Reed Richards I Mr. Fantastic
Feelings that break every formula // Earth-616
"My love for Franklin was never theatrical, it was so natural that I didn't even really notice it until it was gone....Now I notice every gap, every room in this building screams for him. He's not back.... go ahead and say that, it doesn't change anything and it makes it harder to breathe. This is not a stage I could tick off, not a mission with an end point, nothing I could explore, it's a flaw in my equations that I can't get rid of no matter how many times I try to calculate it. I react in routines... in public I am the one who fixes things, who puts things back together, one of those saviors of the world even though I don't even know if it's worth saving this world anymore, because when you feel that something is missing that had fixed yourself little by little, all progress collapses like a house of cards. At home I just move like a machine with a broken sensor, no status can be called up anymore.. just a constant, empty alarm in my chest. I wake up in the morning and have to count: Is my breath still working? Yes... my heart? Yes.. Am I still alive? Yes.. Franklin?... Not here.. And this repeats itself in a never-ending loop. My body rises and goes to work but my mind seems to run against the wall, I never thought the word helpless could give me such a bitter taste. Sometimes I start talking to him as if that would help, I mention his first bike that he was way too small for, or the stain on his favorite t-shirt that even I couldn't get out with all these machines and analysis. It's strange, I suddenly feel anger that suddenly makes everything easier... it clicks my nerves on again, makes my hands faster and my voice harder, I blame myself for all of this and this feeling is almost stronger than the anger and I know that neither will get me one step further but will only numb the pain for a moment. I rarely show emotion, out of habit. Emotional expression was always a kind of signal that I could control, now I feel so damn overstimulated and numb at the same time. Too many impressions flood me... and yet there is too little support. When I'm alone, words come out that I never wanted to say and that is that I'm afraid and I'm afraid that this fear will permanently reprogram me, that the person I was will fail and in the end I will truely become someone who only reacts. The worst thing is not knowing if he is still alive... if he is suffering or if he even knows me anymore. This silence of the universes is a disease... it wears you down, it eats you up, it turns me, who always thought I was absolutely logical, into someone who is plagued every night with the question of whether I have failed. And the answer that keeps buzzing through my head is a resounding yes, because right now I'm wallowing in a form of self-pity instead of trying to save him, to find out where he is... but even if it sounds dubious, I've tried everything and if even my intelligence fails at all of this... if there's nothing I can do, then in a way I'm just a useless shell.
This emptiness, it's a constant hurt, it's molding me into something I don't know... and I don't think it's molding me into something better. I have to learn to exist with this pain... it's harder than anything I've ever experienced."
He listened to the tape recording of his own words several times as he shook his head over and over, hoping to discover himself in it, but the suffering weighed so heavily that he deleted the recording and destroyed the tape recorder. Life had to go on... even if it hardly felt like life, but like a mathematical equation that led nowhere.