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Soldier Boy x feminist!Reader hc
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a/n: I’m thirsty for this man and I need a good enemies-to-lovers storyline for after the finale, so here are some ideas because why not. Reader is a feminist and a leftist and basically all that Ben probably hates.
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Ben clocks you as a problem the second he hears your name. Not because you are loud, although you are, and not because you are popular, although that pisses him off too, but because you are the kind of woman who says exactly what she thinks on camera and somehow makes it sound like a threat to the system itself. You are not just anti-Vought; you are anti-everything Ben was trained to worship, and the fact that you can say all of it with perfect confidence makes him hate you on sight. Which, unfortunately for his blood pressure, turns into fascination almost immediately.
You do not flirt with him like a normal person. You humiliate him. Publicly. Repeatedly. You call him a relic, a caveman, a nepo baby with a body count, a patriotic factory defect, and you do it with the kind of clean, cutting precision that makes every room go silent for half a second. Ben is used to being feared, desired or at least respected. You offer him none of those things. You treat him like a nobody with unresolved daddy issues and a decorative jawline, and that drives him insane because he can tell, very quickly, that you are not bluffing.
The first real crack in the dynamic happens when Ben realizes you are not intimidated by him at all. Not his history, not the violence, not the myth, not the tereible and dangerous reputation. You look at Soldier Boy and see a badly socialized man with an overfed ego and no clue what to do with a woman who can gut him verbally in thirty seconds flat. That is the exact moment he starts paying attention, because he has never been able to stand a woman who sees through him and keeps talking anyway.
Ben tries to get one over on you with the usual tactics: crude compliments, obscene little comments, sexist one-liners, the whole rotten old Soldier Boy routine. You absolutely destroy him every time. You correct his language. You mock his politics. You call his flirting “male environmental damage.” And somehow the worse you make him look, the more hooked he becomes, because no woman has ever made him work this hard just to get a reaction. You do not reward his ego. You wound it, and he starts wanting you like a man who has mistaken being humiliated for being chosen.
You know exactly what you’re doing. That is the important part. You are not softening toward him because he is attractive or because he has the face of a fucking greek god. You are furious that you want him at all, because he is everything you hate in men: misogynistic, reactionary, arrogant, emotionally illiterate, violently overconfident. You always wanted a softboy with empathy and functioning morals, and instead you got Soldier Boy. So you make it everyone’s problem, especially his, because if you cannot stop yourself from wanting him, the least you can do is make him suffer for it.
Ben, for his part, does not understand at first that your contempt is foreplay with teeth. He thinks you genuinely despise him, and that makes him double down on the teasing, the posturing, the stupidly filthy remarks. Then he realizes that every time you snap back at him, your eyes linger a little too long, your breathing changes a little too fast, and your mouth keeps doing that tiny thing it does when you are trying not to smile. That is when he starts losing his mind, because he finally understands that you hate him almost as much as you want him, and that combination is apparently his personal version of heroin.
Your political arguments become a form of flirting that neither of you will name. You call out Vought, the patriarchy, the nonsense of heroic bullsjit and Ben calls you a commie, a bitch, a menace, a pain in the ass. The room always looks slightly embarrassed on your behalf because you have made his masculinity look flimsy in real time, but the thing nobody understands is that Ben deep down likes it it. He says he hates it. He says you are impossible. But he is absolutely addicted to the way you refuse to let him dominate the conversation. Every time you make him look stupid in front of other people, he wants you more. He wants to defeat you. To tame you. To make you surrender and scream his name at night.
The jealousy is immediate and violent on both sides, which is why neither of you wants to admit it. You pretend you do not care when Ben shows up with women. He pretends he does not care when you talk to men. But both of you notice every shift in the room. The second another man laughs too long at your jokes, Ben turns into a nuclear-grade asshole. The second another woman touches his arm, you get so irritated you could spit nails. Neither of you is mature enough to call it attraction, and neither of you is honest enough to call it lust, so it becomes an endless cycle of provocation, denial, and increasingly personal insults.
The first time one of you almost admits it, it is because the other one has gone too far. Ben says something filthy and territorial, you call him a misogynistic piece of shit with the emotional range of a wet cigarette, and then there is that moment where neither of you can keep pretending this is just banter. You both know what the tension is now. It is not just attraction. It is not just mutual hatred. It is the awful, humiliating realization that the person you most enjoy arguing with is also the person you most want to have under you, over you, against a wall, and preferably saying your name like they mean it.
Once the sexual tension finally tips over into actual contact, the whole dynamic gets worse before it gets better. Ben becomes even more possessive because he has finally gotten a taste of what you are like when you stop fighting him for one second, and you become even more insufferable because now you know exactly how badly he wants you. Neither of you suddenly becomes sweet. You are still a menace with a mouth like a razor, and Ben is still a toxic bastard with all the emotional subtlety of a hand grenade. But now every fight carries the threat of a kiss, every insult sounds a little too intimate, and every time he looks at you like he wants to ruin you, you look back like you already have.
