Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Alarms are sounding, a disorienting cacophony of magical and mechanical warnings that tell all who hear them that their end is quite likely nigh. Sheet rock and dust fall from above while the floor begins to warp, the Sanctum’s ancient wood responding to the stress of its universe collapsing.

Christine smells smoke, somewhere, and steels her heart against what it feels by focusing on what she knows.

Both Stranges are accounted for and momentarily neutralized. The INDEX on her wrist confirms an open jump: the way the dimension is torn has left a gaping wound through which she might safely pass. She has no plan, nowhere to go — but she’s gotten by with less. 

Stephen has stopped blathering, so that’s nice; he seems content to wallow in self-pity where she left him. Her heart pricks itself on the realization that there’s no way her restraints are actually strong enough to hold him. He’s just… given up.

Good, she tells herself. Now, leave him to die. 

For once, grim and resigned… Christine listens. She opens a portal.

And she almost steps through it, too.

A downward glance reveals what Christine first takes for a rope around her ankle, but she realizes her mistake when it tightens around her, smooth and dark and muscular.

Tentacles. Of course.

She keeps her tone flat. “Let go of me, Stephen.”

His body morphs, shifting wildly in shape and size, rightfully disintegrating restraints designed to contain a single human sorcerer. He falls to his knees, shuddering as a pair of black, feathered wings tear through his robe and the surface of his skin stretches and bends around shifting bones and muscles.

Stephen gasps, holding one chimeric hand against his ribs while the other sinks to the floor.

”I… can’t,” he grunts through clenched teeth.

Another tremor rocks the floor beneath them with an accompanying, muffled crash like faraway thunder — like the sound of a great ship coming unmoored.

Christine traces the tentacle back, watches it disappear into the sleeve of Stephen’s now-tattered robe. Impossible to know exactly where it attaches, impossible to know how sensitive it is — at least, not without more data.

Pivoting on her heel, she raises her opposite foot up and stomps down — hard. Stephen’s eyes — all six of them — go wide, and the mandibles he’s recently acquired flex around a shriek of pain and rage. The wriggling appendage is swift to retreat, retracting into the hulking abomination into which Stephen is quickly transforming. For a moment, she thinks she’s done it, turning and making for the portal just as a fresh tremor knocks her to the ground. 

A white-hot flash of pain awaits when her elbow strikes the wood, and she knows it’s dislocated.

Stephen’s hands are tangled in his close-cropped hair, mouth twisted in a cry of pained exertion as he struggles to keep himself together.

”I can’t,” he says again, voice raised over the sounds of splintering wood and creaking metal. “They won’t let me.”

Clutching her arm, Christine has little choice but to be dragged by a collection of smooth, oily-black tentacles back into Stephen’s sphere of influence. 

“We’ll try again,” he says with the voices of a hundred monsters. “We’ll make you happy, this time.”

From here, things happen very fast:

A slithering host of flexible limbs wrap around her arms, wrists and ankles, manipulating her upright and into the air — heedless of her noises of pain. A half-dozen glowing eyes look at her like they’re anticipating a meal.

Before Christine has enough time to properly fight back, she is unceremoniously reacquainted with the floor. More shrieking noises, something warm and wet splattering against the floor, leaving a few drops on her cheek. Clutching her arm, looking up, Christine feels unprepared to believe what she’s seeing.

Sin stands between her and Stephen, holding up a massive mystical shield against which the monster that was once a man beats its limbs, the noise of its exertion muffled by the barrier.

“Go,” Sin barks, “if you value your life, go!”

A slab of sheet rock falls next to Christine, shattering on impact and causing her to flinch. She realizes her elbow is back in place when she raises her arms to try and shield herself from other falling debris. The impact never arrives, though, and when she opens her eyes she sees that she has Sin to thank for that, too: in addition to the massive barrier holding his variant at bay, he’s conjured another right above her head.

Face taut, he shouts, ”Go!”

Christine rises, knees shaking, mind reeling.

“Why?”

Sin’s hands are shaking violently, the integrity of his shield declining as the thing that used to be Stephen ravenously tears at it.

She scrambles to her feet. She’s smarter than this, but there’s a hurt somewhere inside of her that won’t let it go, that refuses to stay silent and dissatisfied.

“Why are you doing this?”

Sin looks back at her, tears in his eyes and something that looks chillingly like true grief in his expression.

He looks at her like he’s been bested. Like he’s lost.

With the saddest half-smirk she’s ever seen, Sin releases the barrier he’d been holding above Christine’s head, revealing just how dead she would be if he hadn’t as wood, stone, and glass crash to the floor. 

A single tear falls from his eye, and in a voice Christine knows she will be hearing in her mind for years to come, Sin says, “You would never believe me.”

He snips open the veil with a gesture, and before she has time to react, Christine is falling back through a portal.

*

She doesn’t even really like poetry, let alone Edgar Allan Poe — but in the uncertain hours of the newest chapter of Christine’s life she seeks distraction in the few books that made it through the portal with her.