Ficlet: Above All, Certainty (Star Trek RPF, Chris Pine/Benedict Cumberbatch, 2600 words, Explicit)
Summary: Chris thinks it probably doesn't have to be a big deal. He's gotten the same maybe from co-stars before - Zach, for one - and it's never developed into anything more. If he's lucky, it means he'll end up with another friend for life, but it probably won't be anything more than that. Even his wolf side can't be stupid enough to mate him to a guy who lives in another country.
Notes: This is for siryn99 who asked for "Captain Fine/ Z. Quinto (Or Benedict Cumberbatch)."
Story on AO3
The werewolf thing doesn't work quite like pop culture would have you believe. It's not like wolves and their mates imprint the moment they're born or whatever nonsense Twilight makes people think now. It's more like you meet someone and there's a sense, from whatever part of the wolf makeup that governs that sort of thing, that says this could be it. This wolf - or person - could be a mate. It makes the initial stages a little easier than for humans, but there's still the getting to know each other-do we want this-will this work part to be done.
That's why Chris doesn't think too much of it when he meets Ben and gets that little ping that says maybe. Ben looks at him for a little too long when they meet, but he's human and probably doesn't get quite what's happening.
Zach's a wolf, and totally knows what's happening if the way he's barely even trying to contain his laughter is anything to go by.
"Seriously?" Zach says after Ben's moved on to meeting everyone else. "Your wolf has the weirdest taste."
"Your mate was on Glee." As a comeback, it leaves a lot to be desired, but it's the best thing Chris can come up with when that wolf part of him is still tracking Ben.
Zach just laughs at him again. Bastard.
*
Chris thinks it probably doesn't have to be a big deal. He's gotten the same maybe from co-stars before - Zach, for one - and it's never developed into anything more. If he's lucky, it means he'll end up with another friend for life, but it probably won't be anything more than that. Even his wolf side can't be stupid enough to mate him to a guy who lives in another country.
Then they start rehearsals. It was obvious, even during the table read, that Ben knew what he was doing, but it's something else to watch him act. He's good, probably better than the rest of them.
When Chris runs his mouth about it to the press, Zach sends him the link and Really?
Chris sends back, Fuck you.
*
There's a fight scene, Ben and Zach, and between takes, something like, I wonder if the rumors are true flashes through Chris's mind, which is stupid because he knows those rumors are true. He's seen Jon without a shirt enough to know what kind of marks Zach leaves on him.
The next thing he gets is a really fucking inconvenient flash of lust that's doubly inconvenient because it's not his.
No, Chris says, or tries to say, to the wolf or wolf magic or what the fuck ever governs mating. No matter how hot Ben is or how good an actor or how nice a guy, he doesn't even live in the same country, and he's playing a villain so he's not even coming back to Trek. There's no way letting this guy become his mate is a good idea.
*
Ben shows up late for Friday night drinks, and he has a guy with him. Chris barely restrains his growl, but something must show because Zach throws him an alarmed look.
"Everyone," Ben says with a wave of his hand, "this is Martin. Martin, this is a crowd of people whose names you've no need to remember."
"That kind of politicking is why I'm the one with a BAFTA," Martin says before he goes around and meets everyone individually.
Chris has to blink when he takes Martin's hand and what he should have realized earlier - would have realized earlier if he hadn't been trying so hard to ignore Martin's presence - becomes abundantly clear: Martin is wolf-mated.
"Your eyes are quite blue," Martin says, and a quick look at Ben shows him giving an embarrassed shrug.
"It is your defining feature."
Chris leans back in his chair, puts on his most charming smile, and gestures at himself. "All this, and that's what you choose to mention?" He knows - because he can feel it, gets the ghost of someone else's vision - that Ben takes in what he's showing off.
"Defining feature," Ben says. "Not only feature."
The warmth Chris feels at that is all his, and he doesn't even mind when Ben spends most of the evening laughing with Martin.
*
Tom comes through L.A. and stops in to visit. Chris is glad to see him, he is. Tom is great, a good guy, lots of fun.
Ben is practically incandescent. He plasters himself to Tom's side and doesn't leave. Tom, after greeting Chris and saying, "I've heard all about you," to Zach in a tone that implies so much more than Chris has ever told him, spends the whole weekend - because of course Tom thinks they should all have fun together, the three of them and Zach and Jon - making Ben laugh more than Chris has ever seen him laugh.
"You're freaking me out," Zach says on Saturday afternoon. "And that means you're freaking Jon out."
Chris has to unclench his teeth to try to answer. "He's just-" He makes a sound, not quite a snarl.
"I get it," Zach says. "If that were my unclaimed mate and Tom were all over him, I'd be ready to go all fangs and fur on his ass too. You've gotta either claim him or let him go."
Chris almost bares his teeth.
"Jesus," Zach says, "go outside and calm down. You've gotta get this shit under control."
Chris scowls at him, but he goes outside and wishes he smoked because that would probably help. And give him an excuse to be loitering.
He's calmed down, a little, by the time he goes back inside. He's not sure if it hurts or helps that Ben's eyes find and follow him the moment he comes through the door.
*
"Chris." When they adjourn to a bar after dinner, Tom sits down next to him and slings an arm around his shoulders. "You've been out of sorts all day."
"Sure," Chris says. "I have to share my time with your ugly mug."
"Oh, Chris, you love my face."
Chris can't help laughing, even as he shoves Tom away.
"He just needs to get laid," Zach says.
Chris flips him off. "We don't all have," he almost says "a mate," but catches himself, "someone at home willing to lie back and let us leave marks all over them."
Ben tilts his head, a little like he's looking at them and a little like he's baring his neck. "Or willing to leave marks all over us."
It's not Chris's imagination that he shoots a glance at Chris when he says it. He knows it's not, because the lust this time is worse: his and Ben's, doubled and snapping between them. Ben's eyes go a little dark and glassy, and fuck, fuck, fuck. Chris is supposed to be figuring out how to let him go, not wondering if he can get away with lunging across the table and biting him.
"Sad," Tom says. "That is a sad state of affairs." He turns to goading Chris and Ben into drinking more than is perhaps wise.
Chris is fiercely, selfishly pleased when Ben joins him in resisting all of Tom's efforts to get either of them to hit on someone at the bar.
*
There's a different quality on the set after Tom leaves. Or something different between Chris and Ben anyway. It's not as if Chris's awareness of Ben has ever been muted, but now it's a constant buzz at the base of his skull. Every time he turns around, Ben's eyes are following him.
It gets bad enough that Zach stages an intervention, by which Chris means he shows up at Chris's trailer after they're done for the day and drags him back to his place and he and Jon take turns making alternating stern and sad faces at him.
"It's not just you," Jon says over margaritas. "He has to be feeling it too."
Zach sits down next to Jon, his knee pressing into Jon's thigh.
"It's not easy." Jon puts his hand on Zach's leg. "When you know you could belong to someone, be their mate, and they aren't taking you. It's tough."
Zach puts his arm around Jon and kisses his temple.
Chris rubs his forehead. "You're not making this any easier."
"Chris," Zach leans over the table, "you're not letting go of him."
"Fuck," Chris says, because he's right. "Fuck."
*
Ben shows up at Chris's trailer at the end of the day on Friday. "I brought orange soda," he says. "Alcohol might be more appropriate, but crafty was out." He puts the soda on the table; neither one of them touch it. "I thought we could talk."
"What's up?"
Ben gives him a look that says, even better than any words ever could, that Ben isn't buying Chris's attempt at casual. "I don't think," Ben says carefully, "that I'm the only one feeling this attraction." He takes a few steps toward Chris. "I hope I'm not."
"Ben." Chris puts his hand out. Ben stops before he gets to where Chris would be touching him, which is good. If Chris starts touching him now, he might not stop. "Of course I'm-" Chris takes a deep breath. "I'm a werewolf," he says. "You're feeling this," he pushes some of his mingled affection-interest-lust at Ben, "because it's a potential mate bond."
Ben takes a step back, two, three more until he can sit down on the couch.
"I wouldn't have to wonder," he says.
That's not what Chris was expecting.
"I've worked on three continents in the last year." Ben looks up at him with a look of such naked loneliness that Chris doesn't need the mate bond to feel it. "I know what that does to relationships. It works for Martin and Amanda, because he knows she loves him." He holds out a hand to Chris. "I want that."
Chris sits down on the chair across from him, dizzy with what he's being offered. "Ben, it's not that easy."
"Isn't it? We accept this, and then neither of us has to wonder, ever again."
"We accept this," Chris says, "and we still live on different continents. We accept this and it's a lifetime of trying to manage a few days together a year. We accept this and you don't get to be a dad."
Ben flinches at that, but he rallies quickly. "There's always adoption, or a surrogate."
"Right," Chris says, "single man with children. How long from there until you're outed? Are you prepared for that?"
There's a long, long silence, where Ben doesn't look at him.
"It's not too late," Chris says. "We don't do anything, and it goes away. Lock up when you leave." He leaves Ben there and walks out, even though it's his trailer, even though it's the last thing he wants to do.
*
It hurts, closing everything off. Letting go. He's letting go.
Zach comes by on Saturday and sits with him without speaking for a couple of hours. They have one beer each, and Zach hugs him before he leaves.
*
Chris knows, before he even answers his door on Sunday morning, that it's Ben on the other side.
"May I come in?"
He shouldn't, but Chris lets him in.
"I want this," Ben says. "I don't want to ever wonder if someone wants me or wants me because I'm Sherlock Holmes. I don't want to ever wonder if someone really loves me. I don't want to ever wonder if someone still loves me when I'm half a world away." Chris was careful not to touch Ben when he came in, but now Ben touches him, puts his hand on Chris's shoulder. "I want this kind of love. And I want you."
"Ben, being mated doesn't fix everything. This won't be easy."
"I know." Ben steps closer. "I want to figure it out with you. Please, Chris." He's learned, or figured it out, because his words come with a push at the edges of their connection, where Chris has tried to shut it down.
Chris opens it, and feels the flood of what Ben's feeling, desire and love, and above all, certainty. He means it, every bit of it.
Ben tilts his head, baring his neck. "If I lie back," he murmurs, "will you leave marks all over me?"
Chris groans. He can feel how much Ben wants that, smell it. "Makeup's going to hate me." He sucks at Ben's neck, hard enough that it will leave a mark. The wolf part of him roars in triumph, and his awareness of Ben blossoms into an overwhelming fullness. He can feel everything, knows Ben inside and out.
"Chris," Ben says, and thinks.
"You're mine," Chris tells him. Mine, he sends across the link, every way he knows how.
Chris catches Ben before his knees even start to buckle.
Ben grips at his arms and everything blurs into a haze of movement and shared feeling and not needing to ask for what he wants. It seems like no time at all before Ben is in his bed, on his hands and knees, pushing back into every mark Chris leaves on him. Chris waits for the wolf to be satisfied before he pulls out and flips Ben over so he can see what it's making Ben look like.
Ben, with Chris's mark on his neck, is the most beautiful thing he's ever seen.
Ben arches into him, into that thought, into Chris's teeth in his shoulder.
"Makeup is going to murder you," Ben says later, fingers pressing into the mark on his neck. Chris can feel him under the words, how pleased he is, and how much he knows that he doesn't need the mark to know he and Chris belong to each other.
"Yes," Chris says to Ben's unasked question about his chance to make his ownership of Chris physical. "But not tonight." He puts his hand on Ben's hip, fits his fingers into the bruises on it. "Call sheet has me in the captain's chair most of the day tomorrow."
*
Ben stays over, and they go to the set together in the morning. They don't, strictly speaking, need to. They're tuned into each other, in a way that distance can't touch.
They're not touching, not doing anything to draw anyone's attention to them, and they don't, until they get near Zach. Zach's head snaps up, and he stares at them, then pushes a rumble of approval at Chris.
Ben startles, enough that Chris almost reaches out to steady him. They're wide open, enough that Zach's message went straight through Chris to Ben. Chris keeps his hands to himself, barely, and they separate, Ben to makeup and Chris to Zach.
"Not the choice I thought you were making," Zach says.
Chris shrugs a little, too full of his connection to Ben to heckle him back. "Too late, I guess."
Zach nods. "It's a good choice." He hugs Chris, no stupid bro hugs, a real hug, close and tight.
*
When they break for lunch, Ben turns his phone over and over in his hands and says, "I should-"
Chris glances at him, tunes in to what he's thinking. "Oh," he says. "You can-" He narrows the link between them, shows Ben how to do the same.
He gets a jumble back from Ben, thanks and embarrassment and a clumsy attempt at reassurance.
Chris nudges Ben with his shoulder. "Go," he says. "It doesn't mean I have to know everything. I won't eavesdrop." He doesn't, but he does watch, and he doesn't need their bond to see the way whatever Martin says eases the nervous set of Ben's shoulders.
Ben turns toward him, smiles across the lot, and Chris can feel the whisper of his name echoing through their bond at the same time he sees Ben's lips form the word.
Notes: This is for siryn99 who asked for "Captain Fine/ Z. Quinto (Or Benedict Cumberbatch)."
Story on AO3
The werewolf thing doesn't work quite like pop culture would have you believe. It's not like wolves and their mates imprint the moment they're born or whatever nonsense Twilight makes people think now. It's more like you meet someone and there's a sense, from whatever part of the wolf makeup that governs that sort of thing, that says this could be it. This wolf - or person - could be a mate. It makes the initial stages a little easier than for humans, but there's still the getting to know each other-do we want this-will this work part to be done.
That's why Chris doesn't think too much of it when he meets Ben and gets that little ping that says maybe. Ben looks at him for a little too long when they meet, but he's human and probably doesn't get quite what's happening.
Zach's a wolf, and totally knows what's happening if the way he's barely even trying to contain his laughter is anything to go by.
"Seriously?" Zach says after Ben's moved on to meeting everyone else. "Your wolf has the weirdest taste."
"Your mate was on Glee." As a comeback, it leaves a lot to be desired, but it's the best thing Chris can come up with when that wolf part of him is still tracking Ben.
Zach just laughs at him again. Bastard.
*
Chris thinks it probably doesn't have to be a big deal. He's gotten the same maybe from co-stars before - Zach, for one - and it's never developed into anything more. If he's lucky, it means he'll end up with another friend for life, but it probably won't be anything more than that. Even his wolf side can't be stupid enough to mate him to a guy who lives in another country.
Then they start rehearsals. It was obvious, even during the table read, that Ben knew what he was doing, but it's something else to watch him act. He's good, probably better than the rest of them.
When Chris runs his mouth about it to the press, Zach sends him the link and Really?
Chris sends back, Fuck you.
*
There's a fight scene, Ben and Zach, and between takes, something like, I wonder if the rumors are true flashes through Chris's mind, which is stupid because he knows those rumors are true. He's seen Jon without a shirt enough to know what kind of marks Zach leaves on him.
The next thing he gets is a really fucking inconvenient flash of lust that's doubly inconvenient because it's not his.
No, Chris says, or tries to say, to the wolf or wolf magic or what the fuck ever governs mating. No matter how hot Ben is or how good an actor or how nice a guy, he doesn't even live in the same country, and he's playing a villain so he's not even coming back to Trek. There's no way letting this guy become his mate is a good idea.
*
Ben shows up late for Friday night drinks, and he has a guy with him. Chris barely restrains his growl, but something must show because Zach throws him an alarmed look.
"Everyone," Ben says with a wave of his hand, "this is Martin. Martin, this is a crowd of people whose names you've no need to remember."
"That kind of politicking is why I'm the one with a BAFTA," Martin says before he goes around and meets everyone individually.
Chris has to blink when he takes Martin's hand and what he should have realized earlier - would have realized earlier if he hadn't been trying so hard to ignore Martin's presence - becomes abundantly clear: Martin is wolf-mated.
"Your eyes are quite blue," Martin says, and a quick look at Ben shows him giving an embarrassed shrug.
"It is your defining feature."
Chris leans back in his chair, puts on his most charming smile, and gestures at himself. "All this, and that's what you choose to mention?" He knows - because he can feel it, gets the ghost of someone else's vision - that Ben takes in what he's showing off.
"Defining feature," Ben says. "Not only feature."
The warmth Chris feels at that is all his, and he doesn't even mind when Ben spends most of the evening laughing with Martin.
*
Tom comes through L.A. and stops in to visit. Chris is glad to see him, he is. Tom is great, a good guy, lots of fun.
Ben is practically incandescent. He plasters himself to Tom's side and doesn't leave. Tom, after greeting Chris and saying, "I've heard all about you," to Zach in a tone that implies so much more than Chris has ever told him, spends the whole weekend - because of course Tom thinks they should all have fun together, the three of them and Zach and Jon - making Ben laugh more than Chris has ever seen him laugh.
"You're freaking me out," Zach says on Saturday afternoon. "And that means you're freaking Jon out."
Chris has to unclench his teeth to try to answer. "He's just-" He makes a sound, not quite a snarl.
"I get it," Zach says. "If that were my unclaimed mate and Tom were all over him, I'd be ready to go all fangs and fur on his ass too. You've gotta either claim him or let him go."
Chris almost bares his teeth.
"Jesus," Zach says, "go outside and calm down. You've gotta get this shit under control."
Chris scowls at him, but he goes outside and wishes he smoked because that would probably help. And give him an excuse to be loitering.
He's calmed down, a little, by the time he goes back inside. He's not sure if it hurts or helps that Ben's eyes find and follow him the moment he comes through the door.
*
"Chris." When they adjourn to a bar after dinner, Tom sits down next to him and slings an arm around his shoulders. "You've been out of sorts all day."
"Sure," Chris says. "I have to share my time with your ugly mug."
"Oh, Chris, you love my face."
Chris can't help laughing, even as he shoves Tom away.
"He just needs to get laid," Zach says.
Chris flips him off. "We don't all have," he almost says "a mate," but catches himself, "someone at home willing to lie back and let us leave marks all over them."
Ben tilts his head, a little like he's looking at them and a little like he's baring his neck. "Or willing to leave marks all over us."
It's not Chris's imagination that he shoots a glance at Chris when he says it. He knows it's not, because the lust this time is worse: his and Ben's, doubled and snapping between them. Ben's eyes go a little dark and glassy, and fuck, fuck, fuck. Chris is supposed to be figuring out how to let him go, not wondering if he can get away with lunging across the table and biting him.
"Sad," Tom says. "That is a sad state of affairs." He turns to goading Chris and Ben into drinking more than is perhaps wise.
Chris is fiercely, selfishly pleased when Ben joins him in resisting all of Tom's efforts to get either of them to hit on someone at the bar.
*
There's a different quality on the set after Tom leaves. Or something different between Chris and Ben anyway. It's not as if Chris's awareness of Ben has ever been muted, but now it's a constant buzz at the base of his skull. Every time he turns around, Ben's eyes are following him.
It gets bad enough that Zach stages an intervention, by which Chris means he shows up at Chris's trailer after they're done for the day and drags him back to his place and he and Jon take turns making alternating stern and sad faces at him.
"It's not just you," Jon says over margaritas. "He has to be feeling it too."
Zach sits down next to Jon, his knee pressing into Jon's thigh.
"It's not easy." Jon puts his hand on Zach's leg. "When you know you could belong to someone, be their mate, and they aren't taking you. It's tough."
Zach puts his arm around Jon and kisses his temple.
Chris rubs his forehead. "You're not making this any easier."
"Chris," Zach leans over the table, "you're not letting go of him."
"Fuck," Chris says, because he's right. "Fuck."
*
Ben shows up at Chris's trailer at the end of the day on Friday. "I brought orange soda," he says. "Alcohol might be more appropriate, but crafty was out." He puts the soda on the table; neither one of them touch it. "I thought we could talk."
"What's up?"
Ben gives him a look that says, even better than any words ever could, that Ben isn't buying Chris's attempt at casual. "I don't think," Ben says carefully, "that I'm the only one feeling this attraction." He takes a few steps toward Chris. "I hope I'm not."
"Ben." Chris puts his hand out. Ben stops before he gets to where Chris would be touching him, which is good. If Chris starts touching him now, he might not stop. "Of course I'm-" Chris takes a deep breath. "I'm a werewolf," he says. "You're feeling this," he pushes some of his mingled affection-interest-lust at Ben, "because it's a potential mate bond."
Ben takes a step back, two, three more until he can sit down on the couch.
"I wouldn't have to wonder," he says.
That's not what Chris was expecting.
"I've worked on three continents in the last year." Ben looks up at him with a look of such naked loneliness that Chris doesn't need the mate bond to feel it. "I know what that does to relationships. It works for Martin and Amanda, because he knows she loves him." He holds out a hand to Chris. "I want that."
Chris sits down on the chair across from him, dizzy with what he's being offered. "Ben, it's not that easy."
"Isn't it? We accept this, and then neither of us has to wonder, ever again."
"We accept this," Chris says, "and we still live on different continents. We accept this and it's a lifetime of trying to manage a few days together a year. We accept this and you don't get to be a dad."
Ben flinches at that, but he rallies quickly. "There's always adoption, or a surrogate."
"Right," Chris says, "single man with children. How long from there until you're outed? Are you prepared for that?"
There's a long, long silence, where Ben doesn't look at him.
"It's not too late," Chris says. "We don't do anything, and it goes away. Lock up when you leave." He leaves Ben there and walks out, even though it's his trailer, even though it's the last thing he wants to do.
*
It hurts, closing everything off. Letting go. He's letting go.
Zach comes by on Saturday and sits with him without speaking for a couple of hours. They have one beer each, and Zach hugs him before he leaves.
*
Chris knows, before he even answers his door on Sunday morning, that it's Ben on the other side.
"May I come in?"
He shouldn't, but Chris lets him in.
"I want this," Ben says. "I don't want to ever wonder if someone wants me or wants me because I'm Sherlock Holmes. I don't want to ever wonder if someone really loves me. I don't want to ever wonder if someone still loves me when I'm half a world away." Chris was careful not to touch Ben when he came in, but now Ben touches him, puts his hand on Chris's shoulder. "I want this kind of love. And I want you."
"Ben, being mated doesn't fix everything. This won't be easy."
"I know." Ben steps closer. "I want to figure it out with you. Please, Chris." He's learned, or figured it out, because his words come with a push at the edges of their connection, where Chris has tried to shut it down.
Chris opens it, and feels the flood of what Ben's feeling, desire and love, and above all, certainty. He means it, every bit of it.
Ben tilts his head, baring his neck. "If I lie back," he murmurs, "will you leave marks all over me?"
Chris groans. He can feel how much Ben wants that, smell it. "Makeup's going to hate me." He sucks at Ben's neck, hard enough that it will leave a mark. The wolf part of him roars in triumph, and his awareness of Ben blossoms into an overwhelming fullness. He can feel everything, knows Ben inside and out.
"Chris," Ben says, and thinks.
"You're mine," Chris tells him. Mine, he sends across the link, every way he knows how.
Chris catches Ben before his knees even start to buckle.
Ben grips at his arms and everything blurs into a haze of movement and shared feeling and not needing to ask for what he wants. It seems like no time at all before Ben is in his bed, on his hands and knees, pushing back into every mark Chris leaves on him. Chris waits for the wolf to be satisfied before he pulls out and flips Ben over so he can see what it's making Ben look like.
Ben, with Chris's mark on his neck, is the most beautiful thing he's ever seen.
Ben arches into him, into that thought, into Chris's teeth in his shoulder.
"Makeup is going to murder you," Ben says later, fingers pressing into the mark on his neck. Chris can feel him under the words, how pleased he is, and how much he knows that he doesn't need the mark to know he and Chris belong to each other.
"Yes," Chris says to Ben's unasked question about his chance to make his ownership of Chris physical. "But not tonight." He puts his hand on Ben's hip, fits his fingers into the bruises on it. "Call sheet has me in the captain's chair most of the day tomorrow."
*
Ben stays over, and they go to the set together in the morning. They don't, strictly speaking, need to. They're tuned into each other, in a way that distance can't touch.
They're not touching, not doing anything to draw anyone's attention to them, and they don't, until they get near Zach. Zach's head snaps up, and he stares at them, then pushes a rumble of approval at Chris.
Ben startles, enough that Chris almost reaches out to steady him. They're wide open, enough that Zach's message went straight through Chris to Ben. Chris keeps his hands to himself, barely, and they separate, Ben to makeup and Chris to Zach.
"Not the choice I thought you were making," Zach says.
Chris shrugs a little, too full of his connection to Ben to heckle him back. "Too late, I guess."
Zach nods. "It's a good choice." He hugs Chris, no stupid bro hugs, a real hug, close and tight.
*
When they break for lunch, Ben turns his phone over and over in his hands and says, "I should-"
Chris glances at him, tunes in to what he's thinking. "Oh," he says. "You can-" He narrows the link between them, shows Ben how to do the same.
He gets a jumble back from Ben, thanks and embarrassment and a clumsy attempt at reassurance.
Chris nudges Ben with his shoulder. "Go," he says. "It doesn't mean I have to know everything. I won't eavesdrop." He doesn't, but he does watch, and he doesn't need their bond to see the way whatever Martin says eases the nervous set of Ben's shoulders.
Ben turns toward him, smiles across the lot, and Chris can feel the whisper of his name echoing through their bond at the same time he sees Ben's lips form the word.