shelteredhope

[shelteredhope]

"Ben... I... I'm pregnant..." // >:3c

he looks at her in disbelief, in wonderment, in something he has never felt before and yet knows to distinctively label as love as it spreads through him and pushes away all the rotten things usually residing inside of him. rachel brought a light to him, to his life, to everything   -  she always has been doing this since he has known her and he knows that this is the real magic inside of her, the one that matters to him and that makes all the difference, the one that has turned his life around into something meaningful again. life worth living, worth going on besides the point of his work and going from mission to mission  -  she taught him what it meant to move beyond that, to see the sky beyond that, saving him with her own lifeline added to be a parallel line next to his. and now, now their lines are intertwined, have been for so long that he never wants it to change, and this is the result of it  -  the accumulation of the past years into this. into a family, the prospect of one again, one of their own. something just for themselves, made by themselves.  if you’d have asked the agent years ago if he ever wanted kids or a family, he would have declined by default of his work, but right now all he can do is look at his wife and feel the push of happiness spread through him like the unfamiliar sensation it is, taking him over until a warm smile spreads over his face.

reaching over carefully, he puts a hand on her stomach and looks at it, somehow already riddled speechless by the marvel that is their child, that will be their child, that is their family - the one they are going to have, and he’d make sure of this. make sure that if she wants this, she knows he wants this too. in the end, the bottom line of it all, is for rachel to be happy, for her to have a life she feels worth having with him by her side, and this is what it would always come down to. this here no difference. “are you sure?” he asks her still, blue gaze now settling on her face, trying to read her reaction and if it matches his. “if you want to, if you want this, i’ve got you, darling.” leaning down to kiss his wife, a sweet and tender thing that only exists in the space between them - rachel the only one to smooth out all the rigid edges he gathered in all these years. “even if you wouldn’t, i’ve got you as well. no matter what, yeah? no matter what.”

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Ewan McGregor as Kenneth in Haywire

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“So you don’t want to dance, but you do want to wrestle?”

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Perfect Sense dir. David Mackenzie 

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“I want you. I want all of you. I want you inside and out and catching your breath and aching for me like I ache for you. It’s never been a secret. I’ve never tried to hide that from you. I’ve never pretended I wanted anything less”

— Tahereh Mafi, Unravel Me

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Social Suicide (2015) dir. Bruce Webb

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Drift compatible ex-marrieds pt. 1 | Drift compatible ex-marrieds pt. 2

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She slides her arms around his shoulders (thank Merlin he was sitting) and rests her chin on his shoulder. Several kisses are placed on his cheek, his temple, everywhere she can reach. "Happy Valentine's Day, love."

the smile splits through the weathered facade of his face naturally, the sun breaking through storm clouds after a long and dark day, and stays there as rachel leans down to kiss his face. it’s something more welcome than breathing, to know her by his side and feel her there too, to see the happiness radiating off of her when she gives meaning to a day he’d usually never give a second glance at. in the life before her, those waves of apathy swept him away and made him disregard anything considered of love or related to that concept. silly, it used to be, before the magnificent woman who is now kissing his cheek walked into his life.  (  they walked towards each other, if he is honest about it; every time they just gravitated towards each other. he does not believe in destiny, but when it comes to rachel, he does. )  and now everything is so different, but for the better. all the meaningless ways he used to sink into have been deconstructed slowly and patiently by himself and with rachel’s help and it made him a better person; it gave him purpose. she gave him a new sense to what it means to care, something beyond a license and a contract. new promises, new moments that became memories to cling to when he’s out there alone, a new sense for what matters. because rachel matters, became the center of his world. where once was a void, is now overflowing with light and serenity and love. rachel gave that word, that concept, new meaning and made a usually ignored holiday into something that instills happiness in him. she turned every day into one he looks forward to.

“ah, it’s that day of the year again, huh?” he replies, smiling against the skin of her neck. he places a kiss there, strategically and easily, and then looks up to her with light eyes, with warmth and mirth. then, he leans over to capture her lips in a loving kiss, grinning against her mouth while he does so. he feels happy, for once. around rachel, it is possible for him to feel like that, to feel at all. to allow himself that. he turns around in his seat to put an arm around her waist and pull her around to him, until she falls on his lap. a laugh escapes him then; being close to her will never not make him giddy. “i think there’s some roses on your bedside table, but i wouldn’t know how they got there,” he goes on, his nose rubbing against hers before he kisses her again. once, twice, again and again. “i love you too, darling.” 

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ben’s biography / timeline:

- 13th february, 1971: born in st. andrews, scotland to stuart and rose kentworthy. an only child. ( - grew up in a loving home with his parents caring for him and openly loving him. he never had to wonder if they wanted him or not, they loved him so much it was visible every single day. his father was an economics professor and his mother used to be nurse before she stayed at home after he was born. ) - 21st april, 1981: ben’s parents are killed by a scottish / local mob due to a misunderstanding between his father and the mob’s leader.  - 1981 - 1989: the following years are spent in the foster system, mostly stranded at an orphanage until he finishes school. he also spends the first few years in witness protection, where he gets the name ‘ benedict ’, a name he keeps for the rest of his life. any record of hamish kentworthy is untracably destroyed. - 1989: ben applies for college in the winter of 1989, wanting to major in sport education. - 1990: ben drops out of college at the age of nineteen and signs up for the RAF instead. due to his very good physical state and through signing himself up for therapy with an army therapist he gets into the royal air force training. - 1992: ben finishes his training as a pilot. - 1992 - 1994: ben serves in the air force for two years before dropping out of service. - november 1994: ben gets approached and recruited by the MI6 to serve in the 00 program. ‘ for crown and country ’, more or less. - 1995: the first official mission ben has to take happens to be in scotland. he ends up butchering parts of that mission to go after the people who killed his parents. it is the only time he ever violates his mission guidelines and he gets punished for it immediately - 1997: his first long mission is a deep cover mission in st. petersburg. his cover as a bank clerk to move money for the russian mob lasted 15 months until he finished his mission and took down the whole mob ( and parts of the russian government ) for money laundering, human trafficking and several other crimes, including torture and murder.  - 1999: ben’s a fixed part of the 00 agents, working several missions abroad and in the UK. in between his missions he meets rachel culver ( @fairglenned ), a woman who draws him in, the only person to ever do so, and in the coming months and years he falls in love with her and finds a new sense of belonging that goes past his license ( and the baggage he has been carrying around for so long ). - 2003 - 2006: ben’s second deep cover mission in turkey. he assumes the persona of a travel agent while working his way into dismantling an international criminal web that was moving weapons through south and east europe.  - january 2007: ben makes it back from his mission in turkey and bluntly asks rachel to marry him. thankfully she says yes! he also never takes a deep cover mission after that. - 2007 - now: ben assumes his work as an MI6 agent and while still very ambivalent or even void towards his work, his private life and relationship with rachel gives his life a new sense and meaning that he holds onto. in this time, he also finds out about rachel being a wizard ( and the reincernation of rowena ) while also telling her about his parents and his past, in that case, his birth name as well. 

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"I... I killed them..." ((after that fun time his enemies kidnapped her :)

he can see that, is what he first thinks, looking around them ( looking around rachel ) and seeing the difference in the bodies he took down and the once that have already been motionless once he made it to her. and she is in shock, he can see that from how she is staring at him too, eyes trained on him yet too far away to be really here, and how she shivers in his arms, as if he hasn’t sweat through all of his gear and she’s not burning under his palms. it must be a result of the adrenaline and the lack of nourishment, her paleness and the blood on her a contrast that burns itself into his mind. he already knows he won’t ever forget that sight, won’t ever not see it in his sleep and even when he’s awake and not there to make sure that rachel is alright; that she is safe and alive. the back of his mind, the deep and dark and ugly corner is already screaming at him, ‘ this is your fault, this is your fault, being around her is dangerous to her, this is your fault, how could you, hamish ben? how could you? ’ and while those screams are potent and present, they are outweighed by his relief to know her with him again, to know this is over. that she didn’t die and that he could save her. but even more so, that she could save herself.

“i know, i know,” he tells her, whispers those words into her hair while holding her against him, trying to share his body heat with hers. “i don’t know how, but i know you did, did a pretty good job with it too,” he goes on, his voice sounding faint in his ears but capable anyway. it is the tone he always uses in missions, the one that makes him sound detached but present; and right now he speaks in it to keep himself safe, too, to keep himself afloat along with rachel before the crash comes for both of them. “just, stay with me, yeah? it’s over. it’s over.” and he believes himself when he says it, hopes she believes so, too, because for the first time in his life he feels like it: like this is the end of a chapter and the beginning of a new one. with rachel there with him. 

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“here it is: my heart; this ugly, bleeding thing; this sanguine sum of hurts.”

— to want, to love, to care is to hemmorrhage / d.s. 

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ooh! also! tell me abt what ben sees when he looks in the mirror. what does he think of himself 👀

ok, so we are going to do this in two parts ( sort of ! ) and i am trying not to only ramble my way through that. 

so, what ben sees when he looks in the mirror: at first, his parents. he sees what is not there anymore basically. he sees his father’s hair and jawline, his mother’s eyes, the scar that is on the bridge on his nose he got from when his father taught him how to cut wood. the next thing he sees is a detachment of who he is: he sees benedict kentworthy, he sees a soldier, a weapon, an agent. someone trained to kill and someone who embodies his work. he sees the MI6. he sees everything that is not the most personal parts of himself because they are not visible in his outer appearance. he sees the polished exterior, the mask he wears everyday, and that he has been wearing for so long that it can’t be called a mask anymore. his reflection is his second skin, the armor he wears around the rest of the world. he sees a knife. then, when he stares to long, he sees hamish. he sees his past. he sees who he is. who he sometimes forgets to be too. when he gets caught on the scars and the blemishes and the weathered lines, when he stares at his clothes for so long that they don’t feel like his anymore, then he sees everything that is locked so far away that he sometimes thinks the person that makes his inner core doesn’t exist anymore. but he never stares long enough for that to happen. he has been ben for so long that it doesn’t happen.

what he thinks of himself: there are two sides of how ben thinks of himself and those are pretty obvious: there is ‘ ben ’ and there is ‘ hamish ’. ben is his survival, his day-to-day attire, his working contract, his license to kill. ben is his arrogance and confidence and the second life he had to take on after his parents died. ben is his biography, ben is alive. ben is what needs to be focused on and what he thinks about when he thinks about himself, about how he moves around every day, what he says, how he talks, how he behaves. ben is all the little things that make him a person and they are permanently on his mind, they are something he refined and worked on and still works on every day. ben is his success rate in missions, ben is the man who fell in love with rachel, ben is the man who went to the army and avenged his parents, ben is his now and his future. he thinks highly of ben, of himself when he is ben, and his confidence and arrogance comes from the well that holds all the good memories coming from being that person. he likes himself as ben. he is not afraid to like himself as ben. 

and then there’s hamish, who he basically never thinks of. when he thinks of himself as hamish, he thinks of his family ( or the lack of that, of their absence ), he thinks of his failures, he thinks of being a child and losing. he thinks of hamish when he needs to remember and only then does he think of that part of himself as something good, someone worthy to keep in mind, someone worthy to live. when he’s in deep cover ( both russia and turkey ), he constantly reminds himself that hamish is still alive, that he’s not gone, that he’s still a person, only to not lose every piece of himself in the persona he created for those missions. hamish is an anchor to him, sort of, not one he really likes or likes to think about, but one nonetheless. his self-esteem is not rooted in that, that’s all in ben, but his survival is rooted in there. and his grip on sanity too. so, he thinks of that part of himself as a means to an end, too. overall ben has a very ambivalent relationship with himself.