She's sleeping next to him.
Sin wakes up to a globalized ache that feels as if all his bones are one rattle away from crumbling apart. He raises his arm against the shaft of light piercing through the drapes and sees that he is purple, blue, and black. He tries to sit up and is rewarded with the razor-sharp agony of nerve pain, every dendrite of every synapse at once flooded with the same, agonizing message from every quarter of his body. He groans, falling back against feather-soft pillows that suddenly feel like nothing so much as sheets of sandpaper against his burning skin.
A few deep breaths soothe the initial upset; a few more see him trying to relax the muscles that have begun to cramp, mistaking this for a new injury that needs stabilizing. Once he and his old friend, Pain, are reacquainted, Sin opens his eyes, turns his head… and he sees Christine.
He squints, baiting the headache building behind his eyes but confirming for himself that it is, indeed, Christine — his Christine, the one with hair like autumn fire, his vengeful goddess. That fiery hair is sleep-tousled and haloed around her face, lips gently parted around shallow, sleeping breaths.
Sin considers the possibility that he is in Hell, and this is all some kind of elaborate trick — personalized eternal torment for one of the “really bad” ones. He considers, too, that this is a dream, though this is quickly ruled out; Sin is intimate with the process of dreaming and confident he can tell his states of consciousness apart.
A few other possibilities run through his mind as he stares — memorizing every detail, each flyaway hair and eyelash and the gentle way her fingers are curled against her palm — but none of them stick. He is left to the startling conclusion that this may, in fact, be his real, actual life as she draws in a slow breath and lets her eyes flutter open.
"You're awake," she mumbles, sleep-rough and scratchy. "Good. Okay."
To his horror, Christine moves the duvet aside and makes as if to rise. Sin tries to reach for her, but is stopped by the avenging bulldozer of his pain.
Christine's eyes widen. "No, Sin — Sin, you need to lie back down."
He wheezes, "Don't go," and gods, he feels pathetic... though, perhaps just this once, he's permitted to be a little bit pathetic.
She laughs; it's a quiet thing, borne on the wings of a sigh and possibly the sweetest sound he's ever heard.
This can't be real, he deduces. I don't get to be happy. Christine can't be happy with me.
"I'm not going anywhere," she assures him, eyebrows high the way they get when she's trying to calm an excited patient. "I'm not, okay? I'll —"
She catches herself, though the pain buzzes too loudly for Sin to understand why.
"I'll come right back to bed, okay? But I need to help you get comfortable."
"What... What happened to me?"
"You don't remember?"
"I..." He tries, but it's hazy and it hurts. "No, I… I suppose I don’t."
"Lie back down." Though his full attention is rather occupied with the full-body ache and his disbelief that any of this is happening, at all, Sin recognizes the noise of sterile instruments being unwrapped.
"I didn't want to do this while you were sleeping,” she tells him, one part concern to two parts unimpressed. "Do I have your consent to treat you, Mr. Strange?"
Sin's eyes are trying to fall shut, but how could they? She's here, with him — how can he ever look away?
"That's..." He's forced to clear his throat, which results in a coughing fit. When it abates and he sits back, freshly exhausted, Christine — oh, gods, no — is holding a tiny paper cup with a bent straw for him to drink from. He wants to tell her to get it away from him, but it's too much effort. He drinks, sighs, and glares half-heartedly at her from the corner of his eye. "That's 'Doctor' Strange, madam.”
Christine blinks, remarking, "Fucking typical."
She sets up an IV in the cradle of his left elbow, inserting and taping down the catheter like a pro despite Sin being sure that she hasn't practiced medicine in years. She could make it hurt. He would.
She doesn't.
“You had the bright idea to try and hold open a jump point with your body when its gate collapsed.”
She pushes saline through the IV and Sin tastes it, cold and salty on the back of his tongue.
“Are you in recovery?”
Frowning does nothing to help his headache. “I hope so. Why, you don’t think I’ll make it?”
“Not from this, you…” Christine purses her lips, shaking her head and readying more equipment. “Can you have, and do you want, morphine?”
Realization hits him the way Christine recently did: sudden and sharp. “I’m not an addict.”
The way his shoulders tense at the implication only fans the flames licking the inside of his skin raw. His eyes shut, teeth clenched, assailed by spasms that wash together until most of the muscles in his body are screaming tight against each other.
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes,’ then,” Christine mutters, pushing the plunger.
*
Narcotics aren’t usually her first choice, but her options are somewhat limited and she doesn’t know what his body will tolerate.
Sin gasps, back lifting just slightly as the morphine hits him before settling back down with a sigh of relief.
”Oh, God…” he whispers.
“You can call me ‘Christine’.”
She has no idea where that came from and is a little horrified that her default lexicon has come to include dad jokes; maybe it’s just the never-ending existential crises, a desperate grasp at humor in humorless situations. But Sin laughs.
He laughs, deep and slow and downright sinister. “You’re a cheeky thing. Anyone ever tell you that?”
”None who lived to talk about it.”
He hums appreciatively. “I always knew we’d get along.”
The dreamy bliss that has seeped into Sin’s ordinarily dour expression puts Christine a bit on the back foot, if she’s honest. Everyone reacts a little differently to opiates — she just didn’t picture Sin like this: silly and trying for seductive.
His eyes roam freely, eagerly. “You’re brilliant, gorgeous, powerful… and we share a common pastime.” He narrows his eyes and tucks his chin. ”We’re in the Strange-killing business.”
His mouth splits into a wide, crooked smile and he laughs again, looking relaxed and well-pleased. Christine realizes she’s never before seen him so pleasant and, in his own, maniacal way, charming.
Christine returns to safer waters. “Your vitals are okay, though I’m concerned about your blood pressure. Am I right in assuming you haven’t been to see a physician in the past millennium?”
”I am a physician.”
”A doctor who treats himself has a fool for a patient,” Christine returns breezily. “And now I’ve inherited that fool.”
”I’m your patient, now?”
Christine makes a show of logging the time of administration. “I should hope so. Otherwise, I’m just your drug dealer.”
He drowses intermittently throughout her exam, though he’s chatty enough to spare Christine no time at all to sort through everything that’s happened, all the ways her life is different, now, and all the ways it will never be the same.
He’s a talker.
“I asked myself over and over, trapped inside that idiot’s head: what makes someone happy? What makes me happy? And do you know what I realized?”
“The thing that makes me happy? It isn’t ‘being the good guy’. It isn’t even ‘being the bad guy’, though you’d never know it, would you?”
Even self-deprecating, his laughter rolls dark and deep.
“No. You want to know what makes me happy?”
Stowing her tools and cleaning her work space, Christine deadpans, “What makes you happy, Sin?”
Though she stubbornly refuses his gaze, she feels his eyes on her just like before: like his attention carries weight. “It’s knowing that, all that time, I was never any match for you.”
All things come to an abrupt and screeching halt, for Christine, who finds herself paralytically focused on a blank spot on the wall.
“You could have stopped me any time you wanted. You’re more than a competent enough sorcerer. Even when you were poisoned — which I am sorry for, by the way — it was never me who was in control.”
The same weight his attention holds seems to also afford its own gravitational field, pulling Christine’s eyes inexorably into their orbit.
”I get the feeling you like being in charge,” he croons thoughtfully, “and I can’t blame you: it’s a good look. But I know how much you like to play pretend. Whenever you’re ready, I’m game.”
It is admittedly unethical, but Christine has been playing fast and loose with the Hippocratic Oath for a while; she makes a small adjustment to her patient’s pharmacological regimen, rendering Sin swiftly unconscious.