Christine's stopwatch app counted down, the decimals flickering by, each second feeling like an hour. That painful two and a half minutes already felt longer than eternity, and he was only halfway through. The EKG let out a long, high pitched beep, announcing that Stephen's heart was asystole, but she kept it on. She needed to monitor it so she could get his heartbeat back in a minute or so.
She bit her lip and her face flushed with anger. She hated him so much for making her do this. It didn't matter what he'd told her, how much he reassured her, she'd never forgive herself if she couldn't get him back. There were so many things she needed to say that she'd never be able to express if he stayed dead. He always kept her in his orbit, like an asteroid circling a planet over and over. At first, she'd taken that behavior for desperation, but it felt like something more, now. They trusted each other with their lives instinctively. They always had. It had to mean something in the grand scheme of things, more than friendship, maybe more than romance, like there was a metaphysical connection between them that refused to break.
Her thoughts were cut short as she and Mobius heard it at the same time: footsteps walking briskly down the hall. They didn't bother moving, since Stephen's spell had stayed fast even after he'd died, but they looked up and tensely watched the door, like deer frozen in headlights.
"Dr. Palmer," whispered Mobius from behind, startling her.
"I know, Mobius," she hissed, surprising herself, getting the airway box, defibrillator, and epinephrine ready at her side.
She turned down the sound on the EKG slightly, listening, while keeping one eye on the stopwatch quickly counting down the seconds until she had to revive him.
The footsteps stopped abruptly outside the window, a shadow hovering there like a curious ghost. The shadow moved forward until it disappeared, but the footsteps didn't return. Someone suspected something, and they were waiting right behind the door.
"Dr. Palmer?" whispered Mobius, "Did Dr. Strange's spell only work with sight? Can they hear anything?"
Her stomach dropped. She had no idea, and they were about to find out in less than a minute.
Stephen flew close next to the Ancient One-Sorcha-as they sped above the barren wasteland, a rocky, dry landscape below them, nothing on the horizon but endless spheres of color in the sky.
"Can I ask you something?" he said.
"Yes?"
He lowered his voice, feeling awkward. "In the dream where you spoke to me … you were my mother in that universe?"
"Yes … " her voice dropped, but she didn't even glance his way.
"Does that mean anything? You know, in our universe?"
"Stephen."
"Because I don't know if I can take it if you've been lying to me this whole time." He chuckled, an uncomfortable sort of panic growing in him. "If I'm adopted then I think you probably should have said something to me."
She let out a long, irritated sigh.
"Did you maybe have a little too much fun at a Full Moon party in the seventies, or … ?"
"Stephen, we are not related," she said, rolling her eyes.
"You're sure? Because I won't tell anybody, I just need to know."
She took a curve to the left at full speed, nearly crashing into him, but he ducked and popped up on the other side of her. In the direction they were now headed, the sky became darker, the light from the afterlives above them growing dimmer as well. There were fewer bubbles here, too, and they started to take on more unusual, uneven shapes.
"If you're so concerned about it," she said, "Then go ahead and take one of those genetic tests when you go back. If you're at least fifty percent pure Scottish, then you can worry."
"Got it."
They flew in silence the rest of the way, the landscape changing from a neutral sepia color to a dark, foreboding red, exactly like the demon's realm in his dream. The Ancient One finally slowed as they neared the edge of a sheer cliff. Off in the distance, beyond the drop, one round, dark cloud hovered close to the ground in a desert of swirling red sand.
They both stopped and stood at the very edge of the cliff.
"That is what you must face," she said gravely. "That is the realm of Nightmare."
"Nightmares, you mean?"
"No. The demon's name is Nightmare. He is the guide through the most terrifying dreams that sapient creatures have ever seen."
"But dreams are just mirrors into other universes, right? They're not psychological."
She squinted into the distance. "It's a bit more complicated than that, Stephen. He was created by the eldest gods to bridge the gap between dreams and the budding consciousness of thinking beings."
"You're … going to have to explain that a little."
"Nightmares-existential fear-are important parts of the evolved human mind, and all other sapient creatures. Dogs dream about chasing squirrels-we dream about our teeth falling out because we fear we've been silenced. Do you see the difference? He was meant to lead sleeping minds to what their subconscious feels they need to see."
"So, a demon helped humanity evolve?" he said incredulously.
"Yes. Or at least, he was supposed to."
A hot, dry wind blew at their backs, threatening to push them forward into the chasm. Stephen swallowed, his mouth dry as cotton. No wonder Loki looked like he'd had all the fluid squeezed out of him.
"He used to fulfill his purpose, as frightening as it was for those who he guided, but eventually, evolution took its own path and sentient beings could find their own dreams without his help. He grew restless, bitter … angry. Without a job to do, he started stealing people from their realms through their dreams and trapping them in his. He meant to make a realm for himself, by stealing people's life force and using it to break into their universe. He nearly succeeded, too, but the elder gods fettered his power so that he could only trap one being at a time."
"Why not just destroy him?"
"They refused to kill him. They believe he will be needed again, when all life is snuffed in every universe and the cycle of creation begins anew … in a few billion eons.
"Nightmare didn't take his sentence lying down, of course. He found a way around his psychic shackles and nearly succeeded in claiming a universe for himself while occupying only one mind."
Stephen gasped as he made the connection. All the chaotically melded-together materials in Westview, the scattered bodies with no apparent cause of death.
"He found a variant of Wanda?"
"Exactly," she said, nodding. "Nightmare took over an entire world through Wanda Maximoff's psychic powers, turning her to madness, but ran just short of energy when every single human died, including her."
"So he found another powerful, magical being to finish the job." Stephen said.
A flash of red lightning lit up the hovering cloud, and a burst of crimson traveled through a lightning bolt that wandered from the top of the cloud into the sky-Loki's tether. The storm roiled and seethed angrily, like a nest of snakes slithering over each other. Stephen let out a deep sigh.
"Loki's in the middle of that thing, isn't he?"
"Yes. And he needs your help before Nightmare cracks open his universe like an egg and possesses every living thing in it."
Stephen shook his head in disbelief. "How do you even know this stuff?" he muttered.
"Oh, there are plenty of friendly gods around, willing to gab about pretty much every secret of the multiverse." She smiled at him. "If you were to stay, I would introduce you to Taweret.*"
"Tawe-who?"
"Taweret. Egyptian goddess, protector of women and children. She's a hippo, but she's lovely."
"Wow," he said, "rude much?"
"No, Stephen," she replied flatly, "she's literally a hippopotamus. And they aren't known for being good natured. Neither are most of the Egyptian deities."
She looked back into the distance, the wind quickly drying out her golden robes as it whipped around them.
"All right," he said, gathering his wits about him, "What do I need to do? How do I fight this thing? I read a whole lot of poetry and philosophy, like you told me to, now I'm ready to figure out how to use it."
The Ancient One stood stock-still and closed her eyes, as if he'd just given her a huge migraine.
"No, you're obviously not ready."
"What?" he exclaimed.
"You didn't understand why I told you to study the philosophers and poets. I hoped you would figure it out, but then you've always been much more yang than yin, haven't you?"
He shrugged. "You could have been just a little more specific."
"There was no time," she said, her voice still low, but cutting like a knife through the air. "I suppose you spent all that time wondering what in the world you were supposed to get out of it."
"As a matter of fact, I did." He truly hated to admit that he didn't understand the Ancient One's wisdom at that moment, but he was growing impatient, and more anxious by the minute, dreading that someone would pull him back into the living world.
"I told you that you could not defeat this enemy. The complexity of the human mind is nothing but a children's puzzle to him. He wields only one weapon, but he's had billions of years of practice. You've been a sorcerer for, what, a decade? Less, perhaps?"
"What weapon?"
"Fear. He is fear itself. There is no magic that will defeat his wrath. The only thing you can do is weather his storm. Fortify your mind."
Stephen was dumbfounded, millions of questions running through his head, and no time to ask most of them.
"Why me, then? Why do I have to face off against the literal boogeyman?"
She gave him another wry smirk. "Because you're the best there is, Strange."
He smiled at Mobius's words reflected back at him. He was glad that she'd watched over him the whole time, somehow, having unwavering faith in him, knowing he'd come back to help.
"What do you fear, Stephen?" she asked suddenly.
He thought for a long moment, then answered definitively.
"Failure."
She squinted and shook her head thoughtfully. "No, I don't think so. Try again."
"But … I am. I can't think of anything I hate more than failing."
"You watched yourself fail more than fourteen million times in order to bring back half the universe from the Snap. You must be numb to it by now."
"Well, if you'd asked me a week or two ago, I might have said 'death', but … " he gestured around himself to the barren, red landscape.
He tried to quiet his ever-thinking brain and focus on something more terrible than failure, than death, than losing a patient he could have saved.
His sister's face flashed in his mind, not her pink, rosy cheeks, but her cold, dead stare, her mouth agape, eyeballs freezing into ice cubes. He had screamed for help until he felt like it was no longer his voice crying out. He continued even after his parents got there, repeating one phrase over and over-
"I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do."
"I'm afraid of not knowing," he told the Ancient One. "I'm afraid of being unprepared. If I fail, at least I always know that I've done everything I possibly could beforehand. But failing, knowing that there was no way to have the tools or knowledge to succeed? I can't deal with that.
"I never could have brought Donna back to life that day, Sorcha," he said, the Ancient One giving him a surprised, but gentle look as he used her real name. "There was no way for me to know what to do. I was just a kid." Tears stung his eyes again, dried quickly by the desert wind.
The Ancient One nodded in her patient, knowing way. "Amor fati," she said, as if it was the first words of a spell.
A vague memory popped up from the sludge of philosophy still fermenting in his brain.
"Love of fate? Nietzsche, right?"
"The concept is as old as the Stoic Greek philosophers, but yes. Accept and relish everything that happens, Stephen, good and bad. It is all necessary."
"That sounds way too much like Taoism."
"'Love the whole world as if it were yourself; then you will truly care for all things.'" She quoted the Tao Te Ching as easily as if she'd read it yesterday. "That counts for the bad things, too."
His fear ebbed a little at her words. In the weird sitcom-based universe he'd seen in his dream, and in their universe, the Ancient One always knew just what to say.
"This is probably all the yang in me talking," he said, giving her a sidelong glance, "but I suppose I'm just going to have to dive in, head first, before-"
He stopped and yelped as a painful shock ran though his chest.
"What is it, Stephen?"
"I-I don't know," he replied, stunned, until he realized what must be happening. It was a defibrillator. He was too late. He'd stayed too long.
Without warning, some invisible force pulled him violently backwards, away from the cliff face, as if someone had attached a rope to his ankle and the other end to a racecar going full speed.
The Ancient One took off after him, yelling, "Stephen!, Stephen!" her arm outstretched from him to grab. She couldn't fly quite fast enough, her fingers always an inch or so out of reach.
He screamed as another shock jolted through him, even more painful, the invisible racecar going even more quickly, pulling away from the Ancient One, who was already at full speed. She became a blur on the horizon, yelling his name into the void of the First Cosmos.
Stephen was as terrified and as helpless as a fish caught on a line as the force tugged him backwards, faster and faster. The pull dipped him down into the valley once again, and with a splash, drug him back underwater, into its depths of nothingness. He lost his breath, his sensations, his sense of self, as the light above faded away into a pinprick.
"Clear!"
With one last painful shock, Stephen came back into the physical realm, as upset and disoriented as a newborn baby. He groaned, dizzy and as sick, trying to bring the world around him into focus. Nurses and doctors milled about the room, making a blur of activity, talking above each other and handing medical equipment back and forth. Christine's voice rang out for him through the haze.
"Stephen!" she cried, throwing her arms around him, pulling herself against his naked chest. His sickness subsided for a moment and he forced his arms to work so he could hold her for a few, precious seconds. He couldn't quite make out Christine's finer details thorough his confusion, but he smelled the scent of her, felt her relieved sigh resonate deep in his chest.
"Doctor Palmer?" said a voice that made Stephen's stomach ache again. She let go of him and faced Georgia, who looked like a talking glob of neon pink to Stephen.
"Why in the world have I seen you here twice in twenty four hours?" she asked, a deadly serious edge to her voice. "You're going to tell me why you weren't doing anything when you were supposed to be calling a code?"
Christine puffed out her chest and talked back to her with a tone of ironclad confidence.
"I do not have to tell you anything, Nurse Jenkins," she said. "I am your superior, and you're not going to talk to me that way."
"I think the chief of medicine would like to know why you gave a healthy man pentobarbital!" she yelled. She held up the bag of fluid as the other doctors and nurses looked on in uncertain silence. "What were you trying to do, murder him?"
"Ged out," slurred Stephen. Despite his nausea and pounding headache, he lifted himself up and flung his feet over the side of the bed. "You're not s'posedta be here."
"Are you in danger, Stephen?" she asked him. "Is she trying to hurt you?"
"Get out!"
Stephen made a shaky portal and moved it over Georgia and the small crowd of astonished hospital staff, nearly making it swallow up Christine in the process. She jumped out of the way just in time for Georgia to scream, "Damn it, Strange!" before the portal sizzled closed.
"We've gotta get out of here," Stephen grunted, trying to stand up and grabbing the side of the bed for balance.
"You're in no condition-"
"Now!" he said, barely able to think. All he knew was that he had to keep his promise to protect Christine. Someone would call the cops soon, or even SHEILD, and he wasn't about to deal with that.
"Mobius?" asked Stephen.
"I'm trying," he replied, pressing buttons into the tempad, to no avail. "Shit. I think the battery's had it, Strange."
Mobius rattled it around and banged it against his hand a few times. To everyone's shock, a portal suddenly opened up on the floor like a trap door directly under Mobius and dropped him and the tempad several feet into a body of water, like the worst timed Looney Tunes gag ever.
Stephen and Christine knelt at the edge of the portal, waiting for a few anxious seconds. Mobius didn't come up for air. Disconcertingly huge bubbles broke the surface of the dark, debris-filled water, but nothing more.
Mobius was caught on something. The world he'd dropped into was too dark to see what it was. Dr. Strange tried to cast a spell to form a pair of magical hands, but whatever came out was a jumble of confused energy that nearly made him pass out. The portal was all he could handle. He needed to send his Cloak of Levitation underwater to free him.
"He's stuck," whispered Stephen, looking around at the empty hospital room. "Christine, where's my Cloak?"
"You didn't bring it, remember?"
"I didn't-oh, damn it!" He smacked his hand on the tile floor in frustration. Of course he needed it now. Taking a deep breath, he focused as best he could and dove sloppily into the murky water, the splash muffling Christine's surprised scream.
He swam straight down, still sick as a dog and now blind in the water, until he felt himself hit Mobius's hand. He swam further, trying to feel all over him like a police pat-down looking for the reason he was stuck. After a couple of agonizing moments, Stephen's hand brushed the huge tree branch that Mobius' ankle was wedged tightly into. Stephen freed it, grabbed Mobius' arm, and they both burst from the water, gasping for air.
Christine now dangled more than halfway out of the portal, holding Stephen's sweatshirt down to them.
"Stephen, climb up!" she yelled.
"No, Christine! How are you even hanging like that?"
"I've got my foot hooked on the edge of the bed," she said, straining, her face turning beet red. "You'll be stuck there forever! Climb up!"
Stephen grabbed the arm of the hoodie, which was certainly not meant as a substitute rope, and it started to rip immediately. Hand over hand, he quickly climbed until hegrabbed onto Christine's hand holding onto the other sleeve for dear life.
Mobius gasped from behind him.
"The portal!"
Stephen saw it the same moment Mobius said it. The portal was flickering, preparing to close with Christine hanging halfway out of it. She'd be cut in half in a few seconds.
His sluggish mind raced through the pentobarbital hangover, head and heart pounding in unison.
"Christine, let go!" he cried.
She grunted in pain and terror, knowing what was about to happen, but held on to him stubbornly tight. Stephen, his addled brain unable to think of a coherent spell, let out a wild burst of magical energy into the hospital room, praying he would hit something, anything.
His blast of energy did the trick. It must have hit the bed, because Christine started to slide forward, slowly gaining speed until both of them screamed bloody murder and fell into the water.
When they came up for air, the portal had closed itself into a thin, golden sliver, and blinked out of existence for the last time, leaving them all alone in the moonlight.
"Fuck!" Christine shouted so loudly it startled him. She flailed her arms around, splashing angrily, grabbing at an aquatic plant of some kind and tearing it up by the leaves. "Fuck! Fuck, Stephen! I … " she trailed off and stopped thrashing around, helplessly angry and silent.
Bobbing up and down in water wasn't doing anything to help Stephen's nausea. He swam through the detritus floating on the pond-plants, bits of wood, pieces of garbage-and Mobius and Christine followed in the clearing he made.
His feet eventually landed on the shallow bank and he stood, pulling himself laboriously out of the water, like a sack of mud. They all clambered to shore, panting, coughing, groaning, and dirty. As Stephen stumbled around, a cloud moved out of the way of the bright, full moon and let light shine over the scene. He recognized the spot where they'd landed. A narrow road lay before them, along with the house with the skeleton on the porch. The tempad had dumped Mobius straight into the stagnant pond across the street they'd passed on the way to the library. Mobius' hands were empty as he slowly, dripping, pulled himself to his feet. The tempad had fulfilled its death wish, swallowed up by the pond to become just another piece of garbage floating around in the water.
"Why didn't you pull yourself up?" asked Christine, her voice trembling. The ends of her soaking wet hair quivered like pieces of kelp. "Why didn't you … now we're both stuck here and we're never going to see our universe again."
"Christine … " he whispered.
"I'm never going to see my family again!" she exploded like a red-headed volcano. "From now on, I don't want anything to do with you, or your magic, or your little adventures! You just pull people into your schemes and glom onto them and won't let go, like some kind of needy, smart-assed amoeba-"
"I'm completely fucked too, Christine!" he shot back, his voice fading quickly. "I have a family, too. I am so fucking sick right now. I don't know how I'm standing. I can't even … I can't … "
Tinnitus rang in his ear, making him go deaf for a moment, and then he promptly hurled all over himself and sank to his knees.
"Stephen!" she gasped, running to him, her anger forgotten.
He watched Christine and Mobius kneel down and huddle over him, looks of deep concern written all over their faces. Puking his guts out almost instantly made him feel better, though he still heard a low groan coming out of his mouth that didn't even sound like him. The stars and moon swirled gently above him, like fireflies dancing with a big, white saucer plate.
"Here," said Christine, turning him over on his side. He barfed just a little more, making Mobius jerk out of the way in disgust.
Christine got up and came back with an old bottle full of pond water, pouring it over Stephen's chest and neck to wash away the vomit.
"Thank you," he mumbled, not moving his head lest he feel another wave of dizziness wash over him. His mind was starting to clear from the chemical hangover and the adrenaline, enough to make him realize how badly he'd messed up.
"I'm sorry," he said, his eyes screwed shut. "This shouldn't have been so hard. I should have been prepared. I'm so stupid."
"Stupid? That's the last word anyone would ever use to describe you, Stephen." Christine sat down next to him on the grass, still looking like a drowned rat. "Have you ever called yourself 'stupid' before? That's the first time I've heard it."
"No, never," he said. It was the truth. "Look at me, Christine. I've saved the world so many times. But I can't do this. I can't help one person. And now that I finally know what to do, we don't have the tools to do it anymore, and it's my fault."
"I would have given you a few more seconds-"
"Don't blame yourself, Christine," he said, slowly, carefully pushing himself back up to a half-sitting position. "You were perfect. You did what you were supposed to do. It was all me."
"But you did everything you could?"
"No, I didn't. I thought I knew what was best for our universe by ignoring Loki. Then I thought that I knew better than the Ancient One, and missed what she was trying to tell me. I thought I was over this. I thought I was different now, Christine."
He hung his head low in utter shame.
"I'm not. I'm still scared of what I can't understand."
Mobius stood with his arms crossed, squinting up at the stars. It was too dark to see the look on his face, but Stephen imagined that he might be holding back tears in his strong-but-silent way. Stephen had failed him, and Sylvie, and Loki, and their whole universe. Everything they'd fought for would soon be gone. And he'd even failed Christine, even though she shouldn't have had as much skin in the game as she did.
"Well, at the very least," she said with a sigh, "I'm really glad you're not dead."
"That's really the only silver lining, isn't it?"
She opened her mouth, then closed it again with a shake of her head. He couldn't tell if she was crying or if pond water was still dripping down her face. She gently, silently placed her wet, clammy hand on top of his as the crickets chirped, indifferent to their plight.
"Guys?"
Mobius still looked up at the sky, squinting, but more focused than before, staring at something just to the side of the full moon. Stephen and Christine looked up as well. His hangover haze finally gone, Stephen made out a tiny, blurry streak of red in the sky, like a glowing splinter. It was big enough to make out with the human eye, now, which meant only one thing.
"It's coming," he said.
Christine and Mobius just stared at him, somehow knowing exactly what he meant.
"Is there anything we can do, now?" asked Mobius, like all the life and spirit had been sucked out of him.
"You? No." he answered. "But I … I'll think of something," he finished, feeling as useless as the little bits of plastic pond trash stuck to his skin.
*Taweret, introduced in Moon Knight episode 5, mentions that she knows of the Ancestral Plane and confirms that there are multiple afterlives