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What did it mean for her to be human? It wasn’t something Gwen ever thought she would need to think about, let alone question.
Identity had always been an easy thing. She was Gwen Tennyson, daughter of Frank and Natalie Tennyson. She was a native to Bellwood, California. She was White, and her mom’s side of the family was Catholic, though her parents never really enforced it.
She was a girl, and she was stronger and smarter than all the boys in her class. She did martial arts, honors classes, college prep, academic clubs, volunteer work, and all kinds of things she thought would look good on college applications because that was the kind of person she was. Success was always in her future.
She was also a superhero. Arguably. She didn’t run around in a mask and costume, but technically neither did Ben, and he called himself a superhero.
She helped people. She had powers, and she helped people.
That was important to who Gwen was, even when that fateful summer ended, Ben took off the Omnitrix, and Gwen went back to her normal life. She’d only been eleven, and as much as she hated to say it, that summer was and would always be the most defining part of her life.
The day she meant Grandma Verdona came pretty close, though.
She wasn’t magic.
It wasn’t that she was good at something, or she had the talent to pick up. It was a result of the fact there was something fundamentally different about her.
She was an alien.
How was she supposed to- She didn’t even know. Sit with that? Process it? Adopt it into her self-view? It was just so… out there.
A knock sounded at her bedroom door.
Gwen looked up from where she was lying on her bed, a book face down and forgotten beside her. The door was open, but her dad still lingered in the frame, a bit awkward and a touch distant. Maybe she was imagining it, but it would probably be more strange if he was acting like everything is normal.
“Is dinner ready?” Gwen asked, glancing at the clock. It was an hour too early, but she couldn’t imagine what else her dad could be retrieving her for.
Frank shook his head. “I just wanted to check in. See how you’re feeling.”
Gwen shrugged, or tried to. It didn’t really work when she was lying on her stomach. She pushed herself up, shifting so her legs dangled off the edge of her bed.
“I don’t know,” she answered, and she didn’t have to ask to know what her dad was talking about. “I don’t even know where to start thinking about it. It feels more like a Ben problem than a…”
She trailed off, not knowing the right word to use. Problem probably wasn’t it. It wasn’t a problem. It was just… there.
“That’s good,” Frank said, surprising her.
“What?”
“That didn’t come out right,” Frank responded quickly, and Gwen thought it sounded apologetic. He was quiet for a beat before saying, “It’s good you have a frame of reference.”
Frank was a smart man. Gwen knew that. But the statement was astute in a way that still threw Gwen for a moment. He was right. It was good that she had a frame of reference. She was thinking about all this in the context of Ben, the Omnitrix, and all the alien adventures she’d had.
Her dad didn’t have that, though. He and Uncle Carl had just been- What? Thrown into the deep end?
Had they even known their mom was an alien before she left?
A cold feeling splashed through her. She knew what her dad was saying now. She wasn’t alone in this. He had been, but she wasn’t.
Gwen didn’t know how to feel about that.
When she’d thought it was magic, it hadn’t been lonely, exactly, but she had been alone. It had been scouring through her spellbook, squeezing in secret practice sessions, and generally being in her head about it, trying to figure how this, that, and the other thing worked.
Now it was something outside of herself. It wasn’t something just in her mind. It was something with her body, too.
Her body was one half her mother and one half her father. And her father was one half alien.
She knew it logically, but it was hard to keep the thought in her head.
Gwen wouldn’t say she was that close with her parents. She loved them, sure, and she knew they loved them, but they weren’t close. They didn’t share things. Didn’t sit and talk. Didn’t involve each other in their lives.
Gwen knew she was partially to blame for that. She had come home different after that summer with Grandpa and Ben. Still her, but she’d been part of a whole new world, and now she was returning to the one she’d been part of before. It’d been so small, and her parents were part of that, and it took real effort to include her parents in the parts of her world she could share with them.
But they just also weren’t super warm people. That was fine. Gwen saw how Ben, Aunt Sandra, and Uncle Carl were. They were more like people from TV shows. Their house was… wild. Aunt Sandra was flighty, and Uncle Carl was more grounded, but also more sensitive and free with his feelings than her dad. And Ben was… Well, he’d been a brat at ten, but now that she was older, Gwen knew he’d been just a regular ten-year-old boy. She was sure he hadn’t been like that at home, and he was a good kid at heart, and that was because of Uncle Carl and Aunt Sandra.
Gwen was also a product of her home. Her parents were a little stricter, a little more structured, and Gwen didn’t resent it. She thrived because of it, and she was proud with how she’d turned out.
But there was a bit of a distance that Gwen wouldn’t have dared to call alien before. Gwen wasn’t so sure now.
Her mom was human, which meant that was just the way she was. She’d been raised more conservative, though, so it wasn’t hard to imagine why. But her dad and Uncle Carl had the same upbringing, and they were totally different.
She wasn’t sure where this train of thought was going. Of course they were different. They were different people. But Grandma Verdona had said something about Frank being able to sense her. It’d been a little comment, but the meaning was clear.
Her dad wasn’t totally human.
Verdona had said he was. She had used her power to craft a human body, and she had carried her children just like any human woman. But she had inexplicably said that there was something different about Frank.
Something that had made Gwen get the spark and not Ben.
How alien was her dad? How much of his demeanor was affected by it? How much of that had been passed on to Gwen?
“Gwen?”
“I feel…” How did she feel? All over the place, but that wasn’t really a good answer. “I’m… thinking a lot. And I feel different things about the different things I’m thinking.”
Frank made a noise of acknowledgement. “It took me a long time to wrap my head around it too.”
“But you did?” Gwen asked, and then she realized the question didn’t really make sense. She clarified, “You’re not still thinking about it anymore, right?”
It felt like all she could think about now. Every moment of every day. She didn’t want to. She just couldn’t get out of her head.
Her dad nodded. “I needed some time to get used to it, and I don’t think there was anything I could have done to make that faster, but once I was ready, I could… frame it.”
Frame it?
“I was able to put it into words better. Figure out more structured ways of thinking about it. Ask myself questions, so I could sort out my thoughts better when I tried to answer them.”
That sounded… better. Not the magical solution she wanted, but better than this. “What helped you?”
“I don’t know if you’re ready yet,” Frank answered, and Gwen tried not to make a face. She must have, though, because Frank sighed and visibly gave in. “It got to a point where I knew I needed to either embrace it and go full alien or reject it and just completely turn my back on everything alien.”
Gwen felt a stab of disappointment. “And you rejected it?”
To her surprise, her dad shook his head. “It’s not that simple. It’s not one or the other. Thinking about it that way helped me, but the truth is I’m completely alien and a hundred percent human at the same time.”
Gwen blinked at him. She never expected her father to say such a thing. More than that, he was calling himself alien?
He wasn’t. She knew that. She wasn’t going to say that, though. She waited for him to start talking again on his own.
“Your Uncle Carl rejected it. He fought with your grandpa a lot more about all the Plumber business. I didn’t stay out of it, but I was… You know I’m the younger one, and your grandpa wasn’t around much,” her dad went on, and Gwen could read between the lines. Carl was closer with Max, and Frank was closer with Verdona.
Losing his mom must have hurt pretty bad. Even if Gwen didn’t consider herself close with her mom, she was still her mom. She’d be lost without her.
“When I found out about the spark,” Frank said so quietly Gwen almost didn’t hear it, “I wished I had it.”
An aching feeling crept up in Gwen’s chest. Sadness, an empathy she’d never felt directed toward her parents before. They’d always seemed so… They were her parents. She was aware they were beyond what she saw, but it was a vague awareness. Now, her dad was letting her see behind the mask he showed her.
He’d lost his mom. Gwen understood that so clearly now. He wanted to feel close to her, even if that meant losing his humanity.
“Do you still?” Gwen ask. “Wish for it, I mean.”
Frank shook his head. “I’m happy with the life I have.”
That sounded like rejection to her, but there was still a weight to the way her dad said the words. His senses, did he notice them? Did he have an Anodite’s wanderlust, just without the body to let it happen? Did everything around him feel alien even though it was all he’d known?
Gwen watched him in the coming years, through Ben being outed as a hero and the regular comings and goings of Tennyson life. Her dad still felt utterly human, even if Gwen knew it wasn’t that simple. It did help her monitor herself, though.
She took a break from the alien thing and went to college. She couldn’t stay away from it, though. Did that mean she was choosing to be human or choosing to be alien? She was kind of doing both.
They weren’t mutually exclusive, her dad said, but it was so hard to think of herself as just one thing, these different aspects coexisting within her. It always felt like she was living two lives, one alien and one human.
One hero and one human, might be a better way to phrase it. She was always playing hero, always using her powers, but there were a handful of times where she was truly alien, when she risked losing her humanity and going full Anodite.
She always chose to remain human, but she always went back to using her powers the very next day. And it took a long time, but she realized her dad was right.
Maybe she could be both. It was only part of her, afterall. She was more than just alien or human, more than halves or quarters.
No, she was all Gwen Tennyson, and she liked it that way.