DISCLAIMER: F4 and all its characters belong to Marvel. No money is made from this. This is done all for the greater glory of Reedness!

January 2, 2008

Perfectly Normal
Chapter Three: In which more barriers are broken
By Ina-chan

"It's not the strongest and the fittest who survive. It's the one who is most willing to change."

Nate said that all the time. And it was reflected on both his work and himself. While Nate was a certified scientific genius of his own right, his true genius wasn't how he created or thought things to revolutionize the world. His true genius was his amazing ability to adapt everything around him into his advantage. Within the span of twenty odd years since he started apprenticing under his father's wing as a teen-ager, he transformed a successful family business into a multi-billion dollar enterprise.

And now… seeing Reed slowly overcome all the stumbling blocks put before him both by biology and society… I've come to understand that my boy at age five was truly his father's son complete with all the Richards quirks on top of his own.

His rich chocolate hair waved and curled at the ends like his grandfather's, his uncle's and his father's. Mother's bias aside, I felt rather proud of my son's hair. It seemed a shame that it wasn't going to last, based on the older Richards' track record.

Like a summer flower, the shade only lasted in a Richards' early youth. (Though Teddy always joked that he would always prefer to go grey over bald.) Dad's hair started to turn grey when he was fifteen and would have been completely silver had it not been for the miracle called Clairol before he was forty. When I first met Nate when he was twenty, shades of grey already graced his temples, giving me the embarrassing first impression that he was Teddy's father (stupidly thinking that commenting on his youthful complexion despite his age would be flattering compliment).

Not that it was entirely my fault, I wasn't aware of this family quirk. Teddy never showed me any pictures of his family and Teddy dyed his hair every shade of the rainbow (sometimes at the same time) in a bi-weekly schedule during our youth before he allowing his natural salt-and-cinnamon shade to grow back after his first non-fiction bestseller (too much trouble than its worth to tint it, he claimed).

What I loved about the Richards hair was how its pretty shade perfectly complimented their eyes. By the time Reed was two, it was obvious that his baby blues was temporary. Like the rest of the Richards men, Reed had these beautiful warm whiskey brown eyes that changed color, given the right angle of light, into the illusion that it was liquid gold.

Like most autistic children, Reed had difficulty with meeting people's eyes. It was a strange phenomenon that no one could really explain. But unlike some of the autistic children I've met who would continue to stare at the floor, Reed would shyly peek from the corners of his eyes. Once in a while, he would even try to hold your gaze for a few seconds. That was how we communicated, mostly. I suppose after spending almost every single moment of his life with me, it was a matter of time before we developed some form of almost telepathic bond. Little gestures and sometimes even just on how he looks at me, that was enough for me to know what he wanted to say.

On the other times I couldn't understand, Reed would simply draw or write down what he had in mind. We used to have one of those tiny little chalkboards at first until the chalk dust getting into everything got too annoying. So I ended up adopting one of Nate's habits… carrying a little notebook and pencil in my pockets at all times. Later on, Reed wanted one for himself. He even wanted specifically the same pocket notebook as his daddy's.

That was one accomplishment I was very proud of...Reed learning to read and write well ahead of normal children his age. I always believed and hoped that what Jim Grieves and what Ed said about the future of Reed's cognitive development was wrong. With each accomplishment, it made my hope stronger. I suppose I'm biased to believe that my son is special. But when Reed quickly learned to read and write with alarming comprehension when he was barely five years old on top of his remarkable memory and all the other amazing things he was able to do, it was very hard to ignore the fact that Reed was not just special in a mother's point of view.

Reed was gifted.

"We always knew that Nate was very special. His brain was wired differently from the general population or something."

Teddy used to tell me fond anecdotes about his little brother and all the amazing things he does. How he was able to learn things faster, remember things like its imbedded in his memory, do maths in his head quicker than an adding machine, and has these fantastic ideas about how make machines work more efficiently and effectively. He was already doing high school level schoolwork before he was six years old. A couple of scientists even want to study how his brain worked, until their mother had enough and didn't want one of her babies to be seen as some kind of freak show.

I suppose the whole embarrassment on how Nate and I first met was entirely Teddy's fault. Based on how Teddy used to describe his 'adorable baby brother' resulted in the image of Nate in my head as a version of a precocious seven-year-old Mozart banging away beautiful symphonies on the harpsichord with his tiny little fingers. I didn't understand until now. Perhaps that was the reason why the Dad and Teddy were so calm about Reed's diagnosis all that time. While Nate had his moments, he was overall very laid back about the whole situation as well. Perhaps they were merely watching history repeat itself. Perhaps, just like his father, Reed's brain was just wired differently from the rest of the general population. Maybe it was really just a matter of helping him find a way to express himself… or teaching him means so that we of the general population could understand him.

But unlike Nate, Reed had strange oddities in his behaviour that Ed attributed most likely to autism. Aside from feeling discomfort at being hugged, Reed clearly hated hearing loud high pitched piercing sounds. He used to make a fuss whenever the telephone rang, so I made it a point to make sure that the rooms that we frequented in the house didn't have one. Yet at the same time with great irony, Reed seemed to marvel at the sound of any 'loud music'. From Beethoven's Fifth Symphony to that Jimi Hendrix noise (until the guitar solos hit that unnerving pitch, that was)… he seemed equally entranced as he placed his hands over that damned stereophonic speaker that Nate modified for him (damn my husband's genius) so that Reed could feel the sound vibrating from it.

That was the strangest part of all. Jim Grieves said that the reason why autistic children behaved the way they did was because of what seemed to be some kind of heightened sensitivity to sound and touch. Simple sensations that we perceived as normal could actually be feel unpleasant. That high pitch could be in fact painful to hear and that simple hug could feel a lot more like smothering. Jim Grieves suggested to mute Reed's level of stimuli to make the environment tolerable.

"Is it just me, or does it seem like Reed's wired on coffee?"

I didn't really notice it until Teddy made that observation one afternoon. Nobody really knows what's going on in an autistic child's head. While there are classic symptoms (of which some Reed seemed to exhibit), Jim Grieves admitted that it's also different with every child.

I mean, I've observed that even though Reed seemed to have an aversion to being coddled and hugged, he didn't resist to gentle touch. In fact, he even seemed to like the sensation of my fingers drawing gentle small patterns on his palm or feeling my fingers caress his forehead and run through his hair. In one of those quiet moments, he'd even fall asleep and allow himself to fall into my gentle embrace.

But only to a certain extent… I also noticed that Reed seemed to withdraw more into "himself" the more we left him alone. He thrived more hearing me play and feeling the sounds vibrate from the underneath the piano's belly. And with those specific "pleasant" stimuli present, we noticed that Reed acted more alert and seemed more open to learning something new sometimes to the point of hyperactivity. And as Teddy accurately described it, it was as if the mentioned stimuli seemed to have an effect on Reed like what the first cup of coffee in the morning has on a normal adult.

Nate mentioned about how sensory deprivation was known to induce a state of consciousness that enables enhanced creativity, problem solving and super-learning. Not at all that different from how monks enter a meditative state to ponder on the meaning of life. With Reed's unique condition, perhaps certain types of stimulation could do the same effect.

So despite what the doctors and what society said, Reed continued to thrive in his own way. Teddy joked that Reed was the way it was because it was genetic. Between Nate's stubbornness and my "innate" drive to prove everybody wrong, it was Reed's nature to break through any barriers before him.

Though there were still a number of obstacles that Reed still needed to overcome. While he seemed to grow leaps and bounds regarding finding means to communicate with us, the invisible walls around him immediately springs up in the presence of strangers. In the past almost five years that my son has been alive, I have yet to see my baby smile or hear him laugh and talk.

That was until Reed's sixth birthday…

"You care more about work than your own family!"

I remembered it clearly as if it happened yesterday. How those horrible words finally managed to edge out of my consciousness and out my lips. It was a tense moment around the dining room table. I was furious. Teddy was usually the only one who could snap me out of rage, but he was... away. Dad was just as angry, but he kept his demeanour festive and cheerful. And Nate…

Nate acted as if he didn't do anything wrong.

And that what prompted the whole thing. My loving husband was late coming home for our son's birthday dinner, despite me reminding him pretty much every day for the past two weeks. If Dad didn't go to the office himself to get my idiot husband, Nate would have forgotten about it altogether.

I suppose I should have gotten used to it. That wasn't the only time that Nate put work a priority over us. Usually I understood. Or at least I tried to understand. I know that Nate's work was very important even more than ever.

There was also the ongoing matter with Teddy that he had to deal with. None of the Richards men would discuss it openly in front of me even though Nate and Teddy argued about it countless of times. They've all pretty much tried to ignore the pink elephant sitting in the corner of the room, but we all knew it was a matter of time. Now, avoidance was totally not an option now that Teddy's name made it to HUAC's list. And Teddy's lack of cooperation was not helping matters either. Nate was doing his best to help his brother and keep Richards Enterprises from going belly-up now that the entire nation seemed to have gone insane with the communism paranoia.

I know this was being selfish of me… but still! Couldn't he spare one evening with our son? Reed barely saw him as it was. Teddy once told me during one of his bouts of depression about his resentment with Dad not being there during the formative years of their lives. While Dad tried to make up for it, especially after Teddy ran away from home (and has made his presence in his grandson's life a major priority), it was obvious that Nate seemed bent on repeating the same pattern with his son. It didn't take long for the forced civility to break down. Not even Dad's diplomatic reasoning was able to stop the impending argument.

Just as Dad gathered Reed in his arms to take him out of the room, I came. It was a soft hoarse sound that probably would have gone unheard if Dad didn't yell at the both Nate and I to shut up. And with some of Dad's prodding, it came again…still soft but clearer.

"Mommy reminded Daddy thirty-five times. Ten times today…"

And as we all stared at my boy in shocked silence, Reed obliviously recalled each and every instance the past two weeks that he heard me nag his father about the dinner, acting as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Hearing my baby speak for the first time was more than enough to bring tears in my eyes. But the feeling I felt on hearing him talk for the first time… in complete sentences… without any of the usual baby words preliminaries… acting as if he was doing it all the time… there were no words to describe it. And based on the identical expressions on both Dad and Nate's faces, they probably felt the same way.

Needless to say, we knew right then and there that things were never going to be the same.

End of Chapter 3

Author's squawk:

According to Marvel, Reed was actually younger than he looked. By contrast the age difference between Reed and Sue shrank from 12 years to 7 years as time passed by. Current canon suggests that Reed and Ben are in their early/mid 40's, Sue and Alicia are in their early/mid 30's and Johnny was stated to be 27 in the Waid run (in the early 2000s).

Stan Lee's explanation for the greying temples was that his hair started to turn grey after the war. In the early FF comics, Reed joined the US Army as a military scientist in WW2 (but Reed's involvement on time specific wars are pretty loosely ignored because of future storyline issues). This was also the time when Reed started his working (and love-hate) relationship with Nick Fury. We don't know much about Nate's background, but we do know that Reed idolized his grandfather (just as much as he loved his Uncle Ted) and as a child, listened John's endless old War Vet stories (MK4 established that John was involved in WW2, effectively erasing Reed's WW2 history). It seemed to imply that Reed had a closer emotional relationship with his Grandfather and his Uncle than with his own father.

Going back to the greying hair… When Nate was first introduced, he looked like a strong strapping man in his 60's with a full shock of white hair… but flashbacks in MK4 (I really love that series) showed Nate with his Reed-esque temples when Reed was 5 or 6 years old. Grandpa John, the paratrooper, was the mirror image of Reed at age 20. All these implied that the greying temples were genetic.

Reed's eye color was actually more dependent on the artist. There were issues in the early FF comics (Byrne's run, I think) that gave Reed blue eyes. I suppose now that we have better digital printing technology, colors show up on paper much better than years before. And I really loved the art in MK4, which gave Reed these almost luminous gold-brown eyes that popped out of paper when they used certain lighting. I think a couple of issues used the same color in Ultimate FF's Reed too. And I just thought it looked awesome, especially on panels where Reed shows strong emotions or has his "thinking" expression on.

Now some more interesting stuff on autism:

Autism is NOT mental retardation despite what literature from the 60's assume. While autism and mental retardation can be present as co-morbid diagnosis in moderate and severe cases, just because you have autism as a diagnosis doesn't necessarily mean that you're automatically mentally retarded. Autistic people's level of intelligence varies the same way as people who don't suffer autism.

The only difference is that we normal people measure/see/demonstrate intelligence via communication… a skill that people with autism lack or have difficulty with. They have difficulty understanding figurative speech. So if you say "Bob is sitting on the fence with this decision", a normal person would interpret it as "Bob is still undecided" but to a person with autism, he'd think that "Bob is literally sitting on the fence". Sarcasm and jokes also fly over their heads and they often miss nonverbal social cues. So people with autism has the tendency to fixate on an interest and will drone on and on and on about it, not getting the nonverbal cues from others that what they're talking about is damn boring.

Thankfully, Reed has Ben and Johnny to remind Reed to shut up when he's talking too much… and let's not forget Reed's notorious sense of humor.

Ja!
Ina-chan