Chapter 166: The Fantastic Three
Hell's Kitchen.
Three of the Fantastic Four stood together watching the broadcast — the interview, Ethan's flat refusal to be heroic about it, the crowd, all of it — and none of them said anything for a while.
"Okay," Johnny said finally. "That was genuinely cool. If I gave an interview like that I'd have no trouble with women ever again."
Susan was still looking at the screen with an expression she hadn't quite sorted out yet.
She was doing a comparison she hadn't intended to do, and it wasn't going well for Reed. Ethan hadn't wanted the camera. Hadn't prepared anything. Hadn't tried to manage the moment. He'd just said exactly what he meant, in the plainest language available, and walked away — and somehow that had done more in three minutes than a carefully constructed PR campaign would have managed in months.
And when the warheads had been in the air, and every second had counted, and she'd genuinely not known whether any of them were going to make it —
Ethan had been the one who showed up.
Not Reed.
She didn't let herself finish that thought. She filed it somewhere else and looked at the floor.
The silence stretched.
Johnny broke it again, and this time the lightness was gone. "Where was Reed?"
He said it like he'd been holding it since the warheads and had run out of patience for waiting to ask.
"He probably got caught up in something," Susan said. "We don't know what was happening on his end. We should go back, find him, get the full picture before—"
"He wasn't here." Johnny's voice had an edge to it. "We almost died. Three nuclear warheads, Sue. And he wasn't here."
Susan started to answer, and then she noticed that Ben hadn't moved.
He was standing where he'd been standing, arms crossed, looking at nothing in particular. The posture of a man who had finished thinking something through and wasn't going to be argued out of the conclusion.
"Ben." She said it carefully. "Come on. We're heading back."
Ben didn't answer immediately.
"Ben?" Johnny turned. "Let's go, we're—"
"I'm not going."
Johnny's face went through several things quickly and landed on disbelief. "What?"
"I'm staying." Ben looked at them both, and his expression was the quiet kind — not angry, not dramatic, just settled. "I'm done."
"Done with what?" Johnny spread his hands. "We're leaving. The operation is over, S.H.I.E.L.D. will debrief, Reed will explain whatever—"
"S.H.I.E.L.D. didn't warn us." Ben said it simply. "The warheads were in the air and nobody called. Nobody came. We were sitting in this neighborhood waiting to be vaporized and the people who were supposed to have our backs left us there."
Susan didn't have a response to that. Because it was true.
"Reed knew something," Ben continued. "You don't disappear for that long, at a moment like that, without knowing something. And if he knew — he didn't tell us. He made sure he was somewhere else, and he let us sit here." He looked at Susan. "Does that sound like someone who thinks of us as partners?"
The question landed the way questions do when they're asking you to say something you've already decided but haven't admitted yet.
"I think there's an explanation," Susan said. Her voice was steady. Her eyes were not quite as steady.
"Maybe." Ben didn't argue it. "I hope there is. But I'm not leaving until I hear it from him, and I'm not going back to an organization that treated us like disposable pieces on their board." He turned toward the street. "I like it here. The people don't look at me like I'm something that went wrong. They think I'm cool."
Johnny opened his mouth.
"Sandman told me the school has someone who might be able to fix it," Ben said, and the word it covered everything — the orange stone, the weight of it, the way doors widened when he walked through them and conversations stopped when he entered rooms.
Johnny closed his mouth.
Ben looked at them both one more time, with something in his face that wasn't goodbye but was aware of itself. "Go find Reed. Get your answers. I'll be here."
Johnny looked at Susan.
Susan looked at Ben for a long moment, and then she did the thing she'd been doing with the other thought — she filed it, and she took Johnny's arm, and she walked.
Ben watched them go. Then he turned and headed toward the community school, his footsteps heavy and even, and for the first time in longer than he could precisely remember, entirely deliberate.
Reed had no idea any of this was happening.
He was already three moves into the architecture of the Illuminati in his head, already running the roster, already imagining the version of events where he stood at the center of something that mattered.
Back at the Lucky Dragon, Ethan pushed open the door and immediately stopped.
Oh.
The restaurant was full. Not just full — full. Every seat occupied, more people standing along the walls, the particular ambient noise of a large group of people who have all survived something together and are now occupying the same room with the communal energy of a celebration that hasn't officially started yet.
He scanned the room.
Wade. Pietro. Tobey-Peter, trying to look casual and failing. Tony, already holding a glass. Strange, who had apparently decided to be here despite everything. The X-Men — full roster, which was the part he hadn't expected — occupying one side of the room in a cluster that had the slightly self-conscious quality of people at a party where they don't quite know anyone. And Magneto's Brotherhood, a few key members, positioned near the door in a way that was either coincidental or territorial and probably both.
And Magneto himself, currently holding court with Charles Xavier and — Ethan listened for half a second — apparently explaining, at some length and with audible pride, that Wanda Maximoff was his daughter, and that Ethan was therefore, practically speaking, his son-in-law.
The claim echoed through the restaurant with the particular carrying power of a man who had never once in his life lacked confidence.
Of course, Ethan thought.
He stood in the doorway and took it all in.
The system is going to go absolutely haywire.
He was right about that. What he didn't know yet was that somewhere in the building records, Ben Grimm was already walking toward the school, and that the Fantastic Four had just become three.
He stepped inside. The celebration, such as it was, had been waiting for him.
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