.・゜゜・ˋˏ.·:·.⟐.·:·.ˎˊ・゜゜・.
A force unknowable pushes him away, away and out. In a fraction of a second, Stephen is further from himself than he has ever been in life, but it doesn't hurt. He stares at his hands, semi-transparent and golden in the evening sun's light, and past them to his body. His body, limp and falling into the monk-whatever-'s hands. The Ancient One curls her fingers, pulling a fishing line hooked into the top of his sternum, reeling him back into his body like easy catch.
His vision, or what passes for it in his bodiless state, flashes like a camera's before the moment of impact. Black, white and sepia, a psychedelism of colours and shapes from a badly edited music video. Against the geometric grid of the windows, two broad, feathered shapes open behind the woman's back, great avian hands ready to catch and hold him close.
Raptors flare their wings just before their talons snag on their prey's skin and flesh, to redirect themselves just enough and fly away with a poor rat for dinner.
That's the first time.
An uncountable ten minutes later, he feels himself a mouse, tachycardic heart shaking him in awe and fright, face to face with an owl, silent, menacing and suddenly there. The silent instant before the kill, stretched into infinity. Unknowable eyes, dark and gold, mirror-opaque, and he can see but can't read their minute movements, can't tell if the smile on her lips is real or not. Wings stretch, the realest things in the room, the only things in perspective even to his untrained eye.
The multiverse snaps him back into its whirling colours. He's limp in her talons.
That's the second time.
.・゜゜・ˋˏ.·:·.⟐.·:·.ˎˊ・゜゜・.
He thinks he hallucinated them, of course. The Ancient One isn't an angel, not in Nepal of all places. As he delves deeper into the library, he does consider, once, she might be something else but he doesn't bring it up. He has bigger worries than strange shadows and things in the corner of his eyes, when his twisted fingers barely conjure the smallest of sparks.
First, his hands. Always. Then, maybe, he will indulge his curiosity for a bit before returning to New York and his blessed, magic-less life.
The Ancient One pulls him aside and brings him to Everest.
Beautiful, cold, his white robes blend into the snow. And there he is alone, on the precipice, dying of exposure, dying of shame and frustration, one step away from dying from the fall. "You have to let go." She said. He can't beat a river into the shapes he wants. He can't control the moon, much less the tides. He can't stop the wind, grasp its clouds or its currents. He can only repeat the movements he's been learning for weeks now, shaking ever more and more until even the control over his body fails him.
Fat lot of good it was in the first place.
If Stephen had the energy for it, if the air wasn't so unforgivingly cold and cutting, rarefied, he might have cried. He throws his head back and spots the vulture, flying higher than the earth can reach. It's more of a wonder that his eyes managed to see it, a faint dark shape against the clear blue sky. It soars on warm thermals even over the frigid mountain that's going to be his final destination.
For the first time in his life, Stephen Strange lets his mind be still and quiet. When he breathes in, the cold cuts into his lungs and makes him bleed but it doesn't matter. He's taken a leap of faith, and falls through a boundary crackling with wild magic of the mountains and gazes from above.
Flat on the warm, familiar stones of Kamar-Taj's inner courtyards, he sees them again, curling over him as his Master kneels down. Then his body shuts down.
.・゜゜・ˋˏ.·:·.⟐.·:·.ˎˊ・゜゜・.
The ebbs and flows of energy sorcerers channel and redirect are oft described as if they were made of water. Streams, rivers, seas. When he graduates beyond wide-eyed, befuddled novice, perhaps. His personal energies are molasses, easy to grab but impossible to make flow and yet unwilling to be fixed into spells. The universal energies that apprentices twirl and spin between their limbs and their minds are the opposite end, insubstantial and invisible, a brush of a feather against his spine on a good day, a breath against his freezing nose on a bad one. Anything beyond that is quite literally beyond him.
His body is weak, his mind ignorant, his spirit untrained.
But not for long, oh not for long, he promises himself as he cracks the spine of another book open. Study and practice are no strangers to him. Kamar-taj is physically, mentally and even spiritually more draining than medical school ever was, but Stephen will not let himself be deterred. Training his body, subjecting himself to ordered doses of agony and meditating upon his condition until the universe decides to do its work is hard, even with how used to pain he has become.
He can tell this is the path to healing his damaged nerves. Dimensional energies already revitalize him after each day's trials. And sometimes, just sometimes, when he is least expecting it, he finds himself open to the world. Connected to everything. Some sorcerers see auras, see the past or smell emotions. Wong's serious bloodhound-like nature, he's certain. For now, Stephen hears the music of the spheres, the soft screeches and rolling croons of harmless dimensional creatures.
The Ancient One's wings are eerily silent. He doesn't see them always, and he couldn't help but flinch the first day he saw them fully materialized in his vision. Her smile looked proud, but who could tell with her?
Some large bird of prey from their shape, each feather soft. Brown and white, like the barn owls from the family farm. A strigiform, in shape and behavior.
.・゜゜・ˋˏ.·:·.⟐.·:·.ˎˊ・゜゜・.
"Is she human?" He asks Mordo, recovering from a blow his friend had oh so graciously inflicted upon him in the name of learning. He dusts his red robes as best he can, gaining a few seconds of respite, perhaps.
Mordo shakes his head, smiling like it's an old joke. "She is." Mordo has no wings. No other sorcerer has, that Stephen has seen. "She is no other, ordinary sorcerer. She is the Sorcerer Supreme, and not merely in name. The Vishanti have chosen her for that duty, and what you see is the mantle they have bestowed upon her."
"A badge of office." He rolls his neck, trying not to think about repetitive brain trauma. He wonders if magic wings have weight. "Do all Sorcerer Supremes have a couple of extra fluffy limbs?"
"All those named as such by the Vishanti themselves. It was Oshtur's gift to her son, one that he in turn passed on to his successor, that they might speak for him. A Sorcerer Supreme speaks for the Vishanti."
The Vishanti, extra- or perhaps multi-dimensional beings far above humans in power. Many in the Order swear by them, but Stephen had rolled his eyes and given himself a pat on the back for finding the one stereotypical way in which Kamar-taj was just like the rest of backwards, touristic, fake Nepal. Why would any greater life care for such tiny existences as humans? In the sepia markings of her wings, he sees peacock eyespots and averts his gaze.
Almighty Oshtur in sky and dawn. Hoary Hoggoth and his hosts. All-Seeing Agamotto of magic and truth.
.・゜゜・ˋˏ.·:·.⟐.·:·.ˎˊ・゜゜・.
He falls and wishes for protection. He falls and wishes for wings. He falls and wishes for help. The genie of the lamp rises from masonry dust and each time presents to him the most wondrous gift. Red wool and silk damask, cashmere soft and bumpy brocade, from this world, the next and the afterwards.
The Cloak is his wings. It flares like a peacock behind him, proud as an eagle. He soars above those zealots like that vulture once did, high above the mountains. But Stephen isn't the carrion eater here, and these men have damaged this place of healing and knowledge. Spilt blood on its floors.
It takes him all of twenty minutes to break his oath like laminated glass, seemingly intact but utterly worthless, cracks and breaks visible for the world to see. His hands tremble beyond his meager control like it's the first time he'd lost a patient. The blood on his hand is transparent, but he can feel it crawling up his fingertips from the young man's still neck, filling up the cracks in his skin, sinking into the blue sleeves of his robes. A murderer's gold, broken morals highlighted by a broken body.
He was not even present at the fatal moment, his spirit far away from the body. It wasn't on purpose. He couldn't have known. It had been justified, it had been self-defense- Excuses and platitudes! Stephen Strange is a doctor and a genius and he knows that astral bodies are connected to their physical counterparts. He has pages and pages and scrolls burned into his accursed memory, detailing dangers and warnings and cautionary tales, but he didn't think. A surgeon, ice-cold under pressure and rapidly changing variables, entrusted with the most precious commodity in the universe, and he hadn't been able to think.
He is a doctor, not a soldier. A miserable physician, who'd picked and chosen cases based on utterly ridiculous concepts like visibility and importance instead of the priceless value of a life. But a physician nonetheless.
And she has the audacity to reward him for his failure? To effuse more praise upon him for his indelible sin than anything he has ever demonstrated to her?
She is no angel. She is an impostor. A vulture wrapped in gold, picking at bones and exposed nerves, eyes reflecting everything and showing nothing. He turns his rebellious mind and emotions outwards and sends his Master away, clashes with the man that had been a solid rock during his hardest trials, until he is all alone again.
When she falls, his three wishes are spent. Her wings snap and break like her skull, bleeding redder into shattered glass and ugly cement.
.・゜゜・ˋˏ.·:·.⟐.·:·.ˎˊ・゜゜・.
Stephen doesn't believe in fate. He has rejected the very notion since the first time life slipped between his fingers. That had been nothing more than his personal failure. It could have been avoided, had he just been faster, stronger, more knowledgeable. The resigned attitude that nobody could have done anything, that it had been out of his hands, infuriated him. His hands were a divine gift and nobody told Stephen Strange whether he'd failed or not.
He misses medicine. Misses healing, fingertips deep in blood and cerebrospinal fluid, finding what was wrong and correcting it, salvaging it, building bridges in the true essence of a living being's potential. In the operating room, the outside world is relegated to second, third place. Just him and the body, that wonderful mechanism, intersection of chemistry and biology. Up to him to balance things out with skill and knowledge and a dash of instinct, of the je-ne-sais-quoi that made him the best of the best.
He spent his years battling death at every turn, but he'd never forgotten and, deep down, he'd known that nobody can escape death's grasp any more than mayflies. When she speaks, he cannot help but listen, her words wrapping around his heart and mind in unpleasant ways. Truth hurts.
No one is ever ready, but the woman who guided him into changing his life lets one of her wings drape over his shoulders, and it feels like a prelude is ending.
He closes his eyes for one moment, proud shoulders bending inwards in his grief. Brown wise feathers tickle his face, smelling like tea and wool and mountain air. He's nineteen and his mother removes the shock blanket the ambulance driver had put on him, swaddling him in her shawl. Herbs and ginger and the warmth of a home stolen too soon.
Her fingers let his go, but the weight remains, around his neck, over his shoulders, against his palm, within his heart. The thunder reaches him, snowflakes trembling in an ever-closer wave. Only when it has passed does he go back.
.・゜゜・ˋˏ.·:·.⟐.·:·.ˎˊ・゜゜・.
Stepping back into reality feels remarkably like being ejected from his own body. Everything burns in a distant way, like fizzing soda had replaced his blood rather than acid, those few times. The Eye of Agamotto weighs everything and nothing at all and he descends from ruptured heavens on crimson fabric with an unearthly sort of grace, straight down, as if a giant hand had plucked him down into the correct place. Doesn't feel quite like those times too. The pins of the Cloak are fused to his flesh, not literally this time, and the strength with which it supports him keeps his chest from caving in, again.
It should bother him more how many turns of phrase he now has first-hand experience with, but it turns out Camus was right after all.
The day is saved, all has returned to medial normality and if Wong wasn't laughing, he wouldn't know the world truly has ended, even if just for the three of them. It's the end in different ways instead, from the death of the Ancient One, the stars that guided them, to the abandonment of Mordo, abruptly taking the ground from under his feet. Perhaps time is broken, one bite of the forbidden apple at the time, and it's all Stephen's fault.
But he feels so tired. His soul is screaming, somewhere, at everything. His flesh is stone, unfeeling and sluggish, his skin numb to sensory input. Localized anesthesia has settled in and only proprioception lets him keep awareness of his body. He blinks, follows Wong, the unceasing breeze, favonian wind keeping him aloft. One may trip but the air is always there. Rhymes and fortune cookie nonsense… good with tea.
The Sorcerer Supreme is dead. Stephen dislodges celestial copper from where it thrums tick-tack against his heart, uses the pedestal to steady himself, resynchronizing with the limited flow of time even sorcerers experience, and settles the eye of time back where it belonged with shaking hands.
"Go to the infirmary and stay the night there." Wong says. Stephen pauses, realizing he was following the other man with no destination in mind. "Later, you will move into the New York Sanctum, but the Ancient One had informed us you were injured, earlier. Go get checked out."
"What about-?"
"Go rest. I'll handle it." He takes it as permission to collapse face-first in his own bed.
.・゜゜・ˋˏ.·:·.⟐.·:·.ˎˊ・゜゜・.
Tricky, I like that. The ancient man tells him. Other people would have tried to challenge it directly or just given up. Why didn't you.
"I couldn't win… and I couldn't afford to let it win."
What is magic. What is sorcery. A mere novice, but you already know that sorcery is mortal reaching.
"Beyond. But there's a price."
The man grins. First and foremost, the best sorcerers know how to haggle.
The cat kneads his claws painfully in his leg. You fought. Capital letters hitting his self.
"I had to." He would have gone mad.
Did you.
"I wanted to. And it would have been a waste of time."
A chuff ruffles his hair and cloak. Fire roars.
The breeze makes the yellow hood and robes of a woman who is not her sway.
She pats a space next to her and he sits. She starts from an angle he had not expected. You jumped in, when the zealot was to hurt the master.
Drumm on his knees. "I didn't even think."
You cannot bear to see hurt in front of you. From a dog on the streets to all the lights on the planet.
"I should have thought though. Maybe if I'd had a plan…"
Cool hands cup his face. You have learned. You will do better next time. You no longer fear death.
"Not mine."
Not anybody's. You no longer avert your eyes to spare your heart. Good.
Three pairs of eyes look upon him from above.
Cleverness, fierceness and compassion. That is why you are worthy.
And he falls back into his body.
.・゜゜・ˋˏ.·:·.⟐.·:·.ˎˊ・゜゜・.
First, he glowed, white-hot core like iron straight from the crucible, ready to be hammered into shape, and just as burning to the touch. Master Sol Rama, miraculously convalescent nearby, had read the energy and ordered the Eye of Agamotto brought to him, only for the Cloak to preempt the apprentices and disciples and appear with the relic in its folds. The proximity to which had etched the geometries of time and realities into existence. That was where the copper had come from.
Second, he struggled, wild and frothing, wide-eyed and unseeing, raged against himself. The Cloak did not restrain him but to gently stop his fingers from tearing into his own flesh, and the Masters had stopped any foolish novice from wandering too close nearby where the rippling eddies of dimensional disturbances might catch and hurt them. That was where the shape had come from.
Third, he floated serenely in prismatic currents unseen to the ordinary gaze. Loose-limbed, as detached from the world as the day he had first met the Ancient One, body and mind rested from the tumult of the last days. Swaddled in red fabric of his closest companion, so intertwined they saw not where one ended and one began. That was where the feathers had come from.
And Stephen, blessedly unconscious through it all, wakes up with more limbs than he's ever had.
.・゜゜・ˋˏ.·:·.⟐.·:·.ˎˊ・゜゜・.
Belly down like a sloth, he blinks awake in a haze of comfort and warmth. January tibetan air is cold, penetrating, and it rouses him through his extremities. His fingers tingle and hurt, flexing against linen sheets, making him all too aware that his torso is bare, save for a downy weight below his shoulders. He pops his neck and shoulders, clenching his fists for the usual spike of pain to wake him up.
Then his shoulders stretch too much. Red feathers shiver in the air in the corner of his eye and a counter balance pulls at the muscles in his back. He stops breathing.
Before he can start to hyperventilate, Master Hamir, kneeling nearby, guides him silently to sit up and offers him tea with his hand. Stephen accepts, struggles for a moment to not spill any between his shaking hands and off-center balance, and takes a sip. It is very good, as usual. He is distantly aware that he is forcibly repressing many great things at once.
"万事大吉" Master Hamir does not smile. Is he related to Wong?
Reflexively, he bows his head in thanks.
A disciple, eyes alternating between cowed and awed, directed to the floor or slightly over his shoulder, checks his stitches and helps him get presentable. No shirt is provided. Stephen glares at the mirror, jaw clenched so tight he feels the bones of his skull grind together at their seams. He keeps his eyes wide open, so nothing but dust can irritate them into tearing up. Red ruffles against his sides, almost hesitant, and he does. Not. Flinch.
He is a very different man from a year before, six months before, three days before. He feels it in his soul, in the weight of his memories, the ease of his breath, but it's the mirror that brings all the shattered shards together in ways he'd never thought about.
Up until the accident, he'd kept in shape as much as the average wealthy new yorker did, except it was a surgeon's schedule and not laziness that kept him from going to the gym. After the crash, he'd fallen downhill and never stopped until he was digging his own grave. Seven surgeries just on his hands, all of them another burden into his still-healing body. Besides those scars, he had others. A cut into his lip he felt when he spoke, places in his exposed head and neck where the glass had cut in, the faint lines from the seatbelt that had saved his life, and all the stitches from the other surgeries, aligning his bones, correcting internal damage, catheters inserted and tubes removed, stents and clips, lines and lines running up his forearms…
He'd arrived at Kamar-taj a pale shadow of a man, ragged, unkept, thin and gaunt. Hungry, often unable to finish even small meals with the state of his hands and the demons in his head. Half-addicted to painkillers, self-medicating on off the shelf chemicals and plant extracts, running on pain and adrenaline.
Training had changed that, instilling order and discipline. Focus and patience 'til he could shave himself again, strength and flexibility 'til he could move his body and hands as parts that truly belonged to him. The pain never left, but he got used to it plodding along like a loyal hound, occasionally sinking its fangs in him whether in warning or just to play. He learned to let his body rebel when it needed to, to know when to tighten the reigns and how to fall and let fall the right ways. His spine straightened again and he could look with some pride at his physical self, lean and compact like it'd never needed to be before.
But he still couldn't do delicate work. Couldn't play a guitar like the younger novices, weave like those apprentices, thread a needle and bind loose pages like most disciples, write like the masters. His permanently borrowed computer was full of accessibility programs and shortcuts. It said something of Stephen Strange's pride that it recovered merely partially and already it struggled with such basic, necessary things.
There's little of either of those men in the mirror today, yet a bit of all of them.
It was not Dormammu's work. It was his own choice. To endure losses for something so much greater than himself.
And now he is overshadowed by a great crimson wingspan, curling over his shoulders like the figurative and literal mantle it is. A companion that has refused to let him go, time and time again, and had chosen again to become a part of something, interpolating itself with a heavens-mandated duty. The Cloak gives deeper meanings to having his back.
Funny he thinks, he'd contemplated going under the knife to remove some of the leftover surgical steel in his hands just a mere week ago. Getting them torn from his flesh by eldritch magnetic fields those few times had made an impression.
Now, he traces a finger over his metal collarbone and watches green refractions inside its opaque hollowness. The variant copper is his skin in several places, and much deeper things in others, celestial metal indistinguishable from his organic self at a normal touch. It is alive, rising and falling as he breathes, heating up under his palm, even sweating clear condensation. Where Christine had stitched him up, the nylon is gone, but tiny indentations remain, scarred. Better than any Stark bot. Only a sorcerer would be able to tell its otherworldly truth.
Embossed lines flare, wing shaped, from the suprasternal notch above his sternum, just like the clasps of the Cloak. So much like it, they are the very same he suspects. They run down his pectorals, alternating rectangular patterns, and curve up halfway into his neck, blending back in his skin and into his tendons. Rather than run over or under his shoulders, familiar arches and curves strike out from beneath, through, and intertwine with each other, following the lines of his body to his back.
The whole metallic structure that has replaced his normal anatomy is likely why his body can even support his new appendages, magic or not. Human scapulae are not meant to support wings, for which therapods kept theirs in their front rather than their back. The Vishanti had seen fit to give him an entire artificial scapulocoracoid and ensured his human shoulder blades remained as they were.
Or perhaps not. He knows the Ancient One's wings were simple yet magnificent things that followed no anatomical logic, simply appearing from a spot in her back. He remembers the trauma team working around them without even noticing they were there. He remembers coming back to his body and her, grounded, mortal, fragile, so small, lying alone on the gurney. Her eyes, still open, were clear like winter skies, no birds in sight.
Stephen will never be able to fully divest himself from his roots as a physician. He spent several seconds deeply immersed in the energies of the dark dimension and more than a year in those of the Time Stone. Whatever it is, it is a capitalized Name. Only the Vishantti know how it has changed him. It's not surprising his wings reflect his experiences, past and present.
They do not look natural.
His wings' arms are half metal, hollow like the Eye, letting him see the wall behind them between his new elbow and wrist. Midnight blue feathers, scapulars and small coverts, spring to existence anchored to the metal and a flesh he could see, if he dared to part them with his own hands. From his nape, small as a fingernail on the edges, to the small of his back, he can feel the air hitting them. Ticklish-adjacent.
Below the arches, great Cloak-coloured feathers spill forth, overlapping angular vanes flattened into a cohesive, occasionally moving whole. Beneath, the light hits lozenge motifs in shifting colours and patterns, while the top remains red, as blood and brotherhood. Unsure of how alive they are and feel, and even much less of his dexterity, Stephen does not pluck one of them to examine.
He has looked up bird anatomy recently, but finds only confusion as he tries to classify what type of wings he has, or even the precise anatomical details. He counts red primaries, reaches pi as an answer and sees that the Cloak makes no sense. His wings shrug. The Cloak was almost an extension of his self after the Dark Dimension, a tad more willful, independent in its opinions and far more self-sufficient. Everything they both needed.
Of all the things this transformation has wrought, this is the one he minds the least.
Relaxed, the outermost feathers hit the floor with ease, wing's wrist reaching a good foot over his head. The room, one larger than his own, is still too small for him to extend his full wingspan, larger than he is tall three times over. He tries to arrange them closer to his back, fighting against the Cloak, preening, vain creature that it is. They fold uncomfortably, tense, until he can barely see them behind him. He exhales, releasing them and the Cloak twirls its edges, several feathers detaching and moving beyond his control in loops around the edges of the bed.
"Get back here." Stephen fake-frowns, extending an arm at them, only for a wing to accompany it. The Cloak returns the feathers to their rightful places and he pats the large primaries.
The faintest of air currents makes his follicles rise up like startled cats, and his pinions stand on edge. It has the unfortunate effect of making his wings puff up like a territorial magpie. Or a scared parrot. He glares at Wong through the mirror, since looking over his shoulder would have rewarded him with nothing but feathers.
"I thought only the Sorcerer Supreme got the whole biblical upgrade." He drawls, gesturing absently in the air and shrugging his shoulders and new muscles in a way he's just learned makes his flight feathers open up and stick out like giant fingers.
"Congratulations." Says Wong, setting a tray with food nearby.
Fuck.
.・゜゜・ˋˏ.·:·.⟐.·:·.ˎˊ・゜゜・.
That is not to say Stephen is Sorcerer Supreme quite yet.
The Order recognizes the Vishanti's choice and decision, respects it and has voted, near unanimously, to postpone it.
It is an elegant organizational measure.
Aside from a stung sense of pride, somehow still alive somewhere whithin him, Stephen is more than happy with the outcome. He is technically Sorcerer Supreme, but as Wong puts it, "Despite your quick progression through the bases of the mystical arts, becoming a master is merely the first step in a long path, a commitment of decades. And the Sorcerer Supreme walks at the furthest reaches of that path. You have…"
"Much to learn, yeah, I know."
"You have only learned of the existence of the mystic arts six months ago."
Six months and a year per second crash-course, more like, he chuckles to himself.
"Stephen, what did you do?" Wong breathes and he realizes he'd spoken out lout.
He doesn't want to talk about this. He only realizes how much until his name is being called by the librarian and Stephen finds his wings wrapped protectively around him, covering his body from view. A lone feather brushes against the place where he'd been stabbed in the heart, this very week, and Stephen sighs. Christine would encourage him. The Ancient One would look through him until he said the words himself.
Wong is patient, and his eyes are worried in ways Stephen has never seen in him before.
As succinctly as he can, he delineates his steps and thought-processes, almost falling back into the language he'd use to write case reports. He leaves no room for doubt, for questions, and Wong accepts it with a nod and a moment of silence.
"That explains why the Eye of Agamotto was necessary."
The relic is sitting on the bedside table, covered by a soft cloth. An itch runs up Stephen's arms and he steadies twitching fingers against his legs. The digits almost want to return to the positions they'd been in some many times before, moving by themselves, and he cannot look at them.
Wong reaches for the Eye instead and loops the cord over his head. Whether before it hung over his diaphragm, now it slots almost magnetically between his clavicules, and Stephen wonders how much those bones are compromised by his transformation.
"A bit too much Iron Man, no?" He snarks weakly, seeing the full effect in the mirror, a faint glow from the clasp of his wing-Cloak and prismatic metal everywhere.
"Like I said, you will wear the Eye of Agamotto once you've mastered it." Wong covered the relic, ready to return it to its place in the depths of the library. "Before that, you will need to master yourself."
Years of training and study.
.・゜゜・ˋˏ.·:·.⟐.·:·.ˎˊ・゜゜・.
The Order is a mess. London is being rebuilt, Hong Kong is intact so long as nobody looks at the energies in a one kilometer radius of it, and New York is getting a full refurbishment between dead guardians and loose relics. Even Kamar-taj itself is damaged. Sorcerers shuffle and scramble, and he is once more impressed with the depths of the Order's connections and networks, between family, old students, old patients and a menagerie of people who owed their lives, minds and occasionally souls to vigilant sorcerers.
A number among which he is now included, as a surly old street food vendor passes him a samosa and a basket of cabages. Stephen drops the cabages on the closest novice and scurries back inside, feeling uncharacteristically prickly and raw.
As its new Master, wartime appointment or not, Stephen sleeps in the New York Sanctum and returns every day to train with the Masters at Kamar-taj. Wong moved in, temporarily. The few sorcerers that called New York their home, and that were still alive after Kaecilius, are elsewhere. Stephen crosses them occasionally, distinguishing them from the rest by the heavy expectation that mixes with the air of general amazement directed at him.
He'd never been made for stealth, per se, but he wasn't the type to deliberately call attention to himself with clothing or attitudes. He'd decided early on in his burgeoning surgeon career he wouldn't be the hick from Nebraska, showing off his new wealth in flashy displays. He preferred subtler, more understated things. Watches, a good car, quality suits and cufflinks. The polished piano, a neat penthouse with the best view and top-notch security in the middle of Manhattan. And soon it was people vying for his attention, no need for him to work to make connections.
Perhaps he does have a flair for the dramatic. Just a bit. Being able to spin great distances into nothingness and conjuring weapons, eldritch energies flashing between displays of martial arts found usually among movies, it all went a bit to a person's confidence. Walking confidently into a room, knowing he was the smartest, best doctor within, turned into crossing courtyards with the easy confidence that he too, was a sorcerer, seeing the world with more colors than the spectrum of light had. It made conventional fashion and attitudes seem so restrictive. God knew most Masters personalized their apparel in seemingly bizarre ways.
Belts are infinitely useful and there is never not a use for a pouch full of dried kudzu.
But crimson wings were only a step over an actual cape, and among sorcerers it was the same as a crown. Shoes he was never going to be able to fill. So he spends his days studying, helping the other Masters renew protections and chasing down rogue relics, an ongoing headache, and practicing for his new role and responsibilities. Him and the Cloak haven't graduated beyond robes with cut slits for his wings, but he can now move around with enough awareness of the space he occupies that he's breaking a lot less things. A portentous occasion for the Future Sorcerer Supreme, defender of Earth and all its dimensions.
Less than a week into his new routine, Wong wants authentic New York sandwiches. And he wants Stephen to go get them for him.
Stephen wants to not be recruited into whatever superhero club the propaganda machine is spouting about now or shot by some overzealous anybody. Wasn't magic supposed to be a secret?
Wong is exasperated, his aura is clear, probaly. "You have become too attuned to the dimensional energies. When you were a novice you couldn't see the Sorcerer Supreme's wings unless she willed it. So long as you don't use magic, nobody should notice anything. To normal people there is nothing to be seen."
"Well, invisible or not, my wingspan is massive and New York is packed like a poor man's sardines in a can." He struck his arm, and accidentally wing, out. A weapons' rack nearly went flying, but settled for toppling over and disgorging a multitude of staves into the ground like a giant game of mikado. "Case in point. People will definitely notice when they keep bumping into invisible things around me."
Wong raises an eyebrow. "Well, the Cloak can do the heavy-lifting for now, but you best figure out dimensional phasing soon. I am hungry."
They can do that?
Of course they can. The Mantle exists on multiple dimensional layers, an accordion of reality. Their different energy potentials align with its specific energy flow, more of a side-product of the planetary spells that Stephen is now supporting. That they take a physical form is both the will of the Vishanti and product of their metaphysical weight. Dimensionally spread as they are, it should easily be possible for them to hopscotch between planes, allowing for degrees of visibility, energetic interaction and, naturally, perceived solidity.
That they take a consistent physical form that Stephen has near-zero control over, making noise, hitting stuff, levitating and the opposite, is due to his own inexperience. And possibly the Cloak. Stephen's not sure if it's helping or not, but he wouldn't want it away from him. The Cloak wisely decided that Wings and Cloaks are not good together, and inserted itself into the equation as a reactant.
Still, Wong is hungry. He's just going to have to throw a few spells to divert attention, selective invisibility and an aura, likely Dyzakk's Disillusionment. He grabs his computer to look up a good place in Greenwich Village, booting it up for the first time since his new world went down and managed to limp away, and there's a new email.
Christine (ch palmer metrogen org) - Call me
.・゜゜・ˋˏ.·:·.⟐.·:·.ˎˊ・゜゜・.
Stephen does not will the door to the New York Sanctum to open on its own. It does so anyway.
Christine hesitantly comes in and catches him in the stairs, halfway between either going to open the door or returning to the comfort and anonymity of his room. She stares, and he feels from the way the the outside wind, it is a miserable rainy day in New York, ruffles his scapulars that the cloak has made the decision for them and is fully visible.
"Please close the door, you're letting the flies in." He manages to temper his defensive snark two words in, and Christine is fortunately too stunned to react.
"Hi…" The door gently closes on its own and she approaches carefully, as if he is the wary animal. "Those are… new. They look good."
He descends, hand on the railing. "Cult promotion. One day you're a perfectly ordinary peon, the other you wake up with piercings in weird places. You know how it is.
"Oh, I do?"
"Please, I wasn't the one in a sorority."
That makes a smile twitch across her lips, the tension breaking. "Cheapshot. You promised to never tell."
"There's nobody here but you and me." The Cloak smacks his head with two loose primaries. Christine adjusts the medical bag she carries over her shoulder, nervously eyeing the seemingly soft feathers float back to where they belong. "And the Cloak. He doesn't like when my big head forgets to include it."
"You really should learn that lesson." Christine shakes her head. "Should…?"
He waves her over to a side-room next to the atrium. "Let's get this checked out then. There's a better place around here."
His wound is healed, between the doctors at Kamar-taj and time. Time everpresent. But he owes Chrisitine so much, the least he can do is put her mind at ease. There are answers she might want, that he will not give. He locks overlapping temporal memories in the deepest, darkest lockbox and whispers to them to keep quiet for just a day, just long enough. But there are questions he hopes she might pose, that he can enjoy her company for just a bit longer.
There's so little wound left, that she could be gone in five minutes. He tries not to shiver as gloved hands glide over his chest. He opens his eyes to catch her hazels and finds himself speechless.
"What happened?" Her murmur is loud in the silence of the Sanctum.
"Nothing bad. Nothing wrong." This is just what he is now, who he will be, hopefully.
"Can I?"
A hand halts between their bodies, softly highlighted by dust motes in the air, more magical than anything Stephen has ever managed to conjure.
"Please take off your gloves." They smell too surgical, too much like a life he cannot lead and too much like what knocked him out of it.
Once upon a time, the way her hands explored his chest would mean something different and ardent. Today, it's firm and gentle, half-doctor half-something precious and so much worthier of preservation than passion. The fireplace in winter, the heat of hot chocolate through a thick mug and thick gloves, a friend leaning next to him beneath a single umbrella.
"Can you feel…?" Her fingernails catch on a ridge next to his sternum and she withdraws fast.
"Just as much as normal skin, so far." Strange skin in strange shapes in a strange body of a strange man.
Her eyes meet his for a moment. "That could change?"
"I don't know yet. It's a pretty rare thing, there's not a lot of thousand year old books about these." And none from the perspective of previous Sorcerers Supreme. "I'll figure it out."
"You better." She hummed. "We are scientists, whatever magic thing you have going on here."
"You'd be surprised at how prevalent the scientific method has been throughout history among sorcerers." There are treatises and essays, entire books dedicated to what their authors have seen and experienced and experimented, more than that discussions and records of debates on finer points and grander theories. It's not dogmatic information being regurgitated, but perspectives to enlarge and enrich each of their view-points. He knows that most masters at Kamar-taj are just as accomplished researchers as any university teacher, that he too should one day write his own book.
A supplement to the Book of Cagliostro.
"Can you fly?" Chrsitine's voice breaks the silence that he'd plunged into and she's not looking at him, sitting on a stool next to him, tracing the patterns and whorls of his copper veins, massaging tension sparking more than metaphorically beneath the metal flesh.
A moment. "Yep." He exhales, and gives what he hopes is a convincingly cocky smirk. "You can touch them, you know?" He brings his wings over his shoulders, half-enveloping them in a cocoon of soft red feathers.
"Asshole," she smacks in arm but reaches carefully for them. She strokes so softly he can barely feel it, then gathers the courage to run a hand over the limb of the wing, from shoulder to primaries. "Oh, it's really soft."
"Ever held a bird in your hands? Feathers are like that, especially when they puff up."
"I bet you did, country boy."
"Mostly chickens, I'll admit." He shudders a breath as she cards her hands through his coverlets, parting and examining the feathers. "You're good at this whole preening thing. I should hire you."
Another smack. "Peacocks need it apparently. Have you gone flying yet?"
"What, like, flapping these? No, the Cloak of Levitation can, as the name indicates, do all of that on its own without bothering the laws of physics." At its call, the Cloak moves its feathers up and down in a rolling wave.
Christine's fingers jump to the blue, not independent feathers at his nape, but she takes another deep breath and moves on. One of the many things that make her a great emergency doctor. "Really? That's a shame. I wonder if it's cooler to fly like that than like a bird."
.・゜゜・ˋˏ.·:·.⟐.·:·.ˎˊ・゜゜・.
Everest is beautiful and so much colder in winter.
Stephen breathes in, nose and throat burning. The sky is clear at this height, and his blue-grey-green eyes catch a vulture up high above him. He meets its eyes, two raptors across an expanse of sky. The wind changes direction and hits him like a wall, sending hair and feathers and cloth blowing back, a cold shock that spreads through every blistering nerve and trembling muscle, caffeine on steroids, freedom aggressive.
At the level of the aurorae, the first line of Agamotto's defenses against outside threats are complete, conjoined with the patterns of celestial lights. Beneath that, a heavy and complex web emerges from the eldritch oceans standing strong and vigilant over the Earth. Great currents drift across the stratosphere, natural repositories of prayers and thoughtforms, joined to the earth down below by rising, ever-shifting thermals in the unseen colours of universal energy.
Stephen Strange spreads out his Wings, and jumps.
⟐⟐⟐ ⟐⟐⟐ ⟐⟐⟐ ⟐⟐⟐ ⟐⟐⟐ ⟐⟐⟐ ⟐⟐⟐ ⟐⟐⟐ ⟐⟐⟐
Translation notes and references:
万事大吉 is mandarin for 'all is well' said somebody who did not speak chinese.
"After awhile you could get used to anything." -Albert Camus.
⟐⟐⟐ ⟐⟐⟐ ⟐⟐⟐ ⟐⟐⟐
Afterwords: I finally write a wingfic? Tilda Swinton as Gabriel in Constantine. That's it. That's what led to this. The Ancient One looks LIKE THAT but bald.
posted on AO3 earlier this year - i've been very busy what with doing two degrees ... simultaneously... ...
