Breaking Benjamin (NSFW, 18+)

He strangles a stillborn sob behind his lips, his muscles quivering with unbearable tension. It's as if she's trying to touch some ghost through his skin, some person he never was and can never be, but that's no relief from the burning intensity of her touch.

"... please..." he breathes, barely audible over her singing.

It's too much. It's too much, it's more than he can take, but he has to. He has to...

 

She goes still, hands on one cuff, and looks up at him with half-lidded eyes, dark behind her paint.

Her mouth crooks into a smirk.

"Please what?"

 

"It... it hurts. It's too much..." He's still holding bone-still beneath her hands, his nails biting half-circles into his palms. Pain isn't the right word for this, but it's the closest he can come to the way her touch feels.

He ducks his head, cringing, waiting for her to punish him.

 

"...it hurts?" She secures the final strap, slowly sliding her hands up his legs. "Explain."

 

He's tense and shaking beneath her hands, breath catching. "I..."

He's kept this hidden for so long, the hallucinations, the crazy things he sees that make no sense in any sane world. It's hard to get the words out, even though they're the only ones he can think of that might make her stop.

Or might make her worse. That too. This might have been a mistake, but he... he can't take it...

He swallows hard, chewing his lip. "It... feels... like you're... reaching under my skin," he says, haltingly. "Through to the bones."

 

Her eyes light up. "Does it, now?" She breathes quietly. "Oh, that... that's just lovely."

She hits the edge of the table with one foot and steps up, looking down at him, and slowly draws a finger across the bare skin of his stomach. "....and this?"

 

He gives a strained whimper, arching against his bonds. It's ice-cold beneath his skin, dragging down through vulnerable muscle and into his guts.

It's too intense, it's too much, everything is too much. He can't even tell if it's pleasant or painful anymore.

 

"So..." She bites her lip, fingers trailing lower as her eyes lock on his face. "What if I..."

Her fingers toy with the waistband of his jeans.

"Tell me what you're feeling, Mr. Halverson," she purrs.

 

"I... fuck..." He swallows hard, eyes on hers. "... It feels... cold, scraping across the bone..."

It feels almost like nails on a chalkboard, that claw trailing across his pelvis and the base of his spine. It's wrong, and he can't stop himself from responding. It's not even just physical; that would be easier, in a way, than having a part of him want...

"I don't... I don't want to do this..." he whispers, barely audible.

 

"Mmmh... I see..." her fingers toy gingerly with the fabric, then she frowns. "I told you. Everything that happens now is up to me. Whether you want to be here or not doesn't matter-"

She does not seem to understand, and, more than that, the strange, swimming after image is growing stronger... and for a moment there are two faces looking at him, the second overlaid over the woman's, all blue and green and covered in long kelpy seaweed, plastered down her face like hair. She looks upset.

 

He cries out in surprise, jerking back fast enough that the back of his head hits the rack.

It's part of her, that... that thing, isn't it? Like the faces in the jars, a drowned woman becoming part of the sea. Fuck. It's not real, it can't be real, it's just in his head, it's just the stress...

 

One hand shoots forwards, fisting in the front of his shirt. "Did I tell you to stop speaking?"

 

Benjamin cringes, looking down and to the side, breathing fast. "I... I... there's... a drowned woman in you, wearing your face..."

"There's something wrong with you, you're... you're... more than just a skeleton waiting beneath the skin..."

His filter is mostly gone, by now, between the panic and the pressure to keep talking.

 

"There's nothing wrong with me." She snarls, skin going slightly damp, chill and clammy against his. "She brought me back, and I will never die."

Her grip is tight as iron. "You're mortal. I'm not."

 

"... this is all crazy," he says softly, as he starts to careen toward another anxiety attack. "This is crazy, this can't happen, I'm hallucinating..."

It's that or believe that his goddamned kidnapper has a ghost living beneath her skin, that she's... not really human anymore. That all the things he's seen really happened.

 

The woman stares, then slowly pulls out her phone, stares at it, then at him, expression dark.

"You don't believe me?"

 

He freezes, eyes wide. "... I believe you. I. I'm sorry."

 

Her grip loosens. "...good. I would hate to get my own blood all over the basement."

 

"Your... own blood?"

If she's not mortal, then... then what is she? And what does she want?

He hesitates, swallowing hard. "... whatever you want. You're... in charge."

 

"One cannot prove defiance of death without being willing to die in doing so, Mr. Halverson. I do not believe in half measures."

The smile that graces her features as he says the words 'whatever you want' is beatific.

The feeling of fingers pushing his pants lower is. Well.

"Tell me what you feel."