Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

These are the facts in the case of BENJAMIN ORGANA-SOLO, ESQUIRE, VS. THE UNIVERSE:

1. According to a multitude of online travel guides, rugged Takodana island off Saint Bees Head in Cumbria is a UK anomaly in that it only ever truly rains in early spring and late fall. By all accounts, the third day of October should have been pleasantly cool and dry— and not unleashing the gates of watery hell upon him as he putters down a treacherous mountain road on his way home.

2. Home for the next five months is a rustic cottage in an equally rustic hamlet that's a two-hour drive from Andui, which is the closest thing to a city that Takodana can boast and is where all of Ben's meetings take place. Basic common fucking sense should have dictated that First Order Intercontinental house him somewhere within the city limits but, no, the little shack in Nymeve was the only accommodation that Alistair Snoke's weaselly twig of a PA could book on such short notice, oh, don't look at me like that, Solo, I think you'll find it's quite charming, actually, and, besides, you'll have a car—

3. — which, the car. Ben is puttering down said mountain road because there's really no other way to describe what his rental is doing. Armitage Hux had procured a small, rusty, lemon yellow Chir'daki coupe— ugly as sin and even older than that— because nothing brings Hux more joy than making Ben miserable. Ben's heart had dropped into his stomach when he saw the ancient contraption waiting for him in the narrow driveway outside the cottage and he fully intends to swap it for something built within the last millennium— the car, not the cottage, although he won't exactly be opposed to swapping that, either— but he'd figured it could wait until he got his bearings, having just flown in from New York three days ago.

4. He hadn't even wanted to spend the first half of the new fiscal year trapped on this godforsaken island that was connected to the rest of Britain only by a ferry that chugged back and forth from Whitehaven Harbour once a week, but Snoke had insisted that Ben personally oversee the negotiations and contract signings for what will be Takodana's first seaside resort.

5. Ben can't so much as breathe a word of complaint about his post or his abysmal living conditions because he's already on thin ice, thanks to Massachusetts senator Leia Organa blocking First Order's purchase of a large tract of the Paitnnu Wetlands that Snoke had been planning to turn into a fleet of holiday homes. Ben hasn't spoken to his mother in years so it's nowhere near his fault, but he's certainly being made to feel otherwise back at corporate.

6. So— and supplementary to Items 1 and 3— here he is, gritting his teeth as the Chir'daki's wheels threaten to lose purchase on the slippery incline, the rain falling in sheets so thick he can barely see a foot ahead of him, and—

7. — and a dark, indistinct, four-legged shape scurries out of the trees and onto the road and there's a bump and he's just hit something, what the fuck—

The roar of the rain swallows the screeching of the tires as Ben veers sharply off the concrete and onto a thin patch of soil that borders the forest. He kills the engine and then checks his side mirror, praying that whatever merry woodland creature the bumper had collided with has shrugged it off and is sauntering back into the trees— he's heard of that happening. With deer and, like, moose.

But the sad, furry lump lying pathetically still a few feet behind the car is too small to be either. Wonderful. The cottage in Nymeve already gives Ben the creeps with how quiet everything is at night, and now he's going to be haunted by the ghost of roadkill past on top of that. Grumbling under his breath, he twists the key in the ignition, and—

— and nothing.

He tries again.

Still nothing.

Ben whips out his phone to search for the nearest towing service and, Jesus, there really has to be a threshold of how much bad luck the human mind can endure, because it takes him approximately six whole seconds to realize what he's staring at— or, to be more accurate, what he's not staring at.

There are no signal bars.

Ben slumps forward, pressing his forehead to the steering wheel. He's stuck on an isolated road on some podunk island in Europe, with a phone that's as good as dead, a "car" that's definitely dead, and the semi-flattened corpse of an animal that's very, very dead, thanks to him. It's raining bucketloads and his last glimpse of civilization had been the outskirts of Andui on the other side of the mountain more than an hour ago and, dear God in heaven, Your Honor—

— the prosecution rests—

🍂

When Ben lifts his head fifteen minutes later, the rain has slowed to a vague drizzle. He tries to start the engine again with a half-hearted hope that's quickly and brutally crushed, and then he slips his phone back into his coat pocket along with the useless keys before clambering out of the Chir'daki— which he proceeds to kick for good measure, venting his frustration out on the worn metal. He scuffs his Silvano Lattanzi cordovan leather oxfords while he's at it, but the shoes are doomed, anyway, what with all the hiking that's in store.

It's four in the afternoon. If he starts walking now, he'll make it to Nymeve before sunset. Probably. It's not a good idea, but it's the best he's got.

Out of a lingering sense of morbid curiosity, Ben wanders over to his hapless victim for a closer look— and almost immediately recoils. While there's no mistaking the stocky build, the gray fur, and the sharp claws, the mangled form plastered to the concrete is unlike any badger he's ever seen before, and not just because it looks like a giant stomped on it. There's something about the arrangement of the snout on the black-and-white-striped face, how it jibes with the sightless beady eyes and the open mouth...

The features, Ben realizes, are too human-shaped for his comfort. Like someone was inside the badger's skin and had been about to burst free, headfirst, when it died.

Ben shakes his head as rational thought filters back in. It's some kind of bone disease, or the Takodana badgers have mutated in the way that the elephants on Cyprus grew smaller before they went extinct, or his imagination is running wild. In any case, he's being ridiculous, and he needs to get a move on if he wants to reach the hamlet before dark.

It takes about half an hour of walking along the empty, winding road to hit Ben like a punch to the gut— he'd left his briefcase and his MacBook in the car.

"Son of a bitch!"

The curse explodes from his lungs, echoing through the cool air. As if in response, there's a loud clap of thunder and, without further ado, the rain comes crashing down again, the road and its forest lining blurring silver before his eyes as icy wetness pounds every inch of his being.

Maybe one day in the very distant future he'll look back and find this funny.

He rather doubts it, though.

The black pea coat he's wearing over his charcoal business suit isn't doing much in the way of sheltering him from the elements, so he stomps off into the treeline where he figures the thick forest canopy will slow the rainfall at least a little. He huddles under a massive elm not far from the road and waits for the rain to subside, water dripping from the branches and down his back as he broodingly contemplates his options.

They are as follows:

1. Hike back up the road in the pouring rain to retrieve a MacBook and important documents that stand a hundred percent chance of water damage, losing valuable daylight hours while he's at it.

2. Continue hiking down to Nymeve— also in the pouring rain— and send a tow truck in the morning.

3. Lie down in the middle of the road— also, and he can't stress this enough, in the pouring rain— and wait for death. Become a ghost of roadkill past, along with his new friend the mutant badger.

The third and last option looks more and more appealing with each cold, soggy minute that ticks by, but Ben eventually decides on the second, peeling away from the elm and marching forward, hands in his pockets, head bowed so the torrents don't blind him. The ground is disgusting— a slurry of wet earth and dessicated leaves that ooze into his shoes— but at least the trees are clustered together tightly enough to form a meager barrier between him and the storm. Emphasis on meager. Ben soldiers on, a litany of grudges running through his head like rosary beads. Fuck Hux, fuck his job, fuck his father for meeting his mother at goddamn Burning Man and knocking her up so that Ben could be traipsing through the fucking woods in the middle of the Irish fucking Sea thirty years later.

When it finally, finally stops raining, Ben is drenched to the bone and shivering fit to burst, the lower half of his suit pants plastered with mud. He looks around, dazed by the sudden stillness, and realizes that he'd stumbled deeper into the forest than intended, the road barely visible through the gaps between the tree trunks. He huffs out a breath and makes his way towards that ribbon of concrete, his now utterly ruined shoes squelching with every step. Mi dispiace, Silvano.

The online guides state that the woods covering this portion of the Takodana mountain range that separates Andui from Nymeve are predominantly English elm. Ben had read that there were less than two hundred mature specimens left on the mainland due to some kind of plague spread by beetles that has been devastating the species since the early twentieth century, but here they are plentiful, over forty meters tall, barks like crocodile scales, upper branches splayed out into fan-shaped crowns. There are other trees, too— aspen, birch, and sycamore maple— their leaves just starting to turn red at the edges so that the overall effect is that of dark emeralds being gradually eaten away by licks of flame.

Ben's almost willing to concede that, under vastly different circumstances, it would have all been rather pretty.

Emphasis on almost.

He's only a few more soul-crushingly spongy steps away from the road when he passes a silver birch noticeably greener than the rest and the sleeve of his pea coat snags on one of its branches. Mindful of the hand-spun vicuña, Ben turns around to pry himself loose, and—

— and—

There are moments when the blood runs cold. When the heart stops and the lungs pause in their contractions because the body is so overcome with terror that it forgets to breathe. The veil of normalcy that shrouds the known world is ripped away and the brain short-circuits upon being confronted with what is underneath, with what is twisted and grotesque and cannot— should not be.

The low-hanging branch holding Ben's sleeve in place is not a branch. It's a human hand, its fingers curled around the material just above his elbow, its wrist attached to a slender arm that's growing out of the birch tree's white trunk.

Mushrooms, is Ben's first coherent thought. That's it, isn't it? There's a shrub in South America with bracts that look like swollen red lips, there's an entire genus of flowering vines literally called Clitoria, and there's a fungus named dead man's fingers because that's what it resembles and smells like. It's just a mushroom, no big deal—

" χαίρε?" the tree says.

He should probably scream. If only he remembers how his vocal cords work.

"Heus?" the tree tries again.

That's Latin, Ben's single brain cell helpfully supplies.

"Dia dhuit? Dydh ha?" It's a female voice, the pitch gradually heightening with annoyance at each failed greeting— at least, Ben thinks the tree is greeting him, and he doesn't exactly have the spoons to deal with that at the moment— "Shwmae? Hej? Salut?"

Something breaks through the mire of Ben's stupor upon hearing that last word— an instinct that is quickly developed by anyone who has ever spent any amount of time in Paris, who has had to defensively explain to the locals over and over again that—

"I don't speak—" he automatically starts to say—

"Oh! You're American!" the tree chirps in perfect, British-accented English. "Right. Hello. Could you help me out, then?" The hand releases his sleeve and then splays out its fingers, wiggling them expectantly, and he is too flabbergasted to do anything but react, gripping the thin wrist and, with static shooting through his veins at each point of contact, pulling...

A woman emerges from the tree. There's no magical shower of sparks or clouds of smoke; she's suddenly just there, bursting out of the trunk and stumbling into his arms as he catches her before she can fall into the mud, his hands clamping around a tiny waist and his body pressed up against someone warm and soft, who smells like rain and moss with an undercurrent of berries, and he's not so stunned by the whole situation that he doesn't feel a stab of regret when she steps away.

"Finally!" she exclaims. "I thought it would be another hundred years before I got out of there!"

The woman is as tall and slender as the birch tree she just popped out of and, although Ben still can't wrap his head around that, he's having a hard time concentrating on anything else other than her eyes, mottled brown and green like a forest in high summer and flecked with shards of gold that sparkle like sunlight. Her hair is a rich chestnut hue, long and wild, framing what's quite possibly the most beautiful face he's ever seen, made all the more alluring by the freckles dusted atop her high cheekbones and the bridge of her delicate nose. She's wearing a thin white dress that not only leaves her lithe arms bare but also has a slit cut into the flowing skirt revealing about a mile of perfectly-shaped leg, and she is so Ben's type that his heart stutters in his chest and all he can manage to say at first is a very eloquent, "Um."

Fortunately, another synapse flares to life a beat later and he follows up with a relatively serviceable, "Why were you in the tree?"

"I was cursed," she says, like that explains everything. "Wandered a little further afield and caught this forest's guardian on a bad day. He loathes dryads, you see. Told me I was trespassing and trapped me in the birch before I could scamper."

"He doesn't sound like a very nice guy," Ben ventures, buying time until the camera crew pops out of the undergrowth and the host of some random prank show congratulates him on being a good sport. Maybe they'll give him a ride back to the hamlet— it's the least they can do.

"Oh, Unkar's the worst," the woman fervently agrees. "Took him a couple of centuries to release me, didn't it? Nasty old badger."

"Well, if he's anything like the eerily human-looking one I ran over..." Ben trails off as the woman freezes, then squints up at him with a penetrating expression.

It's not long before she breaks out into a wide smile, and it's as dazzling as the sun coming up from behind a cloud. For a moment he's blinded by her radiance.

"You saved me," she breathes in awe. "You killed Unkar and ended my curse. That's why I was able to leave the tree! I don't know how I'll ever be able to repay you—"

Ben's really searching for those hidden cameras now. "Don't mention it, uh..."

"Oh, right." The woman smacks her forehead in that age-old gesture of having forgotten something, then holds out her hand. "I'm Regina, but you can just call me Rey. And you are?"

"Ben." He shakes her hand and the feeling is golden at the edges, turning the inside of his stomach into a million butterflies. What is happening to him? "Ben Solo."

"Ben Solo." The woman— Regina— Rey— carefully pronounces each syllable like it's treasure on her tongue, all the while looking up at him like he's a knight in shining armor instead of the sleazy corporate lawyer that everyone despises. "Thank you for saving me."

He drops her hand and shifts his weight from one foot to the other, uncomfortable under such admiring scrutiny. It makes him feel like a fraud, which is stupid because the only fraud here is this devastatingly pretty brunette claiming she's a—

"A dryad, was it?" he queries.

She nods.

"And you've been stuck here—" He motions to the birch tree— "for two hundred years?"

She nods again.

"Sure doesn't look like it," he mutters before he can help himself.

Rey's cheeks flush the lightest, most arresting shade of peach. "Well, I am immortal," she says shyly. "Sprang from a drop of Ouranos' blood when Cronus castrated him and everything."

"Right," Ben says slowly. "I have to go now. The house I'm staying at is five miles away and my car died and my phone doesn't have any signal out here—"

"I'm not even going to pretend I understood a single word of what you just said," she amiably declares, and there's his single brain cell again, insisting that of course she would have no idea, Alexander Bell patented the telephone in 1876 and the Motorwagen wasn't rolled out until ten years later. "But I'll walk you home before heading back."

"Back to where?"

"My tree. Every dryad has a tree, yeah? Mine's this lovely old ash in a grove on the other side of the island."

"Right," Ben says again. This entire conversation is ridiculous. "I don't want to take you out of your way—"

"Nonsense, it's the least I can do to make sure you safely reach...?"

"Nymeve."

He hadn't thought it was possible for her face to light up even more, but it does. She's a cartoon character— any moment now sparrows and dormice are going to circle around her singing about the power of friendship, and that won't even be the weirdest thing to happen all day. "Is that pub still there, the one that makes the fudge?"

Ben recalls driving past such an establishment earlier this morning— if only because he'd spotted the neat printout on the window and it had struck him as funny that a pub would allegedly be known for their WORLD-FAMOUS FUDGE!!! (AVAILABLE IN CLOTTED CREAM, MAPLE SYRUP BUTTER, AND RHUBARB). "I believe so, yes."

There's suddenly a mercenary glint in Rey's eyes. "Let's go, then!"

And she starts marching through the woods, in the direction of the hamlet, and he has no choice but to trail after her, all the while furtively glancing around for any sign of the camera crew. Where are those bastards hiding?

🍂

These are the things that Ben notices about Rey during their trek:

1. She's barefoot, the hem of her long white dress swirling gracefully around slim, tanned ankles with each step. The lack of shoes doesn't seem to bother her in the slightest; her stride is purposeful and impossibly light, somehow— leaves don't crunch under her soles and the soggy earth doesn't slow her down. It's like she's walking on air, such a far cry from the absolute racket he's making as he kicks aside fallen twigs and crashes through bramble and tries his best to prevent the mud from sucking his ruined shoes off his feet.

2. She's glowing, for lack of a better word. He has to focus closely to see it but there's a subtle radiance emanating from her skin and her hair, as if she'd bathed in pearl dust, or sunlight. As far as special effects go, it's rather good, actually, and he can't help but be impressed by the sheer commitment to this elaborate prank.

3. Lastly— and, incidentally, more evidence in his ongoing case that the universe is out to get him— she has a very, very nice ass.

Ben's not trying to be a creep, but Rey's traipsing ahead of him and the scanty material of her dress does not leave much to the imagination. Sometimes she steps a certain way or the wind blows just so, molding the back of her skirt to the curves of what is an utterly glorious derrière, firm and pert and nicely rounded. Ben's on the seventh month of his longest dry spell yet, and it's just— it's torture, is what it is. It's when he catches himself almost beginning to drool that he decides it's way past time to quit perving on her and force his gaze onto chaster sights.

Like the elm trees. Or the slivers of gray sky that peek out from the gaps in the canopy. Or the bend in the road at the periphery of his vision.

Or the fat, speckled toad sitting on a moss-coated boulder, watching through unblinking coppery eyes as they pass by.

"Go away, Teedo," Rey snaps, and Ben's in the middle of wondering who she's talking to or what the hell a Teedo is when—

"You can't tell me what to do, little nymph," the toad gloats in smug bass notes and an inexplicable Cockney accent. "Unkar's gone. I'm in charge now."

Rey waves a dismissive hand and doesn't acknowledge the toad's presence again. "Sorry about that," she mutters to Ben as they keep on walking. "A lot of these minor deities need attitude adjustments— oh, you've gone deathly pale, are you quite all right?"

No, Ben would have said if he were physically capable of talking, but he's not, because it's the fucking toad that just talked and he feels like he's going to faint and when he starts shivering he can't stop, it's freezing and he's drenched in rainwater and cold sweat and the toad had a human voice and the badger had a human face and the woman had come out of the tree—

"Ben!" Rey stops in her tracks and grabs him by the shoulders, staring up at him in unadulterated concern. "What's the matter?"

"F-f-freezing." It's a miracle that he manages to form the response through his violently chattering teeth. It had taken a while for the steadily plummeting temperature to affect him but it's doing so with a vengeance now that it's almost dusk, exacerbated by delayed-onset shock at recent events.

Rey relaxes. "I know just the trick for that."

And she cradles his face in gentle palms, surges up on the tips of her toes, and kisses him.

Chapter Text

The kiss is— in complete and utter defiance of the Dooley Wilson song— not just a kiss.

It's... warmth.

It's watching early morning light pierce the bruise-colored veil of a fading night. It's holding one's palms to the glow of a fire in winter. It's basking in an afternoon sunbeam pouring in through a window, as happy as a cat.

Bit by bit, the cold is siphoned from Ben's veins and his shivering subsides. Rey's lips are as soft as rose petals, the taste of her filtering down his throat like droplets of lush caramel brandy. He's intoxicated, greedy for more, and after a while he takes control of the kiss, leaning forward to eagerly lick at the seam of her mouth, chasing the feeling, that eternal summer state...

She pulls away and he very nearly whines in protest. He should feel bewildered— hurt, even— but somehow he understands that it's not a rejection. She's looking up at him with the satisfied smile indicative of a job well done.

And she has done a good job. His shock has vanished along with the chills that had previously been ripping through his system, replaced by acceptance. The woman is magic. There is no hidden camera crew. Okay.

It's not that there isn't a part of him that's still severely weirded out by the whole thing. It's just that— well, it's hard to continue panicking when Rey is so beautiful and so, so sweet. He's— in complete and utter agreement with the Christine Daae song— silent and resigned.

But he's also Ben Solo, which means he's not silent for long.

"So let me get this straight," he says. "You're a dryad."

"Quite so," she cheerfully replies.

"Like an actual—" His hand rises to make a feeble gesture at the towering elms that surround them— "tree-dwelling, speaks-with-animals, has-magic-powers, frolics-through-the-woods-in-orgiastic-pagan-frenzy dryad?"

She wrinkles her delicately freckled nose. "Well, I don't know about orgiastic frenzy, that's really more of a maenad type of deal."

He looks her up and down, taking in her pretty face and her slender figure in the skimpy white dress. He thinks about the kiss that's still tingling on his lips like a phantom touch.

"Too bad," he mumbles.

Rey ducks her head, a dimple flickering into existence at the corner of her mouth. Ben can almost swear that she's blushing again.

🍂

The remainder of the hike to Nymeve is anything but boring. She pelts him with questions about the many ways the world has changed while she was stuck in the tree, starting with his declaration from earlier— the one she hadn't understood.

"What's a car?"

"A... mode of transportation. Like a carriage, but it can run on its own."

"You slew Unkar with a horseless carriage." She sounds impressed.

He scratches his head. "I guess, but it's nothing special. Lots of people have cars."

"There is no one like you," she fiercely insists and, great, now it's his turn to blush. But she mercifully changes the subject before it can get too awkward. "What's a phone?"

"Um." What is a phone? It's one of those things he takes for granted. He'd never dreamed he'd be in a situation where he needed to explain it. "It originally started out as a device that people could use to talk to each other across long distances. Nowadays, you can carry it around, send written messages, take pictures, read books— pretty much everything, really."

Rey stops in her tracks. "What do you mean take pictures? What is this phone?" she demands, positively bursting with curious energy. "I must see it for myself!"

Ben cracks a reluctant smile. The muscle movement is foreign to him; he can't remember the last time he'd smiled at anyone. "I'll show you." He retrieves his phone from his pocket and brings up the camera app. "Hold still."

Click.

He's not much of a photographer, but he's absolutely certain that he's just taken the loveliest photo to ever exist. Rey's gazing into the viewfinder quizzically, the faintest trace of a bemused smile on her lips. Her long chestnut hair and pale bronze skin provide a delightful contrast to the snowy whiteness of her dress, and her eyes reflect the green-gold of the elm trees that are spread out behind her, all around her, atop a carpet of fallen leaves. She's magnificent and ethereal, a goddess of the woods in the most literal sense.

He shows her the picture, and it blows her goddamn mind.

This strikes him as only fair, considering that he lost his the moment she sprang into his life, talking toads and all.

🍂

"Most of the time, I slept," she's telling him as their steps carry them further down the mountain. "There wasn't much else to do. Birch trees are nice to look at but they don't exactly have rich inner lives, and that one was so young. Would've been better if Unkar had imprisoned me in one of the elms, or an oak— at least those have something to say. Of course, nothing compares to my ash tree."

"Of course," Ben agrees. What else can he do? It's not like he's got a wealth of experience in the matter. The inner life of a tree— what the fuck? Before arriving on Takodana, the closest he'd probably gotten to a living example of any of the myriad species as an adult was when the stockbroker he'd been dating had wanted to see the cherry blossoms in Central Park four years ago.

And now he's wondering. "What about cherry trees?"

"Hate them," Rey declares without a moment's hesitation. "They think they're so all that."

"You know what, that sounds right," Ben muses. "I have no idea why, but it does." Another thought occurs to him— he rather doubts people were going around using all that as an expression in the nineteenth century. Hell, Nickelodeon hadn't even been invented back then. "For a forest nymph recently freed from a two-hundred-year stasis who didn't know what a car was, your speech patterns are surprisingly modern."

"The more time I spend with someone, the more I pick up their language," she explains. "It's a dryad thing. Just watch, I'll be speaking like a true-blooded American soon enough."

He hopes she won't lose the British accent, though. He's starting to find it sexy.

They reach Nymeve at dusk— a deep indigo dusk that is softly illuminated by golden light shining through the odd window here and there. Ben's grateful that he lives on the outskirts; his street is deserted, which means that there are no curious stares as he traipses to the cottage with the lower half of his body plastered in mud, accompanied by a strange, barefoot woman wearing a white dress that's too thin for autumn.

The cottage is— to not put too fine a point on it— a dump, a crooked, single-storey affair pieced together from thatch, flint, and wood. It looks like it'll fall apart in a stiff breeze, and Ben dislikes the sight of it even more once it dawns on him that this is also the place where he and Rey will go their separate ways. She escorts him to the mahogany door at the end of the crocus-lined path and he fishes out his key and channels way too much attention into turning it in the lock, avoiding eye contact. A clean break, that's what he needs, no use drawing it out. He should just wish her good night and good luck getting back to her tree and then head to bed, putting this little spot of magic behind him as he goes on with his mundane life.

"Ben? Is something the matter?"

He glances up at the concerned note in her tone. She's standing beside him, her hazel eyes round and dark in the gathering twilight. Is it his imagination, or has the glow emanating from her skin and hair become even more apparent?

God, she's so lovely.

"What—" The word breaks apart in his throat. He swallows and starts again. "What do you mean?"

Rey frowns. "You seem distant all of a sudden. Like you've retreated behind a mask. That's—" Her brow creases as she tackles the new figure of speech that she's assimilating from his psyche via dryad osmosis, or whatever— "totally not cool."

The accent, the solemn delivery, her expression of utmost concentration, the slang— it all comes together in the perfect blend of funny and endearing and a startled laugh rises, unbidden, from some forgotten corner of his chest. He hastily disguises it with a cough as he blinks at her earnest features, at the shred of vulnerability in her gaze as she looks at him like she wants nothing more than for him to come back to her, and the key turns in the lock with a rusty click just as he asks—

"Want to come in?"

🍂

Once he's got her settled on the couch— which is an unbearably gingham monstrosity that's probably been around since Elizabeth I was queen and smells like it, too— Ben excuses himself to change into a set of clothes that aren't caked with forest debris. As he pulls on a burgundy sweater and black jeans, the phone that he'd tossed onto the bed starts buzzing nonstop, the dam of notifications unleashed with the return of signal strength. Texts and e-mails come flooding in at the periphery of his vision, and, finally, while he's rolling on a fresh pair of socks, his ringtone pierces the silence of the bedroom as sharply as an accusation and Snoke's name flashes on the screen.

Ben is, quite frankly, startled by just how much he doesn't want to answer. But he has to.

Doesn't he?

His attention is caught by a beam of light pulsating in the gap between the door and the floor. Either there's a disco party being held in his living room, or—

— he puts the phone on silent mode and leaves it on the mattress as he exits the bedchamber—

— or Rey is curled up on the abhorrent couch, knees tucked to her chest and playing with the switch of the ceramic lamp on the end table, turning it on and off with a look of rapt fascination.

"This is amazing," she gushes. "You mortals have come such a long way!"

Ben stares at this wild-haired woman who's tracked dirt all over the stone-flagged floors and the abominable couch, and something in his chest tightens at the innocent wonder on her face. Snoke will have to wait— it's not like they'll have anything to talk about, anyway, there's no WiFi at the cottage and the hard copies of the important files are in Ben's briefcase up on the mountain. A little voice in the back of his head warns him that his boss will hardly accept this as an excuse, but he ignores it— and it's actually so, so easy to ignore it, like the rest of the world has faded away and Rey's presence is the only thing that matters.

Shit. Maybe she'd drugged him. Slipped something into his mouth during that kiss, something that's impaired his judgment and caused him to believe that she is what she claims to be...

Rey's verdant gaze flickers to him and there's a cute little double take at first, as if she doesn't recognize him with clean clothes and hair that he'd patted back into some semblance of order after it had dried into a scraggly mess during the hike, and then she breaks out into another one of those sunny smiles, her eyes shining with the same wonder that she'd bestowed on Benjamin Franklin's gift to the world. And, just like that, Benjamin Organa-Solo no longer gives a shit whether he's drugged or not.

"Do you want to get something to eat?" he asks, feeling as nervous as as a teenager inviting his crush to prom. "Maybe at the pub you mentioned?"

Rey springs to her feet, the marvels of electricity forgotten. "Yes, let's! I love human food. Haven't eaten any in two hundred years, obviously, but I dreamed about that fudge. Also the black pudding, the shepherd's pie— they had these scrumptious honey cakes, too— quick, think of an outfit."

"An... outfit?"

She motions at him impatiently. "Something the women of your time would wear. I need to blend in."

The image that Ben obediently— if somewhat confusedly— summons is a hunter green turtleneck knit dress worn over black tights with a pair of high-heeled boots that he'd seen in the display window of a department store in New York, en route to JFK. No sooner has he thought of this outfit when Rey— plucks it from his mind. There's no other term for it. He blinks and suddenly she's in that exact same getup, her hair pulled away from her face in an elegant chignon like the mannequin's had been.

Ben wonders if all real magic is like this. No mystical incantations, no fanfare— just the fabric of reality warping right before his eyes, leaving him reeling from one moment to the next. It's more unsettling this way— almost like it's something insidious that can't be prepared for— and yet he's starting to accept that it's as much a part of Rey as her freckles and the dulcet lilt of her voice.

She skips over to the antique mirror hanging on a large iron nail on the hardwood wall— or, at least, he assumes that's her intention, given the way her luminescent eyes fix on the bronze-framed glass to his left. However, she's barely taken a couple of steps when she stumbles, and Ben darts forward to catch her but she's already righted herself by the time he's moved close enough for her to be within reach.

"Yeah, no," she mutters, her lips pursing in distaste. The heels on her boots vanish. "That's more like it. And here I thought the corset was the worst thing to ever happen to womankind."

There's probably some kind of social commentary to be made here, and if Ben were a better person he would have gravely agreed that the various tortures inflicted on the fairer sex in the name of fashion are a lamentable effect of oppressive patriarchal norms. Unfortunately, he's just an idiot; his single brain cell swoons at the concept of Rey in a corset, the tops of her perky breasts pushed out over an hourglass of whalebone and lace. He can only hope and pray that she doesn't pluck that image from his mind but, if she does, she gives no sign of it as she scrutinizes her reflection in the mirror and nods happily before taking his arm and all but dragging him out of the cottage, lured by the promise of a hot meal.

🍂

These are the things Ben Solo knows about Nymeve:

1. It doesn't have a church. This is a fact that wouldn't even be a blip on his radar had it not been for the Wikipedia spiral he went into the evening before his flight, the same spiral where he'd learned that, in British geography, a hamlet is defined by what it lacks— specifically, a place of worship, but more generally, well— everything.

2. He's not even being sarcastic. Nymeve has, like, five streets, and a population of less than a hundred people. It's bordered by the Takodana mountain range to the south and forest and farmland everywhere else. The only buildings are ramshackle cottages— all of which look more or less identical to his— and the pub, which is basically a glorified ramshackle cottage.

3. The pub is located in what can feasibly be called the town center only if one is being generous. It's a short walk or one well-executed long jump away from Ben's rented hovel, and on this cool October night he finds himself wishing the journey would last longer because Rey is—

— very pleasant to walk with. She doesn't seem to be in any hurry to let go of his arm and she feels so nice, pressed up against his side like this as she chatters on in animated tones, matching her memories of the place to the present.

It's pretty much one for one. Nymeve is not a shining example of a dynamic urban settlement that keeps its finger on the pulse of modernization.

Still, Ben finds himself grudgingly admitting that it's not all that bad. The stars have come out, twinkling overhead in nets of brilliant silver, and the air carries that distinctive, melancholy combination of scents that he associates with fall— the sharpness of chimney smoke, the musky sweetness of decaying leaves, the spice-tinged, buttery aromas of pumpkin and cinnamon desserts wafting from open kitchen windows, the subtle floral hint of gladiolus and cyclamen in full bloom. He is... at peace, somehow, despite the incredibly stressful afternoon he had, and he's hard-pressed to come up with anything he'd rather be doing than taking a stroll through this sleepy hamlet with a dryad he'd freed by inadvertently killing a god.

What even is his life?

They reach the pub soon enough and Ben holds the door open for Rey, padding in after her. He is immediately hit by a brick wall of abrupt silence as every single conversation grinds to a halt at the newcomers' arrival— granted, there are only six other people inside the establishment, but they've all stopped to stare. Ben can't really blame them once he takes into account that he and Rey are quite possibly the first new faces to appear in the hamlet since the United Kingdom's neighbors switched to the euro. Speaking of faces, though, his starts to heat up at the unwelcome scrutiny.

"Evening!" Rey calls out, chipper and undaunted, and it's not long before Britishness kicks in and everyone returns to their drinks with the quiet desperation of those who wish to avoid making small talk with a stranger.

The living embodiment of the phrase little old woman scuttles out from behind the bar and ushers Ben and Rey to a corner table. Chatty and spry, with skin the color of teak, wiry salt-and-pepper hair, and spectacles the size of dinner plates, she introduces herself as Maz. "I know who you are," she says to Ben. "The man who owns your cottage, he's a regular here at my pub. Asked me to keep an eye out for you before he skedaddled off to Cinque Terre to live with his mistress. I used to tell him, look, Sudswater, you're never going to find anyone to rent your house to, who on earth would want to stay in Nymeve— but I see I was mistaken, because you're here now, aren't you, Benjamin Solo?"

"Sorry, his name is Sudswater?" Ben queries. Hux had been the one in charge of booking the accommodation, giving Ben nothing but an address along the lines of look for the front lawn with the crocuses, you can't miss it, or just go around knocking on doors until you get to the right one— honestly, the place is so small it'll take you thirty minutes— why are you glaring at me?

"Oh, yes. Sudswater Dillifay Glon," Maz confirms. "A fine old Takodana name." She turns to Rey and her brows nearly disappear into her hairline. "Land's sake." It takes her a beat to regain her composure, to draw herself up straighter. "Well, grant me your grace and all that, little miss."

"May the hills lie low, may all evil sleep," Rey says gamely, and Maz nods in satisfaction before recommending the potted shrimp.

"That woman's a witch," Rey wastes no time in telling Ben once Maz has walked out of earshot.

He frowns. "I don't know, she seemed all right—"

"Ben." Rey giggles, and it sounds like the melody of a burbling stream. "I meant an actual witch."

"Oh."

"A good one," she hastens to add. "Although, truth be told, most witches are good. They get a bad rap from the men who write history, is all. For example, Odysseus' crew were acting like pigs at the banquet so Circe just gave them a taste of their own medicine, and don't even get me started on Thomas Malory, he was the original fuckboy apologist and so he made Morgana the villain when as a matter of fact she and Guinevere had, like, sewing club every Thursday—"

Ben's head is spinning. "How do you know all this?"

For a moment Rey looks taken aback, as if she can't understand where the question's coming from. "Because I was there," she finally says with a shrug.

Like it's no big deal.

Maz returns with the potted shrimp and shepherd's pie for Rey and bangers and mash for Ben, as well as two generous slabs of homemade fudge, all to be washed down with mugs of cider.

Rey digs in with gusto but Ben can't quite concentrate on food just yet. "Are you saying that they were all real?" he demands. "That they existed?"

"Yup." Rey nods, her mouth full of gravy-soaked beef and flaky pastry. "It's real. All of it. The gods. The sword in the stone. The witches." She winks at him, the pub's soft yellow light hazy around her like a halo. "Me."

🍂

They end up talking for so long that they're the only customers left when Maz kicks them out with good-natured exasperation. She sees them off and, as they're leaving her front step, she takes Rey's hand and peers down at her palm.

To Ben's surprise, Rey slips her wrist free from the old woman's grasp, offering her left hand instead. "Anyone can read the right palm," she quips with an air of playful challenge.

The ghost of a smirk plays at the corner of Maz's lips. She squints at the proffered hand for a while and then releases it, looking deep into Rey's eyes. "The belonging you seek is not behind you," Maz says solemnly. "It is ahead."

A shadow falls over Rey's features. "That can't be what the lines say."

"Don't look at me like that," Maz snorts. "You were the one who wanted a left-handed fortune. It is what it is, to be taken as you please."

Ben has absolutely no idea what the hell is going on, but he figures that he might as well get in on it. When in Rome, etcetera. "Could you read my palm, too?"

"Good heavens, no," Maz all but exclaims, shaking her head. "It's late, I've had a long day, and you, young man, are carrying even more baggage than miss daughter-of-the-woods over here. I'll get a migraine. Come back early tomorrow, if you want."

With that, she bids them a good night and retreats into the pub. It's a slightly disgruntled Rey who latches on to Ben's arm again, and together they embark on the walk back to Sudswater Dillifay Glon's cottage.

Chapter Text

"Strange are the things that one is willing to accept, and stranger still are the things that one is unable to realize until much too long a time has passed—"

— is exactly the kind of pseudo-philosophical bullshit that some kind-sounding narrator of an urban fantasy film that can't make up its mind whether to appeal to the Disney demographic or to the members of the Academy would spout during the scene where Ben stops to tie a loose shoelace a few minutes after he and Rey have left the pub.

"See," this hypothetical narrator who probably sounds like Morgan Freeman doing his best Fred Rogers impression would croon, "they've just rounded the corner onto a street where all the lights are out. Had Mr. Benjamin Organa-Solo, Esquire, been in full possession of his faculties, he would have quickly arrived at the conclusion that the waxing gibbous moon is nowhere near bright enough for him to be tying his shoelace with such ease. But, things being what they are, it isn't until he straightens up again that he discerns the peculiar source of the illumination—"

Ben is standing stock-still in the middle of a hamlet that by all accounts should have been plunged into total shadow at this late hour on a dark autumn night— except that it's not. The outlines of houses and gardens and even the edges of the rolling fields at the periphery of his vision— he can see them all as clearly as he saw the knots he was making, because Rey is... she's...

Glowing.

As brightly as Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, or Kylie Minogue's character in Moulin Rouge! when she drowned the bohemians in absinthe.

Except that the woman in front of him isn't a clever triumph of ink and acrylic paint on a celluloid sheet, and she's definitely not Kylie Minogue.

She's— Rey, and she's resplendent and incomparable in the clothes that she spun out of thin air and his thoughts, every inch of her shedding an amplified version of the radiance that he'd first noticed in the forest, her slim figure lighting up the night like an event horizon, so bright that it almost hurts to look at her— but he can't stop looking. It's like he's the moth to her flame, the Icarus to her sun and, hell, she probably knew him, too.

"It was real. All of it. And so our beleaguered attorney-at-law dons his wax wings and soars toward his doom..."

"Shut up, Morgan Freeman," Ben mutters out loud.

It's ever so pretty, the way Rey's brow crinkles in bewilderment at his inane rambling. Then she glances down at herself. "Oh, bother, I'm doing it again," she huffs. "Sorry, this automatically happens when it gets too dark and I'm still out and about—"

As she speaks, her glow starts fading right before his eyes and, before Ben can even pause to ask himself what he's doing, he's reaching out to grab her by the wrist in a gesture that is already pleading with her even before he opens his mouth.

"No, wait, it's—" His voice sounds strange to his ears, suffocated and raspy with the kind of wonder that he associates with seeing fireflies for the first time, with being eight years old and peering out at the world from a treehouse on the last afternoon of summer— "it's perfect, you're perfect. You're..." He trails off, unsure what he's trying to get at, his heart too full with things he doesn't know how to express even as it luxuriates in the warmth of Rey's special brand of daylight.

She slants him an odd look but, more importantly, she doesn't knee the creepily intense doofus in the groin so he'll let go of her hand. "You know something?" she muses, her tone gentle yet vaguely mystified. "In the old days, it was considered bad luck to see a dryad in the flesh. Mortals used to pray to their gods that they wouldn't catch sight of me while they were out in the woods. They were afraid they'd go blind, or mad, or worse. But then times changed and Constantine crossed the Milvian Bridge and, before I knew it, people didn't believe in dryads anymore."

"I'm here," Ben whispers, staring into the golden green depths of her eyes. "I see you. I believe. And I'm not afraid."

"Okay." Rey lowers her wrist, but only so she can slide her fingers through the gaps between his and lead him to the cottage, still blazing like a sunbeam, still lighting his path. "Okay."

🍂

In sharp contrast to her energetic demeanor from earlier that had reminded Ben of a hyperactive chipmunk— and he means that in the nicest way possible— Rey is markedly solemn by the time they arrive at the rented cottage on the outskirts of Nymeve. As he hovers awkwardly on the step outside the front door, she remains on the stone path so that he's even taller than her than ever before— if only by a couple of inches or so.

She clears her throat. "Well, then. Here you are."

"Yeah," he agrees, his mouth dry. "This is me."

She looks from him to her feet then back again, biting her lip. "I really do have to go. My tree is on the Jakku side of the island— it's a bit of a walk."

Ben doesn't even have any idea where the hell Jakku is. It sounds like a stupid place. He already hates it. "I understand."

After all, it's not like he can ask her to stay. He needs to call a mechanic first thing in the morning and arrange for the repaired Chir'daki to be driven down the mountain to Nymeve; if the coupe has to be fixed at the shop or is a total loss— which is the far likelier scenario— he has to call a towing service and bribe said mechanic into picking him up and giving him a ride to Andui so he can make it to his afternoon meeting, after which he'll have to frantically search for another car to rent that'll get him back to Nymeve in one piece— or maybe he can just pack his bags and stay in the city until the transportation situation is sorted out, and that's assuming there'll be a hotel with a vacancy or even that the mechanic will find it in their heart to play Uber driver in the first place—

Just thinking about it sets off the beginnings of a tension headache, stabbing at Ben's skull in a way that threatens a world of pain later unless he pops an aspirin now. There is no place in the grand and hectic scheme of things for a woman who glows in the dark. Logically, it's better that she disappears into the night and he returns to a normal life, one untouched by magic, and maybe one day in the future he'll be able to write all of this off as a vivid, stress-induced hallucination that he can put behind him when he returns to New York and to his routine of contract signings and tennis and finding legal loopholes for Snoke to squeeze through and power lunches at Cipriani Wall Street and carefully growing his 401(k).

So why doesn't it feel like the better option? Why is every muscle in his body screaming at him to beg Rey not to go?

With a start he realizes that she's once more in her white dress and her bare feet, still shining like she's made of gold beneath the pale silver moon. She looks like an angel. She smiles like one, too, before darting up onto the top step to brush a quick kiss to his cheek, a feather-light peck that he almost doesn't register until it's over and she's pulled back.

"It was nice to meet you, Ben," she says sincerely. "Two hundred years of sleep, and I couldn't be happier that yours was the first face I saw when I opened my eyes."

And then she's turning around and walking away, drifting amidst the purple crocuses on steps as light as air, and he can do nothing but stare dumbly after her until she's vanished into the shadowed blanket of the waiting trees, so completely and inexorably that all of a sudden it was like she had never even been there at all.

🍂

These are the events in the unfolding of Ben Solo's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day:

1. He emerges from a fitful slumber feeling like an idiot because of course— the person who'll come along to fix his car will need the car keys and the car keys are with him, duh— which means he welcomes the sunrise scowling into his coffee as he wills his data to move fast enough to give him search results for mechanics based in Andui who won't hang up on him once he explains his predicament. All while birds chirp outside the window, mocking him with their gaiety and their worry-free existence.

2. For a shockingly low extra charge, the petite, stone-faced mechanic from the city picks Ben up at nine in the morning and ferries him to where the Chir'daki is stranded at the edge of the woods. She introduces herself as Rose and that's all the words he gets out of her before she does— something— something that fixes the engine in, like, two seconds. Then she nods a perfunctory goodbye before leaving him in the dust of her Bunkerbuster pickup truck.

3. He ponders the enigma of Rose the mechanic during his own drive to Andui in the antique coupe that now drives like a dream, practically purring like a panther instead of the toothless, geriatric barn cat it had been less than twenty-four hours ago. She'd sounded like an American in person, but he swears the female voice that had answered his call had been British. And she'd moved— sort of like Rey. Like her clunky, grease-stained Doc Martens were barely touching the ground.

4. Snoke calls him when he's thirty minutes away from the city and what follows is such a brutal mix of icy disappointment, harsh interrogation, and patronizing forgiveness that, by the time Ben arrives at his destination, he's wrung-out— tainted, somehow, like he's not the kind of person that magic can happen to.

5. So he convinces himself that he'd been imagining things with Rose, and maybe even Rey. To be sure, yesterday already feels like a fever-dream.

6. The meeting is— well, it's a meeting. That's all that can be said about it. Nothing is lost or gained, and even less is decided upon. "It's all the push-back from environmentalist groups," lamented the posh forty-something developer from London who manages to give off the impression that he's a seventy-year-old Nixon-era Republican and when he says environmentalist he actually means communist. "We just have to let it blow over before we can really get started, doesn't mean we shouldn't nail down the specifics in the meantime—"

7. Spoiler alert: the specifics utterly refuse to be nailed down, and Ben drives back to Nymeve feeling like he wasted his time. Like he's wasting his life.

Looking purely at the facts, it's not so much a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day as it is a Mildly Annoying, Humdrum Nothing Of A Day, but Ben's somehow in an even worse mood than he was when he'd been slogging through the forest in the pouring rain. His surroundings are... empty. Colorless. He can't stop thinking about Rey's eyes, her smile, the way she'd wrinkled her nose— things that should be less memorable than the fact that she's an immortal wood nymph with supernatural powers, but just aren't.

And if he's being completely honest with himself, he can't stop thinking about her ass, either.

But thats... by the by.

And, anyway, she's gone.

Ben ducks into Maz's pub for an early dinner of lamb stew with carrots, potatoes, and onions that she calls a Lancashire hotpot. The food had been delicious last night but, without Rey seated across from him, it tastes like ashes on his tongue. Maz offers him a commiserating grimace when she comes by to clear his plate.

"Your little butterfly has fluttered away, eh, Solo?"

Ben shrugs.

"Probably for the best," Maz remarks. "Mortals and dryads, that's never ended well. Frankly, I'm surprised you didn't turn into a stag at the sight of her naked limbs and get ripped to shreds by hunting hounds."

In a desperate bid to not think about Rey's naked limbs while a little old woman who's quite possibly a witch fixes her shrewd gaze on him, Ben searches his schoolroom memories for the threads of the old myth that she'd referenced. "I think that's goddesses," he ventures after a while.

"Different sides of the same coin," Maz fires back. "I think it was Rainer Maria Rilke, wasn't it, who said that beauty is only the beginning of terror. Narcissus drowning in his own image and all that." She changes the subject. "Would you be wanting that fortune now, then?"

Ben can't find it in him to care either way but, for reasons he's unable to determine at the moment, he places the back of his right hand on top of the table, unfolding his palm.

It's... worryingly long, the amount of time it takes Maz to read his lines, or whatever it is that she's doing. When she finally looks up, she shakes her head and he gets the niggling suspicion that she feels sorry for him.

"Right. First of all— call your mother," Maz announces.

Ben's eyes nearly pop out of his head.

"Second of all— you're not very kind to yourself, are you?" she continues with a sigh. "No, how can you be, when not a lot of people have been... but there is someone who will be. Who is."

"My... my mother?" Ben asks faintly.

Maz rolls her eyes. "Get out of my pub, Solo. Go get the girl."

🍂

And that, Your Honor, is why he is currently driving down the winding country road that snakes out of Nymeve in the opposite direction from Andui at ninety miles an hour.

I shouldn't be doing this, Ben thinks as the sun sets over rolling pastures and apple orchards. I have meetings. I have a 401(k).

He's still in his business suit, for crying out loud.

But it would seem that logic has taken a great flying leap into the void, and whether it would ever be seen again is anyone's guess. He's following the road map of Takodana that he'd picked up at the harbor when he first arrived, the same map he'd stared at for way too long doing a mental Command+F for Jakku before finally finding the little blue dot that's two thousand miles away from his starting point. His data had quivered in fear at the prospect of GPS and only one online guide had even so much as mentioned the place, and only in passing as a pit-stop en route to some random beach with an "interesting" shipwreck. A brief delve into the TripAdvisor forums had yielded a single search result— a ten-year-old post from FinnTrooper2187 entreating fellow travelers, Do NOT go to Jakku!!! Total DUMP!!!

There aren't even any signposts. This is the stupidest thing Ben's ever done.

When night falls, he starts to wonder if it will also be the last thing.

The darkness that engulfs the rural British countryside at the going down of the sun is nothing like a New York night, which is practically just a seedier kind of daytime. It's absolute, a black velvet that at ground level can't be alleviated by the moon and the stars whose silver glow barely pierces through the tops of the leafy elm trees towering at the edges of the road like silent giants. The Chir'daki's headlights seem pathetically feeble as they slice ahead, in danger of being extinguished by the oppressive weight of the gloom.

To say that Ben is starting to get freaked out would be an understatement. He thinks of disfigured, blood-stained ghosts appearing in the backseat, baring rotten teeth at him in the rearview mirror. He thinks of serial killers in trench-coats and hockey masks lunging at his windshield with butcher knives. His parents had always accused him of having an overactive imagination as a child and so—

— when the headlights glint on a long-haired woman dressed in white at the side of the dark road—

— it's heart attack city, it's Ben letting out a strangled scream, it's him momentarily losing control of the steering wheel, it's the yellow coupe swerving off the road for the second time in two days and coming this close to wrapping around a tree before he pulls hard to the right and slams on the brakes.

Jesus fucking Christ.

It's also at that moment that it clicks with him who the woman is— for who else can she possibly be— and he all but tumbles out of the car, leaving its door open, its engine still running, and its headlights trained on Rey, who looks for all the world like a startled fawn, wide-eyed and skittish, as he staggers toward her with none but the oak trees and the waxing gibbous to bear witness.

"It's really you." Her hushed tones of amazement cut through the silence of the deep, dark night. She's sitting down, perched on a large rock that juts out a good three feet above the soil like she's been waiting there a while. "I heard a little yellow car was coming this way, but I didn't think... I mean, well, I did hope..." She trails off, clearly as befuddled by his presence as much as he himself is. It's a quarter to midnight, he should be in bed— not chasing fairy tales halfway across Takodana island.

His brows knit together. "Heard it from who?"

"Well, the turtledoves told the bats, who told the owls, who told me—"

"Of course," Ben mumbles, resigned.

"— And you described your car to me while we were coming down from the mountain, remember—"

Yes, how could he forget, she'd hung on to every word with such a rapt expression that he'd almost been grateful for the Chir'daki's existence—

"— so, while I wasn't sure if it really was you, I thought I'd head to the road and wait for a while, just in case," Rey finishes in a rush. "But, Ben, what are you doing here? Where are you going?"

"Jakku," he replies. "With you." The tips of his ears turn red as it belatedly occurs to him how presumptuous he sounds. "That is, if you'll have me— I mean, no pressure, I was just thinking that maybe you could use a ride—"

"A ride," she echoes, and he's a dog, he really is, because that kiss and the curve of her derrière have never been all that far from his thoughts since yesterday and there's a rather unfortunate innuendo to what he's just told her, made all the more worse because he would be lying if he said he didn't want that.

"In— in the car," he sputters. "My car— well, it's a rental, but you get the picture— and, again, you don't have to let me come—" Oh, fuck, he's made it even worse— "I mean, come with— accompany you—"

Rey stares at him without speaking for so long that Ben resigns himself to apologizing, wishing her well, and making a U-turn and driving back to Nymeve in a haze of abject humiliation. Maybe he can find a late-night radio station and it'll play "Total Eclipse of the Heart" to both suit his melancholy mood and drown out Morgan Freeman's sorrowful voice-over.

But then Rey smiles, and it's brighter than the sun. The air leaves Ben's lungs and something in his chest does somersaults all the way into the pit of his stomach before rising up again, and it's dizzying and nerve-wracking and wonderful and new. Every single misgiving fades away and every single item on his work-related agenda for the week— for the month— hell, for the entire fiscal year — is relegated to the garbage bin of unimportance, where he suspects it will all stay for as long as this woman is around.

"I would love to go on a road trip with you!" she squeals, and she's, like, vibrating with happiness. "Oh, this is going to be so much fun!"

Somebody who's overjoyed at the idea of spending time with him is such a foreign concept to Ben that surely, surely he can be forgiven for just standing there, more shocked than he'd been when he pulled a dryad out of the birch tree. He moves only when Rey jumps into his arms— and that's not an exaggeration, she literally throws herself at him, flinging her arms around his neck as his hands automatically press to the backs of her knees and the column of her spine so that he's now supporting her in a fucking bridal carry while she wiggles against him like her body is too small to contain her excitement, and then she's—

— she's raining kisses on his face, sweet little drops of affection on his forehead, his cheeks, the tip of his nose, his chin, the corners of his mouth, everything she can reach as her legs dangle in the air and he receives each one like it's a blessing made of moonlight, holding her up like she weighs nothing...

It's not long before she pulls back and again there's that regret, piercing him more sharply than any mask-wearing serial killer's butcher knife could ever aspire to, but it's a blow that's soon softened by the sight of her radiant smile that never once faltered since she learned he wanted to accompany her on her travels. "But what about your job?" she cries. "Aren't you here on the island on business?"

"Eh." He shrugs as much as he can shrug with his arms full of lush, sweet-smelling woman. "I can take a few days off, it's no big deal."

Which is a total lie— Snoke will undoubtedly be yelling for his head all the way from the other side of the Atlantic— but Snoke is the least of Ben's concerns when Rey's features are lighting up like a Christmas tree.

"I can't wait to show you my beautiful Jakku," she hums. "Finest woodland on the continent, utterly gorgeous in autumn, lots of caves to explore, lovely little brooks, the fattest, friendliest animals—"

His online search had given Ben the impression that Jakku was a town, but perhaps she's talking about the surrounding forest. "Can't wait to see it," he says, giving her thigh a reassuring squeeze.

Her very supple, very bare thigh.

The skirt of Rey's white dress had ridden up sometime within the last few seconds, the slit falling open so that there's no barrier of fabric between his fingers and her smooth skin. He'd been so taken with every nuance of her animated expression and every sparkling fleck of gold in her hazel eyes that he hadn't realized it until his fingertips dug in— but, oh, is he realizing it now, his palm cupping warm, silky flesh through which he can feel just how toned she is, how lean and strong. They've both fallen silent, his breath coming out all shallow while she peers at him with that same deer-in-headlights look from earlier that, in this context, is dangerously close to driving him mad.

It's with no small amount of trepidation that Ben traces a haphazard circle on Rey's exposed thigh with the pad of his thumb. It's a tentative caress, a question, a prelude to something else only if she wants it to be. Her reaction takes him by surprise— she shudders, her gaze darkening into smoke, her own fingers suddenly tangling into the hair above his nape.

When she does speak again, it's in a voice that he can barely recognize. It's husky and it's low and there's a distinctly primal thread flowing through it the way he imagines wildfire would flow through a prairie's grassy veins. "You are the first man to touch me like this since the Lionheart marched his forces to Jerusalem," she rasps, and the air around them shimmers and warps in on itself and Ben feels as if he's been plunged into a heat haze, like it's the height of summer and clothes need to be off and he must burrow into the coolness of the earth with the roots, or savor the sweet burst of berries on his tongue. The layers of the Rey he knows have been peeled away, revealing the wolf underneath, hungry and raw and everything he ever wanted, everything that would consume him because beauty is the beginning of terror and he's meddling with what he doesn't understand—

— and then, just like that, it's over. The heat wave vanishes and he's able to inhale crisp evening air for the first time in what seems like both seconds and also years, and she's his innocent, winsome Rey once more, leaning in close to nuzzle her nose against his.

"But we'll get to that," she says with a tiny giggle that's just this side of abashed. "Don't worry— I'll go easy on you."

Ben gulps. He'd been the deer in headlights all along.

And it's— kind of great, actually.

Chapter Text

And October, it seems, happens all at once.

Not the still greenish beginning of the month that had greeted Ben when he stepped off the ferry from Whiteharbour. Not the damp, gray days in New York with tacky Halloween decorations plastered all over SoHo storefronts and Starbucks doing a brisk trade in pumpkin spice lattes.

No— this is the October that he had read about in books, back when he'd had time to read anything that wasn't legal documents and memos from corporate. This is the October that had made Anne Shirley glad for the world, the opal month, the season that had inspired rhapsodies in the likes of William Butler Yeats and W.S. Merwin. This is the October immortalized in movies, in broody indie songs, in the vividly inked landscapes of Bill Watterson comic strips where Calvin and Hobbes demolish carefully raked piles of leaves and philosophize about fall.

And the strangest thing is— it had arrived with the sunrise.

Ben had driven all through the night, pleasantly kept awake by Rey chattering a mile a minute in the passenger seat. According to his calculations, they crossed the map-marked border into Takodana island's western reaches at approximately half-past-six in the morning, and now it's an hour later and—

— and Ben is switching off the headlights and slowing the car's pace, trying to keep his eyes on the road while at the same time come to terms with what had been steadily unfolding all around him in the darkness and is only now easing into view as night retracts its fingers and daybreak claims the land in a silken wash.

The lemon-hued Chir'daki is currently cruising smoothly over a ribbon of silver concrete that winds up and down another set of forested mountains. Unlike the peaks between Andui and Nymeve that had sported a profusion of mostly emerald foliage, however, these mountains look like they've been dipped in— in, well, fire. That's the only way Ben can describe it at first. Plump hazel trees, shaggy larches, towering redwoods, crooked alders, and those ever-present ancient oaks and English elms— they stream past the car windows in endless waves of scarlet and ocher and gold and magenta, with the odd streak of tan and purple here and there. Every few minutes there's a bend in the road and the coupe is brought nearly to the edge where those same brilliant colors can be seen spilling down the mountainside into vast gorges and around lakes as still as mirror-glass beneath a perfect blue-gray sky.

It's a postcard. It's a fairy tale. It's a fucking oil painting the way only the Old Masters could do it, capturing the soul of light on canvas, and in the seat next to Ben, Rey is smiling and chatting gaily in her white dress with her chestnut hair spilling down her bare shoulders, and he feels like he's driving through a dream.

🍂

He is so, so content, of course, to just let her talk— to just let the dulcet lilt of her voice soothe his wound-up spirit like a melody soaked in the finest Cabernet Sauvignon. He's happy to nod along, rarely butting in with a question or off-hand remark— and, even on those occasions, it's merely a ploy on his part to get her to talk some more. She tells him about the gods and the goddesses, about the year she went to Italy just in time for the Renaissance, about every war she's ever been privy to. He soaks it all up, not caring how outlandish it all sounds, knowing in his heart of hearts that she's speaking from memory, that her animated tones can only come from a place of truth. His colleagues would probably be snickering at him for being such a sucker if they were here, but they're not here, are they, there's only Rey and the little yellow car and these rolling mountain views and the glorious blaze of autumn...

But, after a while, she seems to run out of steam, trailing off and sinking into a thoughtful silence.

A silence that he lets stretch on for a few minutes, thinking that she's probably tired from keeping up a conversation that was ninety-percent one-sided for the past seven hours and a half, but out of the corner of his eye he soon catches the pensive expression on her face and he glances over at her and asks, "Is everything all right?"

She looks down at her lap, fidgeting in a way that makes him realize she's self-conscious. "I've been so incredibly rude, not letting you get a word in edgewise," she mumbles. "I'm sorry, Ben. It's just that— I was stuck in that tree for so long. Whenever there were footsteps nearby I'd call out for help, but whoever it was either couldn't hear me or they convinced themselves they were imagining things or they did hear me and they ran away screaming— can't blame them, I mean, I suppose that if I were a mortal and a tree asked for help... although you stopped and helped but, as I said, there's no one like you—" She stops short, as if chagrined that she's letting her tongue run away from her again. "I'd forgotten how good it felt to talk to someone else, is all," she finally continues in a near whisper. "To know that someone is listening."

Ben kind of wants to turn the car around and retrieve Unkar's flattened corpse and spend several years studying biology so that he can figure out a way to bring the ugly old badger back to life and kill him again. It's only then that it occurs to him that there hadn't been a corpse on the road when he came back for his car with Rose the mechanic, as if that smear of blood and guts had magically disappeared during the night, but—

— but he's letting himself get distracted with trivialities and Rey needs him and—

"I like listening to you talk," he blurts out. "I love the sound of your voice. That's why I'm not too keen on interrupting you."

She's quiet for a while. He has to focus on the winding mountain path but he can feel the heat of her gaze on him, and a flush creeps up his neck.

"Really?" she finally asks, so soft and vulnerable. So full of doubt.

To hell with road safety. Keeping one hand on the steering wheel, he reaches out to grab her wrist and bring it to his mouth, pressing a kiss to the back of her hand. "Really," he confirms. "Now, tell me more about the Dancing Plague of 1518."

Rey's blushing as he lets go and she folds her fingers back into her lap, but she doesn't miss a beat. "Okay, so. It was actually the Seelie Court's fault— you see, Oberon and Titania had quarreled again and she was, like, this close to divorcing him, yeah? But the Puck told Oberon that perhaps his queen could be wooed with some kind of enchanted reel..."

The woman's talking about fairies now. Ben sighs to himself. He really is a sucker.

And, honestly, he doesn't mind. Not one bit.

🍂

Another hour drifts by and the Chir'daki glides smoothly downward into a valley that, according to both Rey and the map, is called Ponemah. It's a serene place teeming with red maples, that most beloved of autumn trees, their bright ruby hues offset by the golden yellow of the occasional patch of aspens and an ever-present carpet of rusty grass.

They stop at the first human settlement they come across, the village of Burke's Trailing that, quite frankly, looks like Nymeve with a stone church and a few more thatch-roofed cottages tacked on. Rey's excited to interact with people— it's apparent in the way she all but leaps out of the car after Ben parks it on the side of the road.

"Quick, think of an outfit," she orders him again, and this, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is where Benjamin Organa-Solo purchases his one-way ticket to hell, the facts in the case being as follows:

1. He'd jacked off to a model in a Vanity Fair advertisement once.

2. In his defense, he'd been a college freshman on winter break and he'd had the house to himself.

3. It wasn't like he'd waited until the moment his father's decrepit Corellian Engineering sedan— which Han Solo had nicknamed the Falcon in his hubris, when it should really have been called the Lame Duck— rattled pathetically out the driveway before creeping downstairs and making his way to the coffee table with a nefarious glint in his eye. No, Ben had simply settled onto the couch for a mind-numbing afternoon of Hallmark specials when he spied the magazine lying open, the model pouting up at him from a glossy page.

4. He can't remember her face— which is probably already more than enough grounds for the electric chair— but she'd been his type. Brunette, athletically built, and leggy. The clothes she was showing off hadn't exactly been designed to ignite the flames of lust— they were just denim jeans and a cropped sweater baring a hint of midriff— but, when you're a hot-blooded college freshman home alone on winter break and the girl you'd been seeing had only let you reach second base before she dropped out and joined a gang, you take what you can get.

5. And so, almost before Ben realized what he was doing, it had been pants unzipped and dick out and it wasn't a crime of passion, Your Honor, he'd just been— lonely.

6. But all of that is exposition. The opening crawl, if you will. The true unpardonable offense here is that, for some reason, it is that outfit that springs to Ben's mind and it is what Rey sees and, before he can picture something else, she is—

— wearing... it.

The pristine white sneakers. The skintight jeans. The colorful wool sweater that is inexplicably shorter than his memories had hinted at, exposing a good couple of inches of flat, taut stomach. She'd even gotten the hair down pat— a messy bun piled high on top of her head.

"How do I look?" Hazel eyes sparkling with mischief, Rey twirls for him, the spitting image of a youthful December fantasy coming to life against the backdrop of the world's most picturesque fall.

"Beautiful," Ben tells her with an embarrassing amount of sincerity, and she dimples at him before leading the way into the village.

This of course gives him an unadulterated view of her from the back and... God. That ass— in those jeans—

Ben's cock twitches with interest underneath his navy blue suit trousers, and he has to mentally snarl all manner of horrible threats at it before it's safe enough for him to start trailing after Rey.

🍂

The grizzled proprietor of the only shop in Burke's Trailing is a bit on the cranky side. Ben suspects that it's because it's rather early and he and Rey had interrupted the rail-thin, snowy-haired old man's morning cuppa when the bell over the door heralded their arrival. Also, there's just no getting around the fact that Ben is wearing a business suit and speaks with an American accent, which makes him stick out like a sore thumb in this quaint British village that's an overnight drive away from the nearest big city. The proprietor's gray eyes have narrowed into slits of suspicion by the time the purchases of bread, cheese, jam, candy, and bottled drinks have been plunked down at the cash register.

Rey doesn't notice; her lips have parted in delight, her attention caught by something outside the window. Ben follows her gaze and sees movement— two children all bundled up against the chill, one of them holding on to the leash of—

"A little dog!" Rey cries, sounding so utterly, incandescently happy that Ben can't help the tiny smile that flickers at the corner of his mouth. Without saying another word, she rushes out of the shop and his smile widens by a fraction moments later as he watches her get on her knees and pet the fluffy apricot-colored mutt while the kids shyly hang back.

A throat is cleared, and Ben's eyes reluctantly drift back to the proprietor, whose facial expression is now nothing short of thunderous.

"Bit young for you, isn't she?"

She's thousands of years old, pal, Ben has to bite down on his tongue to keep from snapping. Instead, he settles for shooting the old man a dark glare of his own. "It's not like that."

The proprietor shrugs as he starts ringing up the purchases and shoving them into a brown paper bag. "None of my business," he says in a tone that makes it clear he believes it's exactly his business that some sleazy big-shot Yank has brought his jail-bait mistress to this respectable establishment, which— Give me a break, Ben fumes, it's basically a fucking convenience store. It doesn't even have Pepsi.

He snatches up the bag and storms out of the shop.

"Ben!" Rey's grinning at him over her shoulder. There's not a single worry on her delicate features and her eyes are like limpid green pools in the early morning sunlight and for a brief moment he's brought up short because, shit, she really does look too young for him in her cropped sweater and her denim jeans. "Come say hi to Mister Bones!"

On cue, the rotund mop of curly fur barks, then licks Rey's wrist.

"And these are Temiri and Arashell," Rey continues cheerfully, introducing the boy and the girl who give him hesitant, gap-toothed smiles.

Ben forces himself to relax. He can't scowl at kids. Jesus. "Good morning."

Temiri and Arashell freeze, and then Temiri is dropping the leash and the two of them are running up to Ben, barely coming up to his knees as they bounce around him excitedly and pelt him with a steady stream of chatter.

"Where in America d'you live, then, mister?"

"Our aunt is in Delly-ware, d'you know her, her name is—"

"I like Spongebob Squarepants!"

And through it all the little dog is yipping and bouncing as well as it's cuddled by Rey who is also moving like she's in the throes of a sugar rush, and there is a part of Ben that absolutely cannot believe this is happening as he stands there stock-still and clutching a brown paper bag filled to the brim with groceries to his chest.

He does get around to fielding at least some of the questions that Temiri and Arashell are throwing his way, and eventually Rey plucks out a couple of candy bars from their stash and hands them to the kids, gives Mister Bones one last pat on his fuzzy head, and loops her arm through Ben's as she waves goodbye and they walk on.

"That was surreal," Ben can't help but remark once they're out of earshot.

Rey shoots him a quizzical glance. "What do you mean?"

"I don't know, the whole thing..." He pauses, not sure how to explain himself. "Talking to kids with a dog that looks like a plush toy. In a village that looks like this. It's— different."

"Who do you usually talk to?"

"My boss, I guess. Other lawyers." It's not until he has said the words out loud that he realizes it all sounds a bit sad.

"What about your family? I mean," Rey hastens to explain herself, "I assume the family unit is still a thing among you mortals, times can't have changed that much—"

"Yeah, it's still a thing," Ben confirms a little guardedly. "But mine is— not in the picture."

He braces himself for more uncomfortable questions but, instead, Rey gives his arm a reassuring squeeze. "Well, I wouldn't know about stuff like that, I sprang to life out of a drop of blood from someone's mutilated scrotum—"

Ben laughs, and it seems to him that Rey perks up as if gratified. "But what I do know," she says, "is that different doesn't necessarily have to mean bad, yeah?"

She's tucked up against his side, all warm and smelling like rain and moss, and leaves are crunching under their shoes and the village is so quiet that he can still hear the indistinct noises of Temiri and Arashell's animated chatter and the joyful barks of Mister Bones in the distance.

"It's not bad at all," Ben replies.

🍂

They eat their breakfast in the cool shade of a fiery oak tree by the lake at the border of Burke's Trailing, perhaps one of the very same lakes that Ben had seen from up high on the mountain road. If that's the case, it's even more gorgeous up close; the sun has emerged from behind the October clouds to shine on the placid surface of an immense body of water that is a bright, pale color that makes Ben understand what Crayola was getting at when they came up with the shade called robin's egg blue. It gleams invitingly like a polished disk of pure turquoise alongside the burnt orange grass that covers the shores.

"It's a glacial lake," Rey informs Ben as she tears off hunks of dark brown sourdough bread and aged raw milk cheddar, stuffing them into her mouth with aplomb. "You get them when the glaciers retreat, leaving behind huge deposits of ice and grinding away at rocks along the valley floors to produce sediments of silt and clay. In time, the ice deposits melt into the hollows of the land and the sediments remain suspended in the water column, because they're too fine to sink all the way down to the bottom. The sunlight reflects off of these particles and scatters blues and greens back into our eyes."

Ben quirks an eyebrow at her, smearing apple jam on his own piece of sourdough. "Is innate geological expertise a dryad thing as well?"

"Nah. I overheard a couple of hikers talking once— they stopped to rest by the birch tree and the woman was explaining to her companion what makes some lakes more turquoise than others. I think she was the geologist."

It's instantaneous, the regret that hits him at having been so cavalier. He doesn't like thinking about Rey trapped inside the birch, calling out for help in vain. Two hundred years of that shit— how could anyone have endured that, how could she have endured that, and broken so free so joyous and in love with the world still?

"It wasn't all that horrible," she quickly assures him, as if she'd gleaned the direction of his thoughts from the shadow that had fallen over his features. "Like I said, I slept most of the time. And after the hikers left and I closed my eyes, that night I dreamt about glaciers. Ancient and roaring, leaving behind icy footprints as they marched to the sea. It was a nice dream, I enjoyed it. Then I think another few years must have passed and I felt the shift, like everything was thinner at the edges, and I reached out and the trunk gave way when it never had before and I grabbed hold of some random guy's sleeve."

"Some random guy," Ben echoes, his scowl now more of a pretense than anything else.

"Bit of a grump, but very handsome." Rey smiles at him, eyes twinkling, cheeks bulging, lips coated in crumbs. She's so cute. He almost wants to cry from how cute she is. "Lovely hair, too."

"Thanks."

"You're welcome."

They fall into a companionable silence, eating their bread and their cheese and their jam while the remnants of glaciers lap at the shore. After a while, Ben clears his throat.

"So— since Richard I's army went to Jerusalem, was it?" he prompts before he can lose his nerve.

Rey studies him thoughtfully for long enough that he almost drops his gaze from hers in embarrassment. Right before he can, though, she speaks, her voice softer and more quiet than he's ever heard it before.

"He was a crusader," she says. "Well, he didn't start out as one, obviously— none of them did. In the beginning he was a nobleman's youngest son and his horse took fright in the middle of the woods. That's how we met. He fell off and hit his head on a rock, and then he saw me standing over him." The ghost of a wry half-smile tugs at the corners of her lips. "He called me La belle dame sans merci."

And Ben may not speak French, but he knows his John Keats, his palely loitering, woebegone, haggard knights caught up in the thralls of fair and mysterious damsels who whisk them away to enchanted elfin grots. It takes him a while to identify the tight feeling in his chest as jealousy.

"He was very charming," Rey says wistfully. "I really liked him. But then the king called his banners and off they all went, the farmboys and the noblemen's sons and the scholars and the blacksmith's apprentices. He promised me he would come back, but..."

"He didn't," Ben finishes the sentence for her after she's trailed off and doesn't speak again for a good long while.

Rey stares moodily out across the lake. The inner radiance that lives within her skin appears to have dulled, as if the tiny bright sun that is her heart has retreated behind the clouds of some abiding sorrow. "Maybe he never made it," she finally mumbles. "I heard, later, that a lot of their ships sank along the way. Or maybe he survived the crossing, and now his bones lie somewhere in the Holy Land."

Ben wants to gather her into his arms, but he resists. It would feel wrong, somehow, like he'd be trying to score a point over a dead man's unmarked grave. No, he decides, he will wait for her to be the one to reach out— or at least to let him know that it's okay for him to reach out. He will wait, forever, if need be.

🍂

But first—

— first he has to sleep.

By the time he and Rey exit the valley, he's been driving for almost twelve hours, a fact that he'd somehow managed to stave off with a combination of adrenaline and sheer force of will but hits him like a ton of bricks now that his companion is in a less talkative mood and the silences stretch on for much longer and he has a stomach full of heavy bread and cheese.

As the Chir'daki cruises amidst vast stretches of barren fields interspersed with the occasional patches of asparagus, beets, and perpetual spinach, Ben can no longer help himself— he yawns, great and big and gusty, his jaw nearly cracking at how wide it stretches open.

Rey lets out a horrified gasp. "I'm an idiot, I forgot mortals need their eight hours—"

"You're not an idiot," Ben says gallantly, and then he yawns again.

Thirty minutes later, they reach the roadside town of Goazon— a collection of mostly red-bricked, white-roofed buildings whose only purpose seems to be providing a place to eat and rest in between fields— and they check into its rather shabby but serviceable-looking inn. Anchorite Habit House, proclaims the wooden signboard outside the lobby, and the receptionist calls them "Mr. and Mrs. Solo" as she hands the room key over to Ben. He is way too exhausted to even think about the awkwardness that will undoubtedly ensue from correcting her and so he says nothing, but he does blush when Rey grabs hold of his hand as she skips up the stairs.

Thinking that he might have to find a hotel in Andui if the coupe needed to be towed and he couldn't rent another car, he'd packed an overnight bag yesterday and left it in the backseat after Rose the mechanic worked her magic— and maybe it really had been magic, the ancient contraption is taking to the roads like a fucking Ferrari, but, whatever, Ben can no longer dwell on these thoughts when a soft place to lay his head is within reach. He drops the aforementioned overnight bag on the floor of his and Rey's room and kicks off his shoes and crawls into bed, eyelids drooping.

"Poor Mr. Solo," Rey croons, her tone heartwarmingly affectionate as she tucks him in, spreading the blanket over his body.

Ben's hanging on to consciousness by a thread. He fishes out his wallet, phone, and car keys, but can't muster the motor skills necessary to place them on the nightstand; instead, he drops them onto the mattress beside his pillow.

"If you want to buy food," he slurs, nodding towards the wallet, "or something..."

"Don't worry about me." Rey leans in close, kissing him on the forehead. "Get some rest."

Ben smiles, already half-asleep. Hadn't Maz said that someone would come along, someone who would be kinder to him than he's been to himself in years...

That's his last thought before darkness claims him, lovely and peaceful and deep.

🍂

The moon is the first thing Ben sees when he wakes up. It's gone from waxing gibbous to a perfect circle, as cold and as silver as a coin gleaming above the broad-crowned silhouettes of the wych elms that surround Anchorite Habit House, visible through parted lace curtains that flutter in the cold evening breeze blowing in through the open windows. He's loathe to leave his warm cocoon of pillows and blankets, but his mouth tastes like something died in it and his hair is starting to get greasy and he's been wearing the same clothes since yesterday morning.

Ben drags himself out of bed and into the ancient shower, and the water heater gives out halfway through. Of course. He rushes through the rest of his ablutions and changes into gray flannel sweatpants and a long-sleeved white shirt retrieved from the overnight bag, and he's just finished brushing his teeth when he hears the door creak open and pokes his head out of the en suite to see Rey waltzing into the room. She's still wearing the cropped sweater and tight jeans that will end up putting him in the hospital due to cardiac arrest, he's sure of it, and there's a cloth bag dangling on her shoulder while she enthusiastically munches from a jumbo-sized packet of salt and vinegar chips.

Although— they call them crisps over here, don't they— the waitress at a brunch place in Andui had given him A Look when he asked for a side of fries...

Rey smiles when their eyes meet, and for the life of him Ben can't remember what he'd been thinking about. Potatoes or some shit. "You're awake! I went into town and bought dinner— the new currency is a mess, can I just say, but I was able to figure it out— do you like chicken?"

"Um, yes?" Ben ventures to reply.

And Rey extracts a whole roast chicken from the cloth bag. She sets it down on the room's little dining table and peels back the foil wrapper with no small amount of pride, the air soon replete with a delicious, peppery aroma. As he continues to watch, dumbstruck, she also pulls out two plastic trays of mixed greens, a cheesecake, and a bottle of sparkling wine.

"Come eat!" she says, sitting down and gesturing to the chair across from hers.

Ben does as he is bid, although he's honestly surprised that he hasn't melted into a puddle of goo. It's so domestic. She's so sweet. She—

— attacks the chicken with her bare hands, stripping off pieces of crispy skin and plump white flesh and practically inhaling them, the juices dripping down her fingers— which she licks off with gusto, her pretty pink tongue darting out to lap at the slick mess on her skin—

I'm not going to get an erection, Ben tells himself firmly. It would be disrespectful to the spirit of this poor bird that Rey's currently devouring like a protein-starved barbarian. He unfolds the knife and fork that the inn had provided from their casing of table linen and joins Rey in her meal while she regales him with tales of her adventures around Goazon, and he regrets that he hadn't been there to see her bulldoze her way into the townspeople's lives like an exceedingly friendly whirlwind.

"Do dryads even get drunk?" he asks her as he pours the wine into the glasses that had also come with the room.

She starts to nod, then reconsiders. "Not on mortal libations, although I do get a bit tipsy if I have enough. Falling-down-drunk, though, that's really only with Dionysius' wines. And ambrosia— oh, I miss ambrosia! First thing I'm doing when I get back to Jakku is pay R'iia a visit— she's the guardian deity there and she always has plenty of ambrosia in stock." Rey suddenly claps her hands together in delight, struck by a bright idea. "You should have a drink with us! Only a little, though. A shot, maybe less. Mortals can never hold their ambrosia." Then, just as suddenly, her face clouds over. "On second thought, never mind— R'iia might try to steal you from me."

Ben's head is spinning from the many turns that Rey's conversation with herself has taken. "Pardon?"

"She likes mortals," Rey grumbles, biting into a drumstick as savagely as if she's imagining ripping the goddess' head off. "Not that I won't fight her for you— because I totally will, if it comes to that— but it's going to be such a hassle because I'd just have settled back in—"

"Rey," Ben interrupts, because she's visibly fuming. He's never seen anyone talk themselves into being outraged before. "I won't let myself get stolen that easily."

"Oh, you're just saying that," she sniffs. "R'iia's a fertility goddess, you know. All curves."

"I like your curves," he retorts before he can think better of it. "I like everything about you."

Rey blinks.

It could be made of crystal, this moment, so easy to shatter if one of them makes the wrong move or says the wrong thing. Ben almost can't breathe from how tense he is, even as he curses himself for running off at the mouth.

And then Rey raises her wineglass to her lips and takes a sip, lashes fluttering in a natural movement that bears no trace of coyness or seduction— which doesn't mean that it isn't seductive, especially with her freckled cheeks painted such a fetching shade of bashful pink.

"Well," she says after placing her glass back on the table, "that's all right, then."

🍂

After dinner, they move to the bed, sitting up against the headboard and polishing off the rest of the wine while he introduces her to the joys of television— no, Rey, they're not trapped inside the box, we don't need to free them, it's like watching a play except not in real time— and although the inn's reception is a far cry from stellar, to say nothing of the assortment of channels, he eventually finds a marathon of the second series of the Doctor Who relaunch. Rey watches with rapt attention, crunching down on the remnants of her salt and vinegar chips and squealing at every campy alien costume and CGI effect, and Ben does his best to ignore his phone which, although in silent mode, is blinking with text message notifications and calls nonstop. He can see Snoke's name flashing on the screen, along with the London developer's name and, finally, even Hux's. Thank God he doesn't have Internet— he doesn't even want to imagine the state of his e-mails right now.

They decide to switch off the lights since there's enough illumination from the television screen and the full moon pouring in through the gap in the curtains. Lulled by the wine and Rey's warmth at his side, Ben drifts off somewhere around "Love & Monsters," his neck craned at an awkward angle against the headboard, and when he wakes up it's to a crick in said neck and the clock on the wall stating that it's two in the morning and the scene of Billie Piper crying on a desolate beach cutting to a closeup of David Tennant in the TARDIS, a single tear rolling down his face.

Oh no, Ben thinks blearily, right before Rey wails, "Ben!" in his ear and dissolves into sobs.

He fumbles for the remote control on the nightstand and switches off the television, gathering Rey into his arms and not for a second minding the potato chip crumbs scattered all over the blankets. "It's okay," he murmurs into her hair, still in its messy bun.

"N-n-no, it's not," she blubbers, staining his shirtfront with hot tears. "He burned up a sun to say goodbye— they're never going to see each other again—"

Ben opens his mouth to tell her that they actually do, that this isn't the end of Rose Tyler and the Tenth Doctor's story, but then Rey throws her arms around his neck and climbs into his lap, his hand sliding down to the smooth skin at the small of her back, exposed by the cropped sweater.

He rubs soothing circles along the base of her spine as her shoulders shake. "Don't cry, princess—" The endearment tumbles out of his mouth, unbidden, instinctive— "it's not real—"

"It is," Rey insists. "It's always real. Like the plays, like opera— oh, you mortals and your stories never fail to make me cry! You go for the heart every time—"

"Yeah, we're a pretty angsty bunch," Ben tries to quip, hoping it will lighten the mood.

Rey nods, her face hidden against his chest. Even though all artificial light has been switched off, she's not glowing, and that breaks something in him. He holds her quietly until her sniffles subside, until her breathing evens out. According to the clock on the wall, it's two-thirty when she peeks up at him with eyes that are wide and glassy in the moonlight.

"I have a question," she croaks.

She sounds so uncharacteristically timid that his arms tighten around her. "Jesus, Rey. Anything."

"When you went to— to come get me— what if we hadn't seen each other along the road?"

"I would've kept driving," Ben tells her, and he means every single word. "All the way to Jakku. And then I would've looked around for an ash tree and— I don't know— knock, I guess, to see if you were in—"

She kisses him. It's fierce and possessive, and maybe a little desperate, the honeyed sweetness of her mouth unchanged despite everything she'd eaten today. Which, he supposes, is a dryad thing and a neat enough trick— although he would have braved the aftertaste of salt and vinegar chips for this woman, honest to God, and that's how he knows he's in so deep—

Rey pulls away, cradling his face in her small, gentle hands. "I stopped and waited for you as soon as I heard, and you showed up." Her lower lip trembles. "You're the first person I ever waited for who showed up."

This time, Ben is the one to lean down and slant his mouth over hers, no thought left to him but to erase all the pain and the loneliness etched on her features the only way he knows how. She kisses him back, and it's all October and longing, it's all moonlight.

Chapter Text

The thing is— kissing Rey is addictive. She's like toffee melting on his tongue. And when they're on a bed in a darkened room and she's straddling him while dressed like an old fantasy from his hormone-addled late teens after gazing up at him with tear-bright eyes that had been so big and sorrowful and pleading— well, it's a potent combination, and it takes only two minutes of making out and then she's gasping into his mouth and she's grinding down because, yup, there it is, the full salute, the rocket to the moon, the good old Stars and Stripes unfurling proudly over British shores.

"Oh." Rey no longer sounds sad; in fact, she sounds very, very pleased with herself as she rubs against him, eliciting a sound from Ben that is half whimper, half groan. "I think I like these newfangled trousers— these jeans," she breathes out in between kisses. "The friction is— delightful."

"Speak for yourself," Ben mutters against her lips. "I'd like them so much better off."

She giggles, and it goes straight to his dick, unlocking a primal sort of recklessness. His right hand leaves the small of her back to blindly grope her breasts through her sweater, and her own fingers twist into his hair as if in response.

"I like this sweater, too," she pants, and he thinks about ribbed wool scraping against delicate skin and he happily devotes some time to kneading the material with his fingertips, letting it glide over her breasts while he keeps drinking from her sweet lips like he's dying of thirst. She wriggles in his lap, returning his kisses with a hint of the fire that he'd felt when he carried her in his arms last night along the road, beneath the elm trees, and finally Ben can stand it no longer, he pushes the sweater up over her breasts and he takes one pert, dusky nipple into his mouth, sucking gently while he rolls the other between fingers and thumb, and Rey is moaning, rocking against him, arching up into his ministrations as her nails rake down his scalp.

Her breasts are, in a word, perfect. Small and supple and, as he soon finds out, incredibly sensitive. He could play with them for hours but, just as he begins to think that he might do just that, Rey's hand snakes down between their bodies, tugging at his sweatpants until she's pried his erection free, and—

— when her slim fingers wrap around his bare length and begin to move up and down—

— Benjamin Organa-Solo swears that he sees stars—

"I could magic my jeans away," Rey hums in his ear, and there is a teasing lilt to her voice that's gone all husky with arousal, "but I think you want to be the one to take them off. Don't you, Ben?"

He lifts his head from her chest, startled. She's— watching him, a trace of what is not quite a smirk dancing on her lips. The moonlight casts strange shadows on the planes and hollows of her beautiful face and he thinks about sirens luring sailors to their doom on the rocks of Anthemusa.

It should frighten him, but it doesn't.

"You knew," he grates out.

"I saw it." She lowers her lashes. "It's a dryad thing. Sorry."

"And you don't— you don't mind?"

"Why would I?" She leans in to kiss him again, her fist bobbing on his length once more. "It worked, didn't it? You desire me now, don't you?"

There's something about the way she says it that doesn't sit right with him. It's a calm, nonchalant acceptance threaded through the veneer of enticement, and it makes him narrow his eyes even as he kisses her back, slipping his tongue into her mouth, stroking and exploring until she shudders and whines. And then he's helping her pull the sweater over her head and coaxing her gently onto her back on the mattress so that she's laid out beneath him, her bare breasts flushed from his attentions and rising and falling with each ragged breath she takes, her hard little nipples slick with his spit. Even the scant few seconds wherein she's gone from his line of sight as he hurriedly peels off his own clothes are unbearably long, and it's with a rather embarrassing amount of eagerness that he returns to her and, finally, they're skin to skin, and...

"Rey." He cages her in with his body, propping himself up on his elbows as he kisses the tip of her freckled nose. "You don't need to dress up for me." He presses another kiss to her cheek, and another to the line of her jaw. "I wanted you from the moment I saw you in the forest." His lips start working their way down her neck. "Hell, you could be wearing a garbage bag and I'd still..."

"Still what?" she asks when he trails off, and when he hesitates to finish his train of thought, she sinks her teeth into his earlobe, nipping lightly and, oh, he hadn't realized he was so sensitive there. "Still what, Ben?"

"Fuck you senseless," he mumbles into the soft crook where her neck meets her shoulder, and he swears he can feel the air around them warp with licks of heat. Encouraged, he sucks a bruise along the honeyed column of her throat, one hand drifting downward to fumble with her zipper.

"I want you to, χρυσό μου." It's almost a sigh, the way it leaves her lips, and a fresh wave of lust surges through him despite not knowing what it is that she actually called him. But he thinks he can make a guess as to the shape of it, thinks he can divine it from the sound of her voice and the way she runs a hand along his spine. "But—"

He stops what he's doing immediately, raising his head to peer down at her face as his hand freezes halfway through unzipping her jeans. His heart is thundering within his chest and it seems like every inch of his body is screaming for release but, Jesus, he's not an animal.

"We can stop," he says when it's her turn to hesitate, that single word— But— still echoing through his mind. They probably are moving too fast. "We don't have to go any further than this." Although he will have to go jack off in the en suite, probably—

Rey shakes her head. "No, I want to continue," she says earnestly, looking deep into his eyes as she caresses his cheek, and he can't help but lean into her touch, pressing a kiss to the heel of her palm. "It's just that— I don't know if I'm comfortable going all the way here. Sex is... it's personal for me, in a way that's different from humans. It's something that's all tangled up with my nature, my powers— and I'm not so sure I'd love it if my first time in eight hundred years were to be in a mortal dwelling, where I'm cut off from the stars and the wild."

Oh, my God, Ben thinks, I'm going to end up having sex in the woods before this trip is over, aren't I? What's the U.K. statute for public indecency? What if someone takes pictures? He can just see the headlines now: SON OF MASSACHUSETTS SENATOR CAUGHT DEFILING VIRGIN FOREST. Grainy footage of his bare ass is going to ignite World War III—

But then Rey dimples up at him, guiding his limp hand back to her crotch. "Maybe we can do other things first, see how we feel," she suggests, as sweet as pie and a little breathless, and Ben decides that he doesn't care, to hell with it, he would start a hundred wars for this woman. He resumes his task with a newfound sense of purpose, scattering more kisses on her breasts as they work together to peel off her tight jeans, and this is the moment where he realizes that fantasy isn't all it's cracked up to be, because—

"Forget corsets, forget high heels," Rey grumbles moments later as Ben gives another valiant tug, "it's skinny jeans that are the worst thing to ever happen to womankind."

"You said you could just magic them away?" he prompts.

She frowns. "Oh, but I thought you'd like to—"

"Rey, if your pants don't disappear within the next three seconds, I will take the entire fashion industry to court," he deadpans, and she bursts out laughing, and, just like that, the current denim bane of his existence has vanished into the ether, and her legs are long and slender and gleaming in the moonlight.

Ben is smiling when he kisses her again. "I love dryad magic."

"You haven't seen anything yet," Rey says primly. "And you really should smile more— oh!" He's slipped a hand between her thighs and is now tracing feather-light circles on the outline of her clit through her white cotton panties that are soaked with arousal. "Yes," she purrs as he nibbles at her neck, "just like that—" Her own hands are busy flying all over him, fingers clawing at his biceps and mapping the notches of his spine and climbing the ladder of his ribs, her movements artless and exultant as if she's possessed by the sheer, mindless joy of being able to touch someone else after so, so long.

And when Ben's fingers finally dip beneath the waistband of her underwear and one slides into her tight, wet heat, the surprised, gratified sob that emerges from the back of her throat makes him kind of hate himself for not having done it sooner.

"Another one," she begs, and of course he obliges, adding a second finger while she cants her hips toward his wrist and wraps her arms around him like she's holding on for dear life. They hadn't closed the curtains and, thus, the full moon shines over the wych elms at the periphery of Ben's vision, and in its glow the woman beneath him seems to blossom like she's made of the kind of flowers that only reveal their beauty at night, her lips as soft and pink as primroses, her graceful limbs reflecting the moonlight like Casa Blanca lilies, stardust threaded through her hair like flecks of jasmine.

It's almost violent, the way she falls apart, spasming around his fingers and his name rolling off her tongue like a hymn as she arches her spine and there it is again, that heat haze, that eternal summer, clouding his senses so that he can no longer think about anything but following her off the edge.

Ben kneels between Rey's spread thighs as she floats slowly back to earth with a dreamy smile, peeking up at him through hooded eyes. He wraps a fist around his cock, coating himself in her wetness, and it doesn't take long at all— not when he's looking at her cute, flushed face and her perfect tits. His breath hitches in his throat as he comes all over her stomach, painting her skin in ropes of white, marking her as—

— as—

Mine, is all that Ben can think, the single word that his mind seizes and refuses to let go of as he collapses into Rey's waiting arms. They exchange lazy kisses, grinning against each other's mouths, and he can't decide whether it's gross as fuck or actually kind of hot that his come is just sort of being smooshed around between their bodies but, as is always the case, it's so hard to care about anything else but Rey.

"What was it that you called me earlier?" he asks drowsily, nuzzling at her jawline.

"χρυσό μου?" she queries, and he nods. She presses her lips to his temple, and he's already drifting off to sleep with a smile on his face when she murmurs the translation into his hair. "My golden one."

🍂

The next time Ben wakes up, the clock on the wall reads six in the morning and Rey is clinging to him with both arms and both legs like a koala on a eucalyptus tree. And snoring as loudly as the chainsaw that would be employed if said tree ever needed to be cut down.

His bladder had been what roused him. Ben reluctantly extricates himself from Rey's full-body embrace and the autumn chill seeping in through the open window slams into him the moment he heads to the en suite. It's a huge shock to his system, considering that he hadn't felt the slightest bit cold while in bed— although perhaps he has the dryad with magical heating powers to thank for that.

Ben cleans up while in the bathroom— it's not as though the dried-up semen on his skin is the height of sensory pleasure— and he returns to bed with a freshly-soaked washcloth and rubs it as gently as he can over Rey's stomach, wiping away the evidence of their tryst. She doesn't even so much as stir— if this is how deeply she usually sleeps, then no wonder she'd made it two hundred years inside the birch tree without losing her marbles.

He's just settled back under the covers when he sees a familiar rectangle of light blinking frantically once more. Some latent sense of responsibility kicks in and he grabs his phone from the nightstand— but he doesn't actually pick up Snoke's call. Instead, he waits until the ringing stops, and then he shoots off a text message.

Hey, boss, sorry I didn't attend yesterday's meeting with the developer, and I can't make it today or the rest of the week, either. Why, you ask? I'm driving a forest nymph lady I just met to some place called Jakku. Because that's where her tree is, you see. What the hell am I talking about, you might perchance go on to inquire? Well, every dryad has a tree, Alistair. That's only common sense.

It's a testament to how blissed-out Ben still is— to how good of a mood he's in— that he spends several seconds entertaining the idea of typing out and sending those exact words, during which he also imagines what the look on Snoke's face would be upon receiving such a text.

In the end, however, Ben settles on a brief, professional, and completely duplicitous Am currently ill. Have lost my voice so unable to come to the phone. Will make up for it. Apologies.

He then writes another message— this time to the developer— to reschedule their upcoming meetings, and he's barely hit send on that one when the reply from Snoke comes in. It's a long-winded speech on trustworthiness, responsibility, and self-discipline, along with some shit about how the weakness of the body can be overcome by the strength of the mind, and Ben amuses himself with picturing Hux struggling to encode all of that as Snoke dictates while puffing on expensive Cuban cigars.

Then Ben turns off his phone, gathers a peacefully oblivious, snoring Rey into his arms, and goes back to sleep.

🍂

Anchorite Habit House's breakfast buffet is— not good, but Ben wouldn't have known it from the way Rey wolfs all of it down. At first mindful of the other guests in the inn's tiny restaurant, she makes a valiant attempt at using cutlery, and then gives up halfway through her fourth helping of veal sausages. He watches, amused, as she tears into the defenseless tubes of meat with bare hands, all the while chatting animatedly through bulging mouthfuls. People are staring, the fried eggs are hard as rocks, and the coffee tastes like mud, but it's somehow the best breakfast Ben has ever had.

It's nine in the morning by the time Goazon becomes nothing more than a speck in the Chir'daki's rear view mirror. Ben estimates that, factoring in meals and rest stops, it'll take roughly another three days and a half for them to reach Jakku, and that's assuming he can drive ten hours a day. The cozy atmosphere of Takodana's human settlements belies the fact that it's a massive island, with endless sprawls of wilderness, and there's a part of him that's actually looking forward to seeing more of it with Rey by his side. Him. Benjamin Organa-Solo, Esquire, who'd once lobbied for First Order Intercontinental's annual team building to be held in Athens instead of Santorini so that he could take a direct flight back to New York and make it in time for a pre-meeting meeting with select members of the Federal Trade Commission.

"It's not even an actual meeting, it's the pre-meeting meeting!" the usually mild-mannered Dopheld Mitaka had forgotten himself enough to wail desperately. "We're all going to the FTC meeting, so why can't we just—"

Ben had argued that a good pre-meeting meeting was the key to a successful meeting, and Snoke had seen the wisdom in this rationale and promptly moved the team building venue. With the exception of Hux— who'd suggested that they just do Coney Island, to save even more time— Ben's coworkers had never forgiven him for this.

But that had been all right. He hadn't come to First Order to make friends.

"Penny for your thoughts?" Rey chirps from the passenger seat.

Ben glances at her. She's smiling at him, as bright as daylight against the backdrop of autumn countryside rushing past the window, blurring into a river of red and gold. He's loathe to tear his eyes away, but he'd rather have every single one of his teeth pulled out than subject her to a car accident.

"It's been a while since I've gone on a vacation," he replies, transferring his gaze back to the road. "Which is what this is, I guess." Although it's really more like an unsanctioned leave of absence and Snoke is probably hiring an assassin to fly out from the United States right this instant. If he hasn't already.

"Yeah? How come?" Rey asks.

"I'm— busy a lot," Ben haltingly explains. He's not about to tell this magical creature spun from leaf and stem and sunshine that he hates the outdoors. "Work keeps me busy."

"But there's always time to rest!" she insists with a look of dismay. "Unless you positively adore your job, then I suppose that it wouldn't feel like work at all."

"I think adore might be an overstatement," Ben hedges. "It's all right. It pays the bills."

"Is it what you've always wanted to do?"

He huffs out a breath. He hasn't spared a moment's reflection on any of his what-could-have-been' s since... since he was perhaps in his early twenties. "It's not the exact kind of law I imagined myself specializing in when I applied to Yale, no."

"Yale?" She's incredulous. "The college for aspiring Protestant ministers?"

"It's a university now. With all sorts of degree programs."

"Just as well," Rey quips. "Considering all the naughty things you did to me last night, you'd have made for a shit minister."

And Ben very nearly does end up crashing the car. "Rey."

"What?" She giggles, then leans over to plant a quick kiss on the corner of his mouth. It takes all his willpower to suppress the instinct to turn his head and kiss her for real. SON OF MASSACHUSETTS SENATOR TOTALS VINTAGE COUPE WHILE MAKING OUT WITH GIRL WHO'S TOO YOUNG FOR HIM (ALTHOUGH HE CLAIMS SHE'S THOUSANDS OF YEARS OLD).

"Anyway, back to what we were discussing—" Rey settles into her seat once more— "what kind of law did you originally want to specialize in, then?"

Ben thinks about it for a while, a slight frown tugging at his lips. "I don't remember anymore," he says at last, and it's the truth. It's as if the past several years he has spent under Snoke's wing have taken up all the space in his head, leaving no room for the person he'd been before.

Anxious to change the subject, he blurts out, "You've been to Connecticut?"

"Ooh, yes, twice," Rey gushes, attention span like a fruit fly, or maybe a magpie gravitating to the next shiny thing to come along, if shiny things were conversational threads. "I sailed with the Dutch fur traders but hurried back once things started getting tense between them and the English— I couldn't risk being trapped in the New World and unable to return to my tree, you know? The next time I went, it was just after the Revolution, and that's how I know Yale..."

🍂

In the late afternoon, she asks him if they can stop to watch the sunset. "If you take that right turn just up ahead, there'll be a lovely beach further down the road."

Ben had been counting on reaching the next town before dark, but he can't find it in his heart to say no to Rey. Whatever— it's a far cry from the height of peak season and there's bound to be a bed and breakfast that won't mind late check-in.

He makes the turn, and what she'd called the road is little more than a dirt path. His teeth rattle as the yellow Chir'daki's tires lurch over pebbles and potholes, but they make it to the coastline in one piece, and any misgivings he has immediately vanish once Rey scurries out of the car and onto the sand in her gauzy white dress, radiating unbridled joy with every step.

And the beach is—

Yeah.

Pristine sand the color of ivory, cast in a burnished ruby gloss by the setting sun. Rocks as smooth as dark marble, jutting out above crystal-clear shallows. And the ocean, a sapphire blue expanse flecked with the white curls of gentle, foam-capped waves, stretching out as far as the eye can see.

Rey turns back to face him, waiting excitedly for his judgment. She's shimmering at the edges, her long brown hair streaming in the wind.

Ben exhales. For what feels like the first time in years. "So," he tells her with a crooked grin, "this is actually sort of amazing."

And that smile of hers that's almost never far from her lips widens, and she takes his hand and leads him closer to where land ends and water begins.

Chapter Text

In all honesty, Ben knows he should be freezing his ass off.

It's almost seven in the evening— in the United Kingdom, in the depths of October— and the light of day is fading fast and he's on a beach where a strong wind is rolling in from the Atlantic, over the tides of the Irish Sea. Having packed only sleep clothes and work attire in the overnight bag, he's wearing a black blazer, a dark gray shirt, black trousers, and his dress shoes. He should no longer be able to feel his fingers under these circumstances.

In theory, that is.

The reality, however, is the complete opposite. He can feel his fingers just fine— more than just fine, as a matter of fact— and he can feel everything they're touching, because what he's touching is—

— is the sun itself.

Herself. Whatever.

It's bewildering, all these romantic notions. He has no idea where they're coming from. All he knows is that the woman in his arms is his sun, and maybe also his moon and his stars. Hell, maybe she's his whole fucking universe.

It sure feels that way as she slips her tongue into his mouth.

Against his better judgment, Ben had let Rey cajole him into laying back on the sand— mercifully, on the dryer portion that won't cling to his clothes. Now she's got him pinned down with her hands on his shoulders and her lean thighs straddling his hips and she's kissing him for all he's worth, rubbing against him so deliciously in all the right ways. The little whimpers that she's making in the back of her throat intertwine with the roar of the sea to create an aria that he knows will never leave him, like— shit, like Luciano Pavarotti singing Nessun dorma in Milan, and when did he become the kind of pretentious sap who compares playing tonsil hockey to listening to Puccini? Rey is both the best and the worst thing that's ever happened to him, all at once.

Ben's got his hands on her ass, molding his palms to those delightful curves. She kisses him harder every time he squeezes and every time his fingertips brush against the gusset of her panties, but after a while she presses an open mouth and a clever tongue to the skin of his neck, biting and sucking, and his eyes fly open and his spine arches from the sheer pleasure of it all. He glimpses the moment's bits and pieces like they're lovely little fractures suspended in the haze of what will become a golden memory— Rey's white skirt rippling over her shapely legs, her long chestnut hair streaked through with fire in the light of the setting sun, the waves lapping at the shore at the periphery of his vision, the ebb and flood of it bearing a rhythm that strikes him as oddly sensual.

A rhythm that it doesn't take long for Rey's hips to echo. They start rocking against his in earnest.

Ben is suddenly very, very glad that it's the tourist off season and there's not a single pocket of civilization to be seen for miles around, because when she's moving like that— while she's kissing her way down his neck like that— he is absolutely certain that he's not going to let her stop for anything or for anyone.

Not even God himself— or, well, Zeus, if he really wants to stick to the theme—

And then Rey's hazel eyes flicker somewhere off to the side and latch on to an as yet unknown point in the water. The lust on her face vanishes in an instant, giving way to sheer, unadulterated giddiness, and she's on her feet before he can even blink and she's running toward the sea as he just—

— just lays there, staring up at the burnished heavens utterly dumbfounded, hard as a rock and leaking precome beneath his trousers.

"Ben!" Her merry voice drifts over to his disbelieving ears. "Ben, look!"

Attention span of a magpie, he reiterates to himself.

After a while, he gets his erection more or less under control and he stands up, in lieu of something else that had previously been standing up, and he turns to Rey. She's ankle-deep in the shallows, her back to him as she all but buzzes with excitement. He trudges over to her, wincing as the particles of sand that had found their way into his clothes chafe at his skin, coarse and rough and irritating. It's probably sufficient impetus to rethink engaging in any form of sexual activity on the beach, but he can't help but feel a little grumpy at how the whole affair had been so abruptly cut short.

And he can't ruin another pair of handmade leather dress shoes, he really can't, so he stops walking right at the edge of the waterline, as close to Rey as possible without incurring the wrath of whatever god it is that cordwainers pray to. He opens his mouth to ask what he's supposed to be seeing, but the unspoken words die on his tongue as a distant yet clearly massive silhouette emerges from the wave-tossed surface of the glittering sea. Flippers extended like the arms of a Russian ballerina in third arabesque, it leaps out of the water, perfectly framed against the red orange sun sinking into the horizon, and then it does a partial twirl onto its side and falls back into the sea with all the measured elegance of the aforementioned ballerina falling into her partner's waiting arms. Another silhouette follows suit while, a little further away, a pair of serrated flukes as wide as Cessna wings fans out over the Atlantic currents, before landing back down with a mighty splash.

Humpback whales.

Ben had been cockblocked by humpback whales.

And he doesn't mind it as much as he thought he would.

"I haven't seen one in a while," Rey says softly, still transfixed on the horizon. "Even before Unkar trapped me in the birch, it had already been years. I was afraid they were all gone."

And Ben doesn't say anything, but he feels vaguely ashamed for some reason. He and Rey stand in silence, watching the graceful dance until it's over and the last of the whales have vanished along with the final lingering shreds of daylight.

🍂

It's well past nine in the evening when the little yellow car reaches the next outpost of civilization— a seaside village called Arporatal-Lanin that's so tiny you could probably start saying its name on one end and reach the other before the last syllable left your lips. A sleepy-eyed constable gruffly informs Ben and Rey that they don't have "any of those posh hotels" but he concedes that Infrablue over at the pub has been known to rent out his daughter's old bedroom on the second floor when the girl isn't visiting from Belfast.

"Sorry, Infrablue?" Ben asks.

"Infrablue Zedbeddy Coggins," the constable explains— or thinks he's explaining, anyway. "Fine old Takodana name."

"Right," Ben says. "Good to know."

Exhausted from the long drive, he can't suppress a yawn as he pushes open the wooden front door of the village pub for Rey. She's all over him in a second, running her fingers through his hair and looping her free arm around his waist as she tuts about how they have to get him into bed, and soon.

Ben, who's spent the past decade living alone with no one to tell him to get some sleep, offers her a tired, sappy half-smile as his heart melts at her feet. She's magicked on a new outfit pulled from a Burberry advertisement that he'd seen in London, and there's an alluring contrast between how she looks like a supermodel in her plaid coat and black tights and the cute manner in which she scrunches her nose up at him when he insists that he's fine.

The interior of the pub is dingy and it smells like tobacco smoke, with a distinct whiff of boiled crustacean. Most of its patrons look— well, the way Ben would expect the owners of the fishing vessels docked at the nearby wharf to look. Burly and bearded, sunburned faces weathered by salt-laced wind.

The man behind the bar who is presumably Infrablue Zedbeddy Coggins is no different, although he gives Rey a knowing look instead of the suspicious who the hell's this, then glare that his customers had leveled on both Rey and Ben when they walked in. Infrablue's copper hair is streaked through with shades of gray and he's all smiles as he and Ben negotiate a price for the spare room upstairs; it's Rey who brings up the issue of dinner, and the pub owner is happy to declare that his wife makes the best monkfish with smoked almonds in all of the British Isles.

"Laurel, apple, or oak?" Infrablue asks Rey just as she and Ben are about to turn to look for a vacant table.

"Ash, actually," Rey answers with a wink.

Infrablue chuckles. "I'm getting rusty. Been a while since one of your kind passed through."

To say that Ben's startled by this development is an understatement, but he manages to hold his peace until he and Rey have found their seats, right next to the roaring fireplace. Then he wastes no time in blurting out, "Is that guy a witch, too?"

"No, but he's got the Sight." Rey reaches for Ben's hand across the table and starts fiddling with his wristwatch, poking and prodding curiously. She really is a magpie. "I'd wager he's close to another immortal. If you spend enough time or establish a deep enough connection with one of us, you learn how to spot the others."

Ben thinks of Rose the mechanic and how her Doc Martens hadn't quite touched the ground. He's just about to bring her up to Rey when Infrablue's wife arrives with the monkfish, introducing herself as Eighrig.

Rey's hazel eyes light up, not at the food like they usually do but at the woman. "Mu tha thu airson a bhith buan," she chirps by way of greeting.

"Na teid eadar an te ruadh agus a' chreag," Eighrig replies with a smile of her own. She and Rey chat for a while in that rhythmic, rolling tongue that Ben soon comes to decide must be a form of Gaelic, and the longer Eighrig talks the more she sounds like the ocean that one can hear inside a seashell. Her skin is the color of driftwood and her hair, although pulled away from her face in a matronly bun, is shiny and black, with hints of silver shot through it like...

Like starlight on the waves, Ben muses, although he has no idea where that thought comes from or why he's turned into fucking J.R.R Tolkien all of a sudden.

After Eighrig's excused herself, Rey doesn't keep Ben hanging for long. "She's a selkie," she announces as she dives into the monkfish. "Or, well, she was a selkie, I don't actually know which tense would be more politically correct, but— yeah. Her sealskin's long gone, she burned it when she married Infrablue."

"Oh." Ben tries very hard to sound like Rey's just given him some interesting yet minor bit of trivia— something along the lines of hey, did you know that elephants are the only animals that can't jump— but it's hard going. "And, um, why did she do that?"

The look that Rey gives him is so indecipherable, so curiously penetrating, that Ben thinks she must have misunderstood and he hastens to clarify, "Why did she burn her sealskin, I mean, not why did she marry Infrablue— he seems nice, and he has his own business—"

"She loves him." Rey sounds just the slightest bit... not curt, exactly, but like she's not sure whether she wants to continue this line of conversation. "And she wants to grow old with him."

At that, Ben's mind sort of— blanks. Like a newly discovered door has been shut before he can explore the room it leads into. He understands, on some level, that the instinct for self-preservation has kicked in. He is vaguely aware that he's trying to save himself from something he can't articulate.

"Oh," he says again.

It's the last word that's exchanged between the two of them for the rest of the meal. The monkfish is delicious but Ben can't bring himself to do anything more than pick at it. Rey eats even more voraciously than usual, chewing and swallowing with a concentration so fierce that it's almost as if she would do anything just so she can avoid meeting his eyes.

🍂

The spare room above the pub is... a time. It's clean and cozy, the bright patterns of its mismatched bedding, rugs, and curtains leaping out at Ben from a backdrop of the old, grayish brown wood that makes up its floor and its walls, which in themselves are plastered with faded boy band posters and magazine clippings. The sole window above the bed lets in enough moonlight to illuminate the majority of the space, and it faces the sea.

All this would have been— fine, relatively speaking. Ben's picky about hotel rooms but this is the farthest thing from a hotel and he knows that he and Rey are just lucky that they found somewhere to stay for the night.

It's just that— well— the ceiling. It slopes down so low that he has to stoop if he doesn't want to bang his head against it while walking the ten steps between the bed and the door.

But it's only for a night, he reminds himself as he shuffles forward to join Rey, who's back in her white dress and has already tucked herself in against the wall. Like the rest of the room, the bed isn't big enough for a man of over six feet— much less when he's accompanied by a woman who must be at least 5'7". After kicking off his shoes and socks and depositing his coat on the nearby garishly upholstered chair, Ben has to do this thing where he lays on his side and sort of curls around Rey in order to avoid falling off.

It's a good thing— a very good thing— that she doesn't seem to mind. Instead, she wriggles closer to him, nuzzling the tip of her nose against his, and he can't help but return her faint smile. She'd flung open the window and the curtains stir in the breeze as the sound of the waves rushes in, and again it should be freezing but it isn't, everything is warm and toasty and smells like berries and summertime.

Rey's the one who speaks first. "I suppose you're flying back to America once you're done with business here?"

Ben gazes into her moonlit eyes and realizes that he truly doesn't know. His head swims with all sorts of wild, half-formed plans— he'll quit his job, apply for British citizenship, liquidate all his assets and move to fucking Jakku so he can be near Rey and her tree—

"I..." he starts to say, and then trails off. The thing is, he has plans for his life. For where he'll be in ten, twenty years. It's taken a lot of hard work to get to where he is now and he's had to sacrifice so much for Snoke— a life outside of First Order Intercontinental, any hope of reconciliation with his parents, hell, even a normal circadian rhythm—

And that's when a tiny inner voice asks him, Is someone who requires that much sacrifice really worth it?

But Ben's stayed silent for too long. Rey fidgets uneasily, looking a little anxious, a little guarded. Of course, she's quick to cover it up with another one of those peppy little grins, but he can't shake the feeling that he should have done something else, said something else— or, really, said anything at all.

"I really do have to return to my tree," she says at last. "It's— it's home, you know?"

"Yeah." His voice is— strange, even to his own ears. A little wistful. A little regretful. "I know, Rey."

She nods. "So maybe we can just get to Jakku first. Then we'll take it from there."

"Of course." He cups her face, tracing the line of her cheekbone with the pad of his thumb. "I told you I would drive you home, didn't I?"

They fall asleep in each other's arms, the song of the sea wrapped around them like some ancient, melancholy lullaby.

🍂

Ben and Rey run out of luck the following evening. After a leisurely day of driving along the coast, fueled by the lunch and snacks that Eighrig had packed for them, it's already 9 P.M. and there's not a single town or village or hamlet or solitary shepherd's hut in sight. The Chir'daki makes its way inland, back into acres of lush forest, and after yet another glance at the map Ben has to concede that there's no hope in hell of them reaching the next settlement until dawn, at the earliest.

"Do you mind sleeping in the car tonight?" he asks Rey. Actually, he has no idea whether there's enough space for the Chir'daki's front seats to recline at a comfortable angle— because they definitely won't be able to fit in the back— or if they even possess the ability to recline in the first place. God, it's a small car. He's been trying not to dwell on that fact in order to avoid making himself feel even more claustrophobic, but it's getting harder and harder to ignore with each long day of driving that passes.

"I have a better idea," Rey tells him. "Let's go camping."

"We don't have any tents or sleeping bags—"

She shoots him a look. "Dryad, remember?"

He's not really sure what she means by that but he parks the car by the side of the road when she tells him to, and he gets out and follows her when she leads him deeper into the woods, their fingers intertwined. The full moon hangs high above the trees and Rey's glowing again, an angel in her gauzy white dress, and this particular forest is linden, all heart-shaped leaves and trunks like pillars, and it's... alive.

That's the only way Ben can describe it. Logically, he knows that all woodlands are made of living things, but this one is— more. He swears that he can see the branches rustling in ways that have nothing to do with the wind— in fact, there is no wind, the night is as still as glass, and yet the trees are stirring, are shivering, are stretching their rough-barked arms in the moonlight.

"They're lindens," Rey tells him, catching on to his bewilderment. "Baucis was turned into one when it came time for her to die, as was Philyra after she bore the centaur Chiron. In the Slavic countries, the linden wards off evil spirits; among the Baltic tribes, it's the tree of the goddess of fate. In old Germania, people danced in its shade and believed that it helped unearth truth. They're sacred trees and, here on Takodana, the border between worlds is always thinner, but even more so in autumn. They're... awake, I guess you could say. One last hurrah before winter. And now that there's a dryad walking in their midst, they're feeding off my magic in the same way that I'm feeding off theirs. Same goes for the rest of these woods. Everything is connected."

He's glad she took the time to explain. It means that he doesn't completely go into shock when flowers start springing up from the mossy soil beneath her feet. Marigolds and asters, their colors vibrant in this radiance of hers that's like daytime, forming a trail of yellow and purple in her wake. He follows and he follows, and finally they have reached the heart of the forest and Rey lifts her arms to the heavens and several of the linden trees bow, their branches wrapping around one another as fluidly as vines to create a wide bower arching several feet off the ground.

It's the kind of thing that Ben shouldn't be taking in stride but, somehow, he is, and he doesn't know why. It just feels right. There's a certain current in the air, heady and charged, and he can taste the faintest hint of something strange on his tongue, something that's like honey and ozone combined. Is it magic? Who is he to say? And who is he to refuse when Rey darts a come-hither look over the graceful curve of her shoulder? He walks into her spell, beneath the roof of the linden trees which then close in behind him and around them, encasing them in their own little bubble of leaves and branches.

"So much better than sleeping in the car, yeah?" Rey quips.

"Roomier, at any rate," Ben says with a grin, impressed and in disbelief all at once.

There's still a subtle luminescence to Rey's skin that isn't entirely human, but the brilliant, glowing aura that outlines her form has transferred to the makeshift walls that surround them. Tiny golden orbs twinkle at Ben like Christmas lights strung throughout the linden twigs. On the ground at the very center of this nest that Rey has made is a bed of moss and cyclamen that's still growing when he claps eyes on it, sprouting upswept fuchsia petals against a pile of wispy silver green softness.

It's beautiful. It's—

— probably full of bugs and shit—

"Ben." Rey's laughing at the way his features have screwed up in distaste that he can't quite manage to conceal. She lays down, the waves of her chestnut hair and the white veils of her skirts fanning out on the moss. "It's perfectly fine, I promise."

Still he hesitates, eying the bed with the suspicion of someone who has spent more time traipsing through forests in the last few days than he ever has in three decades of existence. "I mean, first the sand and now this..." he mutters.

Rey studies him for a while. Then she switches tactics, biting her bottom lip as she brings her knees together with her feet firmly planted on the moss, raising her closed thighs just enough that the ends of the skirt fall past them, succumbing to gravity. Her legs are so long, so finely formed, so golden and so smooth, more of them revealed with each passing moment as her hand fists into the skimpy fabric bunched at her abdomen, pulling at it inch by inch.

"You know," she murmurs, looking at Ben through her lashes, "in Germany they also used to call the linden 'the lovers' tree.' I wonder if they still do."

Ben groans. "You don't fight fair."

"I really don't," she jovially agrees. "Is it working?"

Instead of bothering with a verbal response, he shucks off his coat and follows her down.

🍂

It's not that Ben's trying to be crass— it's just that he inherited more Solo traits than he cares to admit, among them a penchant for snark at the least appropriate moments, and, well— after his and Rey's lazy, teasing kisses take a heated turn and she locks her thighs around his hips as his hand finds its way to her breasts, it turns out that there is a tent, after all, and it's in his pants. She purrs in delight when his erection rubs against her center and, quick as a flash, rolls him over onto his back; there is a gleam in her hazel eyes that he can't call anything other than devilish, right before she bends down to slant her mouth over his once more.

It's the kind of kiss that takes no prisoners. It's the kind of kiss that makes Ben's toes curl in his socks, and when had he toed off his shoes? He can't remember. All that sticks out to him in the last several minutes is the feel of Rey's body pressed against his, and her scent, and the sounds she'd made. And now she's straddling him, unbuttoning his shirt, sucking bruises into his neck, her eager teeth providing fine little counterpoints of pain to the pleasure that's building up in his system as she swirls her hips against his.

He feels it again— that rawness, that summer haze. It shimmers in air gilded by tiny lights. Rey is in the great outdoors now, where her magic is at its strongest, and that means that she's no longer holding back.

She devours him.

He can't keep track of where her mouth is or what his hands are doing or how he and Rey are moving against each other. It all blurs together beneath the specks of moonlight that filter in through the gaps in the linden canopy. His mind has been reduced to a whirl of autumn leaves. Clothes are torn off and shoved carelessly to the side amidst wild caresses and even wilder kisses, and soon they're both naked and her slender fingers are wrapped around his cock, gliding up and down at a pace that's maddeningly slow as she strokes her tongue against his and his palm curves over her ass.

It's when Ben can no longer stop himself from moaning into Rey's mouth that she pulls away to balance herself on top of him. She's all messy hair and swollen lips and pupils blown wide with lust, her breathing ragged, her dusky nipples hard against flushed, freckled skin. He could happily stare at her forever when she looks like this, but his gaze is drawn inexorably downwards as she rubs his cock along the soaked pink folds of her entrance.

" God, Rey." The words catch in Ben's throat, strained with a mixture of affection and arousal that he's never felt for anyone until she burst into his life. "You're so wet— you're dripping all over me—"

When she speaks, her voice is the huskiest he's ever heard it. "My heart is bound by the seasons." She slides down along his length, so slow that it's torturous. "In winter it sleeps. And in the spring—" Her hips tilt upwards, and there is a pulse in the air as the tip of his cock nudges at her clit. "In the spring," she continues through the gasp that escapes her bruised lips, "my heart wakes. Desperate for love, beating with the earth." She braces one hand at his shoulder while the other drifts between their bodies, poised to guide him inside her. The ends of her long hair splay on his bare chest. He can't move, can't think, can hardly breathe. "Imagine how many springs I've missed since my crusader left me, and how many I slept through while in the birch. Do you think you can take all of it, Ben?"

In this light, on this night, her eyes are molten emeralds, with something of the wolf lurking in their depths. Beauty is the beginning of terror. He cannot look away.

But what he can do is nod. What he can do is claw at their bed of moss, blunt fingers raking through the earth, as she sinks down onto him. "Fuck," he hisses, pretty sure that watching his erection disappear inside Rey's slim body is the closest thing to a religious experience he'll ever get in this life.

To say nothing of how it feels.

"Ben," she pants out in between biting her lip as she seats herself inch by painstaking inch, "you're too— oh—" His hands dart to her waist to help steer her and it takes every ounce of self-control to not just pull her down, make her take it all...

She slicks a couple of fingers along her clit, working in slow circles to ease his passage. "Were mortal cocks always this big?" she mutters under her breath, talking more to herself than to him, and, yeah, he's flattered beyond belief, but she also looks and sounds so annoyed that he chuckles, caught off-guard.

Then her hips roll forward and he hilts inside her and she starts to move, and suddenly he's not laughing anymore.

Rey sets a leisurely pace at first, and it's a continuation of the religious experience, it's heavenly choruses echoing through his head, it's moonlight raining down and tiny golden lights flickering in trees made for lovers, and Ben throws his head back against the moss and lets it all unfold. "So tight, princess," he rasps, "so good—"

"You like this, a chuisle mo chroi?" She rides him faster, flattening her palms on his chest. The world has taken on the quality of a fever dream. "Because I love it. You filling me up so deep, laid in a thousand flowers, trembling like a fawn beneath me—"

It's, like, classy dirty talk. And Ben has to concede that in this case she might have him beat, which doesn't come as a shock considering that she probably hung out with ancient poets and the like. In any case, he's really into it. She leans in to capture his mouth in a kiss that's absolutely filthy, her hot tongue lapping at him like he's an ice cream cone— although it soon becomes apparent that Rey's the kind of person who bites into their ice cream, and it turns out that Ben is really into that as well, his hips involuntarily jerking against hers in a hard thrust as she sinks her teeth into the swell of his bottom lip.

She straightens up with another throaty giggle and tosses her hair over one lovely shoulder. Then her hands fly to her breasts and Ben has exactly three seconds to appreciate the sight of Rey playing with her perfect little nipples before his eyes all but roll into the back of his head as she starts fucking him in earnest. There is no other word for this feeling but wildfire. He is consumed by it, it is all he knows. And it builds higher and higher, and he's moaning her name over and over again, and it starts to take on the tone of ritual, almost, in this place of linden and moss and earth.

Ben doesn't know how the hell he manages to hold off on coming until after Rey does— but he manages it, and she cries out as her inner walls flutter around him, and he swears that there are suddenly profusions of cyclamen flowers in areas of the mossy bed where there hadn't been before. It's weird as all get out, but he doesn't have much time to dwell on it before Rey's quivering aftershocks drag him into an orgasm of his own, and he's spilling inside her with a grunt, and she's licking those petal-pink lips of hers that have curled up into a dreamy smile as she wrings him dry.

🍂

He holds her, afterwards, one arm curved around her waist, keeping her tucked close against him as she rests her head on his chest. He's drowsily gazing up at the patches of starry sky that are visible amidst the roof of woven branches when he thinks to ask, "What did you call me this time?"

"A chuisle mo chroi," Rey murmurs, already half-asleep. "The pulse of my heart."

Chapter Text

Ben wakes up in the middle of the night. The first thing he sees is the moon; while the linden trees are still woven together, circling the sixties flower child's fantasy of a bed in a protective wall, the branches up top have retracted, letting in copious amounts of air and sky. There's a harrowing moment of disorientation as his New Yorker brain shrugs off the mists of sleep and struggles to come to terms with the fact that he'd been sleeping on the forest floor instead of... literally anywhere else.

The temperature is close to teeth-chattering, close to unbearable. He doesn't have any clothes on. A very tiny corner of his mind insists that there's a reason for this, but he's only just emerged from the deepest slumber in living memory and the world isn't making sense yet.

Something moves between his sprawled legs. Ben freezes, suddenly wide awake. Is it a bear? Is this how he dies, naked and mauled into oblivion by Smokey's less civic-minded relative? His gaze slides fearfully downwards, and...

And it's Rey. And everything comes crashing back.

He doesn't relax, though. Quite the opposite, in fact, but in a very, very good way.

She's kneeling between his parted thighs, her lithe body pale in the moonlight. The only parts of her that are covered are done so by the unbound waves of her long, long hair, a section of it draped over one shoulder, hiding her left breast from view. He'd be sad about that, were it not for two things— one, he has a clear line of sight to her right breast and it's beautiful, the nipple already peaked, begging for his mouth; two, once she sees that he's awake, she wastes no time in taking him in hand, pumping gently, that small, silky fist of hers coaxing what feels like every single drop of his blood south.

"I want to go again," she says.

His breath hitches on a strangled laugh as she works him to full-blown arousal in record time. "I thought you were a bear."

Rey giggles, then bows her head to press a slow, sweet kiss to the tip of his cock.

Ben sits up. Moss and flowers prickle his ass and thighs, and it's honestly kind of gross, but also severely far down the list of things he cares about at this exact moment in time. "Christ, Rey," he grates out as her lips trail down the length of him, every soft, fleeting touch echoing through the chambers of his soul, flooding him with a rush of warmth. The chill is a thing of the past. Everything that isn't Rey is a thing of the past, especially when her tongue darts out to lick a hot, wet stripe upwards from the base of his shaft.

"You still taste like me." She beams at him, sounding so damn pleased about it that he could cry. "Can't believe I got this great big thing all the way in," she coos as she continues strewing kisses all around him and, holy fuck, he must have been a saint in another life, because he certainly hasn't done anything to deserve her in this one. He is so incredibly turned on, already seeing stars even before she takes him into her mouth and—

— and sucks—

His fingers tangle involuntarily in her hair. Tiny lights blink throughout the linden trees. His other hand strokes her cheek and she peers up at him adoringly, her lips stretched around his cock, her eyes reflecting stardust. And now he understands why the Taj Mahal had been built, why Troy had burned in Helen's name.

Ben's world crumbles into ashes when Rey pulls her mouth off of him with a slick pop. It is forged anew when she straddles his lap and takes him to the hilt in one smooth stroke, swallowing his groan with her lips as she begins to move. Up and down, her cunt gripping him tighter than her fist had, wetter than her mouth had been. He's lost in the glorious sensations, drowning in the fever pitch, each animalistic little sound that she makes urging him on higher and higher as he paws at her breasts and kisses her with all that he has.

This time, her fingernails rake down his back when she comes, and it's just the right cocktail of pleasure and pain that he needs to follow her into the moonlit bliss. He sinks his teeth into the crook of her neck and he empties himself inside her, and everything smells like moss and honey and the rapturous veins of the earth.

🍂

In the early hours of the morning, the moon retreats behind the clouds and she wakes him again with another hungry kiss.

Ben is—

— so not twenty anymore, but his dick apparently missed the memo and it rises valiantly to the occasion, even as other parts of him twinge in protest.

This time, he takes her from behind. Their knees dig into the moss, surrounded by cyclamen flowers, and he sees more and more of those slim stalks poke out from the soil and bloom into whorls of fuchsia like a time-lapse video as he fucks into her while she moans and scrabbles at the ground. He runs his hands over her perfect ass, so silken and shapely, like a ripe peach. He wants to bite it. He wants to do a great many things.

Most of all, though, he wants to make her come.

His breath emerges in silver wisps in the chill gloom of the early autumn morning. He savors the sight of the elegant, tapered plane of her back as she quivers beneath him, the notches of her spine rippling in the gray light. Then he slides a hand under her taut stomach, deepening the angle of his thrusts; he can feel himself moving inside her, and blood pounds in his ears.

"Taking me so well," he mutters and, oh, she loves that, a breathless assent ripped from her lips as she throws her head back like a wolf howling at what little left of the moon there is. He kisses the back of her neck, his lips slowly drifting down to the soft, freckled valley between her shoulder blades. She clenches around him at each brush of contact, and then his fingers have found her clit and his hips are slamming against her ass and she is screaming and the tiny golden lights are flickering in the linden trees and more flowers are blooming up from amidst the moss and it is so goddamn weird and, in all honesty, she's ruined him for anyone else.

"Yes— please—" Rey's all but sobbing as Ben fucks her through her orgasm. "Come in me, my shining one, the light of my eyes—" She weaves the words through the hazy summer heat that's engulfed their surroundings once more, interspersed with the little cries that his thrusts knock out from her lungs. She almost sounds like she's praying, and somewhere in the depths of his lust-addled mind he thinks of old pagan hymns, chanting to the slow turn of the seasons. Beating against the bones of the earth. "Water me," Rey gasps as he hunches over her, pulling her hair back so that he can kiss her cheek, so that he can pant raggedly into her ear. "Elysium— take me there— let me stay—"

She comes again. This time, she drags her with him, his vision whiting out at the edges as he empties what feels like his very soul into her tight, wet heat. They fall into the moss and cyclamen, into the bed of morning dew. He believes that they are wild things. That they are animals.

🍂

They "go again"— in Rey's words— one more time before finally passing out with the sunrise. Shortly before noon, their eyes blink open and they untangle themselves from each other and put their clothes back on. It's a process that shouldn't take as long as it actually does, but when she's not kissing him he's kissing her and— yeah.

The linden trees spring back to their original positions as Rey takes Ben's hand and leads him out of the forest. He tries not to wince with every step; his thighs are burning, his knees are rickety, his brain has turned into mush. Also, he's pretty sure Ben Junior is dead. But at least it died happy.

God, he's so sore.

Rey looks far too smug when they get into the car. Even more so when he can no longer suppress a shattered groan as he shifts to adjust his seatbelt.

"Pleased with yourself?" he asks, offering her a half-hearted scowl.

"For fucking you into the ground? Absolutely." She leans over from the passenger seat to press her lips to the wrinkle between his brows, and he really can't stay pretend-mad at her after that.

He glances at the rear view mirror as he's backing up. There's no other way to describe his hair but as a bird's nest, complete with the odd twig here and there. His lips are red and kiss-stung, and there are bruises in the shape of Rey's mouth all the way down his throat, disappearing into his collar. He looks like some primitive and more secret version of himself.

He kind of likes it.

🍂

The first thing they do at the next town is check into an inn, because once the afterglow has faded Ben comes to realize that he is in dire need of a hot shower. The tryst in the woods had been great and all— way, way better than he'd expected— but now he just feels like Bigfoot.

The receptionist is a young woman in her twenties, and she bursts out laughing when Ben and Rey walk into the mercifully deserted lobby smelling like sex, with forest debris in their disheveled hair.

"Enjoying your holidays, then?" she quips, and Ben blushes all the way to the tips of his ears while Rey just grins.

Ben snatches the keys from the cackling receptionist and he and Rey head upstairs. The room is sparsely furnished and a bit on the drafty side, but the view from the balcony is gorgeous. They're in a mountain town, so there's plenty of fiery slopes rolling into forested valleys for the eye to feast on.

At the moment, however, Ben is more concerned with the en suite. It turns out to be perfectly acceptable, and, although it seems to be part of Rey's dryad magic that the grime never sticks to her for long, he happily introduces her to the joys of a hot shower. They soap each other up, kissing all the while, and afterwards they towel off and collapse onto the mattress.

It's not long before Ben starts feeling sleepy again. How can he not, when Rey is so warm snuggled into his side, when he feels so cozy in her arms? He yawns into her hair, nuzzling gently while he does so, and she reflexively tightens her embrace.

"Do you want to know what Eighrig and I talked about?" Rey murmurs into his neck.

"If you want to tell me," Ben says, remembering the two women conversing in what had sounded like Gaelic in the firelight of the pub in Arporatal-Lanin.

"I asked her if it hurt when she burned her sealskin. She said spending the rest of eternity without her beloved would have hurt more." Rey is also in the process of falling asleep, judging by the drowsy lilt to her voice. Ben traces soothing patterns on the bare skin of her back. "She said it was worth it."

🍂

The remainder of the journey passes in a blur of barren fields and burnt umber grasslands, wide, sweeping freeways and crooked mountain roads, forests the color of bonfires and placid ice blue lakes. They break up the drive at rustic inns and smoky taverns in sleepy little towns, and they pause to stretch their legs at overlooks and in woodsy glades filled with so much natural beauty that it takes Ben's breath away.

Takodana is good for him. Going several days without being tethered to his phone and the concerns of the real world is good for him.

Rey is good for him. Her animated chatter and her sweet, lovely smiles occupy his every waking hour. It's been ages since he felt this light, this much at peace. His veins are flooded with cold, clear air and autumn sun.

Of course, the sex helps, too, and they have a lot of it.

His pretty little dryad is insatiable.

They have yet to go all the way on a proper bed. Rey prefers the outdoors for that and it takes a shockingly short amount of time for Ben to let go of all his hangups. She has her way with him in secluded groves and on the banks of remote streams and, on one memorable occasion, outside an abandoned farmhouse in a field that had been stripped of crops, Rey's palms flat on the weathered wood while Ben slammed his hips against her ass and desperately tried not to make jokes about plowing.

Every time Rey comes, flowers bloom up from out of the ground, the species random, with no regard for season and always more dazzlingly fragrant than their normal counterparts. The first time he eats her out, it's full-blown red roses.

They leave a trail of roses and tulips and irises and lilies and begonias scattered all throughout the Western Reaches.

He's never going to be able to fuck anyone else ever again. In fact, he's already getting slightly worried that she might have given him a permanent agoraphilia kink.

As they near Jakku, however, Rey sort of withdraws into herself. She grows quieter, staring into space for minutes on end with a pensive dullness in her eyes.

Ben doesn't have to ask her what's wrong. At a rest stop in a quaint village cafe, while he's sipping strong black coffee and she nurses a cup of piping hot tea, she suddenly just— looks at him, with an expression so stark with pain that he immediately reaches for her hand that's resting on the table and laces their fingers together.

"I feel it, too," he rasps. I don't want to say goodbye.

Rey nods, but otherwise musters nothing in the way of response.

🍂

The heaviness returns to Ben's soul as the Chir'daki hurtles over the last few miles. By the time they come across a signpost that points the way to Jakku, his heart is a stone sinking into his stomach.

Rey tenses up in the passenger seat. He can't tell if it's from excitement or dread, and he thinks that it might be a little bit of both. They go around the concrete bend and it seems to him that she's no longer breathing and—

— and it's a town.

The road that they're following slopes gently down into a bewildering mash of clapboard houses and local government buildings and storefronts, all loomed over by utility poles. There are no forests that Ben can see, none of the burbling brooks or the autumnal grottoes that Rey had told him about. It's just— urban space, and a busy one, at that. There are cars and bikes and people out walking their dogs and chatting away on their phones.

"I don't understand," Rey says blankly.

"We'll go further in," Ben hastens to assure her. "Maybe they built over the outer edges of the woods..."

He trails off. Rey is shaking her head. He glances away from the windshield to see tears glistening on her freckled cheeks. "The forest is here— it should be here— I know this land, but I don't..." She's trembling, as white as a sheet. "It's not— it changed—"

Ben pulls over as soon as he can, planning to comfort her, to pull her into his arms. It turns out to be the wrong move, because—

— as soon as the car rolls to a stop Rey is throwing open the door and bolting out of her seat and sprinting down the sidewalk—

Cursing under his breath, he scrambles after her. She hadn't bothered to cast an enchantment on her dress and so the white skirt billows after her, a beacon amidst the crowd dressed in coats and scarves who all turn their heads to gape at this apparently crazy woman tearing barefoot through the streets— as well as at the man chasing after her, shouting her name.

Christ, but she can run.

In the end, the only reason Ben manages to catch up is that she's come to a halt outside a small, single-storey establishment labeled JAKKU TRAVEL & TOURS. The windows are plastered with blown-up photographs of many of the Western Reaches' various landmarks, as well as people mugging for the camera bedecked in adventure gear. A printed sign taped to the door advises that they are closed for the season.

Rey is a statue in front of the building, staring at it like a lost, bewildered child.

"This is where my tree stood," she croaks hoarsely. Her eyes fill with a fresh wave of tears and she lets them fall in silence.

"Rey..." Ben reaches out for her, but she shrinks away from his touch. His arms drop back to his sides, hands clenching into helpless fists.

He doesn't know how long she stands there, looking at the tour agency. He doesn't know how long he stands there, looking at her. They're a few steps away from an intersection that's bustling by small town standards while pedestrians skirt around them, more than a few doing a double take at the crying woman wearing a sleeveless dress out in fall weather.

"Rey," Ben tries again, "I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault," she mumbles. "It's not anyone's. I mean, I understand that humans need places to live. I've watched you stop roaming and plant your roots and build cities from out of the dirt. It's not something I can fault any of you for. It's just that—" Her voice breaks. "I don't know where I'm going to go now. What I'm going to do."

And it feels like Ben's whole life has been building up to this moment. His heart is pounding slowly but his mind is clear.

"Stay in this world," he says. "Stay with me."

She finally looks at him, biting her lip. "You have a life in America. And I don't know if I'll ever want to leave this island to live somewhere else."

"You don't have to decide right away," he says. "I can live in the UK for six months on my passport. And if at the end of that time you want to stay, then we'll stay. I'll move here, I'll look for a job— teaching, or something— does Takodana have a law school?"

"I don't know," Rey says, sounding dazed.

"I already had to be dual-qualified to represent Snoke in an official capacity over here, anyway," Ben says. "It won't be a problem."

"But what about your current job—"

"I'm quitting." He doesn't even have to think twice about it. There's no way he can continue working for First Order Intercontinental after this.

"Ben." She turns to face him at last, and—

And the thing is, he suspects that if Rey had been of the twenty-first century, this conversation would be much, much different. Everyone else Ben knows would undoubtedly be employing the run, don't walk principle in terms of dealing with the lunatic babbling about completely overhauling his entire existence after knowing them for only a handful of days.

But Rey comes from an age where men descended into the underworld to rescue their dead wives, where Alcyone threw herself into the sea to join Ceyx, where for Psyche no task was too great. She lived through Mark Anthony calling his banners for the Egyptian queen and a dying Tristan watching for white sails on the horizon. She believes— truly believes, in numerous ways varying from epic to courtly to, hell, even Grecian on a good day— that the heart can overcome all things. And almost before Ben knows it she's throwing herself into his arms and he's lifting her off her feet and she's kissing him, and kissing him, and kissing him.

"Oh, I'm so glad they made up," Ben hears an elderly woman remark to her friend as they shuffle past. "Maybe he'll give her his coat— poor dear must be freezing—"

🍂

They don't leave Jakku right away. Instead, Rey takes Ben's hand and drags him further into the urban sprawl. She appears to be searching for something and, eventually, her eyes light up at the sight of a kitschy-looking shop called NIIMA OUTPOST. Judging from the display in the windows, it sells everything from out-of-mint coins to Russian dolls to vintage notebooks full of recipes scrawled in faded ink.

Inside the shop, the air smells like parchment and incense. The staggeringly beautiful woman behind the counter doesn't look a day over forty, although something about her gray eyes tells Ben that she's much, much older than that.

"Regina," she coolly greets Rey with only the faintest hint of surprise. "I wondered where you'd gone off to."

"Unkar trapped me in a birch tree on the other side of the island," Rey explains. "But I've come back now."

The older woman snorts. "Not for long, I hope. There's nothing for you here anymore."

"No," Rey says calmly. "Not for long."

The woman's silvery gaze sharpens, honing in on Rey and Ben's joined hands. She then subjects Ben to a penetrating stare before saying, in a tone that drips with disbelief, "Really?"

Rey lifts her chin in defiance. "He's a good man, R'iia."

"Well, I suppose you could have picked worse." R'iia waves a hand in their direction, her fingers glittering with a multitude of antique rings. "There. It's done."

"That's it?" Rey sounds doubtful. "I thought there'd be more... you know, fanfare. At least a burst of light, or heavenly music, or something."

"Goodness, no." R'iia looks scandalized. "What do you think I am, Catholic? No, no, Regina. It's done. May you be happy."

🍂

And Ben's, like, bursting with so many questions, but he manages to hold his peace until he and Rey have left the goddess' shop. A block down and across the street is a tiny park, the first green space that Ben has seen in Jakku so far— although green is, in this case, figurative, since the trees and the grass are already wreathed in the colors of fall— and he and Rey sit on a bench beside a pond overrun with fat ducks.

Rey glances around. There's a hint of sadness to her demeanor as she takes in the park that's been crammed into the middle of the downtown area. Ben can tell that she's remembering the forest that stood here once, and he also remembers how happy she'd been to see that the whales were still around, and he thinks about humanity carving out more and more niches for itself over the centuries and how much the world has changed through her eyes.

He thinks about how there's still time to change it for the better. And he knows that will start with him e-mailing a resignation letter to Snoke.

Hell, he muses to himself, maybe I can look into practicing environmental law.

His mother would love that.

"What was that about?" Ben finally asks Rey. "Back in the shop?"

Rey blinks. "Oh." She rests her head on his shoulder. "R'iia granted me a mortal life."

"What?" His throat closes up. "Rey," he grates out, "you can't..."

"The thing about living forever," she says, her gaze on the swimming, honking ducks, and, God, could this be any less romantic, but somehow it still works— "is that in the end I'm always alone. It's something I've been thinking about since I spoke to Eighrig, but I needed to see my tree one last time. And I wasn't sure if you were— if you wanted a life with me. Until today." One of the ducks dives headfirst into the water, its feathery butt sticking out of the surface, and Rey laughs before lifting her head to smile at Ben. "Now I know that eternity isn't going to cut it anymore," she murmurs. "Not after meeting you."

🍂

They pass by Jakku Travel & Tours on their way back to the car. Rey doesn't break stride— she's hanging on to his arm, preoccupied with telling him about the interesting shipwreck that the online guides had said was a few hours' drive away— but Ben notices her waggle her fingers as they walk by. He glances over his shoulder to see a single flower sprouting up from a crack in the asphalt right outside the door of the building.

It's a Michaelmas daisy, lilac in color, and star-shaped. "The Victorians used it to say goodbye," Rey explains at his questioning look.

He nods and presses a kiss to her temple. She perks up visibly, squeezing his arm, and goes on talking about the shipwreck that they're planning to see. Over the noise of traffic and other people's conversations, her voice at his side is bright and silver green, like the meadows that bloom, winterless and eternal, on the Isles of the Blessed.