So, quick overview of how my Benlena works for those who didn't see my last post: Due to the events of Return of the Swarm, Elena's human personality was destroyed, leaving only the swarm hivemind that we witnessed in action in The Perfect Girlfriend. Elena was a the height of having a crush on Ben when she was taken over by the swarm, and Nanochip Queen Elena picked up her two prime directives from her: to keep Ben happy and safe, and to be his girlfriend. She doesn't care about anything or anyone else, so she's willing to do horrific things in order to secure Ben for herself.
In order to stop her, Ben agrees to call her his girlfriend (he's aro so it's not a huge sacrifice) and convinces her to stop hurting people and doing other immoral things. The resulting "relationship" is very one-sided--Elena insists on doing all of the giving and none of the taking--and Ben feels weird and guilty about it, especially since he blames himself for what happened to Elena before. He has to learn to accept that the old Elena is gone and this new Elena has wildly different wants and needs than the old her, or any other human. He finds himself growing attached to Elena, despite the arrangement originally being just to keep her under control.
Now that the explanation's out of the way, some headcanons:
Ben keeps trying to help Elena find things that she enjoys doing and have nothing to do with making him happy, but the search is largely unsuccessful. The only thing they discover is that Elena LOVES being reminded that she is, in fact, Ben's girlfriend. Ben tries to drop the word whenever he can, even using it like a pet name sometimes. On days that he feels especially bad about not giving in the relationship (even though that's what Elena really wants), he'll tell her over and over again that she's his girlfriend, she's the best girlfriend ever, he's so glad she's his girlfriend and not someone else, so on and so forth. This is one of her favorite things ever, but she'll make him stop the second he starts sounding tired of it. It's no fun if Ben doesn't want to do it.
Because Elena's directive is to be Ben's "girlfriend," she is EXTREMELY adverse to the idea of marrying him. After all, she can't be his girlfriend if she's technically his wife. That's the wrong word. Just thinking about it terrifies her. Ben brought it up once thinking that she might enjoy the extra level of commitment, but quickly learned to never mention it again.ย
Elena doesn't have any real friends because she's not interested in talking about anything not involving Ben in some fashion. (Thankfully she doesn't need or want any other social connections, and is perfectly happy without them.) Still, she managed to bond with the Roomba that Ben bought when he finally got his own apartment. She likes to write new plans with it for the most effective way to clean all the rooms as fast as possible. She even upgrades it, and has turned it into a sort of family pet. She insists that she only likes Roomba because it knows how to clean the house better than any other cleaning robot on the market, but the way she coddles it and insists on keeping it no matter how old it gets makes Ben suspect there's something deeper going on.
