A/N: I live! This is just a four-shot I felt the need to write, and got down in one afternoon; deepest apologies for any errors. The stylistic experimentation is 100% a one-time thing. I do not own the F4, though if I had that privilege I'd actually publish a comic starring them.

Reed Richards' first memory is struggling to read a comic book about Newtonian mechanics, and his father doing his best to explain. It's a frustrating experience, but he likes the book because it's pretty, and because it's important, being (he believes then) what his parents do when he's not around.

Reed can read better than he can talk, at the time, and for that matter afterwards. He's not autistic – Nathaniel and Evelyn made every effort to ensure they knew every detail of his psychology, and he gets those details after – but he's hyperlexic, and even better with numbers. A genius, the adults around the apartment call him, and Nathaniel later tells him that those words cause him to panic, because so few child prodigies ever fulfill their potential, and if there's anything Nathaniel needed as a parent, it's that Reed fulfilled his potential.

Reed's an only child, and not one with a particular fondness for the outdoors, though he's curious enough when he's forced to go out on a walk through Palo Alto. So he makes his first real contact with other kids in kindergarten, and for the most part he's entirely unimpressed, because many of them don't even know how to read.

In first grade he continues to be somewhat distant, though after a discussion with his parents he tries to help some kids with their math, even though it's trivial, and he can't wait to enter the gifted and talented program next year. Many of them don't even care, so he breathes a sigh of first-grader frustration of the unfairness of the world when he sits down with a recent transfer.

"I'm Reed," he says. "What do you want?"

The kid shrugs. "To be an astronaut."

"I mean with the math, stupid."

"My name's Ben Grimm. Jerk."

Reed looks at Ben and makes his best Smaug impression, and then Ben looks back and tries to copy Reed, until they both start laughing.

Somehow, it's the start of a best friendship.

The G&T program is not all it's cracked up to be, and Reed is a bit disappointed that Ben gets in – Ben's a hard worker, of course, and not actually stupid, but he's not that smart. He's even more disappointed that Ben is the second-best in the program.

He continues studying with his parents instead, switching between going way too fast and backtracking, as they try to understand precisely how much Reed is capable of. The answer, as always, is proportional to his interest, but what that's proportional to is less clear. Ben joins him for any of the talks related to space, and they also talk on the phone, long discussion of the cosmos and of science fiction, of heroism physical and scientific.

It's in the May of second grade that it happens – Evelyn Richards is rushed to the hospital for terminal cancer, caused by something of what she's studying with Nathaniel, which is a possible fifth fundamental force or something like that, which Reed doesn't care about, right now, but somehow Nathaniel still does, and develops a method of shielding by throwing himself into his work for a month. That means that Reed's almost alone for that month, and though Nathaniel's cancer-free, he still feels like he lost both parents; but Nathaniel's working to prevent anyone else from dying, and so Reed decides through the tears that he'll try and do the same, no matter how hard it is, and Ben swears an oath to help, in any way it takes, and holds Reed up during the funeral, because they're going to be heroes, and that's what heroes do.

In middle school (private, of course), Reed tries various academic competitions before settling on Baxter Science Championships and NMP, and Ben joins him in the former. They work on rocketry together for it, and then they practice more real rockets, moving further and further east as their constructions become, increasingly, questionably legal. Not immoral – Reed knows there's no actual danger, and Nathaniel guides them towards minimal illegality, because he's back, Nathaniel Richards, educating his son again, but he has to understand the riddle his wife died for, no matter what, too, and so Reed has half a father, but that's enough, really.

But school also means PE, and somehow even though the school is good there's a bunch of people there who are stupid, but strong, and one day in the locker room Reed sees one of them attack him; he fights back, but the bully is only made angrier, and lifts his foot to kick Reed –

And then Ben's there, and pulls the kid off, and kicks him in the face, and it's senseless brutality that Reed knows he'll have to talk to Ben about later, but for now it's enough, and he's earned some respect for fighting back at least, so it doesn't happen again.

"I joined the football team," Ben says later.

"Please tell me you mean soccer," Reed says, but Ben doesn't, even though he knows, or should know, that American football will break his mind, that it'll lead to irreversible loss of intelligence from the beginning, but Ben doesn't listen, he doesn't listen.

(Ben's father was a star quarterback in high school, and Ben has the potential to do the same; and so he won't allow Ben to quit, and Ben doesn't particularly want to.)

Reed watches Ben's bar mitzvah, but afterwards they go to different high schools, and Reed is finally being challenged, if only in competitions; and people are talking, already, about him being as smart as his father, and so he focuses on what matters and puts Ben behind him. He was a friend, Reed thinks, but he had stupid parents and refused to resist them, and maybe it wasn't his fault, but it's still what it is.

Reed applies to a bunch of colleges, but he knows well that he has his pick both for academics and for price, because his father had time to get moderately rich off inventions; and so he decides on State University in New York, because it's where his father went and he's not sure what he wants except to be his father, and it's one of the top five colleges in the country, too, so that helps. He agrees to call his father once a week, and Nathaniel is sad but satisfied when he leaves; and it's only after he gets to State that he finds out that Ben went to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, and so he doesn't have the chance to spit on a picture of Ben for selling out to death.

Reed makes new friends, ones that are actually on his level, and excels in his classes while doing physics research. Victor von Doom from Latveria is the most brilliant physics mind at the school (though a bunch of neutrals seem to think it's Reed, which is wrong, they just think that based on his parentage he's sure), and while he's also crazy and believes in magic, and is as arrogant as Reed was in his first grade, he still strikes up a friendship with Reed, and Reed sighs at Victor's description of Latveria's oligarchs but if anyone can save the country it's going to be Victor.

But Victor begins to develop a plan to save his mother's soul from Hell, and Reed knows it's madness, and the calculations show that it's going to explode and take out half the dorm – so Victor moves to a basement lab to assuage Reed, but does the experiment anyway and it explodes, and even if it's with less force than Reed calculated Victor's still in the hospital for weeks, and expelled, and as Reed sits in the deans' office and talks about Victor's crazy ideas he's crying. Not because of Victor, but because of the article in the paper he's reading, the one from yesterday, the one about Nobel winner Nathaniel Richards dying in a mysterious lab accident, no body recovered, died a hero saving his assistant from the fifth fundamental force that Reed now understands better than anyone else in the world.

The next day, Reed changes his major to aerospace, because he can't do what his father did. Not anymore.