Alien Force. Future Fic. Kevin considers his name. Non-specific paring. Very general spoilers for Alien Force.

Disclaimer: Ben 10 and its characters are owned by Cartoon Network, and I am using them without permission. Please don't sue.

Naming Rights

It'd been years since he had thought about it.

It'd really been a stupid, 11year-old thing to do. His arch nemesis was a 10 year-old boy with ten powers with the last name Tennyson. He was 11, and had roughly eleven powers. Ben's name rhymed with ten, his name rhymed with eleven. It seemed cool to his supervillain-wannabe self to call himself "Kevin Eleven".

It wasn't his real last name.

Part of him wonders why he kept it. He had long since realized it wasn't cool, that it was actually pretty dumb. But it stuck with him. Maybe it was because it didn't quite matter in the Null Void what his last name was. More likely it had more to do with the fact that he didn't have access to any official documents with his given name on it, and "Kevin Levin" seemed like a good enough alias as any for his fake id's. It wasn't the only fake name he used ("Duce Wayne" and "Sam Ishyama" are a couple that he still remembered fondly), but it was the one that stuck.

He stared at the paper.

He could have easily gotten a fake id in his real name. He didn't. It had never seemed right.

He grew out of the maniacal 11 year-old stage. He grew up. Then, all of a sudden, he had friends. He was helping people instead of hurting them. He got moved from the "supervillain" category to the "superhero" one so fast that he still doesn't really get how the hell it happened. His friends didn't know it was a fake name, so that's what they called him. He never corrected them. It wasn't really that important anyway.

He probably should have thought about this sooner. Like, in the previous 9 months.

Kevin Levin had successfully filled out most of the the information form for his newborn child, but when he reached "Last Name" he had stopped. And for the first time in years, he thought of his original last name. It hadn't mattered to him what his name was in a long while, but suddenly it mattered. This was something he was going to pass down to someone else. It could be passed down for generations. It may not matter what his last name was, but it mattered what his kid's was.

His parents abandoned him. They left him alone and unwanted, they left him to morph from a freak to a true monster. Maybe if they had loved him, the bad he had done could have been avoided. Yes, he took full responsibility for his own actions, but he had the distance now to see how truly young he had been. Maybe his mom and dad could have made a difference. Maybe they should have at least tried.

"Kevin no-name" was a punk street kid. "Kevin Eleven" was a psychotic mutant. Baby Kevin was an unwanted and feared child. These weren't people Kevin as proud to have been.

But "Kevin Levin"? Well, maybe "proud" would be too strong to say. But he was, content?, with the man he was now. THAT wasn't a legacy he was horribly ashamed to pass on to a kid.

Kevin rose and headed to the nurses station to turn in the information.

The last blank read "Levin".