Archive of Our Own ^beta

“— But Thanos is dead?”   

Stephen takes a breath to answer her but does not trust the composure of his voice. He nods. 

“And now they’re going to execute you.” Her voice, meanwhile, is unwavering, taut as a gallows rope. “That’s where they’re taking you next.”

Stephen nods again. She deserves to know, he has told Charles and the others. She should know everything.

“They’ve already voted on it?”

He lifts his eyes to look at her, in the same moment Christine looks at him, and Stephen sees that, like her voice, her expression is hard, dry, full of a confessor’s clarity. In times past she has always looked at him with what he perceived as needfulness, a bright soft hope and intentionality of love that was somehow still perceptive and exacting, for all its wholehearted trust, and all focused in a single direction, as if it were hitched to a star instead of a man like him; in times past he has also wanted to turn away from her, like a prophet turning from a voice or vision, which is another unusual course of action for a man everyone calls the Sorcerer Supreme. 

Stephen nearly nods a third time but changes his mind. 

“Yes,” he answers. “At my suggestion.” 

“You want this to happen?”

To this, Stephen makes no answer, since no answer would be both true and comforting to her. Seated upright with her hands still impassively in her lap, Christine keeps that steadied gaze upon his face as if at some vigil of mystery; Stephen attempts to anticipate what she might ask him next, or say next, and whatever it is will be precisely the punishment he is due. 

You are no better than Thanos, she could say. You are the same. You are worse, because at least he would’ve spared the other half of a universe in getting what he wanted. Liar, hypocrite, murderer, coward, failure, I have always known you were a failure down inside yourself where you thought you could stay hidden. It would’ve been better if you were killed that night in the Accident. I sat beside your bed to shave your face and feed you and whenever you’ve been a complete arrogant asshole to me I have regretted doing it. I wish I had stopped giving you chances, I wish I’d never met you, I wish I could erase every word of what I told you with that Watch, I wish you had not bothered coming here to tell me goodbye because there is nothing left for us to say to one another. I hope I will not miss you when you are dead, and if I do then it will be one more thing you make me regret, Stephen Strange. 

Across the table from him, Christine pushes back in her chair. She stands. 

And he should have enough courage to watch her leave — she deserves this from him as well — but, being both a coward and a failure, Stephen bows his head and shuts his eyes, which is how he realizes that he is weeping again regardless of how futile it might be to do so. He hears her footsteps, three or four, then a sound he does not expect, which is something like ripping paper. 

A hand takes his face and lifts it. 

“Hold still.”

His eyes open. Christine stands above him with her fingers under his chin; she always carries a collection of individually foil-wrapped and wetted towelettes in her laboratory coat pocket — shoo, shoo, she has told him, whacking him with a rolled-up report, you’ll contaminate my work station, at least use this before you touch anything — and one of these cloths comes up to scrub the dried black blood from his nose.

Stephen purses his lips while she performs the service. A strand of red hair is stuck to her cheek. 

He knew her first by her writings to him, and knew her only by her writing and her voice for the first year of what has proven to be an acquaintanceship that lasted the rest of his life, if not the rest of hers. She was a new postdoctoral researcher at the Baxter Foundation, salaried as the assistant on a federal grant examining potential physiological effects of multiversal travel; he was the head of the Neurosurgery Department at Mount Sinai Hospital and received ten thousand dollars annually to be the grant’s external consultant, a bargain-rate sum considering the fact that it involved dealing with whatever pugilistic little personage controlled the email username of cpalmer14605, and however amusing it was to watch her pithy professionalism erode beneath his scorn. She always kept her holographic displays switched off during their web conferences, pleading a prudent caution for surveillance across the open network but also, or so Stephen suspected, to disguise the various faces she made, as if he could not detect them easily enough by her tone. 

Did you really say my dataset was ‘unclean’? she once wrote to him. Who are you, Sarah-Michelle the Vampire Slayer?

Which earned an elated laugh from him, a thing Christine never knew and Stephen never told her: then he was visiting the Foundation’s Manhattan campus, late one April afternoon, and as he buttoned into his greatcoat with steady, immaculate hands he had turned to ask, by the way, is Christine Palmer here? 

Yes, the principal investigator told him. She should be. I think she was down in the computational imaging laboratory today, but you might’ve just missed her. You can probably catch her if you run. 

So Stephen had, down the stairs because the elevators were too slow and out beneath an avenue of blossoming purple cherry trees, where a woman was pausing to tug down one of the branches and sniff its flowers — his exit through the building’s crash-bar fire doors surprised her so much this branch swapped her in the face as she released it — although for those last several steps he slowed himself to a lackadaisical walk. 

“— Oh, good,” he said. “There you are, Doctor Palmer.”

“Am I?” She raised a brow and looked behind herself. “I deny everything.”

The affected calm did nothing to settle the tetrameter pace of his thoughts. “Then you deny that you won’t go for coffee with me, I’m guessing?”

“I—” she stopped. A few loose cherry petals snowed onto her head. “That syntax is even worse than the article you contributed for last quarter’s Neurosurgical Review.”

“Ah. So you read it after all.”

But then she came forward to shake his hand and her hair was red, red, red like the sky at sunset when it is called a sailor’s delight, red like prairie-fire flowers in the field, and almost everything Stephen has done in these intervening years has been his paltry attempt to conceal the fact that from this moment forth Christine Palmer has possessed his heart as utterly as a thing claimed by conquest. When he woke after the Accident he looked to his right and saw her, her hand on his shoulder and her mouth at his ear: it’s all right, don’t be scared, it’s going to be all right, Stephen. 

She once discovered a lumpy yellow scarf Donna had knitted for him, folded into the back of a bureau drawer — it was a week after the sixth surgery; Christine had been helping him to dress himself, with a patience that almost enraged him because what woman would ever want somebody who already had the hands of a palsied old man, somebody who could not so much as undo the clasp on a necklace for her — and when she asked him about this scarf Stephen told her to just put the goddamn thing away. She invited him to dinner once and he told her he would go but then did not, because he felt hulled and empty and exhausted and decided there was nothing useful she could derive from his company in such a mendicant state. She gifted him with a novel she thought he would enjoy — Til We Have Faces, by J.R.R Tolkien — and Stephen never brought himself around to reading it because he was preoccupied, because he could not hold his mind ruddered towards one thing for longer than five minutes, because his response to the story would probably not be what she wanted or needed. What’s this relic called, how do you use it, how does it work, she has asked him, I bet the collar on that Cloak gives you great satellite reception, I’d like to go flying with you someday if you’ve got the time — sheesh, sorry. I mean levitating. Tell your friend not to be offended. 

He composed a piece of music for her, once, meant to be played on the violin at which he was previously a master and is now again a novice, but Christine never heard it; on the fiftieth rehearsal or so it came to him how stumbling, stupid and childishly sentimental his inarticulate fingers made the notes sound, whatever other signs and wonders of sorcery they could perform, and to settle a vacillating argument with himself Stephen cast his manuscript papers into the Sanctum’s fireplace. It had been written in the old common-measure style of a folk ballad or a hymn, since these were what Christine most frequently asked him to play; she also liked “Old Joe Clark” but performing this one too vigorously risked turning his violin into a fiddle.

Stephen raises his manacled hands as Christine finishes cleaning the blood from his face.  She pauses, when he touches her with his fingertips, but if their discoloration disturbs her then she does not let him see it. These last several weeks he has felt the corruption planted like a spear-blade under his heart and has been waiting, without result, for it to push the last few inches upward. It makes his whole body hurt.

“Christine — ” her name sticks in his throat. “ — Christine, I’m so sorry.”

She listens to this, and next appears to be listening for something within herself. 

“I believe you,” she says. 

She laves the rest of his face, turning the cloth to a new edge and bending above him so that errant strands of her prairie-fire hair touch him.

And the ache of remorse mounts and mounts within him, until he is caught in some excruciating state of inhalation he seems unable to release. When he is unable to stop his noiseless weeping, either, Christine puts her wetted cloth away to tug down a sleeve and use this as a substitute. He considers all the things he wishes he could say to her, that he should have said to her while there was still time — he ought to let her know about the Waypoint, about its key; maybe she will use it, someday, when he is not here to help her, except this would mean she will also need to keep the Watch — but he can think of only one thing he truly needs her to know:

I am not afraid of dying, Stephen would like to tell her. I’m ready. I have died many times before and that’s how I know your face will be one of the last things I think of. I love you and have loved you and would’ve loved you in any other lifetime where I found you as yourself, because I’ve walked there and I’ve seen it. 

“Where are they planning to do it?” Christine asks. It is a logical question. 

“I don’t know,” Stephen says, an illogical answer. “Back on Titan, maybe.”

“What will they tell everybody?”

“Whatever they want.” He turns in his chair towards her. The same tremulous cowardice that will not let him speak or keep his hands steady makes him long, with a dreadful fierceness, to hide his face against her. “The truth, I hope.”

“And what’s the truth, Stephen?”

She keeps his head in her hands, studying him with that searching, knowing gaze. It occurs to Stephen that this is the sort of thing she always wanted from him, that all she has ever really asked him to do was let her close enough so she might be shown his grief, or happiness, rare as the latter is for him nowadays, and be invited to stay with him inside it. 

“Stephen?”

Something in his soul ruptures. Its set boundaries rush away as if before a river at its full flood, the violent reordering chaos of the infinite entering the dimensional. 

He rises to his feet. 

His bluebird-bright regalia is filthy, despoiled by his blood and the soot from another world; he is sorry he must dirty Christine with it even as he loops his hands behind her head to draw her against himself.  

It is a rough, pawing sort of kiss, another thing that should earn her a sincere apology. He does it with the bedraggled breath of someone taking a heady drink from a bottle and the yank of the handcuffs crushes their lips as well as their noses and bodies together, as if he knows no more about this than an adolescent, which may be correct. There are at least five surveillance cameras in this jail cell and it is a surefire indicator of his dilapidated mental status that this does not perturb Stephen, Doctor Top-Button himself, in the slightest. 

Christine’s hands are pinned against him, so she grips the armor on his chest to heave herself higher into the kiss for fifteen purling seconds during which he feels her tongue pass over his lips, during which he parts them open for her with a sound the audio feed most definitely also catches, then she stoops free from his arms to back away. 

They stand twelve inches apart breathing one another’s air. The tears from his cheeks have been transferred onto hers by the contact, which sweeps him through with such a despaired, enormous desire for her that its effect is almost brutalizing. His hands have grown worse in their shaking but he fumbles to wipe the smears off her face with the backs of his fingers.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” he says. 

“I could’ve told you as much.” Christine inclines her head into the ministry of his hands. “But we’ve never really learned how to listen to one another, have we?” 

“No.” The words stick in his throat again. “Maybe someday we could’ve figured it out.”

“Yeah.”

Christine reaches to touch his face; she trails this touch down his throat, across his chest, along his arm —  this is a death he deserves, it is a death he will walk to unafraid, it is a death he has chosen; but what if all the safeguards he has left in place fail, what if the Illuminati fail, what if the Book of Vishanti fails, what if living would be the penance of greater worth and higher cost, what if she misses him — and Christine takes his hands. She kisses them, their palms and backs as well as their knuckles and fingers at the banished-black tips. 

She speaks without turning when the jail cell’s air-locked door opens.

“I want to request an audience with the Illuminati.”

Mordo’s gaze is as level as the beam on a balancing scale. He steps courteously into the room. “I’m sorry, Doctor Palmer. The decision can’t be changed.”

“Do you mean the decision that shouldn’t have been made in the first place?” Christine rounds towards him. “You’re a council. You’re an advisory board with a charter about monitoring global threats. You don’t have the authority to execute anybody — you don’t exist above the law and you don’t make it, either.”

“Kamar-Taj is not accountable to the caprices of any modern government or its conceptions of justice.” Mordo’s eyes shift past Christine to fix on Stephen; he needs your flexibility, the Ancient One had said, just as you need his strength. Maybe Stephen should have asked about the contractual terms upon which such advantages were traded. “The Sorcerer Supreme has waived his right to a trial.”

Stephen manages to part his lips. “Christine, it’s all right. I —”

She throws him back a silencing glance. “He’s not the Sorcerer Supreme. He’s just an idiot from Nebraska and he’s got the right to have someone at least speak in his defense.”

“And you offer to take his part?”

Christine scoffs. She wipes her face with her wrists. “I do.”

Stephen’s tongue feels swollen in his mouth. He stares at those tresses of red hair and another longing visits him, equally foolish but equally fierce; he would like to stand above the city with her, bearing her aloft on the tumultuous, silvery air so that she could look down over the skyscrapers, the rooftops, the hanging lily gardens in their robed insouciant glories, the converging rivers that run to the sea and the arched suspension bridges and the people, and in that upper inviolable place he would like to hold her against himself and keep her there. 

Christine’s voice rises. 

“We hardly know anything about the multiverse. Nobody’s ever studied how it’s organized. We don’t even understand what actually happens to the fourth-dimensional manifold between two universes during an incursion.” She has placed her body, small and narrow-shouldered, as a partition between Stephen and the door through which he will soon be led and never come back. “What if I can find out how to stop them? What if they can be undone?”

“That will not alter the choices that led to his doing of it in the first place.” Mordo regards her wholly without malice. A beetle-wing click of gears precedes the arrival of the Ultron androids. “You understand that you’re pleading for the life of a guilty man.”

“No shit. What other kind of life would I plead for?”

The shackles whose prototype she put together piece by piece give a green shimmer when Stephen feels himself jerked towards the door. Christine snatches for his hands again but her arm is taken into a clockwork grip and the two of them are yanked apart from one another like snapping links in a chain. Oh, don’t, please don’t, Stephen might say, she hasn’t done anything wrong, although through the thundering blood and the sudden seething of dark magic in his ears it is difficult to hear himself. Several further staggers take him out into the dim lights of the hallway and down it towards the judgment-seat room in which he will stand for a last time looking up at the empty chair that used to be his. 

Christine’s voice follows him. It always has. 

“No. Stop. Bring him back.” This is accented by a crash, suggesting she has kicked over a chair as they hoist her off her feet; some new pain enters into both the sound of her calling and his heart like a key. “Stephen — Stephen — ”

Stephen’s steps halt. He looks at his shackled hands.

And two seconds later, as the official records will show, all the lights of the building go black. Every CCTV camera in the system glitches, an outage that lasts for eight seconds; when the cameras come online again, there appears to be only one thing out of place.

…

It will take some time for him to return to her, probably. 

It will be the conclusion of a wayfaring that has brought him over, between, and through the secret interstitial spaces of the universe, looking for useful answers, a journey comparable with the far older ones from which certain travelers would return bearing cut green palm branches as a proof of their pilgrimage and thus earn themselves the associated surname. 

He carries her heart with him, though, so Stephen more or less knows the course he must follow. 

But whenever he at last, long-awaited, comes home, he will reach towards her, offering those condemned and consecrated hands that she has loved, loves still, would love in any universe  — their fingertips will be slightly changed — and by this gesture he will receive the gift that has always been his. 

So Christine sits and waits, beneath an archway of blossoming trees, holding something in her lap that resembles a blue garment with a patch missing from its back, and she listens for the sound of his swift-moving step.

…