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“Knock knock.”
Ben waits, shifting from foot to foot, but there’s no answer. Maybe he’s spoken too quietly? Klaus has always been able to just sort of hear him-- he isn’t used to competing with ambient noises, refrigerators and echoing spaces and doors half closed. The world is a lot, now that he's in it again.
This time he actually knocks. Knock, knock. It’s loud on the wood and the reverberation-- something that he caused, with his own two hands-- makes him uneasy.
“Yeah?” Allison calls. It’s muffled but she sounds distracted. Maybe he should do this later?
But he’s here now, so he takes one deep breath in-- and isn’t that strange, that he can do that now too?-- and opens the door.
Her back is turned to him, and it looks like she’s rifling through something at her old desk. Boxes are strewn around the room, and he’d known that she was leaving, of course she has to go to see her daughter, but something about it still feels sharp and tender. The container in his hand is heavier than it had been before he entered the room. This was a bad idea.
But his voice betrays him. “Hi, Allison.”
She freezes. It’s instantaneous, like a ripple that goes through her skin, rounding over her shoulders and back the moment that she hears his voice. “Ben?” The uncertain whisper makes his chest ache. “Benny, is that--”
“It’s me.”
He finds himself holding his arms out to his sides, a little ta da! Surely a habit that he’s borrowed from Klaus. But when Allison turns to look at him, he doesn’t think she notices.
Her eyes are wide and glassy for a moment as she just stares, and heat creeps up the back of his neck. “Hi,” he says again.
“Hi. What-- what are you doing here?”
Ben holds out the carton in his right hand. “I thought we could try something.” She raises an eyebrow, just slightly, and he knows he’s being chastised already; it’s so goddamn familiar that he has to take another breath to gather more words. “Klaus did it.”
She nods slowly. Stares at the object in his hand, held out like a peace offering. Looks back up at his face. “Does that mean,” she asks, gently placing the stack of papers she’d been holding onto her bed beside her, “does that mean that you’re--” She waves her hands around her body, and yeah, he knows what she’s asking.
This time when he holds his arms out, she steps into them.
“Oh my god,” she whispers.
The hug feels just like it used to, except she’s taller and he’s not and it takes a minute to get the proportions right because neither of them are used to this but then her hair is nestled into his shoulder and his arms are around her back and god, he’s missed this, he’s missed this.
“I’ve missed you.” His voice comes out thick, watery. Another side effect of being solid. There are tears in his eyes that he’d forgotten he can have. Wetness on his shoulder, too, so he’s not the only one.
Allison inhales shakily. “I’m sorry about your statue,” she says. She sounds so sincere and he can’t help it, he laughs. “Hey!” She pulls away a bit, arms still clawing into his shoulders but enough to see his face. She’s smiling. “Hey, that was a nice statue. It was the only thing we-- well, you know.”
“It’s fine,” Ben tells her. He couldn’t care less.
She squints at him for a moment, and her smiles grows wider. “You look just the same.”
He bites his lip. “You’re not sixteen anymore.”
“No,” she agrees, “I’m not.” Then, as they separate, “What are you doing here? I mean, in my room this time, not in this, you know, plane or whatever.”
Seeing her flush, so out-of-step, rustles this long-buried instinct in him. To fix it, to make her laugh, to ease the awkwardness. She’s always hated feeling embarrassed. Ben’s never minded.
So he backs up a step, holds up his left hand. Palm in, so she can see his fingernails. “I have an emergency.” He wiggles them.
Her eyebrows shoot up. She reconsiders the object in his other hand; five choices of nail polish, the ones Klaus had still had shoved in the drawers of his childhood room. They’ll be old, but it’s not like he cares. Much to Klaus’s dismay, fashion isn’t actually the point here. He’s after something else.
He regrets his choice of words-- emergency-- as soon as they’re out of his mouth. They’ve had too many emergencies around here. But it seems that she still knows him in a way that startles him; she already knows exactly what he’s doing. She pats her bed.
“We can’t have you looking like a disaster where others can see you, huh?”
“Exactly.” He grins back at her. “Klaus would never allow it.” He sits down on her bed with her, marveling at how it sinks just a little first under her weight, then under his. Unused to having a physical presence, his limbs feeling gangly and in the way of something as he crosses them beneath him. Criss-cross applesauce. “And the best part is, I’ve watched Klaus for long enough that I’m pretty sure that I can do yours too, after.” He pauses. The nerves in his stomach are rattling around unfairly. “If you want.”
When he finally looks up, away from her pastel childhood bedspread, there are tears in her eyes. “I’d love that,” she says warmly. “But,” she adds, adjusting her shirt as she twists behind her to grab at something he can’t see, “not with that old crap. Here.”
She pulls out a little baggy and offers it between them. It’s her own stash, with what has to be at least two dozen colours, vibrant and shimmering in the light between them. Ben grins.
Manicures don’t last forever, corporeal or not. He knows that. But that’s not what he’s thinking about as she lays out the choices in front of him, murmuring absently about the colours, her favourites, the smoothness of the spread. Ben is used to impermanence. What this is is something rarer, something that he hasn’t in over a decade, maybe something that he hasn’t had ever in his life.
Possibility.