Work Text:
Reed Richards woke up knowing something was wrong.
Not in the dramatic sense, not the alarms blaring, reality fracturing kind of wrong, but in the quiet, insidious way that suggested a variable had shifted somewhere deep in a system he thought he understood.
His throat hurt.
This alone would have been manageable. Annoying, but manageable. However, when Reed swallowed, the pain radiated outward in a way that suggested inflammation along the mucosal lining, likely viral in origin, possibly rhinovirus. Statistically mundane, biologically inelegant, and deeply offensive.
He lay very still, cataloging.
Temperature: elevated. Not dangerous. Yet.
Respiration: shallow, slightly congested.
Muscle fatigue: present, disproportionate to activity.
Cognitive clarity: acceptable, though thoughts felt… viscous.
He lifted his head an inch.
Bad idea.
The room tilted, not dramatically, but enough to confirm a mild disruption in vestibular equilibrium. Reed closed his eyes again and exhaled slowly, stretching his hand toward the nightstand on instinct.
His arm elongated, slipping easily over the edge of the bed, fingers brushing the cool glass of water he’d prepared the night before.
Unstable molecule fabric hummed faintly as it stretched, responding to his movement like a cooperative exoskeleton.
Interesting, he thought absently. Neuromuscular control appears intact.
The water tasted wrong.
Reed frowned into the glass.
Not spoiled just… muted. As though his taste receptors were operating at reduced sensitivity. He took another sip, slower this time, and felt the cold settle unpleasantly in his chest.
That was when he sneezed.
It was sharp, sudden, and powerful enough that his arm that's still extended jerked reflexively, knocking the glass off the nightstand.
Sue caught it.
She always did.
Her hand appeared in midair, the glass stopping inches from the floor, suspended in a soft shimmer of force. She blinked awake a second later, blonde hair mussed, eyes already assessing.
“Reed?” she murmured. “You okay?”
“I appear to be experiencing early-stage immunological compromise,” he said hoarsely.
Sue stared at him.
“…You have a cold.”
Reed coughed. It was not dignified.
“That remains to be determined,” he said, voice rough. “It could be a novel viral mutation, or a secondary response triggered by—”
Sue pressed her palm gently to his forehead.
Warm. Not alarming. But warmer than baseline.
“You’re staying in bed,” she said.
Reed opened his mouth to argue and instead sneezed again.
Sue smiled sympathetically. “Bless you.”
He blinked at her, momentarily disoriented by how soft the room looked. Morning light filtered through the Baxter Building windows, blue-tinted and hazy, catching dust motes and the faint outline of Reed’s still-stretched arm.
“I should self-isolate,” he said suddenly.
Sue sighed. “Reed—”
“I’ll establish a sterile field,” he continued, already mentally assembling schematics. “Negative air pressure, antimicrobial barriers, limited contact—”
“Reed.”
“I don’t want to expose the children.”
Sue leaned down and kissed his cheek. He smelled faintly of ozone and sleep and something warmer beneath it.
“They’ve already been exposed,” she said gently. “You hugged Franklin last night.”
Reed’s eyes widened. “I did?”
“Yes. Twice.”
“…I should notify the CDC.”
Sue laughed softly. “You should drink juice.”
As if summoned by the word, the bedroom door creaked open.
Franklin peeked in, hair sticking up at impossible angles. “Dad?”
Reed smiled weakly. “Good morning.”
Franklin frowned. “You sound like Uncle Ben.”
From the hallway, Ben’s voice boomed, “Hey! I always sound like this!”
Johnny followed close behind, squinting. “Whoa. Stretch looks rough.”
“I am fine,” Reed said, then immediately coughed again. Longer this time.
Valeria appeared last, tablet in hand. She adjusted her glasses, eyes sharp. “Your voice is strained. Your skin tone is altered.”
Reed nodded. “Yes, I’ve noticed—”
“You’re sick,” she concluded.
Sue folded her arms. “Consensus achieved.”
Reed sank back into the pillows, exhaustion settling over him like a heavy blanket. His arm, still extended, twitched slightly stretching on reflex, reaching toward the doorway.
“…I might need juice,” he said faintly.
Johnny grinned. “Uh-oh.”
Ben cracked his knuckles. “Here we go.”
Sue looked at Reed and saw the fever starting to bloom behind his eyes.
This was going to be a long day.
By midmorning, Reed Richards had declared a state of emergency.
Not aloud. Sue had vetoed that, but internally, where it mattered. His immune system was underperforming. His thoughts felt like they were moving through gelatin. And worst of all, his body was betraying him by continuing to function without consulting him first.
The sterile field was his compromise.
A shimmering dome of force surrounded the bed, just visible enough to be reassuring. Negative pressure airflow circulated quietly, carrying with it the faint, antiseptic scent of disinfectant and ozone. Reed lay at the center of it, propped up against pillows, looking simultaneously brilliant and ridiculous.
Sue stood just outside the field, hands on her hips. “You realize this is excessive.”
“Objectively?” Reed rasped. “No.”
She rolled her eyes, but there was affection in it. “You have a fever.”
“Yes. A hundred point three degrees.”
“That’s barely anything.”
“It is three tenths above normal,” he said. “That’s statistically significant.”
From the hallway, Johnny leaned in, peering through the field. “Wow. You look like a snow globe.”
Ben crossed his arms. “A very nerdy snow globe.”
Reed lifted a finger. “Please refrain from unnecessary exposure.”
Johnny grinned. “You hear that, big guy? We’re unnecessary.”
Ben snorted. “Story of my life.”
Reed shifted, trying to get comfortable and that’s when his arm slid free of the field.
It stretched out smoothly, instinctively, slipping through the force barrier like it had a mind of its own. His fingers brushed the air, groping blindly toward the doorway.
Sue blinked. “Reed?”
“Mmm,” he murmured, eyes half-lidded. “I think there’s juice.”
Johnny stared. “Is his arm… escaping?”
The arm continued onward, stretching down the hallway, fingers flexing experimentally.
Reed’s eyes fluttered closed. “Orange,” he murmured. “With pulp.”
Ben sighed. “I knew this was gonna happen.”
Johnny cracked up. “This is the best thing I’ve ever seen.”
Sue moved quickly, grabbing Reed’s wrist and gently guiding it back toward the bed. The arm resisted slightly, like a stubborn noodle.
“Reed,” she said firmly, “you’re in bed.”
He frowned, confused. “Then why is the kitchen so far away?”
Valeria appeared beside her mother, tablet already recording data. “His proprioception appears compromised.”
Franklin giggled. “Dad’s arm went on an adventure.”
The arm flopped uselessly against the side of the bed.
Reed sighed. “I apologize. My motor control is… degraded.”
Sue pressed a cool cloth to his forehead. “You’re not building anything else today.”
He nodded, immediately drifting.
Two minutes later, his other arm stretched.
Johnny yelped as it brushed past his shoulder. “Whoa! Hands off, Stretch!”
The arm waved vaguely, then continued toward the kitchen.
Ben grabbed it. “Nope. Not today.”
He tugged gently. The arm stretched further.
Ben frowned. “This feels wrong.”
Johnny joined in, grabbing another section. “It’s like wrestling linguine.”
Sue watched the three of them, two grown men and one feverish genius, struggling with a wandering limb, and pinched the bridge of her nose.
“Careful,” she warned. “You’ll pull something.”
Reed mumbled, “Juice…”
Valeria sighed. “Statistically, this will recur.”
Franklin laughed harder.
Sue waved her hand, rendering Reed’s arms briefly invisible. The limb retracted, confused, snapping back into place.
Ben wiped his brow. “I’m too old for this.”
Johnny grinned. “Worth it.”
Sue sat beside the bed, smoothing Reed’s hair back. His skin was warm, his breathing uneven.
“You’re safe,” she murmured. “I’ve got you.”
Reed’s eyes opened just enough to find her. He smiled, unfocused but sincere.
“…Probability of me finding someone like you,” he whispered, “is vanishingly small.”
Sue smiled softly. “Go to sleep.”
He did.
For now.
Reed Richards dreamed in footnotes.
This was not new. Even in his healthiest sleep, his mind rarely shut down so much as it reorganized. Filing memories, cross-referencing equations, annotating experiences with an invisible hand. But fever changed the filing system. It loosened the categories. It let things drift.
He dreamed of heat.
Not fire. Heat. Abstracted and analyzed. He saw it as motion: molecules vibrating, expanding, colliding. The hum of unstable molecules became a low, rhythmic thrum beneath everything, like the universe clearing its throat.
A toaster appeared.
It was the old one. The stainless-steel model Sue refused to throw out because it had survived three relocations and one brief extradimensional incident. In the dream, Reed saw straight through its casing. Saw the heating coils glow, the predictable expansion of metal under current, the way the bread browned unevenly because the left coil degraded faster than the right.
I could fix that, he thought.
The toaster reminded him, inevitably of the Negative Zone.
Heat there behaved differently. Entropy was… optional. He remembered standing on that fractured platform, calibrating a heating element not to toast bread but to keep Ben’s core temperature stable while the laws of thermodynamics sulked in a corner.
Ben’s laugh echoed through the dream, rough and fond.
“Don’t think too hard, Stretch. Just make it work.”
Reed tried to respond and instead coughed.
The dream stuttered.
He was vaguely aware of being moved, of weight shifting beneath him, of the bed creaking softly. Something cool touched his forehead. A cloth. Sue.
Her presence anchored him even in the fog. He couldn’t always see her clearly in dreams, but he could feel her. Like a constant in an equation that otherwise refused to balance.
“Sue,” he murmured.
She was there immediately. “I’m here.”
Her voice cut through the static, warm and real. Reed’s mind reached for it instinctively and his arm followed.
It stretched.
Slowly, unconsciously, sliding out from under the blanket and toward the sound of her voice. Fingers flexed, searching.
Sue caught his hand easily, lacing her fingers through his elongated ones without comment. She guided it back, settling it against his chest.
“Stay,” she said softly.
He obeyed.
For a few minutes.
In the kitchen, Johnny leaned against the counter, watching Ben stir a pot with exaggerated care.
“You sure you know what you’re doing?” Johnny asked.
Ben grunted. “Sue told me to keep it warm and not burn it. That’s my whole job.”
Franklin sat at the table, chin in his hands, flipping through a comic. Valeria sat beside him, tablet balanced on her knees, monitoring Reed’s vitals from a distance.
“He’s dreaming,” Valeria said. “REM cycle is irregular.”
Johnny smirked. “He always dreams like that?”
“Usually with fewer… appendages,” Ben said.
As if on cue, Reed’s arm stretched again—this time sliding along the floor, snaking its way toward the kitchen doorway.
Franklin’s eyes widened. “There it goes!”
Johnny crouched. “I call left side.”
Ben sighed and followed. “I hate this.”
They grabbed the arm gently, like men handling a very confused anaconda.
“Hey, Stretch,” Johnny said cheerfully. “You’re not allowed in the kitchen.”
The fingers twitched. “Soup?” Reed murmured from the bedroom.
Ben froze. “…Did it just talk?”
Sue appeared behind them, carrying a bowl. “Dinner’s ready.”
The arm relaxed instantly.
Johnny laughed so hard he had to sit down. “He responds to soup!”
Sue guided the limb back with practiced ease, tucking it under the blanket once more. Reed sighed contentedly, eyes still closed.
After a few minutes, he woke up.
She sat beside him, spooning broth carefully between his lips.
He drank obediently, blinking blearily at her. “You smell like jasmine,” he said. “And ozone.”
She smiled. “Your favorite.”
He frowned, thinking hard. “Statistically.”
She brushed his hair back. “Rest.”
As he drifted again, Sue looked around the room. At the kids perched nearby, at Johnny and Ben lingering in the doorway, at the soft hum of the building holding them all together.
Cosmic threats could wait.
Right now, their greatest challenge was keeping Reed Richards in bed.
The argument began, as most arguments in the Baxter Building did, with the milk.
Johnny opened the refrigerator and stared into it with mounting disbelief. “Okay,” he said, loudly, “which one of you drank the last of the milk and didn’t replace it?”
Ben didn’t look up from the stove. “I used it for the soup.”
Johnny scoffed. “You don’t put milk in chicken soup.”
Ben stirred pointedly. “I don’t. I used it for the mashed potatoes.”
Johnny crossed his arms. “There were mashed potatoes?”
Franklin perked up from the couch. “I didn’t get any.”
Valeria adjusted her glasses. “The potatoes were consumed at a rate consistent with Uncle Ben’s caloric needs.”
Ben grunted. “Kid gets it.”
Johnny waved a hand. “That’s not the point. The point is: Reed needs juice, Franklin needs cereal, and I need coffee that doesn’t taste like regret.”
Sue, passing through with a fresh cloth for Reed’s forehead, sighed. “Johnny, it’s not a crisis.”
Reed, overhearing from the bedroom, lifted his head weakly. “Milk is… statistically irrelevant.”
They all froze.
Sue turned slowly. “Reed?”
He blinked at the ceiling. “The probability of nutritional deficiency resulting from a temporary lack of dairy is negligible.”
Johnny grinned. “See? Even fever-brain agrees with me.”
Ben snorted. “You didn’t even say anything.”
Reed frowned, thinking. “I was… thinking about you.”
Sue smiled despite herself.
She sat beside the bed, spooning more soup toward him. The scent filled the room.. rich, comforting, old-fashioned. Chicken, carrots, celery, and something indefinable that tasted like home.
Reed sighed after a sip. “You made it exactly right.”
“I always do,” Sue said.
He shook his head slowly. “No, I mean… statistically. The variables align.”
She laughed softly. “You’re delirious.”
“Yes,” he agreed readily. “But I’m also correct.”
Franklin climbed onto the bed, careful not to jostle it. He held up a comic. “Can we read to you?”
Reed smiled, eyes unfocused but warm. “I’d like that.”
Valeria joined them, already flipping pages. Johnny leaned in the doorway, arms crossed, pretending not to care. Ben hovered nearby, large and protective.
As Franklin began reading, Reed listened with the intensity of a man solving a grand equation.
Every word anchored him. Every laugh from the room recalibrated something inside his chest.
Sue watched it happen. The way his breathing evened out, the way his stretching stilled when surrounded by voices.
Reed turned his head toward her. “Sue,” he said softly.
“Yes?”
“The probability of me finding someone as perfect as you,” he began, slurring slightly, “given the size of the observable universe and my own… deficiencies…”
She leaned closer. “Reed—”
“It’s very small,” he finished. “I’m very lucky.”
Her eyes stung.
Johnny cleared his throat loudly. “Okay, this is getting gross.”
Ben nodded. “Yeah. I’m gonna go… check the soup.”
Franklin grinned. Valeria smiled faintly.
Sue kissed Reed’s forehead. “Go to sleep.”
He smiled at her, utterly content. “I love you.”
“I know,” she said.
Reed drifted off, arms blessedly still, the room filled with quiet laughter and the rustle of comic pages.
For all the threats they faced, cosmic, catastrophic, impossible, this was the fight they chose every time.
Staying.
The fever broke sometime after midnight.
Sue noticed because the room changed. Reed’s breathing finally deepened, the way the restless tension eased out of his limbs. His skin cooled beneath her palm. The subtle hum of the unstable molecules in his suit softened, settling into a gentler rhythm.
She sat beside him for a long time anyway.
The Baxter Building was quiet in that particular, hard-earned way that only came after chaos had exhausted itself. The kids were asleep down the hall, Johnny had retreated to the couch with a blanket and misplaced dignity, and Ben had claimed the armchair near the window, already snoring softly.
Sue brushed Reed’s hair back from his forehead.
Even sick, even feverish, he looked like himself. Too brilliant for his own good, too earnest, too open when the world wasn’t pressing down on him. When he slept, the sharp edges faded. There was just Reed. The man she’d chosen, again and again.
She stood carefully and stepped out onto the balcony.
The city stretched out below her, lights scattered like constellations. Traffic hummed. Somewhere far away, a siren wailed and faded. New York never truly slept but it did slow, just enough to breathe.
She wrapped her arms around herself and let the cool air ground her.
Moments later, she heard the soft slide of fabric.
“Reed?” she murmured.
He stood in the doorway, wrapped in a blanket, hair even more disheveled than usual. His face was pale but clearer now, eyes focused in a way they hadn’t been all day.
“You’re not supposed to be up,” she said gently.
“I know,” he replied. “But… I needed to see you.”
He joined her at the railing, leaning carefully, like the world was still slightly unreliable beneath his feet.
“I scared you,” he said.
Sue didn’t deny it. “You scare me every time you get hurt. Or sick. Or quiet.”
He smiled faintly. “I don’t mean to.”
“I know.”
They stood together, watching the city breathe.
“I think,” Reed said slowly, “that I treat problems as if they’re all solvable the same way. Identify variables. Isolate threats. Apply force until the system stabilizes.”
Sue glanced at him. “And?”
“And today,” he continued, “my greatest enemy was mucus.”
She laughed, soft and tired.
“I couldn’t outthink it,” he said. “I couldn’t build my way around it. I just… had to lie there. And let you take care of me.”
She reached for his hand. “That’s not failure, Reed.”
He squeezed back. “It feels like surrender.”
“It’s trust.”
That stopped him.
He looked at her then, not like a scientist examining a miracle, but like a man realizing he’d been living inside one.
“I worry,” he admitted quietly. “About the kids. About Johnny and Ben. About what happens when I can’t protect them.”
Sue leaned her head against his shoulder. “I worry too.”
“But this,” he said, gesturing faintly behind them to the sleeping building, the tangled family inside “this is what matters. Not the equations. Not the threats. This.”
She smiled. “You’re learning.”
He chuckled. “Don’t tell anyone.”
They went back inside together.
Reed returned to bed without protest this time. Sue curled beside him, his arm mercifully stationary wrapped carefully around her.
“I love you,” he murmured, already drifting.
She kissed his temple. “I know.”
The city outside kept moving. Tomorrow would bring new dangers, new problems, new impossible odds.
But tonight, Reed Richards slept... human, flawed, and deeply loved.
And that was enough.