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The yard smells like rotten eggs or something when Ben gets home from Jarquez Otis’s fifteenth-birthday sleepover, and somehow Ben just—he’s got a bad feeling about whatever’s inside. He barely waits to wave goodbye to the Otises, for Jarquez’s mother’s sedan to peel backward out of the driveway, before he’s punching in the garage door code with shaking fingers and wheeling his bike out onto the sidewalk. Ben doesn’t lock up behind him, and he doesn’t call his mom until he’s a safe distance out of the neighborhood, doubled over and wheezing in the crowded annex of a shopping mall. That’ll haunt him, later—that he waits, that he so instinctively puts his own safety before hers that he doesn’t even think to check on Mom first—but something primal is telling him he’ll only be any good to anybody if he first puts enough distance between himself and… and what?
Ben doesn’t know. Oh, god, he feels half out of his mind already, and he has no real reason to even believe anything’s wrong, except—Mom’s not answering her phone. He calls it twice, for good measure, and then he calls up the landline that neither of them ever uses, but the thing that picks it up, sneering at Ben from the other end of the line—that’s not Mom’s voice. It’s high and pitchy, like a woman’s, but gravelly, too, somehow—vocal fry, he thinks that’s called, and he focuses on the quality of it instead of the words it’s saying, and they really should call tomorrow to cancel their landline service because Mom’s not made of money and it’s not worth their savings to keep shelling out just so that this slip-sliding, disembodied voice can tell Ben—tell—
He pushes “end” and slots out some time to hyperventilate in the Macy’s customer restroom before he can bring himself to call the police.
-
Home is a yellow-taped crime scene now, but Ben gets to see his mom one more time, at the morgue, when they ask him to identify her body. She stinks of eggs, and the odd angle of her neck, the purple-red blooming up from her skin—
There’s a lot he doesn’t allow himself to think about, after, and it’s not just that last glimpse of Mom. It’s the way he keeps going for the salt at mealtimes and then staring at the shaker in his hand like he’s forgotten what he’s supposed to do with it; it’s that face he keeps dreaming about, taut and pale and just formless enough that Ben can’t…
About a month after Social Services bounces him to his Aunt Adele and Uncle Mason, Ben hears the name for the first time, only—he could swear he’s heard it before, and not just in passing. “It’s like Dean just—vanished. Even after Lisa dumped him, she still used to talk about him, you know, like he’d still contact them sometimes, or she’d worry about how the whole thing was affecting Ben…” He can practically hear Adele’s put-upon sigh even through the locked door of the guest room that’s supposed to be Ben’s now.
“You think he’s responsible?” says Mason jerkily.
“The police haven’t said anything but… there weren’t any pictures with Dean in their house, not on Lisa’s phone, not on her Facebook—and no one seems to know the guy’s last name. Maybe Ben would know it, but Ben won’t even mention him. I don’t know, Mase. It doesn’t smell right.”
Ben doesn’t bring it up to them the next morning, because he doesn’t know anybody named Dean, even if he supposedly should. At least, he doesn’t think—but his body seems to know a lot of things his mind doesn’t, these days, in the way his pulse picks up and his hair all stands on end and gooseflesh stretches like spandex over his skin because of nothing: nothing he understands, anyway. His grief counselor tells him it’s most likely a trauma response, but Ben—no. Ben feels trauma in his bones most waking moments, feels it in his nightmares and in the minutes when he picks up the phone and calls Mom just to hear the message on her voicemail that hasn’t stopped playing yet. This isn’t trauma. He can tell the difference, by now.
One night, every night, he dreams of spiky stars, and he swipes a knife from the kitchen to carve them into his bedposts at four in the morning, when no one is awake to pity him. Ben feels—safer—after that.
-
Ben blows through four more deaths in the family, half a dozen foster homes, two years on the street, and more embarrassingly fruitless Internet research than he’d like to admit before he tracks Dean Winchester to a no-name town in Kansas. The guy clearly doesn’t recognize him at first, but Ben’s had more than enough time to let the image of Dean’s face marinate in his mind, foggy at first but clearer over the years, to be certain this is him. This is who’s responsible.
“She’s dead because of you—because of what you took from us,” he says. For years, Ben’s imagined spitting these words out and under the guy’s skin, but—Ben just sounds hollow and kind of pathetic, like he’s going to start crying or something any second.
Dean Winchester looks moronic standing there fiddling with his Henley and looking Ben up and down like he still can’t place him. The tall man—Sam; Ben recognizes him from the news footage of their killing sprees he found on YouTube—who's standing inches behind him still hasn’t lowered his gun from where he’s got it aimed at Ben, and Ben smirks at the thing, praying Sam will take a shot. But instead, Sam just stands there with his forehead creasing a little, as though he’s entering that space between intuition and realization. “Who do you mean, kid?” Dean asks stupidly, and Ben…
“What were you to us, anyway? Mom let you into our home. What did you do to us there that was so—so incriminating you decided to wipe our minds clean of it? You made us targets, Winchester, and she couldn’t protect herself against—I couldn’t…”
“Ben,” Dean breathes, finally, and a whole lot flickers across his dumb-ass mug all at once, but Ben’s not having any of it. “Ben, what—did something happen to—”
“Demon,” he says shortly, and Ben really does start crying, then, shuddering away when Dean reaches out with a pale, callused hand.
“I was trying to protect you,” the guy mutters wildly. “I thought you were better off—”
“Defenseless? Yeah. No. You just wanted to be done with us. It’s a good thing whatever you did to make me forget didn’t hold up, or I’d be dead, too, not that I’m any good for anything alive—”
Scowling, Dean tells him, “Don’t talk like that, Jesus—”
“Don’t talk to me like you’re—like you’re my father or something!”
That stops Dean short, but then the tall guy’s muttering, “Dean, let it go, let him be, come on,” and Ben’s—alone, again, and nothing’s changed.