Notes: Written for damalur for Yuletide 2017.
Interference Patterns
One useful consequence of travelling unmasked was that Victor was now free to walk the streets of New York City without being accosted by a swarm of costumed oafs. The plague of copycat vigilantes that overran the city had neither the skill nor the authority to mount a challenge to him, but their failure to recognise that fact had often caused inconvenient interruptions to his plans.
Today, however, he'd been able to go about his business undisturbed. He'd come to the city to deliver a gift to Stephen Strange, a tome of rare rituals that could only be performed by two sorcerers working in harmony. Judging by Stephen's bemusement on receiving the book he would be inspecting it thoroughly for hostile enchantments, but Victor felt they could consider the intellectual exercise an extension of the gift. All in all, a most successful trip.
His remaining plans for the day could not be put into action until the Hydra cell had assembled at their hideout, so he took a leisurely walk past the ESU campus to visit the deli where he'd often eaten as a student. The same elderly Hungarian owner was still behind the meat counter, but if he recognised Victor as the boy who'd come by after classes for a taste of something closer to home or knew who that boy had gone on to become, he gave no sign, only a wrinkled smile and an over-generous portion on being addressed fluently in his native tongue.
In his youth, Victor had always hurried straight back to the lab, too impatient to return to his work to stop to eat meals elsewhere. Today, instead, he took a stroll to the park a few blocks away to sit and eat his sandwich beside the fountain.
He was surrounded by the same American students he'd always despised in his youth - pampered fools, too intellectually weak to even recognise that he was their superior. But now he saw them for the children that they were: unequipped to grow beyond their limitations, unreasonable to punish for failing to comprehend. And as children, they required protectors, even when they were ungrateful or wilfully foolish. Children could not be expected to know any better.
Although some children certainly should.
Victor had trained himself to disregard covert glances after the true reason for the scrutiny he received when not wearing his armour had gradually sunk in; he'd forgotten what it was to have a face that people wished to look upon. So the sense of being under an intent stare was not in itself of note - rather, it was the magical presence behind the stare that drew his attention. Not a fellow sorcerer, but a subtle echo of his own sorcery reflected back at him; the vestigial traces of a magical bond that had once anchored the soul of a child that should never have survived to be born.
A child that, unless the situation had changed without his knowledge, was definitely not supposed to be here.
Victor raised his head, and met the eyes of a small blonde girl too self-possessed for anyone to have yet wondered why she appeared to be out on her own. "Do your parents know you're in this universe?" he said.
Valeria just waved cheerfully in response. She was wearing a blue baseball cap and big sunglasses that might have been an effort at disguise, though he suspected she'd just liked the sparkly frames and the panda picture on the cap. Either way, she skipped over to join him after having been spotted, hopping up to swing her bare legs over the fountain's stone surround.
"Hey, Uncle Doom," she said, dangling her Velcro-fastened sneakers so that the toes just brushed the surface of the water. "I heard you were helping SHIELD to bring down bad guys."
"Yes," he said simply. Apparently too efficiently for the existing authorities to contain, judging by the recent mass breakout from the Ryker's Island Penitentiary. It would be far more effective if he took control of the design and staffing of the prison system for himself: he could replace fallible human guards with superior robots, remove all the layers of needless bureaucracy to place the systems under his direct control...
But repeating a failed experiment with the same methodology would be foolish. The poor results that he'd achieved when given free rein to shape reality to his will proved there had been some unseen flaw in his past reasoning. Until he could determine its nature, it was necessary to follow the principles set out by others and study their methods. Tony Stark was his closest available model for side-by-side comparison, so Victor had begun working to emulate and surpass his successes.
"So what are you gonna to do now?" Valeria asked him. She dragged her sneakers over the surface of the water, creating patterns of ripples. He wondered if she was calculating the effects of the wave interference as he had as a child.
"Something... productive," he said. Evidently incarcerating superpowered criminals would have to be delayed until a more suitable venue could be found for the task, but he could still disrupt their operations and ensure none of their plans could come to fruition.
Valeria had started to squirm; for all her advanced intelligence, she still had only the limited patience of a child when it came to self-denial. "Can I see your new armour?" she blurted eagerly
To assemble the suit here without immediately departing would certainly draw attention to his position - but that only gave him another opportunity to demonstrate his generosity. "If you wish." He indulged her by assembling the armour more slowly than usual, allowing her to see how the components interlocked. It drew less attention than a more dramatic display, but nonetheless people around them soon noticed and began raising their camera phones to film.
He ignored them, as did Valeria - a lack of situational awareness that should perhaps be corrected at some point, although she was undoubtedly accustomed to a similar response when travelling with her parents and especially Benjamin Grimm. That trenchcoat and hat did nothing to deflect the attention of even distracted New Yorkers... though Victor understood all too well the desire to cover a marred appearance that could not truly be meaningfully hidden.
Perhaps finding some cure for Grimm's condition would be considered a fitting form of reparation. Reed Richards had effected a number of temporary transformations over the years, but he had never understood the true cause of the repeated reversions to form: the powerful magical influence of the soul's own belief it had been cursed. It was the same reason Victor had never successfully permanently healed his own scars even when possessed of the powers of a god.
He dedicated part of his mind to theorising on how to help Grimm as Valeria jumped up and walked all round him, studying the fine details of the armour. He patiently allowed her to prod him into flexing a joint here or opening a panel there, knowing she would require little explanation to grasp the basic principles of operation - though some details, of course, eluded her.
"How do you call it to you when you need it?" she asked. "Is it nano-construction, or are the pieces stored in a pocket dimension?"
"Magic," he said. It was the method least vulnerable to sabotage by most of his enemies - and against those who did wield it, whether he could rapidly assemble his armour would not be the factor that swayed the day.
Valeria pouted in indignation. "Magic is just a name for fields of science we don't fully understand," she said, almost on the verge of stamping her foot.
"You are your father's child," he told her, with less rancour than the words might once have held. The likes of Reed Richards and Tony Stark would never comprehend magic until they understood that it was not an error in known science to be straightened out, but rather a complement to it, governed by its own separate and equal set of rules.
Valeria, however, was young yet, and still might learn to overcome such preconceptions. An impulse struck him then... or perhaps a memory, of another long-ago girl called Valeria, and the boyish tricks he'd shown her when he was first beginning to learn his mother's craft.
Letting his armour fold away, Victor levitated a pebble from beside the fountain, and as he caught it in his fist, performed a simple, wordless spell. When he opened his hand, the pebble had reshaped itself into the form of a frog, still mottled with the grey colouration of the stone. It hopped from his palm to land in the water with a heavy splash, where it would live out its hours in amphibian form until the spell faded away.
Valeria narrowed her eyes in a disapproving scowl at that minor act of impossibility. Then they went very wide before she abruptly beamed at him. Victor failed to understand what had prompted the reaction until he realised that this was the first time she would have seen him smile without the cover of the mask.
Or indeed, perhaps, at all.
Then something behind him caught her attention, and her eyes lit up still further as she seized his hand. "Ooh! Let's get ice-cream," she said.
He allowed her to tow him over to the ice-cream vendor and dutifully purchased her a strawberry cone, though he resisted her persistent efforts at convincing him to buy one for himself. It was not, he felt, a particularly dignified way to consume ice-cream in public.
"I missed ice-cream," she said, as they walked through the park together, Victor adjusting his stride to allow for her short legs. "And pizza. Exploring the multiverse is pretty fun, but the snacks are weird."
He was glad of his restraint regarding the ice-cream when he spotted the subtle disturbance of a portal forming underneath the trees. Technological, not magical; the lack of immediate scan results from his armour was unsettling, but he stayed the reflex to ready it as he recognised the familiar figure now taking shape amid the shimmer of glittering lights.
Susan Storm Richards.
"I fear your exploration of this universe may have come to an end," he told Valeria.
She looked around. "Aw, nuts," she said, lifting her hand to her mouth to catch a drip of ice-cream before it ran down her T-shirt. "I thought that scavenger hunt that I sent Franklin on was gonna buy me some more time."
Susan spotted her almost as soon as her own shape had solidified and came hurrying over towards them, her eyes passing over Victor with little attention as she focused on her daughter. "Valeria! We've been looking all over for you."
"I left a note," she said with an overly innocent shrug.
"It took your brother a week to find all of those clues. And you know the rules," she said sternly. "No leaving the universe during games of hide and go seek."
"I just wanted to see how everyone was getting on back home," Valeria said.
Her subtlety was improving. This time her mother looked more sympathetic, and Victor felt he should add his support to encourage this promising direction. "She is in no danger of harm when under my protection."
Susan stiffened, recognising him now by his voice where she hadn't at a first distracted glance. "Doom," she said flatly. He felt the faint tension in the air of a forcefield gathering, though she remained coolly civil. "You're looking better than when I last saw you."
When she had last seen him was not when he had last seen her. To the best of Victor's knowledge, the events of his failed experiment in godhood were now a secret that only he and Reed Richards shared. There she had been a valuable partner in his enterprises, and though he hoped that she might be again, he knew she would be slow to come around. She was far more calm and rational than her brother or Grimm, but she was protective of her family above all else, and it would not be quick or easy to prove himself worthy of trust.
No matter. He would rise to the task.
"I am... well," he said, inclining his head politely. And he believed it to be true, in a way it hadn't been for long decades. More than the physical scarring had been lifted; gone with it was the ever-present brand of his greatest failure and the burning cold touch of Mephisto. Always in the past when he had effected a temporary cure, the knowledge that it was a mere surface repair, that the true injury was still there, had driven him almost to madness. But this time it felt different; he felt as though he were truly healed.
He was still unsure how to take the fact that his subconscious mind apparently trusted Reed Richards in this matter more than it did himself.
Susan narrowed her eyes suspiciously, looking very much like her daughter. "Listen, Doom, I don't know what kind of scheme you've got going, but don't bring my daughter into it," she said.
"We were just having ice-cream, Mom," Valeria said.
"At your daughter's request," he felt it best to clarify. Despite her great intelligence, Valeria's efforts at persuasion and reassurance remained compromised by a child's failure to recognise herself as a child, and the attendant limits to adult trust in her judgement.
Susan was unlikely to trust his recounting either, of course, but she did know her daughter. "Honey, don't go bugging people to buy you ice-cream," she said automatically. "Even if they are Doctor Doom."
"No longer," Victor said.
She gave him a flatly unimpressed stare. "And who are you supposed to be when you're not being Doctor Doom?"
"I am attempting to find out," he said.
Perhaps that wasn't quite the answer Susan had expected, because she started to cock her head with a quizzical look. Before she could speak, however the shimmer of another teleportation device appeared across the park. The sparks swiftly resolved into the form of Reed Richards, looking younger and less haggard than when Victor had seen him last despite the grey streaks spreading through his beard.
He was looking down at the readout on a handheld scanner, neck bent at an angle just slightly beyond natural flexibility; though he could have kept the powers of a god, it seemed he'd chosen instead to reduce himself to his former gifts and reliance on machines.
Of course, as Victor had learned, even ultimate power was not enough to compel others to act in their own interest. Some form of alternative approach would seem to be required - and which the other thing he was attempting to work out.
A second teleportation shimmer appeared beside the first, and the white-clad form of Franklin Richards emerged from the glow. "There they are, Dad!" he said, pointing. He ran over to join his mother and sister.
"You lose, fart-breath," Valeria said, pulling a contorted face. This would, Victor felt, be detrimental to her efforts to convince her parents that she was mature enough to traverse realities unaccompanied.
"You cheated," her brother countered, folding his arms with a pouting scowl.
"Yes, and Franklin, you should have told us as soon as you realised your sister was missing instead of trying to solve all of the clues by yourself," Sue said. "Nobody wins."
"Sorry, Mom," Valeria said contritely. When Susan turned to her son to secure the same concession, she leaned out from behind her mother's back. But I won, she mouthed.
Victor admired her competitive spirit.
Pocketing the scanner, their father strode over to join the group. Unlike his wife, he recognised Victor's unmasked face at first glance. "Victor," he said, smiling warmly. "You're looking well."
Was that a taunt, a deliberate reminder that he had been the one to rid Victor of his scars when Victor had been unable to do the same himself? He bridled, but swallowed his initial reaction by reminding himself of Valeria's presence. She, after all, represented his own moment of triumphant success at a time when her father had been powerless to save her.
Perhaps that made the two of them even. He was testing the concept of approaching others from a position of equal authority, as had been productive in his work with Stephen. It was possible the inefficiencies of entertaining others' lesser ideas could be outweighed by the time spared if he no longer had to put down constant rebellions.
He offered a stiff nod of greeting. "Reed." Adopting his former classmates' first names was a gesture towards his new willingness to work with them on their own terms; in his youth he had taken the unwarranted familiarity as deliberate insult, but over the years he had come to learn that Americans simply expected their cultural norms to supersede others and considered this to be being friendly. Unbending on such minor points of principle ought to help reinforce his new approach.
"Hi, Dad," Valeria said brightly. "Uncle Doom was just telling me how he's going to help round up all the bad guys that escaped after he put them in prison." He assumed that in her naïveté she considered this an effort to cast him in a good light rather than humiliate by holding his actions up for her father's judgement. "And then we had ice-cream."
Fortunately, this last caught her brother's indignant attention. "Mom! How come Val gets ice-cream? That's not fair!"
"You haven't had your lunch yet," Susan reminded him.
"I ate earlier," Valeria said quickly. Victor noted that would still be factually true if all she had eaten was the ice-cream, but neither of her parents pushed for clarification on the obvious loophole.
Franklin turned beseeching eyes on his parents. "Dad, can't we stop for lunch? Since we're here already. And Val got to have ice-cream," he added, managing to imply the possibility of future whining without outright engaging in it. He had a greater degree of subtlety than his sister, though not her natural bent towards deviousness.
Susan looked to her husband, who frowned and rubbed his beard in thought. "Well... we probably shouldn't linger here too long," he admitted. "We're really very close to completing the project - by my calculations, we've almost reached the critical mass of new universes necessary for the multiverse to start branching by itself."
Using Franklin's powerful reality-altering gifts to re-seed the collapsed multiverse with a diversity of baby universes until it became self-sustaining once more. It was an approach that had never occurred to Victor during his time as custodian of the last remaining universe, perhaps because his instincts drove him always to refine towards a single flawless state of perfection.
A state he had never been able to render quite perfect enough, even with the powers of a god at his disposal. Why must Reed Richards always be a perpetual reminder of his greatest failures?
He could feel his mood darkening, and suspected he should leave before this degraded into a confrontation that would damage his efforts to build trust with the public and government agencies. However, he had hoped to have the chance to reap the results of the plan he had set in motion by flaunting his armour so publicly in New York City...
"Yo, Doomsy!" An angry bellow sounded through the park. "A word."
Ah. Right on time.
Victor made no move to flee or defend himself, only politely turned to face the bulky figure striding towards him across the grass.
"If I told ya once, I told ya a hundred times... uh." Benjamin finally noticed the nature of Victor's company, and insofar as his craggy jaw was able to go slack, it did.
Reed smiled at him. "Ben. It's good to see you again."
The children were less restrained, flinging themselves at their honorary uncle to be scooped out of the air before they could crash too hard against his rocky form. "Uncle Ben!"
He caught them automatically, but still seemed to be in a daze. "How- but- you're back!"
Victor supposed he could be forgiven for stating the obvious, given that he'd clearly been working to convince himself the absence was permanent. Any reassurance to the contrary from Victor would have had the opposite effect - hence his arranging this family reunion by subtler methods. He would have to leave it to Valeria to enlighten her much slower uncle that displaying himself so publicly had been a deliberate summons, since expecting Benjamin to make even such a basic inference when it required crediting him with positive motives was unlikely in the extreme.
"Not quite permanently, I'm afraid," Reed said apologetically. "We left the restoration of the multiverse at a rather critical juncture - it doesn't have sufficient mass for it to remain structurally stable yet, so the longer we're away, the more new universes we'll have to create to form enough of a stable nucleus to start generating extradimensional matter."
Ben was smiling broadly. "I know you think ya explained yourself there, Stretch, and that's what counts," he said. He threw his arm around Reed's shoulders, squeezing him slightly out of shape with the tightness of the hug. "Boy, I can't wait to see the look on ol' Flamebrain's face when he sees ya. He'll ignite."
Susan turned to her husband. "We can't leave without seeing Johnny now," she said.
"Well... I suppose it shouldn't do much harm to stop for a quick meal," Reed said, though Victor's mental calculations suggested it would in fact cost them at least a week's delay in wasted work.
All to the good. It would give Victor more time to establish himself before word spread of the return of Reed Richards and all eyes turned to him for solutions once more. He would show he was more efficient, faster to respond to every call rather than splitting his attention between work and family. He would prove himself superior in a manner Richards and the rest of the world would have no way to find fault with.
He stepped away, already separated from the tight little group the family had formed into. "I suggest you try the deli on the corner opposite the ESU research wing," he said, and teleported out without waiting for a response.
His mission awaited.