The first time that Ben meets Claire, he’s nineteen and she has just turned seventeen. Although he’s still joe normal at this point, still thinks that the world is understandable and the supernatural only exists in television and movies, it’s a memorable first meeting.
It’s hard to forget pulling someone out of the wreckage of their car.
He doesn’t even know what happened that night. Only that he stumbled across the destroyed car and found an unconscious girl in the driver’s seat. He managed to get her out and checked her for injuries before calling the police.
Miraculously, she was uninjured. She also disappeared from the hospital over night. It was only later that he found out that her name was Claire Novak, and she had disappeared along with her mother five years earlier. They had left a dead body behind, and both had been wanted for questioning.
–
The second time that Claire and Ben meet, she is nineteen and he is twenty one. Even if she had been conscious when he pulled her from the wreck, she wouldn’t have recognized him as the same man. He’s lost a lot of the muscle and bulk that had helped to rescue her, and he has shaved all of his hair off. Curling away from his temple is a long line of stitches holding together a rather nasty looking gash.
She’s not impressed. She’s seen a lot of hunters take some pretty severe damage from stupid stunts, and this looks like just another idiot looking to get himself killed. Still… he’s the guy she’s here to see, the guy who jumped through all the hoops to even get her number, let alone the thousand and one checks she put him through just to make sure he was neither angel nor demon.
When they part, he has her personal cellphone number, and she has the first of many stories about how he got the head wound.
–
Their third meeting is a year later, when Claire finds herself on a hunt that crosses his. Claire has been tracking a demon for months, and Ben has found himself on a salt and burn directly in the demon’s path. It’s Ben’s first encounter with a real demon since he turned hunter, but Claire is stunned to discover that he actually knows what he’s doing.
They manage to exorcise the demon, and burn the ghost, all in the same two hour span. Claire manages two beers before she’s falling asleep, and Ben lets her crash in his motel room instead of the in the backseat of her car.
He’s still shaving his head, and she gets another story about the scar when he catches her staring at it. She smacks him upside the head in response. He promises to call her if anything demon related winds up on his radar.
He calls her every couple of weeks even when it doesn’t.
–
The fourth meeting is on purpose, with Claire bringing a blessed weapon to Ben so he can destroy the creature that has been plaguing a mid-western town for six months. It’s not an exaggeration, either; the creature feasts upon diseased souls, and the entire town is under quarantine when she arrives.
Claire kicks up a fuss when she finally tracks Ben down and discovers that his scar has split open. It’s not the puss and blood that scares her— it’s the ectoplasm slowly oozing out of it.
Ben kisses her to get her to shut up.
–
The fifth time doesn’t have anything to do with the supernatural or life threatening situations.
Ben takes her out to dinner and a movie, and they both wind up throwing popcorn at the screen. They really should have known better than to pick a vampire flick.
–
It’s not until she’s twenty-two that she finds out that the scar came from brain surgery, and it takes meeting his mother to learn that. He rolls his eyes and complains about losing his mystique thankyouverymuch mom.