This came in later than I thought it would. Honestly, I tried hard to make it last, but when you answer questions, sometimes only straightforwardness is the key. This takes place after the original series' episode "Ken 10" and is written in a style I've only ever used once.

-:-
But a hundred years to a steadfast heart, are but a day.
-Sleeping Beauty.

And Here We Are Again-:-

He sometimes comes, in the night, after a time where Gwen had almost forgotten how he could be secretly kind. Long after, in fact, the years in which she had developed breasts and height and enough magic to make her far more a force to be reckoned with when she was just a child that learned easy spells from a stolen book that had belonged to another girl with a head of smooth, spiderweb colored hair (that book still sat on a shelf back at home and Gwen's fingers fancied tracing over the outlines of runes and words that Latin could never perceive even before the eighteen-hundreds).

She likes to think he does this because he misses her and wants to make sure she is safe, but… she is never really sure. She can't be sure.

They are not Romeo and Juliet, after all.

And it's almost always in places where nobody will care if a warlord strikes up a conversation with a human witch. Either there is nobody for as far as the eye can see (there is a desert on a planet called Corigan that he once dug a tunnel into for miles just so he could surprise her by unlatching a trapdoor under her feet; at which point they ended up talking until well into the planet's night time and she ended up having to follow him back out through the tunnel so she didn't risk getting eaten by giant insects that only came out when the twin suns above them were well and gone) or there are only a few aliens or people around—usually drunk—and uncaring to hear what either of them say to each other while they drink fizzy beverages that never have the grand taste of sugar like on Earth and lack the deep honey tones on the warlord's home planet.

This time it is in a bar after Gwen has finished a task of defeating a magically endowed beast, keeping it from destroying a small town on Luna Lobo (really, those Loboan's were quite different from the one that had attacked Ben so many years ago when helping out Ghostfreak—their pups twice as cute as Ben had been in that form) and she is bone tired as she takes a seat on a barstool and orders up a small dish of some frozen, chocolate covered worms from Vulpin (odd though they look, they strike down any vile feelings once on the tongue and once the brain registers that this is almost as good as expensive Italian chocolate) and a drink that Gwen can't pronounce, but finds easy enough to order when she points to the #8 special written on the board behind the counter. Both are delicious and welcome to her body that hasn't eaten in what feels like three Earth days.

His shadow keeps the glare from the lights out of her green eyes as he takes a seat beside her after scaring off the poor Pyronite that had been two seats to her right. The Pyronite actually left a small cloud of smoke after his drink plashed against his chest when Vilgax turned to the barkeep and ordered something off the menu she assumed was strong from the way he looked less than pleased when he looked over at Gwen for the first time in six months.

"You were injured by that beast," he mutters, that odd little oxygen mask still attached to him even though she knows that if it is possible for her to breathe the air, then it should hold nothing that could affect him.

It's hard not to blush when he's that blunt and eying the tight bandage around her shoulder that wouldn't have been available for the eyes to observe if her sleeve hadn't been torn off, but Gwen manages well enough, lips on the rim of her own pint and sucking up purple bubbles before she bothers to answer him.

"I try not to take it personally. Not as if the poor mad thing knew what it was doing while it was in so much pain. I'm sorry I had to kill it, really."

"You should not feel sorry for a creature that would have destroyed hundreds of children if you had not arrived," he answered back, claws tight on his drink as he removed his mask and Gwen could see that he still (funny, all the little things she still remembered from him keeping her a prisoner, as well as all the things she found herself forgetting until it almost didn't matter in retrospect) had little breaks in the skin around his mouth that told her that he chewed on them when he was agitated. The image of him going over plans with blue and red pens on a holographic map made her lips twitch, but not enough for him to notice as he stole one of her chocolate worms; his mouth turned sideways at the taste.

Gwen often forgot that he could never stand chocolate.

She let his comment slip over her like beach sand and looked over more than his face as he drank to dislodge the horrid taste of the worms that still wriggled between his teeth. He had seemed, in the last few years, to be slowing down from his attempts at ruling over all the universe and simply made it his goal to take the Omnitrix for himself or take down Gwen's cousin—whichever came first. The tendrils at his throat seemed less than what they were when she was ten and he was a little over a hundred years old; less lavish and fewer spots (he used to let her touch them when she was his captive; she liked to count them to make sure he never lost any—he never told her what they meant). His claws had been chipped recently and were only starting to grow sharp again; but she didn't let herself think that he was getting old—his was a race that could live to be five centuries. Gwen often, when drunk and more likely to make a fool of herself, giggled and whispered to him that all he had to do to beat her cousin was to wait until he died. At that point Vilgax would have both the Omnitrix and the chance to dance on Ben's grave.

She really hoped tonight wouldn't be one of those times. Those nights he often ended up carrying her to some weird hotel (holes in the walls for the aliens that looked a bit like slugs or didn't have feet so they had to fly around; beds that looked like the number eight on Sesame Street; temperatures in the room either too hot or too cold and never just right so she either ended up naked in the morning or wrapped in the blankets like a caterpillar) and staying until she had to take off because Ben called with another emergency or Vilgax had to leave to meet with some foreign dignitary or whatever. She always felt sad after those sorts of nights.

His free hand lifted from where it had been settled on the counter and he lightly (a spider checking out a location to set up a new web; tall and wide reaching corn stalks that were perfect and smooth) fingered the very end (loose from tying it, she hadn't bothered cutting the rest and let it hang there a little like an extra long piece of hair or chunk of rope) of her bandage. Some of her blood dotted the white and was made all the more vibrant against his green skin.

Vilgax allowed his smallest finger to trace the skin of her shoulder and Gwen could see him smile beyond his trying to cover emotion while chugging more of his drink.

It was to be a good night, she supposed.