junia

Dex didn’t really need much. That was one of the first things you had learned about him, and one of the saddest. 

He owned what he could carry, what he could hide, what he could use: clothes, weapons, toothbrush, a plain black jacket that had seen through more death than most people. He hadn’t moved into your life so much as folded himself carefully into the empty spaces of it, as if he was still waiting to be told he had taken up too much room.

You had filled the rest. Your desk sat in the corner under the window, always drowning in highlighters, case studies, printed articles, and half-dead pens. Your forensic psychology textbooks were stacked wherever they would fit. There was a mug full of rulers and pencils beside your laptop, a corkboard with notes and deadlines and a photobooth strip of the two of you in Coney Island that Dex pretended not to care about but always noticed when it tilted crooked.

Of course he cared. It was your first date. 

And though he didn’t tell you, he had made a copy of it and put it under his suit when he went out, right over his heart. It was a reminder that you wanted him home. 

But this space was enough. It was more than enough, somehow.

There was still room to dance in the kitchen if you were careful. Last Saturday, barefoot and half-asleep, with the radio turned on, you had twirled yourself into his arms to Tina’s Proud Mary. Dex had just stood there like he had no idea what to do until you took his hands and put them on your waist. There was still room for him to lift you onto the counter when you kissed him too sweetly for too long. There was still room for dinner eaten on a small table with two folding chairs, there was still room for your laundry tangled together in one basket, for his shoes beside yours by the door. 

There was still room, somehow, for Dex to crowd you back against the wall, hands firm on your hips, mouth hot against your throat while you laughed under your breath and told him the neighbors were going get tired of hearing how well he fucked you.

Room for him to murmur filthy and wrecked things, that he should “throw your pills away,” that he was going to “knock you up, huh? Want me to put a baby in you?”

You’d pull back with a wicked smile, nails hooked in his shirt, and you’d whisper, “That is not the threat you think it is, baby.”

You chalked it up to your boyfriend being a kinky little shit. You should have paid more attention to the way his eyes went black, the way his grip tightened on your skin. When he kissed you again, it was with the devoted certainty of a man who had just realized his most unhinged fantasy was not his alone.

Still, even in this small fantasy, there was still room to pretend, on the good nights, that you were normal.

Tonight was not one of the good nights.

Dex had come home after a day across the Supreme Court building with blood dried dark along his cheekbone, though you suspected none of it was his. 

Even if it was, you knew he wasn’t hurt at all, because Dex didn’t stagger or slump. He didn’t come through the door gasping or cursing or asking for help. He entered the apartment with rigid control in his body, like every step had been measured in advance. He came in like arriving home had been a decision, not an escape. Like whatever had happened in this room, with you, was sacred compared to the rest of the world.

He came home like he had not been part of the makeshift siege at court.

Like he had not shot the Mayor’s aide.

Like the whole city had not been tearing itself apart on the news for hours while you sat on the bed with your phone in your hand, refreshing headlines you didn’t want to read and listening for footsteps in the hallway.

When he looked at you, his pupils tracked your face. Before he let you touch him, before he let you ask questions, before he decided whether his own body was allowed to matter, his eyes went over you like a security sweep to make sure you were safe.

Then they landed on your arm and saw a bruise.

It was nothing, really. You had caught yourself badly against the fire escape earlier when you’d climbed out for air because the apartment had felt too small with sirens in the distance and Dex not answering his phone. It was a mean little scar, blue and purple, but shallow enough not to hurt you permanently. It was annoying, more than anything. You had almost forgotten about it.

But Dex looked at it like it was evidence.

So now you were sitting beside him on the bed with a towel, a bottle of peroxide, cotton pads, and the sad frozen bag of peas you had pulled from the freezer because neither of you owned a real ice pack. You were trying to clean blood from his face. He was trying to ice your bruise.

It would have been funny if it did not make you want to cry.

“Give me your arm,” he said.

“There’s literally blood on you,” you sighed.

“Not mine,” he said dismissively, confirming your suspicions, “give me your arm.”

“Benjamin.”

His hazel eyes flicked up, mostly because you only called him that when you were annoyed at him. 

You stared at each other for one stubborn second, but he didn’t seem like he was going to let up. 

Then you sighed and gave him your arm.

He took it carefully, his fingers gentle around your wrist despite the split skin across his knuckles. He pressed the frozen peas to the bruise like he was handling precious and breakable gemstones, his mouth set in a hard line, his focus absolute.

That was the thing about loving Dex: it wasn’t sensible. It had never been sensible.

You’d always had a practical head on your shoulders. You were getting your third degree in forensic psychology because you liked patterns, motive, broken systems, and the strange little hinges inside people that made them choose one door instead of another. You were both a student and a research assistant at the university, which sounded better on paper than it felt in your bank account. You were technically employed, technically building experience, technically lucky to have the position at all. In reality, you were paid in a way that felt insulting once, tuition costs, books, and subway fare had finished carving you hollow.

Still, you were smart. Academically, you understood obsession. You had annotated articles on attachment trauma, violent conditioning, hypervigilance, and maladaptive devotion. You had spent whole nights highlighting phrases that described people like Dex in clinical and sterile language. 

You knew the warning signs and studied the red flags. You knew the vocabulary you were supposed to use. You knew what you were supposed to do when someone like Bullseye looked at you like you were the last fixed point in the universe: run.

But when Dex saved your life during an Anti-Vigilante Task Force raid on the lab you were visiting, all that practical knowledge had become extremely inconvenient.

It had been chaos: glass breaking, alarm screaming. Your supervisor shouted for everyone to get down. The AVTF had come in hard, looking for records, samples, names, anything connected to vigilante research and enhanced activity. You had hidden beneath a workstation with one hand clamped over your mouth and your heartbeat so loud you thought it might give you away.

Then Dex had arrived.

He had been hunting that day. You later found out because he told you. 

He had moved through your lab with a purpose, turning the room itself into a weapon. A glass beaker found its way into a man’s throat. He had thrown a ruler with such perfect force, it split skin and cartilage. A metal clipboard managed to dislocate a man’s jaw, even through the helmet. Pens, scalpels, broken glass, a heavy ceramic mug from your professor’s desk were all used. Ordinary things became fatal in his hands, as if the universe had been waiting for him to point at something and decide what it was for.

He killed twelve men with office supplies and lab equipment, and then he crouched in front of you, breathing hard, blood on his cheek, and asked you if you were okay. 

You should have been horrified. You were horrified.

Part of you had been shaking with terror. Another part, the part you did like to examine too closely, had understood with awful clarity that some monsters were safer when they were loved than when they were not.

You should have run from him.

Instead, you had fallen in love.

Worse, he had fallen, too.

The love that grew between the two of you wasn't sweet, nor safe. Not in the way people with normal jobs and normal apartments and normal dinner plans fell in love. Dex loved wholly. He loved like if he took his eyes off you, the world would immediately try to take you from him. He loved like affection and violence had gotten tangled in him so early that he no longer knew how to separate protection from possession.

And you, for whatever reason, loved him right back.

You loved him in the studio apartment with the too-small kitchen and the desk in the corner. You loved him when he stood behind you while you brushed your teeth, chin resting against your shoulder, silent and half-asleep and watchful even then. You loved him when he checked the locks twice before bed. You loved him when he pretended not to care about your old Greek and Roman mythology books and then remembered every story you had ever told him. You loved him when he came home with blood under his nails, but looked at your scraped arm like the city owed him an explanation.

“Hold still,” he said, pressing the frozen peas more carefully against your skin.

You stared at him, at the slight bruise under his jaw and the split knuckles he was ignoring because your shallow scrape had somehow hurt him more.

“I should get a job,” you said, almost offhandedly.

His hand stopped.

You hadn’t meant for it to come out like that: flat and sudden. Not while he was sitting on your shared bed after a long day. But there it was anyway sitting between you and the ruined silence of the apartment.

Dex looked up slowly. “You have a job.”

“I have half a job.” You laughed without much humor. “I have a professor who thinks payment is optional because experience is apparently a currency. Because PhD students clearly don’t need to eat, right?”

He huffed. A few months ago, he did offer to dispose of your professor and you just waved him off, saying the person who would take his job would be worse. He offered to dispose of him, too, but stopped offering half-measured solutions when you kissed his forehead and said the department would probably just shut down because they can’t afford two murders. “But you’re in school,” he said.

“So?” You shrugged, “Lots of people are in school and have extra jobs.”

“You babysit Mrs. Smithers’ cat,” he frowned.

You snorted before you could stop yourself. “She pays us in lasagnas.”

“She makes good lasagna,” he insisted.

“That is not an income stream, Dex.”

“No,” he shook his head, knowing how hard you actually worked for your spot in the institution. “But you’re always busy anyway. I can take care of you”

“You’re wanted, baby,” you reminded him. 

That hurt. 

Dex’s eyes barely changed, but you knew him too well now. You saw the tiny shift in his eyes. His fingers adjusted around your wrist. He looked down at your arm again, focusing too intently on the ice pack, as if his obsession to keep you safe could be used to cover a wound in the conversation.

“I can provide,” he said.

You sighed immediately, because of course he would say it like that. Like a vow, like a reflex, like a wound of his own.

“I know.”

“I pay rent,” he reminded you, though he said it like it was a responsibility. He didn’t use it against you; it was just a fact. 

“I know.”

“I pay groceries,” he said.

“Yes, Dex,” you huffed, “I know.”

His teeth clenched, more disappointed in himself than at you. “Then what?”

You looked around the apartment because it was easier than looking at him.

Yes, Dex paid rent. Dex bought groceries. Dex came home with cash sometimes, folded tight and tucked away in envelopes. He made sure there was good coffee in the cabinet because you hated your mornings without it. He bought the brand of cereal you liked and pretended it was because it had been on sale. He fixed the loose leg on your desk chair. He remembered bills before you did.

He provided, but it was not stable.

Dex didn’t clock into shifts. Dex didn’t have a payroll department, a predictable deposit, a pension, or a neat little tax form with an employer’s name printed at the top. His work came in fragments and dangerous calls from powerful people who knew what he could do. 

Odd jobs, if you wanted to be generous. Assassination, if you wanted to be honest. 

He did it because he was good at it.

But mostly, lately, he did it because of you.

Because rent was due. Because the fridge needed filling. Because your textbooks cost you too much. Because he liked watching you eat takeout on the bed with your legs folded beneath you, he liked seeing you safe and warm and full in his room. Because every dollar he brought home became proof that he could keep you satisfied, that he could build a life, that he could be more than the worst thing he knew how to do.

And that terrified you almost as much as it touched you, because there was no stability in that kind of work.

Sometimes, Dex wished he had known you when he was still with the FBI.

Before prison. Before Fisk. Before his face was plastered on the news. Before every job application in the world became a joke. He imagined it sometimes in a way that felt masochistic. 

He imagined coming home to you in a suit and taking you to dinner with a paycheck that had his name on it. He imagined you flowers, buying you pretty things and whatever else you asked for. 

He could have been a man for you. As outdated as he knew that sounded, he still wished he could be that man again. 

“It’s not about whether you do,” you said carefully. “It’s just that… it’s not steady.”

His teeth tightened further.

“I’m not insulting you,” you reassured.

“You think I can’t take care of you.”

“No.” You leaned closer, your voice softening the impact. “I think you take care of me so much that you forget I should be allowed to take care of you, too.”

He didn’t answer.

Outside, a siren wailed below, then faded into traffic and distance. The studio felt very small around you, too warm and intimate.

Dex looked down at your arm again and pressed the melting bag of peas more gently against your skin.

“I’ll find something steady,” he said.

Your heart clenched. “Dex.”

“I will,” he promised. 

“Where?”

His eyes lifted to yours. You tried to smile, but it came out tired and fond and sad all the same. “You shot Buck Cashman in front of half the city. I’m not saying that like I’m mad. I’m saying maybe LinkedIn is not going to work out this month.”

“I’ll find something,” he said.

It came out too quickly, too flatly, like he was sealing a wound before you could see how deep it went.

You looked at him where he sat on the edge of the bed, one knee pressed against yours, the frozen bag of peas melting slowly in his hand. You saw the bruise smudged high beneath his cheekbone, the split in his lower lip that he kept worrying with his tongue like he had forgotten it was there. He looked awful. Beautiful, too. The world had tried, again and again, to make him unlovable, and your stupid heart had taken one look at him and said, mine.

“What, a desk job?” you asked.

Dex gave you a look.

He wasn’t offended exactly. More like you had asked him to picture himself, in his Bullseye suit that you loved so much, sitting under fluorescent lights, wearing a lanyard, filling out forms, and smiling politely at coworkers named Brad from HR.

The idea was so absurd that, despite everything, your mouth twitched upward.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” you said, leaning in a little. “Did I insult your very promising administrative career?”

He frowned unwillingly, and for a second you hated yourself for accidentally being a little too mean. 

Still, you couldn’t help yourself. You leaned closer and kissed the scar near his cheekbone so gently it was barely anything at all. Dex closed his eyes for half a second. When you pulled back, he still kept his eyes closed for one breath longer.

“Baby,” you whispered, voice gentler now, nearly breaking with fondness, “you cannot put ‘excellent with projectiles’ on a résumé.”

His eyes opened and found you immediately. “I could.”

You shook your head, “You really, really shouldn’t.”

“I have skills.” He pouted. It was cute.

“You have criminal charges.”

“Transferable skills,” he said, with such dry seriousness that you chuckled before you could stop yourself.

His posture changed, like he always did when you laughed. Not dramatically, though. He didn’t transform all at once. He softened by millimeters, as if your happiness had reached into some fortified part of him and loosened one bolt at a time. The hard line of his shoulders eased. His teeth unclenched. His thumb, which had been pressing the peas too carefully to your bruise, shifted a little.

For a moment, he looked less like a weapon that was left loaded in your apartment and more like a man who had come home to you because there was nowhere else in the world he could bear to be, because he was yours. Because he wanted so badly to be good for you that it almost broke your heart.

He adjusted the ice pack again. “You shouldn’t have to worry about money.”

“We live in New York, Dex.” You tried to sound light but it just came out tired. “Worrying about money is basically a civic duty.”

“You shouldn’t have to,” he said again.

He didn’t say it like a boyfriend trying to be useful. He said it like a soldier stating a mission objective. Like he had identified the enemy— rent, groceries, tuition, your professor underpaying you, the whole grinding machine of the city— and had decided that he would kill it if he could. “Not you,” he added, quieter.

And Dex didn’t feel this way for you because he had learned to be a sympathetic person. He wasn’t.

He didn’t suddenly feel tender toward the whole world because he learned how to love. He didn’t look at strangers and imagine their mothers. He didn’t hesitate before hurting people who had put themselves on the wrong side of his line. He could kill a room full of people and sleep like a baby afterward. He didn’t ask himself if the Anti-Vigilante Task Force agents had families who were waiting for them. Their blood did not weigh on his conscience in any meaningful way.

He hasn’t learned to be secretly good and noble under all the damage in some easy, redeemable way. He was only tender with you, and even that was not because you were an exception to his nature.

It was because somewhere along the way, Dex had thought of you and him as the same person.

You weren’t some separate innocent woman he loved from afar. You were not a moral compass he worshipped because you made him better. You were his life. His home. 

Your body was his body outside his body. Your exhaustion was his exhaustion. Your money was his money, and his money was yours, not because he felt entitled to it, but because the two of you had stopped existing as separate organisms somewhere around the first month he slept in your bed and woke up with your hand on his chest. You were one system now. One thing. One fused unit pretending to be two people for legal convenience.

So watching you work long hours in a lecture hall that barely paid felt like self-harm. That was the clearest way his mind could understand it. Like the two of you shared one nervous system, and every hour you worked yourself past exhaustion was pain traveling down the same wire until it reached him, too.

“Come on, Dex,” you frowned. “You think I want you running yourself into the ground because you decided you have to pay every bill?”

His eyes lifted to yours, and all you saw was terrible sincerity. It was desperate enough to frighten you because it didn’t know how to ask for love without offering blood in return.

“I should take care of you,” he said.

Not I want to. Not I’d like to. Not even let me.

I should.

You swallowed. “Dex…”

“I should.” His voice roughened, and it was absolute, like he had said this to himself before. Like maybe he had been saying it for months, in his head, every time he bought groceries, every time he counted cash, every time he watched you fall asleep over your notes with your cheek pressed to an open textbook. “You shouldn’t have to think about it. Rent, food, school, any of it. You should just—” He stopped, eyes darting away. “You should just sit there and be pretty.”

That ruined you a little.

There were things you could have said: Things about partnership, equality, how love was not supposed to turn into duty, how his need to provide came from some wounded place in him that still believed usefulness was the same as worth. You knew those things. You believed them, mostly.

But then he looked at you like taking care of you wasn’t a burden but a privilege. Like the idea of failing at it scared him more than the city hunting him. Like every terrible thing he had ever been made into could be balanced, somehow, if he could use it to keep you warm, fed, safe, untouched by the worst parts of the world.

He sat there, bruised and exhausted, dried blood at his temple, your scraped arm cradled in one hand as if it mattered more than every wound on his own body.

So you kissed him.

You didn’t mean to make it deep. You meant it to be reassurance, just a little press of your mouth to his, a way of telling him you were not leaving, not angry, not disappointed in how his love manifested even when it frightened you.

But Dex never received you halfway.

He leaned in, immediate and helpless, his free hamd coming to your waist with that familiar, possessive spread of his fingers. It was not rough, because he was never rough with you unless you asked him to be. But it was intense, as if the second your lips touched his, his body decided the only thing that made sense was pulling you closer.

You kissed him until the frozen peas slipped slightly against your arm and neither of you cared. Until his muscles relaxed under yours. Until he made a small sound in the back of his throat that made you hum, pleased with yourself.

When you pulled away, his eyes stayed on your lips, looking at your mouth like it had betrayed him by leaving.

You brushed your thumb over his chin. “You cannot just decide to provide by sheer force of will.”

Dex blinked, still dazed enough from the kiss that it took him half a second to find the conversation again.

Then his eyes sharpened in that almost boyish, almost hopeful way. “What if I got work?”

You exhaled through your nose. “Again. Where?”

His thumb moved once against your waist in small strokes that were barely there. 

“I heard that the CIA director is looking for someone to take over a contract,” he said.

You blinked.

It sounded clean on the surface and filthy underneath.

He said them carefully, like he was testing whether they could pass as normal if he used the right tone. 

“You mean black ops,” you said blankly.

“I mean work.”

“Benjamin,” you tilted your head.

“It’s steady enough.” His eyes did not leave yours. 

“That is not the same as safe.”

His eyes looked like guilt passing quickly through the devotion. “I can handle that.”

“I know you can.” You touched his cheek again, achingly gentle. “That’s what scares me.”

He looked at your face, taking inventory of every emotion there. His hand tightened at your waist.

“I’d come home,” he said.

Your heart ached. “You can’t promise that.”

“I’d make it true.”

“That’s not how promises work.”

“It is for me.”

And there he was. Your Dex. Your impossible, obsessive man, sitting in your too-small studio with blood on his face, telling you with complete sincerity that he could bend fate into obedience if the reward was coming home to you.

You wanted to argue, but he cut you off before you could even finish forming thoughts. 

“If I got a job,” he said carefully, “I could buy you a ring.”

Oh.

Oh, fuck.

For a second, you forgot how to breathe.

He had said it so quietly, so carefully, like the word itself was fragile. Like  if he had manifested it into the room too hard, it might shatter before you could touch it. 

A ring.

Dex watched you like he was waiting to see if he had ruined everything.

He didn’t look casual. He was never casual about you. He didn’t toss out precious things like the future just to see if they landed. He offered them like they had been a piece of his flesh cut out of him.

And you realized, in that second, that this had not been a stray thought.

Dex hadn’t just imagined it. Dex had been living with it.

You could see it now, in the way he held himself in the way his fingers had tightened just slightly at your waist, in the way his eyes kept flicking down to your mouth like he wanted to kiss the answer out of you and was forcing himself not to. 

He had carried this around. Maybe for weeks. Maybe for months. 

Maybe he had been thinking about marrying you while listening to your rant about your professor. He had been thinking about it while fixing the wobbly leg on your desk chair. He had been thinking about it while watching you laugh at Mrs. Smithers’ cat through the cracked door.

Maybe he had been thinking about it while buying groceries. Maybe he even stood in the pasta aisle with blood still under his sleeves, picking the brand you liked better because you once said the cheaper one tasted “dusty.” 

“Mm,” you managed.

It was barely a sound. Your throat had gone tight. You were trying very hard not to break apart, trying not to let the whole sweetness of it take you down completely, but your hand was already lifting to his face. Your thumb brushed the corner of his mouth, careful of the split in his lip.

“You sure you wanna marry me?” you asked.

Dex looked genuinely offended. “Yes.”

It came so fast you almost laughed. You did, a little, but it cracked around the edges. “Really?”

His brow furrowed, as if the question itself made no sense. “Yes.”

“You’ve thought about it?”

Dex stared at you, and the answer was so obvious then. 

He had probably thought about it too much. Dex didn’t daydream. He planned. He mapped. He calculated. Even his fantasies came with exit routes and contingency plans.

“Okay,” you whispered. “What would that life even look like?”

You saw this glint in his eyes, the way they widened by a fraction. You had asked the one question he had been dying to answer.

His hand stayed at your waist. His thumb moved once, almost unconsciously, a small stroking motion through the fabric of your shirt.

“I’d get us a house,” he said.

Your heart gave a helpless little kick.

His gaze drifted past you, not away in dismissal, but as if the apartment disappeared from his eyes. 

“Not in the city,” he said. “Close enough if you still wanted it, for work or whatever you wanted, not right in it. Not sirens under the window all night, not this building where you can hear every footstep in the hall and know which ones don’t belong.”

His thumb moved once against your waist, like even with his head in the clouds he needed one hand on you to make sure the dream had a center.

“We’d look at the suburbs,” he continued. “I’d want roads I could learn. I want neighbors so you can bake them pie, but I don’t want them too close. We need a neighborhood with space between houses. We need streetlights that work. A sidewalk, maybe, where you could walk in the morning if you wanted and I wouldn’t spend the whole time looking over your shoulder.”

You stayed quiet.

You didn’t want to interrupt him. There was something too precious about the way he was speaking, like he had cracked open a safe inside himself and all these impossibly domestic things were spilling out. 

“It would have a yard,” he said, smaller now. “Not huge. We don’t need huge, but we need enough. We would need a fence. A good one. Tall, but not ugly. I’d make sure it looked nice. You’d care about that.”

Your throat tightened.

“I’d make sure I have good sightlines in there,” he continued, “no blind spots.”

There he is. 

“And I’d plant flowers,” he added.

You blinked. Dex glanced at you, then looked down again as if the admission embarrassed him more than the blood on his face.

“You like flowers. The wild-looking ones. The ones outside delis in buckets, or growing through fences. You slow down when you see them.” His mouth twitched faintly, affectionate. “You pretend you don’t, but you do.”

He… noticed?

“I’d plant those,” he said. “I don’t know anything about gardening, but I could learn.”

He kept going before you could answer 

“There’d be a porch, or a back deck. I’d put a chair there for you.” A little warmth moved through his eyes, as if imagining it. “You’d probably bring a blanket out even if it wasn’t cold.”

You smiled, and it seemed to give him more courage.

“And you’d have an office,” he said. “A real one, not a desk shoved into a corner with your papers stacked on the floor.”

Your eyes stung.

“Built-in shelves if we could, for your research books,” he continued. “Your fiction books, all of them. You wouldn’t have to pile them on the windowsill or keep the heavy ones under the desk. Your desk would face a window, but no one should be able to see into it from the street.”

You let out the smallest laugh, but he kept drifting deeper now.

“There’d be a couch in there,” he said. “So I could sit with you while you worked. I’d be quiet.”

The confession was so completely him that something inside you melted. He said it without shame, without trying to make it sound less obsessive than it was. Of course he would watch you. Of course he had already imagined sitting in a room built for your mind, staring at you while you read and wrote and thought, content just to be near the machinery of you.

“I like when you’re focused,” he murmured. “You make that face.”

You did not ask what face. You wanted him to keep talking.

“The kitchen would be big,” he said next, and there was certainty in that, like he had stood in it a thousand times. “Big enough for that island you like.”

Your mouth parted.

“We’d have one with those ugly pendant lights,” he added, with the resigned tone of a man making a grave sacrifice. 

You smiled fully now. “They’re not ugly,” was all you could manage under your breath.

He heard it and very quickly added, “They are. But you like them, so we’d have it.”

That nearly did you in.

“There’d be storage,” he said. “Pans would be in the cabinets, not in the oven. I’d build you a spice drawer and I’ll organise them.”

You pressed your lips together, smiling harder.

“I’d make coffee before you woke up,” he continued. “Yours first. I’d make breakfast and I’d make more than eggs. Pancakes, maybe. You like pancakes when you’re sad.”

Your smile trembled.

“I’d make dinners, too,” he said. “You could sit at the counter and read to me while I cooked.” He looked almost shy at that. “Or talk. I don’t care. I just like your voice.”

The room felt too small for him then. Too small for the size of what he wanted. 

“And a dining table,” he said, his thumb stilled against you. “With more than two chairs.”

He swallowed once and kept going.

“The bathroom would have that shower,” he said. “Like the hotel you wouldn’t stop talking about.”

You almost laughed. “A rain shower?” You asked 

“Yes,” he said seriously. “With a glass door, a bench, and heated floors, because you hate cold tile.”

His eyes flicked to your face.

“I’d spoil you,” he said, like a vow. His eyesight  lowered to your hand, then back to your face.

You couldn’t speak, but he went on anyway, because now that he had started, the dream seemed to pull him forward by the heart.

“There’d be security,” he said. Of course there would be. But from Dex, even that sounded like love.

“I’ll get good locks with reinforced doors. I’d install cameras.” he said immediately, almost gently. “I’ll get motion lights and window sensors.”

He breathed out slowly.

“You wouldn’t have to check anything,” he said. “I’d do it.”

What he was saying was wouldn’t have to listen at night, or wonder, or brace, or be scared just because the world was dangerous. Dex would take the ritual of fear and make it his. He would check the doors, the windows, the shadows, so you could go upstairs and sleep.

“I’d check the locks before bed,” he said. “You could just go up and get in bed. Read or sleep with the light on if you want. I’d turn it off.”

He said it with such certainty that tears gathered before you could stop them.

He didn’t notice yet. He had gone too far into the house.

“There’d be a gun cabinet,” he continued, practical now. “Locked, of course, and separate from ammunition. I’ll get biometric locks and a backup key hidden somewhere only we knew.”

His focus sharpened slightly as he pictured it.

“And a weapons cabinet too, with knives, anything tactical, anything I wouldn’t want left out. It would be hidden or built into the wall somewhere no one would look. Not near the kitchen. Not near the bedrooms.” He said it like he had already rejected three possible locations. “Everything would be secured,” he continued. “No exceptions. Nothing lying around.”

Then, still looking into that future house, still seeing the walls and the locks and the rooms and all the dangerous love he wanted to put inside them, he added, almost absently, “at least until the kids are old enough.”

Oh.

“The kids?” you asked.

Dex blinked. For a second, he looked almost confused that you had stopped him there, like the kids had been so naturally integrated into the architecture of his fantasy that he had forgotten you were only just now seeing the floor plan. In his head, apparently, they already existed. 

“Yes,” he said, as if it were obvious. “Kids.”

He said it as if this were already settled. As if the universe had filed the paperwork. As if somewhere, in some future suburb with a fenced yard, your children were already waiting for him to come home.

“You just assumed?” you asked, your voice dazed.

Dex’s brows pulled together like he was only now realizing assumption was supposed to be a problem.

Then his eyes searched yours, suddenly cautious.

“I—” He paused, his fingers tightening slightly at your waist. “I assumed you’d want them,” he finished. “I assumed I’d give you anything you wanted. And I assumed…” His eyes dropped, then lifted again. “I assumed if there was any way the world let me have you like that, I’d take it.”

There it was.

Dex didn’t want a family because he had always dreamed of domestic happiness. He wanted it like conquest. He wanted children because they would be yours, because they would be his, because they would be the physical evidence of a future he had no right to expect. Benjamin Poindexter didn’t want in half measures. He consumed possibility whole. If he loved you, he loved the future of you and the shape of you extended forward. The house that held you. The children that might come from you. 

That was deranged. That wasn’t normal. But to you, that was also, for reasons you could not explain without sounding like you needed professional intervention, romantic.

Dex watched your mouth part. “I’d love them,” he said. “I would. I know I would. Because they’d be yours.”

There it was, not the socially acceptable version. Not I love children or I always wanted a family. Dex didn’t know how to make love sound normal when it came from him.

He would love them because they would carry your eyes, maybe, or your mouth, or your stubbornness. Because he would look at them and see you continued into another body. 

“They’d be mine too,” he added, like that part was harder for him to trust. “And maybe that part could be good because it came through you.”

Dex looked down at his hands that had done terrible things and could still hold you  like it was made of light.

So you only sat there letting him talk, letting him show you the things he had apparently been thinking around for months.

“Have you thought about names?” you asked.

Dex nodded slightly. 

Your lips parted.

“You have,” you whispered.

He looked almost offended again, but not at you this time. At the idea that he could have built this whole imaginary house, this whole impossible future, and not named the children already running through it. “Of course I have.”

“Tell me,” you said.

Dex watched you carefully. You could tell that there was still that small, frightened part of him, the part waiting for the insult, the laugh, the moment where your wonder hardened into common sense. But you just looked… patient. 

“For a boy,” he said, “Jason.”

Jason.

Dex’s voice lowered. “Because you loved Jason and the Argonauts when you were little. The way everyone went after something impossible.”

You remembered telling him that, barely. It had been one of those late-night conversations with your cheek on his chest. His fingers moved through your hair as you rambled about mythology books you used to check out of the library, about heroes who were never as perfect as people wanted them to be.

Dex had listened.

“And for a girl?” you asked, already knowing he had one.

“Callie,” he said then immediately added, “Short for Calliope. Callie at school. Calliope if she liked it. Whatever you liked.”

Your eyes stung. “Callie,” you whispered.

Dex nodded. “You said she was the muse of epic poetry. You liked that she belonged to stories.”

You pressed your fingers to your mouth. He remembered that too.

“Jason and Callie,” you said with a sigh.

You realized then, that Dex had not chosen names because he liked them. He had chosen names because he thought you would.

Because even in his most private fantasies, the children were not abstract. They were not trophies. They were not little versions of him he could shape into whatever he wanted. They were pieces of you carried forward into the world, proof that some part of you could exist outside your own body and still belong to him, too.

“You like them,” he realised.

“I love them.”

His hand tightened around yours. Then, as if the names had opened a door he could no longer close, he kept going.

“Jason would have your eyes,” he said, voice distant again, head fully in the clouds now. “He’d be quiet, I think, the kind of kid who watches first. He’d notice everything.”

Your throat tightened.

“And Callie,” he said, and a faint helplessness moved through his face. “She’d be trouble.”

You laughed a little. 

“She’d climb things,” he continued. “She’d argue. She’d look right at me while doing exactly what I told her not to do.”

You could see it.

Worse, you could see how much he loved it.

This imaginary little girl, stubborn and wild, already had him wrapped around her tiny, nonexistent finger.

“She’d have your mouth,” he said, almost to himself. “Your attitude.”

“My attitude?”

His eyes flicked to yours, and there was something wickedly fond in them. “Your attitude.”

He looked down at your joined hands again, thumb moving over your knuckles, and his voice changed.

“They’d need to be ready.”

For what?

But you knew what for. This part that should’ve made you want to retreat, but it only made you want to lean in more, because this was Dex’s love too. The same root, grown through darker soil.

“Ready?” you asked.

“For the world,” he clarified. 

Dex’s eyes were calm now, focused and devoted. There was nothing theatrical in him, nothing performative. He was not fantasizing about violence for the sake of it. He was imagining two children made from you and him, and his first instinct was to make sure nothing could ever make them helpless.

He wasn’t in the kitchen anymore. He was in the woods with Jason and Callie when they were older and taller.

“I know what I am,” he said with finality. “I know what I’m good for.”

Your heart pinched. “Dex…” 

“No,” he said, because he knew you. Because he could hear the protest forming before you even opened your mouth. “Don’t do that.”

You tilted your head. 

“I know what I’m good for,” he repeated, gentler this time, but no less certain. “And if I’m good for anything, I will make sure they have every tool in their disposal to survive.”

There was no self-pity in it. He didn’t sound like a man condemning himself. He sounded like a man who had finally found a use for the worst parts of him and decided that they would serve you.

“They won’t be helpless,” he said. “Not our kids.”

Our kids.

“Jason and Callie won’t be fragile and easy to hurt. I won’t do that to them.”

His jaw tightened, and pride flickered through his face.

“They’ll be smart. They’ll be aware. They’ll know when a room feels wrong. They’ll know what a threat looks like before it reaches them.”

You listened, heart thudding.

“And they’ll be skilled,” he said.

It mattered to him. You could hear it.

Skilled.

Not broken. Not molded. Not made into little copies of him. He wanted them skilled, accurate, and alive.

“I’d start small,” he continued. “I’ll teach them hand-to-hand, teach them how to use their reflexes. I’ll teach them how to move without panicking, how to get up when they fall, how to breathe when they’re scared. Jason would overthink it at first. He’ll want every movement perfect before he tries. Callie would rush in and get mad when I made her slow down.” His mouth curved up faintly. “She’ll hate slowing down.”

You almost smiled through the ache in your chest.

“But she’ll learn,” he said. “They both will.”

His eyes darkened around the imagination.

“When they’re older, I'll teach them how to aim.”

Aim was not violence to him, not really. It was discipline. It was proof that the body could obey the mind. 

“They better have their old man’s aim,” he murmured.

It should have sounded awful.

And it did, a little.

But it also sounded like him imagining a son and daughter with pieces of himself; His focus, his loyalty, his ability to lock onto a target and not shake.

“They’ll know how to throw,” he said. “How to hit what they mean to hit. I’ll get them knives, when they’re old enough. Take them to the range to shoot guns when they're older. No one fucking picks on my kids and lives to see another day.” He looked at you then, and the obsession in his face had turned holy. “I’ll make sure they understand that.”

You swallowed.

“If they find themselves in a bad situation, I’ll make sure they’re better than lucky. Lucky runs out. Lucky gets them killed. I want them trained. I want them calm. I want them to be able to look at danger and know they’re more dangerous.”

His hand tightened around yours.

“I want Jason to know how to get Callie out if something happens. I want Callie to know how to get Jason out. I want both of them to know how to get back to their mother.”

Your breath caught. 

Their mother.

Dex said it as if it were the center of the whole plan. 

“I’ll make sure they come home in one piece,” he said, voice rough now. “Ready for dinner. That’s the point.”

Your throat tightened.

“I’ll make damn sure they can leave this house and come back to it. I’ll make sure you’re not sitting at that kitchen table wondering if they’re safe.” His eyes dropped to your mouth, then back up. “I don’t want you afraid.”

Fuck.

The whole deranged, violent, tender fantasy had always curved back to that. Dex teaching your future children to fight, to aim, to survive, not because he wanted war in the home, but because he wanted peace for you. Because his idea of fatherhood was Jason and Callie walking through the front door with backpacks tossed on the floor, cheeks flushed, while you stood at the stove or sat at the island with your coffee and didn’t have to imagine every terrible thing that might have happened to them.

“I’d kill for them, you know this,” he said, rubbing a slow circle on your skin, “I’d burn the whole world down for them.” Dex did not look away. “But if I know they can take care of themselves, then my eyes can stay where they belong.”

His hand cupped your face fully now.

“On you.”

He said it like it was obvious. Like the whole future had a single center of gravity and he had been circling it the entire time, pretending he was talking about houses and kitchens and gun cabinets and kids, when really he had only ever been talking about you.

“Because all of this,” Dex whispered, “would happen because of you.”

His thumb moved beneath your eye, catching the tear before it could fall properly. He looked at you like the city and the sirens and the blood on his knuckles were temporary, like the whole world outside the window was an environment he could outlast if it meant getting you somewhere safe.

“You understand that, right?” he asked, but his voice made it sound less like a question and more like a confession he needed you to survive hearing. 

Dex leaned closer, his hand cupping your cheek now, holding you with that possession that never felt casual. 

“I’d make sure the kids knew that,” he said. “I’d make sure they knew anything good in me came from you.”

Your lips parted, but nothing came out.

“The warmth in the house, the fairytales they would hear before bed, the flowers they pick from the garden.” His thumb brushed slowly along your cheekbone. “They’d know that was you. That all of it was you.”

Your eyes burned.

“They’d love you,” Dex whispered. “because you’re perfect.”

“Dex…”

“And they’d love me because I’d earn it.” he said.

Oh, Benjamin.

Your heart broke a little at that.

He said it simply, like love was not something he had ever expected to be given for free if it was him. 

His hand slid a little lower, thumb brushing the corner of your mouth, parting your lips.

“You wouldn’t have to learn how to shoot,” he reassured. “Because you’d have me.”

His voice dropped lower, intimate and possessive all the same.

“I’d take care of you,” he continued, “because that’s the only thing I was made wrong enough to do right.”

It should have sounded suffocating. Maybe from anyone else, it would have. But from Dex, it felt less like a cage and more like a shelter.

A small, broken laugh caught in your throat.

His mouth curved faintly, almost shy and almost wicked. “You can just sit there and be pretty, huh, baby?”

Your heart gave in completely.

He said it like a promise, like he would happily make a fortress of his own body if it meant you never had to lift a finger. 

Your tears started falling quicker before you could stop them.

They started coming too quickly, gathering along your lashes and breaking loose before you could blink them back. One rolled down the side of your nose. Another slipped along your cheek toward his thumb. Suddenly you were crying in front of him over a house that didn’t exist, children who hadn’t been born, a ring he hadn’t even given you yet, and the sincerity of Benjamin fuckin’ Poindexter imagining a life precious enough for you to be loved.

Dex noticed and his whole face changed. His hand, still cupping your cheek, squeezed slightly. His eyes moved over your face, searching for the wound, the mistake, the exact word that had hurt you.

“What?” he asked, his voice wound tight. “What did I say?”

You shook your head, but that only made another tear fall.

He frowned. “I upset you.”

“No.” Your voice cracked. You hated how small it sounded. “No, Dex.”

“I did.”

“You didn’t.”

There was a panick-y edge beneath the flatness of his voice. Dex could handle blood and anger Dex could handle fear if it had a direction, if it could be aimed back at something. But your tears did something awful to him. They made him look helpless in the one way he could never tolerate: like he had caused pain he couldn’t kill.

You caught his wrist before he could pull his hand away from your face.

“Baby,” you whispered, “no.”

You pressed your cheek harder into his palm, making him understand that you were not resisting his grand plan. “These are not bad tears.”

Still, you could tell he didn’t believe you yet.

“They’re not,” you promised, laughing weakly even though your throat hurt. “You just… fuck, Dex. You just said all of that like it was real.”

His mouth parted slightly.

“You really want all of that?” You asked, though it sounded more squeaky than you’d like 

Dex stared at you, looking almost offended again, as if he was wounded by the possibility that you could still doubt the size of what he wanted when he had just laid it open in front of you.

“Yes,” he said.

You breathed in shakily. “The house?”

“Yes.”

“The kitchen?”

“Yes.”

“The flowers?”

His thumb moved under your eye, wiping away another tear. “Yes.”

“Jason and Callie?”

His eyebrows relaxed immediately at the mention of the names. “Yes.”

You shut your eyes.

And for one second, because he had given you permission by wanting it so badly, you let yourself imagine it.

Dex driving with one hand on the wheel, the other reaching back at a red light because Calliope had dropped her stuffed animal and immediately made it everyone’s emergency. You could see it his eyes flicking from the mirror to the road to her little outstretched hand, his mouth set in that serious line like recovering a plush rabbit from the floorboard was a tactical operation. Callie would kick her feet in the car seat, impatient and bossy, already certain her father would retrieve anything she dropped because Dex had never once been normal about anyone he cared for needing something.

Dex in a school parking lot, terrifying every other father by accident. He’d stand there in a dark jacket and smart-ish trousers, trying to look approachable and while still planning thirteen ways to neutralize a PTA committee just in case someone tried to speak wrongly about his kids. Jason walking beside him with a too-big backpack and the solemn concentration of his father. Callie skipping ahead, fearless because her father was behind her and therefore the world hadn’t yet invented anything that could touch her.

Dex teaching Jason how to throw a ball in the backyard. His son would squinting with concentration, little shoulders tense, trying too hard because he had inherited that from you. Dex crouched in front of him, adjusting his grip, telling him to breathe. Then he’d step back, watching Jason throw too hard and too wide, and smiling anyway. He’d be proud anyway, because it was a start. He’d make his way to the knives eventually. 

Dex standing behind you in the kitchen, arms around your waist, chin tucked against your shoulder while your children ran through the yard beyond the window.

He’d kiss your temple and ask for another one, and you’d say, “We’ll think about it,” because you two were a unit. You were two parts of the same whole. 

You opened your eyes, and he just looked terrified of how much he wanted it.

Your hand tightened around his wrist.

“When you eventually ask me,” you said, voice shaking, “know that I’ll say yes.”

For a moment, Dex didn’t move.

He didn’t even seem to breathe.

His eyes searched yours once, twice, desperately, like he had to make sure he hadn’t imagined it. 

“You will?” he asked.

You smiled through the tears. “Of course.”

Joy did not sit easily on Dex, but you knew this was what it looked like. 

You let out a watery little laugh, because if you did not laugh you were going to sob properly.

That seemed to bring him back to himself.

Dex leaned in and kissed your neck once, then your cheeks, then the damp place beneath your eye where a tear had slipped down.

Each kiss was careful and possessive in the best way. He wasn’t trying to stop you from crying. Instead, he wanted to claim every tear. 

Dex kissed your jaw again, then tucked his face into your neck, and for a long time he just held you.

What you did not know was that the ring was already more than a fantasy to him.

What you did not know was that earlier that evening, before the Supreme Court had gone to hell, he shot Buck Cashman, before he came home, Dex had received confirmation of an advance from Mr. Charles.

He had a government contract. He had a stable job.

Dex had read the confirmation once.

Then twice.

Then, because he was Dex, he had memorized the number. The second he saw the advance, his mind had gone to you.

Rent. Groceries. Your tuition. The overdue utility bill you had tried to hide under a stack of journal articles like paper could make debt disappear. The textbooks you kept putting off buying because you said you could “probably survive with library copies,” even though he had seen the way you frowned when you said it.

And then the ring.

He’d already planned the ring.

And no, he hadn’t told you any of this yet. 

Maybe he will after the first payment cleared. Maybe after the first job was done and he knew the money was steady. Maybe after he had washed the blood off well enough to convince himself he was allowed to touch something as clean as your hand.

He’d find the right jeweler, though he already had one in mind: a shop in the Upper East Side that did custom pieces. He’d get one commissioned specifically for you. Nothing too delicate, because he wanted people to notice it. Nothing too flashy, because you would wrinkle your nose and tell him he had lost his mind.

He’d get something that looked right on your hand when you reached for your coffee in the morning. A gem that would catch the kitchen light when you turned pages in your office. Something Jason might touch curiously as a child, asking if Dad gave you that, and Dex would hear you say yes from the doorway. Something Callie would one day ask to try on, and you would laugh and tell her when she could when was older. Something that said you belonged to him.

And more importantly, that he belonged to you.

For now, he said none of that.

For now, he only held you tighter on the bed, making sure you were okay.

“You’re going to be so spoiled,” he whispered against your skin.

You smiled, eyes closing, tears still drying on your face. “Am I?”

“Yes.”

“By a wanted man with frozen peas?”

That got the smallest laugh out of him. 

“By your future husband,” he said.

Your heart did a helpless little flip.

Little did you know, with this contract, the future wasn’t just a fantasy to him anymore.

He just needed to ask.

—end.

-

You give him a deadpan look in return, clad only in a black tank top and a pair of spandex shorts, as you tug the skin-tight fabric up your legs.

You don’t know Johnny Storm all that well, just that he’s Sue’s younger brother and a pretty damn good engineer. But, in the few short days you’ve gotten to know him, you’ve noticed his strange penchant for covering his awkward tenderness with a feigned sort of arrogance. He’s obviously still getting used to this new world, and the subsequent attention that comes with being among the first people in space — aptly called the Saturn Five.

You figure he’s not yet accustomed to the sudden adoration from the public, and so he’s forced to improvise accordingly.

“How well do I know…?” you trail off.

“Oh, right. Yeah—” the blonde boy stammers, laughing softly at himself.

Your emotionless stare never wavers.

Johnny’s cheeks flare. “My— My brother-in-law, I mean. Reed.”

“Not well,” you answer in a detached monotone and drag the white sleeve up the length of your arm. “Mostly by reputation.”

Johnny scoffs and drags his garment over his freckled shoulders, lean torso straining against the fabric of his thin t-shirt. “And you still decided to show up?” he quips.

You don’t share his amused smile. You rarely ever do. Never, actually. Most of the time, Johnny can’t tell if you realize he’s joking or if you just don’t care.

Now, you just nod in response and answer his rhetorical question in a single word. “Yes.”

Johnny nods to himself, too, and pulls the silver zipper of his suit up his chest. “Yeah, no. I get it. Reed’s a pretty good guy, I guess— But I’m just here to make sure my sister doesn’t do anything, honestly,” he confesses in a breathy chuckle. “…What about you?”

“What about me?” you repeat with pinched brows, tugging on the other sleeve.

“What are you in for?” Johnny wonders with a playful squint in his light blue eyes — the exact color of the sky at two o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, or the color of the ocean at exactly 33 meters deep. “‘Cause I know it’s not just because you like my company, Doc.”

“I don’t know,” you shrug. “To change the world, I guess.”

“That’s all, huh?” he laughs.

You nod once. The zipper whizzes quietly as you drag it up to your neck. “That’s all,” you answer in a monotone before turning on your heel and walking away.

Johnny’s footsteps echo through the expansive launch facility as he rushes to catch up with you. He walks a little too close for your liking, enough for you to feel the warmth radiating from his pale skin and to smell the vanilla-tobacco cologne on his long neck.

His broad shoulder brushes yours with every quick stride down the white brick corridor, moving in extra close every time you pass by bustling scientists in lab coats or clunking machines that didn’t exist to the world a year or more ago.

“I wasn’t— I wasn’t prying too much back there, was I?” he frets with furrowed brows, ocean eyes swimming with concern as he ducks to look at you.

You don’t share his gaze as you hum in a detached tone of voice, “I don’t know. Were you?”

“Yeah, maybe,” Johnny sighs with a shrug. “Half-and-half, I guess— Prying and, for selfish reasons, genuinely concerned for your wellbeing.”

You stop suddenly in the middle of the narrow hallway. Johnny stumbles on his feet beside you. A group of doctors walk down the corridor, then — a gaggle of men with heavy glasses on their noses and clipboards in their weathered hands. He has to take an extra step closer to you to let them pass by.

His chest brushes yours at the dwindling proximity, which seems to affect him far more than it does you. The scent of your perfume makes him dizzy; something fruity, like a raspberry, maybe. Far sweeter than the way you glare at him now.

“Concerned about what?”

“Well, I just mean it’s— It’s one thing for Reed to rope all of us idiots into his crazy plan, you know? We’ve all known him for years, we already know he’s crazy,” Johnny laughs, only partly joking. “But you’re…”

“What? A stranger?”

“Normal,” Johnny corrects before shrugging. “Well, actually, pretty would’ve been my first choice, but… tomato, tom-ah-to, right?”

He flashes you a crooked pink smile then, which would’ve made any other girl swoon at his feet — a proven theory he’s tested at several bars since he became known as Johnny Storm, faithful member of the heroic Saturn Five. But you don’t even blink, totally unmoved by his charm (or lack thereof).

Johnny sighs and drops his head. He finally lets go of all the boyish theatrics he thinks for some reason he needs, which you’re grateful for.

“Look… If something were to happen to us up there, I think I could stomach that, you know— It’d be awful, obviously, but we’d handle it. Like we always do…” He trails off, button eyes round and full of a distant worry that sends him rambling before he can stop it. “But this… This is dangerous stuff, Doc. And Reed knows it. And he shouldn’t have recruited anybody else, but he did, and if something happened to you… I don’t think I’d forgive myself.”

You’re slightly moved by his admission, though you don’t show it on your face.

“Well, I guess, it’s a good thing nothing’s gonna happen up there.”

You turn to walk away again, and Johnny nearly trips over his own feet to stay in stride with you. “Hold on. Just— Just one more question, alright?”

“I’m going on this mission, Johnny Storm.”

“It’s not that—” he insists, voice breaking slightly at the use of his full name.

Even despite your not-so-subtle bitterness towards him, he thinks he hears something strikingly soft in your voice. It’s something almost tender, and perhaps only in his head, which gives his name a brand new meaning. You make it sound like everyone else has been saying his name wrong his whole life.

“I was just going to ask if you wanted to maybe hang out later, by the way, hypothetically,” Johnny rambles, talking wildly with his hands.

You notice his panicked gesturing from the corner of your eye, and how quickly he tucks his anxious fingers underneath his strong arms when he crosses them over his chest. He thinks he almost catches you smiling before you swallow it back down again a second later.

“I’m a little tied up here, actually,” you tell him, though it comes out too monotoned to sound like the half-joke you meant it as.

“Oh. Right. Yeah, me too…” Johnny nods, trying to play it cool despite his stammering.

You enter the main lab side-by-side for your daily check-ups. The rest of the Saturn Five are already waiting for you there. Ben, Reed, and Sue all sit next to each other on their exam tables, hooked to a series of buzzing machines which draw their blood into crimson tubes hanging at their side.

Johnny trails like a puppy behind you, brows raised and eyes glittering in a sheepish sort of look. “So, what about tomorrow, then?”

“Leave her alone, Johnny,” Sue calls across the room with a knowing smile on her face, always inherently gentle in her way, but still teasing like all older sisters are entitled to be.

The blonde boy gapes in response as he stammers, “I’m— I’m not even doing anything!”

“You’re bothering her.”

“I am not!” he argues instinctively, then flashes you a worried ocean-eyed look. “Am I?”

“I don’t know. Are you?” you shrug, as unenthusiastic as ever.

Johnny smacks his lips against his teeth. “Yeah, that’s not helpful—”

“She’s our lead astrophysicist, Johnny—” Reed reminds playfully from his wife’s side, olive skin growing sticky and pale as the nurse takes his blood. (He’s more frightened by needles than the unknown emptiness of outer space. It’s weird.) “—Which is code for: she’s way too busy for you.”

“Too pretty, more like,” Ben scoffs from beside the older man.

Johnny’s face screws in offense, which only makes them laugh harder at the stupid joke — even if it is sort of true. When you part from him to head to your own station, Johnny thinks he hears you laughing at it, too. A quiet, breathy sound that’s more of an exhaled breath than anything, but still a laugh nonetheless.

“Oh, really?” he huffs dramatically, ‘cause he’s been trying to get you to smile for three whole days now. “That’s what gets you?”

✶ — April, 1961 | New York — ✶

Your last night on planet Earth is spent talking to the moon, crescent-shaped and gleaming. It tells you not to worry, though not exactly with words. It just holds you in its gentle glow and reminds you that you aren’t leaving anything behind, that there isn’t anything new you could possibly discover in the vast infiniteness of space. Because the universe was your first ever home in truth, billions and billions of years ago, and now it’s calling you back.

Like a childhood room you only see on holidays, frozen in time like you never even left it.

That’s how Johnny finds you — at an ungodly hour of the early morning, standing in the center of the worn sidewalk, bathed in the neon hues of the bright city square that never sleeps. You drown in your cable-knit sweater, arms crossed over your chest and fingers tucked away in a feeble attempt to hide from the early spring chill. You keep your chin tilted towards the sky, and your eyes trained on something far away.

He wonders if there’s something up there only you can see. That’s how you tend to look at the world, anyway, like you’re keeping all of its secrets.

“Where do you think it ends?” Johnny blurts, always so wrapped up in his own head that he tends to continue inward conversations rather than start brand new ones.

You’re unstartled by the suddenness of his arrival, ‘cause you felt him behind you long before he ever had to announce it — consumed immediately by his palpable body heat, along with the minty aftershave and sea-salt bodywash on his skin from a fresh shower.

“Why do you ask such vague questions?” you snap in return, as harsh as the late winter chill.

It’s your basic primal instinct to be annoyed by his presence, like the rage is hardwired into you. The simmering embers of misplaced anger in your chest are quickly snuffed out by the rolling breeze of a lingering winter, which bites mercilessly at your cheeks and the tip of your nose. Something primitive in the back of your mind subconsciously wishes he’d come closer then.

When you turn to glare at the blonde boy over your shoulder, you find him donned in a fitting long-sleeve tee and a baggier pair of plaid pajama pants. His strong, shaven chin is tilted upward, and his sleep-swollen gaze is pointed to the sky like yours once, only it’s a lot more annoying when he does it.

Johnny laughs on a quiet, exhaled breath. “I mean, where do you think the sky ends and eternity begins?” he repeats, a question that has plagued him for some days now.

He’s tormented by the thought of a thin, black veil — one which separates the only home humans have ever known from an emptiness that goes on endlessly in every direction. Is space just dark and dead and doomed? his mind rages. Is everything worth marvelling at just here on Earth?

“100 kilometers above sea level,” you answer instantaneously. “Approximately, anyway.”

Johnny’s head snaps in your direction. “What?”

“100 kilometers above sea level,” you repeat like it’s obvious. “That’s where the Earth’s atmosphere separates from outer space—”

A laugh sputters suddenly past Johnny’s pink mouth. The boyish sound echoes through the empty city square, which is only filled now by your bodies and flashing neon signs.

A deep frown settles between your brows in return. “Why are you laughing?”

“I’m not,” he insists despite his chuckling. “I swear, I’m not—”

Your eyes narrow at him while his lighter ones glimmer with a newfound life. His cheeks flare a faint pink color from his poorly held-back laughter and the unforgiving late-night chill. He balls a pale fist in front of his mouth to hide how wide he’s smiling.

“It’s a fact—”

“No. I know, I just… I needed that, I think…” Johnny confesses before dragging in a much-needed breath; his first good one all night, maybe. “I’ve just been so in my own head lately, you know? With a bunch of existential stuff from the launch, I guess. I think I just needed to get out of my head for a second, so… Thanks—”

“I didn’t say it to make you feel better,” you snap.

Johnny smiles in the face of your glowering. “Yeah, I know that, too… I’m pretty sure you’re physically incapable of lying.”

“Okay, well, that’s just not true,” you scoff. Not because he’s totally wrong, but because you don’t need him thinking he knows a single thing about you — even if you have spent every day of the past year together.

“Really? Johnny hums with a knowing smile, crossing his arms over his toned chest as he takes a daring step closer. “Then tell me something nice.”

You swallow hard at the dwindling proximity between you. His body heat is all-consuming, swaddling you in a blanket of warmth and tenderness without trying. Whatever the sun is made out of, I think your soul might be made of it, too — those are the first words that rise like bile in your throat. Or your heart, maybe, and you’ve just got sunlight running like fire through your veins.

“Your eyes are very blue,” you observe in a monotone instead. “Like, the kind of blue where it starts to get a little scary if I look at you too long.”

Johnny’s plush grin widens. A big, boyish smile that moves everything inside of you — a flame that melts your body and turns your bones to ash, lighting up all the dark corners.

“And how long did you have to stare at me to figure that one out, Doc?”

“Why does everything have to be some kinda flirtatious remark with you?”

“Because sometimes I can’t tell if you’re flirting with me or starting a fight, so I just assume it’s both.”

“Well, I’m definitely not flirting with you, Johnny Storm—”

“Oh, definitely not…”

“—Flirting is for children. We have a job to do.”

“Right,” he nods in a playfully solemn voice, with a wide smile and a sparkling look in his button eyes. “It’s very serious.”

You shake your head and turn away, headed back towards the towering skyscraper that overlooks the entire city — where you’ll spend your very last night on Earth before you’re seeing it from a space shuttle.

“I hate you,” you grumble as you go.

Johnny’s shoes scuff the pavement as he trails slowly behind you. “No, you don’t…” he lilts under his breath as he follows you inside, blanketed immediately by the warmth of the Baxter Building.

The boy spends his last few hours on the planet pondering not what separates his world from the immeasurable cosmic, but rather how disturbingly thin the veil is between hating someone and loving them.

✶ — April, 1961 | ANSA Hangar — ✶

Nylon for the base. Spandex for mobility. Urethane for the pressure. Nomex for high temperatures. Mylar for the heat loss.

As Johnny helps dress you in the clunky blue and white space suit, you imagine each differing chemical coming together, resulting in a unique mixture that will (hopefully) prevent you from dying the moment you break through the atmosphere. All per Johnny Storms’ blueprint.

“How’s it fit?” the blonde boy wonders aloud from where he stands behind you, latching the last buckle around your back. He gives it one sharp tug just to make sure it stays in place, and you sway softly on your feet to keep your balance.

You nod once. “Good.”

“Better than the last one?” he asks with a smile evident in his voice, knowing that his first trial of spacewear was a complete and utter nightmare. It was too tight in some places, too loose in others, and failed not just one but two fire safety tests. That was about a year ago now. You’d like to think you have a little bit more faith in him these days.

“Anything would be better than the last one,” you scoff.

“Rude,” Johnny frowns.

You spin on the heel of your boot to face him and momentarily falter at how close he is to you. You take a sudden step back from him, like someone jerking away from an open flame. You turn away from his prying gaze and motion to his personalized suit still hanging on the display.

“Do you want help?” you offer unenthusiastically despite yourself.

“Nah,” Johnny declines, shaking his head and crossing his strong arms over his chest. His biceps strain against the tight fabric of his ventilation garment. “I got it. You go ahead.”

Your eyes narrow in a challenging squint. “You said it was a two-person job.”

“Because I wanted to help you,” he shrugs with his cheek tilted to his shoulder. “And I knew you wouldn’t have let me otherwise—”

“So you lied?”

“No, I… slightly misrepresented the truth in order to spend a little extra time with you…” Johnny corrects, blue eyes squinted as he carefully chooses each word. He smiles at the scowl you give him, “…Shoot me.”

“I’ve been meaning to, actually,” you deadpan and turn away.

You hear Johnny snickering behind you as you leave, like he finds something strangely sweet in the empty threat.

He likes it best when you’re mean — he thinks you’re gentlest that way, tender like a green and yellow bruise that’s still healing. The kind you dig your thumb into and revel in the pleasurable soreness you find below the skin. You’re like that, in a way. A delicate lover somewhere deep down in the bruising enemy you’ve decided to be.

Down the windowless corridor and through a set of heavy metal doors, you find the hangar bustling with unfamiliar faces and bulky cameras. The muffled chatter erupts into a thousand droning voices as you enter the room. A visibly anxious and already suited-up Reed Richards stands at the head of it, at the very center of the hounding press.

You freeze in place as the door clicks shut behind you. Your presence gains the attention of the media personnel across the hangar. You cower under their prying eyes and flashing cameras.

“What is this?” you wonder aloud, to no one in particular.

Reed hesitates for a moment, mouth agape and dark eyes wide, as his brain tries to figure out how to answer your question and the hundred others shouted his way. So, he just walks to your side instead, and the gaggle of journalists and photographers follow like so many ducklings behind him.

“This is Doc— Our in-house cosmologist and astrophysicist,” the older man announces as he stands at your side. He puts a gloved hand on your shoulder, almost apologetically so, like he’s trying to silently convey that he hates all this just as much as you do. His fake smile wavers slightly after having been plastered on his face for so long. “If anyone knows what’s waiting for us up there, it’ll be her.”

“I didn’t consent to this—” you deadpan, flinching at the blinding camera flashes.

Your protest gets buried under a barrage of questions shouted at you from every direction. Each member of the press is trying to be heard over the person standing next to them, who is trying to be heard over the person standing next to them. It’s an unforgiving cycle that fills the expansive room with chaos.

“How did the two of you meet?!” a newswoman questions into a bulky microphone from where she stands before a large news camera.

“At Colombia—” Reed answers, faltering briefly when the rest of the Saturn Five walk into the room behind him. Sue, Johnny, and Ben enter wearing their own customized spacesuits. The older man locks eyes with his wife almost immediately, who flashes him a sympathetic smile in return.

Johnny waits for you to look at him, too. He thinks he’s spent the better part of the past year just waiting for you to look at him. Because, most times, he sees you before he’s seen anything else in any given room.

Reed, realizing his sudden silence, stumbles over himself to continue. “Uh, Doc was giving a lecture on black holes, I believe it was, and I—”

“Cosmic radiation,” you correct bluntly.

“…What?”

“I wrote a book on the Black Hole Paradox, but I never taught the Black Hole Paradox,” you ramble in a detached monotone. “We met after a lecture I gave on cosmic radiation— specifically the idea that cosmic rays can penetrate the body and alter its molecules, leading to extreme genetic mutations, which can be passed down for generations.”

For perhaps the first time since security allowed the press into the hangar, silence fills the all-white room. You tend to have that effect on people. On everybody, it seems, except for—

“See what I mean?” Johnny says with a wide grin, relatively unfazed by the hundreds of cameras pointed his way. The lenses follow his every move as he walks to stand beside you, throwing a heavy arm around your shoulder. “Best damn cosmetologist I ever met,” he blunders unknowingly, but with a crooked pink smile that’s hard to say no to.

“Cosmologist,” you correct without taking your emotionless stare off the camera zoomed into your face.

You duck from beneath Johnny’s arm and shove through the crowd of media personnel, heading for the doctors waiting on the other side. The blonde boy takes the sudden attention with ease — he’s gotten all too used to it over the past year.

“She’s the prettiest one, too,” he jokes into the news camera, with a gloved hand cupping the side of his mouth like he’s telling some sort of secret. “But don’t tell her I told you.”

The fiberglass helmets are made of a thick polycarbonate, which Reed’s spent several years perfecting for this very mission. One of the many nurses slides it over your head and locks it into place. The amber-tinted visor, designed to reflect thermal radiation, paints the white building in so many shades of flaxen gold.

Johnny stands beside you — because he’s always somehow right beside you — and turns his heavy head to look at you when the doctor locks his helmet into place. The tinted glass dullens his ocean-eyed gaze and muffles his voice when he asks you, “Remember that date I asked you on?”

“Which one?” you deadpan.

“Any of ‘em?” he shrugs. “Is it too late to hash that out, you think?”

“Well, you can’t exactly take me out for coffee now, can you?”

A pink smile curls from behind his thick, glass visor. “Well, we get back in two weeks, Doc. I’ll have plenty of time to take you out for coffee then.”

“Trust me, Johnny Storm, you’ll be sick of me in two weeks.”

His laugh is muffled, but no less cherry-colored. “I’ve seen you every day for the past year, Doc,” he argues. “If I’m not sick of you by now, I don’t think I’m ever gonna be.”

It makes you frown. You don’t understand why he’s lying. ‘Cause you are, by nature, a rather demanding creature. You’re moody, cynical, and sometimes cruel. You’re at times totally untangible, and at others extremely unreasonable. You’ve intentionally made it very difficult to love you because you’ve spent many years not knowing men to be kind.

But Johnny — perhaps obliviously, and led only by his unbridled curiosity — longed to be close to you despite his inherent softness, and despite all your metaphorical barbs.

“Coffee, then?” you monotone without a glance his way, lest he see the vulnerability swimming in your gaze. “When we get back, I mean.”

Johnny glows at a moment’s notice. His button eyes widen in a not-so-subtle look of shock as his pink mouth falls softly agape. ‘Cause, sure, he’s been trying to get you to like him every day for the past three-hundred-sixty-five of them, but he didn’t expect it to happen so suddenly. Or at all, really.

He nods beneath his helmet, rapid and boyish, and smiles at you far wider than you think he realizes. “It’s a date, Doc—”

The comms built into your helmet hiss as they crackle to life. Johnny flinches as his sister’s voice comes through the faint static. “Comms check. Everybody sound off,” Sue instructs from his other side, flashing her baby brother a knowing look.

“Check,” Reed nods.

Ben salutes with two fingers pressed to his forehead, over his rounded glass helmet. “Check, check.”

A cameraman moves down the line as each of you speaks. The chunky gadget sits heavy on his broad shoulder as he squints into the rubber eyepiece of the viewfinder, zooming into each of your faces.

“Check,” Johnny says with a nod in his direction, always so painfully casual.

The cameraman settles finally on you. He looks at you through the lens as though it were a third eye, and your face screws with a subtle scowl. “Tell this man to get his camera out of my face,” you answer in a flat voice.

Sue’s pretty laugh sounds through the static. “Comms are live.”

The large hangar door whirs slowly open. Early morning daylight bathes the room in shades of orange-gold. The Excelsior towers before you, sleek and silver and shimmering in the soft sunlight. The five of you walk in a line up the steep tarmac, inching closer to what will become your new home for the next several days.

Reed reaches for Sue’s hand before they pass the threshold. “Good luck kiss?” he offers, already leaning in towards her.

“Maybe just one for the road,” the older woman grins.

Their lips pucker for a kiss, but their fiberglass helmets bump audibly together instead. They laugh about it, anyway, as the double doors to the shuttle part with a faint hiss.

Johnny turns expectantly to you then, eyes round and silently hopeful. Your scoff crackles through his comm. “In your dreams, space-boy,” you deadpan and walk on ahead of him.

“Ouch…” Ben winces playfully in response as he enters ahead of the blonde boy.

Johnny shrugs off the rejection with a slow nod. “Rain check, then.”

✶ — April, 1961 | The Excelsior — ✶

You still remember that strange liminal space between high school and university, where they called you overtly ambitious like it were synonymous with the word bitch. No one had been to space before, let alone a woman, and very few of your kind were able to break into the astronomy field at all. Therefore, no one was quite inclined to believe that you’d be the first among them to be truly successful.

Why don’t you just settle down? they huffed impatiently, like your life wasn’t just beginning. The best way for your kind to contribute to society is to be a mother— Everyone knows that.

That was, of course, before you were pictured on the cover of the Times with the rest of the Saturn Five — wherein you were described in print as ‘perhaps the most eminent female astrophysicist of our time.’

You were among the first of women to earn a degree in the field, and the first ever to receive your doctorate from the same university. You were the first female faculty member of Columbia’s astrophysics program — an assistant professor for some excruciating months, until it became rather grating to take orders from men four times your age. Sometime thereafter, and despite all the odds, you were the first female full-time astrophysics professor.

Such accolades inevitably caught Sue Storm’s attention. She liked your persistence, and Reed Richards liked your mind. And somewhere between then and now, you were recruited to become one of the first ever humans to experience the uncharted terrain of outer space.

As you strap into your seat on the Excelsior, you can’t help but wonder about who you’re living behind, and what those who doubted you must think of you now — if they marvel at what you’ve accomplished, or if they pity you still for trying so hard to break the mold.

“Final check and check, please,” Sue instructs through comms, from where she navigates between the two pilots.

Each of your voices crackles through speakers in return, and only then does Ben initiate the ignition sequence. You watch from behind him as he presses a series of buttons on the light-up panel, a pattern you’re unfamiliar with that he knows all too well. His weathered fists push a weighted lever, and the shuttle roars to life.

You feel the floors trembling beneath your weighted boots. Your seat shakes with it, too. Your gloved hands clutch the straps of your buckles in an unforgiving grip while a funny feeling rolls over your stomach. Not with fear, or worry, or excitement exactly — but the distant acknowledgment that your life’s going to change forever.

“We’re go for launch,” Ben announces to his co-pilot, who presses his own series of blinking neon buttons.

The whirring engine jerks suddenly as it lifts from its place on the ground. Four million pounds of pure steel propel suddenly towards the heavens with the burst of a golden flame. There’s a harsh pull and then a numbness, which turns into a heavier, emptier feeling as you break through the atmosphere — roughly 100 kilometers above sea level.

“Woo-hoo!” Johnny exclaims boyishly into his comms, arms raised above his head as the shuttle pierces finally through the dreaded veil — as he witnesses, for the first time in human history, where the bright blue sky meets an all-black eternity.

The gravity is slow to dissipate. It makes everything feel suddenly lighter — the cool air running through your suit, the heavy boots on your feet; your stomach, your heart, your mind. The dizzying feeling must be to blame for the absent-minded smile on your face, you think, ‘cause you look at Johnny then like you’re watching the beginning of the whole world.

A giddy laugh sputters suddenly like magic from your lips. Johnny and the stars sigh in unison. He’s been wondering ever since he met you what the sound of your laughter must sound like. Your smile is the only thing he’s dreamt of for the past year, the only thing, and he mourns it all over again when you ultimately turn away.

The Earth grows more and more distant. What once seemed so limitless, now looks so tiny against the star-speckled void of outer space. Everyone you’ve ever known, everyone there ever was, lived their entire life on this indistinct orb of green and blue. Every saint and sinner, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization. Millions of years of joy and suffering are contained within this brief smudge, swimming in a sea of never-ending blackness. A fleck of dust lost inside a bright sunbeam.

“You seein’ that?” Johnny wonders into his comm, to no one in particular, though he still hasn’t quite taken his eyes off of you.

You nod wordlessly for a moment, ‘cause you can’t believe how blue the world is from here.

It’s a rich, vibrant color that humans couldn’t recreate if they tried, ‘cause such a cerulean-cobalt shade cannot travel the entire distance from the sun to the land. Its molecules, instead, get scattered in the wind and the water, before reflecting in the more observable lighter hue that paints the sky.

But this? This deeper, dreamier, more melancholy blue — this blue that does not reach the Earth, this blue that gets lost on the way to the humans down below — holds the beauty of the entire world in its hand.

“It’s beautiful…” you murmur into the crackling comm, more speechless than the rest of them have ever seen you before.

You turn to Johnny then, who sits across the aisle from you, and wear the orbital golden sunrise in your gaze. Inside his, you find the same dreamlike blue that paints the depths and edges of the faraway Earth. The lost, untouched ultramarine swims now in his round button eyes as he stares unblinkingly at you.

“Yeah…” he nods within a breathless sigh, overcome by the ethereal infinite surrounding him — and the one sitting just beside him in the shape of a girl. “Beautiful.”

✶ — May, 1961 | The Excelsior — ✶

The routine you fall into in space is not quite unlike the one you had on Earth. You’re alone more often than not, hidden away in the observation room with your books and your journals, trying fruitlessly to make sense of the inherently nonsensical universe around you. It’s exactly how you’ve spent most of your life, really — the only difference now is you feel much more at home here, on the Excelsior and in the unpathed emptiness of outerspace, than you ever did on Earth.

Sue Storm is perhaps the only one of you who understands the importance of a real schedule. You and Reed, particularly, would work your circadian rhythms half to death if she let you. But, in an attempt to maintain a routine in an inherently timeless place, Sue insists on taking all of your meals at the same time every day, and in the same spot at the small kitchen table in the galley.

You sit between Johnny and Ben for at least an hour out of the day there, and catch up on plans or other miscellaneous discoveries found while on opposite sides of the shuttle.

The five of you exercise for one hour every day, before breakfast and after dinner, in order to keep the strength in your bones and muscles, which would otherwise be sucked out of you from the microgravity. The rest of the day is fair game and often spent with the five of you scattered about. Sue and Ben are usually navigating in the control room, Johnny and Reed are always finding something to do with their idle hands, and you can often be found on the observation deck looking for something new in the nothingness spanning before you.

And when the rest of the Saturn Five, at the end of a long day, return to their sleeping bags strapped to the wall — yours is the only one left empty. And Johnny knows immediately where to find you.

You drift like a dream in the dim cupola, a room made of so many fiberglass windows. The starry, black velvet universe sits just outside — an undreamt emptiness at your fingertips.

Your hair is tied back and out of your face. Your body is adorned in your nightclothes, a simple white tank top worn over a pair of red gingham pants. Your legs are crossed beneath you, as if you were sitting down, and you scribble something into a journal while a heavier textbook floats at your side. You’re a pretty girl dressed for a quiet night at home, observing Mars as casually as someone would watch their television.

Johnny knocks briefly on the ajar door before he enters. He’s already in his pajamas, too — an old t-shirt that clings to his lean torso and a pair of dark sweatpants that sit low on his hips.

“Sue wanted me to tell you it’s time for lights out, so… Lights out.”

You nod without looking his way, still slouched over the book in your lap. “Good night, Johnny Storm.”

His quiet laugh fills the silent room. “I think she meant she wants you in bed, too, Doc. You know how she is about the schedule.”

“Well, I’m busy, so…”

“You’re always busy,” Johnny scoffs, shutting the cupola door behind him as he maneuvers into the room with you.

The lack of gravity makes his bones feel lighter than air as it carries him towards you, cradling him in its cold and heavy hand. He lingers just behind you, warm with exhaustion and smelling of musky vanilla-berry shampoo as he peers over your shoulder. He can hardly make sense of your haphazard scribbles. Your pen whizzes across the page like something’s telling you’re about to run out of time.

“What are you writing about?”

You motion wordlessly to something at your side, as easily as a parent shrugging off a child. Johnny looks around until he finds a telescope — short, bulky, and likely worth far more than it looks. He plucks the weighty thing in his hands as it drifts by his feet. He falters with it for a moment, struggling briefly to determine which eye to close in order to see out of the damn thing.

With furrowed brows and a single squinted eye, he peers through the lens of the telescope. He doesn’t know how to focus it, or exactly where he should be looking, so instead he marvels at the big, blurry planet looming before him — looking much closer than it did just a moment ago.

“Planet,” he concludes with a slow nod, like it isn’t plain as day in front of you.

With a practiced and half-distracted hand, you contort your wrist slightly to focus the lens for him, all without looking up from your notebook. When Johnny peers through the telescope again, everything is more distinct — the blobs from before are now craters and rocks and ridges on the billion-year-old planet.

Within the shrouds of rust-colored dust and martian stars is something more distant but still well-defined — it’s rounded like a planet, but grayer and swathed in a heavy veil of ice.

“What is that?” Johnny murmurs incredulously. “Is it like a… A ghost planet or something?”

The words feel a bit silly as they spill from his mouth, but you nod in response anyway. “Most scientists would call that an exoplanet, but sure, yeah. A ghost planet.”

“I’m a scientist!” Johnny argues, boyish features screwed in offense — not because you’re wrong, but because he feels a bit like he’s earned the title after being in such close proximity to some of the brightest scientific minds known to man. You, for one. His sister, for another. And Reed, though he would never co-sign that out loud.

“You’re an engineer who plays dress-up in his sister’s lab coat—”

“That was one time!”

You look up and nod your chin towards the window. “Look at what’s around it.”

Johnny ducks his head and squints one eye to peer through the telescope once more. With untrained hands, he refocuses the lens to see a bit clearer — the indistinct clouds there turn into more defined specks, red and dull and dying.

“Uh… Rocks,” he confirms.

You bite back a grin and nod. “Sure. Rocks and stars and dark matter,” you explain further, growing increasingly giddy in a way that makes you already embarrassed at yourself. “It’s a planet— A fossil planet.”

“…Fossil?” Johnny echoes.

“You can tell by the colors of the stars around it that it hasn’t changed or merged with any other galaxies in at least a billion years,” you ramble, gesturing wildly with the pen in your right hand. You point out the window like the strange planet is right outside and not tens of millions of kilometers away. “Which means it’s essentially frozen in time.”

Johnny just nods along. He barely understands you if he’s being honest — ‘cause he’d much rather build things than observe them — but he likes hearing you speak, so he pretends you’re speaking the same language.

Until it’s his turn to talk, that is. Then his blonde brows pinch slowly together and his ocean eyes turn to sparkling buttons. “Wait, what’s so special about a dead planet?”

“Everything,” you answer like it’s obvious, hardened gaze glinting with a newfound life. “They’re like time capsules— They can tell us everything about what our early solar system looked like. How it changed over time, how after billions of years of inhability, Earth just happened to be perfect for human life, it’s—”

The dim lights above you click suddenly off, leaving just one row of amber auxiliary lights glowing overhead. A second later and the heat whirs slowly off, too.

The comfortable warmth gives way to a heavier cold. A shiver crawls up your spine almost instantly that you fight stubbornly away. It’s Reed’s way of conserving power, and Sue’s way of saying that everyone who isn’t in bed will freeze for the night.

Johnny deflates at the interruption.

He was just starting to get you to open up again, just like you did a week or more ago, when the Excelsior first launched and you looked at him like you were discovering something. Johnny wants you to find it again. Whatever it is.

“I hate when he does,” you scowl, dull eyes losing their previous spark.

“I guess it’s a good thing you have your very personal space heater to keep you company, then, huh?” Johnny croons with a lopsided grin. Your frown deepens, and he shrugs. “What? I run hot. I always have.”

“I’m busy. And it’s late,” you deadpan and turn away again. “Good night, Johnny Storm.”

You return to your work with an admirable ease, like Johnny isn’t there at all. Your pen darts across the page in a series of swirled and smudged cursive, sounding much louder in the sudden quiet. He lingers at your side anyway, inching closer despite himself, as though the microgravity were pulling him towards you. He doesn’t say a word; tries to move too much, tries not to breathe too hard, for fear of being noticed.

You do notice him, though. You can’t help but notice everything about him.

“You’re still here,” you observe distantly.

“Well, I don’t want you freezing to death out here, Doc,” Johnny scoffs like he’s doing you some sort of service. “Just let me stay— you know, for warmth. You won’t even realize I’m here, alright? Scouts honor.”

He holds up four fingers instead of three. You turn away again and say nothing. Johnny takes it as the invitation you mean it as, ‘cause you’re no stranger to telling him to fuck off when you really want him to.

You continue your scribbling while he lingers at your side, chest pressed against your arm as he peers over your shoulder. Through the messy cursive, he manages to make out, It’s possible this exoplanet once existed in our own solar system and was later ejected; check for any potential strange orbital movements—

Your hand freezes in place when Johnny’s warm breath fans over your bare shoulder. Each rhythmic exhale through his nose brushes your skin. It makes it hard for you to think, makes all the words in your head jumble suddenly together. You don’t know why.

“You’re breathing on me,” you blurt emotionlessly, neither angry nor pleased, just observant in a way he’s always known you to be.

“Sorry,” Johnny flinches back.

His round eyes swim with a darker shade of blue as they dart over your profile. He wants you to look back at him, even if it’s with malice. He just wants you to see him.

But you keep your eyes on the journal in your lap, even though you can’t figure out what to write anymore. The only thing in your head now is the sun in Johnny’s veins and the deep, Earthy blue in his eyes.

“It’s okay…” you mumble, still detached as ever, but with a white-knuckled grip on your pen. You swallow hard and wait for him to be close again, mourning when he keeps his distance. With a weary look over your shoulder, you repeat more firmly this time, “It’s okay.”

Johnny knows it’s an invitation, but for what, he doesn’t know. His unmanicured brows furrow as his tongue darts out to wet his pink mouth. “Do you want me to… to do it again or…?” he trails off.

The soft look in your eyes turns glacial in an instant. “Don’t say it!” you scold. “Do it, but don’t— don’t say it out loud. That makes it weird.”

You look away again, inwardly cursing yourself for being so vulnerable. Johnny purses a smile to the side of his mouth, lest he look too excited for your request to come closer. He curls his arm around you and keeps a softly calloused palm on the outside of your elbow, gently tethering himself to your side as you sway together in the zero-gravity.

You feel his warm fingers against your skin and flinch on instinct. You haven’t been touched with such gentleness since early childhood. You weren’t a stranger to man or their bodies, nor what their hands could do to yours, but something about Johnny made you feel different.

It was something about Johnny.

You hated that it was always about Johnny.

But you let him keep touching you, anyway — and, in his arms, you feel finally like you belong some place. His breath feels warm and familiar as it rolls across your skin. His chest feels solid and firm as it presses against your back. When he gets closer than he means to, and his chapped lips accidentally brush the curve of your soft shoulder, you tense like he’s burned you.

Johnny’s breath hitches, too. “Sorry,” he blurts again, wide-eyed and worried that he’s ruined something.

“I liked it,” you confess, as blunt with him as you’ve always been. “I think…”

“You think?” Johnny echoes, pink lips curling. “So, you’re not sure?”

“No,” you answer plainly and spare him only a brief glance from the corner of your eye. “So you should probably try again. Just in case.”

He doesn’t know how you do it — how you manage to torment him with your feigned ambivalence and reward him with your closeness at the same time. Johnny obeys you anyway, though, ‘cause it’s in his blood to bend to your every whim. He thinks if the two of you were sunflowers, he’d face you instead of the sun.

He smooths his plush lips slowly along the expanse of your exposed skin, from the edge of your shoulder to the junction of your neck — not quite kissing you, just caressing you with his mouth. His tongue darts out to wet dry lips, and the pink brushes just over your pulse.

You hum on an exhaled breath. And in the deathly quiet of outer space, it sounds almost like a moan.

Johnny falters briefly. “…More?” he whispers against your skin.

You nod wordlessly. You couldn’t get the words out if you tried. You just know you want him to kiss you. God, you don’t want him to stop kissing you.

The entire universe spins around you when his warm lips lock more intentionally on your neck. You go dizzy in an instant without the gravity to hold you down. It makes you feel like you’re going crazy — did love make people crazy? Did love turn people into unrecognizable versions of themselves?

You figure it must.

Because the girl who turns her head to catch Johnny’s lips with her own most certainly can’t be you. The girl who abandons her life’s work, who lets her pen and paper float aimlessly next to her, who turns away from the uncharted universe in front of her to hold desperately onto the blonde boy she couldn’t stand a year ago — whoever she is, is a stranger to you now.

Your fingers twist in his freshly cleaned hair, mussing recklessly at the satin blonde tendrils. Johnny’s hand trails down your body in the meanwhile. His warm, wide palms smooth over your bare arms and across your back. He cups the back of your thighs, urging them around his waist. You lick into his mouth and lock your ankles behind him, keeping yourself tethered to him as you float aimlessly in the heavy air.

“And to think…” Johnny pants when you part from him, smiling lips swollen and rosy. “You spent all this time pretending to hate me.”

“I wasn’t pretending,” you slur with his spit on your mouth.

“Really?” he hums. “‘Cause it kinda feels like you like me a lot, actually—”

His strong hands curl around the curve of your hips, pulling you impossibly closer. Your lap sits flush against his own. Something soft and firm presses along your inner thigh. “I could say the same about you, Johnny Storm.”

You shift slightly, and Johnny realizes how hard he is. His cock strains against his sweats and the tighter boxer-briefs he wears beneath them. Feeling distantly overwhelmed and half-embarrassed, his pale cheeks flare pink. “Sorry…” he grimaces.

“Don’t,” you squint, slightly demeaning but somehow still playful. “I like it… I think.”

You kiss him again, deep enough to steal the breath from his lungs, wet enough to feel your spit on his chin. You wrap your legs tighter around his lean waist until his stiffening cock is sandwiched between your bodies, pressed intently into your own warmth.

Johnny gasps through his nose. He almost thinks he can feel the lines of your clothed cunt against him, hidden folds embracing the most sensitive parts of him. It makes him wonder if you’re wearing anything under your thin pajama bottoms as your hips rock back and forth over his own.

Your mouth is equally as unforgiving. You kiss him like you’re searching for heaven in his mouth, like you can taste stars on his tongue. His lungs burn for air, but still he never parts from you. You’re killing him, with your mouth and with your hips, but Johnny throws himself deeper onto the blade, anyway. He pulls you that much closer, kisses you that much deeper — until he worries he might bleed out.

Your lips smack in protest when he parts from you. “We should stop,” he frets through panted breaths, eyes dilated and heavy-lidded.

“Please, don’t—” you beg and fall back into him again.

Johnny falters. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen you beg. He doesn’t think you’ve ever had to before. You never have to beg for anything; all you have to do is take.

A groan sounds deep in his throat when your hips grind over his own in a slow and practiced rhythm. “It’s gonna be too much,” he slurs against your mouth.

“What?”

“I’ll…” he sighs breathlessly and trails off. He can’t figure out the words to say without sounding like a total teenager; he only knows he should probably get them out before he bursts in his boxers and has to explain to Sue why he’s wasting water on a second shower.

“ I’ll cum,” he confesses finally, fingertips digging bruises onto your clothed thighs in a feeble attempt to stop your merciless movements.

Your lidded eyes dart over his form. His tousled blonde hair, his glazed-over ocean eyes, his flushed cheeks, his kiss-swollen mouth. He’s pretty and pathetic. You want to take care of him and ruin him all at once.

“I want you to cum,” you say. You plead. You command.

Johnny loses himself in your assurance. His slow and languid kisses turn sloppy — full of tongue and teeth and swapped spit. The fingers that once restricted you now fight to keep you close. His hands twist into the fabric of your pants as he guides your hips back and forth against him.

A pretty whimper sounds in your throat every time your clit catches the bulbous tip of his clothed cock, and the exhaled breath fans over his cupid’s bow.

His boxers dampen from his drooling pre-cum as he twitches in the confines of his underwear. He wonders if you feel it, too. He figures you must, if your erratic thrusts and choked back whines have anything to say about it.

“Johnny—” you whisper like a warning to him, voice breaking as your inevitable orgasm twists in your belly.

“I know,” he pants through rapid nods. “Fuck, baby— I know.”

He adjusts you on his waist with a pair of wide hands around your thighs. The harsh and sudden movement sends the two of you spiraling, spinning softly together in the open air like two orbiting planets. The new angle opens you wider for him, keeps your throbbing clit pressed intently to his aching cock.

Johnny feels the way your pussy pounds like a heartbeat for him as it rubs up and down his lap. A whine grumbles deep in his throat.

“I’m cumming,” you whimper against his mouth. Foreheads pressed together, eyes squeezed shut, nails digging crescent shapes into his shoulders. Your sensitive clit catches the ridge of his cock over his sweats, and you gasp. “Oh, fuck, Johnny— I’m cumming.”

The blonde boy holds you tighter. He curls one strong arm over your back and towards your shoulder; his other cradles the outside of your clothed thigh in a bruising grip. He keeps you spread open and pressed mercilessly against him while his hips rut with a sporadic sort of rhythm.

“C’mon,” he grunts in panted breaths against your chin. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon—”

You tense in his hold, trembling when you cum for him. Your thighs clench around his waist. Your fingers ball his thin shirt in your fists. Your face screws as you fight back a moan. A whimper rises and dies in your throat instead, as a warm feeling of honeyed release blooms in the pit of your stomach.

“Yeah, that’s it,” Johnny praises in vague mumbles while you twitch in his hold. His hips stutter as his boxers grow sticky with a premature release. “That’s it, baby… Shit. I’m cumming, too— Gonna cum so hard for you, baby. Fuck—”

His voice breaks with a pathetic whimper. He chokes back a louder groan and tilts his heavy head back towards the ceiling.

Through heavy eyes clouded with a lingering pleasure, you watch Johnny’s orgasm rack through his body. His chiseled jaw clenches. His adam’s apple bobs in his throat. His skin flares a faint pink color.

Even through the layers of clothes separating you, you feel his cock twitching with each rope of cum it spits into his boxers. Johnny grunts through each one of them, hips stuttering against your own, slow to come back down again.

You just stay like that for a while — limbs entwined, twirling slowly, floating together in every sense of the word. Johnny buries his face in your neck. He presses wet kisses to your burning skin, while you keep your heavy eyes trained on the cupola. You blink slowly at the stars and distant planets there, forgetting until that moment that there’s a whole world out front of you.

An entire universe you spent your whole life dreaming about, gone momentarily forgotten in Johnny Storm’s arms.

“Do you think we’re the first astronauts to orgasm in space?” you wonder aloud in a distant whisper.

It makes Johnny laugh. The warm breath of it fans across your shoulder. His body trembles with it, too. “Yeah,” he scoffs. “You gonna write about me in that book of yours? See what other firsts we could do up here?”

He presses one last innocuous kiss to your neck before parting from you. He lifts his heavy head, lips curled into a crooked smile, and finds you scowling at him in return. “Don’t push it,” you deadpan.

“Sorry,” he grimaces, ‘cause he can never quite tell where the line is — how close you’ll let him get before you’re pulling away again. Apparently, cumming in his pants will only get him so far. “I still get to take you out for that coffee when we get back, though, right?”

“Yes,” you nod in your usual deadpan, though something about your detachment seems different now. Maybe because you’ve still got your thighs wrapped around his waist. “I plan on doing a lot with you when we get back.”

It sounds almost like a threat as it spills from your monotone mouth.

It finds Johnny like a promise, anyway.

✶ — May, 1961 | Baxter Building Med Bay — ✶

How quickly a dream turns into a nightmare.

In a blink. In a flash of a bright light. In a searing storm of daunting blue and purple.

On the early morning of the dissent back home, you warned Reed of heightened solar activity. Johnny barely understood a word of it then, but he heard the distant worry in your voice when you told the older man about the strange eruptions of plasma pulsing from the sun, which you feared would disrupt the journey back to Earth.

“Our shielding isn’t strong enough, Reed— We can’t get caught in that flare.”

“We won’t,” he assured, voice strangely even for such an anxiety-riddled man. “You’ll keep an eye on that radar, and Ben will keep us outta the line of fire. We won’t get pulled into that magnetic field, Doc, I swear—”

“It’s not that I’m worried about.”

And you were right not to be.

It was strangely poetic, in a dark, sadistic way, how the thing you dedicated your whole life to learning about ended up killing you in the end.

You’d alerted Reed of the increasing cosmic rays coming in ripples from an aggravated magnetic field. And when Ben hit turbulence, worried that the ship wasn’t strong enough to take it on, the older man told the panicked pilot to push onward. Not because of his own hubris, but because there wasn’t any other choice. There was no going back then — either you laid there and took it, or you pushed the Excelsior to its limits and prayed you escaped unscathed.

Johnny only remembers darkness. And his sister’s screaming. And your strange silence. Then he remembers fire — a big burst of a bright orange flame that engulfed the shuttle as it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere, snapping in half just before plummeting into the Atlantic.

The Saturn Five did not return to the Earth the same way they had left it.

Ben’s lean, white body, for one, is now covered in bulky calluses that make him a hundred times stronger than the average man, totally unrecognizable from the human he was before. Reed reaches across the aisle for his slumped-over wife, and his arm stretches abnormally to fill the distance between them. Sue, seemingly subconsciously, disappears at random in a flicker of refracted light — as easily as someone turning off a light switch. Johnny burns from the inside out, glowing orange from the wildfire raging inside of him.

And you…

You didn’t return at all.

That’s all Johnny can think about when they’re air-lifted back to the Baxter Building. Press hound the halls outside while ANSA doctors scatter about, unsure of what to make of the suddenly superpowed Saturn Five. He paces back and forth all the while, clenched fists bursting into flame at random, ash burning on his tongue.

“We have to go back out there,” Johnny decides firmly, made stern with his sorrow.

He does not cry for you. His grief is made out of something much more discreet than that, as silent as blood spilling from a weeping wound. Your absence pierces him like a thread through a needle. The thought of finding you again is the only thing keeping him stitched together now.

“With what ship?” Ben calls to him.

“We can build another ship— We’ve done it before!”

Sue pushes through the doctors crowded around her, stumbling towards her baby brother despite the blood matted in her hair. “It wouldn’t do any good, Johnny,” she tries her best to calm him despite the tremor in her own voice.

“We can’t just leave her out there!” the blonde boy shouts, teary eyes wide and crazed. He gestures wildly with his hands, and Sue flinches at the flame he holds within them.

“Johnny—”

“We can’t!”

“Johnny, she’s gone!” Sue shouts over him.

She puts her pale hands to his chest, feeling his rapid heartbeat beneath her palm. Her mouth opens to speak, but the words die on her tongue when her fingers start to disappear on their own accord. She balls the fabric of his shirt into her fists and tries to focus.

“If the fire didn’t kill her, being sucked into the atmosphere would’ve, and you know it! It would’ve crushed her, Johnny—”

The boy shakes his stubborn head. “You don’t know that, Sue,” he chokes.

“But she—” Sue pauses to swallow down her own sob, then flashes her brother a more assured, glassy-eyed look. “But she didn’t suffer, Johnny.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do know it. I do. It was quick. It was over before she knew it was happening—”

“Not that,” Johnny snaps and stumbles back. His pale skin glows a faint orange color under the weight of his rage. He softens only at the fearful look in his sister’s eyes. “We don’t know if it killed her at all, Sue…”

The woman sighs, almost sympathetically so. “Johnny…”

“Look at us, Sue!” he shouts, voice ringing through the white and blue med bay.

He gestures around him with fiery hands — at the personified rock that used to be Ben Grimm, at the abnormally flexible limbs of Reed Richards, at the rainbow waves of light dancing around his sister and turning her invisible at whim.

“How do we know that something didn’t happen to her, too? Something that might be keeping her alive out there?”

“There wouldn’t be enough oxygen, Johnny,” Reed comments with an apologetic sigh from where he slouches on an exam table. His words are weighed down with an obvious regret that paints his weathered face. “Even if something did happen, we only had enough air supply for the trip. She’d be running out of oxygen—”

“Don’t!” Johnny snaps with an accusatory finger pointed his way. Reed cowers under the flame in his hand, and the red rage in his dark eyes. “You don’t get to speak right now, Reed— ‘Cause what happened to us out there? That’s on you.”

“It’s on all of us,” Ben says in a feeble attempt to quell the palpable tension.

“It’s on you!” Johnny repeats and storms out of the room, despite the distant calls of his name.

The muffled chatter outside the med bay doors bursts into a symphony of a thousand voices when Johnny rushes into the hallway. He pushes past the press waiting there, dodging questions and camera flashes, as he makes a beeline for the elevator.

“How’s it going in there, Johnny Storm?” he hears a deep-voiced reporter ask.

“How do you think?” the blonde boy bites in response.

His non-answer succeeds only in producing a hundred more questions in return. The choir of unfamiliar voices turns into a buzzing sort of drone as he steps into the lift. Johnny squints at the never-ending flashes and incessant yelling that pervades his inevitable migraine.

“Care to make a comment, Mr. Storm?”

“What happened to Ben?”

“Where’s the Doctor?”

“Are you okay, Johnny Storm?” a younger newswoman, no older than him, calls from the front of the crowd. The only difference in her prying is that it seems almost genuine, as her made-up face screws softly with concern.

“Yeah…” Johnny sighs and presses the button for the main floor. The elevator doors ding as they close ahead of him. “I just… I had a date.”