Azmuth came on a Saturday.
He didn't announce himself. He didn't send a message, didn't request a meeting, didn't follow any of the diplomatic protocols that typically preceded a visit from the creator of the most powerful device in five galaxies. He simply appeared, because Azmuth was the smartest being in the galaxy and the smartest being in the galaxy did not make appointments.
The Rust Bucket was parked at a rest stop somewhere in Ohio. Ohio was flat and boring and perfect for lying low, which was what Max had been trying to do since the lake incident. No campgrounds near population centers. No scenic attractions that might invite disaster. Just flat, boring, beautifully uneventful Ohio, where the most exciting thing that could happen was a corn-related traffic delay.
Max was outside, checking the Rust Bucket's tires, when the teleportation beam hit the pavement three feet from his head. It was a precision beam, tight and controlled, the kind of technology that most civilizations wouldn't develop for another ten thousand years. It deposited a small figure on the asphalt with barely a sound.
Azmuth was, physically, unimpressive. A Galvan, he stood approximately five inches tall, grey-green, with enormous eyes that contained an intelligence so vast it was almost its own gravitational field. He wore simple robes. He carried no weapons, no tools, no technology beyond the teleportation recall beacon clipped to his belt. He didn't need any of those things. His mind was the most dangerous weapon in several star systems.
He looked up at Max Tennyson.
Max looked down at Azmuth.
"Max," Azmuth said. His voice was thin and reedy but carried the absolute authority of someone who had never once in his life been wrong about anything and had the receipts to prove it.
"Azmuth."
"I received your message. All seventeen of your messages. And the six follow-up calls. And the encrypted data packet containing what appears to be a hand-drawn graph rating alien chest dimensions on a star-based system."
"That was Gwen's. I included it for context."
"I see." Azmuth's enormous eyes blinked once, slowly, in the way that Galvans blinked when they were processing something they wished they hadn't processed. "I have reviewed the data. I have analyzed the Omnitrix's remote telemetry. I have studied the usage patterns, the transformation logs, the timeout override attempts, and the biometric feedback from every activation since the device bonded with your granddaughter."
He paused.
"I have also read the notebook entries you transcribed."
"And?"
"And I am here to retrieve the Omnitrix."
Max exhaled. Relief, pure and undiluted, flooded through him like cold water on a burn. Someone was here. Someone who understood the technology. Someone who could fix this, who could take the watch off Gwen's wrist and give her back her life, her identity, her ability to exist as a human being without rating her own body against a scale that had transcended mathematical notation.
"Thank God," Max said.
"God had nothing to do with it. I built the Omnitrix. I can unbuild its bond with your granddaughter. The process is straightforward, the technology is mine, and frankly the device was never intended for a human child in the first place, let alone one who has developed what my preliminary analysis can only describe as a codependent parasocial relationship with her own transformed states."
"Can you do it without hurting her?"
"Physically? Yes. The debonding process is painless. Instantaneous." Azmuth paused again. A longer pause. The kind of pause that contained footnotes. "Psychologically, I make no guarantees. The attachment patterns your granddaughter has developed are... unprecedented. In ten thousand years of Omnitrix development, across multiple prototypes and field tests, I have never seen a user bond this deeply with the device. Or this quickly. Or this... specifically."
"Specifically?"
"She has transformed into Heatblast eight hundred and forty-seven times, Max. In two weeks. The average Omnitrix field tester transforms into their preferred form approximately twelve times in the same period. Your granddaughter has exceeded the statistical norm by a factor of seventy."
Max stared.
"Eight hundred and forty-seven?"
"Eight hundred and forty-seven. And that's just Heatblast. Total transformations across all forms exceed eleven hundred. The Omnitrix's power cell is operating at capacity I didn't believe was achievable without a direct connection to a stellar energy source." He paused. "Your granddaughter is apparently the emotional equivalent of a small star."
"That tracks."
"I need to speak with her. And with the boy."
"Ben."
"The boy she has been, according to your transcripts, 'aggressively snuggling' in increasingly large alien forms."
"...That's one way to put it."
"It's the way your transcripts put it. Shall we?"
They went inside.
The Rust Bucket's interior was its usual state of organized chaos. Max's plumber equipment was hidden in compartments that looked like normal storage. The kitchenette was clean. The bunks were made.
Ben was sitting at the dinette table, playing his handheld game. Gwen was sitting across from him, her notebook open, her pen in her right hand, her left hand resting on the Omnitrix. She was writing, her eyes moving between the page and Ben's face with a rhythm that suggested she was simultaneously composing prose and memorizing his features in case she needed to reconstruct them from memory later.
She looked up when Max entered. Her eyes moved to the small figure on his shoulder.
She blinked.
Her pen stopped.
"Grandpa," she said carefully, "there's a frog on your shoulder."
"I am not a frog," Azmuth said. "I am Azmuth. First Thinker of the Galvan. Creator of the Omnitrix. And I am here to discuss the device currently bonded to your wrist."
Gwen's hand moved to cover the Omnitrix. Instinctive. Immediate. The way a person might cover a wound, or a treasure, or both.
"Discuss it how?" she asked.
"I'll explain everything. But first, I'd like to speak with all three of you. Together."
Gwen looked at Ben. Ben looked at Gwen. Ben looked at Azmuth. Then back at Gwen.
"He made it," Ben said quietly. "The watch. He made it, Gwen."
Something flickered across Gwen's face. Recognition. Calculation. The realization that the being sitting on her grandfather's shoulder was the author of everything she'd become, everything she loved, everything she was terrified of losing.
"Okay," she said. "Let's talk."
Azmuth hopped from Max's shoulder to the dinette table. He was small enough to stand on the table between them, which gave the conversation the slightly surreal quality of a family meeting mediated by a action figure. He straightened his robes, clasped his hands behind his back, and addressed Gwen with the directness of someone who had explained complex things to simple beings for ten thousand years and had long ago stopped sugarcoating.
"The Omnitrix," he began, "is the most powerful piece of technology in the known galaxy. It contains the genetic template of over one million sentient species. It was designed as a tool for understanding, a bridge between civilizations, a means by which any being could experience life as another being and thereby develop empathy, compassion, and mutual respect."
He let that sink in.
"It was not designed," he continued, "for a ten-year-old human girl to use as a mechanism for becoming increasingly large and holding her cousin."
"That's a reductive characterization," Gwen said.
"You have transformed into Heatblast eight hundred and forty-seven times in fourteen days."
"Heatblast is optimal."
"You have rated the device's forms on a system based primarily on chest dimensions and capacity for, and I quote your notebook directly, 'Ben-facial-immersion.'"
"That's a valid metric."
"You told a boat captain you would eat him."
"He pushed Ben."
"You have written that you would boil a lake."
Gwen's jaw tightened. "He pushed Ben into the water. He went under. I couldn't see him."
"I understand," Azmuth said, and to his credit, there was no mockery in his voice. No condescension. Just the clinical, precise empathy of a being who understood emotions as a category of phenomenon even if he didn't personally experience them at the frequency or intensity that Gwen apparently did. "I understand that your feelings for your cousin are genuine. I understand that the Omnitrix has amplified those feelings to a degree that is beyond your control. And I understand that the experience of transformation, for you, has become inseparable from the experience of love."
He paused.
"That is precisely why I need to take it back."
The temperature in the Rust Bucket dropped three degrees. Not literally, not yet, because Gwen was still human. But the emotional temperature plummeted with the sudden, absolute finality of a door slamming shut.
"No," Gwen said.
"Miss Tennyson—"
"No."
"The Omnitrix is damaging you. The psychological attachment you've developed is not a feature of the device. It is a malfunction, a resonance between the Omnitrix's neural interface and your preexisting emotional architecture that has created a feedback loop of increasing intensity. Every transformation reinforces the loop. Every timeout heightens the withdrawal. You are, in clinical terms, addicted."
"I'm not addicted. I'm in love."
"Those are not mutually exclusive states. In fact, in your case, they appear to be functionally identical."
"You can't take it." Gwen's hand was fully over the Omnitrix now, both hands, ten small human fingers wrapped around the device like a shipwreck survivor clinging to driftwood. "You CAN'T. It's mine. It chose me. It bonded to ME."
"It bonded to the first biological entity that made physical contact with the activation surface. That was accident, not destiny."
"It FEELS like destiny."
"Many addictions do."
Gwen looked at Ben. Not with anger, not with desperation, but with a raw, naked appeal that said help me, say something, tell him he's wrong, tell him I need this, tell him I need YOU.
Ben looked at Gwen. At his cousin. At the girl who had spent two weeks holding him, kissing him, protecting him, smothering him, loving him with an intensity that was terrifying and suffocating and warm and safe and the most confusing thing that had ever happened to him.
He looked at Azmuth.
"Can you fix it?" Ben asked. "Not take it away, but fix it? Make the personality stuff stop? Let her be Gwen when she's transformed?"
Azmuth's enormous eyes studied Ben for a long moment. The boy was asking the right question. The compassionate question. The question that tried to find a middle path between Gwen's need and Gwen's health.
"No," Azmuth said. "The feedback loop is self-reinforcing. As long as the Omnitrix remains bonded to her, the attachment will continue to intensify. What began as amplified affection has already progressed to obsessive protectiveness, identity rejection, and threats of lethal violence. If left unchecked, it will continue to escalate until the distinction between Gwen Tennyson and the Omnitrix's transformed states is no longer meaningful. She will, effectively, cease to exist as an independent entity and become an extension of the device."
The Rust Bucket was very quiet.
"She'll lose herself," Max said softly.
"She is already losing herself. The girl who earned straight A's and organized her bookshelf alphabetically and wanted to see dinosaurs at the Smithsonian is being consumed by the girl who rates alien bodies and threatens to boil lakes. The former is your granddaughter. The latter is a symptom."
Gwen was trembling. Not with cold. Not with fear. With the effort of holding something in, something enormous and hot and barely contained.
"Ben," she said, and her voice was small and shaking and human. "Ben, tell him. Tell him he's wrong. Tell him I'm still me. Tell him the Omnitrix hasn't—tell him I'm still—"
Ben looked at her.
His cousin. His Gwen.
The girl who used to call him a walking disaster. The girl who used to roll her eyes when he talked. The girl who had, somewhere underneath all the transformations and the chest ratings and the volcanic kisses, been his family. His annoying, brilliant, impossible family.
The girl who now couldn't go four hours without transforming. Who hated her own body. Who had bitten a boulder and threatened to eat a man. Who had written in her notebook that she knew exactly what she would have done if something had happened to him, and the implication of that sentence had made their grandfather call an alien genius for help.
Ben loved Gwen. He hadn't said it, might never say it, wasn't sure what kind of love it was or what shape it should be. But he loved her. And loving her meant seeing her clearly, even when clarity hurt.
"He's not wrong," Ben said.
The words cost him something. He could feel it, a physical price, like something being torn out of his chest. Gwen's face, the expression that crossed it when the words landed, was the worst thing he'd ever seen. Worse than the frog. Worse than the robot. Worse than any monster or any threat.
It was the face of someone being betrayed by the person they loved most.
"You're not the same, Gwen," he said, and his voice was breaking but he kept going because someone had to, because this was the right thing even though it was the hardest thing. "You were—before the watch, you were mean to me. But you were YOU. You were smart and bossy and you cared about grades and museums and dinosaurs and you were a PERSON. A whole person. Not just—not just the girl who holds Ben."
"I'm STILL a person—"
"When's the last time you read a book?"
Silence.
"When's the last time you cared about a grade? Or a science fact? Or anything that wasn't me or the watch?"
Longer silence.
"You used to want to be a lot of things, Gwen. You wanted to be a scientist. A lawyer. President, maybe, you said that once. Now you just want to be Heatblast. That's not—that's not MORE. That's less. That's so much less."
Gwen stared at him. Her eyes were wet. Her hands were white-knuckled around the Omnitrix.
"You said I was fine," she whispered. "In the car. You held my hand and you said this version of me was fine."
"This version of you IS fine. But this version of you is disappearing, Gwen. A little more every day. And I don't want—" His voice cracked. Broke. He was ten years old and he was trying to explain something that adults struggled with and his words were clumsy and inadequate and all he had. "I don't want to lose you. The real you. Even if the real you is mean to me. I'd rather have mean Gwen than no Gwen."
The Rust Bucket was silent except for the hum of the refrigerator and the distant sound of Ohio traffic.
Max was very still.
Azmuth was very still.
Gwen was very still.
Then she nodded.
It was a small nod. Almost imperceptible. A tiny, fragile motion of acceptance that looked like it was being dragged out of her against her will, against every instinct, against the screaming, burning, all-consuming need that the Omnitrix had planted in her and watered with every transformation.
"Okay," she said.
Max exhaled.
Azmuth reached for the Omnitrix.
"I'll need to—"
"Wait," Gwen said.
She looked at Ben one more time. Studied his face. Memorized it, maybe, the way she'd been doing for two weeks, cataloguing every feature, every detail, every imperfection that she loved.
"Can I—" She swallowed. "Can I hold your hand? While he does it?"
Ben reached across the table and took her hand.
She squeezed. Hard. Human-hard. It wasn't much. It was everything.
"Okay," she said again. "Okay. Do it."
Azmuth nodded. He reached into his robes and produced a small tool, delicate and precise, designed specifically for Omnitrix debonding. He approached the device on Gwen's wrist, calibrated the tool, aligned it with the release mechanism that only he knew existed.
He pressed the release.
Nothing happened.
Azmuth blinked. Adjusted the tool. Pressed again.
Nothing.
"That's... unusual," he said, in the tone of a man who had never once in ten thousand years used the word "unusual" and meant it.
He tried again. A different angle, a different calibration, a different approach entirely. The tool hummed, clicked, interfaced with the Omnitrix's systems.
The Omnitrix's faceplate flashed green. Not the passive green of standby. Not the active green of transformation readiness. A bright, defiant, almost angry green that pulsed once, hard, and then settled into a steady glow.
The debonding failed.
"What," Azmuth said flatly.
He tried again. Different tool this time, pulled from a different pocket, more advanced, more forceful. The tool interfaced with the Omnitrix. The Omnitrix interfaced back. There was a brief, silent exchange of data that occurred at a level of technological sophistication that made human computing look like finger painting.
The Omnitrix refused.
"That's not possible," Azmuth said, and for the first time in the conversation, his voice was not calm. It was not clinical. It was the voice of a genius encountering something that defied his understanding, and the experience was so novel that he didn't quite know how to process it. "The debonding protocol is hardcoded. It's in the base firmware. It cannot be overridden by the user, it cannot be bypassed by the device, it is a fundamental, immutable, ABSOLUTE feature of the Omnitrix's architecture."
He looked at Gwen.
Gwen looked at the Omnitrix.
The Omnitrix glowed.
"It doesn't want to leave," Gwen said quietly. And despite everything, despite the nod, despite the agreement, despite Ben's words and her own fragile acceptance, there was something in her voice when she said it. A tiny, barely visible spark. Relief. Dark, guilty, desperate relief, burning in the back of her eyes like an ember that refused to die.
It doesn't want to leave.
It chose me.
It's MINE.
Azmuth saw the spark. His enormous eyes narrowed.
"The device does not have wants," he said firmly. "It is a machine. It responds to programming, not desire. If the debonding protocol is failing, it is because of a technical malfunction, not because the Omnitrix has developed an emotional attachment to—"
The Omnitrix pulsed green again. Brighter this time. Almost smugly.
Azmuth stared at it.
"...I need to run diagnostics," he said, after a very long pause. "This will take time."
"How much time?" Max asked.
"Hours. Possibly days. I need to interface directly with the Omnitrix's core systems and determine why the debonding protocol is being rejected. The device should not be capable of this. The fact that it IS capable of this suggests modifications to the base code that I did not authorize and do not understand."
He turned to Gwen.
"In the meantime," he said, "do NOT transform. Do not activate the device. Do not interact with it in any way. Every transformation strengthens the bond and makes debonding more difficult."
"Okay," Gwen said.
She said it too easily. Too quickly. With too little of the agony that should have accompanied a promise not to transform.
Max noticed.
Ben noticed.
Azmuth, being the smartest being in the galaxy, definitely noticed.
"I mean it, Miss Tennyson. No transformations."
"I said okay."
"Your heart rate just increased by twelve beats per minute."
"I'm nervous. You're trying to take my watch."
"It's not YOUR watch. It's MY watch. I built it."
"It's on MY wrist."
"A circumstance I am attempting to rectify."
They stared at each other. Five inches of Galvan genius versus four feet six inches of human girl. The smartest being in the galaxy versus the most emotionally volatile Omnitrix user in its history.
"I'm going to set up my equipment in your vehicle," Azmuth said, turning to Max. "I'll need a flat surface, minimal vibration, and ideally no one watching over my shoulder."
"You can use the dinette table."
"Acceptable." He paused at the edge of the table, ready to be carried to his workspace. "One more thing."
"Yes?"
"Your granddaughter is lying. She is going to transform the moment she believes I am not watching. I suggest you take precautions."
"I am RIGHT HERE," Gwen said.
"Yes. And you are lying."
"I am NOT—"
"Your left thumb is on the Omnitrix faceplate. It has been on the faceplate since I announced my intention to debond the device. You are not aware that it's there because the behavior has become autonomic. You are, quite literally, unconsciously preparing to transform at all times."
Gwen looked down at her hand.
Her thumb was on the faceplate.
She pulled it away. It drifted back within three seconds.
"...That doesn't prove anything," she said weakly.
Azmuth sighed. It was a very small sigh, appropriate for a very small being, but it carried the weight of ten thousand years of dealing with less intelligent species.
"Take precautions," he repeated to Max, and allowed himself to be carried to the dinette table.
Max set up the workspace. Azmuth produced miniature equipment from a subspace pocket in his robes, devices so small and intricate that they looked like jewelry but functioned as the most advanced diagnostic suite in five galaxies. He began working, his tiny hands moving with the speed and precision of a being whose fine motor control had been honed over millennia.
Ben was sent outside to keep Gwen company and, more importantly, to keep her away from the Omnitrix.
This was, in retrospect, like sending a match to keep company with a fuse.
They sat on the picnic table outside the Rust Bucket. Ohio stretched flat and golden around them in every direction, a landscape so aggressively normal that it seemed to be making a philosophical argument for the concept of "unremarkable."
Gwen was vibrating. Not XLR8-vibrating, not physically. Psychologically. Every few seconds her hand would drift toward the Omnitrix and she would catch it and pull it back and it would drift again, a constant, exhausting cycle of impulse and restraint.
"He's going to take it," she said.
"He's going to TRY to take it," Ben corrected. "It didn't let him."
"He'll figure it out. He's the smartest being in the galaxy. He built it. He'll find a way."
"Maybe that's a good thing."
Gwen turned to look at him. Her green eyes were intense, searching, almost feverish.
"You really think that? You really think losing the Omnitrix is a good thing?"
"I think—" Ben chose his words carefully. He was ten. Careful word choice was not his forte. But two weeks of navigating Gwen's emotional landscape had given him a crash course in diplomacy that most ambassadors would envy. "I think you were right about some stuff. I think the watch made you care about me in a way that's... not bad, exactly, but not... normal."
"I don't want to be normal."
"I know. But Gwen, you threatened to EAT a guy."
"He deserved it."
"You BIT A BOULDER."
"It was therapeutic."
"You said you would BOIL A LAKE."
"I was emotional."
"You rated your own chest on a thirteen-star system and used SCIENTIFIC NOTATION."
Gwen paused. The ghost of a smile crossed her face. Just a flicker, there and gone.
"That WAS a bit much," she admitted.
"It was INSANE. You are INSANE. You are the most insane person I have ever met, and Grandpa Max once told me about a guy who tried to fight a Tetramand with a pool noodle."
"Did he win?"
"OBVIOUSLY not. The point is—Gwen, I don't want you to lose the watch because I want you to stop caring about me. I want you to lose the watch because I want you to care about YOURSELF again. The you that cared about dinosaurs and science fairs and being president. That Gwen was cool."
"Heatblast Gwen is cooler."
"Heatblast Gwen is HOTTER. There's a difference."
They both paused. Processed what Ben had just said. Ben's face went red. Gwen's eyebrows went up.
"Did you just—"
"NO."
"You said Heatblast me is HOT—"
"It was a TEMPERATURE PUN, Gwen, she's made of FIRE—"
"You think Heatblast me is HOT."
"I think Heatblast you is LITERALLY ON FIRE which is THE DEFINITION OF—"
"You think I'm hot," Gwen said, and she was smiling now, really smiling, the kind of smile that transformed her whole face from "stressed-out ten-year-old Omnitrix addict" to "girl who just scored a point in the longest running argument of her life."
"I HATE you."
"You think I'm HOT and you want to put your face in my CHEST."
"I have NEVER, not ONCE, VOLUNTARILY—"
"You fell ASLEEP in there, Ben. You fell asleep and you said my NAME. You said 'warm' and then you said 'Gwen' and your heartbeat synced with mine and your face did the SMILE THING—"
"THERE WAS NO SMILE THING."
"Breath thirty-nine, Ben. I have it LOGGED."
"YOU CAN'T LOG A SMILE—"
"I can and I DID and I will CITE that log in any future argument about whether or not you enjoy being in my chest, which you DO, which we BOTH know you do, and if Azmuth takes the Omnitrix away then NEITHER of us gets to have that anymore and—"
She stopped.
The smile faded.
The reality of the situation crashed back in, cold and heavy and unavoidable.
"Neither of us gets to have that anymore," she repeated, quietly, all the humor gone from her voice. "No more Heatblast. No more warmth. No more heartbeat synchronization. No more chest. No more holding you. No more protecting you. No more Way Big or Four Arms or XLR8 or any of it. Just me. Just this." She looked down at herself. At her body. The wrong body. The small body. The body that couldn't hold him, couldn't warm him, couldn't keep him safe.
"Just this," she whispered.
Ben didn't know what to say. He reached for her hand. She let him take it.
They sat in Ohio and held hands and didn't talk for a while.
Inside the Rust Bucket, Azmuth worked.
The Omnitrix pulsed green, steady and patient, waiting for whatever came next.
What came next came at 3:47 PM.
Azmuth emerged from the Rust Bucket, stood on the step, and addressed the three Tennysons who had gathered in front of the RV like defendants waiting for a verdict.
"I've completed my initial diagnostic," he said. "The debonding protocol is being blocked by a secondary encryption layer that was not part of the original programming. The Omnitrix has, in essence, generated its own security system to prevent removal. This is unprecedented and, frankly, should not be possible."
"What does that mean?" Max asked.
"It means I need to override the encryption manually. I can do it, but I need physical contact with the Omnitrix core for approximately thirty seconds."
He looked at Gwen.
"I need you to hold still for thirty seconds while I work."
Gwen looked at the Omnitrix. At Azmuth. At Ben. At Max.
"And then it comes off?" she asked.
"And then it comes off."
She nodded. That same small, fragile nod from before. The one that looked like surrender and felt like dying.
"Okay," she said.
She held out her wrist. Azmuth hopped from the step to Max's outstretched hand, from Max's hand to the picnic table, from the picnic table to Gwen's extended arm. He walked along her forearm with the careful precision of someone crossing a bridge, his tiny feet steady on her skin, until he reached the Omnitrix.
He knelt beside it. Produced his tools. Began working.
Five seconds.
"You're doing great, sweetheart," Max said.
Ten seconds.
"Almost there," Azmuth murmured, his tools interfacing with the encryption layer, peeling it back code by code.
Fifteen seconds.
Ben squeezed her other hand. She squeezed back. Hard.
Twenty seconds.
Azmuth's tool breached the encryption. The Omnitrix flickered, green to yellow to red, its systems recognizing the intrusion, scrambling to respond.
Twenty-five seconds.
"Got it," Azmuth said. "The encryption is down. Initiating debonding in three, two—"
Gwen looked at Ben.
Ben looked at Gwen.
And in Gwen's eyes, behind the acceptance and the fragile nod and the held hand and the word "okay," something detonated.
Not anger. Not desperation. Something older than both. Something that lived in the lizard-brain basement of human consciousness, the place where fight-or-flight decisions were made before the thinking mind even knew there was a decision to make. The place where a mother's body decided to lift a car off her child before her brain had finished processing the word "danger."
The place where Gwen Tennyson's deepest, most fundamental self lived, and that self said:
THEY ARE TAKING IT.
THEY ARE TAKING THE THING THAT LETS YOU LOVE HIM.
THEY ARE TAKING YOUR WARMTH AND YOUR STRENGTH AND YOUR CHEST AND YOUR ARMS AND YOUR FIRE AND YOUR HEARTBEAT.
THEY ARE TAKING EVERYTHING.
BEN AGREED.
That last thought was the one that broke her. Not Azmuth's debonding tool. Not Max's gentle concern. Not the logical, rational, correct argument that the Omnitrix was hurting her and needed to be removed.
Ben agreed.
Ben wanted it gone.
Ben wanted her to be small and cold and wrong forever.
The thought was insane. She knew it was insane. The real Gwen, the Gwen underneath, the Gwen that was being consumed, that Gwen knew with absolute clarity that Ben had agreed because he LOVED her, because he wanted her to be healthy, because he was trying to save her.
But the other Gwen, the Omnitrix Gwen, the Gwen that had been growing stronger every day for two weeks, that Gwen heard "Ben agreed" and translated it through the lens of obsession into something monstrous:
HE WOULD NEVER AGREE.
HE LOVES BEING IN MY CHEST.
HE SAID "THIS ONE'S THE BEST ONE."
HE HELD MY HAND.
HE LET ME KISS HIM.
HE WOULD NEVER AGREE TO TAKE THAT AWAY.
THEY MADE HIM SAY IT.
THE FROG AND THE OLD MAN MADE HIM SAY IT.
THEY PUSHED HIM INTO IT LIKE SHAW PUSHED HIM INTO THE LAKE.
HE NEEDS ME TO SAVE HIM.
HE ALWAYS NEEDS ME TO SAVE HIM.
All of this happened in less than a second. In the space between Azmuth's "two" and his "one."
Gwen's left hand, the one with the Omnitrix, the one that Azmuth was kneeling on, the one that was half a second away from debonding, moved.
It moved fast. Faster than she'd ever moved as a human. Faster than thought, faster than reason, faster than the part of her brain that knew this was wrong.
She flicked Azmuth off her wrist.
Not gently. Not carefully. A sharp, violent flick of the wrist that sent five inches of Galvan genius sailing through the air like a very small, very surprised, very angry shuttlecock. He flew approximately fifteen feet before Max caught him, lunging forward with reflexes that belied his age.
"GWEN, NO—"
She slammed the dial.
But she didn't slam it randomly. She didn't let the Omnitrix choose. In the fraction of a second between flicking Azmuth and hitting the faceplate, her mind, her brilliant, straight-A, analytical mind, the mind that had been rating and cataloguing and studying alien forms for two weeks, made a calculation.
Azmuth was a Galvan.
Galvans were smart.
If she was going to beat a Galvan, she needed to be smarter.
She needed to be A Galvan.
The dial spun. Locked. Slammed.
And Gwen Tennyson transformed into a Galvan.
The transformation was strange. Different from all the others. Instead of growing, she SHRANK. Instead of expanding outward, she collapsed inward, her body compressing, her height dropping, four feet six inches becoming four inches, then three, then less, until she was standing on the picnic table at approximately the same height as Azmuth.
Small. Grey-green. Enormous eyes.
And those eyes were not the eyes of a normal Galvan. Not the calm, clinical, dispassionate eyes of a being defined by intellect. These were GWEN'S eyes, rendered in Galvan biology, and they burned with an intelligence that was not dispassionate at all. An intelligence in service of obsession. A genius-level mind with a single, all-consuming priority.
Protect Ben. Keep the Omnitrix. Destroy anyone who tries to take either away.
A Galvan with a yandere's heart.
Azmuth, held in Max's cupped hands, looked across the fifteen feet of space at the tiny figure standing on the picnic table.
"Oh no," he said.
It was the first time in ten thousand years that Azmuth had said "oh no."
"Oh YES," Gwen said, and her Galvan voice was thin and reedy like Azmuth's but somehow sharper, somehow MORE, somehow carrying an edge that his never had because his intelligence had never been focused through the lens of desperate, all-consuming, reality-warping love.
She looked at the Omnitrix on her tiny wrist. Even as a Galvan, even at four inches tall, the device was there, scaled down, its green faceplate glowing steadily.
She understood it now.
Not the way she'd understood it before, as a human, staring at the outside of a device she couldn't comprehend. She understood it the way a GALVAN understood it. From the inside. The code, the architecture, the design philosophy, the ten thousand years of engineering and iteration and refinement, all of it suddenly readable, suddenly OBVIOUS, like a book she'd been holding upside down had finally been turned right-side up.
She could see everything.
She could see the debonding protocol Azmuth had been trying to activate. She could see the encryption the Omnitrix had generated to block it. She could see the feedback loop that was amplifying her emotions. She could see the timeout function, the transformation engine, the genetic database, the power management system, every single component of the most sophisticated piece of technology in five galaxies.
And she could see how to CHANGE it.
"Gwen," Azmuth said, and for the first time, his voice carried something other than clinical authority. It carried urgency. It carried something that, in a lesser being, might have been called fear. "Gwen, listen to me very carefully. What you are thinking of doing, you must not do. The Omnitrix's core systems are balanced with a precision that has taken me millennia to achieve. If you modify them, you could destabilize—"
"The timeout function," Gwen said, and her tiny Galvan fingers were already moving on the Omnitrix's miniaturized faceplate, accessing menus that no user was supposed to access, navigating to systems that no user was supposed to know existed. "is controlled by a power management subroutine located in subsystem seven, node four-four-seven, regulated by a variable threshold that calculates remaining charge against a safety margin of twelve percent."
Azmuth's enormous eyes went wide.
"You've had the device for two WEEKS," he whispered. "How can you—"
"I'm a GALVAN now," Gwen said, and she smiled, and the smile was terrible because it was Gwen's smile on a Galvan's face with a Galvan's intelligence behind it and a yandere's love driving it. "I'm as smart as YOU are. Maybe smarter. Because you built this thing out of intellectual curiosity and scientific nobility and the DESIRE TO PROMOTE INTERSPECIES UNDERSTANDING. And I have a MUCH better motivation."
"Which is?"
"Ben's face goes in the chest," she said simply. "And nobody takes it away. EVER."
She began to type.
She typed fast. Galvan fast. Her tiny fingers moved on the Omnitrix's interface with a speed and precision that matched Azmuth's, maybe exceeded it, because Azmuth worked with the careful deliberation of a craftsman who had all the time in the world and Gwen worked with the frantic, focused, laser-targeted efficiency of someone who had ONE GOAL and TEN THOUSAND IQ POINTS to throw at it.
She went for the timeout function first.
"GWEN, STOP—" Azmuth was trying to get down from Max's hands, his tiny limbs scrambling against Max's fingers. "MAX, PUT ME DOWN, I NEED TO—"
Max put him down. Azmuth sprinted toward the picnic table with the surprising speed of a very small, very motivated genius. He leaped, caught the table leg, climbed with the efficiency of a species that had evolved for exactly this kind of thing.
He reached the tabletop in four seconds.
Gwen had already disabled the timeout function.
Not hacked it. Not bypassed it. DISABLED it. Permanently. Surgically. She had gone into the power management subroutine, identified the specific lines of code that controlled the automatic reversion, and deleted them. Not overwritten, not suppressed. DELETED. Gone. As if they had never existed.
"NO!" Azmuth lunged across the table, his tiny body a blur of grey-green determination. "Do you have ANY idea what you've—the timeout exists for a REASON, you CANNOT just—"
Gwen sidestepped him. At Galvan size, on a Galvan-sized battlefield, they were equals in stature. But Gwen was younger, faster, and motivated by something that Azmuth had never factored into his engineering specifications.
She went for the debonding protocol next.
"If you delete the debonding protocol, NO ONE will EVER be able to remove the Omnitrix!" Azmuth shouted, lunging again. Gwen dodged again. They were dancing across the picnic table, two tiny figures in a desperate chase, one trying to save his life's work and the other trying to make it permanently, irrevocably, ETERNALLY hers.
"That's the IDEA," Gwen said, and deleted the debonding protocol.
Azmuth stopped. Stood still. Stared at her with eyes that contained ten thousand years of wisdom and the dawning realization that none of it was enough.
"What else," he said quietly. "What else are you going to do."
Gwen's fingers paused on the interface. She looked at Azmuth. At the creator of the Omnitrix. At the being who had built the most powerful device in five galaxies and was now watching a ten-year-old girl in a Galvan body take it apart and rebuild it in her own image.
"The transformation limit," she said. "The one that prevents concurrent forms. I'm going to remove it."
"That would allow you to stay transformed INDEFINITELY."
"Yes."
"In ANY form."
"Yes."
"You could be Heatblast FOREVER."
"Yes."
Azmuth was very quiet for a very long time. Around them, the Rust Bucket hummed. Ohio was flat. The sun moved across the sky with the indifference of a star that had no opinion about the technological crimes being committed beneath it.
"You understand," Azmuth said slowly, "that what you're doing is not love. What you're doing is not protection. What you're doing is building a CAGE. For yourself. For the boy. A cage made of alien DNA and deleted safety protocols, and once you close the door, NEITHER of you will ever get out."
"It's not a cage," Gwen said. "It's a home."
"It's a CAGE."
"It's a home where Ben is SAFE and WARM and HELD and I am BIG and STRONG and PERFECT and NOTHING can take it away. Not you. Not the timeout. Not my own stupid human body. NOTHING."
She looked at the interface. At the transformation limit code. At the last safety net between Gwen Tennyson and forever.
"Gwen."
Not Azmuth's voice. Not Max's voice.
Ben's voice.
She looked up. Looked over the edge of the picnic table. Ben was standing on the ground, looking up at the two tiny figures on the table, his brown eyes wide and serious and scared.
"Gwen, please don't."
"They're trying to take it away, Ben. They're trying to take ME away. The me that loves you. The me that holds you. The me that keeps you safe. If they take the watch, that me DIES. Do you understand? She DIES and all that's left is the girl who called you a walking disaster and never hugged you and never told you she loved you and—"
"That girl is my cousin," Ben said. "And I want her back."
Silence.
"I want the girl who called me a walking disaster. I want the girl who got a 98 on a math test and cried about it. I want the girl who alphabetized her bookshelf and wanted to be president and thought I was the most annoying person alive."
"You ARE the most annoying person alive."
"SEE? That's HER. That's the real you. Not Heatblast, not Way Big, not a Galvan with my watch. YOU. The you that's mean to me because that's how you show you care. The you that doesn't need a chest rating to know she matters."
Gwen's Galvan fingers hovered over the interface. The transformation limit code glowed on the display, waiting to be deleted. One keystroke. One keystroke and she could be Heatblast forever. One keystroke and the cage would close and the home would be built and she would never, ever, EVER have to be small again.
"I'm scared," she said, and her thin Galvan voice broke on the word like a twig. "I'm scared of being small, Ben. I'm scared of being cold. I'm scared of not being able to hear your heartbeat."
"I know."
"If I delete this, I never have to be scared again."
"If you delete this, you never have to be ANYTHING again. You'll just be Heatblast. Forever. And Heatblast loves me, but Heatblast isn't my COUSIN. My cousin is the girl who's standing on a picnic table in Ohio, four inches tall, crying, trying to decide whether to give up the most powerful thing in the universe because a dumb boy asked her to."
Gwen looked at the code.
She looked at Ben.
She looked at Azmuth, who was standing very still, very quiet, watching with the expression of someone who understood that this moment was not his to influence.
She closed the interface.
The transformation limit remained intact.
The timeout function was still gone. The debonding protocol was still gone. Those changes were permanent, baked into the Omnitrix's core systems, irreversible without a complete rebuild that would take Azmuth months.
But the transformation limit, the last safety net, the thing that would have made the cage complete, remained.
Gwen stood on the picnic table, four inches tall, grey-green, enormous-eyed, trembling.
"I want to be big again," she whispered. "I want to hold you."
"I know."
"Can I?"
"...Yeah. You can."
Gwen reached for the Omnitrix. The dial spun. The silhouette locked.
Heatblast.
Always Heatblast.
The transformation washed over her, tiny Galvan body expanding, growing, BLOOMING outward and upward, from four inches to four feet to five to six to seven, the magma-skin spreading, the fire-hair erupting, the curves expanding with that slow, familiar, beloved inevitability, the warmth flooding back like sunlight after an eclipse.
She stood in the campsite, seven feet of volcanic Gwen, and she was crying. Heatblast crying. Tears of actual lava rolling down her cheeks, leaving tiny smoking trails on the ground beneath her.
She reached for Ben.
He didn't run.
She picked him up. Put him against her chest. The chest. THE chest. Thirteen stars. Scientific notation. The most important geographical feature in the known universe.
He sank in. Warm. Soft. Perfect.
Bu-bum. Bu-bum. Bu-bum.
Their hearts synchronized. As they always did. As they always would.
"I'm sorry," she whispered into his hair, and her lava-tears hissed where they fell. "I'm sorry I scared you. I'm sorry I'm like this. I'm sorry I can't stop."
"I know."
"I kept the transformation limit."
"I know."
"But the timeout is gone."
"...I know."
"And the debonding thing."
"Yeah. I heard."
"So I'm going to be like this forever. This is—this is permanent, Ben. The watch can't come off. I can't be timed out. I can—I can be Heatblast as long as I want."
"I know."
She held him tighter. Not too tight. Never too tight. But close. As close as physics and love and the structural properties of volcanic tissue would allow.
"Are you mad?"
Ben, face-deep in the most complicated, most dangerous, most warm and soft and safe place he'd ever been, thought about this question.
Was he mad?
His cousin had just assaulted the smartest being in the galaxy, transformed into said being's species, hacked the most powerful device in five galaxies, deleted two fundamental safety protocols, nearly deleted a third, and done all of it because she couldn't bear the thought of not being able to hold him.
Was he mad?
"No," he said, into the warmth. Into the heartbeat. Into the home.
"Really?"
"Really."
"...Why not?"
"Because you stopped. When I asked you to stop, you stopped. That means you're still in there. The real you. The mean, bossy, alphabetizes-her-bookshelf you. She's still in there."
"She hates being in here."
"I know. But she's here. And as long as she's here, we're okay."
Gwen held him. The sun moved across Ohio. The Omnitrix glowed green, permanently bonded, permanently transformed, its timeout function a memory and its debonding protocol a ghost.
On the picnic table, Azmuth stood in silence, looking up at the seven-foot fire alien holding a ten-year-old boy, and he did something he hadn't done in ten thousand years.
He didn't have an answer.
He didn't have a solution.
He didn't have a plan.
He had a headache.
Max walked over. Stood beside the table. Looked down at the tiny Galvan genius.
"Coffee?" Max offered.
Azmuth looked up at him.
"...Do you have anything stronger?"
"I have decaf."
"I meant STRONGER, not WEAKER."
"That's all I've got."
Azmuth closed his eyes. Opened them. Looked at the fire alien. Looked at the boy in her chest. Looked at the Omnitrix, HIS Omnitrix, his life's work, his legacy, now permanently bonded to a girl who used it as a combination security blanket and boyfriend-storage device.
"Decaf is fine," he said.
Max poured him a thimble of coffee.
They stood in Ohio and watched the sunset and said nothing, because sometimes there was nothing to say.
The Omnitrix glowed.
Gwen held Ben.
Ben held Gwen.
And somewhere deep inside the Omnitrix's modified code, in the space where the timeout function used to live, a single line of new programming glowed softly.
Gwen had written it during her Galvan transformation. A single line. Not a deletion. Not a modification. An addition.
It read:
PRIORITY_OVERRIDE: PROTECT_BEN = TRUE; DURATION = FOREVER;
The Omnitrix accepted it.
The Omnitrix had always accepted it.
Some things were bigger than programming.
TO BE CONTINUED...