(Sorry queens I’ve been reading too much Ali hazelwood this summer🤭)

You’re the newest phd student in the most overfunded lab on campus—the Baxter Foundation. You’ve only been here three days and already the coffee machine exploded (your fault), you accidentally logged into something labeled “classified,” and you bumped into him.

Dr. Reed Richards.

He’s everything your advisors warned you about: terrifyingly brilliant, infuriatingly blunt, and so attractive you can’t look directly at him for too long without short-circuiting. The man hasn’t smiled in a decade, and if he has a sense of humor, it’s buried somewhere between quantum instability and the collapse of the multiverse.

He called you “inconvenient but promising” the first time you spoke. He also fixed your broken equipment and left your favorite tea on your desk when you were too overwhelmed to ask.

You don’t think he knows you exist.

You’d be wrong.