Chapter Text
The horizon had long since swallowed the coastline, leaving nothing but an endless expanse of cobalt sea and the steel-gray sky pressing down upon her. Marin Lensherr had lost all sense of time. Minutes? Hours? The relentless pursuit of the three Sentinels had blurred it all into one unbroken, suffocating moment.
At first, she had fought them—turning the ocean itself into a weapon. Towers of seawater had risen at her command, blades of saltwater slicing toward the machines, waves crashing with the force of hurricanes. But the Sentinels did not tire. They did not slow. They adapted. Whatever the humans had done to improve their mutant-killing constructs had rendered them near-unstoppable.
Gone were the clumsy giants from her childhood—these were sleeker, faster, ruthless in design. Their alloy plating was unmarred by rust, their voices no longer a tinny approximation of authority but an unfeeling monotone, issuing her death sentence with each calculated move. She had heard rumors, whispers from the dying, that the latest generation had already wiped out entire enclaves of mutants along the coasts. She had not believed it. Not until now.
Now, she bled.
A deep gash along her side—torn open by the Sentinels’ concussive blasts—burned like liquid fire. Every stroke forward sent knives of pain through her torso. Her hydrokinetic gift was all that kept her alive; she coaxed her own blood to flow where her veins had been severed, forcing her heart to keep beating despite the wound. It was a trick she had learned in desperation, and it was costing her dearly.
Even in water, where she was faster than any human-built machine, the effort slowed her. The Sentinels, by contrast, never slowed. Their red optical sensors glowed behind her like distant lighthouses, unblinking, unmerciful.
Perhaps this was how it ended—not in a blaze of victory, but swallowed by the ocean she had always called her ally. To join the long, silent company of her kind who had fallen.
She risked a glance over her shoulder, bracing for the sight of chrome and crimson light bearing down on her.
Instead… there was nothing.
The ocean stretched out behind her in serene, alien stillness. No silhouettes cutting through the water, no thrum of propulsion. No gleaming eyes fixed upon her. They were simply… gone.
She remained suspended in the deep, her body encased in the shimmering sphere of air she maintained for breath. Her free hand clutched the wound at her side, the other held open toward the darkness, ready to send the ocean crashing down upon any threat. Her breathing was ragged in her own ears.
They could not have vanished. Machines like that didn’t retreat. They were built to hunt—and to finish.
Yet the blue abyss around her was empty, as if they had never been there at all.
Same time, somewhere else.
Johnny Storm had been grumbling to himself from the moment he’d left the Baxter Building. Apparently, being the fastest flyer in the Western Hemisphere also made him the team’s unofficial errand boy. Point Nemo—the most remote spot in the Pacific—wasn’t exactly a joyride destination. And yet, here he was, tearing across open water in full flame mode because some blinking console back home had thrown an alert at three in the morning.
All thanks to Reed.
"You really don’t know what I’m looking for, Stretch?" Johnny spoke into the slim, polished communicator set into his wristwatch—a sleek bit of retro-futurist design Reed had whipped up from alien circuitry and sheer boredom. His voice crackled across the channel as he scanned the horizon, the ocean glittering like liquid mercury beneath him.
On the other end, Reed’s steady baritone replied, “The readings indicate a localized anomaly—something that doesn’t belong. No fixed mass, no constant output, but… different. Distinct.” He was clearly trying to translate his genius into plain English. Reed was an astronaut, a polyglot in half a dozen alien dialects, and the sharpest mind Johnny knew—but explaining things simply? That was a stretch even for him.
Johnny rolled his eyes. “Yeah, and what if your mystery ‘something’ is the size of a paperclip at the bottom of the Mariana Trench? Hate to break it to you, Mr. Fantastic, but I’m fast—not pressure-resistant.” He dipped lower, skimming just above the rolling swells.
Reed’s voice carried a faint edge now, even through the static. “Just keep scouting the coordinates for a little longer. If you can’t identify it, we’ll bring heavier equipment. But this is important, Johnny. More important than you think.”
Johnny let out a resigned sigh. “Copy that.” He banked left, the horizon shifting, endless blue in every direction. Nothing but sea and sky for miles.
Half an hour passed. He’d been on the verge of calling in again—and maybe lodging a fresh complaint for good measure—when he saw it.
Or rather… when she saw him.
She rose from the depths without a ripple, as if the ocean had decided to conjure her into being. Water spiraled upward around her like a column of glass, cocooning her lower body. Her skin was pale under the sunlight, her hair black as ink and heavy with seawater, her posture defensive. One hand pressed hard against her side, the other hovering warily in the air.
For a beat, neither moved. Johnny blinked. In the last few years, he’d seen plenty of things that defied explanation—Shalla-Bal surfing the silver tides of space among them—so a woman materializing from the Pacific and bending the ocean to her will didn’t exactly short out his brain. But still, it wasn’t the kind of sight you expected .
Her voice broke the silence first, sharp and accented—though Johnny couldn’t quite place the origin. “Were you followed? Did you see where they went?”
He frowned, unsure what to make of her urgency. “Where who went? We’re in the middle of the ocean, lady.” His gaze flicked downward and caught on the deep crimson welling between her fingers. She was injured—badly. And whatever had happened, it was clear she was the anomaly Reed had sent him after.
She shifted higher in her watery cradle, scanning the horizon. “The Sentinels!” The word was spat out like a curse. Her eyes snapped back to his, narrowing. “You work for them, don’t you?”
Johnny raised his hands in mock surrender, the flames retreating from his face to reveal his expression. He’d learned, somewhere along the line, that you couldn’t calm people down when you looked like a walking bonfire. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Sentinels, scentinels, whatever—not ringing a bell. But you’re bleeding, and you’re miles from anything resembling civilization. You need help.” He stepped—well, floated—forward, his hand lifting toward his watch.
She didn’t answer. Instead, she backed away, her gaze darting toward every movement of the waves. Johnny used the silence to tap the communicator.
“Team, I found the anomaly. She’s—uh—female. Wounded, disoriented, very upset. Also, stunning , for the record.”
Sue’s voice came through crisp and unimpressed. “Focus, Johnny.”
“Right, sorry. She’s got some kind of hydrokinesis, like—”
He didn’t finish. The ocean around her suddenly surged, and she was upon him, carried forward by a wave that towered like the side of a building.
“You’re with them! Traitor! ”
The wall of water clipped his side as he shot skyward, steam hissing where it grazed his flames. Another wave rose, even larger—he twisted, let it pass beneath him, and felt its crash shake the air. When he looked back, she was gone.
Johnny swore under his breath and tapped the communicator again. “Update: she’s very angry. Called me a traitor. Keeps mentioning some ‘them’—whoever they are, they messed her up bad.”
“Convince her otherwise,” Sue ordered. “And get her back to civilization.”
“Yeah, easier said than done, Sueze. You try chasing an angry mermaid halfway to nowhere!” He poured on the speed, tracing the faint stream of bubbles in the water below. Spotting her dark shape beneath the surface, he swept ahead, cutting off her path with tight bursts of concentrated flame—herding her, he hoped, toward the distant coast.
With any luck, she’d wear herself out before he did. And then he could get her back to the Baxter Building, where Reed could figure out who she was, what had happened to her… and why she looked at him like an enemy.
And Johnny had been right. The chase lasted barely an hour before her speed began to falter—her movements growing sluggish, her propulsion sputtering. Then, as though the last thread of strength had been cut, she simply stopped.
Her body went slack and drifted upward, breaking the surface in a slow, graceless roll. Without consciousness, her powers no longer kept her blood circulating; it seeped freely into the seawater, blossoming around her in plumes of rusty crimson.
Johnny dipped lower, flames trailing like comet-fire against the horizon. “Good news: the beautiful anomaly has officially tapped out. Bad news: she’s bleeding like a stuck radiator.”
He descended and swept her into his arms, the seawater clinging cold and heavy against his uniform. Adjusting his hold, he slid one arm beneath her shoulders, the other pressing a bare hand—glove hastily peeled away — against the wound in an attempt to slow the flow.
Ben’s voice came over the intercom, deep and steady. “Good news for you , hotshot—you can fly at supersonic speeds.”
Then Reed, his tone precise and clinical, layered over the channel. “Monitor the hemorrhage closely. If the arterial pressure drops, we may be dealing with compromised vasculature and possible organ trauma. Apply as much compression as her anatomy will permit without exacerbating shock.” He spoke like a man who had read every surgical textbook ever printed and dissected them for sport.
Johnny cracked his neck, letting the flames rekindle from the waist down, his legs a streak of orange and gold. “Be back in a jiffy,” he said—and then was gone, the air splitting with a boom as he broke the sound barrier.
In a jiffy turned out to mean several hours. Even at top speed, Manhattan was a long way from the most desolate patch of ocean on the planet. By the time the Baxter Building’s silver spire came into view, the October sun had dipped low, gilding the skyline in amber light.
Johnny touched down on the grand balcony, heat shimmering in the crisp evening air. The rest of the team was already there. Ben stepped forward without a word, lifting the unconscious woman easily from Johnny’s arms and carrying her inside. Reed was in motion before her form even touched the examination table, his hands stretching across the room to calibrate an array of sleek, chrome-edged diagnostic machines.
“The bleeding stopped about ninety minutes before we hit visual land,” Johnny reported as Sue slipped into place beside Reed, “but her pulse stayed steady the whole way.”
Sue was already working, scissors flashing as she cut away the intricate, light-reactive fabric of the woman’s suit. The material caught the lab’s glow and shifted colors faintly, like moonlight on water. “No visceral organ compromise,” she confirmed after a long moment, “but there’s a severed artery.”
“Repairable,” Reed said, guiding a slender, articulated robotic arm into place. The micro-surgeon—a Baxter original—stitched the damage with clean, fluid motions.
But the injury was far from the only mark on her body. As the fabric was peeled away, a long gash across her arm revealed skin singed by some intense heat; faint ridges of scar tissue mapped her shoulders and ribs. Sue moved with quiet care, keeping herself between the woman and the room while she was changed into a loosely fitted dress Ben had fetched from storage.
Once the procedures were complete, all four stood watch around the examination table. The raven-haired stranger lay still, pale against the sterile white, her dark lashes stark against skin that looked almost translucent.
Sue finally turned toward her brother, her voice measured. “Did you get anything out of her? A name? Where she’s from? Why she was in the middle of the Pacific?”
Johnny’s gaze lingered on her face—ethereal even in exhaustion. “Hm? Oh. No. Didn’t get a name. She didn’t exactly stop for a friendly chat. Just some accent I couldn’t place, and a lot of talk about ‘them.’ And anger. Lots of anger.”
Sue’s sigh was soft but edged. She rolled her chair closer to the head of the table, brushing back the woman’s damp hair. “There’s something tattooed here… CALYPSO-9.” She glanced toward Reed. “Scars everywhere else. What do you make of it?”
Reed didn’t look up from the bank of monitors as he analyzed a vial of her blood. “Possibly the designation of an experimental subject. Her genetic sequence is human in its primary architecture, but there’s a single gene… utterly alien to my database. Not mutant in the conventional sense, nor any extraterrestrial genome I’ve catalogued. The structure is… novel. Purpose-built, perhaps.”
One of his elongated arms reached across the lab to lift a fragment of her suit. “And this material—reactive to ambient light, hydrophobic, yet porous enough for prolonged submersion. Highly specialized.”
Ben stepped in, his broad hand settling on Sue’s shoulder. “Why don’t you go see Franklin. We’ll hold the fort tonight.”
“Me and Big Ben’ll keep watch,” Johnny added with a grin, holding up a hand for a high five. Ben gave him a flat stare in return.
Sue gave her brother that stop it with the love-at-first-sight routine look that only siblings could perfect. Then she crossed to Reed, pressing a kiss to his cheek. “Keep me updated.”
With one last glance toward the unconscious woman, Sue slipped from the lab, leaving the anomaly in the care of the team—and in the sights of the one person already burning to know more.
While Reed immersed himself in the labyrinthine data streaming from his consoles—cross-referencing the anomaly woman’s genome against every catalogued strain in his archives—Ben and Johnny had improvised a makeshift card table beside her bed. Canasta might not have been standard procedure for monitoring a mysterious, possibly extraterrestrial guest, but in the Fantastic Four’s world, “standard” rarely applied.
The lab was awash in the steady, mechanical heartbeat of the monitoring equipment—sharp, punctual beeps overlayed with the low hum of cooling fans and the faint ozone tang from Reed’s latest bio-analyzer. Occasionally, conversation broke through: speculative theories about her origins, ranging from the plausible to the wildly improbable. But each hypothesis collapsed the moment Reed, in that calm, calculating tone that could dismantle entire arguments with a single clause, unveiled his own.
“It is far more likely,” he had concluded earlier, “that we are looking at the direct result of a Quantum Convergence Event—her presence here coinciding precisely with a trans-dimensional coordinate collapse.”
Translation: she hadn’t meant to be here. The universe had simply picked her up and dropped her in their lap.
Even so, the questions were endless, and every answer depended on her waking up.
The hours crawled by without incident. Sue returned around two in the morning, hair slightly mussed from having been roused by Franklin. She listened to Reed’s theory, contributed a few quiet observations, then departed again. Night reclaimed the lab, save for the quiet company of its occupants.
By five o’clock, fatigue had set in. Ben was slumped in his chair, chin tucked to chest, snoring faintly. Reed hovered over his microscope, lids heavy, the glow from its optics reflecting off his glasses. Johnny wasn’t much better—spinning a small, mechanical trinket between his fingers while seated beside their guest’s bed.
The sharp escalation of the heart monitor snapped him from his fog. His gaze darted to her—eyelids fluttering, then flying open. But the eyes that met his weren’t the clouded whites he’d seen in the Pacific. Now, deep amber-brown irises locked on him, catching the harsh laboratory light like molten glass.
Her breathing quickened. The beeping accelerated in time with her pulse. Her awareness sharpened—and the moment she registered the wires, tubing, and IV line, her body reacted with startling precision.
“Hey—hey now! You’ve lost a lot of blood, you can’t just—” Johnny was already on his feet as she tore sensors from her skin, yanked the IV free, and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She moved like a cornered predator, clutching her abdomen through the ill-fitting hospital dress, backing away from him.
The crash of the table jolted Ben awake. Reed turned from his scope in time to see her heading for the far side of the lab.
“We don’t want to hurt you, miss,” Ben said, palms out, voice level. But his composure only seemed to heighten her suspicion. She pivoted sharply, eyes darting to the nearest window as if measuring the drop.
Reed extended an arm to intercept, aiming to secure her without injury. But she caught the motion in her peripheral vision, her expression hardening.
Her irises bleached white. Her brow drew low. With a single, cutting sweep of her hand, an unseen force hurled Reed’s elastic arm backward like a recoiling spring.
“Do not touch me!”
She was almost at the window.
“I thought you said she had hydrokinetic powers, Johnny,” Ben said from across the room, his voice edged with disbelief.
“Most people are made of a lot of water, Ben!” Johnny shot back, slowly circling toward her. His tone was light, but his posture telegraphed caution—hands raised, movements measured. “Look, we don’t want to chase you again. Just—hear me out. The Sentinels—”
The word froze her. Her stance tightened, shoulders locked.
“We don’t know what they are,” Johnny pressed, his voice lowering. “We’re not with them. And we don’t know you.”
The stare she leveled at him was long and calculating, like she was weighing the truth in his tone against her own battered instincts. Gradually, her shoulders eased. Her eyes returned to their deep amber hue.
Still wary, she spoke. “Where am I?”
“You’re in New York,” Reed began, his voice regaining its measured cadence, “specifically the Baxter Building. Though, given the likelihood of dimensional displacement, I suspect the name holds little relevance for you. My working hypothesis is that you’ve been caught in a QC event—wherein identical quantum particles across two or more universes—”
“Reed,” Sue’s voice cut in from the doorway. She had arrived silently, Franklin balanced on her hip. “She’s in no condition for one of your dissertations.”
Ben nodded toward their guest. “Yeah. She looks like she’s one wrong move from collapsing again.”
Reed exhaled, redirecting his thoughts. “Fine. Get the IV going again and get her settled in the guest quarters. Johnny—you’re on watch.”
“No.” The woman’s voice was firm, flat. “No needles. No IV.”
“You need fluids. Analgesics. Your system is in shock—” Reed began.
“No! I do not trust your machines!” Her voice rose to a shout. The spike of adrenaline made her wince, bending slightly with the pain.
Johnny stepped forward, palms up. “Okay—how about we keep that on the table for later? No more needles unless you say so. You think you can handle the pain, fine. But maybe—just maybe—you could give us a name? ‘Anomaly woman’—as alluring as it sounds— doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.”
Her gaze flicked to his extended hand, weighing the gesture. She didn’t take it, but she closed the distance between them by one careful step.
“My name is Marin.”
Johnny exhaled softly—just enough to betray the tension that had been coiled in his shoulders since she’d first woken. A name. It seemed like such a small thing, but “Marin” gave shape to the mystery, and for Johnny Storm, that was progress.
He nodded a few times, retracting the hand he’d offered and gesturing toward himself with an easy smile. “Marin, I’m Johnny.” He angled a thumb toward the blonde woman standing nearby with a toddler balanced on her hip. “That’s my sister, Sue—and the pint-sized scene-stealer is my nephew, Franklin.”
Marin’s eyes trailed after him, appraising Sue with a measured gaze, her expression cool and deliberate. But when her focus drifted to Franklin, the hardness in her features softened, if only for an instant. Her attention then shifted toward the tall, dark-haired man Johnny indicated next—an imposing presence of intellect more than physique.
“And that,” Johnny continued, “is Reed Richards—our resident emotionally dense science man, also known as my brother-in-law.”
Finally, Johnny gestured toward the towering figure across the room. “And that big guy over there—that’s Ben.”
Ben, ever the steady one, lifted a broad rocky hand in greeting. Marin didn’t flinch, didn’t ask, didn’t even blink at the sight of a man sculpted from living stone—an unusual reaction for someone supposedly from another universe.
Though the tension in the room had ebbed, it rose again when Reed began moving toward them. Marin’s posture stiffened immediately. Reed seemed to note it; he halted halfway, then simply extended a hand toward Johnny. “Take this and see to it,” Reed said.
Johnny gave Marin a quick glance before closing the distance to Reed, who pressed something discreetly into his palm—a sleek, silver-banded device with a subtle gleam of blue along its edge. In a voice pitched low enough to avoid other ears, Reed murmured, “It’s a bio-monitor—tracks heart rate, oxygen saturation… and if she leaves the building, we’ll know.”
Johnny’s expression flickered—equal parts disapproval and reluctant understanding—but he slid the device into the pocket of his crisp white trousers. Turning back to Marin with a roguish half-smile, he asked, “Shall we get you somewhere a little less… crowded, milady?”
Marin cast one more wary glance toward the others before stepping to Johnny’s side, keeping a cautious two feet between them as they entered the elevator.
She watched his hand hover over the control panel before pressing the button for the 31st floor, noting that they’d started on the 33rd. The subtle hum beneath their feet suggested precision engineering far beyond anything in her world. Did they own an entire skyscraper? Perhaps they were wealthy in the way Charles had been. Questions pressed at her lips, but wariness kept them unspoken.
The elevator chimed—a smooth, gentle sound—and the polished steel doors parted. Johnny stepped out first, motioning for her to follow.
The space they entered had a design she could only describe as tomorrow’s dream of yesterday : sleek chrome lines softened by warm amber lighting, furniture arranged in a great oval around a circular hearth, and a panoramic window stretching from floor to ceiling that framed a Manhattan awash in pale morning light.
“So—” Johnny began, clasping his hands before him and walking backward so he could watch her as they moved through the lounge, “—where are you from?”
She blinked at him, uncertain of the intent behind the question. “Westchester County…?”
Now it was Johnny’s turn to look puzzled, as though her answer hadn’t even brushed the surface of what he’d meant. “I mean your accent—it’s not local. Not even from this side of the hemisphere.”
They reached the guest room. Johnny pushed the door open with a flourish, stepping aside. Marin slipped past him, her eyes roaming over the space—retro elegance again, but spacious, with its own massive window spilling daylight over the polished floors. She crossed the room almost instinctively, drawn to the glass, drinking in the skyline.
“Finland,” she said at last. “No, I can’t speak the language. Moved to the States as a child—the accent just… stayed. That answer all your questions?”
Johnny nodded, shutting the door before joining her at the window. “Oh, that’s just one category. Trust me—my list is longer than Reed’s Christmas shopping.” He shifted his gaze from the city outside to her profile—how her eyes moved over the details, as though she were comparing them to something in memory.
“We are in New York, right?” she asked suddenly, her voice low, careful.
“That’s correct…?” he replied, the upward lilt in his tone making it a question of his own.
Her hand moved instinctively to her side, fingers pressing against the wound beneath the borrowed dress. She stepped away from the window, toward the bed. “Your New York is a lot nicer.”
Johnny’s gaze trailed after her almost involuntarily, his usual easy confidence momentarily shaken. He wasn’t exactly a stranger to beautiful women, but Marin was… different. The way she moved—even injured—was purposeful, like someone who had lived too long on the edge of danger. He caught himself staring just in time to see her turn her back, the thin hospital-style gown shifting as she carefully lifted it to check the fresh bandaging at her side. The glimpse of toned thighs and the quick flash of a curve just above sent a sudden heat up his neck—not the kind he could blame on his powers.
A win, he thought automatically, though the unexpectedness of it knocked him off his rhythm.
He cleared his throat, determined to regain some ground. “Nicer? So what’s your version of New York like?” His voice stayed casual, though his fingers worked in his pocket, fishing out the sleek, brushed-chrome watch Reed had pressed into his hand before they’d left the lab.
Marin eased the duvet back with deliberate care, sliding beneath it as though it were the first safe place she’d touched in days. The bedding was crisp, the mattress luxurious—a far cry from whatever accommodations she was used to. She exhaled slowly, her head sinking into the thick, feather-stuffed pillow, and for the first time since Johnny had met her, her shoulders uncoiled.
“The city I know,” she said quietly, eyes half-lidded, “is dull. Broken. Not the kind of skyline you want burned into memory.”
Johnny glanced over his shoulder, saw her settled in bed, and turned toward her fully. He rolled the watch over in his palm as he walked forward. “Sounds—depressing…” He left it there, not pressing. Then, with a faint smile, he extended the device toward her. “Here. Would you put this on?”
Her brow arched instantly. “Why?” The word was pointed, her body shifting subtly away from him. “What does it do?”
He hesitated only a fraction, glancing down at the watch before meeting her gaze again. Those amber eyes searched his face with a focus that made him feel like she was peeling him apart molecule by molecule. “It monitors your vitals—heart rate, oxygen saturation. If something takes a turn for the worse, we’ll know right away.” He was keeping the fact that it could also track her location a secret, something he figured would only freak her out more if she knew.
“You try it first,” she said, still studying him. She sat up a little more, back resting against the headboard, her expression unreadable but her attention razor-sharp.
Johnny didn’t argue. He wasn’t entirely sure why she was so guarded, but pressing her now would only rise the wall between them higher. “Sure,” he said lightly, fastening it next to his own watch.
“Use your power,” she said. It wasn’t a request—it was a test. Her gaze flicked from his wrist to his face, waiting.
He might not have understood the game she was playing, but he played along. With a grin, he let his right hand erupt in a burst of golden-orange flame, a warm glow flickering in the dim light of the guest suite. “See? Just a watch,” he said, the fire snuffing out with a soft sizzle. “Will you put it on now?”
She thought for a long moment, then extended her wrist toward him without a word. It wasn’t agreement, exactly, but it was trust—or the beginning of it.
Johnny slid the watch from his wrist and fastened it around hers, making sure it sat snug enough to read her pulse. For some reason, he lingered a heartbeat longer before letting go. “What kind of scary watches have you run into that make this one feel like a threat?”
Marin eased back into the bed, drawing the duvet close around her like armor. Her voice was quieter now, almost lost against the pillow. “Where I come from—there are a lot of things made to hurt us.”
Johnny’s mind sparked with a dozen questions, each one chasing the next, but before he could voice even one, her eyes had closed. The guarded sharpness in her features softened into something almost peaceful.
And so he sat there for a moment longer, watching her breathe, wondering just how far from home she really was—and what she’d had to survive before ending up with them.