[Story][Short][IC][Arc 1] Butterflies and Hurricanes

[Black Aeronaut]

Mikoto Misaka hears something.  Something that just can't be right.  Sure, she's seen things like it before - anyone that lived in Academy City has... but it couldn't have possibly been that bad?

Could it?

The whispers she overhears, though, seem to beg to differ...

---

Butterflies and Hurricanes

February 20, 2017
Blossom Apartments
Ottawa, ON, Canada

It had been two weeks since that phone call that Rob had shared with her.  One incredibly tense week where Mitsuko and ITEM had shown up on their collective doorstep, and culminated into an epic throwdown with Meltdowner.  Followed immediately after with the most epically horrible day-before-Valentine’s Day Mikoto had ever experience.

And this was saying something since it had nothing to do with her at all - for once, Mikoto had been just a bystander, but even that had been bad enough.

It had made her sick to her stomach seeing such dull and lifeless eyes on people like Nanoha and Fate.  Emotion Restorer-kun hadn’t just wiped out their emotional attachment to Benjamin.

It had removed all of their emotions.

They hadn’t deserved that.  None of them did.  But at the very least the Megami had been able to restore their emotions and most of their emotional attachments.

All except for those that held them to Benjamin.

And that was where things got real bad.  Rightfully feeling guilt over what they had done, those two bitches confessed what they had done.  Mikoto had almost gone thermonuclear herself.  The only thing that had stopped her had been Kuroko, Touma, and Index all holding her back while Rob delivered his sentence: banishment to San Antonio.

The only thing that was better than the looks on their faces was the way Benjamin had mopped the floor with them to fully demonstrate how outclassed they were by the ‘simple apartment manager’, and why they would be totally done in if they ever hurt him or anyone he loves ever again.

The only thing that kept Mikoto from cheering was the look on Usagi’s face.  It was the Queen Serenity mode, to be sure… but it was a cold mask of a ruler’s face.  Distant.  Dispassionate.  Unmoved.  But even Mikoto could tell that deep down, she was crying for them all.

For Benjamin and the seething hurt and resentment he felt.

For Uranus and Neptune and the guilt they felt and the penance they had only begun to pay.

For Nanoha and Fate to experience something so mind-bending.

And for everyone else for having to witness something so terrible.

But as Ben would say, Murphy apparently wasn’t through with them just yet.  Like a maraschino cherry on a shit sundae, Leonard Testarossa finally showed his idiotic pretty-boy face.

Mikoto had never seen anything like it.  She could feel the bloodlust pouring off of Benjamin in waves, and she was by no means telepathic at all.  As nearly as Washu-chan could figure, it was his anti-magic field radiating, and it had been flavored with his emotional state.  If Mikoto had to describe it, it would be like what she imagined getting too close to the site of a nuclear accident felt like.

And yet, through it all, Ben still wore a look of absolute calm, even as he did horrifying things that she had never imagined.

She learned on that day, all too well, exactly why Accelerator never wanted to go up against Benjamin.  And it had nothing to do with his Capacity Down ability.

Benjamin has a long fuse - it is one of his defining characteristics.  But leave him with a sense of having nothing left to lose and then make a justified target out of yourself?  He won’t be stopped.  Anything you put in his way will be nothing more than a minor inconvenience as he throws any and all caution to the wind and completely cuts loose.

The Serenity’s crew were already calling it the St. Valentine’s Eve Massacre.  Except instead of Thompson submachine guns, it was antimatter charges and gamma ray lasers.

It had been the first time in her life that Mikoto had to wear a dosimeter, and she hoped it would be the last.  But knowing Benjamin’s luck…

…Mikoto was starting to see why he and everyone else reviled his bad fortune.  She’d heard that even Lord Phantomhive had used some very… creative language in cursing Benjamin’s poor fortune.

Which made Hayate giving Benjamin that Unison Device named Taiga all the more special.  Mikoto rarely felt people deserved charity - you had to earn your way in life, after all.  But in Benjamin’s case?  For fuck’s sake, enough had been enough!

And then the Puella Magi, Jail Scaglietti and his Numbers all showing up at the same time…

Two.

Fucking.

Weeks.

Just because Murphy and Fate couldn’t stop messing with Benjamin.

And ever since that day, two weeks ago when she sat in on that video-call between Ben and Rob, that dangling thread in a conversation Ben had left was still there.  And it would not leave her alone.  Much like a loose bit of stitching in a jacket that was rubbing a patch of skin raw, his words kept echoing in her mind.

“When you have a step-father who's made it his mission in life to ensure you have no way of hiding anything from him, you learn or... well, that's a conversation for another time.”

A conversation for another time!?  What the hell? She’d thought to herself when Ben had uttered those words.  That sounds like something serious!  Mikoto would have said something, but Ben had already made it a point that they weren’t there to talk about that.

And now things were finally calm enough that she felt comfortable in asking some very uncomfortable questions.

At first, she had tried asking Rob.  She had come to trust the man these last few months - he always did his best to do right by her, and he’d become something like the Cool Uncle that she never had.  She had been pretty confident that he’d explain, but it wasn’t in a way that she wanted.

"Why won't you say anything about him? I know you know more than you're telling."

Rob sighed. "Mikoto, consider what we did to convince Mitsuko that she's in a different universe."

"We showed her an episode of our anime."

Rob shook his head slowly. "We showed her part of an episode of your anime.  I cut it off before it showed you enjoying yourself while wearing that swimsuit that you wanted to wear to begin with."

Mikoto grimaced. "And it showed I had the big screen turned on, and Touma saw me."

"Yeah.  Now, consider that I'm willing to protect your secrets to save you from a bit of embarrassment. Am I going to tell you Ben's secrets?"

"Are they that embarrassing?"

"No.  They're much worse than just embarrassing."

And that was all she could get out of him.

It was a bit galling, but Mikoto was not a person so easily deterred.  So her next attempt was to ask Usagi.  She was talkative, and she seemed to know quite a bit about the strange American from Texas.

However, all she got from the girl who was barely older than herself and yet almost a goddess in her own right, was a stricken look of profound sadness.  But that suddenly changed into a somber repose as Usagi went into what was quickly becoming known as her Queen Serenity mode.

“I’m sorry, Mikoto,” said Usagi in a cool, yet gentle tone.  “That is something only he can tell you about.  As much as I would like to, it is not my place to speak of such things.”

At Mikoto’s shocked look, Usagi went on, “It is regrettable, indeed, but that is the nature of such things.  If he does tell you… you will understand why I can’t tell you.”  And then to Mikoto’s further surprise, Usagi’s eyes became wet with tears, even though she was still bearing her Queen Serenity mode.  “However, you may even wish that you had never learned of it at all.”

Mikoto knew that Usagi was a self-avowed crybaby.  But she had also seen the Queen Serenity mode in action before.  Mikoto could have never imagined Usagi crying while in that state.  And on top of that, Usagi was always so happy and cheerful, even when doing something like homework - because as much as she hated homework, it was a mundane thing, and these days the mundane was comforting.

Mikoto decided to skip asking her sisters.  She had a feeling that they’d all clam up with regards to That Guy From Texas, and then good luck prying anything out of them once they presented a unified front.  Not even Mimi would tell once their resolve was set.



Instead, she went straight to the one person she knew would give her a straight answer with zero fucks given in regards to hurting someone else’s feelings.

“What do you need, Railgun?” said Accelerator when he answered the knock on his door.

“What’s the deal with Benjamin Rhodes?” said Mikoto, getting straight to the point.

“What do you mean?” he replied, nearly rolling his eyes.  “There’s a lot of shit about him that’s weird as fuck.”

Mikoto sighed, trying not to get angry at the one person who could give her answers.

“He said something about his step-father and it won’t leave me alone.  Do you know anything about it?”

Mikoto could count on one hand the number of times she’d ever seen Accelerator genuinely and utterly surprised.  However, Accelerator quickly regained his wits and reapplied his mask of cynical stoicism.

But the tone he used belied that look.

“You have to ask him yourself,” he said in a firm tone, but utterly devoid of the acidity he usually used.  “I can’t talk about it.”

Mikoto practically goggled at Accelerator’s dispassionate refusal.

“WHAT?”

“Are you deaf?  I.  CANNOT.  TALK.  ABOUT.  IT.”

“I heard what you said!” snapped Mikoto hotly.  “WHY!?”

“That should be evident, Railgun.  But if it will get you to leave me the fuck alone, I’ll give you a hint.”  And then Accelerator did one of the most frightening things he could do.

He smiled that vicious, predatory smile of his.

“That guy?  He fucking gets me.  I know, right?  That lame-o?  What the fuck would he know about me?  I mean, he swears he never watched the series or read the manga.  But he’s not the kinda person that lies about shit like that.  So, I’ll tell you this much.  Just so you know how fucked up this shit is.

“That guy’s childhood?  It was the kind of sick, perverted joke that Alasteir-FUCKING-Crowley would get off on!”

Accelerator only laughed at Mikoto’s horrified expression as he shut the door on her.

And then Usagi’s words echoed along with Benjamin’s and Accelerator’s.

“…a step-father… …his mission in life… …no way of hiding anything…”

“…Ben's secrets… …They're much worse than just embarrassing…”

“…you may even wish you had never learned of it…”

“…the kind of sick, perverted joke that Alasteir-FUCKING-Crowley would get off on!”

Mikoto felt sick to her stomach.

What the hell!?  What the FUCKING HELL!? she thought angrily to herself as she fought down her rising gorge.

Now, more than ever, she wanted answers.  This was going beyond just simple curiosity.  Once she had her body back under her control, she pulled out her phone and sent a text message to a contact she had yet to use.

I need to talk to you.
…
What’s wrong?
…
I’d rather not say on my phone.  Face to face is best.
…
Alright.  When?
…
When is good for you?
…
I’m at your service, in case you forgot.  Even if you’re under Rob’s care.
…
Alright.  Tomorrow at noon.  I can slip free of Kuroko then.
…
I’ll have Washu-chan set up a portal.  It won’t trigger the Good Neighbor System, and we can talk in one of her private conference rooms.  Absolutely no eavesdropping will be possible, even from her.
…
And how will you hide this?
…
With a bit of truth.  Someone needed a private consultation.  That’s part of what we’re here for, are we not?
…
…Damn, you ARE good at this.
…
Just doin’ what I can with what I got.  See you tomorrow at noon.

---

February 20, 2017
12:59 PM
Blossom Apartments
Ottawa, ON, Canada

Mikoto checked one last time to make sure that Kuroko wasn’t around, and then sighed in relief.  It took her a bit of doing, but she had decided to take a page out of Benjamin’s book - dropping suggestions here and there, and hiding her real intents in a manner that was barely even hiding them at all.

To her surprise, it had worked amazingly well.  She’d have to thank Ben for that lesson.

Closing her door behind her, Mikoto turned to the empty wall and then tapped out the rhythm from an old advertisement jingle she remembered from when she was a kid.  As promised, the portal formed right away and Mikoto stepped through it without a second thought.

February 20, 2017
12:00 PM
Westwoods Apartments
San Antonio, TX, USA

She found herself in Ben’s living room, the blinds shuttered, drinks set out on the coffee table, and some low-key music was playing.  Mikoto noticed that it was coming from the TV, which displayed a Youtube livestream titled “lofi hip hop radio - beats to sleep/chill to”.  (https://youtu.be/DWcJFNfaw9c)  Complete with a looping animation of a girl with studio-style headphones, laid back in her bed with a chubby orange cat, flopped onto its back and a pleased smile on its face.

Ben was already there, seated in a recliner chair.

“It’s just you and me here, Mikoto,” said Ben.  “I know I said we’d do this in Washu’s lab, but I had a change in heart.  This is a little more comfy, and the soundproofing is good enough that no one can eavesdrop.  Have a seat, make yourself comfortable, and we can go ahead and get started.”

“Right… thanks,” said Mikoto, feeling a bit lame.  She noted the mug before her.  It looked like it had hot chocolate inside.  On one side it had the NASA Meatball.  However, the other side would have made her laugh under any other circumstances.  There, it had text done up in the style of a digital calculator display, and read, “IT’S NOT ROCKET SCIENCE” followed by a subscript in a normal, sans font, “(Oh wait, yes it is.)”

She picked it up and took a sip.  To her pleasant surprise, it was the Mexican Hot Chocolate he’d brought for the ice skating trip… the same momentous occasion where Mimi Hanyu had shown up… and subsequently made a twin sister of herself.

If Mikoto hadn’t known already that she was getting herself into something incredibly heavy, then this would have been the big clue.  Meanwhile, Benjamin waited patiently, studiously keeping his ADHD in check.

“I’ve heard things,” said Mikoto.  “Not a lot.  But it sounded like it was real bad.  And then you said that thing about your step-dad the other day, how he’d never let you keep anything hidden.  It just… it just all suddenly clicked.  But the thing is I didn’t really wanted to believe it at first.  How could you have had it so bad?  When there’s people like Accelerator and Last Order around?  What the hell happened to you that was so horrible?”

Ben sighed, long and quietly as he nodded his head.  “I see.”

And then said nothing for what felt like a long moment.

“Well?” asked Mikoto, somewhat impatiently.

Ben then gave her a sharp look.  “Relax for a minute,” his tone slightly heated.  “You’re not exactly asking for something that’s easy, here.  I thought you were coming to me with some problem that needed outside help, not ask me about my personal demons.  So forgive me if I need to take a minute or two to get things straight in my head.”

Mikoto felt her face heat up, and not from the hot chocolate.  Part of her wanted to lash back out, to bring out the good old Railgun persona that came boiling to the surface whenever someone challenged her.

But current events had humbled her somewhat.  And the simple fact that Benjamin carried within him the ability to render them all into sub-atomic particles at a moment’s notice was honestly more than a little scary.  It was downright terrifying, even for Railgun.

“It’s only been a recent realization for me,” he started.  “That so many people have no fucking clue about what the mechanics behind an abusive relationship between a parent and a child look like.  The thinking behind it is just so alien to others that they simply can’t wrap their minds around it.”

He went quiet as he attempted to organize his thoughts further.

“What does child abuse exactly mean, anyways?” asked Mikoto.

Ben sighed once more, then looked Mikoto in the eye.

“Someday, Mikoto, you’re going to be a grown woman.  And some day, you may - and I stress 'may' here because this is entirely up to you - find yourself undertaking the most Herculaneum task a woman can do: bring new life into this world.”

Mikoto couldn’t help it.  She felt her face go hot at the very idea.

Ben continued, unfazed by her utterly radioactive blush.  “If such a thing comes to past, then with time you’ll come to realize that your children are going to be your greatest achievement in life.  This is how it is for pretty much all mothers.  If you ask your mother, she’ll say the same about you.

“The thing is, with that will come the realization of just how much responsibility it is.  You will hold in your hands a human being who is completely dependent on you.  And as that child grows and begins to have thoughts and reasoning, you will find it further compounded by this fact: they have complete and unconditional trust in you.  They can hear a million different things from a million different sources, but in the end, you will be the person that they will have the greatest amount of faith and trust in the entire world.  They might question what you tell them, but that’s just how human beings are.  Otherwise…  they’re completely at your mercy.

“This is what makes the patterns of abuse so easy to fall into.  Your child will trust you to the point where it won’t matter how much you betray them.  It won’t matter how much you hurt them.  They will almost always internalize it as a shortcoming on their part, and never hold you at fault.”

Mikoto’s mind was reeling at that.  His words had suddenly implanted the idea in her head.  Her.  A mother.  Holding a tiny life in her arms.

That was scary.  Not because of having a baby, but because of the idea of how much responsibility it would place on her shoulders.  She wasn’t at all like her mother, after all…

…But then, Mikoto wondered if her mother had ever at all felt the weight of responsibility that raising her had entailed.  All of her mother’s antics aside, it wasn’t like as if she had neglected Mikoto.  Very much the opposite, really.

Regardless, she understood what Benjamin meant about the responsibility.  It is a huge deal.  But she had never considered it from the child’s perspective.  She’d always been a very independent girl, after all.  And now that she was thinking about it… it made sense.  A child has no other choice but to place all their faith in their parents.

And then the rest of his words began to sink in, and a horrible picture began to paint itself.  She remembered watching Mahou Shoujou Lyrical Nanoha.  How poor little Fate had toiled under her mother’s brutal whims, always thinking that she was solely to blame for her mother’s anger.

“But…  Why would someone do that to their child!?” said Mikoto, aghast.

Benjamin shrugged.  “Any number of reasons.  Sometimes even in combinations.  Sometimes it’s because it’s what they had growing up as well.  Sometimes they’re broken in some way.  Or sometimes, in a few rare cases, it’s because there is something that has literally gone wrong in their brain.  That was the case for one of the most infamous cases of child abuse in America.  A man named David Peltzer had a mother who had been very loving and caring… but one day, it was like something inside of her broke for no discernible reason.  And suddenly, his name became ‘It’, and he was treated to all kinds of horrible punishments - acts of outright cruelty that you would expect from some prisoner-of-war film - and sick, twisted mind games.  He was lucky, though.  At the age of twelve, someone caught wise to what was going on, and child protective services removed him from his home and placed him with a foster family.”

“Is that how it was for you?” asked Mikoto.

Ben sighed once more.

“Not at all like that, no.  But some people… once they understand what I went through… sometimes they think what I went through was just as bad.

“The thing you have to understand about my step-father was that he suffered through child abuse as well.  But rather than be cowed by it, he got a job as soon as he could, and by the time he was of legal age, he left his home behind and made his way in the world.  He’s a very straightforward man that way.

“So imagine how such a man would react to having a step-son that always had his head in the clouds?  Was loud, rambunctious, ridiculously excitable, couldn’t sit still to save his own life, and yet showed signs of being incredibly intelligent and insightful?”

“You’re even more opposite than my mother and I!” said Mikoto in surprise.

Ben nodded.  “But what really did it was that he had chronic migraines.  And I was a child who didn’t even have the concept of an indoor voice because, lo and behold, it turns out I had Asperger’s Syndrome all this time.”

“What does that have to do with being loud?”

“Overstimulation.”

“What?  How?”

“Asperger’s Syndrome is a form of autism.  And when you have autism, you’re hypersensitive to the world around you.  So what do you do to make sure people can hear you when it seems like the sounds of the world are overwhelming you?”

“You talk louder,” said Mikoto in understanding.

Ben nodded and went on, “It probably doesn’t help that I also have Auditory Processing Disorder.”

“Is there anything you don’t have!?” said Mikoto in surprise.

A sharp glare from Benjamin was all Mikoto needed to make her realize she’d just stepped out of line.  Jeez, where the hell did he learn to DO that!?

“The thing about APD is that it’s like dyslexia, only for your auditory cortex.  You hear pitches and tones just fine, but the ability to translate that into useful information has been impaired.  It’s usually caused by some kind of trauma suffered in early childhood.  For me, it was because I was deaf for a few months when I was two years old.”

Mikoto frowned at that.  “How did that happen?”

“I had a rash of bad middle ear infections back then,” explained Benjamin, “and the doctors weren’t prescribing enough antibiotics to do the job.  Once they’d realized I’d gone deaf, they panicked and packed me so full of Amoxicillin that I actually became allergic to it for a while.”  Ben then shrugged.  “But by then, the damage had been done.  I was deaf at an age that was critical to the development of my auditory cortex, and the effects still linger to this day.

“At any rate… that meant I was a very noisy child, and that doesn’t mix well with someone who has chronic migraines.  Add in the fact that he was an incredibly prideful man who didn’t tolerate any sort of embarrassment…”

“That… That’s bad,” said Mikoto worriedly.

Ben nodded.  “And the way he’d lash out at me… he was very fond of corporal punishment.  Leather belt on a bare ass, and he insisted that I always bend over and touch my toes.  I know some people don’t think much about it, but belts are worse than paddles.  They don’t have the same mass, but they cut through the air so much faster, and they tend to whip across your skin.  A paddle can leave deep bruises, sure, but a belt will leave burning welts on your skin if they hit you hard enough.

“But really, the worst part was how he’d lecture me.”

“Why?”  She had to sit through a lecture or two herself in the past, but it was never what she might think of as “mentally scarring”.

“Well, aside from how he’d call me all kinds of things to my face - fuck up, moron, idiot, dumb-ass… For a long time, one of his favorites was ‘tenth of a job’.”

“I remember you saying that last one before,” said Mikoto in confusion.  “What the hell is that even supposed to mean?”

Ben scoffed derisively at that.  “Well, my step-dad was never someone content to leave things as they are for long.  He’s always looking to ‘improve’ something.  So, one day he said that calling me ‘half a job’ was too generous and that ‘tenth of a job’ suited me much better.”

“That is so…” said Mikoto, struggling to find words to describe it. “…so incredibly fucked up!  Why would anyone say something like that!?”

“He had a thing about keeping the house clean to an unreasonable degree.  He never even wanted to see a single crumb on the counter or a speck of dirt on the floor.  Everything had to be gleaming, and he always expected the entire kitchen, dinging room, and all the dishes and pots and pans to be cleaned in just thirty minutes.”

Mikoto rolled her eyes.  “That doesn’t so-”

Ben cut her off quickly.  “In a family with seven children, and only myself and my sister working at it.”

Once again, Mikoto was shocked and she couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing.

“… you’re kidding.”

Ben shook his head.  “And it was never just the dinner dishes, either.  This was everything that had piled up over the course of the day, because my brothers never cleaned up after themselves.  Why should they?  After all, they had me, the kitchen bitch, to do it all for them.”

She couldn’t even imagine it - having that kind of workload put upon you.  Cleaning up after so many people?  And from that much?  There was something that wasn’t adding up here.

“But didn’t you take turns?” Mikoto asked.

“Nope,” said Ben in a matter-of-fact tone.  “Only us red-headed step-children.”

“What the fuck!?” cried out Mikoto.  It was such a cliche, and yet still so disturbing to hear about in real life.  “The hell is this?  A Cinderella story!?”

“That’s exactly what it was,” said Ben.  “Except there was no happily ever after for me, and you’re just now starting to realize this.  Just how fucked up everything was.

“Now try to think of what it would be like to spend your entire existence like that.  Always walking on eggshells because he wanted a quiet house - and he’d wonder why I’d slink around like a dog afraid to be hit.  Always forced to do the jobs no one else wanted.  Which was all of them.  And always belittled, degraded, and above all, punished in humiliating and painful ways for not living up to an impossible expectation.

“Oh, and if he thought you were giving him a dirty look while he was lecturing you, he’d backhand you so hard that you see stars and go skidding across the floor.”

Mikoto blinked at at.  After everything else she’d heard, it was almost like a non sequitur — a statement that does not logically follow the previous ones — even though it did follow the patterns.

“…Were you giving him dirty looks?” she asked.

“Not on purpose,” said Ben as he rolled his eyes.  “Thing is, and I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’ve got a pretty intense look.  But that’s just how my face is put together.  It’s a bit like that trope about the guy in school who looks like an evil yakuza enforcer, but he’s actually a very nice person.  So imagine how that comes off when dear old dad is always demanding that you look him in the eyes, and his prideful nature takes it as disrespect just because your look is that intense.”

Mikoto felt utterly bewildered by that.  How could his father demand Benjamin to do something that was going to rile the man even further?  Was this some form of masochism, or just a means to justify being even more horrible!?  But even so…

“But… didn’t anyone ever notice?” said Mikoto at a level just shy of an outcry.  “Didn’t anyone ever help you?”

Ben shook his head.  “This was at a time when they had just come around on the fact that child abuse is a thing that happens.  They didn’t even understand the full implications until they started to see the correlation between child suicide and child abuse years later.

“So the few times people did try to help, it was half-hearted or limp-wristed.  By all rights, I should have been adopted into a foster family.  Ironically, it might have been better for the rest of my family if I wasn’t there, because dad spent so much time focused on his whipping boy that he failed to notice how things were going to hell in a handbasket with his own kids.”

“What do you mean?” said Mikoto in confusion.  This part was news to her!  And it was the kind of news that left a terrible, sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.

Ben shrugged indifferently.  “What else happens when you don’t properly discipline a bunch of unruly boys?”

Mikoto could only stare at Ben in horror as she processed that, imagining a bunch of young boys tearing around their own house like a bunch of testosterone-fueled maniacs.

“… oh god.”

Ben nodded.  “Yeah.  And that was another aspect of the abuse.  That for a while, my younger brothers got in on it.  They never really got punished for their wrong doings.  Just a tap on the wrists by comparison to what I got.  Because they were just boys being boys, right?  And god forbid I ever take any revenge, because I’m older and I should know better.”

“Fucking hell!” cried out Mikoto, completely and absolutely appalled at what she had just heard.  “Double-standards much!?”

Ben snorted.  “No kidding.  So, they felt at liberty to go into my room whenever they damn-well please, turn everything inside out, destroy my model kits, and even kill my pet fish because,” and here, Benjamin effected a sickeningly saccharine-sweet falsetto voice, “‘Fishy needed a bath and a hair cut!’”

“A bath and a haircut!?” said Mikoto in confusion.  “For a fish!?  What the fucking hell is that supposed to mean!?”

Ben shrugged.  “Mom liked to get me betas.  They’re beautiful and low maintenance, but my brothers thought of those long, flowing fins as ‘hair’.  And unfortunately they weren’t terribly precise about what they were cutting.  As for the bath, they’d dump a bunch of dish washing soap into the tank and stir it up like a washer on a spin cycle.”

Mikoto gaped at Benjamin.  There was no way… just… no WAY someone could do something so horrible!  That level of cruelty went beyond simple cruelty.  It was downright psychopathic!

“And they got away with that!?”

“Eh,” said Ben, displaying an alarming amount of blasé for such a topic.  “Dad kinda lost his cool about the thing with the fish.  He has low opinions about animal cruelty, ironically enough.  Even so, I went through three betas before we just decided it wasn’t worth it.  My brothers simply weren’t getting the message, or they were and just didn’t give a shit.  Either way, it was no use buying me any more fish if they just kept on killing them.  But if it had been me that done the same thing?  Hah.  Dad would’ve turned me into a blood smear on the wall.  I lived in fear of that man for a reason.”

The double-standards again.  It boggled Mikoto’s mind that someone would have a household that operated in such an off-kilter manner.  She almost couldn’t even stomach hearing about it, and, to her own surprise, she was starting to feel outrage on Ben’s behalf!

“You had to have been able to do something!” ranted the girl.  “Some way to fight back!”

“Mikoto?” said Ben, giving her a deadly serious look.  “We’re talking about a man standing a hair over two meters tall.  And he was a strong man who used to go for five mile runs in the mountains wearing fucking lineman’s boots — with the climbing hardware attached — and did regular one-mile swims in the mountain lake his dad owned.  And I was just a soft, underfed, sleep-deprived little boy.”

Mikoto was nearly at her limit.  There was just so much messed up shit there that she was almost becoming desensitized to it.  To hear that Benjamin had been starved as punishment as a child?  It almost sounded normal compared to everything else!

“Underfed?  He starved you?”

“Sometimes.  The fact of the matter is that I had an absurdly high metabolism and I was ravenously hungry all the damn time.  It was so bad that other kids at school noticed and began to pick on me because they thought my parents weren’t feeding me.  The truth was that they were feeding me, but just not enough.  I could put away meals that would take two grown men to eat, and I was this tiny kid at thirty kilos soaking wet.  You should have seen it whenever we hit up an all you can eat buffet.  I could load up my tray four times and still have room left for desert.  By all rights, I should be taller than I am, but I simply never got enough to eat.  It made the times he did force me to go without meals absolute torture.”

Mikoto could only barely grasp the concept.  She had rarely ever felt true hunger, and the times she did was when she missed a meal because of circumstances beyond her control coming to play.  Otherwise, her mother always made sure that she was well fed.  To think that he had experienced that sensation through the night as a punishment?  It outright disturbed her.

She couldn’t have imagined herself in such a situation, but the words Ben used painted an awful picture in her head - one of a tall, powerfully built man brutalizing and belittling a half-starved child for not being some ideal of perfection.  For not being some kind of perfect saint that would be content with living with nothing while working themselves to the bone for everyone else’s sake.  Her sense of justice struggled at the idea that this could go on the way it had.

“But still,” said Mikoto.  “Someone had to have seen it!  Someone had to have known!”

Ben sighed.  “Mikoto, anytime I said anything about it, people would brush it off.  I was deemed to be making mountains out of mole hills because no one understood just how bad my situation was - how utterly and fantastically dysfunctional my family was.  It’s part of the reason why I can’t stand sit-coms.  More often than not, they portray dysfunctional families for laughs, but I can’t laugh at all because I fucking lived it.”  And here it was, at long last.  The anger.  The resentment.  The pure and unbridled vitriol that she knew had to be there, but didn’t hear before.  She had wondered at what point would Ben finally express his anger.  And to her surprise, it was not towards his father.  No, it was instead aimed squarely at society.  And rightfully so, she understood, as he went on.

“Not to mention that when everyone else has the standards of situational comedies to go off of, they’ll think that it’s not that big of a deal.  They think that it’s actually fucking hilarious.  They never consider things from your perspective.  They never consider how dark and oppressive the atmosphere is.  They never consider what it’s like to be cold and hungry in the dead of night, unable to sleep because you have a sleep disorder that no one knows about - least of all yourself - and just wishing and hoping for death to take you away so you don’t have to suffer anymore.”

She could feel it now.  The sense of despair that had caused him.  The idea of going around to other people, begging them to understand you… only to be laughed at and ridiculed.  How hopeless would it have seemed.  How worthless he must have felt.

It was here that Mikoto finally understood.

Accelerator, Last Order, her clone-sisters…  They were all weapons.

But Benjamin?

He had been an animal in cage.

No, not even an animal.  Even animals got better treatment.  And even weapons were cared for, to a degree.  Hell, even Meltdowner was treated better, and she was almost as insane as Therestina Kihara Lifeline!

He barely even rated as a thing that existed.  He had been a piece of trash.  And while Mikoto had thought of some people as trash before, she had never thought of it this way before.  To live such an existence where if someone called you trash, you would have numbly agreed because your father had stripped away all other value you once had in yourself… and then society finished the job by making your existence into a mockery.  A literal joke used to entertain the masses.

Yes, I am trash.  I’m sorry for bothering you.  Cue the laugh track.

The sheer amount of cruelty in that imagery completely up-ended Mikoto’s world.  She now understood why, once others understood what he went through, that his existence could possibly be just as bad as the man who had once been a child called “It”.

Not worthy of respect.  Not worthy of fair treatment.  Not worthy of even being human.

And all because his treatment had been deemed as ‘normal’.

Not even David Peltzer could have made that claim, because he'd been promptly removed from his home and never went back.

Once again, Accelerator’s words came back to haunt her.

“…the kind of sick, perverted joke that Alasteir-FUCKING-Crowley would get off on!”

Except that Accelerator was wrong about that.  Alasteir Crowley would only treat someone like that if he wanted to utterly destroy them.  And that made the story she heard all the more terrible - that you only treat someone like that if you wanted to completely unmake them from the inside-out.

It’s a miracle that he’s even alive at all, thought Mikoto to herself.

“There’s one thing that’s bugging me about all this,” said Mikoto quietly.  “You haven’t said anything about your mom’s role in all of this.  And I know you love your mom.  That story about Hatchet Lady didn’t leave any doubt in my mind.”

Ben sighed and nodded.  “It’s… complicated.”  At Mikoto’s sharp look, Ben shook his head and reiterated, “No, seriously.  It is.”

“Try me,” said Mikoto, a glower on her face.

“Alright.  Mom had very low self-esteem because of her own upbringing.  Just imagine me, only gender-flipped, and that’d be Mom.  And that includes everything that being the opposite gender implies, complete with toxic expectations that are either now-obsolete, or at least on the way out.  Mom once told me that one of her dad’s biggest complaints about her was that if she’d been a boy, then she’d have been perfect.”

Mikoto blinked in confusion.  “What is that supposed to mean?”

Ben sighed again.  “I’m my mother’s gender-flipped carbon copy.  And my mom is every bit as intelligent and mechanically inclined as I am.  And she was a huge tomboy.  Like, during the winter time, she’d go out into her yard and turn over rocks, looking for hibernating scorpions.”

Mikoto blinked again, this time in surprise.  “What?”

Ben nodded his head.  “Yeah.  Mom was that kind of girl.  And she loved finding horned toads - those spiky lizards that can squirt blood from their eyes to scare off predators.  Her favorite thing to do with them was to turn them over in her hand and rub their bellies.  It’s like scratching a dog behind it’s ears.”

Mikoto opened her mouth, then closed it, then repeated the process a few more times before deciding it was a lost cause and to get back to the original topic.

“Look, what does this all have to do with how things turned out with you, anyways?”

“Well, toxic expectations, you know,” said Ben, as though it was obvious.  “Mom had to deal with the fact that her parents expected her to behave like a ‘proper girl’.  Except she couldn’t do that to save her life.  So, she had a lot of what I had while growing up, only worse because her dad would come home drunker than Dublin on Saint Patrick’s Day.  And he was a MEAN drunk - he was a World War Two veteran and…” at this, a troubled look crossed his eyes.  Mikoto noticed that he had to visibly steady himself with a deep breathe before he could go on.  And when he did, it was with a quiet and sorrowful voice.  “…Even though he was just a boatswain’s mate on a torpedo boat, the Marines needed more hands.

“He was part of the flame thrower crews in the Marshal Islands.”

Mikoto felt the blood drain from her face as her heart nearly stopped.  Her education had been most emphatically Japanese, which meant she got her country’s side of the story.  But no matter whose side of the story you heard, the Marshal Islands was the stuff of nightmares.  She could only imagine what it had done to those men who had been forced to burn other human beings alive like that.

And just like that, a mental picture began to paint itself in her head of a man coming back, roaring drunk and with things like that in his mind.  It was only natural to assume the worst in that kind of situation.

“Yeah,” said Ben, like as though he could see the picture in her mind.  “You could say Mom had it worse than me.  So with an upbringing like that, do you think that she’d have what it takes to get out of a relationship like the one she had with my step-dad?”

“Jeez,” said Mikoto fervently.  “You made her sound so awesome before, but she was really… such a…  such a…”

“A doormat?” said Ben, without ire or rancor.

Mikoto blushed.  “Yeah.  Something like that.”

Ben shrugged.  “She was both.  When dealing with anyone else when it came to me or any of my other brothers or my sister?  She was like a swarm of hornets, pissed off because someone just lit their hive on fire.  You know the expression, ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’?  There were times Mom owned it, lock, stock, and barrel.  But with dad?  She let herself get pushed around no matter how much she objected.”

Mikoto was silent for a long moment as she mulled everything over.  With everyone else she had ever known, they either had good people caring for them, or they could fight back in some way or another.  Some, like her, even had both - the comfort and security in knowing that she had parents that loved her, and the confidence that came with being a Level 5 Esper.  But Benjamin had neither of those things.  He had been defenseless and alone for most of his life.

“You really had no way out, didn’t you?  You were really trapped.”  She then looked at Ben in the eyes, keeping herself from crying by the sheer force of will that was born of her pride, and asked, “How did you survive that?”

“Well, that was all Mom as well,” said Ben.  “The only reason why I’m not some abusive fuckhead was because of her and what she taught me.  She did not want me to repeat the cycle.  And then there was the fact that I was her favorite.”

That brought Mikoto’s train of thought to a screeching halt, and with it any reason for shedding tears for him.

“Really?” said Mikoto in the kind of flat tone that denoted grave disapproval.

“Yeah,” said Ben, utterly unfazed.  “Gender-flipped carbon copy, remember?  We were like soul mates.  Always two peas in a pod, Mom and I.”  Ben then sighed.  “Dad hated that, too.  He thought me being so close with my mom bordered on the obscene.  Really, he was just jealous because Mom and I were always on the same wavelength.  And since he never really got me, he never always understood mom, either.  So that just became more fuel for the fire.

“But anyhow, the point is that even though Mom insisted she didn’t have a favorite among us, I knew better.  And this was why I never did go through with taking my own life.  Because I knew that if I did, it would have absolutely destroyed her.”

Mikoto stared at Ben in shock.  Never before had she heard of someone talk about committing suicide, let alone the knock-on effects that their suicide might have, and she almost felt like the entire world had tilted onto its side somehow.  Literally, the dysphoria she felt was so intense that she felt like she was about to slide sideways off of the sectional sofa and fall against the wall.

“I…  I don’t know what to say,” said Mikoto quietly.  “I mean… that shit is nuts.  How do you… how do you even function at all?  I mean, you should probably be in a hospital!”

Ben sighed.  “You’re right.  I probably should be in a hospital, because the fact of the matter is that I actually don’t function all that well.  I have to repress those parts of me so much that there are days when it just overcomes my efforts and I just turn into a zombie, sleepwalking through my own life in a haze of self doubt and self loathing.  I think things that I know are wrong, but I can’t help it at all because the emotion is just that intense - it overrides any semblance of reason or fact.

“I’m nothing, I would think to myself.  I’m not even worth the dirt under their shoes.  I don’t deserve any love.  I should be dead so I won’t trouble anyone anymore.”  He then pointed up at his head, saying, “It’s all up in here, swirling around like a storm.”

“But… can’t Washu-chan fix you?”

Ben shook his head, a sad expression in his eyes.  “This kind of thing… it’s hard even for Washu-chan.  It’s more than just neurochemical imbalances.  Its the memories of what I went through.  She can fix the so-called damage, sure.  But it will just reverse itself after a while because the root cause is still there.  The only way to make sure it stays fixed would be to alter my memories.  And that would make me into someone that I am not.”

“Like this is any better!?” cried out Mikoto, horrified that anyone would actually want to continue to exist in such a state of self-loathing and regret.

But Benjamin simply gave her an entirely new kind of deadly serious look - one that spoke of terrible certainty.  But not terrible in the sense of being frightening, but terrible in how utterly absolute it was - there was no escaping or evading it.  It simply was, and there was nothing you could do to stop or change it.

“Mikoto.  You’ve seen me in action.  You’ve watched me take a hit that would kill a man whether they’re normal or not.  From a trained killer, no less.  But what did I do?  I just smiled at them.  And I told them, ‘Better people than you have done worse than that.’  And you remember what happened next.”

Mikoto cringed at that.  It had been one of the few times in her life she had ever felt outright disturbed.  Benjamin had casually, yet methodically begun to brutalize someone who, by all rights, certainly had it coming to him.  But even with that, the things Ben said; how he carried on in such a conversational tone as he went about his business.  Benjamin spoke of how Gauron could never even understand what it would take to truly hurt him.  How it was so completely out of his realm of understanding.  And overlaying that was the sounds of bones snapping and blood spattering as Benjamin utterly destroyed the man — albeit a horrible monster of a man.  And all in a manner like he was simply performing a household chore like taking out the trash.

It was only now that Mikoto truly understood what Benjamin had meant back then.  And that only made what happened then even more horrifying now.  For all that Gauron had been a monster, there was truly no way he could have ever hurt Benjamin.  Not in the way he would have desired.  Anything Guaron could have done to him would have only annoyed Benjamin, and nothing more.

And Benjamin had indeed been annoyed that Gauron even thought he could hurt Ben in any meaningful fashion.

It was only then Mikoto realized that it had been what Benjamin said to Gauron that had actually destroyed the monster.  That he knew nothing of what it meant to truly hurt someone.  Implying that someone else had hurt Benjamin far more completely and masterfully than Gauron could have ever imagined, even in his wildest dreams.

“All of that hurt and anger that you know that I carry inside of me?  That was me letting it come out to play on that day.  And let me tell you, I fucking relished the ability to finally unleash hell on people that absolutely, one-hundred-percent, no doubts about it at all, deserved it.

“And as fucked up as it is, Mikoto, it really does give me power.  There’s a kernel of truth to the Sith Philosophy from Star Wars - that pain and hatred do give you strength.  The important part, though, is that you don’t lose yourself to it.”

That brought Mikoto back to the present, and with it came a question so natural that it came to her lips with barely any thought on her part.

“So how do you keep from losing yourself?”

“This thing with me and Puella Magi,” he said, almost seeming tired once the topic of the girls that ostensibly loved him came up.  “As messed up as it is, I need it.  I have to have people that are holding my lifeline.  People that will remind me how much it will hurt them for me to go off the deep end like that.  To remind me that I am loved.  That I am not at all any of the things my step-father said I was.  That I am worthwhile.  That I am worthy of them.  And the closer they are to my heart — the closer they are to my soul — the more clearly I’ll be able to hear them.”

“…Does it really help?” asked Mikoto quietly.

“It does, yeah,” replied Ben in an equally quiet tone.  “I won’t lie, there are some days when I am so out of it that their love is almost physically painful to me.  That part of me that is the shit my step-dad put in my head is just tearing my self-worth apart like an eight-hundred pound gorilla gone berserk.  In those moments I’m so far around the bend that I do not want to be comforted.  I actually need space and a literal time-out to just work it out of my system.

“But we’re working on it.  I’ve been getting counseling sessions from Washu-chan and Inara.  It’s very slow going because it’s like a nightmarish piece of computer code, with bits and pieces stuck in everywhere like the most horrible fever-dream of kludge-job chimera coding you could possibly imagine - it’s so bad that you can hardly tell what’s the original code anymore.  And all the notes and backups have been lost, and the inline comments removed.  The only way to fix it is to slowly reverse-engineer the entire thing, and make small patches here and there.”

Mikoto considered that.  As a high-end electrokinetic with capabilities that went beyond what many people may consider, she has done more than her fair share of poking around in computers.  Doing it just for fun was how she had gotten so good at it, and it was something of a guilty pleasure since she never wanted to be considered a nerd.

That said, Mikoto knew exactly what Ben was talking about, and what kind of a nightmare it would be to try and salvage a program that badly mangled.

Only now did Mikoto begin to grasp just how utterly and horribly broken he was on the inside.  And for all her self-righteousness and pride, it made her sad to think about what it must be like for him.

“You’re going to be like this forever, aren’t you?” said Mikoto as she fought back the constricting sensation in her throat.

Ben shrugged helplessly.  “Healing from this kind of damage is not easy and it’s not cheap.  It takes a lifetime to recover from this.  And that is the most horrible part about child abuse.  If left unchecked, it will cripple a person for life.”

And that automatically brought the next question to mind.  If he was really that crippled, then…

“…Why would Ciel Phantomhive want you in charge of an operation like this?”

Ben nodded sagely.  “He actually told me himself once.  This was just before the Halloween Party and that debacle we had go down in Florida.  Things kinda came to a head at my place and I said some things that I shouldn’t have said.”  Ben shrugged.  “To be fair, I had been provoked, but still.  The thing is, though, is that unlike James, I felt so bad about what had happened that I tendered my resignation.  And then Lord Phantomhive called me out to his place.”

Mikoto goggled at Benjamin.  “He did!?  And you’re still working here?”

Ben nodded.  “I know.  He is a demon, after all.  Make no mistake about that.  But the thing is, he’s also a manager.  One who understands all too well how important the well-being of his workers are to his operation.

“I wasn’t called out so he could chastise me.  He called me out to remind me of the qualities he saw in me.  That I was more than just someone who could get into another person’s head.  He hired me because I am someone who would not simply see to the well being of his charges, but to actually care about them and their feelings.”

The thing about what happened in Florida came to mind, thanks to Benjamin mentioning it.  That had been a near-disaster, and Rob still refused to talk about it except to call his part in it a debacle, but somehow the situation back then with Benjamin had not spiraled out of control…  But how?

“But how does this make things different between what happened with you and what happened in Florida?”

“Well…” said Ben, a bit lamely.  He didn’t want to say anything bad about James, but facts were fact - the man had messed up, and in a very bad way.  He sighed and went on, “I don’t know for sure what James was thinking.  I won’t get into that.  The difference is that I simply said something to hurt someone’s feelings, and I apologized for it.  James… He tried indoctrinating his tenants with his own political ideology - to force or trick them into thinking the way he does - and expected that they would just go along because they’re mostly conservatives and libertarians anyways.”

“THE HELL!?” cried out Mikoto in utter shock, because this was the absolute first time she had heard of this.  “That’s what happened!?  That guy!?  He fucking tried to BRAIN WASH his tenants!?”

Ben winced at that.  “Not really, but still painfully close.  He definitely did try to influence their perceptions by limiting where they got their information from by declaring whether their sources were trustworthy or not.  I can only imagine why it took so long for him to be called out on it, given that Ritsuko, Maya, and Misato all went to the same college together.

“Misato went to college?” siad Mikoto in confounded surprise, as this was the first she’d heard about this as well.  “And graduated!?”

“She’s a lot smarter than she looks,” said Ben.  “She wasn’t promoted to being a Major for nothing.

“Anyhow, getting back to the thing with James…”  Ben sighed, as this was something that actually weighed heavily on his own soul - it hit way too close to home for comfort.  “Where he really messed up was in forgetting that they aren’t Americans.  Even if they do share some values, there’s going to be some pretty wide gulfs there.  Mal is a consummate libertarian, but he’s also had an experience very close to what being a refugee is like, so there was no way he was going to think the way the immigration situation at the Mexican Border was being handled was cool at all.  Misato is very much a conservative, but she’s what the rest of the world calls ‘conservative’, and not the ultra-right-wing nut jobs that use that label here in the US.

“And on top of all that, James did not apologize for his actions.  Sure, he didn’t press the matter once he got called out on it, but he didn’t do anything to make things better.  In fact, he simply started treating them like how you’d expect from a landlord that doesn’t care about the personal affairs of his tenants.  Very detached, you know.  And that might be fine if we were dealing with normal people with mundane lives and life styles.  But being detached wasn’t what we got hired on for.  So, Sebastian hooked him up with an entirely different kind of job, and after a while the displacees in Florida got split up and sent to other places.”

“So why did they put Mal and his crew here?  I mean, it had to be more than just because of their ship.”

Ben nodded.  “Inara was one of the biggest reasons.  She… had a medical condition.  Washu-chan got her fixed up, sure, but she preferred if Inara was close by so she could better monitor her condition.  You know, make sure she didn’t relapse or something.  On top of that, Inara is observing the relationship between me and the girls.”

Mikoto was uncertain about that, what with Inara’s occupation and all.

“Is… is that really a good idea?  I mean, she is a very classy lady but she’s still… well… you know, a prostitute.”

Ben shook his head.  “Inara is so much more than that, Mikoto.  What she’s been trained to do?  She’s someone that helps people with their mental health — not only by giving them companionship, but by also being the influence they need in their lives.  Really, in a sense, people like Inara are like the ultimate therapists.  And yes, the sex does help, but really all that does is just grease the wheels.  When you’re willing to be that intimate with someone, it really helps build trust.”

Mikoto frowned at Ben.  “Okay, but I don’t think sex is gonna help in your case.”

Ben scoffed and rolled his eyes as though that should have been obvious.

“Oh, of course not.  I already knew that was so far off the table that it was in another house on the other side of town, simply because Inara has a thing going on with Mal.  Fortunately for me, Mal is fine with Inara helping me out here.  Hell, once the situation got explained to him, he made all kinds of fowl remarks in Mandarin and all but threw the woman at us.”  Mikoto couldn’t help but to snicker at that, for she had seen Mal go off on one of those cursing sprees before.  Ben smiled, then went on, “But anyhow, I already know that I can trust her implicitly.  And believe it or not, being a Companion sometimes means interacting with children.”

“Sooo…?”

Ben scoffed again, this time with an amused smile.  “The girls all love her.  She’s pretty, she’s graceful, she’s poised, she’s intelligent, she’s clever… but most of all, she’s a lover and a fighter.  Really, she deserves the name that she goes by.  But above all?  Inara is a very kind and caring person who hates to see others in pain.  She’s a bit like me in that regard.”

Mikoto grinned slyly at Ben.  “You sure you’re not in love with her~?”

“Pffffft!” went Ben.  “Okay, look.  I won’t argue that she’s a gorgeous woman, but I got more than enough on my plate as is.  If anything, it’d be more like the thing with Rei and I.”

Mikoto rolled her eyes at that.  “At this point, I can’t even be surprised anymore.”

“Welcome to my world, Mikoto,” said Ben with a wry smile.  “It only goes downhill from here.”

“Hah!” crowed Mikoto at the jibe.  “Shows what you know.  There were some days back in Academy City that it felt like I was getting stranger things than you for free in my breakfast cereal!  The only reason that stopped was because I got dumped into this universe.”

As Mikoto looked at Ben, she saw that he was giving her a small smile, genuinely amused by her statement and taking it in the spirit it was meant in.  And for the moment, Mikoto smiled back as she felt his acceptance and acknowledgment of her.

But there was something else in his eyes that caught her attention - not unlike the previous video-conference call.

Is... is he sad about something!?  But... why?  But she somehow knew.  That look in his eyes told her everything.  It was longing that she saw.  Not for her, but for what she had experienced and what she had.

Benjamin had every right to be upset.  To spit at the rest of the world and curse it all.  To become a man not unlike Alasteir Crowley.  Instead, he simply regarded her with a gentle sort of envy overlaid by the understanding that he could never have what he wanted, no matter what may come - the calm acceptance of someone who was used to being deprived.

The realization sobered Mikoto.

“But we're not talking about me," said the Level 5 Esper as she settled back down.  "Everything you went through… that’s all just so fucked up.  How is it that you can be so nice to everyone!?”

Ben nodded at that.  “Well, that kinda has to do with what it means to be autistic.  The horrible irony behind it?  Some people think we’re like robots.”  He then looked Mikoto straight into her eyes.  “That cannot be further from the truth.  The fact of the matter is that part of the reason why people with autism shut themselves off is because we have so much trouble controlling our emotions.  We feel things — love, anger, happiness, sadness — we feel these things so acutely that it makes the world so very hard for us to take.  And one of the most important lessons my mom taught me was that I need to be empathetic towards other people — to imagine being in their shoes and what it’s like to be them.

“I want people to be happy, Mikoto.  I want that for others so much that it hurts - it is literally breaking my heart.  And I want that for others because I have been in the absolute lowest states a human mind can be in.  I don’t want anyone else to feel like that if I could ever help it.”

Mikoto considered that thoughtfully and said, “That was why you reached out to Fate, wasn’t it?  You knew exactly what it was like for her because you lived a life like that, too.”

Benjamin nodded.  “Without the Harlaowns around, she needed someone in her life that understood what it was like.  And to help guide her along so she could have a better chance to heal.”  Ben sighed then said, “Believe me, I know I’m probably not the best person for the job, but that’s why I’m trying so hard to be there for her.”

Mikoto regarded him silently for a moment, because the troubled sound in his voice was blatantly obvious, even to her.

The things he had said thus far had completely recast his relationship with the girls under his care in an entirely different light.  When you had been so badly mistreated and alone for such an ordeal and for such a long time, an innocent love like the one offered by people like Fate and Nanoha could only be like a siren’s call.

And Mikoto suddenly realized that there was something she had to say now that she knew the whole story.

“That thing before with Nanoha and Fate…”  Her face began to redden, but she had to do this because she was a responsible person, and responsible people apologize for their mistakes.

“I… know I said some bad things about you in the past.  That you were a pervert… and a lolicon…  But… after hearing all of this…  I had no idea that it was like that.  And I can see why now you couldn’t chase them away.  And I’m sorry that I ever thought of you that way.  But something still bugs me.  After what you’ve told me, I now understand why Fate would want to be close to you…  But what about Nanoha?  What was up with that?”

Ben sighed.  “We’re… still not sure.  But every now and then, Nanoha and I will catch other’s eyes…”

“And?” asked Mikoto, trying to urge Ben on.

“When I look into those eyes of hers, I see something that no ordinary child should have.”

Mikoto blinked.  She knew that Nanoha was special, but how special could the girl possibly be?

“What do you see?”

“The soul of a Dragonborn.”

That nearly blew a fuse in Mikoto’s brain.  “The hell does Skyrim have to do with this!?” she said hotly.

“Nothing at all, thank God,” said Ben fervently as he cast his eyes heavenward.  “But I don’t have any other way to describe it.  This girl…”  He shook his head, almost as though to clear himself from a daze.  “You wouldn’t know it because she’s never looked at you like that.  But when she does with me?  She has a presence that no one can match.  And that’s what I see in her eyes.  That same kind of determination.  The kind where she will completely reshape an entire world to suit her needs.

“But… How!?” cried out Mikoto in shock.  “Are you sure she’s really like that!?  I mean, she’s just a kid!”

Ben nodded slowly. 

“Nanoha may be a child, but that’s just in body.  In mind and heart?  She is a being of intense passion rivaled only by those who have the power and will to revolutionize the world.  Once upon a time, she nearly lost the person who was most precious to her in the entire world: her own father.  She has vowed to never let that happen again, and because of that determination and passion, she has earned herself the title ‘The White Devil’.  She may be young and inexperienced now, but that doesn’t change what she is in her heart.”

“But… why would she be attracted to you?” demanded Mikoto, because it was well-known that even now, Nanoha still preferred girls.  “What makes you so special?”

Ben gave Mikoto a hard look and said, “Mikoto, I’ve gotten you to sit down, shut up, and open your ears with just a look several times here in the last hour, and you’re still trying to figure that out?”

Mikoto rolled her eyes, but it was out of irritation because she knew he had her dead to rights.

“Okay, point,” she grumbled reluctantly.  “How the hell do you do that, anyways?”

Ben shrugged.  “Supposedly, that was something my mother’s maternal grandfather was able to do.  He never had to really punish any of his children.  All he needed to do was look at them, and they knew that they had not only simply done wrong, but also that they had let down their father and disappointed him.  He was a man that I very much wish to emulate in that regard.”

There was a moment of quiet reflection after that, but not a long one.  Ben could sense that this was where things would wrap up at, so it was he that broke the silence.

“So, all that said, I believe you’ve learned some things here today.  My only question for you is, what do you intend to do with what you’ve learned here?”

“Huh?” said Mikoto in confusion.  “What is this, a homework assignment?”

“No,” said Ben.  “This is much more than that.  This is me asking you what direction are you going to take your life in now that you understand what monsters lurk out there, and what they do to the children they are supposed to care for.”

“I don’t get it,” said Mikoto, still puzzled at what Ben was trying to get at.  “I already knew that this kind of thing happened before.”

“But you said so yourself earlier,” said Ben.  “You didn’t understand it.  Which is why you came to me today.  You finally had an epiphany about one of the more terrible aspects of life, but you didn’t know the full details of what was going on and it was driving you nuts.  And understanding something is a much different thing from simply knowing about it.  So, what will Misaka Mikoto, The Human Railgun, do now that she understands?  Or, is it possible that you still do not fully understand and must dwell on this topic further?”

Mikoto stared at Ben blankly and he realized then that he’d gone full-on Aspie on her, and might have been pushing just a touch too hard.  He quickly decided to try and put the girl a bit more at ease.

“Bear in mind,” he said, “I’m not really chastising you here.  Like I said before, I know very well from my interactions from others here that people who have never experienced anything like what I have simply have no frame of reference, no matter how well it is explained.  A lot of people just can’t wrap their minds around it, and for a good reason, too: it runs completely counter to what most people feel what it means to be human.

“People like Madoka, Usagi, and Sakura… they come real close to understanding, but only because they have so much empathy that seeing me hurt is nearly as painful for them as it is for me.  The only thing is that Madoka has already done the whole Goddess thing, so she already knows this isn’t something you can just wave a magic wand at.  Usagi has the power to ostensibly fix it, but she is still very young and inexperienced.  She had to have it explained to her a few times and she’s only barely coming to grips with the concepts involved.  And poor Sakura, even though she’s becoming so powerful so fast, can’t even come close to that yet.  Maybe soon she will be that strong, and for that reason I’ll probably have to have this discussion with her as well, but not yet.”

Mikoto snorted as a conversation from a while back came to mind.

“Her brother is gonna start giving you death threats again.”

“He’s welcome to try and make good on them,” said Ben with certainty that was born of experience.  “Remember what I did to those giants?  That aside, it doesn’t matter what he thinks.  The moment that girl found the Clow Cards and set them loose, her fate was sealed.  And you know I don’t use those words lightly.  Alicia is proof of that.”

Mikoto nodded.  She had known very few people who had the kind of determination it took to sell their soul for the sake of someone else, but Ben had done it and with very little beating around the bush.  He knew all too well what he was getting himself into, and gave absolutely zero fucks on that matter.

“Sakura is such a nice girl,” said Mikoto.  “But I wonder if she could ever match that kind of determination.  I mean, she is getting powerful, just like you said, and she has to be strong willed in her own way in order for that to happen.  But could she really become strong enough to do what you’re talking about when she’s so naive and innocent?”

Benjamin nodded in understanding.  “I know what you mean.  And the answer, unfortunately, is no.  Sakura must learn, preferably sooner than later, just how twisted life can be, and how to recognize evil when it’s lurking under a pretty facade.  After all, for someone as sweet and innocent as Sakura to gain that kind of power… it sounds good, right?  A person like her could do nothing but good with it, right?  But you remember that near-miss with Cinder in LA.”

Mikoto grimaced at that.  “You mean where Sakura accidentally restored the old canals down there?”

Ben nodded.  “Cinder didn’t just show up and start blowing shit up.  While she did have another objective, she saw an opportunity in Sakura, and made it her mission to get Sakura to her side.  And the most frightening thing of all is that she almost succeeded because Sakura barely knew any better.  It was only a last-minute epiphany followed up by a revelation that made Sakura realize what was going on.  But what was really needed was for her to no-sale Cinder’s pitch right off the bat, because if she had, then Cinder would have cut her losses and bugged out instead of causing even more ruckus.”

Mikoto nodded as she started to get the picture.  “And that was why you had to do that mandatory thing about purity and how it doesn’t work in real life.”

“Exactly,” said Ben.  “Power and innocence only works in fairy tales.  The reality is that innocence can be so easily be misdirected that it’s almost-  No, not even almost, it is downright terrifying.  Especially when you stop and think about what it can lead to.  It was part of why I was walking on eggshells with Fate and Nanoha.  It won’t even need to be intentional on my part - something seemingly innocent on the surface could easily lead those two to doing something very inappropriate for their age, and they’d do it gladly because they still have enough innocence in them to think it was okay because they love me.”

Just then, there was a knock at the door, causing Mikoto to freeze.  Ben, however, got up and answered the door.

“Hey, Kuroko.  Good timing there.”

“KUROKO!” cried out Mikoto in shock.  “What are you doing here!?”

The smaller girl waltzed in with a smug grin on her face.  “Cousin Ben figured he’d need someone to come along and break it up.”

“Yeah,” said Ben sheepishly.  “That’s kinda my thing going on there.  Me being so ADHD, I tend to let conversations go off on tangents - especially once the main issue had been handled.  It’s like a conversational wiki-walk.”

“You… You knew all along!?” said Mikoto in horror as she turned to Kuroko.

“Onee-sama, have you ever known me to be so easily shaken off?  I’ll admit, though, it might have worked, except that Ben texted me earlier that day and had Washu-chan set up a portal in advance.  That was pretty good, by the way.  I can see you’re starting to learn things from Cousin Ben here.”

Mikoto gaped at Kuroko like a gasping fish and Ben decided to direct the conversation towards something that would be a bit less mind-blowing for the Esper.

“It’s not like she knew about what we were gonna be talking about,” said Ben.  “Hell, I didn’t even know.  The secondary objective of getting Kuroko to show up was in case it was something bad enough that I needed a second input before I do anything.  And Kuroko isn’t known for sugar-coating things when someone has a real need to know.”

Kuroko nodded sagely.  “Cousin Benjamin always covers all the bases.  Even though you’ve learned a few things from him, Onee-sama, there’s still a lot more he could teach you.”

“Oh?” said Ben with a mischievous grin appearing on his face.  “Not worried I’m gonna steal her away from you?”

Kuroko grinned back.  “You got enough girl problems without Onee-sama causing you even more.  Besides, she unfortunately seems to have eyes for Touma.”

“HEY!” snapped Mikoto.

But Kuroko only sighed dramatically, completely ignoring Mikoto’s ire and nearly causing Ben to burst out laughing.

“What is a girl like me supposed to do?~” she said theatrically.

Mikoto’s eyes turned towards Benjamin.  “Don’t you dare give her any ideas,” she growled.

Benjamin gave his Kermit The Frog Snicker at that.

“I mean it!” snapped Mikoto, electricity arcing over her body and filling the air with ozone.

“Friendly reminder,” said Ben, the grin still plastered on his face, “Ryouko is my sparing partner these days.”

“Doesn’t mean you won’t feel it.”

Ben rolled his eyes.  “Trust me, kiddo, if she learns anything from me, she’ll have earned it.  As it is, she’s already pretty good.  Not quite at my level, but still pretty good.”

“Just you watch, Cuz, I’ll catch up to you before you know it!”

“Lookin’ forward to it, Ro-kun,” said Ben with a smile as the two exchanged a fist-bump.  “Now, let’s see about getting you two home.”

---

It wasn’t even an hour after they got home that Kuroko's phone buzzed, notifying her of a text message.  She pulled it out, then smiled at who it was from.

Some people thought it was odd that she and Benjamin would pal up the way they did, but the simple fact of the matter was that Kuroko made him laugh, and there was so precious little of that in his life that the girl didn't mind one bit.  She might be frustrated that her efforts to woo Mikoto fell through so often, but even she had to admit it was pretty funny at times… at least, once she's had a chance to review what happened in hindsight.  It also helped that even though he found the whole thing to be funny, he still respected her feelings for Mikoto, and actually wished Kuroko the best in that regard.

After all, he knew all too well what heartbreak felt like.

The only thing that kinda rankled at her was that he made it pretty clear that she may have to settle for sharing Mikoto.  But as much as she wanted to be selfish, she wasn't blind, either.  And ... no, don't call him a troglodyte, he has a name ... Touma, who she'd be sharing Onee-sama with, did save Kuroko’s life back in Academy City.  And it wasn't like Ben (or even Touma, for that matter) were telling her to give up or anything like that, so Ben was still good in her book.

She couldn’t see him as an older brother figure like the others do…  But as a friend?  Yes.  A very good friend.

Hey Ro-kun.  I know you're always on her case, but do me a favor and keep an eye on Mikoto.  I did just lay some pretty heavy shit on her.
…
No problem, Cuz.  I know you didn't want to hurt her or anything, but she kinda needed a wake up call.  Things here might be more calm than in Academy City, but it's also more dangerous.  I kinda worry she isn't taking it seriously enough.
…
One step at a time, Kuroko.  She'll get there eventually, but if we need to, Rob and I will stage an intervention.  It's what we've been brought in for, after all.
…
You really are a great friend, Ben.  I know it's kinda weird, but I think you deserve Homu-chan and Mado-chan.
…
Jeeze, you're making me blush here.
…
Hah.  Don't you go all tsun-tsun on me now!
…
Pffft.  Not in a million years, Ro-kun.  Take care of her.  Touma's a great guy, too, but he's still pretty dense sometimes.
…
Oh man, ain't that the truth!

No further reply was forthcoming, and so she put her phone away again and sighed.  It’d probably be a good idea to go and check on Onee-sama now.

—

Mikoto is a very young person.  Sometimes people are fooled by the degree of self-confidence she exudes and think that she is just small for her age, but the fact of the matter was that she is only fourteen years old.

Well, almost fourteen.  But May 2nd wasn't that far away.

Even so, this is an age where a young person begins to think about the more complex things in life.

Like Benjamin’s circumstances.

She had no real interest in him, even though he was handsome — she wasn’t blind, after all.  But the person that he is reminded her of some of the better teachers at Tokiwadi Middle School — the ones that afforded her respect while also not being frightened of her esper abilities.

And she had to admit that she had respect for the man.  Once he was on the scene, things got done, come hell or high water.  And with his ability to size up a situation, delegate tasks to the people best suited for them, adjust and react as the situation develops and changes, and handle the matters that needed his personal touch… Mikoto actually kinda wished they’d had him around in Academy City.

She wondered if things would have been different for him if he had been a student in Academy City.  She remembered hearing about how he had been before the thing with the blobby little creature joining itself to him.  Back then, his Capacity Down ability hadn’t been anywhere nearly as strong as it is now.  He certainly would have been regarded as an Esper - albeit a Level 0 like Touma.  Hell, even their abilities were similar, though which one was more dangerous to other Espers was debatable - Touma’s required direct contact, but can completely nullify.  Benjamin, at that lower power level, could only partially nullify, but did it in an area of effect that, while weak at the outer edges, grew stronger the closer you got to him.  Esper abilities that only had an effect on contact or at close proximity were automatically at a huge disadvantage when going up against someone like Ben.  And even an Esper with ranged abilities were at risk, as all Ben had to do was close the distance.  If anything, that was even worse because such Espers were usually one-trick-ponies who relied too heavily on ranged attacks.  Ben wouldn’t even need to nullify their abilities once he got close enough.

But would it have been enough for him to have a better life?  Could he have had a better life, living with them at their age in Academy City?  Away from that man that was his step-father?

Maybe.  Maybe not.  Level 0 Espers were derided in Academy city.  But if Ben had been around, he surely would have fallen in with Touma, and the two could have been good friends.  Hell, they would have made for a nightmarish duo.

The Nightmare Zeroes.  Ben and Touma.  One providing AOE coverage and the other striking their assailants down.  That would have been something to see.

Mikoto was sure of it.  Anything — absolutely anything — would have been better than what he had.  It made her realize just how good they all really had it, all things considered.  Everyone back at Academy City had some value.  Even her clone-sisters had a perceived value, albeit as disposable pawns.

But Benjamin didn’t even have that.  He had been regarded as a burden, a useless person, someone unworthy of praise even when he did do good.

What kind of man treats someone like that?  Their own kid — even if he was just a step-child to them!  It still completely blew Mikoto’s mind.

Once again, Ben’s voice echoed in her mind.

“This is me asking you what direction are you going to take your life in now that you understand what monsters lurk out there, and what they do to the children they are supposed to care for.”

Monsters.  That was what he had called them.

She had been fighting monsters lately.  Actual monsters — things that are decidedly not human — that do horrific things to innocent people.  Benjamin once said that they were no better than the Reavers from Mal’s universe, and Mikoto agreed wholeheartedly with that sentiment.

But this sort of monster was of a different breed entirely.  It wore a human face, had a human heart, thought with a human mind, and undoubtedly possessed a human soul.  And yet, they did such things to people like Benjamin.

Perhaps that was why he said they were monsters.  Perhaps their actions, which go entirely against what they are supposed to be, is what made them worthy of the label.

Under that definition, there had been a lot of monsters in Academy City.  But they all had their reasons.

Accelerator's craving for more power, STUDY's jealousy of people who had esper powers, Therestina's need to show that her grandfather's mad experiments were right, and even The Queen's distrust of anybody she didn't have power over. They may not have been good reasons, but they were reasons.

Not his step-father, though.

That, Mikoto realized, was what made him into such a monster.  That he had no real excuse for it.  Less than, even, all the horrible people that sent her clone-sisters to their deaths.

Yes, he may have had chronic migraines.  Yes, he may have been abused as a child as well.  But these were all bullshit excuses.

Mikoto hoped that she would never meet this person.  Benjamin had said that he had changed a lot in recent years - that he had come to realize his mistakes.  But even so, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to contain her anger.

Mikoto had never been the type to willingly consider killing a person.  But this came close.

God-awfully close.

There was a knock at her door and Kuroko poked her head in.

“Is this a bad time?” she asked.

Mikoto sighed.  “No, not really.  I guess I could use some company.”

“What’s up?” she asked as she came inside, shut the door, and went to sit next to Mikoto on the couch they'd found at the consignment shop near Mii's favorite pizza place.  “Was the stuff Ben said really that big?”

“Yeah.  It was.”

“Sooo… I guess it was about his father?”

“How’d you know?” asked Mikoto in surprise.

“He and I had that conversation already,” said Kuroko.  She then looked to Mikoto to find the older girl staring at her, face agog in surprise.  “What?  Did you honestly think we didn’t get to talking about other things while I was giving him pointers on teleportation?”

“But… why would that be of any importance to you?”

Kuroko sighed.  “Now I know how Touma feels when dealing with Index.”

“HEY!”

“Onee-sama.  You are very important to me.  For me, you are the most important person in the entire world.  But that doesn’t mean that other people aren’t going to matter to me.”

“But… how did you find out?”

“It was Alicia.  I forget what it was, but something I said made Ben laugh.  It was embarrassing, but then Alicia told me that I should feel good about it because he hardly ever laughs like that.”

Mikoto nodded her head as the pieces began to fall into place.

“And you wondered why he doesn’t laugh so often.”

“Yeah.  He didn’t tell me a whole lot, but it was enough for me to get the idea.  That he had to deal with that growing up.  I don’t think any of us could have survived that, except maybe Accelerator… but only because Accelerator broke.

“Benjamin… he never really broke.  But he did bend.  He bent so much that it was as close to breaking as you can get.  And he’s still all bent up now.  And even if someone could straighten him out… it’s like when you crumple up a piece of paper.  You can uncrumple it, stretch it out, flatten it, and even iron it… but it will never be that perfect piece of paper ever again.”

“ARGH!” growled Mikoto as she suddenly got up and began pacing around her room, small arcs of electricity crackling around her.  “Thats…  Augh, that is just so fucked UP!  Thinking about what that man did to him… it’s so infuriating!  I just wanna go and smash his face in!”

Mikoto stopped as she suddenly felt arms wrapping around her.  Kuroko, braving Mikoto’s aura of electrical discharge, was hugging her tightly.

“Please don’t, Onee-sama,” she said quietly.  “It’s not gonna fix anything.  It’ll just make more people upset.”

Mikoto sighed as the tension drained out of her.  She didn’t like to admit it often, but Kuroko was special to her for this very reason.

“I’m sorry, Kuroko.  I didn’t mean to upset you like that.”

“It’s okay, Onee-sama,” replied the girl, not looking up at her.  Mikoto knew why, though.  From the watery sound of Kuroko’s voice and the warm dampness growing on Mikoto’s blouse, she knew Kuroko didn’t want Mikoto to see her crying.  “I understand… it made me angry, too.  It makes everyone so angry that it hurts.  It just… it just hurts.”

It hurt.

It somewhat stunned Mikoto to have that realization - that what she learned that day was something so terrible, the knowledge that it happened actually hurt.

Once again, Usagi’s words haunted her.

“However, you may even wish that you had never learned of it at all.”

And now Mikoto understood what she had meant.

Before, everything had been so much simpler.  Even with the strange twists and turns that had come after her arrival in Canada.  Benjamin had just been some weird guy with some issues.

But now?  Now she knew.  She now knew that Benjamin was a broken man, and with good reason for being broken.  She now knew how much of a miracle it was that he didn’t take it out on the people around him.  And she now knew how much of a miracle it was that he managed to survive that ordeal.

She still couldn’t imagine how that must have felt.  But at least now, she had an inkling from the pain that now lay coiled in her heart.

And she now wished that pain wasn’t there.

Usagi had been right - she wished that she had never learned the awful reality of it all.

There was one thing, at least.  She had friends like Kuroko who cared enough to comfort her at times like these.

Shared pain is lessened.  Shared joy is increased.

Those words from Rob finally made sense now as she hugged Kuroko back, grateful for once to have her there.

Everything was going to be okay.  She just knew it.  She had people around her that cared about her, and she had her abilities that made her a Level 5 Esper.

But despite that, a slight sense of unease lingered - like some kind of sick cosmic joke was being played on them all, and the punchline was lurking in the shadows.  She didn’t like to admit it, even to herself, but the conversation between Rob and Ben bothered Mikoto greatly.  It brought to mind worries not only for what might happen to her, but to all of her friends living there at the Blossom Apartments.

I’ll protect them, she thought to herself.  I’ll protect them all, no matter what happens.

It was with this that Mikoto had one last epiphany for the day.

This had to be what Ben felt towards the people he claimed as family - an overpowering desire to see no harm or suffering befall them.  Because he has been there.  He has been hurt in such a profound way that it was virtually unimaginable.  He absolutely hated the experience.  And because of that, he abhors seeing others in pain.  And then the issues with his self-worth, always having to fight himself - to prove to himself that he had value to others…  It is no wonder why he goes through such lengths to make everyone happy.

Everyone but himself.

Nowhere had this been more evident than the casual dismissal of his self-worth.  Freak.  Weirdo.  Tenth of a job.  Someone who should just stop living.  No human being should ever be like that.  But Benjamin is like that.  If anyone tells him to go to hell, he can easily laugh in their face and say that he’s already there.

Which she had to admit was one hell of a…  What was that phrase that was going around on social media now?  Oh, right.  It would be one hell of a flex on Ben’s part, and one she knew he could do.

As she gently rubbed Kuroko’s back, Mikoto knew that the next time she met Benjamin, she would be seeing him in an entirely different light.

[robkelk]

I've had the advantage of pre-reading this part, so I'll confine myself to a couple of errors - one mine, one BA's. Starting with mine:

Mikoto could only barely grasp the concept. She had rarely ever felt true hunger, and the times she did was when she missed a meal because of circumstances beyond her control coming to play.

My error because I didn't catch it in prereading. Mikoto did willingly go without food by choice while she was destroying cloning labs during Railgun S - which was the only reason she didn't throw up the first time she fought ITEM.

fowl remarks

"Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue, idn'it, ay? Beautiful plumage! "

fowl/foul

[Bob Schroeck]

Wow.

That's all I can say, other than to note:

Ryouko is my sparing partner these days.

Unless she routinely goes easy on him, that should be "sparring". <grin>

[Black Aeronaut]

I've had the advantage of pre-reading this part, so I'll confine myself to a couple of errors - one mine, one BA's. Starting with mine:

Mikoto could only barely grasp the concept.  She had rarely ever felt true hunger, and the times she did was when she missed a meal because of circumstances beyond her control coming to play.

My error because I didn't catch it in prereading. Mikoto did willingly go without food by choice while she was destroying cloning labs during Railgun S - which was the only reason she didn't throw up the first time she fought ITEM.

Okey dokey.  I'll rework that later before we post this to the Wiki.

fowl remarks

"Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue, idn'it, ay? Beautiful plumage! "

fowl/foul

Wow.

That's all I can say, other than to note:

Ryouko is my sparing partner these days.

Unless she routinely goes easy on him, that should be "sparring".  <grin>

Urgh.  And the really messed up part is that not even the Grammar Checker in MS Word would be likely to catch these goofs.  Thanks for spotting those.