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Reed Richards had learned—the hard way—that there were few absolutes in the universe. There were constants, certainly, dependable theories and cosmic frameworks, but true absolutes? To believe in those required the kind of faith that was in short supply among the rationally minded. In fact, after decades of scientific questing he had resolutely come to believe in only one:
His wife was the single being in the cosmos who intuitively understood him.
It was a bold assertion. The kind that depended on multiple linked conjectures and a great deal of analysis, but the subject was one in which he had a great deal of interest, so Reed kept his research current and revised it often. He had even gone so far as to give his mental article a title: “Only the Invisible Woman Sees Everything.” His original conclusions were always upheld, and he savored it as a sign of how robust his brilliantly conceived—and entirely theoretical—paper was. It was soothing to think about it when things got tough. Like now.
The Negative Zone portal was still decaying.
It wasn’t exactly a disaster. In truth, it was just some cosmetic surface pitting. Not much more than inter-dimensional rust. When he first alerted the team they had been alarmed, but once they understood the extent of the issue, it had gone…predictably. Ben had finally just rubbed his head and suggested oiling it. Johnny yawned and went back to eating his cereal. And Sue had wrapped her arms around his bicep and squeezed, telling him, “You’ll figure it out.”
That was the part that felt like a disaster. Because Reed was stuck. He still didn’t understand why it was happening. When he had started working the problem, he had quickly theorized four excellent reasons for the decay, but every one had been proven wrong. Only one last hypothesis remained, and it was both unlikely and difficult to prove.
Reed sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. Flexibility meant that back pain was a thing of the past, but his lab’s bright lighting could still cause eye strain. He had once spent a week deriving the ideal brightness settings for the space in fractional lumens, but after two—he checked his chronometer—make that three days of research, even he was reaching his limits. Maybe once the quantum mass scanner was adjusted he would finally get a reading that made sense and he could take a break.
Keeping his eyes clamped tight, he stretched his arm over two work tables and the couch, continuing until his hand brushed the whiteboard against the far wall. He felt around the holder at the bottom. Eraser…marker…marker…where had he put that miniature screw driver? Suddenly he felt soft fingers against his palm and his heart jumped at the familiar sensation. He smiled as the handle of the screwdriver was placed against his palm and his fingers were closed around it.
“Universe still refusing to cooperate?” He could hear the smile in her voice, and it drew a chuckle out of him.
He opened his eyes and stared across the room at his wife. Sue was standing next to the board wearing her gray yoga pants and a loose tank-top. A thick towel was thrown over one shoulder and her hair was down and a bit messy.
“You are a sight for literally sore eyes.” Keeping hold of the screwdriver, he stretched his index finger and thumb around her wrist, reluctant to break the contact.
She tilted her head and pushed her hair out of her eyes with one hand. “Seemed like a ‘real Sue’ moment,” she explained.
It was a cherished in-joke from their earliest days, and she had made it deliberately. Not long after he had first theorized the experimental launch that would one day change them all, they had been in a similar situation. Holed-up in the room over the garage that Sue’s aunt had let him convert to an office, spending days analyzing fuel usage projections. Sue had kept him company the entire time, gifting her presence but letting him work. On day four, the tight jeans and blouses had been dumped in favor of sweat pants and an oversized giveaway T-shirt advertising the Invaders 2 movie.
“This is the real Sue,” she had told him when he had given her a bemused stare. “There are two looks that no one else gets to see, Dr. Richards. Lingerie…and lazy.” Then she gave him that smile that made his rational mind melt. He was never good at saying it, but he cherished her lazy look and the trust it implied. Two days later the fuel analysis was complete, and Sue kicked off those celebrations with her lingerie look. It had been an incredible weekend.
Warmed by the memory, Reed slowly reeled his wife in. Sue tossed the towel onto the couch and let him, weaving around the cluttered work tables.
“I’m quite the fan of real Sue,” Reed observed.
“I’ve noticed.” She sidled up next to him and gave him a kiss on the cheek. He rested his palms gently on her hips and sighed.
“I’m sorry, darling. You know how I get—”
“I do.” She lifted up on her toes and kissed his nose. “Do your science. I’m just going to hang out. Alicia and Ben are taking Franklin to see that new movie about the talking piano and Johnny is brooding around the den. It’s more pleasant up here.”
“Oh. Uh, is there anything I—”
“No. Do your science.” She perched on a nearby stool and quickly got absorbed in her tablet. One strap on her tank-top had slipped to the curve of her shoulder. He stared until his abused eyes started to burn and then wrenched his attention back to the quantum mass scanner. While his hands were busy, his mind idly returned to his favorite mental paper. This moment would make a good addendum. He reviewed the primary arguments while he decided where to footnote it.
The first argument was the easiest: it posited that the vast majority of beings who had studied the leader of the Fantastic Four did not understand him. A veritable horde of humans, aliens, masked dictators, and cosmic intelligences had certainly tried. They had good reason to “figure out” Mr. Fantastic, and had studied him accordingly. Not every interested party was nefarious, of course, but grouping them all together simplified the logic underlying his belief. He had once tried to explain this group to his friends, calling them “the Reed seekers.” He had thought the term eloquent, but Johnny had laughed so hard he ignited himself and Ben had made a crack about a “Reed-seeking missile” that sent them both into hysterics. Chagrinned, he mentally revised the term to “Group A” and never spoke about his Sue hypothesis again.
“Darling,” Sue murmured from behind him, “did your equipment predict any weather different from what the forecast is calling for?”
“What? Um, no,” he answered distractedly. “I’ve received no alerts, which means the aggregate weather prediction will be within five percent of what my equipment is recording.”
“Good to know. Looks like this might be the last warm week we get for a while,” she said, then lapsed back into quiet. Reed frowned, and picked up his micro-welder. Between the short sparks, he continued his earlier line of thought.
The Reed seekers—that is, Group A, made vast efforts to gather data about Reed Richards. What motivated and drove him, even what terrified him. Their goal was to distill his behaviors and vulnerabilities. Some unstable…thinkers…even tried to reduce Reed to the variables and equations that he spent so much time studying. As if using hard metrics to map the vagaries of the human soul wasn’t bad theory from the get-go—not that he hadn’t tried it himself on occasion. As an aggregate, all of this study was somewhat effective. It enabled these beings, whether friend or foe, to make educated guesses about Reed’s actions with an accuracy greater than random chance. But that was simple assessment, not understanding. No. The Reed seek—Group A—was definitively out of the running.
A tinny-sounding splash interrupted his thoughts.
“Oops,” Sue muttered. “Didn’t realize sound was on. Jen did this massive belly flop and shared it on social.” She chuckled and he heard her fingers tapping the screen. “Back to mute.”
“It’s fine,” Reed said with an answering smile. “I’m mostly just doing some light electrical engineering.”
“'Light,' says the genius husband,” she replied under her breath. Her voice grew ever-so-husky when she spoke just above a whisper. He always felt it like it was cupping the back of his neck. Her presence was a bit distracting, but after three days he couldn’t say he minded being distracted. Plus, it focused his mind towards his theory about her.
After one eliminated the first group, only a handful of sapient beings remained in the pool, that is, the running. This was the small, trusted circle of friends who he believed did “get him.” His best friend. His brother-in-law. A few others. They might not exactly understand his thought processes and research, and sometimes they rolled their eyes or said snide things about his behavior, but in the end Reed felt confident that they knew who he was and appreciated him for it. As a result, he felt comfortable around them. A rare phenomenon. So: multiple beings did understand Reed Richards, but a careful examination of his thesis statement still rendered them ineligible. The phrase was not merely “understood,” but “intuitively understood.”
Intuition: knowing or perceived; directly apprehended. Emphasis his.
Unlike the others, Sue hadn’t needed analysis or even a great deal of time. She had barely even needed to know him before she simply…comprehended. Evidence was ample, but a critical anecdote would suffice for this part of the paper:
Not long after they had met, Reed had gone through a rough patch at State University. He had convinced the administration to release additional research funds if he could offer an equivalent cost-saving measure, and had proposed a solar array to off-set energy use on campus, with designs to be presented in two weeks. He had estimated completing them in one, and thus had seen no conflict in scheduling his second date with Sue for nine days after starting research.
Eleven days later, he was still in the basement of the O’Donnell building—a dingy space whose lighting induced headaches after only seventeen hours of work—hung up on an inconsequential bracket that didn’t provide the projected support. Its support was still adequate, but not what his calculations had predicted. His response had been depressingly in-character: instead of finishing the build, he had spent days studying a bracket. Focusing on finding an answer. Screwing up royally.
“You really can’t help it, can you?” Sue’s voice had still been a touch hesitant in those days, as if it was struggling to locate the real man behind the articles and degrees. But it found him all the same, pulled him out of his days-long reverie. He blinked down at the counter and its seven different bracket variations, then turned his weary eyes on her. Even then, she had the power to stop his brain for seconds at a time. Another rare and precious phenomenon.
“Oh no,” he said then. “Oh God…our date. Sue, I’m so sorry.”
She had stared at him for several seconds…and then she favored him with the smallest smile, as if she had seen something in his stricken expression. “Reed Richards,” she said softly, “what am I going to do with you?”
Sue had spun and walked neatly toward the lab’s exit, her sun dress twirling around her legs in mathematical perfection, then stopped at the doorway. “Come find me when your brain lets go,” she told him. It was clear in her tone that she wasn’t at all certain she would give him a second chance, but even then she had still understood enough to let him try and convince her.
He had spent the next few hours frantically studying books on social etiquette. He was so desperate he even asked Ben for his advice (discarded), before rushing over to her Aunt’s house with a single limp rose purchased at a gas station. The rose hadn’t convinced her, but somehow his cobbled-together lecture, “Fifteen Reasons Why I Might Eventually Be Worthy of You,” had done the trick.
He never did get the funding for the solar array.
Only Susan could have made that connection with him. Only her. Who else would have had the patience to work within his labyrinthine mental processes? To intuitively understand that who he was didn’t always make it easy to share what he felt. It was a common frustration—sometimes even Reed was driven up the wall by the demands of his own mind. But Sue? At critical moments, she always gave him the time and space he needed. The data on this particular experiment came back very early. Results: Reed Richards fell in love with Sue Storm.
What in the Negative Zone was he doing?
Reed set the scanner down. This was ridiculous. Worrying about surface abrasions on a portal frame when the most important part of his universe was right behind him? Suddenly, quite intensely, Reed wanted to focus all his attention on his wife. They should do something romantic, just the two of them. He considered it, and an idea presented itself immediately.
“Sue…”
“Mm?”
“Want to go for a swim?”
Her eyebrows raised. “A swim?”
He slid off the stool and stepped over to her. She looked up at him with a note of mild inquiry. He gathered her hands in his and coaxed her to her feet. She gave a breathy laugh as he intertwined their fingers and kept intertwining until they were bonded by a Reedian knot.
“We don’t use the outdoor pool much,” he explained, “and soon it’ll be too cold.” Once autumn set in, their private pool would revert to its usual status as an alternate landing pad for the Pogo Plane. He felt an urgent need to see his wife cutting through the water, her skin gleaming against the lights of the Manhattan skyline. “What do you think?”
She squeezed his fingers and stepped back. Uncertain, he untangled them so she could move away.
“I think…” She smiled, then crossed her arms at the hem of her shirt. She slowly peeled her tank top off to reveal the shimmer of fabric the exact color of her eyes. The top of a one-piece bathing suit. “…it’s a lovely idea, dear.”
Reed’s mouth suddenly grew dry. Bizarrely, his eyes had begun to feel better. He indulged using them for several seconds. “Is that…”
“The suit I wore on our last weekend getaway?” She took a few more graceful steps and looked over her shoulder at him. Her hair partially obscured her expression, but he caught the flash of a wicked grin. She faced away and oh-so-slowly lowered the yoga pants, tilting her pelvis a little more than was strictly necessary. “Do you know how hard it was to find a one-piece with a thong bottom?”
Reed made a sound that may have been, “Urk,” but he was too distracted to be certain. “How…did you know?” he finally managed.
Sue chuckled and spun around, crossing her arms to create an inviting image. “You’re smart. Figure it out if you’re not too…distracted.”
He was too distracted. She had out-maneuvered him again, the minx, but he wasn't without cunning. This called for a less…cerebral…approach. He threw his arms wide, prepping hands that could do surgery from twenty feet away for a different delicate task.
When she realized he was going for the sides of her suit the coy expression turned into surprise. “Reed!” He’d pulled it down two delectable inches before she recovered enough to parry one hand with an elbow and the other with a force disc. She leapt backwards as he approached slowly, his arms circling as he looked for attack vectors.
“You went too far, my love,” he warned, “and now you've reaped the Reed-wind!”
“I won't be distracted by cornball jokes!” Her laugh turned into a yelp as she blocked him again and leapt gracefully over the couch. She considered him for another monent, then made a break for the doorway. Reed struck, managing to catch an expanse of taut belly before she twisted away and foiled two more attempts on higher value targets. She leapt through the door with Reed hot on her heels.
“If anyone asks, I’ll tell them that deflecting Mr. Fantastic when he gets handsy is the best battle training I ever—ahh!” Her words trailed into a shrieking laugh as he formed himself into a wide blanket and enveloped her. Her defensive shield ballooned his form into a ball and they both rolled down the hallway, laughing wildly.
“Lower your shields, woman!” he demanded.
She dropped the bubble and he tumbled on top of her, too spread out to be much more than a heavy blanket. He pulled himself together until he was directly above her, caging her in his arms. They stared at each other until the laughter trailed off into breathing. She leaned up and kissed him once.
“You manipulated me,” he accused.
“Want to explain that while you carry me to the pool?”
“Carry you?” He rolled off of her and they lay there, staring at each other. “I’m the victim here. If anyone is carrying anyone, you should be carrying me.”
“That’s fair.” Sue rolled to her feet and Reed chuckled as he felt her forcefield lifting him up. She put her arms under him, looking like it was the easiest thing in the world. He dutifully wrapped his arms around her.
“Watch that hand.”
“I’d rather watch you.” He kept his hand right where it was and let his fingers wander.
Sue drew in a sharp breath and wiggled until he ceased. “Behave or I’ll drop you.” She started down the hall towards the elevator. “And you’re going to have to flex around doorways because I’m not turning to the side.”
He laughed and agreed. “You know, this is a nice change. I’m free to relax and reveal my conclusions.”
“I’m listening.”
“First, you laid a towel down when you came in. It was odd you would have a towel, but I was distracted, so I didn’t think anything about it. But it clearly made an impact on my secondary thought processes.”
“Some of us don’t even have primary thought pro—”
“Then,” he continued, cutting her off, “you asked me about the weather, to put the ticking timer in my head about the end of Summer.” The elevator chimed and ascended. Sue looked down at him with wide eyes.
“You’re making me sound very smart, darling, which is a big compliment coming from you.”
Reed was undeterred. “Finally, you played that audio clip of She-Hulk doing a belly flop to make me think of the pool.”
“Is that what I did?”
He raised a hand and traced it along her jawline. Her mouth parted and he imagined twelve things he wanted to do with it. The elevator arrived and Sue unceremoniously set him down.
“We’re here. I’ve carried you enough. Any more and you would start to get spoiled.”
“Wait. We forgot to stop by our rooms for my suit…oh, let me guess: you already have that at the pool?”
She tapped her chin. “Darn. My master plan has one flaw. Oops. Guess you’ll just have to go full-frontal Fantastic.” With a whoop of delight, she raced out of the elevator. “Last one there has to wash the Fantasticar!”
He caught up with her just as they burst out onto the patio. It was a glorious night, with a scattering of diamond-chip stars trying gamely to match the glittering city below them. He spun her in place, wrapped his arms around her tight, and pulled her flush against his body.
“You manipulated me,” he repeated, then grinned. “You got me out of my head, and out of my lab. Thank you for the rescue.”
“It was easy,” she said, her eyes searching his face in a way that made him grateful beyond words. And no other words were needed. The final proof had just been definitively delivered by the woman he loved.
It was easy, if you were one Sue Richards. Because she was the only being in the cosmos who intuitively understood him. No one else—including Reed Richards—could claim that. Sue was his single absolute, and he believed in her with all his heart.
“Stop staring and start kissing,” she commanded.
He was happy to comply. Slowly, throughly, and with all the focus he could muster. Sue gave a low moan in the back of her throat and his brain—which had been entirely sidelined up to this point—suddenly offered a tantalizing new thesis: was it possible to express a theoretically infinite love for another person entirely through physical interaction? Current research inconclusive. More data was called for.
He eagerly began compiling.