The lab coats are hung up. The coffee pot across the hall — Reed's fourth of the day — has gone cold in its carafe. From forty floors below, the noise of Manhattan arrives as a low, continuous hum, the sound of a city that never quite bothers to check in.

The living room is all warm lamplight and soft grey couches. A wall of floor-to-ceiling windows faces west, catching the last bruise-purple smudge of the sunset over the Hudson. On the coffee table, a bowl of popcorn is going cold beside a stack of Reed's data tablets.

Reed sits at the far end of the same couch, absorbed in a tablet, his thumb flicking through pages of dense equations at a speed no one else in the room can read. Sue is beside him with a mug of jasmine tea balanced on her knee, eyes closed, letting the two of them bicker like it's white noise.

Cassidy sits cross-legged in front of it in a blazer and headband, back straight, completely unbothered by the argument happening two feet behind her. Her blonde bangs hang low over her forehead. When she taps a key, one link in the molecular chain unfolds and snaps shut again, neat as a folding chair.

Ben Grimm: It's been an hour, Cas. When do we get t' watch somethin'?

Johnny Storm: Oh, now he wants opinions.

Cassidy Storm: without looking up You had an hour. You spent it arguing.