#There were some BAD run-on sentences in here until I proofread it LMAOO

[19orionis]

midnight and pain for uhhhhhh benny bean <3 (oc asks: not-so-nice edition)

Midnight

Ben is pretty nocturnal already, he has been his entire life, and he teaches his classes late in the day to account for this. If he's up especially late, tossing and turning, he's probably thinking about his family. His little sisters that he feels he didn't try hard enough for or the mystery of his biodad, usually. His mother and father are a subject he tries to avoid, because if he thinks too hard about either of them, he just ends up stewing about them all over again. Imagines apologies from them that will never come. I honestly don't think he has actual nightmares super often, he lucid dreams more than the average person and if he's in a bad dream and realizes that it is, in fact, a dream, he's able to just shrug and walk away/change whatever it is his brain is throwing at him. His most uneasy dreams involve him experiencing literal powerlessness while being trapped, given how a lot of his personal identity and empowerment is wrapped up in his magic. Sometimes he even wonders if it's too much. He isn't really a sleep-deprived person. He used to be, when he'd push himself nearly to the breaking point in undergrad, but he's a little too old for that now, and I think over the years he's given himself a cutoff point of, like, 4am. If he's still not on his way to falling asleep, he smokes up. THC is still a fairly effective sleep aid for him when he's intending to use it that way. He also takes a lot of naps on the weekends. Back in undergrad, he spent those wee hours of the morning writing papers, and his major had him writing a lot of them. Long before that, when he was little, he'd manifest light for his youngest sister and act as a night light.

Pain

This ask seems to be more in the physical pain direction, and I like that/will be sticking to it. I feel like I write a lot about emotional pain. Ben's been pretty lucky to avoid serious physical injury for a lot of his life, though early in his line cook days, he probably acquired some bad cuts on his hands from clumsy knife usage. At least one or two have left scarring, but he kind of laughs them off-- once they were taken care of, they weren't super scary or distressing to him. He's significantly tattooed and pierced (including a hand tattoo and a nipple piercing! Yeowch!), so his pain tolerance is at least a little above average. I think his tolerance is less "I barely even feel it lol" and more "oh this does hurt but I can tough it out and keep a straight face." The worst physical pain he's ever felt had to have been when he was little and trying to swear off spellcasting and keep that energy bottled up. He went nearly two weeks before doubling over and vomiting lava, and while he can withstand temperatures much higher than most people can (which I'll get to), it was still horrible, and him being so young didn't help. Now that he's older and more practiced (which is what's helped his body build up such an insane heat tolerance, and this resistance only applies to heat and burns, his bones break as easily as anyone else's for instance), he's leaned on a turned-on flat-top with his arm. Ben barely noticed until a coworker realized and screamed, at which point he finally screamed to cover his magic ass. The resulting burn also wasn't nearly as bad as one would realistically expect it to be from his arm making full contact with that grill for nearly a full minute.