A/N: Damned if I know if Ben's mother knows about the Omnitrix or not (his dad knows, but Wikipedia doesn't mention his mom knowing about it). Wrote this with a different plot in mind, but at 10 PM. Enjoy.
Disclaimer: Don't own the series or any of that.
It's about 2 AM when Ben gets back from one of the longer escapades on the outskirts of Bellwood with Gwen and Kevin. Tired and sore in many places, he would've just collapsed on his front lawn and stayed there if it wasn't for the fact that his parents (more like his mom) would give him an earful about that and had school in about 5 hours. Being the dutiful son that Ben was, he doesn't do the former and opts for the next best thing when one forgets their house keys: break into said house like a burglar.
He's used to coming home late now, as well as picking the lock of his bedroom window -
(It was actually Gwen who taught him how, which surprised the hell out of both him and Kevin and made Ben wonder what exactly Gwen did to learn the 'valuable' art of B&Eing.)
- and slipping in as silently as he knows how. After successfully getting his legs over the window sill, he accidentally jumps the space, out of pure instinct, that his bed occupies under the window and lands on the carpeted floor with a thud that sounds loud enough to be heard if somebody were to pass by his room at the ungodly hour of 2 in the morning. Ben winces, because of all the times he's snuck back into his own house, his landing, whether it was on the bed or the floor, had always been silent.
That, and he put too much pressure on the stupid foot with the stupid bruise on the ankle, so now it throbbed obviously, as opposed to the dull pain he felt before. Graceless he's always been, the 15-year old.
Oblivious as well, because the one night he lands loudly would be one of the nights where a certain somebody is listening for that arrival outside his door. It's a soothing sound, not the obnoxious one she knows her son thinks it is. God knows she would stay outside that door until he did come back.
Sandra Tennyson sighs inwardly and quietly retreats back to her respective bedroom. Her son is back and safe, and that's all that matters to her. She shouldn't worry.
But she does and will, only because Ben is her son, her only child and even though she scolds him from time to time and nags at him, she loves him with all her heart.
Just because fate decided to give her son something that gives him the power to save the world, at the same time making him absolutely vulnerable to God-knows-what-else-is-out-there, didn't mean he had to go gallivanting off, putting himself in danger almost every day of the week.
That summer, 5 years back, made her very suspicious of what Ben was up to with Max. Carl's loose lips confirmed said suspicions, and that was the end of that. Or so she had hoped.
She enters the bedroom silently, crawling in next to her unworried, blissfully-unaware, sleeping husband.
She wishes she could stop worrying. She wanted to trust Ben's ability to keep himself out of harm's way. But a part of her, the maternal part, tells her to approach her son and tell him straight that he worries her to near-death. The other part, the sensible part, tells her to leave him alone and just let him take care of himself. Ben is older and has much more sense than he did when he was 10-years old.
She shouldn't worry, but she always will.
-End-