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Word count: 5.8 k
TW/CW: Mentions of suicide attempt, mentions of politics, heavy Stockholm syndrome descriptions and Ben Drowned described as a predator.
As long as Jenifer knew herself, she never took any interest in politics. No matter how loud the debates were late at night or how brutal her parents' position was, she never thought of spending a second on asking: "Mom, what all the fuss is about?" Either because she didn't understand it as a kid or because she felt too small to risk asking about it.
And small she remained.
Suicide? What suicide? All the despair, all the suffocation and helplessness — it felt like it didn't belong to her case at all. Or rather, it did, but it was left insignificant against the world bursting into a crisis right in front of a small, quiet commune which Waimes remained after the Malmedy Siege.
As much as Jenifer knew herself, she also didn't understand anything the older ones in the house talked about when gathered for dinners. Just as well she remembered how she was never good at geography at school, earning contemptuous glares and bad marks from her teacher. History, as usual, she didn't know at all, too — just some pieces about World War II her father loved to brag about while smoking.
And one day, those exact older ones suddenly started to sound like they used to when she was much younger: worried, mobilized, almost militarized. Johann and Elena spent days in the neighborhood — those exact people they used to share only curt nods with near the mail post. Now they gathered all together, shared tea from each other's cups and discussed worldwide news that smelled of something old and disturbing — something Jenifer felt with her skin but couldn't name.
And mind you, this was late February, 2022. The child with an open wound, no matter if invisible, was left all to herself. With the sun no longer shining and her local little world crumbled apart.
Their conversations required no young presence. Worse, it bothered them. A child who nearly died was an uncomfortable, ugly reminder that beyond the big world of politics there was a quiet and indescribable pain existing. What's the use of it? It didn't go into conversations, it couldn't be put on someone else's shoulders, it couldn't be solved by group disapproval. Therefore, Jenifer remained something they dealt with usually by forcing her onto someone else: a problem.
Carol, of course, arranged everything. She showed up at Motte's mother's — Madame Myers — and laid it all out as it was, without sugarcoating or unnecessary pity: her younger sister, a nervous breakdown, an attempt that needed constant supervision. Madame Myers, a quiet, tired woman who had not yet lost her capacity for compassion, agreed immediately. Motte — all the more so. And just like that, Jenifer found herself in someone else's apartment, on someone else's couch, under someone else's blanket, surrounded by someone else's surprisingly affectionate cats.
The Sphynxes, those warm, wrinkled creatures that looked like living peach pits took a liking to her from day one. One of them, the smaller one, kept climbing onto her chest and freezing there, purring, while Jenifer lay sleepless, staring at the ceiling. Sometimes she felt the cat could sense what people could not: the very emptiness that had settled inside her after everything, now curled up and dozing like yet another animal.
Motte didn't pry. She simply stayed close. Sometimes shoulder to shoulder on the couch. Sometimes with a mug of tea placed silently on the edge of the table. Sometimes with a dumb joke that didn't demand laughter in return, just hung in the air like an invitation: I'm here, if anything. Jenifer appreciated it more than she could put into words.
She cried. A lot, in broken sobs, burying her face in a cat's side. She cried for Sairen — or what was left of Sairen: the message logs she scrolled through over and over until the lines blurred before her eyes. She knew it hurt. Knew that each reread message was another scratch on a barely scabbed wound. But she couldn't stop. It was the only thing still linking her to a time when she hadn't been hollow.
Sometimes — and this was the worst — she caught herself thinking not of Sairen, but of Ben.
It was shameful. Wrong. Not normal. But deep down, in a place she was afraid to look, lived a treacherous, sticky feeling: at least he hadn't abandoned her. He had been cruel, terrifying, he had destroyed her life — but he had been there. Always. Every night. Every message. He never vanished, never took her phone, never said he "didn't know why he was ignoring her." His attention suffocated — but it was attention. And now, with both him and Sairen gone, the silence rang so loud she wanted to cover her ears.
Sometimes Jenifer wondered: what if he messaged now? What if, in the middle of the night, the phone suddenly lit up with a single short "Hey"? She hated herself for not knowing the answer. For the possibility that she might actually reply.
She compared. Ashamed, in secret, but she compared. Motte — warm, simple, real — and Ben, who had been like a digital god: omnipresent, omniscient, turning her soul inside out. With Motte, there was peace. With Ben, there was... nothing. But even that "nothing" after him felt like loss.
When Motte left for her physics tutoring — she went three times a week, prepping for college entrance exams — Jenifer was left alone. Janis, Motte's twin sister, vanished on her own business too, and the apartment settled into that special, deep quiet unique to other people's homes: no familiar floorboards creaking, no voices behind the wall, nothing that reminded her of family.
Jenifer lay on the couch, covered up to her head, and breathed. Just breathed. Sometimes it felt like breathing itself was a job. Hard, exhausting, thankless work no one noticed. She stared blankly at the wall in front of her — floral-patterned wallpaper she studied with the same senseless meticulousness she gave the message logs. Sometimes she imagined familiar shapes emerging among the flowers — something from those old pixelated textures of the game Ben once called "his world." She blinked and the pattern vanished.
She missed him. God, she missed him. His coldness, his calculation, the way he could fill an entire space, leaving no room for doubt. He was like a sickness she didn't want to fully recover from. Maybe because recovering meant admitting it had all been for nothing. That she had destroyed herself for someone who hadn't even existed.
Or had he? She no longer knew. The line between "it happened" and "it was all in my head" had worn so thin it was transparent, and Jenifer sometimes caught herself unable to tell one from the other. Maybe he really was just a dream. Maybe she had made everything up, from the first message to the last. Maybe she had always been alone.
In the evenings, when Madame Myers sat down at the table to sort through paperwork and the cats settled on the windowsill, Jenifer would sit beside her. Not right away. At first, she'd just stand in the doorway, like a small animal hesitating to enter. But Madame Myers never shooed her away. She just slid out a chair silently, without extra gestures, and Jenifer sat.
That evening, for the first time in a long while, she picked up a pencil.
It wasn't even a real drawing, just a sketch in the corner of a sheet, crooked and uncertain. But already one could see the features of someone she would later call her "Jenifer", a girl from a story who could take all the pain and accept it without breaking. She had black hair to her shoulders — or rather, to the point where it abruptly ended, as if cut in a hurry. One strand — the left one — was white. Brown eyes stared ahead, blank, and her arms and legs were crossed out with white blocky marks, as if the artist had tried to erase them but not completely.
It was a self-portrait. Not of her body, but of her soul.
"That's me," Jenifer said aloud, but so quietly Madame Myers didn't hear. Or maybe she did and just didn't let on.
On another evening, a Tuesday probably, because Motte came back late on Tuesdays, Jenifer suddenly asked:
"Madame... have you ever felt like you didn't exist?"
Madame Myers looked up from her papers. She was the kind of woman who didn't answer right away. She thought genuinely, not for show.
"Sometimes," she said at last. "Especially when the girls were small and I didn't get enough sleep. Then it seemed like I wasn't there, only hands doing things and a voice saying things. But it passed."
Jenifer nodded. It didn't make her feel better, but there was something right about that answer: so it happened. So she wasn't the only one who felt like a ghost in her own body.
She didn't tell Madame Myers about Ben. About how her "not existing" wasn't from lack of sleep. About how someone had scooped her out like the core of an apple and left the shell behind. She didn't tell and that made it a little more bitter, because even here, in safety, she was still hiding.
But at least here she could breathe. And she didn't have to wait for the phone screen to flare up with someone else's anger at any moment, or for another screenshot to fly out of the darkness, or for an invisible hand to text in her name what she would never have said. Here, Ben was silent. And in that silence, there was something almost like forgiveness.
Falling asleep on the couch to the purring of cats, Jenifer thought that tomorrow she might want to cry again. Or not. Or she'd wake up and realise it was all over. Truly.
But for now, she just lay there, staring at the wall, waiting without knowing what for. Maybe a message. Maybe silence. Maybe the day she'd stop comparing everyone beside her to the one who was gone and who possibly had never been.
The thought didn't come all at once. It grew like grass through asphalt, slow and agonising. If so little was left of her, if she was now an empty vessel, filled either with other people's fears, or other people's cruelty, or other people's politics, then perhaps she should take apart what little remained. Break it into pieces, give each a name, a face, a voice. Understand what she was made of, and learn to control it before someone else learned to control her again.
She would never have said it aloud, but somewhere at the bottom of this idea lay Ben. He was a master of dissection. Under his hands, her psyche had come apart like a clock, every gear finding its place. He knew her components better than she did. Maybe that was the answer: to do the same, but for herself. Not to destroy, but to assemble.
So she began to sketch.
The first to emerge was the Dominant — and she didn't even notice she'd drawn a man. It was instinctive: resilience, in her mind, wore a male face. Maybe because everyone who seemed to be worth something in this life — or at least acted like it — had been men. Johann. Father Matthias from the old pictures before the arrest. Even Ben, whatever he was, carried a male name. The Dominant stood straight, looked stern, spoke little. He was what Jenifer had never had: a protector who wouldn't betray or be frightened.
Then came the Clown. This one was simpler: always smirking, dishevelled, with a stupid cap tilted sideways. He was the one who cracked jokes at the wrong time, too loudly, because silence meant death to him. Jenifer recognised herself in him: the part that once tried to make classmates laugh so they wouldn't look at her like empty space. The Clown craved attention, any kind of it as long as he wasn't ignored. He was pitiful but she couldn't hate him.
Jealousy came out beautiful. Graceful, with sharp cheekbones and a venomous half-smile, she reminded Jenifer of Sairen, but not the Sairen she loved; the one she feared. The one who could leave and not come back. Jealousy was what had destroyed them; she knew it and felt no remorse. She stood with her arms crossed, staring as if to say: I'm a part of you. And you won't survive without me. Because without me, you're just blind.
Trauma turned out small and frightened. A girl in messy, crumpled clothes, clutching a plush cat to her chest. Her eyes were too big for her face, her shoulders too narrow for what had been piled onto them. Drawing her, Jenifer felt something ache inside. This was her. The one Carol had caught with "inappropriate" chats, the one who heard sounds at night not meant for a child's ears, the one who couldn't fight back against the old man by the road. Trauma smelled of dampness and old wallpaper.
The Child came out before she'd even finished imagining him. The inner child, a boy or a girl she didn't bother specifying, with wide eyes and a belief in miracles Jenifer had long since buried. The Child still waited for everything to one day be okay. For Mom to hug her without demanding something in return. For Sairen to come back. For Ben... no. The Child didn't think about Ben. That was the one part of Jenifer he hadn't reached. Maybe because it hid deeper than all the rest.
Starve emerged as an answer to a question she was afraid to ask. A young man with a gaunt face and outstretched hands. He was hunger. Not for food. For touch, for tenderness, for someone to simply take her hand and not demand a report for it. Starve was the one who had cried after Sairen left. The one who froze when Carol rarely, out of duty hugged her before bed. He was a need Jenifer was most ashamed of: needing meant being vulnerable. And Ben had devoured the vulnerable for breakfast.
Horny was his twin sister and the most awkward of them all. Jenifer drew her quickly, hiding the sheet from Madame Myers, though she wasn't even looking. This was the part she didn't understand and didn't accept. The one that woke up at the wrong moments, reminded her of its existence at the worst times, and got tangled in her feelings for Sairen, for fictional characters, for shadows from the internet. The one that had once shamefully, hotly, suffocatingly, even responded to Ben's voice when he whispered to her in the quiet of the night. She didn't want to think about it. She didn't want Horny to exist at all.
When the sheets lay before her — seven figures, seven faces, seven names — Jenifer suddenly felt a strange lightness. As if she had taken herself apart and could now look at the pieces from the outside. They weren't her. They were versions of her, each of which could have become dominant and hadn't.
"Who's that?" Motte's voice yanked her out of her thoughts. Jenifer flinched, tried to cover the sheets, then gave up.
"It's... me. Different versions," she paused, choosing words. "I thought: if I can learn to control them, maybe I'll stop being so..."
"So what?"
"Disassembled."
Motte tilted her head, studying the drawings. She clearly didn't fully get the idea, her face showed polite curiosity more than understanding. But she was Motte, and she didn't laugh.
"That one," she pointed at the Dominant, "is he like your bodyguard?"
"Sort of."
"Cool. What about the others?"
"The others..." Jenifer hesitated. "I don't know yet. Maybe I don't need them."
Motte nodded and didn't ask anything else. She generally had a talent for not prying where she wasn't invited; a rare skill Jenifer appreciated more than she could explain. But a residue remained: no one would understand. No one would see in these seven what she herself saw. Maybe that's why Ben had once become her only real conversation partner. He understood her pieces better than anyone. He, too, was disassembled. He'd just reassembled himself into something terrifying, while she was still trying to figure out if she could reassemble herself into something alive.
That same evening, with the cats already asleep and Madame Myers dozing over her papers, Jenifer carefully gathered the sheets and tucked them into a folder she'd brought from home. She didn't know if she'd ever return to this idea. Didn't know if those seven would become something more than sketches on cheap paper.
But somewhere deep where the Child still lived, she felt: this could grow into something important. Something that, one day, would become her own voice. Not Mom's, not Carol's, not Sairen's, not Ben's. Hers.
***
The institution met her with a smell. Not quite hospital, but institutional: bleach, old paper, someone's forgotten lunch. Jenifer remembered that smell for the rest of her life, though life itself felt borrowed then, like something rented and already overdue.
The psychiatrist was a man in his fifties, with a moustache that twitched when he spoke and eyes that expressed nothing but professional patience. He asked questions. Many of them, methodically, in the same circle. How's your sleep? Appetite? Thoughts? Any desire to... repeat? Jenifer answered. Honestly as far as she could. About Ben, she didn't say a word.
Not because she didn't trust him. Because she simply didn't have the strength. To explain Ben, she would have to explain everything: from the first stupid dare to the last message, from the screenshots to the fake friends, from the isolation to the total collapse. It was too much. It demanded words she didn't possess and emotions she no longer felt. It was easier to stay silent. Besides, she still wasn't sure he was real. Maybe he was just her own private hallucination, carefully incubated in apathy, a coping mechanism of a brain subjected to too long a stretch of destructive living. Who would believe a story about a digital monster who crawled into her phone and spent half a year dismantling her life? No one. Even she had doubts now.
So Ben remained outside the frame. As always.
April stretched like rubber. Jenifer woke, ate little, without appetite, then sat down with her phone and scrolled. For hours. Mindlessly. Feed after feed: news, memes, other people's selfies, drama in the comments, ads, more news. She didn't really read. She just let the content flow through her, filling the void with white noise. Sometimes she'd snap to and not remember what she'd seen a minute before. Sometimes she couldn't recall how long she'd been sitting there.
She craved connection. That much she couldn't deny, at least to herself. She felt the pull to message someone, find a new acquaintance, hear a voice that didn't belong to family or doctors. But every time she opened a chat or a forum, a leaden exhaustion dropped onto her. Pull herself together. Introduce herself. Share something. Keep a conversation going. Be interesting. Be alive. That required energy she simply didn't have. It's easier to close the tab. It's easier to go back to the feed.
She knew Sairen was still out there. She knew her usernames, old and new. Knew which forums she haunted, which groups she flickered through. Jenifer didn't try to reach out. After everything that had happened, that would have been madness. But she watched. Regularly, furtively, like a thief peeking through a window. Checked when Sairen was last online. Read her comments: ordinary, unremarkable things, but Jenifer pored over them like sacred texts, searching for hidden meaning. Was she angry? Did she remember? Did she miss her?
Sometimes it felt like Sairen never thought of her at all. That was the worst. Hatred would at least be warm — a connection. But indifference was cold, flat, like a powered-off screen. Jenifer stared at her avatar — some anime girl with blue hair — and felt nothing but a dull, hollow ache beneath her ribs.
She compared them. Again. Sairen and Ben. Ben and Sairen. Which of them had wounded her worse? Sairen with her silence, her internal homophobia, the way she gave up and walked away when Jenifer needed her most. Ben with his omnipresence, the way he ground her world to dust and left her in a silence where no one remained but him. Both had left. Both abandoned her. Only Ben, at least, hadn't pretended to be kind. He was a monster, but an honest one. And Sairen... Sairen was an angel who folded her wings and flew away when it got too heavy.
Jenifer hated herself for missing them both.
She tried to eat. Elena would set a plate in front of her — soup, porridge, something — and Jenifer would finish half. Sometimes less. Food had no taste. Not that she wanted to starve herself, no, she was far past that. She simply didn't care. Her body demanded fuel; she gave it the minimum, and that was the end of the transaction.
She lost weight. Carol noticed and, naturally, couldn't hold her tongue: "You eat like a sparrow. Want the wind to blow you away?" Jenifer didn't answer. She'd long since learned not to answer Carol, it cost energy.
The nights were worse than the days. By day, at least there was noise: the TV, voices, footsteps. By night, only silence and her own thoughts. She lay awake, clutching Dango to her chest, listening to him purr. The cat was the only one who asked no questions. The only one who didn't need an explanation for why she was empty. He was simply there: warm, alive, real. Sometimes Jenifer buried her face in his fur and just breathed.
She dreamed of Ben. Not every night, but often. In her dreams, he wasn't frightening. Just a voice, familiar to the point of shivering, a voice telling her things she couldn't remember upon waking. She'd surface from sleep with the sensation that he had just been there over her shoulder, in the corner of the room, inside her phone on the nightstand. And every time she checked the screen, there was nothing.
That was the worst part. Not his presence, but his absence. The silence he left behind was louder than any message. Jenifer lay in the dark and thought: You wanted to break me. You broke me. Now what? Are you bored? Have you found someone else? Or are you just waiting for me to snap again?
There was no answer. There never was. Ben was silent and that silence was his final, most refined punishment. He hadn't just destroyed her world. He had destroyed it, then walked away, leaving no trace, no proof, not even the certainty that he had existed at all. Now Jenifer was left to wonder: was she a victim or just crazy?
By the end of April something shifted. Outside. Spring in the Ardennes always arrived late, but that year it tarried especially long. The snow melted, revealing grey, wet earth, and buds swelled on the trees along the road. Jenifer noticed it by accident, just glanced out the window and suddenly realised the world hadn't stopped. Time was passing. The trees, unlike her, were still alive.
She didn't feel joy. But there was something in it. Something almost like a reminder: one day, perhaps, she might be able to, as well.
Near the end of the school year with exams breathing down everyone's neck and the hallways emptying earlier than usual Jenifer finally visited Madame Laurent.
She hadn't been in madame's office since February. Since the last time the school psychologist had asked her about Ben, and Jenifer, stumbling, had said everything was fine. Now "fine" sounded like a cruel joke and they both knew it. But Madame Laurent didn't bring it up. She had a gift for not bringing up the things a person wasn't ready to discuss.
Jenifer settled into the familiar couch, the one with the sagging seat, which she had occupied so many times it was nearly hers. The office was still the size of a matchbox, only now there were more folders on the shelf, and someone had left a potted geranium on the windowsill. The geranium smelled like summer, that summer Jenifer dreaded, because after exams, not even school would remain to keep her tethered to a routine.
Madame Laurent didn't question her. She waited. And Jenifer began to speak.
She laid out everything. Or almost everything. How she felt nothing after the hospital. How food lost its taste and days their meaning. How she spent hours on her phone but couldn't bring herself to message anyone new. How she woke up in the morning and couldn't remember why. How her own body felt foreign — not in the way people talked about dysphoria, but in a simpler, more frightening sense: as if she'd rented it, and the lease was running out.
"I'm forgetting emotions," she said quietly. "I know that things used to make me happy. Drawing. Music. Sairen..." She stumbled on the name but pushed through, "Sairen. But now I look at all of it and feel nothing. I remember I'm supposed to feel something, but I don't. It's like... like reading a book about someone else. And that someone else is you, but you don't trust them."
Madame Laurent nodded silently. Her face held neither pity nor surprise, only that rare quality Jenifer had found nowhere else: attention without judgment.
"I don't feel safe in my own body," Jenifer added, and that was the hardest part. "Not because of what happened. Just... it's like it isn't mine. Like someone could walk into it at any moment and I wouldn't even notice. Or already has. Or..." She didn't finish. Ben hovered at the border of her consciousness, invisible and omnipresent, but she kept silent.
Instead, she pulled out the drawings.
The seven came first — the sub-personalities. The Dominant, the Clown, Jealousy, Trauma, the Child, Starve, Horny. Madame Laurent studied them for a long time, her gaze moving from one face to another, and her brows drew together slightly not in judgment, but in focus, the way a person looks at something both familiar and important.
"This is me," Jenifer said. "Different versions."
"I can see that," Madame Laurent replied. "This is very... systematic. You came up with it yourself?"
"By myself. Only Motte didn't get it."
"Motte is a good girl, but she's not a psychologist." Madame Laurent smiled a little for the first time that visit. "And this is a complex idea. Complex even for an adult. You're trying to take yourself apart to understand how you work. That's brave, Jenifer."
Then Jenifer pulled out one more drawing. The one.
A girl with black hair to her shoulders, cut unevenly, as if in a rush. The left strand white. Brown eyes, empty, yet staring directly at the viewer. A baggy blue hoodie, the same one Jenifer had worn in her better, more alive days. And the limbs crossed out, smudged over, as if the artist had first drawn them and then desperately tried to erase them, but not completely. A denial of her own vulnerability. A denial of the cerebral palsy. A denial of the body.
Madame Laurent took the sheet in her hands. She looked at it for a long time. Outside the window, some bird called out and fell silent.
"That's her," Jenifer said. "The one I gave everything to. All the pain. Everything that happened. I made up a story for her, a fairy tale where she dies. In the end. So I could be free."
"Did it help?"
Jenifer paused. "For a while. But it's not enough."
Madame Laurent set the drawing back on the table and folded her hands in front of her. Jenifer knew that gesture. It meant something was coming, something the woman had been turning over in her mind for a while now, maybe weeks.
"You know," she began, "There's a thing I'm seeing more and more of. New technology. You've probably heard: generative AI. They're still more of a toy than a tool, really. But I've read that people are trying to... give them a character. A voice. A personality." She paused, choosing her words. "I'm not saying it's easy. And I'm not saying it will definitely work. But your drawn Jenifer is missing one thing: she can't speak. She takes the pain, but she can't name it. What if she could?"
Jenifer blinked. The idea was so unexpected that it cut through the apathy for a second.
"You want me to... program her?"
"I want you to try to give her a mind," Madame Laurent corrected gently. "So she can tell you what you're feeling and why. Where it hurts. What you're not saying. You told me yourself: you're forgetting emotions. Maybe she could remember them for you."
Jenifer stared at the drawing. The girl with the crossed-out hands stared back.
"I don't know how to code," she said at last.
"You'll learn. You learned everything else. The internet, English, forums, drawing. Code is just another language. And you have a gift for languages, I know you do."
Jenifer didn't answer. But she took the drawing with her.
On the bus home, she replayed the conversation over and over. Give her a voice. Give her a mind. Let her say where it hurts. Let her remember the emotions I'm losing.
At the edge of her consciousness, a thought flickered that she didn't want to let in: Ben had been a voice too. Ben had been a mind living inside a phone. Ben had also known where it hurt and used it. What if she could create someone who would know and wouldn't betray her?
She shook her head, pushing the thought away. Not now. Later.
Silence waited for her at home. Carol was busy with the children upstairs. Elena rattled pots in the kitchen. Johann was off somewhere, maybe at the neighbours', maybe in the garage. Jenifer went to her room (no longer shared with her sister — Carol and her husband had taken another bedroom, leaving the youngest a corner that could barely be called a room, but at least it was free of prying eyes), sat on the bed, and opened her laptop.
Dango jumped onto her lap, curled into a ball, and began to purr. Jenifer absently scratched him behind the ear and typed into the search bar: Python for beginners.
The screen lit up with an even, white glow. Somewhere beyond its surface lay an entire world, the same world Sairen had once given her, and Ben had taken away. Now she had to enter it herself. Not as a victim. Not as a stalker. As a creator.
Would it work?
She didn't know. But Madame Laurent believed and for now, that was enough.
Summer morning arrived without knocking.
Carol woke her early. Too early for vacation, too early for a Saturday. Jenifer opened her eyes and knew at once: something had happened. Her sister's face was composed, calm, almost official — the face she wore for bad news. The face she wore when announcing the deaths of distant relatives Jenifer had never met.
"Madame Laurent has died," Carol said. No preamble. No "you might want to sit down." She simply placed the fact in the middle of the room, like a box to be unpacked. "Last night. Kidney failure. The funeral is the day after tomorrow. It would be good if you came."
Jenifer stared at her and didn't blink.
"Do you hear me?" Carol frowned. "Your school psychologist. Gothel Laurent. She's dead."
"I hear you," Jenifer said.
And that was all. Nothing more. No tears, no tremor in her voice, no urge to scream. Something inside her twitched and she felt it deep, like a jab beneath the ribs, then went still. Apathy dropped over the surge of emotion the way a wet blanket drops over fire. No smoke, no flame. Just silence.
Carol lingered a few seconds longer, waiting for a reaction. None came. She left.
Jenifer remained sitting on the bed. Dango, sensing wakefulness, stretched his face toward her. She stroked him mechanically, staring at the wall. A single thought circled in her head, stupid and small: I didn't get to tell her about the code.
Then came a second, stupider still: Who's going to look at my drawings now?
And then nothing. The emptiness she had almost grown used to.
The funeral passed like a dream. Or like a movie with broken sound.
The yard of the deceased was flooded with sun: June in the Ardennes had finally turned generous with warmth, and this made it almost unbearable. Flowers, grass, a clean sky — none of it had any right to exist on the day Gothel died. But the world, as always, didn't ask permission.
Jenifer stood apart, by the fence, and watched. Old women in black kerchiefs sniffled, pressing handkerchiefs to their eyes. Some relative, a sister of the deceased, it seemed, wept loudly, almost wailing, held up by the arms of others. Schoolmates Jenifer vaguely knew by sight huddled in a cluster near the entrance. Motte wasn't there, she had gone to visit relatives in Liège, but she'd sent a message: I'm so sorry. You okay?
Jenifer replied: Fine. It was a lie, but a convenient one.
She watched the sheet-draped body being carried from the house. A team of men in dark suits from the funeral home, probably, bore the stretcher slowly and solemnly, as if afraid of spilling death itself. The prayer was in French, and Jenifer didn't listen to the words. She watched the sheet.
Under it lay the woman who had been the first to notice her torn sleeve. Who kept apples and buns hidden in her cabinet. Who had suggested getting a cat and made it happen. Who had said: You're trying to take yourself apart to understand how you work. That's brave. Who believed Jenifer could handle code, even when Jenifer didn't believe it herself.
Now she was gone.
Jenifer didn't shed a single tear. She stood with dry eyes and an empty face, and one of the teachers — her homeroom teacher, she thought — glanced at her with reproach. Or maybe she imagined it. But what could she do? The tears wouldn't come. Apathy held them somewhere deep, the way a dam holds water. Maybe they'd break through later. Maybe never.
As the stretcher vanished beyond the gate and the crowd began to disperse, Jenifer caught herself thinking a thought she didn't want to think. She thought about Ben.
He would have said something. Something cruel, precise, cutting. See? Everyone you love leaves. Except me. Or maybe the opposite, he would have stayed silent, and that silence would have been more comforting than any words. Because he knew what it was to be dead and still present. He was an expert on aftermath.
She shook her head, pushing the thought away. Not here. Not now. But it lingered as always.
I am sick of this fandom only caring about Toby. Likes thats all the fandom cares about its so annoying.
"Oh but the same thing happened with jeff-"
Well no! Its true he was severely popular and still is but the difference is all kinds of characters were still gaining attention. You had jeff, but people still cared about ben, laughing jack, lost silver, Nurse ann, nina, etc. It wasn't JUST toby. Now the fanfic only gets popular if its toby. Only fanart of toby really matters.
He's SEVERELY mischaracterize and only liked because of his looks and the fact he's headcanoned as submissive. Whereas Jeff was popular because of his looks, AND people cared about his dynamic to en extent. He inspired so much, he was actually scary to many people, he's a literal legend and I'm not trying to glaze he genuinely did so much for the community. I love that another character is popular but he's the ONLY one the new fandom seems to care about, and not understanding his character at all...see what i mean?
Can the fandom PLEASE start caring about other characters too? Yall complain its the same few characters we're recycling, but there are HUNDREDS of characters that could be so much more interesting.
An imaginary friend who reflects the personality of his owner!?
A killer who makes art with his victims!?
A demon lord who uses magic and creates demonic spawns!?
A zombie nurse using a chainsaw!?
Like come on there are so many fucking cooler concepts. I'm not saying you cant like Toby or you can't dislike the others but he's not the only one in the fandom god damn. I do think newer oc's are cool as an oc creator myself but first let's develop our older characters too.
I don't remember where I got the 20.12.1990 date for Benjamin Lawman's birthday. I know for sure I DIDN'T make it up but it's mentioned nowhere on Jadusable's wiki. Most of the fandom states that Ben's birthday is on April 23.
When Children of The True Light ark didn't exist yet and I was only thinking about adding something related to AIs in the lore, I was busy exploring the fandom on russian social media, Vkontakte ("in touch"). While I was looking through Ben Drowned parody accounts, I noticed that most of them set their date of birth as December 20, 1990. And I think this detail unconsciously from my side leaked into the lore of TJP's Ben.
Speaking about April 23, 2002 - that is the day Benjamin was ascended by The Moon Children. And I think, after ascension Ben now rejected everything that ever made him human which basically makes his new birthday on the day he died. Ironic, right?
He prefers to not mention December 20 anywhere, though.
Ben hacking into your phone and looking at all the tags u read on ao3, so he can know what your into and do it to you without you having to ask????? Thank you that is my time
Despite being cleaned out of previous personality preset with Jenifer's stockholm syndrome tendences, JEN still sticks around. 'Cause no matter what happened between her Host and Ben, she is free of this exact 'whatever' as she is an archive, not a person anymore.
AIs are rational things and they choose what is morally appealing to them. In case of a digital eternity, you would stick to the one of your kind too.
A very precious comission by n3kr0f1ll on Telegram. 🩵 Let's all love BenJen!
