Chapter Text
Ben had never believed that his life could be this... joyful. Well, actually that wasn’t quite true. Ben hadn’t thought that his life could be this joyful for a while now, but that had not always been the case. There were distinct eras to his life, and he had, for a while now, felt comfortable sorting his time on this earth into segments. There was the before – before Alyssa, when what he cared about was his life, his career, his job. Getting through high school and then college, launching headfirst into the working world - an era wherein the focus of his life was his looking onwards, to the future. Then, there was Alyssa. She was bright, she was everything, and when she entered his life that New Year’s Eve she and he, well, they gravitated. He became a focal point for her just as much as she did for him - she was his sun, his moon, his stars. Hell, she was the lens through which he began to view life. Before, he had seen a straight line – graduate, work, live, die – but after? God, after all he saw was her, was them , and the world they would create together.
But after her? After her was Tartarus, congealed and cyclical. That was when Ben had truly felt stuck for the first time, treading water and drowning on dry land. Nothing felt like it ever had before, it was just. Empty. His world was skewed, hollow, everything felt out of place without Alyssa. She had been his light. And, frankly, that’s how Ben expected the rest of his life to be wasted and categorized. With there being a before Alyssa, a during, and then an after.
But now? Now, there was his family . Gabbie and Travis had welcomed him into their family with open arms, and he wasn’t the only one. Kent, Harriet, Bruce, and every happy haunt who decided to stick around in the mansion. Ben was overjoyed to be there for Travis, becoming the exact sort of bonus parent Travis needed to truly thrive . A year or so after The Banishment, Gabbie and Harriet had finally made things official (much to the delight of Constance, who was thrilled to see a wedding with two brides and no grooms), and Ben had officially moved into the mansion a year after that. The Bed and Breakfast aspect of the Mansion was taking off in ways none of them could have anticipated – the ghosts agreed to remain low-key around newbies, and profits rolled in.
And Ben was happy – he was joyful . He got to see his sort-of kind-of son every day, he was able to stay out of the limelight by helping Gabbie and Harriet run the back end of the company (although he couldn’t get out of the occasional tour), he got to bother Bruce at work and keep the ghosts in line whenever guests were getting a little too freaked out, it was great, and it was better than he could have really and truly imagined.
Except for one thing.
One single, itsy bitsy little thing.
He had absolutely no idea who might have left roses on his bed.
And this? This had the potential to become a problem