Maybe if I watch Infinity War again, the ending will be different this time. Nope.
I do not own any of the characters. All belong to Marvel or Mr. Stan Lee.
"How many do we win?"
Stephen looks at Tony, really looks at him. The carefully hidden ticks that show how he's forcing himself to stay calm. Stephen saw the same expression back at the Sanctum, and again on the ship. But Stephen knows he will keep his cool. It would take his entire world ending for him to crumble.
That's why it must be him. Fourteen million times over, Stephen saw it, again and again, the heartbreak and loss. The Iron Man will suffer in his living, while half his universe lies peaceful in erasure. Not death. Death would be cruel. No. They will all fade, including Stephen Strange.
Like iron under fire, Tony will crumble. His whole world as he knew it will fade, and the iron man will buckle under the weight of his burden, but he will not break.
"One."
Pain flickers behind Stark's eyes. "One," he parrots.
Stephen gives a small nod. These next few hours will be immeasurable in importance for him to set all the pieces in place for a future in which he will not exist.
Quill grunts and kicks a rock off a piece of rubble. "Well dick brains, we better make this count."
-x-
He cannot stand the space cadets. Technically Quill is from Earth, but he might as well be included with the two aliens who came with him. He understood Footloose, but anything after the eighties is unknown. Stark has already mentioned Mr. Clean and Men in Black in two unrelated conversations. Peter made the mistake of taking his phone out and Quill about lost his goddamn mind, despite the fact that he carries a high tech space helmet and drives a space ship.
Maybe because Stephen has seen the ignorant pawn that will cause the outcome of the battle on this planet, maybe because they are a divided group of morons. Whatever the reason, he distances himself as much as possible.
They'd overlaid the plans, Quill offering insulting advice that they were forced to listen to because his group was the only one present who had actually fought Thanos. Stephen told them what he had seen, of their enemy's arrival and which stones he would use. After that... they couldn't know. What would be the point? He had seen the future where they did know. Nothing good could come from revealing the truth.
The only way Tony Stark would make it out alive, was if they did not know.
Off to his side, the female alien, Mantis, loses her footing on a patch of uneven ground and stumbles from the sudden drop. She and Peter have been taking advantage of the low gravity to see which one could jump highest. Stephen quickly intervenes and grabs her upper arm, where her sleeves do not touch, before she can twist an ankle on the fall. The last thing they need before the fight is an injured, valuable asset.
She steadies herself by laying a hand over his and her whole body suddenly stiffens. The ends of her antennas glow white and she stares at him with unnervingly wide eyes. She already explained to him and Stark that she is an empath, and by touch, she could put someone the size of a planet to sleep. She may have been exaggerating a touch, but they will be counting on her most of all in their fight against Thanos.
Stephen quickly releases her, heart thumping too loudly. He worries how much she could have felt from him. The last thing he wants right now is someone worming around his head. He already had one too many needles there.
Her dark eyes shift over Stephen's shoulder, then thoughtfully meet his gaze once more. She sits and looks down at her hands, now folded over each other, then back at him.
"It is okay to be afraid," she says. She runs her fingers through a lock of her hair. "My friends... they do not show it... but we are all afraid. If it were not okay, why would we feel it?"
He bristles at her audacity. Of course he is afraid. He is terrified. But what good would that do, when he is the only one here who actually knows what's at stake? But when he opens his mouth to snap something about keeping her empathy to herself, he sees the raw compassion etched deep in her eyes, like their paths have finally crossed on a wavelength. Somehow, this alien could understand him more than anyone on this planet.
"Are you afraid a lot?" he says.
She gives a big nod. "Many times. But Rocket makes me smile, even when he is afraid. He is such a good panda. I hope you get to meet him. He will hate you." She laughs, a big bubbly laugh and her eyes crinkle and it is so infectious that it cannot help but crack Stephen's icy exterior and he smiles back.
"It's okay. Lots of people don't like me," he admits.
Her smile drops instantly and she stares at him with such intensity it feels as though she is looking into him. "I like you very much, Stephen Strange. You are a good man."
Stephen squirms from her hand and moves to back away. He doesn't need this. Not right now.
He envies her innocence. All of them. Every instinct since the moment he woke up in that spaceship has been screaming at him to get away. Take the time stone far away, find a way to destroy it, like Stark said. But he remembers how that future turned out. His hands shake from the mounting frustration at his helplessness. That, though dead, he will cause a truly good man the worst pain he will ever know. What good man coldly says he would let a child die for the sake of a stone?
Her fingers brush his wrist and he feels relief, ice over a raw, aching wound. Not magic. It's calming him, and at the same time frightening him. Like a drug. Filling him with euphoria that he knows he shouldn't have. The memory of him and Donna near the stream. Before. The summer house. The deep calm at lying in the leaves staring up at the sunlight through the trees. He thought he had forgotten about that. The wave of peace so much that he has to sit down before he falls. The cloak takes some of his weight.
Mantis' lower lip wobbles. "You hurt. It hurts you so much." A tear rolls down her cheek.
Throat suddenly too tight, he nods.
She sits with him, silent, as he calms down. She reaches for his hand again and he jerks it out of her grasp.
"You can't do that again," he mutters, staring at his boots.
He feels her rests her hand over his. She curls her fingers around his knuckles.
"You blame yourself," she whispers, "when you feel weak."
A incredible wrenching groan makes them jump. Tony is using a laser to separate a beam of broken metal from the crashed spaceship.
"Pete! Grab that other end."
Peter jumps in to help, his helmet shifting to cover his head. Stephen watches them work together, their suits almost in tune with each other about where to move and jerking them apart when debris collapses around them. The arc reactor's glow leaves an impression behind Stephen's eyelids when he blinks. A purple splotch amidst the orange haze.
Mantis' hand tightens around his.
Stephen remembers reading about the surgery in a medical journal that Christine sent him long after he had retired from the medical field. The torso X-rays of before and after. How severe the alterations were to his body in order to accommodate the arc reactor. Lung capacity reduced and his heart, with the miraculously embedded shards, crammed next to it.
Though, Stephen has a feeling that once, just like him, the Merchant of Death had not been a believer of miracles. Even with the multiple surgeries, nothing short of a miracle would have healed the nerve damage to his own hands.
A second surgery had been needed to meld artificial muscle, a sternum, and ribs to fill the gaping hole left by the reactor. The trauma, the surgeries, the invasiveness of it all, to plant a machine inside himself to protect his heart.
Stephen looks back at Mantis when she takes her hand away.
"The metal man must be very important to you," she says quietly.
He stands and dusts the orange dust off the cloak. "You have no idea."
Stephen had met... beings, for lack of a better word, who did not understand the concept of human values, which made negotiations difficult in the long run. Beings who existed to survive, consume, and expand, lacked the empathy to consider others. But aliens who contained an abundance of empathy were even worse.
She stands and hops after him. "He would want to know what you are feeling."
Dr. Strange whirls around, the cloak swirling around him anxiously. "No," he says icily. He stomps away from her. He didn't fly across the galaxy to talk about his feelings.
What good would that distraction do anyway? Attachment to the material is detachment from the spiritual, Wong's irritating wise-man voice ping-pongs through his head. The earthly desires of the Sorcerer Supreme have no place in a cosmic battle, and he is not about to doom them all because of misplaced sentiment. Such luxuries are not meant for him.
I wanted to add more to this fic.
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