Simple Unicycle
Fetzen
Seymour, Indiana
In the small motel room that passed for Rachna Koul’s temporary Seymour residence, Johnny Storm was observing the pieces of evidence the scientist had brought with her to Indiana. There were journals, almost half a dozen of them, and folders full of pictures. It was almost too much for Johnny to take in. His blue eyes ran over the words, daubed in a handwriting that felt faintly familiar to him, trying his best to hear his father’s voice in his head. Every now and then he would have to remind himself that the words weren’t coming from the mouth of his Franklin Storm, of his father, but in the moment it didn’t seem to matter at all.
There was no smoking gun amongst all it all but it was clear that foul play had taken place. SHIELD were keeping tabs on Franklin. The man was a genius, maybe the second most intelligent man on Earth, so if he felt the net closing in around him, chances are that he wasn’t making it up. The pictures of unmarked cars following his every move, the financial irregularities, the autopsy notes that had been tampered with.
Koul seemed to sense that Johnny Storm’s mind was opening to the possibility that SHIELD had murdered Franklin. “Do you believe me now?”
“Holy shit,” Johnny whispered as he inspected one of Franklin Storm’s journals. “You weren’t making it up. SHIELD were up to something.”
“I don’t know that something quite does it justice, Johnny," Koul murmured as she produced the most recent journal. "These journals arrived at my parent’s home last week. In all my years at the Baxter Building, Franklin never even met my parents. I don’t know when he sent them but if he did, it was because he wanted me to know what was going on. The last entry is from the morning Franklin apparently committed suicide.”
Johnny saw Koul’s lip quiver somewhat as she flicked through the journal's pages. The scientist tried several times to read from it and each time her voice died in her throat. Johnny had been so busy thinking about his own strange non-familial relationship with this world’s Franklin Storm that he’d forgotten that he’d been like a father to Koul. He could only imagine how traumatic all of this must be for the scientist.
“SHIELD are watching me. I know that. I feel their eyes on me. Nowhere I go is safe. Not even my own home is safe. It is not enough that they have taken my children from me. Now they are intent upon ending my life. If you are reading this, they have succeeded. Be careful, Rachna. They will come for you and Victor too eventually. They will come for all of us. Be careful.”
It didn’t make for pretty reading – or listening. Johnny gritted his teeth through it. It was either the paranoid ramblings of a delusional man still reeling from the death of his children or a desperate cry for help from beyond the grave. Perhaps it was both. Johnny didn’t know what to think. Coupled with the other coincidences scattered through the documents, it was hard to deny the weight of evidence staring him in the face. Yet the mention of one name amongst the passage Koul recited seemed to pique his interest more than the rest.
“Victor?” Johnny said with a suspicious look. “As in Victor von Doom?”
Koul nodded. “Yes, Victor von Doom. He studied alongside us at the Baxter Building. A brilliant scientist – though he seems to have traded it all in of late and become something of a leftist firebrand in Latveria. Not that I’m surprised. There always was a crusading zeal about him.”
“And you’re sure that there’s not some way that maybe Doom was involved? Not to completely disregard old Franklin’s words there but Doom being behind this all seems to make a lot more sense than Nick Fury holding the smoking gun.”
“What?” Koul sighed as the scientist's face seemed to crumple with displeasure. “No, Victor would never do that. He and Reed were like best friends. They worshiped the ground that Franklin walked on. There was no way he would ever turn on him. Loyalty was kind of Victor's brand.”
To see the way that Rachna had leapt to Doom’s defense was to think that Johnny had insulted Mother Teresa or Mahatma Gandhi. Koul seemed so offended by the prospect of Victor turning on them that Johnny was reminded just how difference this world was from his own. The Fantastic Four could barely sneeze without stumbling into some deathtrap set for them by the iron-masked Latverian. In this world though, Victor was anything but a villain. Though he hated to admit it, having read up of Doom some more since leaving Latveria, Johnny might have admired him – if he’d not had a lifetime of experience that told him that anything and everything connected to Victor von Doom was evil.
The pointedness in his response seemed almost reluctant. “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time that old Doom turned heel on us out of nowhere.”
“What am I meant to do? Pretend that I don’t know all of this? I work for SHIELD. I’ve built a career within the organisation that murdered a man who meant everything to me. Am I supposed to walk away from this and act like it didn’t happen? It doesn’t feel right. Franklin sent me this because he wanted the world to know what SHIELD had done to him – because he wanted justice.”
“Or maybe,” Johnny began quietly. “He sent it to you because he wanted to protect you, Rachna. Maybe he wanted you to get out whilst you still could. I mean, it’s right there and black and white, isn’t it? ‘Be careful’ – I really don’t think he wants you to go all Snowden on this one.”
Johnny watched as tears welled in Rachna’s eyes. He wanted to cross the motel room and reassure her that everything was going to be alright, but he couldn’t do that anymore. He wasn’t sure that things were going to be alright. His world were gone, the Fantastic Four had disbanded and one of these days Darkseid was going to arrive looking for retribution for what Thor had done to his herald. The days of distributing hugs and comforting words were gone. Instead he watched whilst Koul’s tears wet the pages of Franklin’s journal.
“What would you do?” Rachna asked as her bloodshot eyes fixed on Johnny Storm. “Tell me what I’m meant to do with this information.”
“Look, I don’t know if I’m the right person to be asking this kind of thing. I’m not exactly famous for my self-restr-”
Koul lobbed the journal across the room. It smacked into Johnny’s chest and then fell to the ground in front of him. “What would you do?!”
“Is that what you want, Rachna? You want me to give you permission to not give a damn?” Johnny shouted. “Or maybe you want me to tell you that it’s alright for you to throw your life away after a man that’s been dead for two years. That it’s worth risking having whoever murdered him coming after you just so you can have a clear conscience?”
There was no answer from the scientist. Johnny suddenly raising his voice had shocked her into silence. There was fear in her eyes. Johnny felt a pang of guilt hit him as he realised he’d managed to terrify the woman that had travelled halfway across the country to confide in him. If Sue were here, she’d never let Johnny hear the end of it.
“I’m sorry,” Storm whispered as he knelt down to pick up the journal. “I shouldn’t have raised my voice.”
Koul shook her head and a weak, waifish voice escaped from her mouth. “It’s okay, I shouldn’t have come here. You left New York to get away from all of this, it was wrong of me to try to drag you back into it. I understand that now. I understood it before too but I guess I just ignored it.”
Johnny handed Koul the journal. As she clasped it with her prosthetic hand, Johnny’s hand remained glued to it. He looked at her shattered features and realised too late that the tears in her eyes were far from the first she had cried this week. That only served to intensify his guilt.
“I mean,” Koul sniffled feebly. “I don’t know why I expected you to care, really, he wasn’t your father after all, and he definitely wasn't mine.”
It was true. It wasn’t his Franklin Storm. But then, even Johnny’s Franklin hadn’t quite been his. He’d died when Johnny was so young that he could barely remember him. For all intents and purposes, Sue had been both his mother and father growing up. Yet stood there staring into Rachna’s teary eyes, Johnny felt the pull of responsibility across time and space – as if the Johnny of this world was imploring him to act. He tugged the journal out of Koul’s hand and waved it in front of his face.
“You want to know what I’d do? I’d keep pulling on these threads until the whole damn thing unravelled. SHIELD? Fury? The government? I’d take them all on – and more – if it meant finding out what happened to the person I loved. And that’s what we’re going to do.”
The scientist’s teary eyes beamed with joy as she heard the words leave Johnny’s mouth. “You’re serious? You’ll really help me?”
“I’m serious,” Johnny nodded. “Though if you ever refer to anything other than base villainy as being Victor Von Doom’s brand again, you and I are going to have a major problem. Do we have a deal?”
A confused expression appeared on Koul’s face but she shook Johnny’s hand all the same. The pair of them made their way to Rachna’s bed where all of the evidence was piled and began to sort through it. Johnny tried his best to lay it out in a way that was sequential. Even once it had all been assembled, there wasn’t nearly enough to get either of them the answers they wanted.
“It’s not going to be enough,” Koul sighed as she inspected it all. “If we want to find out what really happened, we’re going to need people that can substantiate Franklin’s accusations – put some real flesh on the bones of all of this conjecture.”
One of Johnny’s eyebrows cocked at the talk of witnesses. “That doesn’t make any sense. I mean, if there were witnesses, we’d know about it already – or SHIELD would have got to them too. Who could possibly know more about this situation than we do? We’ve got Franklin’s entire back catalogue right here in front of us.”
It was clear that Rachna had the answer to Johnny’s question. Clearer still from her face was that she knew that Johnny wouldn’t like it. He couldn’t bring himself to ask for the name on the tip of her tongue, but eventually the scientist sighed and let her head fall into her hands.
When she spoke from the edge of the motel bed, Johnny’s fears were all but confirmed. “We’re going to have to speak to Hector Hammond.”
