New villian Alert!
xx
SSC
"So the results are back." Reed announced from beside Susan while flipping through papers on his clip board. Elise sat on the patient's bed, swinging her legs back and forth anxiously.
"What's the problem, Reed?" She asked, steeling herself not to be distraught by the consequences.
"You've passed all your tests, if anything you are in perfect health Eli." She stilled a calm hand on to Elise's clenched fist. The blonde's smile instantly calmed Elise, though her uneasiness remained.
"But... There is a 'but' right?"
"From the BMD tests we discovered that you have a high bone density. At first I figured it was because of all weight training related to your boxing but I think that might not be the case." Richards stated, his gaze skimming over the text.
"What is it?" Eli asked, he lowered the clip board and regarded her firmly.
"I found it odd that out of all of us you were the only one who had no physical mutation. But now I think your skeleton is part of your mutation."
"High bone density, is that bad?"
"It's good actually, your bones are stronger than all of us but in the process it is also lighter. I think it's so you can adapt better to your air related abilities." Susan explained, Elise sighed in relief.
"So the mutation caused the black out?" She asked unsurely.
"I think so." Reed nodded in unison to his wife "Ben suffered severe chest and stomach pains before he turned so it could be the same thing."
"Have you had any recent headaches?" Sue pried in concernedly. Elise shook her head in response.
"Not really, no."
"Good, but just in case." Reed pulled out a bottle of aspirin from his lab coat and gestured it for her to take "Here, if you get any more headaches just take these, it should null the pain."
Hesitantly she reached out and wordlessly took the bottle and peered down at it.
Temporary relieves minor head aches and pains. She fortified her urge to glower down at the label.
"So I can go home now?" She asked peering up at them.
"I don't see why not."
Elise smiled gratefully, eager to change out of her paper dress and see her uncle, Alicia and Johnny.
Johnny offered to drive her and Charcoal home. Elise figured he would have a lot to say, considering he was usually the talkative one. This was why she was extremely irked by his silence throughout the ride back to her flat.
They stood idly in the elevator with Charcoal between them. Elise was tempted to question his silence, but she wasn't the type to pry either. She knew she had to treat him just as she would her friends, wait till they were ready to speak to her. Why was she having so much trouble keeping to her rules around him?
"So what did Reed say?" Johnny suddenly asked, grabbing her attention. She glanced at him; his passive expression was focused on the steel doors.
"Well I am perfectly healthy, it was just my mutation had delayed again unlike you guys and he thinks the headaches was a symptom from all the change." She was suddenly aware of the pill bottle within her jacket pocket. She could hear it rattling about within the pouch.
He immediately turned to her at her statement "Change, what change?"
"My bones had increased in density so I can adapt to my powers or something." She said with a flippant wave of her hand "All I know is that it's nothing serious."
"So the way you passed out, it was a normal?"
She nodded slowly.
His frown deepened. Elise watched, confused by the stiffness in his jaw as he turned his attention back to the lift doors.
"Didn't look normal to me." He grumbled crabbily to himself, but she heard him.
"Is that concern I hear?" She asked. Mischievously with a wry smile on her lips "Careful now, you wouldn't want to do something out of character like think about someone else for a change."
"Is that such a bad thing?"
His voice lacked his usual playfulness, his eyes were blank without its jaded pleasure seeking gleam. The seriousness in his gaze startled her.
"No of course not—I was just teasing." She felt foolish and tongue tied. Elise wasn't used to the solemn, edgy side of him, she felt threatened.
"Why are you being Mr. Sensitive all of a sudden?" She demanded, masking her anxiety with annoyance.
He grimaced "Sometimes I just think you expect people to bounce back as fast as you do."
The elevator doors opened and Charcoal leaped out. Johnny marched out in angry strides and Elise pursued him.
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" She bit back, goaded by his accusatory tone. He stopped at the threshold of her door and spun around to face her.
"What if I wasn't fast enough to catch you? You were literally inches away from the ground Elise, if I was a second late—" He stopped his irate rambling, as if it physically hurt him to say anymore. Elise watched him, bewildered by the glittering vulnerability in his eyes. A defeated sigh escaped his lips and averted his attention to the carpeted floor under them.
"You just, don't seem to care."
His words struck her. Her defenses fell and the rage that was brewing inside her was instantly doused like water to flame. Guilt consumed her, clearly Johnny had been bothered by the whole incident and she was too blind to realize it. It made sense why he would be. Considering it had only been a little over a month since Susan was almost lost forever.
The situation must have brought those feelings back, at least—that was the logic that made sense to her in the moment. Her legs moved back instinctively, trying to form some distance in the confined space of the corridor, so she could gather her thoughts.
Jeremy used to think she didn't care, she was too highly strung to tell him any different and he always had a knack for jumping to unwanted conclusions. But that was a different harder time when she was a harsher person. She didn't want to make the same mistakes.
"I don't think about 'what if' situations, I just deal with the reality and move on." She began to explain gently, trying to hide how uncomfortably naked she felt "It doesn't mean I am not grateful, obviously I would be road mush if you weren't there in time."
He looked to her again, studying her. Elise averted her gaze diffidently. She was overwhelmed by his penetrating gaze.
"Besides, you were the one who made the promise." She grumbled, burying her hands into her jacket pockets and fumbling with her keys.
"What promise?" He questioned uncertainly. She raised her gaze to meet his, watching him from under inky lashes.
"To catch me whenever I fell, or were you just flirting?"
She had uttered the question in a teasing manner. But Johnny had found deeper meaning in her words. His mind reminisced back to when he had first said those words; he knew he had said it then to coax a reaction from her scowling face
Now, knowing he had lived up to it made him feel—virtuous.
He was speechless.
She sighed inwardly. She tried not to feel too disheartened by the lack of a response for him. She averted her gaze to the door behind him.
Elise's attention was drawn in by Charcoal's insistent scratching on the door. She fished out the keys from her pocket, while walking around Johnny's broad frame and towards the door. She unlocked the door and pushed it open.
The blue Great Dane dashed in, heading straight for his feeding bowl. Elise stepped forward to enter. Johnny reached out and wrapped his fingers around her elbow, preventing her forward momentum.
She looked to him in startled curiosity.
He held her gaze boldly and began to pull her back towards him, she was submissive but the faltering look in her eyes was vivid.
His hold on her was gentle but firm, he watched her in affectionate silence. She was glad the brooding haze in his eyes had lifted, but the moment she relaxed completely was when his playful smile returned.
But there was something different about it, something real in the way the smile reached his eyes—setting them a blaze. The intimate warmth in his eyes irked her, along with the silence that stretched on. She had never been stared at so affectionately, even by Jeremy, it was.
Her mental panic came to a permanent stop when his lips descended down upon hers. She was too stunned to respond at first. Johnny took that as an invitation to step closer, burying his hand under the nape of her neck and deepening the kiss.
His warm touch made her knees weak, his kiss threatened to floor her entirely. She steeled herself, grabbed onto the lapels of his jacket and kissed back.
Johnny had to admit, the woman had power over him. Not just in her touch or kiss but something much more profound and real.
Despite her playfulness and teasing, Elise was truthful when it mattered. She didn't play head games with him to gain his attention.
He would call her his closest and honest friend, but he knew in his heart—she was so much more.
He made her heart race and her mind a mess, sometimes just being around him and the emotions she felt consumed her completely. It scared her; she knew that once something threatened to destroy what they had she would feel lost. Yet, she couldn't turn away from him. She wondered if she ever could.
Alicia whistled happily while making her way into her house. Keeping a poised grip on her walking stick she swatted about to make sure there was nothing obstructing her path.
A strong scent of spices brushed under her nose, the smell was coming from her kitchen. She smiled fondly and followed the scent into a brightly lit kitchen. She had memorized the space well.
The tiny rectangular space had long working counters on either side. On the left, in front of the square window was the kitchen and beside it, the cooker.
An average height gangly, bald man stood hunched over the stove. The off-white robe fell to the back of his calves. He wore a pair of stripped pajamas with it. Despite the looks of the uncanny man, Alicia was smiling fondly with a far away gaze.
"Hey dad." She greeted, sauntering over to his side.
"Alicia ,darling." He exclaimed turning to her with a large grin across his face. She placed a doting kiss to the side of his face.
"I made dinner, I hope you are hungry." He said.
"No dad its fine, I just had dinner with Ben."
"Oh." Alicia did not see the dark shadow of dislike that took over her father's face. Despite Alicia's African-American heritage, her father—was Caucasian. Alicia's biological father had passed away when she was very young and her mother had remarried her father's co worker, Phillip Masters.
Alicia considered herself to be extremely close to her step-father. Even after her mother passed away, Phillip had raised Alicia by himself in the most loving fatherly way.
"He wanted to see me; he was a little shook up after what happened with Eli." She explained softly while taking a seat on the wooden stool at the end of the counter.
"Eli?" Phillip inquired while stirring a pot of soup.
"His niece, you remember her I told you she is going to be at the exhibition with me."
"Yes of course, what happened to her?"
"She lost control or something during a mission. She almost died if it wasn't for Johnny, thank God she didn't." Her usual calm expression was clouded in sadness "Ben doesn't want to lose anymore family, not since his brother and sister."
"Yes of course not, we wouldn't want that." Alicia was oblivious to the vague interest in her father's voice "Good thing Elise has her boyfriend looking out for her."
"Oh Johnny isn't her boyfriend, I don't really know what they are but I sense something strange is going on." She was smiling again at the thought of the two youngest members of the Fantastic Five.
"Strange, dear?" Her father wondered.
"Well they are very close, but it's a little complicated. I think Elise is still hung up on Jeremy."
"Jeremy, where is he?" Phillip's gray eyes were gleaming in anticipation. Seems Miss Elise Adams had more to her past than he had realized.
"Well he is in a coma, has been for a while now. It was this whole incident that involved some bad people, Ben didn't tell me most of it."
"I see." He murmured to himself, he was rubbing his chin in thought while stirring the mixture with his other hand.
A coma patient? Most intriguing.
"I am going to head off to bed, big day tomorrow. Good night daddy." Alicia stood up carefully and leaned over to press another doting kiss to her father's cheek. Phillip smiled and petted her daughters hand gently.
"Good night my darling."
He waited till Alicia turned at the bend of the door before allowing his smile to fall. With rigid movements he turned off the stove and stomped out of the kitchen, through the living room and towards a locked door between two shelves. He pulled out a silver key that dangled on a chain around his neck and used it to unlock the hatch.
The door opened with an eerie creak and he stepped in before shutting it firmly behind him. It was a diminutive space with a desk against the far wall within the room and tall shelves on either side. Shadows within the spaces, lingering in the dark corners threatened to consume the room if not for the single source of orange light that emitted from the desk.
Phillip walked towards the desk, passing by many lifeless faces of clay dolls he had stacked on the shelves. The shadows danced in a sinister manner over their vacant faces, he was used to them by now. They were his friends, his playmates his children.
He sat down on the lone chair in front of his work space and reached out; he picked up his most recent model. The one he had been working on most diligently because her predecessor had proved unsuccessful in his plan.
He cupped her figure delicately in his hand, his thumb brushing over the graceful features of her face.
"Elise Adams." He purred down at his creation, her miniature vacant expression did not respond to his call. He smiled.
"Tempest, you have failed me." He said almost sadly. He had seen the news, watched repeatedly as she fell from the skies until she was caught by Johnny Storm. He had managed to render her unconscious with his mind; maybe just maybe, he can try again tonight.
Humming to himself, Phillip leaned forward and plucked a tiny carving tool out of its holder, with his unoccupied hand. He poised the tip of the blade against the curve of her hip and tenderly began to shape it.
"Thou shalt be free as mountain winds. But then exactly do all points of my command. For I am the puppeteer and you are mine to command."