Better Than Ever

"Good," Sue Storm said. There was confusion in her voice. Even a touch of wonder. "Really good. I feel so—alive. Almost bursting with energy."

She held up a hand, which faded into view.

"I can see so clearly. And my hand—the scar I had, on my little finger, where I burned myself the first time I touched Johnny after he became the Human Torch. It's gone. All the little aches and pains...I can't feel any of them."

Doctor Doom inclined his head slightly.

"The healing resulted in healing at a genetic level. Even the changes to your DNA caused by aging have been repaired," his voice echoed within his mask.

She blinked, then turned those blue eyes towards him.

"Johnny—Ben—Reed! What happened to them, where are they?" she asked.

"You do not remember?" Doom said.

"The last thing I remember is...is..." Sue blinked, suddenly unsure of herself. "We were fighting a robot in Central Park. Something pierced my thigh. A radioactive isotope."

She clutched at her leg, which came into view. There was not even a scar now.

"Reed and the others—they went off into the dimensions, to find the source. Franklin and Valeria went away for a while, and then...then..." Sue's brow furrowed. She frowned. "...I can't remember. It's like there's a hole where those memories should be."

"Hmm," Doom mused. "The experience was traumatic. The healing ritual may have removed or muted such memories, if they interfered with your...restoration."

Sue Storm shook her head.

"My kids—" she said.

"Are upstairs, waiting for you. Clothing has been prepared, as well as a meal, and guest quarters for the three of you. The Baxter Building is—not safe, at the moment. But you are my guest here, under my protection. None shall harm you. In this, you have the word of Doom."

The Invisible Woman shot Doom a look that struck him to the core. For a moment—the barest of moments—the expression on her face was not Sue Storm's at all. A hauntingly familiar expression that struck a chord, deep in his soul. When next the blonde spoke, it was with a strangely different voice, and not in English, but in the Latverian language.

<<Oh, Victor. Do not make idle oaths. It is beneath you.>>

Then Sue Storm's normal expression returned. She allowed Doom to lead her upstairs. There was a dress there, the colorful dress of a Latverian hausfrau, with small soft slippers and the close-fitting green dirndl that served as a bodice, lifting her breasts and emphasizing them in the short-sleeved, open-collared white blouse.

Franklin and Valeria were already at the long table in the main hall as it was set for supper. They ran to their mother and hugged her tight. She cradled them to her, a picture of a family that had been torn apart and reunited.

During the meal the followed, Doom did not remove his mask. He sat, and let the children speak to her mother. She drowned when she heard their account of events. Her blue eyes flashed toward Doom once or twice as her intelligent mind intuited something of what had happened during the period of blankness in her memory. After dessert, the children were visibly exhausted.

"We'll stay here tonight," Sue told them, and Doom waited outside the guest chamber as she tucked her kids into bed. Once the door was closed, she turned those dangerous blue eyes on Doom.

"Tell me," she said. "What really happened with this 'Porkum.'"

"I will show you," he said flatly.

In the communciations center of Doomstadt, technicians were ushered out so that Sue could sit alone at a console. She watched, heat rushing to her face, as she reviewed news reports of herself and Porkum together. Reviewed the surreptitious spy feeds that had caught some of Sue's escapades in and out of the Baxter Building. Then Doom's own suit's recordings of his invasion of the Fantastic Four's home, the moment he caught Porkum and Sue—and the monstrous mutant's destruction.

Tears ran down her eyes as the enormity of her sexual transgressions weighed upon her shoulders, even as the memories of participating in those betrayals stubbornly refused to surface.

"His mutant power involved a powerful pheromone," Doom said, softly. "You could not have resisted. It was not a matter of will, mere biochemistry. Perhaps if Richards had not left..."

She glared at him, her face wet, and that strange, terribly familiar mask returned. The Invisible Woman spoke, once more in that odd voice, in Latverian.

<<But he did leave. And you are here.>> The Invisible Woman's hand reached out to rest on Doom's armored thigh. <<That is what you want, isn't it? What you have always wanted, though you would hardly admit it to yourself.>>

Doom's mystic sensors tuned themselves to the female figure before him as Sue rose, hitched up her skirts, and straddled his lap, to press her cleavage against his breastplate.

<<Come now. I do not wish to be alone tonight. This is what you want, isn't it? I want it too.>>

There was something there. Some other spiritual presence within Sue Storm's body. An extra surge of life-**** bound up with her own. Doctor Doom scowled behind his mask. It was a presence he knew, though he had not recognized it until now.