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Yes, there is a place where someone loves you before and after they learn what you are.
-A Place Where Someone Loves You, Neil Hilborn
Apathy was a mercy.
Stephen first considered this as he sat in a hard church pew, staring at the too-small coffin at the front of the room like the force of his gaze could somehow bring Donna back, when he was suddenly and viciously jealous of everyone who lived without connection to anyone else.
“It wasn’t your fault,” was what everyone said to him. He knew it wasn’t true. He knew his mother knew the same thing, no matter how much she tried to hide it. Donna was dead, and it was his fault. The guilt that came with that knowledge seemed to drown him at any given moment, when it wasn’t knocked out of the way by equally large waves of grief or anger. It was awful, but he knew he deserved it.
The cat was still looking for her. Donna had started feeding the stupid thing a year or two again and they both got so attached to each other that their mother let her bring it inside. Stephen was always indifferent to the cat, and the cat just as indifferent to him, but that thing loved Donna to death, and waited by the mailbox for her to come back from school every day; but now, it had been a week, and the stupid cat was still waiting for her.
His mother cried herself to sleep every night, and then cried when she woke up, and cried when she saw Stephen, and cried at the table when she saw the empty seat, and spent all day crying, crying, crying. Selfishly, Stephen was growing tired of it, but he had already taken her daughter; he wouldn’t take mourning from her, too.
He found himself in Donna’s room more often than not. His mother couldn’t bear to go in, but Stephen couldn’t bear to stay out. It was so easy to become detached from all of it when he was laying on the pink sheets, holding her favorite teddy bear and becoming wonderfully numb.
Yes, apathy was a mercy.
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Stephen had seen 14,000,605 futures. In all of the ones where Tony Stark lived past the moon of Titan, he was blessed with a little girl. Sometimes she was joined by another little girl, or sometimes a little boy, but Morgan Stark remained a constant. In all of the futures where they lost, Tony still got to see her grow up. He got to see her graduate the top of her class, got to see her first boyfriend, and he got to see his grandchildren. He got to love and be loved, despite the slow rebuilding of the broken world around him.
Tony Stark was just one man—an irritating, arrogant, caring man, who didn’t deserve what the universe threw his way but still met it with grace. In the grand scheme of all things, his sacrifice would mean more than his survival. Still, Stephen internally raged against the future he had set in motion. He had seen far into this future, farther than intended; he had seen how Pepper became subdued and numbed with grief, how little Morgan became angry and reckless, a troubled genius who was truly her father’s daughter, and didn’t live past twenty-three. He had seen how the kid, Peter Parker, had lost a part of himself with Tony and trusted the wrong people, and lost everyone who ever knew him. They were just people, just a few, insignificant people. They had to suffer so that others might live.
But when Tony Stark raised his hand to snap, something painfully human reared its head within Stephen, something he hadn’t felt in a long, long time; being a surgeon provided little room for emotions, and balancing the fate of the world provided even less—or at least, that’s what he had always told himself. In a selfish, reckless, last-ditch effort, he cast a shielding spell around Tony’s vital organs. He didn’t know if it would be enough. He hadn’t seen this future. And when Tony snapped, he was left horribly scarred and in immense pain, but alive.
“What happens now?” Tony asked when Stephen paid an obligatory visit to the Avenger’s facility weeks later. He looked good, for a man who was supposed to be dead. There were countless monitors attached to him and his entire right side was covered in bandages, but he was smiling, and he was breathing.
“I... I don’t know,” Stephen admitted. “I didn’t see this future.”
Tony went deadly silent, and the smile was gone. The only thing that gave away his rising anxiety were the progressively faster beeps coming from his monitors.
“You said there was only one future where we won,” he said lowly. “If this isn’t it—if this—”
“We won,” Stephen assured. “And I didn’t say there was only one future where we won, I said that out of the futures I saw, there was only one. This future has gone exactly like the last one, except for—” he cut himself off. He wasn’t sure why.
“Expect for what?” Tony demanded. “I swear, Strange, if all this was for nothing—”
“In the future that I saw, you died,” Stephen told him, and he gestured vaguely to the bandages. “But… clearly, that didn’t happen.”
Tony was quiet again. His face pulled into a frown as he thought. Stephen shifted in the hard, plastic chair and threw a glance to the door. He was just about to make an excuse to leave when Tony finally spoke again.
“I could feel the power burning through me,” he said after a long while. His eyes were distant. “I could feel it eating away at every inch of me, inside and out—but it stopped at a certain point, like it was hitting a wall.” His eyes turned to Stephen in a way that made the other man uneasy.
“That was you, wasn’t it?” Tony asked. His eyes turned misty and uncomfortably soft. “You changed the future. Why?”
Stephen opened and closed his mouth a few times before finding an answer.
“I didn’t see every possible future,” he said slowly. “I only had time to search the ones with the most likely variables, but I didn’t expect… I didn’t account for…”
“What, having a heart?” Tony quipped. Stephen cleared his throat, suddenly uncomfortable. He was saved from having to respond by a little girl bursting into the room and charging over to Tony’s bed, followed by a woman. Morgan and Pepper.
“Daddy! You can come home today!” Morgan squealed. Stephen rose from the chair quickly and made his way to the door, muttering something about going somewhere.
“Strange,” Tony called out. The waver in his voice stopped Stephen in his tracks. “Thank you. You need anything, and I mean anything, even a cup of sugar, you let me know, yeah? I owe you. Big time.”
Stephen nodded awkwardly and finally escaped the room. He could hear Tony relaying the conversation to Pepper and Morgan as the door closed behind him, and he hurried down the hall. The door opened again.
“Dr. Strange—”
Stephen made a portal faster than he had ever made one before and was back at the Sanctum before Pepper could finish. He let out a breath. It was done and over with. He could resume his life of solitude, uninterrupted.
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Pepper Stark had other plans for him.
The next day when Stephen opened his email, there was a very nice message from Pepper thanking him profusely and inviting him to dinner. He ignored the warm feeling it brought to his chest and only hesitated a moment before deleting it. He didn’t want to sit through a dinner of gratitude. His least favorite part of being a doctor had always been the gratitude that he received. He hated the crying mothers, wives, siblings, and husbands who would hug him tightly and profess their gratitude. All it did was serve to remind him of a baby sister who he couldn’t save. And so, when another email arrived the next day, he didn’t even open it before deleting it with the hope that eventually, she would take the hint and give up.
Pepper Stark did not take the hint, and it only took a week for him to open the door and see her standing there with little Morgan.
“Mrs. Stark,” Stephen forced out, hoping his face didn’t reveal too much of his instinctive urge to slam the door shut again and pretend she wasn’t there.
“Dr. Strange,” she returned, and he knew that she knew anyway. “I hope this isn’t a bad time.”
“Not at all,” the sorcerer answered, quickly recovering a semblance his charisma. He opened the door wider and waved them in. “Would you like some tea?”
“No, this is just a quick visit,” Pepper said. “I just wanted to invite you to come over for dinner. I’ve sent you one or two emails, but I don’t know if they came through.”
Pepper had sent exactly fifteen emails, and Stephen had deleted every single one, and this was something they both knew. Stephen cleared his throat.
“Yeah, the uh, technology and the magic don’t make for a good mix,” he lied.
“Really? The two seem so compatible,” Pepper said pleasantly. Stephen gave a tight smile. “Anyways, dinner?”
“Yeah, maybe sometime.”
“Tomorrow?” Pepper pushed. Stephen opened his mouth to protest but before he could say anything, Tony Stark’s little spawn chimed in with her big, brown eyes.
“Please?” she asked. Her voice was impossibly sweet, and veered into a promise to be thoroughly crushed were he to decline. Stephen faltered and closed his mouth again.
“Fine,” he said. “Tomorrow.” Pepper’s smile grew bigger in a cat-got-the-cream sort of way.
“Wonderful!” she said. “We’ll look forward to seeing you. Does five o’clock sound good?”
“Yes,” Stephen bit out around a forced smile.
“Excellent. We’ll see you tomorrow at five o’clock, then.” It was definitely more of a threat than a confirmation. They exchanged another round of polite smiles, and then she and Morgan were gone.
Stephen closed the door behind them and scowled. Dinner. At least two hours of people thanking him with words and watery looks—people feeling indebted to him, just because he saved one life. A small, unwanted voice in his head whispered cruelly: but if someone had saved Donna, wouldn’t you do that same for them?
He jerked away from the door and stalked off, as if he could physically move away from the idea. He would go to dinner. It would be torture, but he would go and fulfill his obligations and never see any of them again.
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The dinner was torture, and torture of the highest form. The moment he entered the house, Pepper hugged him and pressed a kiss to his cheek and professed her thanks, and Tony shook his hand warmly with more thanks, and even little Morgan thanked him and then immediately dragged him away to play dolls. Stephen hadn’t played dolls in years upon years, not since Donna needed help with the stupidly tiny shoes for the tiny feet. He couldn’t do it anymore. His hands shook too much.
“Daddy gets shaky sometimes too,” Morgan said cheerfully, and she took the shoes and put them aside. “They can go barefoot.”
The dinner was worse. A rogue spasm of his hand knocked his glass over and sent water all over the table, and Stephen knew he would die, he would suffocate from the humiliation that had layered on top of the already suffocating gratitude, but all that happened was that Pepper got a towel without comment, and Tony prompted Morgan to start talking about how she was going to start school soon.
When the dinner was over Pepper thanked him again and again and almost started crying, and Stephen honestly wanted to sink into the ground until he reached the core of the earth and died.
“I’ll walked you out to your car,” Tony quipped, saving him from Pepper, but the minute they were outside, just when Stephen thought he could take a breath, he turned to him and started with “I really want to thank you—”
“Stop, just stop!” Stephen exploded. “Stop thanking me.”
Tony went quiet and his eyes became sharp as they scanned his face, and Stephen bit the inside of his mouth and resolutely refused to make eye contact, looking out to the trees instead.
“No,” the other man said after a moment of consideration, sounding too much like he knew the real reason Stephen shied away from the gratitude. “No, I won’t. You saved my life.”
“And you’ve already thanked me.”
“Not nearly enough.”
Stephen huffed. “What, I saved your life, so now it’s my problem?” he snarked. Tony’s lip quirked up a bit.
“Exactly.” He took a step closer, and his face became serious. “I don’t think you understand. You saved my life. You saved Pepper from becoming a widow. You saved Morgan from growing up without a father.”
“I know,” Stephen snapped. “I saw it all. When I looked into the other future, I… I saw.”
“Then you should know exactly why we’re never gonna stop being grateful.”
Stephen huffed again and looked away. He walked a few steps until he could lean railing with both hands and stare out at the surrounding scenery. His gaze drifted down to his hands, tracing the scars there for the umpteenth time. He never felt grateful to the doctors who saved his life. But then again, he never had anyone else in his life to be grateful for it, either. He was the only one it affected if he was alive or dead.
“Can you just… stop saying it so much?” he found himself requesting. Tony tilted his head in thought.
“Fine. But I’m still gonna say it sometimes,” he threatened. Of course, he didn’t mean it as a threat; but to Stephen, it absolutely was.
“Great,” he muttered. “Tell your wife to stop, too.”
“Oh, that’s something you’ll have to do yourself,” Tony said with a laugh. He followed Stephen in suit and bent down to let his forearms rest on the railing close to the sorcerer. “I know better than to tell her what to do.”
They weren’t quite touching, but they were close enough that Stephen could feel the heat radiating off the other man.
“You deserve the gratitude, you know,” Tony said in a quiet voice. “No matter what you think.” Stephen jerked back as if the words had burned him.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said lowly, and he opened a portal and went back to the sanctum before Tony could drop any more bombs on his careful facade.
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Stephen could’ve sworn he had a heart attack two weeks later, when he turned to find Tony Stark suddenly standing in the middle of the Sanctum.
“Ever heard of knocking?” he snapped, and followed it with, “if the world’s in danger, it can wait. This is my day off.”
“No, nothing like that,” Tony said with an easy laugh. He was so different from their first meeting in the Sanctum, when he was full of snark and bitter edges, but Stephen supposed that five years would do that to a person. “Pepper sent me.”
“Oh,” Stephen said, trying not to show the complete dread that gripped him. He turned around to pretend to sort books on the bookshelf behind him. “Tell her I enjoyed the dinner and I hope she has a good life.”
“You could tell her yourself,” Tony suggested. “She’s desperate to have you over again.”
“I’m busy that day,” Stephen said immediately, and then cringed at his slip up, but Tony just laughed again.
“I get it, ‘thank you’ dinners can be awkward,” Tony acknowledged. Stephen sighed and hesitated before answering.
“I don’t... I don’t like people indebted to me,” he told the bookshelf, without any idea why he was admitting this within earshot of Tony Stark, of all people. “I’ve never liked it. It just... it doesn’t feel right.”
“Makes you think of all the ones you couldn’t save,” Tony said. He was right, but Stephen suddenly felt uncomfortable, like he had in the hospital room when Tony made the comment about him having a heart, and when Tony told him that he deserved gratitude. He didn’t like how easily Tony could see past his carefully crafted defenses.
“Don’t think of it as a ‘thank you,’ then,” Tony said. “Just think of it as a friendly invitation.”
Stephen nodded awkwardly. “Okay.”
“So you’ll come?”
Stephen spun around. “What?”
Tony looked highly entertained, entirely at Stephen’s expense. “To dinner. Tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“Yeah, and Pepper was pretty insistent that I don’t leave without you saying yes.”
Stephen pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed.
“Fine. Why not,” he decided. Tony nodded with a triumphant smirk.
“I’ll see you then.”
“Yeah,” Stephen agreed, and then Tony was gone, leaving him standing in the Sanctum with random books in his hands.
“What the fuck am I doing,” he muttered.
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This time, the visit wasn’t bad. It really did almost feel like just a friendly gathering to share a meal. He and Tony swapped stories while they played with Morgan, and Pepper chimed in every now and then form the kitchen. He even laughed, once or twice, honest laughs that he didn’t realize he was capable of producing anymore. It was… nice.
Until Morgan turned to him when Tony left for a minute to help Pepper in the kitchen.
“Daddy said that when the lake freezes over that maybe we can go skating,” she said confidentiality.
“I can still hear you, and I remember the answer being more of a solid no,” Tony called over. Morgan’s face creased into a mischievous grin, and it was a sickeningly ironic moment for Stephen’s mind to recognize how much she looked like Donna. The same little smirk, the same dark hair, the same glint in her eyes...
“Dr. Strange?” Morgan looked worried, or scared, Stephen couldn’t tell. He couldn’t do much at the moment. “Dr. Strange, are you okay?”
“Please, Stephen? Just for a bit?”
Her face phased in and out with Donna’s until he couldn’t tell them apart anymore. He stood abruptly and all eyes turned to him with such sharpness that he faltered for a moment.
“Just need some air,” he said, and he knew his usual charisma was severely weakened, but he didn’t care. He made a beeline for the door. His leg hit one of the end tables in the room, sending the knickknacks toppling to the floor. He muttered an apology and stopped to fumble with them with hands that were shaking more than could be passed off for as typical.
“I’ve got it,” a kind voice said, and Pepper was taking the items from his scarred hands with a face that understood too much. Stephen mumbled something about something and ran out the door. The chill air hit him sharply, but it was good, it snapped him awake and back into control—but then, of course, of course, after he took a breath and opened his eyes the first thing he saw was the lake. A small noise of distress escaped him and he turned around with half a mind to go back inside; but he couldn’t go back in there, not where everyone would stare at him and talk to him, so he turned around again to face the lake.
It was fine.
He was fine.
“Donna—Donna won’t wake up, she—she—she fell into the lake and—and I can’t make her wake up.”
He had to leave. Now. His legs took a few jerky steps forward and only brought him halfway down the steps before his strength abandoned him there. Control was slipping away from him again and he took great gulps of air in an attempt to remedy it, but it wasn’t enough. Shit, he was the worst dinner guest, wasn’t he? He would’ve laughed at the thought except he couldn’t breathe, and was this what it was like for Donna in her last moments, sucking desperately for air—
The weight of a hand was on his shoulder suddenly, and he might have shouted, but he didn’t know.
“You’re okay, you’re okay,” a voice reassured him. “In and out, that’s it. In and out.”
Stephen forced his lungs into submission and followed the instructions until he was able to even out his breathing. A glance to his left showed that the voice belonged to none other than Tony Stark. He looked away, his teeth gritting together as shame coursed through him.
“Sorry,” he said breathlessly. Tony shrugged.
“Don’t be. Happens to the best of us.”
“But not to me,” Stephen bit out before he could help himself. “I’m always in control. I…” he trailed off, not knowing what he was planning to say. His gaze drifted back to the lake in front of him.
A crack. A scream. A splash. Then, nothing.
His own desperate, panicked cries for his baby sister rang in his ears, and he pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. In, out. In, out. Tony’s hand squeezed his shoulder.
“Anything you want to talk about?” Tony asked, casual and cautious at the same time.
No. He didn’t want to talk about it. He had spent his entire life not talking about it, and it was working out fine for him—it was when you talked about it that you remembered it, that you had to relive every moment.
“Don’t take her ice skating,” he found himself saying—pleading would be more accurate.
“Okay,” Tony said. “Can I ask why?”
Crack. Scream. Splash.
“DONNA!”
“I...”
“I was pretty firm about saying no,” Tony offered. “She’s got a bit of a lying streak going on right now.” Stephen let out a breath.
“Yeah. Kids.”
Tony made a noise of agreement. Stephen looked up at the lake and then away again, guilt and anger and grief gnawing at him in a way he hadn’t let them in years, and again, he wanted to leave. He wanted Tony to leave. He wanted Tony to take his hand off of his shoulder, where the warm, steady pressure was slowly worming its way through his carefully built defenses.
“My sister fell through the ice.”
He was surprised at how straightforward he was able to say it. It didn’t do the horrible event justice, but there it was, plain and simple.
“I’m sorry,” Tony murmured, and Stephen knew he was.
“She wanted to go ice skating. Our mother was busy, so I offered to take her.” The words kept tumbling out without permission. “I told her to stay close, but I got distracted for just one second… and then she was just… gone.”
“What was her name?”
“Donna.” His voice broke on the second syllable. How long had it been since he had said her name aloud?
“That’s a beautiful name.”
Stephen nodded. A lump was forming in his throat.
“She was eight.” A choked noise that could’ve been a sob slipped out, and he covered his mouth. Tony’s hand squeezed his shoulder tightly. “It was my fault. I couldn’t say no to her, she had the biggest eyes whenever she wanted something—I should’ve said no.”
Tony didn’t tell him that it wasn’t his fault, that he couldn’t have known, and strangely, that was more healing than any of the countless “you can’t blame yourself”s he’d received over the years.
“Is that why you became a doctor?”
Stephen nodded again. “I pulled her out, but I—I didn’t know what to do, and she wasn’t breathing—” all he could see was Donna’s small, pale body in front of him in the ice, his hands scrambling and unsure, trying to mimic some semblance of CPR over and over and over—
He squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep breath, pushing the image from his mind.
“I guess after that I had a notion that if I could save enough people…”
“It would be enough to make up for not saving her,” Tony finished. His eyes were far away, but he offered Stephen a tight smile. “I know the feeling.”
Stephen let out a shaky breath and then took a deep one in. The chill air hit his throat in a way that almost made him cough, but he gained control again. He took another breath to be certain.
“Sorry,” he said awkwardly.
“Hey, you’ve got nothing to be sorry for,” Tony said so firmly that Stephen almost believed him.
“Right,” Stephen said dismissively. “I come to your house and can barely keep it together long enough to make it to dinner. Sure, I’ve got nothing to be sorry for. I knew this was a bad idea from the start. I never should’ve come here.”
“That’s just because you don’t think you deserve anything good,” Tony said, and he was mostly joking, but it wore on Stephen’s frayed nerves.
“I don’t! Have you heard anything I’ve told you? I killed my sister!” His voice was raw and his breathing ragged, rage burning in his chest, but Tony met it all with a steady look of kindness.
“Sometimes, there’s no getting around it. It’s awful, and sure, maybe it’s your fault, but you’ve got to keep living around it. You can’t spend every day of your life punishing yourself for something that seems like it was entirely out of your control.”
Stephen turned away with a huff to try and hide the way that something inside of him was healing and breaking and healing. This wasn’t what Tony was supposed to say. You’re right, was the answer. You’re a monster. You don’t deserve any of this. But of course, he had to add:
“Just because you couldn’t save her doesn’t mean that you don’t deserve anything good.” His voice was irritatingly gentle and deeply understanding, and Stephen hated it.
“It was my fault,” he snapped. “And I won’t let myself forget that.”
“You don’t have to,” Tony said. “But you also don’t have to carry it around with you all the time. I’m sure she wouldn’t want that.”
I never gave her the chance to find out, Stephen wanted to yell, but something soothing held him back, something that felt like Donna when she’d laugh and tell him he was silly whenever he was hard on himself. Tony craned his head to glance through one of the windows.
“I think dinner’s just about ready, if you feel up for it.”
Stephen let out a breath, and with it, he finally let go of a little bit of the anger and guilt and grief he had held on to for years as a reminder of Donna, and it felt like spring air, and it felt like her laughter swept along in the breeze.
“Yeah,” he said after a minute, quiet, subdued, but not defeated. “That sounds good.”