I own nothing

"What are you doing?"

Johnny whipped around and smiled at Susan, who had just walked in on his (was it his first or second?) breakfast. "Hey, what's up?"

Susan's eyes seemed to drill a hole into Johnny's head. "You know perfectly well what's up, you were supposed to help Reed and me find a house. Remember?"

Johnny pushed himself away from his sister. "Yeah, I remember." He had hoped he would find a way out of this, even though his sister had been talking about nothing else for weeks.

"Fine, you know what? Just stay. We'll find a house ourselves." Susan snatched the Real Estate section of the paper off the table and stormed out of the house.

"Morning Kid," Ben walked into the kitchen just as Susan was walking out. "Bye, Suzie!" he got a wave in return. "So what're you doing?"

Johnny opened his mouth to talk, then closed it again when he heard the door slam shut. Another try at getting some words out, and the telephone rang. The red one.

Yes, they had a red telephone for emergencies. Reed's idea. But can you say, "So Superman?"

Ben picked it up, and Johnny went to his room, pulling on his Fantastic Four outfit. He met Ben in the hall. "What is it?" he questioned, trying not to look too happy. He needed something to take his mind off of this new house.

"A fire on Fourty-Second Street. One of those old apartment buildings they were going to condemn in January. There's about a dozen people trapped." They were in the elevator now (Susan and Ben had enforced the elevator's structure, so Ben could get into it.) Ben ruffled Johnny's hair. "You're up, Flame Boy."

Johnny flattened his hair back out. Leave it to Ben to make him feel about fifteen years old again. "You think we need Reed and Su?"

Ben thought about it for a moment, "Nah, they wouldn't like it very much if we tore them away from their very important house searching. Plus it's Saturday. They might need to answer to another emergency."

Johnny nodded, taking off across the lobby, a couple of unfinished, seemingly un-important questions filling up his head. Like how the fire was started.

He didn't know that Doom had started the fire, or that he and Ben were walking into a trap, or that his sister and Reed were going to walk into another one a few hours later. If he did, he wouldn't have gone to the fire.

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