Archive of Our Own ^beta

They don't stand a chance.

They don't stand a chance, because at the end of the day they're four ants in the wake of a god, throwing themselves at the same hopeless cause over and over again. But they don't have a choice in the matter. So they keep trying, each time hoping that something will manage to change – and it does.

Because Doom grows bored. He traps Sue in one of her own fields, smothers Johnny's flames, pins Ben under an avalanche of earth, until there's only Reed left to stand against him. And by the time Reed senses what's gone wrong, there's nothing he can do.

“Victor,” Reed tries. Doom reaches out and lifts him off the ground, suspends him in midair. He struggles to no avail as panic builds a nest in his throat. “You don't have to do this.”

“Wrong again.” Doom closes his outstretched hand in one swift gesture, and the pressure holding Reed up is forced inward, crushing his suit with him still inside it. There's no direction Reed can stretch, nowhere else for his body to go. Someone is screaming. Reed realizes, eventually, that it's him.

Doom throws him aside like a child discarding a toy. Reed hits the ground hard, locked inside the mangled wreck of his body. The world fades in and out.

“Reed!”

Hazily, his senses come back to him, strong enough for him to register that the others are nearby. Reed can't move. Out of the corner of his eye he sees the cracks in the ground around him, the remnants of his impact. They're glowing. He thinks, sharply, of a flag driven into the ground.

Half of Reed's body protests when Ben touches him. The other half no longer cares.

Reed feels Sue and Johnny more than he sees them. All three of them are talking at once, but he can't hear a thing. Reed focuses, then, on the heavy gentleness of Ben's hands, and tries to say something. Tries to say everything. Green light creeps in at the edges of his vision. His mouth is full of blood.

He's dying.

Ben keeps talking, keeps looking at him, like he thinks he can keep Reed here by sheer force of will alone. Some fragments of speech drift down: sorry, please, sorry, look at me, stay with me. Reed hears his own name, remembers waking up alone in the facility, Ben's voice an echo in the halls, and thinks, I never want to leave you. He wishes he could say the words out loud.

The world is all in green, and Reed knows that there's a bargain to be made. He can die here. Or he can take another option. His body sings its agonies, all the same.

Reed shifts himself just enough to risk one last glance at Ben. He looks. He makes his choice.

--

When Reed finally goes still in his arms, Ben thinks that something breaks inside him.

I'm not your friend.

Ben had believed in that. He'd believed in all of it. It had been so easy, hating Reed. Easy, to become a monster inside as well as out. To look at Reed and only see something to blame.

Reed, broken and bleeding, who'd died with I'm not your friend still caught in the air between them.

“Ben.” He looks up. Sue's eyes are filled with tears. “We have to go.”

“Where?” Johnny bursts out. “Where are we supposed to go, Sue? We've lost. Our whole planet's lost. He killed Reed, he'll kill us too-”

“We can't just sit here and wait for it to happen!”

In the distance, Doom has returned to his vortex, pulling the world to its destruction. Ben's world, meanwhile, lies crumpled on the ground before him. There is nothing else.

Then the earth beneath them heaves, energy erupting from every fissure. The light weaves itself around Reed like marionette strings, twining into every broken place on his body until the brightness is too much for them to bear. Ben shouts, reaching out like he can pull Reed back from it, somehow, but Reed's body just lurches to its feet, bones resetting, limbs pulling themselves back into order.

There's a sharp snap as Reed's neck corrects itself and Reed chokes, spitting out blood. Finally, he opens his eyes again. They're inhuman, pupils blotted out by the same green as the planet's energy.

“Reed?” The name escapes Ben's mouth as the ground explodes behind them. He turns around just in time to see a boulder arcing through the air, before a wall rises up to intercept it. Sue's field defends against the remaining debris, but the cause is clear: Doom's noticed them at last.

All three of them move to the defensive, but Reed – if it is Reed – doesn't even flinch. The wall and boulder together sink back into the ground as Doom approaches.

“You.” Doom's voice reverberates over the landscape. “What have you done?”

Reed breathes deep, like he's reminding himself how. “I made a choice,” he says, and Ben's whole world resets at the sound of Reed's voice.

Then Reed steps forward, unsteady at first but increasingly sure, and something like fear flits over Doom's face. He howls. “This world is mine!”

“Not anymore,” Reed grits out, and pulls.

What happens next is a far cry from the battles they lost before, in that it's barely a battle at all. Doom's power tears itself out of him in chunks, unformed tendrils of green light called back to their source until their old host is a husk on the ground, a mess of flesh and metal that then collapses into nothing at all. Far away from them, Doom's vortex sputters and dies.

Reed's whole body shudders as the energy arcs into him. He drops to his knees, eyes blazing, but doesn't make a sound.

Sue reaches him first, Johnny bolting after her, but Ben's rooted in place. They help Reed to his feet, and for a moment Ben's afraid that something else will be looking back from behind Reed's eyes – but then Reed looks up, and even before Doom Ben had never counted on seeing that smile again.

“Ben,” Reed starts. There's a nuance in his voice that wasn't there before, something ageless. “Ben, I'm sor-”

That does it. Ben surges forward and snatches Reed into his arms. “Don't,” he croaks out. “I know. I should've-”

“I heard you,” Reed breathes. “When I was- I didn't get all of it, but I heard you-”

“-you didn't deserve it, anything I said to you, I'm so sorry, Reed-” Ben notices, belatedly, that he's holding Reed too tight. He sets Reed down just as Johnny clears his throat.

“Not that I'm not happy for you and everything-” he dodges just before Sue plants an elbow in his side “-but I'm just wondering if we're stuck here forever? I don't know about the rest of you, but I think I've had enough of this place for one lifetime.”

Reed's brow furrows. “I think- I think I can open a door. Just once. But it'd be enough for the three of you to get back home.”

A silence follows. Sue's the one to break it. “What do you mean, the three of us?”

“I can't go back with you.”

“What?” It comes out louder than Ben means it to. Reed doesn't meet his eyes.

“I made a choice,” Reed echoes. “I could either die, or come back as a new part of the planet. I picked the second one.”

“Reed-”

He cuts Sue off. “And I don't regret it, alright? I don't. It's not- ideal, I know. But it's better.” Reed looks up, then, squares his shoulders. His eyes are burning bright. “It's better.”

So Reed opens the door – a hole in reality that opens up to a view of the crater where Area 57 used to be. The Storms go through first, after saying their goodbyes, but Ben doesn't follow after them, just yet.

“If you asked me, I'd stay, you know.”

“I know,” Reed says. “That's why I'm not going to. Not this time. Wait-” Tendrils of energy snake up his arm to pool in the palm of one hand, before he presses it over Ben's heart. Ben doesn't feel a thing.

“What was that?”

“A promise.”

One last time, Ben pulls Reed into his arms, trying to memorize the feel of him. Reed clings on just as tight.

“Love you,” Reed murmurs against him, almost inaudible. The words Ben wants to say catch in his throat. But he holds on as long as he can, until he trusts that Reed knows, too.

Back on Earth, the air is cold, and Area 57 is gone. But Ben remembers where they were less than an hour ago, what the world looked like from then, and it's hard to think of the current view as anything but beautiful.

That's the thought at the front of his mind, anyhow, just before the world goes black.

–-

Ben opens his eyes and doesn't know where he is. Daylight creeps in at the edges of the covered windows, enough for him to notice Johnny in a chair across the room and Sue curled up on the adjacent bed. They're both asleep. He sits up sharply and regrets it as a wave of dizziness rushes over him, and only then does he notice his hands.

Because they're his hands again, flesh instead of stone, alive in a way his altered body could never hope to be. His head is swimming. Ben looks down at himself and sucks in a breath, watching his chest rise and fall. With trembling fingers he explores, marveling at the warmth, the give of skin under pressure, all the fragments of humanity that he hadn't even thought to miss. He keeps expecting it to melt away. It never does.

A promise, Reed had said. Ben's got one hand pressed over his heart.

Later, when Sue and Johnny are awake, when Ben trusts he isn't dreaming, the three of them will make their plans. They'll weigh the pros and cons of returning to the government again, figure out their new place in the world. They'll mourn. They'll carry on.

And they'll rebuild.

Reed already changed the world once, after all. The least Ben can do is try again.