faderift | [open & closed] and when that day comes

He falls into a drowse. Rouses again. The steady, circular dip of his chin lower, lower; only to jerk up on absent whisper. On the space between each wheeze. Waiting for that telltale crackle. Waiting for it to stop.

The end never arrives. Strange does, and say this for Lazar: Say it short enough, he'll listen. Mouth down. Nothing in the mouth.

Bucking like a roach, he thinks, and says only,

"Naw." Arm shoves under shoulder, the other reaching across blubber to cup Barrow's ass. Might be funny, any other time. Might still be funny in Nevarra. "It's new."

He's gonna die, he thinks again, and this time he doesn't say anything at all. Apparently they're fucking committed. He hauls. Barrow's big, Lazar's strong, and never seen the doctor's hands so gimpy up close. Sets that away somewhere now, beside the times he hasn't poured a drink. The way his fingers shake out of sync with the flesh they press. Easy to break. That's a comfort. It's something to look at, something to watch other than Barrow's beetling arch.

(Sandar lived. Ma drove him off, and Sandar lived, and that's where he's gone wrong now. Should've gone at all.)

“Alright. That’s good.” Inasmuch as any of this can be good news.

They labour together and haul Barrow over, facing down so he won’t choke on spittle or his own tongue, a soft mattress beneath him, no sharp edges around to smash his face into.

Strange reaches into his pocket and pulls out a fine dwarven-made pocketwatch, flips it open, watches the second hand crawl around its face, and he starts counting while he waits for the fit to pass. Timing the seizure, to keep track of how long this one lasts.

In his shallow dream, Barrow is distantly frustrated that he can’t move his arms; he struggles against whatever’s holding him, shouting an invective at whoever’s in charge, but to no avail.

In the real world, he tenses for about thirty seconds before settling again, his brow pinching with unconscious discomfort. He mutters something, ill at ease, but doesn’t wake up just yet.

Hands. Watch the hands — shaky meat, steady metal; gleaming under glass that must've cost months of shaft-rat wage. Lyrium buys fine things: Gears so small you gotta work them with picks, fabric woven from the cocoons of a thousand pale worms. Magic. The space where it ends.

He holds. He waits. It stops, or it doesn't.

"Think all our doctors been murderers," He tells Strange. "But mostly, they keep it outside."

Edited 2025-03-09 05:13 (UTC)

Thirty seconds. Not good, but it could be worse. He sends a sharp look over in Lazar’s direction, professional hackles rising, the insinuation —

“Are you accusing me of something?”

"In charge of this, ain't you?"

He spits. It's been hours since the tobacco, but some stain of brown lingers. Acrid. Ugly as the look he sets back. Eye-to-eye.

Deep breaths. Don’t just fight Barrow’s chaperone. He’s got so many inches on you, and breadth and muscle mass besides— Don’t just cast a fucking spell on him, much as you might like to—

Strange’s expression is frigid, his voice even colder and flintier than usual. “Is that,” he says, “your professional medical opinion?”

He’s bristling, but in the back of his mind, regrettably, he already knows. He knows. The seizure was more than a bad sign. The arrangement, this whole time, was that he'd start to reconsider the plan if Barrow’s health was at genuine risk.

Well, now it is.

Usually, this is when he backs down.

Say anything short enough, sharp enough, and he'll listen. Say it like you'd tell a kid starting to get tall; to get ideas for what you can and can't make him do. Say: You fucking idiot, get back to work.

And usually, he listens.

"Between us," Usually. There's more than one professional here. "Who do you figure's made more bodies?"

Strange might still shake a winner. Day in, day out, and you're gonna lose 'em. The watch ticks. Lazar stares back, inert. Doesn't move, doesn't shift toward some outward sign of rebellion. Say it short and sharp. If this is what they're doing,

He'll do the work.

Edited 2025-03-14 02:22 (UTC)

“You know,” loosely, “unexpectedly, it might still be me.”

Trillions dead in the snap of a finger, a calculated risk— universes crashing into each other, one consuming the other—

But it’s different, when it’s all collateral damage and unseen butterfly effects happening at a distance; not a neck snapped between your own two brute hands, not a knife twisted in a spine, hot arterial blood in your face. Doctor Strange the surgeon had a perfect track record. The Sorcerer Supreme tried very, very hard to limit said collateral damage. He tried not to kill. Ducked and weaved and sidestepped to save every life possible. Do no harm.

He exhales. Tries to shake off all that lingering anger and frustration and disappointment; looks down at Barrow’s shallow-breathing body. The man’s huge but he looks so small in that bed, somehow.

(Stephen wishes, sometimes, oddly, that Isaac were here.)

“Fine,” the man says, curt, after a moment. He snaps the watch shut and pockets it again. “It doesn’t look like his system’s going to survive the withdrawal symptoms, so I’m calling it. Barrow isn’t dying today. We’re ending the experiment.”

Experiment; as if calling it that makes the failure any easier to bear.

Experiment, like calling it that's what he'd do for another; like that's how he'd look on Baudin, or some smaller body. Some dearer one.

"Then get what you gotta. I'm here 'til it's done."

That strikes pretty fucking imperative. He's not blind: The pretty little things in Riftwatch, they only pretend to harmlessness — but if Barrow'd broken Tavane's nose? Niehaus?

(They'd like that, calling this an experiment. He doesn't. He's finding them both a different doctor.)

Edited 2025-03-16 00:36 (UTC)

Alright.

Decision’s made, and speed’s of the essence. Ripping off the band-aid, making the choice: Strange nods and then leaves the room, leaves the infirmary entirely — the earlier discovery was right, the lyrium wasn’t being kept in the room itself — and even Fade-steps down the hallway in a disorienting blur to trim some more of those valuable few seconds. Unlocking and re-locking the more distant store-room, he eventually returns with a philter kit and a small chunk of ore. He weighs it on the medicinal scales in the infirmary, not too much not too little, grinds it into dust, mixing it with water into a thick sluggish draught.

He’s been taught how this works, even long before Barrow embarked on this journey.

Back into the side-room, carrying the small flask. Something more raw and potent than the lyrium potions the mages drink. He looks between the flask to the two men, the bed, thinly-stirring Barrow.

“You’ve better hands,” he says to Lazar. Relenting. He doesn’t want to risk trembling and spilling some of this precious liquid while trying to get it into Barrow’s mouth. “I’ll hold his nose and massage his throat so he swallows, if you can pour in the dose and help to hold him still.”

Strange exits, and his shoulders sink; unaware until now of the angle they'd squared to. One he doesn't wear outside a signpost: This isn't a fight you want.

Strange grinds, mixes, at it stings his nostrils — his throat — even across the room. Never smashed the shit up himself. No patience for it, when it'll sell anyway. Never done it, and when he looks down in, it doesn't look like very much. Water and grit, and a funny sort of light.

Better hands. He props one under the back of his skull, tilts Barrow's face up. Steady. Low,

"Cheers, mate."

And he pours. And they wait.

Edited (wrong icon lol) 2025-03-20 01:57 (UTC)

Just as his arms are beginning to stiffen again, Barrow stirs long enough to sputter and offer feeble resistance. But Lazar is the stronger of them at the moment, and the method works, and it’s with relatively little drama that he downs the lyrium and settles again.

He doesn’t wake up, which stands to reason— he’s been beyond exhausted by the ordeal— but as time creeps along, his breathing becomes gentler, steadier. He doesn’t seize again.

It’s a good twelve hours later when his eyes crack open with a flinch, like waking up to the worst hangover of one’s life.

At first when Strange stayed by his bedside, it was pure monitoring: making sure the man didn’t seize again, didn’t choke on his own tongue, didn’t lapse into something worse. Without the steady beep of monitors and alarms to summon him as needed, it’s all horrifyingly manual. He hovers and frets until the breathing settles, until it seems like Barrow isn’t actually going to die.

Through the woods, he thinks, and it should be a relief, but the failure tastes bitter on his tongue.

He dozed, eventually, in a chair drawn up into that cramped little side-room, arms crossed and head tilted back against the wall. It’s a shallow, fitful sleep, and so he eventually stirs at some noise from the templar’s bed. Cracks open his own eyes. Everything in his body aches from sleeping upright, but he’s in no position to complain, comparatively.

A groan heralds Barrow's full return to consciousness, and his first instinct is to prop himself up on his elbows, but the incredible pain in his midsection prevents it. He flops back down with a wince and a heavy sigh, but the faintest smile dances onto his face-- he's awake, and not shaking, and remarkably lucid. He can deal with pain.

"Doc," he lolls his head to greet Strange in a rasp, clocking his presence, "what's new?" Is this what the other side looks like? Is it the sore serenity that follows the days and nights of misery, of disjointed, half-dream-half-lived moments he can't quite remember?

Has he done it?

It’s the hopeful expression on Barrow’s face, that flicker of a smile, which hurts the most.

Strange doesn’t have experience in this part: the failure. He’d never really had to stand there and wring his hands and dole out the bad news to patients or grieving family members in the hospital. A perfect track record. But he’ll muddle through, because he has to.

So he meets the other man’s gaze with a steady, flat expression, neutral rather than celebratory.

“You almost died,” he says.

The declaration is met with a little scoff, the likes of which can only stem from this sort of situation: you almost died. Of course he did.

"Least I didn't finish," he rasps, his smile growing helplessly. That's happened once already, no need to repeat it.

“Yes, well.”

This is perhaps the most disconcerting thing about the interaction: Barrow has always seen Stephen Strange joking, sarcastic, using too much levity even in the gravest of circumstances. You could hardly prevent him from cracking a shitty joke. Now, though, he’s too serious; doesn’t rise to any of the other man’s warm humour. In the end:

“You’re back on the lyrium, Barrow. It was a choice between putting the substance back into your body or watching your body shut down and die without it. I’m sorry. It was too much strain on your system.”

It’s a slow, creeping process in which Barrow’s smile dwindles, beginning at the corners of his mouth and ending with his eyes, which were so warmly focused and now gaze past Stephen with a faraway quality. He turns his head, looks at the opposite wall. Says nothing.

Oh.

Yeah.

Strange has straightened in his seat beside the bed, but his expression remains just as flat. If he tries for sympathetic, he’s not really sure what his facial muscles will do, some spasmodic twitch, so he doesn’t even try.

You could try again another time, give it another shot, he wants to say, except he knows the grim math. Coming up with the initial nerve must have been hard enough. And Barrow’s fifty-four years old. Coming up on sixty, sooner or later. If it didn’t work now… Putting his body through all of that, all over again, might well kill him the second time.

It takes a long time for Barrow to speak again. When he does, it’s a single, rasping, “then—“ that escapes him before he trails off again.

Then this was all pointless, then this isn’t happening.

"Then fuck it,"

Lazar's been quiet until now. Easy to mistake it: Slouched with his eyes shut, arms crossed; looking for all the world like a great indolent dog. But he sleeps light. But he can listen plenty well (you didn't finish, yeah, hear that happens to geezers —)

Barrow rasps, and it's that crack that finally slings him upright.

"You're not dead."

Empathy's never been his strength. Lazar pushes out of the chair, and then the room. Barrow's awake, Barrow's alive; whatever they gotta say, they can say it alone now.

It’s practically a relief, having the other man puncture the awkward strained silence like this. Not that Strange has much else to say, not like he knows how to clear the air after something like this, but —

He gestures after the doorway Lazar disappeared through.

“Eloquent as he is, he’s right. You’re not dead. You’re still alive. That’s the most important part.”

Before panic can set in over the fatigue and the gloom, there's Lazar, and with his presence follows a sort of trepidation instead. Something happened, perhaps-- the little hairs on the back of Barrow's neck stand on end, caution cutting through as he looks at his friend. He can remember the smell of Lazar up close, and doesn't want to interrogate why.

"I'd," he mumbles, dragging his mind back to the topic at hand and his gaze back to Strange, "like to be alone. Please." This seems a poor combination of people to have emotions around, if he must have them.

The worst combination, really.

But: “Of course,” says the Head Healer, and he rises to his feet. Pushes the visitor’s chair back into the corner and feels his shoulders crack as he straightens up again.

It’s almost — no, definitely — a relief to have the conversation dismissed like this, to be given a reason to withdraw and not have to see Barrow’s facial expression anymore, to grant the other man his space and his privacy to react in whatever way he needs to.

Failure doesn’t sit well on Stephen Strange, and he retreats quietly, closing the door behind him.

[open & closed] and when that day comes

cw mild ableism

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this is so rude

:^)

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🎀