Work Text:
...
The middle timbre and tonal color of his voice identifies him as a baritone, which in an opera seria would likely get him cast into role of the villain — the scoundrel, the betrayer, the caped and swashbuckling libertine, the character who must always pay for his sins at the end — rather than the young lover or the tragic hero, both more typically played by tenors who are handed all the bright showstopper songs but are, on a whole, far less interesting.
“You’re forgetting a role,” Stephen says, after hearing her deliver this observation.
They stand together in the Sanctum’s leaky copper-piped bathroom. The weather has been damp these last three days and Christine has offered to help him shave his face, a thing he decides to make eminently more difficult by singing to himself while she does it: beautiful loser, where you gonna fall, you realize you just can’t have it all.
“Which one have I forgotten?” she asks.
“Opera buffa. You know, comedy — as a baritone I’d be the ring-leader clown.”
Christine planes a safety razor up the dewy skin of his bared throat, over the moving bob of his larynx. “You own a cloak that can think for itself, Stephen. Yesterday you called our food processor a mortal enemy — there’s no fun in playing a role if you’re already living it, is there?”
“Ah, right. Villain it is, then.” The lathered soap on his face makes him look like a pensive old man. “Does that make you the young and virtuous soprano I’m plotting to seduce?”
“I think I’m considered a mezzo-soprano, actually. I’d probably play the villainess.” She flicks the razor clean against the sink. She would tell him there is no fun for a man in pursuing a woman he is already married to, either, but this would be incorrect. “Maybe I’m the one plotting to seduce you, Master Strange.”
“Is that a promise, Mistress Palmer-Strange?”
She plays the razor along his jaw. “Nope. It’s a threat.”
He laughs. The blade nicks him and turns the lather to a strawberries-and-cream mess.
It is indeed a fine baritone voice, though. Like any other it is an emanation of lungs and smooth muscles, teeth and tongue, breath and lips. It has never wholly lost its hard midland Nebraska rhotics, despite several decades in Manhattan, a fluency in Sanskrit, a beginner’s mediocrity in Spanish and Stephen’s personal best efforts. In his moments of fatigue or gentleness it turns low, warm and as full of wavering, inward suppressions as a smoldering bed of embers. It can transform the two syllables of her name into an imperative, a declaration, an interrogative, spoken against the back of her wrist or the inside of her thigh as he kisses them, complemented in these cases by the kittle but tender nuzzle of his beard on the sensitive skin. The sound alone affects her almost as much as the touch, a dangerously inconvenient thing whenever she is attempting to work; there is a city street map on the wall in her home office, upon which Christine has been sticking pins to mark emergency clinics and thus viable spots for a network of stabilized sling-ring portals leading into the Metro-General ER, and her so-called helpmate has been as much of a hindrance as a support.
The damnable cad.
“Tvam sada mak-sakasam vartase, bhaaryaa,” he tells her softly, once, and because he has backed her up against a bookshelf while he says it Christine can feel these words trebled by her own sternum. “Tvam hyrdaya asi.”
It is an odd thing to say at the moment, even without considering how weirdly the Sanskrit lands upon her untutored ear. The buckle of his watch has become playfully but intimately ensnared by a lock of her hair; Stephen has paused to untangle it and that baritone voice is a little higher-pitched, a little more frenetic in his distraction. Christine continues unfastening the clasps on his shirt, saving that ridiculous Rube Goldberg construction he wears as a belt for a kind of final obstacle.
“What’s that mean?” She tugs the opened shirt and the tunic down low enough to kiss the scar on his chest. “You didn’t just tell me how to make a chicken salad or something, did you?”
Stephen loosens her hair from the watch. He lifts her face and kisses her forehead as he smiles. “You always see right through me.”
Which is a lie, naturally. Christine repeats these words later to Wong and does not butcher their pronunciation quite badly enough to keep him from understanding them and turning an aghast shade of maroon: You are with me always, wife, you are my heart.
Well, well, two operatic villains can play that game, and thus she discovers in Miss America Chavez an able accomplice, or else an astute collector of possible future blackmail materials. Her polyglot talents extend only as far as medical Spanish but she finds this provides a helpful foundation; they are in the master’s quarters attempting to tune its piano — it has the momentous, dowager temperament of a elephant but has finally stopped making creative interventions while Stephen plays it — when Christine sits down beside him on the piano’s bench to pass her fingertips along the gray streak in his hair.
“Tu eres mi corazón tambien, esposo,” she says. “El tiempo dirá cuánto te quiero.”
Stephen’s knotty hands pause over the keys when he looks at her. He forgets his role as the seductive rake when his mouth pulls down hard at one side in that smile he wears when he is not in a place where he can let himself cry; it is the same face he made when she brought him the invitation for her wedding to Charlie, while he was saying that’s good, I’m happy for you, you deserve it, and Christine finds that this, too, in the total silence, is as dearly stirring as a physical touch.
He picks up the piano’s dropped tune again after the pause, although the playing is much softer. “What’s that supposed to mean? Are we out of orange juice or something?”
Christine turns a page on his sheet music. “Yeah, that’s it.”
It is not even really a matter of what he says, though. She will be digging her hemostat and forceps around inside a wound made by who-the-hell-knows, extracting what look alarmingly like large porcupine quills, and that voice will be in the midst of a dizzying babble or a self-justifying explanation as he tries to stay conscious. She will be sitting by the library’s fireplace, in one of its chairs or else in Stephen’s chair on his lap, and that voice will be speaking to her about the future, about what scares him or about the failures of which he is most ashamed, about growing up as a midlander boy in Nebraska with Donna and how she and Christine might have gotten along. She will be lying beneath that long, heavy body, or straddled atop it looking down on him, and that voice will make an unguarded noise of longing or pleading or ecstatic delight that in their old life together would have no doubt been a torment to his well-ordered pride. She will fit one of his upturned hands between both of hers by interlocking her pinkies with his outer fingers, kneading her thumbs along the scarred nerves of his palm, and that voice will not need to do anything more than give a little hum of equal parts old, familiar pain and thanksgiving.
In every case it will put something burning through her blood like a fever, and she will want him so much that the force of it is almost paralyzing.
Cad. Rogue. Wicked tempter.
And it is an altogether beloved voice, from a beloved mouth, for all the man’s tendencies towards acerbic or absurd remarks she really ought to have smacked him for at least once. It is the voice in which she has been told this is the part where you leave, you care so much don’t you; it is the voice in which she has been told Christine I am so so sorry, I don’t want you to go, I love you — the fact that she is the second Christine to hear this may cause a tiny spur of jealousy, but she never plans on telling Stephen this — in every universe. It is a voice she lived five years believing that she would never hear again.
It is Stephen’s voice and he is, after all, in the multiversal scheme of things, her Stephen, which is ultimately why Christine can but does not necessarily always choose to win any silly opera villain's gambit of seduction he might set before her as a challenge.
“My Stephen,” she will say, in a playful mezzo-soprano voice, her left hand holding his face with her wedding ring like a little snowflake of cold against his cheek. “My Stephen.”
...