No-One But You (The Star Child's Eclipse)
Chapter 1: Sofia (Part 1)
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"In a drawer…"
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"In the bureau of an upstairs room of my current home…"
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"There is a locked cedar wood box, which I inherited as a youth from my grandfather…"
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"This is, one might say, my box of secrets. When I was young, it contained the treasures of boyhood. A catapult, a lump of beeswax… the carapace of a crab."
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"For many years since, it has been the repository of an archive."
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"Admittedly… a ragged and disordered archive, or a collection of notes and scribblings concerning some of the many cases of my lifelong friend; the consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes…"
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Sofia Strange was laying down on a living room floor in a place called Manhattan, and she was looking up at her father as he read a story from something called a book.
She was listening to her father's voice, and doing this was actually a common pastime between them.
Her father had been reading to her since they met. They met when she was five years old, and now she was going on eight.
Sofia loved to hear her father read, because the man was an expert at talking with such interesting voices.
She could almost see everything he was describing as he spoke, and she found it very comforting.
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"Having had recently a little time on my hands, I reopened this box of yellowing notebooks, and it seemed to me that several of the cases, given the ocean of time between those events and the present day, would now bear telling…"
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That little "Star Child" wasn't the only person listening to Doctor Stephen Strange as he read the book out loud.
His wife, Clea, was present in the room as well. She was sitting in "her" chair across the room, and beside her there were four more guests.
Stephen's reading had actually become a routine pastime for the entire family, because his younger siblings were there as well.
Victor and Donna Strange had guests of their own who were present. Bucky Barnes and Clint Barton were their names, and they didn't mind tagging along and listening to Stephen as he read a story out loud for Sofia.
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"It was a Wednesday evening, in July, at the end of a day of straight jacketing heat… and I sat next to the open window of our parlour at Baker Street, drinking in the air and hoping for the liberating ripple of a breeze …"
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"The newspaper on my lap reported the release from police custody of a known criminal, Tobias Organ, arrested some days previously for the murder of Max Zimmerman… a moneylender shot through the head in his small apartment in Wardour Street."
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"In the end, there'd been insufficient evidence to charge Organ with murder… even though the police clearly thought him capable…"
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Sofia absolutely LOVED to hear him read stories about Sherlock Holmes, and she could tell those stories were her father's favorite.
Stephen's face gave it away, because he was far more expressive and involved with the words on the page.
Sofia was resting her face against her hands, and she was kicking her legs around as the story continued.
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Even the action of turning the page was something she loved to see. It felt special, and her father always looked very poised, noble…and gentle.
He was her hero, for sure, and we're finally going to explore what that actually means in this story.
Everything within the realm of "No-One But You" was going to finally eclipse in this series, and some might say things are going to finally turn full circle.
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The process of all that "full circle" business began with Stephen's youngest sibling, Victor.
Victor was glad to see that his brother made that luxurious apartment in Manhattan a home for himself and his family. Stephen had given up that apartment many times.
The "baby" Strange held that thought as the Sherlock Holmes story was read aloud, then his eyes wandered down toward his boyfriend's left hand.
Clint Barton had some fancy looking tech on his wrist, and it lit up whenever he received an alert.
That "alert" came from a source that was a bit unexpected. Victor happened to see the name of the person who messaged the archer back, and his baby heart began to race at the notion.
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He felt a little flustered, actually, because a goofy dude named Wade Wilson was the person who gave the archer a response. OMG WADE.
There was some ancient history going on beneath the surface, so Barton reached out to Wade on Victor's behalf a while ago.
The archer had to reach out, because Victor still had some belongings in a secluded home that belonged to a certain, someone…
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Anyone trying to communicate with someone named Ezekiel Stane was somehow redirected to Wade. W. Wilson, codename Deadpool.
There was no access to Ezekiel Stane, and apparently he'd been gone for a couple months.
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Good riddance.
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Clint Barton was more than happy to NOT communicate with Ezekiel. He'd rather go through Wade Wilson, so arranging a time and day to pick up Victor's stuff was a friggen breeze.
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So, long story short, that's how this story begins. The archer glanced down at his wrist as well, and he quietly brought his right hand up toward some sort of invisible screen.
He silently typed a message back to Wade by using technology connected to something called "Shrike."
Victor tried to swallow down all of his flustered baby nerves, cuz, I mean… the thought of his boyfriend casually chatting with Wade was both a blessing and a curse.
Things hadn't necessarily gone "full circle" in that regard at all, so Victor was kinda sweating their encounter just a little bit…
Chapter: END
Thanks for reading.