Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The night smelled like petrol and rain-wet leaves, and Rey rode it with her boots on the dashboard, scrolling and laughing at scare pranks on instagram. Poe’s car rattled over every pothole; Finn nursed a paper bag in the back; Rose kept the Bluetooth speaker alive with a playlist that swerved from witchy pop to teeth-rattling synth. The windows were cracked for the smoke. Cold air slicked along Rey’s throat and made the hair on her arms rise.

“Tell me again why we’re doing this,” Finn said, already grinning.

“Because Poe said ‘abandoned satanic church’ and you can’t just say that to me, and expect me to pass” Rey said, kicking his seat lightly. Her chipped black polish glinted when the streetlights caught it. “It’s Halloween. It’s begging for us.”

Poe drummed the steering wheel. “Technically, deconsecrated chapel that got a bad reputation in the ‘90s. Teen cult, goat rumors, cops found candles and, like, a ferret skeleton—”

Rose arched a brow. “Poe read three Wikipedia pages and is now our tour guide.”

“Excuse you,” Poe said, offended and delighted. “Local legend. My cousin got drunk there once and said the bell rings even though there’s no bell.”

Rey leaned her head out the window for the sweet burn of cold, then dropped back in and stole the bottle from Finn. It was cheap whiskey and it loved her like bad decisions. “If the bell rings,” she said, “we dance.”

“Deal,” Poe said, and floored it over a farmhouse lane that turned to gravel and then to something not entirely road. The headlights splashed over hedges, then trees, then the moss-eaten wall that girdled the chapel grounds. Beyond, the church crouched like a warning: stone blackened by damp, leaded windows punched out, the door chained once and then pried open anyway. Someone had tagged a pentagram over the arch—sloppy, earnest, wrong.

Rey loved it immediately.

They parked crooked under a dead yew. The sky was a cold bruise; the moon was thin and mean. The air tasted of gunpowder and pondwater; somewhere a fox screamed. Rey jumped the wall because the chain-link gate offended her, then held a hand out to help the others, even though Poe didn’t need it and Rose pretended not to.

Inside, the chapel was all echo: pews broken into bones across the flagstone floor; hymn boards still clinging to walls in crooked numbers; the altar an ugly block of stone polished by years of hands that had begged and been ignored. The ceiling had a hole big enough to see stars. Wind spoke through it like a throat.

“Spooky ambiance: achieved,” Poe said, and the words came back to them, thinner and stranger. He set the portable speaker on the altar and turned it up until it felt like they were inside the song. Bass thrummed; candles, jammed into beer bottles and empty jars, took flame one by one. Rose pulled a bag of gummy bats from somewhere and a slim silver case from somewhere else; Finn laid out cups and the second bottle—clear, harder.

Rey shrugged out of her jacket and let the night find her wrists. She had dressed for trouble: ripped tights, thrifted band tee hacked off at the sleeves, boots scuffed to honesty. A chain hung low at her throat, the charm a small iron key she’d found in a flea market and decided belonged to her.

They made the church theirs the way kids make anywhere theirs: too loud, too bright, too alive for the dead to mind. They drank in toasts that got sloppier and truer. They danced between the ruined pews like saints with better choreography; they slid on the flagstones and howled laughter up into the hole where the bell wasn’t. Monster Mash played over the speaker. Rose bumped hips with Rey and shouted

"We did the mash"

Rey replying creepily to her with "We did the monster mash"

Poe spun Finn until both of them fell into a wooden carcass and only laughed harder. Rose slipped out a few rolled joints from her pocket. She'd promised it was solid stuff, she didn't fail. With twenty minutes they were giggling over squeak.

Time got weird in the way it does when the air is cold and your blood is not. Poe climbed the half-ladder to the organ loft, yelled, “I can see God from up here,” and then added, “He’s unimpressed” when a bat strafed him.

Rey wandered.

She let the music drop to a throb behind her and found the vestry door hanging off one hinge. Inside was dust thick enough to write in, a hook still holding a rotten length of rope where a bell pull had been. A mirror leaned against the wall, clouded with grime and a single line cracked through the corner like a smile. Rey breathed on it. The fog bloomed and then died, ordinary. She left a fingerprint that looked already old.

In the main nave again, the cold had come in more seriously, so she moved, trying to keep heat. She balanced on the spine of a shattered pew and walked it like a beam, arms out, the way she had as a kid on the culvert behind her foster home, always daring herself farther. The floor ten feet below gleamed dark with damp. It would hurt to fall. She smiled and went faster.

“Rey,” Finn called, the exact mix of fond and alarm she liked to cause. “Please get down.”

She hopped the last foot with theatrical safety and bowed. “I live forever.”

Poe tossed her the cloth bag he’d brought like a magician’s joke. When Rey opened it and found the Ouija board packed tight with its planchette and a stick of incense that smelled like pine tar and oranges, she laughed aloud.

“You brought a board to a notoriously haunted church?” she asked. “You beautiful cliché.”

“Hey, don’t insult my commitment to the bit,” Poe said, grabbing two more candles like he could convince them to do mood lighting.

Rose slid in beside Rey, already clearing a patch of flagstone between the pew islands. “If we’re doing this, we’re doing it right,” she said, that tone her friends knew—a lab voice, experimental and precise even when she was grinning. She set the board, heavy as an attic-secret, and the planchette, wood worn smooth by other, braver or dumber hands. “Phones off. No joking questions about your future career, Poe.”

“What about my love life?” Poe asked.

“Especially not your love life,” Finn said, laying down four votives at the board’s corners like he’d seen on some occult forum. He looked at Rey last. “You don’t have to.”

Rey’s mouth tilted. “Of course I have to.”

They circled the board and sat cross-legged on cold stone. The speaker bled into a quiet song; even that felt too loud, too alive, so Poe turned it down until it was just a heartbeat in the background. Candlelight made them all beautiful and a little haunted. The church held its breath.

Rose lit the incense. The smoke curled, gray snakes dancing slow. “Okay,” she said. “We’re respectful. We say hello, we say goodbye. We don’t invite anything in. Fingers on,” she said, and the three of them did, Rey last. The wood was cool under her fingertips. The letters—A through Z in two arched ranks, the numbers squat at the bottom, the moon and sun painted in cracked lacquer in the corners—looked like they didn’t belong to any alphabet she’d ever trusted.

“Is there a spirit who wants to talk?” Poe asked, half-actor, half-kid.

Nothing moved.

Wind scraped the roof and a small rain of grit tapped the stone like tiny feet. Finn’s gaze flicked to the dark mouth of the vestry and back. Rey felt the pad of her thumb throb where she’d earlier burned herself on a lighter; it twinged now with a ghost of heat. She pressed that thumb lightly to the planchette too, daring it.

“Is anyone here?” Rose tried, simple, clean.

For a long breath, the board was a joke.

Then the planchette twitched.

Finn jerked. They all laughed, edged. “That was you,” Poe said, proud and unconvincing.

“Swear it wasn’t,” Finn said, hands comically high. “You felt that.”

Rey felt something else: the tiniest static against her palm, like the moment before a storm breaks. The incense went bitter in her nose. She smiled because she was herself and because fear tasted like champagne when it was this cold.

“Hello,” she said softly, not mocking, not brave. “We’re listening.”

The planchette slid. Not smooth—a hitch, a catch like it had to chew through the dust of unused rails. It dragged their fingers up, left, to YES. Stopped.

“Okay,” Poe said, whisper-light now. “Okay, cool.”

“What’s your name?” Rose asked. Scientific, as if she could catalog this.

The planchette made a tiny decision and turned, slow as an old dog. It moved to a letter and paused and Rey’s mouth went dry for no sensible reason.

M.

Finn let out a breath that could have been a laugh or a prayer. “M,” he repeated. “Okay.”

The planchette did not wait for permission. It hummed under their fingertips like a living thing and moved again. I.

Rey’s skin felt too tight; the hairs on her arms lifted as if some static hand stood her up by them. The song on the speaker wound to its end and didn’t start again. Somewhere in the trees, something cracked as if the night shrugged.

N.

Poe’s knee knocked hers. He wasn’t shaking. She was. No: she was shivering with a thrill that braided too neatly with fear to separate.

E.

They stared at the word the board had made with their hands.

MINE

The candles leaned and steadied. The incense burned down to a black tooth. The hole in the ceiling looked like a throat.

Poe swallowed. His voice was dust. “Okay, that’s—okay.”

Finn tried for rational. “Common word. Could be—could be anything. A warning? A—”

Something cold zipped up Rey’s wrist like a ring being slid on. She didn’t yank back. She wanted to. She didn’t. “Mine what?” she asked the board, and the church listened harder.

The planchette didn’t move.

Rose’s hand shifted, tiny; the planchette knocked into the edge of the N and Rey felt the jolt in her teeth. The wood’s edge snagged something on her thumb. She hissed, involuntary. A thin, mean splinter kissed the bead of blood out of her skin.

Finn saw first. “Rey—”

“I’m fine,” she said, automatic, and the drop welled rich and bright and then slid, hot, along the side of her thumb onto the planchette’s rim. It sank into the wood like thirsty ground drinking rain.

The change was not dramatic. No bell rang. No ghost wailed. The board just felt heavier, as if it had noticed. Rey’s thumb burned and then went cool and then felt like nothing at all. A pressure—not a touch; that would have been obvious—rested on the air over her shoulder, the way heat from a candle makes you think there’s a hand almost there.

“Okay,” Rose said briskly, breath too fast. “We thank you for talking to us. We’re ending the session. We say goodbye.”

She nudged the planchette toward the corner where GOODBYE waited, letters curved and comfortable from use. The planchette shuddered, slid half an inch—and stopped. They pushed, all three, and it did not go.

“Poe,” Finn said quietly.

“Not funny,” Poe whispered back, not joking. He lifted his fingers clear. “I’m off. See? Not me.”

Rey didn’t lift. For reasons that she would defend to the grave and could not explain, she pressed down. She wasn’t challenging. She was agreeing, the way you brace a ladder someone else is climbing. Under her, the planchette was a small animal that had made a decision to live. It drew itself back to the middle of the board and sat there like a dare.

“Rey,” Finn said again, helpless.

“Hey,” Rey said to the air, to the board, to the wrongness in the room that wasn’t even wrong yet, just awake. “We hear you. Are you friendly?”

The planchette skated, sudden, fast. It bumped her thumb hard enough to bite the tender edge again, and the sting made her eyes water. It slammed to NO and stayed.

Poe swore. “Nope. Hate that. Hated it.”

Rose’s lips thinned. She was thinking in machines, in problems she could solve. “We follow the rules,” she said, stubborn like only Rose could be. She placed a tumbler over the planchette, smooth and controlled. The wood tapped the glass twice like a heartbeat and then fell still.

The word was still there, though, pressed into the night like a thumbprint in wax. MINE.

Rey wiped her thumb on her jeans and watched the blood leave a comet smear. Her pulse was a drum in her wrists and that not-touch at her shoulder leaned, testing for give. She wanted to turn around. She didn’t. Turning around would make it ordinary; she wasn’t prepared for ordinary.

“Pizza?” Poe said, hopeful, desperate, pointing at nothing and everything. It was his talent, turning a mood by sheer force. “We can get delivery to a haunted church. That’s, like, a bucket list.”

Finn laughed because Poe needed him to. “I’m not sending a teenager into this Blair Witch vibe.”

“Fine. Chips on the way back,” Rose said, already blowing out candles with too-sharp breaths. Smoke swelled, sighing out of the jars like something unhappy to be dismissed. “We’re done. We are done.”

Rey didn’t argue. She looked at the glass, at the planchette sitting docile beneath it, at the board with its alphabet that wasn’t for letters tonight. She pressed the pad of her thumb against her mouth and tasted metal. Something in the nave shifted, a small sound like a step in dust. She could say she imagined it. She could say she didn’t.

As they packed, the speaker sputtered and died like a heart giving up a joke. They moved through the chapel’s dark like four small suns, each a candle, each brilliant for a brief time and then out. Poe slung the board back into its bag with more care than he wanted to show. Finn took the glass last and slid it on top of the planchette because it felt safer like that. Rose tucked the incense stub into her pocket like a sample to examine in daylight.

Rey lingered.

She stood by the vestry door and watched her breath make a soft cloud that drifted and was gone. The cracked mirror watched her back, dim and unhelpful. The iron key on her chain lay warm against her sternum like it wanted to be chosen for something. The pressure at her shoulder didn’t leave, exactly. It rearranged itself, a room shifting after you walk through it. It wasn’t a weight; it was a claim.

“Goodbye” she said, quiet enough.

Rey turned her back on the mirror and went to her friends. She didn’t look over her shoulder going through the arch; she didn’t need to. The feeling went with her, climbing into the night and the car and the skin between her shoulder blades.

On the way out, as Poe wrestled the car into life and Finn swore at the cold, the wind shoved the broken door. It swung, groaning. The sound had no right to be anything but wind. It felt like a word.

Mine.

Chapter Text

They didn’t run. They did the sensible, human thing: packed the speaker and the bottles, scooped up the board (glass still snug over the planchette like a little aquarium), and trudged back to the car under a sky that had sharpened to knife-cold.

“Consensus,” Poe declared as he wrestled with the ignition. “We are getting grease.”

“Food,” Finn corrected, breath fogging. “We are getting food.”

“Greasy food,” Rose said, buckling in. “And we’re never telling anyone we brought a toy to a haunted church.”

“It’s not a toy,” Rey said, too mild to bite. She had the cloth bag on her lap. The wood inside felt heavier than it had on the way in. Or she was drunk. Or she was something else now, a thing that noticed when a room noticed her back.

They rumbled down the farm track into town, heater coughing warm air, the speaker dead and sulking in the back seat. Streetlights returned in a rhythm that felt like waking up from a long blink. A fox ghosted across the lane and didn’t look at them. Rey watched her reflection in the side window, the way vibration gave her two mouths and then one. Her thumb didn’t hurt. It should have.

Poe peeled into a lay-by beside Pizza Palace (nothing palace about it; glorious), and they tumbled out with the stiff-legged grace of people who’d been on cold stone too long. Inside: an aquarium bubbling, a countertop sticky with a decade of orders, the blessed industrial heat of ovens roaring. A bored teenager in a paper hat didn’t even flinch at their candle-scent and rubble-dust.

“Four slices, two garlic breads, potato wedges, and your most suspicious dipping sauce,” Poe said, charisma set to ‘please reward me for being charming.’

“Name?” the girl asked, already hitting keys.

Poe’s mouth opened. Rey moved faster without moving at all. “Rey,” she said, and the girl typed it, slid the receipt toward them like a tarot card.

They took over a corner bench, hungry enough for the first minute to be quiet. Rey’s hands steadied around the waxy paper cup of tap water like it was a ritual. Grease bled through cardboard. The world reasserted itself: burnt cheese blister sweetness, salt hitting bright after cold air, Finn making a reverent noise at the first bite.

“Okay,” Poe said around pizza, “so, um—”

“Nope,” Rose said. “We’re not doing a debrief in a pizza place. We’re rehydrating and pretending to be normal.”

Finn lifted his slice in a solemn toast. “To pretending to be normal.”

Rey laughed, because it was the only thing to do that didn’t spill. She dug in—ate like she was catching a train, fast and messy—and let the fluorescent light erase the church. The heat of the ovens found her bones. By the time the garlic bread vanished, they were telling other stories: Poe’s neighbor convinced his cat was a reincarnated aunt; Rose’s professor who refused to believe in thermodynamic efficiency in lab code; Finn’s childhood trick-or-treat route that wound through a retirement community because those old ladies gave out full-size bars.

Rey didn’t look toward the glass case. She noticed it anyway. The condensation breathed, fog-and-clear, fog-and-clear, like lungs. When her name was called, the fog bowed inward in the shape of a looped M before it went blank again.

Nothing. It was nothing. She took the extra napkins and didn’t wipe her hands because she wanted grease under her nails and on her tongue, anything living.

They drove again, fuller, warmer, human laughter filling the car until even Poe relaxed. Rey leaned her head against the cool window and watched towns glide past: the closed florist with a fake crow in the display, the off-license still lit, the kebab shop’s neon trying to sell to no one. All of it safe because it existed.

Poe dropped Finn first (“Text when you’re inside or I’m honking”), then Rose (“Do not open that bag in your house,” she said, finger sharp at Rey, and Rey mimed a zipper across her mouth). The car grew quieter. Poe didn’t turn the music back on. Streetlight braided the road into gold ladders.

“You good?” he asked finally, not looking at her. They were close enough friends for that to be a kindness.

Rey considered lying for three comfortable seconds. “Yeah,” she said. “Just—cold.”

“Hot shower, bed, forget we’re idiots,” he said. “I got you tomorrow for coffee.”

“Please,” she said, because there were a thousand ways to say don’t make me do anything crazier until at least noon and that one would do.

He pulled up in front of her building, a Victorian that had been chopped into flats poorly and then forgiven because the windows were big. The entryway smelled like someone’s curry and someone else’s bleach. The porch light flickered in a pattern that wasn’t Morse code unless it was.

Poe leaned over and bumped her shoulder with his. “Hey. It was a bit, right?”

“It was a bit,” she echoed, and her smile didn’t hurt.

He made a face. “I hate bits now.”

“You’ll love them again in a week,” she said, and got out before he could argue with her. The night slipped down the back of her neck as she shut the door. Poe waited until she’d keyed in and waved at him through the glass and then pulled away with a soft growl of engine that left the street quieter than made sense.

The stairwell was a tunnel of echoes and peeling paint. Rey’s boots sounded too loud and then not at all, like the building decided when she was allowed to make noise. On the second-floor landing, Mrs. Jones basil plant drooped in a windowsill; Rey touched a leaf in apology for being late with the watering, and it sprang back as if she’d pinched a nerve.

Her door stuck as usual, then gave. She clicked the lock behind her without thinking and leaned there a second, forehead to wood, the way you lean into someone taller and let them hold you up an inch.Rey clicked the lock and leaned on the door. The flat smelled like rosemary shampoo and old orange-peel wax. Quiet pooled in the corners. She set the cloth bag on the kitchen table. The planchette thumped once against the glass—like something turning in sleep.

Cold webbed across the window from the edges inward. Fog bloomed and held. Three letters wrote themselves, slow and patient.

REY

Her mouth went dry.

A hand closed around her wrist—warm, exact—and pressed her palm flat to the table. Not crushing. Not kind. She tried to lift; the grip tightened a hair.

Her hair lifted at the nape like something was breathing through it. Heat assembled behind her into the shape of a body and leaned, just enough for her bones to know. The iron key at her throat flipped and tapped her sternum twice. She flinched.

The light clicked off. The room went black so fast her eyes watered. It clicked on again. Cabinet doors whispered open a finger’s width, then shut. The tap blasted one second of water and cut. A drawer slid out and bumped her hip. Her heartbeat climbed her throat; she could hear it in her ears, rabbit-fast.

The grip rolled her palm and found the tiny cut from earlier. Heat flared there—sharp, private—and the sting leapt her arm. She hissed, and the thumb stilled, pleased.

“Poe?” she called, ridiculous, because his name felt like a life raft.

Something answered in Poe’s voice from the hallway—perfect, cheerful...mocking “Text when you’re inside!”

Her stomach fell through her. It wasn’t her phone. The voice was inside the flat, wrong by a breath, like a singer half a note off.

“Stop,” she said, louder. The word came back at her small.

The hallway mirror blackened like a pond at night. In the glass, a mouth’s worth of warmth fogged and vanished, fogged and vanished—someone else’s breathing, steady as if they’d been doing it here for years.

Her wrist released. Freedom came half a beat late, like a coin given back after you’ve already decided it’s gone. She backed away.

The kettle clicked on by itself. The low roar gathered, then squealed into a boil that sounded too much like a scream. The window fogged again, slower, deliberate.

MINE

“Enough.” It broke out of her more plea than command.

A strand of hair lifted and drew across her lips like a hush. Fingers—definitely fingers—slid around her ankle, the leather of her boot creaking. A slow circle traced the bare skin above it. Gooseflesh raced up her calf; her knee buckled. She grabbed the counter. The invisible grip tugged—gentle, testing—and then let go, amused at how close she came to falling.

Rey tore her gaze from the window and stumbled into the hall. It felt colder there, the air thick in the way a room gets before a storm. Her breath smoked pale.

Bathroom. Light. Door.

The cheap mirror showed her too-bright face and too-wide pupils. A clear track appeared in the cleaner streaks beside her cheek—someone’s finger dragging down the glass, slow, tasting the act of leaving a mark. The light buzzed and dimmed; the hum of the extractor fan swallowed and warped, and for two seconds she heard her name in it, stretched thin:

“Reyyy—”

She froze on the spot, turning around slowly.

Nothing.

She killed the fan. The hum died. The silence it left was worse.

Rey cranked the hot tap so hard it protested. Water rattled through ancient pipes and billowed steam. She stripped on a frantic autopilot, boots thudding, denim fought halfway down, jacket flung. The curtain stuck to her calf and she hated how that scared her. She stepped under the spray and let it beat her skull until noise filled her head.

Heat, water, ritual. Shampoo. She could be a person again if she did person things.

The water temperature slid to cold without warning. She gasped and lurched. It scalded hot the next second, a lash that raised her skin. She danced the taps, swore, got it to a truce. Steam thickened until the room outside was a white blur. Her breath pulled the curtain inward with each inhale. The curtain pushed back on the exhale.

Someone’s knuckles rattled—two taps. The sound came from the tile directly behind her left shoulder.

“I swear to God,” she started, stupid again, and choked on her own laugh.

"He won't help you" Breathed behind the curtain. She pressed herself back against the tile behind her.

On the other side of the curtain, the mirror wrote as if a finger pressed through air:

HEL—

The word smeared as a drip cut through it. New letters formed over the streak, firm, deliberate.

MINE

“Cute” she said, and soap burned her eyes and made it sound like she was crying.

The curtain pressed hard against her back like a chest leaning in. The weight didn’t lift when she twisted. Water drummed. Her scalp prickled as if someone watched her at the crown, close enough to count her breaths. She reached an arm out and flattened her palm to the plastic. It was warm where a shoulder would be.

“Get out,” she said, and knew she had no idea what she was talking to.

The warmth slid down—shoulder to upper arm, to elbow, to wrist—and closed around her forearm. Firm. Not bruising. A grip. It pulled, small and certain, turning her under the spray as if arranging her where it wanted her. She yanked back. The grip held and then let go at once, showy, letting her stumble against the tile.

Above the showerhead, the ceiling paint bubbled like a breath under skin. A hairline crack chased itself toward the light fixture and stopped. The bulb dimmed, brightened, dimmed. With each change, steam pulsed and the mirror’s word went in and out of existence. MINE—white—MINE—white—MINE.

Shampoo slid into her eyes again. She blinked, tears hot and useless. The water roared louder, beyond the plumbing. The sound carried a second sound braided through it: Rose’s voice, clear as across a table, saying, “We’re done. Session closed.”

Rey’s ribs cinched. “Rose?” she asked, stupid, hopeful.

Finn’s voice came next, overlapped, too bright: “To pretending to be normal.”

Then Poe’s, a whisper against the back of her neck, smiling: “Text when you’re inside.”

She slapped the wall with her palm like she could jar the recordings out of it. The voices fell away. A new one came close enough to feel the word shape the steam at her ear—male, pleased, not anyone she knew:

“Closer.”

She tore the curtain aside. Empty bathroom. The mirror bled condensation; the window was all white except for a clear oval where someone’s face would be if someone were standing nose-to-glass on the other side.

Her towel wasn’t where she’d left it. It hung from the hook and then slipped—pulled—fell in a slow, theatrical drop to the floor. A second towel slithered off the radiator. The air touched her like a wet mouth.

Rey lunged for the towels, anger this time, anger she could use. She wrapped herself too tight and nearly laughed at the feral little sound it forced out of her. The mirror fog cleared a coin-sized hole and a line traced from it like a face sketching itself: brow, nose, mouth. The impression leaned, amused.

“Enough,” she said, louder, and threw the door open.

The hall was colder, somehow darker for the steam behind her. On the way past the kitchen, the kettle clicked on again. The planchette ticked the glass—one, two, three—like a child delighted with a new trick. The window letters had faded to drips but the outline remained if you wanted to see it.

Her phone vibrated in her pocket. Thank God. She clawed it out—no notifications. The vibration went on, phantom, against an empty palm. In the dead black screen she caught reflections: the kitchen behind her, the hall, her own shape…and for a breath-long smear, another, taller, right over her shoulder. She blinked. Alone again.

Bedroom. Now.

She left wet footprints across the wood, towel trailing, jacket clinging to one forearm. The room met her like a cold mouth. She yanked the curtains tighter though the streetlight already starved the room of color. She didn’t bother with pyjamas; the towel came off and was replaced by an old T-shirt by muscle memory. Her hands were shaking enough to make threading them through sleeves feel like untangling wire.

She dropped onto the bed, on top of the covers, and told herself to breathe in fours the way Finn had taught her once for panic—four in, hold, four out, hold. It worked until the mattress dipped near her knees under a man’s weight. Dipped again at her hip. A third time by her shoulder, like someone settling their knees and a hand as they crawled up beside her.

“What do you want!” she said to an empty room.

Breath—real as hers—feathered her ear. It smelled like blown-out candles. Two fingers traced her jaw, tilted her face like checking craft, and paused exactly where a kiss would go. The pause lengthened until it hurt. Then the touch withdrew a hair. Not gone. Waiting.

Her body did the wrong thing: it went very, very still. Not paralysis; a hunted stillness, old as anything with a heart.

The blanket tugged at her calf. Not a snag—fingers, lifting, making room. Pressure landed at the small of her back and spread, warm and heavy, and pushed just enough to take her breath. When she gasped, it let up, pleased. A hand slid under her shirt, palm flat to her ribs, pausing between each rib as if counting them like prayer beads. It was not gentle. It was careful, and that was worse.

“Who are you?” Her whisper shook.

From the kitchen, the kettle clicked off. Two soft taps answered from glass.

The pressure lifted. The mattress dented by her hip again, then vanished as if the weight had flowed off the bed and stood. The room listened. Pipes ticked. Upstairs, someone coughed. Outside, a bus sighed at the stop and moved on as if nothing here had teeth.

Her phone lit—not with a notification, just the lock screen brightening on its own, the way it does when something brushes the sensor. The wallpaper was a photo of the four of them on a pier last summer, sun-blind and grinning. For one blink the image doubled: Rey twice, one of her faces turned toward a shadow that curved like a smile over her shoulder. The screen went black.

The window fogged, impossibly, from the inside. Letters formed slow as handwriting learned in childhood.

M I N E

She didn’t look away while it faded. She didn’t give it that.

“Come on then,” she said, because terror made her mean and the mean kept her upright. “If you’re going to haunt me, haunt me.”

Nothing moved. The silence felt like laughter with its mouth covered.

She lay back and watched the ceiling until it blurred. Sleep came the way falling does when you miss the last stair—abrupt, helpless, mean.

Chapter Text

Rey woke like she’d been rolled down a gravel hill and left there. Her tongue tasted like old pennies and garlic butter; her skull had a second, worse skull inside it, throbbing on its own beat. The room’s gray said morning, but her body said no.

Phone: dead. Of course. Her limbs remembered moving in the night; her brain didn’t. Every muscle along her ribs ached like she’d been clenching for hours. She lay very still and took inventory: alive, yes; dignity, questionable; coffee, hypothetical.

Someone knocked.

She flinched like a cartoon cat and then swore at herself. The second knock came with a singsong: “Delivery for Ms. Disaster!”

Poe.

“One sec!” she croaked

She scraped hair into something that might legally be called a bun, shoved on joggers and the least incriminating hoodie from the floor, and padded to the door. The mirror by the hall caught her on the way: mascara fugitive under both eyes, lips bitten, towel-crease line on her cheek. Gorgeous.

She opened up. Poe stood there in a puffer, cheeks wind-bitten, holding two takeout cups like holy relics and a paper bag that smelled like cinnamon and apology.

He took one look at her and grinned, weaponized. “Oh wow. Are you…a ghost wearing Rey’s skin?”

“Shut up and hand it over,” she said, already reaching.

He held the coffee hostage an extra cruel inch. “Say ‘Poe, you’re my saviour and I’m humbled by your kindness.’”

She stared at him. “Poe, I will end you.”

“Close enough.” He surrendered the cup.

She took a desperate mouthful, scalded her tongue, and didn’t even care. Heat moved through her like someone turning lights on down a corridor. The ache in her ribs complained and then settled to a background grumble.

Poe came in without asking, because he was Poe and because she stepped back enough to count as permission. “Okay, notes,” he said, already doing a lap like a nosy aunt. “You look like you lost a fight. Your flat smells like a candle shop. And also—” he nudged a boot with his shoe “—you slept in yesterday’s everything, didn’t you?”

“False,” Rey said, sipping again. “I slept almost in yesterday’s everything.”

“Science will split that hair later.” He set the paper bag on the table and pulled out two pastries that were more glaze than structured carbohydrate. “I brought penance.”

“From where?”

“The good place. The queue was horrid. I elbowed a hipster. I’d do it again.”

He leaned a hip against the counter and took a long, deliberate sip of his own coffee. “So. How’s our resident goth heroine this fine morning?”

“Rough,” she admitted. “Like, part hangover, part…jet lag? Like my soul went on a red-eye and left me here to pay baggage fees.”

“Relatable” he said. “I woke up at four convinced the pizza man was a Victorian child. Anyway. Water.” He opened a cupboard like he lived here and found the glasses because he practically did. “And ibuprofen. And a shower. In that order.”

She accepted the pills and the bossiness. The water was cold; it felt like forgiveness. “Thanks.”

Poe squinted at her face, amused-earnest. “You sure you’re okay? You look like you wrestled your sleep and lost.” Rey’s laugh came easy enough to pass. “Please tell me we’re never going back to Spooky Church of Tax Evasion.”

“Mm.” She bit into the pastry and let sugar rewire her brain. “We’re idiots.”

“Fact.” He watched her for a beat longer, reading what she didn’t say and choosing to be gentle anyway. That was Poe’s magic trick. He clapped once, soft. “Alright. Plan. I’m kidnapping you for coffee number two and greasy eggs. You’re not allowed to wallow. Also, I’m confiscating any Ouija-adjacent objects until at least January.”

Her gaze slid, treacherous, toward the cloth bag on the floor by the table leg. She pulled it back. “Do I look like I’m planning a séance?”

“Yes.” He leaned over to peep into the paper bag again, stage-whispered, “There’s a third pastry if you shower in under nine minutes.”

“That’s bribery.”

“That’s love.”

She bumped his shoulder on the way past him, a small, grateful collision. “Nine minutes,” she said, and pointed at the kitchen like a stern landlord. “Don’t reorganize my mugs.”

“I would never,” he lied, already moving them by color.

Rey headed down the hall, coffee in hand, trying very hard not to think about the way her skin remembered heat where there was none—an afterimage of touch, like light behind her eyes when she closed them too tight. The bathroom’s cheap bulb hummed like always; the mirror showed a girl who looked hungover and alive.

Normal. Morning. Poe. Eggs. She could do those things without saying a word.

From the kitchen, Poe yelled, “Do you want the seat by the window or do you want to avoid the sun like a true creature of the night?”

“Window,” she called back, smiling despite everything. “I want to hiss at passerby.”

“That’s my girl,” he said, and clattered in her cupboards like pots and pans were applause.

Rey shut the bathroom door and turned the shower on. Hot water filled the room, steam rising, ordinary as rain. She let the sound cover the part of her that hadn’t slept and the other part that had stayed awake for her. For now: coffee, pastry, friend. The rest could wait its turn.

The café was all steamed milk and clatter, windows fogged from bodies and rain. Rey and Poe snagged the small table by the window—her choice, so she could hiss at passerby—and a sun-bleached plant judged them from a shelf like a disappointed aunt.

Poe was already halfway through his fry-up, narrating a story about his neighbor’s cat that had a vendetta against bathmats. Rey pushed beans around her plate and tried to make her skull stop doing the extra heartbeat thing.

“Movie night,” she said, aiming casual. “Tonight. Triple feature. I’m thinking The Descent, It Follows, and then something dumb as a palate cleanser so we can sleep. You in?”

Poe wagged his fork. “Absolutely not. I love myself. Also, I don’t descend anywhere that isn’t toward a pastry.”

“Perfect,” Rey said, sweet. “I already told Rose and Finn you’d bring pastries and screams.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Emotional manipulation. Rude.”

She grinned, opened her mouth to press, and then saw him.

Behind Poe’s shoulder, at the bar: a man with a mug held in both hands, shoulders easy in a dark jacket, hair a little too long like he’d forgotten to care. He watched Rey over the rim of his cup with a patience that felt like a hand under her chin. When he smiled, it creased one cheek, private. His eyes were…interested. Heat-humored. Flirt heavy enough to be a dare.

The mug hid his mouth when he took a sip. The curve of his smile didn’t hide at all.

Rey’s breath snagged. Something in her—some useless, traitorous part that always wanted to lean—answered.

Poe noticed the pause and turned, half a bite still on his fork. “What? What do you—what are you looking at?”

Rey blinked at him like he’d spoken a language she didn’t know. “The guy,” she said, pointing directly over Poe’s shoulder. “The one with the eyes? The mug? The—how are you not seeing this?”

Poe looked. Past the plant. Past the bar. Past the pink neon that said COFFEE but kept flickering to OFF. He made a small, apologetic shrug. “Rey, there’s nobody there.”

The man—Ben; the name arrived as if dropped into her mind by someone amused with themselves—lifted his fingers in a small wave just for her, almost mocking. He tipped his head, as if to ask, Do you like the view?

“Don’t be weird,” Rey told Poe, not taking her eyes off Ben. “He’s right there.”

Poe turned back, chewing. “I am being aggressively normal. You’re the one hitting on ghosts.”

Ben stood, slow as a cat deciding you were interesting after all, and drifted to stand behind Poe’s chair. Poe kept talking, oblivious—some riff about how he would, in fact, bring pastries and screams if she promised never to say the words “descent into darkness” again.

Rey watched Ben set his mug on the table behind Poe, watched his hand—the same hand that had held her wrist last night; she felt it—slide into Poe’s hair at the nape and curl. Poe didn’t react. He kept talking, animated, fork cutting the air.

“No,” Rey said, breathless, automatic.

Ben met her gaze over Poe’s shoulder. He tightened his fingers in Poe’s hair—affectionate? possessive?—and Poe’s head tipped a fraction like a puppet finding its string, still rambling on about pastry ethics. Ben’s other hand produced a knife from nowhere, bright as a thought. He drew the flat of the blade up his tongue, a leisurely taste, eyes never leaving Rey’s.

“Stop,” Rey whispered. “Don’t.”

Ben smiled with his eyes, indulgent. He laid the edge to Poe’s throat as if measuring for a collar.

Rey’s chair screeched. “Poe!” she screamed, loud enough that two tables flinched and a spoon rang against a cup. She threw her hands over her eyes like she could hold the world together if she didn’t see it break.

Everything in the café stalled for a heartbeat—the hiss of the steamer, the tap of keys, a baby’s hiccup halfway to a cry—and then resumed, ordinary as rain.

A hand touched her wrist. Warm. Real. Poe.

“Hey.” He was close, worried, leaning in so their little table turned private. “Rey. Rey, hey—look at me.”

She peeled her fingers back. Tears made halos of the lights. Poe was there, whole, fork abandoned, his hair exactly as chaotic as always, his throat bare and fine and unmarked. Behind him: no one. Just the bar. Just the neon that couldn’t decide between COFFEE and OFF.

Her breath shuddered. It wouldn’t smooth.

“You okay?” Poe asked, softer now. “You went white.”

She looked over his shoulder again, because she couldn’t not. Ben was gone—or not gone so much as…elsewhere, her eyes unable to find him, the way you know a word and can’t reach it. The space he’d filled still felt warm.

“I—” Rey swallowed. The word stuck. She tried a different one. “Headache,” she said, hoarse. “Too much last night. I just—dizzy.”

Poe’s mouth slanted. He believed her enough to let her keep it. He squeezed her wrist and then let go. “Okay. We’ll get you orange juice like a Victorian cure-all.”

She nodded, because it was the right thing to do. Because she couldn’t say a man smiled at me from the other side of the room and then put a knife to your throat and I think I made him up and I don’t think I made him up at all.

Poe finished his food with gentle, pointless commentary about the tragic state of mushrooms in this economy. Rey sat very still and didn’t turn her head even when the window fogged for a second with no one breathing on it, even when the neon winked to OFF and back to COFFEE like a private joke. She kept her hands flat on the table and listened to the sound of Poe being alive.

When they left, a clean patch the shape of a palm printed briefly in the condensation on the glass door as it swung shut behind them, right at Rey’s shoulder height. It faded by the time she looked back.

They left the café into a wet light that tried to be noon and failed. Poe steered them toward the corner shop with the good crisps and the bad decisions, talking at a pace designed to keep her tethered: which ice cream was objectively the best (wrong), which crisps counted as dinner (many), how Rose would roast them if they forgot napkins (thoroughly, with diagrams).

Rey nodded at all the right places and almost none of it landed. Her hands had a tremor she couldn’t blame entirely on caffeine or last night’s whiskey. When she slipped her fingers into the pocket of her hoodie, they shook against the cotton like she was cold from the inside.

The shop door dinged them into fluorescence and tile. Air that smelled like citrus cleaner and fry grease. Stacks of sugar pretending to be cereal. A row of lurid energy drinks Poe immediately gravitated toward.

“Mission parameters,” he announced, already dragging a basket toward him with his foot. “Popcorn, at least three varieties of crisp including ‘weird’, gummy worms because Rose is a child, something Finn can pretend is healthy, and—” He pointed at her. “—your wine, your rules.”

“Copy,” Rey said, and her voice sounded like she’d borrowed it.

She let Poe monologue to the sweets while she drifted toward the back where the cheap wine stood in a neat parade—greens, browns, reds that looked like they would stain everything they touched. The cooler hummed. Condensation slicked the glass doors in cloudy sheets, dripping slow. Her reflection came up double in the fluorescent flicker—one Rey, then two, then one.

She slid open the door. Cold leapt at her. She reached in for a bottle that wouldn’t embarrass her and paused because she wasn’t alone.

He leaned against the end of the aisle like he’d been poured there—dark jacket, lazy posture, hands in pockets until they weren’t. The smile was the same as the café: private, amused, heavy with a question. Up close he was wrong-beautiful, the kind that made you think of accidents you’d have on purpose.

No one else was in the aisle. From somewhere near the tills: Poe arguing, cheerfully, with a display about whether pretzels counted as bread.

Rey’s mouth went dry. Her fingers tightened on the cold neck of a bottle until it squeaked against her skin.

He didn’t move at first. He let her look. Then the distance wasn’t there anymore. He was beside her, heat in a stripe down her arm, the smell like blown-out candles and orange peel curling in under the industrial cleaner. The door to the cooler eased shut on its own and thunked. The hum settled into a lower note that felt like a hand at the base of her spine.

“You’re not real,” she said, quiet, just to hear what the lie sounded like.

He made a small, pleased sound—delight, not agreement.

His hand came up and, without touching her, pushed her wrist a fraction so her grip shifted to a different bottle. It wasn’t an ask. It was a correction. Her ring finger jumped against cold glass. The label caught the light—a red so deep it looked black. Rhône. She had the absurd thought that if she opened it, the smell would be iron.

“Don’t,” she breathed, and didn’t know what she meant. Don’t be here. Don’t be this. Don’t make me choose.

He stepped in behind her. The aisle got narrower. His breath found the soft place below her ear and warmed it until gooseflesh raced her arms. The bottle neck kissed the lip of the shelf as if bowing.

From the front of the shop: Poe, loud, “Rey? Do we hate salt and vinegar today or are we living deliciously?”

She didn’t answer. Couldn’t.

The man—not a man, something in her insisted, belated and unhelpful—lifted his hand and traced the edge of the cooler glass with one knuckle. Condensation obeyed, clearing in his wake. He drew a neat, deliberate line down, then across, then down. The letter hung there for a heartbeat before the fog rushed back: M.

Her stomach flipped. She reached up without thinking and pressed her palm to the glass, smearing it into nothing.

He laughed, soft, the sound a knife rocked on a whetstone. The knuckles skimmed her jaw, turned her face a fraction like he wanted to see what panic looked like on her. He paused at her mouth—but not the way kisses pause; the way a collector pauses over a rare stamp—then moved on. Two fingers found her pulse and pressed, counting like a metronome. Her heartbeat tried to obey.

“Rey?” Poe again, closer now, voice coming around the corner. “I found weird crisps. They are—oh my God—lasagna flavored, we have to—”

The hand at her throat withdrew. Heat slipped back a step. She almost pitched forward with the loss. The cooler door sighed a centimeter open, letting in a ribbon of honest cold. She grabbed the Rhône because he’d made her, because it was already in her hand, and tucked it against her chest like a shield.

Poe turned into the aisle, triumphantly holding up a bag printed with a cartoon noodle. He clocked her face, stopped, softened. “Hey. You okay?”

“I—yeah.” Rey made her mouth move into a smile that might pass on a busy street. “Just deciding between wine that tastes like regret and wine that tastes like…more regret.”

“Red regret always,” Poe said, instantly helpful. “White regret is for summer.” He dropped the crisps in the basket, peered theatrically into the middle distance. “Also, why does this aisle feel like a meat locker? The heating in here is a scam.”

Rey chanced one look back down the aisle.

Ben stood where he’d first been, somehow both far and near, hands in his pockets again, mug-exchange smile in place like the café rewound itself and hit play. He lifted two fingers in a lazy greeting just for her—hi, little cliff—and then, with Poe’s shoulder blocking and unblocking the view as he shifted, the space where Ben had been was empty. No steps. No departure. Just the aisle and labels and a small drip of condensation that caught the light and rolled, slow as a tear.

Her hands were shaking properly now. She put the bottle in the basket and gripped the handle to give the tremor a job.

Poe, oblivious and perfect, bumped her with his elbow. “Right. Cartoons tonight. At worst, something with puppets. At best, Wallace & Gromit. No murder! No teens dying before they can legally drink”

“Right,” she said. “Puppets.”

He gave her one more searching look—tell me if I need to fight something invisible—and then chose to be sunshine. “Come on, disaster. Gummy worms await.”

They paid. The till beeped its bored approval. Outside, the light had decided on gray. Rey carried the bag with the wine because it was heavy and because the weight made her feel anchored. The glass clinked gently against glass as they walked, a sound that, for a breath, timed itself to a step at her shoulder that wasn’t Poe’s.

She didn’t look. She looked straight ahead and talked about nothing at all until the nothing sounded like safety.

Cartoons died the second Rose shouldered through Rey’s door with a tote bag and righteous purpose.

“Program change,” she announced, thudding three DVD cases onto the coffee table like court exhibits. The Conjuring. The Nun. Annabelle. The universe applauded with a crack of thunder that was probably just a lorry hitting a pothole.

Poe stared, betrayed. “We said puppets.”

"Annabelle is technically a puppet" Rose argued.

“Puppets are scarier,” Finn said, peering at Annabelle like it might bite. “But I’m not telling her that.”

Rose was already rearranging the living room: lamp off, fairy lights unplugged, candles snuffed (thanks, Rose), blinds pulled. She shoved snacks into bowls and shoved bowls at people until everyone had something to crunch so they wouldn’t chew their own nails. “Democracy is a failure,” she said cheerfully, and hit play.

They piled onto the sofa and the floor: Poe in the corner like a human throw pillow, Finn cross-legged with a blanket he didn’t need yet, Rose on the rug with a notebook “for science,” Rey curled into the end cushion, shoulders tucked, the wine she’d pretended not to buy breathing in a glass on the table. The room settled into a hush that wasn’t quiet—soundtrack strings creeping, radiator hissing, rain worrying the window.

Halfway through The Conjuring, tension wound tight. On-screen, doors thought about thinking for themselves. Off-screen, Poe whispered, “Nope,” every time a shadow made a decision. Rey let the noise soak her. Normal fear. Manufactured fear. The good kind.

Heat leaned over the back of the sofa.

A breath found the shell of Rey’s ear—warm, amused. “They all suck,” a man said, voice pleasant as sin.

Rey’s spine went cold. She kept her eyes on the TV, because everyone else’s were. The breath tasted like blown-out candles and orange peel. She slid her gaze sideways.

Ben lounged on the back of the sofa like it was a barstool built for him, one elbow hooked, long body folded into lazy angles. No one else reacted. Poe laughed at a jump scare that hadn’t landed; Finn tore a gummy worm in half with the seriousness of a judge; Rose half hid behind a cushion.

“They never get it right… with us” Ben went on, a low chuckle under the violins. His eyes were on the screen and then on her, more on her. Flirt, private and heavy. “Budget smoke. Bad Latin. Exhausting.”

Rey swallowed so hard it clicked. The sound felt like a confession. Her breath started misbehaving—too high, too fast, visible in the dim when it shouldn’t be. She clamped her hands together in her lap to stop the shake.

“Eh,” he said conversationally, “they’re all cheap tricks.”

The room caught fire.

Flame licked up the skirting boards like someone had painted it on and pressed go. The rug went to bright embers and then to bloom. Heat rolled hard against Rey’s shins, hungry-sweet. Light danced up her friends’ faces, turning them into red-gold masks, into saints at the moment of martyrdom—except they didn’t flinch. Poe laughed at something the Warrens said; Finn reached for popcorn.

Rey’s breath shattered. She grabbed the sofa cushion until her knuckles blanched.

Ben glanced around at the inferno he’d made, then back to her with a tilt of his mouth that said he’d dressed just to disappoint her. “Ooh, see? I can be edgy,” he mocked lightly, as if he’d switched on a neon sign. “Do you feel very cinema now?”

Tears jumped to her eyes without asking. The fire bloomed another inch, a lover leaning in.

Ben flicked two fingers. The flames switched off like a light.

Darkness fell back into place. The only glow was the TV’s blue and the fairy lights Rose had yanked out of the wall. The air smelled like nothing but salt and sugar and the ghost of last night’s candle.

“So lame,” he said, pitying the genre and bored with it. “They never show our true potential.”

Rey’s hands wouldn’t unclench. She looked at her friends because they were gravity. Poe was biting a nail, eyes glued to the screen. Finn’s blanket had crept to his shoulders without him noticing. Rose glanced up just enough to shush Poe when he whispered another doomed joke. The world continued to be the world.

She made the mistake of looking back.

Ben was closer, leaned in until the warm outline of his mouth hovered a breath from her cheek, purely for the cruelness of not touching. His smile curved, all teeth and courtesy. It could have been handsome if it wasn’t so much like falling. “Pay attention, little one,” he murmured, soft enough that the words pressed the skin under her ear, not the air. “This is the good part.”

On-screen, a door boomed; off-screen, Rey’s pulse did. She took a panicked sip of wine to give her hands a job. It shook in the glass, a fine, betraying tremor.

“Cold?” Finn asked absently, eyes never leaving the TV.

“Yeah,” she said. Her voice lived somewhere else for a second and then walked back to her mouth. “Just—cold.”

Ben’s laugh was quiet and pleased, like a whetstone against a blade.

Rose paused the movie to scold Poe for a pun. The room obligingly uncoiled. Ben stayed exactly where he was, a heat-shadow leaned over the sofa, his gaze dragging over Rey like a matchhead. When the movie resumed, he let his hand drift along the cushion behind her curls—close enough that the tiny hairs on her neck stood up in salute, not close enough to be proof.

On the screen, the Warrens promised they knew what they were doing. Ben’s voice—private, velvet—said otherwise: “They never do.”

Rey stared forward and tried not to breathe like prey. She could feel the fire that wasn’t. She could feel the smile that was. And somewhere under the strings and jump scares, she thought she heard a bell with no bell ring once, low and amused, from the exact place behind her where no one sat.

They did the between-movie shuffle: legs shaken, drinks topped, blanket redistributed. Rose swapped discs with surgeon focus. Gregorian chant bled out of the TV like a draft.

“If a single nun sprints at the camera I’m suing the Vatican,” Poe declared, pointing a crisp at the screen like a lawyer with a chip.

“On what grounds?” Finn asked.

“Emotional damages.”

Rey tucked her knees up under her chin and pretended her hands weren’t shaking on the stem of her glass.

The Nun opened on a corridor that thought it was a throat.

“Costume budget: black sheet, ring light, a little make up” Ben murmured over her shoulder, wicked and lazy. He’d perched on the back of the sofa like a crow that learned charm, elbow hooked, long spine bent to her gravity instead of the screen’s. He smelled like blown-out candles and whiskey.

On cue, a priest launched into Latin.

“That’s not Latin,” Ben sighed. “That’s...nothing. It's literally nothing.”

The camera panned a wall dense with crucifixes. Metal. Wood. Some with Hill-country earnestness. Some with prop-room spite.

All of them began to tremble.

“Here we go,” Ben said, amused. He let the words slide close enough that they warmed the soft under Rey’s ear. “Crucifixes don’t work.”

Rey’s fingers tightened on the glass. She didn’t look. Everyone else was riveted, knuckles full of popcorn.

“Sorry?” she whispered, like she was asking the movie to repeat itself.

“Crucifixes,” he repeated, indulgent and faintly bored. “Don’t. Work. A stick and a story. The wood remembers the tree, not your hope. The metal remembers the ore, not your prayer.” He tipped his head toward the TV. Crosses flipped upside down in a clattery wave. “Hot glue and hope.”

On screen, the nun’s face bloomed out of black with trailer timing.

“Boom,” Ben said flatly as the soundtrack screamed. Then, as the music spiked again: “Boom.” The corner lamp flicked—off, on, off—exactly to his second bored boom. Finn made a sound like a kettle considering it and dragged the blanket higher.

“They’ll write a rule now,” Ben went on, mock-solemn. “Every story writes a rule so it can break it later.”

The priest warned the novice not to answer if something called her name in the dark.

Ben bent nearer. Heat gathered along Rey’s jaw. “Rey,” he said, private as a hand in a pocket.

Her name sank through her like a small, dense stone—swallowed and rippling everything it passed. She kept her gaze forward. Poe hissed at the next jump and tried to style it out as a cough.

A cloister door slammed on screen. In the kitchen, every cupboard answered with a soft, delayed thunk, as if humoring the film’s choices. Poe squinted at the hall. “Did your fridge just—?”

“Old building,” Rey said too fast. Her wine trembled in her grip, red regret making faint concentric rings.

Ben dipped two fingers toward the glass without touching it. The surface rose to meet him in a neat meniscus, like a dog that had learned a trick. He tasted nothing and smiled like he had. “Favorite lie so far?” he asked, conversational poison.

“The floating,” Rey said before she could stop herself.

He made a pleased sound that wanted to be a purr and refused to be that soft. The throw at Rey’s knees lifted a slow inch—as if air had learned to levitate too—then settled in a polite bow. “Good girl.”

The nun glided by a row of crosses. Ben leaned into the space behind Rey’s ear and kept dismantling the room the film wanted to build. “Symbols only bite if both sides agree what teeth are,” he said. “You point wood and tin and think the dark will salute. The dark doesn’t read your pamphlet. Faith is leverage. Props are garnish.”

On the rug, Finn muttered, “I hate this bit” to his blanket, which pretended to be a shield.

“Watch this part,” Ben drawled. “They’ll say the demon hates the name of God in a language it doesn’t speak.”

The nun hissed at a prayer in pristine schoolboy Latin. Ben answered in something older and wetter that Rey felt like humidity against her skin more than she heard, syllables curved like hooks. The TV’s audio ducked for a breath. Rose frowned at the HDMI cable like she could glare it into fidelity.

The hallway crucifixes drooped on screen as if melting from heat. In the flat, the frames on Rey’s walls all tilted one degree to the left and stayed there, as if the house had chosen an opinion.

“Stop it,” Rey breathed, but she didn’t know if she meant the film or him or the way her heart was trying to learn the rhythm of his fingers as he tapped the sofa back—tap…tap-tap…tap—off the movie’s beat and right on hers.

The film went to a white-out scare.

Ben didn’t flinch. “Boom,” he deadpanned for the third time. The fairy lights Rose had unplugged exhaled a single thread of smoke anyway, spite or draft or him. It spelled HI before thinning.

Poe clutched a cushion like a scandalized aunt. “If a nun runs at me, I am moving to the moon.”

“Tell the moon to bring better editors,” Ben said, too pleased with himself, and when the nun did sprint at the camera, he yawned. “There she goes. Cardio for Christ.”

Rey bit the inside of her cheek until iron sang.

On screen, the cross flew from a novice’s hand and torpedoed a shadow.

Ben barked a laugh. “Oh, we’re doing fetch now?” He slipped his mouth closer to Rey’s ear, not touching, cruel in the way of almost. “Here’s your lesson, little cliff: wood and metal don’t bind what won’t be bound. Names do. Promises do. Fear does.” He let the last word rest on her skin like a coin placed on a tongue. “You have all three.”

Her breath caught on the rim of it. She stared at the TV so hard the pixels showed their seams.

Rose hit pause to rewind a continuity sin; the room uncoiled in that held breath ordinary evenings have. Ben stayed, head tipped, eyes bright with a private joke he hadn’t told yet. “Valak,” he sing-songed at the frozen frame, then scoffed. “You keep saying it and nothing. Leashes need hands.”

Poe sagged into his corner. “I hate that it’s working on me even though it’s dumb.”

“Same,” Finn said, peeking over the blanket he absolutely did need now.

Rey risked the smallest glance sideways. Ben’s mouth curved like he knew. He lifted a brow: Well?

“Shut up,” she whispered, which was an answer he would always take. His hand drifted an inch closer along the sofa back, close enough that the fine hairs at her nape saluted again on their own.

They watched the last gauntlet: graves opening like yawned mouths, holy water in cinematic abundance, the nun overplaying her hand. Each trope earned a graded noise from Ben—bored “mm,” derisive “tsk,” once an actual laugh when a prop door refused to cooperate with the edit. When the climactic cross pressed to a demon’s face sizzled like bacon, he rolled his eyes so extravagantly Rey felt the air move. “Crucifixes don’t work,” he repeated, patient as a teacher who enjoys being cruel. “But belief? Oh, love. Belief works on you.”

The final sting tried to leap from the screen. Ben didn’t bother to comment. The TV begged them to be scared one last time.

Credits rolled.

The room remembered how to be a room. Someone’s knee cracked. The radiator sighed. Rain shrugged down the glass. The frames on the wall stayed tilted, quietly opinionated.

Poe blew out a breath. “Hated it. Loved hating it. Ten out of ten, Rose, my therapist will invoice you.”

“Eat a lasagna crisp and be brave,” Rose said, smug as a witch with a good cauldron.

Rey put her glass down carefully, because her hands were still tremoring like the film had climbed out and lived in her bones, because he was still leaned over the sofa, warm laugh ghosting the soft place under her ear, because the crosses didn’t work and she’d known that even before he told her.

Ben’s smile slanted, private and pleased. “One more,” he murmured, as Rose swapped discs. “Let’s see if the doll does better.”

Top-ups. Stretch. Nervous laughter that doesn’t quite make it to the eyes. Rose slides Annabelle into the tray with surgeon calm. Sepia fills the room.

“Final boss,” Poe says, brave-adjacent. “Then dog detective. Non-negotiable.”

Finn salutes with his blanket. Rey tucks into the end cushion and abandons her glass so her hands don’t have to prove they’re shaking.

Ben is already there—warm gravity along the sofa back behind her, elbow hooked, posture lazy. He watches her watching the TV.

A soft click of his tongue. “Annabelle,” he decides, pleased. “I do, regrettably, like her.” A beat, wicked: “Still worse eyeliner than your friend over there.”

A sigh from her side.

“Vessels,” Ben narrates for her alone, voice silked with boredom. “Mortals adore a vessel. Jar, box, book, doll. Shelf your terror and call it brave.”

He keeps talking; she keeps not answering.

A cupboard slams in the film. In Rey’s kitchen, the cupboards reply with a soft, delayed thunk. Poe frowns toward the hall, then blames the score. Rey stares straight ahead.

“Cribs, prams, hems,” Ben lists, amused. “Anything that remembers touch.” The real rocker in her bedroom gives one slow creak. He stills it without looking. “There.”

“Rules,” he says, satisfied, just before the priest intones about conduits and consent. “You almost had it, little one. Consent is the only magic you made that works. Props are garnish; belief is leverage.”

Rey’s fingers press crescents into the cushion. Her eyes don’t leave the screen.

The doll turns her head a hair. Ben hums, sincerely approving for the first time all night.

Rey doesn’t move. She doesn’t even swallow when the pram rolls into frame and thunder shoulders down the street. The frames on her wall tilt a clean degree to the right; no one sees. The score sharpens; Finn tightens his blanket.

Ben leans nearer until the shape of his mouth is a heat-ghost by her cheek. “They never show the work,” he murmurs. “Only the ta-da. We are nothing but patience.”

Rey blinks too slowly and the doll is in a closet full of dresses. Fabric sways without wind. A tiny brush at Rey’s shoulder—air learning how sleeves move. She keeps still. The stillness feels prehistoric.

On screen: “It wants a soul.”

Ben laughs under his breath, delighted, unheard by anyone but her. “No, darling. We want attention. Souls are admin.”

Rey’s jaw stays locked.

The plot starts running downhill. Ben’s amusement slims to a knife. He stops annotating. He waits.

Rey can feel the wait.

“Let’s try their little tricks,” he says gently, as if he’s about to teach her a card game.

The fairy lights Rose unplugged exhale a single curl of smoke anyway, a spiteful hi that thins to nothing. The throw at Rey’s knees lifts an inch. Her wine—abandoned—quivers in its glass like a tiny animal dreaming. A pulse lands at the base of her skull—tap…tap-tap…tap—until her heartbeat is a metronome he owns.

She keeps still. She keeps still until still becomes a thing with edges.

Ben sighs, mock-put-upon. “Fine. I know. Already done" He sighs "Bigger.”

The living room stretches wrong. The corners step back. The ceiling learns height. The TV’s sepia deepens to something pond-black. Sound goes thin, like someone opened a window in her ears. Poe’s voice shrinks to a far-off cartoon; Finn’s crunching becomes a metropolis; Rose’s pen strokes are a guillotine.

The doll is in the room.

Not literally—she knows that; she knows that—but the chair by the window has her shape now, and the glass reflects a face that isn’t paper or paint and watches only Rey. Her throat closes around nothing.

Ben’s breath warms the hinge of her jaw. “Cheap,” he says, amused at himself. “Watch.”

He snaps invisible fingers.

The chair looks at her the way a dog does when it already knows you’ll say yes. The doll’s head tilts too far; the neck doesn’t break. The mouth opens; the hinges don’t creak. A hand with too many knuckles lifts from a skirt that’s never touched skin. The room tilts a degree more; the frames on her wall slide to keep up. The floor is a ship. The doll stands without standing.

Ben’s voice: pleasant as ever. “What if this were the shape of a truth.”

Rey’s lungs forget their job. She stares until staring hurts.

The doll—no, not a doll, a place for something to stand—is suddenly closer, between blink and blink, smiling with paint that has learned to fissure at the edges, and Rey has that awful, childlike certainty that if she looks away, it will be right there when she looks back.

She blinks anyway.

Something taller is on the ceiling: a shape like a man if a man were drawn wrong on wet plaster and slipped. Limbs a touch too long; joints a touch too many; a face with too much attention in it. It is not gore; it is geometry that hates her. It smiles and the walls sweat with the effort of not screaming. It lowers its face to hers without moving, patient as winter.

Ben doesn’t whisper. He doesn’t need to. “Do you have final girl energy?”

Rey folds, small and violent. Hands over eyes. She squeezes until she sees comets—white, red, green—until the darkness blooms with fireworks, until there is only pressure and breath and the old, cruel instinct to make herself smaller.

Something leans. The heat of a palm hovers over the curve of her skull, not touching, as merciless as almost. The ceiling thing laughs with no sound. The room narrows to hinge points: elbow, knee, throat. Her pulse is everywhere.

“Good,” Ben says, delighted, soft as a razor. “Now open.”

She won’t.

He waits.

He can. He said so: We are nothing but patience.

The room hums like an animal. The TV hisses sepia. Poe laughs at something far away, nervous and bright. Finn rustles. Rose’s pen ticks. Rain touches the glass. The ceiling breathes.

Rey opens her eyes.

Credits are going up.

The room is the room again. Couch. Table. Bowls. Wine. Fairy lights unplugged. Frames—still tilted, as if the house liked the new posture. Poe is a puddle two cushions down, face hidden in his hands. Finn is declaring, “Cartoon. Now.”

Ben is gone.

Rey’s body remembers being small an instant longer than is reasonable. She unfolds like she’s been wintered. Her hands leave crescents in the cushion. Her mouth is dry; she doesn’t use it.

Poe peeks through his fingers. “Awful,” he announces, voice too loud in the normal room. “Ten out of ten, I’m sleeping in the bath.”

“Dog detective,” Finn says, devout. “Please.”

“Fine,” Rose allows, smug and magnanimous at once.

Rey nods because that’s what a person does when a night ends. The menu bloops to life in clay and cheer. She watches the screen until the colors feel like an exhale. She doesn’t look at the window. She doesn’t look at the chair. She doesn’t look at the ceiling.

Somewhere between the gentle music and Poe’s wrecked commentary, she feels the faintest suggestion of heat at her shoulder—afterimage, echo, promise?—and tells herself it’s nothing.

Chapter Text

Rey woke to quiet that felt suspicious.

No heat leaning over the back of the sofa. No fingertip tapping the rhythm of her pulse. Just rain, steady on the window, and the soft, domestic chorus of sleep: Poe's congested purr from the living room, Finn's blanket rustle, Rose's decisive turn that made the springs complain and then apologize.

She lay on her back and counted the ordinary. Drip from the bathroom tap. Radiator's thin sigh. A bus groaning up the hill. Next door's kettle clicking on like a lighthouse. Her phone lit her face ghost-blue when she thumbed it awake: three memes from Poe (sent at 2:07 a.m., chaos), a link from Finn to an article about "why we scare ourselves on purpose," Rose's bullet-list of "things our building should be ashamed of" (one: soundproofing; two: hallway light that thinks it's a strobe).

She scrolled until her eyes stopped trying to find reflections in the black parts of the screen. For fifteen clean minutes she let the rain be everything. The door to her bedroom banged open without ceremony. "Let's go shopping," Rose said, hair up like a mission, eyes bright in a way that meant she'd slept four hours and called it excellent.

Rey tipped her head back against "But..."

"I'll let you pick the music," Rose offered, already winning. Rey gave a small nod.

They made the kind of morning only friends can make: bad coffee that tasted good, toothbrushes brandished like swords as they cut through the bathroom queue, Finn making eggs in Rey's too-small pan like it was a puzzle, Poe singing the wrong harmony on purpose until Rose threw dishcloths at him, laughter at nothing and everything because it felt like air, because sleep had sanded their nerves back down to human.

Rey caught herself, twice, glancing at the kitchen window for letters in the fog that wasn't there. She caught herself, once, listening for two soft taps on glass and hearing only rain. The absence throbbed in its own way, like a bruise you keep testing.

By eleven, they were shoved into jackets; by eleven-oh-five, Poe had negotiated out of leaving the sofa; by eleven-ten, Rose hauled him up anyway and threatened him with sensible shoes. The hallway plant on the landing—Mrs. Jones's basil—looked healthier than it had any right to. Rey thumbed a leaf; it sprang back as if pleased.

Outside, the rain was steady and uninterested in drama. Pavement shone. Shop windows fogged along the edges like shy laughter. Rey chose a playlist heavy on jangly guitars and women who sounded like they'd broken their own hearts on purpose; Rose nodded solemnly, which was how she said good.

They did normal: charity shops with crooked mirrors, a hardware store that smelled like timber and mother's warnings, the big homeware place where every lamp thought it was an apology.

They ate chips under an awning and let vinegar clear their heads. Poe told a story about a girl in his building who skateboards into the lift; Finn fed a chip to a dog and apologised to his owner like he'd committed a minor theological error. Rey laughed at all the right places and a few of the wrong ones just to make the line.

No Ben in the glass when she checked. No heat finding the soft under her ear when she leaned under the awning and pretended the rain could baptize her out of last night. Her shoulders realized halfway through the chips that they could drop an inch. Her jaw remembered it didn't have to be a fist.

The peace wasn't pure. It never would be now. The edges of her vision still wanted to sneak, the way you look over a cliff because it's a cliff. But the day held, ordinary and stubborn: Rose bargaining with a cashier over a discount sticker like dueling with spoons; Finn insisting on carrying the heaviest bag because good men are clichés; Poe arguing with the rain about frizz and losing.

"I have to go guys! Work tomorrow" she sighed like a boring person. Hugs at the corner. Promises to text. She walked home under a sky that couldn't be bothered to stop raining and felt—miracle—nothing riding her shoulder. No heat at her ear. No frames flirting on their hooks. Just the city breathing and her boots slapping the wet.

Inside, the flat was obediently itself. She locked the door twice because habit's a charm, tossed her keys in the bowl, and ordered Chinese with the speed of a woman who wanted salt more than company. Shower on. Steam. Shampoo. The mirror fogged and stayed a mirror. She caught herself waiting; she told herself not to be pathetic and washed her hair twice just to spend the quiet.

Knock. Takeout. She traded cash for a heavy plastic bag and a "have a good night" from a teenager who had eyeliner she envied. Back on the sofa, she unpacked cartons like small, edible gifts—kung pao, egg fried rice, sesame prawn toast—and found the chopsticks at the bottom.

She needed noise that wasn't her own head. Netflix. Hush.

Good choice: a woman who refuses to die quietly. Rey curled into the corner, tucked the throw over her bare knees, and let the first minutes pull her forward: the cabin, the cat, the slow build. She ate like a person: fast, messy, content enough for her jaw to unclench.

"I swear to god that cat is so cute" Rey said to herself chewing on some noodles.

Halfway through, the movie tightened. The bad guy and the girl faced each other through glass. He took his mask off. The camera held. Rey had been staring longer than shed hoped. She lifted her carton for the next bite.

"Boo," someone said, delighted.

Ben was kneeling on the sofa back two inches behind her shoulder, chin on his wrist, smiling at the screen like he'd been there all night.

The takeout carton went everywhere—rice like confetti, sauce like a crime scene on her throw. Rey's scream tore itself out raw. She jackknifed off the cushions, caught the edge of the coffee table, clipped one shin hard enough to see sparks, and scrambled backwards on hands and heels until her spine hit the bookshelf.

For a heartbeat, all she could hear was the film's thin soundscape—wind, footsteps—and her own breath tearing at the air. Her hands skated in spilled rice. A prawn toast stuck to her palm absurdly and fell.

Ben laughed, low and pleased, the way you laugh when a magic trick lands. He stayed perched where he was, long body folded lazy, elbow hooked, eyes bright with a private game.

"Miss me, little one?" he asked, sugar-sin sweet.

Rey's throat worked around air like it had bones in it. She couldn't make her mouth find a word. Every hair from scalp to ankle prickled so hard it hurt. The TV light framed him in cold blue; his edges looked heat-hazed, wrong and handsome.

On screen, the killer tapped the glass door to get the girl's attention.

"On theme," he murmured, satisfied. "Film club and I are aligned."

She pushed one boot under herself, got her knee under, failed to stand because the rug had decided to be water. Her shin throbbed a hot, hard line. She realized she was shaking only when the chopsticks rattled where they'd rolled.

"Careful," Ben said, kind, as if to a toddler. "You'll stain."

The movie's heroine turned, game-faced; the killer smiled right into the frame.

Ben leaned, the warm shape of his mouth close enough to press, not touching, cruel as ever. "See?" he said softly, amusement like a knife rocked on a stone. "Cheap tricks work on screens. Mine work here."

Rey dragged a breath in deep enough to hurt. "Get out," she rasped, which wasn't a rule; it was a reflex. She forced herself up to a stand anyway, rice sticking to her knee, carton foot printed into the throw, heart loud enough that when the movie went momentarily silent—no score, just breath—she thought it might be audible.

Ben's smile went smaller and worse.

The killer on the TV put his face to the glass. Ben tilted his head—same angle, same lazy interest—and met Rey's eyes like he owned the room and therefore didn't need to hurry.

"Shh," he said again, purely for the pleasure of it.

Rey's breath became a thing she had to remember how to do. She took a step—back? forward?—and the room rocked once like a boat before settling. She blinked.

Rice underfoot. Cartons on the table. Throw ruined. The lamp she'd bought today burned steady and obedient. The room was a room. The window was just rain. Ben was gone.

Rey stood in the middle of it, shaking. When her voice finally remembered itself, it came out small and furious.

"Asshole," she told the empty room.

She cleaned what she could of the rice and rage, killed the TV, and left the ruined throw like a crime scene she'd file later. The lamp held steady, obedient light. The window was only rain. She checked twice.

Bed found her in the way cliffs do: because she kept leaning. She didn't check the mirror. She didn't check the kitchen. She didn't say anything brave to the dark. She got under the covers and lay very still until the stillness changed shape.

Sleep came like a trapdoor.

At first: ordinary dream-junk. A queue that led into another queue. Rose arguing with a cashier about the ethics of discount stickers while wearing a nun's habit.

Then the sound started.

Not a sound you hear. A sound you know. Low. Satisfied. From everywhere.

The dream shuffled. The shop was the church. The church was her flat.

She was alone.

No, not alone.

"Hello, little one," he said, and even in the dream it was the shape of his mouth near her ear that made the words land.

"I'm asleep," to no one.

"Yes."

The planchette was on the coffee table, under a tumbler, under water. Tiny bubbles clung to the wood like secrets. The board lay beneath, letters you couldn't trust.

He didn't show himself at first. He used the room.

The lamp blinked—on, off, on—with the patience of a pulse. The kitchen tap ran for exactly one second, cut, ran for exactly one second, cut. The radiator breathed in time with her, then didn't, so she had to pick a rhythm or drown. On the window, a fingertip she could not see wrote slowly through fog that wasn't fog:

H U S H

She wanted to laugh and couldn't find the place her mouth had been put.

"Cheap tricks," he said, amused at himself. "You deserve better."

He flicked her dream with two fingers. Like a page on a book.

The flat's dimensions buckled. Distance grew slow and syrup-thick; near things turned merciless and close. The hallway stretched like chewing gum. The bedroom door moved a foot to the left because it wanted to. When she stepped, her iron key got heavier against her sternum as if it were being remembered by the metal it used to be.

She looked down at her hands and they were clean. She looked up and they were red to the wrists.

"You don't get to control me" she stuttered.

"I already am," he said cheerfully. "Turn around."

She didn't.

He moved the room again.

Poe was on her sofa, laughing into his hands at something she couldn't see; Finn was on the rug, blanket up to his chin, eyes on a screen that wasn't there; Rose sat cross-legged with a notebook.

They weren't people. Not quite. They were photographs teaching themselves to breathe. Shadows cut in wrong places. Their mouths moved in loops. When she tried to speak to them, her voice arrived late by a full second and then came back twice like an echo if an echo could smirk.

"Don't," she said, or meant to, and hated how it felt like begging not to be humored.

"They're fine," he said, not looking at them at all. "You're very good at loving your distractions."

He stepped where she would not turn.

Ben was taller in the dream, not by inches but by attention. His edges wavered like heat seen from a road. His eyes were not a color the room had agreed to. A shadow set a crown on him when he leaned into light. He smiled, the old wrong-beautiful, and too many candles leaned back as if flattered.

"Walk," he suggested.

She did.

The corridor of her flat thought it was a nave now, old tiles and old water and ages of footsteps learning the same shapes. The bathroom door breathed. The mirror inside was black—not off, not reflective; recessed, like a pond you wouldn't put your hand in. She did anyway. The glass was warm like an animal.

The warmth shut on her wrist.

"Let go," Rey said, and heard the prayer in it.

The grip tightened one hair. "Practice," he said, pleased at the lesson she hadn't agreed to. "Say it."

"What?"

"My name."

Her jaw locked. She hadn't given him one out loud, not in a room that counted. She'd only thought it at a café like it'd been placed there. The true one hung behind him like a coat he didn't need to wear yet.

"I don't—" she started.

He laughed softly. "You do."

The mirror's black ran itself up her arm to her elbow, not touch but decision, cold as a river and the opposite of drowning. Breath stuttered. The bathroom shrank to a throat.

"No," she managed, and the refusal pleased him the way cliff-edges please people who build wings.

"I am patient," he said, as if sharing a family secret.

The room decided to be the church again to save her from something, and failed. The Church opened around her with her flat's furniture obediently inside it: sofa in the nave, lamp on the altar, kettle plugging itself into a stone pillar and clicking on in slow increments.

He was on the back of the sofa again, elbow hooked, as if he'd been there all night and had only let her notice now. "Come here," he said, and the words were polite the way weather is polite until it's not.

She didn't go. He came without moving.

"Cheap tricks." He snapped invisible fingers.

The frames on her walls hinged out and in like eyelids. The cupboard doors thudded like a heartbeat you could point to. The throw lifted and settled as if a cat had reconsidered getting in her lap. The lamp spun its dimmer to the exact darkness he liked. The window wrote MINE. She kept her head still and still saw all of it.

"Better," he decided, smug about his own restraint. Then, softer—knife sheathed but present: "Open your mouth."

She did.

A breath slid in, warm and deliberate. Not a kiss. He wouldn't give her that. It was the pressure of a kiss held a half-inch away and poured into her instead of placed. The shape of a word balanced on her tongue and didn't fall.

"Say it," he suggested, because cruelty is a flavour, not a volume.

Her hands balled against her thighs until her nails found skin. "No."

The room moved again and she didn't. The ceiling lowered. Something unfolded from it—a geometry that wanted to be a man and had learned impatience. Limbs a fraction too long, joints a few too many, a head cocked at an angle that would hurt a person and suited him fine. The smile was patient and wrong and so focused that her muscles forgot all their names. Horns.

He let her see him. He liked her afraid and present, not fleeing.

"Lets try this" he said, cheerful, and then he started.

He didn't touch. That was the joke. The cruelest trick of all: almost. A palm hovered over her crown and the memory of touch made her bones obey. Two fingers passed through the air by her wrist and her pulse altered course. His mouth hovered a hair from the soft under her ear and her breath became work.

He walked around her without walking. The flat/chapel obeyed. The iron key at her throat flipped twice and a line of heat followed it down, sternum to navel, naming her bones. Her name wrote itself on the black mirror without steam. R E Y. He rearranged the letters with a fingertip she couldn't see. Y E R. E R Y. M I N E. The mirror liked the last one best and kept it.

The bell bled through the walls again, nearer. At her shoulder, frames ticked meaninglessly against the plaster. On the sofa, the planchette knocked the tumbler: one, two. The kettle clicked on, a metronome. He tapped the back of the couch to the same rhythm: tap...tap-tap...tap, until her heart obeyed and then he stopped so she would have to decide whether to keep time alone.

The thing on the ceiling leaned down and put its attention inches from her mouth. She shut her eyes because looking at it might break something she hadn't named yet.

He waited.

She opened her eyes to credits climbing a black screen.

The lamp: steady. The frames: tilted, loyal to their new angle. Rice: a memory. Hands: clean. Throat: sore like she'd shouted into a pillow or swallowed something too hot. Wrist: faint ache under the skin—

She turned it in the light. Four pale ovals. The suggestion of a thumb. Not bruises. Not yet. Future tense. A promise.

The clock stuttered to 3:33 and decided to mean it. Rain worked the glass like patient fingers. From the kitchen: two quiet taps against nothing. She flung herself back against the pillow staring at the ceiling with red eyes. Tired. Exhausted.

Chapter Text

The pub breathed like an old dog: low, contented, a little wheezy. Tuesday rain sluiced the windows, turned the street outside to a smeared painting. Inside, everything was polished and waiting—the brass rail, the taps lined up like teeth, the bowls of crisps no one would touch until a second pint made them brave.

Rey was on the wrong side of awake.

She’d done the opening rituals until they felt like spells: till counted, ice welled, limes quartered, the chalkboard specials written and then rewritten because the S in “sausage” kept looking sinister. Now there was only the soft drone of the beer fridge, the hum of the glasswasher, and the BBC subtitles marching across a muted telly in the corner. Time was syrup. Her eyelids were a suggestion from gravity.

Paul, the manager, had vanished to “do invoices” (play sudoku) in the back. One regular snoozed over a half of bitter and a crossword, pencil still upright behind his ear as if his brain had run out before the clue did. A couple in the snug were arguing very politely about whether to buy a dehumidifier. Rain kept time on the panes.

Rey leaned her hip against the bar and polished a glass that was already a saint. She blinked—and her head dipped—and the glass kissed the rubber mat with a soft, embarrassing thup. She rescued it. “Alive,” she told it, and herself, and the CCTV that definitely didn’t care.

Her phone buzzed in her apron: Poe’s photo of the HELLO sign installed and behaving (“it fears me”), Finn’s calendar invite for “not-horror brunch,”

The door creaked. A gust shouldered in and gave up. No one. The brass bell above the frame decided not to ring about it.

Rey poured a soda for herself and drank it like it might have opinions about her staying awake. The sugar hit and then lied; a yawn pried her face open anyway. She checked the clock. It had not, in fact, been three hours. It had been seven minutes.

She did the napkin fold. She did it again in triangles that made no sense. She straightened the beer mats into a constellation only she would ever notice. She drew a small, tidy moth in the corner of the specials board because her hand wanted to draw something.

Her body kept performing wakefulness while somewhere behind her eyes a dream elbowed in.

It came like a nod-off: the way gravity picks you up by the chin and tips you. For a second the pub stretched wrong—ceiling a hair too high, the brass rail farther away than physics allowed, the mirror behind the spirits darkening like a pond. She saw herself in it twice—one Rey, then two—and behind the second a long, lazy figure leaned, elbow hooked, chin on his fist like he’d been there all night, eyes bright and privately amused.

“Little one,” he murmured, pleasant as sin.

Rey jerked upright. The mirror was a mirror again. Her heart executed a needless drum solo. The crossword regular snorted himself awake, blinked at her as if she’d shouted, and went back to pretending four-down mattered more than rain.

“Coffee?” Paul’s voice drifted from the back, the hollow echo of someone standing between crates.

“Please,” Rey said, and it scritched out sandpaper-dry.

He appeared long enough to thump a mug down, slop in something tar-black from a pot that had been alive before noon, and vanish to invoice his sudoku. Rey blew on the surface and swallowed half while it still tasted like punishment. The burn grabbed her throat and forced her to exist.

Ten minutes of ordinary. A couple more polite dehumidifier barbs. The door thinking about thinking and deciding not to. Rey refilled the crisp bowls, because that was a thing hands could do that wasn’t tremble.

She blinked again. The blink lasted a fraction too long.

When her eyes opened, the chalkboard cursive had changed.

Not the words. The hand. Her tidy moth had been joined by another, larger, a smear of black chalk wings that hadn’t been there, shadowing the specials in a way that made the word hushpuppies (leftover brainstorm, crossed out) into HUSH. She stared until the letters went back to what they were, until chalk was chalk again. The board wore the ghost of it like a memory.

“Hey,” the crossword man said suddenly, to no one. “You’ve got a draught.”

“Story of my life,” Rey said, and the joke landed where it needed to.

Quiet resumed, dense and good. The clock conceded five minutes. Rain dropped a gear. Rey poured a half for the crossword and pushed it across when he gestured, joyful because a thing had happened and she could hand it to someone.

A glass at the far end of the bar chimed, a small, polite note as if a finger had circled its rim.

Rey didn’t look. She looked. Nothing there but tidy rows, her face small and pale in the reflection, and—if she wanted—a heat-blur on the edge of vision the shape of a man built to be leaned on.

She filled the drip tray with busywork. She counted the till again and invented a coin she hoped would show up. She texted Poe a picture of the empty pub with the caption: you would die here. He sent back a selfie from his sofa with a dog filter and three skull emojis. Finn wrote: eat something. She ate two stale crisps and called it compliance.

By nine, the polite couple had gone to buy their dehumidifier and save their relationship. The crossword man folded his paper like he was tucking in a child and left coins lined with care. Paul came up to lean on the bar and complain about suppliers like the apocalypse had started in the lager fridge and no one had told him. Rey nodded and mm-hmmed and remembered every third word.

Her eyelids did that slow, treacherous slide.

“Don’t,” a voice said, amused, close as the mirror.

She looked up so fast her neck clacked.

Nothing. The mirror was bottles and her and the telly throwing footballers into glass.

The bell above the door decided, for once, to ring a single note. No one came in. It sounded pleased with itself.

“Last orders?” Paul said, hopeful and lying to both of them.

“Could be,” Rey said.

They did the motions early: stools flipped legs-up on tables; drip trays dumped; limes swept into a deli tub like they could be tomorrows. The pub grew into its closing shape—smaller, more honest, the kind of quiet that asks if you’re ready to be alone with it.

Rey was very ready and not at all.

She killed the telly. The mirror kept its own light a second longer, like a pond keeping the sky after sunset. She pocketed her apron, grabbed her coat, checked the bolt twice. Outside, the rain had stopped pretending to be anything but itself. Pavement shone. The world smelled like wet iron and chips.

No heat at her ear. No tap…tap-tap…tap at her wrist. Only the sound of her soles and the city asking a late, soft question.

“Night,” Paul called, lighting a cigarette under the pub’s awning like a ritual.

“Night,” Rey said, and meant it.

She got three doors down before the bell with no bell rang once, low and pleased, from nowhere at all.

She didn’t turn around. She walked on, spine a straight line, and told herself tomorrow she would sleep like someone who’d earned it.

The pub locked behind her with that hollow clunk that means you’re definitely out of excuses. Rain had rinsed the night clean; the air smelled like wet iron and vinegar. Rey cut left for the chippy because she already knew the truth about eggs and pans and willpower.

Fluorescents. Grease heat you could lean on. She ordered large chips, extra salt, “go rude with the vinegar, please,” and watched the paper bloom translucent as they wrapped it. The kid at the counter slid her a little wooden fork like a blessing. Outside again, the bag was a hand-warmer and a promise. She ate two chips straight from the top and felt almost human.

“Boo,” said someone, delighted, right at her shoulder.

She dropped the bag. Chips went everywhere like confetti at the worst wedding. The little fork skittered into a puddle and floated there, heroic and doomed. Rey’s scream scraped out raw before her brain could vote. She pivoted hard enough on wet pavement to nearly sit down.

Ben straightened from the shadow of a shuttered florist as if the night had just decided to wear him. Dark jacket, hands in pockets until they weren’t. Wrong-beautiful and pleased with himself.

“Miss me, little one?” he asked, sugar-sin sweet.

“Fuck off,” she managed, and her voice sounded in the air like a sparrow trying to insult a hawk.

He laughed, soft and delighted. “No.”

He started walking beside her without walking. His steps didn’t make sound. Hers did, suddenly too loud, too separate, like the street wanted to hear her coming.

She bent for the chip bag; it skated just out of reach, nudged by nothing. He let her chase it three stupid feet, then let it be caught. She clutched it like a child and started for home with the quick, not-panicked walk of someone refusing to give the dark a show.

Shopfronts watched. In the glass of the travel agency window, her reflection walked alone—then with a heat-haze of a taller shape at her shoulder. She blinked; alone again. He chuckled for her ear only. Tap-tap—two polite knocks sounded on the inside of the glass as she passed. No one inside. Closed. Lights off. She kept walking.

At the bus shelter, the plastic panel breathed condensation from nowhere; a fingertip she couldn’t see wrote HUSH backward from the other side so she could read it from the pavement. She didn’t stop. He drifted a half-step ahead, walking backwards now, grin private, eyes bright like knives kept oiled.

“Long day?” he asked, like a boyfriend who had not broken into your life via séance and cruelty. “You look tired.”

“Go haunt a mirror,” Rey said. “Or traffic.”

“Oh, I like your traffic.” He pointed lazily with two fingers. A car slid through the far intersection much too fast, tires hissing. For a blink the headlights cocked toward her like attention. She took a step back without meaning to. The car kept on, ordinary and uncaring. Ben’s mouth tipped. “See? Cheap tricks.”

Her whole body was a metronome now, the pulse everywhere, heel to jaw. He matched her rhythm with two fingers against a bus timetable—tap…tap-tap…tap—until she wanted to scream at a metal pole. She didn’t. She walked.

An alley’s mouth yawned black. Something in it leaned, then didn’t, the way cats test and decide you’re not worth the sprint. Ben’s attention slid that way and back like a tide. He didn’t have to say mine; the space did it for him, receding around them as if the night liked his gravity.

He nipped at her boundaries all the way up the hill. Her coat hem caught on nothing. Fingers—absolutely fingers—tugged at her hood and let go so it snapped against her throat. He hummed the melody of some lullaby that had never belonged to people. A streetlight above them blinked off-on-off exactly to his bored “boom…boom,” and she hated that part of her counted and found it perfect.

“Stop it,” she said, useless.

“Make me,” he said, delighted at the invitation she hadn’t intended.

They passed the off-license. In the window reflection, he leaned in and breathed the soft under her ear without touching. Heat licked her skin and left nothing. “Hungry?” he asked. “You dropped dinner.”

“I have a bag,” she said, because the human brain will cling to inventory as lifeline. She held it up. He plucked a chip out without touching the paper, tossed it in the air, and snapped it from the air with his teeth like a parlour trick. Nothing actually moved. She still heard the bite in her head.

“You should eat,” he said, mock-kind. “Mortals get…fragile.”

“Eat me,” she said, and wished she could stuff the words back into the idiot who’d said them.

He lit up, laughing so quietly it only existed between her skin and her shirt. “Later.”

He started mimicking Poe’s voice again—“Text when you’re inside!”—then Rose’s—“We’re done. Session closed.”—then Finn’s soft, steady “Breathe, Rey,” and each landed a half-note wrong like a singer just enjoying the hurt. She walked faster. He matched without moving.

Her building hove up, a Victorian chopped to flats and forgiven because the windows were generous. The entryway light flickered as if it wanted to be dramatic but also knew Rose had bought a new bulb. She put her key in; the lock turned obligingly. Ben’s heat tipped closer behind her shoulder, polite as a gentleman at a door learned from a knife.

“Say please,” he suggested.

“For what?”

“For quiet.”

She didn’t beg. She went in. She also knew he wouldn't stop if she begged.

The stairwell was a tunnel of damp and echoes. Mrs. Jones’s basil made a shadow on the landing like a listening ear. Rey’s boots sounded like someone else wearing them. Ben’s steps didn’t, which was worse. On the second flight, a fingertip skated up the back of her calf above her boot, lazy as a cat. She almost kicked; didn’t; hated herself for both.

Her door stuck then gave. She stepped inside, tossed the keys to the bowl, locked the deadbolt twice. Ben slid past her without moving and turned her lamp on just to prove he could; it obeyed, steady and white. He glanced at it, approving. “You chose well,” he said, and the compliment made her furious.

She set the bag of chips on the table with shaking hands. A wooden fork fell out, improbable survivor. She picked a chip and forced it into her mouth because bodies need salt more than fear. He watched her chew with interest like she was teaching him something.

Two polite taps came from the kitchen window. She didn’t look. He smiled like she had.

“Good night, little one,” he said, every syllable pure promise.

“Get out,” Rey said, which wasn’t a rule and wasn’t an order. It was a wish thrown into a well to see if water answers.

He leaned in until the warmth of his mouth hovered a breath from her cheek—never touching, mercilessly almost. “Make me,” he said again, delighted, and then he wasn’t there.

The lamp kept burning, steady as a dog. The flat held its shape. Rey stood in the middle of it with vinegar on her tongue and cold air under her skin and told herself out loud, “Eat. Shower. Bed.” She did exactly that in that order, because ritual is a raft and home is a verb.

Rey wiped steam off the mirror with the edge of her hand and told her reflection, “bed,” like it was a command that could stick. She hung the towel, pulled on an oversized T-shirt, and opened the bathroom door into the dim of her room.

Ben was sitting on her bed like he’d paid rent—long legs relaxed, hands braced behind him, wrong-beautiful face turned toward the window as if admiring the rain he hadn’t brought. The new lamp cast him in obedient light; his edges looked heat-hazed anyway.

She stopped dead. Her heartbeat did the stupid drumroll thing and then forgot the beat.

“Why me?” she asked, because every other sentence in her throat was just air. “Why are you bothering me and no one else?”

His mouth curved, private. “Hello to you too, little one.”

“Answer.”

He tipped his head, considering the room, the crooked frames, her, as if choosing which truth would be most fun. “Because you opened the door.”

“I didn’t—”

“You did.” He tapped two fingers on the mattress in a tidy rhythm—tap…tap-tap…tap—her pulse, not the rain’s. “You said yes first. You bled on the board. You looked into the dark. I like people who don't obey.”

She folded her arms tighter across her chest. “Plenty of idiots say yes to things.”

“Mm.” He smiled without showing teeth. “But you’re different. In here.” He flicked a fingertip in the air at chest height, and her iron key—lying on the nightstand—twitched, flipped twice, and settled like it had agreed. “Your attention tastes…better. You don’t look away properly. You try, then you test the edge again. I enjoy that.”

“My friends didn’t look away,” she said, defensive, automatic.

“They looked past,” he corrected, amused. “Good, sensible humans. They keep their rooms neat. I can knock on their cupboards; they’ll blame the pipes. You?” His eyes warmed with a mean fondness. “You hear a knock and look.”

She swallowed. The lamp hummed. The rain showed its seams.

“And,” he added, lazy, “you named me.”

“I didn’t.” It came out thin. She hadn’t said it aloud. Not really.

“You did,” he said again, pleased with the secret they were pretending not to share. “Even when you only thought it. Names are leashes if you use them right. You haven’t, yet. Delicious.”

She took a step toward the dresser like she meant to be busy. He watched her move the way storms watch trees. “So that’s it? I’m interesting?”

“That’s part,” he said. “The other part is mine.”

The word landed low. The frames ticked their wrong little angle as if they agreed.

“Pick someone else,” she said, and hated how much it sounded like begging.

He laughed softly, delighted. “No.”

She stared at him until her eyes watered just to have something to do. “You could ruin me.”

“I could,” he said, mild as weather. “But I won’t. Yet.” honest as a blade: “I like you afraid and present.”

Heat gathered where his hand pressed into the duvet, near her knee but not touching. The mattress dimpled, the invitation merciless because it was nothing more than space offered.

“Go to sleep, little one,” he said, voice pleasant as sin. “Dreams are easier. Fewer witnesses.”

“If you'll let me,” she said, which wasn’t an order so much as a wish with teeth.

“we'll see" he murmured, delighted, and rose without rising—simply un-arranged himself from the light and wasn’t there.

The lamp kept burning steady. The room remembered how to be a room. On the nightstand, the iron key lay where she’d left it, warm as if someone had just held it. From the kitchen, very softly, came two polite taps against nothing at all.

Rey sat on the edge of the bed until the drum in her chest learned a slower song. Then she lay down because gravity is a story she could still obey, and stared at the ceiling long enough to believe it would hold. When she finally closed her eyes, rain wrote patient lines on the glass and the word he hadn’t made her say hovered at the back of her tongue like a coin she refused to spend.

Chapter Text

Rey woke to war.

Every light in the flat was strobing—on/off/on/off—like the place had learned Morse code for panic. The telly howled static; the Bluetooth speaker she never used coughed itself awake; the radio app on her phone had chosen a station at random and was evangelizing about mattresses at top volume. The kettle clicked on-off-on like a woodpecker. The new lamp—a sweet, obedient thing yesterday—flickered boom…boom in time with her pulse.

Her clock read 4:00. Blinked. 4:00. Blinked. 4:00.

“Ben!” she shouted, voice raw, because there was no point pretending it was wiring.

The room laughed with electricity.

Picture frames began to tilt, not one degree this time but all the way to wrong—clack…clack…clack—like teeth. The kitchen cupboards thudded open and shut out of rhythm. The bathroom fan whined itself into a banshee and died; the mirror in there, door half ajar, glowed black like a pond at midnight.

Rey stumbled out of bed, feet slapping wood, shirt twisted, hair a feral flag. “Ben!” She had to shout over the static and the radio and a children’s song the speaker had found just to be cruel. “Enough!”

The window fogged from the inside in one breath, then in heavy strokes wrote:

H U S H

She nearly laughed at the audacity, then didn’t, because the telly hiccupped and switched to the Hush home screen all by itself, like he’d been waiting on the pun.

“Turn it off!” she yelled—at him, at the room, at the kettle, which clicked on again in gleeful defiance.

He didn’t appear first. He conducted.

Two fingers—or nothing—tapped the mattress once: tap…tap-tap…tap, and the lights obeyed, syncing to it. On the third beat the radio cut and the telly screamed a violin note only dogs should hear. Rey clapped her hands over her ears and the sound crawled through anyway, skin-level, like ants.

She made it to the hallway, swore when the rocker scraped one long no across the floor without moving, and shouldered into the living room as if momentum could save her. The new lamp went full sun; the fairy lights she hadn’t plugged in exhaled smoke anyway and spelled HI before thinning. Her phone, face-down on the table, lit and vibrated with no messages—buzz-buzz-buzz—like a heart going wrong.

“Ben!” She hated how much it sounded like a plea. “Stop!”

The noise snapped off like a throat cut.

Silence slammed so hard her ears rang.

Only the rain outside continued, honest and uninterested.

Rey stood in the middle of her obediently still flat, chest heaving, hands shaking, and said, lower, “Why?”

A slow clap came from behind her head.

He was perched on the back of the sofa again, long and lazy, wrong-beautiful mouth slanted into a private smile, applauding once more for effect. “Good morning, little one,” Ben said, tone pure breakfast-radio cheer. “You’re up.”

She wanted to throw something. She settled for words she could lift. “What the hell was that?”

“An alarm,” he said, lightly. “You sleep through subtle.”

She gestured at everything that had been on fire seconds ago. “This isn’t subtle! My neighbors—”

“Mortals dream hard,” he said. “They’ll blame wind. Or pipes. Or the fox they all pretend not to feed.” His gaze ran over her, inventory with intent, and his mouth tucked into a pleased line at the ruin of her hair. “You’re very pretty confused.”

“Die,” she said, because the brain does not always route through diplomacy at 4 a.m.

“Later,” he said, pleased. “Breakfast?”

The kettle clicked on by itself in obedient agreement. She yanked the plug. It continued boiling anyway and then gave up in a huff as if insulted.

Rey pressed her palms to the table and tried to staple her breath down. “Why four?”

He considered her for the fun of it. “Because three is cliché. And four is honest.” He tipped his chin at the clock. It still read 4:00. “Also, I like zeros.”

“Stop touching my things.”

He looked delighted. “No.”

The bathroom fan hiccupped once; the mirror breathed black. She refused to look down that throat. “What do you want?” Rey demanded, throat sore on the shape of the question.

Ben’s smile went smaller, worse. Fond, the way storms are fond of trees they’ve decided to keep—for now. “Your attention,” he said, as if that were tender. “And your fear. And your yes.” A beat. “Not necessarily in that order.”

She swallowed so hard it clicked. “There are other people who—”

“Say yes quieter,” he interrupted, courteous as a knife. “They close their eyes properly. You don’t.” He drummed two fingers on the sofa back—tap…tap-tap…tap—and her heart, traitor, tried to meet it. He stopped so she’d have to decide whether to keep the beat alone.

“Don’t do this again,” she managed.

His eyebrows lifted into polite inquiry. “Don’t do what?”

“Wake the building. Wake me.” She hated the fold in her voice on that last word. “Like that.”

A breath of heat leaned past her ear, not touching, merciless as almost. “Ask nicely.”

“Please,” she said, before pride could catch up.

“Good girl,” he murmured, pleased he’d made her spend it.

The clock twitched to 4:01, as if granting a wish. Every light steadied. The flat remembered how to be a room and held.

She exhaled and sagged into the nearest chair because gravity is a rule even demons respect. The aftermath tremble set in, fine-grained and everywhere. She rubbed her palms down her thighs to make it look like she was smoothing fabric, not hands.

“Coffee,” she said, defaulting to ritual like a raft. “I’m making coffee.”

“I’ll watch,” he said, undramatic and somehow worse.

She went through the motions—grind, scoop, water—aware of his weight on the sofa back like a second horizon. When the kettle finished sulking and boiled at her command, when the pour filled the room with something human and bitter, when the mug burned her palms and asked her to exist, she could almost pretend this was a morning she’d chosen.

Ben leaned, his mouth a heat-ghost near her cheek. “You’re learning,” he said, happy as a cat by a radiator. “Four suits you.”

She blew on the surface and didn’t look at him. “Why?”

“Because it’s when you stop lying to yourself about sleep.” He tapped the clock with his attention. 4:02. “And because it’s when I don’t have to share you.”

Something in her bucked at that—anger with teeth, or fear with an ego. She looked him dead on then, even if the look made her bones feel seen. “You don’t own me.”

“Not yet,” he said, gentle as a promise. “Eat something, little one. Mortals get fragile.”

“Stop calling me that.”

He grinned. “No.”

The window, obedient to no one, gathered rain and let it run. The frames stayed wrong on their hooks, pleased with themselves. From the kitchen, two soft taps answered nothing.

Rey drank, burned her tongue, and let it count as victory. When she set the mug down, the clock said 4:04, stubborn with zeros again. She laughed once, sharp, because the alternative was not laughing, and looked away first because she was allowed to choose small mercies.

“Wake me at seven,” she said, because if he wanted to be an alarm, he could be useful.

“Okay” Ben purred, delighted.

She didn’t give him another coin. She took her mug to the window and watched the rain and let the quiet fill the spaces the noise had scraped raw. Behind her, the sofa creaked the way wood does under a long, relaxed weight. When she glanced back, he was gone.

The light stayed steady. The clock ticked 4:05. For the first time since the siren of it all, the silence didn’t feel like it had teeth. She breathed until the breath sounded like hers again.

Then she turned every switch off herself, just to prove she could, slid back into bed, and stared at the ceiling until it agreed to hold. If she dreamed, the bell with no bell kept time, patient and pleased, and she woke to her own alarm at seven—phone vibrating like a good dog—until the kettle clicked on by itself, obedient as sin.

Seven a.m. arrived as a fingertip to the tip of her nose.

Boop.

Rey’s eyes flew open to Ben lying on his side beside her, head propped on one hand like this was a rom-com and not a haunting. Wrong-beautiful face inches away. Smile small and satisfied. The pillow dipped where his shoulder wasn’t.

She made a noise that was mostly vowel and gravity did the rest. She rolled—too fast, too far—straight off the mattress. The bedside table cut in, sharp corner to temple. Stars. A thunk that would bruise later. She landed on the rug and the rug decided to be concrete.

“Ow,” she said, eloquent.

Above, the mattress creaked with the weight of a very amused sin.

“Rise and shine, little one,” Ben purred, leaning over the edge. His hair fell wrong in a way that made you think about hands. He booped her nose again with nothing at all. The air touched her. She flinched anyway.

“Why are you like this,” Rey groaned, clutching her head. Her fingers came away clean; it still felt like the table had signed its name on her skull.

He considered—magnanimous, thoughtful, cruel. “Practice.”

“Get out of my bed.”

“You left me in it.” He glanced at the empty dip like it had been offered on a silver tray.

She pushed herself upright, blinking through the ache. The lamp was obediently steady; the window was obediently rain; the iron key on the nightstand had flipped itself twice and settled like it had opinions.

“That’s not...” she muttered.

“Anchors and invitations,” he added, all patience. He tapped two fingers on the mattress—tap…tap-tap…tap—her pulse, not the rain’s. “Also, you look very pretty when you wake violent.”

“My head’s bleeding,” she lied on reflex.

He tilted his own, indulgent. “No. But thank you for the attempt.”

She stood, wobbled, caught the table that had assaulted her. The corner stared back, smug. “You can’t just—” She gestured at him. At the bed. At the whole damn morning.

“I can,” he said, pleased. “And did. Alarm as requested.”

“That was not—” She mimed the boop. “—what I meant.”

“You didn’t specify,” he said, and the smile that came with it was a promise to be worse.

The ache in her temple throbbed in time with the memory of his fingertip on her nose. She hated how tender it had felt, how intimate the stupid childishness of it was. She headed for the bathroom on legs that weren’t taking notes. Ben rolled onto his back like a cat who owned the quilt and watched her go with the warm focus of someone picking favorite trouble.

In the doorway she stopped and half-turned because fury arrives a beat later than pain.

The mirror in the bathroom showed a girl with storm hair and a pink bloom coming up at her temple. She pressed a cool flannel to it and stared herself back into a person with a day to do. The living room stayed quiet. When she returned, he was still sprawled in her bed like a villain auditioning for Sunday morning.

“Out,” she said, and pointed, because sometimes pointing helps.

He stretched, spine popping, satisfied, unhurried. “Make me.”

She didn’t have that spell. Not yet. She did have ritual. “Coffee,” she said to herself, to the room, to the bruise ringing in her skull. “Toast. Work.”

“Eat,” he agreed, mock-kind. “Mortals get fragile.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“No,” he said, happy as a cat in a warm patch, and vanished between one heartbeat and the next, leaving the pillow dipped and the shape of the boop still buzzing on her skin like a word she refused to spend.

Coffee. Toast. Knife. The small liturgy that keeps a person a person. Rey sat at the table and pretended the butter spreading to the corners could hold the morning steady.

Ben leaned against the table’s edge without weight, hands in his pockets until they weren’t. Wrong-beautiful, heat-hazed edges, attention bright and private. He didn’t bother with hello.

“Tell me about your parents,” he said, like he was asking the weather.

Her hand slipped; the knife skittered too hard. “No.”

“I already know,” he said, pleased. “I want your mouth to shape it.”

“They’re dead.”

“How old were you when the river tried you on.”

“Ten.”

“Bad weather. Bridge. Lights were useless” he went on, gentle and merciless. “Where did it hurt first.”

“My throat,” Rey said before she could barricade it. “Seatbelt.” She touched the high place the strap had kissed. “And here.” She tapped her temple. “Glass.”

“What did you hear.”

“Nothing.” She stared past him. “That was the worst part. How quiet water gets when it closes.”

He watched her like a collector verifying an original. “And how did you come back up.”

“I don’t know.” The answer surprised her with how fast it came. “I blacked out.” A breath. “I remember the spin, the cold—burning—and then…sirens, maybe. A blanket. Someone talking like their mouth was far away.” She shook her head, angry at the blank. “I don’t remember.”

Ben’s smile tucked in, private. Not kind. “Correct.”

She hated that word on his tongue. “Did someone—?”

“Hands you don’t remember did the remembering for you,” he said, amused by her rage at the gap. “That’s all you get today.”

She buttered another triangle because ritual is a raft. “Is this where you do your therapist voice and ask how it made me feel.”

“You were angry,” he said. “At the quiet. You still are.”

“And you?” She forced a scoff. “Enjoying the case study?”

“I enjoy you,” he said simply. “You carry the river and iron at once. It makes the air taste interesting.”

“Why do you care.”

“Because I should know who I am tormenting. How else can I tease you?”

She stared at the toast so she wouldn’t look at him. “No more questions.”

“For now,” he allowed, delighted by limits. He leaned until his mouth hovered a breath from her temple—right where the bruise was blooming—and almost touched. “Eat, little one.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“No,” he said, happy as a cat in a warm patch, and the room was only a room again.

The day crawled.

Ben was gone—no heat at her ear, no frames flirting on their hooks, no tap…tap-tap…tap sneaking into her pulse—and somehow that made the flat feel louder, like quiet had elbows.

Rey called the pub and lied: “Stomach thing.” Paul made sympathetic noises and immediately told her to keep it to herself because “people hear contagious and run.” She promised to “rest” like the word could be true.

She hung up and unplugged the landline for good measure. Mobile: off. Laptop: closed. HELLO sign from Poe: unplugged, because she didn’t have the energy to be greeted. She slid the chain and latched the deadbolt like a ritual, then stood there in the tiny entryway and let the stillness settle over her like a blanket she wasn’t sure she deserved.

Exhaustion came in waves. Not sleepy, exactly. Emptied. She moved slow because fast would splash.

She did small mercies: shower, fresh T-shirt, clean socks. A glass of water she actually finished. She dragged the ruined throw into a heap by the washing machine and pretended it was a project for Future Rey.

Order in. Pizza app, the same place as always because decision-making had teeth. “Margarita, extra garlic,” she typed, then added potato wedges like a dare. When the order pinged confirmed, she turned the phone fully off and put it in a drawer under takeout menus and spare batteries like a misbehaving pet.

The flat tried to be kind. The new lamp burned steady. Rain kept polite time on the glass. The basil on the landing window outside made a little green silhouette like it was keeping watch. She stretched on the sofa and felt each muscle report in: ribs sore from holding; jaw tender from being a fist; temple a soft bloom from the bedside table’s love tap.

She dozed but didn’t fall—those almost-sleeps that feel like stepping off a curb in the dark. Her brain replayed last nights and new mornings in jump cuts. Every time it cued the worst frame, she changed the channel to something petty and human: socks that don’t match, a stain on the ceiling shaped like a rabbit, whether she owned scissors sharp enough to bully cardboard.

Knock.

Rey carried cash to the door like a talisman, peeped, then cracked it on the chain. Warm steam curled in; so did a grin.

Delivery guy: mid-twenties, damp curls, jacket too thin for the weather and confidence too big for the hallway. “Evening,” he said, voice pitched for charm. He lifted the box, then the bag. “One comfort round, extra garlic. Great call.”

“Cheers,” Rey said, keeping the chain fast. She passed the notes through the gap.

He didn’t take them right away. He leaned, easy. “You look familiar. I probably just deliver to a lot of pretty people,” he added, and let it hang there like he’d tossed a coin and expected heads.

Heat pressed the back of Rey’s neck.

Ben arranged himself against the jamb inside her flat—long, lazy, wrong-beautiful—like he’d been there the whole time, arms folded, watching the exchange as if it were a sport. His mouth didn’t smile. His attention did.

“Tell him no,” he said, voice pleasant as sin. “And shut the door.”

The delivery guy finally took the cash, fingers brushing Rey’s through the crack. “I can get you on the priority route, you know. Perks of knowing people.” His eyes did a slow, admiring loop that ended exactly where Ben was standing, and of course landed on nothing.

Something in the corridor draft dropped five degrees. Rey felt it. He didn’t.

“Priority,” Ben echoed, dry, to Rey alone. “Adorable.”

The kid produced change, deliberately fumbled a coin so it pinged on the floor inside the flat. “Oops—mind if I—?”

“No,” Rey said, at the same time Ben did.

She bent first, scooped the coin, and handed it back through the gap. The chain stayed on. Her knuckles brushed the metal; it chimed once like a warning.

The kid took the coin and the cue and tried again anyway. “You got a name? For the system. If you want it. Or—uh—I finish at ten…”

Ben’s hand slid to the chain and rested there—not touching, just near. The links lifted half a centimeter, as if remembering how gravity works when noticed. The lamp behind Rey flicked once, precise. The HELLO sign Poe had bought and left unplugged exhaled a curl of smoke anyway, a petulant hi that thinned to nothing.

Rey kept her voice even. “Order’s under Rey. That’s enough system for today.”

“Cool,” he said, unfazed, still smiling like the hallway was Tinder. “Well, Rey—if you ever want—”

Ben didn’t look away from her face; he watched the way the word landed in her pupils and seemed…surprised at himself.

“This is new,” he murmured, almost to his own annoyance. “I don’t like him looking at you.”

Rey’s mouth went dry, then found a shape. “I’ve got what I need,” she told the kid, not unkind. “Thanks. Night.”

He blinked, recalibrated, handed over the box and bag. “Night.” His grin softened into something less performative. “Enjoy, Rey.” He tucked damp hair behind one ear and jogged for the stairs.

As his footsteps faded, the temperature remembered the room’s size. Rey shut the door, slid the chain, threw the latch. She set the pizza on the table with hands that betrayed the tremor and turned.

Ben was still by the jamb, head tipped, studying her the way storms study trees they haven’t decided about yet.

“You don’t get jealous,” she said, before she could stop the word.

His mouth did that private slant. “No,” he agreed, as if trying the word on. “I get…annoyed.”

“You almost rattled the chain,” she said. It sounded like an accusation; it was also gratitude, weirdly, for the almost.

“I didn’t,” he said, pleased to be the kind of cruel that leaves fingerprints on air instead of skin. “Say thank you.”

“For what?”

“For letting him leave with all his parts.”

“Jesus,” Rey muttered, heat in her face she refused to name. “He was flirting, not invading.”

“He was looking,” Ben said, as if the two were synonyms carved by fire. Then, slower, like he disliked the taste and couldn’t stop chewing, “You’re not for him.”

Rey opened the pizza box because ritual is a raft. Garlic steam punched the air between them. She pulled out a slice, bit, burned her tongue, welcomed it. “I’m not for you either.”

He laughed, quiet and sincere, and for a heartbeat it sounded like a bell that had remembered it used to be metal. “Eat,” he said, mock-kind, recovering his usual shape. “Mortals are fragile.”

“Stop—”

“No,” he said, delighted to be predictable again.

The fog on the window thinned; MINE dissolved into rain. Rey took her dinner to the sofa and sat with her back to the arm so she could see the door, the lamp, the glass, him. He didn’t move closer. He didn’t leave.

He watched her eat with the bright private attention he’d reserved for cruelty and—apparently—whatever this was. It annoyed him. It annoyed her that it annoyed him. Neither of them had planned for that.

Chapter Text

Rey woke to war.

Every light in the flat was strobing—on/off/on/off—like the place had learned Morse code for panic. The telly howled static; the Bluetooth speaker she never used coughed itself awake; the radio app on her phone had chosen a station at random and was evangelizing about mattresses at top volume. The kettle clicked on-off-on like a woodpecker. The new lamp—a sweet, obedient thing yesterday—flickered boom...boom in time with her pulse.

Her clock read 4:00. Blinked. 4:00. Blinked. 4:00.

"Ben!" she shouted, voice raw, because there was no point pretending it was wiring.

The room laughed with electricity.

Picture frames began to tilt, not one degree this time but all the way to wrong—clack...clack...clack—like teeth. The kitchen cupboards thudded open and shut out of rhythm. The bathroom fan whined itself into a banshee and died; the mirror in there, door half ajar, glowed black like a pond at midnight.

Rey stumbled out of bed, feet slapping wood, shirt twisted, hair a feral flag. "Ben!" She had to shout over the static and the radio and a children's song the speaker had found just to be cruel. "Enough!"

The window fogged from the inside in one breath, then in heavy strokes wrote:

H U S H

She nearly laughed at the audacity, then didn't, because the telly hiccupped and switched to the Hush home screen all by itself, like he'd been waiting on the pun.

"Turn it off!" she yelled—at him, at the room, at the kettle, which clicked on again in gleeful defiance.

He didn't appear first. He conducted.

Two fingers—or nothing—tapped the mattress once: tap...tap-tap...tap, and the lights obeyed, syncing to it. On the third beat the radio cut and the telly screamed a violin note only dogs should hear. Rey clapped her hands over her ears and the sound crawled through anyway, skin-level, like ants.

She made it to the hallway, swore when the rocker scraped one long no across the floor without moving, and shouldered into the living room as if momentum could save her. The new lamp went full sun; the fairy lights she hadn't plugged in exhaled smoke anyway and spelled HI before thinning. Her phone, face-down on the table, lit and vibrated with no messages—buzz-buzz-buzz—like a heart going wrong.

"Ben!" She hated how much it sounded like a plea. "Stop!"

The noise snapped off like a throat cut.

Silence slammed so hard her ears rang.

Only the rain outside continued, honest and uninterested.

Rey stood in the middle of her obediently still flat, chest heaving, hands shaking, and said, lower, "Why?"

A slow clap came from behind her head.

He was perched on the back of the sofa again, long and lazy, wrong-beautiful mouth slanted into a private smile, applauding once more for effect. "Good morning, little one," Ben said, tone pure breakfast-radio cheer. "You're up."

She wanted to throw something. She settled for words she could lift. "What the hell was that?"

"An alarm," he said, lightly. "You sleep through subtle."

She gestured at everything that had been on fire seconds ago. "This isn't subtle! My neighbors—"

"Mortals dream hard," he said. "They'll blame wind. Or pipes. Or the fox they all pretend not to feed." His gaze ran over her, inventory with intent, and his mouth tucked into a pleased line at the ruin of her hair. "You're very pretty confused."

"Die," she said, because the brain does not always route through diplomacy at 4 a.m.

"Later," he said, pleased. "Breakfast?"

The kettle clicked on by itself in obedient agreement. She yanked the plug. It continued boiling anyway and then gave up in a huff as if insulted.

Rey pressed her palms to the table and tried to staple her breath down. "Why four?"

He considered her for the fun of it. "Because three is cliché. And four is honest." He tipped his chin at the clock. It still read 4:00. "Also, I like zeros."

"Stop touching my things."

He looked delighted. "No."

The bathroom fan hiccupped once; the mirror breathed black. She refused to look down that throat. "What do you want?" Rey demanded, throat sore on the shape of the question.

Ben's smile went smaller, worse. Fond, the way storms are fond of trees they've decided to keep—for now. "Your attention," he said, as if that were tender. "And your fear. And your yes." A beat. "Not necessarily in that order."

She swallowed so hard it clicked. "There are other people who—"

"Say yes quieter," he interrupted, courteous as a knife. "They close their eyes properly. You don't." He drummed two fingers on the sofa back—tap...tap-tap...tap—and her heart, traitor, tried to meet it. He stopped so she'd have to decide whether to keep the beat alone.

"Don't do this again," she managed.

His eyebrows lifted into polite inquiry. "Don't do what?"

"Wake the building. Wake me." She hated the fold in her voice on that last word. "Like that."

A breath of heat leaned past her ear, not touching, merciless as almost. "Ask nicely."

"Please," she said, before pride could catch up.

"Good girl," he murmured, pleased he'd made her spend it.

The clock twitched to 4:01, as if granting a wish. Every light steadied. The flat remembered how to be a room and held.

She exhaled and sagged into the nearest chair because gravity is a rule even demons respect. The aftermath tremble set in, fine-grained and everywhere. She rubbed her palms down her thighs to make it look like she was smoothing fabric, not hands.

"Coffee," she said, defaulting to ritual like a raft. "I'm making coffee."

"I'll watch," he said, undramatic and somehow worse.

She went through the motions—grind, scoop, water—aware of his weight on the sofa back like a second horizon. When the kettle finished sulking and boiled at her command, when the pour filled the room with something human and bitter, when the mug burned her palms and asked her to exist, she could almost pretend this was a morning she'd chosen.

Ben leaned, his mouth a heat-ghost near her cheek. "You're learning," he said, happy as a cat by a radiator. "Four suits you."

She blew on the surface and didn't look at him. "Why?"

"Because it's when you stop lying to yourself about sleep." He tapped the clock with his attention. 4:02. "And because it's when I don't have to share you."

Something in her bucked at that—anger with teeth, or fear with an ego. She looked him dead on then, even if the look made her bones feel seen. "You don't own me."

"Not yet," he said, gentle as a promise. "Eat something, little one. Mortals get fragile."

"Stop calling me that."

He grinned. "No."

The window, obedient to no one, gathered rain and let it run. The frames stayed wrong on their hooks, pleased with themselves. From the kitchen, two soft taps answered nothing.

Rey drank, burned her tongue, and let it count as victory. When she set the mug down, the clock said 4:04, stubborn with zeros again. She laughed once, sharp, because the alternative was not laughing, and looked away first because she was allowed to choose small mercies.

"Wake me at seven," she said, because if he wanted to be an alarm, he could be useful.

"Okay" Ben purred, delighted.

She didn't give him another coin. She took her mug to the window and watched the rain and let the quiet fill the spaces the noise had scraped raw. Behind her, the sofa creaked the way wood does under a long, relaxed weight. When she glanced back, he was gone.

The light stayed steady. The clock ticked 4:05. For the first time since the siren of it all, the silence didn't feel like it had teeth. She breathed until the breath sounded like hers again.

Then she turned every switch off herself, just to prove she could, slid back into bed, and stared at the ceiling until it agreed to hold. If she dreamed, the bell with no bell kept time, patient and pleased, and she woke to her own alarm at seven—phone vibrating like a good dog—until the kettle clicked on by itself, obedient as sin.

Seven a.m. arrived as a fingertip to the tip of her nose.

Boop.

Rey's eyes flew open to Ben lying on his side beside her, head propped on one hand like this was a rom-com and not a haunting. Wrong-beautiful face inches away. Smile small and satisfied. The pillow dipped where his shoulder wasn't.

She made a noise that was mostly vowel and gravity did the rest. She rolled—too fast, too far—straight off the mattress. The bedside table cut in, sharp corner to temple. Stars. A thunk that would bruise later. She landed on the rug and the rug decided to be concrete.

"Ow," she said, eloquent.

Above, the mattress creaked with the weight of a very amused sin.

"Rise and shine, little one," Ben purred, leaning over the edge. His hair fell wrong in a way that made you think about hands. He booped her nose again with nothing at all. The air touched her. She flinched anyway.

"Why are you like this," Rey groaned, clutching her head. Her fingers came away clean; it still felt like the table had signed its name on her skull.

He considered—magnanimous, thoughtful, cruel. "Practice."

"Get out of my bed."

"You left me in it." He glanced at the empty dip like it had been offered on a silver tray.

She pushed herself upright, blinking through the ache. The lamp was obediently steady; the window was obediently rain; the iron key on the nightstand had flipped itself twice and settled like it had opinions.

"That's not..." she muttered.

"Anchors and invitations," he added, all patience. He tapped two fingers on the mattress—tap...tap-tap...tap—her pulse, not the rain's. "Also, you look very pretty when you wake violent."

"My head's bleeding," she lied on reflex.

He tilted his own, indulgent. "No. But thank you for the attempt."

She stood, wobbled, caught the table that had assaulted her. The corner stared back, smug. "You can't just—" She gestured at him. At the bed. At the whole damn morning.

"I can," he said, pleased. "And did. Alarm as requested."

"That was not—" She mimed the boop. "—what I meant."

"You didn't specify," he said, and the smile that came with it was a promise to be worse.

The ache in her temple throbbed in time with the memory of his fingertip on her nose. She hated how tender it had felt, how intimate the stupid childishness of it was. She headed for the bathroom on legs that weren't taking notes. Ben rolled onto his back like a cat who owned the quilt and watched her go with the warm focus of someone picking favorite trouble.

In the doorway she stopped and half-turned because fury arrives a beat later than pain.

The mirror in the bathroom showed a girl with storm hair and a pink bloom coming up at her temple. She pressed a cool flannel to it and stared herself back into a person with a day to do. The living room stayed quiet. When she returned, he was still sprawled in her bed like a villain auditioning for Sunday morning.

"Out," she said, and pointed, because sometimes pointing helps.

He stretched, spine popping, satisfied, unhurried. "Make me."

She didn't have that spell. Not yet. She did have ritual. "Coffee," she said to herself, to the room, to the bruise ringing in her skull. "Toast. Work."

"Eat," he agreed, mock-kind. "Mortals get fragile."

"Stop calling me that."

"No," he said, happy as a cat in a warm patch, and vanished between one heartbeat and the next, leaving the pillow dipped and the shape of the boop still buzzing on her skin like a word she refused to spend.

Coffee. Toast. Knife. The small liturgy that keeps a person a person. Rey sat at the table and pretended the butter spreading to the corners could hold the morning steady.

Ben leaned against the table's edge without weight, hands in his pockets until they weren't. Wrong-beautiful, heat-hazed edges, attention bright and private. He didn't bother with hello.

"Tell me about your parents," he said, like he was asking the weather.

Her hand slipped; the knife skittered too hard. "No."

"I already know," he said, pleased. "I want your mouth to shape it."

"They're dead."

"How old were you when the river tried you on."

"Ten."

"Bad weather. Bridge. Lights were useless" he went on, gentle and merciless. "Where did it hurt first."

"My throat," Rey said before she could barricade it. "Seatbelt." She touched the high place the strap had kissed. "And here." She tapped her temple. "Glass."

"What did you hear."

"Nothing." She stared past him. "That was the worst part. How quiet water gets when it closes."

He watched her like a collector verifying an original. "And how did you come back up."

"I don't know." The answer surprised her with how fast it came. "I blacked out." A breath. "I remember the spin, the cold—burning—and then...sirens, maybe. A blanket. Someone talking like their mouth was far away." She shook her head, angry at the blank. "I don't remember."

Ben's smile tucked in, private. Not kind. "Correct."

She hated that word on his tongue. "Did someone—?"

"Hands you don't remember did the remembering for you," he said, amused by her rage at the gap. "That's all you get today."

She buttered another triangle because ritual is a raft. "Is this where you do your therapist voice and ask how it made me feel."

"You were angry," he said. "At the quiet. You still are."

"And you?" She forced a scoff. "Enjoying the case study?"

"I enjoy you," he said simply. "You carry the river and iron at once. It makes the air taste interesting."

"Why do you care."

"Because I should know who I am tormenting. How else can I tease you?"

She stared at the toast so she wouldn't look at him. "No more questions."

"For now," he allowed, delighted by limits. He leaned until his mouth hovered a breath from her temple—right where the bruise was blooming—and almost touched. "Eat, little one."

"Stop calling me that."

"No," he said, happy as a cat in a warm patch, and the room was only a room again.

The day crawled.

Ben was gone—no heat at her ear, no frames flirting on their hooks, no tap...tap-tap...tap sneaking into her pulse—and somehow that made the flat feel louder, like quiet had elbows.

Rey called the pub and lied: "Stomach thing." Paul made sympathetic noises and immediately told her to keep it to herself because "people hear contagious and run." She promised to "rest" like the word could be true.

She hung up and unplugged the landline for good measure. Mobile: off. Laptop: closed. HELLO sign from Poe: unplugged, because she didn't have the energy to be greeted. She slid the chain and latched the deadbolt like a ritual, then stood there in the tiny entryway and let the stillness settle over her like a blanket she wasn't sure she deserved.

Exhaustion came in waves. Not sleepy, exactly. Emptied. She moved slow because fast would splash.

She did small mercies: shower, fresh T-shirt, clean socks. A glass of water she actually finished. She dragged the ruined throw into a heap by the washing machine and pretended it was a project for Future Rey.

Order in. Pizza app, the same place as always because decision-making had teeth. "Margarita, extra garlic," she typed, then added potato wedges like a dare. When the order pinged confirmed, she turned the phone fully off and put it in a drawer under takeout menus and spare batteries like a misbehaving pet.

The flat tried to be kind. The new lamp burned steady. Rain kept polite time on the glass. The basil on the landing window outside made a little green silhouette like it was keeping watch. She stretched on the sofa and felt each muscle report in: ribs sore from holding; jaw tender from being a fist; temple a soft bloom from the bedside table's love tap.

She dozed but didn't fall—those almost-sleeps that feel like stepping off a curb in the dark. Her brain replayed last nights and new mornings in jump cuts. Every time it cued the worst frame, she changed the channel to something petty and human: socks that don't match, a stain on the ceiling shaped like a rabbit, whether she owned scissors sharp enough to bully cardboard.

Knock.

Rey carried cash to the door like a talisman, peeped, then cracked it on the chain. Warm steam curled in; so did a grin.

Delivery guy: mid-twenties, damp curls, jacket too thin for the weather and confidence too big for the hallway. "Evening," he said, voice pitched for charm. He lifted the box, then the bag. "One comfort round, extra garlic. Great call."

"Cheers," Rey said, keeping the chain fast. She passed the notes through the gap.

He didn't take them right away. He leaned, easy. "You look familiar. I probably just deliver to a lot of pretty people," he added, and let it hang there like he'd tossed a coin and expected heads.

Heat pressed the back of Rey's neck.

Ben arranged himself against the jamb inside her flat—long, lazy, wrong-beautiful—like he'd been there the whole time, arms folded, watching the exchange as if it were a sport. His mouth didn't smile. His attention did.

"Tell him no," he said, voice pleasant as sin. "And shut the door."

The delivery guy finally took the cash, fingers brushing Rey's through the crack. "I can get you on the priority route, you know. Perks of knowing people." His eyes did a slow, admiring loop that ended exactly where Ben was standing, and of course landed on nothing.

Something in the corridor draft dropped five degrees. Rey felt it. He didn't.

"Priority," Ben echoed, dry, to Rey alone. "Adorable."

The kid produced change, deliberately fumbled a coin so it pinged on the floor inside the flat. "Oops—mind if I—?"

"No," Rey said, at the same time Ben did.

She bent first, scooped the coin, and handed it back through the gap. The chain stayed on. Her knuckles brushed the metal; it chimed once like a warning.

The kid took the coin and the cue and tried again anyway. "You got a name? For the system. If you want it. Or—uh—I finish at ten..."

Ben's hand slid to the chain and rested there—not touching, just near. The links lifted half a centimeter, as if remembering how gravity works when noticed. The lamp behind Rey flicked once, precise. The HELLO sign Poe had bought and left unplugged exhaled a curl of smoke anyway, a petulant hi that thinned to nothing.

Rey kept her voice even. "Order's under Rey. That's enough system for today."

"Cool," he said, unfazed, still smiling like the hallway was Tinder. "Well, Rey—if you ever want—"

Ben didn't look away from her face; he watched the way the word landed in her pupils and seemed...surprised at himself.

"This is new," he murmured, almost to his own annoyance. "I don't like him looking at you."

Rey's mouth went dry, then found a shape. "I've got what I need," she told the kid, not unkind. "Thanks. Night."

He blinked, recalibrated, handed over the box and bag. "Night." His grin softened into something less performative. "Enjoy, Rey." He tucked damp hair behind one ear and jogged for the stairs.

As his footsteps faded, the temperature remembered the room's size. Rey shut the door, slid the chain, threw the latch. She set the pizza on the table with hands that betrayed the tremor and turned.

Ben was still by the jamb, head tipped, studying her the way storms study trees they haven't decided about yet.

"You don't get jealous," she said, before she could stop the word.

His mouth did that private slant. "No," he agreed, as if trying the word on. "I get...annoyed."

"You almost rattled the chain," she said. It sounded like an accusation; it was also gratitude, weirdly, for the almost.

"I didn't," he said, pleased to be the kind of cruel that leaves fingerprints on air instead of skin. "Say thank you."

"For what?"

"For letting him leave with all his parts."

"Jesus," Rey muttered, heat in her face she refused to name. "He was flirting, not invading."

"He was looking," Ben said, as if the two were synonyms carved by fire. Then, slower, like he disliked the taste and couldn't stop chewing, "You're not for him."

Rey opened the pizza box because ritual is a raft. Garlic steam punched the air between them. She pulled out a slice, bit, burned her tongue, welcomed it. "I'm not for you either."

He laughed, quiet and sincere, and for a heartbeat it sounded like a bell that had remembered it used to be metal. "Eat," he said, mock-kind, recovering his usual shape. "Mortals are fragile."

"Stop—"

"No," he said, delighted to be predictable again.

The fog on the window thinned; MINE dissolved into rain. Rey took her dinner to the sofa and sat with her back to the arm so she could see the door, the lamp, the glass, him. He didn't move closer. He didn't leave.

He watched her eat with the bright private attention he'd reserved for cruelty and—apparently—whatever this was. It annoyed him. It annoyed her that it annoyed him. Neither of them had planned for that.

Chapter Text

Rey couldn't make the ceiling turn into sleep. The lamp was low, the rain patient, the clock a metronome with smug little teeth. She lay on her side, blanket to her chin, eyes gone sand-dry, and finally said into the dim:

"Are you here?"

The mattress dipped first—knee, then the careful set of a hand—like a very polite man had sat down and decided to be still.

She pushed up on an elbow, slow. Heat found a shape: Ben, edges haze-soft, gaze bright and private. He didn't touch. He never had to.

"I can't sleep," she whispered.

"I know," he said, gentle as a blade wrapped in velvet.

"Can I ask you something?" She said softly, half a yawn escaping her.

"Of course!"

She wet her lips. "Did you die? What made you...like this?"

He watched the window as if asking the rain's permission, then looked back with an attention that felt older than teasing.

"I didn't die," he said. "That's one of your words. It fits badly. I fell."

"From what?"

"From a job." The corner of his mouth moved—no humor, only memory. "I was a guardian angel, to this one soul. They were pure, deserved better than what the world gave them."

Her throat clicked around a swallow. "And you lost them."

"I lost them," he agreed. "I broke a few rules for them." He didn't look at her when he said it. That felt like mercy and wasn't.

"So you—"

"I reached down past what I was allowed," he said simply. "And brought them back. Breathing. Warm. I broke the part of me that obeyed, and the world broke me back."

"Hell," Rey said. It came out small.

"Exile," he corrected, amused and bored at once. "Never-close. I could not reach them again. That was the point."

Her fingers found the edge of the blanket and worried it. "Why do it. If...that's the price."

He considered her like weather choosing a tree. "Because guardian is a stupid word if you stand still while a life ends within reach," he said, unadorned. "Because rules are cruel when they pretend love is a hazard. Because silence is an insult when you know the shape of a breath and can make it happen again."

Her pulse made itself loud, everywhere. "Was it—love?"

"Yes. I would have waited until the end of time to kiss her..."

She stared. The rain wrote longer sentences on the glass. "Guardian angels," she said, trying the phrase on her tongue like a dare, "are they...assigned?"

"To their match," he said. "Their soulmates, if you like your poetry out loud. It's a nasty trick. We are given the one life we are best at watching. The trick, little one, is the rule: watch. Don't touch." His mouth slanted, softened and sharpened at once. "It is...difficult. Protecting someone you love without stepping in. You learn patience. You learn to call restraint a virtue while every nerve knows better."

Rey's fingers tightened. "And when they—when it went wrong—"

"It goes wrong," he said, and the lamp hummed like it understood tense. "Hands pulled them free. They don't remember the hands. Most people don't. That's all they're owed."

She breathed too shallow and forced depth into it. "Did they ever...know?"

"They thanked God. Then they hated God" he said, faintly amused by the symmetry.

"Do you miss them?" The knife in her asked it.

"I did" He said honestly "I missed the proximity," he said, honest. "The work with purpose. Watching a chest rise and knowing morning was partly my fault." His eyes warmed with a mean little fondness that somehow didn't spare him. "Now I collect smaller currencies. Attention. Fear. Yes. Less holy. More fun."

She should have been colder than she was. "So you were good."

"I am still exactly what I was built to be," he said, and leaned forward until the warmth of his mouth hovered at her cheekbone—merciless as almost. "A hand near a shoulder. Pressure instead of touch. A rule that obeys itself until it doesn't. Guardian is generous. Keeper is truer."

"Of who?" she asked, because the word chose her and she let it.

He smiled, small and vicious and soft. "Of the one I'm given."

The clock whispered another minute. The basil shadow on Mrs. Jones's sill made a neat ear in the stairwell light. Rey's eyes stung with the edge of sleep that wouldn't fall.

"Will you ever go back?" she asked. "To...wings and mercy."

"You assume I've lost the first and kept none of the second," he said, entertained. "Ask me again on a day I let you sleep."

"So...never," she breathed.

"Optimist," he said, and it sounded like praise.

She turned her face toward the window and kept him at the edge of sight. "Why tell me any of this."

"Because you asked," he said. "Because you open doors. Because angels are assigned to their soulmates, and it is very hard work not to touch what you're built to love." He let that hang between them with artful care, neither naming nor pointing, the shape of a truth lit from behind. "And because if you're going to fear me, I prefer you fear the right silhouette."

Her heart did the wrong thing: calmed. "Was it worth it?" she asked, barely sound. "Breaking it. For them."

"Yes," he said, without flourish. "Every time."

The mattress lifted a fraction as if he'd shifted and then stilled. The lamp hummed, steady. The rain agreed to be background. Rey's eyes finally dipped.

It starts warm.

Mum's ring ticks a soft beat on the dash as she drums along; Rey tries the harmony she's making up; Dad mangles the melody on purpose until all three of them are laughing. The car smells like spearmint gum and Mum's perfume in the wool of her scarf. Wipers duel lazily. Headlights lay coins along wet tarmac and the bridge ahead glitters like a spine.

Rey is ten-and-a-half (the half matters). Her trainers edge onto the seat; Dad gives her The Look; she drops her heels and grins at him, already putting them back when he glances at Mum. The world is kind about small cheats.

Something steps into the beam.

"Daddy!!!" Rey screams pointing her finger.

Maybe a person?

It was tall, wrong blot pulled out of the rain. It turns as if it had a face. Dad swears once, soft, and the wheel jerks.

Coins scatter. Guardrail screams. For one clean second, everything floats—map from the door pocket, half-empty water bottle, Mum's scarf blooming like a red jellyfish—and then gravity remembers them hard. Rey's hair blows wild.

Cold slams.

The car is upside down.

Seatbelts wrench. The roof is the floor and presses against Rey's hair; the window is black river and getting darker. Water knifes in through the seams, fast and unstoppable, a dog that decided to be sea. Sound dies—the radio clipped mid-lyric, the motor a swallowed growl—leaving only the high ring in her ears and the thud-thud of her own heart, animal and loud.

Mum's face finds Rey's through the water. Eyes enormous. Mouth shaping "It's okay" with a lie in it because there's no other sentence left. Her hair lifts and moves like weeds; the scarf spirals off her throat and drifts. Dad is already twisted around, arm braced to keep the wheel from crushing him. He reaches for Rey across the impossible space, fingers closing on nothing but cold.

Everything becomes a list.

Seatbelt. The strap has Rey by the collarbone and won't let go. The button is slick. Her thumb slips. She tries again, harder, panicking smaller. The bite against her chest sharpens until it's all she is.

Door. The handle laughs at her hand. She pulls; the river pushes back, heavier than thoughts. Her lungs kick once—air, air, air—and she swallows water instead. It's everywhere—eyes, ears, nose, throat—cold that burns.

Window. The glass is a black mirror. She slaps it. It's a wall. The wipers try once more out of habit and stop, the most useless, tender thing she will remember.

Mum is fighting her own belt, scrabbling at the clip; Dad's mouth is a string of bubbles. He looks at Rey with a look she's never seen on him: apology and instruction. He points—seatbelt—door—breathe—and his hand slips off the armrest and into the dark between them.

The car ticks as air leaves it. The roof crunches another centimeter. Rey's chest is a magnesium flare—white, blinding. She claws the buckle until her nail splits; she can't feel it through the cold.

Mum's fingers close around Rey's wrist. They're warm even now. She shoves Rey's hand onto the buckle and presses with her, eyes saying good girl, now, now, now—and the release button gives. The strap peels from Rey's chest; pain floods in with the relief.

The river takes the chance.

It rushes her up against the roof. Her knees bang the dash. She kicks and finds nothing. Her foot smacks Dad's forearm; he flinches and finds the wheel again and holds it off his chest like it's a wild animal. Mum is free—she's not, it's still around her waist, she twists—she is—she turns toward the door—Rey follows the movement—her lungs scream air, air—the door won't—Rey grabs it with both hands—push—

It doesn't move. Equalization is a word she doesn't have against the weight of a river.

Everything narrows. The world shrinks to three faces and a black window. Mum's hair flows across Rey's cheek; Rey turns her face into it for one selfish second because it's soft and Mum smells like Mum even in this. She opens her eyes to keep Mum in them and the river presses back and makes her close them again.

Dad's hand is on the ceiling—floor—whatever—palm flat, shoving like he can hold the car up by wanting it. His other hand reaches for Mum's shoulder; misses; finds her scarf instead. It slides. His eyes—he has Mum's eyes—find Rey and go fierce and soft all at once. He mouths love you and lets go of the wheel.

The car sinks a foot. The dark outside becomes more black with small bright coins floating up past the glass. Rey's lungs lock. She gulps again reflexively and the cold invades the last private spaces of her; she coughs but the cough is inside the water and goes nowhere.

Her body starts to do the old thing—the prehistoric thing—sleep now, small animal; this is too big—and the edges of the world go gray.

A hand she does not know is there closes over hers.

Warm. Certain. Not crushing. Not kind.

It sets her palm to the door and pushes with her. Pressure changes—the world eases one hair—and the door gives a grudging inch. The hand doesn't let go. It takes her wrist and drags, inexorable as tide, tilting her head toward the air that isn't.

Her chest is a screaming match. Black freckles creep in at the edge of the world. Mum's palm cups Rey's cheek—her thumb strokes once, once, a blessing—and then the current takes her sideways, scarf trailing like a red comet as she vanishes into dark.

Dad's fingers catch Rey's sleeve and slip. He jabs a finger up like a command. Bubbles jet from his nose, frantic fish. His mouth is a round, astonished O. For a last outrageous second, he looks like he's laughing again and Rey hates the world for it.

The door goes—gives—and the river turns from enemy into hands. Rey is pulled through a slit too narrow to be possible. Metal kisses her shoulder and leaves a line she won't remember. The cold becomes everywhere and then less, a gradient. The hand on her wrist never tightens; it never lets go.

Her head breaks skin.

Air is a knife. It hurts, then it's the only good thing left. She coughs and coughs; it feels like her ribs will split; it feels like her ribs are clapping for her. The river sucks at her shoes; the night howls rain; the bridge is last week and a hundred years away at once. A siren exists somewhere else. Her vision wants to go soft.

Mum's scarf surfaces beside her and collapses on the water like a red heart that forgot to beat. Something large thumps the underside of the river and doesn't come back up.

"Dad?" It tears out of her like bark. The rain eats it.

Small lights strobe the bank—headlamps, phones—smears of yellow and white. A voice from far away yells there!

Another, closer, says don't let her go, and she isn't; she isn't; the hand on her wrist isn't either.

She sees Dad once more.

Not his face. His palm. It presses flat to the glass of the side window as the car rotates, slow as planets, a man waving from another country. Then the river takes that, too. The last coin of light slips off the roof and spirals down after him.

Rey fights stupid.

Kicks. Splashes. Claws at darkness because hands need jobs or they'll start counting. The current slaps her toward a concrete support; the hand on her wrist arcs her around it as if the river is a doorway and someone who knows the house is guiding her out.

"Mum!" Again. It's only rain.

The world goes thin at the edges. The prehistoric decision comes for her—sleep now—and she tries to bite it. Her teeth chatter on nothing. The hand pulls, pulls, like a tide with opinions, and other hands—human, shouting—find her shoulders, underarms, hair, everything. Gravel meets her knees like a promise. Cold air takes her whole face in its hands and slaps.

Blanket. Foil. Blaring. Blue light turning rain into ghosts.

Someone's mouth is very close to her ear saying, "You're alright, love—breathe—breathe," in a rhythm that doesn't match hers until it does. She coughs river until she's empty. Mum's scarf lies on the mud like a spell that ran out of ink.

Rey's last clear thought before the dark folds her up carefully is unreasonable and precise: she didn't say goodnight.

Between that and the morning she will not remember the hand; she will remember the quiet—different from drowning quiet—a bell with no bell, low and certain, as if something near had decided a rule didn't apply and kept not applying it until she was warm.

Sheets twisted to a tourniquet. Her legs kicked once, twice, as if pedals had become water. A small sound leaked out of her—child-thin, furious. The new lamp held its low halo; rain stitched steady lines on the glass. The clock kept its zeros to itself.

Ben sat on the edge of the mattress the way careful men sit on hospital beds—weight set, hands braced behind him, attention bright as a blade he wasn't using. He watched her fight sleep like surf, watched her mouth shape words the river had stolen years ago. Her pulse beat hard at her throat—tap...tap-tap...tap—and he did not match it, did not take it; he let it spend itself on fear and air.

A fistful of hair stuck to her damp temple. Her breath snagged. Her heel thumped the mattress as if a seatbelt had bit.

He leaned in and, for once, didn't make it a game.

Two fingers brushed her cheekbone, light as parentheses. Heat, not weight. The touch steadied the shiver at her jaw, turned it into a sigh that found the shore of a breath and laid down there.

"I'd do it again," he whispered—no theater, no victory—like a vow he'd already broken twice and would keep breaking until rules remembered who made them.

Outside, the rain agreed. Inside, her hands unclenched. The sheet loosed a half turn. Her dreaming mouth softened into something that wasn't a plea.

He stayed where he was, a careful shape in a pool of obedient light, and kept watch the way he used to: not touching, not leaving, every nerve an answer if the dark asked the wrong question.

Chapter Text

They didn’t hop fences or make mischief; they bought paper cups of wine and followed the slow river of people to the proper field. Lanterns lined the path like low stars. Kids wore too-big hats; dogs wore baffled expressions and little ear muffs. The air smelled like cloves, sulphur, and wet wool.

“It’s actually nice,” Poe admitted, scandalized by his own sincerity.

Rey tucked her chin into her scarf and let the cold sting clean. The bruise at her temple had faded to a half-remembered thumbprint. Finn settled his beanie onto her head without comment—quiet warmth over her ears—and she bumped his elbow in thanks.

Loudspeaker crackle. A cheerful voice nobody could hate announced the start. The first rocket laced upward with intent and bloomed—proper and full—into a gold chrysanthemum that painted breath on a hundred open mouths.

The crowd’s ooooh wasn’t polite this time. It was honest.

Rey’s chest loosened a notch she hadn’t realized was stuck. She sipped the sweet heat and let herself look up like a child.

Ben was there. Not appearing—just present, the way gravity is. He stood behind her shoulder, attention turned outward for once, as if the sky had finally earned him. Long body relaxed, hands in the pockets of a jacket that made him look like he’d leaned on a thousand doorframes. He smelled like blown-out candles and a peel of orange over a flame. The new lamp at home would have approved of him.

He didn’t speak. He watched.

White peonies cracked to blue crowns; red chased gold like arguments that end in laughter. The sound rolled over them and came back off the low cloud in a warm echo. Rey’s heart tried to match the pace and then didn’t have to.

Poe narrated for a child near them (“That one’s called ‘Government Overspend,’” to giggles); Rose graded with wicked fairness (“Nine for symmetry; minus one for a late fuse”); Finn clapped shyly at a fan of silver that felt like rain made into applause.

Ben shifted closer, not touching. Heat gathered at the soft under Rey’s ear, an almost that had learned patience. He tilted his head when she tilted hers, tracking the same slow burst. The reflection of light found his cheekbone and drew a blade there; his mouth tucked private at the corners when the crowd gasped in unison.

“You’re quiet,” Rey murmured, eyes on the sky.

“I like when you look up,” he said, as if that were explanation enough.

Gold rain stitched a curtain from right to left, then again from left to right, and everyone ahhed like a congregation that finally liked the hymn. A little girl spelled her name with a sparkler (MIA) and held it up triumphantly to a universe that did not, in fact, deserve her.

Rey’s breath fogged; it smelled like cloves and something she wouldn’t name. Ben’s did not; he still tilted his face into the light like he could taste color.

“Favorite?” she asked, soft.

“Blue,” he said, surprising himself.

“Same' she said happily.

A ring lifted, a perfect donut of white that opened like an eye and then softened at the edges into nothing. Ben’s attention snagged a fraction longer than the physics, as though he preferred this sky—honest pyrotechnics, no tricks, no games—for one stolen minute.

Finn leaned in with the thermos. “Sip?”

“God, yes,” Poe said, dramatizing his gratitude. Rose pretended to scold him and took twice as much.

Rey didn’t realize she’d tipped toward Ben until the almost-touch warmed along her jaw in answer. He let the boom roll through their bones and pass on, let her shoulders drop, let the night be complicated and kind.

The finale climbed slow: shells layered, fans of red, then blue, then gold. The field lights dimmed to frame the sky better. The brass band finally gave up and let silence do the scoring. For a count of ten the world was only color and percussion and the control of someone very good at their job.

Rey felt Ben smile then—not at the fireworks, at her: the way her mouth had softened, the way her breath had lined up with the pacing, the way fear had made room for a different animal.

“See?” he said, barely sound. “Your mortals do remember beauty.”

“Sometimes,” she said. “When we let ourselves.”

He laughed, quiet as a bell that remembers metal. The last burst lifted—strobe-white, thunder, gold rain thick as summer—and fell away into a soft dark that the crowd held for one beat before remembering how to cheer.

The park exhaled into chatter and boots and the old animal satisfaction of having looked up together. Poe found a stall selling doughnuts and committed to six. Rose negotiated two extra napkins like a duel. Finn bought sparklers for later and tucked them next to his wallet like they needed warmth.

Rey stood still a moment longer. The sky had turned back into a lid; the field into a field. Ben stayed where he was, warmth in a stripe beside her, watching her keep watching the last smoke unspool.

“Thank you,” she said before she could decide not to.

“For what,” he asked, genuinely curious.

“For not ruining it.”

He hummed, amused. “I liked your face.”

She almost laughed. “You’re dangerous when you’re sweet.”

“I’m dangerous when I’m anything,” he said, pleased, and finally let his mouth hover close enough that the heat of it could have been a kiss and wasn’t. “Walk?”

“Yeah,” she said, and stepped back into the human spill of friends and sugar and cold noses.

They threaded out with the crowd. Poe draped a doughnut over each of their fingers like rings. Rose declared them married to carbohydrates. Finn slotted to Rey’s side like a quiet wall.

Ben fell in at the edge of her awareness, comfortable in the piece of night that would never be empty again. He didn’t tap a rhythm. He didn’t write on glass. He didn’t ask for a coin. He matched her pace and watched her, and for once that was enough.

The pub was already sweating at the windows when they pushed in—wet scarves, hot air, the fryer’s eternal sin. The same corner table as always had somehow waited for them under the framed ship that insisted on hanging one degree off. They fell into it, laughing too loud, cheeks flushed from cold and fireworks.

“First round’s on me,” Poe announced, and then proved miracles by making it true. Pints, a whisky for Rey, a mulled wine for Rose, and a Guinness for Finn because religion.

“To things that actually went boom,” Poe said, raising his glass.

“Too things that go boom,” Finn agreed.

Rey clinked with all of them, the sound bright and tidy. The first whisky went down hot.

Ben took the sliver of wall just behind her shoulder, where the wood was warm and no one would look. Wrong-beautiful in the pub’s amber, edges heat-hazed, attention bright and private. He watched her face, not her drink.

“Pace yourself, little one,” he said, low and easy.

“Don’t start,” Rey murmured, eyes on Poe, who was trying to explain Catherine wheels with hand motions that could have summoned weather.

“Start what?” Poe said.

“Not you, sorry, my stomachs just hungry I guess” Rey said, and laughed into her second whisky.

The pub did what pubs do: softened at the corners and turned noise into a single animal purr. Chips landed; vinegar turned the air sharp and friendly. Mrs. Jones swept by in a scarf the size of a sail, rapped the table with her knuckles like a benediction, and told Finn to stand up straight. He did. She eyed Rey’s bruise, nodded once, and declared, “Tables always win.”

The next round came on the shoulders of a singalong. Someone lost the melody and everybody else lost it on purpose to make them feel better. Poe went for a harmony that didn’t exist. Rey threw her head back and howled the chorus because her body wanted to sing; her glass kept arriving, full, when she set it down empty.

“Water,” Ben said, mouth near her ear, heat a line along her jaw. “You’re not built for four.”

Rey ignored and smiled at Rose who slid a half-lager in front of Rey.

Rey chased it with the last of the whisky.

Ben flicked his eyes at her glass.

“Darts?” Poe said, already half up.

“No,” Rose said without looking.

"Last time we played, you were two inches from hitting my face" Finn added

“Team-building,” he tried.

Finn hooked a finger in Poe’s belt loop and parked him without spilling a pint. “Team-killing.”

Rey leaned back until the world tilted in the right direction. The glass left a moon on her forehead; she smiled at it in the reflection and forgot why.

“Rey,” Ben said, voice shifted—less tease, more…old. She ignored again. She was young, dumb and having fun. No ghosts were going to stop that.

A stranger bought them shots because Poe had been “good telly.” Whatever that had meant. They saluted poor life choices and knocked them back. The room took a friendly step sideways. Rey felt her laugh get bigger and easier, saw Finn’s smile wobble into sleepy, watched Rose’s hands draw diagrams in the air when words weren’t fast enough.

“Little one,” Ben warned, closer now—heat at the soft under her ear, almost, always. “Enough.”

She turned a fraction, daring the nothing of his nearness. “Make me.”

His mouth curved—pleased and annoyed both. “I can’t.”

“Aw how tragic,” Rey said, and toasted the idea that he’d tried "Class this" she said holding up another shot "As my revenge for days without sleep" she said before shooting it back.

"You'll feel it tomorrow" he said. She simply shrugged.

The pub sang as if it had always known how. Finn’s head found Rey’s shoulder for a second—warm, heavy, good—and she let it be there because she could. Rose made a bartender laugh hard enough to knock the till shut with her hip. Poe told a story about a bad date and turned it into a parable about shoe choices; the table applauded like it had been rehearsed.

Ben tried tactics. A glass of water appeared in the dead space by Rey’s left hand; condensation wrote itself down the side like polite weather. She blinked at it, smiled at her reflection in the curve, and reached past for whatever burned.

“Please,” he said, soft, a word he never spent.

She took the shot.

“Of course,” he said, and the fondness in it had teeth.

The room stepped another inch off true. Rey stood and the floor thought about being a boat. She gasped, laughed, caught herself on the back of the chair like it had sworn to be a friend.

“Fresh air,” Finn said, reading her. “Smoke break without smoke.”

“Chips break,” Poe said, already at the bar to argue for more vinegar.

“Bathroom,” Rose announced, and claimed three feet of queue with authority.

Rey wove toward the loo sign, shoulder-brushing strangers into acquaintances. Ben paced the wall like a reflection that had better table manners than glass. His presence smoothed the corridor by a degree; she hated that she felt it and used it anyway.

In the mirror, her eyes were festival. She washed her hands and watched water do sensible things. Ben appeared behind her shoulder in the glass, the way heat appears on roads.

“You’re tipping into unkind tomorrow,” he said, no tease at all.

“Tomorrow’s not here,” she said, running the tap too long for the tiny sink.

She cupped water and drank from her hands like a child. It ran down her wrists, under her sleeves, woke her skin and not her head. For a second she could feel the edge again—the old goat track of four-in, hold, four-out, hold—then the pub sang a chorus and she lost it happily.

“At least you drank something...” Ben said.

She rolled her eyes. Then she kissed the air by his cheek because she was reckless and he was heat and the mirror was a liar. Almost, always. His attention hitched, sharper, and he smiled, private and wrong.

“Dangerous when you’re caring,” she told him.

“Dangerous when I’m anything,” he said, recovering his shape.

Back at the table, the chips had multiplied. The dog had acquired a surname and a political stance. Mrs. Jones reappeared to give Poe a lecture on shoelaces and left with a paper cone of fries she did not pay for.

“Round?” Poe asked, flush high, happiness higher.

“Half,” Rey said, lying to the part of herself that believed in halves. A full arrived. She cheered like a person who had chosen it.

Ben didn’t sigh. He watched. His eyes were old and bright. He reached for nothing; nothing reached for him. The flat nag in his voice—that guardian note he hated—settled under the pub noise like a bassline no one else could hear.

“Last orders!” the barman rang, and the room made the sound humans make when they have to pick between joy and sleep.

“We’re good,” Rose decided for them, already collecting coats like a shepherd. “Get up, Poe.”

“I am up,” Poe said, from a seated position.

Finn slid out of the booth and held out a hand. Rey took it and stood; the floor did a neat trick where it moved and she moved and they agreed to meet eventually. She laughed at the choreography; Finn steered with two fingers at her elbow like he was guiding a boat to dock.

Outside, the cold slapped kindly. Their breath made ghosts. They grouped for the ritual.

“Text when you’re in,” Poe said, voice wobbling with sincerity.

Rose kissed Rey’s cheek once, quick and surgical. “Water, ibuprofen, bed. Don’t argue.”

“Yes, Doctor,” Rey said.

Finn hugged her with the care you use for delicate shipping. “Call if you need,” he murmured, already knowing she wouldn’t.

They peeled off, glow sticks dim at wrists, the night smelling like damp coats and closing time.

Ben fell into step, warm in the slice of air at her shoulder. “You’re not walking a straight line.”

“I’m walking my line,” Rey said, proud of the sentence.

“Brickwork knows you’re lying,” he said, amused despite himself.

On the stairs up to her flat, her boot missed once; his heat leaned like a hand would have if a hand were allowed. She didn’t fall. She pretended she wouldn’t have anyway.

Inside: keys, chain, latch—the tiny liturgy. The flat exhaled its pub version of a sigh. She kicked off her boots and missed the mat by a county. Laughed at it. Tried again. Managed.

“Water,” Ben said. “Now.”

“Bossy,” she said, and went to the tap because even drunk she wasn’t a complete fool. The glass fogged her palm. She drank half. He waited. She finished it because he waited.

“Good girl,” he said, pleased in a way that made her want to roll her eyes and did not stop the pleased thing from existing.

“Shut up,” she said, smiling around it.

Bed dragged her like tide. She brushed her teeth listing starboard, washed her face with the wrong towel, stared herself down in the mirror until her reflection agreed to behave. The room did a slow rotation and then a slower settle.

At the edge of the mattress, she swayed. Ben appeared there as if careful men sit on hospital beds. “Turn your head,” he said, practical and old. “If you’re sick.”

“I’m fine,” Rey announced, which is what people say before and after they aren’t.

She wasn’t. A minute later she wasn’t. He didn’t touch; he did the cruel almost of it—heat hovering over the hinge of her jaw, presence steady at the small of her back—until her body decided it was done being a mistake.

After, she lay on her side, hair shoved back, eyes wet for the stupid, human reason that the body cries when it’s had enough of being a body.

“You tried to warn me,” she muttered into the pillow.

“I did,” he said.

“Still an asshole,” she added, reflex.

“Always,” he agreed, pleased, and tugged the duvet up with a stirring of air that might have been hands and wasn’t. “Sleep now. Let tomorrow bill you later.”

“Stay?” It slipped out, coin spent because the night had already taken the rest.

“Always,” he said, softer than sin.

Rey and Ben lay flat on their backs, shoulder to shoulder, watching the hairline crack that ran across her ceiling like a paper-cut in plaster.

“It looks like a river,” Rey said.

“A fault,” Ben said. “Rooms keep their own tectonics.”

She huffed a little laugh. “Okay, fault-line boy. Tell me something true about you.”

A beat. “I like storms”

“That’s poetic” She rolled her head toward him. “Favorite smell?”

“Fire smoke.” He didn’t look over. “You?”

“Petrol in summer. And…new books. And chips.” She paused. “How long have you been…this?”

“A long long time” he said. “Long enough to be bored of the calendar. Not long enough to stop being surprised by you.”

She smiled and blushed and let that sit. “Did you have a name before? A human one.”

“Ben” he said, amused.

“Do you sleep?”

“I keep watch.”

“On me?”

He smiled at the ceiling. “On you.”

That pulled something loose at the center of her chest. “What did you like when you were—before?”

“Silence with purpose,” he said. “And the way some people smile at inanimate objects, as if the kettle can hear them.”

Rey snorted. “I do not smile at the kettle.”

“You do,” he said.

They were quiet a while, just the clock and the radiator making small, honest noises.

“Are you cold?” he asked.

“I’m fine.” She tugged the duvet up anyway, then left her hand outside it so she had somewhere to put her questions. “Do you miss…what you were?”

“I miss proximity with rules,” he said. “I have proximity without them. It’s louder.”

She thought about that. Thought about the nights he’d hovered a breath from her, the almost-touch that had become a language. “Why not touch me before now?”

He rolled his head then, met her eyes the way you look at someone across a small fire. “Because not touching you was a game I was winning.”

“And now?”

“I’d like to lose,” he said, softly, like it wasn’t a trick.

He turned onto his side, slow enough that she could clock every inch of the movement. One elbow in the pillow, long body easy, his other hand lifting—not dramatic, just there. His fingers found her cheek, the lightest press, a line from cheekbone to jaw as if he were learning a map.

Warm.

Rey went still, breath snagging on surprise. Her skin didn’t flinch; it reached. Her eyes flicked to his, wide. “Wait—you can touch me.”

“Yes,” he said. No tease, no gloat. “Of course.”

“You’re…warm,” she said, like she’d discovered an extra planet.

“I am what I need to be near you,” he said simply, thumb resting just shy of the corner of her mouth. The heat of him wasn’t showy; it was the kind that sneaks into you and makes your shoulders drop.

She didn’t move away. She didn’t joke. She let herself feel it: the gentle weight of his fingers, the tiny give of skin against skin, the way the room changed temperature in the inch between them.

“What else?” she asked, voice smaller now. “Tell me something else true.”

“I like your laugh when you forget to be careful,” he said, and the thumb slid once, a slow, absent-minded stroke along her cheek like he was smoothing a crease. “And I hate the quiet that used to hurt you.”

Her throat worked. “Me too.”

He didn’t push. He didn’t ask for anything. He traced the edge of her jaw once more, then let his hand settle—two fingers under the curve of her ear, palm along her cheekbone—so light she could almost pretend it wasn’t happening and so certain she never would.

“Okay?” he asked, but it wasn’t a permission test; it was a temperature check, a tiny reality check between two people who’d both learned to live at edges.

“Yeah,” Rey said. Honest. “It’s…nice.”

He smiled like that answer was a rare thing he intended to pocket and keep.

Ben’s palm cupped her cheek, warm and steady, his thumb idly tracing a slow line just beneath her eye. They lay like that, shoulder to shoulder, the crack in the ceiling pretending to be a river and the room finally learning a quiet without teeth.

He watched her mouth for a heartbeat, then met her eyes again—no games there, just intent.

“Little one,” he said, voice low, “may I have a kiss?”

Rey’s breath caught, not from fear this time but from the clean, ridiculousness of being asked. The room felt smaller in a good way. She let herself smile—tiny, unguarded.

“Yeah,” she whispered. “You can.”

He didn’t rush. He shifted closer, careful as tide, his fingers tucking a strand of hair behind her ear like he’d practiced the motion a hundred times without getting to finish it. Then he bent, brushed his mouth to hers once—soft, certain—and paused there, letting her decide the distance.

Rey closed that last inch. Heat spread where their lips met; everything else got quiet in the kind way. His hand stayed gentle at her cheek; her fingers found his wrist and held. It was the softest kiss a demon could have given. His lips were as soft as feathers.

When he finally drew back, it was only far enough to see her face. A smile on her lips, her eyes closed.

“Again?” he asked, smiling like a thief who’d discovered he preferred asking.

She laughed—un-careful, bright. “Again.”

Chapter Text

Friday night came in loud.

Pub doors banging, wet coats, voices stacked two-deep at the bar. The taps hissed without rest; the glasswasher purred like an overworked cat. Paul was “doing floats” (panicking at the till) and the new kid was learning the speed of fear. Rey was in motion—card, pint, smile, next—hair up, sleeves rolled, bruise at her temple long gone, wrist stamped with the venue’s stupid star from last weekend.

“Two lagers and a Guinness,” a man shouted over the room.

“Got you,” Rey said, already pulling.

“Whisky sours, three,” someone else. “Half and a lime,” from the snug. “Do you do food?” “No.” “What about chips?” “We have those”

She was good at this: eyes up, hands quick, a soft laugh when it helped, a raised eyebrow when it didn’t. Tipsy kindness got the same efficiency as sober rudeness. She moved the queue like a tide.

Ben took the sliver of wall by the spirits mirror and watched her work. Wrong-beautiful even under pub bulbs, edges heat-hazed, attention bright and private. He liked the part where people said her name—Rey? Can I get——and meant it as a request, not a claim.

“You’re fast,” he said between orders, low, a stripe of heat at her ear when she kept moving.

“It’s the job,” she said, smiling at a regular and not at him.

The man in the navy overshirt made himself a problem around nine.

Early thirties, watch too big, smile he’d practiced in car mirrors. He started with generous tips and thanks, sweetheart. Rey logged it and worked around it—professional polite, the move along tone anyone behind a bar learns.

“Another for me and—” he leaned in to read the badge he pretended thought was funny “—Rey. Pretty name.”

“Just serving,” she said, topping his pint. “Card?”

He “forgot” the card twice. He touched the bar near her wrist when he didn’t need to. He told a story about his job and his car and his weekend like she’d asked. She didn’t correct his assumption that she’d heard.

“Busy night, yeah?” he said the fifth time, too close now, breath too familiar.

“Constant,” she said, stepping left, serving past him to a woman with exact change and tired eyes. “What can I get you?”

Navy overshirt drifted left with her. “I could keep you company after you clock off.”

“Order?” Rey asked, neutral. The man laughed like she’d been coy.

Ben’s mouth went thin. He stayed where he was because that’s how patience looks until it doesn’t.

“Two tequila?” Overshirt said, eyes on Rey’s mouth instead of the shelf. “And your number.”

Rey poured. Lime. Salt. He tapped the bar again, brushed her fingers like he meant it to be accidental. She didn’t give him the flinch. She moved the shots down the wood like they were for someone else, which they were: a pair of women two places in who’d been trying to signal past him for five minutes.

“Those were—” he started, affront climbing.

“They ordered first,” Rey said, no sugar now. “What’s next?”

“You,” he said, and smiled.

The air by Rey’s cheek warmed. Ben didn’t move; the room did. A very local cold slid across the bar top to overshirt’s hand and sat there like a warning. He rubbed his fingers and frowned at physics.

“Lager?” Rey prompted, already pulling anyone else’s.

Overshirt leaned deeper, trying the secret between us reach. “Come on, sweetheart. Don’t be like that.”

Rey put the pint down in front of someone who said thanks without looking at her like a menu. “Next?” she called.

The light above the till flickered once, precise. Ben’s voice reached only her. “Say the word.”

“Not here,” Rey murmured, keeping the smile for a woman with scarlet lipstick and a no-nonsense jawline. “What can I get you?”

“Gin and tonic, double. And a restraining order for the creep,” lipstick said, deadpan.

Rey’s smile was real. “With you in a second.”

Overshirt pretended not to hear. “You got a boyfriend?” he asked, the old script, bored even as he performed it. “Husband?”

“Its complicated. Order or leave” Rey said, still pleasant. She slid the G&T across to scarlet lipstick.

“Look, I’m being nice,” he said, and there it was—the hinge where nice means owing.

The brass rail trembled lightly under Rey’s palm; she felt it through wood and muscle. Ben didn’t sigh. He blinked like a man done watching a toaster disrespect bread.

Small things moved.

Overshirt’s pint—freshly poured, perfect crown—slid two inches down the bar by itself and stopped at the exact place someone else’s hand would be. That hand, oblivious, lifted it and drank. Overshirt blinked at empty wood.

“Hey—”

“Order?” Rey said again, working around him, heart rate steady by skill if not by nature.

His card—finally produced—declined. Twice. The third time the reader gave an error code that doesn't exist. He turned his wallet upside down and watched nothing fall out. The woman behind him offered a coin pointedly. He moved without meaning to.

“Mate,” Finn said gently from the far end where he’d appeared out of nowhere, towel over shoulder, barback superhero, “step to the side for me, yeah?”

Overshirt recalibrated. He didn’t like being managed by men either. He planted his elbow like a flag. “I’m talking to her.”

“And now you’re talking to me,” Finn said, patient with steel in it.

It should have worked. It didn’t. Overshirt leaned in toward Rey one last time, lowering his voice like it was intimacy. “I’ll wait,” he said. “You’ll change your mind when you’re off.”

Ben’s heat left the wall. He was suddenly at the corner of the bar, elbow hooked, smile small and not kind. Only Rey saw him; everyone else felt the air pay attention.

“Don’t,” Rey said under her breath. “Let me do my job.”

“You are,” Ben said. “I’m doing mine.”

Overshirt reached out—fingers aiming for Rey’s forearm where her sleeve had rucked up—and his reach met…nothing. The space between his hand and her skin thickened like honey. His wrist slowed and stopped two inches shy, tendons working, confusion tilting his face.

“What the—”

“Static,” Rey said smoothly, and stepped further back into the safe zone behind the taps. “Seriously. Order or step aside. Its a packed night, you are wasting space at the bar”

He laughed, color rising. “You can’t talk to customers like—”

“I can when they are being assholes and harassing me" Rey snapped.

The bar mat under his elbow developed ambition. It crawled a clean inch. His balance went with it. He caught himself on the drip tray and came up wet, dignity worse. Rey pretended not to see. Finn did not.

“Outside if you’re going to wobble,” Finn said, not moving from where he’d become immovable.

Overshirt’s friends took that as their cue to extract him with mate come on and she’s working and the universal language of embarrassed body herding. He resisted, then didn’t. One of them apologized with their eyes at Rey; she nodded like the night was long and people are people. The group lurched toward the door. Ben watched them go the way storms watch trees they decided to spare.

“Thanks,” lipstick said. “And—heads up. He’ll try again.”

“I know,” Rey said.

Ben’s mouth curved, private. “No he won't.”

The rush swallowed the moment. Rey went back to being fast: card, pull, smile, next. The stack of orders thinned. Paul reappeared to claim credit for gravity existing. The new kid learned that lime wedges don’t multiply by prayer. Finn ghosted hands where needed and glared where needed more.

Ten minutes later—because of course—overshirt drifted back, solo, contrite with an edge. He set a five on the wood like a token and leaned in as if the previous twenty minutes hadn’t happened.

“Truce?” he said. “I was only having a laugh.”

“Okay. What would you like?” Rey said, voice unchanged.

“Your number,” he tried again, because men who practice smiles in car mirrors also practice scripts.

Something flicked the pub’s fuse box. The lights over the exact spot he stood popped off—no other bulbs—leaving him in a neat personal darkness. The rest of the bar stayed bright. Conversation dipped. People looked. He stepped back, startled, into light. It came back on.

He laughed like he wasn’t rattled. “Weird.”

“Very,” Rey said. “Drink?”

“Fine,” he snapped. “Lager. And smile.”

Ben’s hand found the space above Rey’s wrist, a ghost of pressure that asked you or me. Rey swallowed the first answer and picked the one that left her owning it.

“No,” she said to overshirt, clean. “I’m serving. Not smiling on command. That’s not the job.”

A few heads turned. Not many. The right ones.

Overshirt’s mouth set. “I’m a customer.”

“And I’m done serving you,” Rey said, just as clean. She lifted her chin at Finn, who had moved without moving to a place where he could be useful. “He’s all yours.”

Finn’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Out,” he said, polite as murder. “Now.”

Overshirt’s bravado hit a wall that didn’t care. He looked to his mates. Mates were suddenly very invested in the darts board. He tried the charm again, aimed at the wrong woman; scarlet lipstick didn’t bother looking up. He shoved his hands in his pockets like he’d invented pockets and should get a medal. He left.

Ben’s heat eased. The room took a breath and went back to being a pub.

Rey exhaled in fours and held at two, a habit she pretended was counting change. She poured three lagers, a Guinness, a mercy Coke. She wiped the bar in long, steady stripes. Her hands didn’t shake. When they did later, they did it in the glasswasher steam where no one saw.

“Alright?” Finn said, low, in one of those between-order pockets.

“Yeah,” she said. It was almost true.

Ben leaned close enough for the heat of his mouth to draw a neat line along her jaw. “I don’t like him looking at you.”

“Noted,” Rey said, eyes on the queue. “Don’t break my pub.”

“I’m very gentle,” Ben said, which was not true and somehow was tonight. He let the drip tray be a drip tray and the fuses be obedient and the mats sit like mats.

By last orders, the fury had bled out of the room and left only noise. Scar­let lipstick tipped a big wink and a generous tip at Rey. The new kid survived. Paul declared that the till balanced because he’d glared at it. Finn stacked glassware with the neat ruthlessness of a man who liked when things ended where they belonged.

When the door shut on the final cheers, Rey leaned both palms on the bar and let the wood take some of her.

Ben’s voice lived in the small space between heartbeat and breath. “Say the word next time.”

“I said it,” Rey said. “Just not to you.”

He was delighted and annoyed in equal measure. “Infuriating.”

She finally looked over at him. “Thanks.”

He blinked, surprised enough to show it. “For what.”

“For…not breaking my pub,” she said. “And for the lights.”

He smiled like a thief who liked being thanked for not stealing. “I can do worse,” he promised, affectionate as sin.

“I know,” she said grinning at him.

The street had emptied to wet brick and the sound of taxis gambling yellow down the next road over. Rey locked the last bolt on the pub, flipped the sign, and stepped into the alley with keys between her fingers, Friday’s noise still buzzing in her bones.

“Evening, sweetheart.”

He peeled off the wall like mildew. Navy overshirt. Practiced smile. The kind of breath that wanted to be inside your life uninvited.

“We’re closed,” Rey said, straight line, head down for the pavement.

He cut her off. One hand slapped the brick near her head; the other caught her wrist and pinned it up. Wet mortar kissed the back of her skull. The stink of beer-sour and cheap aftershave.

“Let’s settle up,” he said. “You owe me a smile.”

“No,” Rey said, small and clean.

He leaned in like the alley had told him it was private. She went for the knee. He rode it. His forearm barred her chest, hard and ugly. She dragged breath for a scream.

He slapped her.

A bright pop. The alley twisted. Iron on her tongue. He grinned like he’d proven a point. “Don’t be loud.”

Rey screamed anyway, full throat.

It cut off mid-sound, not because of his hand—because the world paused to listen.

The temperature dropped. The mist stopped falling and hung, beads suspended like a thousand withheld decisions. The sodium lamp at the mouth of the alley flickered once, went dim, stayed there, like it had ducked.

“Move your hand,” a voice said, soft and delighted and wrong, from everywhere and a step away.

He turned.

Ben stepped out of the shadow like the shadow had grown tired of being less. He was wrong-beautiful no longer. He was built for the dark.

Horns unfurled from his hairline elegant as antlers, black as wet stone, curving back with the patience of old trees. Claws slid from his fingers slow and deliberate, not knives—talons, hooked and mean, clicking once with the promise of physics rewritten. His eyes were not a color the alley had agreed to; they were depth. Veins of heat ran under his skin like fire trapped politely, and the politeness had ended.

He smiled without teeth. It was worse. “Hands,” he said, pleasant. “Off.”

Overshirt’s fingers left Rey’s face like they’d remembered gravity. She stumbled, turned sideways, got air into her lungs. He grabbed for her again because habits die slow.

Ben moved.

Not fast. Not showy. The space handed him over. Claws wrapped overshirt’s wrist accurate, not drawing blood—yet—and rotated. Bone learned about new directions. The man folded like a bad chair and met brick shoulder-first.

“Who—what—” he hissed, a thin crackle under real fear.

Ben tilted his head, horns catching what little light there was, haloing him in something the church would have called a problem. “Look at her. Now look at me. Do the maths.”

He pressed. The wall accepted. Overshirt came up coughing. He swung because men like him only learn in one language. Ben didn’t bother to dodge. He caught the fist mid-air and closed his clawed hand around it just tight enough to teach every knuckle its full name.

“Ben,” Rey said, breath ragged, cheek burning.

“Little one,” he said without looking away, voice gone warm and terrible. “He touched you.”

“I know,” Rey said. “I’m okay.”

“You will be, him...not so much” he corrected, and pulled the man forward off the wall by his collar, then put him back into it. The brick rang. A hairline of wet grit powdered down.

Overshirt grabbed at Ben’s chest; claws slid under his fingers like a trapdoor he hadn’t seen. He yelped. Ben’s horns grazed the brick above his head as he leaned in, and the alley suddenly had a crown it hadn’t asked for.

“Do you understand what ‘no’ is?” Ben asked, friendly as a bartender asking about allergies.

“I—she was—she—” the man flailed, words disordering themselves around fear.

“No,” Ben said, pleased at the lesson plan. “The word is no.”

He hit him.

Not wild. Surgical. One to the gut that scooped breath out with a bucket. One to the ribs that made bone reconsider its loyalties. Overshirt sagged, coughed spit and pride onto his own shirt.

“Ben,” Rey said again, sharper.

He heard her like a bell. His attention cut sideways, horns casting two neat crescents on the wall. The claws around the man’s wrist eased a fraction. The anger didn’t go. It shifted shape, took better aim.

“If you run,” Ben told the man, conversational, “I will take the piece of your ankle you don’t need for walking straight.”

“I—okay—okay—” He nodded too fast, eyes everywhere but where the claws were.

Ben leaned closer and the tips of his horns touched brick with a sound like cold glass. His voice smoothed until it was almost kind. “You will not look at her again. You will not name her. You will not stand on a street she is on. If you see her in a crowd, your eye will skip. If you dream her, you will wake. Then I will come for you and she won't be able to save you or your soul”

The man whined, low and child-small. “Please.”

Ben smiled then, all teeth and old law. “Good boy.”

He let go.

Overshirt collapsed to a knee, grabbed nothing, found his feet wrong, stumbled for the mouth of the alley like a drunk inventing a new dance. He glanced back once—stupid—and Ben’s shadow put both hands on the wall beside his head, horns casting a cage. He didn’t glance again. He went, fast enough to believe in calves tomorrow.

The mist fell. The lamp remembered itself. Rain resumed, honest and fine.

Rey pressed her shoulders to the opposite wall and let the shakes come small and mean. Her cheek was a hot bloom. Her hands still wore the keys between fingers like claws.

Ben turned, horns receding like night taking back its toy, claw-tips sliding to fingers that were only hands again. It didn’t happen all at once. He let her see it. He trusted her with the change.

He came slow, as if approaching an animal that had been made to run. “Show me,” he said, and lifted two fingers—blunt now, human now—close to her cheek. “Please.”

She tilted her face. His touch landed warm. Heat soaked the sting without magic, or with the kind that’s only attention. She hissed at the first contact, then melted that honest inch.

“You okay?” he asked, and the demon was still in his mouth and it made the tenderness worse.

“I will be,” she said. It came out wrecked and fine.

He exhaled a laugh he hadn’t meant to keep. “He is very lucky you asked me to stop.”

“I know,” she said, and believed both the threat and the fact that she had changed the ending.

He watched her breath, not her bruise. The horns were gone, but the shape of them haunted the air above his brow, like the alley was still wearing their absence. Rain dappled his hair; it hissed off his skin like something that didn’t understand water and didn’t care to.

“Home,” he said, softer, the word an order and a promise. “Tea. Ice. I watch you sleep.”

“Okay” she breathed.

He stepped back and let the space widen. She moved. Her legs remembered asphalt and stairs. He paced a half-step in front, angle of his shoulder daring the world to try something stupid twice.

On the landing, Mrs. Jones’s basil wore wet like bravery. In the flat, the ritual steadied the air—keys down, chain, latch. The lamp behaved. The frames held their petty tilt.

In the kitchen, she filled a glass with water and watched it for a heartbeat as if physics might forget her name again. Ben leaned against the doorway, still a fraction taller than human, still glowing at the edges like the world was a dimmer switch and he’d snapped it off and on too fast.

“Come here,” he said, and when she did, he dipped two fingers in the freezer’s bag of peas and ghosted the cold along her cheek with care.

“Pretty,” he said, fond and furious both. “Even when you’ve been slapped.”

She laughed, helpless and ugly and exactly alive.

“Thank you,” she said.

He bowed his head, horns brushing her doorway, and looked up with eyes that remembered fire. “Mine,” he said, not as a claim, not tonight. As a vow. Protective as a curse, old as the river.

She nodded once because she knew which shape of the word he meant. Bed found her like a shoreline. He didn’t touch. He took his place at the edge like an armed prayer. When sleep finally came, it found her with a demon counting her breaths and a promise sitting in the room like a weapon put down within reach.

Chapter Text

The flat at three a.m. was all small, honest noises—radiator ticks, rain twitching at the window, the settling sigh of old wood.

A noise that didn’t belong slid under the door of sleep: a slow scrape, then a dull, careful thud from the hall.

Rey surfaced hard, mouth dry, brain still fogged with the kind of rest that doesn’t make bargains. “Ben?” she mumbled into the pillow, half-smiling on reflex because this was the hour he liked to tap out rhythms and call it an alarm.

Another sound. A hinge eased. A floorboard took a weight that wasn’t hers.

“Ben?” she said again, pushing up, hair stuck to her cheek. “If you’ve knocked something over—”

No answer. The air felt wrong. Heavy.

She swung her legs out of bed. Socks whispered the cold floor. “Ben,” she tried, softer, because the dark had his name in it too many times to be innocent.

She waddled into the hall, half-asleep, rubbing her eyes with the heel of her hand, and saw him.

Navy overshirt. Wet hair. Eyes glass-bright with drink and mean intent. He stood in the narrow run between kitchen and entry, legs wide like a man playing cop in front of a mirror, and he was holding a gun two-handed, arms locked, the muzzle already lined up with the space where her chest was.

Every old animal in her body stood up at once.

“On your knees,” he said. His voice wobbled on knees. He took a step closer to steady it.

Rey went cold and bright. Three doors presented themselves all at once: run, scream, freeze. She sank, slow, careful, never taking her eyes off the mouth of the gun. Her knees touched the runner. The rug was ridiculous under bone.

“Hands,” he said. “Up. Where I can see them.”

She raised them. They shook; she couldn’t stop it. Tears came hot and rude because bodies do what they want in the end. She hated that he could see.

“You don’t have to do this,” Rey whispered. “Please. You can go. No one—”

“Shut up,” he snapped. Whiskey and old grievance on his breath. “You think you can make a fool of me? Smile for every prick in the bar, act like I don’t exist?” He couldn’t find the word he wanted because he didn’t own it. The barrel steadied as rage found it a spine. “Face down.”

She didn’t move. “Please,” she said again, last coin, useless. “Please.”

Heat arrived behind her right shoulder, a stripe the radiator couldn’t explain.

“Don’t move,” Ben said, voice low as a thought you invent to save yourself.

She didn’t dare look for him. The man’s jaw set in the righteousness of a drunk in a story. His finger tightened.

“Wait—” Rey tried, because humans bargain with storms.

The shot cracked the hall into a new shape. It was immediate—sound, flash, the hot, impossible fist under her ribs. Rey folded sideways before she knew she’d moved, shoulder into skirting, cheek into carpet, breath knocked out clean.

The world narrowed to a postage stamp of rug fibers and the crooked picture frame and the way air wouldn’t come right. She made a small, ugly sound that wasn’t language.

“Jesus—oh—shit—” the man blurted, bravado burned off in an instant. The gun sagged like he’d remembered what it weighed too late.

“Rey,” Ben said, and he was there—there—knees on either side of her hip, heat at her cheek, palm finding her face with surgeon care. “Look at me.”

Her gaze dragged to him like metal to a magnet. His eyes were wrong-bright. Shadow shook itself loose around his edges. Horn-light ghosted above his brow like the room believed in crowns.

“Stay,” he said, counting her breath with his. “In. Out. Good girl.”

Her hands tried to cage the hurt. His hand covered hers—warm—and pressed. Not gentle. Correct. The pressure gave the pain a border; it had somewhere to go that wasn’t everywhere. Ben appeared to the man now.

The drunk, discovering panic too late, lifted the gun again on reflex.

Ben looked up and smiled, and it wasn’t human. Horns unfurled—elegant, black as wet stone, arching back like old trees. Claws slid from his fingers—talons that clicked once against each other with the promise of physics rewritten. The lamp at the end of the hall dipped without flickering, as if it didn’t want to be seen. The air bent.

“Try,” Ben invited, pleasant as hunger.

The man fired.

The bullet left the barrel; the hallway refused it. It slowed in the thick of the air like a moth hitting a windscreen and fell with a domestic tick to the runner by Rey’s knee.

The man charged the way cowards do—forward, stupid. He reached for Rey’s hair like control lives in a fist.

Ben moved the way night does when it remembers it’s older than light.

He was between them without crossing the space. Claws caught the man’s wrist and turned it; bone learned about new directions. The gun clattered and skittered under the radiator. Ben’s other hand found the man’s throat and pinned him to the wall. Horns scraped brick with a sound like cold glass.

“Look at me,” Ben said, friendly. The man did and wished he hadn’t.

“You hit her,” Ben went on, voice smooth as a blade. “You broke into her home. You pointed a gun at her heart.” Claws flexed, leaving perfect crescents without breaking skin. “Do you understand what ‘no’ is?”

“I—please—” The word came out small and child-shaped.

Ben’s mouth slanted into something that wasn’t a smile. “Good. You know that one.”

He hit him.

Not messy. One to the gut to steal breath. One open-handed across the cheek, claws kissing without keeping souvenirs, to erase the shape of the smirk he’d worn. The man’s head met plaster hard enough to make the wall remember it was only chalk and paper.

“You will crawl out of this building and forget the address,” Ben said, horns casting dark parentheses on the paint. “If you see her on a street, your eye will skip. If you dream her, you will wake. If your hand raises in a room she’s in, it will forget it belongs to you.”

“Okay—okay—” the man gasped, vision narrowed to necessity.

“Good boy,” Ben said, and threw him through the half-open door to the stairs.

He went down ugly, catching himself, failing, staggering. He didn’t look back. He didn’t deserve the dignity. His footfalls ragged down the stairwell until even the basil on Mrs. Jones’s sill could pretend it was wind.

Silence landed hard.

No—Rey’s breath, wrong at the edges; the soft pat of rain; the faint metallic ring in her ears. The pain was a white sun. The world frayed to black around it.

Ben was back, on his knees at her side, horns receding like night tucking away its toys, claws sliding to fingers that were hands and still not merely that. His attention was a gravity well; it dragged panic out of the room.

“Stay with me,” he said, and the command was a lifeline, not a law. He pressed both palms to the wound—over her hands and then replacing them, exact, uncompromising, the kind of pressure that says I’ve done this before and I will keep doing it until you hate me and then some. “Look at me.”

She did. She found his face. She held.

“You’re okay,” he lied with art.

Her mouth worked around a breath that tasted like copper. “Ben,” she managed.

He leaned until his forehead almost touched hers—heat, not weight. “I have you,” he said, and it sounded like a vow pulled taut across centuries. “I have you.”

The air thickened again, that strange curve of pressure that tells rooms to wait. Time leaned. He bought her seconds with a currency the world couldn’t audit. Somewhere, a siren belonged to someone else. Here, there was only breath counted into existence.

Her fingers found his wrist. She pressed, then loosened, then pressed again—a pattern that wanted to be a word and couldn’t afford the letters. Her lips went blue at the edges. The white sun dimmed.

“Don’t,” he snarled, at the dark, at the rule, at the story that had the nerve to think it knew its ending. “Don’t you fucking—”

She blinked slow. The room softened. She looked at him like he was the last honest thing the world contained.

He didn’t mean to spend it. He spent it anyway.

“I love you,” Ben said.

He didn’t say it like a confession. He said it like mine written in fog, like guardian carved into a rule and then broken on purpose, like hands in a river refusing to let a life go out when it could be dragged back in.

A pale, impossible smile touched her mouth for half a heartbeat.

Her hand slipped from his wrist.

Her chest stuttered once under his palms, and then the breath decided not to come back.

The room held perfectly still, as if it had been warned. The rain went on with its small honest work. The crooked picture frame held its petty angle. Ben’s hands stayed where they were, steady and savage, a keeper holding against an ocean that had already taken.

“Rey!” he said again, very softly, as if the word itself could be a door.

It wasn’t.

Chapter Text

It starts warm.

Mum’s ring ticks time on the dash while she drums along; Dad does the drum fill on the steering wheel and misses on purpose to make Rey laugh. The car smells like spearmint gum and damp wool. Headlights lay coins along the wet road; the bridge ahead glitters like a spine.

Something steps into the beam.

Dad swears soft. The wheel jerks. Metal screams. For one bright second everything inside the car floats—map, scarf, Rey’s stomach—and then the world flips and cold slams them.

They’re upside down.

Seatbelts bite. Water comes in fast and sure through the seams, turning the windows black. The radio dies mid-lyric. Sound collapses into the thud-thud of Rey’s heart and the high ring in her ears. Mum’s hair lifts and moves like weeds. Dad’s mouth makes bubbles where words should be.

Everything becomes a list:

Seatbelt. The buckle won’t. Rey’s thumb slips. Her lungs start their countdown.

Door. Pressure laughs at her hands.

Window. Black mirror. She hits it. It stays a wall.

Mum finds Rey’s wrist in the cold and shoves her palm to the buckle—now, now—and it gives. The strap peels from Rey’s chest. The river takes the chance and pushes her up against the roof. She kicks. Her foot smacks something—Dad’s forearm—he flinches, finds the wheel again, holds it off his chest like he can talk metal down with love.

Air is a rumor. The cold burns. Rey’s chest is a magnesium flare. The world narrows to the bite at her collarbone and the need for breath that has nowhere to sit.

A new light enters the car.

Not the headlamps. Not the police that aren’t here yet. White, soft, refusing the river’s color. It doesn’t so much shine as make the dark remember it can’t have everything.

A face is there in the water—clear where everything else blurs. Not distorted like things get underwater. Eyes steady, mouth calm. And behind him, the light gathers itself into wings.

They’re huge. They shouldn’t fit. They do. White—not clean white, not sheet white—feather-white, with the shadow of muscle and weather in them, edges soft and endless. They don’t move like a bird’s. They hold. They make a space inside the river where the river can’t be.

He reaches in.

Not with panic. Not with grab. A hand that already knows the way Rey’s wrist will feel finds it. Warm, somehow; strong. It sets her palm to the door and pushes with her and the pressure changes—the world eases a hair—and the door gives. The river stops being an enemy and becomes hands.

Rey’s head breaks the skin of the water.

Air is a knife. It hurts. Then it’s the only good thing left. She coughs and chokes and laughs and none of the noises make sense. Mum’s scarf surfaces beside her and spreads like a red flower then sinks. Dad’s hand bangs once against glass and is gone.

“Mum—” Rey tries, and rain eats it.

The man is there with her in the cold and the fumes and the siren that doesn’t exist yet. His wings throw off drops like small stars. He turns her face toward the bank and gives her a slow, irresistible pull, as gentle as tide. She doesn’t fight because fighting seems rude when someone holds the water back for you.

On the muddy shelf, hands that belong to shouting strangers take over—underarms, shoulders, hair. Foil crackles. Voices are too loud. The world is up and cruel. The river keeps what it keeps.

Rey twists back, gasping, and sees him clean: the man who isn’t a man, standing thigh-deep in black water as if it were a floor built for him, wings folded half-in, half-out, peeled with rain. He looks at her like he knows the number of breaths she has left and intends to pay for more. He smiles once—small, private, so fond it hurts—and for a heartbeat it is the kindest thing she’s ever seen.

Then the light around him tightens like a muscle. He steps backward and is less; the wings lose edges; the water takes back the shape he made and the night says no witnesses and swallows him.

“Keep her talking,” someone says in a bright jacket, kneeling beside Rey with a blanket like foil armor. “Name? Can you tell me your name?”

“Rey,” she says, teeth chattering, eyes still on the black skin of the river where wings were. She adds, before sense can stop her, “He had…wings.”

“She's in shock,” the jacket murmurs.

Sirens arrive; the bridge flashes blue. Mum’s scarf lies in the mud like a spell that ran out of ink. Rey stares at the river until the cold in her bones feels like it has a name. Something presses against the inside of her wrist—warm, impossible, a ghost of a grip—and her fingers close on nothing and remember.

Years from now, she will say she blacked out. She will say hands did the remembering for her and that’s all she got.

But in the room at the center of the dark, where one true thing is allowed to live, a picture hangs: white wings in black water, calm eyes, a hand that set hers where the world would open, a smile she will know again long after the river has stopped biting.

There wasn’t a tunnel. No choirs.

There was a room that felt like the inside of a held breath—bright without light, quiet without silence, warm the way a hand is warm when it covers yours because it can.

Rey stood in it because standing made more sense than floating. Her chest didn’t hurt here. Her hands weren’t shaking. She looked down out of habit and saw herself outline-soft, like she’d been sketched with light and left half-finished.

“Am I dead?” she asked, because someone had to say the obvious, and she felt like the someone.

“Yes and no,” said a voice that didn’t need a mouth. It came from everywhere, and from nowhere, and from the small orderly part of her that always knew where the spare batteries were.

Rey turned in a circle and found no figure to pin the voice on. “That’s unhelpful.”

“It’s honest.” A pause that felt like a smile. “Hello, Rey.”

“God?” she said, because sarcasm failed her and the word tasted better than nothing.

“If it helps you to call me that,” the voice allowed, not offended, not proud. “Names are how you hold things still. I don’t hold still well.”

She huffed—one soft laugh, shocked at itself. “Him again,” she said, and the room knew who she meant.

“Him again,” agreed the voice, full of fondness that had teeth. “Benjamin. The one you call Ben. The one who refuses to learn when to let go.”

“He doesn’t like being assigned rules,” Rey said, because understatement gave her spine. “He likes me.”

“He loves you,” the voice corrected gently. “Across maps and calendars. Across the kinds of endings you have and the kinds you imagine. You two repeat. I watch.”

Rey’s mouth went dry in a place where mouths do not need water. “Repeat?”

“In all your lives,” the voice said, not making a ceremony of it, just laying down facts like stones in a river. “In the ones where you died old in a chair. In the ones where you did not. In the ones where you never met until the last page. In the ones where you were cruel to each other first. In the ones where he obeyed. In the one where he broke.”

“By the bridge,” Rey said. The room accepted the memory without shiver: cold water, hair like weeds, the pressure changing when a hand found hers, white wings holding back a river as if it were manners.

“Yes.” Warmth threaded the word. “He reached past what he was allowed and put you back. He chose you over obedience. I chose consequence over indifference. He fell. You lived. And here we are again, doing what you two do so well—turning the page and arguing with the margins.”

Rey swallowed. “We’re soulmates,” she said, flat, not asking for poetry.

“If you like your poetry out loud,” the voice said, amused. “You are particular magnets. You persist in finding each other. Even when you shouldn’t. Especially then.”

The word owned skittered over the floor of her mind and tried to climb somewhere important. “He says ‘mine’ like a prayer,” she admitted, irritated at herself for being honest to a room. “It makes me want to fight and want to—” She cut the sentence off at the sensible place.

“He says ‘mine’ like a vow,” the voice said, kinder than she’d expected. “Not a leash. A keeping. There is a difference, small and enormous.”

Rey stood there in the warm-not-warm and let the anger she had been carrying set itself down for a second. It stayed at her feet like a dog that had done its job. Under it was something that scared her more. “If I go back,” she said, “he’ll break the rules again.”

“If he must,” the voice agreed. “He is built to stand between your breath and other people’s mistakes. He is terrible at pretending not to be.”

“You punished him for it once,” Rey said, because fairness is a habit and she had always liked to count.

“I gave his choice weight,” the voice said, neither apologizing nor gloating. “I do not erase. I do not fix without cost. I let you both mean it when you say what you say.”

“I died,” Rey said, voice thin. She didn’t try to make it brave.

“For a moment,” the voice said. “Long enough to be here and to decide whether to keep being there.”

“Do I get to decide that?” Rey asked, sharp. “Or is this—” She gestured at the air. “—inevitable, fate, story time.”

“You always get a choice,” the voice said, not offended. “You can lay down. I will keep you. You can go back. I will keep you then, too. Love does not undo endings. It argues with them.”

She lifted her chin, stubborn out of reflex. “If I go back, will you…fix it.” Her hand hovered over the outline where the hole in her should be. “Make it not hurt.”

“I won’t lie to you,” the voice said, gently stern. “It will hurt. He bought you seconds; the medics will buy you more. Pain is part of the price of being a person.”

“And if I don’t go back?”

“He breaks anyway,” the voice said simply.

It landed. She saw it—the version where he sat in her hallway holding a body that wouldn’t warm, horns out and useless, hands pressed to a wound that didn’t care, whispering stay to a door that wouldn’t open again. She tasted salt in a place where bodies don’t do salt.

“He’s…crying,” she said, surprised at the violence of it inside her. “He doesn’t—he doesn’t do that.”

“He does when it’s you,” the voice said, matter-of-fact as rain.

“And you’ll…send me back?” she asked, blunt. “If I ask.”

“I don’t send,” the voice said, amused. “You go. I stop being in your way. That’s the trick of me. I am not the river. I am the shore.”

She stood there, barefoot in a room that wasn’t, with the taste of copper and river just at the edge of memory and the feel of a demon’s warm hands built for keeping pressed to a wound and the sight of white wings in black water hung on the wall of her head where no one could take it down. She thought of Poe and Finn and Rose, of the pub’s lousy brass polish and the beanie that always found her ears, of a ceiling crack that looked like a river and a mouth that had learned how to say little one without making it small.

“Alright,” Rey said, to the voice, to the room, to the part of herself that collected rules and broke them neatly. “Send me back.”

“Of course,” said the voice, pleased without victory. “One more thing.”

“What.”

“Tell him properly,” the voice said, a smile in it again. “He can carry so much if you hand it to him.”

“Yeah,” Rey said, and wiped at her eyes out of habit. “Okay.”

The room exhaled. The warm became light became sound became—

Carpet under her cheek. The crooked picture frame at its petty angle. The radiator tick. The metallic taste that meant oxygen and fear had been arguing. Hands—warm, steady, uncompromising—pressing her back into herself.

“Stay,” Ben said, and it landed on her like the word it was: a door.

She sucked air. It hurt. The pain was a white sun with black edges. She followed his count anyway because she had decided to.

“Rey?” his voice wobbled.

His face hovered above hers, wrong-beautiful with all the wrongness smoothed back under skin because the world had returned and he had to pass in it. His mouth was tight with terror he was pretending not to name. And his eyes—Oh, God—his eyes were wet.

“Ben,” Rey croaked, small and unavoidable.

He flinched, joy and horror in the same breath. “Here,” he said, and then, because he had already spent it and would spend it again, he said, “I love you.”

“I know,” Rey whispered, and her mouth made the smallest impossible smile around the hurt. It was pathetic and perfect. “I always—” The sentence broke on a cough. She dragged in air anyway, greedy and obedient. “—always find you.”

A sound came out of him that he wouldn’t forgive himself for later and she would never let him forget. Not a sob, not a laugh, something split down the middle. Tears cut clean lines through the blood on his cheek where he’d touched his face without thinking—hers, on him, everywhere.

He was covered in her. He didn’t care. He used both hands to keep her in the world and let the world see him weep.

“Good girl,” he said, voice wrecked.

Boots on stairs. Mrs. Jones’s voice aiming accuracy at emergency services. The door. The bright jackets. The gloves. The practiced pressure replacing his palms, exactly where he’d drawn the map. Oxygen. Numbers. Questions. A competent chorus.

“What’s her name?”

“Rey,” Mrs Jones said, though none of them could hear him, though none of them knew he was there.

“She’s Rey.” he says at the same time.

They lifted her. She found his heat beside the medic’s hand—impossible, useless, everything—like a second weight making the first one count.

Her vision tunneled and widened in waves. On a downswing, she turned her head a fraction toward the stripe of air that held him. “Don’t…leave,” she managed, because the room had asked for it and she had promised.

“Never,” Ben said, and meant it in all the ways the room between had warned her about—blessing, curse, fact.

As the hallway smeared into stairwell and siren, she kept her eyes on the space where no one else could see him and he kept his hands where the living do their work and the dead stop, and somewhere between those two truths they made a third: breath, shuddering and stubborn, that went on.

Chapter Text

Machines breathed for the room. Not for her—she was doing that herself, shallow and stubborn—but enough to make the dark feel less empty. A monitor made a soft, patient metronome. Plastic whispered where a line fed into the crook of her arm. The corridor light made a gold strip under the door, a borrowed sunrise no one had earned.

Rey surfaced slow. The first thing she noticed was thirst. The second was the ache under her ribs, a big wrong O someone had tried to close with thread. The third was that the ceiling was too clean to be hers.

She turned her head an inch. Pain stamped its foot. "Ow," she told no one, because manners are free.

"I know," Ben said, from the dark.

He was there. Of course he was. Sitting in the corner chair like he'd been poured into it and had refused to move in case motion offended the universe. The hospital made him look almost ordinary—just a man in a black jacket with his hands folded and his attention bright and private—but his edges still did that heat-haze thing the world couldn't decide how to process. His eyes were wrong in the low light: too bright, too old, wet at the corners in a way that didn't make sense until she remembered the hallway.

"You stayed," Rey said. It came out scratchy.

He shifted forward, elbows on his knees. "I promised."

A jug and a cheap plastic cup lived on the bedside table as if some helpful night-shift had predicted her. Ben poured without looking away from her, as if he'd practised pouring in the dark. He held the cup to her mouth; she sipped like a person who had learned about lungs the hard way.

"Slow," he said, and for once she didn't mind obeying.

When the water felt less like a miracle and more like a possibility, Rey let her head sink back into the weird, too-fluffy hospital pillow. The room smelled like disinfectant and old coffee and the faint ghost of lemon from a cleaner's shift hours ago.

"Where is everyone," she asked, because the quiet was heavy. "Poe, Finn, Rose—Mrs. Jones—?"

"Being mortal," Ben said softly. "Filling forms. Crying at vending machines. Sleeping badly on plastic chairs until the day staff kicks them out. They'll be back when the sun remembers itself."

Rey nodded a millimeter. The bandage under her gown tugged. She breathed around it. If she didn't move, it hurt in a way she could name.

"You died," Ben said, and it wasn't an accusation. He said it like you mark a fact that tried to be a rule.

"Yeah," Rey said. The room between lived at the edges of her sight like a fever dream with clean hands. "It didn't...stick."

A breath that could have been a laugh snagged in him and turned into something else. "Thirty-two seconds," he said, and the number had been carved into him. "I counted."

She watched him like she was checking a story against a memory. His knuckles were clean now, but she remembered them red. His mouth had a new hard line it hadn't had two nights ago. His voice had learned a break he didn't like.

"I met God," she said, because subtlety had never bought anyone oxygen.

One of his eyebrows wanted to be surprised and didn't dare. "He spoke to you."

"Spoke at me," Rey said. "Like a room speaks. Like...shore, not river."

"Accurate," Ben murmured, and for a beat the wrongness around him softened into something like reverence.

"He told me." She didn't dress it up. "You. Guardian angel. Soulmates. A thousand lives and you always find me. You broke rules. You fell. You keep doing it anyway."

Silence arranged itself neatly between them. The monitor ticked a private rhythm. Somewhere in the corridor a cart wheel protested, then remembered itself. Ben looked at her like the last mask had been taken away and the face underneath had no bad angles left to hide.

"Yes," he said. Sometimes honesty is just the shortest possible sentence.

"I saw you," Rey went on, because it mattered now. "The night of the crash. Not just hands. Wings. They fit in the river like it had to make room for them."

Something moved across his face that wasn't pride and wasn't shame. "I thought they'd take that from you," he said, quiet. "The memory. I'm glad they didn't."

"Why didn't you tell me," she asked. Not sharp. Just the kind of question that lives in bone.

He considered the ceiling for a second, like he owed it money. "Because I liked your no more than I liked your awe," he said finally. "Because I didn't want you to look at me like a miracle and forget to be angry when you needed to be. Because if I said angel out loud before you said Ben, I wasn't sure I'd get to be both."

"That's annoyingly reasonable," Rey said, and felt her mouth do a tiny, traitorous tilt.

He smiled, small and wrecked. "I have my moments."

She took another sip, carefully. The water did its neat trick of making thinking easier. The room drummed around them: pump, drip, tick, rest. She let the silence put its weight down. Then:

"You cried," she said. "In my hall."

He didn't pretend otherwise. "Yes."

"I've never seen you—" She searched for the word. Break was too cruel. Bend was too kind. "—leak."

"I leak for you," he said, and it didn't even sound like a boast. It sounded like a weather report he didn't love giving. "It's irritating."

She laughed once, then winced, hand going instinctively to press the hurt. His hand was on hers before she could decide if she wanted it, warm and firm and careful of the line. For a second she let him hold the pain in place. She didn't make it a metaphor. She didn't have to.

"Guardian," she said, testing the word out loud. "That's your word."

"Was," he corrected, a twist in his mouth. "Is, when you say it. I don't get to keep it for myself."

"What do you keep."

"You," he said, without theater. "If you let me."

She met his eyes and let the room between move in the corner of her memory like a fish in shallow water. Tell him properly, it had said. She swallowed around the desert that lives in hospitals.

"I chose to come back," Rey told him. "I could have stayed. It was warm, and everything made sense, and nothing hurt, and I could hear the end of sentences without waiting."

His jaw tightened so suddenly she almost missed it. "You should have stayed," he lied.

"No." She shook her head a fraction, stubborn as a living thing. "I wanted to come back, and not just because I'm mean and nosy and I want to watch Poe fail at darts forever." She let herself breathe out. "I came back because...you asked me to. And because I wanted to tell you properly."

He didn't move. He didn't breathe. The room did it for him. "Tell me," he said, and the words tasted like prayer chewed up and spat out and made useful.

"I love you," Rey said.

She didn't say it like it was tearing anything out of her. She said it like a fact she had finally decided to spend, coin on the counter, palm leaving it, eyes up. It was ridiculous to say it in a room that smelled like antiseptic and tired flowers. It was perfect.

The look on his face made the machines irrelevant. Not in a dangerous way—she wasn't going to flatline because he had feelings—but in the old way where rooms become churches when you say certain truths in them.

"Again," he said, voice gone rough around the edges like he'd scraped it on a miracle.

"I love you," she repeated, softer. "Always. Across maps and calendars, apparently. In the ones where I die old. In the ones where I don't. In this one, where you're an asshole and I'm difficult and the ceiling crack looks like a river."

He laughed—proper, wrecked—and it set his mouth right again. "Good," he said helplessly. "Good."

They let it sit. The room didn't die from it. The drip kept its tiny metronome. A nurse's shoes hissed past outside and didn't pause at the door because her chart said stable.

Rey wet her lips. "So. Guardian." She nodded at his hands. "What can you do, and what can't you."

"Boundaries," he said, delighted, like she'd brought him a puzzle box. "Excellent. I can bend luck. I can encourage physics to remember manners. I can make a room wait while you find your breath, for a short and expensive time. I can make people like him forget how to look at you. I can pick a lock I am not touching and frighten a fuse into good behavior. I can't heal what a bullet tears cleanly. I can press and press until the fleshy parts believe me. I can't lie to the part of you that belongs to the river. I can't undo a choice you make on purpose."

"And you won't mess with my friends again," Rey said.

"Agreed," Ben said immediately, unoffended. "I was bored."

She snorted. "You get jealous."

"I get...annoyed," he tried, then surrendered. "Yes."

"No touching them," she said. "No...options. Not that they'd—just. No."

"Only you," he said, and did not make it sound like a trap.

She let herself look at his hands on the blanket. Careful, composed. The memory of claws lived under his skin like a rumor. The memory of wings lived behind his eyes like weather.

"You had wings," Rey said, and felt her throat go silly again. "Beautiful, ridiculous wings."

He shook his head, fond and wounded. "I have...echoes. If you saw them, it's because you always were good at seeing the thing under the thing."

"Do you miss them?"

"Sometimes," he said, amused and sad at once. "When with you, no."

"Snob," she said, because if she started crying now a nurse would come in and ruin the moment with kindness.

"Correct," he said cheerfully.

For a while they sat in it: the machine's small noises, the distant cough of a building asleep badly, the neat, unromantic ache under her ribs. He poured more water. She drank. He adjusted the blanket not because it needed adjusting but because his hands needed jobs that weren't breaking rules.

"Is he—" Rey began, and couldn't make herself put a noun on the man who had put metal in her. "—what happened to him."

"Alive," Ben said, bland with effort. "Bruised. Afraid. The police picked him up with a pocket full of bad decisions and a gun he dropped in your hall. Mrs. Jones gave very polite statements and two impolite looks. Your friends are saints with knives out."

"Good," she said. The pain in her voice had opinions. "Good."

"And you?" he asked, and touched the edge of her gown where the tape had tugged, the back of his fingers barely brushing skin, the kindest almost. "Pain level."

"Six," she said automatically. "Eight if you make me laugh."

"I will be extremely unfunny," he promised solemnly. "For the next...seventy-two hours."

"You won't manage it."

He tipped his head. "I'll suffer."

Silence again, the good kind, the kind you could set things down in. Rey watched his face soften into something she suspected very few rooms got to hold. She reached for him without thinking—and winced.

He moved faster than pain. His hand found hers and guided it, slow, careful, settling her fingers between his. Warm. Solid. Present.

"Ask me," he said, so quiet she almost missed it.

"For what?"

"Anything," he said, and for once it wasn't a tease or a trap. "Water. Stories. The shape of a god. What color the river is under bridges at two in the morning. Whether I will leave if you fall asleep."

She swallowed a smile. "Will you leave if I fall asleep."

"No," he said. "Never."

"Good." She squeezed his fingers. "Guardian?"

"Keeper," he corrected, reflex and affection.

"Angel," she said back, just to see his mouth tilt.

He rolled his eyes like a very old man who'd had a very long day and had earned one indulgence. "Sleep," he said, and the word laid a hand over the machines and they quieted to the volume of waves far away.

Rey let her eyes close because she wanted to, not because she had to. The pain didn't go; it agreed to be background. The corridor light under the door didn't brighten; it kept its little sunrise. His hand stayed, warm around hers, a weight that wasn't heavy but would be there when she woke.

Chapter Text

Morning arrived with the soft tyranny of fluorescent lights and the steady beep that swore it had always been there. Rey woke to the gentle ache of being held together by thread and tape, the taste of hospital air, and a nurse named Leah who had the hands of a magician and the glare of a bouncer. Leah checked lines, smiled with her eyes, and told Rey she'd "done very well," which Rey decided to accept as a trophy.

Then the cavalry arrived.

Poe burst in first, contraband rattling, coat half-on like the corridor had tried to fight him. "I come bearing culture," he announced, dumping three bags of crisps, a family-size cola, and a packet of gummy bears into the bedside drawer with solemn ceremony. "Also sugar. And friendship."

"You can't have that," Leah said from the doorway, failing to look truly stern.

"He's going to hide it," Rey stage-whispered. "Like a squirrel with worse impulse control."

"Untrue," Poe said, already rearranging the drawer like a criminal interior designer. "I have excellent impulse control. Also I got you prawn cocktail because you become British in hospitals."

"Thank you," Rey said, and meant both the crisps and the joke.

Finn arrived next, steady and big enough to make the room look small, carrying a ridiculous pillow shaped like a cloud. "For the back, or...hug," he offered, instantly pinking at how it sounded. He set it behind her with a gentleness that made the IV tube less frightening. He adjusted her tray table like he'd trained for it. He refilled her water because the cup had taken personal offense at being half-empty.

Rose came in last like a queen of logistics, laptop under one arm, an extension cord, and a four-way adapter like she was moving in. "We're turning this into a reasonable simulation of life," she said briskly. She plugged the laptop in, wiped the surface with a tiny pack of antibacterial wipes, and raised the head of the bed two clicks with authority. "Any pain?"

"Six," Rey said automatically. "Sometimes seven if Poe talks."

"Rude," Poe said, curled in the visitor chair, already stealing one of his own contraband crisps.

Leah tried to scowl, failed, and muttered, "Twenty minutes," which everyone pretended not to hear as a limit. She did a last gentle check of Rey's bandage, then left with the air of a woman who would fight anyone for her patient and win.

The next hour fell into the bright, easy chatter of people who know how to build a room around you. Poe told the dramatic retelling of the fireworks night, shaving the truth in favor of humor and adding a dog that had not, in fact, rescued him. Finn fact-checked without being a bore. Rose presented spreadsheets about who had spoken to which detective and when; Poe booed the spreadsheet; Rose pretended to be hurt and then kept using it.

Ben sat in the corner chair, out of sight and solid as a thought you can feel, watching Rey watch her friends like he'd paid for front-row tickets to the only show he cared about. He didn't speak. His attention warmed the air near her shoulder, a wall she could lean on without anyone noticing.

Mrs. Jones swept in midmorning like a gale with a bag-for-life full of practical sins—clean socks, a fresh toothbrush, a paperback, and contraband tea bags. "Hospital tea tastes nasty," she said. She kissed Rey's forehead and scared Finn into better posture just by looking at him. "Police have the man in a cell," she added, tidy and dry. "You don't need to worry anymore."

"Thank you," Rey said, and the room didn't wobble when she said it.

By early afternoon, the day took on the rhythm of vital checks and visitor choreography. Poe failed at the vending machine and wrote a breakup text to it on his Notes app. Finn fell asleep in a sit-up nap that looked painful; Rose draped a hoodie over him like a mother cat arranging kittens. Rey dozed and woke to the soft drone of a daytime quiz show on the tiny wall TV and felt the specific, silly joy of being alive enough to be bored by television.

She ate lunch heroically (mashed potatoes that had lost their will to live, a doomed-looking carrot), then napped on purpose as Leah pressed the good button on the IV and said, "You earned this."

When the sky went indigo, visiting hours thinned. Rose packed the laptop for the evening's main event and kissed Rey's cheek, quick and surgical. "Text if you need anything," she said. "Or if you want me to bully a consultant into being kinder."

"I will abuse your power," Rey promised.

Finn squeezed her shoulder. "I'll be back in the morning," he said. "With coffee. The real kind."

"Bring two," Leah called, passing with a tray, and Finn saluted as if he'd been given battlefield orders.

Poe drew a heart on the napkin by her water cup and tried to look cool about it. "Don't do anything dramatic," he said. "That's my job."

"I'll leave that to you," Rey said, and he pretended to be offended all the way to the door.

By the time the corridor quieted, the room had the soft, night-shift hum of tired machines and the peppermint ghost of antiseptic. Rey breathed careful, catalogued the ache under her ribs, and decided it was a manageable roommate.

"Movie?" Rose had left the laptop—for later, when your adrenaline crashes—and a small army of downloaded films. Rey propped it on the tray, plugged in the extension cord and scrolled.

"No clowns," Ben said mildly from the chair, discovering preferences he hadn't admitted to himself. "Absolutely not."

"Bold from a demon," Rey muttered, amused. She clicked IT out of spite and curiosity. The New England streets filled the little screen; the paper boat found the gutter; the drain waited like a mouth.

Dinner arrived on a tray that had optimistic compartments. The nurse set it down with a smile that apologized for peas. "Eat," she said.

Rey smirked and took up her plastic fork like a soldier.

She ate hospital lasagne and chips. She sipped broth and pretended it was consommé at a fancy place with mismatched chairs and an annoyed waitress.

Ben watched her not dramatize the act of being alive—chew, wince, swallow, breathe, laugh at the wrong moment, rewind because pain made her miss a beat—and the look on his face edged between relief and awe like someone who'd found religion in a cafeteria.

Halfway through, a nurse switched the overhead to the little lamp and dimmed the hallway's glow. The room shrank in the nice way. Rey tucked the blanket up and shook two painkillers out of a paper cup with gratitude. Ben poured water without being asked, the one useful trick he could perform with his wrong hands, and held the cup when she forgot the world didn't tilt.

"Scared?" he asked, eyes on the laptop as a red balloon bobbed down a street that never did anything kind.

"At a clown? No," Rey said, but her fingers found his heat in the air by instinct. "At peas, maybe."

Pennywise grinned. Rey rolled her eyes. "Ben," she said, "tell me again why movie demons are all quips."

"Because mortals prefer cheap tricks to expensive truths," he said, fond and disdainful in the same breath.

She ate her pudding and tucked her empty tray aside. The film kept moving toward places where bicycles go out after dark and nobody goes looking with enough people. Rey's eyelids got heavy; the pain under her ribs turned bassline; the room's machines sang lullabies off-key.

When the clown opened his painted mouth too wide, Rey huffed. "Your wings were better," she said, too quiet for anyone with blood to hear.

Ben didn't pretend he hadn't overheard. "Yours," he said back, like a reflex, like a prayer, like a word that builds a room around a bed and keeps the night at the door.

Rey smiled without showing teeth. "Mine."

The laptop's glow made a small theater on the sheets. She watched until fatigue won the right to move her thumb to pause. She arranged the cloud pillow under her elbow, shifted an inch, remembered how to breathe around it.

Leah peeked in, saw the movie frozen on the world's worst grin, and made a face. "Absolutely not," she said, shuddering the way only night-shift nurses can.

The light dimmed to the color of promises. Ben stayed where he was, an unwavering piece of night that had chosen her side. Rey set the laptop aside, finished her cola (a crime, delicious), and tucked the contraband crisps back into the drawer like a dragon counting coins.

"Sleep," Ben said, low and amused. "You can defeat clowns tomorrow."

"I already did," Rey muttered, eyes closing. "I hired one as a friend."

"Rude," Ben said, pleased.

Chapter Text

The room was doing its best impression of night—lamp turned low, machines humming like crickets that had learned manners. The warm pack at Rey's side had cooled to a tolerable weight; the painkillers had rubbed the edges off and then rubbed her nerves raw. Sadness slicked everything, stupid and sudden.

"How do we do this," she whispered, eyes shiny. "Us. For real. You're...you. I'm me. No one else can see you. What does 'together' even mean like that?"

Ben slid closer in the chair, elbows to knees, face in shadow, attention bright on her like heat. "It means I stay," he said softly. "It means we make our own rules."

"That's the romantic answer," Rey said, voice wobbling. "I mean the cruel one. The one where the landlord wants signatures and nurses want next of kin and my friends want a plus-one who isn't a draft in the doorway." She bit her lip. "I want...normal. A little of it. A movie that isn't in my bed. Your hand on a table where other people can see it."

Something old moved behind his eyes. He didn't look away. "The truth is heavy," he said. "Do you want it anyway?"

"Always."

He nodded once, like a priest bracing to say the miserable part. "There are stories—old ones—that say a fallen can wear a life again two ways. Neither is a path I'll walk, and I will not let you walk them. But you asked for the truth, so I won't lie."

"Tell me," she said, even as something in her begged him not to.

"A soul for a soul," he said, voice low and flat, as if refusing to let the words be pretty. "Blood bought with blood. Someone dies by intent, and their...vacancy becomes a house I could be nailed into." His jaw clicked, disgust all the way down. "Or—" He made himself finish it. "—you leave your life to come where I am. No more rooms. No more bills. No more mornings. Only me. Only dark." He swallowed. "Those are the tales. That is the math the cruel like."

Rey stared at him, shock and hurt rising like bile. "That's it?"

"That's what the old rules offer," he said, and his mouth twisted. "Barter and ruin. I won't take either. I won't let you even think them like a choice."

Tears slipped; she didn't bother hiding them. "So we don't get the table. We don't get...hands in public."

"We get my hands in your world," he said, fierce and tender. "We get your world in mine, the slice of air I keep warm. We get late-night movies and my mouth on yours and your friends laughing loud enough I can feel it. We get a life that's strange and honest. We do not get shortcuts built out of other people's endings." His voice dropped. "And we do not get the one built out of yours."

She looked at him for a long, shaky beat. "I hate that the truth hurts," she whispered.

"So do I." He leaned forward until his forehead hovered a breath from hers—heat, not weight. "But it's ours. And I swear to you, Rey, I will never ask for a price like that. Not a stranger's. Not yours. Not ever."

Her mouth trembled. "But you said—if those are the only ways—"

"The only ways to pretend to be normal," he cut in, gentle but unyielding. "Not the only ways to be together." He lifted a hand and held it above hers, the kind almost that had become a language. "I can't be seen. I can't sign the form. I can keep watch. I can make bad lights behave and buy you time when breath is being stubborn. I can be there for every stupid, holy boring thing—your keys, your kettle, your laugh when you forget to be careful. I can love you without making you a cost."

A sob hiccuped out of her—embarrassing, human. He smiled like the sound was a homecoming and not a wound.

"You're allowed to be sad," he said. "You're allowed to hate the rules. Rage at me for what I'm not. I'll hold it. I'll hold you."

"It's not fair," she said, voice shredding on the not. "It's not—" She tried to breathe and tripped on her own chest. "I want a table. I want to sit across from you and have other people roll their eyes. I want stupid photos and Mrs. Jones telling you off for shoes on my rug and you carrying crisps like a normal idiot."

Ben stayed where he was—chair pulled close, elbows on knees, attention a steady heat in the room. "I know," he said, soft.

"You don't," she snapped, because the drugs made everything too honest and not kind. "You get to be heat and almost and I get to explain to everyone why I'm laughing at nothing. I get to do forms with 'no next of kin' and lie about a boyfriend who hates parties." Tears came, humiliating and hot. "I hate it. I hate—" She looked straight at him, hurt bright and stupid. "I hate you."

His face didn't flinch; his hands did, a small give. "Okay," he said, and the word broke like something gentle underfoot.

"Leave," she blurted, the room too small for the word. "Just—go away. I don't want you here. Leave me alone."

The monitor hiccuped at her pulse. The warm pack shifted. She heard herself breathing wrong and refused to be rescued from it.

Ben didn't argue. He stood slowly, no sudden moves, and stepped back—one, two, three—until the shadows took his edges. He didn't quite vanish; he dimmed. "Okay," he said again, even softer. "I'll give you quiet."

"Go!" she shouted, and her voice cracked, and the crack hurt everywhere.

The door opened fast—Leah, the night nurse, already scanning: Rey, the machines, the room, the corridor. "Hey," she said, in the voice that makes fires sit down. "What's happening?"

Rey tried to explain and hit a sob that yanked the stitches under her ribs. She doubled herself with a hand and hated the room for seeing it. "I—" Another sob. "I don't know."

Leah came to the bed and laid one palm on the rail—visible, solid—and the back of the other hand under Rey's elbow, gentle of tape and line. "Okay. Breathe with me. In four. Out six. Come on. One."

Rey did it badly. Then again, less badly. The monitor stopped tattling.

"Pain score?" Leah asked, business as mercy.

"Seven," Rey croaked. "Sad score...stupid."

"Standard issue on night shift," Leah said, pressing the good button on the pump like a small miracle. "Drugs plus pain plus quiet equals weepy. It's allowed." She swapped the cooling pack for warm, tucked the blanket so it behaved, adjusted the blind to a softer dark. "Want me to sit? Or give you quiet?"

"Quiet," Rey whispered, miserable. "Sorry."

"Being a person is not a thing you owe an apology for," Leah said. "If you need to shout again, shout. That's what doors are for." She tapped the call button. "Press if you want company and no talking. I can knit threateningly in your doorway."

A wet, involuntary laugh escaped Rey, then flinched into a hiss. "Okay."

Leah left the door not-quite closed. The room breathed out.

Rey stared at the little lamp's circle. Tears kept coming in small, stupid leaks. She pressed both palms flat to the blanket as if convincing the bed not to tip her out.

The corner where Ben had been watching was only corner now.

"Ben?" she said, small, hating herself and everything for how quick the plea arrived after the order.

Silence. No heat-haze. No stripe of warmth under her ear. The air was only air.

She let out a sound that wasn't language and scrubbed at her face, furious at the salt. "I didn't mean it," she told the ceiling, as if ceilings kept minutes. "It's the drugs. It's...everything."

Nothing answered. The machines kept their gentleness. The corridor hissed a trolley past and forgot her again.

She turned her head toward the dark where he'd been and whispered, hoarse, "Please," because pride is expensive and she had paid a lot already.

Only the warm pack replied, patient against her ribs.

Minutes passed in unkind arithmetic. The meds crept in; the ache backed up half a step. Her breathing settled, reluctantly. The shame salted itself dry.

Leah ghosted by once, checked the numbers without breaking the quiet, set a cup of water nearer, and left the door at the same forgiving angle.

Rey lay very still and listened to the room behave. No heat gathered by her cheek. No almost-touch steadied her hand. The corner stayed ordinary and empty, which is a worse kind of haunted than any she'd known.

When sleep finally took her, it was without witness—just a girl in a too-bright bed, eyes red, mouth stubborn, making peace with a night she'd asked to be alone in and gotten exactly what she asked for. Ben did not return. The dark kept its own counsel. The little lamp burned like a promise she wasn't ready to believe yet.

Chapter Text

Days turned into a schedule: obs at six, tea that tasted like surrender, Leah's steady hands, forms, more forms, a consultant who said "good progress" like he meant "you can leave my ward soon."

No Ben.

Rey waited without admitting she was waiting. She woke at three each night and held her breath for the familiar, impossible warmth at her cheek. She reached her hand out, palm up, and closed it on hospital air. She whispered his name twice and then bit the inside of her cheek for saying it at all.

No Ben.

By the third morning, Leah said, "We're evicting you, darling," with the gentle cheer of someone who likes good news. Discharge papers arrived. The cannula came out clean. The bandage got redressed with instructions printed twice. Painkillers were counted into a brown paper bag with a label that made her sound like she owned the pills rather than the pain.

Poe, Finn, and Rose arrived like weather you want. Poe had a balloon that said CONGRATS in big letters he immediately regretted. Rose had a bag of actual food—yogurts that weren't beige, soup that had seen vegetables. Finn had the cloud pillow under one arm and his patient face on.

"You did it," Poe said, as if there'd been an exam. "You passed Hospital."

"Top of the class in not dying," Rey said, keeping it light.

They packed her sparse little room with the competence of people who've moved students out of halls. Finn folded her blanket into a neat rectangle that went nowhere; Rose checked the windowsill for contraband and retrieved exactly one bag of crisps. Poe took the CONGRATS balloon to the nurses' station and tied it there because Leah pretended to complain but didn't stop him.

"Car's downstairs," Finn said. "I have the softest seatbelt in London."

Rey took one last look at the too-clean ceiling and the little lamp that had tried its best. She told herself this was good. Going home is good. The ache under her ribs disagreed; it had its own opinions.

The hospital corridor smelled like coffee and disinfectant and the end of a shift. People were doing morning loudly. Rey moved through it in a wheelchair because rules exist. The lift disliked all of them equally. Outside, the air was cold and honest. She sat very carefully, and Finn buckled her in like she was a rare instrument.

"Home," Poe announced, like he was directing traffic. "Operation Couch Blanket commences."

The drive was slow. London had not noticed that she had been shot and would like fewer bumps. Rey watched out the window and counted things: dogs in jumpers, a man with a plant, a boy kissing someone goodbye badly. She didn't count the empty slice of air at her shoulder that should have been warm.

No Ben.

Her building smelled like damp carpet and Mrs. Jones's basil. The stairs were an enemy; they took them with care and jokes. Inside her flat, everything was exactly where she had left it: the crooked picture frame, the mug on the draining board, the blanket folded over the end of the sofa like a pet. The hallway rug had a faint stain she refused to think about yet.

Poe fussed with cushions until the sofa looked smug. Finn set the cloud pillow on the bed and pretended not to notice the way Rey's eyes tracked the corner where he used to sit. Rose put the soup in the fridge, the yogurts on the top shelf where Poe wouldn't "accidentally" eat them, and lined up the prescriptions like little soldiers.

"Text if you sneeze funny," Rose said, kissing Rey's hair.

"Call if the kettle is rude," Finn added.

Poe hovered. "We can stay. Movie. Cards. I cheat but you can't prove it."

Rey shook her head, gentle. "I'm okay. I'll sleep. I'm...tired."

They believed her and didn't. They lingered anyway: a hill of chat on the sofa, a last sweep for imaginary hazards, three pairs of eyes pretending not to check the corners of the room as if they'd spot what she was missing.

"Text when you're—" Poe began.

"On mute," Rey finished, and they all smiled because rituals still work.

When they finally went, the flat closed around her like a lid. She stood in the hallway where her knees remembered the runner and the wrong night. The walls behaved. The light above the mirror didn't flicker. The air was ordinary, which is a terrible kindness.

"Ben?" she said, carefully, as if the word might break. "I'm home."

Nothing. No heat-haze. No stripe of warmth at the soft under her ear. No private laugh.

She walked through each room like she was in a museum of her own life. Kitchen: the plant on the windowsill surviving out of spite; the kettle reflecting a small, tired woman back at herself. Living room: blanket, lamp, the dent in the sofa where Poe sits wrong. Bedroom: the ceiling crack that looks like a river, the pillow with a shallow, familiar dip.

She sat on the edge of the bed and felt everything catch up.

"Ben," she tried again, smaller. "Please."

The flat had ordinary answers: the fridge motor switching on, a car door outside, Mrs. Jones humming down the hall. The corner where he had always chosen to stand was only corner.

The bandage tugged when she pulled her knees up, so she didn't. She curled on her side the way Leah had showed her, a pillow tucked where pain insists. She pressed her face against the cotton and let herself do the ugly crying because there was no one to perform for and pretending costs calories she didn't have.

"I didn't mean it," she told the ceiling, the wall, the crack, the mug, the rug, the basil plant, the whole stupid city. "I didn't mean it. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Come back."

There was only the sound of her own breath, scraped thin. The room did not bend. The window did not write. The kettle did not volunteer mercy. If a part of the air wanted to be warm, it either decided not to or wasn't allowed.

She called him once more, a whisper ground down to the seed of a name. It made no dent in the dark.

Eventually the painkillers and the day teamed up. Her eyes hurt. Her chest felt hollowed out and lined with sand. She drifted sideways into sleep the way people fall—too fast, nothing to grab.

She dreamed of a river and a pair of wings that made space where water shouldn't, and the ache that comes from seeing something beautiful and not being able to hold it.

In the flat, the lamp burned steady. The crooked frame kept its petty angle. Outside, the city forgot to notice. Inside, Rey slept with dried salt on her cheeks and one hand curled toward empty air. No one answered. No one came. The little ordinary noises of home played on like a radio in another room.

Chapter Text

The days after discharge stacked up like badly washed plates—functional, not clean. Rey did the little things that prove a person is still a person: showered when the tape allowed, made toast that tasted like paper, thanked Mrs. Jones for soup with too much carrot, typed thank-you texts that read like they were written underwater. She slept in stitched pieces and woke with the ache under her ribs reminding her that breath is work.

Silence had learned her flat in those days, memorized its corners, made itself at home. It said nothing back when she spoke into it. It did not warm the soft under her ear. It did not cause the kettle to repent. It behaved, which is the cruelest trick.

On the fourth evening of behaving, Rey lost the plot.

It started with a cup. She set it on the counter and stared at it until her eyes watered, as if making it tremble would count as a message delivered. It didn't. She laughed once, the ugly kind, wiped her face with the back of her hand like she was a kid who'd fallen off a bike, and went to the hall cupboard for the step-stool like a woman on a mission would go for a sword.

The storage unit under the stairs had a smell all its own—dust and old winter, cardboard and the sweet, pipey scent of shoes no one's feet remembered. Rey shifted boxes she hadn't wanted to shift for months because the tape hurt when she twisted, and she twisted anyway. A tub of Halloween junk wobbled; fake cobwebs kissed her knuckles; she cursed out loud and kept going.

She knew the box she was looking for by its weight and by the way she didn't want to touch it. It leaned in the back like a saved sentence: OCCULT / MISC in Poe's handwriting, annotated with a skull and a smiley face that made her want to cry for reasons not the point here.

Rey dragged it into the light with a hiss she tried to pretend was the box and not her ribs. She popped the flaps. The smell inside was leftover smoke and cheap candle dye, cedar shavings and felt-tip, the weird peppery ghost of incense.

It was there, wrapped in black velvet because even Poe does theatre: the board. Not mass-market, not thick cardboard with fake cracks—old wood, sanded thin by other hands, letters burned in by whoever thought they could be in charge of alphabets. The planchette lay on top, triangular and smug, its glass eye clouded a little.

"Hi," Rey said, hoarse.

The board did not do the courtesy of being heavy enough to hurt when she lifted it. It tucked under her arm like an old sin. She carried it to the living room.

She cleared the coffee table like a person sweeping a stage. The bandage tugged; she winced and set her jaw like it knew better than her lungs. The candles were in a bag-for-life under the sofa because Poe had left them there "in case of apocalypse, romance, or blackout," which is a Venn diagram with poor boundaries. She set them in a ring without counting properly because numbers felt like a dare and she was not taking dares with the universe tonight. She lit them with a cheap lighter that belonged to a bad habit she didn't have.

Flame made the room smaller in a way that would have been cozy if she had company. Alone, it felt like being in a snow globe. The ceiling crack pretended to be a river. The basil plant on the kitchen sill was a ghost with good posture. Rey sat on the floor because grief is primitive and floors understand.

She set the board. She set the planchette. She put her fingers on the glass eye and it felt like a fever pressed to a window.

"Okay," she said, because you tell rooms what you're about to do in case anyone is listening. "Rules. You always want rules. Here are mine. No tricks. No...cheap shit. No other voices" Her mouth shook. "Please."

She thought about making a circle of salt and didn't. She thought about iron and didn't. It felt like handcuffing a guest you were begging to come to you. She tucked her knees, tucked her anger, and let the fear out because it never stays tucked anyway.

"Ben," she said, and tears moved like she'd broken a seal. "Ben. I—"

She couldn't make all the words line up. The big ones tried to stand at the front of the queue and blocked the small ones. She hated herself for not knowing where to put the confession she'd already spent. She hated him for leaving. She hated the rules, the shore, the river, the cheap drains in the hospital. She pressed her fingers on the planchette until white half moons formed at her nails, then let up because letting up is the point.

"Ben," she said again. "I'm sorry. Please."

Nothing. The room held itself very nicely upright.

The planchette stayed politely under her fingers doing nothing.

"Guardian," she tried, because the true thing sometimes had to be the embarrassing one. "Keeper. Asshole. Ben. Come on. Please."

The planchette twitched.

She startled weakly and hated her hands for shaking like she was new to the game. "No cheap shit," she said again, warning nobody. "Ben, if that's you—"

It didn't move.

"Fine," Rey said to an empty room and a board that had burned letters for friends who weren't in this room. "Fine." She exhaled hard enough to hurt herself and did not apologize to her own ribs. "I'll do it like a child. Hello? Is anyone there?"

It didn't move

"Okay," she continued, and the tears that had threatened earlier began with the rude insistence of rain finding gutters. "You're sulking. Good. Me too." Her voice went smaller. "I didn't mean it. You know I didn't. Say you know it. Please."

It is a long time to sit with your fingers on a piece of wood and ask the air whether anyone forgives anyone for everything. Thirty minutes is long. An hour is an insult. Two hours is a crisis.

Rey tried all the ways a person makes themselves heard in an old room:

She was polite. She was mean. She laughed at herself and then at the board and then at nothing. She swore at him. She told the truth to the empty room the way you throw rocks into water: I miss you and you make me so angry and I didn't know it could feel like this and I hate the rules and I love you and I asked for quiet and I didn't want this.

She took breaks to cry quietly from a place very low in her throat. She caught herself dozing once, the kind of sideways slide that comes when your body thinks it can save you some pain by turning you off. She jolted awake with her fingers still on the planchette and hated sleep for being its own explanation.

"Please," she said into the floor. "Please, please, please." Strong words are stronger as two syllables and double begs did nothing in a room where the board refused gentle tricks.

She blew her nose into a kitchen roll because she had forgotten to bring a tissue to the séance. She thought for five ridiculous seconds about how Rose would compose a safety lecture about Ouija boards and hydration, and the laugh that came out of her almost made her vomit.

The pain under her ribboned. She moved carefully, re-planting her fingers. She had the urge to take her hand away and didn't because spiritual tantrums are not the point of this relationship.

When the planchette moved a second time, it was not a twitch.

It was a pull.

Rey's hands went cold. The planchette slid under her fingers like a fish under skin, easy and inevitability and exactly the way it had moved the first night in the church when they had been stupid together and everything had been pretend.

"Ben," she whispered, and the board didn't say yes or no. It scraped once toward the top left, slow, deliberate, and stopped.

Her fingers hovered, trembling above the triangle. She set her fingertips back on it like she was daring a cat to bite and let it go where it wanted.

Y.

She swallowed. The planchette moved without jerkiness, without the show-off stutter of cheap tricks.

It went to O. Then U.

YOU.

Rey pressed her teeth into the inside of her cheek so hard she tasted the old iron again. "You," she acknowledged, voice cracked. "Is it you?"

The planchette held in the center. She had half a second to imagine YES. It didn't give it. It pulled to ....

A.

S.

K.

E.

D.

Spelling has never felt like a weapon. It feels like that when each letter lands like this. She watched her own hands and tried not to be sick. ASKED. The planchette hesitated over D as if it didn't want to finish and then finished anyway.

"Don't. Ben—"

M.

E.

T

O

G

O.

TO GO. She stared at the space between O and G like she could make it wider with breath.

YOU ASKED ME TO GO.

The room tilted. Rey pressed her palm to the floor to steady both it and herself. "I'm sorry," she said, and meant everything the word wanted to include. "I'm sorry. I didn't—"

The planchette moved again, slower, heavy. Her arms ached. Her ribs blazed a quiet warning. Tears fell without the performance of sob. The candles did that thing flames do when they have heard a story and are trying to stay still enough for it.

T.

H.

E.

Y.

The board can hold so few crates for such big freight. The planchette sat on Y like a foot on a threshold. Rey thought of the room between, of the voice that had refused a noun and had sounded like a shoreline and not a river, of how she had asked for honesty and had gotten it.

"Who," she asked, voice a scrape.

T.

O.

O.

K.

M.

E.

They took me.

Her hands slid off the planchette like she'd been burned. It kept going two inches on its own inertia, then sat like a living thing that had decided to pretend to be wood again.

Rey sat back on her heels and made an oh shape with her mouth that didn't find a sound for a while. Her chest tightened in the unhelpful way; she forgot her nurse's counts and then remembered and hated remembering because it made the room less tilted and she wanted it to be tilted to match everything.

"They who," she asked when she could, hating the pronoun and loving it because it meant the grief wasn't just her and him; it had a third thing she could be angry at.

The planchette didn't move. Rey let three breaths pass the way people give cats space to decide to love them and then set her fingers back on it.

W.

H.

O.

It moved again. She followed.

R.

U.

L.

E.

S.

It kept going. The planchette sat a heartbeat, then.

H.

E.

L.

D.

HELD.

"Held?" She swallowed. "You're—held."

A pause. Then, slow: Y. E. S.

The breath she dragged in felt like winter. "Are you—hurt?"

The naked stupidity of asking a demon whether he bleeds where she bleeds yawned in front of her like a drain. She asked anyway, because if you don't ask questions that might break you you don't get to have answers worth having.

The planchette moved like it was being argued with from the other side, like it was dragging chain. N. O. Then I.

C. A. N. ' T. S. A. Y.

"Can't say," she echoed, not sure if she was reading or making law. "Can you—come back?" She hated the childish rise in her voice, hated the need, hated the way the hurt turned everything she said into a song in the wrong key.

It sat. The candle nearest the board guttered and then remembered itself. Rey held her breath in case it helped physics and hated herself for being the kind of person who tries to help physics.

F.

I.

N.

D.

M.

E.

"Where," she whispered. "Where are you?"

S.

H.

O.

R.

E.

The board's economy made heavy wisdom. She had known it, in the way body knows ache before head knows word: the room between, the shore, the voice without a name that felt like wait your turn. She had said God without flinching and he had answered with a place rather than a face.

"How," Rey asked.

The planchette stopped. The candles made the kind of small chorus good fires make when they agree. Rey stripped one hand off the planchette in case she was forcing it and watched it sit like an obedient pet. She put her hand back again and defied all her own instincts to let go a second time now that she had a stupid answer to a cruel question.

She had questions left. Dozens. The nouns alone could fill an A4 legal pad that Rose would buy her on principle. Who holds you. How long. What do I do. What can I break. What is enough. When is morning. She could only ask one thing without breaking open.

"Did you hear me," she asked, low. "When I said it. When I—last night—hospital—when you—" The sentence didn't come. "You heard me."

Y.

E.

S.

She pressed her hand over her mouth because the noise her body wanted to make was not allowed by the house rules after ten. "Okay," she said into her palm. "Okay."

The ache under her ribs pulsed like a live wire. The candles were inches from puddle. The basil on the window did not allow itself to wilt in witness but felt like it wanted to.

"Ben," Rey whispered, hand back on the planchette like a prayer at a wrong altar, "I love you."

The triangle didn't move. She wasn't sure it should. Some things don't want to be spelled. She nodded like he could see, like he was allowed that gift, and the nod hurt and she allowed that too.

"What do I do," she asked, and hated how little the word covered. "What do you need."

S.

T.

A.

Y.

"Here," she said, because where else. "You want me here."

The planchette stuttered weirdly under her fingers.

A.

L.

I.

V.

E.

"Stay alive," she translated, and laughed on a sob because of course even kidnapped he was bossy.

The planchette slid to GOOD BYE like a boat finding a dock and stopped, warm under her fingertips like someone had left their hand on her skin too long.

"No," she said, panic sharpening everything. "No goodbye. Not—please. I can—keep talking."

It didn't move.

She held on a ridiculous second longer and then let go because holding on does not equal keeping. The planchette was only wood now. The eye was only glass. The candles had the good grace to gutter one by one instead of all at once, as if even flame knew how to leave without making abandonment sound like a slam.

Rey sat on the floor until the dark won the room and then some. Her legs went pins and needles. Her hands shook so hard she had to sit on them. She cried like a faucet receives new washers badly, stops and starts, surprising herself with the volume her chest could handle and the way the ache under her ribs spoke up about it.

She got up quick, pain. She ignored. Keys. Phone. Painkillers in a paper envelope that said TAKE WITH FOOD and meant you won't. She didn't text anyone. She didn't leave a note. She looked at the corner of the room where he used to lean and said, "I'm coming," out loud to prove that her mouth could still make a promise.

Outside, the stairwell smelled like damp carpet and the basil on Mrs. Jones's sill going bravely woody. Rey took the steps one at a time because rules exist and gravity likes to win. Rain blew through the lobby when she opened the door and hit her face like the city had been saving it for her.

Her car lived three streets over, sulking under a plane tree, wipers as old as regret. She walked like a person carrying a sloshing bowl; it was finesse, not speed. By the time she got there she was soaked from the waist down, hair pasted to her cheek, coat drinking more rain than it repelled.

The key turned like it had opinions. The engine coughed into life. The radio woke mid-chorus and she stabbed it off because the wrong song would break her where the stitches had just barely convinced her to hold.

"Shore," she told the wheel. "Bridge."

The city disagreed by default. Friday traffic had children in it; Thursday traffic had tired people; this was a nobody-night with rain in its teeth and the kind of drivers who believe in being important at midnight. Rey took the small roads because she knew them by the way the streetlights fell and because she didn't have lane changes in her, not tonight. The wipers made a battered metronome. Breath in four, out four, the way Leah had hammered in. It helped until it didn't.

The pain lived under her ribs like a small, furious animal. Every pothole taught it a new word. She pressed her palm under the lapbelt and drew blood between her teeth so she wouldn't make the noise that would make her pull over and be good. She wasn't being good tonight. She was being stupid. She told herself the truth and kept going.

The rain was heavy.

It hammered the car hard enough that the wipers clattered in protest, hard enough that the road kept losing its edges. Rey hunched over the wheel, chin tucked into the damp collar of her coat, breath counting itself because if she tried to count it on purpose she'd cry again. Four in. Four out. The ache under her ribs rode every bump like it had paid extra.

Street by street, the city gave way to the stretch of road that always felt older than everything around it—flats thinning to terraces, terraces to shuttered shops, shops to the long, open breath before the river. The lights went wider and lonelier. The sky lowered itself until it became weather you could touch.

She found the turn without thinking about it. Her hands remembered; her hands hated remembering. The bridge rose in front of her, black iron slicked to a shine, the lamps making small yellow coins that the rain tried to spend faster than it could lay them down.

She parked badly. Straightened. Turned the engine off because the silence inside the car hurt less than the noise. For a second she stayed there, forehead against the wheel, listening to the tick of cooling metal and the damp drumbeat above her, and then she was moving again because if she waited she might be sensible and sensible wasn't why she'd come.

Out in it, the night took her. Rain slicked her hair to her cheeks; water sloshed cold into her trainer and made her gasp. The wind put a hand on her shoulder and tried to turn her back toward the car; she shrugged it off like a rude acquaintance. One palm on the slick rail, one on the bandage under her coat, she walked to the center of the span and stopped where the road announced its height with a low, indifferent hum.

The river below was not a picture and not a metaphor. It was a muscle flexing in the dark. It moved like it had always won arguments and didn't understand why anyone would keep talking. The lamps threw their small golds onto it and the water chewed them into pieces and took them under.

Rey leaned her hip into the railing until the cold found bone and planted her feet in the grit seam where pedestrians have worn a darker path. She breathed around the hurt because that's what you do when your body insists on being a body.

"Ben," she said, not loud. The rain stole the word from her mouth and flung it away. That seemed right.

She stood there at the rail where she had been a girl and almost died, where white wings had made a pocket big enough for one breath, where a rule had snapped and the night had looked up and learned a new shape. She put her palms flat on the cold metal and felt, through the ache and the rain and the ridiculous, stubborn beat in her chest, the clean, hard line of the bridge holding.

"I found the shore," she told the water, the sky, the iron, the rules, the part of the night that was his absence shaped like him. "I'm here."

Nothing answered that could be photographed. Traffic hissed past behind her like snakes too bored to bite. The lamps buzzed. The rain drilled her scalp and ran down the back of her neck in cold rivulets that made her shiver and laugh once, mean and small.

The rain came sideways, needling skin through wool, drilling at her scalp until her thoughts scattered like starlings. Rey gripped the rail, breath counting itself because if she tried to count it on purpose she'd sob.

Four in. Four out. The ache under her ribs rode every gust like it wanted to be noticed.

"Ben," she called, and the wind stole it from her mouth and flung it downriver. That felt right—nothing stayed.

The bridge hummed under traffic, iron singing a low, indifferent note. Below, the river flexed in the dark, a long muscle chewing the lamps' small golds to pieces. She leaned into the cold and tried to be a fact in a night that didn't keep them.

"I found the shore," she said, not loud, not careful. "I came."

No warmth gathered at the soft place under her ear. No laugh that was only for her. Only rain, doing its unkind job; only wind, putting a hand on her shoulder, trying to turn her back toward the car like a polite bouncer.

"I'm here"

The storm hit a higher gear, pelting the rail until her palms stung. Somewhere far behind her, a horn objected; somewhere ahead, a fox slipped between shadows like water finding a new bed. The river kept its black counsel.

She glanced down—just a glance—and the height said remember. The memory came clean and brutal: a white flare of wings holding a pocket in the water where breath could live; a hand finding hers and setting it where the world would open. The river had been colder then. Or she had been smaller. Or both.

"I need to be with you," Rey said, rain in her teeth. "Do you hear me? I need—"

The wind swallowed the rest. It didn't matter. She knew what she meant. The storm knew too.

Her fingers slipped on the wet rail. She squeezed harder, metal biting the meat of her hands; pain bloomed and steadied her. She pulled herself up one rung—coat heavy, breath sharp—until the cold bit her thighs and the dark opened like a mouth below.

"Blood for blood, or I join you," she said, and the sentence shook out of her like a coin she'd held too long. "I choose you."

A gust hit, cruel and personal, sluicing water into her sleeve, along her wrist, across her knuckles. The world shrank to texture: slick iron, rain like gravel, her pulse hammering wrong in her throat.

"I choose you," she said again, louder, and the river took it the way it takes everything, making no promise and giving no answer.

She loosened one hand to reach for the next slick bar. Her palm slipped, found it, slipped again. Her chest flared—pain, fear, something brighter—and her mouth made a sound that could have been laughter if the night had been any kinder.

"Ben," she said to the dark, to the river, to the space that had learned his shape and refused to be warm. "Catch—"

She let go.

Chapter Text

Cold had teeth.

It bit first at Rey's ankles, then climbed—socks gone spongy, denim poured full of river, the bandage under her coat surrendering to rain. Noise arrived next: water grinding on stone, traffic hissing above, the low iron hum of the bridge, and a voice cutting through all of it like it had been made for bad weather.

"Rey. Look at me. Stay with me, little one."

She pried her eyes open. The world was a smear of sodium gold and storm-black, and Ben's face bent over hers—there—soaking wet, hair plastered to his temples, lashes heavy with rain. He held her like she was breakable and also the one thing he knew wouldn't break in his arms: one arm under her shoulders, the other gathering her knees, his coat ruined against the slick stones of the embankment.

"Ben?" she breathed, and the disbelief in it felt like a fresh bruise.

"I've got you," he said, voice steady the way bridges are steady. "Don't move."

Memory hit like a flash from another century. Wet iron. Wind in her teeth. I choose you. The dark opening under her like a mouth. Then—nothing. Then this: cold, pain waking late and loud—white flare in her lower leg, a stubborn grind at her hip, the old hot ribbon beneath her ribs complaining about a story it thought was over.

She hissed. Ben's hand cupped her cheek, palm warm despite the rain. That impossible heat sank into the softness under her ear, the place that had learned the shape of him.

"Don't panic," he said, and there was fear under the calm, honest and caged. "I think your leg's broken. Your pulse is fast. You're breathing—good girl. Someone came down the steps—he called an ambulance."

"We're—alive," Rey managed, stupid and perfect, and then she wanted to laugh because when you have no language left you state the obvious and hope it becomes a spell.

"Annoyingly," he said, a wrecked little smile touching his mouth as tears cut clean tracks through the rain on his face. He was crying. He didn't hide it. Not from her.

Boots skidded on wet stone. A man in hi-vis appeared in the cone of a weak lamp—the kind of person who runs toward bad sounds with his coat already off. Mid-fifties, rain hood down, kindness in his jaw.

"Ambulance is on the way," he said, kneeling near, hands up to show he wouldn't jostle. He looked directly at Ben—at Ben—without blinking. "Keep her still, yeah?"

Rey's brain took a second to choose between shock and laughter. She stared at Ben, eyes wide. Words tripped. "He—he sees you? How—?"

Ben actually let out a short, broken laugh that turned to a breathless gasp. "I don't know," he said, and he did know, and he was terrified of naming it. "Your choice—Rey. The worst, bravest, stupidest love. A crack in the rules. A trick of fate. A kindness. I—just—appeared. With you. Both of us breathing."

Rey looked at Ben. He was too bright and too real at the same time, wrong-beautiful smoothed down to something the world could stand to see—or that would be seen, now, in this thin moment when rules were busy elsewhere.

She wanted to say I'm sorry. She wanted to say I knew you'd catch me. She wanted to say don't you dare leave me again. Her mouth chose the smallest possible truth. "Hi."

"Hi," he said, the stupid syllable breaking him wider open. His thumb drew a slow arc along her cheekbone, anchoring her to the fact of a face she loved.

Up on the road, brakes screamed softly. A wash of light turned the rain ocean-blue. Voices clattered—competence moving fast. The hi-vis man lifted his arm and signalled; blue spun down the steps and made their patch of river look like a cheap stage.

"You're crying," she said instead, in case he wanted to pretend otherwise.

"I leak for you," he said, trying for a grin and failing and not minding. "Stay with me."

"Always."

Two paramedics appeared in the spray—one with a neat bun and eyes that smiled (KEMI on the chest), the other broad-shouldered and already tearing open a foil blanket. They knelt without wasting warmth.

"Hey," Kemi said, voice tuned to the pitch pain obeys. "I'm Kemi. We've got you. What's your name?"

"Rey," she said, teeth clacking now that adrenaline had decided to take petty revenge.

"Any head knock?"

"I don't think so" Rey said.

"Okay." Kemi's gloved fingers were quick and respectful; everything she did explained itself. "We're going to brace the leg and start warming you. Can you keep looking at him?"

Rey nodded. She looked at Ben and refused to let her eyes go anywhere else.

"On your count," Kemi told her partner. "One, two—lift."

Ben pressed a kiss to the crown of Rey's wet hair—quick, private, a coin slipped into a palm without witnesses. "I am not leaving you," he said, and the sentence had the weight of a vow and the shape of a rule he fully intended to break forever.

They slid the scoop stretcher beneath her, did the awful necessary thing with her leg while Kemi narrativized the pain into something Rey could meet head-on. Rey yelped, cussed, clutched Ben's coat with her good hand. He let her crush his sleeve and didn't pretend not to wince. The foil blanket swaddled her; heat began to tickle at the edges of cold. The rain didn't stop; it decided to be background.

"You two together?" the hi-vis man asked nobody and everybody, kindness irreverent.

"Yes," Ben said.

"Yes," Rey said.

Kemi cut the leg of Rey's jeans with efficient apologies. "You're going to hate me for this," she said, "and then love me for the morphine."

"Big promises," Rey said, breath hitching.

"Big night," Kemi said.

They moved. Up the steps, rain drumming on foil, the bridge turned into a roof of sound. Ben kept pace, one hand on the stretcher rail that should have passed through him and did not. Rey watched the way the droplets tracked down his jaw and thought of the first time she'd seen him wet—white wings throwing water like stars, a hand reaching into the river to make a place for breath.

Inside the ambulance, everything was small and bright and full of intention. Plastics rattled. Oxygen hissed. Kemi and her partner turned the chaos into a room. Ben slid onto the bench, wet and impossible, and no one told him to leave.

"Lucky night," the partner muttered, taping the cannula like a man who kept small gods in his pockets.

"Depends on your definition," Rey said, woozy now that Kemi had delivered on the promise. The morphine made the edges of pain breathe. It also made Ben's face go softer and more devastating, which felt like cheating.

"Keep those eyes open for me," Kemi said, tapping Rey's shoulder gently. "Talk to your boyfriend."

"He's terrible," Rey said, because it was their joke. "But he's mine."

"I'm your excellent, wet boyfriend," Ben said, grave.

Rey laughed and immediately.

The ambulance rocked into motion. Rey watched droplets smear blue light into running ink on the back windows. She watched Ben watch her, attention hovering an inch above her cheek as if he hadn't figured out how the world held him yet and didn't want to jinx it by touching too much.

"Tell me a story," she said, voice cottoned.

"Now?"

"Now," she insisted. "Keep me here."

He thought for half a second and chose honesty over poetry. "When you were ten, you used to blow on the car window and write your name in the fog. Every time your mum pretended not to notice, like it wasn't going to smear the glass. Your dad would hum the wrong harmony so you'd laugh and correct him. You always got carsick if you read."

"This is cheating," Rey said, tears suddenly everywhere. "You're using my own life on me."

"It's a very good story," he said, throat tight. "It has the best girl in it."

"Tell me another."

"Okay," he whispered, leaning in. "You were nineteen, and you decided there were three kinds of nights: loud, wrong, and holy. Loud is for dancing. Wrong is for men you should never have kissed. Holy is for rooftops and chips and the one friend who will sing with you even if you're both flat."

She sobbed a ridiculous, grateful little sob. Kemi pretended to check a monitor because kindness sometimes looks like minding your own business while a miracle holds someone's hand.

Ben kept going, soft as the road.

"You had a blue beanie you insisted was black until Rose staged an intervention. You keep every cinema ticket in a shoebox and pretend it's not sentimental. You name pigeons." He swallowed. The tears kept coming; he let them.

She reached for him—instinct—and he met her halfway, their fingers interlacing over the foil's crinkle, his hand warm, impossibly human. The morphine made the world tilt in a way that didn't feel like falling anymore. She stared at their hands like they were an artifact and then up into his face, memorizing it again for the hundredth, thousandth time.

"I didn't mean it," she said suddenly, the night in the hospital tipping back into the present with the sway of the vehicle. "When I told you to go. I didn't mean it. The drugs. The rules. I was—I was cruel because it was easier than being scared."

"I know," he said, immediate and quiet "Old news"

She smiled high on her morphine hum.

The ambulance howled through a set of lights. Kemi made eye contact with Rey, did the how's our breathing eyebrows, got a thumbs-up. "Five minutes out," she called to the driver. To Rey: "Nearly there, love. You're doing brilliantly."

"Tell me a new truth," Rey said to Ben, greedy now that being alive wasn't a theoretical.

He hesitated, then gave her the one he'd been holding like a hot stone. "When you let go," he said, voice breaking on the second word, "I wanted to tear the world in half for giving you a rule that cruel. I told it no. It listened. Don't make me ask it twice."

Tears came hot and grateful. "I won't," she said, and meant it in that bent, imperfect human way that still counts.

"Good," he said, relief making him look a decade younger and a century older. "Because I plan to be very annoying in your living room for a very long time."

"Normal," she whispered, chasing it like steam off hot tea. "Let's make boring. Let's make ours."

"Yes." He breathed the word like a promise and a threat to any god listening.

They rolled into the bright, too-awake mouth of A&E. Doors flung wide. Warmth and bleach and beeps wanted to swallow them whole. Kemi squeezed Rey's shoulder. "We're going to hand you over, start your scans, get you pain sorted proper."

Rey's hand tightened on Ben's. Panic licked at the edge of her calm. Hospitals meant clipboards and forms and too many fluorescent truths.

"I am not leaving you," he said, leaning down until his forehead rested lightly against hers—warm and sure.

"You..." she started, then decided to spend the coin that always buys her breath. "I love you."

He laughed a wet, incredulous, delighted laugh that turned to a sob on its way out and didn't apologize for either. "Say it again tomorrow," he said, recovering himself.

"It'll still be true," she said, smiling like a fool and hurting and alive.

The stretcher clacked down. The world grabbed the wheels. People descended—competence taking over in neat, brisk hands. For a second he had to step back or be stepped through. The thinness of the night's miracle pulsed; the room tried to forget him. He refused to be forgotten by will alone.

A nurse asked Rey the standard litany. Rey answered, eyes on the slice of air that held him. Someone pressed a pen into her palm; her hand shook; Ben's hovered above it, invisible brace.

As they rolled, the hi-vis man's face flashed in the corridor doorway—soaked, ridiculous, grinning like a conspiracy. He lifted his palm in farewell. Rey wiggled her fingers in thanks. Ben nodded once more, the private nod of keepers who'd share a story in another life.

They reached a bay curtained in optimistic blue. Kemi's hand was on Rey's shoulder one last time; then Kemi vanished back to the night, to the bridge, to the next bad thing she'd make survivable. Rey lay under a kinder light with a film-warm blanket and the noise of machines playing a song she could stand.

Ben stood at the foot of the bed and then at the side and then sat—because the veil was thin and because he refused to move until the world physically made him, and tonight, the world didn't. He watched her like men in old paintings watch miracles they don't deserve. She watched him back like a woman who'd decided to keep her own.

A junior doctor with a soft voice and nervous hands checked the splint, asked more questions, promised scans, promised a better class of drugs. Rey nodded, said please and thank you, did the work of being a person in a place that doesn't always remember how holy that work is.

When the blue curtain fell back into place and they were finally alone enough to breathe each other's air without permission, Rey held out her hand. He took it. No almost. Heat against heat, fingers interlaced, pulse to pulse.

"Tell me another story," she said, drowsy now, pain receding under science and love.

"One day," Ben said, like he was starting a fairy tale and a plan, "A bridge at sunset we will only ever cross together with too many crisps and four friends and zero drama. Sundays where we don't answer our phones. A plant we keep alive by accident." His thumb traced idle shapes on the back of her hand—small maps, private vows.

Her eyes shone. "Add 'being obnoxiously in love in supermarkets' to the list," she mumbled.

"Top three," he said very seriously.

"I don't want...grand," she confessed, voice slipping toward sleep. "I want...boring. Chips. Rude jokes. You bullying the fuse box."

"My specialty," he whispered, delighted. "I will also argue with your toaster. It will not win."

She closed her eyes because she wanted to, not because the room tricked her. His hand stayed. The machine counted a rhythm he harmonized with without meaning to. Tears dried, leaving a salt tightness at the corners of his eyes and the relief of a thing set down.

"Ben?" she murmured, half under.

"Yes, love."

"Don't...go."

He bent and kissed her temple—warm, human, ruinous. "Never," he said, and because the night had already taught them how fragile the word is, he said the other one too, the one he'd carved across centuries and would carve again tomorrow and the next day until it filed its own teeth.

She slept then, the kind you earn, jaw unclenching, fingers softening around his. Outside, the storm ran out of story and went sulky. Somewhere, a man in hi-vis rode home on a bus, texting his daughters that he'd seen something he couldn't name, promising to tell it badly over breakfast. In the quiet blue of the curtained bay, a demon who had been held sat in a plastic chair and counted a human girl's breaths, and if a nurse came by and had to tuck his wet coat up off the linoleum with a confused frown but no comment, that was between the two of them and whatever rule had slipped for one extraordinary, ordinary night.

Chapter Text

Rey woke to the soft tyranny of morning—curtains half-drawn, fluorescent ceiling pretending to be the sun, machines doing their polite beeping like metronomes with good manners. The soreness under her ribs was a dull, negotiated ache. Her leg felt caged but held. The air tasted like lemon cleaner and lukewarm tea.

Ben was asleep in the chair beside her bed.

Asleep, or at least doing a convincing impression. Folded into bad plastic like it was penance he’d chosen; head tipped back, mouth parted just enough to be human about it. The wet had been traded for hospital-dry; someone (a nurse with a sense of humor or a god with a soft spot) had tucked a thin blanket over his lap. His hand still held hers where it had fallen, their fingers a lazy knot.

For half a blissed second Rey just looked. The impossible felt ordinary. The ordinary felt like a miracle.

The door burst open.

“—and I told him, if you drink hospital coffee again, I’m starting a GoFundMe for your tastebuds—” Poe, mid-rant, shouldered in first with two paper cups and a paper bag. Finn followed with flowers that looked suspiciously like they came from a petrol station and guilt. Rose swept in last, armed with a sensible cardigan, a fierce expression, and a Tupperware of soup like a weapon.

Three voices hit the air, then fell off a cliff at the same time.

They froze.

Poe blinked at Ben. Finn blinked at Ben. Rose blinked at Ben. Then all three looked at Rey. Then back at Ben. Then at Rey again. Collective eyebrows did a synchronized climb.

“And who is this?” Poe said, scandalized-delighted, instantly recovering into mischief. “Excuse me. Sir. This is a family-friendly ward.”

Finn, automatic: “He’s tall.”

Rose, dry as toast: “And hot.”

Ben snorted awake in self-defense, did the half-jolt of a man trained by centuries and one bad night, then focused. His eyes landed on Rey first—relief, assessment, the silent are you okay?—then on the trio at the foot of the bed.

“Hi,” he said, because immortals can learn.

Poe’s grin went feral. “So. Prince Charming slept in a plastic chair. Should we be jealous?”

Rey’s brain did a brief, frantic flipbook of excuses: visiting volunteer, night porter, hallucination, demon boyfriend. None of them had been workshopped. She glanced at Ben. Shit.

He squeezed her fingers once—I’ve got it—sat forward, and did not look like a man made of rules and bad weather. He looked like a hero from someone else’s story who’d got lost and liked it.

“I saved Rey last night,” he said, easy, honest in the way that skipped all details. “Heard her scream and ran.”

Poe made a sound like a kettle boiling. “You ran,” he repeated, delighted. “He is a hero.”

Finn’s smile was full and quiet, the kind that gets offered to men who pass tests. “Thank you,” he said simply, and meant it with his whole spine.

Rose took two steps forward like she wanted to interview him, decided to save it for later, and bent to Rey instead, sliding a careful arm under her shoulders for a hug. “You gave us a fright,” she murmured into Rey’s hair, voice wobbling on fright despite itself.

Rey leaned into it, bones grateful. Rose pulled back, eyes going glossy and fierce at once as she clocked the bruise along Rey’s cheekbone, the split in her lip, the tired of her. “You’re a bundle of bad decisions,” she said softly, and kissed Rey’s forehead like a counter-spell.

“Working on good ones,” Rey promised.

“Starting with food,” Rose said, brandishing the Tupperware like a threat. She turned to Ben, professional at introductions even when the ground had shifted under the universe. “I’m Rose. This is Poe, menace incarnate. Finn, conscience of the group. You are…?”

“Ben,” he said, the word landing like a key in a familiar lock. “Hi.”

“Charmed,” Poe said, and bowed, nearly spilling coffee on his own trainers. He recovered with flourish and handed a cup to Rey. “Contraband. The decent stuff. Don’t tell Leah.”

“Leah knows everything,” Finn said, but passed the flowers anyway, then realized Rey had only two hands and one was busy being adored and set them in the plastic jug by the bed instead. The bouquet listed heroically.

Poe planted himself at the end of the bed, elbows on the rail, beaming like a lighthouse. “So. Ben-who-saves-girls-from-bridges. Do you also slay dragons, repair boilers? Asking for a very serious friend.”

Ben, deadpan: “Boilers, yes. Dragons, only if they start it.”

Finn’s laugh came out like a surprised bark. Rose blinked once—as if adjusting to a world where things were allowed to be simple—and let the smallest smile happen. “Prince Charming with a wrench,” she said. “We’ll keep him.”

Ben’s gaze flickered to Rey—is this okay?—and Rey nodded, quick, dizzy with relief. The room was behaving as if miracles could sit in chairs and be introduced, as if heroic lies could share an oxygen line with the truth and not catch fire. She took a sip of Poe’s contraband coffee and it was actually drinkable. She wanted to cry again for a much better reason.

“So what actually happened?” Poe demanded, perching on the visitor chair arm like a gargoyle. “Because one minute I’m texting Finn a rant about vending machines and the next Rose is calling saying ‘get here now’ in her sensible voice, and then we get told you’re fine, ‘fine’ with stitches and a splint, and now there’s a Ben.”

Ben’s mouth tilted. “There was a lot of rain,” he said. “And a bad moment.”

“Understatement,” Rose said.

Finn cleared his throat, sudden shy. “When I was…on the phone with the nurse, she said someone was with you. A man. She said he didn’t want to leave.” He looked at Ben and let that be thanks again.

Ben met it, steady. “I didn’t.”

Poe clapped his hands together, delighted to be narratively satisfied. “Well. In that case, Ben, on behalf of the committee: welcome. Your official duties include but are not limited to carrying heavy things, pretending to think my jokes are funny, and telling Rey to sit down when she stands up too fast.”

“Two out of three,” Ben said. “I’m not lying about the jokes.”

“Rude,” Poe said, beaming.

Rose, businesslike again (her love language), set the soup on the tray, fussed with the blanket, and then—when no one was looking—straightened the edge of Ben’s borrowed hospital blanket with a brisk swipe like she’d adopted him without asking his permission. “Eat,” she told Rey. “Then nap.”

“You’re all very bossy,” Rey observed, happy as sin.

A nurse peeked in, took in the crowd, made the universal five minutes sign. Poe saluted. Finn murmured apologies. Poe leaned down and kissed Rey’s temple, his voice dropping for her alone. “Don’t do that again,” he said, not joking now. “My heart’s only rented.”

“Got it” Rey said, throat thick.

Finn squeezed her shoulder, gentle with a heft that always felt like home. “Shout if you need anything,” he said. “Even if it’s ‘take Poe away.’ Especially if it’s that.”

Poe: “Betrayal.”

Rose hugged Rey again, softer this time, then stepped back. They retreated in a cheerful, chaotic blur—Poe backing out with finger guns at Ben (“we’ll be in touch”), Finn remembering the flowers and forgetting them again, Rose already texting Leah compliments on a chart note.

When the door swung shut, the room fell into a quieter kind of bright. Rey let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. Ben watched the door for a second like he expected the rules to sprint back in and revoke everything. They didn’t.

“Well,” Rey said, spooning soup with the air of a woman who had recently survived and intended to do it again. “Prince Charming.”

“Boilers,” Ben said, pretending to be offended. “Give me an ugly radiator over a horse any day.”

She laughed, the kind that didn’t hurt quite so much. “You handled that.”

“I told a truth they could carry,” he said, eyes on her, not the door.

She reached her hand. He took it, thumb finding that familiar path along her knuckles.

Night had done that kind thing where it made the ward smaller. Lights down to a hush, corridor whispering, machines keeping time like patient crickets. Rey had bullied the remote until the little TV gave her Bram Stoker’s Dracula—grainy, theatrical, exactly the kind of nonsense she needed. She’d turned the volume low and let the shadows do the rest.

Ben had fallen asleep in the chair again.

Properly asleep—chin tipped to his chest, one forearm folded over his middle, the other draped across the armrest so his fingers could still almost-touch the edge of her blanket. The thin hospital throw sat crooked over his knees; his shoes were wet around the edges from a day that hadn’t finished drying out. He looked—God help her—human. Color in his cheeks. The tiniest snore when the scene went quiet and the monitors tried to upstage him. The magic of last night hadn’t winked out with the morning; it had settled into bone.

On the screen, the line arrived. It always did. Gary Oldman, ridiculous hair and eyes full of ache: “I have crossed oceans of time to find you.”

Rey tried to smile and instead made a sound she wasn’t ready for—a punched-out, wet little sob that shook the stitches under her ribs and set her eyes overflowing. It wasn’t just the line. It was the chair. It was his hand on the blanket. It was the fact that the world had finally said yes to them out loud.

Ben startled awake like a person, not a myth—blinked, breathed, found her first. “Hey,” he said, voice rough with sleep, and leaned forward, already reaching, already here.

“I’m okay,” she lied, undone and grinning. “It’s just—he says oceans and—” She gestured weakly at the dripping screen. “It’s stupid.”

“It’s perfect,” Ben said, still hoarse, tugging the chair closer until his knees bumped the bed. His thumb brushed the tear at the corner of her eye and then, because he was this and not that anymore, he kissed it away like an idiot and she let him. Warm. Real. Human-warm and human-real.

She laughed-cry-sighed. “You’re here.”

“I’m here,” he said, as if practicing the sentence to make sure it stayed true. He glanced toward the door, then back, mischief lighting him from the inside. “I think I’m…stuck.”

“Ha,” Rey said, watery. “Trapped with me in fluorescent lighting. Your worst fate.”

“My happiest,” he said simply.

They watched the film breathe for a moment—the ridiculous romance of it, the way love looks when it’s dressed up as death and poetry.

“Tell me again,” she said softly, sudden and bossy in that way that meant I need this. “Tell me you’re…what you are now.”

He didn’t make her chase it. “I’m human,” he said, reverent, a little stunned, like he was hearing it in his own mouth and loving the echo.

Rey’s breath went thin and happy. “We broke something,” she whispered.

“We did,” he said, and the pride in it made him look younger, softer, wildly mortal. He slid his hand into hers properly—no almost, no heat hovering, just palm to palm, fingers interlaced like a habit. “And I’m going to do it right. All of it. Properly.”

“Define properly,” Rey said, narrowing her eyes the way Rose would be proud of.

He didn’t joke. He sat up a little straighter, pulled the blanket up over her arm with a care that had nothing to do with hospitals, and said it like vows he was making up as he went and somehow getting exactly right.

“Dates,” he said. “Not just movie nights because we’re tired—though those, too. Real dates. I take you out. I learn reservations. I pretend to like salads and secretly order you chips. I walk you home every time, even when home is where we started. I learn how to do flowers—proper ones, not petrol-station panic. I bring them on Tuesdays.”

Rey made a helpless sound.

“I do introductions that make sense. ‘Hi, I’m Ben. I’m the idiot who been in love with you for centuries. I’m the man who will now fix boilers and burn toast and will love your friends.’ I put my name on things that want it—post, deliveries.”

She squeezed his hand until he glanced at their fingers and laughed softly, adjusting so he could rub his thumb over her knuckles. “Go on,” she said, thick with good tears.

“I learn your friends,” he said. “Properly. I let Rose bully me. I let Finn show me which takeaway is actually good. I let Poe make me a playlist and I don’t tell him he’s wrong about half of it. I murder plants trying to impress you.”

Rey snorted. “You will murder so many plants.”

“Dozens,” he agreed gravely. “Gone too soon.”

She sniffled and smiled into it. The film said something overwrought about destiny; Rey didn’t mind.

“And then,” he said, softer, as if setting fragile things on a table, “I do the big bits. I ask you properly. Not here. Not because we nearly lost us, but because we didn’t. I will kneel like a cliché if you want the spectacle or I ask you in our kitchen with flour on your cheek and sauce on my sleeve because we burned dinner and ordered takeout. I will marry you. Stupidly. Joyfully. Paperwork and rings and every boring, holy thing.”

Her breath hitched on a laugh-sob. “Ben.”

“I want to learn your grumpy mornings and your loud afternoons and the exact face you make when your toast is wrong. I want to be there when you laugh. I want to be the person who takes the bin out.”

She swallowed. The monitors kept their small rhythm. Somewhere down the corridor, a trolley squeaked and remembered silence.

“Then..." he paused "Children. Tiny, rude people who inherit your mouth and my terrible patience. A dog first, because Poe will cry if we skip the dog step. We choose it. Not fate. Not rules. Us. No one gets in the way this time.”

Rey let out the breath she didn’t know she’d been hoarding. “I want,” she said, startlingly clear. “All of that.”

“Then one day,” he said, as if scheduling it with the universe. “We tell them stupid stories about us, you...they'll know nothing but love"

“I love you,” she sobbed, eyes burning in the best possible way.

He tipped his head, eyes flicking to the TV where lovers made enormous promises and then back to her, choosing the smaller promise and meaning it more. “And I will do the quiet things,” he added, softer. “I will make you tea. I will leave notes for you to read when you miss me. I will learn to sleep on your side of the bed if it makes you feel safer. I will carry the boring, because I can. And when you are scared, I will be scared with you.”

That undid her. She reached up, palm to his jaw, thumb catching a tear that hadn’t asked permission to fall. “You are so sappy,” she whispered, delighted and wrecked.

“Human,” he corrected, grinning, leaning into her hand. “Wildly.”

“Come here,” she said, and when he hesitated for the old reasons she just tugged his shirt and he came like a man remembering he was allowed. The kiss was careful and new and exactly theirs—tasting of salt and tea and sleep and a future they were reckless enough to say out loud. It didn’t try to be forever. It tried to be now. That was better.

When they broke, he rested his forehead against hers, breath mingling, eyes closed in that particular prayer that is two people in ridiculous chairs under ridiculous lights being ridiculous and holy about it.

“Crossed oceans,” Rey murmured, half-tease, half-invocation.

“Of time to be with you,” Ben answered, smiling against her mouth. “And I’m not letting you climb it alone again.”

On the screen, lovers declared fate.

“Sleep,” Ben said at last, smoothing her hair with his palm, the way he’d always wanted to. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”

“You’d better be,” Rey said, already sinking, smiling like a person who’d placed something precious exactly where it belongs.

“I will,” he said.

She slept. He sat in the bad chair with the good blanket and watched Dracula make melodrama of the thing he and Rey had finally made simple, and if he cried once more at a line about oceans, well—there are worse ways to be human.

Chapter Text

The flat smelled like cinnamon and cardboard and the faint clean bite of rain coming in the window you insisted on cracking even in November. Fairy lights made polite constellations along the bookshelf; a paper bat Poe had sworn was “tasteful” drooped heroically over the telly. On the coffee table: bowls waiting for crisps, napkins folded like they intended to behave, a candle that said PUMPKIN SPICE but really smelled like someone somewhere once thought about a pumpkin.

Rey curled into the corner of the sofa, one leg tucked under, glass of wine catching the fairy lights. In her lap, a puppy shaped like a question mark with paws—black ears too big, eyes too earnest—snored with the determination of someone who’d run exactly four heroic zoomies and then crashed. Kylo. He’d come home in a box that had once held oranges; Poe had cried and pretended to have something in his eye; Rose had produced a tiny harness with the same grim competence she used on spreadsheets; Finn had sat on the floor and let the puppy climb his chest in a conquering wave. Ben had not tried to hide that he’d fallen in love in the first five seconds—“This is a conflict of interest,” he’d said, already buying three toys on his phone.

A year. A whole year of ours.

Someone else’s life hung on the wall in frames now—a train ticket from the wrong side of town; a black-and-white shot of the four of them squinting into winter sun on a pier; a terrible Polaroid of Ben cooking eggs shirtless at two in the morning, Kylo staring up like a tiny priest officiating a ceremony of bacon. On the shelf: Mrs. Jones’s basil flourishing to the point of arrogance, next to a new rosemary plant Ben had not yet murdered. On the sideboard: a bowl with keys—two sets—on a hook by the door labelled HOME because Poe had made labels a hobby.

The buzzer had told Rey the food was “ten minutes away” in that confident way apps lie. She’d texted the group chat door’s on the latch, arrive with stories and received a storm of emojis: knives from Poe (???), soup spoons from Rose (!!!), a fox from Finn (??), and a string of bats from Ben (show-off).

The bathroom door opened with a little sigh.

Ben walked in behind her, fresh from the shower, towel knotted low on his hips, put-together and undone at once. Hair damp, curls gone sincere. The steam followed him in like a minor godling. He always looked foolishly mortal after a shower—pink-eared, warm at the collarbones, as if the world had been sanded down to fit him.

“Hello, domesticity,” he said, grin lazy, voice made of the same warm secret as the light in the kitchen after midnight. He leaned down and put his mouth to the soft place under Rey’s ear first—habit, gratitude, superstition—and then trailed a kiss up that counted as a hello and an apology for every bad morning the universe had tried to give them. She tipped her head without being asked. He had always known how to ask.

Kylo stirred, did a heroic little huff, then flopped onto his back with his belly to the ceiling and one paw touching Rey’s wrist like a promise.

Ben tilted Rey’s chin with a knuckle, smiling, and kissed her properly—a kiss with warmth and intent, the kind you give when the day has been kind and you’d like to return the favor. The towel threw a small rainbow of drops onto her t-shirt. She hummed against his mouth and tasted toothpaste and the last of the hot water and here.

“How long do I have?” he murmured into the kiss, words ridiculous and perfect against her smile.

Rey glanced at the oven clock and then at the door as if time might become kinder just from being watched. “About ten minutes,” she said, near enough true.

He made a soft, theatrical groan, pressed his forehead to hers, and then, with the ease of someone who had spent a year learning the shape of her and the shape of every room she loved, he stepped around the couch, hooked his hands under her thighs, and lifted.

“Ben!” she half-laughed, half-scolded, because the wine was poised to betray her and Kylo made a small offended squeak before accepting gravity’s argument and relocating to the warm dent she’d left.

“Safety first,” Ben said gravely, smoothly rescuing the glass and setting it on the table with a flourish before pulling her into him. Rey’s legs went around his waist as naturally as saying come here, knees bracketed against the towel’s edge, her hands finding his shoulders—warm from the shower, broad and familiar. He kissed her again, and this time it was rougher, the kind that made the fairy lights feel like they’d found a second sun to orbit.

“Shame,” he breathed, teasing, and the word warmed its way along the line of her collar. He found her mouth again and smiled against it, as if he couldn’t help it. “Guess my appetizer will have to be dessert later.”

“You’re insufferable,” she said, smiling so hard it hurt sweetly under her ribs.

“You adore me,” he corrected, pressing her back down onto her feet with care, hands steady at her waist a heartbeat longer than necessary. The towel negotiated its dignity. She negotiated the distance between now and soon, mouth already bruised in the way that makes a day behave.

“Dessert,” she agreed, feeling it all the way to her toes, delight doing what pain used to and lighting everything up from inside. She gave him a look that would have made last-year Ben stutter and now made this-year Ben laugh out loud with his whole body.

“Get dressed,” she ordered, bossy and fond.

“Yes, captain.” He leaned in like he might misbehave anyway, and she—rude creature—smacked his bum, quick and scandalized at herself in the good way.

He widened his eyes in outrage, then laughed, retreating toward the hallway. He paused in the doorway, turned, and—because he was a menace and because she had made a life where being a little bit of a menace was allowed—whipped the towel off just long enough to flash a stripe of warm skin and the wickedest grin on earth before snapping it back into decency like a magician finishing a card trick.

“Benjamin,” Rey said, clutching her invisible pearls.

“Rey,” he echoed, cheeky and adoring in the same breath.

Kylo issued a single bossy woof.

The buzzer made its rude bee-bee-bee as if it had been lying in wait for the moment comic timing would be cruelest.

Rey startled, then laughed—head back, goofy joy, the kind that makes a room warmer. Ben pointed two fingers at her like to be continued and vanished down the hall, the sound of drawers, hangers.

She took her wine back, set it on the table, scooped Kylo up like a baby—he tolerated it for a grand total of three seconds, then wriggled like he had paperwork—and padded to the intercom.

“Hi!” she sang, thumb on the button. “Come on up!”

The speaker gave back static and a man’s voice that sounded like chips. “Got your order, luv. Two bags. Lift’s being moody.”

“Always is,” Rey said. “First floor. Door’s on the latch.”

She put Kylo down and he did a brave little patrol of the hallway, inspecting the shoe pile and the umbrella stand, currently holding three umbrellas and, for reasons known only to Poe, a plastic sword. The pumpkin spice candle tried its best. The window breathed a little rain into the room and gave back the smell of wet pavement and someone frying garlic two floors up.

She still felt the kiss everywhere.

The buzzer sounded again, a staccato that sent Kylo skittering gleefully to the door. Rey opened it and let the stairwell do its muffled echo of rubber soles and good intentions. She reached for her purse, patted out the notes she’d left ready, and took a breath that tasted like wine and bath steam and the crisp outside and—ridiculously—happiness, that rare thing, the one you don’t brag about because you’re superstitious, even now.

“Oi!” Poe’s voice came from the hall, a personal foghorn. “We brought popcorn! And a traffic cone! Don’t ask!”

Finn’s laugh behind him; Rose’s don’t you dare riding it like a neat, future scold. Another buzz from the delivery guy. Footsteps. Warmth. The world, correctly, coming in.

Rey glanced down the hall just once. Ben reappeared, toweling his hair, properly dressed now in a t-shirt that made his shoulders an broad and jeans that were a sin. He caught her eye and pulled a face that said I have very immediate plans that have been interrupted by community and food, and she answered with a look that said I know, I know—later and then, because they were allowed now, because the rules had agreed to step aside when asked nicely and sometimes when told, she blew him a kiss across the room.

He caught it with theatrical flourish, palm to his mouth, pressed it to his heart like a drama queen, then pointed at the door like a man about to have his night invaded by his friends and his dog and a film that would make him complain about crucifixes again and loved nothing more.

A knock.

Kylo barked, nails skittering, ears a semaphore of joy.

Rey turned the latch, grinning.

They made the coffee table look small.

Curry cartons steamed like little volcanoes; a paper sack surrendered dumplings and sesame-spotted buns; two mountainous trays of chips shone with salt under the fairy lights draped across the bookcase. Popcorn—one bowl sweet, one salted—sat in uneasy truce. Two colas sweated into coasters; a respectable bottle of red breathed on the side; Poe had brought a plastic tub of gummy bats. Kylo patrolled the perimeter with the intensity of a tiny customs officer, sniffing each new arrival as if it might be contraband squirrel.

Rey had her spot: left corner of the sofa, blanket tucked over her knees, back pressed to Ben’s side. His arm came around her automatically, palm making that small slow circle near her shoulder that meant present. When she leaned into him, he bent and pressed a kiss into her hair.

Poe brandished the remote like a conductor. “For tonight’s cultural enrichment, I have selected a modern masterwork.”

Rose didn’t look up from portioning dumplings. “If it’s about a haunted teapot, I’m going home.”

“It Follows,” Poe announced, smug.

Finn frowned, already dubious. “Isn’t that the…sex demon one?”

Poe blinked, innocent. “I misread the description.”

“Historically,” Rose said, “that has meant you read none of the description.”

Ben’s chest shook with a quiet laugh. Rey tipped her face up to look at him; he met her with a grin that landed warm. “Okay, horror boy,” she teased. “Tell Poe what he has got us into”

“Urban legend retold as contagion metaphor; the monster is inevitability with feet,” Ben said, sliding the remote out of Poe’s hand long enough to fix the aspect ratio because he cannot help himself. “It’s about the dull terror of growing up. And sex, yes.”

“I love when you’re insufferable,” Rey murmured.

He kissed her hair again. “Rude.”

Poe hit Play. The film’s synth heartbeat crept in; the living room softened to a small theater. Rey watched out of the corner of her eye the way Ben watched a thing he liked: attentive, amused, occasionally snobby, occasionally gentle. He would lean forward when a shot landed—see?—and lean back when the dread did that good, slow catwalk down the center of her spine and squeeze her knee, once, as if to say you’re here. She didn’t need the squeeze. She wanted it. That was the trick of safety; it turns oxygen into perfume.

Kylo attempted to mount a rescue of a prawn cracker and got gently outmaneuvered. Finn claimed not to be scared and then jolted so hard he sloshed cola when a window broke. Poe insisted the truly evil thing in the film was the wallpaper.

Credits rolled. Poe did a deep bow. No one clapped.

“We pivot from doom to whimsy.”

“Edward Scissorhands,” Rey said, already smiling.

“Obviously,” Poe said.

“I brought tissues,” Finn offered.

Rey tucked her face into Ben’s shoulder for one private second, inhaling that after-shower heat that clung to him when he’d just tried to shave and gotten cocky. He kissed her hair reflexively.

The movie rolled and Ben just simply stared and watched it with her. eternal bliss felt like this.

Then the music.

That music. The one that had lived under her ribs since she was a teenager, the one that felt like a snow globe cracking in the nicest way. Ice began to fly on the screen; Winona Ryder spun slowly in a white dress while tiny glittering knives made weather.

Rey made the noise she always made—an involuntary little oh that meant this gets me every time. She was ready to hide her face in Ben’s shoulder and cry kindly for seventeen seconds and then heckle Poe for pretending not to be moved.

Rose looked at Rey, then at the screen, then at Ben—and stood.

“Dance with me,” she said, holding out a hand like she’d been planning it for weeks.

Rey blinked. “What?”

“We can be as sentimental as we like.” She tugged Rey up with that. Finn turned the volume up two notches. The room filled with sugar and ache.

They didn’t do anything complicated. Rose had once done a salsa class and retained three steps; Rey knew enough not to step on toes. They moved slowly in the small space between coffee table and telly, hands light, shoulders soft, the candle making puddles of friendly light. Kylo, extremely supportive, circled twice and then sat, tail wagging metronomically.

Rey let herself have it. Let her heart do that twelve-year-old thing; let her eyes go shiny; let the laugh that always arrived in this scene bubble up. Rose spun her once—fast enough to make the fairy lights smear into streaks—then brought her back to center so gently it felt like being set on a shelf where you belong.

Rose’s eyes flicked past Rey’s shoulder for a split-second, and then she did something precise: she turned Rey with a neat little flip of their joined hands—and placed her facing the sofa.

Ben wasn’t on it.

He was down on one knee.

He’d slid into the space between rug and table like a stage direction, a man occupying exactly the amount of room a vow requires. Black t-shirt; jeans that made him look like he understood his body and had decided to be kind to it; hair a little damp still, curlier than usual because the air had thoughts about rain. His face—oh, God—In his hand: a small box.

Everything else dimmed in a generous way. Not silence—never that, not with this lot—but a sacred sort of hush. Poe made a high, strangled glass-whistle sound and clapped both hands over his mouth like a child watching fireworks. Finn froze with a dumpling halfway to his face and then, tender idiot, put it down carefully as if noise might break the moment. Rose stepped back to the couch, arms folded, trying to committee her face into serenity and losing to joy.

Ben laughed once, wrecked and delighted, and then let his face settle into the thing it had been building to all night.

“Hi,” he said, absurdly, as if they were meeting in a queue somewhere. His voice shook on the hello and then found its spine. “This is not how my notes said this would go.”

“You—notes?” Rey managed. Her hands had found her mouth on their own; her heart was making a noise that could have been a song if someone wrote it down.

Ben breathed, the kind you do before diving. “Rey,” he said, and the room learned her name all over again. “A year ago I sat in a chair watched you sleep and swore to be boring in the holiest possible way if the world let me. I promised dates that started on purpose, flowers on Tuesdays” His mouth twitched. “I promised to learn your friends and be bossed by Rose and argued with by Finn and adopted by Poe against my will.” His voice thinned and warmed at the same time.

Poe openly sobbed. Finn made the masculine sound that is basically a sob in a trench coat. Rose bit the inside of her cheek and failed to look stern.

Ben’s eyes were shining in that way that had undone her in A&E and would undo her at seventy-five. “So,” he went on, gentler, “I want to do the next boring, holy thing. Because I want to share all the stupid, kind errands the future is made of.” He swallowed, all edges gone. “I want a key with both our scratches on it. I want to write your name on forms. I want to be in the photo where Finn falls asleep in minutes and Poe insists this one of his playlists would make a good mood. I want to turn up with flowers when the week is petty. I want to stand behind you in the kitchen and make Christmas cookies. I want to be a person in your house and your life and your bed and your morning.”

He laughed at himself, helpless. “I want to argue with you and then love you and then kiss you.”

“Good luck,” Rey blurted. The room laughed too; it broke the tension like a wave hitting sand and left something clean behind. Ben’s mouth tilted—thank you—and then he took the little box in both hands like something delicate.

“I want to be your keeper and your kept.”

He opened the box.

The ring did not shout. It didn’t need to. Thin band, low-set stone that caught the fairy lights and tried not to show off; two tiny notches carved at the shoulders of the band like secret commas; inside, a sliver of engraving she would not see until later and then cry about for twenty minutes. It looked like a thing made for hands that cook and type and hold dogs and shove friends when they are being dramatic. It looked like her.

Ben blinked once—don’t cry, don’t drop it—and looked back up like he was saying a name over an altar. “Rey,” he said, “will you marry me?”

Time did not stop—Kylo sneezed exactly then and Poe whispered “oh my God” into a fistful of napkins—but it did the other thing. It made space.

Rey let her fingers leave her mouth. She put her hand over her heart because her body asked for honesty and then reached out because the room asked for courage. Ben’s hands shook. That made her less frightened, somehow. She laughed, because of course she did; it broke whatever last superstitious crust had formed over the night.

“Yes,” she said. Clear, bright, maybe rude in its lack of ceremony. “Obviously yes.”

Poe launched himself and then remembered and sat, vibrating. Finn made the whoop laugh that happens when relief and joy share a door. Rose let one tear happen and then another and didn’t pretend they were about onions.

Ben made a sound he would pretend later he had not made. He stood, slow, as if the air was thicker for a second, and took the ring with reverent clumsiness. “May I?” he asked, like a man without assumptions.

“You may,” Rey said, queenly, then giggled because she could.

He slid it onto her finger. It fit as if the last year had been a jeweler. The fairy lights caught; the stone answered politely. Rey stared at it like you stare at a newborn or a sunset you paid extra for. Then she looked at him, because the ring was a story, but this was the point.

“Come here,” she said, and he did, and the kiss was not a fireworks thing; it was a welcome-home thing. It tasted like wine and salt and sesame and the too-clean air of rooms where good things happen honestly. It did not promise forever. It promised again, and again, and again.

Poe clapped alone for a second until Finn joined and then Rose, resigned to her fate. Kylo barked once, triumphantly, then found a carrot under the coffee table and declared himself the evening’s real winner.

“Show me,” Rose demanded, within seconds, pretending not to dab at her eyes with the cuff of her cardigan. Rey held out her hand like a magician doing the and now nothing up my sleeve bit, and Rose took it—light touch, proper awe. “Tasteful,” she pronounced. “Which, given this group, is a miracle.”

Finn hugged them both at the same time because he is a linebacker made of marshmallow.

Poe sniffled unrepentantly. “I am so happy for me.”

“For us,” Finn corrected, beaming.

“For them,” Rose said.

Ben exhaled, wrecked and renewed. He took Rey’s face in his hands—careful, as if she’d crack under too much joy (she might)—and kissed her forehead like a benediction, then her knuckles because he’s a sap, then did the extremely human thing of tucking loose hair behind her ear as if it mattered in a universe full of weather and rules.

“Wife to be,” he said, testing the shape of the future in his mouth, then winced for Poe’s inevitable shriek.

Ben’s hand found Rey’s.

They returned to the sofa like people learning the art of walking again, the careful, stupid joy of it. Rey curled back into her corner, now with a left hand that insisted on framing itself like a ham. Ben tucked in, arm around her, thumb inevitably stroking the new circle like he was trying to memorize it through sensation. Poe pressed play; Finn pressed tissues into Rey’s palm without looking at her because he knows things. Rose sat with her ankles crossed and the air of a general reviewing spoils.

“Speech!” Poe demanded, inevitably.

“I just did one,” Ben protested.

“To us,” Poe said, gesturing grandly.

Ben looked at Rey like you married into this and then lifted his glass of cola because he’d switched to soft drinks in an attempt to hide the fact that he was already drunk on relief. “To the committee,” he said solemnly “Thank you,” Ben said, losing the bit. “For loving her. For loving me.”

Finn pretended to cough. Poe made the I’m going to cry face and then turned it into the I’ve always wanted to cry face.

Kylo climbed into Rey’s lap with the gravity of a man accepting a promotion and nosed her ring, then licked her knuckle, then put his chin on her thigh like we did it. Rey cried again for the fifth time in twenty minutes and wiped her face with Finn’s tissue with the sloppy gratitude of a person who has decided to stop apologizing for feeling several things per minute.

Ben leaned in. “You okay?” he murmured, small world voice, for her alone.

“I am so…okay,” she said, laughing at herself, at him, at the world for behaving. “I am offensively okay. I am insufferably okay.”

“Excellent,” he said, wicked and fond. “Let’s be obnoxious about it.”

They were. Poe took seventeen photos and ten were terrible and three were perfect and one caught Ben looking at Rey like she was his whole world. Ben’s mouth found her temple again—habit, superstition, blessing. “Stay with me,” he said softly.

She turned her head, kissed his jaw, then his mouth, quick, reverent, greedy. “Always,” she said, and felt the ring press lightly into his skin where her fingers curled.

Outside, rain stitched its small electric lines into the dark; inside, the candle did its best imitation of weather.

“Alright,” Poe said, remote aloft, dramatic as sin. “Next: The Conjuring, but I will allow exactly two comments from Ben about crucifixes being a myth.”

“Utter tale,” Ben said immediately.

“That’s one,” Poe snapped.

Rey laughed until her stomach hurt and then reached for his hand again, thumb worrying the edge of the ring because it felt nice. He glanced down and then up, the look that always means I know what this means.

Chapter Text

Outside, the city had gone quiet in the way only snow can teach it to. Flakes fell thick and slow, spinning under the streetlamps, softening edges, making even the buses look like they were moving through a fairytale. The church—old stone, high rafters, doors that remembered every winter—held its breath and made a room for the world to be gentle.

Rey stood at the back beneath the choir loft, in the slice of shadow where brides take stock. The wooden doors ahead were closed, but sound came through: the soft tuning of strings, a murmur of coats being shrugged off and laughter slipped into cupped hands, the occasional thrilled whisper that carried like a bell.

Her dress had weight and patience and a long, clean line that made the air behave. It was the sort of gown little kids draw when you tell them “princess” and then add ten years of taste. Silk mikado, crisp enough to hold a bow’s memory; a bodice that fit like a well-kept secret; off-the-shoulder sleeves that framed collarbones and left her neck to take the light. Around her waist, a narrow belt made of tiny seed pearls that looked like frost caught in a line. The skirt began with grace and bloomed—layers of whispering tulle over satin, each cut a hair longer than the one beneath, so movement looked like water getting out of its own way. The train went on and on—cathedral length—gliding across the flagstones like a held breath. Her veil fell from a comb of pearls into a mist that reached her fingertips, fine as breath on glass. If a fairy godmother had been on payroll, she’d have signed off on it with a wink.

She watched the snow tumble past the stained glass as if it were a clock, and tried to breathe in a way that didn’t make the veil catch. The bouquet in her hands calmed her by being something to hold: lilies—white, open, luminous—nested among winter carnations the color of blush, softened by sprigs of rosemary (for remembrance, Mrs. Jones had insisted, with a wink) and just enough pine to make the air think of woods. A narrow ribbon trailed, clean and simple.

“Darling,” Rose whispered from the side aisle, and Rey turned—and had the pleasure of breaking her best friend.

Rose, who does not cry at meetings or funerals or the season finale of anything, put her hand to her mouth and let two perfect, traitorous tears go. She wore a dress that had opinions—a deep winter red, long sleeves, a square neckline that made her look like a painting from the good room of a gallery. The skirt had room to move. In her hands, a small bouquet of holly and white ranunculus with a fringe of eucalyptus; it made her look like she owned December and was being magnanimous about it.

“Oh, Rey,” she said, and then laughed at herself. “I promised myself I would not be sentimental, and here I am—” She sniffed. “—sentimenting.”

Rey laughed, which helped. “You look like Christmas dared to be elegant.”

Rose executed a small curtsey. “And you look exactly like the problem I’ve been trying to solve since I was twelve: how to give a worthy stage to a woman who refuses to dim.” She stepped close, fingertips adjusting the fall of the veil, the lay of the belt. Her hands were steady; her eyes were not. “Here,” she said, trading her own bouquet for Rey’s, “take yours before Poe gets ideas and uses it as a wand.”

Rey took the lilies and carnations back, their cool stems grounding her. “Is he behaving?”

“Poe is in charge of nothing more dangerous than programs,” Rose said. “Finn has him under gentle guard. And Mrs. Jones has a bell. There will be discipline.”

A rustle behind them; the sort of soft thunder feet make when they belong to a man trying to be quieter than his weight will allow. Finn arrived in a suit that had tried on three ties before choosing one that matched the church. He carried himself like a doorframe—something you could trust to be where it was. His eyes did that instant-water thing. He took Rey in—dress, veil, bouquet, freckles that refused full coverage—and exhaled like a man who had been holding his breath since the proposal.

“Ben is a lucky man,” he said, voice gone rough as gravel and twice as kind.

Rey’s throat tightened. “I’m lucky too.”

He offered his arm; she took it. He squeezed, then pretended he hadn’t. “Ready?”

“No,” she said, and then, more honestly, “Yes.”

They moved to the center line, where the aisle stretched long and candlelit. The church had been dressed as if Christmas were a guest of honor, not a season: evergreen garlands wound the pew ends, threaded with small white roses and tiny brass bells, just enough red berry to make the eye glad. The candles—everywhere, in hurricanes on ledges, in tapers along the aisle, in stout pillars on the altar—warmed the stone, made a soft gold halo of every polished surface. A Christmas tree rose to the left of the altar, tall and elegant, dressed in glass and white and a few antique paper ornaments Mrs. Jones had insisted would “make the baby Jesus feel at home.” Its lights threw quiet constellations across the wood of the choir stalls. Somewhere, almost invisibly, the air smelled of orange peel and clove.

The string quartet under the pulpit gave a subtle nod to the sacristan. The first note of Pachelbel’s Canon in D made itself known: that honest progression, that patient bass line breathing in and out while the violins wrote lace on the air.

The doors swung open.

People turned, the way they do, the way they have done a thousand years for every woman who has ever dared the long walk to the future. Rey felt the attention like warmth, not weight. She saw Poe in the second pew on the left, already leaking, a tissue clenched in his fist, Mrs. Jones at his far side in a hat that defied the laws of both fashion and aviation, her eyes proud and wet. She saw the blur of friends, neighbors, the nurse who had pressed the good button on the IV; she saw rose-red and winter coats and the way some faces wore the day like a blessing they’d been waiting to receive.

And then she saw Ben.

He stood by the altar, his best friend at his shoulder, the priest a kind shadow behind them. He wore a tuxedo that had decided to be kind to him: classic black shawl collar, single button, white shirt so sharp it made the camera behave. His bow tie was perfect in a way that suggested Poe and Finn had bullied it into submission and then he’d mussed it with his hands because he’s that man. A small white carnation at his lapel—simple, right—and a sliver of rosemary. His hair was the good kind of disobedient, the curl at his temple not quite tamed. He looked like a man who had smiled in mirrors all morning to learn how not to cry and had failed, graciously.

When he saw her, the thing he’d tried to hold broke, and he cried.

Not theatrically. Not with noise. His mouth trembled, his eyes filled and tipped, and he didn’t hide it, because who hides from a sacrament. His chest rose; he put both hands together in front of his mouth for a breath like prayer and then lowered them because he wanted to see her like this without obstruction.

Rey’s knees might have given if not for Finn. He leaned down—comically, delicately, a large man trying to whisper—and said, “Steady,” and she was.

They walked.

The Canon did what it was hired for: it made time manageable. Step, step, breathe. The train breathed with her, the veil did its quiet veil thing. The candles shivered at the draft from the doors, then steadied, finding their level as the congregation sat down and made a new room out of their attention.

Halfway, Rey caught Poe’s eye. He put his fist to his heart and mouthed holy shit and then immediately looked at the ceiling as if to apologize to God. Mrs. Jones dabbed at the corner of her eye with a handkerchief that had obviously seen service at every family event for sixty years. Rose, two steps ahead, glanced back exactly once—just to check, just to confirm—and nodded to herself like a general, satisfied.

At the front, Ben stood like he’d been set there by tectonics. As they drew near, a laugh escaped him—a small, wrecked sound that meant you, it’s you. Rey could hear his breath now. She could see the tiniest freckle near his eye that hid under stubble when he forgot to shave. She could see the way his hand—damn him—shook once and then steadied as he reached out to take her when it was time.

Finn’s job arrived.

They stopped, the priest a kind presence at the edge of the moment. Finn turned to Rey and instead of offering her hand to Ben immediately, he took her face between his big palms with a reverence that made the front pews sniff en masse.

“You look like the answer to a question I didn’t know I was asking,” he said, voice low, shoulder-thick. “He is a lucky man. We are lucky people.”

Rey’s vision blurred for a second; she blinked it away because eyeliner had made its own vows. “I love you,” she whispered.

“Good,” Finn said, squeezed once more, then turned Rey’s hand in his own and placed it in Ben’s.

Ben took it like he had been waiting to be told how, like he would carry it every day in the boring way and the holy way. His fingers closed around hers; his thumb found the place it lived and rested there for the span of a breath. His other hand lifted—slow, no theatrics—to the veil.

He paused long enough to meet her eyes and ask without speaking ready? She breathed yes.

He lifted the veil.

Tulle slid back over hair and light. The world gained focus the way it does when you step from a shadow into a room that has been laid just for you. The veil fell to rest over her shoulders. The smell of lilies found the rosemary; the candles did their clever work; the Canon reached a place that felt like a door and then opened it.

“Hi,” Ben said, an idiot, a genius. His eyes were a mess in the best way.

“Hi,” Rey said, happier than sense.

The priest smiled like a man who loves being present for good work and began to say things that have been said forever in a thousand rooms like this one, with new names slotted in and old vows changing hands like heirlooms: welcome, witnesses, love, promise, keep. Somewhere to Rey’s left, the Christmas tree’s lights ticked softly as a draft considered an argument and then decided against it. Outside, the snow thickened with intent. Inside, wax glowed steady in pools of glass. The Canon gave way to silence and then to the low, patient phrases of someone reading St. Paul in a voice that refused to be smug about it.

Ben didn’t stop holding Rey’s hand. His thumb kept its small, unconscious circle. She watched his mouth as he repeated the first line the priest asked him to say—I, Benjamin…—and said it like the ground under them had always, oddly, been training him for this. When it was her turn, she said I, Rey with an ease that would have terrified her two years ago and now felt like water finding the right bed.

Vows were simple, sweet and kind. The rings—simple, the band Rey had chosen because it wouldn’t snag on jumpers and Ben’s a clean circle with the tiniest engraving inside—found their hands again. The priest said the line about the circle having no end and Rey did not roll her eyes at clichés because sometimes cliché is a cheap word for human beings finding something that fits too many times for it to be an accident. Ben slid the band over her knuckle and it settled like a decision made last year that had been waiting for its formal wear. She slid his onto his finger and watched a quiet, stunned joy move across his face like light across stone.

When the priest said the part that makes everyone laugh nervously—you may kiss your bride—someone in the back (Poe) made a small noise like a teakettle at exactly the wrong time and the right volume. Laughter warmed the rafters; it made the candlelight friendly instead of grand. Ben’s hands came up in a way they had always done: left at her waist, right to her cheek, pause for consent written not in law but in language they’d created across a thousand mornings. She tipped up and he touched his mouth to hers in a kiss that was not for the camera but for the room, for the witnesses, for today: soft, warm, the curled edge of a smile visible at the corner because that is who they were.

Applause arrived like weather. In the pews, someone’s baby added a delighted squeal. The string quartet struck the first clean, happy chords of Handel without being asked; the bells in the garlands trembled; the tree kept its counsel and glowed.

They turned to face their people. This, Rey realized, was the real moment—hand in hand, veil stitched down her back, ring warm on her finger, the aisle a river they would walk back, into a day with coats and photographs and Mrs. Jones’s mince pies and Poe’s champagne and Finn’s heavy, perfect hug and Rose’s ferocious, efficient love. Outside, snow went on doing its work of making the ordinary look extraordinary. Inside, they made a smaller, more durable weather: warmth, promise, breath.

Ben leaned close, not to kiss but to let his smile happen in her hair. “Hello, wife,” he whispered, awed and teasing at once.

“Hello, husband,” she whispered back, and had the satisfaction of feeling his pulse jump under her thumb where it rested against his wrist.

The string players smiled at each other, lifted their bows, and Pachelbel folded back on itself in a new key that knew how to be bright. The doors stood open to the white world. The candles learned a new trick called daylight and liked it. The Christmas tree, stalwart to the left of the altar, watched two people who had negotiated with rules and weather and won in exactly the right way walk forward together.

If the snow fell thicker, if the bells sounded warmer, if the air itself seemed to make room—that was between the old stone and this particular bright morning. Finn took the first step with them, then stepped apart to let them be a set of two. Rose fell in behind like a general pleased with the day. Poe held his breath and then forgot and whooped. Mrs. Jones allowed herself one small, excellent sob.

And at the threshold between candlelight and cold, between Canon and chatter, between vows spoken and vows lived, Rey squeezed Ben’s hand and felt the most ordinary magic in the world: two rings warm against two pulse.

Snow kept falling, polite as confetti, as the church emptied into a hall that had been turned—by Rose’s spreadsheets, Poe’s glitter, and an army of aunties—into a winter feast. Long tables wore white linen and a scatter of brass candlesticks; evergreen garlands ran their lengths, stitched with tiny white roses and ribbons the color of cinnamon. A Christmas tree presided from the corner, its glass ornaments catching candlelight like small moons. The band finished tuning under a paper star so big even Poe had called it “maybe a bit much” and then changed his mind when it glowed.

Food arrived like a procession. Platters of roasted vegetables lacquered with honey and thyme; a tide of golden roast potatoes with smug little crunches; braised beef that fell apart when you looked at it; mushroom wellingtons with pastry so delicate Rose threatened to file a petition to protect it; salads that remembered summer; baskets of warm rolls; bowls of cranberries so jewel-bright they looked like decorations that had gotten ideas. Mrs. Jones herself paraded a tray of mince pies like a queen with tributes. Somewhere: gravy boats, more revered than reliquaries.

Rey and Ben did that married thing where you keep losing and finding each other in a room that insists on loving you loudly. Aunties kissed cheeks. Uncles told jokes with suspicious provenance. Friends clapped them on the back and spoke in italics. Poe stole one of the little bells off a garland and rang it whenever he felt the speeches lagged. Finn ferried plates like a gentle tugboat. Rose policed the pacing, the canapés, and Poe’s bell with equal efficiency.

“Married,” Ben kept saying under the hum, as if trying the word on for fit. “Wife. Wife. Wife.”

“If you wear it out, you’ll have to get it resized.”

He leaned into her ear and murmured, “Worth it,” in a way that had nothing to do with metal and everything to do with the warm place under her ribs.

They ate until people started pretending not to want more and then having more anyway.

The band, having judged the room tenderized enough, struck up the first notes of “Ice Dance”—that tinkling, breath-held motif—and a hush fell as if someone had put their finger to the night’s lip. The fairy lights seemed to lean in.

Ben’s hand found Rey’s. “Ready?”

“Since I was thirteen,” she said, and he laughed with his whole chest—soft, astonished—and led her to the small clear square Rose had curated from nothing with tape and power.

He didn’t do anything fancy. That was the point. He put one hand at her waist, took her other hand in his, and moved with the kind of care that says this is for us, not Instagram. The music threaded through them like silk. Rey placed her palm lightly at his shoulder and, without having to look, rested her head against him where his heartbeat lived. They swayed, stepped, turned. Ice fell on a screen in some other life; here, tiny paper snow from Poe’s illicit cannon drifted down exactly once before Rose confiscated it and gave him a look that said try me.

“That scene,” Rey whispered, smiling against his jaw. “Every time.”

“I know,” he said, and tightened his arm just a little. “I chose it on purpose.”

“You always do things on purpose,” she murmured.

“Not always,” he admitted, and glanced down at her hand—at the ring warm on her finger—and back with a grin. “But this. This, I mean properly.”

They were so plainly themselves that the room became braver; you could feel it. Couples who didn’t usually dance did. People who danced badly did it beautifully because they were honest about it. Finn persuaded Mrs. Jones to attempt a turn; Poe dragged Rose into a foxtrot and got a lecture with heel leads. The band slid out of Danny Elfman and into the 80s with a gleeful key change: “Take On Me” filled the rafters; Finn attempted the high note and failed with dignity; Poe tried the sketchy video dance and nearly took out a candlestick; Rose mouthed we’ll talk later and then actually laughed when he recovered into a competent spin.

Ben spun Rey under his arm, careful of the veil she’d pinned lower for dancing, then drew her back. “You okay?” he checked, soft, the question that always counted.

“More than,” she said, eyes too bright for the lighting, and kissed him on the mouth in front of everyone with the kind of kiss that makes old ladies vow to live to see spring. Cheer rose like steam. The band took the cue and delivered “Kiss” by Prince, which made Poe shriek in a key no one had licensed and Finn do a shoulder wiggle that broke three laws.

Plates disappeared, plates reappeared—cheese, cake, tiny chocolate something-or-others that Rose pretended to disdain and then ate exactly four of. The Christmas tree kept time with its lights. Children, operating on carnival fuel, skidded under tables and were scooped up by laughing cousins. Someone started a conga line; Mrs. Jones escaped it twice and was caught once, in which case she committed fully and became the leader.

Ben danced like a man who’d earned his clumsiness. He was better than he’d been a year ago—less apologetic, more himself. He let Rey lead when the band swung into Whitney’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody”.

Later—hands sticky with cake icing, cheeks sore, the room having burned off its formal edges and become a long, bright party—the night gentled. The band went to standards. People who had worn their shoes valiantly removed them. Coats returned as makeshift blankets. Candles burned down into little lakes of gold. Outside, the snow argued softly with the street.

They found a table, the five of them, as if pulled by the same tide: Rey and Ben on one side, Rose and Poe on the other, Finn anchoring the end like a lamppost. They fell into their particular silence—the giggly, tipsy kind, where every small joke lands as if it invented humor. Glasses clinked.

Rey watched them—these people, this ridiculous, resilient committee—and felt a click inside her, the sound of something settling into the right groove. Her heart did that bright expansion, the one that first felt like panic a long time ago and now felt like permission. She had kept a secret all day, weeks, by tucking it under joy; it had thrummed there like a bird cupped in both hands. It wasn’t heavy. It was insistent. It asked to be spoken.

She set her glass of soda down, wiped her fingers on her napkin, then reached for the little white bridal handbag she’d slung on the chair behind her. It had no business being useful—pearls, satin, a loop of ribbon—but it had earned its keep today carrying safety pins and lip balm and two toasted almonds Finn had insisted were lucky. Her fingers found the long box inside; her pulse went to her mouth.

“Okay,” she said softly, and the table quieted, curious. She put the long box on the tablecloth—a neat, matte thing tied with a slim ribbon—and slid it toward Ben.

Poe’s eyebrows went operatic. Rose’s eyes narrowed in the way that means a reveal. Finn reached, stopped himself, folded both hands under his chin, and tried to look casual and failed.

Ben looked at her—a really? look, delighted, already undone—and then at the box. “I didn’t think I had any more gifts coming,” he said, voice turned low and careful, as if the box might could bite.

“You don’t,” Rey said, smiling, wrecked and shining. “We do.”

His throat worked. He slid off the ribbon, slow. He lifted the lid like he was unwrapping a saint’s relic. Inside, on the velvet, lay a photograph—crisp, printed this morning; the white stick of a test held at an angle; two clear pink lines so certain the camera had gone out of its way to make them obvious.

Ben went still the way storms do right before they decide to be kind. The noise of the room slipped back; the candlelight pulled close. He looked at the photo for a long second, as if translating a language he’d learned as a child and was hearing again for the first time. His mouth opened, closed. His hand lifted and hovered a heartbeat over the image, not touching, reverent.

“Rey,” he whispered, and the word contained every room they’d walked through to get here.

She nodded, laughter and tears tripping each other.

His eyes filled all at once, like a spring had been touched. He laughed—one wild, quiet breath that made his shoulders shake—and then let the tears fall because who in this room would ask him not to. He lifted his gaze to her, to her face, to the line of her mouth, to the place beneath her hand where a future had already decided to pitch a tent.

“Are you—how—when—” Poe managed, depositing each word alone on the table like a confused waiter with single olives.

Rose’s hand flew to her mouth and then flattened to her chest as if to keep her heart from behaving in a public way. Finn made a sound so large and gentle it didn’t have a word.

Rey’s eyes didn’t leave Ben’s. “A few weeks,” she said, tears finally trespassing into her smile. “I wanted to tell you today. I know it’s obscene. I couldn’t—” She laughed helplessly. “—I couldn’t wait.”

Ben put both hands on the edge of the table and stood as if some inner gravity had shifted its poles. He went around the corner, knelt at her side—not down-on-one-knee formal, but both-knees, careless of his suit, ridiculous, perfect—and pressed his palms, gentle as prayer, to her waist. He put his forehead there first, as if listening for the earliest possible story. Then he lifted his face and kissed her belly through silk and tulle and the complicated architecture of a gown that had not planned for this kind of adoration. His lips were warm; his tears made constellations on fabric that had previously just wanted to be pretty.

“Hello,” he said to their child, voice gone hoarse with the effort of fitting joy into breath. “I will do everything I know how to do and then learn more. I will fix every broken toy and learn every song you love and ruin perfectly. I will love you unconditionally”

Rey put a trembling hand in his hair and carded through it once, like a benediction of her own. Tears ran hot and clean and she let them. “He’ll be sappy,” she told the invisible, delighted baby. “Prepare accordingly.”

Ben laughed, wrecked. “They,” he corrected, then looked up at her, eyes shining. “He. She. Whoever. Hello, you. You are so wanted.”

Poe’s face had entered a new country of crying and now sat in a place called rapture. “You absolute—” He flapped his hands, seeking a word that wouldn’t get him ejected from the hall. “—legends.”

Finn put both hands over his face and then dragged them down slowly like a man revealing an expression he’d been saving. “I’m—” He coughed. “I am so stupidly happy I could lift the building.”

“Please don’t,” Rose said, wiping her eyes and then, in the same motion, reaching for Rey’s glass and moving it out of reach with quiet efficiency before Rey could absentmindedly sip; then she replaced it with water as if she had been waiting her whole life to do that exact gesture.

Ben rose and kissed Rey—on the mouth, on her forehead, on the spot right beside her eye that always makes her breath catch. Then he sat, crowded onto her chair’s edge as if proximity might legislate certainty and they were sensible people who believed in laws. He took her hand, laced their fingers, and pressed both to his mouth like he could inhale the future if he tried hard enough.

Poe raised his glass of cola and then, remembering, set it down, picked up his water with a solemnity that made the table lose its mind laughing, and tried again. “To the baby,” he said, voice enormous and reverent. “To the most spoiled, loved, lectured, serenaded, well-fed small person in the postal code.”

Finn lifted his. “To the smallest bundle of joy.”

Rose: “To...babies” she sobbed finally breaking.

Ben swallowed, lifted his own water because he is not a fool, and could only get out, “To you,” to Rey and the child at once, before his voice went.

Rey lifted hers, smile wobbling, and said, “Oh for goodness sake. To all of us.”

They drank. The candle sent up the tiniest cheer in spark shape. The band, who hadn’t heard but somehow knew, slid into “God Only Knows,” the kind of 60s gift that could crash any 80s party and be welcomed.

Ben and Rey found a last quiet minute in the doorway to the corridor, lit by spill from the hall and Christmas tree glow. The world smelled like pine and cake and snow and the good tired of people who loved you loudly.

He put his palm at her cheek and looked at her the way he had in the church—like a man who had found a door he didn’t know to ask for and was absolutely going to go through it. “I love you,” he said, and it wasn’t the romantic lead’s line; it was a line item, a ledger, a habit, a promise.

“I know,” she said, stealing the oldest joke, and then softer, because the night had earned it, “I love you, too.”

They went back to the table for coats and last bites and the ritual of gathering leftovers into plastic boxes that would taste like home tomorrow. Poe insisted on one more photo; Rose organized it like an artist; Finn held the camera with the gentle ferocity of a man capturing evidence. In the picture: five friends leaning into one another, ridiculous and holy—Ben’s hand at Rey’s waist, Rey’s hand at Ben’s lapel, Rose’s arm through Poe’s, Poe mid-laugh, Finn’s chin tilted like a man guarding a light. On the table in front of them, a long box sits open; inside, a photo with two pink lines, already part of the story the picture tells.

When they stepped out into the snow, it tried to catch on Rey’s veil and failed—gentle, insistent. Ben tucked her arm into his and put his other hand over her hand, an instinct so old it had become reflex. The church bells, tidying up the hour, gave them a little send-off. Behind them, through the hall’s windows, the Christmas tree kept its patient glow. Ahead, the street wore white. Somewhere, a kettle, traitor and friend, waited to be bullied into boiling.

“Ready?” he asked again, out of habit more than doubt.

“For everything,” she said, and meant the long, boring, holy list: naps and night feeds and notes on the fridge; two more mugs because apparently two had become three; Kylo learning to be gentle.

They walked into their winter. The snow, greedy and kind, took their footprints and made them look like a map. Inside Rey, the smallest piece of the future turned over in its sleep, and somewhere very old in Ben a promise found a new place to live, and if the night breathed a little deeper for it, well—some rooms are smart enough to notice when they’ve been given a secret and hold it with both hands.