This fic was inspired by the What if…? S01E04 What if Stephen Strange lost his heart instead of his hands?, but it's turned into something more than that. There's no romance or smut. Sorry if you were looking for that. I just adore the Lovecraftian, Dark Stephen Strange and I had to save him. Give it time. You'll see.

Ch. 1

He knew Tony Stark had to die. The only possible future that allowed a triumph against Thanos required Tony to die. Tony had died in most of the fourteen million possibilities he had viewed. In the percentage where Ironman didn't die, he turned his coat and worked with Thanos, believing whole-heartedly in the titan's cause. Those were the darkest timelines, and even now, he shied away from the memories of those possibilities.

Tony had to die, but his heart broke seeing the child that Tony and Pepper had together before the final snap took Ironman away from everyone. He hated that she had to lose her father so young, but at least she had Pepper, possibly the best mother any child could ask for. But then, time moved past the point he had ended his glimpses into possible futures. Time moved past the return of half of all living things. It moved past the second defeat of Thanos in the war to end all wars. It moved past the time of Captain America, Black Widow and, of course, Ironman. Other heroes stepped up to take their places, but no one forgot those who sacrificed their lives to save Earth.

Doctor Stephen Strange stood in the tree line, watching the throng of black-clad mourners. At their center, a flower-draped coffin sank slowly into the fresh hole in the ground. He had gotten to know Pepper Potts in the five years since Tony died. They were never more than good friends, but he was the first one she called when she got the diagnosis. Metastatic breast cancer. It had seemed to come out of nowhere and grew at a rate the doctors had never seen. Stephen had contacted old friends in the industry, brought in the best experts to help her. He had even tried various spells that should have helped, but nothing worked. The cancer had a mind of its own and threw off every attempt to eradicate it. He thought that, given time, he could find a cure for her. So believing, he had sequestered himself away in a dimension without time, but after what would be years of research in a dimension with time and multiple attempts, Strange finally had to admit that the disease was probably tied to an absolute point in time. For some reason, Pepper Potts was doomed to die just shy of her daughter's tenth birthday.

Admitting his failure to find a cure had been one of the most painful experiences of his life, above and beyond the infinite deaths he had suffered at Dormammu's hands. Having to watch Morgan Stark's face as her mother explained that she was not going to recover from the cancer broke his heart like nothing ever had. As he had become friends with Pepper, he had developed a deep affection for her daughter as well. That was the reason that, when Pepper asked him to become Morgan's legal guardian after her death, he hadn't immediately refused. Now, he watched the girl scoop the first spade-full of soil onto her mother's coffin with Peter Parker at her side, a consoling hand on her shoulder. Tears streamed down her face. He had no idea what he was supposed to do with the girl, but he was damn well going to do the best he could for her.

Morgan stared up at the eye-shaped window above the familiar door on Bleeker street. She had been here a hundred times before, but today, it felt different. It felt wrong. This was home, now and it wasn't right. Home was the house on the river with her mom. A tear slipped down her cheek, one of thousands she had already shed. Uncle Strange put a hand on her shoulder and the door opened of its own accord. Of course it did. Uncle Strange used magic the way trust fund babies spend money.

She mounted the two steps in front of the doors and crossed the threshold. The dark, gloomy walls reared up around her and they seemed to match her mood, supplement her grief. Wong came around the edge of the stairs, took one look at her and glanced at Strange with a roll of his eyes.

"Have you done anything for her?" he asked in his Asian accent. Morgan scrunched her shoulders, almost preferring the indifference that Uncle Strange treated her with. She could handle this. She just needed…time.

"I, uh…I brought her home."

Wong rolled his eyes. "Come, child. I've prepared a room for you. Did you even think of that, Strange?"

"Oh…uh, no? Don't we have staff to take care of things like that?"

Wong huffed and shook his head in defeat. Strange would never shake the last vestiges of arrogance he came to them with. It seemed to be embedded in his DNA. Morgan looked back and forth between the two men and a small smile curved the corner of her lips. In some ways, Uncle Strange very much reminded her of what little she could remember of her father. They both had a sort of absent minded, aloof arrogance that hid a heart that could care very deeply for a privileged few.

"By all means. Show her the room. Don't forget the wifi password."

Wong snorted softly and the small smile on Strange's face spoke of years of shared experiences together. Shouldering her backpack, Morgan followed Wong up the massive staircase. Once they reached the second floor landing, Wong led her to the right, into a hall. The place seemed to close in around them as they entered the narrow corridor studded with doors and ancient relics set into cubbies sized specifically for them. The place looked like it should be hung in cobwebs and grime, but there wasn't so much as a speck of dust. Whether that was due to magic or a small army of cleaning novices, Morgan had no idea.

Wong opened a door at the end of the corridor and Morgan's heart flip flopped. The room beyond was lit with bright lights, marking a stark contrast to the rest of the sanctum. The place barely had room for the furniture, enough space to turn around in and no windows. The walls were pink. Pink! She'd outgrown that color three years ago. The twin bed had a white bedspread with the face of a simple cartoon cat on it. The cat had a pink bow and the pillows were the same shade of pink. Even the dresser and nightstand were white and pink.

"Is that…?"

"Hello Kitty," Wong said with a wide smile. "My cousin loves Hello Kitty. I thought you would too."

"How old is your cousin?"

"Eleven."

Morgan winced. She hated it. The bright, girlish colors grated against her grief. She wouldn't have liked it on a good day, being more of a transformers fan. Now, it just felt like a mockery of her disastrous life. But she couldn't tell Wong that. He was so proud of it. His eyes demanded her approval.

Gritting her teeth, she curled her lips into something she hoped looked more like a smile than the grimace it felt like. It must have worked because Wong beamed at her.

"I will bring you a sandwich and some tea," he said and left her there.

Morgan turned a 360 in the middle of the tiny chamber and it didn't get any better, the longer she looked at it. Tears pricked the corners of her eyes. Her mom would have known how inappropriate this was for her, but her mom was gone. Wong and Uncle Strange cared. She knew they did. She could see the effort Wong put into this. It wasn't their fault they didn't know her that well, but it made her feel so alone and lost.

Dropping her backpack at the foot of the bed, she shut the lights off and dropped onto the bed, only having to move a few feet to accomplish both tasks. Her room at home was three times this size. Where would she keep her projects? She couldn't risk damaging all the relics around the sanctum by working in the foyer, or, even worse, the library. Uncle Strange would kill her…or strand her in another dimension.

She couldn't live without her projects. She was so close to understanding her dad's Ironman tech. She had already built her own prototype armor. She just couldn't get the jet stabilizers as fine tuned as she needed for independent flight. And she hadn't even touched on the nanotech he had mastered before he retired to marry her mom. Peter was the only one that had any understanding of the nanites and he might want help with maintenance on his suit at some point. The interface her dad had left for him couldn't innovate. It could only run the programs her dad created for it. Lucky for her, Tony Stark had left copious notes and files. Not so lucky for her, he had instructed Friday to keep certain things locked down until Morgan reached certain ages.

No one told Morgan she had to follow in her father's footsteps, but she had always sensed a sort of underlying expectation from the adults around her. She hadn't lasted long in public school, quickly outstripping her classmates as early as kindergarten and causing class disruptions in her boredom. Pepper had tried to keep her in some kind of school setting, citing a need for social skills, but no one liked being compared to the 'little genius', so she never really made friends.

After a year of trying one gifted school after another, Pepper crumbled and enrolled her daughter in self-paced distance learning. Morgan ate the classes up like candy. She spent hours on the computer, absorbing everything she could. After an afternoon with a virtual book, she could test out of most courses. By the age of eight, she was studying calculus and robotics engineering. At nine, she tackled her father's files and started trying to create her own armor. Her mother's illness only escalated her learning because working on classes or her own Ironman armor gave her a distraction from the tragedy unfolding in her life. The only reason she didn't have a college degree was because she hadn't bothered to actually sit through the tests and paperwork colleges required.

Now, the tragedy had completed its course, and all she wanted was to get back to her distraction. The tears that had started at the sight of the room that didn't fit her at all turned into a waterfall of sobs as, for the first time since her mom told her she was dying, she had nothing to distract her and hold the worst of the pain back. The rage and grief tore through her and she sobbed until she screamed into the darkness of her tiny, inappropriate room.

The door burst open and Uncle Strange crouched just past the threshold, fists lit up with glowing gold mandalas, eyes blazing and searching for a threat. Behind him, Wong had his own mandalas at the ready and scanned the hallway for danger. Morgan bit her scream off with a soggy hiccup.

"What is it? What's wrong?" Uncle Strange demanded, standing up out of his crouch as no immediate threat presented itself. The glowing magics remained at his fists, painting the dark room in a lurid, orangish light. Morgan glanced around, a distant part of her mind noting that this color fit her mood and her personality so much more than the pink. The rest of her exploded in white-hot rage. How could they ask what was wrong? Wasn't it obvious?

"My mom is dead!" she screamed, jumping up from the bed, fists clenched at her sides. "She's dead! Gone! I have no family left! And you couldn't save her!" She rushed at Uncle Strange, beating at his chest with her clenched fists. The gold mandalas vanished from his hands and he caught her when her knees buckled and fresh sobs ripped out of her chest. Picking her up as though she weighed nothing, he moved them to the bed and set her at his side, pulling her into his chest and wrapping his arms around her. He didn't say anything. He just held her while she sobbed and cursed him. Wong closed the door, letting darkness fall around them.

Morgan had no idea how long they sat in the room, Uncle Strange's arms wrapped around her. The cool metal of the amulet that once encased the time stone pressed into her cheek. His tunic smelled of incense and a scent she could only describe as staticky. She had dropped the recriminations against him soon after she broke down, instead turning to blaming herself. With everything she knew, everything she learned, nothing had worked to save her mom. She hadn't even really concentrated that much on learning medicine. Biology wasn't as easy for her to grasp as mechanics. That might be why the nanotech evaded her.

Maybe if she had pushed herself to learn more about biology, she could have done something. Maybe if she had studied harder. Maybe if she had broken the key on the nanotech. Maybe if…

"It's not your fault." Uncle Strange's deep voice made his chest vibrate against the side of her head. She hadn't even realized until that moment that she had been mumbling her 'maybe if' litany out loud. "I was a neurosurgeon before I became the sorcerer supreme. A good one. It isn't Oncology, but I did handle some cancer cases. I still have acquaintances in Oncology. The best of the best. I brought them in. I stepped out of time to study, to see if anything in the mystic arts or medical science could help her. Nothing worked. Her death is an absolute point in time and there is nothing you, I or anyone else could have done to stop it."

She might have accused him of making up excuses, except she could hear the deep sorrow in his voice. Her mom had been his friend; one of few that he had since he held so many at arm's length. A fresh spate of tears welled up, but she relaxed against his chest, something in her heart unraveling, letting go of a seed of self-loathing. There really wasn't anything she could have done. She hadn't realized until that moment that she needed to hear that. She needed to believe it. Happy had told her it wasn't her fault. So had Peter. It wasn't until Uncle Strange told her the same thing that she finally believed it.

"Why?" she asked, her voice thick with tears.

"I don't know," said Uncle Strange, staring off into space. "If there are beings that control the fixed points in time, I haven't read about or confronted them yet."

"I hate them," she said, reaching up to swipe at the tears on her cheeks. Her head ached and she couldn't breathe in through her nose, but the tight, hot knot of pain that had burned in her chest for weeks seemed to have drained away for the moment, leaving an empty, hollow ache. It would come back. It always did, but for the moment, she was too exhausted to feel.

"I understand your hatred."

She sat up, away from Uncle Strange, still swiping at the wetness on her cheeks.

"Did anything bring this on, besides the obvious?" he asked.

Morgan glanced around the room, but it was pitch black dark with the light off.

"Don't tell Wong, but I don't like Hello Kitty. Or pink."

"What?" Uncle Strange used a hand to spin a mystic light out of thin air. Its golden glow cast his face in Saturnine shadows. He flicked his fingers to send the light toward the ceiling. It grew as it went, turning from gold to white and lighting up the room around them. Uncle Strange looked around like he had never seen the room before. He took in the pink pillows, cartoon cat and pink shag rug. A snort- laugh burst out of him.

"Wong has met you before today, right?" he asked, chuckling and shaking his head at the room.

"I thought so," she said, looking around forlornly. It looked even worse under the mystic light. Uncle Strange chuckled and stood. He turned in place to examine the room and made a sweeping gesture with one hand. The walls mellowed from pink to a pastel goldenrod. Another gesture changed the rug from shag to a tighter weave with abstract circles and shapes in dark shades of green. The white on the furniture colored to an auburn wood stain and black ate at the edges of the bedspread until the only white left was a shattered glass look over a cosmic background. The pink of the pillows and furniture stayed, but deepened to a dark mauve that somehow complimented the walls and rug.

Uncle Strange took two steps to the wall and flicked on the light switch. He turned and scowled at the results.

"Maybe too much color," he said, lifting a hand.

"No!" Morgan rushed to grab his hand before he could gesture. The ridges of scar tissue on his fingers flexed under her touch. "I love it. This is much better."

She looked around. Small as the place was, there was still a spot of wall where she could hang her transformers poster and another spot for pictures of her mom and dad.

"I just don't know where to put my projects." She didn't mean to say it out loud; it just slipped out. She didn't want to sound ungrateful, but after seeing Uncle Strange change everything in her room, her mind had automatically gone to her other problem.

"Ah. That." He gave her an impish smile and slipped the sling ring over his fingers. "I may not have remembered a place for you to sleep, but I did arrange a place for you to work."

With wide, circling gestures, Uncle Strange opened a spinning, sparking doorway to what appeared to be a converted garage. She recognized her attempt at her own armor set on a table to one side and an impressive computer display on the other side. It even had the touch-free workbench interface that made running simulations so easy. Tables with trays of hardware and space to work lined the back wall. Bright LED lights dotted the ceiling, lighting everything up like the midday sun. Her jaw dropped at the size of the place.

"Can I?"

Uncle Strange gestured through the spinning portal. "Go ahead."

With glee, she stepped through the portal. The garage felt a bit cooler than the sanctum and her ears popped from a change in air pressure. This place must be at a higher elevation than New York. Not that it mattered. Uncle Strange could portal her here any time she wanted. The Sorcerer Supreme followed her through the glowing arch and it closed behind them. He watched her with a bemused smile as she examined the work space.

"Your mother gave me the specs and Friday's data. Everything is here."

"Yes, Doctor Strange. I am booted up and ready to work," Friday said from speakers set into the ceiling. Morgan gaped at the computer, seeing a swirling representation of Friday's operating system appear in the touch-free display. For the first time since her mother died, she felt a little steadier on her feet.

"You brought Friday!" she breathed, looking up at Strange. He smiled.

"And I might have consulted with Rhodey on a couple of things," he said, gesturing for her to explore the workshop. "This is a secure place, only accessible via portal, so you can work here alone, if you need to."

Morgan turned to him, tears shimmering in her eyes and a wide smile on her face. She launched herself across the room and slammed into him with a tight hug.

"Thank you, Uncle Strange!"

Doctor Stephen Strange stared down at the girl in his arms. He had never imagined having a child. He'd never really wanted any. They would only take away from his life's work. In some ways, he had been right, but in that moment, he started to think that he might also have been wrong. He could have lived the rest of his life without a child and never missed it, but he didn't…couldn't…resent this little interloper. He placed a hand on her shoulder.

"I think Wong probably has lunch ready. You should try to eat."

Morgan made a face. "I'm not hungry."

"You need to try to eat. I know you haven't been eating."

Morgan's shoulders slumped. The idea of eating made her stomach roil. Uncle Strange gave her a stern look and she sighed.

"I'll try."

She managed to choke down half a sandwich and jasmine tea flavored with honey. After lunch, her other luggage arrived and she spent a few hours putting stuff away and arranging her things to her liking. She still ended up with a couple of boxes of stuff that had no place and she decided to take them to her workroom.

Her workroom. She had a workroom here. She had people that cared about her. Maybe…maybe this could become home, eventually. She missed her mom. She would always miss her mom, but she would be okay.

Sitting on the bed, she picked up a picture that she had set on her bedside table. It was taken when she was a toddler, when her family had been intact. New tears pricked the corners of her eyes, but she didn't feel the level of despair she had succumbed to earlier. A small smile curved her lips as she brushed fingers over her parents' faces.

"I love you three thousand," she whispered.