Chapter Text
"But I’ve never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive."
-Randall Munroe
OCTOBER 14, 2007 – Oyster Bay, NY:
Ben knocks on the Richards' door the day Reed's grounding is over. "Hi," he says, when Reed's mother opens the door with a frown on her face.
"Hello," she says, frowning down at him like she's never seen a ten year old boy before.
"I'm here to see Reed," he says.
She stares at him so long he's half-certain he's got the wrong house, but he knows that garage door. He saw Reed Richards teleport something in that garage. Then she leans back inside the house and calls, "REED!" over her shoulder.
There's a series of loud thumping noises, and then Reed appears, breathless, behind her. His eyes widen as he looks at Ben.
"Hi," Ben says again. "Do you wanna hang out?"
Reed approaches the door slowly, and his mother stands just beyond the doorway, arms folded, frowning. "Hang out?" he echoes. "Doing what?"
Ben's not entirely sure, to be quite honest; he'd hung out with people before, tossing baseballs around or going to the movies or bowling – it doesn't seem to have a set definition. But he also doesn't think any of those things are going to interest Reed, so he straightens up a bit and says boldly, "We could walk down to the library and get ice cream cones on the way."
He has two dollars and seventy-seven cents in his wallet. That should be enough for ice cream.
"Okay," says Reed. "I'll put my shoes on."
But Reed's mom is frowning. "You can't take ice cream cones into the library, Reed," she says, disapprovingly.
"We'll eat them outside on the benches by the park," says Ben.
"It'll keep him out of the garage," someone calls from inside the house.
Ben tries to look innocent when Reed's mother turns her scrutinizing gaze back to him. Then, "Oh, all right," she says, with a sigh.
Ben does his very best to keep a straight face, and does not dare to punch the air in success until the door closes behind Reed, who still looks rather bemused by the fact that Ben is here.
He’s just going to have to convince Reed that he’s here to stay, then.
-
NOVEMBER 2, 2007 – Oyster Bay, NY:
The flathead thing is not a fluke. Reed knows nothing about tools. Ben could understand him not knowing a damn thing about parts – proven by the fact that he'd said power converter and then pointed at a pole-mount transformer. But he's built all this, and he still can't figure out which screwdriver to use.
Reed also knows nothing about building. He's trying to put a screw through sheetrock without putting an anchor in first.
"That's not – no, you can't do that, Reed, you have to anchor it."
Ben is eleven and Reed is ten and it's been three months. He's starting to think Reed might be his best friend. Ben is fairly new to best friends, but he understands the concept.
He takes a breath and counts to five like his Ma taught him and then he feels better. Less annoyed with Reed, who hasn't done anything wrong and doesn't deserve Ben snapping at him. "I'll do it for you," he says. "You can futz around with whatever else, or watch me do it so you can try it yourself next time?"
"Okay," says Reed, and apparently chooses to watch Ben work.
It’s mostly quiet, until Reed says, “So your mom taught you this?”
“Yeah, mainly,” says Ben, wondering how it is that Reed doesn’t know about his dad. Everyone in their school had known for a while there.
“I wish my mother knew about this kind of thing,” says Reed wistfully.
“I don’t like your parents very much,” Ben confesses, and then regrets it.
Reed doesn’t get angry. He just keeps watching him work.
Ben keeps going, because clearly he has no sense, and he needs to fill this awful silence. “I mean, I know they’re your folks, so you must love them, but—they treat you kinda like the people at school do. And it’s one thing for strangers to be like that, and it’s bad that people at school are rude to you, but it’s even worse that you have to deal with that at home, especially after dealing with it all day at school.”
“This place has never felt like home,” says Reed. “Is that—that’s dumb. Sorry.”
Ben stares hard at the anchor. He loves his family even if his brother is kind of mean and his mom can’t spend much time with him but—he thinks Reed is his home, in a weird, complicated way. Best friends are kind of funny like that.
“You’ll find somewhere,” Ben says. “You’re going to find a place where everyone can appreciate how brilliant you are, where there are lots of people who like you, and—”
And it’s going to be away from Ben. But it’s okay. They’re going to get houses next door to each other and build a pool across both of their backyards and hang out all the time even when they’re both married.
“Do you really think so?”
“Yeah,” says Ben. “I know so.”
-
JANUARY 8, 2008 – Oyster Bay, NY:
Ben doesn’t stop coming over.
Reed walks home from the bus stop with Ben every day. Every Sunday afternoon, they go to the library. They sit together in class and Mr. Kenny watches them with narrowed eyes but Ben doesn’t try to talk to Reed during class. They sit quietly, and when they do talk, Ben is patient: Reed realizes too late a few times that he’s been talking too long, but Ben just shrugs, tells him he’s more interesting to listen to than Mr. Kenny.
He doesn’t know how to keep Ben around, but he does know that he desperately wants to keep him, so he tries to pinpoint what it is that Ben wants, or what he’s looking for, or what he sees in Reed. He studies up on boring subjects like Latin and English literature, and weird things like necropsies and Aztec sacrifice, and tells Ben everything he’s learned the next day. It doesn’t seem to matter. Ben listens, occasionally asking questions, usually content to just sit there and listen to Reed ramble. Even about the various uses of the ablative case, or the possibly substantiated rumors of ritual human sacrifice in Ancient Carthage.
Sherlock Holmes says that when you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is likely the truth. It’s sound scientific logic, albeit slow-moving. The dismissal of certain conclusions based on clearly contradictory data is part of the scientific process after all. And when he asks Ben why he doesn’t mind Reed talking about weird stuff, Ben just shrugs and says they’re friends, and he likes to learn.
Friends. Verbal confirmation now exists. They’re friends. So Reed has to figure he’s doing something right.
They wander around town sometimes, just talking and scuffing their shoes on the concrete. Sometimes they play video games. Or Reed tries to teach Ben chess, and Ben tries to teach Reed to pitch, and they’re both bad at it.
But then there are the days where Ben invites Reed over to stay the night, and those are the very best. Reed goes to Ben’s house right after school on Friday afternoons and he helps in the salvage yard and then Mrs. Grimm makes dinner. Jimmy is sometimes rude but Mrs. Grimm is awesome, for an adult, and she lets them have pretty much free reign of the scrap yard for the night.
Those nights, Reed treasures, storing them away in his head just in case it all ends too soon.
They wander, Reed pointing out things he’s used for experiments, Ben explaining things Reed doesn’t recognize, or showing him the insides of cars there. There’s always something new. The dogs follow them - Reed’s not quite sure about the dogs yet but Ben adores them and that’s enough for him - and when they’re tired and they climb up to sit on the hood of a car, the dogs stretch out on the ground beside the car and wait for them.
“Do you think there’s life out there?”
Reed doesn’t understand for a second, but then he follows Ben’s gaze—Jupiter is visible in the dusk sky, alongside a faint crescent of the moon. “It would be statistically improbable for there not to be life out there somewhere,” he says. “It’s also really likely that there’s other life within our own solar system, even, probably. Just probably not life in any way similar to humans. Protozoa and archaebacteria and cyanobacteria.”
“I want to see that, it my lifetime,” says Ben. “Finding other life out there.”
“Once we get a hang of teleportation on Earth, we could probably start looking at teleporting to other planets,” says Reed, thoughtfully.
“I’d want to go to a different planet,” Ben tells him.
Reed is too busy thinking to reply at first. It’s never occurred to him that he could possibly go to space with the teleporter. Space would be awesome. He’s wanted to go to space since he first saw the grainy footage of Neil Armstrong planting a flag. He’s pictured building a rocket, sometimes, like the Nautilus, and exploring space with Ben like in Star Trek. But he wouldn’t even need a rocket! He could be the first person to teleport and the first person on Mars.
He realizes he’s been quiet for too long and wants to kick himself. The guidance counselors and teachers and his mom keep saying he has to reply to people, even when he doesn’t want to, because it’s polite. He doesn’t want to be rude to Ben and make Ben leave.
“Why do you want to go to space?” The words trip over themselves in his haste to rectify the silence, but Ben doesn’t seem annoyed. He’s still squinting at Jupiter.
“I want to see different stars,” he says. “I want to see what their stars look like on nights like this.”
“I don’t know how many planets you can see stars from like we can. Earth has a unique atmosphere,” Reed says.
“It’ll still be a different sky.”
Reed is starting to think Ben might want to get out of this town just as much as Reed does. “We’ll go someday, then,” he says.
Ben’s answering smile is all the confirmation Reed needs.
-
APRIL 19, 2008 – Oyster Bay, NY:
"Whoa, hey," Ben says, when Reed sits upright with a terrified gasp. "Reed? You awake?" He adds, because he doesn't seem very aware of his surroundings.
Reed shakes his head as if to clear it, and then fumbles for his glasses in the dark. His hair is sticking up a bit in the back. "Ben," he says. "Oh."
"Did you have a nightmare?" Prompts Ben.
"A lion came through my teleporter," says Reed, frowning. "I hope that isn't actually possible. My mom would be mad if I let a lion in the garage."
Ben shakes his head. "Your mom would be the least of your worries."
"Really?"
"Yeah. You'd have to deal with my angry ghost if you got me eaten by a lion."
"There's no such thing as ghosts."
"I'd still haunt you," Ben says, decisively, like it's settled. And it works, because Reed just frowns and lies back down, glasses still on.
Then - "Ben?"
"Yeah?"
"I think I would prefer your living company."
"...Okay," says Ben.
Reed rolls onto his side, expression serious in the moonlight. "If a lion comes through my teleporter, I want you to run and not get eaten."
"Dude, a lion is not gonna come through the teleporter. Go back to sleep."
"I can't," Reed says. "The nightmare caused my adrenals to flood my body with epinephrine."
Ben groans and sits up. "All right. Don't laugh, but whenever I got nightmares, my ma would let me sleep in her bed, so I knew there was someone there."
"...I don't think my mother would be amenable to that."
"No," agrees Ben, because he's noticed the distance between Reed and his mom, "but I could."
"Oh."
He's about to apologize for suggesting it when Reed slides closer to the wall and pulls his pillow along with him. "Okay," Ben says. "Cool."
He climbs into the small bed beside Reed, and then pauses before he lays down. "Do you have enough room?"
"Yeah," says Reed, "it's fine."
Ben settles in, flat on his back with his shoulder pressed against Reed's. He usually sleeps like this, looking up at the glow in the dark stars on Reed's ceiling or the cracks in his own bedroom ceiling's paint, but Reed's rabbit-like heart thumping a mile a minute, and his shallow breaths, are new and strange. "You're still wearing your glasses," he whispers.
Reed passes them to him, wordless, and Ben puts them on the bedside table. "What're adrenals?" Ben asks.
"The adrenal glands are a part of the endocrine system responsible for releasing the hormones most commonly associated with the fight or flight response."
"So, fear, then?"
"Yeah," says Reed. "Fear."
The next time Ben comes over, he puts his pillow down at the foot of the bed and sleeps there instead of the floor. Reed only kicks him in the chin a couple times.