#6160 doom

[mr-azure231]

I will come to you. My family. We will be free.

Part 1 of 4

[notarobot1006]

Marvel Angst Fics' Missing Poster Boy, Part 3

(Part 1 can be found here)

(Part 2 can be found here)

We've covered the "hurt" part of the Ultimate Universe's #1 hurt/comfort experience. Now it's time for the other half.

What makes 6160 Reed (or Doom, as he currently calls himself) so compelling is that he tries. He never stops trying.

He tries to harness the cosmic rays that should have empowered him and his loved ones, so that the Ultimates can have their Fantastic Four:

But at the same time, he's also trying to prevent that from ever having happened in the first place.

See, the Ultimates have a working time machine. With a combination of that and reading the Maker's files, they know what their universe 'should' have been like before the Maker ruined it. They know what heroes are 'supposed' to exist. Their first attempt to use it got a bunch of people killed, so Tony ruled that they should stop.

Reed did not stop.

The only thing preventing Reed from radically altering the timeline to get everything 'back on track' is the existence of a barrier preventing anyone from altering the timeline more than six months back, since it was about six months ago when the Ultimates messed with his temporal shield.

This does not stop Reed from trying to break through that barrier. He can use the Immortus Engine (what they're calling the time machine) to look further back than just six months:

He just can't affect what he sees. But it's not for lack of effort. Reed's throwing everything he can against that barrier.

He tries:

And tries:

And tries:

But he can't get through.

The only thing that changes his mind is when he's caught. And even then, no regrets. His justification is that the sacrifice of the world they currently live in is worth it to let a better one take its place:

What changes his mind isn't any kind of moral disapproval at essentially wiping out an entire timeline of people, but just the assertion that his attempts aren't working fast enough:

But even having accepted that he can't save the family he should have had, Reed doesn't give up. He's got two projects going, after all. The time travel one...and recreating the Fantastic Four.

And that's the one that works. He doesn't just make four people with superpowers; Reed makes groups of them:

Those groups aren't just successful, but they respect and even admire Reed. They banter with him a bit, and he reciprocates:

They drag him into celebrating successful missions, and they don't mind that he just kind of stands there:

And he gets onto better terms with one of the original Ultimates. Reed's going through a rough patch this issue in between the cosmic crew stuff, and feels the absence of Susan, Johnny, and Ben in a very literal way:

He discusses the matter with Hank Pym, and Hank provides some incredibly grounded and needed insight:

Reed was not in a good place for a lot of this issue. He wasn't just seeing ghosts, he was intending to join them:

And it's not clear if he's still going to go through with that or not. But between the Fantastic Force and Hank Pym, he's gaining more and more reasons not to. Reed lost basically everything he could. He lost his face, parts of his brain, his identity, and arguably some of his sanity, but what haunts him most is the loss of the family he should have had.

So it's a good thing the people around him are becoming a new family.

[mr-azure231]

And here’s our sweet, poor Doom, making the Maker proud

[mr-azure231]

Doom to the Maker:

I will have my revenge on the Maker…and then I will come to you. My family…in death we will be together again.

—Ultimates #17

[mr-azure231]

The Shape of Loss

I will come to you. My family. In death we will be together again.

—Ultimates #17

[notarobot1006]

Marvel Angst Fics' Missing Poster Boy, Part 1

(Part 2 can be found here.)

(Part 3 can be found here.)

It boggles my mind that the intersection of the Marvel fandom and angst/whump enjoyers aren't crawling over 6160 Doom/Blue Doom/This Guy Here:

like ants on a dropped sandwich. He has been through so much shit in canon.

He:

Was the Reed Richards of his universe. The Reed Richards of the 1610 universe (the Maker) screwed up the math for his shuttle launch:

Causing the cosmic rays to hit wrong, incinerating Johnny Storm and slowly killing Susan Storm from radiation poisoning:

And getting Reed incarcerated for the consequences of the Maker screwing up his math on purpose:

And murdering Ben Grimm, framing it as a suicide:

Despite there being no reasonable way he could make it to the middle of that quarry from the sides in one jump without hitting anything on the way down.

And all of that is before they meet in person. That's going to be covered in part 2.

[mr-azure231]

I desperately, desperately need to talk to someone about Ultimates #17, the preview panels.

[notarobot1006]

Marvel Angst Fics' Missing Poster Boy, Part 2

(Part 1 can be found here.)

(Part 3 can be found here.)

When last we left 6160's Reed Richards, 1610 Reed Richards had messed with his space launch calculations, gotten his friends and family killed, and imprisoned Reed. For simplicity's sake, I'm going to call 6160 Reed Richards Reed and 1610 Reed Richards the Maker.

For now, at least.

So Maker's overarching goal here is to turn Reed Richards into the blue-coded Dr. Doom shown in the first post. By destroying his identity and running roughshod over what little he has left the whole time. We know this because he says it, out loud, constantly.

Starting from the moment he gets his hands on Reed:

What also starts at this moment is:

Messing With Time.

Maker's got, at this point in the plot, a working time machine, and he uses it to disorient Reed from day one:

And introduce a respawn mechanic:

Maker also messes with time more subtly. When Reed meets Howard Stark later on, he tells a story of how he tried to track the passage of time with a sunbeam on the wall:

Naturally, this did not go well.

And as petty and creative as Maker can get with time, he's downright vicious when it comes to the next part:

Messing With Identity.

The Maker doesn't just use his words here. He's always pairing them with something else, and that something is usually violence. One of the milder examples is stretching out Reed's arms:

Remember, this Reed missed the cosmic rays and has no stretching powers. His bones are about to break. The less-mild examples...well, we'll cover them as we go.

First off Maker goes out of his way to cut the Reed Richards out of Reed Richards. Sometimes we're left to guess what exactly he's going after:

(more on why he looks like that later)

And sometimes, Maker tells us. Well, first he's got to get his digs in:

And then he exposits, because he wants Reed to know exactly what he's taking from him:

His sense of scientific accomplishment. The thrill of success and discovery. Reed himself implies that Maker took more than that:

Reed Richards does not get to be Reed Richards. Eventually, he stops calling himself Reed Richards.

As to why his face looked off in that first brain surgery pic, it's because Reed Richards doesn't even get to look like Reed Richards. Well before he pulls out the iron mask, Maker melts Reed's face for no more discernible reason than to deny him a physical connection to what he used to look like:

Of course, that's not a problem for long beyond making Reed unable to fully open his mouth, since:

Nobody's going to be seeing much of said face.

Just Messing With Him

Maker also takes time out of his brutal torture schedule to be incredibly petty:

In case the pic is too small to tell, that's a toothbrush Reed is holding. That's what Maker gave him to clean the lab with.

It's also no coincidence that he's taunting Reed about getting his math right. He's reinforcing the idea that the shuttle failure was Reed's fault for getting his calculations wrong rather than the Maker's for messing with said calculations when nobody was looking.

And it all, to some extent, works. Reed stops using his name:

He internalizes what the Maker keeps telling him, utterly unaware that Maker was the one who screwed up his calculations for the shuttle launch:

But it's not all Doom and gloom. He still tries. Over and over. Reed's struggles -and boy howdy does he struggle- eventually start to pay off. We'll cover the light at the end of the tunnel in part 3.