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After the Snap, after the Decimation, Wong is the most powerful sorcerer left. They lost so much of Kamar-Taj to the dust, and by whatever luck the Snap wrought, there is no one else. It can only be him. It does not matter if he wants it. Either the world is left unprotected, defenseless, or it is him.
There is nothing left of those lost to hold onto; forward is the only way.
But how to go forward?
One step in front of the last.
Captain America is on television. The feed is shaky and fades in and out, staticky like how TV hasn’t been for years. Wong barely pays attention as he stands in the empty room, the sound of the Captain’s speech echoing from a room down the hall. A room Stephen Strange installed to house what few remnants remained from his old life as a doctor. A different doctor; he still heals—healed—the maladies of the body, the spirit, the mind.
The TV turns off and on on its own, like so many modern things do in this place. Nothing is plugged in but phones still charge, the internet still works, lights turn on and off as they please.
Strange left his bed unmade.
A long habit of keeping things tidy and making his own bed compels Wong to move forward and make it, smooth the sheets out, tug the blankets up, put the pillows in the proper spot.
He doesn’t.
There should be things left of those who are gone. Even small, unimportant things like this, an unmade bed.
There is an empty teacup on the bedside table next to a staggered pile of books, most with tabs of paper sticking out, Strange’s terrible handwriting scrawled across the ivory sheets, references to other books and spells and notes.
Wong doesn’t touch anything.
He retreats, shutting the door behind him, and even though he turns off all the lights, one stays on, an eternal way home next to Strange’s empty bed.
There is a room for the Sorcerer Supreme in Kamar-Taj. Strange favored the New York Sanctum Sanctorum, but he stayed at Kamar-Taj on occasion, and when Wong enters, he can’t make himself stay there. That had been the Ancient One’s room, long before, and he can still feel her magic on the walls.
He sleeps in his old room. There isn’t a librarian anymore; the man who took over after he left was dusted, and Wong had kept the librarian’s room, so he’s more comfortable there, alone with his books and his thoughts and his few belongings.
Every day now is long, longer than he thought a day could be. Reality is being held together with tape and twine. The repercussions of Thanos’ great act reverberate through all dimensions, all worlds, destroying ecosystems and habitats and planets, destroying more lives than theirs.
It is so, so terribly quiet now. The few that survived talk little, still in shock, and when Wong leaves Kamar-Taj, the only sound is grief. Less animals, less bugs, less everything.
It hurts.
Less of everything other than pain. There is so much loss in the world. He felt it as a sorcerer, but it is amplified by the powers that come with being the Sorcerer Supreme; he can see grief now, see it feeding, see it hungering, see how it hurts. He has his own grief-beast, an otherworldly being that has latched onto his heart and feeds from the grief that has wrapped around it.
He could be rid of it. Easily. A spell or two to cut it away and it would writhe on the floor and shrivel up and be gone, and he would be free.
He doesn’t. He cradles it like a babe to his chest, lets it feed from him, soothes it when he wants to cry over those he lost but can’t.
He waits for everyone else to go to sleep and wanders around the empty, silent halls of Kamar-Taj in a daze. He preferred the quiet of the library before this, before the Snap, but now the quiet aches, deafens him.
The greatest loss of sorcerers in centuries and it happened because of a madman, a madman who did it without a sword or a weapon. Simply a gauntlet, a glove powered by a few stones.
Wong still doesn’t know how it must have happened, how Strange must have given up the Time Stone, but he watched Strange grow from a man who thought himself powerful but was riddled with insecurities and fear and trying to hide it, to someone confident and strong and truly powerful, even if he was far more arrogant than he ever deserved, and a man like that could not be easily bested. And he knows that the Eye of Agamotto was tied to him with a dead man’s spell; he would have had to give it up willingly.
To be the Sorcerer Supreme is to give up yourself in service to the world, in service to the future.
What future? What world?
Wong hears that the Avengers find Thanos out in the great vastness of space. He hears that Thor chops off his head.
He hears that this is the world.
There is no going back. This is the future.
This is the world.
Kamar-Taj was built to keep the world safe, to keep knowledge for future generations, to train sorcerers, and to keep the Time Stone. The Sorcerer Supreme was a Stonekeeper, a guardian. With the Time Stone gone, Wong has less power than any Sorcerer Supreme before him, but he has more knowledge than all the ones that came before, as he has the written cumulation of hundreds of years of research into time spells.
Less than would be expected are reliant solely on the Time Stone. He had never used it, so he doesn’t know how it felt to use it, but he had seen the Ancient One use it, as well as Strange. The Time Stone seemed to make it easy; these spells are difficult, impossible even, tearing payment from his body and mind.
But he has no will to change anything. He cannot go to the past to change what has happened. He cannot undo the Snap. It is not possible.
But he can see. He can look. He can know.
There are other worlds than these.
Perhaps in this world, Thanos was inevitable. Perhaps this is the way it would have always gone. Wong, alone in the library, surrounded by an empty temple, Sorcerer Supreme to a world that needed him more than ever and unable to help them. Perhaps some worlds simply end like this.
He opens a book and turns the page.
He closes his eyes.
Worlds spin out into thousands. Dimensions stacked on top of another like sheets of paper. So, so many of them interconnect, have the same starting points, have points of similarities where he made the same choice again and again, so many different versions of him.
How many end like this? How many claw him into shredded paper, until he is a husk of a man, until he is—
He is a librarian in this one.
Wong stops, reaches out, steps through the glass.
It shatters around him, but remakes itself instantly. Wong stares at the place between worlds for a long moment before turning away, looking at himself.
He looks the same. Less tired. Younger.
After Kaecilius murdered the previous librarian, Wong had asked for the position. He spent so long in the libraries when he was a student and he had always felt close to the books, the magic seeping out of every page, the knowledge buried in worn paper, and he had wanted to help stop someone else from doing such a terrible thing again.
This version of himself works in a library as well, although a mundane one. Somehow he is in New York City, not Kathmandu, and he’s wearing a maroon t-shirt underneath a light cardigan and comfortable looking jeans. He wonders how this Wong got here, how he came to be so far from home.
There are so many people here, in this other place, untouched by the devastation that ripped through Wong’s home world. If Thanos is here, he has not come yet.
Other Wong hums under his breath, picking up a stack of books on a return cart and turning to put them on his own cart to take them to the back to be scanned and processed. He bumps into someone and accidentally drops the books, and the two of them laugh and bump into each other again as they both bend over at the same time to pick up the books.
Wong shivers. He knows that laugh. He misses that laugh.
A younger Stephen Strange, dressed in an overly large sweatshirt with COLUMBIA in big bold letters over the chest and leggings that have clearly not been washed, laughs again as he hands Wong another book.
The other version of himself flushes as Strange says something, his hand lingering as he hands over the last book, long fingers wrapping around Wong’s wrist.
He could watch this for hours.
He could stay here, an endless shadow, a ghost lost in the pursuit of what isn’t.
He waits until Strange asks Wong out and after he says yes, Wong leaves.
This isn’t for him.
The glass shatters and instantly remakes.
This world is full of smoke. He doesn’t have to breathe but he coughs anyway, waving the smoke away from in front of his face, and it does nothing.
He walks out into a street, although it is barely a street anymore. Wong looks around, frowning to himself, trying to push past the rubble and dust and smoke to see—
New York. Again.
Destroyed.
What happened here?
It is little more than rocks and dust, smoke and destruction. He can’t get very far, forced to scramble over destroyed buildings and blown up cars, and it quickly dawns on him that this is near the Sanctum. Or near where it used to be. He can feel the magic in the air, familiar and old, shattered into pieces.
He finds the Sanctum, coughing through the smoke he’s not breathing in, and he stands in the wreckage, looking around in astonishment. What could do this? What terrible world is this?
Very faint, out in the dark, laughter.
Laughter and magic.
Magic that he remembers from his own world.
He tries to cast a spell but it fizzles out into nothing before it even leaves his hand. He’s a ghost here, unable to change anything, a breeze floating through ether.
The smoke clears and he is able to see. Wong looks up and up and up, and he sees.
Loki, standing high above the world, on top of the only building left in the rubble.
His body suddenly remembers he’s not bound by gravity and physics and he floats, up through the smoke and the destruction left behind, leaving behind whatever terrible thing happened here, and he stops in front of Loki, still laughing.
He’s read all the myths, all the folklore, protected the New York Sanctum when Loki invaded in 2012, caught a glimpse of Loki when he and Thor came to Earth in search of Odin. But he was never this close.
This Loki is mad.
Next to him, a man that Wong has seen in blurry pictures, in the background of press conferences, but has never met.
Hawkeye.
Their eyes burn the same shade of blue.
The glass shatters, remakes.
Wong claws his way home. He manages to send the books back to their proper homes before he vomits all over the study table, his entire body shuddering and seizing. He cleans the mess up and stumbles back to his room; he should change, shower the sweat and magic off of him, but instead he just drops into bed, presses his face into the pillow and tries to cry.
He can feel the magic ripping through him, the magic from other dimensions, other worlds, other lives. It hurts, but so much hurts these days. These days after the end of the world. These days after so much is gone.
Wong waits for the shakes to stop, for his body to accept the stress he’s put it under. Time magic wreaks havoc on a person, on a body, on a soul. He can’t do this very many more times; he has obligations, duties, a world to keep safe.
But his heart aches.
The grief-beast still feeds from him. He conjures an eldritch sword, presses it to the side of the beast, one movement away from plunging it inside and killing it.
But his hand falls away, the sword crumbling to ash. To dust.
He should have been there. Instead he was bound, yet again, by duty.
The duty to others is greater than the duty to himself. He has to believe that like he believes breathing will continue to keep himself alive. The duty to the world, to keep it safe, to keep reality safe.
He sits up in bed, rubs his hands over his face. His body aches; he ignores it. The physical is secondary.
Wong cradles the grief-beast in his arms. He never wanted this. Never wanted any of it.
Does anyone? Does anyone ask for this?
What’s the old adage—only a king who does not want the crown is fit to wear it?
He was drawn to magic, drawn to help, drawn endlessly to knowledge, hungry for it. Hungry for what Kamar-Taj could teach him, hungry to end the monotony of his life.
Hungry for more. But never for this.
He lays back down, stares at the ceiling, counts his breathing until he can sink down into a calm space, a meditation, somewhere where he’s sitting next to a quiet river, his feet in the water, his hands in the grass, the world soft and sweet and warm around him.
He misses his friends.
Someone knocks on the Sanctum’s front door. Wong is the only one there to answer it.
A young woman outside. He can see her before he opens the door—a long scarf, long hair, a hat, warm olive skin, a backpack full of books—and he waves the door open from the top of the stairs. He can feel the Anomaly Rue at his back, feel all the hours Strange spent in front of the chair there, all the times Wong found him meditating there, all the times Wong joined him.
She walks inside and balks, her head whipping back and forth. “That window is over the door!” she exclaims, pointing at the Anomaly Rue. “But it’s also over there!”
Wong smiles despite himself. It feels strange on his face. He forgot how much he enjoyed watching people experience the Sanctum for the first time. “That’s the least strange thing about this place,” he tells her, and the door shuts behind her. “Can I help you?”
She stares at him, her eyes wide behind her glasses. “I—I’m Zelma,” she says, and he already knows her name by the time she’s even said it. “Zelma Stanton.” Her hand comes up, touches the side of the hat on her head. “Are you the Sorcerer Supreme? I need your help.”
Wong gestures for her to join him, not wanting to leave the warmth and comfort of the place around the Anomaly Rue, and Zelma gives the stairs a wary look before she darts up them.
“I am the Sorcerer Supreme,” he tells her, and it still feels like a lie. “My name is Wong.”
Zelma touches her hat again. “Just Wong?”
He smiles again. “Just Wong. What can I help you with? I can do nothing about the Snap, nor can I bring back anyone you lost. But I will do my best with anything else.”
Zelma swallows. She takes off her hat.
The glass shatters and instantly remakes itself.
He wants to know what happens at the end, what becomes of a being like Thanos. What happens after all this? After the inevitable? After Thanos wins?
It is not Earth. It is somewhere else, somewhere empty. Wong stands at the edge of the world.
He walks. For a terribly long time, he walks.
He comes across a statue, hundreds of feet tall, of a woman. He does not recognize her. His eyes do not want to stay focused on her face; she wears a long cloak, wrapped around her body, hooded over her head. When he turns his head away, he thinks her face is a skull, but when he looks back, he can’t seem to tell.
There is a temple, but he walks past it. Behind the temple, a castle, and when he walks inside, he walks into Thanos.
Wong never saw Thanos, never saw him in the flesh or on video, but he knows him on sight. His magic does not work here but he can still feel Thanos, feel how sickening his aura is, how many he’s killed, how he’s reveled in it, in the destruction of the universe. For what? For what end?
The woman, he thinks. The statue. But who?
This is the last of the universe, the last gasps of a dying world. All the worlds, all the planets, all the people...all gone. Wong can feel it. It feels wrong, a stickiness on his skin, digging down deep inside, deeper and deeper, all wrong—
A man walks into the throne room. He isn’t quite a man. His head is a skull, wreathed in flame, and he wears a strange outfit, and Wong feels power around him, power unlike anything he’s felt in all his life. Something otherworldly, something cosmic.
He doesn’t pay attention as the two of them talk. It’s about nothing interesting; Thanos speaks of Her and the flaming skull chatters madly. He leaves them, finds a set of spiral stairs, and walks down them.
A pit. A pit of death and decay. The last of all humankind, trapped in a pit filled with bones and viscera and rotting flesh. A great green beast.
The Hulk.
Wong steps back in surprise and steps through the glass. It shatters and reforms instantly, and he stares at the Hulk through the glass, a tortured wretch of a man, millions of years old, trapped as Thanos’ plaything at the end of the world.
What kind of being could be powerful enough to live that long?
He shakes his head, turning away from that terrible, horrific future that will never come to pass here, and he looks to something else, another place, another world. Hopefully something softer, less painful, less terrifying.
Wong steps through the glass. It shatters and remakes instantly.
He finds this version of himself instantly, sitting on a cot in an empty, cold hospital room, shivering underneath a thin blanket. Wong reaches out for himself but his hand goes right through, and he grimaces, stepping back and away.
The door opens and two men walk in, one of them carrying a thick file. Wong can see his name stamped on the front and his grimace deepens. He recognizes Strange immediately, tall and arrogant and wearing surgical scrubs. “Billy,” Strange says, and if the grief-beast was here with him, attached to his astral form, Wong would be able to feel it bite deeper at the sound of Strange’s voice. “What do we have here?”
The other man, Billy, opens the file and says, “Car crash. Crushed both his legs and L4 and L5. Shrapnel from the car embedded near his spine makes it so they can’t repair the damage—too dangerous.”
Strange makes an interested sound and stares at Wong’s shivering form on the bed, and then he holds out a hand. Billy apparently knows what that means and hands over a couple of x-rays and scans. Strange holds them up to the light and shakes his head. “Plenty of other surgeons can help this man. What else do you—”
“Please,” Wong croaks from the bed. Strange freezes. “Please help me. They say it’s going to hurt like this for the rest of my life if you don’t help me.” Wong looks up and stares at Strange, who stares back.
In another life, Strange would take a bullet or a spell for Wong. In this one, he might leave Wong to suffer for the rest of his life because his surgery isn’t worth his time. Strange holds the x-rays up to the light again and then steps up next to the bed.
“What’s your name?” Strange asks, even though he’s holding Wong’s x-ray in his hand, clearly labeled with his name.
“Wong,” he rasps.
“Just Wong? Like Beyonce? Adele?”
“I like to say they took the naming convention from me instead of the other way around,” Wong says, his eyes fluttering shut, and the edge of Strange’s mouth tugs up in a small smile.
Strange turns to Billy and tells him, “Get the surgical suite ready. We’ll operate on him ASAP.” Billy doesn’t bother to hide his surprise but he rushes out of the room anyway.
The Wong on the bed suddenly slumps to the side and Strange automatically catches him, holding him close.
He doesn’t stay to see what happens.
Wong lands in front of the Anomaly Rue window and summons the closest sharp thing and severs the grief-beast from his chest, throwing it down the stairs. He hears a yelp but ignores it. Is this the only world where he’s living this loss? Living alone?
“What the hell is that?” Zelma yells from downstairs.
Wong turns to her. “I didn’t realize you were still here,” he tells her, and he sends magic fire down the stairs to incinerate the grief-beast’s corpse. They both stare at the ash left in a small pile on the ground for a long moment before Wong sends it away. Zelma gulps.
“What was that?” she asks again.
“An interdimensional being that feeds on grief,” he replies. Her eyes widen. “Why are you here, Ms Stanton?”
Like every time he calls her that, she grimaces. “Zelma,” she corrects, and Wong hides his smile. “You asked for help organizing the books.”
Right. A librarian who can’t keep his books organized. Of course. Wong sighs, nods. “The prior master of the Sanctum wasn’t exactly what I would call neat, and I have had terribly little time to clean up after him.”
He still hasn’t made Strange’s bed. Or been in there since. He wonders if that light is still on, a way to guide his friend home.
Zelma’s face pinches. She doesn’t comment on Strange’s loss; she would like him, Wong thinks. Strange would like her as well. “I know,” she says. “You’ve told me before.” She turns away and looks back down the stairs. There are books all over, books stacked in every room, hundreds and thousands of pages of uncatalogued knowledge that are now Wong’s responsibility. “Are there—are there more of those things? The interdimensional things?”
He doesn’t like to open his third eye often, but he’s had to do it far more often since the Decimation. It blinks on his forehead and to her credit, Zelma barely reacts. The otherworldly blooms alive around him. It had been affected by the Snap as well, but it’s recovered remarkably well, and he can barely tell anything changed.
The mind maggots are gone from her brain and other than a small grief-beast and a worm that indicates she has a history of depression, there’s nothing terribly pressing. Wong looks around the Sanctum and finds himself smiling at the life still within.
So much magic. So many creatures, so much life. They might all be little more than interdimensional bacteria, but Wong will take anything at this point. “Nothing to be concerned about,” Wong tells Zelma, who stares at him for a long time before nodding.
She excuses herself and goes back to the books. He wishes he could join her, but he has responsibilities, a world to keep safe.
His mind keeps returning to the Hulk in that pit. The strength of such a beast to stay alive for so long...perhaps he could use something similar. Something to test his mettle, prove he’s strong enough to be the Sorcerer Supreme, the most powerful being on the planet.
He’ll think on it.
The glass shatters, remakes.
This world is far away from the others. He’s been trying to stay close, not stray too far, not let himself get distracted. But there has to be something else, some life that Thanos never touched, some life where he still became a sorcerer and everything else happened and—
A woman. He’s in bed with a woman—this version of him is in bed with a woman.
Sara Wolfe. They’d been friends before she was dusted; they had started at Kamar-Taj within a few months of each other and had gone through their studies together. She laughs at him, rolls over, leans her head on his bare chest. He runs a hand over her face, cups her jaw.
This is very far from his world. Sara was only a friend, nothing more; Wong has rarely looked at anyone the way he’s looking at her right now.
They talk, but he doesn’t listen. Instead he sits on the far side of the room and watches them, watches how they hold each other, how they touch each other, the expressions on their face, the gentleness. The love.
Some part of him wants this, aches for it. Not for her, not for any woman, but for the feeling he gets while looking at them together, the look on his face when he looks at her, the way she looks at him.
The door opens and a small child rushes in, Sara’s smile with his eyes, the dark amber of her skin, running the same way he runs. Wong holds a hand to his mouth. Their child.
He steps through the glass and turns away. Perhaps...perhaps this isn’t worth it anymore. Perhaps he doesn’t need to know how the other versions of himself have lived, how they died.
But he has always liked knowing. He’s always been so hungry for it, for knowledge, for the unknown.
He steps through the glass. It shatters, remakes around him.
A man cleans the Ancient One’s body with a damp rag. Wong watches him for a while, watches the grace with which he cleans her body, wipes her down perfunctorily, pulls her tunic back over her exposed flesh once he’s done. Everything is done with reverence; whoever this man is, this is an honor.
It makes him uncomfortable to see it, but he watches anyway.
The door to the room opens and a man walks in. It takes Wong a minute to recognize himself; he looks different, taller, a bit thinner, grief riddling his face.
“Father,” this version of himself says. The man looks up. “Are you ready?”
“Are we ever ready?” the man says. His father? His father knows the Ancient One? His father in his world has been dead for years; Wong can only imagine the look on his face if he knew his son was a sorcerer. His father wipes the rag over the Ancient One’s face one last time and then steps away. “Yes,” he murmurs. “I am ready.”
Wong steps up next to his father. They stand near each other but do not touch. They both raise their hands and magical bonds wrap around the Ancient One and lift her from the bed, carrying her out of the room. Wong follows them down a few halls and out of the building to a large open area that has a pyre stacked and ready.
Another man is waiting for them, and he’s almost familiar, just like this version of Wong. He’s tall, frightfully thin, with shocks of white at his temples, and he wears a similar red Cloak to Wong’s Strange.
He watches them lay the Ancient One’s body at the pyre and then all three of them bow.
“Do you wish to say anything?” Strange asks the two of them.
“She already knew,” Wong’s father murmurs, and Wong nods.
Strange lifts a hand and fire bursts from his palm. The pyre is engulfed in moments.
The three of them stand next to each other, Wong in the middle. He does not touch his father; Wong wonders about their relationship, if they get along, if his father brought him to Kamar-Taj in this world. But he and Strange stand closer, the backs of their hands brushing. But nothing more than that.
He doesn’t know this Strange, although he does miss him, miss all versions of him. But instead he watches himself, watches the stiffness in his shoulders, watches the way his body tips towards Strange every so often before he catches himself and straightens back up. This version of himself is less sad than he would expect at the loss of the Ancient One, but he can see that this Wong is happy otherwise.
Happy.
He steps back through the glass, back through to the Sanctum, back to the empty rooms, the empty halls, the place that had once been a home. Zelma is gone and so is everyone else.
He has a room here, but he doesn’t go to it. Instead he goes to Strange’s room.
The light next to the room burns. Everything is exactly the way he left it, the way Strange left it, all that time ago. He doesn’t know how long it’s been since the Snap; does anyone? It could be a month or a year. There is dust in the room but it could have been there before; Strange was never the cleanest.
Wong stares at the unmade bed.
How many worlds was he happy? Is that not enough?
He thinks about shattered glass, the shattered worlds affected by the Snap. So many worlds where so many versions of himself were living lives unaffected by this loss.
He’s the Sorcerer Supreme. His duty is to keep reality safe, to protect it, to protect it above anything else. He can live with the loss in this life when there are versions of himself living without it. He lives all lives; he is more than this singular body, this singular world.
He removes his robes and his tunic, toes off his boots, hangs up his belts, drops his sling ring on the bedside table so it’s within reach. Wong reaches out, touches the cool, untouched sheets, the comfortable pillows, the warm blankets.
He slides into bed. It smells warm, like magic, like expensive cologne, like Strange.
There is no glass to shatter.
The glass shatters, remakes.
Wong laughs over a tuna salad sandwich. Wong can read it on this version of himself, read it on his face; Strange is one of the few people who can break him out of his serious, non-nonsense work demeanor. He tried not to let him in, let him break past the barrier, but Strange always had a way to sneak past someone’s defenses. Wong has never been a weak man, but even he has his blind spots, and it seems he has them in every reality.
Wong finishes the sandwich and Strange pushes over the uneaten second half of his own, but Wong shakes his head, pushes it back. “You need to eat more,” Wong says, wiping his hands off with a napkin. It looks like they’re in a restaurant nearby the Sanctum, one of the ones that gives them food for half price since Strange removed a mystical pest from their oven. “You’re a stick, Strange.”
Strange good-naturedly rolls his eyes. “Sometimes too much human food makes me sick,” he mutters.
Wong shakes his head. “I’ll bring more food from the Sanctum. I went fishing in another dimension last week; there’s still some fish left.”
Strange brightens, takes a bite of the sandwich. “Oh, fish stew again? That’s one of my favorites.”
Wong smiles. “Just because I moved in with you doesn’t mean I’m your valet, Strange.” It seems to be comfortably trod ground, an old discussion they have over and over again, a way for Wong to tease him without it being too obvious to outsiders.
The pleased look doesn’t diminish from Strange’s face. “You’d be a terrible one,” Strange agrees, finishing the sandwich in a couple bites. “And I don’t have any money to pay you for it.”
This is what he has to protect, these two men leaving the restaurant, Strange having tucked an extra $20 bill underneath his plate. Wong shadows them, follows them back to the Sanctum, watches Strange hop up onto the counter as Wong pulls a bowl of extradimensional fish he already had in the fridge and they chatter about nothing as Wong begins to make the stew.
Wong leans against the doorjamb as he watches them. He misses moments like this, comfortable moments where there were no expectations, no putting up a front or pretending to be someone they weren’t. Wong lived a whole life before Strange came into it, and he was perfectly happy before him, but Strange brought...he brought chaos. He brought something else, something no one else ever did. Some sort of magic.
Wong moves and Strange freezes on the table, his third eye opening, but it’s a different green than the green Wong knows from the Strange in his world, and then when he looks at this Strange again, there’s something odd about him, something inhuman, something—
Something wrong.
This Strange has dabbled in black magic. No, more than dabbled; he’s a master of it. He’s something Wong has never seen before. He’s never seen someone still alive who has delved this deep into black magic. How does this version of himself live with it? Does he know?
“Strange?” Wong asks, turning around to see Strange staring right at Wong in the doorway. “What is it?”
“Something is here,” Strange says, hopping off the table. His head cocks to the side, his eyes turning into snake’s eyes. By the Vishanti...he’s absorbed other magical beings, stolen their powers. “Something is watching us.”
Wong wants to say something, acknowledge him, tell him what he lost, but instead he shakes his head and takes a step back through the glass.
This version of Strange relaxes the moment he’s gone, but he still looks around suspiciously. “It’s gone, whatever it was,” Strange says, and he turns back to Wong, the third eye vanishing and his eyes human again. Wong looks around the kitchen but nods, turns back to the stove.
He watches them through the glass but has to turn away eventually. Whatever that Strange went through to turn him into that strange creature, Wong has to keep him there, keep him confined to that world. He’s far too powerful, too close to finding a way out. Keep him there, happy in his life, like all the others.
He lands back in Kamar-Taj, where one of the teachers is instructing a terribly small group of new students. It’s been long enough for students to return. Long enough that not everyone he sees has a grief-beast feeding from them. Long enough that the world has come alive again, although it is still so terribly quiet.
Wong watches some of the students, turns his attention to one of them that struggles. The Ancient One threw Strange onto Everest and let him figure it out or die; that worked for Strange, for a man desperate to best himself, but not for a nervous thing like this.
“Don’t put so much pressure on yourself,” Wong tells the lass. She squeaks in surprise and jumps. He shows her the proper position, the stance, the way to open the portal. “Feel it run through you,” he says. “The magic is inside of you, looking for a way out. Give it a road.”
Her hands shake, but not from nerve damage; she’s anxious, fearful. But so are many students when they first come here. “I don’t feel it,” she tells him, her voice quavering. She hasn’t even produced sparks yet, but that’s not abnormal.
Wong opens a portal, not thinking about a destination, and he sees Strange’s bed for the briefest moment before he stops the spell and it vanishes. He turns to look at her. “Magic is in all of us,” he tells her. “You only have to find it. It takes some longer than others, but it is in everything.” He gestures to the plain robes she wears. “Magic is in your clothes, the food you eat, the shampoo you use. It’s energy, and you would be dead without energy.”
She manages to produce a handful of sparks by the end of the lesson. She crows in excitement, and all of the students gather around to congratulate her, even the ones who are already producing full portals. Wong smiles at them.
“Captain,” Wong greets, closing the portal behind him as he steps into the conference room inside the Avengers Facility. Unlike the Sanctum or Kamar-Taj, this place feels cold, lifeless. Captain America, Black Widow, and Hawkeye sit across the table, and all of them push to their feet to shake his hand.
Wong obliges, giving Hawkeye an extra long look to confirm his eyes aren’t blue, and he introduces himself to all of them. He sits across the table from Steve, who clasps his hands on top of the table. There’s a jug of water in the middle of the table and Wong pours himself a glass after sitting down.
“I wanted to ask you something,” Steve starts. Wong thinks about telling him that he has email but decides against it; sometimes keeping the mystery makes it more fun. He opens his third eye and reflexively recoils at what he sees; most people at this point, two years after the Snap, have tried to move on, or at least started the process. Everyone knows what happened, knows there’s no way to bring anyone back, knows there’s nothing for anyone to do. So the only thing to do is keep living, keep moving forward. Keep trying at the very least. But not these three. All three are riddled with interdimensional parasites, massive grief-beasts, huge soul suckers.
He interrupts whatever Steve was going to say. “All three of you are infested with interdimensional parasites,” he tells them. “I would like to rid you of them.”
“Would it—what would that take?” Natasha asks. Clint looks around the room like he can see the parasites.
Wong conjures up an eldritch sword. “All I need to do is cut them off.”
It’s kind of nice dealing with people who have already been exposed to magic. They are remarkably compliant, listening to him when he tells them to stay still, barely flinching when he cuts the parasites off their bodies and souls. Natasha is easiest, her soul parasites coming off easily, and then he cuts off Steve’s, having trouble with one of the grief-beasts, and Clint is last; Wong keeps thinking about that version of him standing next to Loki after the destruction of New York, his eyes so terribly blue. But that isn’t this version of him. He can’t remove two grief-beasts from Clint, but he does cut them down to a smaller size, doing the same to one very old, very large grief-beast biting onto Steve.
All three of them look lighter by the time he’s done. Wong vanishes the sword and then burns all of the parasites and beasts with eldritch fire.
They all stare at the ash left behind. It still hurts to see it, still painful to see what little was left of so many people they loved. Wong sends his hand through it and the ash vanishes to the other dimensions to be consumed by the beasts there, and then he sits back down, drinking the last of the water.
“You wanted to ask me something?” Wong directs the question at Steve, who nods.
“I think you answered it,” Steve says weakly, still in a little bit of shock, but he quickly clears his throat and shakes himself out of it. “I wanted to ask if you were the Sorcerer Supreme,” he says again, his voice firmer, and Wong nods. “Carol Danvers has gone to other planets and she’s noticed disturbances, a lot of them. Energy disturbances, earthquakes, things like that. Have you noticed anything like that on Earth?”
He’s hungry. A fish stew does sound good. Maybe a good curry. “Yes,” Wong says. “There have been disturbances in the magical dimensions around us. Likes of the interdimensional beasts I cut off the three of you have flourished since the Snap; I’ve been remarkably busy with dealing with it.”
Steve seems to relax, glancing at Natasha, who says, “We were wondering if you’d noticed anything in the Indian Ocean. There’s been a lot more earthquakes there since the Snap.”
“I will look into it,” Wong promises. He looks between the three of them. Clint still hasn’t said anything, but Wong doesn’t know if that’s normal for him or not. Everyone has changed since the Snap. “You asked me here just to look at some earthquakes?” he questions when none of them say anything.
“I, um, started a loss support group,” Steve says. “Sam would’ve wanted me to.” He’s not entirely sure who Sam was, but it really isn’t the time or place to ask. Most of the internet is back up and running again, he can probably just google it when he gets home. “I wanted to tell you about it in case you want to come to one of the meetings.”
He’s not sure he has time to go to a meeting like that. Or if he wants to. “I will consider it,” Wong says finally, unsure of what else to say.
They try to talk more, try to catch up, but there’s so little to say these days, still so much loss drenched around them.
He wants to ask how Strange was dusted, where he was, if he knew it was coming, if he was alone.
He doesn’t.
The world has gotten so much more comfortable with silence now. Before, while he did like sitting in silence in the library, he still liked music or talking to others, but now he can go days without talking to another person. It’s enough to just be around someone, be near them, to see they made it through.
He goes home to the Sanctum, still thinking about that. Is it not enough for other versions of himself to be happy, to know there are worlds where this didn’t happen?
Is there not peace in it?
There has to be, he tells himself. Those other worlds, those other dimensions, those other lives, all kept safe and alive. He doesn’t need to live that way, he just needs to protect it, make sure it’s still happening, that there are versions of himself that never have to go through this, experience all this loss. The Sorcerer Supreme is a being of sacrifice.
It feels like it’s enough.
Wong steps through the glass anyway.
It shatters around him, remakes instantly.
Laughter greets him, familiar laughter, terrible laughter. Wong is on edge instantly, looking around the unfamiliar room he landed in. It is filled with people, more people than he’s seen in one room in years. All Avengers, dozens of them milling around, talking, drinking, celebrating something. The laughter is Loki’s, and he’s over by the bar with Thor, and no one seems concerned by his presence. Not like Wong can do anything about it now.
A wedding, he sees. Tony Stark in a tuxedo, Pepper Potts still in a wedding dress. They call everyone for a toast and everyone raises their glasses of champagne, toasts the happy couple. Tony bends Pepper over, gives her a deep kiss, and everyone cheers.
He finds himself with Strange, the two of them far back in the corner, and Wong is holding two glasses of champagne. Strange is struggling to pull off his yellow gloves; it seems that he still wears them sometimes here. If he’s anything like the Strange that Wong remembers, he wears them when he’s going to be in public and he’s unsure about the level of tremors he’ll be dealing with that day; sometimes they’re so terrible that it makes arms shake as well.
It seems like today is one of those days. Strange can’t get the second glove off and he’s struggling with it, swearing under his breath. Wong creates a small floating perch for the two champagne glasses and reaches out, gently wraps his hands around Strange’s, waits for him to stop struggling.
Neither of them say a word. So much noise around them and neither of them speak.
He’s always taken care of the people he cared about. So few of them now, so few of them in any life. And Strange never makes it easy.
Wong gently holds Strange’s shaking hand, carefully tugs down the glove, slowly pulls it off each finger without Strange making a single noise of discomfort or pain. They lean closer, both staring at Strange’s shaking hands.
“Wong,” Strange murmurs, his voice barely audible, and Wong jerks a little, but doesn’t pull away, only tips his head back, their eyes meeting.
The noise around them blurs into nothing. Wong can feel it, feel what moves between them, and it makes him ache. But more than he wants this, and oh how he wants, he wants this to stay safe, to stay protected.
He wants them to keep this.
He doesn’t stay to see what happens next. Wong leaves the place between dimensions behind, leaves those endless windows into other worlds behind, and he goes home.
The end of the world isn’t easy for anyone to recover from. It takes the world even longer. So many important people lost, so many keys to vital infrastructure turned to dust. Years to recover from it, to make something new from what’s been left behind.
The mantle of Sorcerer Supreme never becomes comfortable, but it becomes something Wong can live with. He starts to think of the Sorcerer Supreme as himself instead of someone else, as a duty he’s been given, an honor to hold it, instead of a weight around his neck.
He and Zelma become close; she comes over to the Sanctum weekly, even long after the books are cataloged and organized, and when she shows an interest in magic, he gives her a few lessons, takes pride in her aptitude.
He never finds what is causing the earthquakes in the Indian Ocean, but he and Captain Marvel keep an eye on it.
He breaks the Abomination out of prison. The Sorcerer Supreme has to be the most powerful force on the planet, and with Bruce Banner stuck in limbo with the Hulk, Wong goes for the next best thing he can find. Every new thing about being the Sorcerer Supreme is a fight, an unyielding battle, a cliff he has to climb with just the tips of his fingers.
He likes the fight. He wouldn’t have made it this long if he didn’t.
The other worlds are safe. Those other lives are safe. They’re happy.
That’s enough.
It’s five years when the world shakes. He’s meditating in front of the Anomaly Rue and it throws him to the floor. The reverberation of energy is so loud and powerful that he can barely stand, clawing his way up the chair, pushing to his feet.
He steadies himself, the world shaking around him. It can only be an attack on the Sanctum; what else could draw that kind of power? But they don’t know who they’re messing with, what he’s capable of. Wong summons swords and shields and whips and knives, everything he can think of, and he’s ready for whatever comes through that door.
There’s another shake, the entire world trembling, shaking so hard he can’t even see, and it throws him off his feet, throws him so far back that he’s thrown through the Anomaly Rue window and out into the street below.
The glass shatters.
There’s one second for him to conjure a shield or a portal or anything to keep him from crashing into the street below, but in that second, something catches him. Something red. Something warm. Something that smells like the bed he’s been sleeping in for four years.
Something that cradles him as it takes him slowly to the ground, resting him gently on his feet, making sure he’s steady before it whisks away, twirling around a familiar man’s shoulders.
“Wong,” the man says, and his voice is soft.
There is broken glass all over the street. It stays broken. It does not remake itself.
This time, he’ll do it himself. He doesn’t need anymore windows.
He never moved the empty teacup. He knows the light next to the bed is still on. A way home, after all this time.
Wong runs forward and hugs him. Tears well in his eyes and fall for the first time in five years.
It’s enough that he has his loved ones in the other worlds. It’s been enough. He’s made his peace with it.
Strange hugs him back.
But it’s good to have him home again.