open | if every constellation above us has a counterpart below.

[portalling]

WHO: Stephen Strange & you
WHAT: yet another new rifter arrival
WHEN: nowish and throughout his quarantine period
WHERE: Around the Gallows
NOTES: Catch-all spot for the month and to continue TDM arrival threads; feel free to tag in tho!

arrival (a variety of prompts).

It begins as an anxiety dream.

He’s experienced no end of nightmares about no end of trauma, but this time the stakes are banal: Doctor Strange is dressed sharply in a formal suit with a scarlet pocket square, giving a speech at a medical conference, standing at a podium staring at the hundreds of faces staring back at him, and finding that his iron-trap memory has suddenly failed and he’s forgotten his entire damned speech. It’s almost a relief when the enormous tentacled eyeball monster barges into the conference center, sending people screaming and scattering, and just as the Cloak of Levitation reappears around his shoulders, Strange finds himself —

somewhere else —

What ensues is a disorienting battle on the outskirts of Orlais, with a rifter appearing in anachronistic formalwear and a red cloak gone inanimate, with a conference lanyard hanging around his neck and a little adhesive nametag (‘DR. STEPHEN STRANGE, MD, PHD, NEW YORK METRO-GENERAL HOSPITAL’ now rendered in Thedan script). And in the fight, Strange realises that almost none of his magic behaves as he expects it to. It’s not the first time he’s found himself unexpectedly dumped in another universe, but this is the first time his own capabilities have failed him. Even after the battle ends, wraiths banished and his dream-monster killed, he keeps trying to light a spark of fire between his hands and finding it more difficult than it ought to be. On the carriage ride back to Kirkwall, with both him and the Riftwatch agents covered in horrid black ichor and gore from the eyeball monster’s innards, at least Strange has the decency to look a little sheepish while the other agents scrutinise him.

“Done this sort of reception a lot?” he asks, lightly, while he keeps unconsciously kneading at his left palm. His hand aches. This is normal. What isn’t normal is the green shard embedded in it like some kind of ethereal splinter, and it makes the usual pain in his scarred hands even worse.

Afterwards, during his quarantine, he can be found in the library at all hours, surrounded by stacks of books, devouring them even late into the night – he’s an avaricious student, and wants to learn everything about his new circumstances. He breaks the polite silence when a glob of hot wax from a candle lands on his wrist, and he curses with a sudden sharp “Oh, what the fuck.”

Strange goes for long walks around the Gallows. You might literally run into him where he’s crouched in a hallway in the lower levels, examining the cleansing runes embedded in the floor which prevent the growth of red lyrium, puzzling over the clearly-magical symbols, feeling that faint hum of magic in the back of his teeth. “Do you happen to know what these do?”

He also inevitably winds up poking his head into the infirmary, morbidly curious; one might walk in on him peering through the bottles of potions and jars of dried herbs, and surveying the surgical tools with a thoughtful little hm in the back of his throat.

wildcard.

feel free to toss me anything (late-night insomnia wandering the halls? new dorm roommates? mealtime in the dining hall?) and i’ll roll with it! or hmu @ quadrille to confab. i’ll match prose or brackets.

Comments

[notathreat]

Time travel, he says, like that's something so easy to swallow. She's seen shreds of it here and there, has seen the way it bends and folds and plucks people out of where they were.

They meander in that thought together, the both of them splintering off into possibilities, memories. Parallel lessons learned in vastly different and interconnecting ways. Nobody ever learns that shit so thoroughly without screwing it up more than once. It's raw and hard-won.

"Then you're ahead of a lot of people I've met."

[portalling]

The corner of his mouth twitches. A smile which is also a little pained. “Experience,” he says, “is a rough teacher.”

Stephen Strange has died so many times. He’s lost count. Dozens, hundreds with Dormammu, and then millions with Thanos; carrying around those memories of your own death gave you a certain maturity over time. He can still be a complete ass, but it’s cut through with a streak of ineffable cosmic responsibility. Grim acceptance.

“You also seem wiser than your years, kid,” he points out after a second, heedless of how blunt that might be, a pronouncement on a complete stranger— but the thought’s there, so he’ll say it. “Must be the whole zombie apocalypse thing.”

A pithy way of putting it, but.

[notathreat]

The harder edges fade off Ellie's smile, and for a second she just looks kind of tired. She comes in glimpses of different ages; sometimes she still feels fourteen, sometimes she feels painfully older than the people around her.

It occurs to her that Strange probably feels that way, too.

"Sometimes," she allows, shrugging her shoulders. "Other times I don't know what the fuck I'm doing."

Maybe that admission is wiser than the rest of it. Wiser than she knows, certainly.

[portalling]

A snort; he laughs, then, for the first time since getting vomited out of that livid green rift in the sky. Short and curt and a little bleak, but it’s just out of darkly humorous understanding:

“Honestly, who the fuck does. If anyone claims to know precisely what they’re doing, they’re lying. Even when you can literally, magically, see the future, it’s still a gamble to make it happen the way you think.”

And as Strange says that, he suddenly realises the funny silver lining of it all: without the weight of the Masters of the Mystic Arts behind him, no one’s expecting him to have his hand on the till of the universe. There isn’t the weight of being expected to know all the answers. He’s eventually going to behave like he does, of course, it won’t take long — but in the meantime, for right now, he’s new and wet behind the ears and no one, absolutely no one here thinks he’s all that special.

It’s a little freeing.