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It was six months after Stephen took possession of the New York Sanctum before he went onto the roof. The fact that it had taken him six months of exploring to even realize you could get onto the roof said a lot about what the inside of the house was like.
He stepped out cautiously, looked around, and cursed under his breath.
*
"So, about those plants on the roof," Stephen began in the morning, over tea with Wong in the parlor. (Technically, the west parlor, or as Stephen thought of it, the one with the creepy dead animal heads on the walls.) As usual, Stephen had made the tea by hand, clumsily struggling with the box of loose-leaf tea and the kettle because Wong claimed it was good to practice doing things by hand rather than relying on magic for everything. Stephen suspected this was mostly an excuse to watch him spill hot water on himself.
"Yes, I was wondering when you were going to water those," Wong said.
"No point; they're dead."
"Well, of course they are now."
Stephen glowered at him. "And were you going to mention these plants to me at any point?"
"You didn't ask," Wong said, and sipped his tea. "This is not bad, but it is slightly bitter; steeping the leaves for about a minute less would produce a nicer result, for future reference."
Stephen let out a very long sigh, which Wong ignored.
*
He could have fixed the plants with magic, perhaps not going so far as to actually restore the sad brown sticks in their pots to vibrant health (Wong would no doubt tell him it was an improper use of the Time Stone, and he was probably right), but it would be the easiest thing in the world to just portal in some new plants and put preservation spells on them. Or maybe dispense with the entire ridiculous rooftop garden, throw some statues and a couple of lawn chairs around, and call it good.
But instead, he found himself tidying up by hand. He wasn't sure why. It had nothing to do with Wong's bullshit about physical labor laying a fertile ground for magical talents; it was just ... easier this way, after a long day of magical labors around the Sanctum. He came up every evening, when he had time, and took down the dead pots with his shaking hands, dumping them one by one into a trash bag that the Cloak helpfully carried around after him. (He hadn't asked it to. It seemed to be enjoying itself. Maybe it used to do the same thing for Drumm; he didn't know how to ask and wasn't sure he wanted to.)
It was soothing, he found, emptying terra-cotta pots into the offered bag while the wind blew in his hair and the sun went down behind the city office towers. It was the same kind of feeling as being alone on a mountaintop, except he felt comfortable here in a way he didn't on actual mountaintops. New York was where he belonged. He wasn't cut out for monasteries and rural isolation. True, what he had here was more like urban isolation, but ... he liked it. He liked being up here, listening to the bustle of the city down below, the honking horns and sirens, the occasional distant helicopter. He was of the city, and yet a little apart from it, as perhaps he'd always been.
He wondered if he ought to tell Wong that, when he next saw him.
*
Not all of the plants were dead. It was the Cloak that alerted him to this, by covering the mouth of the trash bag with a fold of itself and then firmly pushing the plant back at him. After he tried a couple of times to throw it away, he noticed the faint tinges of green at the bases of some of its leaves.
"Fine," he said, putting it back, and conjured a small rain shower over its pot. The Cloak drifted smugly, fluttering in its own nonexistent breeze.
*
Once he'd sorted the dead plants from the living ones, he had to decide what to do about them. The handful of survivors were starting to put on new vegetation now that they were receiving regular watering, but there weren't enough of them to make a decent rooftop garden; it looked more like the leftovers after an "everything must go, 90% off" sale. Maybe Wong would want them, but somehow Stephen didn't want to get rid of them. They'd survived through everything, outliving their master and all of Stephen's halfhearted efforts to kill them with neglect. He related to the tenacious little bastards.
Which was how he found himself at a garden supply store, picking out plants.
"Do you need any --"
"No," he snapped, and then he had the double indignity of having to find the clerk again to ask her which plants would do well outside in a New York climate. She was very nice about it, too.
*
"So this is what you're doing up here," Wong said, and Stephen did not jump, and certainly did not drop the shears with which he had been very carefully, and with great attention to fine motor control, pruning a rosebush.
"Do you knock?"
"There's no shame in finding the rooftop pleasant," Wong said. He wandered between the plants, Stephen's mismatched little garden of Blue Light Special remainders and randomly acquired ornamental shrubs from various nurseries, and Stephen was just braced for a sarcastic comment, but none came. Instead Wong said, "Daniel used to like it up here."
"He must have, given the amount of time it takes to do this properly," Stephen muttered. He started to bend over to pick up the shears, then remembered he didn't have to, and restored them to his hand with a small flick of his fingers. And then it occurred to him that he'd all but admitted he was doing the gardening by hand rather than just slapping a preservation spell on the whole place and calling it good, and he was really braced for sarcasm this time --
... except, that wasn't the kind of thing Wong tended to be sarcastic about. Stephen turned to observe Wong lightly pinching a weed from the soil underneath a shrub, and he thought about Wong's preference for tea that was made by hand, however inexpertly.
"I was thinking about putting some chairs up here," he said. "Maybe a greenhouse in the corner."
"I think that's an excellent idea," Wong agreed. "There's a good vantage for watching the sun rise right ..." He pointed. "Over there."
It was exactly where Stephen had been thinking, but he wasn't about to admit it. "If you're going to be up here, you could be useful. That bush by your elbow has aphids. The fumigation equipment is in the shed."
"You know, a simple pest-repelling spell --"
"Aren't you the one who keeps insisting that it's good for the soul to do things by hand? Picking a thousand aphids off a rosebush ought to be like a soothing spiritual ointment, then."
Wong grinned at that -- really grinned. "It's good to know you're paying attention," he remarked, and went off to the shed.