39. Chapter 39

Hux is as still as the grave. He stares at the compromising position that he has caught Ben and Rey in, his features as white as a sheet, a stark contrast to his severe black robes.

There is no way out of this.

There is no possible excuse—not one that can be believed. Not one that will stop Hux from going straight to the headmaster.

Rey knows what it means for her life to flash before her eyes. She’d experienced it when she faced the manticore and when she unwittingly flew into the Whomping Willow. What is happening now is similar but, instead of memories, it’s the future that’s unfurling in her mind.

A future where Ben is disgraced, his reputation ruined, the second chance that Leia had fought so hard to give him in tatters.

A future where he has to leave Hogwarts and Rey will never see him again.

She can’t allow any of these things to happen.

The panic washes over her in waves.

Rey operates on instinct alone. Her wand is holstered to her arm, which is currently around Ben’s neck, but there is another that’s more easily accessible. She reaches into Ben’s jacket and pries the blackthorn wand from the inner lining, where he always keeps it, and she leaps off of the desk and aims at Hux.

“Obliviate!” Rey yells.

The magic surges forth.

But Hux is fast. Dangerously so. Which, in hindsight, is something that shouldn’t have taken Rey by surprise. She’d seen how he dueled, way back at the beginning of autumn term. She should have known what he’d be capable of.

Hux slips his wand out of his left sleeve and deflects the green jet of the Memory Charm in a single, seamless movement. He disarms Rey before she can even blink, the nonverbal Expelliarmus stinging her fingers, knocking the blackthorn wand out of her grasp. It clatters onto the floor by Ben’s feet, and there is a moment—Rey swears that there is a moment—wherein her eyes meet Ben’s and his gaze begs her to stand down, please—

But it’s too late. She’d already attacked a professor on top of getting caught with another one’s hand up her shirt. She will be expelled, her wand snapped in half. The life that she wants in the wizarding world has never been further out of reach than it is now.

She will fight for it, and she will fight for Ben.

She will do anything.

Rey isn’t thinking logically anymore. Or perhaps she is, but it’s the logic of tunnel vision. The reckless logic of the only way out being through.

She whirls to face Hux, whipping her aspen wand out of its holster. It slices through the air in the slashing movement that Ben had taught her and the incantation rolls off of her tongue.

“Sectumsempra!”

The air fills with searing white light.

For a dark spell to work, you have to mean it. You have to let the magic feed on your anger, your desperation, your hatred.

And Rey’s got seven years’ worth of anger all stored up for her smarmy git of a Potions instructor, and she hates him for discovering her and Ben’s secret, and she is desperate. Merlin, she is so desperate.

Hux is taken off-guard. Either because it’s a curse he’s never seen before or because he hadn’t noticed that Rey had another wand strapped to her arm. The white light barrels toward him.

And then Ben is moving. Faster than Rey’s ever seen him move before, with an Auror’s agility and lightning-swift reflexes.

He places himself between Hux and the curse.

Rey can only watch in horror as the blast of white light careens into him.

There is no time—no opportunity—to scream. To even say his name.

Ben turns his back to her with barely a grunt. The blackthorn wand that he’d retrieved from the floor lashes out, hitting Hux with a well-placed Stunning Spell. Hux collapses and Ben lurches forward, dragging his unconscious colleague further into the classroom at the same time that his wrist flicks and flicks in one burst of spellwork after another, slamming the door shut, locking it, draping the area with all manner of Silencing Charms.

Rey is rooted to the spot all the while. She can’t move. It’s as though she’s been Petrified. Her brain refuses to make sense of the past several moments that seem as though they’ve lasted forever but in reality must have all transpired in the blink of an eye. Time comes rushing back to her in its normal motions only once Ben sinks into a crumpled sitting position, leaning a spine arched in pain against the closed door a few feet away from Hux’s limp, prone form.

And Rey screams then.

It couldn’t have even been a minute, some small and distant part of her thinks. Between Hux walking in on them and spells flying, only a few seconds must have passed. And now Ben is covered in the blood that her dark curse has inflicted and she’s running to him, feeling like she can never be fast enough.

She drops to her knees beside him, hurriedly following his wordless cues to help him out of his jacket. Her wand shakes in her grip as she musters cleaning charms to remove the arterial scarlet rivers running down his face and the front of his shirt. Fuck, there’s so much blood, and more keeps on seeping out, and she soon sees that the source is a deep and jagged wound that Sectumsempra had carved in a serpentine pattern from his brow to his right cheek to the side of his neck to his chest, and she can’t breathe and everything inside her is ashes and splinters because she’d done this to him, he’s going to die—

Occlude, Rey tells herself firmly. She has to Occlude. She has to do this if she wants to save Ben.

Her control isn’t great. Not like it had been earlier, out on the Quidditch pitch. But at least she’s able to wall away her emotions long enough for her to perform the counter-curse.

Or, well—it’s a healing spell for complex wounds that they’d been taught in Charms class this year. She has no idea if it will work against Sectumsempra—and Ben is practically almost unconscious from blood loss and is in no shape to tell her—but it’s her best bet.

Rey traces the tip of her aspen wand over Ben’s wound, careful not to graze it. She chants the incantation with a song-like rhythm that she’d mastered only because Professor Erso-Andor had quizzed them relentlessly on it.

“Vulnera Sanentur.”

It takes ages. Like most healing magic, it has to be careful and methodical, to avoid causing further damage. The first casting of the spell slows the copious flow of blood. The second one cleanses the residue with an antiseptic sting that prompts a hiss from Ben and begins to heal the torn flesh. The third casting fully knits up the wound.

“That’s good, sweetheart,” Ben murmurs as Rey watches the skin on his neck sew together. “That’s very good. You did great.”

She finishes up with the Mending Charm on his ripped clothes, and then her Occlumency walls come crashing down and she bursts into tears. “I don’t have Essence of Dittany. It’ll scar. And you need Blood-Replenishing Potion—”

She breaks off as something occurs to her.

Hux loathes Quidditch with a burning passion. But Obi-Wan makes him attend each match so that he’ll be on call when first aid is needed. And if he’s just come from the pitch—

Rey crawls over to Hux, crying harder as she rifles through the pockets of his robes. In spite of her intense dislike for him, her head has cleared and the horror of what she’d done is settling over her and it feels like a final violation, somehow, to be searching him while he’s out cold.

But it pays off. She finds a tiny wooden chest that she then unshrinks; there’s no Dittany within its meticulously organized compartments, but there are several vials of Blood-Replenishing Potion.

“How—how much do you need?” she asks Ben.

He squints at the vials in her hands, his lips pale and his complexion worryingly gray at the edges. “Two doses should do the trick for now. I might need to take more in an hour, but I can always swing by the hospital wing—Rey. Rey. Stop crying. It’s fine.”

“It’s not,” she tearfully insists, holding the first container of the iridescent ruby liquid to his mouth. She waits until he’s downed it before continuing, “Why did you do that?”

Ben grimaces, gesturing for the second vial in silence. He must be in even worse shape than he’s letting on. He doesn’t answer her question until he’s swallowed the last dose of Blood-Replenishing Potion in a single gulp.

“There would have been no going back for you if you’d cursed him.” Ben’s tone is labored, his brown eyes are at half-mast. “That kind of magic eats away at the soul. I couldn’t let that happen to you. I couldn’t let you do that for—” His pale brow creases, like something’s clicked inside his head. He stares at her with eyes that are now struggling to stay wide and open.

“You did it because of me,” he croaks. “I taught you that spell. And several months later you tried to use it on someone. Because of me.”

Ben seems to arrive at some sort of conclusion—Rey doesn’t know what, she knows only that she doesn’t like it. She opens her mouth to tell him that she’d done it because she loves him—this is far from the ideal situation in which to say it, but she has no idea what else to say, she has to stop him—from what, she doesn’t—she can’t tell—

The words die on her tongue when he hauls himself to his feet. She notices flashes of neon paisley underneath the margins of his trouser legs and she realizes that he’s wearing the socks she’d given him for Christmas—but she can’t linger on that, because his knees are buckling and she’s standing up to help steady him—

Ben gives her a slight shake of his head. Putting distance between them. Bracing his weight against the nearby wall instead.

“You have to go.” He doesn’t look at her. Rey’s heart drops. It’s sent crashing into her stomach by the weight of some abrupt, nameless fear. Ben’s gaze is fixed on Hux, who is still a heap of unmoving black robes on the floor. “I’ll Obliviate him and then plant some false memories. If I do it right, he’ll think he just spaced out during our meeting. You can’t be here when he wakes up.”

“But—” Rey tries to protest, only to falter into silence. But what? It’s not like what Ben is saying doesn’t make sense. In fact, it’s a solid plan.

There’s just something about the way he’s saying it…

“Rey.” Her name in his voice is urgent and just the faintest bit terse after a few seconds have passed and she makes no move to leave. “The memory spells will take some time. And I need to see Madame Kalonia and get her to run a diagnostic for internal damage. You have to go now.”

“You’re—you’re going to Obliviate Madame Kalonia, too, aren’t you?” Rey whispers. “She’ll be suspicious, so—so you’ll need to take care of that—”

He sighs. Her shoulders sag.

Merlin, she’d been so stupid, attempting to land such a powerful dark curse on Hux. Although come to think of the circumstances that led her to that point—

It shouldn’t have taken this long for it to fully sink in just how dangerous the game that she and Ben have been playing all these months is. There’s actually something morbidly hilarious about how it’s dawning on her only now that they’ve been caught and are having to deal with the fallout.

However, Rey doesn’t much feel like laughing.

Her fists clench at her sides and she continues wordlessly looking up at him. Begging him for—

For what?

She doesn’t know that, either.

She’s all over the place.

Finally, Ben appears to relent—albeit only by a millimeter, or so it seems. “We’ll talk on Tuesday,” he promises. “The Room of Requirement, after lights out.” He inclines his head toward the door. “Now, Rey, please—”

It feels deeply wrong to leave him here to fix this mess all by himself, especially with the long and cruel-looking scar that she’d inflicted running down his face and his neck, disappearing into his collar. But she doesn’t have a choice. And she’s delaying him being able to seek out medical attention.

“See you on Tuesday,” Rey croaks, turning to leave.

“Yes.” Ben’s reply is oddly hollow. “See you.”

✨✨✨

The festivities in Gryffindor Tower are appropriately rambunctious. The common room is ablaze with sparklers and confetti, the air smelling like spilled butterbeer. No sooner has Rey slipped in through the portrait hole when she’s pelted with questions left and right about where she’d gone off to, and she manages to come up with the excuse that she’d been heaving in the first-floor girls’ lavatory due to a combination of delayed stress and the fact that the Snitch had been in her mouth.

Everyone laughs and believes her, and a mug of butterbeer is shoved into her hand. She sits on the couch beside Rose, whom Finn had snuck in, and she uses Occlumency to pretend that everything is all right. That, like her friends and her teammates and her housemates, she’s flying high from victory, without a single care in the world.

✨✨✨

Rey spends the rest of the weekend—and all of Monday and most of Tuesday—waiting for the other shoe to drop. There are so many things that could go wrong and she lives through each second trapped in a waking nightmare.

Maybe Ben’s plan hasn’t worked. Maybe the memory charms have failed and she will be summoned to Obi-Wan’s office at any moment and expelled.

Hell, she’s already of age—maybe they’ll send her to Azkaban. Not for sleeping with a professor, she doesn’t think, but certainly for using dark magic on one—

Miraculously, however, nothing happens. Hux is his usual self, treating her and the other students as though they might as well have been flies within the sphere of his existence. Rey is overcome by an incredibly stomach-gnawing wave of guilt whenever she sees him in the Great Hall at mealtimes or in the corridors. And, when she goes to see Madame Kalonia with some excuse about sore muscles from the Quidditch match, the healer doesn’t treat her any differently, either, looking and sounding as right as rain. The guilt in that regard is nauseating as well, especially when Madame Kalonia smiles kindly at her and congratulates her on catching the Snitch.

Rey doesn’t see Ben, though. He’s retreated into his usual pattern of isolation from the rest of the school, and the question that keeps running through her mind is one that she hadn’t thought to ask in the gripping urgency of the moment.

How will he explain away the scar?

As a new week of classes begins, Rey pays more attention to the Hogwarts grapevine than she’s ever had since she was in first year. But there isn’t a single mention about Professor Solo having mysteriously gotten his face carved up. None at all.

It’s not until Tuesday night that Rey realizes why.

Ben’s standing by the wall opposite the Troll Tapestry in the seventh-floor hallway as she scurries up to him underneath the invisibility cloak. The flickering torches throw his face into sharp relief and it is—unmarred. She almost stumbles in surprise.

To achieve that level of healing, the Essence of Dittany would have had to be applied within minutes of the wound knitting up.

How…?

She offers up a discreet cough once she’s near him. There is none of the recklessness—none of that wild, impulsive abandon—that had characterized the majority of their meetings thus far. They’re back to being careful.

As the events of last Saturday had made abundantly clear, they’ve used up all of their luck.

His expression barely changes. The only acknowledgement of her presence is him moving toward the door that’s just appeared. She follows him into the Room of Requirement, her heartbeat slow with dread, loud in the quiet of the night.

Something’s wrong.

Something is very, very wrong.

It’s not the romantic little cabin that awaits her but, rather, the same sterile classroom setting where they usually conduct Occlumency lessons. As the entrance seals up, Rey shrugs off the invisibility cloak, draping it over her arm that she then folds into the other, across her chest. Protectively.

There’s a hint of awkwardness to Ben’s stance as he faces her, his hands in the pockets of his suit trousers. He takes his time studying her with a shuttered gaze and she’s practically holding her breath, wondering what he’d brought her here to say.

At least he seems to be none the worse for wear. There’s no indication that he’d nearly died from curse-induced blood loss a few days ago.

Still, it’s not long before the silence becomes unbearable, and so Rey breaks it.

“You didn’t scar?”

Ben’s jaw clenches infinitesimally. When he speaks, though, he is calm to the point of blank. “The scar’s there. I cast a glamor over it.”

Oh.

In hindsight, it’s such an obvious solution that she’s embarrassed that it never occurred to her. Then again, it’s already been confirmed that she’s a bit dim where Ben is concerned.

“Rey.” He clears his throat. “I believe that last Saturday’s incident has driven home the fact that this—” He pauses, as though mentally correcting himself—“that what we’ve been doing has been monumentally foolish. There are no guarantees that someone won’t find us out again. And if they do, there are no guarantees that we can again stay on top of it. I think it best that, moving forward, we don’t give anyone anything to find out.”

She blinks at him. Stricken and uncomprehending all at once.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Ben continues solemnly. “The blame rests on my shoulders alone. I neglected the usual wards. I’ll never be able to forgive myself for that. I lost my head.” He swallows. “And so did you.”

She says nothing. She lets the truth of his words wash over her with their bitter sting.

It had been the same spell that they’d used to kill the manticore. It had been horribly potent dark magic, and she’d directed it on an innocent person. Although it was in the end miscast, hitting the wrong target, it had still inflicted a severe amount of damage.

What more if she’d actually gotten Hux? There is no doubt in her mind that he would be dead.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Ben repeats. “I was the one who taught you that spell. And, again, I was the one who forgot the wards. You have no idea how much I wish I hadn’t forgotten the wards.” His bottom lip trembles for a moment, the first overt display of emotion she’s seen from him tonight, but he’s quick to revert to impassiveness.

He's Occluding. Ice shoots down her spine. He’d promised that he would never…

“I don’t want to jeopardize your future,” Ben says. “You’re so close to graduating. You have less than a couple of months to go. It is critical that you break free from what you go home to in the Muggle world. I cannot be the reason that you don’t. So—we should end this.”

Rey finally finds her voice. Ragged as it is, tear-choked and accusing as it is. “You said that we were in this together. I thought that meant—whatever obstacles come our way—we’d handle them together—”

“We did,” he replies evenly. “And now there’s an Obliviated healer and a Potions instructor walking around with false memories, and I have a scar from the curse that I invented. I’m… not good for you, Rey.”

“No, don’t—don’t say that,” she hurries to insist, tripping over her own tongue, “you’ve been—you’re everything to me, Ben—”

It’s as close as she’s come to telling him that she loves him, and she’s just about to go even closer and just say those three words, those eight letters, but—

—but he suddenly flinches, as if she’d slapped him—

“I brought out your darkness.” He takes a step back, takes a step even further away from her. “And I’m not even that surprised, because it’s what I tend to do. I destroy things. I drag people down with me. Look what happened—you ended up distraught on what should have been one of the happiest days of your life, the triumph that was the culmination of what you’ve worked so hard for all school year. I did that to you.”

“Ben—” Rey tries to close the distance between them, tries to haul him into her arms, tries to pull him out of the mire of his self-loathing, but then she stops in her tracks when she’s mere inches away.

Because he removes the glamor charm and, in a flash, there it is. The brutal slash that bisects his pale, handsome face.

A sob catches in her throat. It somehow looks worse than it had a few days ago. The lines of it are reddish black, the pattern like shattered glass on his skin. Irrevocable. Permanent. A constant reminder.

And she had done that to him.

“Again, this isn’t your fault,” Ben says firmly, correctly deciphering her expression. “This is all on me. This is the end result of me convincing myself that no harm would come from the two of us acting on our desires, when I should have known better. No, scratch that—I did know better. I just told myself that it was okay because you wanted it, too. But that ends now,” he concludes in resigned tones, his features chillingly blank. “I’ll do the right thing, for once in my life. It’s over, Rey. One day you’ll look back and realize that it’s the correct decision.”

“Don’t patronize me!” She doesn’t realize that she’s yelling until her voice echoes off of the walls. “Stop treating me like a child! You always do that when we argue—”

“You are a child,” Ben coldly interrupts. “And I’m going to hell. My only consolation is that at least I won’t be taking you with me.”

“Is there nothing about this—about us—that you want to fight for?” Rey demands. Or maybe begs. She’s forever begging him, it seems. And this time she’s begging him to admit that they hadn’t been acting on just desire.

She loves him but, it dawns on her now, that it won’t be enough unless he loves her, too.

Ben’s Occlumency walls falter for a moment. She starts to feel a glimmer of hope.

Then he reins it all back in.

“There is nothing I want to fight for that is worth the cost,” he says.

And Rey feels as though the world has come crashing down.

Ben doesn’t even give her a chance to react. A chance to attempt to change his mind one last time. As she stands there, staring at him in disbelief, tears of blinding fury and wrenching grief streaming down her cheeks, he takes a deep breath—

—and the glamor charm ripples back over his face, smoothening away the scar—

—and—

“Have a good evening, Miss Niima,” Ben tells her, clipped and insultingly polite.

And he turns on his heel and he walks away from her in long, brisk strides. Not looking back. Not even once.

He closes the door softly behind him as he leaves the room.

And, just like that, Rey is alone.