Chapter Text
At 2:30am, Rey surrenders. Her eyelids are burning with exhaustion, and she is so delirious that the words in her textbook are starting to make crazy delusional shapes in her brain. If she has any prayer of passing her biochem exam in the morning, she has to …
BEEEEEEEEEEEP. BEEEEEEEEEEEEP. BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP.
Rey’s head flies up from the textbook so fast that she rips one of the pages, now stuck to her chin by way of an unsightly line of drool. She must have fallen asleep at the desk, and now —
BEEEEEEEEEEEP. BEEEEEEEEEEEEP. BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP.
“Oh, Christ,” she mutters, the sound of it already drowned out by the unbearable wail of the fire alarm. At least that’s what she assumes it is — the fire alarms have never gone off in her complex before. During drills, which she usually ignored, a voice would come over the speakers announcing that it was only a test —
“This is not a test,” comes a booming voice. “Evacuate the building in an orderly fashion.”
Rey slams her biochem textbook shut. “Perfect,” she says through her teeth. Just then the volume of the alarm raises to a level so piercing that she cannot help but clap her hands over her ears — it’s unendurable. Even if it were a drill she’d have to leave. But where the hell are her keys? She can’t go without them, the door doesn’t stay open on its own and it auto locks as soon as it’s shut. She scours the apartment, kicking over all the junk that she and her roommates have left on the floor, some remnant of Thai food that Poe and Finn ordered yesterday night before ditching her for Christmas break when they finished their finals.
She feels an unfair twinge of annoyance at them, knowing that Poe keeps his keys by his bedside and Finn wears his in his pocket and if they were here then they’d have gotten the hell outside and away from this noise by now.
After thirty seconds of the siren wailing in her ears so fiercely she thinks her head is going to explode, she decides to just go without them, and figure it out later. One of the libraries on campus will open, she’ll just wait it out there until the morning. She turns back toward her room to grab her coat and a hat and the aggressively large scarf that Finn left behind, thinking that she’ll be able to fashion it into a blanket later on, and that’s when she smells it.
Smoke.
She whips her head around and sees that it coming up in small wafts, escaping out of the crack at the bottom of her bedroom door.
“Not today, Satan.”
She bolts out of there a little senselessly, not even bothering to check if the doorknob is hot, or if there’s any danger on the outside. The hallway is mercifully clear, since anyone with common sense or ears that they want to prevent from openly bleeding has already left the building. By the time Rey barrels down the stairs and slams open the front door to the complex, the firetrucks have already arrived, whirring and whining and causing enough commotion to wake up their entire sleepy college town.
The instant Rey hits the street she realizes just how astronomically screwed she is. She is wearing a pair of fluffy socks, Finn’s old swim team sweatpants, and one incredibly threadbare t-shirt. She sees a frat party across the street spilling out to see what’s going on and immediately hoists her arms up over her chest, realizing that she isn’t even wearing a bra.
And it’s snowing.
“Of course,” she mutters to herself, looking up at the sky with unconcealed derision. She’s talking to herself like a crazy person, but after a week of running off nothing but coffee and library vending machine food, she’s feeling pretty freaking crazy. And she’s also feeling pretty freaking like a person who’s going to fail her biochem exam tomorrow.
She hugs her arms closer to herself, but it’s like trying to start a fire with two blocks of ice. In an instant she can’t feel her nose, her ears, her fingers. She hops stupidly from foot to foot, shifting her weight around, determined not to make eye contact with anyone because she knows how utterly ridiculous she looks.
Her neighbors are all out on the sidewalk and mingling with the scattered frat partiers, who are generously distributing beer from a keg on their lawn to keep people warm. In a moment of weakness, Rey considers going over there, even flat warm keg beer sounding more appealing than freezing her ass off. But of all the equations she’s had to memorize this semester, she doesn’t need any reminding that Drunk Off Beer + Biochem Final = Automatic Fail.
A gust of wind picks up and she shudders violently. Who the hell started that fire anyway? Some tokers celebrating the end of their finals, she bets. She is vividly imagining shoving a joint down the throat of the faceless perpetrator when suddenly she feels an arm around her shoulder.
At first she is too bewildered to react, staring up into the eyes of some blond stranger.
“You look cold, babe,” he says. “How about you come up to my room with a few of these beers and we help warm you up?”
Rey actively tries not to gag. “No, thanks,” she says, sliding out of his grasp.
But there he is again, at her side, trying to push the beer into her hands. “I’m Matt,” he says, with a smile that he must think is particularly winning. “Have I seen you around before? At the technical school?”
“No.”
“You look awfully familiar,” he says, sidling up closer to her. She can smell the stale beer on his breath as he tries wrapping an arm around her shoulder again.
She ducks out of it, firmer this time, planting a scowl on her face. He is drunk enough that he stumbles slightly, sloshing some of the beer into the snow collecting at their feet.
“Don’t touch me,” she says clearly, loudly. “I’m not interested.”
“Hey,” he says, scowling right back at her. She looks beyond him, seeing if she can grab someone’s attention — anyone that could act as a reliable witness to this, so she doesn’t get suspended after she clocks this guy into next Tuesday. Already her fist is cocked at her side, numb from the cold but no less ready for it.
“I’m just trying to help you out,” he says, using his arm to sandwich her shoulders into him. “You don’t have to act like such a bitch.”
She gives herself three seconds to decide whether or not it’s worth decking him — she’s not in any real danger in front of all these people, but that doesn’t make this Matt any less of an asshole. And he looks drunk enough that he probably won’t remember her face well enough in the morning to implicate her.
Then he jerks her to the side, trying to drag her along with him across the street. Screw it. She draws her elbow back, already ducking her head down, ready to fly her fist into his face —
Only there is no face to fly into. She hears Matt yelp, and her fist sinks into nothing but air.
“What the fuck, man?”
It takes Rey a moment to recognize him — she’s never seen the TA to her biochem class wearing anything but those rigid suits he wears to class, all calculated and tall and brooding, handing back their exams and papers with an ever-present frown. Seeing him here in a sweatpants, sneakers, and a giant coat is weird enough — seeing him looming over Matt and holding the punk ass bitch by the collar of his jacket makes it difficult not to laugh outright.
“She said she’s not interested,” says Ben Solo. She has heard his habitually clipped, blunt voice plenty of times in Professor Snoke’s lectures, but never like this. Ben is not loud by any means, but there is something so ferocious in his tone that even Rey is a little taken aback by it.
“Look, man,” says Matt, trying to struggle out of his grasp.
Ben only tightens it, jerking him with a gesture that makes his dumb drunken eyes go wide. “Get out of here,” says Ben, “before you regret it.”
Matt shakes him off, and Ben lets him go. In another instant he’s swallowed up by the gathering crowd of rubberneckers, and Rey is so stunned that she has temporarily forgotten that she is basically becoming a human ice cube. She stares up at the great enigma that is Ben Solo, the very TA who has made her life a living hell for the last semester, not even sure what to say.
“Are you okay, Rey?”
There are 110 people in her biochem class, and he hasn’t made eye contact with her once.
“Uh, yeah,” she says, feeling her cheeks flush. His gaze is intense on her. Most things about him are intense, she has noticed over the last few months. “Thanks.”
He offers her the slightest of smirks. “He should be thanking me, with a right hook like yours.”
She smiles back, a little wary, a little surprised. He looks at her and frowns suddenly, surveying her; she curves into herself awkwardly, suddenly self-conscious that she is braless and pajama-clad in front of the same man who has the power to pass or fail her on the one class that stands between her and getting enough credits to graduate a year early.
“You’re freezing,” he says.
It takes her a moment to understand what he is doing as he sheds his coat — in the next instant he is pressing it firmly on her shoulders. She swims in it, the coat still warm from his skin, smelling like laundry detergent and some not entirely unpleasant musk.
She is so thrown off by the gesture that she ends up stammering up at him. “I—I couldn’t. Thank you. I mean, this is so nice of you, but really, I’m fine — ”
She tries to take off the coat, but he plants two hands on her shoulders and says, “Truly, I insist.”
His dark eyes are so solemn on hers that her protests quiet in her throat. “Thank you,” she bleats. He takes his hands off of her shoulders, clearing his throat, but then the reassuring pressure of his touch lingers.
They stand in silence for a few minutes. She is reluctant to leave his side, still trying to devise some way to get his coat back to him — if she could get one of those blankets the firefighters are distributing down the street, maybe, or sneak into the lobby of one of the dorms on campus while some drunk freshman stumbled in with a key —
“You live in this building?”
“Me?” she asks, blinking up at him. Jesus, he’s tall. She never noticed that in class, but then again, in class the primary thing she noticed about him was that he had an infuriating way of circling even the most infinitesimal mistakes with angry, bright red ink. “Um. Yeah, with my roommates. You — you live here too?”
He nods. His eyes are on her again. She swallows hard.
“I’ve never seen you,” she says, because she can’t think of anything else to say.
He shrugs. “I don’t go out much.”
She snorts a little. “Yeah, me neither.”
Right about then they see a plume of fire burst from one of the windows on the fourth floor — not the apartment that neighbors Rey, but one pretty damn close to it. Everyone on the street starts to gasp, and someone whistles lowly. People are whipping out their phones and filming it. Rey and Ben stand in silence for a few moments, and then, so delirious from lack of sleep that she can’t help herself, she mutters a candid “Shit.”
“I doubt we’ll be let back into the building tonight,” says Ben in agreement.
“My books,” Rey laments.
He cocks an eyebrow at her. There is something unmistakably playful in the expression, and she feels her heart do this strange and slightly unwelcome flop at the sight of it.
“Don’t tell me you’re still studying for tomorrow’s test,” he says.
“Fine,” she says wryly. “I won’t tell you.”
They fall back into silence for a beat, and then he says, “Knowing you, you'll be fine.”
It takes a second to sink in, and then she laughs outright. “You gave me a C plus last week,” she reminds him.
“Yes,” he says, looking up at the building, deliberately not making eye contact with her. “But between you and me, there is a possibility that I have been planning to grade you all on a curve. And there is a possibility that you are at the top of it.”
She can’t help the grin that splits her face, her chapped lips burning in the cold. “A possibility, huh?”
He looks down at her, seeming a bit disarmed by her smile. She has pushed him too far. She is about to take a step back and shut the hell up before she digs herself a bigger hole, but just then he smiles back at her, the sight of it so unexpected that he seems like an entirely different person. Handsome, even.
Great, Rey, she thinks to herself. You’re so drunk off lack of sleep that you have the hots for the asshole TA.
Another firetruck whirs past.
“We’re never getting back in, are we?” she says, the exhaustion creeping into her voice.
“Listen,” he says. “My parents have a house a few miles from here. They’re on vacation. There’s plenty of room.”
“Oh,” she says. “That’s, uh — that must be nice to have them so close.” Rey herself never knew her parents, bouncing in and out of the foster system before finally fragmenting a family together with Finn and Poe. It’s strange to think that this fully-grown, slightly intimidating person has parents nearby.
“What I meant,” he says, his voice a little lower, a little more apprehensive, “is that if you wanted, you could come back there with me.”
“Oh,” is the only stupid word that manages to come out of her mouth. “I …”
She has to say no. This is too awkward, too imposing.
“I know how scary these tests can be,” he says, setting her at ease a bit by steering the conversation back to academics. “We have a guest room. It’s no trouble at all. I’ll give you a ride back to campus in the morning.”
She stares up at him, and there is something in his uncertainty, in the strange shyness that seems so incongruent with the strict TA she has come to know in class, that she trusts him. Completely.
“If you really don’t mind …”
“Come on. My car’s parked in the satellite lot down the block.”
He starts walking, and she stands there, stricken, watching as the crowd unconsciously parts to accommodate his tall, broad-shouldered frame. After a few steps he senses she is not following, and turns back.
Oh … what the hell.
She follows him, practically scampering to match his pace, taking two steps to his every one. She wonders how far his car is from this lot, but is suddenly too exhausted and too grateful to care. Even with the snow and the wind slapping at her cheeks, she feels an irresistible drowsiness starting to overcome her.
“Are you — do you not have any shoes on?”
She doesn’t know what the point of the question is, when the answer is already pretty glaringly apparent. “Nope.”
He shakes his head at her. “The car’s just ahead. Take those wet socks off when you get in, before you lose a toe or something.”
His little car is, unsurprisingly, pristinely clean. It isn’t new by any means, but still smells the way a car does on the lot at the dealership, all fresh and pine-y and well-vacuumed. She feels bad for tracking in all the snow with her soaked, freezing socks, but he doesn’t mention it, carefully watching to make sure she sheds them and that she has buckled her seatbelt before he pulls out of the lot.
The next thing she knows the world is jostling, and she is peeling her eyes open.
“Hey.” Ben’s voice is soft and careful, close to her ear. His hand is on her shoulder. “We’re here.”
She flushes, stunned with herself for falling asleep so easily — in a practical stranger’s car, no less, and when he was doing her a massive favor that deserved more attention that conking out in his passenger seat. Still bleary, she sees that he has opened the car door for her, and is waiting with an expression of both patience and slight concern.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to — ”
“No, no,” he says at once, offering her his hand. “Don’t apologize. You looked — I mean, I know you’re tired.”
She manages a wry smile. Ordinarily she would feel uneasy taking a man’s hand so formally like this, but it feels natural to take his. He eases her out of the car, remembering to grab her socks, and then walks her up the brick stairs to a lovely, quaint little home that she remembers passing on some of her long distance training runs during the cross country season. She had always envied it for its simplicity, for the little flower pots in the window ledges, for the sweet little porch swing on the front deck. It looked like a place where people were happy. It looked like a home.
He unlocks the door and lets her inside, and now he is the one who looks self-conscious as she stands in the foyer, still wearing his jacket.
“Here,” he says, taking it off of her. “I’ll, uh — I’ll grab some dry clothes for you. Hold on.”
She stands in the foyer, watching his retreating back and feeling like an intruder as he disappears down the hall. She shivers, clutching her arms to herself as she takes in her surroundings. She sees shoes lined up by the door, sees family pictures — sees Ben as a baby, as a kindergartener, as a college graduate at this very university. A familiar ache rises up in her as she turns, taking it all in — the way the home is so lived in, so worn, so well-loved.
“Sorry, these are the only clean things I could find.”
She swipes at her eyes, turning to face him with a strange and misplaced guilt. He is holding a pair of sweatpants and a shirt with the Biology department’s logo on it, both of them massively large. They clearly belong to him, and the idea of it makes her chest a little warm.
“That’s — thank you, that’s perfect.”
He is staring at her again, in that careful way of his. She resists the urge to wipe her face a second time. For a moment she is terrified that he is going to say something, but instead he holds out his hand and offers the clothes to her. She takes them gratefully, muttering a thank you, and he points her down to the guest bedroom down the hall.
She is swimming in his clothes, but they are so soft, so comfortable, that she doesn’t even notice. She sinks down into the bed and looks around the room. It is probably the nicest place she has ever slept — between her dingy string of foster homes, the archaic dorms, and the cheap mattress she bought in her current apartment out of the display room of a mattress warehouse, she cannot remember ever feeling so at ease.
There’s a knock on the door.
“Come in.”
Ben creaks the door open slightly, then stays standing in the doorway, as if he is afraid of taking up too much of her space. “I, uh — I brought a towel. In case you wanted to shower in the morning. Bathroom’s down the hall.”
“Thank you,” she says, and because she hasn’t gotten a chance yet — “Seriously, thank you for this, I don’t know what I would have — ”
“It’s nothing, really,” he says firmly. The next words are quieter, a bit more hesitant: “I would have worried about you if you hadn’t.”
Her face burns. She isn’t sure what to say to that. She has lived with Poe and Finn for almost a year, but even now it is strange to her, the idea that someone might worry on her behalf. The idea that someone cares.
He starts shutting the door before she can recover. “I’ll wake you a half hour before we have to leave,” he says. “If you need anything, my room is right across from yours.”
Yours. It’s a curious choice of words. There aren’t many things that belong to her in this world, and she knows for a fact that this isn’t one of them. Still, as she melts into the cotton sheets and the seemingly infinite pillows, her eyelids so heavy that they feel like molasses, she lets all of her usual defenses fall to the wayside. Despite everything, she feels comfortable here. Despite everything, she feels … safe.
“Shit.”
The clock beside the bed blinks 11:07. She scrambles out of the bed so quickly that she trips over the legs of Ben’s sweatpants, stumbling on all fours on the carpet before gathering herself up and practically flinging herself at the door; she moves with such abandon that she feels a dizzy head rush, and by the time she bursts into the hallway, she doesn’t see Ben standing there until it’s entirely too late.
She barrels into him so hard that it almost knock the wind out of her. She would have ended up with her butt on the floor, but Ben’s instincts are quicker than hers, and he reaches out and steadies her before she plummets — which unfortunately, ends with her pressed up against him so close that she nearly bangs into his chin with her forehead.
“I’m sorry,” they’re both blubbering at the same time.
“The test — ”
“— is canceled,” says Ben quickly, “because of the snow, it’s not until tomorrow.”
Rey blinks up at him, the words not quite sinking in yet. After another moment it occurs to both of them that his arms are fully wrapped around her body, and they jump away from each other as if they’ve been burned.
“Oh,” says Rey, still a little breathless. “I … um ….”
“I’m sorry,” says Ben again, “I would have woken you up, but you seemed so tired, I just thought — it might be better to let you sleep.”
The ensuing silence is so awkward that Rey is almost incapable of looking at him. She is embarrassed that she didn’t have the wherewithal to get up on her own, embarrassed that she clearly looked like a wreck the night before, embarrassed at how much of a wreck she must look now.
But most of all, she is embarrassed by his tenderness. Embarrassed by the way he has inconvenienced himself for her, and gone to all this trouble, when she is not worth it by any degree. She has nothing to offer him, no way to thank him. The idea of having to face him for the makeup exam is already unbearable, let alone trying to fathom the awkwardness of this moment, standing here in his clothes in his house in the middle of a weekday.
“I made coffee — ”
“I’ve got to go,” says Rey abruptly, ducking her chin down and walking past him, toward the door. The words come out in a rush. “Thank you so much for everything, I really — I don’t even know how to thank you, except thank you.”
“You don’t have to thank me,” he says slowly, his bewilderment incongruous with her panic, with the way she scurries toward the door.
“I do, though,” she says, her eyes stinging with her embarrassment. She wishes she had woken up in the library with an awful crick in her neck, because it somehow seems more endurable that the excruciating weirdness of this. “Um, I’ll see you in class, I guess — ?”
“Rey,” he says, grabbing her shoulder.
She whips around to face him, still bleary from the violence of waking up, her tongue thick. “What?”
“You — you don’t have any shoes.”
She looks down. “Oh,” she says. “Right.”
“Also, your clothes — they, um, they’re not quite out of the dryer yet, if you just want to wait a few minutes …”
She thinks she might actually die right here in his hallway. He put her clothes through the wash? Has she ever been so pathetic or seemed so utterly useless in her entire life?
Mercifully, he seems to recover before she does.
“Listen,” he says, gathering some of that sternness she is used to from his lectures. “If you want to head back, we’ll get in the car and go right now. But I’m not sure if they’ll even let you into your apartment yet, and — well, I made breakfast.”
She can’t stop staring at him. He looks so at ease here, so unlike the rigid, out of place version of him that she is used to seeing in the sterile light of the lecture hall. It is like meeting a stranger. A stranger who looks after her, who cares that she’s tired, who makes her breakfast while she is conked out in his spare bed.
“I’d really enjoy your company, if you want to stay,” he elaborates, misinterpreting her silence.
Her throat is tight, swelling with some kind of emotion she can’t yet name.
“If you …” She stops herself, taking a steadying breath. “I would — I would enjoy that.”
He smiles at her, that same broad and unexpected smile from last night. He jerks his head toward the kitchen, where she is already smelling something that seems suspiciously like bacon wafting. She follows him, still feeling a little bit uncertain, when he turns to her and says, “There’s only one rule.”
She halts. “Yeah?”
His expression is wry, his eyes bright. “No questions about the exam.”
For the first time since she woke up, she feels herself relax. She returns his smirk and says, “I wouldn’t dream of it.”