarming turns up. “Oh, thank Merlin.”

Just as Rey is about to be touched by her superior’s concern, the older woman adds under her breath, “Wouldn’t have wanted Solo to threaten to turn me into a horklump. I’d have hexed him to oblivion, and I go way back with that family…”

Opening the chest, Seff confirms that Broodica’s Grimoire is inside. From what Rey can see, it looks like any old spellbook, the pages tattered and bound in black leather. At first glance, it certainly doesn’t appear to be capable of ushering in a hundred years of darkness, but she’s learned not to judge the—well, the book by its cover—when it comes to these things.

The chest is closed and handed back to her. She’s the fastest and most agile member of the mission team, her reflexes still that of a Seeker even though nowadays she only plays Quidditch on the occasional weekend here and there. They move out, back through the ice, back into the stone passages, ascending.

They’re almost at the entrance when the Acolytes of the Beyond come pouring in. A flurry of golden robes and flashing dark magic.

Anxiety wraps its clammy tendrils around Rey’s heart. It’s not anxiety for her own safety but Ben’s—his team is guarding the entrance, and if the Acolytes have broken through, what does that mean, is he hurt, is he alive—

No, it won’t do to panic now. The cultists are gunning for her because she’s the one holding the treasure, so she has to focus.

Rey takes up her position alongside Finn. Together with the other Aurors, they fight their way out.

✨✨✨

And, finally, daylight.

To be more precise—Rey emerges from a labyrinth thick with flying curses and the residue thereof, expelling the last of a Smokescreen Spell from her lungs with rattling coughs, and she stumbles out into the bright sun of the Himalayas, Finn by her side and the wooden chest clutched to her… well, her chest, such as it is. She blinks at the swirling white landscape, immediately figuring out how the Acolytes of the Beyond had managed to break through the defensive perimeter established by Ben’s team when they came back from their ritual.

In addition to their sheer numbers and their copious use of the dark arts, the cult had brought several yetis with them—however, the enraged creatures don’t appear capable of distinguishing between foes and allies.

It’s utter chaos. The snow is streaked with blood.

While the good thing is that the Aurors have clearly gotten the upper hand over the last few minutes, Rey is worried because there is no sign of Ben, no matter how frantically she scans the field of combat. She darts into the fray, ignoring Finn’s shout of protest, ignoring the instructions that Ahsoka had given her to Apparate to Kathmandu as soon as she exited the cave system.

Rey ignores all of it, because she has to find Ben and she has to make sure that he’s safe.

This, of course, turns out to not be one of her brighter ideas. Although she does learn where Ben is—another Auror tells her that he’d gone off in hot pursuit of a handful of disarmed, fleeing cultists—several of the dark wizards take one look at her and then at their treasure that she’s holding, and they give chase. She keeps up her Shield Charm and fires off counter-spells as best as she can, but eventually her boots skid on the snow and she’s losing her balance, and tumbling down into a ravine.

Absolute bollocks.

✨✨✨

Once the world has stopped spinning, Rey hauls herself into a sitting position and inspects the wooden chest and its contents to make sure that nothing has been damaged. She lucks out in this, at least.

“Right.” She clambers to her feet. “That could have gone better.”

She’s not really sure how she fell into the habit of talking to herself out loud during missions, but it certainly helps relieve the stress. The sound of her own voice reminds her that she is a person, with a life that is waiting for her to come back to it, so it wouldn’t do at all to get killed.

Rey’s just about to pick up the chest containing Broodica’s Grimoire when a multitude of golden-robed silhouettes come swarming down the sides of the ravine. They surround her, wands raised.

She sighs, tucking the artifact between her feet to keep it safe, like some bloody penguin. “It could definitely have gone better than this,” she mutters under her breath.

A multitude of dark spells hurtle toward her all at once, from all sides. She aims her aspen wand at the white-powdered earth and she casts Protego Diabolica. A variant that she’d tailored to suit her preferences after Ben helped her reverse-engineer the basic spell signature with a combination of Arithmancy and runework and bickering.

Tall black flames blossom on the sunlit snow, wrapping around her in a protective circle. The instant that the Acolytes’ curses slam into this barrier, their magic rebounds on them. As one, they drop like flies, some unconscious, some disfigured, some bleeding, some dead. Victims of the effects that they had each tried to wreak on her.

Moral quandaries are part and parcel of being an Auror. Minor hexes and jinxes are no good when your opponents invariably shoot to kill. It’s a matter of balancing your safety and your duty with what you, personally, can live with doing.

Rey had decided long ago that, in order to fulfill her oath to protect this wizarding world that she loves so much, she has to view combat magic as something in which you dish out only what you’re prepared to take in return.

Once the metaphorical dust—the snow flurries, really—has settled, Rey sends up a burst of red sparks to alert the other Aurors to her location, then she walks over to the array of cultists to begin administering first aid on the grievously injured and Stunning the not-that-injured so they can be efficiently rounded up. However, just as she’s reached the nearest of the prone gold-robed figures, a yeti comes barreling down the slope with a mighty roar. Headed straight for her.

It moves faster than Rey can think. It reaches out with its sinewy arms to slash at her with claw-tipped paws the size of spades—

—only for the pop of Apparition to echo through the mountain air and a tall, broad, and admittedly also yeti-ish figure to run up and tackle her assailant to the ground.

“I’m—I just—Ben!” Rey sputters, watching man and beast roll along the slope, wrestling and snarling. “Where is your wand?”

“Here.” Ben Solo punches the supine, pinned-down yeti in the jaw and slips his blackthorn wand out of the arm holster, then hits the reeling creature with a powerful Stunning Spell right between the eyes.

The yeti stills, unconscious, fanged maw agape.

Ben gets to his feet and stomps through the snow over to Rey. Two years ago, he had swapped out his brown MACUSA coat for the gray robes of the newly minted International Security Task Force, and Rey has to admit that he cuts a striking figure in them.

Even if he is currently glaring down at her with an annoyed expression, his prominent nose and ears red from the cold.

“Miss Niima,” he says through gritted teeth, “would you care to explain why you’re here instead of in Kathmandu, despite obviously having already retrieved the artifact?”

Rey dimples up at him, brushing snowflakes off of his collar. “I was worried about you.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“So can I—”

“I highly doubt that, considering that you almost became the Abominable Snowman’s lunch—”

Ben breaks off when Rey’s hand drops back to her side as she gives an involuntary shiver. Her Warming Charm had petered out again. He mumbles a foul expletive that would have made Professor Mothma raise an eyebrow and he recasts it for her. Then he conjures a scarf around her neck, a pair of fluffy ear warmers that nestle snugly at each side of her head, and mittens on her hands.

“Y’know, Ben,” Rey says as sweetly as she can while he’s adjusting the scarf on her person with a focused meticulousness that warms her more than any spell would be capable of, “you’re turning thirty-three in November. If you want to live a long life with me, you ought to stop being so cranky all the time. Look, you’ve got gray hair already, see, here and here…” Her hand drifts up again, this time clumsily patting his dark locks with mittened fingers.

“I am well aware that I have gray hair, sweetheart,” Ben replies with a sort of put-upon patience. “You gave them all to me. Every single strand.”

He bends down to press a kiss to the offended wrinkle between her brows. It’s only when he straightens up again that they both realize that the battle is over and the other Aurors are peering at them from the top of the ravine.

“This,” Ahsoka says loudly, “is why the two of you should ideally not go on missions together. There was a memo.”

New York, USA

October

After Rey finished up the American half of her Auror training and moved there for good, she and Ben had waited a year to start easing the wizarding public into the fact that they were in a relationship. She’d been living with Finn and Seff and Jess and Kaydel then, all five of them in an Extension-Charmed loft in the heart of Muggle Brooklyn and crashing into their twenties with glorious abandon.

Rey had begun weaving Ben into the chatter. It helped credulity that they’d done a lot of work together when she was still in the joint training program; a perfectly normal way for a friendship to blossom between a former professor and his former student. And because she joined the International Security Task Force as soon as it was created, it was far less dicey when they started spending time together outside of a professional setting than it would have been if she’d interned at MACUSA itself.

From there, it had been easy to casually mention to her roommates that Auror Solo and herself were having lunch, that they’d watched a show on Broadway, that he was helping her figure out a difficult case. Although Finn, Seff, and Kaydel had clearly been weirded out, Jess was rooting for them to get together five months in—and so was Tallie, her blonde head squealing in the Floo all the way from London.

When Ben began showing up at ISTF headquarters nearly every evening to take Auror Niima out to dinner, no one batted an eye.

Rey had initially been put off by how well it was all going but, in the end, she had decided that it was high time the universe gave her and Ben a break, after everything that they’d been through. She’d learned to take it all in stride.

However, the going well is about to come to an end.

Because it’s three weeks after the mission in the Himalayas, and Rose had come to New York for a quick visit, and Rey knows that it’s finally time to tell her two best friends in the whole world the truth.

“I’ve put it off long enough,” she says as she bustles around her and Ben’s bedroom in their townhouse on the wizarding side of Carnegie Hill, scrambling to get ready for her coffeeshop jaunt with Finn and Rose. “I’ve chickened out so many times in the past, but I can’t let them start a new chapter of their lives with this—this cloud hanging over our heads.”

“Technically speaking, you’re the only one who knows that the cloud is there,” Ben drawls.

Rey pauses in the act of running a comb through her tangled hair to frown at him. He’s in bed with a book, as relaxed as you please, reading glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. He’s got a bit of scruff going because it’s the weekend and he isn’t wearing a shirt, and she wonders if she has time to…

No. She’s late enough as it is. So she settles for being annoyed instead of horny.

“Oi, I am having a crisis here,” Rey huffs. “The least you can do is be supportive.”

Ben peers at her over the tops of his glasses. His sensual lips quirk into a crooked and fleeting half-smile, but his demeanor is conciliatory enough when he gets out of bed and walks over to where she’s seated at the dressing table.

“It’s going to be fine.” He presses a kiss to her temple, prying the comb out of her grip. “If memory serves, those two once snuck onto the back of a Ukrainian Ironbelly to rescue you from the clutches of powerful dark wizards. That kind of friendship will survive anything.”

He gently works the comb through her hair. Rey allows herself to be soothed by his words and by the caring motions of his large hands. But, later, when he’s seeing her out the door, anxiety flickers through her yet again.

“I hope that I’ll still be invited to their wedding,” she says sadly.

“If not, we can have a wedding of our own,” Ben deadpans.

In the past, Rey would have blushed and giggled at this and slapped him on the shoulder and told him to stop being such a wife guy. Today, however—standing on the stoop outside their lovely little townhouse, being vaguely-smirked at by her shirtless and scruffy boyfriend, her hair brushed by him and her belly full with the veritable mountains of waffles and crispy bacon that he’d made her for breakfast, she finds herself raising an eyebrow, with a hint of challenge.

“You’ll have to ask me first, yeah?”

At that, Ben blinks. Rey grins and surges up on the tips of her toes to kiss him, and then she Disapparates.

✨✨✨

At twenty-three, Rose Tico is much grumpier and even more introverted than she had been in her teens. It certainly doesn’t help that she spends most of her time with dragons instead of actual human beings these days.

But Rey has missed her short, prickly friend very much, and they spend a good two hours catching up and gossiping with Finn over pumpkin spice lattes in a tiny Muggle café off of Central Park as autumn rain trickles down wide glass windows. Every once in a while, Finn idly places his hand on top of Rose’s on the circular table, caressing the gold-banded diamond on her finger with a touch of reverence. They’re getting married early next year, in Da Lat on Vietnam’s Central Highlands, even though Rey honestly feels like it was only yesterday when Rose stomped into her and Finn’s compartment on the Hogwarts Express and told him to budge up.

Rey glances at Rose’s engagement ring with a soft smile. Rose catches her in the act and bursts out, “I can’t believe that Professor Solo will be at my wedding! Do you know, Rey, I can’t stop thinking about the time you told him ‘There’s no need to call me sir, professor’ and he looked like he was about to blow a vein. And now you’re living together! Funny how the world works.”

Rey seizes her opening. Or, to be more accurate, she picks it up with reluctance, as though it were a suspiciously stained piece of trash. “So, about that…” She takes a tentative sip from her cup, barely tasting the pumpkin spice through her nervousness. “I may not have been completely honest about how Ben and I—started.”

“What d’you mean, then?” Finn asks while Rose gives her a puzzled frown.

Rey swallows the lump in her throat. “It was actually in—in seventh year—”

“Oh.” Rose relaxes while Finn nods in understanding. “Don’t worry about that, we know all about that…”

It’s a disturbing feeling, to be choking on air. “I beg your pardon!” Rey says, loudly enough that the people at the neighboring tables look at them askance. She ducks her head. “I beg your pardon!” she repeats in a low hiss.

“I mean—” Finn exchanges a furtive glance with Rose, then he shrugs. “Everyone knew, really. Sort of.”

Rey’s head spins.

She is having to reevaluate the last several years.

“And no one—no one said anything?” she squawks. “No one—minded?”

Rose bites back a smile. “Well, I found it adorable, personally, although I was surprised it lasted so long, given his—you know—his personality. I was a bit relieved when Aleson Gray started being sweet on you, really, I thought that maybe that way you would have been able to move on quicker…”

“You just—you just let me,” Rey gasps out. It’s not very rational of her at the moment, but she also has the clarity of hindsight and she understands very well how stupid she’d been as a teenager, and the horrifying suspicion is starting to rise to the surface that Finn and Rose are actually very bad friends. “You lot didn’t say a single word of protest—”

“The heart wants what it wants, Rey,” Finn says with a sage nod. Then he chuckles. “I’m just glad nothing actually happened, can you imagine—”

Rey stares at him and at Rose.

“What are you talking about?” she finally asks.

Rose cocks her head. “What are you talking about?”

Rey’s hands fist in her lap. “Me and Ben—my—” She’s about to say relationship with him, but she can’t force the words out.

Finn finishes the sentence for her. “Your crush on him. Exactly.”

“I think that in a way I always knew,” Rose continues. “You were always hanging back to talk to him after first period, and sometimes I’d catch you looking at him like he was, I don’t know, food, but for myself and a lot of other people it wasn’t truly confirmed until the night of the graveyard battle. When he came back to Hogwarts wounded and you carried on like he was dying—”

“To be fair, he was dying,” Finn points out.

“True,” Rose acknowledges, “but Rey was screaming and sobbing over him like her world had ended. That was when I could say beyond a shadow of a doubt that she fancied him.”

“Guys.” Rey is torn between laughter and nerves. “That’s—that isn’t all of it.”

And she just blurts it out. Starting from the very beginning. Telling Finn and Rose, there in that Manhattan café, what she should have told them a long, long time ago.

✨✨✨

Finn and Rose don’t take it all that well but, then again, this is hardly the kind of news that anyone can just let slide.

Rey doesn’t go into the nitty-gritty details of it, but all the information that she parts with is damning enough.

“Merlin’s most baggy Y-fronts, Rey.” Rose has drawn her knees up to her chest and is rocking back and forth in a chair that’s rather too small for such an act. “He could have been fired. You could have been expelled. If Hux had died, you could have both gone to Azkaban.”

Finn has leapt to his feet and is pacing and gesticulating frantically, ignoring the bewildered looks from the coffeeshop’s other patrons. “In the Room of Requirement?” he whisper-shouts—they’re in the Muggle world, after all. “Don’t tell me it was on the couch—I loved that couch, Rey!”

“It was on the couch,” she tearfully admits. This is so much worse than she’d ever imagined. “But I love him—and he loves me—”

“Well, of course he loves you!” Rose exclaims, burying her face in her hands. “A lot of things make sense now! When he tackled Dameron off of his broomstick to get to you the day you flew into the Whomping Willow—and, Finn, d’you remember the maze tryouts, when Luke came back without Rey and Professor Solo told him to turn back into a wombat so that he could kick him into the sky—”

“I remember!” Finn moans. “And it was all happening under our noses!” He suddenly stops pacing, only to point an accusing finger at Rey. “What about that private makeup tutorial on the Erecto Charm? Was it his Erecto Charm—”

Rey nods, her face burning with shame.

“What about that detention?” Rose butts in. “You were the only one he ever gave detention to—but was it really a punishment, Rey?”

Rey fidgets. “It was—it wasn’t not a punishment.”

“Gross,” her friends chorus.

“He’s meeting us for dinner in a bit, isn’t he?” Finn says, wide-eyed. “How am I supposed to act—” A look of determination comes over his features. “I’m going to fight him.”

“Finn, don’t be ridiculous,” Rose scolds before Rey can say anything. “No one’s fighting anyone. We’re all adults here. We can just talk about it.”

Half an hour later, the trio exits the café just in time to see Ben walking down the street toward them. Rose breaks out into a run, meeting him halfway. And, without a moment’s hesitation—

—she kicks him in the shin—

—and he goes down.

It’s like watching an ant successfully topple a mountain.

“Rose!” A horrified Rey scurries over to a groaning, flabbergasted Ben. The sidewalk is clearly full of New Yorkers born and bred; everyone just weaves around them without so much as a second glance. “How could you—why did you do that—”

“That’s for taking advantage of my friend!” Rose yells at Ben while Finn holds her back. “You—you big mean man!”

Rey looks at Finn for help. He looks like he’s about to faint, the specter of deducted House points dancing before his vision, but it’s not long before he taps into his Gryffindor courage. “He is big and he is mean!” he says defiantly, glaring down at their fallen former teacher. “She was only a kid, Solo!”

“That is quite enough,” Rey growls, but Ben places a firm hand on her shoulder, a silent signal to desist. Still, once he’s upright again, she protectively wraps her arms around him while at the same time placing herself between him and her friends. He rubs the small of her back in a soothing gesture while he peers down at Finn and Rose.

“I deserved that,” he says calmly. “This means that I’m paying for dinner, I take it?”

“We want to eat at the Russian Tea Room,” Finn huffs.

“Appetizers, main course, and dessert,” Rose says stiffly. “And you have to buy Rey two desserts.”

“Right.” Ben kisses the top of Rey’s head. “Let’s go, then.”

Massachusetts, New England

November

The Organa estate is located in the wizarding village of Belleau-a-Lir, secretly tucked away, Platform Nine and Three-Quarters-style, between the Muggle settlements of Peabody and North Reading. The house overlooks the Ipswich River and it is five storeys tall and timber-framed and gabled, its brick roof charmingly overgrown with purple ivy, and it is one of Rey’s favorite places in the world.

Because she’s always welcome here.

After some gentle cajoling, Ben had finally agreed to take a few days off from work so that they could celebrate his thirty-third birthday with his family. They’d arrived to find the estate grounds robed in autumn foliage, all reds and golds with the occasional stubborn patch of emerald-green that added to the picture-book perfection, and they’d both been engulfed in hugs and kisses—and much hair-ruffling, on Ben’s part—and ushered deeper into lodge-like interiors that smelled like rosemary and freshly baked bread.

While waiting for the house-elves to finish preparing lunch, Ben helps his grandfather in the latter’s woodshed—the only one out of the many hobbies that Bail discovered in his retirement that had stuck—and Rey wanders over to the enormous mantelpiece in the main living room, which proudly bears the family’s treasured collection of moving photographs. She will never get tired of watching Ben grow up like this—from a chubby toddler shrieking with delight as he’s lifted up in his father’s arms while the magic that he hasn’t yet learned how to control makes various knickknacks rise into the air, to a grubby eight-year-old carefully steering his first broomstick, to a lanky and scowling teenager in Ilvermorny robes—but, today, Rey also has eyes for another set of pictures.

It's something that Ahsoka had mentioned back on Imja Tse, about how she went way back with the family. Rey zeroes in on a photo of a younger Ahsoka Tano, mugging for the camera with her MACUSA dueling partner with the Grand Canyon spread out all around them.

Ben resembles his biological grandfather in hair and height and—well—in brooding. But the man with Ahsoka is much younger than Ben is now; Anakin Skywalker had only been twenty-four years old when he and his wife, the diplomat Padme Amidala to whom he was the longtime MACUSA-assigned bodyguard, vanished after negotiations went sour with a shtriga coven in the Albanian beech forests. No one knew what became of them, and their infant twin children had been left in the care of their friends Bail and Breha. Later on, Luke had taken up the Skywalker name to honor his father.

Back when Luke still had both feet planted in this reality, anyway.

Rey’s gaze flits to the photos with Padme in them. She’s beautiful, and there’s something of hers in Ben, too. The innate elegance that commands a room. The compassion that he’d tried so hard to hide.

Further to the left of Anakin and Padme’s photos are…

Rey blinks, her jaw dropping as she notices a framed picture that hadn’t been there the last time she and Ben had visited a few months ago.

It’s her. Sitting in Ben’s lap, his arm around her waist, in one of the cozy upholstered chairs in this very same living room, the two of them wearing Leia’s shoddily handknitted sweaters and the Organas’ Christmas tree twinkling beside them. Rey has a hand cradling Ben’s jaw and she’s trying to push his face in the direction of the lens, her lips moving soundlessly—she remembers that she’d been telling him to smile for the camera for once in his life. Ben is resisting, trying to hide his face in the slope of her neck instead, his expression so endearingly grumpy.

I’m here, is all that Rey can think for a good, long while.

I’m on the mantelpiece.

I’m part of the family.

“Ah, hija, there you are.” A tiny old witch sails into the living room in a flurry of purple robes. She takes Rey’s elbow with the imperiousness of the old pure-blood families and she speaks in the thick accent that she had stubbornly clung to even though she left her native shores decades ago. “I need your discerning tastebuds to settle a debate between myself and the house-elves, they won’t believe me when I say that sweet and savory go together, Bettie is threatening to quit if we stick marshmallows on the hotdogs. Come along now, to the kitchen—”

Breha Organa breaks off as Rey wraps her into a tight hug.

“Marshmallows and hotdogs together sound good, Nan,” Rey chokes out, barely managing to reign in her tears.

“Ha!” Breha pats her between the shoulder-blades, sounding extremely smug. “This is why I’m always telling Benjamin to marry you already—”

“Nan, please stop proposing to my girlfriend for me,” Ben drawls as he strides into the room with Bail, a table floating along behind them.

Or, well, it is nominally a table—it has four legs, at least.

“Look, mi amor, I’m getting better with the carving spells!” Bail beams proudly at his wife. “I thought that we could put this here. For our coffee!”

“Yes, cariño, it’s very nice,” Breha says, returning his smile.

However, once Bail has turned away to direct Ben where exactly to lower his latest creation, Breha shakes her head at Rey. “This man with his ugly furniture and my daughter with her crooked knitting…”

“I’ll have you know, Mother, that my knitting has improved by leaps and bounds this year.” Leia enters the living room carrying the pile of handmade, fall-themed sweaters that she’d gone upstairs to fish out of her luggage. “Han, tell them.”

“I plead the fifth,” Han barks, trailing after his wife. He is so much healthier these days than when Rey had first met him, but his crankiness has only worsened with age.

It’s like being afforded a glimpse into Ben’s future, Rey thinks with a barely suppressed giggle.

Leia hands out the sweaters that she’s been using to fill up her post-presidency days and everyone puts them on. Rey’s is red with a semi-competent pattern of autumn leaves stitched into it, while Ben’s is a screaming mustard yellow.

“You look very dashing, son,” Han chortles while helping himself to a glass of Bail’s port.

“Big words from a man in turkey-print,” Ben mutters.

Rey grins, tucking herself into Ben’s side as the two Solo men grump at each other. This has been her life for a while now, but it still feels like a gift. Family, home, and belonging. All of the things that she would never have dared hope for, once. All of the things that Ben had given to her without hesitation, without a second thought.

✨✨✨

Ben’s birthday lunch is unsurprisingly extravagant. Rey can barely move by the end of it.

Still, after a rousing game of Exploding Snap with Bail and Breha that devolves into fiery accusations of cheating between the old couple, she musters the energy to walk into the village, Ben by her side.

“Can your grandparents understand each other when they’re bickering in their respective native languages like that?” Rey wonders out loud.

“I doubt it,” Ben says. “They get by on the tone, more than anything.”

At the village, Rey changes out some Galleons for pound sterling, which she then pays an extra charge to be sent via Muggle post to London. Ben watches her do this in silence.

“I know that you think that I’m being stupid,” Rey murmurs on their way back to the house.

“I never think that you’re being stupid.” Ben drapes an arm over her shoulders, hauling her closer to him as they walk. “I think that your heart is too big for this world. I also think that you should be saving your hard-earned money, so, for the nth time, why not just let me—”

“My parents, my money,” Rey says firmly.

His lips purse, but he lets it go.

In the past, oh, how she would have quailed to have disagreements with him, back when they were hiding from the world in a precarious balancing act that she was careful not to upset. She has long since learned how to stand her ground and they’re both learning how to compromise better with each day that passes, a marked improvement from that one time—

“Why are you snickering?” Ben asks her.

“I was just remembering the day you forced me to move in with you.”

“I didn’t force you.” He’s all affronted dignity. “That loft was in danger of literally bursting at the seams from too many Extension Charms. Getting rid of one of the bedrooms would have stabilized the magic, and you were already spending ninety-percent of your time at my place, anyway—”

“Yes, but you didn’t have to hold that Chocolate Frog hostage until I agreed to move in, you know that I’d do anything for Chocolate Frogs, Ben—”

He looks his long nose down at her. “Aggressive negotiations. It’s a time-honored tactic.”

Rey takes out her wand and bewitches a pile of fallen maple leaves to fling themselves at him.

Ben stares at her from amidst a swirl of red and gold. He looks as stern as he had back in the Hogwarts days when she was testing his patience, even though his lumpy yellow sweater goes a long way toward softening the effect.

“You’ll pay for that, my darling,” he promises her in a low rumble, autumn leaves tangled in his dark hair.

Rey shrieks with laughter and runs.

✨✨✨

He chases her through the burnished foliage of New England, all the way back to the house—which is mercifully quiet, the other inhabitants having drifted off to their bedrooms for post-lunch naps. His long-legged strides catch up to her on the fifth-floor landing, where he then scoops her up into his arms and carries her over to the threshold of his childhood attic room as though she were his blushing bride.

Granted, blushing brides probably wouldn’t be cackling breathlessly and flailing in playful struggle.

Ben tosses Rey onto the king-sized bed, the thick eiderdown mattress softening her fall in the most bouncy and luxurious of ways. He kicks off his boots and socks and tugs the yellow sweater and his long-sleeved white shirt over his head, revealing his sculpted torso.

“You know, Miss Nima,” he says in a conversational tone of voice as he takes a giggling Rey’s shoes off for her and starts peeling down her jeans, her knickers coming along for the ride, “I claimed this room every time my parents and I visited Nan and Gramps for the holidays. I loved having the attic all to myself. But, once I was a little older, I started thinking that it would be nice to have a pretty girl in here as well.”

“Instead, you have me,” Rey quips.

Ben frowns, the way that he always does when she resorts to self-deprecating humor. He punishes her for it with a hard kiss that leaves her breathless as he pins her arms to the bedspread.

“I have you,” he rasps against her lips, “and you’re better than anything that I could have ever dreamed. Turn over—get on your hands and knees.”

Rey complies, wearing only the red sweater now, which Ben rucks further up her waist. She gasps, her eyes widening as he lands a heavy, open hand on her rump, the slap of skin on skin echoing through the air. Followed by another in quick succession.

“That,” Ben says from behind her, “is for not thinking that you’re the prettiest witch I’ve ever laid eyes on. That’s worth two spanks, because it is so grievously wrong.”

He doesn’t give her a chance to bask in the compliment. In an instant he is kissing her there, between her legs.

Rey moans into the fluffy pillow as Ben’s clever mouth works its own brand of magic, his plush lips so soft pressed to her entrance and his wicked tongue licking long, feverish stripes along her and delving into her, his too-big hand spreading the stinging cheeks of her ass. She squirms back against him as best as she can while he growls words of approval into her cunt.

Eventually she comes on his face with a strangled little cry, her mind a whirl of autumn leaves, and he doesn’t give her much time to luxuriate in this, either—she can only rest for as long as it takes him to tear off his trousers. She’s still writhing in the afterglow of having been eaten out when he sheathes himself inside her in one smooth stroke, all the way to the hilt.

Fuck.

She muffles her squeals into the pillow as he splits her open on his length, as he plows into her hard and fast, in a way that he hasn’t in a while. It's probably the fact of them being in a childhood bedroom of his. It’s years after Hogwarts, but Ben will probably always be at least a little bit kinky, and Rey doesn’t mind that at all.

“Mmm, yes,” she sighs, wild and unmade as he hits the spot that is the spot, so nice and deep, “just like that, please, sir—”

“Jesus.” His hips snap against her ass. “Look at you. Still taking cock like a goddamn schoolgirl.” She involuntarily tightens around him at that and he swears viciously, his fingers digging into waist. Into the slight bulge that he’s making in her abdomen. Her sweater has ridden up over her chest and her nipples rub against the sheets with his every thrust, electric scrapes of sensation, and she already knows that it won’t be long before she comes again. The bed creaks.

And how wonderful it is to be doing it in a bed, to have every right in the world to do it, to hold hands in public, to have flowers and candy sent to her office once a week, to kiss him any time that she wants to, to have everyone be happy for them…

In the end, all that it takes is a couple of brushes of Ben’s big fingers against her clit for Rey to crash into her second orgasm. She utters a stifled scream as her walls flutter around him. She sobs as he fucks her mercilessly through her aftershocks, never letting her come down but instead bringing her ever higher.

She’s in a daze by the time he pulls out, still hard. He tells her in a quiet tone, through clenched teeth, to roll over onto her back, and she complies without hesitation. He clambers up her body, bracketing her torso between his knees. The sweater has fallen over her chest again and he clucks his tongue at that even as he pumps his erection in one large, veined fist.

“Lift up your top, Miss Niima,” he commands, his voice dark with want. “Show me those cute tits you’ve been hiding.”

“Like this, sir?” she whispers, slowly drawing the wool toward her collarbones, looking up at him with wide eyes as her breasts come into view.

“Shit,” he breathes out, his hawklike gaze honing in on the show with burning intensity. “Exactly like that.” His fist is a blur around his cock. “I’m going to coat those puffy little nipples in my come.”

“My face, too,” Rey begs, and she swears that Ben’s eyes roll into the back of his head—

His free hand slams against the headboard as he hunches over her with a quiet roar, his back bowing as he splatters thick white ropes all over her bare chest, and then her chin and cheeks. Marking her as his, and his forever. And he’s not done coming yet when he slides his tip into her waiting, willing mouth, thrusting slightly, wringing out the last droplets of his spend on her tongue.

“Dirty fucking girl,” he mutters, sounding for all the world like a man who’s not sure if he’s suffered a crushing defeat or won the entire war. “Letting me stick my cock into this tight pussy, begging to be covered in my come…”

Rey closes her eyes and purrs in contentment while she licks him clean the way that he likes, happily slurping up the taste of their combined arousal on his shaft as his breathing evens out above her.

Finally, Ben summons the blackthorn wand into his palm and flicks it over Rey’s skin, vanishing the pools of his spend. He collapses gently on top of her, laying his cheek in the valley between her breasts with a satisfied sigh that warms her all the way to the tips of her toes.

She kisses the top of his head as she idly strokes his sinewy back. “Happy birthday, professor.”

He yawns against the side of her left breast. “You’re going to call me that in bed for the rest of our lives, aren’t you?”

“I think so, yes,” she admits with a giggle.

Kiruna, the Swedish Lapland

December

“Why?” Finn yells to be heard over the cacophony as a volley of dark spells scour the wall behind which he and Rey have taken cover. “Why do our nastiest fights have to happen in snow?”

“At least there are no yetis around this time,” Rey tries to appease him.

“Don’t jinx it,” he says sourly.

“Finn! Rey!” Pammich Nero-Goode calls out from a nearby rooftop. “They’ve pinned you in and we can’t lift the Anti-Disapparition and Anti-Levitation fields, you have to fight your way out of that street before more come! Go—we’ll cover you!”

Rey sneaks a peek around the wall and swallows. It’s a tall order—there are ten of the red-robed Sorcerers of Tund closing in on their position.

“I’m getting married next month!” Finn cries. “I’m not going to die a bachelor!”

And he leaps out from behind the wall and charges.

“Worst last words ever!” Rey calls after him, exasperated.

But she dutifully follows her dueling partner into the thick of the fray, spells slicing through the air amidst the snowstorm, under the glowing veils of the Aurora Borealis.

In truth, she’s determined not to die, either. Ben’s off on a mission in Latvia and he’d promised to nip up north when it was over, so that they could travel back to New York together. It’s the thought of seeing him in a few hours that makes her courage soar, that gives her heart roots.

They’ve evacuated all the civilians, and the small mining town here in the Arctic Circle—that the Sorcerers of Tund have apparently been sneakily transforming into their European base of operations over the last few decades—has become an explosion-streaked battlefield.

Leave it to Aleson Gray to get kidnapped while skiing. It is literally the snootiest way to be kidnapped that Rey can think of. The ISTF had been called in to prevent jurisdictional complications, as Aleson is a British citizen being held in Sweden by a criminal syndicate founded in the United States. Plus, his equally snooty pureblood wife had thrown a fit, and there are very few wizarding governments in the world that won’t bow down to the Noble and Most Ancient House of Yliri posthaste.

To Rey’s shock, she and Finn clear the street that they’d been trapped in with only minor injuries, thanks in no small part to the support provided by the Aurors on the rooftops. They make it back to the staging area by the church, where Tallissan Lintra is a swirl of green healer’s robes and golden diagnostic charms as she moves from one injured fighter to the next. They’d called her in because the Sorcerers of Tund specialize in inventing curses, and no one in Europe is currently more adept at countering new forms of harmful magic on the fly than Tallie.

“You just missed Seff’s Patronus!” Tallie tells Rey and Finn as she shoves a foul-smelling potion down a whimpering patient’s throat. “They’ve found where the Sorcerers are keeping Aleson and they’re extracting him now, in the town center! Oh, will you stop crying and just drink all of it—do you want to drown in your own blood? Honestly—”

“Brilliant healer,” Finn remarks to Rey as they hurry off to help the extraction team. “Bloody horrible bedside manner.”

✨✨✨

Another hour of vicious, fast-paced combat goes by before the last Sorcerer holdouts are sent scattering and one more magical wall is blasted aside to reveal the hidden compartment in the façade of one of the buildings where Aleson had been dragged into by his captors.

There’s a red-robed witch guarding him but, as soon as she glances around and sees that her comrades are either down or gone, she pushes him forward, toward the Aurors.

“Here, take him!” she screeches. “He hasn’t stopped running his mouth since we got him—I’ve never hated anyone so much—”

There are actual tears of frustration running down the witch’s cheeks. She has to be given a Calming Draught before she is put in handcuffs.

Rey stares at Aleson in disbelief as he saunters over to her with windswept black hair and bored blue-violet eyes, looking for all the world like someone who’s stuck at a party and just wants to go home instead of a kidnapping victim who’d been held ransom by an international criminal syndicate.

“Well, well,” he says, smirking at her. “My Niima in shining armor.”

She rolls her eyes. “Only you can make the kidnappers want to give you back.”

Later, though, she does witness the very rare sight of Aleson losing his legendary composure.

Standing at the border of the combat zone just outside Kiruna, wrapped in furs, surrounded by a small army of private bodyguards, her ebony skin and dark eyes flashing in the glow of the Northern Lights, Lairelosse Yliri-Gray glares daggers at her husband as the ISTF delivers him safely back to her. She wastes no time in castigating Aleson in rapid French. He hangs his head, murmuring one apologetic response after another, while every single one of his former schoolmates at Hogwarts who are now in the ISTF all try to keep a straight face.

So, yes, all things considered, it had been a fairly excellent mission, as far as Rey is concerned.

✨✨✨

Rey spends the rest of the evening helping fix the damaged infrastructure and Obliviate the town’s Muggle residents. When she is at last free to stagger into one of the heated, fully-furnished, bigger-on-the-inside tents that have been set up for the Aurors by the treeline of the surrounding forest, she falls asleep right away.

She had requested a tent of her own because Ben would be joining her. The wizard in charge of logistics had shot her an exasperated look before acquiescing, but Rey hadn’t been able to bring herself to care.

And she definitely doesn’t care hours later, when Ben wakes her up with a hand on her shoulder and a kiss to her forehead.

“Hi.” She smiles sleepily up at him. “How was Latvia?”

“Not too much trouble. Did you and the team get Gray out all right?” At her drowsy nod, he makes a face. “Pity.”

“None of that, now,” Rey says with a laugh. She notices that he’s still in his winter coat and ISTF uniform. “Go and change and come to bed.”

“Actually…” Ben hesitates, pressing his lips together as though deep in thought while he studies her face in the lamplight. “I’m a little wired. I don’t think that I can fall asleep yet.”

She perks up, her mind swimming with possibilities. “Oh?” she purrs, in her throatiest, come-hither voice.

“Yes,” he confirms. “Do you want to go sightseeing for a bit?”

Rey deflates. “Oh.”

But, then again, she hasn’t seen much of Sweden yet, and the Aurora Borealis is out, so she leaves the cozy bed to bundle up, getting more excited about the whole thing when Ben suggests that they fly.

He casts a very thorough and impenetrable Warming Charm on her and, minutes later, with her ensconced in the familiar warmth of his magical signature, the two of them are kicking off from the silent ISTF camp on their respective broomsticks.

Rey’s Firebolt Supreme takes to the polar air like anything. She circles Ben on his Yajirushi and then jets off over the forest and he gives chase, and they fly into that shimmering horizon of crisp stars. The Lapland unfurls below them in miles upon miles of forest and marshes and mountains, all underneath layers of pure white snow and crystalline ice tinted in jeweled hues by the Aurora’s shivering veils. She remembers the time that they’d walked through the heather on the Isle of Skye and she’d thought that this was Scotland, rolling and vast—in that same manner, this, too, is Scandinavia, rugged and primeval, starkly beautiful.

She has seen so much of the world now, and there will always be more to see, with Ben by her side.

They head west, soaring over the Kebnekaise massif and its glacial valleys, and they follow the frozen ribbon of the Kungsleden hiking trail to Abisko National Park, where the Northern Lights shine the brightest. No matter how fast Rey goes, Ben is never far behind her; living up to the brand name, his broomstick shoots through the Arctic skies as straight and as true and as lethal as any arrow.

“You were right,” she remarks, slowing down so that they can talk. “The Yajirushi really can rival the Firebolt models in terms of speed.”

“I only bought it so that I could keep up with you,” he grumps.

But there’s something strange about the way that he’s grumping. His expression is… softer than it usually is whenever he’s doing so.

“Rose said that, in hindsight, it was obvious that you loved me when you tackled Dameron off of his broom,” she tells him with a grin.

“I’m still a little mad at you about that day,” Ben huffs. “Even now, thinking about it makes my blood pressure skyrocket.”

Despite his words, his crooked smile is genuine, although small. He isn’t a man who will ever be given to smiling or laughing often, but Rey thinks that she can live with that. That it makes it all the more precious whenever she can cajole some mirth out of him.

Suddenly, he cuts in front of her, in a maneuver that shades close to dangerous, and he leans forward, into her space. “And when did you know that you love me?” he asks in a low murmur, so close that their lips almost touch, there at that great height.

“Valentine’s,” Rey says, a little shyly. “By the Fairy Pool.”

Ben swoops in and kisses her and she kisses him back with a sigh, her heart aglow in the depths of winter.

She pulls back to ask, “What about you?”

“Don’t get cross,” he warns her, “but, the day you were teasing me in class with that Sugar Quill and then you sucked me off under my desk, I almost told you that I loved you then.”

At first, Rey is a little offended—but she realizes that what sticks out to her most about that day is how Ben’s Ministry-required lecture on the Unforgivables had wreaked its toll on him. How he had taken whatever darkness was summoned out on her mouth, and how tenderly he had held her afterwards.

How he had started to say, “I—,” and then, “Nothing.”

“But I think that I knew long before that,” he continues, here and now in the Swedish Lapland. “I think that at first you were the funny girl who tripped while staring at me in the Great Hall, and then you were the beautiful little genius with your silver doe, and then you were the fever that I couldn’t shake. I think that you crept up on me slowly. Then all at once.”

They cruise to a stop over the Abiskodalen valley, with its birch trees and rushing dark rapids and frame of mountains and vast alpine lake. Perched on the Firebolt Supreme, Rey’s blushing, pleased from all the revelations, and out of the corner of her eye she notices that Ben’s fumbling for something in the inner pocket of his coat—but her attention is quickly drawn to the Northern Lights in front of her. Shimmering mists of emerald and sapphire and amethyst and ruby and gold, shifting and pulsing amidst the starry blue-black heavens, its shivering veils illuminating the polar night. Radiance beyond heart’s holding. Glory here, at the edge of the Earth.

Rey knows that it should remind her of the Celestial Ball at Hogwarts, but for some reason she finds herself thinking of city lights, blurring together in a wash of various colors under silver streams, beyond glass.

“Do you remember the first time it rained after I moved in with you?” she asks Ben, her gaze still fixed on the blazing rainbow display. “We were listening to jazz on the radio. We curled up by the windowsill and you counted my freckles.”

“Yes, sweetheart.” His tone is achingly gentle. “I remember.”

He clears his throat.

“Rey?”

She turns around.

And damn near falls off of her broomstick.

Elegantly balanced on the sleek Yajirushi, floating miles above the sprawling landscape of ice, snowflakes in his dark hair, his winter coat fluttering in the breeze, his brown eyes reflecting the glow of the Northern Lights, Ben is holding a small velvet box out to her. It’s been opened to reveal the diamond ring nestled within, shimmering brilliantly like a star plucked from the heavens that aren’t so far away and perhaps never were.

“Miss Niima,” Ben says as Rey starts bawling, “I hope to someday be able to call you Mrs. Solo while I’m lecturing you on your shocking disregard for your own personal safety. I hope to someday proudly bear a head full of gray hair and blame every single strand on your antics. Will you marry me?”

Rey kicks the Firebolt Supreme into stasis and hurls herself onto the Yajirushi. It wobbles precariously under the sudden added weight and Ben’s eyes widen in alarm. “Jesus Christ, I almost dropped the ring,” he snaps, his face pale, as she scrambles into his lap. “It’s my grandmother Padme’s, the Organas kept it safe all these years—what were you thinking—and you could have fallen and broken your little neck—”

“Put it on me already,” she demands between sobs that tear joyously through her chest and grins wide enough to burst.

And he does, still complaining under his breath. The ring slips onto her finger like it’s always belonged, cradled in his large hands. Rey throws her arms around Ben’s neck and kisses him until they’re both breathless, floating above the world on the crests of the Scandinavian winds. The Aurora thrums against her closed eyes until she opens them so that she can beam up at him and commit everything about this moment to memory.

“I love you, professor,” she hums, her fingers curling along his jaw.

Ben smiles at her, crooked and dimpled and boyish, and for Eurydice Niima—soon to be Eurydice Solo—the universe is full of magic.