This Sharp Feeling
Title: This Sharp Feeling
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Ben Linus/OC
Warning: Mentions of sex, masturbation, child abuse, sexual abuse, referenced alcoholism.
Summary: Ben finds something he doesn't know what to do with.
Ben recognises her face from somewhere he can't quite place. He's certain he's seen her before, maybe when quivering in a locked bedroom with the sound of his Father's whisky laden voice just outside the door, or through the fresh garden of Dharma corpses he helps create. He's aware it's not possible. She simply has that sense about her. Familiarity. He can feel it when he reaches out to shake her hand as he greets her off the sub. It's as though the past has hooked itself onto her back, slid between the discs of her spine.
"Pleasure to meet you, my name's Benjamin Linus."
"I'm Magdalene Ness," as she smiles at him, her eyes illuminate, "lovely to meet you, too, Mr Linus."
She's important, and they are inexplicably bound though he knows not how. He watches her with her bright grin and pale face, sorrow stacked away behind it, hidden. It creeps out every other second and tugs on the corners of her lips, as though she has to fight her mouth to maintain a smile. She picks at her nails and makes herself smaller, shoulders burrowed and hands clasped- a rabbit, constantly in the shadow of a farmer's gun.
"I'm so excited to be working here; it's such a lovely place," she glances around, soaking in the greens and blues surrounding her.
Her voice is somewhere neatly in between poetry and deception- like a sad but graceful lie. She walks slowly in comparison to his brisk strides. He guesses he must be right about the weight on her back. He takes her bags and she doesn't stop thanking him until they reach her new home.
-
She's an astronomer, and cosmologist. Her job is to study these subjects from the perspective of being on-island. It's the reason Ben hired her. Jacob had written about her possible candidacy so of course her recruitment was encouraged by everyone.
She speaks about the stars and the cosmos with such wonder that awe bleeds from her features.
-
Ben finds any excuse to work close to her. His words often sound pathetic in his mouth.
Can I work here today? The heating's broke in my office. Or, there's some refurbishment going on.
She believes him though, so it's fine. Or at least she's courteous enough to pretend to.
He watches intently as she scribbles something down. He observes every part of her, the nose wrinkled up in concentration, the long button-down shirt on her slender form, the way she bows her head to take a closer look at her notes. A few strands of hair fall in her face; so she hurriedly tucks them back behind her ears.
Much ease comes in the admiring her. It feels very natural, an organic response to being in her company.
Ben respects her as well. The detachment she has composed, the heart she has managed to bandage up and close off from the world. A clever construction of distance. The walls will crumble eventually, however, and she'll be left cold- a grappling cicada, desperate for any semblance of intimacy, moulting a lonesome skin.
-
She works in a solid mind-set, all of her attention is immersed in whatever is in front of her. They are similar, then. Both know a thing or two about devotion.
-
Even exhaustion doesn't prevent him from laying awake with Magdalene filling his thoughts. On his back in bed, knackered, he wants to know what her mouth might feel like moving across his body. Up his legs and to more private places. He imagines her whole skin pressed against his, he imagines moving inside her, steady and slow. He touches himself with her body inside of his head, naked and writhing. Fantasizing almost feels corrupt when it involves her. Perhaps that's because he doesn't deserve to be with her in that way, to even dream about it.
When he comes his bones feel filthy, like he's let her down. He barely even knows her. What is he thinking? He can't even explain it, just that she should be fucked by someone less rotten than himself.
He'll never get to lay with her anyway so this is futile thinking.
-
Ben touches her whenever possible. When they pass each other around studies and in communal kitchens, he pushes his hand out a bit so as to lightly graze hers. The intimacy is always achingly brief. Fleeting salvation. It cracks him in two nonetheless. Suddenly there is hope where there was once just splinters.
-
"Would you like to join our book club, Magdalene? There's a meeting tonight," Ben says when he sees her making coffee one morning.
"I'd love to, Benjamin."
She always calls him by his full name. At first it's intense and he is perturbed by it. Now it feels natural. Unbelievably casual. It falls out of her lips smoothly and he enjoys hearing it.
It turns out they share a similar taste in literature. She effuses to him for nearly an hour about the clear beauty of Scott Fitzgerald's prose, the brutal magic of Bukowski's poetry. He listens, collects every word she says and stores it in his mind, takes in absolutely everything. Other people try to urge the meeting forward but Ben ignores them. Silences them. He wants to be listening only to her.
"I mean, he may have created many inconsequential pieces but a great deal of his poetry is," she pauses, looking for the right word, "holy. Have you read I am eaten by butterflies? It's one of his uncollected works."
Ben shakes his head.
"You should read it, honestly."
She's so alive when she's talking like this. So agonizingly human that it guts him, twists sharpness into his sides. The passion she has on the subject is alive and burning.
"I will," he nodes, "I will."
"One of the lines is so perfect: my poems are only scratchings on the floor of a cave. I've never heard a poet talk about poetry like that before."
He wants to eat her or something. She has short, choppy hair, and she's wearing a warm-looking sweater. Her face beams at him. She keeps talking about that poem, using her hands to express how amazing she finds it.
"It sounds brilliant," he says, his eyes soaking more of her in.
She tells him that it is and he adores her. He's terrified that she will feed on his heart in the end, then pick the fabric of it from her teeth. But he adores her anyway. It's not the kind of thing one can decide against. It comes like a wave- naturally.
He gives her a handful of books to read on her way out. She'll like them, he promises.
-
They have spent a fair amount of time together, and neither have given anything private away about themselves. It's a game, unspoken and unending. The first to reveal even the slightest detail has surrendered by default. Ben guesses it'll probably be him. She's too composed, too constructed to relax her walls. Even for a tiny flash of time.
-
You create your own longing. You tell yourself you don't need someone that badly and that you can cope fine without them. That way, it's easier to face the person looking at you in the mirror. You promise yourself it's only stress and heat you're trying to scratch out of your bloodstream, not traces of a lover who you haven't even had. You do this because it's less painful to deceive yourself than to be honest, to succumb to what you know can only be unrequited. You tell yourself you were born for something other than this, if only you could recall it. If only you could stop pining for one hour and try to remember something other than green eyes, green eyes, green eyes, and waves of yellow hair, and green eyes, and small hands.
(But nothing will equal those small hands and nothing will ever equal those fucking green eyes.)
-
Ben is right in the end. He's the first one to give himself away. It's at a Christmas party. Everyone is drinking wine or whiskey apart from him.
"You don't drink?" she asks politely as she sits down next to him.
He shakes his head, "My Father was a bitter drunk."
She nods, she nods like she understands. It feels like a strange relief. He angles his face away from her stare; it cauterizes him.
"I'm sorry."
Her eyes are huge, brimming with her apology. She whispers it as though it were a secret for only him to hear. Their separate gazes meet somehow in the cracked darkness. The shivering lights from the front of the room reach and slide between them. She blinks before he does, letting her attention fall to her lap where she picks at a nail. Her fingers seem well-versed in awkwardness.
"And I'm sorry for bringing it up. I didn't think-"
"No matter," Ben tells her.
"I'm still sorry."
Instead of synapses, Ben wonders if Magdalene has apologies keeping her body in place. She mutters them so frequently; surely they have crawled their way inside her. Anyone whose spent more than a week in her company must know that she will always be sorry about something. Even when the only thing left to be guilty about is the bones that she's made of and the last pieces of air left in her lungs. Even then she will still be sorry.
-
Ben waits for weeks after that. He waits for her to open a small piece of herself up for him. They're in the lab when it happens. Finally, she says: "He was like a wolf. He was just a man, but he was closer to a wolf."
She says it so gently it almost appears to be a casual conversation. However, he knows immediately that it isn't.
"Who was he?"
"My Father's best friend," she flips through the papers on the table, speaking in a non-committal way, like they were discussing the weather, "It started when he began baby-sitting us, when my Father went away on business."
She could stop there. Ben has already grasped the gist of it. Her voice perseveres though- a fire burning itself to death.
"He led me out to the garden shed so my little brothers wouldn't notice. He took off my pyjamas. He'd ask me to take them off myself if he felt patient."
Ben can't help it. He involuntary takes in a breath. It's sharp and audible.
"Well," she sighs, "you get the picture."
He tells himself how to breathe.
"It began when I was eight, and it didn't stop until I was thirteen. My Father came home early and caught him one night."
Ben wants to look away but he can't.
"And my Daddy beat him, he beat him so hard," her tone is slow and deliberate, "left him paralysed, only able to move his neck," she drinks some of her coffee, "so he went back and snapped it."
She laughs. The sound is low and hollow, brutally raw. Ben averts his eyes.
"We're flawed to our very core, and sad sometimes," she bites her lip absent-mindedly, "but we're always more than those who've hurt us, Benjamin."
He agrees, "What happened to us is dead."
For the first time he looks at her and sees a bud of hope. She repeats his words and adds her own, they roll of her tongue like water droplets, "So we're free."
That night he doesn't dream about making love to her, he dreams of war instead. He wakes up in the early hours to spill vomit over the toilet seat. Visceral images form in the backs of his eyes when he does, of a confused little girl, clenching her trembling fists as she's lead outside into the cold and dark night.
Everything is always so horribly delicate. This, he realises, is the first slash of love. He asks himself how can I keep her?
-
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Ben Linus/OC
Warning: Mentions of sex, masturbation, child abuse, sexual abuse, referenced alcoholism.
Summary: Ben finds something he doesn't know what to do with.
Ben recognises her face from somewhere he can't quite place. He's certain he's seen her before, maybe when quivering in a locked bedroom with the sound of his Father's whisky laden voice just outside the door, or through the fresh garden of Dharma corpses he helps create. He's aware it's not possible. She simply has that sense about her. Familiarity. He can feel it when he reaches out to shake her hand as he greets her off the sub. It's as though the past has hooked itself onto her back, slid between the discs of her spine.
"Pleasure to meet you, my name's Benjamin Linus."
"I'm Magdalene Ness," as she smiles at him, her eyes illuminate, "lovely to meet you, too, Mr Linus."
She's important, and they are inexplicably bound though he knows not how. He watches her with her bright grin and pale face, sorrow stacked away behind it, hidden. It creeps out every other second and tugs on the corners of her lips, as though she has to fight her mouth to maintain a smile. She picks at her nails and makes herself smaller, shoulders burrowed and hands clasped- a rabbit, constantly in the shadow of a farmer's gun.
"I'm so excited to be working here; it's such a lovely place," she glances around, soaking in the greens and blues surrounding her.
Her voice is somewhere neatly in between poetry and deception- like a sad but graceful lie. She walks slowly in comparison to his brisk strides. He guesses he must be right about the weight on her back. He takes her bags and she doesn't stop thanking him until they reach her new home.
-
She's an astronomer, and cosmologist. Her job is to study these subjects from the perspective of being on-island. It's the reason Ben hired her. Jacob had written about her possible candidacy so of course her recruitment was encouraged by everyone.
She speaks about the stars and the cosmos with such wonder that awe bleeds from her features.
-
Ben finds any excuse to work close to her. His words often sound pathetic in his mouth.
Can I work here today? The heating's broke in my office. Or, there's some refurbishment going on.
She believes him though, so it's fine. Or at least she's courteous enough to pretend to.
He watches intently as she scribbles something down. He observes every part of her, the nose wrinkled up in concentration, the long button-down shirt on her slender form, the way she bows her head to take a closer look at her notes. A few strands of hair fall in her face; so she hurriedly tucks them back behind her ears.
Much ease comes in the admiring her. It feels very natural, an organic response to being in her company.
Ben respects her as well. The detachment she has composed, the heart she has managed to bandage up and close off from the world. A clever construction of distance. The walls will crumble eventually, however, and she'll be left cold- a grappling cicada, desperate for any semblance of intimacy, moulting a lonesome skin.
-
She works in a solid mind-set, all of her attention is immersed in whatever is in front of her. They are similar, then. Both know a thing or two about devotion.
-
Even exhaustion doesn't prevent him from laying awake with Magdalene filling his thoughts. On his back in bed, knackered, he wants to know what her mouth might feel like moving across his body. Up his legs and to more private places. He imagines her whole skin pressed against his, he imagines moving inside her, steady and slow. He touches himself with her body inside of his head, naked and writhing. Fantasizing almost feels corrupt when it involves her. Perhaps that's because he doesn't deserve to be with her in that way, to even dream about it.
When he comes his bones feel filthy, like he's let her down. He barely even knows her. What is he thinking? He can't even explain it, just that she should be fucked by someone less rotten than himself.
He'll never get to lay with her anyway so this is futile thinking.
-
Ben touches her whenever possible. When they pass each other around studies and in communal kitchens, he pushes his hand out a bit so as to lightly graze hers. The intimacy is always achingly brief. Fleeting salvation. It cracks him in two nonetheless. Suddenly there is hope where there was once just splinters.
-
"Would you like to join our book club, Magdalene? There's a meeting tonight," Ben says when he sees her making coffee one morning.
"I'd love to, Benjamin."
She always calls him by his full name. At first it's intense and he is perturbed by it. Now it feels natural. Unbelievably casual. It falls out of her lips smoothly and he enjoys hearing it.
It turns out they share a similar taste in literature. She effuses to him for nearly an hour about the clear beauty of Scott Fitzgerald's prose, the brutal magic of Bukowski's poetry. He listens, collects every word she says and stores it in his mind, takes in absolutely everything. Other people try to urge the meeting forward but Ben ignores them. Silences them. He wants to be listening only to her.
"I mean, he may have created many inconsequential pieces but a great deal of his poetry is," she pauses, looking for the right word, "holy. Have you read I am eaten by butterflies? It's one of his uncollected works."
Ben shakes his head.
"You should read it, honestly."
She's so alive when she's talking like this. So agonizingly human that it guts him, twists sharpness into his sides. The passion she has on the subject is alive and burning.
"I will," he nodes, "I will."
"One of the lines is so perfect: my poems are only scratchings on the floor of a cave. I've never heard a poet talk about poetry like that before."
He wants to eat her or something. She has short, choppy hair, and she's wearing a warm-looking sweater. Her face beams at him. She keeps talking about that poem, using her hands to express how amazing she finds it.
"It sounds brilliant," he says, his eyes soaking more of her in.
She tells him that it is and he adores her. He's terrified that she will feed on his heart in the end, then pick the fabric of it from her teeth. But he adores her anyway. It's not the kind of thing one can decide against. It comes like a wave- naturally.
He gives her a handful of books to read on her way out. She'll like them, he promises.
-
They have spent a fair amount of time together, and neither have given anything private away about themselves. It's a game, unspoken and unending. The first to reveal even the slightest detail has surrendered by default. Ben guesses it'll probably be him. She's too composed, too constructed to relax her walls. Even for a tiny flash of time.
-
You create your own longing. You tell yourself you don't need someone that badly and that you can cope fine without them. That way, it's easier to face the person looking at you in the mirror. You promise yourself it's only stress and heat you're trying to scratch out of your bloodstream, not traces of a lover who you haven't even had. You do this because it's less painful to deceive yourself than to be honest, to succumb to what you know can only be unrequited. You tell yourself you were born for something other than this, if only you could recall it. If only you could stop pining for one hour and try to remember something other than green eyes, green eyes, green eyes, and waves of yellow hair, and green eyes, and small hands.
(But nothing will equal those small hands and nothing will ever equal those fucking green eyes.)
-
Ben is right in the end. He's the first one to give himself away. It's at a Christmas party. Everyone is drinking wine or whiskey apart from him.
"You don't drink?" she asks politely as she sits down next to him.
He shakes his head, "My Father was a bitter drunk."
She nods, she nods like she understands. It feels like a strange relief. He angles his face away from her stare; it cauterizes him.
"I'm sorry."
Her eyes are huge, brimming with her apology. She whispers it as though it were a secret for only him to hear. Their separate gazes meet somehow in the cracked darkness. The shivering lights from the front of the room reach and slide between them. She blinks before he does, letting her attention fall to her lap where she picks at a nail. Her fingers seem well-versed in awkwardness.
"And I'm sorry for bringing it up. I didn't think-"
"No matter," Ben tells her.
"I'm still sorry."
Instead of synapses, Ben wonders if Magdalene has apologies keeping her body in place. She mutters them so frequently; surely they have crawled their way inside her. Anyone whose spent more than a week in her company must know that she will always be sorry about something. Even when the only thing left to be guilty about is the bones that she's made of and the last pieces of air left in her lungs. Even then she will still be sorry.
-
Ben waits for weeks after that. He waits for her to open a small piece of herself up for him. They're in the lab when it happens. Finally, she says: "He was like a wolf. He was just a man, but he was closer to a wolf."
She says it so gently it almost appears to be a casual conversation. However, he knows immediately that it isn't.
"Who was he?"
"My Father's best friend," she flips through the papers on the table, speaking in a non-committal way, like they were discussing the weather, "It started when he began baby-sitting us, when my Father went away on business."
She could stop there. Ben has already grasped the gist of it. Her voice perseveres though- a fire burning itself to death.
"He led me out to the garden shed so my little brothers wouldn't notice. He took off my pyjamas. He'd ask me to take them off myself if he felt patient."
Ben can't help it. He involuntary takes in a breath. It's sharp and audible.
"Well," she sighs, "you get the picture."
He tells himself how to breathe.
"It began when I was eight, and it didn't stop until I was thirteen. My Father came home early and caught him one night."
Ben wants to look away but he can't.
"And my Daddy beat him, he beat him so hard," her tone is slow and deliberate, "left him paralysed, only able to move his neck," she drinks some of her coffee, "so he went back and snapped it."
She laughs. The sound is low and hollow, brutally raw. Ben averts his eyes.
"We're flawed to our very core, and sad sometimes," she bites her lip absent-mindedly, "but we're always more than those who've hurt us, Benjamin."
He agrees, "What happened to us is dead."
For the first time he looks at her and sees a bud of hope. She repeats his words and adds her own, they roll of her tongue like water droplets, "So we're free."
That night he doesn't dream about making love to her, he dreams of war instead. He wakes up in the early hours to spill vomit over the toilet seat. Visceral images form in the backs of his eyes when he does, of a confused little girl, clenching her trembling fists as she's lead outside into the cold and dark night.
Everything is always so horribly delicate. This, he realises, is the first slash of love. He asks himself how can I keep her?
-