Darkness, so pure not even a single ray of light can find its way to me. How long have I soaked in this darkness.
Three days. Seventy-two hours. Four thousand three hundred and twenty minutes. I know because I've counted every single one of them, lying in what remains of my room, staring at the ceiling, watching the shadows move across the plaster as the sun rises and sets and rises again. The Valium wore off after the first day. The clarity that came after was worse than the fog. Much worse.
I haven't showered. Haven't changed clothes. Haven't eaten anything except the granola bar my mom left outside my door on day two, which I ate mechanically, tasting nothing, feeling nothing except the hollow ache in my chest that won't go away no matter how still I lie, how quiet I stay, how much I try to disappear into the mattress beneath me.
The darkness isn't just around me. It's inside me. It's become me.
I get up. My body moves without conscious thought, operating on some autopilot I didn't know existed. My legs carry me down the stairs, past my mom who calls out something I don't process, out the front door into afternoon sunlight that feels like an assault. I squint against it. My eyes have adjusted to the dim cave of my room. The brightness hurts.
I walk. One foot in front of the other. Down the driveway. Along the sidewalk. Past Mrs. Henderson's house with its perfectly manicured lawn. Past the Johnsons' place with the tire swing hanging from the oak tree. Past all these normal houses full of normal people living normal lives where cousins don't kiss each other, where desire doesn't corrupt everything it touches, where love follows the rules.
The Walmart appears after twenty minutes of walking. The massive blue and white building squats on the corner like some corporate temple, its parking lot half-full of cars glinting in the sun. I walk through the automatic doors and the blast of air conditioning hits my face. Fluorescent lights buzz overhead. A greeter in a blue vest says something to me. I don't respond.
I walk through the aisles. Past the groceries. Past the electronics. Past the clothing section where a mother is holding up a small dress for her daughter to see. They're both smiling. The daughter can't be more than seven. She has no idea yet how complicated everything becomes. How desire ruins everything. How love can be the most destructive force in the universe.
I find what I'm looking for in the home goods section. A bathtub. Large, white, porcelain. It sits on a pallet, wrapped in plastic, price tag dangling from the faucet fixture. One thousand two hundred and forty-nine dollars. I stare at it for a long moment, and something clicks into place in my mind. Some decision I didn't know I was making suddenly becomes clear.
I reach for the Omnitrix.
The couple browsing shower curtains three feet away doesn't notice at first. They're debating between beige and cream, their voices low and domestic, and I twist the dial on my wrist, feeling it click into place, feeling the familiar hum of alien DNA waiting to be activated.
I slam my palm down.
The transformation hits like a freight train.
My bones crack first. Not the clean snap of a break but the wet, grinding sound of calcium splitting lengthwise, of marrow expanding, of skeletal structure multiplying in ways human anatomy was never designed to accommodate. My spine elongates and I feel each vertebra separate and duplicate, feel new bone growing between existing bone, feel my spinal cord splitting like a fork in a road, branching, creating new pathways for new limbs that don't exist yet but will in seconds.
My skin tears. The sound is like fabric ripping, like meat being pulled apart, and I feel it happening across my shoulders, down my sides, the epidermis splitting open to make room for what's coming. Blood doesn't pour out. Instead there's this green luminescence, this alien light that spills from the wounds, and I can feel my cells reorganizing, feel my DNA rewriting itself in real-time.
My muscles tear and reform. The pain is exquisite. My biceps split down the middle and new muscle tissue grows between the halves, doubling my arm mass, and then my shoulders crack open and new arms push through, emerging from my torso like some horrific birth. I feel the bones of these new limbs growing outward, feel the joints forming, feel fingers sprouting from hands that didn't exist three seconds ago.
My chest expands. My ribcage breaks apart and reforms larger, wider, creating space for the additional organs I need to power this body. My heart splits and becomes two hearts, both pounding in my chest, both pumping blood through a circulatory system that's multiplying by the second. My lungs tear and duplicate. I can feel them inflating, feel the new airways opening, feel oxygen flooding through passages that are still forming.
My face changes last. My jaw cracks and extends, my teeth growing larger, sharper, my skull reshaping itself to accommodate the increased muscle mass. My eyes burn as they adjust to new wavelengths of light. My ears ring as they recalibrate to different frequencies of sound.
The whole process takes maybe five seconds. It feels like hours.
When it's done, I'm standing there as Four Arms. Ten feet tall. Four arms, each one thick with muscle. Red skin. Four eyes. The couple with the shower curtains is screaming. The woman has dropped her purse. The man is backing away, his hands up like I'm going to attack him. Other shoppers are running. Someone yells for security.
I ignore all of it.
I reach down with my lower right arm and tear the plastic wrapping off the bathtub. The sound of it ripping is satisfying. I grip the porcelain with two hands and lift. It weighs maybe three hundred pounds. In this form, it feels like nothing. I turn and walk toward the front of the store, the bathtub held easily in my upper arms, my lower arms swinging at my sides.
People scatter as I approach. A mother grabs her child and pulls him behind a display of lawn chairs. An elderly man with a cane moves faster than I would have thought possible, pressing himself against a wall as I pass. A teenager with his phone out is recording everything, his hands shaking, his face pale.
I reach the entrance. The automatic doors slide open. A blonde girl in a Walmart vest is standing there, maybe seventeen, her name tag reading "Ashley." She's supposed to be checking receipts. Her eyes go wide when she sees me. Her mouth opens and closes. She tries to speak but nothing comes out at first.
"You... you have to..." she stammers, her voice barely above a whisper. "You have to pay for that."
I look at her. All four of my eyes focus on her face. She's terrified. I can see it in every line of her body, in the way her hands are trembling, in the way she's leaning back like she wants to run but her feet won't move. She's just a kid doing her job, trying to follow the rules, trying to do what she's supposed to do even though there's a ten-foot-tall alien walking out of her store with a bathtub.
I walk past her without saying a word.
Behind me, I hear her start to cry.
The parking lot is chaos. People are running to their cars. Someone is shouting about calling the police. Car alarms are going off. I walk through it all, the bathtub balanced in my upper arms, my lower arms swinging in rhythm with my steps. The asphalt is hot beneath my feet. The sun beats down on my red skin. I don't care about any of it.
I start walking home.
The first block, people just stare. They're too shocked to do anything else. A man washing his car drops his hose and water sprays across his driveway, forgotten. A woman pushing a stroller stops dead in the middle of the sidewalk, her mouth hanging open. Two kids on bikes skid to a stop and just gawk.
By the second block, the phones come out. Everyone has their phones out. They're recording me, filming me, taking pictures. I can hear the camera shutters clicking, can hear people narrating what they're seeing. "Holy shit, is that Four Arms?" "He's carrying a bathtub." "Where's he going?" "Someone call the Plumbers." "Is this real?" "Are you getting this?"
Third block, people start following me. Not close. They keep their distance, staying maybe twenty feet back, but they're following, this growing crowd of people with their phones out, documenting every step I take. A news van pulls up alongside me, a camera operator hanging out the window, filming. The reporter is shouting questions I don't answer.
Fourth block, the fear sets in. People realize I'm not stopping, not explaining, not doing anything except walking with this bathtub, and they start to get scared. What if I'm dangerous? What if this is the start of something? What if I'm going to hurt someone? Parents pull their children inside. People lock their doors. Someone screams.
Fifth block, a police car appears. Lights flashing. Siren wailing. It pulls up in front of me and two officers get out, their hands on their weapons but not drawing them. "Stop right there!" one of them shouts. "Put down the bathtub and put your hands... put your arms... just stop moving!"
I walk around the police car. They don't try to stop me. They just watch me go, their faces confused, uncertain. They get back in their car and follow at a distance.
Sixth block, more police arrive. Three cars now. Then four. They're creating a perimeter around me, keeping civilians back, but they're not trying to stop me. They don't know what to do. I'm a registered hero. I've saved the world multiple times. But I'm also walking through a residential neighborhood carrying a stolen bathtub, and that doesn't fit any protocol they have.
Seventh block, a helicopter appears. I hear it before I see it, the distinctive thwop-thwop-thwop of rotor blades cutting through air. It circles above me, maybe two hundred feet up. News helicopter. Channel Seven logo on the side. The camera is pointed down at me. I'm going to be on the evening news. I'm going to be everywhere. Ben Tennyson, hero, walking through Bellwood with a bathtub. The internet is going to lose its mind.
Eighth block, the crowd following me has grown to maybe fifty people. They're keeping their distance but they're there, this strange parade of witnesses, all of them filming, all of them trying to understand what they're seeing. Someone starts a livestream. I can hear them narrating. "We're following Four Arms through Bellwood. He's been walking for like twenty minutes. Nobody knows what's happening. This is insane."
Ninth block, I see my street. The familiar houses. The familiar trees. The familiar cracks in the sidewalk I've walked over a thousand times. Everything looks the same as it did three days ago, before Gwen walked away, before my world ended. But nothing is the same. Nothing will ever be the same again.
Tenth block. My house. The white two-story with the blue shutters and the maple tree in the front yard. My mom's car in the driveway. The porch light on even though it's still afternoon. Home. The place where everything fell apart.
I walk up the driveway. The crowd stops at the property line, held back by police. The helicopter circles lower. I can feel the downdraft from the rotors, can feel the wind it creates pushing against my skin. I set the bathtub down on the front lawn, right in the middle of the grass, right where everyone can see it.
I walk to the side of the house where the garden hose is coiled on its holder. I uncoil it with my lower left hand, turn on the spigot with my lower right. Water starts flowing. I drag the hose to the bathtub and drop it in. The water hits the porcelain with a hollow sound that gradually deepens as the tub fills.
I stand there and watch it fill. The water is cold. I can see it rippling in the tub, can see the sunlight reflecting off the surface. The helicopter is still circling. The crowd is still watching. The police are still maintaining their perimeter. None of it matters.
When the tub is half full, I walk to the front door. I'm still Four Arms. I have to duck to get through the doorway. The house feels small around me, cramped, like a dollhouse built for a different species.
My mom is in the kitchen. I can smell something cooking. Pasta sauce. Garlic bread. Normal dinner smells from a normal house where nothing is normal anymore. She hears me come in and turns around, and her face goes through about six different expressions in two seconds. Shock. Fear. Confusion. Concern. And finally, that particular look mothers have when they know something is deeply wrong with their child but don't know how to fix it.
"Are you alright, darling?" she asks, and her voice is gentle, careful, like she's talking to something wild that might bolt.
I don't answer. I walk past her, my footsteps heavy on the hardwood floor, my upper arms brushing the ceiling. I head for the stairs.
"Ben," she calls after me. "Ben, what's going on? Why are there police outside? Why is there a helicopter? Ben, talk to me."
I climb the stairs. Each step creaks under my weight. I reach the second floor and walk down the hallway to my room. The door is closed. I open it with my upper right hand.
The destruction hits me like a physical force.
Three days ago, when Gwen walked away, when she left me standing on that street with her taste still on my lips and her rejection burning in my chest, I came back here and I destroyed everything.
My bed is overturned, the mattress slashed open, stuffing spilling out like guts from a wound. The frame is broken, the wooden slats snapped in half, the headboard cracked down the middle. My desk is in pieces. I took my baseball bat to it, swung until my arms ached, until the wood splintered, until the drawers were smashed and the contents scattered across the floor. Papers everywhere. Notebooks torn apart. Pens and pencils snapped in half.
My dresser is on its side, all the drawers pulled out and thrown, clothes everywhere, mixed with broken glass from the mirror I punched. My knuckles still have scabs from that. The mirror is shattered, huge cracks radiating out from the impact point, pieces of it on the floor glinting in the light from the window.
The window itself is cracked. I threw my desk chair at it. The chair broke. The window held, mostly, but there's a spiderweb of cracks across the glass, and one corner is completely shattered, covered with cardboard and duct tape now.
My posters are torn down. Ben 10 merchandise, band posters, movie posters, all of it ripped from the walls, some of it torn to pieces, some of it just crumpled on the floor. There are holes in the walls where I punched through the drywall. Four of them. Five. I lost count. My hands were bleeding by the end. I didn't care.
My TV is smashed. The screen is a spiderweb of cracks, the plastic casing broken, the internal components visible. I threw my alarm clock at it. Then I threw the alarm clock at the wall. Then I threw everything I could lift until there was nothing left to throw.
My bookshelf is overturned, books scattered everywhere, spines broken, pages torn. My trophies from soccer, from track, from various hero commendations, all of them on the floor, some of them bent, some of them broken. My laptop is in pieces. I took it apart with my bare hands, pulled the screen off, ripped out the keyboard, destroyed it completely.
The carpet is covered in debris. Glass. Wood splinters. Pieces of plastic. Torn fabric. Blood stains from my hands. It looks like a bomb went off. It looks like a war zone. It looks like the physical manifestation of what I felt when she said it was wrong, when she said we couldn't be together, when she walked away and left me with nothing but this howling emptiness inside my chest.
I stand in the doorway and look at it all. This is what I did. This is what she reduced me to. This is what love looks like when it has nowhere to go.
I walk to my closet. It's the only thing I didn't destroy. I don't know why. Maybe because it was closed. Maybe because I ran out of energy. Maybe because some part of me knew I'd need it later.
I open the door.
My clothes hang there, untouched. Jeans. T-shirts. Hoodies. And in the back, covered in plastic, my tuxedo. Black jacket. White shirt. Black pants. The tux I wore to winter prom five months ago.
I went with Julie. Sweet, normal, uncomplicated Julie who liked me and who I liked back in that simple, easy way that relationships are supposed to work. We had a good time. We danced. We took pictures. We kissed at the end of the night and it was nice. It was fine. It was exactly what it was supposed to be.
But I don't remember any of that.
What I remember is Gwen.
Gwen in her crimson red dress. Gwen with her hair up, little tendrils falling around her face. Gwen dancing with some guy from her school, some preppy asshole in a blue tux who kept his hand too low on her back. Gwen laughing at something he said. Gwen looking over at me while she danced, her eyes meeting mine across the room, and in that moment, in that single moment, I knew.
I knew I was in love with her. I knew I had been in love with her for months, maybe years. I knew that every other girl was just a distraction, just an attempt to feel something that wasn't this consuming, impossible, wrong thing I felt for my cousin.
I knew, and I hated myself for knowing, and I spent the rest of the night pretending I didn't know, pretending everything was fine, pretending I was having a good time with Julie while all I could think about was Gwen in that red dress.
I reach for the tux. I'm still Four Arms. My massive hands are too big for the hangers. I transform back, slamming the Omnitrix, feeling my body compress, feeling my extra arms retract, feeling my bones crack back into their human configuration. The pain is there but distant, background noise I barely register.
I'm human again. Regular Ben. Regular size. Regular number of arms. I pull the tux out of the closet and strip off my clothes. The shirt I've been wearing for three days. The jeans that smell like sweat and despair. I drop them on the floor with everything else.
I put on the tux. The white shirt first, the fabric crisp and clean, smelling faintly of the dry cleaner's chemicals. The black pants, the belt, the jacket. Everything fits the same as it did five months ago. I look at the bowtie, still clipped to the hanger, and I leave it there. I don't want it. I don't want to look put together. I don't want to look like I'm going somewhere nice.
I look at myself in the broken mirror. The cracks distort my reflection, make me look fractured, multiple versions of myself all slightly offset. That feels right. That feels accurate.
I hear footsteps on the stairs. My mom appears in the doorway. She looks at me, at the tux, at the destroyed room, and her face crumples.
"Ben," she says, and her voice breaks. "What's happening? What are you doing?"
I walk toward her. She doesn't move. She stands in the doorway, blocking my path, her hands coming up like she's going to grab me, like she's going to make me stop and explain and talk about feelings and get help and all the things mothers do when their children are falling apart.
"What the hell are you doing?" she asks, and now there's anger mixing with the fear. "Why is there a bathtub in the front yard? Why are there police outside? Why is there a helicopter circling our house? Ben, answer me!"
I push past her. Just enough to move her aside. She grabs at my arm but I'm already moving, already heading for the stairs, already descending.
"Ben!" she shouts after me. "Benjamin Kirby Tennyson, you stop right now!"
I don't stop.
I reach the front door and open it. The helicopter is still there, closer now, maybe a hundred feet up. The sound of the rotors is loud, a rhythmic thumping that vibrates in my chest. The crowd has grown. More people. More phones. More cameras. The police have expanded their perimeter. I can see news vans parked down the street. This is going to be everywhere. This is going to be the story everyone talks about.
I don't care.
I walk across the lawn to the bathtub. The water is almost full now, maybe six inches from the top. The hose is still running. I reach down and turn it off. The water stops flowing. The surface of the water in the tub settles, becomes still, becomes a mirror reflecting the sky and the helicopter and me standing over it in my prom tux.
I step into the tub.
The water is cold. Shockingly cold. It soaks through my shoes immediately, through my socks, the cold seeping into my feet. I step in with both feet and lower myself down, sitting in the tub, the water rising around me.
It soaks into my pants first. The black fabric darkens as it absorbs the water, becomes heavy, clings to my legs. The cold spreads up my thighs, sharp and biting, and I feel goosebumps rising on my skin beneath the fabric. The water reaches my waist and soaks into my shirt, the white fabric becoming translucent, clinging to my stomach, my chest, outlining every muscle, every rib.
I lean back in the tub. The water rises to my shoulders. My jacket is completely soaked now, the black fabric heavy with water, pulling down on my shoulders. The shirt clings to my arms, to my torso, a second skin that's cold and uncomfortable and perfect.
I close my eyes.
The helicopter is still circling. I can hear it clearly, the rhythmic thwop-thwop-thwop of the blades cutting through air. It should be annoying. It should be intrusive. But it's not. It's soothing. It's a rhythm, a pattern, something constant in a world where everything else is chaos.
The water is cold against my skin. I can feel it seeping through every layer of fabric, can feel it touching every inch of me, can feel the weight of the wet tux pulling me down, making me heavy, making me solid, making me real.
I think about Gwen. About her red jumper and black skirt. About the way she kissed me back. About the way she said it was wrong. About the way she walked away. About the way I'm drowning in her absence, drowning in this bathtub in my front yard, drowning in front of everyone, drowning in a tux I wore when I first realized I loved her.
The water laps at my chin. The helicopter circles. The crowd watches. My mom is probably crying. The police are probably calling for backup. The news is probably going insane.
And I just sit here, in this bathtub, in this wet tux, in this darkness that's so pure not even a single ray of light can find its way to me.
I don't know how long I've soaked in this darkness.