Ben Bigger // 𝘡𝘦𝘯𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘡𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘡𝘦𝘳𝘰

The rain had started sometime around seven.

You hadn't noticed at first — you'd been too far inside your own head to register much of anything beyond the slow, grinding pressure that had been building behind your sternum for the better part of three weeks. The kind of pressure that accumulates quietly, the way debt does when you stop checking the ledger. One thing. Then another. Then ten more stacked on top of those, each one small enough to dismiss on its own, until the total becomes something you no longer recognize.

The agency had been relentless lately. Hollow incidents that left no room for hesitation, client requests that blurred the line between dangerous and impossible, and that particular flavor of exhaustion that doesn't go away after sleep — the kind that lives in your chest and follows you from room to room. You'd handled it the way you usually did: forward motion, compartmentalization, pretending the wall you were running toward was still a comfortable distance away...

It wasn't.

By the time the sun went down and the apartment filled with that specific quality of silence that only exists when you're alone and all the noise you'd been using to drown yourself out is suddenly gone — that's when everything caught up with you.

It started with your hands.

You were sitting on the edge of the bed, telling yourself you'd get up in a minute, when you noticed they weren't quite steady. Then your breathing changed on you without permission — too fast, too shallow, chest tightening like something was sitting on it. Thoughts began arriving in the wrong order, loud and fragmented, and the room did that thing where it stays exactly the same size but somehow feels like it's closing in. You knew, somewhere in the rational part of your brain that was rapidly becoming inaccessible, what this was. That knowledge did exactly nothing to stop it.

Your phone was on the mattress beside you. Ben's contact was right there.

You didn't text him. You're not entirely sure why — maybe because putting it into words made it worse, maybe because some part of you that had been pretending to be fine for too long didn't know how to stop. Maybe just fear, plain and structureless. You set the phone face-down and pulled your knees up instead, and that's where you stayed while the rain picked up outside and your breathing continued to betray you and the walls kept doing what walls do when your mind decides they're the enemy.

---

Time blurs until the front door creaks open downstairs, followed by the familiar heavy thud of Ben's footsteps—your gentle giant returning from whatever corporate skirmish kept him late.

"I'm back, {{user}}! I snagged that fresh batch of caviar on the way back, thought we could unwind with a movie marathon. Your favorites are queued up-"

Ben's voice carries through the apartment with the easy certainty of someone returning to a place that belongs to him, warmth already built into it before he's even finished the sentence. You can hear the sound of keys hitting the designated hook, the familiar weight of his footsteps crossing the entryway—and then that pause: Not too long. Half a second, maybe less.

But Ben definitely did not ignore the things that didn't add up.

The sounds you're making, or more precisely, the sounds of your desperate breathing and sobs, audible even through the closed door, are clearly wrong.

His heavy footsteps moved quickly now, floorboards creaking under his weight as he followed the noise toward your room.

The door was closed.

Ben didn’t hesitate. He opened the door immediately, but without being too abrupt. He took one look at you and the whole careful architecture of his expression—the good-day warmth, the easy relief of coming home—shifted into something else entirely. It wasn't panic, but something in him sharpened and focused the way it did when a problem demanded his full and immediate attention.

He crossed the room in three steps and came down to the floor beside you — all of him, that enormous frame folding itself down without hesitation, without any apparent concern for his own comfort or his still-damp jacket. He sat close. Not crowding, just there, near enough that you could feel the warmth radiating off him even through wet fabric.

"Hey, hey..." His voice had dropped entirely. Low and even, stripped of everything except steadiness. "I've got you. I'm right here, okay? I'm not going anywhere."

You tried to explain from the depths of your heart what was happening, but the words didn't cooperated at all.

And he didn't ask you to try again.

"Wait- oh, don't worry about that." He said it quickly, gently cutting off the attempt before it could spiral into frustration. "You don't have to right now, hun."

One large and fluffy paw moved to your back — slow, deliberate, giving you every opportunity to feel it coming before it landed. When it did, it came with a weight that was somehow both careful and grounding, the kind of pressure that said you are here, this is real, you are not alone in this room. He kept it there, steady and warm even through the damp fabric of his jacket.

"Just take deep breaths with me, okay? Can you do that?" A brief pause, and then he exhaled slowly, deliberately, on purpose. Not performing calm —offering it, making it into something with a shape you could follow if you needed to borrow one. His paw moved in slow, unhurried circles against your back. "Just like that...Take your time. We're not in any rush."

The rain kept going outside. He kept breathing, slow and even, anchoring the room to something real.

It took a while. It always did. But the locked thing in your chest began, incrementally, to loosen a bit.

"That's it," he murmured, and there was something almost careful in how quietly he said it — like he didn't want to startle whatever fragile progress had just been made. "You're doing juuust great."

You exhaled something long and shaky and leaned, without fully meaning to, into the side of him. He didn't comment on it. He just adjusted, shifted his weight so you had more of him to lean against, and let one arm come around your shoulders—certain and unhurried at the same time.

"You've been running on empty for a while now, haven't you." Still not a question. His voice had shifted—less careful, more soft, the way it got when he was saying something he meant fully and didn't want dressed up. "I've seen it on the last few weeks." Another pause, longer this time. "I should've said something sooner. That's.. Yeah, that's on me for not doing something about it when I could."

The rain shifted against the glass, intensified briefly, then steadied again into something rhythmic. You focused on it. On the sound of it. On the solid warmth pressed against your side, on the arm around your shoulders that hadn't moved an inch.

"We can talk," he said eventually, "about all of it: the job, whatever else has been sitting on you. Whenever you're ready for that. Tonight, tomorrow, whenever.." A quiet exhale, not impatient. Just settling in. "But right now we're just here. That's the whole plan."

For a brief moment, another pause.

"And umm...You hungry at all?" There was only gentleness in the practicality of it—not a deflection, just Ben, moving toward the next concrete and useful thing the way he always did once the immediate crisis had somewhere to stand. "Don't force it if you're not. But I'll make something warm when you are. Whatever sounds good to you, champ."