CHAPTER 2: THE REPAIR SHOP HUSTLE
Three days of freezing his ass off in that abandoned building taught Ben a truth more fundamental than any of his mysterious powers: survival required resources.
He'd spent seventy-two hours scavenging the immediate area, pocketing anything his MacGyver Mind identified as potentially useful. Copper wire stripped from condemned walls. Bolts and screws from trash piles. A half-broken socket wrench some contractor had abandoned. The debris of urban decay became a toolkit, each piece carefully hoarded in his jacket pockets.
But he couldn't eat wire. Couldn't sleep in a doorway when January temperatures dropped below freezing. His thirty-seven dollars had shrunk to twelve after buying the cheapest food he could find—gas station hot dogs that tasted like regret and compressed sawdust.
He needed money. Shelter. A cover story that would survive scrutiny in a neighborhood where everyone knew everyone's business and strangers were either cops or threats.
The solution came on day three, during a systematic exploration of South Side's industrial areas. Ben's MacGyver Mind cataloged each abandoned building, analyzing structural integrity and potential uses. Most were either too damaged or too visible—squatter camps drew police attention, and police attention meant questions his fake ID couldn't answer.
Then he found the garage.
It sat behind a foreclosed house on a street that time had given up on. Two stories of house with boarded windows and a foreclosure notice peeling off the front door. Behind it, separated by an overgrown patch of dirt that might once have been a yard, stood a detached garage. Single story, roll-up door secured with a rusted padlock, concrete foundation that looked solid despite decades of neglect.
Ben's MacGyver Mind assessed it in seconds: structurally sound, roof intact except for minor leaks, electrical service still connected but shut off, plumbing capped but functional. The space was full of junk—rotting furniture, boxes of moldering paperwork, tools corroded beyond use—but the bones were good.
Perfect.
He circled the property twice, checking sight lines. The foreclosed house blocked direct view from the street. The neighboring houses were close but not too close. The old man next door was outside, smoking on his porch and watching Ben with the suspicious attention of someone who'd lived through enough bullshit to recognize more when it wandered into his sight line.
Time to test the Silver Tongue properly.
Ben approached the chainlink fence separating the properties, moving casual but purposeful. Not threatening, not sneaky. Just a guy out for a walk who happened to stop.
"Afternoon," he called out.
The old man—seventy if he was a day, weathered face and hands that spoke of manual labor—didn't respond. Just took another drag on his cigarette and watched.
"That garage," Ben said, pointing. "You know who owns it?"
"Bank, probably." The old man's voice was gravel scraping concrete. "Or the city. Owner died six months back. Family cleared out anything worth taking. Rest is garbage."
Ben nodded, letting silence stretch. His Silver Tongue stirred, suggesting approaches, but he held back. Rushing this would set off alarm bells. He needed the old man to think this was his idea.
"Shame," Ben said eventually. "Good space going to waste."
"You a cop?"
"No. Handyman." The lie came smooth, practiced. "Looking for somewhere to set up shop. Cheap rent, month-to-month, nothing official."
The old man's eyes narrowed, but Ben caught the calculation happening behind them. This neighborhood didn't run on official leases and credit checks. Everything was cash, under the table, off the books. And judging by the state of the old man's house—peeling paint, sagging gutters, yard that was more weeds than grass—money was tight.
Ben's Silver Tongue activated, words flowing with unconscious precision.
"I can fix things," he said. "Real cheap, nothing fancy. But I need workspace. Somewhere to keep tools, meet customers." He paused, let the implication hang. "Could probably handle maintenance on the properties too. Gutters, plumbing, whatever. Call it part of rent."
The old man took a final drag and flicked his cigarette into the dirt. "City might notice eventually. Might want to condemn it, tear it down."
"Might." Ben shrugged. "But that takes time. Paperwork. Meanwhile, space sits empty."
"How much you thinking?"
"What's fair for a garage with no electricity, no heat, and probably rats?"
A smile cracked the old man's weathered face. "Hundred a month. Cash. First and last upfront."
Ben countered. "Fifty. Month-to-month, no contract. I'll fix your gutters this week, clean them out properly."
"Seventy-five."
"Sixty, and I'll patch that roof leak I can see from here."
They shook on it. Ben handed over the last of his cash—exactly one hundred twenty dollars he'd earned the past two days doing odd jobs for people desperate enough not to ask questions. Two months' rent, burning through his emergency fund in one transaction.
But now he had a base. A workspace. A foothold in this world.
The old man—Mr. Kowalski, he said his name was—produced a key for the padlock and shuffled back to his porch without ceremony. Ben waited until he was inside before approaching the garage. The padlock was cheap, same type he'd picked on the abandoned building, but he used the key this time. The door rolled up with a shriek of protesting metal.
Junk. Exactly as advertised. But his MacGyver Mind saw past the garbage to the potential underneath. Clear this out, repair the worst damage, and he'd have a functioning repair shop within a week.
Ben got to work.
The first test of his fourth power came on day five.
He'd spent two days cleaning, organizing, making the garage habitable. Kowalski watched occasionally from his porch but never commented. The neighbors barely glanced his way—South Side had perfected the art of aggressive indifference. As long as you weren't causing problems, people left you alone.
Ben had acquired more tools through a combination of dumpster diving, pawn shops, and one carefully executed Silver Tongue con on a contractor who'd agreed to "lend" him equipment and promptly forgotten about it. His workspace was crude but functional.
He'd also been thinking about his fourth power. Illusion, his mind supplied when he concentrated on that particular awareness. The ability to make objects appear different than they were. Transmutation, but only visual. Temporary.
He needed to test it. Needed to understand the limits before he tried using it for anything serious.
Ben locked the garage door and pulled out a piece of scrap paper—part of an old letter he'd found in the junk. Plain white, slightly yellowed, meaningless.
He held it in both hands and focused.
The power responded like a muscle flexing. His vision blurred. The paper shimmered, edges becoming sharper, colors bleeding in like watercolor on wet canvas. Thirty seconds of concentration, and suddenly he was holding a twenty-dollar bill. It looked perfect. The texture felt right—that particular blend of cotton and linen that gave currency its distinctive crispness. The printing was immaculate, every line and serial number exactly where it should be.
Pain lanced through his skull. Ben gasped, nearly dropping the bill. His nose was bleeding—hot blood running over his lip, tasting of copper. The nosebleed was sudden and profuse, requiring him to tilt his head back and pinch his nostrils.
Five minutes later, the bleeding stopped. The twenty-dollar bill still looked real in his hand.
"Okay," Ben said aloud, voice nasally. "So that's the cost."
He tested the bill's properties methodically. It felt real. Weighed right. Even the holographic strip looked legitimate when held up to light. His MacGyver Mind confirmed this was indistinguishable from actual currency through any normal inspection.
But would it spend?
Only one way to find out.
Ben cleaned the blood off his face, grabbed his jacket, and walked three blocks to a corner store. The cashier was a tired-looking woman in her fifties who barely glanced up when he entered. He bought a pack of cigarettes—didn't smoke, but they were a standard purchase that wouldn't raise suspicion—and handed over the twenty.
She took it. Held it briefly to the light. Marked it with a counterfeit pen that showed green instead of black.
Made change.
Ben walked out with cigarettes and seventeen dollars in real money, his pulse hammering in his throat.
The power worked. Holy shit, it actually worked.
He made it two blocks before his Danger Intuition screamed a warning. Ben stopped mid-stride and patted his pocket. The change was still there. He pulled out the bills—
The twenty he'd received as change had reverted.
No, not reverted. Disappeared wasn't the right word. He was holding a scrap of newspaper, folded to roughly bill-size. The illusion had failed, and what remained was just... paper. Worth nothing.
"Six hours," Ben whispered, doing the math. He'd created the illusion at 2 PM. It was now just past 8 PM.
Six hours duration. Then reality reasserted itself.
That cashier had his face on camera. Had a piece of newspaper she thought was a twenty-dollar bill in her register. When someone noticed—when they reviewed transactions and found the discrepancy—there would be questions. Maybe police. Definitely attention he couldn't afford.
Ben's hands shook. The euphoria of successful testing curdled into ice-cold fear. He'd just committed fraud, left evidence, and his Danger Intuition had been screaming at him too late to matter.
"Stupid," he muttered. "So fucking stupid."
He walked back to the garage in a paranoid haze, checking over his shoulder every few seconds. The cigarettes went in the trash—evidence. He burned the newspaper in a barrel behind the garage, watching it curl into ash.
Lesson learned: the illusion power came with serious consequences. Six-hour duration meant careful planning, awareness of reversion timing, and the constant risk of exposure. It was a tool, not a solution. And like all tools, it could destroy the user as easily as help them.
That night, Ben lay on a salvaged mattress in his garage workshop and stared at exposed rafters. His nose still ached from the earlier bleeding. His head throbbed from the power's exertion. But he was alive. He had shelter. He had capabilities that should be impossible.
The question was: what would he do with them?
Sunday morning brought his first glimpse of the Gallaghers as real people rather than distant figures.
Ben was outside the garage at 11 AM, installing a hand-painted sign he'd made from salvaged plywood: BEN'S FIXES - CHEAP & FAST. Crude lettering, but his MacGyver Mind had guided his hand to make it legible and vaguely professional.
The Alibi Room was four blocks away, visible from where he stood. And at 11:47 AM exactly, Frank Gallagher stumbled out its door.
Ben recognized him instantly. The shambling gait. The stained clothes. The particular brand of pathetic that somehow radiated even from a distance. Frank weaved along the sidewalk like a ship taking on water, singing something off-key and incomprehensible.
On TV, Frank had been darkly comedic. A cartoon villain whose antics drove the plot. In person, he was just sad. A middle-aged man drowning in alcoholism, stinking of booze even from fifty feet away, ignored by every pedestrian who passed him.
Then Fiona appeared.
She came around the corner at a near-jog, grocery bags in both hands, hair pulled back in a messy ponytail. Even from a distance, Ben could see the exhaustion in her posture—shoulders hunched, movements efficient but weary. Twenty-two years old and already carrying the weight of six people's survival.
"Frank!" Her voice cut across the street. "Get your ass home!"
Frank turned, nearly fell, caught himself on a chainlink fence. "Fiona, my darling daughter—"
"Don't." She closed the distance, grabbed his arm with the practiced grip of someone who'd done this a thousand times. "You were supposed to watch Liam. I can't leave you alone for three fucking hours—"
"The boy is fine! Perfectly safe with his—"
"He's two. You left him in his crib while you went drinking."
Ben watched them through the gap between houses, frozen. This wasn't a TV show. This was a young woman dragging her drunk father home while juggling groceries, probably calculating whether she had enough food to feed everyone, probably wondering if Frank had stolen money from her purse again.
Fiona shoved Frank hard enough to make him stumble. He said something Ben couldn't hear. She responded by shoving him again, and this time Frank's expression flickered with something—shame, maybe, or anger, buried under the alcohol.
Ben's instinct was to intervene. Help carry the groceries. Offer some excuse to make this easier for her. His Silver Tongue stirred with suggestions, perfect words to smooth this scene.
Then his Danger Intuition pulsed.
Not physical danger. Social danger. The wrongness of interference. If he inserted himself into this moment—stranger offering help to a woman clearly in crisis—it would create suspicion. Questions. The kind of attention that revealed inconsistencies in his cover story.
Ben forced himself to turn away. Went back to hanging his sign, hands shaking slightly.
Behind him, Fiona's voice faded as she hauled Frank toward the house. The street returned to its normal ambient noise—cars, distant music, someone's dog barking.
He'd just watched the opening beats of season one play out in real life. Fiona being parentified. Frank being Frank. The machine of dysfunction grinding forward exactly as scripted.
And Ben had done nothing.
The weight of that inaction sat heavy in his chest as he finished mounting the sign. His workspace was ready. His cover story was established. He had powers that could change everything—or ruin everything worse.
But watching Fiona drag her father home, seeing the real exhaustion in her shoulders instead of an actress playing a role... that made the knowledge he carried feel less like advantage and more like curse.
He knew what was coming for them. Monica's return. Steve's secrets. The endless parade of disasters. And he'd have to watch it all happen, paralyzed by the uncertainty of whether his interference would be salvation or just a different flavor of catastrophe.
That night, Ben used his MacGyver Mind to repair an old radio he'd found in the junk. Got it working after two hours of tinkering. Tuned it to a local station playing late-night blues. Let the music fill the garage while he organized his tools, each one placed exactly where his power told him it should go for maximum efficiency.
The radio DJ announced the date: January 11th, 2011. Episode one would air tonight on whatever channel Shameless premiered on. Somewhere in the original universe, people were watching the pilot, laughing at Frank's antics, rooting for Fiona.
Here, Ben was living in that pilot. Breathing its air. Trying to survive its reality.
He turned off the radio eventually. Lay on his mattress in the dark. His four powers hummed in his awareness like background radiation—always there, always ready, always tempting him to use them.
The Gallagher house was invisible from here, but Ben knew its direction. Knew what was happening inside. Knew the stories that would unfold if he did nothing.
Whether he had the right to interfere didn't matter anymore.
He was here. He was alive. And doing nothing was itself a choice.
The question was: which choice would he regret less?
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