Little Boy Lost - Whilom

He was just a little boy, throwing a temper tantrum with his fists. He was the tiger cub, too big for its handler, too young to know its strength. He was the eager child, trying to earn his parent's good graces by digging up flowers in the yard, roots and all, to present as a gift. He was the fearless warrior, still afraid of the monsters under his bed.

It didn't matter, really, what he was. Bottom line, he was broken, and Max couldn't fix him. She could only break him more.

The Nomlies, he had whispered, horror blowing his pupils wide. And all that time she had spent tracking him down, convincing herself that this isn't him, this isn't Ben, was wasted. She'd heard that no one forgot their first love. No one forgot their first hope either, she guessed. Because she still remembered every vivid detail in the gray world they grew up in: Ben's hands, fluttering in the light, shadowing the wall with bird-shapes; his face, open and smooth, eyes gleaming at the shapes on the wall. It was like he had forgotten it was him making the shadows, gotten too caught up in the play of light and dark. He'd never grown out of that, not really. It was just, when he got older the shadows were more than just birds on the wall. They were knives and teeth and barcodes and tattoos and killing over and over again.

Maybe that's why she stopped fighting the onslaught of memories. Maybe that's why she knelt with him, didn't argue with him, finally watched the shadows with him instead of telling him to stop making up the stories that helped them live. Maybe that's why she whispered, "Tell me about the Good Place."

He'd never smiled like that. It had been years since she'd seen that smile cross his face, the one that said someone believed him like he believed in the Blue Lady, and she'd never seen it on this adult Ben. Even with his gasp of pain, the smile was beautiful. Because it didn't belong to a killer. It belonged to a child playing with shadows, hoping in something better.

Where no one ever gets punished.

And no one gets yelled at.

And nobody disappears.

And when you wake up in the morning, you can stay in bed as long as—

She hated herself for breaking him. She hated him for never leaving childhood behind.

He was the child whose captivity hadn't ended with a barrier of wire fence. In a way, it had never ended. He had lived inside his mind, even at Manticore. His greatest fear was the Nomlies, his greatest hope the Blue Lady. Years outside the concrete and wire hadn't changed that.

So when it was all over, his smile sliding from his face in the split second it took for her to shift her hand, she cried because she'd never killed a child before. She cried because Ben was the broken boy, the one who could never be fixed, and she had helped—leg, neck, mind. Somewhere along their gravel road, all had snapped.

He was the child lost in an adult world where no one spoke his language or understood his games. He was the prodigy, effortless in performing feats which only tightened his fetters. He was a soldier, one of the best, one of the few who got to go to the Good Place he'd always talked about.

Or, at least, Max hoped so. And if not, at least she'd made sure the sky was the last thing he saw.