Ben Untethered

It was funny how a life could look so different from one day to the next.

One day there was balance between impulses, with dark urges sitting patiently to be collared by optimism that things could get better.

And the next day, the scales had broken, those impulses had poured out, and those urges were ripping that optimism to shreds, gnawing, gnashing, splashing in its blood. 

Ben was untethered from optimism and severed from those normal things that people dressed themselves up in to obtain some sense of comfort and obscure one’s fear of inevitable death. Habits. Routines. Hobbies. Hope. 

That sense that things were going to work out and be okay, that there was a purpose in trying to be good, had always been a slippery and nebulous thing to him. But he had held on. God, he had held on through sweat and tears and rage and hate. It had felt like the right thing to do even when it was the hardest thing in the world. He had wanted and tried, so badly, to be normal. He had reached out for something as ridiculous as an ordinary life.

But some fat stupid cunt had cut the cord. And now he was falling. He plummeted.

The darkness had rushed in around him. Down here the light was dim and shadows obscured things that should be basic and immutable. He lost his sense of time, his sense of days and nights passing. His sense of hunger. His sense of right and wrong. Far out of reach, far back up the depths, at heights that seemed forever lost to him, he had lost his ability to control himself. He didn’t miss it. It seemed such a stupid thing to aspire to now. 

The Ben in the bottom of the valley at the base of Normal Mountain looked different. He looked at himself different. He stared into his blue eyes that others called pretty and saw an absence of things. He saw the truth inside them. He hated himself for trying to deny it. It hated him too. The creature’s face in the mirror looked exhausted and unnerving through its own gaze but it was beyond hope and the only mercy it deserved was death. But he had to make things up to it first.

Perched all pretty up there, others looked at him different, too. He could feel it. Those feelings he’d had as a teenager had for a time submerged under dark waters but now raged, roaring out of the surface, washing him under waves of pain and paranoia. He avoided going outside, going to work. Those were normal things that were for normal people. How had he hid the truth for so long? He was a pretender amongst people, hoping nobody asked to see proof of having a soul. When he went outside, he didn’t need to see their faces to know he couldn’t stand them. Sitting at home, he still saw their expressions etched on the undersides of his eyelids, scratchy and itchy. 

Disdain writhed under his fur and under his skin and in his teeth, clenched, as he stared at the ceiling while other people on the planet rested, night after night. He played out conversations of what they would say if they knew the truth about him. They all had Owen’s voice in their throats. The longer he went without sleeping, the more insistent their words became, the louder their volume, the more terrifying their impact. He begged them to stop for a moment’s peace but they were dedicated to finally helping him see the truth. People, normal people, would never accept him. He was something else. And he shouldn’t fight it.

But he didn’t want to hurt Andy, he said. It didn’t matter. They didn’t care. 

Nobody in his mind cared for the efforts he had gone to to smother his urges, the pain he had put himself through to fight what he wanted to do. It did not matter. The urges and fantasies that had plagued him since he knew what it was to desire the sensual touch of another person had cast him as a monster for life in a role he never signed up for. He had been handed a script and his body demanded that he act it out. It did not matter whether he fought it or cried over it. It did not matter if he would ever somehow summon the strength to fight off the terrifying monster inside of him. He would always be the monster to them for virtue of what he wanted rather than what he did. 

If they didn’t see a difference, why bother fighting it?

This tether to the world of normality was never meant for things like him. He had obviously come out wrong when he was born, a soul inaccurately, imperfectly attached to a body. There was clearly something deeply, unfixably wrong with him. The extremities of his spirit were seared where they didn’t fit inside his physical presence and were instead exposed to the vacuum of the void. He started to wonder if clutching to those confines made it hurt so much more – half of him in heat, half of him in icy water. Blinding light and suffocating dark. The scales were broken. He needed to give himself to one. 

That’s what he did at last. Free-floating away from hope, he saw the truth. It was cold out here, but at least the fight was over. He didn’t want a normal life anymore. 

He only wanted Andy. 

The other lights in his view had retreated behind dark clouds beyond his reach, distant and dim and cruel and cold, but Andy… Andy was so bright and so warm. He was all Ben needed. Ben could not heat himself. Someone else needed to.

His love sustained him. He pretended to function for the otter’s benefit. He showered before Andy came over. He managed to eat when Andy did. He slept when Andy stayed over and only when Andy stayed over, although when the boy was in his house, sleep was the very last thing Ben wanted to do. He was so cold, and he craved that warmth. It was greater than oxygen. He filled the cracks in his mind with Andy to patch out the howling, shivering chill. He savoured the touch of that boy like an angel had descended from heaven to scoop him up from an icy ocean.

When he touched Andy it didn’t feel like the boy was real. Mid-reach it always seemed like his hand was going to pass through the otter and he would fade away like all the other people with all the other critical voices and angry faces in his mind, temporary and cruel. But Andy was real. He looked up at the bunny. He smiled. Ben smiled.

Ben was free from the constraints of what was right and what was wrong. He did not need or want friendships or habits or hobbies or hope for a normal life. In Andy’s light he could breathe freer than he had ever been able to before. 

So he filled his lungs with everything he could get from the child. Everything. Andy became his lifeblood, his breath, and he treated the child accordingly, never knowing when he might gasp for him on another dark night when the thoughts in his head turned unpredictable – when they could not be quietened and demanded suicide as vengeance for the sins of his existence. He breathed in the look of that boy’s face, the curves of his body, the sound of his voice. His ass. His assss. His fuckinnggg assssssssssss. 

In a month, he masturbated to the child two hundred times. Two dozen times more he used Owen to get off while whispering to the Andy in his mind. Even when his oversized hypersexual penis was too sore to feel good, the pain distracted him from the gnawing hollowness in the untouchable part of his being. He stored the articles of clothing he took from Andy in airtight bags and pulled them from the plastic and wrapped them around his face when he needed to breathe and needed to cum. The photos and school workbooks in Andy’s house – Ben copied and saved and printed and filed them, a mundane chronicle of the incredible otter’s existence. Masturbation material. When he slipped and tore the photograph of Andy smiling in his school uniform Ben performed surgery, one hand clutching tweezers, the other alternating between applications of glue and stroking his dick, breathing heavily as he attached individual fibres of paper to their siblings to restore his pictured perfect boy to life. The strands of his pink-painted hair and fur – Ben picked them off his couch and bed with reverence and stored them safely. He kissed the strands of drool on Andy’s cups. When he held his head close to Andy’s he timed his inhales to capture the air from Andy’s lungs. He recorded Andy sleeping in the hope that playing it on the television when Andy wasn’t there would enable Ben to feel connected to his little love and get some rest as well. Two hours, he sat there, recording him with his phone that night, until his battery ran out. The video picked up the sound of his masturbation. It still never worked as well as the real thing. 

The hare mentally placed Owen back where the stupid fat cunt belonged – an annoying but occasionally useful tool that could be exploited for greater exposure to the person Ben really loved. Ben did the bare minimum to sustain their relationship and Owen’s low self-esteem and complex trauma filled in the gaps. Owen made excuses for Ben's behaviour so the hare didn’t need to, and in that way, Owen was the best adult boyfriend he could ever hope for.

To Owen, Ben’s obsession with Andy was actually generosity; his time alone with the child was an effort to give his boyfriend a break from the little brother he hated; Ben didn’t care about his appearance around Owen because he was comfortable around him and that was a good thing; Ben’s hateful expression towards the adult otter was always, always deserved, because Owen had must have done something wrong, and the otter needed to redouble his efforts to be a better boyfriend and make up whatever it was he had failed at. 

Owen spent more time outside smoking. Ben spent more time inside with Andy in his lap, savouring every sense that shivered in the presence of the person he truly loved, huddled around the light and swearing to never release his cold trembling grip on it. Radiant and beautiful and perfect. Pure enough to burn away the black tar of sin that dripped from his big best friend onto his soft fur and pretty face as Ben made up his betrayal to the monster within by finally indulging its fantasies. Bright enough that the look of fear on his face always faded after Ben exposed him to things a child ought not see. Resilient enough to keep shakily smiling and pretend that everything was alright. 

When the otter told Ben he was okay, it sounded like he meant it. It really did. 

Ben resolved to give his special boy the love he deserved. He was scared, but he would be brave for Andy. 

“I love you”, Ben said. He spoke those words with enough gravity to knock a planet out of orbit. He said it with the weight of his life. 

When the little otter said “I love you too” back, it felt like he meant it with the same force. It really did. 

Their love was a beautiful thing. He would deny it no longer. It was time to do what needed to be done. 

Deep in the icy marrow of his bones, Ben knew this would be the final act. And it commenced with applause from all the voices in his head.