40. Chapter 40

When Zade Kalliday dumped Jessika Pava way back when—in fourth year—Rey had been treated to a crash course in the five stages of a breakup. She couldn’t have avoided it even if she wanted to, given that she’d been sharing a room with Jess since they were eleven.

It had just never crossed her mind back then that the lesson would one day apply to her as well.

The first stage is denial. Rey ends up sleeping in the Room of Requirement that night; she tells herself that it’s because she’s too bloody shattered to walk all the way back to her dorm but, honestly, there’s a part of her that hopes Ben will change his mind and retrace his steps—to the seventh-floor corridor, to her.

Of course, that doesn’t happen, and she stumbles out into the gray light of a new dawn with bleary eyes that are all dried up from crying. She doesn’t go to class that day and the next, feigning a migraine to her roommates who are thankfully conscientious about bringing her meals and notes and homework. Rey spends a grand total of two days huddled under her blanket; Tallie, Jess, and Jannah tiptoe around her and speak in soft voices, aware of the fact that she’s at the very least doing poorly even though she suspects that they’re starting to not buy her excuse.

It's not until Friday that Rey crawls out of bed to go to class, briefly energized by the prospect of seeing Ben. All throughout her morning ablutions and the breakfast she picks at under the weight of Finn’s concerned glances, she fantasizes about Ben asking her to stay behind after he’s dismissed everyone else. She fantasizes about him going down on his knees and telling her that he’d been wrong, that he can’t live without her. She fantasizes about him pleading with her to take him back—and maybe she will, maybe she won’t—or, well, she will, but it’d be nice for him to sweat a little, even if it’s just for a moment—

However, when she walks into the D.A.D.A classroom, Rey is more than a bit surprised to find herself hurled headlong into the second stage—anger—at the sight of Ben.

He just looks so supremely unbothered. He avoids turning his head in her direction during class but, otherwise, it could have been just any normal week for him. She is incensed. And, the longer she sits at her desk and pretends to be listening to his lecture, the more her fury builds.

Logically, Rey knows that Ben is putting his Occlumency skills to good use. His features are wooden, as is his tone. But she’s not really in the mood for logic right now. She’s hurting. And her mind keeps circling back to when he first rejected her. The whirlwind events of that Halloween and the strange November that followed.

Ben looming over her outside the castle, drenched in rainwater and moonlight and the remnants of dark magic. “It cannot happen again.” Ben in the sun-dappled greenhouse, where the air was heavy with the scent of sweet flowers and earthy lushness, where he’d recoiled from her desperate kiss. “We can’t.”

Ben in his office, the spasm in the hollow beneath his eye, the phantom sensation of his come still burning on the skin of her stomach. “We shouldn’t have done this.”

Merlin. Looking back on their fractured history just makes Rey feel so—tired. Maybe she’s the one to blame for all of this, for being so persistent when he’d kept pushing her away… but he’d come to her of his own volition, hadn’t he, that day in the library? “Here I am. I’ve made up my mind. If you’ll still have me.”

Rey mulls everything over with Ben’s dry, clinical lecture as her backdrop. Eventually, she arrives at the conclusion that Professor Solo does not, in fact, know what he wants, and she can’t keep doing this forever. She can’t keep letting him string her along on threads of second-guessing and rapture and heartbreak. It’s all very fine for him, isn’t it, but she’s the one whose studies are taking a hit, who can’t even talk to her dearest friends about this one thing.

She manages to get herself so worked up that, by the time class is over, she practically storms out of the room.

The back of her neck prickles as though a pair of eyes has slid over to her and is watching her leave, but she resists the urge to glance over her shoulder and check.

After lunch, though, Rey’s anger gives way to something else.

Because after lunch is Potions. And having to sit there and look at Hux while he drones on and on for an eternity… it’s almost too much to bear.

The guilt eats Rey alive.

In the gloom of the clammy dungeons, Hux paces back and forth, hands folded behind his back as he discusses the theory behind the Elixir of Life, a legendary, immortality-bestowing concoction that it is said can be procured from the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s easy to discern where facts end and Hux’s musings begin; he prefaces the latter with variations on “I believe that…” and “I have observed…” And, the thing is, his musings really are brilliant, he’s synthesizing potioneering and alchemy in a way that’s got even the most lackadaisical students on the edge of their seats, because for all his flaws Armitage Hux is the sharpest Potions master of his generation, and the only reason that he's not working for the Ministry or some cushy private company is his father’s disgrace.

And Rey had tried to kill him a few days ago.

She hadn’t been thinking. She’d followed her gut. Chasing an instinct to protect what was important to her, she’d fallen back on something that her magic remembered. On what had in that moment seemed like the quickest solution to the problem at hand.

Perhaps that’s what the Dark Arts are. That certain wildness, that easy way out.

But at the cost of the soul—and Ben knows that better than anyone. And he’d made sure that she wouldn’t pay the price.

Doesn’t that mean he cares for you? asks a voice in the back of Rey’s head. In fact, if she replays Ben’s actions during their time together, it forms a picture of someone who cares.

However, he hadn’t cared enough to fight for her—

“Oi, Rey.”

She blinks. Finn had been the one who spoke, in a furtive whisper; he and Rose are looking at her in concern.

“Are you all right?” he continues. “You’re awfully pale.”

“Is your migraine back?” Rose presses, also speaking in hushed tones underneath Hux’s arctic monotone. “D’you need to go to the hospital wing?”

Before Rey can respond, Finn suddenly leans forward, squinting at her. “Here, are you—crying?”

Is she? Now that he’s mentioned it, she can feel traces of wetness leaking out of the corners of her eyes, and she is absolutely mortified, hurriedly blinking away her tears and Occluding before anyone else can catch on—

“Miss Tico. Mister Evans. Miss Niima.”

The three of them flinch. Hux is glowering at them while the rest of the class silently watches.

“Would you care to share what is so vital that it takes precedence over my lecture?” Hux demands. “Mister Evans?”

“Nothing, sir,” Finn mumbles, his attention abruptly zeroing in on his notes.

“Take five points from Gryffindor, then,” Hux sniffs. “As for yourself, Miss Tico? Do I dare hope for some clarity?”

“Can’t think of anything more important than Potions, sir,” Rose says blithely, flipping through her textbook.

“Such a quaint attempt at sarcasm deserves to be awarded with a five-point deduction from Hufflepuff.” If there’s ever a voice that sounds like an eyeroll, it would be Hux’s. “Last but not least—Miss Niima. What do you have to say for yourself?”

Rey can only stare at Hux in all his peevishness and remember him as a crumpled body on the floor of the D.A.D.A. classroom. She can only say what she means.

“I’m sorry, professor.” Every syllable comes out painstakingly clear and sincere as she holds his gaze, her heart in her throat. “I’m truly sorry. I’ll never do it again. I promise.”

Finn knocks over a bottle of ink in his haste to gape at her. Rose’s eyebrows nearly disappear into her hairline. The other students all look at Rey like she’s just announced that she’s dropping out of school in order to devote her years to studying the life cycle of the Crumple-Horned Snorkack.

Hux, meanwhile, appears to be a mixture of belligerently confused and distinctly uncomfortable. “Er. Yes. Well. Another five points from Gryffindor.” He collects himself with a huff and resumes pacing the aisles. “As I was saying, there is a historical instance of a rogue alchemist selling a fake panacea made from lard and corn starch, which gave the drinker boils instead of immortality. However, I have reviewed that conman’s methods, and I believe that his process had some merit. Certainly not in terms of ingredients, but the emulsification…”

Rey endures the rest of the period, and then she escapes from Finn and Rose’s good intentions by claiming that she needs to consult Madame Kalonia for stronger migraine relief, hurrying away before they can offer to accompany her.

But she doesn’t actually consult Madame Kalonia. She’d rather not see Madame Kalonia ever again, if it were up to her. In the state that she’s in, one look at the healer’s kind, oblivious smile will definitely trigger a full-on breakdown.

One week passes painfully into the next, and then another. Ben continues to be polite and distant in class and Rey continues to cycle between anger and denial, although at some point toward the end of May she realizes that she’s reached the bargaining stage, which is every bit as horrible as it had been when Jess was stuck in it.

One if only after another flickers through her thoughts like droplets of the last of the spring rains that speckle the newly lush campus grounds in silver.

If only she hadn’t gotten carried away so completely that she’d forgotten herself after the Quidditch match. Surely it hadn’t been fair to expect Ben to assume all of the responsibility in keeping their secret safe.

If only she’d aimed better and landed that first Obliviate on Hux—and, after she hadn’t, if only she’d kept her cool.

If only she’d been a better… partner or girlfriend or whatever she’d been to Ben. Less hotheaded. More confident, both in bed and out of it. If only she’d been more sophisticated and less prone to letting every single thing cut so deeply, then maybe he would have stopped thinking of her as just a kid a long time ago.

If only she had been someone worth fighting for.

Once this line of thinking has seized hold of Rey’s mind, it is the devil of a time getting it to let go, however briefly. She can Occlude against the worst of it in sufficient enough measure that she doesn’t flounder too much with regard to schoolwork, but she has trouble sleeping. And eating. And just generally moving.

Her nights are spent tossing and turning in bed, replaying everything that Ben has said and done over the last several months, replaying what she herself has said and done in return, before she finally succumbs to a fitful slumber plagued by bad dreams. Then she wakes up and she goes through the motions of each day feeling like she’s walking underwater. Food tastes like nothing.

Rose and Seff and Finn and Rey’s roommates and all the other Gryffindors are growing more and more concerned. Rey can tell. But she doesn’t even have the energy to come up with a solid excuse, and so she just… doesn’t. She withdraws, outrightly sinking into sullen silence when pressed.

She’s definitely in the fourth stage now. The depression stage. Jess had gotten through hers fairly quickly, but then again Jess had been able to vent to Tallie and to the unwilling hostages that were her other roommates.

Rey has no one that she can share this pain with.

The academic calendar is a saving grace; it’s N.E.W.T.s in a handful of weeks, and the sheer volume of coursework that their professors dole out puts even the gargantuan loads of the previous months to shame. Everyone is busy revising and there’s not a lot of time to focus on Eurydice Niima and her problems, and she prefers it that way.

She comes to dread Fridays so much that it’s almost nauseating. It doesn’t escape her notice that Ben starts slanting more lingering gazes and deeper frowns at her with each week that passes, but some latent survival instinct kicks in and makes her shy away from thinking about it too much.

Because he doesn’t know what he wants, and she cannot go through this again.

✨✨✨

On a Saturday right smack in the middle of June, Rey decides to try and make the most out of the pleasant weather and while the afternoon away on the shores of the Black Lake. Her friends are at Hogsmeade; Rose had begged Rey to come along but she hadn’t been in the mood when even just getting out of bed these days is already such a chore.

Besides, Hogsmeade weekends are a rare reprieve from all the studying, and she doesn’t want to ruin it for everyone else with all her moping about.

Rey sits cross-legged on the green grass by the dark water, absentmindedly noting the delicate pattern of ripples on its surface that are caused by a mild breeze. It doesn’t take long for her to realize that her spur-of-the-moment decision had been a grave mistake—alone, with only her thoughts for company and no schoolwork to occupy them, the memory of the time Ben found her at this spot plays behind her eyes despite her best efforts to keep it at bay.

She’d fallen asleep here, on the grass. She’d been dreaming of him and he had called her name and she’d woken up to find him standing over her, looking away, jaw clenched, because her skirt had ridden up her thighs.

Rey wonders if that had been the moment Ben started thinking of her as more than just another one of his students, or if it had been earlier or later than that. She’d never asked. He’d swept her up into his maelstrom and it had been all so exhilarating and new and looking back on all of it now there are countless things that she’d left unsaid—countless words that she’d swallowed back down—because she’d been so shy and awkward and afraid of messing up.

A shadow falls over her, cast by the golden sunlight.

Rey looks up into a pair of blue-gray eyes that are almost violet in the radiance of early summer.

“Not a big fan of Hogsmeade, I take it?” says Aleson Gray, sounding like what she’s beginning to suspect is his usual self—bored and unimpressed.

“Hogsmeade’s all right, I just wasn’t up for it today,” Rey says cautiously. “In any case, considering that you’re here and not there, you’re probably less of a fan of it than I am.”

The corner of his mouth twitches. “You could be right. Everyone’s too bloody happy when they’re there.”

She snorts. It’s such an echo of her current state of mind that she warms to him a little, even though hers had been brought on by a secret breakup while his is most likely brought on by the fact that he’s just being… Aleson.

He appears to relax the teensiest bit at the sound of her caustic mirth, but then they’re descending into a silence that stretches on long enough to become awkward.

It’s not like they have a lot to talk about, after all. It’s not like they’re friends or anything.

“Are you all right?” Aleson finally asks.

“How’s your sister doing?” Rey prompts at the same time.

They blink at each other.

She’s seized by the strangest urge to laugh—and so she does. And it feels good to laugh after so long. Like a weight has been lifted from her soul, if only for just a fleeting moment.

Aleson smirks down at her. “Lizzie’s fine. And, judging from your performance at the last Quidditch game of the season, I managed to refrain from contaminating you with her bad luck germs as well.”

Rey flushes red as she remembers her performance in excruciating detail. “It wasn’t exactly the most graceful of catches, was it?”

“Not even a little bit,” he agrees. “But it will certainly be immortalized into Hogwarts legend.”

She groans, resisting the urge to bury her face in her hands. But at least the next round of silence that they fall into is more companionable.

“It was pretty cool,” Aleson acknowledges after a while. “How you stood up on the broom and miraculously didn’t fall over. For the first several seconds, anyway.”

“Er, thanks.” Rey still can’t quite deal with compliments, even after all this time and especially from a snooty Slytherin, but she’s improved enough to smile and to be clear about her gratitude. “You never struck me as the type to attend the matches.”

“I am as interested in Quidditch as I am in going to Hogsmeade,” Aleson deadpans. “But, since this is our last year and I hadn’t been to a single game, I figured that it was now or never and I might as well see what all the fuss was about.”

Rey hates the fact that this whole conversation is reminding her of Ben. Of how he hadn’t understood the appeal of Quidditch at all but had done his best because it had been important to her. She is having a hard time reconciling all of the sweet things he did with the harsh way he ended it—ended them.

“Niima,” Aleson suddenly ventures. Only to pause, a trace of discomfort flickering over his sharp features.

It belatedly comes rushing back to her that he’d asked if she was all right. She peers at him guardedly from her spot down on the grass, wondering what he sees. What he makes of her now that she feels like she’s only a fraction of her former self.

He regards her with a flinty, imperious solemness that gives her the impression of someone weighing his words and mentally casting ahead for a path forward, trying to determine what to say that will produce the best outcome.

“I don’t think you’ve been eating,” he tells her at last.

A breath hitches in her throat. Her friends have noticed, she knows that because they’ve been shoving all sorts of cuisine in her face to try to tempt her, but no one’s ever stated it so plainly until now.

It elicits a certain shift in Rey’s perspective. It’s as though she’d had a vague notion that something was wrong and now it’s been concretized for her, given voice, given a shape.

Aleson roots around in the pocket of his robes, eventually producing a miniature pumpkin pasty. He taps it with his elm wand—a sleek, silvery, elaborately carved instrument that looks like it’s worth more than Rey’s life—and the pasty expands to its original size.

“Here.” He holds it out to her and she is far too surprised to do anything more but take it from him. He waves off her stuttered gratitude with a hint of impatience. “I don’t know what happened, Niima, but you should at the very least be eating. And perhaps get some sleep, too, while you’re at it.”

“What, at the same time?” Rey quips.

Aleson rolls his eyes at her and Rey feels marginally better about herself and the sorry mess that she’s in, enough so that she dimples at him shyly.

And then her gaze slides over his shoulder and lower to the right, and her heart skips a beat at the sight of a tall, broad figure striding across the grounds.

Ben has his back turned to her and is clearly on his way to the castle. There’s a brown paper bag clutched in his hand. Maybe he’d been visiting Chewie and the Care of Magical Creatures professor had given him one of his homemade treacle cakes—or something, whatever, Rey doesn’t know and she tells herself very firmly that she doesn’t care as she surreptitiously watches him disappear through the castle doors.

She definitely doesn’t care, and she definitely doesn’t wonder if he’d seen her and what would have happened if he had and she’d been alone. She will plow through the bargaining and depression stages of her post-breakup haze and then she will hit the fifth and last one, which is acceptance.

And then she will move on with her life, and the years will pass and Ben Solo will be just a memory. Just an anecdote from her reckless youth. Just someone who had happened to her back when she was eighteen.

After next month, she won’t ever see him again.

“Niima, I realize that you’ve not bitten into the pumpkin pasty yet, but the house-elves made it, I’m sure it’s not so bad that you need to preemptively cry.”

Her eyes dart back to Aleson’s face. His manner is quietly teasing, but there’s the faintest shred of real worry lurking underneath.

Rey Occludes, packing away all of her thoughts about Ben.

“I’m fine,” she says. “I had something in my eye, is all.”

✨✨✨

That night, Rey takes a long, hard look at her reflection in the mirror by her bed.

She doesn’t like what she sees.

She’s lost some weight. Her cheekbones are more prominent—almost harshly so. Combined with dark circles of fatigue under her eyes and the sickly pallor of her complexion, the effect is very nearly skeletal. Her clothes hang loosely off of her frame.

The girl in the mirror might as well have been a stranger, gazing at Rey with wide, sad eyes.

I have to snap out of it. The epiphany shoots through her veins like ice. I’ve spent nearly an entire month wallowing and pushing my friends away.

I have to snap out of it, or else there will be nothing left of me.

As if on cue, the door bursts open, revealing Tallie, Jess, and Jannah hovering at the threshold. Tallie and Jess are giggling and bouncing on their heels; Jannah is grinning, her dark eyes alight with mischief.

“Rey, let’s go,” Tallie whispers. “Finn’s waiting for us in the common room and Seff, Kaydel, and Rose are outside, by the portrait hole. Come along now.”

“Come along where?” Rey asks, severely baffled.

“The dungeons,” Jess replies. “We’re invited to a deathday party.”

✨✨✨

Rey ends up not bringing the invisibility cloak even though they will most certainly get into trouble if they’re caught wandering the halls after lights out. It’s a decision brought on by a sense of solidarity; she doubts that the cloak’s magical field will expand to cover eight rebellious teenagers. All for one and one for all.

Besides, there’s a much-missed thrill to be had in sneaking down the corridors, trying to stay as quiet as possible, dodging Jess and Kaydel’s fellow prefects and Unkar Plutt and Mr. Pancakes. Rey feels freer and freer with each step that she takes, her friends’ silhouettes scurrying alongside hers in the summer moonlight, the June night beaming with promise and possibility amidst the ancient stone of Hogwarts.

Finn and Rose fill Rey in on the way to the dungeons. The event is being hosted by Nearly Headless Nimi, the Gryffindor ghost—he’d floated by and invited them on their way back in from Hogsmeade—but it’s actually a surprise party for Exar Kun, the Bloody Baron, who is the resident ghost of Slytherin House.

“Today’s the five-hundredth anniversary of the day Exar Kun stabbed himself with the same knife he used to kill his mentor,” says Finn. “He’s going to be so mad—always been a grumpy phantom, hasn’t he---I can’t imagine that he’ll take kindly to a bit of a do in his honor—”

“Nimi’s been trying to draw Exar out of his shell for centuries,” says Rose. “Maybe tonight is when he finally succeeds.” She elbows Rey in the ribs none too gently. “Speaking of drawing people out of their shell…”

Rey would have laughed if it hadn’t been imperative that they stay quiet. She smiles instead, a little teary, a whole lot heartfelt. “I’m sorry. I just…” Her smile fades as she scrambles for a suitable excuse, hating that she can never tell anyone the truth. “I guess I’ve just been worried about N.EW.T.s.”

It's not a shoddy reason, come to think of it. Her friends are all too keenly aware of how her future hinges on getting good grades. Due to her situation in the Muggle world, she needs to become independent as soon as possible.

She suppresses the inner voice that whispers that Ben knows that, too, and that he’d said as much, about not wanting to jeopardize the life that she can have—

No. She can’t think about Ben tonight. She’s just going to have fun.

She deserves that, surely.

“We’re all worried about N.E.W.T.s.” Finn pats her arm. “Just… talk to us, all right? Don’t feel like you can’t. We’re in this together.”

✨✨✨

Once their little group reaches the dungeons, it’s easy to figure out where the deathday party is being held; one of the numerous passageways snaking through the bowels of the castle is lined with long, thin, jet-black candles that burn bright blue. In this gloomy illumination, Rey thinks that she and the others look like ghosts themselves. They follow the trail of flickering tapers and the temperature drops and drops and they all start shivering.

It's the kind of cold that can only be produced by a sizable crowd of ghosts.

They hear the deathday party before they actually enter the venue. Or, rather, what they hear is a sound like thousands of fingernails scraping against a chalkboard.

“Lovely,” Jannah mutters underneath the racket.

They cast warming charms on themselves and shuffle into what is one of the roomier dungeons, decorated with black velvet draperies and more of the jet-black candles, a thousand of which blaze in an enormous brass chandelier overhead. The source of the dreadful commotion that had been audible from the passageway is a ghostly orchestra playing thirty musical saws atop a black-draped raised platform. The room swirls with castle ghosts, flitting around, chatting with one another, walking through the walls, trailing silver mist in their wake.

“Welcome, dear friends.” Nearly Headless Nimi wafts over to them. “So glad you could join us. Couldn’t very well let you lot graduate without ever attending a deathday shindig now, could I?”

Before anyone can respond, Nimi glides lower a little too quickly and his head flops off of his neck.

Or, well, almost all the way off. The executioner who’d been assigned to decapitate Nimi hundreds of years ago had done so with a blunt axe. Thus, it had taken forty-five hacks to kill him, and in the end his head had only been partially severed.

Back in first year, several of the Muggleborns had cried at the Start-of-Term Feast and proclaimed their desire to drop out of Hogwarts when they saw Nimi’s almost-decapitated head loll, exposing the inside of the bloody stump of his neck. Rey hadn’t been one of them—she’d been fascinated, she’d thought it brilliant, and she’d been so excited to see what else the wizarding world had in store for her.

And she is still excited now, she realizes. A deathday party, of all things—there’ll always be more to see and to experience. Magic will never lose its wonder.

“Evening, Sir Nimi,” Seff says amiably once Nimi’s gotten his head on straight in an extremely literal sense. “How’s Exar liking his surprise, then?”

“Oh, he loathes it,” comes Nimi’s dour response, and Rey’s gaze trawls the dungeon until she finds the hulking visage of Exar Kun glowering at the orchestra, his robes covered in his mentor’s blood. “So, don’t even bother greeting him. He threatened to chop my head off all the way. But there’s food and there’s more live ‘uns over there, so—help yourselves! Have a blast!”

Once Nimi’s floated out of earshot, Tallie declares in a stage whisper that she can’t quite decide if this is the best or the worst party that she’s ever been to, and Rey’s inclined to agree.

The food is laid out on a banquet table, and it’s all gone bad. Large, whole fishes rotting on handsome silver platters. Cakes burned until they’re hunks of charcoal. Haggis crawling with maggots and wedges of cheese furry with mold. In pride of place is an enormous charred cake in the shape of a tombstone, with Exar Kun’s name and date of death inscribed in tar-like frosting.

“They overcook and taint the food to give it a stronger flavor,” Rose tells Finn and Rey authoritatively. “So that spectral tastebuds will be more likely to pick up on it.”

Rey watches one of the ghosts open his mouth wide and pass his head through a platter of fish. “Can you really taste it?” she asks him.

“Almost,” he says sadly as he drifts away.

The live ‘uns that Nimi had been referring to turn out to be a gaggle of seventh-year Slytherins, and Kaydel immediately drags Rey and the others over to her housemates.

Only a few hours after their chat by the lake, Rey finds herself once again face-to-face with Aleson Gray.

“Hi,” she says.

He nods at her. “Niima.”

Tallie and Jess clutch at each other, practically levitating along with the ghosts.

Not even Rey is willing to brave the rotten feast, but Aleson and his friends came prepared. They pass around packets of crisps and bottles of Tongue-Tying Lemon Squash, a syrupy beverage that has the effect of twisting one’s tongue into knots for a few seconds.

Eating crisps, ghost-watching, listening to musical saws, and laughing as they try to talk through twisted tongues is not a bad way to spend a couple of hours. Rey is the most carefree she’s ever been since that fateful day in the D.A.D.A. classroom after her last Quidditch match.

By the time Aleson hands her another packet of crisps, she feels comfortable enough to joke, “I do hope that feeding me won’t become a habit, I’m afraid that you won’t be able to keep up.”

Tallie immediately leans forward. “When did he feed you?”

“How did he feed you?” Jess adds, also leaning forward.

“It was nothing,” Aleson drawls before Rey can blush and stutter her way through an explanation. “We just bumped into each other earlier by the lake and I gave her a pumpkin pasty.”

Tallie places a hand over her chest, like she’s about to swoon. “With the wind blowing in from the moors? With the sunlight shining on the water?”

A thoroughly embarrassed Rey grabs Tallie’s wrist, forcing the other girl to bring her bottle of Tongue-Tying Lemon Squash to her parted lips. Everyone else laughs, and after a beat Rey finds herself laughing along with them, swept up in the mirth and the companionship and the implicit promise that things will be okay—that she will be okay.

✨✨✨

“I’ll walk the little lions back to their tower, lads,” Aleson tells his friends a while later as they make their exit from the deathday party that’s still in full swing even though it’s almost five in the morning.

“I mean, there are a lot of them, I’m sure they can make it back all right,” Kaydel points out with a knowing smirk that Rey’s not too sure that she likes.

Aleson shrugs. “I’m in the mood for a stroll, anyway.”

“Suit yourself.” Kaydel kisses Jess good night and leaves along with the other Slytherins—their common room is only a handful of passages over.

As the remainder of the group navigates the silent corridors of Hogwarts, Rey notices that they’ve sort of splintered off into pairs. Seff and Tallie are huddled together, her head pillowed on his shoulder as she stifles her yawns against her cupped palm as they walk. Jess and Jannah alternate between playfully shoving and shushing each other. Finn and Rose hold hands all the way up until the entrance to the Hufflepuff Basement—a nook concealed behind a stack of barrels on the right-hand side of the kitchen corridor—then he joins in on Jess and Jannah’s roughhousing.

This arrangement results in Rey hanging back and walking together with Aleson in utter silence. She has no idea why he’s accompanying them—maybe it’s a pureblood thing, to like skulking around in dark corridors at the crack of dawn.

It’s not until Seff splits from the group at a passageway leading to the west side of the castle—where Ravenclaw Tower is located—that disaster strikes. Rey, Tallie, Jess, Finn, Jannah, and Aleson make a turn into the next corridor and—

—and Ben looms up from out of the shadows at the end of the hall—

Rey feels as though she’s been kicked in the stomach.

He hasn’t seen them yet; he’s walking with his hands shoved into his pockets, head bowed. The students scramble for cover.

All for one and one for all indeed, but—when dealing with a teacher like Professor Solo—it’s every man for himself.

Jannah and Jess duck behind a suit of armor. Finn and Tallie run back the way they came.

Thinking fast, Rey grabs hold of the sleeve of Aleson’s robes and ushers him into another corridor that’s just a couple of steps ahead.

They would have been in the clear, if not for the fact that Mr. Pancakes is dozing belly-up in the middle of the floor and Rey stumbles over him.

Unkar’s fat cat awakens with an unholy shriek, his sharp claws out, his yellow eyes blazing in the pre-dawn gloom.

“Merlin.” Aleson helps Rey to her feet and then gets between her and the enraged animal, who wastes no time in trying to shred his leg to pieces. “Do you think we’ll get into trouble if I Stun him—oh, good morning, Professor Solo.”

Rey leans back against the wall, squeezing her eyes shut.

Is it really too much to ask the universe to give her a bloody break for once?

When she opens her eyes again, Ben is staring at her and Aleson. His expression fractures, and it’s a split second of overwhelming rawness and vulnerability that flickers by too fast for her to pick out one single emotion before he slams all of it shut behind Occlumency walls again.

He nudges Mr. Pancakes away from Aleson with his foot. The cat spits out one last murderous hiss and then vanishes into the shadows, and Rey braces herself.

Because Ben will misinterpret this, there’s really no way that he won’t, and his jealousy has always been a thing of legend, this is the same man who’d gotten angry at her for sitting next to Seff in his class, and perhaps there’s one tiny part of her that wants him to react in a completely overblown manner and mete out completely overblown punishments so that she can get him alone for one last blazing argument, one for the road, one to remember her by—

“There is no use in docking house points or assigning detention when curfew hours will end in five minutes,” Ben says coolly. “Just be more careful in the future. I cannot guarantee that the noxious feline won’t actually try to kill someone before the year is out.” He offers them a curt nod. “Mr. Gray. Miss Niima.”

He walks away as abruptly as he’d appeared.

Aleson raises an eyebrow. “I say, he must have woken up on the right side of the bed for once.”

“Dunno,” Rey mutters. “C’mon, let’s see to your leg—are you bleeding?”

She busies herself over Aleson’s injuries, ignoring the tiny part of her that is left frustrated. The tiny part of her that had been raring to give Ben Solo one more fight.