[Ben doesn't notice her deciding, in turn, to take this more seriously. There's a crack straight down the center of his mental landscape, and through it can be glimpsed that place he once spun out of nothing for his family. Soft, cool, and welcoming, it is where he learned to love, how he learned to talk about it, how he first taught himself to trust completely and blindly. He doesn't, these days, allow himself to look at it, he's tried his best to pave over it with the help of his friends; he trusts them when they say it's not real, of course he does, because there are other cracks that show him places that are as impossible, as imaginary, and he is absolutely willing to let them be part of some non-reality that can't touch him.
But he loved Her best of all of them, and at a time in his life where nothing else seemed right, where nothing else was warm, he'd taken comfort in that at least. It's very difficult to leave that behind for a world without Her.
He's broken out of it by her hand reaching toward him, preternaturally aware of his personal space in the way only someone who has had it routinely and casually violated can be, and some of the gentility goes out of him in its own silent, reflexive warning. He doesn't quite lean away, not the least because she takes her hand back. In its wake he looks up at her face, meets her eyes with his own bright brown gaze, and says,] Are you?
[ Spam ]
But he loved Her best of all of them, and at a time in his life where nothing else seemed right, where nothing else was warm, he'd taken comfort in that at least. It's very difficult to leave that behind for a world without Her.
He's broken out of it by her hand reaching toward him, preternaturally aware of his personal space in the way only someone who has had it routinely and casually violated can be, and some of the gentility goes out of him in its own silent, reflexive warning. He doesn't quite lean away, not the least because she takes her hand back. In its wake he looks up at her face, meets her eyes with his own bright brown gaze, and says,] Are you?