Title: Touch
Author: ianthe_waiting
Rating: MA
Disclaimer: Carnivale and its characters are the property of HBO and the show's producers; no copyright infringement is intended.
Genre: Drabble
Warnings: M/F, S.2 spoilers
Summary: #26 – Touch. To touch was to heal, to touch was to kill.
Word Count: 742 words.
Author's Notes: Drabble: a slice of fic in less than 1500 words.







Prompt 26 – Touch









“Don’t you touch me!”

Ben had heard that phrase wheezed at him most of his life, and yet, as his mother lay dying from the dust pneumonia, he wanted nothing more than to feel her thin arms about him.

He knew, as she knew, what his touch could do, but what she did not know was he had no desire to heal her. Ben wanted his mother to die because it was her wish to go.

Besides the one phrase his mother always said, the others were epithets of Scripture she was obsessed with from the day he was born. If he was not some devil-spawn, he was an angel of death, born to rain plague upon an already plagued world.

It had taken eighteen years for Ben Hawkins to learn the rules.

To touch was to heal, to touch was to kill.

From the kitten he had resurrected to healing the disease in the little girl’s maimed legs, Ben had almost believed his mother’s words that he was, indeed, something of the Devil. It was not until much later that he realized that by touching someone he could simultaneously give life and take it away, over and over again.

Touching Sofie was like that.

His attraction to her started long before he saved her from being raped in the gas station near Milfay, it had started with dreams he had when he was fourteen or fifteen. Those dreams had been vague then, and it was not until Lodz and Management that he knew who the girl had been in the white salt flats, kissing him as if to swallow him for food, or breathe him like air.

When he touched her, he could feel the darkness inside her, the broken parts needing to be fixed, but he just touched her. Just to touch to feel her, and she felt like heaven.

There had always been something about Sofie, and it was not just because something magical whirled around her. There was something about the way her skin felt. Ben could not compare it to some lovely thing, but to him, touching her was like touching the end of a nightmare.

Ben realized that he liked to touch her. There was something sacred about her.

He could not articulate the other sensations of her body, her taste, her smell, Ben only knew how to feel by touch.

When he wrapped his arms about her, his palms sliding over the planes of her shoulder blades, sliding over the curve of her hip to her round bottom, Ben wondered if he would ever want to touch anyone else.

Sofie was not scared even though Ben’s heart pounded against his chest as if to rip through and spill his blue blood over her body in a type of baptism. He had never been allowed to touch before—not even with Ruthie…

The inside of her thighs, the dark mass of curls at the angle, his rough fingers touched it all. She did not recoil, she did not scream at him to stop, Ben felt Sofie arch into his touch. He almost wanted to cry.

Ben groaned into her hair when he thrust inside, the tight confines of the cab of the truck not the best place to worship such a beautiful thing as Sofie. Ben pushed the thought aside, too elated to be touching her in a manner that let him feel free of the yoke his father and Management had put upon him. Inside Sofie, touching Sofie, all he could see was her—kissing her in the white plain.

Sofie whimpered as he moved, her fingers digging into his spine as they rocked together, the windows fogging as outside the temperature dropped.

Her touch, his touch, Ben wondered if he could die in that moment and never have a bad dream of dark men, of war, of cornfields, of Scudder, again.

Ben murmured incoherently into Sofie’s hair, his lips trailing down her cheek to take her mouth again. Lips touching, Ben felt a pleasant shock ripple through his body from the base of his spine upward, and Ben felt Sofie’s body clamp around his organ—the deepest, most intimate touch Ben would ever know.

And Ben was gone, just as the sounds of raindrops pelted against the metal roof of the cab and against the windows.

To touch was to heal, to touch was to kill, and with Sofie, it was to become whole.