29. Chapter 29

Sneaking into Gryffindor Tower at four in the morning, Rey can only heave a sigh of relief at the fact that the common room is deserted, plunged in darkness. It was a good thing that she’d woken up, because Ben certainly hadn’t been going to.

Send you off to bed after I make you come, he’d said. It had turned into I’ll cast a healing spell in the morning when he was done spanking and fucking her. Then she’d had to poke him in the ribs so he’d wake up a little and loosen his embrace enough for her to clamber blearily off the couch.

The man had actually whined, low in the back of his throat, and ordered her to stay.

Granted, he’d been half-asleep, but still.

Ridiculous.

She’d told him that she needed to return to her dorm and he’d grumbled nonsensically before rolling over on the couch, facing away from her. He’s going to have an awful crick in the neck when he wakes up for real in a few hours. His back will probably hurt, too. Twenty-eight is so very ancient, after all.

Rey’s smiling softly to herself as she steals into her room.

Jannah has dozed off at her desk. She’s drooling all over a haphazardly scattered array of parchment. Tallie and Jess are in their respective beds, faces caked in mud masks and cucumber slices over their eyes. Jess is mumbling an incantation over and over again in her sleep—she’s been trying to get Bombarda Maxima right for days now. It’s a good thing that she’s not holding her wand, or there would probably be a hole in the ceiling.

Rey shucks off the invisibility cloak and packs it away, then climbs into her own bed—and groans.

Merlin, her ass hurts.

Tallie and Jess bolt upright like electronics have suddenly started working at Hogwarts and they’ve been shocked.

“Rey!” Tallie cries, turning to face her. “We fell asleep waiting—are you all right—what did that horrible professor do to you?”

“I’m fine. It’s nothing.” Rey is so, so thankful that it’s dark in the room. So thankful that the faintly moonlit shadows hide the deep blush that she can feel staining her cheeks. “He just made me dust the shelves in his office and I fell off the ladder I was perched on, is all.”

Jess glances at the clock on the wall. “It’s nearly the crack of dawn! Solo’s got a hundred shelves in his office, then?”

“Well—he actually does have quite a lot.” This isn’t a lie. Ben has many books in his office; they’d been the only sign that someone was actually using the place before he’d gotten the couch.

The couch.

Rey hides her increasingly red face in her pillow. The movement makes her sore muscles twinge and she stifles another groan.

“Poor Eurydice,” Tallie coos. “Are you bruised from your fall? Shall I heal you?”

Hell will freeze over before Rey lets Tallissan Lintra see that their Defense Against the Dark Arts professor has painted her bum with his stupidly big handprints. “I’m all right, really. Just tired.” She fakes a yawn. “If it doesn’t get any better I’ll go to Madame Kalonia,” she lies through her teeth, knowing that she will do no such thing.

“If you say so, darling,” sighs Tallie. “G’night.”

“G’night, Rey,” Jess echoes.

“’Night,” Rey mumbles into her sheets.

In all honesty, she’s touched that Tallie and Jess tried to wait up for her. In the past, only Finn and Rose have exhibited such concern. Rey can trace it back to the day that she’d asked if they could show her how to do her hair in her secret, misguided attempt to be pretty for Ben. Ever since then it’s as though the thin layer of ice that had separated her from Tallie and Jess all these years has vanished.

She snorts. It figures that an affair with her teacher would be the one thing that would put Rey on better terms with her roommates.

✨✨✨

The next week is a slow one in terms of school gossip. That has to be the reason nobody will shut up about her and Ben Solo. Aside from “There’s no need to call me ‘sir,’ professor” taking on the patina of legend, interest is sparked in Rey being the first student this term to be granted the dubious honor of a D.A.D.A. detention. Her peers are hungry to know what he’d made her do. What a Solo detention is like. Everyone agrees that he’d had to be very pissed off, indeed, to mete out this type of punishment—despite his stern façade and his demanding curriculum, Solo does not assign detention. Doesn’t so much as deduct House points.

He is the marble man, and Eurydice Niima has cracked his armor.

Rey no longer turns as red as a beet when people ask about it, but she still has trouble looking anyone in the eye. It doesn’t help that her schoolmates have also taken it upon themselves to speculate as to why she gets under Solo’s skin so much.

“I heard from Jysella that you’ve got corresponding Patronuses, you and him,” Reeqo Swen tells Rey during groupwork in their N.E.W.T.-level Arithmancy class. They—along with four others—are sitting on the floor, extrapolating the counterspell to a fiendishly complicated curse that Professor Jiklip had placed on an antique pewter teapot.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Rey demands without sparing him a glance. All of her attention is focused on the teapot, which is currently hovering in the air within a shimmering blue stasis field that she and Korr Sella had woven together to keep the curse neutralized while they worked.

“I think it means that you and Solo are soulmates,” Kaydel Ko Connix opines with a vaguely absentminded smirk. Like Rey, her brow is furrowed in concentration as the tip of her wand traces golden numbers and symbols around the cursed object. “And your wand cores are—what was that Solo said, back during our dueling module—”

“Twins,” supplies Pamich Nerro Goode. She’s calculating for the counterspell along with Kaydel and Reeqo, the three of them sliding equations together, commuting and discarding variables. “Tail feathers from the same phoenix.”

“So—matching Patronuses, matching wand cores,” Reeqo presses. “Maybe it’s also a romantic match?” He waggles his brows suggestively.

Rey rolls her eyes. “You know what’s not a match? The spell signatures.” She grabs his wrist with her free hand and uses it to nudge a string of vibrational numbers into their proper sequence, releasing him only once the arithmantic formula of the counterspell is the exact reverse of the curse signature that she and Korr and Seff Hellin had spent nearly forty minutes painstakingly deconstructing and are now projecting in the space over the teapot. “Honestly, you lot, this is very delicate work, we have to concentrate.”

Her tone is shrill. A little bit too defensive. Seff looks at her askance.

“The second layer isn’t adding up for me,” Korr announces, eyeing the deconstructed curse formula. “Rey, could you proof it, please?” She duplicates the relevant sequence with a flick of her wand, then sends the copy floating gently over to where Rey is sitting cross-legged.

Rey is all too happy to oblige. At least the Head Girl is conscientious enough to not be distracted by petty issues that have no bearing on their grades—

“But you and Solo defeated the manticore together, yeah?” Korr says without missing a beat once Rey starts sketching calculations in bright emerald light. “That is rather romantic, even if I do say so myself.”

“You sent him a message with your Patronus, didn’t you, so he’d know where to find you in the Forbidden Forest?” Kaydel is, of course, up to date on all the Gryffindor goings-on because of Jess. “Why him, of all people?”

Rey fidgets. “We’d just been discussing the Patronus Charm in his class. So he was the first person I thought of.”

“I reckon it’s because you la-la-looove him,” Reeqo sings out, his wand moving erratically as he makes kissy faces.

The other students titter—all of them except for Seff, who has been quietly working thus far. Who flashes Rey a sympathetic grimace.

As for Rey herself, her heart has caught in her throat. Without knowing it, Reeqo has dealt her a blow right to the gut. She stares at her equations, trying to make sense of them, but a searing question has taken root and it fills her whole being, echoing and echoing until there is hardly space for anything else.

Is she in love with Ben?

That’s something that Rey has yet to ponder. She loves Finn and she loves Rose and she loves pumpkin juice and she loves flying and she loves Hogwarts. But actually being in love? She has no idea what that is. What that means.

Ben is her first… everything.

They had spent the long, undemanding days of winter break learning each other, talking about themselves and their lives. Now that school’s back with a vengeance, their meetings are rushed and clandestine, and all too fleeting. There has simply been no opportunity to discuss this in any way, shape, or form.

Not that she has even the slightest clue how to bring it up. She imagines herself saying to him, “Oi, d’you love me, then?” And she cringes.

Rey throws herself into the proofing. At least arithmancy is a language that she can understand. She finds the error, corrects it, then floats the revised equation over to Korr.

“I think we’ve got it,” Seff says after they’ve spent a few more minutes fiddling with the numbers. “And we’re making good time, too.”

Rey looks around the classroom. None of the other groups seem to be as far along as hers is. She vanishes the projection of the curse’s deconstructed formula and then she and the others are watching with bated breath as Kaydel, Pamich, and Reeqo urge the finished counterspell sequence toward the teapot.

This is a delicate process. In order to activate the magical properties of an extrapolated arithmantic signature, the numbers need to sink slowly and gradually through the stasis field and into the relevant object, and everything has to be correct. It requires the height of surgical precision.

And, yet, Rey’s groupmates keep chatting away. Teasing her without knowing that each jibe is hitting too close to home.

“What if it’s Solo who’s in love with Rey?” Kaydel muses with a shit-eating grin that is far too reminiscent of Jess’. “I mean, she’s the only one he’s ever given a detention to. Maybe he just wanted to spend more time with her.”

The others laugh. Rey’s stomach drops. Once more, she attempts to distract herself by focusing on the task at hand. The first layer of the counterspell equation is having a hard time penetrating the stasis field, so she waves her wand in rhythmic circles, dialing back the shimmering blue sphere’s magical opacity. They can’t totally remove the artifact from stasis while it’s being decursed, or else the energy surge will cause untold devastation.

Korr really should be helping Rey with this, since they’d been the ones to conjure the containment field in the first place. But the Head Girl is absolutely riveted by the hypothetical depths of Professor Solo and Eurydice Niima’s feelings for each other. “It wouldn’t be a bad match,” she says. “They’re both extremely talented and mildly socially abrasive—and the manticore incident proves that they work well together. Plus, their kids are going to be so tall.”

“Can we please discuss something else?” Rey snaps. “Like, I don’t know, this practical exam involving a heavily cursed teapot that we’re currently in the middle of?”

“Make that very socially abrasive,” Korr dutifully amends.

Rey’s minor burst of temper has the effect of making her groupmates shut up and work intently for a grand total of ten minutes. Once three layers of the counterspell have been piped in through the stasis field, Reeqo turns back to Rey as he and Kaydel and Pamich incorporate the final sequence. “So, Rey, you should go for it, yeah? Who knows, Solo’s mood could drastically improve once he has a girlfriend.”

She has proof beyond the shadow of a doubt that somewhat regular shag sessions do not make Ben more well-disposed toward the class in the slightest. She doesn’t even know if he truly considers her his girlfriend.

“Very funny.” She tries for poise. Tries for flippant composure. For Reeqo and the others, this is just normal, good-natured japing.

The last layer of the counterspell equation disappears into the teapot’s pewter surface, and Rey and Korr gradually bring down the stasis field. Bit by bit, careful to let a few seconds pass between each reduction.

All while Reeqo, Kaydel, Pamich, and Korr herself joke gaily about what they are now positively certain are the lustful glances that Professor Solo shoots Rey in class.

If they only knew, she thinks. Sweat gathers on her palms. If they only—

With the last of the containment sphere fading into oblivion, the counterspell equation becomes visible in its entirety, flashing across the teapot in a blaze of white heat for the briefest of moments.

But it’s still long enough for Rey to spot the crucial error that her group has made.

They’d sequenced the number nine on more than one occasion in order to get everything to line up with the values of the deconstructed curse. They had also determined early on that the arithmantic grammar of the curse is Chaldean in nature.

What every single individual in the group had failed to remember—what they’d all been too distracted to keep in mind—is that the Chaldean method doesn’t make use of the number nine as it is sacred and, therefore, unassignable.

“Wait—” Rey starts to say. Starts to tell the others that their equations are off and they should recast the stasis charm—

But it’s too late.

Magic explodes from the teapot. Rey, Seff, Reeqo, Kaydel, Pamich, and Korr don’t even have time to try to run or to dodge; they can only scream as the curse sweeps through them.

Rey’s face stings. Her vision goes blurry.

It doesn’t last that long. After less than a minute her symptoms abate and she sighs in relief. After all, it’s not as though a professor would employ lethal magic against students—

Then she gets a good look at her groupmates and she screams again. They scream right back at her.

“Well!” Professor Jiklip stalks over to the chaotic scene, her hands on her hips. “This is what you lot get for incessantly chatting away while decursing! Honestly, what if this had been a real dark artifact?” She rolls her eyes as Kaydel bursts into tears while her fingers trail over what’s currently growing on her face. “Hospital wing, all of you.”

✨✨✨

The six students troop down the corridors of Hogwarts in disgrace. They are greeted with peals of horrified laughter from the other teenagers and disappointed head shakes from the professors that they encounter on their way to the hospital wing. The portraits point at them and cackle. They look so gruesome that they even end up scaring one of the castle ghosts, who gives a start when he sees them and hastily vanishes into the wall.

It turns out that the curse Jiklip had placed on the teapot was an ingenious distillation of both Jelly-Legs and the Pimple Jinx. She had used arithmancy to negate the former’s mobility-impeding effects and instead focused on combining the two spells into an enchantment that had caused dozens of tiny purple tentacles to sprout all over Rey’s face as well as the faces of her five classmates. It is harmless, overall, but impossible to cancel without the antidote that Jiklip had asked Madame Kalonia to brew the week prior.

Rey’s impressed, despite herself. Despite the fact that she currently looks like one of Davy Jones’ crew in that Muggle movie about pirates.

“This is the most humiliating day of my life,” Korr groans. “Cursed because I forgot that the Chaldean method doesn’t utilize the number nine—Mother and Father will never let me hear the end of this.”

“Perhaps if we had been focusing on our practical instead of talking nonsense,” Rey suggests in wry tones.

“Your tentacles wriggle when you talk,” Korr retorts just as wryly. “They look like they’re waving at me.”

Rey scowls. She feels the appendages on her face writhing with the movement.

And it’s as though the universe has decided that she’s not suffering enough today, because—

—because when she and her classmates take the turn into the next corridor—

—Ben is there.

She nearly screams for the nth time that day, as shocked and as horrified as she is. He’s walking in her direction together with Larma D’Acy, the Herbology professor. D’Acy’s holding a huge potted plant in both hands and he is carrying her books and her scrolls, clearly escorting her to the greenhouses, the two of them talking quietly.

They catch sight of Rey’s group at the same time. D’Acy trails off from whatever she’d been saying and it’s almost comical how wide Ben’s dark eyes go, the size of dinner plates, really, but he’s quick to retreat behind his Occlumency walls.

By the time the two parties draw level with each other and come to a stop in the middle of the hallway, his expression is utterly impassive.

“Goodness.” D’Acy clucks her tongue. “That’s a nasty-looking curse.”

“Yes, professor,” Pamich says mournfully. “We botched our Arithmancy practical.”

“Is that so?” D’Acy glances at Ben. “Wildis Jiklip continues to outdo herself, doesn’t she? Fascinatingly complex.”

“Quite.” Ben’s stony gaze flickers from one student to the other, saving Rey for last and lingering just a moment too long.

He’s wearing a brown three-piece suit today. It is deep and rich, the color of oak. He’d paired it with a striped blue-and-white shirt and a navy tie.

He looks amazing. Broader than ever. And she looks like something that crawled out of the Black Lake.

Rey’s pretty sure that the tentacles on her face are waving at him.

“I suppose that you’re on your way to Madame Kalonia for an antidote potion?” Ben addresses his question to her group at large. They all nod, and he grimaces slightly, and Rey knows it’s because he’s having to watch a whole host of tentacles jiggle. “Bat spleen is commonly used in potions that aim to remove extraneous… growths,” he continues. “Depending on how it’s been prepared, it may induce some swelling. Make certain to chase down the antidote with a small dose of Deflating Draught.”

“Madame Kalonia undoubtedly knows that,” Rey ventures.

A flicker of annoyance slips through Ben’s façade. “Verify it with her,” he orders with a sharp glare.

Rey bristles. She’s about to tell him off for being so bossy, but she catches herself at the last second. They’re not alone.

Ben has a way of wearing the world that makes him appear to be the center of it. He eclipses his surroundings until he’s the only real thing left—or, at least, the only thing of any possible importance.

For her, anyway.

“Will do, professor.” She tips him a salute, then she and Pamich and Kaydel and Reeqo and Seff and Korr are scurrying away. She feels Ben’s gaze pinned to the back of her neck until she vanishes from his sight.

It’s not until they reach the floor where the hospital wing is located on that it occurs to her—

“Did I salute?” Rey wonders aloud.

“You sure did,” says Reeqo. Utterly and completely unrepentant, channeling all that Ravenclaw tenacity into taking the piss out of his classmate. “D’Acy and the rest of us might as well have been chopped liver. The unbridled sexual tension was—”

“Shut up before I hex you,” Rey snarls.

✨✨✨

Madame Kalonia is impressed by Professor Solo’s foresight when Seff dutifully brings it up to her. “Is there nothing that man doesn’t excel at!” The healer beams as she dispenses small flasks of the rose-colored antidote to Rey’s group. After they gulp it down, she has them immediately follow it up with even tinier vials of the acid-green Deflating Draught.

It takes around three minutes for the tentacles to disappear and everyone’s faces to go back to normal. Not a moment too soon, Rey thinks, eyeing her reflection in the mirror.

When it’s time to head back to Arithmancy—and plead with Jiklip not to fail them—Kalonia has Rey stay behind.

“I have to redose you with your contraceptive, dear,” Kalonia explains as she walks over to the cupboard full of potions. “The Deflating Draught will have cancelled it out. But it’s just for this month. You can see me again on the usual day in February.”

Rey nods. Given the reason her classmates had been teasing her earlier, she feels a rush of immense gratitude toward Madame Kalonia for waiting until everyone else had gone to tell her.

Once she’s taken her contraceptive potion, Rey leaves the hospital wing. She steps out the door and promptly collides with a broad brick wall that smells of sandalwood and copper and all the other things that make her hindbrain perk up.

“Miss Niima.” Ben’s hands drop to her shoulders to steady her. “I just need to ask Madame Kalonia a few questions about that antidote. I believe it might have some interesting Defense Against the Dark Arts applications.”

“Right.” The word rolls off of her tongue. She doesn’t quite believe him. The hospital wing is a bit out of the way, especially if he’s coming from the greenhouses. He could have just gone straight to Jiklip.

Had he—had he come to make sure she was all right?

His eyes are searching her face with the same intensity that he applies to everything. After a while, he nods almost as if to himself and he lets her go.

“Have a good day,” he says, as cool as a cucumber. As cool as someone who doesn’t fuck her brains out every now and then.

“Bye, sir,” Rey whispers.

Ben’s jaw clenches. He brushes past her as he steps inside the hospital wing. The door closes with a grim finality and she is left standing all by herself in a hallway full of portraits and the occasional group of students passing through.

It had been sweet of him to check up on her in his own outwardly stern, surreptitious way. But Rey finds herself pondering the other couples in school that she knows—Finn and Rose especially—who are free to make no secret of their panic when the other has to go to the hospital wing.

That is something that Rey can never have with Ben. He can only bite her head off when she hasn’t been careful. He can only invent reasons for their paths to cross.

She doesn’t even know if he thinks of them as a couple. Surely what they have is too illicit—too ephemeral—for that. In the past, she hadn’t considered it a big deal, what their label is.

But as one month turns into the next, it’s starting to matter.

And if she decides that she is in love with him? There’s no one she can share that with. Not Finn and Rose, and certainly not Jess and Tallie. She doubts that the bonds of girl talk will cover her particular situation.

It’s so strange. Because of Ben, she had stopped feeling so alone. But the sneaking around, the coolness in public, the pretending, the monumental shadow of what is at stake hanging over their heads—all of it is just a new kind of loneliness.

✨✨✨

It takes a couple more meetings, but eventually all the seventh-year D.A.D.A. students get the hang of summoning their wands. Rey has never been prouder of herself and of her classmates. It’s a collective achievement. There are no words to describe the triumph that roars in her ears when—for the first time and after weeks of practicing and forcing her consciousness to entwine with the magic—it all slots into place and her aspen wand flies into her palm.

Ben actually smiles, despite his Occlumency walls being so firmly constructed. He has her stay behind after class on the pretext of requiring her assistance in levitating the furniture back to their proper spots. He eats her out on the teacher’s table, his head moving underneath her skirt while she sobs and buries her fingers in his hair. It’s her reward for being an exceptional student. For being a good girl.

And it is afterwards—when all her clothing has been straightened and he’s standing between her legs while she fixes his tie—that she blurts out, “I think you should teach me Occlumency.”

Ben had been staring down at her fingers as she fiddled with the checked fabric around his neck that she had tugged all to hell while they’d been kissing. His eyes flicker to her face and they are brown with a hint of olive in the light of early February, so open and so soft.

“Occlumency,” he echoes. It’s a question.

“Yeah.” Rey ducks her head, bestowing more focus on his tie than it actually warrants. “The day of the—you know, the tentacles—my groupmates and I flubbed it because, well, they were teasing me about you—” His jaw drops, and she hurriedly presses on—“because of our twin wand cores and our matching Patronuses, you understand, and because you’ve never given anyone detention but me.”

“Oh.” A slight smile plays at the corner of his mouth. His gaze goes a little glassy. A little far-off.

Her entire body flushes bright red as she realizes that he’s remembering the—specifics—of her detention.

He gives her bare thigh a fond little pat, still somewhat staring off into space. Into some sort of daydream.

“Ben.” Rey yanks at his tie to bring him back down to earth. “As I was saying, I got so distracted by the teasing that I failed to spot a crucial error in our calculations. I think that wouldn’t have happened if I’d known how to not be affected.”

He lets his head be guided by her pulling at his tie until their faces are so dearly close together. He swoops in to kiss her. “Sure,” he mumbles. His slight smile is wider now that it’s held against her lips. “Sure, I’ll teach you Occlumency.”

✨✨✨

“What’re you lot doing for Valentine’s Day, then?” Elliver Olim asks that weekend while a good number of the seventh-year Gryffindors are hanging out in the common room.

Tallie lets out a bark of harsh, cynical laughter from where she and Jess are huddled by the fire, practicing their charmwork.

Gandris Dyun shoots Elliver a look of disgust. “Mate, Kazuda’s really got you whipped if you’re thinking about bloody Valentine’s Day.”

Elliver doesn’t bother to deny it. He’s sprawled on the couch beside the table where Finn and Rey are playing wizard chess, and his face lights up at the mention of Kazuda Xiono, his boyfriend who’s in Ravenclaw. “It’s just that it’s this coming Friday, is all.”

“Valentine’s,” Tallie declares with a haughty sniff, “is a soulless, capitalistic enterprise designed to monetize emotional relationships in a paean to mass-market consumerism.”

Rey looks up from the chessboard, catching Jess’ eye.

“It’s going to be her first Valentine’s without a date,” Jess explains, and Tallie glowers at the fire.

“Rose actually thinks the same,” Finn remarks as his queen beats the living daylights out of Rey’s bishop and drags it off of the board. “So we aren’t going to celebrate on the fourteenth itself. But I told her that I’m taking her to tea at Madame Puddifoot’s in Hogsmeade on Saturday, whether she likes it or not.”

“I guess I’ll see you there,” Gandris begrudgingly concedes. More than a few eyebrows are raised at him, given his previous vehemence, and he colors slightly as he goes on to say, “Jysella’s that sort, y’know, so I got us a reservation—”

Finn and Elliver hoot, making kissy faces at Gandris.

Rey lets the merriment flow around her. A stream that she isn’t part of.

She has no strong feelings toward Valentine’s one way or the other, but her gut tells her that it’s going to be so much worse this year. All the pink heart-shaped decorations that will undoubtedly bedeck the Great Hall, the bouquets and love notes that her schoolmates will be handing to one another, the dwarves dressed as cupids that will barge into class or accost students in the hallways to deliver their singing telegrams… Rey’s always found all of these very annoying. This year, however, she can already tell that the upcoming fourteenth of February will serve as a cutting reminder of what she can never have with Ben.

No flowers or cards addressed from him. No hairy dwarf carrying a harp to croon about how very fit her professor finds her. Certainly no date at Madame Puddifoot’s, where everyone can see.

Even if the flowers and the cards and the telegrams can be anonymous, Rey already knows that Ben wouldn’t deign to send her any of them. When he’s not snogging or shagging her, he is a cranky, no-nonsense man who’s ten years her senior. It’s a given that he won’t have any plans to so much as acknowledge Valentine’s.

And it’s not like she wants him to, Rey tells herself firmly. Valentine’s isn’t even a real holiday, it’s a—a soulless and enterprising mass-market pagan, or whatever Tallie had said.

Rey lifts her nose in the air, strengthened by newfound resolve. Her fingers close around another chess piece—her knight—and she moves it toward Finn’s end of the board.

He promptly checkmates her. She spends the rest of the day being very cross with him.