Work Text:
…
She has apprised him at least fifty times of her opinion regarding dimensional gateways in the apartment — does his international cult of witchcraft and wizardry have a commandment against doorbells and front buzzers, maybe? — which he has usually rebutted by explaining how travel via transcendental bijection of the spacetime continuum isn’t exactly like riding a subway car up to 74th Street and he cannot reasonably be held accountable for every single instance whereupon he has dropped from out of the fourth dimension onto her folded laundry or materialized at the windowsill where she keeps her angel-wing begonias.
Christine therefore hears a first telltale fizzle of sparks and opens her eyes from an unsettled, barren sleep to watch a portal spiral open in her bedroom; she is preparing her talking points when Stephen steps from the dazzling air and the portal pinwheels shut.
Its shape leaves an autographing afterimage against the blackout-curtained darkness. For about fifteen seconds she lies in patient resignation, as if being tipped back in a chair at the dentist’s office, but he speaks no greeting to her. There are instead three cautious steps across the floorboards and a rustle of heavy embroidered cloth against her sheets.
She snaps the switch on her bedside lamp. Its light discovers Stephen bending his head down to wake her, the Cloak fallen forward about his shoulders so it resembles a pair of great enveloping wings, and she gets a close look at him.
“Hey,” she says.
“Uh.” He retraces the three steps backwards. His voice is hoarse. “Hi. Sorry.”
She flips back the duvet and swings both feet to the floor; she is wearing jersey shorts under a large t-shirt she bought at a rummage sale for strictly ironical purposes whose front shows the Simpsons dressed as the Avengers, or at least the ones whose images Tony Stark signed over for licensed usage after the New York Incident. Comic Book Guy is costumed as Captain Rogers.
“What’s wrong?”
Stephen does not answer. She saw him last not five days ago but there appears now, impossibly, to be a shade more gray within his beard, and at his temples, as though time has taken his head between its hands to rake its fingers through his hair. Lamplight strikes a gleam off that funny bronze ring he wears on two fingers with their athwartly-angled knuckles and all the taut lines of his face suggest the shape of some desolate, marooning grief.
It is the same way he appeared to her almost ten months ago, now, when he returned with similarly unannunciated abruptness five years after everyone else presumed he was dead — she had dropped the cup of iced apple juice she was bringing to a patient in post-op and screamed — and Christine comes forward to meet him. Her wristwatch reads 2:06 AM, meaning she has slept one hour in twenty-four after spending sixteen of those on a double shift in the ER.
“Stephen.” She frisks him for wounds, between his neck and waist to end with a finger on his wrist over the radial pulse. The tactical first aid kit in her closet is the kind ordinarily used by army medics, outfitted with chest-seal patches and burn gel and quick-clot powder and a tourniquet worked by a windlass mechanism. “What is it? What happened?”
His expression flickers.
“1975, Bob Seger, Beautiful Loser, Side A,” he says. “What’s the track after ‘Katmandu’?”
Christine’s jaw snaps shut. Her hair is wet at the ends and the showerhead in her bathroom has been dribbling all night. She pulls closer to scrutinize his red-lined eyes, which have not once looked away from her, and counts the iambs of his pulse for fifteen seconds on her watch before leaning back.
“Wait here while I get a penlight,” she says. “I’m going to check your pupil dilation.”
The slightest inflection of a smile moves his lips at a corner. “Answer the question first. It could be a matter of cosmological significance.”
“Is it a spell? Am I supposed to say an incantation to release you? Okay. Come on — we’ll do it like we’re playing Taboo. What’s the next hint?”
“I promise I’ll explain.”
“You do know that’s not reassuring, don’t you? The last explanation I got from you was about how you trapped an ancient Sumerian spell inside an ice cream machine at the McDonald's on 3rd Avenue and the staff didn’t notice for a week.”
The smile flirts over his mouth again, but then something deeper within him is touched like a palpated wound and he sobers. The pallor of his complexion would usually indicate an advanced stage of tissue hypoxia, except his pulse and breathing both appear regular, not that this concept holds any premium significance in his new line of work.
“Christine. Please.”
She sighs.
The original Bob Seger record predates her birth by several years but she can recall the Beautiful Loser cassette tape she bought to go inside the glove compartment of her very first car, a blue Ford Ranger pickup she had helmed along the endless midwestern roads with their endless fields of wheat and corn to either side; her other favorite tape was Dolly Parton, 1969, In the Good Old Days When Times Were Bad, and if you don’t love me, leave me, and don’t let it trouble your mind. Driving home from school on warm harvest-time afternoons she would crank down both windows to let the chaff-filled, sepia-colored air rush past her, and through her, and at such times she always sang along: whatever happened to that crazy boy, with the love light in his eye?
“‘Jody Girl,’” Christine answers; she frowns. “It is ‘Jody Girl,’ isn’t it?”
The tension goes from Stephen’s shoulders in a heave as he crumples onto her bed. He sits and bows forward over his folded hands, until his forehead nearly touches them; for a dizzy instant Christine believes he is going to throw up and nearly darts for something to catch it with.
“Thank God.” That congested misery retains a dense presence in his voice. “Oh, thank God. I thought I’d skipped the timeline again.”
All the words in this sentence are real, which is more than can be said for many things Christine has heard from him. She peers politely beneath the Cloak’s collar to expose the nape of his neck and examine it for dried blood; she finds none.
“Stephen?” she aligns the Cloak’s collar again. “Is anybody in danger?”
He raises his sore eyes to her. “Not yet.”
“Is it the Sanctum?”
“No. It’s just snowing in the lobby — I don’t think that wood’s ever been weather-sealed.”
“Well, are you in any danger?”
This question is redundant, at least from a standard anamnestic perspective, since she would presume when taking the history of a normal patient that the descriptor ‘anybody’ necessarily included oneself, but then again asking even the simplest question of Stephen Vincent Strange has always been like tapping a stone, which will yield on the thousandth strike but not on the nine hundred and ninety-ninth.
Stephen shakes his head, once.
“No more than usual.”
“Then do you want me to make you some tea,” she says, “or are you planning to tell me you can’t stay?”
“No.” He swallows. “We’ve got time.”
Christine draws away. This had been meant more as a psychological wellness check than a serious question and his answer sticks a pin of trepidation into her heart; beyond the sparkling dimensional gateways, beyond the preposterous robes and the semi-sentient levitating cloak with the persnickety, possessive deportment of a queen housecat and beyond even his novice capacity for sincere apologies, the second-oddest alteration in him has been his ornate and extensive newfound opinions on tea. The fact that she prepares it with microwaved water and disposable cotton filters is something Stephen usually takes as an unpardonably calumnious breach of etiquette, and the fact that he accepts this offer without any quibbling whatsoever suggests either the flotsam aftermath of some horrible shock or a brain-rattling blow to the head. Possibly both.
She unhooks a ceramic mug from its wall-peg in her kitchen and drops boxes of herbal tea onto her face when they tumble from the top cabinet shelf, where she keeps them beside her instant coffee and oatmeal. She fusses over the preparations while putting her mind into order.
There was a day perhaps four months after the Accident when Christine had used eight hours of personal leave to drive him seventy miles eastward along I-95 from New York City to consult with a researcher at Yale-New Haven Hospital. The hospital had been recruiting subjects for a clinical trial funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and Stephen’s interview with the Yale University project coordinator had lasted an hour, during which Christine went down into the cafeteria — a nurse asked if she was his wife; Stephen had given a brusque reply; only family were allowed access to such inner conversations, even if Stephen had wanted her there in the first place— and she purchased a bottle of lemonade from the vending machine. She sat out in the hospital’s central courtyard to drink it, alone at an iron patio table beneath a horse chestnut tree that was dropping petals off its massed pink-white flowers. She had finished only a third of the lemonade but stayed there at the table, without moving, without looking at her phone or reaching into her purse for the Diana Wynne Jones novel lent to her by a young niece, without even glancing up at the tree’s palmate branches as they flurried more petals down onto her, holding all her concentration balanced over a single intention like she was making a wish at a fountain or praying her way up the decades of a rosary. When she finally looked over her shoulder Stephen had been standing there, watching her, carrying his purposeless hands curled close against his chest inside a pair of open-fingered nylon compression gloves.
He had turned and gone away. Christine had followed him to the car as though forming the rear-guard to a funeral procession and driven two hours home with him in a rigorous, self-contained silence, because for as long as she had known him Stephen had only ever shared with her those select parsed-out few pieces of himself which would least inconvenience him in the gifting of them: and this, she thinks, is the nearest precedent she has ever seen for the expression that was on his face just now in the bedroom, when he raised his eyes to her from his hands, and whatever the expression might mean.
She waits two minutes for his tea to steep after thumping her last drip of honey into it from a bottle — the tea is Bigelow Raspberry Royale; there was a time when she did not bother removing the bags at all, letting her teas simply sit until they acquired the potency of tannin, but he has managed to instill respect for at least a few tenets of proper brewing — and when she returns to the bedroom he is rubbing his knotty hands together as if to coax the feeling back into them. The Cloak stands in a corner like a suit of armor.
Christine hands him the mug. It is a gag gift she got from a cousin in Iowa; it presents, in styled letters, the words ‘OH FOR— SAKE’ and substitutes a guileless cartoon fox for the omitted expletive, thus making it suitable to any professional, personal, or PG-13 setting. She sinks onto the bed beside him, close enough to hear his quiet breathing but far enough that there is no risk of her bare leg touching him.
“Okay,” she says. “Tell me.”
“Okay.” He rearranges his hold on the mug to cup it by its bottom. He blows a long breath. “I found out where Loki’s been.”
“Which Loki?” The life she lives makes this question seem as sane as a loaf of bread. “The dead one?”
“No. The Time Heist one.” He sips the tea; she is heartened by the finicky face he makes at its taste. “The one Stark and Rogers lost when he stole the Tesseract.”
“Ah, right. That one.” She looks at her toes. They are painted a red called Wine-Dark Sea; the next-deepest shade offered by the same brand is called Black Widow. “Where’d you find him?”
The surface of Stephen’s tea quavers, because he is not able to hold the mug entirely steady. Any possible reflections within it shiver apart.
“Well,” he says, “we have reason to believe he was detained by a secret shadow organization who manages the mechanisms of energy dispersal and object equilibration we usually refer to as the flow of time by pruning off divergent pathways that risk creating exponentially expansive multiverses and then colluded with an alternate female version of himself to kill an entity from the 31st century who was living at the event-horizon endpoint of eternity and maintaining our reality along a single sacred timeline to prevent a cross-dimensional armed conflict.” He stops, lifting his eyebrows at her like a presenter pausing for questions; Christine nods for him to proceed. “So, now the timeline’s dividing uncontrollably, and there’s a mild to moderate chance it could create spontaneous unstable dimensional openings or trigger a cataclysmic dissolution of the continuum caused by a concatenation of spatial paradoxes.” He turns his eyes up and left. “That didn’t help much, did it?”
“No, no. You’re good.” Christine glances at her watch again to confirm it has not started melting in the manner of a Salvador Dali painting. “I’d say more, but I’ve only ever watched like two episodes of Doctor Who.”
Stephen scoffs at his inconstant reflection in the tea. “That wouldn’t have helped at all.”
“Why’s that?”
“Time doesn’t have enough exterior shape for anybody to say it wobbles. The second Tamil Nadu manuscript of Cagliostro’s treatise on dimensional travel compares it to the theater set in a play.” He touches a finger to his tea and a rosette of bronze light appears in the air; a fresh arabesque of steam rises off the tea’s surface. “We think of a stage as what contains the story — we’re wrong. The story is what shapes the stage.”
Christine considers this. Her first and last encounter with thespianism was when she played an angel in the fifth-grade Christmas pageant and began the nativity scene with her arms raised too high in exultation; from her perch she had looked down over David Howard’s fat baby brother, cast for the most important part as he lay asleep at center-stage swaddled like a paschal lamb, and by the end of the pageant her arms were tingly from staying so perfectly still. She had once heard it said — maybe this is incorrect — that true priesthood is a perpetual state of vocation, and posed there on the auditorium stage in craft store-feather white wings she had wondered what other things a person was meant to take with them from this life into whatever came next; she has also wondered, since, if it will be this way for Stephen, if there is now some special sign upon his astral body or his spirit or his soul that will set him forever apart from ordinary people.
But, then again, Stephen Strange has always been extraordinary, in one way or another. Frankly it is a marvel the universe took so long to discover the black ace of spades up its sleeve.
Christine folds a leg beneath herself.
“You know, I’ve been trying to find at least one book in the library about this stuff,” she says. Stephen’s brow puckers and she is glad not to have told him about the fanged lawn gnome she found in her apartment building’s basement last month; she shooed it away by cymbaling two aluminum trash can lids together. “Half the things they’ve got on magic are just about magic tricks. No offense, but I can’t see a parent hiring you for their kid’s birthday party.”
“What, kids these days aren’t into cosmic horror and profound existential dread?”
“Hm, I didn’t say that. We had an eight-year-old in the ER last week with linear fractures of the seventh through tenth ribs and a ruptured spleen. She wanted me to find out if you could change people’s eyeballs into maggots.”
“Rapid generation of a necrobiome in the retinal pigment epithelium? Overdone, but doable.” He halts. “What'd you do for her?”
“Stent fixation of the fractured ribs with a filling of polymethyl methacrylate and a partial splenectomy followed by an aggressive regimen of antibiotics. It took me an hour to find a pharmacy that carried them in a chewable gummy form for a price her mother could actually afford.”
“You said stent fixation? With PMMA? That’s strictly experimental, Doctor Palmer. Since when did it become a standard treatment?”
“Since a trauma surgery team at Sanford Health implemented it three years ago. I’ve got some PubMed articles saved in case you want to catch up on things you missed when you were, um —"
“I'm thinking of it as being away on an extended pilgrimage.”
“Pilgrimage leave. That works.”
“How’d your eight-year-old triple-fracture get injured in the first place?”
“She jumped from an apartment window in Starrett City. She said — hold on. You should hear this.” Christine looks to some point high above her head. “She’d been teaching herself to fly, but the school jungle gym wasn’t tall enough for a valid test run.”
“Oh my.”
“I told her she should’ve started with levitation first and seen how she liked it. The conversation didn’t go that quickly, though. I think it was flight, butterflies, whether or not I knew butterflies eat rotting flesh, carnivores, dinosaurs, fossils, time travel, you, levitation, and then the maggot eyeballs.” Christine picks at her toenail polish. Her head throbs from fatigue and she is not making any sense. “Did you know that, about butterflies?”
“Why do you think I wouldn’t let them land on me at the lavender farm in Long Island?”
The farm in question is in East Marion, New York. The Saturday outing had been Christine’s devising and had provisioned her with perhaps her favorite picture of him; Stephen is looking straight into the camera, his clean-shaven face squinched because he has turned towards the sun at Christine’s command to smile; his black Versace sunglasses sit cocked back on his head because he has lifted them to read the fine print on a botanical label; he is in the midst of explaining the historical uses of lavender as a treatment for eczema, candidiasis, and nervous disorders; his nose is palletted with white sunscreen and he looks like an idiot; on the trip home they will have a bitter argument, about his horrible rudeness to the retail staff and her duped readiness to pay twenty-five dollars for a bag of lemon-lavender tea cake mix, but in the picture this part has not happened yet.
“One day,” Christine says, brushing away the flaked nail polish, “I swear I’m going to tell you something you don’t claim to already know.”
“You’ve done that — you told me there were other things that could give my life meaning.”
Like what, she hears again, from where it is stuck as a barb in her heart under several healed-over layers of muscle, like you?
“Yeah,” she says, “but you learned that for yourself eventually, too.”
Stephen smiles, and when he does it causes another baffling well of grief to spring up in his exhausted eyes; her gaze makes a quick diverting tour of the bedroom while he organizes himself again with a few gulping swallows. She judges when he is ready to speak.
“So what happens next?”
The pendant around his neck transfixes her within its mute, omnipotent attention when he turns on the bed towards her. The twilled fabric of his pant leg is warm and rough where his knee touches her thigh.
“I’ve got the timeline stabilized. The timelines.” He opens the hand that wears his bronze ring. “It should stay that way until we decide what to do about it — or with it. Don’t tell Wong I’m considering the second option.”
“You’re implying Beyoncé wouldn’t approve of manipulating the multiverse to your advantage?”
“Don’t tell him you know about that, either.”
“What? The multiverse?”
“Beyoncé.”
“You should talk to Jane Foster. She’s the world's leading expert on spatial dimensions, isn’t she? I think Pepper kept all Tony’s blueprints for the Time GPS.”
This is an absurd piece of conversation but Christine cannot help herself. It makes her sound like a senator’s wife, or the wife of a five-star army general, a woman bound within some exclusive society organized by vague, unwritten rules and precise, excruciating consequences. She nonetheless keeps these women’s phone numbers saved in her contact list, along with that of a biologist named Betty Ross and, more recently, a high schooler named Michelle.
I figured I should do some networking, MJ has explained, sitting beside Christine on the bus for three stops. It just kind of feels like I need my own backup now, you know? When you see this crap about being in love with a superhero in the movies, it’s always from the guy’s perspective. You know?
Yes, Christine had answered. I understand.
She lets her folded leg slip to the floor and studies Stephen again.
“And you're sure you’re not hurt?”
He moves his attention from the bronze ring back to her like a man transferring flame from one candle onto another, with ceremonious care and complete concentration; in his bygone life it had often seemed as if he was fully not present with her anywhere, in anything, his mind leaping ahead along a dozen different channels at once towards its next action, and the utter immediacy of such gazes are his other, first-oddest alteration.
Christine waits but concludes this luminary silence is the only question or answer she is going to get.
“I’m not your go-to for this, Stephen,” she says. “I can deal with the sucking chest wounds and the hemothoraces, but I know you didn’t come here at two o'clock in the morning to drink my shitty tea.”
“No,” he says, and there are several futile movements of emotion beneath his haggard features before he determines the next best or better thing to say. “Stabilizing a splitting timeline isn’t something that comes with instructions. I wasn’t sure I’d get back to the right place.”
“But what does that mean?”
There is a flinch in his eyes, as though he has just received a sixteen-gauge needle in the vein of an extended arm. “You might not want to know.”
“Hey. I once used a defibrillator to help your astral body kill the henchman of a separatist faction mystic arts zealot whose name reads like a bad Scrabble hand — try me.”
He sets the mug aside on her bedside table. Light catches his watch with its fractured face; after the Accident a medical technician had brought it to Christine inside a zip-locked bag, labeled with Stephen’s name and date of birth and his seven-digit patient identification number, since upon his arrival in the medical chopper it had been identified as his only salvageable personal affect. The Armani suit, the Louis Vuitton dress shirt, the black satin Tom Ford bowtie and the Berluti leather shoes had all been so soaked in blood or prickled with laminated windshield glass that they were simply yanked off, or else sheared away and dumped in the hospital incinerator. The jeweler had put a customized solid case-back onto the watch at Christine’s request — ordinarily a Jaeger-LeCoultre’s back would be made from transparent sapphire crystal — in order to engrave her inscription. She spent almost a year presuming he had pawned it, for its jewels and its silver, beggared as he was in all other things by his despair.
And the inscription, the jeweler had asked her, what do you want it to tell him?
Stephen looks away. It presents her with a view of his profile; the bones are made all of gracious, austere lines, drawn in long sweeps as if to capture some ascending unicursal movement like the flourishes of a fleur-de-lis.
“I went back along the timeline,” he says. “Our timeline. I bound off the most serious divergences into loops so they wouldn’t branch any further and create deterministic nonlinear effects in the greater dynamical time system. Imagine it kind of like — plugging leaks in a pipe.”
“Sure. Got it.” Christine rests her chin on her fist. “Or like that episode of the Twilight Zone where the guy goes back to try and stop Lincoln’s assassination.”
“Funny, I would’ve bet money you’d go for a Ray Bradbury reference.”
“In reference to what?”
“Stop. I know you’ve read it. ‘A Sound of Thunder,’ Collier's Weekly. It’s a short story classic.”
“Then maybe you should’ve picked a universe where I actually paid attention in Mrs. McCatty’s American Lit class, dweeb.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because I needed ninety percent of my brain for passing organic chemistry and Shane Oman in World History got the other ten. He was a total dreamboat.”
Stephen takes the affronted posture of a rooster ruffling its tail-feathers. “Spectacular. Maybe next I’ll pick a universe where I won’t need to go belt-sand that from my memory.”
“Shush. You should be grateful. He was the one who made me realize I have a type — tall, dark, and convinced he’s about twice as subtle as he really is.” This nearly fishes a laugh from him, but not quite. “What kind of serious divergences are we talking about?”
“I don’t know. Go ask Shane Oman from World History— ow.” She has smacked his knee; he moves it out of reach to count on his fingers. “Greece lost the Battle of Salamis, the Spanish Armada landed in England, the Allied invasion of Europe failed at Normandy, Benjamin Franklin made the American mascot a turkey and the saxophone was never invented because Adolphe Sax got hit in the head with a cobblestone when he was six.”
“Huh. That’s not good.”
“You don’t ever want to hear what jazz sounds like on a bassoon.” He uses the five raised fingers to scratch at his trim beard. “Hydra had a thing for tentacle monsters, Thanos wasn’t really a bad guy once you got to know him, Hasbro lost a billion dollars in prospective action figure sales, Stark’s chauffeur was a zombie and Peter Parker was a pig.”
“Stephen. That’s rude.”
He folds down the fingers. “Technically he was a spider who’d been bitten by a radioactive pig. I didn’t have time to clarify the morphological specifics.”
“And I’m guessing there was a timeline where Bob Seger’s eighth studio album only had three tracks on the first side?”
“No, but there was one where Bob Seger’s songs were done by Pete Seeger and Pete Seeger’s were by Bob Seger.”
“Did you like ‘Old Time Rock and Roll’ any better that way?”
His face contorts like that of a boy downing a spoonful of cough suppressant. Christine keeps the hand under her chin in the event she needs to laugh and must cover her mouth.
“There wasn’t a universe where we called it the Strange-Palmer Technique, was there?” she asks, when the ticklish temptation is past. “Oh, or one where you called it the Palmer Policy — I definitely know there wasn’t one where you liked watching game shows with me.”
All the easy sportiveness goes out from him again in one plunging, trapdoor instant and there is that same expression of forbearing pain, as if he has turned the wrong way and disturbed a set of new stitches.
Christine lets the hand drop from her chin. She rests it on the flat space above her breasts.
Those had been her preferred sort of date, rare as they were, eating Chinese takeout from a place down the block from Metro-General called Wok-on-In and with the little television in her living room turned to Wheel of Fortune. Stephen never attempted to answer the word puzzles, for himself, although he would keep score for Christine, writing out her totals on one of those cheap writing pads she got free for donating annually to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital.
“No, no,” Stephen would say, to the screen. "Don’t buy another vowel, you imbecile."
“Ask to solve,” Christine would holler. “Solve. It’s ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.’”
Stephen, bent over the notepad so Christine could see only his bay-brown hair with the gray stealing into it, would award her another five thousand dollars; she never had similar luck at making him watch The Price is Right.
And these were the times, it would occur to Christine, long after it was finished, when she had loved him best, which is a bizarre conclusion to draw about a man she once screwed on the passenger seat of his two-hundred thousand dollar Lamborghini — she had bumped her head against the roof a few times; Stephen had gotten the car’s interior detailed the next day — and who once surprised her with two plane tickets to Paris, overlapping serendipitously with a guest lecture he was scheduled to deliver at Sorbonne University. It is the same tenderness with which she keeps her memories of watching his thumbs tap a rhythm on his steering wheel, of seeing him toss a wadded paper over his shoulder towards the trash can and then observe how it had landed, of noting the mute and mortified way in which he received the embraces of parents whose children would still be alive by tomorrow morning; sitting in front of a television that received only basic cable, eating from a folding carton of egg foo young, she had loved him the most wholly and with the greatest clarity and from a place most untouched by the ravages of impatience or resentment or unforgiveness, those times when his selfhood did not stand in the way of his personhood.
Stephen has lapsed into another silence. Christine lowers her voice.
“Stephen?" she asks. "What else did you see?”
He removes his ring and then lays his hands in his lap, staring at them with something like stricken anguish. She follows his eyes along the gnarled lines of each scar.
“It was the accident, wasn’t it? You had to watch it happen again.”
“Yes.”
It is a short answer, although it is made into a long one by the scope of what it contains, and Christine reaches out to place her hands over his.
“I’m sorry.” Her throat vices. “I told you there were other ways to save lives, but you were right too — it’s been a harder way, for you. Especially for you.” She carries around at least a dozen unfinished speeches to him, folded in some front pocket of her heart and all of them saying how she is so, so, so proud of him, how he has suffered in body and mind and soul for the world’s sake in ways she never knew were possible and he has managed to bear it all, but each speech sounds a bit asinine when she rehearses it aloud; she ought to try anyway. “The things you’ve done for everyone, they’ve meant so —”
“You died, Christine.”
A cab door slams somewhere on the street outside. A toilet flushes upstairs. Her showerhead drips again, and maybe she has not heard him correctly.
“— I what?”
He moves his open hands, under hers, so that they are upturned and her fingertips can be cupped lightly within them like at the initiation of a dance; the skin on his palms is cross-grained by calluses. She waits while his thoughts work within him.
“That night,” he says. “I asked you to come to the Neurological Society Dinner with me and you said yes, and then I crashed the car and you died.” His eyes close, hard. “I kept trying to go back and change things, only nothing I did mattered. You always died anyway.”
The moment following this has no motion at all, so that past and future both swing around it like the fixed point on a mapmaker’s compass. Her heart beats quicker through her veins.
“You were trying to—?”
His eyes open. “With the Time Stone. The Ancient One told me it couldn’t be done, but I didn’t listen. I thought I’d be able to prove her wrong if I had enough power.” His thumbs come up to settle on her knuckles. “The world paid the price for that and so did you.”
Christine expects he will look away, here; he does not. She looks back.
She had sat at his bedside after each new surgery, the seven following his first encounter with a catastrophe so personalized in its exacting price that it seemed like either the conclusion to a myth or the beginning of a parable. She would stare at his hands, with their piercing steel fixators, which somehow put her mind on a shining wreath of thorns, and she would lay her hand alongside his atop the hospital bedsheets because she could not touch him without hurting him.
Stephen would say nothing, sequestered as he was within some place far down in his soul where only death or the divine could reach him; Christine would not say anything, either, and waiting awake there beside him just outside of those isolated, evening-vigil agonies she had probably loved him best, too.
Slowly, leaving one hand in his, she leans over to snap off the lamp; the soft, sheltering darkness drops into place and she flops back flat across her rumpled bed. The gesture seems to confuse him and so she gives his fingers a tug of invitation.
“Come here,” she says. “Honestly, I think I’ll need to be lying down while I hear this.”
His limbs are stiffened by the complicated belts, sashes, and layers of his robes, but he spreads himself alongside her across the bed until they are arranged like two children stargazing in the grass, although his left hand remains woven together with her right. She rolls onto her side and in turn Stephen lifts their joined hands to rest atop his chest.
“Okay,” she says. “Tell me.”
And, like a rock yielding upon the thousandth strike, he does; there is the accident, the journey eastward, the awful green eye blinking over and over as fate invents a new way to kill her each time, the entombing library of forgotten truths and the consumption of power like one star cannibalizing another and the uncoiling of his mortal body to become some elder-god terror, the pleading for an intercession of mercy that will not come or else an intervention of justice that will not come either and the holding of her in his arms one last time as the broken universe collapses into a neutron-star density from which it first emerged, leaving him to drift endless and changeless and alone over an empty void inside the prism of his magic, then Stephen finishes speaking and it is quiet.
She really ought to have gotten that penlight and checked his pupils, Christine thinks. This is complete lunacy and she believes every word of it.
“How do —” although this may not be the best word to begin with, since Stephen has informed her that the how in magic does not matter half so much as why “— but why you can remember all of that? It's like something that really happened to you?”
“Yes.” He inserts a stop. “No. It’s like a vision. I can remember it because I lived it, in a different time.”
“Except that it never happened.”
“But it did,” he says, “because it might have.”
His hand is braided so tensely around hers that its shaking seems to transmit itself into her own nerves. The tremors that run through the arch, splintered bones and recreated muscles of his fingers have often reminded her of spiderwebs laden with morning dew, or the vibrations in a plucked chord, the raised scars like seams to mark the intrusive places where his wounds have been made and the light of the world has thus entered him.
And there is the thinnest rim of an instant, as they lie in this new quiet, when Christine very nearly rebuts his account with a set of practicalities she has readied, the way she might console a patient in a fever delirium or a child emerged from a nightmare.
For one thing, there is no universe parallel or present where Stephen Strange would allow himself to be found inside a greasy pizzeria wearing a two thousand-dollar Italian suit unless he also happened to be wearing a body bag; he had been invited to the Neurological Society Dinner as a keynote speaker, not an awardee; she had been scheduled to work the 7:00 to 11:00 PM shift that night and could not have accepted his invitation, even if she had felt so inclined and was not emphatically ignoring the fact that he was still hung up on her, which is why she was there at the nurse’s station when they delivered a Caucasian male, late thirties to early forties, a car crash victim whose hands the EMS workers had needed to extract from the dashboard that had crushed them; above all, last and first, the pursuit Stephen has described for her — across time, beyond death, through the ransoms negotiated in a currency of body and blood — is one born from a devotion more full of wanting, seeking, and a deep, penetrative longing than anything he has ever really felt for her, at least in this particular lifetime, and of course Christine knows such desperate devotion well because she spent five years hearing everyone tell her he was dead and believing against reason, against fact, against the laws of matter and spirit alike that it must be otherwise.
Stephen, she is preparing to say, without the least hint of cruelty, you could never do a thing like that, but then her fingers touch against the watch on his wrist, with its fracture-starred face and the hands fixed into an eternal present moment to match the promise engraved into its back.
She stops. Maybe he could tell her a few things she does not know yet, either.
“Stephen.”
He turns his cheek. The coy lock of hair that dangles over his forehead touches teasingly against hers. His clothes carry the scents of fragrant censer-smoke and parchment in their folds.
“You said everything else happened the same way, didn’t you?” Christine asks. “The exact same way? Meaning you went to Kamar-Taj and fought Kaecilius and defeated Dormambo.”
“Dormammu.”
“Listen, I almost got it right that time.”
His face is so close his weak exhale of laughter puffs warm across her throat. “Yeah, you did.”
“And losing—” his hand twitches under hers “— and the part about me dying,” gosh, but that sounds weird, “that was supposed to be the one you couldn’t change?”
“An absolute point,” he says. “A moment of pure existence. The Ancient One said everything depended on it.”
“But — well, if that’s true,” Christine says, pushing her way through these abstractions as if bearing a lantern through fog, “then what happened to you after you got stabbed at the Sanctum?”
The creak of the bed indicates that he lifts his head, slightly.
“What?”
“You came to me at the hospital with a cardiac tamponade.” She taps his chest over the spot where she had looped her sutures into him. “If I hadn’t drained that pericardial effusion when I did, the pressure of the blood around your heart would’ve killed you — and then what happens to the journey of the great and terrible Strange Supreme?” Christine grimaces. “Jeez. Let’s hope Dairy Queen doesn’t ever use that for something.”
His head remains up, alert.
“I—” he loses the words “—I don’t know. That wasn’t a part of what I saw.”
“There you go, then,” Christine says. “So that couldn’t have ever happened to us, because the universe needed me to be there when your all-significant ass just so happened to need emergency thoracic surgery — I’m in the story, right? Not the stage.” She intends to stop here, lest he find one of the many gaps in this argument and because love’s principle strength is mostly in testimony rather than rhetoric, but a last detail itches at her. “And there’ve been times when you scared me shitless, but I don’t think I could really be afraid of you. Not if I knew it was you — I’d probably have to figure all the extra eyes and horns came with some logical explanation.”
And perhaps this is not the wisest thing to say, because at this last, light touch the bounded circle of his containment shatters and in the darkness she feels the wash of a warm, salting dampness begin to blot her shoulder, her hair, her neck and face as he buries his own against it.
“Christine, I’m sorry,” she hears him say, although she cannot imagine what he is apologizing for because he has said this to her once already. “I'm so sorry.”
She shifts. She pulls herself nearer to bring her arms around him and she has never held him in quite this way, before. This is new, and somewhat astonishing, and she feels a little lost in the vastness of it, so she spreads her palms across his back to feel the humming of his heart.
“Hey.” She turns her head to put her lips against the scallop of his ear. Those vulnerable gray strands of hair at his temple ghost against her nose. “It’s okay, Stephen. We’re okay. I’m right here — okay?”
He brings his arms around her and then his hands are against her back, as well, with the thorn-wreathed trembling inside of them that is like moral courage.
At the very last second, she feels him smile.
“I know.”
She sighs out her exasperation. He laughs.
...
She cannot remember falling asleep but nonetheless wakes at around 6:10 AM with his face still flush against the curve of her neck, his arm flung immobile across her stomach — she is still in her dumb pajamas; Stephen is still in his dumb belted robes — and the Cloak hovering over them with something uncannily like matronly contentment.
Christine mimes a brief explanation, concluding in the message that anyone who comes in here attempting to disturb Master Strange will be promptly clobbered senseless with her hallway fire extinguisher; the Cloak flutters back satisfied to its corner.
Stephen opens his eyes perhaps ten minutes later, disentangling himself from her, and she flits at his robes to straighten them before he trips his way over a goodbye — it will take a few days to realize he has absconded with her fox mug — and he goes out through a blazing door in the air. He returns around seven o’clock the same evening, trampling yet again upon her edict about portals into the apartment and carrying a pair of single-serving aluminum ramekins with crinkly plastic lids.
He sets them on her kitchen table to lift away the tops with a touch of vaudeville showmanship and Christine sees he has brought her two chilled, firm yellow custards. She catches a blooming whiff of vanilla.
“Where’d these come from?”
“The kitchens at the Sanctum,” he says. “It took a few tries to get the consistency right. Apparently those warnings against using the Flail of Hermestigus to beat egg yolks are meant to be taken literally.” He raises two fingers. He tucks them against his throat, where one might examine the reflection of a buttercup. “Stand back.”
She does.
He inhales, bends one arm artfully behind his back to gather the Cloak out of his way, and from his lips he exhales a gas-blue plume of fire; Christine yelps; the fire throws his face into planing contrasts as it alights upon the two dishes he has spread and it twirls there in devilish fury for perhaps ten seconds before Christine blinks, against the stunning brilliance, to find herself looking at the exquisitely caramelized tops on two creme brûlées.
She rubs her eyes to clear the flash-pan speckles from her vision. Stephen stands to await her evaluation.
“Now, that,” she says, once the twitterpations in her heart have calmed, “is one hell of a magic trick, Doctor.”
“I’ll lend you the books.”
“Aren’t they all in Sanskrit?”
“No, some of them are Ancient Greek.” He swings out a kitchen chair for her. “I’ll translate it.”
“So long as there’s illustrations.”
They settle at the table, seated across from one another. Christine smacks her spoon to crack the glossy amber-gold crust of burnt sugar; Stephen holds his dish forth so that she might perform the same high, hallowed office for him, and she has already shoveled into her custard to the third or fourth mouthful when she glances up to see there are unspent tears standing in his eyes again. She swallows.
“Thank you,” she says. “This is one of my favorites.”
“Yes,” he says. “You’ve told me.”
…