47. Chapter 47

As it turns out, that night marks one of the two times that Rey is able to see Ben while he’s in hospital.

After that—after the biggest and boldest declaration of her life—she’d held him until his breathing had evened out and he’d fallen asleep. Another nocturnal visit ends up being out of the question; Han and Leia have the monopoly on that for the rest of their secret stay in Hogwarts. Rey’s gathered that the security protocols require them to minimize moving around the castle during the busy, crowded days, and she can’t continue staying up until the wee hours waiting for them to leave. She still has classes and N.E.W.T. review to worry about, after all, and she doesn’t want to give Ben any cause to blame himself if her schoolwork suffers on his account.

She is—not content to wait, not exactly, and of course she still frets, but she is mostly just glad that his parents are here and that they’re spending time with him while he’s in such a state. Han is looking better, stronger, like he’s almost fully recovered from his injury, although there are deep worry lines on his and Leia’s brows and Rey feels like a creep whenever she watches them walk past her while she remains unseen by them outside the hospital wing.

So, yes, the second and last time that Rey sees Ben while he’s convalescing is during the day.

To be more precise, on Saturday afternoon.

It starts with Tallie bounding into the Gryffindor common room where Jess, Jannah, Rey, and Finn are holed up studying. “Professor Solo is all better!” she announces. Tallie had recently begun shadowing Madame Kalonia in her spare time, in preparation for her upcoming apprenticeship at St. Mungo’s. “He can talk a little and his vitals have stabilized—Madame Kalonia says that she’s never seen a recovery quite like it and he might even be released in a couple of days. She’s letting him see visitors now, do you lot want to pop by?”

“Absolutely.” Finn all but leaps to his feet and, at first, Rey is surprised and more than a little emotional that her best friend has apparently warmed up to the love of her life after they’d faced near-certain death together—but then Finn tosses his Potions worksheet aside with a triumphant finality. “Anything to stop balancing antidotes according to Golpalott’s Third Law.”

Rey snorts. “I guess it’s safe to say that you’ll never be a potioneer.”

“And the wizarding world is safer for it,” Finn solemnly confirms.

Rey goes with her housemates; there was never any question of that. It turns out to be quite the production. Jess keeps an assortment of greeting cards on hand and she goes to fetch one—a garishly cheerful Get Well Soon! number with a pop-up rainbow that they all take turns signing in fuchsia glitter ink. Then they fetch Seff and Rose at their respective common rooms and the next half-hour is spent wandering the grounds, picking flowers that are eventually fashioned into a bouquet with conjured scraps of crinkly paper and a bit of twine.

The students peer doubtfully at their handiwork.

“I mean, it’s not exactly a masterpiece, is it?” Finn ventures. “But it’s the thought that counts, yeah?”

“Let’s just have Rey give it to him,” Jess says airily. “She’s his favorite, so he’ll accept it.”

“Oi,” Rey growls, that same old blush heating her cheeks as the others snicker and hoot.

However, as they troop back into the castle, Rey turns Jess’ words over in her head and she has to fight a small, pleased smile. She is Ben’s favorite, isn’t she? His favorite student. His favorite girl.

He loves her. She doesn’t think that she’ll ever get tired of reminding herself of that.

They run into three of the MACUSA Aurors outside the hospital wing—Eryl Besa, Tahiri Veila, and Ganner Rhysode, who has sufficiently recovered from his ordeal.

He beams at Rey. “Ah, Miss Niima! My savior. Good show last week.”

“Excellent spellwork and top-notch reflexes,” Eryl says fervently. “None of us could have done better at your age.”

Suddenly everyone is looking at Rey. Her face is flaming. She nods her thanks and shyly tries to hide behind Finn and Rose.

“Mr. Evans and Miss Tico, you were both amazing as well,” Eryl says. “I hope your teachers weren’t too harsh.”

“We got points taken off,” Rose sighs. “Twenty apiece.”

Ganner waves a dismissive hand. “Twenty is nothing. Why, in my fifth year at Ilvermorny, I once cost Wampus a hundred and seventy points due to an incident with a snallygaster—”

Eryl elbows him in the ribs. “Let’s not give these kids any ideas when they’re this close to graduating, shall we?”  

“We were just saying goodbye to Auror—I mean, Professor Solo,” Tahiri says in that throaty, musical voice of hers, and Rey’s good mood veers slightly toward annoyance. “But we hope to see some of you in New York very soon.” Her jade-green eyes linger on Rey and Finn with a sparkle of mischief in their depths. “Best of luck with your N.E.W.T. exams.”

Flanked by Ganner and Eryl, Tahiri glides gracefully away, her long, white-gold hair fanning out behind her. The students watch the three Aurors disappear around the hallway.

“Is she a Veela?” Jannah wonders out loud once the coast is clear. “She’s got to be, yeah?”

“I think so,” says Seff.

“Without a doubt,” Finn adds.

“Makes no sense if she isn’t,” says Rose.

She’s only a quarter-Veela, Rey fumes silently to herself. While the battle in the cemetery has definitely made her grow up with regards to certain things, she is starting to suspect that she will always be at least a teensy bit jealous. And, when she takes Ben back, he will have to live with that.

She leads the way—stomps, more like it—into the hospital wing. Once they’re inside, Tallie insistently presses the bouquet into her hands.

“Well, I can’t give it to him,” Tallie sniffs over Rey’s protests. “He’s our teacher, that’d be weird—”

“It was your bloody idea to make a bouquet,” Rey hisses.

“—but the two of you fought a battle together, so it’s all right if you do it,” Tallie continues as though Rey hadn’t spoken.

Before Rey can argue any further, Madame Kalonia pokes her head out from behind the curtains draped around another patient’s bed. “Are you lot here to see Professor Solo?” At the collective nods from Rey’s group, she says, “Well, make it quick, that poor man still has a couple of potions that he needs to imbibe within the hour.”

Rey is left with no choice but to carry the bouquet. At least she has enough presence of mind to allow Tallie to usher them to Ben’s bed—otherwise, she would have ended up having to explain how she knows where it is.

Tallie parts the curtains with a cheerful, “Hullo, professor, it’s me again—Miss Lintra, that is--I’ve brought visitors—”

Just like last time, Ben is in hospital robes, reclining against a mountain of thoroughly fluffed pillows. His skin is no longer deathly pale, though, and he’s combed his hair and he’s freshly shaved and reading a book.

Or he had been reading a book—he lowers the heavy-looking tome as the students tentatively crowd around at the foot of his bed. He stares at all of them but his gaze lingers on Rey as she clutches the flowers to her chest like a shield against awkwardness.

Ben’s expression is—it’s soft. He’s not Occluding. He is visibly surprised when he notices the flowers and then his scarred features sort of crumple, into something so gentle and so close to affectionate.

Jannah takes the lead once the silence becomes unbearable. “Wotcher, Professor Solo!” she chirps, prompting Rey and the others to mumble a chorus of “Wotcher” as well.

Ben’s lush mouth quirks at the corners. “The lot of you should be studying. Your N.E.W.T.s are in a week.” His voice is hoarse at the edges, stained with the rustiness of not having been used much for the past several days.

“Yes, sir,” Seff conscientiously agrees, “but we just wanted to visit for a bit and check in on how you were doing, sir.”

“Ah, well. Thank you.” The tips of Ben’s ears are turning a rather bright shade of pink. Rey realizes that he has no idea how to handle this. That he doesn’t know what to do with himself. “But I’m fine, really. There was no need to go out of your way.”

“Nonsense, sir!” cries Jess. “You’re the best Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher we’ve ever had, why, everyone who went into the maze passed with flying colors because of you!”

“And we did well at the cemetery because of the dueling module,” Finn says earnestly. “Rose and Rey and I, we held our own because of stuff that you taught us.”

Ben immediately switches from looking unsure of the situation to looking irritated. “Don’t remind me of that. That was exceedingly dangerous, what were you thinking—”

Rey clears her throat and steps forward, holding the bouquet out to him like the peace offering that it now apparently is. “We brought you flowers, sir.”

He blinks and suddenly there it is again, the uncertainty in his brown eyes, the nervous little clench to his jaw, the pale expression torn between harried and shocked. Merlin, Ben Solo without his mask is the most fascinating sight that Rey’s ever witnessed. She could look at him forever this way.

She conjures a vase atop his bedside table and plops the bouquet into it. It’s a clumsy assortment of common blooms with colors that don’t mesh very well with one another at all, but Ben regards the whole thing with hesitant wonder, as though he’s just been gifted with a lush, sprawling garden that he doesn’t know how to care for.

“It looks very nice, Miss Nima,” he finally says.

His voice is raspy. She’s standing so close to his bed.

She shivers.

“That’s not all, professor, we made you a card, too!” A beaming Tallie hands the get-well-soon card to Ben, who takes it as gingerly as though it’s a Howler.

Rey watches Ben open the card and peruse the signatures scribbled inside. There is something almost heartbreaking about the way he holds the thin, flimsy piece of cardboard so carefully in his large hands. And, when he looks up again, he is speechless, Adam’s apple bobbing in the elegant marble column of his throat.

Her dear Professor Solo, felled low by the kindness of others.

It’s okay, Rey wishes she could tell him as their eyes meet. You can have this. You get to have this. We deserve everything—you taught me that.

Whatever he sees on her face, it makes some sort of acceptance slide over his. It is somewhat self-deprecating, but it is acceptance none the less.

“This was very thoughtful,” Ben tells his students. Awkwardly. Sincerely. “Thank you.”

✨✨✨

As Rey’s group leaves the hospital wing, Madame Kalonia asks her to stay behind so that she can check if the wound on her arm is healing smoothly. It turns out, though, that that’s only one of the reasons that the healer had wanted to meet with Rey in private.

“You didn’t come by for your contraceptive last month and for this July,” Kalonia remarks after they’ve gone into her office and she’s run a diagnostic on Rey’s arm to confirm that there’s no more soreness or any other lingering effects of the curse. “I owled you a reminder.”

In the time before, this would probably have made Rey blush and stammer out some form of weak response, but it’s amazing what surviving an actual battle can do for one’s composure. She’d held her own with and against people she considers adults, so this was… fairly nothing. “I didn’t need it last month,” she tells Madame Kalonia in even tones, as vaguely as possible when the unvarnished truth would have been along the lines of, Professor Solo and I were broken up last month and he’s the only action I’ve ever gotten, and incidentally I did get your owl but I felt too guilty to respond on account of, y’know, him Obliviating you because of our forbidden affair.

The healer cracks a wry, knowing smile. Rey is overcome by the fear that Kalonia will launch into a tangent on the pains of young love, so she hurriedly continues, “But I think that I’d like to start taking it again, if that’s all right.”

“Of course, dear. Let me just get a dose for you.”

After Rey’s imbibed the contraceptive potion, she hands the container back to Kalonia and takes in the older woman’s kindly expression. She suddenly feels as though she’s back in the dungeons, looking upon Hux and trying to apologize to him with all of her heart. It hurts too much, she almost shies away, but she forces herself to hold the healer’s gaze. To take responsibility. It was a frightened child who had cast that spell and she isn’t that. Not anymore.

“I’m sorry,” Rey says, as clearly and as sincerely as she can manage. “For not responding to your owl and for Disapparating when you told me not to—and for all the times you’ve had to patch me up. I would never have made it seven years without you.”

At first, Kalonia seems taken aback. Then she smiles again, wider and warmer, and pats Rey’s uninjured arm. “Don’t jinx it, Miss Niima. There’s less than three weeks to go before graduation. You still have time to obtain an injury that I can’t fix.”

Rey can’t help but grin in response.

As she leaves the office, she hears the healer blowing loudly into a kerchief. “Like clockwork, these seventh-year blues,” Kalonia mutters to herself before Rey has fully closed the door in her wake. “Every single one of them getting all mopey and sentimental, every single time.”

✨✨✨

The seventh years have little opportunity to continue gossiping about the cemetery battle and Rey and Finn and Rose’s involvement in it and Professor Solo’s wicked new scar. There is some talk about these things, but markedly less than there should have been in normal circumstances.

Because the N.E.W.T.s are fast approaching, and that means it is time to buckle down.

The fifth years had just wrapped up their O.W.L.s. Many had emerged in a near comatose state and their batch had sunk into a general depression over the days that followed. This only adds to the anxiety that the seventh years are feeling for their own examinations.

Rey has never revised so much in her life. She always has her nose buried in a book even while eating and she always falls asleep hours after midnight with her cheek pillowed on rolls of parchment. She and her roommates don’t talk unless they’re quizzing one another and she spends most of her free periods with Finn and Rose in the Room of Requirement, studying, studying, studying. It’s around this time that she develops what’s shaping up to be a worrying addiction to coffee.

The Friday before N.E.W.T.s, Rey blearily stumbles into the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom with the disturbing sensation that she’s less of a person and more of a hyperactive zombie.

However, once she’s past the threshold, the jolt to her system makes her feel quite alive, indeed.

She’d been expecting Jyn Erso-Andor, who’d filled in for Ben while he was in hospital. But the person elegantly slouched against the teacher’s table is over six feet tall and very wide, and he’s wearing a navy suit and his halo of sable hair is artfully tousled and his brandy-colored gaze softens when he sees her and Rey has missed him so, so much.

She doesn’t think that she’ll ever be able to look at his scar without at least some flicker of guilt, but she has to admit that, from an objective point of view, she can understand why it appears to have gotten the girls in her class in a tizzy. It bisects his face in a stark line, the harshness softened by soulful eyes and pouty lips. It makes him look dangerous, like he’s someone who can’t ever fully be tamed.

Rey sits down along with the rest of the excitedly whispering seventh years. The return of their D.A.D.A. professor is a welcome break from the monotony of constant revision. Ben regards them with a trace of mild amusement, his hands in his pockets, then he glances at the wall clock with a patented little sigh.

“Ten minutes for any and all questions,” he declares. “Go.”

A dozen hands shoot straight up into the air all at once.

Rey bites back a smile as Ben gamely fields her classmates’ eager inquiries about the battle and the dark wizards and why he’d been in the hospital wing for so long. It’s not that she wants to smile because of all that he suffered—Merlin, no—but it’s just that he’s not Occluding and everything about his manner seems so relaxed and easy. By his standards, at any rate. Even when he has to lie through his teeth about the scar having been inflicted by a dark curse when he went into the church to save Rey—even when his jaw clenches a little as he does so—there is still a certain… captivating quality. It’s effortless and somewhat self-deprecating at the same time. His plush red lips are all little twitches at the corners and fleeting smirks, dimples peeking out every once in a while, and he moves like the world rolls off of him. His dark eyes are expressive and intense.

Could it be that Ben Solo without the mask is—charming?

Rey looks around. The other seventh years definitely seem to think so; they’re hanging on to his every word. She busies herself with laying out what she needs for the morning’s lesson. It’s a necessary distraction, or else she’ll jump her professor’s bones right then and there, in front of God and everyone. She retrieves a roll of fresh parchment from her book bag along with a pot of ink and a quill, arranging them neatly on her desk, then she slides her D.A.D.A. textbook into the compartment underneath—only for it to meet resistance. Something else has been wedged in there. She reaches in gingerly—you never know what you’ll find in a desk compartment in a school for teenaged witches and wizards—and her fingers close around cardboard and crinkly plastic.

At first, Rey thinks that it’s someone’s candy wrapper that they hadn’t bothered to throw away or vanish. She’s all set to be annoyed by this, but pulling it out reveals that it’s actually an unopened packet of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans. There’s writing scrawled on the cardboard in the familiar block letters that she remembers from the note that had been attached to her Firebolt Supreme last Christmas.

DON’T FORGET TO EAT, it reads.

It’s simple and to the point, and maybe even a little terse.

But, still, it feels as though every single drop of blood in Rey’s body has turned into a million butterflies.

She carefully tucks the candy into her book bag just as Ben declares an end to the questioning and their eyes meet.

He is very quick to look away, but there’s the barest hint of a lopsided smile on his face. It reaches his eyes and her heart is aglow.

Things like this, she realizes, are exactly what she’d needed. Small gestures in the day-to-day. It goes a long way toward making the secrecy bearable, in addition to not having to second-guess herself around the shields of his Occlumency. She wonders if that makes her high-maintenance, if perhaps she’s asking for too much, but she pushes her doubts aside. She and Ben can talk through that later. They will talk about everything now.

It's the second-to-the-last Defense Against the Dark Arts lecture this school year, and the last that the graduating batch will have before their N.E.W.T.s. The rest of the period is spent reviewing everything they’ve learned, sprinkled with a handful of extra crash-courses in spells and theories that Ben suspects will come up in the exams. By the time the bell rings, everyone is back to being exhausted, and Rey—despite the sweet surprise that Ben had given her—is back to being preoccupied with her revision agenda for the day, including the upcoming Potions practical after lunch.

Thus, it startles her far more than it should have when Aleson Gray comes up to her outside the D.A.D.A classroom, looking like there’s something that’s weighing on his mind.

Rey does have to wave away an intrigued-seeming Finn and Rose, who tell her that they’ll be at the lake until lunchtime before scampering off with giggles and meaningful glances over their shoulders, but the good thing about N.E.W.T.s on the horizon is that the other students are too tired and distracted to bother giving her and Aleson a second glance as they shuffle into an alcove directly across the classroom doors.

“We’ve not had much opportunity to speak since the night of the tryouts,” he tells her. “I just wanted to check that you haven’t been transformed into a gibbering shadow of a person by dark wizards.”

“That’s a really suspicious thing to say,” Rey quips. “How d’you know so much about the inner workings of dark wizards, then?”

Aleson smirks. “You’ve caught me.” The moment of levity passes and he’s suddenly serious again, blue-gray eyes that are almost violet gazing at her somberly in the morning light, aristocratic features like stone. Then he reaches up one hand and rubs the back of his neck as though he’s somewhat embarrassed as to what he’s about to say. It’s a strangely humanizing gesture. “Lairelosse owled me when she heard that Palpatine loyalists had infiltrated Hogwarts. She was worried that I’d gotten mixed up in it. We’ve, er, started writing each other again.”

Rey blinks. “That’s brilliant,” she says, her first and most instinctive reaction. She’s genuinely happy for him, but she can’t figure out why he’s telling her the good news in a manner that’s so—cautious, for lack of a better word.

“Yes, well—” Aleson fumbles, which she’s never seen him do before, and then it just… clicks.

He’s trying to apologize for something that he’s not sure he needs to apologize for. It’s not as though she’d given him a lot to go on in the first place. He’s trying to tell her where his heart lies, without knowing if she cares.

“It’s really, truly fine.” In her haste to reassure him, she ends up sounding alarmed. Rey swallows and attempts a more normal tone of voice. “You should definitely attempt to patch things up, if that’s what you want.”

Aleson still looks conflicted. Rey finds herself remembering that moment during the career fair, when she’d realized that he’d been searching for someone to just be quiet with.

Acting on impulse, she throws her arms around him. He tenses at first, but he eventually squeezes her back, and Rey’s smiling when she pulls away. Smiling at his somewhat aghast expression.

“It wouldn’t have been fair to either of us,” she says. Let him make of that what he will. “But I’m glad that we became friends.”

You’ve helped me more than you’ll ever know, she adds silently. He’d been one of those who pulled her out of the dark hole she’d been stuck in after her and Ben’s breakup. She thinks that she would have healed much more slowly if not for a little moment by the lake and a midnight jaunt with the Tongue-Tying Lemon Squash and the castle ghosts.

Aleson turns a bit pink and he can’t quite meet her gaze, but the upward curve to the corner of his mouth appears sincere enough. “I’d walk you to wherever, but I promised my sister that I’d help her with her homework before her next class.”

Rey laughs, waving him off. “Go on, then. I’ll see you later. Revise with me and Finn and Rose in the library after Potions, yeah?”

“I’m only taking the bare minimum of N.EW.T.s, I don’t need to revise that much. But I’ll see you.” He saunters off, lifting a hand in farewell.

She rolls her eyes behind his back, watching him disappear down the hallway. Then she gets the odd sensation that she’s being watched in turn, and her gaze inadvertently drifts over to the open door of the D.A.D.A. classroom—

—and she nearly jumps out of her skin—

Ben is looming at the threshold, absolutely grim-faced. Like a disgruntled, overly large gargoyle.

“How long have you been standing there?” Rey demands, pressing a hand over her heart as its beating steadies.

“I wasn’t eavesdropping, if that’s what you mean,” Ben huffs. He retreats further into the classroom and she casts a furtive glance around the empty corridor before she follows him.

✨✨✨

Ben leads the way to his office on the upper level, littering the classroom and the spiral staircase with all manner of privacy wards and sensor spells in his wake. He wards his office, too, installing healthy amounts of locks and shields on the doors and windows. Rey can hardly begrudge him for any of it; they’ve both earned their paranoia.

She deposits her book bag on the floor and parks her bottom on the edge of his desk, reflecting on how much she has missed this perch. The inside of her chest fills with a pleasant warmth as she spies the vase of flowers on one of his bookshelves, the blooms as fresh and vibrant as the day she and her friends had picked them. He’d probably enchanted them not to wither, which she finds very sweet and endearing—and utterly unexpected, but in a good way.

Ben stands in front of her, within arm’s reach, his hands in his pockets. He studies her pensively as she idly dangles her legs off of the table, waiting for him to break the charged silence.

When he doesn’t, she huffs out a breath and speaks. “Thanks for the candy.”

“You’re welcome. Sorry I’m such a jealous bastard,” he surprises her by saying, his voice low with an exasperation that’s turned in on himself. “Sorry you have to put up with it.”

“Er…” Rey trails off, not quite sure how to respond. In addition to being guilelessly charming, Ben without Occlumency is apparently also as direct as a freight train.

“First with Hellin and then with Gray, it makes—it’s always made me miserable, seeing them hanging around you,” Ben admits. “I keep thinking about how they can give you things that I can’t. How your life would be so much easier if you could be with someone out in the open. How either of them—how anyone, really—would be free to shower you with all the affection and the adoration that you need without it becoming a scandal.” His generous mouth twists into a frown. “And then I think about how I want to be the only one who showers you with affection and adoration, so much of it that you’ll never spend another second feeling unwanted, and it drives me crazy and I just get possessed by the urge to punch something.”

He bites out this last part so darkly that Rey has to struggle against the horrifying temptation to issue the most ill-timed giggle in the history of the human race. Leave it to Ben Solo to talk himself into getting mad. But, in any case, she feels so much better about her pettiness regarding Tahiri Veila. Ben is just the same, if not maybe even a teensy bit worse.

“You didn’t seem that jealous the night you caught Aleson and me sneaking around after hours,” she remarks lightly.

His frown deepens, shoulders slumping infinitesimally in something akin to surrender. “I was Occluding. Rather heavily, I might add. It was only when I was in that state that I could let you go. Let you be happy with someone else.”

“You already make me the happiest that I’ve ever been,” Rey murmurs. And she could live forever in Ben’s shy little grin and the flush of his ears and the way that his brown eyes turn so gentle when she tells him that. He takes a step toward her but pauses once she speaks again, a question striking. “How come you stopped Occluding, then? Even before we had our talk in the cell, you didn’t have your walls up anymore.”

He looks—stricken, for lack of a better word. Like she’s unearthed a memory that causes him immense pain. It’s a testament to how much he’s willing to try for her that he dredges it up, brings it to the surface. Gives it shape.

“It haunted me, the way I ended things with you,” he rasps. “It probably will until the day I die. I kept thinking about the look on your face when I broke my promise to you and started Occluding again. I convinced myself that it had been worth it, that I could live with hurting you like that if it meant that you’d be able to move on from me. But not even these misguided intentions could diminish how much it hurt every time I remembered that I’d made you cry. Every time I saw you in class afterward and you were so pale and tired and thin. Then came the night of the tryouts. You and Luke were the only ones who still hadn’t emerged from the maze and eventually he runs out onto the pitch after Apparating beyond the castle gates, and he’s screaming about how you’d been captured by Palpatine’s remnant. I feared the worst.” The words catch in Ben’s throat. “I knew that there was a chance that you were dead. That your last memory of me was that I’d said all those horrible things to you and broken my promise. I couldn’t bring myself to Occlude after that.”

He closes the distance between them and cradles her face, tilting her chin up to examine her features like a man half-starved. “The whole time that I was running to you, I bargained,” Ben croaks. “I bargained with God, with Merlin, with whatever force that exists in the universe—that, if you were still alive, I’d stop shutting everyone out, I’d be better, I’d never hurt you or the other people that I care about ever again, I’d fight for you and give you everything that you wanted. I’d do all of these and more, you just had to still be breathing. You just had to still be with me.”

“I am,” Rey whispers, driven by the need to comfort him. To erase the shadow of despair that she sees in his eyes. “I’m still breathing. I’m still with you.”

Ben sighs, brushing the pad of his thumb across her cheek. “I’m such a mess, Rey,” he says mournfully. “I know we’ve already talked about this, but there remains a part of me that doesn’t think it’s fair to saddle you with all of my baggage. My jealousy, my penchant for fucking up—”

“Ben. Wait.” She takes his hand and laces their fingers together, folding them over her heart. The warmth of his skin pressed to hers, pressed to the fabric of her white blouse, is its own blissful refuge. “I am incredibly jealous of Tahiri Veila,” she tells him, earnest and beseeching. “I’ll probably never stop being jealous. And I was just thinking earlier that I’m probably going to need a lot from you, and it’s going to be a lot of work on your part. I also haven’t quite gotten the hang of controlling my temper and seeing things from someone else’s point of view. I think—” and here her voice lowers to what is almost a hiss, vaguely scandalized—“I think that I’m high-maintenance, Ben.”

His lips twitch. He leans forward, nuzzling at the tip of her nose. “I like maintaining you,” he rumbles through a slight smile that’s so, so close to her mouth.

She squeezes his hand in mild admonishment. She absolutely adores this side of him, but there’s more stuff to air out. “And I have bad impulses,” she says seriously. “Like what happened with Hux—I went straight to the dark. I didn’t even think about it. I was so scared of losing you, and you ended up paying the price for it, anyway.” With her free hand, she traces the scar, her fingers trembling along the jagged line from his brow to his jaw. “Point is, I have issues, too. There’s so much about myself that I still need to figure out and work on. If you think that you can manage with all of that, then I can manage with all of you as well.”

Ben gets a look on his face that Rey recognizes from when she and her classmates had given him the flowers and the card—that grateful, disbelieving acceptance. He clearly still has misgivings but it appears as though at least some of the burden has been lifted from his shoulders. He moves to kiss her but, before their lips can meet, she stops him, placing a hand on his bicep.

“I need a lot from you,” she repeats, apologetic at first, but her tone becomes steady as she hits her stride, as he gazes at her with those dark eyes that seem to say, anything, anything. “One of those is—I need to know what we are. I was too shy and awkward to bring it up, before, but I rather think that I’m done with second-guessing and assuming. You have to tell me what this is to you. What you would like to happen after I graduate. If this—” She gestures across the space between them—“has a future.”

Ben’s jaw clenches. Rey gets the impression that it’s not that he’s reluctant to be honest with her—it’s more that he’s embarrassed about what his honesty will entail. It’s those huge ears of his; they’re slowly but steadily turning as red as Christmas lights. A dead giveaway.

He suddenly braces his hands on the edge of the desk, bracketing her thighs between them. Caging her in against the wood with his broad frame. “All right.” There is a familiar intensity to his stare, eliciting in her the even more familiar feeling that she’s about to be in over her head. “Cards on the table, sweetheart,” he says, a little roughly. “I want to marry you.”

The world stops.

Every bit of it—every molecule of air, every drop of blood, every flicker of light—it all comes screeching to a halt.

“I… what…” Rey squeaks out. Her hand rises up—to push him away? No—her fingers curl at his chest, tangling with his shirt buttons, his tie. “Marriage… Ben, I’m—”

“Not right away,” he grunts. “Not even for five years or ten or—whenever you’re ready, really. And only if you want to.” The red flush has spread from his ears to his cheeks. He’s practically a tomato. “Don’t give me an answer now—I’m not asking yet. Don’t even think about it until you’re a little older—until we both are and, to tell you the truth, I’d be fine with waiting until we’re senior citizens, if you were so inclined. This isn’t meant to pressure you in any way, shape, or form. But you asked me what this was, and that’s where I’m at. That’s where I see us going. I will ask you to marry me someday, and I hope that you will say yes.”

“Oi,” Rey jokes weakly, absolutely staggered, “you’re not saying this just to get into my pants, are you?” She winces as the sentence leaves her mouth. Of all the immature—yeah, she’s definitely not ready to get married right after graduation.

But Ben doesn’t let her run from this. He doesn’t let her hide behind wisecracks. He leans in close again, burning and intent, almost hawklike. “Do you remember when I told you what I saw in the Mirror of Erised? When I said that you were wearing nothing?”

She nods, too caught up in the sheer devotion in his eyes to speak.

“That wasn’t exactly true. You were wearing a wedding ring,” he says hoarsely. “I want to be your husband one day. I want to give you a home and a family. I want you to feel loved every second of every day from now on. That is my heart’s desire.”

It’s as though Rey’s fingers move of their own volition, tightening around Ben’s navy tie and using it to yank him toward her. It’s as though her body leans in of its own accord, meeting him halfway, her lips already pursed.

She doesn’t think about any of these actions. It’s all muscle memory. It’s instinct to kiss him, in this life and in any other.

She all but slams her mouth against his, their teeth clacking together. Graceless. Desperate. But it takes only a beat, if that, for them to start moving in a familiar, beloved rhythm, sighing softly against each other’s lips. This, too, is muscle memory, as is the way he reaches one large hand around her to cup the small of her back. As is the way she grasps at his shirt and locks her thighs around his hips, bringing him closer. He is so warm and he tastes like her future and all her old sins, and she has missed him so, so much. So much that she very nearly cries from how good it feels to be kissing him, even better than she’d remembered it.

Then she feels a spatter of wetness on her cheeks and she realizes that Ben’s already crying.

“I love you,” he mumbles in between each starved, lingering kiss. “I never thought I’d get to do this again. I love you with everything I have.”

“I love you, too,” Rey sniffs and, oh, bollocks, he’s set her off and now they are once again both crying. Her hand slides up to his shoulders, feeling the breathtaking width of them strain against his suit jacket. She traces his contours and she clutches at his hair, remembering, remembering, with her fingertips, with her mouth. With each happy tear that is shed. Then she’s rolling her tongue just the way that he likes, because it’s like riding a bike, you never forget, and he’s groaning, kissing her deeper, rocking against her core.

She’s missed that, too—the tent in his trousers, the breadth and the hardness of him between her spread legs. She thinks that she hasn’t felt this alive in a long, long time. It’s not long before he’s lifting his lips from hers in order to trail a close to bruising path down the slope of her neck until her head is thrown back and she’s gasping, greedy for more—

—and then—

“Fuck. There goes the alarm.” Ben pulls away. The defeated, flabbergasted annoyance on his face softens when he notices that Rey’s staring at him in confusion. “Someone’s tripped the perimeter of the sensor spell. It extends out into the corridor and the alert is audible only to me,” he explains, pressing a chaste kiss to her forehead. “I forgot that I had consultations today. I’ll be fielding students’ last-ditch attempts to pull their grades up all morning and afternoon.” His gaze darkens as he takes in her kiss-stung lips and her rumpled blouse. “I’ll fail them all.”

“Do not do that,” Rey admonishes. She hops off of his desk and retrieves the invisibility cloak from her book bag. It would be feasible to pretend that she’d seen Professor Solo for a consultation of her own but, to quote an old adage, she’s not in the mood to be perceived by anyone else at the moment.

Mostly because she’s just been snogged to within an inch of her life and she’s pretty sure that she looks like it.

Ben escorts her to the door, which he opens at the same time that he brings down all the wards. Rey darts a quick kiss to his chin and slips on the invisibility cloak, reveling in his faint, boyishly pleased grin as she turns away.

Unseen, Rey drifts past a pair of fourth-year Hufflepuffs on the spiral steps. A brunette and a redhead, conversing in hushed tones.

“I say, Professor Solo’s even more fit with the scar, isn’t he?” says the brunette. “Makes him look all mysterious-like.”

The redhead giggles. “Wonder if he’s got a girlfriend. I’m sure he does, tall bugger like him.”

He does, Rey confirms smugly to herself as she leaves the classroom. It’s me. I’m the girlfriend.

And he loves me, and he wants to marry me one day.

She shouldn’t have been worried about possibly being high-maintenance. The man is already hearing wedding bells; he just might be more high-maintenance than she is.

Rey takes off the invisibility cloak once the coast is clear and she decides to meet up with Finn and Rose by the lake. She feels like she floats all the way there, happiness and contentment dancing at her heels.

✨✨✨

Come Thursday of the next week, though, Rey doesn’t feel happy or content in the slightest. And she most certainly doesn’t feel like she’s floating—or perhaps she is, but in a barely-aware-of-her-surroundings way, brought on by lack of sleep and too much caffeine.

The entire weekend had been spent revising, taking quick breaks only to eat and to go to the bathroom and to nap in brief spates. On Monday, representatives from the Examinations Authority had arrived at the castle, and the seventh years were plunged headlong into the Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Tests that would make or break their futures over a two-week period.

Rey’s first exam had been Charms. Just like O.W.L.s in fifth year, she sat the theory portion in the morning and then the practical in the afternoon. All in all, Charms hadn’t been that bad, she got within three questions of finishing the written before the timer ran out and she’d definitely aced the practical. She and Rose had then spent several hours consoling Finn, who’d mixed up his incantations and caused the egg cup that he was supposed to be making do cartwheels to sprout a fanged mouth and try to devour the examiner.

Transfiguration on Tuesday had gone fairly decently for Rey as well. There’d come a point that her mind blanked during the written and she completely made up a definition for Crinus Muto on the spot—thinking back on it, it probably wasn’t a spell to turn dogs into criminals—and during the practical she’d somehow vanished her examiner’s eyebrows when she was supposed to conjure a grand piano. She’d gotten everything else right, though; she strongly feels that.

It was on Wednesday that Rey’s composure had begun to fray. The Ancient Runes N.E.W.T. had been mostly theoretical; the students were required to translate a fifty-page spell book written especially for this exam and then cast ten successful spells from it at the end of the day. The runes were a dizzying mixture of Druidic, Elder Futhark, and Gnomish. Rey’d made it through the first twenty pages all right, but then mental fatigue had caught up with her and she’d plodded and flubbed her way through the rest while the examiners watchfully patrolled the aisles. In the end, Rey had turned in a translated text that was at least forty-percent gibberish and, during the practical, only six of her incantations had worked.

She’d botched it. Utterly and completely. She’d ruined her life.

Rey lets this slow horror roll through her as she lays in bed in a nearly comatose state on Thursday morning. She doesn’t have any exams today but she doesn’t even have the time for a good cry about the trash heap that her career prospects have amounted to. Because she has to revise for the Potions N.E.W.T. tomorrow.

Why bother? she thinks, staring up at the ceiling of her dorm room. I’m just going to fail it, anyway, like I failed Ancient Runes. I’m just going to end up disappointing everyone.

No New York for her. No Auror job.

“Eurydice!” Tallie shrieks at nine in the morning when Rey still hasn’t crawled out of bed. “We are not doing this, do you hear me? We are not surrendering! Don’t you dare give up on me now!”

With the kind of manic gleam in her eyes that can only be induced by conditions of high stress, Tallie grabs both of Rey’s legs and hauls her out of bed, pushing a jumbo-sized thermos of piping hot coffee into her hands.

Rey dutifully spends most of the day studying Potions with Tallie, Jess, and Jannah. The four of them work together and make good progress but, in the late afternoon, Rey’s brain reaches a point wherein it absolutely refuses to absorb new information. And she’s wracked by nerves again.

Jess has apparently arrived at that point as well. “Right, you lot.” She stands up, slamming her textbook shut. “I’m off to get laid.”

“Whatever works for you,” Tallie mutters, her nose buried in seven years’ worth of notes, “just come back right away so you can quiz me on Felix Felicis. And tell Kaydel that I’d like my hairpin back if she’s not using it anymore.”

After Jess has flounced out of the dorm, Rey stares at a page of her textbook that she can no longer process, the words swimming together as Tallie and Jess’ exchange plays on loop in her ears.

Off to get laid.

Whatever works.

Huh.

A little while later, Rey’s knocking on the door of Ben’s office. After his last class has let out.

✨✨✨

She will say this about Ben Solo—for all his flaws, he is a very attentive boyfriend.

All it takes is one look at the pale-faced, bleary-eyed state that she’s in for him to gather her into his arms, murmuring assurances into her hair as he’s locking the door and casting all the usual wards.

“I think I failed Ancient Runes and I think I’m going to fail Potions,” she wails plaintively into his shirtfront, her tears coming hard and fast.

He holds her and lets her blubber all over him for a bit, and there’s something very cathartic about just crying and crying, with someone there to catch her. Once she’s quieted down, he picks her up and carries her over to the couch, depositing her gently against the cushions and pulling off her trainers and her socks. With no classes and no exams, she’s in casual attire today—a fraying bargain-bin red skirt and a floral-printed top. He rubs her feet with a soothing pressure until she’s all but mush under his strong fingers, and she hugs a throw pillow to her chest and lets herself be comforted and cared for.

“What can I do for you?” Ben finally asks, his thumb skimming along the curve of her ankle. “What do you need right now?”

“Could—” Rey sniffs—“could you take your shirt off, please?”

She hardly knows what she’s saying. She’s just a vibrating ball of coffee and insomnia.

Ben raises an eyebrow, but silently complies. He shrugs out of his blazer and folds it over the arm of the couch, soon followed by his checkered button-down. He removes his shoes and his socks as well, and that leaves him in only his pair of tailored dark trousers.

Rey takes a moment—or, all right, several moments—to drink in the sight of his broad chest with its scattering of freckles and his chiseled abdomen with the dusting of dark hair leading further down. Her brain can definitely absorb this information. A pleasant little thrill courses through her, all shivery and excited.

She holds out her arms in a wordless plea and he goes to her, stretching out beside her on the couch, gathering her close. Her fingers wander over his exquisitely defined torso, retracing all their well-loved paths, and he nuzzles into the crook where her neck meets her shoulder as he reaches down with one hand to cup her bottom, patting and squeezing with a fond, idle possessiveness.

She’s missed this. Every touch—and the feeling, of being surrounded by him, of being enfolded in his warmth and his strength—it’s all so familiar and yet it’s as though it’s the first time all over again, their hearts beating in slow tandem, their every breath soft and sure.

“You technically need only five Exceeds Expectations to qualify for the Auror program,” he reminds her after a while. “So, even if you think you didn’t do too well in Study of Ancient Runes, it’s not over yet. Not by a long shot.”

Merlin, she’d needed to hear that so badly. She hadn’t realized just how much. She relaxes, but only enough to wrinkle her nose at him. “And how sure are you that I’m even going to get at least five?”

“I know you are.” He tangles his fingers in her hair, craning his neck so that he can strew light kisses along the line of her jaw. “You are an exceptional witch. The events of this past year alone have proven that. You can do anything.”

She hides a smile against the elegant jut of his collarbone. “Thank you, Ben.”

“Want me to quiz you in Potions?”

Rey makes a face. “Now? Really?” Then her mind yells at her to pay attention, because his tone has gone strangely raspy with—

—with the devil’s own mischief—

“What kind of teacher would I be if I didn’t help my favorite student review for her exams?” There’s laughter in his voice even as his stupidly big hand hikes up the hem of her skirt and, Merlin, she just wants to spend all of eternity making him sound like that, so young and carefree.

“Fine,” Rey concedes on a teasing lilt. “Hit me with your best shot, professor.”

Ben rolls on top of her, his solid weight pinning her to the couch. She loves him like this, smiling down at her with his eyes crinkling at the corners, waves of lush dark hair framing his intriguingly angular face and the ivory column of his throat.

“What are the three main ingredients of Pepperup Potion?” he asks.

“Bicorn horn, mandrake root, and jewelweed,” she says promptly.

He rewards her with a lingering kiss that lasts too soon. “Why is Essence of Venomous Tentacula not considered deadly despite being a poison?”

“It has no known lethal effects, only a sensation of burning in the insides and the drinker’s skin turning purple,” Rey chirps, which earns her another kiss.

And so on and so forth. More questions. More kisses, each one more heated than the last, until she’s panting and he looks his fair share of rattled, his eyes at half-mast with the beginnings of desire.

His hand returns to her skirt, wandering underneath it, toying with the waistband of her knickers. “How can one mask the foul taste of Wolfsbane Potion?”

“You can’t. It’s—” Rey breaks off with a sharp gasp as Ben slides two fingers down her underwear, curling them against her damp entrance. “It’s—rendered ineffective—if you add anything else,” she manages to scrape out.

Ben mouths at her neck, picking up where they’d left off last Friday. The tip of his thick middle finger delves inside her and she instinctively thrusts her hips, enveloping him to the knuckle.

“Shit,” he mutters under his breath. “So tight, I’d forgotten—” He clears his throat. “How can the use of spine of lionfish in Wiggenweld Potion be reconciled with the fact that it’s also an ingredient for a potent herbicide not fit for human consumption?”

“In Wiggenweld, the—the spines are added whole,” Rey whimpers. “Whereas, for the herbicide, they’re crushed—into a powder—”

That’s all the impetus that Ben needs to work his way in deeper, pumping gently. Opening her up for him.

It’s frankly amazing how wet she’s already gotten, and so quickly, too. It’s as though her body is making up for lost time. Like she’d been waiting for so long, the way that the earth waits for spring.

“We’re going to have to stretch you out again, Miss Niima,” Ben says, all serious and gravel-voiced as he eases a second finger into her. “This pretty little pussy went too long without my cock in it. How do you extract Syrup of Hellebore?”

“What…” Merlin, how does he expect her to concentrate when he’s doing that, when he’s saying all these filthy things? Rey screws her eyes shut and tries, anyway. “You—you boil it. For—for an hour…”

“Good girl. Excellent.” A few more thrusts and a playful nip to her neck, and she’s coming with a soft cry, coming for the first time in nearly two months, coming so hard that it’s like the world shatters.

Ben lazily kisses her through her aftershocks, and then it becomes clear that he’s not done with her yet. Her heart rate has barely evened out when he slides down her body, tugging off her drenched knickers and her frayed skirt. He peers at her from between her spread legs, that not-so-nice glint in his dark eyes. “How do you prepare honey for an Invigoration Draught?”

Rey shivers as his warm breath ghosts against her still-twitching cunt. The shiver emerges in her voice as well. “D-dilute it w-with w-water.”

“Correct.” His tongue darts out, flicking against her clit. She nearly springs off of the couch but he holds her still, one hand pressed inexorably to her stomach. “The solution is called honeywater, isn’t it, Miss Niima? Not too creative a label, but succinct. It tastes sweet, too. But I can think of sweeter things.”

And his mouth works its much-missed magic, lapping and sucking so unbearably slowly and at times stopping to ask her yet another Potions question. She writhes and she moans and she thinks that she’s going to die from this kind of drawn-out pleasure that has no end in sight.

Ben is relentless. Pushing her to do her best, as always. He doesn’t let her come until she’s recited Gunhilda de Gorsemoor’s final theorem on the cure for dragon pox. It’s only then that he seals his plush lips around the small bundle of nerves at the apex of her thighs and sucks.

Rey sees stars. She seizes up and she screams and she rolls her hips into the pulse of his mouth and she practically soaks his face.

She can’t even find it in her to be embarrassed by that. She’s too dazed, flying too high. And, in any case, he seems to love it, because when he comes up for air his pupils are blown wide with lust and he all but pounces on her mouth, kissing her and kissing her, letting her taste herself on his tongue.

He doesn’t stop her review any time soon, though. As he pushes her shirt up her sternum—as he kisses every freckle on her breasts—as he turns her nipples into hard little peaks with his fingers and his tongue—he takes her through a whole damn apothecary’s worth of potion ingredients, quizzing her on their effects. She finally understands what it means to be driven to madness. Only he can make her so.

He offers her only the briefest of respites when he pulls away to unbuckle his belt, to peel off his trousers and his briefs. She watches hungrily, her breath emerging in harsh tatters, and the strangest thing is—

The strangest thing is that, when his erection pops into view, Rey is overwhelmed by a surge of affection that cuts through her arousal like a burst of static. She has missed this part of him beyond belief, this long, thick, angry thing with its veins and its pink flush, this thing that’s…

Even bigger than she remembers.

She swallows.

Kneeling between her legs, Ben tracks the movement in her throat with predatory eyes.

He drops one heavy hand on her bent knee. His other hand, he wraps it around his shaft, fist bobbing in measured strokes.

“Claw of griffin.” He tosses out the next question with an air of smug challenge.

“Strength…” Rey’s mouth has gone dry, watching him swell. She licks her lips and tries again. “Grants immense strength.”

“Very good, Miss Niima.” Ben poises himself at her entrance. “What about feather of the Jobberknoll?”

“Truth, sir,” she grates out. “Truth and memory.”

“Fantastic.” He glides the tip of his cock along her outer walls, gilding her in precome and her own wetness. “You’ve gotten every question right so far. Such a good student. Such a good girl.” She feels his low and rumbling praise in her clit. She loses herself in it. “Do you know what good girls get, Miss Niima?”

“I—” Don’t say it, Rey, no—“I hardly think that that question will come up in the exam, sir.”

Ben freezes. His gaze turns from wolfish to, well, owlish. His jaw drops, lips forming an o of shock.

Rey claps her hands over her mouth in order to muffle a sudden onset of the giggles.

It doesn’t exactly work, but Ben soon does it for her, leaning down and kissing her so hard that she forgets how to laugh. How to even breathe.

“You’re impossible,” Ben grumbles between even more kisses. “Literally the most infuriating witch to ever walk this earth. I wouldn’t have you any other way.”

And, with a shift of his hips, he sinks inside her.

At last.

At long last.

She digs her teeth into the round of his shoulder as her walls stretch to accommodate him. She really had forgotten how big he is. She’s whining a bit, overloaded with sensation. He fills her until there is no space left for anything else.

“As I was saying,” Ben mutters, so pointedly that she almost laughs again—but then he’s moving and she can’t, she can only issue tattered little moans at the friction, the slip, the closeness, the wonder.

Soon enough, the time for humor is past. Because here and now it’s muscle memory, it’s all the things they’d been denied for so long, it’s his mouth eagerly swallowing her cries and it’s her hips rocking against his and it’s all the promises of good things on the horizon that she can reach if she just keeps chasing it. It’s the wildness, sweeping through their forms. Taking over.

“That’s it, Miss Niima,” Ben growls in Rey’s ear as she spirals closer and closer to the edge and she starts making the most strangled, most animalistic noises to let him know it. “Good girls get their marvelous little brains fucked out. Good girls get to come with their professor’s cock crammed into their tight pink pussies. Good girls get to have everything they want.”

“Yes, sir, please,” Rey hears herself moan. She wraps her arms around Ben’s neck, clinging to him for dear life as he picks up the pace. “Want to come, Professor Solo—need it so bad—missed you so much—”

“I missed you, too.” Ben’s large fingers curl around the base of her throat. “So, so much.” He swirls his hips in just the right way, hitting that spot inside her, and she’s unraveling, falling apart around him, falling under his rough thrusts and into his words both filthy and sweet. “Jesus Christ. You have no idea. The dreams I had about you.”

And then he’s falling with her as well, spilling inside her with a groan that sounds utterly broken, flooding her with a rush of heat that soothes her aching soul as it coats her inner walls.

Rey feels the most—intense—sort of peace. The stress of N.E.W.T. exams melts away and every bone in her body melts with it. Ben collapses on top of her and covers her face and her neck in kisses, the two of them still joined. She cards her fingers through his hair, drowsy and blissed out, her eyes drifting shut.

“Last question,” he murmurs, because he can’t leave well enough alone and she supposes that she has no choice but to love him for it. “What are the known effects of billywig stings?”

“Giddiness,” she breathes out with a faint, sleepy smile, “followed by levitation.”