Chapter Text
Benvolio is missing out.
He knows that, feels it somewhere in the pit of his stomach. Every single hour of the day, there is something trying to dislodge itself from the back of his brain, and this is what it whispers. There’s something fundamental about being a teenager, and he isn’t doing it.
He could be sneaking out at night to god knows where, throwing everything to the winds all for the sake of love. He could be carefree, skipping class and meeting people and going to the mall and spending all the money that he actually has on something that isn’t his extreme dependency on coffee (despite the many boxes of tea that sit unopened on his desk. The transition is not going well). He could go to parties, smile at people he doesn’t know, find something to do other than stay in his room, pick apart all the imaginary scenarios in his head where life is just better, and think about all the shit that could possibly go wrong.
He doesn’t.
Despite all that thinking, all that worry that someday he’ll wake up and nobody will be there, and everyone he goes to school with will be living it up somewhere else after leaving him in the dust, all those sleepless nights of ceiling-staring, listening to the noises of the parties next door that he hasn’t been invited to, in the end, he does nothing.
He likes to think of it in terms of physics. Objects at rest will remain at rest until they are acted on by a force. Benvolio can count the number of things that throw him into motion on one hand: his cousin, his best friend, whatever has happened to Tybalt, who Romeo has decided that they all collectively hate, his aunt and uncle, and… absolutely nothing else.
It’s stupid, really, how much his life relies on the people he loves.