OUT OF THIS WORLD .. ben tennyson x reader

xvi. captured

     While not as outlandishly early as he had woken several times before, Ben had still done so screaming. [name] had woken to Gwen hitting her like the snooze button on an alarm, eventually graduating to trying to shove her off the top bunk so that she'd do something about the noise.

     Max barely stops her from toppling to the floor by placing a hand on her side when she rolls, stepping out of the bathroom to check on him. "Another nightmare?" It's rhetorical; the way Ben tried fighting him away while he shook him awake was answer enough. He only wanted his suspicions confirmed to know what his next move should be.

     "It was— It was that weird alien from my vision," Ben gulps. He's wiping at his eyes while [name] and Gwen drop down from their bed. "Just.. bigger, uglier, and scarier.. .. He— He looked right at me and said I'm coming for you now.."

     The words are enough to make Max freeze as he fetches Ben a glass of water. He forces the cup into Gwen's hand and rushes to the driver's seat, leaving her stumbling and stammering over herself before she hands it off to Ben. "We're hitting the road now."

     "Grandpa," Gwen starts with obvious hesitance. She and Ben look at each other uncertainly, turning to have [name] join in their uneasiness. She turns away and instead joins Max up front, curling up in the passenger seat. "It's three in the morning."

     Shaking her head at the cousins as they shift to move closer, [name] speaks in a quiet voice. "We need to beat the traffic, don't we? Rushmore is a national monument, isn't it?"

It's later in the morning when everyone is properly up and awake. Max had asked [name] to take the wheel an hour into his initial shift so he could sleep some more, only taking back over once the sun was starting to rise and any cops who peered in through the windshield could get a clear view inside.

"You're sure you're feeling okay? No vomiting? No fainting? No sudden necrosis of the skin?"

[name] hadn't even been out of the bathroom long before Gwen descended on her like a bird to its prey, following her to the dining table and sitting across from her.

It'd been a week of endless "are you sure you're not sick or dying," from Gwen since the stint at the power plant. [name] knew why. It was wildly unsafe for humans to enter spaces of such high radiation; the Tennysons had almost forgotten to snag a few of their own when they ran in. Gwen was trying to grapple with the fact that [name] had gone the whole time without a suit and was somehow still alive, asymptomatic, and nonchalant about the entire thing.

"Yes," she reassures for the nth time that day. "I'm perfectly healthy, perfectly fine, and perfectly sound."

Not actually, but she didn't want to worry Gwen any more than she already was.

Physically? She could never feel better. Radiation had never been a threat to her. She was conditioned to take a blast that could level more than a city, even if it were to leave her weak and writhing for a little while. Alongside that, she was feeling uncomfortably strong. Max had joked that she was finally in her element now that she wasn't withering away back home as she showed more and more of her strength. Gwen had taken it as a sign that she was heavily infected by the radiation, fearful that she'd turn into something like the Hulk.

Mentally? There was always room for improvement. Ben's waking nightmares had put [name] and Max on edge enough for both to agree that even getting on the road at the strangest hours was a better plan of action than sitting still. Not only that, but she could feel herself shift through so many emotions that she felt sick. Rage, determination, annoyance at the smallest inconveniences, the elation that came from having something just in your claws— everything made her hearts clench so tightly it gave her headaches. She hardly managed to keep it in check with her own emotions.