Edith and Ben - some thoughts on Ben's clumsiness

[Originally posted at Ana Mardoll's Ramblings.]

So what I've been thinking about is Ben coming in because he took a nasty fall and hit his head, and he's been hearing that if you whack you head check it out because this person just got up and brushed it off and was dead the next day as a result. (They do say that.) And then Caroline touches some other part of him, probably his shoulder, he reacts with visible pain, she says that she thought it was just his head, Ben says that the shoulder thing is something else and refuses to talk about it. His head checks out fine.

Caroline sends Edith to convince Ben to come in to talk about the "something else" (at this point she might suspect child abuse) and when he finally comes in at some point while Caroline is looking at the very bruised Ben (once the shirt comes off there's no hiding it) she realizes that he's hiding his palms from her. They're scraped all to hell. That's actually basically the image that this is built around is Ben Swan reluctantly opening up his his hands to show Caroline Cullen the deeps scrapes running across his palms.

Ben would be frustrated and not interested in offers to help. His position would be, "I did what you asked, leave me alone." Because by this point anyone as clumsy as Bella has doubtless been through all kinds of tests and had the answer always come back that, "There's nothing wrong with you, you should be fine." Anything done to help has obviously failed (unless Bella was somehow worse in the past) so at this point I can see Ben or Bella in a position of: that's the way it is, I don't want to talk about it.

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