Rise of an Immortal

Chapter 196: Cracks in the Timeline

[Baxter Building, New York, Morning]The Baxter Building's living room was in the middle of a disagreement when Ethan stepped through his portal.

He sensed them before he saw them, three familiar presences radiating the frequency of people who had been circling the same argument for at least twenty minutes and were nowhere near finished.

He closed the portal behind him, folded his presence inward without effort, and stood quietly in the corner to observe.

'I came here to surprise Sue and take her to Mars but instead walked into a Fantastic Four family tribunal. This universe has a remarkable sense of timing.'

Ben Grimm sat on the couch in his human form, hands wrapped around a coffee mug. He was dressed simply.

Johnny Storm stood by the window with his arms crossed and his jacket slightly too fashionable for nine in the morning.

He was looking out at the New York skyline with the restless energy of someone who wanted to be moving and was being asked to stand still instead. His jaw was tight and his foot tapped a slow irregular beat against the floor.

Susan Storm stood between them. Her blonde hair was pulled back, her posture straight.

She was the current leader of the Fantastic Four and right now she was letting the argument run its course before redirecting it, watching both men with sharp, patient eyes.

"He said he's safe," Ben said, for what Ethan suspected was not the first time this morning. "Reed doesn't say things he doesn't mean. If he says he's safe, he's safe."

"He's been gone for weeks, Ben," Johnny said, turning from the window. "Weeks. And now we get a text? Like he just stepped out for groceries and forgot it was going to take a month?"

"It's better than nothing."

"It's barely better than nothing. It's the minimum possible communication a person can send without it technically being silence." Johnny's arms dropped to his sides. "I'm safe, be back soon. He didn't say where he is, didn't say what happened and didn't say why he couldn't call."

"Maybe wherever he is, a message was all he could manage."

"Or maybe Reed opened another portal in this building without telling anyone, got pulled into a dimension he wasn't prepared for, and decided the most efficient response to that situation was a text message." Johnny's voice climbed slightly. "We should be looking for him."

"And look where?" Ben set his mug down. "Last confirmed location is this building. Security footage shows nothing. No energy signature, no portal residue, nothing. We have no starting point."

"Then we make one. Every dimension Reed has ever opened a portal to, we start there and work through the list."

"That list is longer than you think, kid."

"Then we start making it longer," Johnny said. "Because sitting here waiting feels wrong."

Sue had been watching both of them, she looked at Johnny, then at Ben, then at the window.

"I'll ask Ethan," she said.

Both men looked at her.

"He'll know something," she continued. "Or he'll be able to find something we can't."

Johnny opened his mouth, paused, and closed it again. He sat on the windowsill. "Yeah," he said, after a moment. "Okay. That's actually a good call."

"Obviously it's a good call," Ben said. "When is Sue's call not a good call."

"I could name occasions," Johnny said.

"Name one."

"The mandatory team communication meeting."

"That meeting was necessary."

"It was three hours long, Ben."

"It was necessary for three hours."

Ethan let the concealment drop.

Ben's head came up immediately. "Speak of the devil!"

Ethan spread his hands. "I prefer to think of myself as considerably more than that. But I will take it."

Johnny stared at him. "How long have you been standing there?"

"Long enough," Ethan said pleasantly.

Sue looked at him, warm and exasperated in equal measure, her eyes bright. "Were you going to announce yourself at any point?"

"I was gathering information," he said. "It's a skill."

"It's rude," Johnny said.

"It's efficient," Ethan said.

Ben pointed at him. "You heard everything."

"I heard enough." Ethan walked into the room and settled on the edge of the couch, looking between all three of them. "Reed sent a message this morning. He's somewhere he either cannot communicate from properly or chooses not to for reasons he has not explained. He says he's safe and will return soon. But we got no starting point to search." He looked around at their faces. "Is that accurate?"

"Very accurate," Sue said.

He had already spent a few seconds on the problem the moment he sensed the tension in the room, reaching through the Authority of Time and tracing the threads of Reed Richards's timeline with careful attention.

'Reed is fine,' he confirmed to himself, following the branches forward. 'He went somewhere, voluntarily or otherwise, and he comes back. The majority of futures have him returning intact and soon. Whatever he is doing out there, it resolves cleanly.'

Finding the precise location required more effort than the situation was worth. Partly because the dimension Reed was in generated enough timeline noise to make pinpointing him difficult, and partly because Ethan simply didn't feel the need to find Reed that soon.

Even though he never said it aloud or showed it openly, he knew Reed and Sue had once been together and had even planned to marry. Now he and Sue were together, and some part of him felt no urgency to bring Reed back into the picture.

Besides, the Fantastic Four or rather, the Fantastic Three in this situation seemed to be functioning perfectly well under Sue's leadership.

'I will tell Sue privately. She can decide what she wants to share with the others.'

"I can look into it," Ethan said. "It will take some time to do it properly. But what I can tell you right now, with no qualification, is that he is safe. That part of the message is true."

Ben exhaled and set his coffee down, the tension in his broad shoulders dropping visibly.

Johnny looked at Ethan with sharp, searching eyes. "You can actually confirm that? Not just reassure us, but actually confirm it?"

"I can confirm it," Ethan said, and the absence of any qualifier in his voice settled the room in a way that a longer answer would not have.

Johnny uncrossed his arms. "Okay," he said, quieter. "Okay. That's a lot better than where we were."

"Considerably," Ben said.

Sue looked at Ethan and said nothing, but her eyes said enough. The relief was there, genuine and deep, but underneath it was something quieter, something that had been waiting for exactly this confirmation from exactly this person. He held her gaze for a moment and gave her the smallest nod.

'She knew he was probably fine,' Ethan thought. 'She just needed someone she trusted completely to say it out loud. That was what this was actually about.'

After a few minutes of lighter conversation, Ethan took Sue's hand and opened a portal.

"See you both soon," he said to Ben and Johnny. "Try not to open any portals to other dimensions while the building is unattended."

"That is a very specific thing to say," Johnny called after them.

The portal closed.

...

[Carter Residence, New York, Same Time]

The bathroom mirror had cleared of steam, and Didi looked at her own reflection without really seeing it.

She had taken a shower without fully being present in it, her mind still sitting in the conversation she had been turning over since the previous night at the DeadEnd Bar.

The woman in black. The universe's own Death, perched on a bar stool, sipping a drink she had not expected to enjoy.

The reflection looked back at her. Young face. Dark hair loose around her shoulders. The white bathrobe cinched at the waist.

A thoroughly human appearance for something that was thoroughly not, and the gap between those two realities was something she had grown surprisingly comfortable with over time.

She thought about what Death had told her.

Ethan was a Singularity.

She had not needed the term explained to her. She had encountered it across countless universes and countless timescales.

A Singularity was what the higher beings called an individual whose choices radiated outward and altered the fates of other beings at a scale that was measurably significant.

Not merely influential nor simply powerful. Something more structural than that, a person whose presence in a timeline changed the shape of futures in ways that normal fate assessment could not predict or contain.

They were rare. In most universes one appeared perhaps once in a geological epoch, if at all. In universes where one arose, prophecy and destiny became substantially less reliable. Everything downstream of a Singularity's choices became a field of possibilities rather than a map of certainties.

She had seen Singularities before, in her home universe. She had known Ethan was one for a long time. But what Death had added was the part that stayed lodged in her chest.

The cracks.

Ethan used his power carefully. More carefully than most beings at his level ever learned to, because he thought about consequences in a way that raw power rarely encouraged.

But even so, the sheer scope of what he was doing was creating structural stress in this universe's timeline. Thin fractures spreading outward from the points where his power touched what was supposed to happen.

These are not catastrophic... yet. But accumulating, quietly and steadily, the way pressure builds in rock long before the surface shows any sign of it.

Death had been nervous during that conversation. Didi had noted it and said nothing about it.

A cosmic embodiment of that scale did not get nervous without reason. It got nervous when it was looking at something it could not fully predict and was honest enough with itself to admit that.

Didi set one hand flat against the edge of the sink and looked at herself in the cleared mirror.

'He doesn't know about Lucy,' she thought. 'He doesn't know his future daughter came back to warn me and doesn't know about Death's visit but maybe know about the cracks.'

Ethan was honest with the people he loved to a degree that was sometimes startling. He had told them things most people would have carried alone for their entire lives, including the truth about Franklin Carter and the deliberate manipulation that had shaped his relationship with Susan.

He kept his deepest secrets like the reincarnation, his previous life and the full story of how he got his powers. But within the circle of the people he loved, he operated with a transparency that was genuine and consistent.

If she told him now that a future version of their daughter had appeared in a bar to warn her that he was going to erase Death from this universe, she did not know what he would do with it.

She did not know whether the knowledge would help him avoid the moment or whether knowing would inadvertently create the conditions for it.

Fate worked like that sometimes, especially around Singularities. Especially around people who responded to problems by immediately trying to solve them.

And if she told him about the cracks in the timeline, about Death's warning, he would start adjusting his behaviour, which might close some fractures and open new ones in the process.

'This is not the right time to discuss this with him,' she decided. 'I'll find the right moment and the right way to tell him. I don't want to hand him another problem that he will immediately grab onto and pull harder than necessary.'

She let out a slow breath and looked at herself in the mirror one more time.

Then something shifted behind her eyes, and the corner of her mouth pulled up despite everything.

He was taking them all to Mars today.

She already knew and the image came to her clearly. Jean seeing a terraformed planet for the first time, her hand over her rounded belly, looking up at a sky that was the wrong colour and the right temperature.

Anna's face when she understood the palace had been built with all of them in mind. Susan walking through rooms designed around her specific preferences before she had ever been asked what they were.

'He built us a home,' Didi thought, and the warmth of that realization moved through her, cutting cleanly through everything else weighing on her heart. 'On an entirely different planet, just to make sure we would be safe from whatever is coming for us.'

She could sense that their family would eventually be pulled into the wider multiverse of this universe. Her future daughter had already confirmed as much.

But for now, she wanted to enjoy these quiet moments with Ethan and the others.

She smiled at the reflection, fully and without reservation, and went to get dressed.