Benji feels like he can breathe for the first time in nearly an hour as Ethan and Will come tumbling in through the door of the safehouse. They’d lost track of each other in the chaos and confusion that had followed the explosion that had taken out a solid chunk of the warehouse-turned-base of operations for their terrorist du jour; Benji and Luther had already been clear of the building when it had blown, but Ethan and Will– they didn’t know.
As much as they’d wanted to stay and search, to find their teammates, they knew the plan: rendezvous at the safehouse and prepare for the next leg of the mission. So they’d acquired a vehicle and made their way across town to the little house they’ve been holing up in, where Benji had proceeded to pace nervously across the floor as the minutes had ticked up and there had still been no sign of Ethan or Will. And though Luther had told him more than once to relax, that they would be here, Benji could tell he hadn’t been as calm as he’d been pretending.
There’s a momentary release of tension, a sigh of pure relief when Ethan and Will finally do show up, but Benji’s breath catches in his chest again when he really takes them in. They’re both looking quite a bit worse for wear – bruised and smoke-stained and singed around the edges. One of Will’s sleeves is actually burned, the visible skin of his forearm shiny and pink.
“Were you in the warehouse when it blew?” Benji demands, a little shrill.
“Yes,” Will says flatly, at the same time Ethan assures them, “Just a little bit.”
They turn and look at each other. Ethan smirks. Will sighs.
“Are you alright?” Benji asks, despite the evident answer.
Ethan glances at Will again, tilting his head as if to say, “Well, are we?”
Will rolls his eyes, but answers with a firm, “We’re fine.”
“Good,” Luther says, “because I need your eyes on this.”
His tone is nearly businesslike, the “What took you so long?” implied, but Benji catches the way his eyes rove over both Ethan and Will, checking them over just as surely as Benji is doing. Still, he nods towards the computer, where he’s been reviewing the information they’d managed to lift from the warehouse before it had gone up in flames, and Ethan immediately snaps into focus mode, crossing the room to where Luther is sitting. When Will makes to follow, Benji intercepts him, glancing back at Luther and Ethan. Seeing their attention absorbed by the screen in front of them, Benji turns back to Will. “You’re really alright?” he asks, voice low.
He shouldn’t let his anxiety get the better of him, not in the middle of a mission. They’d promised that whatever happened between them, it wouldn’t get in the way of their jobs; they would trust each other, trust their skills, trust that they would come back to one another at the end of the day. And this isn’t a breach of that agreement – not really. Benji just wants to be sure.
“I’m fine,” Will promises.
Benji clucks out a little disapproving noise and reaches for Will’s hand, taking it and turning it gently so he can inspect the burn on his forearm.
“I’m fine,” Will says again. “It’s nothing. First degree. Ethan put me out.”
“There’s some burn cream in the first aid kit,” Benji says, as though Will hadn’t spoken. “I’ll go get it.”
Will rolls his eyes, but when Benji begins to let him go, he turns his hand in Benji’s grip and holds tight.
“Hey,” says softly. “Thank you.”
His eyes flash up over Benji’s shoulder, checking that they’re still beneath Ethan and Luther’s notice, before he leans in and presses a kiss to Benji’s cheek. For helping. For caring – it goes unsaid, communicated by the brush of his lips against Benji’s skin.
“Yeah,” Benji says, equally soft and a little breathless as Will pulls away. “Any time. Every time.”
Will quirks a little smile at him, tired but real, as he lets Benji go, and Benji can feel down to his bones that he’ll do anything to prove that he means it.
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Hello, I'm Lama... My husband, Mohammed, is 30 years old. I want to ask for your help for my husband. Please support him and share his story so that it reaches everyone.🙏
My husband, Mohammed, has suffered from numerous health problems for 12 years, and the situation has worsened during the war due to shortages of medicine and healthy food. He urgently needs surgery and medication.😔
Hello, I'm Lama from Gaza, I'm 24 years old, and my husband Mohammed is 30 years old, we got married in 2022 in a beautiful, warm and quiet
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Not "The Character did nothing wrong" or "The Character is irredeemably awful" but a secret third thing: The Character may display moments of deep love & compassion, may even have a strong sense of ethics, and may also be capable of brutal cruelty that is irreconcilable with those traits. The constant tension between the different sides of The Character's nature is exactly what makes them compelling, and attempting to reduce them down to simply "a terrible person" or "innocent & misunderstood" is missing the point of the questions a media with nuanced characters is asking you to consider
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unscientific poll: if you were going to attend a terror camp style keynote for another TV fandom (the kind where you get on zoom with cast and crew and they answer your questions or play a silly game) what fandom would you most want it to be for
???
iwtv
heated rivalry
the pitt
ofmd
asoiaf
star trek
stranger things
good omens
another tv show which i will put in the replies
Voting ended onJan 4
you are definitely allowed to nominate old ass tv shows that have been off the air for ages i'm just curious .....
[established Benji/Brandt, 998 words; I have naught to offer but this unconscionable fluff. I'm sorry. Here it is]
Will grimaces as he digs his fingers into the dirt, creating divots in the freshly turned soil. He really should have invested in some gloves.
He’s never had a problem getting his hands dirty if the situation calls for it. Gunpowder, sweat, mud, blood – things happen when you’re out in the field, and you can’t flinch at a little mess. But there’s a difference between willing and enjoying. He’s always hated the feeling of things caked around or under his fingernails.
In any case, gardening isn’t exactly a life-or-death situation. It’s not like he really has to be out here, playing in the dirt. It’s just that Benji has been making noises about how Will spends too much time at the office, or at the gym, or at the range, and how he needs a hobby that’s just for his enjoyment and not an extension of work.
This is, as far as Will’s concerned, hypocrisy of the highest order. If he needs a hobby that doesn’t have to do with work, then Benji needs a hobby that doesn’t involve him sitting in front of a screen. He’d informed Benji of this in no uncertain terms.
So at least Benji is suffering alongside him.
“How are there so many damned rocks?” Benji swears when his trowel hits another stone buried in the dirt. “I swear they’re materializing down there.”
“Well, that is where you tend to find rocks,” Will drawls. “In the ground.”
“Ha.” Benji deadpans. “You’re hilarious. I had no idea I was dating a comedian.”
“You’re just cranky because the rocks like you better,” Will says, creating a few more holes in his side of the nascent flowerbed – notably devoid of rocks.
“And because it’s hot out here, and because my back is going to murder me later for hunching over this long, and because I still don’t see the point of this,” Benji replies.
“You complain an awful lot for someone who once spent hours hiding out in a field, waiting for the go-ahead on a mission,” Will says.
“That was different,” Benji says, and – yeah, Will sees his point. “Whose idea was this, anyway?”
“Yours,” Will says without hesitation.
Benji makes an affronted noise. “It was not my idea!”
“You’re the one who said we needed a hobby,” Will says.
“No, I said you need a hobby,” Benji shoots back.
“And I said you also needed a hobby, and you said okay–”
“I said fine, actually, there is implied there a certain level of reluctance–”
“–and then you asked for some suggestions, which I gave you, and you picked gardening off the list, so,” Will concludes, “it was basically your idea.”
“You’re full of shit, you know that?” Benji says, but he’s clearly trying not to laugh now, so Will doesn’t take offense. “Why would you even suggest gardening if you don’t like it?”
“I never said I don’t like it,” Will says, carefully neutral as he reaches for the seed packets they’d picked out at the hardware store last weekend.
“You don’t have to, I can see the faces you keep making while you’re digging. Plus, you’ve got that thing about your fingernails–”
“It’s not a thing–”
“–so why was it on the list?”
Will sits back on his heels, thinking about it for a moment. Why had he suggested gardening, when he’d known the sort of work it would entail, and when he knows that it will ultimately end up ignored and overgrown or dying when he and Benji both get too busy with work?
Maybe he’d been hit with the nostalgia stick. He’d always dragged his feet as a kid when his mom had insisted that he help her out in the yard, picking and prodding as they manicured the garden to her standard of perfection, but he can almost look back on those afternoons with a kind of fondness now, given the distance of time. Or maybe he’d just liked the idea of coaxing something living out of the earth, of caring for and nurturing something on a small, almost inconsequential scale.
Finally, he shrugs. “I don’t hate it,” he says. “It was something I already knew a little about, it gets me out of the house, gets you out from in front of the computer; seemed to fill all the requirements. Did you want to plant the begonias or the peonies first?”
“Will,” Benji says, and he sounds so serious that Will looks up and meets his eyes, “I have no idea what either of those are.”
Will can’t help it – he laughs. “You picked them!”
“I picked them because they sounded like very stereotypical flowers!” Benji insists. “I don’t know the first thing about gardening, I assumed you’d stop me if I picked something ridiculous!”
“They’re not ridiculous,” Will says as he tries to get the snickering under control. “They’re perfectly nice flowers. Model flowers, really.”
Benji sighs, letting his head fall back as if he’s searching the heavens for answers (or patience). “Why can’t we be the type of couple that takes– I don’t know, long, relaxing walks, instead?”
Will snorts, and Benji sits back up with a sheepish sort of look on his face.
“Yeah, alright, I heard it as I was saying it,” he says. He chews his lip thoughtfully for a moment before asking, “How do you feel about hiking?”
Hiking?
It does check all the boxes, now that Will thinks about it. It would get them out of the house, it’s physical enough to keep them both engaged, it would help them unplug a little from the stress of daily life…
“I could get into hiking,” Will says.
“Oh, thank god,” Benji says, already rolling to his feet. “Let’s go back inside. I’ll let you use the sink first.”
If there’s a better declaration of love, Will honestly can’t think of one at the moment. He takes Benji’s hand up and happily follows him back into the house.
For a long time, it’s really pretty mild – small symptoms that are usually easily put off to be dealt with at a more appropriate time. It’s manageable. Sometimes it’s even an asset; he’s detail-oriented, fastidious, and has an excellent eye for patterns, and he uses these things to make himself a better agent. He tends naturally towards repetition, and he quickly learns that he enjoys going through the motions of learning to use a firearm, of learning to clean and care for one, of learning to defend himself, over and over and over again until it’s ingrained as muscle memory – until he’s good at it. He’s good at his job, good enough that they give him a team
Being a field agent, however, particularly being a team leader, is stressful; a few more compulsions start slipping in through the cracks, but it’s still manageable. Then Croatia happens, and it breaks him. Symptoms get… out of hand. He ends up on medication to help regulate (something he’d resisted in the past because he hadn’t wanted anything interfering with his thought process or reaction time, but now – well, he figures he’s never going to go back into the field, so why not?), and that brings it back down to manageable again. They put him to work as an analyst; his attention to detail and eye for patterns makes him an asset there, too, and it’s fine. He can live like this, it’s fine
And then Ethan happens
Will surprises himself with how well he does with being dragged halfway across the world and into situations he thought he’d never be able to handle again. He thinks maybe it acts almost as a shock to his system; everything that happens is so far out of his routine, it’s like his usual rules don’t apply. He’s able to roll up his sleeves and get shit done, just like he used to
It’s not a tenable solution, of course. He has a grand old meltdown when he gets home and finds that he still needs the medication to help regulate his days
For a little while, after Ethan tells him the truth about Julia, he hopes – well, if the big, awful mistake you thought you made wasn’t actually as awful as you thought, maybe the symptoms of your mental illness that worsened as a result of said mistake will improve? But no, brains don’t work that way. He has a lot of work ahead of him if he ever wants to get out in the field again
Instead, he helps coordinate missions from headquarters, he argues for the future of the IMF, and when that isn’t enough, he does his best to look out for his friends in whatever capacity he’s able while under the watchful eye of the CIA
But when things go spectacularly pear-shaped, when Ethan and Benji are in danger, Will packs his shit up—both mentally and physically—and gets his ass back out there. His friends need help, and that’s going to have to be enough to get him through
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Important Update on Our Family Blogs and a Call for Your Support
Due to the shadowban on my brother Tareq's blog (@tareqayad), we have created new blogs to ensure continued communication with you:
Tareq's new blog: @tareqayad1
My brother Sohail's blog: @sohailayyad1
My brother Yehya's blog : @yehyaayyad
Hello, my name is Tareq Ayyad, a Palestinian living in Gaza. … David Jones-Krause needs your support for Help my family escape death in Gaza
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Fundraising Update:
We set an initial goal of $2,0000 and only $1,038 remains to reach that target. we have raised $18,965 thanks to your generous support. If 41 people donate $25 each, we will successfully meet our first milestone.
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