Chapter Text
Ben wakes up and the world is gray.
It’s morning, but he feels exhausted anyway, the kind of tired that comes from sleeping too much instead of not enough. He rubs at his eyes, trying to scrub the drowsiness away, and reaches for his phone to check the time.
Instead of his phone, his hand finds an unexpected absence. Grunting, Ben rolls over just enough to reach down the side of the bed and retrieve it from where it’s fallen.
When the screen lights up, it isn’t the time that catches his attention. It’s the messages.
Ben’s at peace with the fact that he doesn’t get a lot of calls. When it comes down to the wire he’d rather read a text or just see someone face to face – and if it’s a little bit pathetic, that 90% of his already meager traffic comes from a single source, so be it. He’ll take Reed’s selfies and and too-grammatical texts any day.
But this new influx is excessive even by Reed’s standards: a dozen missed calls and a handful of voicemails, all timestamped at around three in the morning. His brow furrows.
Then again, it’s Reed. It could all lead back to something innocuous, some kind of late-night breakthrough that Reed couldn’t wait til morning to share. Ben remembers sleeping over at the Richards house and waking up to the sound of a desk lamp flicking on, with Reed scribbling down notes too urgent to sleep on before finally collapsing back into bed.
So an eleventh hour discovery sounds enough like Reed to pass muster. Ben could believe in that.
Then he starts listening. That’s when the worry starts to creep in.
-
“...told the guys, that I’m not going without you. So you need to get over here, Ben, fast as you can, screw Neil Armstrong-”
“-look, look, I’m trying, give me a second, he probably just missed the first one- Ben! Listen, you need to pick up your phone and talk to me, things are happening, it’s kind of a big deal, so – call me back. Soon.”
“Ben! Ben, come on, please pick up your phone, I know this sounds crazy but- it’s just really important that you get here as soon as possible, okay? Time is of the essence. It’s really late, I know, I’m sorry, but I promise it’s worth it, I’ll explain everything- I’m talking about changing the world and you’re asleep and just- pick up the phone, Ben. Please.”
“...one more time, give me- Ben, seriously, we can’t wait around much longer, but we really need you – I really, I really need you. To be here. For this. Also in general. But mainly for this, so it’d be really nice if you could- talk to me at least. Instead of being asleep. I don’t want to wake you up, but I kind of do, and I promise you’ll get why when you get here, so-”
“Hi, Ben. Look, we – we’re going, alright? Victor says if we wait any longer it’s not gonna work and we’ll miss our chance. And I, I want you to know how much I want you to be here, going with us. Like, if it was up to me- but this is the one time we’re gonna be able to make this work. But I wish- I just want you to know- I really- You’re the one who got us here, you know? Nothing would’ve ever...nothing would’ve gone right. Not without you. This whole thing, the gate, all of it – it’s yours, too. I know you don’t believe me, but it’s true. I just...I really miss you, Ben, I – I gotta go. I’ll talk to you later, alright?”
-
By the time Ben really thinks through what he’s doing, he’s already on the train.
He tries to laugh about it, at first – better yet, tries to think about Reed laughing about it, the idea that some latenight drunken phonecalls were enough to make Ben drop everything and rush over. He thinks about Reed smiling, saying, really, buddy, that’s what it takes for you to come and see me?
Because it’s not like Reed hasn’t wanted Ben to visit. He’s hinted as much, even outright said it a couple of times. Ben’s the one who keeps holding back.
But there’s always been things Reed couldn’t see, or just wouldn’t see. This is one of them. Ben knows the shape of himself, knows what he’s meant to be. So he knows he was never built for the world Reed’s in right now. After so many years of just the two of them together, Reed’s finally made it to a place where people think and work and feel the way he does, and he’s happy there. (He might only see fragments of Reed’s new life, but Ben would have to be blind to miss that.) The end result: Ben’s not as sure of his place in Reed’s universe, anymore. He’s afraid, much as he hates to admit it. Not of being replaced. Of being outmoded altogether.
So Ben thinks about Reed, about Reed waiting for him, and it’s a comforting thought. Except Ben can’t help but wonder why he suddenly needs comforting thoughts.
He shoves his irrationality aside and snaps his attention back to the view from the window: the world all gray and bright, gong by too fast to see clearly. It’s just a worst case scenario , he makes himself believe. Nothing more than that.
Reed’s fine.
-
Ben’s only visited this part of the city once before, but it doesn’t take him long to remember the way. It’s easier to navigate this time, no luggage to carry, no Reed gawking up at buildings and nearly getting run over as a result. The Baxter Foundation looms like a sentinel against the sky. It’s almost reassuring.
Then Ben sees the mass of people thronged around the entrance, and something heavy hits his stomach like a punch. He doesn’t run – he refuses to run, he won’t let himself give in to that new panic thrumming in his throat – but he still shoves his way into the pack, forcing his way to the front of the group.
“Move along, people, the building’s closed, nothing to see-”
The cop – she must be a cop – is exasperated, her loud voice carrying across the crowd. In retrospect, Ben knows he must’ve asked her what happened, but he doesn’t remember the act of it. He doesn’t remember anything in the wake of her answer.
“Look, the building’s closed for the day. There was a lab explosion or something, late last night. Nobody gets in til further notice. Why, you got business?”
A lab explosion. Late last night. Ben reckons he could pick out the exact time, if he tried.
“You alright, son?”
Don’t blow up , Ben thinks, and tastes bile in his mouth.
-
The news makes it back to Oyster Bay before Ben does. As far as he can tell, someone came by the Richards’ house in the morning, after he’d already left.
The world blurs out, but people keep saying the same things anyway.
A freak accident. Such a shame. He was so young.
The people who knew Reed better don’t say anything at all when Ben goes by. They just look at him, like they hope he doesn’t know, like they hope he does, just so they won’t have to tell him. He can’t shake the weight of their staring. In the days after that, he goes out less and less, until he’s not going out at all.
Ben asks himself, once, if he should visit Reed’s parents, go and say whatever people are supposed to say when there’s been a death in the family. What would be worse: seeing them uncaring, with their eyes dry, or seeing them grieving, mourning the way Ben wishes he knew how to.
Because that’s the core of everything, right now: Ben doesn’t know how to do this. All the things they talked about, before Reed left or even after, and not a word of it can help Ben understand this. And he knows, if things were different, if it’d been someone else, he would’ve gone to Reed, or Reed to him, and maybe they would’ve made some sense out of it. Reed could be good at that, sometimes.
But Reed’s gone. Reed’s gone, and Ben doesn’t know where to begin.
-
There will be a funeral. Closed-casket, he learns, which is almost a relief, until it sinks in and becomes distantly horrifying instead.
Ben doesn’t remember his father’s funeral. Looking back, he thinks he must’ve been there – a little kid in a sea of suits and uniforms – but maybe not. Maybe he was sent off somewhere else, kept out from underfoot. His mother would know, he reckons, but it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing he can just ask , out of the blue.
In Ben’s head, Daniel Grimm is locked in a handful of photographs. When his father had died, he’d been too young to remember anything else.
He thinks back, then, to when his mother and brother would leave the house and he’d sit in front of the refrigerator, looking up at the portrait at the door. He’d sit there, thinking there’s Dad, there’s your father, what do you want to say? And he’d never think of anything real enough to waste the words on, so he’d stay there, silently, until a door opened in another room and he slipped away again.
Was that a kind of mourning? Knowing that you wouldn’t get an answer, but still wishing you knew how to ask?
Ben wouldn’t be unwelcome at Reed’s funeral. He’s Reed’s friend – was, was Reed’s friend, he has to remember that past tense, now. He knows that he should go. He knows that going would be the right thing or at least the done thing and maybe in the long run, it would help.
That much he’s certain of. The same way he’s certain that he can’t go. That he can’t let himself think of Reed as just a thing in a box, to be buried and left behind. Ben can’t bring himself to be a part of that. He doesn’t know what would happen if he tried.
When the day finally comes, Ben takes the truck and drives til he hits the middle of nowhere. He pulls to the side of the road, shoves his fist against his mouth, and screams.
-
It’s almost a month gone by when Ben remembers the messages.
He tries, at first, to keep from listening. He knows there’s nothing good about it – what’s the point of torturing himself like this? – but all it takes is one loose thought of I’ll never hear his voice again to break him.
So Ben listens to Reed’s voicemails. Listens until he could recite them backwards, every nuance, every breath. Until it’s second nature for him to screw his eyes shut and search for Reed in the sound, trying to keep him for a little longer before the recording ends. He never manages it. That doesn’t stop him from trying.
Ben wonders, sometimes, if he’d been awake, if he’d been listening – would it have made a difference? He doesn’t think he’ll ever know what happened that night, and it’s worse to try and imagine it. Better to keep it like a flash in the dark, formless and unspecific, where he doesn’t have to dwell on did he know or did it hurt.
Even before everything, he’d never wanted to think about Reed getting hurt. Ben spent most of his life trying to keep that from happening.
You loved him , something says inside his head, a hundred listens later. Ben thinks, I know.
No, it says, you loved him.
Ben feels like he’s been hollowed out and left to rot.
-
The world moves on. Ben tries to do the same.
Most days it's just a matter of going through the motions, reciting the right lines. Ben likes to think it comes more naturally these days. Likes to think that someday in the future it'll be natural, too. Someday. Just not yet.
The past four months have been the longest he ever lived through. But he lived through them. He has to remember that.
Ben isn’t sure what drives him to visit the cemetery at last. Only that it seems like the right time. That he’s far enough from Reed’s death that going there won’t undo him altogether.
It’s another gray weather day when Ben makes the trip. Clouds blot out the sky overhead. He picks his way through the headstones, passing flowers in various states of wiltedness, before he finds the spot he's looking for.
There are no flowers at Reed's grave. The marker is plain, name and years etched out in an impassive fashion, and Ben thinks he'd have missed it if he hadn't been actively searching for it.
What did he expect to find here? There's nothing about this place that feels any closer to Reed – just a name, just a body under the earth, it's not Reed , it's not anything at all – and his hands curl into fists as for a moment he's caught up in the unfairness of it, that Reed's gone and he's-
-still here, still waiting for the phone to ring, still hung up on conversations that they never got to have.
"I'll talk to you later, alright?"
"All this time," Ben says under his breath, ragged and weary, "and I still don't know how to miss you."
It's not much. But it's more than he ever managed before, as a child sitting in front of a fridge, and he thinks that that has to stand for something.
Then Ben hears someone approaching from behind him and he starts, looking back over his shoulder just in time to see the newcomer arrive.
"I'm sorry to have disturbed you."
Ben knows the voice but can't place it. He opens his mouth to say something like it's fine , but the man goes on.
"You're Reed's friend, aren't you?" An old memory clicks back into place as Dr. Franklin Storm takes a step towards him. "His assistant, from the science fair...Ben Grimm, wasn't it?"
"That's me." Suddenly Ben’s struck by how easy it would be to hate this man, standing there in his quiet dignity, to look at Dr. Storm and think he'd still be alive, if you hadn't taken him away . And it's not a fair thought, it's the kind he'll regret later, but Ben finds it difficult to care about fairness, right now, against the sudden aching in his chest. Still, he does what he can to shove the thought aside.
"Reed often mentioned you," Dr. Storm continues. "To hear him tell it, you were as much a part of the quantum gate project as he was."
Four months was long enough to scar him over, but Ben knows he isn't healed enough for this. As it is, he can't suppress a huff of disbelief. "That's just something he said. I wasn't – it was him . All of it." Ben breathes, then, sure and slow. "It was always him."
"You underestimate yourself." The doctor considers him. "There were only three people in the world who worked on the quantum gate, before Baxter. You are the last one left." He pauses, like he's testing the weight of what he's about to say. "You might be able to finish what he started."
The world stills around them. There's so much wrong with the idea that Ben isn't sure where to begin. Because he's not Reed – he can't be Reed, not the way Dr. Storm or anyone else might want him to be. And yet, he knows the shape of what he's being offered: a door to close, a possible goodbye.
"Completing the gate won't bring him back." The words are raw in Ben's throat.
"No, it won't," Dr. Storm concedes. "But he could live on through it."
This is a crossroads, but Ben thinks it wasn't much of a choice.
It was always Reed, after all. He's known that since the start.
"What do you want me to do?"