Chapter Text
Reed knew him by reputation before he’d met him. A brilliant transplant from across the Atlantic, he’d been told through the grapevine. Of meager means, working out of ramshackle sheds and caravans and yet he had already created machines, tools of warfare, that every country on either side of the Iron Curtain was at least fifteen years away from inventing. A weapons expert. That’s how they had described him.
When they finally met on day of registration, the appearance certainly matched the description. Handsome. European. All sharp edges and clipped vowels. And he was icy, with eyes that barely spared him a glance. Cold to friendship. To collaboration. A cruel scoff at the not unwarranted suggestion to room together left Reed feeling stung, rendered cold himself in the wake of his retreating footsteps. Like an embarrassed schoolboy left out in the snow.
Victor von Doom left a bitter aftertaste in his mouth. He never wanted to see him again.
So naturally, it turned out they shared nearly every single class together.
It was easy enough to distance himself from him in the wide, coliseum-like college auditoriums. Reed was happy to drown out the dour von Doom in his enthusiastic pursuit of knowledge.
Unfortunately, he found quite quickly that State University was just like Harvard, Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, Stanford, and all the rest. It was hard for the rest of them to keep up. (Including most of his professors.)
On its own, that wasn’t much of a problem: Reed often enjoyed walking others through his thought process, although he often failed to recognize when he lost his audience about five to ten minutes prior to arriving at his conclusions.
No, what the real problem was that Victor von Doom was exactly on his level. And the way Victor would have likely put it, quite many levels above him. And when Reed contributed in class, every so often he would go out of his way to remind Reed of this. Outside of this, Doom seldom contributed to the discussion. But in these moments, even the worst student in class barely hanging onto the discussion could’ve told you that they were thinly-veiled insults. The venom felt unwarranted, as if punishment for Reed daring to speak his mind. It created a burgeoning resentment in him, curdling the joys and pleasantries of the classroom like spoiled milk.
One particular day in Theoretical Physics, where by chance he had sat right in front of Victor himself, Victor made the rare comment in class unprompted, about his adjustments to the Gödel metric and its implications for.. time travel?
The novelty of it took him off guard as he listened. Reed found his brows furrowing further and further while Victor spoke. Despite the esoteric nature of the subject, the ideas were objectively fascinating, but-
“It’s not reproducible to our universe,” Reed said, halting Victor’s speech almost absentmindedly. He continued. “You’re disregarding the negative cosmological constant. The logic is sound but the math is—“
“If I required peer feedback on my work, I’d ask for it,” the boy interrupted curtly.
Reed felt his face flush with embarrassment. And he felt somewhere deep inside, a cracking of the ice. He swiveled around, his voice loud enough to carry across the room. The words left his mouth almost before he realized what he was saying.
“Next time suggest a less harebrained theory, and you won’t need any.”
There was a smattering of hushed giggles and gasps across the classroom, and Reed caught the briefest glimpse of Victor von Doom’s thunderstruck expression before turning back in his seat.
The professor chortled at the front, pulling attention back to himself. “Alright gentlemen, that’s enough. Back to the lesson at hand, shall we?”
Reed could feel the heat of eyes on the back of his head. The hairs on his neck prickled, but not uncomfortably. Warmth bloomed in his chest.
He didn’t turn around for the rest of the class period.
Gathering his things at the end of lecture, his heart skipped a beat in a savage, satisfied way hearing the sound of a breath exhaled through teeth. He made his way down the steps defiantly proud with the image of blazing brown eyes burned into his retinas.
“Y’know Stretch, when I said you needed to get out of the lab more often, the library was not what I had in mind.”
Reed chuckled at his roommate as he squatted down to pull a veritable tome from the row of books, followed by another, then another. Ben Grimm watched this action with considerably less mirth, which continued to wane with each textbook Reed pulled from the bookcase.
Ben sighed exasperatedly, leaning against the opposing bookcase with far too much weight as the shelves whined in protest. “At this rate, I seriously doubt yer gonna see sunlight by the end of the semester, let alone any girl’s panties. They shoulda warned me I wuz gonna be rooming with a nerdy vampire.”
Reed coughed pointedly, his eyes still trained on the shelf he was examining. “I didn’t realize an education in women’s lingerie was a graduation requirement. They must’ve left that one off the list I got.”
“Graduation requirement?!” Ben exclaimed, eyes wide with disbelief, unfettered even when a passing librarian shushed him angrily. He gave Reed an insistent slap on the back, making him drop the precarious stack of books he was trying to stand up with. “Buddy, no roomie of mine is gonna make it through freshman year a virgin. Yer insultin’ my pride with this. Aunt Petunia’s favorite nephew has some standards to uphold!”
“Ben, I don’t think your aunt is particularly worried about how much play you or I are getting in college,” Reed said exasperatedly, interrupting his action to pick up his books to indignantly whisper: “And for the record, I’m not a virgin.”
Ben looked distinctly unimpressed.
“Fergive me for bein’ a skeptic. Come to Len’s frat party on Thursday with me! If you spent more time away from yer one true love, Miz Erlenmeyer F. Lask, I’d be able to see what game ya actually got!”
Reed let out a long suffering sigh, struggling not to smile at his friend’s persistence. “I suppose…”
Ben gave him another affectionate slap to the back. “Attaboy! You can come with me and the guys from the team, I’ll introduce ya.”
He smiled in earnest as Ben regaled him with all the details. Nodded and smiled, sighing as Ben, after having gotten what he clearly wanted, proceeded to excuse himself from the premises, citing a deathly allergy to “musty old books.” It turned out the campus librarian was immune to the old Grimm charm, as he heard her whisper hushed diatribes at Ben as he left. Reed shaking his head, continued to grin to himself even after Ben was gone. He turned and dropped to the ground to gather his pile of books for library checkout in his arms.
Yet in this new solitude, he felt an uncanny awareness he was being watched.