Chapter Text
Ben Solo is a vampire.
Well… He’s kind of a shitty vampire but still. Her point stands.
Rey sips at her warm beer and stares at him from across the room, trying to squint through the dimmed overhead lights, the crush of bodies, and the bloody fog machine that someone had set up in the common room of the Lambda Phi Nu house for the bi-monthly Friday rager.
First of all — an absolutely absurd name.
Second of all — who had trusted these idiots with a fog machine?
Solo is hard to miss, all things considered. He’s currently shirtless and screaming while he holds up Armitage Hux’s legs in a keg stand, a grungy pink ball cap backwards on his head. His chest is — wow. Yeah. The boy works out way too much. Rey licks her lips. Pale and broad and speckled with dark moles and freckles. Muscles. Everywhere.
And also totally, totally a vampire.
It started like this: Solo is in her Modern Women Writers class. A night class. One Rey had only taken because it fulfilled her diversity credit requirement and didn’t conflict with her full schedule of engineering lectures and labs.
She has the misfortune of sitting directly behind him, distracted at every turn by the perfect wave of his dark hair and the unfair width of his shoulders. Apparently no one ever taught him how to pick clothes that fit because his shirts are always a size too small, stretched tight over the muscles of his back.
Back to the point — ENG-230 is a night class. It starts at 8pm. The last dying rays of sunlight have already retreated behind Alderaan’s famous mountains by the time they all trickle into that fluorescent-lit classroom once a week.
This is not compelling evidence, she knows, but she has more to submit to the jury: she has seen Ben Solo crush the solid wooden top of one of those long, shitty lecture hall tables in his hand like it was no more than styrofoam.
When she’d goggled at him, mystified and horrified and yes, a little turned on, he’d just blinked and asked her to please repeat her thoughts on Alice Walker using smaller words this time.
Then — then! — she’d spotted him lurking in Aldera quad just outside of her dorm building, watching her with glowing yellow eyes as she’d stumbled home from a too-late night in the library.
So, to summarize: super strength? Check. Only seen at night? Check. Golden eyes? Certified vampire.
Rose understandably thinks she’s insane, her brain rotted by too many rereads of Twilight (it had been one of the few young adult series available at the tiny, shitty public library in Jakku — and a younger Rey had desperately needed to read about true love and people who came back in the end) and too many physics equations taking up space in her cognitive processor.
Rey knows what she’s seen, though, and she knows that Ben Solo is more than the dumb jock frat bro he appears to be.
Sure, she hasn’t actually seen him drink blood but it’s only a matter of time. That’s why she’s here, in the Lambda Phi Nu frat house when she would rather be literally anywhere else because honestly, this kind of sucks. The whole place smells like beer and feet mixed with the oddly chemical smell from the fog machine.
She’s going to leave… Just as soon as she gets proof of Ben Solo doing something more suspicious than absolutely dominating at flip cup.
Rey sighs and swirls her awful beer around in its cup. She doesn’t even like beer. She doesn’t like any of these people, except Rose, who had vanished about twenty minutes into this terrible idea and hasn’t been seen since.
“Rey!”
She startles, beer sloshing, and her head snaps up in time to see Ben pushing through the crowd towards the patch of wall she’s been shyly occupying for the past forty minutes.
Oh, he is hammered. Absolutely sloshed. She’s surprised he’s so steady on his feet considering how red and watery his brown eyes are. He smiles as he approaches her, revealing charming dimples in his cheeks, as if they haven’t spoken for a mere collective total of fifteen minutes in their single shared class.
Honestly, she’s kind of surprised he even remembers her name.
“Hey, I didn’t know you were coming,” he says, almost breathless as he comes way too close into her personal space.
Rey shies away because vampire. And also because he smells like the inside of a hot brewery and he’s still shirtless and there’s a little bead of sweat rolling its way down his pec and she does not need this. He feels like a furnace beside her. A humid, sweaty, kind of funky furnace.
She tries to stare down at the floor but her eyes get caught on the low-slung waistband of his shorts and the little trail of hair leading down from his bellybutton. His feet are huge, flipper-sized Nikes dwarfing her battered, off-brand keds.
Vampire, she reminds herself as she tries to work moisture back into her dry mouth. A bloodsucker.
“It’s not really my scene,” she admits, inching backwards until her shoulder blades bump the wall. “I came with a friend.”
Not a lie. Rose had invited her with absolutely zero expectation that Rey would accept.
Ben leans a little closer, bracing one hand on the wall above her head and blocking out the rest of the world with his big body. His face is too close to hers. She finds herself staring at his mouth, trying to glimpse his teeth while he talks. He peers into her mostly full cup pointedly. “Yeah? What if I get you a new drink? Think it’ll be more your scene then?”
“I really doubt it,” Rey says, swallowing thickly as she attempts to recompose herself. She could not imagine that any drink in this entire house would be better than this lukewarm beer. Quantity over quality with these boys.
So admittedly, the fact that he’s drunk and happy and offering her drinks is kind of punching holes in her theory but Rey will not be deterred. She knows what she saw!
“C’mon,” Ben says, apparently not about to take no for an answer. He grabs her wrist, skin hot on hers (okay, maybe that is also bad for her hypothesis but if Twilight taught her anything, it’s that if vampires can sparkle, they can do anything), and drags her through the crowd. People call out to him as he goes, making Rey want to die a little under all the attention. It seems like everyone knows him.
He brings her into the kitchen and, without asking permission, places both hands on her hips and lifts her up onto the counter. The sticky counter. Rey tries not to shudder with disgust as her thighs cling to the granite.
“Stay,” he says happily and then turns around to rifle through the fridge.
She stares at the bumps and valleys of his back, entranced by the way they move as he shoves aside 24-packs of beer. There does not appear to be any food.
“Here!” He pops back up with a bright red bottle clutched in his hand.
A wine cooler. Rey blinks, uncertain if she should be offended or not. On one hand, she’s no quitter. On the other, strawberry daiquiri does sound a hell of a lot better than whatever is in her long-abandoned cup.
With a resigned sigh, Rey snatches the bottle out of his hand.
Or tries to. Laughing, Ben holds it away from her. His freakishly long arms put it well out of her reach and her eyes narrow. None of the old myths ever mentioned vampires being obnoxious himbos but here they are.
She lunges off the counter, driven by instinct over logic, and jumps for the bottle. She remains tragically unsuccessful. He is tall in a way that she’s fairly certain counts as discrimination against the vertically challenged and all she manages to do is press herself against his bare chest. Repeatedly.
Once she becomes aware of this fact, she scrambles back against the counter, red-faced and glowering.
“You gotta pay for it,” Ben says, smirking wide enough to show off his teeth. Crooked but not vampire-sharp. At this moment, Rey cares less about his potentially preternatural origins and more about how incredibly punchable that smug expression is.
“You’re the one who offered me a drink!”
“A kiss,” he continues, as if she hadn’t even spoken. “That’s the price.”
Rey is certain her face has turned redder than the plastic cups stacked on the counter next to her. She should feel insulted, harassed even, but instead her body goes hot and tight and her eyes dip down to his mouth and—
Yeah. Yeah, she could kiss Ben Solo. Vampire or not.
She swallows, flushed right down to her toes. This is one of those Bad Ideas that Rose likes to go on about, the kind where Rey does things before her brain can catch up with her.
Rey licks her dry lips and leans closer, drawn irresistibly into his orbit like a circling satellite. The air between them crackles with heat and electric energy; enough that the hair on her arms lifts and her skin tingles and she has just enough self-awareness left to think that can’t be normal before she’s kissing him.
Fireworks. That’s what she thinks about as soon as her lips touch his. Lightning, thunder, sparks; all those things she’s read about in her guilty pleasure novels in the dead of night but never experienced in the few times she’s tried kissing other people.
His lips are as soft as they look, no trace of fang to be found. She buries both hands in his hair and that’s also soft, silky and perfect. His gross pink hat goes tumbling to the ground. He groans as she tugs him closer except it sounds more like a growl—
Glass shatters at their feet and then he’s got both of his big palms on her ass, squeezing and massaging like he can’t get enough of her. He kisses her like he’s devouring her, open-mouthed and rough. His tongue pushes past her lips to stroke her own and it should be wet, sloppy, and terrible but fuck, Rey loves it. Every wet slide sends lightning down her spine, all the way to her clit, where it settles with a persistent throbbing.
“Rey,” he rasps but anything else he might say gets lost because he can’t seem to keep his lips off hers. Or maybe it’s because she keeps yanking him back to her. “Fuck.” He kisses her again. “Fuck.”
She agrees. She so, so agrees. He tastes like cheap beer and cinnamon, somehow, and Rey could spend the rest of her life kissing him.
Ben’s grip on her ass tightens and he drags her tight against his body. Tight enough that she can feel the hard ridge of his erection against her belly as one of his thick, lacrosse-built thighs slides between hers.
It suddenly doesn’t matter that they’re standing in the kitchen of a disgusting frat house and that any one of his brothers or their guests could walk in and catch them. The only thing that matters is the pressure on her clit and the little growl that chases each of his breaths.
Rey grinds against him shamelessly. If Ben Solo is a vampire then… Well, he’s a really hot vampire and he kisses like they’re the last two people alive, so who can really blame her for letting him shove his tongue down her throat? These are extenuating circumstances. She claims not guilty, amen, the end.
He nips at her bottom lip and his teeth feel sharp on her tender flesh. She hardly notices because he licks away the sting and she’s lost again, humping his thigh and whimpering when his thumb presses into the soft spot in front of her hip bone.
The rasping sound at the back of his throat has turned constant, like the purring of a big cat or a rumbling engine. Inexplicably, with no input from her higher brain functions, it makes her clench, slick coating her underwear until she’s certain she’s leaving a wet spot on his shorts.
“Rey,” he groans, and there’s something in his voice, something strange and deep and animalistic, but it just makes her burn hotter.
All at once, Ben suddenly tears himself away from her and Rey is left cold and bereft in his absence. Her arms hang in the air, hands still reaching for him. She blinks like a newborn, sluggishly trying to process how she had been kissing him and now she is not. It takes her too long to tear her eyes away from his heaving chest but when she finally looks up at his face, she finds nothing but wild-eyed panic.
Gold eyes. They’re definitely gold, molten and searing under Lambda house’s shitty overhead lights.
Rey’s brain stutters out. Gold eyes. Vampire. Kiss, kiss, kiss. She licks her tingly, swollen lips and presses the back of her hand over her mouth. She’d kissed him and she would absolutely kiss him again if he didn’t look like he was about to start hyperventilating.
Before she can try to say something, he’s just — gone. Rey blinks and it’s like he’s vanished, leaving nothing but her aching cunt and his hat on the floor in his wake.
Mortification sweeps over her once she processes what’s just happened, almost (almost) sweeping away the flush of unsatisfied arousal.
What the fuck, actually. He’d been the one to ask for a kiss! Rey doesn’t think she’s that bad at it, even if she hasn’t had a lot of practice. Ben had seemed like he was enjoying himself. Maybe he’d realized that she’d realized what he was and then realized she’d realize—
Rey presses her lips together and balls her hands into fists against her thighs. Her thoughts aren’t even making sense to herself anymore, scrambled like an egg from the thwarted heat between her legs.
Well, fuck Ben Solo anyway. And fuck this stupid frat and their stupid, gross house and their shitty beer.
She glares at her abandoned cup on the counter, still full of tepid piss-colored liquid, and then reaches out with one hand to smack it off the edge. It hits the ground with a splatter that is less satisfying than she’d hoped for.
Now she’s definitely going to figure out his secret, if it’s the last thing she does.
🌔 🌕 🌖
The next time Rose invites her to a Lambda Phi Nu house party, Rey agrees with the grim certitude of a soldier marching to war.
Ben has been avoiding her, she’s certain of it. He’d changed seats in their one shared class, ignoring Rey’s burning gaze boring into the back of his immaculately styled hair. He’d taken to sprinting out of the room so quickly when the clock ticked over that she’s surprised he didn’t leave smoke in his wake.
It all just makes her more suspicious.
There’s also an unfortunate, itching, familiar feeling of humiliation burning up the back of her neck that she’s desperately trying to ignore. Is she really so awful at kissing that he can’t even look at her now? Maybe her blood smells disgusting. That sounds like a vampire-thing.
He won’t be able to avoid her at his own house party though, which sounds like an insane stalker sort of thought out of context. Rey opts to ignore it, just like she’s been ignoring the twisting in her gut every time he refuses to look at her.
Her and Rose make it two steps past the front door before Rey sees him. Ben stands in the Georgian archway of this obscenely expensive frat house, shirtless and clutching a beer cup in each hand, and stares at her like she’s the vampire. Like he’s never seen anything like her before.
Then he turns and sprints across the living room, squeezing through the asses-to-elbows crowd gathered around the beer pong table setup where the coffee table should be, moving like the hounds of hell are at his heels.
Rey stares after him, jaw dropped. What the fuck? Is she really that terrible? They kiss once and now he can’t even tolerate being in the same room as her?
Fists clenched and snorting like an angry bull, Rey takes off after him. She ignores Rose’s startled protest. She ignores the annoyed shouts as she elbows aside some poor, unsuspecting sorority sister. All she sees is Ben Solo’s broad shoulders disappearing out the sliding glass door leading onto the patio and she knows, instinctively, that if she lets him get away now, she won’t see him for the rest of the night.
So she barrels through the door after him, out into the cool night. “Ben!” she yells at his back, officially abandoning her dignity when he ignores her. “Ben Solo — god dammit—”
The backyard is dark and the dewy grass is cold against her ankles as she practically jogs after him. If she were smart, she’d take the hint and let him go. Vampire or not, he’s just some dumb frat bro and he’s definitely not worth all this effort.
But she can’t. It’s like a magnet pulling her towards him, or some invisible thread stringing her along in his wake.
Or maybe she’s just a horny gremlin and she can’t get the way he tastes or the weight of his thigh between her legs out of her head. His body had felt so fucking good and natural pressed up against hers and she just can’t let that go without… something. An explanation. Closure, maybe.
Lambda house is situated at the top of a hill that slopes down into the woods that rural Alderaan is so well known for. She squints as her eyes adjust and she spots Ben scurrying towards the autumnal red-gold trees, his pale shoulders a beacon in the moonlight. Confusion overtakes her indignation — there’s no way he hates her so much that he’d rather wander shirtless into the woods in the middle of the night than talk to her.
Something uneasy clenches in her belly and the hair rises on the back of her neck. It occurs to her that she doesn’t actually know Ben Solo. Maybe he contains multitudes. Maybe he’s both a vampire and also a serial killer. Maybe he hides the bodies of his victims back in these woods. Maybe—
She still follows him, because she apparently also contains multitudes: she is both horny and also an idiot.
Ben has almost made it into the treeline when someone suddenly steps out in front of her and Rey nearly slams into a second, unfamiliar shirtless chest. She stumbles backwards to avoid them and swears under her breath as she watches Ben disappear from sight. Scowling, she glares at the stranger who had interrupted her chase.
Armitage Hux. Ben’s best friend. Fellow Lambda Phi Nu brother.
“Rey,” Hux says, even though he has no reason to know her name as far as she’s aware. She’s literally never spoken to him before. Ben must have talked about her. “The party’s inside, you know.”
Rey frowns at him and stands on her toes to look over his shoulder. Ben is long gone, nowhere in sight. When she looks back at Hux, the gibbous moon catches his eyes just so, flickering gold and green like when she shines her flashlight on the raccoons outside the dorms at night—
Oh. Oh, no.
Goosebumps race up Rey’s arms and she stumbles several steps backwards. A cold sweat dampens the back of her neck despite the chilly temperature.
Hux raises both hands, like he’s soothing a frightened animal. “Let’s go back inside. I’m sure Rose is waiting for you, yeah? I’ll get you ladies a couple of beers.”
He has a sort of snooty, Imperial accent despite the fact that she’s pretty sure he has the word ‘HUXINATOR’ scrawled across his chest in sharpie and his ginger hair is pulled back into a tiny little man bun.
“Yeah, okay,” Rey says uneasily, shuffling back another step. “Where–but— where’s Ben going?”
Hux tips his head curiously but there’s something in his expression that is pitying… or mocking. “For more chips.”
Rey nods but her hands are balled into tight fists behind her back. “Right. Cool. Of course.”
And then she turns and bolts back to the house, as quickly as she can stumble up the damp grass and away from Hux. She needs to find Rose and she needs to get the fuck out of dodge because whatever Ben is, he is apparently not the only one.
Fortunately, Hux doesn’t follow her but Rey gives each of the Lambda boys a suspicious side-eye as she plows back into the humid, overheated interior of the house. She shoulders through the crowd of increasingly drunk college kids until she spots Rose’s bouncy black hair over by the snack table (which is currently covered in bowls full of chips).
To her friend’s credit, Rose doesn’t even hesitate when Rey rushes to her side in a full panic.
“We need to leave,” Rey says and Rose, who had been in the middle of laughing at something another girl — Kaydel, maybe — had said, immediately turns serious and grabs Rey’s arm.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. We just need to leave. Please, Rose.”
It’s the ‘please’ that seems to get her. Less than two minutes later, they’re out the door and heading down the block back towards their dorm. As they go, Rey glances back over her shoulder to see Hux watching them with an inscrutable expression.
“I know you don’t believe me,” Rey whispers sharply as she ushers Rose up the dark street, “but there’s something wrong with them. Ben — and the woods — and Hux’s eyes—”
For once, Rose doesn’t laugh at her. “Okay,” she says slowly, looking at Rey as if she’s trying to decide if she should be worried for her health. “I thought you were kidding before but you’re like, really freaking me out now. Are you saying you think the whole frat pack—”
“Frat pack—” Rey repeats. “What even—”
“— are vampires?”
“We’re going to revisit the ‘frat pack’ thing later,” Rey says, because of course that’s the sort of stupid, inane moniker that the Lambda boys would use, “but there’s just something wrong with them. Vampires or — or whatever they are, I don’t know — I just think they might be dangerous.”
Rose peeks up and down the street, as if some drunken frat-vampire might be following them. There’s no one except a cluster of other girls, giggling and staggering home on teetering heels from a different house party.
When Rose looks back, there’s a familiar expression on her face; it’s the one she gets sometimes when a particularly tricky matrix refuses to converge or when her Battle Bot Club robot starts trying to stab ankles instead of enemy bots.
It’s a Rose Tico classic, really. Nothing stands in her way once she gets an idea in her head.
“We’ll figure it out, then,” Rose promises. “Even if they turn out to be just run-of-the-mill weird rich kids, at least it will make you feel better to know.”
Rey might cry. Before coming to Alderaan, she’d never had someone so unwaveringly on her side. Rose might still think she’s crazy, and that she’s read too many books, but that means nothing in the face of her loyalty and love.
“Thank you,” Rey whispers and surprises them both by impulsively hugging her friend. Rey isn’t much of a hugger, by nature, but this feels like a good time for it.
When Rose pulls away, she’s grinning ear to ear. “Alright, let Operation Frat Pack begin!”
“We are not calling it that.”