Chapter 0164: Burning Hate

Research Earth. Nighttime.

"Gwen. You're becoming a liability…" Alex said tiredly as he looked down at Gwen who was on the bed with her arms and legs forcefully spread apart by his restraints.

"Go fuck yourself, you mind-manipulating bastard." She spat out.

Alex held his forehead, "What do you want from me? I was dumb and horny and didn't think before acting. I was annoyed when you said another man's name when we were doing it. Is that what you want to hear?"

"Then don't fuck another man's girlfriend!" She struggled to free herself, "Don't manipulate her memories and enslave me to your twisted desires." She stopped referring to herself in the third person by the second half of that sentence.

"I'm offended, I already have a woman who meets that requirement. She gets to try anything and everything extreme that I want to do." He said, referring to MJ.

"Then free me and be with her!" She screamed, "Let me go and I won't cross your path ever again. You already have two entire planets to yourself, I'll hide on a discrete island, far away from you."

Alex sighed, "Did you not just hear?" He sighed, "I care about you—"

She interjected, "My other self, you mean."

Alex ignored her words, "…And you can forget about getting away from me in this lifetime. Plus, with how I work, 'this lifetime' is going to last for an extremely long duration, preferably forever. But absolutes are difficult to adhere to." He smiled with a tilt of his head.

"You are keeping me here against my will!" She started thrashing around and stopped talking to him.

"Gwen, your other self, unlike you, isn't consumed by hate. Even if I do let you go, she won't like it and will come back to me." He said.

"She won't once she realizes what you did to us." She said hatefully.

"Gwen. I care about you. Believe it or not, both of you—" Alex said. Before he could say anything more, she gave him a hateful look before her eyes closed.

"Alex?" Gwen called him as her eyes opened.

Hearing the familiar gentle tone as she called his name, Alex sighed tiredly and sat back on the bed. Gwen's limbs were also freed at the same time.

Looking at Alex's tired figure, "She came back, huh? How long?" Gwen asked after coming to a realization. She sat up on her knees and hugged Alex from behind, resting her chin on his shoulder.

"Yeah… A couple of hours. It's already night." He said, enjoying the warmth that he was feeling from Gwen's body, "Any luck?" He asked.

"Nope…" She said, "I have zero recollection of what happened. In one moment, I'd just walked into the dorm and looked at your face, and in the next, I'm tied on the bed, calling your name confusedly."

Alex turned his head and met Gwen's lips in a gentle kiss before saying, "You know, I found something amazing," Gwen's lips made their way to his neck as her arms tightened around his torso, "It's something that can completely change the course of our planet…s. Our empire…"

"Hm?" She questioned, more focused on sucking his neck than on his words. But she was still listening closely.

"I have… received a power that allows me to harness and tap into the very forces of reality. The very force of reality that made all this possible." Alex said to Gwen, referring to the current situation of the solar system.

That got her to pay attention to his words, "How even…" She couldn't even comprehend what kind of encounter would grant him something like that.

"Long story…" Alex dodged, "What's important is that we need to research Cosmic Energy, learn how we can harness it, and find some method that can be used to produce more of it." He said.

"That's a big order…" Gwen frowned.

"There's more…" Alex said, "I don't know how, but we never realized that this whole system of 40 planets that is a clusterfuck of gravitational pulls is a lot more messed up than we realized." He said.

"We already knew that." Gwen said, "We've already theorized that there was some external force that was keeping each planet intact."

"Yeah, but we didn't consider the other side of that gravitational interference," Alex said. "Light is an absolute in the universe, right?"

"Yeah, You can be moving at half the speed of light and you'll still perceive light as if it was at its original speed. This is how time travel based on the theory of relativity works, you're moving not just through space, but also time." She said, "Why are you talking about Quantum Physics 101?"

"What's the one thing that can affect light," Alex asked her, guiding her to the answer.

"Black holes…" Gwen said after a moment of thought, "Gravity." She gasped in realization.

"Exactly." Alex said, "The messed up gravity is somehow strong enough to affect light and that's causing time to go haywire all around the cluster. Each planet, and even separate regions on those planets are in their own time zones."

"It's impossible for us to not have realized any of this…" Gwen said, "You have to be wrong. I can believe the time on the planets being out of sync with each other, but even regionally? It's impossible to not have noticed it."

"It's the same thing that prevented me from realizing it." Alex said, "Even though I have bodies on the other planets, I didn't realize this time difference before I started messing with Cosmic Energy."

"So you're saying that this… this Cosmic Energy is responsible for all this. And it's also responsible for making sure that people ignore obvious signs right in front of them." She was in disbelief, "How can a force of nature even do something so… convoluted?"

"There are conscious entities who can harness this energy. Celestials, beings beyond even them. I can keep going further," Alex shrugged, "One of them is probably responsible for this situation in the first place."

"Fuck…" Gwen needed some time to process the huge info dump that she'd just been subjected to.

Alex stood up, forcing Gwen to stop hugging him from behind as she looked up at him with confusion, "Come on. Let's take a walk." He offered her his hand.

…

Alex and Gwen were lying on the grass, looking up at the many moons and planets with different textures and sizes that littered the sky along with the stars. Some moons were broken into halves and littered the space around themselves with debris, others were completely intact but seemed foreign, having been terraformed.

As for the Earths, they were distinctly different from even the terraformed moons since their sizes were so much more massive.

Gwen's hold tightened on Alex's hand, "As scary as it feels to have some overlooking overlord that can just snap us out of existence, it makes for a damn nice view of the night sky."

"Hm…" Gwen heard Alex grunt in response and smiled.

"Hey, Alex…" Gwen said.

"Hm?"

"Can you…" She hesitated, "Can you tell me what I…she found out from our merger that caused her to hate you so much in the first place?" She asked.

Alex didn't answer and Gwen turned to him, "Alex?"

"…It's best that you don't know," Alex said after some hesitation.

"Why…" Gwen didn't suppress her curiosity.

"One of you hating me to death is enough, thanks," Alex said with a tired tone.

"Tell me…" She shook his arm.

"You'll know naturally once I resolve her resentment and she merges back into you," Alex said, dismissing her request.

"If you don't tell me, then I'm going to keep annoying you." She pouted and slid herself over to him before straddling him. She held his head between her hands and frowned, "Tell me…"

Alex gave her a little smile and his hands rose, trailing up along her legs. She was wearing denim shorts with a tank top and a cardigan, so Alex was directly touching her slender legs.

"Tell me…" She leaned over and her face got extremely close to him.

Alex's hands slowly made their way to her waist as he tightened his hold, trapping her on top of himself, "No," He said before bringing his face forward and kissing her. Gwen's eyes naturally closed as she melted into his kiss and hugged him back.

After a few minutes, they finally separated as Alex said, "Be patient. You'll find out sooner or later."

She made a grumpy face and tried to get off of him, but he didn't free her, "Stay." He whispered.

Gwen kept acting grumpy but still rested her head on his chest and closed her eyes.

"Haah…" Alex sighed tiredly, 'Should I try to get the Time Stone from MCU's Dr. Strange? If it works in the first place…' Alex almost wanted to change his past actions to fix everything. But it was still an 'almost' thought. The best course of action would be to have alter Gwen accept him despite what he did. That would be the best-case scenario when considering the future.

'If only she was a greedy bitch like MJ… I would've had no issues in that case,' Alex sighed tiredly. Laura, both Gwens and Wanda were women that Alex cared about from the bottom of his non-existent, slimy heart. Jane and Nat… he considered them as close comrades, but he didn't really have a lot of inhibitions about his actions with them.

As for MJ, she was a test subject and outlet for whatever he wanted to try. If he ever ended up reaching the TrueMerge state with MJ, he would probably overpower her consciousness and completely take over for the duration of the state.

'Whatever…' Alex shook his head. Gwen's current state could only be fixed with a huge amount of time. Time that he didn't really have with the accelerating state of the other planets.

'Time…' Alex had a dangerous thought that might just fix a lot of things, 'I need to talk to her about it…'

***

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