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Stephen received the news on a lonely, bleak Tuesday morning.
A simple, short phone call, from the tiny clinic squeezed into the shaded corner of a Nebraska street that Stephen had nearly forgotten about.
“I regret to inform you, but Beverly Eustis Strange passed away last night.”
Stephen didn’t know how to respond, thanking the clinic and hanging up, alone and numb with his thoughts.
He and his mother had never been close, and they had only drifted further apart after Donna’s death, foregoing contact altogether when Stephen had moved out. Stephen had loved her, yes, and he knew that she loved him despite the agony of his childhood, but he had barely thought of her in years, had created his own life away from her. And now, she was dead.
~
Stephen forced himself to go to her funeral.
Wong had offered to go with him, to support him through the grief he barely felt. Stephen declined, pointing out that the Sanctum still needed guarding. Wong had acquiesced with nothing more than a stare that felt like he was seeing into Stephen’s soul.
Stephen set a shaking hand on the brim of Beverly’s casket. She looked as beautiful as she ever had. Stephen actually looked quite like his mother, even if he hadn’t inherited anything else from his her, other than his intellect and re-surfaced compassion.
“A right loss, Beverly Strange,” a voice said beside him.
Stephen looked over to see an unfamiliar face buried beneath the strain of time and a thick black veil.
“Sure. A right loss.” Stephen looked away, taking in Beverly’s features, painted into a reflection of who she was in life, his voice low and threatening to break.
“Did you know her?” The woman asked.
Stephen swallowed. She was his mother, but had he really known her? Her smile was a distant memory, rare before Donna’s death and nonexistent afterwards. Was he really qualified to answer?
Stephen let out a breath. “Yeah. Yes, I knew her. She was my mother.”
The woman’s expression changed into something bitter, hateful.
“You’re the Stephen Strange everyone is on about? The one who killed half the universe?”
Stephen’s breath caught in his throat. He knew that he had never been the public’s favorite hero, particularly after the Decimation, but he had thought that maybe, three years later, the overall opinion of him would have changed.
“Yes.” Stephen replied quietly, his words almost sticking to his throat. “There was no other way.”
The woman huffed and pattered away, her black veil swaying with each step. Stephen watched her go, swallowing around the lump in his throat.
He turned back to his mother. He leaned down and pressed a chaste kiss to her cold forehead, whispering a silent goodbye, yearning silently for the mother he never truly had.
When he straightened and turned around, he found most of the other funeral attendees staring at him. Some he barely recognized from his youth, some older, and some younger. Beverly had never truly connected with Stephen, had barely loved him in the first place, but she had been a beloved community member. Unlike Stephen, who was barely regarded as a person, sneered at on the streets and yelled at during Avengers press conferences, monuments honoring the fallen spat on in protest of his actions.
Word must have travelled fast about his attendance for everyone to be staring at him the way they were. Stephen stared back at the crowd. It took him only a few seconds of tense silence before he turned on his heel and walked out of the venue. No one followed him, but walking down the streets of his long-abandoned childhood home felt like every eye in town was turned on him.
A stranger passing him on the street seemed to whisper about the way he ‘saved’ the world, how he could have been better, done more, saved more.
An advertisement for self-defense classes at the local library had a cartoon ninja on it, resembling Master Jio in his mind and telling him that his condemnation of humanity for the greater good was only a selfish move to keep himself alive.
A faded yellow flag over a rundown Thai take-out place seemed to command the Ancient One’s spirit, asking him how he thought that he had any right to grieve his mother when he had gambled for salvation with the lives of trillions.
Stephen found himself agreeing with them.
Nothing he had ever done after Titan had forgiven him of his sins. He was irredeemable, broken beyond repair, unable to go back and rewrite his own history, his mastery over Time slipping through the Universe’s cooling fingers.
What right did he have to grieve? He had barely even known his own mother. Her passing was merely the ache of change; nothing compared to the agony of losing half of Earth's population in one fell swoop.
Stephen was the one to have chosen this path. He was the one to sacrifice, to condemn over four billion people just for one shot at winning.
He had held Time in his grasp, had a chokehold on the universe, and devoted himself to the power of a god – and what god had the right to reap the grief of the beings it made suffer in the first place?