your name on my tongue /benji, clue

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

from here x

B E N J I  R O W L A N D

He looks up from the blood pooling under his hands too late. Stella is already halfway across the yard, back to him with a knife in her hand, leaving him.

His mouth opens, for the briefest of moments, the usual calm quiet behind Benji's gaze is alive with fear. He doesn't take the pressure off of Grady's stab wound, doesn't rise to go after her even though he wants to, badly. "Stells, no!" he calls out after her, frustration laced tight around each syllable as if he can hide the panic in his tone that way.

If he leaves Grady like this, then there'll be no one to hold the other boy together.

Benji loses sight of Stella in the dark and drops his gaze back down to the boy dying under his hands. Silly little Grady, he had that girl follow him around all day back in September because he was so scared Benji was going to tell everyone about their little kiss. He knows better than to kiss and tell though, better than to pretend that moments like those even matter.

Life is precious but it's fleeting. You can only hold onto so much until it's overflowing from your hands and slipping through the cracks, until you have nothing at all.

A kiss is just a kiss, a body's just a body and love was always something for other people, not for kids like Benji.

Grady's blood seeps from under Benji's balled up shirt, slipping out between his fingers, staining the creases in his hand.

"You're not going to die," he says to him, tone matter-of-fact, "Don't, Grady."

Benji knows that sometimes it is a choice. It's one he had to make often enough when he was growing up. Weak, always, his parents didn't raise weak things, they simply put them down. He had to be strong, he had to be stubborn and he had to make the choice to keep living every single day.

This time, he can't just watch and wait as the girl he loves disappears into the dark. "Zeke," Benji says, "Take over." Then he nods down at Grady, "Don't remove pressure, don't let him sleep." He waits for the other boys hands to come down over his before pulling back to rest on his ankles.

His palms are red with Grady's blood, already drying and oxidizing in the cold night air. He reaches out and brushes sweaty strands of hair away from the other boy's forehead lightly. There isn't much in the way of friendship between them but that isn't rare for Benji. He can count his close friends on one hand and even then those people might be surprised to find out they'd been included on that list.

Before he rises, Benji leans in close to ensure that Grady can hear him over his own laboured breaths.

"You owe me a new shirt, Sullivan, so you better live."

Then he's standing and he's striding away across the lawn, shirtless and feeling it now away from the bonfire. Someone abandoned a jacket along the side of the house and Benji picks it up as he heads for the front porch. It's dark alongside him, dark on all sides.

He's afraid, only a fool wouldn't be.

Stella can't be that far ahead of him but she's always been capable of doing a devastating amount of damage in a matter of moments. Sometimes it feels like he's dating a monsoon.

There's no time to be afraid, his friends are dying in the dark.

He glances briefly over his shoulder, at the night and the driveway leading up to the road.

Then Benji slips into the house.

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

B E N J I  R O W L A N D

There's something strange about shadow and the way that it bleeds, seeping into everything and devouring it until it might as well not exist.

Benji stands there in the frame of the front door for a moment, eyes adjusting to the dark, catching on the abstract deep yellow frame of light cast on the living room floor by the doorway of the kitchen.

He opens his mouth, "Stella?" he asks the dark.

Then he has to shut his eyes.

Pain has been brewing in a slow steady beat behind his forehead for a few days now. He knows what it means, has felt the ides of war always long before the first flash of silver armour on the horizon. A migraine is coming, slowly migrating across the grey plains of his brain matter to land at his feet, overtaking him in one short breath.

It's been this way since he was a child but it was just part of life for him, normal days cut by endless weeks of debilitating pain. He didn't have a childhood, just brief breaks from agony.

And even though he's been medicated now for years and they tell him he'll be okay now, the migraines still come for him every now and then like a hand on his shoulder, keeping him in check.

"Don't," he mutters curtly, opening his eyes against the onset to gaze into the storm.

Something's not right, though he's been inside now for at least a minute or two, all he can hear is silence. And it's heavy, almost like it's more physical than just a sound. There's a long quiet here, a terrible kind of hush that always comes after a tragedy.

"Naomi?" he tries next as he steps further into the room. It's easier to make out a couch now and a fireplace. There's a lamp on a table in the corner, photo frames on the walls with people encased in them, eyes glinting in the dark and smiles gleaming. Everything is so much creepier in the dark.

Benji strays closer to the fireplace and his hand wraps around a firepoker, so tightly that the metal digs into his palm and his knuckles go pale.

The light coming from the kitchen beckons and he sighs, fear crawling up the back of his neck like a cold finger.

"Fuck," he whispers.

Then he steps forwards, holding the poker slightly behind him as if to guard his own back.

"Stella," he says, a warning note in his tone "If you're hurt, I'll-"

What?

He pauses, fingers loosening then tightening around the handle of the poker once again as he tries to comprehend the idea of losing her. But that's difficult, pointless even.

"Cease to be," he mutters softly.

Then Benji takes a deep breath and steps into the kitchen.

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

B E N J I  R O W L A N D

The kitchen is empty. Warm yellow light falls from a vintage stained glass lamp hanging low over a table for four and buttercup yellow-tile acts as a backsplash behind a deep-set sink with a white stone basin. Yellow rubber gloves hang over a tall faucet, water drips slowly off the fingertips to land with a soft kerplunk into the basin below.

But the kitchen is empty, the back door secured shut against the dark and the bonfire still burning outside. Benji stands there in the doorframe for a long moment, assessing. He's a thinker, always thinking almost too deeply according to Stella. How many times has she pressed her pointer finger against the crease between his brows as if she can turn his brain off for him?

The concept is nice but he's experienced mindless oblivion enough times to know that it's not for him.

He slips into the kitchen, glancing over his shoulder into the dark living room just once before abandoning it. He rests the firepower against a cupboard door within reach and then places a hand down on the granite countertop, fingers coming away slightly damp, filmy almost, from the residue of a cleaning agent.

Benji looks up to look out through the window over the sink but it's too dark, all he sees is a faded version of himself staring back at him, framed by the warm glow of the lamp. His expression shifts as a sliver of pain shoots through the back of his head. The migraine continues to form slowly, exasperated by the beer and all the excitement.

Something in his reflection catches his eyes and Benji turns around to spot a coffee machine on the counter along the opposite wall. He crosses the floor and opens whitewashed, pine cupboard doors until he finds an open bag of ground coffee hiding behind a canister of hot chocolate mix.

Almost mindlessly, Benji sets the machine to brew a pot.

While he waits for the coffee to brew, he leans back against the kitchen sink with his arms crossed, the fire poker still close enough for him to grab quickly if he needs to. His gaze flicks back towards the door into the living room and the darkness laying in wait just beyond the halo of light peeking out from the kitchen, once, twice, again.

A shiver runs down his spine as the coffee brewer hisses and spits stale coffee grounds into the pot below and Benji turns to the side to pull a knife out of the block sitting on the counter nearby. There are already a couple missing from their places and he tries not to think about that, how he isn't the first to enter the house tonight.

And how it's so quiet when only moments ago, someone was screaming.

Would he have even come in here if Stella hadn't?

"No," he answers the empty kitchen, but it's hard to say how true that really is.

The boy sitting at the fire with his friends half an hour ago couldn't bear the thought of losing any more of them, but the Benji here now isn't quite so sure he can even trust them anymore.

The killer has to be someone that they know and the idea it could be one of them feels like a knife in his side, but it's a knife he's become used to living with, it's almost too easy. He was raised to never trust anyone, not fully. His family has enough money that they had to learn to protect it from those who might worm their way into their lives just to taste some of it.

Raised in a house like that, it's hard to accept that someone could love him without motive.

Maybe that's why it'll always be Stella and him in the end, at least with her he knows where he stands.

The coffee machine signals the completion of its job and Benji pushes himself off the counter, knife in hand, to pour himself a mug. The sweet, toasty scent fills the kitchen, cutting through the smell of disinfectant that had been hard to notice before without anything to compare it to.

And though the knowledge had begun to form since the moment he entered the room, Benji pauses with the rim of the mug stalled against his lip as he finally understands.

He's standing in the middle of a crime scene.

[benji chooses to wait]