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Benjamin wasn’t born with an innate desire to see the stars. He wasn’t an explorer, he wasn’t a dreamer. His world was a much more concrete one, growing up in a colony in the Eta Draconis system. His mother died when he was young and his father worked the mines, leaving Benjamin mostly alone with his siblings. He quickly learned to be the responsible one, as though they had a loving father who tried his best, long hours in the mines left him either absent or exhausted. He stayed long enough to see his brother and sister off to universities off-planet, and then joined up with a long-haul freighter out to the edges of known space, glad to finally bid the bleak mines farewell and take up his love of machines and engineering rather than caretaking.
He served a few years making runs between outer colonies and Ferengi space when, as often happens in these stories, he met a girl. Her name was Iris, and she owned a small boutique in on Allanis, the home port of his current ship the Aces Wild, the ship he was currently on. They hit it off one night at a small bar he frequented, and after a couple months of meeting up every time he came back, they got married. His ship didn’t allow families, but that was alright – the run was a fairly short one, and he was home with her at minimum two days every week. They’d both known the kind of work he was in when they married.
During a run through Ferengi space, there was an accident in engineering. They were testing a replacement conduit they had gotten from a less-than-trustworthy merchant, when it failed during a pressure test. Shrapnel lodged in his eye, and was beyond the skill of their medic to repair. Due to a lack of credit and low available funds, he wasn’t able to get much more than a functional replacement from the Ferengi hospital he was taken to. When he got back to Federation space, he inquired about getting it and the scarring healed, but discovered the Ferengi rushed the job and it wasn’t attached to the optic nerve correctly, so replacement could wind up damaging the nerve beyond repair. For fear that things would simply get worse, and since the eye he had was functional - if a little glitchy - he simply kept it and made the best of it. Besides, Iris thought the scar gave him a roguish air, which made her happy, and so he was happy, too.
