35. Chapter 35

When Rey opens her eyes, it’s to the sight of Finn, Rose, Seff, Tallie, Jess, Jannah, and the rest of the Gryffindor Quidditch team staring down at her amidst a backdrop of white curtains billowing in a slight breeze.

“What… what happened?” she groggily forces out through a throat that feels as though it’s been stuffed with the same sandpaper that was rubbed all over her lips and tongue.

Rose’s expression crumples, like she’s about to burst into tears. “Oh, Rey!” she sniffs. “You flew straight into the Whomping Willow. We all thought you were a goner. Please never do that again.”

And then Rose does start sobbing, and a pale-faced Finn reaches over to take his girlfriend’s hand, all while observing Rey solemnly.

As the memories come rushing back, Rey puts two and two together and it dawns on her that she must be lying in bed in the hospital wing. She would have given a start—would have tried to bolt upright—but she can’t seem to move for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to her just yet. Still, she pushes that concern to the side for now, choosing to focus on more urgent matters.

“Did we win?” she croaks. “Did I catch…”

She trails off because her teammates suddenly look very grim.

It occurs to her that her fingers had grazed the curve of the little golden ball, yes, but they hadn’t been able to close around it before the lightning struck.

“Azlyn caught the Snitch. She’d followed you and it shot down toward her after you were hit,” Jannah explains with the air of a healer walking a family through their loved one’s untimely death. “We lost by a hundred points.” She sucks in a breath and then puts on a determined expression. “But that’s all right, we can always win the next match. What’s important is that you’re okay.”

Rey’s heart drops into the pit of her stomach. The one task that she had to accomplish as a Seeker and she couldn’t even do it right. She’d failed everyone who’d been counting on her.

“To Azlyn’s credit, she did fly off after you,” Seff says earnestly. “Keyan was yelling at her to leave it, but she went and tried to catch you before you reached the Whomping Willow.”

But Rey can barely spare a thought for Azlyn’s uncharacteristic show of compassion because Jannah, of all people, had stated that it’s not a big deal to lose a match.

Which means that something is seriously, seriously wrong.

Rey glances down at herself.

And almost shouts.

The entire upper half of her body from the neck down has melted. That is the first description to come to mind. Her torso and her arms ooze over the sheets in mere flaps of skin and muscle without a skeleton to hold them together, like they’ve been fashioned from Play-Doh by a child with a particularly twisted imagination.

“That bloody tree left your clavicles, ribcage, humeri, and ulnae in such bad shape that Madame Kalonia decided it would be easier and more foolproof to vanish the bones and regrow them than try to repair every crack,” Tallie says mournfully. Her blue eyes are rimmed red; she’d clearly already gotten out of her system all the crying that Rose is doing now. “It’s honestly a good thing that you were unconscious for that much Skele-Gro. I can’t imagine that that’d have been very pleasant at all.”

“Yeah, small mercies, I guess,” Rey mutters a little sourly, although she has to acknowledge that Tallie does have a point. The last time Madame Kalonia had poured Skele-Gro down her throat, Rey had been in fourth year and she’d broken her leg dodging a blast of fire from a Blast-Ended Skrewt in Care of Magical Creatures class.

There had been no need to vanish bones then, but the small sip of potion required to heal her fracture had tasted dreadful. It had burned.

Rey silently calculates how much Skele-Gro had been administered to her in order to regrow the bones of her whole torso. Probably half a flagon. No wonder her mouth felt like it had been incinerated. She is glad to have been out cold for that—as well as for the entire process of her bones disappearing within her body.

“You also had a concussion and lots of bruises and splinters. And I mean lots,” Jess tells her. “I’m not kidding. You looked like a porcupine who’d been in a fight—”

“I think she gets the picture, Jess,” Finn sharply interrupts. He’s got an arm around Rose’s shoulders now and she’s weeping into his shirtfront. “Anyway, Professor Solo and Madame Kalonia took care of all of that, and now all you have to do, Rey, is wait for your bones to regrow.”

“Professor Solo?” Rey echoes before she can think better of it.

Finn nods. “Yeah, he assisted Madame Kalonia with healing, and he was also the one who got you out of that tree.”

Tears well up behind Rey’s eyes, heavy and bitter, but she’s too conscious of all the people huddled around her bed to let them fall. Ben definitely can’t hover over her or else people would ask questions, but she wants to see him so much that it is almost a physical ache, like hunger.

“But Solo was rather brilliant, wasn’t he?” Elliver Olim gushes, prompting a chorus of assent from the others.

And, just like that, Rey is all ears, and Jannah is all too happy to oblige. Probably grasping the opportunity to dwell on something that isn’t Gryffindor’s defeat at the hands of Hufflepuff. “Solo raced down to the pitch as soon as you were knocked off-course. I’ve never seen anyone run so fast—”

“Well, he has very long legs,” Tallie muses, her tone taking on a vaguely dreamy note.

“Yes,” Rose stops crying over Rey’s injury long enough to agree. “And I’m sure he works out, he looks like he does.”

Finn and Seff exchange eerily identical scowls. “Ahem, I believe that Jannah was speaking,” Seff says in what is by his standards a shockingly curt manner.

“I really was,” Jannah huffs with affronted dignity. “Anyway, as soon as he reached the field, he got into a row with Professor Dameron, who’d been flying low at the time because he’d just blown his whistle and declared the—” A vein throbs in Jannah’s temple—“the Hufflepuff win. I couldn’t hear what they were saying because it was raining so hard, but Solo was shouting. Then he tackled Dameron off of his broom—”

“He what?” Rey squawks, and Jannah nods emphatically.

“Straight up dove at him and wrestled the broom out of his grasp, I couldn’t believe it. Then Solo went off after you. The man is actually a fairly decent flyer, who would have thought, and by the time the rest of our team got to your location—”

“—He was doing battle with the Whomping Willow!” Gandris Dyun butts in. “Shooting curses at it while it tossed you around—”

“Some quite powerful curses,” Jess adds contemplatively. “Like, extremely dark magic. It would have had to be, to break through the tree’s defenses—”

“—And the Whomping Willow eventually got fed up, or maybe it surrendered, I don’t know,” says Fry, one of the Chasers, “and it lobbed you at him.”

“It… what…” Rey feels faint. She’d been unconscious for all of this. She tries to imagine the blasted tree throwing her limp form at a broomstick-riding Ben, but her mind simply refuses to process it.

“The other professors arrived and Solo brought you down and you were given first aid,” Jannah continues. “Mothma was in a right state, let me tell you, wouldn’t stop wringing her hands all the way to the hospital wing.”

“What—what about my broom?” Rey asks. “Is it okay?”

“It’s out in the hall with all of ours,” Jess replies. “I’ll bring it back to the dorms with me, no worries.”

“I need to check it,” Rey persists. “The lightning might’ve damaged—”

“The only thing that you need to be doing, Miss Niima,” Madame Kalonia snaps as she bursts in through the white curtains around Rey’s bed, “is resting. Your visiting hours are over—no, no,” she says firmly over the protests of Rey’s friends and teammates, “this poor girl has to regrow every single bone between her neck and her hips. She has a long three days ahead of her and her body needs to marshal its strength. Out you get, all of you—”

Rey musters a small, reassuring smile at the other students that doesn’t entirely ring true as they reluctantly shuffle out of the hospital wing under Madame Kalonia’s watchful glare. It’s not long before the healer is turning to her with a disgruntled frown.

“It is going to hurt a lot when the Skele-Gro kicks in,” she informs Rey. “Unfortunately, I cannot administer painkillers because that will interfere with the regrowth. I’ve cast Silencing Charms around this area, though, so there is no need to hold back if you wish to scream.”

“That’s really helpful, thanks.” Rey can’t quite disguise her sarcasm, and Madame Kalonia’s lips purse for a brief moment before she continues speaking.

“There is a stasis field placed around you which restricts movement. There will be no need for you to eat or drink, although after the forty-eight-hour mark you should be able to sit up to do either if you are so inclined. The stasis also makes it so that there is no need for you to use the loo.”

“Small mercies,” Rey says again. Today is just not her day.

Madame Kalonia clucks her tongue. “Students flying around on broomsticks while dodging lightning strikes and heavy irons balls, a tree that attacks anyone who touches it—it is simply beyond me as to how this school hasn’t been shut down yet—”

She’s still complaining as she moves away. Rey is left alone, staring up at the ceiling, wallowing in guilt and misery, just wanting to see Ben.

✨✨✨

Rey wakes up in the middle of the night consumed by blinding agony.

The upper half of her body feels like every inch of it is riddled with iron nails from within. The pain grinds. She screams and she screams, sore all over, nerve endings shot to hell.

The hours stretch on in an endless haze. Her screams taper off into whimpers and tears leak from the corners of her eyes. She is unable to move, unable to think clearly, barely even able to breathe.

Once in a while Madame Kalonia appears by her bedside, parting the stasis field to massage a mentholated balm into her scalp and her temples and her feet. It’s a paltry comfort but Rey clings to it, wanting it to never end, thinking—perhaps embarrassingly so—of her mother, of how she wishes that her mother had been there to do this for her during all the times that she’d been sick as a child.

Sleep, whenever it comes, is fitful. There’s never a true rest.

The second day is much the same, except that she’s too tired to manage anything more than the occasional groan of pain.

Pain is all that she knows. The burning nails driving into her muscles, the splintering of new bones forming underneath skin, all contained within the cage of helpless immobility. She memorizes the pattern of stone and wood on the ceiling and the rippling of the white curtains in the breeze and she listens to footsteps and to voices as other patients are treated and visitors are either admitted or turned away depending on the condition of whom they’re visiting.

Rey hears Finn and Rose at one point, then Seff and Tallie, then Jannah and Jess. Their arguments with the exasperated healer get downright heated, and she has to smile. At least she has them, at least they still like her, even if she is a failure and a good-for-nothing.

At two in the morning of the third day, she is startled awake by the sensation of someone tucking her sweaty hair behind her ear long after Madame Kalonia had said that she was going to turn in.

Rey’s eyes fly open, slowly adjusting to the darkness. Ben Solo is standing by her bed, staring solemnly down at her in the moonlight.

He is all silver-etched shadows, so much so that, at first, she nearly thinks that he’s an exceptionally handsome castle ghost. But his palm is warm against her cheek and she sighs as she weakly nuzzles into it, his touch an anchor amidst all the aching.

The minutes pass and her brow wrinkles when there’s nothing but silence on his end, but it soon occurs to her that he probably thinks that they’ll be overheard.

“Madame Kalonia put Silencing Charms,” she tells him. “Probably so that I don’t bother people with my carrying on.”

Ben flinches.

He couldn’t have reacted any differently if she’d slapped him.

“I know that there are Silencing Charms,” he finally says. “I know every ward that has been cast around here. I know every second of Harper Kalonia’s schedule. That’s why it took me this long to visit—I was casing the place, so to speak. Trying to figure out the best way to see you.”

“I didn’t even think you’d be able to see me at all,” Rey admits.

“No power on this Earth could have kept me from it.” Ben’s tone is so fierce that she shivers, under the spell of his intense adoration as always. “I’ve been disillusioned outside the hospital wing since last night, performing detection spells and all that. Once I’d marked the time that Kalonia concluded her rounds and when she’d wake up and start again, I snuck in.”

Rey fights back a snort. If the American Department of Aurors knew what their training was being used for these days…

“Why were you being so quiet, then?” she musters the temerity to ask.

Ben glances at her right hand like he wants to hold it, but he can’t due to the stasis field that encases her, starting from below her neck. Even if he could have risked breaching the stasis, any sort of pressure on her hand would be unbearable, anyway. Rey’s only glad that it actually looks like a hand instead of the rubbery flaps of skin that it had been a day ago. He pats the top of her head instead, a tenderly awkward gesture that makes her smile even as she waits for his response.

“I’m a little overwhelmed,” Ben grates out. “You look like shit, sweetheart.”

Perhaps she should have been offended, but the endearment goes a long way toward mollifying her. She’s just about to open her mouth to respond with a quip of her own, but then there is another spurt of regrowth and the ever-present pain that she has been learning to live with abruptly sharpens.

Rey bursts into a fresh round of sobs. She’s so tired and it hurts so much. The sounds that she makes are small and pathetic, scraped raw, and Ben drops to his knees beside her bed, pressing his lips to her temple until the pain tapers off into a dull, throbbing ache that still consumes her entire being but is, at the very least, more manageable.

Once she comes back to herself, she notices that he’s shaking. He looks up at her and there are tears in his dark eyes.

“Oh,” Rey says softly. “Ben, it’s okay—”

He shakes his head, resting his brow against the side of hers. “Do not comfort me.” His tone is gruff. “I should be the one—but I can’t—not always, only like this…” He trails off with her unable to make sense of his words. His fingers tangle in her hair. She gets the impression that he’s trying to regain some semblance of control.

“Rey,” he finally ventures. “Baby.” He kisses her cheek as it flushes with pleasure at the endearment. “Are you able to talk about it? To tell me what exactly happened?”

She swallows, and she does. It’s somewhat unsettling to relive what a close call it had been, but at the end of the day she can do anything as long as he’s by her side. She starts from flying higher than she should have in an attempt to catch the Snitch and she ends with the last thing that she remembers—kicking the Firebolt Supreme away to save it and the Whomping Willow gathering her up in its weighty branches.

Ben has gone strangely tense by the time that she’s done speaking. When he peers down at her, it’s with a vague frown and a glint in his narrowed irises.

She doesn’t think that he’s using Occlumency—he’d promised her that he never would when it’s just the two of them—but he does appear to take several deep breaths before his expression clears.

“Thank you for telling me.” He strokes her hair again, then leans in close to kiss the tip of her nose. “Go back to sleep. No,” he says firmly when she starts to protest, “you need as much rest as possible. Just close your eyes. I’ll be here for another three hours.” A trace of an oddly haunted look enters his gaze. “Then I need to go before Kalonia embarks on her morning rounds.”

“I wish you could stay,” Rey admits, lulled by the cradle of his hands, by the gentleness of his touch. Rendered so small and vulnerable and ready to confess anything by how badly she hurts, by how strong and protective Ben looks hunched over her like this.

A shadow of something that shades close to agony darts across his pale features. His lips ghost over her forehead and he continues kneeling by her bedside.

“Thanks for saving me,” she murmurs as she drifts off. “Again.”

“First a manticore and now a killer tree. I hope that this doesn’t become a habit for us,” he says wryly, running his fingers through her hair until she falls into another spate of restless, pain-wracked slumber.

✨✨✨

True to Madame Kalonia’s word, Rey is able to sit up in bed on the third afternoon and enthusiastically slurp down a bowlful of porridge.

Ben stays with her throughout her last night in the hospital wing as well, grading papers by her bedside. She can’t talk that much, her body ravenous for sleep as it wrestles with the last stage of the healing process, but it’s a comfort to see him every time she opens her eyes. And to just feel him there, beside her.

She goes back to class on Thursday with a brand-new ribcage and brand-new arm and collar bones. Aside from some soreness and the occasional stiffness if she makes any sudden movements, the Whomping Willow incident may as well have been a bad dream, and she has to shake her head at how preposterous and amazing the magical world can be.

Keyan Farlander proves to be utterly insufferable about the Hufflepuff victory, smirking at Tallie and Rey whenever he sees them together. “Merlin,” Tallie grumbles to Rey after second period, when her ex and his friends have sauntered out of earshot, “I had such bad taste in men, what was I thinking—”

“Well, now you’ve landed a winner,” Rey tells her earnestly.

They both turn to look at Seff, who’s walking toward them carrying a mountain of textbooks in his arms. He beams when he catches Tallie’s eye and gives her a small wave. Textbooks go crashing onto the floor.

“Lucky me,” Tallie sighs before going over to help Seff as Rey bites back a grin and joins Finn and Rose on their way to the next class.

In truth, Rey is also more than a little concerned for the state of Jannah’s emotional wellbeing after losing the match, but the Gryffindor team captain seems to have adopted a frighteningly positive attitude. “It’s fine, I’m fine,” Jannah says to anyone who asks—and, sometimes, to those who don’t. “We’ll just have to soundly beat Ravenclaw. It’s no big deal. We’ll practice in earnest once Rey’s fully back on her feet. I’m fine.”

The guilt eats away at Rey. Everyone else tries not to show it, but she can tell that they’re disappointed. After all, Quidditch is Gryffindor House’s thing. It had all been riding on her and. in the end, she hadn’t been able to deliver.

She is useless. Good for nothing. Just like her parents always tended to say.

She is despondent when she enters Ben’s classroom on Friday morning. And he certainly doesn’t help matters when he barks out, “What are you doing here?” the moment he sees her.

Rey stops in her tracks, as do the other students. Ben glances around as if he’s only just remembered that they have an act to keep up.

“Miss Niima,” he says with significantly more composure, “you have recently suffered several harrowing injuries, due in no small part to Hogwarts’ appallingly low safety standards. Go back to your dorm and rest. Do you have any availability this coming Wednesday?”

“Er, I’ll be free all afternoon,” Rey says. Of course, he already knows that. The man deserves an Oscar award.

Ben offers her a clipped nod. “Come by my office at two-thirty on Wednesday and we’ll go over today’s lesson. Dismissed.”

Rey’s classmates, knowing an opportunity when they see it, all turn to head for the door.

“Not all of you,” Ben says in long-suffering tones. “Just the person who was clobbered by the Whomping Willow, please.”

Rey scurries back out into the hallway to the disappointed mutterings of the other seventh years. Although there’s a part of her that seethes at Ben’s high-handedness, she’s grateful for the reprieve, as everything still feels a little tender. She follows his orders and takes a nap in her room—unfortunately sleeping through Potions class as well, and Hux will definitely not be as understanding.

Still, she’ll worry about that some other time. She’s just looking forward to spending the entire afternoon with Ben on Wednesday.

✨✨✨

By a stroke of rotten luck, Rey has to think about her missed Potions lecture much sooner than she would have liked, because on Wednesday she bumps into Armitage Hux on his way out of Ben’s office. The weasel-faced prat smugly informs her that she’s failed his quiz by virtue of nonattendance, and Rey is left glaring a hole into his back as he descends the stairs.

“Sorry, our meeting ran a little late,” Ben says once Rey has shut his office door behind her. “Obi-Wan has Hux and myself working on something—and, before you ask, it’s an event for your upcoming career fair. I am not at liberty to divulge specifics.”

“All right,” Rey says, amiably enough. Seventh-year career fairs orchestrated by Obi-Wan are bonkers, in a good way, and she doesn’t want the surprise to be ruined for her, either. “Can I ask what it’s like teaming up with Hux, at least?”

“Horrible.” Ben snorts. “I hate him so much.”

His face indeed bears the put-upon expression of someone who has had to tolerate Hux for a longer period of time than originally planned, and Rey has to laugh. “You haven’t exactly been endearing yourself to your coworkers lately, yeah?”

Ben pauses in the act of getting up from behind his desk. He scrutinizes her intently from across the room, then grimaces as he stands. “Your friends told you, I suppose.”

“They did,” Rey confirms. “Don’t worry, I think it’s bloody hilarious. Dameron won’t ever forgive you, but that’s no great loss.”

“I pursued what I judged to be the best course of action. Dameron was saying that he’d be the one to go after you because he was already on a broom, but I couldn’t—” Ben takes a deep breath, walking slowly toward her. “I couldn’t just stand by and wait while you were in danger. My colleagues are now of the opinion that I have a soft spot for you, and I have spent the past few days being good-naturedly ribbed for playing favorites with my students.”

Rey grins, but it’s quick to fade into something more quizzical once she realizes that Ben appears sterner and sterner with each step that he takes in her direction. He stops a good couple of feet away from her, his hands in his pockets. He looks really nice today in his double-breasted black suit, although she could probably do without his striped tie that’s predominantly green and is much too Slytherin for her taste.

“How are you feeling?” he asks her. “Is there any pain?”

“None at all,” Rey says.

“Any discomfort, even just a little?” he presses. “And were you able to get enough rest?”

“Ben, I’m okay.” It comes out a little exasperated. A little impatient. “Good as new, in fact.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” he says evenly. “So now we can discuss what the hell did you think you were doing.”

Rey blinks.

“This was not your first Quidditch game by a long shot. Surely you were already aware of the perils of flying at that height when there was lightning everywhere. But you went ahead and, as a result, basically got zapped out of the sky.” Ben’s tone is no longer even. Fury crackles through it, a simmering echoed in the darkness of his eyes. “I cannot even imagine how you would think that it was an acceptable risk.”

“It was—it was completely acceptable!” Rey sputters. “I was so close to catching the Snitch—ask any Seeker and they will tell you—”

“That statement does not exactly leave me brimming with confidence in the judgement of Quidditch players in general,” Ben says icily. “And don’t even get me started on how you were lying there regrowing all the bones in your torso and you had the—the gall to say that you’d gotten a fucking broomstick to safety—”

“It was from you!” Rey cries. “It was from you and it was really expensive, Ben—”

He takes a big, stomping step closer. He leans into her space, his hands still in his pockets. “Do you think that I wouldn’t have bought you another one?” he hisses. “Do you think me so miserly that I wouldn’t have replaced something that made you happy but lost through no fault of your own?”

“How would I have been able to explain that to the whole school, then?” she demands. “Where would I have possibly gotten a new broomstick?”

He glowers but is otherwise at an obvious loss for a response. She wonders if the helplessness of their situation cuts as deep for him as it does for her.

“You should have practiced some common sense,” he eventually growls.

“I did what I did because the Firebolt Supreme was important to me,” she says stubbornly, “as was the Quidditch match—”

“Nothing is more important than you!” Ben roars. It echoes through the sunlit office, shocking Rey into silence. “You are all that matters!”

His hands emerge from his pockets. His fingers twitch and he hesitates for a moment, his gaze darting to her shoulders.

He wants to hold her, she realizes distantly. But he’s not sure if it would be wise given her recent injuries.

In the end, Ben settles for running a frustrated hand through his hair, and Rey stares into his wild, desperate eyes while her heartbeat races out of control.

“You’re the only one who thinks that, you know,” she finally says. His jaw clenches as if in warning, but she barrels on. “Being good at Quidditch is basically the only thing that I have to offer. I’m far from the prettiest or the smartest student. I’m not the one that either Finn or Rose loves the most, because they’ve got each other for that. I’m not even my parents’ favorite child—and I’m their only child—” Her voice catches but it spills out from her anyway, everything that she’s ever thought but never had the guts to say to anyone else. “What I can do, however, is be a Seeker, and take care of the broom that you gave me for Christmas. But now you’re mad at me for doing that and, because I wasn’t fast enough, we’ll need a two-hundred-point lead over Ravenclaw in order to win the Cup—”

“Get on my desk,” Ben says tersely.

Rey’s world screeches to a halt. “What?”

“You heard me.”

“Oi,” she says, disbelief and anger building up inside her, “I am baring my soul here—”

“Get on the desk,” Ben repeats, implacable and every bit as hard-headed as she is.

Fuming, Rey storms over to the large wooden desk that’s piled high with textbooks and rolls of parchment. She parks her bottom on the edge of it, scooting backward until her feet are dangling over the floor. Then she crosses her arms in front of her chest and bestows the man who’d trailed after her with a ferocious scowl—

—only for it to slide away, replaced by a squeak, as Ben hunches over her, slamming his hands down on the table, on either side of her thighs.

The kiss that he presses to her parted lips is a study in contrasts. It’s insistent yet gentle, somewhat clumsy but then again not rough—as though it were borne of both affection for her and annoyance with how mere words can’t suffice to encompass all that the heart has to say.

It is a kiss that manages to tell her shut up and, at the same time, please listen to me.

By the end of it, the fingers of her right hand have curled themselves along the lapel of his suit as if of their own volition.

“Rey,” Ben groans out once they’ve broken apart. He closes his eyes, resting his forehead against hers. Inhaling slowly and steadily like he’s breathing her in. “Do you have any idea how worried everyone was? I’ve gone on scores of high-speed chases as an Auror and I would consider myself a fairly competent flyer—and Dameron’s broom is professional quality as well—but your teammates nearly outstripped me in the rush to get to you. Even those on the opposing team—like Azlyn and Warv—hurried after you. That goddamn tree is extremely fast and powerful and I still had to threaten your fellow players with detention so they’d stay back and not get hurt trying to help pry you loose. And when the other people who’d been in the audience started arriving—” He pulls back and peers solemnly down at her, brushing away the tears that have started rolling down her cheeks.

“Your friends were crying,” Ben says, and of course that makes Rey cry harder as well. “Your other teachers were rattled. Jyn was as white as a sheet, and Obi-Wan gave very stern orders to have you taken to the hospital wing. Do you know how many times I’ve seen Obi-Wan act stern in all my life? Exactly zero. Until today.” Ben kisses her again and she can taste the salt of her own tears on his tongue before he pulls away to nuzzle at her cheek. To rasp, “This school, as abysmally lacking in basic precautions as it is, is your home, Rey. You matter beyond your ability to catch the Gold Snitch—”

“Golden Snitch,” she automatically corrects, and Ben rolls his eyes.

“Semantics.”

It’s enough for her to crack a watery smile, which he once again grazes with his lips.

“Didn’t people gather around your bed in the hospital wing?” he prods. “Did that not prove that you are important to your friends? I saw Miss Tico and Miss Lintra sobbing on their way in to see you. Don’t you remember that?”

“I mean, I do,” Rey whispers, “but I didn’t—”

She hadn’t connected it. She had needed it spelled out for her.

She thinks that it might be for the same reason Christmas and Valentine’s sometimes feel like they happened to someone else.

There is something that’s a bit haywire inside her mind. Something that refuses to process that she can be a person whom others care for.

What does that mean, then? That she needs to constantly be told? What rotten luck, to have to go through life like this, forever in search of validation from somebody else—

She watches Ben arrive at a decision. It’s easy to read his face when they’re alone, when they’re like this. She sees it all unfold—his epiphany, his acceptance, his bright idea that she can’t figure out just yet, his determination to see it through.

The next kiss that he gives her is filled with heat.

She recognizes this rhythm, this rolling of his tongue, and she is all too happy to welcome it. Craving touch to go with all those sweet words of affirmation. His wandering hands deftly unfasten the buttons of her white blouse and hike up her gray skirt, palming her thighs, gingerly stroking her sides. It’s not long before he’s finagled her clothes and her underwear into a haphazard heap on the floor, followed by her socks and her shoes. He covers her body with kisses and caresses, and she clutches at his shirtfront and grinds her wet heat against him through his trousers because there is a thrill to this, too. To having every part of her bared while he's still in his suit.

Rey is a little confused when Ben draws back; it’s not often that he stops once they get going. His dark eyes sweep over her, lingering on her face, her neck, her breasts. He looks at her like it’s both memorization and worship, each moment of scrutiny as intimate as a kiss to the corner of the mouth. She blushes.

“I don’t tell you how beautiful you are often enough,” he murmurs. “You deserve to hear it every day.” He skims his large fingers lightly over her collarbone, seizing the opportunity to lean in and kiss the delicate skin of her eyelids after they’ve fluttered shut. “You have the most gorgeous eyes I’ve ever seen. Hazel, like a lush forest that I never want to leave.” His lips then dart to the space between her brows. “I also love the little wrinkle that you get here, when you’re mad at me.”

“I suppose it’s for the best that I’m mad at you a lot, then,” she grumps, eliciting a hoarse chuckle from him.

He moves lower, kissing the tip of her nose and then her cheeks, keeping up a steady stream of the nicest, loveliest words. “You also have the cutest nose. Sometimes when we’re not together and I’m having a stressful day I think about how, if I could only tweak your nose at that very moment, everything would be all right. And don’t even get me started on your freckles. They’re adorable.” His soft, clever mouth traces the path that her freckles make, all the way down to her shoulders and her chest. “They form constellations that I can study until this sun burns out.”

By the time he reaches her breasts, she can barely breathe from the anticipation—and it really doesn’t help matters in the breathing department when he strews kisses all around her nipples without quite making contact with them. He blows on each one gently, and they are stiff peaks, and she could cry from the yearning. “I love these pretty little tits,” he whispers, his fingers cupping and squeezing, teasing, relentless and sensual. “I love how they were made for my hands and my mouth. I love watching them bounce when I fuck you. I will never get tired of saying this.”

He dips his head low and sucks on one breast first and then the other, tongue swirling and teeth grazing in just the right way, and she squirms beneath him, the newly regrown spine an almost perfect curve, her hips writhing and her limbs wild like grasping things. A pile of books and parchment go crashing to the floor. Her fingers tug at his hair. She moans his name over and over again, pants it out, cries it, urging him on.

“You also have—” Ben lifts his head to nuzzle at her throat—“the most enticing voice, with the hottest damn accent. Every time you open your mouth it just makes me want to have my way with you.” He moves higher, smirking against her lips. “Ah. I skipped your mouth, didn’t I, Miss Niima? How foolish of me.” He kisses her, over and over and over again, and Rey is too drunk on praise to do anything but grant him access, let his tongue delve inside and taste to his heart’s content. “I’d die for this lovely, witty mouth, and how it’s perfect for kissing, and all the clever things that emerge from it, and all the ways that it says my name,” he hums, nibbling at her bottom lip. “God, Rey, I can’t even count the number of times that I remembered something you told me days later and grinned to myself. The portraits probably think I’m an idiot.” She lets out a giddy laugh, which he is quick to swallow with his smiling lips.

But then he’s looking down at her, mirth replaced by a solemn truth that seems so precious written all over his face. “Speaking of things that you told me, do you remember what you said in the greenhouse? Back when—when I was still being an asshole?”

“Oh, so you’re never an asshole these days?” she can’t resist quipping.

He chucks her under the chin in retaliation, but continues earnestly enough that she feels somewhat guilty about joking at a time like this.

“You said that you wanted a man who could love somebody hard enough to break the Imperius Curse.” Ben’s dark eyes are suddenly so tender, almost difficult to look into for all their piercing vulnerability. “That was the moment that I realized—although I couldn’t admit it to myself back then—that I needed you in my life. Your gentleness, your compassion, your brilliance, your prickly little shell, your good heart.” He presses his lips to the spot on her chest under which her heart beats for him and him alone, then he takes her hand, lacing their fingers together, scattering more kisses over her knuckles and her wrist. “I need these hands, too. So talented at everything, so strong, weaving magic with a grace and inventiveness I’ve never seen before. These hands that can soothe me and make me weak in the knees at the same time.”

Rey is so pleasantly flushed now, all covered in goosebumps, her toes curling. Merlin, it’s—this is sex, isn’t it, another form of it, just slow and worshipful touches and softly rasped words.

And Ben’s not even done yet. His mouth travels lower and she closes her eyes as he enumerates everything else that he likes about her. It is all so achingly beautiful. She just wants to stay like this. He stops talking only when his head is buried between her thighs and he’s kissing her there, so languorous and yet so fierce all at once, his tongue licking broad, hot stripes along her entrance and dipping inside to slip between her inner walls, the tip of his nose nudging at her clit with delicious pressure, his fingers digging indents into her thighs as he holds them apart. He eats her out in his nice suit and she moans and writhes for him, riding his face, so very close…  

And then he stops. He pulls back a little, gazing at her with hooded eyes, and he very emphatically does not resume. Her entire body stiffens. Betrayal!

His plush lips are red and swollen, slick with her arousal. She watches them curve into a vague smile that he then hides against the inside of her thigh.

“Say that you’ll take care of yourself from now on, because you matter,” he directs.

“What?” She gapes at him through a fog of bewilderment and desire curbed short.

“Say it,” Ben repeats, “and maybe I’ll let you come.”

“I’lltakecareofmyselffromnowonbecauseImatter,” Rey mumbles.

He cocks his head. “I didn’t quite catch that, sweetheart.”

Merlin. This is, without a doubt, the most embarrassing thing he’s ever made her do in bed. Or on desk. Or against wall.

But she really, really needs to come. She’s dripping all over the table, every inch of her sensitized, straining, twitching.

“I’ll take care of myself from now on,” Rey forces out thickly, “because I matter.”

“Good girl.” Ben seals his mouth over her clit, sucking until she’s right on the very edge.

Then he draws back again, earning a shout of frustration from her that she feels in her very core.

His gaze is unrepentant. Like steel. Focused only on her. “Say that you’re beautiful and amazing and loved.”

“I’m…” Her voice cracks and she tries again. “I’m beautiful—and amazing—and loved—”

By you? she nearly asks him, but then his mouth is on her cunt once more and she is throwing her head back and canting her hips and almost—

“Ben!” Rey wails, because he stops again and it’s actually starting to hurt. Maybe even much more than the Skele-Gro had. Her entire body is trembling.

But he just grins, a hint of mischief peeking through his stern facade. “Now say that you’re the sexiest witch of your age.”

She wheezes out a sound that is a laugh and a groan at the same time. “That is not true.”

“It is,” Ben insists firmly. “So say it.”

Rey falls back against the desk, staring at the ceiling with the beginnings of the most ridiculous smile tugging at the corners of her lips. “I’m the sexiest witch of my age—oh,” she gasps as he dives back in, taking her higher and higher on the flicks of his velvety tongue and every pulse of his lips.

“Say that I’m lucky to have you,” he rumbles against her cunt.

“I’m lucky to have you,” Rey breathes out.

Ben reaches down to pinch her bum in admonition. “Now is not the time for that—”

“No, I mean it. I’m lucky to have you,” she murmurs. He goes still. “And you’re—” There is a small part of her that whispers that what she’s about to say is the greatest lie of all, but Ben is everywhere and she is about to be there and so that insecure little voice is shoved aside—“and you’re lucky to have me—”

And soon the opportunity for words is flying past, because all of a sudden Ben is sucking and lapping away at her like his life depends on it, and Rey can no longer speak, she can only sob in joy and in catharsis and in relief as she soars and falls into her hard-won orgasm. The most exquisite shattering.

It's all syrupy slow, the aftermath. Ben’s got an endearingly crooked grin on his face as he helps her sit up on the desk and gathers her into his arms. He kisses her soundly and she tastes herself on his tongue with a contented sigh, her fingers trailing over the considerable bulge in his trousers.

“It’s your turn, I believe,” she purrs against his lips.

“I’m looking forward to it,” he drawls. “You’re not the sexiest witch of your age for nothing.”

“Ben!"

✨✨✨

“How was your D.A.D.A tutorial?” Finn asks her later that night while they’re eating dinner in the Great Hall. “Have you mastered erections yet?”

Rey chokes on her pumpkin juice. “I beg your pardon?”

“The Erecto charm?” Finn clarifies. “For constructing shelters in a pinch?”

And, yes, Rose had provided Rey with notes of all the spellwork that had been discussed last Friday, but—

“You have to know what that sounded like,” Rey snaps at Finn.

“Believe me, they do.” Jess glares at Finn and the other seventh-year boys, who’ve all started sniggering. “It was probably for the best that you weren’t in class, Rey. These jokers were completely unbearable. You should have seen Professor Solo’s face, he was so fed up—”

“I’m sure his mood was much improved today,” says Gandris. “After giving Rey a private tutorial on erections—”

Elliver snorts soup all over the table, to a chorus of groans from those who get caught in the splash.

“You are all disgusting,” Tallie informs the boys with her nose in the air. “Leave Eurydice alone. It’s fiendishly complicated, Erecto is, of course Professor Solo had to give Rey a hands-on lesson—”

“Not helping,” Rey says under her breath as the boys laugh even harder.