It’s like two versions of Stephen Strange suddenly do very brief internal psychic battle in this moment: the doctor who remembers sitting in a chair very much like this and wants to scoff no, of course not, there’s no such thing as curses, every malady has a perfectly natural cause and anything else is mere superstition,

and then, in the back of his mind, a voice reminding himself gently: To show you just how much you don’t know.

Anything is possible. He does magic, for fuck’s sake.

So he reels himself back in, remembering where he is now. How much bigger the world is now. “Okay. Yeah, in fairness, that can happen too. What makes you think of curses?”