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In his dreams, Benji died that day in Kashmir.
In his nightmares, he's alive, but Solomon Lane is with him, draining the life from Ilsa with a chapped and bloodied hand pressed to her throat; forced to watch in stark detail, because in nightmares like these, the noose lets him live in spite of its choking tightness, in spite of the mark it leaves–has left behind. And when the flame of life in Ilsa's eyes is extinguished, Benji remembers the horrified pain on her face the entire day after waking.
He dreams about Lane a lot.
He's just never lucky enough to watch him die.
They happen frequently enough, these death-defying nightmares, that Benji is almost lucid during. It's the strangest thing to experience, something he'd never mention in a psychological interview; something he'll never mention to Ilsa, or Ethan, or even Luther. When Lane touches him, he's there, all over again, bathed in the dim yellow glow of the setting sun through foggy windows. When he wakes, he's gasping for breath, just as he had been when Ilsa was gracious enough to have saved his life.
His subconscious tricks him, sometimes. Once, it was Ethan who'd hanged him. Once, Ethan was the one who cut him down from that itchy sisal rope and gave him life again, on the cold, rotten hardwood floor of that cabin… But his subconscious is cruel, too, because if he were truly lucid dreaming, it would be Ethan's hands running up the core of his hanging body; not Lane's.
Benji's vision's been cutting in and out, with the oxygen he's so desperately gasping for coming in scattered waves. What sobers him–what opens his eyes wide enough to see decently through the blur of tears–is two subsequent gunshots, visceral in the way they splinter the silence of his mind, like a harsh punctuation in the stillness of the cabin that makes his ears ring. This is one of those dreams where, like the noose, even bullets don't harm him. Everyone else is fair game.
What he sees is the silhouette of a man with hair like Ethan's–standing for a moment like James Bond down a gun barrel before falling to his knees in the open doorway; a gust of icy mountain wind chasing the stranger into the room, whistling past him and enveloping Benji right as he’s got the rope cut and plummets to the floor at Lane's feet.
Lane strolls past him, then, without so much as a glance or care towards the fact that Benji has full mobility, were his muscles not screaming and his throat not burning and hoarse. He's straight as a rod as he walks, in detailed black and brown to fuzzy grey as Benji's eyes well up again. And when he reaches the collapsed figure in the doorway, he only Hmphs, and Benji knows for certain it is Ethan there.
He watches transfixed, stretching the moment into a grotesque tableau of uncertainty. But this is a dream, and Ethan is still alive, too–his features once animated with confidence, twisted into a mask of shock, and incoherent as Lane drags him by the shirt collar to throw him face-first next to Ilsa's lifeless corpse.
Lane's nose twitches, lip curling in fury disguised as disinterest. Benji has that wicked glare memorised. He's seen enough versions of it to know its true nature.
“You’re a monster,” Benji growls, and it’s dramatic, but he knows Lane wouldn’t be receptive to anything but. There’s about a million vicious things he could say, but nothing else seems to come out, as though the same breeze nipping at his cheeks has frozen his voice box as well. Benji flinches as Lane's cold hands find his neck and lifts him with supernatural strength, his muscles tensing reflexively, breath held but for nothing–
The knot at the back of his neck is picked undone, a relief for a split second until the rope itself is torn from his neck, leaving a horizontal pink burn over his trachea that mimics the one he sees daily in the mirror in his waking life. He yelps, in pain and surprise; wills himself to try to stand, but his legs are like cement, and his heart sinks to meet them, heavy and hurting.
“Benji,” Ethan whispers. In his dreams, Ethan’s voice is ambiguous, but days later when he’s still replaying these scenarios over and over in his head, Benji can hear the words in Ethan’s exact cadence, broken and anxious. The way he’d sounded when he’d told Benji he couldn’t protect him. The way he always sounded when he was at his tipping point and about to get 120% serious. “Don’t give him anything.”
It isn’t exactly up to him.
He gives Lane all of his REM sleep. He doesn’t get a bloody moment’s rest from giving Lane too much, because although he’s no longer being strangled, Lane’s stepping in front of him and kneeling, with that same hank of rope with its prickly fibres ready for bondage.
“Hold out your hands,” Lane says expectantly, focused solely on Benj’s pink-rimmed eyes as he shakily obeys and offers his arms, wrists-up.
Most of the time, Lane is violent in the way he binds his wrists–dragging the rope over each of them to tie a hasty knot. This time Benji can see every detail: the way Lane binds both wrists together with four layers of rope strewn side-by-side, criss-crossing over the bight to form a loop that secures the knot he’s planned. He’s itchy already, fingers twitching, brushing Lane’s knee–
Benji gasps inwardly in surprise and disgust. Indeliberate contact somehow feels much worse.
The tail of the rope ends up in the ether. As Lane disappears, Benji can hear the weighty slap of it thrown over a support beam in the ceiling, the chaotic manipulation of his surroundings that shift and blur like a watercolour painting; he doesn’t need to see every step of his torture when the pain that follows seems so real–The sharp throb radiating through his shoulders as his arms are wrenched over his head, his body struggling to support itself on his tiptoes as he dangles like a marionette. And as he’s hoisted ever upwards, Ethan sits up as well, hauled to his knees by the ghosts of his guilt; crimson smeared across the floor beneath him, depthless black around the twin bullet wounds in his gut.
The rise and fall of Ethan’s chest inspires him, because even in a false reality, he’s hanging on, might even have a plan, might even be biding his time to lunge at Lane and save himself and Benji, too. He scoffs–no, Benji would be the first to be saved, were Ethan in the position to rescue anyone. And then they’d just end up here all over again, because Benji would inevitably bungle it all up and put Ethan in danger.
He’d end up like Ilsa.
Some things, even lucid, Benji can’t place. In the darkness–or through the lack of clarity–every breath feels like a betrayal of his body, the frost clinging to his lungs a reminder of the agony that awaits him. Lane idles unseen, menacing as a bomb milliseconds away from detonation–And he’s lost all sense of time.
“Lane?” Benji barks. “Lane!”
Already his voice shakes; turns into a yelp when he becomes aware of the man’s presence behind him, so grotesquely silent, but intimidating.
God, he wants to stop feeling intimidated by him.
He fades into his line of vision almost instantly, his own brain teasing him, shoving Lane's sour mug so closely in front of him that he can see his own reflection in the man's irises; every wrinkle and untamed grisled hair on his chin. Lane applies gloves; takes hold of Benji's jaw and squeezes like one might a cat, pressing the muscle on either side of his lower molars to force his mouth open before shoving a thumb under his tongue. It makes Benji drool reflexively, and before he even realises his misdeed, he's biting down on Lane's knuckle.
Lane's hand leaves him with a stream of saliva spilling from Benji's lips as he stands instantly upright, and for a moment Benji thinks he may be hit. Rather unsettlingly, he's simply met with an angry hiss, tempered by a scrunch of his nose and a tight-lipped frown. And again time feels elastic, stretching on and on while Lane observes him.
Finally, he's decided his punishment, turning his back, and Benji can't bear to think of Lane's bucket list of torture for Ethan Hunt. He shouts in vain. “Hey–!”
And as though he were waiting for Benji's go ahead, he gives Ethan a kick in the stomach.
Only once, but without restraint, and the howl that pierces the air is unlike anything Benji's ever heard, the sound of a hunted animal that's been maimed but not put out of its misery, followed by a long, dry gasp that lingers with Benji. He thinks Ethan may say something– Might curse or otherwise say something to antagonise their enemy–But Benji can't make it out over the pounding of his heartbeat between his ears.
He can't hear his friend over his own pitiful sobbing.
Lane returns to him; produces two blue diamond-shaped pills, repeating the process of making Benji's saliva ducts well before pinching each one into the back of Benji's throat. The pills sit there, stuck to his tongue, and instinctively he wants to retch, to cough them up and spit them back into Lane's palm like a child–But he can't put Ethan through more abuse for something so benign.
Then Lane's cupping his chin and closing his mouth, forcing him to swallow the drug down with a vile cocktail of saliva and swallowed tears and mucus anyway.
“I’m going to undress you.”
“Wh–What? What for?” His tongue feels numb.
Of course, he can guess–In nightmares, Lane’s crossed boundaries in nearly every way but sexually. But Lane doesn’t acknowledge the question, and the insidious statement echoes off the walls of the cabin, seems to vaporise and becomes absorbed into its wooden foundation and folds in around him, and it’s the only thing Benji can think about until suddenly the sentence has come true, and Benji’s tops–his jacket, jumper, button-up shirt et al–have vanished. He begins to tremble, would say it’s the nip in the air if he could get away with lying to himself.
By some grace he doesn’t have to feel Lane’s bony, leathery fingers picking at him, stripping layers from him, but what he experiences now is much worse; makes his flesh crawl and his stomach churn to feel Lane hard in his trousers behind him, slipping those hands over his abdomen and down beneath the waistband of Benji's tweeds.
“No,” he hisses, as the man's hands roam underneath the fabric, feeling over his thighs; brushing Benji's cock with the back of his hand despite Benji's wriggling to avoid the unwanted contact. He jerks against his restraints; reckons he might be able to escape if he dislocated a hand, but the thought makes him anxious, and so he only chuckles darkly with tears staining his cheeks, “This is the most pathetic thing you could ever do.”
“I have a feeling you'll think differently, soon.”
Hovering over him, Lane takes his time, popping the button atop the zip of his fly, splitting its teeth with an overindulgent drag of the pull. Benji rolls his shoulders to throw the man off of him, but the hard truth is he can’t do anything about it, and he puts up a fight only because he knows it’s expected of him. If he were to truly misbehave, he’d risk more injury to Ethan, so he lets Lane hook his thumbs into the belt loops of his trousers and tug his pants down with them; watches in silence and lets Lane kick his legs apart as the rope keeps him hung. As he struggles to stand on the balls of his soles, his bottoms pool unceremoniously between his knees.
Ethan–
Benji’s breaths scatter rapidly from him as Lane withdraws, trading himself for a grim view of Ethan washed in acidic light, teeth clenched against the pain of surviving. He only has to look at him for a second, and then Lane’s beside him with another hank of that same shit rope–yards of it that tickle and itch against his bare chest, and scrape when he lurches at the slip of it on either side around his neck. It doesn’t tighten. Lane seems content to leave it hanging against the small of his back, crossing the front of it in an X beneath his Adam’s apple before looping a knot through and continuing on; running parallel lines up the front of him, looping rope through every few inches to knot it, intricate and specific in his methodology. He clicks his tongue when the rope reaches Benji’s groin.
Lane’s eyes sweep down his home gym-toned pecs and inexpertly-carved abs. He shudders under the scrutiny, can’t help but spit–
“What!?”
The corner of Lane’s lips twerk upwards, and then the man’s staring back down at the rope in his own hands as though he were estimating a measurement. He ties an experimental knot a bit lower down than the rest–one that breaks the pattern, and rests firmly against his taint when Lane parts the rope around his cock and pulls it between his legs. He trembles at the vibration of it, tremors sent down the length of rope and over his skin when Lane harshly tugs his craft between the crack of Benji’s arse.
“Shit!” He wheezes, “Ff–Fuck you–”
“Hm.”
“If you don’t need anything from me…” He hates the way his voice warbles, embarrassed that Ethan has to hear him like this, “...just kill me already.”
And then the rope is looped through that dangling lasso at his back, either end of it pulled around to the front, crossed over his chest just above his nipples–
He shivers, horrified; eyes screwed shut to lessen the mental torture, but predictably, his mind’s eye reveals everything. There’s no way to hide from what’s being done; Benji could teach a goddamn shibari lecture with the way he's committed every precise loop and pull to mind. Every faint touch of rope over his chest sets him on fire, and he’s ashamed, but the draw of it doesn’t itch so much for the time being–while Lane is threading rope through loops and around him some more, creating diamonds and triangles on either side of his centre.
The rope tightens as he progresses, and the press of those knots is overwhelmingly present–
And he’s about the protest some more, to try anything that might change Lane’s stubborn mind, when those smooth, gloved hands are on him; cupping his balls, tugging them enough to make Benji hiss and pull away–which only pulls on his shoulders and throws him off balance and makes it feel like he’s been sliced all over. Lane moves with him.
Cradled in Lane’s hands, his cock stirs with interest, and Benji groans. No, not now, anything but this.
Lane’s eyes darken as Ethan coughs behind them, a blanket of dread coating the cabin in the wake of Lane’s broken concentration. The man turns, fist tight against Ethan’s scalp to drag him closer; making him hack and spit up as Ethan flails and tries to fight him off–Failing when Lane stabs a fist into his bleeding gut and holds him there breathless, helpless against the invisible bond of ungodly agony.
“No!” Benji screams. “No-no, please!”
And then it’s like Ethan doesn’t exist at all, Lane uncaring that he’s simply sat there. He turns his attention back to Benji, hand dripping, rubescent and reeking of iron.
He’s forced to get hard.
It’s easy, because his adrenaline is high, and there’s 100 milligrams of Viagra in his system, and Lane’s wicked hand is stroking him with indifference, firm and slow. Slick with blood. The leather of his glove is cold and smooth against the heat between Benji’s legs; it freezes his muscles, jaw sore from clenching, forcing himself not to retch. But despite it all, he throbs at the touch.
The pain of the rope–circled four times precisely around the hang of his balls–helps him come to, a bit. He expects Lane is being rougher with him to purposefully inspire disobedience, but he grits his teeth and bares it when Lane draws the rope down the seam of his scrotum and then wraps it around the base of his shaft in one–two–three doubled-up loops that pull at his tender flesh like bristly little fingers. Ever-present when he’s dead still, then nauseatingly rapturous when Lane gives the rope a rueful tug.
Lane hums.
With a hand smacked firmly against his backside, Benji whines to feel the ripple down the back of his thigh. He wants to be sick as much as he wants another smack. No-no-no, stop–
“You could save Him, I think,” the man says; contemplative, quiet when he speaks, with that lazy hand on Benji’s cock increasingly inviting. His thumb swirls over the tip, wrenching out another clenched-tooth, shuddering moan. “In time.”
He’s not forgotten about Ethan, lying there by Ilsa’s frozen body; becoming a corpse himself, slowly–Without medical attention soon, he’ll bleed out, become infected… anything in the long list of bad endings that Benji worries about before, during and after every mission.
“How?”
“Benji,” Ethan rasps, holding himself up on an elbow so that Benji can see the defiant look in those stunning hazel eyes. “Don't–”
Benji chokes back a sob, helpless to do anything other than fold to Lane's peculiar whim.
Ethan's presence is embarrassing to him, makes his pale skin pink and hot enough to melt this infernal mountain's snowcap. He wants to demand Ethan not to watch, but Lane seems amused by it, fueled by it, and when at last Benji closes his eyes to shield against Ethan’s gaze, he receives a firm smack on the cheek. “Does Ethan Hunt not deserve your full attention in his last minutes?”
“How can I save him?”
His words hang in the air, dense and suffocating as the world around him warps into a surreal blur. Ilsa rises from the dead; a bludgeoned, zombified version of her that takes hold of Ethan with dagger-sharp nails, arms wrapped around his core to anchor him in place. Her mouth opens, but she’s unable to speak–Benji only just understands that she’s laying claim to him, in life and in death, and there’s nothing he can fucking do about it.
The smile that creeps across Lane’s lips, then–slight as it is–makes Benji’s heart stop cold.
He continues, drawing the ends of sisal rope from Benji’s caged erection and upwards, looping it through a bight below his navel, and it tingles and makes him twitch and gasp–And then Lane’s draping the excess in his palm, forming a hangman’s knot that he carries to crown Ethan’s head. It slips easily over his friend’s ears to settle loosely around his neck, trapping him there, attached to Benji a body’s length away. The speed of Ethan’s gasping breaths begins to rival his own.
Lane is out of view but ubiquitous, fracturing time with every touch until he's spreading Benji apart and rubbing the blunt tip of his own cock against Benji's hole. He feels the ground shift beneath him, a chasm of dread opening wide.
And he screams as Lane shoves his way inside.
Instinctively he arches his back, tries to jerk away from his captor, but Lane’s hands are insistent and firm on his hips, pulling him backwards with a fierce tenacity that has Benji gasping and the noose around Ethan’s neck tightening ever so.
The tug around his cock frightens him in the way that it feels brilliant, but shouldn't; tears blurring his vision yet again, but now he's glad for it. If he can just keep his hips forward enough not to tighten the noose, he doesn't have to look at Ethan, and he can put faith in the idea that he might be okay.
It's easier in theory than in practice, with Lane's thrusts long and calculated, wordlessly shaking Benji to his core, holding him back to drill in deeper. Every movement, no matter how slight, rattles the rope around Benji's chest, pinches into his nipples and when he’s not mindful, his body betrays him with a moan. It's only thanks to the burning tension in his shoulders and the numbness of his arms that he remains grounded even a fraction.
Benji steps forward on his toes, growls as Lane flicks the rope–Gasps in ecstasy when the knot beneath his balls sends a coil of pleasure through his abdomen and Lane brushes his prostate with omnipotent timing. “God–!”
Then Ethan's gasping, too; desperately, choking on frozen air that dries his lungs because Benji can't help himself.
The rope around him pulls when Lane bucks against him again–
Again his prostate is stroked–
He sobs, chest tight, pulled between his friend and mortal enemy like a metronome; desperate to deny the sick pleasure in it all.
Again and again–with ruthless precision until suddenly Lane stops, not withdrawing, simply stood still behind him to watch as Benji trembles with the need for release.
“I can offer you so much more, Mr. Dunn. You can’t save him, now.”
“Please,” he begs, through snot and saline. “No…”
The spears of light that eke through the cabin walls have darkened, shifted from yellow to a foreboding pinkish-red that paints the room in blots of brown and black–So dark he can barely make out Ethan's knelt form. Every part of him is throbbing from pleasure, from pain. He startles when Lane drapes himself across his back, beard prickling where it rests between Benji's shoulder blades; then he extends a hand, beautiful friction against Benji's aching cock. He doesn't so much as move, just allows Benji to rub against him, using his palm to thrust into the spiral of rope.
He's pathetic, so close to coming. He can hear the scratchy rasps of his name in Ethan's voice, ricocheting in his brain, breaking him down.
With a final gasp and swear, Benji lets his head hang and snaps his hips back; fucks himself on Lane's cock until he can't hear anything and Ilsa's dragging Ethan with her to the ground.
He startles awake from hyperventilation, sprawled face-first on the uncomfortably firm safehouse bed; drenched in flop sweat that strings the corners of his eyes as it drips down his temple–Each heartbeat pulsating with the weight of what he's done in the recesses of his mind, why he's woken hard and rutting against the mattress as though he could still get off and live with himself.
He won't dare touch himself, but he allows the shame and the hatred and the regret to be his hands, cheeks burning; and he can feel the cool morning air clinging to the sweat on his back, the friction in his cotton briefs magnificent at such an early hour. With his eyes still closed he can almost feel Lane's hand on his neck as he begins to roll his hips more deliberately and finally comes with a cry–spilling hotly between his stomach and soaking the front of his pants.
He's disgusted with himself, but that's becoming as frequent as the nightmares, isn't it.
Then rolling his face into the pillow, Benji breaks down and sobs until he thinks he might faint, and has to tip his cheek away from where it's damp with sweat and tears. The unused pillow to his right is cased in a threadbare floral print, a detail he finds himself drawn to; he counts the petals on each flower and levels his breathing before sitting himself upright to face the day.
There's a straight razor laid out for him on the vanity top in the loo. Just another detail of note. It reflects the rising sun through the barred slat window above his head as he washes the come from his stomach; pale yellow and bright, the polar opposite of that cabin in Kashmir. One look in the mirror and he’s vomiting into the sink, grappling at the faucet, resting his head against the tap as he retches.
In, two, three.
That's right–He's survived. Ethan and Ilsa, too, and the rest of that mountaintop settlement, even if they don't realise it.
Out, two, three.
Even if he can hear Lane's voice in his head on repeat, “I can offer you so much more,” it's fine. He's not there. Benji escaped and the good guys won, and Luther's texting him over tea. It all cost so very little.
It's just so fucking hard not to dream.