If only I had wittier titles.
Dear gods, it's fanfiction. Proof that I contribute to this fandom with more than just cmvs!
Title: Slip of the Tongue
Pairing: Bevin, maybe others vaguely implied in the future
Chapter: 1/?
Warnings: Eventual boyslash. Bad words.
Summary: No one could mind their own business anymore. It wasn't as if anything strange was going on between him and Kevin, even if Ben was feeling decidedly more fond of him as of late.
“Why don’t you like my boyfriend?”
It was the first thing out of his mouth when he got through the door. Behind him, Kevin’s car peeled out of the driveway with a screech, and if he’d bothered to look, would have seen it narrowly miss the mailbox. As it was, Ben was too mortified with what he’d just said to take notice.
“I mean - friend. Yeah, friend.” Catching hold of his righteous indignation once more, he planted his hands on his hips, glaring as much as possible at his parents. “Why don’t you like my friend?”
His mother, who was still a little wide-eyed, didn’t answer. After a gruff clearing of the throat, his father placed his coffee down on the living room table.
“Ben,” he said, aiming for stern and controlled, only to be cut off by his son’s high-pitched yelling.
“Did you suddenly develop amnesia, or something?”
“Ben!”
“I mean, don’t you even remember the whole grounding fiasco?”
“Your father and I will not-”
“The ship? And the phone? And I had a black eye?”
“That’s-”
“I busted down my bedroom wall for him!” His voice had turned to angry pleading, hands raised as if to demonstrate. “And you-”
“Ben.”
He stopped. Sandra was glaring, using the look that said he’d be grounded forever if he said another word. Ben fell silent, crossing his arms and waited. He was fully aware that how he was acting was not at all mature, and he felt his temper cooling after the outburst.
“If,” his mother said, “you would stop shouting and listen to us, maybe we could have an actual conversation.”
Ben didn’t really want to have an “actual conversation” with them at the moment. He kind of wanted to go to his room and sulk, and maybe call Gwen and complain-
…like an angry girlfriend who calls her best friend to whine about how her parents don’t like her boyfriend. What was wrong with him tonight? Disturbed, he sunk into the cushions of the couch, hands in his lap. “Sorry,” he added, just to be on the safe side. Determined to take control, however, he quickly followed up with “Why call me up and tell me to stop seeing Kevin?”
Sighing, Sandra Tennyson swept her blond hair back from her face, looking tired, before dropping a pile of papers on the low table between them. “We were worried,” she began and held her hand up when he tried to interject. “Let me finish! Your father and I had been thinking that we didn’t know much about this Kevin character, since we never really talk to him.”
Ben was trying to listen to her, he really was, but he kept having to ignore the papers she dropped in front of him and really, what were they? They obviously had something to do with everything. But what…?
“-Ben? Are you listening?” Carl demanded.
“Uh, yeah.” He blinked and tried to look focused. Attentive. Not dazed and ready to fall asleep. It had been getting late, hadn’t it?
“Well we found your yearbook, but we couldn’t him.”
That got his attention. “Oh.”
His mom’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah, “oh”. Ben, care to explain why Kevin isn’t in the yearbook?”
“So he’s not in the yearbook.” Ben shrugged, leaning back in what was hopefully a clearly unconcerned way. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“He’s not in the yearbook, so we called the school about him and he’s not attending it.” Sandra tapped her fingers on her arm, and Ben glanced at the papers again.
“So?”
“So,” the emphasis was so sharp it could cut, “he’s not eighteen, Ben. It‘s obvious. Your father and I checked the other schools just in case, and he’s not going to them either.”
If it hadn’t been a total invasion of Kevin’s privacy, Ben would have felt touched that his parents got that riled up over such a small detail for him. Since it was, however, he found himself steadily growing confused.
“O-kay,” Ben tried. “So he’s not going to school and he’s only sixteen. I don’t know why that’d enough to make you freak out.”
“Well, your mother got suspicious-”
“Of Kevin?” If this had somehow managed to happen when he was younger, it would have made perfect sense. Now it just seemed stupid. Kevin was his friend, and not only that, he was the friend who got him the halo-viewer of his grandpa Max and saved Gwen and bought him smoothies. Sure, he’d tried to kill him those few times, but that was a long time ago and they didn’t know about that anyway, so what was the problem?
“-and she called the police.”
“…what?”
“I worded that wrong.”
His mother reached across the table and placed her hand over his. “What your father meant was that I contacted them and did a little background check on Kevin-”
“You what?” Ben yanked his hand away, eyes wide. “Don’t you think that’s going a bit too far?”
“Apparently not, since this,” she indicated the mess of papers, the ones he’d momentarily forgotten about, “is all about him.”
His gaze dropped to the small stack. He snatched the top few up, frowning, and skimmed them.
“Assault,” his father began, “and weapons were found in his trunk. Speeding tickets like you wouldn‘t believe, resisting arrest-”
“That was only once!” Ben snapped, tossing the reports down. Silence. He looked back up, only to find them more or less gaping at him. “What?”
“You knew?” His mother asked.
“Well- well yeah. I mean, the weapons are for the aliens we fight, mom, come on-”
“Ben, that alone might have been excusable, but coupled with the violent tendencies and the problems with authority-”
“He’s just got a temper, it’s not like he gets in any real trouble-”
“-you don’t call resisting arrest-”
“-was only once and you weren’t there, he told me-”
“So you weren’t there either!”
“I don’t have to be, Kevin’s not stupid-”
“-don’t want you doing things like that-”
“-doesn’t need me babysitting him and- wait, what?” Ben held up his hands, barely aware that he was standing now. “Me? What’d I do?”
“Nothing, Ben, but what I read scares me and you’re coming home later every night and I know you say he’s your friend, but you haven’t even known him that long!”
Ah ha. “Yes, I have,” he retorted.
“And-what?”
“I’ve known him,” Ben leaned forward, voice smug, “for five years.” About. Give or take the four and a half where they didn’t have any contact. “I met him when I was ten, in an arcade.” Belatedly, he added, “it was during the summer I was with Grandpa and Gwen.”
“You-?” His mother stopped and gave him an odd, probing sort of stare, as if trying to figure out if he was lying. “You’ve known him for that long?”
“Why didn’t you tell us about him?”
Well, why not? “That’s- why would I? I mean,” he added at his mother’s thunderous look, “I don’t tell you about the people I meet every single day, that’d be weird.”
“Ben,” Sandra exclaimed, “you used to tell us everything!”
Oh, no. She wasn’t going to go on about some sort of clingy, my baby-is-growing-up tirade, was she? “Well, no. Not really everything.” Hint, hint.
“I meant about who you hung out with, your daily life.” She sounded sad now. Damn.
“Now listen,” his father began, frowning when his son let out an exasperated sigh. “Is there any particular reason you decided not to mention you knew Kevin in the beginning?”
There had been whole essays dedicated to the many reasons. In his head, at any rate. “Well, there was sort of a period of time when we didn’t talk to each other- I met him in New York, okay? And then we kept running into each other after that, over and over,” and attacking each other and getting cuffed to each other, “and then the summer was over. And I went back home and I didn’t know Kevin ever moved here until, like, really recently.” Translation: I never knew he broke out of the alien prison I left him in when we were kids and was running a shady weapons business.
“Wait a minute. I know why you had a reason to be traveling around, but how did you keep ‘running into’ Kevin? You were all over the country!”
“Um.” Um? Um? “Kevin traveled. A lot.”
He got the Suspicious Parent Look. “With who, Ben? How?”
Ben mumbled something to the floor.
“What?”
“He was…” Lie! Lie! Kevin would be pissed if Ben just dropped their past at his parent’s feet. Especially without asking. “He had powers then. And he traveled…alone.” Because eleven year olds wandered the countryside all the time. “And, you know.” From their glaring, he gathered that they did not know. “We were practically the same age! We tended to want to go to the same places, I asked Grandpa Max to go to those places, and we used the same routes and stuff. It‘s not like it‘s that unlikely. When I saw him again here of all places, I wasn’t thinking about anything other than hey, it’s Kevin, I wonder if he remembers me?” More like holy shit, it’s Kevin, how did he get back to earth, and why does he have muscles now?
Actually, after the ‘holy shit’ aspect had worn off, Ben did wonder how Kevin managed to buff up so much. He specifically remembered a scrawny, lanky kid who could only throw Ben across the train tracks because he swung him around first.
Well, that was enough talking with his parents to last him the month. Time to wrap this up. “So, now that that’s settled-”
“Ben.”
Damn! “Yes?”
“One last thing.”
Only one? That was manageable. “Yeees?”
“Where did you re-meet him again?”
Shit, no, it wasn’t. “Mr. Smoothie?” His parents didn’t know he twitched when he lied, right?
“Are you sure about that, Benjamin Tennyson?”
Jeez. “He sort of dumped smoothie all over me, so yeah, I am sure.” The words slipped out, making him think of the time when Crash and TJ had messed with him and Ben had had to ward his friend off, lest he get another assualt charge (to be fair, it had been months since the last one, from a guy who had tried to scam Kevin out of an ungodly amount of glowing green rocks).
Suddenly his mom sighed, apparently accepting his answer. “All right, fine. Perhaps we did go a little overboard.”
“Only a little,” he replied with a smirk, heading quickly up the stairs. “I’m tired, good night!”
“Ben-”
He slammed the door behind him.
Luckily, Ben had watched an embarrassing amount of lame teen movies to know that when he lied, he needed to have those involved in the cover know he was lying so they could confirm his story. Sure, his parents believed him now, but when they inevitably got nervous and protective and parent-y, they’d casually ask Kevin how they had rekindled their friendship and oh, how screwed Ben would be then.
“Pick up, already.” He landed on his bed with a whumph, phone in hand.
Click. “Ben?”
“Hey, Kev!” Overenthusiastic greeting. Oops.
“Uh, hey. You in trouble or something?”
“I don’t always call you when aliens are afoot.”
“I meant with your parents, you dork. They looked a little mad when I saw them. Figured you’d done something stupid again.”
“Hey.” He rolled onto his back, kicking his shoes off. “Don’t be a jerk. It was because of you they were angry, you know.”
“No, I don’t know. And what’d I do now?”
“Don’t worry about that; you didn’t really do anything. They just started poking around and, oh,” he picked at his nails for effect, even though Kevin couldn’t see him, “found your police records, your not-going-to-school, your general freakiness.”
“Thanks.” Sounded a little grumpy. Must have been the freakiness comment.
“No problem. Anyway, I sort of told them we met when we were little-”
There was a terrific screech of tires on asphalt, the blare of a horn and muffled cursing.
“Kevin?” Ben sat up. “Kevin?”
“Ow, shit, fuck-”
“What are you doing? And don’t swear so much.”
“Dammit, I just poured hot coffee all over my pants.”
Laughing would have been rude. Ben did it anyway. “I didn’t know you drank coffee.”
“I don’t.”
Okay, then. “I didn’t tell them-” He glanced over at his door, folded the covers over himself, and curled around the phone. “I didn’t tell them the truth, Kevin. If that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.” He stretched his legs out and closed his eyes. “I said we met at the arcade, during that summer road trip, and that you were traveling alone and we just kept running into each other all over the place. And when we re-met here, it was at Mr. Smoothie and you dumped your drink all over me.” Ben could hear Kevin pulling his car over, and the door opening. Probably cleaning off the seat or something. “So if you are for some reason in their immediate vicinity, and they ask you about that sort of stuff, that’s what you tell them. Got it?”
“…mm-hmm.”
Ben opened his eyes and squinted at the stitching of his bed. “Kevin, why did you have hot coffee in your car if you don’t even drink it?”
“Helps keep me awake.”
“Why do you need to stay awake? …Kevin, where are you?”
“Oh no, Benji. You’re not going all mother hen on me and flying out here.”
Out where? “Fine. Be that way.”
Kevin chuckled. It was a low, pleasant laugh that he wanted to fall asleep to. He rubbed his eyes and tugged at his shirt.
“Good night, Ben.”
“Night, Kevin.”
Title: Slip of the Tongue
Pairing: Bevin, maybe others vaguely implied in the future
Chapter: 1/?
Warnings: Eventual boyslash. Bad words.
Summary: No one could mind their own business anymore. It wasn't as if anything strange was going on between him and Kevin, even if Ben was feeling decidedly more fond of him as of late.
“Why don’t you like my boyfriend?”
It was the first thing out of his mouth when he got through the door. Behind him, Kevin’s car peeled out of the driveway with a screech, and if he’d bothered to look, would have seen it narrowly miss the mailbox. As it was, Ben was too mortified with what he’d just said to take notice.
“I mean - friend. Yeah, friend.” Catching hold of his righteous indignation once more, he planted his hands on his hips, glaring as much as possible at his parents. “Why don’t you like my friend?”
His mother, who was still a little wide-eyed, didn’t answer. After a gruff clearing of the throat, his father placed his coffee down on the living room table.
“Ben,” he said, aiming for stern and controlled, only to be cut off by his son’s high-pitched yelling.
“Did you suddenly develop amnesia, or something?”
“Ben!”
“I mean, don’t you even remember the whole grounding fiasco?”
“Your father and I will not-”
“The ship? And the phone? And I had a black eye?”
“That’s-”
“I busted down my bedroom wall for him!” His voice had turned to angry pleading, hands raised as if to demonstrate. “And you-”
“Ben.”
He stopped. Sandra was glaring, using the look that said he’d be grounded forever if he said another word. Ben fell silent, crossing his arms and waited. He was fully aware that how he was acting was not at all mature, and he felt his temper cooling after the outburst.
“If,” his mother said, “you would stop shouting and listen to us, maybe we could have an actual conversation.”
Ben didn’t really want to have an “actual conversation” with them at the moment. He kind of wanted to go to his room and sulk, and maybe call Gwen and complain-
…like an angry girlfriend who calls her best friend to whine about how her parents don’t like her boyfriend. What was wrong with him tonight? Disturbed, he sunk into the cushions of the couch, hands in his lap. “Sorry,” he added, just to be on the safe side. Determined to take control, however, he quickly followed up with “Why call me up and tell me to stop seeing Kevin?”
Sighing, Sandra Tennyson swept her blond hair back from her face, looking tired, before dropping a pile of papers on the low table between them. “We were worried,” she began and held her hand up when he tried to interject. “Let me finish! Your father and I had been thinking that we didn’t know much about this Kevin character, since we never really talk to him.”
Ben was trying to listen to her, he really was, but he kept having to ignore the papers she dropped in front of him and really, what were they? They obviously had something to do with everything. But what…?
“-Ben? Are you listening?” Carl demanded.
“Uh, yeah.” He blinked and tried to look focused. Attentive. Not dazed and ready to fall asleep. It had been getting late, hadn’t it?
“Well we found your yearbook, but we couldn’t him.”
That got his attention. “Oh.”
His mom’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah, “oh”. Ben, care to explain why Kevin isn’t in the yearbook?”
“So he’s not in the yearbook.” Ben shrugged, leaning back in what was hopefully a clearly unconcerned way. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“He’s not in the yearbook, so we called the school about him and he’s not attending it.” Sandra tapped her fingers on her arm, and Ben glanced at the papers again.
“So?”
“So,” the emphasis was so sharp it could cut, “he’s not eighteen, Ben. It‘s obvious. Your father and I checked the other schools just in case, and he’s not going to them either.”
If it hadn’t been a total invasion of Kevin’s privacy, Ben would have felt touched that his parents got that riled up over such a small detail for him. Since it was, however, he found himself steadily growing confused.
“O-kay,” Ben tried. “So he’s not going to school and he’s only sixteen. I don’t know why that’d enough to make you freak out.”
“Well, your mother got suspicious-”
“Of Kevin?” If this had somehow managed to happen when he was younger, it would have made perfect sense. Now it just seemed stupid. Kevin was his friend, and not only that, he was the friend who got him the halo-viewer of his grandpa Max and saved Gwen and bought him smoothies. Sure, he’d tried to kill him those few times, but that was a long time ago and they didn’t know about that anyway, so what was the problem?
“-and she called the police.”
“…what?”
“I worded that wrong.”
His mother reached across the table and placed her hand over his. “What your father meant was that I contacted them and did a little background check on Kevin-”
“You what?” Ben yanked his hand away, eyes wide. “Don’t you think that’s going a bit too far?”
“Apparently not, since this,” she indicated the mess of papers, the ones he’d momentarily forgotten about, “is all about him.”
His gaze dropped to the small stack. He snatched the top few up, frowning, and skimmed them.
“Assault,” his father began, “and weapons were found in his trunk. Speeding tickets like you wouldn‘t believe, resisting arrest-”
“That was only once!” Ben snapped, tossing the reports down. Silence. He looked back up, only to find them more or less gaping at him. “What?”
“You knew?” His mother asked.
“Well- well yeah. I mean, the weapons are for the aliens we fight, mom, come on-”
“Ben, that alone might have been excusable, but coupled with the violent tendencies and the problems with authority-”
“He’s just got a temper, it’s not like he gets in any real trouble-”
“-you don’t call resisting arrest-”
“-was only once and you weren’t there, he told me-”
“So you weren’t there either!”
“I don’t have to be, Kevin’s not stupid-”
“-don’t want you doing things like that-”
“-doesn’t need me babysitting him and- wait, what?” Ben held up his hands, barely aware that he was standing now. “Me? What’d I do?”
“Nothing, Ben, but what I read scares me and you’re coming home later every night and I know you say he’s your friend, but you haven’t even known him that long!”
Ah ha. “Yes, I have,” he retorted.
“And-what?”
“I’ve known him,” Ben leaned forward, voice smug, “for five years.” About. Give or take the four and a half where they didn’t have any contact. “I met him when I was ten, in an arcade.” Belatedly, he added, “it was during the summer I was with Grandpa and Gwen.”
“You-?” His mother stopped and gave him an odd, probing sort of stare, as if trying to figure out if he was lying. “You’ve known him for that long?”
“Why didn’t you tell us about him?”
Well, why not? “That’s- why would I? I mean,” he added at his mother’s thunderous look, “I don’t tell you about the people I meet every single day, that’d be weird.”
“Ben,” Sandra exclaimed, “you used to tell us everything!”
Oh, no. She wasn’t going to go on about some sort of clingy, my baby-is-growing-up tirade, was she? “Well, no. Not really everything.” Hint, hint.
“I meant about who you hung out with, your daily life.” She sounded sad now. Damn.
“Now listen,” his father began, frowning when his son let out an exasperated sigh. “Is there any particular reason you decided not to mention you knew Kevin in the beginning?”
There had been whole essays dedicated to the many reasons. In his head, at any rate. “Well, there was sort of a period of time when we didn’t talk to each other- I met him in New York, okay? And then we kept running into each other after that, over and over,” and attacking each other and getting cuffed to each other, “and then the summer was over. And I went back home and I didn’t know Kevin ever moved here until, like, really recently.” Translation: I never knew he broke out of the alien prison I left him in when we were kids and was running a shady weapons business.
“Wait a minute. I know why you had a reason to be traveling around, but how did you keep ‘running into’ Kevin? You were all over the country!”
“Um.” Um? Um? “Kevin traveled. A lot.”
He got the Suspicious Parent Look. “With who, Ben? How?”
Ben mumbled something to the floor.
“What?”
“He was…” Lie! Lie! Kevin would be pissed if Ben just dropped their past at his parent’s feet. Especially without asking. “He had powers then. And he traveled…alone.” Because eleven year olds wandered the countryside all the time. “And, you know.” From their glaring, he gathered that they did not know. “We were practically the same age! We tended to want to go to the same places, I asked Grandpa Max to go to those places, and we used the same routes and stuff. It‘s not like it‘s that unlikely. When I saw him again here of all places, I wasn’t thinking about anything other than hey, it’s Kevin, I wonder if he remembers me?” More like holy shit, it’s Kevin, how did he get back to earth, and why does he have muscles now?
Actually, after the ‘holy shit’ aspect had worn off, Ben did wonder how Kevin managed to buff up so much. He specifically remembered a scrawny, lanky kid who could only throw Ben across the train tracks because he swung him around first.
Well, that was enough talking with his parents to last him the month. Time to wrap this up. “So, now that that’s settled-”
“Ben.”
Damn! “Yes?”
“One last thing.”
Only one? That was manageable. “Yeees?”
“Where did you re-meet him again?”
Shit, no, it wasn’t. “Mr. Smoothie?” His parents didn’t know he twitched when he lied, right?
“Are you sure about that, Benjamin Tennyson?”
Jeez. “He sort of dumped smoothie all over me, so yeah, I am sure.” The words slipped out, making him think of the time when Crash and TJ had messed with him and Ben had had to ward his friend off, lest he get another assualt charge (to be fair, it had been months since the last one, from a guy who had tried to scam Kevin out of an ungodly amount of glowing green rocks).
Suddenly his mom sighed, apparently accepting his answer. “All right, fine. Perhaps we did go a little overboard.”
“Only a little,” he replied with a smirk, heading quickly up the stairs. “I’m tired, good night!”
“Ben-”
He slammed the door behind him.
Luckily, Ben had watched an embarrassing amount of lame teen movies to know that when he lied, he needed to have those involved in the cover know he was lying so they could confirm his story. Sure, his parents believed him now, but when they inevitably got nervous and protective and parent-y, they’d casually ask Kevin how they had rekindled their friendship and oh, how screwed Ben would be then.
“Pick up, already.” He landed on his bed with a whumph, phone in hand.
Click. “Ben?”
“Hey, Kev!” Overenthusiastic greeting. Oops.
“Uh, hey. You in trouble or something?”
“I don’t always call you when aliens are afoot.”
“I meant with your parents, you dork. They looked a little mad when I saw them. Figured you’d done something stupid again.”
“Hey.” He rolled onto his back, kicking his shoes off. “Don’t be a jerk. It was because of you they were angry, you know.”
“No, I don’t know. And what’d I do now?”
“Don’t worry about that; you didn’t really do anything. They just started poking around and, oh,” he picked at his nails for effect, even though Kevin couldn’t see him, “found your police records, your not-going-to-school, your general freakiness.”
“Thanks.” Sounded a little grumpy. Must have been the freakiness comment.
“No problem. Anyway, I sort of told them we met when we were little-”
There was a terrific screech of tires on asphalt, the blare of a horn and muffled cursing.
“Kevin?” Ben sat up. “Kevin?”
“Ow, shit, fuck-”
“What are you doing? And don’t swear so much.”
“Dammit, I just poured hot coffee all over my pants.”
Laughing would have been rude. Ben did it anyway. “I didn’t know you drank coffee.”
“I don’t.”
Okay, then. “I didn’t tell them-” He glanced over at his door, folded the covers over himself, and curled around the phone. “I didn’t tell them the truth, Kevin. If that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.” He stretched his legs out and closed his eyes. “I said we met at the arcade, during that summer road trip, and that you were traveling alone and we just kept running into each other all over the place. And when we re-met here, it was at Mr. Smoothie and you dumped your drink all over me.” Ben could hear Kevin pulling his car over, and the door opening. Probably cleaning off the seat or something. “So if you are for some reason in their immediate vicinity, and they ask you about that sort of stuff, that’s what you tell them. Got it?”
“…mm-hmm.”
Ben opened his eyes and squinted at the stitching of his bed. “Kevin, why did you have hot coffee in your car if you don’t even drink it?”
“Helps keep me awake.”
“Why do you need to stay awake? …Kevin, where are you?”
“Oh no, Benji. You’re not going all mother hen on me and flying out here.”
Out where? “Fine. Be that way.”
Kevin chuckled. It was a low, pleasant laugh that he wanted to fall asleep to. He rubbed his eyes and tugged at his shirt.
“Good night, Ben.”
“Night, Kevin.”