Chapter 8
So maybe Wong was right, you could be a little prideful, you could stand to listen and lower your head when Strange was sharing his advice and input too. Your mother was surely rolling in her grave for you not having learned your manners by now. Especially to strangers kind enough to take you in.
Look at him, rebinding your legs with shaking hands and intent care. This isn’t a time to stand on your pedestal and look down. It’s a time to thank him. So thank him, you tell yourself.
“Look at you, doting on me.”
He scoffs. “Doting? Can’t have my only patient dying. That’d be a terrible track record. You should eat something. Wong would have my head if you wasted away.”
“So he likes me best?”
“Clearly. I mentioned before I think he’s looking to kick me out entirely.”
Close enough.
“Are you comfortable?”
“Getting there. Some new legs would be nice.”
“Unfortunately, I only have the two on hand, and they’re in use.”
“Damn.”
Once he’s finished he settles back to admire his work, gently rotating your legs to make sure all the wrapping is secure. “Let me know if that’s not tight enough.”
“It’s good, really.” You glance up at him. “Thank you.” There we are. Done.
He squints at you slightly with a smile, as if he knows the words are an effort, conjured up with consideration of whether what he’s done is really worth a thank you.
“You’re welcome,” he mutters quietly, and moves away.
Saying ‘thank you’ is awkward. You already miss the banter.
When Strange settles in the room, he settles back into the armchair, but he’s suddenly too far away. You can’t see the details on his face and clothing, or – no that’s not it. There’s something about it all that’s just not close enough. You don’t need him touching your legs necessarily, but with the familiarity you’ve built up over the past little while, it’s just nice to be close to people again. It’s nice to not have to be independent again. To be around people you can trust and to want them to be near to you.
So when Strange settles into the armchair on the furthest corner of the room, and you’re tucked up in bed, you gesture and say simply, “Come closer.”
With an unsettled grunt he pulls the armchair across the floor and the floor groans, “Like this?”
“A bit closer.”
Again, he pulls the chair. “Is this what you want?”
You laugh, “A little bit more.”
He rolls his eyes and moves the chair again, fractionally this time.
“Well, that’s ridiculous. You’ve gone entirely too far this time.”
With a heave he pulls the chair all the way over to sit beside the foot of the bed, waddling in front of it like a strange penguin.
“Perfect.”
“You, are entirely ridiculous. There’s nothing wrong with where the chair was.”
“Yet you don’t seem to mind humouring me.”
He murmurs something under his breath and you settle yourself under the covers, head softly protesting against light, against thought.
“What are we doing today,” You ask, with your eyes momentarily closing. “Don’t you have important sorcerer things to do, or are you hanging out with me for a reason?”
“I want to understand you,” Strange says, bracketing himself in the chair, fist to his chin like the Thinker. “I want to know your history, and how you came to be this way, how you’ve come to struggle with the sicknesses that you have. If I know more of what’s happened to you, I can have more of an idea of how to help, of where to go from there. And surgeons… There admittedly isn’t any surgery for migraines or the chronic illnesses you seem to be afflicted with, but I was a brain surgeon so there was a lot of intersection between the brain and migraines. I don’t want to handle you as if I know you. I want you to tell me who you are – I know you want that.”
You swallow hard. He’s really listening to you. Maybe Wong talked to him too. He wants to hear everything you have to tell him. This, of course, means that you have to actually tell him. With that thought you shiver. It’s one thing to fight for your right to be heard, it’s another to have to speak for yourself. If you were to explain how your illness came to be, it would have to be the full explanation, of everything that’s happened to you. And while Strange is now willing to listen. You don’t know that you’re entirely willing to tell it. You realise you haven’t told anyone. You realise no one has asked.
“I’m sensing some trepidation.”
“Well done, Sherlock.” Don’t snap, don’t snap at him, he doesn’t deserve it.
Strange sighs and settles back into the armchair. You can already see that some of the openness from before is clouding over.
“It’s just… touchy.”
“Clearly.”
“And I don’t like to talk about it.”
“I can see that.”
“Because my family died?” It wasn’t a question, but your voice rose like it was one.
And that stopped him. His brow creased, his lips clamped together.
“Not all at once, it’s not like that.” Your words come out in a rush. “It was years ago when it started. Like with the blip and stuff. I mean I’ve always had migraines but they were pretty infrequent, just came with a lot of stress and stuff like that.
"So, my dad was sick. Like pre-blip. He was pretty much bedridden and couldn’t work and it was hard on our family to see him deteriorate like that, but when the blip happened it was like a miracle because none of my family got blipped? None of my immediate family I mean. Me or my mother or dad or sister. So it’s like we were the luckiest people in the world, because how many people do you know that that’s happened to?
“Anyway, I was training to be a shoemaker at the time, which, in the changing world suddenly felt very stupid. And with all the changes it just wasn’t a job that I could pursue anymore, not with the knowledge of what was actually needed, so I-”
You glance at Strange, and his gaze is unwavering from your face.
“I, uh. I mean, my dad passed away. He couldn’t get the medication he needed anymore because the manufacturer didn’t have the people and proficiency to make it anymore? Or something. By the time it was being produced again he was palliative. My mother took that really hard because we’d made it through the blip together, y’know, we’d made it through the worst, so she thought we’d make it through everything. And… I wanted to help her so I gave up being a shoemaker and started studying psychology to become a therapist. Because… I'd never seen her take something so hard. Nothing like that. And I wanted to understand the world around me, understand what was happening to people and how to help them."
You didn't tell him how you didn't want to give up shoemaking, you wanted to be a cobbler. You liked creating. You missed making something useful. It never felt un-useful to the world or to yourself. You were only told it was.
“And, yeah. I know this is a long roundabout way of telling you all this, I wasn’t sick at this point. My mother was really struggling but my sister was taking care of her more than I could, she was younger and had just finished school so she took her gap year to try and work on family, right? So, um, why is it so damn hot in here?”
Pressure on your arms, you unzip Strange’s hoodie and peel it off. Hissing at the momentary brush of whisper soft contact against your bare arms. He still isn’t saying a word, urging or reassuring you. Maybe you don't have to tell him everything. The quick version, anyway.
You take a breath. “My sister was hit by a drunk driver, because the world was going to shit and people were losing their will to live, right? Which made everything worse. My mother was inconsolable after that. She thought we were cursed. Saved only to be tortured. She lived… maybe three? Three and a half months? And it was all pretty downhill in that time. She passed because she was just… so low. So broken. She couldn’t believe that this was the world anymore.
“And… yeah. I got stressed, I was overwhelmed trying to handle, taking care of her and trying to keep her… alive. Migraines got worse. Body couldn’t handle it. Got sick. That’s uh, that’s me. Kind of all there is to it. I had some money saved from my jobs and inheritance, so I could try and go to doctors and get myself back on track, get some answers, pay rent while I wasn’t working. Its been hard though.”
Strange still hasn’t said a word, he looks at a point on the floor, eyes moving back and forth, processing it all. It is a lot, but he did ask. You didn’t know how else to say it all, either.
“What about you?” You ask, reaching desperately in your vulnerability for him to reciprocate anything. “Did you lose anyone in the blip, or…?”
He stares at you, for what feels like the longest time. And it feels blank and heavy and like you can’t break through.
“Strange?”
He flexes his hand and mutters, almost below his breath. “We all lost someone in the blip.”
You nod, somewhat dismayed by his vagueness. If you’d chosen to share you didn’t know why he couldn’t, but maybe he wasn’t entirely ready yet.
He says your name and looks at you properly now. “I’m sorry for what you’ve lost.”
You shrug, “We all lost something in the blip.” He’s still sitting there, tense and odd. “Are you… okay?”
“Me? Are you?”
Another shrug. “It’s a lot to process again but I’ll get there.”
“How are you feeling these days? I can’t imagine you’ve had an easy time navigating all of that pain and processing what you can.”
“Not exactly. Sometimes I still feel so heavy and other times I try not to think about it. And sometimes I just… feel guilty. I feel as though I’m constantly vacillating between being afraid of death and ‘how am I not dead yet?’ It’s not that I’m wanting to die, but there’s a fear, or an expectation in me… I expect that I should have died by now. And I hardly know what to do with myself for not having died yet. I’m… waiting. And feeling every moment.”
“You’re anxious.”
“Yes. Massively.”
“And you think you deserve to die?”
“I don’t know about deserve to. We all die, I will die at some point, but I feel like I’ve passed my expiration date. I don’t know how I’m still alive.”
“You’re alive because it isn’t your time yet.”
“But how can it not be?” You exclaim, “I feel as though I should be dead.”
“You aren’t the one who chooses. But, that is a common trait with post traumatic stress disorder. Feeling like you’re living on borrowed time? Very common.”
“Post…” You pause. “I, I have trauma. Sure, I mean, everyone does. But that’s…” You wave your hand in the air, hoping that’s enough of a dismissive ending to your sentence.
“Forgive me. I’m not a psychologist, only, you’re showing some traits of PTSD. I don’t mean to offend you-,”
“I’m not offended-,”
“You seem tense-,”
“I might be tense.”
“I only meant that… I wouldn’t be surprised if that was something like what you have.”
“That’s a heavy label.”
“It is. I’m sorry. Though it’s not as uncommon as you might think. Mothers have PTSD from traumatic births, children have PTSD from hard childhoods; it’s not only soldiers and war.”
“Surgeons from botched surgeries?” You suggest.
Strange twitches. “Yes.”
You push at the sides of your head. You knew this would happen, and here it is, the pressure beginning to mount. You’re not sure if it’s cold in the room or if you’re just starting to chill but the back of your neck feels awful. You wrestle down into the bed as far as you can while still having your mouth out of the covers to speak. “I suppose it could be something like that, then. If everyone has some sort of… post Blip trauma.” You turn on your side suddenly. “Can I ask you something?”
He waves his hand through the air, suggesting that he’s an open book, though you greatly doubt he is.
“Did you blip, or did you stay?”
“I disappeared, yes.”
“What was it like?”
He looks sad, but not for himself. You can’t figure it out, and it especially makes no sense when he says. “Didn’t feel a thing.” His eyes flicker over your form. “Are you okay?”
“Another migraine coming. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Can I do anything?”
“I don’t know. It’s just my neck that’s really cold.”
Wordlessly, Strange rises from the chair and steps up to you. He presses one of his hands to the back of your neck, and oh, it’s warm. Your tense muscles relax as he’s heating the skin and muscles up through your shoulders and neck.
“Is this a magic thing?”
“It is.”
You settle and close your eyes. It’s quiet for a few moments before you decide to add, “Fuck Thanos.”
Strange chuckles, and he’s close enough for you to feel it, “Fuck Thanos,” He agrees.
“And fuck The Avengers too.”
“… yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”