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The reunion with Luther is a bit of an accident.
Not that Ben hasn’t been intending to visit Luther had some point, because he has. But he’d be lying if he said that he hasn’t been putting it off. Meeting with Vanya had been an accident too-- Five barging into Klaus’s room, demanding to a space just an inch to the left of Ben that he come down to the library, where Ben had found and reunited with his unsuspecting sister, it wasn’t exactly how he’d planned it-- but at least with Vanya things had come sort of naturally. He suspects that it won’t be that easy with Luther.
But then, when is anything easy?
In the end, the decision is all but entirely made for him, because Luther sees him.
It happens when he’s spending time with Allison again, getting a refresher coat on his nail polish. Luther comes barging into the room, asking about some thing or another, and does Allison know where his coat went? Ben blinks out as fast as he can, but it’s futile. It would have been obvious even if Luther hadn’t caught a glimpse of him, for the way that Allison is caught mid-motion, hand poised over nothing, nail polish dripping onto her carpet.
It’ll probably be a funny story some day. But today it means that Ben has to face the music.
He feels almost bad as he flees back to Klaus, invisible and incorporeal, listening to her stutter over an explanation for why her deceased brother had been sharing a spa day with her. Almost bad, but then again, Allison has taken Luther’s side for years and years against Klaus-- and Ben by extension-- so there’s a sort of justice in her finally defending Ben, lying for Ben, that makes him smile despite himself.
He’ll pay Allison back somehow for covering his ass.
When he stumbles back to Klaus’s room he flags him down, motioning for his brother to remove his headphones. Klaus rolls his eyes but obliges, eyes widening expectantly as he waits for an explanation.
“Luther saw me,” Ben rushes out. “Luther saw me with Allison.”
Klaus blinks. He regards Ben for a moment as he processes, and then his expression hardens almost imperceptibly, gaze becoming intent. “You don’t have to see him,” he says.
Ben bites his lip. “I know.”
“You don’t owe him anything.”
“I know.”
“But you’re going to anyways, aren’t you?” Klaus sighs, but he doesn’t actually look upset, not really. He’s just… protective, Ben knows. In the best ways that he knows how.
“Yeah. I am.”
“Well okay,” Klaus says. His expression walks the line between sympathetic and resigned; a familiar tight rope for both of them. “Good luck. Don’t do anything I would do.” There’s a pause, and then Klaus’s grin is feral. “Actually, do everything that I would do.”
Ben rolls his eyes. He takes a moment to steady himself, breathing like he’s about to meditate, and then wills his body corporeal again. It still amazes him how he can feel it happening, bit by bit, the solidity rushing through his veins like molasses until he’s real. That first time had been so unexpected, the second time so sudden, but now it’s like a full body stretch as it comes over him and he settles into it, content and heavy and whole. Once his hands can hold again, he rifles through the bottom drawer of Klaus’s vanity until he finds what he’s looking for, and then turns to leave. Better to get it over with sooner rather than later.
(And, if there’s a part of him that’s excited to see his brother, to touch him, to speak with him again after all this time, well can anyone blame him, really?)
Ben is walking his own tightrope, between excitement and wariness, anger and love, hurt and longing. He misses Luther, so much that it aches, but as he makes his way back to Allison’s room, he has to wonder if that’s enough.
–-
“He’s in his room,” Allison tells him apologetically. She pulls her arms around herself like a hug. “And Ben-- he means well, yeah? He’s missed you. So much.”
“I know,” Ben tells her honestly. “I’ve missed him too.”
–-
Ben knocks. Luther pulls open the door almost instantly, as if he’d been waiting next to it, with red eyes and an almost frantic look on his face.
“You’re here,” he says. As if Ben wouldn’t come. Or maybe as if Ben wouldn’t come to see him.
“Hi, Luther.”
“Where have-- why didn’t you come to see me sooner?”
A flash of guilt hits Ben in the chest. A familiar image springs up behind his eyes; Luther, at sixteen years old, face close and shirt covered in blood and begging for help. My brother’s dying, he’d screamed. Ben had wondered up until then if Luther had actually considered him one.
“I didn’t… it took Klaus and I a while to get the hang of it. After that day with Vanya, we were both worn out. We’ve just been practicing.”
Luther knows all of that, of course. He’s been pestering Klaus since the day that wasn’t the apocalypse, peppering in questions about where Ben is and how they did that and if it was really Ben. But repeating the excuse is easier than admitting that Ben had been scared to come here, scared to do this.
“It’s good to see you,” Luther says after a moment. “I-- come in.”
Ben follows him in as he gestures, and wonders if he should offer Luther a hug. Or maybe if he really just wants Luther to offer him one, but he knows better than to expect that. Not because Luther isn’t capable, or wouldn’t want to, but because he assumes that they’re all just as terrified and repulsed by his body as he is (personally, Ben isn’t in a place to throw stones about other’s bodies).
But the moment passes, and they don’t hug. And then they’re just sort of standing there, looking at each other, and Ben does his best to smile.
“So you lost your virginity, huh.”
Luther makes a choking noise. “Uh-- how did you--?”
Ben stares at him, one eyebrow raised.
“Klaus really needs to keep his mouth shut about that.” Luther is bright red. He looks vaguely cautious, like he’s not sure he’s allowed to be telling a dead person what they can and can’t talk about.
“Klaus didn’t need to tell me.”
Luther frowns. “Then who did?”
Ben keeps staring.
It takes a minute-- because Luther’s certainly not stupid but he’s always had a one-track mind-- but eventually comprehension dawns across his face in a wave.
He raises his eyebrows, bewildered. “You really were here this whole time.”
Ben grits his teeth. “Yep.” It’s really not fair that Luther gets to look surprised. It’s not fair that he gets to pretend that this is new information, when they’d been telling him-- Klaus had been telling him-- for years, and he never once considered it. “Yeah, I was. Klaus was never lying. Not about this.”
He would never have lied about seeing Ben. Not about something that important.
Luther has the good sense to look sheepish, although surely for the wrong reasons. “I didn’t know, Ben. I just assumed--”
“I know what you assumed.” Ben crosses the room, fed up with this already, and drops the CD that he’d brought from Klaus’s room onto the bed. “Whatever, Luther. Take that up with him, not me.”
“No, listen--” When Ben turns to shoot daggers at him, Luther holds up his hands in surrender, and quiets his voice. He’s learning, at least. “-- Please hear me out. You deserve an apology for this. From me. I’ve been trying, over the past few months, since everything with Vanya, to-- to get better about-- how I treat everyone. And it--”
“I don’t want an apology,” Ben interrupts. It’s gone on long enough already. He gets that Luther’s trying, he genuinely does, and he feels bad for his brother, honestly. Luther is perhaps the most lost of all of them, in some ways.
But still. Ben won’t hear this. Not even for him.
“I shouldn’t have--”
“Enough, Luther.”
“Look, I’ll apologize to Klaus later too, just let me--”
“It’s not about you,” Ben seethes. Luther stops like he’s been slapped. “It’s not about you. And I don’t want an apology. Because if you start to give me one, then I’ll realize that I can’t forgive you, for this or anything else, and I don’t want that, okay? I don’t want to--” Ben cuts himself off before he can say something like hate you, because it’s not really that, not exactly. He loves Luther, he does.
But that well of anger has been there for a lot of years. Before he died, even.
If they go there, if he touches that…
“Apologize to Klaus,” Ben adds, because he doesn’t trust Luther to understand that part without it spelled out for him. “But give me another few months, alright? And don’t expect him to forgive you right away, either.”
When he finally pauses for breath, Luther is still staring at him looking slightly shell-shocked; it’s probably the most Ben has ever said to him at once. But there’s something soft in the way he regards Ben, too-- an understanding. Recognition.
He nods.
“Alright, uhm. What can I do, then. For you now?” He clears his throat.
Ben’s shoulders slump. He’d forgotten the ways in which anger can get etched into the body, like a layer of weight beneath the skin.
Now that he’s shed it, he doesn’t feel lighter like he’d hoped. He’s just tired.
“I still love you, Luther,” he says resignedly, because he doesn’t expect Luther to understand that part either, and it’s too important to go unsaid. “I came here to visit my brother.”
Luther stares at his feet. “Oh.”
“Yeah.” He’d roll his eyes, if he thought it would do any good. He settles for rolling his shoulders. “So can we do that? As brothers?”
When Luther looks back up, there are tears in his eyes. It’s unexpected, and a pang of protectiveness swoops into Ben’s gut.
“Anything you want, Ben.” He says it gently, and he wipes his eyes with his stupid t-shirt, and despite everything, Ben hates to see him like this. Luther has always carried a lot of guilt-- maybe even more than he’s carried his sense of duty, and the guilt came first-- and a lot of that was because of Ben. Because of how things ended.
My brother is dying! Somebody help, please!
“I don’t want your apologies for how I died either, for the record.”
It’s out before he realizes he’s saying it, and Luther blinks. He still looks so young, so off-center, when you catch him off guard. “Right. I uh- I won’t, then.”
Ben steps forward. Places his hand, gently, on the top of Luther’s arm. It’s huge now, of course, but it still feels exactly the same as when they were kids. “You don’t owe me one. Not for that.”
Luther looks at where Ben’s hand is holding him and clears his throat again, tears welling up and over his red-rimmed eyes. He opens his mouth, then closes it again. Pauses. Then he smiles up at Ben cautiously, and it’s like the sun is rising over his face.
“Thank you,” he says earnestly. “But you’re right; it’s not about me. Uhm. What did you want to talk about?”
Ben smiles. “I didn’t want to talk, actually.” Luther’s eyebrows crease together, so Ben points to the bed. The CD is still sitting where he’d dropped it, reflecting light from the window.
Luther’s eyebrows shoot up again, but he looks privately excited. “A CD?” He reaches for it automatically, grateful for the redirection, and pries the case open without even looking at it, spinning it in his hand fluidly before he moves toward his CD player.
Ben shrugs. “You always were an enthusiastic dancer.”
Luther pauses on the play button. The back of his neck flushes. “Right. How much of that did you see?”
Ben grins. Oh, he’s missed this. “Which time?”
Luther hits play and straightens, quiet as the CD whirls to the first track. The he faces Ben with a challenging stare. A teasing smile draws up the corners of his mouth, and the edges of his eyes, and all of the oxygen is finally back in the room.
This is what they’re good at. The easy teasing and the pointed, gentle tension of building a joke together. He and Luther were never all that close as kids-- not even the sands of time can override that-- but they did sometimes share this. The pure joy of being childish.
“Is that right? So you must know my signature dance move, then?”
Ben pulls a face. “You mean the crab?” That one will never get burned out of his memory.
“No,” Luther says. Then he grins, low and deadly and victorious. “The moonwalk.”
Ben laughs so hard that he misses the first few notes of the song starting up.