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Benson beat his childhood abuser to death after never receiving justice; he would never pressure Randy into anything remotely sexual. In fact, I don’t think he would even be willing to make the first move on Randy due to his trauma.

He gave a whole speech to Randy on how it���s good to be a virgin. I think Benson has been celibate for a long time. He’s so touch-starved for true affection, I think he would repeatedly push Randy away for initiating any sort of contact.

Benson can push Randy around and gently touch his face in comfort, but the second Randy tries to give him any sort of comfort back, he clamps up and shuts down.

Randy takes the approach of domesticating a wild animal when it comes to slowly getting Benson to lower his emotional walls before Benson is even willing to accept so much as a hug.

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getting the fuck out of there immediately. taking this with him also

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The Passenger brain worms have me sooooo bad blame @wormswurld

thinking so hard about if they got out together, going to live in more rural places like the Western states — Wyoming, Utah, Montana — and making a home out in the fields together. they live in a decades old house, creaky, the foundation sagging, but it’s home for them. they wouldn’t have it any other way.

Randy does most of the decorating, taking Benson to thrift stores in the area with him. he loves spending hours there, envisioning where every piece might fit in his new home, the home he feels most himself in. meanwhile, Benson will just come home with road signs he took off their posts just to stick up on the wall or on their bedroom or front door.

Benson works on a construction site, and goes hunting during the season with a group of his coworkers. his one rule is he doesn’t shoot deer—they remind him too much of his beloved boy back home. he couldn’t bear to think about the light draining from his eyes, it makes his stomach churn. instead, he hunts squirrels, geese, other woodland creatures. but the deers stay sacred in his heart.

Randy gets a job at a little antique shop, working for a much older couple. he loves how quiet it is, how low pressure everything is. and especially how he doesn’t have any jackass coworkers anymore. he learns from the owners everything about the antiques and where they came from, why their special, and how old they are. he brings all this info home to Benson, and some employee discounted trinkets too. including a pair of deer and ceramic cowboy boots.

i want them :( i want them so bad

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— “Just like your Daddy.”

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I am begging everyone who has ever bemoaned about Hollywood only making sequels and IP movies to go see Sinners in theaters. It has the creative team behind Black Panther working on it and their talent shines through in the cinematography, music, costuming, EVERYTHING. It's a completely original screenplay written by Ryan Coogler and if you want to support original movies, go see it in theaters.

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fondly remembering when pope francis said he hopes hell is empty. top pope francis moments. right up there with him saying some seminaries are too faggy

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tw: body horror

a little priest

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I finally got this line and the screenshots I've seen simply do not do justice to Arthur's deadpan delivery xd

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(x)

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we all make mistakes

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by the way (i sadly cant share this document cause it was sent to me personally and i dont think its online) i've been reading a compilation of earliest writings by European settlers about Kentucky and its fucking wild

the main thing they mention is the river cane, everywhere. Cane cane cane cane cane on every page. Canebrakes stretching for miles and miles, dark woodlands of massive trees spaced wide apart with canebrake as the understory

But also they talk a lot about: Huge fields of strawberries that seem to turn red in spring with all the strawberries getting ripe. Raspberries. Groves of American plums, even some AN ACRE big just a huge patch of plum trees. Cherry trees. Huge grape vines growing up one in every four trees. Persimmons and pawpaws. Walnut trees. Hickory trees. Oak trees. And sugar maples. EVERYWHERE. And the canebrakes absolutely TEEMING with turkeys, passenger pigeons and quails

Reading the descriptions of looking out into a valley and seeing herds of 200-300 bison frolicking in the clover and river cane almost makes me want to cry...

It's crazy how much they talk about plum trees because plum trees are so rare now!

Really it's wild seeing how abundant the edible woody plant species and berries just-so-happened to be when Europeans first came. Right?

To me it seems like obvious pieces of evidence that indigenous people were actively cultivating this land. It was a landscape scale agriculture fully integrated with the ecosystem.

Even more so because it started to collapse very soon after settlers came. The sugar maple trees were mostly killed by settlers hacking indiscriminately into them with hatchets for maple syrup making without caring about the trees survival, the livestock running loose destroyed the native clover and cane causing invasive grass to grow back, and the bison...reading about the bison is so sad!

The wasteful slaughter of bison began very early. Lots of writers talk about other settlers killing bison just to say they killed one, or killing several of them and barely taking one horse load of meat from them, or seeing traders killing bison by the hundreds just to take the most valuable parts and leave the body to rot...And the writers knew it was wrong! but they couldn't stop the others from doing it. So bison were basically gone from around Lexington before 1800 :(

Settlers even killed the bison for wool--this was fascinating to me, they described making their cloth out of nettle bast fiber and bison wool. Native Americans also used bison wool for textiles, but as far as I know they didn't kill them for it (tho i reckon they might have used the wool on a bison they killed)...the wool peels right off in big clumps in the spring. Same thing with mountain goats, indigenous peoples would just gather the mountain goat wool when it naturally shed. But the settlers were killing bison to shave the wool off and it said only the young ones had good wool so if they killed a bison that didn't have good wool on it they would just kill another one.

They destroyed the river cane not knowing that bamboo was strong and useful for practically everything. Destroyed the native pastures of buffalo clover, Kentucky clover, running buffalo clover and God knows what other extinct or undiscovered clovers. And now wild strawberries and raspberries are hard to find, American plums very rare, persimmons rare...

The settlers didn't understand this land, didn't try to understand it, they were full of greed and just tried to force their idea of agriculture and their idea of society onto it, and watched in bafflement as the natural abundance and beauty of the land around them fell into decay and ruin from their abuse.

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Thinking about how Benson was a traumatized victim of CSA and a queer man living in the rural south in the early aughts. He saw so much of himself in Randy, and when Randy started getting pushed around and bullied, it was himself Benson saw being hurt yet again right in front of his eyes.

He was raised poor and by a single mother. Likely never came forward about what he was subjected to as a child, never developed any coping skills or received any sort of therapy. Just years of pent up pain, smoldering under the layers of himself he kept packed away inside like winter clothes, just waiting for the seasonal change that would never come so that he could finally shake the wrinkles out and examine it.

But then he saw himself in this scared young man. He knew who he’d become, even if no one else did, and the thought of seeing someone set on the same path when he had the power to help redirect his course and save him was lead-heavy on his spirit. So Benson, without any emotional regulation skills, who simply didn’t know what he didn’t know about healing, saved Randy in the only way he knew how.

Deep down he knew he needed comfort and healing and closure for the ghosts that never fully died and continued haunting him all these years later, his mind a decrepit and condemned house of horrors that he couldn’t afford to move out of or exorcise. So he did for Randy what he’d needed done for him, but laced with the anger and violence he’d come to associate with moving on. A cornered dog showing a puppy how to snarl and bite.

And when the literal face of his trauma was in front of him, speaking to him, not even recognizing him, whatever rational thought was still in the driver’s seat bailed out, and the anxiety and trauma and deep, visceral fear took over. Yes, the bullying at the beginning of the day triggered his PTSD, but coming face to face with the reason he became this way to begin with pushed him fully over the edge, and for literally the rest of his life Benson would be in the throes of reliving the trauma that had plagued him for most of his life.

He wasn’t an inherently violent person. He became this way because he didn’t know what or who else to become. The anger felt not just inevitable but like the only option. He never realized softness and vulnerability were an option outside of the wood paneled walls of his cluttered childhood home, where he could safely kiss his Ma on the forehead and bring her pastries and cigarettes. But he brought Randy there. Let him wear his clothes and meet his mother. Took him to breakfast and wiped his tears and told him It isn’t your fault, you were just a kid. Assured him that There is nothing wrong with you for being a virgin, and it’s a good thing that you’re the one in control of your body and sexuality. Encouraged him to Stand up for yourself, don’t let other people hold you back. Randy was a safe place for softness, and Benson was trying to fight against everything in himself that tied vulnerability to victimization despite how badly he wanted to be not only a comfort for Randy but comforted by him.

Benson felt he was too far gone, but Randy wasn’t. And maybe in helping Randy he could help himself. Randy could be his comfort and closure and peace.

But then Sheppard happened, and Benson’s mind turned on itself. He tried to fight back, but became only more distant from reality, retreating into himself while simultaneously trying to escape himself, spinning his tires in the mud and only finding purchase and movement when a bullet -his bullet from his gun- ripped through Randy’s shoulder. And his peace, his boy, was looking up at him with wide, wet eyes, scared and hurt, and Benson never wanted him scared and hurt, had only ever wanted to help. But now, freckled in blood and bathed in the red and blue lights of squad cars, Benson’s brain finally, finally, after all these years silenced, and he saw his life and himself for what they were.

He was a scared little boy whose last goal in life was to be a giraffe before his fate had been decided for him. He wasn’t equipped for adulthood or juggling the complexities that came with it. He was only ever rolling with the tide and surviving by caring for Ma and flipping burgers with a head full of trauma and a trunk full of bullets. His life had been driven by fear and violence, and his lot had been decided for him in the third grade. He never had a say in it. He was never in charge. A scared lamb without a sheepdog to keep the wolves at bay or a flock to insulate him and, not knowing what else to do, he threw himself to the wolves as a sacrificial omen, his last utterance the name of the man whose altar he was laying his body upon.

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new tag game: the thing you most often pretended to be as a kid—whether it was a horse, a bride, a queen, a specific character, a knight, a lawyer, a baby, anything—is symbolically representative of you currently. what is it for you?

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toxic yaoi enjoyers where you at

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Nothing pleases me more than The Passenger fandom finally getting big enough that people are posting about girldad Benson ON THEIR OWN, without me bringing it up!

IM EATING IM EATING

Anyway my favorite dad Benson au I have is one where he hooked up with who he thought was a twink at a gay bar and she was actually a dyke and the dyke thought Benson was a butch. Anyway, one oopsie pregnancy later and birth mom not wanting to have a kid at all combined with lack of access to healthcare results in Benson getting full custody when she’s born on the condition birth mom gets to name her! Of all the things, names her Poppy after the flower.

Poppy is 4 by the time Randy starts working at BBB. He has no idea Benson is a dad until one day Benson brings her into his shift cause Ma is having a bad health day and can’t babysit and he sure as shit isn’t affording daycare or a paid babysitter on top of all the other bills. Benson sets her up with a coloring book and some toys at one of the booths he thoroughly cleaned and Randy cannot figure out why he’s suddenly more obsessed with Benson now.

Just some random lil facts:

- Benson learned sewing and knitting from Ma and saves money by making some Poppy’s clothes following old thrifted patterns. Poppy is also a sucker for just wearing one of daddy’s shirts as a dress

- Poppy is autistic (got it from Benson) and didn’t speak until she turned 4. This also means she has sensory issues and cannot stand her hair being in her face. But she also wants her hair long (discovered during the world’s gnarliest meltdown when Benson tried cutting it to keep out of her face). Instead, he learned how to do different braids to keep her hair neat and she loves them

- Benson has a small chicken coop at the house to save on meat and eggs. He keeps telling Poppy not to name the chicks but she does, and she cries every time it’s butcher day. After enough visits to BBB she names some of the chicks after Benson’s coworkers.

- Poppy says unintentionally out of pocket things all the time, as all 4 year olds do. Following the previous point, one day she tells Chris “daddy killed you and then we had you for dinner last night” and then walks back to her booth leaving a mildly terrified Chris behind

- Instead of paying for a crib, Benson had Poppy in the bottom drawer of his dresser pulled out. When she got old enough, she switched to co-sleeping with him in bed. He plans on cleaning out Ma’s abandoned hoarder bedroom in the future to turn it into Poppy’s own space

- Benson feels a special kind of pain seeing Ma treat Poppy with more attention and visible care than he got most of his life. He tries not to take it personally, tries to remind himself how much of an impact his shithole of a Pa had on her when he was still alive. Benson should just be grateful he has the support at all for Poppy, not bitter

I have so much more y’all, if you have questions about her or my dad Benson, please send me asks!!!