How about some super tender Ben Solo showing Rey calligraphy. Maybe showing her how to spell something ? Maybe her name in another language or “ I love you” ya know, gimme that soft shit girl. You know I’m weak for it! 😩😘
@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.
I know.
