As a girl, Sue had been a parent. Her father and mother had died young, but now before giving her a baby brother to care for. So, a teenage girl, she'd stepped into the gap. Washed his clothes, done his dishes, cut the crusts off his sandwiches. All while a part of her, and it fluctuated in size every day, saw the other girls who only had to worry about diets and clothes and boy bands; it screamed "Unfair! Unfair! Unfair!" And she couldn't argue with it, not when Johnny got to be a kid and she had to be an adult.
She didn't want to take it out on Johnny. He'd lost as much as she ever had. More; at least she had the memories of their parents. He barely had their faces. But still, the frustration piled up, just from Johnny being Johnny, and she... overcompensated. She went for him to go to sleep, at a 9 PM bedtime she was uncommonly strict about, and then she dug into her closet for the clothes he never saw her in. The leather. The red lace. The thin tops. And she went to the kind of clubs that probably shouldn't have let her in and did the kind of things that she shouldn't have done, yet couldn't regret.
Boys (bad boys) called her Stormy, and hung off the puffs of smoke from every cigarette she burned. Tobacco or otherwise. She'd danced way too close with other girls' boys, stealing them away, and sometimes stealing both. They weren't called threesomes back then. Just 'partying'. And that was about as gay as Susan had ever been.
Last night, she'd eaten out three women.
Sue had been under no illusions that 'Stormy' was the real her, anymore than she was 'really' June Cleaver. She was somewhere in-between. She loved both the danger and the safety, the day and the night; male and female (she thought ruefully). Then came Reed, and Ben, and Johnny too, in a way, the way he matured ever so slightly and fit into their little group, the dutiful son with Reed, the annoying little brother with Ben, playing the kind of tricks you never could with a sister. She'd found herself, in a way.
And, in another way, the birth of the Fantastic Four was a blessing on that account. Suddenly, she was both sex symbol and scientist, family member and Imaginaut, Susan Storm and the Invisible Woman. Getting married just confirmed it. She could have it all. The danger, the risk, the adventure, all with a home to come back to and a sweet husband and a family that loved her unconditionally.
Where had it all gone wrong?
Somewhere along the way, with Johnny and Ben forming their own little families and with the birth of her two amazing children—the fantasy had given way to routine. She had to mind Reed— with his dictatorial tendencies, his patrician outlook, the self-assurance that bordered on supremacy—as much as she ever had Johnny. She had to comfort Ben in his heartbreak, because the world just kept breaking the biggest heart she'd ever known. And Johnny... she actually envied Johnny. The way he seemed to dip into responsibility without it ever sticking. He was best friends with that spider fellow, but if it wasn't convenient, that was alright, Peter could just find Daredevil and play with him. It was all so...
Something had happened to her, small but infuriating, and it just happened
so much...
So she'd slipped back into
her
old routine. She'd been Stormy again, without even realizing it. The old double agent had come back to life as she went out with her friends for a night on the town, no idea what a night it would be. She'd stayed with Janet and Jen as they changed right before her eyes, showing her lusts she never could've imagined them possessing, then holding up a mirror for her to look into. Like the dance of the seven veils, her inhibitions had fallen. She would be present, but not look. She would look, but not stare. She would stare, but not touch. One by one, she had gotten out from under her vow to Reed, and by the time the coke was on her nose and a dildo was up her ass, she'd still thought of herself as Susan Richards. Was she? Had she ever been?
She'd gone back home, helped into her clothes by her newfound friends—co-conspirators. They'd washed her up and given her water for her hangover and Emma herself had given Sue a smart pat on the rump to send her on the way. And she, still the dweeb that had never gotten ahead of a single Avenger on the Maxim Hot 100, had taken the taxi humming
I Could've Danced All Night
to herself like she'd just been romanced by Clark Gable. She'd seen the show's last Broadway revival. What had she been doing getting fucked in the ass by a former supervillain?
Then she'd slept without even a moment's insomnia, dead to the world as soon as her head hit the pillow. The night burned the drug out of her system, letting her guilt in. She'd woken up a changed woman, though the change had come the previous day. This was just when she felt it.
Frantically, she'd gotten into the shower and scrubbed herself like there might be evidence painted on her skin. The clothes she'd thrown out only because burning was too extreme. She went without make-up and it just made the woman in the mirror harder to recognize. She'd always been a natural beauty, but now there was a terrible light in her reflection. A smile that seemed to persist right through her horror. She'd hadn't just cheated on her husband. She'd loved every second of it.
Emma's voice rang in her eyes, as clear and loud as church bells in the distance. "That high is not what this drug is all about. It was developed to destroy old-fashioned feelings of guilt, shame, and taboo.... Susan—this is what you want without fear of remorse, regret, self-loathing... all those emotions designed to keep you in line."
The thought leapt to her mind. She could go back. Get more of Emma's 'mutant coke'. Bury this useless guilt again, leaving only her enjoyment of what had happened. But no. She hated the idea. Getting through life self-medicating, not for depression or anxiety, but just to kill her remorse. No, she deserved to feel this way. She deserved to feel worse. Because as awful as she felt, she couldn't bring herself to hate what had happened.
She just couldn't let herself
think
about it.
"Sue? Are you awake?" Reed's voice came through the cracked door, followed shortly by his head on an extended neck. Sue looked around, as if checking whether she
was
awake. After that night, everything felt unreal.
She was still in bed, her eyes aimed at the alarm clock without actually acquiring it. She'd slept in one of the guest rooms, and it still smelled vaguely of aftershave and flannel from when they'd had Wolverine over. Sue hadn't expected Reed to notice her absence; it had smelled like another all-nighter in the lab. But apparently not.
"I'm up," Sue said. "Just feeling a little under the weather."
She turned herself invisible to go into the bathroom and turn on the shower. Reed's head, still extended, followed her in. Luckily, he was used to her not wanting to be seen before she put her face on. For a moment, he was distracted by her clothes becoming visible as they were peeled from her body, then by the outline of her in the steam and hot shower spray.
"If I did something to offend you, I'd appreciate you letting me know." Reed's body made that balloon-rubbing sound as his body caught up with the rest of him. Apparently this was important enough for him to join her in whole. "I reprogrammed HERBIE to let me know if there's a greater than sixty percent chance of my having angered you, and to order flowers as appropriate, but the system is still in beta..."
"We're fine." Sue reassured him by turning her face visible, along with a helping of her upper chest. As she might've expected, he'd rededicated himself to science far too much to be flustered once more. "I just caught a bug and I don't want you to get sick."
"Well, let me run you through the scanner suite, just to be sure. You never know when one of these things is a potion of Diablo's..."
Sue thought of him picking up the coke in her system. She had to give it time to flush out. If it did flush out. It was some kind of mutant drug, right? What if it would keep showing up on drug tests when she was eighty? "Please, Reed, I can't have every 48-hour bug be treated like something out of Star Trek. Just let me be sick awhile, please? The kids can bring me breakfast in bed, like I did for my parents growing up. It'll be fun."
