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Decades ago, Victor had overseen the restoration of the Patriarchate Palace, the building that would become the seat of Victor's reign. In the long slant of centuries, Doomstadt had absorbed some of the fluted columns and Venusian statuettes that dappled Western Europe. In the alien way hate was preserved in memory, Victor could recall how he detested the slow poison that eroded what was Latverian. How every Western architect plucked another star from Latveria’s rightful firmament. He had thrown them all out of the country.
In the midst of the restoration, the Patriarchate Palace may as well have been ruins. So much had been removed, made to accord with a new vision of what Doom’s people could be. Ruins without destruction – that had been a sweet novelty. The pooling providence that suggested that one day soon, something worthy of the name Castle Doom would rise up from the ashes.
Now Castle Doom was returned to ruins again. Now there was no sense of providence in it. Latverian ambitions were gone. Only Victor and his ghosts remained now.
“It’s very simple, my love,” Cynthia said, her brows knitted together in a kind of beatific concern that Victor struggled to place in his memory. “Hasn’t he always held you back?”
Victor grit his teeth, but kept his eyes aimed at the floor. “I cannot deny my own responsibility.” Reed, who had remained uncharacteristically silent, watching Cynthia pace the weathered floor of the castle ruins, looked up at Victor with wide eyes when he heard this.
Cynthia sighed. “Yes,” she agreed wearily. “You take responsibility in everything, it seems. Even me.” Victor crossed his arms.
“You’re my mother. You’re my responsibility.” Cynthia’s eyes narrowed on him, and Victor swallowed. Years later, the sinking feeling of being caught out was still familiar from childhood. Cynthia moved behind where Victor stood, setting his nerves alight. He kept still when she placed her hands on his arms.
“I’m your mother,” she allowed, facetiously sweet in his ear. “And what is he, that you take responsibility over him?” She gestured with a long-nailed hand to where Reed stood. Where she pointed, Reed seemed to become unfrozen. Alive, like his strings had been taken up from where they lay limply on the floor.
He approached Victor, as though hooked and drawn in by Cynthia’s pointing finger. He stopped close, too close, soliciting intimacy from Victor with no hint of compunction. “You know I’m weak,” Reed said quietly, avoiding Victor’s eyes. “But you never kill me.”
In other circumstances, Victor would’ve laughed at this statement. As it was, a labored cough erupted from his throat, a scoff that had withered. “You can’t be serious. I don’t kill you, so I must care for you?”
“Not killing something can be a great ordeal,” Cynthia said lowly in his ear. Victor felt his fists clench, as his fist might have clenched around the neck of the rabbit if he had been able to do as his mother bade him. The memory had been haunting him again since Cynthia’s return. Victor’s single, shameful act of mercy. If he had known as a child that sparing the rabbit would consign him to a lifetime of failures, he might have been able to muster up the gall to kill the thing. “No,” Cynthia contradicted him, interrupting his thoughts. “You wouldn’t have been able to.”
Cynthia’s arms around him retreated back and away.
Reed finally looked up at Victor, and as close as he was, Victor could see an unnatural purple glint coloring his eyes. A sigh rattled through Victor’s throat, the fatigued motion stifled by the stiff structure of the Iron Man armor. Reed, or the apparent Reed, laid his arms gently on Victor’s forearms.
“This is a trick,” Victor suggested tonelessly. Did it even mean anything to comment on what was obvious? Victor had never thought so. Reed hummed and smiled gently.
“Isn’t it?” He asked. “I know everything about the real me. Anything you’ve ever wondered about.”
“I don’t wonder about Reed Richards,” Victor said bluntly. Reed laughed softly, and made his final move, the finishing blow that had been lurking in the air: he leaned forward and rested his cheek against the green light on Victor’s chest.
“You wonder if he notices,” Reed said. He seemed not to mind the way Victor’s breath had begun to rush out of him.
“Notices what?” Victor ground out. Cynthia had stalked away again, looking pointedly away from where Reed held her son.
“That a rabbit you don’t kill is a pet.”
Victor heard himself groan a terrible frustration, like something dying. He wrenched himself into movement, taking the false Reed’s shoulder beneath his hands and pushing with all his strength. Sure enough, the man crumpled to the ground in a heap.
Too late, Victor heard Cynthia’s laughter, soft at first but growing out of control. “Oh, Victor,” she cried. “I’m afraid there’s no hope at all for you.” She was bent over with the force of her mirth. The sight boggled Victor, who had hardly known his mother to smile, let alone laugh this way.
When he could not take her in anymore, his gaze dropped to his own feet. Reed, with blood seeping from his lips, had shuffled to wrap himself around one armored leg. “Isn’t it simple to want?” The sneer twisting his face was as strange as Cynthia’s laughter. The illusion was breaking apart. Even fury could not keep Victor upright.
He fell backward, away from Cynthia, away from Reed. Another crumbled ruin, but there had long been too many to count.