Work Text:
"No, I can't feel anything."
"You - what?"
"I'm not scared, I'm not excited. I'm not - anything. It's like my emotions are the innards of a pumpkin, and it's Halloween night, and the candle is a representation of how numb I am."
"That doesn't make any sense."
"Neither does the fact that I feel nothing!"
“Ben. You lost your entire life in the course of a few days. Being in shock is to be expected honestly.”
“I wish the Hive had succeeded. I’ve never been happy, but when the infectious spores were inhaled, when I was singing about having never been happy, that might have been as close to happiness as I had ever experienced.”
“Okay. Wishing the Hive had succeeded, that’s a desire. That’s similar to an emotion. Does the thought of actually singing intentionally bring any emotions?”
“No. Nope, not happening. I don’t like musicals.”
“So you are feeling some things.”
“I hate this. I hate everything. I - I can’t -“ Ben had only tried therapy at Kelly’s insistence. After all, they had been traumatized by the alien invasion, that sort of shit transformed people, even if they hadn’t been temporarily turned into a singing zombie like Ben had before the helicopter crash landed, causing a concussion that had miraculously killed the connection between Ben and the Hive Mind.
Ben left. Maybe he’d smoke instead. Talk therapy was bullshit. Transformation was just part of life. He didn’t have a purpose, and that was fucking fine. Ben would rather feel nothing, be a pumpkin with innards scraped out like Charlotte’s guts hanging out as she sang about joining her and dying than actually mourn his friends. He would never see them again unless he killed himself, and if he did that, he’d never see Kelly again.
Ben would return to therapy the following week, having felt more emotions. Anger when he heard musical music, fury bordering on insanity, Ben felt like he would always be insane, an insane Paul killing the meteor and himself with it, but he survived. He had survived, and now he had to learn how the fuck to live in the world where he had no purpose. He hadn’t had a purpose in Hatchetfield anymore, but he hadn’t been as glaringly aware of it as he was now. Unemployed and unemployable as the thought of returning to an office made him have another emotion (anxiety, fear, horror as he heard his boss admit to wanting to be choked out at night and unable to leave without risking his job), Ben just Kelly, who had her pot farm. They were fine, sometimes. Ben returned to therapy to try to be better than fine, find a form of living that was more than surviving.