Chapter Text
Reed Richards still felt as if his extremities were frozen as he laid down on the floor of his lab in his home and headquarters of the Baxter Building in New York City.
The Fantastic Four had been caught in Doctor Doom’s trap earlier, and they had barely managed to free themselves.
Of the fantastic quartet, Reed was their leader as Mister Fantastic, and his elastic body and flexibility had been no good against restraints and a room colder than the vacuum of space. Benjamin Grimm, the Thing, had been equally restrained in chains that were tied to the fate of his other three teammates. He could have easily freed himself with the considerable strength of his impenetrable orange rocky skin, but to do so would have harmed everyone else. Despite what others called him and his hulking form, he was no monster. Jonathan Storm, the Human Torch was the youngest of the team, and he was trapped in a tank of breathable liquid that kept his full body flames doused and in check. His older sister, Susan Storm, the Invisible Woman had two superpowers–one of invisibility that she couldn’t use to hide from Doom’s sophisticated sensors, and the other was her invisible force fields that she could not form when the portion of her brain that generated those fields was being scrambled by sonic pulses.
They were all trapped as prisoners in orange jumpsuits, and no longer in the blue bodysuits they customarily wore as their superhero uniforms. Gone too was the encircled number four; they had no communications devices between them, but they did not need it.
It turned out Sue’s invisibility was the weapon she needed. Instead of using her own power for self-camouflage, she hid the trigger button that would have sealed their fates.
Johnny himself had been absorbing heat, not creating it. And when he finally released the heat, he shattered the tube that contained him with a rapid temperature change.
Then, Reed pushed through the pain of his very body shattering as he stretched himself free with a body density he had carefully calibrated. When Sue took out every light in the dungeon by absorbing the light itself as her brother did heat, Johnny followed through with searing fire that freed Susan from the tyranny of the sonic scramblers.
Ben, at the right moment, freed himself last with a yank that shattered the chains into pieces. He knew then that it was clobberin’ time.
The purple servo-guards were upon them in an instant as Dr. Doom’s electronically modified voice pierced through them with all the rage and majesty contained in his iron-encased armor. He was a blur of a fur-lined green tunic and cloak, and magical bolts of electricity were fired from his gauntlets.
“Try as you might to escape Doom in body, Doom will forever be in your mind!” Doom snarled, a great rage in his furious attacks.
“That’s enough, Victor.” Reed replied, his tone jaded, his voice hollow.
“It will never be enough! Never!” Doom replied with a passion that was at odds with the dispassion given to him.
The Fantastic Four were a team, and this was hardly the first time they had been trapped in Doom’s dungeons, nor was it their first escape from Castle Doom in Doctor Doom’s tiny kingdom of Latveria in Eastern Europe.
Their secretive trek through Mount Doom had been arduous. It had been the end of spring, but on that mountain it was like the middle of winter. Reed felt as if he would have shattered with every step as he led his friends and teammates along the steep snow and ice laden path. If Susan hadn’t hidden them with her invisibility and promise of protection, they would have been discovered. If Johnny hadn’t kept them warm with just enough heat cycled through a contained force field and his cheerful words, they would have all frozen. If Ben hadn’t disguised himself as a rocky snow covered boulder with them all in his arms with resolve, they would have just as well been captured.
The hidden teleporter Reed had left in a cave on Mount Doom was not questioned by the rest of his teammates; it was their way out.
And they had all gotten back safely.
Some hours later, Reed got up from the lab floor to go to the kitchen. It was one of their many communal kitchens, but it was the one they got the best work and many meals done at.
“Hey Reed! You look like you could use the cocoa.” Johnny said as Reed approached the counter.
Sue was already wearing a robe over a sweater, with her hair in a towel as she sipped on her own hot cocoa. “After that, I think we all do.”
Ben was already done with his cup and dropping the soaked marshmallows left at the bottom into his mouth. “I’m gonna need ta snooze early.”
“Thanks.” Reed said as Johnny handed him a full cup of the hot chocolate.
“If Doom wanted to say ‘happy birthday’, he could've just said something.” Johnny shook his head.
“Hmm?” Reed looked up from where he had been deep in thought as he peered down the hot drink.
“You’re turning thirty this weekend, Reed.” Sue leaned against the counter. “You’re not that good even with your own dates, huh?”
“Oh. Yes. I forgot.” Reed replied. “I forget how quickly time passes.”
“Just gotta roll with it.” Ben yawned. “See youze in the morning.”
Sue was already cleaning her own mug. Johnny waited his turn to rinse the two cups in his hands.
Reed was still at the counter by the time everyone else had retired, but he did not feel lonely. This was more than a team, these were his friends—his family. They had all been with him when they stole the government rocket he’d been working on and took it on a maiden voyage in the name of science and progress against rivals who were easing closer to the finish line. They had ended up being bombarded by cosmic rays up in space—the ship’s shielding hadn’t been enough, like Ben, his best friend and pilot had warned him. His other dear friend Sue had gone with them all, along with her brother Johnny, and they had all been altered up there—the cosmic rays that should have killed them, but instead transformed their bodies, imbued them with superpowers.
If Reed hadn’t worked to make them the celebrities they were as the Fantastic Four, they would have been subject to military experimentation and reprimand, or worse. At least they were adored and protected by the public, rather than hated. They could continue to do the exploring and adventuring that was in their core, in addition to the superheroics.
Their clashes with Dr. Doom and other supervillains had become famous–or infamous in the villain’s case. But Dr. Doom had always been the most… excessive of their rogue gallery.
The one that pierced Reed closest to the chest. The one that hurt him the most.
When it was time for bed, Reed put aside all the readings-in-progress that had spilled onto his bed on his table.
All the books along his bedroom walls which he had piled high, sans shelves, had knowledge contained within them that weren’t the comforts he was seeking tonight. Completed volumes, ear-dogged copies, books of various sizes and subjects and genres, nonfiction and fiction: mathematics, physics, engineering, poetry, philosophy, science fiction, romance, fantasy—none of it was on his mind at the moment.
There was something he wished to revisit, and he found it deep behind the drawer of his night stand: REED RICHARDS JOURNAL STATE UNIVERSITY.
As he flipped through it and looked at passages that caught his attention, he soon realized he had been trying to pinpoint something. When did everything go so wrong?
What terrible tragedy occurred to a talented young man like Victor von Doom to make him become the masked tyrant that was Doctor Doom?
Reed knew part of the answer, of course. He had learned bits and pieces from Latverian archives, pilfered publications, stolen data, even from soundbites of Latveria’s citizens. Even from Boris, Victor’s trusted servant who had been like a guardian to him after his father died. After Reed had learned Victor was alive, he did research out of pure curiosity. The desire to understand a man who had declared him his greatest enemy drove him to look everywhere for information. In the end he had satisfied his curiosity but in the process, his sympathy for the man had grown exponentially. If only he had known…
Victor had been born in Latveria to a Roma doctor and witch, a people who were subject to the abuse and persecution of the small principality’s original barons and kings, who hounded Victor’s clan in the community in which they resisted assimilation. Perhaps, Victor had been tragedy-bound and ill-fated from the start, the result of the inauspicious circumstances of his birth. It was why Victor worked so hard to change his fate and that of his people. He had lost his healer of a father to the baron’s vengeance over an impossible cure for a fatal illness vexing the baroness.
His mother… he had lost earlier, and it was his mother’s secrets as a sorceress that Victor had learned alongside science at State University, where he had attended with Reed. It was bizarre and strange, scientific and mystical experiments that Victor had carried out in his dorm room… so that he may understand his mother’s gifts to him. It was his mother’s soul that Victor had tried to save with a forbidden machine that would have contacted the netherworld.
Reed hadn’t understood it back then, when he had seen the open door to Victor's dorm room and saw the complex notes laid out on the desk pertaining to far-out concepts like matter transmutation and dimension warps. He had mentioned to Victor how some of the equations had been a few decimal points off, but perhaps he’d been too hasty in doing so… He recognized now, that in hindsight, he had gotten… a secret thrill in correcting Victor, and the teen had ignored his humiliating counsel with disastrous results when the experiment exploded in Victor’s dorm room.
They had both been arrogant teenagers, but Reed had made an enemy when he should have made a friend, had he reigned in his own excess of ego. Perhaps, that was why Victor had rejected him, that fateful day that they had first met.
The machine that had exploded in Victor’s face and injured him in physical appearance also damaged him in reputation. After a humiliating expulsion, Victor had ran off to the Tibetan mountains and learned mystical secrets from an ancient order of monks, and in the months and years that followed, became their master. That was where he would forge the armor and identity of Doctor Doom. The murder of Dimitri Fortunov, the grandson of Vladmir Fortunov, who had just become King and the seizing of Latveria’s throne had been sensational international news.
Reed had studied the charred remains of the machine as well as the notes, and tried to fully understand Victor’s intentions. When he finally understood, somewhat, he had even returned to Doom the mysterious artifact he had found in the remains of the dorm room, the lodestone meant to help Victor locate his mother’s soul: a locket his mother wore every day that contained the portrait of Cynthia von Doom and a young Victor von Doom.
Dr. Doom had said the gesture changed nothing between them, and he suspected this latest stunt was the latest in a line of attempts of Victor trying to make good on that assertion.
Reed had never collaborated on that extradimensional rift-opening machine with Victor, but he had worked with Doom on a different machine.
A time travel machine.
The Time Platform had been their brainchild, for unbeknownst to him, Victor had used his notes. It was the result of his and Victor von Doom’s design. It was a machine that couldn’t have existed without either of them. It had been a machine Dr. Doom used against them in their very first encounter as superhero and supervillain, when Reed had found out Victor was alive.
Now he was going to make the machine again, from scratch.
He would figure out a way to make everything right.
He would prevent Doom.
He would only be gone for five minutes.