Isabella had a child once. I was a father two whole days before it died. It was a girl, named simply Maria, the most common of all Spanish names. Her birthing nearly killed Isabella, and all for nothing, for two days of watching her die. After that the price of children seemed too much. It was not a price I was willing to pay again. On the Island I always paid close attention to the children so that I would be able to identify our next leader, but I never became involved in their lives. Until Ben. Until I sent him back into the enemy's camp with my handiwork on his face and realized that I wished more to protect him from them than I did to gain the information he would provide us.
I scorned my sentimentality. Ben was intended to serve the Island, not to fulfill my need for a son, which need I didn't even have. I think I succeeded in keeping our relationship unsentimental, because Ben always saw me as a friend and a mentor, not a father. I used to think this was a good thing, but now I am not so sure. If our relationship had had more emotional substance, perhaps we would not each have betrayed each other as easily as we did. I helped make him into the sort of man who could betray me and whom I could betray.
Anyway, who am I fooling? I was too scared to make him my son, so instead for a while I set him up as a kind of demigod.
As he had predicted, his father went into a wild rage when he returned to the Barracks bloodied and professing loss of memory about what had happened to him in the last month. Roger Linus tried to stir the Dharma people up into an attack on us, but they were far too busy trying to contain their electromagnetic Incident to pay any attention to their janitor. Then he wanted to take him away from the Island, but Ben protested strongly, pretending a sickening enthusiasm for the Dharma Initiative. They also didn't want to let him go. He offered them a unique opportunity to study how a child would grow under circumstances that prevented women from living through pregnancy. As a child he fooled all the eyes watching him, and there were many, for he was the only child in the Dharma Initiative. All the children had been sent away before the Incident while he was still with me in the Temple, and no children were born after that. It must have been surreal for him.
Now that no schoolteachers were needed, he was left to glean any learning that he could mostly on his own. This contributed to his being able to learn vast amounts while pretending to learn fairly little. He flunked tests, purposefully achieved lower IQ scores, and in every way made certain he earned his place as workman beside his father. Once he grew older, no one thought about him very much.
His lonely, unsupervised life and his father working all the time gave him latitude for sneaking away alone. He came out to meet with me monthly. I taught him our ways, our Latin, our fighting style, all about Jacob. In return he told me all about what he learned about Dharma research. It was infuriating that they were learning more about the Island than I knew, but Ben was the perfect spy. Sometimes those days it seemed like I learned more from Ben and the Dharma Initiative than from Jacob. He told me about the desperate rush to build the Swan station and equip it, about the Orchid's careful research into the forces deep inside it, about the Flame's communication with the Outside world I knew nothing about, about the submarine and the Dharma Initiative's vast resources. Naturally I communicated these things to Charles and did not know that he had dreams to build himself an empire with them.
Charles was always concerned that Ben was going to be seduced by the Initiative and become a double agent against us, but then, Charles never did trust anyone but himself. Not even Jacob. He'd even manage to alienate Eloise, his staunchest supporter for a long time.
I, however, never doubted what was in Ben's heart while he was with the Initiative. Charles had never seen (I took care that he should not) the one time he came to me sobbing at age thirteen and begging to come back to us. He had never seen him unfolding to me plans for sabotaging the Initiative, a gleam in his eye. He had not seen the eyes of him when he first woke up in the Temple. No, Ben Linus had never been one of them, and continued exposure only increased his impatience to leave them behind. He only submitted to my insistence that he learn all he could from them, and as he grew into a young man, I watched him grow into deep, deliberate patience and insight.