Mae Overdosed

SSR: I couldn't leave it at that. I got a call that Mae had OD's. I found Mae in her apartment, on the floor...

The words did not measure up to the stark reality of that morning when Sue Storm had gone to her friend's dorm. She had found the door unlocked. Mae on the floor. Face crusted with white powder. Not breathing. The cold, stark horror that had frozen her heart and nearly sapped her courage. Sue's brain had raced a thousand miles a minute as she called 9-1-1. Desperately pounding Mae's chest as she waited for the EMTs, forcing her breath into Mae's mouth.

She didn't think of the **** that still crusted Mae's mouth until her own heart began to beat hummingbird-fast, and the dim apartment seemed to grow brighter. Then the EMTs were there and took over. They carried her out on a stretcher, and she was breathing, alive and not awake but awake and...

Sue had gone through Mae's apartment and taken everything. Every pill, every baggy. She should have flushed it down the toilet. After all, Sue had no idea who Mae had bought it from or who she owed.

The night before the rocket trip with Reed, Sue had taken Mae out of the hospital and ridden in the cab with her to the detox clinic. Mae was sullen, out of it. Sue wasn't sure how much damage had been done, but to her, the other woman had looked tired, so very tired. Yet there was a look of such terrible triumph in her eyes as the nurse checked her in.

It was as if she knew that Sue still had the ****. Knew she hadn't disposed of them. That it was only a matter of time.

SSR: After we got back from outer space, I was freaking out. Flickering in and out of sight. I couldn't control my powers. Ben was in pain. Johnny was spontaneously setting things on fire. Reed could barely maintain solid form, and he was the only one who could safely get us hotel rooms. Two rooms. I was all on my own, because I was a girl. And I had my stash. Just a little something I'd taken for emergency, some downers. And I...I took them. I told myself it was to calm down.

JVD: Oh, Sue...

Even as Sue had crushed the pills and snorted them, she had told herself that this was a one-off. An emergency. A crutch. Except she had looked at herself in the mirror, with the little powder ringing her nostril as her face faded in and out of sight, and she just wanted to escape from her reality.

A crutch. One she leaned on when things got too much.

*PING*PING*PING*PING*...

"Oh no," Reed said. "The chronal divergence is spreading. It started in our college days, but the changes are propagating out through the timeline. Ben, how are we coming along?"

"Few more minutes, stretch," the Thing said, as he snapped chronal shielding into place on the Fantasticar. "But how we gonna know what's been changed? And how can we change it back without creatin' a blim-blasted alternate timeline?"

"Never fear for that, chum," Reed said. "I've reverse-engineered some of Doom's temporal technology. If we can identify when the changes occurred, we can fix things without creating an alternate timeline. As long as the time changes don't interfere with our history sufficiently to prevent us, we have a window of opportunity."

SSR: So, you know. There were times I fell off the wagon for a bit. I'm not proud of it. But eventually the **** ran out, and I had to get more.

JVD: How!?