Chapter 6

Morgan brought herself back home, not sure what, if anything, she had accomplished. She wasn't even sure what she wanted to accomplish. All she knew was that Dark Strange had helped her and she wanted to find a way to help him in return.

When she did finally settle back into her body, her stomach growled loud enough to hear it. Wincing, she rose from her bed and fetched pop tarts from the tiny kitchen in the Sanctum's basement. She very nearly fell asleep eating them. As soon as she tucked enough away to shut her stomach up, she fell into bed and dreamed of tentacles and webbed wings.

When she awoke, Uncle Strange still hadn't returned. Just for something to do, she went to the room where Wong taught her martial arts, stretched and spent an hour practicing. Unfortunately, the exercise left her mind free to think.

She had decided she wanted to help Dark Strange get out of that prison, but she wasn't sure how. Surely, anything she could do, he had already tried. But at the same time, sorcery was as much about study and drawing on the power of other beings as rote magic. Having destroyed his own reality, maybe he couldn't access resources she could. She hadn't tried moving through the sphere wall in her astral form. Maybe she couldn't. If the walls of that reality were so compacted they wouldn't allow astral exchange, that would explain why a sorcerer supreme could be imprisoned there.

So, how was she supposed to help him?

Morgan slammed a fist into the practice dummy she had been pummeling. This wasn't doing enough to distract her mind. She needed her workshop. Reaching down, she took the sling ring from her pocket. She slid it onto her fingers and then stopped, staring at it. Could she portal into Dark Strange's shattered reality? Surely he would have portaled out if that was possible, but what if his sling ring was destroyed with his reality? What if all the sling rings in his reality were destroyed, along with the resources to create them? Could it really be that simple?

Closing her eyes, she concentrated on picturing the slab of concrete with the curve of the crystalline sphere behind it. She had only viewed the reality from the outside, but she could imagine what it looked like from the inside. She imagined the arch of translucent blue, looking out on an empty, uncaring expanse of darkness. She pictured the cracks in the slab of concrete, aiming to put the portal near the edge so she didn't take up all of Dark Strange's space in there.

With brow furrowed, she held out the hand with her sling ring and began describing a circle in the air with the first two fingers raised on her other hand. Sparks spun into a circle. They sputtered with the strength of her concentration until she felt something click and the image in her mind solidified, as though she could actually see the remains of the pocket dimension that was all that was left of Dark Strange's reality. The spinning, sparking circle widened until it was just tall enough for her to walk through without ducking.

Opening her eyes, she could see the scintillating sphere on the other side of the portal and something indescribable off to the left. She had seen Dark Strange in his inhuman morphs and thought nothing of the size and shape of the thing in the pocket dimension. She stepped through the portal, grinning from ear to ear.

The thing turned on her, eyes of gold, red, green and blue covering the massive, drooping head. Horns sprouted from its elongated skull, too many to count, like a nest of snakes frozen in place, twisted and warped. The great jaw opened, revealing rows and rows of sharp, crooked teeth. Tentacles fused into the thing's torso like grotesque ropes of flesh binding it in place. It leaned on one bulging, deformed arm that looked something like the trunk and roots of an uprooted tree sprouting from the shoulder. The other hand, still relatively humanoid, reached for her.

"Lost one." The voice that came from that gaping maw was guttural and ended on a low growl. It sounded nothing like the voice she recognized. "Your power will be mine."

The fingers were within an inch of her face before she realized what was happening. This wasn't Dark Strange. Or, if it was, he wasn't in his right mind. She threw herself to the side, dodging the fingers by a hairsbreadth. He opened his mouth again, a fiery glow erupting from his throat and eyes. The light seemed to hit her like a sledgehammer. It grasped her in an incorporeal grip, dragging her toward him. It burned where it touched her skin and she screamed as a tearing, ripping agony writhed across her flesh. She tried to scramble away, but the power drew her like iron to a magnet.

Darkness had begun to eat at the edges of her vision when a dark shadow flitted through the glow and it suddenly cut off as Dark Strange's black and gold cloak wrapped itself around his head. The pain vanished and Morgan dropped to her knees, gasping with the memory of that tearing ache.

Dark Strange ripped at the cloak with his mostly humanoid hand, trying to pull it free as it twined itself tighter around his head. One corner of the cloak gestured at the portal and Morgan needed no further prodding. She dived through the circle of spinning sparks and slammed it closed behind her. She sprawled on the floor of the practice room, heart pounding and lungs heaving. A phantom ache, just the memory of the pain of whatever spell he had started to use on her, burned across her skin like she'd lain in the sun for hours without sunscreen.

Groaning, she rolled over, tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. What had happened? Dark Strange had helped her, before. He had never tried to hurt her. She had started to think of him as a friend. Had he lied? Had he hidden a darker motive, waiting for her to come to him like a spider at the center of its web?

That made her think of Peter and his close association with spiders. Uncle Strange still wasn't home and she didn't want to talk to him, anyway. He would be angry that she had tried something so fundamentally stupid. All she really knew about Dark Strange was that he had destroyed his own reality. Mistake or not, there should have come a point where he realized what he was doing and stopped before it was too late. He had told her, himself, how self-absorbed he had been. He had warned her of his capacity for evil. And yet…that hadn't seemed like him. She needed advice.

Staggering to her feet, she spun up a portal to a New York apartment she had been in many times. When she crossed the threshold, someone yelped and a flurry of movement to her right made her turn, falling into a defensive crouch. The encounter with Dark Strange had her on edge.

She found a wide-eyed MJ on the couch, a blanket pulled up to her chin and Peter scrambling into pants beside her, muscles flexing under the pale skin of his chest. She caught a glimpse of something she never wanted to see on him and flushed bright red, turning her back on them.

"I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to interrupt!" Her face felt hot with embarrassment and it flared the lingering ache of the spell Dark Strange had used against her. She knew what she had stumbled on. She had been able to read since age three and learned to hack internet parental controls at five. Her mom had made sure to educate her on what she would inevitably find on the internet. She didn't get the appeal, yet, but she knew what they must have been doing when she interrupted.

"I'm sorry! I'll just go. I'm really sorry." The portal had closed behind her and she started spinning up a new one.

"It's okay! Just…MJ…do you want to go to our room? This must be important." Peter came around the coffee table, shrugging into a long-sleeve shirt. "Is Doctor Strange okay, Morgan? What's wrong?"

Morgan's hands dropped, the portal sputtering out. Tears of mortification, pain, betrayal and all around stress slipped down her cheeks. Seeing them, Peter rushed to take her arms. "What's wrong, Morgan? Does Doctor Strange need my help?" He reached for the web slingers on the coffee table, but she launched herself at him before he could reach them. She wrapped her arms around his ribs, sobbing into his chest. Surprised, his arms closed around her and that was what she had needed. Uncle Strange made a good parent and teacher, but Peter was like her older brother. She sobbed into his shoulder and he sat right there on the floor, curling her up in his lap and making soothing shushing sounds into her hair.

"He tricked me, Peter! I thought he was my friend and he tricked me!"

"Who? Who tricked you, Morgan?" Peter pushed her back to look into her eyes. She swiped at the tears running down her cheeks and tried to breathe through a stuffy nose.

"Dark Strange. He helped me find my way home when I got lost on the astral plane and he seemed nice, just…you know…miserable. I wanted to help him, but when I made a portal to his reality, he attacked me!"

"Portal? Astral plane? Morgan, is Doctor Strange teaching you to be a wizard?"

Morgan sniffed and blinked at him, shocked that he didn't know. But, she thought back and realized she hadn't seen him since the funeral for her mom. That thought brought on a new gush of tears. How could she forget the closest thing she ever had to a brother?

"Sorcerer. He's teaching me to be a sorcerer. I'm not going to Hogwarts," she said, trying to use the joke to quell the tears.

"Okay. Sorcerer. So, that's new. And you can already astral project and make portals?" She nodded, sniffling through her stuffy nose. She could see him processing the information she had given him and his brows drew down in a dark look. "Okay. But he tricked you?"

"No! Not Uncle Strange. Dark Strange tricked me!" Peter's scowl smoothed into lines of confusion and Morgan clenched her fists, frustrated with her own babbling. "When I astral projected for the first time, I…I got lost. I found a broken reality with another version of Uncle Strange in it. I call him Dark Strange because he's…well…you'd have to see him. Anyway. He helped me find my way home. He didn't ask me for anything. He even told me he deserved to be stuck where he was because he broke his reality. He's the only one left of it.

"I thought he just made a really big mistake. I wanted to help him. He seems so sad and angry with himself. He's trapped there, all alone and I didn't want him to be alone. But, when I tried to go into his reality with a portal, he attacked me. Was I wrong? Was he tricking me all along?" A fresh sob heaved out of her chest and she collapsed back against him. Peter held her while he processed what she had said. He looked up at MJ, standing in the doorway of the bedroom with a robe wrapped around her slim frame. She had heard everything. She wouldn't have been able to help but hear in the tiny New York apartment they shared.

"Hey, Morgan." MJ joined them on the floor and Morgan blearily peered at her from under Peter's arm. "Does Doctor Strange know about…you know, what happened?"

"Some of it," Morgan confessed. "He didn't believe me about Dark Strange at first. He said that alternate timelines are a legend and there are no other realities, just other dimensions."

"Technically another dimension is another reality…"

"Hush, Peter. Not now," MJ said, never taking her eyes off of Morgan. Peter bit off what he was saying, realizing it didn't matter at that moment. Morgan gulped down a hiccup and took a shaky breath. Explaining to MJ seemed to calm the panic and anger welling in her chest.

"He made me take him to see Dark Strange. He was kind of mean to him. He said he deserved to be left there alone because he destroyed his own reality. But he was trying to bring back someone he loved and I thought I might do the same thing to bring mom back and I felt bad for him. He said if he had it to do over, he wouldn't have destroyed his reality."

"How can anyone destroy an entire reality?" Peter asked, eyes wide as MJ looked at him.

Morgan explained what Dark Strange had told them, how he had gained all that power. She described the way he shifted around, seemingly out of his control.

"I think you should stay away from him, Morgan," Peter said, scowling at the thought of something with that much power and questionable morals near Tony Stark's daughter. Just as she thought of him as a brother, he had unofficially adopted her as his sister and he wasn't sure how he felt about Doctor Strange teaching her the mystic arts, even if Pepper had asked Stephen to take care of her after she was gone.

MJ took Morgan's hands and looked into her eyes.

"Do you think he was tricking you?" she asked. Morgan rolled her lips together and between her teeth, then shook her head.

"No. I mean, maybe he's just a really good actor, but I would swear he was honest. It didn't even sound like him when he attacked me. He wasn't human at all. I'm not sure he completely recognized me. It happened so fast, it's hard to say. It was almost like one of the…things…he had absorbed was in control."

"I don't know, Morgan. Some people are really just that good at hiding their intentions," Peter said, his thoughts going to when he battled Mysterio and how he'd made one of the worst mistakes in his life.

"At this point, I'm not sure it matters," MJ said. "Whether he's just a really good actor that tricked you or possessed by the things he's absorbed, he's dangerous. He attacked you once. He could do it again."

Morgan nodded. She agreed with MJ, but she still didn't like it. Something in there had been worth saving. She still believed that.

"How did you get away?" Peter asked. "You didn't say."

"His cloak. It's like Uncle Strange's, but looks different. It wrapped around his head so I could get away. It…oh no! It's still there with him! What if whatever part of him attacked me is angry with it? What if he hurts it?"

Peter and MJ looked at each other. "Umm…Morgan, it's just a cloak," MJ said.

"No! That's like saying Friday is just a computer, or EDITH is just a defense system! Uncle Strange's cloak is sentient, maybe even sapient and so is Dark Strange's. It saved me. I have to check on it!" Morgan jumped up, sliding her sling ring on. She spun her fastest portal yet into existence.

"Morgan, wait!"

Ignoring Peter's protest, Morgan jumped through into her workshop and shut the portal down before they could follow her. Hoping she had time before Peter called Uncle Strange, which he inevitably would, she sat on the floor and closed her eyes, shrugging out of her body with ease. She raced to the beacon at the tiny pocket dimension, set on checking on the cloak, even as dread coursed through her at the thought of facing Dark Strange again.

She found him in much the same position as the first time, fully human, sprawled in a heap on the ground with the cloak covering him, intact. Morgan sighed with relief to see the cloak unharmed. Dark Strange looked up at the sound of her sigh. He scrambled to his feet and she backed away with a wave of fear. His face fell.

"So it wasn't a dream," he said, his expression pained. "Morgan, I'm sorry. Words can't describe how sorry I am. I had hoped it was a nightmare, the memory of trying to absorb you." His knees buckled, hitting the ground with a loud crack and he hunched forward, running hands through his hair as he tucked his head against his knees.

Morgan floated back toward him. Could she believe him?

"Your cloak saved me but you didn't hurt it."

Dark Strange stroked the lapel of his cloak fondly.

"He's faster than me when I'm not all here and he knows my heart. He knew I didn't want to hurt you. He's been the closest thing to a friend I've had until you came." He sat back on his heels, looking up at her. "Please, Morgan. Promise me you won't ever try that again. I'm trapped here and I need to be trapped here. Some of the things I've absorbed are powerful beyond your imagining and they're still there, still aware sometimes. I can't always control them. I believe I'm not entirely sane anymore, at least, not all the time."

He shuddered and something moved under his skin, pushing at it like a baby in its mother's womb. Morgan shivered.

"I appreciate your company. Talking to someone again after so long has been wondrous, but don't risk yourself like that again. Just…don't." Tears slipped down his cheeks as he pleaded with her and Morgan's eyes grew wide. She had never seen Uncle Strange cry and it felt…not wrong, exactly, but different.

Dark Strange's cloak wrapped around him like a hug and he sighed. "Please promise."

"Oh! Yes. I promise," she said, her mind whirling. He hadn't tricked her after all. If he'd meant to trick her, wouldn't he have tried to talk her into letting him out? Instead, he had warned her not to let him out at every turn. This time, she would listen.

"I promise I won't try to let you out again, but I'll be back. I have to go before Uncle Strange shows up. But no matter what, I'll be back."

"Go. And thank you for forgiving me."

"Sure. No problem."

She left as fast as she had arrived, her mind working furiously as an idea began to form.