#*my writing.

@softboybensolo

It’s sort of funny, like learning to run before she could walk; Rey can read, understand basic and speak a half dozen galactic languages; and can channel and use the force as well as any Jedi.

But she can’t write.

Of course, this is a deficit easily masked - she wasn’t about to jot letters down for the Rebellion and it wasn’t as if she had any reason to otherwise tap into this unspent skill.

(so why does she dream of a pen’s nib babbling over rough flimsi? words looping and scrawled until it wasn’t writing, but art taking shape.)

When Ben defects three months after Crait, Rey’s entrusted with ‘ensuring he posed no threat to their ranks’ -- a glorified babysitter, but at the very least it provided him with the chance to grovel, to beg her forgiveness.

He earns it after a week.

He gets a room next to hers after two.

Rey spends the next several waking up in his bed, a large arm draped around her waist. 

Slowly, the hollow places are filled with memories to be made, the Jedi texts now rest on a shelf that Ben had built out of Wroshyr wood, Chewbacca had helped him, and Ben fell asleep with his head on his lap that day. 

He’s got a new calligraphy set once the base is in a position to afford such luxuries; their numbers grow daily and the General is convinced that small gestures, like this, promote the enriched atmosphere she’d always dreamed of cultivating on an empirical scale.

Rey watches him, perched on the foot of his bed with a blanket tied around her throat like a cape. Ben has been scribbling for hours now, alternating between long, fluid motions and short bursts of what she imagines to be pent-up creative energy.

She musters up the courage to peek over his shoulder, and Ben stiffens. “It’s beautiful.” Rey’s wonder upends her words, leaves them like rainfall down his back, a raw affection that has him shivering.

“Do you wanna try?” Ben rumbles, tilting his head back to kiss a lazy path along her jaw, now it's her turn to tremble, but she disguises her embarrassment within it.

There’s little use, Ben can read her better than anyone else. 

“I don’t know how to,” she explains, sheepishly, looking away. 

Before Rey can react or realize, Ben has brought her down to sit on his lap, fingers curling around hers to help them take the shape of holding the pen properly. 

“Let me show you.” And in that; you need a teacher. How soft was this man that cradles her, that shows her the shapes of R, and then E, and finally Y; and she smiles with the remembrance of the firestorm he had been on Starkiller, begging her where now he offers, exists on a gentler plane. 

She practices when he’s out sparring, training recruits or tinkering with the falcon with Chewie by his side.

Until she’s mastered the only three words she’s wanted to say and never knew how.

I love you, fills up a large sheet of flimsi and Ben freezes when his eyes fall on the white that breaks up the dark bedding where Rey’s fallen asleep.

When she wakes up, Ben’s folded over her like a shield to the outside world. He’s stuck her writing to the wall beside his (their) bed and added underneath it.

your family had its own secret pet living in the walls of your childhood home, feeding on all the unhappiness that simmered overnight,  and after years of hiding  it makes itself known to you. 

you name it rage. you name its unborn child grief.  make them collars out of resentment,  sew sorrow into every stitch &  seal it with a kiss.

at night you curl into a ball of tender fury, soft and vulnerable as a newborn rabbit, but when you dig your fingers into Anger’s matted fur you feel safe, feel at peace. your nest may be cold and empty but Anger keeps it warm,

and when your father finally moves out and makes his true self known, Grief is born. it cuddles up with you and Anger, and you know, tonight, you’re safe from the ghosts of this house.

@reylocanoncrumbs

Rey had never been able to figure out why Ben spent more time kissing her neck, her collarbone, and her breasts, than her lips. 

Not until Poe asked ‘who’d done it’, or when Leia’s brows inched towards her hairline. 

She saw the marks, sure, but what were they to anyone else? Its not like she saw Rose wearing a necklace of bruises, bites and everyone fawned over her and Finn’s romance

It wasn’t until the force connects her with Kylo, and Rey’s low-riding tunic showcases the evidence of their last tryst, that she learns why. 

His eyes grow wide as dinner plates, as she’s on her back, working on the belly of the falcon.

“Rey.” Kylo snaps, and she slips out to frown up at him.

“I’m busy, Ben.” 

He kneels, ignoring her attempts to resume what he could only imagine is an activity less exciting than spending time with him. Kylo runs a gloved fingertip over the patchwork of purple and yellow overlapping on the side of her neck, looking devilishly pleased with himself for it. 

“They saw them?” Affectionately, nearly a purr, and it only amplifies Rey’s confusion -- Kylo’s distraction with the state of her lets Rey catch glimpses of his mind, and in it, she learns the true meaning of what she’d thought to be innocuous marks.

Rey splutters, standing so quickly that Kylo almost falls backwards in his avoidance of her petite fury, 

“I’m not your property.” Her cheeks are burning, and she claps her hand over the ‘hickies’ to disguise them ( as if that’ll help - half the resistance has seen them by now ), “ --- I can’t believe you Ben Solo.” His lips are twisted into something distinctly smug. 

The furrow between Rey’s brows deepen, a wicked thought smoothing her unease into a calm that’s, perhaps more threatening than her rage, 

“Your mother saw them too, you know.” Rey smirks, and Kylo’s smile fades. Its his turn to blush, but it peaks through on the tips of his ears through the curtain of raven waves.

“Wear something with a higher neck,” He suggests a moment later, bending down to kiss her -- Rey bypasses his lips and bites just below his jaw-neck junction, leaving a visible bruise.

“I thought you weren’t mine,” Kylo grunts, running his palm over the broken skin to soothe the wound. When he looks back up, Rey’s already resuming her tinkering with the Falcon,

“I’m not.” Comes her tinny reply, a smile audible in it even if distorted. “I never said that the inverse wasn’t true.” 

Rey measured their time together by the colors they see; on their one year anniversary, she mouthed blue into the pale column of Ben’s throat, watching the sea lap at the soft peach sand and giggling when it washes over their toes. 

The next year it was the white of Rey’s first snowfall, all wide-eyed and captivated by the wonder of seeing it in person (she’d protested that film couldn’t capture how silent and soft the world was after it snowed), like it wants to whisper, unwilling to wake up spring from where it slumbered.

This year, however, is green.

Tall trees reach skywards and Rey turns her face up to feel where sunlight filters through their jade canopies. It was magical, even if a bit cold. Ben has never argued where they spend their anniversaries, so long as they were together; but Rey can tell the love of the great outdoors wasn’t a mutual one.

That only makes her love him even more.

“Come on Solo.” Rey gripes as he stares warily at the tent she’d put up (all by herself -- Ben’s long limbs and surely disposition only got in the way), “It isn’t that bad.” Coaxing him with a wry grin, she reaches her hand out and gives her sap-sticky fingers a wiggle.

“Please?”

He can’t resist that, and they both know it. So he succumbs to the weight of her bright hazel eyes, his lips already resenting the smile they fall into.

They make love on the small air mattress, and Ben stops complaining sometime between the post-coital kisses to his chest and when Rey had insisted they do proper s’mores. 

Ben can’t say no to sweets, either.

He gathers firewood, and Rey pretends she didn’t see him sneak the pile of pre-cut logs from the back of her Subaru -- setting out the ingredients, she pats the flat ground she’d covered with a tartan blanket (it’s threadbare and bits of grass poke up through the too many holes-- Rey refuses to get a new one). 

He sits cross-legged, quiet, his sharp features alternate between fierce, and soft; thrown into the undulating shadows of firelight. He is undeniably beautiful, and Rey’s chest swells with the knowledge that he was hers, and that three years together was more than anyone has ever given her before. 

“I love you.” She sighs, after burning her fifth marshmallow, and Ben, the big bleeding heart that he is, shares his perfectly toasted one with her. When they kiss next, it is messy and sweet, a bit of chocolate on his lips and she hums contentedly as he pulls her onto his lap.

It’s when they’re watching the stars through a gap in the trees, that Ben finally moves away; she thinks he might be going to get water, or maybe begin packing up so they can go to bed. 

Instead, he’s kneeling, and Rey scoots up to a sitting position to watch him curiously. 

He’s got a box in his hands and there are more stars in his eyes than in the blanket of night above them.

Rey cannot sit still. 

Its earned her sighs, grumbles, and the occasional, but sharp, tug of her hair.

“Are you done yet?” 

Ben’s got three strands of auburn trapped between his fingers, “I would be further along if you could stop fidgeting.” He points out. Despite his frustration, there’s no small amount of affection in his voice, and the gentle weaving pattern of his hands. 

He’d offered in passing, to plait her hair, and Rey lit up at the chance -- she knew how to do those three buns of hers, but they didn’t feel right, especially now that her hair’s grown longer, hanging halfway down her back.

“Fine.” She wiggles a little, and he pulls her head back enough to plant a kiss to her brow

“Stop. Moving.” There’s no real warning in that, but Rey wants to be done and over with --- she’s never been very good at staying immobile. The desert breeds a thick thread of suspicion in the unseen world around her, she cannot help it, even now, on Naboo, with guards and the force and lightsabers within arms reach.

Finally, or mercifully, he’s finished, and Rey rockets upwards the moment she feels his hands leave her hair. 

Slack-jawed, she runs presses a palm to her reflection, eyes gone wide and round with glee,

“You made me pretty.” Rey blinks.

“You’ve always been pretty.” Ben’s voice is a little rough just then, as if he could not believe she thought otherwise,

“Where’d you learn this?” She turns on her heel to look up at him owlishly, and for a moment Ben just stops, and stares.

She’s beautiful. More than that she’s bursting at the seams with tactile energy, a star cursed to be trapped in corporeal skin, Ben clears his throat,

“My mother.” A pause. “It’s an Alderaanian crown braid. For royalty.” He adds, looking more than a little sheepish.

“Royalty, hm?” Rey muses, giving an avian tilt of her head. “If you’re a Prince. Does that make me a princess?” She can’t quite keep the girlishness from peaking around the edges of her voice.