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Benedick is having a wonderful evening: Beatrice is sitting in his room in his chair and playing his console, while he is watching a match of his favorite cyber team, live, the final. Idyll.
“C’mon! He's on the right! Flank’im!”
“Why are you commanding them?”
Beatrice has only one headphone on, and with the other ear she is listening attentively to Benedick behind her back.
“I’m not commanding them, I'm cheering them up.”
“You are commanding…” Beatrice waves her hand, “You're not even the highest rank in the room…”
Benedick forgives Beatrice for this behavior: Benedick has the highest rank in the room, Benedick serves in PsychOps as a sergeant, and Bea became a specialist give or take a couple of weeks ago. Beatrice is really cool, if you don't put Benedick next to her: Beatrice jumps with a parachute every month, Beatrice runs two miles in fifteen minutes, Beatrice is getting into the Special Forces, all that's left is to get all the paperwork...
And Beatrice also thinks she's a guy.
Beatrice asks to be called...
“Bea,” Benedick carefully touches his shoulder, “Here, to the left-...”
“Don’t peek over my shoulder, I don't like that, thank you,” Bea snaps and puts on both headphones, isolating herself from Benedick.
“I’m not peeking… I’m watching my match…”
The idyll falls apart. He buries his face in his phone.
Beatrice is a beautiful girl. Bea is a handsome guy. Benedick loves both of them very much, if he’s being honest, and that's why Benedick doesn't understand why Bea is so upset with him now. He didn't do anything bad to Bea today...
Beatrice is beautiful when, an hour later, Benedick pulls (once-it-was-his) T-shirt with the erased unit crest off and pulls her closer by the waist. Beatrice is silvery, thin and strong, with constellations of freckles all over her body and plexuses of muscles under her skin. Benedick likes her terribly: rebellious, independent, too much like him in character, he feels so good and comfortable with her, they understand each other without words. Always understood, from the very beginning, even before they ended up on the same base and got to know each other again.
They enlisted in the army together.
They went through Basics together.
They ended up on the same base even after Benedick’s deployment and Bea’s airborne school.
He’s known Benedick for too long; «it's almost ridiculous,» Bea thinks, and then cuts himself off before he can explain to himself what exactly is ridiculous.
“You think too much.
When you lie on his arm, when you take the blanket away at night, when you stand in your kitchen in the morning with the keys to his apartment in the pocket of your graphite-gray sweatpants, you think too much about some kind of useless bullshit. You're trying to seem to be someone you're not.
All you are is a person with their own moral compass. And your compass is extremely flexible.
How do you manage to hate him as a person, and then sleep with him and smile at him in the morning? Let him pull you on himself, let him pull your hair, let him do a lot of things? And then stay the night. And in the morning, take his keys, go to your place, make coffee for both of you, bring the computer and work on his bed, shaking your head to the music he showed you yesterday. And nothing is gnawing at you! And yet you like this situation!
He doesn’t love you, you won’t marry him, wake up!”
Bea wakes up in the middle of the night and stares at the body lying next to her for a long time. The body has a graceful narrow back, not a single tattoo, and strong arms that now scoop up Bea and press him closer to the male torso. And at such moments, Bea feels truly light and weightless, and most importantly — loved.
Feels Beatrice .
And Beatrice is a gentle, kind and vulnerable girl who only needed a little love. But there was no love, never. And this is why Bea appeared.
“You are not a pack animal, you are just an adaptive survivor who joins any pack and stays there so confidently that no one even notices the substitution until you start sowing discord between them. Cuckoo. Richard Papen. Your head is for thinking about the evil that you do not see, hear or speak of. You hold it behind your teeth and the bones of your skull. You come to a strange monastery and draw a pentagram on its floor, in which it is so convenient to lay out tarot cards.
You think too much.”
Benedick sleepily moans next to her, rubs his face on the pillow, which looks more like an explosion of cotton, and opens one eye. The right one. His left one was shot through in his youth: the doctors managed to save the eye itself, but now Benedick does not use it when he needs to aim... or look at something very important, important down to the very last detail. Noticing Beatrice, he immediately smiles, still half asleep.
“Hey…”
“Hey,” she smiles back at him and brushes the hair from his face with her thin fingers.
“What time is it, beautiful angel?”
“Zero nine ten…”
Beatrice feels shy from the “beautiful angel” and immediately hides her face in Benedick’s neck so that he does not see her blush. She can prove to people until she is hoarse that everything feminine is alien to her, but look how one handsome young man affects her. And this is not the first time: Bea can lie with the most severe swelling due to her period and nervously pick her face in a man’s shirt and some stretched-out sweatpants, but when Benedick distracts from his game and turns to her and says in the most casually romantic way:
“You're pretty.”
Beatrice begins to glow.
Beatrice feels like a girl with him.
Beatrice feels strange about this.
As soon as Bea returns home, he will try to wash it all off under an impossibly hot shower, scrape off his femininity with an iron sponge, scratch all his skin in inconspicuous places. Bea hates that he disappears, as soon as Benedick is nearby, that Beatrice gets in Bea’s place. She is small, puny and romantic, and Benedick is just using her, he will never love her, and Bea will never be able to protect her.
Meanwhile, Benedick is nauseous due to the emotional swings that Bea gives him every day. Benedick is ready to accept him no matter what. Benedick is ready to accept her no matter what. Just explain to Benedick the rules of the game, because here they are, being soft, happy with each other, and she is hugging him around the neck, kissing him on the cheek and promising to go on a ten-hour car trip with him listening to his favorite music…
And here Bea is already yelling at him, standing in the doorway with his backpack, getting ready to leave. And Benedick no longer recognizes the person in front of him. The issue is not gender. The issue is that:
“Idiot!” Bea wipes tears from his face, pushing Benedick into the arms outstretched for a hug, “Idiot, how I hate you!”
“Bea, please… Darling, stay, please…”
“I’ll strangle you in your sleep!”
“Okay then!” Benedick can’t hold it back any longer, waving his hands, “If this is what you want to be happy, I’ll gladly let you strangle me!”
This is no longer funny.
[“Idiot!” Beatrice laughs, sitting on his hips, clapping him on the shoulder, “Idiot, how I hate you! I’ll strangle you in your sleep!”
“You will definitely strangle me!” Benedick laughs with her and pulls the neck of her navy-blue hoodie towards himself; Beatrice rests on either side of his head and freezes with an undying smile before leaning forward.
He came about fifteen minutes ago without calling or warning, muttered something sleepily and fell face-first onto her bed, where they are now selflessly kissing: he having forgotten about sleepiness, she having forgotten about the grudge. He hasn’t called since last weekend because he’s been out in the field all this time. She hasn’t called since last weekend because she was waiting for him to call. They’re both geniuses because no one warned anyone.
And they also terribly missed each other.
That’s why, when a few minutes ago, standing in the hallway, Bea decided to give him attitude, Benedick simply picked him up in his arms and carried him off to the bedroom to cuddle.]
“I’ll strangle you in your sleep,” Bea repeats again with all his hatred, as if Benedick hadn’t heard him, but he only nods.
“You’ll definitely strangle me, brave young man.”
“I’ll strangle you, but it won’t bring me happiness!” Bea explodes with emotion again, “You’ll die, but it won’t bring me happiness!”
“So how can I make you happy?!” Benedick himself almost pleads in despair, completely confused in his best intentions, “I’ll do everything for you, please, bid me do anything for you!”
“Kill Claudio!”
Beatrice’s desperate cry hangs in the air.
Claudio .
Benedick covers his face with his hands and seems about to cry. Bea looks at him with bitter contempt, feeling his moral superiority, although there is absolutely nothing to be proud of here.
“Not for the wide world,” Benedick says quietly, adamantly, and sits back on the bed. Bea throws up his head.
“Then there is no reason for me to stay here either.”
“Why do you need me to kill my best friend?”
Benedick now looks defeated, trampled, and devoured of faith. As if Bea ripped out his heart and ate it in public in the marketplace, just to prove his hatred for Claudio. Only for Bea this is not an easy conversation either.
“Because he is your ex,” with each new word, with each new thought, Bea gets more and more heated, from a quiet bitter voice to hysterical tears, “Because you still love him. Because he is a real man, and with me you are just for fun, so you can date a guy, and fuck a girl! So your internal homophobia is more comfortable like this, right?!”
“Bea…” he raises his tired look and shakes his head, asking for mercy, “Please, don’t…”
“If I were a man-!..”
“Bea, you are a man for me.”
These words knock the ground out from under Bea’s feet, he needs to sit down, and he carefully lowers himself into the chair. Benedick’s eyes are shining in the darkness of the room, Beatrice for some reason really wants to hug him and say that everything will be fine now, but Benedick only continues.
“I do not care who you are, how you define yourself and what you call yourself. I love you for the person you are. Not for your anatomy. Not for the concepts imposed by society. Bea or Beatrice, I love you , with any name and gender in the documents.”
Did the backpack straps slip off your shoulders or is it something metaphorical? Beatrice doesn’t know, but she no longer feels the need to be strong, to be independent, to be for herself and by herself, she wants to cuddle up to the person opposite her in a disgustingly cliched way...
She does so.
“May I?” Beatrice asks him somewhere in the shoulder, refusing to emerge for even a second from the embrace that feels like home and peace.
“Mmm?” Benedick holds her, sitting on his lap, like the most precious cargo in the world, kisses her light hair, buries his nose in it.
“May I stay the night?”
“I was just about to ask you to stay the night…”