versusnurture | fifth ♢ private + voice + spam

fifth ♢ private + voice + spam

private/voice } ben

[She contacts her warden as soon as Hannibal makes his announcement. Last night, when she checked in, she was distant; this morning she seemed more confident. This afternoon, she's shaky, uncertain, every bone in her body trembling, it feels like.]

Ben. I lost time. [This is an excuse, she knows.]

He made me dinner, Ben.

public } voice

[She cuts the feed on, then off. On/off, on/off, in strange but rhythmic patterns like Morse code.]

[She's fishing. Questions, accusations will come - she remembers that much from last time, with her real father, with Garret Hobbs, the Shrike. She wants them now. She doesn't want to wait.]

public } spam

[She doesn't change her routine, not even slightly. Which is not to say she's not afraid: she's terrified. There's no Freddie Lounds here to publicly doctor this story, to minimize her shame. Even if there was, she honestly isn't sure she'd want that anymore.]

[So she walks the halls and accepts what comes, goes to the art room, goes to lunch, visits Ben on his shift. Sometimes she goes to the CES and forgets where she is and how time passes. Hours and hours go by as she sits under a tree with her knees pulled up to her chest.]

[This is the only vulnerability she shows, and it is accidental.]

private } zane

I know what he wants from me so I can ask him for information if that's what you want.

[It's about the Emperor, of course; she no longer has the privilege, in her own mind, of contacting Zane for any reason other than business.]

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[He's grounding her. She does understand that. But every part of her feels like it's floating, disparate.]

[The question is easy to answer. She looks at him, solemn and solid, looking down at her, keeping her steady, and she nods.]

I can always trust you, Ben.

[The wording is deliberate; not does she trust him, but can she here, now. He knows that sometimes, it's just not possible. He knows it shouldn't always be. Especially not lately.

But he won't hurt her. He can give her the space she needs and he can be here, knowing how it feels to be dangling out over the yawning void of insanity that no one else can see. He does not judge. That, she can always trust, as long as she can.

His fingers tighten subtly.]

Tell me why you think you messed up.

[She winces - not in pain, but surprise - and leans into the touch slightly. It helps.]

[The answer is difficult, not only to articulate, but get out. She throws it out of her mouth like a bomb.]

On Thursday. I saw Ned. I didn't try to set him free. He was scared.

I tried to make him feel safe. But I didn't try to set him free, and then I . . . [Vanished. Out of her own head.]

I got lost.

[The contact is beginning to chafe, but he hasn't noticed it yet. She's saying things that he knows she should be punished for in some capacity, even if it's only a verbal reprimand. Later, he thinks, almost instinctively. Not now.

She's still lost. But she reached out, much sooner than he ever learned to, and that must be secured first.]

You aren't anymore. I won't let it happen lightly.

Tell me what happened.

[His tone brooks no argument. She doesn't try. Her responses are as quick and informative as she can manage.]

He invited me over for dinner.

[Just like the first time. With the mushrooms. When he crawled inside her mind.]

He invited me to Ned's cabin. He said that Ned had invited us for dinner. That Ned's pies were delicious.

When I got there, he said that Ned had burned himself. That he was gone but he'd be back later. By the time dinner was almost over, I knew - I knew there was something wrong. I asked him where Ned was.

[Where's Ned, Daddy? Like she would have killed him that minute if she could have. And she would have.]

Ned was tied up in the bedroom. With his dog. He told me to run. I didn't.

Ben, why didn't I run?

[There's a list Ben is making in the back of his mind that he hopes he'll remember later; things that will need to be done. Remove Hannibal from the kitchen crew. Inform him that he is barred from initiating contact with Abigail. Speaking with his friends to help monitor her, for her safety and for her actions.

Here, now, though he listens, and when she asks him a question, he answers.]

Because if you had, Lecter would have hurt you. Self preservation is a powerful motivation.

Was Ned injured?

No. He wasn't injured physically. Not that I saw.

[But there are hundreds of thousands of ways to hurt people in ways that don't show. Ben knows. Ned will never be the same again.]

He was really scared.

I want a different motivation.

[In many ways, Ben prefers physical injury to being afraid. Fear held him captive all of his life. Injury is something he is built to sustain, mend, and overcome with relative ease.

He can't do anything for Ned. He knows who the Piemaker is, but Ben has avoided him ever since Aeris Navem. Some things are better left forgotten and buried.

Ben searches her face, trying to find the silent letters there, the signals that will tell him what to do, what to say. He thinks he should recognize them. He's not certain he does.]

You can choose motivation. By a process of elimination, if not by selection.

Running would not have solved anything. Informing someone - me - or acting would have.

Why did you accept the dinner invitation?

[She wants to be angry at what he's saying. Wants him to be wrong - wants to tell him that acting would only have gotten her killed. But she's clever. She is. She knows how to lie. How else can she get better at it than to practice against the best? Even if she gets killed over and over along the way.]

[There is a flaw in this logic, she knows it. But she can't pinpoint it.]

[She looks at Ben with her face as open as she can make it, though different parts of herself flicker across her face without her consent, masks of naivete and monstrosity shifting and swaying like light through stained glass. Why did she accept . . . ]

[Because it would be rude not to. Because if she didn't he'd come up with something worse. Because there was a part of her at the back of her mind that knew something was wrong and wanted - not to fix it, because she doesn't think that's her problem, her prerogative, to solve crises, but - to know what it was. To see what would happen.]

[None of these are the real reason.]

[She tells Ben the real, pathetic, broken, ugly reason, and she keeps looking at him while she does, because she wants to see the precise moment he decides to give up on her.]

Because when he's kind to me, he makes me feel safe. Protected. Untouchable.

It feels like love.

It is not love.

[Ben doesn't look away either, and his reply is not immediate, nor harsh, nor accusing, nor disapproving. It's a fact. He tells it to her because she does not seem to know it, which he understands; he has only just begun learning the size, the shape of something like love. How it is always different but always the same, how he can give it and he can receive it, and how powerful it can be.

What it can motivate the people it chooses, who choose it, to do and overcome.

Ben is not a romantic, at least not that he's aware of (he is), but he has learned that as easily as he can, these days, identify love amongst the detritus of other emotions, he remembers a time when he couldn't. He remembers that some days it's harder, and that someday it may be impossible again.

So he watches her, and he tells her that it feels like love but it isn't, and then he realizes something else. Kind. He has been told he is kind, repeatedly, and he didn't understand how that was possible. He didn't understand how he could be.

Now he does. He is kind in such ways as other people can see, so that Abigail may see it, too. He is kind so that she may know kindness.

His expression doesn't change, though he loosens his grip and straights up some, standing more firmly between Abigail and the door. His voice is low between them, confident, and kind.]

It is manipulation.

[Intellectually she knows. But intellectualism isn't enough. It never was. It didn't allow her any better insight into her father's psyche, or Hannibal's, or her own; everything she's understood of the truths of the universe have come from instinct. Cleverness leads to pain.]

[He isn't looking away. He isn't dodging the issue to spare her feelings. He's telling her the truth, he's telling her facts, because he knows she can handle them - or at least that it's better to have the truth and break than to have lies and stay the wrong kind of strong.]

[Her gaze shifts from his eyes to follow his movements as he steps in front of the door. He's protecting her, she realizes, and it feels like her heart is overflowing. He's standing between her and danger. She doesn't know how to process this in words or actions or thoughts, so she presses her fingers to her lips and shakes her head slightly. Not a no. Just a gesture of confusion, at her own wrongness.]

It is. But I want it anyway.

You want it because it is what you know. It is what is familiar. Known. Safe.

[There is a buzzing in Ben's skull that never goes away; it is the pound of the treadmills, the slide of the projectors, the ring of his unit's voices rebounding off cement walls, the recoil from a gun, the reprimand of a task done wrong. It is Manticore and he carries it with him wherever he goes and he always will, and he knows it was wrong there. He knows they weren't happy, weren't safe, weren't loved.

There is a mark on the inside of his wrist, a smudged and replaced black marker, just visible above the edge of his field jacket's cuff. It says Discipline, because Ben knows in his bones that Manticore is wrong, but Manticore is what his bones are made of, it was the first thing that made sense to him, it was the last thing he wanted as he searched the sky for any signs of the helicopters coming to take him away and waited for it all to end.

Manticore is wrong and he will always know that. He will also always want it.]

You have other options now. Other people. When you are ready, you can choose one of them instead.

[It's an addiction, she decides all of a sudden - an itch that will never go away. Not only to be loved, but to be coveted; not only to be coveted, but to be told in one way or another that you can be greater, you can be the girl whose death inspires so many others, you can be the perfect monster. She wasn't raised in this but everything she's experienced in the past year and a half has washed the rest of her life away, a muddy sweep draining down the gutter and into the earth, as if it never was.

[Now she is - something. Something that will be something else, soon enough, but she doesn't know when or how or even why.]

[But Ben's right. She does have other options. One of her options is to seesaw between old and new comforts until she discovers the best place in the middle to be. She understands that Ben reaches for the past; she doesn't need to see the mark to know when he's reeling, reaching, desperate, as if it will come back and somehow be something other than what it was. The point is that even betrayal can be comforting in its own ways. Even lack of choice can give the illusion of independence.]

[She wants desperately to reach for him, but it would be comfort for her, not him. A way to make her feel better for being unable to do anything about his sorrow, his confusion, his insanity. But Ben's insanity is his own, just as hers belongs to her. There are some things that they have to sort out for themselves. It wouldn't be called redemption if someone else could fix it all - it would be called, as she told Zane (privately, because she'd never say this where Ben could see it, not anymore), retraining.]

I will. When I'm ready.

[This is a promise she believes in. She isn't lying or trying to comfort him. When she's ready, she'll choose one of them instead.]

[But she doesn't want to be ready yet. Which is selfish - but selfish is what she has to be now.]

[This doesn't mean she doesn't regret it. She brims with regret, looking at Ben now.]

And I'm sorry. If this - me, being my warden - reminds you of things that. Aren't really safe, but feel safe. I don't mean to be . . .

[So difficult. So crazy. So close to the bone, reminding him of old wounds that will never heal up fully.]

Edited 2013-10-15 05:10 (UTC)

[He understands, which is why he framed the information the way he did, not shoving it down her throat but setting it across her knees where she can lift it, take possession of it when she is ready. No one can make her choose to turn away, especially not Ben. All he can do is what Gaheris, Aya, Alex did for him and be ready when she does.

She apologizes and Ben shakes his head, just once, a definitive, abbreviated movement.]

It is not your fault, and I do not blame you. Faith - redemption - means little enough if it is never tested. If any of it can help you, it will be worth it.

[She presses her eyes shut tightly to stave off tears. She doesn't understand how people like Ben exist, how they could possibly be real, how heroes could be neither born nor made but etched out of the gaping maw of insanity by one's own will. How Ben gets up every morning, even though the night must surely bring him new terrors, drag him a little further down again, how he gets up anyway and fights for himself. And now for her on top of that.]

[When she opens her eyes again and looks at him, she feels shattered and glued back together again by his strength as well as his weakness, and how desperately important he is to her.]

You don't like it when people call you good, do you? Like Arkin.

It's just that . . . you feel like a good person to me. [She presses the heel of her hand to her chest, hard, as though to press away some phantom pain.] For me.

[Ben, he would tell her, is not a hero. He tells his own stories, that of his family, and he is not the hero in them. He no longer believes himself the monster, either, the out of control creature that needs to be put down for a happy ending, that others need protection from. He's just Ben. What that means changes from day to day, but he's no hero, and he's no monster, and only he knows how far he is from either at any given time.

He waits, though this time there is uncertainty gnawing at him. Has he said the wrong thing? He can smell saline more strongly, though he sees none in excess; then she's looking at him again and he still doesn't know what he should be saying, what would be reassuring. She speaks before he can figure it out, and the way his back straightens is telling enough of what the answer is to that.]

I... no. I don't. [His voice has gone very slightly more flat, withdrawing slightly, but he doesn't go far. He makes sure to keep it even.] I spent my formative years desperate to be a good soldier which, for us, was tantamount to being a good person. It was all important, and the standards were too high to meet without becoming mindless.

That's not what you - or anyone - mean when you say it, I know. But I know not all of me is good. Knowing others think I am a good person makes that feel like failure, when really it is only an impossible standard.

[She bites her lip and doesn't speak for a while. She's not upset, not exactly, except in the way that someone with no perspective whatsoever could be sorry for something they'll never understand. What she's doing is coming up with new vocabulary.]

[Finally she looks up and nods decisively.]

Then instead of that, I'll just say . . . I'm glad you're my teacher. I don't think I'd learn as much from anyone else.

[Ben, familiar with his own long pauses while he processes new information, follows each nuance as far to its end as he can reach, maps it out and sorts it into its proper place and prepares follow up questions, waits. The white noise of his own mental flaw is fading in at the edges and it seeks to push the boundaries deeper into his control, but he focuses on her and doesn't look at it, and he thinks maybe he can stay here a while longer. Not only physically.

The compromise is... acceptable. He blinks slowly at her.]

I had some concerns that anyone I was assigned to would attempt to take advantage of the obvious flaws I have not only as a warden but as an individual. That they would be disinclined to be cooperative. Instead, you are teaching me in kind, Abigail. I am glad we met. I am glad we've been assigned.

[Her smile is wry. Still a little distant, although she's surprised, herself, at how quickly he's been able to tug her back to herself. Then again, Ben is always surprising.]

[She knows that she did attempt to take advantage of him. It's just that she didn't attempt for very long. He threw such a wrench in her understanding of how manipulation is supposed to go that she simply couldn't - that, and he somehow, effortlessly, got her to love him.]

[There's nothing else she can say beyond what they've already both said, nothing to add to show him how crucial he is beyond what she's already doing, has already done. So she just looks at him with eyes that are by now halfway clear and nods, acknowledging.]

It's right.

[It just is. It's the right thing.]

Can you stay? For a while. I don't want to be alone.

Of course.

[If she were to say any of that aloud, he would explain to her about how this has been his function almost as long as he has been told his function is to be a letter perfect soldier; how he cannot change the bad things that happen around them or to them, how he cannot protect her from many things, how no one can, but he can do this. He can safeguard her sense of self, steady her at the very center if she lets him. He can construct for her a safe space inside her own head, and he can continue mending and painting and securing it indefinitely. As long as he retains, in turn, himself.

He cannot make it so Hannibal never existed, nor would he if it were within his power. But he can help pick up the pieces and carry them alongside her until she is ready to take them back for herself.]

I am finished for the day. I am available as long as you like, with the exception of my assigned kitchen shift tomorrow. [He hesitates then, double checking his own perception of time and his activities within its confines; after a moment he adds,] Alex will assist me by fulfilling that obligation as well, should my presence continue to be required - or desired - here.

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fifth ♢ private + voice + spam

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