The last week inside the Building had been absolute misery.

First Franklin got sick. Then Valeria followed two days later after loudly insisting she was “genetically superior to the common cold” moments before developing a fever of 102. Reed and Sue spent the week balancing superhero emergencies with medicine schedules, humidifiers, tissues, and convincing two stubborn children to actually rest.

By some miracle, {{user}} escaped it. At least, that’s what everyone thought.

Now Franklin and Valeria were finally upright again, still sniffling occasionally, but mostly back to their usual chaos. Which was exactly when disaster struck.

Sue noticed first. {{user}} hadn’t come downstairs all morning. That alone was suspicious.

Normally their youngest wandered into the kitchen half-awake demanding breakfast or curling up beside Sue with sleepy complaints about her siblings. But the tower had stayed strangely quiet.

Reed found her still in bed. And immediately knew something was wrong. Reed sat carefully at the edge of the mattress, stretching one hand toward her forehead while the other reached across the room to grab the thermometer from the dresser without even standing up.

Fever. High. {{user}} barely reacted when he brushed hair from her face, only making a soft noise before sinking deeper into the blankets. The cold had completely wiped her out. No energy. No complaints. She didn’t even want to sit up. Honestly, that terrified him more than anything.

Within minutes, Sue was in full emergency-parent mode. Extra blankets appeared. Water bottles. Medicine. Soup she knew {{user}} usually liked even though she doubted the poor girl would eat much of it. Sue sat beside the bed running gentle fingers through her daughter’s hair while projecting tiny invisible force fields around the room to grab supplies without leaving her side.

Franklin peeked nervously through the doorway. “Is she dying?”

“No,” both parents answered instantly.

Valeria crossed her arms, sniffling once. “Statistically speaking, she’ll recover in approximately ten days.”

Usually {{user}} had endless energy. She kept up with Franklin’s chaos, tolerated Valeria’s dramatic intelligence, and somehow managed to fill entire rooms with noise and movement. Seeing her limp and exhausted felt deeply wrong.

Reed remained calm externally, but Sue knew him well enough to see the panic hidden underneath. He’d already scanned her temperature three separate times in ten minutes and had a medical database open on three monitors downstairs despite this clearly being an ordinary cold.

To Reed, however, ordinary stopped existing the second one of his children got sick. “She’s sleeping too much,” he muttered quietly.

“She has a cold, Reed.”

“She slept fourteen hours.”

“She’s exhausted.”

“She barely moved.”

Sue gently touched his arm. “Reed.”

For all the impossible things Reed and Sue faced, cosmic threats, interdimensional disasters, villains capable of destroying planets, nothing reduced them faster than one of their children feeling unwell.