Stephen went outside on the master bedroom's tiny balcony which looked over the newly minted city-state of Tvania. People milled around, completely unaware of the drama hovering over them. A few cooking fires crackled in front yards, racks of rabbit and chicken and vegetables roasting on them. Delicious smells wafted through the air, mixed with the scents of the lush forest.
He sighed and rested his elbows on the balcony. The village was real, he didn't need a spell to uncover that. Still, Loki had somehow convinced all these people to follow him. There had to be a lie or a trick in here somewhere. This was Loki he was dealing with, after all.
A sudden crash from downstairs broke the peaceful silence, followed by Sylvie's angry screams.
"You kept telling me one of them would help, Mobius! You promised me!"
Stephen ran out of the bedroom and down the stairs, but waited at the bottom, hidden from view, listening.
"Sylvie, I tried!"
"You didn't try hard enough!"
Her heavy boots stomped around the place like a pounding hammer, then a clatter, like silverware scattering on the floor. She and Loki must have certainly been a pair. He wondered what a lover's spat between them would look like.
"I know you're angry, but that's no excuse to lose your mind, okay? I'll have to find someone else."
"No one can do anything! I've been trying to take care of him this whole time and I cannot do it anymore!"
Another crash, brittle and sharp, like broken glass.
"Stop! Enough!" Mobius thundered, startling him. Stephen didn't think Mobius's voice could even get that loud.
The house was eerily quiet after that, and Stephen couldn't make out what they were whispering. All he could hear were Sylvie's hiccupping sobs.
"Shit," he muttered. This was real. He'd be a monster if he didn't-
He stopped that thought in its tracks. Loki meant something to them, and he was sick, but he was not innocent. He'd somehow cheated his own death, a death that had ripped Thor's heart out and left him depressed for years. He'd murdered in cold blood, without hesitation, with a smile on his face, tried to force humanity to kneel to his will. Stephen couldn't forget watching the chilling footage from SHIELD's archives, of Loki taunting Black Widow like a sadistic maniac. He was no America Chavez. He wasn't even a Wanda Maximoff.
Stephen walked around the corner and into the kitchen, trying not to betray any emotion on his face. Broken china dishes and silverware littered the peeling linoleum floor. Mobius held a crying Sylvie in his arms, who straightened and scowled the second she caught sight of Stephen. She fiercely broke away from Mobius, head down, glaring like a lioness bent on killing her prey.
"You!" she growled.
Stephen prepared a spell with a golden glow of magical energy, every muscle taught and ready to fight.
"Sylvie!" hissed Mobius. She paused, breathing heavily, then stamped her foot with a frustrated scream, a shuddering vibration of angry magic emanating from her like a tiny earthquake. The house shook so violently for a moment that a bit of plaster fell from the ceiling.
Mobius let out another sigh, then took the tempad out of his pocket.
"I'll take you home, I guess," he mumbled, pressing buttons on the tempad.
"No," said Sylvie, a crazed look in those unnerving green eyes of hers. She crossed Stephen to stand in front of Mobius. "Don't let him leave. We kidnap him, that's what we do. We force him to help. He can't leave without you, right?"
"Good Lord," Mobius muttered, rubbing his forehead like he had a migraine. Stephen couldn't blame him. "Sylvie, no. He could obliterate us if he wanted to."
"Smart man," said Strange, which earned a disgusted look from Sylvie. She walked up to him, sneering, like she was ready to take a bite out of him, just for the hell of it.
"You're scum," she spat, then turned and exited the kitchen through the back sliding glass door, stomping into the overgrown backyard and disappearing into the underbrush.
"Is she always like that?"
"Only when she's desperate," replied Mobius solemnly.
After a moment, Stephen spoke again. "Look, Mobius-"
Mobius looked up at him with a glimmer of hope in his eye that made Stephen feel like garbage.
"I don't think you should keep looking for variants of me. I'm sure there are other doctors out there who can help, other sorcerers-"
"I don't think so," Mobius interrupted him. "There's no other doctors-turned-sorcerers I can think of."
"Why me, though?"
Mobius finished putting the coordinates into the tempad, and a doorlike portal opened in front of them, the Sanctum visible through a golden haze of light.
"Because you're the best there is, Strange."
Stephen took one last look at Mobius, who seemed like he'd aged ten years in the past hour, then stepped through the door. Before he could turn around and apologize, the portal had closed, leaving him in the lonely, empty library in the dying evening light.
The next morning, Stephen sat down at the side bay window nook in the kitchen of the Sanctorum, sipping a chai tea, eating scrambled eggs, wondering if Mobius was still looking for him in some other universe, when his phone buzzed. The name 'Christine' popped up on the screen. His heart skipped a beat. She never called, only texted, and rarely.
"Hey! How are you?" he answered the phone, much too brightly for how early it was.
"Fine. Tired," she said, stifling a yawn. "Had to cover for Dr. Morrison last night. I'm surprised your phone works in another universe. I was just going to leave a voicemail to ask you to call me and let me know as soon as you got back."
"Oh," he said, voice dropping guiltily. "I didn't actually stay there very long."
"You helped him that quickly?" She was chewing something as she spoke, having breakfast just like he was. "What was wrong with Mobius's friend?"
He paused for much too long.
"Stephen, you didn't do it, did you?"
He winced and cursed himself for not thinking of a lie immediately. Christine was as sharp as a tack, and knew him better than anyone. Anything he tried to come up with then, she'd see through like a pane of glass, even over the phone.
"Why?" she continued. "Was it really too much to handle?"
"In a way, yes. Christine, his friend was Loki."
She stopped chewing. "That Loki?"
"Yes, that Loki. The bad one, who killed lots of people. That Loki."
"I thought he died?"
"He didn't, apparently. He cheated his own death, somehow. Or a variant of himself did, I'm not sure. But he's still the one who tried to blow up New York."
She paused for an agonizingly long time. Stephen nearly thought she'd hung up when she finally spoke again, in a tone that surprised him.
"You didn't help him, though, even though Mobius went to you, specifically?"
He nearly laughed. "Christine! It was Loki. The guy who-"
"Yes, I know who," she cut him off curtly. "But was it some kind of trick or did he actually need help, and then you refused?"
She was angry now, he could tell. He couldn't believe it. They'd been through the same hellish nightmare together during the Battle of New York.
"That's not important. If I had helped him with whatever disease he had-"
"Disease? Stephen, how bad was it?"
She sounded incensed, as if she was his mother demanding that he explain why he'd skipped school.
"It doesn't matter," he said, desperate to change the subject. "There's no use in helping someone like him, he would only create more problems if he was healthy."
"I can't believe what I'm hearing. You always want to hold the knife, but now you refuse to use it? You took an oath-"
"The Hippocratic oath doesn't apply to sorcerers," he said, now growing angry himself. How could they not see eye to eye on this? "I made a decision that wasn't based on anything but preservation, okay? He should have been dead anyway."
"'Warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh- '"
"'-The surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug', yeah, yeah."
"'Above all,'" she kept going, "'I must not play at God.'"
"I have to play God, sometimes!" he exploded, leaving a chasm of silence between them. "I have to play God," he repeated, quieter, letting the gravity of that truth sink in for both of them.
"Stephen, you refused help to someone who needed it. It doesn't matter who it was. It doesn't matter what you think of them. If you're a doctor, you are supposed to try to help everyone you can, even if they just spat in your mother's face."
He knew somewhere deep down that she was right, but he couldn't back down now. "You don't know anything. You've seen me fight, but you haven't seen everything I have to go through to have a chance of winning. You don't heal your enemy if they are just going to immediately stab you once they're better. That's stupidity."
"Then stop calling yourself Doctor," she said, quiet, but with embers burning underneath. "You're not a doctor anymore. You just said so. You don't have a doctor's M.O. You don't have a doctor's respect for life. Call yourself Mr. Strange, you hypocrite."
"I worked hard for that degree-"
"And you just threw it away."
He let out a breath he didn't realize he was holding in so tightly.
"I'm coming over," she said suddenly.
Stephen nearly gasped. "What? Why? I'm not dressed yet, you need to go to bed-"
"I am coming over, and you're going to somehow get me to that universe. Make a portal or call America Chavez or something-"
"No."
"-Because I am going to be the one to help him, because you won't."
"Christine, he could kill you!"
He didn't know if she'd heard him because the phone beeped twice, signaling the end of the call. She was serious. Well, if she was going to be stubborn about it, then he had to be, too, for her sake.
Twenty minutes later, there came an expected pounding on the Sanctum's enormous front door, fast and angry. Stephen hurried down the wide staircase, happy that Wong was busy and wasn't there to answer it before him.
He stood next to the door and shouted through the crack, "Christine, please go away."
Boom. Boom. Boom. The Sanctum's oversized knocker rang through the foyer, startling him.
"Christine," he warned, "You are delirious with sleep deprivation. If you go take a nap, you'll feel better about all this, I promise."
"I am not a toddler, Stephen!" she shouted back.
"You're acting like one."
"No, I'm, not!" she punctuated each word with a boom from the knocker. He cringes, fearing he might go deaf if she kept it up.
"Fine," he muttered to himself, rolling up his sleeves. "You want to play this game even though you don't have any cards? I'll play."
He made a portal to the outside. Christine stood there holding on to the knocker in cold morning drizzle, without an umbrella or a proper coat. If she weren't so angry, she'd look pathetic, like a drowned kitten clinging to a branch.
"You're going to get sick," he told her.
"Let me in."
He wasn't mad anymore, just mildly amused that she thought she could make him do anything. He made another portal behind her and she let out a sigh of relief as she turned around.
"Finally, now we-" she stopped when she realized the portal went straight back to the foot of her bed.
"Go to bed, Christine," said Stephen, and gave her a light shove through the portal. She stumbled with a yelp and fell face first on her mattress. He closed the portal quickly, feeling like he'd just released a spider outside and needed to get away as soon as he could.
"That was mean, Stephen," he muttered to himself, portaling back into the Sanctum. "She'll get over it, though."
The rain continued and got worse within the hour, the sun barely getting a chance to peek through the clouds. Stephen was about to start cooking lunch for himself when the second knock came.
"No," he mumbled. She wasn't trying it again. He decided to open the door that time, in case it was someone with an emergency.
"God damn it."
Christine had an umbrella this time at least, and closed it with a snap, sending a spray of water in his face. She pushed past him and into the foyer, towards the stairs, as if she had the slightest clue where she was going.
"Did you talk to America yet?" she asked as she walked.
"Nope," said Stephen, making another portal in front of her. Before she could avoid it, he moved the portal towards her, enveloping her in it, then closed it with a sizzle of golden light.
By five-o-clock that evening, Stephen had nearly lost his mind. Christine came back the third time, and the fourth time, and the fifth time, just as stubbornly determined, like a robot on a mission with no need to eat or sleep.
By dinnertime, the rain was a relentless monsoon. The knock came once more, like thunder echoing through the Sanctum.
"Are you kidding me?" he screamed.
Stephen shoved himself out of his chair and made yet another portal to meet her outside. She was soaked, despite her raincoat and umbrella.
He pointed at her, hand trembling. "I have been really nice to you so far, putting you right back in your house over and over, but I will put you on the top of the Himalayas this time, I swear to god!"
"Did you get hold of America?" she asked coolly.
"No! I absolutely-" he paused, then sighed with pure exasperation and covered his face with his hands. "You just did something I didn't think was possible, Christine."
"What's that?" She tilted her head with a cocky little smirk that she got on her face when she knew she'd won.
"You made me feel sorry for Dormammu."