Chapter Text
“Dormammu! I have come to bargain.”
“I do not bargain!”
A bolt of sickening green suddenly sprouts from his chest. The pain is immediate, awful, vice-like. He welcomes the cold blackness as he feels his heart shudder to a stop. A moment of respite. Then -
“Dormammu! I have come to bargain.”
This time, his gleeful foe draws out his suffering, slowly flaying him from the legs up, until he is begging for mercy. He doesn’t really expect mercy, and none is forthcoming anyway.
“Do you yield, Sorcerer?”
He is wheezing, barely breathing in the thin vapours of the Dark Dimension, and almost passed out from blood loss, yet still manages to gasp “Not until we have a deal.”
“Then you will die a thousand needless and painful deaths.”
His neck is violently snapped back by an unseen force and his vision goes dark -
“Dormammu!”
He projects swaggering confidence, but inside, his astral form is twisted up in agonised knots as it is compelled to carry out the sequence time has bound it to. Inside, he is screaming, screaming, screaming –
“Strange! Strange!”
He is shaken awake, still screaming. Delirious and confused, reality filters slowly in. He is on Earth. He is in bed. He is not dying. The bedclothes are snarled around him in a sweaty tangle, and radiate heat.
Wong is standing over him, looking concerned, but not alarmed. He hands Stephen a pewter cup of water. “Drink. Your throat must be sore.”
It is. Strange drinks, several drops spilling down his beard in his haste.
“How long?” he rasps, wiping his mouth with the back of his trembling hand.
Wong counts on his fingers. “Almost two hours this time. It would have been more, but your damned Cloak managed to escape and woke me up.” The cloak in question hovers sheepishly behind Wong, its folds twitching anxiously.
Strange groans, and rubs his gritty eyes with the heels of his palms. So little. “I guess that means good morning then Wong.”
“Good morning, Doctor Strange. I’ll have someone fetch you some breakfast.” Wong politely departs, leaving Stephen alone with his thoughts.
It’s been over a month since the events in Hong Kong. The first week was a flurry of activity, rebuilding the sanctums, gathering reports from the other masters around the world, and repairing the wards and protective spells which had been damaged in the attacks. Kaecilius was gone, but he still had a few scattered followers who would launch the occasional raid, but they were generally easy enough to repel without a leader or access to the Dark Dimension.
He’d reasoned his lack of sleep was due to the sheer amount of work there was to be done. After all, he was the Sorcerer Supreme now, the guardian of the entire universe. It was a lot of responsibility. And a surprising amount of paperwork, following his swearing-in ceremony. But then the second and third weeks came and went, and he was still waking three or four times a night, screaming so loudly that he learned others could hear even through the thick stone walls. After that, he’d placed a soundproofing charm upon his room, but often the disturbances in energy his distressed astral form produced were still enough to wake the more advanced acolytes in the building.
Now, Strange isn’t bothering to try and get back to sleep, but he is all too aware of the hours he is missing out on starting to take their toll on his body. Aches seem magnified, small injuries are taking longer to heal, and his hands feel even more useless than usual. He checks his watch, and feels his heart sink as he reads 2:40am from the cracked face.
Blearily, he dresses in his customary royal blue robes. Fastening buckles was always a challenge with his damaged hands, but recently he has been using a short spell for simplicity’s sake. If his body has physically slowed down over the last few weeks, his mental state has very suddenly slammed on emergency brakes, swerved, and spun upside down into a ditch.
The Cloak sweeps over his shoulders and clasps affectionately around his neck. After the first few nightmares resulted in the Cloak breaking out of his wardrobe and dragging him out of bed by the feet, thus further hindering his ability to sleep, he’d taken to locking it in a magical chest in the corridor near Wong’s room - much to the Cloak’s distaste. He can rely on it to help when he is in actual bodily distress, but it seems to flounder when it comes to nightmares, and he suspects the Cloak might be feeling rather impotent.
Strange strokes his red collar affectionately and trudges to the library – there is work to be done, and magic to master.
It was bound to happen sooner or later. Strange is practicing a tricky fire spell outside in the courtyard. The mandala is fiddly and has complex looping additions that require him to almost hyper extend his arms and then flick them out at esoteric angles. He can’t quite get it right; concentrating is hard to do when you’re tired. During his 5 year residency at New York Hospital, he’d become used to extremely long shifts, and had developed coping mechanisms accordingly. Practicing something so often that it became second nature and the movements were just permanent muscle memory he’d found was excellent preparation for being sleep deprived.
So learning a new spell with unfamiliar movements and positions was probably not the best idea. Still, ambition and the drive for knowledge was what got Doctor Strange up in the mornings, even if those mornings were a little earlier these days.
He completes a fiery line in the air with a flourish and then staggers a little as the energy for the spell flows through him. His target, a small bale of hay across the courtyard, does not burst into wild blue flames as it is supposed to. Angrily, he attempts the magic again, and again, nothing happens. Yet some magical energy is still being taken from him, and he sways on his feet, black spots dotting the edge of his vision.
Perhaps he should stop. No, he must perfect this. He raises his arms to begin anew when shouts reach him, sounding like they are coming from a distance. He ends the flow of magic with annoyance.
It’s one of the apprentices, Kenara, and she’s levitating a huge globe of water above her as she runs from one door to another. Smoke is rising from one of the buildings, and there’s an eerie glow in the early morning twilight which isn’t streetlights. Suddenly, Wong bursts out of the door nearest to him.
“Strange! The Sanctum’s on fire!” His words sound muffled, like he’s hearing vibrations through a wall.
“What?”
“The bloody building’s on fire, are you deaf as well as blind?” Wong yells, gesturing at the clearly visible flames flickering in one of the upper windows. “And we can’t seem to put it out.”
For the second time that day, Stephen feels a sinking sensation in his chest.
“Fuck. I’m on it.”
He swears, starting to run and opening a doorway at the same time. Within a few seconds, he’s staggering through the sparks into a room which is just starting to properly blaze with broad tongues of blue flame erupting from antique furniture. The heat in the room is physically searing. Acolytes are casting water summoning spells and oxygen removal hexes at it from a distance, but it doesn’t seem to be having much effect other than to slow the progress of the fire. They look glad to see him, and reduce the rate of their sorcery as he is forced back to them by the unbearable heat.
Summoning his remaining energy, Doctor Strange seeks out the long winded counter-spell in his memory and, drawing it to the surface, performs the complicated mandalas, even though his hands feel slow and stupid. Finally releasing the magic, he watches with relief as the blue flames recede into nothingness. The students give a resounding cheer, when all of a sudden, a wave of crippling fatigue seeps through his body and he feels his legs give way underneath him. He would have sagged to the floor, but true to its name, the Cloak of Levitation catches him and buoys his limp body up.
Someone must have noticed either his head lolling forwards or the tips of his boots scraping uselessly against the floor, as the cheers are replaced by gasps of concern. As unconsciousness inexorably claims him as its unwilling victim, he feels himself being held up by several supportive arms.