This'll be the last chapter, folks. Many, many thanks to those who've read/reviewed/glanced at my story. C:

Chapter 15

"I'll be just a few minutes," Gwen said to Ben, before disappearing into the bathroom of his home.

"Sure," he answered her, before walking over to the front door and slipping out of his shoes, seeing as he and she had just come back to his home after their walk after the funeral.

Ben was barely out of said shoes when he heard a knock at the door. Raising his eyebrows in slight surprise, he stepped on over to it and pulled it open. The man standing on the other side of the doorframe was all too familiar, and Ben couldn't help but to be a little bit nervous to see him standing there.

"Paradox," he finally said, giving a nod of his head. "Won't you come in?"

"No, thank you," the older man replied, before raising a beckoning finger toward Ben. "I'd much rather you come with me. Oh, don't give me that look - you'll be gone the equivalent of ten minutes, if that. I have something to show you that will finally help you make sense of everything."

Feeling quite compelled by hearing this, Ben finally gave in, despite his sense of wariness, and stepped out onto the front lawn in just his socked feet. "Well then, where are we off to, Paradox?"

"We are setting off to a point in the future about a decade and a half away from where we stand here, now. The setting: many planets have succumb to an overlord alien, one with malicious intent, and Earth is next on the list. Holding out for a good while, Earth finally does get their hero."

"Sounds like the movie that we ordered on Netflix last night," Ben replied, before willingly offering Paradox his forearm. "And if all that's really true, then I'm glad Earth will have such a competent hero. But how is hearing any of that going to, as you claimed, clear anything up for me?"

"Just wait, you impatient boy, and you'll see," Paradox replied in an annoyed voice, before taking hold of Ben's offered arm; within seconds, the two of them had seemingly disappeared right into thin air, as had been the case on more than one occasion before.

In the next second, Ben found himself and Paradox to be standing on what seemed to be a football field, or something at least as big.

"Right, we'll never teach them not to mess with us that way, Loxley!" came a voice from somewhere off to the right. "Work on that uppercut!"

Turning to look to see who was speaking, Ben found himself looking at a small army of teenagers, all of whom were practicing sparring and battling with each other, in turn. Noticing in particular as a boy with sandy-blond hair made contact with the face of a slightly taller, slender-built girl, Ben almost wanted to raise his voice, to protest the boy hitting the girl so hard. However, his protest would have gone unwarranted and uncared for had he bothered to utter it in the first place, for the girl struck said, "That's it, Loxley! Good job!"

The boy called Loxley and the girl then high-fived each other, before the girl then glanced down at the watch on her wrist. "Alright, everybody! Attention! Attention, please!" she called out, and eventually everyone got the message and grew quiet.

"It's getting near to seven o'clock," the girl said to them, tossing her long, pale-blond hair back behind her shoulders as she spoke. "So most of us need to get home now, for dinner and homework and all that jazz. But we'll meet here tomorrow - same time, same place. Because, again, what's our motto?"

"Nobody better to kick alien butt than us!" a tanned girl with dark hair shouted, before the rest of the team shouted it in unison; afterward, the blond leader of the group added, "And also tomorrow, we shall work on coming up with a … better motto. Well anyway, good night, guys!"

As the teenagers began to disperse, to head down this street or that one, a porchlight came on over the roofing of a nearby house. It was a familiar looking house to Ben. Shaking his head, he gasped when it finally clicked in his mind where he knew it from. "That's my uncle Frank and aunt Natalie's house!"

"Indeed," Paradox simply replied, before he and Ben watched as a woman barely more than thirty years old stepped out onto the porch.

"That sort of looks like Aunt Natalie…" Ben began, but as he took a few steps closer and narrowed his eyes, he realized that it wasn't his aunt; it could not be his aunt, because no one had those same, almond and emerald eyes, except for his Gwen.

"Maxy, come on in for dinner now!" the older version of Gwen called out, before placing her hands at her hips as the blond girl ran up to the doorstep, before hopping up onto the front porch. "You have a new bruise. You weren't really hitting each other again, were you?"

"Mom, spare me the lecture."

"Maxime River Tennyson!" the older Gwen scolded her. "If you don't want any lectures, then don't be giving me any kind of back-talk like that. Got it?"

"Yes, ma'am," the blond-haired, green-eyed girl answered in an apologetic tone, before adding just as she and her mother turned to enter their home and close the door behind them, "I won't let it happen tomorrow, but Loxley just had to learn to throw a better punch today, and…"

Paradox looked over to Ben then, and he could tell that the young man was trying to put all these new pieces together in his head. He might as well give him a little help.

"I know you've blamed yourselves - you and Gwen, that is - for not destroying the Omnitrix any sooner than it had been done. I even once blamed you for it, too. But the fact is, some things throughout time are sincerely meant to be, and they can't really be changed, or else events will become too altered, you see?"

Shaking his head slightly, Ben replied, "I was following you at first, but now I'm a little confused, I think."

"Well, to put it a bit more bluntly, yes, you and Gwen could have destroyed the Watch and then took to consummating your relationship there on the island. But you didn't. And either way, said consummation was very important, and I couldn't really let either of you leave the island and come back here before it occurred, or else it might not have occured at all."

Noticing Ben's confused look again, Paradox added, "I've seen much of the future; you must remember this. And I knew about her - Maxime River Tennyson - and I knew who her parents were, and with only barely having to do the math, I realized that for her to exist in this timeline at all, then her parents - that is, of course, you and Gwen - had to have created her and brought her into existence at a younger than average age for most couples."

"But Gwen isn't… we only did what we did one time," Ben replied, arching an eyebrow.

"How do you know Gwen isn't?" Paradox replied, folding his arms across his chest. "The point to this - the part that will alleviate, I would hope, much of your guilt - is the fact that, as I said, it was written in the stars for you and Gwen to create the future defender-of-Earth before leaving the island. So it was therefore, sad as it was and still is, written in the stars for your grandfather to end up being the one to destroy the Omnitrix. Just think if Gwen had done it alone, and lost the life already created? And if it hadn't have been Max Tennyson sacrificing himself, then perhaps the little one wouldn't have been called Maxime after him."

"My head's hurting so bad right now," Ben interjected. "I mean, I totally understand what you're saying now - for the most part - but my head is aching from realizing it all. Like, if Grandpa hadn't done what he did, then this blond girl wouldn't have been a Maxy at all - that is what you're saying right? That all the tiny factors, well, factored into who she ended up being, to help defend Earth?"

"You've got it," Paradox said then with a smile, before grasping onto Ben's forearm and zapping them out of the future air and back into the air of the present, of the here and now.

"We're back in my front yard again," Ben noted, looking around.

"Yes, and not a second more than ten minutes has passed by you, either," Paradox answered, before reaching out and shaking Ben's hand. "Until we meet again."

"Until then," Ben repeated back, before releasing the time traveler's hand and watching him as he faded away into thin air.

Still feeling a little more than overwhelmed by all of the new information he'd been given, Ben walked back into his house and knocked on the bathroom door. "Gwen, you almost done in there?" he called out. "I wanna come in and grab some aspirin from behind the mirror."

There was a hesitation of silence, and then finally Gwen called back, "You can just come in here with me."

Finding this a bit odd, but really needing the aspirin more than the feeling odd about it was worth, the young man stepped on into the bathroom along with Gwen, who was sat at the edge of the bathtub, holding something in her hand. Not asking her what it was at first, Ben filled the glass tumbler on the counter with water, before opening up the hinged mirror and taking out a bottle of aspirin, popping three of them into his hand before tossing them into his mouth, and then chasing them down with the water from the tumbler. Once this was finished, the tumbler was washed out and the medicine was replaced behind the mirror cabinet, Ben took a step over to where Gwen was, taking a seat at the edge of the tub, alongside her.

"So, what's that you've got in your hand?" he finally asked her, having never seen thes like of something like it before; it seemed to be a tapered sort of plastic stick, and there was some sort of marking in blue at the end; it was a baffling object.

"Well, do you see this little blue plus sign here?" Gwen said to him, moving the stick in closer toward his face; when he nodded that he saw it, she added, "Well, that's the results of a test I just took."

Suddenly, Ben felt as if he knew exactly what he'd just been looking at.

"I'd been feeling a bit uneasy the past week, and I wasn't, erhm, getting my visit from mother nature, if I should put it in such a way… and since we did do what did that one time, I figured there was a possibility, and as it so turns out…"

Standing up from the tub, Gwen waved the pregnancy test around a bit, before announcing to Ben, "It's positive. I'm pregnant."

Feeling an immense mixture of six hundred and seventy different feelings and emotions at once as he heard Gwen say these words, Ben finally calmed himself down enough to manage to focus on giving the redhead a smile. When she returned the smile, Ben reached out and placed a hand on Gwen's flat (for now) stomach, and said simply, "Heya, Maxy."