31. Chapter 31

And, really, it’s not as though she’s stupid or anything.

Her parents certainly think that she is, as do some of her teachers. Hux, in particular. And, yes, perhaps she does need to work on her essay-writing, and in all honesty she’s not super great at enumeration, either—

—but the point is that—Rey’s not so lacking in brain cells that she’d failed to understand why Ben had said what he’d said to Obi-Wan.

Even if Ben and Rey had made plans, even if they’d talked about their feelings or whatnot, he couldn’t very well have told the headmaster—his boss—that as a matter of fact he was a big fan of Valentine’s Day and he was going to spend it with one of his students, whom he was madly in love with, by the way, and that was all right, wasn’t it, old chap?

Common sense had dictated that Ben would respond in that manner. But it had still hurt to watch. Rey’s mind keeps circling back to it, and she’s actually getting a lot of Occlumency practice done from how often she has to pack her memory of his memory away. To keep it from distracting her and from snagging at the corners of her heart.  

But, sometimes, she isn’t successful. Sometimes she lets her guard down and she spirals through a rabbit hole of doubts.

Because they haven’t made any plans and they haven’t talked about feelings. And, come to think of it, all that Ben had told Obi-Wan was that he thought Valentine’s Day was silly and that he had no time for the nonsense of romance.

What if he hadn’t been throwing the headmaster off the scent?

What if he’d actually meant it?

Ben had been so sweet to her over the holidays. Come to think of it, though, he’d just found out about her parents then. He’d felt sorry for her, probably. And she can’t depend on his good will forever, it’s not as though he owes her anything…

The fourteenth of February is chilly and gray, reflecting Rey’s mood. Breakfast is a ghastly affair, which is something she’d never thought she’d say about any meal at Hogwarts—but everything is pink and red and heart-shaped. The toast, the eggs, the sausages, even the blood pudding. Obnoxious arrangements of roses and baby’s breath deck the walls and glittering streamers—also pink and red and heart-shaped—trail down from the ceiling.

Not to mention the fact that most of the school’s couples are acting all soft with each other. It’s nauseating, is what it is.

Finn spends the entirety of breakfast flicking paper hearts over to Rose at the Hufflepuff table. Rose steadfastly ignores him, because Valentine’s day is a capitalized pelican market, and Rey feels a surge of gratitude toward her very practical, very wise best friend.

Then she remembers that Finn and Rose are going on a late Valentine’s date tomorrow in Hogsmeade, and she’s back to scowling at her virulently pink porridge again.

And because it’s Friday, she has Defense Against the Dark Arts, and she ducks her head as she shuffles into Ben’s classroom, unable to look him in the eye.

Rey couldn’t have told anyone who asked what Ben’s lecture had been about that morning. All she can do is sit there and stare at the wooden surface of her desk as his deep voice rumbles on. Marshaling her Occlumency to help her get through first period is like trying to hold on to water. All she can do is remember what an absolute cake she’d made of herself, letting him see all her foolish perhaps-maybes about this sham of a holiday only to then walk into his mind and see him scoff at all of it.

It's a relief when the Clock Tower bell rings out to signal the end of the class. She stands up and shoves her unread textbook and unused quill into her bag, then she makes a beeline for the door.

“Miss Niima,” Ben calls out softly but firmly. “A word, if you please.”

Rey freezes, paranoia turning her veins into ice. But none of the other students have noticed that their professor has asked her to stay behind—not even Finn and Rose.

Because Doran Sarkin-Tainer screams, “The dwarves are coming!” and the hallway clears instantly as the seventh years rush to escape.

Rey closes the door to the sight of a troop of hairy dwarves dressed as cupids running after her classmates, barking out the names of those who have singing telegrams addressed to them.

There is the sound of invisible locks clicking into place, followed by the velvet-drape sensation of a Silencing Charm falling over the room. Rey takes a breath and turns around to find that Ben has moved away from the teacher’s table and is standing within arm’s reach, his hands shoved into the pockets of his gray three-piece suit.

And she still doesn’t want to look at him but he makes it impossible. With shoulders like that, with the height that steals the air from her lungs, with lips so generous. With expressive brown eyes that are—

—currently narrowed down at her in… annoyance?

“Rey.” Ben sighs. Up close, she realizes that he looks like he’d spent the night tossing and turning. His lush dark hair sticks up a bit at the ends. “I would appreciate it if you would in the future refrain from walking out on me before we can talk things through.”

She hangs her head. She remembers not only how their first Occlumency lesson had ended the other night but also the day she stormed off after yelling at him in this very classroom. Hogwarts couples tend to do that whenever they argue—even Finn and Rose are not immune to the occasional need to have both the last word and a dramatic exit. Perhaps that’s where Rey’s gotten it from.

But Ben is older. A proper adult, with a job and everything, even if he’s not exactly sticking to the ethics of it. He must find her antics very immature—and tiring, on top of having to juggle keeping their secret and teaching every D.A.D.A. class from first year to seventh.

She is… such a nuisance.

“I’m sorry,” Rey mumbles, her gaze trained on the floor. She braces herself for him to sigh again, to say that perhaps this had been a mistake, they’re obviously incompatible and she’s too young, she got upset over bloody Valentine’s Day, for crying out loud—

“I’m sorry, too.”

The words are so quietly intoned that, at first, she thinks that she’d imagined them. Her gaze whips back up to Ben’s face and his expression is vaguely rueful.

“I’m slow to react sometimes,” he tells her. “You’re like a freckly little whirlwind, you’re always catching me by surprise. I’m not used to being open. To letting someone else in. And it’s not as though I bring a wealth of relationship experience to the table,” he adds with a wryness that makes her crack a smile. “So—let’s try to be patient with each other, shall we?”

Rey nods. Ben relaxes, then stoops down to press a kiss to her forehead. There is a certain enigmatic gleam in his eyes when he pulls away, appraising her.

“Are you free tonight?” he asks.

✨✨✨

The day can’t end soon enough. Rey spends most of it torn between excitement and apathy, which she’s pretty sure is an entirely new achievement across the board, if the board were the spectrum of human emotion, and she could probably patent it. She can’t wait to find out what Ben has in store for her but, at the same time, it always has to be at night, doesn’t it, in secret, under cover of darkness, and no one can ever know.

As the hours drag on and more and more of her schoolmates receive flowers and confessions and lovebirds transfigured into love notes—and get tackled to the ground by burly dwarves who unrepentantly deliver their singing telegrams—Rey feels lonelier and lonelier. These circumstances are far from improved later in the evening, when Tallie grudgingly concedes, behind the closed bedroom door, that her lunch with Seff had been quite enjoyable. He’d taken her to the very top of the Astronomy Tower and for dessert they’d had strawberries and elderflower wine while looking out over the school grounds.

“He’s very kind.” Tallie blushes a little. “It was rather lovely.”

“But I thought Valentine’s Day was a pangolin,” Rey grumbles.

Tallie shoots her an odd look. “Did you mean paean? Well, yes, that was—before. But now I’m not so sure.”

Rey is caught off-guard by a hollow, gnawing sensation in the pit of her stomach that feels suspiciously like… regret. Or something like it.

It’s not like she’s jealous of Tallie because of Seff, in particular, but—well—Seff had liked her first. Hadn’t he? He’d asked her to be his date to the Celestial Ball and he’d admitted that it hadn’t been a platonic decision on his part when she told him that she wanted to go just as friends.

If Rey had allowed herself to like Seff back, would she have been the one on the Astronomy Tower with him earlier, eating strawberries and drinking wine and conceding that perhaps Valentine’s Day wasn’t so bad, after all?

It would have been nice. She can’t think of anyone at Hogwarts who would have opposed.

It would have been easy.

She lays back in bed and closes her eyes, mostly so that Tallie will stop talking to her. But, because Rey hadn’t gotten much sleep the previous night from fretting over seeing Ben again in class, she actually ends up dozing off—only to wake up an hour later, with a stifled gasp.

As Tallie, Jess, and Jannah slumber on in the dark, Rey scrambles to her feet and throws on the invisibility cloak. She’s still wearing her school uniform and it’s a bit rumpled, but there’s no time to change. She bolts out of the dorms and out of the portrait hole and through the shadowy hallways and out the castle doors and across the grounds, making it to the entrance gates at a quarter to eleven—fifteen minutes later than what she and Ben had agreed on.

Why he’d told her to meet him here, she doesn’t know, but he’s nowhere in sight. The gates tower over her, made of goblin-wrought iron and flanked by two columns topped with statues of winged boars. They’re flung wide open, usually closed only for the summer, and a short distance away there’s a guardhouse that Unkar Plutt sometimes mans when he feels like it. The caretaker’s not around tonight, though. No one else but Rey is around, and her heart starts to sink before she remembers that Ben had told her to stick her hand out of the cloak for a brief moment, so that he would know she was there.

She does this. And—

“There you are,” says the column to her right.

“Sorry, I fell asleep.” Rey squints. “Oi,” she whispers after a few seconds have passed, “where’re you, then?”

“I’m disillusioned,” says Ben’s voice.

Rey ponders this for a moment. “Well, I s’pose,” she says slowly, “but that was really Snoke’s doing, wasn’t it, with the Imperius Curse and all, you oughtn’t beat yourself up—”

There is a short pause. “I cast the Disillusionment Charm on myself,” Ben patiently explains. “Put your hand out again.”

She obeys, and—there, in the moonlight, the faintest outline of someone else’s hand—his hand—reaching for hers, followed by the sensation of his fingers lacing through the gaps between hers. The sleeve of the invisibility cloak falls back past her wrist and he leads her out the gates.

It's excellent charmwork. Ben’s not invisible but he’s taken on the exact colors and textures of their environment so seamlessly that he might as well be. Rey can’t even comprehend the amount of skill and raw power that’s gone into accomplishing such heavy disillusionment.

They stop walking at a tree-secluded spot that it’s soon clear is just beyond the school’s Anti-Disapparition field. “We’ll have to side-along,” Ben says. “Hold on to me.”

Rey feels around, following the lines of his broad shoulders all the way to the slope of his neck, which she happily clings to as his almost-invisible arms wrap around her invisible waist, pressing her close.

“Where are we going?” she asks.

“It’s a surprise.” She can hear the half-smile in Ben’s tone, and then he Disapparates.

Last school year, Rey had taken the twelve-week Apparition course led by an instructor from the Ministry of Magic. That had been the only time that Obi-Wan had lifted the Anti-Disapparition Jinx over the campus, and it wasn’t as though Rey could have freely teleported herself around the Muggle world this past summer. As a result, she has almost forgotten the feeling of Apparition, how it can make you kind of want to hurl if you’re not prepared for it—and even then. The borders of Hogwarts spin away and she is free-falling, with Ben as her only anchor, and she is being squeezed through a tight rubber tube.

Then the soles of her shoes hit the ground and she is standing. On some sort of… cliff?

Rey extricates herself from Ben, ripping off the invisibility cloak. She turns—

—and there’s an ocean laying miles beneath her feet. Its waters glossed in moonlight.

She’s been to the seaside a handful of instances in her eighteen years of life, and always in the heat of a summer’s day. She has never before experienced it at night, in winter. The only illumination to see by belongs to the moon and the icy stars. She’s so high up that she’s on top of the Earth, and from here the ocean stretches on forever, ancient, vast, and eternal.

When she looks back at Ben, he has cancelled the Disillusionment Charm. He’s still wearing his gray three-piece suit from earlier, with charcoal waistcoat and navy tie, but the breeze is lively and it carries the scent of fresh aftershave.

“Where—” Rey swallows. She sounds so small. She is small in front of the ocean, in front of Ben. And she doesn’t fare much better with her second attempt at the question. “Where are we?”

“The Isle of Skye.” His tone is soft, like he’s afraid she’d gotten spooked. He is watching her with a hint of wariness, as though he’s not sure if she’d liked his “surprise” and he’s more than prepared to argue his case.

“I’ve never been here before. I’ve never been anywhere much, really.” Her gaze flits back to what she now knows is the Sea of the Hebrides. “It’s beautiful.”

Ben waits silently. He lets her look around for as long as she wants. He lets her breathe it all in. Her eyes gradually adjust to the silver-lit gloom and he lets her feast on the panorama of silhouetted, rugged coastline crashing into rippled velvet waters underneath a carpet of heaven.

Once she’s had her fill, it occurs to Rey that she’s not cold at all, even though it’s February in the middle of the North Atlantic. In fact, she’s rather toasty, like she’s bundled up in the best, most luxuriously insulated coat instead of being simply in her school-issue blouse and skirt.

Ben must have cast a Warming Charm on her without her noticing. Now that she’s paying attention, though, she recognizes his magical signature, wrapping around hers as potently as though they are one. It’s the same as when his spell had saved her out on the Quidditch pitch last December, when she fell off her broomstick. It feels like she’s home, in the arms of someone she—

She blinks, and then shakes her head to clear it of the thought that deep down she’s scared she’s not ready for. Instead, she pastes on a smile that is swift to turn genuine. How could it not, when he is so very fit and he’d brought her to this enchanted realm?

“This is wicked,” she tells him, and means it with every fiber of her being. “Thank you.”

“We’re not done yet.” He smirks, and she can’t even be annoyed at him for it. It’s a pleased little smirk. Boyishly proud. “Come on.”

He takes the invisibility cloak and carries it for her, bunched up under one arm. His free hand holds his blackthorn wand aloft, blazing with the radiance of Lumos, which she casts, too. They make their way down the ridge that Ben says is called the Black Cuillin; it is steep and craggy, and comprised mostly of gabbro rock and basalt. Even with magic to smooth the way in both the literal and the figurative sense, the descent is still treacherous, and they don’t talk much as they concentrate on maintaining their footing on the path.

But Rey does manage to get in the occasional question here and there. “Not a lot of Muggles live here, yeah?”

“The island gets somewhat crowded during summer because of tourist activity, but for most of the year the sheep outnumber the people two to one. The bulk of the human population is a six-hour hike away from where we are. In Portree.”

“Ooh, the Pride of Portree, they’re moving up in the League, did you know, lots of canny players, although they need to work on their defense, I reckon—”

“This is… Quidditch, yes?”

Rey giggles, changing the subject. “Are there any purely wizarding villages?”

“Just one,” says Ben. “And it’s on the opposite end of the coast.”

“How d’you know so much about Skye, then?”

“Quite a few of my childhood holidays were spent here. My parents love this place. No one recognizes my mother, and my father doesn’t have to worry about coming up with plausible explanations for owls landing on his head or how the glass his son was standing in front of at the zoo suddenly vanished, setting the capybaras loose.”

Rey nearly trips. “What?”

Slightly in front of her, Ben lifts one shoulder in a careless shrug. “In my defense, I was eight. I thought it was an unfortunate situation for them to be trapped like that. I wanted them to be free.”

If Rey hadn’t been navigating a roughly hewn mountain path in the dark, she would have given in to the urge to roll over laughing. The sheer mental image, of Han and Leia and a sullen eight-year-old Ben surrounded by rampaging giant rodents…

There is a certain lightness to Ben—an easiness to his responses—that is markedly absent within the boundaries of the school campus. Rey feels it, too. The weight of secrecy has lifted. They’re out in the open, they’re somewhere that doesn’t evoke constant reminders that they’re in the wrong, that they’re—maybe, quite possibly—doomed. Here on the Isle of Skye, they are free.

Like the capybaras, she muses to herself with a quiet snort.

Time flies when you’re preoccupied with not breaking your neck by falling off of a bloody mountain in the dead of night. Almost before Rey knows it, the path has leveled and she and Ben are crossing a peat moor teeming with heather and grass that toss in the breeze like soft and gentle waves. There is a river, dark and burbling, that Ben tells her is called the Brittle, which honestly only makes her start craving candied roasted peanuts, and they keep it at their right, and Ben paves the way forward, conjuring bridges and transfiguring water to earth so that they don’t get splashed on the stream and ditch crossings.

A new world is unfolding before Rey, bit by bit. She almost asks Ben where exactly he’s taking her, but she desists. Tonight, after all, she has learned that surprises can be very lovely.

It all just opens up to meet her, this rolling Scotland, this silver wilderness.

It’s past midnight when they reach a roaring waterfall that tumbles into a glistening pool. Rey finds herself wishing that the sun was out so that she’d be able to truly appreciate the sight.

“This is the first of the Fairy Pools.” Ben has to raise his voice a little in order to be heard over the rushing water. “There isn’t a particular Muggle legend attached to them—although there doesn’t really need to be when one talks about the Celts and the fae. The pools are the color of turquoise in the daytime, but they’re not that impressive in the dark.”

Rey looks at him quizzically over the orb of light emanating from her aspen wand. Why did he bring her here if he was only going to complain about it—

Ben extinguishes his Lumos spell and, by the light of hers, walks over to a fairly nondescript, moss-covered boulder lurking beside the pool. He taps his wand to it and intones, “Dissendium.”

Stepping stones rise up from out of the water, one after the other. Forming a straight path from the boulder and over the pool and into the falls.

Rey lets out a short, breathless laugh. Of course. No matter where you go, even to the farthest shore, there will always be magic. The wizarding world will always be right around the corner.

Ben takes her hand and, together, they cross.

✨✨✨

The waterfall parts for them. The spray feels like nothing, wreathing their bodies in visible mist but otherwise not even the slightest bit damp.

Rey’s grip on Ben’s hand tightens as she takes in all that had been waiting on this side.

Behind them, the falls roar on. There shouldn’t have been anything past the rocks that the water cascades over, but, as she stands there beside Ben on the stepping stone, she is surrounded by another pool, dozens of times the size of the one they’d just left, fed by not one but seven waterfalls, all spilling into a glade of some sort that’s mostly purple heather ringed by tall green trees.

She can see everything. Because the moonlight is as bright as day and the water glows turquoise and emerald, the currents visible and shifting slowly and gracefully like the celestial dance, and the thick heather sparkles with thousands of tiny lights that flicker and float in all the colors of the rainbow.

Fairies.

“This is the Fairy Pool of the wizarding world,” Ben says quietly. “There’s no particular legend attached to it, either. It just is. It’s Rowena Ravenclaw’s Scotland. And I—” He pauses, and she looks at him and realizes that he’d been staring down at her all this time, his pale features traced at the edges with the jewel-toned hues of the radiant waters. “Mom took me here just the once. She hates doing things that Dad can’t, and this glade is inaccessible to Muggles. I was only six years old, but I’ve never forgotten it. And it was the first place I thought of when I mulled over what you and I should do for Valentine’s.”

“You didn’t have to,” Rey says thickly, through a lump in her throat. She’s so—touched. And happy. And sad. Because she is a silly girl who gets upset over silly things and she doesn’t deserve Ben Solo.

“I wanted to.” He tucks a loose strand of her hair behind her ear. “Don’t get me wrong—I have never celebrated Valentine’s Day. But I also never had anyone I would have willingly spent it with. Until you.”

She sniffs, reining in her tears. “Well, it is past midnight, so technically your record’s spotless.”

Ben chuckles. And, Merlin, Rey would walk through hell and back for that sound. “The things that are important to you are important to me,” he says, and her heart skips a beat. “Now, let’s get out of the water.”

✨✨✨

Countless tiny, shimmering wings take to the air with every step that Ben and Rey make through the heather. Like they’re kicking up stardust. They find a nice spot on the side of a hill where they have a view of the vast Fairy Pool and its sparkling falls, and Ben takes out his bookbag that he’d shrunk to fit into his pocket. When it’s returned to its original size, he rummages through it and removes more shrunken objects and dispels the charm on them one by one.

He had brought a picnic blanket, a cheese fondue with croutons and bacon cubes and roasted baby potatoes to dip into it, several delicate and fruity desserts that Rey recognizes from the display window of Madame Puddifoot’s Tea Shop, wineglasses, and a bottle of sparkling apple juice.

Rey settles on the spread-out blanket while Ben casts several protective enchantments all around the perimeter. Repelling jinxes so that the fairies won’t come near, shielding wards that conceal their presence. She honestly thinks that it borders on overkill—what are the chances that any other witch or wizard would be taking a midnight hike down the Black Cuillin during the Isle of Skye’s off-season—but Ben is a former Auror. It’s the sort of job that imbues a healthy dose of paranoia.

Then he joins her down there amidst the heather and the blanket suddenly seems a little too small, but in a good way.

“So,” Ben says as they begin tackling the fondue, with Rey sitting between his legs and leaning back against his chest, “why does the Portree Quidditch team need to work on their defense?”

Rey brightens up. She yaks his ear off for a good half an hour or so. She gets downright passionate about it.

He listens intently. Thoughtfully. He asks questions and he offers his own observations even though she suspects that he’s like Finn when it comes to Quidditch and he’s secretly dying inside. The things that are important to you are important to me, Ben had said, and it warms Rey more than any magic can.

They eat and they talk and they drink apple juice, and it’s all so carefree under the stars. He actually shrugs off his suit jacket and loosens his tie. A miracle. She loves seeing him like this, outside of Hogwarts and of Hogsmeade. It’s not that he’s suddenly become a whole new person, but there are layers being peeled back to reveal someone less stern. Someone who is charming in a wry sort of way.

And perhaps it’s possible to get drunk on apple juice, or perhaps she just gets drunk on Ben and the heather and the Hebrides. It’s honestly also quite possible that her brain had short-circuited the moment he rolled up his white shirtsleeves, revealing those shatteringly defined forearms. Whatever the case, she has to be the first person to see this side of him in a long time, and that is a greater and much more important gift than flowers or singing telegrams.

After a while, the previously endless specks of light covering the glade start dimming or winking out entirely as scores of fairies either doze off or retreat into the woods. And Rey, who has completely and utterly let her guard down, who is now wholly acting like herself the way she would around Finn and Rose, gets the absolutely brilliant idea to race Patronuses.

“Really?” Ben looks doubtful and a little drowsy. And so cute.

“C’mon, it’ll be fun,” she insists. “Just from that big tree over there—see, right there—to the waterfall we came from.”

“And what do I get when I win?”

“When?” Rey scoffs. “My Patronus’ll mop the floor with yours.”

The corner of his mouth lifts. A gleam of challenge shines in his dark eyes. “We’ll see.”

It’s with a certain amount of pomp that Rey fires off a nonverbal Patronus Charm at the same time that Ben does. His stag and her doe emerge from the backdrop of tall pines and glide silently over the lush, thick heather, toward the Fairy Pool.

“How did you know that it was my Patronus?” Ben suddenly asks. “That night, at your detention?”

Rey fidgets as much as she can with his arms wrapped around her from behind. “I, er, may have seen it before.”

“Oh?”

She sighs, and tells him about the time that she and Finn and Rose broke curfew and snuck around under the Invisibility Cloak and saw him in the Entrance Hall, with Chewie.

Ben stifles a raspy, rumbling sort of laugh into the slope of her neck. “You little troublemaker.”

Rey grins. The graceful silver silhouettes of stag and doe are bounding over the water now. They’re keeping pace with each other. There’s no telling who will win.

“What do you think it means?” She finally gives voice to what has been on the back of her mind since the start of seventh year. “We have twin wand cores, corresponding Patronuses…”

She trails off. They’ve never discussed this before. Wand cores can at least be brought up without a second thought, but a Patronus is a deeply personal thing to the witch or wizard who casts it.

But here and now, by the Fairy Pool on the Isle of Skye, it just feels right that they can talk about anything.

“It’s hard to say,” Ben mumbles after a prolonged silence. He still hasn’t lifted his face from her neck. His lips graze against her skin with every syllable. “A wand core is a conduit of your magic. A Patronus is an extension of your soul. There is so much that we have yet to understand regarding the natural laws that they follow, or if they follow any at all. But, taking these two things together, in relation to you and I—” He nuzzles at her neck, he tightens his embrace, a big bear of a man gone soft. The sound of his voice rolls through her like moonlight over the Hebrides. “Maybe we don’t need theory, or a legend, and it’s enough that it just is. Or maybe I was always meant to find you. In this life and in any other.”

And Rey turns around in the circle of his arms, and she kisses him.

At first it is a clumsy smash of two sets of lips, because she is impatient and desperate and there is so much that her body is burning to say. From his seated position, Ben topples over backwards in surprise and she falls with him, pinning him to the blanketed ground. The race forgotten. He tastes sweet and bright, a combination of sparkling apple and the dessert that they’d saved for last, that had been all peach and molasses. Rey can’t get enough.

There’s a frantic quality to the way she’s doing this. To the way she’s clawing at his hair, straddling him, rubbing against him until they’re panting into each other’s mouths. She thinks—with that hazy, far-off corner of her mind that is still capable of thought—that she might be trying to run away from something, although she doesn’t know what.

In the end, it’s Ben who slows them down. Rey squeaks as he rolls them both over so that she’s the one on her back, his elbows braced on the blanket at the side of each of her shoulders, his hips slotted firmly between her thighs. He grins down at her, a lazy, crooked kind of grin, his eyes crinkling at the corners, and she swears that the world has just gotten a little more magical.

“I think that I might be coming around to the notion of Valentine’s Day,” he hums, right before slanting an open-mouthed kiss over her already parted lips. He takes his sweet time, nibbling and licking his way in as though she tastes as sweet as she thinks he does. His hands are busy—the left tugging her hair loose from its trio of buns, the right fiddling with the garment covering her chest.

She feels him smiling into their kiss as the topmost button of her blouse pops open. “Missed you baby,” he lifts his mouth from hers to croon. The man actually croons, flirting with her like she’s not already about to give him everything.

Well, two can play at that game.

“Missed you, too, sir,” Rey murmurs, her own fingers snaking between their bodies to unzip his trousers.

He wrinkles his nose at her and then kisses her again. And again and again. He stops only once her blouse is open to just slightly above her navel and he has successfully tugged it down, along with the cups of her bra—which is a plain, pale pink color totally devoid of any strange animal patterns, thank you very much.

Ben chuckles, obviously knowing what she’s thinking, and Rey rolls her eyes.

But soon she’s rolling her eyes for an entirely different reason.

“Professor,” she gasps, her spine arching off of the picnic blanket as Ben seals his plush lips over one nipple, sucking slowly before switching to the other. It should have made her blush, how calling him by his title while they’re snogging rolls off of her tongue so naturally but, then again, she’s long since accepted that this is just the way that she is.

“Missed your cute little tits, too,” he mumbles into her skin. Her skirt has ridden up her thighs and, after some fumbling with his own underwear, it is so very easy for him to grind his bare erection against her through her knickers. “Missed your tight, hot pussy. Can’t believe you made me teach you Occlumency when we could’ve just fucked.”

Despite the fog of arousal that has settled over her bones, Rey manages to bristle. “Oi, I was all for shagging that night, you were the one who—”

His palm molds itself to the outline of her cunt, cupping her in one hand. She whimpers as he pushes a finger against her clit, the fabric of her knickers stopping the pressure from becoming unbearable, making it just right and not enough at the same time. He strokes her through this flimsy barrier for what feels like an eternity, all while licking and sucking her nipples until they’re as hard as rocks. She’s red in the face, whimpering for him, her underwear soaked through. The air smells like grass and like sandalwood. The stars and the distant, dimming fairy lights are all that she sees with every flutter of her eyelids.

“Put it in me,” she hears herself panting out. “Please, sir, need your cock, please put it in—”

“We have to get you ready first, Miss Niima.” Ben’s tone is mildly chiding and it drives Rey crazy. “Since you were late because you fell asleep, I assume that you didn’t have time to play with this pretty pink pussy before meeting me. In flagrant disregard of our agreement.”

“I’m sorry,” Rey moans, squirming as he shifts his hips so that his cock is flush against her bare inner thigh. Shit, it’s like he’s made of solid rock that’s been held to a fire.. So heavy. “I won’t forget again.”

He is unmoved by her pleas. She has to concede that she likes his sternness when it’s applied to—this. He stimulates her without letting her come until she’s near tears, and yet there’s a part of her that relishes every moment of it. How could she have forgotten how good this is, why does she have to keep picking fights and learning stupid bloody Occlumency—

Ben makes his way back to her mouth, kissing her senseless as she feverishly runs her fingers through his hair and arches up into him. Then he covers the rest of her face with butterfly kisses while he maneuvers her right leg to wrap around his waist.

“Going to fuck you now, sweetheart.” The gravelly hoarseness of his tone is the only indication that he’s barely holding on to his control. “Right here, out in the open. That’s how hard you make me. Just going to tug your little panties to the side and shove my cock into you, won’t even bother to take them off. That’s how much I missed you.”

“Yes,” Rey sobs, hiding her face in the collar of his shirt, thinking that she might die from affection and arousal at the same time, “I need it, Ben, please, I need you, I missed you so much—”

She chokes on a wail as he pulls the gusset of her drenched underwear out of the way and sinks into her in one smooth thrust. The wind sighs through the soft, dewy heather surrounding them.

It’s as though all the fight evaporates from Ben’s system in an instant. He presses his body as close to hers as possible, nuzzling at her cheek, rolling his hips against hers. Rey lets out a series of garbled noises torn between squeals and groans as he ruts into her so fully and so deliberately that it’s almost torture.

“All good?” he asks, peering down at her features.

She blinks at him in disbelief. “Yeah, why?”

“It’s just that…” He looks a little abashed. “I wasn’t certain if it would be okay, given that you didn’t get fingered first.”

“Professor Solo.” It’s her turn to be stern. “I’m wet enough that it doesn’t matter. And I think I’m rather used to you by now. Now just get us both off, please.”

He reaches out a hand and tweaks her nose.

She lightly slaps his wrist away and wiggles her hips to try to make him go faster.

And he does, settling into a rhythm that has her exposed breasts bouncing slightly with every thrust. Soon she takes over the job of keeping her knickers tugged to the side to grant him access while he continues pumping into her and fondling her tits, and even though no one can see or hear them thanks to the wards, it’s still odd to be shagging outdoors. But also in a good way. She feels as wild and as eternal as the Hebrides, and Ben’s hands on her shoulder and thigh are so gentle even as he splits her open and he mutters dirty words of praise in her ear.

“So tight, Rey, so amazing,” he tells her through gritted teeth. “Was worried it would hurt if you weren’t stretched out a bit first, but, God, you’re such a good girl, aren’t you? Look at you just taking it. Taking my cock.” He gives her nipple a sharp pinch and she closes her eyes, arousal coiling in her abdomen, ready to unfurl like waves of silver. She tucks her thumb against her clit and swirls it and she starts to shake. So close, so close, Ben’s dark encouragement coaxing her to even greater heights. “That’s right, that’s it, play with your little clit while your teacher fucks you. Want to feel you break around me, sweet girl.”

She comes hard, gushing all over the picnic blanket, probably. Crying out her triumph to the star-strewn heavens. And he follows not long after, the two of them writhing and tangled and still mostly clothed on the rolling hill.

Ben fills Rey up so much that she can feel some of it leaking out of her. She lets go of the gusset of her underwear and it slides back into place, keeping his spend inside her. He’s shaking slightly, all the tension draining out of his broad frame as he collapses face-first into her cleavage.

She stares up at the moon with a faint smile on her face. She cards her fingers through his sweat-dampened hair again, lazily this time. She breathes in the scent of earth and sex.

“Belated Happy Valentine’s.” Ben’s voice is muffled against her breast and also through a yawn. Before she can respond, he turns his head slightly to press a kiss to the side of her other breast. “And to you.”

Rey starts to giggle, but then it freezes halfway up her throat. Something is piercing her heart with all its bittersweet joy, with a solemn epiphany like a final sunrise.

Just like that, she knows.

She can’t run from it anymore.

And she can’t believe she realized it while he was wishing her boobs a Happy Valentine’s.

She is stunned into silence.

Ben lifts his head to peer at her with what he makes it seem as though is the last of his strength. “Are you all right?” he asks her drowsily.

I love you, is what Rey doesn’t say out loud but has in an instant taken up residence there in that place between the magic and the soul. As if it had been lit up for her by the moorland moon and the Fairy Pool. As if it had been brought to her by the wind blowing across the purple heather. Carried over the sea to Skye.