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The Sanctum was quiet without Stephen. There was no arguing with the Cloak; no laughing; no sounds of a spell-in-practice going wrong; no book pages turning; no footsteps pacing in his room, above the kitchen. And it felt wrong to talk aloud, to make any noise at all. The heavy atmosphere lay over the Sanctum like a quilt, like a graveyard. Even the animals were loathe to make a sound.
Tao had made a nest on Stephen’s bed. She had gathered everything that she could carry on her own that smelled strongly of her mother. She had raided the laundry basket for unwashed shirts and towels; her favourite place to find comfy things to lay on, especially because it smelled not only of Stephen, but Wong too. She had stolen a shoe from by the front door, but after taking one and realising just how heavy it was, she left the other behind. A less heavy item was the pair of yellow gloves, the ones that everyone hated, but they made his hands a little more stable and no one could really blame him for how ugly they were. Tao, snuggled down inside one of the gloves and her head settled on the shoe, thought back to the many times when the mage had cradled her in his arms, feeding her with a bottle of milk, wearing these gloves. She bit the old scuff marks where tiny stubs of tooth had chewed when she had been teething; she had hated these gloves, the colour had been too bright for her liking, and she had growled whenever Stephen had worn them, but now… she found that she didn’t mind them so much. Maybe because she missed him. She missed him so much. She wanted him to put these gloves on again, hold her again, feed her again.
She wanted her mother back.
Vishanti had taken to sitting on the stairs, where he had the best view of the front door. Day after day, he sat there, watching and waiting. Throughout the nights, he would struggle to keep his eyes open - ghost or not, he needed sleep - and he would take short dozes until the sun climbed up in the sky, shone through the window, cast a shadow on the stair banisters and the furniture, and created dappled pools of light from his fur at the side of him. He had gone up to Tao a few times, wishing to sniff at Stephen’s scent just once more, but she had grown protective and territorial in her sadness and grief and had growled at him when he tried to get close. He had whined and tried to rest his nose on a shirt and, if his skin had been flesh and bone, his nose would have been split open by Tao’s claws. And that was the final straw, for their relationship to crumble just like that, it hurt, and the dog left to go back to his vigil on the stairs. He was hurt, already hurting from Stephen’s death, but he thought he could at least find comfort with his friend, practically his sister. But alas, it was not meant to be.
He just wanted his dad back.
And Wong’s was a quiet pain, a silent hurt, a soundless agony. He fed Tao and Vishanti at the same time everyday, without fail, even though he left with teary honey glazed eyes, even though he hated every second he was forced to stay in the Sanctum. His fingertips would dance over the oak brown wall, the dragging steps of a dance with a broken foot. God, how he wanted to run. Just… go. Anywhere but here . But then he would feel shaking hands on his shoulders, the embrace, the contact. He was still there, somewhere. He just wished he could have said goodbye. That was the hardest part, that all he had said to Stephen was about money for a damned sandwich; it was a terrible choice of last words for his friend to think about in his final moments. The final moments that Wong thought about intensely when he would sit, sometimes, in Stephen’s old chair by the fireplace. The truth of the matter was that the librarian didn’t know how Stephen had died; he didn’t know if Thanos had torn him to pieces or stabbed him or even crushed him underfoot, or even if he had been part of the Snap. All he knew was that Stephen had died; he had felt it in his bones.
He missed his best friend.
Wong had never hated the colours of the Earth more. He saw Stephen everywhere . He saw his eyes in the ocean; his robes in the sky; the Eye of Agamotto in the grass and the leaves; the Cloak in the blood that fell from the dimension-hopping birds. In his own tears, he saw the hundred more that had decorated Stephen’s face when he woke up gasping after a nightmare filled with Dormammu. In his own shaking breaths, he heard the raspier ones that had been shuddered into his shoulder as he held Stephen close. And in the touch of the bedsheets, he felt Stephen’s white-winged blackbird hair running through his fingers. Everything reminded him of Stephen, and he hated it.
But what he truly hated the most was the fact that the world moved on, they dealt with the fact that their brother or their father, or their best friend, or even their therapist had faded into nothing, and they continued to live. Cars still ran across roads, boats still floated in the ocean, trees still grew, people still breathed. They didn’t even know that their strongest guardian had died, because the mystic arts were not in the public eye. He could barely stand to look at red curtain because it reminded him of the Cloak, which in turn made him think about the multitude of arguments that had taken place between it and Stephen, and yet outside the walls of the Sanctum, he looked at passers by and they looked okay. Maybe they weren’t, but that wasn’t really the point. He just wanted someone to realise that Stephen was gone.
And then someone visited the Sanctum.
When the doorbell rang, everyone had been excited. They had raced to the front door, as though beyond it lay the answer. They could see the red of the Cloak, it was him, it had to be. Vishanti and Tao, who had stumbled down the stairs from Stephen’s room faster than she ever had in her short period of life, were there first, claws scratching at the door, whining. Wong opened the door and-
They all felt the blow. The crushing disappointment. The scathing heartbreak all over again. It had been stupid to dream really, stupid to think that, just maybe, he would have come back. Vishanti and Tao, ears drooping and tails low, turned and left; climbed the stairs, back to Stephen’s room - Tao back to her nest that no longer smelled of Stephen and Vishanti to lay on the floor, they had come to a sort of truce between them, but under that truce was a gaping cavernous wound of mistrust.
Wong, despite his own personal wishes, did not turn away in his sorrow. He stood and stared blankly at Tony Stark, who played with his hands and looked uncomfortable being in the librarian’s presence. There was a beat of silence that seemed to go on for far longer than it truly did, where they just stared at each other; there was no swapping of emotion, no analysing, no shared pain in their eye contact; this was reality, not a fantasy book. They just waited for the other to say something.
‘Can I help you?’ Wong said, deciding to be the one to move things forward.
Stark cleared his throat. ‘Uh… I just thought I should let you know… Strange… Stephen was caught in the Snap.’
The librarian swallowed and nodded. ‘I see,’ he bit out, forcing the words past the lump in his throat.
‘We’re doing everything we can to reverse it though,’ the Avenger said, a touch of hope in his tone.
Wong wished he could be so optimistic. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘well, you’d better or by the Vishanti, I swear I will.’
Tony stared at him, blinking in his shock and confusion. Most other people he had told this sort of news to had started to cry or ask him what he meant. But none had nigh-on threatened him to get something done about it. ‘Uh… yes, right… we will,’ he stuttered.
‘Good,’ the librarian snapped, before slamming the door and sinking to the ground. He covered his face with his hands as sap fell from trees of gold.
Wong was a hard man, a strong man, it took a lot for him to cry. And yet it was Stephen that pulled tears from his eyes, drew them forth as though he asked for them. That man with broken hands that could bend time and space at his will, that man who had showed up in his library with an ego larger than Kathmandu itself. But then that wasn’t quite true; Stephen’s ego had been in shreds, shattered just like his hands, and he had only inflated it as a defensive mechanism - he was in a strange place surrounded by things he didn’t understand and people he didn’t trust, of course he was going to act like that. Not to say that Stephen’s ego had been non-existent, he had thought rather a lot of himself.
But then they had moved in with one another and, though sometimes Wong was caught between the library and teaching at Kamar-Taj, he had been around Stephen enough to see just how caring he was, how kind and emotional. He got to see universes crumble with a wave of Stephen’s hand when they were out on a mission, and then, when they were at home, he saw droplets from rock pools of kelp and sapphire leak onto sandy beaches of white until the mage would wipe away the puddles furiously, hiding his pain. Perhaps the greatest gift of all was that he feared Stephen when he was against his enemies, harnessing raw power bleeding from his very core into his attacks, and then he got to see that same all-powerful sorcerer coo over a baby dragon suckling from a bottle cradled his arms.
Stephen Strange was an enigma, and Wong was honoured to have such an intriguing man in his life.
But he wasn’t in his life anymore. He was dead. Because even with all the hope that Stark had seemed to have, Wong felt that it would be a very long time before he would see those eyes again, those eyes with entire multiverses in them, filled with the deepest ocean water, touched with the darkest strands of seaweed. Eyes that Wong could get lost in.
The librarian wiped at his eyes, swallowing the sadness, before he stood up, using the wall to stable himself. The grief, the fresh waves of pain that rolled over him, made him stagger, made him stumble, over to Stephen’s chair. He sank down into it, fingers smoothing over the fabric - soft - he could understand why Stephen had sat here so often; it was like a warm hug. Or maybe that was Wong’s imagination conjuring up a trembling embrace.
A trembling embrace that Wong wished he could have been given just once before Stephen left, before the door slammed shut with the whispered swish of old fabric, before shields made of the sunset flowered from shaking hands and wrapped around arms that held the very fabric of time together.
He was more than his best friend. Wong was deeply, madly, stupidly in love with Stephen Strange. And who could blame him?
But, oh, how he wished he had realised it before Bruce Banner fell through their ceiling.
It was close to a year later when ashes were sewn back together by needles of stars and the thread of comets, held by hands of golden dust and dragon fire. Wong wished he could have been there to see the reconstruction of his perfect face, his sharp cheekbones, his Cupid bow lips; to have seen the very marrow of the universe drip into his irises, to have seen the ocean offer up its deepest blue and the Spring leaves of the baobab trees float down to rest upon its surface; to have seen those hands knit back together, the scars sticking out furiously, the trembling more than just nerve damage.
Wong hadn’t really needed the call from Stark to let him know that Thanos had been defeated and that those reduced to ash were flesh and blood once more. Tao and Vishanti had told him; they suddenly perked up, as though they could feel in their hearts that Stephen was back. As though he had reached all the way from Titan to ruffle their ears and kiss their foreheads.
He would tell no one that the sound of Stark’s voice choking out that everyone was home had made tears spring to his eyes and grab around his airways.
‘He’s back,’ he whispered, as the phone settled back in its cradle, ‘he’s alive.’
He collapsed to his knees, hands shaking, tears leaking. He hadn’t expected the news, not with how the Avengers handled themselves, if the rumours were to be believed. But they had done it, and Wong had never been happier to hear news of their triumphs.
He was told that Stephen was to be collected from Titan in some spaceship or other that the Avengers has acquired, the same as the others that had been there. He was told to wait at the compound for their return. He took Vishanti and Tao with him; one reason was because they wouldn’t let him leave without them, but really Wong knew that Stephen would worry if they weren’t there.
Tao had grown a lot since Stephen had last seen her. Before he left, she had been the size of a kitten with a rounded belly from the treats that Stephen often spoiled her with. But now, she was a year older with a leaner figure, a longer neck and face, and her wings were larger than Wong’s head. She was still small, about the size of a housecat, with scales like the sky had drained into them, and seafoam that had crystallised in her eyes.
Wong knew she was hurting deeply; the nest that she had made of Stephen’s clothes didn’t smell of anything anymore, just cotton and dragon, even the smell of sweat and other-dimensional blood had dribbled from the shirts.
It would be good for all of them to see Stephen again. And though it felt like cheating, that they escaped the cruel clutches of grief whereas others with elderly parents or young children that had passed long before the Snap could not, Wong couldn’t help but find himself not caring. It wasn’t about anyone else, it was about him and Vishanti and Tao and Stephen.
As they walked through the doors of the compound, Wong felt the stares, the squinted gazed as they tried to see if the dog at Wong’s heels was really see-through or they were just mad, and the tilted eyebrows as they wondered if it was a mythical beast on Wong’s shoulder or an elaborate stuffed toy.
He stood at the back of the group. There weren’t many people there, the Avengers and a few others of importance that Wong couldn’t say he really cared about. He wondered whether Stephen would have changed, it had been a year. He wondered if his beard would have grown again, hanging from his face like a hangman’s noose. He wondered if he would have aged, if he would have a few more lines around his eyes that crinkled when he laughed. He wondered if he would still remember Wong’s face, or the chill of Vishanti’s fur, or the way that Tao’s claws would hit all the wrong pressure points. What if he came off of that spaceship and didn’t know who they were?
Wong closed his eyes, and hoped.
It felt like an hour, maybe longer, maybe a week had passed and he hadn’t noticed, before he heard the doors open and the baited breath was held.
Everything went silent.
There was Stark, leading the group behind him. He had his arms around a teenager in a red and blue outfit, a black spider splayed across the chest. Behind him was a group of three, who all clung to each other: a human, a tattooed giant, and a petite woman with antennae in her head. And then behind them came the most beautiful man that Wong had ever seen.
He had indeed changed.
He looked terrified . Pools of the universe looked back and forth at all the faces staring back at him, widened in their fear. No longer did he radiate the cool confidence of a master; he was returned to that nervous beginner that Wong had seen frequent in his library all those moons ago. His hands were cradled against his chest, their painful shaking visible even from where Wong was standing.
Tao had started to squeak in delight. Her mama! Her mama was back! She flapped towards him, Vishanti following on foot, Wong tailing behind.
He sensed the movement and he looked up at them with fear in his eyes. His shaking hands looked to be in too much pain to even consider conjuring up shields and ropes. So instead he flinched away from them. And that hurt Wong more than he thought it would.
‘Stephen?’ Wong whispered, almost too scared to say his name any louder in case it was a dream, that he’d wake himself up and Stephen would crumble away in front of him.
‘W-Wong?’ Stephen wheezed in return. His voice had turned to soot in his throat, there was no way it would flow after so long of staying dry in the riverbed.
The librarian’s lip wobble and he threw himself at Stephen, arms wrapping around his shoulders, squeezing tightly. ‘I’ve missed you so much,’ he said.
Stephen, who was also being hugged by a baby dragon and a dead dog, smiled and raised his arms to hold onto Wong in return.
‘I’ve missed you too.’