#m. au | music!verse ben: nowhere man

[kylo-wrecked]

{ cont'd from here }

Ben sterns his face with a name-brand expression he hopes Brunnhilde recognizes as disgust, his eyes narrowing at her knowing smile. Cats have looked less offended by bumbling, mucky-mitted toddlers. "You ever want spaghetti, I'll make it." Steps around Brunnhilde's kitchen island, away from her. He soaks up her half-dimmed home chef's station with the last of his body's width he hadn't snorted or smoked away. "You light your cursed candles." "Pottery Barn," Ben laughs, banging Brunnhilde's cabinet doors like he's shaking the spirits from them. "Sure. And the apple was from Whole Foods. And I'm from..." How does he feel? He stares into a liminal cupboard. A weirdly empty cupboard with a thirsty grail inside it. And within that? Maybe there's the stretch of two hundred and fifty years staring him down from a box that seems to have no back. No end. "...nothing. Nowhere," he mutters and shuts the door. The adjacent cabinet reveals angel hair, tinned olives, and a mini jar of fig jam. Ben twists and watches Brunnhilde from over his broad black shoulder; his head cocked like some bird of prey, cheek partially obscured by raven hair, hands forearms still resting on the bottom shelf. He blinks. "You loot that stuff from an ancient tomb or Eataly?"

@valkxrie

[kylo-wrecked]

Two worlds. Two shits Ben doesn't—shouldn't—give. Bronzite gaze in reverse, two eyes veering off 'Jake,' washing over the loose sketch of himself in the windshield, slipping onto the triptych city. Put the black rum away. Put the bottle down. Two voices in an airlock brain. Just one, really. One throwing itself against a flat black antechamber. Echoing.

The shapes don't twist themselves into words. They did, those word-shapes might sound like 

Lay off already. '                        ' {Lay off already.} Stop being angry.' '                         ' {Stop being angry.} Stop it. '           ' {Stop it.} Make it stop. '                    '  {Make it stop.}

Really, there’s no second voice to tell him 'no.' There's no voice that says, 'Listen.' No voice that says, 'Hey, dickwad, your phone's ringing.’

Ben almost misses that, too. Confuses the persistent buzzing in his tight, designer pocket with brain static. Left hand leaves right arm behind. Leaves a bruise, four white moons. And he tells Rachel, in a sable business-calm, if they don't want him, get LCD Soundsystem. Finally, he kills the buzzing and slides the dead hand mirror onto the dashboard. Deja vu.

Manhattan weaves around the cab, ticking off its own meter in the language of bodies, light, bokeh. Holding all its hollows and ridges together in a Stygian web. Melting pot his ass. And 'Jake.' Ben watches him drive, hit the signals, smack the steering wheel, mulling over the 'spiel' he's not getting and the 'deal' that he is. 

'Sometimes, we don't know who we are.'

Ben unlocks his forearm then, flexes his fingers in the Chambers mosaic. Colors of courthouse stone, scaffolding, fruit stands, dogs and people barking, Checkers. Because nothing screams New York City like Taylor, Michigan. 

"Jake," Ben starts, sotto voce, icing the air quotes off his name with a certain coldness possessed only by him and a witch's tit. "Let's turn back a few pages. Matter 'fact, let's review the table of contents."

Turns the arm bruise against leather and presses his cheek into the headrest's edge. 

"One: you don't know me. You just think you do."

And there's but that one point, a quiet point. A so quiet you can't feel it draw the blood point. A so quiet you can hear a pin drop point. Rest of the body yet to be bled. Rest of the book yet to be writ. 

The next song dances in greys. Funeral chanting, even though it's just Charles Mingus and his piano. He turns again and Ben's leonine profile greys, too. Abstracts in thought. Cubist chewing off his own angles as Max Weber buildings shift in traffic. 

"I don't like 'missing' facts, and I don't like being spared," he says, so low Ben almost can't hear himself. "If there's more…" 

Give it to him. 

@silverjetsystm

Listening is roots away from hearing. Jake’s not even sure if he himself is hearing between pressurized draining from ear to throat. Tink tink tink rattling his brainpan, background vocals uncannily morbid, as haunting as Ben’s flat motor oil eyes. Up and coming headache on the horizon, black storm clouds.

Ben’s hurt, drowning in a shit answer, a wrong play. Drowning enough to toss a fact into Jake’s seat. ‘Don’t feel remorse….Don’t like it…’ Factoid goes through the plexi-glass divider to where he feels Mr. Wall Street primly seatbelted like another passenger in the cab.

Neon blues cycle through the office, obscuring framed movie posters, a cassette tape in the tray.

Vocals reminiscent of game over sounds bring finality to blank dead face. Throat grumbles, arms closing off the conversation. Pedestrians continue their pilgrimage, stare though the bars at the view. The cab is another part of the great body.

Play again? Drop the divider? Let Grant do cleanup?

Yes. Naw. His cab, his rules.

Black rum is a mixologist’s wet dream. Got to watch out for the cheats who make young rum look old. Fake colors instead of real molasses. Jake’s the third alter, the oldest in mental age and self-perception. B”H, they have a thick head of hair.

“See.” Sniffing, cap brim pointed up. Grey light throws deeper crow’s eyes. “This ‘s happened before. Not --” small gesture close to the wheel. Baseball glove leather jacket and statue of indeterminate origin, “Exactly like this. I’ll spare you the whole spiel. Can’t unring knowing. If ya feeling cheated and lied to, I don’t blame you neither. I’m trying to give you --”

Slow down. Checks the rearview. Turn signal clicks twice and he seizes the chance, cutting in front of a Tesla. Horn blares. Laugh lines stretch further on Jake too.

{Floaties.} [Absolutely not.] “A life vest. A map on ‘what’s the deal.’ I reckon you’re close to getting it but got a few key facts all mixed up.” Oh, he’s going to get driven into the railings. Grant rubs his temples. “Missing. Missing. It sounds like a cop out but it’s true. I don’t remember what Grant does a good three-fourths of the time. Grant don’t remember what I do neither. Sometimes, we don't know who we are or are some combination of us. We live in two different worlds.”

@kylo-wrecked

[kylo-wrecked]

{ cont'd from here }

An hour of staring at this next prize revealed behind Pinto Flare curtains: it's a fur coat with genuine white leather trim, a thirty-inch electric range, Connie jumping up and down because the third prize is a Vega notchback wagon, and the medical office pastels of radio-trained voices and tooth-drilling incidental music.

Phone buzz cuts through the fog and Ben slow blinks at 'Fair' after a fifty-three-minute break. At ‘Soldier.’ Oh boy, oh boy. Hell yes, that’s who you could count on to break you out of a hospital day stay. Ben’s almost giddy. And it’s not the drugs! They didn’t give him anything stronger than an IV. This is all

[Solo] him

A pause, then another violent tap tap tapping hailstorm over the sound of a background buzzsaw. His arms still feel heavy. His head swims, but he isn't drowning.

[Solo] fine [Solo] fucking thank you [Solo] seriously thought i had to block you [Solo] 100 E77 Street [Solo] they think im a danger to myself? [Solo] this is child’s play as far as im concerned [Solo] i cant just lie here all day haha

Bob Barker explains the four spaces to Connie on TV. A nurse glances nervously through the windowed door of reality. Ben bends his neck over the little window in his hands. Pins and needles bite his fingers as he types.

[Solo] refrigerators were so small [Solo] do you g et why i cant be here [Solo] itll be me and bob forever , my brain will explode [Solo] the # of doors ive watched open on brown schemed mid consumer goods [Solo] is like [Solo] indefensible

And there's a longing in his stomach, a hunger for something untenable, while the pastels berate him with things that have never mattered, and his fingers prickle, and his ear rings.

[Solo] im sitting in a dentist’s office while i decompose on a hospital bed [Solo] why not let me

He ignores the unfinished nature of that unfinished sentence.

[Solo] you know? [Solo] how soon can XxSoldieRxX get here

@silverjetsystm

[kylo-wrecked]

{*butterfly knife emoji*}

Her tongue was heavy in her mouth. Her ears repeated her pulse to her, rushing in and out like the sea. All salt. All air. She watched him carefully; this so-far nameless man with hair that fell like art. Who had a full mouth and who had laced the filter between her teeth with liquor. I'm not a bitch. I'm a cunt. Words ricocheted off the heavy bass, off the lights, and the selfish haze of 3am. He was all prowling. All spine. Mercy switched its place between them each time ownership was taken of a highly contested cigarette. Around and around, red cherry smouldering with all that remained of Asgard. She revealed herself; bone and blood and feathers unfurling from her back as she took a drag, her gaze sitting serrated and unyielding upon his face. A tongue slid between her teeth. Hers? Hers. They weren't going to fuck. Not yet. Fucking would put an end to the night and the edge it pressed against her throat; the column long and bare and begging to be consumed. Mercy, mercy. Maybe begging for it was all that was all she had left. Air from her wings pushed his hair back. His fingers brushed her lower lip as he retrieved his coffin nail and refreshed its liquor taste. Honey and hops. Peat and barley. Mercy, mercy. It was not in her nature to beg.

It wasn't in his nature to be merciful, not while he had his teeth sunk in the Big Sour Apple, tracing her through the mullion of absinthe-dark clubs and boudoir catwalks and the insides of great drawn oak rooms regular people never see through Upper Manhattan's windows, where gods come to die. And beg. 

He was inky hair, and a crooked smile, and cheekbones that seemed a shade too pale, and any number of epithets. Paragon, Just Lucky, Asshole. Black damask pants, black dog bite—

You're right. You are a cunt. 

They exchanged cigarettes with the brush of fingers, talons to callouses. Long trailings of tobacco smoke, longer legs lengthening in a chlorine lagoon. She rested her claws on his collarbone, and he sat in the 3 AM haze. The water and the moon lapped his calves. 

No courting. 

He dreamt of her once. More than once.

No touching.

He ate an apple.

No fucking. 

Her wings are born on a dark Thursday evening. The shadowed sky is patient, swelled for a storm. His hair settles, and his eyes fizz, filling with light the way the cigarette's beacon does when he inhales. Clicks his heel on the part of tar beach their sphinxlike hosts didn't cover in gold, and mosaic, and Bacardi. The El Dorado's bays and balconies are green-gold with 808 bass. 

This may be their first meeting or their fifth. 

He showed her the seeds on his tongue.

"You lick those clean?" Motions to her pinions, her pride, with the coffin nail's cherry. Threatening proximity, conflagration, but he only holds it out to her, refreshed with the taste of liquor and metal. 

No mercy. 

@valkxrie

[kylo-wrecked]

It's a small pot. One she had been nurturing; not that anyone would think her so. It was filled with black soil and housed tiny green shoot. A sprout of a thing, barely the length of her little finger. Resilient and living, despite it all. She had two others at home, and three in the freezer. Not enough to start an orchard, but enough to give one as a gift.

"Buzzfeed told me you're a Scorpio." Her voice holds the wraith of a smile. She wonders if there will be a big party later - all glamour, and all for other people. For now, its quiet. "Do you want me to sing you happy birthday? It's an offer I'll only make once."

The earthy terracotta doesn't surprise him, the gesture only slightly. Fills the bowl of his soul with apples baked in honey and Southern Comfort. Heart like a hand pie. 

"Don't take everything you read to face, baby," he says, flashing his wolf's grin, an angle he knows she likes. "It's not becoming. I've got squares in my chart like you wouldn't believe." All joined by other constellations. 

Brunnhilde's sprout of a thing finds itself under Manhattan's mirrored light. Someone else will have to look after it; Ben knows just the person who'll hate him and do it anyway. He considers the shoot. Then sidling back, he lifts Brunnhilde’s chin, considering her with the eyes of someone whose parties are always thrown in his honor. His kiss is his thanks and his blessing.

"Hm. You know some people can't sing sitting down?" His grin dims, becoming something dark and delicious, a raw cacao. "Sit down." 

Nods his head toward the sofa hovering on a discreet mold and above the rug like a UFO. 

"Go on."

Maybe her voice would be a gift. Or maybe it would be another curse.

@valkxrie

[kylo-wrecked]

@chromium-siren

been actively avoiding posting this but fuck it , modern au time ( i just wanted to draw hux in a tweed suit jacket)

anyways, this thing took me two-ish weeks to finish cus 70% of the way through finishing it i scrapped phas and hux's pose and redid it from scratch, so if you want to see that here's the link for it + alt colors

[kylo-wrecked]

{ expanded from here }

Brunnhilde steps onto the ledge. The sun ripens the sky, a blood orange rolling through its open mouth. A sky just blue enough to remind Ben, that gravity? That's a thing. A thing etched into their earthly firmament, and something he carries in his shoulders, his gaze.

"Oh, brother," he groans. "Stop." Gravity makes him sink toward her, nevertheless. Those fifteen bags stuffed with shredded documents, bitten-up bins, and abandoned mattresses might break a fall, but not entirely; the stray chaise wouldn't save his bones. Would Brunnhilde?

Ben's eyes burn with the question question. Instead of asking, he laughs, and his canines are dewy with new nectar.

"You already wasted it."  Hanging over Brunnhilde, a shadow cast by a fiery sky, he says, "You wasted that apple on me," and smiles, his crooked skyline of teeth, the teeth that pierced that apple's flesh, wet and shining.

Amazingly, his heel returns to the roof's edge. Steel on limestone. Neither of them lives in this clay mansion drawn over in lengths of dawn umbrage cast by Prospect Park's skeleton trees- but Brunnhilde, with her feet still bare, her dress still silk and melting between his fingers, could make kingdoms from unlikely things: daybreak, the tar beaches and solar panels lining New Brooklyn castles, really, really sad sacks of shit. She is the maker of Ben's new sky body, the chest ringing with bells, the apple blossoms growing up through his sternum.

Of course, he's still rotten to the core. Isn't that why he laughs and looms and leers? Why his lips, laced with tobacco and autumn, impose themselves on hers?

He Kissed Me (And It Felt Like a Slap). That's not how it goes. It goes like this: Ben spreads his wings across the risen sun and feels space ripping at his back. He falls because that's how the myth was written; that's the tragedy howled by the choir.

And he takes her with him, tipping them both into the air, with her silk midriff, arms, and upper back cocooned in his chest (that expanse of Tom Ford's cotton), his arms (that swallow her), his chin (tucked against the base of her skull), both their hair flapping about his God-forsaken head, feathering, window glass, dead birch, iron spokes screaming by.

This is their first kiss. It happens so fast. It's a slap in the face. And sonically, it carries the undertones of Phil Spector's ominous arrangement, He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss), Carole King's apology wasted on the Crystals.

And the ground inches closer; Ben can hear the lace patterns on an old, naked mattress, this wailing sax. So fast, and then Zemirot twelve inches above the rubbish, his shoulders and head brushing fraying upholstery.

He still manages to hit something on the way down.

"Son of a bitch," Ben groans, exhilarated. The words barely pass his lips, but he caws, "Serves you right" into the Godless sky.

There were no gods; the last of their light lined his tissues, his heaving ribcage, his kneecap, the bones around his bones.

"Serves you friggin' right," he cries, laughing, breathless. Not at Brunnhilde, who pins him in space, hovering by a distance of twelve inches, and should drop him.

Maybe only the gods have fallen.

Let Brunnhilde drop him. Ben kisses her anyway, with teeth, tongue, and nectar, in a flash. It happens so fast.

@valkxrie

[kylo-wrecked]

{ expanded from here }

There was a familiarity in the shadows of her bedroom, where that mythus named sleep remained a cipher carved in her fine wood furniture, where a siphoned bottle and glossectomies of candle stubs curled around and hedged an oblong serving platter the color of the past.

Morning resumed at two in the afternoon, with ritual. He could smell the fuck you rising off her locks like sun, mixed with the animal musk of their skin, his of woodland, hers of honey.

‘Cunt,’ he wanted to say.

(~Allow him to pluck a lament for her quarter’s sleep on these golden strands.~)

‘You’re welcome,’ he did not say.

He combed in silence, strumming the teeth over the yearning slant in her rhomboids, warying the diamond-backed wound. The shiver of shoulder blades that were not wings. The shape of a woman poised with unasked questions he could feel between his ribs.

He was not happy to be anywhere.

‘No,’ he might have answered. ‘Yes and no’

Soft was his handling. Soft if only because he caged his sharpness in his mind. His hands themselves retained their angles, plying her desire.

They replied,

‘I don’t fuck beggars,’ And yet ‘Beg for it’

They pressed the tender cavity at the back of her skull; she pressed his pulse. He could feel his thrumming in her thoughts, taste his own heart like Brunnhilde’s fondness for wine.

Who knew just as well that gods were cruel? That cruelty was a finger rimming the mouth of a glass? Measured in pieces of dawn? Against shards of midnight?

@valkxrie

[kylo-wrecked]

📞 Music!Ben to Post-Ragnarok B

{ 🫀 You broke and bought: Music!Ben }

She picks up on the third ring. Swell. He'd have guessed the ninth. He'd have guessed she'd given him a bunk number, but it's her distinctive pitch accent—and she's drinking. Something. Her mouth is wet; she comes up for breath.

"What're you doing?" he asks anyway. He doesn't know what time it is. He tries to picture her somewhere other than a damp SoHo rooftop or a dark underpass along the East River and gives up, waits for the color of her voice or an end tone.

Can she picture him? The living room panorama is the only surface that feels right right now. Cool under his leaning forehead. It suspends him over the burnished face of Battery City, which lives up to its fancy when lightning strikes.

@valkxrie

[kylo-wrecked]

No?

He bristled but brushed into the master bedroom, crossed the carpet, padded onto heated bathroom tile, and sat, tentative, a dog learning how to trust a new handler with its paw. Brunnhilde came to him like one of God's testier angels, haughty and golden with tricks and lessons. He reached up and placed his palm over her palm; it was a sea-broiled crab on a white sand.

Ben was a vampire tan in midnight joggers, staring up bleary and bruise-eyed from the tub rim, his hair a rolling black storm, and his face a bi-lit mask. Brunnhilde moved and triggered the overhead saucer lights, four-by-four-inch votives.

"No," he muttered. "It's a burn."

Raised and revealed his left fist, black flecks and blood engraved in his mid-knuckles. The peroxide was for this second foul.

"Not broken either."  

His pupils rolled inside his glazed corneas, hinged on the bath vanity, the little plastic disc Brunnhilde had placed there.

"I punched a camera," Ben said, rolling his tongue under a jagged molar. "Joking," he added, with all the gravity of a black hole.

@valkxrie

@kylo-wrecked

She senses his approach; the barometric pressure changing as Ben's body moves the air and energy in his path. A hum escapes her at his first real words. She sets her phone on the counter. She listens to his command.

"No" Brunnhilde replies flatly. Her blue goes to his face, then to his hand. Her expression registers only that she is not one to be commanded. Not anymore.

"Sit" She indicates the edge of his tub. Her intention is clear, hands already removing the safety seal on the peroxide. "Do you think it's broken?"

A little plastic disk joins the space beside her phone; beside the Whole Foods bag and the pickles. She keeps the peroxide, her free fingers extending to Ben - giving him the option to decide if he would put his palm over her palm so she might see the wound.

[kylo-wrecked]

{ cont'd from here }

Actions speak louder than words. They scream and throw consoles across the studio. They show up unannounced in Alexander Wang. They decide what is acceptable; that mouth-frothing is vogue. Ben wouldn't hide his teeth for forty million dollars and a little respect. 

"I am an asshole," he replies sadly.

Leaf and Ben are different animals. His fans are as rabid as he can be, sharing one heart, one pumping unit on the fritz. Her fans put her heart in a glass display like a prized Barbie. Collectors that play with yarn and cotton. What they have in common are parasites.

Ben's cambers on his left shoulder—yeah, no, that's a knit headband crowning Leaf's skull in this backroom party of two and change, its mere presence coconut creaming the mala. Gross.

“’亲爱的(?)’ " 

His pronunciation is competent, evidenced by long tours through Singapore and Beijing, a past getaway to Guangzhou that led to their manager's untimely spiritual demise. 

And speaking of death. 

"If you pretend you like me, someone might notice." That's not a smile teething the glass rim. "Can't have that."

That's yet another beast.

Ben tongues wine like a cat. Eyes glittering with devil's mirth and a dusting of snow. His seasonal ~fun~ isn't yet habit— isn't yet something Condé Nast and its subsidiaries find tantalizing. He's not yet been burned like the KoR Grammys he'll toss in a fire, palladium with black-ochre edges. There are more delicious rumors. Murmurings that circle fruit baskets and moons of pâté. Wrapped in gold leaf. Right here in this chamber. 

'Mr. Adele' waves off Leaf's fleas. Her company, her entourage. Whatever they are. He's here for her.

"Can't prove what's not true, baby," Ben says, almost as bad as the wine. Acidic. Wan. Drinkable nevertheless. Leaning too close, spilling his scent, juniper, a hint of Hong Kong cigarettes. Searching her face. "Come on, don't be boring. You bother me when you're boring." 

Mr. Double-Platinum yields a coy blade from his Swiss army arsenal of angles, slicing Leaf up and down with a gaze. He's gone platinum again and could be a braggart, but that's not why he's here.

Yes, yes. Why here, why now? He's here for Leaf. He's here because everything is happening right now. He's here because he can be wherever he wants, because his presence is inlaid into the natural order, like a storm.

@t34dious

[kylo-wrecked]

Inspired by 'prompts for helping bathe an injured loved one' | Music!Ben

For what felt like eons, there had been a sting in her scapula. A scalpel of a thing that came and went in severity. That prowled the nerves of her spine, seething on some days and sleeping on others. She had tried to reach it before, with failure and pride resulting in silence and a heightened cuntiness. For what had been eons, Brunnhilde had been able to call upon her sisters for help with such things. They were eons themselves now - bitter and black against her biting. And - she bit hard, grinding her teeth as she sat naked and bleeding in the middle of her bathroom. New light cast itself around the room; an aurora from sunrise that bounced off shattered glass and a beautiful thing stuck beyond her reach. A thing lodged in the flesh at the crook of one wing. A slicing thing. A gleaming thing. A thing that had once belonged to a snake. "Ben." Had he picked up the phone, or was this a voicemail? She didn't know. She was beyond pride now, having ventured into tear-stained madness. "Ben, I need your help."

{ 🫀 You broke and bought:// Music!Ben/ not accepting }

She spoke his name into the mouthpiece, and a question mark hung silently on the other line for what must've seemed eons. Black and biting.

"...All right."

Ben sighed, but his tone indicated he had heard the pain in her voice. So the cobra lowered its belly on the forest floor, folded its hood, and slithered away.

"Brunnhilde." Then it returned, flicked its tongue. "Whatever it is, don't make it worse before I get there."

He did not need her help to make things worse. Phone pocketed, headset hung, he flagged down Brendan/Brandon. Get the car.

—

Brunnhilde's feathers unspooled and swelled like undyed yarn in her monstrous bath. It had been messy work; she hissed and yowled and smacked him with a carpal. He didn't tell her how he'd once splinted a finch's shoulder girdle, how he'd kept the bird in a box near his childhood bed. Ben perched on the stool he'd dragged from her living room with blood on the pads of his feet and under his nails, turning the thing that had once belonged to a snake in his palms. Watching.

"What is this?"

This slicing thing. This gleaming thing that hadn't come from Brunnhilde's shattered mirror.

"How long was it caught there?"

She'd made it worse long before he arrived. But there was the apple. He'd seen how quickly it divined the hand he'd crunched into a mixing console. This was different, though. Winged creatures required flight for matters his hands could scarcely grasp.

He set the slicing thing down and stirred the water with his knuckles, checking the temperature. Brushed her thigh's outer seam as his hand surfaced. He pressed the wet on his thumbs to his parched tear ducts and leaned over Brunnhilde with a mean red glare.

"Answer me," he demanded.

@valkxrie

[kylo-wrecked]

[Bathing injured music!Ben]

⁸⁾

⁹⁾ climbing into the bath/shower with them, more for the physical comfort than practicality

-

They don't expect Ben to eat in front of them, but hey, they come by their nature the hard way. Jake unpacked Grant's reusable tote first - tuna salad with an extra heaping of real friggin mayonnaise for the fridge, squashed cloudy challah, and Jewish penicillin tightly contained. If it gets tossed, it's not like he's gonna know and he ain't gonna tell Nedda.

Left eye serious, right eye swollen shut, Jake checks Ben's injuries, skimming off the top of Marc's memory. "Sore? Us too."

They, Steven-and-Jake (easier than Steven worriedly pacing) get the water going, climbing in after Ben. Red-purple hands scrub black dog hair, mix of them grinning as muscles read enjoyment, ease. “so Mr Surly and Serious likes having his hair washed for him, hm? don’t worry, i’ll keep your secret.”

As bathing continues, Jake steps back, leaving Steven to flick mustache onto the mat, soaking quietly, holding Ben close.

{ 🫀 You broke and bought:// Music!Ben:/ accepting }

The sun doesn't have to go down on the day the way it does, spraying its blood all over the Meatpacking District's luxury Belgian blocks, but Ben is Ben, and Jake can't shut up. Before Ben even starts, as a Jersey lawyer put it, another one of his 'little fires'—boom. Someone else throws the Molotov and gives Jake-Steven red hands, a plum for an eye. And Ben—

He feels sorry about the cab (~whose repairs he's paid for, whether They like it or not~). Not sorry about going full moon inside. Uncognizant of how Steven-Jake fights to transport his broad jumble of limbs, bones, and contusions into the bathroom.

Ladies and gentlemen, presenting the meatbag of the year, the hour, the minute. He's survived his expiration date, and he's not eating tuna. 

No hospitals. No tuna. No 'thank you' apart from his stiff-and-lax muscles' cooperation with lowering him into the bath. His sharp eyes are sheathed, at rest beneath their lids as They work Their fingers into his scalp. Wet cat with his ears flicked back. 

"Mr. Surly and Serious—" 

Gives up. Mr. Surly and Serious licks the metal off his teeth. Blood that prevails after a bad moon. Sun. Fucking a. 

Mr. Surly and Serious lets himself sink further into steam and soap-pearls filling the only tub in New York big enough to fit the two of them and change. Mr. Surly and Serious even lets his head tip back a little while Jake-Steven rinses his black dog hair clean; enjoy the private show, you half-bastard. 

Gradually, between suds, fingers, and overlapping limbs, Jake's pink washes out into a pure blue and Ben settles against the rhythm of that hard-carved chest returned to Steven.

He would laugh at the mustache flopped on a heated tile, but the image isn't funny ha-ha. It's funny in a way he can't place. And his ribs hurt.

"Steven."

Water laps arms folded around arms, overlapping knees. Ben trawls his finger-pads through bath water and along the undersides of Steven's thighs. Water joins them; they're almost as one.

"Quit worrying, will you?" he grumbles, tucking his skull under Steven's chin. "You'll give 'Mr. Surly and Serious' a headache." 

Steven. 

…Jake. 

Thank you.

@silverjetsystm

[kylo-wrecked]

Ben would've been dead a long time ago if looks could kill. Give him a good Norse funeral; set him upon his longship; burn him on the pyre; make of him a mound or a sacrifice; let the Kylo mask be his grave good. He allows Miss Lens Flare to flay him—he's long since checked out, and the bloodless don't bleed. 

His stupid mouth, a cutting instrument insured for millions, smiles. Lips peeling back, revealing teeth too white to be so crooked; his bite may be his signature mark. 

"I am the job description." 

And he follows her, scrolling through his own phone with long fingers as hooked as he's wry. Cuts her off at the mainboard, one big, black-clothed roadblock.

"Kaial—" scowls at the letterhead, Rachel's fwd; fwd; fwd, the contracts he never reads, the name that could double as a medical condition. "Kai." 

Kaialis. Cholangiocarcinoma. Rhabdomyosarcoma. 

Say that three times fast.

Ben slips his touchscreen into his back pocket and contemplates Kai as though she were a tumour. Unnecessary and utterly benign. She could be removed without impacting the temporal. Plucked right out of his time-block the way he plucked her phone from her hands. Worse things have happened to those who've called him 'sir.'

"Unless you don't want the job." 

He counters Kai's glare, tilting his head, angle ruminative, eyes tinted glass.

"I asked for the best," he shrugs. "Maybe you're not?"

@ofthestcrs

It nearly takes all of her strength not to unleash the full wrath that laid inside of her the moment her phone was plucked from her hand so effortlessly. Of course, he wouldn't take to be ignored. Why had she expected anything less of him? Arrogant fucking musicians and their dire need to feel like the world revolved around them when they were merely just a small blimp in time. Kai reminded herself that her reputation was leaning on this. Hell. Her whole career could run down the drain in a matter of minutes if she allowed herself to be unprofessional and oh that irked her bones.

If looks could kill, Ben would've dropped dead on the spot from Kai's gaze though. Her facial expressions were too often the windows of her soul. A thrashing fire so ready to burn those who made her life feel ever more difficult. Not just people like Ben, but others. Men who tried to convince her that she belonged in front of the camera rather than behind it. That dire need to exploit her and tear her open for everyone to gawk upon. She was particular in how she photographed others. She could tell when a wolf was rabid for blood and too often they came wanting her own. This felt the same.

Her jaw tightened at the words that spew out of his stupid mouth. She kept quiet in hopes that might save her. She was lucky to have caught her phone when she did, pressing it to her chest for a moment -- covered in a turtle neck despite how hot it could get in venues sometimes -- and then slid it into her pocket. She wanted to ask if he even had a heart when he crossed it with his words, but she thought better of it. Instead, her disdain grew on her face as he light the cigarette.

It reminded her too much of her father. Careless of those around him. They way he'd intentionally light up in front of her cousin because he had asthma. God. She was glad that fucker was dead. She hates the way Ben looks at her, pulls at the neck of her shirt as if the skin wasn't already covered. She feels like she's suffocating under the weight of it all. What the hell was he even thinking about her? Did she really want to know? Probably not.

He speaks again and Kai was ready to just move. Anything to redirect his attention to something or someone else. Horrifying then that the woman swooped in to scold him and in tandem blocked her one way out of this. She'd never felt more caged even if it wasn't intentional on this poor woman's end. She could only imagine how frustrating it could be to babysit a man nearly in his 30's. Did they ever grow mature enough to care for themselves? Not likely.

"I don't recall that being in my job description." Finally words and god she tries to keep her tone as professional as possible, but the clenched jaw makes it nearly impossible. She doesn't bother to answer his second request. To give her name was to dig her grave ... that is if he even cared to remember it. Too often though the uniqueness of her name had put her in positions she'd been not too thrilled to be in. Too often she found herself remembered when she tried her best to be forgotten.

"So I'll just go elsewhere. Good luck on your endeavor though .... sir." The last part made her feel sick to day, but she needed to sound as less catty as she could before she was using the small space Miss Hall Monitor left to make her escape. Her lips silently whispered in prayer for him not to follow. Hoped he wouldn't make demands that she'd have to face. This was already her worst nightmare.

[kylo-wrecked]

{ cont'd from here, because i, like some people, had no chill }

Tenements creaked like broken bones. Old bones. Their windows whistled while the Domino Sugar Factory flipped the bird across the way. Pigeons and crows roosted on the tired arms of streetlamps, shaking out their wings. Dark pinions overlapped darker pinions in a black tangle, not unlike Ben's hair. The wind could've blown them away, man and Valkyrie both. Ben and his sharp teeth laughed at the sky. The stars, ghosts. Below, the East River laughed with him, rolling and hissing endlessly.

His laugh was curt, there and then gone, and he regarded Brunnhilde, this sliver of moonlight with the hardness of a diamond, pursing his lips in thought. Ben was listening.

Maybe selectively. Maybe with what was left of his soul. Maybe he felt as the Valkyrie did. Maybe not—maybe they didn't want the same things. Maybe he didn't give a good God damn. Nor had he ever wanted glories, ashes, feathers, and fallen sisters. He didn't care for such things any more than he'd cared for flying business class.

Ben Solo was made for the travails and tragedies of fruitless human endeavor. He was made to rot. Was she? From what she described, Ragnarok seemed like another exercise in futility: it meant nothing. Even gods destroyed themselves. 

Even gods answered questions with questions. 

When Brunnhilde pierced Ben with her gaze and asked her questions, he provided a statement. 

"Home is sound and the color it makes. That's me."

Ben was also made for music. His fingers, their seemingly preternatural familiarity with stringed instruments, the branching pathways in his brain, drawing shape and flavor from things not meant to have form, taste, or tincture. 

Additionally, he might have thought he was made for reality, the state of things as they exist, even when they have wings.  

"You? You sound like a woman," he said, shrugging at Brunnhilde, her pretty pissed-off face. "Maybe you belong to yourself now. Maybe your home is being angry. How the shit should I know? You 'belong to nothing?' Then why're you so proud? You ever think of that?"

Tapped at his temple as the wind ruffled through those black locks, and the pigeons cooed, and the crows laughed along as they ascended from the sudden smell of rain. 

"Do you have feathers up there, too?" 

[kylo-wrecked]

“I want a pumpkin spice latte and I don’t care what anyone thinks.” [Jake ✨️ to music!Ben]

{ from this meme :// not accepting }

Another car flared by, its horn brushing against his left eardrum. Ben's head swiveled slow on his neck, machine-like, expression indicating he'd heard Jake perfectly, studio smooth, while the rest of the noise on this corner of what was formerly known as Alphabet City frothed and flattened.

"You disgust me."

Turned out every Brooklyn Boy ate shit eventually. Ben trawled a hand through the air like it might come tenderly… and smacked Jake's cap flat over his eyes. Then Ben pitched his weight out of the cab, slamming the door too hard, stirring up crunched leaves. Some woman jumped and cursed. He smiled under shades like tinted windows and a black ball cap and disappeared around a scaffold.

Minutes racked up on a silent meter, but lo and behold, Ben returned with a fragrant cup of orange bullshit. Just for Jake. Shoved the seasonal vessel through the rolled-down window, threatening spillage and third-degree-balls.

"Here you go, shithead."

Hunched down in the back, like that might ward off any unwanted public inquiry. The nice thing about New York was that nobody cared who you were when you were right in front of them; the stone-faced barista shrugged and rolled her eyes at the tip. Ben would make a fun story for later.

And he ordered a pumpkin spice latte. A pumpkin spice latte?

Ben had his own sightings; Tyra Banks at the Odeon, ordering everything on the menu and actually eating it. Cameron Diaz crossing a SoHo street too early in the morning—she'd looked rough. Jake Gyllenhaal on the Q—they pretended not to see each other.

"Better drink it," he grumbled, fishing for a lighter with one hand. "Shaved years off my sweet ass getting you that."

Urged his own cap over his eyes and lit a cigarette. He'd picked up something for himself, gripped in the crook of an arm—dark and flat, no steam, no ice. The ephemera of lighter fluid made it phosphate in spots. Maybe it was motor oil.

"Make you drive Staten Island."

@silverjetsystm