bury the heart / stella & benji

Stella's movement is gentle, glaringly so, despite her words.

Benji watches her from his place on her bed, back resting against the headboard. An empty notebook sits in his lap and he brushes the pencil in his hand over it absently. A building comes to life slowly beneath his fingertips as Stella adjusts her nightgown. She reveals a shoulder slowly as if he hasn't seen all of her hundreds of times.

It's oddly charming.

He stares at her as she speaks, only half-listening to her chatter. Stella's been a talker for as long as he's known her and over the years it's become easier to tune her out than to let her push his buttons. She's fond of making decisions for him, of telling him what he likes and doesn't like, but the more she does that the more he knows that she doesn't love him. It's alright, a relationship doesn't need to have that.

She brings up Cleo and he shuts his eyes, fingers tightening on the pencil. Finding her in the dark the other night had felt like a bad case of deja-vu. Benji hadn't been the one to find Scarlet but he'd dreamed about it so many times that he might as well have been and finding Cleo had brought all those memories back in full force.

When Stella reaches for him, he lets his cheek fall against her palm. Her hand is icy against his cheek and he raises a hand to keep hers there for a moment. It's a reflex, done out of necessity. He hasn't been feeling well for a while but it isn't his illness, it's something else.

There's something fractured within him.

Benji ignores it and sets his notebook aside, Stella a welcome distraction from his thoughts. The two of them were assigned the reproductive system, something that they both knew far too well.

"Maybe we should start with some practical experience," he suggests and turns towards her on the bed, "Just to get those ideas flowing."

He presses his lips against her bare shoulder and places a hand on her stomach. What he and Stella have isn't much but it's the most familiar and constant thing in his life. There's a hollowness between them but no one knows him better than she does, it's kind of a pity.

"Promise me that you won't go anywhere at night without me," he murmurs against her skin. Even through their dysfunction, the idea of losing Stella hurts, "Even if you don't believe her."

Some of the pieces of them that fit together are good. The reason he always winds up back here, in her bedroom, is because he's supposed to be here, with her.

For a moment, a brief dream, he thought he might be different. He held Scars's hand in his and the world finally slid into place in a way that made sense. Then Stella happened, in the same way that she always did, how she'd always known how to.

And he was fucking her when Scarlet was being butchered.

"Are you angry with me?"

"No," he answers truthfully even as she gets up and leaves him. His side is colder where she was pressed against him and Benji shudders a little. His blood circulation has always been bad.

Like always, he wishes to be less weak, less of a fraud.

Stella's sudden anxiety is out of character and Benji tries to remember the last time he saw her so vulnerable. It's hard to say, maybe the first time they fucked after he'd started dating Scar. Two o'clock, Scar was in math class and Stella had a spare. Tuesday afternoon was meant to see Benji in trig but he'd skipped it.

He could blame Stell for it but it wasn't her fault.

"Why," he asks, "Are you mad at me?"

Maybe she knows he's been fucking Cleo during their spares. Part of him hopes that she does, so that she can burn just beneath her skin too.

Parts of him died with Scarlet. Parts of him burned the night he found Cleo laying in the dirt, broken.

But so many pieces of hm still bloom at Stella's fingertips. It feels alright to be known when she's knowing him.

benji stands but doesn't go to Stella. He can recognize her with her arms crossed, her hair on end. She can't be touched like that, a livewire in a lightning storm. so he waits there instead, palms open on his lap. He opens his mouth, the emptiness inside of him spilling out, but the words stop dead on his tongue.

"Stell, I think I need help," he wants to tell her, "I don't think I've been okay for a long time."

But he sits there in silence instead, until she's done being upset with him because she always will be. For all the ways that they work, there are a hundred more reasons why they're terrible for each other. It helps with the emptiness a little, knowing that she'll be there, being miserable with him for a long time.

"I think..." he says, carefully, "I think I just miss seeing you like this."

He doesn't mean in pain.

"I mean human?"

Something he doesn't know how to be either. They both grew up with parents too focused on appearances to form a real connection.

"I love you," she says but the phrase feels flat, just a formality.

She falls into him, kissing to end the conversation in the same way that they always have and Benji does it too. He lets it happen, falls back and his head hits the mattress. her weight on top of him is heavy, warm. It's perfect, she fits perfect, she always has.

Right?

"Wait," he says softly and puts a finger against her lips, "Why?"

Maybe part of him wants to hurt her and that's why he asks.

In all the times before when she'd whispered the phrase, Benji had never asked her for a reason. He'd never once considered the deep well that those three words came from, only the way that they felt like a balm on his skin, in a constant state of burning. He used to feel special somehow when she said, 'I love you'.

But it doesn't feel the same anymore when she says it. It feels scripted, like just something she's supposed to say or a way to end a conversation that she doesn't want to have.

Benji knows now that 'I love you' doesn't solve anything. In fact, it hardly matters outside of these four walls, it's useless. No matter how many times he whispered it shy and soft into the top of Scar's head as she slept, unhearing, it didn't save her.

"Because I just do."

"It feels like a lie," he interrupts, gazing up at her, "When you say it to shut me up."

A tear slips down her cheek, reaching for him and he waits for it to fall and land on his cheek, steels himself even but then Stella is wiping it away before it can. Afraid again to give him everything probably because she knows deep down, what they both know.

"Can't that be reason enough?"

"No," he says but he doesn't push her off of him because they both know that he never will. In the same way that Stella's envisioned a life with him, Benji can't fathom a future without her in it.

But there's a secret hidden piece of himself that only one person ever got to see and that person is dead. He keeps waiting for that pain to subside, works to fill it with warmth elsewhere but he can't. There's so much guilt and shame around Scarlet's death that Benji knows he might never be alright.

Part of him blames her.

It's a new piece of him, something he's never given to Stella and it's so loud and sharp that he's afraid to let her hold that piece. Maybe when she does, it'll cut her, then she won't say, 'I love you' anymore.

"How can you love me after everything?" he asks, "And how can I love you?"

But this time when another tear starts to fall he reaches up to trap it with his thumb against her cheek, fingertips gentle on her skin, he loves her without words.