The morning after the museum incident was, by Tennyson standards, almost peaceful.
Almost.
The Rust Bucket was parked at a campground just outside D.C., nestled between two oak trees that were, for the moment, not on fire. Max had made pancakes—regular pancakes, with regular ingredients, from a regular box, because he had decided that normalcy needed to be actively, aggressively cultivated like a fragile plant in hostile soil. Normal pancakes. Normal syrup. Normal orange juice.
Normal.
Please, God, let something be normal.
Ben was eating pancakes. He was eating them with the mechanical, dissociative efficiency of someone processing a backlog of traumatic experiences and choosing to deal with them by not dealing with them. Bite. Chew. Swallow. Don't think about the chest. Bite. Chew. Swallow. Don't think about how warm it was. Bite. Chew. Swallow. Don't think about the fact that you fell asleep in it and it was the most comfortable you've been in your entire—
Bite. Chew. Swallow.
Don't.
Gwen was sitting across from him at the dinette table, and she was... different this morning.
Not transformed-different. She was human. Fully human. Small, orange-haired, ten-year-old, cat-pajama-wearing human Gwen Tennyson, eating a pancake with a fork and knife because she was the kind of person who used a fork and knife for pancakes.
But something had shifted.
Ben couldn't put his finger on it. She wasn't staring at the Omnitrix—well, she was glancing at it, the way someone might glance at their phone, but not the obsessive, unblinking, soul-consuming STARE of the last few days. She wasn't ranting about timeouts. She wasn't writing in her notebook. She wasn't calculating recharge cycles or composing angry letters to alien civilizations.
She was looking at him.
Not the desperate, all-consuming, I-need-to-hold-you-or-I'll-die look of Heatblast-Gwen. Not the frantic, vibrating, your-hair-is-soft-and-I-counted-47,000-strands look of XLR8-Gwen. Something... quieter. Softer. A look that lived in the space between the old Gwen (who would rather eat glass than compliment him) and the transformed Gwen (who would rather die than stop complimenting him).
She was smiling at him.
Just... smiling. While eating a pancake.
It was, somehow, more unsettling than any alien transformation.
"What?" Ben said.
"Nothing."
"You're looking at me."
"I'm looking in your general direction. You happen to be in it."
"You're SMILING."
"People smile, Ben. It's a facial expression. We learned about it in second grade."
"You don't smile at ME. You smile at GRADES and AWARDS and ALPHABETIZED BOOKSHELVES."
"Maybe I'm expanding my smile portfolio."
"Your WHAT?"
"Eat your pancakes, Ben."
He ate his pancakes. She kept smiling. The Omnitrix pulsed softly on her wrist—recharged, ready, waiting.
Gwen glanced at it.
Glanced at Ben.
Glanced at the Omnitrix.
The smile widened.
Ben felt a chill that had nothing to do with temperature.
"I'm going to transform," Gwen announced, approximately forty-five minutes later.
They were outside, in the campground's communal area. Max was at the picnic table doing something on his phone that was either checking email or coordinating with an intergalactic paramilitary organization. Ben was sitting in a camp chair, reading a Sumo Slammers comic he'd found wedged behind the Rust Bucket's toilet, trying very hard to pretend yesterday hadn't happened.
"Why?" Max asked, not looking up from his phone.
"Because I want to."
"What's the threat?"
"There's no threat."
"Then why—"
"Because I WANT to, Grandpa. Because it's been—" She checked an invisible clock. "—fourteen hours since I was Heatblast, and fourteen hours is a VERY long time, and I've been VERY patient, and I ate your pancakes, and I didn't yell at the Omnitrix ONCE this morning—"
"That's true," Ben acknowledged grudgingly. "It was weird."
"—and I think I've earned a transformation. A recreational transformation. For... recreation."
Max studied her. She was standing in the middle of the campsite with her hands clasped behind her back, bouncing slightly on her heels, radiating the energy of a child who'd been VERY good and wanted EVERYONE to acknowledge it.
"Rules," Max said.
"Rules."
"Don't burn anything."
"I won't burn anything."
"Don't grab Ben."
"I—" She paused. Considered. "I won't grab Ben WITHOUT PERMISSION."
"That's not what I—"
"Those are my terms, Grandpa. I'm COMPROMISING. You should be PROUD of me."
Max looked at Ben. Ben looked at Max. A silent conversation occurred—the kind that could only happen between two people who had been through a shared ordeal and had developed a shorthand for "she's going to do it anyway, isn't she?"
Max sighed.
The Sigh. Capital S. The one that would be engraved on his tombstone.
"...Fine. But—"
Click. Slam.
She was already transforming.
Heatblast. Again. Always.
The slow, luxurious, savoring transformation—the warmth spreading from her wrist, the magma-skin crawling across her body with unhurried grace, each inch accompanied by a soft, pleased sound from Gwen that Ben was trying VERY HARD not to think about.
The growth. The expansion. The hips widening, the thighs thickening, the waist cinching, the chest—the chest—swelling forward with ponderous, geological inevitability. The fire-hair erupting in a cascade of yellow-white flame. The eyes blazing open, white-hot and focused.
Focused on Ben.
"Hi," Heatblast-Gwen said, and her voice was a warm furnace, a crackling hearth, a mug of cocoa given the power of speech.
"Hi," Ben said warily, from his camp chair. He had not run. This was progress. He was also gripping the armrests of the camp chair so tightly that his knuckles were white, which was less progress.
She stood there for a moment. Seven feet. Volcanic. Curves that didn't belong in the same conversation as physics. Fire-hair dancing in a breeze that she was generating herself through sheer ambient heat.
And then she did something she hadn't done before.
She walked.
Not toward Ben. Not with purpose or intent or the focused, target-locked stride of a heat-seeking missile with a Ben-shaped guidance system. She just... walked. Around the campsite. Slowly. Casually.
And she was swinging her hips.
Now, Heatblast-Gwen's hips had always been... present. They were impossible to ignore. They were the architectural equivalent of flying buttresses on a cathedral—massive, prominent, structurally significant, and visible from several blocks away. Every step she'd taken in every previous transformation had involved them, because they were attached to her body and her body had to move and when it moved, they moved, because that was how bodies worked.
But this was different.
This wasn't the incidental, unavoidable motion of enormous hips being transported from point A to point B. This was deliberate. This was intentional. This was a performance.
She walked past the picnic table, and her hips swayed to the left—a slow, heavy, rolling motion that shifted approximately two hundred pounds of volcanic mass through an arc that could have been measured with surveying equipment. The air rippled. The ground trembled. The picnic table creaked as the displacement wave hit it.
She walked past the Rust Bucket, and her hips swayed to the right—the same slow, heavy, gravitational motion, like watching a planet wobble on its axis. Her fire-hair trailed behind her, flickering in the wind she was creating, and her tail—wait, Heatblast didn't have a tail—her fire-train, the trail of dancing flames that followed her lower half like the world's most dramatic bridal train, swept across the ground in a wide arc.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Each swing was accompanied by a sound—a deep, soft, geological whomp as the sheer mass of her lower body completed each pendulum-like oscillation. It was hypnotic. It was rhythmic. It was the tectonic equivalent of a metronome.
Whomp. Left.
Whomp. Right.
Whomp. Left.
Ben watched.
He didn't mean to watch. He was reading his comic. He was VERY focused on his comic. Sumo Slammers issue #47, "The Revenge of Kenko," a gripping narrative about—about—
Whomp.
—about something. Something that wasn't hips. Something that was a comic book and was in his hands and was very interesting and—
Whomp.
Gwen walked past him. Close. Not touching—she'd promised not to grab without permission—but close enough that he could feel the heat, could see the glow of the magma-veins pulsing across the landscape of her hip as it swung past at approximately eye level.
She glanced down at him.
She winked.
A Heatblast wink. One blazing white eye closing briefly, a flicker of flame dancing across the lid, accompanied by a smile that could have lit a city.
Then she kept walking. Whomp. Whomp. Whomp.
"What are you DOING?" Ben asked, and his voice came out approximately one octave higher than intended.
"Walking," Gwen said innocently.
"You're not WALKING. You're—you're doing something ELSE."
"I'm walking, Ben. In a campsite. Is walking not ALLOWED?"
"Not like THAT!"
"Like what?" She turned to face him—a maneuver that involved rotating her entire lower body through a 180-degree arc, her hips tracing a circle in space that briefly blocked out the sun. "I'm just WALKING. With my LEGS. Which are attached to my BODY. I can't help how my body MOVES."
"You're SWINGING."
"My body has a natural GAIT, Ben. It's called BIOMECHANICS. Look it up."
"That's not BIOMECHANICS! That's—that's—"
"That's what?"
He didn't have a word. He was ten. His vocabulary for what Gwen was doing extended approximately as far as "weird" and "making me feel strange" and he wasn't about to say the second one out loud.
"It's WEIRD," he settled on.
"Mm-hmm." Gwen turned and walked away again. Whomp. Whomp. Whomp. Over her shoulder—her massive, glowing, volcanic shoulder—she added: "Weird good or weird bad?"
"Just WEIRD!"
"That's not an answer, Ben."
"IT'S THE ONLY ANSWER YOU'RE GETTING."
She giggled.
Giggled.
Heatblast—seven feet of living magma and geological excess, a being of fire and fury and impossible proportions—giggled. The sound was extraordinary. It started somewhere deep in her chest—Ben's brain immediately, traitorously supplied the memory of having his face in that chest and feeling vibrations very similar to this—and bubbled upward through layers of volcanic rock and molten lava until it emerged from her lips as a cascade of warm, crackling notes, like a campfire laughing.
It was, objectively, a beautiful sound.
Ben's comic was upside down. He did not notice.
Max sat at the picnic table, watching his granddaughter walk laps around the campsite with the exaggerated hip-swing of a runway model who'd been redesigned by a geological survey team, while his grandson sat in a camp chair with a comic book he wasn't reading and a facial expression he would later deny ever having made.
Max questioned his life choices.
Not all of them. Some of them had been excellent. Joining the Plumbers: good choice. Marrying Verdona: complicated but ultimately rewarding choice. Having kids: great choice. Buying the Rust Bucket: debatable but sentimental choice.
Letting his grandchildren go camping near the projected landing coordinates of the most powerful piece of technology in the galaxy: catastrophically bad choice.
He sipped his coffee. It was cold. He didn't care.
Gwen completed another lap. Whomp. Whomp. Whomp. She passed by Ben's camp chair, and this time she slowed down—not stopping, just... lingering. Letting the heat wash over him. Letting the glow of her magma-skin paint warm light across his face.
"Nice day," she said conversationally.
"Mm," Ben said. His comic was sideways now.
"Good weather."
"Mm."
"Your hair looks nice today."
"Mm—wait, WHAT?"
But she was already past, walking away, whomp whomp whomp, her fire-hair swaying, her laughter trailing behind her like sparks from a Roman candle.
Ben's face was red.
Not from the heat.
Twenty minutes into the recreational transformation, Gwen stopped walking.
She'd been circling the campsite like a volcanic satellite in a decaying orbit, each lap bringing her slightly closer to Ben's camp chair, the radius tightening by imperceptible degrees. She was now approximately five feet away—close enough to touch, if she extended one of her long, glowing arms. Close enough that the heat rolling off her was a tangible presence, a warm pressure against Ben's skin.
She stopped. Turned. Faced him fully.
Ben looked up from his comic (which was now not only upside down but also open to a page he'd already read three times without absorbing a single panel).
"What?" he said.
Gwen tilted her head. Her fire-hair cascaded over one shoulder, individual flames licking at the air. Her blazing white eyes studied him with an intensity that was somehow different from her usual all-consuming adoration. There was still the warmth, still the love, still the bone-deep certainty that Ben was the center of all things. But there was something else now. Something new. Something that made the corners of her mouth curve upward in a way that was less "doting caretaker" and more—
More what?
Ben didn't know. But it made his stomach do a thing.
"Can I ask you something?" Gwen said.
"...I guess."
"Yesterday. In the museum. When you fell asleep."
Ben's grip on the comic tightened. "I didn't fall asleep. I was resting my eyes. In your chest. Which I didn't enjoy."
"When you were resting your eyes," Gwen amended, with a patience that suggested she was willing to accept any narrative framework as long as the conversation continued in the direction she wanted. "You said something."
Ben's blood went cold. Which was an achievement, given that he was sitting five feet from a living furnace.
"I didn't say anything."
"You did."
"I was ASLEEP. I mean—I was RESTING MY EYES. With my mouth closed. In SILENCE."
"You talk in your sleep, Ben."
"I DO NOT—"
"You said 'warm.'"
Silence.
"You said 'warm' and then you nuzzled closer. I felt it. Your face shifted approximately two degrees to the left, deeper into my chest, and you said 'warm' in this tiny little voice, and your fingers tightened on my arm, and—"
"OKAY. Okay. Maybe I said 'warm.' Because it WAS warm. Because you are LITERALLY MADE OF FIRE. That's not—that doesn't MEAN anything—"
"And then you said 'Gwen.'"
Oh no.
"You said 'warm' and then you said 'Gwen.' In that order. 'Warm' and then 'Gwen.' Like they were the same thing."
"I was DREAMING about DINOSAURS—"
"Were the dinosaurs named Gwen?"
"MAYBE! DREAM DINOSAURS CAN BE NAMED ANYTHING!"
Gwen took a step closer. Then another. She was right in front of his camp chair now, towering over him—seven feet of volcanic warmth and confident, deliberate, intentional presence. She wasn't grabbing. She wasn't scooping. She was just... standing there. Close. Looking down at him with those blazing eyes and that new, strange, stomach-doing-things smile.
"I want to try something," she said.
"No."
"You don't know what it is."
"The answer is still no."
"It's not a hug."
"...It's not?"
"It's not a hug. It's not a grab. It's not a chest thing." She paused. "Well. It's adjacent to a chest thing. Chest-adjacent."
"What does CHEST-ADJACENT mean?!"
"Can I kneel down?"
"You're ASKING?"
"I'm asking."
Ben stared at her. Heatblast-Gwen, asking permission. Not grabbing. Not scooping. Not deploying the four-armed emergency embrace or the volcanic chest snuggle or any of the other tactics she'd developed over the last four days for maximum Ben acquisition.
Asking.
"...You can kneel down," he said cautiously.
She knelt.
Even kneeling, she was taller than him sitting in the camp chair—her torso rising above him, her fire-hair casting warm dancing light across his face, her chest approximately at his forehead level. But she wasn't pressing forward. She wasn't closing the gap. She was just... there. Present. Close.
"Can I touch your face?" she asked.
Ben's heart did something. Something it had no business doing. Something that felt like a skipped beat, except it was more like a beat that happened twice in quick succession, a cardiac stutter that sent a flush up his neck and into his cheeks.
"...Why?"
"Because I want to."
"That's not a REASON."
"It's the only reason I have."
He looked at her. At her face—still recognizably Gwen, even rendered in magma and light. The high cheekbones. The determined set of the jaw. The eyes that were white-hot and blazing but somehow still managed to convey the specific, unique brand of Gwen Tennyson stubbornness that he'd known his entire life.
"...Fine. You can touch my face."
Her hand came up. Slowly. Not at the speed she was capable of—not the lightning-fast snatch that could grab him before he blinked. Slowly, deliberately, giving him every chance to pull away.
Her palm cupped his cheek.
Warm.
Not hot. Not burning. The same 78 degrees she'd calibrated for him, the temperature she'd determined through careful experimentation was his optimal comfort point. Her volcanic skin was smooth against his face—not rough, not sharp, impossibly, inexplicably soft. The magma-veins in her palm pulsed gently, and he could feel her heartbeat through the contact.
Bu-bum. Bu-bum. Bu-bum.
"Ben," she said, and her voice was barely above a whisper—a warm whisper, a whisper made of embers and honey and the crackle of a fire that would burn forever if she had anything to say about it.
"...Yeah?"
"I'm going to do something."
"What—"
She leaned in.
She leaned in slowly.
She leaned in with the deliberate, unhurried, absolutely intentional motion of someone who knew exactly what they were doing and wanted him to know it too. Her face descended toward his—her massive, glowing, volcanic face, framed by curtains of fire-hair, lit from within by the light of a living star.
Ben's brain sent an urgent alert. Multiple urgent alerts. A cascade of urgent alerts that amounted to SOMETHING IS HAPPENING, SOMETHING IS HAPPENING, WHAT IS HAPPENING, WHY IS HER FACE GETTING CLOSER, WHY IS—
Her lips touched his.
Warm.
That was the first thing. The overwhelming, all-encompassing, brain-dissolving warmth.
Heatblast-Gwen's lips were—like everything else about her—impossible. They were made of volcanic rock. They should have been hard, rough, scalding. They were none of these things. They were soft—the same impossible, physics-defying, material-science-laughing softness that characterized her chest, concentrated into two points of contact that pressed against Ben's mouth with a tenderness that was almost unbearable.
The temperature was perfect. 78 degrees at the contact surface, because Gwen had calibrated everything, because Gwen calibrated everything, because she was Gwen and data-driven optimization was her love language even when her actual love language was apparently this.
The kiss was gentle. Not aggressive, not consuming, not the overwhelming force of Heatblast-Gwen's usual physical affection. It was light. Careful. A question asked in warmth instead of words.
It lasted three seconds.
Three seconds during which Ben Tennyson's brain performed the following operations:
Second One: WHAT.
Second Two: WHAT WHAT WHAT WHAT WHAT WHAT—
Second Three: [CRITICAL ERROR: COGNITION.EXE HAS STOPPED RESPONDING. PLEASE REBOOT.]
She pulled back.
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
His face was the color of a fire truck. Not because of her heat—her temperature control was, as always, flawless. Because every drop of blood in his body had apparently decided, in committee, to relocate to his face.
His mouth was open. Not in speech. Not forming words. Just... open. A aperture with no signal coming through it.
His eyes were wide. Not blinking. Possibly not capable of blinking. Two brown circles of absolute, total, catastrophic system failure.
His comic book was on the ground. He'd dropped it. He hadn't noticed.
His hands were still in the position they'd been holding the comic. Frozen. Mid-grip. Holding nothing.
"Ben?" Gwen said.
Nothing.
"Ben?"
Nothing.
"...Ben?"
His mouth closed. Opened. Closed again. His lips moved—tiny, mechanical movements, attempting to form words, failing, attempting again, failing again. A goldfish on a warm rock. A computer trying to load a program too large for its memory.
"Buh," he said.
"...Ben?"
"Buh."
"Are you okay?"
"Buh."
Gwen tilted her head. Her fire-hair cascaded to one side. The smile on her face was—
It was everything.
It wasn't the all-consuming adoration of early Heatblast-Gwen, the obsessive need to hold and protect and smother. It wasn't the sharp, dismissive confidence of old Gwen. It was something in between. Something new. A warm, pleased, slightly mischievous smile that lived in the exact center of the Venn diagram between "I love you unconditionally" and "I know exactly what I just did and I am DELIGHTED."
She giggled again. That warm, crackling, campfire-laughing sound, bubbling up from deep in her volcanic chest and spilling out of her like sparks.
"You're doing the thing," she said.
"Buh."
"The thing where your brain stops working. You did it when I first transformed. And when I picked you up the first time. But this one is—" She giggled again, her massive shoulders shaking with the effort of containing it. "—this one is the BEST one. Your face is SO red, Ben. And your heartbeat went—" She placed her free hand over his chest, feeling the hammering rhythm beneath his shirt. "—oh my gosh. It went SO fast. It went like—bababababababa. Like a hummingbird."
"Buh."
"Was that your first kiss?"
"BUH."
"It was MY first kiss. Well—Heatblast-me's first kiss. Which is also my first kiss. Because we're the same person. Which means I just had my first kiss." She processed this. Her own flames brightened—a visible blush, rendered in fire. "Oh. Oh. I just had my first kiss."
"WHAT DID YOU DO?!" Ben's voice came back online with the force of a dam breaking. "WHAT DID YOU JUST—YOU KISSED ME! YOU KISSED ME ON THE MOUTH! ON THE—THE—WITH YOUR—"
"Lips," Gwen supplied helpfully.
"WITH YOUR LIPS! YOUR LAVA LIPS! ON MY MOUTH! THAT'S MY MOUTH! THAT'S WHERE I EAT FOOD AND SAY WORDS AND YOU PUT YOUR LIPS ON IT!"
"Yes."
"WHY?!"
"Because I wanted to."
"THAT'S NOT A—GWEN, YOU'RE MY COUSIN!"
"And?"
"AND?! AND?! 'AND' ISN'T A RESPONSE TO 'YOU'RE MY COUSIN'! THE RESPONSE TO 'YOU'RE MY COUSIN' IS 'OH NO, YOU'RE RIGHT, I SHOULDN'T HAVE DONE THAT'!"
"But I don't feel that way." She said it simply. Plainly. Without a shred of doubt or hesitation. "I feel like I should do it again."
"DO NOT DO IT AGAIN!"
"Your heartbeat says differently."
"MY HEARTBEAT IS PANICKING! PANICKING AND ENJOYING SOMETHING FEEL THE SAME FROM THE OUTSIDE!"
"Do they?"
Ben opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"I need to go somewhere," he said. "Somewhere that isn't here. Somewhere that doesn't have you in it."
"That sounds terrible."
"It sounds NECESSARY."
He stood up. His legs were not cooperating. They were doing the thing that legs do when their owner has recently experienced a paradigm-shifting event and the body hasn't caught up—wobbling, uncertain, like a baby deer on a frozen lake.
He took one step. Wobbled. Took another. His face was still the color of a sunset. His brain was still performing emergency diagnostics.
Gwen watched him go with that smile. That warm, pleased, knowing smile that suggested she understood things he hadn't figured out yet and was perfectly willing to wait for him to catch up.
Then she stood up. To her full, towering, seven-foot height.
And she started walking after him.
Whomp. Whomp. Whomp.
Hips swinging.
Max had watched the whole thing.
He'd been sitting at the picnic table, ostensibly on his phone, actually watching his granddaughter kneel in front of his grandson, cup his face, and kiss him.
On the lips.
His ten-year-old granddaughter. His ten-year-old grandson. Who were cousins.
One of whom was currently a seven-foot fire alien with proportions that could be described as "aggressively hypothetical."
Max set down his phone.
He picked up his coffee.
He drank the entire cup in one long, slow, contemplative pull.
He set the cup down.
He stared at the middle distance—the specific middle distance that veterans stare at when they're reviewing the chain of decisions that led them to their current situation and finding every single link insufficient.
I could have retired to Florida, he thought. I could have bought a condo. I could have taken up golf. I could be on a golf course right now. In Florida. Where the only things on fire are the occasional sinkhole and my friend Jerry's marriage.
Instead, I'm watching my volcanic granddaughter chase my other grandchild around a campground because she kissed him and he's having a neurological event.
He looked at the Rust Bucket. The Rust Bucket looked back with the mute sympathy of a vehicle that had seen too much.
I did this to myself, Max thought. I chose this. I chose the camping trip. I chose the campground near the Omnitrix drop coordinates. I chose to let two ten-year-olds near the most powerful device in the galaxy.
This is my fault.
Everything is my fault.
He picked up his phone. Dialed a number.
"...Hey, Phil. Yeah. It's Max. Listen, do you know any good therapists? Not for me. Well—maybe for me. Definitely for my grandson. Probably for my granddaughter, but I'm not sure therapy works on someone who's on fire half the time."
A pause.
"No, I'm not joking. When have I ever joked about family therapy?"
A longer pause.
"...Okay, that time with the Null Void was different. This is—Phil, just—do you know a therapist or not?"
Ben had made it approximately two hundred yards from the campsite before Gwen caught up.
Not because she was fast—Heatblast was actually one of her slower forms. Because Ben's legs had staged a general strike after approximately fifty yards and he'd been reduced to a fast walk that was more "controlled stumbling" than "actual locomotion."
He heard her coming. Whomp. Whomp. Whomp. The seismic announcement of approaching hips. The soft crackle of fire-hair. The gentle hiss of grass igniting and extinguishing under volcanic feet.
"Go AWAY, Gwen."
"No."
"I need SPACE."
"Space is cold and empty and doesn't have me in it. You don't want space."
"I DEFINITELY want space."
"Your ears are red."
"My ears are NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS."
"They're red because blood is flowing to them because your heart is pumping fast because of the kiss. I can hear your heart from here, Ben. It's still going fast. It hasn't slowed down since I kissed you. That was four minutes ago."
"STOP MONITORING MY HEART!"
"I can't. It's my favorite sound. I told you that."
He spun around. She was right behind him—five feet back, maintaining the distance, not grabbing, not scooping—just following. Walking with that hip-swinging, ground-trembling, reality-warping gait, her hands behind her back, her expression the picture of innocent, volcanic contentment.
"WHY did you kiss me?!" Ben demanded.
"Because you're my favorite person."
"Cousins don't KISS cousins!"
"This cousin does."
"On the MOUTH, Gwen! That's—that's a ROMANTIC thing! That's a thing that ROMANTIC people do! We are NOT romantic people!"
"Aren't we?" She tilted her head. Fire-hair cascaded. Sparks danced.
"NO! We are COUSINS! We are RELATED! We share GENETIC MATERIAL!"
"I'm currently a Pyronite. I don't think I HAVE genetic material right now. I think I have geological material."
"THAT'S NOT THE POINT!"
"What IS the point?"
Ben sputtered. Floundered. His brain, which had only recently come back online, was threatening to crash again under the strain of trying to articulate why kissing your cousin was wrong to someone who was made of lava and absolutely certain it was right.
"The point is—the point—you can't just KISS people! Without ASKING! That's—Grandpa told you not to GRAB me without permission and KISSING is—is—"
"I asked to touch your face."
"Touching my face and KISSING MY MOUTH are DIFFERENT LEVELS OF CONTACT!"
"I'll ask next time."
"THERE WON'T BE A NEXT TIME!"
"I'll ask very politely."
"GWEN!"
She giggled. That warm, crackling giggle, and she did the hip thing—the deliberate, rolling sway—and Ben's brain sent another urgent notification that he aggressively dismissed.
"Why are you WALKING like that?!" he demanded, gesturing at her lower half—at the slow, pendulous, absolutely-intentional oscillation of approximately four hundred pounds of volcanic hip.
"Like what?"
"Like THAT! Like you're—like you're TRYING to—"
"Trying to what, Ben?"
He didn't have words for what. He was ten. His vocabulary for the concept that Gwen was currently embodying consisted entirely of a vague, formless sense that something was happening and he didn't understand it and it was making his face hot independently of her ambient temperature.
"Just STOP it!"
"Stop walking?"
"Stop walking like THAT!"
"I can't help it. This body has a natural center of gravity that—"
"You are DOING IT ON PURPOSE."
Gwen smiled. The mischievous one. The new one. The one that had appeared today and was, Ben was beginning to realize, significantly more dangerous than any of her previous expressions.
"Maybe," she said.
"MAYBE?!"
"Maybe I'm walking like this on purpose. Maybe I noticed that when I do—" She executed a particularly dramatic hip swing, one that shifted approximately a quarter ton of volcanic mass through a slow, deliberate arc. "—this, you look at me differently."
"I look at you like you're CRAZY!"
"That's not how you're looking at me right now."
"HOW AM I LOOKING AT YOU RIGHT NOW?!"
"Like I just kissed you and you didn't hate it."
Silence.
Absolute. Total. Nuclear silence.
The kind of silence that happens when a statement lands so precisely, so accurately, so devastatingly on target that the recipient's entire defensive infrastructure collapses simultaneously and there is simply nothing left to say.
Ben's mouth opened. Closed. Opened. Closed.
His face, which had been the color of a fire truck, achieved a new shade—a shade that could only be described as "emergency" and that probably didn't exist on any standard color chart.
"I—" he started.
"You what?"
"I—I HATED it. I hated it SO MUCH. It was the WORST. It was TERRIBLE. Your lips were—were—"
Soft, his brain supplied, completely unbidden and deeply unhelpfully. They were so soft. And warm. And they tasted like—what did they taste like? Campfire. Cinnamon. Something sweet. Something—
"—HORRIBLE," Ben finished, loudly, over the sound of his own treacherous thoughts. "Your lips were HORRIBLE and I HATED it and I am going to FORGET it happened and I am NEVER going to think about it again EVER."
"Okay," Gwen said.
"OKAY?!"
"Okay. You hated it. You're going to forget about it. I understand." She paused. Smiled. "Can I kiss you again?"
"WHAT PART OF 'I HATED IT' SUGGESTS—"
"The part where you're still here. The part where you stopped running. The part where—" She took a step closer, and her voice dropped to a warm, low, intimate register that resonated through the ground. "—the part where your heart is beating so fast right now that if I were still XLR8, even I couldn't keep up with it."
Ben took a step back. His back hit a tree.
Gwen took a step forward. She was close now. Very close. The heat radiating off her was a tangible thing—not uncomfortable, never uncomfortable, always that perfect 78 degrees at the contact surface—but present. Enveloping. Like being wrapped in a blanket made of starlight.
"One more," she said softly. "Just one more. And this time—" She lowered herself, kneeling again, bringing her face level with his. Her blazing eyes were gentle. Her smile was gentle. Everything about her, in this moment, despite the fire and the impossible proportions and the geological absurdity of her existence—was gentle.
"—this time, you can say no. And I'll stop. And I'll never do it again."
She waited.
The forest was quiet. The birds had relocated (as they always did around Heatblast). The insects had wisely sought cooler locations. The only sounds were the soft crackle of Gwen's fire-hair and the rapid, hammering, deafening sound of Ben's heart, which he was absolutely certain she could hear and which was absolutely, categorically, DEFINITIVELY not communicating what she thought it was communicating.
"...No," Ben said.
Gwen's expression didn't change. The smile didn't waver. The gentleness didn't flicker.
"Okay," she said. "Okay, Ben."
She leaned back. Started to stand.
"No, I mean—" Ben's hand shot out. Grabbed her arm. Her massive, glowing, volcanic arm, warm under his fingers. "I mean—no, I—"
His brain and his mouth were in open warfare. His brain was screaming WHAT ARE YOU DOING. His mouth was operating under the authority of some other part of him—some deep, irrational, recently-kissed part that had opinions his brain hadn't approved.
"I mean no, don't—don't stop. I mean—"
He closed his eyes.
"One more," he whispered. "But I'm NOT enjoying it."
Gwen's face could have lit the entire eastern seaboard.
She leaned in again. Slowly. Giving him every chance to change his mind. Her hand came up—the same gentle cupping of his cheek, the same perfect warmth, the same pulse of her heartbeat against his skin.
She kissed him.
Not longer than before. Not more intense. The same gentle, warm, three-second press of impossible softness against his lips. The same perfect temperature. The same everything.
But this time, Ben's hands came up and rested—lightly, barely, almost imperceptibly—on her arms.
Holding on.
She pulled back. Their eyes met—blazing white and deep brown. Fire alien and human boy. Cousin and cousin.
"Buh," Ben said.
Gwen giggled.
From two hundred yards away, at the campsite, Max Tennyson watched through binoculars that were far more powerful than any civilian model.
He lowered them.
He stared at nothing.
He picked up his phone.
He dialed.
"Phil. It's Max again. Forget the therapist. I need two therapists. And a lawyer. And possibly a priest." He paused. "And tell me about that golf course in Florida. The one with the condos."
A long pause.
"I know I said I'd never retire. People say a lot of things, Phil. People say a lot of things before their grandchildren start kissing each other in the woods. Just—tell me about the condos."
He hung up. Drank coffee that had gone cold an hour ago. Stared at the middle distance.
In the forest, Gwen was walking back toward the campsite, and her hips were swinging, and Ben was walking beside her—close, closer than he'd ever voluntarily walked to any version of Gwen—and his face was red, and her flames were bright, and somewhere in the Omnitrix's alien circuits, a timer was counting down toward the inevitable beep that would end this moment like all the others.
But for now—for these few, impossible, probably-need-therapy minutes—they walked together.
Whomp. Whomp. Whomp.
"Gwen?"
"Yeah?"
"...Your lips are warm."
"I know."
"Like. Really warm."
"78 degrees. Your optimal temperature."
"You memorized my optimal temperature."
"I memorized EVERYTHING about you, Ben."
"That's creepy."
"That's love."
"...Same thing?"
"Same thing."
Whomp. Whomp. Whomp.
The Omnitrix glowed.
Max drank his cold coffee.
The summer continued.
TO BE CONTINUED...