Archive of Our Own ^beta

The Metro-General Hospital mobile clinic she operates is a refurbished RV whose sides advertise primary and urgent care, screenings, vaccinations, referrals, and needle exchanges. Its size would make it an absolute bastard to drive or park anywhere in the city except for the fact that Stephen has bespelled it to bend in half at its center, or compact itself down to the dimensions of a minivan; he has tried to explain the mystic thermodynamics of this process, several times, but Christine’s lone ‘B+’ in high school was for Honors Physics despite her tutor’s many intercessions and therefore it is a nobly wasted effort. It makes about as much sense to her as why he keeps a beard and grows his hair long, since she can recollect the days when he preferred to stay as close-cropped and slick-faced as a Roman emperor: but hair, Stephen has told her, is like the truth, which continually reasserts itself, and like the truth one can either resist or accept it. Christine’s own jaw-length bobbed hair is a brittle sheaf of blonde she once sheared almost completely off because her first-grade classmate Allie Hamilton compared its yellow color to Janice’s hair in the Muppets.

She gives Stephen a scrunchie, usually a pink one. He usually accepts it.

She has gotten better at understanding how his uniform’s many ceremonial panels and layers fit together, though, so that if Stephen cannot undress himself she can help him to do it; its patterns remind her of a redwing blackbird, that handsome gentleman caller to the summer pastures with his bright, brave song and valiant commandant’s epaulets. At the last moment of this careworn familiarity Christine turns herself modestly around and allows Stephen to peel the bloodied trousers down his legs before he wrestles into a gawkish paper gown. Beneath the clothes his skin is the same wandflower-white as before, which she thinks of as Before, a paleness that shows the strong veins at the backs of his knees despite all those newer, textured scars that wale his body up and down like a tree the deer have scraped their antlers against. The oldest of these scars is from a three-inch penetrating wound above his heart, not counting the ones on his hands. 

Then Stephen sits and makes no complaint whatsoever, regardless of any debridement or irrigation, poking or prodding Christine subjects him. She pauses often to let him tap her shoulder as a gauge for his pain: one tap through seven, since he will not admit to anything higher and seven is a holy number. When his fingers shake too badly to manage even this she receives an answer anyway. 

She knows the noise his joints make when they are rearticulated into place and has lately detected the swoosh of a minor diastolic heart murmur while resting her stethoscope’s bell — she breathes on it first, to warm it — against his immovable back. His chest and waist, like the rest of him, are thicker and heavier than they used to be, touched by the same engined power that has filled out his thighs and bountied his arms; she maintains a folder for tracking any variation in his vitals and writes down both his cataloged injuries and current weight in a mood of what she considers dispassionate disinterest. When she offers him a Band-Aid his primary criteria for selection is that it does not feature the image of anybody he works or has ever worked with, who all aside from Bruce Banner refer to Christine as the Night Nurse despite her varying shift schedule. This makes Stephen’s pickings surprisingly slim until she purchases a box of dinosaur-themed ones whose packaging calls them bravery badges. 

She holds up the options for his careful discrimination. Stephen makes a disdaining face until Christine gives him one with a tyrannosaurus on it, and if his antics are riling her she might also stick a second one across his mouth.

Sometimes he sings while she works and Christine tries to identify the tune, writing her guesses down on a hand-held whiteboard she uses with patients who are hard of hearing, or she sings to see if Stephen can do likewise, since the few rudimentary healing spells he has taught her are worked best when she is not wholly thinking about them. This invariably devolves into a competition; one time Stephen emerges victorious using what proves to be a verse from the ballad “Sir Patrick Spens'' while another time Christine outwits him with “Pretty Fair Maid Was In Her Garden.” It is a song she first heard in middle school off a Peggy Seeger album, although it is not a song she ever managed to play in those private guitar lessons her father paid for because she was no good at the piano, the flute, ballet, watercolor painting, figure skating, or rhythmic gymnastics. Nobody eastwards of the Mississippi, Stephen included, knows that her sixteenth birthday party was a debutante ball for which she wore white gloves, freshwater pearls, and a dress she spilled champagne onto deliberately because she had chosen it at the shop herself and her mother only mentioned that its neckline was unflattering just before Christine walked downstairs to greet everybody; she has never told anybody that her parents have not spoken with her since the semester she started nursing school — well, you can come home by Thanksgiving or not at all; it’s your choice — and for graduation day she arbitrarily chose a couple in the audience at whom to smile so she would not look so stiffly, blankly odd sitting there with her prim stockinged ankles tucked underneath her folding chair.

Christine suspects the spoiled, petty histrionics of being cut off from her inheritance would amuse Stephen a bit, if he knew about them, the way he was amused to discover she knew how to use snail tongs and that her favorite novel is The Blue Castle, and she supposes this is his right as a poor midland farmer’s son who has twice now ascended like a firework to magnificence upon the propulsive forces of his mind and spirit. They met when Christine referred a woman with spinal stenosis to him for treatment and Stephen called her to give a point-by-point critique of her diagnosis, an opening sally he might have won outright had Christine not suggested her idea for percutaneous endoscopic unilateral laminotomy and bilateral decompression using 3-D real-time image navigation. 

And thank you for calling me personally to discuss it, Doctor Strange, she told him, in her finest finishing-school voice. It was wonderful of you to do so. 

At the back of the mobile clinic is a bowl sink, the sort found in salons. If Stephen is filthy enough Christine settles him here once everything else is finished, unbinds his hair from the scrunchie and washes the whole eagle-brown wing of it, studying how the water tumbles through those blazes of old-man-winter white as well as how a slumbering calm steals over his sharp, elusive features while he reclines there. He keeps the crooked hands folded atop his chest and is usually ready to drop down dead-asleep by the time she finishes the drying and combing. 

She lends him the use of a cot. He crumples into it wearing the spare t-shirt and sweatpants she keeps in a drawer. Sometimes Christine stands above him, watching him, in much the same way as she watched at his bedside after the Accident; Stephen watches her in return with those intuitive eyes that are almost a perfect match for the specter-blue of his magic. 

It is his eyes more than anything else that have always flummoxed her. They contain a spry, secretive, passata-sotto kind of levity able to strike at the ridiculous in almost anything — just the sort of man who would be chosen by a pair of fairytale seven-league boots, she figures — and however much this romping playfulness has often delighted Christine or sparked up her laughter it has also, always, made her withdraw from him, at that final risked moment: as if she is pouring out a drink for him but has evermore reserved its bottom-most sip for herself. 

It is the reason she once called a Manhattan jeweler in a mild panic to say no, please, she’d changed her mind, they could leave the wristwatch’s back the way it was. The customized engraving had been a lovely suggestion, a beautiful idea, but — Christine did not mention this last part — it was bad enough the most expensive thing she could afford out of her own pocket was a Bulova Lunar Pilot Chronograph with a price tag of five hundred dollars, rather than the twenty-three thousand dollar beauty she first set her eye on; she had chosen the Lunar Pilot because a shopkeeper told her the Apollo 15’s mission commander wore one just like it, when he flew to the moon, and for maybe six swooning hours she thought those words she was planning as the watch’s inscription where about the prettiest a woman could say to a man. She had pleased herself with thinking how it would be like the way noble ladies once gave their favored knights a token, to wear in a joust, or the way girls once gave beloved soldiers a lock of their hair as a treasure to keep before they marched away on some long, hard-road journey — any resemblance of said hair to a Muppet’s notwithstanding — until Christine sat down and gave serious consideration to what Stephen would say.

Ah, will it? he would smile, without a trace of meanness in his heart. I’ll make sure I keep this well-wound, then. That’s not the kind of thing I’d want to miss. 

So no, she didn’t need the inscription, Christine told the jeweler, and hopefully that change wouldn’t cause anyone too much hardship. When she finally gave Stephen the watch she was in such a fraught state of anticipation she had not been able to so much as look him in the eyes, and thus saw only those pale hieratic hands lifting it from its box.

Christine, this is — then he stopped, for a second, and whatever he planned on saying next must not have been suitable, or especially complimentary, because instead he told her simply, Thank you.

On the night of the Accident their relationship had been over and done with for more than a year, but it appeared the MGH patient Strange, Stephen V. never bothered removing her name as his emergency contact and so Christine was there alongside him up until they bore him away through the operating room’s double doors. When an ER technician presented the watch to her — all his other personal effects were so ruinously bloody they were jammed into red medical waste bags and disposed of — its crystal face was shivered into seven or eight pieces. Its sub-dials were broken; the main dial appeared to be working, however, and just before visiting hours ended every day Christine would fasten the watch to his hospital bed’s safety bar so that he could look through the impersonal, unlistening darkness of the room to see those luminary dials and know exactly how much longer the night would last. She returned at nine o’clock one morning to learn the watch was gone. 

He asked me to put it away, a nurse informed her. I think it was upsetting him — no, please don’t feel bad. He’s had an awful shock.

It is just as well Christine has never asked Stephen what he did with the watch, what became of it or how much its damaged parts eventually sold for, presuming — which she does — that he pawned it to finance another downward inch of his fathoms-deep debt. If he had not realized before how little it was worth, compared to his other timepieces, that would have certainly discovered it for him. She has never asked him why he was wearing it for the society dinner, either. She has not needed to; she refused his last-impulse invitation and the man has always been most inclined to pursue those things he cannot possess.

Time will tell how much I love you, indeed. There are occasions when Christine would like nothing better than to take that yellow-headed girl who still lives and dreams somewhere deep in her heart and just smother the puny nuisance.

And they were never suited for one another, she understands. Stephen is extraordinary, intricate, unpredictable, easy to bore but difficult to dissuade; she is relentlessly uncomplicated, simple, knowable in her habits as well as fixed fast in her desires, and her love for him has therefore remained as persistently perennial as a straggling chicory-flower that thrusts itself back up each year through the same cracked stone.

But even this offering of devotion would be no use to him; over the last several months of standing above Stephen at the bed, amidst these avowed silences, seeing him lay himself down to sleep, Christine has watched the mirth slowly departing from his eyes and observed some dire, surmounting solitude gradually taking its place. He has been forced down and down again into the crucible of so many awful choices that she wonders if his heart must not emerge a little more hardened each time.

He invariably refers to America Chavez as kid, the Kid. It’s okay, Kid; don’t worry, Kid; we’ll figure it out, Kid, you’ll be safe. You’ll be safe, one way or another.

I promise. 

Christine has tried several times to remember how old Donna Strange was when she died, the season’s first drowning at Lake Minatare the summer before Stephen left home for Columbia University, but she does not know. Maybe he has never mentioned it to her. 

So she merely watches him, waiting for anything within his expression she might be able to interpret, then Christine turns from the bed to bring him ibuprofen or a cup of juice, perhaps a fresh bandage if he has bled through his first one; it is always unsettling to see, parsed out so clearly, which angles of him belong to the Sorcerer Supreme who can unravel the warp and weft of time itself and which parts belong to the man who chops his vegetables with a pizza wheel because it stays steadier in his hand than a kitchen knife. He has shattered so many of the Sanctum’s china teacups that anything he grabs nowadays automatically transfigures itself into plastic with the scandalized irritation of a matron forced to abdicate her seat on the train.

Christine is typically back within five minutes, and this is the only point at which Stephen violates their arrangement:

He raises his right hand to his lips, pressing his fingers there. He extends the hand towards her. 

The first time he did it Christine thought he had developed a septic fever and in his delusion he was blowing her a kiss, until he mouthed two words and she recognized the gesture as American Sign Language. No talking, they agreed, since everything worthwhile had already been said between them, but the notion that talking could be split into several differentiable concepts was just the sort of loophole Stephen Strange would exploit.

On those initial occasions Christine simply nodded her head, or rolled her eyes if the injuries he brought to her for treatment like a child with a boo-boo were particularly moronic. He once walked in with a foot-long alien lamprey eel attached to his elbow and she only got it off him by beheading it with a set of trauma shears; he brought the lamprey back to her the next morning prepared into a wine sauce entree of something like bordelaise along with a scribbled note about this being considered a delicacy on the planet Xanadar, a dish Christine tasted a bite of before feeding it to some stray cats. She kept the note.

The fourth or fifth time he made the same sign to her, however, she held out her right hand with its palm facing inward before sweeping it towards herself, as if gathering something into an embrace, and this has since become a final movement in their routine. 

“Thank you,” Stephen signs to her. “Thank you,” and he rubs a fist over his breastbone. “So so so sorry.” 

“You’re welcome. It’s no trouble,” Christine says in reply, since he does not otherwise specify what he is apologizing for. She inscribes several circles in the air with her forefinger. “Always. Always.”

This seems to make him pause. Twice or thrice Christine has thought she saw his eyes grow watered and red-lined, mayhaps, unless this was his attempted containment of a yawn, which makes more sense because his jaw locks tight at the same time. 

After this he settles onto his back — Stephen is a stomach-sleeper ordinarily, but because he turns towards the fight rather than away from it his injuries mainly come from this direction — and closes his eyes. The dark hair spreads over his shoulders like a mantle, like a testimony; Christine looks at him and thinks about how she used to giggle over the church-talk way her Frozen Chosen elders discussed sex as knowing a man, being known by him. 

Yet it is a fitting descriptor, she will admit, funny though it may be, because there is indeed a knowledge of Stephen that she carries within herself still, as if the scent and sound and touch and taste of him has remained like a presence in her flesh and blood. She harangued him once into taking a trip with her up to the Adirondacks, to the summit of Mount Skylight, and as they stood there gazing down onto the uplifted blue peaks and the deep-cleft valleys Stephen had put an arm around her and into that almighty distance he sent a clear, long, quavering whistle; all the hills gave this music back to them tenfold like a chorus and Christine turned an ear against his heart to think, I hope this is one of the moments I’ll get to live over again whenever the time comes for me to die. People talk about the joy in heaven and I hope it feels something a little like this. 

And if she were to stroke her fingers through that crowning-glory hair of his now, or stoop to kiss his face, if she were to hitch up a knee and climb her way onto the cot beside him gingerly so as not to jostle him, Christine wonders what would happen next. 

You care so much, don’t you?

Thus she knows the answer, obviously. She knows how it would end because it has ended already. Even the romantic girl she has never managed to get rid of in herself — the one who seems willing to have her heart broken, broken, broken, to trust one more time and always one more time — is not so ignorant as that.

Or perhaps she is: someday it will be this same interior girl who compels the grown-up Christine Palmer to dig through the cold stones of a fallen temple, after the Kid brings her there through a portal, even if the labor rips her hands bloody and she will have to consider the possibility of retrieving Stephen’s corpse in pieces, his redwing blackbird robes and hair or perhaps a hand, collected like relics. She will consider the alternative of leaving him behind, or at least leaving behind that profaned, beloved body whose many breaches she has mended again and again.

And the silly girl will say to herself, nope, no sir. I can’t let Stephen get turned into a ghost or anything like that just because he hasn’t got a proper resting place. He’d be a menace. He’d haunt me for laughs. He’d do things like charge my hair with static electricity so I shocked myself on everything. I would hear him knocking at my door to be let in but when I opened the door he would not be there.

So it’s okay, Christine will think, as she rolls away a last stone.

I can let him break my heart just once more.

For the time being, though, she leaves Stephen to sleep, walking on her toes so she will keep quiet. Whenever she next draws back the cot’s privacy curtain he is gone; the sheets are cleaned to spotlessness and tucked into the thin mattress’s sides with perfect hospital corners.

He has not left even a single hair behind on the pillow.

…

On the other hand, maybe Christine has been mistaken about several things.

Because when she takes away that last stone, sending a skift of dust and daylight down into the hollowed place above the temple’s broken altar towards which she has been digging, a man’s startled face is turned up at her — looking perfectly like it is supposed to, excepting some slashes and bruises; come to think of it, the warnings never specify why a man should not dreamwalk into his own corpse — and Stephen sees her. He is pinned so that only one arm is free and he speaks in a quiet rasp. 

“Christine?”

“— How do you do, sir?” she asks, since this strikes her as the well-mannered thing to reply with in absence of any helpful social precedent. “You know, most people who want to build themselves a fort just use some pillows.”

“Christine,” he says again. 

She is stretched out on her stomach within the cleared-away rubble and she works an arm forward. America has told her what happened at the Waypoint: he betrayed me, he was going to kill me, he was dying, he told me he was sorry.

She opens her hand.

“It’s okay, Stephen — it’s okay. Try not to move too much. You’re really hurt.” She wriggles her hips to make more space. “The Kid brought me here. She’s all right — I’ll explain everything after we get you out.” She shifts her eyes to the left. “Actually, forget that. I’ll explain almost everything. It sounds like other-you hasn’t got much more sense than you do, but I guess that shouldn’t shock me.”

She says this to make him laugh, which is a failure because instead Stephen lets out a quiet, animal sort of sound from deep in his chest. This time his voice is mournful, yearning, and she hopes he does not have a concussion. 

“Christine — ” his jaw trembles. “Christine, I — ”

“You hush. We’re still not talking, remember? You’ll give yourself an internal hemorrhage if you haven’t got one already.” A weak blue-white light appears in the palm of his shaking hand, letting her see his eyes clearer through the dimness; she recognizes their expression. She speaks more quietly. “You can tell me later. I’ll listen.” 

Then she reaches towards him, as far as she is able. Their fingertips touch, just so, until Stephen pits the last full measure of his bodily strength against all the broken weight of hell atop him to bridge the final half-inch that separates them.

Her hand closes around his wrist. His hand seizes likewise around hers, so hard it almost hurts, and as they wait for the next spill of dust to settle Christine’s fingers detect the shape of something he is wearing, treasure-kept, inside his sleeve. 

…