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kariachi · 10 months ago

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Morning fic! Hitting on that 'no but actually Kevin is not that dangerous by Ossy standards', with a really big helping of 'Max is actually kind of a fucking asshole'.

A warning for gore, which is more than the children get.

There was no helping the turning, anxious feeling as Ben and Gwen made their way into the base. Normally it was fine, the place was practically a third, fourth home, but something about their grandpa’s call, a summons more than anything, had them on edge. He hadn’t spoken like they were his grandkids, more like they were subordinates, and it had them sticking close together as they slipped past the people slowly repopulating the place.

Not a single one maintained eye contact.

Grandpa Max was waiting in his newly claimed office, part of a cluster reserved for local and regional Magisters. Additional chairs had been brought in, facing a screen on the wall across from the door. He gave them a smaller smile than usual when they stepped inside.

“Kids,” he said, and the pair nodded back at him.

“Grandpa.” Gwen kept to the opposite side of Ben from him, their relationship strained after the whole mess with Kevin. His lips quirked downwards as he swept his gaze over her, then focused on Ben.

“What did you need,” Ben asked, less tense was still waiting for some sort of shoe to drop.

“I wanted,” Max said, the fingers of one hand drumming on his desk, “to let you kids know that I’m proud of you, for sticking to your morals when it wasn’t easy.” The statement hung like a shoe. After a long heartbeat, Gwen reached for it first.

“But?” The grandfather’s gaze flicked briefly to her, then back to Ben. He gestured to the seats with his other hand.

“I thought it was about time you learned what Osmosians are really capable of.” Muscles tight, the cousins looked to each other as they went to sit.

“We’ve dealt with two already, Grandpa,” Ben pointed out.

“Aggregor hardly wasted his effort,” came the argument, “and Kevin is still young.” Max’s fingers stopped drumming as he reached over and pressed some buttons. “I need you to see an adult in action.”

As he said it, the screen came to life. First shining blackness, then a cut to security camera feed. Neither recognized the location, the interior of some sort of building. Military, presumably, from the blaring alarms and crowd of alien soldiers in the frame, huddled together and waiting, blasters drawn and aimed. They started firing before their target came into frame, but it did them no good. Just barely in the chaos could the cousins see something odd happening to the wall. Mere seconds after they started firing, spikes erupted through the dozen plus in a spray of blood and metal.

Ben’s hand automatically went to the Omnitrix, Gwen’s clamping over her mouth. An Osmosian walked calmly onto screen, the same matte metallic of the walls, the hornbuds they’d seen on Aggregor replaced with short, branching antlers adorned with intricate rings, and a pattern of teeth, claws, and unfamiliar symbols scarred into their bare arms. Heedless of the blood pooling, they approached the crowd of bodies, inspected them. Whatever they were looking for, they seemed to find it, reaching into the mass of metal and dead flesh to pluck out a tablet. A quick jolt of electricity turned it on, and the Osmosian leaned against the wall beside the spikes as they scrolled through it. Their head tilted, they pulled another tablet from their pocket, connected it to the first long enough to fiddle. Both went back into the pocket.

Returning to an upright position, they laid the hand that had held the tablet against the wall. Ben flinched when their eyes went a solid teal, drawing Gwen's attention for the split second before a charge of electricity surged through the Osmosian, then back up and through the wall. The alarms stopped. A voice in a calm but authoritative tone rang through the hall. The Osmosian smirked before they slipped out of frame. For too long a moment the feed lingered on the growing pool of blood beneath the bodies before cutting to another camera.

Alarms going again, the Osmosian was surrounded this time, having been ambushed stepping into a crossroads. Each group of soldiers had shields up, allowing them to fire openly without hitting their fellows across the way. It was clear from small snarl on the Osmosian’s face that they weren’t happy, that they were in pain. Gwen cringed despite herself to see it, and Ben tensed, both giving a small gasp when the Osmosian shifted their form, the actual shape of them, to divert the blasts. Their form and body in constant motion, blasts now having to do a mere fraction of the damage they had before, they threw themselves at one of the groups of soldiers. Limbs shifting into steady weapons even as the rest of them continued to adjust, they crashed through the shield, showcasing all the same strength as Kevin. As blood and yelling came from behind the scattered metal, the other groups abandoned their positions and charged.

The whole mess was chaos, the corridor too crowded to make out what was going on in it’s depths, but it didn’t take long to get some sort of idea. An entire mass of soldiers was flung around to the opposite side of the conflict in unison. A tattered head flew out into the open. More metal flashed with each body that dropped. A multi-bladed limb skewered three people at once, flung them aside. The final soldiers at the back turned and fled, one too slow. They were grabbed by the arm and pulled into a vicious bite through the back of the head, sharp Ossy teeth amplified with shapeshifting.

“So that’s not just a Kevin thing,” Ben muttered breathily as the feed showed the bloodsoaked Osmosian looking once more through the pile of bodies for another tablet to check. Gwen turned to stare at him, both heedless of their grandfather’s sigh in the background.

“What do you mean ‘a Kevin thing’?!” He managed a small shrug, not taking his eyes off the screen where the Osmosian wasn’t even bothering to stop the alarms again.

“You remember when I got grabbed for gladiator stuff? Yeah, Kevin was tearing people apart with his teeth. Probably shows how much he likes all of us that he didn’t bother with that this time around.”

“Don’t get cocky, Ben,” Max said. As he did, the feed changed to yet another camera.

The same Osmosian, still covered in blood, stood in front of two heavy gates, one directly behind the other, blocking the path forward. It was obvious they weren’t mechanical, and each was so thick and heavy it was difficult to see between them. They pulled out a tablet, checked something, then stowed it away. Looking the gates over, they gave a long stretch. Again, their shape shifted as they reached into one of the gaps, this time far more extreme than before. Their form stretched and thinned, the same mass but pulled tighter and tighter, shifting more like putty than the flesh and bone they saw more often than not from Kevin. Even the skull lengthened in a way that had Gwen put both hands tight against her face and Ben’s arms locking around his stomach. Thin and malleable, the Osmosian slipped through the gates like it was nothing, gathering themselves back up in a small heap on the other side. In the time it took them to stand up, it was as if they’d never done such a thing.

The cousins didn’t know if this compilation had been set up like this, or if Max was deliberately letting the feed linger until the Osmosian left the frame again.

Another camera, this one inside a small passageway, watching a door with a power nullifier hastily installed above it. The device activated as soon as the Osmosian stepped inside, the door slamming shut behind them as the metal they’d made themselves vanished in favor of flesh and bone. Immediately they yanked the glaive they carried from their back, untouched until now as far as the Tennysons could tell, and pressed themselves against the wall in a defensive position. No attack came, but the air coming from the vent took on a slight tinge of color. The Osmosian seemed to notice, turning their head to glare at the vent before scanning to the power nullifier. Glaive in hand, they tapped it against the device, ran it over the surface, before jamming the end of the foremost blade into a particular spot. Only a little pressure was needed to split the thing in two in a shower of sparks that had the Osmosian glowing in the same way Kevin did when he absorbed energy.

“In case it’s flammable,” Gwen muttered under her breath, Ben nodding along as the gas very much did not explode. Suddenly they couldn’t have been sure it would have helped the soldiers if it had. Instead, the gas seemed to cut off in the moment before the Osmosian put their hand to the wall again, drawing on more power. The door reopened, and the Osmosian turned to smirk into the camera for several long seconds as it stayed that way. Still staring into the lens, they switched over to absorbing the metal, consuming all but one hand’s worth. They kneeled, stuck their non-metal hand into the gas pooled at the floor.

The cousins stopped breathing as the hand quickly shifted entire states of matter.

“They can do gasses,” Gwen barely muttered as the Osmosian straightened out, their hand nebulous and shifting with the air currents, the tint barely visible in the proper air.

“I mean,” Ben said haltingly, “Kevin did do mud that one time, that’s like, half liquid. So, it makes sense?” More gas began roiling from the hand, flashing the cousins back to seeing Kevin producing extra matter so many times from what he’d absorbed. Quickly the smirk, the slowness- the Osmosian’s plan became clear.

“He’d still have to worry about breathing it in himself,” Gwen said, flinching when their grandfather snorted.

“You assume they’re breathing.” It dropped a pit in their stomachs as they actually looked and saw it to be true. There was no movement in the chest, the nose. Even as they had to wonder if Kevin could do that, the wrongness settled under their skin. The screen went black then, shutting off just after. “Everyone still in the building at that point choked to death on the gas, excepting them.” The cousins continued to stare at the screen, muscles tense and stomachs roiling.

“Who was that,” Ben asked, voice barely above a whisper.

“Nobody knows. An unnamed Osmosian soldier. Could still be active for all we know.”

“And the other soldiers?”

“The attack was on a Delpir military facility, under the orders of the High General of the Osmosian Empire,” Max said. “The actions of the soldier and their team put a decisive end to conflict between the species.” He settled his hands on their shoulders, the pair jumping at the sudden contact. “One Osmosian, with ease, took out an entire military facility.”

Though they slowly nodded, Ben and Gwen shared a look between them at that. If just the one Osmosian had committed the massacre they’d just witnessed, where had the rest of the squad been?

“How did anybody manage to kill Kevin’s dad,” Gwen had to ask. Max’s grip tightened.

“Devin should have used his powers differently,” he said, voice as tight as his hold, “but he never had been the brightest, or the best fighter. Tried to avoid it when he could.”

“And Kev’s only reached a fraction of his potential,” Ben said, Gwen chewing her lip beside him.

“Yep.” Loosening his grip, he gave them each a small jostle. “I know this was hard to see,” he said, an understatement if anything, “and it can be hard to look at them the same way again after. Phil and I worked with Devin for twenty-six years, and we still struggled with it sometimes. But it’s important for you to understand just how powerful an Osmosian can be.”

He did his best to turn them in his direction, but they refused to look away from the screen. They knew what was coming, and it settled sharp and wrong in the depths of their guts. Like growling and hissing in the backs of their minds. Effort was needed not to reach for each other.

“Morals are all well and good, but the next time I say to kill an Osmosian I expect you to do the right thing.”

Neither nodded. Neither spoke. The office was silent for minute that felt like hours before Max’s hands dropped away with a sigh. Before they both stood, all but pressing against each other, and made their hollow goodbyes. His reassurances of his pride, of his faith, fell over them like a snowdrift, dragging them down as they headed back out of the base. Nobody looked at them at all as they left.

For the next three days they stuck to Kevin like a security detail. Tried to play like everything was fine, but didn’t refuse themselves his worry and care despite it. They all three slept together curled up on Ben’s floor, hit up restaurants he liked, reaffirmed their bond and their friendship. The cousins knew him, despite everything they trusted him, and while the sinking feeling from that video, the blood stuck behind their eyes, the message stung like poison. Like acid in the realization that for all their grandpa had only ever described Kevin's dad as good, as loving, friendly, kind, for decades he had never trusted him. The very thought that a soldier acting on orders should be proof enough they need be ready to kill any of them. It wasn’t worth thinking about, not when they could fill the gnawing void with peace, and fun, and Kevin’s snorting laughter.

They would never tell him about the meeting.

They would never again feel quite the same way about their grandfather.

#fanfic #ben & gwen: *don't want to kill their friend if there's any other option*#max: better traumatize them into a distrust of all osmosians so next time they don't hesitate #if the show didn't want me leaning into max being an asshole they shouldn't have made him use slurs nearly get the world fucked over-#-say he would kill kevin like he would a 'mad dog'#only act against servantis openly grabbing kevin for experimentation when he realized his own head had been fucked with #and try to act like phil was a great guy before the nemetrix like he wasn't a complete shithole from the word go

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