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Earth-1610
The rental car that Reed and Sue had picked up in the city pulled slightly to the right. It hadn’t been obvious in the slow stop-and-go of New York traffic, but now they’d made it to the highway outside the city, and the pull had taken up center stage.
Thinking it the more gallant move, Reed had taken on the responsibility of driving them to Sue’s mother’s temporary American residence. Having lived so long in the city, he wasn’t especially comfortable driving, but anyone who had piloted a spaceship ought not be overly concerned about that sort of thing. At least, that was what he supposed.
Sue, in the passenger seat, was fiddling with the worn paperback cover of the book she’d brought along to occupy the drive. She hadn’t opened it once, the best sign that she was dreading the upcoming parental dinner. Again and again her fingertip traced the white letters of the title– Earthlings.
“I shouldn’t have to be civil with her,” Sue said, an edge of frustration in her tone.
“I don’t think you should, either,” Reed agreed readily. He adjusted the wheel to reorient them to the left.
“She invited us because she wants a favor, that’s all this is,” Sue went on. Reed didn’t say anything, for he too suspected this would be true. As it had been with Atlantis, so it always was with Dr. Storm. The dull highway noise made the ensuing silence no less conspicuous. Reed thought of his own mother, who had never asked him for anything he had been able to give.
“What’s your book about?” he asked eventually.
“Hm,” Sue looked over at him, though he could not appreciate it with his eyes focused on the road. “A girl who decides she must be an alien.”
“Why does she decide that?”
“She can’t get along with anyone,” Sue explained. “Society rejects her, so she rejects society. It’s pretty grim, I guess.”
“Right. Sounds melodramatic,” Reed said, chuckling weakly. Sue shrugged, and he caught the movement in his peripheral vision.
“I read the very last two pages already,” Sue said, tone leading into something.
“Didn’t that ruin the story?” Reed wondered. He usually felt sure of where Sue was going with things, but with the older Dr. Storm lurking on the horizon, he sensed an unknown direction to her thoughts.
“I had this suspicion. Like I could see the shape of her terrible end,” Sue answered.
“And did it end terribly?” Sue nodded again in his periphery. He pulled the steering wheel left.
“The girl and her cousin retreat from society and eat each other. They’re both aliens, in the end,” Sue said. Reed swallowed.
“Figuratively or literally?”
“Figuratively.”
“I see,” Reed said hesitantly.
A day and a half later, Reed was retrieving their belongings from the rental car upon its return. Dinner with Sue’s mother had been as unpleasant as Sue had anticipated. Mary Storm oozed a strange brand of maternal condescension that Reed had no script for, and he’d been hammered by nasty shock all through the meal. He was like a foreigner in Sue’s world, for the nastiness was rote to her. Soon after they’d arrived back at the Baxter building, Sue had retreated to her room.
Running his hand under the passenger’s seat for anything left behind, Reed’s fingers found the copy of Earthlings that Sue had left there, forgotten in her quick exodus back to normalcy.
There were a few other odds and ends to be taken– a travel coffee mug, a tube of lipstick. But the book Reed did not return to Sue right away. He kept it with him in the lab, only for a day or so, before he left it on the coffee table in their common area.
An alien, he thought, with an inkling of utter hopelessness. But then he went back upstairs to find Sue.
–
Earth-616
Victor had dreamed a thousand false futures, pursued them doggedly and to great personal loss. Over and again, the same pursuit. A lesser being would’ve called Victor a hopeful man. Doom knew better. Hope was a living death. Only true relentlessness led to vindication. And Victor did plan, in spite of everything, to be vindicated.
An indecipherable suspicion pestered him unabatedly in the hilly countryside outside Turin. There was a freight railway which ran from the city factories up and out of Piedmonte, hauling cars and makeup and textiles through the eye of a needle and into the rest of Europe. Naturally accompanying the freight railway was a gravel ditch running along the side of the tracks set further into the mountain. The ditch accumulated various forms of flotsam and jetsam, loosed pipes and tire rinds tumbling down from the bounds of freight cars and making permanent homes in the dirty, unpeopled ditch.
The ditch was, in the end, an unremarkable place. And for one sought after by every favor of challenger, noble and ignoble, the unremarkable made better sanctuary than the most secure fortress.
The first day he had seen it, he had not been able to tell what it was. Victor’s fingers had itched to take it back to a laboratory, to wrest its secrets in the way only he knew how. Organic? Synthetic? With his usual resources, it would be no great mystery for long.
But of course, he lacked his usual resources. Victor had few choices about where to store his own physical form, let alone an unidentified lab specimen.
The Turin tracks served a certain purpose well enough. His own lab as it had been before, in Latveria, could not have been more secret than the rail ditch. The freight trains from Turin required only three or four men to operate, and as they built speed in the countryside hills, none of those few ever took the time to gaze down at the gravel. The train men were apathetic even to Victor’s lonely figure along the tracks, pacing up the length as he listened over a handful of pirated radio frequencies to intelligence chatter. At every turn, some new bother demanded Victor’s attention. Yet the chatter didn’t mention him at all. People around, close enough almost to touch, and yet Victor may as well have been on Mars. At the very least, no one knew where to find him, and he could be alone to think after long days spent rounding up the rabble he’d once commanded.
As it was, Victor was the only one who saw the black patch of– something– at the edge of the tracks.
Something that twitched when prodded, and rippled with the rattling movement of the passing trains.
Of course, it was impossible to leave the issue alone, then. The thing was alive. Victor left for hours at a time, unwilling to be derailed from his larger goals. But always he returned, and found the something bigger than when he had left it. Lumpier, somehow.
There was a chill growing in the air by the time the first shocking development arrived– winter in Turin was bracing, but tinged with a chemical twang that suggested spilled fuel and burnt rubber. Further into the countryside, there was cleaner natural beauty. But Victor had no interest in that now.
The something had an eye. A blue eye, that blinked and looked about intelligently. Around it, meat (for the eye seemed to imply that it was, in fact, meat) had accumulated, not black but red and wet. Like the inside of a human.
Crouched over what was now a mound, Victor watched and jerked back when another eye appeared– this one clouded over with white.
“Te jó ég,” Victor hissed, bracing his hands on his knees. The mound shivered, presumably now able to hear him, too. The shivering ratcheted up in intensity, and Victor staggered back several steps. Before him, the mound was resolving itself into shapes, serpentine ropes of flesh that smoothed out into arms and elbows and fingers. The head came last, with features rising up to gather around the eyes. What had been bloody and wet reformed into pale skin, the white glint of teeth, dark hair that curled about ears and neck.
And then Victor was looking at Reed.
Reed, who fell over on his hands and knees, breathing raggedly and eventually spitting an excess of saliva onto the gravel beneath him.
“The head is the hardest,” Reed gasped at length. Victor, whose eyebrows had surely climbed to the heavens, schooled his expression into something cool and unimpressed when Reed lifted his head up and looked at him.
“In what way?” Victor asked, curious despite himself.
“The…piece of me made by the Molecule Man,” Reed paused to make a face at the mention of the man. “It had ganglia, but no neurons. They’re hard to remake fast.”
“I’m sure he assumed you wouldn’t be able to,” Victor suggested, crossing his arms to shield himself from the fact that he was impressed. Reed huffed a weak laugh.
“Oh, sure. Idiots always assume everyone else is as idiotic as they are,” Reed conceded. He was rearranging himself, sitting back and pulling his knees to his chest and looking up at Victor with some interest. “It's you. I see the multiverse is not as big as I once imagined.”
“Small, or merely ruled by providence,” Victor said, and smiled slightly when he realized he’d never said anything to that effect so casually. It was always shouting, with Reed.
“Right,” Reed said slowly. Then, he’d never been as partial to providence and fate as Victor had been. “You, Sue, and Ben. Like bad pennies,” Reed continued, frowning. “I suppose I’d rather be talking to you than either of them.”
Startled by the statement, Victor laughed, the sort of laugh that he was sure he hadn’t enjoyed in years.
Reed scowled up at him. “What’s funny?”
Victor shook his head. “It’s hard to say. Don’t you remember us being enemies?” Maybe something about remaking his own brain had set this Reed’s priorities backwards. Victor swept his cape aside and sat down cross-legged, facing where Reed still sat hugging his knees. The gesture seemed to mollify Reed, whose scowl eased.
“Everyone’s my enemy,” he said simply. The words sat in the air for a moment, before Reed unfolded and sat cross legged, mirroring Victor’s posture. “But you,” he began, one finger pressed thoughtfully to his chin. “You didn’t just find me today, did you?”
“No,” Victor confirmed.
“You knew it was me,” Reed ventured.
“I suspected that could be the case. I didn’t know,” Victor said, shrugging. The gesture was easier in Stark’s armor than it was in his own. In fact, he hadn’t truly anticipated anything of the sort that had happened. Victor had long since learned that Reed was not present in all the places and things Victor imagined he could be. The suspicion which had so drawn him to Turin was related in some way to Reed. But it didn’t shock Victor in any grand way to think that he was consigned to a preternatural awareness of Reed– that was the kind of albatross the universe was all too happy to dump on him.
“You’re smart. Not as smart as me,” Reed paused politely to allow Victor time to roll his eyes. “But smart enough that you wouldn’t seek me out for that.”
“That’s correct.”
“But you kept coming back,” Reed said thoughtfully, looking at Victor as though he were a puzzle. Too late, Victor sensed that saying anything more would be giving too much away. He couldn’t help the way he broke eye contact, looking down at the ground.
“You– want me,” Reed realized, though he didn’t sound as though he believed it, his eyes had narrowed and turned wary.
“For what?” Victor croaked, finding his voice again. It sounded weak, he knew, but he couldn’t help himself, couldn’t bolster his own ramparts. It was one thing to be pathetic when he knew Reed would never know about it– dead or missing or whatever else he was. It was different to be studied by this impish little copy– studied and understood.
“You tell me,” Reed said, voice soft and newly resolved. Victor looked up and could see the resolve: Reed had moved to crawl towards Victor, his back was arched, lips parted in the accoutrements of seduction.
“What are you doing?” Victor asked, holding still only by sheer force of will. To scramble away (as part of him desperately wanted to) would be giving away too much.
Pausing, Reed seemed to give thought to what he would say. “People always said how lucky I was to have Sue,” he said in a musing tone. “I’m sure that was right. But actually, I’ve never once felt lucky, not about anything.”
Victor breathed out audibly. The bitterness edging into Reed’s voice was sharp and stinging and too familiar.
“You know,” Reed continued. “If you had the me you wanted, that wretched sentimentalist, people would say that you were the lucky one.” His legs had curled up under him, and Victor had only a split second of warning before Reed dove at him. Reed’s weight was slight, but Victor fell back onto the gravel, head shielded by the metal panel of armor at the base of his skull. The collision rang out with a disconcerting thunk.
In an attempt to stop him from making any more sudden movements, Victor scrabbled to anchor his hands around Reed’s waist, holding him firmly where he’d straddled Victor. Reed seemed not to notice, his brows knit together and face pinched in unexplained pain.
“What’s happened?” Victor demanded. What’s wrong? But that couldn’t be right. He didn’t want to be worried over Reed, especially not this Reed.
“Just– it's hard to focus,” Reed grit out. “Every piece of me is in a different place.”
“And what are you doing?” Victor asked, thinking that perhaps answering the question would clear his mind.
“I’m–” Reed’s hands had crawled up to clutch at his head. “I’m in a lot of prisons.”
“Not all of you,” Victor said, disbelieving. Laying there in the gravel, he watched Reed’s face, twisted and flushed under the stars over Turin. His eyes, so striking earlier as they emerged in the industrial ditch, were glazed over, as though seeing many different things. It seemed impossible to Victor that over and over, a million times, Reed Richards (even a second rate Reed Richards) had been rejected and put away by the universe.
“Oh,” Reed gasped. The muscles under Victor’s hands flexed and protested, and Reed coughed before he continued. “There’s one place– Victor and Sue are watching this awful movie.”
It was strange to hear another version of himself referred to this way, but Victor was more caught by the idea that there was another universe where he, Sue, and Reed were doing anything together.
“You don’t know it's awful,” Victor said, instead of voicing the clammy feeling growing in his stomach. The one that arose whenever he saw the difference between his own life and the life that could be.
Exhaustion was slowing Reed down, now. That seemed plausible, too. Surely birthing oneself was in some way tiring. Reed’s posture sagged even as his hands fell back down to rest on Victor’s shoulders.
“I do,” he said emptily. “I do know it's awful.” He coughed again, and curled into himself, head coming to rest on the faintly glowing light on Victor’s chest. “I just need a moment to think,” he mumbled.
He stopped moving eventually, going lax against Victor, and Victor supposed he had fallen asleep. Victor remained on his back, staring up at the stars.
Victor kept his eyes on the stars even as he slowly moved his hand, letting it hold Reed around his shoulders.
It couldn’t go on this way, of course. But for as long as Reed slept, Victor could stay as he was. The next train out of Turin would be loud, and it would end all this.
The thought wasn’t as comforting as Victor wished it were.