"Red, of course, is the colour of the interior of our bodies. In a way it's inside out, red."
— Anish Kapoor
There was a nine hour and 45 minute gap between New York and Kathmandu in the spring (not even a proper rounded 10 hours because Nepal is contrary like that, grumbled his tired mind). That meant that by the time the service finished in the early afternoon in central Asia, it was just after 4:30am in New York.
He sighed as he left the hall and looked out the window to the dark skies surrounding the metropolis. The very first twilight of dawn was just starting to brighten the sky in the east; some people would already be heading into the city to beat the rush hour crowds both coming to and from Manhattan during working hours.
Crazy to think that he was just like them four short years ago.
A bit of fluttering from behind stirred him from his thoughts; the cloak did not know what to make of his mood. "I'm fine, just tired," he murmured. "I won't need you for a while." Permission granted, the cloak carefully removed itself from his shoulders and floated down the hall until it was out of sight. It liked to wander around the Sanctum and he gave the relic as much time as he could spare to do it.
Stephen looked over his shoulder when he heard someone coming down the hall from the Kamar-Taj entrance. It was Wong. No words were spoken by his friend, but he knew him well enough to know the sorrow behind his stoic expression.
When Wong did speak, he said, "You're on New York time, aren't you?"
He was pretty sure Wong already knew the answer to that question. "I can't sleep yet," he said. "But I'm not sure I can concentrate on anything well enough to get actual work done."
The librarian took a step closer. "Work can wait for a few hours. I'll put on some tea."
Stephen wordlessly followed Wong into the kitchen and let the man do his thing. He was very particular with tea: loose leaf and traditionally made (in other words, without magic) was the only way he took it. The librarian claimed it tasted funny when magic was involved; he personally did not taste any difference.
And so he sat at the kitchen table, shaking hands clasped loosely together as he waited for Wong to do his tea thing. Maybe it was a sort of relaxation technique for him. He had no idea, and now was not the time to ask.
His hands shook a bit more than usual. Emotion. Exhaustion. Likely both.
A cup filled three-quarters full was placed at his knuckles. With a word of murmured thanks, Stephen took the cup but made no move to drink it.
"Drink, Stephen," Wong said after a few minutes of silence between them. "I didn't make that so you could waste perfectly good tea."
"The horror," he said, but the quip came out tired and half-heartedly. He did, however, drink a couple mouthfuls when Wong's look didn't relent. "Don't you have someone else to mother hen?" Again, he sounded more tired than anything.
"Not at the moment," was his flat reply.
Stephen sighed, and the silence fell again across the kitchen, interrupted only by the occasional, quiet sip from either of them.
Wong placed his empty cup down some several minutes later. "I will start looking into the existence of items, spells, and potential dimensions that might make a person untraceable by usual means."
"Hamir found no evidence of magical interference," he reminded him, because he was certain Wong already knew this.
"The item, dimension, or spell may be one that cannot be traced. Those are very rare, but not impossible."
"Or she just took a little vacation and got killed at the end of it!" Stephen exclaimed, slamming his hands down against the table (and resolutely ignoring the ache that emotional outburst caused). He swallowed and added, "A little vacation in my city, under my watch, and murdered by a vile bastard of a human being motivated by simple greed."
Wong gave him a firm look. "Do not think the blame lies on your shoulders, Strange."
Stephen did not reply and let the silence rest between them again. Eventually he finished off his tea and looked down at the table. "Have you ever had a pierogi?"
Wong didn't answer immediately. Stephen didn't look up to see the expression on his face.
"Don't think so," was the eventual answer.
"You should. There's this great 24-hour Ukrainian restaurant on 2nd and 9th. They make really great pierogies. Good potato pancakes, too."
He carefully lifted his eyes from the table. Wong was giving him an even look. "I'm not going to sleep anytime soon and I need to eat," he said in reply to the look.
"2nd and 9th is a bit of a walk for food."
"I need a bit of a walk." He stood and waved a hand at himself to apply a glamour spell over his robes so it appeared he was wearing a dark jacket over a navy blue, high collared sweater. "I'll call ahead for the food. Won't even take me an hour to get back here, and that's only if I'm too busy eating all the pierogies on the walk back."
Wong pursed his lips together. "I have better things to do in Kamar-Taj. But I'll be back here in an hour if you promise to bring enough food to share."
"I was offering, wasn't I?" he retorted as he turned to head for the door.
"Stephen." The doctor paused to look over his shoulder. "I know you're deflecting."
"Absolutely no idea what you're talking about," he answered, and with that, left the kitchen.
The cloak hovered in the foyer near the door. After all this time, he still had no idea how it knew when he planned to leave the Sanctum; it just did. This time, though, he waved it off. "Pretending to be completely normal. I'll see you in a bit." The cloak turned and floated away (probably to go to the room with the everlasting fire within the hearth; the enchanted piece of cloth was quite fond of warmth).
The early morning fog still sat heavily across Greenwich Village, leaving lingering dewdrops on Stephen's jacket as he made his way east towards 2nd and 9th. What early-morning New Yorkers were up ignored him; delivery men carefully backed their trucks into narrow parking spots adjacent to the sidewalk, dog-walkers kept their pets of all sizes going at a brisk pace, and businessmen and women chatted into barely-visible wireless earbuds about everything and nothing.
It must be nice. On days like this, sometimes, he just thought… sometimes it must be nice to not have the fate of the world on your shoulders.
Sometimes he missed it.
Stephen grimaced to himself and forced his thoughts elsewhere.
Predictably, they went back to Neelu and the funeral. Guilt gnawed at the bottom of his stomach and crawled its way up his ribcage to reach his throat and choke him. Sorcerer Supreme for a couple months and already one of his charges was dead, and dead from mundane causes. The knowledge that he had failed consumed his mind and the details of the passing street began to turn into a blur.
It was when he nearly ran over a woman walking her two corgis ("Sorry, I'm so sorry, are you alright? Good, good, again I'm so sorry...") that Stephen realized he needed to move his thoughts elsewhere. His guilt would do nothing except perhaps cause him to collide into more New Yorkers. He forced himself to consider Wong's words instead.
There were certainly items and places that could make someone untraceable by magic. The issue with the theory was that Neelu had absolutely no business being anywhere near such items or places. She was a translator, for God's sake.
She had no business being on the streets of New York, either, said another part of his mind, and he couldn't think about this anymore. He was too tired and too grieved to accomplish any productive thinking during this walk.
Speaking of. He did tell Wong he would call ahead. With a new task at mind, Stephen reached into his pocket—
—and realized he had left his cell phone at the Sanctum.
Damn it all.
It wasn't entirely his fault. He was potentially the only person in New York City that had his phone less often on him than not. Along with texting being hardly worth the effort half the time, he usually spoke to the other members of the order face-to-face. Most sorcerers had phones, of course, but generally speaking they were not widely needed when finding someone was a simple portal away. The majority of his conversations on the phone were with the Avengers and other allies of a hero-ish nature. A handful of old medical colleagues made the rest of the list.
Besides that, it was stupidly easy to get a phone ruined in a day's work. Tony had immediately replaced his phone the first time it was unsalvageable, which was nice of him.
('I don't want your charity, Tony,' he had protested.
'How else am I supposed to reach you when a big magic Cthulhu pops up in the Hudson? Owl post?'
'I have an eye on the magical pulse of the world and would notice anything major—'
'Take the damn phone before I decide to stuff a truck-full of them down your chimney instead.')
But he really didn't want to deal with the hassle. Ergo, no phone when dealing with more messy extra-dimensional creatures. Unfortunately that meant he often forgot it during more mundane outings.
So he wouldn't be pre-ordering the food. That was fine. It was unlikely to be busy at this time of day, anyway.
Stephen turned out to be correct. While there were a handful of early risers (locals, it looked like) in the restaurant, it was mostly empty this early in the morning. The sun was still a good half hour away, with only the first streaks of orange and red currently lightening the horizon.
Because of this, he managed to get in and out with his order of pierogies in less than fifteen minutes. By the time he had the food, his stomach was protesting its lack of meals since the morning before. He opened up the bag and dug in.
It turned out that pierogies were very good for a tired and grieving soul. Before five minutes had passed, he had scoffed down three of them.
In his defense, they were really very good.
Bless the people of New York; no one batted an eye at him walking and eating pierogies at dawn. He imagined that he could walk in his robes and be mostly ignored, too, but unlike the Ancient One, he did like to blend in as much as possible with the crowd when he could. He was little interested in drawing undue attention.
After the fourth pierogi, he forced himself to stop and make sure there were enough for him to eat with Wong at the table. Then again, he mused, if I eat my share now, I can avoid the conversation he was hinting at.
That just made Stephen think of Neelu again, and his temporarily raised spirits sunk once more. He eyed the bag of food; maybe it was time for a fifth one. Food was distracting, and distracting was good.
As he debated internally (and very purposefully) about the issue of pierogies, he heard a female voice shout from the right. He quickly focused and realized the voice was coming from a narrow side street just a few feet ahead. "Help! Help, someone, please!" was the clear call.
Stephen hurried his steps, magic crackling at his fingertips as he came to the alley. Dawn's light did not quite reach through the majority of the narrow road, but he was able to make out a woman kneeling beside a fallen man, shaking his arm as she cried, "Henry! Help, someone!"
He quickly left the main sidewalk and crossed the short distance between them. Upon approach, the details of the scene became clearer. The woman was somewhere in her 30s, fit, and dressed in business-casual. She looked distressed, but seemed otherwise unharmed. The fallen man was of a similar appearance to his companion in both style and physique and bore no obvious wounds. There were no eldritch monsters, no dimensional rifts, and not even any petty thugs. The magic fell from his fingertips as instead his medical mind took over. "What happened?" Stephen asked as he knelt beside the man, placing his breakfast aside.
"I— I don't know, he just— he just collapsed!" the woman sobbed. "Henry!"
The former surgeon carefully turned the man from where he laid partially on his side to instead lay completely on his back and gave him a quick once-over. Still breathing, and no belt or tight collar that needed loosening. Small mercies. "How long ago did he collapse?" He reached for the man's wrist to take his pulse.
He caught the woman shaking her head. She seemed to be calming down a bit and was now reaching for her fallen purse. "I— I don't know, he just— he just fainted."
Best not to take chances. "Call 911," he said, and then tuned her out to keep track of the man's heartbeat. His brow furrowed as he counted; his pulse seemed completely normal for his age and body type, which was admittedly unexpected considering his current state.
Stephen saw her withdraw her arm from her purse in his peripheral vision. He began to focus again on her as he asked, "Does he have any known medical conditions?"
By the time he realized she was not holding a cell phone, it was already too late. A sharp, agonizing pain coursed through his entire body and he fell to the side as his leg collapsed under him. His eyesight blurred and his tongue lolled uselessly in his mouth. Every one of his nerve endings burned; it felt as if his hands were on fire.
The doctor could not make out many details, but he was pretty certain that the supposedly unconscious man had picked himself off the ground and was now pressing his hands against his upper arm and the side of his face. Stephen's head was held still against the pavement as the woman reached for him again, but his sight remained too blurry to distinguish beyond that.
He felt a small sting in his neck, and soon he knew no more.
He was gonna get Thai at first, but Google revealed no 24-hour Thai places in a 1.5 mile radius. So he went to the infamous Ukrainian place that is open instead. Good ol' NYC.
I was quite bummed to discover that my favorite 'jab someone in the neck for instant knockout' was complete Hollywood fiction and waffled a bit on whether to change the ending or not. Then the Spider-Man Far From Home trailer came out and look, there goes Ned instantly passed out from a little dart to the neck. So yeah, in the MCU, HYDRA or S.H.I.E.L.D (or HYDRA as S.H.I.E.L.D) invented this. Thanks MCU!
Red is a theme that ran consistently through the story. It's an incredible color that has a variety of meanings that range across an emotional spectrum. I wish I could say that I added red on purpose from the beginning, but its presence was not something I realized (despite an illustration coming in a couple chapters that featured ONLY the color red!) until I was finishing it up and scrambling for a title of some sort. That is where the inspiration for the quotes came from. The chapter titles come from the quotes. The story title was cobbled together after reading through dozens of red-related lyrics.
