Work Text:
A Christmas Lost and Found
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"Ben, this is Rey," said his mother. "I want you to be nice to her."
Ben frowned at the girl shying close to Uncle Chewie's leg. She was very small, and skinny, and her eyes were too big, and worst of all, she was a stranger. Ben didn't like strangers.
Chewie patted her head. "It's alright. Ben's nice. Want to go play with him?"
And the girl shook her head 'no', which Ben decided meant she was stupid because what kid would want to stay with the boring adults rather than go play? Poe would be here soon, and they'd find something fun to do. Not that he really wanted her to say yes. He didn't. He'd rather play with Poe by himself.
"How old are you?" he asked her. She looked way smaller than him.
"Five," she said so quietly he almost didn't hear.
Five. Ugh. Basically still a baby. Ben felt all the disdain that a seven-year-old can have for someone younger than himself. He looked at his mother, who gave him a raised brow and a warning expression.
They'd told him someone new was coming to Christmas dinner. They said that Uncle Chewie was taking care of a girl who had no family. They tried to prepare him for having their traditional dinner gathering disrupted by a new face because they knew he didn't like new people.
They didn't tell him she'd be some little baby who didn't like to play.
Ben was bored of her immediately. "K. Bye," he said, and ran off to get his new Nintendo 64' games out so Poe could play with him when he got there. He knew his mother wasn't very happy about him leaving her, but he didn't care. What was he supposed to do with a little kid who didn't want to play, anyway?
Poe arrived a few minutes later with his parents. Ben went over to greet him. They must have told him about the new girl too, because within the first minute of arriving, Poe said he wanted to meet her before they started playing games. Ben huffed his annoyance but followed anyway. He was usually guided by whatever Poe said.
The girl was still glued to Chewie's leg.
"Hi," said Poe with a smile. "I'm Poe. What's your name?"
The girl looked at him like a person looks at a dog before they know if it's nice or not.
"Her name is Rey," Ben told him, annoyed at her silence.
Poe was a couple of years older than Ben and way more patient with little kids. He smiled wider still. "Hi, Rey. We're gonna go to Ben's room to play some video games. Want to come?"
"I only have two controllers," Ben objected.
"We can take turns," offered Poe.
But Rey shook her head and pressed her lips tight together.
Ben experienced withering disdain, even though he was glad she didn't want to play. Her refusal confirmed to him that she was, in fact, stupid.
Poe didn't seem bothered. He shrugged. "Okay. Well, you can come watch if you get bored of the grown-ups."
Then he turned, the boys scampered off to Ben's room, and Ben was finally able to show him the new games he'd gotten that morning for Christmas. They decided to try Snowboard Kids first.
The rollicking music and downhill swoop of their characters sucked Ben in so thoroughly, he forgot all about the party guests. His world narrowed to this screen, to his rival on the slopes, and the mechanics of the trident controller that he was still trying to figure out. He didn't notice that halfway through the third race, the new girl had crept into the room to sit by him.
"Poe's better than you," she said.
It made him jump, which made him drop the controller and his tubby snowboard kid fell off the slope. He gave her a dirty look.
"What are you doing here?" he snapped. "I thought you didn't want to play."
She looked at him. "I don't want to."
Poe finished first and gave a triumphant whoop. "Hey, you brought me good luck, Rey!"
Ben scowled. "That's not fair. You made me lose."
"You were already losing," she said, pointing at the screen. "You keep falling off."
"That's your fault," he said, getting angry. "You distracted me."
"Hey, it's okay," Poe said quickly. "It's alright. We'll just play another. I bet you'll do better this time, Ben."
Ben gave Rey a glare and focused his attention back on the screen. Stupid girl. He did do better that second race. Rey didn't talk and didn't distract him, and he came in second behind Poe.
"I've played this game before," Poe told them when Rey again observed that he was better. "My friend Jess at school has this game. We play it at her house. I've already had some practice. Ben will get better. He just got this game today! First time."
"I got from Santa," Ben explained, expecting that this would excite her as much as it had excited him that morning to find it under the tree.
But Rey didn't look excited. The little girl gave him a look that made him feel stupid. "No you didn't. Santa isn't real."
Ben's face and neck got hot. He frowned. "Yes he is."
"No, he isn't."
"Yes he is!"
"NO," she shouted, jumping to her feet. "If Santa were real, kids all over the world would get presents and they don't."
"He is!" Ben insisted, his stomach hurting, eyes stinging with unspilled tears because he was too angry and he always cried when he got angry. The other kids at school made fun of him for it. "And kids all over the world do get presents."
"No they don't," said Rey, who looked like she was close to crying too. Her fists balled up. "I never have before today."
"Maybe you never got anything because you were bad and didn't deserve it!"
"Whoa, whoa," Poe said, trying to come between them. "It's okay, guys, we don't have to fight about this—"
But Rey, face red, eyes shiny with tears of her own, ran off, fleeing back to the side of Uncle Chewie.
Ben wiped at his eyes and looked back at the TV. Rey might tattle, and because she was little, somehow he'd get in trouble for it. He just knew it. Grown-ups always blamed older kids for making younger kids cry. Ben used to use that strategy himself with Poe when they were younger.
His fingers hovered over the buttons but he didn't press anything, still feeling too hot and angry to play. Of course Santa was real. She was just mean and stupid and wanted to make him feel like a baby for believing in a person no one had ever seen. But Ben had written to him and gotten an answer. He knew Santa was real. Rey was wrong.
Ben decided that he hated her.
The adults sat the three of them together at the end of the long table. The grown-ups could talk without the kids being in the middle of it this way. Rey didn't talk. Poe and Ben talked about airplanes. Ben, still angry, kicked Rey's leg under the table whenever he got the chance. All it took was one very rough smack of her sharp little mary jane shoe against his shin to get him to stop.
After dinner, she bit him. They were fighting again, this time about whether baby cats were called kitties or kittens, and she tackled him and chomped his arm, sinking her tiny teeth in deep. Ben howled and hit her, but she wouldn't let go and Chewie had to come pry her off of him. Leia ushered Ben off to the bathroom to wash, clean, and bandage his surprisingly deep wound. Ben sobbed. When they left the bathroom, they saw Chewie talking gently to Rey in a corner. Too gently. Ben wanted her to be in big trouble. She made him bleed! Justice, however, was not his that night. Ben's mother made him go to his room until their guests were gone.
"She bit me," he reminded her indignantly when the house was empty and his mother came to talk to him about it. He showed her the bandage in case she'd forgotten how bad it was.
"Rey is kind of different, Ben," she explained gently. "She had a hard time. She didn't learn about what kids are and aren't supposed to do. Chewie will help her learn that biting is wrong, but you need to be nice too. You weren't very nice to her tonight."
Ben scowled. "She was mean first. She said Santa's not real."
He meant for it to be a scathing accusation, but his mother didn't look shocked or scandalized. She just kind of looked at him in a strange way for a few minutes. Then she said, "What did Rey say about it?"
"She said that some kids don't get presents, so he can't be real. But he is real."
His mother sighed. Ben's stomach hurt all over again. He didn't like the sound of that sigh.
"Some kids are...are really lost," his mother eventually said. "Some kids are so lost, Christmas doesn't happen for them. Santa can't find them. Rey was like that, Ben. Uncle Chewie found her and rescued her."
Ben thought about this. He puzzled over it as he got ready for bed, and thought about it while his mother read him a chapter from Redwall. Eventually, when she tucked him in and kissed him goodnight, he asked,
"Mama, now that Uncle Chewie found Rey, will Santa be able to find her too?"
She smiled. "I think so. She'll finally get to experience Christmas. We can show her how much fun it is."
Ben frowned. "You can. Not me. I don't want to be her friend."
"Well, she's not going anywhere," said his mother. "So you'd better get used to her."
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By the next Christmas, Ben was already plenty used to Rey. Whenever Uncle Chewie came around the family, there she was beside him, like a little shadow. She'd long since stopped being a stranger, and now she was just this little nuisance he had to put up with. Because even though Ben was used to her, he still didn't like her.
Rey didn't play well. She preferred being alone, and when she did wander into whatever activity was happening, she'd just observe and make her blunt, mean observations. Poe thought she was adorable and hilarious. Ben didn't see it. She was, in his opinion, a little monster. When he got the full set of Magic Tree House books for Christmas that next year, he found that she'd stolen them and taken them off into another room to read by herself. He didn't even know she could read. Six-year-olds couldn't read Magic Tree House, right? She was just looking at the pictures.
But then she spoiled the identity of Morgan Le Fey for him and he couldn't forgive her. He stole the books back from her and shoved her, and she launched herself and her teeth at him again. Her last bite had turned into an actual real-life scar on Ben's arm, and he wasn't about to give her a second opportunity to get another piece of him. He shoved her back with his feet when she knocked him down, and the grown-ups had to intervene again before any real damage happened.
After dinner, Poe got her to play video games with them. Ben was better, and he thoroughly beat her in the beginning, which felt good. Her frustration made him happy. But by the next Christmas, she far outstripped them both in pretty much every game they played.
She was super annoying. She was ornery and confrontational, quick to rise to a fight. Ben made fun of her for being so small and weak, but Rey packed a walloping punch and he learned firsthand just how weak she wasn't. When he and Poe ran around trying to prove who was the fastest or the strongest, Rey sat by and decided she was the smartest, and Poe would laugh and agree with her. Ben thought she was horrible. She ruined all their fun all the time.
It felt good to tease her and make her angry. It felt like revenge.
She never did concede the point about Santa. Even when she started to love Christmas, she still staunchly refused to believe. When Ben was nine, he caught his parents talking about getting a gift, which later came from Santa, and the whole lie began to unravel. It hurt. It made him angry. But he didn't even feel so much betrayed by his parents as much as utterly furious that Rey was right all along.
She was a barnacle he couldn't get rid of. Every family gathering, there she was — which was stupid because Chewie wasn't even family, and Rey definitely wasn't family. But Ben's parents had made for themselves a different kind of family, which included their best friends like Poe's parents, Wedge and Aunt Nora, old Aunt Maz, and giant Uncle Chewie.
Luckily Chewie lived far enough away that they didn't see them all the time, and the children didn't attend the same schools. She went to a public school. Ben went to private school with Poe. They only had to cross paths at his parent's parties. That was quite enough for Ben.
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Rey couldn't stand Ben. He was her mortal enemy.
Every holiday was the same stupid thing. They'd be thrown together and told to get along while the adults sipped wine and laughed about people and politics. Poe would devise some activity for the three of them, Ben would sulk and stew, and at some point, he'd find a way to insult her, and then Rey would retaliate and the whole thing would devolve into fighting.
Poe usually tried to break it up, but sometimes he came down on Ben's side, and Rey hated that. It wasn't fair, these two older boys shutting her out like she was some little nuisance. To his credit, he usually tried to include her to the best of his ability, but Rey mostly still felt like an outsider for those first few years. She was always the outsider.
The thing about Ben was that he was so mean. He said horrible things to her sometimes about not having a family. Rey punched him in the mouth one summer after he called her 'reject' one too many times. That Christmas, he learned a new word and used it instead. He caught her sneaking food off people's plates while they were tasked with the clean-up. She was nine, and he eleven. Rey didn't even think about what she was doing. It was an old, old habit she hadn't been able to shake in four years of stability and security.
"What are you, some kind of scavenger?" Ben said with disgust. "Like a vulture. Gross."
After that he started calling her 'Scavenger.' She threatened to hit him again, but by this point, she wasn't sure she could take him, and he called her bluff. She tried, but he was getting a lot bigger than her, and he just pinned her to the ground and drooled on her face until Poe pulled him off. The dickhead.
When Rey was nine, Leia decided that the kids should be giving each other gifts. Poe was a fairly decent gift-giver, though Rey wasn't sure what to do with the various scented lotions and lip balm he always seemed to find. She gave him warm socks because Chewie advised her that warm socks were always a great idea.
Ben usually gave her something nice that his parents had picked out, with some terrible twist of his own. Like a lovely charm bracelet adorned with various charms related to her interests, and one of a piled poop which he'd point out as something he picked himself because "you're a shitface and you should remember that." His mother heard him use the word and made him go wash his mouth with soap. It was revenge enough that Rey didn't feel the need to retaliate.
She started giving him whatever the hell she could find. Chewie didn't regulate her gift-giving, so she set a very low bar for herself with regard to Ben's gifts. She got him a bar of soap, because, she said in her note, he was a fartnugget who should shower more. A package of crackers because he was bland and uninspiring. A keychain with a random name. A weird little grass hut ornament she found at a theme park gift shop that had nothing to do with anything. Ben always rolled his eyes and chucked her bogus gift behind his shoulder.
The Christmas after she turned eleven, and Ben thirteen, she tried to help Leia with the cooking. Chewie had arrived early to help Han with some things, and Rey took herself into the kitchen to try to be useful. Leia had Ben in there shoveling scoops of cornbread batter into muffin tins. She put Rey in charge of baking them while Ben washed the bowl when he was done.
"You filled them too full," Rey told him, peeking at the cornbread muffins halfway through their bake time.
"Yeah, yeah," Ben said irritably, still at the sink. "They're probably fine, but you have to find something to whine about because that's all you know how to do. I never do anything right, according to you."
"No," she said plainly. "You don't."
"Fuck off, basket baby."
This was his latest iteration on his old go-to insult about her being a foster kid. Rey didn't let it get to her anymore. "You should probably wash your mouth out with that soap before your mother hears you swearing like that, pizzaface."
Ben turned off the water and swung around to face her. He was currently experiencing insane growth spurts, stretching taller and taller every few months, and he'd gotten all gangly and weird-looking. His skin was breaking out all the time too, and Rey loved comparing his zits to pepperonis because it made him furious.
Like now. He got all red, fists clenching. A few years ago and he would have sat on her for something like that. These days he just got pissed, and sometimes Rey experienced a thrill of fear because she could see the anger in every jerk of his oddly proportioned body, and she didn't know if he would really hurt her.
"Wait until you start breaking out too, you garbage-eating little nobody," he seethed. "Then everybody who says you're so pretty right now will gag at the sight of your pimple-pocked face and I'll laugh my ass off at the ugly hag you've become."
Rey shrugged. She always pretended not to care when he called her a nobody. "I can learn how to be a warty witch, but however bad it gets, I know I'll never look as bad as bobble-head-Gumby-with-a-whole-mountain-range-on-his-face."
"I hate you so much," he said, voice dark and low. He stalked past her. "No wonder you got dumped by your family."
That unbearable pain flashed through her again, old and familiar, and she launched herself at him, shoving him against a wall so abruptly his zitty forehead smacked it. He turned around to grab for her, but she was already running away, fleeing to wherever the adults were so he wouldn't do anything too heinous in front of witnesses. He scrambled after her.
In the living room, the adults were sighing and clapping with soft coos of approval, and it was enough to startle the two tweens right out of their argument. Beneath the sprig of mistletoe Leia had hung from the beam dividing the dining room from the living room, Snap Wexley was kissing one of the other young adults accompanying one of the families this year — Karé, maybe, was her name.
Apparently, everyone thought this was adorable.
Rey wrinkled her nose in disgust and gave the other grown-ups a withering look of disapproval. Poe saw her and came over grinning, hooking his arm around her shoulders.
"What's the matter? Don't you want to kiss someone under the mistletoe?"
Rey pushed his arm off. "Ew. No, I don't. And definitely not you."
He laughed. "Of course not me. You're too young for me, for one, and you're like a little sister. I could never. But I bet one day you will kiss someone under the mistletoe, and I hope I'm here to see it and remind you that you said it was gross."
Poe was already fifteen, and Rey heard rumors about all the girlfriends and boyfriends he'd already had. He was probably dreaming of getting to kiss someone under the mistletoe. Rey liked Poe well enough, but she absolutely did not understand him.
Snap was way older than they were — in college already. That seemed like an appropriate age to kiss someone, Rey thought. Not that she ever would. She didn't understand the appeal.
Poe hooked his other arm around Ben, who had slunk up next to them. When they were together, Rey thought Ben looked especially stupid. Poe was one of those teenagers who exuded cool. He was proportional and had decently clear skin, skinny but still manly looking with his Latin stubble and curly dark hair. Ben, by contrast, was gangly and pale and his ears were too big and he had this sullen look about him that made people steer clear.
Not that Rey could blame them. He was terrible.
"Do you wish Gwen Fazma was here right now so you could kiss her under the mistletoe?" Poe teased him.
Rey had never heard the name before. Must be someone from his school. She frowned and glanced at Ben. The tips of his ears turned red and he shoved Poe's arm off him, much the way Rey had done earlier.
"No," he muttered. "I don't. And shut up about that."
Gross. Ben had a crush on someone. Poor girl. He saw Rey staring at him and gave her a little glare. Rey stuck out her tongue at him.
Poe shoved them both. "Knock it off, you idiots. Let's go play a game or something. I brought one I think you'll like. It's called Curses and the point is to make yourself look as stupid as possible."
Rey and Ben both turned to him with mirrored expressions of horror, which made him laugh.
"It'll be good for you. Come on."
"Is something burning?" Ben asked, turning his head to sniff at the air.
Rey blanched, heart stopping in her chest. One job to do, and she'd forgotten all about it. She ran back to the kitchen, the boys on her heels. Leia was there already, taking some overly-brown cornbread muffins out of the oven with a patient smile.
"I'm sorry!" Rey said, mortified and angry at herself. Smoke billowed out of the oven.
"No worries," Leia said. "They're well-done, but not burned."
Poe shook his head, wincing. "It smells like they burned."
"Some of the batter overflowed onto the bottom of the oven," Leia explained. "That's what's burning. Rey, open a window for the smoke, would you? Ben, go get the stepladder. I bet that smoke alarm will go off any—"
A shrill, high-pitched beeping cut off her words, making everyone dart to their respective jobs with a sense of panic. Rey opened windows, flung open doors, Poe fanned the smoke towards her with a dishtowel while Ben scrambled up the ladder and reached his weirdly long arm up to the smoke detector on the ceiling, hitting the silence button.
"I told you they were too full," Rey snapped at him when Leia left to go reassure the rest of the guests that everything was fine.
Ben put a hand over her face and pushed her as far away from him as his long arm could reach. "Get out of my life, flea."
She bit his palm. He yelped, yanking his hand back against his chest and looking at it with horror. Rey gave him a nasty glare and then stalked out of the kitchen to spend the rest of the evening by Chewie's side. It was boring, but he never tried to make her go away.
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The next year, Poe had a girlfriend with him at Christmas Eve dinner. He didn't pay a lot of attention to his two friends, which meant Ben and Rey spent a lot more time arguing. Pushed too far by his cruel comments, Rey finally tackled him to the ground, trying to punch the living daylights out of him. Ben was strong, though, and they ended up wrestling in the grass of the backyard, trying to squish the other into the dirt. Rey wanted him to come out of this with either a bloody nose or a mud-stained face. Instead, Ben managed to get her on her back —
And then, abruptly, it ended.
She didn't understand what happened. One second he had murder in his eyes, and the next, panic. He was reeling back from her and sprinting back for the house like his life depended on it. He shut himself in the bathroom and didn't come out until his mother pounded on the door and told him dinner was served.
The weirdo.
Ben didn't look at her or speak to her for the rest of the time, even though she did her best to pester and annoy him.
"What's wrong with Ben?" she asked Poe on New Year's when he was still acting like she didn't exist. He wore a hoodie and basketball shorts, and sat on the couch by Han and Chewie, ignoring everyone.
Poe smirked. "He's fourteen, Rey. It's hard."
Rey had no idea what that meant, but she didn't like the way Tallie, Poe's girlfriend, giggled and elbowed him.
That night, Ben did finally acknowledge her existence again. He spiked her mashed potatoes with some kind of horrible hot sauce. She wept from the burn and coughed and almost threw up until somebody pushed a glass of milk into her hands, and after taking a huge gulp, she went to Ben, who was laughing so hard he was physically crying, and overturned the rest of the glass on his head, pouring milk all over him in front of everyone.
They both got in trouble. Neither of them cared.
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Ben was absolutely annoyed to see Rey and Chewie show up at his house one day without any excuse of a family gathering to justify them. He used to like when his honorary uncle Chewie would visit, but not time, he couldn't say anything about the unwelcome visit. Rey was already crying when he opened the door. Perplexed, he stepped aside and let them come in after Chewie said they needed to talk to his mother.
Rey had recently turned twelve. Ben didn't go to her birthday party, even though his mother tried to make him. He refused. She threatened. He accepted his punishment. There was no way he would go celebrate the girl he hated with a bunch of her stupid public school friends.
His mother took Rey into her room and they didn't come out again for a long time. Ben looked at Chewie, who sat on the couch with a weary sigh.
"What's wrong with her?" he asked.
Chewie shook his head. "She's a girl without a mother at a time when a girl really needs a mother."
Ben frowned. "What does that mean?"
"It means she's growing up. Things happen to girls when they grow up, Ben."
Ben was pretty sure Uncle Chewie was talking about a period, which he had learned about in health class — and from his very honest and open mother. He was disgusted. He understood the mechanics and the purpose, but it still seemed unforgivably nasty to him that girls would regularly leak their insides to the outside. When Rey and his mother eventually emerged, with his mother announcing that everyone was going out for ice cream together, he got close enough to whisper,
"So you're bleeding now, huh?"
And she shoved him so hard he stumbled back. Her eyes were red from crying. "You shut up. I don't want to hear anything from you."
And there was so much venom in her voice, Ben let her be for the rest of the day. He listened to his mother chirp over ice cream about how much fun it was growing up and decided that she was really delusional. It didn't sound fun for Rey to start uncontrollably bleeding, and it definitely wasn't fun for Ben that his body thought he should be reproducing every second of every day. Growing up sucked.
Maybe it would help, though, if he imagined the horrible visual of Rey sitting in a diaper full of blood the next time he popped a boner while she was around. He hated that his body betrayed him like that. He hated that sometimes, the slightest brush of her body against his, however unintentional, would send him sprinting for the bathroom because he just had a crisis and needed to clean up.
She was the worst person in his life, and his body was a traitor. It made him hate her more.
Luckily he didn't have to deal with her much. The other girls at school were a more constant source of desire and fear. And more than Rey, more than the alarming habit of his body to rise to the least or most innocuous stimulus, was the increasing certainty that his parents didn't understand him. He was spiraling into a place he knew they couldn't follow. He didn't think his dad liked him very much. He knew his uncle didn't like him at all.
And Ben began to feel very alone in the world. Poe was still a buddy at school, but he was a junior and busy with his own friends, and Ben struggled to find a group of his own. He didn't like people all that much. He started working an after-school job at his uncle's shop, and even though it was nice to have some pocket change, he felt suffocated by his own life for reasons even he didn't understand.
When Christmas came around, Ben didn't want to see Rey anymore than he did any other year. This year, though, it felt worse. He really didn't want her to come over. Luckily his dad's old friend Lando was in town with his daughter Jannah, so they joined. The presence of a fourth teenager helped buffer the interaction he had to have with Rey, and they managed to escape that year without any major incident. She gave him a pen that screamed a death scream when the button was depressed, making him jump clean out of his skin the first time he tried it. He gave her a necklace his mother had bought for her — plus a bottle of facial cleanser because she was starting to experience pizzaface now too and Ben delighted in reminding her.
Jannah and Poe got them all to lay down under the Christmas tree and look up at the lights like they were little kids again. Rey laughed, totally enchanted, and Ben was temporarily too pleased to think of anything mean or hurtful to say.
🎄🎄🎄
When she was 14, she still didn't understand why Ben should have gotten all weird that Christmas two years ago. Being 14 was no great fun, not with breakouts plaguing her, an annoying, unpredictable menstrual cycle to figure out, and this irrepressible irritation with the world constantly flickering at the edges of her mood — but none of that explained how or why Ben had gotten weird that year and never really came back from it.
He was a bigger asshole at sixteen than he was before, but in different ways. His insults were quiet, sharp, subtle. He didn't physically fight her anymore. He didn't tease her or pull her hair or call her childish nicknames. He didn't stay in the room when she goaded him. In fact, most of the time he didn't seem to notice her at all. He didn't pay attention to anyone. He sat with his flip phone, texting people, and then played his Gameboy when he ran out of texts. Poe was largely interested in adult things by then, and his boyfriend of the year.
Fortunately for Rey, that was the year that Leia absorbed a new family into their orbit, and Rey had new friends in the form of Rose and Paige Tico. The girls were friendly and fun, and Rey felt spitefully satisfied when she caught Ben watching them laughing and having a good time while he brooded moodily in the corner with his Gameboy. Let him feel himself an outsider for once.
Rose and Paige tried to get to know him. Rey was annoyed to see him be polite to them in a way he'd never been to her. They didn't know the asshole that lurked beneath his quiet, subdued demeanor.
"Poe is cute," Paige confided the next year. "I know he's single now. Do you think I have a chance?"
"Probably," Rey said, concentrating on the puzzle they were working on. A snowy cabin in the woods. "He's into everyone."
Rose gave her sister a withering look. "Please, Paige, have some self-respect."
Paige laughed. "It's Christmas, Rose. I need a date for New Year's. Why can't I have some meaningless fun?"
"Ben," Rose said, waving him down as he moved past them, Gwen Fazma's hand clutched firmly in his own. "You guys wanna help us with this puzzle?"
Rey frowned and gave him a hostile little glare, lest he feel tempted to accept the invitation. Ben stared at her with a cold glare of his own.
"Let's," said Gwen, tall and blond and beautiful.
Ben shook his head. "No. Let's find Poe instead."
Rey was relieved that they didn't come. She didn't want to get to know Gwen. These people never stuck around, these girlfriends and boyfriends. These interlopers. They weren't part of the inner circle.
At least Ben was careful not to find himself under the mistletoe. Poe caught Paige under it later that night, but Ben seemed to studiously avoid it, and Rey was glad. She might have thrown up to hear everyone cooing about him kissing Gwen there. Horrible sasquatch teenagers shouldn't be applauded for kissing. They should be quarantined as menaces to society.
That year they gave each other gifts as usual, and as usual, Ben's gift was obviously a pick from Leia which he'd just put his name on. It was a buttery soft blanket, warm and cozy and perfect, except that he'd hand-stitched 'scavenger' into a corner of it with gold thread. Rey knew he'd done it to remind her that he knew she was trash. She enjoyed his look of bemused disgust to open a pair of socks which she'd had printed with her face and her flipping him the bird.
Life might be changing, but their old hatred for one another wasn't one of them, and Rey was glad about that.
The year Rey turned sixteen, she watched Ben grow more and more distant. They were at the same high school now. Chewie moved them closer for his work and she ended up testing into the private school on an academic scholarship, haunting the same halls he did. She saw the crowd he was hanging out with. They were bad news. Rough, angry delinquent types who liked to brag about breaking the law and being as obnoxious as possible. They were all seniors, and all way over the high school scene, except to terrorize freshmen and torment their fellow students. Ben didn't seem happy with them, but then, he never seemed happy anymore.
Rey overheard Luke talking to Chewie, complaining about his nephew. The words were harsh. Unnecessarily cruel. Rey wondered if Ben knew how little his uncle thought of him.
She didn't really speak to him at school. He didn't speak to her. Sometimes they acknowledged each other in the hall, curt nods or lingered gazes the only form of recognition they would give. Rey was briefly plagued for a time by a couple of obnoxious boys who said lewd things to her in an effort to get her attention, but eventually, they stopped and began to avoid her at all costs. Rose said she thought Ben had something to do with it. She saw him with one of the boys pinned against the wall, nose bleeding.
Rey doubted it had anything to do with her. Ben and his group liked to beat people up for no good reason. Still, she wasn't complaining that the boys were too neutered to do anything to anyone after that situation.
School was really the only time she saw him. Ben didn't come to family gatherings anymore, and the summer after he graduated, he disappeared completely. He quit working for Luke and just left. His parents didn't know where he'd gone. He told them he didn't want them in his life anymore, and that was that.
Rey watched Leia and Han worry about him. She sat with Poe, Paige, Rose, and Jannah at the 4th of July fireworks and couldn't help feeling itchy and unhappy any time she thought about Ben being absent. It was all wrong. He should be here, with everyone who cared about him. What an asshole, to worry his parents for no reason.
He wasn't at Thanksgiving, and Rey's patience wore thin. Leia had set a place for him, and the empty chair beside Poe was like this loud, neon sign that things were all wrong. Rey didn't think it was fair for Ben to treat everyone this way. To treat his mother this way.
She saw Leia wiping at tears later that night, and she knew it was for her lost son.
Selfish fucking prick.
What was so bad about his life anyway? He had parents who loved him, a community who valued him, money and security, and everything an emerging adult could want.
Christmas Eve came, and Leia said she still hadn't heard anything from Ben. She set a place for him at the table again, just in case.
Rey snapped. She started texting the people she knew from school. The people who knew Ben's people. She got numbers. She got names. She texted some guy named Maul who told her where Ben was. She got up from the couch, found Poe's keys on the mantle, and took his car into the dark of night.
Ben was still in the same city — all this time. She found him in a squalid little flat with some of his friends from high school. It was depressing, really. Rey burst into the apartment to find them all sitting around on a broken assortment of furniture, a bottle being passed between them, cigarette smoke filling the air, muttered, discontented conversation about the nihilism of life filtering among them. Just like high school, they didn't seem to do anything except make resentment their brand.
The others looked at her with disinterest. Ben, though, looked at her with astonishment and then anger. He stood up from his place on a dilapidated couch and came to her in the doorway.
"What the fuck are you doing here, scavenger?" he demanded.
"It's Christmas Eve," she told him. "You need to come home."
"I know what day it is." He looked over her shoulder. "Who brought you here?"
"No one. I drove myself." Rey's heart squeezed at how bad he looked. He'd gotten so skinny. There were dark shadows under his eyes. His skin looked sallow and pale. Was he using hard drugs? Why did he look like this?
"You," he said derisively. "You came for me. That's a joke. You're old enough to drive?"
"You know how old I am, dickhead."
He rolled his eyes. "Always charming to see you, princess. You shouldn't have come, though. This is no place for you."
She looked over his shoulder at the people sprawled on the couch. "It isn't a place for you, either."
"Go home."
Rey frowned. "Your mom has a place for you at dinner. You need to come."
Ben scoffed. "Since when are you my keeper? Sorry you wasted your time, but I'm not going."
"Yes you are," she said firmly, grabbing his arm when he tried to turn away.
He looked at her with disdain. "How did you think this was gonna go? You were just gonna walk in here and rescue me from my terrible life and take me back?"
"It's Christmas, Ben," she said in exasperation. "You're an asshole every day of the year, can you just take one day off, please?"
He pulled his arm back. "I'm not gonna go celebrate some commercial Christian appropriation of pagan beliefs with a bunch of insincere people who don't care about me. We aren't even religious. Why do we participate in that garbage?"
"It's not about social commentary, Ben, it's about being with people—"
"I'm not going."
She grabbed him by the collar in a flash of impatience and anger. "Yes, you fucking are, you piece of shit coward. What the hell is wrong with you? Suddenly you're too good for your family? Suddenly you hate that you have people in your life who love you? Trying to pretend you're some disillusioned lost soul, cast out and rejected by the world? Some misfit, misunderstood, abandoned? Well fuck you."
He blinked, surprised at her fury.
Rey yanked him in close. "You're coming home, Ben. It's not an option. You're not who you're pretending to be. But I am. I'm everything you think you are. I wasn't loved. I wasn't wanted. I was supposed to end up in a place like this, as angry as they are, with no one who loved me to bring me to Christmas dinner. That's my life you're appropriating, Ben. Trust me when I say that you don't belong here."
Ben's hand engulfed hers, prying her fingers off his shirt. "They don't want me back, Rey."
"Yes," she said shortly, "they do. You're coming."
She seized his hand and yanked. And Ben, skinniness notwithstanding, was way too big for it to have worked, but she found him easy to drag. He was coming along, following her down the stairs to Poe's car. She surged with triumph, even though she was still angry.
They didn't speak on the way back.
They walked in when dinner was already underway. Everyone stared at them in shock, but to their credit, nobody said anything. His mother got up, gave Ben a huge hug, and led him to his seat, piling his plate high with food. Rey slid into her own chair, and Chewie gave her a little smile and an approving nod.
Poe asked for his keys back, but the funny little look he wore told her he wasn't going to get upset about his car being used.
They didn't fight that year.
Ben didn't disappear again after that. He moved back home and reconciled with his parents. Rey knew this because Leia bought her a bouquet of flowers and gave them to her with a sweet note thanking her for dragging her hopeless boy back home.
Rey didn't see him again until the Easter dinner. He looked better — healthier. He was filling out again. She was initially pleased about this, but it didn't take long for him to say something mildly offensive — something he'd picked up in one of his classes since he'd apparently started at university — and for Rey to contradict it before they were bickering again. Like old times, but without milk being dumped over anyone's head.
He was aggravating again, and Rey was content that her world had once again been put to right.
🎄🎄🎄
Ben's mother compelled him to attend Rey's high school graduation. He did so without much protest, though he made the token grumbles so they didn't think he was eager.
In the intervening two years, he had seen little of Rey. Holidays, of course, but otherwise nothing. He didn't see much of Poe either, or anyone, really. He was busy with school, busy with trying to decide what kind of adult he was going to be now that he'd decided to accept his life and his family for what it was.
He went to Rey's graduation and said little but a cursory murmur of congratulations, to which she responded with an eye roll. He told himself that he didn't actually find her attractive in her cap and gown, it was just the bubbly energy from everyone else infecting his brain. She had grown into a woman sometime in the last year or so, and Ben tried not to notice it.
She went to a local trade school to become a mechanic, and their worlds diverged. They spoke at Christmas dinners and other holidays, but only briefly, and only the surface-level stuff. He learned more about Rey's life from Rose and the others, who told him she was happy and working hard. She'd become best friends with this guy named Finn. They were living together. Ben didn't ask for any more information after that.
Rey brought Finn to Christmas dinner one year. They didn't act like a couple. They acted more like brother and sister. Still, Ben watched and wondered what drew them together. He found out Finn was a foster kid too, and decided being rejects together made them equals. He himself had brought Bazine to dinner that year.
When Rey gave him her gift — a poster of Shakespear insults so he could "step up his game," he smiled in spite of himself. Bazine gave Rey a wary look, especially after Ben gave her his gift, which was a fanny pack printed like a hairy beer belly. Rey laughed and put it on immediately, asking Finn if he liked her holiday food-baby. Bazine cornered Ben and demanded answers.
"Are you cousins?" she asked.
"Fuck no." Ben shook his head. "I'd hate to be related to her by blood. She's a nightmare."
Bazine didn't look convinced. "What is she to you?"
"She's just the daughter of a family friend."
"Did you used to date?"
He laughed. "Definitely not."
Bazine frowned. "Did you sleep with her? Are you into each other?"
"No," he told her. "We're just very old enemies."
"You don't seem like enemies to me," she said.
He shrugged. "You should have seen us a few years ago. It could get violent. But we're adults now, so we know how to pretend to be civil. Sometimes."
Fortunately, Bazine had little reason to think about Rey during the rest of the year. It's hard to be jealous of someone who isn't around. Ben didn't see anything of Rey. They said she and Finn moved out of state for his internship. Poe reported this, because, apparently, he had struck up a long-distance relationship with Finn. And that was how Ben learned that the intimacy between Rey and her roommate was very strong but platonic.
🎄🎄🎄
Finn couldn't come, but Rey was not about to miss Christmas dinner at Han and Leia's house.
The weather wasn't promising. A huge snowstorm was rolling in. Her flight got canceled, and Finn begged her not to go.
"Just wait a day or two," he told her. "Then I can go with you. We can see if there's still room on my flight."
"I can't, Finn. It's Christmas. I'm not going to miss it."
"You'd still be there for New Year's!"
"That's not good enough, though. I have to be there for Christmas."
"Why is this so important to you?" he asked, shaking his head. "It's not like you're choosing not to go. They'll understand."
Rey couldn't bear the thought of not being there. The idea filled her soul with grief so sharp she could cry. Christmas at Han and Leia's was the first time she caught a glimpse of how her life could be — filled with people. It was there she found belonging. Chewie's tribe became her tribe. Poe and Ben, her — no, not her brothers. Poe became like a brother. Ben never was. He was the Joker to her Batman. Or maybe she was the Joker and the Batman. It was hard to tell, really.
Regardless, Christmas at Leia's was where she belonged. Leia was the closest thing she had to a mother. She couldn't abide the thought of that empty chair she knew would be there, waiting for her to show up. She put on Planes, Trains, and Automobiles while she packed. Finn watched with her, pointing out all the ways the plot could go horribly awry if either one of the men were, in fact, a twenty-four-year-old pretty girl traveling by herself.
Rey ignored him. They watched I'll be Home for Christmas after, for inspiration, and both gushed about how they'd crushed on Jonathan Taylor Thomas as kids. She checked that the route home was still open, let Chewie and Leia know she was getting on the road, and shortly after lunch, she left. It was only a six-hour drive, giving her plenty of time to make it by dinner. While she drove, she imagined the feast awaiting her, and the grinning faces of everyone she loved. Rose would definitely have her boyfriend there, and Poe would be sighing a melancholy sigh that Finn couldn't come until a few days after. Paige and Jannah were both single, so Rey would probably mostly hang out with them. Ben was still dating Bazine, she was pretty sure. Rose hadn't told her any differently, anyway.
Rey would do her best not to interact with him. She always struggled when he brought a girlfriend to Christmas. It made her feel meaner than usual — made her want to poke and prod and get him angry. It made her feel petty and spiteful. The one year she brought a boyfriend home, Ben had been absolutely horrible, trying to find ways to humiliate her in front of Beau, or worse, turned his teasing and tormenting on Beau instead. She told herself it was just payback if she was especially annoying when he had a girlfriend around.
Really, though, she wondered. The doubts were mostly introduced by Rose, who pestered her all the time about whether or not Rey was absolutely sure her fixation on Ben was only due to a long-standing feud. Rose said she thought their tension was evidence of something else. Rose said she thought Rey had caught feelings somewhere along the way.
For her own part, Rey denied it and denied it and denied it. It was impossible.
The snow started to fall pretty heavily an hour into her drive. Traffic slowed as everyone lost sight of the lines on the road and traction became an uncertain thing. Huge, wet flakes accumulated on the rolling mountain landscape, heaping in slushy piles between long wet tire tracks. Rey was careful to avoid stepping on the break whenever possible, careful deceleration her better ally in such conditions.
It was slow going, but she was going. She watched the minutes and hours tick away at an agonizing pace as she crawled through the snowstorm. It was hard to see for how thickly the flakes fell. Lanes were abandoned in favor of cars just trying to carve whichever path down the highway they saw fit. Many slid off. Rey turned her music down a little and gripped her steering wheel in intense concentration.
She would make it home. Even if she had to stumble in halfway through dinner. Even if she only made it for dessert. She would be there.
Dusk fell, and the snow didn't stop. Ice crystals in the air refracted the headlights into vertical beams of light, disappearing into the hazy, thick curtain of snow clouds bearing down on the earth. The cars thinned as harried drivers called it quits for the night. An important highway pass had been closed, rerouting what little traffic remained off onto a remote mountain road. She found herself alone on this dark lane, hardly able to see the edges of the asphalt as she crept through a wintery landscape, not a soul in sight.
Maybe Finn was right.
Rey was afraid. This was a dangerous situation. A terrible idea. She should have stayed home and waited for the storm to pass.
This wasn't like the movies at all. No traveling hijinks, no comedic shenanigans of trying every which way to get home for Christmas. This was icy and wet and dark and isolated.
Out of the visual chaos of giant flakes loomed an enormous mass of animal — an elk or a moose, and Rey hit the brakes so hard, her car immediately slid into an uncontrolled skid. She screamed as she skated right off the highway and down into a ditch on the side of the road, buried up to the windshield in snow.
Fuck.
Trembling, she tried in vain to reverse and back out. The tires spun, the engine roared, but nothing moved. The car was extremely stuck. And there was no one around to help her. She had no cell reception. And with a long, sub-zero night ahead of her, Rey knew it would get very cold very quickly.
She closed her eyes and leaned her head on the steering wheel, tears rising rapidly. She wasn't going to make it. And worse, she was going to freeze to death in this car where nobody in the world would find her.
Lost.
Terribly, utterly alone.
She pulled her backpack onto the passenger seat, digging her scavenger blanket out and wrapping it around her shoulders. She thought of Leia and cried. She thought of Ben, about how comforting it was to be despised by him. His attention, his teasing nickname sewn into this blanket, reminded her that she was seen, she wasn't forgotten, she was part of something. Fuck, she missed him. Maybe Rose was right. Christmas at Leia's wouldn't be Christmas at all without Ben.
Her heart ached. It wasn't just him, though. She missed all of them.
She closed her eyes and leaned her head on the window, praying to whatever Christmas entity existed that she wouldn't die out here alone.
🎄🎄🎄
A half-hour into it, headlights cut into the snow-covered darkness of her car. Someone shoveled out her door, and she was able to get out. A trio of people in snowsuits helped her and her things into a 4x4 fitted with treads. They said something to her about being forest rangers, seeing her hazards glowing under the snow, said something about getting her somewhere warm.
They took her to a ranger station a few miles away. They had a satellite phone and let her use it to call home and explain what happened, reassuring everyone she was safe, and they'd get her to the nearest town tomorrow when the snow stopped. The rangers gave her hot coffee, sat her by their heater, and told her they had a cot she could sleep on. They said more things, but Rey was too relieved to be alive to pay much attention. She wept and thanked them. And then, because she wasn't about to die, she wept because her Christmas dinner was a bowl of canned beans and a mug of coffee, her people far away, celebrating without her.
Her pain was great enough to dredge up very ancient insecurities in her, and she had to close her eyes and remind herself that her life was different. Chewie and his people were different. They loved her. They had not abandoned her. She wasn't spending Christmas alone because she wasn't wanted. She tried to get to them, but the universe had denied her.
At least she was alive. That was something to be grateful for. She would see everyone soon, just not tonight.
It felt like midnight, but really it was only about 7:30 when a tremendous motorized noise disturbed the stillness of the ranger station. The three rangers sat around a table playing Texas Hold'Em. They invited Rey to play, but she declined. It reminded her of the year that Poe taught them to play, and she was the only one who could interpret Ben's lack of expressions and call his bluffs. He was so annoyed. He said she must be cheating. She'd laughed.
The sound filled the cabin and got all the rangers to their feet in a stir of curiosity. They went to the door and opened it to see a huge Snowcat idling outside, massive treads covered in slush, and a large figure climbing down and coming towards them.
Rey didn't get up from her cot by the heater. It was probably a ranger from another station, or something equally meaningless.
It wasn't.
"Excuse me," said the familiar voice. "I'm looking for a woman named Rey. She crashed somewhere in the area and I understand she's been taken to a station."
She bolted upright, astonished and overwhelmed to see the figure pulling off a hat, his thick black locks and wonderfully familiar face, strong and masculine and not pizza-colored for many years now, turning him from a stranger into Ben Solo. And Rey had never been more surprised, or more overjoyed, to see him.
She ran across the little cabin and flung herself at him with a wordless cry, tears starting all over again. She sobbed into his chest. He was, without a doubt, the most wonderful Christmas miracle she could ever have imagined. Maybe Santa was real after all. Maybe she was seen and granted a wish at last.
The rangers backed up with looks of bewilderment.
"God, I'm so glad I finally found you," Ben said with a rumble of emotion, hugging her to his cold coat. "We checked two other stations besides this one. There's no sign of your car. It's for sure buried."
"How are you here?" she managed to ask when she got her voice back. She stepped back, wiping at her tears. His dark eyes were bright in the light of the cabin, his pale cheeks flushed from the cold. Little snow crystals clung to the fringes of his hair and the ruff on his coat. He looked like a damn fairytale prince, and Rey didn't mind acknowledging that to herself.
"I came to bring you home," he said, cocking an eyebrow with a little smile. "You don't belong here. And if I don't get to miss a year, neither do you."
She laughed, vision blurring again, and dropped her head into her hands.
"Get your stuff, little scavenger," he said. "Let's go. They're waiting on us for dinner. We don't want the food to be cold by the time we get there."
She did. Out in the freezing night, an unfamiliar man waited for them in the Snowcat. She thanked the rangers again and again before bidding them a Merry Christmas and climbing into the huge machine after Ben.
He tucked her in beside him, his arm firmly around her. The engine was too loud to allow for conversation. She kept herself buried in the blanket he had given her long ago, wrapped tight and snug, and watched the snowglobe world cascade around them, heart aglow with the happiness of knowing she was found. Ben had found her. And even though they weren't there yet, she had the overwhelming certainty that she was already home.
🎄🎄🎄
Poe was fed-up with his two friends and their shenanigans.
"It's time," he told the Tico sisters, Hux, and Jannah.
The call had come before everyone even arrived. Poe had gotten there an hour or so early to hang out with Ben. He'd heard his buddy broke up with Bazine a few days before and assumed Ben would need some good cheering up because Bazine was a bombshell and Ben didn't deserve her.
He arrived, found everyone in a tizzy because the news had come that Rey was holed up in some shack in the mountains, stranded after driving into a snowbank. Poe had never seen Ben so worked up in his life. He was beside himself with agitation, pacing around like a madman, making calls, googling the companies, making demands like only crazy people make. He found a private search and rescue group. They were willing to take him. And then, like a hurricane, he was gone.
And Poe had had it.
When the Ticos and Calrissians arrived, he put his plot into motion.
Paige wrinkled her nose at his assertion. "This is a bad idea. They can't stand each other."
Rose, Jannah, and Poe looked at her like she was insane. Had she even been here for any Christmas in the last decade or so?
"The mistletoe," Poe told Leia. "I'll hang it for you."
She let him. He didn't know if Leia knew what they were up to, but she didn't act like it. She focused on keeping the food warm while she chatted companionably with Chewie and the others.
"It'll be a game," he told the friends. "The one who can get them under it is the winner, who I'll treat to a bottle of their choice on New Year's."
Rose's boyfriend, Hux, wanted to know the whole history. He'd only come for the first time last year. Rey and Ben were still hostile, but they didn't fly at each other's throats like they had been known to do, so Hux didn't know anything about them except some simmering, underlying tension that filled whatever room they happened to occupy at the same time.
"They've been in love with each other for years," Rose explained.
"Forever," Poe said in solemn agreement, war flashbacks of their intense obsession with each other flickering through his mind.
Hux laughed. "But they don't know it?"
"They think they hate each other. They're confused," said Poe. "But this is the year they confront the truth. This is getting ridiculous. I mean, come on. Ben literally hired a private search and rescue company to personally drive him out in a blizzard to go get her. Please. It doesn't get louder than that."
Everyone agreed. Of course they did. Poe had known them from the beginning. He knew he was right.
Eventually, Ben and Rey arrived. They looked normal —it wasn't snowing on this side of the mountains, and they'd clearly had time to dry off because there wasn't much trace of snow about them. Rey wasn't injured. She looked like she'd just stepped off a plane in a perfectly ordinary trip home.
Everyone surrounded her and took their turns embracing her with effusive expressions of how happy they were that she was okay and that she'd made it. Poe was surprised to see how these demonstrations made Rey tear up and become too emotional to speak. Ben hovered nearby and accepted the occasional word of gratitude and praise that was given to him by the relieved party guests. Poe noticed how he watched Rey, his expressions subtle as ever. To the trained eye, like his best friend's, Ben was not as calm as his exterior suggested. He looked at Rey with relief and warmth and a little bit of anxiety. Still worried about her. Poe reveled in delight at the confirmation of what he already knew.
Leia whisked everyone to the table for their late, but nonetheless delicious dinner. She made Rey recount her harrowing ordeal about sliding off the road by the appearance of a moose. Rey laughed a little when she talked about how surprised she and the rangers were when Ben showed up, but she was just so happy to be going home she didn't care whose car took her there.
At this tease, she shot Ben a little glance, reminiscent of the old fire she used when she poked at him for real — but Poe flared with hope to see the smile that accompanied it. And Ben smiled too, looking down at his plate with a private kind of pleasure that did not come from the renewed enthusiasm of others who thought he was a hero.
This was definitely the year for the catalyst. They were primed for it.
After dinner, the mistletoe conspiracy began.
Poe engaged Ben in conversation about the search and rescue company, slowly moving towards the threshold step by step so that Ben kept unconsciously shuffling forward too. He succeeded in getting Ben under the sprig, oblivious to his placement. He turned with the intention of calling Rey to join their conversation with some question about the snowcat, but she was nowhere to be found. Poe floundered. Ben waited a minute for the conversation to resume, but when he saw Poe at a loss for what to say next, he eventually said he wanted a bit more wine and wandered off to talk to someone else.
When Rey finally reappeared — talking to Chewie about her ordeal, apparently — Rose tried to lure her while Hux worked on Ben. Their strategy was good. They tried to get the individual members of the pair to come after a plate of cookies Rose had, standing under the sprigged beam. But Hux got there first, Ben got distracted by a word from his father, and Rey — who was habitually aware of this particular location after many years of being Leia's guest — immediately looked up and grinned about Rose and Hux being caught under it. And then, of course, there was nothing else to do but for the already established couple to kiss.
Paige tried too. She got them both in the same conversation and was working her way towards the beam when Rey and Ben began to argue about Christmas music and then Ben abruptly walked over to the stereo to demonstrate what he meant about the Andrews Sister's version of Sleigh Ride.
All the attempts of the evening were thwarted for various reasons, until Leia, having somehow timed her moment perfectly, dropped a recently emptied glass in an apparent clumsy fumble. She yelped and jumped back, while Rey and Ben both lunged forward to help her pick up the glass shards. They were both the closest to her and were so startled they did not realize the very convenient location of the incident.
Poe surged with triumph and adoration for Leia's cleverness.
"Well look what we have here," Han said, enormously amused.
They looked up at him, and then up at the sprig to which he pointed.
Rey blushed. Ben frowned.
"Oh," said Leia innocently. "Oops. Sorry, kids. Nothing to be done about it, though. Mistletoe is mistletoe. Best get to it."
"With handfuls of glass?" Ben objected.
Poe stepped in and scooped them out of Ben's hands. The goblet had broken into fairly clean pieces. He took Rey's too. Quick as lightning, Rose had taken a broom and swept the floor around and between them. They were left with nothing to do but glance at one another and then away again, self-conscious.
"No excuses," Poe said. "You know the rules."
Rey, despite her violent blush, wrinkled her nose and made a grossed-out expression. "I've been careful to avoid being caught under here with anyone every single year and now that it happened, it has to be with him?"
"Aw, Ben's not so bad. He's gotten really hot as he's grown up, in case you haven't noticed. It's not that big of a deal," chirped Rose cheerfully.
Rey shook her head, but there was something subtle and cheeky in her face, Poe thought. Or maybe he just hoped.
"It's not happening," she said. "I might actually throw up if I have to get that close to his ass-eater breath."
The corner of Ben's mouth quirked a little in the barest hint of a smile. "Well, that works out, then, because I'm pretty sure I'd need to put a paper bag over your head just to get through it without catching whatever disease made your face that way."
Rey narrowed her eyes in a little glare, but could only barely conceal her grin.
"The law of mistletoe in this house is unbreakable," Leia interrupted, her tone chiding. "You can stand there all night dodging the issue, but you've both been around long enough to know that you can't leave that spot until you've kissed. You don't want to invite bad luck for the entire next year, do you?"
Ben gave his mother a withering look. "We're not that superstitious, Mom. Neither are you."
"It's Christmas, Ben," said his father. "It's a time for superstition."
Poe grinned and reveled in their collective victory. With Han and Leia on their side, there would be no getting out of it.
🎄🎄🎄
Well...shit.
Ben was not prepared for this scenario.
It wasn't that he didn't want to kiss her — he didn't let himself ask that question — it was just that this was Rey and it was an impossibility. Sure, okay, there were some...troubling inconveniences when it came to his regard for her. Like he thought about her all the time, he worried whether or not she'd bring home a real boyfriend one day, and he broke up with Bazine because he didn't want to bring her home for Christmas again and have to attend to someone else's happiness while he traded insults with Rey. Ben could acknowledge that he had very complicated feelings all tangled up in him about this girl. But that didn't mean he was ready to…or that he could even imagine trying to…
But they were here, and nobody had successfully argued their way out from under the mistletoe before…
He should just do it fast and get it over with.
Rey was watching him warily, but when he searched her face, he saw no true hostility there. She might let him…
"Will you bite me?" he asked, mostly teasing but genuinely a little concerned. Despite his mother's assurances to him as a child, Rey had never really been domesticated out of the use of her teeth.
She raised an eyebrow. "I don't know."
"Ben," complained Poe. "Sometime tonight, man."
"Do it," Rose cajoled.
"Be brave," said Hux.
"Get it over with and let's go have pie," said Chewie.
"Just do it already," laughed Lando.
"You want me to kiss her?" Ben demanded, annoyed by their pestering and feeling the pressure of the moment too keenly. "Fine."
And then abruptly, before he lost the nerve, he seized Rey's face between his hands, leaned down, and kissed her.
He meant for it to be a short peck and then away, but once he was there, he didn't remember how to retreat. Her lips were soft. She didn't bite. His heart gave this funny kind of flip, and she smelled great, and there was a very responsive movement of her own when her lips met his. And he remembered how she'd looked at him when he found her in that cabin. Like he was a new star in the sky.
So he lingered.
When he did pull back, his head was spinning. He searched her eyes and saw surprise, and vulnerability, and…curiosity. She exhaled a shaky breath, gaze darting to his lips.
And Ben needed a little more.
"Let me just—"
He dipped back in to sample the feeling one more time. Astonishingly, she let him. He braced her head in one hand, the other slipping down to her throat. Her body rose to meet him, and she was kissing him back with as much fervor as he gave, her hands wrapping around his wrist, sliding up around his neck.
The dam broke.
Ben couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't remember anything but pure fire coursing through his veins. He burned alive, and he felt her burning with him. This frustrating, endearing little creature. She meant more to him than anyone else. She always had.
In the furnace of that kiss, Ben discovered the paper-thin boundary between hate and love.
He managed to drag himself out, but barely, gasping when he broke off by an inch or two. Rey was trembling in his arms, and her eyes were so bright. And she was beautiful.
The others were still there, whooping their triumph and support, or expressing their surprise at how desperately they went after each other. Ben didn't care about them. The flood of the broken dam was still surging in full effect, and he wanted to be alone with Rey to figure out what the hell was happening. He scooped her up into his arms and marched her off down the hall towards his childhood bedroom.
"Ben, wait!" someone cried behind him.
"Guys, that's not what mistletoe means!"
"What about the pie?"
"Rey, yell if you need rescuing."
Ben, heart crashing against his chest, ignored them all, kicking the door shut behind him. He set Rey down on her feet, only to immediately push her up against a wall and kiss her again — aggressively this time. It felt so damn good to kiss her. And she was so eager, her hands grasping at him like she meant to pull him in closer, clawing into his clothes, grasping into his hair. Ben's were everywhere too, pinning her against the wall and digging into her waist. She leveraged against him as her legs shimmied up his body until he was holding her above him, hands pressed against the wall beside her, neck craning up to kiss her.
It was feverish and uncontrollable.
A lifetime of emotions flooded between them, surging in a tidal swell, devastating everything in its path.
She ground her hips down against him, and not for the first time in his life, Ben became acutely aware of the effect she had on his body. Unlike his early teen years, however, he didn't panic or run away. He let it throb with wanting. He pushed his hardness against her center and savored her sigh. In all these years, since the first time she awakened these feelings in him, he had never allowed himself to imagine being with her like that. He never envisioned a scenario in which this would be permitted, or wanted, by either of them. But they were here, and there was no ounce of hesitation in him. He'd see if she could take it. All of it. And knowing her, he was certain she could.
There were no words exchanged. They didn't need it. Rey was as committed to showing him her feelings now as she ever had been, loaded with repressed emotion, venting all of it on him with her lips and her teeth and her hands. She blazed brighter the more Ben tried to take from her. Her lips electrified him, her soft little moans broke him, and Ben lost track of which actions took them from the wall to the bed. He'd never been so hard, or more determined.
And there was nothing strange about stripping her down and taking in her whole, glorious body — naked, except for the charm bracelet he'd given her years ago, which she inexplicably kept wearing even though he included a nasty little insult with it.
Years of complicated resentment and yearning did not trouble him or stop him from appreciating the glow of her skin, the satin of her breasts, the architecture of her strong body. He explored it all with his lips, urging her in soft whispers to "be good and be quiet, scavenger, can you?" before burying his head between her legs.
It should have been weird to know her like this after all this time. It wasn't. All of it was as natural as breathing.
Maybe he'd always known they would ignite like this. Maybe it was never a question of if, only a matter of when. She gasped his name in barely suppressed ragged entreaties, body moving for him like a feral symphony. She was trying to be quiet, darling wild creature that she was, and Ben ached with the force of his affection.
"Ben," she pleaded after the flood of her first release soaked his chin. "I need you."
And oh, to be needed by her!
When he did push into her at long last, it was like the pieces of a puzzle sliding into place. They weren't safe about it, he met her bare, skin against skin, but nothing about their relationship had ever been safe. They didn't even think to pretend at caution. He kissed her again, soft and tender at last because the frenzy calmed to something slower and sweeter once he was fully embedded. And itch finally scratched. And he was right in his assumption, she had done beautifully, accepting every bit of him like she was made for it.
He told her so. "Taking me so well," he murmured senselessly. "God, Rey, you're perfect."
It felt so good to have her wrapped around him, inside and out. So good, he had to pause and take a breath and savor the moment. Rey was here with him, wanting and touching and letting him in like he never dared to imagine.
"Ben," she said unsteadily.
His hand spanned her throat, cupped the side of her jaw, holding her like she was something rare and precious.
Her eyes were shining.
"It's okay, baby, it's okay," he soothed. "I've got you."
He didn't want her to retreat from this moment. It was a lot, he knew, but they could face it.
"I'm scared that I…" her breath failed her and she shook her head. "I think I might…"
"I know," he whispered thickly. "I feel it too."
Ben thought he might be in love with her. He thought maybe he had been for a very long time. Deeply, irrevocably in love.
And he thought that maybe she loved him too.
Still and careful, a little bit overwhelmed, he held her face tenderly between his hands, searching, searching those glassy hazel eyes. He saw yearning in them, and remembered how terrified he'd been when he thought she was lost to the cold dark snow of a mountain slope. Though he'd mercilessly tormented her for being abandoned as a child, in truth he hated the parents she didn't know who could cast her out and make her hunger always for a place to belong. He knew where she belonged.
"You're mine," he whispered. "You always have been."
She leaned up on her elbows to kiss him again, and Ben's heart throbbed with painfully strong emotion. He coaxed her down again and gave a few gentle pumps.
Slow and tender, contrasting the furious blaze of their first ignition, they burned together in quiet rapture while the sounds of Christmas at Ben's house tinkled faintly through the door. The clatter of silverware against dishes, the murmur of conversation, the occasional burst of laughter. Home was all around them, and home was in them.
He fell for Rey all over again after the quiet, intense taking of her led to a blinding, agonizing, messy finish deep within her body. And when it was over and they lay cooling together in a lingering embrace, he marveled at the change in fortune, and how perfectly right that it should have been her all along.
She was quiet and comfortable. Almost absently, she traced the tiny white crescent scar on his forearm.
"Maybe I was marking you," she mused with the lilt of laughter in her voice. "Maybe I was leaving my signature so you would always know that I meant you for my own."
He smiled. "Brutal, but effective. You got under my skin that day and never left. Took me a while to understand it, though. I don't think I really knew that I was yours until you came for me when I was lost. No one else cared enough to drag me out of there and bring me home. You did."
She propped herself up on his chest and looked at him. Her face glowed with that freshly-fucked luster and her eyes were full of something nameless. How fierce she had looked that night when she came for him, sixteen and full of righteous indignation. He liked that Rey, and he liked this Rey. His Rey.
"They cared, Ben, but I think they were scared of you."
"That's not something anyone could ever accuse you of."
She laughed. "No. I've never been scared of you. Not really."
He hummed in fond affection, grazing a knuckle along her jaw. "You found me, and I found you."
Tears rapidly filled her eyes and she buried her face in his chest, hiding. "God, Ben, I was so sad, and then you were there...and I felt like I wasn't alone anymore. I felt like I was already home."
"You were," he said, voice thick again. The way she could always provoke him to stronger emotions than anyone. "Without you, this place, this holiday, this house, they aren't right. You belong here with everyone who loves you. With me."
"With you," she agreed very softly, squeezing her arms around him as if she feared he'd vanish.
They were quiet again for a while, listening to some of the guests bid their goodbyes for the night. The party was winding down, which was just as well because Ben didn't think he wanted to face anyone right now. To think that he'd lost his head so thoroughly — going straight from a reluctant mistletoe kiss to a long-overdue first fuck without even caring that everyone knew — god, what was wrong with him? Or maybe not wrong. This felt too right to be wrong. He'd endure all the teasing they could dish out in the days to come. This result, right here right now with her, was definitely worth it.
"I forgot your gift in my car," she said after a minute. "But I think I wouldn't want to give it to you now anyway. It's one of those stupid gag gifts we always give."
"I want it." He laughed. "I love them. I see you're still wearing your shitface bracelet, so I'm guessing you liked my presents too."
"I liked them," she agreed, grinning. "They made me feel like I mattered to you. If you didn't care, you wouldn't bother."
"That's true." He sighed, perfectly happy for the first time in his life. "You're still a booger-breath dingleberry of a human being who says Santa isn't real, but I guess I have to put up with that since I've discovered I'm in love with you."
Rey's cheeks glowed with pleasure, eyes bright again. "And you're still a frog-lipped dickhead who believes in fairytales, but you're mine, and…I love you too. Kills me to say it. My pride is wounded. My younger self would be so offended."
He laughed, reeling with the bizarre impossibilities of this night. "Do you really? Love me?"
Her expression softened. She propped her chin on her hand and regarded him with a little smile. "Turns out I do, yeah. I'm as surprised as you are. And I'm a little freaked out because I don't think it's new. I think I've felt this way for a long time."
"God, Rey, please don't go back to Finn after this," he groaned, holding her close and tight. "Just stay with me."
"I'll figure something out," she said, shimming up to give him a quick, reassuring kiss. "You found me, and it's Christmas, and I'm home. Don't spoil it with worry. I'm not about to run away from where I'm wanted. Where I'm...loved."
Fuck, he loved the way she blushed when she said that. He made a plan right then and there to wait until his parents had gone to bed, and then he'd take her out to sit by the fireplace and the glittering tree, wrapped only in her scavenger blanket, and they'd discover what kind of new Christmas traditions could be made in the wake of hate turned to love.
🎄🎄🎄
The Mistletoe Conspirators did not anticipate how effective their plot would be, how truly primed for combustion the two victims were. There was no second-guessing, no going back. By New Year's, it was well understood by everyone that the days of fighting and pretended enmity were gone, and in their place began an era of playful teasing, harmless bickering, intense and genuine affection. This result was worth it, but they still sometimes wondered if they'd touched magic they shouldn't have messed with by pushing them together under that sprig, setting something into motion that nobody was quite prepared to deal with. Their love was something cosmic, as consuming as their rivalry had been. They all generally agreed that they'd never known two people more devoted to one another than Ben and Rey, who took to their new relationship like they were born for it.
Leia alone remained unscandalized by their obsession with one another. She toasted the New Year and the new beginnings with the victor's wine Poe had supplied her, and sat by in perfect satisfaction while her son discovered happiness and belonging with the girl Leia already suspected was the other half of his heart from the beginning.
Ben and Rey were not aware of the plot against them or the reactions of those who found the victory too much to handle. They loved effortlessly.
And this was the gift they gave each other that year: that they were lost, and they were found, and in each other they found themselves home for Christmas.