Urgh. I know, I know, 'Ben losing his arm' isn't exactly a creative or original idea, but here I am, doing it anyway. I swear this started off as a simple exercise and then spiraled off into a monster when I wasn't looking...and, well. I guess I'll see how it goes.

This is what he remembers: a thumb on his cheek like a tear, wiping away water that spills there, with the taste of salt falling to his lips. And a rock at his back, heaviness, crushing weight, where there should be a warmth that spreads into thickness, splintering out into fingers and thumb. And yet no light there to divide the skin, no green light, to help halo his wrist.

Instead, a collection of noise, a dull thud in his head. Things are falling down.

'I will make this quick,' says a voice, usually so calm and collected, but this, this time, so shaky that Ben has to clench his teeth in phantom pain. 'Bite down if you need to.'

There is no green light on his arm anymore, only orange instead. Orange, shaped like a blade and curved impossibly like a flame. He remembers watching, spots in his vision, as it descends.

For that's where the pain starts. And thankfully, soon after, where the memory ends.

'I expected gift cards,' says Ben airily, waving a hand towards the abundance of colour that drifts in over the desk next to his bed. 'Not flowers.'

He watches in distaste as leaves curl to the floor, overlapping the ledge of wood that juts out above the drawers. Above them and these long tongues of green, lie purple petals and coils of red, forked stomata that arch out of their pollen-filled cores like the filament inside a light-bulb.

Ben stares at them hard, then gives a disdainful sniff. 'I'm surprised I haven't started sneezing yet. I mean, really? Giving the recuperating hero weird alien flowers? That strike anyone as a good idea? What if I'm allergic!?'

From the plastic chair pulled up to his side, Rook gives him a fond smile. 'I do not think peanuts bear such a close resemblance to these 'weird alien flowers' that you have to worry about swelling up like a balloon.'

Ben narrows his eyes. 'Have you been talking to Gwen again? Because for the record, I do not swell up. I just...get a bit puffy in the face. That's all.'

But Rook ignores him, reaching out with a careful finger to stroke an escaped leaf that falls slightly above the floor to entwine itself with the metal railings beneath Ben's bed. It trembles a little at his touch and Ben is struck by how fairy-tale like the image is, before he shakes himself. Rook is a little too good at too many things, without having to add the title of 'plant-whisperer' amongst them.

'Dude,' he mutters, starting to cross his arms before he remembers, with a rush of clear, crisp shock, why he can't. 'Dude...' he murmurs again, trailing off long enough for Rook's eyes to narrow in suspicion, which, like magic, brings his mind back to his tongue more than quickly enough for him to blurt out his next line. 'Stop fondling the plant!'

A look of consternation crosses Rook's brow, but he obligingly drops the leaf to cover up the glint in the metal frame beneath. 'I was not fondling anything,' he informs Ben haughtily, 'it is not my fault, you cannot seem to appreciate the beauty of nature.'

'I appreciate nature, just fine,' Ben says, just as testily. 'At least, when it's away from me, far enough away that I don't have to worry about it choking me in the middle of the night.'

'I would not ask Rook Shar for flowers that would harm you.'

Ben is quiet a moment. Then, with a thumb carefully stroking the covers at his waist, he asks, 'your sister sent them?'

Rook beams. 'Yes! She is currently being stationed near the Gardenia Omolia, a solar system famed for its flowery vegetation and aromatic therapies. I asked her for something designed to raise the spirit of another.' His smile softens, becoming a careful, quiet line that curls into something even Ben doesn't want to shatter. 'Thankfully, it appears that you have done a fine enough job raising your own.'

At this, Ben lets his own smile slip free, ignoring the quick clench in his gut. 'Yeah, you know me. I always bounce back.'

It is not until two hours later, after Rook has exhausted the long list of flowers his sisters had suggested as alternatives, as well as their many, many uses, that he decides to leave the room to fetch Ben some juice. 'Or some other canned form of beverage, that is not a smoothie,' he tells Ben pointedly, carefully closing the door behind him, instead of simply allowing it to swing shut. 'I apologise, but the doctors were most insistent.'

Ben watches him leave and then, with a groan, lets his head thump back against the pillow, the smile escaping his face alongside the whoosh of air his sudden movement throws up.

It's alright, he tells himself. The smile's not a lie, not if he's simply doing what he told Rook he was doing. Bouncing back. Raising his spirits. It's not a lie, if Rook believes it.

When Ben pictured losing his arm in the past, he always imagined it being shorn off, in a mess of gristle and gore. And unfortunately, his imagination refused to stop there, choosing to reach past the hours he was awake and dive headfirst into his dreams, pushing him into great, clawed bouts of terror filled with red and crushed bone and leaving him gasping within a mess of crumpled pillows and a duvet that split at his waist. Then he would fling a hand out, seeing it as skeletonal in the gloom as it felt for his wrist and watch before he allowed himself to breathe, feeling both awake and angry at its touch.

Never, once his dream had passed out of prophecy and into real life, did he expect both bad timing and a landslide caused by Cannonbolt's roll to be the reason he was now, effectively, harmless.

Lame, he thinks. Stupid. But then, hasn't he always been?

So now he watches on the news as Harangue crows over the triumph of universal karma, at how they are all free from the weight of the terror he causes and thinks, good luck, buddy. Have fun with all the future terrors I hope they'll be able to stop without me. And he sighs, wears a smile on his face when Grandpa bustles in, or when Gwen arrives with her serious, compassionate face on, Kevin firmly in tow.

'How you doing, champ?' his Grandpa asks, taking care to shove cookies into his hands, ones with periwinkle eyeballs in place of the more usual chocolate chips. Not even the nurse's blanched face is enough to discourage him.

'Fine,' Ben always replies, repeating the reply again and again, when Gwen is here, chatting about the advances they've made in prosthetics and how she'd sure they could get him a slime-green coloured arm if that's really what he wanted. The only quiet one is Kevin, and his eyes are dark and thoughtful as he watches them both, smiling when Gwen looks to him for encouragement, but letting a storm settle on his brow as soon as she turns away.

Ben tries not to think on that too much. Kevin, he knows, is often more observant than people give him credit for.

And of course freakin' Rook is always here in his off hours, asking questions and showing off all the snapshots he's taken with a tablet, pushing the bright colours of people who are actually getting out there and enjoying their lives, under Ben's nose.

'You should have told me how sensitive human skin is to the rays of the sun,' he tells Ben reproachfully. 'Just think, all those hours when I saw people wiping grease onto themselves and I thought it some weird family bonding activity, not dissimilar to how other primates on this planet comb lice out of the fur of each other.'

On seeing Ben screw his face up into a wince, Rook frowns and continues rather hurriedly, 'well, you should have said something! One of the nurses here was nice enough to tell me how sunscreen can prevent cancer.'

Ben rolls his eyes. 'I'm surprised you didn't know already. You do so much research, that I would have thought you'd have stumbled onto yet another nugget of trivia involved sun-factor fifty or something.'

'I am flattered that you think I know everything,' says Rook a little loftily. 'But unfortunately, I do not. If I did, I would not have to ask why you are still making no attempt to fit yourself up with a prosthetic arm.'

Ben is quiet at this. For this is the trouble with Rook; he has never been afraid to pry, all his reservations and politeness flying out of the room, when it concerns something he truly cares about.

'Leave it,' Ben tells him firmly, turning his head back and away, all so he can stare into the sky. And as though to match his mood, all the window displays is grey, a swirling mist of it that sweeps out to touch the glass with a chill that condenses, dropping tears down to swirl against the sill.

But Rook fastens his mouth into a tight line and Ben has to work hard, after that, to keep the levity in his own voice.

'It's no big deal,' he says, 'I'm just not feeling ready for it, not yet.'

Rook looks at him for a long while, before letting his gaze flicker and drift round the room, taking in the purple flowers and their wilting leaves, now more grey than green as they attempt to trail their way into Ben's sheets.

'It's not my fault,' Ben says defensively, hands anchored into the duvet that for the moment, still rises above the dying coils of plants. 'I've even got people to water them. It's like they want to die.'

Rook shoots him a very dry look. 'Imagine that,' he mutters.

But the conversation between them seems to strangle and die after this, and all Ben can do is offer half-smiles, feeling his mouth cut into his cheeks as he strains to keep the silence between them palatable. He isn't too surprised that the Revonnahgander lasts only nine more minutes until he makes his excuses and leaves.

Perhaps it's time he does the same.

During the night, he is awoken by pain. It bleeds out from his dream into reality and Ben is left flailing in the sheets, his fingers wrapped around a stem as the plant, Rook's stupid plant, tightens round the frame of the bones within. It strangles the blood vessels and rips through the flesh with the same protrusion of thorns a rose bush holds and Ben has to hold back a cry, choking on his own tongue as it branches up into the roof of his mouth. But even with all that, with the black, grim weight lying on his limb and thrusting it down into the sheets as though they could part and crumble beneath like soil, Ben knows this is wrong, all wrong. Because this pain, this new focus of gravity on his skin, is all concentrated on the wrong limb, the one that isn't there.

He grunts, shifts, and daringly, lets out a small scream. It's not as though he's back there again, caught in the memory, with his arm trapped but still there. No, now it is no longer here, but still it feels...it feels...

Ben's not an idiot. He knows about phantom pain. The Doctor had warned him, made him a nice list of what to expect, the nice orderliness of it undermined seconds later, when he had then adjusted his glasses and informed him that of course, it was different for everybody.

Itching, aching, a tingle of temperature as it changes and tugs on a bunch of nerves that are now ghosts to the system...all described and noted. But to Ben, it feels as though his arm is trapped under a solid tonne.

But he won't tell Grandpa, he won't. He won't tell anyone. Other people, stronger, braver people must have to deal with this all the time. Besides, it's not as though there's a proper cure.

He spends the rest of the night whimpering, a troubled sleep touching him only as the first grey light of the dawn trails in. It touches the window, plays with the sill, and the sight of it before he drifts off, hopefully into nicer dreams that will hold him, is enough to firm his resolve.