#<- new core au we're reworking hehe

[knownangels]

even

wc: 5.3k

Benji has never once thought oh good, it’s over. Never once had the first breath of fresh air after a skirmish — fumes and smoke and the tang of something metallic in the back of his mouth, like he’d dusted them between his molars instead of shot them from the barrel of a gun— and thought: ah, it’s done. 

For some soldiers, the aftermath is the end. When the relief washes in and the adrenaline dies and the help arrives. Benji’s the help. It’s a crooked, evil phenomena: dreading the end of a fight. Crosses his wires all up in a tangle; it makes him twisted and selfish, doesn’t it, that he dreads the pause in gunfire?  

But that doesn’t mean it’s ever silent, after a fight. The explosions and drumbeat of bullets and clinking of mags and spent rounds — it covered the rest of the noise. 

He keeps his cool, of course. Part of the job. But if there was ever a portion that tested and stretched the limits of his composure, it was the after-noises.

He’s never thinking ah good, it’s over. He’s thinking: aw fuck, here we go. 

*

Benji has the misfortune of taking something to the shoulder. Well. Relative misfortune. The other poor bastard taking cover behind an upturned stack of crates with him is a bit worse off. 

“Patch me up.”

Benji winces when he turns his head. It pulls something, tugs some muscle connected to the injury. Blood bubbles up between his fingers, soaks through his glove. 

Not so much as what soaks through the infantryman propped beside him. It’s a pool between them, spread out like some uncrossable, ruby-shined sea. Within it, the reflection of the noontime sun transfixes Benji. That, or he’s getting woozy.

He’s silent a beat too long; the other soldier begins to panic. He twitches all over, like he means to move. To grab Benji’s arm, his vest. Maybe he thinks he does move. Maybe, in his mind’s eye, he’s shaking Benji by the shoulders.

Maybe he really does think Benji can help. Because this is the part of the battle — the after — where Benji’s job starts. Where the little red cross on his uniform becomes a beacon, rather than a scrap of fabric with a few stitches loose. 

(Benji’s only loose stitches, ever. He prides himself on that.) 

But no amount of tight stitching is going to help the other injured man. Benji’s got a through and through, nice and clean. He can tell, the way the wound aches. You get enough of them, wounds that is…well, you start being able to differentiate pain. Being able to tell the difference in missing flesh, the way nerves throb a specific way for a tactical blade’s slash or shrapnel aching deep. The absences feel different. Voids, and all that. 

“Patch me up!” 

Benji glances up from the nasty, serrated combat knife buried handle-deep in his solar plexus.  When the other soldier screams it, his whole torso shudders. That’s how Benji knows what it’s hit — getting winded after a blow to the center of the chest is shit enough. This is a bit worse. It’ll be about now that he realizes he can’t pull another breath: on cue, the soldier’s eyes pop wide. His face starts to lose color. 

Benji winces as he props himself up to a kneeling position. He lets go of his own injury, gritting his teeth until he swears he feels one chip.

“Rough way of it,” Benji croaks. He’s not sure if it’s from overuse or not speaking at all; he never knows what happens, in the midst of the during. He goes someplace else. Checks out of the hotel, so to speak. Benji laughs.

“What do —you— mean—?” The infantryman wheezes. Benji wishes he knew the man’s name. But they’re all cannon fodder. Frontline first in bastards, he and this one. His name isn’t known either, or else the man would have used it. 

“You’re going to die.” Benji says. With his good arm (not as bad arm, he supposes, because he can feel a nasty fucking bruise blossoming in the crook of his elbow) he reaches across to pinch the man’s eyelids wider. His pupils swim, catching Benji only for a moment before they slip away. 

“I’m —no. You…medic.” 

“Got a basic med kit, sure.” Benji’s focus drifts back to the wound in his chest. The man heaves a breath — one of his last few — and shudders. Another spot, one Benji hadn’t noticed until just now and one that rests unfairly close to his heart, spits a stream of crimson. 

“Hurts—!”

Benji tips the man’s chin up. His head hangs back loose on his shoulders. He shivers again. Somehow, hemusters enough strength to give Benji’s wrist a claw-like grip. Benji welcomes it: the sting of nails into skin distracts from the throb in his shoulder. 

“Got painkillers, yeah.” Benji pats his cheek awkwardly. No matter how many times he finds himself in this position, this gunpowder-scented bedside with none of the cool depressed indifference of a hospital room, he knows he’ll never get better at the manner. It’ll eat at him something fierce, sure. He’ll sit up and remember the exact shade of silvery flecks in this man’s eyes. But easing their final closure with kind words or comforting promises or sympathy — 

Nah. He’s shit at it. Always will be. 

“Got painkillers,” Benji repeats, patting the man’s cheek to stir him a bit. “But it’ll have stopped hurting by now, right? By the time I give ‘em to you, it’ll be done. It’s good to go quick, mate. Promise. You wouldn’t believe how long it takes, sometimes. ‘Sides, you got your brain intact, lucky you. All those nice chemicals of your own’ll be giving you the trip of a —”

The man’s panicked expression slips into something peacefully slack. Doped up. Benji huffs out a laugh that, were it his first time in this exact scenario, might strike him as morbid. 

“Lifetime. Aw, ‘pologies. Poor choice on my part.” 

Benji makes quick work of the chain around the man’s neck. The little blue tags they kit each of them out with are cheaply made. Transparent, light-catching material, maybe resin, with silver etched letters and numbers. Benji has seen them shatter when dropped. Benji has treated a man who ran chest-first into a wall on leave, crunched his tags against his chest, and needed them fished out with a pair of tweezers. He hadn’t much appreciated the Operation joke Benji’d made, during.

He leaves one of the rounded rectangles in the man’s fist, which needs to be manually closed — so he can be identified, once clean-up touches down.

The other tag he slips into his pocket. It’s the first of the afternoon, the first of this after (Benji’s beginning), but it won’t be the last. By the end of the next hour or so, a half dozen of them will clink together. He might even forget they’re there; he might only remember to take them to his lieutenant, to be transferred to records then shipping then family, the next morning when he’s tossing his trousers into the hamper to take them to the wash on base so the blood from this man’s gaping chest wound which stains his thigh and seeps warm onto his skin can be wrung out and tint the water pink — 

Benji blinks. With a gentle hand cupping the back of the dying soldier’s head, he guides that fluttering, distanced gaze down to his own. He holds up the single tag on its chain.

“Rough way.” Benji repeats. He is at his usual, habitual loss for what else to say. “We’ll get it to —well, whoever. Family, or —y’know. Whoever.” 

He hopes the man doesn’t slip away to his hapless fumbling. Would be a particularly shit end to his already shit day. 

Once the body has gone fully limp, Benji pushes himself to his knees. He does a careful check of his surroundings. Other bodies lie amongst the rubble, some out in the open, some groaning  —or dying — from their injuries just out of vision. 

Benji slips the tag into his pocket. He bites his glove off, velcro strap ripping loudly but not loud enough to drown the after-noises. The etched letters of this first man are a soothing texture beneath his swiping thumb. But he can’t make out the word they spell. He never learns the man’s name. 

He doesn’t want to. 

*

 When he discovers, after a thorough assessment of the remnants of the firefight, that he is the last of this particular squadron alive, his hands only set to shaking a little.

Benji has not been in this position before. Their leader for this mission, a stalwart and square-jawed woman by the name of Jamison— or maybe Jemison, or Jamesson — lies in a crumpled heap behind the warm exhaust of a generator. The production facility they had been tasked with protecting had come under predicted attack, but it seems as though despite all her experience she had not been able to predict the nasty, forceful blow to her skull.

Her tags get tucked alongside the others. Benji is all too aware of his own, now. They’re nestled against his chest, digging in beneath the strap of his vest. He’s the only survivor. He needs to get a working comms established; their commander’s radio has been crushed by the same weapon that had made jelly of everything above the shoulders. 

He’s the only survivor. He needs to find a way to share that information. He needs to find someone to share that information with. He needs to get back to base. He needs a shower. He needs sleep. He needs—

To pay attention.

His gut moves him. He has no control of his muscles, so it must be instinct. Instinct: one single breath to his right, behind a corner. Instinct: the swivel of his hip. Instinct, the steadying placement of one boot back, braced to mitigate the momentum that pushes him back as he catches a swinging weapon by its handle. 

It’s instinct that uses both arms to yank his assailant off their feet. But it’s Benji, his shoulder and the pain that comes with this life-saving motion, who screams. 

He stumbles with the shock of it. Like lightning. His palm bruises and cramps. HIs whole arm goes limp as it sizzles white-hot up his forearm, wraps his bicep, and settles like a shard of pure electricity in the oozing hole in his shoulder. 

“Fuck!” Benji gasps as he falls. Embarrassingly, right on his arse. 

“Fuck you!” The weapon-wielder yells back.

It shivers him with déjà vu.

Benji has the sensation of someone looming over him, someone holding him to the ground with a fist in his vest; he has the sensation of instinct and adrenaline seeping from him hand-in-hand. His gut coils weak once more, no longer offering him any help in the face of danger. He’s lost more blood than he realizes. And with that realization comes another:

He’s the last left. There will be no one to deny him painkillers. No one to joke about his assigned method of departure, rough way. No one to tuck his tag in his fist. No one to take it back to base, to identify be identified, to be sent home. 

“Benji.” Benji says. He says it. Not instinct. It’s written on his tag. But he wants them to know.

There’s a long pause where he imagines the graceful arc of the weapon he’d briefly caught. He imagines it cutting through the air. He imagines whatever it is burying itself in his skull. Imagines the mess. 

Benji blinks his eyes open (when had he squeezed them shut?) and stares, for a moment, blankly. 

“Oh shit.”

“Oh.” He breathes. And then, for some reason, he smiles. “Oh shit.” 

*

 “It’s still cute.” 

Benji’s scowl turns into a proper wince; Xavier winds the bandage around his shoulder too tight. He’s not as practiced at this — maybe not at all. And Benji had refused to touch the little bottle of painkillers in his kit. 

It felt wrong. He — it just was wrong.

So he bites his knuckle the whole time Xavier tends to him. While the wound is cleaned, while its packed (squeamishly, which is admittedly charming), while a firm hand pulls the strip of white cotton tight, tight, tight. 

“Sorry?” He’s still delirious. Head swimming from the blood loss, the wind-down of medical trauma. Of endorphins running out. Of—

(the flash of the warehouse, bodies strewn, guns smoking, the after-noises, the man’s rolling eyes)

“Your name.” Xavier insists. "It's still cute."

He looks no worse for wear; almost as if he hasn’t been in the midst of it at all, aside ruffled hair and a sweat-slicked face. There are circles under his eyes, but then again, Benji hasn’t seen a set without them in quite some time. He just hasn’t been close enough to the enemy (which is what Xavier is, his mind insists) to see how they’d been faring.

Not as bad, if Xavier’s chipper, toothy grin and color-flushed face are anything to go by. They’re not, Benji knows. He is by definition an anomaly. Not of this place, this world, and certainly not the standard by which other battle-pallid faces and distanced eyes should be judged against.

I need a fucking nap, Benji thinks, because his thoughts are rapidly unspooling. He keeps his mouth shut to keep them from escaping that way.

But Xavier nudges him. Friendly like, an elbow to his undamaged shoulder. It jostles enough to hurt, but its numb enough now that he can grit his jaw to it.

“Remember? We ran into each other before.” Xavier snorts. “You threw a gun at me. Kind of stupid.”

“Out of ammo.” Benji defends. “What else am I s’posed to do, I see a big bastard like you comin' at me?”

He pretends not to notice how Xavier’s chest puffs at that, even though it wasn’t a compliment.

“Run, maybe. Although that doesn’t always help.” 

“Didn’t.” Benji says. He gestures at the massive gore-slicked hammer propped against a crate adjacent to the position they’ve taken; Xavier had pulled him away from the open-air warehouse floor into a smaller room. Managerial, if he were to guess from the monitors and upended bullet-riddled file cabinets. There are probably useful documents in there he ought to go through and save, bring back for intel. 

But Xavier’s smiling. There’s something off about it, a twist that isn’t charming or jovial that hints at a dark few future hours; Xavier had been the only survivor of his crew, too. 

“Well, us either. A few of those guys were assholes, though, so —“

Benji laughs incredulously at the awful implication of that.”What, so they deserved it?” 

Xavier’s laugh smears right off his face. His eyes do a funny thing: distance and blur.

“Some of them.” He intones quietly, voice dark and monotone. Benji hasn’t known him long enough (doesn’t know him at all!) to determine if that’s uncharacteristic. Given their last encounter, it might be.

And just as quickly it appeared, its gone. Xavier straightens up to his full height, which is fucking up there, and snaps the clasp of Benji’s now-empty med kit shut. He pats it twice, pauses, pats it again. Then tucks it carefully inside Benji’s pack before zipping that shut, too. 

“There we go. You’re all set.” He kneels down again. He’s so tall their faces don’t nearly align, but when he tilts his head its just about there. “Are you going to tell people I kissed it better?”

His breath drifts over Benji’s face. It smells sweet, like fruit flavored candy. It also smells like blood; he has a cut on the inside of his mouth somewhere that still leaks, turns the delicate pink between his white teeth a fresh, deranged red. 

“I’m not going to tell anybody anything.” Benji says. He doesn’t say it because he’s nervous there’s a threat underlying a smile that is, by all visual clues, absolutely threatening. He says it because — 

He says it because he wants Xavier to know he can be trusted. That this isn’t just another good deed, another favor. It isn’t happenstance. A moment of weakness; of mercy. Two’s a pattern. He says it because telling Xavier: if we see each other again — 

No. He can’t say that. 

Something beeps on Xavier’s person. He pats his chest, then his breast pocket. From there, he pulls a tablet. Or what looks like one. Its transparent screen is peculiarly thin. With the blue glow and digital beeps, Benji gets the impression that its technology is incredibly advanced. Futuristic, even. Certainly nothing he’s ever seen. 

And that too is something he should act on: he should pull his side piece from its thigh holster and level it at Xavier’s pale forehead (where a cluster of freckles thins in the center, from brown to nearly his skin tone). He should pull the trigger. He should take the tablet, he should find out if Xavier has tags of his own, he should take the documents, he should turn them all in —

Instead, Benji reaches up and taps his knuckle against the back of the tablet’s screen. 

“Tell your mum ‘hullo’ for me, yeah?” 

Xavier blinks. And then he laughs, wild and delirious — just how Benji feels. 

*

He has no need for them and has never believed in the workings of the universe to as enchanted a level as they require, but the fact that Benji makes it back to base is nothing short of a miracle.

A narrow escape of two enemy patrols. Sliding down a muddy hill (because of course the rain started up) into a drainage ditch. The ambient temperature isn’t too low, but Benji’s injured. And the water is thigh-deep. And the shock of it is enough that he gasps and goes cold all over.

And it should be there they find him, blue in the lips and gray in the face and dead, tag tucked in his own fist and thumb pressed so hard to the name it etches into skin instead of cheap plastic. 

It is there they find him. He just isn’t dead.

His lieutenant claps him hard on the back. It’s his injured side. The gauze has, again miraculously, avoided soaking through with the disgustingly muddy runoff that coats the rest of him. 

Perhaps because it was wound too tight.

“At ease, mate.” Quinn barks. The rest of the pick-up squad gathers around them. Some start to ask questions — who’s with you, where are the rest, where’s the commander, how’d you bloody do it, private? — but the lieutenant creates a barrier between Benji’s listless, tired gaze and the rest of them. 

“Now how have you managed this time, Benj?” 

He doesn’t know Benji’s injured. But the squeeze he puts to that wound on his shoulder feels deliberately harsh. Any other time, the informal touch and it’s proximity to affection might stir something in his gut. But whatever heat that could be there has been eaten up to fuel its instinct, instead. 

Instinct that had saved him. Instinct that had wandered him blindly through the warehouse and right into the path of — 

Benji doesn’t pass out until they have him on the medical transport. But he comes awful close to it then. 

“Miracle, sir.” He chirps. 

*

It turns out he has a bit of internal bleeding near his spleen. And a concussion. Shoulder-shot is baby shit, so some of the others say. Plenty of them are duty served enough to be ninety percent scar tissue. Benji doesn’t want to go that way. He’d like to be mostly intact when he goes. But more and more, he’s realizing that is a privileged afforded to very few in this line of work. 

He spends four days in recovery. A week in post, another on desk duty. He eats up as much of the free time as he can doing things he ought to enjoy. Puzzles. Shooting the shit with some of the other injured, still recovering from missions past. Going over strategy and intelligence with the lieutenant, even though its not information he should be privy to and only knows because its offered under less than professional circumstances. 

Benji thinks of the dead man’s rolling eyes on both of those occasions, when they come up. 

“Sorry.” He pulls away, feigning a wince. The lieutenant’s quarters are darkened with only the orange glow of a distant desk lamp to illuminate them. Benji faces away from it; there isn’t enough light to show the deceit twisting that expression. “Still sore. Thought I could —“

“Tough through it?” Quinn finishes for him, broad chest under his palm rumbling with a laugh that he finds pleasant. It feels good to touch. To be touched; that’s why he’s here. It’s always why he is. Benji gets too much of the after-noise. The clutching of his wrists, of his vest. The begging. Patch me up. Patch me up. 

That’s the real reason he returns to his own quarters, gut icy with something he’s scared to name. 

“No need, mate. Go get your shut eye. Need you functioning anyway.” 

*

Before he slips under his own covers, in his own room, Benji takes his tags off. The chain tinks against the end table’s edge, and the last thought he has before sleep pulls him under is a fearful one: 

Don’t shatter. Don’t shatter. I don’t have tweezers on me. I can’t pull the pieces out. What if it cracks right along my name? Who will know? 

*

He’s cleared for the next mission. And just like the previous, things go south very quickly. 

Patterns, he’s thinking, lip tucked between his teeth as he patches up a particularly nasty gash. It’s not serrated, or else the damage would be worse — this one had been unfortunate enough to take the blade between clavicle and armpit. It will be a slow heal. It will sting like a bitch. Itch like one, too. But the wound’s recipient seems no worse for this shared information, when Benji informs him of it. 

Benji wonders if Xavier is ever worse for the wear. If he’s capable. Even carved up, exhausted. Both of them separated from their respective squads, hunkered up in the same rotted-wood cabin in the middle of nowhere; he should be wary, tired, exhausted, teeth pulled back defensive.

Except when Benji had stumbled into the decrepit old shed, he’d only —

He’d only smiled. 

(“Knew it. We were totally due for another one.”)

That jolliness has faded only slightly the longer Benji spends, carefully disinfecting the edges before pinching the skin together to stitch. He takes his time. He takes time he hasn't got to spare.

“Hurt?” Benji asks, eyebrows pulling in when Xavier shakes his head. “Mate, fuck off. Looks like it does somethin’ fierce. I’ve got pills—?”

Xavier squeezes his eyes shut. The smile slips and then plasters back in place, more plastic-stiff than a moment before. 

“You nursed me back to good health, doc.” Xavier somehow manages to purr, despite his obvious state and rough-edged voice. “I’m okay. I can get back. We’re not even, though. So next time—“

“No.” Benji says. He isn’t sure what he’s denying; that they’ll meet again, that they’ll tend to something open and raw and bleeding on the other, that there will be a next anything. 

There shouldn’t. 

“But we’re two-one. You have to get me back.” Xavier sticks his lower lip out, puppy-eyed and sweet. “Just one more favor?” 

Benji winds the gauze too tight around his midsection and yanks the shirt back down over his torso. He’s very professional about it. His gaze does not wander. He does not linger, does not press firm to heaving ribs and note the jump of Xavier’s body beneath him. Not just the movement of breath, a pained gasp, but — but —

“Fuck you.” Benji says, but it doesn’t have the intended effect.

Xavier just smiles. 

*

“What?” 

Benji isn’t in his bed on base. He sits upright, and the sheets drift off him like water. There and then gone. 

He feels his lungs move, his lips part. 

There’s a laugh on the other side of the room. He’s suddenly feverish. Sweat sticks to him, his chest heaving with desperate breaths. When a hand flattens to the center of it, right above his solar plexus, it slips like he’s slicker with something other than sweat. 

“You woke up, like, all panicked. And went ‘who will know?’. Fucking spooky.” A laugh. “Weird.” 

Benji opens his eyes, then. Except — he’d noted the clock on the wall, the second pair of shoes kicked off by the door to his room, so his eyes had already been open…hadn’t they? 

There are no windows in his room on base, just four bland gray walls. But he feels a breeze — a stirring of fabric, like curtains in the summer—-

Benji sits up again. His head swims and everything goes funny, colorful.

“What?” 

He glances to the side. He’s not in his room. He’s not in his bed, on base. He leans over the side of the mattress. The sheets slip from him like water, and pool on the ground. 

Benji realizes he rests on a shitty, thin futon. Right on the ground. It’s been nudged into the corner of the room — the room being a spare. Mostly empty, devoid fo decoration in a house that shares both those qualities. He hasn’t had the time to do much with it, other than agonize over the debt he now runs with his sister. 

Debts, the thought drifts airily around him like a physical thing. Two-one. Patterns.

His head swims when he turns it the opposite direction, towards the window on the north side of the room. He’s not on base — there are no rooms. He’s in the house, and he’s with— 

Xavier stands against the sunlight that pours in. He fades at the edges, wispy and gold, shimmering like a cartoon oasis. When he finally stands in front of Benji (head tilted and towering, like that high-noon triage in the warehouse weeks ago), he plots out the light. And as he drops to his knees, scooting so that Benji has no choice but to lie back against the mattress, the room is less bright than it was a moment before. 

“You talk in your sleep.” Xavier says. He reaches towards the back of his neck, triceps flexing in a distracting enough manner that it draws Benji’s focus there. He pulls a black, sweat-slick shirt off himself slowly; Benji is incapable of doing anything but watch as each pale inch of skin is revealed. 

“Do I?” He asks, throat dry. 

“Yeah. Wasn’t expecting it.” Xavier smiles and leans over him, braced on stiff arms. He winces; the pull of his brow is cute. “It’s cute.” 

Benji laughs. His hand is suddenly full of warm, smooth skin. Xavier doesn’t look pained this time, as he slides that hand up and down prominent ribs. The gnarly blade has barely left its mark; where it had torn him open, there’s barely a scar. 

“We shouldn’t. We probably shouldn’t.” Benji says. It stirs a strange feeling in him, something close to familiarity. 

“Not your type?” Xavier laughs. It’s that mad and unhinged thing. It doesn’t quite fit the moment. “Bullshit.” 

Benji hasn’t the brain power to react to the ego-driven quip with anything but a gasp. Xavier flattens over top of him, a graceful roll of their bodies together. The sheets are back on him; Xavier pulls them off, the last barrier. He’s warm against Benji, pressed chest-to-chest. Smiling that quirked, strange smile. Not soft at all. Benji wonders if it ever softens — and then he wonders nothing at all. 

They’re kissing — in the middle of it, suddenly. There’s no build up, but it feels languid as though they’ve been doing it for some time. Xavier’s broad hand, fist clenched like it had been around the handle of that hammer, rests on his chest. The other has wedged between their bodies, is nudging the sheets off, is pushing Benji’s sleep pants down his thighs, is — 

Xavier stops kissing him, pulls back just enough to pant against his face. He smells sweet, like he’d just had his body weight in candy floss before they’d gotten to this point. Up until this point, he’s been kissing close-mouthed and shy. But when their cocks touch, squeezed sweetly in together Benji’s hand now, not his, the force of those kisses becomes something else entirely.

The more their hips rock together, skin dragging deliciously, the firmer Xavier’s mouth. He skates kisses across Benji’s jaw, leads teeth down his neck, and then stops to press his forehead to Benji’s chest. To watch. 

“Guess I am, huh?” Xavier pants. His voice is soft and humored. Benji laughs about that, shaking his head — that’s something about the other man he’d noticed right away. The sweet, boyish hint of ego laced in every word. 

It’s sticky and hot, sweat on his temples and dripping onto Benji’s chest, his cheek. He licks his lips and tastes salt. Tastes metal. When Xavier throws his head back and moans softly, his teeth are bloody.

The beginning of the orgasm tightens his stomach then, a warmth spreading in a swirl beneath his belly button. His thighs flex, calves squeezing enough that a cramp zips up his leg.

“Two-two.” Xavier sighs, face buried in his neck. His hand has wedged between them again, is pulling Benji just the way he likes, with the grip and rhythm he prefers when he’s close, he’s close—

Being pulled from the dream is a fist to the gut.

*

Benji jerks awake with a noise that startles him even more.

His shoulder is still tenderly healing, and now it’s properly sore: that arm is lifted at an uncomfortable angle, maybe has been for awhile. His fingers are tight in his hair, fisted in a clench so severe the joints ache. Benji has little to no warning as both consciousness and orgasm split him in separate, abruptly dizzying directions. 

“Fuck,” he grunts, a soft whine slipping alongside the shocked expletive. It’s a longer one than he’s used to; it leaves his hips twitching and abdomen heaving for a good while after the last bit of release cools on his stomach. 

He lays there, breathing hard, staring up at the perforated ceiling of his room on base. 

Benji turns his head to the side. His tags rest in a tangled heap; he’ll have to pick the knot apart at first-call breakfast. In the dark, he can’t make out the letters of his name. He knows they’re there, etched into the rectangle. 

He doesn’t drift off again for another hour. He’s too awake, once he’s pulled himself into the bathroom to wash off the mess, once he’s pulled the scratchy sheet off, once he lays there, shivering and staring up at the ceiling. 

The lack of tiredness starts to frustrate him. Benji reaches up and squeezes his shoulder. To the healing divot of new, pink skin Benji presses his thumb, harder, harderharderharder. Until it hurts, until it’s electrifying, until he has to scowl and shut his eyes and think of something else to distract. Some way for his mind to wander around the pain, some distraction—

Benji relents his grip. He turns onto his uninjured side. He dreams of curling into a ball on his thin futon in an otherwise empty room.

*

He gets exactly four hours and eleven minutes of sleep. His eyes are red-rimmed and underscored with purple shadows the next morning, when he sits across from his lieutenant, when he is briefed on another mission

I need to pack extra in the kit this go around, Benji thinks, blinking sleepily. Just in case. Really. Just in case.

The lieutenant, perhaps mistaking his tired stare for something of secretive interest, smiles back at him. A second later, a slip of paper is passed beneath into his stiff fingers. Benji unfolds it across his lap to read:

functioning?

When his eyes lift, the lieutenant’s sear into him. Benji lifts a flat palm and wiggles it. 

So-so. 

#writing #bp #xw #bp x xw #val au #<- new core au we're reworking hehe #also mentions of violence/gore/brief and nonexplicit illusions to self harm behavior #you know. the benji special.