Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s the end of the world, and Dr. Christine Palmer sits in a bar, nursing what will probably be the last beer she’ll ever drink.

Jumping between universes, stopping incursions, meeting and teaming up with her variants… By now it’s all starting to feel a little pointless. It may as well be an eternity ago that she met Stephen from Earth-616, watched him walk through a portal to go try and save the multiverse and one very special girl. She wonders what happened to them before laughing, soft and humorless; if 616-Stephen hadn’t been able to get America to safety, Christine’s universe-hopping wouldn’t have lasted this long. She’d be wandering through a red-tinted suburbia while Wanda put her kids on a school bus.

Her beer is empty, and the bartender gives her another without asking. On the TV mounted in the corner a grim-faced news anchor does her best to explain what’s happening: the asteroid, the aliens, the imminent destruction of the planet and everything on it. Christine has plenty of time to escape; the INDEX display on her wrist tells her that the crowd of people hooting and dancing around are about sixteen hours too early. But she wonders if she might just stay, instead.

Because, again… what’s the point?

She keeps trying to save universes from collapsing, and most of them collapse anyway. Yeah, maybe she saves the planet from time to time, if not the people – and nature can make a comeback on Earth, and other planets might survive, if she can keep reality from unraveling. But it’s becoming more and more difficult to keep things together, more difficult to meet herself and explain what she’s doing, again and again — more difficult to see this as a meaningful endeavor rather than the worst, most thankless kind of moral obligation.

So, she sits, and drinks, and thinks about dying here, how it might not be so bad. She’s a doctor; she could walk into a hospital, sign bogus scripts for benzos and morphine and be gone before anyone noticed she wasn’t wearing a nametag. In all this chaos, it might just work, too.

A low, sneering voice cuts through the news, the crowd, and her thoughts.

“Well, well, well…”

Fear at once overwhelms her – which is odd, for someone calmly contemplating the end of her existence. Reaching for the last of her resolve, she slowly turns in the direction of the voice.

“What are the odds that, at the end of the world, I should find the one person I’d want to spend it with?”

His robes are dark, minimal – not like the flashy red-and-blue affair of 616-Stephen. Dark sleeves, muted blues and blacks, dark pants with metal accents, black boots…

“I’m sorry,” she says, aiming for 'cold' but landing in 'snide', instead, “did you lose your way to a B-list villains’ convention? You want to go out the door, hang a right, and go fuck yourself.”

She hates the sound of his laugh. She hates his smile, how it seems to unnaturally widen his face, the way it fails to bring color to his cheeks and deepens the chiseled lines that run like tear tracks from his eyes. He’s pale, goatee a static mess instead of clean lines and sharp angles.

“Ugh,” this sinister Strange groans, taking a seat at the bar, “stop: you’re thinking about him so loudly I could hear you ten universes away.”

Christine isn’t sure why he’s dropped the bad-guy act for something more casual. She has the mad thought that, maybe, he’s just as tired as she is.

“Have I only gotten that far from you?” She shrugs, eyes firmly on the bar rack. “I’d better step up my game.”

The way he stares at her produces a physical sensation, like something slimy slithering between her fingers and toes. She takes a fortifying swig of beer.

“You actually wrapped back around,” he informs her, conjuring a tall, pale drink. The bartender barely looks twice. “I’ll admit to some surprise: I honestly thought I’d never see you again.”

Christine frowns, recalling, “That’s right: last I saw you, you’d been impaled on your own comically gothic spike-tipped fence.” She gives him a cursory once-over.

His widow’s peak is dramatic, like the rest of him, but Christine can at least appreciate that, under any light other than that produced within a crumbling Sanctum in a dying universe, he really isn’t much paler or more sallow-skinned than his less-menacing variants.

He’s gaunt, cheeks just a little sunken, and despite herself Christine can’t help but notice how sad his eyes are, how hollow they’ve become through years of searching for something he’s never been able to find.

He splays his hands. “Fit as a fiddle, I’m afraid, though I find myself suddenly brimming with curiosity.” He leans in, and Christine keeps her eyes fixed on the wall. “I simply must know what brings a nice girl like you to a place like this.”

“Funny you should mention,” she says, making to rise, “I was just leaving. If you’ll excuse me—“

He snatches her wrist, not quite hard enough to hurt. “You’re not going anywhere,” he growls. “Though we could do with some more privacy, don’t you think?”

With a snap, all the patrons vanish, leaving only the echoes of their laughter and half-finished drinks behind. Christine feels her eyes widen as the fear catches up with her. Stephen Strange is an ass in every universe, but his power is undeniable. She chides herself for forgetting, for thinking she could escape him so easily – though, in her defense, she had been living under the happy pretense of this particular Stephen being dead.

He rises smoothly, relinquishing his hold and leaving Christine to rub at the marks his fingers didn’t leave behind.

“Look: you’ve found a new crusade. Great,” he says with a grimace. “But I know you’re wondering if that voice in the back of your head is right. If it’s all for nothing.” He sidles closer. “I’m here to tell you that it is."

Too fast for her to respond, his hands close the last of the space between them. “Let me show you.”

There are no lights, no flashes, no magical fanfare; Christine is simply, all at once, somewhere different. From this vantage point she sees windows into countless universes, but there are three that come into clearer focus the longer she looks:

She sees two Loki variants at the edge of a universe, watches the blonde one drive a blade into the chest of the person who had been keeping their timeline together; 616-Stephen losing control of a spell and ripping open the fabric of his universe; America and Stephen, tearing through reality.

“A great, cosmic storm has been brewing,” Strange says in her ear. “I’ve had time to watch it grow. Incursions cascade into each other, obliterating dozens of universes in just a few short hours.”

With a gesture, he pulls one of the dimensional windows closer to them. Through it, Christine sees herself – four of her, in fact.

“It’s almost sweet,” Strange coos, “watching you all just… try and try.”

She remembers this one. They’d come across each other on Earth-8217, each with her own INDEX, her own plan. She watches from afar, relives the moment: the heat of the artifact they were trying to contain burning her hands and arms, the light emitting from it like a barely-contained star. It was dumb luck that she survived; she’d lost her footing while the other three Christines had held on.

She could have gone her whole life, she thinks, without ever knowing what it was like to watch herself get vaporized three times over. Wouldn’t that have been nice?

Regaining herself, Christine leans back, stepping away only to be returned to the empty tavern. “You’ve made your point,” she spits, pushing past Strange to reach the space behind the bar.

“I wasn’t making a point,” he argues gingerly, “I was simply showing you the futility of what it is you’re trying to do.”

Christine scoffs, horrified when it comes out a little wet. “Thanks for that.”

There is a pause during which Christine does her best not to cry; he hasn’t earned it, not yet at least. Focused on that as she is, she only realizes he’s joined her at this end of the bar because she catches his mottled hands folding themselves atop the polished wood, out of the corner of her eye.

“Come with me,” he entreats her gently. “Let me take you home.”

A dreadful, cackling sort of laugh bursts from her like a can of snakes. “Home? And what is ‘home’, to you? Hm?” She reaches for the good whiskey. “Neither of us wants to play in your gutted-out haunted house."

“Alright, then: where will you go?” he challenges. “Your home universe is gone. Everywhere you go, every time you team up with your variants, you are setting in motion the sorts of forces that lead to incursions in the first place.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Christine barks. “At least it’s better than letting myself waste away, stuck in a universe that’s imploded into a diamond because my alignment changed to ‘true evil’.”

She drops a handful of ice cubes into her glass, feeling manic as she adds, “Which I would love to ask about, by the way, don’t think I wouldn’t. It’s just that I don’t trust you any further than I can throw you."

She casts about for a bin of lime wedges, more than a little disappointed to see him so unruffled by her barbs. The truly obsessive ones are usually quicker to anger, more volatile; this one, at least, does a good job of pretending to be human on the outside.

“I see you’ve found your way to an apocalypse event,” he abruptly observes. “You’re not familiar with the Pompeii Principle, are you?”

Christine frowns but doesn’t take the bait; she pops the top off a ginger beer and pours it over her whiskey and lime.

“As I understand,” Strange elaborates, “when entering a timeline during or close before an apocalypse event, any action undertaken will fail to result in a new branch in time.”

He’s staring; Christine can feel his attention like a clammy fog against her skin. Rather than acknowledge him, she finds a straw and takes an appraising sip.

“I wonder,” Strange says pointedly, “what kind of 'action' you’re looking to undertake. Penny for your thoughts?”

“You can keep your pennies.” She looks up, judging the wiry bulk of him where he stands. “I’ll tell you that for free: it’s definitely not 'hanging out with my ex’s evil variant'.”

“Not even if he’s got the solution to your incursion problems?”

“Not even then,” she agrees, pushing around a floe of ice cubes, “because there is nothing you could say or do that would make me believe you. Plus,” she adds, a sickly tension in her gut, “you did such a great job convincing me it’s a waste of time. Why should I care?”

“You will notice,” he says, “that I carry no incursive energy field, if you take the time to look.”

By now, it’s muscle memory; it isn’t until she’s initialized the scanning process that she realizes what she’s doing, and that she doesn’t need to bother doing it. It isn’t until she’s scanned the readout that she realizes that, somehow, for once in the infinite expanse of the multiverse, Stephen Strange appears not to be stretching or outright fabricating the truth.

“Sinister Strange” – who or whatever he is – carries no risk of incursion with him while travelling between universes.

Even with the INDEX dampening her own incursion field, Christine still needs to be careful about how much time she spends in any one place.

If she can figure out how to operationalize this…

Christine observes him carefully, a sharply bent eyebrow and a slow smile his answer to her expression and her silence.

“And you’re just going to…” she gestures incredulously, “share with me how you’re doing that?”

He folds his arms, shadows pooling beneath his elbows on the glossy wood. “Well,” he drawls, “in the spirit of full disclosure, there is one thing I’d like in return.”

It’s been a while, she notes dully. “Let me guess.”

Strange studies her intently. “It's the same thing I've always wanted.”

Christine makes her customary disgusted noise, drinking deeply as he insists, “Just one chance, Christine – give me just one chance.”

“No, thank you. I’ve done that a thousand times, in a thousand universes, and we both know how it ends.”

“Don’t tell me you never think about him – well, me,” Strange amends, preening beneath her withering stare. “There was something there, once.”

“We’re not having this conversation,” Christine deadpans, whiskey buzzing pleasantly in her head. “You don’t know me, and I don’t know you. We are not our variants. Even if I did give a damn about you – and I don’t,” she reminds him, retrieving the lime wedge from her drained glass, “it’s a fixed point. No universe can withstand it changing.”

His eyes predictably linger on her mouth when she bites into the lime. “But what if it could?”

Christine shakes her head, drops the lime into her glass. “You can't just ignore the rules, Stephen –”

He strikes the bar with an open palm. “You’re not listening to me!”

The door slams, the lights flicker, and tendrils of shadow flare up behind Strange, who is at once significantly more menacing: his eyes flood with darkness as his teeth flash, on his feet and looming over the bar.

Christine knows she’s scared, and she knows it’s written on her face, but she doesn’t take long to get herself back together. As she does, so too does Strange; he smooths down his robe, runs a hand over his hair, breathes slowly through his nose, and molds his mouth into a crooked smile.

“Sorry,” he says in an affected whisper. “Temper, I know. I’m working on it.”

Christine furtively checks her INDEX. There’s no easy way out; the next proximal dimensional flare isn’t for another few hours. Punching a new hole through the fabric of reality isn’t ever her first choice, but for the sake of escaping one of the most dangerous things in the multiverse, Christine feels willing to make an exception.

That is, she would be willing to make an exception, if the choice was offered to her. And, perhaps to some other Christine, it was.

This Christine, though, doesn’t have nearly as many options as she thinks she does.

“Let me make this a little easier on you, darling.”

There’s a prickling sensation on her wrist, where the INDEX is – or, was; Christine watches it dissipate into so many purple photons.

“There,” Strange sighs, “isn’t that better? No more distractions.”

Christine is left blinking ineffectually at the reddened band on her wrist, where the INDEX has been attached since she-no-longer-remembers-when. It’s her passport, logbook, and vehicle for interdimensional travel, a point of convergent technological evolution for the Christine Palmers of the multiverse. It’s what allows her to leave the faintest trace possible of her existence, helpfully sweeping over the paradoxes she might otherwise be creating and finding pre-existing paths of interdimensional travel for her to use.

Without it, she is trapped.

Without it, she invites incursions.

As if to confirm it, the ground beneath her feet begins to shake. She barely catches herself on the lip of the bar.

Strange is wearing a heinously self-satisfied smirk. “I’d recommend coming with me,” he says.

Steadying herself, Christine lays her palms flat on the bar. “So, let me get this straight: you have the means to stop these incursions, but you won’t share it unless I agree to… what? Move into your dead universe and be your toy for eternity?”

His eyes darken. Christine didn’t think that was possible.

“I’m very, very nice to my toys,” he says. “You would want for nothing. I could give you everything you –”

“No.”

He can’t quite conceal the irritated curl of his lip. “You seem very ready to give up on your crusade,” he remarks drily. “And to vilify my motives.”

“Allowing incursions to continue happening is hardly the heroic thing.”

He turns away. “Well, we’ve pretty firmly established that I’m not the hero type.”

Christine snorts. “Obviously.” She shakes her head. “Entire universes, for one person –”

“Two people,” he amends, glancing back.

She glares. “I realize that being evil comes with some built-in blind spots for you, but personal happiness isn’t worth destroying other branches of reality for.”

“That’s just the thing,” he says, turning on his heel. “It’s the only thing worth it, worth the destruction of the cosmos. Love: real, abiding love –”

“You don’t love me. You’re obsessed with me.”

He pauses, purses his lips. “Perhaps," he admits, narrowing his eyes. “But I know something you don’t.”

“Oh, really?”

He smiles with too many of his teeth. “Yes, really.” He stalks lazily forward. “I know that it excites you.”

“You’re sick.”

“Am I?”

In an instant, a third eye appears on his forehead, rising out of the skin. Christine nearly gags. “I can see inside that pretty head of yours. Not your individual thoughts, nothing like that, but your feelings. Desires.”

He slithers closer. “The little hopes you keep tucked up in the tight, tight little corners, in the rafters of your mind.”

Christine feels her shoulders rising. “You’re not impressing me,” she warns him.

“Am I not?” He comes closer still, vanishing the third eye. “Because I think that, deep down, you’re curious, too. You think maybe, just maybe…” He drops into a murmur, eyes hooded, expression pleading, “… we could be happy."

Christine, to her eternal shame, falters. Closing her eyes, bowing her head, she realizes once more just how tired she is. She’s so, so tired…

“There’s something between us, Christine, you can’t deny it.”

She scrounges just enough willpower to say, “The only thing ‘between us’ is your fixation, Stephen. That’s all there’s ever been.”

If anyone were to ask Christine why what happens next, happened next, she isn’t sure she could satisfactorily answer them.

“Fine,” Strange rasps after a series of long, tense moments, turning from her and retreating deeper into the bar. “I suppose I’ll just have to keep searching.”

Flooded with relief, she’s prepared to deliver a final cutting remark, but stumbles. “Searching for what?”

He casts a glance over his shoulder. “The right Christine, of course.”

Comprehension dawns a moment too late, and Strange begins to conjure a portal.

Christine moves, calling “Wait,” as the pieces fall together: if she doesn’t… she retches internally… submit, some other Christine will have to – one who might not be able to protect herself, who can’t see this Strange for what he really is. A sinking feeling settles in as she strides to catch up. He must have known all along that this is one of the only reasons she would ever agree to shackle herself to him.

“If I…” Christine pauses, sighs. “Look: I’m not saying I trust you, and I’m certainly not saying that I’m going to… I don’t owe you another chance, okay?”

Dark eyes regard her from deep within their sockets, inscrutable as he allows the portal to fall closed. “I suppose,” he agrees. “So, what now?”

I can’t believe I’m doing this. Christine takes a bolstering breath, releasing it as her new reality begins to take shape. “I’ll go with you, under a couple of conditions.”

Eyes widening, Strange’s grin goes from predatory to ecstatic. “Oh, Christine,” he groans, earnest and elated, “you’ve but to name them.”

With a hollow feeling in her chest, Christine goes on, eyes fastened to a crack in one of the tiles. “First, no messing with my mind. No dreams, no illusions, no mind control.”

“I would never –”

“You would, and you have. Try any of that shit with me, you’ll find out just how painful the consequences are, and the deal is off.”

There it is again: that slow-stretching, sharklike grin. “Go on.”

She wants assured privacy and space to work, because she’s not giving up her career to play housewife; no physical touch of any kind without an explicit say-so; and an assurance that he’ll make a good-faith effort to help her figure out how to bottle his anti-incursion properties.

“And," she finishes wearily, "in exchange…”

“In exchange,” he parrots, “you will give me an honest chance to prove that we can be happy together.”

Her eyes sting when she closes them.

“And if, after all of that, you still want to leave… you may.”

It makes her stomach flip, but she opens her eyes and holds out her hand. “What do you say?”

A lingering look, and Strange takes it. “I say, I’m game. Let’s play.”

Dr. Christine Palmer stands in a bar, upon a planet, within a universe whose death has just been moved many hours closer to the present moment, and her only way out is with an evil variant of Stephen Strange.

There's a word for this, she thinks, reevaluating her half-baked notion of letting herself die here. There has to be a word for this.

He's holding out his hand, smug and smiling, and Christine wants to do anything other than go with him. But she does.

'Bad,' Christine’s mind supplies. This is really, really fucking bad.

Chapter Text

Oh, she is perfect.

Granted, Christine Palmer is a gift to every universe in which she exists; Strange knows this to be true. But 838-Christine has a certain way about her — something in the way she moves, the way she glances at him: like a wary gazelle watching a lion drink from the same watering hole. Like she’s waiting for the first sign of trouble so she can bolt.

He’s taken care of that, of course. He’d never leave something as important as her security untended to. She’s a bit prickly, but even the thorniest roses need careful tending, a patient hand. And, of course, the right environment.

She doesn’t yet understand his love for her; when she does, she’ll never have to wonder whether he’d do something to her she doesn’t want.

“How do I know you won’t just…” she’d asked soon after arriving, with a glance and a meaningful gesture between them.

Strange had twisted his expression into one of disdain. “Christine, please. I’m not an animal.” He’d turned away as if offended, but only to indulge in a smirk. He won’t need to force the issue. She’ll take him willingly — enthusiastically — all on her own. Strange just needs to be patient.

And, between the two of him, he has patience aplenty.

*

"Blind luck" is the misconception that anything in the multiverse happens by accident.

The universe with which Strange’s home had collided belonged to the variant of himself he’s taken to calling ‘Strange Supreme’ — mainly because his doppelgänger despises it.

“It makes me sound like a fast-food special,” he gripes from the opposite side of a darkened, full-length silver mirror.

Strange feels his mouth stretch wide. “Well, you wolfed down more than your fair share of gods and monsters before we met. You’d certainly qualify as a super-sized snack, for anyone capable of chowing down on you.”

Shadows pool beneath his counterpart’s eyes as he bows his head just enough to submerge them. “But you’re not going to do that,” he says, “because you need me.”

“Because I need you,” Strange agrees. “Yes, indeed, I do.” He paces, leaving the other to fold his arms from within the mirror. “You’re going to win Christine over for me. For us,” he swiftly amends.

“Uh-huh,” the other Strange deadpans. “Listen, buddy, I’m telling you: let it go. Things are stable here for now, but we have no idea how long that’ll last. It’s an absolute point —“

”It will last as long as we need it to,” Strange interjects. “The properties you imbued your universe with by reifying its liminal membrane bled over into mine. We are more stable than most timelines in the multiverse, especially given recent circumstances.”

The Strange variant approaches the surface of the glass on soundless feet. “And you don’t think that creating a pocket dimension has any chance of causing an incursion cascade?” He scoffs. “I didn’t think there were any others as desperate and as deluded as I was.”

Oh, my friend, Strange thinks with private malice, you have no idea. So very many of them fell to madness long before Strange had found them and put them out of their misery.

“The only way to work around an absolute point in time,” Strange explains, as patiently as he can, “is to remove the thread of a given universe’s reality from the rest of the time stream: a pocket dimension, yes.”

A twist of his wrist produces a leather-bound tome whose pages rush to find relevant diagrams and spell matrices for the variant’s inspection.

”It has all the necessary properties, checks every box. I don’t know how or why, but for reasons I cannot fathom and about which I dare not speculate, our two universes united into the one place in the multiverse where we can have what we want.”

Strange can tell his variant wants to believe what he’s hearing; he merely lacks the same vision, the proper insight — that last, flickering glimmer of hope. The obsession that refuses to let their love die has dimmed within this other Strange.

He’s lost the faith.

“I know why you doubt,” Strange assures him. “But if you can muster the courage for one more try, we can finally, finally have her.”

They size each other up in the long, silent moment that follows. Then, the variant asks, “What would you have me do?”

“I need her weak and wanting. I want her heart, her body, mind and soul.” He stalks forward. “I want all of her.”

The shoulders of his doppelgänger rise and fall. “Yeah, join the club, buddy. What the hell do you think all the Stephen Stranges of the multiverse have been trying to do this whole time?”

“Trying and failing. We cannot fail here. This might be our last chance.”

“What do you mean, ‘last chance’?”

“You haven’t noticed a distinct lack of Christine Palmers in the great, wide multiverse?”

The other eyes him dubiously. “Uh, no? I was kind of only ever fixated on my Christine, not —”

Strange’s hands come to grip the sides of the mirror, breath fogging the glass. “Mine, yours, ours — in the end, it’s all the same. We’re here, and so is she, but I can’t do this on my own.”

The man in the mirror looks for a moment as if he’s about to make a cruel joke. It never arrives, though; instead his expression falters, and there’s a flash of pity that lasts a second too long for him to quite conceal it.

Fine. Let him take pity. Whatever gains his cooperation.

“Tell me what you want from me,” the other begins cautiously, “and I’ll see what I think.”

Strange conjures a chair, as well as a table laden with an assortment of mundane and magical sundries. “There are certain things that I can’t give to Christine. You’re going to help me with that,” he says.

The newly conjured furniture is helpfully reflected in the mirror; the other Strange sits. “What kinds of things are we talking about?”

Strange fiddles with a small brass relic. “We both know that the Darkhold exacts -“

“Exacts a heavy toll, yeah.”

Strange feels his lip take an irritated curl. “Yes, well — it’s not just sleepless nights and extra eyes. There are other bodily effects that I didn’t anticipate.”

He sighs testily. “Look: I love that woman just as desperately as you do, I just don’t know if I can… please her.”

From the mirror: a frown that is more curiosity than reproof. “How long did you carry it?”

“Unimportant. We want the same thing: to love her as well as we are able and keep her at our side forever.”

A noiseless top is set spinning upon the table within the mirror. “Forever’s a long time. She might change her mind.”

“Fortunately, that won’t be an option she considers.”

The top clatters onto its side. “What?”

Strange reclines, restless fingers drumming on the table.“There’s a spell — you know the one.”

“No — no, I am not on board with this.”

“Don’t play the hero, Stephen,” Strange sneers. “It doesn’t suit you.”

“This is not a game.” He leans forward. “Christine’s mind is not a toy. I won’t be a part of this.”

“You will, or you’ll never see her again.”

There is silence, and space, and something like the prickle of static in the air before the mirror-bound Strange growls, “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Strange does not heed the danger. “You know the situation you’re in. I could leave you here. Let you watch from the sidelines as I woo her, love her…” He reaches for a lascivious smile. “Take her to bed.” He shrugs. “I’m a pretty quick study.”

In an instant, the other Stephen launches himself from his chair, eyes aflame as he grows and shifts, his voice a garble of hissing, snarling violence. “Do it and I’ll kill you,” he vows through a growing number of teeth. “I will fucking kill you, d’you hear me?”

With a wet thump and an earsplitting crack, the monster in the mirror strikes the glass, an angrily coiling tentacle drawing back for another blow.

Strange feels his eyes widen. “Stop!” he cries. “You know what this mirror is; breaking it will destroy all three of us!”

The tentacles halt, writhing in the air as the thing in the mirror eyes Strange murderously.

Strange sags with relief.“Okay,” he sighs, “let’s calm down, shall we? Put our tentacles and eyeballs and things back where they belong?”

To Strange’s great surprise, this works. He realizes that it takes the other Strange what appears to be a great deal of effort to put everything away once it’s been set loose. He makes a mental note.

Strange remains silent as his variant breathes slowly, eyes lit with a soft yellow glow as the last of the tentacles recede. Unable to help himself, Strange asks, “Did you really eat Shuma-Gorath?”

The other Strange cracks one eye open — the eye that’s appeared on his stomach, spanning the better part of his torso.

“Come closer,” he croons, lips unmoving, “and find out.”

Once things appear to be mostly as they should be, Strange tries this whole thing over again. “Listen. I think we got off on the wrong foot, here.”

He waits for the last of the scales to fade into skin. “What I’m envisioning is a mutually beneficial partnership, one where we both get to have Christine.”

With a final shudder and the sound of bones resetting, his counterpart is restored to his (almost) entirely human form.

“I’m listening,” he says.

*

“Knock, knock.”

Christine swipes hastily at her cheeks. “Yeah, hi,” she mumbles.

His boots are nearly noiseless on the carpet. “Just checking in.”

An uncomfortable, unhappy laugh. “Right.”

The room is sparse, but not barren. A queen bed rests atop a hand-carved, stained oak frame — a bureau, side table, and a door leading to a private bathroom. The walls are a shade warmer than white — the color she’d painted her bedroom at home.

He’s taken care not to match things too precisely; he’d lied when he’d said he couldn’t read her individual thoughts, and so far he’s reasonably sure she has no idea that he has access to her memories, as well.

But that’s for later.

Right now, Christine needs him. 

He makes a wide arc around the bed, coming to rest on the corner furthest from her. She tries to shrink from him, anyway.

“Look… I know that, coming from me, this might sound completely ridiculous —“

”Yeah, probably.”

He pauses, waits until he feels her begin to wonder awkwardly if she’s actually hurt his feelings.

“I meant what I said, about making you happy. I don’t want to keep you here if you’re miserable. And I don’t want you to be miserable while you’re here. If you want to leave…”

Her laughter is dark. “Here it is.”

“… then you can leave.”

“Then why bring me here at all?” She leans back, resting a hand just behind her hip, long, elegant fingers tipped in red leaving their imprint on the duvet. Strange is mesmerized.

“I know what this place is,” she says. “I don’t know how, but you’ve found somewhere — or something — outside of the natural flow of space and time.”

You’re so close, he thinks affectionately. My sweet, smart pet… Not a ‘somewhere’, not a ‘something’, but a ‘someone’.

Her brow knits loosely. “Why bring me here if you’re not trying to hold me?”

Strange puts on a repentant affect, stooping his shoulders just slightly and resting his elbows on his knees. He feels her eyes on him, the soft, sweet warmth of grudging compassion that emanates from her like the light of a star or the warmth of a fire.

”I know you don’t trust me,” he says quietly —quietly enough to force her to turn, just slightly, to make sure she can hear. “You have no reason to.”

He dares to move, to angle himself closer “But if you won’t trust me, will you at least trust yourself?”

It is here that his alliance with Strange Supreme first bears fruit: his mirror-bound variant alerted Strange to the fact that, in what turns out to be a great stroke of luck (or the multiverse’s equivalent), Christine actually is safest in here, with them.

(It’s an odd sensation, sharing a body and a mind with someone else, but well worth it if this success proves indicative of what is to come.)

”You know exactly what’s happening,” he insists softly. “You’ve seen it dozens of times. There just aren’t very many places you can safely go.”

All at once the overwhelm hits her; Strange feels it like a blast of hot air as she lowers her face into her hands.

She’s even more beautiful when she cries, he marvels.

“What, so now I’m just an incursion magnet?” Her eyes glimmer with angry tears. “This whole time, I’ve been causing the same kinds of incursions I’ve been trying to stop?”

Despite her accusatory tone, Strange takes this for progress. Whether she conceptualizes it this way or not, Christine has just asked him to console her, to give her answers. To take care of her. 

He is only too happy to oblige.

He wears a sympathetic frown. “No, Christine, not at all.”

(Touch is unwelcome, now; Strange sees that clearly. His variant longs to reach out, to take her in his arms and kiss her vigorously, to taste the tears on her cheeks —)

Instead, he abandons all artifice of self-pity in favor of gentle, loving concern. “You couldn’t have known for certain your home universe was destroyed.”

”I could have made an educated guess.”

(The variant responds strongly to this. Strange decides to loosen the leash a little bit.)

”Christine,” he demurs, “there is no one as brilliant and capable as you — every ‘you’ there’s ever been. You care so much; it’s one of the things I —“

(No, not yet — too soon.)

“… admire about you,” he finishes awkwardly.

She laughs again, and it’s sad — but there’s a thread of true amusement, the merest pleasant impression that is carried with it. Strange feels his heart beat in a way it hasn’t in centuries.

“I know you wouldn’t have chosen this,” he confesses, “and I am truly sorry that I didn’t tell you more when I first found you.”

She sighs, shaky and brief as she attempts to stem the slow, stubborn tide of tears Strange watches leave glistening tracks on the surface of her skin.

”It’s alright. I wouldn’t have believed you, anyway.”

(There is much the variant wishes to say — declarations of love and devotion, a never-ending list of things he yearns to promise her. Strange endeavors to teach him the value of silence.)

”Whatever it is within my power to give you,” he vows, “you will have. No illusions, no tricks: reality, as you want me to shape it.”

He feels her mind working through the scale of that statement, the first tentative stretch of her budding imagination into the fertile soil of possibility. It is delicious.

“For now,” he says delicately, “I’m going to leave you; I can tell you’re tired.”

It’s barely there — a randomly-firing neuron — but for just a moment Strange feels the aching tug of being missed.

He feels his heart clench. Some part of her, at least, doesn’t want to be alone.

”Good,” she says, soft and brusque. “I need some sleep.”

He is loath to leave her — temptress that she is — but thinks perhaps it’s for the best. There is much to do, and much to learn about working together with his variant. His raw, desperate desire is inspiring — all the vital power of gods and beasts and things of which no mortal has ever dared to dream, keeping the flame of his love well-fed.

As Strange lays himself down to rest, to process and to plan, a long-dead spark flares back to life.

Chapter Text

“I want you to do it.”

Strange blinks up from the book whose pages he has been steadily turning for the last hour or so. Marking his place with the attached silk ribbon, he sends it floating to its shelf before turning his entire attention to Christine. “I’m going to need a little elaboration on that, sweetheart.”

“Don’t call me —“

Her mouth takes on a brittle smile, eyes glittering with the cold light of what Strange recognizes with alarm as impending hysteria.

“You know what?” She giggles, chilly and mirthless. “It doesn’t matter. Call me whatever you want.”

It was only a few days ago she’d lambasted him for addressing her as “dear ”…

Strange speaks slowly, rising from his chair in similar fashion. “Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong, and  —“

“I want you to use magic to make me believe that I love you.”

Strange spends long moments struggling to comprehend what he’s hearing, to divine the reason behind this sudden and dramatic shift in their relationship — because it’s been the equivalent of three Earth months, and up to now Strange had felt very little progress has been made.

Which makes absolutely no sense to him, if he’s honest. He’s given her everything she’s asked for, met all of her needs with alacrity, abetted all of her failsafes and maintained a respectful distance from her wards — elementary (and adorable) though they are. He wonders if this is akin to taking up gardening in retirement, the way people so badly need to feel needed, if only by a patch of dirt and a few wilting blossoms.

Christine will never not feel needed, Strange vows, once she settles into her new normal; he needs her every second of every day. But the distance between them yawns wider each time she rebuffs him, refuses him a gentle word or subtle kindness by perennially gifting him the cold shoulder.

He’d begun by giving her an entire city (a continent, really, but the city was where all of his hardest work was done). The God of the Abrahamic faiths created the world in six days; Stephen Strange did it in four, though his was admittedly much more humble: a handful of stars, a living planet, and, most importantly, a comfortable place for them to live.

It’s a strikingly faithful recreation of NYC, if he does say so himself, but Christine just can’t get over the fact that Strange has “made” all of the people with whom she interacts: she says it feels like he is staging a play.

“Don’t try and make this place something it’s not,” she’d said.

And herein lies the problem with ordinary conceptualizations of time, space, and existence: ‘this place’ is a blank slate. ‘This place’ is, or could be, quite literally, anything and everything they want.

(And, simultaneously, nothing that we want, the variant had sulked that day. Schrödinger’s love story.)

“Enough,” Strange had hissed, blinking himself to the space before the silver mirror. “What is your problem?”

“My problem?” The variant pressed his palms to his chest, as if scandalized. “My problem? I’ll tell you what my problem is: we’ve spent weeks trying things your way, and so far it’s gotten us nowhere.”

You can’t expect her to jump into our lap in so short a time — we must be patient, Strange had told him.

“I’ve thought about it long and hard,” Christine says now, crossing her arms, “and I’ve decided that if I’m going to be stuck here forever, I may as well be happy.” She weakly shrugs. “Or think that I am.”

Silence reigns, and Strange takes her in with what he can only imagine is a look of utter bafflement.

(Thusly baffled, he is unable to stop the variant from steering the conversation.)

“Christine,” he says faintly, “why?”

“I just told you,” she plows on, “that I want you to do it. I’m giving you permission.”

“No,” he protests, stepping closer, “no, this isn’t what I want.”

“Well, it is what I want,” she says, bleak as autumn rain. “You said this place could be whatever I want, right? You want to make me happy?” She throws her arms wide; Strange feels something inside him breaking. “Make me happy.”

How can she do this? the variant wonders. Does he not give her all she asks of him? Has he not been a dutiful guardian and a gracious host? Why would she rob them both of this — the joy of courtship and love? Their lives could be so sweet — why does she refuse to open her heart to them?

(Strange feels the variant’s agitation spiraling; he takes the chance to reorient the situation.)

“Is there anything in particular that brought this on?”

“Aside from being trapped here?”

He closes his eyes, taking a short, deep breath. “I understand that you’re frustrated with your circumstances,” he sighs, brow furrowed, “but this isn’t the solution. I can’t  meddle with your mind. It’s too dangerous.”

Christine stalks forward, pointing an accusatory finger. “You can, and you have.” Her voice quavers. “I know exactly what you’re capable of, all of you. Just do it and be done.”

“No,” he insists, steeling himself against the curious fluttering in his gut. 

Her expression collapses, and like one forsaken she implores him, “Why?”

The variant’s distress grips tightly at their heart. She sounds so desperate…

“Because nothing is worth the risk,” he lies. “Your mind isn’t a toy.”

(An odd feeling, like the variant knows and is outraged by Strange misusing his words.)

She throws her hands up. “Then what, Stephen? I sit around and wait until you get bored of not getting what you want?” She shakes her head; a tear leaves a dark spot on the front of her blouse. “I’m doing this on my own terms. This is going to be my choice.”

“Even if there was a way for me to do what you’re describing…” The variant shakes their head. “Christine, I would never do that to you. I love you.”

“No,” she says, a clinging tremor in her voice, “no, you don’t, Stephen. You love the idea of me: the idea that despite everything that you are, all the horrible things you’ve done, someone will see past what you’ve become and find something in you that’s worth loving.”

Strange and the variant share their first harmonized mix of emotions: it is dread, heartache, anger, some feelings they’d forgotten they’d had and are eager to forget again.

It’s awful.

Pale and trembling, Christine fumes. “Well, guess what?”

Her hair is especially red, Strange has noticed; many other Christines are closer to strawberry-blonde, but the one who stands before him looks like nothing so much as a vengeful goddess, wreathed in flame and sowing destruction in righteous fury.

He’s certain he’s never wanted anything as much as he wants her.

“There’s nothing there,” she spits. “Everything I could have ever loved in you, you destroyed with your…” She gestures widely. “Your insane quest to find a version of me that would take you.”

It cuts like a knife and stings like poison, he knows, because it’s far too close to the truth.

(Because it is the truth.)

“So,” she says quietly, “do the spell, or the ritual, or whatever your particular brand of magical bullshit happens to be, and…”

Strange never learns what might have come next in that sentence, because Christine flees the room with measured, cautious strides. The anxiety of turning her back on him is palpable, hanging in the air like smoke. Whatever internal conflagration is responsible must also be what galvanized the conviction with which she just asked him to take away her physical and mental autonomy.

“What are we missing, that she was able to get to this point?” An unblemished hand worries at one of the clasps of the variant’s robe. “This feels wrong,” he laments from within the mirror, “so, so wrong.

”You and I have both come too far to start worrying about right and wrong,” Strange rasps. “She’s given her permission; the wards won’t even try to stop us.”

The variant’s eyes take on an incredulous glint that is somehow amplified by the magic of the silver mirror; they glimmer like distant, hostile stars. “Tell me you’re not seriously considering this.”

Strange pulls a face. “Tell me how you’re not considering it.”

The variant balks. “Do you seriously intend to predicate our relationship with the woman we love on false feelings?”

Strange’s mouth takes on a self-righteous moue.  “How is respecting her wishes such an issue for you? I thought you loved her.”

”It wouldn’t be real!” the variant shouts. “Twisting her mind is not how —“

Strange groans, slouching. “Please, spare me your sanctimonious platitudes, Strange Supreme,” he wheedles. “The goal was to work together until we gained her compliance, and now we have it.”

In the structured void of the place in Strange’s mind where the mirror exists, he approaches his doppelgänger. “Well done, us.”

”Oh,” he says, like an afterthought, “and I’ve been rethinking the terms of our arrangement.”

The mirror seems to grow darker with every measured step forward his variant takes. “I’ll bet you have.”

With a feigned look of sympathy and a playful squint, Strange admits, “I know, you probably saw this coming a mile away — great minds think alike, and all.”

The variant does not seem amused by this. No matter; he’ll soon cease to be a concern.

“What did she mean,” the trapped one suddenly asks, “when she said she knew what we were capable of?”

Strange shakes his head. “What we’re —?” He scoffs, shrugs. “Sounds like she’s met a Strange or two who weren’t as fussy about their methods as you are.”

For a brief moment, there is stunned silence. Then, eyes narrowed, the man in the looking glass says, low and dangerous, “‘Fussy’?”

Strange is beginning to wonder if the mirror is supposed to be this dark; he hides the concern inside a disparaging laugh. “I don’t know why you lied to her. She clearly knows we’re not above using magic to ‘persuade’ people.”

The variant’s eyes flash, mouth twisting into a snarl as he throws himself against the mirror’s surface.

”Ah ah ah,” Strange tuts, “none of that — unless you want to take her down with you.”

Within the mirror are claws and teeth, limbs that stretch and writhe as all of the things the glass-bound sorcerer has consumed fight for expression.

“You can’t do this,” he rumbles in a hundred voices.

Strange makes a disgusted noise. “God, but you are tedious. I was wondering if I was going to miss you, but I’m happy to know I’ve got nothing to worry about on that front.”

“I won’t let you touch her,” the variant growls, engulfed in darkness that seems to strain the mirror’s edges, until all that’s left of him are two bright, hateful stars.

“Hate to be the bearer of bad news,” Strange chortles, “but you’re trapped. ‘Mirror of the mind,’ remember? Wong taught us this little trick.”

There emanates from the mirror a sound somewhere between a gurgle and a hiss, and Strange only understands the trouble he’s about to be in when all that darkness spills over the mirror’s edges.

“You know,” the variant muses in a voice that is suddenly everywhere, “I’ve been wondering if I’d miss you, too.”

Strange backs away, mind working frantically to determine what’s happening and how to stop it.

“But I see now that I can’t let you get any closer to her,” the variant says solemnly. 

With each second that passes, Strange feels more and more the press of confinement like the weight of leaden chains, and struggling only serves to tighten an invisible noose around his neck.

“It seems your Wong failed to mention that Mirrors of Mind can be inverted,” Strange Supreme remarks, walking casually out of the darkness and into Sinister Strange’s line of sight while the latter fights ineffectually against the bonds of darkness that hold him.

“You know how I knew you and I were never going to get along?” the newly liberated Strange inquires. “You tore apart your universe, threatened the integrity of space and time trying to find her.”

His expression darkens, deepening the shadows under his eyes and in the hollows of his cheeks. “But not to love her.”

Strange feels consciousness slipping, giving over to the variant he has grossly underestimated.

“All you care about is owning her, catching the one thing you were told you couldn’t have.” His expression sours. “You want her for the novelty.”

The change is nearly complete: columns of silver appear at the edges of Strange’s shrinking field of view, bounding him in. 

“I was prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt, until you jumped on her offer like that.” The variant approaches the mirror from the other side, leaning in as if to deliver a secret to the silently screaming Strange caught in a trap of his own design.

“In case you need it spelled out: having sex with someone under the influence of magic is assault. And we don’t assault the people we love. You think about that, for a while.”

Strange is powerless to do anything but watch as the variant he had sought to exploit prepares to leave, solely in control of the body they share.

Chapter Text

It’s the little things that clue her in to this place being not-quite-real.

The streets are too clean; too few homeless people sleep under the bridges and at the bus stations. There are never any car accidents more serious than a fender-bender, and no one going into or coming out of the hospital looks particularly sick.

Her case load is perfectly manageable.

She prescribes herself marijuana.

The local dispensary  —  conveniently located two blocks from her front door — collects donations for an animal shelter. Christine puts her change in the jar.

It’s only as she walks home that she notices every stray she comes across looks well-fed, and always seems to find a spot out of the rain or in the sun.

Nobody is anything but kind to them.

Other things take her longer to notice: the air is cleaner, and the subway runs more smoothly. There’s never a line when she reaches the checkout, and she can’t remember the last time something went bad in her fridge.

There are never any shootings in the news.

And that, somehow, makes it worse: that this fabricated reality betrays itself by being kinder and more civilized than her own ever was.

Christine is a doctor, a woman of science, and still would swear she actually feels her heart split open like a shifting glacier when that element of this place finally hits her.

It rains that night — hard, pelting the windows as thunder rolls in the distance. She drinks, and cries, and when she wakes in the morning she feels as fresh as a daisy, no hangover in sight.

Once again, bad weather is the worst thing on the news.

*

The change takes hold of him gradually.

She first had cause to notice it about a week after their… she doesn’t feel right calling it an “argument”; she’d marched off before he could make any reply and then wandered around the city until late.

In hindsight, she can admit that her request had been jarring, probably, if nothing else. But his feelings and comfort are not her responsibility; she’s now in the midst of setting up her laboratory on the second floor of the New York sanctum — that’s her responsibility, and it’s to herself, not him.

Thinking on it, she’d only really begun to think of their exchange as an argument when he started showing up on her route to work with conciliatory coffee and pastries. She had caught him in her new favorite coffee place one morning, standing in line, waiting impatiently for his double cappuccino like a run-of-the-mill privileged white man — as if he isn’t as good as God to this entire world.

He’d looked up from his smart watch, seen her, and done a double-take that saw the wooden stir stick he was gnawing on fall from his mouth and clatter onto the floor.

Christine greeted him cheerily, “Well, this is hardly a surprise.”

”I swear —“

”Don’t.”

”No, really —”

”Don’t.”

”Have you tried their bagels?”

”Do. Not.”

Somehow, it becomes a routine.

At some point, they start talking.

It is upon one of these days — as indiscriminately pleasant as any other — that she chooses to confront him. He stands on the corner, holding two coffees and a bag containing what Christine knows with one hundred percent certainty is a bear claw and avocado toast, because that’s what she wants to eat right now.

“You’ve certainly taken some liberties,” she observes, accepting her prizes, “with our terms and conditions. I expected you to at least pretend to hide the fact that you’ve been reading my mind.”

Strange looks around them, gesturing broadly. “What, you mean breakfast and the quality-of-life upgrades?”

“Is that what you’re calling them?”

“C’mon — I’m not going to put you in a more polluted, toxic world than I have to.”

“Hmm.” They carry on in silence, Christine eventually relenting with, “Nice of Congress to pass that bill on climate change, though.”

She can feel him side-eyeing her. “Oh, yeah —bipartisan support, I heard.”

“Yeah. And funded by the billionaires. Who’d have thought?”

They laugh, both of them together, and it feels…

Soft: “Are you… actually mad? Because I can stop, if that’s how you really…”

It’s something in his voice, the way it gentles not just in volume, but in tone, that makes her take a second look at him.

He’s trimmed the beard - nothing fancy, but between that and his much-improved color Christine surmises something significant has taken place. She likes it, but for that very reason refuses to trust it.

“What’s with the new look?”

He glances down. “Oh, this old thing?” He tugs at the front of his pullover. “It’s been in my closet for weeks, figured I’d try it out.”

Christine swats his shoulder, surprised to receive a ready “ouch!” in response.

He’s not usually so… expressive.

“Did something happen that I need to know about?”

He manages, ultimately, to keep her in suspense until they arrive at the sanctum.

“So,” he concludes, “I did what I can to contain him, at least until we figure a way of getting you out of here.”

Her mouth opens with a reply that dies on her tongue. Getting me out?

This new-and-improved Sorcerer Supreme wastes no time, casually reshaping the internal anatomy of the sanctum to speed things along. The stairs escalate them to the upper floor, where the carpets and floorboards extend and contract like smooth muscles, moving them hastily along to the site of Christine’s soon-to-be laboratory.

Strange waves open the space’s heavy double-door, sending a gossamer cloud of dust motes and packing particles adrift through beams of morning sunlight. Christine settles into a chair that accepts her weight silently and creates a perfect postural mold. It’s criminally comfortable.

“That device you had — the ‘index’, did you say?”

“Inter-dimensional entry-and-exit,” Christine elaborates, retrieving her breakfast from its paper bag.

He takes his attention from an O-LED display to give her the sort of admiring look she remembers getting when they’d first met in medical school, before she’d realized exactly how bad he was for her.

Her throat suddenly feels tight; she bites greedily into the bear claw.

”It’s an inspired piece of hardware,” he applauds her, and it lacks its usual, faint undertone of condescension. “I haven’t worked out the particulars just yet, but I think that there may be a way for us to combine your work with some of what I learned in Cagliostro’s library to —“

“Can we talk?”

It’s as much a surprise to her as it appears to be to him, based on his dazed blinking and subtle head-shake. Her stomach knots. What am I doing?

If she wasn’t so intimately familiar with what it feels like to have her mind under magical influence, she would guess Strange is responsible for this abrupt request. As it stands, though, the way he’s softened around the edges seems to have reminded Christine that this is her first chance to speak to him — to anyone, for that matter — about all that’s happened. It’s not like she’s spoiled for choice in the friends department, and up to now she would never have dreamt of having a candid exchange of feelings with her captor.

A single traitorous brain cell recalls that she is, in fairness, safer 'in here' than 'out there'.

… Protector?

Whatever he is, he pulls up a chair and sits a few feet from her desk, folding his hands and leaning forward with what looks suspiciously like genuine concern.

“Anything you need,” he says, kind in a way she’s never heard, and even his eyes look different. Where 838 and most other Strange variants’ are a cold, critical blue-grey, this particular Strange has eyes like a sky full of summer rain, bright and warm and heavy with the promise of something spectacular.

Christine pushes away the food that suddenly seems like the last thing on her mind, instead reaching for and holding her coffee like it’ll guide her through whatever she’s about to say. She starts and stops a number of times, but never once does the merest hint of impatience or frustration appear on Strange’s face. If anything, her struggling to find her words seems to be intensifying the depth of his concern.

She starts slowly, “I just… I don’t know how I can… how I’m supposed to feel about this. Any of this,” she adds with a clarifying gesture to the room at large. “I mean, I’m still not really sure I believe you’re actually going to try and help me.”

Strange frowns. “Didn’t I tell you I would?”

Christine feels her budding smile turn sour. “Technically, that was the other guy.”

His eyes fall from her, fixing themselves somewhere in the middle distance near the corner of her work station.

“I know I agreed to give you guys a shot, but it’s…” She trails off into a sigh, the weight of it bowing her shoulders. 

“I think I get it.”

Christine has never had whiplash, before, but feels certain she gets pretty close when surprise dictates she immediately return this man to her line of sight. “You do?” 

“Well,” he pedals back, lifting his hands —somehow completely absent their usual web of scars, “to some extent. Obviously, I can’t know exactly how you’re feeling, but my sense of empathy is intact.”

This, for some reason, strikes Christine as absolutely hilarious. She doubles over in her chair, rocked by laughter.

His voice deepens. ”What’s so funny?”

Christine wipes the tears from her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she wheezes, “it’s just…” The laughter subsides with a stray chuckle, and while Strange does appear to be genuinely confused, the edges of his fragile ego aren’t poking through. There’s just more of that concerned, expectant curiosity.

She shrugs. “That’s just not something most other Strange variants can say. Empathy isn’t really their strong suit.”

Whether this is truly new information for him, Christine cannot say. She watches sharp eyebrows come together in a frown, and in the lines of his face Christine thinks she can make out something like regret.

”I can’t promise you I’m any better than them,” Strange says frankly, “but I’m prepared to try.”

They regard each other in silence for what feels like a short eternity before Strange is up and flitting around the lab, asking questions, inspecting equipment — sharing what he knows. They talk, and joke, and eat lunch together — but he is always in the corner of Christine’s eye, always subject to her scrutiny.

Because, as much as this Stephen — they agree to refer to him by his first name, while the sulking variant remains ‘Strange’ — as much as he seems different, feels different from any of his variants she’s ever met, Christine knows better than to take any Strange at his word.

Chapter Text

The honey-glow of a coastal sunset shines through the lab’s windows, dripping warm on Christine’s skin and her equipment, coating every surface.

As workplaces go, hers truly enjoys a prime piece of real estate: smack-dab in the middle of the city with views like this one courtesy of the gateways from the sanctum’s rotunda.

For tonight, she has Belize.

It was decent of Stephen, she supposes, to put her up so comfortably. He could have tried to arrange for her to live and work in the sanctum from the start, denied her her space. Instead, she’d walked right back into her own apartment: a floor plan just the right size to accommodate her and perhaps a cat or two. She hadn’t had the chance to adopt one before taking up the worst hobby in the multiverse, and thinks that that, at least, was for the best.

What bothers her most is how normal this all feels — as if their lives are perfectly ordinary, as if Stephen didn't create a planet inside a pocket dimension for the express purpose of getting her comfortable with the inherently flawed and grossly problematic circumstances under which he is attempting to woo her. 

Despite it all, she finds herself grateful. He makes her feel safe. 

Because that makes perfect sense, her inner voice harps. Were it not for the matrix of wards and frequent self-checks, she would think Stephen had given up on trying to be subtle in his attempts to meddle with her mind. As it stands, any time she feels like smiling at him, or when she thinks of him fondly, she immediately attempts to combat it with a less charitable observation or two. If she can call one readily to mind, she reasons, chances are he isn’t in there.

She's a little disappointed that, in spite of everything, it’s only taken him a handful of months to get himself into her good graces. She wishes she could muster the energy to be mad about it, about not making him work harder for it, until she once again considers the futility of such an exercise.

Christine’s mouth settles into a grim line. There are things she can control, and things she cannot. She cannot control the complexity of the problem they are trying to solve: nothing less than the fate of the multiverse. She cannot control that experiments take time to develop and to carry out.

She cannot control that she needs to eat, or that eating with company is sometimes preferable to eating alone.

Likewise, she cannot control that Stephen has chosen to live as a well-connected foodie whose guiding principles seem to be “variety is the spice of life” and “if you’re going to eat, eat only what you love”. He invites her to lunches, because dinners would feel too much like a date, and talks with such earnest enthusiasm that Christine can’t help but resent him for how much she's enjoying herself.

“Did you always love food this much, or was it something that happened over time?”

He sets down his fork and thanks their waitstaff for clearing their plates. Christine can’t help but feel dumbfounded: who is this guy? Why is he so different from his variants?

“Actually,” Stephen says, taking up his glass of wine, “it was the Christine Palmer of my universe who got me interested.”

After a moment of thought, Christine asks, “What was she like?”

He doesn’t seem surprised, but his smile is sad and the circles under his eyes are tense. “She was incredible. The most amazing woman I’ve ever known.” He glances up with a smirk Christine wants to call “rakish,” but won’t.  “Present company excluded,” he adds.

“You don’t have to do that,” she assures him, picking at the syrupy remains of a poached pear.

He says, ”I know,” and that’s the last word on the subject until after he’s walked her home, when the afternoon is just shy of becoming dusk.

“I meant what I said, Stephen. I don’t want you to feel like you have to diminish the role she played in your life. It’s not like I’m going to be jealous or anything.”

Stephen dares to laugh, narrowing his eyes. “I don’t know, that didn’t sound very convincing.”

Christine unlocks her door with a reluctant grin. “Uh-huh. See you at work?”

”See you tomorrow,” he agrees with an easy smile. "Goodnight, Christine."

From her street-facing window Christine watches him emerge onto the sidewalk: tailored jacket over a graphic t-shirt and a pair of expensive jeans, he’s as cookie-cutter “wealthy New Yorker” as they come. He looks both ways before j-walking across the street.

He’s a gentleman: smart, funny, kind — kinder than any Stephen Strange Christine has ever met. He’s always on time, cordial when they disagree, and despite her expectations he’s given no outward sign that he’s waiting impatiently for the day she agrees to take him to bed.

And yet…

The farther away he gets, the more his façade slips, and maybe it’s just in her imagination, but Christine cannot help but see in the roll of his shoulders and his long, languid strides, something she can’t quite put her finger on until he turns to look at a mural a few blocks down. His eyes are cold, ruthless.

Yeah, Christine decides with a shiver. There’s something about him that’s almost wild. Predatory.

Animal.

*

To Christine’s consistent amusement, the Stranges of the multiverse repeatedly fail to consider that she might know something about the mystic arts, herself, after all this time. It’s a simple matter to post rudimentary protective wards over top of the real ones — the ones Stephen can’t see. If he could, he would be grilling her on her ability to lay Vishanti sigils — within “his” sanctum, no less — without him noticing.

She gets glimpses into his thoughts now and again, when his energy and attention are spread thin. She seldom lingers there, because doing so would be the very same kind of violation she herself dreads.

… However.

The things she learns within those snippets of time are enlightening, to say the least. For one thing, it’s loud; others might be able to keep several trains of thought running at a time, but Stephen’s brain is like Grand Central Station.

For another, there’s the mirror, and the variant inside it.

It is his voice, nasal and menacing, that she hears first. “How long do you plan to keep me in here like this?”

Stephen’s voice is acerbic in a way Christine has never heard. “How long did you plan on keeping me here like this?”

The variant’s counterfeit laughter somehow makes her skin crawl, despite her being momentarily incorporeal. “Still,” he hisses, “you know you can’t keep going like you have been. I see your control slipping. I see how badly all your friends want out.” He cocks his head to one side. “I certainly hope none of them hurt our dear Christine because you were too weak to keep them in check.”

Slipping away before either has a chance to notice her, Christine returns to her body, releasing the light from her sigils into the air. Hours later, she finds herself tumbling down a new, terrifying rabbit hole:

Guntram the Six-Eyed Raven, herald of war and disaster;

Shou-Lao the Undying, an (almost) immortal dragon that guarded the power of the Iron Fist;

The Ram of Amun-Ra, contender for the title of Creator of the Universe, god of the sun and air, guardian of pharaohs;

Camazotz, Mayan god of night, death, and ritual sacrifice;

Shuma-Goroth, the many-tentacled, monocular horror.

These and hundreds more make up the sordid host of creatures Stephen has absorbed, any one of which would qualify as an alpha-level planetary catastrophe.  Christine knew he was dangerous, but this..?

She shakes her head, swiftly tidying away the books and scrolls she's been referencing. Stephen is powerful enough to not only have consumed those things, but to subjugate their will to his own. 

Well, she thinks, and it’s this that gives her pause: if Strange is right, maybe Stephen isn’t handling his power as well as he appears to be.

Christine gathers her bag and makes for the sanctum's door. There's a bottle of wine in her fridge that's calling her name.

*

Stephen wakes in the dead of night to a curious sensation, almost like his teeth are itching. He wanders into the kitchen with a mean craving for carrots and destroys an entire bag of them before he realizes he’s not eating them for their flavor, but for the way they snap between his teeth. 

*

He hears Christine approaching the study one afternoon, and is seized upon by a sudden urge to hide. He acts upon it before it occurs to him to consider why the hell he should.

She calls out for him, and he feels his ears angle up and back, like they’ve been pricked to the tune of a snapping twig. His shoulders rise, muscles coiling as he lies in wait. He's transfixed by the long, lovely line of her neck and throat, the rise and fall of her chest. Healthy. Strong.

I wonder how fast she can run…

"Are you in here?" she calls.

His nostrils flare and he gets her scent: skin and soap and a thread of anxiety. Could he fit his teeth around her throat, if he tried?

"Stephen, what are you doing behind this door?"

“Erm,” he mumbles, shaking his head. Definitely not stalking you like a goddamn tiger. "I'm... rusty. Rusty hinge, I mean. The hinge is rusty and I’m going to fix it.”

Christine’s eyes go hard — appraising, clinical. “Are you okay?”

Stephen swallows thickly, unable to ignore the way her carotid throbs beneath her skin.

“Yeah, yes — yes, I’m fine,” he stammers, pushing down a growing wave of nausea. "I just need to lie down, I think."

*

Christine has a problem.

For several weeks after Christine first came to live in her old-new apartment, she had no problem resisting the urge masturbate. Voyeurism was a foregone conclusion as far as she was concerned; she'd thought of it as a refusal to give Strange what he wanted.

But she’s frustrated, tired, and painfully, desperately oversexed: heat pulses at the apex of her thighs when she gets an abdominal cramp that beautifully, horribly mimicks the first throb of an orgasm. A harrowing stumble out of bed leads to a visit to the en-suite that results in her thinking the words, I look like a fucking crime scene.

The worst part is, she knows precisely why.

Multiversal travel can do a lot of weird things to a person, but it’s simple human biology that screws her over, this time.

Christine had been alerted by her INDEX to the fact that her IUD needed to be replaced. It wasn't hard to find someone to do it, but before they'd gotten through the doctor-patient rigamarole, blaring sirens and flashing lights (which Christine now realizes may have been her fault) meant that they hadn't been able to replace the old device with a new one. She sees the label when she closes her eyes: side effects of discontinuation can include: cramping, nausea, fatigue, excessive bleeding, increased or decreased libido, mood swings...

Another twist of pain sees her doubled over, naked, on the toilet seat. Truly, there could not have been a worse time for the Stephen Strange shit-show to roll into town.

She’s just glad he’s been content to leave her to her own devices, lately.

*

Stephen wipes the sweat from his brow, rests his head on his forearms. A vicious craving for cantaloupe and honeydew has left his belly swollen, distended, and he loses concentration long enough for his jaw to unhinge like it's been trying to do all day. He swallows down another melon, rind and all, and worries for a moment that it's gotten caught in his throat. Luckily, the valves and muscles morph to accommodate, restoring his ability to breathe. He's left to assume that his stomach has extended to nearly the entire length of the seven-foot, scaly tail he woke up with instead of his legs; there's no other explanation for his having put away an entire case of fruit in six hours.

At least he has a better understanding of what’s happening, now. 

Strange’s comment about his “friends” disturbed Stephen more than he liked to admit, especially considering that he wasn’t wrong: every god, monster, and mystic being Stephen has ever consumed longs to be free.

When his universe collapsed, the pressure under which Stephen’s body was placed resulted in the partial sublimation of the beings whose power he’s taken. Spiritually, magically, they truly are monstrous: an amalgam of eyes, muscle and sinew, scales and feathers, venom and fangs and ichorous bile.

Their nearest means of achieving freedom is through expression. It’s as if the parts of his DNA that code for eye color expressed themselves based upon whichever of the competing genes is strongest in the moment — only, instead of eye or hair color, these “genes” code for leathery wings, forked tongues, and alien appetites.

So, he surmises: these competing instincts aren’t necessarily sexual in nature — they’re usually more along the lines of ‘hunt’, ‘kill’, ‘eat’ — but fear, excitement, and arousal are all closely linked within the psyche of the human animal.

Which is why Christine's menstrual cycle is such a problem for him.

*

It takes scarcely any time for Christine’s fantasies to default to ones of Stephen. She's naturally suspicious, but none of her wards so much as hum, and she suspects that his ego wouldn't let him prime the pump with images of other lovers that came before and after him.

This is to say nothing of the fact that she hasn’t laid eyes on the man in days — which may have played a role in her decision to do this, now. As silent as the sanctum has been, she feels confident that he’s stepped out on some macabre errand or other.

It’s quite easy for Christine to explain this away as a means of potentially reducing the amount of pain she’s in. Orgasms are some of the best analgesics, after all — and, really, does it matter what she thinks about if the job gets done?

Her fingernails bite into the inside of her thigh, and she imagines they're his, instead: long fingers spreading her wide. She closes her eyes and hears him whisper all the things he loves about her, how wild she drives him, how good she feels. She imagines the nip of his teeth, his hand on her throat, just gently pressing, and she lets herself imagine the kind of sex they'll never be able to have.

Christine likes a partner she trusts enough to enjoy hearing them call her a pretty cockslut while using her mouth, knowing that it all serves no purpose other than to fan the flame of her desire. She wants her partner to lay out in graphic detail how they're planning on thoroughly fucking her without feeling more humiliated and used than she wants to.

But that kind of relationship can’t stand on a foundation of eggshells and thin ice. Having rough sex isn’t complicated, but kinks that involve power and dominance, obedience and submission, even the odd bondage date and light impact play — can’t flourish in a setting where the balance of power is so fundamentally out of whack as it is, here.

Turning onto her stomach, she bears down on the fingers inside of her and presses the heel of her palm against her clit. Her brain quietly insists upon a backstory for this imagined encounter, one that somehow makes them having sex okay — a reconciliation, some kind of catharsis —

She smirks. An alternate universe.

Turning her focus to her meta-magical dream version of Stephen, she shudders to think of him rasping in her ear, "You want it?"

"Yes," she sobs, face streaked with tears.

“Ooh, sweet thing,” he teases, smearing wetness across her cheek, “you're just a mess, aren’t you? A big, slutty mess."

"Stephen, please," she whimpers, pulling at the soft rope holding her hands above her head . "I need it."

"You ‘need’ it?" he softly wonders, dragging his hot, swollen head through her dripping heat. "Yeah, you're pretty wet."

As if to prove it, he grips himself by the base and slaps his length against her swollen lips. It's lewd and humiliating and he's so big and so hard that it imparts a not-insignificant sting. "Stephen, no," she whines, clenching her thighs, trying to twist away.

He moves her back into place, reopens her legs.

"You know how to tell me 'no'," he snarls, "and that's not it."

With a meaningful look and eye contact that lasts just a few extra seconds, Stephen drives himself into her, nearly folding her in half as she cries out, all at once beautifully, perfectly full.

*

Stephen is up at odd hours of the night, and it's only after a week of restless self-distraction that he realizes he's been reading in total darkness. His senses of smell and hearing are sharper, and he hears her at night, on the days she sleeps in the lab, in the sanctum, when she’s —

He shakes his head, closes his eyes, and prepares to meditate, starting with a big, deep breath that floods his head with the scent of her: blood, arousal, sweat. He hears the sweet, soft sounds that accompany it, the way she can’t help but murmur his name, sighing ooh, yes, yes —

He is hungry, tired, irritable, and something he can’t let himself name, because if he names it, he’ll know what to do about it, and he promised Christine, he promised he wouldn’t touch her —

But she hasn’t stopped, so neither can he.

This is hell, he thinks mildly, taking his sore, abused cock in hand. This is what hell must be like.

Stephen comes dry, the tenth time he’s jerked off today. He’s not sure how much longer he can keep this up.

*

"Fuck yes," the dream of Stephen groans, taking an appreciative handful of her ass, pushing deeper, "I love this pussy, so hot and wet and tight."

Christine bites her lip, and while she is presently incapable of forming anything more coherent than a feeble, shuddering cry, she imagines it would get her point across.

*

He shouldn’t.

*

"Yeah," her fantasy says, doubling down, "fuck, Christine, you're so good, you know that? Taste like a dream, fuck like a dream —"

Christine comes shockingly quickly and with a cry that she muffles into her pillow. She doesn't try to stop her hips from their mindless fucking down onto her hand, imagining briefly that she has simply fast-forwarded to the point where she comes and the scene fades to black.

Her hips slowly return to stillness, and she releases the breath she was holding. She lingers deliberately in the moments that follow: the sweetness of sated arousal, the ache at last relenting.

*

He knows he shouldn’t.

*

Far too soon, a moan shatters her dreamy silence as she is assailed once more by twisting, wrenching pain. She curls around her middle as if to protect it from what’s happening inside. She bites into her lip, but it fails to keep a pathetic, sniveling noise from escaping through her teeth.

*

He does it anyway.

"Come on, Strange," he steels himself quietly. "C'mon, you're here, she's there, all you have to do is..."

*

There is a knock at Christine's door.

Pain and anger sharpen her tongue. “I’m not in the mood, Stephen.”

Silence, then: “Can I come in?”

Bitter tears begin to prick at her eyes. Why can’t he just leave her the fuck alone?

”I know you’re suffering,” he says from the other side of the door. “I don’t have an ulterior motive for this, Christine. I just want to help.”

She waits, puts up a token resistance, but soon yields him entry after briefly washing her hands. If he has anything to say about the mess of pills on the side table or the box of tissues tangled in the duvet, he keeps it to himself.

Tugging the quilt up around her shoulders like a soft cocoon, she grumbles, “It’s just a bad period.”

Stephen is... softer, than the other variant, more mindful. He gives her more space. She grudgingly appreciates this as he sits a few feet away, in the chair in front of the window. He looks awful, she finds herself thinking, ashen-faced and hollow-cheeked even as his eyes shine keenly.

“I’m thinking electrolytes, caffeine, and muscle relaxers,” he says. “Is there anything else I can do? Something else that helps?”

The human mind, Christine observes, is truly a remarkable thing.

It can also be an absolute fucking nightmare.

Take Christine’s mind, for example: her first thought in response to Stephen’s query is of a donut shop — her most reliable mood-booster in times such as these. It specialized in unexpected and outlandish flavors, but they made a crème brûlée donut Christine loved so much, it was the only thing she ever got.

She doesn’t know why it’s that that does it, but her eyes instantly flood with tears. Unsure of what else to do, she gathers her legs up to her chest and tries to hide her face in her knees.

A soft, heartbroken, “Oh, Christine,” makes it to her ear despite her volume. “I’m so sorry.”

A brief pseudo-silence follows as Christine fights to get herself under control. She hears a scuff, the pillowed scrape of wood against the grain of the carpet. Stephen’s voice sounds closer than before.

”Magic, medicine, or both?”

Christine is about to tell him where he can shove his magic, but a fresh wave of wrenching pain pulls a wail out of her, instead.

”I don’t care,” she finds herself crying, “just make it stop, Stephen, please.”

Something changes: a charge in the air that wasn’t there a moment ago travels across her skin. There is an instant, perhaps a thousandth of a second, during which Christine has time to realize just what a colossal mistake she’s made.

Stephen speaks in a hypnotic baritone, with just an edge of something that might be a little menacing, if she listened more closely. If she could listen more closely.

”I thought you’d never ask.”

*

Just make it stop, Stephen, please.

For the first time since this began, Stephen feels all elements of himself align.

A prayer has been uttered, a wish made: such things are as good as doors thrown wide, and every light and shadow inside of him unites behind a common handful of goals: protect, nest, care.

The magic flows from him effortlessly: calming and analgesic, tender and curious. A thousand eager eyes take her in as she sits there, poor thing, tearful and in pain.

He reaches out, distantly aware of his own mind cautioning him against it. The warning is drowned out by voices that trill and click, some that purr and grunt and long to cage her between their limbs — his limbs, thank you — and lick the salt from her skin.

Christine sighs dreamily, sinking back down to the bed as Stephen moves, crawling over top of her. Shameless and urgent, he presses his face between her breasts and breathes her in. She’s warm, almost feverish, and his perception of her scent, her body’s readiness, is fast taking on a new dimension.

His brain is filled with a carnal chant of mine, mine, mine, as he takes in the sight of her, exactly as his counterpart once described: weak and wanting, soothed and pliant, theirs for the taking.

His mouth starts to water, and his body begins to change.

*

The lingering salt stings her cheeks, but that's all the discomfort she feels.

The pain is gone.

How is the pain gone?

The answer, of course, is "magic" — but after all this time, it's not an answer Christine is prepared to accept at face-value. But it's such a relief, a rush of contentment, of ease and quiet, that her incredulity dissolves like fragrant smoke.

Without thinking, she raises her arms and wraps them loosely around Stephen's neck.

An answering rumble starts in his chest and ends in his throat, before it has a chance to touch his tongue. Though her eyes remain closed, basking in the warm release of easing pain, Christine feels the vibrations through the wall of his chest.

She feels them quite acutely, in fact, because Christine hasn't worn a bra all week; breasts tender and swollen, she's wearing nothing but a dark, soft shirt that stops just above her knee.

So, when Stephen's chest rumbles like that, like a thunderstorm with something to prove, the first place to feel it are her hyper-sensitive nipples.

She does not act quickly enough to suppress the pitiful sound she makes in response and wonders if it's possible to die of embarrassment. Bracing for it, she forces herself to look at Stephen’s face.

"Holy shit," she whispers.

Two wide, glossy blue eyes stare down at her, vertical pupils wide and dilated. He is breathing through an open mouth Christine is reasonably certain holds more than thirty-two human teeth, and speckled across his shoulders, chest, and the edge of his jaw are small patches of shining bronze-and-black scales.

With the sound of ripping fabric, he goes stiff, arms shaking by Christine's ears as he hangs his head between his shoulders, groaning in a way that leaves her unsure whether it’s in relief or pain. Christine's hands fall to his shoulders, hovering.

Softly, carefully: "Stephen?"

His head snaps up, pupils narrowing in a way that leaves her breathless. One of his arms gives out and he catches himself on its elbow, clenching his hand into a fist. Turning her head shows Christine that his fingers have dull-tipped claws that divot the flesh of his palm.

Christine isn't sure why this is... why she's responding the way she is. A new cramp takes hold, and she braces herself, guarding against a pain that never comes. Instead, she's left with a pleasantly familiar throb that happens again, and again, until it’s coming in waves and it feels like she’s going to —

"Oh, fuck," she whines, “fuck, shit, I’m so sorry, I’m —“

Christine hasn’t come this hard in a while — and certainly not on her own. She counts herself among the unfortunate number of heterosexual women who usually require penetration to achieve orgasm, and whose preference is for partnered release.

This, though?

Christine’s body is singing, and Stephen hasn’t so much as lifted a finger.

And oh, his voice does not help: there’s a low, booming undercurrent that makes him sound like his every word comes from within the chest of something primordial.

”Did you —?” His tone is one of wonder, folded smoothly into that heavy bass.

Christine’s hands fall from his shoulders, covering her eyes with a mournful sound. “Oh my god…” she laments. “I don’t… how did you do that?”

The sound of his laughter is sex itself. It doesn’t help that there is what appears to be fire in the back of his throat, she sees when peeking through her fingers. 

“I don’t know,” he purrs, “it seems like that was all you.” He turns his neck with a series of pops and cracks that seem to travel down his body, like his spine is in the process of realigning.

But that can’t be true, for two reasons.

The first reason is that such a process would invariably cause extraordinary pain, and it is definitely not pain behind the heated breath and smoldering glower with which Christine is presently growing enthralled.

The second reason is that Christine continues to hear that sequence of popping joints past the point where a human spine ordinarily stops. This would suggest that Stephen’s body is much longer, than usual.

Christine frowns. Longer?

An inch at a time, her knee cautiously climbs, looking for Stephen’s pelvis and finding… well, it is a pelvis, but there’s an entirely new group of muscles and bones attached to it. Tracing her foot along where his leg should be reveals that he does, in fact, have a gigantic, scaly, muscular tail.

Breathless and sated, warm and very nearly relaxed for the first time in over twelve hours, Christine asks him, “Are you a fucking dragon right now?”

His scales make noise when he draws back, a sort of soft clattering that is so much sexier than it has any right to be. His torso is tastelessly muscular, for a sorcerer, and she’s not sure who told him it was okay to drag his claws all over himself like that, like he’s discovering his body for the first time.

“Well,” he says, eyes hooded, tweaking his own nipple, “I would much rather be a dragon who’s fucking you, but I understand if that’s not to your taste.”

The answer must be written on her face, because he makes another of those low-pitched trills and lowers himself back down.

”I’m going to make you feel so good,” Stephen swears softly. “Can I do that for you? Will you let me?”

Things have taken on a bit of a rosy glow from where Christine is spread out beneath him. As he nuzzles into her neck, letting her feel more of his scales — smooth and warm and lovely, catching the low light of the room — she can’t help but arch into his touch, into the wide, flexible plates that cover his belly. 

“You’re beautiful,” she murmurs, reaching up to trace the scales along his jaw. “I mean, you’re always —“

She expects the insufferable grin, the one that says I knew it, but instead receives a quietly awestruck look as a flush rises in his cheeks and chest.

How much trouble is she in, she wonders, that she looks up into Stephen’s face and thinks that he’s adorable?

Chapter Text

He must have settled into the new body, because when next he moves it’s with the grace of a cobra backed up by the size and muscle of a python. It all happens quite fast, and Christine is still very much waiting out the aftershocks of her recent orgasm, so she isn’t entirely sure how Stephen goes about it — whatever the case, she now finds herself reclining in the hollow space in the middle of his massive, coiling tail. Her shirt rides up, and she has just enough presence of mind to tug its hem back down.

Now that she can take him in completely, she sees that he isn’t quite the ‘dragon’ she’d thought he was. He’s more in keeping with traditional renderings of creatures said to dwell in the Asian sub-continent: a man, mostly, from the waist up, and if it weren’t for the slit pupils and predatory glint in his eyes, the subtle re-shaping of his face to accommodate his newly-reptilian features, she wouldn’t know him as any different from the Stephen she sees every day.

Below the waist is an entirely different story. Soft horizontal plates cover his lower belly and groin, growing harder and more pronounced as they go down the length of his tail.

Massive in a way that seems improbable, Stephen’s body very nearly fills the entire room. His coils shift beneath her, smooth and sensuous, almost hypnotic. The feeling of all that muscle around her, wrapped in smooth, warm skin, the knowledge that her position is entirely helpless — He could swallow me whole, if he tried — 

She has let herself be caught off-guard. She didn’t think through her words enough before uttering a cry for help. It’s almost as ridiculous as bungling a genie’s wish.

But she’s not afraid.

She feels like she should be; anywhere else, these are fatally compromising circumstances. It’s probably just more of the magical “help” Stephen is rendering: lowering her guard, clouding her mind, getting her to relax.

She leans back on the layers of his enormous tail, and as he brings himself to her eye level his coils carry her up, holding her close. 

Stephen’s voice is rumbling and dark. “I wouldn’t be worthy of you,” he says, “if I didn’t acknowledge that this looks suspiciously like I’m taking advantage.”

Take it, one loud, desperate piece of her mind pleads. Just take it — if you take it, I don’t have to choose. I can’t choose yet.

“I mean,” she falters, mouth suddenly dry, “I wouldn’t even know where to begin, with…” She gestures vaguely at the lower half of his torso.

Stephen smiles, and it shows Christine a great many teeth and a pair of wicked-looking fangs. A low noise resonates from within his chest as he uses his tail to bring them closer.

He breathes into her ear, “I could show you, if you’d like.”

Christine is rendered momentarily non-verbal as the warm length of his tongue eagerly greets the flesh of her neck. He lingers there, gently exploring with his lips, but he stops short of holding her throat between his teeth.

Christine has never felt such a confusing mix of horror and arousal in her life.

“Stephen,” she says, attempting to smother it, “how are you doing this? What are you?”

He draws back, cradling her cheek in one hand as the other rests at the junction of her neck and shoulder. It looks like he’s shaking something off as his eyes refocus — that, or he’s trying very hard to make Christine think he is.

“I’m sorry.” The snake eyes undermine his hangdog look, but he makes a good effort. “Of course, you’re right: what the hell am I thinking? I — it was like I heard you, and then I was just… here.”

The haze in Christine’s eyes is partly lifted. “You heard me? Like, when I was — ?”

He gives a rueful grimace. “This thing’s senses are really, really good.”

Understandably mortified, Christine drops her face into her hands. “Oh my god…”

True to form, Stephen’s bedside manner is atrocious.

“It’s kind of amazing, really, when you think about it. I’ve been able to smell you on and off all day, but I think it was specifically the...” his nostrils flare in a way that appears reflexive, and he dips his chin to indicate Christine’s lower half, “added ‘variable’ that’s got me like this.”

Christine’s not sure whether the ‘variable’ is masturbation or menstruation, but quite frankly, she doesn’t care.

“Yeah,” she sighs, letting her head loll back onto the topmost coil of Stephen’s tail. There’s a subtle shift of the muscles beneath her neck that move her into what she quickly realizes is a far more comfortable position.

“I needed my IUD changed out. Couldn’t get a replacement. So, for the past few days, I’ve been a mess of blood and hormones.”

It is here in Christine’s story that her affliction becomes apparent to her, as the intermittent growling noises that Stephen doesn’t seem able to control immediately change in pitch: lighter, gentler, carried on something like a whine or whimper. 

“You’ve been hurting this whole time? Why didn’t you say something?”

His hands have returned to her face and neck, and she’s almost sure he’s going to try to kiss her. 

Terror seizes her when she realizes that she wants him to.

*

And maybe he would, if the circumstances were different: if she wasn’t so vulnerable.

(That alone is enough to goad the hunter inside of him. He can taste — actually taste — how much she wants him to take her, to sink his teeth in, to wrap her up and squeeze the air from her lungs.

She wants us, the creature insists. Your mate is here, entirely within your grasp; she is slick and fertile, her body crying out to be filled. How can you delay?)

“It’s fine,” Christine is saying, crossing her arms. Stephen pulls carefully back, making space. “This is just the way things are, for a while. It’ll be over in a few weeks.”

Stephen's voice drops into a baritone he isn’t sure he's ever been able to reach, before. “Weeks?” 

His tongue flicks out, tasting her pain, her heat, then bringing them into his mouth, into the organ on the roof of it that fills his head with the scent of her.

She is frightened, the other voice realizes. This will not do.

Stephen blinks, attempting to banish his passenger’s consciousness to the background.

You dare, sorcerer?

Christine’s eyes find his and his chest swells, heated with the fire Stephen is admittedly pretty happy the passenger is keeping tamped down.

His next words come atop a heavy, rolling purr. “You have nothing to fear from me — on this, you have my solemn vow.”

The eyes in Stephen’s head see so much more than his old ones ever did; they see the way her heart is beating, the places where Christine is warm and cold, the way her pupils dilate when his body shifts around her.

“I understand you have a complicated relationship with my host,” the passenger says in Stephen’s voice.

Alarm grips Stephen by the throat. Hey, hold on a minute —

“Please, allow me to introduce myself."

The bottom drops out of his stomach. How are you doing this!?

”I am Knossos,” he says, “attendant of Dionysus, consort to Tiamat…”

He leans down, drinks in her frightened arousal, her lovely, misshapen anxieties, and her lips part prettily when he whispers into her ear:

“God of fertility and carnal pleasure.”

*

Gods and monsters…

What does it say about her, Christine wonders, that her reaction to this is nowhere close to ‘unqualified disgust’?

She could do worse, she supposes.

“O-kay,” begins her tentative reply, “um, ‘Knossos’? Can I talk to Stephen for just one second?”

His nostrils flare, and he makes a sound somewhere between a grunt and a snort. “That villain of a sorcerer?” The forked tongue makes its reappearance, wagging rapidly in what reads to Christine as annoyance. “I promise you,” he rumbles sweetly, “a congress between just us two will prove far more fruitful.”

“And I am happy to have that conversation with you,” she assures him, mindful of the way his tail seems to squeeze her just a little more tightly. “But first, I really need to talk to him. Please?”

This seems to be enough pandering; Stephen’s face falls for a moment, blinking back to himself before he scans her nervously. “Christine?”

”You have got to be kidding me,” she groans, once more using her hands to shield her eyes from the sheer dumb bad luck that Stephen Strange drags with him everywhere he fucking goes.

“Stephen, you ate a sex god? A snake sex god? Are you out of your mind?”

”At the time,” he starts defiantly, quickly deflating with, “yeah, that’s a pretty good assessment, actually.”

”I cannot believe you...”

He bristles. ”I was doing everything I could to save the woman I loved.”

“So now I have to pay for it?”

If Stephen’s look didn’t tell her clearly enough, Christine would be the first to admit that she could have worded that better.

But it’s true, isn’t it? He made the decision to swallow up a menagerie of dangerous mystical beings in a doomed attempt to bring a different Christine back to life. She had nothing to do with that. 

Odd, then, that she feels deeply guilty.

“That’s…” Stephen begins, only for the words to die on his tongue. “You’re right,” he rasps. “I’m sorry. This isn’t fair to you.”

“Stop,” she says, settling a hand on his chest. “You didn’t… I’m not really upset. I mean, I am upset, just not…”

Christine sighs. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair of me. It was petty, and rude, and unkind.” Her eyes fall to his sternum. “I’m a little volatile, emotionally, right now, but that doesn’t give me the right to be mean for the sake of being mean, so… I’m sorry.”

*

How have you allowed her to elude your grasp this long, sorcerer?

For now, Knossos seems content to take the hindmost, resorting once again to heckling Stephen from within a corner of his mind. It’s a welcome reprieve from ‘Strange’, though, he’ll admit.

Stephen’s passenger observes: She is lovely, by your standards. She possesses a shrewd mind and a stout heart, and she clearly sees something in you that I do not.

Oh?

Something to love.

Damn, okay…

Do not misunderstand; this is no slight to you. I simply find the males of your species repugnant.

Great.

*

Christine isn’t sure where to rest her eyes, but it’s probably not where they are right now, skirting the perimeter of Stephen’s groin, noticing the way the soft plate lying over it has developed something of a bulge.

She takes a deep breath. “Okay, so…”

Stephen rubs the back of his neck. ”Yeah, I mean…”

”This isn’t a good idea, right?”

There is a meaningful millisecond of hesitation on Stephen’s part. “Right, yeah.“

”I mean, we don’t know anything about this… him,” Christine stumbles.

“Absolutely. I was going to say the same.”

”And, you know, even if we… even if it was a good idea, to do that, it’s not like we could just… There’s so much wrong with this scenario already. The power dynamics alone…” 

“Exactly. Yes.”

”Right?”

”No, yeah, definitely.”

“I mean, for all we know —“

”We know nothing about his reproductive system.”

”And I’m not wild about the idea of laying eggs with you. Sorry,” she ends on a thin chuckle.

Stephen laughs sheepishly. “Right. Bad times all around.”

They each breathe into a silent pause.

Stephen’s tongue flicks thoughtfully. “But…”

Christine says it way too fast: “But, what?

“Well… I don’t think I can change back until Knossos is… placated.”

He receives an unimpressed look for his trouble. “I’m dying to know how you want to go about placating a sex god.”

*

Take. Her. Knossos snarls. 

“About the way you might expect,” Stephen says drily. “I can draw wards for you, lock myself in the study until it passes and I’m myself again.”

He tries to discern what she’s thinking and feeling, and to his great surprise he learns that the race of creatures to which Knossos belongs have a latent emotional-sensory organ. There are genuine logical concerns for Christine, here, but something else, too. Something she is trying to hide.

Stephen cocks a brow. “Do you have any other suggestions?”

*

Christine is much less concerned about her own well-being than she should be, she thinks, because the idea of having sex with her sorcerer ex-boyfriend while he is channeling a god whose entire deal is ‘sex and snakes’ does not alarm her nearly as much as it ought to.

Her true anxiety is that she’s going to come out on the other side of this dreamy painkiller magic and be horrified, or disgusted, or heartbroken, or ashamed — anything that would ruin the memory.

That’s the real problem, she thinks, eyes catching on all of the places she wants to touch but won’t. It’s the same problem she’s had all along: there is no way she can do this without wondering if it’s coerced. 

Because manipulation doesn’t have to be blatant, overt influence on thoughts and feelings. It can be a smell, a word, a tone of voice. It can be déjà vu, or the way light filters through a window — all subliminally lowering one’s guard.

(“Just take it — if you take it, I don’t have to choose. I can’t choose yet.”)

It felt like her — feels like her, but…

This, she realizes, is why she puts up such a fight. This is why she drives herself crazy, critically inspecting every thought, every whisper, every desire she has.

And she is so fucking tired of it.

“Fuck,” she groans, “I — okay, look: you’ve clearly got some stuff, going on. And we both seem to know that I’ve got some stuff going on.”

What are you doing? demands her voice of reason. 

She swallows with effort, eyeing the trail of bronze and black diamonds scattered across his shoulders. “So, if… y’know. Maybe we can…”

Stephen narrows his eyes, causing their pupils to widen. ”Maybe our ‘stuff’ will sort out the ‘stuff’ the other one can’t sort out on their own?” he guesses, tasting the air.

Christine nods, at last allowing her hands to settle on Stephen’s shoulders. “Yeah, something like that.”

Are you fucking kidding me?! shrieks the last bastion of Christine’s good sense. You’re really going to let him into your pants. After everything. While he’s a monster inside and out?

It is here, while Stephen regards her with impossible eyes and his scales softly undulate where she touches them, like he’s shivering — it is here in Christine’s story that her old affliction once again becomes apparent to her.

Because her heart revolts not against the cold, reptilian eyes, not the scales, or the tongue, or the fact that he has been violating her cardinal directive of ‘no touching’ for the past five minutes.

No: Christine’s heart chides her mind for calling him a monster.

*

Fertility goes both ways, sorcerer. She will bear no offspring.

“He says he can take care of the pregnancy thing,” Stephen says distantly, struggling to focus through the fog that seems to be rolling into his brain.

Christine runs her hand along the black diamonds that dapple his spine; Stephen feels his scales rippling beneath her fingers. It feels like a full-body shudder, and within his abdomen there begins to build a mounting, pleasurable tension.

*

Christine is once more endeared by the amalgam that is Stephen when that deep, booming voice asks her timidly, “You really want this?” 

Her fingers dance along his shoulders. “I do — I promise you now, and I will promise you again afterward: I do, I want this.”

The low trill of distress he releases in response just about fries whatever is left of Christine’s brain.

“What if…” Stephen’s eyes flit anxiously. “Okay, what if its semen is molten lava, or something? Or, like, it inflates while it’s inside of you?”

“You’re insane if you think any of what you just said makes me want this less.”

He looks at her like she’s driving a knife into his ribs. “Fuck, fuck… no, I can’t, Christine, I can’t.” He grips her by the arms. “I could hurt you, or worse. How could I live with myself?”

She takes his face between her palms. “Stephen. You’re a god. If something really bad does happen to me… make it ‘un-happen’.”

This silence feels markedly different from the ones that came before. This one is full of the things each of them might do or say, full of breathless anticipation.

Stephen’s pupils snap thin. “Did you really just tell me,” he growls, “to fuck you, to death? Is that what you just said?”

He doesn’t leave her long enough to answer; there’s hardly a hair’s breadth of time between his utterance and Christine’s back slamming against the wall, cushioned by Stephen’s tail to keep her head from knocking.

“Because I can absolutely work with that,” he snarls, finally bending to take her mouth in a heated kiss.

Chapter Text

They don’t take things quite that far, today, though Christine wonders how close they make it before she taps out.

She’s never been good at counting orgasms — it takes her out of the moment, which defeats the purpose of the entire act as far as she’s concerned. So, when Stephen rests his chin on her shoulder, chest pressed to her back as his arms wrap around her waist, murmuring against her skin, “That’s fifteen, now, sweetheart. Holding up okay?”

Well. She’s just glad she doesn’t have to count.

He nestles her in an assemblage of blankets, cushions and soft furniture between sessions of raucous, mind-blowing sex; he hurries to her side with water and food, cleans her up, cooing at her all the while; and when she permits herself to cuddle up with him he begins to purr like a jungle cat.

It’s as bizarre as it is comforting. 

“You smell incredible,” he sighs, nuzzling into her neck. Their most recent exhausted flop sees her sitting in what amounts to his lap; the weighted length of his tail ensures she doesn’t tip over, coiled lazily around them.

She laughs breathlessly, reaching back to offer a half-hearted swat and a “cut it out,” before sinking back against him.

A warm, satisfied hum emits from Stephen’s chest. “Ticklish, are we?” His hands diverge at her waist, one reaching down, the other rising to take a generous handful of her breast. “You’re not ‘ticklish’ anywhere else, are you?”

”Stephen,” Christine protests, “I can’t; it’s starting to hurt.”

Stephen’s southbound hand moves past her clitoris and lips, doesn’t try to fit its fingers inside of her — all it does is widen its grip, cupping her from perineum to mound.

It’s an odd feeling at first, but as the seconds tick by Christine realizes that it’s giving her an odd sense of security, like he’s saying “I’ve got you” with a touch. She turns to look at Stephen only to find that he is taking her in with heavy-lidded eyes full of naked lust and hopeless adoration. She tries to think of something to say, but kisses him, instead, moving her hand to the back of his neck so she can pull him into something slow and sweet.

It is soon made filthy by way of Stephen’s possessive growling, deep and rhythmic as he presses his tongue into her mouth. She savors the taste of the moan he plants there right before a burst of healing magic erupts from the palm he has pressed to her core.

”There,” he says with a contented growl. “Any pain, now?”

Instead of answering, Christine rises to her knees, straddles Stephen’s hips, and indulges in the feeling of his skin and scales as she runs her hands up his chest. At this point it doesn’t matter to her if it’s magically-induced or just hormonal: Christine needs this dick like she needs air, right now, and the sweet ache only grows sweeter as her muscles shudder wantonly around nothing. She is breathless, already clenching with refreshed need — because the only things stopping her from chasing her bliss all night are chafing and fatigue, and with one of those barriers magically removed, she is free to enjoy this for as long as her legs hold out.

Smirking in a way she is certain he knows is obnoxious, Stephen leans back on a low sofa, elbows resting behind; if he had legs, they would be spread.

Instead, a glistening slit appears from the belly-plate over his groin, its edges rosy with the proof of their coupling: blood and abused flesh, the slightest bit of swelling.

”And this isn’t weird or gross, to you?” she asks again.

Stephen’s tongue emerges slowly, unhurried, wagging only briefly before retreating back into his mouth. He splays a hand on her lower back, pressing her down onto him until their openings align.

“Christine,” Stephen hisses dreamily, tangling his fingers into her hair whilst encouraging her hips to rock, “this is — you are — the single most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. This could never be anything but perfect.”

He spends a long moment drinking in the sight of her before adding, “Plus, having Knossos around takes the menstruation thing to a whole new level.”

An inquisitive brow rises to a peak. “How so?”

*

Life, Knossos tells him, is precious; the same is true of creating life, for it is only by the grace of those we love that we create new life, at all. Even if our intention is not to sire children, the act of sexual communion still holds great significance. Honor your partner with your love, your presence in this moment, and the potential contained within you both that cannot be unlocked alone. 

*

Stephen scoffs. “He has a breeding kink.”

(Your kind are truly innovative when it comes to reducing complex truths to vulgarity, sorcerer.)

Christine dips her chin, watching him with stern incredulity. “As long as we all understand…”

“One hundred percent. Not for real, just for fun.”

*

Christine doesn’t have to wait long before things take a turn.

“What if I kept you like this, hm? Fucked you full all day long? Never let you out of bed, just you, me, and your gorgeous cunt?”

He stands to one side of the bed he’s conjured for this express purpose: to lay Christine on her side with one leg raised so that Stephen can hold her up, spread-eagled, hugging her thigh to his abs.

“You know what this is?” The pad of his thumb teases at her entrance, where she’s stretched tight around him; it’s enough of a shock to put a startled noise in her mouth. “Know why this makes me wild for you?” He brings his thumb to his mouth, gives Christine plenty of time to see how red it is before pressing it to his tongue.

He leans in close — close enough to stir the wisps of hair that hang around Christine’s face, close enough that he tests the limits of her flexibility. Close enough to smell her blood on his breath.

”You’re in heat.”

Christine’s brain is, admittedly, a little mushy, which perhaps accounts for the paltry objection she makes and the way she instantly abandons it.

”Yeah,” Stephen growls, snapping his hips. “Your body’s trying to let everyone know this pretty kitty wants to play.”

His pace slows, but this is small relief; he compensates by punctuating his words with sharp, powerful thrusts right as his curiously layered voice goes from ‘hungry’ to ‘murderous’ in no time flat.

”But they can’t have you,” he snarls. “You’re all mine.” He releases her leg, guiding it down before turning Christine onto her back and moving into the space between her legs, holding her wrists above her head. “I’m going to ruin you, ruin this perfect pussy — keep you too full to move, too full to think about anything other than how badly you want me to breed you. Fill up that sweet little belly of yours…”

As she lies here, writhing and wet, the sound of their flesh colliding in her ears and nothing but the hum of pleasure in her body, Christine can admit she’s glad to have changed her view on the proclivities of Stephen’s guest.

*

Stephen is extraordinarily glad that this form still allows him access to simple healing spells. If it didn’t, they may actually have ended up much closer to the ‘worse’ end of the ‘hurt you, or worse’ spectrum. 

This level of libidinous zeal usually manifests among individuals of a species because there is intense competition for resources and reproductive partners; Knossos does not confirm this for Stephen directly, but the single-minded ardor with which his facet of Stephen’s spirit is applying itself to the tender annihilation of Christine’s body tells him he’s right.

It is only with serious effort that Stephen swallows down the claiming bite he wants to put on the swell of her breast, instead panting into her mouth, “Can I touch your neck?”

Christine bites her bottom lip in what looks like an attempt to stifle the little moan she makes in reply.

Needing no further direction, Stephen leaves one hand to restrain both of Christine’s and moves the other to her neck, slowly wrapping long fingers around her throat.

*

All voices of reason and good sense have long since fled Christine’s brain.

”You know what I love about you?” Stephen says, somehow both deliberately goading and heartbreakingly sincere. “You tell me so much without saying a single word.”

Christine wants to touch him, to run her fingers through his hair and hold him close, but Stephen’s grip is firm, uncompromising.

”Right now,” he murmurs, lapping lazily at her breast, “you’re telling me, ‘I trust you’.”

A helpless noise escapes between Christine’s teeth as Stephen latches onto her nipple. “I couldn’t very well do this and not trust you, could I?”

If he doesn’t stop laughing like that — deep and rumbling and unconscionably hot — Christine is a goner.

”I guess I’m just wondering what it was that changed your mind about me,” he smiles, returning to kiss and nip her neck as his thumb travels the ridges of her cricoid cartilage with just enough pressure to make her body wonder.

”It wasn’t any one thing,” she sighs, arching up. Stephen responds by tightening his grip, obstructing her airway. 

He cocks his head, looking down at her. ”You don’t want to tell me?”

When Christine relaxes, Stephen does, too. “Why do you assume that?” she whispers hoarsely.

Stephen plants a kiss in the cradle of her collarbones before speaking into the scant space between their lips. “Because I really, really want to hear about it, and you haven’t told me, yet.”

Christine’s laugh is reedy and thin, almost a wheeze. “I’ve been a little preoccupied.”

“Have you?”

The hand he’s got on her neck tightens gradually, as does his grip on Christine’s wrists, and there’s a curious, cool edge to it when he says, “Then allow me to help focus your attention.”

It is instantaneous and explosive, the pain in Christine’s shoulder when Stephen’s mouth gapes wide and he sinks his fangs into the muscle there. Her answering shout is a twisted, strangled thing that only ends when she chokes on it. Her hands are held fast above her head — she has just enough of a shadow of awareness that he’s interlaced their fingers. She scrabbles and kicks, tries to push him away, to dig her nails into his skin, but it’s no use: he closes his tail more tightly around her as the hand around her neck moves to take a fistful of her hair, holding her in place. 

Her inner dialogue is fragmented; ‘But… wait,’ it says in a voice that sounds too young to know life hides heartbreak around every corner, ‘this was going so well. I felt so good. Why would he do this?’

Then there’s the fire, the rage, all of her survival instincts. ‘You absolute imbecile: I warned you. I warned you, and now it’s happening again.’

‘Again, Christine.’

“Stop,” is what she tries to croak, but even before the last segment of a tail made of pure muscle wraps around her throat, she’s having trouble breathing. The uncanny pressure with which her shoulder is throbbing tells her she lives in the darkest possible timeline (pocket dimension, whatever), and her worst fears are making themselves at home, because Stephen’s fangs are pumping her full of what she’s pretty certain must be venom.

*

Stephen is fast growing weary of this inconsistent bodily autonomy.

Knossos, he seethes, what the hell do you think you’re doing?

That he receives no reply to this is more alarming than anything else. Knossos?

Icy terror seizes his heart when a cruel, rasping voice replies, Sorry, Stephen. It’s my turn.

Chapter Text

The swap takes about as long as reaching out and grabbing someone by the throat, and it is with dread and dismay that Stephen recognizes this feeling of inversion, a kind of magical vertigo. At the edge of his awareness comes the sound of Strange’s voice, gift-wrapped in an audibly smug, self-congratulating smile.

Hello, old friend.  Miss me, after all?

Stephen tries to open his mouth to speak, but remembers in the middle of the attempt that he’s not in control of his body, anymore.

Did you really think I wouldn’t find a way out? You don’t honestly believe you’re smarter than me, do you?

Annoyance briefly colors Stephen’s alarm when he remembers something Christine said, once, about how all Stranges really are the same: it’s always a pissing contest. None of them can ever stand to play second fiddle, and they always want to be the one holding the knife — which may explain why Strange variants don’t ordinarily survive each other’s company for very long.

You’re addressing me as ‘Sin,’ from now on, by the way. That’s what sweet Christine calls me, in her mind — short for ‘sinister’, can you imagine?

His reedy, sneering laugh floods Stephen’s awareness, but he can’t see anything; wherever he’s going, his other senses haven’t caught on. 

I wonder if that signifies something: that I’ve got a pet name, and you’re still just ‘Stephen’.

The variant’s sardonic chuckle is the last thing Stephen hears before he understands the shift in his embodiment: it feels like he’s being pushed out of his own mind.

Or, rather, trapped inside of it. Again.

He reaches out: Knossos? 

Dead, heavy silence, then: Here, sorcerer.

The thrum of Stephen’s panic recedes. Not solitary confinement, at least.

What’s that stuff going to do to her? 

I cannot say for certain. Your kind and mine share many things in common, but in this area we are most dissimilar.

Stephen drags his incorporeal hands down his equally incorporeal face. What does it do, when used as directed?

Within the prison housed in the grander whole of Stephen’s mind, their spirits wander while they talk.

Generally, Knossos rumbles, it is used to pacify a reactive sexual partner, should they become violent.

Stephen doesn’t have a stomach, exactly — he’s really just a consciousness, right now — but the part of him that most closely approximates it twists itself into a knot.

So, she’s… what? What do you mean by ‘pacify’?

Whatever it is, Stephen is reasonably certain he’s going to hate it.

It sends the shiväyt — the sexual recipient — into a sort of heat. They usually grow compliant once their blood begins to boil.

Stephen attempts to contain his horror. How do we stop it?

I do not know, Sorcerer Strange — envenomation is an intimacy not lightly undertaken. The effects can last for hours, if the bond is strong enough.

Stephen sighs, metaphorically easing his fingers through his hair. Good thing she’s been resisting our efforts to ‘bond,’ I guess.

The serpent takes a thoughtful pause, and there’s a physicality to it — like his forked tongue has revealed itself to help prepare his answer.

What? Stephen stalls out a short distance away. What is it?

Do you truly not know?

Lacking a body, Stephen is unable to take the kind of long, deep breath that might otherwise help him communicate his thoughts with patience and tact. Look, friend: it’s been a long day, so if you could dispense with the… Stephen creates the impression of waving an irritated hand… the vagaries, and just tell me? That’d be great.

The psychic strength of a thousand pounds of muscle and primal noise invades Stephen’s sphere of existence. Did I not say she saw something in you I could not? Something to love?

Stephen is so certain he can refute this point, he hardly knows where to begin. 

He recalls when Christine first came here, how unhappy she was, and how much it had pained him to know he couldn’t change that. How he toiled for weeks, carefully prying up the edges of Sin’s mirror, inch by painstaking inch until he was able to turn it back on his slimy variant — all the while, mesmerized by the merest glimpse of her.

Those glimpses were always of dark places: enraged by her circumstance, consumed by grief, made desperate and dejected by a complete lack of hope.

No matter what Christine does or does not do, at the end of the day, she cannot leave — not without bringing death and destruction everywhere she goes, and she’s much too compassionate for that.

She cannot leave, and Stephen is functionally immortal. If nothing else, she has by this point surmised, he will simply wait her out: grind down her resolve, slowly poison her mind, put her on a drip feed of oxytocin and give her sex lifted right out of her wildest dreams. There is nothing stopping him.

Even thinking it gives Stephen a twisting, writhing anxiety in the vicinity of his diaphragm, that she has been so harmed, so ill-used and poorly treated she has become convinced that, to him, she will only ever be an object: something for him to own and admire and, eventually, misplace and forget about.

How could this ever truly be her choice, with that knowledge hanging over her head? How could that ever be love?

Stephen doesn’t have to paw through her memories to know that one or more of his variants has assaulted her, or made the attempt. At least one tried to do what Sin did, when Christine asked him to put her in a prison of false affection.

It took her a very, very long time to let Stephen walk her home.

Sometimes, when she’s done with her day’s work in the lab, she silently slips out the back like a thief in the night. He knows, of course; at this point Stephen and the sanctum are like two chambers of the same heart. He knows it’s the back door because it tickles his left elbow, and he knows she’s gone because all of the life has fled the sanctum.

She eventually tells him about the variant who had watched her for weeks, who had followed her to work and gotten into her apartment, left her gifts and mementos, little proofs of his obsession everywhere she went. She changed jobs, moved out of the city, but it never mattered. He always found her.

Her nightmares are all of him — of all the Strange variants who sought to make her theirs. And the only reason Stephen knows all of this is that Sin routinely played the voyeur when Christine was alone. The rest he’s gathered through snippets of conversation and intentional, active listening, and the conclusion he has come to is this:

Stephen Strange has never brought Christine Palmer anything but pain, trauma, and regret. That’s not a mix of things love can grow from.

… And yet.

There's the way she sometimes half-smiles at his jokes, the way they chat on her route to work — and the fact that she hasn’t insisted that he stop, or leave her alone. The fact that, despite the way she talks to him (blunt and brutally honest), they’ve eaten lunch together every day for the past fortnight.

That she should speak to him at all is astonishing; for her to tell him things so intimate and raw that he questions whether physical sex was ever the height of intimacy, at all? That’s mind-boggling.

But, now that he’s thinking about it… it keeps happening.

She keeps coming to the sanctum. She keeps talking to him, telling him things. They seldom text, but she’s never surprised to find him on her way to work, or knocking at her door. In the weeks since they began their work in earnest, gathering data and resources to address the incursion problem, they’ve been spending more time together in her lab, usually in quite close proximity. A nudge here, a tap there — tiny, perfunctory touches — have slowly evolved into more familiar gestures. 

She takes comfort when he offers it. Stephen has never felt such a sense of care and accomplishment, at least not since —

Ah: the old wounds, again.

Not since the night he got into a car with the first Christine Palmer he ever met — ‘his Christine’, though that phrasing makes him cringe, now. Not since the worst night of his life, has Stephen known the sense of pride and deep, loving satisfaction he felt when Christine — the woman with him, now — allowed him to lay his hand on her shoulder when another failure saw her slouched over her workbench, silent, bitter tears dripping noisily onto the steel. Stephen promised they would keep trying, that he wouldn’t give up, but said he thought they should probably call it a night. They had gone back to her apartment, and for the very first time, Stephen was invited in.

She’d mixed them both a drink in silence before bringing him to her living room, sitting on the couch, and turning on the television.

“Don’t know if you did it on purpose,” she’d said to him gruffly, “but my favorite show got a new season. They cancelled it, back in my universe. Tonight’s the premiere.”

He’s told himself a hundred times it was only because she had no other choice, no one else who could understand. She had come in the next morning, smiled when she saw him — really smiled — and said it was nice to not have to deal with dubious looks from the friends she would normally have to tell that her ex came over, but nothing happened.

She is shiväyt-sankari, Sorcerer Strange. Whether she knows it or not, she cares deeply for you, and that may be enough.

Panic is not what Stephen thought he would feel upon hearing those words, but panic and fear are all he has room for. 

*

The fevered throbbing spreads out from Christine’s shoulder, waves of heat lapping over and against her skin like a tidal flame: relentless and inevitable. She endeavors to move her arms, with limited success; her fingers feel fuzzy and are only weakly curling while her brain desperately wills them to make a fist and pound it against the chest of the thing on top of her.

She’s released, melting into the bed as little more than a puddle of heavy limbs and labored breathing. She knows this isn’t ‘Stephen’, anymore; he’s retained the pseudo-reptilian form, but she would know the cruel light of Sin’s eyes anywhere.

In an effort to suppress her grief at finally getting the betrayal she expected from the start, Christine catalogues her symptoms: paralysis, numbness and tingling, loss of fine motor function, confusion and brain fog…

Her head is too heavy to move, but the puff of breath on her cheek and the way the mattress dips to either side tells Christine that Sin is looming over her.

“So, tell me: what was it?”

Their bodies aren’t pressed together, anymore, but Christine is acutely aware of her nudity as his eyes hungrily drink her in, a sensuous, guttural trill rising in his throat when he settles back down over her. Christine’s spine is set upon by a blinding shiver when he presses his face into her neck and breathes in greedily, shamelessly groaning on the exhale.

Pressing his lips to her ear, Sin murmurs, “Was it the way he tried so hard not to eye-fuck you every time he looked?” The flicker of his tongue betrays the delight with which he is watching Christine’s distress unfold; it tickles her ear, and she shudders. It’s all she can do.

“Or is it the way he tries to help out with all your little experiments?” He delicately moves a stray lock of hair from in front of her eyes. “Really, that bastard shot you in the foot. If it was me out here with you, we could have had things buttoned down months ago.”

Her skin crawls, but Christine is powerless to interrupt as he leaves a short chain of ardent, open-mouth kisses from her jaw to her collarbone.

“We could have been patching things up,” he softly whines, “this whole time, it could have been you and me.” He’s looking at her plaintively, like he just wishes she would talk to him, more.

A sharp smile frames his teeth when he croons, “But I’m here for you, now.”

He dips his head, dips his tongue into the well of her ear and Christine chokes on a gasp she can’t completely stifle.

“And I’m going to love you better than he ever could,” Sin promises. “You’ll see.”

Christine clings to her last, fraying threads of clear-headedness, but something tells her she might already be past helping. Warm all over, still struggling to catch her breath, her hands’ feeble attempts to grip at the sheets, the mattress, anything she can reach, prove fruitless.

Her voice is trapped in a dreamy slur when she finally catches her breath enough to ask, “What did you do?”

“It’s just a little something to help you relax.” Sin pinches her chin and uses it to turn her head, his breath sterile as frost as he gazes down at her. “Seems like it might be working, already.”

The instant his fingers touch her skin, Christine is over-sensitized, caught in a sensory loop of too much, too much, too much as burning, aching pain travels down her arms and legs, burrowing into her muscles. Arching up and writhing back, tears begin to pour from her eyes as her mouth opens in a half-strangled sob.

“Ssh, shh, it’s alright,” Sin hisses, gathering her up in his arms and in the coils of his massive tail. Instantly, the burning edge of Christine’s distress cools, though she continues to whimper softly — involuntary, mindless.

“Don’t be afraid,” Sin whispers against her cheek. “It will pass.”

As he says so, the pain smooths out, leaving Christine clammy and exhausted and strangely, bizarrely calm. The fog in her brain thickens and her mind is flooded with it — obscuring her thoughts, hiding away her logic, frustrating her attempts to think about anything other than her immediate surroundings and present sensations.

“Poor thing. You need it bad, don’t you?”

He presses a tender kiss to her temple, inciting a shiver. “Just a little longer, alright? We have some catching up to do, you and I.”

Chapter Text

The laboratory doors slam shut behind Christine, creating a tremor that gets nearby cabinets fearfully chattering.

“I call upon the shielding power of the Vishanti,” she pants, running her fingers over the grooves inlaid in the doors where their latches kiss.

Threads of golden light snap taut along the room’s perimeter, weaving together into a braid of focused magical protection that softly hums as it slowly turns, softening the lab’s sterile interior with a warm, would-be comforting glow. Her stomach is on fire and her feet unsteady, but Christine has enough presence of mind to hastily retrieve a fresh set of clothes from her bug-out bag stashed in the corner.

The sound of Sin’s voice precedes that of his fist at the door.

“Christine,” he says with a long-suffering, paternal air, “come out of there so we can talk about this.”

The only reply he gets is a pained grunt when Christine bashes her hip into the edge of the nearest work station. She leans, using her hands and arms to pull herself along until she reaches her terminal.

Bang-bang-bang. “Open the door, please, Christine. You don’t have to hide from me.”

A gentle whir precedes the arrival of a metal tray, upon which the necessary equipment is neatly laid. She collapses into a chair, and her fingers feel fat as they struggle to grip the elastic band she’s provided for use as a tourniquet. She widens her eyes and leans in close in an attempt to make up for how her vision is swimming, fumbling at a clumsy knot — but her hands aren’t doing it right, and why is it hotter than hell in here…?

Knock-knock-bang-bang-BANG.

Christine curses, fumbling with the needle and jabbing herself painfully. If she can just get a blood sample, maybe she can figure out the properties of the stuff he’s drugged her with and find a way to stop it. And, if not, she can think of at least one other use —

(She misses the vein again.)

Probably. She can probably still do this.

(And again.)

… Maybe. She’s starting to think it’s impossible for her to judge where her body starts and ends: her inner elbow is fast becoming a mottled mess of gently weeping punctures.

“Here: let me help you with that.”

Christine yelps, jumping in her seat as what must be her first hallucination takes shape: Stephen’s torso, translucent and astral, emerging from the wall behind her terminal.

She hates how frightened she sounds, but her strength is fading and she can’t waste one speck of it trying to seem brave. “Are you real?”

While sympathy is not an expression native to Stephen’s features, the fact that she can recognize it at all tells Christine that this is, in fact, Stephen. "I hope so,” he says, “or else this probably isn’t going to work.”

He raises his arms, motioning her closer. She moves, permitting Stephen to lay his hands over hers, keeping her steady as she at last guides the needle to her vein. There's a warm, buzzing pressure, like the air between them is humming.

“There,”  he murmurs, helping her connect the draw tube. “Now, just hold it…”

An extra-loud BANG causes Christine to startle, and she very nearly (very painfully) jostles loose the needle.

“Easy, easy — hey, look at me, look at me.  You’re going to be okay, alright?”

Christine is exhausted to the point of tears, flooded with chemicals wreaking havoc on her aching body, starved for touch as her clitoris and labia miserably throb to the beat of Sin, Sin, Sin…

She doesn’t feel very “okay”.

Astral Stephen does his best to help her remove the elastic tourniquet just as a wave of nausea induces her to rest her head on the table. Running all the way to the lab had been a bad idea, but it’s not like she’d had other options; Sin hardly would’ve let her stroll down here to seal herself in.

BANG. BANG. BANG. “Christine, let me in!” The doors rattle in their frame, but the protective ring is undisturbed.

Her mind is rapidly going from fuzzy to blank, a syrupy stillness descending: it coats her insides with a sweet amber glow that feels just like falling asleep next to someone you love — safe, cared for, and peacefully, dreamily helpless.

“You’re doing great,” Stephen assures her, “just hang in there…”

The next phase creeps over her like a physical sensation, like gnawing hunger. She thinks this might be similar to what a starving woman feels in the hours leading up to her cold, lonely death — only Christine isn’t cold, and she desperately, desperately wishes not to be alone. The muscles in her major labia are flushed with blood, clenching tight in anticipation of an encounter she is determined not to have. Fear and arousal conspire to lower the shutter on her thinking mind, and it’s not until warmth like honeyed wine suffuses her senses that she hears:

Christine…

It’s a whisper in her ear, a breath set free in a silent room — at once the most enticing and the most foreboding pair of syllables she has ever heard, and they completely drown out whatever Astral Stephen is trying to say to her.

Thinking fast, Christine channels her fading focus into rifling through a nearby drawer until her fingers brush the tacky edge of a roll of duct tape. She peels up its corner and tapes her wrist to the arm of the chair, tearing it with her teeth once finished.

I want to help you, sweetheart. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.

… You know, she could use a little help, right now, actually.

Wouldn’t this all be so much easier if she had some help?

If she lets Sin inside, maybe…

She bats away the transplanted thoughts, handing the roll of tape to Stephen — who, to his credit, somehow manages to solidify his hands enough to keep from dropping it. 

"Aaannd I’m doing what, with this?"

"You need to tie down my other hand,” Christine huffs, breathless with the effort of resisting the pull in her chest, a persistent tug towards the object of her torment. “Don’t let him anywhere near me.”

You know I would never hurt you, darling. Don’t you think this has gotten a little out of hand?

”He got me with some kind of —“

”It’s an aphrodisiac,” Stephen says, as if he’s explaining something to her.

Christine’s vision begins to blur. “You know this, how?”

”Knossos conveys his sincere apologies.”

An irritable growl emits from Christine as she replies, “You can both apologize after you put that blood sample into its cradle.”

To Christine’s violent irritation, Astral Stephen opines, “Even if we could isolate the venom, it would still take hours —“

Christine shakes her head, holds up her free hand. "Tie me down," she commands, "and process the fucking sample, Stephen.”

Once she has spoken, there is only a moment’s hesitation before Stephen complies, slipping the bloody tube into place and carefully taping down her other arm — his lips pressed into a grim line, all the while.

"Now, my mouth," she instructs, shuddering at the tone in which Sin whispers, The things I would do for that mouth… 

Stephen eyes her coldly, setting aside the tape. "Not until you tell me what you’re doing.”

”You can’t let me do verbal invocations,” she insists. “If I can cast a spell, I can let him in.“

”I’m not taping your mouth shut. That’s at least a second date thing.”

Christine would laugh, honest.

“Stephen, if you don't, I'm going to —“

Let me in?

Christine grits her teeth, nails biting into the arms of the chair. ”For fuck’s sake,” she snaps, “Stephen, tape my mouth shut.”

”Not before you use it to tell me what the hell you’re doing. What is the plan, here?”

I’m going to come in there and take you right in front of him. Think he’ll like that?

“I'll dispel the wards, when I’m under, if you let me,” Christine breathlessly explains as her muscles start to spasm, “and those are the only things keeping him out. I won't be able to —" She whimpers, pressing her knees together. "I think… I won’t be able to stop.”

Astral Stephen spends far too many precious seconds in silent consideration. 

You're going to need me like you’ve never needed anyone else, Sin silently vows to her. You can feel it already, can’t you?

Christine tastes tears in the back of her throat. “I don’t know how much longer I have, Stephen, please.”

“There has to be some other way.”

You know there isn’t.

She wriggles, restless. “No,” she grits out, “there isn’t. Keep me stable, manage symptoms, wait it out. It’s got to wear off sometime, right?”

Have you ever had someone this deep inside of you?

Christine feels her skin crawl when Sin’s command rises in her mind; she can almost feel his lips, the scratch of his goatee, against her cheek.  Come for Daddy.

A horrible, slimy shiver scuttles like a millipede down her spine, and she peaks with an angry roar — angry, because if she isn’t angry, then she needs to contend with the shame, with her powerlessness and damp underwear.

Her eyes pinch shut as a new wave of clenching, aching pain erupts in her pelvis, so she misses it when Stephen reaches for her, faltering halfway and letting his fingers curl self-consciously in on themselves.

*

Stephen never would have guessed he would ever feel sorry watching Christine have an orgasm.

Getting here was no mean feat — he’s not even really sure how or what he is, right now. All he knows is that one minute he and a sapient snake-man were trying to escape from a psycho-magical prison, and the next he was here: astral, mostly — which, by the way, also shouldn’t be possible —

I understand now what the trouble with your species is, Sorcerer Strange, remarks the same snake-man in the back of Stephen’s mind. You spend so long thinking about whether or not something should or should not be, you never learn whether it truly is.

And, d’you know what? Stephen really can’t argue with that. Even if he could, he has other compelling tasks to attend to — such as making sure this fever doesn’t actually boil Christine alive — though understanding his corporeality would go a long way towards understanding the kinds of help he can render. It might also quell the fear that’s crouching like a shadow in the back of his mind:

He isn’t sure he and Sin have ever been embodied at the same time, since the post-incursion pocket dimension formed. The laws of space-time and paradoxical risks apply only loosely, here, but they do apply on some level. If Sin was right, and the mirror is really broken, then the moment both of them enter the same room…

”I’m sorry.”

To say that Stephen does not understand why Christine is saying this to him would be a dramatic understatement. “What on Earth for?”

Christine is crying, and Stephen doesn’t know why he still can’t do anything about that. “I don’t know,” she admits, voice pitched low to mask the tremor, “a lot of things.”

Sin hasn’t yet resumed his hammering on the door, but Stephen figures it’s just a matter of time — so, he seizes what he has. ”Christine,” he says softly, daring to drift closer, “you haven't done anything wrong.”

“I just…” There is something like a shear in the face of Christine’s groundedness, her presence. Her eyes grow wide and distant, blind with fear. “Why does this keep happening?”

Stephen’s heart lurches.

”Why? I try and try, and I run, and I run, and I run…” Her expression begins to crack, automatic muscle movements peaking her brow and forcing her to bite her lip. “But I always end up back here. With him.”

With you, is what Stephen expects Christine to say next. He briefly imagines it: her look of disgust, the sickened tone of voice and the demand to leave her side.

But she doesn’t do that. Instead, Christine briefly hyperventilates, and after a few intense moments her eyes gradually refocus, and her breath calms somewhat, and she sighs, and whispers, “I’m glad you’re here.”

How could Stephen possibly know what to do, in this situation? Semi-astral, momentarily split from his sinister variant, attempting to help Christine as she fights urges whose intensity Stephen cannot imagine — does he comfort her? Will it make things worse, if he tries? It seems like years since they were tangled in her sheets, counting orgasms — right up until Sin bit her. 

“Open your eyes,” he hedges, carefully neutral.

She does, and they are brilliant: green and brown and gleaming with tears.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Stephen vows, holding her gaze. “I’m here, and I’m not leaving. Not unless you want me to.”

His heart leaps at the panic that flashes in her eyes. “Please don’t.”

”I won’t,” he assures her, daring to lay his hands on top of hers, fighting back a smile to see the way her shoulders relax, just a little bit, the way she sighs with clear relief.

The moment is short-lived.

BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG!

The hits are coming faster, now, and a quick look tells Stephen that his counterpart is starting to make progress in beating down the door, the wood creaking in its effort to hold together.

”It’s okay,” he says, unsure if he’s doing it for his benefit or Christine’s. “As long as the seal holds, we’ll be —“

A blast of malevolent magic crashes against the doors, a smattering of corrosive purple shards slipping through the slowly-splintering wood. One of them nicks the golden chain; a nick becomes a cut, which begins to fray, and much too quickly the spell starts to unravel.

”… Shit.”

Sin tears a massive hole in one door, giving Stephen a look into how his variant has corrupted their borrowed form: Sin’s face has grown discolored and pockmarked, eyes flooded black and red as his jaw hangs open in a shrieking roar, revealing the black, swollen fork of his tongue.

Stephen feels his face fall. “What’s happening to him?”

He can almost feel his passenger’s trepidation — like Knossos has just come up behind Stephen to lay a steadying hand on his shoulder. This bodes ill, sorcerer…

“Stephen —?”

Her voice commands his attention like nothing else, and he turns back around. And, gods forgive him…

Ruby-lipped, face flushed and chest heaving, thighs clenched, pupils blown wide and staring up at him like he’s mana in the desert, Christine looks absolutely debauched in a too-small T-shirt and cotton boxers. Her fingers flex against the leather arm rests, periodically tugging as if to test the hold of her restraints.

She writhes, looking at him piteously. “Stephen, I need…”

The sound of splintering wood tells Stephen he has perhaps fifteen seconds to figure out what he is, what he’s doing, and how he’s going to keep Christine safe. 

He then decides that, really, only one of those things matters.

”Wheel yourself to the corner,” he tells her. “Lock the wheels when you’re behind something, go, go.”

She makes the attempt, but the moment she puts pressure on her feet and begins to push, her knees buckle, trembling. 

“I can’t,” she gasps.

You must make contact, Knossos urges him. Venom’s effects are alleviated by physical touch. 

“I don’t have a body,” Stephen says aloud, “how do I touch her?”

As you have been for the past several minutes.

”Please, touch me.”

Stephen shuts his eyes, barely mustering the wherewithal to look at Christine, to see the expression she’s wearing while she whines like that.

“Please, Stephen,” she cries, fresh tears falling. “I need it, I need you.”

“Just hang in there,” he implores her, keeping his distance. “You won’t feel like this forever, I promise.”

”It hurts, Stephen —“

With a sound like crashing thunder, one of the doors is reduced to shattered timbers.

Quickly, sorcerer!

Against his better judgment — despite his fears, despite the guilt worming through his guts… Stephen ducks his head, holds her face between his half-solid hands, and presses his lips to hers. She sobs, straining as if she means to throw herself at his feet, and Stephen imagines what it would be like to run his fingers through her hair, his astral hands communicating only the barest hint of its softness, the silky strands barely responding to his touch.

He hears the shattered remains of the door creak and scrape under the weight of Sin’s massive body, and Stephen is forced to withdraw from Christine as the air is split by an angry, primal roar.

Chapter Text

Consider, if you will, the strength of a paper crease.

With only a few newtons of force, a scrap of dried-out, chemically-bleached pulp is transformed into something living, something that stands on its own — and, however you might try, once the fold is made, its presence is as indelible as the passage of time, or the ink that may color the page. It can never be as it was, before.

Stephen and Sin are a bit like a paper crease: a little blemish that refuses to be set to rights. A scar on the space between worlds.

Maybe they’re more like the fold of a errant prion that can trigger the destruction of an entire identity, or a cancer cell that just refuses to die, defying every urge of spirit and nature to permit things to continue as they ought to.

Alas…

Their dimension collapses, yes, but if growing smaller was an unfailingly lethal process, what would be left of the Microverse? (A question for another time, perhaps.)

And while their dueling egos do not quite make it down to that tier of existence, they are crunched so tightly against the fabric of their private universe that they cannot perceive the being who is presently perceiving them.

Perceiving, and judging.

“Just when I think one of them finally learns,” the Watcher mutters, “they prove once again that Stephen Strange is still one of the gravest threats to the multiverse.”

All around him is the muffled noise of realities in flux, the composite tremor of a billion worlds as they vibrate against each other, stretched nearly to their breaking point.

“Lucky for you,” the Watcher grumbles, narrowing luminous eyes at the pair of sorcerers in the palm of his hand, “you’re not actually the worst thing out here.”

That, and he owes Christine an apology. If not for the Watcher placing his trust in Strange, she might have been spared her encounters with both of them.

The Watcher reflects on his mistake: the day he brought together a band of very unlikely heroes to help him stop Ultron and Zola in their tracks while fighting over a set of infinity stones. When the pair of villains were trapped in their crystalline prison, the Watcher had not foreseen the possible consequences of keeping one pocket dimension inside of another, and gave it to the Strange who had once made the mistake of calling the Watcher a god.

Then, when the incursions started up in earnest, the nested realities just-so-happened to crash directly into the husk of Sin’s dying world.

But the Watcher knows that very little in the multiverse happens by accident. He is still chasing down the origin of the cascades, but he has a funny feeling that, somehow, Strange is at the center of it.

Until he can unravel that mystery, though, the Watcher will keep them close. He considers intervening further, but knows already that his oath lies in tatters at his feet; he can’t afford another mistake.

And besides, he reasons with a growing smile, Christine is more than capable of handling them on her own. 

Chapter Text

Christine slips into the shadow of a support beam in the Sanctum’s loft and tries to disappear, taking in the space around her, searching for something, anything she can use to slow him down — but the looming bookcases and cluttered displays offer up nothing to her frantic scrutiny. Overhead, the Sanctum’s enormous window lets in the gauzy-grey light of a sky in the process of falling apart.

The door bursts open, flying against its wall with a thundering crash Christine feels reverberate through the ancient wood. A curse and a spell are the last things she hears for one beat, two, three, until slow, stalking steps follow her up.

Sin’s voice is like a serrated blade, jagged and sharp. “Come out, now, sweetheart.”

Through the gloom a shadow passes, warping and bending as it travels across each of the cabinets, beams and tables.

“I don’t much care for hide-and-seek,” he warns her. His footfalls are muffled, as if the floor beneath him is conspiring to aid his hunt. “You know I’ll find you eventually.”

The reminder cuts into the dread she’s been trying to drown with adrenaline since the chase began.

“Let’s not kid ourselves, Christine. We both know what you were doing, when I found you in that bar.”

Christine closes her eyes, tries to slow her breathing…

“Long, long ago,” Sin muses. “Sad. Alone. Hopeless.” He sounds closer, now, but muffled, as if he’s looking away. “You were going to let yourself die there, weren’t you?”

Shame like a roaring fire warms her cheeks and ears. Whiskey, beer, morphine...

It would have been so easy.

People accidentally overdose all the time; for those well-versed in the art of keeping bodies alive, the inverse of the craft is a constant presence, only ever a heartbeat away. Back then, Christine had wanted to think she was just closing in on the right heartbeat to make her last.

The shame comes when she admits to knowing how selfish that is, that she more than most has a responsibility to try and mitigate what has erupted into a full-scale interdimensional catastrophe. 

Sin’s voice echoes between the pillars and walls. “If you were mine, you never would have gotten so low. I would never have allowed it.”

It’s too dangerous to try and draw power, here, for spells or weapons; it would lead him straight to her…

“Is this not better than death? A world that’s all your own, a man who loves you — who would do anything for you? Is this really so horrible?”

She doesn’t want to, but she can’t help that her brain pauses, stops to think. In a lot of ways, he’s right; Christine knows there are millions, billions who would kill to be in a similar position. So many people go unloved, uncared for, uncelebrated…

Is it really so bad?

There’s an edge to it when Sin queries, “Or am I just too much for you? Poor little Christine, running away from another one of her problems?”

Christine’s eye lands on the dusty face of an artifact sitting dormant on a nearby shelf: copper and glass and the golden-grey of desert sand.

Her stomach lurches. The Sands of Nisanti…

“I guess it’s really not so surprising,” Sin observes. “You never did learn to control that temper of yours.”

Christine’s fingers tread cautiously along the blunt edges of the globe until she’s able to silently roll it into her palm. As if on cue, a crash of thunder shakes the Sanctum, lightning splits the sky, and Sin’s voice slithers to her ear, demanding:

”That’s why you killed him, isn’t it?”

Though the world crumbles around her and her safety is far from certain, all else falls away when Christine becomes sure of what she’s heard, and she nearly drops the artifact.

How?

How does he know?

“You got angry, and you just couldn’t help yourself, could you?”

She buried it deep — almost deep enough to forget, just deep enough to make her wonder sometimes if it’s a memory or a dream.

Another roar of thunder causes her to startle, reminding her that she doesn’t have time for any of this.

”Honestly, I don’t blame you, not after what he’d done. He had it coming.”

Emboldened by her discovery (held steady by the aggressive compartmentalization of her feelings), Christine calls out, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Found you.”

It’s a little sooner than she anticipated, Christine would admit — which is why Sin does in fact get the jump on her, pulling her into the light before pressing her against the beam.

”I just love it when a caged bird sings,” he whispers triumphantly. 

The Sands of Nisanti work their magic by depriving Sin of his; the moment he seeks to bind her hands, Christine activates the power-dampening artifact to immediate effect.

Sin is left weak and wheezing, leaning back against a nearby table only to cause its sundry contents to fall when he loses his footing. He catches himself on his hands, crying out in pain.

It is as she finishes restraining Sin that Stephen finds her. “Christine!”

Her knees are shaking and there’s a fine tremor in her hands, and she breathes a sigh of genuine relief at the sight of him. “Oh, thank God…”

Upon reaching him, she falls against Stephen’s chest and wraps her arms around him, pressing into the crook of his neck. He tenses but returns the hug, his hands caught in a tremor of their own.

“Come on, we have to get you out of here,” Stephen says, taking her hand. “This place is falling apart.”

At their backs Sin calls out, voice ragged, “You think he can help you? You barely know what you’re up against, out there. I’ve seen it all. I know it all.” A long, dark lock of hair has fallen across his forehead, helping him to appear even more unhinged than usual. “I can keep you safe in ways that sad sack could never dream of.”

Relinquishing Stephen’s hand, Christine does an about-face, marches up to Sin, and full-on slaps him across the mouth.

She hardly recognizes her own voice. “I’ve had it up to here with you thinking that I need or want protecting, let alone any you could give me.”

You learn a lot about someone, Christine thinks, by seeing them angry. You learn what matters to them, what they believe about the world and about themselves. This is what Christine learns about Sin — though by this point it’s more of a refresher:

“You’re just like the rest,” he says with visible disgust. “I give you everything, you reject me. I change, and still —”

He strains against his bonds, working himself up. “What do I have to do to prove to you that I deserve to be happy!?”

The silence that follows is deafening.

Once the ringing in her ears has subsided, Christine prods him, “Don’t you mean ‘we’?”

Sin blinks, frowning.

Christine helps him out. “Don’t ‘we’ deserve to be happy?”

“… That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!”

Christine shakes her head. “No, it’s not. You said it right the first time: you think you deserve to be happy, and you think you can’t be happy unless you have me. Sound about right?”

Her throat feels tight and her eyes are beginning to sting. “Though, in fairness, any Christine would do, wouldn’t she?”

*

I suppose I’ll just have to keep searching.

Searching for what?

The right Christine, of course.

*

She’s crying, and she doesn’t care; tears of rage get a pass. “How many of my variants have you found, used up, and thrown away?”

“Christine, don’t be like this, please. You know I would never —“

“If the only thing your mouth is good for is lying, I’m going to sew it shut.”

His face falls, tear-track lines fainter than ever as the muscles of his face slacken, waiting for instructions that don’t come.

”You Stranges really are all just alike,” she spits, keenly aware of the way Stephen shifts uncomfortably behind her. “You can’t imagine a world where you’re not the hero, can you?”

Sin opens his mouth. Christine hits him again, and this time his lip splits on one of his incisors.

Stephen, at her elbow: “Christine, we need to go.”

But Sin’s eyes hold her still, burning and defiant. She needs to see that flame stomped out.

”You have never been the tragic hero treated unjustly by an unkind world. You manipulated me into coming here by appealing to my guilty conscience.”

”You agreed to give me a chance,” he throws back.

”Christine, we really have to —“

“And you promised not to screw around with my brain,” Christine barks. “But from the second we got here, you’ve been trying to do exactly that.”

Out of Sin’s forehead appears that leering third eye.

“The Darkhold exacts a heavy toll,” he growls. “You can’t imagine what it’s like, getting in there and seeing what you want — what you need — while you refuse to let me give it to you. Stephen may have gotten a chance,” he insists, “but I never did. You never let me —“

”Christine.”

She whirls around. “What?!”

It takes her mind a moment to realize, looking at Stephen’s face, that both of his variants are now wearing the same, stunned expression. She considers feeling bad before remembering the truth, the accounting behind this situation that lays out all of the ways she was right, every little I told you so chomping at the bit.

Christine’s voice is flat when she says,  “Goodbye, Sin,” and makes for the exit, Stephen trailing behind.

*

“You don’t have to tell me anything.”

”I wasn’t planning on it.”

”Okay, but you know I have to ask.”

”You don’t have to do anything, Stephen.”

The sound of two people walking is replaced by a solitary staccato.

”You killed one of my variants and we’re both probably about to die. Can it really hurt to satisfy my morbid curiosity?”

Christine stalls. “Fine, but keep walking.”

Once he’s taken the lead, Christine tells him.

*

Stephen gets her to the jump point, but something’s wrong. 

They arrive in a chamber with a massive ring-shaped structure on a raised platform at its center. Christine’s curiosity is piqued, but she has little time to assess the level of advancement or examine the controls; the floor has been shaking on and off for the past several minutes, and time does not appear to be on their side.

Stephen’s cagey, anxious; he starts talking less and finds ways to avoid making eye contact with her. He mutters, "It's in here,” as he leads her to a door at the edge of the chamber.

"What is?"

"Your way out."

The room is small and seems to serve no other purpose than to house the object inside: her INDEX, repaired and, unless she is very much mistaken, upgraded. The latch opens silently and closes around her wrist with a soft click, the crystal display glowing into life.

“But…” Christine frowns, shaking her head. “We’ve been working together on this for months. We were nowhere near this point. How did you —?“

Stephen busies himself at the console by the ring. “It will take you anywhere you like, within a given dimensional proximity,” he informs her. “I would recommend using the gateway, here, but I’m afraid it’s a one-way trip somewhere you would rather not go.”

The adrenaline has died down and she’s shaking, exhausted as she cautiously approaches.

“Stephen,” she asks, “how long have you had this?”

The rims of Stephen’s eyes are permanently stained with pink and purple shadows that seem somehow darker than before. His hands hover unsteadily, and his mouth opens only to deliver an ineffectual, "I…"

Her banked rage begins to stir, heat like a rising flame lifting Christine’s chest and sharpening her tongue. “How long have you been keeping this a secret from me?”

He turns to her, shoulders stiff, eyes guarded. "I know what this looks like, but I swear to you, I wasn’t —"

Golden cords fizzle into being and wrap Stephen’s arms tight to his sides. He winces as if in pain; Christine responds by closing her fist, tightening the cords until his ribs start to creak.

Somewhere in the past few hours, it would seem, the well of her compassion has run dry.

"Answer me."

"We —“ Stephen gasps, amending, “you… Four months. You finished it four months ago."

The newest tremor ceases, as if it too bears horrified witness to this development — as if it, too, cannot quite believe it.

Christine hears herself only faintly, as if from a distance. “What?”

Her hand momentarily relaxes, allowing Stephen a moment to breathe. He's crying; he looks at her through tear-soaked lashes and the way he's breathing tells Christine his sinuses are inflamed.

He at least has the decency to look her in the eye when he tells her, "I've been lying to you. I... I was selfish and afraid, and I thought, if I just had a little more time —"

"Stop, stop..." She snaps her fingers, shifting the magical restraints from active casting and leaving them to work independently. Her hands find her temples and Christine struggles to understand…

How is this possible?

Logistically, how? How could she not have noticed?

She's been so careful. She’s thought of everything, every loophole, every sneaky, conniving insult a Strange can conjure, and still —?

She trusted him — she forgot herself and she trusted him. She knows better.

How has she ended up here, again?

The nexus of their doomed love resounds with all of the wisdom she wishes she could have imparted to herself before it was too late, the things her variants have told her with wide, urgent eyes as their universes crumbled around them:

He’ll make you doubt yourself.

Don't let him in, whatever you do.

He’s lying.

Record everything.

Don’t listen.

You’re worth more than this.

And then, further on:

… Just do it.

… It’s easier if you let him.

… No one will believe you.

… It’s not that bad.

… Don’t bother.

It’s more than enough to populate her daydreams and nightmares with flashes of her other lives, all the creative ways she and Stephen have come up with to hurt each other.

You’d never have come this far on your own.

Drinking again? Really?

You think anyone else would put up with this?

We can talk about it once you’ve calmed down.

Smile. You're so much prettier when you smile.

What, like you?

A cold, distant sort of tranquility settles over her, and beneath its weight Christine feels something snap.

At the very least, she supposes, this is familiar territory: escape from the deranged sorcerer before he or an impending catastrophe kills her.  Since he’s being kind enough to let his emotions get the better of him, Christine pushes Stephen against a low bookcase. His knees hit the edge and he slumps into sitting.

There is power in detachment. Freedom, of a kind. It’s the freedom to surrender to one’s darker self in the absence of the tempering influences of guilt and compassion.

“So, help me understand this: you thought that by betraying my trust, you were going to find some way to convince me to stay with you?”

He closes his eyes, looking as if it pains him to say it: "I know I screwed up —“

”Oh, massive understatement.”

”But I want to try and fix this, I — I’ll make you happy, just like you wanted. We can be happy, together.”

Manic laughter animates Christine’s shoulders. ”I’m confused: do you not see how your magical little snow globe of a pocket dimension is falling apart around you?”

His head shakes emphatically. ”We can go anywhere. Your new INDEX virtually eliminates the risk of tandem incursions.”

”You and I have done enough damage to the multiverse, Stephen. I’m not causing more by trying to make this work someplace where my death might be an absolute point in time — especially not with an insane sorcerer who has been lying to me for months!”

“I wanted —“

She cuts him off by closing her fist again, intrigued by the interplay of pain and misery across Stephen’s face as he sits there, squirming and groaning.

It’s not enough.

”Do you really think,” Christine begins, in a voice so even it’s almost flat, “that I give a single, flying fuck about what you ‘wanted’, Stephen?”

Christine releases her fist long enough for Stephen to catch his breath before closing it again. The strangled noise of pain he makes is familiar, somehow, and satisfying — but it’s not enough.

”You think you can lie to me? You think you have the right to just waltz into my mind and rearrange all the furniture without even knocking on the goddamn door?”

“I’m sorry,” he wheezes, hands gnarled and pale beneath the cords that hold him tight.

Christine shakes her head. ”Not yet, you’re not.”

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.