Fortunately Johnny’s suffering didn’t last long.
Relief washed over his face the second he saw the guy with the big capital M on his chest floating outside the window and knocking lightly.
“Hey, somebody order a Superman delivery?”
“Wayne!”
Reed threw both hands in the air and cheered, then barked at the Baxter Building’s AI to open the window.
Reed didn’t even get two steps before a warm, feminine blur shot past him.
Susan launched herself at Wayne the moment he drifted inside, wrapping her arms around his neck in a tight hug.
She held on for a long second, then started checking him over for injuries like a worried mother hen.
Wayne blinked at the pure concern on her face, then smiled.
“Susan, I’m fine.
Really.”
In this world he’d been an orphan from day one until the Storms took him in.
That made Susan his big sister and Johnny his big brother.
They’d all moved out of the old place years ago, but they still lived under the same roof.
Susan was twenty-seven, Johnny twenty-three.
Both had finished college and gone full-time with the Fantastic Four.
Wayne was more of a part-timer.
Most days he only suited up to back the other two up.
Truth was, he’d rather be a singer than a superhero.
Unfortunately he was completely tone-deaf.
He could have rewritten reality to fix that, but he refused.
If it wasn’t his real voice, what was the point?
Johnny poked his head out from behind Susan, voice careful.
“See?
Told you.
My little brother’s invincible.
Nothing’s gonna happen to him.”
“Thanks, Johnny.
It’d be even better if you stopped calling me little brother.”
“Sure thing, little brother.
No problem, little brother.”
Wayne gave him a long, complicated look, then decided it wasn’t worth the argument.
“I can’t win with you two.”
Susan rolled her eyes, reached up, pinched Wayne’s cheek in mild annoyance, then rose on her toes and pressed a quick kiss to the same spot.
“Next time you go running some dangerous experiment, you talk to me first.”
Reed watched the whole thing with clear envy.
He’d asked Susan out more than once.
So had plenty of other guys.
She turned every single one of them down and never explained why.
According to a certain anonymous source (Johnny), it was because she’d been raising her absurdly good-looking little brother as a yandere since they were kids.
Reed was still nursing that particular wound when a small camera device came flying at his face.
He scrambled to catch it.
The second he realized what it was, the melancholy vanished and pure joy took over.
Wayne crossed his arms, one eyebrow raised, corner of his mouth curled up.
“Data inside should be enough.”
“Thanks, Wayne.”
Reed practically sprinted to the computer and plugged the device in.
Inside was every scrap of spacetime data Wayne had recorded while bouncing through the Multiverse.
With this, Reed was certain he could finally build a working Multiverse traversal machine.
While the data loaded he suddenly remembered something and glanced back.
“By the way, a few days ago I picked up a weird signal from deep space.”
“You want me to go check it out?”
“If you’ve got the time.
If you’re busy, don’t worry about it—”
“Of course he’s busy!”
Susan’s glare hit Reed like a physical force.
He instinctively shrank.
“Do you have any idea how far he had to go just to get you that data?”
Johnny quietly sidled over to Ben, took a sip of the coffee the Thing had made, and watched the show like it was free entertainment.
Personally he agreed with Susan.
Why risk another trip?
Even if some alien menace showed up, so what?
His little brother was invincible.
“Sorry, Susan.”
Reed blinked, then gave Wayne an apologetic smile.
“Wayne, I’m sorry.
I keep forgetting you’re still just a kid.”
“Just find some time to upgrade my suit.
I think it’d look cool if this M could light up.”
Wayne could have made the letter glow himself by twisting reality, but he needed to give Reed something to do.
Mr.
Fantastic was one of the smartest people on the planet.
Leaving him with nothing useful would just make him sit in a corner and sulk.
As for actual protection, Wayne couldn’t care less.
The toughest materials in the universe felt like soft tofu to him.
They shattered on contact and weren’t even close to as useful as his own Bio-force field.
“Glowing, huh?”
Reed’s confidence came roaring back.
“I’ll build you a new one.
I’ve been playing with nanotech lately, so I’ll throw that in too.”
“Then I won’t hold back.
And Reed, relax.
The Avengers just showed up, right?
We’re not the only ones around anymore.”
Wayne waved, then drifted upward, ready to leave.
“Not gonna eat something first, Wayne?”
Ben finally spoke up.
He’d noticed the kid still hadn’t had breakfast.
“No need, Ben.
Gwen said she’d bring me something yesterday.”
Susan’s eyes went wide, but Wayne was already out the window and gone in a blink.
She pressed her lips together, clearly not done with the topic.
“When he gets back I’m having a serious talk with that brat.
Girls these days are way too good at wrapping boys around their fingers.”
…
Manhattan, Greenwich.
Empire State University.
Wayne had taken his time flying over from the Baxter Building.
“Slow” for him was still blisteringly fast to everyone else, but for someone who could break light-speed without trying, this barely counted as a casual cruise.
He preferred it this way on Earth.
Not because going faster would wreck the planet—his Bio-force field handled that automatically—but because blazing around at full speed was just boring.
From the stratosphere he locked onto his target in an instant.
The Bio-force field rewrote his combat suit into ordinary clothes.
Students below stared up, excitement written all over their faces as Wayne punched a clean hole tens of meters wide through a cloud layer hundreds of meters thick, then drifted down until he was only a hundred meters above campus.
He landed lightly.
Nobody rushed him.
They’d tried that before.
Every time someone got close they suddenly forgot why they’d walked over in the first place.
They all suspected Superman was doing it on purpose, but there was never any proof.
So they just stood there staring, hoping he’d somehow read their minds through eye contact alone.
“I really don’t get why they always stare like that.”
“Maybe because you look like that and still act surprised?”
A girl with long golden hair, a slim waist, and curves in all the right places stepped out of the crowd.
She used a paper bag of sandwiches to half-hide her face, grabbed Wayne’s hand, and towed him away before anyone could react, leaving a trail of jealous stares behind them.