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The tea on Tony’s nightstand had gone entirely cold. A thin, translucent skin had formed over the surface of the amber liquid, reflecting the sterile, blue-white glow of the holographic monitors suspended in the air. He didn’t remember when he started to like tea. Tea wasn’t… well… his cup of tea. At least that was the case earlier in his life.
But Tony didn’t drink it. He hadn’t drank anything but cold coffee and one glass of water to take with some pain meds to keep his headaches at bay, in three days. He was sitting on the edge of his workbench, a solder in one hand and a delicate, half-disassembled circuit board in the other, his eyes bloodshot and fixed on a microscopic flaw in the gold-titanium wiring. Willing his eyes to focus. With little success.
Then he felt it again. That sudden, cold draft that seemed to slice straight through his chest, right where his sternum met his ribs. It wasn’t a physical pain, his scans, which he ran meticulously every twelve hours, showed perfect cardiovascular health. His blood pressure was optimal. His heart rate was a steady sixty-five beats per minute, which still was a little concerning, looking at his caffeine intake. The concentrated sum of it could surely kill a horse.
Yet, despite all that, he felt hollowed out. Like someone had taken a melon baller to his sternum and left an empty, ringing cavity behind.
"FRIDAY," Tony muttered, his voice raspy from disuse. "Check the ambient temperature in the sub-level."
"Exactly seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit, Boss," the AI replied, her voice soft, almost tentative. "The same as it has been for the last six hours. Perhaps you should try to sleep. Your biometric data suggests a severe deficit in REM cycles."
"Yeah, well, my biometric data can bite me," Tony grunted, setting the soldering iron down with a sharp clink. He rubbed his face with his hands, his palms scratching against a week’s worth of graying stubble, palms pressing into against closed eyelids. "Is Rhodey still upstairs?"
"Colonel Rhodes left for the Pentagon three hours ago, Boss. He left a message reminding you about the charity gala on Friday."
"Right. The gala."
Tony stood up, his joints popping in the quiet of the lab. He walked over to the glass wall of his workshop, staring out into the dark, manicured gardens of the upstate Compound. The world was quiet. The war was over. Thanos was a bad memory, the stones were gone, and the snapped had returned to a world that was slowly, painfully stitching itself back together. Tony Stark had survived the impossible. He had beaten the odds. He was healthy, he was wealthy, and he was completely, utterly free.
So why did he feel like he was standing on the gallows?
He reached up, his fingers tracing the collar of his black t-shirt, sliding down to touch the skin of his chest. There was no scar there anymore. No arc reactor. But there was a phantom weight, an invisible thread that pulled toward the south-southeast—directly toward Manhattan. Naa, that’s probably just his tired brain.
Tony shook his head, clearing the fog. He was really just tired. The PTSD was acting up again. It was the same old song and dance.
"I'm going up," Tony said, turning off the holograms with a wave of his hand. "Wake me if the world is ending. Otherwise, let me rot."
Three miles south of Central Park, the Sanctum Sanctorum sat in its quiet, temporal pocket, hidden in plain sight.
Inside the grand library, the air was heavy with the scent of old paper, ozone, and dried lavender. Stephen Strange sat on the floor, his legs crossed, his hands resting on his knees. His palms were facing upward, trembling in a slow, rhythmic pattern. That he wasn’t hovering in the air to meditate would’ve been a warning signal for everyone who knew him… but there was no one.
Because Stephen Strange was not meditating. He was holding a leak in a dam that threatened to drown him.
Every breath Stephen took felt like inhaling crushed glass. In the center of his chest, a bright, golden thread of pure life force extended outward, stretching through the walls of the Sanctum, weaving through the crowded streets of Manhattan, and anchoring itself directly into the heart of Tony Stark, fifty miles upstate.
The thread pulsed. With every beat of Tony’s heart, a fraction of Stephen’s own vitality was siphoned away, flowing down the golden line to keep Tony's compromised cellular structure from collapsing. It was a masterpiece of forbidden magic: a life-tether.
The cost of the magic, however, was not just physical.
To keep the tether stable, the recipient had to be completely unaware of its existence. The soul is a jealous, stubborn thing; if Tony’s mind recognized the magic, if his conscious thoughts latched onto the emotional weight of Stephen’s devotion, the tether would snap under the tension of his own willpower. Tony’s mind would reject the foreign energy, and his body would fail within minutes.
To save Tony's life, Stephen had to erase himself from Tony's mind. Well at least that was the original plan. But Wong reminded him, that the risk somebody else mentions him is rather high. So he decided to erase the memory of Stephen Vincent Strange from nearly all minds on earth and beyond. With a few exceptions of course. Wong still knew who he was and the other sorcerers in Kamar-Taj.
***
He stood in the hospital room while Tony lay in a medically induced coma, the burns from the Infinity Stones eating away at his life force. Stephen placed his trembling, scarred fingers against Tony's temple and whispered the incantation. He watched, his own heart breaking in real-time, as the memories of their shared glances on the Benatar, the quiet confessions in the dark, and the desperate, frantic love they had built in the shadow of the apocalypse were dissolved into mist.
When Tony woke up, he remembered the fight. He remembered the wizard who had given up the Time Stone. But he remembered him only as a colleague. A stranger with a cape. A man without a face.
***
Wong stepped into the library, his boots soft against the hardwood floor. He carried a tray with a single cup of tea, the steam rising in lazy spirals. He looked down at Stephen, his eyes filled with a quiet, heavy pity that Stephen absolutely despised.
"The connection is spiking," Wong said softly. "His heart rate is rising. He is preparing to sleep."
Stephen didn't open his eyes. "I know."
"Stephen... you cannot keep this up forever. The drain is cumulative. You are aging yourself. You are giving him years that belong to you."
"He has a world to build," Stephen whispered, his voice dry and hollowed out. "I am insignificant, Wong. The trade is fair."
"And when he dreams?" Wong asked. "The mind is not easily fooled by memory charms. The subconscious remembers what the conscious mind is forced to forget."
Stephen finally opened his eyes. Their usually striking, brilliant light-blue-greenish color seemed dimmed, they were ringed with deep, dark shadows of exhaustion. "Then I will have to be there to make sure he doesn't remember too much."
Upstate, Tony was engulfed in restless sleep.
The dream was always the same, but the details were getting sharper. He was back in the cold, pressurized cabin of the Benatar. The oxygen scrubbers were dead, their warning lights casting a rhythmic, bloody red glow over the metal walls. He was lying on the floor, his breath coming in shallow, frosty gasps.
But in the dream, he wasn't alone.
There was someone sitting beside him. A tall figure wrapped in a heavy, dark coat. Tony couldn't see his face, it was blurred, like looking through a camera that couldn't find its focus, but he knew the shape of those broad shoulders. He knew the way those large, scarred hands felt when they wrapped around his own.
“We’re not going to make it, are we?” Tony heard himself say in the dream. His voice sounded so small, he hated it.
The blurred figure leaned down, pressing his forehead against Tony’s. “We are. I promised you, Tony. I will carry you home, even if I have to drag you through every hell in the multiverse.”
“Who are you?” Tony begged, his fingers clawing at the man's chest, trying to find something solid to hold onto. “Why can't I see you? Please, just let me see you—”
The dream shifted, the cold metal of the ship melting into the scorched, red earth of Titan. The sky was raining fire. Tony was falling, his suit disintegrating into ash, and the blurred man was reaching for him, his voice screaming Tony’s name over the roar of the wind. But as their fingers touched, the man turned to dust, leaving Tony alone in the dark, suffocating under the weight of his own failure.
In his bed at the Compound, Tony thrashed. His skin was slick with cold sweat, his breath hitching in his throat as a low, desperate groan escaped his lips. His heart rate spiked to a dangerous level.
Miles away, Stephen felt the golden thread twitch, tightening like a piano wire.
Without a word, Stephen closed his eyes and let his spirit slip free from his physical shell. His astral form rose into the air, a shimmering, translucent projection.
With a flick of his scarred wrist, Stephen tore open a localized portal, stepping through the dimensional fold directly into Tony’s bedroom, the Cloak of Levitation following suit.
The room was dark, save for the ambient light of the moon shining through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Tony was tangled in the sheets, his face contorted in a mask of pure, unadulterated terror, his chest heaving as he fought a war that existed only in his mind.
Stephen’s heart clenched. He walked to the side of the bed, his astral form carrying no physical weight, yet the air in the room instantly grew charged with a quiet, soothing pressure.
Beside him, the Cloak of Levitation, which had been hovering motionless next to the portal, unraveled itself. The crimson fabric, warm and soft, floated over the bed. It lowered itself gently, draping over Tony’s trembling shoulders like a heavy, protective blanket. The red velvet hummed with a quiet, reassuring vibration, mimicking the steady cadence of a heartbeat.
Stephen leaned over the bed. He didn't touch Tony—he couldn't risk the magical feedback—but he positioned himself directly in Tony's line of sight, even though Tony’s eyes were closed tight in sleep.
Stephen focused his energy. He gathered the ambient magic of the Sanctum, channeling it through his soul, and let his eyes glow with a soft, brilliant intensity.
Two light-blue orbs, luminous and incredibly gentle, cut through the darkness of the bedroom. They hovered in the air above Tony, casting a cool, soothing light over his sweat-sheened face. Stephen projected everything he couldn't say into that light. His peace, his safety, his absolute, unconditional devotion.
I am here, Stephen thought, sending the silent wave of energy into Tony’s subconsciousness. The war is over. You are safe. I have you.
Gradually, the tension in Tony's body began to melt. His breathing slowed from frantic gasps to deep, even rises. The Cloak of Levitation tucked itself tighter around his torso, a red flicker of warmth wrapping him in a soft, constant hug that warded off the biting chill of his nightmares.
Tony’s hand, which had been clenched into a tight fist against the mattress, relaxed, his fingers curling slightly as if grasping at a lingering warmth. His face smoothed out, the terror of Titan fading back into the quiet dark.
Stephen stayed like that for hours. He stood by the bed, his glowing blue eyes watching over Tony’s sleep, the Cloak keeping the nightmares at bay, holding the line between Tony’s life and the void. He stayed until the first pale lines of dawn began to paint the horizon in shades of orange and gray.
As the sun began to rise, Stephen sighed. It was a silent, heavy sound.
He recalled the Cloak, which reluctantly pulled away from Tony’s chest, hovering back to Stephen’s shoulders. Stephen took one last, long look at the man he loved—the man who would never know his name again, the man who was currently alive and breathing because Stephen was willing to be forgotten.
"I love you, Tony," Stephen whispered to the empty air.
With a turn of his heel, Stephen stepped back through the portal, closing the rift behind him and leaving the room silent once more.
A few minutes later, the alarm on Tony's phone blasted Black Sabbath trough his bedroom.
Tony blinked his eyes open, the bright morning light spilling across the bed. He lay there for a moment, staring up at the ceiling, his mind unusually quiet. The heavy, suffocating dread that usually greeted him in the mornings was gone, replaced by a strange, lingering warmth in his chest.
He felt... safe. He felt like he had been held.
He sat up, his brow furrowing as he looked down at his hands. There was a faint, phantom sensation on his skin, like the touch of a heavy woolen fabric, and the air smelled faintly of sandalwood and old paper.
"FRIDAY?" Tony called out, his voice quiet in the morning stillness. "Did... did anyone come in here last night? Rhodey? Anyone?"
"No, Boss," the AI responded. "The security protocols were active all night. No physical breaches were recorded."
"Right. Of course."
Tony rubbed his chest, his fingers pressing against his collarbone. The physical health was there. The energy was there. But as he stood up and walked toward the window, looking out over the world as the sun rose, nurturing the life, the hollow spot in his sternum seemed to ache with a renewed, quiet intensity.
He got used to those nights, that sometimes, in the darkest hours, when the nightmares were especially bad, there would be two light-blue orbs warding off the evil and a red flicker wrapping him in a warm hug. When he woke up the next morning, he always felt like something was missing but he never could put his finger on what that something was.